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How bad is your Spotify? | This is hilarious...> You are 26% basic. You're trying to be cool with Kapitan Korsakov, but your favorites are the same as everybody else's..> Your spotify was please-read-my-manuscript-walmart-hawaiian-shirt-sitting-alone-in-the-cafeteria bad.Ouch.Really interesting project by all means. I hope they release the source - I'm curious about how it was built.Edit: This same link was posted 11 hours ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25513886 here and is not at all getting the same popularity. Anyone got ideas? |
NSA, NIST, and post-quantum crypto: my second lawsuit against the US government | Weirdly, any time I've suggested that maaaybe being too trusting of a known bad actor which has repeatedly published intentionally weak cryptography is a bad idea, I've received a whole lot of push-back and downvotes here on this site. |
Chrome now tracks users and shares a “topic” list with advertisers | My friend Jake runs an analytics company.He's faced enormous challenges due to Google's "privacy" policies... Google is removing nearly all access to user data, they don't even like you looking at the user agent string (which issues a warning)... not to mention its impossible to know about search traffic and even referring urls.Meanwhile Google has access to all this data, so he tells me all this is just gaslighting so they can illicitly protect their monopoly on web data. |
Bitcoin Gold Hit by Double Spend Attack, Exchanges Lose Millions | When Bitcoin was running up to $20,000, I tried to analyze the system and come to a personal conclusion about its equilibrium value, because I didn't want to miss out if it really was the currency of the future.I ended up not investing, because of the possibility of a double-spend attack. I think that cryptocurrency enthusiasts are seriously underestimating the importance of double-spending attacks to the economics of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.A few points that convinced me not to put my money into this system:If hash capacity were traded on a perfectly competitive market, then it would always make sense to rent 51% of the capacity at market rates, earn the transaction fees, and also perform a double-spending attack. There is no equilibrium point for transaction fees where this attack becomes uneconomical. The only defense is that the market for hash capacity is imperfect.The market for hash capacity is going to become more efficient over time. ASIC miners will be commoditized, so that hardware investment becomes a much smaller factor in hash cost versus energy. This might be even worse during a bitcoin downturn, because there could be a glut of ASIC miners.Miners will coordinate with market prices, turning off capacity when the price dips (for example, because someone is underbidding to create a 51% attack). If mining becomes more decentralized, it will be harder for miners to act in their common interest (fending off 51% attacks) and against their immediate interest (selling their hashrate to the highest bidder, or taking it off the market during an underbidding attack).High transaction volume is not necessarily any help - the more transaction volume, the higher the cost of the attack, but the greater the rewards. The semi-anonymous nature of bitcoin means that one could easily flood the network with double-spend transactions. Attacking a huge network like bitcoin would be an audacious and expensive act, but there are certainly organizations with the resources to do it, e.g. intelligence agencies, organized crime. The massive rewards to such an attack also offset fixed costs such as writing and testing the software to carry out the attack. |
When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling | A lot of this post seems pretty reasonable. But:In my experience, it’s fairly easy to judge technical skill. A friendly conversation about technical interests and recent projects can often be enough.Bullshit. Sounding credible in technical interviews is a skill, not the same skill as actually being a good programmer, and might even (statistically, in the large) be close to orthogonal to it.We found this out the hard way. At Matasano, we started our work-sample hiring process[1] as a way of filtering out the smooth-talkers. Before work-sample tests, we'd spent loads of time on carefully designed interview questions; interview design was something close to a hobby for some of us.Of course, it was only after we started doing work-sample challenges that we discovered that not only were a lot of excellent-seeming candidates actually not capable of delivering, but an even greater fraction of the candidates our "friendly conversations" were selecting out were in fact perfectly capable. It was a bad deal all around.Whatever you do, don't fast-path "senior" developers. Everyone should run the same process for the same job. Not only do you risk hiring people who won't work out, but you're also depriving yourself of the most important data you need to iterate on your hiring process.[1]: https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/ |
WhatsApp, Used by 100M Brazilians, Shut Down Nationwide Today by a Single Judge | I'm here to defend the judge's ruling, a position very unpopular among all my friends here in Brazil.Brazilian law regarding regarding privacy of users of internet services is very recent and clear: if a judge order the company to share a specific user data, the company must comply. You can disagree with the law, but the law is there.Now, the judge ordered Whatsapp to share a particular user conversation (a suspect murderer - edit: drug dealer). But the problem is: Whatsapp have no offices or operations in Brazil. The order was sent to Facebook, who ignore as Whatsapp is another company. So, without any executives in Brazil that could be held responsible for disobeying the law, the judge fine the company. They continue to disobey the order (for months). The judge suspends Whatsapp activity (for 24h a few months ago, but that order was suspended itself after a few hours). Now Whatsapp continue to disobey the judge's order until this day. The judge suspend the company again.All arguments I hear against the judge is in the line that Whatsapp is "too big to fail". That's not a valid point in my opinion. If they disobey the law, it must have consequences, no matter how big and important to brazilian society they are. If they had operations and executives in Brazil this would never had happened at the first place. They would have lawyers fighting against the decision to share the user data and this would be solved by the justice system (never coming to have its activity suspended).
But Whatsapp simply ignored brazilian justice system as if it was above the law.It is very unfortunate that it came to this point, but it is not like a judge decided yesterday that Whatsapp should sufer for whatever reason. They got a lot of months of warning for this. And he is acting completely according to the law. For me, all of this is Whatsapp fault. |
Robinhood launches 3% checking account | For folks trying to understand this, some context which may be useful:Checking accounts are loss leaders virtually everywhere, the exception being smaller community banks. Their primary revenue stream was, once upon a time, net interest income, but these days due to the extremely low interest environment and alternate sources of funding the revenue stream is more weighted towards fees (primarily NSFs, although that was hit a few years ago) and debit card interchange.Robinhood also likely expects to not become the park-your-money account of choice for older dentists but rather to become the spend-your-money account for their millennial userbase. With high velocity of money and low balances the interest expense is minimal and, to the extent they use debit cards, the interchange revenue can be material. (In a stylized example where someone makes $2k a month and spends $200 on debit card purchases and $1.8k on rent/etc the interest cost for the year is ~$30 and the debit card interchange for the year is ~$60, even ignoring potential interest revenue.)This is roughly in the same line as their core strategy, which is spending what would otherwise be a marketing budget on keeping commissions at zero, making money on the other ways brokerages make money. If you do not understand how a brokerage makes money, I encourage you to peruse the annual reports of e.g. eTrade or TD Ameritrade, which will happily explain their revenue sources and why commissions are a surprisingly small portion.Metacomment: geeks who believe they have outmathed a financial firm should ask themselves "Are financial firms likely to be bad at math?" and "Are financial firms incapable of hiring their own geeks?" |
Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure called “Cloudflare” | Cloudflare is horrible for blind people.Screen readers, the programs that use synthesized speech to tell us what's on the screen, cannot read images. Good captchas usually have audio equivalents (which come with their own set of problems), but this one doesn't. If you're blind and flagged by Cloudflare for some reason, you're cut off from accessing half the internet, potentially critical banking/governmental/medical/communications/educational services. We rely on the internet way more than our sighted peers, so this is very important. This has recently happened to me on a few sites, fortunately not critical ones, but it was not a pleasant experience nonetheless. CF engineers, please fix this ASAP. I'm surprised there still isn't a huge lawsuit over this, as this is clearly violating all sorts of laws. |
Firefox 87 trims HTTP Referrers by default to protect user privacy | Just a FYI because some people are complaining that Mozilla is doing something evil or will break all of the web or something. Chrome made the same change a while back:https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2020/07/referrer-p...So if this breaks something people probably already noticed. And Mozilla is merely aligning with the browser with the largest market share on this. (Also everyone who wants something different for their sites, it's configurable: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Re... ) |
Gmail was down | Say where you are located.It is down for me, SF Bay Area (east bay). |
Indie Hackers: Learn how developers are making money | This is very cool, but can I ask you a question?Some days ago I posted a very similar website here (http://www.transparentstartups.com/) and I didn't get barely any vote whereas this one is getting totally viral (385 votes and adding).Please let me know what I'm doing wrong. The only thing I can think of is that I didn't mention some key words like "developers" and "money" but "startups" and "transparency". Or is there anything else I'm missing here?Thank you in advance.UPDATE: I'm learning a lot today, thank you guys for the feedback. |
Thailand cave rescue: all 12 boys and coach successfully rescued | Can anyone explain how the heck they found the children in the first place?Seriously, I can't wrap my head around it. The kids were stranded 2.5 miles inside the cave. All anyone knew was that the kids didn't return form their hike. How does that lead to "Hey, let's dive into the cave and maybe we'll find live children"?I guess they were expecting the worst, but still. |
Show HN: A basketball hoop to maximize shots that go in [video] | "Who is Monte Carlo?" Monte Carlo is for Europe what Las Vegas is for the US. The first name that comes to mind when you think gambling.Monte Carlo method is repeated random sampling to obtain numerical results.Monte Carlo algorithms are heuristic algorithms that solve problems with random process that can give wrong answers.Las Vegas algorithms are algorithms that solve problems with randomness but get always correct result or knows that it failed. Runtime is finite.Atlantic City algorithm is a probabilistic polynomial time algorithm that gives correct answer > 50% of the time (or 75% of the time by some definition). |
Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful | I’m thankful for yeast. It’s so, so convenient that we have a non-pathogenic bacteria which will eat pretty much any simple sugar, can be found on the surfaces of most fruits, and is essentially effortless to cultivate, which also does a bunch of useful things like leaven bread and make a bunch of delicious short chain fatty acids (both in bread and on their own, like in marmite) and make alcohol (although that one maybe does more harm than good)! |
I fucking hate Jira | I feel like hating on Jira is the pastime that is now passed down from each generation of programmers to the next.I'm going to stick up for Jira. I certainly don't "love" Jira, though I do think they've made significant improvements with "new Jira" (I think they call them team-managed projects now).The problem I have with the incessant Jira bitching is that I rarely feel that bitchers have a true understanding for the extreme difficulty of the organization-wide problem Jira is trying to solve. It's always taken on from the position of "well, it didn't make my specific use case easy", but never with an appreciation with some of the complexity that Jira needs to solve for other users at your company, never mind other companies.Obviously some of the complaints (speed, stability) are very valid, but here's a question I think is just as valid: why don't you think some other company has come along and toppled the Jira crown? Certainly tons of them have tried, and while many have their supporters, they are almost equally likely to have their detractors.The fact is, building a generic project management and tracking tool is a really difficult, hard problem. In my old age as a programmer I feel like Jira is kind of like our form of government: "Jira is the worst project management tool, except for all the others". |
The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers | This bothers me as well. Even tasks as simple as adding a repository are now being "improved" with a curl | sudo bash style setup[1].However, installing from source with make was (and remains) a mess. It may work if you're dedicated to maintaining one application and (part of) its stack. But even then it usually leads to out of date software and tracking versions by hand.Many people have this weird aversion to doing basic sysadmin stuff with Linux. What makes it weird is that it's really simple. Often easier than figuring out another deploy system.(The neckbeard in me blames the popularity of OSX on dev machines.)[1] https://nodesource.com/blog/nodejs-v012-iojs-and-the-nodesou... |
Life is Short | Mr Graham, I respect you and you've accomplished more that I will in my life, but I sincerely hope that this essay against "bullshit" and "arguing online" isn't you declaring that you'll be "bubbling" yourself after your last essay was met with wide disagreement.It's possible that sometimes, no matter how smart you are, your experiences have been limited in a way and you're missing a part of something everyone else sees. And if thats the case, it's not something to be afraid of or to shut yourself off from.Anyway good luck! |
We posed as 100 Senators to run ads on Facebook. Facebook approved all of them | The best solution, and currently in effect as law in many European countries, would be to stop political ads altogether on Facebook and the Web.No more "hey who is paying for that anti-XXX political ad?", they just wouldn't exist anymore. Plus, less money raised and spent by political campaigns.Also, this article comes just one week after that one: "Facebook’s political ad tool let us buy ads “paid for” by Mike Pence and ISIS" [0][0] https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/wj9mny/facebooks-politic... |
Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, and databases | There is something about Notion that makes it feel very well-made and coherent. It’s one of the few apps I use with this inherent feeling of quality (off the top of my head Sublime Text/Merge, Beyond Compare, Things fall into this category of intangible greatness). Every interaction is delightful, and the app scales really well from basic note-taking to decently complex databases with grouping, filters, relations, templates and permissions. It comes with really good real-time collaboration.On the flip side the software a bit slow to start and uses a lot of resources—it’s based on Electron, but I encourage everyone to try it (the demo on their website is cool!).This is as close to “painting the back of the fence” as it gets. |
Canon sued for disabling scanner when printers run out of ink | I stopped buying inkjet printers. They are a scam, the ink costs a fortune and they are built as cheap as they can, meaning that they will break and you have to throw them away because they are impossible to repair, they are slow and when you need them they don't work because they were not used for too much time.After having 5 broken printers in the garage I said enough, that is a useless waste, and invested some money in a mid range laser printer (only b/w, but I don't need to print in color anyway) that doesn't give me any problem, and with a toner that costs 10$ on Amazon (not original, but who cares?) I print 2000 pages. That means that in 5 years that I own it I only changed it 2 times.I really don't see a reason for inkjet printers to exist, I hope they will disappear from the market. |
Mikhail Gorbachev has died | The United States didn't do enough to help Russia transition to democracy in the 1990s. There was no "Marshall Plan" after the Cold War like there was after World War II. This was a huge mistake, and we see the consequences now, with Russia having turned back toward totalitarianism and imperialism. Sadly, it seems that Gorbachev's efforts were mostly for naught. But it was courageous at the time to open up the Soviet Union to glasnost and perestroika.Of course Yeltsin was a big part of the problem too. |
First 'tooth regrowth' medicine moves toward clinical trials in Japan | Please, I beg science ... anything like this.I do what I'm told to do. Yet as the years pass it's been cavities, root canals, extractions, crowns, and everything else.The worst part isn't even the procedure, it's the cost (in the U.S. at least!). Thousands and thousands of dollars any time they need to do anything. And that's with dental insurance. They like to deny claims.Dental should be covered under medical but that's an entirely different story. For now, I hope science keeps working on this. |
Code Llama, a state-of-the-art large language model for coding | Does anyone have a good explanation for Meta's strategy with AI?The only thing I've been able to think is they're trying to commoditize this new category before Microsoft and Google can lock it in, but where to from there? Is it just to block the others from a new revenue source, or do they have a longer game they're playing? |
Kill Google AMP before it kills the web | With respect to scrolling: We (AMP team) filed a bug with Apple about that (we didn't implement scrolling ourselves, just use a div with overflow). We asked to make the scroll inertia for that case the same as the normal scrolling.Apple's response was (surprisingly) to make the default scrolling like the overflow scrolling. So, with the next Safari release all pages will scroll like AMP pages. Hope Gruber is happy then :) |
Do you need a VPN? | I always ask this on the VPN threads here, and don't feel like I get a solid answer (I'm not particularly well-versed on the topic so I'm genuinely curious and would love to be corrected).If I go to Bob's website on my computer without any VPN, and Bob wants to find me, all he would need to do is get my IP, call my ISP with a warrant, and then get my information.If I go to Bob's website while logged in with a VPN, and Bob wants to find me, he first sees that he's getting tons of hits from this IP because thousands of users are sharing this same VPN. So then he uses some kind of fingerprint to figure out my unique user sessions. Then he calls the VPN company, and asks them to associate the IP and specific browser sessions with me. In that case a) the VPN really does store logs even though they advertise they don't, so they're able to associate me with my activity, or b) they really don't store logs and have no idea which one of its thousands of users logged into his website with that IP.It seems in the latter case, even with a malicious VPN, it's one additional (maybe trivial step) to associate me. But it's still better than just using your own ISP. Isn't that why people use VPNs to avoid DMCA letters from their ISP?So what is the downside to using a VPN if you're aware that they aren't foolproof vs not using a VPN at all?If you roll your own VPN on AWS or the like, don't you lose the benefit of sharing the VPN with thousands of users? Wouldn't it be easier for Bob to call AWS with a warrant and get your account info than mess with some offshore VPN provider? |
Learning Synths | Question: All of "learn synths" tutorials I've managed to dig up are really "sound creation" tutorials.I have not found a good tutorial or paid online class on how to _play_ synths. Is taking a traditional piano course the best way to do so? Observationally, the play style seems quite different, even if some basics are the same. Most practically, I see synths typically played with right hand, left hand is on the modulator or knobs.Basically, I'm finding it hard to find resources on how to play and make the most out of your synth (as opposed to piano), once you have dialed in the sound you want... |
Do not Draw a Penis | Of course I started by drawing a penis, and the voice told me off and erased it. Then I started drawing a rabbit, and to my surprise the voice recognized the rabbit with me just completing the ears, and commented "nice rabbit". I had to add a penis to the rabbit and was a bit disappointed the system didn't recognise that little addition. |
Agents raid home of fired Florida data scientist who built Covid-19 dashboard | I'm always amazed at how often cops approach every day tasks with weapons drawn. Reading the article (and being aware of the ongoing story) there's no indication (to me) that there would be any hostility facing the officers. Thus it is easy to draw a conclusion of threat escalation from the police towards a citizen (if this is the wrong conclusion to draw then the police need to do a lot more work to justify their actions and explain why they thought there was a threat, because right now no one should buy that). This is unacceptable gun behavior in any environment and goes against conventional training (I'm sure there are gun users here or people who at least shot in the boy scouts or something). I mean officer #2 even appears to have his finger on the trigger (officer #1 doesn't). There's a rule "never point a weapon at something you do not intend to destroy." Pointing a weapon at a person indicates they are willing to destroy (kill) that person. This is unacceptable in non-violent cases where there is not an equal force against them. I just can't imagine the training they get. It makes me feel like Surviving Edged Weapons[0] is, at least in spirit, used. [1]I've seen a lot of people with bad trigger control and not knowing proper gun safety, but I've seen it far too often from police. The acceptable level of this for police is zero and it isn't even close to that.[0] This is a cult classic for "Bad" movies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4ZpyKSmgdE[1] From what I've seen, it does still seem like they do similar training that is highly fear based. As in "you could die at any second. It is you or them" and does not reflect the reality that being a cop is relatively safe. At least that narrative is not in the public domain. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-06-23/how-da... |
Police playing music while being filmed, seemingly to trigger copyright filters | The real problem here is that there is no consequence for incorrect takedowns. If content is taken down and then it turns out to be fair use, no one suffers a penalty.The DMCA and similar laws provide protection to the platform if they act quickly on takedown notices, but the law needs to be updated to provide penalties for the reporter for inappropriate takedowns.This would allow Google/Facebook/et al to change their tools from automatic takedown to reporting the violation to the copyright holder, and then it is up to the copyright holder to file a claim. If perhaps the copyright holder makes too many erroneous claims, they lose their copyright altogether.Let the platforms be neutral, put the liability on the copyright violators and copyright holders equally, so both have a reason to act fairly. |
The smallest and worst HDMI display | I love this. What is it about pointless technical projects that are sometimes so alluring? I wonder if it's the removal of secondhand stress since there is no 'meaningful' success criteria. |
Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter | Two-party iterated prisoner's dilemma is hard enough. Sensible players will coordinate with something like tit-for-tat, but that only works when both parties start off on the right foot. Regardless of initial strategy, the chances of degenerating towards the mutual-defection Nash equilibrium increase with the number of parties.The only prior example of world coordination at this level would be nuclear disarmament achieved via the logic of mutually assured destruction, and that was essentially a two-party game between the US and the USSR. Climate change mitigation, which more closely resembles AI safety in both complexity and (lack of) barriers to entry, has been sporadic, inconsistent, and only enacted to the extent that it has been compatible with profitability due to the declining cost of renewables.How exactly does anyone propose to enforce compliance in an arrangement that encompasses not only multiple parties (OpenAI, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc.), but also at least two levels (corporations and nation-states)? For a coordination game like this to succeed, the consequences to any defecting party must be extreme. What's going to happen to the first major company that decides to exit the agreement? |
A new kind of map: it’s about time | I think this is great, but I can see it being potentially improved further if there was a temporary overlay of the physical map whenever you hover over a destination.Basically, I feel that completely removing the physical map is okay until you've picked a target. Then, having to click on it to be able to see what the route looks like (which streets to take, etc.) is higher friction than I'd like. Instead, imagine if hovering would give you a route overlay, and as you hover your mouse over multiple places you're considering, you're already aware of the physical directions as well.Having to click back and forth feels quite constraining.This is simply feedback on a way I think it could be improved further, not to take away from how good it already is. |
Show HN: I made a privacy-first minimalist Google Analytics | Creator here. As a developer, I install analytics for clients, but I never feel comfortable installing Google Analytics because Google creates profiles for their visitors, and uses their information for apps (like AdWords). As we all know, big corporations unnecessarily track users without their consent. I want to change that.So I built Simple Analytics. To ensure that it's fast, secure, and stable, I built it entirely using languages that I'm very familiar with. The backend is plain Node.js without any framework, the database is PostgreSQL, and the frontend is written in plain JavaScript.I learned a lot while coding, like sending requests as JSON requires an extra (pre-flight) request, so in my script I use the "text/plain" content type, which does not require an extra request. The script is publicly available (https://github.com/simpleanalytics/cdn.simpleanalytics.io/bl...). It works out of the box with modern frontend frameworks by overwriting the "history.pushState"-function.I am transparent about what I collect (https://simpleanalytics.io/what-we-collect) so please let me know if you have any questions. My analytics tool is just the start for what I want to achieve in the non-tracking movement.We can be more valuable without exploiting user data. |
I'm betting on HTML | HTML is the solution to walled-garden lock-in? What? Those walled gardens already use HTML, including some of the semantic elements mentioned (plus ARIA semantic attributes, which are much more sophisticated).> ChatGPT-like interfaces are likely the future of human data access.And the whole point of artificial intelligence systems is that they don't require specialized "machine-readable" annotations in order to process input. ChatGPT (and its future offspring) can navigate regular websites the same way humans do. They don't need us to hold their hand. They know when a sequence of paragraphs constitutes a "list", without it having to be explicitly marked as such, etc.What the author appears to be describing is simply an API mediated through HTML semantic elements. But if you have an API, you don't need a Large Language Model for automatic data access – a good old Python script using Beautiful Soup will do just fine. And it has the added benefit that it runs entirely locally. |
An Experimental Course on Operating Systems | Does anyone else think it's time for a new and promising operating system? The hegemony of OS X/Windows/Linux has basically gone on for a generation.Shout-out to BeOS (the old geeks will know of it) which was the last promising new OS I encountered... and that was many moons ago |
Show HN: Browsh – A modern, text-based browser | Some of you may have seen this before under its previous incarnation of "Texttop". Then it was just a hack, but I got some great feedback, so I've spent most of the last 12 months turning it into something serious. It's morphed into more than a mere TTY gimmick. That UNIX philosophy of text being the "universal interface" has somewhat unexpectedly risen to the forefront, such that Browsh is now essentially a text browser engine, serving to both TTY clients and, somewhat ironically, other browsers - see https://html.brow.sh Being able to render any modern site (even WebGL for example) to text seems like an appropriate return to the web's origins. The obvious benefit being to those less fortunate that have slow and/or expensive bandwidth.Also, I'd be interested in any opinions here about how to financially support this project. At the very least I'd just love to somehow make this my job. |
Unbricking a $2k bike with a $10 Raspberry Pi | Products like this make me furious.Selling a product whose interface/API/whatever is deliberately obfuscated so that the manufacturer also has a monopoly on a subscription service or an app for said product is blatantly anti-consumer, anti-competitive, anti-environment, and should be illegal.Fuck Peloton. Fuck Flywheel. Fuck all the proprietary IoT companies.And apparently fuck me for having the gall to want to control my air conditioner from my computer rather than GE Android app #12 that has God-knows-what baked in and that's going to be abandoned in two years anyway.Nobody should ever feel like they have to throw out an otherwise functional refrigerator-sized appliance because of software obsolescence.I am absolutely willing to die on this hill. We need a GDPR-sized hammer to fix this. |
Free for Developers | It would be neat if HN could offer something like "Login By Facebook" that returned user/create date/karma. Would make a nice testbed for offering free stuff while having some high pass filter like "HN account > 3 months old and has > 500 karma." |
The rise of never-ending job interviews | My one and only Google interview went this way years ago. Each round they'd send me more books to study, which frankly I couldn't be bothered to read given the circumstances.My experience ended when an interviewer in round 3 or 4 asked me an obviously scripted question. I answered sarcastically, he got peeved, and I never heard from them again.I'm not claiming I'm Google caliber, whatever that means. Obviously I'm not because I don't have the patience for their interview questions.To be clear, the entire question was:
What's not in a Linux inode?My answer was:
Lots of things...dinosaurs, the moon...The interviewer told me very matter of factly that it was in fact, the filename.I honestly lost all respect for the process, sorry Googlers. |
Bitwarden raises $100M | If you're a Bitwarden user and this doesn't worry you, you haven't been paying attention to the history of almost every company that has accepted VC funds.It doesn't matter how well intentioned the founders are - once you accept that kind of money, it's not your product anymore. You are now in the business of making money, nothing else, and those skewed incentives will start bleeding into their product and business practices sooner or later.As a company, Bitwarden has been a huge role model for me, and I hope they'll be the exception to the rule. But $100M is a lot of money, and I simply can't imagine it having a net-positive effect on the company and product. But we'll see...For anyone looking for a bootstrapped, open source alternative to Bitwarden, check out Padloc:https://padloc.app/
https://github.com/padloc/padloc(Disclaimer: I'm the founder) |
Visual Studio Code 1.0 | VSCode has done the thing that nobody expected MS to do, change the way code was written on Unix/Linux.I love linux/unix, but the problem always was with the lack of an awesome text editor cum IDE, yep there is eclipse but it is too clunky, I do not like sublime as it isn't FOSS (call me crazy), gedit took way too much memory, geany is fast and mean but the UI sucks plus functionality isn't that great.Enter VSCode, code writing feels amazing again, not the functional part, but the actual manual part.I do not like vi because I primarily was learning web dev and I didn't really get my head around using vi effectively and still learn the web dev, so I am not a emacs/vi superstar as I have heard that both of them are fine text editors.but for the people like me who don't or can't use terminal based editors, VSCode is quite literally the best.The new Che project of Eclipse does seem promising, but the last time I tried installing it, it took around an hour, consumed GBs of my bandwidth and still nothing.I am still Waiting for the day I'll be able to program in its entirety on my android device.I used Atom but it is too slow, it is surprising that VScode and atom share the same ancestor but one is blazingly fast and Atom is so damn slow.Edit: yep vscode didn't transform coding on unix, it merely changed it to some extent, and why the downvoting? point out where I am wrong, I'll get to learn! |
I'm on the FCC. Please stop us from killing net neutrality | Nick Gillespie: Your plan will, according to a write up in Politico, and I think this is accurate, it quote, "will jettison rules that prohibit internet service providers from blocking or slowing web traffic or creating so called paid internet fast lanes." Question for you, do you think fast lanes will become a thing? What is the value of a internet fast lane?Ajit Pai: The answer to the first is we're not sure. We've never seen them before and that's part of the reason why I thought the rule in particular was, that was adopted in 2015, was very premature banning something that's simply didn't exist.I took the time to read Ajit's argument here. It's completely mislead. If murder hadn't happened in a certain area yet, would it be "too preemptive" to outlaw it? Fast lanes DO exist in other countries right now. This is outrageous. |
Firefox tooltip bug fixed after 22 years | Software is gradually turning into a similar pattern of layering like sediment. With most modern "hardware level" applications, there are still layers of OS magic happening under the hood.We're now into maybe decade 4-ish of software dependency.There was a scene in one of Alastair Reynold's books where a character basically was a computational archaeologist. That resonates with me a lot.In a couple centuries, it's not a terrible prediction of the future that software stacks will accumulate cruft over time and debugging certain issues will require immense financial effort to both dig through the layers of software commits and historical proposed merge commits, plus adding extra tests on top of bedrock code and its fixes.No idea what this will look like. I imagine easily executed functions will pop up in mixed pip's and npm's that are easily recreated functionality every decade, regardless of prior art. Every new programmer wants to make a stamp on the world.There's some saying about history repeating itself, but I'm dumb and don't remember. |
Myself – v1.0.3 | This makes me think of a new requirement for a hypothetical programming language: this requirement is that the programming language supports a coding style where additions to the code (new functionality, or bugfixes) are appended at the end of the code text, rather than inserted inside the existing code. I wonder if a language like this would be feasible and practical. |
I noticed some disturbing privacy defaults in Windows 10 | Windows is now essentially a personalized, cloud-based operating system with the primary interface as a personal assistant, so I expected to see all these things as defaults. The advanced features just couldn't work without it. I'm glad there's at least an opt-out, but I do think that Windows needs an OS-wide incognito mode, just a simple switch to record or not record data.I generally use that on my browser for when I hand my laptop to someone else and don't want their activity polluting my history, but now there's the risk of the entire OS learning someone else's habits when they just need to use the computer and don't want to log in. Sometimes, guest accounts are too restrictive.I do like having the option of a personalized experience, and Microsoft is generally one of the most restrictive companies when it comes to sharing data. With their push toward more personal cloud services, I hope they will take special care to maintain that record, although everyone knows that certain groups like government have ways of getting whatever they want if it's available.Hopefully, some of the fine-grained permissions of Windows Phone will soon carry over to the unified platform for those who want it, but either way, I would still do any especially sensitive work on Debian or a similar system. |
Found hooked up to my router | I don't see how this 'man' in the middle could actually intercept passwords, except for http, but who runs auth over http anyway. For https, the 'man' would have to substitute its own certificate and then the browser / client software wouldn't trust the cert/domain combination without the end user being extremely stupid (and knowledgeable enough to achieve the stupidity). |
1MB Club | Ahh let the bikeshedding continue.In these situations all I want to say is "Who cares".Optimization matters when it actually solves a problem, before that it's just wasted effort.I don't hear the general public yelling from the rooftops "The web is too slow! Developers are building too fast! I wish we could go backwards!" |
The Apple GPU and the impossible bug | It's been said more than a few times in the past, but I cannot get over just how smart and motivated Alyssa Rosenzweig is - she's currently an undergraduate university student, and was leading the Panfrost project when she was still in high school! Every time I read something she wrote I'm astounded at how competent and eloquent she is. |
Uber broke laws, duped police and built lobbying operation, leak reveals | Still a million times better than what it replaced. About 20 years ago I was working with the Australian taxi cab industry. The hq of the regulatory authority shared the address of the main payment system. The regulatory authority was made up of representatives of each taxi cab company that each had one vote. There was one taxi company (the one that controlled the payment system allowed) with 200+ subsidiaries that made up that organization. If anyone tried to get into the taxi industry they'd use their 200 votes to say they are not allowed by regulations. This was a company making 2billion a year in one state of Australia alone (NSW). It was so incredibly fucking corrupt and i am thankful to Uber Lyft and all the other incumbents for managing to get their foot in. It required dirty dealing to get past this corruption. |
De-Stressing Booking.com (2019) | This is why I sometimes hate a/b testing. I'm sure someone at booking a/b tested these things and saw an increase in revenue. The thing that these tests don't measure are very long term effects where people either start to hate your product and look for alternatives, or become so numb to the changes that the initial novelty effect wears off. The person who ran the test gets a promotion for increasing revenue during the quarter but the net result is a massive negative for the longevity of the product. |
Bullshit Jobs | I am fairly convinced that bullshit jobs (and entire bullshit industries) exist as a consequence of the following things:1) There is less and less actual work to be done due to technological progress;
2) There are economic incentives to create larger and larger organizations;
3) Society hasn't found a rational way to redistribute wealth yet.This is tragic. Entire human lives are being wasted on this dystopia of boredom and meaninglessness. I would argue that part of the stalemate is caused by politics and social norms. Even though there is not much actual work to be done, people still tend to tie their self-worth and social status to employment. This leads them to demand jobs from politicians, and the politicians find a way to provide them. "Jobs" is usually one of the main topics in any modern election. A rational society at our current stage of development would be celebrating job destruction, not creation.As technology progresses, and all things being equal, the situation will only become more extreme and ridiculous. Unfortunately, I bet we will get out of this stalemate in a rather nasty way: through resource depletion and environmental collapse.It depresses me that our species hasn't been fundamentally able to elevate itself above basic monkey-like biological programs and do better than this. |
What I loved about Paul Allen | The only thing I ever think of when Gates speaks about Allen is how they tried to reduce his equity when he got sick. It's something that has stuck with me for 20+ years. |
IT Runs on Java 8 | The funny thing is that from a purely technological point of view, Java (even the 5-year-old Java 8 and certainly recent versions) is far ahead of most other stuff hyped on HN (as well as less hyped stuff). Virtually no other platform comes close to that combination of state-of-the-art optimizing compilers, state-of-the-art GCs, and low-overhead in-production profiling/monitoring/management. And much of the cutting-edge development and technological breakthroughs on these matters continues to take place in Java (disclosure: I work on OpenJDK full-time). Just in the past few years we've seen the release of open-source GCs with less than 2ms worst-case pause times on terabytes of heap (ZGC and Shenandoah), a revolution in optimizing compilers (Graal/Truffle), and there's an upcoming release to streaming access to low-overhead deep profiling (JFR). So Java is not only the safe choice for serious server-side software; it's also the bleeding edge. |
You've only added two lines – why did that take two days? | A variant of this that has driven me to quit more than one job is having a non-technical manager look at a UI prototype and consider that 90% of the solution. "The UI guys had this page ready two months ago! Why doesn't this work yet?" It's even worse when you present a working prototype. They simply don't understand that the backend functionality is what's doing the bulk of the work, and just because you can see something, that doesn't mean it's secure, performant, scalable, or even functional beyond demoing with dummy data. |
Ask HN: Google is confusing me with others in a harmful way – what can I do? | It is laughable that "tech giants" are going to great lengths these days in cahoots with elected politicians and warlords (equally), to crack down on "misinformation" and yet when their own algorithm and callous management propagate damaging misinformation, no one can crack the whip on them, so to speak.As others suggested, this needs to hit the court and be brought to the notice of regulators too. What if one day this deceptive "knowledge box" gets someone lynched? Am sure this has already happened if the lens is broad enough. Nevertheless they cannot be allowed to associate random photos with unrelated content without repercussions. At the very least they should have a channel where the general public can reach them and they take prompt action based on the merits of the case.It's laughable how feudal, unaccountable, unreachable and unregulated the tech industry is, while they have a deliberately cultivated oversized impact on society. |
Thinking the unthinkable | > “Then I’m going to kill myself,” he said.I remember doing that.> He’s been on a slew of antipsychotic and mood altering pharmaceuticals, a Russian novel of behavioral plans. Nothing seems to work.I remember that.> A few weeks ago, Michael..threatened to kill meI did that too.She forgot to mention the time(s) he threatened to run away. (I'd be surprised if he didn't.)After a marathon of transfers, expulsions, and incidents, I was at the end of the line. My parents interrupted my electronic solipsism for a moment to tell me the truth. It was a long conversation, but it can be summed in a sentence."Son, you're out of options, if you want to have a future you need to play nice at this next school."Maybe I'd been delivered that message in the past, if I was, I don't remember it. This time it clicked for me. I realized that I'd had my fun hurting the faculty of various schools, but if I wanted to see the day after tomorrow, I would need to stop hurting people.Before I continue on with my story, I would like to share an anecdote about handwriting:For the longest time my handwriting was awful. My whole life in fact. When I was learning, I had a mean, evil instructor. She would yell at me when I wrote the letters wrong, it really seemed to bother her. So I wrote the letters the wrong way on purpose, because making her mad was more important to me than drawing Latin runes. Eventually I had learned how to handwrite, entirely wrong, out of habit.As the years passed by, the root of this badness became obscured in other peoples memory. My mom attributed it to mental illness, everyone else did too. But I knew better. I know better. A few months ago, I decided to improve my handwriting. I would pick a font and learn to write in it. There wouldn't be any tutorials of course, I'd just copy the symbols until they looked right.At first it was just trial and error, I would try and write the symbol the way I saw it on my computer monitor. (The only one that eluded me is that weird 'a' that looks more like an '&'.) Then, once I figured out how to write the symbol, I would practice the motions over and over on paper. I eventually moved on to writing whole sentences, entirely in this new script. Then whole paragraphs. I stopped short of essays, because by then I had basically mastered the points where my current writing lacked.Then at school I would apply it, even when it was slower than my normal note taking, I would slowly and methodically do my symbols the new way; the right way. Occasionally I would fall back into my old habits, but only for a moment. Slowly I got better, faster. Over the course of days it became a habit. Over the course of weeks it became second nature. Over the course of months it faded into the background.Back to my story. I knew I couldn't do what I was doing anymore. So I sat myself down and listened to Linkin Park's Breaking the Habit, over and over, on repeat. The problem is that it's stupid easy to threaten to kill people. It's stupid easy to be a terrible person. I decided I didn't want to be that person anymore, partly because I couldn't be.I got to school, and did the last overtly malicious thing I can think of. (At least, that can be characterized by my earlier behavior.) There was a boy, let's call him Jacob, Jacob had earned a reward for his good behavior. I knew this before he did, because I was in an introductory one on one with the instructor, to explain the rules. She told me to tell him she wanted to tell him something. But not to spoil it.I went up to him and promptly relayed that he was in major trouble. He went into the head instructors office crying. I hadn't meant to do that. I figured when he heard that he had actually received an award it would lift his spirits even more. It was a pretty stupid idea.He came out of her office drying his tears, but still sobbing a little. It hurt me to see this. He didn't deserve that, and it was all my fault. I'd ruined what should have been a happy moment in his life. Of course; the instructor had words for me, they were scalding as I remember them. But as I contemplated Jacob, they were just background noise. I cried.And after that, things got better. I stopped lying, I stopped calling people names, or threatening to blow them up. Occasionally I would fall into my old habits, but I'd rebound. Eventually, I was so well behaved that they couldn't justify keeping me at a specialty school, I was filtered back into the public school system.I often think about what my younger self would think of me now, I don't think he would like me very much; in fact he might even threaten to kill me. If he did, I'd probably laugh. I'd tell him the truth:"You can kill me, but that won't solve your problems." |
Tom Magliozzi, Co-Host of NPR's 'Car Talk,' Dies at 77 | I hope Melissa "the Twerp" Peterson (http://www.wnyc.org/story/1421-my-dog-hates-you-too/) does a eulogy for him.(Girl who wrote a letter complaining that the show sucked and that she had to listen because her parents did in the car... they had her on and she'd periodically call in for years)My all-time favorite was the episode where someone called in and said that their vehicle would run pretty well but with lots of vibration for 8 minutes, then the engine would cut and refuse to start up again. It turned out to be someone onboard the Space Shuttle. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moAqzM4ptm8 |
Front Page Subreddits Go Private in Response to Firing of Reddit Admin | It's kindof astonishing what is happening over at reddit right now."The internet" has it's own culture, and the people running reddit right now (one of the places where this culture is the strongest, imo), seem to have no idea how to interface with it.It honestly feels like it got taken over by silicon valley middle management marketing types or something, and now they just can't seem to figure out why the users keep getting pissed off at them.I know there are still people like kn0thing over there, but...what else is going on? Is there anybody over there without a business degree? Because it really doesn't feel like it. |
Private client-side-only PWAs are hard, but now Apple made them impossible | Better title: Apple restricts tracking by limiting browser storage, which hurts my particular app.Browsers need to be severely limited due to them running arbitrary code from the web. Doesn't matter if it's an offline web app. If you want more access, make a native app (with or without web technologies). |
A visual guide to SSH tunnels | Is it just me or is this site a bit of a disaster on mobile? |
Postgres Language Server | Letss gooo!! Supabase keeps on delivering things that I need.I am regularly surprised how bad the tooling is for SQL/databases. Especially that there is no decent formatter that supports plpgsql, and doesn't absolutely mangle your queries (sometimes actually breaking your queries..).Best options atm are imo TablePlus and DataGrip, I have tried a bunch of options in vscode and although there are useful tools, it's all not really there.(Also excited to see what else they will release this launch week!) |
The Philips Hue ecosystem is collapsing | Can someone explain to me what this ecosystem is and the appeal of it?I have nothing automated in my life, that I know of? I don't have a garage; the door to the house has a key; the lights I turn on with a switch; no Alexa, don't use Siri... I am not exactly opposed to automation, but I am hesitant to share even more demographic data to cloud services. |
Thoughts on Flash | I love this. Apple clearly laid out their reasoning, using facts and persuasive argument. The world needs more of this.Obviously, there is some spin in the post, and I don't completely agree with 100% of it, but I love the level of discourse. |
New in PostgreSQL 10 | How does PostgreSQL 10 compare with Cassandra for BigData requirements? |
How the CIA used Crypto AG encryption devices to spy on countries for decades | Gives you a sense of why the U.S. intelligence community is so nervous about having Huawei at the core of the domestic 5G network. Would not be fun for the U.S. to have done to them what they've done to others.And as a U.S. resident, even as I acknowledge and deplore what the U.S. intelligence services have done to others, I still don't want China to do that to me. This is not an area where equitable (but bad) treatment makes things right IMO. |
Show HN: Beeper – All Your Chats in One App | While working on Pebble, we ran into a lot of issues as we tried to enable messaging from the watch. For example, we never figured out how to send an iMessage or WhatsApp reply. While digging around for a solution to that problem, I thought it was odd that no one had built a Adrium/Trillian/Meebo chat app for modern chat networks. I buried that thought for a while, until I learned about Matrix two years ago.Matrix is the holy grail of chat. It's end-to-end encrypted by default, federated and open source. The only problem is that not a single one of my friends or family was on it! Luckily the Matrix folks had already envisioned a solution to this problem - they built an API enabling 'bridges' between Matrix and other chat networks. This struck a chord with me, maybe we could finally build a single app that I could use to chat with all my friends, regardless of which chat app they used. Through the Matrix community I met Tulir, the most prolific bridge developer and we started working together on what would become Beeper. I've been using it as my primary chat client for almost 2 years now. I could not imagine going back to the hot mess of 12 different chat apps I had before!Beeper is a paid service because I think it aligns interests between us and our users. We make a featureful and secure app, in exchange you pay us money. For those who prefer to self-host, you can run the entire Beeper backend stack on your own server. The vast majority of the code we've written for Beeper is open source on gitlab.com/nova. Our desktop client is closed source, but you can use Element (or any open source Matrix client) if you prefer. See our FAQ for more info or I'd be happy to explain more. |
Hire-to-fire at Amazon India? | Former AWS engineer here.I worked on a pretty critical product in AWS (big AWS service with lots of traffic) and I can safely say that it's totally up to your manager and pre-existing conditions which make up the job. My manager was great as a person but would always lack in my career-oriented goals (bigger projects, promotions, etc)But what really sucked for me was the pre-existing conditions. Our on-call was pretty bad (40-60 tickets a week) and there was very little investment being put in to improve it. We had a lot of little scripts here and there which would solve extremely specific situations but no focus was ever put on in building a general framework or trying to reduce the ticket count. This often led to engineers taking the day off after their on-call due to the load and honestly it made people quite grumpy. And upper management was always much more interested in feature delivery since the focus was always on promotions and the more you delivered the better it looked for your manager. So now you have engineers with such a terrible on-call load along with pressure to deliver new features and projects within the atrocious tight deadlines that would be set. It was, to be blunt, a shit show.Code quality was atrocious. We had one enormous Java method (>1000 lines) which would take care of nearly every single request coming into our service... With only about 7-8 unit tests. It was so difficult to get even basic things done to the point where any ticket that needed to be done would take a minimum of 4-5 days regardless of complexity. And of course managers and senior engineers would estimate small tickets to take around 1-2 days and then be shocked when 2 days later it's not even close to being finished. I will give Amazon credit that they do grill design reviews pretty harshly so those are done well in general. But code reviewers didn't care about quality or best practice. If it works then ship it.I'm just not 100% sure about the whole PIP scene. Our service was extremely critical and we were extremely understaffed. So I don't think it applied to anyone in our org but I know of other teams who would have no issues in taking in a fresh college grad, making them do work for 6-12 months and then just randomly putting them on PIP. Sad but I've seen it happen a few times in my time there.I'm glad I got the Amazon stamp on my resume and left. When I left, more than half my team and my manager quit around the same time too. It was definitely a wild experience. |
Facebook hacker beat my 2FA, bricked my Oculus, and hit the company credit card | I really think for the Oculus side of this, they should be on the hook for refunding a significant portion of the cost of the user's Oculus library when they ban the account.This would put the cost of a ban to Facebook for real users in the order of hundreds of dollars which is more than enough to have a support person do a realistic evaluation of the situation. It also reflects the non-recoverable portion of the cost to most users - you can sell the headset, but you can't transfer the value of the library to anybody. That is a straight up and very significant financial loss.While other aspects of the ban policy are obviously still very problematic, the fact that an arbitrary ban that is caused by actions outside the user's control can result in hundreds of dollars of losses sits at a whole different level and should be legally problematic for Facebook. |
Google Chrome to remove detailed cookie and site data controls | They are really on a roll there, how many user hostile moves is that in the last 30 days? I think I lost count at 4. And all in the name of 'helping our users to improve their experience'. Since when is removing features that users depend on a positive?But with the competition as good as dead they can do whatever they want: the bulk of the audience is now captive and has lost either the willpower or the means to attempt to escape.It's about time we reboot this web thing. |
The resolution of the Bitcoin experiment | The folly of BitCoin is to believe that technical problems are somehow orthogonal to social problems. They never are. And never has this been more true in the history of our species than with the technology of money. Money is an artifact of the state; always has been, always will. |
Japanese writing system basics | I liked the beginning and expected the next word after "mouth" to look almost the same, with a subtle change, which would be a logical extension. But it was quite a jump from a simple square (口) to god-knows-what (食).Also, why 食 is translated as "Eclipse" in Google? |
Snakisms | I guess I don't know enough philosophy to understand some of the jokes.Anthropomorphism: the apple moves like the snake, man was made to the image of god and so on.Apocalypticism: the game just ends after a few moves without notice.Asceticism: the game ends if you eat the apple, you are supposed to be like a faquir.Capitalism: you start the game with 50, spend 10 each apple you eat - when you are broke you can't afford the apple.Casualism: I had to Google this one, the screen just flashes
with random squares.Conservatism: just the plain old snakes game.Determinism: the snake just moves by itself and you are unable to control the game - your destiny was set in stone the moment you were born.Dualism: you can control the snake body with the regular controls, and you can move the snake mind with your mind. My mind is too weak so I was unable to move the snake mind.Existentialism: you move the snake in a dark screen - after reading the wikipedia I guess the joke has to do with freedom in a meaningless world.Holism: the whole screen moves with the snake (makes it very hard to get the apples in the corners)Idealism: imagine you are playing a game of snakesMonism: your play is not restrained by the walls - after reading it I guess the joke is about you being made of the same substance of god or something like thatNarcissism: when you finish the game it sends an email to the creator about how much you love his work.Nihilism: just a black screen, no snake, no apples - nothing in the world really exists.Optimism: you see apples everywhere but looks like they are not nourishing because the snake doesn't grow.Pessimism: the play field is smaller and the apples appear outside of the walls where you are unable to reach.Positivism: you see only a narrow part of the play field, I guess the joke is that you are unable to know the universe because our senses are limited.Post-apocalypticism: no apples, you just move through a scrambled play field.Romanticism: every time you eat an apple you see a cheeky statement like "food tastes like ashes when I'm not sharing it with you".Stoicism: like a plain old snake game but you don't die when you hit the walls or yourself - after reading the wikipedia article I guess the joke is that virtue is sufficient for happiness, so the sage is immune to misfortune.Utilitarianism: you have only two very narrow paths, one with 5 apples and other with one apple. If you take the one with more apples you win, otherwise you loose. |
Insane state of today's advertising part 3 | I'm actually rather surprised that companies like Google aren't offering solutions to integrate ads into the delivery of the page content itself rather than JavaScript at this point, as it's pretty easy to block the specific domains serving ads. It seems relatively straightforward; the ads would be pre-rendered on the server providing the response and could send the same info a script would for the most part, especially if there was an auxiliary script you could load from your own domain. Not that I'm endorsing the idea, it's just that it seems like an obvious solution to the usage of ad blockers. |
DuckDuckGo will use Apple Maps | Some paint it as if the main reason to switch was privacy (https://www.imore.com/duckduckgo-switches-apple-maps-because... "DuckDuckGo switches to Apple Maps, because privacy"), but the previous map provider was mapbox (openstreetmap plus commercial sources) and I doubt mapbox collected more data than Apple is now. |
Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before? | Super serious question. Of the 278 comments that have been posted to this thread in the last 8 hours, has anyone suggested a single female author? I looked for a while and saw exactly zero. Isn’t that kind of notable? |
On Apple’s “Expanded Protections for Children” – A Personal Story | The issue here has nothing to do with children, they would always use 'children' as excuse. The issue here is installation of Spyware Engine.The very fact of existence of such Spyware Engine has effect that each person would behave as 'someone is looking'.This means zero privacy. This means 'no privacy' feeling. Everyone is more 'careful' when people around. And this has prolonged effect on society's freedom, democracy and rights of individual because independent thinking happens when true privacy is there.Even a fear of false triggering the system and exposure of one's private thoughts/pictures/events to other people during 'sorting out false alarm' would make people behave differently. Even if they have nothing to do with any children the fear that their private moments can become public just because some AI would decide so would make each person think twice about each step.This is a huge attack on privacy of individual and should not be taken lightly. The effect will be also huge. Just imagine what they will do next if they get away with this. Just imagine what other companies will do once this is accepted for apple devices.I think this can/should also be considered as a fraud because when one bought apple device one was never told that spyware would be installed some day later.Edit: I think it should be illegal/made illegal to install any spyware on any device for any excuse without warant. Spyware is a Search of 'home' without warrant to some degree, isn't it? Done through the hands of some private company under some excuse... What about Fourth Amendment? |
Htmlq: like jq, but for html | "htmlq: like jq, but for HTML""jq is like sed for JSON data"sed: "While in some ways similar to an editor which permits scripted edits (_such as ed_), sed works by making only one pass over the input(s)"ed: "ed is a line-oriented text editor".Software definition through a reference to another software is somewhat confusing. Potential users come from different backgrounds (I had no idea what is jq), and it is not clear what are the defining features of each project. Is jq line oriented? Is htmlq operating in a single pass? |
Airbnb’s design to live and work anywhere | >Most companies don’t do this because of the mountain of complexities with taxes, payroll, and time zone availability, but I hope we can open-source a solution so other companies can offer this flexibility as well.I think this is a genius growth play for Airbnb. Make it easier for _other_ companies to operate in a similar way so that _their_ employees can travel and live in an... Airbnb! Next, they should lobby to get US and EU to make short-term "tourism + wfh" visas more accessible so that this becomes even more popular. I think everyone wins here. |
How I spend my first 5 minutes on a server | I went through the article and then read every single post on this thread. I am not a security expert so I won't even try to contribute except to say that I see a lot of people offering criticism without taking the extra step of explaining how they would go about hardening a fresh Linux install (or a pile-o-servers in a rack, whatever is applicable).It'd sure be nice for those of us who are not security experts to read alternative approaches rather than, paraphrasing and not picking on anyone, "using a firewall is dumb" or "blocking ssh is pointless".I like isolated ideas such as using a script to completely automate the provisioning of new boxes. Kind of a no-brainer if you ask me. The problem is that such recommendations are not followed by something like "Here's the script I use on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS".How about it guys? Would you care to attempt to produce a canonical HN "How to harden your server" reference?Maybe one of the security experts on HN can start a repository on Github to evolve a canonical script. I'm pretty much 100% Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, so it is my hope that this is one of the platforms that is addressed.I did some looking around and this is what I found (I am in no position to evaluate the merits of any of these at anything beyond an intermediate level):https://github.com/bluedragonz/server-shieldhttps://github.com/eglimi/linux_hardeninghttp://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/linux-security.htmlhttp://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1002167http://www.thefanclub.co.za/how-to/how-secure-ubuntu-1204-lt...http://www.andrewault.net/2010/05/17/securing-an-ubuntu-serv...http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1919111https://help.ubuntu.com/12.04/serverguide/security.htmlhttp://www.sans.org/score/checklists/linuxchecklist.pdfhttp://nvd.nist.gov/scap/content/stylesheet/scap-rhel5-docum...http://blogs.csoonline.com/ubuntu_lts_vulnerability_scrub_ag...http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=510812 |
Why Japan’s Rail Workers Point at Things | I noticed the problem on myself on several occasions and kind of invented the same solution.For example, sometimes I would take a medicament mechanically while doing something else and just a few minutes later, forget if I took it or not. Solution: say loud to myself "I'm taking a pill".Another: sometimes I'd lend some amount money to a colleague, and a few weeks later I'd have a hard time figuring whether they gave it back, and they too. Solution: I tell them to hit me (or do some other stupid thing) when they give the money back, so we both remember.Going even further, sometimes I have to set a reminder to myself like "take an umbrella when leaving tomorrow morning because it's gonna be raining". Putting umbrella close to the exit, or doing a phone reminder do not always work, particularly when I'm in a hurry. One thing that works is doing some notable physical disruption in the environment, like putting a can of tomato sauce, upside-down, close to the exit. |
Google Container for Firefox – Prevent Google from tracking you around the web | In order to use this supposed privacy-enhancing feature, you must allow the authors of this extension total control over everything you do on the web. Add-ons are automatically updated in Firefox by default, so you can review this code now and it will change later. This seems like a poor trade. |
Animation of how bridges were built in Central Europe in the Middle Ages [video] | I used to be tempted to think that our modern generations are extra smart because of the cool gadgets we have.Seeing stuff like this, and reading ancient political / philosophical writings, gives me a much-needed reality check. |
AirDrop is now limited to 10 minutes | I don’t ever want to hear again how Apple is some champion of privacy and ethics.I’ve lost count of how many scandals have come out of their relationship with China from the suicide nets to the repeated investigations showing their supply chain was riddled with slave labor that they would later campaign against protections that would prevent it. Now this. They are fucked as a company, I can’t get out of their ecosystem fast enough. |
Framework announces AMD, new Intel gen, 16“ laptop and more | I’m happy to answer questions that everyone has about what we announced! It may be a little while until I’m able to jump back on though. |
Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions | The concept of affirmative action is foreign to me (quite literally so). I only know it from American media, and I've come understand it to mean "positively discriminate based on race, so long as it's a minority race" - please correct me of I'm wrong.But anyway, my question for the Americans here who grok this stuff: I assume the intent is to help disadvantaged people have opportunities that more priviledged people have already. Right? I mean, I can get behind that. But then why the entire detour with race? Why not just.. well, let poor people come first? Would the goal suddenly not be met if poor smart white kids get into good schools, too? Who loses in this case?I don't mean this as a hihi actually sneaky anti-affirmative-action post, I don't understand the subject matter well enough (nor America in general). I genuinely don't get why the race thing is part of the equation. Shouldn't this just be run-of-the-mill social democratic "lets hand out some extra opportunities/benefits to the poor" program? |
Tell HN: AngelList told my employer that I'd updated my profile | Hi there,I’m Dave and I work at AngelList on our Talent platform. Please accept our sincere apologies for what happened here.Sending an email without giving you a heads-up or control over its content was wrong. Here’s what we’re doing to fix it:* We’ve made it clearer that tagging a company on a project may notify them by email.* We’ve revised the project tagging email to clarify that it’s automatically generated by AngelList.* We’re looking through all emails we send on behalf of our users to make sure that a) it’s clear when an action may generate an email notification, and b) any automatically generated notifications come directly from AngelList.As long as you keep your profile up-to-date by tagging your current and previous employers, we won't show them you’re looking for a job— they won’t see your name or resume appear when using our recruiting tools.Again, please accept our apologies. We’re working to make this better. Please let me know if you have any further questions or concerns -- [email protected],
dave |
JupyterLab is ready for users | I'll be teaching a group of nine and ten years olds to code. I'm planning on using Jupyter.What I'd really like to do is make a multiplayer naval game, with each player controlling their ship from their own notebook. Players would start out by running commands like fire(range=400, bearing=120) right from a cell, but would later be able automate their ship - for example, pick the nearest enemy, get the range, and plug that into firing automatically at it.My server would be projecting a big map of the world up on the wall.However, to do this nicely, I need the ability to make a cell (or a function defined in a cell) run every X milliseconds. I know I can do this for one cell, with a loop and sleep function, but I'd really rather have multiple cells/functions "running", so we can break the code into smaller chunks, and to let them build their own ship UIs.Any advice on how to do this in Juptyer with Python? In an ideal world, I'd just "tag" a cell somehow so that it ran periodically. |
Mess with DNS | This tool is so neat! One thing I've learned from it is my ISP (sonic.net) seems to be doing queries to _.example.com. For instance:$ dig @50.0.1.1 nelson.lily6.messwithdns.com aResults in two queries being answered by the messwithdns server. One for nelson.lily6.messwithdns.com as expected, but also one for _.lily6.messwithdns.com.Any guesses what that naked underscore query is for? Not every nameserver does it (Cloudflare, Google, Quad9, and Adguard all don't). But Sonic isn't the only one that does.I've asked on Twitter and the best guess right now is it has something to do with RFC2782 or RFC 8552. But those are about using _ to make unique tokens that aren't likely domain names, things like _tcp or _udp. What would a naked _ mean? |
Ukraine is a major producer of neon gas, critical for lasers used in chipmaking | 90%! Did we really let ourselves become so reliant on Ukraine and Taiwan for computer chips? Taiwan being the next country most under threat.In fact, Reuters just reported that "Taiwan warns Chinese aircraft in its air defence zone"https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/taiwan-reports-ni... |
SingleFile: Save a complete web page into a single HTML file | Author here, it makes me really happy to see SIngleFile on the front page of HN. Thank you! I take the opportunity to make you aware of the upcoming impacts of the Manifest V3 [1], and for those who prefer zip files, I recommend you to have a look here [2].[1] https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/SingleFile-Lite[2] https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/SingleFileZ |
Shell script best practices, from a decade of scripting things | Hands down, shell scripting is one of my all time favorite languages. It gets tons of hate, e.g. "If you have to write more than 10 lines, then use a real language," but I feel like those assertions are more socially-founded opinions than technically-backed arguments.My basic thesis is that Shell as a programming language---with it's dynamic scope, focus on line-oriented text, and pipelines---is simply a different programming paradigm than languages like Perl, Python, whatever.Obviously, if your mental model is BASIC and you try to write Python, then you encounter lots of friction and it's easy for the latter to feel hacky, bad and ugly. To enjoy and program Python well, it's probably best to shift your mental model. The same goes for Shell.What is the Shell paradigm? I would argue that it's line-oriented pipelines. There is a ton to unpack in that, but a huge example where I see friction is overuse of variables in scripts. Trying to stuff data inside variables, with shell's paucity of data types is a recipe for irritation. However, if you instead organize all your data in a format that's sympathetic to line-oriented processing on stdin-stdout, then shell will work with you instead of against./2cents |
Winamp shutting down on December 20th, 2013 | I just switched back to Winamp after getting fed up with the latest release of iTunes.At least it's a real application that I can download and own for myself, and doesn't stop working just because it's no longer being supported.This is a great example of why I don't move all my data to the cloud, or use browser-based apps for things that matter to me.Hopefully they'll release the codebase to the world. |
You Suck at Excel with Joel Spolsky (2015) [video] | This video of Martin Shkreli using Excel [1] is what really made me realize I suck at Excel...[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFSf5YhYQbw&feature=youtu.be... |
Facebook to Buy Giphy for $400M | Congrats to giphy I guess? But I'll be honest, any time I've ever used them as an extension in slack or anywhere, and tried to get relevant gifs, I got back some really bad results. I'll never fully understand why they're so successful short of just dominating the market through sheer popularity. I remember switching our team over to rightgif and the difference was astounding given the fact that giphy has millions upon millions and loads of developers. |
Only Google is really allowed to crawl the web | The bigger problem, to me, is not around crawling. It's the asymmetrical power Google has after crawling.Google is obviously on a mission to keep people on Google owned properties. So, they take what they crawl and find a way to present that to the end user without anyone needing to visit the place that data came from.Airlines are a good example. If you search for flight status for a particular flight, Google presents that flight status in a box. As an end user, that's great. However, that sort of search used to (most times) lead to a visit to the airline web site.The airline web site could then present things Google can't do. Like "hey, we see you haven't checked in yet" or "TSA wait times are longer than usual" or "We have a more-legroom seat upgrade if you want it".Google took those eyeballs away. Okay, fine, that's their choice. But they don't give anything back, which removes incentives from the actual source to do things better.You see this recently with Wikipedia. Google's widgets have been reducing traffic to Wikipedia pretty dramatically. Enough so that Wikipedia is now pushing back with a product that the Googles of the world will have to pay for.In short, I don't think the crawler is the problem. And I don't think Google will realize what the problem is until they start accidentally killing off large swaths of the actual sources of this content by taking the audience away. |
Tell HN: A hacker's life is in danger, your awareness may be life saving | Does protesting even do any good in a government such as Iran? Being present during a protest -- get targeted and locked up or worse (killed). It is really doing the oppressors a favor by gathering together.Rather than take it to the streets they should take it to the basement and plan out calculated attacks and disrupt the infrastructure that facilitate their rule. |
Ask Wirecutter: Can you recommend a not-smart TV for me? | I've designed and built many such TVs for the commercial/industrial vertical. I am currently working on developing such a TV for the consumer market and launching it under the name DUMBO.TVLet me know your thoughts. Reference pix of 70" industrial display using Samsung LCD panel and in-house LCD controller with physical OSD menu buttons along with IR/RS232 control capability: https://imgur.com/a/k6zrH3s |
Turn your browser into a notepad with one line | Ah shoot. If Chrome allowed localStorage to be accessible from file:/// then we could add save (CTRL+S) and automatic load using this: data:text/html,window.onload=function(){var a=document.body;a.innerText=localStorage.mydoc;a.addEventListener("keydown",function(b){b.ctrlKey&&83==b.which&&(localStorage.mydoc=a.innerHTML,b.preventDefault())},!1)};
Firefox will save it to localStorage but clear the local storage afterwards. Weird.Oh well.At least we can still turn our (Chrome) browsers into desktop calculators by pressing CTRL+SHIFT+J!(If you want the un-minified version of the code I wrote: http://jsfiddle.net/d5sGq/) |
A US-born NASA scientist was detained at the border until he unlocked his phone | Their point about how other countries will take the US's stance as a cue is somewhat scary.If you try and cross any border it will be relinquishing access to all accounts.I'm assuming email also comes along with 'social media', since communication is by its definition social.So how do you protect yourself?
I think just going with "Don't have any social media" isn't a good answer because the relationship that children growing up today with the internet is almost completely different to even people 10-15 years older than them.Someone having carte blanche access to a person's phone will find something if they want to.Imagine you're in a few group chats, someone mentions doing some drug. And you've just entered a country where that's an instant prison sentence.Maybe some off colour jokes about politicians? Proof to kick you out or at least detain.I imagine we're at the cusp of something much more unsettling. The technology to reverse image search a face is available today. It's pretty easy to make you appear associated with anything, anyone, etc. |
Show HN: This Word Does Not Exist | Complete List (so far) of this X Does Not Exist sites:• This Person Does Not Exist https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/• These Lyrics Do Not Exist https://theselyricsdonotexist.com/• This Cat Does Not Exist https://thiscatdoesnotexist.com/• This Rental Does Not Exist https://thisrentaldoesnotexist.com/• This Waifu Does Not Exist https://www.thiswaifudoesnotexist.net/• This Resume Does Not Exist https://thisresumedoesnotexist.com/• This Artwork Does Not Exist https://thisartworkdoesnotexist.com/ |
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