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Tell HN: AWS appears to be down again | Me: Hesitation at last job moving absolutely everything (including backups) to AWS because if it goes down it's a problem I'm a firm believer in some kind of physical/easily accessible backup.Coworkers: "You're an f'n idiot. Amazon and Facebook don't go down, you're holding us back!" Me: leaves cause that treatment was the final strawAmazon and Facebook both go down within a month of each other, and supposedly they needed backupsThem: shocked pikachu face |
GitHub Copilot is generally available | I've been using Copilot non-stop on every hobby project I have ever since they've let me in (2021/07/13) and I am honestly flabbergasted they think it's worth 10$/mo. My experience using it till this day is the following:- It's an amazing all-rounder autocomplete for most boilerplate code. Generally anything that someone who's spent 5 minutes reading the code can do, Copilot can do just as well.- It's terrible if you let it write too much. The biggest problem I've had is not that it doesn't write correctly, it's that it think it knows how and then produce good looking code at a glance but with wrong logic.- Relying on its outside-code knowledge is also generally a recipe for disaster: e.g. I'm building a Riichi Mahjong engine and while it knows all the terms and how to put a sentence together describing the rules, it absolutely doesn't actually understand how "Chii" melds work- Due to the licensing concerns I did not use CoPilot at all in work projects and I haven't felt like I was missing that much. A friend of mine also said he wouldn't be allowed to use it.You can treat it as a pair programming session where you're the observer and write an outline while the AI does all the bulk work (but be wary), but at what point does it become such a better experience to justify 10$/mo? I don't understand if I've been using it wrong or what. |
I went to 50 different dentists: almost all gave a different diagnosis (1997) | My son when 3 had a fall and a few teeth were bent. Went to our local dentist who mostly had a wait and see opinion. But then calls a day later and says they’ve decided they should just come out. Two top front teeth. Would have no top front teeth for years.I went into engineer mode and while I acknowledged I didn’t have domain expertise, I asked questions and probed the whole situation. Very unsatisfactory, meandering answers.This was a deeply distressing experience. For the first time ever I did the “call in a personal favour” thing and asked my dad to reach out a family friend, a former cosmetic dentist and former head of the province’s dental association for a second opinion.He saw my son a few hours later and he was just livid about the diagnosis. That it was possible they’d have to come out but it’s impossible to know this for at least a few more weeks or more.In a few months the teeth returned 100% to normal and firmed right up as the ligaments healed.I’m not a conspiracy nut. I believe in listening to experts (but ultimately making an informed decision). I believe in modern medicine. But that experience shook me and forever changed my trust in the dental industry.My feeling is that the nature of dentistry leaves a lot of room for subjectivity and COVID left a lot of dental chairs empty. |
Bring a stick man to life. | Lol: http://i.imgur.com/4t98S.png |
Meteorite crash in Russia | Here's a collection of insane videos of the event, some with the enormous sonic boom:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIAm5hq8WWc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0cRHsApzt8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Np_mpGYSBSACan anyone translate what they are saying in the first one?You can get a good idea of the new videos being posted using YouTube's "last hour" filter:http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%D0%BC%D0%B5%D1%... |
Ellen Pao Is Stepping Down as Reddit’s Chief | I think this was the right thing to do from a PR perspective. Having Steve back as the new CEO will definitely be good for the community.I also applaud Reddit's announcement for calling the community out on their childish BS:> As a closing note, it was sickening to see some of the things redditors wrote about Ellen. [1] The reduction in compassion that happens when we’re all behind computer screens is not good for the world. People are still people even if there is Internet between you. If the reddit community cannot learn to balance authenticity and compassion, it may be a great website but it will never be a truly great community. Steve’s great challenge as CEO [2] will be continuing the work Ellen started to drive this forward.All in all, a good day I think. |
Stack Overflow Outage Postmortem | > So the Regex engine has to perform a “character belongs to a certain character class” check (plus some additional things) 20,000+19,999+19,998+…+3+2+1 = 199,990,000 times, and that takes a while.199,990,000 isn't really all that many. I'm a little surprised it didn't just cause a momentary blip in performance.edit: whoops, i guess that's per page load |
Penguin travels every year to visit man who rescued him (2016) | > It's technically illegal to have a wild animal as a pet in Brazil, as officials want to ensure vulnerable creatures don't get separated from their families and that they can be reintroduced into the wild after injury.Same where I am. I've wondered, though. What constitutes a pet?For example, I give peanuts to the wild squirrels around my house. This is not illegal where I live. It is illegal, however, to keep a wild squirrel as a pet.Several of the squirrels seem to recognize me, and run up to me when I go out, get up on their hind legs, and wave their front paws around in a gesture that looks like they are asking for peanuts.I'm pretty sure some of them would come inside to get their peanuts if I opened the front door but did not go outside. From there I could probably train them to essentially be pets [1].But would they legally be pets, and therefore illegal, if they were free to come and go at will? Or would they simply be wild animals coming into human space, which happens to be controlled by a human who isn't going to make them leave?A co-worker had a similar situation with a raccoon. He was giving her food, and she got more and more comfortable with him, to the point she would come right up, and peacefully accept food and petting. She even brought her babies by apparently to show them to him.Was he legally keeping a pet raccoon?[1] I don't actually want squirrels in my house. In fact, I've done some looking into squirrel traps in case one does come in and I need to get it out. That almost happened a couple of times when I was tossing peanuts from the door, and one squirrel startled another from behind, causing the first squirrel to dash forward right toward my door. |
Signal threatens to dump US market if EARN IT act passes | 1. The police are either lazy or incompetent if they say they cannot trace criminals because of E2E secure chat.2. You don't need to know the contents of a chat to glean massive amounts of metadata. FB Messenger and WhatsApp going truly E2E encrypted will still put FB (and anyone serving them with warrants) to know in real time who is talking to whom, what their IP addresses are, and possibly real location (if they are using the app on their phone). This can be used to created a Signature profile... many Pakistanis and Yemeni have died from a Hellfire missile strike because they matched a pattern of activity. Google "signature strike" for more info.3. The terrorists and pedophiles that are the most dangerous are using far more sophisticated means of communication than Wire, Signal, WhatsApp, Wickr, etc. Saying that this is "for the children" or "for our safety" is complete bullshit and anyone saying otherwise needs to prove it. |
Ask HN: Why is Microsoft Teams still so bad? | Long ago Microsoft had MSN Messenger, which was one of the leading messaging apps. It worked well, and many 'normal' users were using it. Then Microsoft dissolved the team behind it and screwed up the product so bad with bloatware and ads that everyone moved to WhatsApp (except in the US where people went back to texting).Then Microsoft came out with Communicator, renamed it to Lync, which was a corporate messenger/meeting software. It used its own server, that could federate outside. It worked very well. They added LiveMeeting as a separate app for meetings, built on the same protocols. Our company used it with the "roundtable" camera from 2008, and it all worked amazingly well. We had meetings with people joining in from home and other offices over the internet using inexpensive webcams, 15 years ago.Then they bought Skype and it went downhill from there. I don't know what happened, but they took a lot of time integrating technologies from Skype (peer-to-peer) with their own tech (which was more telecom/server based) and tried competing with ever-changing perceived competitors by copying parts of their features and UI, without ever making any feature really good. They integrated everything into a single program, Skype for Business, now renamed Teams, and made it bloated and obnoxious. Just try to get it to not start at login... It's like MSN all over again.I think the Communicator/LiveMeeting software combo they had 15 years ago would still (conceptually) do pretty well as messenger/meeting software now, when modernized. It was much less intrusive and behaved like nice software that you actually wanted to use. |
MacBook Pro | This event was by far the most disappointing Mac event in the history. A lot of the time was wasted in:- Mildly funny jokes and comparison with 90's technology.- 90% of the talk was about the touch bar.- Awful demos of Photoshop & some cringy DJ.I was hoping we would see:- A new MacBook with all day battery life and touch bar, even thinner design. Ok, I understand that they are trying to consolidate their product line but the category of a web-browsing machine that is 12", super small design and an adequate processor is left without any update.- A MacBook pro with some real innovation. They could just copy Microsoft with a detachable screen (oh but they would cannibalize iPad market), pen input, touch screen. But, instead we get this touchbar thing which is great but I am just disappointed that it is the only thing they have innovated here.- Killed Macbook Air.- No iMac update (!!!).- No monitor announcement.Microsoft really hit it out of the park yesterday. Apple's entire presentation felt like they are trying to fill the 1.5 hours of time with bullshit.Also, Panos Panay sounds like a genuine, authentic, passionate and knowledgeable whereas Jony Ive sounds like an Evangelical designer who feels "fake". I don't know how to explain it. |
Google says it will run entirely on renewable energy in 2017 | >"It’s good for the economy, good for business and good for our shareholders".Let's be honest...it is not good for their shareholders. They are buying power at a significant premium and costing their shareholders money. It is a direct hit to the bottom line. This might be good for the environment - at the very least they are helping renewable energy companies get bank financing through purchase guarantees, which will advance the technologies being used and perhaps one day make them economically viable. But to say it's good for shareholders is disingenuous.>"In some places, like Chile, Google said, renewables have at times become cheaper than fossil fuels."I love all of the hedging that comes with any article that tries to paint renewables as economical. This sentence has holes a truck could drive through. It could literally mean that at one point, years ago, Chile had extremely high gas prices for a week and Google was amazed that their bill for that week was lower than it would have been with conventional power sources. |
GitHub commit search: “remove password” | Too many comments here recommend to clean up the commit and just hide the mistake under the rug. This is wrong.If you leak a password to any public location, there is only one reasonable course of action: CHANGE IT!Don't even bother rewriting the commit. Focus on changing that password right away, and while you're at it, figure out a better way to manage your secrets outside of your source code in the future. Mistakes happen, but they shouldn't be repeated. |
Give Me Back My Monolith | I don't think I blame the author at all. I'm not sure why you would start with microservices, unless you wanted to show that you could build a microservices application. Monoliths are quicker and easier to setup when you're talking about a small service in the first place.It's when an organization grows and the software grows and the monolith starts to get unwieldy that it makes sense to go to microservices. It's then that the advantage of microservices both at the engineering and organizational level really helps.A team of three engineers orchestrating 25 microservices sounds insane to me. A team of of thirty turning one monolith into 10 microservices and splitting into 10 teams of three, each responsible for maintaining one service, is the scenario you want for microservices. |
Seinfeld Adventure | Does anyone know of a comedy show similar to Seinfeld? |
GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces | Serious question: if I were to use this, would Microsoft collect analytics on me (code written, keystrokes, mouse movements, sleep/work schedule, productivity metrics, etc) and monetize that data by using it to build some AI product like Copilot, or build a productivity dashboard so managers can fire people for not being productive enough (like Xsolla did), use it to serve me ads, or do some stupid/irresponsible/unethical thing with it that will ultimately end up hurting me in the long run?Because I feel like the answer to that is yes, and I can already see myself in the future writing something angry in the comments section of an article on HN that exposes some evil/stupid shit Microsoft did with this, or happened as a result of this.I'm not against the concept of using a thin client for development, but it just doesn't seem smart to me do it in such a way where you have to place trust in a company that, throughout their entire existence, has consistently proven that you should not trust them, because they have no incentive to (and thus never will) act in your best interests. It's like if Facebook released their own web browser and "promised" to respect your privacy; you'd be an idiot to believe them. |
The All-Seeing “i”: Apple Just Declared War on Your Privacy | >So what happens when, in a few years at the latest, a politician points that out, and—in order to protect the children—bills are passed in the legislature to prohibit this "Disable" bypass, effectively compelling Apple to scan photos that aren’t backed up to iCloud? What happens when a party in India demands they start scanning for memes associated with a separatist movement? What happens when the UK demands they scan for a library of terrorist imagery? How long do we have left before the iPhone in your pocket begins quietly filing reports about encountering “extremist” political material, or about your presence at a "civil disturbance"? Or simply about your iPhone's possession of a video clip that contains, or maybe-or-maybe-not contains, a blurry image of a passer-by who resembles, according to an algorithm, "a person of interest"?What I don't get is what prevented these things from happening last month? Apple controls the hardware, the software, and the cloud services so the point at which the scanning is done is mostly arbitrary from a process standpoint (I understand people believe there are huge differences philosophically). They could have already scanned our files because they already have full control over the entire ecosystem. If they can be corrupted by authoritative governments, then shouldn't we assume that have already been corrupted? If so, why did we trust them with full control of the ecosystem? |
Why I Left Rust | Wait. Let me get this straight.Someone is an expert in this field.They're asked to speak at RustConf after a leadership vote.They've also written an article about reflection in Rust - a purely technical thing that is already pretty widely disliked conceptually. (EDIT: the talk was about this, but it's also compile time reflection and came with the usual disclaimer that it was not representative of any of the Rust team's viewpoints or support)Rust members were "uncomfortable" with this purely technical viewpoint - not their behavior, personal beliefs, or even their demographic?And then they pushed them out of the conference behind leadership's back?Did I miss something? This is indeed really childish behavior.EDIT: oh. It's not even reflection, it's compile time reflection. As in, it's not the next Java but instead something that might actually be very useful for the language if done correctly.https://thephd.dev/i-am-no-longer-speaking-at-rustconf-2023> The sudden reversal smacks of shadowy decisions that are non-transparent to normal contributors like myself. It is a brutal introduction to the way the Rust Project actually does business that is not covered by its publicly-available Procedures and Practices and absolutely not at all mentioned in its Code of Conduct.Agreed. The Rust project needs to stamp this out before it begins to fester. This is incredibly stupid behavior coming from what is being regarded as the next C++.Come on, Rust committee. Let's grow up here, shall we? |
“My ten hour white noise video now has five copyright claims” | 1. Assemble a botnet2. Automatically download and reupload popular videos, with extremely subtle modifications.3. File automated takedown notices against each copied (popular) video4. Destroy youtube's ad ecosystem for cheap |
DNS Performance compared: CloudFlare 1.1.1.1 x Google 8.8.8.8 x Quad9 x OpenDNS | Pushed a shell script to compare all of them from your location:https://github.com/cleanbrowsing/dnsperftest $ sh ./dnstest.sh |sort -k 22 -n
test1 test2 test3 test4 test5 test6 test7 test8 test9 test10 Average
cloudflare 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms 4 ms 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms 1.30
norton 2 ms 2 ms 2 ms 2 ms 2 ms 2 ms 2 ms 2 ms 2 ms 2 ms 2.00
neustar 2 ms 2 ms 2 ms 2 ms 1 ms 2 ms 2 ms 2 ms 2 ms 22 ms 3.90
cleanbrowsing 11 ms 23 ms 11 ms 11 ms 11 ms 11 ms 11 ms 13 ms 12 ms 11 ms 12.50
google 4 ms 4 ms 3 ms 21 ms 21 ms 61 ms 3 ms 21 ms 21 ms 22 ms 18.10
opendns 2 ms 2 ms 2 ms 39 ms 2 ms 75 ms 2 ms 21 ms 39 ms 13 ms 19.70
comodo 22 ms 23 ms 22 ms 22 ms 22 ms 22 ms 22 ms 22 ms 22 ms 23 ms 22.20
quad9 10 ms 37 ms 10 ms 10 ms 10 ms 145 ms 10 ms 10 ms 10 ms 20 ms 27.20
yandex 177 ms 216 ms 178 ms 182 ms 186 ms 177 ms 183 ms 174 ms 186 ms 222 ms 188.10
adguard 199 ms 210 ms 200 ms 201 ms 202 ms 202 ms 199 ms 200 ms 198 ms 201 ms 201.20 |
States bring action against Google under federal and state antitrust laws [pdf] | >211. Google falsely told publishers that adopting AMP would enhance load times, but Google employees knew that AMP only improves the [redacted] and AMP pages can actually [redacted] [redacted] [redacted]. In other words, the ostensible benefits of faster load times for cached AMP version of webpages were not true for publishers that designed their web pages for speed. Some publishers did not adopt AMP because they knew their pages actually loaded faster than AMP pages.Vindication for everybody pointing out that amp pages don't actually load faster, they were just incompatible with things that commonly made sites load slower.>212. Google also [redacted] of non-AMP ads by giving them artificial one second delays in order to give Google AMP a [redacted] [redacted] slows down header bidding, which Google uses to turn around and denigrate header bidding for being too slow.Seems damning. (emphasis mine)Wonder what all the redacted is.Also glad to see that google's preferring of amp sites in searches is going to get them in trouble, as that was basically the primary complaint I had with it. AMP pages would show up in searches for dynamic content, despite its restriction of static pages |
ImageNet contains naturally occurring Apple NeuralHash collisions | > it's not obvious how we can trust that a rogue actor (like a foreign government) couldn't add non-CSAM hashes to the list to root out human rights advocates or political rivals. Apple has tried to mitigate this by requiring two countries to agree to add a file to the list, but the process for this seems opaque and ripe for abuse.If the CCP says "put these hashes in your database or we will halt all iPhone sales in China", what do you think Apple is going to do? Is anyone so naive that they believe the CCP wouldn't deliver such an ultimatum? Apple's position seems to completely ignore recent Chinese history. |
Hong Kong: Police Raid Tiananmen Square Museum | The Chinese Government is speeding up their efforts to swallow Hong Kong and Macau into the Mainland.Closing the media outlets, museums, websites that speak against them. And a few key people get abducted here and there to scare more people and force them to accept the Beijing Regime. But... The people from Hong Kong still demonstrates and tries to fight for their lost rights. |
Ideal Monitor Rotation for Programmers | Am I the only one (fullstack programmer + designer + hobby photographer) here who's perfectly okay with a single laptop monitor? Maybe it's to do with I love being mobile, maybe it's that I use UI and text very small, but I can perfectly fit either 3 Vscode tabs, or website + PIP video, a few terminals, many views in Sketch or a combination of those in a screen (16" MBP). I'm also okay with working with Photoshop or sometimes DaVinci Resolve or After Effects too.Honestly I don't understand why so many screens are needed, haven't felt any need for more than one in 15+ years (though I've always used max possible resolution + very small UI scaling). I even don't use multiple desktops.Not a rant or criticism in any way, just trying to see an actual need for multiple (or rotated) monitors. |
Ask HN: Developer abused “sign in with GitHub”? | Lmao the victim blaming on this one.Github failed to indicate clearly what the consumer was going to use this person's credentials for.This is Github's fault, end of story. If the permissions included "can star repos", instead of just "can read/write repos", then sure.Github are too _lazy_ to build granular enough scopes; they should be able to ask "why are you using this scope?" and it should _never_ be the case that someone using one small part of the api has to ask for a scope granting blanket access.Granted, there are quite a few issues with granularity of scopes/oauth for various other services, too.Edit: also the stinking elitism in here; the worst part of the tech community. Just bc someone has a Github account doesn't mean they're some sort of super hacker, there are junior devs out there who could've easily done this and your response to them is "get gud scrub". |
ChatGPT Enterprise | Is it really so hard for companies to provide a price range for Enterprise plan publicly on the pricing page?Why can't I, as an individual, have the same features of an Enterprise plan?What is the logic behind this practice other than profit maximization?I'm willing to pay more to have unlimited high-speed GTP4 and Longer inputs with 32k token context.EDIT: since I'm getting a lot of replies. Genuine question: how should I move to get a reasonable price as an individual for unlimited high-speed gpt4 and longer token context? |
Quake on an oscilloscope | This was posted earlier and set off the voting ring detector. I haven't looked closely, but that may have been a false positive. Since it's a good post and didn't get the attention it deserves, we won't treat this one as a duplicate. |
Justice Department says it will end use of private prisons | Corrections Corp down 20%https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3ACXW |
Avoid Non-Microsoft Antivirus Software | I also want to raise an alarm about a current AV practice, not mentioned in the article: AV products like Bitdefender will MITM
your HTTPS connections by installing their
own root certificates, by default and
without warnings
In the name of "security", this undermines the very purpose of what HTTPS is about, knowingly endangering their users.And consider that I, a highly technical and security conscious software developer, only noticed it because I saw green icons appearing in my search results and then noticed that Google's SSL certificate is now a fake. And I only noticed it because I know how this shit works and those green icons seemed suspicious.And yes, I'm using the word "fake", because I doubt that companies like Bitdefender have to pass the same certifications as a certificate authority or that they have any deals whatsoever with Google. And it's a serious vulnerability, because their certificate can get stolen and used by malicious software, not to mention you now have to trust a third-party with all of your secure connections, which includes your Google searches exposing your most secret desires, your Facebook and Slack chats, your bank account, everything. A third-party that does not have the scrutiny of your open-source web browser.That's just preposterous and these products only survive because users are gullible and technically illiterate. |
To Break Google’s Monopoly on Search, Make Its Index Public | Okay, this is a relatively serious proposal to require Google to allow API access to its search index, with the premise that it would democratize the search engine ecosystem. There are some issues with the regulations he proposes (you have to allow throttling to prevent DDoS attacks, and you can't let anyone with API access add content to prevent garbage results), but it's roughly feasible.The main problem is, I think the author is wrong about what Google's "crown jewel" is. Yes, Google has a huge index, but most queries aren't in the long tail. Indexing the top billion pages or so won't take as long as people think.The things that Google has that are truly unique are 1) a record of searches and user clicks for the past 20 years and 2) 20 years of experience fighting SEO spam. 1 is especially hard to beat, because that's presumably the data Google uses to optimize the parameters of its search algorithm. 2 seems doable, but would take a giant up-front investment for a new search engine to achieve. Bing had the money and persistence to make that investment, but how many others will? |
Homebrew 3.0 | I can’t even begin to imagine how much value Max Howell (creator of Homebrew) has added to the world. It’s the recommended package manager at every place I’ve worked at and saves so much headache.I use Linux at home and package managers like AUR are great, but macOS is where the users are. |
Ask HN: What game do you wish existed? | [Borrowers: The Game]You live as tiny mouse-sized humans existing with regular humans who should never know your presence as you occupy the walls and spaces in their home. Every day you must hunt for food, which involves collecting gear to traverse spaces (paperclip + string = grappling hook and rope, matchstick = torch, plastic bag = parachute) to reach places where food is stored (i.e. the kitchen - defended by the cruel cat, mousetraps - easy to find but deadly to use, others). There's also more than one of you with time, where you can find and recruit others from outside the house, mate to create a family base of increasing members (prompting you to expand more into the walls which will increase your chance of discovery by normal humans), and most importantly - coordinate scavenger hunts with your crew (think: one Borrower leads a climb and trails a rope down, allowing others to follow, where more people == more food for the base). Due to the high death rate, there are no main characters, just Borrowers.[Extras]- Riding or rearing mice? (they can lead you to the cheese and help dodge the cat)- Stealing and riding a drone? (perhaps not such a rustic experience anymore)- Turning your tiny wall cave into a thriving Borrower city complete with electricity and beer? (might require killing the humans) |
What really happened aboard Air France 447 | I've followed the discussion of the AF447 investigation on several flight discussion forums.The PF (Bonin) apparently never became aware of his angle of attack (once the airplane fully stalled, AOA was absurdly high). He did not seem to be aware that his constant inputs had caused the Airbus's THS (trimmable horizontal stabilizer, horizontal flaps on the tail) to deflect to maximum in order to try to keep the nose up. Therefore when he tried to input stick up (nose down) several times briefly, and there was no obvious response (the computer takes a while to reduce THS elevation in response to opposing input), who knows what he thought -- maybe that all readings were incorrect.Strangely, Bonin was the one pilot who had significant recent glider experience as I recall. The Airbus computer even in "alternate law" functions nothing like a glider (only "direct law" is sort of close to direct input), so maybe that further confused him.In my opinion, at night, over an ocean, in a storm, with no visibility, in possibly significant turbulance, a modern aircraft cutting off Autopilot for any reason other than computer failure is completely unacceptable. A computer should be able to fly as well as a human under those circumstances.People suggesting that on airliner forums get flamed. But it's true. Most pilots kept up the refrain that a computer cannot safely fly by gps and gyros unless they also have airspeed. Which is true. It's dangerous to fly if you don't have true airspeed (gyros and gps cannot accurate provide relative wind speed). However, if pitot tubes are frozen and the computer no longer has valid airspeed, the pilots no longer have valid airspeed either. Pitch and power is all they can do. The computer can do that just as well. All it needs to know is aircraft weight, which can be entered (maybe it is entered) before takeoff and automatically adjusted to account for fuel consumption.There are a bunch of factors that contributed to the accident:Pitots shouldn't have frozen.Lack of Air France training for controlling an aircraft at altitude with the computer in "alternate law" (mode without full flight envelope protection; it's therefore possible to stall).The command structure in the cockpit without the Captain (who had just gone on break) actually had Bonin in command, even though the co-pilot in the left seat outranked him... AF has since changed that. CRM (crew resource management) was poor; the co-pilot in the left seat didn't try to take control until way too late. The co-pilot was preoccupied with where the Captain was rather than offering constructive input on how to fly.Bonin was not adequately aware of what his inputs were doing, or what the plane's Angle of Attack was, and did not react properly to the stall warning which in almost every case at high altitude means drop the nose, not raise it (though without valid airspeed there's a risk of overspeed which can cause a new set of problems).The Airbus computers had some quirks; stall warnings stop if airspeed drops too low (due to some computer programming logic involving low airspeed, AOA sensors, and the result being silencing the stall warnings).Nobody believed a passenger aircraft would be so stable during a full stall. This undoubtedly contributed to confusion about whether they were actually stalled. The Airbus's computer setting the trimmable horizontal stabilizer to max nose-up deflection, in response to Bonin's almost constant nose-up input, possibly contributed to the stability during stall.Angle of Attack information may not have been adequately displayed to the PF (Bonin) -- the black box doesn't record data from the right set of instruments, so nobody knows what Bonin had on his screen.There was poor notification on the co-pilot's side of what the PF (Bonin) was doing. Unlike traditional aircraft, it is not easy to see what the pilot in the other seat is doing with the stick.There was poor notification on either side of the cockpit when the other pilot took control. When the co-pilot took control, Bonin almost immediately took control back, and it's not clear either of them knew what the other was trying to do. Apparently there's a light that indicates override, but who would notice such things under that amount of stress?IOW, it was a disaster from top to bottom. Usually in aircraft accidents there's a chain of events, but in this case there were so many possible contributing causes that other than having better pitots that didn't freeze over, solving any one other problem may not have broken the chain. |
Show HN: 6 months ago I quit my job to pursue indie dev. Here is our first game | Hey guys, thought I'd throw in my 2-cents as an Independent Games Festival judge, and as press.First of all, your presentation is terrific. Great art and sound. Top notch, feels like it came from a very talented team. With this game on your resume, you've got a great future ahead of yourselves.Now, the bad part: from a gameplay perspective, your game is not unique enough to win out on its own merits in any app store. If you have any money left, spend that cash on those awful, dark-alley fake review and promotion services. Take all of Ronyeh's advice, it's excellent, but you can't stop there. To succeed today in the app stores, you have to cheat, so go buy some reviews and downloads so you can raise your ranking in the store. It's a self-fulfilling cycle: higher rankings, more sales.There is an awful lot to be said for this being a complete game with a pleasing experience, but there are already a dozen games with similar gameplay in the AppStore. though yours may be the most polished, sales of games in AppStores are less about quality and more about cheating to get more sales, or having a juggernaut that's already on top, like Angry Birds.That being said, this is a perfect game to hang such cheating tactics around: it looks the part and sounds the part of a successful game, and it doesn't go the easy route of copying Angry Birds in every single interface window. Compare that to, say, Hill Climb Racing, a top ten app store game that looks awful and is infested with spyware.But I think the best advice I can give you is to add some sort of meta-layer to your game. The fundamental gameplay is interesting and often challenging in the right ways, but there's no uniqueness factor. Perhaps adding some type of incremental reward for the puzzles. Completing a puzzle without reset gets you some form of currency, which can then be spent on customizing your hot air balloon, or on some form on in-game assistance. Think Dungeon Raid. Most mobile game companies just implement the puzzle and are done with it. The real stand out games take those simple puzzle interfaces and layer complex game elements triggered by successes and failures in the puzzle game.Keep up the good work. You're obviously talented. You'll make money at this, but you can't rely solely on the press and the quality of your game. You have to game the app stores to succeed.Oh, and when it comes to press, I really don't have any good advice. Try to find some small outlets to work with because the big guys will ignore you, and do so in a mean and churlish way. It's sad to say, but the gaming press these days are mostly retarded monkeys with no idea what it actually takes to make a game. Yer not going to get to the front page of IGN, so don't waste time trying. Find some small app store review sites no one has ever heard of and be nice to them. They'll give you a bigger bang for your buck. |
Microsoft Band | While everyone is trying to make a watch that looks as traditional as possible, Microsoft is thinking radically different for how the future watch should look likes. That's some guts.At $200 this looks like great device with built-in sensors including GPS and UV that also talks to whatever phone you own. I also like the fact that heart rate monitor is always on. Addition of barometer could have been nicer, however.Other tidbits:-Screen looks too small to do much of an interaction so I'm guessing type of apps would be mostly notification types.-I seriously hate all these stock photos and videos. Marketing seems to be out of ideas and creativity yet again. Show the f*ing product, not random faces.-48 hr battery life-Cortana works only for Windows Phone-It's supposedly made for the right hand which is very weird.-Sleep quality monitoring seems pretty cool-The whole thing is projected as health device and makes me feel that it's designed for fitness nuts. This is going to severely limit the audience and very bad marketing strategy. Apple's watch is much more human/teens oriented that anyone wearing watches wouldn't mind to wear regardless of its health related features and probably mostly just for fun (send my heartbeat!). |
Changing Our Approach to Anti-Tracking | I've been blocking 3rd-party cookies since a decade now. I have never witnessed any website breaking. And I do regularly buy from online shops (ebay, amazon, lots of others) while blocking 3rd-party cookies.I'd really want to know which websites do break, and if they do, in which fashion. |
German court bans Tesla ad statements related to autonomous driving | I agree with this wholeheartedly, even as a Tesla owner. Tesla goofed from the beginning by calling tech like "Autosteer" and "Traffic Assisted Cruise Control" under the moniker "Autopilot" while shifting everything above that to "Full Self-Driving". They should have called it "CoPilot" since that infers that you're still the driver in charge of controlling the vehicle and it would have had exactly the same reception (possibly better) than what's happening now. As it stands, it's misleading and, frankly, disappointing to get into a Tesla for the first time and try "Autopilot" only to realize that you have to keep your hands on the wheel, navigate the accelerator and brakes, stop at lights and stop signs, and basically drive the car while it keeps you in the lane and stops you from hitting other cars. That's not "Autopilot", that's "CoPilot". |
Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack | I'm somewhat surprised that Amazon didn't end up acquiring Slack, considering that the major thing they are missing compared to Microsoft is productivity tools. If they had purchased Dropbox and Slack they could've gotten a foothold rather quickly and slowed down one of Microsoft's major selling points (you already use Office, why not Azure?). Discord could be another interesting company in the chat space, as I'm sure they are considering an enterprise play (if they aren't they are insane, considering they have one of the more user friendly chat services and with SSO and a SLA they could probably charge $10 per user).(Yes, I know Chime exists. But I don't think I've ever heard of anyone using it, and Slack is still rather popular.) |
uBlock Origin becomes top addon on Firefox | I think it's only a matter of time until adblock is legally banned.The current situation, where the vast majority of the internet relies solely on ads and an increasing number of people use adblock year over year is unsustainable.The system can support a certain number of free riders (people who consume the product but don't contribute back in ad eyeballs), but at a certain point the math will no longer work.Eventually we as a society will reach a point with only two options:1. Stop using ads to fund most of the internet2. Ban adblock so our current ad funded internet can work. |
Puter | So it’s a “desktop” environment without any of the privacy or security of a desktop environment, written in javascript & css (ie cheap and slow), where all the data is stored on a cloud owned by a couple of dudes (they can snoop, sell, and cut off access to your data at any time), all without encryption?Am I missing something or this a TERRIBLE idea? How does it keep showing up over and over again? Just about any developer could build something like this in under a month, it isn’t some novel idea.
I don’t mean to rain on a parade here I am always happy to see hobby projects, but the fact someone is investing in this and real money is being allocated seems ridiculous. The implications of anyone seriously thinking this is a reasonable cloud desktop environment are scary; people will get duped into being data harvested with no ownership of their data. |
Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award | Bob has been an active member of the Austin startup community for 10+ years and I've talked with him many times. As a EE, it was cool meeting him the first time and once I'd chatted with him a few times, I finally asked the question I'd been dying to ask: How'd you come up with "Metcalfe's Law"?Metcalfe's Law states the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of devices of the system.When I finally asked him, he looked at me and said "I made it up."Me: .. what?Him: I was selling network cards and I wanted people to buy more.Me: .. what?Him: If I could convince someone to buy 4 instead of 2, that was great. So I told them buying more made each of them more valuable.It was mind blowing because so many other things were built on that "law" that began as a sales pitch. Lots of people have proven out "more nodes are more valuable" but that's where it started.He also tells a story about declining a job with Steve Jobs to start 3Com and Steve later coming to his wedding. He also shared a scan of his original pitch deck for 3Com which was a set of transparencies because Powerpoint hadn't been invented yet. I think I kept a copy of it.. |
Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel | I wish it wasn't solely powered only by Microsoft Cloud and could support python running locally, but regardless I think this will still be huge and single-handedly modernizes Excel by a large margin.This alone could eliminate the need for websites that just want this sort of data. I can think of a past project at a previous job I did building an analytics website used only by a handful of people internally that could have been just as well served with something like this, had it existed at the time. |
Why I'm a Pirate | Creative effort - or at at least any that is truly worthy of the name - takes tears, and sweat, and blood. We can marvel at the output of an artist, or a writer, or a composer, or a film maker and yet fail to focus on the years of toil that often preceded that work. And I am not here speaking of some isolated genius. I still remember the days when I was so dissatisfied with my lack of writing skills that I decided to devour the subject with a non-stop investment of thousands of hours of work specifically aimed at improving those skills - and the seemingly fruitless results of what seemed to be mediocre output at the time - only to wind up, in time, with some degree competence in that area, competence that has served me well professionally and otherwise as I now exercise that skill set in various ways. That sort of creativity is something we all can do, each in his own way, and it is therefore common to us all and not limited to the work of the occasional genius. We all can create, some better than others, and we can all rejoice in that process because it is one of the fundamentally rewarding things we can do in life. It is in our nature to build things, and to improve upon them, and to innovate. This can be in writing, or drawing, or painting, or sculpting, or coding, or composing, or performing, or doing any other act requiring creativity. This is not some trivial take-it-or-leave-it part of life. It is often what defines us at our core.Copyright, at its heart, is aimed at giving the person who creates something control over the creative work. If I write something, I control what is done with it. No random person can just come along and appropriate it to that person's use or profit. I can say no to that or I can say yes, as I determine. If I say yes, I can require that person to compensate me for using my work or I can decide that I don't want compensation because I want others to freely benefit from my work. The point is that it is my decision. I have sole control over what is done with that which I create. Why? Because the law protects that right. And it does so, for the most part, through copyright.When people propose that copyright be abolished, they are saying, if effect, that anybody who produces a creative work immediately forfeits any right to control it and that any random person can come along and freely enjoy the benefits of that work and also freely reproduce and distribute that work. Under that sort of legal system, I can attempt to sell my work, or license it, or perform it publicly, but anybody else can do the same. Why? Because it is no longer "my" work, at least not legally. It is not protected in any way from the efforts of others to exploit it commercially or to give it away as they like. It is anyone's right to do with it what he will. Now, of course, I may rejoice in this. I may desire to create something wonderful and see to it that it is freely distributed to the maximum degree possible because I feel it is important that people benefit from my creative output without any obligation to me. Under a society in which copyright is protected, I can freely choose to do that if I like. I can place my work in the public domain and relinquish any right to compensation for it. Or I can let others use it freely but only on if they meet some condition that I impose on it, such as giving me attribution. The point is that this is my decision. If copyright does not exist, though, I have no such rights and I have no such control. In that case, anybody can use it, replicate it, seek to profit from it, claim it as his own, or whatever, all without my having any say whatever in that process. In such a system, anything created by anybody is simply common property. People can use it for good or for bad but I have no say in it. I may be the creator but that is beside the point. People like the author of this piece can simply saunter by and take it for whatever use the like.When a society makes a decision to defend the right of a creative person to control his work, and to profit from it or give it away as he likes, it has to make all sorts of policy decisions. Should such control last indefinitely? Of course not. Why? Because the benefits that we all get from being able to control our creative work only last so long. After a time, and certainly after we die, we have presumably exhausted whatever benefit we get from such control. Then too, others also create and, in time, all sorts of people borrow from one another and build upon the efforts of others regardless of the degree of creativity that they add to the process. Given enough time, we get what is known as a "common heritage" - something that far transcends the creative work of any one person. And so we have what is known as a public domain - a rich collection of creative output that is freely available to all. Those who value copyright and its social benefits in protecting creative output also value the public domain because it is a natural concomitant to the protected core of works that fall under copyright in any given generation. Indeed, a key aspect of copyright is precisely to encourage people to create - to invest the very blood and sweat that it often takes to do something great - in order that society generally will be enhanced and improved as creative works are done, are made available to the world as the creator may decide, and eventually pass into the public domain. So a fundamental tenet of copyright is that it cannot be absolute. It needs to be strictly bounded to achieve its legitimate goals without being extended to a point where it defeats those goals and gives special privileges to persons for no good reason.Today, copyright has been seriously abused in the U.S. and elsewhere and needs to be fixed. In particular, terms of copyright need to be brought back to sensible levels. The public domain as it exists needs to be preserved and a better system needs to be in place by which orphaned works can freely enter the public domain. Many other fixes are needed as well. What is most definitely not needed is a SOPA-style enforcement scheme that opens up legal channels to copyright holders that would permit all sorts of abusive actions against innocent parties in the name of copyright enforcement. This sort of thing merely perpetuates the abuse and does not fix anything. Those who have been paying attention strongly sense this, and it has been pretty amazing to watch people unite to oppose the back-room sleaziness that led to such legislative efforts in the first place.To defeat SOPA, though, one must affirm copyright. Just as we recoil at legal abuse in a SOPA-style scheme, we equally recoil at self-righteous claims that people can freely take what others create with no consideration whatever given to those who create it. That sort of radical assertion will get us nowhere when it comes to shaping serious legal policy in the SOPA debate. It needs to be roundly rejected. |
Understanding the bin, sbin, usr/bin , usr/sbin split | As someone who comes from a Windows (and further-back, OS/2) background, the directory structure of -nix systems is baffling. It's really interesting to read the background on why it came to be structured a certain way, but I feel that the current structure doesn't jive with how we use computers in a modern way. The structure seems to be optimized for single-file command-line based applications and are not well suited to today's much more complicated GUI applications.Mac OS X, I think, has done a decent job of structuring the file system to be more user friendly despite the -nix background.Modern use cases typically revolve around either installation and use of specific applications, often with dozens or hundreds of files needed, and data storage. In Windows/Mac, applications (for the most part) are installed into their own individual application folder and a GUI (as opposed to the PATH) is used to provide easy access to the application. This makes it easy to 1) know where to put a program you're installing, 2) know how to locate a program after install, and 3) keeps all the application components in a single place for easy move or removal.In my somewhat limited experience with Linux, I find that the complicated nature of the file system makes package management systems necessary to simply keep track of where all the files are: executable in /usr/local/share/bin, configuration files in /etc, libraries in /usr/lib, and I'm not sure where non-binary resources of an application get stored.I once installed my favorite browser (Opera) in Ubuntu. It didn't make a desktop or Applcation menu icon for some reason, so I figured I'd just go make a icon to point to it. It took quite a while to just figure out where the executable was at.This could very well be one of the reasons that many people find Linux on the desktop difficult to use. They don't understand where anything goes.I hope that one day one Linux distribution will at least step up and consider restructuring the file system to be more friendly and straight forward and to take advantage of the availability of long file names. |
Slack was hacked | I hate to be the negative guy, and they were hashing passwords better than 90% of the sites, but it would be SO easy to completely neutralize password leakage when the attacker only has access to the database.https://blog.filippo.io/salt-and-pepper/tl;dr: Hardcode a second salt in your application code or in an environment variable. Then a database dump is not enough anymore to do any kind of bruteforce.It's simple, free and you can retroactively apply it.EDIT: I addressed some of the points raised in this thread here https://blog.filippo.io/salt-and-pepper/#editedtoaddanoteonr... |
The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install | The Doom install image was 35x the size of the Apollo guidance computer.Thirty-five times! Apollo software got us to the moon. Doom wasted millions of man-hours on a video game.My point of course is that these comparisons are not actually that illuminating.Are web pages much heavier than they need to be? Yes. This presentation very capably talks about that problem:http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htmDoes comparing web pages to Doom help understand or improve the situation? No, not any more than comparing Doom to Apollo memory size helps us understand the difference between a video game and a history-altering exploration. |
Wildcard Certificates Coming January 2018 | Serious question. What does LetsEncrypt buy me that I could not get from having a knob in applications and browsers that lets me accept self signed certs?To be clear, the reason I am asking is that historically a CA was intended to be a way to validate "who" you are talking to. LetsEncrypt is providing a signed cert that does not validate an entity. It just solves the self signed cert, which could also be solved in applications by having a setting to "Accept Self Signed Certs". Some apps and appliances already have this. |
Why We Terminated Daily Stormer | We take down Al Qaeda terrorist websites all the time because they can be used to radicalize people. Nazis are no different. They are calling for the systematic violent overthrow of the US government and for the extermination of many millions of so called undesirables. This is a terrorist threat. I take this threat very seriously as do many people in the Jewish, Hispanic, and African American community.There are literally thousands of hosts out there in and outside the United States. The idea that Cloudflare is a public space requiring the protection of the first amendment from a company's policies is laughable. The idea that I'm seeing any of these comments arguing to the contrary means HN is already infiltrated by /pol/ and other Nazi sympathizing groups. |
Ask HN: Are you ok? | Thanks for asking. Not really, and it's 100% work-related. I dread coming in to work and it's given me awful anxiety that's turned into occasional passive suicidal ideation. Once I leave work, I feel like a totally different person and all the symptoms disappear.My boss calls me stupid, incompetent, r*tarded, and "like you have part of your brain missing". He grills me on literally everything I do, like why I'm getting up from my desk or why I'm eating what I brought for lunch. He interrupts everything I say and puts me down in front of other people. He took away benefits he knew I enjoyed, like being able to take college courses for free in unrelated areas like music and ceramics, and he banned me alone from making conversation with my work friends, and moved my desk away from them to his office so he can watch everything I do. I'm underpaid ($40k/year) and therapy sessions are $150 each, so I don't have much saved up to just quit and search for new jobs full-time. He threatens to fire me almost every day. I'm not sure how I'll ever get out, this started about a year ago and I've been applying every day since but haven't found anything. It's hard for me to believe that another job won't be the same thing.Sorry if that's oversharing, but working here is draining my soul.edit: thanks for all the support everyone, it means a lot :) |
Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead | No kidding. Early adopter of gsuite for domains (work and personal email). The google home devices CANNOT get your calendar from your google calendar. My Alexa device can easily.The thing of stuff just stagnating and no care to scrub the rough corners is crazy.They have some things they keep on improving. I think youtube is there (after the dumped plus thank goodness). Chrome seems to be moving along nicely.I used to push google chat / video hard, including to external business partners. Then - yoink, google duo was hot, then yoing, hangouts? then yoink, hangouts meet? Then yoink, meet. It's honestly mind blowing. So now we are stuck on zoom.We were making the move to docs and sheets, but it's basically stuck. Now it looks like office 365 is going to be the cloud editing future for word / excel type needs. For those of us who are older this is totally incredible - Office was so anti-linux / cloud it was incredible, and now word in the cloud kinda works!And yes - when you get locked out of even a paying account because some state machine gets screwed up (looking at you gsuite admin onboarding flow with some kind of zombie state issues) you CANNOT get an actual person who can help.Android / Chrome are amazing - why not put the execs like this in charge of shipping everything? Instead i keep hearing that google engineers are going on "strike" (ie, getting company paid days off). |
Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise? | I recently had the privilege of trying to do the right thing when I identified fraudulent research carried out by an institution in Austria. The initial response of the institution was positive but when I pressed for further details on how such things could happen suddenly nobody anymore would take my call. The research was paid for by a private company to pimp a nonsense product. The research was never published in a research journal but it didn't stop the company using the name of the university alonside exerpts from the paper in marketing material alongside gushing claims of "proved by science".The company threatened to sue me and the university threatened me as well. Neither has followed through on threats. The company wants to keep selling their rubbish magnetic health ding ding and I assume the university wants nobody to look into how positive results for the product came out of their institution. Allround an education on how the real world works. |
Firefox desktop extensions coming soon for the upcoming Android release | There's a lot of hate any Firefox and the "blessed apps." But come on, chrome and Safari don't sorry add-ons at all!I know there are other apps that support add-ons but the fact is that Firefox is __the only__ "mainstream" browser that does this (quotes because it's 0.25% in the US, as the 4th most popular, behind Samsung fucking Internet).It's popular to hate on Firefox, but this is the nerdiest of nerd issues and if we're being honest, all this has accomplished in the last decade is a decrease in market share and keeping Safari and (more so) Chrome dictate the Internet and user experience. Firefox being so low puts no pressure on Chrome to add add-ons. Firefox being so low just means Chrome can continue pushing the ad first Internet.Yeah, it's fun to complain, but which do you hate more? That Firefox only provides 80-90% of what you want (when major competitors provide __0%__), or Google dictating the Internet (like AMP)? Complain, but maybe tone it down a bit. This is not the holy war you want. |
Firefox Send: Private, Encrypted File Sharing | It really is a shame that there still isn't a easy way (A person whose computer knowledge extends to using facebook), that I know of, of sending arbitrarily large files that isn't tethered to a specific cloud service and is also reliable (can tolerate connection dropping).It seems that bitorrent protocols are pretty close, but I don't think there is a seamless client that allows for "magical" point to point transactions. |
My unusual hobby | I had to take a semester on formal proofs using Coq, the same tool the article talks about.Putting aside their steep learning curve, formal proof methods do not guarantee that the code you've written is bug free. They only guarantee that the code follows the requirements you defined given the conditions you also set on your inputs. You can think of it as a mathematical proof of your postconditions will hold given that your preconditions are true.And you know what? People do make mistakes establishing those preconditions and postconditions all the time, and the tool is not going to be of any help. You've proven your code, but it may not do what you actually wanted it to do.During a lecture I saw a tenured professor, who was a well-respected mathematician and expert in Coq, make some rather obvious mistakes while establishing those preconditions and postconditions. His proof was valid but worthless.When you add that writing those proofs is actually rather time consuming, you end up with a niche product with little real-world applicability, except possibly for safety-critical environments. |
Nvidia Unveils GeForce RTX 30 Series GPUs | Wow, I wasn't planning on upgrading from a 1080 (non-Ti) but the 3080 is so good and priced so well, I probably will. I just ordered a 240 Hz 1440p IPS monitor and I wasn't planning to hit 240 Hz, but this makes it so easy I might as well.My day job is primarily ML as well, so I might just go for the 3090. 24 GB of memory is a game changer for what I can do locally. I really just wish Nvidia would get its shit together with Linux drivers. Ubuntu has done some great work making things easier and just work, but having them directly in the kernel would be so much nicer.One thing I'm curious about is the RTX IO feature. The slide said it supports DirectStorage for Windows, but is there an equivalent to this for Linux? I'm hoping someone with a little more insight or an Nvidia employee may have some more information. |
Overkill objects for everyday life | I will postulate an opposing view to TFA:Quality consumer goods are better in two key areas. First, they are replaceable. I don’t want a military grade mixer in my kitchen if getting a broken whisk or motor on it is going to require me hunting all over eBay for the specific part hoping it’s available. I was very excited at one point about the idea of getting a commercial dishwasher that can run a load of dishes in like 90 seconds. Problem with those is that you can’t go to Lowe’s and get a replacement part when it acts up. You have to call a restaurant equipment servicing company and pay them what a restaurant with a broken dishwasher would pay. Or more because you aren’t a frequent customer. Sure, maybe it’ll break less but here’s the thing: my modern LG dishwasher will be more convenient to use and if I get 10 years out of it rather than 20 I still spent only $1000 on the top of the line one rather than the $4k on a 10 year old used commercial unit that I will struggle with the entire time.Second, consumer goods are replaceable. I am used to my Kershaw knife. I broke it yesterday. I can get it serviced by the manufacturer or get a brand new one, or both. If I buy some special forces surplus knife and chip the blade I am either done with that knife or I’m taking it to a specialist or I’m buying a new one. Knowing that I can replace an item I’m used to when a one-for-one replacement is a comfort. Obviously that doesn’t work for everything but it works for items that are made by high quality manufacturers.Bonus: a military grade mixer is going to suck to make high end pastries because it’s geared towards making mashed potatoes for the troops. I feel like the author is romanticizing ma class of products that in reality aren’t all that amazing except in a couple of key areas that to most consumers aren’t as big of a deal. So while it’s possible that, as the author states, the average consumer is an idiot, I don’t see much evidence that the author is much ahead of the pack here. |
IRS tests free e-filing system that could compete with tax prep giants | It is WAY past time for this. It's absurd that we have to regurgitate tax information that has already been reported to the government. But it's even more absurd that the government gives us no way to do so electronically.And then there's the disgusting shell game that IS the entire U.S. tax system, which is the root of the whole problem.But... didn't Congress pass some corrupt legislation years ago that made it illegal for the government to set up a tax-filing Web site? What happened to this: https://www.propublica.org/article/congress-is-about-to-ban-... |
Cormac McCarthy has died | I know its bad form to speak ill of the dead but -A friend gave me a copy of "Child of God" amd frankly it was the most disgusting, dark, unrewarding, unethical, uninspired, uniteresting, poorly written books ive ever read.I was flat out offended by the book and repeatedly had to set it down and fume about how unnecessarily disgusting he was being. I never finished it.
I got the impression that cormac was a thoroughly disturbed individual with a macabre fascination with the most fucked up 0.00001% of humanity. To make matters worth he cant write worth a damn.I will say his metaphors can be quite beautiful hut they often make no sense grammatically.Tldr : Cormac Mccarthy is not for me. |
Stripe: Bitcoin | The Bitcoin community might want to take a deep breath and recognize where Bitcoin has the most real-world use. The idea that my mom will someday use Bitcoin to buy books online is about as realistic as the belief that, any minute now, youngsters will realize that the daily newspaper is better read in paper form, because of the texture and experience and the anonymity of paper. For that matter, I am a computer programmer, and I love to play with new technologies, and I'm utterly unable to imagine why I'd ever want to pay with anything with Bitcoin.There are a large number of people living in China who would like to get around the nation's currency controls. There are a large number of people living in Russia that want to move money without being tracked. There are a large number of people living in Latin America who want to avoid taxes in their own countries. This is what drives the use of Bitcoin. The only large scale need for Bitcoin is criminal activity, in China, Russia, Latin America and elsewhere.Currency regulated by the government is a classic "good enough" product. It might lack some features that would be nice, but 99% of the public doesn't seem to care. Rather, they want more money, but they don't want to change money. If they had real doubts about the currency, they would dump it in exchange for real goods. But instead, most people work hard to acquire more money, and they show no real concern with the standard proxies for currency (credit cards, checks, etc). |
Tinker with a Neural Network in Your Browser | The swiss roll problem also illustrates nicely the idea behind deep learning.Before deep learning people would manually design all these extra features sin(x_1), x_1^2, etc. because they thought it was necessary to fit this swiss roll dataset.
So they would use a shallow network with all these features like this: http://imgur.com/H1cvt8dThen the deep learning guys realized that you don't have to engineer all these extra features, you can just use basic features x_1, x_2 and let the network learn more complicated transformations in subsequent layers.
So they would use a deep network with only x_1, x_2 as inputs:
http://imgur.com/XBRjROPBoth these approaches work here (loss < 0.01). The difference is that for the first one you have to manually choose the extra features sin(x_1), x_1^2, ... for each problem. And the more complicated the problem the harder it is to design good features. People in the computer vision community spent years and years trying to design good features for e.g. object recognition. But finally some people realized that deep networks could learn these features themselves. And that's the main idea in deep learning. |
If you want to understand Silicon Valley, watch Silicon Valley | It's quite amazing how good a job Silicon Valley does considering how badly wrong it could go (I'm looking at you Big Bang Theory). I'm sure there are quite a few industries that could have similar comedies about them from people who really know what the industry is like. W1A is another great example. |
Redis Turns 10 – How it started with a single post on Hacker News | As someone who is fairly tech literate but not familiar with this tech stack - in practical terms, what is Redis, and what is it used for? |
Ask HN: My wife might lose the ability to speak in 3 weeks – how to prepare? | Record her reading the texts of a standardized text training corpus.That way, you can retrain an existing AI to do text to speech with her own voice.Edit: here's a link to the corpus that I believe Mozilla uses
http://www.openslr.org/12/ |
Dropbox Converts to Permanent WFH | To be clear (if you only read the headline :)), not entirely remote. Solo work at home, collaborative work in "studios", basically reimagining the offices into collaborative/convening spaces that you go into from ~once/week to once a quarter depending on team/role.Remote-only cuts out the in-person experience entirely, which is problematic for building teams and culture; and ad hoc "WFH whenever you feel like it" gets a sort of worst-of-both-worlds situation where you neither get the same kind of flexibility nor the sense of community you typically get from an office (since a large percentage of the team isn't there on any given day, and folks that come in the office less tend to be at a disadvantage in terms of visibility & recognition). |
Google Is Forcing Me to Dump a Perfectly Good Phone | I wrote a thread[0] on Pixel 3 (trying to convince Google to extend the support) a few months before it went EoL[3] (Oct '21). Here's the important bits:- 10M+ Pixel 3 devices that were sold worldwide- 72% of Pixel 3's estimated lifecycle emissions are from its manufacturing[1]. Using your phone is _not the source of most of the emissions during a phone's lifecycle_.- It has gotten worse over time, but Google hasn't offered better guaranttes. Pixel 5's emissions-over-lifetime are 30% higher than that of Pixel 3.The alleged reason Google can't offer support beyond 3 years is because of Google's dependence on Qualcomm for the support[2]. Apparently Qualcomm asks for a ridiculous amount of money to support any chip beyond a measly 2-3 years. Apple gets away with it by building their own chips, and Pixel 6 is guaranteed to be supported for 5 years as a result.However, the fact that Google - one of the world's richest corporation can't convince or pay Qualcomm to support a perfectly functional device in 2022 is astonishing.[0]: https://twitter.com/captn3m0/status/1427908406086553601[1]: https://storage.googleapis.com/mannequin/sustainability/repo...[2]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/03/the-fairphone-2-hits...[3]: https://endoflife.date/pixel |
Tools for Better Thinking | Does anybody know of something similar, but written in a more elaborate book-like fashion?It's not about format, of course, it's just that all these model-zoo's are only half of the story — not useless, but rather incomplete. That is, if you learn a lot of them, one day you might remember something and find it useful — or you might not. This is a bit abstract, but I want to say you rarely ever need any special tools of thinking (or maybe even tools in general) — you want a technology. That is, a relatively broad (but precisely defined) instruction of how to identify and approach a set of problems in some domain. I.e., it is more about when to use a tool or technique, rather than being a exhibition of such tools. I mean, there is important difference — that's kinda the difference between going to college and going to a museum.For example, GTD is a technology (doesn't matter good or bad). It tells you when to use tools/techniques suggested (and a better book would have more showcases and exercises to internalize the idea, IMO). This site or coursera's famous "Models Thinking" course — aren't. |
TSMC, Bosch, Infineon, NXP to jointly build semiconductor fab in Europe | Wonder if the Taiwanese govt at some point will step in and block these onshoring measures as a matter of national security.If countries are less reliant on manufacturing within Taiwan, its one less reason to stand up to Beijing's one China principle. |
Supreme court: Warrantless cell phone searches illegal [pdf] | A great decision, IMO, and the only sane decision for e.g. traffic stops (a place where cell phone searches should never have been considered legal). It probably won't alter things appreciably for somebody who is being arrested, though. I can't imagine that warrant will be hard to get if the police have enough on you to put you in cuffs. |
Being a Developer After 40 | The article was pretty good until this part.>If you are a white male remember all the privilege you have enjoyed since birth just because you were born that way. It is your responsibility to change the industry and its bias towards more inclusion.I'm from an Eastern Europe and my family never was rich, I had to put in a tremendous effort to even get into the industry. Assuming I got an easy ride simply because I'm white is a pretty racist statement and I find myself surprised that no one is calling out the author on it.>It is your duty to send the elevator down.No, it's not. Just like women don't have any duty to ensure that there's an arbitrary number of men working as models and just like black NBA players have no obligation to ensure that there's enough white guys on the team I have no obligation to worry about some arbitrary quotas. |
PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer | I'm curious - What is the utility of headless browsers?Are there people who earn money by getting it to automatically fill out forms, enter competitions etc? |
Things Many People Find Too Obvious to Have Told You Already | > CS programs have, in the main, not decided that the primary path to becoming a programmer should involve doing material actual programming.Well, that's because CS programs are designed to teach CS, not to be a vocational school for programmers. |
Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation | The trusting developers not to sell any data but putting zero safeguards in place to prevent this and extremely punitive repercussions despite being repeatedly told by the public, media, and even high level employees tells me Facebook can't plead ignorance to this and they not only knew this was happening, but they probably intended for it to happen. They knew it was illegal but put all the incentives for companies not to follow the rules. That's the only hole in his statement.As for the rest of it, it's progress. It seems like a lot of good changes, but Analytically Facebook execs probabaly summarized that this is the least they had to do to stave off regulations or monopoly anti trust from congress. Any less, regulations would still be placed on them so it's brilliant strategy to do this and frame it in a way that Facebook is concerned about all the damage and we voluntarily do this for you instead of the truth which was we knew about this forever and only are doing it because of threat of regulations.Overall, an optimal outcome for all parties currently, except for society as a whole down the line |
Facebook Container Extension: Take control of how you’re being tracked | I already use the multi-container accounts to do this. It works fantastically, and is the biggest reason that Chrome is gone from my mac.Why is this different from Privacy Badger? This allows you to segregate all facebook toxicity to a single container. This allows you to fully use facebook, and places like login via facebook, without exposing other things to facebook in the first place.That said, this really doesn't address either the Cambridge situation, or the fact that Facebook themselves allowed the Obama campagin to pull demographic information in violation of their own polices, which was arguably impacted far more people (https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/facebook-data-... && http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5520303/Obama-campai...). The only solution to that is to #DeleteFacebook. Facebook is a surveillance as a service provider. The only way to keep them from monetizing you for commercial, social or political reasons is to firewall them off.You can also associate this with a VPN, if you want to deny them the IP address your home machine is using. |
KABOOM in 180 lines of bare C++ | Impressive effect.I didn't realize openmp was so easy to use. It isn't realtime but you could bake up some cool effects with this.AMD FX8320 3.5GHz$ time ./tinykaboomreal 0m4.176s
user 0m28.631
sys 0m0.012s |
ZombieLoad: Cross Privilege-Boundary Data Leakage on Intel CPUs | What is the recommended course of action? Stop buying Intel products, and devices which contain them?What about devices with older processors? I'm still running a Sandy Bridge rig and it works fine, except for the side channel vulnerablities. It's probably not going to be patched. I also have a cheaper computer with a Skylake processor, which is newer yet still vulnerable!It's only a matter of time until something really nasty comes along, making all these PCs dangerous to use. What then? Lawsuits?My questions are only partially rhetorical. |
Firefox is showing the way back to a world that’s private by default | It's been 2-3 years since I switched back to Firefox ever since I cut around 90% of Google out of my life, sadly I still can't find a good search engine where I don't spend more than 5 mins trying different keywords to get the results google gives me.Out of all the browsers I like that Mozilla were the first to point the finger to the elephant in the room while Microsoft, Google, Opera just turned a blind eye on privacy, although I don't think anyone expects much from Google these days.Firefox has once again became my default browser on all my devices after like 6-8 years since I last used it. I guess as far as privacy concerns goes, if you are looking for a company/browser that will continue working on protecting you from trackers by default that'd be Mozilla.Random observations that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the topic: Firefox for windows is perfect. I actually think it's faster on Windows than on OSX for whatever reason. Playing videos, like using Netflix or Youtube is extremely sluggish on Firefox OSX, but is fine on Windows. I always end up using Safari if I want to watch a video on a higher resolution because the performance drags a lot on Firefox, especially it Netflix's overlay UI you can literally observe it's lagging behind but not in Safari. |
Tailscale raises $100M | Tailscale has a fantastic product, I’ve been extremely happy from day one. If you’re waiting for a weekend to have a few hours to try out Tailscale, don’t, it takes 15 minutes to get every device you own up and running and talking. This is the lowest friction personal VPN to ever exist, and once you see how easy it is for your own devices, you’ll wish you had it at work.The biggest risk that this company has is that Cloudflare (in all reality) should just buy them or reimplement it. It’s the type of product cloudflare would make, that’s for sure. Being based on open source wireguard, and being just a STUN/TURN server at its core… I’m sure that Tailscale will be the first but maybe not the best.I’ve been dreaming lately of a tor-like network that’s based loosely on the idea of tailnets. Rather than blockchain bullshit, you’d have a direct ring of trust with friends, and then you could set up access policies to forward packets for people you don’t trust, but who know someone you do trust.Web3 happens when people can host stuff on their phones, and Tailscale is something that lets you host things on your phone. |
GitHub to lay off 10% and close all offices | Closing all offices, I have to say, makes it way easier to do more layoffs. Having been through layoffs in semiconductor manufacturing in the 90's, when you had to, you know, get the people from work and take them to a place and all that, it involved paying a lot of money for extra security and such. With no offices, it's a lot easier, and you never have to meet the person face to face.Five years from now, I think we will not see "remote only" for a large company and think "ooh, they value their employees I guess", but rather, "uh oh, they like to think of their employees as being like virtual servers, easy to spin up and easy to shut down the moment you don't need to pay for that capacity". |
Show HN: LLMs can generate valid JSON 100% of the time | I can make GPT4 return valid JSON simply by providing examples in the system message. This works nine times out of ten.But it's still probabilistic, and nine times out of ten isn't good enough.Occasionally it will hallucinate responses like this:{"key1": "value1", "key2": "value2" for i in range(n)}Re-prompting with the parsing error message is usually enough to get it on the second try.But escaping double-quotes and newline characters is less reliable. Even after giving it multiple examples, it correctly escapes only about half the time.Re-prompting for escaping errors still yields a ~50% success rate. |
Canadian surgeons urge people to throw out bristle BBQ brushes | A trick I learned from Argentinian circus people, who make amazing BBQ, is let the grill heat up and then cut an onion in half to rub on the grate. It imparts a nice flavor and cleans the grill very well. |
A federal court has denied a pre-trial motion to dismiss a GPL enforcement case | To use Ghostscript for free, Hancom would have to adhere to its open-source license, the GNU General Public License (GPL). The GNU GPL requires that when you use GPL-licensed software to make some other software, the resulting software also has to be open-sourced with the same license if it’s released to the public. That means Hancom would have to open-source its entire suite of apps.Alternatively, Hancom could pay Artifex a licensing fee. Artifex allows developers of commercial or otherwise closed-source software to forego the strict open-source terms of the GNU GPL if they’re willing to pay for it.This obligation has been termed "reciprocity," and it lies at the heart of many open source business models.http://www.rosenlaw.com/pdf-files/Rosen_Ch06.pdfThe more important issue here is reciprocity, not whether an open source license should be considered to be a contract.AFAIK, the reciprocity provision of any version of the GPL hasn't been tested in any meaningful way within the US. In particular, the specific use cases that trigger reciprocity remain cloudy at best in my mind.Some companies claim that merely linking to a GPLed library is sufficient to trigger reciprocity. FSF published the LGPL specifically to address this point.So I believe a ruling on reciprocity would be ground breaking. |
How I got to 200 productive hours a month | > Two years ago I could spend a week not working because I was avoiding some task.This is a great article and there’s plenty to talk about in organizational systems, even if this seems to be subtly pitching his own products in places. But if anyone reading this identifies with this sort of chronic procrastination, consider seeking psychiatric help. This is a giant red flag for adult ADHD, which is a serious and often misunderstood issue, and one of the few psychiatric diagnoses for which there is solid treatments (stimulants) with near universal efficacy and very few side effects. Getting on Adderall, then Vyvanse changed my life for the better, and basically solved this issue overnight, as well as a bunch of other benefits. |
The web at maximum FPS: How WebRender gets rid of jank | Now that this is closer to shipping, I'm curious what impact this would have on battery life. On the one hand, this is lighting up more silicon; on the other hand: a faster race to sleep, perhaps?Have there been any measurements on what the end result is on a typical modern laptop? |
Amazon increases minimum wage for all U.S. workers to $15 an hour | i wanted to read this article but techcrunch's oath GDPR privacy panel represents the cutting edge of dark patterns. |
Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real? | It's funny: I always thought the Internet and platforms like Amazon with the collaborative reviewing system would make brands more and more obsolete, because you could just pick high-quality products from smaller manufacturers by looking at user reviews.Now I find that I rely more and more on brands to decide which things I buy, because I simply cannot trust user reviews in most of the cases. Recently there are more and more Chinese products flooding Amazon (Germany) with products that have hundreds of well-written positive reviews. I have to assume that most of them are fake because there's no way that some niche product can have more reviews than let's say a PS4 or Nintendo Switch, which is sold millions of times.Really a shame that Amazon does not seem to care much about this, maybe a chance for the smaller shops to take back some lost business though. I find that I buy more in smaller e-commerce shops, because I find they're much less affected by the review fraud and often ship things just as fast as Amazon. |
FOSS app removed from the Play Store for linking to the project's website | Just wait 5-10 years and it will probably be the same way on Windows and MacOS. They will argue that installing arbitrary, unvetted software through the web is dangerous, so it's only reasonable for Microsoft and Apple to make this very difficult and instead promote installing all software through their app stores (which they already start doing). Once software is primarily distributed via these stores they will also start asking for a cut of any revenue that is made through that software. The reason it's not like that already isn't that they're very nice, it's just that historically computers were open platforms and it will take longer to convert them to the walled gardens that smartphones have been from the very beginning of their existence. |
What does it mean to listen on a port? | This article has taught me the concept of "discovery fiction" and, I'm sorry to say so, but I already hate it.I get the idea of presenting concepts in a more natural flow and smuggling in some spaced repetition, but the whole story just felt extremely forced and artificial to me, sort of like a drawn-out sequence of expospeak.There has to be a better way to include spaced repetition and discovery in teaching.Edit: Note this correction by Michael Nielsen: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30325048 |
De-AMP: Cutting out Google and enhancing privacy | My main gripe with AMP may seem pedantic or even petty, but it's the way it messes with the URL. Copying and sharing or saving a URL is fundamental to web, and AMP makes me have to mess around to get that standard URL. It's about as small as first world problems get, but it's annoying all the same. |
Microsoft Edge's JavaScript engine to go open-source | Wait, Edge does better on ES6 coverage than both Chrome and Firefox? Microsoft have seriously stepped up their game, especially seeing as it's now neck and neck for performance with Chrome: http://venturebeat.com/2015/09/10/browser-benchmark-battle-s... |
The Refragmentation | A very fascinating article that I have truly enjoyed reading minus the last 10 or so paragraphs where Paul expressed it unequivocally that he's a status-quo warrior and that nothing can be done to remedy the problem of the ever widening gap of income inequality in the global economy and more specifically in the US and that it's a "natural" product of the state of affairs in our world. A classical example of « the naturalistic fallacy » [0].Also, it's also worrying the degree of infatuation or affection for the early 20th century years with central planning of the economy, crony capitalism, robber barons, an all-powerful big government, centralization and concentration of power at the hands of a few, regimented and uniformed society ...etc.No leftie is arguing or longing for any of these policies. What we're looking for is just more equality in economic opportunities and esp capital and that distribution of capital to be more fair across all the classes and not to be a privilege only for rich and highly connected people.That's how we envision the solution to fix this problem of "fragmentation" as he put when it exactly is more like a "segregation" problem but not based on racial or cultural factors but on economic one into two completely separate societies between the haves and have-nots, between the 1% and the 99% of the population and it's getting worse and uglier by the day.[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_fallacy |
Web Scraping in 2016 | Keep in mind that companies have sued for scraping not through the API, for example LinkedIn, which explicitly prevents scraping via the ToS: http://www.informationweek.com/software/social/linkedin-sues...OKCupid did a DMCA takedown for researchers releasing scraped data: https://www.engadget.com/2016/05/17/publicly-released-okcupi...Since both of these incidents, I now only scrape if it's a) through the API following rate limits or b) if there is no API, and the data has the explicit purpose of being shared publically (e.g blogs), I follow robots.txt. Of course, most companies have a do-not-scrape clause in their ToS anyways, to my personal frustration.(Disclosure: I have developed a Facebook Page Post Scraper [https://github.com/minimaxir/facebook-page-post-scraper] which explicitly follows the permissions set by the Facebook API.) |
System design hack: Postgres is a great pub/sub and job server | Another neat hack is to use Postgres as a quick & dirty replacement for Hadoop/MapReduce if you have a job that has big (100T+) input data but small (~1G) output data. A lot of common tasks fall into this category: generating aggregate statistics from large log files, searching Common Crawl for relevant webpages, identifying abusive users or transactions, etc.The architecture is to stick a list of your input shards in a Postgres table, have a state flag that goes PENDING->WORKING->FINISHED->(ERROR?), and then spin up a bunch of worker processes as EC2 spot instances that check for the next PENDING task, mark it as WORKING, pull it, process it, mark it as FINISHED, and repeat. They write their output back to the DB in a transaction; there's an assumption that aggregation can happen in-process and then get merged in a relatively cheap transaction. If the worker fails or gets pre-empted, it retries (or marks as ERROR) any shards it was previously working on.Postgres basically functions as the MapReduce Master & Reducer, the worker functions as the Mapper and Combiner, and there's no need for a shuffle phase because output <<< input. Almost all the actual complexity in MapReduce/Hadoop is in the shuffle, so if you don't need that, the remaining stuff takes < 1 hour to implement and can be done without any frameworks. |
Ask HN: What are some books where the reader learns by building projects? | Elements of Computing Systems by Nisan and Schocken has you 'build' a computer from basic logic gates to CPU/Memory to assembler, VM, etc. all the way to a running program.https://www.nand2tetris.org/ |
Something that I’m surprised a lot of devs don’t know; there are official domains you’re supposed to use for documentation, testing, etc. They are specifically reserved by IANA for these purposes. Originally I think it was just example.com, but they now have a list of all them: https://www.iana.org/domains/reserved |
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Tell HN: Somebody implemented something I wrote a blog about | Years back, every web browser's built-in password manager locked up the page when submitting a login form, waiting for the user to answer "do you want to save this password?" before proceeding.I thought that was silly: how do I know if I want to save the password before I've seen whether it's correct? Which I can't see until the form is submitted.At the time I was using Opera, so I wrote in to their customer support suggesting that the prompt appear after the new page loaded. I never heard back, but a couple months later their next major release implemented exactly that behavior. A few months after that, every other browser followed suit.I can't have been the only one bothered by the existing behavior, but given how long browsers had worked that way before I wrote in, I like to tell myself that the timing wasn't a coincidence, and that my little suggestion rippled out into a change that made a small thing better for the whole world :) |
My solopreneur story | I am really fed up with this kind of indie hacker story.MMR updates are superficial. Weak signal. I'm confident most are absent of critical info and some are entirely made up. I don't disbelieve anyone in particular, but when a mechanism of virality proliferates, it often gets deployed without the backing substance."How I XYZ" around money is similarly misleading. Most entrepreneurs I know cannot recreate their own success – when they set out on a new venture, they need to look with fresh eyes, invent some new techniques, and discard a lot of methods that previously worked. If entrepreneurs aren't even able to reuse their own "how I xyz," then how will a stranger with even less nuance be able to learn or apply much from the blog post? Again, some of these stories have great lessons, but as a category I believe they are more noise than signal.Finally, the sheer obsession with money saddens me. The great entrepreneurs of our world are hardly motivated by money – to them, money is a tool that they factor in as they work to realize a vision, not an end goal. How ethically/morally impoverished is this technical class to be so obsessed with money? There's a term for this – greed. I know that a lot of jobs suck, a lot of stuff in life is expensive, we need money to do a lot of basic things, etcetera. But money is not the only solution, and more money is not an even better solution. I don't think this incessant messaging around money is virtuous – I think it is both a product of greed and a means of harnessing the greed in others. (And where are the entrepreneurs bragging about impact?)(For the record, I am not jealous – I make my money doing literally whatever I want, on projects that I find much more exciting, with ample time left over for nature walks, rock climbing, reading, and more. Unlike these authors, the money I make is not the most interesting part of my story.) |
NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth | At 2 billion years older than Earth, I can't begin to imagine what kinds of things could possibly be living on this planet. Given, of course, that it's got the right ingredients for life to arise. What if it's suffered huge extinctions recently? What if there's a domineering species out to conquer the planet just like humans? What if there's a society there more sophisticated than us? It's a very exciting discovery. |
Facebook Announces React Fiber, a Rewrite of Its React Framework | No thanks I'll stick with plain html and jquery for the frontend of my small projects. Plain javascript works perfectly fine as long as you namespace your functions and separate them into different files. All these frameworks end up creating much more problems than they solve. |
Chemists discover how blue light speeds blindness | f.lux author here, still slogging through the article. It is hard to understand the light levels used because they use "power" (uW, mW) from a laser, and not "irradiance" (uW/cm^2 or mW/cm^2), so which area they have concentrated that light over is hard to understand. All I can see is it is from a laser, so the irradiance could be extremely high.The human lens filters most light at the peak of the given spectrum for free retinal (383nm), and so once you get to 450nm like an LED, the hazard data in the visual range is 100x less sensitive, see Fig 1 here:https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1751-1097....It bears repeating that computer screens have Not sure the conversion to white light is correct, and it is unclear to me right now if this much retinal is available in vivo. |
So you've made a mistake and it's public | I don't know. Years ago, I was on an email list and I did a lot of sincere public apologizing, in part because the internet was younger, so we didn't have a lot of stuff worked out. We were just stumbling our way forward as best we could.And the end result was that I became everyone's bitch. People would intentionally pick on me and be ugly to me and when it went sideways, the group as a whole would go "There she goes again!" and blame the whole thing on me and expect me to apologize and kiss everyone's ass.I am much less free with public apologies than I used to be, though I am still equally willing to own my actions (a la "I did x. That didn't turn out well.")There are some people in the world just looking for someone to blame and if they get it stuck in their warped tiny little minds for some reason that you are a good person to blame, good luck escaping their shit. Such people are a case of "The only winning move is not to play." and, unfortunately, you tend to find that out after the fact because they have burned you and will not stop burning you, no matter how above-board, high-minded blah blah blah you handle the situation.Some people are just hell-bent on proving "No one is actually that good" because they have baggage, so trying to do the right thing consistently just makes you a target of their shit and they really need therapy, but aren't getting it.Such people seem to be rather poor at letting things go and my impression is some of them will cyberstalk you for years after you try to leave whatever situation originally put you in contact with them.(Edit: No, this wasn't about my gender. This detail has already been addressed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25087829) |
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