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Title: Follow up question: is that complexity necessary or artificially inflated?<p>Note: this is a fun jab back at <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34218003" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34218003</a><p>Frontend feels like it gets incredible amounts of uninformed hatred here, and you could copy/paste many of the defensive replies here over there verbatim. My take is backend isn’t too complex, just sometimes over-complicated in specific cases. Just like frontend! I just wish there weren’t so many non-frontend developers in every frontend thread hating on it while obviously not being very experienced with it!<p>Happy new year!
Upvote: | 68 |
Title: Dear HNers who engage in any form of "thinking in public" (whether that's blogging, posting notes online, or maybe even participating in HN/Twitter/forum discussions): What are some of the pros and cons of thinking in public vs thinking in private?<p>Since it's relatively easy to find the benefits of blogging and other ways of thinking in public, I'm especially curious to hear about some of the potential cons of thinking in public / the benefits of thinking in private?<p>And with that in mind, how does one effectively manage both to make the best out of both approaches?
Upvote: | 243 |
Title: We are having an issue with Google. All of our email is going to spam (including email between team members).<p>We have a Domain reputation of 100% as per Google's own tool (Postmaster), and we are following all of Google's best practices -> SPF is set correctly, DKIM, DMARC, the emails are only sent when the customer selects to receive an email, and we include a visible unsubscribe link.<p>Our whole business is paralyzed, and Google customer support doesn't seem able to identify the issue. It has been 2 weeks.<p>Is there something else we should be doing?
Upvote: | 47 |
Title: In docker compose you have a flat list of services and you manually weave them together with configuration.
Then in an effort to secure things you add on frontend/backend networks to isolate containers from each other.<p><pre><code> services:
proxy:
build: ./proxy
networks:
- frontend
app:
build: ./app
networks:
- frontend
- backend
db:
image: mysql
networks:
- backend
</code></pre>
You add config to share credentials between services.<p><pre><code> services:
app:
build: ./app
environment:
DB_PASSWORD_FILE: /run/secrets/db_root_password
secrets:
- db_root_password
db:
image: mysql
environment:
MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD_FILE: /run/secrets/db_root_password
secrets:
- db_root_password
secrets:
db_root_password:
file: ./secrets/db_root_password.txt
</code></pre>
Is there a way to abstract away these extra configuration steps and keep it simple yet secure by default?<p>If you would express db as a dependency/resource of app, could you infer that you could put it in a seperate network and have the credentials automatically link?
'As a developer' I'm not really interested in the network specifics or which credentials, I just want them to talk securely and minimize any attack vectors and keep any configuration to a minimum.
With tens of apps, their databases and transversal connections, how to do you keep the configuration to a minimum?<p>Googling around I found;<p>humanitec:
https://docs.humanitec.com/integrations/resource-types/mariadb
They express something as 'resources', a dependency type that can be provisioned automatically with inputs and outputs that then can be injected in the application env vars:
mysql://${externals.my-db.username}:${externals.my-db.password}@${externals.my-db.host}:${externals.my-db.port}/${externals.my-db.name}<p>you're limited to a limited set of drivers ofcourse and how would you express an app1 to app2 dependency?<p>juju:
https://juju.is/<p>Each app is packaged in a charm which seems to be a yaml declaring inputs, dependencies and other meta data and optional python code that can respond to certain lifecycle hooks<p>https://discourse.charmhub.io/t/implementing-relations/1051<p><pre><code> name: my-node-app
...
requires:
database:
interface: mongodb
provides:
website:
interface: http
</code></pre>
Things can seemingly be autowired based on what interface they provide and require?
So just make a list of apps until everything resolves?<p>Does anyone have experience with these tools or others like it?<p>How do you stop others and yourself from drowning in credentials, certificates, env vars, jvm params and k8s yaml(times every environment)
How do you do (not the configuration management) but manage an inventory of what configuration is needed to run your environment (or a subset for ci)?
Upvote: | 74 |
Title: Hey HN,<p>My friend’s children are starting their adventure with programming at school with Scratch. Unfortunately, the eldest one is blind, and as Scratch is visual, he won’t be able to use it. A pity: the kid has probably the most vivid imagination of all people I know.<p>Can you recommend an alternative? Something tactile or audial, perhaps? A quick googling yielded <a href="https://codejumper.com/" rel="nofollow">https://codejumper.com/</a> – is it worth the $1K it costs?<p>Personal experience reports are most welcome. Thanks!
Upvote: | 219 |
Title: If you have used fly.io, what is your experience of the service?
Upvote: | 47 |
Title: What i see happening soon is:<p>With all this recent AI stuff where it is able to create content that feels real
I started to think about how AI could just create the world for you.<p>Since we already are basically living in the internet we could have
some terrorist organization finding an isolated enough person and attack him with a program
that would generate a bubble just for him: fake friends, fake events happening, fake influencers and news programs just for him, basically whole internet content
and then only reality check would be talking to other people (which Trump us taught is also not necessarily true "fake news" argument)
and then easily this person can be pushed towards some criminal or whatever activity.
Upvote: | 61 |
Title: GitHub is being partially blocked in India by a prominent ISP (ACT) across multiple states under a sealed court order.<p>You can find multiple reports here: <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=Github%20%40actfibernet" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/search?q=Github%20%40actfibernet</a>. It has shown up in news reports: <a href="https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/gadgets-news/github-content-domain-blocked-for-these-indian-users-reports/articleshow/96687992.cms" rel="nofollow">https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/gadgets-news/github-cont...</a><p>ACT is using SNI-sniffing to block raw.githubusercontent, unlike most other blocks, which are DNS based. ACT's block page claims it is under a court order to block the domain:<p>> curl <a href="http://raw.githubusercontent.com/" rel="nofollow">http://raw.githubusercontent.com/</a><p>> This URL has been blocked under the instructions in compliance with the orders of a Hon'ble Court.<p>(Using HTTPS results in a dropped connection).<p>Unfortunately, there is no easy way to find out if there is even a court order behind this block. A few times court orders are leaked, and a court case to get a single order published took 3 years[0] . Other ISPs are known to block websites without court-order due to technical issues[1]<p>for the last few weeks, GitHub previews on the website have refused to load, alongside some other interesting cases, such as extension previews breaking on VS Code (, Obsidian etc).<p>Hopefully, GitHub is fighting a case to get this unblocked, and given the resources it has, to challenge the law here as well (the law gives no recourse as it stands).<p>[0]: <a href="https://internetfreedom.in/delhi-hc-directs-meity-to-provide-a-copy-of-the-blocking-order-and-a-post-decisional-hearing-to-mr-tanul-thakur-whattheblock/" rel="nofollow">https://internetfreedom.in/delhi-hc-directs-meity-to-provide...</a><p>[1]: <a href="https://github.com/captn3m0/hello-cloudflare/">https://github.com/captn3m0/hello-cloudflare/</a>
Upvote: | 294 |
Title: This is an update to my previous post <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34189717" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34189717</a> . Stripe has resolved the issue and everything has been released. I told the contacts at Stripe that I would do a write up about what happened from my point of view to help them understand what happened to me. I figured it would be good to do that write up publicly to help both Stripe and potential Stripe customers understand what happened and how it was resolved.<p>Summary: Stripe put my accounts in review for a spike in sales on Cyber Monday. Throughout the month we received very little communication from Stripe and had many support chats and calls. Keep in mind that the whole time Stripe was still accepting payments on our behalf on all of these accounts. Each of the chats/calls asked us to upload the same invoices each time for review and gave us vague information that our accounts were being reviewed. Finally out of frustration I posted on HN about my issue. Thanks to @dang for getting a Stripe employee to respond and he was finally able to resolve the issue for me.<p>Overall this review process was pretty bad. Very little communication and nothing I could really do directly to move things along or get any real information. It took a random Stripe employee to get an email from @dang and post on HN in order to get this issue resolved. I’m lucky because I know about HN and know that Stripe employees frequent the site, but I don’t think HN wants to become the Stripe support forum.<p>Stripe you can do better. We all know that in order to scale you need to automate pieces of your infrastructure and communication. But, there is a balance between automation and manual review. When someone like me gets caught up in an automated system there needs to be better ways of letting support help that person.<p>See my comments below for actual details and dates.
Upvote: | 501 |
Title: For a total of $5.21
Upvote: | 261 |
Title: I made a terminal pager that can be used instead of more, less, tail -f.
It has a mode that distinguishes between headers and columns.
Upvote: | 181 |
Title: Hello HN<p>Over the New Year's break, I created semanticvideosearch.com. This can search any video based on meaning and context. I would love to get your feedback on it. What should I change and what can be improved?<p>The preprocessed videos can be search very quickly, while the youtube video links take some time (yt videos also have a upper duration limit due to compute issues). I intend to add search based on the frames of the video soon.<p>I would love to know your thoughts on the demo and any suggestions for improvements.<p>Thanks!<p>PS: the inspiration to create this was to get the 2 mins of content from youtube videos with 18 other mins of fluff.
Upvote: | 77 |
Title: I guess I'm posting this on this throwaway because of the very topic of this post.<p>I don't feel safe sharing my true opinion online. I generally find that I'm very distant in belief from a lot of people on social media (reddit, twitter, let alone facebook or whatever, even if I don't use them).<p>Just to give an example, I couldnt care less about people engaging in incest and find it just an old cultural taboo. Adults are responsible enough to know about the dangers of having children and they can do whatever they want.<p>Say, on reddit (even if some might agree), I would typically get people calling me disgusting, downvoting, going through my post history, attacking me, DMng me, whatnot.
This in itself is not a big deal, but when disliked opinions by the hivemind start to pile, you are seen as an enemy, someone to be sabotaged, followed around and downvoted, etc.
If it links to your real identity? Oh boy. One wrong opinion here in the US is enough to ruin your life.
Ah, i just remembered that article about a mentally challenged guy who dressed as Hitler in halloween and as a result got fired from his 20+ or so year janitor job. Not the same, but I somehow find it relevant in a way. (He was making fun of hitler, he claimed)<p>I'm not unhealthily paranoid, and I'm not someone with outright illegal views. But I don't fit the right or the left, and so I have no allies, sometimes only enemies.<p>I don't want to make this too long. I'm venting here because people here are more open minded than in general (even if I feel that's changing with the years and as more people join here... just me?)<p>Thanks for reading.
Upvote: | 75 |
Title: Did you at any point in time have a life coach? Did that help you grow professionally and personally? Would you recommend getting one?
Upvote: | 44 |
Title: I am sure most of you noticed the trend, but a lot of folks online, from influencers on twitter/instagram/tiktok to CEOs of some companies who were big on crypto, web3 (I never understood what that even means) now switched completely to AI/ML with the popularity of DALL-E/ChatGPT.<p>Me and some of my colleagues are fairly active on the MachineLearning subreddit and we've been getting a lot of unsolicited dms to collaborate in a breakthrough ML/AI project. The conversations start something like this: https://imgur.com/a/z6GUTGc Yup, you guessed it, they have the idea and we have to implement it. If you look into their profile history, you’ll see that they’ve been heavy on crypto/NFT/web3 stuff until a few months ago, some even made good money. They don't even have the dataset. One guy proposed my friend that he has a startup idea to use GPT-model to let people talk to their pets and that it should be 'fairly easy' to finetune from an existing model.<p>I am already fairly tired of seeing all the ChatGPT stuff on my socials, and I am not looking forward to another few years of more low effort/low quality stuff in peak of inflated expectations phase. I love GPT, I have many pipelines where I actively use it, but I also see the potential where people will abuse it, in every form from increased spam, personalized phishing, etc. Imagine scammers calling your grand parents not with an non-native accent anymore - heck maybe with your own voice (which in my head is fairly easy to do - get someone's family tree, call the grandkid using a model fine-tuned on some local accent, perhaps of the opposite gender and engage them in a conversation - use the voice clips to finetune another model and then call their parents/grandparents to get money, heck even the transcript for the scam interaction can be auto-generated). I am a first-generation college student, and getting my parents to use a smartphone has itself been a challenge - there's no way I can teach them to identify sophisticated scams. I bracing myself and not looking forward for all of this to come.
Upvote: | 299 |
Title: Full e-mail I received https://i.imgur.com/Nz1tEfu.png<p>https://circleci.com/blog/january-4-2023-security-alert/<p>--<p>We wanted to make you aware that we are currently investigating a security incident, and that our investigation is ongoing. We will provide you updates about this incident, and our response, as they become available. At this point, we are confident that there are no unauthorized actors active in our systems; however, out of an abundance of caution, we want to ensure that all customers take certain preventative measures to protect your data as well.<p>Action request:<p>Out of an abundance of caution, we strongly recommend that all customers take the following actions:<p>- Immediately rotate any and all secrets stored in CircleCI. These may be stored in project environment variables or in contexts.<p>- We also recommend customers review internal logs for their systems for any unauthorized access starting from December 21, 2022 through today, January 4, 2023, or upon completion of your secrets rotation.<p>Additionally, if your project uses Project API tokens, we have invalidated those and you will need to replace them. You can find more information on how to do that in our documentation here.<p>We apologize for any disruption to your work. We take the security of our systems and our customers’ systems extremely seriously. While we are actively investigating this incident, we are committed to sharing more details with customers in the coming days.<p>Thank you for your urgent attention to rotating your secrets.
Upvote: | 47 |
Title: Given all the streaming services,
cable and sling alternatives being roughly the same price, and just general prices of games/dlcs, Spotify/YouTube premium (the full page ads and frequency of them on YouTube is at a new level without premium).<p>I just feel like if we’re at peak monetization, I might as well go back to my old teenage ways.
Upvote: | 416 |
Title: Hi HN,<p>We’re Elizabeth, Catalin, and Tom - the founders of Ello (<a href="https://www.helloello.com">https://www.helloello.com</a>). Ello is an AI-powered app that mimics the one-on-one interaction of a reading tutor by listening to, encouraging, and coaching kids grade K-3 as they read out loud from a real book.<p>We posted on HN back in 2020 when we launched Trustle, a company designed to pair families with dedicated experts in child development. We learned from that experience that parents don’t want a consultant, but they do want actual help with specific challenges—one of the biggest being reading.<p>Prior to COVID, 65% of 4th graders in the U.S. were reading behind level. The most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress report revealed that reading levels have dropped even further, to the lowest level since 1992. These disheartening statistics reinforce something we learned during our time at Trustle—of all the pain points parents face in raising children, reading can often be one of the most critical yet most difficult to address, especially if the child doesn’t like to read.<p>In an effort to help reverse this trend, we used advances in speech recognition - driven by self-supervised learning - to create a virtual experience designed to provide effective reading support. It's no substitute for attention and coaching from a caring adult, which is obviously what kids really need, but unfortunately that is not always available.<p>If every child had consistent access to 1:1 reading support and every parent or caregiver had the time, language skills, and confidence to help their children learn to read with no outside assistance, then there would not be a need for a technical solution. Unfortunately, we know not every child has this access, and many parents are looking for extra support. That's why we've built Ello.<p>If you look at a great teacher or parent working with a child, they are talking to each other. Ello uses a speech recognition model that listens to what a child is saying and provides the appropriate phonics based coaching, as well as commentary and help. As a child reads across the page of a physical book, the Ello app tracks the child’s progress and picks up when they miss a word or get a word wrong and then steps in just like a good reading coach would.<p>One criticism that we’ve heard since launching is that we are trying to replace the sacred role of a parent teaching their child to read. We say, “Not at all!”. Ello can serve as a resource for every type of parent without being a “replacement”, which is impossible in any case.<p>We’ve had most success with children who are reluctant readers. Ello provides a fun environment to practice reading without the pressure of an adult watching you. We’ve seen kids who flat out refuse to read start to enjoy reading in a short period of time.<p>We are highly privacy oriented; unlike most apps relying on speech tracking we can work completely on device with no internet and no audio data shared back with us.<p>We launched in early in 2022 and have come a long way since then. The model works like this: we mail customers five books and a prepaid return shipping label every month. At the end of the month you mail the books back or keep as many as you want for an additional $5 apiece, and then we mail you next month’s box. Our reading specialists help determine the appropriate reading level for every child and make sure that we are sending books to match. Right now we support roughly K through 3rd grade, although Ello can be effective for some Pre-K kids as well.<p>We know there are many parents on HN, including those with young children. We would love to hear about your experiences and needs around your children’s reading journeys and your perspective on how something like Ello might help. Or, if you’re in the US, give us a try (we are only in the US as we ship physical books right now, but are launching a digital only version in the first half of this year and then will be available more broadly) - you can get a free month with code ellohacker. And of course we welcome any feedback, questions, and ideas!
Upvote: | 41 |
Title: Me with my friend Vitaly Ludvichenko made an experiment to combine ClickHouse server and client to make a self-contained program running a database engine and processing data without a server: <a href="https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/pull/150">https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/pull/150</a><p>Development continued in the past 6 years, and now clickhouse-local becomes a swiss-army knife for data processing. Say "ffmpeg" for datasets and more.<p>It can resemble textql, octosql, dsq, duckdb, trdsql, q, datafusion-cli, spyql, but has better capabilities and performance.<p>Here is a tutorial: <a href="https://clickhouse.com/blog/extracting-converting-querying-local-files-with-sql-clickhouse-local" rel="nofollow">https://clickhouse.com/blog/extracting-converting-querying-l...</a><p>"serverless" in the same sense as here: <a href="https://www.sqlite.org/serverless.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.sqlite.org/serverless.html</a>
and also in the more common sense - clickhouse-local can be packaged into AWS Lambda and serve queries on a per-request basis, as here: <a href="https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/issues/43589">https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/issues/43589</a>
Upvote: | 289 |
Title: Hi HN,<p>I believe Google has a grave authentication issue and I cannot burst the impenetrable tier-1 support wall to solve it.
Hopefully I'm wrong, but for the life of me and the support reps I talked to, we cannot get a stranger logged out of my YouTube account.<p>The stranger is using my YouTube account through my old Smart TV that I gave away (my bad for not logging out, but there should be recourse for this).<p>Once I discovered this, I have changed passwords and revoked auth tokens on all relevant services (Spotify, Disney+, etc.). All services no longer show the stranger accessing them - with the exception of YouTube.<p>The actions I've taken multiple times (as instructed by Google support):
- Changed my Google account's password
- Revoked all "devices I trust" under my 2FA settings
- Logged out of all devices in the "Your Devices" list<p>This did force me to log back in on my own devices (phone, TV), but I still see new videos that the stranger watched in my YouTube history.
This has been happening for weeks.<p>Google support walked me through these steps and then gave generic "make sure your password are strong" article links, but of course, refuse to escalate this.<p>If you wish, you can view the support transcripts here (I admittedly got a little short during the 2nd conversation, which I regret):
https://pastebin.com/GypwBPFj<p>---<p>Some details:<p>- The videos in my view history are in Arabic, so I know it's the stranger who watches them<p>- I know the stranger has access through my old TV because I saw their activity on all apps I had installed on my TV, and I saw my old TV signed in from a distant city under "Your Devices" list
Upvote: | 106 |
Title: I am court ordered to pay for my children's livelihood, and I can't live with them, so I need to pay for my own livelihood. I also owe about $10k in taxes from two years ago, and $10k on my car that just got repo'd, I haven't paid December's rent and don't have any money for January's, I have $150 to my name.
I got fired from my last client on the last day of November. I've worked with him since around 2019. I applied for regular jobs in 2017 and 2018, and was offered many jobs including one by Goldman Sacchs for quarter million a year, but their offer and every other one was retracted because of my criminal background.<p>In particular, 7 years ago and 12 years ago, I flashed teenagers. That's the crime. I was told it'd be easier to find a job if I had murdered someone, because nobody understands the mental illness that causes flashing, which I don't have anymore and haven't for years. But my name is part of google search now, the entire first page, so I can't escape it.<p>I don't know where to find clients who would be willing to work with me. And I'm on a time crunch. I am legally required to pay $3k/month for my wife and children's livelihood, and have no money to pay a lawyer to get that overturned, and when I presented my case to the judge he already said no, I will have to pay this or be found guilty of contempt. I also owe about $1k/month in back taxes and other debts. Not to mention needing to afford a lawyer (guessing $1k/month), and rent ($1k) and food ($200) for myself per month. That puts me at $5200/month.<p>So I figure I need to make about $40/hour, which sounds like a lot but remember Goldman offered me $125/hour which testifies to my skill even if they retracted it for other reasons. And I got many similar offers for anywhere from $50-$100/hour from other companies out here.<p>I'm absolutely out of ideas. I have very very little time left to get a job before I'll probably be homeless. This is creating decision paralysis. I also have very little idea how to navigate job applications lately. I get no hits on upwork, and I can't work in government/financial/medical jobs because of my criminal record. And I can't find any subreddits where I can offer my services as a software consultant.<p>I have basically no advertising or marketing skills at all. I've made some software that I think is legitimately innovative and asked for GH sponsors for it, and posted regularly on HN to tell people about it, and it gets no attention at all, not a single upvote ever. And I imagine reddit would be even harder to get noticed on.<p>I'm okay with dying, I actually kind of prefer it, so if this doesn't work out, then that's it, and I'm done, and I've done my best. But my children need me to provide for them, and I will do everything I can to provide for them. That's my only purpose in life, and if I fail at that, then I'll be glad to go to sleep.<p>---<p>3 clarifications:<p>I would rather die than not provide for my children. My one and only purpose in life is to be their father. So I will provide for them or die trying.<p>I have the skills for $150/hour, so I'm sure someone out there is willing to get it at the bargain price of $50/hour. I just need to find them somehow.<p>And I am not suicidal. I am just really, really tired of life, and would be relieved to finally be done living in a lose-lose situation, whether by success or failure.
Upvote: | 73 |
Title: I work for Facebook (now Meta) on an infra service and have for over 3 years. When I joined I knew I was getting into an environment that had high expectations of ICs.<p>Ever since I started there has been this high anxiety attitude around job performance -- specifically performance reviews. As an L3 I paid much attention to it but after a promo or two people started giving me advice that I should be prepared to 'really output a lot of impact' in order to make it. I have done quite well so far, but I'm getting a bit exhausted by trying to continuously justify my worth \ existence as an IC and ensure people perceive my work as good \ important.<p>As I've seen my friends move around to other companies I've gotten the sense that engineers at other companies don't really have to deal with this sort of anxiety as much, either because expectations are more concrete ("we need these things done\designed\scoped out and you're working on it") or because performance reviews are just not so intense.<p>With recent layoffs and the direction of the company I am thinking about trying to move around, maybe to a smaller company. From a personal perspective, performance culture is one of the things I have come to dislike most about this company, although maybe it's like this most places.<p>Is it like this elsewhere? Any thoughts?<p>Note: by IC I mean engineers that contribute to changes directly, not sure if that's a common term
Upvote: | 71 |
Title: It's been years (over a decade?) since I've had a server at home but I'm setting one up for media and I got to thinking: what else should I do with this box? So I was wondering what cool/nerdy/weird stuff you all are using home servers for. DNS and file sharing seem like obvious applications I could set up. I already run email and web on a VPS so that's taken care of. What are you doing with your home server?
Upvote: | 519 |
Title: As it seemingly stands, it looks like Stripe is about to refund €147.000,00 worth of payments to my all of my customers due to 2 account closures (customers that have already received their orders).<p>I have been running 2 eCommerce stores with Stripe, where we have shipped physical products out to our customers, from a local warehouse, which have been delivered within 5-10 business days of the order being placed.<p>After about a month of running the stores, we received a notice about Stripe having to conduct a manual review on our account, and thus payouts would be frozen.<p>We submitted the requested info, for both accounts.<p>In the case of account 1 (which has approximately €101.000,00 on hold) led to an initial closure and a 120 day hold. But then later a notice about refunding all of these payments back to the customers.<p>In the case of account 2 (which has approximately €46.000,00 on hold), Stripe deemed that we’ve been performing unauthorized charges on the account, and that they will have to refund all the “affected charges”.<p>Now in the case of account 2, there are no unauthorized charges, all customers have received their products and we have tracking numbers to prove this.<p>In the case of account 1, we requested a further review and got the reply that our money would be held for 120 days, and that “the affected card payments in 5 business days from the account closing day,” with a link referring to all the charges in our dashboard.<p>Obviously we also have tracking numbers to prove that literally every succeeded payment from account 1 have received their products, and we have submitted this to Stripe as well.<p>The reason for closure of both accounts is that our business is “high risk”. I’m not sure what this really means in our case, as we just sell consumer electronics in the $100-200 price range from a local warehouse (no dropshipping or anything like that).<p>Effectively what I can take away from this, is that Stripe is about to refund all the payments from my customers which evens out approximately €147.000,00.<p>When calculated in that stock has already been paid for and sent out, this translates to about a total net loss in the range of €250.000,00 for our business.<p>I’m not sure if this is a result of Stripe’s automated fraud protection systems, or if an actual human has decided that it’s adequate to try and refund €147.000,00. Worth of customer payments that have already received their order.<p>Regardless, I can understand an X day hold of the money, although it is annoying, but as far as I can tell, it most likely is not legal for Stripe to actually just refund customers who have already received their orders?
If the payments do end up being refunded, we will of course be taking legal action and contacting media outlets in efforts bring this story to the public eye, and to hold Stripe accountable for this.<p>Has anybody had a similar experience where they lost over 6 figures worth of payments, basically for no good reason?
Upvote: | 288 |
Title: Curious to know what thing / product / service improved your 2022?<p>For me it was an Elgato stream deck.<p>Initially bought it on a whim (probably more as a gimmick) but now find myself using multiple times a day in the office (sales) environment.
Upvote: | 514 |
Title: I'm working on i18n of an API for a customer now. It's a domain where one needs to refer to phone numbers, bank accounts, National Identity Numbers, business / legal entity organization numbers etc; in short, IDs in misc. national and international registries.<p>URN should be perfect for this; I would expect to do the i18n by replacing a Norwegian account number "12345678902" with "urn:bban:NO:12345678902", or a Danish company number "987322431" with "urn:business:DK:CRV:987322431".<p>However, the list of URN namespaces is very lacking. I'd expect to at least see "urn:msisdn:<phone number>"; or "urn:nin:DK:..." for Danish national identity numbers. But it's not there.<p>What I see looking around is a lot of home made solutions that make inferences about ID spaces based on "country" that usually holds but not always; or solutions coming from the XML world that seem very complicated to figure out (like ISO 6523 which declares '0037' for the Finnish company registry, and the syntax around it is XML or home-grown). URN would have been such a simple and nice solution. Why has it not catched on?
Upvote: | 124 |
Title: I keep finding articles that more or less talk about this but not some serious research on the topic. Do someone have a few pointers?<p>Edit: to clarify what I mean by fragility, it's how complex software, when changed, is likely to break with unexpected bugs, i.e., fixing a bug causes more.
Upvote: | 46 |
Title: Hi HN community,<p>I'm Marcus, a 17-year-old Software Engineer from Germany.<p>For the past two years I've been working on Tablane [0](<a href="https://github.com/Tablane/tablane">https://github.com/Tablane/tablane</a>) a task/project management tool, with features like:<p>- Collaborative Editing (google docs)<p>- Optimistic updates with RTK Query<p>- Realtime sync with Socket.io<p>- An awesome design<p>Let me know what you think! Ask me anything!<p>How I got here:
2020: I was developing a TTT [1] (Trouble in Terrorist Town) plugin for my minecraft server, when I started to require a project management tool to keep track of the features I wanted to implement, originally I used a text file, but after some time I started using products like ClickUp and Monday.<p>But not long after I hit several paywalls for features that I wanted to use (Custom Status, Limited Number of Boards, ...)
Soon after Tablane (originally task-board) was born. I started building the website using plain HTML, then found out about React and completed Colt Steele's "Web Developer Bootcamp" [2] and "The Modern React Bootcamp" [3] and started re-writing Tablane in React, and started adding feature after feature.<p>Now I am about to finish Highschool and originally I thought about applying to college and spending another 3-5 years there, but after the positive feedback I got on a three month internship I did at ContentPepper, and seeing how my own projects developed, I decided to look for open Developer positions, to work with a team of experienced developers so I can learn even faster.<p>Links:<p>[0] <a href="https://tablane.net" rel="nofollow">https://tablane.net</a><p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/MarconLP/TTT">https://github.com/MarconLP/TTT</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.udemy.com/course/modern-react-bootcamp/" rel="nofollow">https://www.udemy.com/course/modern-react-bootcamp/</a><p>[3] <a href="https://www.udemy.com/course/the-web-developer-bootcamp/" rel="nofollow">https://www.udemy.com/course/the-web-developer-bootcamp/</a><p>Socials:<p>Résumé/CV: <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CbZi1Bm-MlDHEb4WjsFBzIBSomJa1M7T/view?usp=share_link" rel="nofollow">https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CbZi1Bm-MlDHEb4WjsFBzIBSomJ...</a><p>LinkedIn: <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcus-hof/" rel="nofollow">https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcus-hof/</a><p>Email: marcus (dot) hof (at) protonmail (dot)com<p>GitHub: <a href="https://github.com/MarconLP">https://github.com/MarconLP</a><p>Twitter: <a href="https://twitter.com/Marcon565" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/Marcon565</a>
Upvote: | 352 |
Title: I just really enjoyed reading through https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34272687 and figured folks on HN might have equally good recommendations at a higher price point.<p>On Black Friday I bought a Roborock S7 MaxV Ultra (top of the line robot vacuum/mop), and it has just 100% solved my vacuuming/mopping needs (and this is from someone with two large dogs who shed a lot). It was $1200 but the ROI I'm going to get on that from saved time/not getting random dog hair in my mouth (they seriously shed a lot) will easily be worth it. The downside is I'm sure the Chinese government now has a detailed map of my house, but, y'know, tradeoffs.<p>What higher-priced item did you get that I should be looking at to make my life better/easier?
Upvote: | 87 |
Title: A similar post was done a few months ago and it was pretty fun so why not do it again ? share you're personal sites below and let others critique you!<p>I'll start with mine https://www.yusuf.fyi/
Upvote: | 103 |
Title: From impaired long-term and working memory, clarity of thought, mental agility, to executive function, it feels like the depression and anxiety caused by trauma have completely blunted my mind to a debilitating degree. Acquiring, integrating, and productively applying information is an enormous challenge. In meetings, I feel like a mental sloth. I've tried a variety of antidepressants, psychedelics, and supplements, to no avail. Talk therapy has done little.<p>Has anyone been able to cognitively recover?
Upvote: | 119 |
Title: Thanks to the speed of the internet, I’m beginning to feel that logic on server side with PHP or other server side technology, is just as interactive as JavaScript - without the complexity of React, Angular [insert framework here] and associated package and state management.<p>Oh, and security!<p>Thoughts?
Upvote: | 48 |
Title: Seems like every time there's a negative Stripe story on here, the inevitable question, "any alternatives?" gets asked. Hell, I was tempted to ask myself. Instead, I decided to search hn.algolia.com to see for myself what others have recommended in the past.<p>Might as well share the list with y'all, make it meta.<p>--<p>2Checkout | https://www.2checkout.com<p>Adyen | https://www.adyen.com<p>Amazon Pay | https://pay.amazon.com<p>Authorize.net | https://www.authorize.net<p>Balance | https://www.getbalance.com<p>Braintree | https://www.braintreepayments.com<p>ChargeBee | https://www.chargebee.com<p>Chargify | https://www.chargify.com<p>Checkout.com | https://www.checkout.com<p>DigitalRiver | https://www.digitalriver.com<p>Dwolla | https://www.dwolla.com<p>FastSpring | https://fastspring.com<p>GoCardless | https://gocardless.com<p>MangoPay | https://www.mangopay.com<p>Mollie | https://www.mollie.com<p>Opayo (previously SagePay) | https://www.opayo.co.uk<p>Paddle | https://www.paddle.com<p>Payoneer | https://www.payoneer.com<p>PayPal | https://www.paypal.com<p>Qonto | https://qonto.com/en<p>Spreedly | https://www.spreedly.com<p>Square | https://squareup.com<p>Verifone | https://www.verifone.com/en/us<p>White | https://whitepayments.com<p>--<p>Observations from my data collection:<p>Sassy appears to have been acquired by FastSpring. Balanced Payments apparently went under but I found another payment service called "Balance" instead. Paymill is defunct but their Github org has a bunch of code. No idea what happened to Spryng Payments but Spryng still exists.<p>It's also worth mentioning that a true "Stripe alternative" simply does not exist. No one does everything they do and I'm pretty sure most services are lacking in the developer documentation department. Still, having options is always great.
Upvote: | 122 |
Title: Just received an email from Meta, part of it states:<p>“Starting January 1, 2024, we will start deleting old Oculus accounts to ensure that we are not keeping Oculus account data longer than necessary. If you do not create a Meta account by this date, your Oculus data (including associated apps, content and games you have downloaded or purchased) will be deleted.”
Upvote: | 138 |
Title: The last three comments posted have been out of character. First some random incomprehensible typing:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34285936" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34285936</a><p>And then posting the same archive.org link on two several years old articles:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17327039#34286087" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17327039#34286087</a><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10611015#34286089" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10611015#34286089</a><p>Not sure what’s going on.
Upvote: | 105 |
Title: Hi HN,<p>I tried editing a subdomain's CNAME record and it was not editable (API returned "Duplicate entry"). So I deleted that record and tried creating again. Same error. Now our old record is gone and I can't create new one. I spoke with the support and they created a record for `subdomain.example.com.example.com` instead of `subdomain.example.com` from backend (lol).
When I pointed it out, they politely said they cant do anything about it .<p>Now I can do nothing to revert what I did. This was a subdomain used by few people in the company so it didn't cause any major problems. But it would have been disastrous otherwise(Some of our pings are already failing).<p>We will be transferring the domain to another registrar ASAP.<p>I would recommend anyone having a GoDaddy domain to transfer to another registrar. More examples: https://old.reddit.com/r/godaddy/top/
Rant over.
Upvote: | 56 |
Title: `:x` leaves the modification time of files untouched if nothing was changed.<p><pre><code> :help :x
Like ":wq", but write only when changes have been made.</code></pre>
Upvote: | 537 |
Title: I have a couple of ideas I’d like to build that would target business/enterprise and take the form or a SASS product (problems I see people having regularly)<p>I’m a pretty generalist fullstack engineer.<p>The things that worry me about this space are security best practices, providing features like corporate single sign on and handling data that customer expect to be healed very securely.<p>Its probably clear I don’t know much about this space and am likely missing even more things. Any advice or heads up would be really appreciated. Advice on business models and go to market strategies would also be really nice.
Upvote: | 181 |
Title: Just a little demo I made of a fully functioning game of snake encoded entirely within a valid url (around 1033 bytes of code encoded into a 1464 byte url).
Upvote: | 114 |
Title: Some highlights:<p>- 100% free and open source (<a href="https://github.com/alexmojaki/futurecoder">https://github.com/alexmojaki/futurecoder</a>), no ads or paid content.<p>- No account required at any point. You can start instantly. (You can create an account if you want to save your progress online and across devices. Your email is only used for password resets)<p>- 3 integrated debuggers can be started with one click to show what your code is doing in different ways.<p>- Enhanced tracebacks make errors easy to understand.<p>- Useful for anyone: You can have the above without having to look at the course. IDE mode (<a href="https://futurecoder.io/course/#ide" rel="nofollow">https://futurecoder.io/course/#ide</a>) gives you an instant scratchpad to write and debug code similar to repl.it.<p>- Completely interactive course: run code at every step which is checked automatically, keeping you engaged and learning by doing.<p>- Every exercise has many small optional hints to give you just the information you need to figure it out and no more.<p>- When the hints run out and you're still stuck, there are 2 ways to gradually reveal a solution so you can still apply your mind and make progress.<p>- Advice for common mistakes: customised linting for beginners and exercise-specific checks to keep you on track.<p>- Construct a question that will be well-received on sites like StackOverflow: <a href="https://futurecoder.io/course/#question" rel="nofollow">https://futurecoder.io/course/#question</a><p>- Also available in French (<a href="https://fr.futurecoder.io/" rel="nofollow">https://fr.futurecoder.io/</a>), Tamil (<a href="https://ta.futurecoder.io/" rel="nofollow">https://ta.futurecoder.io/</a>), and Spanish (<a href="https://es-latam.futurecoder.io/" rel="nofollow">https://es-latam.futurecoder.io/</a>). Note that these translations are slightly behind the English version, so the sites themselves are too as a result. If you're interested, help with translation would be greatly appreciated! Translation to Chinese and Portuguese is also half complete, and any other languages are welcome.<p>- Runs in the browser using Pyodide (<a href="https://pyodide.org/" rel="nofollow">https://pyodide.org/</a>). No servers. Stores user data in firebase.<p>- Progressive Web App (PWA) that can be installed from the browser and used offline.<p>-----------<p>A frequent question is how does futurecoder compare to Codecademy? Codeacademy has some drawbacks:<p>- No interactive shell/REPL/console<p>- No debuggers<p>- Basic error tracebacks not suitable for beginners<p>- No stdin, i.e. no input() so you can't write interactive programs, and no pdb.<p>- No gradual guidance when you're stuck. You can get one big hint, then the full solution in one go. This is not effective for learners having difficulty.<p>- Still on Python 3.6 (futurecoder is on 3.10)<p>I am obviously biased, but I truly believe futurecoder is the best resource for adult beginners. The focus on debugging tools, improved error messages, and hints empowers learners to tackle carefully balanced challenges. The experience of learning feels totally different from other courses, which is why I claim that if someone wants to start learning how to code, futurecoder is the best recommendation you can make.
Upvote: | 371 |
Title: Everyone has different perspectives and values, so what do you personally think is the most important problem in the world right now?<p>The original quote is from Aaron Swartz [1]<p>> What is the most important thing you could be working on in the world right now? ... And if you're not working on that, why aren't you?<p>[1] https://www.azquotes.com/quote/1202481
Upvote: | 44 |
Title: Maarten was a good friend and colleague of mine for many years. Maarten was a pioneer of the field, and was especially known for his work on Prolog and on Constraint Programming. During his retirement, he wrote several superb articles which you can find on the site "A Programmers Place" (<a href="https://vanemden.wordpress.com/" rel="nofollow">https://vanemden.wordpress.com/</a>). Maarten, I will miss our many lively discussions!
Upvote: | 158 |
Title: What for desktop and/or mobile are yall using to replace Dark Sky?
Upvote: | 59 |
Title: Hey all,<p>I'm keen to learn how you can move from 'traditional' tech roles into game development. I <i>love</i> games and, while I know there are some issues re: salary & hours worked, still think I'd regret not trying it myself.<p>What are the usual sideways paths one can take to go that way? My tech stack is almost definitely irrelevant; Python, JS, Rust, Haskell, etc...<p>Any tips from the game devs out there?
Upvote: | 205 |
Title: Do you have a simple example that ChatGPT is not an AGI? I mean - the examples that are so simple that anyone could do and ChatGPT shows a total lack of understanding of the simple underlying concepts?<p>Here is my example:<p>Q: How many letters has the string "djsjcnnrjfkalcr"?<p>A: The string "djsjcnnrjfkalcr" has 16 letters. Is there anything else I can help with?<p>Q: Are you sure?<p>A: Yes, I am sure. The string "djsjcnnrjfkalcr" has 16 letters. If you count the number of individual characters in the string, you will see that it has 16 letters. Is there anything else I can help with?<p>Q: Can you split it in half into two strings then?<p>A: Sure! Here is how you can split the string "djsjcnnrjfkalcr" in half:<p>string1 = "djsjcnnr"
string2 = "jfkalcr"<p>Each of these two strings has 8 letters. Is there anything else I can help with?
Upvote: | 78 |
Title: It feels like you need to look up if something is a scam or not rather than just the user reviews. I mean it started in the 70s with the prominent make up Pyramide schemes but in the last 2 years it just got mainstream to scam everyone around you. How do you navigate it? I deactivated personalized ads on YouTube and every ad is for a scam now.
Upvote: | 51 |
Title: I am at a point where I turn everything into work. That's not healthy at all. How do you have fun? How do you unwind so that you can come back to work fully energized?
Upvote: | 51 |
Title: I have severe FOMO or ‘grass is greener’ issues in that I have a well paid, fairly easy job, but I keep dreaming about working in other fields. I’ve been a Developer, and now Software Sales Engineer (still coding a lot), for 10 years.<p>I keep dreaming about going to school again for Physics or ‘real’ engineering (Mech, EE, etc.) and working on cars, planes, ships. I have friends who went that route and work on really cool things but they keep saying they did CS due to how easy and flexible of a life it gives.<p>Any tips to get my mind out of this and just be happy with my life?
Upvote: | 40 |
Title: Hey everyone! My name is Peter and I just launched my first-ever App in Google Play after learning to design and code for the past 9-10 months!<p>I launched a free App called Clever Plant app. An app that helps you grow plants and connect you with a plant-loving community.<p>Basically, I come from a family of florists. For my entire life, I have been dealing with everyone asking me how to take care of some random plants, and I got fed up with it.<p>One day when I was thinking about startup ideas something clicked - let’s create an app that helps you grow plants together with an exciting plant-loving community! Growing your plants doesn't have to be boring so let me try to change this.<p>And so the Clever Plant idea has been born.<p>After listening to a bunch of Y combinator lessons to learn how to validate the idea and research the competition I and my friends got to work and start learning how to design and code.<p>As we started with big dreams and a million features we want to add to our app, we soon realized how hard building an app is with zero tech knowledge.<p>But long story short, here we are! The app is live and ready to use, albeit with much fewer features than we initially planned to add!<p>This is our first version of the Clever Plant App, and we are eager to hear your feedback!<p>The link:<p><a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.app.cleverplant">https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.app.clever...</a>
Upvote: | 40 |
Title: Hi, everyone! I'm a recent-transitioned CTO, and I feel I lack a lot of business background when discussing with others C-Level. Is there a way (books, courses or even College material) to help improving this gap?
Thanks!
Upvote: | 206 |
Title: I've found Reddit posts and comments tend to appeal toward the average person. It's like I'm listening to pop music while reading Reddit comments - the same thing over and over again. The same kind of averageness that gets tiring and unfulfilling to read.<p>What I like about Hacker News is the comment and link quality is very high. What I like about Reddit is I can read about any topic I want.<p>Is there something that combines the two?
Upvote: | 66 |
Title: Got a doozy of a dark pattern from Amazon today. I'm not sure that my order is relevant, but I ordered a cheap clip contact microphone for a tuner. I placed the order and received the confirmation email as expected, but I also received a "Welcome to Amazon Music Unlimited" email as well. I assume I left some box checked or something that I failed to opt out of, but I never saw it. This was a 90 day trial after which it would charge me $9/month. I immediately went to cancel and then got several "are you sure" dialogs with up-sells and confusingly designed buttons to try and get me to keep the service (or even sign up for a higher charged one).<p>I have to say that although Amazon has fallen quite far in my estimation in the last few years, this is something else - it feels like they'll be hocking magazine subscriptions at me next.<p>Keep an eye on your subscriptions and credit cards - and I'll be canceling my Prime membership of over a decade. I was on the fence and have been meaning to, but this seals it.
Upvote: | 50 |
Title: I recently came into ~$700k, and I'm trying to figure out what to do with it. My risk profile is medium (family, middle age), so this isn't play money, but I am confident in my employability. My initial instinct was to follow the default "Put it in the SP500 through a no fee fund" but curious if that advice is still valid or if there are other ideas HN might have.<p>Using a throwaway account, I've been on HN for a loooong time.
Upvote: | 47 |
Title: Ex.
Diablo 2 <a href="https://youtu.be/qt0jCgxIhrI?t=1078" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/qt0jCgxIhrI?t=1078</a>
RE3 <a href="https://youtu.be/pOvU2m4vat4" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/pOvU2m4vat4</a>
Upvote: | 89 |
Title: When I was 13 (many decades ago), I wrote the BASIC ELIZA that many of you have probably experienced (if you are of a certain age) or (if you are not ...) you've almost certainly experienced a knock-off of mine.<p>Today, Jan 8th, is the 100th centenary of Joseph Weizenbaum's birth, so I asked ChatGPT to write ELIZA in js.<p>Long dialog (~10 rounds) short, here's where it ended up:<p>'''
// A list of ELIZA's responses
const responses = {
"I feel": [
"Why do you feel {0}?",
"What do you think is causing you to feel {0}?",
"Do you often feel {0}?",
"How do you normally deal with feeling {0}?"
],
"I want": [
"Why do you want {0}?",
"What led you to want this?",
"Do you often find yourself wanting {0}?",
"How do you think getting what you want will make you feel?"
],
"I need": [
"Why do you feel like you need {0}?",
"What led you to feel like you need this?",
"Do you often find yourself feeling like you need {0}?",
"How do you think getting what you need will make you feel?"
]
};<p>// A list of keywords
const keywords = Object.keys(responses);<p>// A function that generates a response
function generateResponse(input) {
// Check if the input contains any of the keywords
for (let i = 0; i < keywords.length; i++) {
if (input.includes(keywords[i])) {
// If the input contains a keyword, return a random response
// that includes the remainder of the input, with personal
// pronouns conjugated correctly
const response = responses[keywords[i]][Math.floor(Math.random() * responses[keywords[i]].length)];
return response.replace("{0}", input.substring(keywords[i].length + 1));
}
}
}<p>// Test the function
console.log(generateResponse("I feel sad"));
console.log(generateResponse("I want a new car"));
console.log(generateResponse("I need some help"));<p>'''<p>My conclusion: It's not yet up to being a 1970s 13 year old programmer....yet. :-)<p>----
(Apparently ''' ... ''' doesn't do code in HN. Sorry for the wrap-around formatting.)
Upvote: | 88 |
Title: Throwaway for obvious reasons. I work for a company doing interactive media work (think conferences touch screens, cool-ish 3D websites, museum-like installations and such). The company specializes in short films / adverts but we have a small interactive department (~6 people) that I am the head of.<p>It's a small company which grew very quickly - I became the head of the department because I was one of the first developers at the company and basically created and sold our first interactive projects. With time, we pitched more and more of those, and here we are today. As a result of this the company lacks a lot of structure and "middleware" positions - e.g. I do all the hiring myself, and while we do have marketing / project managers, their knowledge is tailored towards films / adverts and don't have a strong knowledge about projects with a programming-heavy background.<p>The thing is, I've tried and tried to do the best job I can but I just don't enjoy management. I can deal with clients fine, but I don't like having to check on others to ensure they're working as they should. I don't like hiring people and doing interviews. I don't like having to worry about "capacity" when getting a new project. I don't like doing performance reviews and making sure that people's "efficiency" is as high as. I don't like having to supervise every proposal going out to make sure our marketing department didn't promise some technical heresy. I don't like giving people "shitty" tasks to do (because there will always be some). I don't like sitting with someone for a couple hours to explains how I'd like things done, or having to fix something they've done wrong. And of course I don't like being in endless meetings.<p>I like sitting down and solving problems with code, getting a brief and build something cool. but as of recently I'm lucky if I can allocate 25% of my time to this, while the rest is all these tasks I don't really enjoy.<p>I tried telling myself that it's a childish and idealistic way of thinking and that it's all a part of career progression regardless of where you work at, giving myself time to try and mature into the position, and trying my best to address all the pipeline issues and technical shortcomings of the company. but it's been a long time now, the way I think about this hasn't changed at all and I feel it's really eating into my mental health now - I find myself procrastinating on tasks like hiring, putting off one-on-ones, and other destructive behaviour.<p>I've been in the company for a long time and I love the people in it, the culture, and the fact that because of my position I have a lot of freedom to do things the way I want. I'm also quite invested financially as I have some vested shares which should hopefully mature in 4/5 years. But I'm not lying if I say that I haven't woken up with a passion or spring in my step to go to work in a long time and I don't know if I can subject myself to 5 more years of this.<p>Any advice from people who have been in similar positions?
Upvote: | 198 |
Title: I noticed that I'm no longer reading an article, blog post, etc. I just scroll through it and close the page. It' really very rare that I spend time on some blog post, but I do read books, and I do it more than ever.<p>Are we slowly losing a joy of reading blog post because there are so many? Are the books gaining popularity again? What are your thoughts?
Upvote: | 358 |
Title: I've picked up the following, just wondering what everyone's thoughts are on the best books for a strong foundation:<p>Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning - Bishop<p>Deep Learning - Goodfellow, Bengio, Courville<p>Neural Smithing - Reed, Marks<p>Neural Networks - Haykin<p>Artificial Intelligence - Haugeland
Upvote: | 285 |
Title: In ten years I've never been asked to solve a captcha to login in. Is this new? What happened?<p>I know that my input into conversations is not some critical feature of HN or anything, but this is enough of a barrier to keep me from bothering to login on most occasions.<p>Seems odd to enable google to track users logging into HN, but maybe it's always been this way and for some reason recaptcha is just flagging accounts from my network today.
Upvote: | 104 |
Title: Apparently Multi Collagen Protein is a thing now, but I can't tell if it's bullshit or not.
Upvote: | 47 |
Title: Today our host cancelled a place we booked 6 month ago with zero communication, at time of check-in.<p>We landed at our destination and ready to check into our Airbnb that we booked almost 6 month ago, for an entire month.<p>The airbnb is managed by a company, who I assume manages the entire building.<p>The host promptly tells us it's no longer available, and that we should accept their offer of either refund or another listing that's in a completely different location, with no picture or reviews, but promised that it's "similar"<p>Of course, being hesitant, we said no thanks, we're happy with just a refund.<p>They proceeds to tells us to contact airbnb, and then ghosts us.<p>We open a ticket with Airbnb, calls them, and they proceed to give us the run around and tell us to just book another stay.<p>So what else are we going to do? be homeless for a night in foreign city?<p>So of course we try to book, except it's last minute and the only listings available are the once you must contact the hosts first.<p>Good thing we arrived at 11am and not 6pm. or we'd be literally f*cked for the night.<p>Why am I complaining?<p>Airbnb, you should do better.<p>I am a startup founder, I understand these types of situations has probably zero affect on your bottom line. So you probably never prioritized the need to spend engineering time "fixing" it.<p>You also probably look at your metrics and say, well these situations happen to <1% of our overall bookings, it's not a problem.<p>But PG says, the best startups are the ones who solve intense immediate pain for a small number of people.<p>Well, my confidence in you is absolutely shaken, and now I'm not so sure your position in the space is so infallible anymore. Because eventually this will happen often enough that "the small number of users with intense pain" will give arise to a newer and better version of you, and you will be legacy.<p>In the end, we booked another place last minute, had to spend 2x the amount and received a refund (well let's see in 10 days).<p>If I was in a much lesser able financial situation, I might not have been able to float a few thousands of dollars on my credit card, and may have literally ended up homeless.
Upvote: | 229 |
Title: Hi HN! I've been working on a code editor and I think that it's mature enough to catch some interest. It's using a custom GPU accelerated GUI written in C++. Currently implements some interesting features: LSP, terminal, auto-completion, linters, formatters, custom keybindings, plugins and more. It's a hobby project but still intends to be an alternative to other popular code editors like Sublime, Kate, Lapce, Lite XL (and takes inspiration from them).<p>The project was born as a playground for the GUI I'm developing (eepp GUI) and is advanced enough to currently be my main code editor, but it's a work in progress, and many features are still pending. Some minor hints on how to use it:<p>Folders are used as project (and .gitignore is used to ignore files)<p>The wheel icon on the top-right has all the options you need (Ctrl/Cmd + M to show).<p>Some keybidings to navigate any project (navigation is keyboard driven):<p>Ctrl/Cmd + K = Locate Files<p>Ctrl/Cmd + Shift + F = Global Search<p>Ctrl/Cmd + Number (Go to tab #)
Upvote: | 233 |
Title: I'm curious to see some examples of what people consider good visual illustrations of CS concepts, from both usefulness and aesthetics perspectives.
Upvote: | 461 |
Title: Throwaway.. because I don't want to tie my actual account to this one.<p>People - how do you deal with the ongoing requirements it appears that jobs place, such as social network involvement. To me - this means LinkedIn posting rubbish, Twitter bollocks, public GitHub repos for sharing - even the asks from employers to post here.<p>I, as a person have <i>zero</i> accounts anywhere, except for one here. I've been gainfully employed in industry for ~2 decades, and frankly I have neither need nor desire to have a "social profile". I speak at conferences when I want to, sans twitter, linkedin, etc. Moreso - I find the amount of developer advocate written blogspam (let's just call it marketing crap) only contributes to the web problems - and hence have started to block... everything, including my employer's search results (personally, with a plugin in DuckDuckGo and Google.<p>I'm not interested in writing blog things. I'm interested in continuing my ongoing work as a principal engineer, without marketing externally on the fakery of "how great we/I am/are", or "humbelbragging", or frankly any of the rubbish I keep encountering. I just want to focus on the things we're collectively doing to be successful.<p>So... how do you handle this?
Upvote: | 148 |
Title: The web is filled with posts where people have poured heart and soul into their writing. Just because they post on the internet, doesn't mean that other companies own it.<p>We do this for search engines with robots.txt. We should do the same for AI.
Upvote: | 108 |
Title: I'm around 40 and recently I have been asked to port an API from one language to another. The code I'm porting is average code, not terrible, but plenty of little things to complain about.<p>I feel like my past self could have handled this task, but I am really struggling. Porting this API will require a deep understanding of the existing API, which, of course, has several layers of abstraction.<p>I can't seem to hold more than about 2 levels of call stack in my head. There's the entry point function which calls other functions, which call other functions, which call other functions, etc. You know how it is, code calls other code, and logically it forms a tree of calls and return values that often goes several layers deep. I struggle to hold more than about 2 levels of this call stack in my head. By the time I'm down in the weeds I've forgotten what I'm doing, what the purpose of the actual API call is.<p>I don't know how to break this into small enough chunks that I can understand it or make progress on. Imagine I gave you the code for the sha512 algorithm, and a hash, and asked you to find the pre-image (the input). This is how I feel. Where do I even get started? How do I find even a single chunk of manageable work to break off.<p>The hard part is, several other developers are making progress on porting this API. Why can't I? What happened?<p>I don't know if this task is just an especially bad fit for me, or if my mental abilities are declining?
Upvote: | 596 |
Title: Hello, guys~ I recently developed a data exploration and visualization app which can be used as a different type of open-source alternative to Tableau. It is extremely easy to embed in your apps just as a react component. The original purpose is to develop a lite plugin that can be easily embedded in most cases, it doesn't have to be a large BI, but a lite graphic plugin.<p>GitHub: Kanaries/graphic-walker, <a href="https://github.com/Kanaries/graphic-walker">https://github.com/Kanaries/graphic-walker</a><p>The main features implemented:
* A user-friendly drag-and-drop-based interaction for exploratory data analysis with visualizations.
* A grammar of graphics-based visual analytic user interface where users can build visualization from low-level visual channel encodings.
* A Data Explainer explains why some patterns occur / what may cause them.
* Using web workers to handle computation tasks which allows you to use it as a pure front-end app.
And you can use it in your app as a react component:h me in github or discord.<p>Feedbacks and advice are welcome! Discuss with me in github or discord!
Upvote: | 148 |
Title: I’m a developer with an idea for a new type of personal device. However, my expertise is firmly on the software side.<p>Part of this device will involve at best some novel industrial engineering and at worst a new type of material being invented. (An analogy might be the Corning gorilla glass used in makijg the first iPhone touchscreen)<p>How should I go about finding someone to help me prototype the device, or understand if it’s even possible to make?<p>I’ve done Google scholar searches and some other limited investigations but that’s about as far as I can get on my own.<p>This person or firm could be a cofounder or early employee if it proves a viable idea. I just don’t know where to even start.<p>Any advice most appreciated.
Upvote: | 53 |
Title: I'm 32 years old and living in Europe and come from a blue-collar worker's family.<p>I'm pretty good at my job (broader data science) and have been earning US-level income while maintaining Eastern Europe-level expenses for the last 7 years or so. Thus, I've managed to have a decent amount of savings in cash and index funds / ETFs .<p>During the last recession (2007-8), I was just 16yo and my family was hit pretty hard back then. Now, I do believe that recessions are the only realistic way to achieve real social mobility, and have been planning to really benefit from the next one (whenever it happens).<p>Any additional thoughts, tips, and personal experiences are welcome.
Upvote: | 70 |
Title: In BigCo for 6 months. Running out of things to talk about meaningfully in weekly one-on-one meetings with my manager.<p>I see it as a good opportunity where I get full attention. I don't want to just keep blowing my trumpet, or just complaining.<p>A week isn't enough time to get things done and 30 mins is not enough for deep dives.<p>Curious about how others have leveraged their time with the ones responsible for your promotions.<p>Edit: Just to add, I am fortunate to have a good manager, not complaining one bit. I'm trying to make some effort to make it worth our time.
Upvote: | 374 |
Title: Howdy HN Friends,<p>I've gone back to school into a medical degree.<p>However, I am realizing that I have trouble reading well. I used to not have trouble with any topic, but now I have to re-read text several times, I have to take a ton of notes (40+ pages per chapter), I am skipping lines and transposing characters.<p>I went to a specialist for academic learning and they did a battery of tests and told me my reading level is very low and were surprised I am even in a medical program.<p>I went to a development/behavioral ophthalmologist and they prescribed new lenses and cognitive eye therapy. The lenses seem to help but the eye therapy isn't.<p>I am at risk of needing to withdrawal.
Perhaps pausing this education is the best thing while I get this under control, but I don't see a path to start on.<p>Any advice?<p>Edit: I have talked with my advisor and instructors and they don't have advice except to seek more help, ask even more questions.<p>Edit 2: Taking no meds for the last 9 months, never had Covid, my PCP referred me to the development/behavioral ophthalmologist.<p>Edit 3: no alcohol, no drugs, no ADHD medications.
Upvote: | 85 |
Title: Kandria, an open world action RPG platformer written in Common Lisp is now out and available!<p>A prior discussion of Kandria can be found here: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32043026" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32043026</a>.<p>I'm the lead developer and sole programmer for the project. Would be happy to answer any questions about it!
Upvote: | 487 |
Title: Hey HN, Victor and Jacob here. We’re excited to show you what we’ve been building over the last couple of years! IcePanel (<a href="https://icepanel.io">https://icepanel.io</a>) helps architects and developers easily explain how their software works with interactive and explorable diagrams.<p>Modern systems are complicated, and getting new developers up to speed and contributing fully is time-consuming and difficult. It costs the new developer's time, as well as the time of the senior first/second generation developers who help them constantly through their first 6 months. The resources people use to learn new systems are usually scattered across a maze of artefacts, like confluence pages or outdated draw.io diagrams, which are usually incomplete, with the ‘real’ understanding of the system being tribal knowledge in the team. As discussed in yesterday’s post <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34328069" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34328069</a> “documentation only works up to a point” and we believe this is due to docs being disconnected from the code. A map of your software architecture for current and future design, linked to code, gives new team members a trusted way to learn tribal knowledge.<p>Before IcePanel, Jacob was part of a cross-functional team in a large company, where they’d have regular meetings about the technical design. People would draw boxes and lines on a whiteboard or present Bollywood-themed Visio monstrosities that nobody truly understood (impossible to find in Confluence/Sharepoint). Depending on the people invited, 1-hour meetings cost the company thousands of dollars, and there were often no outcomes. We both felt the tools in this area were not working, and there was space to build something awesome.<p>We built IcePanel on top of the c4model.com, a simple set of abstractions for audiences with different technical abilities. The simplicity of the C4 model works well for teams who practice “just enough architecture,” and fits with a vision of democratizing architecture across dev teams. We also work with our larger customers to help with the scaling challenges of the C4 model and have built features like tags and flows that add interactive overlays on top of C4 diagrams.<p>Most diagramming tools are generic and flexible for any purpose. This is great for quick sketches and whiteboarding but painful for creating longer-term documentation where it’s important for objects to contain metadata and have relationships with other objects.<p>The benefit IcePanel has over diagramming tools such as draw.io/Visio is how it uses modelling, overlays and links to reality to keep your diagrams up-to-date and allow engineers to find the code they're interested in faster. Model changes are automatically synced across all diagrams, and you can refactor connections or the object hierarchy. We use interactive overlays to add/remove information rather than creating new diagrams for every new topic of conversation, meaning fewer diagrams to maintain. Objects in IcePanel can be linked to resources in the real world, such as source control, wiki pages or cloud resources. This allows developers to learn about resources of interest faster, and you’ll be alerted if those resources no longer exist, prompting you to update the model or diagram.<p>Thanks very much for reading! We’d be grateful to anyone who checks out our website (<a href="https://icepanel.io">https://icepanel.io</a>), interactive demo (<a href="https://s.icepanel.io/vmHvBHr4BeMEOa/bPBR">https://s.icepanel.io/vmHvBHr4BeMEOa/bPBR</a>) or leaves a comment with thoughts and feedback. Happy to chat!
Upvote: | 123 |
Title: Just got off company announcement, here are the key details:<p><pre><code> - the departure affected 10% of the company
</code></pre>
The benefits include:<p><pre><code> - 2.5 months of severance, plus one week for every year of tenure
- 3 months of health insurance
- 1 year cliff for RSUs waived for new employees. In cases where employees did not get equity, they get a lump sum payout
- Visa holders get one 30-minute paid consultation with an immigration attorney
- Voluntary self departures accepted until 12PM tomorrow, but self-departures only get 2.5 months (tenure not factored in severance)</code></pre>
Upvote: | 70 |
Title: Salaried Microsoft employees in the U.S. will be transitioned to Discretionary Time Off (DTO) as of January 16, 2023. Vacation was previously accrued throughout the year each pay period.<p>Vacation balance will no longer be tracked and all vacation must now be approved by a manager.<p>In the email, HR also notes that many companies including LinkedIn and Salesforce have already adopted this approach to vacation.
Upvote: | 74 |
Title: Hey HN! We're so excited to show you Val Town (<a href="https://val.town" rel="nofollow">https://val.town</a>)! A "val" is a JavaScript/TypeScript function or value that runs on our servers. We aim to get you from idea to running code in seconds: type code, run it, get its API endpoint, schedule it - all from the browser, in a couple keystrokes.<p>We're a startup of 4 people, mostly in NYC. We've been working on this for 6 months and are eager for feedback from the HN community.<p>Why do we need yet another online coding IDE? While researching devtools[1], I found myself wanting something halfway between Replit and Zapier: a tool that makes hosting, deploying, scheduling, and authenticating easy, but is first-and-foremost a programming tool.<p>We added `console.email` to the runtime to make it incredibly easy to email yourself. We don't have npm imports yet, but we do have a low-friction system that treats every user as a namespace, so you can refer to `@me.foo + 1` or `@yourFriend.bar()` right in your code. There are a lot of thorny implications this newfangled import scheme creates, but also many joyous and carefree coding experiences! One of my favorite features is that we store every evaluation, up and down the callstack, including inputs, outputs, logs, etc, which has been an amazing aid to debugging.<p>So far, Val Town is mostly used for what we're calling "programmatic notifications": query a data source for new items on an interval and email them to yourself.<p>Get notified when users you "follow" post on Hacker News: <a href="https://www.val.town/stevekrouse.hnFollowPollJob" rel="nofollow">https://www.val.town/stevekrouse.hnFollowPollJob</a><p>Get notified when to close your window during fire season in SF: <a href="https://www.val.town/stevekrouse.aqi" rel="nofollow">https://www.val.town/stevekrouse.aqi</a><p>Get notified when there are new citations on a paper: <a href="https://www.val.town/ernest.newCitationNotification" rel="nofollow">https://www.val.town/ernest.newCitationNotification</a><p>Subscribe to RSS feeds: <a href="https://www.val.town/stevekrouse.pollRSSFeeds" rel="nofollow">https://www.val.town/stevekrouse.pollRSSFeeds</a><p>A good place to get started would be forking one of those vals and modifying it to suit your needs. Some folks are using the tool in other ways, such as in webhook contexts, and we encourage those uses as well. We'd LOVE to pair-program with anyone looking to try out the tool and give feedback. Email [email protected] :-)<p>Main site: <a href="https://val.town" rel="nofollow">https://val.town</a>
Docs: <a href="https://val-town.notion.site/Val-Town-Docs-01c8eb9c534b4899802f3a9e31d540ab" rel="nofollow">https://val-town.notion.site/Val-Town-Docs-01c8eb9c534b48998...</a>
Discord: <a href="https://discord.gg/dHv45uN5RY" rel="nofollow">https://discord.gg/dHv45uN5RY</a>
Blog & Newsletter: <a href="https://val-town.notion.site/Blog-6d3ef714d0c849e9be71b3986a1dcd46" rel="nofollow">https://val-town.notion.site/Blog-6d3ef714d0c849e9be71b3986a...</a><p>[1] - Whole Code Catalog: <a href="https://futureofcoding.org/catalog/" rel="nofollow">https://futureofcoding.org/catalog/</a>
Upvote: | 332 |
Title: Hello, to all the people of the world.<p>I am Mohammad Hosseini, a prisoner in one of the dreaded prisons of the Iranian government. A man who had no one, no mother, father or family, but who was a friend of all the goodness in the world. After days and nights of resistance under severe torture, they forced me to confess the lie they wanted to hear and the crime I had not committed.<p>In the dawn of tomorrow, at the foot of the gallows, I will look up to the sky for the last time, see the last star and cry out with all my strength, "Woman, life, freedom". I will cry out in the name of justice and in the hope of a world without violence, a world that loves nature and that is safe for all the children of the world.<p>For me, who has been deeply lonely all his life, in a country where working children have not known justice, my only wish is that the world be a place where all children can be children and internalize love for people and for nature, and love all the creatures of this beautiful existence.<p>And for all this love, which is all I have left after this short, painful life, I shouted in the streets to stand beside the students of my country who were under batons and war bullets, shouting woman, life, freedom. Children who were forced for years and could do nothing but wish death to the whole world, but who are now the ambassadors of love and kindness, freedom and equality for all people, with the longing for peace, with the longing for a homeland and world free of violence.<p>These are not the words of a young man longing for salvation. These are the words of a lonely child laborer from the dark depths of the history of a country scourged by cruelty and violence. Who, in all the black nights of his childhood, embraced nature instead of a mother or a father. And who vowed to cry out for freedom, justice and love with all his resources and possibilities.<p>I wanted to say that I will give my life for the freedom of the women of my country.<p>And know when my body has become a flag in the fiery sunrise wind, that a man shouted at his last breath: long live love, long live freedom, long live all the peoples of the world.<p>-- source --<p>سلام، به همه مردم دنيا. من محمد حسینی زندانی در یکی از زندان های مخوف دولت ایران هستم. مردی که هیچ، مادر، پدر و خانواده ای نداشت، بلکه دوست همه خوبی های دنیا بود. پس از روزها و شب های مقاومت در زیر شکنجه های شدید، مرا مجبور کردند به دروغی که می خواستند بشنوند و جنایتی که مرتکب نشده بودم اعتراف کنم. در سپیده دم فردا، در پای دستک ها، برای آخرین بار به آسمان نگاه می کنم، آخرین ستاره را می بینم و با تمام قدرتم فریاد می زنم، «زن، زندگی، آزادی». من به نام عدالت و به امید دنیایی بدون خشونت گریه خواهم کرد، دنیایی که طبیعت را دوست دارد و این برای همه فرزندان جهان امن است. برای من که در تمام عمرش عمیقا تنها بوده ام، در کشوری که کودکان شاغل عدالت را نمی شناختند، تنها آرزوی من این است که دنیا جایی باشد که همه کودکان می توانند بچه باشند و عشق به مردم و طبیعت را درونی کنند و همه موجودات این وجود زیبا را دوست داشته باشند. و برای این همه عشق که تنها چیزی است که بعد از این زندگی کوتاه و دردناک بر جای گذاشته ام، در خیابان ها فریاد زدم که در کنار دانش آموزان کشورم که زیر باتوم و گلوله های جنگی بودند بایستم، فریاد زن، زندگی، آزادی می زدم. کودکانی که سال ها مجبور بودند و نمی توانستند کاری جز آرزوی مرگ برای تمام دنیا انجام دهند، اما اکنون سفیران عشق و مهربانی، آزادی و برابری برای همه مردم هستند، با اش آرزوی صلح، با اش آرزوی وطن و جهان آزاد از خشونت. اینها حرف های جوانی نیست که برای رستگاری رستگاری می خواهد. اینها سخنان یک کارگر کودک تنها از اعماق تاریک تاریخ کشوری است که با بی رحمی و خشونت جستجو شده است. که در تمام شب های سیاه دوران کودکی اش به جای مادر یا پدر طبیعت را در آغوش می گرفت. و چه کسی عهد کرد که با تمام منابع و امکاناتش فریاد آزادی، عدالت و عشق را فریاد کند. می خواستم بگویم که جانم را برای آزادی زنان کشورم خواهم داد. و بدانید وقتی بدنم به پرچمی در باد آتشین طلوع خورشید تبدیل شده است، که مردی در آخرین نفسش فریاد زد: زنده باد عشق، زنده باد آزادی، زنده باد تمام مردم جهان.<p>-- end --
Upvote: | 75 |
Title: I swear driving around recently that headlights are getting brighter than they used to be<p>It’s like either 30-40% of folks are driving with their brights on or (what I’m guessing) is that the average brightness of headlights is going up.<p>Is that a true hypothesis?
Upvote: | 61 |
Title: I am a Millennial primary care physician. I began training before COVID hit, so I have perspective as someone who practiced medicine before, during, and after the pandemic. There are multiple, long-standing issues in medicine, many that have been unmasked by COVID but have been festering for a long time:<p>Doctors don’t run hospitals. Due to EMTALA, every single patient that shows up to your emergency department has to be treated. When insurance companies and private equity realized that you can’t say no to doing the work, then why should they pay you? Ultra lean staffing prior to covid led to the sh*tshow during the pandemic and, now that everyone is quitting, things are now in total collapse.<p>Go to any hospital in the country and, even if you have a serious problem like a heart attack, sepsis, a kidney stone blocking off your ureter while your kidney fills up with pus and you’re turning grey and shivering because you’re dying, well, chances are you’re going to be lying in a bed in the hallway.<p>Up in the ICU hopeless 95 year olds will sit on ventilators and other life support machines for weeks because doctors don’t have any discretion in stopping futile care. You can be a 30 year old pregnant woman, and you will die waiting for your ICU bed in the emergency room. There are 30 rooms in the ER, but 3 nurses overnight…what do you think happens if you have an accident and urinate or have a bowel movement in the bed? That’s exactly what happens. Good luck getting pain medicine for your kidney stone, there’s 10 other patients and they’re all sicker than you.
Upvote: | 199 |
Title: There are a couple of engineers on my current team that I can only describe as being a little too smart for their own good, and I'm struggling a bit with how to work with them. I've worked with this sort of engineer on previous teams as well, and they all share a few traits:<p>- They're brilliant, I mean very smart people (in an almost academic way?)<p>- They have a big appetite for adding complexity to systems<p>- They also have a big appetite for adding work to their own plates<p>- Their code has no consistent style<p>I work in embedded systems, so I'm generally writing C for resource-constrained systems. This sort of environment is rife with footguns, and I spend most of my time just trying to avoid those. A big part of that is keeping the things that my team controls as simple as possible, and while we are resource constrained, it's a balance. The tension comes when someone's more than happy to, for example, implement a complex caching scheme from scratch to save a few hundred bytes here, a handful of microwatts there. To me, adding that type of complexity for those sorts of performance improvements is missing the forest for the trees.<p>When an engineer like this proposes something that adds unnecessary complexity, it's usually hard to argue with. The proposed change typically does indeed make the system objectively better, and they're the one taking responsibility for doing the work and ensuring its correctness. But the overall system becomes a little more brittle, and a little harder to reason about, two things that are much more difficult to measure than memory and power.<p>Here's an example: an engineer on my current team recently proposed adding a significant feature to a module I wrote to make something dynamic that's currently statically defined at compile time. I pointed out that we could just change a couple entries in a static table to accomplish his goals, and we were able to avoid the extra work. What was notable, though, was his immediate willingness to write that feature. Maybe I'm lazy, but I'd sit there and think of half a dozen other ways to do it before settling on changing the module itself. But because he's smart enough to easily reason about a complicated solution, and he's willing to take on the extra work, he stopped there without weighing it against the larger system.<p>Have you worked with engineers like this? Do you have any thoughts on how to work with them in a productive and friendly way?<p>--<p>One more example if you feel like reading more:<p>In a past role, I got into a debate about code style with the smartest person I've ever worked with. It boiled down to me advocating for more whitespace in his code and him arguing that adding whitespace made the code harder to read. It took a bit, but eventually I came to understand that he is so good at reading code that he just wants it all laid out in front of him as densely as possible. He can effectively run it in his head, as long as he can see it.<p>That was baffling to me, I walked away thinking that I must be pretty bad at reading code. I use a very consistent style with long variable and function names, I keep my solutions as simple as I can, and I use whitespace generously to provide visual cues about the code's structure. All of this is to minimize the amount of brainpower I needed to understand my code, so I can put that energy toward thinking about the problem itself.
Upvote: | 509 |
Title: I'm just curious to know whether it's possible to crowdfund the compute costs for GPT models? It seems like this stuff is going to start to get beyond what any one individual can run, meaning it's in the hands of corporations or people with deep pockets. Can groups of people pool together money to run shared models? Because the alternative is that the companies just run away with the technology and leave the rest of us to wait for APIs or use whatever they give us.
Upvote: | 153 |
Title: I just inherited a ring that has been passed down in my family since WWI. My great grandfather (who was a scoundrel) took a brooch off of a dead German officer in 1915 in Belgium. He had it converted into a ring.<p>In 1931, my great grandfather coincidentally met the brother of the dead officer. The brother saw the ring and said, "That looks remarkably like a brooch that has been in my family in Bavaria for a long time."<p>I'm not actually sure if it's a crest, now that I write this. And it's pretty small. If possible, I'd love to figure out how to get it back to that family, but I have no idea where to begin.
Upvote: | 87 |
Title: Ruby on Rails (RoR) dominates web development in Ruby. It's rich in features, but it's also a heavyweight framework.<p>Do you eschew RoR and use an alternative Ruby web development approach? (Example: different framework, or writing your own framework)
Upvote: | 51 |
Title: So as a result of an extreme example of inefficient bureaucracy, one which is probably unique to the military, I have found myself in the fortunate position of being paid to effectively work 2-6 hours a week for the next 6-7 months. It was preceded by 6-7 months of 60-80+ hour work weeks, so I like to think it all balances out.<p>I graduated a few years ago with a degree in computer engineering, and I am now located in a small coastal city. If you were in my position, beside the obvious of relaxing, hobbies, etc, what would you do? I have considered trying to find a part time development role (it would be difficult though as I am effectively on-call for when those 2-6 hours are). Alternatively, I could pursue a side project to keep my technical skills sharp, but I can't think of any that call me. Any ideas?
Upvote: | 97 |
Title: Just received this email:<p>Hi,<p>As the Owner (or designated Account changes contact) for your Tailscale tailnet, we’re reaching out to inform you that we have updated Tailscale’s Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.<p>What’s changed?<p>We added a Data Privacy Addendum (DPA, a.k.a. “Data Protection Agreement”) that outlines our uses, obligations, and responsibilities with protecting your data.
We improved definitions and language to reflect our ongoing commitment to safeguarding your privacy and data, as well as to making room for some new features we’re working on.
We changed the jurisdiction of the documents to New York, NY USA (from Ontario, Canada).
We included a binding arbitration clause to help mitigate the business risks of granting a DPA to all of our customers.
We incorporated an NDA to make it easier for us to share resources like our SOC 2 report with any customer that requests it.
Please take the time to review the new documents, linked above. Copies of our former agreements - Terms of Service and Privacy Policy - are available in case you wish to compare.
What do I need to do?<p>You don’t need to take any action to accept the new Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. They are now in effect.<p>If you have any questions, please reply to this email.<p>Cheers,<p>David Carney<p>Co-founder & COO, Tailscale Inc.
Upvote: | 65 |
Title: I have been using TypeScript for a few years now, and I haven't yet been convinced that I would choose to use it if I had the choice; not just for my own personal projects but for large scale applications where the codebase is shared with many developers.<p>I want to skip over the static typing benefits argument, because I think it is well understood that static typing is a good thing and if we could bless JavaScript with a built-in and robust typing system then I don't think many people would be against that. My issue is with the amount of extra work it places on developers, much of it the "dumb" kind of work which can eat up hours and doesn't deliver all that much value.<p>i) Like a framework, you are at the whim of TS devs as it gets updated (edited)<p>For example, a new package you install can require a new TypesScript version. Once installed, you then may need to update your source code. This can place quite a high tax on the developer, where perhaps a 10 minute change becomes hours long.<p>ii) Libraries are badly documented<p>Most libraries do not document their types, or have no examples using TypeScript. Some worst offenders: Apollo, Protobufjs. The type definitions exported by these libraries can be large and complex, and the error messages emitted by TypeScript are so long and cryptic the result is often a drawn out process of trial and error along with trawling through source files.<p>iii) Error messages are hard to follow<p>Errors are long and don't provide enough detail. They will explain a type mismatch referencing many types you may not have ever seen, and are not documented anywhere. Except for simple errors, many of them are very hard to follow to a remedy.<p>iv) It requires yet more transpilation<p>Transpilation takes time, and always adds a burden to developers. I didn't mind so much with ES6 etc because eventually many functions were included in a broad set of browsers. There doesn't seem to be much progress including TypeScript in a browser, and feels like these complicated transpilation steps could be with us for a long time.<p>I could probably add more to this list, but my point is that I just can't see that TypeScript is worth all this time investment and making progress so slow sometimes. Are there others that come to this conclusion? I mainly see positive posts about TypeScript.<p>edit: I referred to TypeScript as a framework which it isn't. However it feels similar to me in that you are at the whim of TypeScript developers and how they decide to progress with the language.
Upvote: | 365 |
Title: Getting an error loop on Tweetbot on all accounts:<p>Re-authorization Failed
Failed to request token from Twitter.com:: service unavailable
Upvote: | 501 |
Title: Archive repositories are either slow, or responding with HTTP 503, on both HTTP and HTTPS.<p>This is the second major archive.ubuntu.com outage in recent memory.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33380584
Upvote: | 49 |
Title: I have come to a realization that I don't really enjoy Software Engineering(& the processes that it comes with) but I do love programming & solving problems.<p>Finding and fixing bugs is a lot of fun. Incidence response is a lot of fun. Hacking on new projects is a lot of fun. Writing unit tests is fun too.<p>Refactoring, rewriting, sprint, agile, rearchitecting things etc aren't that fun. I like a few languages and I am not too keen on learning new paradigms or languages unless I have to. I'd rather get to value now by making something that just works(and is adequately tested) than engineer something thats future proof but takes longer to get out.<p>What are some good jobs for a person like this?
Upvote: | 760 |
Title: Hi HN, I work for a small company and we've recently come across a version of our software that's been cracked.<p>Specifically, the crack modifies some of our binaries to circumvent the activation process and allows bogus registration keys. Pretty standard stuff AFAIK. Thankfully, our digital signatures are lost in the process, so that's reassuring.<p>We haven't done the most thorough search of how widespread the issue is, but we've estimated that it's about 1 user per day since the early half of 2022. A license costs a few thousand dollars, but we do regional pricing and bulk licenses for larger firms. We also provide free licenses to academics (with proof).<p>For context, we are a <15 person company where we all wear multiple hats and would like to continue providing great service, training and introducing features. It's clear to us why someone would crack our software, especially in lower income countries.<p>I'm not entirely sure what other information would be helpful to provide, but I was wondering if anyone has run into this into the past, and how it was mitigated. While we'll always have some piracy, we'd like to keep it to a minimum.
Upvote: | 216 |
Title: Hey everyone, I’m Pedro, and together with my friend Paulo I co-founded MagnaPlay (<a href="https://magnaplay.tech">https://magnaplay.tech</a>). Basically, we’re a “Spotify”, but for games made by independent creators on PC.<p>Paulo and I have been indie gamers for the past decade. Both of us have insanely long back catalogs of games we’ve always wanted to try, but couldn’t. When we were stuck at home during covid, we were frustrated and decided to set out to solve this problem. Naturally, this decision was made during a game of Call of Duty: Warzone.<p>For consumers, MagnaPlay eliminates the paywall when it comes to buying a new game. Today, the indie market is incredibly saturated and prices are increasing. A subscription service, like Spotify, can make indie gaming more affordable and allow players to try out more content.<p>For developers, we solve the problem of lower consumer lifetime values for indie games. Most indie games sell for around $10 and lose 50% of that to tax and store commissions, so the average player only nets them around $5 LTV. By introducing a revenue model which focuses on the distribution of player subscriptions, we’re able to pay developers a recurring revenue stream, as long as people are playing their game. This way, indie games can achieve profitability with a smaller player base, which is crucial as these developers tend to have incredibly small marketing budgets.<p>MagnaPlay subscriptions cost $8/month. We divide that up and distribute it to developers based on a series of data such as time played, play sessions and number of downloads. We designed this with the idea of helping indies achieve profitability with a smaller player base, crucial when competition is ever-increasing.<p>This isn’t a new idea, but we offer a few twists. Namely: a) we only work with indie games, which makes the unit economics work; b) we don’t do streaming—the business model doesn’t really work and it’s not as cool as it sounds; and c) we’re trying out all our funky gamer ideas: letting players vote for titles, let players review games on a review feed and even letting players choose who gets part of their subscription!<p>By far our biggest difficulty is overcoming the chicken-and-egg problem of platform businesses: we need games to get users, and we need users to get games. We have a few high quality games already, but not enough yet to draw major interest. Things have been especially hard on the supply side, because most of the time we’re competing with massive companies such as Microsoft, which really bankroll their service “Game Pass”. We’re going to have to be clever and determined to overcome this problem and it may need some real hacking…accepting any suggestions!<p>In the meantime, if you think MagnaPlay is a good idea and would like it to exist in your world, like we do, we’d love you to consider taking a leap of faith with us and getting in early. We promise to listen closely to your opinions about what games to add and how to build this out going forward!<p>The other perennial question, of course, is piracy. Since we don’t do streaming, all games are installed on your computer, but since we’re a subscription service, we have to validate your subscription—and however we do that, it has to be effortless for the indie developers to integrate with.<p>For this, we ended up building our own DRM program. It consists of a C++ wrapper that encrypts and compresses games’ raw binary, as well as a program which injects assembly code into the game’s .EXE files which validates the parent process of the program upon running. The beauty of it is: developers don’t need to change any of their source code! (An interesting tradeoff is that although this reduces game file size by around 26%, it unfortunately increases memory usage by around 9%.) Most players understandably dislike DRMs, and of course there’s no perfect solution against piracy, but we’re hopeful that this approach will be non-intrusive enough for both players and devs to solve this core business problem.<p>We are super happy to see customers trying out games they normally wouldn’t! One example was Jared, who runs an indie podcast (Indie Game International on Spotify!): he got word of MagnaPlay and later told us how he gave this little indie game called Existensis a try and he absolutely loved it, played it to completion, and then ended up interviewing the developer on his podcast! So far, this was definitely the coolest thing we’ve seen happen on/due to MagnaPlay.<p>We’re happy to launch MagnaPlay on Hacker News and are eager to hear your feedback on our value prop, suggestions on dealing with chicken and egg, and on our product, which is available now for a free trial and then $8/month on <a href="https://magnaplay.tech">https://magnaplay.tech</a>. We look forward to your comments!
Upvote: | 94 |
Title: Jumping off of this post: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34370440" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34370440</a><p>I thought it'd be fun to host a tournament to see what creative strategies people can come up with. I think the code might need to be cleaned up a tad ;)<p>I'd be willing to put $1,000 down personally to the prize pool.<p>1. What do people think?
2. Does anybody have any experience hosting such a tournament? Any advice?
3. Anybody wanna help make this happen?
Upvote: | 61 |
Title: A while ago someone asked about best purchases under $200, and it made me wonder what items people have gotten the most use out of. What are some of your favorite items that are made to last?
Upvote: | 73 |
Title: This is just a side hustle but I ended developing 300+ tools. Any feedback or suggestion is welcome.
Upvote: | 151 |
Title: years ago, I lost just over $200,000 and went into a heavy depression.<p>Today, I am sharing the learning lessons so that you do not make the mistakes I made.<p>1. Do not trust people blindly, especially your team:<p>This was the number mistake my cofounder Oscar, and I made. We trusted our team blindly.<p>2. Don't launch an unstable product:<p>My product was in the alpha stage, and I fell for someone's trap who asked me to launch my product early, leading to many angry and upset customers.<p>3. Do not build an ALL-IN-ONE product:<p>Time and time, even at PitchGround, we see founders having a large vision and wanting to BUILD an all-in-one tool.<p>It's a recipe for disaster because it's very difficult to manage the repo if the scope is too large.<p>Instead, split the large vision into multiple smaller projects if you want. It's easier to manage, maintain, grow and kill if things are not working out.<p>4. Follow a systematic launch cycle:<p>- Idea: Validate your idea with at least 80 out of 100 people who have paid you $1 for your idea.
- Build JUST one MOST REQUESTED FEATURE by your buyers in your idea stage.
- Test, TEst, TESt, TEST...and KEEP testing.<p>Many companies need to understand the importance of QA during early-stage. You don't want frustrated users.<p>5. Focus on stability and not UI/UX:<p>Your MVP should focus on stability and not UI and UX because your initial set of customers won't care how fancy your product looks, but what they care about is whether their problem is getting solved or not.<p>6. Sell to at least 1k paying users before building more:<p>We made a huge mistake by building more, leading to more stability issues and unsatisfied users.<p>7. Build an audience before building a product:<p>I wish someone had told me this 5-6 years ago. Please only build a product if you have an audience.<p>Spend at least six months building enough audience, so your initial distribution becomes very easy.<p>I have learned more valuable lessons, which I will share in the future, but I hope these lessons help you build better & smarter.<p>Let me know your thoughts in the comment below.<p>----<p>Edit:<p>Since many of you requested to share more details, here is the short backstory:<p>I started working on my SaaS somewhere in 2016, and the first thing I did was hired a CTO.<p>The person had around 3+ years of experience.<p>Not only was I paying a good salary, but I was also paying for his rent. When we started building the initial set of products, the overall product development kept getting delayed. He said we needed more developers, so we hired around 6-7+ developers.<p>All the developers were reporting my ex-CTO, and as per our mutual understanding, I was not allowed to have any say in how the product will be developed, and he will be offered full support and resources.<p>I agreed to that.<p>Several months passed, and the product was not ready, but I was also losing cash quickly. I was already under heavy stress because there was no flow of income for the product.<p>I met someone during this time who told me that I should launch my product, and some people will even buy during the alpha stage. I found it skeptical but fell for that trap because I was desperate to bring in more cash to keep the funding going on for the project.<p>This is where I made another mistake because I unknowingly ended up overpromising, and my team failed to deliver a quality product.<p>Over 1.5 years passed, and we still needed a stable product.<p>Over two years went by, and I still did not have a stable product, and this is when my ex-CTO quit, and a few other developers quit along with him when I realized that he used my resources to build his product and shortly flew out of the country.<p>..I ended up hiring an outside dev team with the little more money I had to keep my promise to the customers, but that did not go well either.<p>I had no money left; I had to shut the project completely because I had deep into reds and had gotten into heavy clinical depression.
Upvote: | 41 |
Title: rearrange the chess pieces so that the number of pieces threatening each square matches the large number in that square? pieces move freely<p>https://chedoku.com/#dailypuzzle
Upvote: | 43 |
Title: What are the role-model software companies with amazing dev culture now?<p>In 2013-15 many people were looking up to how Netflix or Spotify built their dev culture and how they operated and developed their products.<p>What companies are setting current trends now (in 2022-23)?<p>EDIT:
I know that 'amazing culture' can mean different things to different people. I'm interested in examples of the companies that are setting the current trends how development should be done. Structure of teams, CI/CD, pipelines, responsibilities, tooling, day-to-day working methodology (product management probably too).<p>Of course this judgement is subjective - I'm fine with that.
Upvote: | 72 |
Title: I’m looking for ways to “pay it forward” and make helping other people a bigger part of my life. Curious to hear what other HackerNews people have come up with. For context, I’m a software engineer (mostly front-end) and also have a law degree.
Upvote: | 42 |
Title: I was advised to remove this post
Upvote: | 98 |
Title: There are a lot of blog posts talking about the fact that testing in prod should not be a taboo like it may have been in the 90s. I've read some of these [1] [2], I get the arguments in favour of it, and I want to try some experiments.<p>My question is -- how does one go about doing it _safely_? In particular, I'm thinking about data. Is it common practice to inject fabricated data into a prod system to run such tests? What's the best practice or prior art on doing this well?<p>Ultimately, I think this will end up looking like implementing SLIs and SLOs in PROD, but for some of my SLOs, I think I need to actually _fake_ the data in order to get the SLIs I need, so how to do this?<p>Suggestions appreciated -- thanks.<p>[1] https://increment.com/testing/i-test-in-production/<p>[2] https://segment.com/blog/we-test-in-production-you-should-too/
Upvote: | 60 |
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