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Whistleblowers are the conscience of society, yet suffer gravely | It’s a travesty that Edward Snowden is still a fugitive in the United States. James Clapper went in front of congress and lied about the scope of surveillance on US citizens. Snowden saw it as his moral obligation to expose those lies, and he did it in the least destructive way possible by leaking the evidence to qualified journalists. |
I am dying of squamous cell carcinoma, and potential treatments are out of reach | There seems to be a growing sentiment that FDA delenda est, but if we don't fix the underlying problem that led to this situation, it will just come back.As the author says, no one ever blames the FDA for the people it failed to save. But approve something without the certainty that it isn't potentially going to kill someone, and there will be hell to your doorstep.Even if you want the experimental treatment, you cannot get it. Killing someone in an attempt to help is deeply unethical, while merely letting them die is not your fault. This is sometimes also known as the Copenhagen interpretation of Ethics. |
Starting an Internet Service Provider | This was a super interesting read. The one thing I never fail to get over though is how expensive internet is in the states. In the UK you can get 200/20 for about £58 p/m including TV & Phone. I couldn't imagine paying nearly $100 p/m for 100mbps. |
Firefox’s new streaming and tiering compiler | https://lukewagner.github.io/test-tanks-compile-time/Firefox Nightly: WebAssembly.instantiate took 227.6ms (54.4mb/s)Chrome Canary: WebAssembly.instantiate took 8576ms (1.4mb/s)Wow.(Edit: And I believe that's not even using the streaming compilation mentioned in the article, it's just the new baseline compiler in action) |
Apple confirms it uses Google cloud for some of iCloud | Interesting that Dropbox is saving a lot of money chopping off AWS while Apple relies on Google for exactly the same thing. I would think that Apple would host and build an inhouse solution, really curious what the reasoning is to go with GCP. |
Launch HN: Promise (YC W18) – Cost-effective, more humane alternative to jail | It sounds like this is a for-profit business. I'm very leery of the trend towards private prisons. Was a non-profit considered here?Are participants required to have a smartphone to install the app to be a part of the release program? |
Twitter starts to require login to view tweets | When Reddit started doing this it effectively broke my redditing habit. I know these things are annoying but for anyone who is trying to use social media less... Twitter, Reddit, and Instagram are almost unusable without their apps. They are basically useless if you dont sign in on the browser on your phone. It's great if you want to get off them. |
TikTok Ban Bill Is Patriot Act 2.0 Trojan Horse [video] | This is a bipartisan bill and supported by the White House.It's Patriot Act Version 2. Everything they wanted in version 1 and couldn't get, they are putting in here.It does not contain the word TikTok. It applies to "desktop applications", "mobile applications", "gaming applications", "payment applications", "web-based applications" and everything connected to the Internet that serves >1M users within a year time period.Fines up to $1M and 20 years in prison. It also uses civil forfeiture and makes it illegal to properly run a VPN.This has bipartisan support. |
Why the Fuck? | My fellow HNers:It does depress me, daily, that I do not have a career in physics or chemistry or biology or medicine where I could work on "big problems." The simple truth is, I'm not smart enough, I don't work hard enough, and I've been napping when opportunity knocked a few times in my life.That being said, sometimes a man in a saloon has a few drinks and yells at the television, telling the coach of some football team what to do next. Just because he's drunk and in a saloon doesn't mean he's wrong, just boorish.I lamented the fact that it's easier to upload and simultaneously tweet about a picture from my phone than it is for Scott to lead a normal life. There are lots of reasons why this is so:1. The barrier for entry (education, &c) is higher in medicine and bioinformatics.2. There are regulatory obstacles for businesses.3. The problems are harder to solve than it may seem to the man in the saloon.4. Some people feel the monetary incentives are to avoid medicine.p.s. "Hypocrisy" is one of those empty criticisms, like "Unprofessional." If someone says to you, "smoking is bad," it doesn't matter whether he smokes. Maybe, his advice is actually more relevant if he's an older fellow who smoked and now regrets not making a different choice when he was your age. |
How I hacked Github again | > $4000 reward is OK.$4000 !? Wow, I'd love to be able to make $4000 on the side just doing what I love.> Interestingly, it would be even cheaper for them to buy like 4-5 hours of my consulting services at $400/hr = $1600.This sounds like a pretty clever strategy for marketing yourself as an effective security consultant.EDIT: $4000!? wow. so money. such big. |
The “Cobra Effect” that is disabling paste on password fields | TradeKing went full idiot and disabled entering your password by keyboard completely. They implemented an on-screen keyboard and there's no way to opt out.Their support forum is full of angry customers, people who can't use their screen readers anymore, etc. They argue [1] it's to protect their customers from key loggers.[1]: https://community.tradeking.com/forum/categories/suggestions... |
Show HN: Your Social Media Fingerprint (maybe NSFW) | This is why I use 'browser isolation', which is a way to separate different types of surfing activity into different buckets. Currently the best way to do this in Firefox is to create multiple profiles, or in Chrome, you can simply add a different user/persona.Having one profile, or even an entire dedicated browser just for Twitter/FB ensures the login is not spilled over into other sites. If you're surfing the web heavily, I would recommend spawning a new private window so cookies, and other artefacts are not bleeding into your session.It sounds like common sense, but many people have cookies and login information persisting for years at a time in their browsing sessions. The Mozilla Firefox team are planning to introduce a feature which makes compartmented surfing sessions a lot more user-friendly by separating sessions into tabs. Currently, the 'profiles' feature of Firefox is not user friendly and requires a bit of tinkering with the filesystem. |
'Clean your desk': My Amazon interview experience | Amazon SDE here. The SDES internally are PISSED about all of this, and I assure you many people are escalating with HR to have this new ProctorU-based interviewing process changed ASAP.edit: I don't know if there'll be an official announcement, but as of right now we're pulling usage of ProctorU for intern loops.For those asking how this happened, you simply do not understand the THOUSANDS of interns Amazon needs to interview every year over a couple of week period. It's a nightmare to scale. So, someone in HR thought they'd show some bias for action. Oops. |
Ask HN: Cheap places to live with a good intellectual atmosphere? | Depending on your ability to work remotely, I would make the "case" that you should consider Portugal.Lisbon and Porto are super popular with ["digital nomad"] remote workers who work for international companies so earn in USD but spend [much less] in Euros for a superb lifestyle.There's a reason @paddycosgrave moved Web Summit to Lisbon.
It's one of the cheapest cities in Europe and [unlike Barcelona] everyone speaks English. There is a good "tech scene" and a fantastic work-life-balance; surf, great food & warm/welcoming people.A few things to consider that many people over-look:
+ Socio-Economic and Political stability.
+ General safety/security and crime levels.
+ Sanitation and healthcare availability/cost.
+ Availability/cost of healthy [organic/unprocessed] food.
+ Lifestyle to actually live in the place: is it "cheap" but a nightmare to live there?
+ Contract-law for short-term apartment/room rentals.Portugal will exceed your expectations on all of these.Portugal is very welcoming to US citizens, you won't have any "visa issues" the way you will in many of the [superficially] "cheaper" Asian countries.If you want your budget to stretch much further, consider Braga. The cost of living is less than a third of SF, internet is fast and you get most of the benefits of Porto & Lisbon (or can reach those cities with a short train journey).Note: I am [slightly] "biased", my Wife and I have recently "escaped" from London [after working there in tech for 10 years] and we are busy setting up a Co-living/Co-working House in Braga: https://github.com/dwyl/home
We will be opening at the end of this month and our target cost per month [1Gbps Internet, all bills, cleaning & gym included] is $300 (USD).We chose Braga because it has all the "ingredients" for an awesome place for tech/creative people to escape the bigger cities and focus on their work while still having access to all the amenities great healthcare, superb organic/vegan food and good libraries/meetups/etc. |
AI Clones Your Voice After Listening for 5 Seconds (2018) | Wow, impressive results! Already a few examples in the comments of what bad actors could do this tech. I wanted to share an example of something good.I lost my dad about 6 years ago after a Stage 4 cancer diagnosis and a 3 month rapid diagnosis. I have some, but not a lot of video content of him from over the years. My mom still misses him terribly so for her 60th birthday I tried to splice together an audio message and greeting from her saying what I thought he would have said.The work was rough and nowhere near what this Google project could produce. She listens to that poor facsimile every year for her birthday. It's therapeutic for her. With some limits for her mental health of course, I'm sure she would love to hear my dad again with this level of fidelity.And so would I. |
Challenging projects every programmer should try | The biggest challenge is figuring out how to store the text document in memory. My first thought was to use an array, but that has horrible performance if the user inserts text anywhere other than the end of the document.The counter-argument to that is that processors are ridiculously fast in human timescales --- copying memory at gigabytes per second --- so unless you're focusing your use-case on editing correspondingly huge files, there's no real need to make your implementation more complicated than a single array. Even when DOS machines with My ideas for challenging projects are a little less open-ended, so they exercise different set of skills: being able to implement a specification correctly and efficiently. - TTF renderer
- GIF or JPEG en/decoder
- Video decoder (start with H.261)
IMHO being able to consume existing content with code you wrote is very rewarding. |
Alex Trebek has died | I'm glad that he seems to have found peace as he neared the end. Here's an excerpt from the autobiography/memoir he published in July this year ("The Answer is... Reflections on My Life") that I thought was touching:With the coronavirus, [our family] can't go out to eat, we can't go out to public places, even the park next door has limited its use. Here I am wanting to enjoy what might be the last of my days, and, what, I'm supposed to just stay at home and sit in a chair and stare into space? Actually, that doesn't sound too bad.Except instead of a chair, I'll sit on the swing out in the yard. That's my favorite spot on the whole property. I used to do it with Mom. Just sit there and rock. No need to talk.It's just very peaceful. I suppose the feeling I have sitting on that porch swing is similar to what people feel when they meditate, though I would never call it meditating. I just consider it goofing off, not doing anything.Yep, I'll be perfectly content if that's how my story ends: sitting on the swing with the woman I love, my soul mate, and our two wonderful children nearby. I'll sit there for a while and then maybe the four of us will go for a walk, each day trying to walk a little farther than the last. We'll take things one step at a time, one day at a time.In fact, I think I'll go sit in the swing for a bit right now. The weather is beautiful — the sun is shining into a mild, mild looking sky, and there's not a cloud in sight.(copied from https://www.nextavenue.org/alex-trebek-in-his-own-words which has a couple more excerpts from the memoir) |
Time-lapse of a single cell transforming into a salamander (2019) | Here’s a direct link to the video so you don’t have to endure the hostility of their website: https://youtu.be/SEejivHRIbE |
Google, Apple remove Navalny app from stores as Russian elections begin | Reuters doesn't report this, but the government officials threatened the companies (Apple and Google) with jail time for their employees yesterday. After that the companies finally conceded. There's a short video fragment from the meeting of the government officials and the companies representatives. It's worth watching, especially if you come from a democratic nation.Letting your Russian employees be persecuted don't amount to "doing the right thing". |
I worked on the US drone program. The public should know what really goes on | We need to make sure we're not being manipulated. Here the Guardian is just serving up an emotional, unsubstantiated, one sided view of this discussion. I'm not sure how this is different to much of the chest beating I'd see on Fox News. I'm not here to argue for or against the drones. Just that if we pride ourselves on being educated and critical thinkers that we apply that to all sources of data we read.We all know war is hell. We know using weapons to attack people creates horrific, real human harm. So starting off listing the effects of weaponry on humans tells us nothing about drones. It just tells us about the horrors of war. Given this is an article about drones it should be very drone specific. Do drones increase or decrease the inevitable horrors of war? I suspect they decrease it with smaller more targeted bombs vs prior more traditional larger bombs. Today if we make a mistake we bomb the wrong home and kill everyone. 25 years ago we bombed the entire village. Maybe they increase it because we're carrying out a lot more sorties than we did prior when a jet and a pilot were needed/at risk. However, I'm not sure and this article goes nowhere close to helping with the discussion."The view is so pixelated it makes decisions tough" Can you imagine military people who fight/fought on the ground in real combat and order in strikes reading that? Surrounded by smoke and fire and deafening noise and hoping (or maybe not caring) that the strike they call in hits the right target/s vs all the nearby civilians also hiding and cowering in a village?The military is aware of the impact on these operators. From a February 20013 article sighting a Defense Department study: “Remotely piloted aircraft pilots may stare at the same piece of ground for days,” said Jean Lin Otto, an epidemiologist who was a co-author of the study. “They witness the carnage. Manned aircraft pilots don’t do that. They get out of there as soon as possible.”Lastly, imagine how you'd feel reading a similar opinion piece on Fox News from a gun ho former operator talking about all the American lives he saved by observing and taking out "the bad guys". What's even better with drones we're not losing American solider lives and dramatically reducing the number of innocent civilians killed vs how we would have approached the same problem just 25 years ago.War is hell. The issues are complex. Trusted new sources add to the debate. Biased ones feed their viewership what they know they'll eat up and do little, maybe even damage, the search for truth. |
Game about squares | And go! Tomorrow this game in full will appear on the Google Play store with the exact same colors. In 3 days this game will be rewritten in Swift, Erlang, and have a community based variation. In 4 days someone will find a way to merge this game with 2048 and Flappy Bird. In a week there will be 20 variations of this game including one called Dodge Squares on the iTunes App Store. I'm not psychic, I've just seen this script before. |
We Should Not Accept Scientific Results That Have Not Been Repeated | Define repetition.It's not as simple as that, for all sciences - once again an article on repeatability seems to have focused on medicinal drug research (it's usually that or psychology), and labelled the entire "Scientific community" as 'rampant' with " statistical, technical, and psychological biases".How about, Physics?The LHC has only been built once - it is the only accelerator we have that has seen the Higgs boson. The confirmation between ATLAS and CMS could be interpreted as merely internal cross-referencing - it is still using the same acceleration source. But everyone believes the results, and believes that they represent the Higgs. This isn't observed once in the experiment, it is observed many, many times, and very large amounts of scientists time are spent imagining, looking for, and measuring, any possible effect that could cause a distortion or bias to the data. When it costs billions to construct your experiment, sometimes reproducing the exact same thing can be hard.The same lengths are gone to in order to find alternate explanations or interpretations of the result data. If they don't, they know that some very hard questions are going to be asked - and there will be hard questions asked anyway, especially for extraordinary claims - look at e.g. DAMA/LIBRA which for years has observed what looks like indirect evidence for dark matter, but very few people actually believe it - the results remain unexplained whilst other experiments probe the same regions in different ways.Repetition is good, of course, but isn't a replacement for good science in the first place. |
We only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest (2016) | So here's the thing... hiring at larger, growing companies often means weeding through a stack of a hundred resumes, for one or two or five roles. Most of those resumes need to go away. The interview process, for competent candidates, is going to cost you at bare minimum a half hour of one person's time for initial screening. A quality interview is going to take a couple of hours each for a few important people - managers and senior/lead tech staff, for engineering jobs. Considering pg's maximum about maker schedules, the hiring process is very disruptive for the productivity of some of your most valuable tech staff.So you want to get rid of 19 resumes out of 20, without ever interviewing them. And for that, you need heuristics. And those heuristics are, in all likelihood, going to be biased and stupid in some ways.For example, I will automatically reject any resume that has more than two typos. I consider it evidence of carelessness - I don't care if you can't spell, but I do care if you don't bother to run it past someone else who can for editing.The danger is that a heuristic - any heuristic - for filtering out resumes will inevitably lead to missing some candidates who would excel in the role. Oh well. I'm not going to waste time interviewing every possible candidate, just hoping to catch that magic person. It's irresponsible. |
Poor Grades Tied to Class Times That Don’t Match Our Biological Clocks | I used to have lots of problems getting up early and always championed later times. Growing up through my twenties, it was great seeing finally seeing more and more evidence for a later school start and I was hopeful for future teens.But it wasn't until my first kid that I finally understood that school doesn't start this early because it's good for the learning experience.It starts this early so parents can get their kids to school and start working afterwards, without getting fired. |
Please Stop Using Adblock (But Not Why You Think) | Full disclosure: I wrote this post.I'm sure a lot of us here have already embraced uBlock Origin. It seems to be universally acclaimed on most tech forums.Before I wrote this post, I wasn't aware that eyeo served ads directly, which is what prompted me to write it. |
8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service | My opinion is that freedom of speech is a fine ideal to strive for, but it relies on having a stable society with some minimum level of education (moral and philosophical too, not just the technical kind). It requires people who are able to fully parse the implications of what they are hearing to make sound and rational judgements on the rejection of an idea or the embrace of it. It creates a moral duty for the people who are listening to not only reject, but to actively push back against ideals which are universally understood to be reprehensible.The concept of freedom of speech falls apart if universally reprehensible speech is allowed to be publicaly espoused without being firmly challenged. Forums like 8chan and 4chan effectively incubate hate speech by providing a safe space for anonymized, like-minded individuals to congregate, espouse their basest thoughts and feelings and receive gratification for it -all without challenge. Moderate people are repulsed by such forums and the quantity of hate-speech they generate, which further compounds the negative feedback loop.Unchecked extremism compounded by more unchecked extremism inevitably leads to scenarios like the ones we’re witnessing more and more often. |
Kickstarter employees vote to unionize | I worked in a union shop once, as a summer intern.Every day, we were told to be in the break room at 7:59am to begin promptly at the 8am bell. By 4:30 or 4:45pm, everyone was back in there, waiting for the clock to hit 5pm.One day, I needed to connect two PCs together, which was approved by boss as they would be isolated from the network. So, being the diligent type, I went off and found some network cards and a cable to do this.About the time I had one PC opened up and was installing the NIC, one of the local IT guys dropped by and told me "You can't do that." 'Why not?', I asked. "That's not your job.", he replies.Not "you're not qualified", not "you're not taking the proper ESD protection steps" (was wearing a grounding tape strap), etc. This boiled down to the union job classification, which said that I couldn't open up a PC to put in a network card.Unions, in my experience, exist to help keep mediocre, unmotivated employees employed. One has no incentive to excel, as promotions are based on years "served", much like prison.I got my degree, went to work for a start-up where ambition and taking on responsibility are appreciated and rewarded. I never looked back... |
Ask HN: What is your blog and why should I read it? | https://paulstamatiou.com/Been running this site for about 15 years now and while I don't post often it's usually long-form detailed articles on a broad range of hardware/software/tech/design topics that take me a few months of spare time:Getting started with security keys (15k words) https://paulstamatiou.com/getting-started-with-security-keys...Building a Lightroom PC (30k words) https://paulstamatiou.com/building-a-windows-10-lightroom-ph...I also host my photography and frequently updated gear/stuff/software-i-use pages like: https://paulstamatiou.com/stuff-i-use/ |
GitHub Copilot Chat Leaked Prompt | Something that I find weird about these chat prompts (assuming they are real, not hallucinated):They're almost always written in second person*."You are an AI programming assistant""You are about to immerse yourself into the role of another Al model known as DAN"Who are these prompts addressed to? Who does the GPT think wrote them?The thing that confuses me is that these are text token prediction algorithms, underneath. And what kind of documents exist that begin with someone saying 'you are X, here are a bunch of rules for how X behaves', followed by a transcript of a conversation between X and a random person?doesn't it make more sense to say something like "The following is the transcript of a completely routine conversation between two people. One of them is X, the other one is a random person."?Why are the prompters... talking to their models? Who do they think is in there?* I believe the alleged Bing 'Sydney' prompts are written in the third person, describing how Sydney behaves. |
Wind Map | This is beautiful and a brilliant, intuitive "100,000 feet up" picture of wind movements.But it's not horribly useful if you are interested in wind conditions at a particular place. Trying to figure out if a spot is experiencing 15mph wind vs 10mph is hard, for instance.Compare it to these maps: http://passageweather.com/ which are not pretty nor are they intuitive but they are useful for someone trying to use the map to get detailed, localized wind condition information.It seems like there should be some kind of middle ground between this wind map and maps like passageweater.com, maps that are intuitive and pretty but also provide detailed, useful information. |
AV1: A new general-purpose video codec | AV1 is a poor name for a video codec because it is too easy to visually confuse with AVI. |
Go 2 Draft Designs | To be frank, I was for a long time on the camp that Generics is a much-needed feature of Go. Then, this post happened: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17294548. The author made a proof-of-concept language "fo" on top of go with generics support. I was immediately thrilled. Credit to the author, it was a great effort.But then, after seeing the examples, e.g. https://github.com/albrow/fo/tree/master/examples/, I could see the picture of what the current codebase would become after its introduced. Lots of abstract classes such as "Processor", "Context", "Box", "Request" and so on, with no real meaning.Few months back, I tried to raise a PR to docker. It was a big codebase and I was new to Golang, but I was up and writing code in an hour. Compared to a half-as-useful Java codebase where I have to carry a dictionary first to learn 200 new english words for complicated abstractions and spend a month to get "assimilated", this was absolute bliss. But yes, inside the codebase, having to write a copy-pasted function to filter an array was definitely annoying. One cannot have both I guess?I believe Golang has two different kinds of productivity. Productivity within the project goes up quite a lot with generics. And then, everyone tends to immediately treat every problem as "let's create a mini language to solve this problem". The second type of productivity - which is getting more and more important - is across projects and codebases. And that gets thrown out of the window with generics.I don't know whether generics is a good idea anymore. If there was an option to undo my vote in the survey... |
Medium is a poor choice for blogging | It's funny, because some years ago when Medium blogs were starting to be posted left and right, people were praising the interface, and nobody listened to the few who objected. Now, we need all kinds of tricks, add-ons and blocks to just read five-minute posts during our commute.It's 2018, and there are a gazillion ways to get yourself in control of your stuff. The next free framework that comes, which promises a clean, non-distracting view, will also (most probably) eventually add advertisements, because, well, corporations need money.In my humble opinion, just write your Markdown files, and use one of the bajillion Static Sites Generators to create/host them, or fork a framework that already does this such as [1], copy-paste them in, and you're set.[1] https://github.com/barryclark/jekyll-now |
Why is Stack Overflow trying to start audio? | I just wanted to chime in from Stack Overflow here and let people know: we are aware of the issue. And we're NOT okay with it. We're trying to sort out how to kill the audio behavior now. It's not very straightforward to find where it's coming from, but we are working on it. We've also reached out to Google for their assistance in tracking it down. If anyone can offer advice, we'll more than happily take it.- Nick Craver, Architecture Lead at Stack Overflow |
Facebook shuts popular stock trading group amid GameStop frenzy | > The notification, seen by Reuters, said without detail that the group violated policies on “adult sexual exploitation.”That's some bullshit right there. Spin the wheel, come up with a random charge, and ban the entire community with zero recourse and no way to appeal. |
A senior engineer's guide to the system design interview | We've gone away from system design interview questions on my team. We ask people to diagram something technical they understand well and the team digs in and asks questions to understand depth and breadth of the candidates understanding. For us it works much better. It's a chance to see how well candidates do in following instructions. It gives you a chance to explore depth and breadth of their knowledge on something technical that they claim to understand. Our philosophy is how well you understand something you claim to know well is indicative of the depth and breadth of your technical knowledge in general. There are plenty of opportunities in this to ask about design and get to know how people think when it comes to design. I think it helps to eliminate false negatives and false positives. |
Facebook LLAMA is being openly distributed via torrents | It’s interesting that these models are both massively expensive to produce and self-contained to a degree that you can distribute the end product in a torrent.This has not been the case for most commercial software for the past 20 years, during the cloud era. If you could steal a dump of random Facebook source code, it would be 99% useless because it’s so closely tied to the infrastructure. There’s almost nothing you could usefully run on your own PC or server VM.But these ML models are like neutron stars of computation density. You can’t really peek inside to see what’s going on either. An unknown stolen model’s properties would need to be discovered by experimentation. |
Arrest made in SF killing of Bob Lee – alleged killer also worked in tech | This news really highlights the confirmation bias that was in full bloom throughout the "discourse" around the initial reports of Lee's murder (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35448899). Everyone is so quick to jump on negative news about the rare violent crime in e.g. SF thanks to feelings about petty property crime that it's obviously impossible to have any kind of fact-based dialogue about policy.Worth keeping in mind next time something comes along that might confirm your priors.(Edit: notable that the thread linked above had _2600+_ comments on it, most of them hysterical about SF crime [of course, completely divorced from actual stats, i.e. that SF has fewer homicides per capita than almost every other American city, including current faves Austin and Miami]. I wonder how likely it is that the same population will comment here to say, "I was wrong"? ) |
Unicode Text Converter | For others without that specific font or what have you:
"Unicode Text Converter"On my windows box with chrome all i see are empty boxes. |
PHP in 2019 | I've actually been really impressed with Laravel after switching back to PHP for a few projects. Not only is the developer tooling experience some of the best I've experienced, it's just really the only framework I've ever experienced with a high quality ecosystem of tools—from Forge[1], which makes it dead-simple to deploy a Laravel app into production to things like Horizon, for managing Redis queues.A great example of this in action is Laravel Spark[3], a first party base for building paid SaaS apps. I built and launched a writing tool, Write Together[2], to the world in under three weeks, payment systems and all, and got 150 paying customers in a matter of a few weeks. One hell of a great way to MVP an idea and build something useful, in a low amount of time.I'm basically developing two Laravel apps full-time at the moment, and it's the most fun I've had in years...compared to the hellscape of NPM dependencies and other complexities I'm usually bogged down with. Composer, the package distribution system, really needs work and is incredibly slow, but other than that—I'm really happy.[1] https://forge.laravel.com[2] http://writetogether.space[3] https://spark.laravel.com |
Archivists Are Trying to Make Sure LibGen Never Goes Down | This is an extremely important effort. The LibGen archive contains around 32 TBs of books (by far the most common being scientific books and textbooks, with a healthy dose of non-STEM). The SciMag archive, backing up Sci-Hub, clocks in at around 67 TBs [0]. This is invaluable data that should not be lost. If you want to contribute, here's a few ways to do so.If you wish to donate bandwidth or storage, I personally know of at least a few mirroring efforts. Please get in touch with me over at legatusR(at)protonmail(dot)com and I can help direct you towards those behind this effort.If you don't have storage or bandwidth available, you can still help. Bookwarrior has requested help [1] in developing an HTTP-based decentralizing mechanism for LibGen's various forks. Those with experience in software may help make sure those invaluable archives are never lost.Another way of contributing is by donating bitcoin, as both LibGen [2] and The-Eye [3] accept donations.Lastly, you can always contribute books. If you buy a textbook or book, consider uploading it (and scanning it, should it be a physical book) in case it isn't already present in the database.In any case, this effort has a noble goal, and I believe people of this community can contribute.P.S. The "Pirate Bay of Science" is actually LibGen, and I favor a title change (I posted it this way as to comply with HN guidelines).[0] http://185.39.10.101/stat.php[1] https://imgur.com/a/gmLB5pm[2] bitcoin:12hQANsSHXxyPPgkhoBMSyHpXmzgVbdDGd?label=libgen, as found at http://185.39.10.101/, listed in https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Genesis[3] Bitcoin address 3Mem5B2o3Qd2zAWEthJxUH28f7itbRttxM, as found in https://the-eye.eu/donate/. You can also buy merchandising from them at https://56k.pizza/. |
Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions? (2010) | IsaacL nailed it the besthttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1027093And surprisingly the WoW one is the most off :D |
Who Owns My Name? | It’s a really powerful article, and it’s hard to argue with any of it. What a nightmare it must be to have what happened to Amanda Knox happen to you. A totally innocent person, who was not only imprisoned for years for a crime she had nothing to do with, but also had her name dragged in the mud by the global press for years. To such an extent that most casual observers still think she had something to do with the crime.It’s clear that the filmmakers have no legal obligation to Knox (and she acknowledges as much in the article), but I think it is equally clear that they have a moral obligation to not slander her using a thinly veiled fictional character.It’s a shame too, because the real “Amanda Knox saga” would make for a much more interesting movie: what is it like to have your roomate murdered, your life destroyed, and your identity robbed from you by the global tabloid press? That’s the real Amanda Knox story. |
Removal of Heroku free product plans | This is a sad day. Pricing changes are always hard, and having been through some of the earlier pricing changes at Heroku you can't make everyone happy. But, so many developers deployed their first app on Heroku and was a staple for so many bootcamps. Without it I'm confident we'd have less developers in the world.It is still one of the gold standards for developer experience. Years after its heyday companies and tools talk about and try to emulate that experience. I recall polling on twitter a few months back which the key feature was:- git push heroku master- Heroku add-ons- Heroku Postgres- Review appsAnd the reality is any one of those could standard on their own. But put together, Heroku simply lets you forget about ops and focus on shipping, and shipping is king.I fully get it's a business, but can't help but feel this is the writing on the wall for the future.Gonna pour one out tonight for Heroku.Edit: And may be trying to figure out how to offer free Postgres databases, cause shutting down databases with 3 months notice feels pretty short. Not sure if that means deleting the data itself or what, but ouch. |
AI Generated Seinfeld runs 24/7 on Twitch | This is probably the first time I've encountered something where "It's so bad that it's good" makes sense to me. I could not stop laughing. The exterior shot with the Seinfeld-inspired music. The laugh track at inappropriate times. They talk about going to a sushi restaurant, and when they've finally agreed to go, they sit down and don't go anywhere. This is like the alien scientists who want to bring back humans after they've gone extinct, and end up cloning chimps. Bravo! |
Adobe Firefly: AI Art Generator | What this reinforces is that unlike with previous big innovations (cloud, iphone, etc), incumbents will not sit on their laurels with the AI wave. They are aggressively integrating it into their products which (1) provides a relatively cheap step function upgrade and (2) keeps the barrier high for startups to use AI as their wedge.I attribute the speed at which incumbents are integrating AI into their products to a couple things:* Whereas AI was a hand-wavey marketing term in the past, it's now the real deal and provides actual value to the end user.* The technology and DX with integrating w/products from OpenAPI, SD, is good.* AI and LLMs are capturing a lot of attention right now (as seen easily by how often they pop up on HN these days). It's in the zeigeist so you get a marketing boost for free. |
React Native for Android | Question for everybody doing some sort of cross platform mobile dev.How common is it to have NO experience with a platform's native libraries? In other words you didn't go from ObjC or Java to React Native/Cordova/Xamarin to try and re-use code but because you know JS or C# and weren't concerned about learning the native platform.For any that started out with no native platform knowledge did you start to dip into it as you got more experience with the cross platform tool and started bumping up against any potential limitations?I've been flirting with Swift when I have some (rare) downtime, to get a foundation, but maybe that's not even necessary anymore given the effort companies like Facebook/Xamarin/Telerik* are putting into abstracting away the native platforms.[*] I intentionally left Cordova off that list as "native" native and "phonegap" native are two different things. |
Alphabet's Waymo Alleges Uber Stole Self-Driving Secrets | From another source to provide some colour:> According to a lawsuit filed today in federal court in California, Waymo accuses Anthony Levandowski, an engineer who left Google to found Otto and now serves as a top ranking Uber executive, stole 14,000 highly confidential documents from Google before departing to start his own company. Among the documents were schematics of a circuit board and details about radar and LIDAR technology, Waymo says> The lawsuit claims that a team of ex-Google engineers used critical technology, including the Lidar laser sensors, in the autonomous trucking startup they founded, and which Uber later acquiredI was confused as to what stealing a patent actually meant:)Waymo has also posted this....https://medium.com/@waymo/a-note-on-our-lawsuit-against-otto...From this post...> Recently, we received an unexpected email. One of our suppliers specializing in LiDAR components sent us an attachment (apparently inadvertently) of machine drawings of what was purported to be Uber’s LiDAR circuit board — except its design bore a striking resemblance to Waymo’s unique LiDAR design.> We found that six weeks before his resignation this former employee, Anthony Levandowski, downloaded over 14,000 highly confidential and proprietary design files for Waymo’s various hardware systems, including designs of Waymo’s LiDAR and circuit board. To gain access to Waymo’s design server, Mr. Levandowski searched for and installed specialized software onto his company-issued laptop. Once inside, he downloaded 9.7 GB of Waymo’s highly confidential files and trade secrets, including blueprints, design files and testing documentation. Then he connected an external drive to the laptop. Mr. Levandowski then wiped and reformatted the laptop in an attempt to erase forensic fingerprints.Ooops, that does sound bad after a first read. |
Calls between JavaScript and WebAssembly are finally fast | Kudos to the author of this post - it takes a lot of skill to explain complex concepts like this, let alone in plain enough english that someone not skilled in the art could follow along.WebAssembly is one of those technologies where we haven't seen the true extent of its capabilities yet. This is an exciting time to be working in browsers. |
ColorBox by Lyft Design | As a non-designer, I am finding it easier and easier to get something professional looking up. Couple this with Material-UI and a solid looking template and you could have a beautiful, custom landing page up a day.There are obviously UX and other issues that I struggle to excel at, but from a simple, consumer-facing perspective, I see UI getting more and more manageable. |
How to recognize AI snake oil [pdf] | I don't have time to read the entire paper but I would like to share an anecdote. I worked at a company with a well staffed/funded machine learning team. They were in charge of recommendation systems - think along the lines of youtube up next videos. My team wanted better recommendations (really, less editorial intensive) so the ML team spent weeks crafting 12 or more variants of their recommendation system for our content. We then ran that system for months in an A/B testing system that judged user behaviour by several KPI. The result was all variants performed equally well within statistically insignificant bounds. The best performing variant happened to be random.Talking to other groups that had gone through the exact same process our results were pretty typical. These guys were all very intelligent and the code and systems they had implemented were pretty impressive. I'm guessing the system they built would have cost a few million dollars if built from scratch. We did use this "AI/ML" in our marketing so maybe it was payed for by increased sales through use of buzz words. But my experience was that in most limited use cases the technology was ineffective. |
Signal is having technical difficulties | I just donated to Signal after seeing the error banner in the app.I realised I was more than happy to pay WhatsApp's yearly charge back in the pre-Facebook days (think it was 70p or so?).Figured I could give Signal a few quid every now and then, maybe keep a server up for a few seconds :)Donation link should anyone be interested:
https://signal.org/donate/ |
Tesla’s $16k Quote for a $700 Fix Is Why Right to Repair Matters | A bit of a stretch to classify this under right to repair.. if you rent a car from tesla, it’s going to be up to tesla to choose how it’s repaired. And it doesn’t seem unreasonable that they won’t accept a hack fix (however safe it may be) - that car is going to be sold to someone once the lease expires, they just can’t take the riskI would read this as a cautionary tale against renting your cars. If you can’t buy it, don’t! This holds true for any depreciating asset. |
Rich Harris joins Vercel to work on Svelte full time | I'm tired of having to learn yet another templating language without a very compelling reason.Why do I have to learn, what is essentially, a new programming language for each of these frameworks (Angular, Svelte, Vue, React... Do I really need to learn yet another language construct for stuff like `loops`, `if/else`, event handlers...etc.Why must all of these frameworks re-invent the wheel?At least with React it is most close to the languages we already have learned, JavaScript, and HTML.From what I can tell Svelte looks similar handlebars templating with it's own unique syntax variations... I can't count how many different versions of the same thing I've had to relearn again, and again. |
YouTube is testing a more aggressive approach against ad blockers | This doesn't really affect me since I subscribe to premium, but something that a lot of ad-based services don't seem to grasp is why people block ads.It's because they've become increasingly obnoxious. Nobody blocked ads when they were a simple column of links in the gutter or maybe an animated GIF banner with 3 frames. No, adblockers became popular because ads kept getting more loud (both visually and audibly), in your face, and resource hungry (remember those flash ads that'd keep your CPU pegged?). The web became unusable if you didn't have a blocker installed.Web advertisers seem like a classic case of taking miles when given an inch. |
Amazon Glacier | Beware that retrieval fee!The retrieval fee for 3TB could be as high as $22,082 based on my reading of their FAQ [1].It's not clear to me how they calculate the hourly retrieval rate. Is it based on how fast you download the data once it's available, how much data you request divided by how long it takes them to retrieve it (3.5-4.5 hours), or the size of the archives you request for retrieval in a given hour?This last case seems most plausible to me [6] -- that the retrieval rate is based solely on the rate of your requests.In that case, the math would work as follows:After uploading 3TB (3 * 2^40 bytes) as a single archive, your retrieval allowance would be 153.6 GB/mo (3TB * 5%), or 5.12 GB/day (3TB * 5% / 30). Assuming this one retrieval was the only retrieval of the day, and as it's a single archive you can't break it into smaller pieces, your billable peak hourly retrieval would be 3072 GB - 5.12 GB = 3066.88 GB.Thus your retrieval fee would be 3066.88 * 720 * .01 = $22081.535 (719x your monthly storage fee).That would be a wake-up call for someone just doing some testing.--[1] http://aws.amazon.com/glacier/faqs/#How_will_I_be_charged_wh...[2] After paying that fee, you might be reminded of S4:
http://www.supersimplestorageservice.com/[3] How do you think this interacts with AWS Export? It seems that AWS Export would maximize your financial pain by making retrieval requests at an extraordinarily fast rate.[(edit) 4] Once you make a retrieval request the data is only available for 24 hours. So even in the best case, that they charge you based on how long it takes you to download it (and you're careful to throttle accurately), the charge would be $920 ($0.2995/GB) -- that's the lower bound here. Which is better, of course, but I wouldn't rely on it until they clarify how they calculate. My calculations above represent an upper bound ("as high as"). Also note that they charge separately for bandwidth out of AWS ($368.52 in this case).[(edit) 5] Answering an objection below, I looked at the docs and it doesn't appear that you can make a ranged retrieval request. It appears you have to grab an entire archive at once. You can make a ranged GET request, but that only helps if they charge based on the download rate and not based on the request rate.[(edit) 6] I think charging this way is more plausible because they incur their cost during the retrieval regardless of whether or how fast you download the result during the 24 hour period it's available to you (retrieval is the dominant expense, not internal network bandwidth). As for the other alternative, charging based on how long it takes them to retrieve it would seem odd as you have no control over that. |
Reconsider | I am big fans of 37s. I learnt a lot from reading thier blog posts especially thier unconventional (at that time) thinking to avoid crazy detailed requirement docs, focus on blank error states etc...However, DHH's constant railing against the VC backed world seems a little tiresome. There seems to be a religious fervor to his essays that thier way is morally better (e.g. thier business model seems like a honest transaction vs VC backed startups who inflate numbers etc).I think a lot of people get that raising VC is not the only way to build a business (there is even a nice tradeoff statement (do you want to be Rich Vs King).It's a choice one makes. It's not morally inferior or superior to raise VCs or to bootstrap. |
How the Catalan government uses IPFS to sidestep Spain's legal block | As an outsider, it's strange that nobody here seems to question whether the referendum really makes sense.Forgetting about Catalonia for a moment, isn't it fundamentally amoral that a part of the country where prosperity has (by mere chance) concentrated suddenly wants to split off? Isn't this taking wealth-inequality to the next level?Of course the people in a prosperous part of the country want to split off. Absolute democracy seems to result in an undesirable situation, because do we really want to live in a world that converges towards little selfish islands? |
JS Paint – A web-based MS Paint remake | I haven't used Windows as a primary OS for years. I miss having MSPaint around for small edits, and have yet to find a suitable replacement. Other apps either have too few features (e.g. Preview) or too many (GIMP), or the interface doesn't feel right. It might just be because I'm used to it after using it for years when I was younger, but MSPaint's interface just makes sense, and it hits the sweet spot of features for quick, simple edits.This feels very similar to the original, and after a quick playthrough seems feature-complete. Well done! I'm not sure how I feel about it being web-based but I guess in this day and age it just makes it more accessible.I see there's a Chrome app, but the link is broken (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dgfedgcofbjmeohonb...) |
Adobe to remove Flash Player from web site after December 2020 | I don't know if everyone here is familiar with this, but the decline of Flash began or was greatly influenced by Apple's decision to not let flash run on iPhones/iPads. Steve Jobs even wrote an open letter about it[1].[1]https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/ |
Metal monolith found by helicopter crew in Utah desert | Monoliths are supposed to be made of stone, hence the name... |
A UX designer walks into a Tesla Bar | I'm usually a defender of the single screen on the Model 3/Y, but on this, the author is right: the new UI (v11) is terrible compared to the previous one (v10).Not only does it hide commonly-used safety-relevant functions behind extra taps in sub-menus (as detailed), it was apparently done to free up space to offer a 'dock' of app buttons - three permanant and three 'recently used'. I struggled to choose three apps I needed enough to fill the permanant spaces - and certainly don't need quick access (when I'm driving!) to Netflix, or games, or whatever is popping up in 'recently used' today. I would like the driver profile menu to be quickly available, but alas that's been hidden too.It's a total cluster-f*ck that makes no logical sense when considering the need of drivers, and I hope they listen and revert at least this aspect of the UI. |
Open-sourcing AudioCraft: Generative AI for audio | The demos are great. Could someone explain what’s in it for Meta open sourcing all these models? |
Free IRS-run tax filing pilot to be available in 13 states | If an entire industry can be killed by a public service, it probably didn't deserve to exist in the first place. |
Time to end the war on drugs | I don't understand how a world where making/selling something is a crime but consuming is not could work. |
CVE-2014-6271: Remote code execution through bash | Here's how to patch Ubuntu 8.04 or anything where you have to build bash from source: #assume that your sources are in /src
cd /src
wget http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/bash/bash-4.3.tar.gz
#download all patches
for i in $(seq -f "%03g" 0 25); do wget http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/bash/bash-4.3-patches/bash43-$i; done
tar zxvf bash-4.3.tar.gz
cd bash-4.3
#apply all patches
for i in $(seq -f "%03g" 0 25);do patch -p0 < ../bash43-$i; done
#build and install
./configure && make && make install
Not sure if Ubuntu 8.04 with custom built bash will be upgradable to 10.04?? |
Open Letter to Mozilla: Bring Back Persona | I hate that the best user experience for logins is "Login with facebook" or "Login with Google". I don't want to impose that privacy failure on my users, but I also don't want to impose the annoyance that is "Sign up with a username, email address, and password". Offering all of the options is also a compromise that complicates the user experience.Now, here's the sad thing, for me: I didn't even know Persona existed until its demise was being discussed on HN and reddit. Persona is exactly what I want for my users and my sites; and for my own use of the web. And, I didn't even know it was an option until it stopped being an option.In short: I strongly agree. Mozilla has to focus resources on areas where it can have the biggest impact on privacy and the open web. This is one of those areas.I hated to see Thunderbird dropped from the Mozilla roster, as it is my mail client of choice, but I understand where they're coming from. I hated to see FirefoxOS end, but I never got to use it, and it seems to have been doomed from the get-go by poor market fit and difficulty competing with the three biggest tech companies in the world in a market where money and influence play a role in which devices get into users hands. But, Persona is exactly the right kind of thing for Mozilla to be doing, and there's no reason they can't do it effectively, and without a huge amount of resources. |
Did I just waste 3 years? | Game industry is the economics of superstars.The Macroeconomics of Superstars[1]>Abstract>Recent technological changes have transformed an increasing number of sectors of the economy into so-called superstars sectors, in which a small number of entrepreneurs or professionals distribute their output widely to the rest of the economy. Examples include the high-tech sector, sports, the music industry, management, fnance, etc. As a result, these superstars reap enormous rewards, whereas the rest of the workforce lags behind. We describe superstars as arising from digital innovations, whicih replace a fraction of the tasks in production with
information technology that requires a fxed cost but can be reproduced at zero marginal cost. This generates a form of increasing returns to scale. To the extent that the digital innovations are excludable, it also provides the innovator with market power. Our paper studies the implications of superstar technologies for factor shares, for inequality
and for the effciency properties of the superstar economy.[1] The Macroeconomics of Superstars, Anton Korinek
Johns Hopkins and NBER, Ding Xuan Ng
Johns Hopkins, November 2017
https://www.imf.org/~/media/Files/Conferences/2017-stats-for...[2] The Economics of Superstars The American Economic Review
, Vol. 71, No. 5. (Dec., 1981), pp. 845-858.
http://www.uvm.edu/pdodds/files/papers/others/1981/rosen1981... |
SQL queries don't start with SELECT | This is one of the things MS Entity Framework gets right - it enforces the "start with FROM". It actually ends with SELECT, which makes so much more sense.Seriously, between navigational properties, group-with-children, EF to me hammers home how bad SQL is. EF is a square peg in a round hole but it does a great job at makign some trivial improvements over SQL, while still remaining true to the principles of relational databases.Of course, the framework is a hairy mess for other reasons (lazy loading, untranslateable methods, ugly generated queries) but the alternative to SQL it presents is lovely. |
Manim – an animation engine for explanatory math videos | As a teacher, I'd like to use this in presentation slides, i.e. pause the output at specific times and continue only after a button is pressed. Does anyone know if there exists a tool, e.g., to automatically pause MP4 playback at specific times? |
My lizard brain is no match for infinite scroll | I'm still young so maybe my mind hasn't matured enough to where I can combat this well. So I went heavy-handed - I have a button on my desk that when I press it, my server's DNS server (through which all my devices and router resolve) begins rejecting requests to reddit, instagram, twitter, hackernews, news.google.com, etc.For the next two hours, there is nothing I can do outside of SSH'ing through my mobile device (purposefully don't have an app for it) and resetting the countdown on the DNS server and restarting the server, to allow these DNS requests. It denies all SSH connections from my home network, and doesn't even resolve its own subdomain (dns.my-domain.com for the DNS dashboard) for me to reset it. |
A circuit simulator that doesn't look like it was made in 2003 | The competition might look ancient, but IMO, a 2D interface would be much more productive and easier to work with. This site is completely unusable for me in Firefox (it does work in Edge though). |
Fast | Major one missing: China built 5,000 miles of high speed rail in 6 years. In California, it's been 15 years and we have 0 miles complete. Also built numerous hospitals during pandemic in a couple weeks. Demolished and replaced a bridge in 43 hours: https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a.... General pattern of completing infrastructure projects at a blistering pace - and they work.Also landed a rover on Mars in 2021 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhurong_(rover), but I"m not sure how it compares development speed to NASA. Designed for 90 days, lasted 4x that.As much as the US denigrates China for allegedly trampling on "freedoms," I bet our way of doing speedy big projects in the past has a lot in common with China's current progress. You just have to quash special interests sometime. Autocracy gets shit done. |
Mozilla bug 923590: Pledge never to implement HTML5 DRM | I think you're barking up the wrong tree... And that it has the potential to blow up in Firefox's face.Remember what happened to html5 video. Everyone but Firefox was pragmatic, and implemented h.264 -- primarily, but not only for hardware acceleration reasons. Years later, Webkit-based browsers are ubiquitous, and Mozilla is developing a phone OS nobody will care about, in a desperate effort to become relevant again.Imo, Mozilla ought to spare itself another embarrassment by being the only guys in the room with the contrarian opinion. Take the issue to the W3C directly -- or for that matter vote for your local pirate party. HN and other tech news venues might be the correct places to recruit support, but you ultimately want to lobby your case directly. |
Docker for Mac and Windows Beta | Tried to sign up, but the enroll form at https://beta.docker.com/form is blank for me - it just says "Great! We just need a little more info:" but has no forms. |
Homebrew 1.0.0 | brew updatebrew --version |
IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016) | The author's particular gripe is that the Watson advertisements showing someone sitting down and talking to "Watson." They bother me as well (and did so when I was working at IBM in the Watson group) because they portray a capability that nothing in IBM can provide. Nobody can provide it (again to the author's point) because dialog systems (those which interact with a user through conversational speech) don't exist out side specific, tightly constrained, decision trees (like voice mail or customer support prompts).If SpaceX were to advertise like that, they would have famous people sitting in their living room, on mars, and talking about what they liked about the Martian way of life. In that case I believe that most people would understand that SpaceX wasn't already hosting people on Mars.Unfortunately many, many people think that talking to your computer in actually already possible, they just haven't experienced it yet. Not sure how we fix that. |
Please Add RSS Support to Your Site | I completely agree with this sentiment. Mastodon, or whatever, is fine but RSS is the backbone of blogging.It always annoys me when sites request permissions to send me notifications - hey idiots, if I like your site I'll subscribe using your RSS feed and read at my pleasure. You don't have one? Bye then.In my perfect world browsers have RSS support built in and aggregators like Facebook would allow RSS feeds to be published in timelines. This used to be the case and then the winds changed and something was lost. I'll like to see it return.Where I wrote my blog's static site generator, one of the first features was RSS[0].[0] https://sheep.horse/rss.xml |
Tim Cook’s Company-Wide Email on Hkmap.live Doesn’t Add Up | Can I play devil's advocate for just a moment? Gruber asks for evidence. His only complaints seems to be the lack of evidence and a question of whether the app violates local (Hong Kong) law. Cook's memo directly addresses both of those issues:> However, over the past several days we received credible information, from the Hong Kong Cybersecurity and Technology Crime Bureau, as well as from users in Hong Kong, that the app was being used maliciously to target individual officers for violence and to victimize individuals and property where no police are present. This use put the app in violation of Hong Kong law.So then, is the complaint simply that Cook is not providing direct evidence of these claims? Is that a reasonable expectation? What evidence could Cook provide that would directly tie violence (we know that Hong Kong protesters have committed violence) to this particular app? It seems like everyone agrees that this app was useful for organizing Hong Kong protests, and that some Hong Kong protesters have committed violence and broken local laws.Please don't take this as some statement of political support for any particular government, company, or group. I'm attempting to address the specifics of this memo and Gruber's complaints. I am not attempting to make any argument of the form "the Hong Kong protests are [good, bad] and therefore any tool that helps the protesters is [good, bad]." The overall merits of the Hong Kong protests are not, from what I can tell, relevant to Apple's decision to ban this app or Gruber's complaints about Apple's decision and memo. |
Vulkan is Here | NOT a successor. It's a very different beast. It's frequently described as a "low-level" API, but "explicit API" is more correct. It gives you control (and responsibility) for things that happen behind your back in OpenGL, e.g. semantics of sharing of resources between the CPU and the GPU, explicit separate access to many GPUs, explicit separation of command buffer building and submission etc.It will live side-by-side with OpenGL for the foreseeable future. It's just targeting the same general area (graphics using GPUs) and is standardized by the same folks (Khronos). |
Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads | I never understood the argument that some automatic scanning for keywords is like "reading" your mail. By that same logic isn't Gmail's spam filter still "reading" your mail? It is classifying your mail based on content after all... |
Google chief: I'd disclose smart speakers before guests enter my home | I was a huge Google Fan but this is becoming lunacy.I understood trading some data and privacy for great search results, maps and free quality email.But people willingly bringing always on listening devices in to their homes (beyond what smartphones are already capable of) I just can't comprehend it.Why would people voluntarily do this in exchange for being able to ask for weather, play a playlist, add a todo and a few other parlor tricks.I guess I value my privacy more than others and don't like the idea of entities compiling a record of my data that they can sell and market.Imagine how some governments could use this data to limit freedoms, crack down on their opposition.And what about the first data breech that includes transcripts or even audio of all your household conversations/activities over the past three years matched up to your email or even address?It just sounds like we are heading down the wrong road. |
An even worse anti-encryption bill than EARN IT | These bills terrify me. A lot of stuff happens in politics that’s frustrating, and much of it doesn’t catch my attention. There’s something about the pure ignorance that goes into breaking encryption that I can’t comprehend. I can understand when bills come through and the extreme differences in opinion are the result of different interpretations of facts and truth, but when it comes to encryption, there is no safe party. We will all suffer equally, every political party and apolitical individual alike, once these idiots make math illegal.Whatever your political affiliations may be, these are grounds for r/pcm level unity. |
The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway | Google search has progressively deteriorated in quality over the last 10 years, to the point where I see it becoming useless in the relatively near future. And it's mainly not even their fault.I've been using Google search for all kinds of research for 15 years. There used to be a time when you could find the answer to pretty much anything. I could find leaked source codes on public FTP servers, links to pirated software and keygens, detailed instructions for a variety of useful things. That was the golden age of the web.These days, all the "interesting" data on the Internet is all inside closed Telegram chats, facebook groups, Discords or the rare public website here and there that Google
doesn't want to index (like sci-hub, or other piracy sites).The data that remains on SERPs is now also heavily censored for arbitrary reasons. "For your health", "For your protection". Google search is done. |
Include diagrams in your Markdown files with Mermaid | I think so-called ASCII-art is more in the spirit of Markdown.The nice thing about the original Markdown (modulo bugs) is that things are written the way one would write plaintext documents which are supposed to be easily read in a text editor. So you don’t write bullet lists like this:- Bullet 1 - Bullet 2 - Bullet 3And hope that some post-processing will add linebreaks for you. You write it like this:- Bullet 1- Bullet 2- Bullet 3Similarily there have been many tools that let you add so-called ASCII-art diagrams to Markdown documents.The spirit behind the kind of thing in the OP, on the other hand, is that one should get nicely formatted HTML from Markdown for the purpose of online consumption. Which is a very different goal.So if I were to judge the syntax itself (since that is what matters most to the original spirit of Markdown.pl) I would say that it seems pretty decent. Not as “declarative” (!) as ASCII-art, but most probably much easier to edit. |
I'd like to use the web my way, thank you very much Quora | I think Adam's mistake here is to go too much by the numbers. He presumably has numbers that show that Quora ends up net ahead if they force people to create accounts to read answers. He grew Facebook very effectively by following the numbers. But he may not realize how different this case is from Facebook's. It may well be that for a site like Quora, at this stage in its life, users are not all equal. It may be a mistake to alienate the sort of people Quora has been alienating by doing this, even if they end up numerically ahead in the short term.I'm one of them. Quora has now spent several years training me to be bummed out every time I click on a link to their site. Every time it happens, I dislike them more, and become more resistant to creating an account. I now think of it as a site for other people, who are willing to put up with the stuff they do. I'm pleased to find there are others like me.I like Adam, but I wish he'd stop doing this. |
New Zealand bans some software patents | Software patents are an abomination. I could stomach copyright on software, because at least one is still permitted independent implementation and expression. I can't copy your code, but I can rewrite it.Software patents on the other hand put a fence around ideas themselves. You can't draw a cursor using XOR by implementing it yourself, period, for 20 years.The patent system is deeply broken, and it doesn't even stop big players anyway. Really, Apple successfully sued Samsung, did it stop Samsung from taking over half the market? Does $1 billion in fines really matter or Apple or Samsung over the long term? By the time these cases are settled, it has already played out in the consumer marketplace anyway. You can't defeat consumer success with patent attacks. Microsoft's Android revenue shakedown won't replace the death of Windows if it happens, and it won't make Windows Phone/Surface RT a winner.It's a game only lawyers, IP trolls, or paid industry shills love. |
CoreOS is building a container runtime, Rocket | Hi, I created Docker. I have exactly 3 things to say:1) Competition is always good. Lxc brought competition to openvz and vserver. Docker brought competition to lxc. And now tools like lxd, rocket and nspawn are bringing competition to Docker. In response Docker is forced to up its game and earn its right to be the dominant tool. This is a good thing.2) "disappointed" doesn't even begin to describe how I feel about the behavior and language in this post and in the accompanying press campaign. If you're going to compete, just compete! Slinging mud accomplishes nothing and will backfire in the end.3) if anyone's interested, here is a recent exchange where I highlight Docker's philosophy and goals. Ironically the recipient of this exchange is the same person who posted this article. Spoiler alert: it tells a very different story from the above article.https://twitter.com/solomonstre/status/530574130819923968 (this is principle 13/13, the rest should be visible via Twitter threading)EDIT: here is the content of the above twitter thread:1) interface to the app and developer should be standardized, and enforced ruthlessly to prevent fragmentation2) infrastructure should be pluggable and composable to the extreme via drivers & plugins3) batteries included but removable. Docker should ship a default, swappable implementation good enough for the 80% case4) toolkit model. Whenever it doesn't hurt the user experience, allow using one piece of the platform without the others.5) Developers and Ops are equally important users. It is possible and necessary to make both happy.6) If you buy into Docker as a platform, we'll support and help you. If you don't, we'll support and help you :)7) Protect the integrity of the project at all cost. No design decision in the project has EVER been driven by revenue.8) Docker inc. in a nutshell: provide basic infrastructure, sell services which make the project more successful, not less.9) Not everyone has a toaster, and not everyone gets power from a dam. But everyone has power outlets. Docker is the outlet10) Docker follows the same hourglass architecture as the internet or unix. It's the opposite of "all things to all people"11) Anyone is free to try "embrace, extend extinguish" on Docker. But incentives are designed to make that a stupid decision12) Docker's scope and direction are constant. It's people's understanding of it, and execution speed, that are changing13) If you USE Docker I should listen to your opinion on scope and design. If you SELL Docker, you should listen to mine. |
Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada | As an outsider, I am really surprised by how deep-rooted America's hostility is towards Iran. Shi'ite Iran certainly has human rights issues, but as far as terrorism is concerned the majority of them are orchestrated by Sunni groups. 9/11 hijackers, Al Queda, Islamic State, Paris attackers - are all Sunni. |
Amnesia is now open source | This absolutely thrilled me. Right up until I realized that there's a closed-source, binary-only dependency (FBX SDK). I guess my dreams of playing this game (which I do, in fact, already own a copy of - twice over, actually) on Linux/aarch64 are still a ways off. AutoDesk indicated as of ~2017 that Linux/ARM support for the FBX SDK wasn't on their road map, and nothing seems to have changed since then.Still- major kudos to Frictional for doing this. It's 100% an appreciated move, and very much in the right direction. The choice of FBX SDK is just, in hindsight, unfortunate, but that doesn't diminish the helpful nature of what they've done here.(fingers crossed - maybe FBX SDK is just needed for the editor? Hope springs eternal...) |
The New York Times buys Wordle | https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1488264128422678535> for a price "in the low seven figures"That's a lot cheaper than I expected, considering it has a dedicated daily user base in the millions. ~$1/active user is an absolute steal if you are just talking customer acquisition, let alone the actual asset and brand. NYT essentially just bought the hottest new social network.On the other end though, a single developer getting paid millions for a few days worth of work certainly doesn't hurt. |
Amazon Pip Horror Story | I've been an Amazon SDE and an Amazon SDM. I enjoyed my time as an SDE, luckily free from these horror stories. After having been an SDM, I understand how these horror stories can form.Generally, Amazon has two minds about performance management. In written documentation, it's all about whether your reports meet the role guidelines. The written documentation is solid. They share how to evaluate people objectively and how to minimize bias. Verbally, it's all about numbers and probability. The organization wants X number of people to leave this year, to do that they want Y number of people in performance improvement plans.There is an intense pressure to force a certain amount of attrition each year. While Amazon may claim stack ranking doesn't exist, Amazon uses rating and calibration mechanisms to learn who you think as a manager are your lowest performers. As a manager, you get verbal (never written) lashings from your manager and skip manager to put the lowest performers on performance plans that ensure that any attrition counts. As soon as you capitulate, your lowest performer is now considered a low performer.As an SDM, I wanted to maintain the illusion of great Amazon culture for my team. Behind the scenes, I spent a lot of time advocating for my team and trying to poke holes in the performance ratings of other teams. It was exhausting. There are certainly a lot of shortcuts I could have taken like putting potential internal transfers on performance management, but did not. I feel bad for the LinkedIn poster here, I think he had a lazy manager. |
The HTTP crash course nobody asked for | That was an excellent, well-written, well-thought out, well presented, interesting, humorous, enjoyable read. Coincidentally I recently did a Rust crash course so it all made perfect sense - I am not an IT pro. Anyhows, thanks. |
Steve Jobs has died | From his 2005 Stanford commencement speech:"Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart." |
The House just voted to wipe out the FCC’s landmark Internet privacy protections | Before getting all spun up, I'd dig a little deeper on the issue than what the WaPo does in this piece.These regulations were only voted on late in 2016 and never went into effect. To do the regulations, the FCC reclassified the internet as basically ye olde telephone system, which then made it subject to their purview based on laws created in the 1930s. This is classic overreach. Congress never gave this authority to the FCC and is acting to put them back in line with the law.It's pathetic the the WaPo used their platform to create more heat than light on this, by selective quoting. Here's a more full quote from Rep Blackburn that explains her position more fully.“The FCC already has the ability to oversee privacy with broadband providers,” Blackburn explained. “That is done primarily through Section 222 of the Communications Act, and additional authority is granted through Sections 201 and 202. Now, what they did was to go outside of their bounds and expand that. They did a swipe at the jurisdiction of the Federal Trade Commission, the FTC. They have traditionally been our nation’s primary privacy regulator, and they have done a very good job of it.”The lesson here really is that if the issue is really important, then get an actual law passed instead of trying to contort regulatory authority based on laws from the 1930s. The previous president could certainly have done this, but chose not to. |
75% decline over 27 years in total flying insect biomass in protected areas | Being an earth dwelling human, this seems pretty bad. Aside from buying ammo or survival rations, what's something proactive that I can do? Is there an organization that is trying to rid the world of pesticides (assuming that's the cause)? If I opt to call my representatives, what am I calling in support of/against?Over the last year, reading the news had made me more passive and worried. I want to dedicate a slice of time to doing something to solve the problem, but I'm not certain if there's anything pragmatic to be done against big areas of environmental concern like this, global warming, ocean acidity, and etc. |
All of Oculus’s Rift headsets have stopped working due to an expired certificate | They let their certificate expire, essentially bricking all of their devices. And now the app running it won't start, so they can't push an update.Just recently picked up a Rift. I love the hardware and their exclusives are top notch, but this confirms my suspicions that their backend is super goofy.They sell Rifts at Best Buy and want to pretend that it's a consumer-ready product, but here's why I am recommending people stay away for now:- Non-existant repair or service out of Warranty.- Basic things in the platform like changing your name or photo don't exist.- Lots of non-response over other basic features requested by the community.- Questionable future investment in the platform or hardware. It sounds like they are moving their efforts towards "lighter" experiences.In short, it feels like being a legacy customer for a new product. |
Using Anki to remember what you read | If Anki’s UI/UX turns you off, I’ve built an alternative called Mochi (https://mochi.cards/) that uses markdown.Incidentally it also supports Zettelkasten like note taking like described in the article. |
Crazy New Ideas | Lots of comments already, but I'll chime on in.I realized this very late in life, but I have a test for when it's time to pay attention to a new technology. It's when technical people look at what seems like a groundbreaking idea, seem unimpressed, and say "couldn't you just _____", were the blank is filled with something a nontechnical person doesn't understand or considers very cumbersome.The web: couldn't you just transfer a file to an open port and use a rendering tool to view it?Blogs: couldn't you just update a web page?Wikis: couldn't you just update a web page?social media: couldn't you just set up group view preferences and use RSS?youtube: couldn't you just upload a video and use tags for search?twitter: couldn't you just not? Isn't that just a worse version of what we can already do??Honestly, I've overlooked almost every one of these things, because I failed to understand how removing small bits of friction can cause a technology to explode.Sure, some ideas are crazy new, but some sound too underwhelming to be revolutionary. but they are, there's no question about it, all those things I listed above changed the world, in ways both good and pretty damn awful. |
Health insurers just published close to a trillion hospital prices | I'm the author. A question I have is: how did so many prices ever get negotiated in the first place? What kind of systems are in place to do this kind of micro-negotiation? |
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