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Publicly Funded Research Should Be Publicly Available | "Be publicly available" you mean available to everybody on earth even though they have not funded it ? |
Elon Musk on How to Build the Future | It always saddens me when I see a slew of Debbie Downer comments from the HN crowd."Yes, he ushered in the electric car revolution, but the production carbon footprint is still huge!""Yes, he's building rockets, but he took a bunch of government money!""Yes, he's paving the way to Mars, but what has he done for world hunger?"And it not just with Musk, but really with anyone who has been successful. I would have thought that the technologists were above such petty envy. We're here to improve humanity's lot, aren't we? |
Questions | > Why are there so many successful startups in Stockholm?Several reasons. First, you need to recognize that any Sweden-based startup will, when it gets to be known internationally, have a Stockholm-based office. So it's not about a city of 1 million inhabitants, it's a country of 10 million that's the true number here. As an example, I believe Spotify opened their original offices in both Stockholm and Göteborg more or less simultaneously.With that said, a commonly stated reason for why Sweden in general has such a high prevalence of tech startups comes from a bunch of fortuitious decisions in the 90s and 00s. In 1998 Sweden's government started a program that allowed employers to sell their employees computers under a tax free scheme (the so called Hem-PC-reformen https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hem-PC-reformen). This was extremely popular, and led almost every Swedish home to get an often extremely overpowered personal computer. Thus, practically everyone who was a kid in 1998-2006 (the rebate was cancelled in 2006) grew up with a computer. This gave Sweden a huge advantage compared to other countries in the early Internet revolution.Sweden has also invested heavily in building a fiber network, you have access to gigabit Internet even in some extremely rural areas.Another thing is that Sweden doesn't have the tradition of dubbing movies. That means kids will be exposed to English from an early age. This leads to Swedish tech companies not being afraid of hiring talent globally and generally use English as their business language.Finally, out of the 5 examples posted, one is Mojang, which is clearly an outlier. I'm not saying what Notch accomplished wasn't extremely impressive, but it was essentially a one-man operation, and probably shouldn't be held as an example of a trend. |
Linux Mint drops Ubuntu Snap packages | From the linked announcement: https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=3906> Applications in this store cannot be patched, or pinned. You can’t audit them, hold them, modify them or even point snap to a different store. You’ve as much empowerment with this as if you were using proprietary software, i.e. none. This is in effect similar to a commercial proprietary solution, but with two major differences: It runs as root, and it installs itself without asking you.This is a great summary of why people rightfully feel nervous about Snap. People run linux because they want visibility and control into what is happening on their systems. Canonical seems to want to take away that visibility and control from their users. |
Nvidia is reportedly in ‘advanced talks’ to buy ARM for more than $32B | This is quite concerning honestly. I don't mind ARM being acquired, and I don't mind Nvidia acquiring things. But I'm concerned about this combination.Nvidia is a pretty hostile company to others in the market. They have a track record of vigorously pushing their market dominance and their own way of doing things. They view making custom designs as beneath them. Their custom console GPU designs - in the original Xbox, in the Playstation 3 - were considered a failure because of terrible cooporation with Nvidia [0]. Apple is probably more demanding than other PC builders and have completely fallen out with them. Nvidia has famously failed to cooporate with the Linux community on the standardized graphics stack supported by Intel and AMD and keeps pushing propietary stuff. There are more examples.It's hard to not make "hostile" too much of a value judgement. Nvidia has been an extremely successful company because of it too. It's alright if it's not in their corporate culture to work well with others. Clearly it's working, and Nvidia for all their faults is still innovating.But this culture won't fly well if your core business is developing chip designs for others. It's also a problem if you are the gatekeeper of a CPU instruction set that a metric ton of other infrastructure increasingly depends on. I really, really hope ARM's current business will be allowed to run independently as ARM knows how to do this and Nvidia has time and time again shown not to understand this at all. But I'm pessimistic about that. I'm afraid Nvidia will gut ARM the company, the ARM architectures, and the ARM instruction set in the long run.[0]: An interesting counterpoint would the Nintendo Switch running on an Nvidia Tegra hardware, but all the evidence points to that this chip is a 100% vanilla Nvidia Tegra X1 that Nvidia was already selling themselves (to the point its bootloader could be unlocked like a standard Tegra, leading to the Switch Fusee-Gelee exploit). |
Modifications to Google Chromium for removing Google integration | My preference for a well supported Chromium-based browser that's not Chrome would be to use one of the "Blink" based browsers:https://vivaldi.comhttps://brave.comhttps://www.opera.comOpera was purchased by a Chinese consortium, I'm not a fan of Brave's hijacking of ad spaces so my preference is currently vivaldi - which was founded by co-founder and former CEO of Opera and has been adding new innovative features at a good pace.Edit: been having fun trying out the latest vivaldi, loving a lot of their features like you can add website filters like greyscale, invert colors and sepia, monospace font + disable loading images or only load from cache, etc.https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Dn03GeXWkAEXRP3.jpgFeels like they're focused on adding cool features users want, instead of Chrome's catering to mainstream-only users and features that benefit Google. |
Bike crash left Spokane man unconscious, so his Apple Watch called 911 | I bet this is a great feature (and I do have an Apple Watch), but can we please hold for a sec here? This piece reads like an Ad. Furthermore, many comments here are about "I want to see my kids grow up". Now please, calculate the odds of:- you are in a terrible accident- there is no one around you to call an ambulance- you can’t call an ambulance yourself, because you are knocked out or can’t moveI think the odds for such an event are rather low. If you like smart watches, sure, go ahead and buy one. But for everybody who just wants to wear it because they are afraid: I don’t think it’s necessary for most people, unless you ride around alone in remote areas and are inexperienced or whatever.My point is: don’t buy because of fear if your risk profile is super incredibly low. |
Universal Basic Income is Capitalism 2.0 | I like the simple argument made here about UBI enabling efficient consumption.I worry about three things with UBI though and they're more social than economic.1. Power Divide - society will be easily divided into two groups: those who depend on the UBI to live and those who don't. The former will be absolutely at the mercy of the latter. We can see this a little bit with the coronavirus relief packages.2. Predators - individuals and companies will find a way to take your UBI check from you as fast as possible. We can see this in housing where some governments give poor people vouchers for rent. Those vouchers are targeted by slumlords who find a way to give you as little as possible for them. There will be rampant scams and bad behavior in areas where the UBI makes up a larger portion of total income.3. Charity - let's say we actually give every person enough money for food, housing, and utilities. Some people will mess up. They could spend it all on an addiction or just make a bad investment. Even with UBI they could still end up hungry or homeless. Will we help them? Or will we say "you had your UBI, the rest is on you". This changes the morals of how we treat people in the worst times.I wish all of the above wasn't true. But I just don't think America can handle UBI and I'm not sure how that's going to change. |
Beyond Meat signs global supply deals with McDonald’s, KFC and Pizza Hut | This is the best news I've heard all week. The more widely vegan "meat" is available, the more likely it is to be adopted by average people and not just dedicated vegans.Reducing the demand for real beef is probably one of the best things we can do in the short term for the environment, due to the amount of land required for cattle farming, and due to the surprising amount of methane emitted by cattle.
(see the documentary "Cowspiricy", or Mark Rober's "Feeding Bill Gates a Fake Burger to save the world: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-k-V3ESHcfA) |
I love you, dad | My father has substance abuse problems too (alcohol dependency for 20 years) and it has destroyed his relationship with my siblings and my mother, he's going to lose what little he has left very soon and I genuinely fear he's going to do something very similar to what is mentioned here. I am the only child that will talk to him without contempt and I have long since left home. He lost his own father very recently and that pushed him deeper.What do I do? How do you deal with a situation like this? |
Why nobody ever wins the car at the mall | Since this is a California on-site thing, California sweepstakes law applies.[1]- "The exact nature and approximate value of the prizes must be disclosed clearly and conspicuously when they are offered."- "The law prohibits the company from misrepresenting the odds of receiving any item offered."- Prohibited: "Failing to award and distribute all prizes of the value and type represented."Online complaint form here.[2][1] http://consumerwiki.dca.ca.gov/wiki/index.php/CONTESTS/SWEEP...
[2] https://oag.ca.gov/contact/consumer-complaint-against-busine... |
Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars | Why don't we send a rover to some of these interesting places? It seems like we're constantly making fascinating finds on Mars, then send rovers to the middle of a random rocky desert. |
MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations | I honestly don't understand why JSTOR, Elsevier and others like them still need to exist.Top universities should just found a non-profit, per subject, with a single paid facilitator and a single paid editor (per journal) to find peer reviewers and edit the papers into a monthly journal.Modern tech has made it ridiculously easy to type, edit and publish such a thing if the inputs are LaTeX, Word, Markdown files or a Google Doc. And if you want it printed, there are shops that can do that for you for a small fee as well.This should be 100% open access to everyone, extremely cheap and could be 100% funded by those who are still willing to pay for paper versions or by tiny contributions from the top 100 universities. |
Nature makes all articles free to view | For those not in the know, Nature is THE journal to be in if you want to be successful in bioscience. It is peer reviewed, fairly exclusive, and they generally only publish game changer style science. If you are in science, and you get a first author Nature paper, your ticket is punched and you are about to have a moderately successful career.For all the nitpicking going on about the delivery method, searching, and it not being "enough", this will largely not matter to scientists. Articles are generally shared by DOI or PMID, indexing is very specific. If not, relevant papers in the field are nearly known by heart and new info from competing labs is checked on daily. Problems 1 and 2 are not as underserved as HN thinks.This is a monster announcement for institutions that may not have the money for a Nature sub, and the public at large to have better access to such a powerful archive of historically hidden info. The fact that it's not delivered in a DRM-free format for every device ever all the way back to the oldest article is nothing compared to how incredibly huge this is. I am spamming this to all my old lab buddies as we speak.TL;DR: The output system for academic publishing sucks at the high end, but it just got a lot less sucky. |
It seems that Google is forgetting the old web | While it's become impossible to browse the wider Web with Google, it's getting a bit easier elsewhere.A few helpful search engines:* https://millionshort.com/* https://wiby.me/* https://pinboard.in/search/A recent movement to build personal Yahoo!-style directories:* https://href.cool/ (my own project)* https://indieseek.xyz/* https://districts.neocities.org/* https://the.dailywebthing.com/The above resources are focused on general blogging and personal websites - for software and startups, I would refer to the appropriate 'awesome' directories. (https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome or https://awesomelists.top)If you know of any more, please list them - a small group of us are collecting these and trying to encourage new projects. |
Async-await on stable Rust | This is a big improvement, however this is still explicit/userland asynchronous programming: If anything down the callstack is synchronous, it blocks everything. This requires every components of a program, including every dependency, to be specifically designed for this kind of concurency.Async I/O gives awesome performance, but further abstractions would make it easier and less risky to use. Designing everything around the fact that a program uses async I/O, including things that have nothing to do with I/O, is crazy.Programming languages have the power to implement concurrency patterns that offer the same kind of performances, without the hassle. |
Show HN: I wrote my own RTS game engine in C | Sometimes I feel like i'm an untalented, unproductive waste of oxygen.Then I see a post like this and know for sure that I am. |
So you've installed `fzf` – now what? | I love fuzzy shell history. Game changer in terms of shell productivity.I use atuin[0] instead of fzf as I find the experience a bit nicer and it has history backups built in (disclaimer, I am a maintainer)Some of our users still prefer fzf because they are used to how it fuzzy finds, but we're running an experiment with skim[1] which allows us to embed the fuzzy engine without much overhead - hopefully giving them back that fzf-like experience[0]: https://github.com/ellie/atuin
[1]: https://github.com/lotabout/skim |
When an app asks for permissions, it should have a “feed fake data” option | I’m all for the “fake data” idea, but also: Apps should be required to gracefully handle the cases where users deny permission to access real data. I know last time I developed for iOS, it was Apple’s policy that apps cannot punish users or exit() the app in retaliation for them denying a permission. Apps must gracefully handle it and continue running.Also, and this was even longer ago, apps could not require users to have “an account” in order to run. I remember (this was over a decade ago) my company making a product change that forced users to have an account in order to function and we got (rightfully) rejected by the AppStore for this. It seems they must have softened this stance because I am seeing more and more apps that require an account to function. |
FBI raids alleged online drug market Silk Road, arrests owner | Wow, what a complete shitbag (DPR = Dread Pirate Roberts): DPR sent a message to "redandwhite" stating that "FriendlyChemist"
is "Causing me problems" and adding: "I would like to put a bounty on
his head if it's not too much trouble for you. What would be an
adequate amount to motivate you to find him?"
And then Later that same day, redandwhite sent DPR a message quoting him a
price of $150,000 or $300,000 "depending on how you want it done" -
"clean" or "non-clean"
DPR responded: "Don't want to be a pain here, but the price seems high.
Not long ago, I had a clean hit done for $80k. Are the prices you
quoted the best you can do? I would like this done ASAP as he is
talking about releasing the info on Monday.
DPR and redandwhite agreed upon a price of 1,670 Bitcoins - approximately
$150k - for the job. In DPR's message confirming the deal, DPR included
a transacation record reflecting the transfer of 1,670 Bitcoins to a
certain Bitcoin address.
Made $80mm in commissions running a drug trafficking network, paying hundreds of thousands to have people executed, mail fraud, money laundering, conspiracy.... He's looking at cartel level prison time. |
Mystery signal from a helicopter | I love Oona Räisänen's blog. She's my hero. She combines a love of figuring stuff out with lots of fun hacks. And when I read her blog it makes me happy to see someone with that joy of uncovering mysteries. |
Notepad++ V 7.3.3 – Fix CIA Hacking Notepad++ Issue | I know it's annoying to hear this, but I'm going to keep saying it: this stuff is silly. The DLL injection stuff in the CIA leaks should embarrass the CIA. If you're calibrating your defenses based on the idea that application programs on Windows and OS X can defend against malware, you're playing to lose.Here's the rootkits track from Black Hat 2008 --- keep in mind that this is almost a decade old and that it's public work:* Deeper Door: Exploiting NIC Chipsets* A New Breed of Rootkit: The System Management Mode Rootkit* Insane Detection of Insane Rootkits* Crafting OS X Kernel Rootkits* Viral Infections on Cisco IOS* Detecting And Preventing Xen Hypervisor Subversions* Bluepilling (implementing a hypervisor rootkit) The Xen HypervisorThis is just one year's work. If you summed all of it together, you're talking ~2.5 FTEs across 7 different research projects which we will very generously assume took a full year to develop (spoiler: no, none of them did). People who can write hypervisor rootkits command a pretty decent salary, but it's not 2x the prevailing SFBA senior salary. So this is at most mid-single-digit millions worth of work.I don't know why the CIA has this team of people bumbling around with DLL injectors and AV bypasses. Maybe it's some weird turf thing they're doing against NSA? But the stuff in the CIA leaks is not the standard you need to be protecting yourself against. |
Show HN: Get Paid to Build Your Next Side Project | Photoshop license costs $348 a year. If 1000 people get together and put $400 each, you'll get $400000. That money could be used to leverage a Gimp to be more Photoshop-users friendly. Then you don't have to keep with the subscription model. You have a great piece of open source software available for everyone to use as long as they want. You can do another round to get more features added.This solves the issue that you get with subscription based services, which is that if you stop paying every month/year you loose access to the tool to do your work.Instead of building yet another SaaS wouldn't be smarter for users to gather and pay for a software libre solution? |
Forget Google, time to end the Visa-MasterCard duopoly | I don't get it -- Amex and Discover are still providing healthy competition, so the "duopoly" the author complains about seems to be largely irrelevant. Competition between cards is thriving and consumers benefit -- witness the miniscule transaction fee the credit card companies keep after paying your rewards back of 2% to 5%, when you pay your bill on time.The article's main point is that such large companies are a cybersecurity risk, and that the government should regulate/nationalize/globalize payment infrastructure.Unfortunately, experience tends to show that governments would be far worse at providing secure, low-cost payment services. Also, credit cards already are highly regulated when it comes to consumer protections.So, this article is just not making a lot of sense to me. |
Click | This is great. I tried to hack the progress by automating clicks, using: let button = document.getElementsByClassName('button')[0]
Array(100000).fill(undefined).forEach(() => button.click())
In response, I got the following log message: > Such a smart subject. |
Reddit's website uses DRM for fingerprinting | While many Redditors are changing their "avatar" to dancing rainbow cockroaches, I had the idea to set mine to the Digg logo as an act of protest. I'm hoping it catches on. I suppose Reddit's new userbase may not even know what that means.Why the hell do we need avatars on Reddit anyway? Most of them are animated, strobing distractions.Reddit has jumped the shark. If there weren't significant opportunity cost, I'd happily work on a replacement. It's become a low-signal, high-noise ad-laden dumpster fire.Advertising is eating the Internet alive. I fucking hate it. |
EU to make it mandatory to use customer-replaceable batteries in household items | I have a contrarian view on this. I really don’t think governments should be making technical decisions for the product design unless it directly impacts health issues. If fixed batteries makes product smaller or better then it’s choice of creator, maker and hacker. Consumer should be voting with their wallets and they should have a choice. This kind of constant interference from EU burocrates without understanding technical details is what led to completely pointless “accept cookie” disaster all over the Internet that has already cost billions of dollars collectively while not benefiting anyone. |
CATL has announced a new “condensed” battery with 500 Wh/kg | I just realized how much energy efficiency is being squeezed out of a Tesla. It's incredible.A normal diesel fueled sedan such as the Chevy Cruze diesel runs at about 31mpg, which is 13.2 km/l or 15.3 km/kg. Diesel has a mind-boggling 12700 Wh/kg energy density[1], which translates to an efficiency of ~827 Wh/km for the Chevy.By contrast, the Tesla Model S, has a ~540 kg battery[2]. At 272 Wh/kg (from the posted article), that's ~147 kWh of energy storage, and the Tesla can do a rated 650km on a single charge[3]. So that's an efficiency of ~225 Wh/km, which is ~27% of the energy required to run a normal car!It just wouldn't have been possible to run cars on batteries without this efficiency bump.1. https://chemistry.beloit.edu/edetc/SlideShow/slides/energy/d...2. https://blog.evbox.com/ev-battery-weight3. https://www.caranddriver.com/tesla/model-s |
Datomic is Free | Datomic's is perfect for probably 90% of small-ish backoffice systems that never has to be web scale (i.e. most of what I do at work).Writing in a single thread removes a whole host of problems in understanding (and implementing) how data changes over time. (And a busy MVCC sql db spends 75% of its time doing coordination, not actual writes, so a single thread applying a queue of transactions in sequence can be faster than your gut feeling might tell you.)Transactions as first-class entities of the system means you can easily add meta-data for every change in the system that explains who and why the change happened, so you'll never again have to wonder "hmm, why does that column have that value, and how did it happen". Once you get used to this, doing UPDATE in SQL feels pretty weird, as the default mode of operation of your _business data_ is to delete data, with no trace of who and why!Having the value of the entire database at a point in time available to your business logic as a (lazy) immutable value you can run queries on opens up completely new ways of writing code, and lets your database follow "functional core, imperative shell". Someone needs to have the working set of your database in memory, why shouldn't it be your app server and business logic?Looking forward to see what this does for the adoption of Datomic! |
So A Blogger Walks Into A Bar… | In what sense do antitrust laws apply to investors? Why is it unlawful for investors to band together to get better terms for themselves?Wouldn't it be perfectly legal for these people to sit around a table an agree to merge and start a fund? If that's the case, how could it be unlawful for them to work on a joint venture? Just because I don't like the JV doesn't make it unlawful! |
Terminating Service for 8Chan | I don't like 8chan as a website, but I'm still not a fan of this move. Feels like no one online wants to just provide a 'dumb pipe', and always want to act like a pseudo publisher trying to dictate what's allowed and what isn't.Imagine if real life utilities did this. If because someone used your property for offensive purposes, the water company cut off the water supply, or the electricity company refused to provide electricity, or your phone provider cut off service or what not. That would be ridiculous, yet it's exactly the situation we're in with internet services. No one wants to just be a utility.I believe online service providers in at least some markets should be regulated like utilities. Maybe Cloudflare, definitely domain name registrars, perhaps cloud services and CDNs in general. Because at the moment, it seems any controversy at all means losing access to anything internet related. |
YouTube-dl is now part of GitHub/dmca.git | Heh, I didn't expect to get much attention for this. I thought it would be funny to push a merge commit between the 2 repo's latest commits. As a result, the git history is accessible from the dmca repo if you know the commit hashes. Since I didn't rebase, all the commit hashes were preserved with signatures. Another fun discovery is that deleting my fork of github/dmca didn't affect the PR like I thought it would, so it seems a mirror of youtube-dl's commits are stuck in the ether until GH deletes my PR and garbage collects the repo. |
Tell HN: Happy Thanksgiving Everyone | Hackernews is simultaneously the most cantankerous and, imho, highest quality response on average public forum on the net. I absolutely love it here and sincerely appreciate this place. I feel like I’ve grown up on this site in so many ways.I am continually humbled by not just the consistent quality of content but also the comments. It’s a testament to the moderators that this site has maintained this level of quality for so long.I am thankful and happy to use thanksgiving as an excuse to express that notion. |
EU Digital Markets Act, aimed at Google, Apple, Amazon, approved | This is easily one of the most expansive Acts regarding computing devices passed in my lifetime. The summary is in the link. As an iPhone user, this will enable me to:* Install any software* Install any App Store and choose to make it default* Use third party payment providers and choose to make them default* Use any voice assistant and choose to make it default* User any browser and browser engine and choose to make it default* Use any messaging app and choose to make it default* Make core messaging functionality interoperable. They lay out concrete examples like file transfer* Use existing hardware and software features without competitive prejudice. E.g. NFC* Not preference their services. This includes CTAs in settings to encourage users to subscribe to Gatekeeper services, and ranking their own services above others in selection and advertising portals* Much, much, more.After the Act is signed by the Council and the European Parliament in September, Apple, Google, Amazon, and other "Gatekeepers" will have six months to comply. Fines are up to 10% of global revenue for the first offense, and 20% for repeat offenses. |
Show HN: New AI edits images based on text instructions | It's a little premature, fine, but I want to start liquidating my rhetorical swaps here: I've been saying since last summer (sometimes on HN, sometimes elsewhere) that "prompt engineering" is BS and that in a world where AI gets better and better, expecting to develop lasting competency in an area of AI-adjacent performance (a.k.a. telling an AI what to do in exactly the right way to get the right result) is akin to expecting to develop a long-lasting business around hand-cranking people's cars for them when they fail to start.Like, come on. We're now seeing AIs take on tasks many people thought would never be doable by machine. And granted, many people (myself included to some extent) have adjusted their priors properly. And yet so many people act like AI is going to stall in its current lane and leave room for human work as opposed to developing orders of magnitudes better intelligence and obliterating all of its current flaws. |
Show HN: Monica, an open-source CRM to manage friends and family | Founder here. Here to answer any questions you might have. The site is not perfect, it's not mobile optimized, there are probably bugs, there is a gazillion features missing, no APIs but it's a labour of love, open-source and I hope it will help people other than me. I want to grow this product but I need to know what you need, people.
Edit: sorry for the bugs I see on my server popping here and there. Didnt expect that much users and traffic. |
No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me | I don't personally think the dislike button is the explanation. But something seems to have changed in the Youtube recommendations algo in the last few weeks.In my experience, the algo has gotten very noticeably worse recently:- Recommending lots of 6 - 12 year old videos on topics I'm interested in (who cares about a 12 year old product review?)- Recommending tons of videos I've already seen or recommending really, really old videos from people I normally watch. It's always done this, but it seems worse recently.- Trying to push "streamer bro" meme videos on me, which seem aimed at 12 year old kids- The algo seems to be really clinging to recommending only videos about the last few topics I searched and totally forgetting my main interests. Look up a video on a new car you just bought? Congratulations, Youtube will now recommend you every video ever produced about that car forever to the exclusion of whatever it is you are actually interested in even if you have never shown an interest in cars.Maybe someone who works at Youtube knows if a new recommendation system was pushed out recently or something? It's miserable. |
Atom 1.0 | I still haven't given Atom a go. Is it worth switching from ST3? |
Guacamole – A clientless remote desktop gateway | I am really getting tired of programmer's "cute names for things". I recently went through training on adobe experience manager and literally every single internal technology was named for something that had no bearing on what it actually did. Felix, Sling, Jackrabbit ... I just did a quick google on the AEM tech stack and got the following choice quote which I feel perfectly illustrates the meaninglessness of Apache's naming "Apache Felix is to Apache Sling what Equinox is to Eclipse." what does any of that mean or do?!I'd very much prefer if the named Guacamole the "Apache clientless remote desktop gateway" |
GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview | Scary. For the first time in my life, I feel like my expertise is at risk of being rendered obsolete. Maybe not this year, but the writing is on the wall.Soon coding without an AI will feel as antiquated as delivering food by horse. And resistance is futile because markets will punish those who refuse.We'll probably need less and less developers as AI advance. Just like we need less manual labor in farms today.And coding is just one of the many applications where AI can replace brains.Governments will have to ponder about what to do with a world of people who became inferior to machines at almost everything. Universal Basic Income?It's amazing and terrifying at the same time.Perhaps our first contact with an alien will be with one we created ourselves. |
Try: run a command and inspect its effects before changing your live system | As cool as this is, it shouldn’t be necessary. A proper undo turns every command into the equivalent of a “try”, allowing users to experiment without fear of data loss. Everything in a computer user interface should be undoable.This has been known for over 40 years, but the industry has been very slow to get the memo. The undo implementation on the iPhone is a weird joke. CLIs have barely even tried (with a few exceptions like Jef Raskin’s Canon Cat, a textual UI completely different from anything else I’ve ever seen).Maybe one day… |
Ask HN: What has HN given you? | Nearly 5 years ago, a few months after being rejected from YC and a few weeks from being essentially bankrupt (my daughter had an unexpected surgery while we had only catastrophic health insurance), my brother and I posted a Show HN about Webflow (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5407499). It was our last-ditch attempt to show a proof-of-concept to the world before going back to our old bosses to ask for our jobs back.Thankfully, the post took off - we were #1 for most of the day, and over 25,000 people signed up for our beta list in the several days after that post. This helped us reapply to YC with a lot more confidence and traction, and we were able to get into the next batch.Webflow (https://webflow.com/) has since grown into a profitable business with close to 1,000,000 users all over the world, billions of website requests served, and close to 60 team members in over 14 countries. I'm pretty sure none (or very little) of this would be possible without HN and the community here, and the super positive reception our post had.Today, we're on a mission to enable more people to create powerful software without having to learn how to code - we probably have decades to make that vision a reality, but we're on a decent start in large part thanks to our launch on HN.A HUGE thank you to the community here! |
Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community | As an Italian, I raise my eyebrows every time China is mentioned as an example for the successful containment of this virus.It could do that because it could afford to take the economical hit and because it is an authoritarian state, which means you can get almost everyone to obey, in one way or another. Also, the Chinese Party is what caused this mess to begin with, by allowing this virus to spread all around the world.Why on Earth is this a good model?Undoubtedly for the safety of citizens, but even with all the people shouting about a "fascist revolution" going on with the previous government, it only took three orders to strip everyone of most of their freedoms without anyone batting an eye (especially since no one knows for how long, the April 3rd date is a joke).Quarantining is probably inevitable (although it won't help the overloaded ICUs until two weeks from now, so more capacity will always be needed), but following rules in place in an outbreak does not mean one should not question their principles.And this letter should be sent to the media and the government, since both can't even understand an exponential, or basic statistics (even with the so-called "peak" reached, cases will keep on increasing until recoveries are due).Personally I'd like fast-tracking of anti-SARS-CoV-2 drugs instead (those are the ones which will get out of this mess, quarantining is just flattening the curve, although immensely beneficial), along with setting up place for non-intensive care COVID-19 patients. Every ICU bed freed is a victory. |
Tell HN: YouTube is banning accounts that support Ukraine | We’ll this is just massively embarrassing for YouTube. The Reddit thread will get picked up by National media. YouTube will say the reporting was misuse of their terms and was a cyberattack from state level actors implying their reporting algo isn’t actually at fault. They will mention that the automated algo protects children and at risk people. They will then reinstate the accounts and say they are sorry for the temporary inconvenience and pleased that they could respond so swiftly. And the algos won’t change, not one bit. And there will still be no human oversite of these sorts of bans. |
Project Loon | "I love those who yearn for the impossible." -GoetheI wish other large companies showed such ambition. Telecoms like AT&T can't even be bothered to roll out the network upgrades they promised in the early 2000's. |
Apple File System | The spartan description of APFS certainly sounds like the (partial) feature list for ZFS--the comparisons made in the comments here are on-point. ZFS though took around 5 years to ship and, arguably, another 5-10 to get right. I say this having shipped multiple products based on ZFS, writing code in ZFS, and diagnosing production problems with it.On-disk consistency ("crash protection"), snapshots, encryption, and transactional interfaces ("atomic safe-save") will no doubt be incredibly valuable. I don't think though though that APFS will dramatically improve upon the time it took ZFS to mature from a first product to world-class storage.Some commenters have opined that (despite Apple distributing ZFS for Mac OS X at WWDC nearly a decade ago) that ZFS would never be appropriate for the desktop, phone, or watch. True ZFS was designed for servers and storage servers, but I don't think there's anything that makes it innately untenable in those environments--even its default, but not essential, use of lots of RAM.Who knows... maybe Apple have spent the decade since killing their internal ZFS port taking this new filesystem though the paces. Its level of completeness though would suggest otherwise. |
SES-10 Mission | Does SpaceX have any real competitors in the private sector? Would be a bummer if people decided they were a monopoly of some sort and demanded a break up. |
Zoom says it won’t encrypt free calls so it can work more with law enforcement | This series of tweets from Alex Stamos has more specific information and tradeoffs being considered: https://twitter.com/alexstamos/status/1268061790954385408?s=... |
CT scans of AirPods evolution | This is still the strongest apple advantage: design, engineering and build quality.Recently I wanted to buy a second notebook so I could leave my MBPro at home in trips where I didn't want to work, but still had a machine that run linux and windows for some quick idea or even some light gaming.Decided for a Samsung Galaxy Book Pro. Expensive machine, but slightly cheaper than a MacBook Air. good i7 11gen processor, excellent battery life, very light but with surprisingly good thermals, 1tb SSD, but unfortunately no option to have it with more than 16GB RAM.Anyway, was very satisfied with it, and it was so light that I was even booting it with linux and doing some programming on it.But, one day I just opened the lid by the sides, heard a crack, and the gorgeous OLED screen had cracked.Of course I didnt abuse it, I just opened it, without excessive force or speed. But the screen is very fragile, the lid is paper thin, but not rigid enough, it seems, to avoid this problem.And of course, Samsung says it was my fault, and I will have to pay the fix.And yes, I know people have plenty of complaints about apple, but I never had encountered such an obvious problem with an Apple product. Have they not stress-tested this stuff? |
Ask HN: How do you deal with getting old and feeling lost? | I’m in my late 40s. Just gone through 15 years of absolute shit with an ex partner and financial chaos.Decided I’d fix it in 2019. Three important things to concentrate on:1. Health. If that’s off, fix it first. Everything depends on health. Sort out your diet, physical fitness and health and mental health follows. I’m fitter than all my peers and both fitter and healthier than I was in my 20s. Can run a half marathon now.2. Social contacts. Get out there and make friends. In my case i signed up to Meetup and just attended random stuff until people stuck. This usually involves hiking, pubs and bars, restaurant nights out.3. Invest in experiences. Go travelling, do new things and learn new stuff completely away from your usual area of expertise and comfort. So I’m usually desk bound in the middle of the city but a few weeks back I’m standing on a mountain in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night in the middle of winter doing celestial navigation course. It was amazing.All positive, fulfilling experiences in life I have found require putting yourself in unusual and uncomfortable positions. Life where there is no normal but it’s not bad abnormal is where the fun is. Doing those things together with other people is where you make meaningful lasting friends and relationships too. |
Show HN: Open Hunt – an open and community-run alternative to Product Hunt | I will definitely use this over ProductHunt. I mean, for crying out loud, I signed up for PH just now to leave a comment and the first thing you get is "commenting is restricted to those users invited by others in the community". Yeah, so I have to supplicate myself to some random Internet stranger and beg permission just to comment on your site? Not happening... |
Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms | I looked into coding PDFs once. Then I closed my MacBook (Pro) and went for a long walk into the ocean. I think I almost got to America, but then I turned and swam back again. Turnd out I had just fallen asleep and had a nightmare. I was actually just working with regular text files, and everything was fine. |
U.S. State Department phones hacked with Israeli company spyware | I don't understand the focus on NSO in these stories. If U.S State Department personnel in Uganda were shot from an M-16, would the headline mention "an American arms manufacturer"? No, because it's ridiculous.For better or worse, NSO's product is a weapon. How is it any different from an M-16? Where is the outrage towards the people who used this weapon against the State Department? |
Tools for Better Thinking | does anyone know a simple app that allows hyperlinking within notes? I want to create a roam-style knowledge base, but most tools are too heavy for my purposes. I prefer to keep things cross-compatible and future proof with .txt or .rtf, but to my knowledge, neither allow hyperlinking to documents |
Microsoft is preparing to add ChatGPT to Bing | I really worry about the meta effects that Search is having on the internet. Google has slowly degraded as the internet has morphed into being almost entirely an SEO driven contraption. It's now very difficult to find good original information because it's overwhelmed with spam. Whether that be websites that copy that original information but pushes you through a maze of adverts, serving you what looks like original information but is actually just manufactured content, or straight up astroturf. All of these effects work to make real original work less economical and less valuable - it has no value if no one can find it. If you do something worthwhile on the internet it'll be stolen and no one will care anyway, because no one will beleive it.Now ChatGPT is 1 further step of intermediation. No longer are you competing with everyone else to get noticed by Google search, hoping Google actually has an incentive to bring people to your valuable page. No, now ChatGPT will just serve your stuff to the customer, having stolen your stuff wholesale with no chance of ever actually referencing you. Given that new situation why would anyone ever produce any text of value for the internet? Why? To pump MSFT share price? Well you won't. So what will be produced? Massive amounts (even more) of trash information will be pumped out, raising the noise floor and in turn bringing down the quality of ChatGPT, and who's to say what's right! The whole point of Google was to figure out what was right from the organic structure of the internet, but if you replace the organic structure with Google and ChatGPT there's no one left providing the original information that these services will use. |
Facebook recruiting and Unix systems | Hey folks, I'm the student writing the emails in the post here. Thanks to everyone for their criticisms. While I was initially kind of shocked by the recruiter's response, I've had a lot of time to think about it today and have realized that I was being pretty damn condescending and spoke out of line without regards to the context. It's been a hard lesson learned. I honestly regret the whole exchange, and posting it online was inappropriate as well. I briefly debated deleting the image, but decided to leave it up for sake of posterity and accountability.Also, just to be clear, I do not (and never did) hold any hard feelings towards the recruiter; in fact, it was very kind of them to point out why I was not qualified in the first place. This has been probably the most reflective of how I let my ego get the best of me at times, and I hope it might serve as a warning to those who might be tempted to do the same "devsplaining" in similar situations.Please let me know if you have any other criticisms beyond the ones already voiced in this thread. I'm reading through the comments here as I can, and it's been a lot of good advice. Thanks again. |
Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side | You can view your reCaptcha V3 score here:
https://recaptcha-demo.appspot.com/recaptcha-v3-request-scor...I get .7 on my iPhone, I’m guessing that my liberal use of Firefox containers and the cookie auto-delete extension on my desktop will give me a much lower score and cause me to have to jump through extra hoops at websites that implement it, just like the reCaptcha V2 does.Edit: I also got 0.7 on Firefox with strict content blocking (which is supposed to block fingerprinters), uBlock Origin, and Cookie AutoDelete. I get 0.9 from a container which is logged into Google. |
Draw.io: Online Diagramming Website | I've tried drawing diagrams with these tools and it seems so much harder for quick drafting than just using pen and paper and also a lot of work to get anything even remotely good looking (like aligning things or making boxes of the same size, ie performing mass operations).I would like to use a tool where I first describe the relations in text/code and the layouting and formatting is done separately, and formatting should be hierarchical. |
Amazon EC2 Mac Instances | An interesting offering from Amazon that is crippled by Apple and MacStadium, who deserve to be raked over the coals for their recent EULA changes. Just read the post on MacStadium's blog: https://blog.macstadium.com/blog/developers-big-sur-and-vind...Under the new agreement, you must:* Rent to only one organization* Rent for 24 hours at the minimum* Use it for some set of "approved" development work…among other restrictions. And Brian Stucki is celebrating these changes?! This is a sick joke. You're enjoying a significantly tightened EULA that benefits nobody but yourself, a EULA that means that a single CI build now costs $26 on AWS instead of 50 cents; one that means that more than half the comments here are confused why AWS is ripping people off.Shame on you Brian Stucki, shame on you MacStadium, and shame on you Apple. Your EULA changes are absurdly hostile to developers, since now they're either going to have to buy Macs themselves or rent from MacStadium-like services. Shame on you both for colluding together for making this situation horrible and then having the guts to write that blog post.I can't believe I'm saying this, but Amazon, I feel so sorry for you. You didn't deserve this. |
Tell HN: DEI initiatives undermine the self esteem of PoC within a company | (Black man here)Two things can be true at once.I have built great things. I can stand on my own. My merits are great. I do not want to be the token employee that is trotted around for Diversity Points (tm). I do not like the diversity porn that a lot of these DEI groups get off on.That being said, I do recognize that I have benefited from these groups (at least at their most genuine). There are groups that are aimed at cultivating black people in tech. Prior to this, in the earlier internet age, you had to cut your teeth on IRC and forums. That was where technical people were in the computer tech space.Do you know VIRULENTLY anti-black (or woman, or gay) these communities were? I can't begin to describe it. That is totally off-putting to someone who has the ability succeed but does not want to deal with the hate. There's also the fact that most (read: all) of the computing pioneers are white. I respect all of those people, but it does help to have someone to look up to. I'm positive that Satya and Sundar are great motivators for indian kids to look up to (as they should be).These DEI initiatives aren't perfect in any way, but the goal is to give the affected groups the foundations to succeed. To put people in the affected communities out front as role models. I accept the annoyances for the sake of good and progress.EDIT: In the below thread are many people who personally identify as omnipresent IRC Gods, so my experience must have happened in an alternate universe. My bad. |
How to Think for Yourself | PG sure has been on a kick about how brilliant of an independent thinker he is in a sea of conformity.It's clear in all of his writing that he's perpetually beating around the bush about some current itch he has, I wish he would just come out and say it with out pretending to be a deep thinker:> Do you want to do the kind of work where you can only win by thinking differently from everyone else?I mean, taken outside of this being a PG essay I would assume this means stay away from SV, but I suspect that's not really the point.> One of the most effective techniques is one practiced unintentionally by most nerds: simply to be less aware what conventional beliefs are.This essay is an object lesson in how this leads to profoundly conventional thinking. This entire thing reads like it was torn from the journal of a clever middle-schooler who thinks he's so much more clever then the world.Right now Silicon Valley VC thinking is the dominant ideology, putting blinders on to what is considered convention isn't cultivating an independent mind, it's an assertion of the status quo.> An essay that told people things they already knew would be boring.I agree, but given how beloved rehashed versions of "aren't we the clever independent thinkers!" essays are here I think there is some empirical evidence to the contrary. |
What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work? | Wow this is 19,000 words. I like his summary at the end:At some level it’s a great example of the fundamental scientific fact that large numbers of simple computational elements can do remarkable and unexpected things.And this:... But it’s amazing how human-like the results are. And as I’ve discussed, this suggests something that’s at least scientifically very important: that human language (and the patterns of thinking behind it) are somehow simpler and more “law like” in their structure than we thought.Yeah I've been thinking along these lines. ChatGPT is telling us something about language or thought, we just havent got to the bottom of what it is yet. Something along the lines of 'with enough data its easier to model than we expected'. |
Google’s nightmare “Web Integrity API” wants a DRM gatekeeper for the web | > Exactly how the rest of the world feels about this is not necessarily relevant, though. Google owns the world's most popular web browser, the world's largest advertising network, the world's biggest search engine, the world's most popular operating system, and some of the world's most popular websites. So really, Google can do whatever it wants.This is the point that company breakups start to make a lot of sense.When Google can do something that every one of it's users hates and none of us can do anything about it, they perhaps have too much market power. |
The Uber Bombshell About to Drop | Uber passengers only pay 41% of the cost of trips, with investor capital making up the differenceFWIW this assertion (which isn't really core to the central thesis of the post, but still) is wrong. That number comes fromhttps://ftalphaville.ft.com/2016/12/01/2180647/the-taxi-unic...but the author of that story misread the data. Uber only counts their cut as revenue not the full cost of the ride.Despite this repetition (now corrected, thx!) of this incorrect data I find the overall thesis of the post compelling! As a disinterested bystander, it will be interesting to see how it all plays out.EDIT: It turns out the original 41% statement comes from http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/11/can-uber-ever-deliver... not from the Financial Times. It can be hard to trace these things back sometimes. |
Stanford CS007: Personal Finance For Engineers | So you've completed CS007. And graduated Stanford. You've even managed to save around $10K in cash from various summer jobs and gifts from relatives. The consensus advice investment management professionals would offer is to sock it away in a well-diversified set of Vanguard Funds. Which you keep adding to on a monthly basis allocated from your paycheck. As well as re-investing any dividends generated. Which will compound nicely over the next thirty years. Leaving you with a $1M nest egg that will provide stable yearly income during your golden years. As well as a decent inheritance left over for the next generation.But I have a really hard time giving this advice to a 22 year old. I certainly didn't heed it myself. Instead I used the cash and spent 100% of it on my own professional and personal development. So, naturally, since this is Stanford and Silicon Valley. I'd include a section on Risk. Taking it. Managing it. What are the rewards. As well as the costs. But with the emphasis the post-graduation 5-10 year window may represent a unique opportunity in your life to take it. And that there are programs such as StartX and YC available to assist should you decide to go all in. |
Facebook Renames to Meta | If there is going to be a metaverse, I'm not sure I want Facebook to own it. It's like a bad sci-fi pulp story.Given their investment and research, I wonder if they should open it all up (even if contradictory to short-term gains in ad revenue) so it has a chance to grow? Federate it a bit more than they are comfortable with, to at least give it a chance. I could see this flubbing out hard otherwise.I'm personally keen on the AR/VR space (surrounded by headsets here), but the early adopters are so polarized about Facebook/Oculus's involvement. I don't know if a rebrand (is this really that?) would be enough for the tech crowd to forget and move on. |
Bun v1.0.0 | > The transition from CommonJS to ES modules has been slow and full of terrors.
> Bun supports both module systems, all the time. No need to worry about file
> extensions, .js vs .cjs vs .mjs, or including "type": "module" in your
> package.json.
>
> You can even use import and require(), in the same file. It just works.
This is the highlight for me. The Node.js ecosystem is more-or-less completely broken otherwise. This might save it.(I think that the most impressive thing about Bun isn't its performance but the pragmatic, developer-friendly choices that have been consistently made by Jarred.) |
Proposition HN: I will pay $8000 for you to build your side-project/MVP | This discussion is awesome! I would never have believed such a simple conjecture could provide so much illumination around the myths and realities of startups.First, its a great deal, both for hmexx and folks who take him up on it. Frankly I think it could be revolutionary. My reasoning is as follows;Many "products" over the last couple of years have been fairly straight forward web "apps" built on top of existing infrastructure. They provide some basic customer value, they tend to be fashionable (moderate lifetime), and generally take less than a year to produce.That is almost exactly the same as the book publisher model.So hmexx sets himself up as an MVP "publisher" and pays "authors" $5000 up front and a 50% interest in the proceeds going forward. Now lots of new book authors would love that deal because they know how to write books but they have no idea how to promote them into bookstores and Amazon's top lists etc. Unlike books though web apps don't pay out a revenue stream on per-unit sales. Instead they tend to either a pay a chunk via a buyout, or they generate income over time with advertising/partnerships. If we're talking about "apps" for mobile then there is a revenue stream very similar to books.So I reason its a good deal because the content creator has a much better chance to benefit from their creation than previous generations of artists had.Now as an illumination, the whole 50/50 thing shines a light right into the core of the startup 'dream' mentality. It is the idea that you will start a company that becomes the next Facebook and you become a billionaire over about 10 years of nights. 50% of zero is zero, 50% of a billion dollar company is $500M worth. The closer reality is that if the idea has 'legs' then you can expect a series A round that will reduce both of you to 33% and then a series B which takes you to 20% to 25%. If you get there you're probably making a decent salary and have some small but non-zero shot of a return.Every year somebody makes over $50M on one of the big lottery games in the US, its only like once in 5 years that people make over $50M from their startup. The good news is that fewer people have the chops to "buy in" to a startup lottery ticket.So that is the reality. If you want to make some money, buy a house, raise a family. Go work for Oracle or Apple or Microsoft or Google. Don't do startups for the money, do them because you are passionate about what they are trying to create. If you do them for the money you will become bitter and depressed.But this offer, to be paid $5000 in exchange for a half interest in the lottery ticket you create? Given the 'two, three month' worth of work estimate. There is not a whole lot to complain about. |
Diamonds Are Bullshit | Maybe I'm spoiled as a nerdy (and interested in nerdy) gay guy, but I pity those in this thread saying that their fiancee wouldn't listen to reason about this. It slays me that "tradition" is so important to people that they will waste such vast amounts of money and prop up such a gross, violent industry in the face of reason. |
Deep Photo Style Transfer | What was up with the "apple" photo? |
Identity Theft, Credit Reports, and You | Another good way to protect yourself is to save money, and avoid needing to rely on banks for a credit lifeline. |
Ask HN: Who is firing? | Back in the first dotcom bubble, we had FuckedCompany.com. It tracked these sorts of things on a daily basis. |
Show HN: RoughJS – Create hand-drawn graphics using JavaScript | If you repeatedly clear canvas/draw with a setInterval of ~100-200ms, looks kind of like the hand-drawn un-stable lines art style of Squigglevision (Dr. Katz / Science Court) :)EDIT: If folks want to play with a JSFiddle: https://jsfiddle.net/49g2Leqw/9/ |
Completely Silent Computer | Am I the only one who thinks of smartphones and tablets as silent computers?Granted, they can't do what this person's high-spec workstation can do, but they do most of the computing tasks most people use (used) noisy fanned computers with clacking disks for and in many cases do those tasks better.And unless I'm just losing my hearing, my smartphone is completely silent as long as I don't accidentally press the Golem Invoker, er, Siri button. |
Show HN: Obsidian – A knowledge base that works on local Markdown files | Maker here, excited to be on Hacker News. Obsidian is going into public beta today! (We're also on Product Hunt, come check us out!)We made Obsidian to be your long-term second brain and personal knowledge base. As you put in more notes and make more connections, the knowledge base gets more valuable, so we think it's important that you can 100% own your data and not rely on any cloud services.We believe you second brain should work similarly to your own brain and connections are crucial in thinking. Obsidian supports [[internal links]] between your notes out of the box, and provide a powerful graph view and backlink pane to help you understand your knowledge.We also noticed how personal note-taking and knowledge management is, so we built Obsidian to be very extensible from the start, and let you put together your own workflow with plugins like daily notes and page preview as building blocks.This leads to our three fundamental values of Obsidian:1. Local-first, Markdown plain text based;
2. Link as first-citizen.
3. As extensible as possible.Obsidian is a powerful front-end for your knowledge, like an IDE for your notes.Learn more about Obsidian's features: https://obsidian.md/featuresRead the story of the project and the team: https://obsidian.md/about |
Google users locked out after 15 years' use | This article finally prompted me to do what I should've done a long time ago, which is to create a Fastmail account and begin importing my Gmail into it. I've seen this story far too many times, and no longer will I say "yeah but it'll never happen to me".Setting up the import was insanely easy, and my Fastmail account is now configured to enable me to send using my Gmail address from directly within Fastmail. Plus after the import is finished, it will still periodically bring over any new emails received to the Gmail account.Fuck you Google. |
Edge sends images you view online to Microsoft | This is just bananas to me that a browser would perform "super resolution" at all, much less by default.Couldn't this wreak havoc on doing things like viewing medical images, inserting false detail that isn't there?As well as on text in images, e.g. inventing a cleanly readable but hallucinated license plate number on a car, or financial figure, where the original is blurry?Not only does this seem like a terribly dangerous idea, but I'm shocked that a legal review at Microsoft would ever have approved this in the first place. |
A Step By Step Guide to Transfer Domains Out Of GoDaddy | As noted elsewhere, it's the hosting plans that they make their money from, and so that's what I'd aim to transfer. So I've got a two-part question:1) How does one transfer all the DNS information, including the A and MX records (anything else I need?)? Is this all provider-specific? Or can they just port in the existing data?2) When I'm ready, I'd want to set up a web site, and especially a mail server. Any recommendations? (I know this has been asked plenty in the past, but this seems a good time to make a list excluding GoDaddy) |
WhatsApp co-founder tells everyone to delete Facebook | I don't get what changed? We've knows Facebook tracks everything, we've known Google does the same thing. If you've ever developed anything in messenger even today, it's amazing how much information is given. We know all these sites track everything you do outside of Facebook too. Everyone has been trying to get them to stop, we know it's illegal to build a profile on someone but Facebook gets around that by building a profile but not assigning it to your direct name.Regulations should have sprouted in Obama years, but the admin and tech execs were too buddy buddy and no way Trump promotes this because it makes him look like he is accepting Russia interfered and it's not politically expedient for him to do so.Same thing with Harvey Weinstein and all the metoo that was known by everyone. I mean I'm happy with all of this coming out, but why now? How is it so coordinated? Usually these guys pay journalists for fluff pr counter views or to shut down stories. Weinstein did.Is this Data just a metoo thing? Is google next? |
Amazon disallows pointing out paid reviews | I purchased the same webcam for my high school sophomore in September 2020, as school restarted (all online for him). The box contained a $20 "gift card" if I emailed proof of my 5-star review. It looks identical to the one I received (including the email address). Only the reward is different.I didn't try to write a review, I notified customer service in an attempt to report the seller.I documented everything including photos, my exchange with Amazon customer service, and the confirmation from the seller that they would pay me $20 for a 5-star review. I did not take the money offered ... I was appalled at the situation and more than a little angry that I had been tricked by bogus reviews.Here's what happened when I reported the seller:Me: Hi. The box for this product contained a card that says “Amazon $20 gift card” and looks like a gift card, but the back says I have to give a 5 star review and send my order information to an outlook email address. Is this legitimate? Is it really a $20 Amazon gift card?Amazon: Thank you so much for your information on this, I will certainly pass it along here so that we can check this promotion or offer directly with the seller. Because I am not seeing that advertised on the item at all And would not be capable of confirming if that is a legit Amazon gift card because, I do not see that offer on the itemMe: So what should I do?Amazon: My best suggestion would be to contact the seller directly for this through this link [redacted] So that you can confirm directly with them if this is legit or not Certainly giving away gift cards for good reviews is not professional And I have to report the seller for thatMe: I thought this type of offer was forbidden by Amazon’s own policies for sellers. But I will contact them using the link you sent to ask them if that’s what you recommend.Even though the CSR reported the seller, and I confirmed with the seller through Amazon's own communication system that they were paying $20 per 5 star review, nothing happened to the seller. The item (a webcam) is still for sale on Amazon, with thousands of additional 5-star reviews - more than 12,000 now, compared to 3,266 when I let Amazon know how they were gaming the reviews in September.Once again, the good guys (in the case, customers and honest sellers) lose out while the bad guys win, with no repercussions. |
Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer | > Good code is code that can be understood by a junior engineer. Great code can be understood by a first year CS freshman. The best code is no code at all.This a thousand times. Having empathy for future devs, maintenance, and bug fixes is so important. |
AlphaGo beats the world champion Lee Sedol in first of five matches | I was at the 2003 match of Garry Kasparov vs Deep Junior -- the strongest chess player of all time vs what was at that point the strongest chess playing computer in history. Kasparov drew that match, but it was clear it was the last stand of homo sapiens in the man vs machine chess battle. Back then, people took solace in the game of Go. Many boldly and confidently predicted we wouldn't see a computer beat the Go world champion in our lifetimes.Tonight, that happened. Google's DeepMind AlphaGo defeated the world Go champion Lee Sedol. An amazing testament to humanity's ability to continuously innovate at a continuously surprising pace. It's important to remember, this isn't really man vs machine, as we humans programmed the algorithms and built the computers they run on. It's really all just circuitous man vs man.Excited for the next "impossible" things we'll see in our lifetimes. |
Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone | > “I’m all for universal access, but not theft!” tweeted Elsevier’s director of universal access, Alicia WiseYou want everybody to have access, but you don't want them to get it for free.Wow, so you want the entire world to all pay for the material you were given for free. Hmmmm. |
Get Started Making Music | Ableton is great and paved the way for a more creative and intuitive workflow! I switched from Cubase very early on and never looked back. That is, until I found Bitwig (https://www.bitwig.com) which supports Linux! They also deserve a shout out taking it even further! |
My startup failed, and this is what it feels like | Well written. One thing I always find funny about the startup world is the idea that hardship is good. Hardship isn't good. Hardship sucks. Sometimes hardship is something you need to survive to accomplish your goals, but not always. While there are a lot of successful startups that went through a lot of hardship, there are a lot of them that didn't. It seems that based on a lot of factors that were outside of your control you were playing the startup game on "hard mode" and you gave it a pretty good run anyways.Also a pretty good lesson that having a good job and comfortable life maybe isn't so bad after all (a very un-silicon valley lesson). |
John C. Bogle Has Died | Not sure how many HN people follow the Bogle philosophy, but to me it feels not inappropriate to turn on the black bar. |
Common mistakes in PostgreSQL | > varchar (without the (n)) or text are similar, but without the length limit. If you insert the same string into the three field types they will take up exactly the same amount of space, and you won't be able to measure any difference in performance.Seriously ? everytime I create a django charfield I try to guess in my head what is the best length for this field to optimize for performance, but sounds like using unlimited length (textfield) field doesn't make any difference. Good news |
Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life | Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.— Ira Glass |
Announcing SyntaxNet: The World’s Most Accurate Natural Language Parser | This is really cool, and props to Google for making it publicly available.The blog post says this can be used as a building block for natural language understanding applications. Does anyone have examples of how that might work? Parse trees are cool to look at, but what can I do with them?For instance, let's say I'm interested in doing text classification. I can imagine that the parse tree would convey more semantic information than just a bag of words. Should I be turning the edges and vertices of the tree into a feature vectors somehow? I can think of a few half-baked ideas off the top of my head, but I'm sure other people have already spent a lot of time thinking about this, and I'm wondering if there are any "best practices". |
Quick, Draw | It seems the answers are pre-programmed because I drew just a car and it said "I know! It's a police car" even though I'd drawn no siren.Also with the sweater drawing I'd drawn just a T-shirt accidentally then when drawing a long sleeve it said it knew it was a sweater when it could have been similar things.So this demonstration isn't about it identifying the drawing correctly, it's just about saying when it's found something considered close enough in an overly-broad range of ambiguous things based on the answer it's been given already.It did identify some partially drawn things, like a line or a circle or more complex things the partial drawing could have been, but the pre-loaded rigging made me stop the test. |
Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, and eBay exit Facebook’s Libra project | I hope this doesn't cause Facebook to give up on Libra.I personally have no desire to own Libra. But traditional bank accounts kind of suck as a product and I would like to see more tech companies competing with them.The problems with bank accounts:1. They charge you fees for things2. They try to upsell me stupid financial products3. They are not easy to use in other countries4. Typing in my credit card number sucks5. Typing in my credit card number isn't secureNone of that has really gotten any better in the past ten years. It feels like banks have mostly given up on making their product better. Instead of improving their product, they just buy more expensive retail locations.I would probably rather use a financial product produced by Google, Microsoft, or Amazon than a financial product produced by Facebook. I just don't want the rules to end up being, big tech companies are not permitted to compete with crappy banks. |
Ask HN: Who is hiring right now? | Red Hat | All Positions Remote | Everything | https://www.redhat.com/en/jobsRed Hat. You know who we are. We're also the world's top Kubernetes provider with OpenShift (well over 1000 customers). We're Ansible. We're OpneShift Dedicated and OpenShift Online (Hosted services). We're a huge company with openings in marketing, management, VPs also! We're worldwide. We have offices around the globe. We're all remote: the location listed in a job posting is where the manager is located. 90% of the time the job can be performed remotely.Red Hat is still Red Hat. In fact, even more so, now that our CEO is also President of IBM. Think Pixar and Disney, NeXT and Apple. We sell absolutely no software that is not 100% open source, unless we're in the process of open sourcing it. Even our acquired companies' software, we eventually open source. Have you contributed to an open source project? Ooooooooooo, we LOVE that! Come join us! I currently spend work hours helping the CNCF, for example!I've been here 18 months now, and they will have to drag me out the door. I'll probably never leave willingly. It's a spectacular place to work. You can even use me as your reference in your application: [email protected] They even gave me my nick as an email alias!https://www.redhat.com/en/jobsSenior Front end developer:
https://us-redhat.icims.com/jobs/77709/senior-front-end-deve...Technical Operations Lead
https://us-redhat.icims.com/jobs/78616/it-support-engineer/j...Enterprise Data Catalog Program Manager
https://us-redhat.icims.com/jobs/78495/enterprise-data-catal... |
Kite is saying farewell and open-sourcing its code | "Our diagnosis is that individual developers do not pay for tools. Their manager might, but engineering managers only want to pay for discrete new capabilities, i.e. making their developers 18% faster when writing code did not resonate strongly enough."I never used Kite, but I've tried Github Copilot twice, and found it marginal at best (and distracting at worst - which is why I turned it off both times). If Kite was similar, the reason I'm not paying is that coder AIs are not providing any value.Developers are somewhat reluctant to pay for tools but I think you can get them to pay for things that are worth it. I've been paying for code editors for years. |
Academic Torrents – Making 27TB of research data available | Perhaps I'm going off tangent, but the social dynamics associated with torrenting are pretty darn interesting.On one hand, they seem to converge towards a consensus with most seeded and downloaded files and popularity as a trust factor. On the other, they also promote the dissemination of ideas the knowledge of which poses a threat to the status quo that is, the state towards which a society was coerced to.On one hand, Torrents are about rejecting the Publisher and Big Media status but on the other they are about arriving to a democratic status about which films/books/... are the best or most useful.And don't even get me started about the constant ethical dilemmas associated with sharing and who should control or own the data.To link all that threads into a broader topic, we could associate the torrent subculture to the Dionysian archetype which Nietzsche wrote about. |
An open letter against Apple's new privacy-invasive client-side content scanning | Honestly I'm glad to see a non-insignificant amount of people in tech take this seriously, especially when the goal Apple announces appears to be for the greater good. It can be hard to stand on the side that doesn't immediately appear to be correct. We have already lost so many freedoms for 'national security' and other such blanket terminology.Just be warned, there will be those that unfairly try to cast this as helping the distribution of CP. Expect a headline tomorrow: "Edward Snowden et al Supports Child Porn" - or some other hot take.A few other things:1. Vote with your feet - Put your money in the pockets of the people aligned to your values.2. Actively support projects you align with - If you use some open source hardware/software, try to help out (financially or time).3. Make others aware - Reach out to those around you and inform them, only then they can make an informed choice themselves. |
Librarian's Letter to Google Security | About a decade ago, a broken iPhone caused me to experience how bad Google's MFA reset process was — there were multiple _years_ where the “hard landing” form triggered a flow which sent an email to an internal mailbox which didn't exist! — and while I was able to use printed backup codes after I returned home the experience left me concerned enough that I went to one of their identity group's public meetings here in DC.One of the things which I was struck by was how unseriously they appeared to view their role in modern life. People were generally very casual about the need and were especially uninterested in anything which required them to work with outside parties.My suggestion was that they consider a protocol where trusted civic authorities could be allowed to confirm someone's identity, which sounds like it would be useful for this case: let the person initiate a mediated reset flow where someone like a librarian, police officer, etc. could authenticate in their official capacity and check a box saying that they've confirmed the photo ID for the person standing in front of them. Most of the benefits from MFA are preventing things like phishing attacks which are also stymied by limiting it to people in your geographic area, although you might want to disable this for high-risk people enrolled in Google's Advanced Protection Program. |
FTX’s collapse was a crime, not an accident | CoffeeZilla covered this in a recent video. The effort to paint over such blatant fraud and negligence and pretend it was all a mistake from a well-meaning kiddo is disgusting.https://youtu.be/0rL35_WV3lE |
Ask HN: What is your favorite YouTube channel for developers? | https://www.youtube.com/bisqwit is by far my favorite and I've spent many hours watching him.He does things like create a Doom-style engine from scratch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQYsFshbkYw .. create a NES emulator: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y71lli8MS8s .. work back from a C++17 example to show why new C++ standards are needed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrwwa68JXNk .. and even building a Tetris clone in GW-BASIC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDnypVoQcPw .. Right now, he's doing a series on cracking 80s videogame passwords: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzLzYGEbdY5nEFQsxzFan...Sirajology - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWN3xxRkmTPmbKwht9FuE5A - is another interesting one. He moves a bit too quickly for me, but does things like explain machine learning in 5 minutes or how to generate music with systems like Tensorflow. |
Canada has arrested Huawei’s global chief financial officer in Vancouver | Can somebody explain to me on what authority the US can request the arrest of a Chinese national on Canadian soil for any action they took while conducting operations of a Chinese organization headquartered in China? |
Ask HN: What are your favorite low-coding apps / tools as a developer? | Hasura by far, lets you point-and-click build your database and table relationships with a web dashboard and autogenerates a full GraphQL CRUD API with permissions you can configure and JWT/webhook auth baked-in.https://hasura.io/I've been able to build in a weekend no-code what would've taken my team weeks or months to build by hand, even with something as productive as Rails. It automates the boring stuff and you just have to write single endpoints for custom business logic, like "send a welcome email on sign-up" or "process a payment".It has a database viewer, but it's not the core of the product, so I use Forest Admin to autogenerate an Admin Dashboard that non-technical team members can use:https://www.forestadmin.com/With these two, you can point-and-click make 80% of a SaaS product in almost no time.I wrote a tutorial on how to integrate Hasura + Forest Admin, for anyone interested:http://hasura-forest-admin.surge.shFor interacting with Hasura from a client, you can autogenerate fully-typed & documented query components in your framework of choice using GraphQL Code Generator:https://graphql-code-generator.com/Then I usually throw Metabase in there as a self-hosted Business Intelligence platform for non-technical people to use as well, and PostHog for analytics:https://www.metabase.com/https://posthog.com/All of these all Docker Containers, so you can have them running locally or deployed in minutes.This stack is absurdly powerful and productive. |
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