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Stable Diffusion is a big deal | After using SD heavily for a week, I half agree with this. It is incredibly disruptive, and it's wild how much it accelerates the creative process. I'll give you that.But two things I've noticed:First, artists will still have a massive advantage over non-artists with this tool. A photographer who intimately knows the different lenses and cameras and industry terms will get to a representation of their idea much faster than someone without that experience. Without that depth of knowledge, someone might have to rely instead on random luck to create what's in their head. Art curators might be well-positioned here since having a wide breadth of knowledge and point of reference is their advantage.Second, we need the ability to persist a design. If I create a character using SD, I need to be able to persist that character across different scenarios, poses, emotions, lighting, etc. Based on what I know about the methods SD/Midjourney/Dall-E are using, I'm not sure how easy this will be to implement, or if it's even possible at all. There will always be subtle differences and that's where being an artist who can use SD for inspiration instead of merely creation will retain their advantage over a non-artist.That said, holy crap. This tech is insane. |
Pornhub Bypasses Ad Blockers with WebSockets | Looks like another example of porn companies pushing the envelope with technology.They were accepting credit cards online before virtually anyone. In fact, I think most innovations in technology come from either the military, video games or porn. |
Matrix Multiplication | This is a cool example of what Bret Victor calls an "Explorable Explanation" [0]. That said, I feel that it's more important to understand how and why matrix multiplication corresponds to a composition of linear transformations than learning the actual mechanics of doing the computation. You can get good at matrix multiplication without knowing what is going on. I view that as a less valuable activity than learning about linear transformations (vector-space structure preserving mappings) between finite dimensional vector spaces.[0] http://worrydream.com/ExplorableExplanations/ |
Paralyzed man regains use of arms and hands after experimental stem cell therapy | This is very exciting. This type of work can even benefit people who aren't paralyzed — damaged cartilage can also be repaired this way.When I ran track in college, I somehow developed focal cartilage defects in both knees. This brought my running career to a halt and made walking extremely painful for about a year. In an attempt to fix this, I had a type of surgery known as the OATS procedure performed. This is where the surgeon takes a plug of undamaged articular cartilage from a low load bearing region of the knee and swaps it with the damaged cartilage. Walking is mostly pain-free for me now, but it still hurts too much if I attempt to run.As though one cartilage injury weren't enough, I somewhat stupidly decided to take up weight lifting after I couldn't run anymore and attempted to set down a barbell that was way too heavy for me. In doing so, I triggered a mild lower lumbar disc herniation. So now I have two permanent injuries. Luckily, neither injury is very severe, so some days I don't even notice the pain while other days it approaches mildly annoying "background noise".These types of cartilage injuries are common, and arthritis is even more common. But the issue with cartilage is that once it's damaged, it doesn't heal on its own because cartilage has no vascular system. You can break all the bones you want and eventually they will heal, but damaged hyaline cartilage will not. The best that your body can do is to produce "low-quality" fibrocartilage in place of the damaged hyaline cartilage.Fortunately, there's been a lot of research over the last decade on using mesenchymal stem cells (taken from your own bone marrow) to regrow true hyaline cartilage as opposed to fibrocartilage. The stem cells have actually been shown to differentiate into hyaline cartilage. For me, this has the potential to permanently alleviate both knee and back pain. Moving this research away from clinical trials seems to be taking forever for some reason though... |
Code together in real time with Teletype for Atom | Is it only a coincidence that real-time collaboration is being announced both for Atom and VS Code (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15704376) at the same time? |
I took 50k images of the night sky to make an 81 Megapixel image of the moon | All the download links are down at the moment. Here's a torrent link:magnet:?xt=urn:btih:j6ixrzpitvpmkx5tgroy6utcpqr5hhhj&dn=updated%20mosaic.png&xl=304863698&fc=1 |
Netlify Dev | Can anyone explain the elevator pitch of Netlify to me? I know it's become quite popular in the last couple of years and I can't figure out why. I don't doubt that it's good at what it does, but it seems to do the same thing as any number of services.For example, I see a lot of people talk about it for static sites. But you get free static sites through GitHub, nearly free static sites on Amazon S3. What does Netlify do special that these others don't? I'm not attempting to bash the service, I just want to understand what its killer features are. |
PayPal stops payouts to models on Pornhub | Financial deplatforming is a monster, long-term trend to watch over the next decades. Deplatforming happens with sex workers. It also happens in the US marijuana industry. It happens with perfectly legal political content.The number of ways in which someone, somewhere will be offended by products or services for sale is growing, driven by a rapidly improving worldwide communication network and delivery system, and by people terrified of the change that brings.The response by PayPal and many others has been to cut service. With each case, the circle of people finding themselves cut off from the traditional economy grows.Bitcoin is often criticized for its lack of use cases. I find a very high correlation between the strength of this belief and lack of awareness of financial deplatforming in its many guises. |
Ask HN: Best books you read in the past decade? | The Count of Monte Cristo - This is one breathtaking epic. I have been putting off reading this novel for quite some time and occasionally see this name popping up in HN too, but never gave a serious thought for giving it a go. Was I wrong! This is an epic in its true sense, and you will feel a sense of amazement as you progress through the novel. I'm quite a reader, and I have not experienced such amazement when reading any other book (atleast in recent times). Perhaps, I read this book when I was pretty down and kind of hopeless where my life is taking me, because this book is all about HOPE. Even if you are not a reader, the storyline itself will beat any of the entertaining stories out there. But this book is more than its storyline. At the minimum, you will learn to hope which is a big takeaway from this novel. If you are on the fence reading this, just go for it.Other books which I find interesting- The Slight Edge- Sapiens- The Master and Margarita (apart from the fact it is a great novel, this is so wickedly funny ) |
Some tiny personal programs I've written | I own the house I currently live in because of a script I wrote.We had been looking for a new build for some time and had settled on a development and specific house we wanted to buy, but it was still months away from being released. We were told they released houses in person first, then listed them online later that day, but I was bored and wanted to see when new houses were listed, so I wrote a scraper to alert me whenever a new house became available.One day, we got a call from the property developer telling us the house we were interested in would be available in person from 10am the next day. Because we wanted to be certain to get it, we appeared at 8am, only to find that 3 other people were already waiting. Houses are released in batches of 2 or 3, so whilst we weren't hopeful, we joined the queue and waited.At 9am, while waiting in line, I got an alert telling me that the house had been released online, so I open their website on my phone and paid the deposit.At 10am, when the sales office opened, all hell broke loose as the person first in line (waiting since 5am...) discovered the house they wanted had already been reserved online. I'd effectively stolen his house. It was awkward to say the least as all of us were crammed into a tiny portacabin while this unfolded.In truth, I felt awful for depriving him of the house he and his family wanted, but relieved that we had reserved the house we wanted after a 5 month wait. A few weeks later the developer got in touch to say that they had changed their policy nationwide and would only be releasing houses online in the future because of "the incident"...Whilst I wasn't willing to give up our reservation, I worked with the person who had wanted our house so that they were alerted whenever a similar house in the same development became available. He got one, there's no hard feelings, and him and his family are now my next door neighbours. |
Flat UI: Free Web User Interface Kit | I love the work that was put into this and there are some elements that I think are done extremely well and stand on their own...but after seeing a page where everything is flat, I've totally joined the non-flat side of the debate, due to the confusion/ambiguity of the interface...the buttons were especially jarring for me. |
Explosions near Boston Marathon finish line | The worst part for me (and I really am feeling bad about this) is that I should be concerned about the victims right now, but I can't stop thinking about what freedoms I'll be losing as a result of this. |
Dear Startups: stop asking me math puzzles to figure out if I can code | Here's the test I've used in the past:Before the interview, I ask them to write some code to access an HTTP endpoint that contains exchange rate data (USD, EUR, GBP, JPY etc.) in XML and to parse and load said data into a relational database. Then to build a very simple HTML form based front-end that lets you input a currency and convert it into another currency.I ask them to send me either a link to a repository (Git, SVN etc.) or a zipball/tarball. If the job specifies a particular language, then I obviously expect it to be in that language. If not, so long as it isn't in something crazy like Brainfuck, they have free range.If the code works and is basically sane, that goes a long way to get them shortlisted.During the interview, I'll pull the code they sent up on a projector and ask them to self-review it. If they can figure out things that need improving in their code, that weighs heavily in their favour. Usually this is things like comments/documentation, tests, improving the structure or reusability. If it's really good, I'll throw a hypothetical idea for refactoring at them and see how they think.The reason this works is that, despite Hacker News/Paul Graham dogma to the contrary, "smartness" isn't the only thing that matters in programmers. It's actually fairly low down the list. When hiring programmers, I want people who are actually able to do the daily practical job of writing code, modest and self-critical enough to spot their own mistakes, and socially capable to actually communicate their decisions and mistakes to the people they work with.I interviewed a guy who was intellectually very smart and understood a lot about CS theory. I asked him why the PHP code he sent me didn't have any comments. "I don't believe in comments because they slow the PHP interpreter down." Sorry, he can be smarter than Einstein but I ain't letting him near production code. |
'Happy Birthday' song copyright is not valid, judge rules | Fyi, for anyone that has paid for a license. The fact that the copyright is dead does not necessarily mean licensing contracts are also void.The obligations of contracts can and sometimes do survive the disappearance of underlying IP rights. If someone agreed to pay Warner 10$ for the right to sing Happy Birthday each time their movie airs on TV, that contract is likely still in effect. Consideration (what one party gives in a contract) is measured at the point of formation, not years later. An agreement to not to sue someone is not premised on the validity of that theoretical lawsuit. An agreement to not attempt something is still an agreement even if said attempt would prove futile. There are cases where a contracting party has been forced to shell out for something anyone else could use for free. So if anyone reading this has signed a licensing agreement, talk to your lawyer before ripping it up. |
How is GNU `yes` so fast? | Speed vs readability:https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/blob/master/src/yes.chttps://github.com/openbsd/src/blob/master/usr.bin/yes/yes.c |
This person does not exist | Thanks for all the upvotes! Since I made this site, people have already started to train on datasets beyond just real faces. Turns out it can disentangle pretty much any set of data.Gwern has applied this to anime dataset
https://twitter.com/gwern/status/1095131651246575616Cyril at Google has applied it to artwork
https://twitter.com/kikko_fr/status/1094685986691399681This was to raise awareness for what a talented group of researchers made at Nvidia over the course of 2 years, the latest state of the art for GANs. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1812.04948.pdf (https://github.com/NVlabs/stylegan)Rani Horev wrote up a nice description of the architecture here. https://www.lyrn.ai/2018/12/26/a-style-based-generator-archi...Feel free to experiment with the generations yourself at a colab I made
https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1IC0g2oDQenrDmwbtkKo...I'm currently working on a project to map BERT embeddings of text descriptions of the faces directly to the latent space embedding (which is just a 512 dimensional vector). The goal is to control the image generation with sentences, once the mapping network is trained. Will definitely post on hacker news again if that succeeds. The future is now! |
Things I learnt the hard way in thirty years of software development | Great lessons! Although it didn't include one that I had to learn the hard way, multiple times:Your throwaway prototype will be the codebase for the project.In my career, I've seen multiple throwaway prototypes that were hacked together. None of them ended up in the waste bin."Just add X and Y and you're done". "But this is just a quick hack to show the interface, there is nothing behind it!" "Yes, and the interface is fine, so why start from scratch? Just add the rest".Now I know: I never build throwaway prototypes ever again, it's always a base for the project to come. |
Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations | I think the responses to this can be broken down into a 2x2 matrix: level of concern vs. understanding of technology.1) Don't understand ML; not concerned - "I have nothing to hide."2) Don't understand ML; concerned - "I bought this device and now people are spying on me!"3) Understand ML; not concerned - "Of course, Google needs to label its training data."4) Understand ML; concerned - "How can we train models/collect data in an ethical way?"To me, category 3 is the most dangerous. Tech workers have a responsibility not just understand the technologies that they work with, but also educate themselves on the societal implications of those technologies. And as others have pointed out, this extends beyond home speakers to any voice-enabled device in general.In conversations about this with engineers the response I've gotten is essentially: "Just trust that we [Google/Amazon/etc.] handle the data correctly." This is worrying. |
Writing userspace USB drivers for abandoned devices | How does one learn how to write device drivers under Linux? |
Six Months of Tiny Projects | > I believe there's a big advantage to this "micro-bet" approach of launching many tiny businessesThese aren’t businesses. These are websites. Most people on HN can build a website. It takes some coding and some tech knowledge. Not everyone can build a business. That involves marketing, advertising, customer acquisition, cash flow management, legal, on and on.While what the author did was neat and fun for him, let’s not pretend this is the path to a successful web business. I’d bet there’s few “micro-bets” that are generating any meaningful amount of money. |
Npm Audit: broken by design? | I found that much of the underlying cause is those mass reporting regex denial of services as being high severity bugs.So many people are reporting these in tons of different projects: https://github.com/search?q=regex+denial+of+service&type=iss...Anyhow it is just annoying and they broke NPM Audit based on these reports.It is good to fix all possible bugs, but many of these are not anywhere close to the level of bad that the reports are making them to be.But maybe this is needed to just get rid of these issues in genera? So a wave of regex vulnerability reports and then we build this type of checking into prettier or similar and we do not have these in the future?EDIT: It appears there as a project that found 100s of CVE reported Regex vulnerabilities in npm projects -- this is maybe one of the sources of mass reports. See the bottom of this resume: https://yetingli.github.io |
This Website is hosted on an Casio fx-9750GII Calculator | Last year I bought I used TI for my daughter who needed it for school. I got her the oldest version, the one which takes AAA batteries and communicates with the outside world through a serial link. A project like this brings to mind the possibility of stuffing a Raspberry Pi Zero in the battery compartment, hooking it up to the school WiFi, using a terminal app on the calculator to communicate with the Pi and in that way voiding the whole reason of using these ancient beasts in the first place. I won't do this of course - she's there to learn other things besides refining the art of cheating [1] - but it would be a tempting hack. An even more elaborate hack would be to replace the guts of the thing with a Zero running a TI emulator as well as some more useful stuff like ssh. The possibilities are endless... so endless in fact that I'm fairly certain this has been done already, somewhere.[1] which in my days at school consisted of writing the translated works of Homer on a 10x10cm piece of paper, a good way to a) learn to write incredibly small and b) get those words to stick inside your head long enough so you don't actually need to consult the cheat "sheet" during the test. |
New in Git: switch and restore | A lot of comments along the lines of ‘why do people use instead of learning the commands’.For me, I used to use the terminal git, and I still do occasionally. But I use Sourcetree now for most things because I make less mistakes seeing the tree visually all the time.My job isn’t to use git, it’s to write specialist software. If I get the software written and the customer is happy, it doesn’t matter whether I use or not. Imagine having 100 complex things bouncing around your head and having to make that 101 when you forget the order of arguments to merge.The guy who knows every command of git backwards is welcome to apply for a job managing a git repo or something if such a thing exists? But I could harp on the same way about his missing MATLAB or firmware skills. |
Pfizer's oral Covid-19 antiviral cuts hospitalization, death by 85% | Does anyone have a sense as to when US society will completely eliminate COVID measures? Is it just me or is there no clear exit criteria anymore? This will go on forever without exit criteria. |
25-Dec. Shout-out to everyone else at work | Quite a few of my NASA colleagues worked today to launch the James Webb Space Telescope, and I'm sure most of them didn't mind working on Christmas.And I certainly appreciate all of those who work on the holidays to keep us safe. |
Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title | Time to change the format. It's understandable you don't want to spend your whole career preparing for these long matches all the time. For the challenger it's 6 months of preparing, but for Carlsen it would've been his 6th time of preparing for this in a few years.They have also become less entertaining. 12 matches is long (edit, 14 now), but no one dares to take any risks. Caruana was just defensive and all games ended in a draw. Karjakin they both at least won each their game, but still had to go to rapid tie-breaks. And against Nepo it was a steamroll, understandably meeting him again isn't that exciting.It's also almost impossible for a new person to get a chance. Even Carlsen didn't like the format and didn't participate in the Candidates for a few years, and when he first did he almost didn't win it to be allowed to play the WC match. Even though he clearly was the best player at the time.I wonder how this will affect the status of the title, when it's in practice is now a title-fight between the second best players.Also what will happen to the hype in Norway? Each WC match has so far been live streamed on all big news pages, biggest TV channels etc. It will still be a Christmas tradition to watch the rapid WC tournament I guess, but I'm afraid this will lead to less coverage. But just to tell how big Carlsen is in Norway: This is the top news on all outlets at the moment. |
1Hz CPU made in Minecraft running Minecraft at 0.1fps [video] | What's with the code?I don't know much about Minecraft, but I assumed the CPU would be built purely from blocks which act like transistors. Yet there's a part of the video where the show code written in-game(?). What's up with that? Isn't it cheating? |
Demoscene accepted as UNESCO cultural heritage in The Netherlands | This is great to hear. Demoscene is one of the most influential things I have came across my entire life, and changed how I code forever.I remember watching Farbrausch's "fr-08 .the .produkt" [0] when it came out and telling myself "If a computer can do this with 64KB of data, at this speed, my programs should be able to do the same, or at least shall be close". I was forever poisoned at this point, and this simple sentence shaped my whole academic life and career.[0]: https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=1221P.S.: Rewatching it, again, for the nth time. Hats off to chaos, fiver2, kb, doj, ryg & yoda.P.P.S: I show people YouTube version of Elevated (https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=52938), and ask them to guess the binary size rendering this thing in real time. The answer blows everyone's mind, every time. |
Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News.. | It's a genuine problem and has been growing gradually worse for a while. I think the cause is simply growth. When a good community grows, it becomes worse in two ways: (a) more recent arrivals don't have as much of whatever quality distinguished the original members, and (b) the large size of the group makes people behave worse, because there is more anonymity in a larger group.I've spent many hours over the past several years trying to understand and mitigate such problems. I've come up with a bunch of tweaks that worked, and I have hopes I'll be able to come up with more.The idea I'm currently investigating, in case anyone is curious, is that votes rather than comments may be the easiest place to attack this problem. Although snarky comments themselves are the most obvious symptom, I suspect that voting is on average dumber than commenting, because it requires so much less work. So I'm going to try to see if it's possible to identify people who consistently upvote nasty comments and if so count their votes less. |
Atta Elayyan, Developer of MetroTube and LazyWorm Apps, Killed in Christchurch | He wasn't just a programmer. He was also a Counter-Strike: Source pro and a legend of the New Zealand CS scene. He was a goalkeeper for the country's national futsal team (indoor-soccer) and won two national titles and a player of the year award. He was a car enthusiast who custom-built a beautiful BMW and won the "Best V8 Engine" award at a show and shine competition. On top of all of that, he was a programmer who founded LazyWorm Apps and developed apps like MetroTube and Tweetro+. According to one of the lead software guys at Microsoft, MetroTube was once the most popular app on the Windows store.Most importantly, he was a father of a 2-year-old girl.His loss is tragic and I had to write about it. I shared this elsewhere and I was referred to this amazing place and asked to share it here as well, so I did.Thank you to anyone who reads his story. |
Security Flaws in Adobe Acrobat Reader Allow Gaining Root on macOS Silently | The good news is, unlike Windows, macOS has a fantastic default PDF viewer ("Preview") and I don't know why anyone would ever install Acrobat on it |
How far can you go by train in 5h? | As a European it boggles my mind seeing how trains are basically non-existent in the USA (just look at Houston station), given how dominant the whole "Wild West" railroad rush is in everybody's immagination. Railroads are super ubiquitous here, and we've to work with a pretty hostile terrain - Italy has lots of mountains, hills, rivers, and yet has one of the best networks in the world. Most of the USA are basically empty, it would be pretty easy to build high-speed rail. |
MacBook Pro featuring M2 Pro and M2 Max | It’s crazy how far ahead Apple is getting in the laptop game with these new chips. I have the first gen MacBook Pro with the M1 Pro (ok maybe they’re not winning the naming game), and it’s a perfect computer. Battery life is literally all day, every single action is instant, I have zero regard for many apps or tabs I have open. It’s just perfect.I have literally traveled with just a 30 watt anker brick for my phone and used it to trickle charge my MacBook overnight and I’m good to go. |
More Paypal nonsense | These horror stories are so common that I have to ask: why does anyone still use PayPal?I ask this in the most constructive way possible... is there a set of use-cases that PayPal is still the best for? Is it a lack of awareness of alternatives? International availability? Something else? |
“Equation Group” ran the most advanced hacking operation ever uncovered | This is exactly what the NSA should be doing. Everyone (rightfully IMO) complains about overly broad data collection happening within the USA, but here (as with stuxnet) you have the exact opposite, a targeted foreign activity conducted with care and targeting. I know it's not for everyone (not least because not everyone is in the states, huh), and it could be considered a bad precedent, but it's not like Iran asked our permission before they launched their nuclear program, or other states are actually waiting on the US's example to have their own intelligence services do their jobs. If you hold that something like 9/11 should be prevented, and that (actual) WMD programs should be stalled, then it follows that this is a fine way to go about it. |
Justice Department Is Preparing Antitrust Investigation of Google | Good. To quote an old friend who worked for Google:"I'm worried that if the rest of America knew what we were actually doing here they would literally come here and kill us..." |
VVVVVV’s source code is now public, 10 year anniversary jam happening now | You know, people like to crap on Flash (and there are valid reasons to do so), but I really miss how quick you could get a game built with it, while it still felt like "real" programming.With Flash, I felt like a nice "one-stop-shop" in a lot of ways; you could draw your graphics, animate them, and code them, and you could get a simple game made in an hour or two.I haven't tried Unity or really any other dedicated game engine, so maybe you get that feeling with those, but I will always be nostalgic for Flash; it really helped make programming "fun" for me. |
America's 1% Has Taken $50T From the Bottom 90% | Correction: The Fed's policies have taken $50T of wealth from the Bottom 90%.When you bail out irresponsibly over-leveraged and nearly bankrupted banks and corporations, and pay for those bailouts with tax-payer money, you steal from the poor and give to the rich.Most importantly, when the Fed decides to print money ad nauseam, they create massive asset inflation, which steals from the poor and gives to the rich. This is because those dollars that are printed go directly into bonds, equities, and assets that only a small amount of the population owns a significant amount of. When money is "printed" the Fed actually injects money into financial markets through buying assets. This asset inflation caused by money printing gives more money to the rich to buy more assets, thus driving up the prices of financial products, real estate, and all other valued assets in society. Thus, cost of living skyrockets, but only the rich are actually increasing their net worth (which is increasing exponentially). All of this happens while minimum wage, and most wages, are stagnant.Wealth inequality and social unrest in America is DIRECTLY related to corrupt and/or incompetent (you choose) Fed policies. It amazes me why most people do not grasp this. I think it is lack of education. |
US Media Blacks Out Snowden Interview | I highly recommend watching this interview, in which Snowden clearly explains his motives for doing what he did and describes the scope of the data collection carried out by the NSA and its allied foreign intelligence agencies. While I've followed this story quite extensively, this is first time I've actually watched an interview with Snowden, and I was very impressed with his intelligence, thoughtfulness, depth of knowledge and eloquence. (The interview is 30 minutes long.) |
The art of over-engineering your side projects | Lots of times I use side projects as a way to explore new stacks, deployment approaches, etc. The goal of the project is not to deliver anything, it's to learn so that when I go to do my next "real" project at work, I know what works well and what doesn't. |
Open-Source Home Automation | I have a pretty big install of Home Assistant. You can see a screenshot of my main dashboard here.https://i.imgur.com/pJAGAZT.pngWhen I built the house I decided that I was looking for a Home Automation system that was going to be:a) Open source, or open standardsb) Everything can be done entirely locallyI settled with using the KNX system for the primary actuators for the house, with Home Assistant for automation and control.One nice property of KNX is that it's distributed, you don't need any central manager for the system to work, so if you press a light switch, then that sends a packet on the KNX network directly to the light actuator. Then there is an IP/KNX bridge to allow you to interact with the KNX network to hack on it.All the "light" automation in the house is all done using KNX programming. For example, walk into hall, light turns on. You don't need a central authority for that. The motion sensor just talks to the light directly.For anything more complex, Home Assistant get's involved for all the more "global" automation via the IP/KNX bridge.And of course you can control everything through it's app. I love how fast and responsive it is since it's local. It's maybe 100ms at most from clicking the button in the app to the light being on.The main thing I can't do without the cloud is voice control. I'm using Google Homes for it which Home Assistant exposes all my devices to. Local voice control systems really suck compared to Google unfortunately.Another thing I'm happy I did is just put sensors for everything everywhere through the house. Here is a screenshot of most of them.https://i.imgur.com/5VeMuE1.pngI actually have more data then this that I haven't bothered to hook up yet since it hasn't been important. Like the motion sensors also provide light levels and so on.Overall, I would definately recommend Home Assistant. |
Google adds experimental setting to hide full URLs in Chrome 85 address bar | Another phrase I live by: "the road to Hell is paved with good intentions."There will be some VP of Product or Engineering buried deep in the bureaucracy who is pushing this, deciding with no evidence (or, worse, lots of evidence to the contrary; believe me this happens) that it is the "users who are wrong" [1].It now takes something like 4 taps to get to the point where I can correct or otherwise edit the URL in my mobile browser (Safari) as I have to go through different layers where someone, somewhere has decided I can't possibly mean to edit the URL so I must be wanting to select the entire thing.I'm sure this same "it's the users who are wrong" from a handful of key stakeholders that is pushing AMP. And for something that supposedly improves the mobile experience, it doesn't fit on my iPhone 11 screen and it's also disabled zoom. This is probably because I've changed the default zoom, something that gives me no end of problems but I can't control how bad my eyesight is and I don't need a company telling me I'm wrong for wanting to zoom. There is never an excuse to disable zoom on a browser and browser makers should remove the ability for sites to do this, period.I used to love the simplicity and features of Chrome. I once relied a great deal on Chrome Sync. For years I've used a password manager so a lot of the need for that has gone away. Sometimes it's nice to be able to open a page I have open on another device but I can also live without this.I'm tired of this anti-Web and anti-accessibility SJW nonsense to the point that yeah, I'm ready to ditch Chrome.[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMqZ2PPOLik |
Goodreads plans to retire API access, disables existing API keys | Key para:The web has to mature beyond advertising as a business model. For this to happen people are going to have to open their wallets, pay for the services they use, and support independent businesses. That’s how we build a web where indies can thrive - one that’s more village centre than financial centre. I think the shift is underway.True/false? |
Native Linux GPU Driver for Apple M1 | It's so comical to see a literal VTuber developer doing absolutely awesome work on an extremely high technical level, and better yet, on HNs frontpage almost every week.God bless anime. |
Setris – Tetris with Sand Physics | Why doesn't this run in the browser? :( It's 2023 - and no offence intended - but I would rather not download a binary blob from a random Internet page to execute it outside the browser's sandbox. Especially since it looks this game could easily be programmed with WASM and/or vanilla JavaScript. |
Kelly Rowland couldn't have used the =HYPERLINK() function to message Nelly | Up next: could have two NCIS agents typed on the same keyboard at the time to defend from a security breach in real time? |
Louis C.K. experiment results: over $500,000 in 4 days | I really hope people don't turn this into a "Louis CK did it, so you should publish without DRM!". I agree with the anti-drm sentiment a lot of people hold, but this experiment only worked because it's "rare". Every time something like this is done people use it as evidence of the viability of the idea (Radiohead's pay what you want comes to mind too) and that really shouldn't be done. The only reason I heard about this experiment was because it's an experiment and I would personally bet that if this wasn't an experiment a huge portion of these sales would never have happened, I hope in the ensuing celebration of the success of this people don't forget this important fact."Louis CK published without DRM and made $500,000 sales in 4 days, therefore if you publish without DRM you too will break your own sales records" |
Hospital creates bidding war by posting pricing online | One thing to keep in mind is that there's more to good medical care than a fair price:Post-op infection rate - do all clinical employees regularly wash their hands before and after each patient encounter?Re-admission rate - does the institution or surgeon do enough cases of a particular procedure to be proficient?Error Rate - Are pre-op checklists ALWAYS used?Post-op care - Are supportive therapies like Physiotherapy available?It bugs me to see medical interventions treated like a commodity, these "products" don't always follow generally accepted market principles - a price cut in colonoscopies will not significantly increase demand. |
The NYPD Was Ticketing Legally Parked Cars; Open Data Put an End to It | For people who skip straight to the comments: I couldn't fit it into the title, but the other half of the OP's title is that the author confronted the NYPD with his data analysis and they thanked him and spoke positively about the effect of open data:> “Mr. Wellington’s analysis identified errors the department made in issuing parking summonses. It appears to be a misunderstanding by officers on patrol of a recent, abstruse change in the parking rules. We appreciate Mr. Wellington bringing this anomaly to our attention...> Thanks to this analysis and the availability of this open data, the department is also taking steps to digitally monitor these types of summonses to ensure that they are being issued correctly.”*Sure, it's easy to pay lip service to open data and transparency...but I've found for the most part that bureaucracies are generally OK with open data after it's been ingrained in their culture (which is why it is so amazingly easy to get data from Florida -- they have an IT system that is optimized to handle it -- the employees don't mind fulfilling the requests since it's no skin off their back).Bloomberg got the ball rolling, and hopefully the momentum continues...I'd be happy with NYC agencies tolerating open data as a status quo...Looking forward to the day when bureaucrats and citizens can get to the point where transparency isn't seen as a zero-sum game. |
Five minute guide to better typography | It's a quest of mine to understand this subject mathematically. I'm convinced that typography is an exact science, it's just easier to use intuition than find the formulae that govern it. Like catching a baseball versus understanding gravity and drag.For example, when aligning that header, they're moving the leftmost pixels into alignment with the body's leftmost pixels. The correct state is well-defined, it's just not understood by the program.More complex, the amount of space under a heading. A heading's bottom is neither its bottommost pixel (the space between the bottom of an "a" and "g" is mostly empty), nor its baseline (that space isn't entirely empty); it has a soft bottom, a fade to emptiness. The ideal spacing is a function not only of what's being separated and by how much, but also the gradients that border it.Does anybody know of good resources on this subject? What I find tends to be more about habit than derivation. |
People Aren’t Dumb, the World Is Hard | We’re dumb in comparison to the systems we’ve created. Increasingly, the disparity between what our technology is capable of and our own limitations as animals will become a pressing issue.One thing that always bothers me is how we have this myth of personal responsibility that supposes an individual is equipped to defend their own interests against a multinational corporation on their own.“Well I just don’t get why the baby didn’t defend itself from the bear.” |
WebGL Fluid Simulation | I tried this on my mobile phone, expecting it to not work properly, but everything was super-smooth. Impressive. |
Show HN: I built an After Effects for dummies | I quit my job over a year ago. Been bootstrapped on savings. I picked up a gig last year and only made $30K in 2019.Hoping my efforts pay off. |
I fought the PayPal and I won | I haven't been using PayPal since more than 5 years.For quick transfers I can use Revolut. For buying something I can use card. For easy payment integration with Web apps there are countless tools.So I am wondering what use cases PayPal still serves, use cases which aren't already better covered by better means. Why pay heavy commissions to PayPal? |
U.S. moves to bar noncompete agreements in labor contracts | Non-Competes being legal is only acceptable I think if the worker will continued being paid for the period of the non-compete. I can see reasons that non-competes exist, but those reasons don't really make sense in a world where patents and trademarks also exist. The fact that they are essentially illegal in California, and California's economy works shows that they are unnecessary and also don't hinder technological development. |
The Rust I wanted had no future | Very interesting insight from Graydon, in hindsight I too would have loved something more towards ML than C++. I never liked the kitchen sink approach that I see first C++, now Rust moving towards, but I respect what Rust has managed to solidify into. It's a good language.That said, I still hate async with a passion, it makes the language more complex and not very elegant (i.e. function coloring). And now that I know how it works behind the scene (thanks to Jon Gjengset [1]), it feels so complicated and hacky, a mediocre very high level concept that someone managed to implement as a zero-cost abstraction. Impressive, but still a bad idea.I'm sure the pro of having a BDFL instead of a committee is being able to follow a singular vision, instead of trying to appease members by adding the fad du jour which might stray a little too far from the original vision. Too many chefs in the kitchen and all.1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThjvMReOXYM |
Extracting the SuperFish certificate | Question for the more legally-minded among us: Can Lenovo face consequences over this? I mean, they deliberately crippled the security systems of their consumer goods, presumably without properly notifying their customers. That sounds like the kind of thing a company could, or should, get sued for. |
Ask HN: Pick startups for YC to fund | Hey everyone! I manage and run the Fellowship program at YC. I just want to build on top of what Dan wrote about being nice. We’re not asking you to do this because we think it’s good manners. We actually believe it’s the right way to think and act like the best investors.It’s easy to form some really bad habits when you sit in a position of power to judge the potential of a person, a team, an idea and their execution—believing that you know better and focusing your time on finding weakness.The best investors don’t spend a lot of time on what can go wrong. They already know the odds are against every startup that ever comes into existence. They already know every startup is a shit show. Those will be the reasons why all the other investors will miss out on an unpredictable opportunity. The best investors try to figure out what can go right. They dream a little with the startup and they then sell that vision back to the founders.Remember that the big wins in startups come from the margins. For you to find what no one else could have predicted, know that it will take the shape of something that isn’t obvious.Being nice gives you a good foundation for being open and optimistic, which is what we strive for when we read applications here at YC.Thanks again for trying this out with us. I'm really excited about what we discover together. |
iOS Privacy: Easily get a user's Apple ID password, just by asking | This is related to an issue called root-phishing or superuser-phishing. You can do this with the Windows admin password prompt, the MacOS prompt, or with Linux sudo, as long as you can run code from a user account or edit a single file. alias sudo='sudo ./somethingbad; sudo'
I'm surprised you don't hear about this that often. There is no perfect solution, since any visual feedback the operating system can do to make their prompt "official-looking" is possible by an application as well, unless the operating system can display information the user would recognize that it not accessible by the application. A perfect solution on iOS is to "minimize" the application so that the home screen is shown and then show the password prompt. The user would immediately recognize the wallpaper and icons to be theirs, which are two pieces of information unavailable to the application. However, the application could still fool the user by displaying the box over the application anyway. |
Show HN: My embarrassing personal website from the 90s | I miss this era of the Internet. It represents a period of time where average people used the open Web to publish, rather than post on a corporation's platform.Obviously there's been plenty of development since then that I would not give back, but people favoring publishing their own sites rather than posting on social media is not incompatible with those developments. That part didn't need to be lost. |
Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail? | FastMail. It's one of the few third party hosts to support push email on iOS with the native Mail app (it's a custom protocol based on APNS), since Mail doesn't implement IMAP IDLE [1].They are also the main sponsors behind the JMAP protocol [2] and some open source projects such as the Cyrus IMAP server.[1]: https://fastmail.blog/2016/12/21/what-we-talk-about-when-we-...
[2]: https://jmap.io |
Build Your Own X | Is it just me or does all these great educational content out there lead to analysis paralysis? I mean if I wanted to just learn something new and I chanced upon this web page I'd be stumped on where to start. |
SMS is not 2FA-secure | My understanding is that you don't even need to do a SIM swap, because the SS7 signaling system is insecure. SIM Swap is likely the easiest way as wage-slave employees are quite pliable to bribes[0]. But if you want to be even more anonymous, you can apparently re-route texts remotely [1].0: https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/mans-1m-life-savings-s...1: https://www.kaspersky.com/blog/ss7-hacked/25529/I thought both these vectors were already common knowledge
to HN readers. |
President Daniels responds to Chinese student's harassment | This is just an example of the different ethics between China and America. America is very deontological in terms of FREEDOM. We love freedom above everything else. China is very consequentialist, they care about prosperity and success over everything else. I'm a pretty red blooded American (I drive a black smoke diesel truck and have enough firearms and ammo to make it pretty far in the apocalypse). I wonder what ethical system will be more successful in the future. We can already see having consequentialist ethics that don't care about your freedom do a lot better at fighting pandemics. The Chinese know that Tiananmen Square was a bad thing, but they want to forget about it and move on (consequentialism). In America our Tiananmen Square is probably slavery and we apparently don't want to forget about it even if it rips our county apart (deontological). What system will succeed in the next 100 years? The pandemic really showed me some of the issues of Western deontological ethics. |
Why I Quit Being So Accommodating (1922) | For anybody learning to say "no" currently - learn to say "no" gently and kindly. I'm quite bad at this myself. I let people impose stuff on me, and once I have had enough, I have a very rude way of telling people off. One reason for this rudeness is a fear that I will lose something when declining (e.g. a relationship or money), so I feel stuck between a rock and a hard place - I don't want to help, but I feel I should not decline. Most of the times, my rudeness while finally saying "no" is out of place, e.g. when my fiance needs something from me that actually makes sense, or a customer who needs some small task that they would actually pay for.Watching other people (esp my fiance) saying "no" ever so gently has me wondering how easy life could be if I were able to do the same. I'm practicing it, and I think I'm getting better at it. Telling the other person the root cause why you say "no" helps a lot to instill empathy for your situation. The root cause always stems from a need or necessity that you currently have, like need for rest/food/time to think/time to finish this or that task properly/... Even if you are lazy and simply don't want to help right now, remember that this laziness also fulfils one of your needs - probably you need to rest or think.ADDED: Telling people that you just cannot help _right now_ also softens the blow. Also, if it's a customer then delaying might even be more beneficial than just declining - you might need the billable hours in the following week. |
Why We Must Fight for the Right to Repair Our Electronics | What about the right to use our electronics? Google has been silently pushing their "SafetyNet" APIs into Android, including an "attestation" API[1] that dynamically fetches and runs an opaque binary program[2] served and signed by Google that collects whatever data they deem necessary to verify the "integrity" of a device.Devices that are rooted will not fail to attest via the API. Devices where the user has chosen to install a custom ROM will fail to attest (even with a locked bootloader and no root). Apps from Google Play can use these APIs to decide whether to work on a user's device.This is macOS SIP taken to a different level. You can't watch Netflix and whatever other app decides to use these APIs unless Google has complete control over your device, including the ability to remotely collect and transmit opaque and arbitrary data at any time. This is a dishonest attempt to disguise a draconian DRM scheme as pro-user, pro-safety, anti-virus/rootkit. We're at the point where you don't even own your own filesystem anymore on a Linux device. I think this is a step beyond traditional DRM, including traditional hardware content protection.[1] https://developer.android.com/training/safetynet/attestation...
[2] https://koz.io/inside-safetynet/ |
A letter about Google AMP | I do not believe page speed should play a role in search rankings at all. It has nothing to do with the content and the person with the correct and most relevant content doesn't always have the relevant skills or a DevOps specialist handy to meet the requirements.This only helps the heavy handed SEO optimized sites with deep pockets and time to kill get yet another edge.The article with the best insight isn't likely to be the one with the perfecly optimized website.I understand that pagespeed effects end user experience when they hit a website, however that's not what I searched for. I did not search "fastest website with okay knowledge about dogs" I asked for "website with the best knowledge about dogs".I want Google to be able to show me the most awesome page about dogs. The most in depth and relevant information. That niche dog blogger who is so passionate that they spend all their time researching dogs. I don't want "10 cool facts about dogs by Buzzfeed". |
Statement on New York Times Article | What I find noteworthy about this story is how contentious and weaponized have gender and race become. Out of the four negative claims, one accused Scott of racism and two accused him of of some variant of misogyny. The fourth associated him with some other form of non-pure thinking.I am afraid things will get worse before they get better. I expect the trumpism/fascism wave will provoke unhealthy reaction and further chain-reaction. My personal lacmus paper is the use of "white male" label as an argument, which is not totally uncommon even here on HN. |
The Drivers Cooperative | It's always surprised me that we haven't seem more attempts at co-op like models in spaces like this, and I'm happy to see it.Uber/Lyft strike me as thin businesses in the value that they actually provide both to riders and drivers. Yes, they were responsible for some initial innovation, but now the cat is out of the bag, and the concept could absolutely be applied in a business structure that is more profitable and friendly to the people actually delivering the services.Getting initial traction with riders, and adequately investing in trust & safety strike me as the two hardest parts up front. On the flip-side, they should benefit from less regulatory scrutiny, and less pressure from investors vs. the heavily funded players like Uber & Lyft.I'm rooting for them and hope to see this go somewhere. |
Show HN: iPod.js – An online iPod that connects to Spotify and Apple Music | This is really cool. It’s amazing how “realistic” the clickwheel feels—it instantly transported me back to actually using an iPod. Also, there’s something poetic about emulating the clickwheel on the interface that replaced it :) |
Web Push for Web Apps on iOS and iPadOS | An important detail that you might miss without reading the article is that these capabilities are not available to any website a user visits. The user must add the website to the their Home Screen before the website can ask for notifications permissions.As an iOS user I actually like this restriction. Can't imagine what the browsing experience would've looked like if any website could take their chance on sending me notifications |
Pricing Money: A beginner's guide to money, bonds, futures and swaps | This is an excellent resource and a great read, but DAMN do money markets seem stupid as all get out to me. Where is the productive output of all these arbitrage shell games? How is this more than an abysmal waste of time and resources simply to make a small handful of bankers richer? |
Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase | I swear this guy exists at every company I've ever worked.He's the guy you go to when you find some legacy code which you have no idea how the hell it works and end up getting a 2 hour history lesson into a decade of company politics and failed replatforming projects.They're hard not to love. |
Nokia acquired by Microsoft | This is a great move. There is no money in being an Android vendor except if you're Samsung and are totally vertically integrated. With Windows Phone, Nokia and Microsoft at least have some hope of carving out a profitable stake in the market.Anecdotally, I'm very impressed with some of the new Lumias. I got a 620 to replace my stolen iPhone, and for $200 unlocked its phenomenal phone. The build quality makes a flagship Samsung feel like cheap plastic crap. And Windows Phone flies despite the modest specs. I was disappointed in the 920 I had earlier, but at this price point the shoe is on the other foot.I hope this is portends a Microsoft phone... |
The Case for Slow Programming | I largely agree w/ the argument here, but "slow" is going to be self-defeating nomenclature, and is also inaccurate. Business doesn't want slow. So if we're pitching slow, we're setting ourselves up to lose and the speed-hackers are going to win.Our goal is architectural soundness. I believe the biggest fallacy of our industry is we think the only way to get these is to go "slow". Not true.What we're really saying is our industry is short on skill sets. With specific skill sets, you can build architecturally sound systems at no extra cost.If I were to build a house today it would take me much longer than someone else because I don't have the necessary skills. I might hurry in which case the house would be shoddy. Is the shoddiness of the house necessarily because I hurried? No. It's because I didn't acquire the required skill sets first.The software industry has no such (practical) concept of the skill sets required to build architecturally sound systems. We have a bunch of well-meaning hackers, and as a result shoddy systems that decay into technical liabilities.Our industry needs to solve this skill set problem. The challenge is that academia has a hard time teaching these skill sets, because they are so removed from the practitioner. And businesses can't teach it b/c it takes years and special experience to actually teach it. So it's not advantageous to a business to teach those skill sets.So how do we do it? And how do we organize an industry around professionals who know how to build architecturally sound systems and code? This is a very difficult problem for a world that has such high demand for code and such little understanding of what the professional skill set would afford them. |
What I'd tell myself about startups if I could go back 5 years | > A good developer can pick up any language or platform in a few weeksYes and no. There's a major difference between "picking up" and actually being good at something. If you have nobody on the team that is either already intimately familiar with the language/platform, or has experience with various languages/platforms, you're going to be spending a lot of time figuring out how to do stuff properly instead of just building stuff. And if you are a startup with a limited runway, that difference is crucial. |
How I Hacked Facebook and Found Someone's Backdoor Script | This is Reginaldo from the Facebook Security team. We're really glad Orange reported this to us. On this case, the software we were using is third party. As we don't have full control of it, we ran it isolated from the systems that host the data people share on Facebook. We do this precisely to have better security, as chromakode mentioned. After incident response, we determined that the activity Orange detected was in fact from another researcher who participates in our bounty program. Neither of them were able to compromise other parts of our infra-structure so, the way we see it, it's a double win: two competent researchers assessed the system, one of them reported what he found to us and got a good bounty, none of them were able to escalate access. |
Tasty Seaweed Reduces Cows’ Methane Emissions by 99% | My company is currently working to grow Asparagopsis Taxiformis, here in the US, for this purpose.I agree with comments that we have big issues to tackle in regards to methane sinks failing, such as permafrost, and there are things to be said about people moving en masse to plant based diets – but, the future will always be a mix of tomorrow and today. Many people will still eat beef, and we need to ensure we reduce the negative effects of raising cattle as much as possible. We need a giant, mixed bag of tricks working in unison to slow the warming we have caused over the last 100 years.Luckily, current research is showing that – not only does AT nearly eliminate methane from the bovine digestive process entirely when supplementing between half and two percent of daily diet – we are seeing early indications in research of some amazing additional benefits – improved milk production, increased immunity, improved food conversion ratio (meaning you can feed cattle less and have them pack on more protein). Studies are not finalized, but what I have heard of them sounds very, very good.My background is in tech (founded and exited a TechStars company and have had a career in software and hardware startups) and my colleagues are in marine biology and phycology (algae science). My hope is that by approaching this problem from the perspective of a fast-iterating startup, we can get this product to market faster than the traditional routes of academic timelines and federal funding sources this industry is used to.If you are an investor, beef serving restaurant owner, or in business related to cattle raising and finishing and would like to find out more, please email us at [email protected]. And follow our newsletter for updates at https://goodalgae.com.Cheers! |
Ask HN: What are you learning? | I'll probably get a lot of shit for this, but LeetCode.I've recently been furloughed, and I think that redundancies aren't too far away. There aren't many companies hiring in my area at the moment, and if I'm going to move it's going to be for a big company, so I'm dusting off the CV and am applying to some Big N companies.A recruiter recently reached out to me, and I've got an interview with one Big N company coming up soon, so am using my new-found free time to study and, at the very least, be a bit more employable at the end of this pandemic. |
Apple Music on Android requires its own payment details to avoid Google 30% cut | Note to the people asking why this matters:Legally, if you take a position in federal court on X (i.e., that it's okay to ban external transactions by apps using your app store), and you are found to be doing not-X in an analogous situation (i.e., setting up external transactions to avoid fees in your competitors' app store), the court can rule against you in the original case...and then sanction you and your lawyers for wasting the court's time proclaiming X...and then legally bar you from asserting X in those proceedings, or related proceedings.Courts are generally okay with some form of alternative arguments, (i.e., I didn't do Y, but if I did Y it was legal for me to do so), but they absolutely will not accept contradictory arguments by the same party (It's okay for me to do Z but I won't allow others to do Z in the same situation). |
Firefox's JIT is getting significantly faster | It's sad how these valuable optimizations are unknown to the average person. When I hear "the browser" discussed in almost any parlance, the implication is Chrome. It's rare to even hear someone say "Chrome," as it's the defacto choice for the non-mobile web. Convenience breeds ignorance. |
Ask HN: How to learn sales? | You need to separate sales from marketing. Sales is a conversation, marketing is a broadcast. Marketing gets the phone to ring, sales takes the call and closes the deal.For B2B sales resembles project management: the goal is not to convince everyone to buy your product or service but to diagnose their needs and only engage with firms that will benefit.For larger deals you "sell with your ears" as much as you talk.I find Neil Rackham's "Spin Selling" very useful. Peter Cohan's "Great Demo" embeds a lot of discovery advice and suggests that a good demo is really a conversation driven by mutual curiosity about customer needs and software capabilities.For B2B customer development interviews (those early market discovery conversations) I have a short book you may find helpful. See https://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2020/01/30/40-tips-for-b2b-cus... (there is also a link at the bottom for a PDF version).Two final books I would suggest, while not exactly sales books, are "The Innovator's DNA" by Clayton Christensen and "The Right It (Pretotype It)" by Alberto Savoia. They cover a number of techniques for finding the right problem to solve and determining if your solution is a good fit for customer needs. I mention them because it's not uncommon for a startup to have a product problem that manifests as a sales problem. |
Rust Foundation: Hello, World | The board's vote seems to be heavily biased in favor of large corporations, with half the seats for them, 2 for the community, and 3 for "project areas." Contrast this with the governance of GCC, which has all of them as community members or project areas. |
Plan 9 from Bell Labs in Cyberspace | What's Plan9? |
I'm a scam prevention expert and I got scammed | There's one easy rule that could have avoided all of this - never give out any info on incoming calls. If I get a call or text about fraudulent transactions, I'll keep them on hold while I log into the bank website. If I get a call about a late payment, I'll thank them for the info and ask them to stay on while I pay online. If I get an inbound call with a more complex request, I'll ask them for their employee info and call back the official service number. It annoys the caller sometimes, despite always treating them professionally, but I keep that a hardline rule no matter how real it feels.I heard this from a security guy and was under the impression it was one of the sacred laws of security. If it's not, it should be - it's a rule of thumb that would stop 90% of social engineering attacks I hear about. |
Show HN: I wrote a free eBook about many lesser-known/secret database tricks | In isolation because of Corona last year, I started to share many lesser-known database tricks I know on Twitter (@tobias_petry). Although I thought that only a few people would be interested in something like this, it became a matter of course over the months. Meanwhile, thousands follow me to read my database tips or news.Since every message in the constant social media stream vanishes after a few days, I had to do something about it. Knowledge must be preserved. I sat down for a few weeks and reworked every example and every text to create an ebook that you can read in an evening and still impart tons of knowledge.And so "Next-Level Database Techniques for Developers" was born. |
Kris Nóva has died | What from :( |
Show HN: Hacker News Classics | Occasionally you see articles on HN with a date in the title, like “(1998)” — and over the years I’ve noticed that these tend to be some of the best posts.It makes sense: on a site devoted to news, an article posted so long after it was published has to be especially good.So I hacked together this page, which links to every HN post with a date in its title earning more than 40 votes. It’s sorted in chronological order to encourage wandering. |
Oslo had 0 pedestrian, 0 cyclist, 0 children and 1 driver trafic deaths in 2019 | One interesting observation on Oslo is that, pedestrians do cross the street when it's red for them, if there's no moving traffic close by. This is totally different from, for example, Copenhagen, Stockholm and places I visited in Germany. They're like Italians of the north.That's probably why we felt at home on the streets during our stay there, as a family from Turkey. I would love to have that 0 deaths statistics here instead, though. |
NewPipe – ad-free, open-source Android YouTube client | This is the best youtube client, bar none. It keeps local history and "subscriptions" without requiring you to log in to google. I use it on an Amazon Fire Tablet. There seems to be no iOS equivalent, which is one of the things preventing me from upgrading to an iPad.Has anybody used it recently on AndroidTV / FireTV? I've tried it several times in the past, and its always been wonky there. I use SmartYouTubeTV (https://smartyoutubetv.github.io/) on AndroidTV right now, and the logged out experience is terrible. |
Radicle: A peer-to-peer alternative to GitHub | What a nice funky design. That front page has a soul, unlike almost everything else I see nowadays. |
An oral history of Bank Python | I was the person who first deployed Python at Goldman Sachs. At the time it was an "unapproved technology" but the partner in charge of my division called me and said (This is literally word for word because partners didn't call me every day so I remember) Err....hi Sean, It's Armen. Uhh.... So I heard you like python.... well if someone was to uhh.... install python on the train... they probably wouldn't be fired. Ok bye.
"Installing python on the train" meant pushing it out to all the computers globally in the securities division that did risk and pricing. Within 30mins every computer in goldman sachs's securities division had python and I was the guy responsible for keeping the canonical python distribution up to date with the right set of modules etc on Linux, Solaris and Windows.Because it was unapproved technology I had a stream of people from technology coming to my desk to say I shouldn't have done it. I redirected them to Armen (who was a very important dude that everyone was frightened of).The core engineers from GS went on to build the Athena system at JP and the Quartz platform at BAML.//Edit for grammar |
DuckDuckGo Removes Pirate Sites and YouTube-DL from Its Search Results | Question: does anyone actually know what DDG does with user data? Like they market themselves as a "privacy respecting" search engine, but how much of this is truth?I'd imagine there's good money in convincing people they have privacy because then they'll provide more interesting data.Has the company ever been audited? Why should they be trusted to not compromise user privacy? Imo at least Google is honest: you know when you use their products as intended you have no privacy, and they don't try to hide thisEdit: since DDG isn't open source like searx, how do we know there is ANY truth to their marketing claims?Edit: Just for accuracy, the browser extensions are open source. But as far as I know, the actual search engine isn'tEdit: They made over 100 million in 2020. They clearly can (and should) get an independent audit. It's shocking that they haven't had a single audit. Even startpage has |
To uncover a deepfake video call, ask the caller to turn sideways | Source: I work in the field.This is a current limitation, and an artifact of the data+method but not something that should be relied upon.If we do some adversary modelling, we can find two ways to work around this:1) actively generate and search for such data; perhaps expensive for small actors but not well equipped malicious ones.2) wait for deep learning to catch up, e.g. by extending NERFs (neural radiance fields) to faces; matter of time.Now, if your company/government is on the bleeding edge of ML-based deception, they can have such policy, and they will update it 12-18-24 months (or whenever (1) or (2) materialises). However, I don't know one organisation that doesn't have some outdated security guideline that they cling to, e.g. old school password rules and rotations.Will "turning sideways to spot a deepfake" be a valid test in 5 years? Prolly no, so don't base your secops around this. |
What not to write on your security clearance form (1988) | When I moved to Canada, at age 16-17 I initially failed a lot of job applications at places like Staples, Future Shop, Best Buy, Radio Shack, etc.For some reason, many of them had a type of "Corporate Personality Test" on their application, and asked the same "Have you ever considered stealing from your employer?" to which I would cheerfully answer "Yes".Apparently this was an automatic deal-breaker; there was no follow-up - no "HAVE you ever stolen" or "WOULD you ever steal from your employer", or "why were you considering it" or anything like that. My mind never stops and there's virtually nothing in the world I have not "considered" (as in, thought about, crossed my mind, evaluated, etc). Similarly, years later it actually took my Canadian therapist a little while to adjust as well when he asked if I ever considered suicide and I cheerfully replied "Yes!" (I'm not suicidal, in the least, by any of the normal metrics; but I genuinely don't understand people who have "never considered" it - how do you block & limit your mind? What mental fences do you have that you have never "considered" such an obvious course of action in the likely billion of seconds of thinking?).I don't know what other people do with their brains; my wife falls asleep within 30 seconds of her head hitting the pillow, my mind insists on spending an hour or three "considering" things I apparently shouldn't put on a job application lol :-) |
RedPajama: Reproduction of LLaMA with friendly license | I'm very glad people are starting to push back against claims of various LLMs being open source. I was beginning to be worried that the term would be forcefully redefined in the ML space to mean "weights available." With the kickoff of projects like this and Databricks' Dolly, I'm heartened to see the community saying "no, we are willing to spend the compute to make actually open models."(While it's true that the actual model code of Llama is properly open source, it's also useless for inference by itself. Claiming these models are open source seems like having your cake and eating it too - you get accolades for "open sourcing" but still get to control what happens with it.) |
GDPR: Don't Panic | Here in UK I have been receiving about 5-10 emails a day from various companies - most of whom I don't remember - telling me I need to sign up again so they can keep my details and keep spamming me.Fantastic. |
Verizon and a BGP Optimizer Knocked Large Parts of the Internet Offline | From the post:>"It doesn't cost a provider like Verizon anything to have such limits in place. And there's no good reason, other than sloppiness or laziness, that they wouldn't have such limits in place."Is "sloppiness or laziness" really the only possible attribution here? I'm not a big fan of Verizon but I'm a big fan of civility and empathy, two qualities which your blog post lacks. Outages are a really unfortunate fact of life. We've seen them recently with Google, AWS, Dyn - all companies where technical competency is generally not questioned. It's quite possible the cause of of this outage was some "perfect storm" scenario such as an eBGP router rebooted and came up with a stale or incorrect config. "Perfect storm" scenarios even happen at companies with very rigorous engineering cultures as we saw with the most recent Google outage.Your attempt to shame an organization without knowing all the details reeks of immaturity and pettiness. Ditto for your willingness to turn this into yet another Cloudflare marketing opportunity. Have you forgotten about your own Cloudbleed incident? How would you feel if it a security company took that as an opportunity to shame you for "sloppiness or laziness"? Or some other company's CEO was offering to send people "Cloudbleed Support Group" T-Shirts on HN as your own CEO is doing in this thread?Lastly RPKI isn't a silver bullet, RPKI authorities can also be misconfigured and attacked[1][2]. This happened with the LACNIC incident in 2013[2]. It's also worth mentioning that RPKI potentially creates new threats[2]. But again it seems more important to you to use this as a marketing opportunity and promote yourself while throwing someone else under a bus while uttering pithy summations.Also from your post:>"And, in particular, we're looking at you Verizon — and still waiting on your reply."Although Verizon is the 400lb gorilla in the room, their NOC and network engineers are still regular people with kids and families and feelings. They are also people who have had a really shit day today. Why you can't extend just a bit of human compassion and feel compelled to try to shame is quite inexplicable.You may think that your blog post was a marketing coup but I see it as a massive failure in in both leadership and civility.As a thought exercise maybe Cloudflare leadership could think about how they would like the community to react the next time they are at fault.[1] https://www.cs.bu.edu/~goldbe/papers/hotRPKI.pdf[2] https://www.cs.bu.edu/~goldbe/papers/sigRPKI_full.pdf |
Show HN: See a Satellite Tonight. No Telescope Required | For whoever built this app: I was checking HN in bed. I clicked your app and noticed the ISS would be passing overhead in less than a minute. My reaction was to immediately jump up, yell at my kids to run with me outside. We didn't know where to look, but then I figured out how to load the streetview and saw that it would be closer to the horizon and BOOM. We finally saw it zooming across the night sky, everybody started to cheer and yell. It was the most amazing thing we've done all week :). |
What: A terminal tool to check what is taking up your bandwidth | Bad naming.. WHAT(1) BSD General Commands Manual WHAT(1)
NAME
what -- show what versions of object modules were used to construct a file
(MacOS ...) |
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