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Facebook reveals its cryptocurrency Libra | This is an interesting story and I would like to learn more about libra-coin. Unfortunately I think hackernews has a strong anti-facebook bias that is making the opinions here nearly universally one sided.I think we can say three things fairly uncontroversially in favor of this1. The world could use an online independent currency2. Adding stability to blockchain currencies and having that work on a large scale is a good thing3. Unlike government issued currencies, any monopoly or control facebook derives isn't done through force, it's by making a coin better than all the other coins. Other people are still free to make their competing coins.That said I understand the detractions that many here are presenting. I just wish there could be a deeper exploration of both the pros and cons. |
Google have declared Droidscript is malware | It's seriously time to re-embrace the idea of ownership and control of our devices, and reject Android and iOS altogether. Developing for those platforms has become worse and more restrictive over the years, and this kind of crap is now just everyday news.How good are Pinephones[1]? Are there better alternatives?[1] https://www.pine64.org/pinephone/ |
Get started making music | I tried this a few years ago and it was addictive and amazing. Highly recommend.I’d also like to tangent to say: music used to be a much bigger part of our lives. Before the radio a piano was a household staple. Kids would learn, family’s would play and sing to each other. We’ve largely given that up.Imagining hearing one of your family members just start singing to themselves without any background music, does that feel uncomfortable? Would you sing along?I think to many the answer is clear, music, as well as many other endeavors are something to now be enjoyed but not created. And oh boy do we get to enjoy the “best” music and “best” films and “best” books on demand.And along the way we lost the large bits of ourselves which created and enjoyed together. So, in short, 10/10 would do the tutorial again. |
I hereby resign | Holy shit. Except for a few details, I could have written that.I recently had a job I was "promoted" into a pseudo-managerial role and immediately asked to disparage people I actually really liked, in order to put a "unified front" about our history and our people before new management. Told it would be "insubordination" not to sign this "official version of events", even though it was full of factual inaccuracies. I was shocked and disgusted. (The company's engineers are great; this is a managerial ethics problem.) Resigned on the spot. No two weeks' notice, just walked the fuck out.Half my friends think I'm a hero for not selling my soul. Half think I'm an idiot for firing myself to avoid harming others who were in someone's crosshairs already. I don't think I'm either. Hero and idiot both imply a choice. I had none. I am not going to do the wrong thing. Ever. Not for more equity in a company whose executives are okay with this kind of shit, not to keep a job. Just not fucking happening. |
Why you should never use Upwork | From the Upwork FAQ: "You'll need to download and use the Upwork Team App—this tool includes the Work Diary, which ensures you are guaranteed payment. By taking work-in-progress screenshots every 10 minutes, it provides proof to your clients that you are hard at work."Screenshots every 10 minutes? You mean... screenshots of MY SCREEN every 10 minutes? That was what made me close their website and totally forget it until I've seen this submission on HN today. |
Apple Removes HKmap.live from the App Store | Here we go again...Let me explain how Chinese people think about HK, since none of them ever seem to explain it on a site like this.Imagine you are a middle class American. Maybe you are but if not, just imagine, tech city on the east or west coast. You're pretty invested in being an American, skin in the game, manifest destiny etc. Very good. They call this tianxia by the way, basically Chinese manifest destiny.Let's say one day some stupid little state that you don't care about and vaguely resent decides it wants to secede, wants all these rights others don't have, wants to be able to marry its cousins or make nukes at home or whatever. Alabama, say. Alabama wants to secede and they have some demonstrations. You think: "hahahaha no"They keep demonstrating. The larger country talks about sending in the national guard or something. "Good, who do they think they are" you say.Some alabamans post an app on the app store so they can avoid the national guard. It's linked to secessionist alabamans avoiding and even attacking the guard. Apple takes it down, then puts it back up, then takes it back down"Good" you say.This is how, conservatively, 90%+ of Chinese think. For them, HK is a tiny little past-glory city who thinks it's better than everyone else and is just causing trouble. They will eventually be brought into line, hopefully without too much bloodshed, just like Alabama. It's not really malicious. It's a province of China - it's misbehaving, and it will be brought into line in due course. Nothing more, nothing less.I expect someone explained these truths to Apple, they saw the futility of taking some hopeless, simplistic, you-don't-even-live-here side, decided this was not the hill they wanted to die on, and pulled the app. I don't blame them.I'd like to note that I do not support the Chinese Govt in any way and think the world would be a better place with an independent, democratic HK - a city I genuinely love. The Chinese have about as much chance agreeing with that as Americans would about an independent Alabama. Not going to happen. |
Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation | Reading these threads on twitter is like listening to a friend having a bad mdma trip replaying his whole emotional life to you in a semi incoherent diarrhea like stream of thoughtsPlease write a book, or at the very least an article... posting on twitter is like writing something on a piece of paper, showing it to your best friend and worst enemy before throwing it in the trash |
Fuck It, I'm Going Back to Firefox | The biggest issue I have with Chrome is how aggressive it's been about linking Google IDs with the browser. I've lost data twice by bugs related to not having a linked ID.Please Google, understand this; I don't want my browser linked with my Google account. |
China Blocks WhatsApp | What the long-term effects will be: China's ruling class further cement their power at the cost of China's innovation and future growth. Interesting and useful things are made when people able share and consume information. e.g. Jack Ma's US visit exposed him to Yahoo. Ma Huateng was clearly inspired by his exposure to ICQ. The list goes on. The same thing happens in the West but it happens a lot more often since there are a lot more opportunities to share ideas with much fewer restrictions.The end result is that China's fate as being relegated to being the world's giant copy machine is sealed unless things revertThe people who will get ahead in China in the future are the ones who are somehow able to live outside of China to experience new ideas. This is already true, but its importance will grow as China's censorship grows.The more China closes up, the less Western companies have to fear about future tech dominance or crazy innovation from China in the long runTo be fair, things may even out since Western governments seem to be doing all they can to copy China's censorship and gov control. SOPA, PIPA, SESTA, and the Digital Economy Bill come to mind. I'm sure others can add more to the list. |
Show HN: Make a programmable mirror | I'm guessing this is based off [1] which uses a normal monitor and a Raspberry Pi.This one looks much quicker and simpler than [1], but what if you need to do anything to the tablet (updates, new app, etc)? Remove it and re-adhesive?Personally, I've been working on doing the same with an RPi and Hover so I can wave my hand in front of the mirror to swipe to new screens/info.[1] https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/magic-mirror/ |
Use of Google Analytics declared illegal by French data protection authority | I think we (in the EU) will soon realise the bizarre consequences of these regulations. European startups will not be able to use standard SaaS or PaaS tools (like AWS, Azure, Mailchimp, PayPal etc) if they are based in the US (like most of them are). No cloud services, no Office 365 or Google Workspace.It will take forever to build up a similar ecosystem in Europe and I think most successful European entrepreneurs will just end up starting companies in the US instead.There must be some reasonable middle ground before we fragment and destroy the entire Internet. Why not start by making a general exception for temporary storage of less sensitive data like IP-addresses for efficiently and cost effectively delivering a web service.If there is one thing they could start looking in to it would be handling of personal information by governmental organisations. I work a little bit with a few municipalities, and the number of documents with deeply personal information that are just emailed around over unencrypted email is shocking. |
Help users in Iran reconnect to Signal | Hi, from Iran with love!First of all, thank you moxie and signal team for this proxy.Until 2018, many Iranians used telegram but Iran's regime after Russia blocked this messenger. telegram released mtproxy and this proxy was helpful. Russia lifted the ban on telegram but this app is still blocked on my country. but with VPNs, many iranians still use this app. after 2018, second most popular messaging app in iran was whatsapp, until facebook's new privacy policy, like all of you, many iranians switch from whatsapp to signal. mullah's regime removed signal app from the iranian app stores and started blocking all signal traffic in the country, but they don't block whatsapp. I'm not a paranoid but it is difficult to understand for me why they didn't block whatsapp after 2018? can they break whatsapp encryption?I have a suggestion for signal team: please put tor in the signal, tor is better than any proxys or vpns. |
Show HN: Alacritty, a GPU-accelerated terminal emulator written in Rust | I'm the author of Alacritty, and I'm here to answer any questions! |
Apple Faceshield | I can hear Jony Ive describing it as "fashioned from a single continuous pane of clear polymer" in my ears right now... |
IPFS Support in Brave | Mozilla promised us Tor integration, IPFS integration and more private browsing by default. Brave delivered it all. |
Alternatives to Google Products | I'm a little discouraged when I see articles like this that seem to be completely tuned for developers or look over completely decent pro-privacy alternatives like Apple.For example, the "best" calendar alternative is Etar which looks to a Github repo. Really? At the very least you could mention Apple Calendar. Is Maps.Me (which uses AdSense) really better than Apple Maps? I'm not a fan of hooktube either - it just further cements YouTube's monopoly.I think what what bothers me is that "privacy focused" tends to be conflated with FOSS. I'm really thankful for organizations like Mozilla and Signal that are trying to deliver privacy focused applications to real people. However I also think we should recognize Apple-like companies who are also privacy focused without necessarily being FOSS. I think that will help move more non-technical people out of central databases. |
Teach Yourself Computer Science | Has anyone here learned a subject by going through one of these "teach yourself" lists? I've learned most of what I know about computers on my own, but it wasn't from following a list of textbooks. And when I've tried to follow a course like this for other subjects, despite my initial interest, I've found myself unable to make it through more than a couple chapters of the first textbook before running out of steam.But somebody must be getting some value out of these things, right? Am I just bad at studying? Or not as interested in the subjects I'm trying to learn about as I think I am? |
Can't you just right click? | This makes me wonder how open source is supposed to work on macOS. People seem to become more and more aware of it and even enterprises that insisted on support contracts can see that they can't get around open source completely anymore. Meanwhile Apple is removing the ability for me to have a pet project without paying an Apple tax.If the message were completely transparent, something like "The developer didn't pay $99 for us to do a cursory check on them (or whatever it is that Apple does with that money), are you sure you want to run their software? [Move to trash] [No] [?]", then that would give the user the relevant information to make this decision, but as it is, virtually no mac user will understand what is really going on.I also can't imagine $100 is easy to come up with in countries below level 4[1]. The OpenStreetMap Foundation recently introduced a way to waive the yearly £15 fee for OSMF membership if you have a certain number of map edits or otherwise contributed to the project. The OSM community seems to be quite diverse, but I can't imagine that Apple computers are less widespread than OpenStreetMap.[1] https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Factfulness#incomegroups |
Apple Terminates Epic Games' Developer Account | Not sure why people are surprised or consider it giant news.> The court recommended that Epic follow the App Store’s guidelines and policies while the case is in progress – the rules they followed over the past ten years until they created the current situation themselves. Epic refused.Well duh, this is a show match court fight of Epic Games not liking the rules and not getting the special treatment they want. No matter what opinion one holds on mobile store rules, they are their rules and so far you have the choice of following them (which is also somewhat iffy) or not being on the store.The whole goal of two post-capitalism enterprises having a fit is for one or more of them to make more money. The whole "it is good for consumers" or "good for developers" is just sprinkles and marketing to appeal to the public. Separate the issues and angles and see it for what it is: just a bunch of legal departments having a fight. |
94-year-old Lithium-Ion Battery Inventor Introduces Solid State Battery | I'm scanning the paper really quickly. I'm not a chemist but I do know a thing or two about batteries and the standard caveats apply here:When they say 3x volumetric energy density, that is the actual energy density, which is energy per liter (normal density is mass per liter). Normally people use energy density to refer to energy per kg. Because this is a solid state battery, it is much denser than normal batteries (which are roughly as dense as water). Solid state batteries are smaller but much heavier and this is no exception. It is 33% the size of a lithium battery, but for the same energy it's about 2.5x heavier. Weight is still a much bigger problem for batteries than size- batteries are much smaller than the exhaust, engine and transmission of a car, but also much heavier.The main limit on specific energy(kwh/kg) for this battery and for solid state batteries in general is voltage. Li-ion is 3.7v nominal, this battery is 2.5v nominal.1,200 cycles may seem low, but it is actually very good; around 3x the life of current batteries. This cycle life is the time to degrade to 80% maximum storage, at a certain discharge depth and speed. Current batteries only last 300-400 cycles at their specs, but last tens of thousands at 30% depth of discharge.Problem with the above: in this particular battery, the chemistry breaks down very strongly after it reaches the end of life. Normal lithium does this too, but not as strongly. This stuff may potentially last longer, but it fails much less gracefully. Not in a dangerous way, but in the same way as a normal car often does; once its broken it'll just work worse and worse until it is barely limping.The temperature capabilities may seem irrelevant, but they are actually a decent problem for li-ion and are the reason lead acid is still used in cars.Another interesting possibility for glass solid state lithium batteries is that recycling would be very easy. In organic batteries the electrolyte burns or reacts pretty much no matter what you do, but with glass you can plate and unplate cells. Unfortunately due to specific energy, polymer solid state electrolytes are much more likely than glass (also much cheaper).Edit: IMPORTANT NOTE: this is NOT a fundamentally new type of li-ion battery! Solid state batteries have been around a while (glass, ceramic and polymer), and have specific advantages but low specific energy and power. This particular implementation is a bit higher power and possibly lower cost, but it's just a little blip of progress. Solid state batteries are a good candidate for the future, but they aren't there yet. |
JetBrains: $270M revenue, 405K paying users, $0 raised | I'm a big fan of the way JetBrains sells their licenses. Like a lot of software companies nowadays, they only sell licenses on a subscription basis. But with a very customer-friendly clause of where if you pay for a subscription for 12 months you get a perpetual license for the latest version of the product when you initially subscribed. And then after paying for any particular version of a product for 12 months, you also get a perpetual license for that particular version and so on and so forth.Their FAQ page explains it a lot better than I can: https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What... |
“I saw that you spun up an Ubuntu image in Azure” | The register article on this https://www.theregister.com/2021/02/11/microsoft_azure_ubunt... has responses from Canonical and MS, which shed a bit more light on the situation.The Canonical quote is the most illuminating :-"As per the Azure T&Cs, Microsoft shares with Canonical, the publisher of Ubuntu, the contact details of developers launching Ubuntu instances on Azure. These contact details are held in Canonical’s CRM in accordance with privacy rules."On February 10th, a new Canonical Sales Representative contacted one of these developers via LinkedIn, with a poor choice of word. In light of this incident, Canonical will be reviewing its sales training and policies." |
Open-Sourcing our Firmware | I've been so happy to see what Framework has been doing lately, and really want to support them, but I already have a desktop as my primary computer and two Thinkpads that are already set up nicely, but that I rarely use. I moved from 15" laptops to 14" when Lenovo added the numpad on the larger variant, and 14" is about as small as I want to go.I kind of want to buy a framework though, just to support them? But I have no use for another laptop, let alone a small 12" one! Should I get one anyway because, what the hell, why not? Should I wait and then jump on one if/when they release a larger model?Anybody else have similar feelings?Edit to add:I also have one of the last Thinkpad models that support S3 sleep (T480 -- within a model or two, I think?), which is currently super critical for Linux... I need to be able to close the lid and come back after a week.It's easy to blame the manufacturers for this, but the consistent answer seems to be "Intel's Tiger Lake platform does not support S3 sleep," and all of the system builders base their work on what Intel's reference platform does. So short of going to extreme effort to hack it together themselves (something that is likely not their specialty), reasonable sleep behavior is not going to be an option unless Intel brings S3 back, or does work to improve the S0ix states.I absolutely do not want to support the no-more-S3 clusterfuck right now. |
Apple M1 Ultra | This is insane. They claim that its GPU performance tops the RTX 3090, while using 200W less power. I happen to have this GPU on my PC and not only it costs over $3000, but its also very power-hungry and loud.Currently, you need this kind of GPU performance for high resolution VR gaming at 90 fps, but its just barely enough. This means that the GPU will run very loudly and heat up the room, and running games like HL Alyx on max settings is still not possible.It seems that Apple might be the only company who can deliver a proper VR experience. I can't wait to see what they've been cooking up. |
Standard Markdown | would love to hear Gruber's take on this. |
All European scientific publicly funded articles to be freely accessible by 2020 | What does this mean in practice? Will the EU force the publishers to make them freely accessible? Will the EU only allow scientists to publish in open journals? Europe indirectly funds a lot of research. This will bleed into the workflow of scientists worldwide. |
CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M is abandoned due to bugs | I just don't understand these software deals, the price is so high. At 44 million, you can hire 146 engineers each paid 300k for a full year. Trust me, you need much less to build something like this, and there's no excuse for it to suck so bad.I'm also curious, anyone know where the development actually happened? Did Deloitte further subcontracted out? Was it outsourced? |
Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed | This is a great article explaining why a lab leak should always be a suspect. The alternative theory is that a virus traveled on its own (via bats or other animals) from bat caves 900km away to Wuhan where there are 2 labs researching bats. One of the labs is lesser known but is right next to the seafood market and the hospital where the outbreak was first known. [1]This article points out that a lab outbreak could have happened in the United States and many places in the world. We need to avoid demonizing China over this if we want to ever find out the truth and learn how to prevent another pandemic outbreak.[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200214144447/https://www.resea... |
Embrace the Grind | > For example, I once joined a team maintaining a system that was drowning in bugs. There were something like two thousand open bug reports. Nothing was tagged, categorized, or prioritized. The team couldn’t agree on which issues to tackle
> I spent almost three weeks in that room, and emerged with every bug report reviewed, tagged, categorized, and prioritized.Honestly, this is one of those traps a team can fall into, where nobody feels empowered to ignore the rest of the business for 3 weeks to put the bell on the cat. The only person without deliverables and due dates is the new hire. And it takes a special kind of new hire to have the expertise to parachute in, recognize that work needs to be done, and then do it with little supervision.But he's right in general, that you can get some surprising things done by just putting in the time and focus. Which is why it's so utterly toxic that corporate America runs on an interrupt driven system, with meetings sprinkled carelessly across engineer calendars. |
Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering | Ever since WebAssembly was first introduced, I thought it was obvious[1][2] that the end game for those that want to control the web is sending opaque binary blobs of code that only use the browser for the canvas tag's framebuffer. Font rendering and layout can all easily be accomplished by embedding libraries like freetype. This breaks all forms of user control - like ad blockers - and turns the web back into cable TV.I didn't expect the first move towards canvas-only rendering to be traditional wordprocessors. As usual, this is merely the first step. Once the tech has been normalized by developers, transitioning regular webpages will be a fait accompli.[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10294187[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26351771 |
Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work | Without trying to be inflammatory in any manner, I will say that it takes a certain level of privilege to say one shouldn’t discuss politics at work.If you disagree I’m happy to discuss this viewpoint rather than being downvoted to oblivion.Lots of issues are deemed “political”, but imagine you fall into one of the marginalized groups:— lgbt: Don’t discuss the possibility about being fired for your sexuality because it’s too political.— Women in tech: Nope, let’s not go there, too political.— Underrepresented minorities in tech: Sorry it’s a pipeline problem, don’t bring politics into this.— Education: Too political to discuss the fact that schools are trying to balance their admissions in the face of very uneven opportunities amongst their applicants. Never mind the fact that school admissions were never fair to begin with.We can’t improve without discussion, and it’s unfortunate that these type of issues are so divisive.Again, If you disagree I’d love to understand your viewpoint as to why. |
Show HN: Boring Report, a news app that uses AI to desensationalize the news | I think this is an amazing idea! The only flaw I see with it is that without the sensationalized headlines I read through going "Oh that doesn't matter, that doesn't matter either" etc haha I haven't found an article that sounds interesting in a few scrolls.I mean, it's great because it's accurate. Half of the "news" we're fed is sensationalized so we'll click on it and it's really nothing but it gets us riled up about something that is effectively meaningless to us. This just brings reality to the forefront and makes me realize I don't care about the news lolThank you though, this is awesome! |
The Face Behind Bitcoin? | Topic other than discussing the irresponsibility of "outing" a guy using the clever tricks of using his name and public records look ups.> A libertarian, Nakamoto encouraged his daughter to be independent, start her own business and "not be under the government's thumb," she says. "He was very wary of the government, taxes and people in charge."> What you don't know about him is that he's worked on classified stuff. His life was a complete blank for a while. You're not going to be able to get to him.Growing up and living in the D.C. area, I'm constantly surprised at the paradox of the deeply conservative anti-federal government types who work for the government - directly or as a fed contractor. Who'll rattle off about privacy issues before hopping on the bus to their job working on an NSA contract at a Fed contractor...that sort of thing.I've even pointed out point-blank that their salaries are paid for by the same taxes they rail against incessantly and are met with blank stares or wry grimaces before they launch into an extended soliloquy about "values" or personal responsibility or some such. I've even had folks in the military swear up and down that some military benefit program isn't a result of tax payer dollars but mysteriously appears out of some kind of pay differential sacrifice they've made instead of working in the private sector.It's rather bizarre and I guess to Nakamoto's credit, he actually did something about it in a sense.edit meta-response to the replies indicating that perhaps his close contact with the government is what motivated him to develop bitcoin, I think that's plausible. What we don't know is if he developed this philosophy before or after working with the government.I'm curious though, in the general sense about people who have a fundamentally anti-government philosophy, then take roles supporting and building up the same government they clog their facebook feeds rallying against. |
Philae has landed | Amazing job! This might be a silly question but are their any ideas as to the actual real world benefits we could see from this? The director-general of the ESA said "This is a big step for human civilisation" so I presume there is some idea of what they expect to gain from this mission?Edit: Thanks for all the replies! I'm at work now but will take a look at them this evening. |
How to Get Things Done When You Don't Feel Like It | Couple tricks on getting started:- Use the 15 minute rule to get started, only agree to do 15-20 minutes of work to see if you are flowing in that project, most of the time once you get started and loaded up the project in your mental space you can easily flow on it. Pomodoro is nice as well, but the 15 minute get started rule has less commitment needed and usually works, or just plan to do at least one tomato and you end up doing many.- Leave a currently solved code part partially done or leave a compile issue on the area you were working on, then wake up the next day, finish that part and you can flow right into other work because the domain is in your mind.- Multiple projects and work on another project during procrastination or a thinking spot of the current project. Have main work projects, side projects, fun projects, some are more fun, more work or just tedious/rote that you can use depending on your productivity or work style of the day.- Motivators and triggers: music (usually a playlist that is used during work to make it more regular), coffee/gum/work food, focus by turning off distractions except for breaks, stand up regularly and walk around when stuck on any issues that need to be done, and visualize shipping.- Creative Open/Focused Closed state: do creative work in the open state, block out time and explore, do must be done work in the closed state, minimize distractions and exploration [1].- Start the day right, work on something simple or one check in for instance before reddit/HN/news or distractions, sometimes the first thing you do in the morning can influence your whole day, reward yourself with distractions but base yourself in production at least 2 to 1 productivity to fun/distraction.Ultimately be a pro, a pro can start working to a high level even when they don't want to, sometimes you need to jump start or get a rolling start but you can develop a habit to get moving and ship.[1] https://genius.com/John-cleese-lecture-on-creativity-annotat... |
Bolt founder on Stripe/YC | His claims about HN are false. Short version: his post was 2+ hours later than Stripe's, not an hour earlier, and fell in rank because users flagged it, not because moderators did anything (which I suppose is what his mafia/mob language was intended to imply).The longer version is going to involve a tedious barrage of links, but I want this to be something that people can check for themselves if they care to.Quoting from https://twitter.com/theryanking/status/1485784877060349953 and https://twitter.com/theryanking/status/1485784882173255680:> Both had organically made it up to #1 on Hacker News with 100s of upvotesTheir first post, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16215092, made it to #2 (http://hnrankings.info/16215092/) and got 171 upvotes. The second, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16870692, made it to #4 (http://hnrankings.info/16870692/) and got 70 upvotes.> On April 18, 2018, we posted this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16870692 [...] An ~hour later, this showed up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16869290. Ours disappeared.Stripe's post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16869290) was submitted at 17:41 UTC, and Bolt's post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16870692) was submitted over 2 hours later, at 20:08 UTC. If you want external evidence for that, look at the hnrankings.info pages for the two posts (Stripe: http://hnrankings.info/16869290/, Bolt: http://hnrankings.info/16870692/). You'll see that they first pick up Stripe's post on the front page at 17:45 and Bolt's at 20:30. You'll also see that Stripe's post made it to #2, not #1 as he claims.Here's the HN front page at 19:09 that day: https://web.archive.org/web/20180418190904/https://news.ycom.... Stripe's post is already at #2. Bolt's hasn't been submitted yet. The first snapshot with Bolt on the front page is at 20:35: https://web.archive.org/web/20180418203508/https://news.ycom.... By 21:21, Bolt's briefly makes it higher than Stripe's: https://web.archive.org/web/20180418212112/https://news.ycom....> Ours disappearedBolt's post fell in rank because it was flagged by users—that is the drop you can see in http://hnrankings.info/16870692/ and in this snapshot by 21:21: https://web.archive.org/web/20180418222105/https://news.ycom....I don't know why users flagged it. (Edit: generally, though, if you want to figure this out, the best place to look is in the comments. The top comment in the Bolt thread is complaining about non-transparent, enterprise-style pricing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16871886, which is a classic HN complaint. The same complaints had appeared in their earlier thread, for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16215604 and
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16215578. We actually downweighted both of those complaints. That's standard HN moderation when indignant comments are stuck at the top of a thread.)None of the flags came from YC founders or staff. (Edit: I looked into whether it might have been Stripe people doing the flagging here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30070445.) HN moderators did not make the post fall in rank, or moderate the post at all. I don't think I'd ever heard of Bolt before today.The article no longer exists on bolt.com, but if you want to compare it to
the stripe.com article, the articles are here:https://web.archive.org/web/20180418201841/https://blog.bolt...https://web.archive.org/web/20180418171628/https://stripe.co...His insinuations about HN are false too. He's clearly insinuating that we use insider powers to favor stripe.com submissions with special treatment on HN. That's precisely what we don't do.Stripe succeeded on HN because they were favored by the community for many years. They are one of a small number of startups who have reached what you could call 'community darling' status on HN. It's true that this is incredibly hard to do. Another startup that managed it, around the same time, was Cloudflare (not a YC startup). Startups achieve this by doing three things: producing products that the community considers good, producing articles that the community finds interesting, and mastering the art of interacting with the community. You need all three.I wish more startups would achieve this, YC or not. Whenever I run across one that's trying to succeed on HN, I try to help them do so (YC or not)—why? because it makes HN better if the community finds things it loves here. Among the startups of today, I can think of only two offhand who are showing signs of maybe reaching darling status—fly.io (YC), and Tailscale (not YC).All 4 of the startups I've mentioned have the advantage that they were|are targeting programmers, which gives them a fast track to rapport with this community—sort of a ladder in the snakes-and-ladders game. However, that's not a sufficient condition for getting a satisfying click with the community, and it isn't a necessary one either. The real problem is that so much of the content that startups produce to try to interest this community just isn't interesting enough (to this community), and often gives off inadvertent signals of being uninteresting—things like seeming too enterprisey, or too slick in the marketing department.If the bolt.com people had asked us for help, I would have been just as happy to help them as anybody else. I would have told them that the opening of their article (https://web.archive.org/web/20180418201841/https://blog.bolt...) was too enterprisey to appeal to HN. The language is drawn from ecommerce retailing, which makes sense given the little bit we've all learned about Bolt today, but is the kind of thing that comes across as boring on HN. The references to Gartner and Experian feel like reading an enterprise whitepaper, which detracts from credibility with the HN audience.This is the sort of thing I've told countless startups over the years. It's dismayingly difficult to express this information in a way that people can actually absorb, but I have a set of notes that I've sent to many startups in this position, which I plan to turn into an essay about how to write for HN. if anyone wants a copy, email [email protected] and I'll be happy to send it to you.I had a bunch of other things I wanted to say here, but mercifully, I've forgotten them. |
Building Jarvis | Say what you will about Zuckerberg, but this is a really cool project! Steps he took:1. Connect his home devices (lights, thermostat, doors, music player, TV, CCTV etc) to his computer, so he can turn them on and off from it and in general automate his house from his PC.2. Add an NLP component to his computer, so he could text instructions to it and it would apply the correct automation task. This can learn preferences too and be told about mistakes so it does better in the future.3. Add face recognition, so it can recognise people at his door and automatically open it if they are expected.4. Add speech recognition, by creating an app for the phone that is constantly on and listening for his voice. This is then converted to automation tasks again.All in all, an interesting way to spend 100 hours. Calling it AI is a bit of a stretch though; this is basically linking up a bunch of in-accurate sensory parsers, coupled with some limited machine learning, connected to a bunch of if statements. Still a long way off of Jarvis, who is basically a genius by human standards! |
The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius | I agree with his theory, but what I find particularly interesting is that I think most people do not have an obsessive interest in anything at all. And as someone who has obsessive interests in a lot of things (some “useful”, some not), that seems really odd to me: how can you just be satisfied to go to work, come home, watch TV, and go to bed each day? (Not saying that’s the wrong way to live, just saying it is surprising to someone who isn’t that way). But I guess the obsessive ones are really the weird ones in society, in terms of the fraction of the population they constitute.My problem lately has been acquiring enough free time to be obsessive. I really miss the days of playing piano for 12 hours straight or tinkering around with reverse engineering the OS of some MP3 player. And my wife is pregnant for the first time, so like PG mentions, I wonder (but suspect) how that is going to change things. I have a very intense dread of losing myself in the necessary mundanity of life; I am more financially comfortable than ever, but I also feel less like myself than I ever have. Going to meetings, making dinner, creating to-do lists — these don’t fit my personality at all, but I have to do them because they need to be done. |
Software engineering topics I changed my mind on | Have never agreed with a blog post more. Every single bullet point, 10/10.Okay, okay, actually I have one qualm~> Standups are actually useful for keeping an eye on the newbies.Unfair. Standups are useful for communication between a team in general, if kept brief. If senior engineer X is working on Y and other engineer M has already dealt with Y (unbeknowst to X), it's a great chance for X to say "I'm currently looking for a solution to Y" and for M to say "Oh I had to solve that same problem last month!"Seniority has nothing to do with this. Communication/coordination/knowledge-sharing matter at all levels. |
Can’t send email more than 500 miles (2002) | Every few years this story resurfaces and always makes me smile. |
The days are long but the decades are short | Those of you on HN that are past the 30+ mark. What would you add to this list? |
The missing semester of CS education | Over the years, we (@anishathalye, @jjgo, @jonhoo) have helped teach several classes at MIT, and over and over we have seen that many students have limited knowledge of the tools available to them. Computers were built to automate manual tasks, yet students often perform repetitive tasks by hand or fail to take full advantage of powerful tools such as version control and text editors. Common examples include holding the down arrow key for 30 seconds to scroll to the bottom of a large file in Vim, or using the nuclear approach to fix a Git repository (https://xkcd.com/1597/).At least at MIT, these topics are not taught as part of the university curriculum: students are never shown how to use these tools, or at least not how to use them efficiently, and thus waste time and effort on tasks that should be simple. The standard CS curriculum is missing critical topics about the computing ecosystem that could make students’ lives significantly easier.To help mitigate this, we ran a short lecture series during MIT’s Independent Activities Period (IAP) that covered all the topics we consider crucial to be an effective computer scientist and programmer. We’ve published lecture notes and videos in the hopes that people outside MIT find these resources useful.To offer a bit of historical perspective on the class: we taught this class for the first time last year, when we called it “Hacker Tools” (there was some great discussion about last year’s class here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19078281). We found the feedback from here and elsewhere incredibly helpful. Taking that into account, we changed the lecture topics a bit, spent more lecture time on some of the core topics, wrote better exercises, and recorded high-quality lecture videos using a fancy lecture capture system (and this hacky DSL for editing multi-track lecture videos, which we thought some of you would find amusing: https://github.com/missing-semester/videos).We’d love to hear any insights or feedback you may have, so that we can run an even better class next year!-- Anish, Jose, and Jon |
Microsoft fixes 5-year-old Defender bug, reducing Firefox-related CPU use by 75% | Quick napkin math of the wasted power :
Firefox has ~300e6 users, let's assume the bug wasted 5 extra watts 4 hours a day.That's 250 megawatts saved, the equivalent of an average coal power plant. Because some Microsoft engineer missed a bug. |
Log is the "Pro" in iPhone 15 Pro | If I was a prosumer/hobbyist video equipment company, I'd be terrified about what Apple does next. They already have significant penetration into the editing market (both with Final Cut, and codec design), they control a number of the common codecs, and they have _millions_ of devices in the field along with substantial manufacturing capability. The cinema end aren't in trouble yet IMO, but the rest should be concerned... |
Tesla Energy | I must say Elon is a brilliant engineer but not the best of orators. |
GitLab Database Incident – Live Report | This is painful to read. It's easy to say that they they should have tested their backups better, and so on, but there is another lesson here, one that's far more important and easily missed.When doing something really critical (such as playing with the master database late at night) ALWAYS work with a checklist. Write down WHAT you are going to do, and if possible, talk to a coworker about it so you can vocalize the steps. If there is no coworker, talk to your rubber ducky or stapler on your desk. This will help you catch mistakes. Then when the entire plan looks sensible, go through the steps one by one. Don't deviate from the plan. Don't get distracted and start switching between terminal windows. While making the checklist ask yourself if what you're doing is A) absolutely necessary and B) risks making things worse. Even when the angry emails are piling up you can't allow that pressure to cloud your judgment.Every startup has moments when last-minute panic-patching of a critical part of the server infrastructure is needed, but if you use a checklist you're not likely to mess up badly, even when tired. |
Microsoft acquires Github | People keep mentioning how "Microsoft changed" due to VS Code, the Linux subsystem, .NET Core.I say that they are the same company, only with different cash cows.Haven't they spied on Windows 10 users? Do they not engage in patents racketeering? Haven't they killed Nokia and ruined Skype?"But Mom, some of the other companies are doing it too", well yeah, but some of us don't have double standards, in spite of what you'd think and that doesn't absolve them of anything ;-)Brilliant marketing campaign though. They needed it I guess, but it's getting obnoxious.---That said I'm glad that after the acquisition GitHub will be led by Nat Friedman, the former CEO of Xamarin, which has some credibility.At least the news isn't all bad. |
Let's Encrypt Has Issued a Billion Certificates | I shudder to think about what will happen if they go down for whatever reason. Or get compromised, or the renewal gets bugged etc.It is all cool and great, but is it sustainable long term, who guarantees that everything will work in 10 years? Monocultures are not desirable.A ray of hope - you can get a two-year certificate for 10 bucks - so right there, another major benefit of Let's Encrypt, they makes for better competition. (ok I know Apple will stop honoring these starting in the Fall, but I still got two years since the expiration will be for new certificates) |
Why are glasses so expensive? The eyewear industry prefers to keep that blurry | Reminder, if you're in the US, the FTC says your eye doctor must give you your prescription after your exam. If a doctor refuses to do so, they can face legal action and penalties.https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/blog/2016/05/buying-prescriptio...That said, I don't think the FTC stipulates what information must appear on the prescription. Many docs leave off your PD (pupillary distance), which is a necessary measurement if you're buying online. Fortunately, there are a variety of easy ways to take this measurement yourself after the exam, although if you're really concerned about precision, you'll want the doctor's measurement.And by the way, it should go without saying, but I'll say it anyway. Although the quality of eyewear available online can be comparable to what you'd get in store ... please don't think an online eye exam is an acceptable substitute for visiting an ophthalmologist in person and getting a comprehensive eye exam! |
WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism | > WeWork then used this cash to underprice competitors in the co-working space market, hoping to be able to profit later once it had a strong market position in real estate subletting or ancillary businesses.> This is of course Amazon’s model, which underpriced competitors in retail and eventually came to control the whole market.This is wrong, wrong, wrong. The difference is Amazon saw what the marginal costs could be, and had a specific roadmap to drive investment into bringing them down. WeWork fundamentally has no way to drive down the margin on real estate in any meaningful way. Especially as a lessee.> The goal of Son, and increasingly most large financiers in private equity and venture capital, is to find big markets and then dump capital into one player in such a market who can underprice until he becomes the dominant remaining actor. In this manner, financiers can help kill all competition, with the idea of profiting later on via the surviving monopoly.A bold assumption with no citations. There are just as many counterfactuals to this strategy as there are examples. The scooter market is an especially bad - there is so much capital from so many companies - if you were trying to establish monopolies that would be a bad bet.> Endless money-losing is a variant of counterfeiting, and counterfeiting has dangerous economic consequences. The subprime fiasco was one example.The subprime crisis is completely unrelated! And if anything it was proof that money-making assets should be scrutinized more.WeWork is a garbage, charlatan company. But don't misunderstand what is happening here. |
DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use | A few years ago I switched my desktops to use DDG while leaving my phone using Google. At first I had to !g all the time. Now that’s rare.Now I’m starting to have the other problem. If I search for a company, product, person, etc., on DDG it’s the first hit. But on google I just get a wall of ads and videos, and it’s hard to tell where the actual homepage is for the thing I’m looking for.So as of now I would say, google is still better if you’re looking for something obscure and especially if you don’t know what it’s called. But today I would say DDG is better if you are searching for something specific by name. |
Hackers claim to have breached Okta systems | And this is why I would ultimately never trust a centralised company with our authentication infrastructure: because something like Okta is an infinitely more attractive target than we are. Their offering is sweet, and I’m always tempted to just give in, but this confirms me in my decision. |
Show HN: A friend and I spent 6 years making a simulation game, finally released | I’m a sad. No Mac. :-(Looks really good. Congrats man. 84% overwhelmingly positive isn’t anything to sneeze at too. The experience must have been amazing. I learned more about computers in developing games that were 1% of what you’ve done. No matter the financial outcome you are winning at nerd life, which is the only life that matters (other than to your spouse your family and friends). |
How we got read access on Google’s production servers | Just $10k?This sells for at least 10 times more on the black market. Why would one rationally chose to "sell" this to google instead of the black market.Some people don't break the law because they are afraid to get caught, but I like to believe that most people don't break the law because of the moral aspect. To me at least, selling this on the black market poses no moral questions, so, leaving aside "I'm afraid to get caught", why would one not sell this on the black market? Simple economic analysis.Very serious question. |
“I have toyota corola” | As somebody who has written to companies about bugs in their products (and almost always ignored), I would really appreciate a response even if it was some form letter thing to the effect of "I just make a small component that happens to be used in your car, kind of like the people who make the screws in your car. Please contact your car manufacturer directly."I personally just like knowing somebody read my letter instead of going into a black hole. And I kind of expect these things to go into black holes, so it's actually kind of heart warming when I receive any kind of response.And this response would at least tell me to try a different contact. (I know in this case who Daniel Stenberg is and know what curl is so I wouldn't make this specific mistake, but sometimes hunting for support contact information returns things that are vague.)If the customer gets angry at the response, it's fine because it just means they don't understand, which means they are just getting angrier at the car company. The car company deserves that since they made it so hard to contact them. |
“Pinterest needs to be removed from Google IMO” | It should, but this also illustrates a problem with Google Search that they'll need to grapple with in the future. Namely, that while they should treat all sites equally, in practicality there's not really much incentive to on their part.Think about it. Let's say Google does remove Pinterest altogether, banning the site as a punishment for 'gaming' the system.What then? The people that do search for Pinterest will find it missing, and likely assume Google screwed up/their search engine is broken. They won't know Google banned the site or what for, they'll just think 'Pinterest should be coming up, it isn't, so Google is broken'.And I suspect that underpins a lot of instances where Google gives larger more popular sites and services a slap on the wrist for using black hat SEO. Google knows that if they really did treat them 'equally', then the average Joe would think Google's search engine was a broken mess because it doesn't bring up what they expect it to.However, on the flip side by not banning them or punishing them, you get stuff like this where it seems like large sites are allowed to break rules with impunity and smaller ones are hit with the banhammer for a single offence. It's an interesting conundrum. |
ChatGPT Plus | I've been using ChatGPT pretty consistently during the workday and have found it useful for open ended programming questions, "cleaning up" rough bullet points into a coherent paragraph of text, etc. $20/month useful is questionable though, especially with all the filters. My "in between" solution has been to configure BetterTouchTool (Mac App) with a hotkey for "Transform & Replace Selection with Javascript". This is intended for doing text transforms, but putting an API call instead seems to work fine. I highlight some text, usually just an open ended "prompt" I typed in the IDE, or Notes app, or an email body, hit the hotkey, and ~1s later it adds the answer underneath. This works...surprisingly well. It feels almost native to the OS. And it's cheaper than $20/month, assuming you aren't feeding it massive documents worth of text or expecting paragraphs in response. I've been averaging like 2-10c a day, depending on use.Here is the javascript if anyone wants to do something similar. I don't know JS really, so I'm sure it could be improved. But it seems to work fine. You can add your own hard coded prompt if you want even. async (clipboardContentString) => {
try {
const response = await fetch("https://api.openai.com/v1/completions", {
method: "POST",
headers: {
"Content-Type": "application/json",
"Authorization": "Bearer YOUR API KEY HERE"
},
body: JSON.stringify({
model: "text-davinci-003",
prompt: `${clipboardContentString}.`,
temperature: 0,
max_tokens: 256
})
});
const data = await response.json();
const text = data.choices[0].text;
return `${clipboardContentString} ${text}`;
} catch (error) {
return "Error"
}
} |
Six-Legged Giant Finds Secret Hideaway, Hides For 80 Years | This is a fascinating story, but I must ask - does this belong on hacker news? Please, I ask with no intended malice. |
Today Sci-Hub is 10 years old. I'll publish 2M new articles to celebrate | I really hope sci-hub survives this. Sci-hub and libgen are like an entirely different internet, one allowing you to dive as deep as you wish into any technical subject. There’s really no comparison I have found anywhere for the depth of material available. People always point to Wikipedia, but all of that is surface level. If you to build something, research something, or just really delve into it, there’s no substitute for having access to all of the latest textbooks, manuals, and papers. I’ve never found any source paid or otherwise that comes even close. |
PyPI Was Subpoenaed | I'm guessing some poor typosquatter managed to hit a gov agency and is about to get alphabet soup all over him. |
How We Built r/Place | > We actually had a race condition here that allowed users to place multiple tiles at once. There was no locking around the steps 1-3 so simultaneous tile draw attempts could all pass the check at step 1 and then draw multiple tiles at step 2.This is why you use a proper database.I'd probably add a Postgres table to record all user activity, and use that to lock out users for 5 minutes as an initial filter. Have triggers on updates to then feed the rest of the application. |
AMP for email is a terrible idea | I'll get down voted for saying this, but the HN crowd's hypocrisy is baffling.1. Gmail is a channel that Google has under monetized for a decade. This is an opportunity for them to extract value from the said channel. If you're allergic to Google offering free services that use your data for advertising, go pay for email. Google isn't a charity and you aren't entitled to a Gmail of your choosing.2. Apple is a prime example of successfully monetizing a "channel". They sell you hardware that apparently you own, but cannot run apps that haven't received Apple's blessing. Even their fucking charging port is proprietary (lighting) and to build an accessory compliant with iPhones, one has to pay an Apple tax of $7/unit that can easily be avoided with open standards such as uUSB. Never in the history of computing has your hardware required the manufacturer's blessing to run apps. Why do I mention this? Because an overwhelming majority of those foaming at the mouth at AMP are doing so on their iPhones and iPads - I hope the irony isn't lost on you folks.3. If you find Apple's practices more abhorrent than AMP and consistently oppose both - congratulations, you're a minority whose reasoning isn't clouded by brand jingoism4. If you called bullshit on Google because a) mobile pages can be fast(er) even without AMP and b) JavaScript was restricted within email for security, then your opposition to this proposal is the most accurate.Cheers |
The Dutch Reach: Clever Workaround to Keep Cyclists from Getting “Doored” | It is true that getting doored is not part of the Dutch vocabulary as it is not something that happens often. But there are more reasons than grabbing the handle with the opposite hand.A non extensive list: 1) Dutch car drivers all have been bicyclist before they get their driver license, everyday to school more than an hour being nothing being frowned on. 2) Major transit bike routes have separate bike lanes, the tiny narrow ones of the gif in the article barely exist. 3) Bike lanes in cities usually are placed between the footpath and the parked cars, with most of the times a 50cm wide band left of the bike path allowing for car doors being opened without going over the bike paths, usually this is used for planting trees too 4) All politicians drive bike, the Dutch Prime Minister comes to work on his bike 5) There are local associations part of the national http://fietersbond.nl in every town and they passionately lobby every time they see an opportunity. 6) these volunteers are highly respected and their input is valued by the municipalities 7) one of the prime goals of Dutch national ministerie of Traffic is lowering the number of injured and death in traffic, good recording of cause by police is step one, good statistics then determine the ways roads are laid out. 8) On smaller roads without a separate bicycle path, as a bicyclist you're always on the watch if someone might step out of a car and try to keep a distance by bicycling towards the middle of the road which isn't an issue as this is low traffic street, major bike transit always has separated bike paths with distance to the parked cars. 9) during driving lessons, watching bicyclist is a prime part of the lessons and a good driver keeps an eye on the mirrors for back-coming bicyclist and will warn passengers on the back seats before they get out.And there are probably more reasons that Dutch have few accidents being doored. |
Fred's ImageMagick Scripts | Seeing tools like this pop up periodically and get so many upvotes it seems a lot of people aren't aware of great tools. It would be interesting to see a gallery of Unix classic/modern tools presented in a structured course. Is anyone aware of one?Something like images (imagemagick), video (ffmpeg/vlc), audio (sox), phone (asterisk/etc.), SMS (pdus/various), linguistics (various), classification (NNs), version control, snapshots, clustering (PXE/corosync/pacemaker), security (kernel toolkits), transaction systems and databases (sqlite/RDBMS/noSQL/time series), networking (filtering/firewall rules, intermittent connectivity, local multidrop protocols, tcpdump/wireshark), kernel security toolkits, CI/CD, etc.Scope would be essentially everything except tools lying within the popular web stacks.The goal would be that a student with interest could work their way through the syllabus and emerge a capable multi-domain unix hacker, rather than needing to encounter these problem domains over decades of career, rediscovering well worn approaches. |
How to manage HTML DOM with vanilla JavaScript only? | The problem with vanilla JS is not APIs, API is the easy thing. The problem is building proper architecture, so code won't quickly turn into spaghetti. With frameworks like Angular or React, it's much easier, as the general structure is dictated by framework and developer just have to follow good practice. With vanilla JS it's the wild west. |
Signal community: Reminder: Please be nice | I maintain a very popular piece of FOSS software as my full time job (you've all heard of it, many of you use it).Easily the worst part of the job is toxic users who hop on to issues demanding you implement them immediately and belittling your planning ability. Worse when you were planning on implementing it soon anyways, but now if you do it's "rewarding" their behaviour (in their eyes at least), and they become invigorated to go and spread their toxicity even further. Alternatively, you can hold off on implementing it until things cool down, but then all the nice users who have been patiently waiting get screwed.I'm forever grateful that I actually get FAANG salary to do this -- I wouldn't keep it up if I was getting the little-to-noting many FOSS contributors get. |
Show HN: Trading cards made with e-ink displays | Trading or collectible card games that have cards that modify themselves with play would be great here. SolForge is the example I'm thinking of, but I'm sure other games do it too. |
Pirate Weather: A free, open, and documented forecast API | I was really hoping https://merrysky.net/ had a graphical forecast similar to weather underground's 10 day. I've yet to find anything else that quickly shows everything you'd want to know in a single image. Even the mouseover timeline is perfection. It is so good and seemingly exclusive to WU that I sometimes wonder if they hold a patent for it. |
We are beginning to roll out new voice and image capabilities in ChatGPT | This announcement seem to have killed so many startups that were trying to do multi-modal on top of ChatGPT. The way it's progressing with solving use cases with images and voice, not too far when it might be the 'one app to rule them all'.I can already see "Alexa/Siri/Google Home" replacement, "Google Image Search" replacement, ed-tech startups that were solving problems with AI using by taking a photo are also doomed and more to follow. |
Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways | Everybody here is disappointed at Slack, and I like open protocols and open platforms just like everybody else, but I still have a contrarian view.Instead of blaming Slack, why not accept that the open protocols indeed suck? IRC does not specify encoding, netsplits are a common issue, file sending sucks, etc. XMPP also has file sending problems, does not play nice with mobile, is fragmented (not every client implements desired extensions), etc.Why not accept that there are legit technical reasons why existing open protocols are unacceptable?We should not be blaming Slack so much. If we want to make a difference we must come up with a better open protocol that satisfies all the requirements. And it does not end there: there must also be an open client that normal people actually want to use, and there must be tons of marketing to promote it.Stop complaining about companies not adopting open protocols and do something. Dominate the world using open protocols, then the walled garden companies will follow. It is not easy, it may even feel wrong, but it is the only way. |
I Charged $18k for a Static HTML Page | My parents had been running their own tailor shop in the 80's, barely making ends meet, pulling in less than $20K a year.It wasn't for lack of business, father was a master tailor trained in Italy and capable of elite bespoke craftsmanship. They had as much business as they could handle. The problem was that they were charging what they thought the work was worth rather than what their customers were willing to pay.At some point, during the Reagan years, my mother had an epiphany and jacked up the prices massively, far beyond what my father thought was remotely reasonable. The result? Even more business, more pressure, more return customers. That put me and my brother through an expensive college.There's something about high rates that makes customers feel more important, it's a status-thing and it also propels them to take you more seriously even if they have you do low-value stuff. |
Story of a failed pentest | The problem I have with pen tests is that they're not systematic and rely on the cleverness and knowledged of the tester. Even if they identify an issue, it's often hard or impossible to ensure it doesn't regress, and if it's an inhouse or custom software they've never seen before they likely won't be of much help without a lot of effort.I think one step forward would be also approaching security the same way epidemiologist track down causes of diseases. In that they take patient data and trace back the factors that caused it, just instead of patients we're talking about security vulnerabilities and breaches. Having a corpus of causal diagrams that then we can develop software to analyze risk factors that we can then systematically test for. |
OnlyFans to block sexually explicit videos starting in October | This is going to be corporate suicide on a greater scale than Tumblr's policy.I say greater because OnlyFans is/was still on a massive upswing whereas Tumblr was 10 years past its peak already when the nails went in the coffin.Edit: I understand this is supposedly not their choice. |
Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier? | Marketing.The one thing I pushed off for as long as possible. Because it was always easier to build more, than it was to go into marketing / sales.No clever tricks, or growth hacks. Me and my cofounders just connected with everyone we could on LinkedIn, twitter, discord, etc. and talked to people about the product: https://rysolv.com/.In fact, part of the reason we delayed marketing was looking for some clever way to 10x, or make it go viral. A big motivator was Paul Graham's "do things that don't scale" post [1]. So we just sat down and talked to people.[1] http://paulgraham.com/ds.html |
Glassdoor not so anonymous | Glassdoor has posted a notice on ZURU's page regarding this: https://www.glassdoor.com.au/Reviews/ZURU-Reviews-E2286297.h...It appears a few other companies are doing this too, including Kraken (https://www.kraken.com/) as you can see here: https://www.glassdoor.com.au/Overview/Working-at-Kraken-Digi...EDIT: If anyone from Glassdoor is reading this, please advise on a way to either unlink my profile from my identity - or remove my profile and contact information altogether. I believe GDPR may provide some assistance here. |
Please Make Google AMP Optional | I never really understood why google amp is bad. Can anyone explain the reason why people think its ethically bad? |
Dotfile madness | To me, the real problem is not the dotfiles, but the regular (i.e. non-hidden) files that applications surreptitiously create in my home folder. (Which the author does mention as being particularly bad.) dotfiles in the home folder are not a new thing on Linux (e.g. .bashrc, .profile, .emacs, etc.), even if it would be better if more applications used the XDG folders. And if I don't see them when I "ls", they don't bother me.But nowadays, lots of applications seem to think it's OK to put normal files in my home folder without asking first. This is just outright barbarism. In particular, Ubuntu now seems like it's all-in on snaps, and if you use snaps, they create a non-hidden "snap" folder in the user's home folder. Madness! And when people complain, the devs have the gall to suggest that this is all fine:https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/snapd/+bug/1575053I like the idea of snap/flatpak in the abstract, but until they get their act together, and stop creating non-hidden files in my home folder without asking first, I am never going to use snaps.And of course, all this is on top of the new fashion for the OS to "helpfully" create Documents, Music, Video, etc folders in my home folder, and set the XDG environment variables to point to them. Noooooope.But at least in that case the user can change the environment variables and delete the stupid folders. No such luck with ~/snap. |
Docker Hub Hacked – 190k accounts, GitHub tokens revoked, builds disabled | Docker Hub being hacked was basically just a question of time.With how much of the internet blindly pulls images from it, the potential gain from hijacking just one high-profile one would be monumental. |
The day Windows died | It's really sad that there is no where for us to go in the desktop OS space right now.I, weirdly, daily drive all 3 OSes.MacOS; Work issued laptop and longish-time user (about 6 years with it).Windows; Desktop PC mostly for games. I've been using Windows since I could walk.Fedora; Desktop PC, dual booted which I use for most everything else.I cannot believe how much of a dumpster fire Windows has become. From the ads to the degradation of basic desktop functionality - it's become so arduous to deal with.MacOS is better, but it still very annoying to deal with in a lot of ways. Apple are certainly set on degrading the user experience and in general neglect much needed feature additions.Fedora is fantastic, but no matter how much I love it, Linux is janky.I am looking at Linux and hoping that it saves the desktop OS experience - because it's very clear that both Microsoft and Apple are not interested.MacOS ties me over until then - but I can't even game on my Apple Silicon MacBook Pro now, so when I travel I have to bring two computers with me... |
A new approach to China | This is incredible. This is the first time, I have seen a LARGE company* Putting its users above profits* Stand up to Chinese Government.Since accounts of human rights activists were targeted, this operation was clearly done at the behest of Chinese Government. I'm disgusted by the levels to which the Chinese Government can stoop.It is time the world stands up to China. If a corporation, whose main aim is to generate profits can eschew it and take a moral high ground why can't the government do it? Are the cheap goods from china so necessary that it is not worth antagonizing China ?EDIT: Additional details from Enterprise blog post http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/01/keeping-your-da...It was an attack on the technology infrastructure of major corporations in sectors as diverse as finance, technology, media, and chemicalThis is clearly an act of espionage by the Chinese Government. The bigger questions is whether these are the only companies targeted or the only ones discovered. This is not the first time, the chinese have tried something like this.http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7970471.stmThe researchers said hackers were apparently able to take control of computers belonging to several foreign ministries and embassies across the world using malicious software |
Quick tip for developers who use OS X | Bash, running in your terminal, understands both the Emacs and the Vi commands. By default is Emacs, so you can C-a (control-a) for beginning of line, C-p to go back in command line history, or C-r to search it.I prefer the Vi mode, though. Add to your .bashrcset -o viThen you can press escape to go from input mode to normal mode; there k will take you to the previous line in command line history, j to the next line, ^ and $ to the beginning and end of the line, /something will search something back.Editing is really fast; move by words with w (forward) and b (backward), do cw to replace a word, r to replace a letter, i to go back to input. It will remember the last editing command, just as Vi, and repeat it when you press . in normal mode. |
How to C in 2016 | Some of this seems like horrendously bad advice:- Using fixed width integers in for loops seems like a fabulous way to reduce the portability of code- the statements in "C allows static initialization of stack-allocated arrays" are _not_ equivalent, one is a bitwise zeroing while the other is arithmetic initialization. On some machines changing these statements blindly will cause a different bit pattern to end up in memory (because there are no requirements on the machine's representations for e.g. integers or NULL or ..). There are sound reasons why the bitwise approach could be preferred, for example, because a project has debug wrappers for memset that clearly demarcate uninitialized data- the statements in "C99 allows variable length array initializsers" aren't even slightly equivalent. His suggestion uses automatic storage (and subsequently a stack overflow triggered by user input -- aka. a security bug)- "There is no performance penalty for getting zero'd memory" this is bullshit. calloc() might optimize for the case where it is allocating from a page the OS has just supplied but I doubt any implementation ever bothered to do this, since it relies on the host OS to always zero new pages- "If a function accepts arbitrary input data and a length to process, don't restrict the type of the parameter." the former version is in every way more self-documenting and consistent with the apparent function of the procedure than his use of void. It also runs counter to a rule from slightly more conservative times: avoid void at all costs, since it automatically silences all casting warnings.Modern C provides a bunch of new things that make typing safer but none of those techniques are mentioned here. For example word-sized structs combined with struct literals can eliminate whole classes of historical bugs.On the fixed width integers thing, the size of 'int', 'long' and 'long long' are designed to vary according to the machine in use. On some fancy Intel box perhaps there is no cost to using a 64bit type all the time, but on a microcontroller you've just caused the compiler to inject a software arithmetic implementation into your binary (and your code is running 100x slower too). He doesn't even mention types like intfast_t designed for this case, despite explicitly indicating "don't write C if you have to", which in 2016 pretty commonly means you're targeting such a device |
DuckDuckGo Traffic | The results are good enough at that I use it exclusively now.In case y'all didn't know, DDG does some neat things like this:https://duckduckgo.com/?q=beautify+json&t=h_&ia=answerhttps://duckduckgo.com/?q=qr+hello+hn&atb=v123-2__&ia=answerhttps://duckduckgo.com/?q=url+unescape+Hello%2520HN&atb=v123...https://duckduckgo.com/?q=crontab+0+0+*+*+*+%2Fbin%2Fsh&atb=... |
Apple Sign In | Disposable, anonymous email forwarding is a massive step forward for privacy. I know we've all been doing it for a while, but this on a consumer level is fantastic. |
Penpot: Open-source design and prototyping platform | This is the beauty of FOSS. It might be rough at the edges but you can always have access to it and not have to worry about losing your daily driver (talking to you Figma). Every organization needs to start thinking about this and invest in good FOSS tools for any recent technology to avoid business continuity risk. |
Dutch government says no to backdoors, grants $540k to OpenSSL | I tried to open the (Dutch) DOCX that contains the official position paper of our government, but LibreOffice refuses to open it: File format error found at
SAXParseException: '[word/document.xml line 2]: unknown error', Stream 'word/document.xml', Line 2, Column 30060(row,col).
http://www.tweedekamer.nl/kamerstukken/brieven_regering/deta...Great. Usually OOXML Word files at least open in LibreOffice, but this one seems to have some unsolvable weirdness. I don't get why they don't offer a PDF download — it, at least, is an open format that can be reliably opened on any OS. Or offer a plain text version, or simply post the paper on their website in HTML. |
How Uber Used Secret “Greyball” Tool to Deceive Authorities Worldwide | How diabolical!In a world where privacy has been traded away for convenience, it's poetic justice where a startup uses data mining techniques to subvert the government. This is the same government that would have no issues to use the same techniques to spy on its own people for its own motives.I'm neither on Uber nor the government's side in this case, just simply making an observation. The lack of data privacy seems to be a double-edged sword for users and government/law enforcement alike. |
USB-C hubs and my slow descent into madness (2021) | If you want a decent dock you have to spend a bit of money. I went through this pain before accepting the cost and buying a CalDigit Thunderbolt 4 Element Hub[1]. Run's two 4k displays at 60Hz, any peripheral and charges my laptop.So good I bought a second.1. https://www.caldigit.com/thunderbolt-4-element-hub/ |
Facebook Whistleblower Leaks Thousands of Pages of Incriminating Internal Docs | I think a lot of people are choosing to ignore that a lot of companies have done things in the past that were not illegal at the time of action. However, those actions were later decided to be made illegal because the behavior was deemed to be antithetical to our values.For example, Standard Oil did not break any laws in its ruthless consolidation of the nascent oil industry. In fact, it exploited the law to allow it to grow into the monstrosity that it eventually became. In response, Congress passed the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890 which subsequently prevented the actions that Standard Oil had used to consolidate the market.There should be no question, that what FB is doing here, while not illegal, is highly dubious ethically. |
“Amateur” programmer fought cancer with 50 Nvidia Geforce 1080Ti | Recently a Chinese media interviewed me and I talked about a few side projects I have done in the past. I talked about the Neuralrad Mammo Screening project and Neuralrad multiple brain mets SRS platform. More awareness on radiation therapy to the general public will greatly help the community and we believe Stereotactic Radiosurgery (SRS) will eventually replace majority of the whole brain radiation therapy (WBRT) in the next five years.Here is the link to the original article:
https://www.toutiao.com/article/7094940100450107935/ |
Load Balancing | we are so stuck with this push request load balancing its crazy, if we just switch to pull instead of push things get much smoother, and resources get better utilizedyou cant reliably guess if the instance where you will push your request actually has capacity to handle it, even using ML to guess it will still have thrashing propertiesbut if you just let instances pull work, things work out for themselvessadly, the whole industry is stuck on http pushi was playing with it few years ago making a simple queue and wrote my ideas here: https://punkjazz.org/jack/we-got-it-all-wrong.txt and some basic benchmarks https://punkjazz.org/jack/we-got-it-all-wrong-2.txtin the same time, there is so much tooling for http, and its so natural to use it, that it is actually hard to switch to another transport layer, so now the best we have is some naive bayesian classifiers in the LB and some exponential backoffhere is the difference i had in timings using synchronous io queue vs http for 2 endpoints, one fast and one slow (endpoints had the same code, just transport was different) 2019/02/19 22:26:27 synchronous QUEUE ... 20000 messages, took: 29.95s, speed: 667.74 per second
- 0+10=9711 48.55% ******************************
- 10+ 5= 276 49.94%
- 15+ 8= 20 50.03%
- 23+12= 16 50.11%
- 35+18=3398 67.11% **********
- 53+27=6549 99.85% ********************
- 80+40= 30 100.00%
- 120+60= 0 100.00%
- 180+90= 0 100.00%
- 270+ 0= 0 100.00%
2019/02/19 22:26:56 http ... 20000 messages, took: 29.55s, speed: 676.91 per second
- 0+10=3274 16.37% ********************
- 10+ 5=1523 23.98% *********
- 15+ 8=4439 46.18% ****************************
- 23+12=4756 69.96% ******************************
- 35+18=3318 86.55% ********************
- 53+27=2037 96.73% ************
- 80+40= 581 99.64% ***
- 120+60= 70 99.99%
- 180+90= 2 100.00%
- 270+ 0= 0 100.00%
you can see how the fast endpoint is always fast with the queue transport, but with classic push load balancing it spills latency a lot, because the instance is sometime busy servicing the slow requestPS: this post is absolutely amazing! and the animations are brilliant! thanks a lot for making it |
Lenovo Caught Installing Adware on New Computers | This is much worse than just installing adware. They install a web proxy which MITMs all web connections, including HTTPS by means of a pre-installed trusted root certificate.The root certificate is the same across all installs, and the private key is present on the machine (necessarily, to operate the proxy):
https://twitter.com/fugueish/status/568258997578371072Someone will extract the private key in the next few hours, and then HTTPS will be basically completely broken for all Lenovo users -- anyone will be able to spoof any site to them.Uninstalling the app does NOT remove the certificate: https://twitter.com/metsfan/status/568265468173107200On the bright side, Firefox does not use the system certificates (it has its own list) and Chrome will no doubt push an update to block the certificate promptly. |
Announcing new tools, forums, and features | Some nice improvements here. It appears, though, that Projects suffer from the same problem we've had with Issues: they are limited to one repo.I know there are some tools to manage Issues across repos, but for the most part, the tools seem to assume you work on only one repo, or that milestones only affect a single repo.I would love to see projects/milestones become more capable when dealing with cross-repo issues. |
Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS | Just to be clear: This service is offered by Amazon/AWS themselves, it isn't a third party. That's a question I had when I first clicked, which is why I am answering it here.One big "gotcha" for AWS newbies which I cannot tell if this addresses: Does this set or allow the user to set a cost ceiling?AWS have offered billing alerts since forever. They'll also occasionally refund unexpected expenses (one time thing). But they've never offered a hard "suspend my account" ceiling that a lot of people with limited budgets have asked for.They claim this is a competitor for Digital Ocean, but with DO what they say they charge is what they actually charge. I'm already seeing looking through the FAQ various ways for this to exceed the supposed monthly charges listed on the homepage (and no way to stop that).Why even offer a service like this if you cannot GUARANTEE that the $5 they say they charge is all you'll ever get charged? How is this different from AWS if a $5 VPS can cost $50, or $500?That's what Amazon is missing. People want ironclad guarantees about how much this can cost under any and all circumstances. I'd welcome an account suspend instead of bill shock. |
Upwork asking me for a $12.5k refund as the client was using someone else’s card | Remember, companies will always look after themselves before anyone else. If Upwork is the middleman here providing a payment platform, then I'd expect them to swallow the cost of card fraud, not the freelancer. I suspect individual freelancers have a theoretical dollar value in their calculations and it's never going to be bigger than the company accepting a financial risk.I do wonder why the author is still on Upwork, their rating & exposure on there must be worth more to them than working several weeks for free, but personally I'd walk. I also don't understand why the pay back is not pro-rata instead of full time, allowing freelancers in this position to earn some money to pay the bills whilst paying back the chargeback (although they shouldn't be paying it at all). If the author is in the same country as the client then they should also be taking legal action to reclaim the money (which again, Upwork should be doing). |
Social media is a cause, not a correlate, of mental illness in teen girls | I'm still reading it, but this is great so far. As a father to four little girls, though, it makes me feel really defeated. I can already see that social media has eroded my wife's mental health. I just don't know what to do in the next few years when our girls approach the age when everyone else will get an iPhone and have an Instagram account. I want to say no, but that leads to many other issues, including what the author describes perfectly in this passage:"Suppose that... a 12-year-old girl decided to quit all social media platforms. Would her mental health improve? Not necessarily. If all of her friends continued to spend 5 hours a day on the various platforms then she’d find it difficult to stay in touch with them. She’d be out of the loop and socially isolated." |
Fire declared in OVH SBG2 datacentre building | The classic "lp0 on fire" error message comes to mind:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lp0_on_fireReally though, I feel truly awful for anyone affected by this. The post recommends implementing a disaster recovery plan. The truth is that most people don't have one. So, let's use this post to talk about Disaster Recovery Plans!Mine: I have 5 servers at OVH (not at SBG) and they all back up to Amazon S3 or Backblaze B2, and I also have a dedicated server (also OVH/Kimsufi) that gets the backups. I can redeploy in less than a day on fresh hardware, and that's good enough for my purposes. What's YOUR Disaster Recovery Plan? |
I won the local election, but my township ignored the results and state law | Local politics is absurdly corrupt in many cases as nobody pays attention. |
DuckDuckGo vs Google | "Google would be an elephant while DuckDuckGo is a mosquito (this is not to emphasize; I’m actually making things better for DuckDuckGo)."Why would this guy go out of his way to say this metaphor is actually literally informative and generous towards DuckDuckGo while apparently having exerted no mental effort and being incorrect by orders of magnitude on his own data?If you're most generous to the writer, you get 12 million hits /day vs 13 billion hits /day according to his data from Wolfram, for a ratio of ~1/1100, which applied to a pygmy elephant of 5500 lbs yields a corresponding weight of ~5 lbs for the mosquito, or over 2,000,000 mg, versus the average mosquito weight of about 5 mg. Even if he meant a small 2000 kilogram pygmy elephant and a 20mg elephant mosquito, he's still 5 orders of magnitude too generous towards Google in mass comparison in his metaphor in which he is "actually making things better for DuckDuckGo".I think most people think of animals like African Elephants when they hear "elephant", though, in which case you're looking at a 13,000 pound animal versus a ~12 pound one if you use hits as your metric, or a ~95 lb one if you go by visits as your metric.So an actually fair metaphor is if Google's an elephant, DuckDuckGo is somewhere between a goose and a hyena. Better watch out, Google. |
Hunting Down My Son's Killer | As a father with a son with severe autism (not to suggest it's equivalent to Bertrand's condition), there is an important lesson here that might not be apparent at first read.Before you have children, understand that it's for the rest of your life. Really understand the impact. Your concerns are second, beyond anything you've ever understood. Marriage is about compromise. Children, however, afford no such privilege.Make no mistake, it's worth it. Looking into those eyes, seeing that smile. Getting your first smile, laugh, hug, or kiss. Nothing compares. |
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