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Bret Victor: Learnable Programming | There's already two comments here about being "harsh" or "ungracious" towards Khan Academy which is ridiculous.The usual HN article that contains criticisms is usually limited to that. Some rant that took 10 minutes to write and contains nothing constructive.Bret Victor put an insane amount of time into this (I can only assume) and is truly advancing mindsets about programming tools and learning. We should all be thankful that he put this much effort into a "criticism" piece. |
Calculus Made Easy (1914) [pdf] | I'm embarassed somewhat to say this, but over the past few weeks I've been taking the courses on Khan Academy on mathematics. I'm nearly 30.and I'm not talking about brushing up on my linear algebra, that comes later, I'm talking high school level mathematics, stuff that I've largely forgotten or didn't "get" first time round.I've seen these "machine learning for hackers!" articles who try to dish out a bit of maths saying that's all you need, but I don't think you can escape the fact that sometimes you just need to start from the beginning and work your way up |
Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo | Many of the more reasonable criticisms of the memo say that it wasn't written well enough; it could've been more considerate, it should have used better language, or better presentation. In this particular link, Scott Alexander is used as an example of better writing, and he certainly is one of the best and most persuasive modern writers I've found. However, I can not imagine ever matching his talent and output, even if I practiced for years to try and catch up.I do not think that anyone's ability to write should disbar them from discussion. We can not expect perfection from others. Instead we should try to understand them as human beings, and interpret them with generosity and kindness. |
Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro | This idea of “actual professionals” that always comes up in response to apple’s “Pro” moniker amuses me to no end.Everybody throws the term around and no two people have the same definition! What in the world is an actual professional? There are professional journalists that just need a browser and text editor. There are professional programmers working on huge code bases in compiled languages that do need a beefy machine, and there are professional programmers that just need a dumb terminal to ssh into a dev machine in the cloud.And then of course what the largest subset of people seem to mean is professional video editors or content creators. What percent of the working population are video editors? Some tiny fraction, how did that become the default type of professional in the context of talking about computers?And then a lot of things that people also complain about like how replacing the wider variety of ports with usb c or thunderbolt is contradictory on a “professional” machine also don’t really make sense. Professionals can use dongles like anyone else. In fact many professionals will have more specific needs that require a single a way, for instance having a builtin sd card reader doesn’t help a professional photographer using cfexpress cards. |
I spent eleven years working on this Line Rider track | Hi everyone, I made this! I already told my whole story in this article (if you'd rather watch a video essay about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CikpAHiPlmQ) so not much more to add other than I'm still (slowly) working on Line Rider! If you have any questions here I am |
Do not leave XPS laptop in any sleep/hibernate/standby mode when placed in a bag | I stopped using my Microsoft Surface Pro because it had the same issues. It's a clusterfuck of bad design decisions at Microsoft, the most offensive one being that they prioritize the execution of their scheduled spyware upload (telemetry) over honoring the agreement with the user that a sleeping PC will remain asleep unless the user takes action. It'll even install updates at night and then make reboot sounds to wake you up. And the next day, your unsaved open documents are all gone. Plus as described here, many Windows 10 laptops will either burn themselves, or the battery will be empty whenever you need em. |
Gates Foundation to require immediate free access for journal articles | Bravo. It would be really neat if the US Government could get on the same bandwagon. Our tax dollars being used to fund research that we can't access is insane. |
Show HN: I taught my little brother JS, and he made this videogame in a week | Hasn’t been mentioned before: try this on a phone. It uses the gyroscope for control and it quickly becomes second nature to balance/guide the square around the screen. Also a very nice and rewarding discovery process, as it starts out with squares speeding by, until you realize it’s the tilt of your phone that is causing it. Congrats, super fun! |
OpenAI's GPT-3 may be the biggest thing since Bitcoin | I am deeply enjoying this comment thread - it's a bit of a Barium Meal [0] for determining how many people read (a) the headline, (b) the first paragraph, or (c) the whole thing before jumping straight into the compose box.Having read to the bottom, the quality of text generation there absolutely blew me away. GPT-2 texts have a somewhat disconnected quality - "it only makes sense if you're not really paying attention" - that this article lacks entirely. Adjacent sentences and even paragraphs are plausible neighbours. Even on re-reading more closely, it doesn't feel like the world's best writing, but I don't notice major loss of coherence until the last couple of paragraphs. I am now really curious about the other 9 attempts that were thrown away. Are they always this good?![0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canary_trap#Barium_meal_test |
The UX on this small child is terrible | How do I get new features added to the roadmap? I’ve been asking for an “eat vegetables” interface without the “offer dessert in exchange” workaround for over a year, no response, yet in the same time frame I’ve seen things like “climb top-heavy bookshelf” and “unfurl entire toilet paper roll” deployed… who is asking for these features?? |
Essence: Desktop operating system built from scratch | So first off: Very cool. Amazingly polished, and self-hosting! Especially since it looks to be an actually-independent project with POSIX as an optional compat layer.I feel like the features that are unique are mostly in 3 groups:1. Features that shouldn't be unique to this system. Tabbed windows have occasionally happened on other systems, and probably should become more common, and there's no reason it shouldn't work on other systems. I hope this inspires other people to copy;)2. Features that only work if you have really tight integration or different primitives than most OSs are using. Programs updating file name when you rename from the file manager, or the file manager showing when files are open... might be possible to graft on to other systems, but it'd be a right pain. Even systems like MacOS are going to struggle - the whole OS is under one company that could do cross-functional stuff like that, but any time it touches applications you need external developers to support it and that may or may not work out.3. Features that are possible, but nobody else does it because it's impractical - possibly only impractical from their starting points, though. Showing total size of subdirectories is expensive on ex. Linux because you have to walk every file recursively. I don't know if they're just eating the cost because they haven't hit a case where it matters, or if their system actually makes it cheap (I could easily imagine a filesystem that moved the calculation cost up front). |
That awkward moment when Apple mocked good hardware and poor people | I just can't bring myself to feel the author's anger, in any capacity. He wants to position this as a jab against those who build their own PCs, but that is utterly irrelevant. What percentage of those 600 million five-year-old PCs do you really think are being thoughtfully maintained by modders? Does the author realize that most people do not want the responsibility of maintaining their own hardware? Or that they don't have the knowledge to do so?Allow me to paint a more realistic picture: many of those PCs are junky, dusty boxes, running some outdated version of windows, filled with bloatware and riddled with security issues. Inside them are a bunch of spinning platters just waiting to fail. And when they do eventually fail (due to wear, or a virus, et al), someone's Grandmother is going to be shit out of luck, with no way to get at her email, saved photos, or anything else.A properly configured iPad, leveraging iCloud for device backups, photo backups, email credentials etc, solves all of these problems. And they'll even configure the iPad for you in the store, so grandma doesn't need to know how to do any of it. Do YOU want to be the poor sap attempting data recovery on a failed disk, then realizing that even if you do recover grandma's data, you've still got to go buy a replacement drive, find a copy of windows that grandma knows how to recognize, and install everything exactly as it was before you got there? I've been that guy before, in both a personal and professional capacity. You will eventually fail, memories will be lost, tears will be shed.We must not gloss over the fact that the iOS ecosystem does solve some very real pain points for real people. |
GameStop Is Rage Against the Financial Machine | > These points doubtless make me appear to be a complacent shill for the financial industry, talking down to the rubes. For the record, I’m still angry about the way workers were ripped off in Britain more than three decades ago, and about the way the little guy ended up bearing the brunt for the financial implosions of 2000 and 2008. But it looks horribly to me as though the same thing is going to happen again — and I don’t think the answer to today’s many ills is to empower poor people to bankrupt themselves with margin accounts and derivatives.Who is this hurting, exactly? The author is making it sound like messing up the short stock is somehow hurting "the little guy" in the long run, and I wouldn't see that happening unless:a) Gamestop is somehow in a bunch of mutual funds tied to employee pensions/401k'sb) The "little guy" refers to the Reddit traders that are making a killing right now, with the expectation that eventually the stock price will crash again.As best I can figure, most of the /r/ guys are doing this as a form of trolling and aren't expecting to get rich off it or pour their live-savings into it. And again, as best I can figure, the only people this "hurts" are the ones who were originally shorting the stock. So if this comes down to guys on Reddit pissing in Wall Street's cornflakes, it's hard for me to feel sympathetic for Wall Street. |
Astral | Yet another case of Python developers getting a basic utility which any other language had available for years and being amazed at something which is an industry standard literally anywhere else. Linter taking multiple seconds is not a problem which occurs in any other popular language.It really boggles my mind why is this lang so popular. Once you write something a little more involved than an utility script or jupyter notebook you start dealing with stupid problems like- venv- no standard package manager, dependency resolution taking forever- multiprocessing- untyped libraries (looking at you boto)- `which python`- wsgi- CLI debugginget cetera.I'm currently working daily with Python, and compared to the .NET world I'm coming from, it's MINDBLOWING how many things are annoying here. In my previous job I was able to spend several years working on a C# app barely ever needing to touch the terminal, everything came with batteries included, tooling / autocompletion / package management / performance / time spent on dealing with little issues was REALLY good in comparison.Reason I moved is that it's hard to find a job in C# which isn't soul sucking stuff like banking / maintainance / insurance, so I'm dealing with it as the project is interesting at least. |
Maine passes bill to prevent ISPs from selling browsing data without consent | I couldn't find links to the actual bill anywhere so I tracked it down:http://legislature.maine.gov/LawMakerWeb/summary.asp?ID=2800...The summary:
"This bill prohibits a provider of broadband Internet access service from using, disclosing, selling or permitting access to customer personal information unless the customer expressly consents to that use, disclosure, sale or access. The bill provides other exceptions under which a provider may use, disclose, sell or permit access to customer personal information. The bill prohibits a provider from refusing to serve a customer, charging a customer a penalty or offering a customer a discount if the customer does or does not consent to the use, disclosure, sale or access. The bill requires providers to take reasonable measures to protect customer personal information from unauthorized use, disclosure, sale or access. The provisions of the bill apply to providers operating within the State when providing broadband Internet access service to customers that are billed for service received in the State and are physically located in the State." |
92 of top 500 subreddits controlled by same 5 people | The inadequacies of Reddit make me miss the message board days of old. Around 2001, I was active on a niche message board for a Gameboy Advance game. The board was only vaguely about the game itself; most topics were just random news and conversation. At its peak, there were probably a few hundred posters, tops, but everyone had an avatar, a screen name and a recognizable identity. I never met any of these people in real life, but nearly two decades letter, I can still remember the various screen names and personalities. This sort of thing just doesn't exist anymore, simply because the subreddit version of X would destroy a (non-Reddit) budding community before it had a chance to grow.Reddit is a reflection of the broader societal trend away from local or small communities toward an anonymized, faceless megacorp one, replete with all the problems that usually entails. I hope that somehow we can get back to the human feeling of the early internet. |
Show HN: My wife is pregnant; naturally I made a baby-name app to prepare | This will be our second kid, and at least for us figuring out a name that we both love is hard. There are literally tons of baby-name apps out there, most of them more fully-featured and polished than Nom de Bébé and you should probably use one of those. However a lot of them include a disturbing amount of tracking or for any number of reasons just didn't work for my wife and I (bugs, subscriptions, lack of names, etc). So in continuing the tradition of "An app can be a home-cooked meal" [1], I built my own for us to use. You're welcome to use it too.[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22332629 |
Dear Spotify, can we just get a table of songs? | This is a big frustration of mine, too. The other is that Spotify is extremely biased towards playlist listening and makes browsing and listening to a library of albums really painful.The good news is that Spotify's SDK and API are actually powerful enough that you can build up an entire alternative interface, which is actually what I recently started doing: https://i.imgur.com/ar7VrYy.png.It's still work in progress but actually works perfectly well already. It's not ready for public use yet and also isn't open source yet though. If you want to follow development I guess the best place to do that is my twitter: https://twitter.com/tom_j_watson. |
Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now | I'm not leaving Twitter. It seems more likely than not that Elon will reverse the ban on links to other social media sites. I just don't want to hang out there in the meantime. Plus given the way things are going, it seemed like a good time to learn about alternatives.I still think Elon is a smart guy. His work on cars and rockets speaks for itself. Nor do I think he's the villain a lot of people try to make him out to be. He's eccentric, definitely, but that should be news to no one. Plus I don't think he realizes that the techniques that work for cars and rockets don't work in social media. Those two facts are sufficient to explain most of his behavior.He could still salvage the situation. He's the sort of person it would be a big mistake to write off. And I hope he does. I would be delighted to go back to using Twitter regularly. |
Smartphones with Qualcomm chip secretly send personal data to Qualcomm | This seems like much bigger news than it's being received as. Sure, other chip makers do sketchy things, but is that really where we're at in 2023? We're so beaten down by proprietary user-disrespecting hardware/software that we just shrug it off?This makes me mad. I'm so sick of this type of thing. It's a horrible time too because the embedded 5G chips are about to be part of everything, sending telemetry back about where they are and what they're being used for. I think it's utterly ridiculous that if you aren't ok with this type of thing, then you have to go way out of the mainstream to find products, and often there's no viable option. "Ownership" now means nothing.Imagine if you bought a car from somebody, and they secretly kept a spare key and periodically used your car to run their personal errand. Would you be ok with that so long as they always had it back before you needed it so you never knew they were doing it?That's what is happening when you "buy" a device and the device maker uses it to run code that serves only themselves (without receiving permission), to the detriment of your privacy. I can only hope RISC-V combined with people willing to care can lead to a return to a time when people actually own stuff and ownership is something we respect. |
Zero-day in Sign in with Apple | "Apple also did an investigation of their logs and determined there was no misuse or account compromise due to this vulnerability."Given the simplicity of the exploit, I really doubt that claim. Seems more likely they just don't have a way of detecting whether it happened. |
Intentionally making close friends | Disclaimer: no unsolicited advice please.I'm old(er) mid-40's, single, no kids, and never married. I don't have much family or close friends. Hookup culture is de rigueur but it doesn't interest me. Where I'm at, there isn't a context to meet people and most random people in public around keep to themselves and treat me like I'm invisible. I do volunteering but that also doesn't go anywhere.If you have to constantly take the social initiative, then you're carrying the relationship. Sometimes absence is better. Instead of dwelling on loneliness or self-pity, keeping productively busy seems a better alternative.I'd like to have a family and kids, but an inability to find and make friends precludes that. The thought of getting old alone, having no one to check-in on me, no one to bury me, no one to care that I'm gone, and no one at a funeral seems depressing. I don't see how I won't end up in a "potter's field" somewhere. |
Victory Lap for Ask Patents | > The number of actually novel, non-obvious inventions in the software industry that maybe, in some universe, deserve a government-granted monopoly is, perhaps, two.Any idea to which two he might be referring? |
Comcast, AT&T and Verizon pose a greater surveillance risk than Facebook | Yes, ISPs can snoop on you to a degree, but I don't see how it's worse than Facebook or Google. ISPs have to work around widespread (and growing) encryption, while Google/Facebook have your _actual_ data... plus, they know way more about you in minute detail via their mobile apps and devices. My home internet is VPN'ed and unless my ISP is expending undue effort on monitoring me, it can't see much detail about what I do on the Internet. However, Google/Facebook break all the security layers because we explicitly _trust_ them with all our data. Unless something fundamentally changes (maybe via net neutrality somehow allowing ISPs to penalize encrypted traffic or something), I don't see how Facebook/Google don't run away with all the power here. |
You probably don't need AI/ML. You can make do with well written SQL scripts | My startup was approached by a corporate VC that wanted to make a strategic investment. Based on the attendee list from our meeting, which included very high up folks from the company, I felt good going in. They expressed interest in our technology that makes reading on screen easier [1], but they were surprised to learn that we didn't use machine learning to accomplish this.I indicated that it was actually quite effective without ML, and that it was easier to explain to users this way. They kept prodding around on the ML stuff, and how we might be able to use ML to accomplish roughly the same thing.A week later they said that they were no longer interested because, although they liked what our tech was able to accomplish, it didn't fit with their investment thesis — which was all about ML.My wife asked me why I didn't just make some stuff up and say we could do v2 using ML. Perhaps she was right.1: http://www.beelinereader.com/individualupdate: in response to feedback below, I edited the link to point to a page with relevant content instead of our generic landing page. Lesson learned! |
John Carmack: My Steve Jobs Stories | "I did think it was cool to trade a few emails with Steve Jobs."Funny he should write that. Many, many years ago I wrote an email to John Carmack asking something about his .plan postings which must have seemed fairly mundane looking back on it now. He was nice enough to write me back. And I thought that was pretty cool too.I guess it just goes to show that even the people you respect or admire have people they respect and admire themselves. |
Jony Ive to form independent design company with Apple as client | Given his penchant for thinness over function, I hope this means we can have a thicker pro laptop again, with all the ports back and a more robust keyboard. |
CSS Gradients that avoid the “gray dead zone” | This article seems to give RGB a bad rap but I think it makes the most sense for gradients. I wouldn't want a yellow to blue gradient to cycle through a (partial) rainbow of colors. But I also wouldn't really ever choose to make a pure yellow to pure blue gradient. Most pleasing gradients you see in the wild use colors that are more similar to begin with, so it's a bit of a strawman. It's really just about carefully choosing your start and end (and optionally intermediate) colors. |
Sony: All personal data stolen from PSN | I wonder how many times a company can install trojans on your computer, destroy your OS's security, secretly watch all your actions, then proceed to not properly protect your data when you voluntarily give it to them...before going out of business.Sony's size and momentum must be pretty crazy. Or maybe it's our society. I just can't imagine a small record store in the 1960s, after being caught spying through the bedroom windows of its customers, ever staying in business.I feel terrible for anyone caught in this. But maybe, just maybe, Sony isn't the company to do business with anymore? |
Making a virtual machine in Google Sheets | Oh, man. This is a VM in JS ("Google Script") with a UI in Google Sheets.If I had more time I'd post a VM in Google Sheets formulas only.Anyone want to take it up?Edit: hold my beer (see my reply below) |
Facebook Security Chief Said to Leave After Clashes Over Disinformation | There's breaking reporting that Facebook just had personnel in the Cambridge Analytica offices before the UK authorities could get there with warrants.https://twitter.com/carolecadwalla/status/975844154361221121> BREAKING: Facebook WAS inside Cambridge Analytica's office but have now "stood down" following dramatic intervention by UK Information Commissioner's Office..https://twitter.com/carolecadwalla/status/975855218490519552...> To be clear, @facebook was trying to "secure evidence" ahead of the UK authorities. Nice try, @facebook. The UK Information Commissioner's Office cracking whip...British legal investigation MUST take precedence over US multibillion $ company.....Something VERY wrong is going on at Facebook.edit, with another account:https://twitter.com/DamianCollins/status/975856097163702272> Facebook have confirmed that auditors and legal counsel acting on behalf of the company were in the offices of Cambridge Analytica this evening until they were told to stand down by the Information Commissioner. These investigations need to be undertaken by the proper authorities |
A Facebook crawler was making 7M requests per day to my stupid website | Hi Napolux,It looks like your site is using a theme based on my website (https://ruudvanasseldonk.com/, source at https://github.com/ruuda/blog). That is fine — it is open source after all, licensed under the GPLv3. But I can’t find the source code for your site, and I can’t find any prominent notices saying that you modified my source. Could you please add those? |
When your coworker does great work, tell their manager | This is the biggest problem with stack ranking software engineers, the practice I had to endure while at a well known software company. All it does is create a zero-sum game, so I have no incentive to compliment anyone else. I needed to make sure that my rank was as high as I could make it, which really sucked during performance time. It was very stressful, even though I was a high performer, because it didn't foster the type of environment I wanted to work at, which is collaborative.I heard from my friends at Facebook that the environment there is equally crazy. Everyone knows that the performance reviews are based on lazy stats, so they game the stats. Every time someone requests a meeting, they are expected to give a "thank you" which is one of the measures for performance. Also, things like the number of reviews commented on could be easily gamed by adding a "+1!" as a comment which sounds like another undesirable place to work at. Maybe current Facebook employees can comment, however. |
A list of recent hostile moves by Google's Chrome team | Remember the "Safari is the new IE" narrative? Just because Safari doesn't support some API doesn't make it IE, IE wasn't an inferior browser at the beginning either. What made IE the IE everyone hates was its departure from standards(?) and enforcing its own vision of the web thanks to its enormous market share. On IE's case, MS probably stagnated it to prevent competition against its desktop Apps business and on Google's case it's going to be in the name of data collection and ad business.Chrome is the new IE.But yeah, that's what you get when you don't know history. |
Hotwire: HTML over the Wire | This is so exciting to see, especially for older folk like me.Almost 20 years ago, one of my professors told us before graduation that hot tech is mostly about the idea pendulum swinging back and forth. I immediately chalked it up to 65+ above white wise men snobbery.However, this is exactly that. We started with static pages, then came Ajax and Asp.net and the open source variants, then we went full SPA, now we are moving back to server side because things are too complicated.Obviously tech is different, better, more efficient but the overall idea seems to be the same. |
Modules, not microservices | Microservices, while often sold as solving a technical problem, usually actually solve for a human problem in scaling up an organization.There's two technical problems that microservices purport to solve: modularization (separation of concerns, hiding implementation, document interface and all that good stuff) and scalability (being able to increase the amount of compute, memory and IO to the specific modules that need it).The first problem, modules, can be solved at the language level. Modules can do that job, and that's the point of this blog post.The second problem, scalability, is harder to solve at the language level in most languages outside those designed to be run in a distributed environment. But most people need it a lot less than they think. Normally the database is your bottleneck and if you keep your application server stateless, you can just run lots of them; the database can eventually be a bottleneck, but you can scale up databases a lot.The real reason that microservices may make sense is because they keep people honest around module boundaries. They make it much harder to retain access to persistent in-memory state, harder to navigate object graphs to take dependencies on things they shouldn't, harder to create PRs with complex changes on either side of a module boundary without a conversation about designing for change and future proofing. Code ownership by teams is something you need as an organization scales, if only to reduce the amount of context switching that developers need to do if treated as fully fungible; owning a service is more defensible than owning a module, since the team will own release schedules and quality gating.I'm not so positive on every microservice maintaining its own copy of state, potentially with its own separate data store. I think that usually adds more ongoing complexity in synchronization than it saves by isolating schemas. A better rule is for one service to own writes for a table, and other services can only read that table, and maybe even then not all columns or all non-owned tables. Problems with state synchronization are one of the most common failure modes in distributed applications, where queues get backed up, retries of "bad" events cause blockages and so on. |
Reddit user captures video of 2012 voting machines altering votes | The shenanigans you seem to tolerate during elections are just incomprehensible to us foreigners. The number of horror stories I've heard in the last couple of weeks regarding everything from just weirdness of the system to blatant manipulation is farcical.It's possible that I'm getting a bleaker picture than reality, I suppose, since I only read about the broken stuff and not the instances where everything just works. |
Show HN: I'm 12, learning JS, and wrote Wolfram's cellular automaton in Node | Liam, this is incredible!I thought it might be useful for you to incrementally see how someone in industry would review or change this code, so here's a little code review via video: https://youtu.be/UkVOrcS--04We very incrementally build up to the final code, which can be found here: https://gist.github.com/stevekrenzel/b490564bf1c7f98e232a6c8...Hope you find it helpful! |
Recursive Game of Life | Doesn't work in FirefoxUncaught
Object { message: "assertion error", stack: "C@https://oimo.io/works/life/main.js:31:459\nze@https://oimo.i..., g: {…}, value: "assertion error" }
main.js:37:66 |
Bing AI can't be trusted | I have come to two conclusions about the GPT technologies after some weeks to chew on this:1. We are so amazed by its ability to babble in a confident manner that we are asking it to do things that it should not be asked to do. GPT is basically the language portion of your brain. The language portion of your brain does not do logic. It does not do analyses. But if you built something very like it and asked it to try, it might give it a good go.In its current state, you really shouldn't rely on it for anything. But people will, and as the complement of the Wile E. Coyote effect, I think we're going to see a lot of people not realize they've run off the cliff, crashed into several rocks on the way down, and have burst into flames, until after they do it several dozen times. Only then will they look back to realize what a cockup they've made depending on these GPT-line AIs.To put it in code assistant terms, I expect people to be increasingly amazed at how well they seem to be coding, until you put the results together at scale and realize that while it kinda, sorta works, it is a new type of never-before-seen crap code that nobody can or will be able to debug short of throwing it away and starting over.This is not because GPT is broken. It is because what it is is not correctly related to what we are asking it to do.2. My second conclusion is that this hype train is going to crash and sour people quite badly on "AI", because of the pervasive belief I have seen even here on HN that this GPT line of AIs is AI. Many people believe that this is the beginning and the end of AI, that anything true of interacting with GPT is true of AIs in general, etc.So people are going to be even more blindsided when someone develops an AI that uses GPT as its language comprehension component, but does this higher level stuff that we actually want sitting on top of it. Because in my opinion, it's pretty clear that GPT is producing an amazing level of comprehension of what a series of words means. The problem is, that's all it is really doing. This accomplishment should not be understated. It just happen to be the fact that we're basically abusing it in its current form.What it's going to do as a part of an AI, rather than the whole thing, is going to be amazing. This is certainly one of the hard problems of building a "real AI" that is, at least to a first approximation, solved. Holy crap, what times we live in.But we do not have this AI yet, even though we think we do. |
Thank HN: From Google form to $1k in revenue in one month | Congrats! Small note, none of the listings appear when using uBlock Origin [ https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin/cjpa... ], a popular ad blocker.It seems related to your /js/ads-controller.js file (it gets blocked because of the "/js/ads-" portion in the path).I would suggest fixing that (and preferably minimizing your JS into one bundle). |
Show HN: Markov chains explained visually | I've seen Markov chains applied to language generation - producing sentences that make sense grammatically but not literally. Anyone know what the connection is here? I think I have an idea but would like to see if it gets independently verified by someone else. |
Eve: Programming designed for humans | I think that Eve is tackling the wrong problem.Allow me an analogy: "Bronk, the math designed for humans." Instead of dense algebraic expressions like "3x+49", you get to write "thrice the value of x plus 49." You may consider this a straw man, but I think that if you look hard at existing programming languages, you'll see that they are all designed for humans, and that the challenge in programming is in formulating your thoughts in a precise fashion. Should languages create higher-level abstractions to allow humans to reason about programs more efficiently? Yes! But that's not what this environment is about.I do see one possible rebuttal to this, which would be an entirely different form of programming that is to traditional programming what google search is to the semantic web; that is, rather than specify programs precisely, we give examples to an approximate system and hope for the best. In many ways, that's how our biological systems work, and they've gotten us a long way. I don't see that happening in Eve, though. |
Don’t Mess with The Google | Disclaimer: I don't speak for Google and don't have any real context into why this occurred. Speaking as myself, a private citizen.I work in Spam & Abuse and it's possible that this is the result of some clustering algorithm that was trying to take down sharders / phone buying rings. It's very possible that the SWEs responsible didn't consider this possibility (that legitimate customers would be used to shard purchases) and I'm pretty sure if the affected customers appeal they'll be reinstated, maybe with a warning. I certainly wouldn't characterize this as intentionally punishing the individuals who purchased phones on Google's part -- notice that only users who directly sent their phones to the reseller's address were taken down. Smells like automation to me.The "deleting all their data if the appeal doesn't go through" thing is actually because of privacy policy and Google can't keep your data around for longer than 90 days give or take after your account is suspended. Again it seems heavy-handed but is more a perfect storm of big-company policy decisions with good intentions overall. Know that if you ask Google to remove your account, you'll actually get everything wiped! (That's a good thing imho!)It really is unfortunate that FPs (or "mostly-FP"s) in Google's systems impact people so badly. FWIW for most Google services if you abuse them you usually get a service level suspension rather than your entire account suspended, probably for this exact reason. |
Amazon, Berkshire, JPMorgan to Create Healthcare Company | As some other people have mentioned below, the much lauded[1] vertically integrated health provider Kaiser Permanente started this way, as the health provider caring for the workers of an enlightened large employer, Kaiser Steel, which at the time was a massive shipbuilder for the Navy and others headquartered in California with a major presence in the SF Bay Area.I was briefly covered by a Kaiser plan, and have a lot of old friends who are either covered, work there, or worked there, and can say people really appreciate not only the relatively low costs but also the ability to just come to one place no matter the ailment and know you'll be able to get an appointment quickly and be taken care of, and won't have to haggle to get the care you need or deal with insurance company roadblocks. To the extent there are downsides (and of course there are) they are around not being able to have your own doctor (though I do think there is an approximation of that) and overzealous cost cutting (see the kidney center scandal).My understanding is Kaiser has not spread much beyond California due to regulatory issues.(Interestingly, Kaiser Steel was a major setting for Atlas Shrugged.)[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/21/business/kaiser-permanente... |
California law requires businesses to let you cancel your subscription online | The New York Times doesn't allow you to cancel your subscription online. |
No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This | Seriously. What's the point of open source if companies just steal it, build billion dollar industries on top, and then lock everything down?Apple is telling us we can't run our own software on their goddamned devices, yet they built their empire on open source.Look at Facebook, Google, Amazon. They've extracted all the blood they can and given us back scraps. AWS is repackaged software you pay more for. Yes, it's managed, but you're forever a renter.They've destroyed our open web, replaced RSS with DRM, left us with streaming and music options worse than cable and personal audio libraries.The web is bloated with ads and tracking, AMP is given preference, Facebook and Twitter are testing the limits of democracy and radicalizing everyone to cancel one another.Remember when the Internet was actually pleasant? When it was nice to build stuff for others to use?Stop giving your work away for free when the companies only take. |
Show HN: Web browser to help programmers think clearly | What I really want is a browser that displays information in a clear, unified format that I can customize to my liking.I want this browser to disregard all visual HTML and CSS rendering, and rather instrument a headless browser to gather the navigation and content from sites.I want to be able to easily make my own instrumentation for sites that do not yet work on this browser.I’m want to allow some branding in the form of one theme color, used for one top navigation bar background, and a site logo there. That’s it. Nothing else. But maybe make this easily customizable with the rest of the interface.In effect, a ”reader mode” but for the entire browsing experience, not just the main content. |
What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book? | I once took a critical thinking course and bought the textbook 2nd hand from the college bookstore. A week or two in, I noticed half of a sentence written in the margin. As the professor started teaching the topic from that page, he rhetorically asked a question, did not get an answer, and then answered himself with the sentence from the book. I filliped ahead and found that the entire book was annotated with all of his answers, anecdotes, and various other helpful notes. There was even a table that accurately listed his wardrobe choices! The notes were in several different handwritings, and the book had been resold over a dozen times, so that professor must have been teaching the same class the exact same way for a decade or more. I quickly became a star pupil as I always had an answer ready. I added a few notes along the way and then sold it back to the bookstore at the end of the year. I really wanted to keep it for posterity, but It just seemed wrong to take it out of circulation. |
Google Inbox | Congrats to Google on shipping!Side question: am I the only person fully satisfied by my email workflow? I practice inbox 0- if an email is in my inbox, it means something needs to be done about it (whether it's replying, filing a bug report, writing a patch, etc). Once it's done, it gets archived. I star the stuff that I'll need to refer to later, like tickets for a flight or concert. I then have a few server side rules to do things like mark certain classes of emails as read (eg build logs, mailing lists), so as to not flood my phone with notifications. And... that's it.(edit: oh and yes, I am also very diligent about unsubscribing from the stuff I know will never be relevant, rather than just archiving it and forgetting about it until another email from the same source comes up a week later. After a few weeks of consistently practicing this, your inbox gets much better)I get probably a few hundred emails a day at most (work+personal), and this system works great for me. I know people like Paul Graham think email is utterly broken, but when you're at their level I'm not sure ~any~ tool will be satisfying - they're absolutely outliers.So HNers, do you really have a problem with your email workflow, or is everyone just repeating "email is broken" because some smart people with an ungodly amount of email said so? |
Firefox Now Available with Enhanced Tracking Protection by Default | It is funny how my browser preferences has changed over last 5 years.2014 me as a developer had Chrome as number 1 browser for both development and all rest. Firefox once a month just to check cross browser compatibility. And Safari was just installed without me using it.2019 me uses Safari for everything except development. Excellent power consumption and UX. Firefox for development. And lastly Chrome for all web apps that only work on Chrome. ( Google Meet etc. )
I feel much much better that I am not dependent on chrome. |
Zoom Acknowledges It Suspended Activists' Accounts at China's Request | “The reality is Zoom operates in more than 80 countries and continues to expand, which requires compliance with local laws even as Zoom seeks to promote the open exchange of ideas.“This kind of rationalization isn’t just a problem with Zoom, Apple does the same thing - blocking podcasts and other apps in the Chinese market (also the Taiwan flag emoji).This is wrong.What’s legal and what’s right are not the same thing, Zoom’s PR about the promotion of an “open exchange of ideas” is nonsense and both Zoom and the CCP know it.Companies that work to suppress the rights of citizens are complicit in that suppression and its legality is irrelevant.When Zoom is requested to send over names and videos of political dissidents to authoritarian leaders will they comply?I’m sure those killed will be pleased to know Zoom was operating within the legal framework of their country.Legality should be the bare minimum standard - and in countries with bad laws (Middle East, China) it shouldn’t even be that. |
Why we won’t be supporting Sign in with Apple | As they point out at the very bottom, all their arguments apply to all third-party sign-ons, so they're removing Facebook as well.So there's nothing specifically against Apple, despite the title seeming to imply it -- just that they're taking the move right now because of Apple's new policy coming into effect.I've got to say, I really wish there were a way to know whether I already used Facebook, Google, or Apple to log into a site or app before. My password manager is usually pretty good at letting me know if I've got a "normal" account with user/password, but it doesn't do anything to remind me if I ought to log in with one of the other services.Every time I'm occasionally asked to sign into Spotify, Pinterest, Medium, Quora, etc. -- it's like, I'm pretty sure I've signed up with something before, but who even knows which one, or multiple?If password managers could start saving that you've got accounts associated with Apple/Facebook/Google and highlight the relevant button on sign-in, it would be a big feature improvement. |
Facebook knows Instagram is toxic for teen girls, company documents show | Is it Facebook / Instagram's fault or us as a culture? As a culture we adore beauty, wealth, power...Facebook seems to be just a platform where our natural desires can have a play. Facebook hasn't created this impossible beauty ideal, it was created long long ago by Hollywood and the fashion industry. Facebook just makes it super easy for people to become obsessed with something by "connecting" with it.
It used to be that 40 years ago you watched some supermodel in a commercial for 20 seconds and she was gone. The novelty with the internet is that now you can follow this supermodel and get dozens of alerts a week about her.
If it's not Facebook it's gonna be TikTok or something other platform. |
Apple's director of machine learning resigns due to return to office work | Warning: Hot Take.I genuinely believe many people who prefer working in an office versus at home have unfulfilling social lives or bad home lives. The social dynamics, competition, in physical offices fills the void in their lives. Also seems like most of the people clamoring for a return to the office are also climbers & middle managers.For some work a physical presence is required not just preferable, but for most of a software engineer's day to day there really is no unquestionable upside.I'll quit before I go back full time. I've never been happier or more fulfilled with my work/life balance, and I've never been more productive with my time. I'll even take a different remote position at a 20% pay cut and a reduction in equity, at least, to retain WFH. Most I'm willing to give is a day a week in office, and maybe temporarily longer in rare circumstances where the benefit in performance is clear. |
Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service | > Today, we’re excited to announce the public beta for Cloud Spanner, a globally distributed relational database service that lets customers have their cake and eat it too: ACID transactions and SQL semantics, without giving up horizontal scaling and high availability.This is a bold claim. What do they know about the CAP theorem that I don't?Separately, (emphasis mine):> If you have a MySQL or PostgreSQL system that's bursting at the seams, or are struggling with hand-rolled transactions on top of an eventually-consistent database, Cloud Spanner could be the solution you're looking for. Visit the Cloud Spanner page to learn more and get started building applications on our next-generation database service.From the rest of the article it seems like the wire protocol for accessing it is MySQL. I wonder if they mean to add a PostgreSQL compatibility layer at some point. |
Suez Canal says traffic in channel resumes after stranded ship refloated | Lots of articles quote a $XXX billion dollars per day figure, but those numbers are normally for "worth of goods delayed" which, while interesting, doesn't tell the story to me.Are there any estimates as to the actual cost of this "mishap", due to e.g. spoilage, financial/contractual repercussions of late deliveries, personnel/fuel costs? |
The Grug Brained Developer | Ah, the ample club of wishful thinking.There are two general ways of approaching software design (and I'm paraphrasing Tony Hoare here):1. You can write software so simple there are obviously no errors2. You can write software so complex there are no obvious errorsOne thing that escapes "grug" is that achieving 1. often requires more sophistication than their magical club allows. Most well-intentioned "grug" developers will write software so simple that it becomes it's own form of complexity: a giant mud-ball of for-loops, while-loops, variable assignments, and other wonderful side effects. Instead of addressing complexity head-on with abstraction, "grug" will beat "galaxy brain" over the head.What grug fails to understand is that simplicity isn't easy or familiar. It doesn't mean "sticking to what you know." If often requires being able to reason about programs and to verify that reasoning!But go ahead grug... keep beating people over the head with the club and hope that the complexity will go away. |
Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended | I hope that the wheels stay on sufficiently to get an idea of where EM wants to take Twitter and find out what kind of value it can bring. Having said that, he really made it obvious to me as an eng that the severance is the option I would be taking. Going "hardcore" on things can be fun, at the right time in your life, for the right reasons, with the right people. But somebody who takes over the company and accrues so much social debt so quickly for no other discernible reason than looking like the smartest person in the room misses the bar for "the right people" by a pretty significant margin. |
Google’s Plan to DRM the Web Goes Against Everything Google Once Stood For | It's time to start lobbying hard for an antitrust breakup of Google. This DRM plan, as abuse of a monopoly position, provides more political coverage for a forced breakup.It's pretty clear how to break up Alphabet, because it grew mostly by acquisition.- Google - search, ads on search pages and nothing more.- DoubleClick - third party ads on other sites.- Analytics - services to web sites.- Cloud - the money-losing data center service. Probably gets sold to AWS or Hurricane Electric.- Android - phones and similar devices- Chrome - browsers- YouTube - streaming content. Probably gets sold to Netflix or AT&T or Comcast.- Waymo - self-driving cars. Probably gets sold to a car company.- Alphabet - all the other stuff.Now, some of these have conflicting interests. That's a good thing. With Chrome separated from Google and Doubleclick, and forced to fight for market share, it's not in Chrome's interest to prevent blocking ads from DoubleClick or Google. Google wants people to see ads on search pages, while Doubleclick wants people to leave the search site and see ads elsewhere. Now there's competition.Antitrust action against Google is already underway. The State of Texas and several state attorneys general have a case pending.[1] There are other cases.[2] All these cases benefit from Google's move to entrench their monopoly by technical means.So make lots of noise politically about that. It's quite likely to make Google dump this proposal, on the advice of their antitrust lawyers.[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-06-05/google-an...[2] https://www.lanierlawfirm.com/google-antitrust-lawsuits-expl... |
DeleteFB: Selenium script to delete all of your Facebook wall posts | I don't trust the "delete" button to scrub it from FB's database.I'd be slightly more confident (slightly) that editing the post might cause the core data in the db to be updated, however. In which case, I think the more effective script would be one that goes through all of your FB posts and scrambles them, or replaces the text with gibberish. |
M1racles: An Apple M1 covert channel vulnerability | ELI5, anyone.Are the chip registers not protected? What's the mechanism that's allowing this data sharing to happen? |
Skeuocard | Upvoting because this is so beautifully executed and I'd love to see people test this out on their checkout process.That said, my experience indicates that this is not going to convert well.To mirror the author's own quote:"Every question a user has to ask themselves during the checkout process is another reason for them not to complete it."What's presented here is a drastically different experience from the norm.It doesn't behave the way you'd expect if you've ever bought anything else online.Beyond that it has to load images dynamically based on card type which, on a slow or interrupted connection, will create even more confusion.I love the concept, I love the execution, I just don't think this is going to be a conversion driver.But I'll test it anyways. |
Amazon Pulls Out of Planned New York City Campus | If Amazon had just quietly announced plans to expand to LIC without the "HQ2 Search" dog and pony show they almost certainly would still be here.Google buys entire city blocks and nobody bats an eye. Turns out that publicly shaking down cities across the US tends to draw out the opposition.More publicity = more scrutiny = more angry opponents of your business decision |
My Second Year as a Solo Developer | Two cents offered because this post really strikes a chord with me, and I also spent some time chasing down rabbit holes early in my software business:These products do not appear obviously commercializable and multiple years invested into them without materially improving the businesses does not decrease my confidence in that snap judgment. You could probably talk to business owners with problems, launch an (appropriately priced; hundreds to thousands of dollars per year) product against those problems, build contingent on getting 10 commits to buy, and be at +/- $100k in 12 to 18 months. Many people with less technical and writing ability have done this in e.g. the MicroConf community. If you want the best paint-by-numbers approach to it I've seen, c.f. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otbnC2zE2rw&t=2s(I'll note that What Got Done is probably a viable boutique SaaS business if you somehow figured out distribution for it, at price points between $50 and $200 per month. My confidence on this approaches total. HNers skeptical because it is technically trivial should probably reflect for a moment on how much time is spent on standups at a company with 20 or 200 engineers, what one hour of their time is worth, and how likely that company is to put an engineer on this project specifically.)If you run an API-based business in the future: Usage-based billing is a really tricky business model for a solo developer. Note that you can say "Usage-based billing but we have a minimum commitment", and probably should prior to doing speculative integration engineering work. Your minimum commitment should be north of $1,000 per month; practically nobody can integrate with your API for cheaper than a thousand dollars of engineering time, right.This also counsels aiming at problems amenable to solutions with APIs which are trivially worth $1,000++ a month to many businesses which can hire engineers. Parsing recipe ingredients seems like a very constrained problem space. Consider e.g. parsing W-2s or bank statements or similar; many more businesses naturally care about intake of those documents, getting accurate data from them, and introducing that data into a lucrative business process that they have.I would encourage you, to the maximum extent compatible with your sanity, to prioritize "Will this get me more customers?" over behind-the-scenes investments like CI/CD which are very appropriate to Google but will under no circumstance show up in next year's report as One Of The Most Important Things I Did This Year.For similar reasons, I would suggest devoting approximately zero cycles to cost control. You don't have a cost problem and no amount of cost control will bend the curve of your current businesses to sustainability. You have a revenue problem. Your desired state in the medium term will make it economically irrational for you to think for more than a minute about a $50 a month SaaS expense; marketing and sales gets you to that desired state, not cost control. |
Ever-expanding animation of the life of the 796th floor of a space station | Reminds me of a game I used to play called Space Station 13. It's a completely unique game. Imagine a giant game of Among Us, but with the engine complexity of Dwarf Fortress. Most servers are high level roleplay, where each player has a role (doctor, janitor, captain, clown, etcetera) and the rounds play out until chaos ensues (theme changes each round, but it could anything from station terrorists to a wizard causing bedlam). This YouTuber really expresses it better than I ever could: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URJ_qSXruW0Everyone has their goals to achieve each round, but it's general havoc. The OP animation really channels the feeling of playing the game. |
Y Combinator is funding the future of spam in Windows | So when earlier it was mentioned, I assumed "They have to have a different angle on this; they're a YC company." And seeing a strong thread title and no evidence for it other than "The industry they're in is ridiculously seedy", I thought maybe HN was in rush to judgement mode.So I thought I'd try, you know, installing something.Make your own call:http://images1.bingocardcreator.com/blog-images/hn/its-not-a... |
Why can a scam company raise $40 Million Series C + $76 Million Series B? | I'm the Series A investor in this company.We in fact have done plenty of due diligence, and you will be pleased to know it is not a scam company. In fact, the company has very high customer satisfaction ratings, including an NPS that is in the ballpark of Amazon, and a very high customer retention rate. More than half of the people who subscribe to the service are still subscribers after two years, which is unusually high for a subscription service.I obviously cannot speak to your girlfriend's experience. With nearly a million subscribers, there are certainly people with bad experiences -- same is true with any service. Netflix is great but I am sure there are a number of people who have had a bad experience.I would encourage the HackerNews community to consider the opposite: if we assume the investors in this business do perform due diligence, is there another possible explanation? Is it possible that this case is not representative of the average case?But hey, we don't have to be he-said-she-said here, anyone can just go to the site and verify if this claim is true. In essence, the claim is: "The site tricked me. I went to buy a single pair of shoes, and in doing so, they actually started taxing my credit card every month, and no one warned me."Folks are right to be skeptical -- a lot of businesses have done this, tried to hide the fact there would be future charges. Does JustFab?I just went to the site -- you can do this -- picked a random pair of boots and put them in my shopping cart. I then clicked checkout, and here is what that page looked like:http://imagesup.net/?di=15138026329215"I wonder how much of this $100 million are from people like my girlfriend who simply didn't read their entire 2,500 words Terms of Service and were unaware that they were charged $39.95 a month for nothing" -- Seriously, please look at the link above to the checkout flow and tell me that's how you see it, that you have to read the 2,500 word TOS to figure out that this is the case.Seems pretty clear to me. You can get the boots for $39 if you join the VIP program. "With this purchase, you will be activating your VIP membership"Under "How VIP Membership Works", it explains:
" If you do not take action between the 1st and the 5th of the month, you will be charged $39.95 for a member credit on the 6th. Each credit can be redeemed for 1 JustFab item, so use it to shop later!"It's in plain English, and in the same font size as everything else on the page. Over 800,000 people can manage their subscription account every month without racking up credits. I'm sorry it didn't work for your girlfriend, and I recognize she is not the only one who has not grokked the subscription element and been surprised -- but it's a tiny minority, and the information is quite clear on the site.Finally, one may ask: why subscription at all? Well, $39 for a high quality pair of boots is a really, really good deal. Most e-commerce merchants have to reacquire their customers for every transaction. By asking members to commit to come back to the site once a month, the company doesn't have to constantly pay google or other traffic sources to acquire members, and to have prices like this you have to keep costs low. That's the deal. There are plenty of higher priced places to buy shoes if you don't want to subscribe.Double finally: credits never expire. If you have 8 credits in your account, you can go get 8 pairs of shoes.Justfab is an awesome company and is creating and H&M or Zara experience online: fast fashion at great prices. I'm not sure HN is the target demographic, but it's a great service and customers love it, and VCs have poured money into because of that. |
Google transferred ownership of Duck.com to DuckDuckGo | DDG is great - have been using it for months and I really enjoy the results. Google searches seem to be more of an echo chamber whereas DDG results seem to be more representative across a broad spectrum of sites. |
Monoliths Are the Future | I'm a database guy, so the question I get from clients is, "We're thinking about breaking up our monolith into a bunch of microservices, and we want to use best-of-breed persistence layers for each microservice. Some data belongs in Postgres, some in DynamoDB, some in JSON files. Now, how do we do reporting?"Analysts expect to be able to connect to one system, see their data, and write queries for it. They were never brought into the microservices strategy, and now they're stumped as to how they're supposed to quickly get data out to answer business questions or show customers stuff on a dashboard.The only answers I've seen so far are either to build really complex/expensive reporting systems that pull data from every source in real time, or do extract/transform/load (ETL) processes like data warehouses do (in which the reporting data lags behind the source systems and doesn't have all the tables), or try to build real time replication to a central database - at which point, you're right back to a monolith.Reporting on a bunch of different databases is a hard nut to crack. |
Audacity 3.0 | Very pleased that Audacity is still actively developed. I said it before but I think this can't be overstated:Audacity may had some quirks over the years but it's still one of the most (if not the most) accessible tool for audio editing by non-professionals with an adequate feature set. It's used by community radio stations all over the world since it's easy to teach and cross-platform while being free. |
Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab | It’s insane how much cynicism I’m seeing here. I know people who are nuclear scientists at LLNL - if they’re excited about this then it’s a big deal. The experiment actually created more energy than expected and damaged the sensors.This website is seriously infested with reflexive contrarians and it’s a not healthy. |
Copyright Office Ruling Imposes Sweeping Right to Repair Reforms | This sounds like a niche for a small Pacific island. Islands like Jersey and the Cook Islands tailor their legal systems to cater for those who want a looser financial system. A small state could tailor their laws for those who want to repair things and potentially make a very nice "high tech" economy out of reverse engineering, importing broken stuff and exporting fixed stuff. Copyright holders might try and block an import, but they would be fighting a harder battle against "parallel import" laws.--Edit: And they could set up a network of embassies around the world, with integrated repair shops. Instead of visiting the Kiribati embassy to get a visa, you might visit to get your device fixed. |
The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML | I am not a front-end developer but looking at it from a distance I really don't get modern web design. Sure some sites might need fancy javascript single page features, like if your webpage is an interactive map or realtime game, but most sites are just text and some pictures. Whats with all the javascript? Your site looks just like the next one anyway! It feels like an "Emperor's New Clothes" situation or maybe more likely I just don't understand the allure as an clueless user.. I am almost tempted to make a webpage to see what the big fuss is about! |
Backblaze submitting names and sizes of files in B2 buckets to Facebook | Yev from Backblaze here -> we’ve looked into and verified the issue and have pushed out a fix. We will continue to investigate and will provide updates as we have them. |
Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices | Developers at unicorns: even in the best of times, do you feel more expendable than you've felt at other jobs? We always are amazed at the number of developers at companies like this. (the numbers I've seen are old, but I guess out of 22,000 employees, it was something like 5000 engineers?) While that allows you to build in a more robust way than a smaller company, it seems like there's no shortage of developers working on tooling, R&D projects, and at least partially on open source projects, roles that could presumably go away if a company had to focus strictly on the core product. |
OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble | This post seems half right, half wrong.Wrong that OSM should be a service provider and not a database - I think it should be a database, and corporations are good for OSM. The post calls for OSM to essentially become Mapbox. It's insanely expensive to be Mapbox, and Mapzen just failed trying to be a less corporate version of Mapbox. And then the usage policy part of the article is moot or at least not that consequential if you don't believe OSM should be a service provider.Right: Moderation tools need to be created/fixed. New mappers need to be encouraged/onboarded better. Vandalism is a problem. OSMF culture is toxic. Hidden gatekeepers are toxic. Imports need to be supported. Bots need to be enabled, and we need to consider people who contribute code/tech/imports first class OSM contributors and not just glorify the individual mapper.Probably right: OSM needs layers, or even a more sweeping re-architecture to allow better versioning, moderation, better tooling, and easier understanding of the data.Probably wrong: Expanding the scope of OpenStreetMap to include transient data. Too much other work to do, maybe later for this. |
20GB leak of Intel data: whole Git repositories, dev tools, backdoor mentions | > If you find password protected zips in the release the password is probably either "Intel123" or "intel123". This was not set by me or my source, this is how it was aquired from Intel.Can't say I'm surprised, people are lazy.Another large tech company I used to work for commonly used an only-slightly more complex password. But it was never changed, so people who had left the team still could have access to things if they knew the password. It was an entry point into the system more than the company's Red team. |
NYT journalist hacked with Pegasus after reporting on previous hacking attempts | So, what is the legality of this? I've not followed much about this at all, but NSO group appears to be an Israeli company.Do they just sell, or operate the hacking software for their clients? If they operate it, is it illegal for an Israeli company to hack an American citizen (I assume it is illegal in America, but how about Israel?)Is the sale of hacking software regulated in any way? |
Microsoft is building a Chromium browser to replace Edge on Windows 10 | What other options do they have? Even on HN you hear "I use Egde to download Chrome". Many of you here don't test your own work in Edge. At the same time Microsoft is getting the heat that Windows 10 is unstable and the last major update shows that it is. Very urgently, I imagine, Microsoft is trying to change the perception of Windows 10 by doing everything they can to make it more stable. Changing the browser engine is a big step in that direction. It is a step they have to do because.. and now comes the down votes... YOU don't test your work in Egde and because YOU tell all friends and family to use Chrome instead of edge. I bet many of you even helps friends and family in downloading it. So stop complaining about monoculture. Many of you helped create it. |
Twitter hides Donald Trump tweet for “glorifying violence” | Twitter is well within the rights to do this, but I have seen tweets from blue check marks essentially calling for violence and Twitter didn't remove them. So, does that mean Twitter actually -supports- those view points now? If Twitter is going to police people, it needs to be across the board. Otherwise it's just a weird censorship that is targeting one person and can easily be seen as political.Everyone is applauding this because they hate Trump, but take a step back and see the bigger picture. This could backfire in serious ways, and it plays to Trump's base's narrative that the mainstream media and tech giants are colluding to silence conservatives (and maybe there could even be some truth to that.) I know the Valley is an echo chamber, so obviously no one is going to ever realize this. |
Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work | After seeing posts like this on HN for years, this one officially scared me enough to completely migrate off Gmail altogether. I’m in the process right now of removing my gmail from any online account.Pro-tip: if you use a password manager, it’s as easy as searching for your Gmail address. For all other accounts, I’ve been able to find them by searching for the phrases “verify your email” or “verify email” or “verification” in Gmail.Just imagining the nightmare that would happen if I got locked out of my Gmail account (10 years of accounts)…I can’t believe I didn’t do it sooner.You can also do a full export of your Google data, which I highly recommend.Switched to fastmail recently for my personal domain and could not be happier with the service. It costs money every month, so they have actual human support if anything goes wrong. |
(next Rich) | I wonder if he’ll still give talks. I don’t blame him if not, but he’s really good at it.“Simple made easy” was a classic even if everyone proceeded to ignore the practical advice contained therein. And “Maybe not” is my personal favorite, a great discussion of requirements/provisions and the downsides of option types. |
My dad taught me cashflow with a soda machine | Anyone else here think that kids should be allowed to spend their childhoods being, well, kids?A lot of people seem to spend their time as parents trying to teach the things they think their kids should know, but too often these seem to be things that kids need to know to fulfil their parents aspirations for them. Sure cash flow is a useful lesson (though one that I'd suggest could be taught more efficiently) but this feels a bit like a parent pushing someone down a particular line.Now I'm not saying that this is a bad story, and certainly not a bad parent, just that IMHO the absolute best bit of this story - by a country mile - is that it's something they did together, parent and child spending time with each other. If he learned about cash flow then that's great, but it's not nearly as great as him learning about his dad and his dad learning about him. |
Mathematics all-in-one cheat-sheet (2013) [pdf] | Wow, I have to say I feel somewhat bad for the author who spent so much time (months?) compiling this semi-comprehensive reference work. There's so much information, but at the same time, so little useful information to any particular reader. It's so broad as to be a hindrance to using it in any sort of daily reference.Who would use this? Wouldn't you probably resort to a reference more specific to your field?Is this the product of someone's superficial fascination with mathematical equations combined with OCD to copy down everything ever read, gone awry? Or is this like a strange version of a Noah Webster? |
How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler | I still don't know what to think about this.On one hand, Parler was a hate site, filled with conspiracy theories, radicalization and racism. So it's no loss that it's gone, and it took far too long to deal with it. And just like I wouldn't bat an eye for AWS taking down an ISIS recruitment site, I don't really see any loss here.On the other hand, do we really want a handful of unelected billionaires deciding what is acceptable speech - whether or not we agree with them? We talk about net neutrality, but shouldn't we apply the same standard to hosts like AWS?Overall it feels like a legislative failure - in an ideal world, we have laws applied even handedly to deal with this. But in the absence of political will for these laws, what should be done? I think we are better off without Parler, but how can we do that in an even handed and consistent way? |
Mathematics for Computer Science [pdf] | This fall I will be teaching the required "Discrete Math for CS course" to about fifty students at the University of South Carolina. Previously I used Epp's book [1] which in my opinion is an outstanding book but regrettably is $280.44. Many of our students are working minimum wage jobs to make ends meet, and I don't want to make them pay so much if I can at all help it.Lucky I saw this!!I do have one reservation though -- many of our students come in with a weaker mathematical background than MIT students; for example we spent several weeks doing proofs by induction (and no other kinds of proofs) and this text doesn't seem to feature a couple of weeks worth of examples.I think I'll probably go with this and supplement as needed. Really it looks quite wonderful. (And hell, the book seems to be open source which would mean that I could potentially write supplmentary material directly into the book and make my version available publicly as well.)This thread seems like a particularly good place to solicit advice: experiences with this book or others, what you wished you'd learned in your own undergraduate course on this subject, etc. I've taught this course once before -- I feel I did quite well but I still have room to improve. Thanks![1] https://www.amazon.com/Discrete-Mathematics-Applications-Sus... |
Draggable objects | Thank you everyone! What a surprise to be on HN today. Happy to answer questions! |
Amazon, Apple and Google Cut Off Parler | I'm just going to come out and say something that I've had a hard self reflective time coming to the conclusion of. I don't believe in free speech without limits.I have strongly felt that the actions taken by these companies is morally and ethically the right thing to do, for any business and that is inconsistent with believing in true free speech. My line for free speech seems to lie in speech that incites violence or speech that discriminates against people for immutable characteristics of their person, both of which I know Parler harbors in abundance. I think there are simply some ideas that are too repugnant to not rebuke.That said I don't like how centralized we've become on these existing platforms either. Monopoly on communication means it's too easy to let that window slide on what is acceptable speech to limit. |
Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks | So...what is the future of enterprise open source? Is there a future for enterprise open source?If you start a company and open source your core/clients, your product becomes part of AWS, and AWS runs you into the ground. If you mix in proprietary licenses to protect yourself, AWS forks your core, adds in open-source licensed clients, then runs you into the ground (and you lose open-source contributors/supporters as a bonus who may fork your core themselves).I remember from a undergrad class reading Google's system design papers, that they publish only the top-level architecture for core systems they use, and only after 3-5 years of use when they have moved on to a better system. After all this (Docker/Redis/Elastic/Nginx), I think that might be the best path forward. You can provide the benefits of open-source and recognition for the architects, but not lose your competitive advantage. Open-sourcing your core product seems too idealistic. |
Congrats! Web scraping is legal! (US precedent) | "HiQ only takes information from public LinkedIn profiles. By definition, any member of the public has the right to access this information. Most importantly, the appeals court also upheld a lower court ruling that prohibits LinkedIn from interfering with hiQ’s web scraping of its site."Surely I'm not reading this correctly. This would seem to suggest that websites are not legally allowed to prevent bots from crawling their sites. Lots of sites have ToS preventing such things, are those legally void now? Are captchas on public pages illegal, even if you request the page 8000 times in a second?"In this case, hiQ argued that LinkedIn’s technical measures to block web scraping interfere with hiQ’s contracts with its own customers who rely on this data. In legal jargon, this is called” malicious interference with a contract”, which is prohibited by American law."This is almost weirder. If LinkedIn wanted to force users to sign in to view profile info, would they be not allowed to do that because some company had signed a contract that implicitly assumed access to that data? If someone writes a web scraper for my site, and I unknowingly change my site in a way that breaks that scraper, can a court force me to revert the change?Seems to imply that every business is somehow beholden to every contract signed by anyone. |
Amazon Prime inflates prices, using the false promise of ‘free shipping’ | Seems like commenters are misreading the lawsuit here. My first instinct after reading the top paragraphs of Stoller's post was also "so what, this seems fine," but if you read to the end and see what the suit is really alleging, it's not just a policy that punished sellers for offering discounts on their products when sold off Amazon. It's the fact that Amazon is charging anywhere between 30-45% in fees to the sellers, which is much higher than other online marketplaces and obviously less than the 0% they'd charge themselves to sell through their own site (though they'd still need to pay money to operate the site), and then punishing them if they sell somewhere else that has lower fees for a lower price.That seems like legitimately monopolistic behavior and something that is illegal and should be stopped. The post is still misleading in that it doesn't mean Amazon is raising prices across the board by 30-45%. But they are raising prices across the board by whatever the delta is between their fees and WalMart's fees, or some other marketplace that charges even less, minus the difference in shipping.Normally, market forces would solve this problem without any need for legal intervention, because some other marketplace like WalMart can just offer lower seller fees and attract all the sellers. But that doesn't happen precisely because Amazon's massive subscribed user base represents so much of the market that no can afford not to sell there, which is seemingly the definition of a monopoly and why legal intervention is called for. Lower-cost marketplaces can only compete if Amazon is not allowed to blackball sellers from access to the only customer base that matters. |
Stripe Identity | I've never seen a company release incredible products with as high velocity as Stripe has over the last few years. Truly incredible. $1.50/user may sound outrageously expensive at first, but having seen all the engineering power it takes to build something like this at Uber...it's a totally fair price. |
QOI: Lossless Image Compression in O(n) Time | I know you don't like "design by committee" and overly complex formats. Also, the compression algorithm itself is somewhat independent of the "container format" that it's used with.However, if I may make a suggestion: If you do end up rolling your own container format for any reason, always include a way to store the colour space of the image!Treating RGB images as arrays of bytes without further tags is like treating char* as "text" without specifying the code page. It could be UTF8. Or Latin-1. Or something else. You don't know. Other people don't know. There's often no way to tell.Similarly with colour spaces: sRGB, Display P3, and Adobe RGB are just close enough to be easily confused, but end up looking subtly wrong if mixed up. |
TermKit - a graphical terminal replacement | I had a similar idea about 10 years ago, but never got around to implementing it.I'm amazed at the amount of hatred directed towards this - as if the terminal could in NO WAY be improved?!. But clearly it can. For example - wouldn't it be nice to have a terminal status bar with your CWD / git branch / etc in, without cluttering up space before $? Yep, you can use screen, and that destroys your ability to use the scrollbars.Or, consider filename completion. Wouldn't it be nice to show the intended completions in a popup as you're typing (like web browsers do) ?Why, when I do 'ls', can I not drag & drop one of the files to another finder window? Why is the terminal forever isolated?Why when I run 'mvn install', which generates umpteen bazillion lines of output, can the result not be folded into a single line showing the summary, that I could expand if I wished?There's lots of scope for this kind of thing. My main concern would be whether a single WebKit control is the right way to go - it'd be nice to, for example, embed custom controls within the shell (but this might also be possible).So I think it's an awesome idea. |
Physical assault by McDonald's for wearing Digital Eye Glass | No one at an ordinary McDonald's would even notice such a device. Ergo this was not an ordinary McDonald's, but one with security people looking for cameras. Why would a McDonald's have security people looking for cameras? Possibly because it was a mafia front. If you wanted to launder money, a fast food restaurant in a popular location would be a good place to do it.The way the employees behaved is consistent with this explanation.Edit: I should have said no more than that the excessive reaction of the security people suggests there may be something dubious happening at this McDonald's that they don't want filmed. But there are other less dramatic things they might be doing besides money laundering: using undocumented labor, for example. |
Trevor Perrin requests removal of NSA from IETF Crypto Review | Two things you did not know before this post but know now:* The IETF has a dedicated crypto review board, the CFRG, which approves or pokes holes in the cryptography used by other IETF standards.* The chair of the IETF CFRG is an NSA employee (Kevin Igoe, one of the authors of the SHA1 hash standard).I just learned these things a couple weeks ago. I am not generally a believer in the theory that NSA actively subverts Internet standards†. But even I think that it's crazy for an NSA employee to chair the CFRG.In case you're wondering: Trevor Perrin is widely respected professional cryptographer. Most cryptographers work for university math departments. Perrin worked for years as a staffer for Paul Kocher, the godfather of side channel attacks, at Cryptography Research. He's the designer of the new forward secrecy ratchet for OTR (Axolotl) and the TACK TLS extension, and a behind-the-scenes contributor to other IETF crypto standards. Perrin wrote the pure-Python "tlslite" TLS implementation. If you were to draw a "family tree" of crypto know-how in the software security profession, a surprisingly huge chunk of it would be rooted in Perrin (and Nate Lawson and Kocher); for instance, virtually every modern TLS break came from ideas that Perrin popularized. 64 current Matasano Crypto Challenges, probably 50 of them I can trace to Perrin and Lawson. Trevor Perrin is someone you should pay attention to.† (my best guess is that the standards NSA was actively subverting were about international telephony; subverting the IETF is a little like subverting the Linux kernel --- doable, but bad tradecraft) |
Amazon Dark Patterns | An alternative explanation for this is that Amazon is struggling with identifying fake reviews, which could explain both why there seem to be many fake reviews and why one would get blocked from writing reviews (basically falling victim to a false positive of their fake review detection).Obviously there is also some bad UX thrown in for good measure (being able to write a review without being able to send it), but we aren’t necessarily looking at dark patterns here.This could just be Amazon struggling with and failing at a task (avoiding fake reviews).Not all bad UX is a dark pattern, sometimes it’s just bad UX … (a dark pattern is bad UX with a positive consequence for the person or company offering up the UI or maybe just and intended positive consequence, even if the UI doesn’t achieve that goal)I think it’s a stretch to argue that Amazon is really benefiting from any of this and long term this erosion of trust is not at all good for Amazon. I do honestly think that if Amazon could snap with their fingers and remove all fake reviews they would do it. (Which is not to say that Amazon does not employ dark patterns elsewhere.) |
Discord bans r/WallStreetBets server, subreddit went private for a while | Discord would claim its “hateful and discriminatory content” for anything in the fucked up reality we are currently living in. For instance, if you call someone retarded and a mod doesn't step in, that is considered hateful. Even though retard is in the dictionary and a widely accepted term by many people. Then saying that only retards buy the shit hedgefunds are peddling would also be considered discriminatory. I'm tired of this fucking bullshit and ready to go thru as many proxy accounts as needed to get my point across. Discord needs to go out of business or grow some balls. Everything in this world could be construed into being hateful or discriminatory if you stretch enough. |
3D printed mirror array | There is an artist (at least) that uses arrays of motorized parts to create a similar effect https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kV8v2GKC8WA mesmerizing |
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