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My dad's resume and skills from 1980 | Can we bring back this form of resume, please? Information is clearly organized, easy to read, easy to remember.No need for 5-star skills ratings, dual-colored backgrounds, unreadable fonts, and whatnot... |
A camera that snaps a GIF and ejects a cartridge that displays it | Hah, not exactly what most people think when you use the word 'print' but then again ...People have asked what is the impact of 'free' CPUs. Something Dave Rosenthal realized way back in the 90's was that the electronics for driving a display could be printed on the margins of the display and eliminate the need for a separate controller board. Having watched the evolution of displays and seeing Mary Lou Jepsen's work on the PixelQi and other screens it became fairly clear that it still made sense to use silicon for the controller and glass for the elements, but once you get to OLED technology (no backlight) and printing on plastic substrates then you reach the point where you can imagine something like this project but the size, weight, and thickness of a Polaroid picture rather something the size of a cigarette box.At its simplest, imagine an OLED display driven by reading out an EPROM printed on the borders. Your camera encodes the image in the EPROM and then whenever you apply power to the "picture' it shows the one image.Certainly something there to explore, a number of engineering challenges between there and a product though. |
Amazon Web Services in Plain English | Hey HN, I wrote this, thanks for all the feedback. In particular if I've mischaracterized the functionality of a service or you see something that's really off please email me at [email protected] or just tell me here and I'll fix it. |
Google to reduce workforce by 12k | I need to see these "I take full responsibility" people actually punished. At the very least, this sentence needs to be removed from their mouths.Alphabet had 116 billion USD "cash on hand" at the end of September 2022. Even if the full cost of each of those 12K employees is 500K per year, that's "only" 6 billion dollars to keep those "great" people that they "love" working with around.Net income for that quarter was almost 14 billion dollars, and net income for "that year" was almost 67 billion dollars.Things are in decline, sure, but clearly this is a company that can actually afford to keep "great" people that they "love" working with employed, so "affecting Googlers lives" doesn't have to "weight heavily" on anyone.Sorry, but these antics require revolution. Not a friendly chat with the brand imagery wizards. Not a "well just use DuckDuckGo".It's rare to encounter a whole "class" of people more desperately deserving barbarians at the gates of their tower. |
Build Your Own React | Very, very nice.His presentation library is available as well!https://codesurfer.pomb.us/https://github.com/pomber/code-surfer/blob/code-surfer-v2/re... |
We’re dropping Google Ads | For smaller websites (also referred to the democratization of the internet), I am sure many people may (or have) feel (felt) guilty for using an ad-blocker.Then you see all those shitty ads for:- finding a russian bride- getting rich through some millionaires secret- anti-aging remedies- adwareand you realize that the ad-model only benefits Google and the peddlers pushing the dodgy adverts. Everyone else is losing.People keep saying that "journalism is dying", but this industry and its ad-model isn't very "old" in historical terms. For every Business Insider that dies, the world will carry on. For quality journalism (an oxymoron of sorts) and news that matters to people and their circumstances, I assume people will keep forking out money (like they do for The Economist).If someone smarter than myself can elaborate, how is Googles business-model for ads on 3rd-party websites sustainable for the long-term? |
Introducing nushell | The compelling idea here is that they convert the output of common shell commands into tabular data that can be manipulated using common operators, so that you don't have the remember sorting/filtering/grouping flags that may be different for every different shell command. So, imagine being able to use the same sorting/filtering logic on the output of `ls` as you might on the output of `ps`, and without relying on hacky solutions like pipelines to `grep`, `cut`, and `sort`.It also means shell command output can be easily transposed into JSON and CSV. Actually pretty clever! |
Atom | I was all ready to be skeptical and everything... but this could actually be amazing.I currently use Chocolat for code editing, which is beautifully elegant and I love it, but there are 25 little tiny things that I really wish I could fix. I file issues, but the developers rightly have their own priorities. It's closed-source, but even if it were open source, I'm not about to learn how to use XCode and Objective C and figure out how to compile and whatnot.But if Atom is ultimately just a big collection of straight-up node.js files, and anyone can go in at any time to change a line here or there -- and it's in JavaScript, so it couldn't be easier for programmers in general -- and there's no compilation step or anything -- then it's almost a fundamental paradigm shift for what desktop software could be.It already makes me dream of a word processor I could hack like that, or a music player. Just by opening up a text editor. It's an inspiring thought. |
100 years of whatever this will be | All of the current histrionics that we hear from DeFi advocates regarding escaping the evil centralized Banks and Regulators and what not -- you know what they remind me of? They remind me of what I hear from junior developers when they're tasked with fixing an antiquated, broken software system. These developers typically lack the experience and the patience necessary to fix the system incrementally from within, so they usually propose a hard fork, or a rewrite in , or some other such shiny greenfield solution that promises eternal escape from the problems of the past.It's strange to me that a lot of pragmatically-minded developers I know would point to the immediate problems with that kind of approach, but are nevertheless quick to embrace the equivalent approach when faced with society-scaled problems.And I do think that there are equal parts incompetence and laziness at play. I myself am often tempted by the siren song of burning a legacy codebase to the ground and starting from scratch. I'm lazy and I know that it's going to suck to roll up my sleeves and do what's necessary. But I also know, from having done that enough times, that this impulse is often an abdication of my responsibility to actually fix what needs fixing instead of playing with new toys. |
Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses? | I have a consumer app with a subscription model. I'm a single developer with no employees. I work between 10-30 hours per week. Last year, my EBIT was close to 300,000€. This year, it's going to be around 370,000€ (and since I live in Germany, my income is in the top 0,5% or so). In the first year, my EBIT was merely 30,000€. It's been going up steadily since then and my product has been around quite a while.Please don't ask what my business is. I rather share true numbers, but don't link to my product. I see no upside in being super transparent about the financials in a non-anonymous way (although I enjoy transparency from others ;)).What I think makes my product successful (and I keep this short, because luck plays an important role. Most startup stories suffer from survivorship and hindsight bias):- It serves a niche and does so very well, better than all others. I have clearly defined my niche, although it took me years to exactly pinpoint it. There's a tendency to want to grab a "bigger audience". Since I make more money than I ever imagined, there is no need to grow bigger or reach a wider audience. This would also make the product less focused on the specific niche.- Start working on something, release a prototype after 2-6 weeks. Don't invest months or years in something without users.- For me, marketing = SEO. I never really got into social media. But I have to admit that nowadays, my SEO rankings dropped a bit and people talk about my product in Facebook groups.- If there are two books I'd recommend: "Rework" by Basecamp. It helps you to focus on a minimal set of features and think about what's truly important. Couple this with "This is Marketing" from Seth Godin, where he explains how traditional marketing is dead and how it's important to find a niche. Don't read more books, interviews or whatever. Get into a "starter mindset" by reading and then do.- The subscription model helps you to stay afloat. People will pay for a product they use every day (and thus, derive value from every day). If your product is not used every day, but only once per month or so, expect way lower revenue. |
Contra Wirecutter on the IKEA air purifier | The Wirecutter is a highly flawed review site, but at least it's a real one. There are vanishingly few left for general consumer products. There's WC, Consumer Reports, and what else? They've seem to have all been killed off. When I'm researching some category of product, I feel lucky if I find any professional reviews written by people who have actually touched the thing they're reviewing. I know we've all had the experience googling "reviews of X" only to get overwhelmed with SEO spam. Forget finding something written by somebody who has experience with it. It's hard enough to find something written by a human. |
Blender is testing PeerTube after YouTube blocks their videos worldwide | The comments here are more interesting than the article itself. Looks like the real issue was a UX snafu on YouTube's part that support had trouble resolving for too long. Let's hope YouTube does better in the future.However, if you read the comments here, they paint a sinister portrait of YouTube that has nothing to do with Blender's issue. Some examples:- ads are required for big channels (false)- demonetization of content creators (unrelated)- anti-trust based on search or social networking (unrelated)- SketchUp is blocking YouTube videos (false)We might as well change Hacker News from an article based format to a topic based format if everyone is just going to bring in their unrelated and false pet peeves to every discussion. |
AlphaFold: a solution to a 50-year-old grand challenge in biology | Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25253488, which was posted a couple hours earlier. |
Including “And. And. And. And. And.” in a Google doc causes it to crash | When I come across posts like these, I just wonder, "How in the world did the user discover this in the first place?!"Let's place bets:A) The user just let autocomplete "take it away" (not sure about this one since they were able to access the console)B) Pen Testing?C) Error copy and pasting?D) Actual dialog in a sci-fi post-apocalyptic love story where a robot discovers the Turing test and attempts to set itself into an infinite loop. |
The Machine Fired Me | This is literally an episode of Better Off Ted.[1] In it, the titular Ted is inadvertenly deleted from the company system when trying to correct a misspelling of his last name. Eventually, he is forced to interview for his own job as the system had already put out an ad for his replacement. I think the most striking part of it, and of the true story from the post, is the human factor - the idea that the humans involved looked to the system as an authority and followed its orders blindly.I wonder what other examples there are of people blindly following technology - people driving into lakes because their GPS told them to, etc. Plus, as our society gets more and more dependent on these systems, we may lose out on the flexibility that human mediators and problem solvers once gave us. The human tendency to defer to authority may never be as terrifying as when that authority is held by an uncaring machine with a couple bugs.What was once satire has become too real.[1]: http://betteroffted.wikia.com/wiki/Goodbye,_Mr._Chips |
How to do a code review | Here's the part that resonated with me most: A particular type of complexity is over-engineering, where developers have made the code more generic than
it needs to be, or added functionality that isn’t presently needed by the system. Reviewers should be
especially vigilant about over-engineering. Encourage developers to solve the problem they know needs to be
solved now, not the problem that the developer speculates might need to be solved in the future. The future
problem should be solved once it arrives and you can see its actual shape and requirements in the physical
universe.
Note how Google does NOT say "make sure the code is properly architected". Instead they say "make sure the code is not over-engineered"! At top companies like Google, projects rarely fail because there isn't enough architecture. Instead projects end up costing 10x to 30x because of unnecessary complexity. Over-engineering is a trap that very good developers fall into all too often. I am glad to see Google has cautioned against this, because I can now point my fellow developers to this when they are about to fall into the same trap! |
First-Person Hyper-lapse Videos | The result is quite simply breathtaking. It looks like something shot for a movie using a stabilised dollycam, the fact they were able to achieve the same thing using nothing but a GoPro, their software, and likely a week of post-processing on a high end desktop PC is simply amazing.I hope we see this technology actually become readily available. There might still be work to be done, but in general if they can reproduce the demo videos with other content then they're on to something people would want. |
We are removing the option to create new subscriptions | Wow.Hadn't heard of Mullvad before reading this, figured I'd give it a try. That is hands down the BEST onboarding experience for an app (let alone a VPN) I've had in I don't know how long. Took me maybe 2 minutes to go from no account to a working VPN connection.I love that everything is anonymous (down to the account credentials just being a randomly generated token). |
Don't mess with Newegg | It seems to me that the legal system in the US is largely broken, and that just about anyone can be sued if only you find the right grounds. Being sued and defending yourself is enormously expensive which is what patent trolls exploit.Why not use this offensively against patent trolls? Find all sorts of ways to take them to court, the American legal seems to have plenty of opportunities in that regard. There are some problems with standing, but I'm sure that a concerted effort could be effective.Sue them into the ground with guns blazing. Sue them for everything from not upholding workers rights, to misleading advertising and spelling mistakes. Make them taste their own medicine.The effort could be crowdsourced. |
I Just Hit $100k/year On GitHub Sponsors | Reading these makes me sad about the law in my country, Finland. The lowest tier of OP ($7 for no reward) would be illegal here.We have a law called "Money Collection act", which states that to gather donations (i.e. payments with nothing in return), you have to get a permit. This permit costs money, is not given to individuals, and is given only for non-profit activities.So this means that if you see a donation/sponsorship button on a software project where the money goes to a Finnish person, it is illegal (unless they have obtained a permit, which is highly unlikely). If you see a patreon/sponsorship with rewards, it's a grey area. The only clearly legal way is by selling actual things, and of course then you quickly need to set up a business.I host a free project myself and I've had to set up a business (sole proprietorship) and sell things in order to get money for server costs. Even though people have been interested in donating, I can't do that legally. |
Modern Media Is a DoS Attack on Free Will | Stop carrying your smartphone. Leave it at home. If you must because your family/work depends on you, then delete every app. Use your laptop as your main driver. If you need to, get a laptop with better battery life.Start developing a personal philosophy of internet usage. Here is mine:Category 3 [Abstain from completely] Reddit (Yes, all of reddit), Facebook ... Category 2 [Check once every couple days ~15 min total] Serious news sites (NYT, WashPo, WSJ)
... Category 3 [Check daily ~30 min total] Twitter (Follow helpful people only), HN, MediumThis article makes some really good points. Our media is becoming adversarial. Developing a time management plan is essential. I can't let my time fall victim to the system. I don't have enough to throw away. |
AWS forked my project and launched it as its own service | I run the open source strategy and marketing team at AWS. As I told Tim privately and publicly (https://twitter.com/mjasay/status/1317084448119169024), I hadn't been aware of this but am talking with the relevant product team to see how we can improve in his regard.AWS uses a lot of open source, and we contribute a lot, both in terms of code (first-party projects like Firecracker and Bottlerocket, but also third-party projects like Redis, GraphQL, Open Telemetry, etc.), testing, credits, foundation support, and more. But open source is ultimately about people and communities, and I personally feel we could have done more to acknowledge the great work Tim and his co-maintainers have done, and try to support their Headless Recorder work. We're talking with Tim now about this.(While I think we do far better than sometimes acknowledged, we're also always looking to improve, and appreciate all the feedback that helps us toward that goal.) |
Climate change: IPCC report is 'code red for humanity' | It’s just so hard to know what actions have what impact on CO2 production. Some are high-pain, low-gain (switching devices off instead of standby?), some are opposite (cycling instead of driving when possible etc).For that if for no other reason, I’d rather if consumer prices included an explicit CO2 tax. The here can be a rebate for poorer people, or personal allowance, whatever, but there would be a fixed yardstick for measuring your personal impact.Off the top of my head, I have no idea which if my activities generates the most CO2. My car? Energy use? Diet? Going skiing once a year? No idea.Newspaper articles only help a little, they usually present an incomplete picture, and optimising against an incorrect utility function is often counterproductive.I’m imagining something like VAT, where “value added/carbon” adds up over the lifetime of product/service production. |
ICANN board withholds consent for a change of control of the .org registry | Everyone involved should still be stripped of their position/title. Totally unacceptable that this was even on the table.The WSJ editorial board had an Op-ed about this[0], and tried very hard to make it seem like it was an overreach by the AG and it was vital that ICANN go through with this. I was honestly surprised, they're generally level-headed and while they do side with wall street over main street they don't make fallacious arguments.[0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/working-the-webs-referees-11588... |
A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work | Apparently this is the "story time" thread, so here's mine, of how I hacked the Linux kernel without ever having written more than maybe 50 lines of C code.This was in early 2001, I was an exchange student in Japan, and I'd bought a really cool gadget in Akihabara that almost nobody had heard about: a hardware MP3 player. For storage, it used MMCs (precursor of SD cards), affordable ones held 32MB. To get music onto those cards, I also bought a USB card reader.And there I ran into problems: the PC in my dormitory room was a used Pentium Pro desktop I'd gotten very cheaply without an OS, and I'd installed Linux on it. But at that time, USB support on Linux was still rather spotty, and while the card reader was in principle supported as a mass storage device, the USB driver would reproducibly freeze up after a short time accessing it.As mentioned above, my C skills were basically non-existing,
but compiling your own kernel was at that time still a pretty common thing for Linux users to do, so I had some experience with that. And I was motivated. I enabled kernel debug output, and discovered that just before freezing up, the driver would report that it had received an event with a certain ID. I found the code that handled events, and I found the code that handled the problematic event. I looked at it and realized that I was many months of learning away from being able to fix it.So instead, I deleted it. I simply made the driver ignore that type of event.It worked. I could use the card reader to put MP3 files on the MMCs and listen to them on the player.I felt a strange mixture of achievement and embarassment. |
Algorithms, by Jeff Erickson | > Please do not ask me for solutions to the exercises. Even if you are [an] instructor, I will say no.That's kind of a bummer. I like to be able to check my answers when teaching myself things.Am I somehow alone in that? |
Design the next iPhone | At first I thought this was kind of "meh" but then I clicked over on the "components" list at the bottom. Dear god, I just spent the last 5 minutes giggling and adding absurd things to the phone. I absolutely love this. |
Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing | Apart from the general consternation about an OSS license becoming non-OSS, can we also talk about the problem that companies are formed, invest a whole lot of resources into creating a product, open-source it, and then have Amazon eat into their profits by just installing and maintaining that product as a service?No matter how you slice it, I think Amazon is bad for us end-users, and Elastic is good. Elastic could have released ES as closed source, but they didn't, and the OSS ecosystem is better for it. They were hoping to make money off their product, which I don't think anyone can fault them for, but instead Amazon came in and took a bunch of that money while not giving anything back.Now Elastic is not happy, and I wouldn't be either. As an end user, I'm grateful the circumstances exist that allow companies to make a living from OSS, and I want to encourage that. AWS is the fly in the ointment there, and I don't see how blaming Elastic for not giving us stuff for free any more is anything other than entitled. We should be grateful that ES is OSS at all, and we should want an environment where companies that produce OSS can thrive, instead of blaming them for wanting to get paid for the work that they release freely into the world.Amazon hinders that, period. I don't think Elastic is in the wrong here, I think Amazon is. |
Remembering Allan McDonald, who refused to approve the Challenger launch | While I really do respect this person, I can't help but wondering how many people today on HN could make such a decision, especially those who insist to "move fast and break things" or "rough consensus and working code", etc, etc.Probably not many. (Probably I couldn't either.)It's one thing to praise a hero like him... but how can we be that guy while having a stable job? |
Hertzbleed Attack | Brilliant approach, really. Never occurred to me to try something like this!Are you affected? Very likely. What can you do about it? Nerf your CPU performance by disabling "turbo boost" or equivalent. Should you do it? Probably not unless you're particularly vulnerable (journalist, human rights activist, etc.)One thing I found interesting that may get changed later, so I'm documenting it here, is in their FAQ they say:> Why did Intel ask for a long embargo, considering they are not deploying patches?
>
> Ask Intel.So Intel did ask for a long embargo, then apparently did nothing about it. My guess is they investigated "can we actually mitigate this thing with a microcode update?" and arrived at the conclusion after actually trying - or possibly after external influences were exerted (you be the judge) - that no, there's not much you can really do about this one.Later in the document another FAQ says:> [...] Both Cloudflare and Microsoft deployed the mitigation suggested by De Feo et al. (who, while our paper was under the long Intel embargo, independently re-discovered how to exploit anomalous 0s in SIKE for power side channels). [...]Which is again telling us that there indeed WAS a long embargo placed on this research by Intel.Only mentioning this here just in case the PR spin doctors threaten the researchers into removing mention of Intel on this one. Which honestly I hope doesn't happen because my interpretation is that Intel asked for that long embargo so they could investigate really fixing the problem (state agencies have more methods at their disposal and wouldn't need much time to exert influence over Intel if they decided to). Which speaks well of them IMO. But then again, not everybody's going to come to that same conclusion which is why I'm slightly concerned those facts may get memory-holed. |
Spleeter: Extract voice, piano, drums, etc. from any music track | For your listening pleasure, here's a full-length demo. I decided to use the Jonathan Coulton classic "Re Your Brains", because I can legally share and modify his music under its Creative Commons license.First, the original:https://mwcampbell.us/tmp/spleeter-demo/jonathan-coulton-re-...Now the derived stems:Vocals: https://mwcampbell.us/tmp/spleeter-demo/jonathan-coulton-re-...Accompaniment: https://mwcampbell.us/tmp/spleeter-demo/jonathan-coulton-re-...Note: I'm not affiliated with this project or Mr. Coulton. I just think this is a cool project and wanted to share. |
Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour? | How to cook for yourself, really, really good food. I no longer crave restaurant food, and all of the really important things I learned about cooking take just the time to read it, hear about it and then try it. All without any special hardware.A few examples:1. Cooking jasmine rice: rinse it first, 1 c. water to 1 c. rice ratio. Bring to boil, turn down heat to lowest setting. Leave lid /the entire time/. Fluff the rice (look this up) when done. (about 12-15 min of cooking)2. Baking a cake: (any square pan yellow cake) Read how baking powder actually works, then you realize you need to mix and bake quickly. Letting it sit before baking will make a flatter cake. Also, stick a butter knife in the middle to test when it's done, if it comes out with batter stuck on it, it needs a few more minutes.3. Eggs: When frying, scrambling, put the eggs in warm water before cracking to make them room temperature first. They cook better this way.4. Chocolate syrup: 1 c. water, 1 c. cocoa power, 1 c. sugar, 1/2 tsp vanilla, 1/2 tsp salt. Blend it in a blender. (sealed container works best, as it's messy) Better than store bought, super cheap, use organic if you like...etc...Why is this valuable? Because I am no longer tempted to waste money at restaurants any more, or buy unique expensive organic products (because I can make them now). I feel incredibly free and liberated that I get food at home that tastes better than what is at a restaurant now. (for about 90% of the stuff I like)Also, I can teach my kids, and they start life with these skills. Great question, way too many things to write down... |
ISPs should not police online speech no matter how awful it is | I agree, we've got far too many entities that should just be 'dumb pipes' trying to play moral police at the moment, and it's a very worrying situation when it comes to free speech on the internet. Cloudflare is an often brought up example, as are payment processors like Visa and Mastercard and app stores like the iOS and Play Stores, but ISPs trying to block traffic for a site that's not actually illegal feels like a step even further than that.It feels like private companies are de facto writing the laws about what's allowed online and in society right now, and that it's almost become a loophole for censoring free speech on a whim.And while the site in question here is ethically bankrupt in basically every way, it doesn't seem too far fetched to assume the same thing could (and potentially will) happen for sites many more people agree with because someone/some group at an ISP doesn't like them or think they should be accessible. |
Detaining my partner: a failed attempt at intimidation | The salient quote from Greenwald's article on this:They completely abused their own terrorism law for reasons having nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism: a potent reminder of how often governments lie when they claim that they need powers to stop "the terrorists", and how dangerous it is to vest unchecked power with political officials in its name. [1]This is a great example of why we should treat terrorism like any other crime, and why the police should never be trusted with exceptional powers simply because we feel under threat. Give them the powers, and they will be misused - in this case they were used on a relative of someone nothing to do with terrorism purely for the purpose of intimidation. The security services even called Greenwald to give him the news that his partner had been detained.[1] http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/18/david-m... |
In Memoriam: Ian Murdock | This was very recent, and the facts are not yet in. The best evidence we have to go on is his most recent tweets, captured on Pastebin (http://pastebin.com/dX3VSPkM). His Twitter account (https://twitter.com/imurdock) seems to have been deleted, which is extremely strange.Main notes:* He was repeatedly beaten by the police. He alludes to having taken photos of the injuries, and having been hospitalized, so this will be easily proven.* His last tweet is "abcolucity i'll tweet it or twitch it or whenever the rufk can i have 30 minutes toe wtie my suittyes ?" This to me strongly suggests a head injury.* "The rest of my life is to fight against the police.. they are NOT friends, so don't ever ever believe otherwise."* "watch my blog later http://ianmurdock.com" "I'm not committing suicide today. I'll write this all up first, so the police brutality ENDEMIC in this so call free country will be known." There are no posts about this on his blog.I believe this was murder: he died from a head injury sustained at the hands of the police. I also believe that the police will rule that it was a suicide; but he made clear future plans which weren't executed, so this will be a lie.(EDIT: At some point in this saga, Ian's Twitter account got hacked. The deleted account, and the strange last tweet, were probably a result of that.) |
Facebook Container for Firefox | I use Firefox multi-account containers[1] extensively, it's honestly the primary reason I use Firefox these days. The big win for me is that I _hate_ having to use the Google account switcher, so I basically set up a container for each Gmail account (work, personal, old email, etc).The nice bonus feature is you can have certain sites default to containers. I had a paid YouTube account for a while, for example, so having any YouTube link open in my personal account was nice for not getting hit with ads on initial click due to my default Gmail not being the right one.There's also a plugin[2] that will make any new tab default to whatever the first tab listed is. Really great for if you want to have a whole browser window dedicated to one container.[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sticky-window... |
Apple Hides Taiwan Flag in Hong Kong | What's it take for an engineer in the US to actually do something like this?If my boss/product manager wanted me to do something like this, I'd be calling them out for shitty politics, and telling them they need to find a new engineer because I'd quit immediately - and likely incite others to come with me.Maybe I have a higher sense of morality than others, but I'm no shill for China's power over Taiwan. I can use my entitlement/privilege as an engineer to say "fuck off" to anyone who wants me to do things I find immoral. Furthering the needs of a power hungry regime looking to assert dominance over others? Nope. I spend all my day working to further democracy and freedom, not to enable free thought and self-determination to be squashed.Whoever coded this change and approved this PR, shame on you. |
Space Elevator | Couple of things I learned from this:1. Some birds go really high into the sky. Not sure how they evolved to tolerate such a hostile environment. But it seems that Duck-like birds are able to handle very high altitude.2. There are lots of cool spaceships that man has made. But it seems most of these were made in the 1950-1990 era. It's a shame that we are no longer doing that. |
CRISPR eliminates HIV-1 infection in live animals | Back in 2011, there was an announcement from MIT about a new approach to a broad-spectrum antiviral that appeared to work.[1] This goes way beyond an AIDS-specific cure.
But it was at MIT Lincoln Labs, which doesn't usually do bio. So the researcher moved to Draper Labs, but didn't get much funding. Then that funding ran out. Now the guy behind this is trying to get funding on Indiegogo.[3] The problem seems to be that it's too far along for small-scale YC-sized funding, but not far enough along to sell to Big Pharma. The guy behind it clearly doesn't know how to get funded. He has a web site [4] and keeps trying for crowd funding.Some VC needs to talk to this guy. This might or might not work, but the upside is good and the costs aren't that high.[1] https://www.ll.mit.edu/news/DRACO.html
[2] http://www.businessinsider.com/todd-rider-draco-crowdfunding...
[3] https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/dracos-may-be-effective-a...
[4] https://riderinstitute.org/ |
Facebook has been paying people to install a “Research” VPN | The fact that this exists makes me uncomfortable, but I'm having trouble pinpointing a reason why it's bad. People are opting into the data collection. Perhaps they don't know the full extent of what Facebook is tracking, but sideloading apps on iOS is not a one-tap process—anyone who used this had a sense of what they were doing.And, $20 per month is pretty substantial compensation.The way that Facebook is bypassing Apple's rules feels shady, but I've always felt those rules were user-hostile to begin with. I firmly believe that users should have control over their own devices, and that means letting users give information to companies if they so choose—especially if they're being financially compensated. |
We Hacked Apple for 3 Months | July 6 - August 6 - September 6 -- that's 2 months elapsed, not three.Five people working for 2 months is 10 person-months. Apple paid them just under $52,000, none of which was guaranteed. They had to pay whatever taxes are appropriate for their jurisdictions.I'd say Apple got an amazing bargain. |
Is that ship still stuck? | I don't think people are giving enough credit to how stuck the ship is.Look at some of the photos of the front of it. Look at how far out of the water it is sitting. The ship might look like that if it were totally empty, but not when it is full of containers like this.Some people saying: just drag it off of the sand. Okay! And what happens when that causes you to rip a hole into the hull of the ship? Now it's really stuck.Some people have suggested unloading the ship. I don't think you realize the infrastructure required to unload a ship. You're basically asking to build a port in the middle of the egyptian desert. That isn't going to happen.It's really stuck. It's probably going to take a couple of weeks to get it unstuck. |
Thanks Dang, Happy Holidays | Dang, thank you for everything you do - Happy Holidays!!For the unfamiliar, here’s more information on Dang:https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th... |
I made a smart watch from scratch | We haven’t solved homelessness, poverty, cancer, or war. We don’t have self-piloted flying cars. But for about $90 in parts, one person can design, manufacture, and build their own bespoke smart watch. Humans have made truly remarkable progress in some very specific ways. |
A crashed advertisement reveals logs of a facial recognition system | You'd be surprised / scared / outraged if you knew how common this is. Any time you've been in a public place for the past few years, you've likely been watched, analysed and optimised for. Advertising in the physical world is just as scummy as it's online equivalent.Check out the video here http://sightcorp.com/ for an ultra creepy overview. You can even try their live demo: https://face-api.sightcorp.com/demo_basic/. |
Happy 15th birthday Hacker News | HN is what reddit used to be like when it first started. Links to interesting Tech, programming and science stories and high quality discussion compared to something like Digg.Thankfully HN hasnt dropped in quality on that front unlike reddit. Its still so good I dont even click on the link I click on comments to get a HN summary which gives me a pretty good idea if its worth reading or not. Most of the time the comments are even better and more informative. |
Facebook acquires Oculus VR | Damn! I don't like this.I had hoped they jump in bed with valve.Yes, I just really dislike facebook, so I hate to see them aquiring something i was really excited about.Also from the article:> After games, we're going to make Oculus a platform for many other experiences. Imagine enjoying a court side seat at a game, studying in a classroom of students and teachers all over the world or consulting with a doctor face-to-face -- just by putting on goggles in your home.Nah, I'd rather not, thank you. I prefer to actually visit my doctor where facebook doesn't get all the data about it. |
Broot – A new way to see and navigate directory trees | I'm one of those skeptic people who always criticize just because I'm a negative person. However... I LOVE THIS PROGRAM! I really, really, really love it!I don't care if it's been done before. I don't care if exists and does a similar thing.Awesome because:
- short name (br in terminal, I'll remember that instantly)- easy installation- web page is awesome and shows you instantly how to best use this program- help page in the program itself is awesome, clear and easy to navigate- defaults are sensible and totally easy to get used to- broot just WORKS! and it works well, I finally got rid of all the aliases around ls that I used in order to get info I wantAmazing job Denys, 10/10 for the web, program, documentation and examples!Btw. Linux/Windows user here. |
A spreadsheet in fewer than 30 lines of JavaScript, no library used | My text disappears after I type it in and move on.And why do you call a table an "excel-like" app? Can it so =SUM(); can it do search and replace or the over 9000 other features of excel? No... it's a table, with a editor. |
Amazon's customer service backdoor | Whois is great for social engineering attackers. You get a name, email, address, and the first service to attack.Meanwhile, the ICANN is working around the clock to make it illegal for us to protect our personal information, and whois protection is becoming an increasingly niche service for registrars.For example, gandi.net (and thus Amazon) doesn't hide your name when you have it turned on. By the time you find this out, it might occur to you to just type in a different name, but now you're violating ICANN policy. And it's already been scraped by any of those whois history websites. |
NSO group iPhone zero-click, zero-day exploit captured in the wild | Wow, so much discussion of Apple and their software, and so little of NSO group and why they're even a thing.I just want to add this: these people operate pretty much in the open. They're not ashamed of it either, or else they wouldn't put it on their CV:https://www.linkedin.com/company/nso-group/people/That right there tells me that we as "the tech community" are way too okay with this sort of application of the tech. The tech we're all so convinced will "make the world a better place." /s |
Outlawed by Amazon DRM | Tangentially related, I am getting very, very tired of "customer service" departments using phrases like:"While we are unable to provide detailed information on how we link related accounts, please know that we have reviewed your account on the basis of the information provided and regret to inform you that it will not be reopened."This happens more frequently: Google says this all the time, based on posts here; Amazon now does the same thing; even apartment rental companies will say "you've been turned down on the basis of this report that we don't know the contents of."If your company can't reveal specific reasons or steps behind why an action was taken, DON'T TAKE THAT ACTION. Even my credit card issuer will tell me exactly why my card was flagged and they deal with ACTUAL MONEY. All these statements do is infuriate customers, create bad press, and drive away other customers. Scammers will just back up, look at their entire operation, and hammer away again with 300 new accounts so all you've accomplished is pissing off customers who want to do business with you. |
Console.mihai(); | Thanks for the touching post - it's always good to hear these human stories about the people who write the software we use every day.I have a question though - the post does not mention Mihai having passed away but has a mournful tone. A commenter on the blog post said 'rest in peace'. Is Mihai retiring from development due to illness, or has he indeed passed away? |
A half-hour to learn Rust | As a Python programmer with limited experience with compiled languages, Rust code was more intimidating to read or look at than C++, Java or Go. After only an hour, I am overwhelmed by the sheer beauty and mature design of this language - it almost reads like Python or as well as any compiled language can. I cannot believe that I am smitten by Rust within an hour. Its features seem, obvious. My experience with Go was frustrating since I felt like I had to give up elegance for practicality. I did not expect to learn 1-2% of Rust when I woke up today. My thanks to the author.I'm curious what other what other developers who primarily use Python think of this article and Rust in general? |
The Big [Censored] Theory | I find that it's always interesting to THEN consider, okay -- while there's no centralized board or anything -- what does e.g. American censorship go after? |
Factorio: Space Age | I have purposely avoided Factorio just because I'm convinced that I'll sink so much time into it. It looks super fun, but I have stuff to do.Maybe one day.... |
My Resignation from the Intercept | "as a last-ditch attempt to avoid being censored, I encouraged them to air their disagreements with me by writing their own articles that critique my perspectives and letting readers decide who is right"That's not how this works. If the editor concludes that it's a garbage story dropped a few days before the election in an attempt to influence the election, you don't run it and then "let the readers decide who is right". As he well knows, all that matters is that the story runs, not whether it's shown to be false months after the election is over. Strange that he thinks his readers are that gullible.I want to be clear that I'm not claiming to know the truth as it relates to this story, only that this is the position of the editors, and that his argument is nonsense. |
Nightdrive | I'm amused that we share initials and a passion for this kind of project! Mine's https://rezmason.github.io/drivey .One key difference: this guy built his demo from scratch, whereas mine's a port of someone else's work. It's great to see another implementation, with its own techniques and features. |
Personal and social information of 1.2B people discovered in data leak | People data labs's data is pretty accurate. Here is mine:
https://api.peopledatalabs.com/v4/person?api_key=9c6a1382204...You can try it for yourself by changing the email. All of the information is public, so I don't mind. They are basically doing data integration. |
Making the dislike count private across YouTube | Bummer. I often use like vs dislike ratios as a gauge on whether a video is worth watching. If I see a 3,000 up / 48 down video on a topic I'm interested in there's a really good chance the video is great.I'm a small time creator (~13.5k subs) and don't care at all about upvotes or downvotes being public. There's only been a handful of videos out of hundreds that received more downvotes than expected because the video was posted on a place out of my control and folks didn't like that. Almost always if a video naturally gets downvoted it's because you either released something bad or unrelated to what your channel normally expects. |
Open-source apps removed from Google Play Store due to donation links | The Apple/Play stores are essentially a totally broken implementation of something that had existed for over a decade before: package repositories. It's embraced and extended Linux/BSD package/ports trees, except without things like the ability to add a 3rd party repository with other authors signing keys, pin certain versions, etc.https://battlepenguin.com/tech/android-fragmentation/#packag...We could go on about how regular users wouldn't understand or care and blah blah blah and we'll keep getting software that's neutered, tracks us and becomes more like the proverbial car with the hood welded shut; where people who know about cars have to attach several sidecars just to keep our vehicle doing what we want it to do. |
SteamOS | This is effectively the software-only equivalent of a console launch.Is anyone else skeptical that they can motivate publishers to spend time/money porting their games to the Linux platform?Valve certainly has a better chance than most at pulling this off (and likely enough user/market data to make this seem like a valid investment) I am still super skeptical that these publishers are going to spend the time porting their AAA releases to this platform.A good chunk of the console games barely make it to PC/Windows as it is, let alone a PC/Linux platform... seems like a tough sell.If the goal is an entertainment OS with streaming and DVR capabilities in addition to the few Linux compatible games on Steam, that's a bit different of a story but not a huge commercial win I don't think (unless they having some amazing partnerships planned with Netflix/Amazon/Vudu/Hulu for streaming that I am not thinking of).If the goal is to make Steam into an entertainment platform (not just games) it is interesting to watch all these platforms converge on this "entertainment delivery pipeline" solution. |
Sublime Text 4 | Hello HN,I'm one of the developers at Sublime HQ. We're all very excited about this release. If you have any questions you'd like to ask I'll do my best to answer them. |
The Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company | I've wondered for a long time how much money could be saved if the non-trivial administrative overhead of insurance companies were removed from all but truly catastrophic cases (where claims start at $10k or more) and medical, dental, and drug costs were paid out of pocket (including via an HSA account). There are numerous cases where cash-only medical clinics are able to offer up-front pricing for a fraction of what is billed to medical insurance companies. If Cuban's idea is "we don't do insurance but you're free to pay with an HSA card or seek reimbursement from your insurance company" then this could be a huge winner. |
Zoom iOS app sends data to Facebook even if you don’t have a Facebook account | EVERY. SINGLE. APP. THAT. INCLUDES. THE. FACEBOOK. SDK.Even if you don't log in. The Facebook SDK sends data back.Hook your device up to an intercepting proxy and start up a few apps. 99% of them do this.I really wish Apple would put an end to this. |
Bun: Fast JavaScript runtime, transpiler, and NPM client written in Zig | > curl https://bun.sh/install | bashThis type of thing needs to stop |
94k Bitcoin (1B USD) transferred from unknown wallet to unknown wallet | From the top twitter comment:
> 0.06BTC in fees? Why so expensive?Just gotta say, its pretty amazing we live in a world where 1 billion dollars can get transferred pseudo-anonymously in a reasonable time frame, only costing the transfer party $600. As a really stupid, non-real-world comparison, Western Union has a transfer limit of $2500 per transaction, and a $20 fee per transaction. If you were to initiate a $1,000,000,000 transfer it would take something like 400,000 transactions costing you something like $8 million dollars in fees. |
New Google SRE book: Building Secure and Reliable Systems | Hey everyone - Seth from Google here. Thank you for all the positive comments about the book. I'll be around to answer any questions you might have. As noted, the book can be downloaded for free in digital formats.PDF: https://landing.google.com/sre/static/pdf/SRS.pdfEPUB: https://landing.google.com/sre/static/pdf/srs-epub.epubMOBI: https://landing.google.com/sre/static/pdf/srs-mobi.mobi |
4.2 Gigabytes, Or: How to Draw Anything | I know that technology has displaced workers in the past, but it seems to be doing so at a faster and faster pace. It makes me rethink my involvement in the creation of software and its ethical implications. |
Keybase launches encrypted Git | Keybase team member here. Interesting fact: git doesn't check the validity of sha-1 hashes in your commit history. Meaning if someone compromises your hosted origin, they can quietly compromise your history. So even the fears about data leaks aside, this is a big win for safety.From an entrepreneurial perspective, this is my favorite thing we've done at Keybase. It pushes all the buttons: (1) it's relatively simple, (2) it's filling a void, (3) it's powered by all our existing tech, and (4) it doesn't complicate our product. What I mean by point 4 is that it adds very little extra UX and doesn't change any of the rest of the app. If you don't use git, cool. If you do, it's there for you.What void does this fill? Previously, I managed some solo repositories of private data in a closet in my apartment. Who does that? It required a mess: uptime of a computer, a good link, and dynamic dns. And even then, I never could break over the hurdle of setting up team repositories with safe credential management...like for any kind of collaboration. With this simple screen, you can grab 5 friends, make a repo in a minute, and all start working on it. With much better data safety than most people can achieve on their own. |
U.S. Supreme Court Puts Limits on Police Power to Seize Private Property | The important thing to understand about this case is the background and what the SCotUS actually ruled on. It's actually rather narrow ruling even if it is extremely important. The court exercised judicial restraint here, and made the minimum ruling necessary.Timbs was convicted of possession/sale/whatever, jailed for a year, and fined $1,200. The state confiscated his Range Rover as well.Timbs sued or appealed the confiscation by Indiana, which he he could prove he didn't buy with drug money. The judge of the lower court of Indiana agreed.The state appealed the judge's ruling. The Indiana Supreme Court reversed the lower court's decision, ruling that the 8th Amendment did not apply to the states.The SCotUS unanimously disagreed and vacated the Indiana Supreme Court's ruling. The 8th Amendment does apply to the states. However, that's all that they ruled upon. They didn't not rule on whether or not confiscating the SUV was an excessive fine, and remanded the case back to the Indiana state courts.Now the state of Indiana will be given an opportunity to prove in Indiana court that confiscating the SUV is not an excessive fine. That seems unlikely, however, since the charge Timbs was convicted of carried a statutory maximum fine of $10,000, well below the value of the SUV. |
The lab-leak theory: inside the fight to uncover Covid-19’s origins | It's not that productive to say, but this thread's comments are mostly trash, if you read this comment first, just turn around. |
Atlassian fired me while I was taking care of my wife who is fighting cancer | I worked at a company that had unlimted PTO when suddenly one day they revoked the policy because they said some people were abusing it. The new policy was still very generous (6 weeks PTO per year) so no one complained. Fast forward a year later and we were hearing things from executives and managers like, "you know you don't have to use all you're PTO, right?". I'd ask, oh, it will rollover to next year? The reply: "No, it won't. But that's really the wrong way to think about it."So it turns out people were taking much more time off now than when PTO was unlimited. They started denying request and making up trivial rules, like 2/3 of your team must be available at any time (regardless of the team size), oh, and those rules weren't in the official policy. Good luck trying to get specifics in writing.Eventually they changed back to an unlimited policy but secretly told managers they should start denying requests after x number of days have been used. I think it was five weeks, which again is still generous but it bothers me because the intent is to hide that number in hopes that people will use less. I also get no tracking for how many days I've already taken unless I go through my requests and count the approved ones myself.The unlimited policy is definitely a scam at many companies. Most of my team has been denied requests for reasons that don't exist in the written policy, like, "you recently had PTO already." Honestly I'd rather have a policy that only allowed 3 or 4 weeks with a minimum mandatory that each employee is required to take at least two weeks off per year. |
Welcome to Libera Chat | How is this better than Matrix? Freenode had posterity going for it. What does a brand new IRC network in 2021 have to offer than Matrix does not? |
NASA: We're sending humans to Mars | Sometime in the past fifty years NASA became paralyzed not by budget cuts, but by political in-fighting, fractured organizational structure and lots and lots of red tape. And then there is all that pork that goes around with the entrenched contractors. The tale of the last Mars program that NASA put together is a great example of this. They got handed a technically sound plan to get there in reasonable time with reasonable resources. Then every org-unit in NASA wanted to add their own part to stay relevant and it got so bloated both technically and financially that it had to be put to rest.So unless they convince me that they managed to get their internal structural problems under control, I don't think they get anytime to Mars within this century. And certainly not before the private sector does.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constellation_programp.s.: There is a free movie on YouTube telling the tale: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcTZvNLL0-w |
Reverse Engineering a Mysterious UDP Stream in My Hotel | Can you send your own UDP packets to the elevator then? |
Onedrive is slow on Linux but fast with a “Windows” user-agent (2016) | They can't be throttling based on user-agent... right? I thought this was the New Microsoft. Any other hypotheses? |
Introducing ChatGPT and Whisper APIs | > It is priced at $0.002 per 1k tokens, which is 10x cheaper than our existing GPT-3.5 models.This is a massive, massive deal. For context, the reason GPT-3 apps took off over the past few months before ChatGPT went viral is because a) text-davinci-003 was released and was a significant performance increase and b) the cost was cut from $0.06/1k tokens to $0.02/1k tokens, which made consumer applications feasible without a large upfront cost.A much better model and a 1/10th cost warps the economics completely to the point that it may be better than in-house finetuned LLMs.I have no idea how OpenAI can make money on this. This has to be a loss-leader to lock out competitors before they even get off the ground. |
Twitter ‘smytes’ customers | We had 20 minutes notice, and then everyone was kicked out of the Slack support channel and API responses simply died. What the actual fuck. They have mobile client SDKs out in the wild that are now just eating up battery life as they retry an impossible query forever. |
Show HN: Can’t afford Bloomberg Terminal? No prob, I built the next best thing | If you like stocks and are careful with the way you spend your money, you know how much time goes into buying shares of a stock. It’s tedious and I don’t have 24k for a Bloomberg terminal. Which led me to the idea during xmas break to spend the time creating my own terminal. I introduce you to “Gamestonk Terminal” (probably should’ve sent 1 tweet everyday to Elon Musk for copyrights permission eheh).In summary, the Terminal (https://github.com/DidierRLopes/GamestonkTerminal) has 7 distinct menus:
- Discover Stocks
Top gainers; Sectors performance; upcoming earnings releases; top high shorted interest stocks; top stocks with low float; top orders on fidelity; and some SPAC websites with news/calendars.- Market Sentiment
Scrolling through Reddit main posts, and most tickers mentions; Extracting stocktwit sentiment based on bull/bear flags; Twitter in-depth sentiment prediction using AI; Google mentions over time.- Research Web pages
List of good pages to do research on a stock, e.g. macroaxis, zacks, macrotrends, ..- Fundamental Analysis
Read financials from a company from Market Watch, Yahoo Finance, Alpha Vantage, and Financial Modeling Prep API.- Technical Analysis
The usual technical indicators: sma, rsi, macd, adx, bbands, and more.- Due Diligence
Some features are: Latest news of the company; Analyst prices and ratings; Price target from several analysts plot over time vs stock price; Insider activity, and these timestamps marked on the stock price historical data; Latest SEC fillings; Short interest over time; A check for financial warnings based on Sean Seah book.- Prediction Techniques
The one I had more fun with. It tries to predict the stock price, from simple models like sma and arima to complex neural network models, like LSTM. The additional capability here is that all of these are easy to configure. Either through command line arguments, or even in form of a configuration file to define your NN. |
Court issues permanent injunction in Epic vs. Apple case | Think Apple has already seen the writing on the wall - both S. Korea & the US are now probably going to push back against the IAP restrictions, and they can / should do a couple of things, which might actually increase revenue.1. Cut down the IAP commission to 15% for everyone.
2. Cut down the commission to 5% for those who pay for a Business Account, say at $5,000 a year.The thing is no customer wants to use any company's half-assed bug-riddled purchase or subscription system. Every iOS and macOS user will prefer to use the Apple system. All Apple has to do is to make the rates competitive enough, that after considering building their own purchases system, factoring in sales tax and VAT, most developers will happily just opt for Apple's system if the rates make sense. Many people are putting up with 30% already — bringing the rates down to something reasonable with an upgrade path to put them on par with payment processors like Stripe (with VAT and Billing and Radar) or Paddle will just increase revenues for them.The moment they drop rates and ease restrictions apps that are not being built because of these rules will get built, and these apps will gladly pay the market rate of 5% to 10% for a full service payments system. |
My Family’s Slave | I had a terrible "Billy" moment a few years ago.I was travelling and a friend said I could use her house, because it was empty. This was perfect for me, since I had a wife and kid.It turns out there was a housekeeper. She did everything for us, made us feel very comfortable, cooked, served, helped with the kid, etc.Then one day I found out she didn't have her own room, despite the place being a multi storey mansion. In fact, she slept on a mat in the kitchen. And not only that, there would be a phone call each morning to wake her up, from the master of the house. He didn't want her to get too comfy while the family was out.It was all a bit shocking. I still haven't chatted to my friend about this, because what on earth do you say? And otherwise ordinary western educated person -in fact a feminist, globalist, left-leaning idealist- who has a slave? What if I've misunderstood something? Maybe my friend didn't approve of it? Maybe he did? I'd never be able to talk to my friend again.I got the housekeeper a present when we left, as she'd been so good at taking care of us. But naturally I didn't enquire any further into her relationship with the family.-------My main thought is there's a sort of Stockholm syndrome going on. Lola still had thoughts for her family back home, but she was so integrated in the new family it became part of her life, too. I guess it's a coping mechanism. Even slaves need meaning in their lives, and taking care of kids is meaning.-------Ok, enough of moralizing. Actually I find it comforting that there is at least some sympathy for my predicament. At least one or two of you think it is possible that they would behave similarly. Or at least acknowledge the awkward situation.I will talk to this friend in person next time I'm in that part of the world, which should be soon, about this incident, and get the full story of how their housekeeper lives. |
We Chat, They Watch | It’s worth noting that Facebook Messenger also intercepts and filters messages. For example, it’s impossible to send a message containing the link “joebiden.info”. On the mobile app, it will simply say “failed to send.” On desktop, it will tell you the link violates its “community standards” and cannot be shared. |
Google has a secret deal with FB called “Jedi Blue” that they knew was illegal | What can we as people in top 1% with 1) information about big tech abuses 2) skills to fix this do?Individually we can use browsers like firefox or brave and probably donate time or money to them, but I think it's not enough.I think we would need something like a movement against those abuses, but probably the biggest win would be a business model that could win with them in the free market.Is this possible? Has anyone tried something like this? |
ElonJet Is Now Suspended | Well it seems like Elon is reneging on his previous commitment to free speech.- https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1589414958508691456 |
Firefox 66 to block automatically playing audible video and audio | Muted autoplay is still allowed. WTH Mozilla. Just stop. Stop the stupid auto-playing video. Nobody wants it.This announcement almost made my morning. It's frustrating seeing video everywhere when you're just trying to read an article. If I wanted video, I'd turn on my TV. |
Dan Kaminsky has died | I had dinner with Dan once, he ”social engineered” me and claimed he forgot to bring money. I knew what he was doing, but also knew that if picking up the tab was the price i had to pay for getting to hang out with him, I got the better end of the Deal. Rest In Peace |
Use one big server | Yep, there's a premium on making your architecture more cloudy. However, the best point for Use One Big Server is not necessarily running your big monolithic API server, but your database.Use One Big Database.Seriously. If you are a backend engineer, nothing is worse than breaking up your data into self contained service databases, where everything is passed over Rest/RPC. Your product asks will consistently want to combine these data sources (they don't know how your distributed databases look, and oftentimes they really do not care).It is so much easier to do these joins efficiently in a single database than fanning out RPC calls to multiple different databases, not to mention dealing with inconsistencies, lack of atomicity, etc. etc. Spin up a specific reader of that database if there needs to be OLAP queries, or use a message bus. But keep your OLTP data within one database for as long as possible.You can break apart a stateless microservice, but there are few things as stagnant in the world of software than data. It will keep you nimble for new product features. The boxes that they offer on cloud vendors today for managed databases are giant! |
The Password Game | I'm stuck at "iatetomatoesyesterday0265Z#521juneVpepsiVIIxngxcaboutAg[moon emojis]italy2020Bf7+" trying to solve the chess notation puzzle.I especially laughed at the rule "must include today's Worldle" and I'm happy with my solution including every emoji for "must include the current phase of the moon as an emoji."(HackerNews doesn't seem to display emoji. My solution is to paste every moon phase emoji.)Excited to see what's next after figuring out the best move in this Chess puzzle.This reminds me of trying to manually construct an Autogram like below. This one is a quote someone else made. I tried to do it myself and it is so hard because the counts keep changing as you write out other counts!Only the fool would take trouble to verify that his sentence was composed of ten a's, three b's, four c's, four d's, forty-six e's, sixteen f's, four g's, thirteen h's, fifteen i's, two k's, nine l's, four m's, twenty-five n's, twenty-four o's, five p's, sixteen r's, forty-one s's, thirty-seven t's, ten u's, eight v's, eight w's, four x's, eleven y's, twenty-seven commas, twenty-three apostrophes, seven hyphens and, last but not least, a single !https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autogram |
Amazon Prime Air | (Disclaimer: I work for Amazon, but not for anything related to this. This is the first time I'm learning of Prime Air.)I'm somewhat disheartened by the skepticism of a lot of comments from HN, Reddit, and Twitter. Not stuff like "I wonder how they'll handle adverse weather" (which I think is intellectually interesting) but stuff like "As soon as one of these kills a dog it's done for". What merit is there in rooting for failure for failure's sake? This feels like science fiction in the best way possible.I have no idea whether or not this will work, but I sure hope it does. It's incredibly exciting. |
Grumpy: Go running Python | This seems like an odd engineering choice. Presumably the effort to create a python->go translator would be non-trivial. Why not just start rewriting components into Go, and migrating them out of Python, leaving python as essentially the presentation layer at most? |
Google Maps Hacks | Navigation apps have mostly settled into a comfortable state of "good enough" mediocrity. In addition to the "red but no traffic" problems highlighted by others I find turn by turn directions are incredibly annoying while driving in areas I'm intimately familiar with and there's no way to say "I know what I'm doing when I'm in this area" or "pause giving me voice directions for 10 minutes". Additionally:* I can't compare multiple modes of transportation on the same map. E.g. driving vs. walking vs. transit.* There's no way to optimize for minimizing left turns, especially onto busy streets.* Multi-destination route optimization is not available. E.g. I need to go to the mall, the grocery store, and the bank, what's the sequence of destinations and route that minimizes travel time.[1]Edit:
[1] I realize this is describing the travelling salesman problem, but for small (n it should not be too difficult while still being useful in practice. |
ReMarkable 2.0 – A digital notebook that feels like paper | I have been very happy with my ReMarkable 1, and have ordered the ReMarkable 2.0.Hacker News might be interested in the active development community around the device: https://github.com/reHackable/awesome-reMarkableThe device is open. It's just an embedded linux device. You can ssh into it, and run arbitrary code. The SDK is based on Qt. You can also connect a keyboard to it over a USB-on-the-go port.I have been imagining porting a lightweight Qt-based virtual terminal to the device and using it as an e-ink unix terminal. Alas, I have not yet had the cycles to complete this project. |
YouTube is banning anti-vaccine activists and blocking all anti-vaccine content | I think we have to ask if this won't have a chilling effect on open discussion by moderate voices. I'm subscribed to the channel of an M.D. on YouTube who discusses COVID-19, vaccines, etc. He is very careful to (repeatedly) point out that he is vaccinated, he has personally vaccinated hundreds of patients, he encourages everyone to speak to their doctor and follow their recommendations, believing that the vaccine is beneficial for the overwhelming majority of people. But, for all that, he has had videos taken down, and worries that it will happen again.Months ago he was insisting that the people who had contracted COVID-19 and who had antibodies in their system may not need the vaccine. Now, we have a number of studies coming out to support that. But months ago that was "anti-vax" (employing the slanderous use of the term).People are going to cheer that "wackos" will no longer have a platform. It's not the wackos we should be worrying about. It's the stifling of legitimate public debate, the stifling of legitimate voices who find themselves in the minority. |
The Ethereum merge is done | > The Merge is one of the largest technological events in the industry to date.I feel kinda ashamed. I work in the IT industry and I claim to have knowledge about ("good") software engineering practices, distributed systems, compilers, algorithms, etc. Nevertheless, I didn't understand a word of what the article is saying. Could you recommend serious references (preferably books and not random blogs) I could read to catch up with what's going on with crypto these days? I'm not planning to "buy" crypto; I would like to understand the technicalities. |
Taking control of all .io domains with a targeted registration | This is a huge screwup on the part of the people who run the 'root' of .IO, and their entire operation should be severely scrutinized by ICANN.In my opinion almost all of the 'weird' TLDs which are country codes that are actually operated by a third party commercial service are 95% spam and junk registrations. .TV is a good example.Technical screwups aside, the existence of .IO and the fact that it "belongs" to the UK government is morally questionable, since the entire country code only exists because the British and American militaries forcibly removed the original inhabitants of islands such as Diego Garcia so that they could use the area as naval and air force bases.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Indian_Ocean_Territoryhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diego_GarciaIf I had been able to successfully register these names and get live traffic going to a BIND9 instance, my first instinct would not be to alert the company through its first tier customer support levels, but to immediately post a summary of the problem to ARIN, RIPE, APNIC and ICANN mailing lists. This would get the issue in front of people who immediately understand how serious the problem is, and hopefully one of them would be able to contact the principals of .IO directly. |
Ask HN: Why is Reddit on mobile so obsessed with making me use their app? | It is pretty offensive that they say "reddit works better on the app" when the only reason for that is that they broke everything on mobile (on purpose?) in a series of badly-implemented redesigns.I'm never going to install it, and I have all but stopped reading it because these prompts are so obnoxious. That's probably +$ for Reddit though.I don't understand why companies constantly do stuff that serves only _themselves_, and then expect users to engage with it because it exists. Users are able to identify when something is valuable to them. If you make it valuable they will use it. Consider the difference on an ecommerce site between a comment section vs a few company-picked "testimonials" above the fold. _Everyone_ knows the testimonials are garbage. Maybe your conversion goes up a tick the first time you put them on the site, but when a repeat viewer sees the same ones again they're going to roll their eyes and register you as untrustworthy. Whereas a (reasonably-managed, honest) comment section provides loads of information that's actually valuable to the consumer. |
Mcmaster.com is the best e-commerce site I've ever used | McMaster is great.This article is also completely glossing over another reason to use them: Their shipping is somehow insanely fast.Almost everything is next-day delivery, even for standard shipping. They've somehow got their logistics COMPLETELY nailed. I believe they have their own agreements with USPS/FedEx/etc...McMaster is generally not the cheapest, but they're almost always the fastest and the easiest.Machining/industry runs on McMaster. |
Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today | At my office a lot of the non-programmers (marketers, finance people, customer support, etc) write a fair bit of SQL. I've often wondered what it is about SQL that allows them to get over their fear of programming, since they would never drop into ruby or a "real" programming language. Things I've considered: * Graphical programming environment (they run the queries
from pgadmin, or Postico, or some app like that)
* Instant feedback - run the query get useful results
* Compilation step with some type safety - will complain
if their query is malformed
* Are tables a "natural" way to think about data for humans?
* Job relevance
Any ideas? Can we learn from that example to make real programming environments that are more "cross functional" in that more people in a company are willing to use them? |
Lyrebird – An API to copy the voice of anyone | It's there any copyright protections for a person's voice? If not, David Attenborough and Morgan Freeman will be lead voice actors in my next game project |
Subsets and Splits