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An odd discovery on Spotify | People have been noticing this a lot recently but what nobody seems to know is that this is a form of money laundering/“scamming.” I know because I used to be active on crime forums and talked to some of the people who engineered this scheme.People will set up fake Spotify artist accounts with stolen identities and bank accounts, pay a musician for songs that pass as music, and then bot millions of streams on them. At this point there are so many of these fake profiles and songs that the music, which is simple “mood music” normally (which happens to be easy to make), is appearing on real playlists and being recommended to real listeners. |
Project Naptha: a browser extension that enables text selection on any image | Every time I click "Allow" on "Access data on all sites" for an extension I creep closer to my security hole paranoia threshold. If it was all in JS, who cares? But this sends ajax to remote servers of course.Am I alone? |
WhatsApp's Signal Protocol integration is now complete | This is really excellent. A few thoughts:1) They seem to have replaced TLS/SSL between client and server with "Noise Pipes". Based on a couple of minutes Googling this seems to be a brand new one-man protocol from Trevor Perrin (the same guy who did Axoltl on which Signal is based). At least, I'd never heard of it. I wonder if this is the first inkling of a post-TLS future?http://noiseprotocol.org/noise.html2) It's a shame to see key words be killed off by internationalisation concerns. 12 words seems so much more friendly, at least to English speakers, than a 50 digit number. In practice I doubt any non-trivial numbers of people will ever compare codes by reading out such a number. I hope further research here can develop better replacements for encoding short binary strings in i18n friendly ways (perhaps with icons instead of specific words? if you don't speak a common language with your chat partner then the app is useless anyway).3) What's the next step? My feeling is that the next step is securing the build and distribution pipeline. WhatsApp could partner with security firms around the world, like Kaspersky Lab in Moscow, perhaps one in Germany and another in Iran, to make it harder for the software to be forcibly backdoored by a single decision of a single government representative. This would require splitting the RSA signing keys used by the app stores. I have some code in my inbox that claims it can do this (it's written by some academics and I obtained it after a bit of a runaround) but I never found the time to play with it.Of course, getting a bunch of security firms to sign off on every update, no matter how trivial that update is, might prove politically difficult inside Facebook. If mobile platforms supported in-app sandboxing better then the app could slowly be refactored to be more like Chrome, where the base layer doesn't trust the upper layers. Those upper layers wouldn't have access to key material and could then be updated more freely than the higher privileged components. |
NSO Group's iPhone Zero-Days used against a UAE Human Rights Defender | An untethered stealth jailbreak that installs without user interaction from a webview, that's almost as bad as it gets. And for iOS 7.0.0 - 9.3.4 inclusive. And with exfiltration of audio, video, whatsapp, viber, etc etc. So thorough and so bad :-/ |
Google offers free fabbing for 130nm open-source chips | I've spent some time in the chip industry. It is awful, backwards, and super far behind. I didn't appreciate the full power of open source until I saw an industry that operates without it.Want a linter for your project? That's going to be $50k. Also, it's an absolutely terrible linter by software standards. In software, linters combine the best ideas from thousands of engineers across dozens of companies building on each other's ideas over multiple decades. In hardware, linters combine the best ideas of a single team, because everything is closed and proprietary and your own special 'secret sauce'.In software, I can import things for free like nginx and mysql and we have insanely complex compilers like llvm that are completely free. In hardware, the equivalent libraries are both 1-2 orders of magnitude less sophisticated (a disadvantage of everyone absolutely refusing to share knowledge with each other and let other people build on your own ideas for free), and also are going to cost you 6+ figures for anything remotely involved.Hardware is in the stone age of sophistication, and it entirely boils down to the fact that people don't work together to make bigger, more sophisticated projects. Genuinely would not surprise me if a strong open source community could push the capabilities of a 130nm stack beyond what many 7nm projects are capable of, simply because of the knowledge gap that would start to develop between the open and closed world. |
Suez canal blocked by a massive ship | If you go to vesselfinder you can follow the drama in real-time! Seems it's still stuck: https://www.vesselfinder.com/?imo=9811000 |
Linux can’t be installed on a recent Lenovo laptop | Maybe someone can help me understanding.Why is it OK to lock down smartphones, TV devices, consoles, but not OK for PCs? |
Wikimedia Foundation spending | Also known as "the institutional imperative." Quoting Warren Buffett's 1989 letter to shareholders:[1]"My most surprising discovery: the overwhelming importance in business of an unseen force that we might call 'the institutional imperative.' In business school, I was given no hint of the imperative's existence and I did not intuitively understand it when I entered the business world. I thought then that decent, intelligent, and experienced managers would automatically make rational business decisions. But I learned over time that isn't so. Instead, rationality frequently wilts when the institutional imperative comes into play.For example: (1) As if governed by Newton's First Law of Motion, an institution will resist any change in its current direction; (2) Just as work expands to fill available time, corporate projects or acquisitions will materialize to soak up available funds; (3) Any business craving of the leader, however foolish, will be quickly supported by detailed rate-of-return and strategic studies prepared by his troops; and (4) The behavior of peer companies, whether they are expanding, acquiring, setting executive compensation or whatever, will be mindlessly imitated.Institutional dynamics, not venality or stupidity, set businesses on these courses, which are too often misguided. After making some expensive mistakes because I ignored the power of the imperative, I have tried to organize and manage Berkshire in ways that minimize its influence. Furthermore, Charlie and I have attempted to concentrate our investments in companies that appear alert to the problem."[1] http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/1989.html |
The largest Git repo | A handful of us from the product team are around for a few hours to discuss if you're interested. |
I wandered off and built an IDE | @anakicThat was an enjoyable read! I have also tried qutting my job as a developer, tried making money by working for myself (and focusing on developing features instead of actually making money, same as you), then returning to a "proper job" as an engineer. There were many recognizable moments in the blog post.I once took a course in entrepreneurship, as a distraction from computer science, and the bottom line is that to make money you should first try to find someone willing to hand you their money, and then put the effort into making the product or service. But, as a developer, it's soul-wrenching and just feels wrong to try to sell something before something proper has even been made. But I've seen it work many times, you just need sales people that are not afraid of making up products while they go, with both the profit and stress that follows.I'm glad you found a good opportunity with an accelerator, good luck with the next adventure! |
Show HN: SHA-256 Animation | I wanted to understand how SHA-256 works, so I made a terminal animation that shows the bitwise operations at each step. I wrote a text guide in the README.md to explain what's going on. I think my technical terminology is okay.I'm new to hash functions though, so I don't yet know why SHA-256 has been designed in the way it has (e.g. why exact numbers were chosen in the bitwise rotations).As far as I understand, the Sigma functions promote diffusion of bits to help prevent collisions, and Choice/Majority/Addition help to make it a one-way function, but I'm not entirely sure. I'd be interested in learning more about the design if anyone has experience in this field. |
ECC matters | As someone who has had to read thousands of random game crash reports from all over the interwebs (you know when Windows says you might want to send that crash log? like that), I totally agree.Of all the things to be worried about, like OS bugs, bad hardware configuration, etc. bad memory is one of those really troubling things. You look at the code and say "it's can't make it here, because this was set" but when you can't trust your memory you can't trust anything.And as the timeline goes to infinity, you may also get one of these reports and be asked to fix it... good luck. |
Developers’ side projects | > Not related to your employer’s line of work. Um, wait. What’s the definition of related? [...] I don’t know. It’s a big enough ambiguity that you could drive a truck through it.No, it's not that ambiguous at all. The courts rarely side with the company, and only in cases where it's quite obvious the work was directly related. If your side project isn't directly related to the work you are doing, then you don't need to worry.Don't let Joel or any other tech CEO scare you into not working on side-projects. Don't even tell your employer about side projects. Leave them out of the loop entirely. |
Windy.com | Windy is great. The map is appealing, but be sure to check out the forecast view for a particular location. Also make sure you try different locations. I'm in the Salish Sea on Orcas Island in the San Juans and because we have a lot of topography here mixed with ocean, we have a lot of local effects, contour winds and so on and there are big differences between locations.Also note that Windy can get it wrong. I grew up in Cape Town and forecasting there is easy compared to here because it's the tip of Africa surrounded by Atlantic and Indian Ocean. Here it's very mixed with land, sea, big 11,000ft mountain ranges like the Olympics and so on and this region is hard to forecast. For where we are, the forecasts - and Windy's map specifically - is wrong fairly often.A trick that a lot of folks don't know about is using ATIS, AWOS or ASOS at a local airport or airfield. If you want to know what the weather is at a given location, find a nearby airport, get their ATIS (or AWOS or ASOS) phone number and you can call and get a real-time report that is extremely accurate. I do this for KORS, our local airfield all the time. You can get this data off Foreflight although I'm sure there are plenty of free alternatives. Obviously it's current weather, not forecast, but it's often helpful. |
Apple’s new M1 Pro and M1 Max processors | "Apple’s Commitment to the Environment"> Today, Apple is carbon neutral for global corporate operations, and by 2030, plans to have net-zero climate impact across the entire business, which includes manufacturing supply chains and all product life cycles. This also means that every chip Apple creates, from design to manufacturing, will be 100 percent carbon neutral.But what they won't do is put the chip in an expandable and repairable system so that you don't have to discard and replace it every few years. This renders the carbon-neutrality of the chips meaningless. It's not the chip, it's the packaging that is massively unfriendly to the environment, stupid. |
Nova by Panic | I really like their pricing structure here. If you want updates forever, it's functionally a subscription (which makes sense - constant updates require constant dev work). The key difference is that if you stop paying, you keep everything you've paid for previously (the app and all past updates).That's a _great_ way to do a subscription. |
Federal judge: Border searches of cell phones require a warrant | It's a literal national security issue.I know people who have two factor codes and password vaults on their phone's that if compromised by a competent attacker could compromise nearly every major corporation in America.Imagine if a foreign intelligence agency managed to get a border guard asset.Even from a reciprocity point of view, if we search other people's phones, that sets expectations that ours can get searched too. It's dangerous precedent all around. |
Why HN was down | Amazing that such a large percentage of debugging involves determining exactly what you are debugging. The definition of the problem, many times, is the solution.Might be a good time to mention Rubber Duck Debuggging. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging |
Email a Dumpster Fire | > P.P.S. We're offsetting by 3x every bit of CO2 this creates via Cool Effect.Is this really how this carbon offset thing works?You release a bunch of greenhouse gases - but it's "OK" because you pay money to some organization that might eventually plant some trees (or use your money to buy/rent fossil-fuel-burning machinery to orchestrate the planting of trees)?Seems like guilt-avoidance to me. |
Google can ban your Android app if they think you’ve clicked on your own ads | I'd extend this even further: never use a single account for more than one purpose. Create a separate account at the same company for the other purpose. Some examples:- Every product/project you manage should be on a separate account on Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc.- Nothing tied to your consumer accounts should be used for anything business related.- Your Amazon shopping account and your AWS account should definitely not be the same account.- Don't use services where you're required to mix accounts like this.Some examples:- If the issue in this thread is actually an automatic ban, account siloing very likely would have avoided the issue. ([edit] likely, it would not have been possible to silo accounts in this case, as a child comment points out)- Facebook apparently lacks the willingness to block an account from Marketplace, but they will block an account from all Facebook properties.- Paypal has banned businesses because the account was created years ago by someone who at the time the account was created was 17.The point of this isn't that it's impossible to connect the dots that you are the same person. The point is to make it difficult for an automated system to deal too much damage to you, and make it difficult for someone looking at a single account's history from accumulating too many "strikes" against that account. |
Moderna’s HIV vaccine has officially begun human trials | As I understand it, the reason an HIV vaccine has been so difficult to create is that HIV mutates so easily. I understand the basics behind how mRNA vaccines are generated, but I don't understand why this approach would be expected to have any more success in evading the high mutation potential of HIV than other vaccine types. After all, it was even a concern with new coronavirus variants that the original Moderna vaccine would be less effective against them (and, indeed, while the original vaccine is still highly effective against all variants, my understanding is that it is less so than the original variant). And SARS-COV-2 mutates much less easily than HIV.Can someone with more knowledge explain the thought process behind this? |
Start Self Hosting | Self-hosting is something that we should be constantly iterating on making easier; it's really the path forward for privacy centric folks. The main challenges are managing workload scheduling (SystemD is complicated for a layperson). Networking is another challenge; for instance, if you wanted all or part of these services to remain offline or on a Mesh VPN there's a lot of knowledge required.There's some projects trying to tackle the workload orchestration piece; CasaOS (https://www.casaos.io/) being one of my favorites but there's also Portainer (https://portainer.io). TailScale and and ZeroTier are great for Mesh VPN networking, where you may need to run some workloads in the cloud but want them networked with your home applications (or just to keep them offline). They also allow you to access applications running on a home server that doesn't have a static IP. Cloudflare Access is okay; I haven't tried it because it deviates from the mesh VPN model significantly. |
Hacker News Parody Thread (2013) | Unrealistic.Not a single person complained about link not working with JavaScript disabled. |
Tearable Cloth Simulation in JavaScript | Without wishing to appear negative, I do find it odd the way that a technical crowd react to these online demos. Would you have found this impressive if it was a compiled executable? Because this is just the same thing, just running slower because it's on the web. It's not technically novel in any way.If you're curious about the algorithm, then take a look at the presentation 'Advanced Character Physics' by Jacobson. They were used in published games at least 13 years ago and are very widely known and implemented.I get that there's some novelty to this stuff, but we already know that asm.js can achieve performance within a factor of 2 of compiled C code. Since we know that exists, I don't really see what's interesting about seeing each individual piece of code ported to work on the web. |
Hijack of Amazon’s domain service used to reroute web traffic for two hours | Getting a basic certificate issued is incredibly easy these days. If you own the DNS resolution, you can get a cert.Here a few ways I can think of to make this harder for an attacker:* Add a Strict-Transport-Security to all HTTPS requests. This means the attacker will need to get a valid cert (still easy if you can hijack BGP).* Pick a preferred SSL issuer and stick with them. Add a CAA DNS record only allowing that one issuer.* Go through the EV SSL process with your preferred issuer. Now modify your CAA DNS record to add an EV policy. This should make it very difficult for an attacker to get a cert issued during a BGP hijack.* DNSSEC? Make sure to choose an SSL issuer that will correctly test DNSSEC? |
I should have loved biology | There is a large gap between the mechanisms of chemistry and the magic of biology that most people do not see closed until late in their education. It's a real shame that this gap cannot be closed sooner.In undergrad I took a bunch of biology and chemistry classes. It wasn't until I took Biochemistry (a senior level class) that everything came together. The biochemistry class I took was a re-telling of all the stories you learned in molecular biology but with the tools you acquire in organic chemistry.Equipped with those tools I relearned the Krebs cycle and photosynthesis as real chemical reactions that make sense rather than a chain of facts to be memorized.The class left me with a deep and profound reverence for life. Every process in a cell has a mechanism that can understood with chemistry. However, the magic of life exists where those processes come together and interact in incredibly complicated ways.It's seductive to think that we should be able to tease apart this complicated processes and figure out how "life" works, and maybe someday we will. However, it's easy to underestimate the level of complexity and interconnectedness in these systems.Many of us understand how hard it can be to debug a distributed system. Imagine trying to reverse engineer a distributed system with tens of thousands of interconnected services and messaging queues that all just sort of evolved and were not built with clean engineering practices. |
Twitter Bootstrap | I only recently started learning HTML and CSS so I was wondering if there is a good resource for learning how to use grids.I don't exactly understand how to use grids (or even why). Is it for visual consistency or is there an underlying usability/maintainability benefit to using grids? |
Microsoft begins showing an anti-Firefox ad in the Windows 10 start menu | Has anyone here actually looked at the "anti-Firefox" ad in question? It's literally a tile that says "Still using Firefox? Edge is here!". I'm not really sure what we expected here. This is about the same as a browser asking you to make it default when you open it. All big companies do weird anti competitive things. This isn't one of those things. I know I'll likely get downvoted for this opinion, but to many commenters here saying things like "this is why I don't believe in the new Microsoft or that Microsoft has changed", I'm not entirely sure how some meh ad telling you to switch your browser counteracts things like SQL Server on Linux or Azure supporting Linux VMs, or Microsoft's purchase of github, or .net core being cross platform, etc. I don't generally care to support a large company, nor am I an active developer or user in the microsoft stack, but the over reaction is a bit absurd.Does anyone who uses Firefox realize for a long while they were primarily funded by having Google pay them to be the default search engine? |
G7: Rich nations back deal to tax multinationals | I do wonder if we wouldn't be better off eliminating corporation tax entirely.The revenue of a corporation can, roughly, be:1. Spent on goods or services from another company (including freelancers, contractors, etc.)2. Spent on rent3. Spent on capital purchases4. Spent on wages5. Spent on debt repayment or other forms of financing6. Paid out in dividends7. Spent on share buybacks8. Invested in something elseItems 1-5 are all good things that we want companies to do, and corporation tax is normally applied after this spending is accounted for. Items 6 and 7 ought to be taxed, and frequently are (dividends and buybacks create income for individuals who will pay tax on that income). Item 8 is a bit vaguer, but probably shouldn't be taxed in most cases (if we're worried about companies parking cash in very low-risk assets, then super-low yields are effectively a tax on that anyway).All that the corporation tax adds to this picture is the creation of work in tax avoidance services, and an unjust inequality between those firms that can afford those services and are structured to take advantage of the rules, and those that can not and are not.It's not obvious to me that corporation tax /can/ be fixed, and so it may be better simply to scrap it and replace it with something more difficult to dodge.EDIT: formatting |
Yahoo discloses hack of 1B accounts | Fittingly, attempting to change my password to a 32-character random string generated by 1Password returns an error that the password "cannot contain my email or username", regardless of the contents of that random string (I tried several).It does, however, _happily_ accept `passwordpassword` and cheerily move along to confirming that my recovery email account from 2003 is still valid. |
The inception bar: a new phishing method | "Ceci n'est pas un UI."This specific example may be new, but the concept of fooling users with websites containing images of the system's own UI is not new --- for example, all the fake antivirus alert boxes. That had a relatively easy mitigation --- using non-default appearance on your system (e.g. an XP-style "you have a virus!" dialog box image would just look silly if you weren't using XP with the default theme), but it seems the trend toward un-customisability is just going to lead to this being even more easy to exploit.Of course, mobile browsers hiding important information and being even more un-customisable makes this worse.Well, even I, as the creator of the inception bar, found myself accidentally using it!When reading a product's documentation that has screenshots explaining how to do something, I've also accidentally tried to manipulate them instead of the actual dialogs. I'm sure others here have had similar experiences too. |
Ask HN: Are you put off building something because it already exists? | Here's the recommendation I give to students when they ask me this question (it's a common one!):You come up with a brilliant idea, you obsess over it, you Google some info, and on your screen lies your idea, being done by someone else, for the last two years. You’re all too familiar with that sinking feeling in your stomach that follows. You abandon the idea almost immediately after all that excitement and ideation.First (as already mentioned), existing solutions prove your idea — their existence proves that you’re trying to solve a real problem that people might pay to have solved. And it proves that you’re heading in a direction that makes sense to others, too.Second, and this is the biggie: The moment you see someone else’s solution, you mar and limit your ideas. It suddenly becomes a lot more difficult to think outside the box because before, you were exploring totally new territory. Your mind was pioneering in a frontier that had no paths. But now, you’ve seen someone else’s path. It becomes much harder to see any other potential paths. It becomes much harder to be freely creative.Next time you come up with that great idea, don’t Google it for a week. Let your mind fester on the idea, allow it to grow like many branches from a trunk. Jot down all of the tangentially related but equally exciting ideas that inevitably follow. Allow your mind to take the idea far into new places. No, you won’t build 90% of them, but give yourself the time to enjoy exploring the idea totally.When I do this, once I do Google for existing solutions, I usually find that all the other things I came up with in the ensuing week are far better than what’s already out there. I have more innovative ideas for where it could go next; I have a unique value proposition that the other folks haven’t figured out yet. But had I searched for them first, I never would have come up with those better ideas at all.Finally, I’ll say this: if you see your idea has already been done and you no longer care about it, then it probably wasn’t something you were passionate enough about in the first place; it was just a neat idea to you. |
VPAID ads destroy performance and are still served by major ad networks | At the Guardian we needed our own video player, because we couldn't rely on a third party platform not to take down something that we published. Editorial independence was important.We implemented our player on top of video.js, and most of the developers who were there at the time still have nightmares about it.We finally got the thing working, looking good, embeddable, reasonably cross-browser. We shipped it. A few days later, we get a curious email from some ad provider. "It looks like your VPAID ads have stopped running!"Oops. We'd naively believed we could live without Flash (I take full responsibility for this stupidity). The sales folks pointed to a big gap between our old projected revenue and our new projected revenue. So we went and did the work[0], hating every minute of it.The underinvestment in ad-tech by publishers and the cancerous ecosystem of vendors that have grown up around it is one of biggest collective mistakes made by an industry.I am optimistic that this problem can be solved, and we are actively looking at this at my current employer. We sell direct, usually without a ton of intermediaries. Talk to me if you want to know more.Incidentally, if you want to know if a publisher is going to survive the next five years, a decent proxy is the number of intermediaries involved in their ad supply chain.[0] https://github.com/guardian/video-js-vpaid |
I used DALL·E 2 to generate a logo | This blog post proves that Dall-E 2 will not make human taste and design ability obsolete. The final image he ended up with is a lot uglier and more complicated than most of the intermediate steps. I think generative art AIs will have a similar effect on design as compilers have on software development, and will not put artists out of a job. |
Tell HN: The Internet situation inside Iran | Just my opinion but I think that non-interventionism should be promoted here. Especially when it comes to political situations like this. It’s a dangerous game. |
Threads, an Instagram app | I'm calling it now, this is going to hollow out twitter in extremely rapid fashion. I give twitter a couple of months once this launches, they'll do a Wile E Coyote where they walk off the cliff, followed by plummeting. Meta is going to grind the blue bird to a fine powder, not saying this as a Meta fan, just a casual observer.There's massive pent-up demand for an alternative, and so far Bluesky and Mastodon haven't been able to fulfill it due to scalability and network stickiness reasons. Meta can absorb all of twitter's traffic without breaking stride, and they'll have a userbase in the millions within hours of launch that's able to hop over from IG.RIP twitter, 2006-2023. |
USA Facts – Federal, state, and local data from government sources | I'm seeing many things (if this data is accurate, which assuming it is as it's from all government sources) and trends that go against a large percentage of what the media on both sides are perpetuating. That is my first takeaway at a glance.My second takeaway at a glance is the giant problem that is Social Security. It's been said over and over, and the aggregation of more data into charts comes to the same conclusion. The way Social Security works is not sustainable. Period. Something has to give. A $405 B shortfall on SS in 2015. If that was at least half, we would actually not be running a deficit. We would have a budget surplus if we actually made Social Security/other Gov. retirement program replacement actually sustain itself perpetually. What. A. Concept.A quick third take away seems to be the unprecedented rise in non-cash government aid (food stamps) during the Obama administration. The data is there, needs more analyzing of course.Lastly, it seems that Government revenue for Federal and State/Local has actually increased pretty linearly with the population. Despite all the different changes in the income tax rate/other progressive taxes. This supports an overhaul to the tax code to a more simple, flat tax system. From another data source outside this report, I'd have to find it, but historically, no matter the top bracket tax rate, the Federal government collects about 15-17 % income tax. Including when the top rate was 90%+.As far as the presentation, my favorite part is each piece of government data is tied to 4 distinct duties of government outlined in the Constitution. That's pretty brilliant. |
Cybersecurity Incident Involving Consumer Information | Suppose Alice is a "victim of identity theft". BigBank gives $10k to Fraudster as a loan, thinking that Alice is the actual recipient. Experian, Transunion and Equifax report this loan as a debt which Alice owes to BigBank.Who is the real victim? The credit reporting agencies want to convince people that the consumer is the victim, and so Alice bears the burden and risk of clearing her name. But it is the credit reporting agencies inflicting this upon Alice. BigBank is the victim who lost money, and BigBank bears the responsibility for making the mistake of giving out a loan in Alice's name. The Fraudster committed a crime against BigBank, not against Alice. It is Experian, Transunion and Equifax, by holding this fraudulent loan against Alice, who are victimizing Alice.The idea that Alice was victimized by Fraudster is a concept being perpetuated by the credit reporting agencies as a way to absolve themselves of responsibility, and place the burden upon the consumer, and to avoid realistic identity-verifiction which might slow or complicate the practice of issuing large amounts of debt to the general public. |
“The books will stop working.” | I have a close friend who published an engineering text book. He worked a couple of years on it and it was well received in his particular field. The book was pirated within months and is freely available on PDF. It's unfair that his hard work is being used globally for free.So yes, having books shut off sucks but so does piracy. |
Write Libraries, Not Frameworks | A framework, usually, must predict ahead of time every kind of thing a user of it might need to do within its walls.The one thing not mentioned in the article is that the above line of thinking is almost guaranteed to lead to an insane level of abstraction, which was parodied in this classic article from nearly 15 years ago:http://web.archive.org/web/20141018110445/http://discuss.joe...(Sadly, that site is gone, but the memories live on...)Addendum: to see this in practice, one needs to look no farther than Spring, the famous Java framework:https://docs.spring.io/spring-framework/docs/current/javadoc...https://docs.spring.io/spring-framework/docs/current/javadoc...https://docs.spring.io/spring-framework/docs/current/javadoc... |
Notion for everyone | I love using Notion, but I think the general discussion about it does not talk enough about how it's flexibility is also a problem many times.1. Flexibility of blocks is a cognitive overhead for most folks in my team. They would rather prefer more constrained and opinionated approaches like Trello2. Notion is currently a jack of all trades and master of none. We have tried to use it as a wiki, project tracker, issue tracker, CRM & spreadsheet. Though it's good to have one tool that can do many things, we quickly reach limits of what is possible automatically and have to spend a lot of time to manually maintain it3. Convention over configuration creates problems for other team members to follow because conventions are not documented properly.But I see a lot of potential of it becoming a platform. If they can incentivize 3rd parties to build over their platform and build trust, I think it's gonna be the next big thing. "One platform for all my data" with specialized tools to deal with different kinds of data. I can imagine tools like Tello, Jira, Hubspot, Google spreadsheets & draw.io running over it. |
You download the app and it doesn’t work | Apple takes a 30% cut of all IAP.Google scrapes info and displays it in widgets above links to the actual content. Google charges trademark holders AdWords ransom to protect searches for their own brands.Amazon kills OSS business models by offering managed OSS services on AWS at an unbeatable cost. Amazon picks off the best performing market place categories with Amazon Basics ‘recommended’ competitors.The list goes on and on.Tech is an industry defined on building scale and then collecting rents. Apple IAP is just the current outrage but the entire industry is working towards building the next ‘platform’ for others to sharecrop on. |
Thank you, GitHub | If I read another piece of American corporate crap --- plastic, formulaic, always-be-selling --- I'm gonna throw up on my keyboard. The write-up is rife with stock phrases, and vapid emotionalism. Somewhere when the rest of us are busy there's a room somewhere where people get the cheat-sheet, fill-in-the-blank training that produces this junk. Look the guy probably had some success and met some great people. So why in the hell can't you say that in your own words? |
Google mandates workers back to Silicon Valley, other offices from April 4 | I think anyone who's claiming that remote work has been "proven" to be better or worse is wrong. There are some studies but they use estimations and proxies, carrying the same flaws as doing performance reviews based on lines of code.We've proven that the big tech companies can go fully remote and not completely crash and burn, that's about it. Some people love the lack of commute and less semi-forced hanging out, some people hate onboarding on a new company as a remote person and so on and so on.I personally prefer a company where everyone's on site. I want to be able to quickly resolve any issues in person, not over voice call or slack, and I think that an environment where someone can tap me on the shoulder when they need help leads to overall higher productivity, even if individual productivity suffers temporarily. |
Guidance to make federally funded research freely available without delay | "All agencies will fully implement updated policies, including ending the optional 12-month embargo, no later than December 31, 2025."Why does this need a 3 year transition period? Six months would be plenty. |
Reverse engineering a mysterious UDP stream in my hotel (2016) | The question is: why? Why distribute the music that way, why not just attach it to a radio directly, or some RPi that will pull the stream, or just have it prerecorded.Despite its simplicity, seems to be overengineered. |
How I Lost My $50,000 Twitter Username | Who are people's current favorite domain registrars? I've been with name.com for the last year or so and have been happy, but I'm always curios to hear from others. |
Top Books on Amazon Based on Links in Hacker News Comments | I did something pretty similar over christmas, though I used named entity recognition to extract book titles rather than looking for amazon links, and (so far) also limited it to specific "Ask HN" threads about books. You can find it here: http://www.hnreads.com/. It is interesting to see how little overlap there is between the two, though that may be due to my using far fewer (and also newer) threads! |
The Great Cannon has been deployed again | Browsers really have to be a lot more skeptical about the code they run. Running code should not be able to randomly attack any IP address on the internet. Code from non-TLS pages should not be able to run at all. Perhaps that should also apply to code loaded from 3rd party sites.Connecting to a web page should not be consent to allow the operators of that web page to make my computer/phone do whatever they want on the net. It certainly should not be consent to delegate that power to others, either via a embedded link or a MITM attack. |
Moved a server from one building to another with zero downtime | No downtime is acceptable, but they have only one server?What if a technical failure happen? What if there's a fire in the server room? What if there is an earthquake and the building collapses? What if... many things can happen that can result in a long, long downtime with this tactics.If uptime is so crucial, the system should be setup in such way that moving one server should be a peace of cake, not a spec-ops mission. |
Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery | I just got one. I’m blown away by the speed as well. Chrome runs insanely fast! Alas, it’s not developer ready yet. Brew is a mess. Docker doesn’t work. PyCharm is WIP although can use x86 version. I was skeptical of the hype but this little laptop has made me realize how slow everything else is.Unfortunately, while the hardware has accelerated far beyond expectations, the software - specifically MacOS BigSur is a major step backward. So many fucking animations. Everything feels fluid like operating in molasses. The UI changes seem to be shoe horned into a desktop that doesn’t need giant white space for fat fingers. Menu bars are twice as tall taking up precious space. Top bar was already crammed with a lot of icons. Now, they’ve made them sparsely spaced by adding padding between the icons. Everything is baby-like with rounded corners and without borders. Segmentation UI elements are no more. I want to ask Apple’s UI team: WHY!? What is currently wrong with macOS Catalina UI? Until you can satisfactorily answer that, there shouldn’t be any change. Stop changing the UI like you’re working at Hermès. It’s not fashion. If the reason is to unify everything, all screen sizes, then you’re sacrificing all three. Perhaps making it easy to develop apps for all 3 platforms is a plus, but as a user, this all feels like a regression. I’ve lost hope in modern UI engineering. It’s not engineering anymore.I want macOS that has a UI of Windows 95. That would be totally insane on Apple Silicon. |
Tell HN: Thank you for being fast, almost ad-free and text-only | As others will be quick to point out, HN does have ads in the form of job postings for YCombinator startups that are delivered inline with the links on the front page. That said, it's relatively unobtrusive. And of course, the existence of HN is a large part of the marketing for YCombinator itself. Personally, I'll commend dang for doing a high-effort job at moderation, and tolerating all the dunking on Paul Graham that we do. |
"That's Why You Don't Have Any Friends." | The author's observation about high school is exactly why my kids, by default, will be home schooled. If they decide they want to go to public or private school at some point, I'll let them. Unlike a lot of kids that end up getting bullied, they'll know that their attendance is completely optional. I'm not looking to shelter them from the real world, only the fake miniature society that exists at school. |
What happens when you launch Google Chrome for the first time? | Google Chrome
https://twitter.com/jonathansampson/status/11654932064417792...Microsoft Edge (Chromium) Beta
https://twitter.com/jonathansampson/status/11661386925090652...Opera
https://twitter.com/jonathansampson/status/11653532133081292...Vivaldi (Same thread as Opera)
https://twitter.com/jonathansampson/status/11653581559220592...Dissenter
https://twitter.com/jonathansampson/status/11653770639326371...Brave
https://twitter.com/jonathansampson/status/11653912119995187...Mozilla Firefox
https://twitter.com/jonathansampson/status/11658588961766604...Cheers! |
Missing Covid-19 test data was caused by the ill-thought-out use of Excel | I work in healthcare and by far the biggest production issues we've ever run into are people who run Excel spreadsheets through our file processing where the leading zero's have been removed from patient identifiers because that's Excel's default behavior and you CANNOT TURN IT OFF!EDIT: I have no idea who downvoted my post because what I said is 100% true. We have to tell customers to stop opening CSVs in Excel and then uploading them to us because what they upload could be missing critical data. Excel interprets a number and then formats it as a number, but in healthcare, 10 digit numbers are really strings. Unless your IT team has created an Excel extension and had it preloaded onto your local copy, Excel will remove leading zeros and there isn't a way to get them back if you save/overwrite. |
LOL just got kicked out of @ycombinator | I'm the person this original tweet was about.None of you know any of the internal details but what I can state is that Paul has no idea what he's talking about and later admits to the fact I wasn't lying.Here's the order of events:1. I went to a neighborhood clinic in Oakland, CA that's literally next door to my house, I can see the church from my window. Paul lives in NYC which is on the opposite end of the country.2. I asked them about eligibility and told them I don't clear CA guidelines. They told me it's first come, first served with an ID showing I am 18+.3. I showed up the next day, waited in line for 4 hours then got jabbed.4. Posted it in an internal forum for other founders.5. A few people had issues so raised them which I addressed but YC still took down the post within the day.6. I appealed but YC still held their decision as final.Outcome: YC founder came with his aunt, uncle, and mom all over 65 to get jabbed who didn't know about the vaccine site.---Paul ends up tweeting about it and making a huge deal around something he has no idea about. He gets a bunch of people on Twitter upset about something they don't know about.Outcome: Internet rage. |
Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear | You know what's fun? Pasting in text from Ernest Hemingway and seeing what he did wrong.But seriously, this is a nice, simple way to point out some general rules of thumb for improving writing, although I would love for it to be less proscriptive. Not every long sentence is a bad sentence, not every passive-voice sentence is a bad sentence, and not every adverb is a bad adverb.Oh, and by the way, the copy editor in me can't help but notice that an app that's intended to help you improve your writing tells you to "Aim for 2 or less" adverbs, rather than "Aim for 2 or fewer." |
2048 AI | I've been playing this for awhile now and I think I have found that the best method is to only use 3 directions. This forces your highest number into a corner and only spawns 2's and 4's in the opposite corner. You build up numbers that cascade down to the corner. It almost never gets stuck, but if you do I guess you'd have to push the 4th direction you haven't been using. |
China lands Chang'e-4 on far side of Moon | The way they used the L2 point to lasso a relay satellite so they could transmit information from the rover on the far side is stunning too. This was really brilliant, China's space program has really become something. |
My friend starts her job today, after learning to program in prison | There are a lot of people saying they're in favor of this type of thing. And for non-violent offenses I'd probably also be on board.But this person committed a "serious, violent crime" that sent them to prison for 13 years. Are you comfortable sitting next to someone who is capable of a "serious, violent crime"? Are there certain crimes that cross the line for you? Would you expect your employer to inform you of their record?Edit: Just want to remind people, 13 years could very well mean that they murdered someone. Context around the charge is key, and no one seems to be acknowledging that. |
What it's like to spend 40-50 hours in VR every week | I'd be very afraid to fry my eyes. I can't imagine strapping a bright display at 10cm from your eyes, for hours on end, won't lead to eye issues later on in life. I already feel strained after using a headset for an hour. |
Web scraping is legal, US appeals court reaffirms | While I have sympathy for what the scrapers are trying to do in many cases, it bothers me that this doesn't seem to address what happens when badly-behaved scrapers cause, in effect, a DOS on the site.For the family of sites I'm responsible for, bot traffic comprises a majority of traffic - that is, to a first approximation, the lion's share of our operational costs are from needing to scale to handle the huge amount of bot traffic. Even when it's not as big as a DOS, it doesn't seem right to me that I can't tell people they're not welcome to cause this additional system load.Or even if there was some standardized way that we could provide a dumb API, just giving them raw data so we don't need to incur the additional expense of the processing for creature comforts on the page designed to make our users happier but the bots won't notice. |
Redbean 2.0 turned into more than a hobby project | Maybe this is common knowledge, but this is a quick and dirty way to reduce bots, spam and abuse. if geo:get('location', 'accuracy_radius') >= 100 then
SetStatus(403)
Write('you can only post comments from your home internet connection')
return
end
Bad actors often use cheap cloud instances, and the IP addresses of their data centers typically have an accuracy radius of 1000 km. |
Attention Is Off By One | I don't really understand the subject matter enough, so I apologize in advance for the meta-comment...The author mentions that he would maybe have written this as a scientific paper:> I tried writing a serious-looking research paper about the bug and my proposed fix, but I lost a series of pitched battles against Pytorch and biblatex, so I figured I’d just write a blog post instead. (History is written by the winners; blogs are written by…)Honestly, thank god he didn't. This paper is so much more readable and approachable than what gets published in "serious" journals. The tone is self-effacing, it does not have an "ego" the way scientific papers tend to have. If all science read like this, and if we were "allowed" to cite research that reads like this, I think we would be much better off. This reads like a conversational, approachable textbook, not like an impenetrable wall.Is it because I don't understand attention at a PhD level that I hold this opinion? Maybe. Could he be writing like this because he's a layman and utterly wrong about the topic, unlike those Serious Science Authors? Maybe, I don't know.But my god, wouldn't it be nice to be allowed to write like this? |
Fired | There are people who were at OpenDNS in the early days who were incredible, and as we grew, became less and less incredible, largely because the things that made them incredible actually started to be really frustrating as the company grew and they didn't want to change those things. So they had to leave. Usually it was a series of conversations about how the person, their peers, and the company were all unhappy, and why should we perpetuate the pain. We'd do our best to have them leave in a way that made them feel dignified and like they controlled their destiny, and but once in a while, there wasn't a meeting of the minds and we had to say "well, it's not gonna be fixed and it's time to go do something else." Even in those cases, I always thought so highly of the work I did with those people over the long haul, even if it was painful at the end.The point being, if I started a new company tomorrow, I would, without a doubt, go and try to hire some of those same people to help me start it. And maybe now, as a more capable manager than I was then, maybe some would make it longer, or maybe some would realize as the company goes from 10 to 100, that they are just much more satisfied at really early stages. Maybe we'd even define their comp and equity to reflect the fact that they might not be on board for the long haul, but might be key for the early innings.The same thing is true for hiring bigger company people too early... without structure and process, some folks go crazy too and have to leave. You need the right people at the right time. This is hard to do. I messed up a bunch of times. Some people grow with the company through stages, and some don't. I think it's a responsibility of the company to help people grow if they want, or to end the misery and let them go back to what they love if they don't want to change.Finally -- For what it's worth, people are fired all the time ( as I have been ) for all kinds of reasons, and so it's not a reason not to hire someone. Professional hiring managers know this. |
React Native is now open source | The first thing I do now on each Facebook open-source reveal, is to check the PATENTS file for the toxic second paragraph, to see if they've changed it. Sadly, no. I can't imagine being able to use this at any decent-sized company with lawyers. :-( https://github.com/facebook/react-native/blob/master/PATENTSSee for example the discussions at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9111849 (eg. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9113515)Full disclosure: I work at Google, where many are sad to not be able to use recent Facebook code. |
When you type realty.com into Safari it takes you to realtor.com | This has been driving me mad for the better part of a year: the autocomplete behavior in Safari is totally broken. Last year it started picking words from your query and going through your history and using that to autocomplete so you'd always go to some random thing from your history that's barely relevant even for the most generic search terms (if I type "ptrace" I want to go to a web search, not some random Stack Overflow question I clicked on two years ago that happened to have "ptrace" in its title). Now it's randomly loading other websites I have never been to when I type search terms (I searched "sketch" the other day and it took me to "sketchers.com"). It's WWDC week, so FB7333211 for the first one and another incoming once I can reproduce this reliably. Please fix your stuff, Apple.Oh, while I'm here: trying to escape out of the autocomplete suggestion is also awful, it's some sort of combination of ⎋ and ⌫ and the arrow keys until you can get the thing to not show up in the bar, and then you have to look very closely to make sure that it's not going to send you to the Top Hit anyways. |
Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun | And so the grand experiment begins. I feel bad for the folks losing their job because that always sucks, and I hope there's a decent severance package.Now we'll see what happens to Twitter... I hardly use it, so if it implodes it won't bother me too much. But I am curious to see if all the "how do you need X people to do Y?" commenters are correct in this case. The app is simple but doing simple things at scale is hard. I wonder if we'll see more downtime and issues now.I think this is also a great experiment for everyone who either thinks Elon is a genius and the greatest thing to bless this Earth, or those who say he's overrated and Tesla and SpaceX were successes independent of him. I think Twitter has been around long enough that we've all formed impressions of it. Let's see what this single change of replacing ownership actually results in.Anyone want to make predictions about the state of Twitter in a few years? |
GitTorrent: A Decentralized GitHub | Lovely work!We ask for the commit we want and connect to a node with BitTorrent, but once connected we conduct this Smart Protocol negotiation in an overlay connection on top of the BitTorrent wire protocol, in what’s called a BitTorrent Extension. Then the remote node makes us a packfile and tells us the hash of that packfile, and then we start downloading that packfile from it and any other nodes who are seeding it using Standard BitTorrent.The disadvantage here is that any given file in the repo could be stored in an ever increasing number of packfiles. Each existing version of the repo will generate a new packfile to get it to the newest version, and it's up to the authenticated masters to generate and seed each of those packfiles, while peers either do or do not cache these replicated datas. In short, this means of syndicating updates ignores the Merkle-DAG-ness (DAG-osity?) of Git.The un-updateability of torrents is something that seems to seriously limit it's use. There are a lot of interesting attempts to hack around this- LiveStreaming and Nightweb are two that spring to mind. https://www.tribler.org/StreamingExperiment/ https://sekao.net/nightweb/protocol.html |
30k U.S. organizations newly hacked via holes in Microsoft Exchange Server | Wow. Patching (or using cloud mail providers) would have mitigated the risk for this one...and many others in the past (and the future). The cleanup from this is big for those who were hit.Launching attacks during major news events surely also helped the attackers stay under the radar for longer. |
Infinite Mac | What does one have to do to get as clear and pretty of a UI as that on the modern desktop OSes? Everyone switched from bitmaps to vectors over a decade ago and now everything is fuzzy, antialiased, scalable, flat, hard to make out.Of course you can always run dwm on linux with a hodgepodge of makeshift utility apps, write your own keybinds to set your brightness and volume and other such inanities, but in order to get a 'complete' desktop experience you kinda have to opt-in to GNOME/KDE which are trying to do the same things as Apple or Microsoft, aesthetically speaking. And tough luck if you actually use Apple or Microsoft to begin with. I tried running bug.n and it seems to not work in win10, let alone win11. |
How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac | Hi HN — Ben from Dropbox here on the desktop client team. Wanted to clarify a few things —- Clearly we need to do a better job communicating about Dropbox’s OS integration. We ask for permissions once but don’t describe what we’re doing or why. We’ll fix that.- We only ask for privileges we actively use -- but unfortunately some of the permissions aren’t as granular as we would like.- We use accessibility APIs for the Dropbox badge (Office integrations) and other integrations (finding windows & other UI interactions).- We use elevated access for where the built-in FS APIs come up short. We've been working with Apple to eliminate this dependency and we should have what we need soon.- We never see or store your admin password. The dialog box you see is a native OS X API (i.e. made by Apple).- We check and set privileges on startup — the intent was to make sure Dropbox is functioning properly, works across OS updates, etc. The intent was never to frustrate people or override their choices.We’re all jumping on this. We’ll do a better job here and we’re sorry for any anger, frustration or confusion we’ve caused. |
Laws of UX | The site is beautiful and I couldn’t do it. But I’ll still be a bit judgemental. It breaks my first law of UX: don’t be self serving.The first screen is a long scroll of 20 elegant looking blocks and titles none of which mean anything on their own. I have to click on each and sit through some superfluous animation before I can even get access to the explanation.Because of the animation, t he natural flow of swiping back on my phone results in a really janky transition.I have to say, I love the style of these graphics. Minimalism I guess? Reminds me of the University of Waterloo during my childhood. |
Belarus 'diverts Ryanair flight to arrest journalist', opposition says | FYI technically it wasn’t a forced landing by fighter jets. “Someone” reported there’s a bomb on the plane while they were in the Belarus airspace, hence they did an emergency landing in Minsk.So while we know who “someone” is and that it’s all planned in advance (the journalist reported that he was followed minutes before take-off), technically speaking the safety protocols were followed, and when landed they arrested a wanted man once he was on their soil.This reminds me of force landing Bolivian president’s plane in the EU flying from Moscow when they thought Edward Snowden was on the plane. |
The second operating system hiding in every mobile phone | One of the side effects of software eating the world is that the world becomes more exploitable. I expect that over time we may see the emergence of general 'software building codes' much like there are physical building codes, and more importantly liability associated with failing to provably meet such codes.The current 'random person implements firmware that controls the this chip' practice and the 'no warranty etc etc' disclaimers will, I predict, be replaced by manufacturers who are willing to warrant their code. |
How to Center in CSS | The mere fact that a site like this can exist and not be a joke is proof that CSS is still badly broken. I should be able to center things by writing: foo {
align: center;
valign: center;
} |
Apple Has Removed Dash from the App Store | I find it ironic that the EU goes after Google for allowing third party stores (Samsung, Amazon, Nvidia, etc) and sideloaded APKs and allows you to build your own APKs for free...... but Apple just randomly removes apps that people have purchased from the Apple Store (thus stealing their money and their product, doing everything short of uninstalling it, but preventing reinstallation), and the EU stays silent?This is some bullshit. |
Ask HN: What is your favorite internet rabbit hole? | Browsing medical diagnosis codes... https://www.cms.gov/Medicare/Coding/ICD10/2016-ICD-10-CM-and...Some of the most mildly interesting:V9543XD Spacecraft collision injuring occupant, subsequent encounterW5602XD Struck by dolphin, subsequent encounterX35XXXD Volcanic eruption, subsequent encounterX52XXXD Prolonged stay in weightless environment, subsequent encounterY0881XD Assault by crashing of aircraft, subsequent encounter |
Post-surgical deaths in Scotland drop by a third, attributed to a checklist | My former roommate is a pilot. When I first met him, I noticed that he uses checklists for just about everything, even the most basic everyday tasks.After some time, I decided to apply that same mentality to my own life. Both in private and work situations.I get it now. Checklists reduce cognitive load tremendously well, even for basic tasks. As an example: I have a checklist for when I need to travel, it contains stuff like what to pack, asking someone to feed my cat, check windows are closed, dishwasher empty, heating turned down, etc. Before the checklist, I would always be worried I forgot something, now I can relax.Also, checklists are a great way to improve processes. Basically a way to debug your life. For instance: I once forgot to empty the trash bin before a long trip, I added that to my checklist and haven't had a smelly surprise ever since ;) |
“Code” 2nd Edition | "Programming Windows" exposed the simplicity behind the Windows architecture. If you had even a smattering of C experience, Petzold could get you writing Windows applications the same day you opened his book. He triggered an explosion of software development.There are excellent books for novice Linux programmers, but unfortunately, nothing compared to Petzold's clear and direct presentation.. |
Apollo is dead. Long live Apollo | So where is everybody going after reddit? |
YouTube now defaults to HTML5 video | What joy it is to finally uninstall Flash. The last time I was this happy to uninstall crappy software was when I realized that I no longer needed RealPlayer.For those that don't know it, RealPlayer was a very popular proprietary media player (with its own proprietary formats) circa 2000. The company's stock was worth $380 a share in 2000; it's now worth $6.The only explanation for RealPlayer's popularity was its DRM I think; lots of commercial users wanted the DRM.But it got more bloated with every release, and I had to go through its countless option settings every time I updated it to disable all the sneaky ways they came up with to violate user privacy. I'm relieved that we no longer need either Flash or RealPlayer. |
Google Dataset Search | Very nice. Worth keeping in mind prior examples for comparison's sake. My favorites so far:- https://www.opendatanetwork.com -- what I would call the "Google, for Socrata datasets"- https://public.enigma.com/ -- One of the best collections of U.S. federal data, with good taxonomy and lots of useful options for refining a search, such as filtering by dataset size.- https://www.data.gov/ -- Not as useful as what most people would want -- e.g. unlike Enigma and Socrata, it's a directory of self-submitted (by the government) data sources, not one in which the data is stored/provided in a standardized way. But it's a pretty good listing, though not sure if it's much better than just using Google.- https://data.gov.uk/ -- Better than the U.S. version in terms of usability and taxonomy. |
Patio11's Law: The software economy is bigger than you think | I remember reading this article about SAP a few months ago, and it just blew my mind: https://retool.com/blog/erp-for-engineers/Here was an entire market segment I'd never heard of, and just the market leader is worth $163B. And on top of that, the technology is so totally alien to anything I'd ever heard of before. It's like an alternate-history kind of thing. Like if we discovered a continent somewhere in the Pacific that had never been in contact with our civilization and had steam-powered airships or some crap.And I'm sure this is just one of many such industries, even just within the umbrella of software. |
How I went from $100-an-hour programming to $X0,000-a-week consulting | Damn, that sounds nice. I wonder if system admin/architecture can be modeled that way. I'd love to bill even a modest $2k/week, rather than trawl craigslist, responding to posts for "unix/linux ninjas" then having shops balk at anything over $20 an hour.I don't know how many messes I've cleaned up (likely left by people charging a hell of a lot more than me) for really low rates.I know, I know. Craiglist and other online boards are the dregs of the job market. But I have no network (few friends, few contacts), and I only do remote work. I take what I can get, but it sucks to see half-assed admins getting the gravy. |
How SSH got port number 22 | I wonder if there will be a new invention like the Internet during my lifetime, where I can actually participate in shaping and defining it.While I grew up with computers, when Internet got to the first homes like mine, I was still too young and had only very limited programming skills to contribute to it.Love these stories about how simple and straight-forward it was to have a huge impact. I guess there is some nostalgia involved, but these were, in my opinion, better times. |
Facebook’s tracking of non-users ruled illegal again in Europe | >“The cookies and pixels we use are industry standard technologies and enable hundreds of thousands of businesses to grow their businesses and reach customers across the EU,” said Facebook’s VP of public policy for EMEAIf it is "industry standard", does that make it ethical? |
Backdoor in event-stream library dependency | I really have a hard time putting as much blame on the author as the people in that Github thread are doing. Maybe they could have handled this specific issue a little better, but the underlying problem is just one of the flaws in the open source community that everyone has to accept. Maintaining a project is a lot of work (even just having your name attached to a dead project involves work) and the benefit from doing that work can be non-existent. If the original author has no use for the project anymore and someone offers to take it over from them, why should the author be expected to refuse? Isn't adding another potentially unknown maintainer generally better for the community than a project dying? |
Congress Is About to Ban the US Government from Offering Free Online Tax Filing | Oh man, I've had government provided automatic filings for ages now (Finland). US is really odd how it emphasizes the benefit of the middleman over the benefit of the individual citizen (it seems). Or have I completely misunderstood what's going on here? |
We can't send email more than 500 miles (2002) | Best part of reading this is coming away having learned the existence of units the CLI. How did I spend 20 years on the shell and not have needed or discovered this? |
I Still Use RSS | I've mentioned this on HN before, one pattern I've noticed is a lot of sites tend to truncate their RSS feed so you have to click through to see the full article etc. This is mostly OK but kinda frustrating, as in the before-covid times I used to ride the London Underground a lot where no celluar signal is available in the tunnels - so my offline RSS reader would be useless.So I wrote a little web service accepts an RSS feed, and then crawls each link in it, parses the HTML to extract the text using one of those text extraction libraries, and then "republishes" a new version of the feed (with the full article) which I then subscribe to in my RSS reader so I can read the articles offline, e.g.example.com/rss?feed=foo.net/artcles/rssI've never open sourced it though because I guess it's a bit of a grey area - the sites want you to go to the full URL so they can show you ads etc |
TabFS – a browser extension that mounts the browser tabs as a filesystem | If you're on macOS, you can do a small piece of this natively with AppleScript (or anything that can send apple events) in Chrome or Safari -- namely, you can iterate through windows or tabs, view their source code, and execute arbitrary javascript you pass (there's a one time security option you have to accept). This can be handy for quick automations if you don't want to install anything.(Background: I have RSI, so I've been developing some integrations between applications and Talon Voice (https://talonvoice.com/). AppleScript ends up being surprisingly valuable/fast/reliable for applications that support it. I also built an integration with iTerm2's Python API before noticing that everything I was trying to do was already supported by its AppleScript dictionary, and was faster. In Google Chrome, the "iterate through tabs and execute javascript in them" is very useful for automating Google Meet muting/unmuting.)Nothing against this excellent project though; I'm a big fan of Omar's Twitter! And I suspect most here will appreciate the easier scriptability of the filesystem approach than dealing with the atrocious syntax of AppleScript. |
Enough Is Enough | I really don't think the problem is software patents, it seems to me the real problem is that most software patents seem to be ridiculously trivial.Here's an example: my employer, a rather small company has invested an enormous amount of resources in developing a specific algorithm. It took years of research and development, lots of money and brainpower, it's very far from being trivial (in fact it's so complicated I have to admit I don't understand some parts of it) and it's light years ahead (in terms of usefulness and speed) of any other algorithm with similar applications.Obviously the last thing we want now is simply handing it over to our competitors, after all this work. If the patent system didn't guarantee us monopoly on using the fruits of our own R&D, this algorithm probably would not have been developed for a very long time, if ever, by anyone. It would have been innovation that never happened.My point is that the threshold of what can patentable should by way higher, but I think we need a (software) patent system none the less. |
Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas | The problem with search is that not only is Google getting worse, but I've also mostly outgrown it, in that it isn't sophisticated to answer pretty much any scientific question I would want to ask.- No way to search for a scientific question and get a summary of the current scientific consensus or viewpoints on specific issues- It's really hard to access academic journal articles online.- Even when you can access journal articles, it's hard to know which ones to look in to answer your question. Sometimes it's hard to even know which field(s) your question falls under.- Even if you vaguely know which field your question falls under, you don't necessarily know any of the vocabulary used by that field.- No way to search by dependent and independent variables, confounding variables, etc.- No way to sort articles by the quality of their methodology, the quality of the journal they were published in, the quality of the researchers, etc.I know this isn't a product that more than 1% of the population would use, but if someone built it then maybe there are other things it could be used for. |
I will not do a tech interview | Granted, there are a lot of bad tech interviews out there (asking about algorithms that nobody ever uses) ... but I do not understand this.Imagine someone's being hired for a front-end position, and we don't have months to get them up to speed.I'm going to ask them to explain how a closure works. How they deal with AJAX. What they think about "!important". Things to be careful about with floats. How CSS precedence/specificity works. Give them an example webapp idea, and ask how they might architect it.None of these are gotchas. All of them are directly applicable to the work they'll be doing. If you can't explain how closures work, then either you don't understand them (so you shouldn't be hired except for a very junior position), or you're bad at communicating/explaining (which, on teams, can be equally bad).The author says "Other times I just froze on topics that I know very well." Maybe somebody can explain this better to me -- but if you freeze up in interviews, are you also going to freeze up in developer meetings? During code reviews? When you're in the room with clients?If you freeze up in interviews, then it doesn't seem like the problem is with interviews -- the problem is with you freezing up, isn't it? I mean, if you can't answer basic questions about your knowledge in a one-on-one conversation, then that's a real problem, and not just in interviewing. (Obviously, some overly aggressive or unfriendly interviewers can be off-putting, but I'm just talking about "normal" friendly interviewers.) |
Cursors | Wow! There is so much going on here. I can't believe you're not logging!* First it starts out as a simple maze puzzle game.* Then it there're weird layouts where people are clicking stuff, and
pathways are opening up randomly.* Then you realise it's not random at all, people have to click things
for pathways to open.* Then you realise someone has to stay behind and sacrifice themselves
for other people to go through.* Then there're levels where multiple people have to coordinate and
click at the same time to open n layers gates.* Then there're levels where not only do you have to stay behind, you
have to go out of your way to do so. So you'll be letting people
through for a while, you realise, as it's more efficient for the
group as a whole. At some point you have to decide you've taken your
turn and you move towards the main gate and wait, and then new
people come and then they have to realise to go to press the key.* So next level you see someone sacrificing themselves and you decide
instead to go take their place and wiggle your mouse to tell them to
go. "I got this", you indicate.* Now some people have got it into their head this is all about
cooperation and selflessness. So you can be waiting in one of these
buttons in the middle of nowhere, letting people through for a
minute, and a new guy will start making their way towards you to let
you go, and you draw "thanks" on your way out, they wiggle their
mouse to say "welcome" and off you go, leaving them behind.* On some levels, not only did people have to coordinate at the same
time, but things had to be done in sequence. On one, there wasn't
enough people to hit all buttons at once, so we coordinated where
you would unwrap the "outer" layer of wall protecting the exit, and
a couple people would move inside, then you'd unwrap another inner
layer, and so on, until they could get out. Finally, you'd decide
your turn was over and go wait the same way. It took quite a while
before this was figured out collectively -- but once newcomers saw
how it was done it went in one smooth operation until I got out and
onto another maze.And that's to say nothing of the selfish people who just passed
through maze after maze. In one maze people were waiting, and I and
another were at the buttons, but there was one other. One of them had
to realise they needed to sacrifice themselves. We were both wiggling
our mouses to indicate so, but they didn't see it.There's also the way people will follow you in the maze if you look
confident, and the way people will draw on the right exit to help
people out. I'd try to leave a trail if I'd had the right exit cracked
in the maze.In a way I think the inability to write and communicate is fantastic:
you can't just tell someone "do this". They have to figure out that
they need to collaborate, they have to have some kind of intuitive
social empathy that puts the needs of the many against the needs of
the few.Genuinely, mate, this is the most fascinating "game" I've played in a
long time. And I can't believe you're not logging it all! I'm sure
game theorists and psychologists would love to get their hands on this
kind of data. I thought it was a real experiment done for research.Glad I got to play this while 700 people were on it, I think that
really made for some great interactions. It felt like being part of
some kind of military team. |
Keep the Internet Open | While I like the Internet being open, I don't like "net neutrality" extremism.1) While I dislike monopoly carrier antics, I'm even more unhappy about the idea of government bureaucrats dictating network engineering standards to carriers and ISPs. If you build a network with caches/content servers close to users, and expensive backhaul back to your network core, you can offer essentially unlimited traffic to users hitting the cache, and still provide more limited access to other stuff. I'd prefer high bandwidth everywhere, but that isn't always an option. It should be a market decision, not a national government decision.2) The real problems with lack of NN are due to lack of competition in the access provider market. Focus on fixing that. A lot of this is due to local governments requiring providers cover entire markets to cover any of a market -- if someone wants to build another WebPass or CondoInternet and only serve high-density developments, that's great! Trenching fiber to single family homes is marginal anyway, but if you have low take-up in a neighborhood it is even worse. If you are going to push for regulation, have it be regulation to empower actual competition in the network access market.3) Zero-rating in emerging markets (e.g. FB in India) is really the only way for many lower income users to afford services at all -- particularly for video services. |
NASA's Perseverance rover sends stunning images | Stupid question maybe but like is there a reason the picture quality seems worse than a decent dslr photo? I'm so curious what that photo would look like, taken with an everyday camera, without the bizarre 'scientific' look of these shots. |
Rockstar thanks GTA Online player who fixed load times, official update coming | This is going to be a great point on his resume.How many people get to say something like, "Reduced GTA 5 load times by 70%"?! |
Twitter CEO fires two top executives, freezes hiring | So there's two options right - the first is that Parag is for some reason making big strategic decisions about the direction of the company despite the fact that we all know he'll be gone if the deal closes. Or he's making big strategic changes at the behest of the acquirers before the deal closes.Neither of these things seem particularly kosher moves to make. The question is how to figure out which one it is.It would seem weird for Parag to be following Musk's orders given how Musk has behaved. It also seems weird for Musk to already have the insight into the company to know specifically who to fire. There's not much advantage to making these changes now.On the other hand, going rogue and making big strategic decisions about the company really has the potential to burn Parag's reputation for wherever he would move next.I guess there's a third option - that Musk has expressed a specific view, Parag has a different view, but that they both think that this move is necessary anyway so just got on and did it. |
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