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Earn-IT threatens encryption and therefore user freedom | I feel like they missed the primary point which is that E2E encryption is the primary thing protecting everyone from hackers/criminals/other-governments. Without it the criminals WILL have access to your systems and data and then you can basically say goodbye to anything being valuable at all.Locking your door at night is a poor metaphor. A criminal can literally infiltrate and search through every unsecured computer connected to the internet in a matter of minutes and using almost no resources and with little risk. This drastically diverges from physical assets.Making encryption illegal will ensure that only criminals use it, thus making only criminals safe online. |
20 lines of code that beat A/B testing every time | This is thought-provoking, which is good. However there are significant issues with the approach.1. Real world performance varies over time. For instance there are typically daily, weekly and monthly conversion rate fluctuations. Not an issue for A/B testing, but a big issue for this approach if a random switch in direction happens at the same time that conversion fluctuations happen to head in a good direction.2. (This is really a special case of #1 - but a very, very important special case.) This approach creates long-lasting interaction effects between tests and independent changes. That requires explanation. Suppose you're running a test. Version A is somewhat better. But version B is temporarily looking slightly better when you make a significant improvement to your website (maybe you started another test that works). Now you're adding a lot of good traffic to version B (good because of the other change) and very little of the new good traffic to version A. This new version B traffic soundly beats your old version A traffic. This correlation between time and website performance will continue until the old version A traffic is completely swamped by new version A traffic. With only 5% of your traffic going to version A, this can easily take 100x as long as your test has been running - or more. (Properly constructed A/B tests do not suffer this statistical anomaly.)3. Code over time gets messy. One of the most important characteristics of A/B testing is that you can delete the mess and move on. With this approach you can't - it just hangs around adding to your technical debt.4. Businesses are complex, and often have multiple measures they would like to balance. For instance in a recent test, conversion to click was hurt, conversion to a person who clicked 5x was helped. A/B testing let us notice that something weird was going on and think about what we really cared about. This automated approach would make a decision and could have hidden a real problem.5. Many tests perform differently on existing users and new users. A/B testing with proper cohort analysis can let you tease this out and decide accordingly. This approach doesn't give you that kind of sophistication. |
Thinking of Selling on eBay using Paypal? Think Again | I stopped selling things like this on eBay a long time ago because I do not sell things frequently enough to keep up with the scams du jour.My local craigslist is where my for-sale items now go. Sure, I may get a little less than top-dollar for an item, or it might take a little longer to sell, but I'm never left with some after-the-fact dispute where I have no control (note: I'll only accept cash).eBay was fun while it lasted, but then it became a giant flea market with basically semi-pro retailers looking to sell things, and a whole bunch of random scammers. Intermixed in all that was the occasional legitimate "amateur" seller.For the very few times I've purchased something on Ebay in the last few years, it's always been from "pro" sellers with storefront type setups. The hassles of dealing with amateurs selling poorly described items, taking too long to ship, etc. was also not worth the "deal" I was getting.A true "amateur to amateur" auction type sales website is an area begging for competition... |
YouTube-dl: Open-source YouTube downloader | The tragedy of this software (and many like it) is that despite working exactly as advertised, easily and with a lot of features, because it's a quiet open source project without any SEO rigging it will never appear in page 1 of any searches by laymen trying to download videos ("save youtube to hard drive", "download youtube videos" et al).The amount of crapware I've had to remove from family member's PCs just because they wanted to save a video is ridiculous. |
Ending Bitcoin Support | This reads a bit like the sort of things people say when breaking up so as not to upset the other person too much. You're a great person, but you're just more of an asset than a medium of exchange, and what I need in my life right now is a medium of exchange.What future does an asset have if people don't actually buy stuff with it? That is not a purely rhetorical question; cryptocurrencies change things a lot. But this news is worrying. |
Let's Learn About Waveforms | I really, _really_ love this kind of visual guide. Do you guys know of anything similar for other (unrelated) learning subjects?Edit: just saw this one in the footer of the Waveforms page. http://www.r2d3.us/visual-intro-to-machine-learning-part-1/ |
Notre-Dame cathedral: Firefighters tackle blaze in Paris | For those asking about why there isn't visible water being sprayed on the fire... There's no point. Any firefighting efforts are focused on preventing the spread of the fire to other structures (potentially other parts of the same structure)As a rule of thumb, the water flow necessary to extinguish a burning structure is the volume of the structure (in feet) divided by 100. The resulting number is (in rough numbers) the amount of water you need, in gallons per minute. For a fire this size, you're looking at tens of thousands of gallons of water per minute. It's just not possible. |
Going Critical | I am struck in particular by the 'expert --> idea' simulation. It suggests that an effective strategy for beating the competition to the punch in making a breakthrough discovery is to concentrate a diverse collection of expertise (it also explains why it pays to be very social in your career as a researcher).As mentioned in the article, putting specialists together in the same room is one way to accomplish this, but I can imagine the same happening in the mind of a single polymath, who, though perhaps being mediocre in several subjects, connects enough dots to beat the competition to combining them in a novel way. It might also make sense to recruit a few such polymaths/generalists to be put in your room of distinct experts, since they might serve well as a sort of 'interconnect bus' between them. |
Former ICANN CEO is now co-CEO of the private equity firm that tried to buy .org | What would happen if browsers just decided to make their own name service? Does icann have some sort of protection on domain names? Given that we already use Google or cloudflare DNS, why not just make a competing nameservice and throw icann to the curb? |
Slack is down | > Customers may have trouble connecting or using SlackI can't stand how marketing speak pervades every sphere of the world. Their entire system is offline (inconvenient certainly, but it happens) and they can't bring themselves to say "Slack is down. We're working on it and will be back ASAP." or something similar. Instead we may have trouble. |
I liberate the ending to Minecraft from Microsoft and give it to you | I feel for the guy, making a living off of art is difficult.However, with an extensive email chain explaining the story was written as the ending of Minecraft, even going into detail about how it was to be displayed in game, an agreed upon offer (if a bit vague), and then an exchange of funds - with no immediate attempt to return said funds. I'm no lawyer, but that sounds a lot like a legally binding agreement.> So he divided it between the twenty-five staff at Mojang, as a late Christmas bonus. That’s $120,000 each. Five or six times what I got for writing the actual endingDid the twenty-five staff put in 5x or 6x the work? It seems likely. I understand that to some the end story may be deemed to be essential to the experience and talent was required to write this story - but that attitude just undermines the hard work of everyone else involved. Who knows how much effort those staff members poured into perfecting things that were essential to the experience that made Minecraft?> Bear in mind, here we were a couple of weeks before the official launch, and Minecraft was already a phenomenon: in its unfinished state, it had already sold five or six million copies, in beta, at $15 a copy. So it was, at that point, already a hundred-million-dollar game, but with no endingIt certainly doesn't seem like the ending provided disproportionate value to Mojang compared to the work of their staff. |
Llama.cpp: Port of Facebook's LLaMA model in C/C++, with Apple Silicon support | A quick survey of the thread seems to indicate the 7b parameter LLaMA model does about 20 tokens per second (~4 words per second) on a base model M1 Pro, by taking advantage of Apple Silicon’s Neural Engine.Note that the latest model iPhones ship with a Neural Engine of similar performance to latest model M-series MacBooks (both iPhone 14 Pro and M1 MacBook Pro claim 15.8 teraflops on their respective neural engines; it might be the same exact component in each chip). All iPhone 14 models sport 6GB integrated RAM; the MacBook starts at 8GB. All of the specs indicate an iPhone 14 Pro could achieve similar throughput to an M1 MacBook Pro.Some people have already had success porting Whisper to the Neural Engine, and as of 14 hours ago GGerganov (the guy who made this port of LLaMA to the Neural Engine and who made the port of Whisper to C++) posted a GitHub comment indicating he will be working on that in the next few weeks.So. With Whisper and LLaMA on the Neural Engine both showing better than real-time performance, and Apple’s own pre-existing Siri Neural TTS, it looks like we have all the pieces needed to make a ChatGPT-level assistant operate entirely through voice and run entirely on your phone. This is absolutely extraordinary stuff! |
Scaling up the Prime Video audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs | My word. I'm sort of gob smacked this article exists.I know there are nuances in the article, but my first impression was it's saying "we went back to basics and stopped using needless expensive AWS stuff that caused us to completely over architect our application and the results were much better". Which is good lesson, and a good story, but there's a kind of irony it's come from an internal Amazon team. As another poster commented, I wouldn't be surprised if it's taken down at some point. |
What every software developer must know about Unicode in 2023 | Is it just me, or is anyone else seeing what looks like the mouse pointer of everyone else reading the page, like 1,000 little ants on the screen |
PayPal forces buyer to destroy $2500 pre-WWII antique violin in dispute | Some guides for buying violins that go back to 2006 which say to ignore the labels on violins.http://reviews.ebay.com/Buying-an-old-violin-on-ebay?ugid=10...http://reviews.ebay.com/What-apos-s-in-a-Name-A-Guide-to-Lab...http://reviews.ebay.com/Violins-on-Ebay?ugid=100000000142981...Paypal TOS Covers counterfeit items:10.1 b Further, if you lose a [Significantly Not as Described] Claim because we, in our sole discretion, reasonably believe the item you sold is counterfeit, you will be required to provide a full refund to the buyer and you will not receive the item back (it will be destroyed). PayPal Seller protection will not cover your liability.
https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/marketingweb?cmd=_render-c...If Paypal decides you sold a counterfeit item, you lose the item and your money. |
“Game Programming Patterns” is now finished | Bob, if you're lurking this thread:Congrats. Any idea when I'll be able to buy it?Like the other free-online-first books I've read, I've gotten enough value from it that I'd like to thank you by paying for it. |
Reddit | Exciting news. One thing I sincerely hope reddit will do with the new injection is to increase the level of quality of content and discussion across the board. Often the advice given is "you've got to find the smaller subreddits" and while that's true, I think having the first few layers filled with terrible content and hive-minded, often racist/sexist discussion is incredibly detrimental to both the site's image and new user experiences.I know there's great content there, and great people having great discussions, but it's not terribly easy to find. I'm thoroughly convinced that reddit could be an incredibly valuable source of reliable news, discussion, and entertainment, but the way it's structured highlights its more juvenile aspects.And if it can find a way to establish legitimacy, it'll be worth far more than it is today. |
Web Design: The First 100 Years (2014) | If Maciej hadn't written this, I would still feel alone in how I see the technological world. I really can't express how grateful I am that this exists.There is a vast, vast gulf between what the majority of software developers seem to think users want, and what users actually want. And this isn't a Henry Ford "they wanted faster horses" sort of thing, this is a, "users don't just hate change, they resent it" sort of thing.I work directly with end users. It's mostly over email now, my tech still works with them in person, face-to-face, in their business or home. We get so many complaints. So many questions: "do I really have to upgrade this?" "I liked this the way it was." "It worked just fine, why are they changing it again?"Every time I try to argue on behalf of my customers, here or elsewhere, it gets ignored, or downvoted, or rebutted with, "but my users say they always want the latest and greatest..."There are 100 million people in the United States alone over the age of 50. How much new software is designed for them? How much new software exists merely as a tool, comfortable with being put away days or weeks at a time, and doesn't try to suck you in to having to sign in to it on a regular basis to see what other people are doing with it? How much of our technology -- not just software, but hardware here too -- is designed to work with trembling hands, poor eyesight, or users who are easily confused?There are over a hundred million people that don't understand why your site needs a "cookie" to render, that can't tell the difference between an actual operating system warning and an ad posing as one, that aren't sure what to do when the IRS sends them an email about last year's tax return with a .doc attached. (That one happened today.)For these people, the technology most of us build really really sucks.And that is a growing demographic, not a shrinking one... |
The mysterious case of the Linux Page Table Isolation patches | "Hey, I think I noticed a horrible horrible embargoed security bug. I know, I should do my best to pole holes in the embargo early!" |
Who’s behind the “reopen” domain surge? | >[. . .] the Dorr brothers simply seek “to stir the pot and make as much animosity as they can, and then raise money off that animosity.I am fascinated by people like this. They have to understand they are doing awful things to the world around them. How do people like that sleep at night, or look themselves in the mirror?Even if you believe in gun rights to the extreme, being purposefully combative, negative, divisive, and awful just to make money is not a great look. How? Why? Why do people do these things? |
Stripe Payment Links | (Stripe cofounder.)While there are lots of antecedents (this is, after all, just a checkout page with a URL), and even though this was substantially inspired by the growth of the no-code ecosystem[0], the thing that's interesting to me about the payment link "space" is that it's a use case that really took off in other markets first -- Nigeria, India, Philippines, etc. I suspect that staying abreast of important new patterns emerging outside US/Europe will become more important for many businesses in the years ahead... there are a lot of legacy assumptions being questioned.And feedback very welcome on our Payment Links product itself![0] We were excited to have Ben Tossell, one of the original no-coders, as one of our beta users: https://twitter.com/bentossell/status/1397246339898093568 |
Imagen, a text-to-image diffusion model | >While we leave an in-depth empirical analysis of social and cultural biases to future work, our small scale internal assessments reveal several limitations that guide our decision not to release our model at this time.Some of the reasoning:>Preliminary assessment also suggests Imagen encodes several social biases and stereotypes, including an overall bias towards generating images of people with lighter skin tones and a tendency for images portraying different professions to align with Western gender stereotypes. Finally, even when we focus generations away from people, our preliminary analysis indicates Imagen encodes a range of social and cultural biases when generating images of activities, events, and objects. We aim to make progress on several of these open challenges and limitations in future work.Really sad that breakthrough technologies are going to be withheld due to our inability to cope with the results. |
Ooh.directory | Time is a flat circle, eh?But all kidding aside, web directories should be much more powerful now than in the 90s. Websites have RSS, and directory websites should be able to automatically monitor things like uptime, and leverage RSS to preview a site's most recent post.I've considered maintaining my own directory on my personal website (a one-way webring if you will), but always stopped because the sites I linked to either died, or were acquired and became something very different. |
Bard and new AI features in Search | I agree this is bland corporate speak. But it reminded me of a question that's been floating around:A number of pundits, here on HN and elsewhere, keep referring to these large language models are "google killers." This just doesn't make sense to me. It feels like Google can easily pivot its ad engine to work with the AI-driven chat systems. It can augment answers with links to additional sources of information, be it organic or paid links.But I guess I'm wondering: what am I missing? Why would a chatbot like ChatGPT disrupt Google vs forcing Google to simply evolve. And perhaps make even more money? |
Optimizing web servers for high throughput and low latency | Fab tour de force! Great!(Though I've been optimising my tiny low-traffic site on a solar-powered RPi 2 to apparently outperform a major CDN, at least on POHTTP...) |
They're deleting my channel, but they don't know why? [video] | Alternative Video Sites :https://lbry.tv/https://www.dailymotion.com/https://www.bitchute.com/https://dlive.tv/https://bittube.tv/ |
Whistleblowers: Software keeping inmates in Arizona prisons beyond release dates | This is an outrage. It is also a perfect example of how software is used to create increasingly more elaborate and faceless bureaucracies that force individuals to spend more and more time contending with them. Somehow software has become the ultimate vehicle for bureaucratic violence. Software is simultaneously infallible and the perfect scapegoat. The inmate who lost their phone privileges for 30 days is an example. They did nothing wrong but the computer says so and nothing can be done. The computer is right in the sense that its decision cannot be undone, and solely to blame since no human can undo its edict or be held accountable, apparently. It is tragic and absurd.There was an Ask HN question the other day where the poster asked if the software we are building is making the world a better place. There were hardly any replies at all. Is this because for the most part our efforts in producing software are actually doing the opposite? It certainly seems that way reading articles like this. |
EU withheld a study that shows piracy doesn't hurt sales (2017) | As someone who grew up in Eastern Europe in the early 2000s, with a a taste for Western media, especially movies, and the Internet becoming a widespread thing, it was infuriating waiting for movies to come to theaters months behind the rest of the world. Not to mention the horrible country specific posters and advertising, limited availability and titles. Piracy was the only option.It felt like the Internet would solve all these problems, like you'd be able to experience culture from any part of the world however you liked and at the same time as the rest of the world. Sadly that never happened. It's much better now but it still feels like the media is crippled by old local distributor deals. The fact that e.g. Netflix offers different movies for every country is something that honestly does not make any sense yet everyone accepts it.When I got my first Kindle 12 years ago my Amazon account was registered with my local European address so the books available in store were all complete trash romance pulp novels. Once I simply changed my home address to some random location in New York I suddenly had access to hundreds of thousands more titles. The Internet never delivered on its promise. |
Ukraine calls on hacker underground to defend against Russia | This thread is mostly full of jokes, and that's cool. But more seriously I'm exactly the kind of person I suppose this is meant to appeal to. I've spent the last 2-3 decades breaking into systems. Many of these systems comprise what the US calls "critical infrastructure". That's pipelines, power generation, transmission, distribution. Air traffic control systems. Government agencies.I'm based in the US. The problem is that the US, unlike Russia, will not simply agree to allow attacks against foreign targets so long as its suits their strategic purposes. And I suppose that's for the best. In the meantime, myself and people like me simply aren't going to risk our entire careers to retaliate. I suppose if we felt strongly enough we would've joined the NSA and done this legally. I wish Ukraine the best and hope our "official" hackers are doing their best to assist or will be unleashed soon. |
Delaware judge discovers hidden entity recruiting people to be patent trolls | Current USPTO patent examiner here. The most effective way to eliminate bad patents would be to give examiners more time, say double the time across the board to start. If an examiner can't find prior art in the little time they're given, and they have no other reasons to reject the application, they'll have to grant it. The amount of time was (basically) set in the 1970s based on data from the 1960s. There have been some minor increases since then. Several orders of magnitude more prior art exists now. And while search technology has improved, it hasn't become orders of magnitude better. So I'd argue that the workload has increased dramatically since the 1970s. Simply giving examiners more time would probably greatly reduce the grant rate, and also incidentally reduce examiner stress levels. Patent examination is a tough job, as examiners rarely get enough time to do a quality job, and this leads to the high stress levels.USPTO upper management is taking comments about the "robustness and reliability of patent rights" until February. You can leave your comments here:https://www.regulations.gov/document/PTO-P-2022-0025-0001Unfortunately giving examiners more time is only briefly addressed in this request for comments. I think the public should really drive home the point that the procedural changes discussed wouldn't be anywhere near as effective as simply giving examiners more time.Don't believe examiners are overworked? Take a look at this subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/patentexaminer/(Note that this comment is only my opinion, not that of the USPTO, US government, etc.) |
Maybe treating housing as an investment was a mistake | > Meanwhile, renters are desperate. They’re begging for housing prices not just to slow, but to fall.I have a friend who is a head chef at a decently popular bar and restaurant on Broadway in Capitol Hill, Seattle (very trendy part of town if you aren't familiar, steep commercial rent). He lives in a 400 sq ft studio and is barely, barely making it from one paycheck to the next. I am sitting on a 2.6% interest rate mortgage and my prices are set for the next 30 years. I probably work half as hard as he does, if not even less than half. I have a lot of cognitive dissonance associated with that. |
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket has exploded at Cape Canaveral | Here's good video of the test/failure:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BgJEXQkjNQ#t=1m10s |
How to Come Up with Profitable Business Ideas | For a B2B SaaS company, the easiest/most likely[1] algorithm to succeed[2]:1) Be embedded in the industry for a while2) Make lots of connections, build credibility3) Build SaaS app to solve key pain point you experienced in #14) Sell to the folks you know from #25) For bonus points/de-risking: find 25 potential customers (from #2) and reach out to them and validate this idea (Jobs-to-be-Done). Get a handful of them to commit, even verbally, to buy this when you've got an MVP built.[1] Clearly this is not the only way to be successful, but "I have a random idea lemme build it" is a great way to be not successful[2] Succeed = your business that makes enough revenue to support you and a reasonable lifestyle, equating (and/or eventually surpassing) what you would typically make at a W2 gig, from a diversity of customers and not trading your personal time for money. |
What Does a Coder Do If They Can't Type? | I developed an RSI a few years ago, and I had to leave my job. It was devastating to lose both my career and my passion to an injury.Since then, I've been working with a friend on a new voice coding app called Serenade [1] that aims to enable anyone to program by voice. With Serenade, you can speak natural English voice commands like "delete second function" and "add class person". Not only can this be faster than typing, but it also means you don't have to memorize the syntax details of every language or a bunch of editor keyboard shortcuts.We found that cloud speech APIs and programs like Dragon weren't accurate enough for common programming words, so we built a custom speech engine (based on Kaldi [2]) that's designed specifically for coding. The app is still early, but we think the future of programming is working with these higher-level inputs rather than typing out code entirely by hand.We're looking for people to give feedback, so if anyone is interested in giving it a try, you can download Serenade at [3] or email me at [email protected].[1] https://serenade.ai[2] http://kaldi-asr.org[3] https://serenade.ai/download |
Happy New Year HN | Man, fuck 2020. I picked up 2 bottles of Champagne for the wife and I before I decided it was a 3 bottle kind of year. It's 5:30 and we're one bottle in so clearly the right decision. Here's to 2021 being a lot better for everyone! |
What I Worked On | This is a well-written essay even if it's a bit long and somewhat navel-gazing (it is, after all, written for pg himself). However, I was continuously struck by just how ridiculously privileged and serendipitous pg's early life was to the point where I just can't even relate to it.He basically meandered his way from an expensive (today) college to an even more expensive (today) grad school, then to art school because he felt like it, and only stumbled into an actual job because he was basically broke. Then he magically found an incredibly affordable NYC apartment and finally was in the right place at the right time to take advantage of the dot com boom and again lucked his way into leaving at the right time, mostly because he was burned out.Don't get me wrong, pg obviously worked hard on both Viaweb and Ycom, and self-taught a lot of the startup lessons that are now common knowledge. But if I wrote this story as fiction with pg as the main character, people would laugh at the absurdity of it. For people who don't think luck is one of the biggest factors of success, just read this essay. |
SQLite is not a toy database | > There is a popular opinion among developers that SQLite is not suitable for the web, because it doesn’t support concurrent access.No, the issue is it doesn't have high availability features: failover, snapshots, concurrent backups, etc. (Edit: oops, comment pointed out it does have concurrent backups.)SQLite isn't a toy DBMS, it's an extremely capable embedded DBMS. An embedded DBMS is geared towards serving a single purpose-built client, which is great for a desktop application that wants a reliable way to store user data.Once you have multiple clients being developed and running concurrently, and you have production data (customer accounts that are effectively legal documents that must be preserved at all times) you want that DBMS to be an independent component. It's not principally about the concurrent performance, rather it's the administrative tasks.That requires a level of configuration and control that is contrary to the mission of SQLite to be embedded. They don't, and shouldn't, add that kind of functionality. |
Man who thought opening a TXT file is fine thought wrong | To the author: This website seems to use something called SmoothScroll (edit: a javascript library) which makes my scrolling really really jumpy/janky. I'm using chrome on a MacBook with the touchpad. Made it basically impossible to scroll around the page which in turn made it very difficult for me to read the article. |
Poll: Where do you live? | I hope there is someone who knows how to code in this community to parse the results and do a nice visualization. I have a cousin who knows about computers, if noone knows here how to do it, I can ask him to try. He always helps me with my printer. |
Akamai to Acquire Linode | I think this is Akamai figuring out they need to address the self-serve market.Akamai has 6x the edge network footprint of Cloudflare and has all the cool trendy stuff like edge workers, they just suck at selling to the developer. |
So I took a corporation to arbitration | Arbitration consumer protection attorney here! Nice work, and nice write up.If nothing else, I hope folks will run with your first point. Far too many people are scared of arbitration, and it can be a really powerful tool for situations like this. It’s fairly accessible and straightforward, especially for folks in the HN crowd.One pointer for other folks in the future is to make sure you look into your state’s specific consumer protection law. (Sometimes called UDAP law or deceptive practices act.) Often times, these laws will allow you to recover more than just your out of pocket damages to punish companies that are deceptive.One other way to “enlarge the pie” in situations like this is to hire an attorney. I know, it sounds like I’m shilling for my peers, but hear me out. This same UDAP consumer protection laws let you recover attorneys’ fees as part of a judgment/win. If you’re not an attorney, you simply can’t seek those.So let’s say your claim is $2,000. Under those laws, maybe you can “treble” (triple) your damages if you win. So now your best day is $6,000. And the company knows it.But if that same law says you can get attorneys’ fees too, the company knows that they could be facing a 50k+ judgment at the end (almost entirely comprising attorneys’ fees), and then that often incentivizes earlier, higher settlements. My involvement in cases, and the threat of attorneys’ fees often results in higher settlements than my client would get on their “best day,” and even after paying out my portion. (I typically do these on contingency — I don’t get paid unless you get paid).Lastly, let’s just say I’ve done an arbitration or two with a home warranty company. They don’t make money by paying out claims! |
The Twitter Files | Most concerning thing here is that this proves political parties (including the white house[0]) have a direct line to Twitter[1] to get stuff they dislike removed. One would have to assume that there was also a direct line to other social medial platforms. It's so wild to have the slimy-ness of our American political system be revealed in yet another way. So in America you cannot say negative things about political leaders online?!?!Since this is true, then where else are political parties trying to get unflattering speech suppressed that we don't even know of yet?[0] https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598828932395978752[1] https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598827602403160064 |
Most promoted and blocked domains among Kagi Search users | Pinterest was certainly the first site I blocked.I've never understood the hate for w3schools. No, it's not MDN, but it's not offensively bad either, and it's been a helpful reference from time to time. If w3schools comes up first in a search, I trust that it probably has the answer to whatever very simple question I must have asked, unlike something like Pinterest, which will just be spam no matter what. |
Ask HN: How did you decide what problems to solve in your lifetime? | I want to be careful with this decision, to avoid any future regretsDon't forget to consider that you may regret whatever you do - by human nature, the grass is proverbially always greener on the other side. People who have kids may wish they hadn't, but if they hadn't, they may have regretted that - in both cases thinking they'd made the wrong choice. Socrates and Kierkegaard, among others, discussed this as a basic feature of life - how regret seems 'objective', but it's far from it."Marry or do not marry, you will regret it either way. ...Laugh at the stupidities of the world or weep over them, you will regret it either way. ...Trust a girl or do not trust her, you will regret it either way. ...Hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret it either way. ...This, gentlemen, is the quintessence of all the wisdom of life." - Kierkegaard, Either/Or(The Preface of Either/Or even says about the book's chapters "Read them or do not read them, you will regret it either way."!) |
Relearn CSS layout | To me an evident thing in UI development is that separating stylesheet from layout isn't really a thing anymore and the benefits of this separation aren't really that clear.Things like SwiftUI and React are showing that declarative UIs can be built by tying the style to the layout and allow for much better accessibility, tooling, overall thinking of how UIs work.So to me CSS feels a bit outdated since big companies are definitely moving away from this separation. How does HN feel about this? |
I fear App Review is getting too powerful (2015) [pdf] | I mean, there’s a point to be made about how much monopoly power Apple holds, and it’s now clear these questions weren’t asked until now because lawmakers were really sweet on the maker of their shiny iPhone - but this letter ain’t it.The author is grovelling to the point of it being honestly pitiful. The amount of derogatory references to the web and Android also make it really hard for me not to question the motivation behind this letter.It’s transparently from an author who built their entire business on the shoulders of a single third party and is now horrified in realising it’s been taken away.If anything, the lesson to be learned here is that if your business depends exclusively on another company for its survival then it’s not your business.To the authors point - yes, Apple can change it’s policies whenever it likes, and can use those policies to kill other companies it views as competing with it’s own interests.This in itself isn’t news. Dropbox got flat out told by Steve Jobs to sell immediately for whatever he felt generous enough to give them or he’d crush them with a competitor. There was a podcast recently wherein someone who sold to Apple (I’m sorry I can’t remember who it was, will try to dig it out and update) got his deal reduced by 25% or so by Steve Jobs in person - after accepting it and flying out to Cupertino just because Jobs could and he wanted to make a point.This isn’t new information or a new policy, although maybe it’ll be a fairer playing field now that the hornet’s nest has received a good kicking. |
How I Experience Web Today | So true, so sad.These days, when even a few hurdles of crap present themselves, I often just leave. I don’t care what the site has to say or sell me.Whenever I come across a site that just displays content immediately, it fills me with joy. Usually it’s some obscure personal or academic site, but for a moment I feel like I’ve found a gem in the desert and I browse happily for a while…then I promptly add to a list of non-crap-peddling sites. I long for a curated list of such sites. |
Show HN: I'm 48 and finally learning how to be a game developer | My son wants to learn how to make games but I have no game development experience.What path did you take to start learning game development? |
Apple broke up with me | Something very similar happened to me with Amazon. I used a new debit card from an online bank to purchase an expensive item and deliver it to a foreign address (which is admittedly suspicious). The payment bounced, Amazon immediately locked my account and requested to see a card billing statement sent to my home address to reactivate it. Upon login I am presented with a stern request for documentation, a pdf upload field, a tweet-sized text field for comments, and all communication comes from a [email protected] address. All my kindle/audible/etc media immediately became inaccessible.I went through every possible channel to explain that the card does not send me a billing statement and I cannot possibly produce one, requesting to be called or at least emailed by a human, to no avail. After spending tens of thousands of dollars on Amazon over the course of fifteen years I couldn't even get a personal call from the case manager, and all my purchased media is gone.To this day I have found no resolution, and the only next step is to contact them through a lawyer. |
Guide to FFmpeg | FFmpeg is powerful technology, yet approaching it can be very daunting. So we decided to create an approachable guide for intermediate devs.
Feedback is very much appreciated. |
OnHub | My biggest issue with this is that Google wants to inject a piece of hardware into my home that acts as the gateway to my data. A device through which all :> Incoming data runs through> Internal data runs through> Outgoing data runs throughAnd then wants to be vague about what data they will be pumping to their back-end for analytics/data mining.I have had a long standing proposal for home automation and I'm curious to know, in this era of insecurity and people vacuuming up all your data, how many of the tech minded people here would be interested in a device which ensures your 'home automation' data stays in your home. This can be quite clearly achieved in hardware and by having an out-of-band oversight controller that literally will not allow certain data to exit the physical domain of your home...Cloud nonsense? It's called an application and a home automation application doesn't need to run in someone's cloud...Whose interested? I think it's about time this cloud foolishness for the sake of monetizing someone else's data in an insecure manner come to an end. Everyone loves to rant about 'disruption'... I feel its about time this data monetization cloud bananza be disrupted. |
The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs | I'm really glad that people at Mozilla use ridiculous numbers of tabs too. Lazy-loading of tabs is the reason I switched to firefox. I'm not sure if it's still this way, but Chrome used to load every tab on startup. So even if you only had 100 tabs, you were looking at 5+ minute startup time. God-forbid that any of them were Youtube, or you'd have to go through and pause them all.I've just updated to Firefox 55 to test this, and the improvement is ridiculous. I hope that Firefox focuses more on power users in the future.I'm curious what the author uses to manage all of these tabs. I use Tab Groups, but I think they won't work in a few Firefox versions so I'm looking for alternatives. |
Quine Relay | In case someone is able to run this beast, I'd appreciate an upload of the intermediate source files. |
Using SVG as image placeholders | (Developer of Primitive here.)Love seeing people use my software in different ways! If this looks interesting to you, try it out:https://primitive.lol/https://github.com/fogleman/primitiveAlso, I made a Twitter bot that posts samples every 30 minutes based on "interesting" Flickr photos using randomized Primitive settings:https://twitter.com/PrimitivePic |
Difftastic: A diff that understands syntax | This looks absolutely amazing.One thing I do find interesting (and a wish were different) is that only programming languages are supported, rather than data formats as well.For example, two JSON documents may be valid but formatted slightly differently, or a common task for me is comparing two YAML files.Comparing config files that have a well defined syntax and or can be abstracted into a tree (JSON, YAML, TOML, etc.) would be absolutely lovely, even and including (if possible) Markdown and its ilk. |
Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says | There's a lot of bad headline-writing on this subject today.Here's the NYT's headline: Lab Leak Most Likely Caused Pandemic, Energy Dept. SaysAnd then the sub-head (or dek, if you want to sound like you're in the know): The conclusion, which was made with “low confidence,” came as America’s intelligence agencies remained divided over the origins of the coronavirus.So we have a conclusion: 'lab leak most likely cause,' and a confidence score: 'low'.The NYT goes on to say:Some officials briefed on the intelligence said that it was relatively weak and that the Energy Department’s conclusion was made with “low confidence,” suggesting its level of certainty was not high. While the department shared the information with other agencies, none of them changed their conclusions, officials said.https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/26/us/politics/china-lab-lea... |
Got called to a professor’s office after a complaint his SPARC4 was running slow | Back in 1989 I worked as a one-man-IT-department for a bunch of ex-academic economists doing econometric modelling on a Digital VAX 11/750. This mini-computer was running VMS - a multi-user operating system. All users had admin rights and each one thought that they could make their models run faster by bumping up the process priority as far as it could go - which of course interfered with the realtime processes needed to manage the effective running of the computer. Unsurprisingly, this had the opposite effect to what they intended. When I discovered this was what was happening, I revoked their privileges and after a system restart, sanity was restored. I was thanked for finally making the system work faster. |
Brendan Eich Steps Down as Mozilla CEO | I am a strong supporter of gay marriage, but I have to say that I find this very unfortunate and worrying. Apparently many Mozilla supporters seem to think it is okay to bully a qualified person out of his job only for his political views, even if they had absolutely no effect on his qualification or his actions on the job.I can't help but feel like this campaign has done a lot more harm to him than his $1000 donation could have ever done to anyone. |
WireGuard is now in Linus' tree | So,curious here: I'v been reading about how the focus these days is to move networking code to userspace because you can squeeze out more PPS performance,does the fact that WC makes use of kernel code heavily give it a performance disadvantage? |
We Are Preparing a Class Action Lawsuit Against Robinhood | Do they realistically stand a chance given that what Robinhood did is technically covered by their TOS? Are we finally going to get answers on how legally binding TOSses are? |
Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index | How much energy does watching porn consume? Playing video games? Watching a movie? Browsing Facebook? Using a ski chair? Visiting an amusement park? Going in vacation? Cooking your favorite type of food? Making ice cream? Driving to your friends? Listening to music? Concerts? Having a party? Banking? Casinos?As a species we use energy to meet our goals. Those goals may be situated anywhere in our hierarchy of needs. Some are essential, some could be considered trivial. But they are all important for their consumers.Bitcoin is now considered by some important for our future finance system. While not everybody agrees, this may be more important than countless other ways we use energy, for much more trivial reasons.Being judgmental about how others use energy they pay for reeks of hypocrisy, virtue signaling and holier-than-thou attitude. |
Prettymaps: Small Python library to draw customized maps from OpenStreetMap data | Have you thought about building a site where users could order framed posters of any address they like using the output of this library? I think that would be cool |
Ask HN: Comment here about whatever you're passionate about at the moment | Thanks so much for posting this, I love the spirit of it. I'm passionate about my sobriety journey. I just got home from a dinner party of ex coworkers and friends. Being the only one not drinking is hard for me and a huge change. I used to lead the charge with booze, it was the thing that took my crushing anxiety away. It made everything more fun. Well, that can only last so long when you abuse it so much and it fucks up your life.I successfully made it through tonight and will hopefully have many more successful nights. Love and strength to anyone else out there in a similar boat. |
Interactive Linear Algebra | Linear: having to do with lines, planes, etc.This definition makes me worry that the book is going to operate entirely in R^n. Is there anything here about substantively different vector spaces? |
Career advice for people with bad luck | I really want to see more articles like this on HN. However, this is really "career advice for people at struggling companies." The luck part doesn't get discussed in the way I expected. To me, bad luck is things like:- You're in the wrong place at the wrong time. Ex. you graduated in 2008-2010/now or your business sector got wiped out by COVID- Despite your best efforts at networking, you simply never meet that magical person who can strap a booster rocket to your career/company- You don't have a resilient financial and mental safety net in the form of good friends/family early in your career that enables you to take risks, or you got dealt a bad hand in the form of things like dependents or health issues and simply can't afford to take risks- Despite all your work, you get blindsided by things completely out of your control. Ex. a big company straight up rips off your product/service/side gig or an executive at your company guts your project/department- You don't have the magic paper credentials to get you through the doors at places you want to go because you didn't know you needed them earlier in life when they were practical to getThese are the kinds of things I want to see tackled with real-world career advice since I think they apply to a lot of people. For every lucky executive or entrepreneur there are many who were unlucky. |
Websites that look like desktop GUIs | https://webamp.org/ this really took me back! Even the equalizer works, and the magnetic window stickiness! |
Microsoft 365 has employee surveillance and analytics built in | git is even worse than whatever these tweets suggest Office 365 does. Git stats have been used against me on performance reviews even though there's no context to the situation. I went from a programming role to an ops role because the ops person left the team and I was the only one left that could do the work, so my number of check-ins dropped, but my contributions that improved the ops section weren't acknowledged.Any company can create bad metrics if they want. The only solution is to either play the game, or change companies.That said, I fail to see how effective employee monitoring would be via Office 365. I don't know who would be evaluated on number of emails sent per day, unless they were some sort of support personnel. And if so, they are already being monitored by other means. Any other type of evaluation sounds absurd, ex. number of Word docs opened or created, number of spreadsheets opened, number of presentations created, etc. |
Accused murderer wins right to check source code of DNA testing kit | > The co-founder of the company, Mark Perlin, is said to have argued against source code analysis by claiming that the program, consisting of 170,000 lines of MATLAB code, is so dense it would take eight and a half years to review at a rate of ten lines an hour.First, the defence doesn't necessarily have to evaluate all 170,000 lines. They just need to find one buggy line which could potentially overturn the result.Second, even if it did take a full 8 years, is that a good reason to deny the defendant due process? |
Banning words won’t make the world more just | What was it, 10 to 20 years ago, people started to be noticeably nervous when they were coming near a description of my disability. It used to be so simple. I am 100% blind, and guess what, I prefer the term blind because it is pretty descriptive and relatively short. But all of a sudden, people external to the community started to fumble around with "visually challenged", and all the nonsense variations of that in my native language. It is so weird, because it adds yet another layer of distance between "us" and the "normal" people. You can almost feel how the stumbling-word is making communication even more awkward. I (and almost all of my friends with a similar disability) make a point of letting people know that we actually prefer the word blind over everything else, and not even that does put people at ease.
It sounds a bit provocative, but it feels like that: The language terror they were subjected to has made them so unsecure that they actually dont want to hear that blind people have no issue with being called blind. They somehow continue to argue, sometimes not wanting to accept that and going on to use weird language.Its a weird phenomenon. The longer I watch all of this, and I also mean the gender-language-hacks, I feel like this move has added to the distance between various groups, not made it smaller.It is so condescending to believe your own language-police more then the person you are talking to. Yet, the peer pressure seems to be so high that this actually happens. Sad. |
My 24 year old HP Jornada can do things an iPhone still can't do | > Users should be in control of their devicesOne data point on this whole debate around Apple walled garden. It's basically my own opinion, not a blank statement. It won't be very popular here but whatever. Here it goes:The reason why I'm personally sticking with the iPhone is exactly the walled garden. I had a 3G, the 5, and now the 8 for last 5 years (there goes the argument about buying a new phone every year). I bought all of them knowing very well what I'm getting into and I want it to remain that way. If I didn't want a walled garden, I'd get an Android phone. |
Neil Armstrong has died at 82 Today | Neil Armstrong would have been 17 years old when Orville Wright died in 1948. In the lifespan of those two men, humanity went from horse-and-buggy to standing on the moon. One wonders what the 17 year olds of today might accomplish... |
Chaos Computer Club breaks Apple TouchID | Just to keep things in perspective, the goal of Touch ID is not to be unhackable. The goal is to get more consumers to move from zero security to pretty good security.A very large number of people don't put any kind of passcode of any kind on their phone, simply because it's inconvenient. Touch ID is designed for them. It's not designed to secure nuclear footballs.Touch ID is going to massively reduce the number of totally unsecured iPhones that require zero effort to access. That's the goal.I think some people see "fingerprint scanner" and think "military-grade security" because that's where we've seen scanners before in movies and such. But this is really very much a solution for the consumer market, where convenience and usability are critical features of a security system. Sometimes infosec folks forget that. If you make it too hard to use (passcodes), people just bypass it. So you can blame the user, or you can try to design something easier to use. If in the end you've improved the overall security landscape, you've succeeded. I think that's what Apple is doing here. |
“We found PayPal vulnerabilities and PayPal punished us for it” | PCI DSS requirements specify that companies have 30 days to refute or remediate externally reported issues [1]. If they don’t respond or fix some of these issues, then PayPal will no longer be compliant and all credit card companies will be forced to stop working with them unless they wish to set precedence that PCI-DSS compliance is no longer required to be followed.According to this image [2], they did not respond or refute within 30 days.If PayPal’s PCI-DSS compliance certification isn’t revoked then PCI-DSS is a farce.[1] https://www.itgovernance.co.uk/blog/a-guide-to-the-pci-dsss-...[2] https://cybernews.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/paypal-2fa-... |
A New Future for Icanhazip | Chinese originated spam and abuse is so outrageously widespread, I don’t understand why there isn’t a conversation going on about cutting them off from the wider internet. They blocked most of it anyway. |
Last Flight Out | The shower page was interesting, you get 4 minutes of shower time a weekhttps://brr.fyi/posts/showering-at-the-south-poleI'm surprised they can't just melt snow water to run things like showers.Oddly no suggestions on the page about doubling up your shower with someone else to have longer or more frequent showers. |
Firefox Developer Edition | Hi! Just a heads up that folks from the dev tools team will be monitoring this thread and are on-hand to answer questions. We'll try not to thread sit too much. :) In brief, the Developer Edition is a new release channel for Firefox, replacing Aurora (our pre-Beta channel). Everything else about the release cadence is the same.There are four major new features here:1. The Firefox Tools Adapter ("Valence"), which lets you use the Firefox dev tools to inspect and debug pages in Chrome for Android and Safari for iOS. The goal: one set of tools to debug any browser.2. Side-by-side profiles. The Developer Edition defaults to a profile named `dev-edition-default`, which makes it easier to run Developer Edition at the same time as a normal release version of Firefox. You don't have to deal with the profile switcher each time.3. Developer-friendly defaults. Developer Edition ships with things like remote debugging and browser-chrome debugging enabled by default.4. And, for all of you who hated Australis, a compact theme with square tabs.But those are just consequences of the single biggest change:5. We have a new channel, which new rules. And we want to use it to build the best possible browser for web developers. We can ship new tools that aren't yet ready for the Beta channel, and we can change the browser's appearance and defaults specifically for web developers.We'll be watching this thread during launch, but you can always submit feature requests on UserVoice. The right people will see them: https://ffdevtools.uservoice.com/forums/246087-firefox-devel...This isn't a finished product. It's an invitation.What tools do you need? |
Booting from a vinyl record | When I was a CS major in the 90's, one of my professors told me a story of his own college days, with punch-card computers.His university bought a tape reader (like, punched paper tape, not magnetic tape) to do the boot code of the computer, on the theory that tape was a little easier to manage than punch-cards for the boot (you can't lose one of the cards, or get them out of order, etc with tape). So my prof and some of his friends start playing with the tape reader, and they realize that what controls the IO speed of the tape is actually the tensile strength of the tape -- if the feeder tries to put too much force on it, it will tear the paper tape. The actual computer can read the instructions much faster than the tape can physically handle.So they got some plastic tape instead, and punched the boot code in the (much stronger) plastic tape. Then, to boot the computer, they'd feed the plastic tape through the part of the reader that actually read, bypassing the mechanical part that pulled and wound the tape, and then manually grab the other end and yank on it as hard as they could, basically starting the computer like it was one of those old lawnmowers that you pulled the cord to turn over the engine. |
Show HN: I made a modern web UI for Wikipedia | I am one of those people who actually like Wikipedia the way it is. It's what I hoped the web to become.But i am sure there are people who will appreciate your effort. Thank you for your work. |
In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously | The simple answer is to reject the cashless society.In the medium to long term it's simply incompatible with any reasonable definition of freedom. Surveillance is bad enough, but a system that allows governments to arbitrarily "turn off" thousands or millions of people at the push of a button is too powerful to not be abused.Even the mere existence of such a system has a chilling effect. Which I suspect is precisely what these people want and is exactly why we can't give it to them.I'll take inconvenience over slavery any day of the week.This isn't some sort of anarcho-libertarian paradise opinion, I have no issue with there being a well functioning justice system.But yeah, if you want to seize assets, get a court order and go and lock someone in a box and take their things, don't take the cowardly way out and pretend that you've just flipped a database key and it's not really a big deal.By the same token, if you tell me there's been a murder on my street I'll give you the CCTV footage of my door cam. If you ask me for a backdoor, I'll tell you where to shove it. That's what being a member of a free society is, that seemingly minor distinction is one of the most important things we have and better minds than mine have sought to elaborate on why.Even a child is able to understand that force is still force regardless of whether it involves the direct visible physical kind. |
How to professionally say | Hey Akash,I like the idea of giving people some help expressing themselves at work. You might be interested to learn about the Power Distance Index, and the body of work on PDI and work culture.You’ll see if you read the comments here that some people are like “the alternatives are bullshit corporate speak and infuriate me”, and some are like “yes, at last, a way to help people be more polite / better communicators”. There’s a smattering of “this is passive aggressive” thrown in.One of the broad pitches PDI at work types make is that the lower the PDI, the more direct communications are preferred; the higher, the more ‘diplomatic’ the communications are preferred. My vibe on your list is that it’s just a tad more diplomatic than Silicon Valley wants to be, hence the slight negative ‘passive aggressive’ reactions.Some of the lowest PDI countries in the world are Israel, and many Northern European countries, and it fits my experience that in those places additional respect is given for bluntness - as Jan Maas in Ted Lasso says “I’m not rude, I’m Dutch.” As a broad stereotype using the alternate wordings you give would be a sign you are not someone to be respected in that environment.On the other hand, Saudi Arabia’s PDI is high, and I would bet that some of your alternate list there would still be much too rude; just a guess, I haven’t worked in Saudi.Anyway, thanks again for this; if you stay interested, you might consider reworking this into different ‘cultural norms’ lists to help people acclimate / go both ways; at that point, I think it would be a very broadly useful resource. |
2-in-1 calculator app adds up to surprise hit for retired engineer | > For example, if a user calculates "89 x 15 = 1335" on one calculator and taps the arrow key, the result "1335" will be displayed on the other calculator, allowing the user to continue a problem while the previous equations are still shown on the screen. This makes it easy to notice errors.While the UI is very different, the key benefit described here reminds me a lot of Soulver: https://soulver.app/I love Soulver for how quickly it lets you throw together quick guesstimates and sanity checks. The ability to incorporate previous results by reference and update those on the fly greatly improves the clarity and my confidence in my experience. |
Make-A-Video: AI system that generates videos from text | A lot of people saying it's over for traditional movie-making - lmao. I look at these and see nothing but uncanny valley artifacts, and I don't think it will improve much from here.It's like self-driving cars. They use almost very effective statistical models, certainly better than our previous models, but they never seem to shake off that "almost" and become truly effective. |
Leonard Cohen Has Died | It's a widely held sentiment that 2016 has killed more long-running celebrities than any other year. Is there any factual basis to this, or is it just confirmation bias? |
Explaining React's license | I love love love love love react as a technology, but this is just awful. I believe any developer not on Facebook's payroll still contributing to React or React native at this point has a moral obligation to stop. I personally feel like such a fool for not taking all this seriously before the ASF gave me a wakeup call. React is a trojan horse into the open source community that Facebook purposely and maliciously steered over time to deepen their war chest. Maybe that's an overblown take, but they had a perfect opportunity here to prove me wrong and they didn't. The defensive cover they present here feels so paper thin.Even if we paint all of their actions in the most favorable possible light, and even if the clause is a paper tiger as some have claimed, it doesn't matter. This is not how open source should work. We should not have to debate for years if a project's license is radioactive. Especially individual devs like myself who just want to use a great tool. We should be able to just use it, because it's open and that's what open means. This is so much worse than closed. It's closed masquerading as open. |
Fire extinguished at Ukraine nuclear power plant, Europe's largest | This has been a real reckoning for me, as somebody who has historically been very pro-nuclear.Quite simply, humanity is too good at screwing things up to harness such a fundamentally powerful and dangerous source of power. It requires a commitment to long lasting peace and stability that we're just not capable of. |
Elizabeth Holmes is sentenced to more than 11 years for fraud | If we're talking about financial damage done this sentencing still feels exceedingly light. We have a real double standard - there are people in jail for longer for possession.Edit to clarify: My statement is more intended to emphasize how overly punishing possession charges rather than to advocate for draconian charges for all offenses. |
Promotion of alternative social platforms policy | When MS bought github many people moved to gitlab and started to advertise their gitlab IDs. I too put my gitlab in there. But ultimately, gitlab didn't catch on on a permanent basis: most devs still are on github, thanks to network effects. People removed their gitlab mentions.I feel the same with the "find me on mastodon" twitter bios: people will realize that only 50 of their thousands of followers can be found on mastodon, and then move back in a few weeks after giving up on the experiment. During all that time they have still kept most of their activities on twitter because there is simply more going on there, more replies to their tweets, more tweets to reply to, etc.banning them might have actually the opposite effect here: then they get forced to focus on mastodon. Having a large number of users advertise mastodon ids and talk all day long about how horrible twitter is on twitter actually drives engagement. Banning large numbers of users is very bad for engagement on the other hand, but very good for mastodon engagement numbers. |
Depression Part Two | So what is it called if you have every single one of these symptoms, except actually being depressed? I find myself not caring at all about what others have to say, how they feel, etc. and you can imagine the hurdles that imposes on someone who has to make a legitimate-feeling human connection to sell a product. Social interactions are a game to me (that I've gotten quite good at) but none of it feels real.I haven't felt that need to be dead as described, but definitely concluded that death would be neither good nor bad...and what's the point in waiting, right? Isn't it all the same?And the "everything is hopeless bullshit" attitude i've had many times. I've just concluded that, perhaps...everything IS pointless. But we can enjoy it nonetheless. Enjoy the pointlessness, since it's all we CAN do.Anyway, is there a name for this besides selfish asshole syndrome? Anyone else like this? |
Earliest images of the moon were better than people realised | I wish the article got into more of the technical details behind how this actually worked. I find it absolutely jaw-droopingly incredible that they were able to shoot gigabytes of essentially IMAX-quality negatives, develop them in flight (which requires temperatures of around 20ºC for all of the materials involved—Edit: they didn't do this because it would've been too difficult, and ended up using a mostly dry development process. See Edit link), scan them(!!!), and then radio them back to the earth. I would find this amazing today, and all of this happened in the 1960s!Edit here's a little more information: http://www.moonviews.com/2012/06/lunar-orbiters-classified-h..., and the link from there to http://www.nro.gov/history/csnr/programs/docs/prog-hist-01.p... contains the technical details on the camera I was after. Amazing stuff. |
iPhones are hard to use | Most of this article just lists semi-advanced features that people don't know about. I think that’s Apple’s intention...Having every feature and option up in your face can reduce usability and make simple tasks harder for the average user. Apple wants a product that's easy for anyone to use and that often means keeping non-essential features out of the way.I’d be more interesting in seeing feedback for Apple on how to improve the situation without compromising on ease of use.(Regarding the WiFi thing...I agree this is a very annoying default setting, but I think a worse outcome is when a user shows up in their friend’s house and has no idea how to connect to the WiFi. Making the user go to Settings -> WiFi to disable this prompt means they’ve demonstrated they’ll be able to go back to that page to manually connect to a network in the future. If you turn this setting off on a friend's phone, be sure they still know how to connect manually.(Though I do think iOS could be smarter and not prompt you to connect to intermittent networks while you’re driving around a city...)) |
The Yoda of Silicon Valley | Taking the opportunity to post the video of Knuth mishearing the question "What makes a good teacher?" as "What makes a good T-shirt?" at my uni.https://youtu.be/74BfHoE66rc?t=42m17s |
Uber lays off 435 people | Hello Uber Engineer here!Obviously everything I say is personal experience and opinion.
I think the layoffs were long overdue and should've happened sooner. There was a general understanding between my coworkers and I that Uber definitely over hired in 2016. Thanks to that a lot of engineers ran out of things to do which led to political infighting over roadmap, ridiculous redundant resourcing - every single team had mobile/web, severe shortage on infra teams since head count was already taken by main Uber teams. We even started building and maintaining our own chat app. I disagree that all the cool eng project that we put out and share here is a waste of time or resources. Those project was initiated by real needs on Uber and only the best make it out into the rest of the world. Engineers that shipped those projects are still here and we would've done it regardless of whether the 435 people that were hired in the first spot. I fully realize that it's an insensitive thing to say but I think it's important that it's expressed somewhere.I think the lesson here is to grow responsibily, and it's real people's lives that are being affected. Don't hire people to alleviate your current engineer's burnout and stress. Learn to plan better and to prioritize aggressively instead of just hiring and getting everything done. |
Someone has stolen my Instagram account | I think this is indicative of the biggest problem we have had with social media: there is no legalism here, just "codes of conduct" that companies and users both willfully ignore.If your handle gets sold by some facebook employee to a rich kid in LA, what recourse do you have? I don't know what laws this would break (maybe some broad definition of fraud? I Am Not A Lawyer) so it's not like this person has a slam dunk legal case...We have no external arbiters of online interaction, no well-respected third party we can go to to arbitrate. The last defense is the mob, potentially shaming the companies in question into recanting. I've seen it happen on this very website multiple times. But it is not sustainable, it does not scale, and it allows the companies to keep fucking with people who can't make their injustices known. |
Extreme HTTP Performance Tuning | > Disabling [spectre] mitigations gives us a performance boost of around 28%Every couple months these last several years there always seems to be some bug where the fix only costs us 3% performance. Since those tiny performance hits add up over time, security is sort of like inflation in the compute economy. What I want to know is how high can we make that 28% go? The author could likely build a custom kernel that turns off stuff like pie, aslr, retpoline, etc. which would likely yield another 10%. Can anyone think of anything else? |
Let us serve you, but don't bring us down | I run a system at my employer that occasionally gets scraped by malicious users. It can be used to infer the purchasability of a specific domain, which is a moderately-interesting API endpoint, since that requires talking to domain registries. For a while, nobody cared enough about it to abuse the endpoint. But then we started getting about 40 QPS of traffic. We normally get less than 1.I was keeping an eye on it, because we are hard-capped at 100 QPS to our provider, beyond that and they start dropping our traffic (and it is an outside provider, bundling domain registries like verisign and stuff), which makes regular users break if their traffic gets unlucky.Anyway, after a week of 40qps, they start spiking to 200+, and we pull the plug on the whole thing: now each request to our endpoint requires a recaptcha token. This is not great (more friction for legit users = more churn) but it is successful. IF they had only kept their QPS low, nobody would have cared. I wanted to send some kind of response code like, "nearing quota".FTR before people ask: it was quite difficult to stop this particular attack, since it worked like a DDOS, smeared across a _large_ number of ipv4 and ipv6 requesters. 50 QPS just isn't enough quota to do stuff like reactively banning IP numbers if the attacker has millions of IPs available. |
Using prime numbers to make better backgrounds | This is very well explained, but not all that novel. Brian Eno used to generate long soundscapes like this, using loops of mutually prime lengths of time.Edit: See also -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambient_1:_Music_for_Airportshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_music |
A small restaurant owner on Google, DoorDash, and Grubhub | > DoorDash uses our brand name “Saddleback BBQ” right in the advertisement.> Possibly the most maddening thing is that if a customer clicks on the link, it does NOT take them to a webpage to order from Saddleback BBQ. It takes the user to a general page to order BBQ from anyone that serves BBQ. At the top of the list? Applebees.This is a particularly egregious sleight of hand. It's a relatively easy click-through to write for DoorDash, and it would result in the customer getting exactly what they were looking for (instantly looking at Saddleback's menu options and probably ordering). But DoorDash isn't content with delivering what they promised! The customer must perform a secondary search within DoorDash just to find that same restaurant again, because Saddleback is nowhere within sight on the page they've actually landed on. It's sneaky because it seems like incompetence, but the reality is that they've absolutely done it on purpose so they can double-dip one customer and display ads to them from restaurants that paid more to DoorDash. |
MasterCard to open up network to cryptocurrencies | These stories usually spur more enthusiasm for buying cryptocurrency, but ironically those buyers aren’t interested in spending cryptocurrency using their MasterCard.They’re hoping other people will buy cryptocurrency from these announcements, driving the price up. Or, more likely, they’re just hoping other people will buy cryptocurrency and not use it in these spending systems.Spending cryptocurrency would result in selling that cryptocurrency, which would drive the price down. That’s not what cryptocurrency investors actually want.Should also note that MasterCard crypto transactions almost certainly won’t be settled on the blockchain. Not with $8 Bitcoin transaction fees. They’ll just be denominated in cryptocurrency and people can deposit/withdraw in certain cryptocurrencies. MasterCard only needs to buy and sell on the blockchain as needed to provide an FX window. The actual transactions would be stored in traditional database systems (aside from customer deposits/withdrawals, just like Coinbase)Why? Because MasterCard would get to act as an exchange and collect exchange fees. Exchange fees are a great way to charge consumers for spending their own money in 2021, when normal credit cards actually pay people 1-2% to use them. Cryptocurrency’s inefficiency is their financial upside. |
Tailwind UI | On the surface, the markup is pretty damn awful. But if you reach certain level of proficiency, this will definitely speed up development.
Back End Developer
Personally I would prefer Bootstrap over this approach. |
YouTube will now show ads on all videos even if creators don’t want them | As a content consumer I see this as a positive thing for me.A few months ago when YouTube decided to auto-add ads on all videos, my watch time on YouTube decreased by more than 50% since I consume all video content on either my phone or my tablet (where I don't have access to AdBlock), and I find the amount of ads I have to go through to watch a video so annoying that I'd rather not watch it at all.As a result I spend my free time on Coursera or listening to audiobooks instead and I log in to YouTube once a day to have a quick scroll through the subscriptions page to see if there's anything worth watching. Keeping the amount of ads in mind and the stress they cause me, I am more selective and will often not click on a video that I previously would. And I don't mindlessly binge-watch video for hours on end any longer.With the new monetisation coming in place, I can see my consumption of YouTube declining even further to the level of Google - use it as a tool, when you really have to and not just for entertainment. And I welcome it! Just thought to share a perspective of a consumer rather than a creator.On the other hand I do understand YouTube's move. After all, it's their platform and they're not running a charity - people often forget that it's not their birth right to use a company's product or a service without paying for it one way or the other. |
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