prompt
stringlengths 0
90
| completion
stringlengths 1
26.3k
|
|---|---|
I Violated a Code of Conduct | We're literally tearing ourselves apart, and I don't want to hold opinions about human beings anymore. Anyone can be an enemy or dislike you.Social media has rotted us from within and from all sides. Left, right, it doesn't matter. Everyone is so hostile and eager to end other people.This is madness.Yes, I did read the article. We're cancelling people over criticism. Somebody needs to hide Linus.I don't like criticism. I was bullied a lot as a kid. But I thought part of what made us American was our rich, diversity of opinions and our grit to withstand challenge. We're supposed to work together and see past the differences. |
Tech-savvy audiences block Google Analytics | There is a German movie about the system that is used to gather TV ratings. It's a special box that some users get which reports what they are watching. Small sample size goes into a big statistic (not sure how accurate the portrayal of the system in the movie is). These boxes are given to the people who pay the German public TV fee, which excludes i.e. students (they don't have to pay) and some other groups. This group of critical people figured that out and started to hack into these machines to fake ratings. They faked the ratings away from stupid trash TV towards some higher quality stuff, documentaries, culture, ...
Obviously in the movie then the country saw a renaissance, everyone got smarter, yadda yadda, you get it.I feel like this is similar.
All tech savvy people block ads and analytics and at least the known tricks they use against us. So the internet only tracks the defenseless people and is then built to serve them (and or exploit them).Maybe we should engage in large scale AdWords fraud. Send come fake traffic away from Facebook and over to Wikipedia. |
Ask HN: How much do you make at Amazon? Here is how much I make at Amazon | Seattle Googler here (throwaway account).Position: Senior Software Engineer (level 5)Tenure: 4 years, no prior experienceComp: $300K (160 salary, 40 bonus, 100 stock)Male, native English speakerP.S. We're hiring. |
“We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020” | I say this every time someone brings up Flash's failure, but ... It's a tragic failure on Adobe's part. The tools for 2D animations and games in Flash are far beyond anything else out there from a creative standpoint. There isn't a product on the market that comes even close. Everything now is too technical, too specialized.There are lots and lots of artists and developers out there who learned Flash's toolset and got good at it -- and now all that knowledge is useless. And there aren't even better tools to replace it.It could have been different. Too bad they let it fail. |
Facebook exodus: Nearly half of young users have deleted the app | Note I wrote my father in law when he had gone too far down the rabbit hole and legitimately worried about the poison it spreads around his demographic:I left Facebook when I read some press release about it being designed from the outset to make you feel bad because it keeps you engaged; hoping someone agrees with something you liked or shared and the dopamine hit it releases. I don’t like feeling manipulated and manipulation is facebooks modus operandi. All to track everything I do around the internet to sell me ads for $12/person/year in revenue.I left Twitter for basically the same reason and when I’d stick on the site refreshing it all day hoping someone noticed the well thought out point I spent 3 hours putting together only to realize no one cares. Leaving both after about a week feels like when I have taken breaks from caffeine. It sucks at first but after a week, you feel refreshed and clean. I’m sure drug abstinence feels similar.My father went down the rabbit hole of Facebook and shares political crap constantly, flooding peoples news feeds. There’s a feature on Facebook that lets you silently unfollow people so they’re on mute. Everyone of my family members who are Facebook friends with my dad have done this to him and don’t see anything he posts. He’s shouting into a black hole thinking the whole world is paying attention while in reality no one is.He has said things that the man I grew up with would never have said and Facebook/ talk radio is to blame. We’re all vulnerable to it, which is why I try and stay away from it.https://www.wired.com/2017/02/dont-believe-lies-just-people-... |
Jd | I'm intrigued but skeptical of this bit:Jd is a columnar (column oriented) RDBMS.Most RDBMS systems are row oriented. Ages ago they fell into the trap of thinking of tables as rows (records). You can see how this happened. The end user wants the record that has a first name, last name, license, make, model, color, and date. So a row was the unit of information and rows were stored sequentially on disk. Row orientation works for small amounts of data. But think about what happens when there are lots of rows and the user wants all rows where the license starts with 123 and the color is blue or black. In a naive system the application has to read every single byte of data from the disk. There are lots of bytes and reading from disk is, by orders of magnitude, the slowest part of the performance equation. To answer this simple question all the data had to be read from disk. This is a performance disaster and that is where decades of adding bandages and kludges started.Jd is columnar so the data is 'fully inverted'. This means all of the license numbers are stored together and sequentially on disk. The same for all the other columns. Think about the earlier query for license and color. Jd gets the license numbers from disk (a tiny fraction of the database) and generates a boolean mask of rows that match. It then gets the color column from disk (another small fraction of the data) and generates a boolean mask of matches and ANDS that with the other mask. It can now directly read just the rows from just the columns that are required in the result. Only a small fraction of the data is read. In J, columns used in queries are likely already in memory and the query runs at ram speed, not the sad and slow disk speed.Both scenarios above are simplified, but the point is strong and valid. The end user thinks in records, but the work to get those records is best organized by columns.Row oriented is slavishly tied to the design ideas of filing cabinets and manila folders. Column oriented embraces computers.A table column is a mapped file.What's the other side of this argument? |
Patent Trolls Inbound: Our First Lawsuit | There needs to be an anti-patent-troll membership organization. You pay a fee relative to some metric and the organization acts as insurance against parent trolls by fully defending any patent lawsuits that are obviously unjustified. And to keep costs low, membership in this organization would be public to deter patent trolls from even trying to sue a member in the first place. |
Theranos, CEO Holmes, and Former President Balwani Charged with Fraud | Ok, this is the money line in that press release for me:“The charges against Theranos, Holmes, and Balwani make clear that there is no exemption from the anti-fraud provisions of the federal securities laws simply because a company is non-public, development-stage, or the subject of exuberant media attention.”For all those entrepreneurs are trying to "fake it until you make it" be aware that the SEC considers your strategy both fraudulent and they feel they have the jurisdiction to prosecute you. And while I doubt the SEC is going to go after every CEO that raised a Series A on a pitch deck that was pure fantasy, the people who participated in the round might bring them in if it served their purposes. |
Warp – Mobile VPN | There goes me and my co-founder's plan of disrupting the Mobile VPN market. Or may be, we still have a chance?Anywho, congratulations Cloudflare! I long held an opinion that the VPN market was ripe for disruption when I looked at privacy policy of some of the top players. Having analysed the market, I find that its defragmented with no clear run-away winner. I hope you're able to make a headway with all the interesting innovations that you plan to offer on top of it.Here are some ideas that I had in mind for a Mobile VPN:1. Ability to run a dns-blacklist, tag-based blacklist, and a ip-firewall at cloudflare's end (not on the end devices). May be you could add that as an option to your wrap+ product?2. Auto change exit IPs underneath the covers.3. Take over the dialer and route calls over IP whenever possible.4. Provide ability to analyze traffic on a PC.5. Track and warn mode per app, where the traffic is analysed for a particular app to generate a report on what its doing and how much.Basically, bring enterprise-grade security to the end consumer. |
City Generator | Love these sort of things.It’s been on HN a few time before but Townscaper by @OskaSta on twitter is also brilliant. He’s worth following as he documents the development of the projects he’s working on, currently a new island generator. Really interesting intersection of algorithms and art. Often shares other peoples work to thats super interesting, I have a feeling he may have retweeted something about this city generator but not sure if it’s the same one.https://mobile.twitter.com/OskStahttps://www.townscapergame.com/Edit:Yes, it is the one Oskar has retweeted, this is the creator: https://mobile.twitter.com/watawatabou |
Draw SVG rope using JavaScript | Author here.Woah! This kinda exploded, thank you so much for the kind words!Lately, I'm trying to add more interactivity to my posts. Mainly inspired by amazing work of Bartosz Ciechanowski [1].I started drawing with code a few years ago and completely fell in love with it. Problems like this one scratch my itch for creative programming.I hope some of my posts will inspire people to try making pictures using code, just for the sake of it. Programming should be fun :)[1] https://ciechanow.ski/edit: typos |
Documenting the Web together | Don't forget you can use https://devdocs.io/ too which also searches MDN and store offline. The two are a great pair. |
Finland adds the demoscene as a UNESCO intangible world cultural heritage | This is nice, I guess, but I'm still not sure how this has any benefit for anybody except that demoscene now shares a list on Wikipedia with some folk dances and knitting patterns.I think it's much more newsworthy that the Revision Demoparty happened last weekend despite the corona pandemic. It was fully online but still a 72-hour non stop event. Many of the releases are mind-blowing, check https://pouet.net |
Hundreds of fishing vessels vanishing along Argentina’s waters | My 2020 prediction that there will be no more wild caught fish in markets by 2030 seems ever closer...The truth is, Argentina knows what’s happened but is likely powerless to stop it. If they acted to curb the issue, China would stop bribes to the Argentina leadership and likely impose sanctions of some kinda. |
Oh shit, git: Getting myself out of bad situations | Adopted a git GUI years ago and haven't looked back. I get looks sometimes, but I can't help but gloat when I can stage and unstage individual lines in less than a second.I think anyone who uses the CLI is either trying too hard or hasn't realized the beauty of a git GUI.Takeaways:- My commit time is usually much faster than coworkers, with higher accuracy (less frequent accidental commits, etc.)- I don't remember the last time I made an irreversible change to the repo, or had an "oh shit" moment. And that's despite using some interesting git features.- Staging individual files, folders, lines of code, or hunks is easy. Makes maintaining multiple trains of though / addressing bugs while working on other code a non-issue.- It's easy to keep files uncommitted for long periods of time intentionally, without slowing down my workflow.- It's much easier to get an overview of the changes I'm making. |
LocationSmart Leaked Location Data for All Major U.S. Carriers in Real Time | Hi all, I'm the researcher who found the bug. I started looking at it after I saw the earlier HN posting about Securus and LocationSmart.Happy to answer questions and provide any additional context. |
Time flies in Google Earth’s biggest update in years | What's really striking to me about timelapse videos of the Earth is how, at a grand enough scale, the growth of human settlements on Earth really looks no different than the growth of bacterial and fungal colonies on Petri dishes.We think of ourself as special, as having conquered environments, technology and more - and when zoomed out you could explain everything we've built and accomplished as the achievements of a sufficiently robust slime mold simply using available resources to continue growing. |
Apple CEO Tim Cook 'secretly' signed $275B deal with China in 2016 | Daring Fireball [1] has another passage from the article which is illuminating with regards to any promises Apple makes about how it will resist governmental pressure to compromise its products, vis-à-vis Apple's CSAM scanning tool."Sometime in 2014 or early 2015, China’s State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping told members of the Apple Maps team to make the Diaoyu Islands, the objects of a long-running territorial dispute between China and Japan, appear large even when users zoomed out from them. Chinese regulators also threatened to withhold approval of the first Apple Watch, scheduled for release in 2015, if Apple didn’t comply with the unusual request, according to internal documents.Some members of the team back at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., initially balked at the demand. But the Maps app had become a priority for Apple, so eventually the company complied. The Diaoyu Islands, when viewed in Apple Maps in mainland China, continue to appear on a larger scale than surrounding territories."Apple has, and will, fold to government pressure faster than a lawn chair.1. https://daringfireball.net/linked/2021/12/08/the-information... |
A from-scratch tour of Bitcoin in Python | I'm amazed that he has time for this kind of hobby work. |
Google achieves AI 'breakthrough' by beating Go champion | Our paper: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v529/n7587/full/nature1...Video from Nature: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-dKXOlsf98&feature=youtu.beVideo from us at DeepMind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUbqykXVx0Aedit: For those saying it's still a long way to beat the strongest player - we are playing Lee Sedol, probably the strongest Go player, in March: http://deepmind.com/alpha-go.html.
That site also has a link to the paper, scroll down to "Read about AlphaGo here".If you want to view the sgfs in a browser, they are in my blog: http://www.furidamu.org/blog/2016/01/26/mastering-the-game-o... |
Founder to CEO: How to build a great company from the ground up | I feel like there’s an ‘all or nothing’ attitude recently around starting a business which doesn’t make sense to me. Either you’re making millions and have 100 employees or nothing.I work in a company that has 5-10 employees, nobody is working their ass off and there’s steady income and gradual growth. Our CEO is not a millionaire, but he enjoys his work and the company he works for. There is no plans for fast growth or VC funding.Can anyone explain to me where does this obsession with VC funding and huge growth come from? I feel like if you grow your company by more then 50% YOY you will end up with a totally different company culture, and you might end up hating your own company. |
Nascar driver stuns to qualify for championship with GameCube move | Reminds me of another example of video-game inspired tactics:Just before he reached the end zone, with 17 seconds remaining, Stokley cut right at 90 degrees and ran across the field. Six seconds drained off the clock before, at last, he meandered across the goal line to score the winning touchdown. For certain football fans, the excitement of a last-minute comeback now commingled with the shock of the familiar: It's hard to think of a better example of a professional athlete doing something so obviously inspired by the tactics of videogame football. When I caught up with Stokley by telephone a few weeks later, I asked him point-blank: "Is that something out of a videogame?" "It definitely is," Stokley said. "I think everybody who's played those games has done that" — run around the field for a while at the end of the game to shave a few precious seconds off the clock. Stokley said he had performed that maneuver in a videogame "probably hundreds of times" before doing it in a real NFL game.https://www.wired.com/2010/01/ff-gamechanger/ |
I refused to become an FBI informant, the government put me on the no fly list | This is exactly the way the Stasi used to get new agents.Monitor someone who they wanted to recruit until they could1) find an accusation for which the target would have no alibi (although they were clearly innocent)2) confront the target with the accusation and the penalties for it,3) say that (as an agent) "I personally think that you are innocent although you have no alibi and would have to be found guilty if reported,4) "but to prove your loyalty, you could help us just this once in our fight against the criminals we just accused you of working with." |
478 points in 13 minutes? If it isn't a data error or special case, seems like some accounts are in need of deletion...edit: 492 points after another minute |
|
EU Announces That All Scientific Articles Should Be Freely Accessible by 2020 | Why on earth do people think this is to the detriment of publishers? This will effectively just lock in their profits by forcing all eu grants to include the cost of payments to publishers to make research papers open access. It just means the taxpayer is now paying for open access instead of individuals having to pay up themselves. Note I'm not saying this is a bad thing, and it is possibly worth publicly subsidising this as an intermediate step, but it is far from being one in the eye for publishers as other comments here seem to think. |
More than 600 points and no comments? What's going on here?Maybe it's something like that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3742902 |
|
Snowden leak: Cavium networking hardware may contain NSA backdoor | How the NSA successfully manage to prevent the Washington Post and friends from discovering and reporting on this malicious backdoor? They've been sitting on these documents for a decade. Are the journalists just that *uncurious* about the deep contents of the documents they hold exclusive access to? Was this some kind of organizational failing? |
Sundar will be the CEO of both Google and Alphabet | I see a few comments praising Sundar. As someone who doesn’t follow closely, but feels that Google has deteriorated dramatically under his watch, does someone mind explaining the reasoning for said praise? |
A URL Lengthener | Love it.This is going in the toolbox along with http://shadyurl.com |
Startup Playbook | I wish there was a similar level and quality of resources for what I think are called lifestyle businesses. By that, I mean product-based businesses with at most a few million in revenue, a 5ish person team, a solid sustainable market position, and no desire to revolutionize any unicorns.I know a lot of people attempting this and they mostly seem to be flying under the radar, or at least have nowhere near the cachet of a startup. They are often bootstrapped, frequently for lack of other options.For those of us who don't want to be in the pressure cooker or are turned off by the hype machine, these businesses are a viable alternative route toward independence and possibly achieving a significant impact. The fact that they have become as attainable as they are is I think also something quite remarkable. |
Facebook is closing Parse | Separately, we developed an open-source Parse-compatible API server for Node/Express. https://github.com/ParsePlatform/parse-serverThis, along with the database migration tools released earlier, allow developers a full migration path to move from Parse hosted data + API to their own infrastructure.Over the weekend, I set up a website & app on a $5 DigitalOcean box running Parse and Mongo locally. |
The 'Fuck You' Pattern | "Wow, fuck you. I just wanted to look at cats.""Well, fuck you, too. We're here to sell ads."It's not about dark patterns, that's just a second-order effect. It was never about dark patterns.This is the implied agreement. You understand it, or you don't. And if you don't, I guess you haven't been on the web in the past decade or something.What? You thought it was fair that a company spends millions in technical infrastructure and staffing so you can sit at home and spend your time looking at cats for free? No, they have your attention and they're going to connect you to organizations who will pay for it. |
Prosecutor as bully | From the article: For in the 18 months of negotiations, that was what he was not willing to accept, and so that was the reason he was facing a million dollar trial in April — his wealth bled dry, yet unable to appeal openly to us for the financial help he needed to fund his defense, at least without risking the ire of a district court judge.Remember, this was on HN just a week ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5003335Once again we see the true nature of criminal prosecutions: the prosecutor's tactic is to bring outrageous charges that could result in decades in prison, bankrupt the defendant one way or the other (seizing assets or making the case so complex it bleeds him dry), and then use that to coerce a guilty plea. It's no wonder that trials by jury are becoming so vanishingly rare that even the Supreme Court has written that "in today’s criminal justice system, the negotiation of a plea bargain, rather than the unfolding of a trial, is almost always the critical point for a defendant." [1]Do we really want to live in a country where your right to a trial is an empty right?[1] http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/11pdf/10-444.pdfEdited to add: many people in this thread want to name and shame the individual prosecutor in this case. That is seriously misdirected effort that is not going to solve the systemic problems. It may even exasperate them, as it falsely implies that the problem is with individual overstepping prosecutors rather than a system in which it's the norm. |
Paradise Papers: Dear Tim Cook | What annoys me the most is that, as a small company, I can't evade from my country tax system. I pay the taxes. All of them, at full rate.But there are these big companies which can afford to create offshore companies/holding just to evade some tax system, and lower their tax rate.So, what? The tax rate of a country is now "artificial", because it will never be applied to all revenues from all companies, because the higher profiles will be able to evade a part of it.If governments want to reclaim more, they could raise up the tax rate, considering that the biggest players will only pay a fragment of it. But the small companies, the one that can only follow the rules? They are screwed.All companies should be considered equals regarding the tax system. It is simply not the case when such schemes are used.Edit: exactly the same point of view as jitbit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15651457 |
Mourning loss as a remote team | Pete would ask to work more hours. He claimed he could use the money. He was a contractor rememberAmidst the loss here, this line stood out to me and brings to mind all the terrible ways contractors are taken advantage of, or at least, treated and compensated vastly different than their "staff"/"full-time" peers who are often doing the exact same work. For fun, google the phrase "permatemp".E.g. I had a past job as a middle manager where my team interfaced heavily with a group of contractor developers overseas. When the time came to demo new features and place superlatives upon the various teams, I noticed my leadership cadre said nothing about the contractors and did not acknowledge any of the work they had done.I spoke up about it when the floor was given for anyone else to give kudos where they desired, and mentioned the overseas team and thanked their team lead for working with me on delivering. He spoke up and expressed his gratitude in kind.Apparently, this got my CTO into "trouble" with "legal" because I guess merely acknowledging contractors was some kind of a "problem". As a result, my boss got in trouble. As a result, I got written up. I was out of that company within six months after relationship with my boss and CTO deteriorated immediately after I opened my darn mouth.For expressing gratitude.To contractors. |
Be Kind | I really like these two paragraphs towards the end: Being kind isn’t the same as being nice. It isn’t about superficial praise.
It doesn’t mean dulling your opinions. And it shouldn’t diminish the passion
with which you present them.
Being kind is fundamentally about taking responsibility for your impact on
the people around you. It requires you be mindful of their feelings and
considerate of the way your presence affects them.
This get's missed a lot here on Hacker News. Many people are often hostile towards content creators or other commenters.It's perfectly OK to disagree with someone; but please consider doing so in a respectful and thoughtful tone. Remember that others often shut-down when they read criticism, even when well warranted. The way you phrase and present yourself defines whether you're giving criticism or critique. |
I Miss Microsoft Encarta | Obviously this is pure nostalgia. Wikipedia + Google is superior in pretty much all imaginable ways. And available to people "in the developing world". (I don't really get why Scott included that part. The number of people who have access to a PC with a Microsoft Encarta CD-ROM and also don't have web access via their phones.. my guess is that the total number is about 17, globally.)That said, nostalgia is fun sometimes. |
US Constitution – A Git repo with history of edits | Why legal professionals are not using version control goddamit?! It's exactly the tool they need. Just recently worked with a lawyer who was negotiating settlement agreement on my behalf. The agreement in MS Word, edits highlighted with a color background, change requests in the body of the email - after 2-3 rounds of corrections reaching the other party nobody is able to keep a track of anything anymore. Seriously? Years of studies, prestigious profession, peoples' careers and lives at the stake, and this is how you work?! |
Block YouTube ads on AppleTV by decrypting and stripping ads from Profobuf | I just subscribe to YouTube premium to support my favorite application out there.I learn so much from the people who spend hours and hours making videos every month that I am more than happy to pay a measly $13 or whatever it is every month to YouTube. |
Steve's Google Platform rant | It now 404's so I've posted it here:Stevey's Google Platforms RantI was at Amazon for about six and a half years, and now I've been at Google for that long. One thing that struck me immediately about the two companies -- an impression that has been reinforced almost daily -- is that Amazon does everything wrong, and Google does everything right. Sure, it's a sweeping generalization, but a surprisingly accurate one. It's pretty crazy. There are probably a hundred or even two hundred different ways you can compare the two companies, and Google is superior in all but three of them, if I recall correctly. I actually did a spreadsheet at one point but Legal wouldn't let me show it to anyone, even though recruiting loved it.I mean, just to give you a very brief taste: Amazon's recruiting process is fundamentally flawed by having teams hire for themselves, so their hiring bar is incredibly inconsistent across teams, despite various efforts they've made to level it out. And their operations are a mess; they don't really have SREs and they make engineers pretty much do everything, which leaves almost no time for coding - though again this varies by group, so it's luck of the draw. They don't give a single shit about charity or helping the needy or community contributions or anything like that. Never comes up there, except maybe to laugh about it. Their facilities are dirt-smeared cube farms without a dime spent on decor or common meeting areas. Their pay and benefits suck, although much less so lately due to local competition from Google and Facebook. But they don't have any of our perks or extras -- they just try to match the offer-letter numbers, and that's the end of it. Their code base is a disaster, with no engineering standards whatsoever except what individual teams choose to put in place.To be fair, they do have a nice versioned-library system that we really ought to emulate, and a nice publish-subscribe system that we also have no equivalent for. But for the most part they just have a bunch of crappy tools that read and write state machine information into relational databases. We wouldn't take most of it even if it were free.I think the pubsub system and their library-shelf system were two out of the grand total of three things Amazon does better than google.I guess you could make an argument that their bias for launching early and iterating like mad is also something they do well, but you can argue it either way. They prioritize launching early over everything else, including retention and engineering discipline and a bunch of other stuff that turns out to matter in the long run. So even though it's given them some competitive advantages in the marketplace, it's created enough other problems to make it something less than a slam-dunk.But there's one thing they do really really well that pretty much makes up for ALL of their political, philosophical and technical screw-ups.Jeff Bezos is an infamous micro-manager. He micro-manages every single pixel of Amazon's retail site. He hired Larry Tesler, Apple's Chief Scientist and probably the very most famous and respected human-computer interaction expert in the entire world, and then ignored every goddamn thing Larry said for three years until Larry finally -- wisely -- left the company. Larry would do these big usability studies and demonstrate beyond any shred of doubt that nobody can understand that frigging website, but Bezos just couldn't let go of those pixels, all those millions of semantics-packed pixels on the landing page. They were like millions of his own precious children. So they're all still there, and Larry is not.Micro-managing isn't that third thing that Amazon does better than us, by the way. I mean, yeah, they micro-manage really well, but I wouldn't list it as a strength or anything. I'm just trying to set the context here, to help you understand what happened. We're talking about a guy who in all seriousness has said on many public occasions that people should be paying him to work at Amazon. He hands out little yellow stickies with his name on them, reminding people "who runs the company" when they disagree with him. The guy is a regular... well, Steve Jobs, I guess. Except without the fashion or design sense. Bezos is super smart; don't get me wrong. He just makes ordinary control freaks look like stoned hippies.So one day Jeff Bezos issued a mandate. He's doing that all the time, of course, and people scramble like ants being pounded with a rubber mallet whenever it happens. But on one occasion -- back around 2002 I think, plus or minus a year -- he issued a mandate that was so out there, so huge and eye-bulgingly ponderous, that it made all of his other mandates look like unsolicited peer bonuses.His Big Mandate went something along these lines:1) All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces.2) Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces.3) There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team's data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network.4) It doesn't matter what technology they use. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols -- doesn't matter. Bezos doesn't care.5) All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions.6) Anyone who doesn't do this will be fired.7) Thank you; have a nice day!Ha, ha! You 150-odd ex-Amazon folks here will of course realize immediately that #7 was a little joke I threw in, because Bezos most definitely does not give a shit about your day.#6, however, was quite real, so people went to work. Bezos assigned a couple of Chief Bulldogs to oversee the effort and ensure forward progress, headed up by Uber-Chief Bear Bulldog Rick Dalzell. Rick is an ex-Armgy Ranger, West Point Academy graduate, ex-boxer, ex-Chief Torturer slash CIO at Wal*Mart, and is a big genial scary man who used the word "hardened interface" a lot. Rick was a walking, talking hardened interface himself, so needless to say, everyone made LOTS of forward progress and made sure Rick knew about it.Over the next couple of years, Amazon transformed internally into a service-oriented architecture. They learned a tremendous amount while effecting this transformation. There was lots of existing documentation and lore about SOAs, but at Amazon's vast scale it was about as useful as telling Indiana Jones to look both ways before crossing the street. Amazon's dev staff made a lot of discoveries along the way. A teeny tiny sampling of these discoveries included:- pager escalation gets way harder, because a ticket might bounce through 20 service calls before the real owner is identified. If each bounce goes through a team with a 15-minute response time, it can be hours before the right team finally finds out, unless you build a lot of scaffolding and metrics and reporting.- every single one of your peer teams suddenly becomes a potential DOS attacker. Nobody can make any real forward progress until very serious quotas and throttling are put in place in every single service.- monitoring and QA are the same thing. You'd never think so until you try doing a big SOA. But when your service says "oh yes, I'm fine", it may well be the case that the only thing still functioning in the server is the little component that knows how to say "I'm fine, roger roger, over and out" in a cheery droid voice. In order to tell whether the service is actually responding, you have to make individual calls. The problem continues recursively until your monitoring is doing comprehensive semantics checking of your entire range of services and data, at which point it's indistinguishable from automated QA. So they're a continuum.- if you have hundreds of services, and your code MUST communicate with other groups' code via these services, then you won't be able to find any of them without a service-discovery mechanism. And you can't have that without a service registration mechanism, which itself is another service. So Amazon has a universal service registry where you can find out reflectively (programmatically) about every service, what its APIs are, and also whether it is currently up, and where.- debugging problems with someone else's code gets a LOT harder, and is basically impossible unless there is a universal standard way to run every service in a debuggable sandbox.That's just a very small sample. There are dozens, maybe hundreds of individual learnings like these that Amazon had to discover organically. There were a lot of wacky ones around externalizing services, but not as many as you might think. Organizing into services taught teams not to trust each other in most of the same ways they're not supposed to trust external developers.This effort was still underway when I left to join Google in mid-2005, but it was pretty far advanced. From the time Bezos issued his edict through the time I left, Amazon had transformed culturally into a company that thinks about everything in a services-first fashion. It is now fundamental to how they approach all designs, including internal designs for stuff that might never see the light of day externally.At this point they don't even do it out of fear of being fired. I mean, they're still afraid of that; it's pretty much part of daily life there, working for the Dread Pirate Bezos and all. But they do services because they've come to understand that it's the Right Thing. There are without question pros and cons to the SOA approach, and some of the cons are pretty long. But overall it's the right thing because SOA-driven design enables Platforms.That's what Bezos was up to with his edict, of course. He didn't (and doesn't) care even a tiny bit about the well-being of the teams, nor about what technologies they use, nor in fact any detail whatsoever about how they go about their business unless they happen to be screwing up. But Bezos realized long before the vast majority of Amazonians that Amazon needs to be a platform.You wouldn't really think that an online bookstore needs to be an extensible, programmable platform. Would you?Well, the first big thing Bezos realized is that the infrastructure they'd built for selling and shipping books and sundry could be transformed an excellent repurposable computing platform. So now they have the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, and the Amazon Elastic MapReduce, and the Amazon Relational Database Service, and a whole passel' o' other services browsable at aws.amazon.com. These services host the backends for some pretty successful companies, reddit being my personal favorite of the bunch.The other big realization he had was that he can't always build the right thing. I think Larry Tesler might have struck some kind of chord in Bezos when he said his mom couldn't use the goddamn website. It's not even super clear whose mom he was talking about, and doesn't really matter, because nobody's mom can use the goddamn website. In fact I myself find the website disturbingly daunting, and I worked there for over half a decade. I've just learned to kinda defocus my eyes and concentrate on the million or so pixels near the center of the page above the fold.I'm not really sure how Bezos came to this realization -- the insight that he can't build one product and have it be right for everyone. But it doesn't matter, because he gets it. There's actually a formal name for this phenomenon. It's called Accessibility, and it's the most important thing in the computing world.The. Most. Important. Thing.If you're sorta thinking, "huh? You mean like, blind and deaf people Accessibility?" then you're not alone, because I've come to understand that there are lots and LOTS of people just like you: people for whom this idea does not have the right Accessibility, so it hasn't been able to get through to you yet. It's not your fault for not understanding, any more than it would be your fault for being blind or deaf or motion-restricted or living with any other disability. When software -- or idea-ware for that matter -- fails to be accessible to anyone for any reason, it is the fault of the software or of the messaging of the idea. It is an Accessibility failure.Like anything else big and important in life, Accessibility has an evil twin who, jilted by the unbalanced affection displayed by their parents in their youth, has grown into an equally powerful Arch-Nemesis (yes, there's more than one nemesis to accessibility) named Security. And boy howdy are the two ever at odds.But I'll argue that Accessibility is actually more important than Security because dialing Accessibility to zero means you have no product at all, whereas dialing Security to zero can still get you a reasonably successful product such as the Playstation Network.So yeah. In case you hadn't noticed, I could actually write a book on this topic. A fat one, filled with amusing anecdotes about ants and rubber mallets at companies I've worked at. But I will never get this little rant published, and you'll never get it read, unless I start to wrap up.That one last thing that Google doesn't do well is Platforms. We don't understand platforms. We don't "get" platforms. Some of you do, but you are the minority. This has become painfully clear to me over the past six years. I was kind of hoping that competitive pressure from Microsoft and Amazon and more recently Facebook would make us wake up collectively and start doing universal services. Not in some sort of ad-hoc, half-assed way, but in more or less the same way Amazon did it: all at once, for real, no cheating, and treating it as our top priority from now on.But no. No, it's like our tenth or eleventh priority. Or fifteenth, I don't know. It's pretty low. There are a few teams who treat the idea very seriously, but most teams either don't think about it all, ever, or only a small percentage of them think about it in a very small way.It's a big stretch even to get most teams to offer a stubby service to get programmatic access to their data and computations. Most of them think they're building products. And a stubby service is a pretty pathetic service. Go back and look at that partial list of learnings from Amazon, and tell me which ones Stubby gives you out of the box. As far as I'm concerned, it's none of them. Stubby's great, but it's like parts when you need a car.A product is useless without a platform, or more precisely and accurately, a platform-less product will always be replaced by an equivalent platform-ized product.Google+ is a prime example of our complete failure to understand platforms from the very highest levels of executive leadership (hi Larry, Sergey, Eric, Vic, howdy howdy) down to the very lowest leaf workers (hey yo). We all don't get it. The Golden Rule of platforms is that you Eat Your Own Dogfood. The Google+ platform is a pathetic afterthought. We had no API at all at launch, and last I checked, we had one measly API call. One of the team members marched in and told me about it when they launched, and I asked: "So is it the Stalker API?" She got all glum and said "Yeah." I mean, I was joking, but no... the only API call we offer is to get someone's stream. So I guess the joke was on me.Microsoft has known about the Dogfood rule for at least twenty years. It's been part of their culture for a whole generation now. You don't eat People Food and give your developers Dog Food. Doing that is simply robbing your long-term platform value for short-term successes. Platforms are all about long-term thinking.Google+ is a knee-jerk reaction, a study in short-term thinking, predicated on the incorrect notion that Facebook is successful because they built a great product. But that's not why they are successful. Facebook is successful because they built an entire constellation of products by allowing other people to do the work. So Facebook is different for everyone. Some people spend all their time on Mafia Wars. Some spend all their time on Farmville. There are hundreds or maybe thousands of different high-quality time sinks available, so there's something there for everyone.Our Google+ team took a look at the aftermarket and said: "Gosh, it looks like we need some games. Let's go contract someone to, um, write some games for us." Do you begin to see how incredibly wrong that thinking is now? The problem is that we are trying to predict what people want and deliver it for them.You can't do that. Not really. Not reliably. There have been precious few people in the world, over the entire history of computing, who have been able to do it reliably. Steve Jobs was one of them. We don't have a Steve Jobs here. I'm sorry, but we don't.Larry Tesler may have convinced Bezos that he was no Steve Jobs, but Bezos realized that he didn't need to be a Steve Jobs in order to provide everyone with the right products: interfaces and workflows that they liked and felt at ease with. He just needed to enable third-party developers to do it, and it would happen automatically.I apologize to those (many) of you for whom all this stuff I'm saying is incredibly obvious, because yeah. It's incredibly frigging obvious. Except we're not doing it. We don't get Platforms, and we don't get Accessibility. The two are basically the same thing, because platforms solve accessibility. A platform is accessibility.So yeah, Microsoft gets it. And you know as well as I do how surprising that is, because they don't "get" much of anything, really. But they understand platforms as a purely accidental outgrowth of having started life in the business of providing platforms. So they have thirty-plus years of learning in this space. And if you go to msdn.com, and spend some time browsing, and you've never seen it before, prepare to be amazed. Because it's staggeringly huge. They have thousands, and thousands, and THOUSANDS of API calls. They have a HUGE platform. Too big in fact, because they can't design for squat, but at least they're doing it.Amazon gets it. Amazon's AWS (aws.amazon.com) is incredible. Just go look at it. Click around. It's embarrassing. We don't have any of that stuff.Apple gets it, obviously. They've made some fundamentally non-open choices, particularly around their mobile platform. But they understand accessibility and they understand the power of third-party development and they eat their dogfood. And you know what? They make pretty good dogfood. Their APIs are a hell of a lot cleaner than Microsoft's, and have been since time immemorial.Facebook gets it. That's what really worries me. That's what got me off my lazy butt to write this thing. I hate blogging. I hate... plussing, or whatever it's called when you do a massive rant in Google+ even though it's a terrible venue for it but you do it anyway because in the end you really do want Google to be successful. And I do! I mean, Facebook wants me there, and it'd be pretty easy to just go. But Google is home, so I'm insisting that we have this little family intervention, uncomfortable as it might be.After you've marveled at the platform offerings of Microsoft and Amazon, and Facebook I guess (I didn't look because I didn't want to get too depressed), head over to developers.google.com and browse a little. Pretty big difference, eh? It's like what your fifth-grade nephew might mock up if he were doing an assignment to demonstrate what a big powerful platform company might be building if all they had, resource-wise, was one fifth grader.Please don't get me wrong here -- I know for a fact that the dev-rel team has had to FIGHT to get even this much available externally. They're kicking ass as far as I'm concerned, because they DO get platforms, and they are struggling heroically to try to create one in an environment that is at best platform-apathetic, and at worst often openly hostile to the idea.I'm just frankly describing what developers.google.com looks like to an outsider. It looks childish. Where's the Maps APIs in there for Christ's sake? Some of the things in there are labs projects. And the APIs for everything I clicked were... they were paltry. They were obviously dog food. Not even good organic stuff. Compared to our internal APIs it's all snouts and horse hooves.And also don't get me wrong about Google+. They're far from the only offenders. This is a cultural thing. What we have going on internally is basically a war, with the underdog minority Platformers fighting a more or less losing battle against the Mighty Funded Confident Producters.Any teams that have successfully internalized the notion that they should be externally programmable platforms from the ground up are underdogs -- Maps and Docs come to mind, and I know GMail is making overtures in that direction. But it's hard for them to get funding for it because it's not part of our culture. Maestro's funding is a feeble thing compared to the gargantuan Microsoft Office programming platform: it's a fluffy rabbit versus a T-Rex. The Docs team knows they'll never be competitive with Office until they can match its scripting facilities, but they're not getting any resource love. I mean, I assume they're not, given that Apps Script only works in Spreadsheet right now, and it doesn't even have keyboard shortcuts as part of its API. That team looks pretty unloved to me.Ironically enough, Wave was a great platform, may they rest in peace. But making something a platform is not going to make you an instant success. A platform needs a killer app. Facebook -- that is, the stock service they offer with walls and friends and such -- is the killer app for the Facebook Platform. And it is a very serious mistake to conclude that the Facebook App could have been anywhere near as successful without the Facebook Platform.You know how people are always saying Google is arrogant? I'm a Googler, so I get as irritated as you do when people say that. We're not arrogant, by and large. We're, like, 99% Arrogance-Free. I did start this post -- if you'll reach back into distant memory -- by describing Google as "doing everything right". We do mean well, and for the most part when people say we're arrogant it's because we didn't hire them, or they're unhappy with our policies, or something along those lines. They're inferring arrogance because it makes them feel better.But when we take the stance that we know how to design the perfect product for everyone, and believe you me, I hear that a lot, then we're being fools. You can attribute it to arrogance, or naivete, or whatever -- it doesn't matter in the end, because it's foolishness. There IS no perfect product for everyone.And so we wind up with a browser that doesn't let you set the default font size. Talk about an affront to Accessibility. I mean, as I get older I'm actually going blind. For real. I've been nearsighted all my life, and once you hit 40 years old you stop being able to see things up close. So font selection becomes this life-or-death thing: it can lock you out of the product completely. But the Chrome team is flat-out arrogant here: they want to build a zero-configuration product, and they're quite brazen about it, and Fuck You if you're blind or deaf or whatever. Hit Ctrl-+ on every single page visit for the rest of your life.It's not just them. It's everyone. The problem is that we're a Product Company through and through. We built a successful product with broad appeal -- our search, that is -- and that wild success has biased us.Amazon was a product company too, so it took an out-of-band force to make Bezos understand the need for a platform. That force was their evaporating margins; he was cornered and had to think of a way out. But all he had was a bunch of engineers and all these computers... if only they could be monetized somehow... you can see how he arrived at AWS, in hindsight.Microsoft started out as a platform, so they've just had lots of practice at it.Facebook, though: they worry me. I'm no expert, but I'm pretty sure they started off as a Product and they rode that success pretty far. So I'm not sure exactly how they made the transition to a platform. It was a relatively long time ago, since they had to be a platform before (now very old) things like Mafia Wars could come along.Maybe they just looked at us and asked: "How can we beat Google? What are they missing?"The problem we face is pretty huge, because it will take a dramatic cultural change in order for us to start catching up. We don't do internal service-oriented platforms, and we just as equally don't do external ones. This means that the "not getting it" is endemic across the company: the PMs don't get it, the engineers don't get it, the product teams don't get it, nobody gets it. Even if individuals do, even if YOU do, it doesn't matter one bit unless we're treating it as an all-hands-on-deck emergency. We can't keep launching products and pretending we'll turn them into magical beautiful extensible platforms later. We've tried that and it's not working.The Golden Rule of Platforms, "Eat Your Own Dogfood", can be rephrased as "Start with a Platform, and Then Use it for Everything." You can't just bolt it on later. Certainly not easily at any rate -- ask anyone who worked on platformizing MS Office. Or anyone who worked on platformizing Amazon. If you delay it, it'll be ten times as much work as just doing it correctly up front. You can't cheat. You can't have secret back doors for internal apps to get special priority access, not for ANY reason. You need to solve the hard problems up front.I'm not saying it's too late for us, but the longer we wait, the closer we get to being Too Late.I honestly don't know how to wrap this up. I've said pretty much everything I came here to say today. This post has been six years in the making. I'm sorry if I wasn't gentle enough, or if I misrepresented some product or team or person, or if we're actually doing LOTS of platform stuff and it just so happens that I and everyone I ever talk to has just never heard about it. I'm sorry.But we've gotta start doing this right. |
Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay | I love the US and California, the tech scene is amazing and I was lucky to met such talented and friendly people in about every place I worked... from very large tech cos to "garage" startups.Which is why it pains me to see that so many engineers get stuck with such ridiculous salaries (relative to the value and wealth they provide and create). Problem is that some salaries are seemingly high compared to what the average worker does in the country but ridiculously to what they would look like if engineers were allowed to capture a greater (that is a >0.01%) percentage of the added value they CREATE.Most, from the freshly out-of-school to the senior engineer with glowing reviews are getting scammed because they get paid just enough to live a comfortable life but not nearly enough to what they are worth and what they would need to consolidate their place in the upper middle class.I had one company acquired by a large tech co. Probably going to start another one soon, I won't commit the same mistake twice... engineers need their fair share. They are the one creating things, they are the one on the front line and we should not get satiated by the crumbles we are left with. |
We’re sorry, and we’re not rolling out the fees change | It creeps me out to no end when corporations mimic human social behavior using community relations teams. It's made worse by people thinking that anything about the content of the apology matters. It was literally crafted by an expert actor. The only thing we should care about is the reversal and whatever concrete action Patreon takes to prevent a new fiasco (which I see no mention of). The company executed a business decision with bumbling incompetence, then was forced to back it out because of their customers. That later bit is interesting, the fact that it was accompanied by something written by a trained parrot is not.I'd still be looking for alternatives, the original decision was a gross breach of trust and revealed that Patreon's business 1decisions are not coming from the authentic place we may once have hoped for.edit: to clarify, the content I'm looking for in a real apology is a plan of action so that this isn't repeated. Patreon needs to restore trust. Apology language doesn't do that. Rolling back the act of searing incompetence was step one. Making sure it doesn't happen again is the real apology. |
Charm – Tools to make the command line glamorous | I love the general renaissance of terminal UI tools we are seeing in the last few years.I can't quite put my finger on what I like about it so much. Something to do with the simplicity and directness of these UIs, guaranteed optimised for efficient keyboard nav, widespread adoption of vim-like navigation keys, and the fact that they link directly with my terminal shell so I can stay entirely in a stream of thought while working through complex series of tasks that weave in and out of these apps and shell interactions.I do wish it was easier to select text from the terminal screen without using the mouse. It is supported in terminals to place text onto the system clipboard, but rarely implemented in most of these apps. It's the main reason my hands leave the keyboard. |
Germany plans to dim lights at night to save insects | I actually was sitting outside a few nights ago and realized that there was no more fireflies, and I couldn't remember the last time I had seen one. I used to go out all the time during summer as a kid to catch them, they would light up whole fields. That was just like 15 years ago. Pretty sobering realization |
My Current HTML Boilerplate | I've never thought to do something like this as a way to detect whether or not js is being used.
...
document.documentElement.classList.remove('no-js');
document.documentElement.classList.add('js');
It's so simple but so effective. Will be copying that. |
Windows needs a change in priorities | Like every Windows user, I have had a lot of frustrating experiences with the abusive behavior and dark patterns that have taken over the platform. Like when they started having Skype silently run in the background logged in with the user's Microsoft account without any notice or human intervention, and removed the setting to disable it from launching at startup so that it couldn't be prevented. I had to completely uninstall it, which didn't really help, because they still kept bringing it back after every update. I assume that they're going to do this with Teams now.For every egregious user-hostile behavior, you can search and find a ton of forum threads where people discuss at length how to reverse or mitigate them. The fact that Microsoft is aware of this and continues to prioritize this kind of abusive growth hacking over user trust, knowing fully how that impacts the company's reputation among enthusiasts, is perhaps more damning than the actual practices.Nobody at Microsoft who has decision-making authority actually cares. Contempt for the users is so deep in the DNA that this will never get better. It's disappointing, because it ultimately undermines all of the great effort that people elsewhere in the company have put into features like WSL that might otherwise make the platform attractive to modern developers.It creates a really adversarial posture between the user and the platform. When they introduce new features, I'm reluctant to even try them because I don't trust their intentions. It's like being in an abusive relationship. |
I refuse to let Amazon define Rust | Is there more context here that's missing from the tweet thread?> And now they want to actually take Amazon's principles and claim that they're Rust's.These just... literally... aren't Amazon's principles. At all. "The practice of coming up with pithy statements to guide decision-making" is the Amazon part.> they've also taken steps to marginalize the core team. and some other dirty shit I won't say rn.This sounds like the real concern, and it sounds really concerning, and I hope people come out to speak publicly and candidly about it. But it doesn't seem sensible to pretend that the making a list of adjectives is itself malign. |
Tell HN: You are not alone this Christmas | Thank you for this gesture.
I lost almost everything. Job, 7-year relationship, my mental health.Feeling that I'm not only alone but inadequate to have a life like anybody else.I'm still alive, so there's that. |
Show HN: Lofi.cafe | Could the CPU load be reduced? If I am only on the page, not even playing any music yet (probably because something is blocked), I get 1 core up at 100% CPU load. This can't all be for an animated background image, can it? |
Reinstating our SAT/ACT requirement for future admissions cycles | our ability to accurately predict student academic success at MIT 02 Our research shows this predictive validity holds even when you control for socioeconomic factors that correlate with testing. It also shows that good grades in high school do not themselves necessarily translate to academic success at MIT if you cannot account for testing. Of course, we can never be fully certain how any given applicant will do: we're predicting the development of people, not the movement of planets, and people always surprise you. However, our research does help us establish bands of confidence that hold true in the aggregate, while allowing us, as admissions officers, to exercise individual contextual discretion in each case. The word 'significantly' in this bullet point is accurate both statistically and idiomatically.is significantly improved by considering standardized testing — especially in mathematics — alongside other factorsSo much for that common, popular notion that standardized tests do not predict anything of value. |
How to do hard things | I am a 4th semester CS student from Germany and still don't grasp recursion, even though I already took the data structures & algorithms courses.
If you did have something like a magic moment where it made sense to you, please enlighten me as I would really like to truly gain an intuition (and implement a parallelized msd-radixsort for learning-purposes because I failed to do this assignment yesterday). |
Trials begin on lozenge that rebuilds tooth enamel | >In addition, the researchers are investigating a gel or solution with the engineered peptide to treat hypersensitive teeth. This problem results from weakness in the enamel that makes the underlying dentin and nerves more vulnerable to heat or cold. Most common products currently on the market can put a layer of organic material on the tooth and numb nerve endings with potassium nitrate, but the relief is only temporary. The peptide, however, addresses the problem permanently at its source by strengthening the enamel.I want this so badly.I've never had a cavity despite my poor dental hygiene habits and lack of dental practice visits but apparently I suffer from bruxism that can make half of my teeth hurt whenever I bite on anything harder than a wet noodle. Just now I brushed my teeth with a pain-numbing toothpaste and just the act of brushing my teeth made them hurt. Although sometimes I can go for some time without pain, it's been pretty much a constant in my life for the last years. |
California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment | From my perspective as a person who lives in San Francisco and also drives a LOT (10-20k miles per year, and many small drives within the city): Cruise cars do not perform acceptably.They manage to avoid collisions by driving extremely conservatively, but the way they traverse, say, a left turn against traffic is absurd. They slow everyone down, including emergency vehicles and public transit, by performing far below the level of most Human drives.They don't work in the rain, they can't handle construction, they block garages and driveways.Waymo vehicles are objectively far better. They drive like Humans do. Still some issued with weather and construction, but they work well alongside busses, trucks, and private cars without slowing anyone down. |
California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment | From my perspective as a person who lives in San Francisco and also drives a LOT (10-20k miles per year, and many small drives within the city): Cruise cars do not perform acceptably.They manage to avoid collisions by driving extremely conservatively, but the way they traverse, say, a left turn against traffic is absurd. They slow everyone down, including emergency vehicles and public transit, by performing far below the level of most Human drives.They don't work in the rain, they can't handle construction, they block garages and driveways.Waymo vehicles are objectively far better. They drive like Humans do. Still some issued with weather and construction, but they work well alongside busses, trucks, and private cars without slowing anyone down. |
Ubuntu Edge | Does anyone really still want a phone you can plug into a monitor? This would have been a dream product back before broadband and wifi became ubiquitous, and before extra PCs became so cheap.Nowadays, it seems like a much better design is to have multiple devices with different form factors that can access shared data via a cloud.(unless this product is meant as an NSA-proof system, but I don't see that it makes a very convincing product for that use case either...) |
Julie Ann Horvath Describes Sexism and Intimidation Behind Her GitHub Exit | There seems to be several problems. Not entirely sexism.1. Founder's wife asked Horvath out and gave her a lecture about who is the boss. Probably out of jealousy.2. Founder's wife physically inanimate Horvath, making her unwelcome and scared.3. Founder did not stop the wife and protect his wife.4. Horvath was approached by a male co-worker and according to her her rejection had caused tension between her and that co-worker.5. Horvath's partner is also a Github employee.6. Another founder tried to step in but the situation didn't really resolve.7. Horvath felt male co-workers gawking/staring/looking at female co-workers hula-hooping while sitting in a couch looked like someone visiting a strip club.This is more like a failed company management than sexism at work.A partner can help his or her partner looking after/helping/running a company even as a non-employee. He or she could send employees your homemade cookie or send them birthday card. It's okay to share thoughts with partner how to run a company, how to resolve people-people problem.But the founder should not let his or her partner to intimate anyone: HR, executives, managers, engineers. This type of behavior, I thought I would only see them in drama (well I guess you can say something about WhiteHouse...)The founder accused Horvath for bringing love affair into the company because she was/is dating an employee. The founder has a good point: try to avoid dating someone working with you. It's a beautiful story; but you can cause all sorts of mess. See this childish engineer who was rejected by Horvath became angry at her and started ripping her code out. I have read about Github's open culture, but hey, how could anyone do that!? And yet no one seen to care internally at all because he's a popular figure in the company. Well, I can't say everyone in that company is shit because there is also a rank in any organization. I wouldn't go against someone senior or more popular unless I have to. This is also a bystander problem: unless we have to deal with it, let other people and the people in the story deal with the situation.While the founder is right about avoiding dating someone in your own company, he couldn't see that his wife (effectively meaning his own family problem) was also leaking into the company's daily operation.The other founder tried to help Horvath. The founder apologized and tried to restrain his wife from sitting across Horvath. But the wife continued to "spy" on her. She was welcomed to do whatever she want to do. Horvath tried to ask other executives to help for the very last time and none worked out. Either the founder was scared of his wife (love her so much he didn't want to yell at her) or none of the executives really care. Someone with management skill should have step in and tell the founder "stop letting your wife to come in!"Apparently, people fear the founder? and the wife??Regarding the strip-club comment, I don't know the best way to avoid it. I, as a male, try to avoid staring at another female because I fear someone like Horvath accuses me of sexism. Maybe the guy was just bored or thought that female worker was beautiful. Staring at someone shouldn't be counted as sexism. It's hard. Would a female staring at a beautiful male count as sexism?I am not saying there is no sexism in work place, but I think Horvath's overall sexist experience might have been influenced/augmented based on her treatment in the company (no one stop the founder and his wife abusing power).But hey, I am just reading off the article. Her experience could be worse! I do feel bad for all the intimations she had to go through. I felt really bad as I was reading the article.Final point:Horvath then told her partner, also a GitHub employee, about what was happening. She warned him against being close to the founder and his wife, and asked him not to relay information to them. I have a mixed feeling. If I were in his situation, I would try to sort out the problem with the founder myself. But now that I read about it, I guess in the future, if I were in a similar situation, I would not talk it out until situation gets worse. |
Silicon Valley Women, in Cultural Shift, Frankly Describe Sexual Harassment | How is it that the old money industries of Wall Street and Hollywood, no vanguards of gender egalitarianism themselves, seem to have less flagrant sexual harassment issues? Do they keep them under wraps or are they just more mature by now? |
Why did moving the mouse cursor cause Windows 95 to run more quickly? | From a comment:
Try opening a large file with Notepad on a contemporary machine. The window must not be full screen. When loaded, mark all text using the mouse (the keyboard works as well, it just needs more manual skill). While still holding the button down (and marking) move the mouse down, so the text gets marked and scrolled. Now compare the scroll speed while holding the mouse still versus wiggling it. Depending on your machine the speed up can be several times faster.It's not just Notepad :-) I do this often, when I have to mark a lot of things. |
Planet Found in Habitable Zone Around Nearest Star | Keep in mind that at best it would take maybe 1,000 years with current technology to get there with a probe or human-supporting ship. It would be highly unpopular however as it involves exploding nuclear bombs behind the craft to get it there that fast--that and it would probably cost trillions to build the thing. |
Mozilla Acquires Pocket | Mozilla is growing, experimenting more, and can acquire startups.Mozilla doesn't have the resources to continue with Thunderbird.I am increasingly baffled by their decisions and how they relate to the strategic plans [0] they've been producing for a while. Despite the worthy words in their plan they seem to have no sense of direction. That saddens me.That said I'm happier having Pocket as an open source part of Mozilla/Firefox than a surprise integration of a commercial app.[0] https://wiki.mozilla.org/MoFo_2020 |
Chrome breaks the Web | > they made all top-level event listeners passive by default. They call it “an intervention”.This is my very problem with Chrome/Chromium right now. The Chrome team does assumption on how things "should" be (in a highly subjective way) and breaks the web.Another example: they decided to ignore the value of `autocomplete` attributes on `` tags [1], because:> The tricky part here is that somewhere along the journey of the web autocomplete=off become a default for many form fields, without any real thought being given as to whether or not that was good for users. This doesn't mean there aren't very valid cases where you don't want the browser autofilling data (e.g. on CRM systems), but by and large, we see those as the minority cases. And as a result, we started ignoring autocomplete=off for Chrome Autofill data.Problem: Chrome now auto-fills wrong parts of forms with username/passwords and this breaks forms that get unexpected data when submitted. And now, they opened an issue on their tracker [2] to track "Valid use cases for autocomplete=off".This is insane to think that the developer is wrong to use some attributes values, and to assume how a page should behave, ignoring devs intentions and Web standards.[1] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=468153...[2] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=587466 |
Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted | This reminds me of the long conversations that I used to have with family members and friends several years ago. With their continuous requests to create my own Facebook profile so I can keep in contact with them and with their activities as well as to share my whereabouts. I always used the same argument to reject these suggestions — "I don't want Facebook to have too much data about me, more than the data that you already provided".I got used to the looks of disbelief, thinking that I was some sort of hermit, an antisocial.I also got tired of answering the frequent "Why don't you have Facebook?" questions.I remember the last time I had this conversation with someone, last year (2017) around August. I found a new love partner, and after the long intimate talks on the phone, they requested the usual "intimate pictures", not necessarily sexual but certainly sexy. While I have no tabus with regards to my sexuality, having an understanding of how the Internet works, I have always refused to send that type of images/videos/audios, and I always tried to be patient with the other person to explain my constant denials. Unfortunately, expecting a non-tech-savvy person to understand how data moves around the Internet is most of the time based on hope, and even if they understand, they ultimately don't care because the result doesn't change: you don't get to share something with them and that affects personal interactions.I am sure that the deletion of media files in services like Facebook has never meant to be absolute. Many of my colleagues believe the same thing that I believe: Facebook and other services do not actually delete data, they just mark it as "deleted" and purge it only if they need the space. The same way a hard drive works, you don't really delete a picture when you hit the "delete" key, nor even if you clear the "trash" folder, the data is still there, where it was, it just loses the links to the metadata.It is sad how this information becomes news only when bad things happen. |
Carbon Removal Technologies | We already have carbon removal technology. They’re called trees.[Edit] I’m not being facetious. 40% of emissions are as a result of poor land management. We’ll need all the technological help we can get, but if we can’t manage land as carbon stores - not sources, we’re not going to win this race. |
How We Saved Dot Org | Ah yes, bravo EFF, you've won another battle barely keeping us at the status quo.When are you going to stop playing whack-a-mole trying to defend against every assault on internet freedoms and go on the offensive and try to win the game for the good guys?We now have the ability to give the poorest child on earth access to the same information as the richest, and yet we allow industry to shackle us instead.It's time to demand intellectual freedom. #AbolishCopyright. #AbolishPatents. #AbolishImaginaryPropertyLaws |
An Open Letter Against Apple's Privacy-Invasive Content Scanning Technology | I recently listened to a Darknet Diaries episode on messaging app Kik. This app is apparently being used by many people to trade child pornography. In this episode, there was some criticism expressed on how Kik doesn't scan all the images on their platform for child pornography.I would really like to hear from people who sign this open letter, how they think about this. Should the internet be a free for all place without moderation? Where are the boundaries for moderation (if it has to exist), one-on-one versus group chat, public versus private chat?To quote this open letter: “Apple is opening the door to broader abuses”. Wouldn't not doing anything open a different door to broader abuse?Edit: I would really love an actual answer, since responses until now have been "but muh privacy". You can't plead for unlimited privacy and ignore the impact of said privacy. If you want unlimited privacy, at least have the balls to admit that this will allow free trade of CSAM, but also revenge porn, snuff-films and other things like it. |
Dozens of Companies Are Using Facebook to Exclude Older Workers From Job Ads | It doesn't make sense to me to discriminate against people with more experience. Can someone explain it to me?I have heard that companies like recent grads because they are (1) more malleable and (2) can be paid less. But neither of those reasons seem to me strong enough. I'm talking completely about the company's own interests.Let's address the first reason: malleability. A recent grad presumably will adopt the company's culture faster, complain less, and in general pick up things sooner. Well, the hardest, meanest coworkers I've ever had were late twenties, early thirties. I've worked with people in their sixties, and they're sweet people. Even the grumpy old sysadmin had only a thin layer of spikes. After just a few days I could see through most of it, and he was 10 times more helpful than my other sysadmins. Not only was he softer (at least deep down) but he was smarter, having done it for decades. Even when he met a new problem, his keenly developed taste made him more likely to choose something that would be more maintainable long term.Now let's address the second reason: salary. I am 10 times better than I was when I started. I know, because I still work with some of my code from back then, and I desperately want to rewrite it all. How much more does a senior developer make than a new hire? 50% more? Seems worth it to me. 100% more? 200% more? Still maybe worth it. And if some old fella can't get work at all, maybe he would settle for something between 50% and 100% more. I mean, why not at least make an offer?It just don't make no sense. Other fields reward grayhairs. You see some sixty-year-old painter or architect or carpenter, you think he's probably pretty good. You see some straight-out-of-college twenty-something in . . . any other field, you think, "I sure hope he knows what he's doing." |
If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs | The best way to bring back blogs is to start with your own. It looks like this is the author's fourth post and s/he hit a home run with the top post on HN.But that's rarely how things work.The thing few people tell you when you start blogging is how futile it will seem - for a long, long time. You'll start by posting something you put a lot of work into. You'll publish, thinking of all the comments and emails you'll get.Then, nothing. You'll check the analytics. Abysmal. Nobody is reading!You may write a few more posts, but it's always the same story. A lot of work goes in, but not much comes out.And this is the point at which most bloggers stop. After all, how can you justify more time spent on something that doesn't pay back?The problem is that with a blog you need to think in terms of years. You have to write regularly over the course of years before you'll get any kind of reliable following.In the meantime, you'll notice how blogging regularly changes you. You'll notice patterns you never noticed before, especially if you stick to a particular "beat." You'll get better at choosing topics. You'll figure out ways to write faster. You'll get better at pushing through mental fog and procrastination that keeps so many others from writing.You may also discover that you really, really hate writing. Nothing wrong with that, but understand that many people also dislike writing anything longer than a tweet. And that's why good blogs are kind of scarce. And therein lies the opportunity. |
Every Byte of a TLS Connection Explained and Reproduced | Author here - I was going to publish this today but it leaked out ahead of time. Enjoy!EDIT: I'm putting a CDN in place. |
Microsoft to acquire ZeniMax Media and Bethesda Softworks for $7.5B | Soon we'll just have Microsoft, Epic, and a conglomeration of EA, Activision, and Ubisoft after Bobby Kotick forces them all to merge. Facebook will bungle up any chance they have of capturing the gaming market after writing a cryptic paragraph about their legal right to request blood samples from all Oculous users in the TOS. Valve will quietly exit software development altogether, and pivot to building custom vanity knives using their hardware manufacturing experience. Can't wait for the future GAAS market! |
Mars becomes the 2nd planet that has more computers running Linux than Windows | The GPL will soon infect the whole galaxy. |
What is AT&T doing at 1111340002? | Even in relatively technical circles, like HN, many people are not aware of this and I use every opportunity I have to reiterate:A SIM card is a full blown computer with its own CPU and memory.Your carrier can upload and run arbitrary code without your consent or knowledge. They can do this at any time.This means that your "phone" is actually three different computers running in concert - the actual phone itself (iOS or Android or Symbian), the baseband processor running the baseband code, and the SIM card. |
Slide to Unlock | This helped me to find out that my Huawei phone had "AI Touch" enabled. That apparently is a feature to touch any image with two fingers and the super smart AI finds out what is shown in the picture and where to buy it.Goes without saying that I immediately disabled this. /shrug |
This word does not exist | Author here! Funny to see this at the top of HN today -- happy to answer any questions (source code is here https://github.com/turtlesoupy/this-word-does-not-exist)Shameless plug for my other "this x does not exist": This Fucked Up Homer Does Not Exist https://www.thisfuckeduphomerdoesnotexist.com/ |
The Next Microsoft | This is great.It will never work.A brand has to reflect the culture of how a product is made, sold, experienced, etc...Microsoft is not about simplicity, it's about feature creep. Microsoft sells software and licenses to big companies. Big companies don't want simple, they want value for their money - features!A better brand promise would be Microsoft - It Does Everything!Look at Windows 8. Is it going metro only? No, Metro is a feature on top of the existing mountain of features. Instead of one UI, it's now TWO UI's!!!Putting this kind of branding on Microsoft is like putting the geeky kid with oversized glasses and suspenders a new wardrobe. Sure, the kid will look cooler, but it won't stop him from playing Magic: The Gathering in their basement.Microsoft has built their company on saying "yes" to just about everything. The simplest Windows ever sounds like they are saying "no" to things and that's not what Microsoft does.I love the design, but it's not Microsoft |
Show HN: Privacy-focused, ad-free, non-tracking torrent search engine | Suggestion: get rid of the torrent files and just serve magnet urls in plain text without a clickable button. This way you get rid of the knowledge of who-downloaded-what, and also save some bandwidth. |
Apple Engineers Its Own Downfall with the Macbook Pro Keyboard | I honestly don't understand all these quality sacrifices just to make things thinner. It makes the product actually feel somewhat cheap and brittle.The same thing confuses me with smartphones. Everyone keeps making these bacteria and finger print magnets thinner... the minute you drop it, it's shattered or unuseable... and so then you're buying a case to protect it from scratches and shatter... so what's the point of making it thinner in the first place? Gimmicks IMO just to sell things year over year without adding real value or actual features. |
Apple's apps bypass firewalls like LittleSnitch and LuLu on macOS Big Sur | Apple seems to do all kinds of weird networking _stuff_. For instance, during wakeup, your T2 equipped Macbook will wait for a DNS response and then use said DNS response to synchronize time via NTP before letting the user use the keyboard. Probably checking timestamps on signatures for the keyboard firmware, or something stupid like that. This only happens if it happens to have a default route.Similarly, all macOS machines will test a DHCP supplied default route before applying it by trying to reach something on the internet. So if you happen to have some firewall rules that block internet access, no default route will be applied until the internet check times out.I won't share the other sentiments about the above, but is it really that hard to document these behaviors? |
YouTube to remove content that alleges widespread election fraud | We are very fortunate to have the algorithms, employees & management of Youtube/Google watching out for us. We're not intelligent enough to view a video and decide for ourselves what is fact v. propaganda v. entertainment. Hopefully some day we will have the same protections the CCP gives its people with even more content moderation. Thank you Google - you're the nanny the American people and the world always hoped for. |
Apple enabling client-side CSAM scanning on iPhone tomorrow | I'm really conflicted about this.For context, I deeply hate the abuse of children and I've worked on a contract before that landed 12 human traffickers in custody that were smuggling sex slaves across boarders. I didn't need to know details about the victims in question, but it's understood that they're often teenagers or children.So my initial reaction when reading this Twitter thread was "let's get these bastards" but on serious reflection I think that impulse is wrong. Unshared data shouldn't be subject to search. Once it's shared, I can make several cases for an automated scan, but a cloud backup of personal media should be kept private. Our control of our own privacy matters. Not for the slippery slope argument or for the false positive argument, but for its own sake. We shouldn't be assuming the worst of people without cause or warrant.That said, even though I feel this way a not-small-enough part of me will be pleased if it is deployed because I want these people arrested. It's the same way I feel when terrorists get captured even if intelligence services bent or broke the rules. I can be happy at the outcome without being happy at the methods, and I can feel queasy about my own internal, conflicted feelings throughout it all. |
Forking Chrome to render in a terminal | Newbie question: why the terminal cannot have full high definition graphics ? |
The Mullvad Browser | I guess why not.This is an open source, rebranded Firefox and Firefox-like browsers could use some publicity. It promotes privacy and privacy can use some publicity too. Tor too.Mullvad seems to be honest in the fact that their business model is selling VPNs and it's nice they are saying it's not enough. They are not saying that you might not need one though.We need a Firefox with good defaults and it seems like this browser is such a thing. I'd prefer these privacy features to be in upstream Firefox but I guess world is not perfect and that Firefox still relies on revenues from Google so can't be as privacy-focused as it should.My little concern I guess is that this browser will push for their service so it's a bit like an ad for them, at least with its name. But fair enough, and at least the business model seems healthy.With Mullvad already being a Mozilla partner for their branded VPN, all this actually look good. They seem to be spending their money on worthy stuff. |
How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters | But why? The trend towards putting icons into Unicode may be a mistake. Unless it's a symbol one uses in a sentence, there's no real reason to have it in Unicode. Unicode should not be viewed as a standard clip art library. |
GitHub Package Registry | This is really outstanding.It will mean the death of Maven Central, about which I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, Sonatype deserves enormous thanks for what they have done for the open source world, as does mvnrepository.org. Their central repository has been free and maintained for a long time. Thank you, Sonatype.On the other hand, it took me three days to release a new version of one of my artifacts the other day. The process for doing a Maven deploy is very complex. It took hours to get my private key to work because the key registries were slow. Then the staging server was slow, and kept timing out. Support was responsive, and said they were dealing with a DDOS attack. On top of that, it takes a while for artifacts to show up in the registry even after they have been uploaded. I'm glad that getting that artifact out wasn't an emergency.This new Github service separates the registry from the artifact storage, which is the right way to do it. The registry should be quick to update because it's only a pointer. The artifact storage will be under my control. Credentials and security should be easier to deal with. I really hope this works out. |
Alan Kay's answer to ‘what are some forgotten books programmers should read?’ | These reading lists are lovely and promise a Better You, but I'll propose the following challenge:* If you're at home, turn around and look at the bookshelf you've already accumulated. Did you really read all those books you so looked forward to when you first bought them? Or do you remember all the best bits from your favorite ones? Be honest now... the unbroken spine on your Godel Escher Bach suggests otherwise. Read what you have, before stressing on Kay's or others' lists!* If you're at work, have you read all the wiki/docs/etc created by your team and neighboring teams? Do you understand the full architecture and implementation of the system you work with every day? Go read that, level up and become the most knowledgeable person on your team. |
CRDTs are the future | I'm going to come clean, I am a shitty software engineer.I'd like to have things like CRDTs under my radar to pull from when architecting technical solutions. But I don't.I have been coddled by the bullshit of "just-good-enough" web development for nearly a decade, and I feel like I will be haunted by it forever at this point.I WANT to employ mathematically proven solutions, but not only has it been 10+ years since studying computer science (and with it, the relevant mathematics) but I never even graduated.So here I am, another under-educated over-paid GED holding Rails engineer putting together shit solutions I know will eventually leak.So, having said all of that, is there hope for adding things like this to my toolbelt? And where do I even start? I feel like going back to school full-time is out of the question, because I have a life now. Maybe online classes? I'm curious to hear thoughts from people who maybe came from a similar pit of despair, or otherwise understand what I am talking about.It's just... sad to know enough that I produce less than optimal work but don't know enough to confidently prevent it from happening over and over and over again. Is this just the profession I have locked myself into? |
Disclosure: Unlimited Chase Ultimate Rewards Points | Can someone please explain to me why companies make decisions like this? I have been on HN long enough to see many stories like this, but never once hear the suggestion of a rational line of human behavior.Is it lawyers misunderstanding the value of security research? |
On Apple's Piss-Poor Documentation | I’ve been picking at SwiftUI recently and run into this myself. You want to know how something works or how to use it, so you go to Apple’s documentation. “Here’s the type signature, have fun!”Thanks. But I was hoping something more than what Xcode’s autocomplete already filled in for me.So instead you end up on 3rd party tutorials (special thanks to John Sundell and Paul Hudson) and always looking at dates on Medium posts because something from before WWDC 2020 might no longer be useful. Or maybe it is. How do you know if the feature changed significantly in the more recent release? I don’t know, but I can tell you where you won’t find out: the official docs. |
Show HN: We built an end-to-end encrypted alternative to Google Photos | Your homepage says "protect your photos/faces etc. from algorithms"The algorithms are what makes Google Photos; Google Photos. If I wanted to just store my photos I'd throw them in a S3 bucket or Dropbox or something.Google Photos lets me automatically categorise my photos by person, lets me search my library using text search for anything (e.g. I can search 'museum' and see pictures I've taken in museums). That is where the real value of Google Photos comes into play.> But we are far from where we want to be in terms of features (object and face detection, location clustering, image filters, ...) and user experience. We are hoping to use this post as an opportunity to collect feedback from fellow hackers.So you're going to implement algorithms then? |
I've started using Firefox and can never go back to Chrome | Along with obvious ones like uBlock Origin working perfectly, etc., I have 2 other favorites:- Native reader mode- Native PiP mode for videosYes, you can get extensions for this in Chrom(e/ium) but having these as a native feature is really nice.Things I want to see in Firefox:- Good/extensible keybindings- Tab groups- Tab searchEDIT: How do I break sentences to newline in HN without really making a new paragraph? You know, for bullet points, etc. |
Amit Gupta has found a 10/10 matched donor | > At this point, my blood type changes to the blood type of my donor. And my blood will now have my donor’s DNA, not my own.That's actually really fascinating. This perpetuates for life? This would seem to imply that a person who's received a transplant will, thirty years later, be walking around with two separate sets of DNA, as the other cells in the body presumably would not change.Given that DNA is (indirectly) responsible for the way that cells communicate with one another (among other things), I wonder if this dichotomy creates any complications in other ways. (Not counting potential graft-host disease rejection - I'm talking about further down the line). |
“Apps intended for kids may not include third-party advertising or analytics” | I totally agree with this!I built a game and naively added ads to it as it seemed a good way to monetize. The game started to be really liked, and had 300k+ downloads overall. Many kids started playing it also.Luckily I realized quickly that kids play on the devices of parents and so the ads they might see are at times super inappropriate!Then I removed all ads, I'd rather make less money but have people play and have a good time. Its not always about money. At times I get contacted by players, how they love the game and how it has been part of their childhood etc. Some very moving messages, worth more then a few additional bucks from ads and I feel much better because players aren't exposed to random ads, pictures and messages.The learning for me was that I will never work on anything that uses ads as source of income, this includes turning down jobs at Google and Facebook. |
Facebook, WhatsApp Will Have to Share Messages With U.K.? | The idea that moves like this will "keep us safe" is utterly preposterous; there are a multitude of other ways in which terrorists (or the boogeyman de jour) could communicate - are the UK and US governments going to insist on backdooring IRC, Slack and face-to-face conversations? Are they going to outlaw encryption libraries?I truely fear for the future that western governments, in particular the 5 eyes members, are hell-bent on creating. They denounce China and Russia for their human rights records in one breath, and seek to strip us of privacy and personal rights in the next - the hypocrisy is simply staggering.What's perhaps even more frightening is that so many people believe that moves like this are to keep us safe, will keep us safe.This can not end well... |
Doug Engelbart has died | Can we get independent verification of this? I've looked at all of my usual primary sources and I can't find third party confirmation. |
Goodbye, EdgeHTML | Seriously, switch to Firefox. It's good again, and prioritizes privacy.[0] After Chrome's forced-sign-in debacle [1] I switched away from Chrome on all my platforms (Windows, Linux, Android) and haven't missed a thing.[0]: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/11/firefox-sync-privacy/
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18055161 |
Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down | Maybe they're still angry with him about leftpad.Yes, it really is the same guy: https://kodfabrik.com/journal/i-ve-just-liberated-my-modules. And, joking aside it would be wise to bear in mind that we're reading only one side of the story here. As with leftpad, there's another side to this.With leftpad he told Kik, "fuck you" (https://medium.com/@mproberts/a-discussion-about-the-breakin...), and then wrought global havoc on npm users. Now he's claiming the Chrome Extension Team "continuously troll developers", and is pulling down something he's created... again.I only have two data points, so the behaviour here is a coincidence rather than a pattern, but I will guarantee you whatever you think of Google there is more to this than meets the eye.I'm not without sympathy for the author, but neither am I about to uncritically take his side. |
Robinhood now has a 1-Star rating on the Google Play Store | One of the good things I see coming out of Robinhood blocking trading, Twitter and Reddit booting problematic users, Parler getting vaporized, etc. is a sudden realization amongst people of just how easily major parts of their lives can be instantly turned off by intermediaries.My hope is that this will drive a reformist movement around digital rights (speech, commerce, etc.) As well as a movement from platforms to protocols. |
FedNow Is Live | For those curious, it is really using IBM MQ[1] under the hood and uses a bespoke flavor of the ISO 20022 specification.The FedNow Service itself is the tip of the iceberg in terms of what actually happens from an end-to-end perspective.We've been working to become a Certified Service Provider so feel free to ask me anything. I'm happy to share anything that is not under NDA.[1] https://www.ibm.com/products/mq |
A Message to Our Customers about iPhone Batteries and Performance | > Apple is reducing the price of an out-of-warranty iPhone battery replacement by $50 — from $79 to $29...> Early in 2018, we will issue an iOS software update with new features that give users more visibility into the health of their iPhone’s battery, so they can see for themselves if its condition is affecting performance.There we go.It took too much trouble and too long for it to happen, but Apple is stepping up and doing the right thing.Actually, the cost of battery replacement is now excellent. If they hadn't screwed this up by not communicating what was going on, I think they could have easily justified $49 - $59.So I take the drop to $29 as a tangible apology, which I appreciate. (Well, personally, I've already replaced my battery using a $25 kit from Amazon, but obviously that's not viable for the great majority of iPhone owners.) |
Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia | Creator here. Six Degrees of Wikipedia is a side project I've been sporadically hacking on over the past few years. It was an interesting technical challenge and it's fun to play with the end result. Here's the tech stack: * Frontend: React (Create React App)
* Backend: Python Flask
* Database: SQLite
* Web (frontend) hosting: Firebase Hosting
* Server (backend) hosting: Google Compute Engine (it runs fine on a tiny f1-micro instance)
All the code is open source[1] and I'm happy to answer any questions about building or maintaining it![1] https://github.com/jwngr/sdow |
Advanced Data Structures (2017) | As a busy self-learner, when is it time to learn data structures in depth? I feel like there are always 10 other technologies I need to know more urgently (eg, more bash, Linux, testing frameworks, deep learning, c++ libraries, linear algebra, common security mistakes/attacks, OpenGL, etc) |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.