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MIT researchers uncover ‘unpatchable’ flaw in Apple M1 chips | The author is here and ought to make it all clear but if you google the title of the article you can download the paper already despite everyone being coy about it and the ACM not having published it yet. It's kind of ridiculous it's getting this kind of press before the paper is officially published and available. If the paper was published and security experts were allowed to analyze it before the tech press went nuts the stories would probably have a different tone.This is interesting theoretically but the amount of access required is pretty high, this is hardly an exploitable zero day.Having read the paper, in a nutshell it requires:- Login to the Mac in question- Ability to install a custom kext to make the PACMAN Gadget work. The exploit requires access to undocumented registers on the M1 that are apparently not accessible from user space, but this is a bit unclear.- Also need an exploitable kernel buffer overflow against Mac OS (they made a custom kext with a buffer overflow)- Run the bufferflow + Pacman Gadget together to do the final elevationIf someone can find a way to do this without installing kexts then it becomes way more serious. As is it certainly is a super interesting paper and presents a bunch of work for chip designers. |
Mozilla Standards Positions Opposes Web Integrity API | Expected, but meaningless if we can't drive people towards Firefox and away from Chromium products. That's something of a responsibility we all have, especially those of us invested in the safety and security (collectively, trust) of the web.I haven't seen anything yet on whether Brave will support it, though if I'm understanding correctly, they won't have a choice since they're using Chromium. Hopefully I'm misinformed. |
The fact that I agree with all of this just makes me sadder at how it was presented. Thanks for building a handy straw man for the methodology developers to attack.I flagged this --- it's virtually content free --- but that's a futile gesture given how susceptible HN is to this particular form of social engineering. |
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Leaving the Mac App Store | I avoid buying from the mac app store as much as possible.If Apple ever decided to change mac os x to no longer allow external applications, I would switch to Linux right away. I don't want to do that because I do like the os X better a GUI... But there's no way I'd stay on a system that wouldn't allow me to do what I want with it. |
SCOTUS: Patent Rights Over a Printer Cartridge Are Exhausted When It Is Sold | If you want to learn about a really interesting aspect of the "first sale doctrine" and how it applies to software, you should have a look at "Vernor vs Autodesk" in the USA and compare it to "Oracle vs UsedSoft" in the EU. Basically, in the USA the courts determined that if a company sells you software, but in their terms & conditions claim that they are merely granting you a license, then you can't resell the software b/c you aren't considered to own it. In the EU however, if a company sells you a permanent life-time license in exchange for a one-time fee, the courts determined that you aren't merely licensing that software, you own it and you are allowed to resell it.I think these different rulings haven't been fully appreciated yet. For example, if you buy Apple's Final Cut X for $299, you should be allowed to resell that software if you live in the EU, but there is currently no way to transfer licenses between users, preventing users from reselling it. It seems to me that by preventing users from reselling their software, Apple (and the Google Play Store) are probably violating EU law on this matter. |
I Got Access to My Secret Consumer Score | I’m curious what sort of due diligence these companies must do to authenticate you as a person prior to satisfying an information retrieval request. Given that the exchange is entirely digital, it seems plausible that there are bad actors who would pose as someone else to gain access to their personal information. What sort of liability does one of these data controllers bear when they fail to properly authenticate a person prior to handing over all their data? Is it limited to tort liability, in which there needs to be proof that the transgression ultimately led to some particular damage? Given that this data is being traded on the free market, what’s to stop abusive employers, ex-spouses and criminals from exploiting this information? |
New academic journal only publishes 'unsurprising' research rejected by others | Why don’t research groups just publish to their own websites or directories like arxiv? What’s the role of an academic journal in 2020?Honest question, I’d love to see more blogging from hard science academics but I’m wondering if there’s a reason why that’s challenging or if it’s just academic culture. We should have a Substack/OnlyFans for scientists. |
Brad Cox has died | There is no doubting the legacy of Objective-C (especially given the high likelihood you are reading this post on a mobile device, using app written in Objective-C), but to truly appreciate Brad's legacy, am curious about the appeal of using Objective-C.Having developed only one small iOS app with Objective-C code, I was mostly turned off by its overall verbosity in the context of NS prefixes. Hence, I ask the question on behalf myself and others who did not appreciate the language and did not give it a proper chance... what did I miss and what are its top appeals?Nevertheless, Rest In Peace to a pioneer. |
The Alexander: Why did you build such a long piano? | As someone who's tuned my own piano, the inharmonicity in the bass is really noticeably low. |
Mistral 7B | The way the wind's blowing, we'll have a GPT-4 level open source model within the next few years - and probably "unaligned" too. I cannot wait to ask it how to make nuclear weapons, psychedelic drugs, and to write erotica. If anyone has any other ideas to scare the AI safety ninnies I'm all ears. |
Stop SOPA, save the Internet | Ok, you've convinced me. Now what? I have time and money, so give me a call to action dammit. |
God's Lonely Programmer | I'm a huge fan of Terry's work, because he works hard, has a clear vision for what he wants to do, and makes it happen. That's more than can be said of many self-professed hackers who never see a project to completion or are motivated solely by peer recognition.You may disagree with the logical coherency of his goals - I for one think the "temple for God" thing is pure kookery - but he is a master craftsman, and in this context it's all that really matters. There are people who devote their entire lives to pointless things. There are people who work on supposedly pointless things, which later turn out to not be so pointless. There are people who are supposedly working on world-changing things, which really are completely pointless. In the end, you can't predict the future. Just do honest work that you feel is worthwhile, and see what happens.(if you want to play the hypothetical game, who's to say that Terry Davis won't develop some extremely efficient low level algorithms/techniques never done before that will dramatically impact computing?)Every time his story comes up, there are people who respond with answers along the lines of "what can we do for him? can we find him assisted employment? can we raise money for him?" etc. While these comments are surely well intentioned, they end up being mostly condescending and out of place, as if talking about a completely helpless being. But Terry strikes me as anything but helpless - based on the various interviews he's given and comments he's posted, he seems to be quite content with his situation, and that "assisted employment" is the last thing he'd want or need. If anything, this is just a further argument for reforms like basic income and better treatment of mental conditions (e.g. with better early detection).There are also always comments expressing surprise at how one can suffer from such a mental condition and yet do complex intellectual work like low level programming. These questions are based on the premise that schizophrenia (or a similar condition) impacts your brain in such a way that would make logical reasoning impossible. But that's not how it operates - logical reasoning is largely unaffected. Like `daveloyall says in another comment in this thread [0], what's affected are a few key "first principles". For instance, if you're persuaded that you're being constantly tracked by the CIA, removing all your clothes or dismantling your car to make sure you aren't bugged are very logical, reasonable things to do. The problem is that when you're operating under premises that are shared with no one else, the resulting dissonance makes integration with the rest of society problematic. But with this in mind, it's easy to see why one could be schizophrenic and yet still be able to program or do math or weave baskets, especially if the skills were mastered before the condition developed.Terry is a maker of miniatures [1], and I'm happy we have such people walking among us.[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8658958[1]: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/04/10/in-the-reign-of... |
“Warning: Do Not use my mirrors/services until I have reviewed the situation” | Interesting.It is entirely possible it is survivor bias on my part but I get the suspicion that a global sort of 'cyberwar' that has been rumbling along for years is heating up rapidly. I've seen a 10x increase in various scripted attacks being attempted (patch early and often folks!) and a number of APT level compromises of systems either staging malware or deploying it (see the latest bulletin on the Afghan government compromise). And of course the whole Free Syrian Army / ISIS / terrorist nom de jure attacks.I can't shake the analogy to pictures from WW II where shop keepers were huddled in the back while soldiers fought from the front of the store. I see innocent servers being 'occupied' by enemy malware so that it can launch attacks on other servers further into a protected network.Fortunately in this modern version of war you can "kick the soldiers out" of your server by bringing it down and re-imaging it. And they won't turn around and shoot you, but that is not all that comforting somehow. |
Caltech Researchers Find Evidence of a Planet Beyond Pluto | > Batygin and Brown inferred its presence from the peculiar clustering of six previously known objects that orbit beyond Neptune.This raised a big red flag in my mind. This must produce a literally astronomical multiple comparisons problem. Yes they reported sigma = 3.8, but if they didn't do their multiple comparisons correction right (which I am in no position to determine), they're basically reading tea leaves.If you're not familiar with multiple comparisons, it's kind of like [this](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/649893-you-know-the-most-am...) or [this](https://xkcd.com/882/). If you look at enough extra-neptunian bodies, some of them are going to be in an odd looking cluster. |
Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People | While I agree with Maciej's central point, I think the inside arguments he presents are pretty weak. I think that AI risk is not a pressing concern even if you grant the AI risk crowd's assumptions. Elided from https://alexcbecker.net/blog.html#against-ai-risk:The real AI risk isn't an all-powerful savant which misinterprets a command to "make everyone on Earth happy" and destroys the Earth. It's a military AI that correctly interprets a command to kill a particular group of people, so effectively that its masters start thinking about the next group, and the next. It's smart factories that create a vast chasm between a new, tiny Hyperclass and the destitute masses... AI is hardly the only technology powerful enough to turn dangerous people into existential threats. We already have nuclear weapons, which like almost everything else are always getting cheaper to produce. Income inequality is already rising at a breathtaking pace. The internet has given birth to history's most powerful surveillance system and tools of propaganda. |
Uber faces criminal probe over software used to evade authorities | Seems like a lot of people are confused/have questions about why Uber is being criminally investigated by the Department of Justice.*Here's why:1. Uber is subject to the laws in the jurisdictions in which it operates. Evading authorities is textbook obstruction of justice. Not only did Uber build software that they used to evade authorities & break local laws in multiple states and countries, but they profited from it (which has a variety of other RICO implications.)2. Sure, corporations are people too, but, nonetheless, only people engage in civil disobedience. Related, for courts, a company that profits from violating of local laws is not a protester or freedom fighter battling injustice, it is criminal enterprise.3. Charging Uber under RICO would by no means be unusual or a stretch; this is a quite run of the mill application of these laws. (eg see Preet Bharara's RICO prosecutions: https://www.google.com/search?q=preet+bharara+rico+prosectio... )4. This is unquestionably a federal matter, within the DOJ's jurisdiction. Uber operates across state lines--and used Greyball in multiple jurisdictions. That said, Uber could & likely will face criminal investigation in other jurisdictions.5. Finally, this is definitely not Trump's revenge on Travis. Not only does it simply not work that way--USAs are independent & it'd be beyond illegal, but this specific USA was appointed by Obama. (There were two Trump didn't fire; USA Stretch is one of them)(*And, yes, I am a lawyer. And, many years ago, I worked at the Department of Justice) |
Have a personal web site | I don't want a personal web site. I've had a handful of them in the past, and I've thrown together a couple shitty blogs over the years, but there are three big reasons why I don't anymore: I'm not that interesting; I don't have anything to show off; and inevitably it'll either become a chore or go out of date.Like everyone, I harbor fantasies about how interesting I am, and if I run into you at the pub, I'll talk your ear off about the places I've been and the things I've done, but if I'm objective about it, none of it is particularly praiseworthy, and it's hardly going to make me stand out to a potential employer. Any attempt to dramatize my life or skills is going to reek of pomposity, even the rare bits that are somewhat unique.I'm not a designer. I'm not a visual person. Any attempt to fashionably describe myself is going to backfire. My resume is a good overview of my skills and experience, but if I try to turn that into an online portfolio, it's not going to be any more impressive. If I don't keep it up to date, and remodel it constantly to keep up with contemporary fashions, it's going to make me look old and out of touch.I have an exceedingly common first and last name, so I'm hard for employers to find online. I'm happy about this. I don't want employers scrutinizing my social media presence, as benign as it is. I would never give a potential employer any of my online IDs if they asked.If you've got something to say or show and you want your own home page, go for it. I don't think most people actually have enough interesting content to warrant it, though, and I'm pretty sure that I don't. |
Math Basics for Computer Science and Machine Learning [pdf] | Very first sentence of 2.1 is full of notation, symbols and terms that I, as a prospective student, might not understand.So many teachers seem incapable of stepping outside their sphere of knowledge and seeing what they know and others do not. And so much work went into this. |
Facebook, Twitter block the NY Post from posting | This was a shockingly dumb move. Whether or not you think these actions were politically motivated or made in good faith, it just poured liquid oxygen on the "reform section 230" fire you're seeing from both sides of the aisle - one using the censorship reason, the other using the disinformation reason.There's no way you don't block a newspaper, and the press secretary, and prevent anyone from even private messaging the link to each other, and blocking people who share screenshots, and not invite serious scrutiny or action.The legislative blowback is going to suck. Section 230 is an ordinary law, not a constitutional right or based on one, and that means it's exposed to all the usual political fighting. |
The Deno Company | > Many are more familiar with the Chrome DevTools console than they are with a Unix command-line prompt. More familiar with WebSockets than BSD sockets, MDN than man pages. Bash and Zsh scripts calling into native code will never go away. But JavaScript and TypeScript scripts calling into WebAssembly code will be increasingly common. Many developers, we think, prefer web-first abstraction layers.Every time I read something like this I realize how much in the minority I am. I am not a web developer. I have never written JavaScript before in my life. I hate working with “web-first abstractions”. I feel like it is just massive bloat on top of true native application. But given the popularity of things like electron, react-native, Node, and Deno I don’t speak for the majority.And the thing is, I don’t know if I just learned web dev if I would love this new approach to software that is eating the world and I would “get it”. Or if it just exists because JavaScript developers don’t want to learn something new. |
Changes at Basecamp | There's a great blog entry I just read about this, "On Politics At Work". I think the author effectively hits on a real problem with a lot of these discussions.https://json.blog/2021/04/26/on-politics-at.htmlTo some folks, "politics at work" means "endless battle royale political debates among coworkers in a Slack all day long; why wouldn't you be against that?But to others, "politics at work" means "are we paying women and men the same for doing the same job?" and "are our recruiting practices leading to a non-diverse workforce and missing out on great people who should work here?" and "what problems does our company sole, and for whom?". These are really important questions. Why wouldn't you want to bring them up at work?I'm giving Basecamp the benefit of the doubt and assuming they're trying to stave off the former. But it's not that easy to do that without also affecting the latter, because if you ask questions that boil down to is our company discriminating, even unintentionally and do our LGBT and minority employees feel as safe and valued as our straight cis white employees, someone will be super upset that you're "bringing politics into the workplace." (I guarantee someone reading this is thinking "ugh, 'cis' is a slur, why you gotta be so political," and, bang: somebody has just made recognizing the existence of trans people into something inherently political, and now we get to argue over whether that somebody is me or the cis-is-a-slur guy.)Here's a thought: if your goal is to try to keep company Slack channels civil and focused on work, then don't say "don't be political." Say "keep company Slack channels civil and focused on work." |
Pencil | >"artisanally crafted" (grammar)Did an artisan craft it? No, it looks to me mass-manufactured to spec by someone or something who doesn't have a say in its design or the ability to individualize it. You mean "made of wood," but that's the most you can squeeze out. Please don't try to steal the thunder of actual artisans.> "unique built-in eraser"
> "unique sensor lets you flip Pencil to erase"Yeah, the crappy Wacom knockoff I bought in 1998 had the same thing. Wacoms have the same thing. If you are like all the other, most popular, long-existing things, you are not a unique thing.If they're delusional about this, what else are they delusional about? Why would I spend money to support hubris? Because I'll have some minor extension of my abilities within a double-walled garden?Aim higher. |
Apple blocks Google from running its internal iOS apps | Let’s say you’re using a Google API like Maps, and you violate terms by snapshotting sections of their maps and storing them on your severs so you can serve static maps without making API calls. They’d shut down your API access immediatelyGoogle and Facebook both knew the terms. They both knew that the Enterprise Distribution Program was for internal use only. They still put ads out in the wild to recruit regular consumers to use internal apps which is beyond the scope of the program. Why would the certificates not be revoked?I don’t understand people who are acting offended that Apple is enforcing the clear terms of service it laid out. |
Ask HN: Best book / resources on leadership, especially for tech teams? | The US Army has an exceptionally well-crafted field manual on leadership. No fluff, but also no chest-thumping. It's honestly the best resource I've ever seen on what constitutes a good leader, how good leaders are developed, and how good leaders develop their teams.Being a DOD publication, it's in the public domain: https://usacac.army.mil/sites/default/files/misc/doctrine/CD...I can't stress enough how excellent it is. |
Google bans Zoom from employees' computers | What's surprising to me is that it was allowed before. They have had their own videochat solution for years, so I would expect the usual "eat your own dogfood" approach. |
The most underused browser feature: reader mode | Reader mode really helps me in printing as well. Old comment of mine:Printing is something I started to do some months ago. Instead of keeping the tab open for weeks, I decided I'd print anything I want to read and place it a physical "inbox".Some tips: I print 2 pages to a side, so 4 pages per printer paper. Even long articles don't use too much paper, and for my eyes it's still readable (there are a few articles where I need to enlarge first). I print using either Firefox's "Simplify Page" feature or its "Readability" feature. This removes almost all the noise: No ads, no menus, etc. It's just the article and relevant images. Similar to reading a physical newspaper.It's been a game changer. I can now read wherever I want. Going to the mechanic? I just take some of these printed articles with me. I find myself taking notes on the paper - something I would not do well on the computer screen. My eyes get a lot less strain. Once you get used to this, there's no going back. Now when I see an article through a web browser, it's just ugly. Too many distractions. Even the menus are annoying. I didn't realize I'd been putting up with filth for so long.I initially worried that my inbox would get full and I'd have the same mental angst, and my plan was that if it happens, I'll take a random bunch and throw it in the recycle bin. But it never came to that - I still manage to read everything I print. Somehow, the physical inbox weighs less on my mind than the virtual one. I don't feel I need to deal with this inbox. It's OK if it just sits there collecting dust.Bad for the environment. Good for the brain. |
Gmail 2FA causes the homeless to permanently lose access 3 times a year | In one of the later posts, the OP writes that the homeless will lose any physical thing after N weeks. So what kind of 2FA would be homeless-proof? I don't see a solution.Also, fully acknowledging Google and other bigtechs 2FA is far from ideal:The other thing is, we want at the same time Gmail to be unhackable against best hackers and state sponsored adversaries for the billions of users, including high profile dissidents, journalists, and senators who will inevitably have accounts; and at the same time to homeless people who can't keep any physical thing. It's kinda difficult to meet those conflicting requirements well at the same time.Maybe the solution should be to have some basic free state-paid email provider for those people. They are not forced to use Gmail specifically (albeit the number of non-sucking and free email providers is probably close to zero). |
Wobbly clock | This clock is great for teaching kids how to tell time! When learning to read a "circle clock", they have a heck of a time understanding what it means when the hour hand is almost but not quite pointing at a number. So when it's 3:45 they will say 4:45 because they know the big hand on 9 means "45" but they get confused because the little hand is almost pointing at 4.This clock solves that problem.Anyone know if I can get this as an Apple Watch face? |
Developers who use spaces make more money than those who use tabs | The reason I use tabs is pretty simple. It's faster to move around only using the keyboard. It's also faster if I'm changing code that requires reformatting. Finally, when another developer looks at the code, their IDE will render the tabs as whatever its set up for, 2 spaces, 4 spaces, etc. In other words, it adds flexibility.Brace yourself: I use two spaces after the end of sentences too. [1] I am quite the rebel.Modern IDE's (Sublime Text) let you easily convert spaces to tabs (or vice versa) and intention length of existing code.
[2][1] http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2011/01/...[2] https://css-tricks.com/changing-spaces-tabs-sublime-text/ |
TurboTax Hides Its Free File Page from Search Engines | I popped "file free tax returns turbotax" into Google and found the page directly listed.
The page in question is https://turbotax.intuit.com/personal-taxes/online/free-editi...The robots.txt for the intuit.com domain is: https://turbotax.intuit.com/robots.txtNot listing in robots.txt to block the personal-taxes folder, which has many offerings and a sub from that is the free one.I'm not seeing the block that the story is on about in search and in robots.txtWhat am I missing?[EDIT ADD] Thank you for all the replies, I see what they did there now. |
Bitcoin is a disaster | Related: the current rise of Bitcoin prices has been peculiar to me, and seems to be a bit of a canary in an inflationary coal mine.We've injected trillions of dollars of fiat into the economy this year. It feels like the sky-high valuations of technology companies and Bitcoin are "shock absorbers" of sorts, or early signals of inflation-yet-to-come. If we assume the market is efficiently pricing these assets (like AirBnB's IPO) then it could very well be that the actual value of a fiat dollar has dropped dramatically -- making sky-high valuations more reasonable -- and we'll only see that reflected in the price of consumer goods and commodities once industry leaders collectively feel comfortable the economy is on track again. After all, you can only charge what consumers can afford to pay.I'm an armchair economist at best. I just can't make sense of the market right now, and wouldn't be surprised to see the price of things like groceries, beer and travel double or triple what they were in 2019. Is there anybody writing about this that I haven't been paying attention to? Am I missing something? |
Dr. Seuss books deemed offensive will be delisted from eBay | Now this part is getting a little too carried away. It is one thing for libraries and bookstores to decide not to offer for borrowing or sale things that they disagree with.It is another (and overstepping imo) for Ebay to restrict individual people from selling to others goods that are not illegal or in violation of their other practical rules (no selling jewelry, monetary equivalents, etc).This falls into the category of taste / political opinions and has gone too far too quickly. Much as I don't like what the silly cartoons are, and of course while I don't think Ebay is a public forum that has any obligations (they can do what they want), I think Ebay is getting in deeper than it should.Will they apply the logic here to all categories of goods for sale? T-shirts? Political buttons? Historical political pamphlets? Current political pamphlets or campaign material? How about baseball team merchandise that has racist mascots? (Why haven’t they?) Merchandise of companies where the CEO may have bigoted views?How about books that have words in them that discuss race, or in any way describe an unflattering picture of a certain group? Or scientific studies that may come to race-based findings?I think the other thing that bothers me is that to be protected by such measures, you have to be popular. And it's flimsy. This year it's group, next year that group is forgotten and it's on to group. Woe to the actually wronged group of people who can't garner enough popular support, and who fall by the wayside of laws that are less enforced because people thought the social-media driven justice system took care of it.Ps. And edit just to add, lest someone discount my opinion as from a privileged position, I am among one of the groups said to be portrayed in a racist way in those books. If only people’s concern about racism in cartoons extended to more important matters as well. |
Japan's government plans to encourage 4-day workweek, but experts split | It's an open secret at least in the tech world that absolutely no one is putting in a productive 40 hours of work a week. This was true well before the pandemic and is more pronounced than ever now. Everyone needs to be "present" for 8 hours a day 5 days a week, but spends their time in pointless meetings, preparing documents and powerpoints that no one will read, faux social/teambuilding events, hour long lunches, goofing off on the internet, all to maintain the pretense of office culture.Companies that shuffle things up to prioritize productivity over simply showing up will be set to succeed over the next generation. |
Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations | So basically they’re developing a product marketed to streaming platforms to identify what’s “more attractive” to consumers. The algorithms are still optimized for increasing sales and engagement, not improving recommendations (for the user).That’s exactly why I’m unhappy with Spotify lately. I feel I’m being sold a bunch of corporate portfolios on what’s currently in vogue, and not just artistically but politically, with playlists like this-gender-race supporting this-cause. I actually just want to listen to music.I still use it but stumble my way through looking at related artists while avoiding playlists and recommendations. |
FBI seized PokerStars.com, FullTiltPoker.com, UB.com,... domain names | Reagan is the one who signed "asset forfeiture" into law. I remember at the time reading newspaper articles claiming this was "just going to be used to keep drugs off the streets" and how "law enforcement are outgunned and now can defend themselves against drug dealers".It was obvious to me then that this was a violation of due process. Also, it is not authorized by the constitution, and thus every act of seizure under it is criminal act. (There is a federal law that makes it a felony to violate constitutional rights under color of law. Fourth amendment prohibits this.)Notably, Bush the First, Clinton, Bush the Second and Obama have not made any moves to undo this legislation.Meanwhile, this has been used to take money from bikers on their way to buy a motorcycle, and random motorists in Florida and Texas who get pulled over for speeding. "It could be drug money" says the "law enforcement officers" who take life savings and then spend it on themselves.Just because they haven't seized your assets yet, doesn't mean you aren't at risk.When the government can take whatever it wants, without any legal restraint, and in violation of the ultimate law of the land, that government is not a legitimate government.We should be outraged. We should be throwing the bums out-- from Obama down to the local state congresspeople or local sheriffs and judges who fail to take actions overturning this, or who themselves participate in this. It does not matter what party they are from, they are all culpable, and they are all criminals.Edited: I removed the reference to my property that was stolen by the FBI because it prompted many people to attack me below. I really would rather the discussion be about how to resolve this issue for domain names, or maybe some discussion about how to overturn these seizure laws.Edited: I've made the legal case in defense of those wrongfully convicted. I cannot keep up with the tide of people who have no citations of the law, but are quick to disparage me personally, for my crime of defending victims here.Frankly, I think that the ease with which people assume that "naturally" these people were "bad guys" and therefore what they did was "illegal" despite the law and the constitution, is the very proof of my central point that the government is out of control, and they are getting away with it because people can't be bothered to challenge the belief-- taught by government in government schools-- that the "rule of law" holds sway. |
Suicide | So heres my experience with this whole topic:When I was very young, I remember feeling trapped in life. It wasn't a particularly terrible life, but not a particularly great one either. There were times when I just didn't want it. As I got older, I spent a lot of time mildly depressed. There were expectations I couldn't live up to, it seemed my family wanted me to be perfect, and the repercussions for not being so were pretty emotionally damaging. Somehow I internalized this expectation, and it only worsened all of it. There were a lot of things that I didn't know how to do well: make close friends, talk to girls, ask for help. A lot of this was probably BS at first, and in retrospect everyone went through it. I know that for me there was a weird feedback loop tho, reinforced by craziness in my family, where they would push away my friends, and would ridicule me for needing help.Anyway, all that led to this scenario where I felt even more alone an trapped. As others were working through this stuff, I couldn't figure out how to even start going with it. I wasn't a "forever alone" kind of guy, I stuttered through this stuff, but not in a particularly meaningful way. Not existing sounded amazing. I contemplated it off and on. At one point I had a serious sit-down with myself about the topic of suicide. I went over the pros, the cons, ways to do it, the consequences to others and so on. I decided, this was an option. I also realized, I only get to choose it once.I found this realization very comforting.Ever since, I have been slightly annoyed at the "suicide is not the answer" stuff I read. I get pissed at the people who deride it. I hate the people who talk about it as not an option. It is an option, but a pretty drastic one. (Raganwald: I like your stuff usually, but your blog post kind of annoyed me, even tho it's not terrible advice... it just doesn't work for me - nothing personal)Since this realization, I have gone through some pretty down times. As I mention above, I'm a bit socially/emotionally challenged, and sometimes I just feel like I'm getting nowhere in the world of people. I see them over there doing their thing, and I just don't understand how it works. I occasionally even see them not as people, but the same way I would see a group of dogs or other animals interacting -- I notice their behaviours, I try to figure out WTF it is all about, but I just can't relate. This really bothers me when it happens. Other times I get really down over messing up with people, or not being a top 50 programmer, or not being 4 hr marathoner, or whatever else my perfectionism is going on about. In all these cases, if it's bad enough, I get this thought:"You can just give up. You can stop existing."I don't shy away from it, I don't push it down, that seems to make it worse. I'm not scared of it, I welcome it. Like I said above, it is a comforting thought to me. It reminds me I have some power in the world, no matter how fucked up things are at the moment. Afterwards, the next thought comes:"You only get to do this once. Is this the time?"And I get to decide if it makes sense. And I only need to decide for today. Do I want to do this today? Sure things are fucked up, but I sure would exit in a pretty shitty situation: things undone, house a mess, porn not properly deleted from the computer, finances not in order, etc. So I won't do it today. Maybe I'll start getting ready to do it. Tomorrow I can decide again.Sometimes this goes on for a day. Sometimes it goes on for a week. But the very act of contemplating it seems to have a healing power for me. Now that I know I can at least do this, and I'm going to do it right, it reminds me that I can maybe do stuff. Getting ready for it, reminds me more that maybe I'm not so trapped, and there is a path forward, paradoxically getting me to the point where I usually put aside the silliness after a while, with a freshly organized set of life surroundings. Sometimes it's more than a while, but for me, this works.I'm putting this out here, for the people who are contemplating suicide, and somehow reading these comments. Contemplate away, I won't begrudge you that. I'd like to remind you that this is a one-time deal tho, so if you're going to do it, make sure this is the right answer for you. If you are unsure, wait a while, see what else you can do also - the option doesn't go away, in fact this basic option is the greatest power you have, don't squander it.Also: after this article leaves the front page, I'm going to delete this post, because while I think it is important, I don't know that having these words public for posterity is a wise decision. |
Bidding farewell to Google Code | Hi everyone. I wanted to let you know (and I know this isn't a huge surprise) that we will be shutting down the Google Code project hosting system over the next year.Wired did a nice story about Github that touches on the shutdown: http://www.wired.com/2015/03/github-conquered-google-microso...I'll be hanging around answering questions, but the short form of 'why' is that it just isn't used much anymore, ourselves included, in favor of Github or bitbucket. |
Google Has Started Penalizing Mobile Websites with Intrusive Pop-Up Ads | What's really stupid are sites from which you can buy things, but then pop up an ad for something else. Fandango, which sells movie tickets, does this. As you're trying to get to the "buy ticket" page, they shove movie trailers for other movies in your face.I mentioned a site earlier today which sold plumbing supplies.[1] They pop up a "gimme your email" box which 1) cannot be dismissed, and 2) isn't even theirs, it's from "justuno.com", a spamming service.These outfits have lost sight of what their web site is for. They're putting obstacles in front of a customer who's about to give them money. This is usually considered a big mistake in retail.[1] https://www.tushy.me/ |
Show HN: Lorem Picsum – Lorem Ipsum but for photos | Tangentially, I got tired of Lorem Ipsum text and created Quantum Lorem Ipsum, now with 100% more physics jargon.http://neil.panchal.io/articles/quantum-lorem-ipsum/https://github.com/neilpanchal/quantum-lorem-ipsumEdit: Created a Github repo |
I Know What You Download on BitTorrent | An intern once thought it was a good idea to torrent a couple of Game of Thrones episodes using my startup's Digital Ocean box.We found out after Digital Ocean forwarded us an email from HBO (who presumably tracked Digital Ocean down via the IP) that we were engaging in piracy. We sent an email to everyone with access, saying whoever was doing it to stop. Then we got a second email (a final warning).Everyone denied doing it, so I had to find the offender via checking the bash history of the box for all users.Sure enough a couple of mkv files had been downloaded and deleted by an intern :( Making the mistake of downloading it was forgiveable once, since we lived in a culture where piracy was rampant / normal (this was before Netflix et al were available in my country). But repeating the offense, failing to come clean and making us waste our time to locate who did it was not. (This was a small 7 person startup so trust was super important).As for why the intern needed to ssh into a digital ocean box to run a torrent? The college internet (where he was working from) blocked torrent connections and he wanted to be the first one to download and release the episodes on the college intranet. Smh. |
OpenStreetMap proven to be a highly accurate map in top US cities | Good that OSM is accurate in cities as well, because in hiking, skiing, or even some ferry routes, OSM simply wins because that's often the only mapping provider to even have _any_ data. Some of my first hand experiences:- French GR-20 routes. Google maps are laughably empty, while OSM has you covered with almost the same information as the hiking maps you can buy on the trail.- Anapurna - similar to GR-20 situation. This route gets changed often due to landslides, but there is always some person doing a great job updating information not too late after.- Volcanoes - OSM maps often contain camping grounds, water sources, etc. This is something I actively contribute too. The level of detail is amazing. Some guides in fact lose potential clients because of this.OSM is a wonderful feat by all its contributors, and isn't appreciated as much as it deserves. |
Et Tu, Signal? | Good Morning,I am the CEO of MobileCoin.A few points:1) I started MobileCoin to fund Signal. That’s it. I believe that a world with a well-funded signal is a better place. In order for signal to compete in the 21st century with messaging apps around the world they need a payment story. MobileCoin is the only thing ever built that is both privacy protecting and fast that meets the standards of data retention signal requires.2) MobileCoin Inc. intends to maintain an extreme minority of the coins once the dust settles.3) This is designed to be used as a payment rail, which requires us getting coins in the hands of users. As you might imagine, navigating the regulatory waters of how to do that with compliance to how governments want us to behave is non-trivial. It’s important for us to move with correctness over speed.4) this project is 4 years of my life building real technology. This is not a pump and dump scam. We have been very careful in the design, operation, and development of this system to give it the best chance at surviving in the world of cryptocurrency projects. It is non-trivial to deliver a coin that is useful for payments (the requirements are speed, privacy, low-energy footprint, and operation in resource-constrained mobile environments).Let me put it simply, I love signal and we intentionally designed this currency to be as oblivious as possible with respect to user data so that signal could maintain their relationship with their users, one of retaining as little information as possible without compromising on the user experience. Nothing else in cryptocurrency, or payments, comes close to the level of privacy and performance that MobileCoin has achieved.I welcome any questions I am able to answer. Note that some questions revolve around tightly regulated areas of concern and may take longer to answer as I must check with outside counsel before replying. |
What rr does | This is incredible!For those that have used it, how useful it is for debugging multithreading heisenbugs? Can I let a process run under rr for days, wait until it crashes to due a heisenbug, and replay the trace without rr having to go through days of recording? i.e. is it possible to fast forward the trace, somehow?(I nerd sniped myself a bit here, wondering how fast forwarding could be implemented. I think it might be achievable with periodic process memory snapshots and incremental traces.) |
Cheap junk flooding Amazon has brand names like MOFFBUZW | Pro tip: If you absolutely must buy the junk being sold by MOFFBUZW and other randomly generated drop-shipper brands, the exact same product is usually available on AliExpress for 10% the price. |
iOS 17 automatically removes tracking parameters from links you click on | I use uBlock Origin on Firefox on Android with "Actually Legitimate URL Shortener Tool" added but am weirdly conflicted on this news. If a user opts to kneecap advertising, that is soundly within their rights. If a company does the same against another company's advertising as a part of their normal business, I feel like the user becomes a pawn in some corporate warfare strategy.Maybe it's because I think Apple is slowly building a parallel advertising ecosystem that is slightly less intrusive for users but massively more lucrative for themselves. |
Neovim | Thanks for trying to do what many of us secretly wished we could do but can't because of time/skill constraints. I will definitely move to NeoVim the second it's packaged (is it yet?), regardless if you've changed anything yet.I hate the ideas many programmers have about backwards compatibility, that it's more important than development speed and modern concepts. There is nothing holy about Unix era software, chances are it's shit and a lot of it should be thrown out.Look at SublimeText, it's got 1% of the features of Vim, yet it's converting Vim users left and right, by its sheer usability.We as developers in the Open Source community should be ashamed people are still using Vim to write LaTeX in Bash running on terminal emulators. (Yes, it gives me shivers just thinking about how much each of those technologies sucks when you think about how good it all could be.) |
Firebase is Joining Google | Hacker News -I want to take this opportunity to personally say thank you! The community here has been instrumental to our success. You’ve been our supporters, beta testers, fans, and critics. Even the comment threads here have been a valuable source of feedback :)I want to reiterate a point that James made in the blog post: Firebase is here to stay, and it’s only going to get better at Google. Our entire team is joining Google, and James and I will continue to run things day-to-day. You’ll still see us around the tech scene at meetups, conferences, and hackathons, and we’ll still be active here and on Twitter.Thanks again -- big things are coming! |
US Senate Report on CIA Detention and Interrogation Program | > Interrogation techniques such as slaps and "wallings" (slamming detainees
against a wall) were used in combination, frequently concurrent with sleep deprivation and nudity. Records do not support CIA representations that the CIA initially used an "an open, non-threatening approach," or that interrogations began with the "least coercive technique possible" and escalated to more coercive techniques only as necessary.> The waterboarding technique was physically harmful, inducing convulsions and vomiting. Abu Zubaydah, for example, became "completely unresponsive, with bubbles
rising through his open, full mouth." Internal CIA records describe the waterboarding of Khalid Shaykh Mohammad as evolving into a "series of near drownings.> Sleep deprivation involved keeping detainees awake for up to 180 hours, usually standing or in stress positions, at times with their hands shackled above their
heads. At least five detainees experienced disturbing hallucinations during prolonged sleep deprivation and, in at least two of those cases, the CIA nonetheless continued the sleep deprivation.> Contrary to CIA representations to the Department of Justice, the CIA
instructed personnel that the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah would take "precedence" over his medical care, resulting in the deterioration of a bullet wound Abu Zubaydah incurred during his capture.> CIA officers also threatened at least three detainees with harm to their families— to include threats to harm the children of a detainee, threats to sexually abuse the mother of a detainee, and a threat to "cut [a detainee's]
mother's throat."The list goes on.I have no words. This stuff would make Gestapo, KGB and Stasi proud. I can only hope more people read this report. Worse imaginable crimes are committed in the heat of passion or because of madness. Those are scary. What is more scary to me is cold institutionalized, calculated, torture, which is what this is.Not sure who said, maybe it was Slavoj Zizek, about how if we are even debating "is torture right or what advantages it might have" we have already lost. Torture should be like rape. Anyone suggesting debating if rape is acceptable should be slapped on the head and considered an idiot. Torture should be the same in any civilized country. We are not only debating it, we have also done it, we have institutionalized it, and make no mistake, Fox and the like will also be debating its "benefits and how it saved Americans' lives". |
Welcome Chris Lattner | Elon Musk is the new Steve Jobs.He is an inspirational leader and talented people want to work with him. It appears it will be harder and harder to attract and keep talent at Apple with out a leader like Steve Jobs. |
Python Is Eating the World | Reading this got me thinking and I wonder if other people feel like me about this, so I'm going to share it. This is not serious, but not entirely unserious...I try to be a good sport about it, but every time I write python I want to quit software engineering. It makes me angry how little it values my time. It does little for my soured disposition that folks then vehemently lecture me about the hours saved by future barely-trained developers who will ostensibly have to come and work with my code. Every moment working with python (and that infernal pep-8 linter insisting 80 characters is a sensible standard in 2019) increases my burnout by 100x.I try to remind myself that we're trying to make the industry less exclusive and more welcoming to new developers and "old" isn't necessarily "good" (in fact, probably the opposite), but damn I just don't understand it.It used to be that I could focus on other languages (Erlang, Nemerle, F#, Haskell, Ocaml, even C++) and sort of balm myself. But now, I can't even overcome the sinking feeling as I read the Julia statistics book that I'm going to be dragged back to Python kicking and screaming in the morning, so why even bother?And frustratingly: it's one of the few languages with decent linear algebra libraries. And that means it's one of the few languages with good ML and statistics support. So it's very hard not to use it because when you want to cobble together something like a Bayesian model things like PyMC or Edward actually give you performance that's obnoxiously difficult to reproduce.This is what the industry wants and evidently a lot of people are okay with it, but to me it's misery and I can't work out why people seem to like it so much. |
Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic | I'm super excited to have the Tumblr team and product join the Automattic family. We've been evolving Automattic to be more of a Berkshire Hathaway-inspired model and businesses with a lot of autonomy, and this continues that trend.I was very impressed with the engagement and activity Tumblr has continued to have, and I hope that with this new ownership and investment the product will blossom. |
SpaceX bans Zoom over privacy concerns | The fact that they show end users (no pun intended) an "end-to-end encrypted" badge on the meeting window itself, and elsewhere explain how a Zoom server (not Zoom client) is what constitutes an "end" despite the whole rest of the electronic communication industry using "end-to-end" to refer exclusively to user agents, is bonkers. |
Vaccine hopes rise as Oxford jab prompts immune response among old and young | OK, someone tell me why this isn't the good news it sounds like |
Tell HN: AWS appears to be down again | We are barbarians occupying a city built by an advanced civilization, marveling at the hot baths but know nothing about how their builders keep them running. One day, the baths will drain and anyone who remembers how to fill them up will have died. |
Worldle | I was extremely confused about the distance values in relation to the percentages until I read the help:> The distances displayed correspond to the distances between the selected and the target territory centers.> For instance, the computed distance between United States and Canada is around 2260km even if they have a common border.That's extremely deceptive and non-obvious unless you read through the documentation. One of the appeals of Wordle is that it is an extremely intuitive game which doesn't require rule reading. |
Persepolis of ancient Persia rendered in WebGL | This is really cool. Seeing these beautiful colors I realize how much how I imagine the ancient world is shaped by museum artifacts and photos in textbooks, which show raw and brown/grey/white stones, rusty tools and weapons. I've grown thinking about pre-medieval times as a landscape of ruins. It would be like if future humans were picturing our current world as nothing but bombed cities.It's a really cool project. Now I want a VR game where I could simply walk around ancient cities and watch people go about their day. |
Big data is dead | "For more than a decade now, the fact that people have a hard time gaining actionable insights from their data has been blamed on its size."The real issue is that business people usually ignore what the data says. Wading through data takes a huge amount of thought, which is in short supply. Data Scientists are commonly disregarded by VPs in large corporations, despite the claims about being "data driven". Most corporate decision making is highly political, the needs of/whats best for the business is just one parameter in a complex equation. |
'Our minds can be hijacked': tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia | Does anyone see an analogy with highly processed, sugary foods? Highly addictive, thought to be miracles of convenience, but ultimately detrimental when consumed in excess, and now we are starting to realise that and demand better. I wonder if society will go through the same rejection phase with attention-seeking media consumption. Or maybe those who grow up with it will be better able to control themselves. |
The New York Times Is Now Available as a Tor Onion Service | Does the onion service still serve the same advertisements their website and mobile app do?If so, they're leaving their users-who-want-to-stay-relatively-anonymous open to attack via the advertisement vector. Members of that group would be considered high-value targets simply due to their anonymity desires.I can't see the number of daily users being large enough that they'd lose significant profit by closing that attack vector. Hell, if there was a way to pay NYT enough to disable ads on all their services, I'd do it. |
Why Do Keynote Speakers Keep Suggesting That Improving Security Is Possible? | I love Mickens' work, and think this is overall a great presentation, but I feel like it misses (or maybe just doesn't fully explore) an important point.Start with the Internet of Things example. He chalks up the abysmal security record of IoT devices to two factors: it keeps IoT devices cheap, and IoT vendors don't understand history. And there's a lot of truth in both these assertions! But they are both just expressing facets of a deeper, more fundamental reason: IoT devices aren't secure because their customers don't demand security.This deeper problem completely explains why the two higher-level problems he observes exist. Making your product secure makes it more expensive and slower to come to market than just leaving it wide open, and the IoT vendors know their customers care about cost and availability and don't care about security. So they do the rational (in the homo economicus sense of the term) thing and optimize for things their customers are actually willing to pay for.The same causality can be observed in the ML world. Mickens asks why people are hooking ML systems whose operation isn't fully understood to important things like financial decisionmaking and criminal justice systems. The answer is that the customers demand it. ML is trendy and buzzworthy, so if you're a vendor of (say) financial systems, and you can find some way to incorporate ML into your offerings with a straight face, now you have an attractive new checkbox on the feature list your salespeople dangle in front of potential customers. And once the effectiveness of having that box checked becomes clear, you kind of have to do it, even if you know it'll be ineffective or even worse, or risk losing business to a competitor with fewer scruples.All of which is to say that what we see playing out in both these scenarios isn't really the vendors' fault. They are instead classic examples of market failure. People end up buying shoddy products because spotting their shoddiness requires technical expertise they don't have; responsible vendors who try not to make shoddy products lose sales to irresponsible vendors who don't; eventually all the responsible vendors are out of business and the only products available to buy are shoddy ones. There are lessons to learn from this, but they're economic rather than technological. |
Play Counter-Strike 1.6 in your browser | I love how people like to make browser versions of everything. From chat apps to email clients to games. But they all end up consuming 10x the memory but are still 10x slower than their native counterparts ! |
Things I wish I’d known about CSS | It always helped me to do an absolute basic concepts course on a new technology I learn.Like, sure I can play around in Photoshop or Eclipse or CSS or JavaScript and find most things.But a good 101 course is worth so much saved time.Most of the stuff in that article was mentioned in a CSS box model course I did 10 years ago.People were always baffled how I learned all this. Well, I read the docs!They always assume every one learned like them, by trying stuff out all of the time, until they got something working. Then they iterate from project to project, until they sorted out the bad ideas and kept the good ones. With that approach, learning CSS would probably have taken me 10 times as long.Sure this doesn't teach you everything or makes you a pro in a week, but I always have the feeling people just cobble around for too long and should instead take at least a few days for a more structured learning approach.What I didn't learn about CSS in a basic course and what cost me multiple weeks to fix, was `pointer-events: none`. Keep this in mind when your clicks stop working after you pulled some new CSS ;) |
Zoomquilt (2004) | I created this project back in 2004 together with a bunch of other illustrators. It grew out of a community where people collaborated on artwork over the internet. Happy to see it continues to gather interest. You might also enjoy http://zoomquilt2.com (2007) and http://arkadia.xyz (2015, my favourite) |
The end of the nice GTK button | I really miss a consistent user experience. A core idea that I as a user can rely on to predict how a new app will work. I was in awe when I discovered as a kid that user interface were a research area. Things like Fitt's Law and so on. It was not just opinion.Today I get the feeling it's mostly just opinion. Either the designer's opinion or the wish to copy the look of something.Whenever I see a hamburger menu I silently think "Here someone has given up".And there are a lot of behaviors that are not functioning well.Is something a button? Should I click it or double-click it? How about long-press on it? How can I know when there's no visual clues?Things like "Hide cursor while typing" in Windows. It has not worked properly for decades and today only work in some super old apps like Notepad.Another thing is type-ahead. I remember in classic MacOS, people pressed shortcuts and started to type the filename or whatever. It was all perfectly recorded and replayed. In modern Windows, press Win-key and start to type, oops, it missed the first keypresses, presented the completely wrong results and made a mess of your workflow.I feel confused and disrespected as a user every day and I've been using WIMP graphical user interfaces since 1986. Sure, computers do more today, but there's less consideration of almost everything. |
McDonald's just dropped a brand new Game Boy game | This isn't even the first legitimately interesting video game connection to McDonalds, weirdly.Treasure is an influential game development studio that did a lot of really interesting work in the mid to late 90s, responsible for games like Gunstar Heroes, Radiant Silvergun, Ikaruga, Bangai-o, Silhouette Mirage, Dynamite Headdy, Mischief Makers, Alien Soldier, and others. They were a bunch of ex-Konami developers (who had worked on games like Contra 3, Axelay, Super Castlevania 4, the arcade Simpsons) who were tired of making license games and wanted to make their own original games. A few of their games did well in the market, but they and their particular approach to innovation in action game rule systems has had a much, much bigger impact on other action game developers since.And their very first game when they left Konami and started their own studio, the game they had to make to stay afloat to make Gunstar Heroes, was... a Sega Genesis McDonalds game, the 1993 "McDonald's Treasure Land Adventure".Longplay here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNbmJyL872cI've never played it, but it looks really solid and vastly better than it has any right to be. |
The Future of Markdown | Wow, I wasn't expecting my email to Jeff to end up as a front-page blog post!The point here is that Markdown doesn't have a spec, nor do any of its variants to my knowledge, so I was proposing to come up with some Markdown-like language that does have a spec. Under discussion here is the more ambitious (but also appealing) plan of writing an official spec for Markdown, the same way JavaScript got a spec in the form of ECMAScript that we now identify with JavaScript itself.A spec is a long, tedious, human-readable document that explains the behavior of a system in unambiguous terms. Specs are important because they allow us to reason about a language like Markdown without reference to any particular implementation, and they allow people to write implementations (Markdown processors) independently that behave identically. The Markdown Syntax Documentation is not a spec (it's highly ambiguous), nor is any implementation (not human-readable; some behaviors are probably accidental or incidental and difficult to port perfectly). The hard part of writing a spec is codifying the details in English, and secondarily making decisions about what should happen in otherwise ambiguous or undefined cases.My motivation for working on a Markdown spec is first and foremost avoiding "bit rot" of content, which happens when we write content against one Markdown implementation and then later process it with another. We don't have this concern with HTML, JSON, or JavaScript, or at least we know what bounds to stay within to write code that will work on any implementation. This is achieved through specs, even if only implementers ever read them.I would love pointers to Markdown processors that are implemented in a more principled way than the original code, for example using standard-looking lexing and parsing passes, but that still handle nested blockquotes and bullet lists together with hard-wrapped paragraphs. |
The Mac Pro Lives | Am I the only one that sees OS X as the biggest reason to switch to Mac? I mean Windows is good, but nowhere good as OS X. And please, don't tell me Ubuntu or other linux flavors. They look good (and are good if you are programming on them) but the UX is still lacking a lot. (Never mind the confusion of the different flavors, packaging systems, and configurations). Also god forbid you have a problem (especially a hardware problem) and then try to debug it. Good luck searching online for a resolution.I never had success with Linux. My Macbook pro has had its shares of problems (Wifi issues that later resolved with a system update) but it's nowhere my experience trying to install Linux and battling the drivers issue.Anyone figuring out the Linux/Laptop problem is re-inventing the Macbook Pro/OS X.Here are things that I'd pay $1,000 on top of the current Macbook Pro model:- Thiner/Lighter- Longer Battery Life (5+ hours)- 32/64GB RAMFor OS X:- Less cluttering (ie: remove all Apps and let the user decide what to install, like Siri and crap).- Native Package ManagerThat's about it. I'd be buying the new Macbook Pro in a month. But if Apple releases something like the above, I'm more than happy to drop 5-8k usd into it. |
Remote Code Execution on a Facebook server | Nice job! I also really appreciate the lack of memes and very concise format of this blog post |
Facial recognition: It’s time for action | Biometrics are creeping into everyday life. One of my local gyms this week switched to requiring fingerprints or you were barred from access. Another local gym uses facial recognition for entrance, although you can choose to have a member card instead if you ask for it directly, they don't list it as an option.Thankfully in the EU we have GDPR. It considers biometrics as a similar sensitivity to medical data, so unless you genuinely need it (maybe a hospital) then you can only get it with explicit consent. If consent is not given then that can not bar you from service.So I reported a company to the ICO this week for the introduction of fingerprint scanners and was assured they consider it was a breach and will deal with them. GDPR isn't perfect and I think defaulting to consent is wrong and alternatives must be called out but you can't help people sleeping walking into it, it is very convenient. |
The “Talk” | So, I have a question. I found the 'article'... well comic, surprisingly easy to read and I think I learned something. However, my knowledge of quantum computing has mostly been based on articles that the comic was poking fun at. I've not had any formal education. So my question is, was this indeed a good educational comic, or does it just have a different set of problems from other articles on quantum computing? |
Scrollbar Blindness | I have to pile onto the criticism of the hidden scroll bars, and other similar features (like the hidden buttons of PDF viewers now, such as in Chrome). Discoverability is a problem.For anyone (cough, elderly parents) who aren't adept at discovering hidden features, these things can be utterly mind-boggling and frustrating. Even I was stumped for a good minute the first time trying to print/save/download a PDF when that "feature" came out.I don't really need the small sliver of menu space in PDF view to be reclaimed -- and for what, a "clean" look? Those are real and important functions I desire. What I actually need is for news and blog sites to stop covering 1/4 of their vertical window space with hovering frames, ads, and banners asking me to subscribe. Which, by the way, subsequently don't properly calculate into that now hidden scroll bar's movement and cause you to overshoot the displayable area when paging down. End rant. |
River Runner: drop a raindrop anywhere in the USA, watch where it ends up | This is amazing, outstanding project! Interestingly, I got it "stuck" when I clicked somewhere random in California (Pope Valley, apparently): https://i.imgur.com/deOsIt2.png |
Ask HN: How did my LastPass master password get leaked? | Just happened to me one hour ago and got scared shitless. Time Monday, December 27, 2021 at 3:50 PM EST
Location UNITED STATES
IP address 107.173.195.83
Actions taken, in this order: - Head to *Advanced Options* -> *View account history* to see if anything suspicious is going on (nothing so far)
- Disable Lastpass MFA and use Google Authenticator (Authy)
- *Account Settings* -> click on *Show Advanced Settings* -> *Destroy Sessions* (to see if anyone is actively logged in)
- *Account Settings* -> click on *Show Advanced Settings* -> *Country Restriction* to my country only (luckily not in the US as the bot was)
- Change Master Password
Also moments earlier: - Investigating all Mac processes
- Disabled all Chrome extensions and deleted most (should have made a list)
Let's hope it's not as bad as it seems.Edit#1 | Following IP addresses are reported in the thread so far: 160.116.88.235
160.116.231.145
160.116.88.235
107.173.195.83
107.173.195.213
154.202.117.78
196.19.204.79 |
Firefox rolls out Total Cookie Protection by default to all users | Why weren't separate cookie jars the default in the first place? I know that browsers other than Firefox have no real incentive to protect your privacy, but I'm wondering why cookies were designed to be shared among different pages in general |
I'm not a Woman in Tech | >I want inclusivity, not exclusivity.Thank you. I find myself feeling the exact same way as a black man in this industry, and cringe at "minority only" events and clubs. We don't need token inclusion and separate praise for being "brave" and "fighting against the odds". We need a world where those things are irrelevant. |
Remote Code Execution on Most Dell Computers | OEM: Let's differentiate our otherwise
commodity hw product!
OEM: I know, let's add value with bundled
software the customer can't uninstall!
Then the bundled software turns out to (inevitably) be useless vulnerable garbage. Inevitably because a) the customer doesn't need it, b) it's engineered with all the effort that normally goes into adware for captive audiences (i.e., _minimal_), which means it will be vulnerable.Here's an idea: OEM: Let's differentiate our otherwise
commodity hw product!
OEM: Let's add NO bundled software.
That would be fantastic. |
How to get root on Ubuntu 20.04 by pretending nobody’s /home | Slightly offtopic, but a common exploit(?) I frequently see with Linux desktop environments is a few seconds where the user's live desktop is displayed after resuming from standby, before the logon screen comes up. Not exactly a case of obtaining control of one's computer, but could be effectively used through repetition to transcribe any sensitive content that may have been onscreen.It always struck me as a very strange phenomenon to occur given the apparent security superiority of Linux in contrast to Windows. Perhaps that's an antiquated notion now, given modern distros that prioritise form-over-function more than they used to? |
Git's list of banned C functions | Its really wild, as a person coming from other languages who has written maybe ten lines of C in his life that the functions that seem to be massive footguns in C are, like, "format a string" or "get time in GMT." That's... really scary. |
YouTube approves ad by Belarusian gov with journalist from hijackd Ryanair plane | I don't get these "confession" videos. Not only is it usually obvious that they are coerced, either by the person's demeanour or obvious signs of violence. They are such a trope of dictatorships it wouldn't even be possible to broadcast the most truthful of any such confession video without looking suspicious. Indeed the very act of humiliating your enemies in public is incompatible with the idea of democracy.So, what gives? Is it supposed to demonstrate the regime's ability to break you? Do these dictatorships just suck at PR as much as they suck at other aspects of governing? |
Servers as they should be – shipping early 2022 | It sure looks pretty, but appears to be -- dedicated to virtualization, done their way- rather inflexible in hardware specs- vendor-locked at the rack - if you have hardware from someone else, it can't live in the same cabinetI guess if you just want a pretty data center in a box and look like what they consider a 'normal' enterprise to be, it might appeal. But I'm not sure how many people asked for Apple-style hardware in the DC. |
Curves and Surfaces | I find these play-with me mini-apps incredibly useful, a technique used by the author Bartosz in other articles:https://ciechanow.ski/naval-architecture/https://ciechanow.ski/internal-combustion-engine/https://ciechanow.ski/cameras-and-lenses/https://ciechanow.ski/gears/Bartosz if you are here (username doesn't seem like it) how long does an article like this take to make? Looking a bit deeper and seeing how there are 10k LOC just in curves.js, and the curves.js seems custom for this, I'd guesstimate 1-3 months of fulltime work.In any case, thank you for these incredible works of art and science! I had only seen a couple before so I'll have a deep look into the others! |
Show HN: Long Range E-Bike | We really need a terminology to differentiate better between pedal-assist only e-bikes ("pedelec") and electric motorbikes. A "bicycle" that can accelerate without the need to pedal at all is an electric motorcycle, no matter if you put pedal on it or not.I see the two as totally different things: I've tried pedal-assist e-bike and they're great. But... Although I have nothing against motorbikes I'm not cool at all with basically motorbikes getting a free pass because they're disguised as bicycles.BTW this reminds me of the old french "Solex / VéloSolex": basically a real engine put on top of the front wheel, and able to accelerate by itself without the need to pedal. But the thing still had pedals. I used to use one and still have one in a garage. But I didn't use it on the bicycle lanes...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%A9loSoleX |
Toyota owners have to pay $8/month to keep using their key fob for remote start | That is just bullshit.A $8/mo charge for a app based remote start? I could live with that. Servers need power, the app needs updates etc.A $8/mo charge for something which does not incur costs for Toyota? Hell no.It seems like bit by bit - every single industry is going down a fucked up route. TVs with built in ads? Cars with pay-by-month features? DRM locked coffee machines? I really hope, there is some sort of evil-bullshit-corp ranking homepage. |
Large Eruption Near Tonga, Heard in NZ. Tsunami at Tonga and Fiji | The satellite imagery is incredible -- you can see atmospheric waves traveling hundreds of kilometers:https://www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/goes/sector_band.php?sat=G1... (GOES-West)https://www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/goes/sector.php?sat=G17&sec...https://rammb.cira.colostate.edu/ramsdis/online/loop.asp?dat... (Himawari-8)https://rammb.cira.colostate.edu/ramsdis/online/himawari-8.a...Edited comment: originally linked to the wrong satellite imagery (from a separate eruption several hours ago). The discussion in this link is still informative, but not current:https://www.nesdis.noaa.gov/news/hunga-tonga-hunga-haapai-er... |
Ask HN: Urgent connection to Twitter support | Success! Twitter @support just got back to me with news that the rate limits have been increased!HN, you are awesome! |
New Windows 10 Devices From Microsoft | Could be a MBP replacement for developers. The only thing is those of us running on OS X, how is Windows 10?I love my command line and linux like commands and tools.
- Homebrew
- Bash scripts
- Docker (Windows 10 currently not supported)
- VagrantI just feel the tooling for MS isn't in the direction I am.
I still have a Windows 7 desktop and it's just not the same. |
New Evidence of Hacked Supermicro Hardware Found in U.S. Telecom | Finally a named source, but still no photos and the alleged hacked board is still not in the hands of a public security researcher.The "trojan ethernet connector" paragraph mentions similarity to an NSA implant, which appears to be this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_ANT_catalog#/media/File:NS...I'm now wondering if someone found an NSA implant and misreported it as Chinese. We're going to end up in the stupid situation where people are afraid to report foreign intelligence attacks because it's illegal to report an attack by US intelligence agencies, aren't we? |
Goodbye Joe | Fred probably forgot to mention it, but Joe, Mike, and Robert starred in a short film Erlang: The Movie, a very fine and concise demonstration of fault-tolerance of Erlang.The film has some magic power that I cannot describe but made me watching it over and over again.YouTube link to the film with fixed audio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXmOlCy0oBM |
Text Editing Hates You Too | How much is poor text input eroding the use of non-latin script worldwide? I.e. how many just give up instead of using poor input?As an example: I use a Swedish keyboard. If I'm in a situation where ö is missing from the input (because the app is stuck in an en-US keyboard layout say, so I have to hit a modifier ¨+o to type an ö) then there is a very good chance my communication with my colleagues would just naturally be in english instead. I'd sigh and just give up using it. Rather than using an o for my ö I'd just type it in english instead.Is this a thing in e.g. asia, israel, or the arab world? Do kids that speak english communicate more in english in cases where the input doesn't let them communicate easily using their preferred script? Are there new "hybrid" languages popping up in electronic communication where languages that use non-latin scrpit are written in latin in e.g. text messages? (You could argue that emoji is just that but the other way around I suppose) |
Assange case: Key witness admits he lied | The astroturfing against Assange became insane at a certain point. There was a time where you could say “Wikileaks” nearly anywhere online and have a flood of comments calling Assange various things and anyone who didn’t outright hate him a terrorist. |
9-Euro-Ticket | Very important caveat for all of you who are thinking, “woo hoo, no need to buy that EuRail pass! Or to buy an expensive ICE ticket!”These tickets are good for all “Nah- und Regionalverkehr,” explicitly excluding ICE, IC, EC (international) and long-distance busses (like the one between Munich and Zürich)If the train number begins with RE or RB, you’re good, but of course, those are the slow ones that stop in every village along the way.This is for the benefit of people who live here and are struggling with 2 EUR/liter fuel, not the kind of people who blithely paid 60 EUR to take the ICE. There does not appear to be any residency requirement, but remember, you’re not the target market for this (unless you live here and are struggling with fuel prices…) |
How to be a -10x Engineer | > Ask your team to perform tasks that resemble work. Common examples include presentations, diagrams, and ticket management.I'm as salty as the next guy, but in my experience it has been the sub-par employees who are the ones that don't do this. Ticket management is not busy work, it's a necessity for everyone to keep updated. Presentations and diagrams are tools to communicate. I can safely say that by far the most waste I've ever seen has always come down to poor communication rather than anything actually business or technical related. |
It all began with a strange email | This is truly fascinating.I remember hearing about virtual economies where money can be injected at any time through gold mining, etc, and that they were inherently unstable. Once you got the gold farming schemes that sold gold on e-bay, it created massive hyperinflation.And it totally made sense that hyperinflation would occur since the creation of virtual gold was limitless and effortless, so the gold farmers didn't care how much gold they sold it for as long as they got real money. That rendered the price of gold worthless, and it drove up the prices of virtual goods across the board.I would love to see how these problems are tackled in the virtual world. |
Trackers | Believe it or not, some stores sympathise with you. They might actually be run by people like you, people who read your story.They still want to know how you proceed round the store, because that helps them optimise shelf layout, identify hard-to-find items, and so on. So yes, they might use the standard in-store CCTV to observe your journeys, and when they figure that you and people like you always have difficulty finding the eggs (seriously - why is it always so hard to find the eggs?), they'll move the eggs somewhere more prominent, so they can sell more eggs and you can buy what you came to buy.But that's as far as it goes. They don't follow you out the store, let alone into your bedroom. They don't match anything with third-party data, let alone your mobile phone number. The store just wants to know where to put the eggs.Unfortunately, your bouncers have simply been told to "hurt them if you have to, I’ve really had enough of it". So last time they came in, they smashed the CCTV cameras. The store-owner remonstrated with them a bit but the whole debate around bouncers has become so polarised that there was really no point arguing.---And if this metaphor seems a little obscure, this is why it is irresponsible, populist and ultimately self-defeating for uBlock and chums to block self-hosted Piwik and other such internal analytics tools. Because some of us are trying to do the right thing and your bouncers are still beating us up. |
18yo arrested for reporting a bug in the new Budapest e-Ticket system | I remember coming across a serious bug in a site that belonged to a top multi-billion company. My brother also found what essentially an unrestricted privacy leak (and possibly editing access) in a top university (leaked data is sensitive personal information, not academic). Neither of us reported (or exploited) what we found.Protection from this kind of blame-shifting and misdirected retaliation should be guaranteed by law. Until it is, bugs in critical and important infrastructure will go on unreported, and remain available for malicious actors to exploit. |
Non-profit’s $300 hepatitis C cure as effective as $84k alternative | The latest episode of Econtalk "Vincent Rajkumar on the High Price of Cancer Drugs" is relevant to this subject: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2018/04/vincent_rajkuma.htm...It discusses structural issues relating to why drugs are so expensive (mainly in the US). Some of it's regulatory (e.g. Medicare not being allowed to negotiate drug prices), or there being no ceiling on prices related to efficacy as in many other countries.But some of it's because nobody in the system seems to have a real incentive to reduce costs, even when the benefits are worth it. E.g. an example that's mentioned is that doctors will usually describe the latest brand medicine that's outrageously expensive, instead of a generic that's cheap and statistically almost exactly the same thing when it comes to efficacy. |
I've spent the last two years building a new email client | No offense but unless it’s a 1st party client email clients are something that is very hard to trust.Who controls your client has access to your inbox with most services even the few that have separate IMAP/POP3 passwords like Hushmail can be compromised through it.If your client also integrates with encryption or worse takes charge of it my encryption key is also now at risk.Lastly since email today is pure HTML you also inherit all the possible vulnerabilities that come with having a DOM parser and a layout engine and even modem browsers still get both wrong.And using something like Electron or even Chromium won’t implicitly save you because the way you implement them matters a lot and now you are tied with their update cycle which might break functionality forcing you to manually backport security fixes which is hard to accomplish.So unless you have the source or show an audit from a respected firm (c53, isec etc.) its going to be quite hard to recommend to anyone to take the dive and try this out. |
Announcing Open Source of WPF, Windows Forms, and WinUI | While unlikely, I hope one day that the entire Windows operating system will be made open source — I'm not sure how Microsoft would make the revenue work out, but I bet it could be done. And the world would be better for it. |
Flightradar24 – how it works | Not a big fan of "data monopolies" like Flightradar24. It's as if OpenStreetMaps was a private company that capitalizes on being first into the space and having a community of contributors willing to supply data to a private company for free. I hope an open data project such as https://www.adsbexchange.com/ wins in the long-term. |
The Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity (2017) | New hot take: I'm addicted to my laptop. The phone barely registers in terms of interest because I work on my laptop anyway, which is less cumbersome to navigate.Notwithstanding the need to separate work from leisure life, much of leisure is just attached to this device. Even the less consumptive activities, like writing or playing music, benefit from it. And anything to do with innovation or research is absolutely tied to it. This has been amplified somewhat owing to the pandemic, keeping me from activities out-in-the-world, but even before it all happened I merely had the gym and the odd outing to the coffee shop on the regular, and weekly/bi-weekly outings with friends.It's a mechanical issue. By which I mean, I enjoy research at leisure and relatively solitary activities, but at the same time I want to pull away from being in front of a screen; it hasn't to do with consumption versus creativity or challenge. I try to remedy this with scheduled walks, and enough social time. Historically I imagine a person like myself would just be stuck in front of books instead, which I do also, but so much info can be gleaned from the web particularly research papers.EDIT: this concerns me more-so now as we'll be trying for a kid, and I'd like to lead by example.What I'd like to see in the future is AR tech that rewards mobility and in-person interaction, creating collaborative spaces anywhere. That may seem like more of the same problem, but the marriage with technology will only deepen, so it's up to us to set the terms. |
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