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Mosh: SSH for 2012 | Ok, I'll be "that guy". Why not just use tmux or screen? Is character delay a real issue in 2012? Seems like it's more of a proof of concept of their syncing algorithm rather than something super useful.EDIT: Fair enough, I stand corrected. :-) |
Fractal Lab | Was it really necessary to implement your own scrollbar? It's absurdly slow (and therefore annoying) on Firefox/Conkeror, and seems entirely redundant when the browser handles scrolling perfectly fine. |
Let’s talk about usernames | The entire concept of usernames that are unique and permanent is stupid and even "cruel". The reality is that a relatively small handful of privileged early adopters get good usernames that match their identities, and everyone else gets screwed. These identifiers then act like tatoos that you got a long time ago and are stuck with for the rest of your life: people end up reminded every day of a sport they can no longer play due to an injury ("hockeystar") or loves lost ("iheartjessie"), attached to a joke that is no longer funny or to a thought that they found adorable as a 13 year old (when you are legally asked to "choose a username": a modern era coming of age scenario) but which adults find inane, or to a nickname that means something different than you realized to some people and now can't change.The reality is that there are almost ten billion people on this planet and they live for upwards of a century. You are simply deluding yourself if you think it is reasonable to build a system with unique, permanent usernames. Nothing in the real world works like that, including trademarks. And it just helps enforce the very problem that people try to trust usernames and then get tricked by people who sniped usernames that are tied to other peoples' well-known identities (leading to abused "verified" badge systems and legal challenges and expensive hostage scenarios... it just sucks).And for what? To make it easier to hand-type a URL? Does anyone even do that? I am super technical and I barely even do that in 2018, as if nothing else there are too many websites in existence to remember all of their one-off URL schemes. Like almost everyone, I either use the site's built-in search feature or I do a search on Google to find people, and let a combination of page rank and personalized results guide me to the right destination. Some web browsers don't even show URLs anymore!Here is a great example of where it is completely insane: Facebook. There is absolutely no good reason for that website to have usernames for regular users, and they frankly shouldn't have usernames for businesses either. It isn't even clear to me that the app--which most users are using, not the website--even has a way to show people's usernames, which means this is an identifier which somehow everyone knows must be chosen and must be unique and is nigh-unto permanent but which somehow is also simultaneously meaningless but is also a horrible point of contention? What?I am lucky. I spent a bunch of time in 1994 to select a username, and despite being 13, I was mature enough to come up with something that wouldn't ever come to cause me complex problems. People ask me what it means, and it essentially doesn't mean anything: it has only a positive connotation to me when I hear it, it is entirely neutral, and it had no existing usage I could find. Yet, I also still got screwed, as I am semi-famous, and everyone knows me as this username. I have kids who look up to me enough to want to take my name as a show of support and I have to essentially be the big bad asshole about it because in a world of unique and permanent usernames, people then assume the kid is really me. On the other side, I have been asked to rename myself by moderators of various forums as they couldn't believe the real saurik got an account on their site, and it was "confusing" people.And so in the end we all have to deal with the worst-case scenario anyway: unless you do nothing but sign up for random sites rumored to be interesting constantly (which I seriously tried to do), you eventually will succumb to needing a way to prove who you are on multiple sites and tie together those identifies. And for most users... as in virtually all "normal users", that moment comes when they are using only two websites, as their username was probably something like jay.freeman.178 as everything that was even remotely interesting to them was taken a decade earlier by literally a different generation of humans, so they let the website automatically generate one.In a world where everyone is having to solve the worst-case problem anyway, every site should just have numbers as unique identifiers, at most have some kind of trust score for degrees of separation on the site (so you can get a feeling for "is this the saurik that I met?"), and everyone should be trained "names don't matter and if you see someone with that name it doesn't even slightly mean that they are the same person you met last week". |
Airline pilots landing at LAX report “a guy in jetpack” flying alongside them | ATCs have a reputation for never losing their cool and that really shines through here:“Tower, there’s a guy in a jetpack flying outside.”“Copy. To your left or your right?” |
Here is today | What was before the universe? |
Secret contract tied NSA and security industry pioneer | NSA invents weak (Back Door present) crypto algo.Pushes RSA to make it a Default in a key function (RNG) by giving them $10 Million.NSA points to RSA as an early adopter and gets NIST to certify it.Millions of systems are now protected by an RSA product that the NSA deliberately weakened.Any sufficiently skilled rogue actor can attack virtually any business that uses these RSA products -NSA (Cyber security Command) gets even more money to "Protect" us from said Rogue actors.So all-in-all good investment on their partEdit: Spelling fixed per commenter pointing out the difference between rouge and rogue. I did imply malicious actors not red-cheeked actors (not that they are mutually exclusive). |
I Turned a Routine Traffic Ticket into a Constitutional Trial | I was with the author until reading this unfortunate quote:> Traffic camera laws are popular in part because they appeal to a law-and-order impulse. If we are going to stop those nefarious evildoers who jeopardize the health of the republic by sliding through yellow lights when no one else is around and driving through empty streets at thirty miles per hour in twenty-five zones, then we need a way around such pesky impediments as a lack of eyewitnesses.This is an unfair rhetorical attack that trivializes the motivations for necessary enforcement of traffic laws. Whether or not you are a fan of traffic cameras, traffic violations are in fact serious and should not be brushed off. The problem is, one day you make it easy for people to think it's ok to do 30 in a 25, then the next day they're doing 35, then 45 the next.I honestly do think people should be ticketed for 30 in a 25. It's not a trivial laughing matter. It always dismays me to see people downplaying speeding. 30 vs 25 will increase your stopping distance more than enough to kill a child. Yet, we nonchalantly think it's cool as a society to blow through red lights and everyone speeds. The author clearly separates "the slightly more respectable offense of owning a speeding vehicle" from "armed robbery, drug dealing, and other misdeeds". Would the author feel that speeding is any more respectable than armed robbery if a speeding driver killed their kids?I agree that traffic cameras are a poor way to enforce these laws, but I want to point out that they really do need enforcing and shouldn't be trivialized. |
VS Code uses 13% CPU when idle due to blinking cursor rendering | It just doesn't go in my head that we are building text editors inside a web browser! I get it, there are many good use cases for Electron and it's easy to get started with cross platform support, but why is everybody going crazy about text editors in them? Because you can write plugins in JS?Wouldn't it be better to make native application, especially for code editors, where developers spend most of their time, where every noticeable lag and glitches are not appreciated.Edit: Many people here think that I am attacking this web based kind of technology, which I am not, and sorry for not being clear enough, but why chose something so high up the stack for dev tool?Edit2: For non-believers in nested comments, look -> https://github.com/jhallen/joes-sandbox/tree/master/editor-p... |
The bullet effects in Terminator 2 weren’t CGI | Wait until you hear about how Cameron filmed the scene with a helicopter going under a highway overpass.https://filmschoolrejects.com/terminator-2-helicopter-stunt/ |
Germany: New government plans 'right to encryption' | In all honesty, I don't/can't value government provided rights. The reason is governments have no basis to grant anything more than an individual.If you think about it, if I grant you a right to privacy - what can that possibly mean to you? If not just I, but I and 10 others (or 100, or 10000) agree to grant you a right, still - what does that mean? Do you now have that right?In fact, the position is nonsense.The question then, is at what point do a bunch of people become a government? What is the magic number? And on what basis does a government have greater rights than the individuals it purports to represent?The answer in reverse, is that government does not have greater rights than individuals. It does not determine morality. A majority of people might decide to rule over others - and they may be successful via their greater or co-ordinated force - but at no point does that use of force become a right. Put simply, if someone or a group or a government initiate force, that is a wrong. Re rights, you can do whatever as long as you are not harming another.Governments are not greater than individuals. While we might go along with government dictats or government 'granting of rights', there is no moral basis for it. It is just the labouring under an illusion. The government illusion is powerful, for sure, and there is malign threat therein, but at no point can government create a right that is not already existent for the individual. If some people believe it can, they are mistaken. If those people undertake the dictats of government, acting forcibly against other that have done them no wrong, they are acting immorally.In answer to the main post then, individuals have always had a right to encryption, if it is not harming anyone. Governments have never had the (moral) 'right' to decrypt as that is stealing someone's privacy. Governments can of course write laws to justify whatever they like, but these laws themselves need to align with morality to be 'right'.PS I seriously don't mind being down-voted, but would rather understand what the objections are to my argument. |
We need a middle class for startups | Totally agree with this article. It's not just about funding methods, but also playbooks for these types of businesses, and best practices.I've bootstrapped IPinfo.io to millions in revenue and a team of over 20 - so we're squarely in the "Middle class", and there's a tension between the "bootsrapper advice" (which mostly applies to optimizing for lifestyle and eliminating any risk) and "VC backed advice" (which mostly seems to optimize for scale and speed) - and a lack of advice for anything that balances those 2 (let's be ambitious and serve a large market and create the best products with great people, but let's run this as a marathon and not a sprint, and let's not risk everything on a big outcome). |
Tesla remotely converts battery pack, cutting 1/3 of range | So the way I'm reading the post is Tesla swapped out a battery pack for a 60 with a 90 and enabled the 90. Tesla, years later, discovers that even though the hardware for a 90 was installed it should have been software limited to be a 60. (I'm assuming that Tesla only made the owner pay the cost of the 60 battery swap even though they replaced it with a 90). They go and "fix the glitch" and set it back to the 60. Since the new owner bought it thinking it was a 90, because it was enabled to be a 90, presumably paid for it assuming this was the case and is now upset because they don't have what they thought they bought.Sounds like all around bad decisions. The previous owner shouldn't have sold it as a 90 or at least disclosed that, "It's a 60 but Tesla swapped out the batter with a 90 and left it configured as a 90". Tesla, being notified, should have just enabled the 90 and made the customer happy. How exactly are people supposed to abuse this? Tesla put the 90 in there and they're the only ones who are going to be doing that. Presumably this cost them a fortune to do it in the first place. Why not get some good will out of it? "Hey sorry about your battery. We only had a 90 so we threw that in there. Enjoy. Tell everyone you know about how awesome Tesla was about fixing the problem and remember that next time you go to buy your next car" |
GGML – AI at the Edge | ggml and llama.cpp are such a good platform for local LLMs, having some financial backing to support development is brilliant. We should be concentrating as much as possible to do local inference (and training) based on privet data.I want a local ChatGPT fine tuned on my personal data running on my own device, not in the cloud. Ideally open source too, llama.cpp is looking like the best bet to achieve that! |
Au Revoir | It always amazes me how you can convince a founder/CEO is not right man for the job, and slowly push him away.Companies that succeed are driven by burning vision, not by day-to-day operation people. It might make feel the companies run smoother for some time, but day-to-day executives are harmful to a company core vision leading to boring companies if they manage to sustain profitability in the long run at all. |
We got banned from PayPal after 12 years of business | I've been preaching this since forever.Don't rely on PayPal. They're less professional than a kid selling juice next to the road.There are no grace periods with PayPal to give you time to move to another service.There is never more than a generic reason and stonewalling when they terminate you.And yes, their decision is always final.They'll happily terminate your only source of income on a friday afternoon, freeze your funds, then laugh at you as you scramble to get an alternative up and running.Don't build on PayPal. It's no foundation at all. |
Still alive | For the uninitiated, what sort of content is Slate Star Codex known for?I see he kind of addresses it in his initial post. That description seemed pretty broad and open ended though. |
Apple's iCloud+ “VPN” | Props to Apple for the design of this service. It doesn't hit all the privacy targets that long-time personal VPN users might be looking for, and it doesn't get into the game of trying to circumvent region locked content*, but otherwise it's likely to be a solid privacy improvement for almost all users in a careful and deliberate way.I use a VPN for other reasons (downloading Ubuntu ISOs mostly) but I'll probably turn this on and leave it running on all my devices because of how transparent it appears to be. I trust Apple's onion-routing design more than I trust my VPN provider not to log things.* I'm actually glad they don't try to get around region locks. I consume a lot of BBC content and live in the UK. I'm constantly struggling with my VPNs (with UK endpoints) being blocked because others outside the UK could be using them. It would be nice if the BBC didn't block like this, but UK residents do typically pay for the content whereas those outside the UK are unable to. |
Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far | Prediction: Brain drain at Twitter begins as Elon starts enacting unpopular policies. Valuation tanks. Morale becomes non-existent and Twitter slowly starts to fade from existence while competitors begin to fill the void. I give it 3-5 years before it's gone full husk. |
From Asm.js to WebAssembly | Does everyone think this is good news?I'm all for making the web faster/safer/better and all that. But I am worried about losing the web's "open by design" nature.Much of what I've learned and am learning comes from me going to websites, opening the inspector and stepping through their code. It's educational. You learn things you may never read about in tutorials or books. And it's great because the author may have never intended for their code to be studied. But whether they like it or not, other people will learn from their code, and perhaps come up with [occasionally] better versions of it on their own.This has helped the web development to evolve faster, and it's obvious how democratizing this "open-by-design" property is, and I think we should be concerned that it's being traded away for another (also essential) property.Human beings cannot read asm.js code. And a bytecode format will be more or less the same. So, no matter how much faster and more flexible this format/standard is, it will still turn web apps into black boxes that no one can look into and learn from. |
Ask HN: What are the things that you have automated in your personal life? | I have semi-automated cooking for the week ahead.We recently started cooking meals for the week ahead on Sundays and then freezing them. The aim was to give us more time with the kids and to cut down on housework.To save time on the Sunday cooking session I have cobbled together a very clunky, and I mean VERY clunky semi-automated cooking system. It comprises a Raspberry PI which controls a couple of WiFi mains switches attached to the induction hob and the slow cooker. A wooden spoon attached to a 360 degree servo motor hangs above the pot on the hob and can be activated by the Pi for stirring. Initially I tried to use one of those cheap three-legged novelty vibrating pot stirrers, but that didn't work out. Thermocouples feed back to the Pi to help control cooking.The whole thing is controlled by a messy Python script and 'recipes' are JSON based text files. They just define how long each device should stay on, a max temp to turn them off and how often they should be stirred. I get an email when cooking is done.I plan to add some functionality over the summer to tip in ingredients as needed. The biggest issue is that it doesn't handle chunky food, it works for soups, chili sauce, pasta sauce etc. I'd love to figure out a way to fry and separate mince as you would with a spatula.. |
Jitsi Meet: An open source alternative to Zoom | I've tried Jitsi Meet and found it to be smooth. During a hangout call with a group of ~8 friends I introduced it as an alternative. User experience comparison:Onboarding:
Jitsi: Click a URL. No accounts.
Hangouts: Google account. Need to individually invite other Google accounts.Video Quality:
Jitsi: Decent, slightly better than hangouts.
Hangouts: Passable but grainy.Video Layout:
Jitsi: Automatically big-screens current speaker, shows small screens of others. Has option to tile to equally size screens.
Hangouts: Same.Conclusion: Friends preferred Hangouts.It's quite disheartening that "average users" shun 1 click URL room creation with superior video and audio quality for manually adding contacts. And that's without any considerations for free software vs. Google panopticon. They would rather tolerate a multi-step process of sharing gmail accounts, asking the same person for their email repeatedly. |
I have no capslock and I must scream | Very similar to A Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling by M. J. Shields (frequently misattributed to Mark Twain):"For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and Iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all.Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" -- bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez -- tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th" rispektivli.Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld." |
Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs | It's interesting how the tone of this article is almost exactly the same as the one about the Microsoft employee that recently quit Google.Something happens to companies as they get larger, where the culture of a company starts dying from a death-by-a-thousand-cuts, and then they start promoting the wrong people into upper management that seem to really poison a very good company culture. It sounds like Goldman Sachs is one of these companies.The irony is that I think the shift in mentality came from Wall Street itself pushing the idea of "maximizing shareholder value", in the 80s. This lead to a bunch of financially positive but culturally negative (some would say sociopathic) decisions, such as closing plants that were profitable, but weren't profitable enough. I think Michael Moore had a movie on this called "The Big One".Forbes has an article on this, calling it "The Dumbest Idea in the World":http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2011/11/28/maximizi...I read the biography on Goldman Sachs, and I don't doubt for one second that there was a historic culture that most of the employees were fiercely proud of. But as the author mentioned, a few mistaken promotions into power and the whole culture of a company can change through death by a thousand cuts. No doubt the same thing is happening at all large companies that started off with great roots. I saw this occur at Yahoo, where completely idiotic decisions were made in order to preserve revenues so that managers' bonuses were left in tact.Is this something that can be avoided? I'm not sure... corporate culture starts at the top and works its way down. It's something that must be demonstrated by the leaders of the company at every level, and it filters down to the lowest ranks. So if you have a company with strong leadership, then I think it can be staved off for a while, but it requires a relentless focus. |
Leaving Beta, New Sponsors | Leaving beta? They don't even have a Windows/IIS client yet. They're nowhere close to "release quality". |
Wine 2.0 released | Cool. I have to admit I haven't thought about Wine in a while because I can't think of any software I use that doesn't have a Linux version. What are people's use-cases nowadays? |
Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition | As someone that jumped ship from how slow Chrome has gotten and went to Nightly /w Stylo and (CPU threads - 1) e10s processes enabled about 2 monthsish ago...Holy damn Firefox is actually fast.Fair comparison, both having Pocket, uBlock, Evernote, OneNote, Pushbullet, and Bitwarden; neither of them having an extension the other doesn't. Above described Firefox Nightly config vs Chrome Dev.Test machines are a workstation with a i7-4771 @ 3.9ghz, 32GB DDR3-2133, Radeon 7970 with a trio of 1080p screens (a very fast modern machine from the Haswell era) and a laptop with a i5-32120M, 8GB of DDR3-1600, Intel HD4000 iGPU feeding a 13" 2560x1600 @ 200% hidpi (an Ivy Bridge era MBPr 13" Late 2012). Both machines run Win10.Both machines have less real world wait on Firefox than Chrome, and the interface has less latency between when I do something and it even begins processing the request. Also, under a ton of windows and tabs, Firefox seems to use less RAM and the speed gap seems to widen.I don't care about about artificial benchmarks, btw, they never seem to measure what actually makes browsers slower for humans.Edit: Even though I just said I don't care about benchmarks, using Speedometer 2.0-r2216: On the workstation: Firefox 58.0a1 2017-09-26 64bit 61.18 vs Chrome 63.0.3217.0 dev 64-bit 51.67; on the laptop, same versions: Firefox 28.58 vs Chrome 26.74So, arguably, flat out benchmarkable performance is the same, with Firefox just slightly edging ahead (18% and 6% faster). It isn't enough to explain how fast Firefox feels now.Edit 2: And now with Edge 40.15063.0.0/EdgeHTML 15.15063: Workstation, 46.72; Laptop 21.37. Firefox is 34% and 31% faster, Chrome is 25% and 11% faster. |
No More Cheap Shipping for Chinese Sellers | The impression I get from that thread is that the dream here is now Americans can do what they do best, sit in the middle of transactions and collect rent. Previously, you could go to a Chinese website and have the Chinese factory send you a widget directly to your door. Now that will be too expensive, but hey we have a solution! An American will order a bunch of widgets in bulk, ship them over in a cargo ship, come up with some fancy marketing, and then sell the widgets to you at 200% markup. You know these folks will never hire electrical engineers to certify safety and conformance, or work with the factory to improve the product in response to customer feedback. They're there to do one thing: sit in the middle of the transaction and charge Chinese manufacturers for the privilege of selling to Americans.But hey, look on the bright side... at least there is someone you can sue when your widget blows up. |
Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era | During 1999-2000, I helped hundreds of people learn how to use Flash. I was, looking back now, probably one of the top experts on Flash 4 at the time in the world. The twist - I was a 15 year old living in a tiny African country called Lesotho.Lesotho is pretty isolated from the world. Nobody even knows it exists. Living there, Silicon Valley might as well be on Mars.However, we used to get issues of Wired Magazine from South Africa, and these came with shareware CDs. These CDs included 30-day trial editions of Macromedia Flash.Flash was amazing at the time. Being able to create interactive animations blew my mind. I learned Flash 4 completely inside and out. I knew every single feature, every single quirk.Of course living in Lesotho, there was nothing I could really do with all this. Most people around me didn't even know how to use computers. Flash was several layers of abstraction away from that.So I used to spend all my time on Yahoo Chat's Web Design chat rooms. Mainly hanging out with nerds in the US. We used to have countless people drop by in the rooms every day asking questions about Flash. Mainly people working for web design agencies in the US. I was the resident Flash expert. Flash questions always were referred to me.In the 2000s Flash rightly got a lot of flak. I'm not sad it's gone. But it was really something special, especially in the late 90s. |
X | If you think that it is just a sick joke, take a look at this and think again: http://www.zifyoip.com/wysiscript/sigbovik.html |
The Long-Term Stock Exchange Opens for Business | "They described the immense pressure on companies to pursue short-term results over creating value for future decades and generations."Where does this pressure come from?
The board? Can't you appoint a board that is long-term friendly?
Institutional investors? Wouldn't the same investors interested in the LTSE also be interested in you on the traditional market if long-term is part of your DNA?
Shareholders? Shareholders agree to all sorts of craziness if they like your company (see voting structure of Palantir, Facebook, etc.)Maybe others can elaborate on what problem is being solved here. |
Don't you lecture me with your thirty dollar website | This website is inane, juvenile and has no real use. And for all those reasons I love it. Kudos to HN for being a place where I can find things that just bring some silly fun to my life.I remember in the early days of the Interwebs, there was so many sites just like this one. You didn't have to go to FB, IG or some other content mill to find them. Plus, when you did find one, it had the same feeling of excitement as finding a $5 bill on the sidewalk.Here's some other great sites.
* http://eelslap.com/
* https://theuselessweb.com/ |
Realistic computer-generated handwriting | My first name contains one of the fewest used letters of the alphabet and in first position nonetheless: XavierLet me tell you: the training data did not contain that many X to begin with :DThe Xs at best look like Ts, at worst like malformed Os.Always funny to find the blind spots of some piece of tech. |
Transmission BitTorrent app contained malware | Along with the recent Linux Mint hijack, this really illustrates the need for people to verify programs they download. Though I think most people can't be bothered to verify the checksum on a file every time they download it.On the other hand, the Windows and OS X App Stores are awful. Linux package managers are looking like one of the only straightforward ways to distribute applications securely. |
Does anyone remember websites? | Check out the search engine at http://wiby.meFrom their about page:Search engines like Google are indispensable, able to find answers to all of your technical questions; but along the way, the fun of web surfing was lost. In the early days of the web, pages were made primarily by hobbyists, academics, and computer savvy people about subjects they were interested in. Later on, the web became saturated with commercial pages that overcrowded everything else. All the personalized websites are hidden among a pile of commercial pages. Google isn't great at finding those gems, its focus is on finding answers to technical questions, and it works well. But finding things you didn't know you wanted to know, which was the real joy of web surfing, no longer happens. In addition, many pages today are created using bloated scripts that add slick cosmetic features in order to mask the lack of content available on them. Those pages contribute to the blandness of today's web.The wiby search engine is building a web of pages as it was in the earlier days of the internet. |
Dumber phone | Personally, I find my smartphone addiction gets worse when I turn off all notifications. Because then FOMO takes over and I spend tons of time digging into apps to make sure I didn't "miss anything". For me, it works much better to intentionally choose the notifications I get to be the things I really want to be interrupted by. I wish there were an AI or human secretary who could make those judgements on a per-notification basis with my best interests in mind, but that doesn't seem to be a realistic option at my income level.Another thing I do to limit my phone's dopamine rush is to delete all of the social media apps from my phone and only access them via a browser. mbasic.facebook.com is significantly less addictive that the app, while still being useful. Sometimes when I really need a break, I'll create a block list in the "Restrictions" settings on my iPhone and block Facebook, Reddit, Twitter and HN completely. I wish that there was a way for someone else to be able to remotely manage those restrictions for me, so I could uninstall all of the time-suck apps from my phone and only re-install them by getting permission from a friend who could help me honor my intentions. |
Why you should not use Google Cloud | So piggybacking on this, I have a similar story to tell. We had a nice young startup, infra entirely built out on Google Cloud. Nicely, resiliently built, good solid stuff. Because of a keyword monitor picked up by their auto-moderation bot our entire project was shut down immediately, wasn't able to bring it up for several hours, thank god we hadn't gone live yet as we were then told by support that because of the grey area of our tech, they couldn't guarantee this wouldn't keep happening. And in fact told us straight out that it would and we should move.So maybe think about which hosting provider to go with, don't get me wrong I like their tech. But their moderation does need a more human element, to be frank all their products do. Simply ceding control to algorithmic judgement just won't work in the short term if ever at all. |
How to learn D3.js | Anyone know articles on how to integrate d3 with virtual-dom libraries like ReactJs ? |
Fight back against Google AMP (2018) | Websites WERE building horrible, non mobile news articles in HTML when AMP started at Google in 2015. The news articles were so slow and wasted so much bandwidth that many news orgs wrote bad apps (think CNN app; BBC app) to replace shit with even worse shit. That's what you get when you skimp on frontend engineers!!!AMP gives little guys, the ones starting blogs and trying to grow, a shot at freedom of speech. The web was developing in a way that the big players like BBC and CNN would dominate with big budget winner-take-all walled gardens. AMP is one of Google's most anti establishment services, which means I'm sure Ruth will be killing it very soon!This meant Google search on the mobile web was literally dying. Every year more and more content was being locked inside walled Gardens!! I was a maintainer of AMPHTML 2015 - 2018 at Google. The project is hibernating and loses a ton of money I know I worked on the budgets for flash memory for AMP. At the time Facebook and others were proposing proprietary non HTML news document formats. Google, to keep HTML alive, decided to cache amp for free, which subsidized hosting costs for ALL news websites. I hate it that now I have to switch browsers 2x to write an article comment, too! But news apps NEVER supported this AT ALL!! News apps NEVER supported a working search feature AT ALL!! News apps NEVER supported a good user experience or global search AT ALL!If you want to rant, blame the bloatware mess that is HTML, it has almost at killed The mobile web, not AMP! AMP is Google's attempt to keep HTML alive on phones ... |
If a MacBook Pro runs hot or shows high kernel CPU, try charging it on the right | This post on HN yesterday fixed my problems of the last 5-7 days. I use a TB 2 Hub hooked up to a 2018 MBP to 2 4k monitors, a USB mic, etc.And I've noticed the hub got really unstable whenever the CPU fans would go wild. Looks like it was the controller overheating due to the shitty thermals that Jony Ive's Apple seems to keep pushing out. (Still the Apple of today).Now that I've switched my ports in a different config, so far I've had no crashes in the last 2 days.I swear, I wish I didn't love macOS so much (or wasn't so heavily invested in it), or I'd happily ditch it for a really powerful thermally cooled desktop and use that as my machine. WSL makes this more palatable, but the unparalleled retina support on macOS, my 15 years of using it, and just habits built up, keeps me from leaving. (I felt the same way when I first moved from windows to macOS, but it was in my early 20s and I had lots of time to play with the OS) |
Facebook account banned after linking Oculus account | Seriously, stay away from Oculus. I know they currently have the most versatile/best value headset in the Quest 2, but needing to have a FB account linked to it should be a deal-breaker for anyone who doesn't already have an active FB account (and perhaps even those who do). It isn't just an auth system shared by multiple products. It's Facebook, and the ban-hammer can come down swiftly, especially if, like the author, you are just creating an account to link to your Quest. I'm also not confident, as of right now, that FB is gonna fix this in a meaningful way. |
I tried to report scientific misconduct. How did it go? | In graduate school, in my lab there was a grad student who was kind of an unlikely "professor's pet". He was tall and had surfer's long hair with a bit of a hippie aesthetic. Anyways, he was also really completely clueless about how to do science correctly, but also, I guess, really good about playing politics (there was a time when he asked me to put some bacterial plasmid DNA on my mammalian cells. I told him "it doesn't work that way", but I did it anyways and handed over the cells, and he got the observation he was expecting). On his main project he was teamed up with a super sketchy foreign postdoc that I was convinced would say anything to get high profile papers out.So they did a series of experiments and reported results that screamed "artefact". On one of them, for example, the postdoc got trained to use the electron microscope and they went through thousands and thousands of images to pick out the one that had "just the right morphology" (I am pretty sure they were snapping photos of salt crystals). On another, they reported that their research subject protein was so fast at the process we were studying that everything occurred IN MIXING TIME. That to me, screams "you are not doing your experiments carefully".Meanwhile I was sweating balls working on a very careful preparation of similarly finicky proteins (you agitate them and they do bad things since they're metastable) and finally got it to produce reproducible results. I suggested they adapt my preparation to their protein but they couldn't give a damn, they had already published their paper and had moved on to sexier proteins.But then an intern was put on the project, and she could not reproduce their results, after working on it for six months (she is careful and honest). At the end, I felt so bad for her, I offered to train her on my technique, but she passed. I think she was burned out on the project. I asked if I could get a sample of the protein that she had prepped, and she agreed.I ran the protein through my preparatory technique and observed that there was a contamination that could have seeded the kinetics of their process. Upon isolating an uncontaminated sample, I carefully but briskly rushed the sample over to the machine. Nothing. Curious, I jacked the temperature up to get it going faster. Nothing. I left it in the machine overnight. Nothing. Finally, convinced that I had likely done something wrong, I dropped the sample in a shaker at temperature, came back the next day and recorded amazingly high signal. In short, the observation that it was "super fast" was entirely an artefact.As I, too, was trained on the Electron Microscope, I quickly spotted my sample onto an EM disc, reserved some time and hopped on the 'scope. The first grid sector I looked at, there was literally TEXTBOOK morphology in front of my eyes.I stapled together my results, gave it to the grad student, and told him that the general gist of his paper was probably still correct, but that he should be careful about characterizing his protein as exceptional. I then said it was in his hands to do the right thing.What do you think he did? Nothing, of course. He kept on the talks circuit, still talking about how exceptional his discovery was, and to date there have been no retractions. He even won the NIH grad student of the year award.The epilog is that after a decade of floundering I realized that even though I am pretty good at science, I was no good at playing academic politics and quit the pursuit; I drove for lyft/uber for a bit, and now I'm a backend dev. I am certain that my experiences are not unique. Amazingly the intern returned to our lab, and had her own three-year stint chasing ghosts that turned out to be overoptimistic interpretation of results reported by a postdoc.Oh. What happened to the grad student? He's a professor in the genomics department at UW. |
Announcing Rust 1.0 Alpha | Wow. Anyone remembers Rust pre-0.1? When it had typestate, ML syntax, garbage collection, etc.? So nice to see how the language slowly evolved and was molded to fit as best as possible the problem they were trying to solve. |
A practical security guide for web developers | Had this SO link saved since probably soon after it was asked 7 years ago. Still relevant and still being updated.http://stackoverflow.com/questions/549/the-definitive-guide-...Includes:- How to log in- How to remain logged in- Managing cookies (including recommended settings)- SSL/HTTPS encryption- How to store passwords- Using secret questions- Forgotten username/password functionality- Use of nonces to prevent cross-site request forgeries..........And much much more. |
Show HN: Primitive Pictures | Hi HN, OP here. I've tinkered with this problem a few times over the years, but only now am I happy with the results. This time I wrote it in Go and implemented things a bit differently that helped performance quite a bit.I plan on implementing SVG output pretty soon. It won't be hard I just haven't done it yet.For the Twitter bot, I'm planning on adding another mode where it posts a GIF showing the iterative progression of drawing an image.Let me know if you have any questions or if you have ideas for other features! |
How to Be Successful | 1. Be born to a wealthy middle class family and go to an elite school. |
Explorabl.es | Hah, was planning on linking to Nicky Case[0], but of course that's exactly who's behind this! :DVery exciting project. We're absolutely leaving "leaving money on the table" by not leveraging the full power of the brain for education and reasoning about complex systems. See also: Bret Victor's "Ladder of Abstraction" [1], and Kevin Simler's "Going Critical" [2].[0] https://ncase.me/[1] http://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction/[2] https://meltingasphalt.com/going-critical/ |
Apple acquires Dark Sky | Sigh.I mean, congratulations to the founders of Dark Sky. It’s a wonderful app and they deserve all the money they’ll get from this and they deserve a lot of credit for not selling user data when almost every other weather app does. But shutting down the API and Android apps feels like an egregious move by Apple.And I hope we actually see a good improvement to the Apple weather app as a result of this. I remember a few years ago Apple bought a fantastic public transit app (Embark?), shut it down and I still don’t think their Maps app comes close to the original transit app.Vaguely topical thought: I wonder if we’re going to see a lot more of this. A large economic downturn means a lot of small, independent companies will struggle to survive. Being swallowed by a megacorp might be one of the few ways to keep something alive. |
Intel's disruption is now complete | As someone who worked on Intel's phone chip: we definitely didn't win it. We fucked it up twelve ways to Sunday. Why: giant egos. There were turf wars between Austin, Santa Clara and Israel over who would design it, and the team that won out had long since lost its best principle engineers and had no clue how to spin the architecture to meet the design win. Otellini's hindsight hedge is pure spin: we knew the landing zone, we just didn't know how to get there. And the aforementioned turf war guaranteed we didn't get access to other teams' talent. I'm bitter because it was a really fun team when I moved from Motorola to Intel Austin, and then it just corroded over political battles. |
Ask HN: What are some good technology blogs to follow? | Somewhat related to following blogs. But how do I follow blogs anyway? Is there any good Google Reader like apps, that are easy to use? |
Equifax Lobbied to Kill Rule Protecting Victims of Data Breaches | Wow if anything this is quite worse than the article
says.You can read Equifax's original letter in all of its Orwellian double-speak: https://www.regulations.gov/contentStreamer?documentId=CFPB-...It's absolutely shocking to me how many times they use the words "serve the public interest".The sell-out that wrote that letter btw is this guy: https://www.cov.com/en/professionals/s/david-stein |
On Being a Principal Engineer | This rings true to my experience.
I'm a Staff engineer and of my 40 hour week about 10-15 of those hours are interviews, meetings, and answering questions. Questions about technical feasibility, architectural discussions and planning, long term strategic planning, and lots of one offs from other developers.I enjoy the soft work I do, a lot of emotional labor for other developers, soft sells for tech/feature work around the company, process strategy and such. I never expected this to be such a large part of my job, and how much value comes from it.But I am also at this weird point where I am not sure if the title of "staff/principle" can be transferred to another company. A lot of the value that I add now is because of the historical knowledge I have. What we have tried as a company, what we haven't, why we built some things the way we did, how things work currently, how the politics works and the trust I have built.In the past year, I have seen less than 5 job posting for a staff engineer. |
A Modern JavaScript Tutorial | Remember when some people advocated not using semicolons to end statements? Good times...https://javascript.info/structure |
The best engineering interview question I've ever gotten | Author of the interview question here. I came up with the idea after working at the company for a couple months and realizing that the skill of "diving into an unfamiliar area of the code and quickly figuring it out" was very important for us. Database codebases are large and complex -- so much so that almost every new feature you work on for the first year or so feels a lot like doing the question.Over the years of evaluating with it, we learned a lot about its quirks (both false positives and false negatives). At one point, someone got so frustrated that they threw their laptop on the floor. Happy to answer any questions about it! |
Outlook now ignores Windows' Default Browser and opens links in Edge by default | Windows is just full of hostile, anti-user patterns these days. I've considered building a windows box just to have a gaming rig multiple times over the last few years, but every time an article like this or their crusade against Chrome reminds me that Bill Gates is still the same anti-trust monster he was in the 90s. |
Gravity waves from Big Bang detected | They made a nice video of the researcher surprising Prof Linde with the news:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlfIVEy_YOAThe reaction of the couple is great! |
Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters | There is no point in giving me binary-tree-traversing questions; I don't know those answers and will never be interested in learning them.Let's presume this is out of preference and not ability. It's a pretty basic concept. If your preference stops you from learning something as basic as this as a programmer, then it doesn't seem likely that you will be motivated to keep up with even more abstruse concepts.Nearly every programmer nowadays knows that naive string concatenation is inefficient, and so they should use a stream or something like that. I'd rather hire someone who knows exactly why it's O(n^2) and why adding to the end of an array that doubles when it expands is O(n) amortized. Why? Because a different but analogous situation might well come up in a programming job, and the person who likes to think about such things is more likely to spot the potential problem and avoid it altogether! The fact that the op would actually feature the above sentences as a large text excerpt sets off the "Dunning-Kruger" alarm for me.That said, the op still has a good point. There is considerable organizational disconnect being displayed here. Those big companies would do well to have developers or a puzzle website do the initial filtering, rather than waste people's time by alternatively telling them they're supposedly wonderful, then supposedly horrible. |
Safe ways to do things in bash | I've written a ridiculous amount of shell script in my day, especially when doing "devops" before we had a term like "devops" to describe it. I've fallen in almost every pit bash has. With that background, here is my opinion.1. This article contains excellent advice and should be starred for later retrieval.2. Having basic scripting skills will make you a way better programmer. Many times I've done huge refactors and needle-in-hay-stack searches using only shell commands.3. Shell is the universal language.4. Bash isn't that bad once you get used to it (seriously.
I'll grant you tho that arrays are still nasty ;-) ).5. Bash is not that dangerous if you follow best practices. Don't be lazy!6. You will not regret getting really good at shell script. You'll have to take my word for it now because you don't know what you're missing. |
Sr.ht, the hacker's forge, now open for public alpha | Will we be able to selfhost it on our own infra? |
I don't know how CPUs work so I simulated one in code | The final for Computer Architeture had us building an 8-bit CPU. It was a multiweek project, starting with
designing the instruction set leading up to building the CPU in software implementing bubble sort in assembly.The first and only time I had to do an all nighter (2 actually) in college was due to that project. Two days before the final presentation, the CPU didn't work. After a few clock cycles the memory would contain garbage. I ended up rebuilding it from scratch debugging every step of the way only to find out the 1-bit mux (a primitive supplied with the software) was wired backwards.0 corresponded to the B input, and 1 selected the A input.Once I correct that, the CPU worked like a charm, we nailed the final preso, and I slept for 16 hours. |
Frances Allen has died | First female IBM fellow.First female winner of the Turing Award.Lots of other notable stuff.Sadly, this is the first I've heard of her. Hopefully all that means is I'm not a real programmer.Edit: To be clear, I really meant "I hope other people here are familiar with her work, even though I am not because I'm not a real programmer." I'm happy to see that some people are, in fact, familiar with her and her work. |
Drone Footage of Arecibo Observatory Collapse | So if they knew there is no money to even maintain it and this collapse was a likely outcome why not lower the platform in advance before any cable breaks? Just from a safety perspective omitting this seems to be somewhat negligent, no? |
70TB of Parler users’ messages, videos, and posts leaked by security researchers | Where are the comments about how awful it is for people's private messages to be leaked? Or is this okay because the media told me these guys are the bad guys. |
To Apple, Love Taylor | For everyone suggesting that artists are simply being greedy or unreasonable in expecting Apple to pay them during the trial period, I'd encourage you to consider the hypothetical I posted in the last thread about Apple Music's 3 month trial. It might help contextualize the artists' and labels' complaints:> Tomorrow, Apple announces that it will be introducing an "App Store Subscription." For $9.99/month users will receive unlimited access to all apps on the App Store. Developers will receive a share of each user's subscription payments in proportion to app usage. Apple simultaneously announces a 3 month free trial for all App Store accounts, and states that it will be making no payments to developers during that trial since users are not paying for it.I, personally, would ditch iOS development for Android in a heartbeat if that happened. I can't blame musicians for having a similar reaction. |
Things You Notice When You Quit the News | I can't really get onboard with this. A lot of the comments here, and the commentary in the article itself, talk about how depressing the news is, how biased it is, about Gell-Mann amnesia -- and they're all right. But from my own experience, the people I know who don't follow the news (either at all, or extremely minimally) are spectacularly ill-informed; they get their news either third-hand (which suffers from all of the aforementioned problems plus being re-reported poorly), or not at all, and operate with only the sketchiest understanding of what's happening in the world. They aren't going to "read three books on a topic" (from the article), they're just going to remain oblivious. And that's far worse, in my opinion. |
Killing TurboTax | "Killing TurboTax" is essentially a meme until we meaningfully simplify the tax code.There is no software development team on earth who could catch up with the full capabilities of TurboTax without some sort of fundamental shift in the business. I really hate to say this as someone who makes a living out of it, but dealing with the current amount of complexity in the tax code with a piece of software that a non-expert could use is virtually impossible.For the happy path (i.e. single individual, no dependents, no investments, no retirement, rents home), you could certainly build an application that handles these scenarios. The moment you factor in individuals who are bringing stock sales, multiple investment properties, ownerships/K1s and other complex scenarios to bear, its a different hellscape altogether.Also don't forget that most states have their own independent tax codes as well, which further complicate matters. There's difficulty multipliers all over this problem domain, and you can be certain that the lobbyists employed by Intuit, et. al. are encouraging this. |
Replit's new Code LLM: Open Source, 77% smaller than Codex, trained in 1 week | Some links:- Repo: https://github.com/replit/ReplitLM/tree/main/replit-code-v1-...- HuggingFace: https://huggingface.co/replit/replit-code-v1-3b- Demo: https://huggingface.co/spaces/replit/replit-code-v1-3b-demo- Early benchmark results: https://twitter.com/amasad/status/1651019556423598081A lot about this project was surprising. We knew it was going to be good, but didn't expect to be this good -- especially surprising was the finetuned performance boost, and the fact that the model is decent at language tasks and reasoning (in some cases much better than much larger general-purpose models).It feels like there is a lot more to do with this model, and I have a suspicion you can even make a half-decent chatbot (at least one focused on code) by finetuning it on conversation (and/or instruction) datasets.Will follow up with a more comprehensive technical report and the UL2R version (fill-in-the-middle support). |
Azure ChatGPT: Private and secure ChatGPT for internal enterprise use | So the public access one isn't private and secure? |
Facebook to ban white nationalist content | I consider myself a free speech absolutist. Or very nearly so.But that runs both ways. Not only do I think that almost all (to borrow a mathematical term) speech should be permitted, but also that the onus is on the speaker to make themselves heard or to find an audience. No company or platform owes them anything.In earlier times, that meant that no newspaper or printing press was required to print everything sent their way. Today it's the centralized websites that also don't have this obligation.If FB decides to ban bigots, or YouTube wants to kick anti-vaxxers off their site, so be it. You can host your own video if you'd like, or maintain a personal blog site.* You are not entitled to widespread distribution. Never have been.* Which leads to a place where I'll agree on obligations: root infrastructure like DNS or network connectivity. Those are the common carriers of our Internet. |
Photos capture life inside a drop of seawater | I wish there were a way to "productize" this, or automate it at least.I'm imagining some sort of aquarium-like tank you stock with ocean water that is able to maintain the microscopic life, allow them to flourish. Meanwhile, some sort of slow or periodic pump draws aquarium water into an attached, miniature "photography studio" where an appropriate camera+lens feeds a constant live stream to a display or to the web or to a Bond-villain's giant projector in their lair.What a wonderful "screensaver" to have when the occasional appearance of a micro organism graces your screen. Perhaps too there are as-yet undiscovered species we might find with such a device? |
Codename: Obtvse | -- Removed. Perhaps I overreacted. --As a designer, I find it somewhat perplexing that people here demand that code be directly copied for something like this be wrong. Design is more abstract than code, yes, but it's just as fundamental a part of the resulting product.Copying design, especially when the original source is so obvious, has damaging effects that are hard to quantify. Poor clones can directly damage the creation of a strong original brand and can preempt future creative product positioning. Because it is not user facing, identically copied code--when the design has been changed--has no such effects. Why do so many people believe that only copying code should be considered wrong when design has the potential to be more damaging? To me, they are both equally wrong.Great artists steal. Please steal my ideas. Take them, manipulate them, and build them into something that is your own. I wouldn't have publicized my new platform if I didn't expect the ideas to be used. Just please don't copy my implementation or designs. I need those things to be sacred so I can craft experiences that are not diluted by external factors. |
A cave in Romania that was sealed for 5.5M years | "in pitch darkness and temperatures of 25 °C"Is this supposed to be terrifying? Anyone who woke up at night and walked to the bathroom faced pitch darkness and temperatures of 25 °C! |
New Cities | Look to how Tokyo does things. A few takeaways:- mixed use zoning: reduce requirement for long trips by mixing many compatible types of commercial with residential, and remove single housing type developments. Also, allow many smaller apartment complexes mixed with single family houses, instead of segregating housing types.- street design: No more hierarchical/dendritic street layouts. That is, no more dead-end streets, which lead to collectors, which lead to arterials - you're bottlenecking a huge population through a very small, fast, and unsafe road system. Instead, make the streets highly connected, and narrower to encourage slower but steadier car traffic, and blocks shorter. Porous streets networks can route around bottlenecks and can have many more concurrent cars than even crazy-huge Texas-style freeways.- no big street setback requirements: encourage density by removing crazy suburban-style setbacks.Edit: I wanted to make a plug for form-based zoning, which is zoning where the form (building type) is zoned, not its use. This doesn't necessarily refer to its style (Neoclassical, Modernist, etc) but how it interacts with the surrounding buildings on the street. E.g. buildings above a certain size might not be allowed in an area, and not be allowed to take more than N number of yards of street frontage. Setbacks of a certain size might be prohibited, or allowed. This allows of a reasonable number of mixed uses like restaurants, shops, and other day to day commercial uses to coexist with residential. This does not mean that heavy/noxious industry can be built up there. This was the error the Euclid v. Ambler decision made 100 years ago: they threw the baby out with the bathwater by restricting zoning by type; there is not a small amount of racism that came with Euclidean/exclusive zoning, e.g. removing a formerly viable way for immigrants to start a business with a house above (a la Bob's Burgers) and thereby increasing the barrier for success. |
MacBook Pro with faster performance and new features for pros | It's not possible to buy it without the TouchBar any more :(I really wanted to like it, and the concept could perhaps eventually be good, but the current implementation is infuriatingly bad:• I need more than one tap to change the brightness, volume or skip to the next song.• The buttons are in different locations depending on context, so it's not possible to use it by muscle memory.• TouchBar automatically goes to sleep, making the previous two points worse.• It's not even that good for its intended purpose. Previews of things on it are too tiny. Most actions still require multiple taps, and it's in the uncanny valley between direct and indirect manipulation.Fingerprint sensor is convenient, but the TouchBar ended up being a gimmick, not a pro feature. |
Katie Bouman, the computer scientist behind the first black hole image | Serious question HN:If Katie was a man do you think people would be going through git histories and their published papers trying to determine if she is being over-credited for her achievements? |
Wikimedia is moving to Gitlab | Anyone thinking of moving to their own Gitlab instance with Gitlab CE-- either stay on Github or prepare to waste your time dealing with user spam bots that pollute your site's search results.In other words-- if you want the common use case for a FOSS project:1. publicly viewable main repository with publicly viewable issue tracker2. requirement to log in to view all snippets, user profiles, perhaps even other repos as enforced by administrator settings (otherwise SEO bots will leverage these features to eat your search results)3. anyone with an email can sign up to post issues to the main repo's issue trackerThere is no combination of settings in Gitlab CE to achieve this. Any sane approach has to leave out step #2. That means that your Gitlab instance gets hammered with user spam from bots which then get indexed in Google search results for your site.Worse, Gitlab has no tools to make it easy to remove the user spam (and obviously no tools to prevent it from happening).Just run a public-facing Gitlab CE instance for a few days. Search for one of the spam snippets you collect, and you'll find results for all the FOSS projects out there running their own Gitlab instances.I've never seen any solutions offered by Gitlab for this, nor frankly any interest in the myriad bug reports about them addressing this at all.Edit: typo |
I no longer trust The Great Suspender | As the developer of a pretty popular "utility" browser extension, I've been shocked by the volume of email I get every week about it.On a daily basis, I will get requests to sell the extension. Once or twice a week, I will receive an offer to add "a couple lines of code" to my extension which are always generously described as "allowed in the Chrome Web Store" by little fly-by-night organizations that only even have a landing page half the time and usually have throwaway-looking gmail accounts. Out of curiosity, I've asked a few what their code does and they never fully describe it, but it either collects analytics to ship home (my extension runs on all sites, so it's appetizing to them!) or places paid results at the top of any search results, for which I can make "thousands of dollars a month based on the number of North American users I have".Here is an example email I received yesterday. It's a good example of how they call it "an SDK" and looks like one of the more legit ones (they registered a domain to send email from, at least). We at [redacted] are considering purchasing the complete license and ownership of the extensions which have 50K+ active users, may I know if you would be interested in selling? If so, - what is your estimated price?
Regarding the SDK monetization which we discussed earlier, as it is not distractive and is compatible with any other monetization. We have straightforward terms and provide support for your users agreement. Our partners generate 3-20 K USD monthly with our solution for the browser extensions.
As a kind reminder, we are [redacted] — a reputable global peer-to-peer ethical proxy network. All our clients are big reputable companies, we authorize their business before providing any proxy plans.
Look forward to your further feedback and discussing further details of our financial proposal for your Software in a short Zoom call or here by emails.
Finally, I am also hounded by teams at Microsoft and Apple, who want me to port the extension to their new plugin ecosystems so it can be featured/showcased. I worked with Apple on one similar thing for an extension and it caused such a huge jump in support and feature requests from users that I was overwhelmed, so I am not keen to do it again until I have more free time. They can't understand why I don't want to grow by tens of thousands of users a week, but I'm just one person and don't make money from it whatsoever. |
So what’s next (personal news from developer of popular CoreJS polyfill) | In my unasked-for opinion, he should absolutely give up on this project, and take a salaried job that'll let him support his family and not have to deal with the entitlement issues and lack of perspective the community evidently has. If half of what's in this post is true, he's shown admirable restraint: I'd have burned it all down the first time someone got pissy about a free thing I gave them. |
Microsoft, Google, Facebook Back Apple in Blocked Phone Case | Notice how the headline makes sure to specify "over terrorist's phone" and not "over user privacy" or "against federal conscription by the FBI."Take a second and re-read the headline. What does it say? To me, it spells out Microsoft joins Apple to back terrorist's privacy against the FBI.The government couldn't have chosen a better case to publicize in search of a precedent in their favor. And the media isn't helping.Edit: In case it wasn't clear, I think it's actually disingenuous to mention the word "terrorist" in the headline at all. Nothing about why Apple is resisting (which is the crux of this news cycle) has to do with the fact that they are, bizarrely, fighting for this (dead) user (who is undeniably a madman murderer and potentially a terrorist)'s right to privacy.Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, and everyone here in the comments isn't defending this person's right to privacy. It's 100% about the principle and the precedent and it's a million times about the future users and nothing to do with this horrible person. For that reason, it's unfair (in fact, you could call it purposeful misrepresentation) to say that they are against the FBI unlocking "terrorist's phone" or defending the "terrorist's privacy" in any way. What they are doing, if one excludes self-interest, is protecting the principle for everyone else out there. |
What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen | It's not worth buying any of these 'Smart' TVs. I don't know whether it is a shoddy developer experience provided by the likes of Samsung / Vizeo etc or if it's the developers themselves (Hulu I'm looking at you) who do not maintain their apps which are constantly bug filled.I much prefer my old dumb TV that has a Roku plugged into it. Oh yeah, and I know it's not WATCHING ME. |
Cookie Warning Shenanigans Have Got to Stop | In The Netherlands the Data Protection Authority announced this month that websites are no longer allowed to block access when people click "NO" in the cookie warning;Clicking 'no' should still allow people to view the website, but without placing any tracking cookies.Source (in Dutch): https://autoriteitpersoonsgegevens.nl/nl/nieuws/websites-moe... |
'We good now China?' South Park creators issue mock apology | I have to say, this is really the only way to respond to China when it comes to their no-humor censors: just come out and mock them. They don't really have any way to reply.One wonders if there is an entire revolutionary class within China sharing South Park videos for freedom. |
Disney claims anyone using a Twitter hashtag is agreeing to their terms of use | At a rummage sale a few years ago, I bought a book published by Disney in the 1960s or 1970s which had instructions on how to make Mickey Mouse puppets. It also said to "have fun" making them. Selling things for a profit is a lot of fun.As far as I'm concerned, I now have a perpetual, transferable license to make and sell Mickey Mouse puppets. I even asked a lawyer. |
I’ve had the same supper for 10 years | Here's an interesting thought experiment – would you (and everyone else here) have the same reaction to this article if it was written by a North Korean farmer who was perfectly happy with life being in the exact same situation as this Welsh one?Would he still be "enlightened" and "content" or brainwashed, oppressed and a victim of propaganda? |
Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you | I grind away at our codebase day in day out causing me immense personal anxiety and burnout risk and all for what?Well! The honest answer is because software engineering is an incredibly satisfying intellectual pursuit. So satisfying that outside of work in my spare time I literally do it for free, giving away my work to strangers as free / open source software.Why draw a salary then? Or stock? Well obviously I have to feed my family. But also I have to then see that I’m getting a big share of the pie too, because otherwise someone else will be eating some pie that was rightfully mine, and that feels wrong.Would my C-level pals get their $15m exit without my work? Maybe, but it’s less likely. Would they get it if the other top engineers and I all downed tools or walked out as a group? No. So why is their exit equivalent to several mansions and mine is around about a year’s worth of salary?Waterfall edge marble kitchen island indeed. |
Minecraft creator says he’s canceled talks for Oculus Rift version | I can't honestly blame him here.I doubt the issue is Facebook 'creeping [him] out', so much as it is that it's uncertain what exactly Facebook is going to want out of the deal. Facebook isn't primarily a games company, and it's even less a 3D/desktop games company. There doesn't appear to be any obvious motivation for Facebook to use this tech for its intended purpose, so the question becomes what exactly they do want Oculus Rift for.I assume Notch is worried about those implications. Will Facebook start demanding that every Oculus Rift game have tight Facebook integration? Will Facebook do something strange, like have Facebook wall updates appear in the game world irrespective of whether it fits into the game? If I were a game developer, this'd creep me out too. |
HTTP headers for the responsible developer | I have been trying to explain the importance of HTTP headers to some younger/junior devs I am working with. I have noticed that headers are often considered to be 'too technical' or even 'old tech'.I'm going to recommend them to read this, but I do think I need to explain a couple of things that the article is not clear about:- Be sure that you understand the concept of HSTS! Simply copy/pasting the example from this article will completely break subdomains that are not HTTPS enabled and preloading will break it permanently. I wish the authors made that more clear. Don't use includesubdomains and preload unless you know what you are doing. Scott Helme also did a great article about this [0].- CSP can be really hard to set up. For instance: if you include google analytics, you need to set a script-src and a img-src. The article does a good job of explaining you should use CSP monitoring (I recommend sentry), but it doesn't explain how deceptive it can be. You'll get tons of reports of CSP exceptions caused by browsers plugins that attempt to inject CSS or JS. You must learn to distinguish which errors you can fix, and which are out of your control.- Modern popular frontend frameworks will be broken by CSP as they rely heavily on injecting CSS (a concept known as JSS or 'styled components'). As these techniques are often adopted by less experienced devs, you'll see many 'solutions' on StackOverflow and Github that you should set unsafe-inline in your CSP. This is bad advise as it will bascially disable CSP! I have attempted to raise awareness in the past but I always got the 'you're holding it wrong' reply (even on HN). The real solution is that your build system should separate the CSS from JS during build time. Not many popular build systems (such as create-react-app) support this.- Cache control can be really hard too. If you don't have time to fiddle with these settings, I recommend using a host like Netlify, they seem to do a proper job at caching in my experience.[0] https://scotthelme.co.uk/tag/hsts-preload/edit: typos |
Open Source Tractor | i work on heavy equipment such as tractors, diesel trucks and excavators in the USA. this is an excellent start, but its a long way from a tractor.some of the pitfalls that need to be addressed:"Modular Power Unit" is undefined. can i run it on white gas? diesel? kerosene? what is the engine displacement? air cooled or liquid? If we mean to say this tractor is all-electric, keep in mind most small farms arent equipped to charge anything more advanced than a cordless drill or flashlight.Cab frame has no safety glass or panels, so the operator enjoys every rock and every tree branch :(. a shade canopy is a nice add as well.no lights. this is a nonstarter for every farmer that wakes up at 4 am.quick hoses are nice, but I cant find a PTO knuckle so its restricted to things like lifting and towing (and maybe ripping). this is okay, but for an un-weatherized vehicle ill need to use barn real-estate to store, its certainly lacking. |
Prince of Persia in JavaScript | Awesome! Takes me back :)My 8 yo son is playing it now, he knows all the modern consoles, but this is challenging him. He is frustrated things are hard from the beginning, jumps don't work right away and he stopped after a few minutes. I remember my perseverance as a kid.I was thinking about that lately, I see my kids don't have this strong motivation as I had, not for anything. Everything works for them and is layed out. For example, when I was young I had a lego technic motor, but the wires sometimes got oxidatid or just broke, and I had to fix it. My son has a new lego set, and the motor always works, except when the wireless remote runs out of battery.
Same with gaming, it always works, while in the past even getting a game to run could be a challenge on its own. And when he gets stuck in a game he watches a YouTube. No hours of frustration and endless searching and figuring for a solution.I see my kids don't have much of these challenges, everything works for them.Don't know how this will affect them on the long run. Now it's only my observation. |
Postgres WASM | The use cases here are going to be really wide spread in my opinion, just a few ideas off the cuff. Obviously the 30mb size means it won't really be for regular consumer apps, but for enterprise or specific tasks it can make a lot sense.1. Training websites2. Interview challenges involving SQL3. Client side tooling that loads data into your local machine and displays into a SaaS web app without the SaaS app ever having your dataAppreciate the hard work from Supabase and Snaplet on this! |
Any sufficiently advanced uninstaller is indistinguishable from malware | Why do Windows programs need special installers/uninstallers? Why isn't this handled by Windows itself? |
Dropbox Attempts To Kill Open Source Project | This is Arash from Dropbox. We removed the ability to share the project source code because it enables communications with our servers in a manner that is a violation of our Terms of Service. By our TOS, we reserve the right to terminate the account of users in this case.
However, we chose to remove access to the file instead of terminating the account of the user.We recently built a tool that allows us to ban links across the sytem (as of a few weeks ago) and I wasn't aware that a DMCA takedown email would be auto-generated and sent. This was a tool built for our support team and I'd never personally used it. That said, we feel strongly that the code is a violation of our TOS and don't believe the removal of the content from our site is censorship.I'd also like to clarify that nobody's accounts were threatened: in every case my phrasing was as follows: 'I hope you can understand our position and can agree to remove the Dropship code'. |
Amit Gupta needs you | If this works out for him, it would be cool to see him champion other peoples' life-threatening needs as shamelessly as he's doing his own. |
Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects | Please for the love of god just don't use Slack.We have learned absolutely nothing. Let's all jump on the bandwagon of another closed-source, proprietary, walled-garden service and hand over all of our private intra-company communications to a private third-party in another country. GREAT IDEA. |
Try quickly typing 1+ 2 + 3 into the iOS 11 Calculator | As soon as I upgraded my 6s to 11, I saw performance seriously degrade. It takes -seconds- to bring up the iMessage editor.My immediate thought was that Apple had liberally sprinkled wait() into the iOS 11 code base so that I'd feel like my ole A9 CPU just wasn't cutting it any more and I'd realize, as they do, it's time to upgrade.Or... maybe they are running every key stroke through the new Azure-enabled Cray computers to better predict what I am going to type so that overall, my typing is more efficient and I'm actually spending less time typing...Yeah. Yeah, that's it! |
Single Page Applications using Rust | We're finally getting back to this point where you can choose whatever language you want to program for the web. It only took us 15 years of being flamed every time you pointed out you didn't like Javascript but were forced to use it to be part of the modern web. One of the motivations for Viaweb was being able to do Lisp, hopefully this gets the web back to that mindset of only the behavior mattering and whatever language you want to use go for it. |
Vertiwalk Vertical Walking | In case anyone else was irritated by the inability to scrub through the auto-playing video, adding this CSS rule in your browser's dev tools should fix it: .vp-progress { display: block !important; } |
Builder's Remedy goes into effect in many California cities tomorrow | Wow that's great news!The level of bureaucratic creep that has been imposed on property owners is actually unbelievable to me. I obviously understand some regulations (you can't built a chemical processing plant in a residential neighborhood, obviously), but cities have creeped themselves into all-powerful overseers.Most cities now have the power to tell you what kind of house you can build, how you can paint it, how you can landscape it, what kinds of cars you can keep in your own driveway, what you can do in your leisure time on the property etc.It is insane.I honestly hope there is a property-rights case that abolishes all of this. If I own the property, then it's mine. If I want to collect old VW busses and park them in the front yard, I don't care what effect this has on my neighbors property value. This is my home. If you don't want to deal with living near other people, move to the country. |
Go is Google's language, not ours | Actually there are relatively few real (TM) open source projects driven by the community, at least if you look at important projects. Many open source projects are just commercial projects driven mainly by a single company. Look for example at Redis, MongoDB, MySQL, and Elasticsearch. They follow exactly the model described in the article. Technologies like these could have been developed by a community, too, but it is hard to form such a community and keep it alive.For a community-driven project from the size of a database some serious sponsors would be needed. Good examples are Rust, Linux, and PostgreSQL. I wonder why so many companies are happily paying Oracle (and the likes) tons of money instead of sponsoring an open source project like PostgreSQL. |
1:60 scale Boeing 777 made from manila folders | Since we are on this forum, I'll take a bite:Carousels need to die. Everyone hates them, no one interacts with them unless they have to. The carousel doesn't work for the user and it doesn't work for the product.http://shouldiuseacarousel.com/https://www.dgtlnk.com/blog/website-carousel/The plane model is nice. |
Microsoft blocks EdgeDeflector to force Windows 11 users into Edge | The last version of Windows I used was Windows XP. I since switched to various Linux distros and macOS, now settling on a combination of Debian and Ubuntu as my daily laptop/server OS’s.My initial reasons for my leaving the Microsoft world were because I didn’t agree with Microsoft’s ethics: it’s like being an exploitative, self-serving (as opposed to user-serving) conglomerate is wired into its company structure.MS’s great work with VS Code got me thinking that maybe there’s some hope for them as an organization, but every time I peek back into the Microsoft world like this I’m even less inclined to ever go back.I mean, their customers are actively developing workarounds for their shitty dark UX patterns, and their response is basically: “sorry, we insist that you adhere to our dark UX patterns”.Fuck that. Life’s too short for that bullshit. Vote with your time, money and attention. |
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