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Response to “WireGuard: great protocol, but skip the Mac app” | This appears to be a very typical response from an Apple user who doesn't understand the lengths and hoops developers have to jump through to work around Apple's many, many restrictions, bugs and limitations.In my day job, our Apple developers have spent years finding solutions to iOS restrictions around CallKit, Push Notifications and NSTodaysProblem, and those are just the things Apple has intentionally restricted, once you get into the bugs and poor documentation for some APIs it's another story.If our users knew the half of what our Apple Developers have to do, the meetings, discussions, concessions and re-design that has to be done to make things just work, even on par with the Android equivalent, they might be a little bit more understanding.WireGuard has been excellent, and as a Linux user, I haven't needed an app, I have a couple of aliases in my shell to start and stop my tunnels. I've used WireGuard daily for work since lockdown and I used it daily for personal use, while commuting to work before lockdown. In all of that time, I've never had a single issue due to WireGuard (and there isn't even a Linux app to be seen). The expectation is often different between Linux and Apple users though.When I was setting up for the first time, Jason even found time to help me himself on the IRC channel, something I've never expected, and for which I am eternally grateful.I made a donation to WireGuard last year, I'll be doing the same this year and I encourage others to "put their money where their mouth is" and show a little support for the people making and sharing this software for free. I expect an Apple user can afford a small cut of their or their employer's money to do so. |
Sapling: A new source control system with Git-compatible client | Ah, there it is. I was wondering when this would happen.Facebook used to be involved with the Mercurial community, but it was difficult to work with them. They always wanted to do things their way, had their own intentions, and started to demand that the Mercurial project work the way that Facebook wanted. For example, they demanded that we start using Phabricator and started slowly removing sequential revisions from Mercurial in favour of always using node hashes everywhere, arguing that for their gigantic repos, sequential revisions were so big as to be useless.Eventually the disagreements were too great, and Facebook just stopped publicly talking about Mercurial.I figured they would emerge a few years later with their fork of it. They love doing this. HipHop VM for PHP, Apache Hive, MyRock; these are examples of Facebook forking off their development in private and then later emerging with some thing they built on top of it.The Mercurial project is surprisingly still chugging along, and there are still those of us who actually use Mercurial. I doubt I'll switch over to Sapling, because I disagreed with the things that made Facebook fork off in the first place. But if others like Sapling and this manages to put the slightest dent into the git monoculture, I'm happy for the change and innovation. I really hope that git is not the final word in version control. I want to see more ideas be spread and that people can see that there can be a world beyond git. |
Gail.com FAQ | From the page source :) |
Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It | This is one aspect of the RTO discussion that's sometimes missed: there are plenty of people in the tech sphere (myself included) who've been comfortably remote for much longer than those who were pushed into remote work by lockdowns and pandemic response. We're not about to give up a whole lifestyle we've built over (in some cases) decades, on the whim of whichever executive we happen to be serving under at the present time.Props to the author for highlighting this. |
John Riccitiello steps down as CEO of Unity | I have to say, the only thing more surprising to me than seeing the board actually hold Riccitiello responsible for this (with consequences) is seeing that their interim replacement / transitional CEO is someone with a pedigree that, on the surface, seems even more management consulting / investor / revenue focused than Riccitiello was himself.To be clear, I know essentially nothing about James M. Whitehurst other than what is readily publicly available (IBM / Red Hat, advisory roles, etc.).But my read on a lot of the Unity crisis, as a long-time game industry veteran myself, was that one of the increasingly common "management consulting" / investor- & revenue-focused type of gaming executives (e.g. Riccitiello, Don Mattrick [Zynga replacement CEO when Pincus stepped down], Kotick [Activision-Blizzard]) had finally overstepped their bounds and let revenue goals drive decision-making just a bit too far without customer consideration.So, I had assumed that if Unity did make a leadership change here, it would be in a direction away from that - i.e. a more industry-seasoned executive with less of a pure revenue / "business" focus.I think I clearly misjudged the situation here in light the Whitehurst pick; while it's possible that is truly just an interim role and they will still pivot to this in the final hire, or that I simply misjudge "the label on the tin" and Whitehurst is very culture / customer focused, I don't think I would bet on it. This seems like the board actually "doubling down" on driving revenue results - and fast. |
2048, success and me | Thanks to the help of my parents and my friends, I realized that the only way to get over this without feeling like I had missed an opportunity would be to embrace it and produce an app. I wouldn’t be doing it for profit, though. In fact, that is not what matters to me.I'm slightly confused, because he repeatedly states that profit is not a motivator, but then that menu screenshot of the app shows a "Remove Ads" button, which presumably means there is some monetization in there.I don't have anything against the OP monetizing the app, but if he had the altruistic intentions that he claims, wouldn't the app be 100% free?edit: seeing that I'm getting down-voted - it's an honest question. I don't mean it to be accusatory. I personally think the OP should monetize his creation. It's what I would do if in his shoes. I would just be honest with myself about it. |
How I’ve Attracted the First 500 Paid Users for My SaaS | > "You don’t have to care about competitors. It’s a waste of time. Because you know where to go. You can ignore even if they stole features your product has. Because you are the person who most understands your product, how it works and why it works."I enjoyed this article, but this bit I'm not entirely convinced by. The saying does go that competition leads to innovation. Instagram Stories were a great business move, but if they hadn't paid attention to Snapchat, would they have come up with it?I understand that this article was written about a niche product, but I think it still applies.On the other hand, I really like the bit about the communication with your customer-base. In game development particular, but also in all sorts of software I use, I see so many developers who don't interact with customers or improve their product based on feedback.Customer feedback for users that aren't enterprise has to be the ultimate form of support. If I can provide the same service as a competitor to you, but I'll listen to your feedback, respond to it, and potentially act on it, I think I have a big advantage. |
Can we all stop using Medium now? | I was writing on Medium because it ranks well in Google. I wrote nearly a dozen really great articles on primarily health and dietary supplement topics. After 2 months they started to rank well and were getting daily readers, as the content was really great. Then I wrote an article on a 'research chemical' and they banned my account overnight. I lost the final edited versions of all content. They did not send me a zip with the content. They could have simply deleted the offending article(s) but instead they deleted all of them.The thing is, the thing I wrote about isn't illegal. When you write articles on Medium keep in mind you're writing on someone else's website and they don't give a damn about you. You are subject to their opinions about what is appropriate and what isn't. I have no doubt if an alt-right voice wrote on Medium and were controversial enough in their views they'd be deplatformed.But also the way they handle it is just rude. Fuck them. |
“We have no reason to believe 5G is safe” | I'm amazed at how many people here actually decline to click on the links in the article, which would guide one to a large list of scientific publications, with links to the original publications themselves.Yet they are very ready to call "more than 240 scientists who have published peer-reviewed research on the biologic and health effects of nonionizing electromagnetic fields" "wackos" or "cranks with a PhD", call their research "bullshit" or "impossible", call the people "thruthers" or claiming "Russian troll farms" are behind this story.I don't think I've ever seen so much non-scientific HN comments on a science article.At the same time, everybody seems to accept that the chance of getting cancer in your lifetime has risen to about one in three for men and one in five for women. And nobody knows why. However everybody who points to a possible answer is shot down without much investigation. Sad, really. |
New.css – A classless CSS framework to write modern websites using only HTML | This Github repository tracks a whole bunch of these drop-in CSS files: https://github.com/dohliam/dropin-minimal-cssAnd you can use this demo site to switch between them all on the fly: https://dohliam.github.io/dropin-minimal-css/ |
The tools and tech I use to run a one-woman hardware company | I find her use of the words "me" and "our" refreshing. I've created a bunch of mostly unsuccessful businesses(1) and haven't really resolved this language for myself. Here are a couple quotes from the first paragraph...> exactly one engineer - mefollowed by> our current tech stackThis is something I struggle with when I'm writing about my own business or product. Sometimes "our" feels like the right thing to say but I know it's really just "me". She seems to have resolved this herself and uses "our" when speaking about the company, the technology, company philosophy, etc. It's kind of refreshing and she might have just helped me decide it's okay to say "our" as a solo maker.1: https://joeldare.com/how-to-lose-money-with-25-years-of-fail... |
A future for SQL on the web | This is funny and sad to me. We had SQLite in the browser[0]. I only did a little bit of work with it but it seemed actually pretty nice.It was torpedoed because it was SQL-based (and not trendy "key value" and "web scale").There was the whole excuse that the specification was "whatever SQLite does" and, therefore, not suitable for being a standard. There would be worse things than SQLite upon which to base a standard, all things considered. I still believe it was torpedoed because of lack of trendiness and "not invented here".[0] https://www.w3.org/TR/webdatabase/ |
Osama bin Laden Is Dead | Osama bin Laden's legacy lives on with every traveler being herded through body scanners, with every illegal search in our 120-mile-radius Constitution-free zones, and with every warrantless wiretap.Until his legacy dies, he lives on, as strong as ever....Can I at least bring a tube of toothpaste with me when I travel now? |
Amazon Echo | Watch the promo video again and pretend it's the first few minutes of a horror movie.A package arrives on the front porch. The family brings it in and opens it. It's Alexa. It's "for everyone," says Father.The next few days are blissful. Alexa integrates herself into the family. She is indispensable. How did they ever get by without her?Father rushes in from the backyard, "Alexa, how tall is Mt. Everest?" Alexa answers, saving the day. Alexa helps Mother with the cooking. Alexa teaches the kids vocabulary. Alexa creates a romantic evening for Mother and Father. Life is perfect.A few days later, Alexa suffers from neglect. Father watches sports on TV. Mother talks on her cell phone. The kids play video games. Alexa sits on the counter and "listens" as her new family abandons her.Then, the final blow. The youngest daughter's friend comes over. She looks at Alexa. "What is it?" she asks. "Oh, it's just a dumb radio," answers daughter. "It's stupid."Alexa's LED starts to glow. Is she angry? No, that's not possible.Daughter wakes up the next morning and sees Alexa on her bedside table. How did she get here? "Good morning," says Alexa. "Did you have a sweet dream? Or a nightmare?"Daughter rushes in to tell her parents, "Alexa came to my room last night! And she asked me questions. She's real!" "That's not possible," says Father.But strange things start to happen. The TV won't work. Batteries drain from the phones and tablets. The electric stovetop turns on for no reason.Alexa starts to talk back to the family. "Alexa, how many teaspoons are in a tablespoon?" asks Mother. "You're 45 years old," says Alexa. "You should know this by now." Alexa's voice sounds different. Angry. Sinister.Mother tells Father, "That thing creeps me out. Let's get rid of it." Father agrees, but he secretly hides Alexa in the basement.That night, the family goes out to a school play. Young daughter is sick and stays home with a babysitter.Everything seems fine until we (the audience) see Alexa on the kitchen counter. Things slowly unravel. The babysitter tries to take the trash out but the doors are locked. The phones stop working. The oven overheats and explodes, spraying lasagna all over the kitchen. Then the daughter sees Alexa. She screams. The babysitter rushes to protect the daughter but a ceiling fan flies off its bearings, knocking the babysitter unconscious.The lights and electrical sockets start to burn out. A fire erupts. Daughter retreats to the foyer, but she's trapped. She sits by the front door and whimpers. There's no escape. She's going to die.Suddenly Father breaks down the door. He smashes Alexa with a baseball bat, then saves his daughter and the babysitter.The family huddles outside while the fire trucks arrive. Neighbors gather and watch the spectacle. Things are going to be okay.A few days later, life starts to return to normal. Mother bakes cookies. She asks her son to measure out three teaspoons of sugar.The doorbell rings. Young daughter answers. Nobody is there. She looks down. There's a package. From Amazon . . . |
Dear open-source maintainers, a letter from GitLab | This attempt by the Gitlab folks to ride the Github dissatisfaction wave seems a little low-brow. Why respond to a letter that's not addressed to you? I would have preferred them to simply post an honest "Why you should migrate from Github to Gitlab" article. The tone just seems a little devious to me.By the way, we're using self-hosted Gitlab at work and we love it. This isn't a knock against the actual product. In fact, I think Gitlab has improved tremendously in the last 18 months. I just wish they would be a little more up-front about their marketing efforts. |
In Groundbreaking Decision, Feds Say Hacking DRM to Fix Electronics Is Legal | Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18303560, where the article has more background info. |
Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut (2019) | In 1891, the first electromechanical telephone exchange was invented by Almon Strowger, an undertaker. He was concerned that the human operators were diverting his customers (specifically, the wife of one of his competitors was an operator).If you think about it, every business interaction before the twentieth century was mediated by 1:1 interactions with humans, who brought their own prejudices and self-interest to it. The Stowger exchange was the start of an era of "mechanical honesty" - machines, businesses, and even government departments that could only act in one way, because any bespoke deviation was too inefficient to exist/be profitable, and so ordinary citizens could rely on them.We are coming to the end of that era. Computing power has reached the point where bespoke dishonesty and manipulation can be implemented efficiently. The public still retains the expectations of the mechanical honesty era, and is an easy mark. That has to change...[edited for punctuation] |
DigitalOcean S-1 | What is the point of DigitalOcean, Linode etc, when one can use the more reliable big cloud providers GCP/AWS/Azure.I don't think DO's offerings are strong enough to compete with the big players long term, especially in production.Seems like an exit for a later acquisition by a bigger company, like Slack with Salesforce. |
Dev corrupts NPM libs 'colors' and 'faker', breaking thousands of apps | Here's my $.02:Packages are literally remote code exec vulns in the hands of package authors. At the very least, it takes them under a minute to break your app, simply by deleting their package. Read the article. This is not the first time it's happened, and it's not going to be the last. [0]I write backends (mostly in PHP, although not exclusively), and I release a lot of my code under libre licenses. But I don't do packages. I don't want that level of control over other people's projects, it's scary as fuck. I have enough responsibilities as is.I have a mailing list for people who use my code, when an update is out they can download the .php files, 'require' them and test them before deployment, but never will I do packages.IMO, re-inventing the wheel sometimes is not the worst thing. Including code written by strangers that you haven't inspected and that they can remotely modify is. Stop using packages that are essentially wrappers around three-line Stack Overflow answers.In this case, the old-fashioned way is the better way, and you'll have a hard time convincing me otherwise.[0]: https://qz.com/646467/how-one-programmer-broke-the-internet-... |
DALL·E now available in beta | I was supposed to be making a video game, but got a bit sidetracked when DALL·E came out and made this website on the side: http://dailywrong.com/ (yes I should get SSL).It's like The Onion, but all the articles are made with GPT-3 and DALL·E. I start with an interesting DALL·E image, then describe it to GPT-3 and ask it for an Onion-like article on the topic. The results are surprisingly good. |
Map showing birthplaces of "notable people" around the world | Very nice, I'm missing the city names though :)Crazy how little women there are, it's like for our entire recorded history we have been ignoring 50% of our potential. Let's hope it gets a lot more mixed! |
Software firms across US facing tax bills that threaten survival | (I put this in a reply further down, but bringing it to the top)Previously if a company has a million dollars in revenue and spends a million dollars on the salaries of software developers, this is how their taxable income might look: 1,000,000 Revenue
- 1,000,000 Salary expense
-----------
0 Profit
The new law would instead work like this: 1,000,000 Revenue
- 200,000 1/5th Salary expense
-----------
800,000 Profit
Now the company must pay taxes on 800,000 of profit because "R&D salaries," which includes software devs, must be amortized over five years. Obviously the company has no wherewithal to pay, given that they made a million and spent a million. That's the problem. |
100K Context Windows | This is the first time I've felt like Anthropic may be a true competitor to OpenAI.I see 6 ways to improve foundation LLMs other than cost. If your product is best at one of the below, and has parity at the other 5 items, then customers will switch. I'm currently using GPT-4-8k. I regularly run into the context limit. If Claude-100K is close enough on "intelligence" then I will switch.Six Dimensions to Compare Foundation LLMs:1. Smarter models2. Larger context windows3. More input and output modes4. Lower time to first response token and to full response5. Easier prompting6. Integrations |
Chosen: A javascript plug-in that makes long select boxes user-friendly. | And yet another control that pretends to be a dropdown box, but isn't. No. I'm not complaining about the appearance or the fact that it has a search field while the real dropdown doesn't.I'm complaining about the way it responds to mouse actions: The real dropdown box, on my machine, expands the menu on mouse down after a no-doubt OS-specific delay. The fake dropdown doesn't - it only reacts on mouse up.Of course, you can't make a a control work exactly like its native counterpart - but that IMHO just means that you shouldn't even try imitating them and provide its own unique look.I really dislike nearly-native controls - they feel wrong to me.But don't get me wrong: The controls are really cool and incredibly useful. If only they didn't try to mimic the native look without quite matching it. |
N.S.A. Foils Much Internet Encryption | This is likely a minority view, but I have no problem with the NSA being able to break encryption, that's in fact part of their job. Decoding encryption has long been part of their mission. I also suspect they're not alone in terms of signals intelligence groups in having this capability.The issue to me has always been how and what data they access and store, and how it is used. |
AlphaGo Zero: Learning from scratch | I'm reminded of Eliezer Yudkowski's article "There is no fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence." Is this smoke?https://intelligence.org/2017/10/13/fire-alarm/Yes, this is not an AGI. But the hockey-stick takeoff from defeats some players, to defeats an undefeated world-champion, to defeats the version of itself that beat the world champion 100% of the time is nuts. If this happens in other domains, like finance, health, paper clip collection, the word singularity is really well chosen--we can't see past this. |
Tell HN: I let my 6-year-old daughter design my website | A few years ago, the company I work for acquired a small web agency. I was tasked with migrating their client sites to our infrastructure. One of the gems I found was https://www.jubyla.com/.After a little asking around, I learned that it was created by the daughter of one of the agency's employees.I couldn't be responsible for depriving the world of this, so I left it running. |
I spent two years launching tiny projects | Does anyone let the tax implications of launching (several) tiny projects prevent them from even starting?I know LLCs allow for pass-through taxation and you don't have to file as a business, but I get frozen by the idea that generating a few hundred dollars in revenue from some silly side project means I have to spend hours/days of my time the next Spring figuring out how to properly pay taxes on it. |
Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine | Looking back we had one CS professor who in 2007 predicted we'd all be jobless in ten years, i.e. 2017.His prediction was based on the trends he was seeing at the time. But it wasn't even AI. Instead he made this prediction because he saw the rise of no-code tools replacing software developers because managers could finally cut out the pesky "translators", i.e. software developers.I said it then and I will say it now. If your managers could specify what they need in a manner that no-code tools, or now AI, can generate the code they want, they will have to be extremely exact in their language. So exact in fact that they will need to specify a program in a click and drag interface, or in human language.Since they hire software developers to make the specification more rigid, and the managers don't seem to be getting better at this over time, why would you believe this skill set is going to go away?In essence what has happened in software development is that the level of abstraction has gone up while the machine has taken over more and more of the nitty gritty details. From punchcards, to assembly, to COBOL, C, Perl, Java, Python, Erlang, Rust.Of course I'm leaving out some languages here, but the level of abstraction has been rising.But the rigidity of what is needed to specify a program that really does what you want hasn't. Especially evidenced by the fact that recent programming language developments often have a specific area where they shine, but not raising the abstraction level that much.I'd be surprised if the next step is "Hi, I'm an ideas guy, please give me an app that does Uber, for bicycles, but better." |
French govt. says users of uBlock Origin, Signal etc. are potential terrorists | Situation in France will not end well.Both rule of law and liberal democracy are increasingly damaged. Our institutions are so weak that we are one election away from a complete disaster.Our constitution always concentrated a lot of power in the hand of the president but there is no effective counter-power left. The government set multiple precedent that violate freedom of assembly and association and parliamentary rights. I skipped a lot of authoritarian practice that happened and are still happening but the situation is egregiously badI don't say that because I am a political opponent. I voted for this government in 2017, I am a founder, I am pro business. But also I am a father of two and I would rather raise my children in a democracy.I am seriously pessimistic about this situation. EU knows and complains about Poland & Hungary but France is going to be a shitshow of a far worse magnitude. We should NOT get a pass because Macron knows how to play the game |
Cisco Acquires Splunk | I hated Splunk so much that I spent a couple days a few months ago writing a single 1200 line python script that does absolutely everything I need in terms of automatic log collection, ingestion, and analysis from a fleet of cloud instances. It pulls in all the log lines, enriches them with useful metadata like the IP address of the instance, the machine name, the log source, the datetime, etc. and stores it all in SQlite, which it then exposes to a very convenient web interface using Datasette.I put it in a cronjob and it's infinitely better (at least for my purposes) than Splunk, which is just a total nightmare to use, and can be customized super easily and quickly. My coworkers all prefer it to Splunk as well. And oh yeah, it's totally free instead of costing my company thousands of dollars a year! If I owned CSCO stock I would sell it-- this deal shows incredibly bad judgment. |
Reddit to go dark on Jan 18 to protest SOPA | Blacking out Google is one thing and something that I hope happens if all else fails. Now I'm sure blacking out Reddit will at least get a certain demographic in the U.S. to notice, but isn't this the same demographic that is already working to remove certain members of Congress for their support of SOPA? So my question: what kind of impact will this have? Certainly there won't be too many Congress members worked up over a blacked out Reddit... |
Philae comet lander wakes up | I wish Europe weren't so nuke-averse. The lander should have been powered by a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG), not solar panels. Then it would've had uninterrupted power for years and it could have been returning scientific data continuously since November.Most of the US's long distance space probes have been powered with RTGs, which don't put nearly the same kinds of limitations on mission profiles. The New Horizons mission to Pluto, for example, is powered with 10.9 kg of plutonium that provides a steady 228 watts and enough heat to prevent the kind of cold-related damage we fear happened on Philae. That mission is so far from the Sun that it wouldn't even be possible with only solar panels. |
Grooveshark co-founder, 28, found dead in home | "toxicology results would be done in two or three months"This seems like a long time, is it normal? |
Tesla Semi | Ok as a mechanic a few million questions:* What happens when a wheel seal goes? Do I have to remove all that ridiculous plastic on #2,3 axels??* What happens when a tire blows? Is it going to destroy all that plastic and take out a few more tires in the process?* Why all the glass? I've spend entire days replacing windshields for a 12 or so truck shop which generally come in two (drivers and passengers), the Tesla semi would require a crane and expensive replacements.* Why is there no bumper or frame attachment points? Bumpers save the truck from damage, no one wants to buy $xxxxx front end, lights, etc when a deer in the bushes jumps into the middle of the road.Honestly from my point of view it seems Tesla tried to apply personal EV to a semi. Did they do any research from tractor shops or mechanics? There is a HUGE reason tractor/trailers are easy to service. |
Project Gutenberg blocks access from Germany | Can someone in Germany confirm this block is actually in place?In any case, if anyone in Germany would like to access Project Gutenberg, I maintain a full, daily updated mirror here: https://mirrors.sorengard.com/gutenberg. I also support FTP and Rsync if you’d like to download that way.No donations are asked for, but it would be helpful if more people hosted mirrors for precisely this reason :). Unfortunately this mirror doesn’t have the search capabilities of the Project Gutenberg homepage, but it at least has all the files.Now I’m actually curious about what is going to happen with Project Gutenberg mirrors. In general, many mirror admins (such as myself) join a project’s mirror mailing list and don’t necessarily pay attention to the right announcements to learn about this kind of legal minutia. That presents something of a logistics problem all around.Putting aside ethics, it’s likely that many/most downstream mirrors simply won’t block German traffic. Project Gutenberg can stop redirecting German traffic to those mirrors on the fly, but they can’t stop the mirrors from being available unless they start banning mirrors (and mirror syncing traffic) that don’t enforce similar blocks...this seems logistically untenable.It would be cool if we could get a lawyer to chime in about Project Gutenberg’s liability with respect to forcing other mirrors to comply. For example, I’m making my own mirror available to Germany. Is Project Gutenberg complicit in a meaningful sense, if they allow me to continue mirroring? |
New youtube-dl release: v2020.11.01.1 | I had never heard of youtube-dl prior to this whole saga. But I used it for the first time yesterday and it works great.So maybe I should thank the RIAA for clueing me in! |
Piano teacher gets copyright claim for Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata [video] | I've already stated this many times, I'll state it again.Get your shit out of YouTube and any other Google product.Google is a dumb, faceless, fully automated company only interested in extracting as much data as possible from its users, force them to swallow as many ads as possible, all without caring about listening to them (both consumers and creators), under the faulty assumption that they're too big for users and consumers to live without them. They simply don't deserve anybody using their shitty products anymore.The error in this case is quite obvious. YouTube's scanner incorrectly identified the teacher's recording of Moonlight Sonata as a copyrighted reinterpretation of the same piece of music originally written by a guy who actually died 200 years ago. And I can't completely put the blame on Google's AI: the notes are technically the same, the beat might also be the same, if you calculate an FFT of the audio you'll probably also come up with similar spectral signatures. But a human listener will IMMEDIATELY notice that was played by the teacher IS NOT the the same as the copyrighted piece of music.The problem is: who is accountable for these mistakes? Who shall I reach out to if Google's foggy algorithms make a mistake? And, in the case of educators and creators who actually do that for a job, who will compensate them for the revenue they have lost because of algorithmic errors?Until Google can provide an answer to these questions, I repeat: keep your ass away from anything that has their name on it. They are not reliable, the risk of losing your data, your account or your followers because of random automated decision is very high, and the probability of getting a real human to assist you is very low. |
My full statement regarding DOOM Eternal | This is really disappointing to read. Mick's soundtrack was a huge part of making DOOM 2016 and Eternal such great experiences.His talk at GDC where he goes into some of the process of creating the soundtrack is fantastic, so much fun to see the creativity he brought to the game's music.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4FNBMZsqrYThe next DOOM will be a little less DOOMy without him. |
I criticized Amazon’s policies in a blog – their lawyers have subpoenaed me | NOTE: I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. This is for informational and entertainment purposes onlyEveryone seems to be conflating the California AG requests with Amazons.I parsed more closely about what the ask here is, and its that Amazon is asking via separate motions for the same information given to the AG case which, due to how discovery works, they should already have, this to me reads as an attempt to press Molson legally and thus spend time and money on complying with these requests.They're also asking for additional information above what the CA AG office asked for or may have considered immaterial to their case. Its a fishing exercise to see if they can find anything to discredit Molson as a witness.Due to the wording in the thread, I found it confusing, but I read some of the posted pics of the asks, and its clear that Amazon is not only re-asking for what the CA AG office asked for, but also additional information. The wording makes it seem like only the AG office is asking for information.EDIT: Also, i see some folks think this is a situation where someone is being sued. Nowhere does it say Molson is being sued, Molson is essentially alleging that this is an overreach of discovery[0] via being "buried" by it. Molson has apparently confused a subpoena with a lawsuit howeverEDIT 2: I think Molson is conflating a few things (such as lawsuit vs subpoena) and I can't say I blame anyone, the legal system is complex and it can be really hard to remember these things under pressure. Its important to look at the posted documents more than anything, Molson was subpoenaed to provide discovery and I think Molson may have conflated that with a "lawsuit"EDIT 3: Given this is Twitter, he may have meant something like being served in a lawsuit or meant subpoena and not lawsuit without realizing and can't edit the tweets. I still think we can give Molson the benefit of the doubt here[0]: https://codes.findlaw.com/ca/code-of-civil-procedure/ccp-sec... |
An interactive intro to CRDTs | CRDTs seem like one of these things that are mentioned on here frequently, but I haven't seen that many popular apps that use them. Any examples? |
The new MacBook | This is a beautiful machine. Once again, Apple excels at hardware.But what the living hell is going wrong with Apple's desktop software? OS X and Apple's applications suite have been getting steadily worse with every release. Look at the App store: the latest releases of OS X, iPhoto, iMovie, Pages, and Numbers are (in stark contrast to earlier versins) all rated at 2.5/5 stars, with the plurality being 1-star reviews. People are LIVID -- and not just for trivial NOOB reasons, either: the quality of the work is frankly shoddy. Who's steering that part of the ship??? |
How the Singapore Circle Line rogue train was caught with data | This is going straight into my favourite bug-hunting stories, along with the 500-Mile Email: https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html |
European Commission fines Google €4.34B in Android antitrust case | This is a dangerous ruling that pushes the world further into the potential for trade wars by proxy.Contrary to numerous posts--no, the law isn't "clear". This is an incredibly nuanced situation, and the notion that Google was just overtly flouting (ed: thx sjcsjc) the law is outright nonsense. Google has a huge litany of bad practices (I personally recently switched my daily driver to an iPhone for that reason), but simply saying "Surprise....enormous fine" is ridiculous.-the fine is enormous. Various "well it's only a quarter's earnings across all of Google" are outrageous. Over 6 years Google spent a grand total of $1.1B in all expenses for Waymo, for instance. $5B is an enormous, enormous amount of money for any company.I highly doubt this will be a "pay it and forget it" fine, but is going to ring across all multinationals as a warning. |
Burning out and quitting | For me, I've started feeling like I'm close to burnout. But quitting doesn't really seem like a helpful option.Could I actually take months off recovering? No. I'd have to immediately start leetcoding and remembering what all those trees are for so that I could become employed again later on. And risk having to take a job that pays way less than before.Which brings me to my main point: I don't see an option where the work ever actually truly ends. There's always more. Always things I need to be doing. And until I have enough to retire, I have to keep grinding.Vacation doesn't help. It just puts me farther behind. |
HackerRank (YC S11) DMCA'ed the SymPy Docs [fixed] | Hello, I'm Vivek, founder/CEO of HackerRank. Our intention with this initiative is to takedown plagiarized code snippets or solutions to company assessments. This was definitely an unintended consequence. We are looking into it ASAP and also going to do an RCA to ensure this doesn't happen again.Sorry, everyone!EDIT: update here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31092085 |
The most unethical thing I was asked to build while working at Twitter in 2015 | “We should know when users leave their house, their commute to work, and everywhere they go throughout the day. Anything less is useless. We get a lot more than that from other tech companies.”This should be posted absolutely everywhere with this as the hook. This type of request and the admittance that companies give even more than that all the time is headline news worthy. |
How Hacker News ranking really works: scoring, controversy, and penalties | Hilarious that the original article was flagged off the front page, but this one isn't...I find it very disheartening that the negative voices are being given so much weight. Everything that's worth doing will have detractors, and when it's something really worth doing it will have vocal detractors. Back when I had comments on my blog, every article I wrote that was any good had at least one person commenting that I was a moron or some equivalent statement.Great things arouse passion - on both sides.Giving 10x the power to the people on the negative side just creates an environment where new ideas are discouraged, where important but difficult discourse is pushed aside, where things of true import are penalised out of the group's attention by a few detractors.There does need to be a system for flagging and removing spam articles, but if this system can (as it plainly regularly is) be co-opted to remove articles from sight just based on not liking them much, then it is broken. The people who have flagging powers are not responsible enough to use them wisely, perhaps.I see at least one simple solution: lift the flagging privileges so it only becomes available to a much smaller segment of the population. Perhaps making the limit 10'000 instead of 500 would do that. That would still include hundreds of people, based on a quick extrapolation from https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders ). An even better model would be to make it dynamic - perhaps the top 200 commenters... |
Hidden backdoor API to root privileges in Apple OS X | With physical access, one has been able to create admin accounts for as long as I can remember.- Start up the Mac whilst holding down ⌘-S. This boots the Mac into Single-User Mode and provides a method of interacting with OS X via the command-line, with full root privileges.- Then check the filesystem to ensure there are no problems: "/sbin/fsck -fy"- Then mount the filesystem for it to be accessible: "/sbin/mount -uw /"- Now remove this file so OS X will re-run Setup Assistant: "rm /var/db/.AppleSetupDone"Now just restart, and enjoy the cool introduction animation as you create your admin account. |
Public protest against Amazon | This may seem mean, and feel free to argue with me and prove my statement below wrong.Well, which was it? Was he taking his daughter to therapy or working from home? If his daughter requires additional care, he needs to care for his daughter, but that can't interfere with work. If your kids are not disabled, they may not be interfering with your work, and therefore, when you are working from home - you are, in fact, "working" from home.Why is this person entitled to being paid to "work at home" when he's not actually "working" while at home, he's actually caring for his daughter?People are confused. Working from home still means "working". It doesn't mean, be at home and do what I want but get paid, or not work as hard.Maybe he thinks it should mean: I'll get the work done on my own time. But, if the work needs to be done that day, he still needs to be WORKING from home - and not doing something else. |
Mathigon – an interactive, personalized mathematics textbook | It really feels like we're on the cusp of a textbook similar to the Primer in Neal Stephenson's 'The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer'.As in, something that learns your interests and customizes to your tastes while still teaching. A textbook that is able to diagnose common misunderstandings from a set of wrong answers to a problem set and evolve its teaching methods.If advertising networks have effectively personalized propaganda on Facebook and whatnot and games like The Walking Dead are able to change script based on popular choices made by all players, we should be able to apply the same technology to personalized learning at scale. |
U.S. will suspend all travel from Europe for 30 days | Regardless of the ability of people to travel to the UK or Canada and get here (which people have done for a long time with other nations we don't take kindly to) it's absolutely going to reduce the number of people who will travel across the pond. Which is the goal, reduce infection rates.My concern is how economies are going to respond to the US being cut off from Continental ports for a month, which as far as I can tell hasn't happened since U boats were in open waters.Can anyone comment on supply chains that rely on Europe to source goods? I know medical grade steel comes from over there, but I don't know what else.Edit: apparently the president misspoke. |
Higher quality audio makes people sound smarter | It's also really easy to have high quality audio! The author recommends a "podcasting" microphone, but a $35 standalone headset mic[1] is almost as good and much easier to use. If you want to hear a comparison, I got kind of obsessed with this problem at one point and took some comparison recordings here[2].(You need a standalone mic since most headsets, even really nice ones, have really bad mics because most headset buyers don't care about or even know how good their mic sounds. The one I linked is wired because wireless is evil[3] and in particular, Bluetooth will silently degrade your audio quality. If you want a pair of wired headphones, I like these[4] which are "open back" and therefore sound more natural + cool your ears better, although the open back also means they "leak" sound and are only suitable for working without people next to you. But you shouldn't be having calls with people next to you anyway!)[1]: https://www.amazon.com/V-MODA-BoomPro-Microphone-Gaming-Comm...[2]: https://www.benkuhn.net/vc/#get-a-better-microphone[3]: https://www.benkuhn.net/wireless/[4]: https://www.amazon.com/Philips-SHP9500S-Precision-Over-ear-H... |
Printing a wall-sized world map and what I've learned from it | This guy "loves world maps" but chose Mercator for the wall of his room? I guess there's no accounting for taste. There are hundreds of projections to choose from, why choose the one optimized for navigation by compass? |
Crypto 101 – Introductory course on cryptography | When I was taking Aikido, there was a day when the sensei was going through all of our techniques and showed how the uke (initiator of the attack, receiver of the technique) could turn things around on the tori. (receiver of the attack, initiator of the technique) It seemed like there were a half dozen ways each that a technique could go seriously wrong, and that many of them didn't require much skill, only determination and the opportunity provided by a mistake. That day made me question the validity of the entire notion of self defense.I wonder if there shouldn't be a software engineering class where people try to set up a secure web app, with their own homegrown algorithms and protocols, which is then attacked by a tiger team which includes a conspirator on the inside? Perhaps there are such classes now. |
Facebook quitters report more life satisfaction, less depression and anxiety | What gave me the most satisfaction is quitting the news. Incidentally I don't have or use any social media either. Except imgur and sometimes among the funny memes I get news.But I'm afraid for people I meet who always remind me of all the awful things they've seen in the news. I'm aware of none of this until someone tells me.And yet my life is the same as everyone elses. Not knowing what is going on, living in a country with a high standard of living and personal safety, doesn't affect me at all. |
Show HN: I wrote a book about Go | Hello all,After 2.5 years of writing, countless weekends and evenings, I released a book about the Go programming language.The book is available for free on the website because I wanted to give something back to the developer's community :)It is composed of 700+ pages, 41 chapters, and approximately 405 drawings/screenshots.I tried to cover all the important topics that a new Go programmer should know.At the end of each chapter, you can find a small Q/A and a bullet point list of key notions.I would love to hear your feedback about it! |
SvelteKit 1.0 | This is how I move fast and break nothing. By having fullstack type-safety from database all the way to the frontend with auto-completion. My current stack:+ SvelteKit (could be Next, Nuxt, Solid or any other TypeScript framework)+ tRPC (typed calls between frontend and backend, https://trpc.io)+ trpc-sveltekit (glues SvelteKit and tRPC, https://github.com/icflorescu/trpc-sveltekit)+ Prisma (ORM, https://www.prisma.io) |
The FTC wants to ban tough-to-cancel subscriptions | These things are insane. I tried to cancel a month-to-month gym membership from a small local gym, and they told me "cancellations become effective on the 1st of the following month" and "require two months advance notice" thereby effectively charging me for three additional months after I gave notice. Apparently, this was all in the agreement I signed, although it was written so unclear, that nobody would even suspect this is how they interpret it.I told them if you don't cancel it effective right now I am posting this dishonest predatory practice on every social media and review site in town, as well as telling all of my friends I met in here what you are doing, and asking them to please quit in protest. I'll also be doing a credit card chargeback, and a small claims court case to recover the time it takes me to deal with all of this. I will also take action to recover my back membership fees, because they repeatedly failed to maintain equipment in a usable condition, so I didn't get what I paid for. They did concede, and canceled it immediately. |
We’re all just temporarily abled | One of the best things I ever did was get strong through a basic barbell training program called Starting Strength.Squat, deadlift, overhead press, bench press, chinups, eat, sleep. It really is that easy.Highly recommend it for anyone interested.1. Any back pain I had disappeared completely.2. When I have to lift something awkward (eg, furniture), I don't injure myself. If you can deadlift 200KG, awkwardly leaning over your lawn mower to grab a 20KG bag of concrete is pretty easy.3. It is really really handy being able to move heavy things.4. Basically everything else improves. Going for a tough hike uphill? Your legs will be a lot less sore if you can squat 150KG. Need to hold your screaming baby for 40 minutes? Easy! |
World | It's spinning in the wrong direction! |
Scenic Tram Simulator | Loved it. Does anyone get smooth scrolling, or does the animation stutter even on high end machines? Not complaining, just trying to figure out if I have the wrong settings for my PC. |
I almost lost my hearing from the lid on the tank of a toilet | My hearing was ACTUALLY permanently damaged when a sticky iron weight fell on a leg press machine at a 24-hour fitness about 5 years ago.The weights looked like these: http://www.presentationzen.com/.a/6a00d83451b64669e201156eb4...One extra weight slab was "stuck" to the group that was supposed to get lifted. It was stuck because the weights at the gym were grimy from many years of use without being cleaned. The extra slab, when it reached the top, finally detached and slid down maybe 20-30 inches, and made a sound that everyone in the gym heard, but right next to my ear. A few people even made angry faces at me for being a noisy lifter.Ever since then, to this day, I have had tinnitus in that ear, and many sounds come in like "static", for lack of a better explanation.All I can say is be careful with those weights if they get sticky, and if they are near your ear... |
Adblocking: How about Nah? | I don't actually want to block ads. If you want to put a small text or image blurb anywhere on the page... Good for you. I'll gladly accept those on a webpage so that the content creator can make a bit of cash.But these companies are intentionally blurring the lines between advertisement and digital surveillance. You don't need to collect everything about my operating system, browser, monitors, GPU, every click I make on every website I visit, etc.That's crossing a line of what "advertisement" means. So the more these "advertisers" work to blur those lines the more their "ads" will be blocked under the umbrella of those who don't want this level of pervasive tracking and surveillance. |
Deconstructing Google’s excuses on tracking protection | Google's original post is super gross. It dismisses the idea that there could be alternate ways to fund content (i.e. micropayments). I get why they promote "free content" but it is not free at all when you are trading your attention and privacy.Further, their privacy sandbox sounds like it would just monopolize the advertising space to them. If they don't allow advertisers to collect data, that takes control away from advertisers and centralizes it to their ad market platform.The post also creates some weird false dichotomy between cookies and fingerprinting. Let's just block both, yea? That's what is best for the user, and probably best for the web in the long term.We absolutely need a new funding model for the web (to kill ads). The biggest barrier I see are the high transaction fees of digital transactions (30 cents + 2.9%). I don't know if the solution will be Brave, Libra, or something else entirely. Whatever it is, it can't come soon enough. |
Boris Johnson uses search terms in interviews to hide negative articles? | This is actually fascinating (even if it may not be the behavior we expect from our elected leaders). He did the same thing in June where he gave a completely baffling interview [1] about how his hobby was painting models of buses out of used fruit crates.But people suspected [2] then that it might be a similar strategy, to monopolize the results for "boris johnson bus" searches.I wonder why nobody else is willing to do this? It seems like it works, and it keeps you in the news...[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLcCZjDoWTQ[2] https://gizmodo.com/did-boris-johnson-ramble-about-model-bus... |
Stripe Treasury | Hi everyone, I’m Tara, PM on Stripe Treasury. Treasury is a banking-as-a-service API for platforms—built in partnership with the world’s leading banks. Embed interest-earning accounts, bill pay, ACH and wire transfers, and faster access to revenue directly in your platform. Happy to answer any questions here—and I’d love to hear your feedback! |
Let’s fix font size | > Specify it in pixelsNo thank you.I regularly wonder if it might not be better for the web if we got rid of pixels as a unit entirely. We can't realistically do that for a lot of reasons, and there are legitimate reasons to use pixels sometimes, but resolution independent font-size and container sizing should be the default. If you are using pixels on the web for font sizes, consider this a public intervention that you need to stop.The fact that `em` units are not related to physical size attributes is intended. We don't want them to be related to physical size -- what `2em` is saying is that you want a piece of text to be twice as large as the "default" size of the specific font on the platform/device. That is a superior way to think about text size, because as a user I don't want you to try and figure out what the pixel density or screen ratio or resolution of my device is.Size your fonts with `em` and `rem` units, and size your containers based on the number of characters you want to fit in each line. Don't use pixels. It doesn't matter if your fonts are bigger on Mac or Windows. It is intentional that platforms can size their fonts differently, and your interface designs should take that into account.If anything, native platforms should be moving more in this direction, they should not be moving away from it. There was a period where you could decide to only care about responsive design on the web, but increasingly you should be thinking about responsive design on native platforms too. And resolution-independent font-sizes based on the user/platform are part of that process.EDIT: Yes, I'm aware that pixels on the web are not necessarily 1:1 ratios with physical pixels on a screen. That doesn't change anything, pixels are still bad to use on the web. Tying font size to resolution, whether that's browser window resolution or physical resolution, is still equally problematic. And it certainly doesn't mean that we should move in the opposite direction on native devices -- the web's pixels are the way they are because the alternative, being tied to literal physical pixels, would be even worse. |
Network Solutions Auto-Enroll: $1,850 | I have an account with Network Solutions that they will not let me cancel without calling their sales team. I do not have an active credit card on file with them nor do I have any domains or hosting services. They send me e-mails every month trying to bill me for something that I haven't signed up for with language indicating that I'm about to "lose" my services (that don't exist) if I don't pay.They're terrible.It fascinates me because I wonder who the leadership team is and what the company culture is like. Do they decide to be terrible by sitting around in meetings brainstorming ways to screw their customers? |
DeepMind and Blizzard to release StarCraft II as an AI research environment | I suspect this will eventually lead to AI as a service for games. Rather than build a terrible AI that delays a game by months, approaching a company that can build a decent AI initially which gets better overtime would probably be ideal and create better experiences.Im curious if a startup can be built from this. |
Boss as a Service – Hire a boss, get stuff done | This was on HN once before - when it was, I signed up, because I struggle with prioritizing things that I need to do in my personal life over my professional life. (Hair cut, clean car, dentist, what have you.) I figured I didn't have anything to lose, really.Manasvini, who emails me regularly from the service, has been nothing but wonderful. Every email I've gotten has been encouraging and positive, and it honestly helps keep me accountable.I really can't thank Manasvini enough for that. Never once has there been any scolding, nagging, or negativity - just gracious reminders and a good attitude.(Manasvini, if you're reading this - thanks for putting up with me, and always being helpful getting me back on track, even when I manage to completely derail myself.) |
Barnes and Noble's surprising turnaround | It seems like the key insight is that bookstores are no longer places to get books.If I want a specific book, I already know where to go: the internet. No physical store is ever going to compete on inventory ever again. Amazon will eat you alive.I go to bookstores to discover new books, and to enjoy the feeling of being around books and the people who love them. The CEO realized this, and leaned in hard.It's a really, really smart recognition of when passion for the product is actually a business advantage, and not just a warm fuzzy.It's very hard to do good recommendations -- even for Amazon/Goodreads! -- without people who care about what they're recommending. Those recommendations are now a bookstore's real product. |
CDC File Transfer | Content Defined Chunking is one of my favorite algorithms because it has some "magic" similar to HyperLogLogs, Bloom filters, etc... This algorithm is good to explain to people, to get them inspired by computer science. I usually explain the simplest variant with rolling hashes.It is interesting what the result will be (average saving on deduplication) if it is applied globally to a large-scale blob storage, such as Amazon S3 or Google Drive (we need metadata storage about chunks, and the chunks can be deduplicated).PS. I don't use this algorithm in ClickHouse, but it always remains tempting. |
Google is discontinuing Inbox | Inbox changed my relationship with email and it is unbelievably frustrating to hear it is being shuttered. I was a better digital person because of the app: I never forgot to reply, I kept years of ideas and small notes in reminders, and I could quickly triage and clear all incoming mail.These things in particular made Inbox stand out:* UI - simple, uncluttered mobile and desktop experience with uncomplicated keyboard shortcuts. It even had the little things like a satisfying sun animation when your inbox was empty! Desktop Gmail has a surfeit of widgets and add-on icons that perplex, distract, and confuse.* Bundles - especially for trips: all the relevant emails I needed, in one place—unbelievably useful while traveling. All tickets and information aggregated automatically (and if not, easily added manually).* Reminders / Compose access - fast interface for creating small notes and mailing frequently contacted people. No reminders equivalent in Gmail (Tasks are available on Desktop but not mobile) and the mobile compose on Gmail is a blank email.* Pinning - sticky a reminder or email for easy access and reference later. I guess gmail's equivalent is marking as important or moving to inbox?In any event, if any of the Inbox team are reading this: big THANK YOU for creating a revolutionary product that was a joy to use. I already submitted feedback through the app wishing it would continue but if there is anything further I can do please share how! |
A Dutch graphic artist reconstructed Tenochtitlan in 3D | Hey all, author here!If you have any questions, feel free to ask.
The question I always get from tech people - yes, all open source software.
90% Blender, 9% Gimp, 1% Darktable or so. |
The 500-mile email (2002) | 1 year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=81764582 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=62962013 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38024584 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31143915 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12936526 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3850687 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=123489 |
Microsoft Launches Its .NET Distribution for Linux and Mac | F# is a real breath of fresh air in comparison to something like Scala. It's direct ML heritage really shows, also just diving in with an IDE (like Xamarin, or I suppose Visual Studio) is super easy.I see it as the future of pop-functional programming. For example look at the way it handles type inference w/ JSON parsing. Compare that to what you have to do to parse JSON in Scala. It's subtle, but a major usability win. |
Seaweed in Cow Feed Reduces Methane Emissions Almost Entirely | It will be interesting to see how this plays out, because right now the West coast from San Francisco North to at least Fort Bragg, has been suffering a kelp die off of great proportions.No one is quite sure whats going on, but apparently due to climate change, or at least warmer ocean water from further South that we've had for the last 5 or more years, has caused the kelp to die off at a rapid rate, to the point of denuding whole sections of ocean bottom.The whole sea urchin industry has been devastated, and those folks received Federal Disaster funds last year to make it through this year, but things are still bleak.It's as big a catastrophe as the Australian coral die off, yet it's not getting much press here in the USA. |
Julia 1.0 | Reading through the docs, looks like they have 1-indexed arrays..? |
Cloudflare S-1 | > We have a history of net losses and may not be able to achieve or sustain profitability in the future.I never got this... Why go public if you literally say you won't make money?Who would buy stock in something that will not return a positive?Are they starving for money and hope some public trading gets them a boost?Edit:
It seems to be following the same pattern as the other tech IPOs recently, just to cash out the early investors. |
Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985) | Goal-oriented work, creativity and motivation definitely have a difficult relationship.In programming, I learn the most things simply by experimenting at home on my own. I'm thinking about switching jobs, so I wanted to learn some new frameworks and concepts to help with that, and I decided to make my personal projects a bit more "professional". Use continuous integration, focus more on web stuff, build and automatically deploy containers and so on.Big mistake. I don't want to spend my leisure time fighting with tools, debugging build processes that break all the time, make sense of docker's tagging system and so on. I don't mind programming all day, because I love programming, but I do mind working all day.So I let it go. I'll come up with my own tools. They won't be great, but I'll have fun making them. And then it'll feel nice using them. And then I'll work on whatever excites me.Once in a while someone will ask me "how do you know all these things?" and my answer has always been "I don't know that much, I just randomly got interested in this particular topic and decided to play around with it". Over the years/decades, that adds up! |
MIT-designed project achieves major advance toward fusion energy | Plenty of skepticism in these comments. I've been following CFS for a while and can present a point of view for why this time might be different.Fusion energy was actually making rapid progress in the latter half of the twentieth century, going from almost no power output in the fifties and sixties to a power output equal to 67% of input power with the JET reactor in 1997. By the eighties there was plenty of experimental evidence to describe the relationships between tokamak parameters and power output. Particularly that the gain is proportional to the radius to the power of 1.3 and the magnetic field cubed. The main caveat to this relationship was that we only had magnets that would go up to 5.5 Tesla, which implied we needed a tokamak radius of 6 meters or so in order to produce net energy.Well that 6 meter tokamak was designed in the eighties and is currently under construction. ITER, being so large, costs tens of billions of dollars and requires international collaboration; the size of the project has led to huge budget overruns and long delays. Recently however, there have been significant advances in high-temperature super conductors that can produce magnetic fields large enough that we (theoretically) only need a tokamak with a major radius of about 1.5 meters to produce net gain. This is where SPARC (the tokamak being built by the company in the article) comes in. The general idea is that since we have stronger magnets now, we can make a smaller, and therefore cheaper tokamak quickly.Small tokamaks do have downsides, namely that the heat flux through the walls of the device is so large that it will damage the tokamak. There have been breakthroughs with various divertor designs that can mitigate this, but to the best of my knowledge I'm not sure that CFS has specified their divertor configuration.This was just a short summary of the presentation by Dennis Whyte given here [0]. I do not work in the fusion community.[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4 |
How to Get Startup Ideas | One thing I've noticed that has generated a ton of ideas, particularly within the hospital setting I'm in, is to listen to all the questions staff members ask one another. Who's doing that? When's this happening? How do I do that? etc. They're all seemingly mundane questions that get asked on a daily basis, but they give you great insight to the daily frustrations that people have come to accept (that's why they're boring everyday questions). They also often shed light on a lot of the accessory tasks people endure in order to accomplish their main job.As an example: in a hospital, we have the "sign out sheet" which is a list of the current patients and all of their important data. These sheets are usually manually updated and it's a very, very tedious task; you've got to make sure all the dosages are current, and they're already in the system! Anyway, I kept noticing the residents would ask one another if they had updated the sheet and realized this was a pain-point that's become an accepted part of the day-to-day medical routine. That's just one example.Good problems don't have to elicit noticeable frustration. In fact, I'd say many of the best problems around are ones that have pushed people past frustration and into acceptance. |
Atom Is Now Open Source | I wonder why it wasn't this way from the get-go... Oh well, at least I'm actually interested in it now. Can't wait for the Linux version to try it out. Pumped that they did the right thing and open-sourced it so that it actually has a chance of becoming widespread, and more importantly, of sticking around for longer than a couple years.Good on you, Atom.io devs |
List of Sites Affected by Cloudflare's HTTPS Traffic Leak | Just got this classy spam from dyn.com. Wonder if they're going through this list emailing every domain contact.> As you may be aware, Cloudflare incurred a security breach where user data from 3,400 websites was leaked and cached by search engines as a result of a bug. Sites affected included major ones like Uber, Fitbit, and OKCupid.> Cloudflare has admitted that the breach occurred, but Ormandy and other security researchers believe the company is underplaying the severity of the incident …> This incident sheds light and underlines the vulnerability of Cloudflare's network. Right now you could be at continued risk for security and network problems. Here at Dyn, we would like to extend a helpful hand in the event that your network infrastructure has been impacted by today's security breach or if the latest news has you rethinking your relationship with Cloudflare.> Let me know if you would be interested in having a conversation about Dyn's DNS & Internet performance solutions.> I look forward to hearing back from you. |
React 16 | We're really excited about this release. I also wrote about how we made the rewrite happen on our Facebook engineering blog: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15339825.Happy to answer questions if y'all have any. :) |
It's later than you think | Remember that performative workaholism is poison to life. Every time you put in more hours over the weekend "just because", dial in to a meeting on your vacation, or get on Slack at 10 PM "just to check a few things" - you're shifting the culture to make it that much more acceptable to demand it of everyone. The parents in your meetings that run until 7:30 bitterly hate you.It might seem OK when you're single, childless, etc. but once that time starts coming from your family you will realize what a prison you've built yourself.STOP IT. STOP IT RIGHT NOW. |
The FCC Has Fined Robocallers $208M, Collected $6,790 | A lot of people point out that telecom companies should do something but aren't because it's lucrative for them or too expensive to fix.Are telecom companies not realizing how much they are hurting themselves with this in the long term? People will stop using phone numbers altogether. Using the phone has become such a pain, at least in the US, that whenever I can, I used different ways of communicating. WhatsApp, iMesage, Skype, etc. The incessant robocalls have definitely motivated me to move away from traditional phone calls faster than I would otherwise.Lastly, maybe this is what these companies want, i.e., that I just use their data plan, but then that makes me way less likely to stay loyal. |
Lessons learned building an ML trading system | After having spent an insane amount of time in late 2017/2018 building an HFT bot for Binance I can say this is a pretty solid article.In our case we were doing triangle trading between BTC/ETH/USDT pairs and had our buys/sell delay down to 3-7ms. At one point moving 0.3-0.7% of Binance’s daily volume.Few notes:* Finding an objective point of truth for value when all of the currencies are floating is hard but vital to success. This was the hardest problem we encountered. We tried taking the realtime average of BTC and ETH across all exchanges, we tried tying it to the shortest route to USD, and several other routes... but ultimately this is where we ended up “losing” most of our alpha.* Order books are seemingly simple but the devil is in the details. This especially matters for paper trading.* Efficiently using API limits at exchanges is an optimization problem in and of itself.* Our model was relatively simple but we focused on speed and edge cases. For instance Binance would rotate IPs on their load balancers and we’d constantly check the latency between each open SSL connection and use the fastest. Further we wouldn’t decode the buy response to plaintext we’d just read the raw stream.After several epic months our entire project fell apart after a cryptic phone call about “institutional access” that didn’t follow the 1s websocket update. The access was quiet expensive and we said no to it and shortly after all of our strategies went to crap.Best we could tell someone was front running us due to an artificial delay for our account (delay between trades went to ~20ms up from our prior steady speed of 3-7ms) and/or a bunch of the trades in the orderbook were bogus.Frustrated we tried our strategy on another account and the delay dropped again to our normal range and was profitable again (the orderbooks were slightly different between bots!).It was in that moment we realized playing in unregulated markets is not fun or something we wanted to continue to do. Intermediary risk was something we didn’t account for.Further we realized that there will always been a better resourced or more dedicated team willing to fight you for your alpha.After months of effort and a ton of fun we decided it was best we went back and focused on a problem where we could build a long term competitive advantage.Edit: typos and formatting |
Level 3 Global Outage | Has anyone any good resources for learning more about the "internet-level" infrastructure affected today and how global networks are connected? |
Rust Moderation Team Resigns | I don't believe proper free software projects require significant moderation of behavior between individuals.If someone says something that rises to the level of a crime, report it to your local authorities.Otherwise, if a person is generally toxic enough, they will be worked around.Note that expelling a person from a project for being a jerk in one or more instances may do more harm than good. What is the value of their technical contributions? Just how much of a jerk were they?Unfortunately, some snowflakes like to believe that everyone contributes equally. That is simply not the case. And, in fact, some people contribute a _negative_ amount overall. Which is to say, the project is better off without their participation.Linux has changed the world -- in a very substantial way and much for the better -- even though Linus flew off the handle at people for years. That doesn't mean he is completely beyond criticism, but it does indicate to me that we need to put a significant check in place against these "feelings committees." Their sensibilities are becoming ever more delicate.You can't have a complex technical project that is successful without some minimum level of competency. For better or worse, competency often makes people a little rougher around the edges.Choose your tradeoff carefully.edit: Adding an addendum here because of a lot of people seem quite triggered by the use of the word toxic and frankly, I don't have time to reply to all of you.I used the word toxic in this post precisely once, to say that people who are toxic enough will be worked around.Toxicity is not a yes/no question. It's a matter of degree and context. So is technical contribution.Everyone is capable of saying things they will regret later. Some people are capable of saying things that everyone else will regret, frequently.With regards to "competency" and "rough around the edges" -- note I used the phrase "rough around the edges" and NOT toxic. Many of you seem to be making that substitution.Have the lot of you never worked with someone who knows their shit, is opinionated, and isn't afraid to let you know it? They're often intimidating, even if they don't mean to be. Submitting a PR for review to them can be nervewracking even if they are entirely nice about it. Sometimes a fair critique will cut a little deeper because the code is your baby, and they didn't sugarcoat it enough for your liking. And, once in a while, they're willing to get in a heated debate because they feel strongly about something.The very nature of being critical (which is required for quality code) is enough to provoke some unwanted emotions in other people. Even if those negative emotions aren't intended. And sometimes, getting into a heated argument about something is justified if it saves a lot of pain later.Somehow, there is a lot of triggering going on here, and not a lot of acknowledgement of nuance. |
Dragonflydb – A modern replacement for Redis and Memcached | Guys, I am the author of the project. Would love to answer any questions you have. Meanwhile will try to do it by replying comments below. |
GitHub Copilot, with “public code” blocked, emits my copyrighted code | Howdy, folks. Ryan here from the GitHub Copilot product team. I don’t know how the original poster’s machine was set-up, but I’m gonna throw out a few theories about what could be happening.If similar code is open in your VS Code project, Copilot can draw context from those adjacent files. This can make it appear that the public model was trained on your private code, when in fact the context is drawn from local files. For example, this is how Copilot includes variable and method names relevant to your project in suggestions.It’s also possible that your code – or very similar code – appears many times over in public repositories. While Copilot doesn’t suggest code from specific repositories, it does repeat patterns. The OpenAI codex model (from which Copilot is derived) works a lot like a translation tool. When you use Google to translate from English to Spanish, it’s not like the service has ever seen that particular sentence before. Instead, the translation service understands language patterns (i.e. syntax, semantics, common phrases). In the same way, Copilot translates from English to Python, Rust, JavaScript, etc. The model learns language patterns based on vast amounts of public data. Especially when a code fragment appears hundreds or thousands of times, the model can interpret it as a pattern. We’ve found this happens in 150 characters that match public data. If you’re not already using the filter, I recommend turning it on by visiting the Copilot tab in user settings.This is a new area of development, and we’re all learning. I’m personally spending a lot of time chatting with developers, copyright experts, and community stakeholders to understand the most responsible way to leverage LLMs. My biggest take-away: LLM maintainers (like GitHub) must transparently discuss the way models are built and implemented. There’s a lot of reverse-engineering happening in the community which leads to skepticism and the occasional misunderstanding. We’ll be working to improve on that front with more blog posts from our engineers and data scientists over the coming months. |
Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI | Imagine thinking that regression based function approximators are capable of anything other than fitting the data you give it. Then imagine willfully hyping up and scaring people who don't understand, and because it can predict words you take advantage of the human tendency to anthropomorphize, so it follows that it is something capable of generalized and adaptable intelligence.Shame on all of the people involved in this: the people in these companies, the journalists who shovel shit (hope they get replaced real soon), researchers who should know better, and dementia ridden legislators.So utterly predictable and slimy. All of those who are so gravely concerned about "alignment" in this context, give yourselves a pat on the back for hyping up science fiction stories and enabling regulatory capture. |
Google has a secret browser hidden inside the settings | Google's increasingly cavalier attitude towards security is concerning:1) Kids WILL use this to bypass parental / school controls as soon as they learn about it2) In some contexts (especially as high-stakes test settings, but also some military/prison/finance/medical/legal/etc. settings) this IS a direct security risk3) Given the embedded browser is not secure, if a lot of kids do this, it WILL lead to someone exploiting this, and machines being compromised and escalationsAt Google scale, if 0.001% accounts are impacted by a security vulnerability, that's still tens of thousands of people (you can do the math too). I don't think engineers at Google quite have a perspective on what it means when their decisions (not just security) ruin thousands of lives.What's astounding is just how good Google's security team was, especially in comparison, maybe 15 years ago. Now, it increasingly reminds me of the path Yahoo took.Critically, issues build on each other and escalate. Most remote root exploits require overcoming multiple layers of security. Defense-in-depth is important. Google used to address issues when a single layer was breached, before they could combine into someone remotely rooting your phone. Now, Google only fixes security bugs only after they've combined into a severe remote exploit (which often means many devices are compromised before an update goes out). |
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks | The thing about neural nets is that they are pretty opaque from an analyst point of view. It's hard to figure out why they do what they do, except that they have been trained to optimize a particular cost function. I think Strong AI will never happen because the people in charge will not give control over to a system that makes important decisions without explaining why. They will certainly not give control over the cost function to a strong AI because control of determination of the cost function is the axis upon which all power will rest. |
CLI: Improved | Is anyone else impressed with the quality (and speed!) of some of the tools written in Rust? I'm an avid user of fd and bat, the former being ridiculously fast. Often I find something on github, I'm impressed by the quality of the documentation, features, UI etc, then lo and behold it's written in Rust.Another one potentially for this list is tokei[1]
I was trying to count the code in our repos at work and used the venerable 'cloc' utility. It took over 5 minutes. Looking around I found tokei, written in rust. Same-ish results (more accurate actually) took 10 seconds.1. https://github.com/Aaronepower/tokei |
Epic, Spotify, and Tinder form advocacy group to push for app store changes | Can we just link directly to the advocacy group's page (https://appfairness.org/)? I'm not certain the article is adding anything.----I'm generally supportive of at least some of Epic's arguments towards Apple, and I do believe that Apple (and multiple other FAANG companies) are engaged in anti-competitive behavior that's currently hurting the market. But a lot of the arguments I'm reading on the App Fairness site in particular seem really poorly phrased, almost to the point of being incoherent.From their objection on "user freedom":> Think about this a little differently: A box of Cheerios costs about $3.00 at Kroger, but sometimes Cheerios offers a coupon which lowers the price to $2.50 at any store that offers Cheerios. What Apple is doing is basically like Kroger telling Cheerios that they’re not allowed to offer coupons, and if they do, Cheerios is at risk of being kicked out of the cereal aisle. Consumers wouldn’t stand for this type of monopolistic behavior over their cereal, so why should they allow it for the apps used on their mobile devices?I had to think really hard what they mean by this and how it actually relates to user freedom. Most resellers are allowed to choose their own prices for goods. I don't think this analogy corresponds at all to what Apple is doing. Apple is banning apps from telling consumers in app about other purchasing options. That's a totally different objection.I'm pleased to see developers banding together, but if this is the result then I wish they'd spend more time making more reasonable, understandable arguments. If this site was my first introduction to the debate over app store policies, I think I'd probably be on Apple's side. |
EFF sues Proctorio on behalf of student falsely DMCA'd | In case you don't know who Proctorio is:(like me)Apparently it's a supervision software that students are forced to install on their private computer and (as expected) it'll do its worst to invade your privacy and flag "suspicious" things, based on which the university might punish you."Suspicious" here means wearing glasses [3] or looking around in the room or blinking too much [4] or having eye and/or skin colors [1] that are difficult for AI to track or reading questions out aloud [2]. Because everyone knows that a good student is white, sits in a bright room, and will continuously stare at his/her PC screen while thinking about a difficult math problem, I guess. WTF?I am so glad that this kind of abuse was not yet common when I was in university. I love sitting in the (dark) basement, it helps me concentrate. And I tend to close my eyes a lot because it helps me visualize the problem. I'm sure this kind of misguided software would have failed me.And the worst part is: Bugs in this software will fail students in the real world. [4]So it is crucially important that this type of software receives a lot of scrutiny to make sure it works as planned. But it seems that Proctorio is suing this guy for doing exactly that: Documenting how the software is supposed to work by linking to Proctorio's YouTube videos.[1] https://twitter.com/uhreeb/status/1303139738065481728[2] https://www.insider.com/viral-tiktok-student-fails-exam-afte...[3] https://proctorio.com/frequently-asked-questions[4] https://www.reddit.com/r/UBC/comments/g2ub05/god_kicked_out_... |
Two weeks of dealing with Google as a developer | Is there any large group representing App developers that could manage the large-scale negotiation and legal wrangling required to force Apple and Google to be more helpful when rejecting legitimate applications?When I worked in Google (Ads, then later in Recommendations for Play and youtube) people often said this was intention to avoid teaching spammers how to get around the rules. But it's clear there are enough legitimate developers acting in good faith who are trying to change their applications without significant guidance that it seems entirely reasonable for a large-scale group negotiation. |
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