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Things I wished more developers knew about databases | I never realized this before but many excellent developers struggle with SQL beyond simple SELECT statements. I have a colleague who is by all accounts a deeply technical person but one day he confessed to me that he didn't really grok SQL and that he'd rather work with a "real" procedural programming language to just store and retrieve data.Part of it may be due to the fact SQL isn't really a programming language but a declarative DSL for manipulating sets and tables. Things like GROUP BYs and PARTITION BYs (window functions) that come naturally to mathematical types/functional programmers are less intuitive to procedural programmers.I suspect this was what attracted developers to noSQL databases like Mongo in the first place -- it's more attuned to a programmatic mindset.(this is not universally true of course -- many programmers have no issues with SQL at all.) |
AudioMass – free, open source, web-based Audio and Waveform editor | Hello hackernews!I am the author! Wow, I can't believe the attention this is getting! Hopefully this proves to be useful as a tool, and not just as a JS demo! :)The next plans are
- redo drawing library to further improve performance!
- polish a bit some audio plugins (like the paragraphic EQ) since some parts feel a bit off (the limiter, paragraphic eq for example).
- Add some tutorials! Some things might not be straightforward like using Shift + [keys] for shortcuts etc.
- Easier recording mode (like the ability to open a new empty audio project)
- Multitrack mode, for more channels!
- play a bit more with the concept of having different windows that can be in different screens (check out the frequency analyzer under "view")To answer a few questions, I plan to have a very open license this is just a fun side project for me. but I need to figure out the licenses of some libs I am using first (eg wavesurfer, lzma-wasm) and do proper attribution!Thanks again!PS. I wrote this in 2018, and just kept it on my hard disk until recently, so certain features might be slightly different than back then :) |
Criticizing Google got me fired | This is the article in a nutshell. Google funds anti-monopoly think tank. Anti monopoly think tank writer praises the EU for fining Google for being anti competitive, Schmidt gets guy fired by threatening to withdraw funding. I know that's just his side of the story, but it doesn't look great for the think tank or the Google.If you didn't know it already, think tanks are a euphemism for propaganda machine.Shortly after my group published a statement praising the European Union for fining Google for violating antitrust standards in June of this year, I was contacted by Anne-Marie Slaughter, the president of New America, who said that Eric Schmidt, Google’s parent company’s executive chairman, was furious about the statement. Schmidt, she said, was threatening to pull his name and substantial funding from New America in retaliation. |
Css-only-chat: A truly monstrous async web chat using no JS on the front end | Haha, I’m glad to see people enjoy this (author here)! If you like this sort of thing, some other terrible proof-of-concepts I’ve done:A ruby dsl that’s indistinguishable from JavaScript. http://kevinkuchta.com/_site/2017/07/disguising-ruby-as-java...^ and in talk form: http://confreaks.tv/videos/rubyconf2018-ruby-is-the-best-jav...A url-shortener using AWS lambda - JUST lambda. No data store. http://kevinkuchta.com/_site/2018/03/lambda-only-url-shorten... |
“ISO obstructs adoption of standards by paywalling them” | > The value of standards is in their adoption.Tim Sweeney correctly observes this, then continues to talk about "millions of hobbyist programmers". I do not believe that ISO targets, or even has any remote interest, in this market.ISO is comprised of nation-state members who will inevitably mandate ISO standards as part of legal compliance. Various stakeholders actually participate in standardization efforts and thus also both already know the standard and are able to push it through. All of these categories (government, industries in highly regulated sectors and large stakeholders) have large amounts of capital. The amount of money required to fund a purchase of an ISO standard barely even factors in on a balance sheet.Hobbyist programmers arguably make a lot of open source software that builds the foundation for today's and tomorrow's platforms. However, when the big bulldozers from the previous paragraph roll in, hobbyist programmers give way to highly paid employees of these giants; be it by merging a patch or be it by being worked around with a greenfield project or fork.On the other hand, ISO has an incentive in charging money for their standards because this adds perceived value: If something is freely available, it is easier to dismiss it as a non-serious effort when debating whether it is worth to bind personnel for participation in the standards committees; the standards come across as valueless, worthless.Looking at this vector of interests of the various parties involved, I see little reason for this state of affairs to improve. |
CalyxOS – De-Googled Android Alternative | The thing which always makes me hesitant about these projects is that they don't receive frequent security audits and not having an expensive brand behind them makes them more at risk to being willing to trash their name at the cost of my privacy and security. I consider these to be a fairly critical part of any project which claims superior privacy and security.I think about it this way: Should I trustA. The company which has thousands of developers working on it and wants to avoid their brand being dirtied by failures in security and privacy.B. The small group of people who have formed an organization which may or may not be another Anom like FBI controlled software.Don't get me wrong, I absolutely want to pick B, but I consider it much more risky since there are a lot more unknowns around that. At least with A I know what I'm getting (basically a free flow of my info to whichever government asks for it, but cross my fingers they don't ask for it or that A doesn't want too broad of a breach of trust). |
Apple requires account deletion within apps in AppStore starting January 31 | What about inmutable systems? My app (using scuttlebutt) creates an 'account' but it's located as crypto keys only within the app and apple keychain. So far the apple reviewers refused to believe that it works like. It's open source, they've got the code... but still....Same is true for anything crypto. The account as it were exists on many devices, but it's not something you as the app creator can manage.I think apple protecting privacy is good, but the effect on actually private systems is complicated. |
HN is up again | I don't think I had ever fully internalized how often I open this site throughout the day. Finish a task? HN. Got frustrated/stuck on a problem? HN break. Waiting for something to install/upload/compile/etc? HN.Needless to say I opened a new tab, typed "n", and hit enter countless times today before my brain caught up with my muscle memory. |
Tell HN: You can't hire because you don't post salary ranges | We just went through a large hiring cycle. We posted two versions for every job posting- one with salary ranges and one without.The ads performed equally well in regard to total responses with the better candidates responding to the ones without salary ranges.And... before you say, perhaps your salary ranges were bad, they weren't. Our salary offerings are very aggressive to the developer's benefit. In my opinion, salary is a sign of respect from you employer.If your primary reason for responding to an ad is based upon salary you are not going to be happy where you work. I promise. Of the top reasons people are happy at work, salary is way down on the list. [0] It is important, it makes it possible to pay bills, but it isn't what makes people happy.Meaning, if you are looking for a place you will enjoy working, do not start with salary.[0]https://www.forbes.com/sites/jacobmorgan/2014/12/15/the-top-... |
Yahoo installed a backdoor for the NSA behind the back of the security team | I seriously think that to get a CS or EE degree (or similar) B.Sci degree, you should be required to take at least one full term length ethics course. Same idea as the ethics courses taught to junior law students.The internet is already fucked up enough with governments and rogue corporations messing with its AS-adjacency topology in non-free ways at OSI layers 1-3 , before you even get into stuff like writing backdoors at layer 4+ to pass all email to the NSA. |
Aaron, 5 years later | "Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations." - AaronI think about his quote quite a bit lately.
I wonder what he would have thought about modern facebook, google, and the extreme consolidation of american corporations. |
Getting better at Linux with mini-projects | According to a post in the comments, the author is 18 years old which means that I've been using Linux longer than the author has been making use of the blood in his veins. But that does not mean that I didn't learn something from his post!While the technical accomplishments and understanding are commendable, I think that the main takeaway for me is the excellent approach to learning. Keeping it simple and taking an open-minded approach to learning (as exemplified by his attitude toward systemd) is an approach that more people could stand to take. So often we complicate things in our heads to the point where they seem unknowable and so we assume that they are too difficult and we don't try. I have seen this in myself at times and I see it others as well.I'll be sharing this post at work so that the people who I work with who don't really understand Linux so well can appreciate the approach that was taken and hopefully also glean something from the excellent write-up itself. |
Doom Running on an IKEA Lamp [video] | We should all take some time to consider that our light bubs have more powerful computers than the first computer many of us once owned.This perspective makes scifi stuff like "smart dust" seem a lot more feasible. Ubiquitous computing, what will it bring us? |
Why Twitter didn’t go down: From a real Twitter SRE | > This left a lot wondering what exactly was going on with all those engineers and made it seem like it was all just bloat.I was partly expecting the rest of the article to explain to me why exactly it wasn't just bloat. But it goes on talking about this 1~3-person cache SRE team that built solid infra automation that's really resilient to both hardware and software failures. If anything, the article might actually persuade me that it was all bloat. |
LastPass autofill exploit | Please correct me if I am mistaken, but couldn't this have been implemented into an iframe that when ran could send the passwords to another remote server?If so, I am a little taken back by LastPass only offering $1,000 to the researcher that found and reported it for fixing. He or she could have taken a different path and resulted in this being used in some complex targeted attack against tech corporations via short-url redirect interstitial pages, or an ad network's javascript, etc. Given the potential damage, I'd say there is a missing zero or two on that reward amount, in my opinion. |
VR | I bought a Vive the week of Thanksgiving and have been using it roughly 2 hours a day. Every other day is my workout day most of the week (unless I'm playing hockey that day/night) and the VIVE has become part of my workout now too. After I complete my normal workout - a mixture of hockey specific training, free weights, aerobic and of course tons of pull-ups - I now spend an additional hour+ in VR.I typically play Space Pirate Trainer first; once I get around level 15-20 things are so hectic I'm moving a ton and often going to one, or both knees. My abs and back can feel it big-time. I start with this game because it's not quite so intense at the start and is a good VR warmup.More impressive is Holopoint - a bow and arrow game. That is easily the most physically demanding VR activity that I've found so far. I'm usually sweeting pretty solidly when I complete 8-10 games of Holopoint. I'm also noticeably fatigued in my arms, back, legs, hips, all over. And just to be clear most would classify me as extremely fit (regularly skate with/against NHL bound Junior players, the minimum pull-ups I do in my workout are 30 consecutive, body fat Lastly I find I am no longer interested in 'regular games'... such as Madden, NHL 16, Gran Turismo, etc (on PS4), or even my all time favorite Dark Souls (series). I simply can't go back to not being physically engaged the way VR games are.VR is going to be absolutely huge in the health/fitness space. |
Brave launches 1.0 | I've been using Brave rewards, both as a user and a content maker. It's really great, and I feel this may be a reasonable alternative to the invasive trackers+ads we have today.For the uninitiated, Brave lets users opt-in to Brave rewards:- You set your browser to reward content creators with Basic Attention Token (BAT). You set a budget (e.g. 10 BAT/month), and Brave distributes it the sites you use most, e.g. if you watch a particular YouTube channel 30% of your browsing time, it will send 30% of 10 BAT each month to that content creator.- As a user, you can get paid in BAT. You tell Brave if you're willing to see ads, and how often. If so, you get paid in BAT, which you can then distribute to content creators. Brave ads are different: rather than intrusive in-page ads, Brave ads show up as a notification in your operating system outside of the page. This prevents slow downs of the page, keeping your browsing focused, while still allowing support of content creators. And of course, Brave ads are optional and opt-in. |
Recycling was a lie to sell more plastic, recycling industry veteran says | Something I watched and read about last year was that injection molding of plastic can be done only when one third or less of the pellets are recycled. If there is too much recycled material in the mix it doesn't flow into the mold correctly and one third is the most you could possibly use and then that product can not be recycled again. The polymers that make up the plastic simply aren't capable of reforming over and over.Given that plastic at best gets 1.3 uses, the initial one and then a third of that material can go into a recycled container. That is it. When you compare that to the thousands of reuses of glass bottles we used to do for milk it is really apparent how awful the plastic process is, its barely better than just throw away. This also ignores the fact that huge amounts of the plastic used isn't actually recyclable at all.The triple whammy to all this is that all over the planet people have been cleaning their plastics with hot water, drying and then separating it into different rubbish bags with separate collections and additional bins etc. All for a giant lie about recycling that was never true. We have wasted substantial energy and time on something that never worked and helped destroy the environment even more because of it. |
Why is the Gaza Strip blurry on Google Maps? | Not really related to the article at hand, but I've been on a bit of a Google Maps binge the past couple weeks. I learned a few interesting facts, blurry Israel being one of them.Another strange thing I found that might not be super well known (I didn't know about it) is that all GPS data in China is offset by a nonlinear psuedo-random amount. If you turn on the satellite view in Google Maps and look at various cities in China, you'll see that the road and business overlay is off by anywhere from 50m to 500m. And the strangest thing is that it's not a consistent offset from place to place.Turns out this is very intentional, and China uses a different geographic coordinate system than the rest of the world. WGS-84 is the most common coordinate system, but China uses GCJ-02, sometimes called Mars Coordinates. Part of GCJ-02 is an algorithm that obfuscates the results. So applying any GCJ-02 coordinate to a globe using WGS-84 coordinates gets distorted like a funhouse mirror.It's easy to find open source libraries to convert WGS-84 to GCJ-02 and vice versa. But Google Maps doesn't do it, for political reasons I suppose? I've read that if you open Google Maps within China the mapping data is correct, but have no way to test that. |
Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead | Another article about fears of AGI. As a reminder, there is not a single LLM on the market today that is not vulnerable to prompt injection, and nobody has demonstrated a fully reliable method to guard against it. And by and large, companies don't really seem to care.Google recently launched a cloud offering that uses a LLM to analyze untrusted code. It's vulnerable to prompt injection through that code. Microsoft Bing still has the ability to be invoked from Edge on any webpage, where it will use that webpage content as context. It's vulnerable to prompt injection. Plantr is advertising using an LLM in military operations. Multimodal LLMs offer us a new exciting opportunity to have prompt injection happen via images. And OpenAI had decided that prompt injection isn't eligible for bug bounties because "those are for problems that can be fixed", which is a wild thing for a company to say at the same time it's advertising API integration with its product.But sure, let's have yet another conversation about AGI. The problem is that the only thing these articles do is encourage the public to trust LLMs more. Yes, spam is a concern; yes, the politics of technology on the workplace is always something to consider. But these articles take a naively positive tone towards LLM capabilities that glosses over the fact that there are significant problems with the technology itself.In the same way that discussions about the ethics of self driving cars masked the reality that the technology was wildly unpolished, discussions about the singularity mask the reality that modern LLMs are frighteningly insecure but are nonetheless being built into every new product anyway.It's not that these conversations aren't important, I do think they're important. Obviously the politics matter. But the failure mode for LLMs outside of content generation is so much worse than these articles make it seem. On some level they're puff pieces masquarading as criticism.I guess the silver lining is that if you're genuinely losing sleep about GPT-4 becoming a general agent that does every job, don't worry -- that'll only last until it gets someone's bank account emptied or until some enemy combatant uses prompt injection to get a drone to bomb a different target. Unless this security problem gets solved, but none of the companies seem to care that much about security or view it as a blocker for launching whatever new product they have to try and drive up stock price or grab VC funding. So I'm not really holding my breath on that. |
How to Do Great Work | As I've gotten older, I believe more and more that having a desire for great work has more negatives than it does positives. This post really demonstrates why I believe this – mainly because PG doesn't touch at all on why someone would want to do great work while romanticizing how great it is to have that desire.I don't think the question that ambitious people should be asking themselves is "what is work that I can do that will be great?" but something more akin to "what is work that I will find fulfilling?" Why do you want your work to be great? Do you think that the work being perceived as "great" is fulfilling in and of itself? What are you trying to prove through this work, and whom are you trying to prove it to? These are important questions to ask yourself because, otherwise, you're going to end up getting burnt out and wondering what all of your effort was really for.A personal anecdote: when I was younger, I wanted to be great at piano. I played it since I was very young and I spent many hours playing it through my teens. I competed against others at music festivals with moderate success, and I wanted to continue doing great work with it. But this environment put me in a terrible headspace. I would frequently have angry outbursts when I made minor mistakes while practicing. If not anger, I'd chastise myself to the point of crying (I firmly believe this is what gave me low self-esteem through my college years). When someone would tell me to take a break given my emotional state, I'd firmly say no and go back to practicing because... why would I stop? The best piano players practice for hours a day non-stop. I'd spent so many hours practicing and I was actually pretty good. I wouldn't be able to do great work if I were to take a break.It made me a competitive asshole, a sore loser, and a depressed individual.Ambition is still an admirable trait to have because, among other things, it demonstrates that you have curiosity and a love for life. But point I'm trying to make is that being ambitious for great work simply because you want to do great work is not a healthy way to do your work. You need to have a deeper reason for why you've chosen the work that you do, and you shouldn't fall for the romanticism that these sorts of essays put forth.The work that you do will be great work if you have a reason for doing it other than "I want to do something great." |
Poll: How long have you been programming? | Related: are there any 2nd or 3rd generation programmers around? My both parents are professional software engineers.(Waiting for someone to go: "I am a direct descendant of Ada Lovelace, now get off my lawn") |
What is Happening in Istanbul? | "These people are my friends. They are my students, my relatives. They have no «hidden agenda» as the state likes to say. Their agenda is out there. It is very clear. The whole country is being sold to corporations by the government, for the construction of malls, luxury condominiums, freeways, dams and nuclear plants. The government is looking for (and creating when necessary) any excuse to attack Syria against its people’s will.On top of all that, the government control over its people’s personal lives has become unbearable as of late. The state, under its conservative agenda passed many laws and regulations concerning abortion, cesarean birth, sale and use of alcohol and even the color of lipstick worn by the airline stewardesses."It sounds as if the protestors, if the author is genuine, are protesting something I call "Singaporification." It's the fusion of authoritarian quasi-fascist rule with capitalism-- a kind of socially conservative, often (but not always) religious conservative, but economically neo-liberal state of affairs. On the surface it sometimes looks theocratic, but in reality it's more of a dictatorship of gentrification. Religious morality (or sometimes secularized versions thereof) is used as a facade to condemn any form of social deviancy and especially to mentally control the lower classes by manipulating their religious faiths.(We see the latter in America with the "culture war," which is a way of distracting the largely-religious working classes while their future is sold out from under them.)In conversations with fellow techies, it's disturbed me to what extent many seem to tacitly support this kind of thing. I've been in many conversations explicitly praising Singapore -- a country that permits death sentences for minor infractions -- as a viable model of the future.The thing that makes Singaporification scary is that it works. The scariest dystopias are not hideous hellscapes where nobody would want to live, as those tend to self-destruct or at best persist in tiny enclaves and never catch on. Who would want to emulate North Korea? But seductive dystopias are dangerous because they can catch on. Who wouldn't want low crime, clean streets, and a wonderfully healthy economy? In that sense I find Singapore to be the scariest dystopia in the world today.Historical precursors include Franco's Spain. Think of Singaporification as a gentler, less overtly violent form of Spanish fascism. But as we see if you openly challenge it, the gloves rapidly come off and your shiny clean utopia busts out the tanks, tear gas, and death penalty sentences.Edit: on second thought, it also represents a fusion of liberal nanny-statism, conservative social authoritarianism, and neo-liberal economics. Government by and for the uptight, culturally xenophobic urban professional.As Benjamin Franklin said: those who sacrifice liberty for security and prosperity deserve neither.Worth watching: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066434/"Buy, and be happy."If action flicks are more your thing, this is a fun and a bit underrated riff on the same theme: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106697/ |
Tell HN: Google should drop Quora from search results | They should definitely drop Pinterest from Google Image Search results. |
TikTok overtakes Facebook as most downloaded app | I'm a huge fan of TikTok because after years of content stagnation and dullness, the internet is fun again. Especially places like Twitter and Instagram are outrage and depression inducers for me, consumed together it feels like the society is collapsing but everyone is living a perfect life at the same time.The China thing is touchy but I want the west to beat them by being better, not by being dismissive and protectionist.I guess by now everyone has heard of their legendary discovery algorithm so I'm not going there but recently I noticed that some of my favourite creators from the Youtube etc. are on TikTok and their material is much nicer to consume there. Why? I think this is because of the short and fast phased nature of the TikTok content. Instead of publishing 10 to 30 min videos(AFAIK Youtube encourages that, it is also good for the revenue), they put together a short video that shows the gist of the subject. They will also be much more responsive, quickly replying with short videos to the comments. It's a very dynamic place.One exception for me is Nile Red, I love watching his 40 min chemistry videos. Actually, there are a few more YouTubers who's content works best on YouTube but I'm watching far less and I have more spare time now.Maybe the medium is the message still holds? Maybe people are now ready to hear the message of the TikTok? |
Run Stable Diffusion on Your M1 Mac’s GPU | Magnusviri[0], the original author of the SD M1 repo credited in this article, has merged his fork into the Lstein Stable Diffusion fork.You can now run the Lstein fork[1] with M1 as of a few hours ago.This adds a ton of functionality - GUI, Upscaling & Facial improvements, weighted subprompts etc.This has been a big undertaking over the last few days, and I highly recommend checking it out. See the mac m1 readme [3][0] https://github.com/magnusviri/stable-diffusion[1] https://github.com/lstein/stable-diffusion[2] https://github.com/lstein/stable-diffusion/blob/main/README-... |
Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian | When is this overhype for Slack going to stop? It is a chat application with a slightly improved UI like it existed 30 years ago.This is a step in corporate IT that I really cannot fully understand. It seems that every company//startup has to use slack nowadays to pretend to be cool again.Everytime I have a serious conversation about the productivity gains or losses of Slack though, it is pretty clear to me that it is more disruptive than helpful. It fosters a "Always on" culture, where irrelevant chats are exchanged publicly to advertise how much work is being done. If you shut down Slack and appear as Offline people assume you are not working.It also seems to me that now that Slack became the norm for communication, I almost don't receive well written emails with well-argued technical discussions anymore. Everything is now a "Chat" that dilutes the technical discussion because it needs to be responded "directly".I would expect 2018 to be the year where people start questioning the utility of "Slack everywhere" and not blindly jump on the Slack bandwagon because that's what great startups do. |
Ask HN: What startup/technology is on your 'to watch' list? | Self-driving cars. Now that the hype is over and the fake-it-til-you-make-it crowd has tanked, there's progress. Slowly, the LIDARs get cheaper, the radars get more resolution, and the software improves.UE5's rendering approach. They finally figured out how to use the GPU to do level of detail. Games can now climb out of the Uncanny Valley.The Playstation 5. 8 CPUs at 3.2GHz each, 24GB of RAM, 14 teraflops of GPU, and a big solid state disk. That's a lot of compute engine for $400. Somebody will probably make supercomputers out of rooms full of those.C++ getting serious about safety. Buffer overflows and bad pointers should have been eliminated decades ago. We've known how for a long time.Electric cars taking over. The Ford F-150 and the Jeep Wrangler are coming out in all-electric forms. That covers much of the macho market. And the electrics will out-accelerate the gas cars without even trying hard.Utility scale battery storage. It works and is getting cheaper. Wind plus storage plus megavolt DC transmission, and you can generate power in the US's wind belt (the Texas panhandle north to Canada) and transmit it to the entire US west of the Mississippi. |
Nexus 6 | 5.96” - A phone just under 6". This is possibly the biggest disappointment about the phone. Its simply too large for the average user. The nexus 5 was already quite difficult to reach the top corners with one hand in my opinion with its 4.95”.you get over 24 hours of use from a full charge. - too many times I have heard this phrase from other smartphone manufacturers and its never true. Since this phone is made by Motorola(which I think is a great company that builds good products)there is hope but that screen is going to be a battery drainer. Motorola had their [0] Motorola Droid Maxx which held a 3,500mAh battery and its at least kind of true for that statement above.If they had put the 3220 mAh battery (or larger) in a 4.7" - 4.9" phone, I would gladly pay for that. Why can't smartphone manufacturers understand that a longer battery life is whats lacking in mobile devices?All the goodie features like Google Now and other location hungry services completely drain your battery in a short time. All I want is a smartphone that can last for at least one day on one charge.Lastly the price. The nexus line is known for the competitive price/performance being greatly competitive. If this phone asks for more than £350, does it really have the nexus characteristics anymore?I hope there will be android phones still produced with 5" or less screen size in the next 4 years. A significant portion of the population don't have unimaginably big hands (or pockets) to carry these so called "mobile" phones.0. http://www.engadget.com/2013/09/16/motorola-droid-maxx-revie... |
How is NSA breaking so much crypto? | Its...their...job...I wonder what world you all live in in which this is a bad thing. Theres real threats out there and i'd hate to live in a country that lacked the geopolitical leverage to make use of these tools to my nation's interests. |
Thinkpad X210 | > Battery life is a little over 4 hours with the flush battery (55Wh) and 6-7 hours with the extended battery (80Wh).Not going to lie, that’s pretty horrible.> Battery life would increase by 50% if I got PC6 or PC8 idle states. The fan only turns on if I’m doing something intensive like compiling go or scrolling in Slack.lol. One of the things that really drives me nuts is my computer’s fan turning on when I know really shouldn’t be. I have lived and worked with people for whom having their fan randomly turn on for no reason is completely normal, and I just can’t understand how they can bear it. If this happens to me, you can bet I’m digging through Activity Monitor and killing the culprit before the fans can get fully ramped up. |
Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up | Creating a throwaway for obvious reasons. I'm not an investor but someone who is in a position to make key decisions about peoples' careers and give advice, and I do have a bit of a trick I use for this.There was one black female mentee who I noticed was timid in taking credit for her work. I had recently attended a diversity panel where someone in a similar role as me said that in a similar situation, and her advice to her mentee was "Think about what a white man would do" and everyone applaud such an insightful advice. So identifying such an opportunity, I said the exact same thing word for word, basically "I see you're hesitating to take credit for your work. Think about what a white man would do."Immediately after saying that, I could tell it wasn't taken well, and she asked "what does that mean?" I couldn't come up with an answer for that which wouldn't be taken in a really bad way, so I backpedaled. She later reported me to an administrative person who luckily felt it was too vague to file a serious report about, but told me to watch what I say.But I do have a solution (my trick). From that point on, I definitely give more subtle advice unless they have passed my test, which is I see how they react to situations where they could give the benefit of the doubt to others in vague situations. Sometimes, I'll bring up a past story about another anonymous person and see if they are outraged and want to get them in trouble. Only the ones who remark that they probably had good intentions, and don't react too strongly, I'll give more candid advice to. |
A deep dive into an NSO zero-click iMessage exploit: Remote Code Execution | It's a real shame that the people who came up with this exploit are working for NSO and not on solving P = NP or something. I'm sure if we got them and the ones working on crypto at NSA in a room together, we'd have it and clean unlimited energy in a week.I often feel sad thinking about how many brilliant engineers are dedicating their time to helping governments spy on people or other governments. |
Ex-Twitter exec blows the whistle, alleging reckless cybersecurity policies | Millenials and GenZ may have no idea who Mudge is. I, however, almost lost my first job out of college at a bank because I ran l0phtcrack against our Windows NT 4 server to see if it could crack passwords. I showed my boss, and he pulled me aside into another room and tore my head off for irresponsibly running this tool against a production server. He said I could have been fired if this got out, but he covered my ass, sent out an email requesting everyone reset their passwords, and let me continue working. I learned a good lesson because even though my intentions were good, and it did expose security issues, it was a bit immature and should have been done in a more controlled manner along with the proper clearances.Mudge knows the implications of "whistleblowing". He has been a security consultant and even testified to Congress. He's not some noob that doesn't understand security or how systems work together to provide services like disclosure to FTC. The idea that Twitter PR can pooh-pooh away his concerns is shockingly stupid.I think Twitter is in real trouble here. |
Show HN: Generating fantasy maps – an interactive exploration | If the novels were as bad as he says they were, maybe he can crank out some random(ly bad) prose to go with it, and get Amazon-rich.(And/or, this might make an interesting companion project.) |
1Password Travel Mode: Protect your data when crossing borders | Counter: the border agent asks "are you hiding any information from us?". answer yes, and they get you to disable travel mode. answer no, and you just committed a felony. |
A bootable CD image with a retro game in a single tweet | I was confused as to how you could represent a bootable CD image in printable characters. It turns out that you can't. This is a tweet of a perl script which creates a cd.iso file that you can then boot from. The perl script significantly decompresses the data in the tweet.That said, this is a playable game in around 60 bytes of actual data which is impressive. |
PIA VPN to be acquired by malware company founded by former Israeli spy | This article and articles like this miscast Kape in an incorrect light. To be clear, in the past the company was known as CrossRider and provided a developer SDK that could be used to integrate with browsers. Unfortunately, CrossRider didn't do enough to prevent malware (like platforms these days and their fake news) and the platform was used by some bad people for bad purposes.When the new management team of CrossRider took over, they immediately ceased to engage in the previous business and focused on the opposite due to the insights they gained watching nefarious developers abuse their platform. With the focus on security and privacy, they changed their name to Kape and further the new company will be called Private Internet as it will be purely focused on privacy.The merger between Kape and PIA affords PIA the resources needed to bring privacy to the mainstream. The company can now be decentrally owned by the people, and public reporting requirements are much stronger than those for private companies. Couple this with a new random audit program we are going to launch and its as transparent as it gets, and it's exactly the direction we at PIA want to go, where our users no longer need to just trust us, instead our actions are and will continue to be verified.Ultimately, the choice of VPN is yours, but transparency is verification and with most VPN companies being incredibly secretive about their operations, who is behind it, and where they are located, what they do with their funds, etc. I stand behind the move to bring more transparency to privacy.The company has always practiced sustainable karma - wherein we do what's best for the people/what people want, and that allows us to make a living doing what we love; that's not going to change.Sincerely,
Andrew - Co Founder PIA |
Poll: Switching from WhatsApp | Where is the "Don't switch" option? Because as much as I hate that Facebook bought them, they're part of what I would call "critical social infrastructure."Asking to leave WhatsApp is like cancelling your contract with your ISP and going offline just because you don't like the company. |
Postgres gets support for upsert | I love that it's there now. I've been waiting for it for a long time, but one thing I don't get is... why does every single implementation have to have their own slightly different syntax?pgsql -> on conflictmysql -> replace / on duplicateoracle -> mergemssql -> mergesqlite -> insert or replacefirebird -> merge / update or insert |
It’s time to kill the web app | I find this unconvincing.Every negative thing said about the web is true of every other platform, so far. It just seems to ignore how bad software has always been (on average)."Web development is slowly reinventing the 1990's."The 90s were slowly reinventing UNIX and stuff invented at Bell Labs."Web apps are impossible to secure."Programs in the 90s were written in C and C++. C is impossible to secure. C++ is impossible to secure."Buffers that don’t specify their length"Is this really a common problem in web apps? Most web apps are built in languages that don't have buffer overrun problems. There are many classes of security bug to be found in web apps, some unique to web apps...I just don't think this is one of them. This was a common problem in those C/C++ programs from the 90s the author is seemingly pretty fond of. Not so much web apps built in PHP/JavaScript/Python/Ruby/Perl/whatever. |
Apple blocked the FlickType Watch keyboard then announced a clone of it | Alternatively, Apple prevented people from wasting their money on a feature that was about to be built into the OS. |
Why can’t a bot tick the 'I'm not a robot' box? | The box has made browsing using TOR insufferable! It fusses and makes me click storefronts and traffic lights until I run out of patience and close out of whatever webpage I was trying to visit. I assume it has to do with a lack of Google cookies on the browser, essentially punishing me for trying to protect my privacy. |
Signs you’re working in a feature factory (2016) | I'm part of the technical leadership at a company who is transitioning from small to medium-sized company. This article is disparaging virtually all of the initiatives we're trying to actually implement.It's actually really hard to transition from anarchy into a more process-oriented where each person has a role to play so that Devs are no longer responsible for literally everything because everyone is used to Devs doing everything. PMs used to verbally communicate vague ideas of what the customer was looking for and it was up to us to interpret and decompose and deliver on dates agreed upon without our input.There is a reason that the points in this article exist at all - because the alternative is actually worse! |
Moiré No More | I would think the optimal technique lies somewhere between the two: a convolution kernel optimized to conflate halftone dots with each other as to restore exactly the information possible. (Of course, such a kernel would have to be individually tuned for the orientation/spacing of the dots.)Literally painting over frequency peaks in the FFT with black circles I imagine would be pretty lossy, and not entirely rid yourself of the pattern (since you're making a new pattern with your dots). Indeed, in the animation, the image does get darker as circles are added, and some of the pattern is still visible.Perhaps using a blur tool to blur out the peaks in the FFT would serve to maintain original image tone, and further reduce patterning? |
No-more-secrets: recreate the decryption effect seen in the 1992 movie Sneakers | Wait, you're telling me I can just download these 3-5 source files, type `make`, and it will _just build_?No:* Setting up an isolated build env* Pulling 1600 dependencies and building them from source* installing a filesystem layer with 1600 .so libraries* running docker, npm, etc?_AND_ it compiles in a fraction of a second?Amazing what this new language C can do. |
First they came for the Iranians | I am an Iranian CS student. I had a fully funded PhD admission at one of the US universities. I was admitted for the Fall 2016 semester.I am currently in Iran due to my visa not being issued despite the 7 months I have waited for it. I was able to defer my admission to Spring 2017 semester, but then _this_ happened.I am quite sure that I will never be able to attend this program. I had very high hopes for my future because of this admission.I was very sad today after hearing this news. I have to come up with a new plan for my life, since it never occurred to me that I would not be able to attend.Edit: Thanks for all the support from the HN community. |
IndieHackers.com acquired by Stripe | While going from a blog-to-acquisition in less than a year is an impressive feat, there have been suspicious circumstances around IndieHackers submissions to Hacker News including clickbait titles that are frequently fixed by HN mods, and in one case, explicit voting manipulation with an attempt to bypass the voting ring detector via linking to /newest: http://i.imgur.com/08pAFOw.jpgThis acquisition sends a disappointing message that growth hacking works. |
What Gödel Discovered | > This proof showed that “1 + 1”, does indeed equal “2”. It took 2 volumes to get here.I know this seems logical to mathematicians, but it feels to me like having to take 2 volumes to prove something than any child knows intuitively is... I don't know what word I am looking for... obsessive? |
Firefox Was Always Enough | I will make the same comment I made on another post regarding Firefox and Mozilla:a few tips from from no one:1. Rewrite the Mozilla mission statement. I read that and have no idea what your organization does. Mission statements seem like corporate naval gazing, but if it is honest and well written it keeps everyone focused on what you are working towards.2. Refocus on Firefox R&D and core technologies - Firefox needs to be the best browser. It is the thing that makes the company money and makes it recognizable to the lay person. You will never be able to outspend Google, Microsoft, and Apple, but they are always going to have more competing priorities pulling their best engineers away and causing political infighting about what should be crammed into the browser. Mozilla does not have to have any of that.3. Invest more in Thunderbird the application and develop Thunderbird the privacy focus email service for independent professionals and small businesses.That is it. I like some of Mozilla's side projects and I agree with the business philosophy that they should be looking to diversify their revenue stream, but I think they should all be part of two core products: Firefox and Thunderbird. Why Thunderbird? Because I think there is an undeserved niche in the business email service provider space and I think Mozilla can have a universal client on desktop, phone, tablet, and browser that is the trojan horse to up sell that product. |
Heuristics that almost always work | This story reminded me of a story written by a Czech biologist who studied animals in Papua-New Guinea and went to a hunt with a group of local tribesmen.The dusk was approaching, they were still in the forest and he proposed that they could sleep under a tree. The hunters were adamant in their refusal: no, this is dangerous, a tree might fall on you in your sleep and kill you. He relented, but silently considered them irrational, given that his assessment of a chance of a tree falling on you overnight was less then 1:5000.Only later did he realize that for a lifelong hunter, 1:5000 are pretty bad odds that translate to a very significant probability of getting killed over a 30-40 year long hunting career. |
Comcast is injecting 400+ lines of JavaScript into web pages | The thing that's so irritating about large telco's is not just that they're evil, but the casual stupidity of their actions, including their evil actions.I mean, look at the code. Look at the function of this code. Look at the business purpose of this code. Look at the security aspects of using this code. Look at the legal ramifications (why the hell is that LGPL thing up top there ?). Look at their internal communication. Look at how easy it is to see exactly what they're doing ...All of it screams "no double digit IQs anywhere near this thing".And yes, I mean, I know that's not true. Their people are not this stupid (though some must be). But they do this anyway. The organisation does business analysis at the level of a 5 year old, codes like a 10 year old, obviously this has not passed legal review, ...How can an organisation that executes this badly become this big ? I mean, I know the answer is "government" and government making them a monopoly, but still. WTF. |
AT&T updates firmware to block access to 1.1.1.1 | I'd say there is a 98% chance this is a bug in some firmware and a 2% chance AT&T is intentionally trying to block Cloudflare DNS.I get why people are paranoid about ISPs blocking content and net neutrality, but let's not cry wolf prematurely. The technical details here strongly suggest a bug rather than intentional blocking of 1.1.1.1 DNS traffic. |
NULL license plate not such a bright idea | A colleague used an app's "generate secure password" feature to change their ISP's web portal login - which then also became the WAN router's password - which they didn't realise.It was about a week before the router dropped its connection and needed to re-authenticate - and that's when I was called in to investigate the loss of connectivity - which Windows 10 very unhelpfully reported as the network cable disconnected and was resetting or power-saving on the NIC so the "link active" LED on the switch was going out for about 2 secs every 10 sec. Cue a round of cable and switch swapping to no benefit. The LEDs for all other devices on the switch (running Linux and mostly internal servers) were behaving normally.I finally backtraced to the router and a useful error message. We put two-and-two together and my colleague called up the auto-saved details in their password manager; it was long, and ALL non-alpha numeric characters - starting with a backtick, which the router would not accept. I tethered my phone to my laptop and tried to login to the Web account portal - which would NOT accept the passphrase. I tried it without the backtick "just in case" - nope.We had to do a "lost password" reset on the portal..and wait for the email with link.Lessons learned:The ISP's password change page did not seem to validate input, but the login page did.Avoid backticks in passwords. |
TXT Record XSS | I am half serious, but how about making HTML served in TXT records a standard trick for serving small web pages very quickly? There are way fewer network round trips: 1. DNS query for TXT record for example.com
2. DNS reply with HTML content
Compared with the traditional 7 steps: 1. DNS query for A record for example.com
2. DNS reply with x.x.x.x
3. TCP SYN to port 80
4. TCP SYN/ACK
5. TCP ACK
6. HTTP GET
7. HTTP reply with HTML content
It would also make the content super-distributed, super-reliable, as DNS servers cache it worldwide (and for free so it would reduce hosting costs :D). Also TXT records can contain more than 255 bytes as long as they are split on multiple strings of 255 bytes in a DNS reply.Again, I am only half serious, but this is an interesting thought experiment...Edit: oddtarball: DNSSEC would solve spoofing. And updates should take no longer than the DNS TTL to propagate: the TTL is under your control; you could set it to 60 seconds if you wanted. It is a common, false misconception that many DNS resolvers ignore the TTL. Some large web provider (was it Amazon? I forget) ran an experiment and demonstrated that across tens or hundreds of thousands of clients wordlwide, 99% of them saw DNS updates propagated within X seconds if the TTL was set to X seconds. Only <1% of DNS resolvers were ignoring it. |
YC Fellowship | Kat from YC here. Sam, Matt Krisiloff and I are happy to answer any questions about the Fellowship. You can also send questions to [email protected]. |
Adobe deactivates all Venezuelan accounts | What makes this even worse is that this is only a huge issue because Adobe moved to the whole 'Creative Cloud' thing rather than the old 'buy each product outright' model. With the old model, it wouldn't hurt these creators all that much if their accounts got deactivated, since the software would just not get updates.Now on the other hand... they're screwed. It's a 'brilliant' example of how these 'cloud' based services are a bad deal for the user, because it puts them at the risk of getting locked out their own purchases due to legal hassles like this. |
How we recovered $300k of Bitcoin | The author is a very talented applied cryptographer with a very impressive resume (he is looking for new projects).The following CV line stands out however:Google: Software Engineer, Ads Review. June 2014– March 2016.Angular / Java developer on the internal tool used by contractors to review Google ads for policy violations.How did that saying about "brightest minds working on ads" go?I am not blaming the author as I would have done the same(and I imagine author was not told when hired that he'd be working on Java/Angular ad tool).Again it is not that Java or Angular are bad per se, but working on ad CRUD seems completely orthogonal to author's talents. |
US intelligence mining data from 9 US Internet companies in broad secret program | I think it's interesting to ask why these programs are so widely hated.These are national security assets: evidence gathered here will never be used in a drug case, or a tax evasion case. Why not? These tools exist for the bigger fish: the dozens of Soviet-era nuclear weapons believed to be missing, or the small amounts of dangerous pathogens that periodically vanish from research labs. These are what the government is worried about, and they're not going to risk revealing their methods for something lesser.Warren Buffet has predicted a major nuclear terrorist attack on an American city to be a "virtual certainty" given enough time.Ok, but no one here is going to argue that stopping terrorism is bad: the problem is in how we define terrorism. What happens when the definition becomes progressively wider? What counts as "terrorism" is political, after all.It's important to remember that we still have a functioning democracy. If you -- Hacker News reader -- decided to run for congress tomorrow, you might not win, but you won't be killed, sabotaged, or secretly blocked. While some individual politicans may be corrupt, the system broadly is not. These programs are enforcement mechanisms; the laws themselves are still made by the people, and maybe corporations. While we as a population may argue about social issues like gay marriage and abortion, our government is not fascist.Further, I take these programs as a great example that security is much harder to create than it is to destroy. Extreme efforts such as these may still be insufficient to prevent New York from being destroyed by terrorists. In that case, the acts of a few crazy people still overcame a monumental effort by the entire intelligence apparatus. What does that say about the time Hacker News is so afraid of, when it's more than only a few crazy people that the government is "worried about"?Should these programs exist? I don't know. I'm as worried as anyone about the scope creep. I'm willing to accept a level of inherent danger with living in a free society. However, do not forget that we can't see NSA success stories. I might be willing to accept a risk of periodic car bombs, which while tragic are not statistically significant; however, if PRISM is actually effective at tracing and intercepting Soviet nuclear weapons, I can see multiple sides of this issue.We have rights to privacy and protection from unreasonable search and seizure. Those rights were created to prevent unfair loss of life, liberty, and property. These programs, hidden in the background, don't inconvenience you, or lead to loss of freedom or property. Is privacy good? Of course. But the incentives the intelligence apparatus have to not use any data collected here against anyone for reasons less than "real" terrorism are strong enough, that I think it's not open-and-shut. |
I was asked to crack a program in a job interview | Real-life tests are THE best thing to send job candidates. It scales well (you don't have to spend personal hours on them) and you get real information.This applies even to sysadmins. We have a favourite: set up a VM with a slightly-broken application in a slightly-broken Apache and Tomcat, and get them to ssh in and document the process of fixing it. Even people who aren't a full bottle on Tomcat will give useful information, because we get an insight into their thought processes. I recommend this to all.(I note we've just done a round of interviews where we get a nice-looking CV and conduct a technical grilling. Hideous waste of time for everyone involved. All CVs should be regarded, on the balance of probabilities, as works of fiction. Do a remote self-paced test like this. You won't regret it.) |
Red Hat to Acquire CoreOS | It seems like early 2018 is rife with acquisitions and mergers. Was the recent tax law a factor? Seems like these acquisitions take so much time that it couldn't have been dependent on that. So why all this activity? |
Google terminated our Developer Account, says it is “associated” | We need legislation forcing companies to manually review algorithmic decisions that impact people's lives - there has to be a proper appeals process.It's simply not economical for many companies to deal with the long tail of false positives, so they don't. Google has billions of users, and if their algorithms are 99.999% right about bans, their metrics look great but that's still tens of thousands users wrongfully banned.I'm not usually a fan of government intervention but this is such a no-brainer for regulation.With how much our modern lives are dependent on services like Google's, they effectively become utilities and should be regulated as such. |
Stripe laying off around 14% of workforce | Hey pc, if you're around:> John and I are fully responsible for the decisions leading up to it.What are the two of you doing to show accountability? Are you slashing your own future stock grants, cutting your own salaries, diluting your positions with stock grants to everyone else? What's the consequence for this decision on your end that shows you're accountable for what happened, not just responsible for it? Since you have no intention of cashing out, the valuation cut is ineffectual as a consequence to you, and the support/severance package will probably have minimal impact on your own bottom line since it's all largely been accounted for (payouts of planned bonuses, existing unvested stock etc) |
Protomaps – A free and open source map of the world | Cool but basemaps are a very tricky thing from a geographers perspective. There are several border conflicts. When it is open source there could be some manipulation.Immediatelly getting downvoted. All I'm saying is that official map boundaries these days should be used.Because I can again not post because too fast here my clarification: I mean official not commercial or proprietary |
If the Earth were 100 pixels wide | Is anyone else a little bothered by the fact that the reported speed was 1/5 the speed of light, yet the flyby necessarily increased to well over the speed of light in order to actually get you to Mars before you got bored and closed the tab? Traveling at the speed of light would have taken 5-20 minutes. Traveling slower than that would have taken even longer... |
Poll: What are your liked and disliked programming languages? | And the award of least significant poll of the week goes to...Seriously, you won't get anything meaningful out of this, people will vote for the language they like and then bash the usual suspects (PHP, actionscript, C++,...). Also they will browse the first 20 entries or so and then get bored and skip to the end.I'm sure the people who "dislike cobol" (7 people at the moment) have intimate knowledge of the language in production in order to cast such a vote.It's just a popularity contest and a bad one at that.Also: "Other - Dislike: 5 points". Enough said. |
An Open Letter to Intel | I can't tell if this is earnest or 2nd degree. Can people more familiar with Mr Tanenbaum's style enlighten me?Because if this is earnest I'm quite seriously baffled. I don't mind BSD at all and I won't comment on the political side of things but why on earth would you rejoice that you worked for free (I assume?) for Intel only to have your work end up in some user-hostile module forced on the users? Is Tanenbaum egotistical enough that merely having his work be "the most widely used computer operating system in the world" justifies everything? And then he uses that to argue that BSD is superior to GPL because this way big companies can use the code without giving anything back? Great success. |
Google Maps won't let you save home address without allowing all Google tracking | There was a lot of uproar about this internally but nothing changed. They told us that this was the only "practical" option.The company has rotted. |
uBlock Origin: Address first-party tracker blocking | This was always coming. Next we will have unblockable ads delivered through first party and using obfuscated techniques like canvas or webassembly. The endgame will be all/most websites embedding 1st party ads and tracking and the only way to not see them would be to not use the WWW at all. At that point we will have lost. |
The Decline of Usability | Ubuntu got worse at 18.04. Logging in on desktop now requires "swiping up" with the mouse to get the password box. The "swiping" thing is to avoid problems with unwanted activation when the device is in your pocket. It's totally inappropriate to desktops.Then there's icon mania. I've recently converted from Blender 2.79 to Blender 2.82. Lots of new icons. They dim, they change color, they disappear as modes change, and there are at least seven toolbars of icons. Some are resizable. Many icons were moved as part of a redesign of rendering. You can't Google an icon. "Where did ??? go" is a big part of using Blender 2.82. Blender fanboys argue for using keyboard shortcuts instead. The keyboard shortcut guide is 13 pages.Recently I was using "The Gimp", the GNU replacement for Photoshop, and I couldn't find most of the icons in the toolbar. Turns out that if the toolbar is in the main window (which is optional), and it's too tall to fit, you can't get at the remaining icons. You have to resize the toolbar to give it more space. Can't scroll. There's no visual indication of overflow. It just looks like half the icons are missing.(I have no idea what's happening in Windows 10 land. I have one remaining Windows machine, running Windows 7.) |
Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads | Fuck the guy who wanted to suck up to the management in some stupid meeting projecting estimated revenue out of this to ask for a raise later because he "contributed to a revenue increase" to the company.There's absolutely no after thought to this decision - If I paid 1000s of dollars for an "idiot box" that's supposed to reproduce faithfully the signal that I pass it, showing ads is unacceptable, no matter what the context or reasoning is.This is one of the reasons I paid the premium and went for a Sony instead. They haven't done anything stupid like this yet, and I don't use smart features on the TV anyway, so I don't plan on updating the software either. Hopefully they face backlash over this stupidity and this doesn't go on to become a norm.That would be really, really terrible. |
AirPods Max | $549!?That puts it in the same price category as: Sennheiser HD660S, Audeze LCD-1, Beyerdynamic DT1770/1990, Grado RS2e, among many many others.Honestly, I don't understand why you would buy these when there are a lot of established professional audio companies offering better sound at a cheaper price. At least airpods have a unique selling point in their portability and ux but I don't see how this benefits over-ear cans. |
Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord | I'm longing for the return of the mailing lists.Sure, the format is slow and somewhat complex, but then it seems like all the places are devoid of non-immediate conversations.Companies are moving to the Slack, informal groups to the Discord. I've been using IRC for years and I still love it but with recent adoption of Slack it seems everyone wants to push all the communication there and I don't think it works. It's hard to search for stuff (usually it takes me 3-4 queries to find thing _I know_ is there) and then it's in lengthy conversational format that takes a bit of time to replay. You might lose window of opportunity to provide important info just because you aren't present at the moment and since Slack is perceived as a low impact tool, those conversations can happen in late evening hours.And yet all the places that (in my opinion) were better to have more fruitful, thoughtful and searchable conversations are slowly winding down. Newsgroup are long dead, mailing lists are perceived as archaic, forums are closing down one by one. It might be me, but I start to get feeling that even on StackOverflow conversations aren't what they used to be. Only e-mail is left - in some places at least, because some organization start to have "why send an e-mail while you could send Slack message". Thankfully those organization usually bless users with capability of installing Slack on their private phones /sToo bad Google Wave didn't pick up. |
When hiring developers, have the candidate read existing code | I like this approach.Far to often I’ve interviewed at places and been grilled by the interviewer only to find out when you start the quality isn’t great, what you where grilled on you won’t be working on “as that’s to hard” or “we don’t do that” despite being grilled on it and the level of skill not to great they just want senior people. It’s the bait and switch.At least being taken through existing code you know what you are getting yourself in to. Also looking at the current open pull requests and closed pull requests to see the standard and speed of delivery. Bonus points for no PR’s and trunk driven development as that shows a very mature team.My simpler interviews have often been with companies that have held a higher bar than the ones with tougher interviews. Those companies have often been sink or swim though and if you don’t make the grade you’ll be kicked out pretty quick. My last company had a reputation for new starts disappearing and not great that way, but the team was probably the strongest bunch of people I’ve ever worked with as only do good survived. |
Pirate Library Mirror: Preserving 7TB of books (that are not in Libgen) | Again, it's just insane to me that we don't even much have a meaningful discussion of:"Hey, wait, literally everyone could have the entire library of Alexandria in their house for a couple hundred bucks per person. Like, all the knowledge ever. Maybe that should be considered the good default of things.At least one in every town that everyone could use, for free, forever, without restriction to ANY of the knowledge anyone desires." |
“Let her speak please” | What's really interesting is that the author only became 'boiling' with rage when this socially-unaware moderator talked over the woman on the panel, not when he talked over the other men.This kind of behavior is extremely common in STEM, and happens to everyone. If you don't talk with confidence, purpose, and animation, you're going to get talked over by the alpha nerd of the group. Man, woman, or purple elephant. Problem? Yes. Sexism? No. |
iPhone X | They make is so easy to login to the phone -- I'm still waiting for the ability to add multiple users. When I hand my phone to my daughter she should see her apps, my son, his. And when I hand my phone to my wife, she should unlock it and see.... her phone. If 256GB local storage and 11ac WiFi isn't enough storage and bandwidth to make this easy, I would be OK if it only kept the last GB of the camera roll.Of course this sync should happen directly between our devices when they are on the same network. No need to go through the cloud.By default if her phone rings it should only alert on her primary device. Unless she authenticates to my device at which point everything is there waiting. If her phone was ringing and she picks up my device and authenticates it should answer the call.Ideally this is all smooth enough that we have matching devices and don't care which one either of us walks out of the house with.The end game is that when networks are fast enough, the cloud mature enough, and homomorphic encryption performant, we get to the point where the phone basically lives in the cloud and anyone can pick up any iDevice, authenticate, and be looking at effectively their own device. |
Arm China Has Gone Rogue | People need to wake up to the fact that China being a potential market of >1B people is an illusion. This is particularly relevant for any tech company.Let me spell it out: Chinese companies are extensions of the state. They are tools of Chinese foreign and trade policy. What cooperation you think US companies provide the US government, it is nothing in comparison.The Chinese government will ensure that no Western competitor will "win" in China. Period. I understand why to a point. My main issue is with the West being completely oblivious to it.If China wants to impose such restrictions on Western companies, they shouldn't get access to Western markets. And that's it.Here's where I think this will first come to a head: I believe the US government will at some point soon decide that any person born in mainland China is a security risk as far as working on anything national security related. This will probably extend to key industries of national importance too (eg SpaceX). |
In defense of the Google chef | This is essentially a Trolley problem that people are getting quite indignant about: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problemHere's an oversimplified example that mirrors the classic Trolley problem:Suppose the company consists of three people: The founder, the engineer and the chef. The founder can't raise more money from investors and she realizes that if she fires the chef it'll free up 200K ISOs which can be used to recruit a sysadmin. Without a sysadmin the startup will fail. If the founder gives up her own shares, she loses control of the company to one of the investors, who she knows will sell the company to cash out immediately. If she stays in control, the founder aspires to grow the business to 20x its current size. Should the founder fire the chef?What small detail would have to change in order to quell the ire of all of the people claiming that Pincus is acting unethically? |
You might not need jQuery | No, please no. If size is an issue for some reason or you want to have no dependencies you can use something like http://zeptojs.com/ and just embed everything in one minified file. If you do things right only the functions you are actually using will get placed in there as well.Do not reinvent the wheel to solve problems that can't be solved in much cleaner and nicer ways. Managing dependencies can be annoying, but we all bite the bullet for a very good reason, because reusing solid well tested code is a good thing. |
Things I Regret About Node.js [video] | I think it's quite interesting to see that originally node.js was presented as a bloat-free alternative to "enterprise languages" like Java, C# or even Python or Ruby. A lot of complexity was subsequently added in an ad-hoc way which has resulted in (for example) a package management system that's wildly out of control.It's very popular of course, so I'm definitely not arguing that metric. However, the stuff that was originally called examples of tooling that exhibits unneeded bloat and complexity (Maven) is now reimplemented in Javascript, but poorly (npm). |
ISOC sold the .org registry to Ethos Capital for $1.1B | The time of .org as 'trusted' is over.When a private equity investment firm buys something, they plan to extract value, they don't create value.Ethos Capital was formed in 2019 [1]. Price caps were lifted before it was sold [2]. Combined with the billion plus valuation, something is sketchy. Even if you trust this sale, they could even resell it to a less trustworthy owner after increasing rates making a return on investment, that is probably the plan..orgs will be filled with extortion to good .orgs, and fake .orgs will be created which will create distrust about existing .orgs, and allow propaganda to spread.There will be tons of malware and phishing going on when people think they are on trustable domains.If they could buy .gov they would. Just more of the turn of the internet to authoritarian/corporate control over the internet's anti-authoritarian/public/independent roots.[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethos_Capital[2] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/11/private-equity-f... |
I want a computer that I own | I have a similar feeling, but with modern smartphones.Owning my computer is still relatively possible. I can build a computer from parts which I can choose, and have a choice in which operating system to install on them. Laptops are slightly more closed, but even on those I can choose the OS myself.Modern smartphones however, seem like walled gardens in which I have no control at all. I cannot choose any of the parts, and even doing simple reparation tasks like replacing a battery is a nightmare these days. I am locked into a single OS on my smartphone, which either spies on you or is locked down even more. Every iteration a bit more control is taken away from the user. And its increasingly hard to step away from them, since a lot of normal interactions such as banking almost requires you to have such a phone.Both Android and iOS suck. I've made my own Android phone tolerable with F-Droid and trying to ungoogle it as much as possible. But unfortunately I find myself locked into using google play services since solutions like MicroG just don't cut it. They lock me out of slightly too much of my daily smartphone usage (note that this is definitely not the MicroG's developers fault, they have done amazing work). |
Blocking Kiwifarms | Reading over the comments I see everyone thinking this is about “free speech.” It is not. It’s about what in the US you’d call “due process” and in all the rest of the world you’d call “rule of law.”Our decision today was that the risk created by the content could not be dealt with in a timely enough matter by the traditional rule of law systems.That’s a failure of the rule of law on two dimensions: we shouldn’t be the ones making that call, and no one else who should was stepping up in spite of being aware of the threat.Encourage you when these issues arise to think of them in the rule of law context, rather than free speech, in order to have a more robust conversation with frameworks that have an appeal and applicability across nearly every nation and government. |
The window trick of Las Vegas hotels | Presumably, he means a single window we see is made up of 4-6 panes and
those panes are bigger than a single storyI am having trouble seeing the 4-6 windows combined from the photos of the Bellagio. The close up does not help.The first mentioned buildings seem brutalist esp. the second one.
It is a form of utilitarian architecture that has great appeal to me.
I think in part because it is rare now.I find them far more pleasing to the eye than the giant glass clad high rises
that was the fashion for a long time.
I have read that it is now going out of fashion, but I have not yet seen any
examples locally.Wanting to give my dogs new and exciting places to sniff and pee
I try to walk around in different neighborhoods in the area.
As have been doing this for many years now and the unexplored
neighborhoods are getting farther and farther out.About two years ago, at random, I found a brutalist single
family dwelling. It is a big house for a single family but
it is the smallest such building I have ever seen, it is beautiful.
(to me)I truly stands out from all the other nearby houses.
I have visited that area often to take pictures and just look at it.
I would love a chance to see the inside.If I had the money and I most certainly do not, id love to live
in a house like that.
It would make giving directions a lot easier as well.I wonder if there exists brutalist "tiny homes".
That would be something to beholdFor an explanation of the term brutalist see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%A9ton_brut |
John Carmack joins Oculus as CTO | I've played with an Oculus VR, and I think they're amazing.But I'm not convinced that they're ready for the mass market yet. Not because of any failing on their part, but because I think that they need games, and controllers, specifically designed to work with VR.You can't use mouse/keyboard well if you can't see the mouse/keyboard. UIs that float at the bottom of the screen feel very odd when you move your head around and they stay at the bottom of your vision.We're going to need a year or two of people producing iterations of new interfaces before we have something that feels really smooth to the average user.(In the meantime they're great fun to play with.) |
The Death of Microservice Madness in 2018 | I think "microservices" is so appealing because so many Developers love the idea of tearing down the "old" (written >12 months ago), "crusty" (using a language they don't like/isn't in vogue) and "bloated" (using a pattern/model they don't agree with) "monolith" and turning it into a swarm of microservices.As an Infrastructure guy, the pattern I've seen time and time again is Developers thinking the previous generation had no idea what they were doing and they'll do it way better.
They usually nail the first 80%, then hit a new edge case not well handled by their architecture/model (but was by the old system) and/or start adding swathes of new features during the rewrite.In my opinion, only the extremely good developers seem to comprehend that they are almost always writing what will be considered the "technical debt" of 5 years from now when paradigms shift again. |
AI winter is well on its way | This is a deep, significant post (pardon pun etc).The author is clearly informed and takes a strong, historical view of the situation. Looking at what the really smart people who brought us this innovation have said and done lately is a good start imo (just one datum of course, but there are others in this interesting survey).Deepmind hasn't shown anything breathtaking since their Alpha Go zero.Another thing to consider about Alpha Go and Alpha Go Zero is the vast, vast amount of computing firepower that this application mobilized. While it was often repeated that ordinary Go program weren't making progress, this wasn't true - the best, amateur programs had gotten to about 2 Dan amateur using Makov Tree Search. Alpha Go added CNNs for it's weighting function and petabytes of power for it's process and got effectiveness up to best in the world, 9 Dan professional, (maybe 11 Dan amateur for pure comparison). [1]Alpha Go Zero was supposedly even more powerful, learned without human intervention. BUT it cost petabytes and petabytes of flops, expensive enough that they released a total of ten or twenty Alpha Go Zero game to the world, labeled "A great gift".The author convenniently reproduces the chart of power versus results. Look at it, consider it. Consider the chart in the context of Moore's Law retreating. The problems of Alpha Zero generalizes as described in the article.The author could also have dived into the troubling question as of "AI as ordinary computer application" (what does testing, debugging, interface design, etc mean when the app is automatically generated in an ad-hoc fashion) or "explainability". But when you can paint a troubling picture without these gnawing problems appearing, you've done well.[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_ranks_and_ratings |
Assange Indicted Under Espionage Act, Raising First Amendment Issues | Charges like these, which such heavy minimum sentences should he be convicted, are exactly what he claimed were waiting for him if he left the Embassy. Over the years, many observers claimed he was delusional in this regard. It appears he wasn’t. |
EA will be releasing the C&C Tiberian Dawn and Red Alert source code under GPL3 | One of the best things that could happen to the gaming landscape would be if companies like EA and similar learned from Microsoft's move to open sourcing more software and involving the community more gives them a lot more goodwill and business as a side-effect.And then us gamers get more long-lived games as a benefit as well. |
DisneyMustPay Alan Dean Foster | > The larger problem has the potential to affect every writer. Disney’s argument is that they have purchased the rights but not the obligations of the contract. In other words, they believe they have the right to publish work, but are not obligated to pay the writer no matter what the contract says. If we let this stand, it could set precedent to fundamentally alter the way copyright and contracts operate in the United States. All a publisher would have to do to break a contract would be to sell it to a sibling company.That’s insane. If this were to hold up then any royalty obligation could be shuffled off to a shell entity?! |
Beej's Guide to Network Programming (1994-2020) | All your kind words are literally bringing tears to my eyes--thank you!My current plan is to keep writing freely-available guides for as long as I can reach the keyboard. And maybe even longer with what will undoubtedly be awesome futuristic speech recognition--or mind-reading! That's not scary at all!I'm leaning on bash/zsh scripting one I finish the utterly gigantic C guide I'm on now... hopefully later this year. But I'm always open to suggestion for topics... :) |
Show HN: Workout.lol – a web app to easily create a workout routine | Everyone is very complementary so can I be allowed to be the debbie downer? As a web app, it's neat! Functionally, not a fan as yet.I've lifted for a couple of decades. I put in the muscles for a pull workout I will be doing today and the results are... dumb. "Dumbbell superman" nah not going to do that. Two types of hammer curl? Nah that's a waste of time. "Bayesian hammer curl" wtf, my eye is twitching. Two types of dead-lift only differentiated with different shaped weights? Nope that's dumb too. It's also suggesting exercises at the wrong level e.g. bands or dead-lifting a kettlebell. I'd need to put all my gym's kettlebells onto a bar for a useful dead-lift :) It also had no vertical pull like a chinup/lat-pull for a back workout which is kinda criminal.For a beginner, they won't know it's dumb, so this is kind of harmful. They need to use a more carefully designed complete split / full-body-workout, because it matters how multiple days combine, not just a single day.For an intermediate/advanced lifter, clearer goals are more useful e.g. PL or BB, and then planning intensity/loading/waves/deloads etc. for constant progression. What I find most useful is deep dive discussion by an expert for most effective exercises and how to get the most of out of them with subtleties about grips and cues to increase mind-muscle-connection etc. Suggestions for how to swap out exercises to work around injuries or focus on weak points is very useful. The lifter can then iterate and swap exercises in and out of their routine to keep it fresh and useful. |
US Senate votes to undo FCC internet privacy rules | So, it's weird. I was on reddit this morning, and there seemed to be a bit of astroturfing going on about this.The comments i replied to, which all claimed "this was a power grab by the fcc from the ftc" (which is ajit's talking points), are now deleted. In fact, every account i can find that said similar things is now deleted.
https://www.reddit.com/user/danberlin/comments/ (click on context for any of them).In any case, for the curious, here's the history here:The FTC historically did privacy for ISP's.FTC has no section 5 authority (IE to make those kinds of rules) for common carriers. It's specifically exempted by the FTC act, and has been for 90 years. This has been upheld in court.
See https://iapp.org/news/a/the-att-v-ftc-common-carrier-ruling-...In June 2015, the FCC reclassified the ISP's as common carriers.Tada, the FTC rules no longer apply.So the FCC regulated them with roughly the same set of rules.Now they've undone this.Now the claim is "well, the FTC should be doing it, it was just a power grab by the FCC". But that's not really accurate. The power grab, if any, was reclassifying them as common carriers. Once that was done, they pretty much had to regulate them because the FTC can't.Because the FTC still doesn't have authority to regulate them, and they are still classed as common carriers, there is a void.Now, it may actually be better for the FTC to be regulating them. But it's definitely the case that, for the moment, no privacy rules will apply to them because the FTC can't regulate them until the FTC's common carrier exemption is repealed.See Maureen(an FTC commissioner)'s speech here:
https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/public_statements...Note, the speech is out of date a bit, because since then, the 9th circuit court ruled that the exemption is status based, not activity based, despite what the FTC wants. |
How do I draw a pair of buttocks? (2014) | It's funny how different the atmosphere is on the various stack exchanges. On many other sites that question would have been closed with the rational "Needs more focus." |
The age of average | What the article describes is correct, but I don't think the words "average" or "homogeneity" or "conformity" are the right terms, as they seem to carry negative connotations here. Rather, the right word is "convergence".The point is, people like certain things aesthetically. It used to be that artists and designers were still trying to figure out what looks good, and trying all the things. But now we've tried so many things and we've gotten better at zeroing in the precise aesthetics viewers and consumers want. We've converged.Sure, you can design electric toothbrush branding that "stands out", but it's probably going to result in less sales. Because most people don't want to express their unique personality via their electric toothbrush, they just want a nice slim white object that blends into their sink area.The great mistake that this article makes is thinking that people need to be constantly expressing themselves in some unique way that nobody's ever done before. But the world has almost 8 billion people, few things are as unique as you think.Can't we just enjoy having nice things? Even if those things have converged aesthetically? They've converged because we think they're nice. Things don't need to be different just for the sake of being different. Because different can also be worse. |
Coders Automating Their Own Job | You know how sometimes you love an article so much that you are annoyed you didn't write it? This does a better job than I could have of tieing together a dozen threads of conversation that I've had with various friends for years.I actually believe that there's a culture war implied in this debate; the question of who deserves to reap the gains of automation is more than just philosophy or ethics. The question "is there inherent nobility in work itself?" seems to be just as much a political divide as any of the current popular hot-button issues. Your gut reaction says a lot about the regional values of where you grew up, whether you'd ever support a basic income, and whether you believe that someone's refusal to work should condemn them to destitution.The closest comparison is the attitude people have if they find a wallet. In Japan, you will get your wallet back with cash intact. Yet in the west, there exists a large contingent of people who believe with all of their heart that God wanted them to find it, that the person who lost it should have been more careful, that they are just having a lucky day. Unless God shows up and declares one side to be ethically correct, it will remain a toss-up.One thing I find fascinating about the article is that it's assumed the cleverness was the code written to automate. This is incorrect; the cleverness is in noticing when a task can be automated. Typically, the code itself is trivial.Anyhow: automation is surely one of the best reasons every person should learn a little bit of programming. And even with that task accomplished, I suspect that the rate of people seeing the opportunity to automate will stay roughly flat. |
How to assess the quality of garments (2014) | I mostly dress pretty casually: jeans and a T shirt is pretty typical. My shirts “fail” not because of stitching or things like that. Most of the time they get armpit stains from deodorant after probably 20 time I wear them or so. At that point I toss them. I don’t see how higher laity fabric would result in anything different, so I stick to cheaper basic shirts for everyday wear. I like clothes, but I like variety. I’d rather have 4 different belts I can mix and match, and replace them for $10-20 when they wear our rather than the one indestructible $100 belt. Quality clothing is good, cheap clothing has its uses too. |
Springer Textbooks More Than 10 Years Old Available for Free Legal Download | Sooo many good books! I'm exhausted!
Here are some good ones:MPEG Video Compression Standard:http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/b115884Chaos and Fractals:http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/b97624Proofs from THE BOOK:http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-662-05412-3Joel on Software:http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4302-0753-5Programming Challenges:http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/b97559 |
Introducing Keybase Chat | OP here! I had to trim the post down for brevity, but I thought the HN community in particular might be interested in the API side of things.Undocumented in the post: you can invent channels for app-to-app communication from the JSON API. For example, it's possible with Keybase chat to have a program posting encrypted messages for another person or program, without cluttering up the visual chat interface.Also - to test chat we've cut the invitation requirement. You should be able to try the app without anyone inviting you. |
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