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Passwordle | There is like... four people I know I could send this to who'd laugh, it's so niche. Yet I also laughed out loud when I got how conventionally impossible it is. |
Flipper Zero – Portable Multi-Tool Device for Geeks | Popular security researchers have claimed that the Flipper Zero website is a honeypot site. |
Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children | Full disclosure: Principal Software Engineer here on the Scratch backend...Scratch is not built to be a "teach your kid programming languages" system, it is based on the work and ideas of the Life Long Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab (the director of this group is Professor Mitch Resnick, the LEGO, Papert Professor of Learning Research). The Papert part is where the term Mindstorms comes from (https://www.amazon.com/Mindstorms-Children-Computers-Powerfu...) and was used by the Lego Group when branding those products, and our philosophy is heavily influenced by that.I can say that the https://scratch.mit.edu/statistics/ are real and we have a substantial footprint of backend services and custom software to support it. We handle on the order of 15-20 million comments/month.The primary design philosophy is:Passion: You have a strong interest in a subject/problem to solve/explore
Projects: Build something based on your passions, gain directly interactive experience with it.
Peers: Share your work with folks who are interested and provide feedback to you
Play: It should be fun!Note that there is nothing in there about STEM/STEAM nor application development. We build and support Scratch to provide creative tools for anyone to explore computation in a from that is relatable and has a low floor for understanding/entry. Having said that, the complexity of what Scratch can do rises sharply the more you work with it and the concepts behind "forking" and opensource are built in via the remix ability on individual projects.A lot of design thinking goes into the frontend of Scratch to build on a creativity feedback loop that is not focused on learning Python or any other specific language (or the syntax of them, i.e. avoid "why isn't my program working... oh, one too many tabs... or maybe this semi-colon, or maybe this .")Another part I think is worth raising, the Scratch frontend is a sophisticated virtual machine interpreter that has it's own machine code and model that is executing in a Javascript environment in browser and it is still open source. Google's Blockly project was based on the ideas of Scratch 1.4 and when we ported Scratch 2 away from being Flash based, we partnered with the Blockly group to fork their code base and create Scratch Blocks.Based on the TIOBE index, we're usually somewhere in the top 20 most popular "programming languages". _eat it Fortran!_ |
Music Theory: An Education from First Principles | This is actually my side project. It's very much unfinished but if anyone has any feedback I'd love to hear it. |
What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020) | I worked in public accounting with some major corporations as clients. Every single company I interacted with used SAP. It is the de facto software in its field and is deeply entrenched. Its UX is the most horribly wicked thing I’ve ever come across. We would conduct walkthroughs with process control owners that showed us what they would do in SAP to perform their job functions, and it would take multiple, intelligent people to capture all of the processes. The knowledge that the users at the client had built up was extensive and highly specialized. If something happened to that person, I don’t think you could quickly plug in a new person and have them take over. The initial learning curve felt far too high. I’m sure it gave those people a sense of job security.I feel there is a lot of room to develop better tools that are not so horrid, however, the process for replacing SAP will be long and close to impossible. SAP feels like one of those businesses that’s too big to fail because it’s so entrenched in the corporate world. Somewhat jokingly, I think it would be easier to switch the US over to the metric system. Any challenger will have to be massive, accept losses for over a decade to gain market share, and have incredible support for their clients if they ever want to takeover in the Fortune 500 world. Challenges too great for a mere startup to accomplish.It’s easier to just hire people to learn the SAP workflow and then hire external auditors to make sure the accounting policies are properly being followed. |
Patagonia founder gives away the company | Apologies if this is an unpopular thing to ask -- but is a very wealthy person giving away his/her wealth to be held in trust in perpetuity (to accomplish some mission) an unambiguously good thing? Separate the question from this particular story today, that is not my intention to poke at specifically.One thing I can see with wealth being transferred among generations, between actual people, is that people can die and their ideas (especially bad ones) can die with them. Even if the wealth is redistributed and misspent, it ends and turns over to someone else. New ideas and purposes for the wealth can take their place.On the other hand, when a trust/foundation holds wealth, putatively forever, their mission might turn out not to be productive, or even good. I think of certain examples of charities which, by their holdings and activities, keep certain things in status quo and unable to change, which we would sometimes like to leave behind.All this wealth transferring to entities that will not die and pass on their fortunes to other purposes. What does this cause in the long run that we haven't anticipated?Like many things that are on my mind, our system is not just about incentivizing the good, but avoiding the inadvertent bad.Am I totally off / this is not a concern? |
SpaceX Starship rocket explodes minutes after launch from Texas | People want to see 100% success in all things. But that isn't very economical. Compare the SLS to Starship.SLS has had a 100% success rate. One launch, one success. But it costs $2B per launch (and climbing) and has taken 12 years to get here. Plus, it's stealing pieces of the Space Shuttle, which was developed in the 70s over a long period of time.Starship will launch a half a dozen "failures" before they achieve success, but they will have a bigger, better launch system that's fully reusable and costs orders of magnitude less per launch."Fail fast" applies to more than just software. |
Fine-tune your own Llama 2 to replace GPT-3.5/4 | For translation jobs, I've experimented with Llama 2 70B (running on Replicate) v/s GPT-3.5;For about 1000 input tokens (and resulting 1000 output tokens), to my surprise, GPT-3.5 turbo was 100x cheaper than Llama 2.Llama 7B wasn't up to the task fyi, producing very poor translations.I believe that OpenAI priced GPT-3.5 aggressively cheap in order to make it a non-brainer to rely on them rather than relying on other vendors (even open source models).I'm curious to see if others have gotten different results? |
Statement from Edward Snowden in Moscow | I'd really like to see Wikileaks devoting more of its time, energy, and fund-raising into breaking news about government-operated surveillance programs in the last two countries where Edward Snowden has been located, namely China and Russia. As an American citizen and voter, I'm still mulling over what I think should be the correct policy response to the revelations about NSA claims about NSA data-gathering programs, but I have deep ties to China as a speaker and reader of Chinese and a long-time student of the language, culture, and history of China, and I have similar connections, less thoroughly developed, to Russia. People everywhere just wanna be free. We ought to be hearing a lot more about all the various governmental data-gathering and surveillance programs, everywhere in the world, and of course we should also be learning more about the actions of private business corporations to gather data on all of us. That Wikileaks tells us much more about the United States federal government than about any of those other entities tells me something about Wikileaks, and perhaps tells me something favorable about the United States.If you really want to be an idealistic but hard-headed freedom-fighter, mobilizing an effective popular movement for more freedom wherever you live, I suggest you read deeply in the publications of the Albert Einstein Institution,http://www.aeinstein.org/organizationsde07.htmlremembering that the transition from dictatorship to democracy described in those publications is an actual historical process with recent examples around the world that we can all learn from.AFTER EDIT: Good catch by the readers who noticed the non-American English in the Wikileaks press release here (mentioned in other comments in this thread). The press release kindly submitted here is plainly not Edward Snowden's verbatim words, but more self-publicizing from Wikileaks. |
Firefox 64 Released | > We’re excited to introduce multiple tab selection, which makes it easier to manage windows with many open tabs. Simply hold Control (Windows, Linux) or Command (macOS) and click on tabs to select them. Once selected, click and drag to move the tabs as a group — either within a given window, or out into a new window.Yessss. It doesn't happen often, but the times when I open up 6-10 tabs for research but then decide they deserve their own window so I can focus on them (and subsequently drag them out one by one) is still a lot. |
Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust | When I was at IBM 15 years ago, IBM was far from being a monopoly, since there were plenty of competitors in the hardware space (HP, Sun, Dell, etc) and in the software space (Oracle, SAP, etc.) and in the Services space (Accenture, PwC, KPMG, etc.) employees still had to complete annual legal training that was very similar to what was described in the post.Any large company with half-way competent legal counsel is going to tell their employees not to say, "our goal is to crush our competitors, dominate the market, and hear the lamentation of their women." Instead they will tell their employees to focus on making life better for their customers. It's a much healthier way for product managers to focus, and what you might do if the goal is "crush/dominate the competition" is *not* the same than if the goal is delight the customer. So it's not just a messaging strategy to prevent embarassing e-mails from coming out at trial; it's a business strategy, too. |
Spinning Diagrams with CSS | Some commenters on HN and Twitter were curious how I made the spinning diagrams in a previous thing I wrote, so 8 months later I finally wrote down an explanation.(Previous HN thread here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32528769 ) |
We reduced the cost of building Mastodon at Twitter-scale by 100x | > ...10k lines of code. This is 100x less code than the ~1M lines TwitterI wish I didn't see this comparison, which is not fair at all. Everyone in their right mind understands that the number of features is much less, that's why you have 10k lines.Add large-scale distributed live video support at the top of that, and you won't get any close to 10k lines. It's only one of many many examples. I really wish you compare Mastodon to Twitter 0.1 and don't do false advertising> 100M bots posting 3,500 times per second... to demonstrate its scaleI'm wondering why 100M bots post only 3500 times per second? Is it 3500 per second for each bot? Seems like it's not, since https termination will consume the most of resources in this case. So I'm afraid it's just not enough.When I worked in Statuspage, we had support of 50-100k requests per second, because this is how it works - you have spikes, and traffic which is not evenly distributed. TBH, if it's only 3500 per second total, then I have to admit it is not enough. |
Google collects cell tower info even if location services are disabled | It's amazing to me how many comments here excuse Google's behavior by offering the impractical "solution" of just not using a smartphone (a false dilemma) when the obvious answer is to get an iPhone. That's the advice of pretty much everyone in the infosec field and I'm sure some of them will attest to that in this thread. |
Google Exposed User Data, Feared Repercussions of Disclosing to Public | Company finds a security vulnerability caused by a bug. Logs show that it has never been used by anyone. It patches the vulnerability.[Honest question] Should the company announce it publicly?PS: Keeping in mind that this is part of the Murdoch vs. Google war going on for about 10 years:https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2009/11/murdoch_vs_google...https://www.thedrum.com/news/2017/03/28/timing-everything-ru...https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/22/16920254/news-corp-rupert...[Edit: added the "Honest Question" tag]Edit 2: Related post by Google:https://blog.google/technology/safety-security/project-strob... |
New study: Google manipulates users into constant tracking | I tried using Google Maps without search history turned on. It's basically a downgraded version. They tied saving locations with the search history, so it won't let you search for friends' contacts, set a home address, etc. Is it on purpose? I don't know, but I find it weird that they would tie some unrelated features together. Why does setting a Home address require search history? |
Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut | It feels as though much of tech has gone from helping people accomplish their goals efficiently to a business model of extracting rents while providing no or little value.In this example, what benefit is GrubHub providing to anyone? The person used Yelp solely to look up the phone number of a restaurant. GrubHub deserves 15% of his order for that? Why, because they made a deal to give X% of it to Yelp, and convinced the restaurant this was a good deal?What value did they provide here?Meanwgile, Yelp used to be a resource to find good businesses. Now it's... Something else. It's leveraging it's market power to make money rather providing customers with any value.I don't know what the answer is but it feels like society needs to come up with a new word, new idea, (or probably an old one we've forgotten) and make it both an ethically bad thing and then also an illegal one (or at least one that is taxed higher). |
Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days | This is pure bullshit. If Netflix won't commit to it's part of the deal (FULL HD and 4K) then why should I commit to my part (13.99 monthly)?You cannot decide by yourself to lower the quality of your services and keep the price same.Sometimes I wish I had enough money and time to seek "legal retribution" from these type of situations. I would love for this case to make it to the European Court in Strasbourg."The video-streaming provider said lowering the picture quality would reduce Netflix data consumption by 25%.But it said viewers would still find the picture quality good."How would they know what I find still good, if I found it still good than I wouldn't have taken the premium plan!!
So many fallacies in this way of thinking.. |
Facebook Indefinitely Suspends Trump | All of these HN comments are defending shouting "Fire!" falsely in a theater under the guise of it being a slippery slope before all speech is lost. I have lost a lot of respect for these slippery slope arguments because they are easy to make and ignore the obvious problem which is that some speech shouldn't be tolerated... Especially intolerant or harmful speech. |
Scrollbars are becoming a problem | It's not just scrollbars.It's the elimination of window borders. Aside from not being able to differentiate one window from another similarly colored window in the background, it's nearly impossible to click and hold on anything along the edge to resize the window.It's the overloading of the title bar with so much shit like search boxes and extraneous buttons that a user has almost no place to grip to move the window.It's the way that tabbing between text boxes either doesn't behave the way you'd expect, or doesn't work at all.It's all the tooltips that interrupt and litter the interface and, at times, block out things that you are looking at. And 95% of the time, the information provided in these tooltips are redundant or useless.It's amazing how much damage these cargo-cult UI/UX morons have done in the past ten years. They threw out several decades of usability pioneered by real HID experts for something that looks pretty but doesn't fucking work for a lot of people.Applications like Postman, Teams (and pretty much all of MSFT's applications these days), Chrome, and Insomnia should be case studies on how to not design user interfaces. They are about as bad as desktop software gets.The biggest sin is that this would be a non-issue if these things were configurable at the windowing system level and could not be overriden by app developers. But the trend has gone in the opposite direction; instead of providing more configurability, Windows and Gnome/GTK are actually taking away options that have existed before. |
Violated: A traveler’s lost faith, a difficult lesson learned | Hey everyone - we were shocked when we heard about this unsettling event. We have been working closely with the authorities, and we want to reassure our community that, with the help of our security infrastructure, we were able to assist the police in their investigation, and we understand from authorities that a suspect is now in custody.We've created a marketplace built on trust, transparency and authenticity within our community, and we hold the safety of our community members as our highest priority. We will continue to work with our users to stamp out those who would put that community at risk in any way. The vast majority of our community members genuinely respect and protect each other, but we urge users to be careful and discerning with each other and to hold others accountable through reviews, flagging and our customer service channel. Our hearts go out to our host and we will continue to work with her and with the authorities to make this right. |
Hacking my Vagina | I wonder if an article called "Hacking my Penis" would ever last long the HN front page. |
A startup’s Firebase bill suddenly increased from $25 to $1750 per month | [Firebase Founder here] I’m very sorry for the surprise and frustration experienced by the poster, especially due to problems working with Firebase support. We’re embarrassed by the level of communication on our side, and we’ll be working directly with this developer to resolve the issue.There are a couple of things I’d like to clarify for the group, to help folks understand what happened here, and hopefully help others avoid the same problem.1 - The Firebase Realtime Database charges for SSL overhead on all requests (we charge for all OSI Layer 5 network usage). We’ve always had a policy of charging this way. Unfortunately, we introduced a bug late last year that began undercharging for SSL, so when the bug was fixed it surprised many people who had gotten used to the lower numbers. For most people, the change was very small. For a small number of people though with exceptional use cases (ie. tons of small network requests from IoT devices without support for session tickets), this can result in a larger change. We identified and contacted developers who were significantly affected, but this customer didn’t get the email. We should have done better. (we mention this change in our FAQ -- https://firebase.google.com/support/faq/ -- under “Why was my Realtime Database reported bandwidth lower than average”)2 - We recently started actually enforcing overages on legacy plans and our current fixed-price ($25/mo Flame) plan. This is new -- in the past, we allowed unlimited usage on every plan, since we hadn’t built the tools to control this. This meant that many of our developers were getting far more than the listed limits for free. So you may start receiving emails now warning you of bandwidth overages, not because your usage patterns changed, but because we’re now enforcing limits for your existing usage. If you upgrade to the Blaze plan, you’ll start being billed for your full usage amounts -- so double-check your database’s “Usage” tab before upgrading.I’ll be looking into our profiling tool to see if we can improve it to give a more complete picture of costs.Again -- I want to apologize to the poster for the poor support experience. If others on the thread have had similar problems and feel they are not getting the attention they want from support, feel free to email me directly as well: [email protected] |
Glitter bomb tricks parcel thieves | I just told this story on HN, but my car window was smashed on 10/13/18 and the theives got my wallet and house keys.They used my credit card at foot locker (~$500), The Store Manager confirmed two guys made the purchase and corporate said they would turn over the video if police just ask.A month later the bank fraud dept informed me someone was trying to cash a fake check ($1,600) against my account at an ATM using my ID (stolen from the car) and they ATM video shows the guy and the would turn it over to police if they requested it.I even emailed the detective with chain and all he had to do was reply all, but the detective refuses (“we don’t look into these things”). Meanwhile these people have my address and key (even though I rekeyed) they may be lurking and try to come in, and I should be entitled to know what these people look like.I was attacked on HN for suggesting this but I’ll suggest it again, since the author of this post already had video of these theives, there needs to be a platform to post these videos for the public to crowdsource the identity of these people.I know there are not police resources to pursue every amazon purchase, but in my case it was grand theft and it’s ongoing, and likely to escalate, but the police are unwilling to do anything to help (but be damn sure they’d look into it if they were the victims). |
New slats make the Golden Gate Bridge sound like a David Lynch movie | I'm just glad they identified the source of the hum, many people are impacted for years by unexplainable sounds, and it is maddening.It took me and my neighbours a month to find the source of a hum that was resonating with our windows. It was torture, with midnight walks and lurking around potential sources, mapping nearby industrial sites, and questioning our sanity, while our windows were vibrating without a stop. We were very lucky to track it down to a badly installed air conditioning vent 200 m away.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hum |
This page is a truly naked, brutalist HTML quine | This page, while not brutalist, is IMO much more interesting since it codes itself live:https://www.strml.net/Discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21035313 |
Wikipedia to Shut Down on Wednesday to Protest SOPA | I don't think this is a good idea. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia that many people depend on all over the world. Encyclopedias should not just switch off for political reasons. Books don't turn off. Digital information should not turn on and off either for any reason. A big red banner covering half the page can get the message across without actually making us unable to access the information stored in wikipedia. |
I Had My Electronics Seized by U.S. Customs and Border Protection | As an American citizen who travelled extensively up until TSA made me too miserable to continue, I am absolutely embarrassed about the travel situation in the United States.I grew up in the land of freedom, and grew up hating overzealous and pointless "security" associated with the iron curtain.We have freedom of speech, which inherently means freedom of thought. At one point we were the bastion of freedom and hope, and a leader in this regard. Nobody should fear harassment because they happened to speak at DEFCON anymore than one should fear harassment because they spoke at Jesus camp, or the science fair for that matter.We SHOULD be encouraging people to come here and talk about things that might get them in trouble in their home countries. We SHOULD take a position of leadership and protect the basic inalienable rights of all people regardless of their citizenship, alliances, or thoughts.I am absolutely appalled at the state that our government has arrived at. I am stunned that after such a strong revocation of the previous leadership that Obama's generation sought to increase security theater, decrease freedom, and decrease the rights afforded to our own citizens and our visitors.The enemy of our freedom isn't thousands of miles away in some terrorist training camp. It's the people we freely elect who have seemingly no forethought and no historical understanding of our fundamental values.A leader isn't someone who looks to cover his ass at every opportunity. A leader is someone who stands up, tells people there is something wrong, and pushes us back to the values that we were raised to be proud of. You don't have to be president to be a leader. Every police officer, every border agent, every engineer, janitor, and unemployed citizen can stand up at some point and see enough is enough. People need to stop arguing about politics and stop worrying about the boogey man. People need to start caring about freedom and they need to stop the culture of fear.Sorry... This whole discussion hit a sore spot for me. I have always been a proud american and this kind of behavior just flies in the face of the values I was raised to embrace. |
Did I just win? | 1. Create issues for items I need fixed on my github repos.2. Offer a $100 bounty to people who can trick me into getting some string into my projects. The easiest way to "trick" me of course is to hide it inside of a PR which fixes a real issue.3. Find and remove the string before merging the PR. I've had one of my issues fixed for free. Rinse and repeat!Bonus Round: Stage an announcement on twitter and have someone cleverly trick me into including the string on my website (which I was totally going to do anyway). Post clever trick to code geek social media and reap the sweet free viral marketing and hackers trying to earn a Benjamin. |
Ask HN: How to get started with machine learning? | If you want to jump right in with "hello world" type TensorFlow (a tool for machine learning), see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12465935 (how to fit a straight line using TensorFlow)If you like to study/read: the famous Coursera Andrew Ng machine learning course: https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine-learningIf you just want course materials from UC Berkeley, here's their 101 course: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11897766If you want a web based intro to a "simpler" machine learning approach, "decision trees": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12609822Here's a list of top "deep learning" projects on Github and great HN commentary on some tips on getting started: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12266623If you just want a high level overview: https://medium.com/@ageitgey/machine-learning-is-fun-80ea3ec... |
I Fell 15,000 Feet and Lived | Awesome read.Can anyone explain the quote below? I don't really understand how the minesweeper understood the signal.---The Coast Guard amphibian gained altitude and flew off. (I learned later that he headed for a squadron of minesweepers that was returning to the United States from a tour of the Western Pacific. He was unable to tune to their radio frequency for communications. But this ingenious pilot lowered a wire from his aircraft and dragged it across the bow of the minesweeper, the USS Embattle. The minesweeper captain understood the plea, and veered off at top speed in my direction.) |
Thank you to dang and sctb | Their nicks don't ring a bell with me, and I've been here for ~2 years.Which probably means that what they're doing is a good thing though, not a lot of flame wars going on!
(Or alternatively, I just stay away from articles that might cause need for more moderation).But thanks! Good mods are crucial for a place like this |
Canada Border Services seizes lawyer's phone, laptop for not sharing passwords | I have asked this question before, but never really got a satisfiable answer: why do governments (not just USA/canada) spend these resources to check data physically at a border?It's not like you need to 'smuggle' any form of data physically.I mean, any data considered to be dangerous (like terrorist attack plans, atomic bomb designs or political inside information) can be accessed across borders via the internet. You don't need to have those on any of your devices.And even if you had the data on a laptop, how does border patrol even know what they are looking at? |
Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B | So I have to deal with both tools at my company. The reality is that it all feels so incomplete from a BI standpoint. Managers are throwing money at front end tools like Salesforce and Tableau, but the entire back end stack is still pretty much the same as 20-30 years ago (big expensive Oracle-ish databases).I think the development of Python and Jupyter and other less known things like Vega are much more interesting. Python is today the only "glue code" that puts all of it together, from data to insights. |
Firefox 83 introduces HTTPS-Only Mode | I’m surprised at the negative knee-jerk reaction. I actually love this idea immediately. It encapsulates something I kind of already wanted when using HTTPS Everywhere.This doesn’t guarantee the transport is end-to-end secure; I’m sure plenty will strip the encryption at an LB and then possibly send it back over the internet. But, I think it’s a good addition nevertheless. Here’s to hoping for more DoH and encrypted SNI adoption as well. No good reason to leave anything unencrypted if it doesn't have to be.(I’m less happy with Firefox’s approach to DoH rollout, but I’m still glad to see DoH gaining some traction. Let’s hope the end result is worth it...) |
PostgreSQL 14 | Somewhat related, but does anybody have suggestions for a quality PostgreSQL desktop GUI tool, akin to pgAdmin3? Not pgAdmin 4, whose usability is vastly inferior.DBeaver is adequate, but not really built with Postgres in mind. |
The first person to hack the iPhone is building a self-driving car | Prototypical case of the 80/20 rule. He has implemented the happy case. But that system is nothing people realistically would want to drive their cars.What he did is impressive. But the results are not that outlandish for a talented person.1) Hook up a computer to the CAN-Bus network of the car [1] and attach a bunch of sensor peripherals.2) Drive around for some time and record everything to disk.3) Implement some of the recent ideas from deep reinforcement learing [2,3]. For training, feed the system with the oberservations from test drives and reward actions that mimick the reactions of actual drivers.In 2k lines of code he probably does not have a car model that can be used for path planning [4] (with tire slippage, etc.). So his system will make errors in emergency situations. Especially since the neural net has never experienced most emergencies and could not learn the appropriate reactions.And guess what, emergency situations are the hard part. Driving on a freeway with visible lane markings is easy. German research projects autonomously drove on the Autobahn since the 80s [5]. Neural networks were used for the task since about the same time [6].[1] http://www.instructables.com/id/Hack-your-vehicle-CAN-BUS-wi...[2] http://arxiv.org/abs/1509.02971[3] http://arxiv.org/abs/1504.00702[4] http://www.rem2030.de/rem2030-wAssets/docs/downloads/07_Konf...[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka_Prometheus_Project[6] http://repository.cmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2874&c... |
GoDaddy injecting JavaScript into websites and how to stop it | I think it's pretty unfortunate that even now, CSPs are getting so little love in the comments of a post where they would have easily prevented this script from loaded at all, and could have helped the author discover the script the second it was added.For the unitiated, Content Security Policies (CSP) allow you to, among other things, define a whitelist of origins for things like scripts, css etc. and also notify you of violations. There is little excuse to not set a strong CSP on your sites if you can and you'll be glad you have it once something does happen. |
IKEA buys 11,000 acres of U.S. forest to keep it from being developed | I never understood why people hate IKEA. Yes it's cheap. Yes it doesn't last a lifetime. Yes it needs a lot of wood. Yes it's highly optimized.But guess what, IKEA is a business responding to the needs of people. The negatives that are mentioned frequently are merely a symptom of our ever faster developing society. The people who complain are the same ones that just buy cheap crap from china without even thinking about it.IKEAs ability to produce products that people actually need, at such a scale, is amazing to me. It does what it promises. It's cheap. It fills most people's needs fully. Customer support is perfect. I know in 10 years replacements for their core products will still be available. Their way of innovating the products is genius.I can't think of any other company that even comes close. Well, maybe LEGO. |
It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency | “But it’s like the early Internet!” shouted the Emperor’s coinholders. “The Internet wasn’t yet useful a mere, um, thirteen years after its invention either.”I can see how people in their twenties would fall for this argument because they can’t remember. The reality is that the internet was immediately extremely interesting (either useful or fun) for practically everyone who got access. Email and ftp alone were killer apps. A bit later came Usenet and IRC and MUD gaming. There were things to download, people to meet, flame wars to participate in. People would stay up until 4am to get a chance to go online in university shared facilities.With cryptocurrency there’s nothing to do. You could pay $100 to buy a “cryptokitten” or whatever, but then you’d be stuck shilling it on somebody else somehow. The community is a mix of Scientology-like groupthink and multi-level marketing sales pitches. The early Internet was infinite times more fun. |
A dad took photos of his toddler for a doctor – Google flagged him as a criminal | > A Google spokeswoman said the company stands by its decisions, even though law enforcement cleared the two men.Wow. Just wow. This is worse than the usual Google's automated screw-ups. In this case, Google was notified of the issue by the NYT. Yet they actively chose to continue to screw over their victims just because they can.> In a statement, Google said, “Child sexual abuse material is abhorrent and we’re committed to preventing the spread of it on our platforms.”Just how tone deaf can Google be, continuing to treat these innocent folks as criminals in this passive aggressive statement even after being proven wrong? Do these people have no empathy at all? |
New Orleans teenagers found a new proof of the Pythagorean Theorem | I have read about this proof for a bit and this is the first write-up that gives the slightest details. The phrase "using trigonometry" is confusing. What they do is assume functions sine and cosine exist, as normally defined, as ratios of triangle values, without assuming these have the various Pythagorean-theorem derived properties. They then construct an infinite series of nested triangles and use the formula for the sum of geometric series' to derive the length of the original triangle's hypotenuse. It certainly seems clever.I'm still confused what axioms they're effectively using relative to the usual Pythagorean theorem proofs - most of these use the formula for area of a right triangle and this seemingly doesn't. On the other hand, it seems an infinite construct would require things like the axiom of induction, which may or may not be included in axiom of axiomatic geometry. |
MiniGPT-4 | On a technical level, they're doing something really simple -- take BLIP2's ViT-L+Q-former, connect it to Vicuna-13B with a
linear layer, and train just the tiny layer on some datasets of image-text pairs.But the results are pretty amazing. It completely knocks Openflamingo && even the original blip2 models out of the park. And best of all, it arrived before OpenAI's GPT-4 Image Modality did. Real win for Open Source AI.The repo's default inference code is kind of bad -- vicuna is loaded in fp16 so it can't fit on any consumer hardware. I created a PR on the repo to load it with int8, so hopefully by tomorrow it'll be runnable by 3090/4090 users.I also developed a toy discord bot (https://github.com/152334H/MiniGPT-4-discord-bot) to show the model to some people, but inference is very slow so I doubt I'll be hosting it publicly. |
Show HN: XKCD-inspired StackSort | If you give it about 30 seconds it works eventually, this is beautiful. I had a good laugh.Edit: It makes me want to do something crazy like setup a tool chain that cobbles whole programs together with trial and error like this. Throw enough resources at it maybe it will be faster and cheaper than your avg. developer.It will be an unmaintainable mess as if you used Brainfuck or Perl. But it will run, by god, it will run. :DYou laugh now, but imagine a bizarre combination of genetic programming and machine learning with Stackoverflow and Github used as corpuses. Great Scott! |
RethinkDB Postmortem | Hey all, author here.FYI, the post is still in its unpublished state. It's basically right, but I've been meaning to edit it for tone and rewrite the market failure section for clarity. Didn't get the chance to do that before it made it on HN, so keep in mind that you're reading a (late) draft. |
GitLab acquires Gitter, will open-source the code | Somewhat off topic, but I was once very interested in working for GitLab. According to their compensation calculator, though, I'd be making less than half what I make now (also working remotely). They ding me for living in a comparatively low cost area.I'm surprised they are able to attract talent to achieve what they have done so far. It makes me worry somewhat about my future prospects in an increasingly globalized talent pool. |
Google AMP – A 70% drop in our conversion rate | Question: If what makes AMP fast is the restrictions on size, JS, and CSS, and you know this and want to conform to this, why do you need to use AMP? Why not just develop your site like this anyways? Is the lightning bolt really that worth it? I'm not convinced that (any more) Google prioritizes AMP pages beyond the coincidence that they prioritize faster ones and they are faster.Also, I wonder if I'm the only one that avoids AMP-based sites out of principle. I highly doubt it affects your conversions (I'm not really the easily "convertible" type), but makes one wonder if there can be effective web tech boycotts. |
Former Tesla Firmware Engineer Discusses the System | Why is this interesting or surprising? Of course almost all challengers have hacky tech under the hood because they don't have the resources. Winning from that position is possible not because of generally better tech but by delivering something that the incumbents don't.Remember the demo of the first iPhone (vs the huge expertise of Nokia). Or how Microsoft won the desktop starting from a single user, cooperative multitasking system (vs all the sophisticated Unix-based systems). Or Facebook running on despised MySQL and PHP.These hacks are part of the strategy. It's risky but probably doing these 'properly' would increase the risk even more. |
Why Bother with What Three Words? | W3W suffers horribly from "call for price". You won't catch Google or Amazon making you call and talk to a human being (on GMT time no less) before figuring out if you can afford their service.I'm preparing my own version, truly open source (though with a premium component), with the following improvements over W3W:•Length-optimized. If one character sufficiently describes your location, you don't need to tack on extras. A 12-character code with the last two lopped off will be imperceptibly close to the original.•Precision optimized. Every additional character, no matter the value, will result in a location not identical to the absence of that character.•Precision-focused. When a location is precise to the nearest 100km, km, m, or µm, the browser tools make that clear.•Logic-optimized. With pencil and paper, you'll be able to figure out how to go N, E, S, W by X distance by adjusting a particular character.•Spheroid-optimized. The Mercator projection is often held to be an imperialist distortion of the globe, and that's what traditional latitudes and longitudes use. Half the "namespace" of nearly every coordinate system is biased toward the poles. The distance between 89° N, 10°W, and 89°N, 10°E is 38km, but at 1°N, it's 2226km. My system has a simple and clever way to equally represent the dense equatorial regions and the sparse arctic and antarctic regions, and that equals shorter codes.Watch this space. |
QuickJS JavaScript Engine | Is there anything that Fabrice can't do? I mean, FFMpeg is almost a PhD thesis in and of itself, and he still manages to find time to make TinyC, QEMU, and now this. To say I'm jealous of his skills would be an understatement. |
Why I Left Google | To understand why Google isn't what it used to be, one has to understand what happened in 2009-2011. This is the era when Google decided to get "real managers" and they hired a bunch of executives from places like Oracle, IBM, and Intel. If Google had told them to wipe their fucking feet off before tracking shitty culture into the place, it might have survived. It didn't.Google has an immense amount of talent "under its roof". Unfortunately, there's a necrotic layer of useless and counterproductive middle management coming up with a series of "innovations" that each have made the company worse. For a few examples:* 20% time is dead. It requires managerial approval. More on that later.* Until recently, people were hired "between levels" on the engineering ladder (which is generally a disaster at Google; see this: http://piaw.blogspot.com/2010/04/promotion-systems.html) and then about 2/3 of them were "downslotted" to a lower level. It didn't affect their pay, but it blocked future raises, was a career kiss-of-death, and generally shat all over morale. What's amazing to me is that no one ever said, before this bit of syphilitic idiocy could reach implementation, "This is a terrible idea and you need to stop abusing cough syrup on the job." Fucking California culture, man. In New York, terrible ideas cause buildings to fall down kill people and so we refuse to tolerate them. Unfortunately, Google's executives seemed to lack the insight to recognize an obviously horrible idea as horrible. (Downslotting was abolished last year, but I'm astonished that such idiocy got in the door in the first place.)* Engineers (not just managers) literally drop everything for 1-2 weeks each year to write "Perf" (for themselves and peers). The high-stakes performance review process is just that important.* Google is resistant to any change that might improve engineer productivity beyond the rather plodding rate it has now. C++ and Java are the real house languages; Scala's not even on the table. Python is listed as a house language so Google can still hire people but it's rarely used and nearly deprecated in production.* Managers have free rein to fuck over an employee in Perf if they believe him to be "distracted" or at risk of future distraction by 20% time, even if that employee's performance is otherwise strong. This doesn't make Google any worse or any different from more traditionally managed companies. It does deprive them of the right to market 20% time as a perk without being called out as liars.* Last summer, it was announced that every employee had to have a 3-word "mission statement" that managers could change, and a 63-word quarterly summaries of their work. This was the infamous "7/20" all-hands in which the deprecation of 20%-time was announced.* HR ignores severe ethical lapses by influential managers, including a person who was outright proven to be using low performance scores and PIPs (Performance Improvement Plans, which stop transfers) to block transfers.To make it clear, Google still has some really great people and could turn itself around if it just fired most of the middle layers. The company still has an incredible number of immensely talented engineers of whom I think quite highly, but the company is so horribly managed that I see nothing but a cold, miserable twilight in its future. |
Chrome 56 will mark HTTP pages with password fields as non-secure | Pm - "why is this page insecure"Developer - "chrome labels password fields as insecure over http"Pm - "what if it wasn't a password field" |
Craigslist takes personals sections offline in response to FOSTA | This is not surprising, but sad.
Years ago, i was dragged (i was the only engineer in the local office) into a whitehouse (or maybe it was state department, i can't remember) sponsored working group on online sex trafficking.The non-profits dedicated to fighting this, while seemingly well-intentioned, were completely and totally unwilling to see any other perspective or try to find shared ground. It was scorched earth approach or nothing. Literally to the tune of "we should be burning down craigslist entirely, and yahoo, google, microsoft, etc should be required to be scanning your search history and reporting you to the police if they suspect you might be sex trafficking".It was frustrating enough that two of the other participants literally walked out.The only thing mildly surprising to me here is that it took them ~10 years to get the house to do it. |
Apple Introduces AirTag | I thought one of the big use cases for this was to track stolen items, like a backpack or maybe even a bicycle.But the "anti-stalking" feature will notify someone if an AirTag they don't own appears to be traveling with them.Does this render it useless for anti-theft, then? Since it will just notify a thief that the bike they just stole is being tracked, and they can look for the AirTag and throw it in the nearest trash can?Not criticizing Apple here -- anti-stalking is super-important -- but just looking for clarification if this will help you find lost items, but not stolen ones. |
Google to turn on activity tracking for many users who turned it off | Hello hello, PM for the feature checking in here. amf12's reply is quite on-point. Web and App Activity is designed to store search activity across all Google services, and we're splitting Workspace data out since it's governed by strict data handling guarantees, with the hope that more people will feel comfortable getting the benefits of better search in Workspace without having to opt-into search history being tracked for all Google services.Search history can be immensely useful for our users, since a lot of them re-run prior searches or want search experiences built on top of prior ones. Today, for the Workspace paid offering admins who choose to disable the somewhat confusingly named Web and App Activity admin console control, users in the domain have no ability to get relevant and historical search suggestions in Drive or Gmail that can help them save time. |
Show HN: EdgeDB 1.0 | EdgeDB co-founder Yury here. Ask me anything :)Live launch stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRZ3o-NsU_4 |
Animated Drawings | Hey! That’s my project!Code and dataset are here: https://github.com/facebookresearch/AnimatedDrawingsAnd a browser-based version of it is here:
http://sketch.metademolab.com/ |
Ask HN: Is it just me or GPT-4's quality has significantly deteriorated lately? | OpenAI's models feel 100% nerfed to me at this point. I had it solving incredibly complex problems a few months ago (i.e. write a minimal PDF parser example), but today you will get scolded for asking such a complicated task of it.I think they programmed a classifier layer to detect certain coding tasks and shut it down with canned BS. I like to imagine certain billion/trillion-dollar mega corps had a back-room say regarding things that they would really prefer OpenAI's models not be able to emit. Microsoft is a big stakeholder and they might not want to get sued... Liability could explain a lot of it.Conspiracy shenanigans aside, I've decided to cancel my "premium" membership and am exploring open/DIY models. It feels like a big dopamine hangover having access to such a potent model and then having it chipped away over a period of months. I am not going through that again. |
Hands-On with Microsoft's New Holographic Goggles | What is the killer app that will get people to go out and buy these? I don't think Holo Studio is it.Where is your imagination racing to? |
Apple’s New Mac Pro to Be Made in Texas | This line caught my attention:"The US manufacturing of Mac Pro is made possible following a federal product exclusion Apple is receiving for certain necessary components."Is this sort of a "if you don't make us pay tarrifs on component X, we'll build component Y in the USA?"Also I'm happy to see Apple doing this. Even if it's 50% press fluff, I think it'll make other companies in the industry think harder about their own practices because Apple commands such a great reputation. |
Google Buys Fitbit for $2.1B | Vic Gundotra (VP Google) said back when Microsoft bought Nokia that "two turkeys don't make an eagle".Google officially has become the Microosft of the mid 2000s. Lack of direction and innovation, buying up companies just for the sake of it.Here is a link to Google's anology:
https://www.techspot.com/news/42338-google-attacks-nokia-and... |
Apple has threatened to remove Amphetamine from the App Store | You’re angry. I’ve felt this in a trademark lawsuit. You think the world should get behind you and change the corrupt system.My advice is to immediately rebrand as gracefully and effectively as possible and use all that activist energy to effect the transition.They kind of have a point which doesn’t make them right, but they hold all the cards and you will lose this one and regret the wasted bandwidth. |
Yamauchi No.10 Family Office | Besides being a beautiful website, I was rather touched by their call to action:"Seeking stability only clouds your soul. Fear of failing only kills the seeds of innovation. We must create a more exciting future where people feel free to dream and leap into a world of possibilities. We must create a freer future where people are eager to truly live."It's hard not to love Nintendo.Also TLDR for those that didn't scroll through the whole thing, this family wants to use their wealth to fund business ventures in Japan. For those unfamiliar, Japan has had a so-called "Great Stagnation" since the 90s. Population has declined, GDP growth is slow and puttering, and some are saying that Japan has lost the edge it had in the 80s.This sounds like the Yamauchi family's attempt to bootstrap and create an ecosystem of ventures to reinvigorate entrepreneurship in Japan and their way of giving back. |
Show HN: Warp, a Rust-based terminal | Wanted to give it a shot but got disappointed when I launched it and the following happened:- Outgoing request to googleapis.com- Outgoing request to segment.io- Outgoing request to sentry.io- Requires sign up (only via Github, mind you)I understand the first request is probably to get some dynamic configuration, even though I'd rather my terminal ship with static configuration. But then you have segment and sentry: not interested in sending telemetry from my terminal. Finally having user accounts for a terminal is such as strange concept.I really wanted to like it, too. The screenshots look great |
DNS Toys | “Why? For fun.”I love this. It doesn’t need a reason to exist. It’s interesting on its own.That being said, can anyone think of additional interesting reasons for why this would be useful rather than the same toys over HTTP? |
Imaginary problems are the root of bad software | If anything it's the incentive system in software industry, which is at fault.1. No designer is given promotion for sticking to conventional designs. It's their creative & clever designs that get them attention and career incentives.2. No engineer is paid extra for keeping the codebase without growing too much. It's re-writes and the effort he puts in to churn out more solutions (than there are problems) that offers him a chance to climb the ladder.3. No product manager can put "Made the product more stable and usable" in their resume. It's all the new extra features that they thought out, which will earn them reputation.4. No manager is rewarded for how lean a team they manage and how they get things done with a tiny & flat team. Managers pride themselves with how many people work under them and how tall in the hierarchy they are.Our industry thrives on producing more solutions than needed. Efforts are rewarded based on conventional measurements, without thinking through- in what directions were the efforts pointed at.Unless the incentives of everyone involved are aligned with what's actually needed, we'll continue solving imaginary problems, I guess. |
Ask vs. Guess Culture | The "Ask vs Guess" name rhetorically frames it in favor of the Askers. Asking sounds reasonable, guessing does not!But really it's not about "Guessing", it's about understanding. It's about community, and relationship, and trust. What this culture really wants is for you to pay attention and understand the people around you, rather than treating everything as a transaction. |
Zotero: Personal Research Assistant | The problem with this (and Mendeley, Papers, Bibtex, etc.) is that each paper/thought is isolated. Roam Research (http://roamresearch.com/) is my new jam. |
Systems Design for Advanced Beginners | How can I gain practical experience in these things? The jobs I've had mainly revolve around adding new features, not doing any of the things described in the article. Does working at bigger companies actually give you experience with this? |
Tell HN: Aaron Swartz died today, 8 years ago | Although Aaron made enormous contributions to many different technologies, I often think of reddit when I think of Aaron.I often wonder how he would feel, not just about censorship there, but about the direction the entire Internet has taken in regards to censoring of content. I can't - and wouldn't - speak for him, but I would be supremely interested in his thoughts. |
Mac OS 9 | I'm the creator of the site, thanks for the submission.This is an in-progress port of the SheepShaver emulator to WebAssembly/Emscripten, https://github.com/mihaip/infinite-mac/issues/34 is tracking the remaining work.If you're interested in running older Mac software in the browser, the BasiliskII-based sites at https://system7.app/ and https://macos8.app/ may be better bets. They will boot faster and have fewer compatibility issues (especially System 7).The main thing that Mac OS 9/SheepShaver brings is PowerPC support. There is also a variant of System 7 for PowerPC with more esoteric mid-90s Apple projects like OpenDoc and QuickDraw GX installed available at https://system7.app/?domain=system7-ppc.app. |
Hi I’m Hank, and I bought a bus | Holy hell. I'd love to live in that. Sure, I live in a rather cheap apartment right now, but come on. That's beautiful work, cheap, and probably could sell for a hell of a lot more.The only stipulations coming to my mind that would stop me from rushing out and doing it /right now/, are* What are the laws like, regarding parking and sleeping this somewhere? Do I have to find campground or something, or just live in Walmart parking lots all the time?* What's done for cooling/heating? Does this require a pretty temperate environment, or is it relatively well sealed?* Is all power generated by the bus? If so, does that make traditional tasks on the computer or other places hell, with the shaking, and if not, what generates it and how much can you support?In general, I LOVE the idea, and the execution. That bus looks as roomie as my(once again, crappy, but still, a real) apartment. |
Xamarin now free in Visual Studio, and Xamarin SDK being open-sourced | Can somebody please explain to me why Microsoft is suddenly being so open? Are they afraid to lose relevancy due to Linux/OSX/Android and this is their way to fight back? What is the long-term strategy behind all of this?edit: Thank you for all your answers! |
Luna – Visual and textual functional programming language | Hi guys! My name is Wojciech Danilo and I'm one of the founders of Luna. The timing for this news is a little unfortunate, because we are just before releasing Luna as an Open Source project! However, it's great time to answer some questions and give you a short update what has happened for the last couple months:1. We've raised a seed round of $1M, so we can safely focus on product development and shortly on community building!
2. We've improved our core technologies to be much more robust, open and extensible, including:- We've re-written our graphical interface to be much more open and extensible (it was previously running on WebGL and now we base just on HTML, so it will be possible to attach any HTML-compatible controls / visualisations directly to nodes)
- We've implemented new, better type inferencer and updated Luna compiler in many ways.
- And much much more, but I don't want to uncover everything before the release, especially when it's around the corner :)I would love to answer your questions, so If you've got any, just post it here and I'll do my best to cover it. Don't forget to singup for the list at http://luna-lang.org. We'd love to collaborate with you during the upcoming release! :)Cheers,
Wojciech |
Amazon is stuffing its search results pages with ads | Their basic underlying assumption appears to be that they're no longer in danger of losing customers and can now act accordingly.Now that they've captured 50%+ of US ecommerce, they've also raised many prices, to the point where they're far from the cheapest price in many cases. A random example... the cat litter I just purchased is $17.89 at Amazon, $13.49 at Walmart. Last week I bought a chair mat for $21.95 on Ebay - identical item on Amazon was $33.95 (both including free shipping but Amazon came with an additional 8.25% sales tax).They can do that because so many people don't price compare anymore before going to Amazon.Not to mention the issues of buying an expensive brand item and getting a fake instead, as well as the large numbers of fake reviews. Indeed, it is pretty hard to get started in Amazon FBA these days when your competitors all have hundreds of glowing reviews for similar products and you have none.They've also moved many items to the add-on category (no more free shipping unless you have $25+ in the cart, even with Prime).My Prime membership expires in a couple months time, and this time I'm not renewing it, after being a member for several years. |
Lemmy, an open-source federated Reddit alternative, gets funding for development | How is this going to avoid becoming like Voat?Reddit already has competitors. It is just that they are cesspools as the only people who have a strong reason to leave reddit are those reddit has banned. |
User Inyerface – A worst-practice UI experiment | Well...I did it...somehow...I did...00:06:57That seems too fast...apparently i've experienced these things far too much. It actually was filling me with rage. I came close to saying fuck it...I really did...Well done to the creators...you managed to, with 100% accuracy, capture every single thing that's horrible about signing up to websites.That bow thing though...gotta admit, was worth it just for the chuckle I got as I realized... |
Pokemon Card Animation | Took me a while to REALLY realize this is all CSS no WebGL. You just blew my mind... and ruined my weekend: I'm not leaving home untilI learn this sort of wizardry! |
I am very real | This submission could not have come at a better time.Over the past couple of weeks, I've been contemplating making a submission urging HNers to be human, and to recognize that everyone else who comments here is also a human, and that stories about startups and notable figures are essentially about humans - humans who all have families, friends, ambitions, desires, flaws, struggles.All too often I see people here forgetting about that. I myself have been guilty of it in the past too. But there's something about the negativity and criticism here that grates on me more than on other sites. I think people here tend to assume that being an engineer/programmer means that not only must they treat their code with utmost logic and rationality, but that they should look at life in the same manner - that to be an empathetic and emotional person puts them at some sort of optimizational and productive disadvantage. All that leads to is cold, harsh discourse and criticism without considering the more abstract, but very real ways humans feel and behave. It's sad to see.So, I guess this is that submission. Next time you write a comment, ask yourself if you're being human and remind yourself that whatever you're about to say is directed at another human.Stop being robots, and just act human. |
Stellar | Feel free to send me 1000 stellar in step 4 of the signup process. Username: corey. Had to be the first to ask :) Thanks in advance! |
I made my own clear plastic tooth aligners and they worked | Not to be a downer, but was any thought given to the safety of the plastic(s) used?This is something that's in your mouth a lot and constantly exposed to saliva.The Dimension 1200es mentioned doesn't appear to be specific to medical applications.[0] The product page lists the only compatible thermoplastic being ABSplus-P430. The MSDS for that basically says the stuff is dangerous in molten form, and beyond that there's very little data.[1] The same company makes "Dental and Bio-Compatible" materials for use with their other products, and these appear to have considerably more safety data.[2]>The aligner steps have been printed, in addition to a “riser” that I added in order to make sure the vacuum forming plastic (sourced from ebay) ...As another commenter pointed out, the vacuum forming plastic is probably the primary concern because the 3D printer was just used to create the molds. The specific type of vacuum plastic isn't mentioned.Regardless, very neat project.[0] http://www.stratasys.com/3d-printers/design-series/dimension...[1] http://www.stratasys.com/~/media/Main/Files/SDS/P430_ABS_M30...[2] http://www.stratasys.com/materials/material-safety-data-shee... |
Left-pad as a service | Hahaha - isn't it hysterical how everyone using npm for small reusable code pieces! Aren't they morons! How stupid of people to trust their package manager to be consistent and correct and return packages they were expecting.How stupid of people to reuse small often used functions that only do one thing well.How does everyone taking the piss intend to protect themselves from this in their OS package manager, or PPM or composer or pip?It's not javascript devs fault that the standard library is so piss poor you need these short code snippets and I've definitely included small 5-10 line packages via npm or other package managers rather than roll my own because it's likely they have bug fixes I haven't considered. I can also use npm to share these snippets between the many projects I'm building.* No I wasn't affected by this because I review the packages that I want to include, however the level of smugness here is absolutely ridiculous. |
153k Ether Stolen in Parity Multi-Sig Attack | Just skimming through the Solidity docs, I see a lot of unwise decisions there aside from the weird visibility defaults.All state is mutable by default (this includes struct fields, array elements, and locals). Functions can mutate state by default. Both are overridable by explicit specifiers, much like C++ "const", but you have to remember to do so. Even then, the current implementation doesn't enforce this for functions.Integers are fixed-size and wrap around, so it's possible to have overflow and underflow bugs. Granted, with 256 bits of precision by default that's harder to do than usual... but still pretty easy if you e.g. do arithmetic on two inputs.Operators have different semantics depending on whether the operands are literals or not. For example, 1/2 is 0.5, but x/y for x==1 and y==2 is 0. Precision of the operation is also determined in this manner - literals are arbitrary-precision, other values are constrained by their types.Copy is by reference or by value depending on where the operands are stored. This is implicit - the operation looks exactly the same in code, so unless you look at declarations, you don't know what it actually does. Because mutability is pervasive, this can can have far-reaching effects.Map data type doesn't throw on non-existing keys, it just returns the default value.The language has suffixes for literals to denote various units (e.g. "10 seconds" or "1000 ether"). This is purely syntactic sugar, however, and is not reflected in the type system in any way, so "10 second + 1000 ether" is valid code.Statements allow, but do not require, braces around bodies. This means that dangling "else" is potentially an issue, as is anything else from the same class of bugs (such as the infamous Apple "goto fail" bug).Functions can be called recursively with no special effort, but the stack size is rather limited, and it looks like there are no tail calls. So there's the whole class of bugs where recursion depth is defined by contract inputs.Order of evaluation is not defined for expressions. This in a language that has value-returning mutating operators like ++!Scoping rules are inherited from JS, meaning that you can declare variables inside blocks, but their scope is always the enclosing function. This is more of an annoyance than a real problem, because they don't have closures, which is where JS makes it very easy to shoot yourself in the foot with this approach to scoping. |
What 4chan thinks of HN | Sadly, most of the things on there are true. We can try to deny it all we want, but most of the stuff that's there is true. The power of anonymity is that you get to voice honest opinions without tying it up with your identity and/or feeling responsible for it. Of course, this can be argued otherwise too, by citing some (bad) comments as example from that thread, but for the most part, what you see there are honest comments.Some of my favorites:>Why [popular technology] is [unexpected opinion]>Why I have decided to stop using [ Tried and true web dev environment] and start using Meteor>Why [obscure framework] is the next [industry standard framework].>Ask HN: Why is nobody using [obscure niche technology from the 80s]?>[Actually interesting topic] - 0 comments>Can the NSA blow up your PC remotely?>Why you shouldn't store your files locally, but in the cloud>Why it's impossible to use PHP even though millions of people are doing great things with it>Some blog post about scalability... blog crashes after posting link to HN and /r/programming>Show /hn/: I ripped off an existing product and added Bootstrap to it>Pay me $50 to teach you decades old vim features in screencast form>Reasons Why A Basic Income Guarantee Might Just Be A Bad IdeaAnd this is the best:>38090087so the password is password? |
AlphaGo beats Lee Sedol again in match 2 of 5 | As someone who studied AI in college and am a reasonably good amateur player, I have been following the matches between Lee and AlphaGo.AlphaGo plays some unusual moves that go clearly against any classically trained Go players. Moves that simply don't quite fit into the current theories of Go playing, and the world's top players are struggling to explain what's the purpose/strategy behind them.I've been giving it some thought. When I was learning to play Go as a teenager in China, I followed a fairly standard, classical learning path. First I learned the rules, then progressively I learn the more abstract theories and tactics. Many of these theories, as I see them now, draw analogies from the physical world, and are used as tools to hide the underlying complexity (chunking), and enable the players to think at a higher level.For example, we're taught of considering connected stones as one unit, and give this one unit attributes like dead, alive, strong, weak, projecting influence in the surrounding areas. In other words, much like a standalone army unit.These abstractions all made a lot of sense, and feels natural, and certainly helps game play -- no player can consider the dozens (sometimes over 100) stones all as individuals and come up with a coherent game play. Chunking is such a natural and useful way of thinking.But watching AlphaGo, I am not sure that's how it thinks of the game. Maybe it simply doesn't do chunking at all, or maybe it does chunking its own way, not influenced by the physical world as we humans invariably do. AlphaGo's moves are sometimes strange, and couldn't be explained by the way humans chunk the game.It's both exciting and eerie. It's like another intelligent species opening up a new way of looking at the world (at least for this very specific domain). and much to our surprise, it's a new way that's more powerful than ours. |
Nintendo Switch – New Video Game System [video] | If there's a "switch" here, it's Nintendo finally taking feedback from customers and third parties seriously.Console with graphical power that rivals Xbox One and PS4. Check.Industry-standard architecture and tooling (Unity), allowing third parties to flood in. Check.Blends their successful portable division with their console division (this has been a common refrain for awhile now). Check.They already addressed multiplayer, although they could go further with that.This is going to be a major windfall for them. |
Cancer ‘vaccine’ eliminates tumors in mice | Writing this from a squeaky recliner set beside my wife’s bed in the oncology department of a local research hospital.Three weeks ago she had a radical hysterectomy and partial lymphadenectomy to treat stage IIIc ovarian cancer, and we’re back to try to aid her in her recovery to prepare for chemotherapy. Chemo should start next week, but we are hoping to also participate in a clinical trial for atezolizumab. This is a drug that essentially blocks the cancer cell’s immunosuppressive mechanism (expression of PD-L1) and allows the body’s natural immune response to do work on the disease.Suddenly inspired to learn more of the nitty gritty around how cancer and the associated therapies work, I’m shocked at how sophisticated the battle is. At least in this case, the unregulated reproduction of cells is just the beginning, and my lay mind can’t grasp how simple mutation is responsible for it. If someone told me cancer was sentient with a will to thrive, I’m now much less inclined to laugh them off.Therapies that arm our own immune syatem in the fight against this monster really seem like the light at the end of the long, dark tunnel. |
Ex-Facebook insider says covert data harvesting was routine | What's utterly horrifying about this whole thing is how the media is acting as if this is some sort of surprise. Like what did you think was happening at a company collecting data about billions of people? Especially at a company that has a CEO who is famous for calling its own users dumb fu * * s? A company that experimented on at risk teens. Like come on.--edit---Or lordy, didn't expect this comment to blow up this much. Do forgive me if it sounded a bit smug, that was not my intention. But the fact of the matter is this was something we were all warned about, we were shown countless examples of exactly this, not just us nerds, everyone, people like Edward Snowden risked their lives telling us about how all this data was being used against all of us. and yet everyone kept giving more and more, you were looked at like a tin foil wearing nutter when you told people not to give away so much information about themselves so easily.At the end of the day, this is not really 100% facebook's fault, this is our fault, the fault of everyone who so readily made their information available without giving much thought to who sees it and what happens to it. And no just because you are not a techie you are not off the hook for not caring enough about your own privacy. I mean what level of technical knowledge is needed to know that once you post something online others can see it?Funny thing is, this would all blow over after a few months, and everyone will go back to the usual habbits. |
Ask HN: Who Wants to Be Fired? | I didn't know this format was a thing and am so very excited to discover it. I hope you folks enjoy reading horror stories.I got a job as a Software Engineer in my current company 4.5 years ago; friend-of-a-friend sort of thing. The company had an apparently disastrous piece of software that was their main LOB. They had gone through pretty much every local consulting agency - at least once, on a few occasions they had gone back to one they had already used. It was about 10 years old and consisted of a mix of VB6(!), VB.NET, C#, F# and somehow now Node. At the time tackling a disaster like that sounded fun and I was miserable at a consulting gig. It was a 20k bump but no benefits (health or retirement), but as a single guy 6 months away from paying off his college debt I wasn't worried. I figured I'd dump a few years in then move on.Three months in, I'm absolutely baffled at what the company does. I was told they handle insurance claims, basically acting as a TPA. (Important detail: I had no idea what a TPA was at the time. It's gonna matter later.) The software does handle claims, but they also have 10 other projects that cover a bunch of random business use cases. Apparently the CEO is a self-described "idea man" and would task the previous developer to 'prototype' his ideas from time to time. The problem was his idea of a prototype was a fully-functional application that he could sell to investors and clients - until he got bored with it and shelved it. This ended up with the company having around a half-dozen actively used products in a half-dozen markets. In addition to the TPA side of the company that was about 50% of revenue, the other half was split over 1) check cashing software, 2) HR/onboarding software, 3) some sort if discount medical visit scam, 4) some sort of MLM scam that the CEO's brother-in-law co-opted him into, 5) a random cannabis and self-help website run by some yoga guru type dude the CEO knew and finally 6) a piece of software that let helped churches organize events and donations that took about 50% of any transaction that was run through it as "fees" for our company. Now I could talk about any of those monstrosities at length, but this is already shaping up to be a wall so I'll skip that.1.5 years later. I've wrangled the mix of VB6, VB.NET, C#, F#, PHP4, PHP5, PERL, ASP.NET WebForms and MVC, SQL Server, Postgres, MySQL still using MyISAM, god knows what other horrors I've forgotten. All of this without version control - just folders copy-pasted over and over on a 10 year old server in the closet that has no redundancy, two failing disks and one PSU out of order. The last guy had started some positive changes: moving everything over to Azure, porting everything related to the claims business into a more modern MVC app. I finished his work. I squashed about a dozen Wordpress instances into a single, multi-tenant host. Squashed out all the other languages and databases into just C#, ASP.NET, SQL Server. Ended up reducing the Azure spend by about $2000 a month. Felt good! CEO loved me. COO (my direct manager) loved me. CFO was pleased. All throughout this, I had convinced the COO to cut out all the shady, near-illegal, morally bankrupt garbage we did. No more check cashing (awful, awful industry), no more MLM of any sort, no more stealing money from churches (we kept that going, just changed our fees to a nominal amount). All the work I had done lead to a decrease in onboarding time from 2-3 days to 10 minutes and the TPA side of things was now about 85% of our revenue. Happy ending, right? Just you wait...Somehow, I had not encountered a single brilliant "CEO Idea" for 1.5 years. He decided to fix that on one delightful summer day in the mid-west by announcing that we would be acquiring a healthcare startup that a buddy of his ran. Now this pissed most of the folks at the company off and is probably a good point to talk a little about the structure of said company. As mentioned, we had a CEO, COO, CFO, and "Chief of Sales" (never heard of a COS myself, but who knows). We didn't call ourselves a startup and had none of that Bay-style of startupness; we were just a small business with some investors. After the C's we had myself as the lone engineer, two sales guys, three admin-types and six or so customer service folks. None of which had healthcare or retirement benefits, mind you. So there was a bit of rancor when Mr. CEO started talking about dropping $5 mil to acquire this fancy new healthcare company. Somehow me, Mr. Software Engineer, ended up being the guy that needed to take this head-on (well, to be fair, the COO and I had great relationship). That's a tale in and of itself, but at the end of the day we ended up getting a 6% matching 401k and $500/$1000 single/family monthly reimbursement for health insurance, stopped 3-4 people from quitting, got me a whole lot of respect in the office and a fancy new title of "Chief Technical Officer" (not related to the benefits; CEO was just happy at how efficient I'd made everything) and 20k base salary increase. CTO at a company with 1 engineer. Neat. Happy ending, right? Just you wait...We also got a brand new healthcare startup for about $2.5 mil in cash, $2.5 mil in stock. We got sheisted and it was our fault. While I'm no MBA, I know what due diligence is, and I intended to do it from the technical angle while our CFO handled it from the financial. Before we bought the company I made every effort to actually review what their software looked like, but was single-handled blocked by my own CEO. "We're never going to do that, Throwaway," he would say, "Other CEO is my friend! I've known him for twenty years and if he says his software is solid, it is! Just trust me." Diligence took about three months and despite dozens of arguments, I was denied any access to anything technical. All I ever got was: "Our software is in Node using MongoDB and is hosted in the cloud." Great. I was never even allowed to meet or speak to their development team (apparently 5 engineers, all of which were phenomenal). The only human being I ever spoke to at this company was the CEO. So I tried other angles, the big one being: what the hell does your software actually do? Their big claim to fame was 'modernizing concierge medicine using AI'. If you're like me and have no idea what concierge medicine is, it basically means your doctor comes to you because you're a rich yuppie and can't be bothered to leave your beach house to visit him. How do you enhance that using AI? I had no idea. Still don't. And so we bought the company with zero diligence done, though the CFO did say their books looked good, whatever that means. So the nightmare begins...2 years in. We start onboarding people, I start onboarding the project itself. I am finally given direct developer contacts, which are a bunch of emails that don't end in the same domain as the company we just bought? Pardon? They're all @BobsRandomConsultingCompany. I reach out, explaining who I am, that we just acquired Project X and I need access to the code, environment, engineers - the whole nine. I get a very lovely, professional response from a Project Manager over at Bob's who lets me know that they will be sending over a contract so we can get started right away, along with their rate sheet! I'm baffled! I thought Project X had 5 internal engineers, Mr. Other CEO?! At this point I promptly aged 6 months in 6 minutes and I felt the first twinge of an ulcer growing.Contract arrives, I sit down with COO and CFO and explain that we have been duped. COO is angry; CFO is not concerned until I show him the contract that Bob's sent over. The contract ye olde healthcare startup signed apparently agrees to pay for 5 fixed resources (at $200/hr!) for 40 hours of work each, per week, for a period of a year. Now I'm not unfamiliar with being outsourced as a resource, from a consulting company, for a fixed amount per week - but never have I seen a contract that binds you for a year, especially for 5 resources, with not one deliverable mentioned anywhere. Maybe my five years of consulting wasn't enough, but that blew my mind. Additionally, they sent us the server bills (AWS) and informed us we paid directly for utilization in addition to a "HIPAA Monitoring and Compliance Fee" of $3000/mo. As I had not a year ago lowered our own cloud costs to about $800/mo, this number struck me as staggering. $3000/mo base + around $2000 for the servers currently running. Also, "what the fuck is HIPAA" I said aloud, the only answer being the two confused shaking heads of my COO and CFO. Uh-oh...Segway. The actual Project Manager of the acquired company (not the one from Bob's Hair Care IT Consulting Nail and Tire Salon) has moved in and I've finally got a victim to victimize with my many, many questions. She already looks harrowed before I begin my interrogation. Are people actually using this? How much do we make per visit? Visits per month? I forget the answers to these, but the end takeaway was: we bring in about $10k/mo net right now. I'm no accountant, but I'm fairly confident you can't pay the expenses of a company + a half dozen employees on $10k/mo. PM agrees - they've burnt through about $7 mil of investor cash over their 6 years of existence. No path to profitability is in sight.Around the same time I've got the Project X repository (whew, at least they used source control) moved over into my world and have started reviewing the actual source. I'm no Node wizard, but I'm immediately confused as I see both Express and Hapi (two server frameworks, generally considered competition to one another) used in the same project. That's...odd. Investigation intensifies: it's a simple CRUD project that takes a form submission from a registered user, saves it in Mongo and slaps it into a queue for delivery to the given doctors email. That's really it. There's some back-end admin that allows the doctor to write some notes about their visit. Like a little baby EMR (though I had no idea what an EMR was at that time). Amusingly, it's got an Angular front-end (1.x, because why not spread salt on my wounds) that hits an Express endpoint that then proxies the call to a Hapi endpoint. For no reason. I can't find a single comment or piece of documentation explaining why. Icing on the cake? Their is in fact authentication used from Angular -> Express. The Hapi endpoints, however, are wide open - but surely not from the ELB, right? Certainly it's just an idiotic architectural decision that isn't actually exposed to the public? Nope. There's a rule in the ELB. Sweet Baby Ray's someone help me, there is a publicly accessible, completely open API that anyone could discover that gives away patient and doctor information. Huh, I wonder if the US has any sort of regulation on that kind of stuff? I should really take some time to investigate that HIPAA thing I found earlier, maybe that's got something to do with it...Employment duration: unknown. My ulcer has had a baby. I think I may have had a psychotic break. I Googled HIPAA. I simultaneously shat and pissed myself, which I didn't think was possible during a panic attack, but the human body is an amazing thing. I took Thursday and Monday off from work to read through a PDF I found of this most enlightening "HIPAA" legislation. It says "SAMPLE" or "UNOFFICIAL" or some such on it, so I'm not sure how accurate it is, but whatever - I need to educate myself somehow. I spent a thrilling four days reading, re-reading, and summarizing what I understood of the several hundred page document - printed in three-column layout because why not make it more abysmal. It doesn't seem completely dire; it looks like there is some stuff we need to do if we are storing this mythical PHI, but it isn't terribly complex (at least technically!). I had already been planning encrypting everything we own, and all of our sites are already behind SSL, so this should be cake. Phew! Calm down, baby-ulcer, don't think about grand-kids quite yet. Also I found a few great summaries of the Act which I could share with my COO - but really, we need to sit down with Legal and have them explain why this was never brought up. And let's be honest, I'm not a lawyer - the professionals can handle this!Legal has never heard of HIPAA. That's not good. I convince COO to ask Legal to reach out to a different Legal who specializes in healthcare. We sit down with them a few days later and our new Legal turns white after I lay out everything we do, our concerns, and the simple question: "Do we need to do any of this stuff I read about?" Turns out, having your CTO read a complex, many-hundred-pages legal document is not the best way to get accurate legal advice. We're fucked. We're a TPA filing insurance claims - we absolutely, 100% must comply with this Act. Oh and guess what? The Act has a delightful addition called an Omnibus, passed back in '13, that makes any possible defense we might have had to not comply...completely null and void. We're in what is called 'Breach'! We have fucked up. Royally and legally. Icing? We're all personally liable, at least to the letter of the law. But don't worry - we didn't know we fucked up, so the fees are an order of magnitude less. They'll only bankrupt the company 5 times over, instead of 10! Hurray! |
PayPal to allow cryptocurrency buying, selling and shopping on its network | For me this is bitter-sweet as I've watched Paypal for years try kill any blockchain startup that had anything to do with using their shitty payment processor. "Absolutely NO cryptocurrencies! Unless of course it's us monopolizing it! Then it's okay!" Facebook pulled the same shit banning crypto ads and then shilling their crapcoin. Samsung did it by stalling anyone working on blockchain tech designed to run on their devices until they could offer their own solution. Google is doing the same with search ads until it can shill their centralized cloud solutions as a scalability option and whatever other evil shit they have in the pipeline. These companies are the anti-thesis to the blockchain. Paypal's crappiness is probably a leading reason 'Satoshi' invented Bitcoin. |
‘Extremely aggressive’ internet censorship spreads in the world’s democracies | The problem is that we didn't teach people about manipulation techniques because that was governments' favourite tool to control the masses. Now that anybody can reach anyone with any information, bad actors use these techniques to control people to their advantage. Governments' are now in an awkward position - ramp up education in these areas and forever give up a tool that worked for ages, or censor the information in hope that bad actors will not influence the public. It seems like governments still want to manipulate people, so censorship in their mind is the only way out of this.
Unfortunately it is like having an aching tooth and taking pain killers hoping it will pass instead of going to dentist.
My only hope that in the end this will make politics more honest and people will learn how they are being exploited.
I don't accept that someone should have a power over what I can or cannot read and preventing me from forming my own opinions. |
Gitlab S-1 | I realize plenty of tech companies IPO and aren’t profitable. But it seems scary to be losing more money than what you generated in total revenues.REVENUE:2021: $152m (loss of $192m)2020: $81m (loss of $130m)EDIT: reworded for clarity. |
Italian watchdog bans use of Google Analytics | Italy is the 4th in a string of recent decisions across the EU.(We're tracking these cases on isgoogleanalyticsillegal.com along with details for each.)Note that it's not illegal to use GA entirely, just illegal to use in its default state which transmits PII to the US. |
Yes, we’re being bought by Microsoft | That's 2.5 Instagrams, or 0.33 Nokias. What do you feel, realistic, too much, too little?Personally I feel this makes (much) more sense than instagram, these guys have a very loyal following, a tremendously strong product and actually make money.Congratulations to everybody on the selling side in this deal, too bad it had to be Microsoft but with amounts like that there are not too many companies on the acquiring side.Does anyone know if this was stock / cash / a mix?edit: this Microsoft - Mojang deal will do more to get people into (games) programming than a million $ adspend by codecademy wouldedit2: right now (16:43 my time) microjang.com is still freeWonder how long it will take before that is a registered domain.edit: microjang.com is now no longer free. Registrant:
Microjang Development (DR is US)
PO Box 100439
NY, NY 10163-4668
US (UNITED STATES) |
Reddit removed NSL canary from 2015 Transparency Report | Someday someone will get an NSL, say screw it, publish it on the internet (with mirrors) and tell the government screw you I now have standing. |
From Node to Ruby on Rails | The years when Rails monoliths were the de facto web stack were some of the best of my career. As I progressed in my career and the popular tech stack shifted to things like microservices, document DBs, serverless functions, Node, importing tiny nom packages for everything, docker containers, React, and GraphQL, the sheer cognitive overhead of getting a simple app up and running gradually took all the fun out of the job for me. The fast, satisfying feedback loop of writing a feature in Rails was replaced with weeks-long coordination efforts between independent microservices, constant discussions about tooling, and doubts over whether or not we had chosen the “right” flavor-of-the-week framework or library for our product. Every time I started a new project or a joined a new company, we had the reinvent the wheel for our bespoke Node/serverless stack and have the same tiring conversations about naming conventions, logging, data consistency, validation, build scripts, etc., all of which Rails gives you by default. I ended up spending more time on tooling setup than actual business logic.I eventually gave up and switched to a semi-technical product management role. |
When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think | Sometimes I wonder if I'm using the same ChatGPT as everyone else. I pay for GPT4 access in ChatGPT, and it is a really terrible writer. I also pay for Copilot, and I think a can count the number of times it has been helpful with one hand. I'm trying to get on this hype train, but I'm left with an empty feeling every time I try to seriously spend some time with these new tools. |
Everything you always wanted to know about mathematics (2013) [pdf] | Does anyone know of an entry level book that could take someone through say, high school math to college alegbra / calculus?This is my singular biggest hurdle in going back to school to finish my degree and I'd love to fill the gaps I have around mathematics so I can not only finish my degree; I'd also like to participate in some more advanced computer science that rely heavily on underlying computation. |
Elsevier journal editors resign, start rival open-access journal | So, as an academic myself, I have been wondering. Why don't some tech-savy people (the kinds that roam around HN) create an open-source publishing platform and offer journals to use their services for free / cheaply? Something like a GitLab for publishing papers. I wouldn't be surprised if the German government would agree to fund such a thing these days. This would make such a jump for willing editorial boards much easier. |
NSO Group iMessage Zero-Click Exploit Captured in the Wild | I always wonder what it takes to find this kind of exploit. Are the programmers at NSO group just the best in the world? Or are they incredibly lucky? Both? I’d love to know what a normal day at work is like for their engineers. Clock in, sit down at a…crazy expensive hardware and software testing station? Crack open a brand new iPhone and start probing away while referencing internet sourced chip documentation and software manuals? What does it even look like? |
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