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Authoritarian nations are turning the internet into a weapon | Yea, must fight back! |
The new business of AI and how it’s different from traditional software | I worked on the recommender and personalization stuff for a midsized fashion retailer. It took me about 2 years to figure out most of the work done by our ML & big data teammates was pure fiction.I believe, but have no conceivable way to prove, that all of the easy wins have been won by the first movers.It's weird. I have almost irrational optimism about the unbounded potential for deep learning, ML, big data, and so forth. Amazing, almost magical, stuff like KP figuring out that Vioxx was killing their patients once they had enough data and asked the right questions.But I'm also completely skeptical about using these techniques for culture and entertainment and advertising. Methinks that ceiling has already been hit and there's nothing on the horizon.Too bad. I really wanted our internal version of Stitchfix to actually work. Now I'm not sure it's possible. Or that we (or maybe just me) were asking the wrong questions. |
Understanding the bin, sbin, usr/bin, usr/sbin split (2010) | The confusing and nonsensical (not immediately obvious by typing ls and reading) folder structure in unix/linux/etc has always been one of my biggest complaints with it as an operating system.I consider it to be a warning about the importance of refactoring and renaming things sooner rather than later, because the longer that something sticks around, the more dependencies it develops and the harder it is to change. |
MIT-licensed high-quality SVG icons | The year is 2020. Even icons have npm install. *eyeroll* |
California governor issues statewide 'stay at home' order | This is effectively stopping the economy and creates all sorts of rippling effects.US has awful social support and this will hit the working population really hard.The best case I see is we can ramp up testing kits and masks to 100s of millions. Test everyone repeatedly. Track and quarantine rigorously. At the same time give monthly stipends to everyone while “sit in a hole or die” order is going on.Make sure banks don’t foreclose, people still have insurance and jobs (too late for some parts like hotels and restaurants).I can see why people are panicking and buying guns in poor neighborhoods. We’re putting people on survival mode.We first downplayed this for a long time when we had a 2 month head start (Thanks Trump and team) and still feel unprepared for the worst. |
Show HN: DNS over Wikipedia | Does this comply with the terms of service?
I know this won’t be a popular reply and that’s fine, but I just want to know whether your admittedly intriguing concept isn’t taking the piss :) |
My blog is now generated by Google Docs | Hah, interesting project. I built something similar a while ago (https://github.com/nicolas-fricke/google-doc-blog) using article_json: https://github.com/Devex/article_jsonWith that, you also get support for embedded objects like Youtube videos and the like :)Feel free to reach out for more info! |
Make educated wireless router/AP upgrade decisions | > 650 → 390: MAC efficiency
> there are 'housekeeping' packets that MUST be sent at the SLOWEST possible modulationTrue, but it's actually the slowest supported/enabled modulation, which can be increased. In a crowded 2.4GHz environment (1Mbps min. modulation), raising it to 12Mbps or more can cut 50+% fluff (SSID, ARP, data broadcasts..) down to > 2166 → 1083: Client MIMO
> You must use the minimum MIMO common to both devicesMU-MIMO should enable the router to split its numerous MIMO channels to multiple devices with less MIMO channels. I have no idea whether it actually works. |
How GPT3 Works – Visualizations and Animations | It has such a confusing name.. I always think this is something interesting, and then it's just more ML bunk. |
Uber CEO says its service will probably shut down temporarily in California | California is bullying freelance. And honestly I don't see the realistic end goal. They can bring on all their drivers full time it would be a nightmare to pay and manage for a company that makes no money. Or uber treats driver worst and the quality of rides gets worse by lowering standard. |
New Zealand is about to test long-range wireless power transmission | This would be great for crowd control. |
How Do Routers Work, Really? | Click is a very good software router to read and learn: https://github.com/kohler/clickIt can be more than a router though. |
rg3d: Rust 3D game engine with an FPS demo game and scene editor | This is a excellent project, you should also make support via github possible for those who don't want to use patreon. |
SQLite now allows multiple recursive SELECT statements in a single recursive CTE | Nice, I was about to pull RedisGraph in to a small project using SQLite to do two graph queries. |
Apple’s longtime supplier accused of using forced labor in China | Apple also lobbied against the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. Reprehensible.https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-nike-coca-cola-lobbied...Passed the House, has not yet passed in the Senate.https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/6210 |
A single laser fired through a keyhole can expose everything inside a room | Misleading title. It can't see _everything_. It only works for dynamic objects. |
New alternatives to HSL and HSV that better match color perception | Art teacher speaking. Hope the author is reading.The figures directly under the sentence ‘Here is the sRGB gamut plotted for set of hues…’ have real utility which the author may have missed. They clearly show that the peak saturation value has a different lightness value for each hue. For example, a peak saturated yellow is required to be brighter than a peak saturated blue.Explaining this to designers can be a real grind. These figures would make the task a lot easier.I really wish for a color picker that did not normalize the color space (as in the figures that follow). |
Firefox Browser: best for a free web | The main problem with Firefox is Gecko.Technically it's a great rendering engine, fast, standards-compliant, maybe only slightly more buggy than Webkit. Unfortunately it has a different set of bugs than webkit. Web developers have just so much time to debug the apps. Once the app works for ~90% of users on webkit, spending as much time or more testing and debugging for ~7% of FF users is not always justified.This is a catch 22: FF users get more bugs - more pressure to move to Chrome, fewer users on FF - less money to develop Gecko leading to more bugs. My prediction is that FF will either drop Gecko or die. |
Designing Beautiful Shadows in CSS | "Physically Based Rendering in CSS" sounds kind of silly, but here we goFirst, the width of the blurred region (penumbra). Imagine putting a camera on the ground and pointing it at the sun. By moving the camera in and out of shadow, it can see more or less of the sun. Intuitively we know that the higher the box is, the bigger the penumbra. The sun has an apparent size of .53°, and so does the region of partial shadow descending from the edge of the box. Some trigonometry later, and The ratio of the width of the penumbra to the elevation of the box is .00925 or about 1%Next, we can calculate what portion of the sun is visible from the penumbra. The amount of sun visible is a portion of a circle, so we do an integral of a circle function and hoo boy would that be a pain to type on mobile. The graph is sort of a `smoothstep` shape, but is very close to linear |
“This project will only take 2 hours” | This just highlights difference between a student project proof-of-concept and a product... and thus, you need to know what kind of software you're developing.Monitoring the clipboard periodically, determining if there's a URL, and recording it somewhere if it is - that's easy. If it's a student project to show that something can be done, then you are DONE.If it's a tool that you hope others will actually use, then yes, you need more. |
How I helped build a profitable MVP over a weekend | I think food delivery business is all about cheap delivery guys. If we look deeper - he profited from restaurant fees minus cost of delivery. |
Ask HN: Why doesn't anyone create a search engine comparable to 2005 Google? | An end-to-end machine learning system should compress all the web into a good search engine soon. |
Busy Simulator: Feign importance with repeating app sounds | Wow, that was triggering. Great work though — I shall use this for mental resilience training. |
Sequencing your DNA with a USB dongle and open source code | There is a 3+ year old London-based project, partnered with an established genome sequencing company, doing something highly interesting.They sell swab kits directly, or via NFT purchase, for ~$500 for a 30x near complete sequencing (that's 30 passes for over 99.9% vs 0.2% for 23andme et al). The results are stored in an encrypted AMD SEV-E vault to be accessed by big pharma or individuals, only for specific markers, in exchange for the $GENE token paid directly to the genome owner. Figures touted are $50-80 per request. This token is burned as kits are sold, can be staked, offers rewards like DAO membership, can be gifted to charities researching specific diseases in various populations. It can act as a form of UBI in unbanked populations and puts your DNA back in your control.To me it's the best use of web3 tech I've come across, so disclaimer, I am invested and a DAO member, but it's early in the project still. They are not quite ready for mass marketing. They are moving over to Polygon for very low transaction fees in January, will be launching the first joint NFT/kit sale (the next season might include personal genetically generated art) to fill the vaults with 10k sequenced genomes. They are over half way already through work with charities, but that is the magic number before big pharma can start making queries. Right now though they are quietly building and preparing before marketing plans kick in later in Q1.Take a look at https://genomes.io where everything is explained in more detail, the team are presented and the tokenomics set out.TL;dr - for $500 right now you can get your entire genome sequenced, stored in a vault to earn you passive income, if you agree to each query. But wait for the NFT vs buying directly, it will have more perks. |
Exposing a web service with Cloudflare Tunnel | Does anyone have experience with software you can self-host a dial-out tunnel to achieve the same? I'm looking into a similar setup (connecting from an internal site to a private cloud, rather than to the Internet) and would prefer not to write the software myself if I can avoid it: network programming is tricky; network programming with failover, doubly so.It's a real system with various security and compliance concerns; Cloudflare and dev-focused services like Inlet or simple SSH forwarding are unfortunately not going to work. |
Moving money internationally | This post knows nothing about the subject it talks about.Reads like "Russia stronk, Russia do not care" kind of propaganda, SWIFT is exclusively used for wire transfers and exclusion from it leaves companies to conduct their business via Cash-only, just look at the Iran, they only trade with cash when it comes to exports/imports. |
The Joy of Small Projects | A small project [1] that I use often on projects and teaching is a text-based ERD editor. Being text-based means I can write it with minimal tooling (with vim or vscode) and in git-friendly format. Since the students (and myself) requested more functions, I keep enhancing it occupationally but it is already useful since day-1 :)I think the key motivation is being able to see the actual users (ideally also being the active user yousrelf)https://erd.surge.sh/ |
It took me 10 years to understand entropy | Shannon called the function "entropy" and used it as a measure of "uncertainty," interchanging the two words in his writings without discrimination |
Policy punishes disabled people who save more than $2k | I went to a special high school for kids with autistic spectrum disorder and we were basically all educated and given assistance for during transition to graduation getting SSI immediately.So I've had SSI my whole life essentially. I've had to live with these restrictions since I was basically 20. I moved out from living with my dad only a handful of years ago. I'm 33 now and I get 870 something dollars a month plus an extra from the state itself and I get supplemental nutrition food stamps and I also get my rent lowered and mostly taken care of and I just have to pay $103 a month for rent.Doing literally anything that would be considered taking in income would just be stupid for me to do because of any of the penalization that comes with it. Saving money would just be not a good idea even though it would be a great idea to have some sort of a safety net... But my stepmother and actual father have things just in case for that for me so I'm lucky in that regard...I have extreme anxiety when it comes to managing any of this or managing a lot of things especially over the phone and my dad has had to manage most of that for me directly and I've had to sign a lot of paperwork to make sure that he can talk for me. I basically consider if I didn't have him that I would be homeless or dead right now.I had a single job during my adult life and I was only a couple years ago. It was through a job placement program for people with disabilities and I was working for some local racing engine shop that needed someone to help with computer things. I helped build them a website with e-commerce stuff all over it and made sure everything was following all the right rules to do all of that I help them build a Facebook presence... A whole lot of stuff in just a couple weeks. I was a brand new person working there out of only like five people that work there and I was the only one who had a brand new computer that I had to build myself out of parts they bought for me that I asked for... But none of that really matters because I realize that the woman at the job placement who managed my case was dating the owner of the engine shops son. As soon as I found this out that just gave me extreme anxiety every day and I felt like I was being just used and I quit. I'm not going to get exploited like that being somebody's computer monkey boy with no proper management. |
Modern city dwellers have lost about half their gut microbes | I found them in the seat of an Uber during spring break |
Homeland security workers indicted in scheme to silence China critics in U.S. | Ah so the US is becoming China. |
How did REST come to mean the opposite of REST? | Don't care about the semantics or grammar-- I just need a way for the UI to run a function on a server. |
Lex Fridman Podcast #309 – John Carmack | My Programming gods:
- Jef Dean
- John Carmack |
Docker Compose best practices for dev and prod | I wonder if this works with overrides:docker-compose.yml (build current dockerfile)
docker-compose.image.yml (fetch stable image)To avoid duplication, the second file only specifies the image. |
Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on? | I wish more people would use captions in public spaces, rather than setting their phones to maximum volume. |
Ask HN: Ads triggered by WhatsApp “end to end encrypted” messages? | In my case i observe this was happening because of keyboard i was using (Gboard in my case), generally they keep track of all the words we are typing (for dictionary or suggestion purpose??) and that is used for ads targeting. |
A hundred UK companies sign up for four-day week with no loss of pay | You can already try that by taking 4-8 days (depending how many bank holidays are around) out of your 28 days and work for two months 4-days a week. I did so in July and June and it was a blast.From my tests, as long as you manage other people expectations, nobody will notice or care if you’re not there in IT.And it’s not only 4 days of work. It’s also 3 days of rest. It’s obviously for the same reason but still… it does feel more powerful once you feel it on yourself. Distressing is amazing.Once you try you will never want to go back.Tbh I already work 100% remotely with flexible hours I want, and as long as I deliver nobody cares how much I work. Why anyone would? Seriously, who cares? As long as value is delivered: nobody. |
Unredacter: Never use pixelation as a redaction technique | Got it. So from now on, I will overlay to-be-redacted text with a pixelated version of some different text. Labour intensive? Maybe.But just imagine the face of someone getting Rickrolled in this fashion. |
1500 Archers on a 28.8: Network Programming in Age of Empires and Beyond (2001) | An RTS we developed just recently (Iron Harvest) is still based on the same basic principle. But instead of peer to peer we use a "smart" proxy server that receives the commands of all clients and sends the entire sequence back to the client. That way if one client has a high ping the other players latency isn't affected. |
Parse, don't validate (2019) | >it’s only three words long:
Parse, don’t validate.My own English parser is telling me it's actually four words, however.Your mileage may validate that differently. ;) |
Anyone else witnessing a panic inside NLP orgs of big tech companies? | As someone who's a crap NLP practitioner, everything is just fine and dandy.I've never really had the gear or the skills to put together anything that improves over what I can pull from huggingface.What I do have, and virtually none of my (not remotely technical) colleagues have, is a clue what to do with all this stuff.They reckon it's about churning out poems and boilerplate text, the minute I figured it could give me whatever json I could reasonably ask for from a source doc, I was overjoyed.I see more things I can be doing now, not a risk of being replaced. |
Live Starlink Satellite and Coverage Map | https://orbita.terrestre.arThat's a site I've made to track satellites. Yet another one! It's a 2D map, where you choose / fast-forward time, see the ground track prediction, and horizon radius. |
Dell goes back on WFH pledge, forces employees to come back to the office | Work from home does not work well if labor productivity is changing rapidly... |
Update: U+237C ⍼ &Angzarr; | this looks like a variant of thunderhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Weather_symbolsNEW2.png?u... |
2,200 forgotten vintage computers from a barn in Massachusetts | "[...] where retro tech collectors hid." In the dark? Quality journalism. |
Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber? | I just want to say that I was overwhelmed by the engagement this post got. Thanks for everybody who took time to respond / share their thoughts & feedback.I've been in the process of moving so I haven't read through many of the responses, but it seems as though there was plenty of interaction between others which is cool!I'll definitely review everything I can over the next week and follow up, I'm genuinely interested in understanding how others perceive this situation as well. |
I walked across Luxembourg | Wow, that looks like a lot of fun! Maybe I'd try and do something like that over a week.I also looked and Rhode Island is 70km north to south. I don't know if it has as many pubs and hotels as Matt encountered, though. |
In a Git repository, where do your files live? | https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2Git internals chapter. You'll learn more than you ever wanted to know about how git works.Plus this classic: https://tom.preston-werner.com/2009/05/19/the-git-parable.ht... |
JavaScript Garden | Thanks for the tips, very intresting |
I wanna work at Instagram | Or if anyone wants a date, she's looking for that too....http://www.okcupid.com/profile/nettatheninja |
Airbnb Victim Speaks Again: Homeless, Scared And Angry | I'm sorry, but very little of this story rings true for me. "EJ" reminds me of a roommate I had in college who was a serious drama queen. If she felt wronged by you there was no remedy short of spending every moment lavishing her attention and apologizes (and who has time for that?) that would appease here and it was never enough. I don't doubt AirBnB offered assistance and "EJ" herself said so. However, with a drama queen it is never about finite forms of attention (money, vindication, etc) but renewable sources where she is able to maintain victimhood without taking a shred of responsibility for her part (no matter how small) in the events that are alleged to have unfolded. I mean what kind of drama queen psycho ex carries on about a CEO wanting to meet her for coffee, but not asking about her feelings? What are they dating or something? Nobody cares about her "feelings" feelings are transient and not fact. What they want is to solve the problem and since they are men, they're having some real problems understanding what a losing game they're playing when the opposing side is a drama queen. |
“I hate almost all software” — Ryan Dahl | GNU is Not Unix |
Python Requests: HTTP for Humans | Trying to use the requests module yields: File "/usr/lib/python2.6/cookielib.py", line 38, in
from calendar import timegm
ImportError: cannot import name timegmfor me.On two different machines, one OSX SL with Python 2.6 from MacPorts and the other Ubuntu 10.04.3 LTS with Python 2.6 via aptitude.Can not find any solution for this via Google and its siblings.I'm stuck :(-jsl |
Learning C with gdb | don't forget about panel mode in gdb!ctrl-x, ato toggle it on/off |
AskPatents.com: A Stack Exchange To Prevent Bad Patents | Check out Joel's Intro http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/09/askpatents-com-a-stack... |
EA refuses to refund user for SimCity, threatens account ban | I'm watching this, sipping a cocktail and waiting for the crack to come out. |
Postgres on the GPU | interesting, I'm also currently working with GPU |
Lying Microsoft Advertising | They removed the screen images and changed the copy so it says>The ASUS VivoTab Smart is lighter than the iPad, has more ports, works with more printers, lets you see two apps at once, and runs Microsoft Office and other desktop programs.Glad this 346 upvotes and 216 comments compared to the Xbox threads that were flagged off the frontpage. Great discussion Hacker News! |
Super successful companies | This is a great essay for any startup person who's actually serious about creating, advising, or investing in the next Waze in Tel Aviv, Oculus Rift in Orange County, California, or Dropbox in the Bay Area.Of course we'd prefer a deep dive, but that requires a lot more thinking, data, reasoning and work.You're talking about a book versus a blog.I really liked this essay.Yes, some of the stuff is redundant, but there's enough modifications and it is compact enough that this is a very useful list.HN folks:If you can do better, do it.I see a lot of whining and complaining on here and no alternative solutions that are better. If you have something better to say, say it. If you've read something better, provide the link.Otherwise, be a little more appreciative that someone who knows a lot more than 99.99% of the folks in startups is sharing his insights concisely for free. |
Fake Name Generator | Major issue here is that the site is linking to www.ssnregistry.org which is pretty obviously a honeypot for SSN numbers... |
Apache Wave | I don't understand this submission. There's no news here, it's an "about" page from 2010. What am I missing? |
Lenovo's Response to Its Dangerous Adware Is Astonishingly Clueless | if anyone knows someone who has purchased an infected lenova with superfish, send me an email. My wife is a class action attorney and is conducting an investigation in the matter. Eire1130 (at) gmail (Dot) com |
Running Lisp in Production | Once you go deep enough you are fucked no matter what language you choose. Might as well pick one that doesn't beat you up too much. |
Photos from inside the Baikonur Cosmodrome | Okay, there has to be someone capable of taking care of the orbiters around? How much would just a minimum amount of maintenance really cost? I think this a real world manifestation of state secrecy and its a shame.On a similar note, I was very happy to see that parts of both Columbia and Challenger will be on display for the public. |
The Battle for Wesnoth needs help | I'd like to explore the possibility of contributing to its development and maintenance. I may not be an "experienced" C++ programmer, but I am an experienced programmer looking for more experience with C++. |
Yahoo Releases the Largest-Ever Machine Learning Dataset for Researchers | 1) Begin registration to a community college.2) Get .edu email address3) Profit |
How Elon Musk Stole My Car | Pretty amazing how organizational incompetence took what could have been a minor inconvenience or even a positive (your car gets driven by Elon for 50-100km is probably a plus, if it is already used) to a pissed off customer.Otoh, I'd far prefer a company screw over a rich guy who is the very definition of an equal party to contract/informed consumer. The "buy here pay here" used car dealers catering to poor, relatively uninformed, and powerless consumers do things far worse than this as routine business practice. |
What Happened: Adobe Creative Cloud Update Bug | I got super lucky and happened to see the original tweet about this. Immediately ran the terminal commands. |
Universities Are Becoming Billion-Dollar Hedge Funds with Schools Attached | Would like to offer an argument that the Ivy League schools that hire hedge funds also are very good at subsidizing tuition. When I went to Princeton, only 40% of students paid the full "45k" tuition, and those were families that were so well off that they don't mind the 45k at all. I would say the average tuition paid at Princeton is closer to 20k. So there does seem to be such a correlation: rich schools -> using HFs -> make a bunch of money -> fund students from poorer backgrounds to attend the school. |
We’re pretty happy with SQLite and not urgently interested in a fancier DBMS | For everyone loving SQLite, you should consider donating to them. I remember a post this last year about the maintainers working on it full time, but making much less than most of us probably do. |
Blind Apple engineer is transforming the tech world at only 22 | This reminds me of a few things with respect to Apple and accessibility (listed in chronological order here).* In a speech Tim Cook made in December 2013 on receiving the "International Quality of Life Awards" at Auburn University [1] (link goes to the exact time in the video when this was said):> "These values guide us to make our products accessible for everyone. People with disabilities often find themselves in a struggle to have their human dignity acknowledged, they frequently are left in the shadows of technological advancements that are a source of empowerment and attainment for others, but Apple’s engineers push back against this unacceptable reality, they go to extraordinary lengths to make our products accessible to people with various disabilities from blindness and deafness to various muscular disorders."* In early 2014, in the context of an NCPPR representative asking Apple CEO Tim Cook to "commit right then and there to doing only those things that were profitable", this is how Tim Cook responded [2]:> When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind," he said, "I don't consider the bloody ROI."* In July 2015, marking 25 years of the "Americans with Disability Act", Tim Cook tweeted: [3]> "Accessibility rights are human rights. Celebrating 25yrs of the ADA, we’re humbled to improve lives with our products. #ADA25"Regardless of profit motives and the higher prices of iDevices (in comparison to others), Apple is leading on a few different fronts, one of them being accessibility and its commitment to improving it continuously. This kind of inclusivity, which should be a default, is what progress of humankind is about.[1]: https://youtu.be/dNEafGCf-kw?t=272[2]: https://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/tim-cook-soundly-rej...[3]: https://twitter.com/tim_cook/status/624584736862679040 |
NoScript is harmful and promotes malware | Clickbaity title |
Maslow CNC | The Kickstarter is live
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1830738289/maslow-cnc-a... |
Why Tim Cook Is Steve Ballmer and Why He Still Has His Job at Apple | Hasn't Microsoft done the right thing here though as a company for the long-term: visionary CEO leaves meaning potential for great risk to the company > put someone in place who shores up the finances > once finances are in a great position bring a visionary in and change things around again. It reads to me like Microsoft's long-term strategy as a company is actually really good. They must have known they could not continue their dominance but they could continue to be relevant if they had the finances to back it up. Swapping one visionary CEO for another could is a risk because big ideas don't always work (if executed poorly).For any company, a charismatic dominant CEO leaving causes instability a board would be foolish not to try and stabilise things at the company before moving on again. A CEO does not act in isolation even though this article paints it like that and takes guidance from their board. |
Visual Studio for Mac Preview | I was like what the hell is Mac Preview? |
The origin story of Google Analytics | "Now that I’ve moved out of San Francisco, I wear Google shirts a lot more often."This made me laugh. |
UW engineers achieve Wi-Fi at 10,000 times lower power | It would be great if this could be used in (new) mobile phones and tablets in a low power mode when you don't need high data rates. |
Using Immutable Caching to Speed Up the Web | A very creditable action, cheers to Mozilla!This increases the democratization of the web and allows small fries to have a disproportionately larger footprint. |
Secret docs reveal: an FBI with vast hidden powers | Look at what can be accomplished with some fear-mongering and millions of apathetic citizens. The intelligence community must be so proud of themselves. |
Can sleep deprivation cure depression? | Depression is a symptom of sleep apnea, which is essentially sleep deprivation. In fact, the disease was only uncovered because psychiatrists at Stanford were noticing that all their depression patients were complaining about their sleep. |
The thriving black market of John Deere tractor hacking | 1. John Deere is right and protecting themselves and trying to be risk averse.2. The farmers are rightfully indignant about being locked out of their own machines. Farmers are risk averse too.Never the twain shall meet.It's the tech and scale that is wrong.The field of ag isn't suitable because of the nature of work especially during harvest.Maybe all smart machines should only be leased out. It is logical but that would never sit well with farmers because that is trusting someone who doesn't understand farming.'Smart farm machinery' isn't useful unless it can be repaired by 'the cloud'(as it were).Your life will/can go on without your iPhone. Without farm machinery(800-1000 acres is a 'small farm'), you are toast. The farm is toast. Income is toast.Although, I wonder how farm insurance treats smart machines.Smart farming machinery isn't really all that smart. Yet. |
Banks scramble to fix old systems as IT 'cowboys' ride into sunset | Interesting how COBOL still stays relevant till this day. "They don't make 'em like they used to" is a cliche more commonly heard for hardware rather than of software. |
How I Made My Own iPhone in China [video] | How much fully refurbished iPhone 6S will cost here? |
Data structures and algorithms interview questions and their solutions | Dear HN,Please stop telling companies not to use this method of interview.Sincerely, Michael.I use it to filter myself out before wasting anyone's time.What I see here is an AND gate, and their use of this process itself triggers the false in my own filters-for-job-positions system.I see it as an uniform filter. The company is filtering me out, or in. And, if I understand the reality of their options for filtering methods, I can use that information to filter them back. Interestingly enough, this one is pretty uniform for me, if they use the method of out-of-a-book problems in either an on-the-whiteboard or pair-programming session, they have solved the problem of whether I want to work in that position without my having to trouble myself with memorizing problems to answer, nor waste their time screening me.The filter I am applying here is against the out-of-the-book part of this. If a company wanted to provide a previously solved bug in a section of their own code, with enough information to debug but perhaps not enough testing written into the system, to me this would not filter that position out. As long as the job would be similar in setup to the methods used during the interview this would be fine by me. Difficult, as the level of chaos internally to any interviewee is very high, and most positions would not be nearly as chaotic as the induced level this hiring process creates.I think asking on-the-board questions, or running some pair programming, is a filter for perspective, and attempts to identify how an applicant handles chaos.To put it another way, the company wants people who when they hear an alarm will file out of the business in an orderly fashion, doing that job that has out-of-a-book interviews during hiring. I personally walk towards alarms, not away, and am plenty happy not to be stuck in a position that isn't supposed to have someone like me in it.My system is tragically flawed, of course. A company could easily use an interview process they consider arbitrary to filter the lowest tier of applicants (non-tech people fishing for a few months paid internet browsing), and I could, not recognizing the insignificance of it, preselect them false when they would have stopped that interview after ten minutes and hired me on a handshake. |
Uber’s Anthony Levandowski out as Advanced Technologies lead amid legal fight | Another day, another scandal. |
Esoteric programming paradigms | I would add pictorial programming languages, such as ProGraph if you want a really unusual way to program. Object oriented, but inherently dataflow. Loops were very weird though.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prograph |
Open Source Datasets | This brings up a huge point about how important data sets are to analysis and machine learning. There are so many libraries out there that make learning algorithms quick to run, and the absolute most important part of a project of that type is correct and formatted data. |
Vladimir Voevodsky has died | Comments from the members of Homotopy Type Theory - Google Groups.https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/homotopytypetheory/K... |
Blockchains explained visually (part 1 of 2) | Nice and eloquent! Will read also other articles. |
My Journey to a Better Language Learning System | Reminds me of my own experience. I "beat" Duolingo French, but not conversational at all. I can ask the perfect question, but can't understand the answer. Most of the time, no one can even understand my pronunciation. |
Volkswagen Official Gets 7-Year Term in Diesel-Emissions Cheating | Really glad consequences are being held for a person who also benefited from it before. |
What Spectre and Meltdown Mean for WebKit | Good work WebKit team in putting this together, it's just as good as Raspberry Pi's note on why it isn't affected by Spectre & Meltdown - https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/why-raspberry-pi-isnt-vulne...Of-course here, the mitigation are being detailed as well. |
Ask HN: What's the recommended method of adding authentication to a REST API? | From the cheap seats (as I am a liberal arts major) and currently an entrepreneur trying to launch some microservices for my resume editing and other professional services business using R-project and the plumbing api creator package. What about a fairly lengthy random password provided to clients (human beings) they input into the intake form using Typeform, then the underlying code checks for it in the "authorized" file and removes it after 1 time use? The form feeds the api inputs directly.TIA. |
Interactive map of Linux kernel | I love Linux!this map is very useful |
The Cost of Developers | Pretty Apple-oriented article.Sure, Apple has created a platform, but at which cost? You are obliged to develop for iOS, OSX only having an Apple computer.
The platform has no escape rooms.Windows has extended the .Net to run even on Linux and you can build Windows applications from other OSes as well.
The flexibility is in the tooling and MS knows it - see how dramatically improved Visual Studio in latest releases and now compare it with Xcode: what's new in Xcode 10? The Dark mode, what else?The author still forgets that actually the ultimate gaming platform is still a PC with Windows. Mobile gaming has improved, but the best gaming experience (VR and not) runs on bare metal PCs.Apple just decided to ditch OpenGL and OpenCL in favour of Metal - this will backfire in the near future, because developers look for easy tooling which allow them to use fewer but high quality APIs and not three thousands (e.g. Vulkan, UWP). |
A mysterious grey-hat is patching people's outdated MikroTik routers | Would have been nice if he got around to the router at our office, we got cryptojacked: https://imgur.com/a/Q7Pmxth |
California’s Monarch Butterfly Population Hits Record Low | I planted butterfly bushes and milkweed to attract more butterflies in our area. After my city started spraying city-wide for mosquitoes, the butterflies and bees vanished. |
MIDI 2.0 Prototyping announced | > All companies that develop MIDI products are encouraged to join the MMA to participate in the future development of the specificationThe good news: a new enhanced MIDI spec is in the works!The bad news: you're gonna have to fight for it. |
It’s Time to Move on from Two Phase Commit | If you read it closely, this is very similar to RAMP transaction. Both has pretty significant write amplification for storing transaction metadata and multiple versions of each key. By storing txn metadata and multiple versions, it provides many nice attributes like non-blocking, concurrent transactions, etc.The difference between Abadi's proposal and RAMP is that it moves the "second phase" to the worker, which performs the remote read, to figure out the txn decision.I think this proposal should be better compared to RAMP instead of 2pc. And even in RAMP paper, it states that this doesn't solve all the problems. E.g. how would you do the traditional read-modify-writes? |
Second-Order Thinking: What Smart People Use to Outperform (2016) | This is interesting, I'm pretty sure we all do this to a large extent, I would say one thing that I've noticed when everything was going sideways was I learnt that in the absence of a good viable outcome doing nothing was a very effective strategy.Not without its risks either, but in some cases my act of doing nothing allowed what I had done to progress (where I knew it would not have a detrimental impact and couldn't see any path forward that was effective, I just circled the wagons and waited. Surprisingly effective. |
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