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I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea | That was a fun read. I wish the author mentioned how much he was trying to sell the service for. It could have been $59 a month or $599 a month and with doctors you could potentially expect the same answer.I'm not a psychologist but some of the author's quoted text came off extremely demeaning in written form. If the author happens to read this, did you really say those things directly to them?For example, Susan (psychologist) was quoted as saying:> "Oh sure! I mean, I think in many cases I'll just prescribe what I normally do, since I'm comfortable with it. But you know it's possible that sometimes I'll prescribe something different, based on your metastudies."To which you replied:> "And that isn't worth something? Prescribing better treatments?"Imagine walking into the office of someone who spent the last ~10 years at school and then potentially 20 years practicing their craft as a successful psychologist and then you waltz in and tell them what they prescribe is wrong and your automated treatment plan is better. |
Moderna Is About to Begin Trials for HIV Vaccine | Video of the lifecycle of HIV. To me it's absolutely mind-blowing to think that this entire process developed on its own, in dark, and is mindlessly progressing along so effectively that despite all of our technological capability we can barely contain it.https://vimeo.com/260291607(also how awesome is the music?) |
Where does my computer get the time from? | My cat is crazy accurate for time down to the minute. I can be sitting reading, on the web, or watching a movie all of which are random and not repeated at any specific time. Yet at 9pm exactly any time of the year she sits by the stool and complains if I am not there to give her a treat at 9pm Atlantic time.Note she does get thrown off by seasonal time changes in the fall and spring but she only needs about a week to reset. |
Calling All Hackers: Help Us Build an Open Wireless Router | Uh, no thanks EFF. We were working on this idea, we approached you - all we wanted was a little endorsement from you, and our large company partner was willing to open license a slew of patents, RPI style. What we got back was from the EFF was a bunch of nerd arrogance and essentially this: We are too busy reading the news about the Snowden affair (which was new at the time) to talk with you. A month or two later we facepalmed reading a post from another EFF staffer about the importance of open patents... |
Spaceship Generator | I love that the ships look more like "skyscrapers in space" then airplane like spaceships we usually see in tv shows/movies.This is most likely (according to multiple hard scifi authors) a much more realistic depiction of how spaceships are going to look like.Example given: The Expanse - "Flip and Burn" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4EiW1bHwsQ |
I’m Joining Stripe to Work on Atlas | First time I've seen Atlas. I'm immediately worried. If someone starts a company using this I presume it's subject to US laws? What does this mean:1. For taxes? If I live in the UK and start my business with Atlas does the US get the corporation tax revenue or the UK (or a split of the two)?2. For data security/privacy? Is the data I store now subject to access by the US government through National Security letters and the like? I believe that if I was storing EU citizen data I'm subject to privacy shield but all data would be more susceptible to US government requests. Is this accurate?Edit: Quite shocked at the number of downvotes a completely legitimate question is getting... |
Wikipedia blocked in Turkey | I'm a canuck who has worked with Turks and has visited Turkey. They're a wonderful people from a beautiful country with a real problem of a person in power. Turkey is almost entirely Muslim, yet they produce alcohol and tolerate its consumption within their borders, even by their own people. Let that fact sink in for a moment. Erdogan is subverting the premier secular democracy of the Islamic world, but nobody seems to care.Turkey is nothing like the common stereotypes we have of it in the West, but Erdogan is a guy who, I think, wants to change that. A wonderful human being who I've had the privilege of knowing is currently in prison in Turkey on absolutely baseless accusations[1]. Nobody in Canada gives a damn because he was an "Imam", and that's a scary word apparently.People in the West need to wake up and do their due diligence on Erdogan's regime. There's some seriously scary stuff happening because of this guy.[1]http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/davud-hanci-turkey-cou... |
Firefox Multi-Account Containers | I LOVE this feature, but it has only one problem: when I'm in a container and I press Ctrl+T (new tab), the new tab opens in the default container. This doesn't make sense, I want it to stay in the same container.This was also discussed in the issue tracker, in a now closed issue, in which the intuitive behaviour (staying in the same container) was proposed, but got sidetracked and in the end implemented something totally different.So if anyone from Firefox is listening here: please PLEASE consider implementing Ctrl+T in the same container :) |
YC Startup School 2018: a free, 10-week, online course | Hi, I'm Adora, a YC partner, and will be helping out with the course. Very excited to meet and work with everyone. Happy to answer any questions. |
Ask HN: What are the best textbooks in your field of expertise? | Options, Futures and Other Derivatives is basically a Bible.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/013447208X/ref=dp_ob_neva_mob... |
Swedish Couple Builds Greenhouse Around Home | I wonder how they control humidity inside the home and prevent mildew/mould? The air in the greenhouse would be very humid all year round I would have thought? |
Hy | This is not like the clojure is to java, it's only a syntax transformation, superficial.Usually lisp and FP means that you get immutable data structures and a good concurrency system, both of which you get in clojure.I looked at this a while ago and figured it's not useful for production, but an interesting project none the less. |
Reasons not to become famous | So I only see three reasons to be famous:1. The attention and adulation is your drug. I think there's no shortage of people who fall into this category.2. To convert that fame into opportunities you wouldn't otherwise have; and3. To convert that fame into money.Obviously if you're just plain rich then (3) is moot. If you fall into (1) then money can buy you fame to a degree.So that leaves (2). Wealth will give you many opportunities fame will but certainly not all. Or at least the costs to replicate that are truly ludicrous, like being a star in a Marvel movie, spending a year on the ISS, going to the Moon, that sort of thing.The way I see it the downsides of fame are significant. I've heard tales from people who worked in media years ago that the very stars who now want the media to leave them alone and to respect their privacy would beg them for stories and coverage just a few years earlier.I don't think I'd want to be ultra-wealthy (as in a billionaire+). At that point you're almost removed from society. I imagine you end up moving in circles with other ultra-wealthy people that are actually quite small. You risk being a target of the desperate, the criminally minded (fraud, kidnapping, blackmail, that sort of thing) and the mentally unstable.And really what is the practical difference between having $20m and $2b? Sure you'll have nicer houses and more of them. You may well have a super-yacht at that point. But who cares? I know I don't.You could say "you would if you had $2b" and maybe that's true. I'm sure I'd buy a nicer place but I think I'd still want to keep a relatively low profile. |
Emoji Kitchen | Tangential, but I can hardly be the only one who thinks emoji are stuck in a preteen mindset, with poop being the naughtiest thing expressible. Which serious language has no words for sex, drugs and the tragedies that haunt a human life? |
Firefox finally outperforming Google Chrome in SunSpider | I use Firefox everywhere I can, warts and all, just to avoid the Chromium monopoly. It was actually a huge bummer for me when Edge gave in and switched to Chromium; having a giant like Microsoft support a third browser engine would really have been a boon to the health of the ecosystem. |
Ventusky – Weather data visualization | Very nice, although default of Fahrenheit, really? The date format is ISO rather than US by default. Maybe a master switch [US|Countries in the 21st Century] 8-) |
An Open Letter to the FCC | The revocation of the Net Neutrality rules became a foregone conclusion once Donald Trump was elected. The sad reality is there's not much we, Eric Schneidermann or anyone else can do about it.There are 5 FCC commissioners but only 3 may be of the same party. Ajit Pai, Brendan Carr and Michael O'Rielly are locks to vote in favor, so it will pass, 3-2.At this point the best thing people can do is prepare to vote in 2018 and 2020, whether that's registering voters or forming groups to get lazy liberals or independents to vote to send better people to Washington.One side aspect that I think hasn't been covered: FCC Chairman Ajit Pai is a former Verizon lawyer and probably plans to parley his government experience into a lucrative gig at one of the big telcos once the Republicans are inevitably thrown out of office, so he stands to personally profit from this decision.As Donald Trump would say, SAD. |
Mmm, Pi-hole | I'm surprised this is the top slot right now. Troy, generally, puts out interesting info on security related news however this feels a bit minimal. Since the project has been around a number of years now, and it's not relegated to only a RPi I would have expected him to delve into things a bit more. Pi-hole will also break things. I think the common one I always heard from users on my network at home were that Google click-thrus for products always fail. But... Don't deploy it on an RPi. It's not worth the inconvenience of maintaining another entire device for a network service. There's an actively maintained container I'd recommend, or it's very easy to deploy as a VM. Troy also didn't hit on anything like DoH or DoT, surprisingly.Container link: https://hub.docker.com/r/pihole/pihole/Edit: word |
SEC Sues Musk and Seeks Ban for His Tweets on Go-Private Deal | This comment I made a few weeks ago is coming alot closer to the truth than I would have expected.I hope for Space X and Tesla's sake that the reports of a directory and Executive ban don't come true.https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18016250#18016292SpaceX is doing well, Tesla has pulled itself back from the brink and may actually become a profitable car company.All Elon had to do was keep his head down and not pick twitter fights....EDIT one thing I should point out is that some people have questioned if the tweet had any adverse affect at all on the shorts, given that the stock is down now.The answer is hell yes and the fact that the stock ash gone down since the tweet only strengthens the shorts case.The reason is that when you are short the biggest issue you have is that the stock could go against you, in this case that means it could go up. So to guard against that you generally have a price level in which you would exit the trade.So when Elon tweeted, a whole whack of shorts got stopped out, intentional or by their risk limits. Infact there is a lawsuit already filed by Citron due to this. That momentary bump, while short lived was more than enough to close out some short positions.If he's found to be in the wrong here by the SEC, then it seems like it wouldn't be too hard to find him guilty in the coming lawsuits. |
Things I Learnt from a Senior Software Engineer | > Naming your clusters? Naming them after the service that runs on them is great, till the point you start running something else on them too. We ended up naming them with our team name.This is covered by RFC 1178¹, Choosing a Name for Your Computer (from 1990):Don't choose a name after a project unique to that machine.A manufacturing project had named a machine "shop" since it was going
to be used to control a number of machines on a shop floor. A while
later, a new machine was acquired to help with some of the processing.
Needless to say, it couldn't be called "shop" as well. Indeed, both
machines ended up performing more specific tasks, allowing more
precision in naming. A year later, five new machines were installed
and the original one was moved to an unrelated project. It is simply
impossible to choose generic names that remain appropriate for very
long.Of course, they could have called the second one "shop2" and so on.
But then one is really only distinguishing machines by their number.
You might as well just call them "1", "2", and "3". The only time
this kind of naming scheme is appropriate is when you have a lot of
machines and there are no reasons for any human to distinguish between
them. For example, a master computer might be controlling an array of
one hundred computers. In this case, it makes sense to refer to them
with the array indices.While computers aren't quite analogous to people, their names are.
Nobody expects to learn much about a person by their name. Just
because a person is named "Don" doesn't mean he is the ruler of the
world (despite what the "Choosing a Name for your Baby" books say).
In reality, names are just arbitrary tags. You cannot tell what a
person does for a living, what their hobbies are, and so on.1. https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1178#page-2 |
Writing one sentence per line | This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety.Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals–sounds that say listen to this, it is important.So I write with a combination of short, medium, and long sentences. Create a sound that pleases the reader’s ear. Don’t just write words. Write music.(Gary Provost) |
Let's build a Chrome extension that steals as much data as possible | > Chrome scrolls the permission warning message container, so more than half of the warning messages don’t even show up. I’d bet most users wouldn’t think twice about installing an extension that appears to ask for just 5 permissions.An egregious and nearly unbelievable oversight on Google's part. :-\As a developer, it's unimaginable to me to not test the extreme high and low numbers of inputs cases to ensure things look and operate as expected. Especially for a security sensitive UI element.The chain of humans who've been responsible for developing and testing Chrome Extension functionality and security has been asleep at the wheel this whole time, for something like 15 years.There are so many risk-reduction controls in place; tons of red tape and umpteen security and privacy reviews required to ship even minor features or updates, yet here we are.How many hands have been in the pot and not noticed/raised/resolved what amounts to a pretty obvious security vulnerability? And if this kind of issue can fly undetected for so long, what can organizations with drastically less resources than $GOOG do to ensure adequate velocity while not leaving the proverbial barn doors open?The author deserves the highest tier of bug bounty reward for bringing this to light. What's that? It wasn't submitted through the proper channels to be eligible? Right. |
Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk? | grin Here we go...For "laughing at ourselves" and oddities of computer languages, there is "Wat" by Gary Bernhardt:
https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/watFor an opinion on the Sun to Oracle transition, there is "Fork Yeah! The Rise and Development of illumos" by Bryan M. Cantrill, Joyent. His Larry Ellison rant makes me smile:
https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=33m00s |
Images and video showing extent of Oroville dam damage | I really like the way those videos were presented. Silently, looping, laid out one on top the other, each with a one line description. If that was one long video i would have kept jumping backwards to rewatch all the scenes. Final thought, drone footage continues to blow me away. |
“Learning How to Learn,” the most popular course on Coursera | Took the course. A lot of it is cruft and motivation for the underlying core ideas. The techniques suggested are things many people are already familiar with: recall, deliberate practice, interleaving, spaced repetition, Einstellung, Pomodoro, Feynman Method, Cornell notes or similar (to force recall), exercise regularly, sleep well, focus on concepts not facts (chunking), etc. A composite of these dramatically enhances the learning process.I can post some of the notes I took on the course if anyone is genuinely curious. The key premise of the course is that the brute force approach people usually take to learning is highly inefficient and ultimately ineffective (you'll forget).EDIT: Notes https://pastebin.com/JNbGxvpQ |
Samsung Phone Users Perturbed to Find They Can't Delete Facebook | It's not just FB, my Samsung S9 came preloaded with 'undeletable' Microsoft apps too. But this is nothing new, Samsung phones have came preloaded with bloat since forever.When buying a new phone I always spend some time deleting all Samsung, Microsoft, Facebook and carrier related apps. Yes, you can delete 'undeletable' apps through ADB, without rooting the device. pm uninstall -k --user 0 |
Burger King is introducing a vegetarian patty from the start-up Impossible Foods | The Impossible Burger is the best veggie burger I've ever had.I was a vegetarian for 10 years, and have now been a pescatarian for 8 years. It has been 18 years since I have had a proper cheeseburger, and since then I have had many thousands of veggie burgers. Cheeseburgers are probably my favorite food, and I haven't had one in 18 years. If someone told me that the world would end tomorrow, I would go out and eat a proper cheeseburger.I have some experience in this area, is what I'm trying to say. The flavor and texture is the closest to actual meat I've ever had. And that, then, is the key for a lot of people: they don't want a veggie burger that simulates meat. Which is fine! I do, and I imagine the market for close-to-meat veggie burgers is bigger than obviously-not-meat veggie burgers.Others in the thread have mentioned the Beyond Burger, which is also good. But the Impossible Burger, for me, is way better. I have had my Impossible Burgers at Bareburger. At home, I went with Morningstar Farm's Grillers Prime for a long time, but about a year ago they changed the recipe, and I did their black bean for a while. I have since discovered if I season the Griller's Prime while I'm frying it, it comes out much better. |
Gitlab More Than Doubles Valuation to $2.75B Ahead of Planned 2020 IPO | Question to current Gitlab users: Why do you use Gitlab instead of Github? What are the killer features that make it worth switching to? |
I do not agree with Github's use of copyrighted code as training for Copilot | I thought this was a pretty good thread (by an ex-Wikipedia lawyer) on Twitter about the IP meaning of Copilot.https://twitter.com/luis_in_brief/status/1410242882523459585...And this is a longer article about how IP and AI interact:https://ilr.law.uiowa.edu/print/volume-101-issue-2/copyright...I am not a lawyer, but I am capable of summarizing the thoughts of lawyers, so my take is that in general, fair use allows AI to be trained on copyrighted material, and humans who use this AI are not responsible for minor copyright infringement that happens accidentally as a result. However, this has not been tested in court in detail, so the consensus could change, and if you were extremely risk-averse you might want to avoid Copilot.A key quote from the second link:Copyright has concluded that reading by robots doesn’t count. Infringement is for humans only; when computers do it, it’s fair use.Personally, I think law should allow Copilot. As a human, I am allowed to read copyrighted code and learn from it. An AI should be allowed to do the same thing. And nobody cares if my ten-line "how to invert a binary tree" snippet is the same as someone else's. Nobody is really being hurt when a new tool makes it easier to copy little bits of code from the internet. |
Blender 3.0 | Side note: It is very interesting to see how pro-blender everyone is. You know how there is almost always a group of people who will say something bad about an open source project (disclaimer: not judging the people or their potentially legitimate complaints, also I may be part of such groups). With blender, it's hard to see such a group. Maybe I am missing it? Maybe blender is actually doing incredibly well compared to othee projects? Not sure |
Why is it hard to buy things that work well? | I think it's that you don't notice things that work well. House foundations, light switches, filesystems, silicon manufacturing, water delivery, grocery store logistics, etc etc etc.These are all things that most people never notice because they just work. It doesn't even occur to people day-to-day that these things can fail. |
Dall-E 2 illustrations of Twitter bios | Obviously, from the AI point of view, this is just amazing and frankly terrifying.OK, I'll be the guy who brings the snark. It seems that when Silicon Valley tech people create AI, it makes exactly the art you'd expect Silicon Valley tech people to like. I.e. this is very much the style you see in NFTs, or, as someone else said, in Dixit. It's quirky and stoner-ish, very "transcendental"... for an AI, it's amazing...For a human, it would be dross.Yeah, yeah, I know, art is subjective, well I like it, how can you impose your tastes on the rest of the world, et cetera et cetera. Sorry, but it's dross! It's the kind of work the guy in the art shop up the road churns out, and sells to the ignorant locals in my town. It's the art equivalent of Visual Basic. (I'm trying to get through to you that in this world, too, things can not just be done, but be done well or badly.)If there's a lesson on the AI side here (and maybe there isn't) it is just that these machines are still copying. They were trained on a bunch of art - and you can clearly see the kind of art that was used. Presumably, if it were just trained on Old Masters and Picasso, Dall-E would be mass-producing the stuff I, an intellectual, like.Note the difference, though, with a real artist. A real artist takes as input the real world - Rouen cathedral, the horrors of war in Spain, a Campbell's soup can - and produces art as output. This takes as input art and produces more art. |
Dalai: Automatically install, run, and play with LLaMA on your computer | Hey guys, I was so inspired by the llama.cpp project that I spent all day today to build a weekend side project.Basically it lets you one-click install LLaMA on your machine with no bullshit. All you need is just run "npx dalai llama".I see that the #1 post today is a whole long blog post about how to walk through and compile cpp and download files and all that to finally run LLaMA on your machine, but basically I have 100% automated this with a simple NPM package/application.On top of that, the whole thing is a single NPM package and was built with hackability in mind. With just one line of JS function call you can call LLaMA from YOUR app.Lastly, EVEN IF you don't use JavaScript, Dalai exposes a socket.io API, so you can use whatever language you want to interact with Dalai programmatically.I discussed a bit more about this on a Twitter thread. Check it out: https://twitter.com/cocktailpeanut/status/163504032247148953...It should "just work". Have fun! |
Tell HN: Hello | MS Access - Learn it first!Why?The first few reasons that come to mind:1) To quote a friend of mine, “If a 50 year old boilermaker can work it out, then anyone can.”2) MS Access will more than likely be installed on your computer at work.3) Almost all "startup" type programs will need databasing of some sort.4) It has macros and modules (VBA - Visual Basic for Applications)5) As you start to learn Visual Basic for Application you can use this to potentially automate things at work as it available across Word and Excel.Read these to get started:Database basics [1]This article provides a brief overview of databases -- what they are, why you might want to use one, and what the different parts of a database do.Database design basics [2]A properly designed database provides you with access to up-to-date, accurate information.Learn the structure of an Access database [3]Becoming familiar with the tables, forms, queries, and other objects in a database can make it easier to perform a wide variety of tasks, such as entering data into a form, adding or removing tables, finding and replacing data, and running queries.[1] https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Database-basics-2C5...[2] https://support.office.com/en-gb/article/Database-design-bas...[3] https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Learn-the-structure... |
Show HN: I made an interactive Bootstrap 4 cheat sheet | I made this! Thanks for sharing it. I'll be watching this thread for comments and feedback.(Moderators: Could you remove the #dropdown part from the URL please?)Edit: The two post seem to have been merged by the moderators. Thanks! |
Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications | We are, temporarily, in a kind of dark ages of end-user open source software. The reason is that we shifted from software-as-a-product to software-as-a-service.With the old upload-and-forget model of software distribution, you could put a tarball on a free FTP site for a few pennies, and then a million people could use it, or one person could, and you wouldn't have to lift a finger. A million people could fork your application, or one person could, and you wouldn't have to do a thing. Variable costs for an OSS developer were $0. Fixed costs were just the cost of your computer and an internet connection.But if you deploy an open source service to the cloud, it's going to cost you more than a few pennies, and if a million people try to use your service you have two headaches: financial and operational.In theory something like Ethereum solves this problem, but it's not really ready for the scale yet, and it's hard to use.In theory something like a Heroku Button[1] on Github solves the problem, but Heroku artificially introduces a 30 second delay for accessing free applications, and put lots of their infrastructure behind a paywall that the deploy-er has to manage and pay for.This has been a difficult problem to solve, because unlike the x86 machine of the OSS explosion in the 90s, the "cloud computer" is still actively being invented. Ethereum didn't even exist a few years ago, and Heroku is a moving target. Linux Containers are also brand new, and then there's Docker and other VM standards, not to mention Google, Azure, etc... we are still grasping in the dark to try to answer the question, "What does a standard cloud machine look like?"Until we answer that question, closed source services are going to have an immense advantage over open source ones. After we answer the question the power dynamic there will reverse and there will be a cambrian explosion of user-facing open source services.[1] https://blog.heroku.com/heroku-button |
Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers | Since this is an audience of passionate technologists, here's the top piece of advice I have:Do not be seduced by the technology!I killed one of my startups this way. I've seen many many die this way.It can hurt your pride as a passionate technologist to choose non-cool but mature and easy-to-hire-for tools. But it's those tools that are the most economical.Remember, your customers care 0% about the backend technologies you're using as long as they are getting the value you promised them."Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work." Gustave FlaubertYou're running a business, not a technological showcase for other engineers (who are not even your customers!).Remember that the most economical tool for the job is often not the coolest or trendiest - but is some old boring workhorse that other engineers will scoff at.Build your business for your customers, not for your technological pride or to demonstrate your technical prowess to friends.Don't get me wrong though! There's certainly a time and a place to play with all the coolest and trendiest stuff, but if you're optimizing for growing a business, that is the time for choosing low-risk, simple, mature tools. |
Japan's Hometown Tax | I always found this system very interesting, since the citizen can decide how some of their tax money is spent (besides voting).On the other hand I have always lived in Northern Italy, and around half of my taxes go to the poorer regions of Italy, mostly to be squandered by corruption, clientelism, and organized crime. |
China | >”It’s economically productive for the 1% to maintain a trade relationship with China. The financial incentives don’t help any Americans, and in fact, most of us are hurt by this relationship...”So true, since its inception with GHW, its execution and realization through Clinton and then once fully engaged the timid, supplicant responses from GW and BO, China has contributed to the stagnation of the blue collar worker on America with the full complicity of Democrats, Republicans and most of Industry and even unions who didn’t oppose their cozy politicians. They all only saw starry dollar signs...That’s where we are now. People have had enough. That’s why they put up with the guy no one likes because he’s willing to sever that codependent relationship.Now, if you ask any pol running for the nomination who the greatest threat to America is... it’s not going to be China... |
“We already store data. In a database. It works well” | What I find fascinating is that the person pushing Jimmy to use crypto for Wikipedia does not seem to fully grasp the technology they are pitching.1. He pitches it is great to track people posting illicit content on Wikipedia, then argues that crypto is pseudonymous, So why would you use that when web trackers we have today already know what I had for breakfast2. Why would anyone want people to post illegal material on a blockchain when it is immutable? Let's assume the culprit goes to jail, but then you have billions of people now able to access illegal content, that can never be removed because it is on a blockchainWhat a sales pitch. |
Breaking GitHub Private Pages for $35k | Well, colour me impressed. The dude's in high school and finds stuff like this? Hopefully it won't get to his head, we've got enough "rock star" devs :) |
Apple dropped plan for encrypting backups after FBI complained (2020) | Some have speculated that with the introduction of the PSI/CSAM system Apple will enable E2EE backups. Given the lack of an explicit statement on Apple's part and their history regarding E2EE backups (this article, and other statements). It seems really unlikely to me that Apple will enable E2EE backups.Under E2EE, assuming the device key is randomly generated, if you have one device (as many users do) and you lose that device you would lose all your data. The alternative is the key is derived from your iCloud password, in which case, if you forget your password, you lose all your data.Right now, you can browse your photos online. There's been no statement that this is going away. Implementing this functionality with E2EE backups seem highly problematic.These are huge changes to iCloud functionality that Apple would surely announce...There are many open questions. And given that there’s no clear statement from Apple, I’m inclined to believe that they retain the ability to decrypt all data. |
Apple unveils contactless payments via Tap to Pay on iPhone | Hacker News is such a bizarre place.On the one hand, we have threads about how browsers are fingerprintable and some app is using telemetry and endless discussions on theoretical zero-knowledge protocols and the importance of cryptography and Snowden saying this and that that get voted up to the top.On the other hand, something like this comes up which is basically another step along the "no-one accepts cash" funnel and so now everything you ever buy with metadata is part of the borg. Like, you've literally deliberately introduced an MiTM.I don't get this blind spot. Paying with cash is literally the easiest thing I do to reduce my data trail. |
Image Synthesis from Yahoo's open_nsfw | This is absolutely fascinating.It's mesmerizing to see this NSFW detection applied in reverse, and it's even more interesting to observe your mind react to the generated images. You can see the sort-of-mons pubis patterns, the maybe-pubic hair, the perhaps-breasts and the suspiciously phallic appendages, complete with realistic colors.Interestingly, all exposed skin suggests that the training dataset for the NSFW detection was skewed towards caucasians, given how the synthesized images are near-completely devoid of skin tones other than light pink. Perhaps this is a good visual indication of unintentional 'bias' in datasets? |
Hans Rosling has died | My favorite video of his: A huge chunk of the women in the world spend a depressing amount of their time washing clothes. The washing machine has done more for women than anything else:
http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_and_the_magic_washing_... |
Tesla Passes Ford by Market Value | Interesting, but market cap isn’t everything - FTA:"While Tesla’s market capitalization has swelled in size, Ford still overshadows the Palo Alto, California-based company in most other financial metrics. Over the last five years, Ford has posted net income totaling $26 billion, while Tesla has lost $2.3 billion. Last year, Ford had annual revenue of $151.8 billion compared with Tesla’s $7 billion.And when it comes to car sales, Tesla sold 40,697 vehicles in the U.S. last year, according to researcher IHS Markit. Ford sells that many F-Series trucks in the U.S. about every three weeks." |
Helm: Personal Email Server | Don't most ISPs ban residential accounts from running something like this?Comcast terms:> use or run dedicated, stand-alone equipment or servers from the Premises that provide network content or any other services to anyone outside of your Premises local area network (“Premises LAN”), also commonly referred to as public services or servers. Examples of prohibited equipment and servers include, but are not limited to, email, web hosting, file sharing, and proxy services and serversVerizon terms:> You also may not exceed the bandwidth usage limitations that Verizon may establish from time to time for the Service, or use the Service to host any type of server.AT&T terms:> using such account for the purpose of operating a server of any type;Sources:https://www.xfinity.com/corporate/customers/policies/highspe...https://www.verizon.com/about/terms-conditions/verizon-onlin...https://www.att.com/legal/terms.aup.html |
'Fake' Amazon workers defend company on Twitter | I feel like authenticity of online communication is an unsolved problem. The web was supposed to be a democratizing platform: all you need to communicate with the world is an ISP and a keyboard. But if there's no way to control for authenticity, online sentiment will just be an arms race for who can pay for the best astroturfing. |
Plans you're not supposed to talk about | Reading this gave me a kind of horrifying idea that goes something like:You know about a deadly disease whose most serious outcomes can be avoided by getting a shot.Many members of a group in your society have decided they don't want to get the shot. You are annoyed by the way they talk about a lot of things, including the way they talk about avoiding the shot. They, in turn, call you "smug" for the way your group talks about having everyone get the shot.You realize that if the other tribe keeps acting this way, a lot of them will die -- 1% of them overall, and as many as 10-15% of the oldest members of the tribe, with them having a fresh chance to die with every mutation and reinfection every 12 months.You realize that smugly insisting that those people should "get the shot" will make them dig in their heels and insist they will never do any such thing. This will, in turn, kill them. This will diminish their tribe's size and political influence. Is this a plan? Is it a thing you are doing on purpose? |
Peter Eckersley has died | Peter, I'm lucky to have called you a friend. This happened to suddenly and quickly, I'm reeling. You were magic.He exuded love and charm. He would be overjoyed to see me and give the best hugs whenever we ran into each other. He is this super accomplished person but that was never the conversation. I've known him for years and it's only now that I discover his LetsEncrypt involvement. It speaks volumes to him, he was so focused on everyone around him and filled with love for them, never self-promoting, just loving and being amazing. He would give the best hugs, and few seconds longer than most, and you could hear him smiling while he does so. Thank you Peter |
SpaceX Launch Livestream: CRS-8 Dragon Hosted Webcast | Watching the webcast feels like being at some blockbuster movie premiere. There's a largish crowd following the launch and applauding on every launch stage completion.
Not that it's a bad thing per se, it's rather the opposite, it however, feels quite weird and staged as opposed to launches done by ESA, Roscosmos or even NASA. |
Epic Games chief pays $15M to protect 7,000 acres of North Carolina wilderness | Hopefully we see similar efforts from others. The incoming president has stated he plans to gut the EPA and potentially even divvy up some state/national parks for development. Private donors will have to win out over commercial interests, as far as conservation is concerned. |
Show HN: A stop-motion video of an engine | It took 2,500 photos and 4 days to shoot, followed by about 8 days of photoshopping & grading. |
Freelancer.com has ruined my life | I worked for Freelancer.com briefly as a software engineer at their HQ in Sydney for about 1 month (that was in the year before their IPO) - I was fresh out of university. The culture within the company was toxic.They treat developers like crap - Both those who use the platform and those who work at HQ. They fired me after 1 month during my probation because I was too slow to implement a feature because I was spending extra time writing tests. I remember the tech director telling me "That's not the kind of engineering we do here" after I tried to justify why tests were important. Several of these horrible people went on to work for Facebook later.The CEO of Freelancer.com is a complete jerk. A few years after I had gone, I spoke with engineers who used to work there and there was gossip going round that the CEO had sex with a female employee and she got pregnant. He also hired his friends in top positions; some of which were utterly incompetent. Some of the CEO's favourite employees got drunk during work hours in front of the overworked engineers.Employee retention was very low. |
The Business of SaaS | Yikes, that was the best article on SaaS that I've read all year. So much great information.A few things jumped out to me as off:> Conversion rates of low-touch SaaS trials with credit card not required:> 2%+: extremely goodReally? 2% seems awful. If a company signs up for your trial, they must have a problem they're trying to solve. If you don't solve 98% of peoples' problems, it seems like you have a problem getting people engaged with your product.Our (bootstrapped low-touch B2B SaaS's) trial -> paid conversion is closer to 8%. This doesn't feel "extremely good". I think we can do much better.> Virtually no low-touch SaaS business achieves net negative churn; their churn rates are too high to outrun.What about Intercom and Front? Are they just outliers?I would guess that this is actually true, but only because most low-touch SaaS business don't have scaling pricing - they have fixed plans. If you have pricing that scales with usage/value, you'll make much more each month from expansion revenue.Overall I loved the article, and wish I could have read it a year ago before we launched our SaaS company. Thanks patio11 and Stripe. |
Goodbye Aberration: Physicist Solves 2,000-Year-Old Optical Problem | > After months of working on solving the problem, Rafael González recalls, “I remember one morning I was making myself a slice of bread with Nutella, when suddenly, I said out loud: Mothers! It is there!”> He then ran to his computer and started programming the idea. When he executed the solution and saw that it worked, he says he jumped all over the place. It is unclear whether he finished eating the Nutella bread.This is my favorite quote from the article. Soon to be the most famous slice of Nutella bread? |
Zoom to bring end-to-end encryption to all users, including non-paying | I find this story arch with Zoom amusing:1. Pre-COVID Zoom claims it has E2E encryption for everyone.2. During COVID Zoom grows in popularity, which prompts journalists to learn that the claims that Zoom has E2E encryption are inaccurate.3. Zoom admits that it never had true E2E encryption, but announces they will develop it and it will only be available for paying customers.4. Zoom gets another wave of criticism for restricting its new E2E encryption service so it walks back to its original message that all accounts get E2E encryption.Given their track record I’d expect this timeline to repeat itself so after they release this E2E encryption feature, security researchers will discover that it’s not true E2E encryption again. |
I reverse engineered McDonalds’ internal API | Just a note, the machines are not broken, they have shut themselves down for sanitary reasons. Ice cream, as a food that is very close to neutral in pH and without much in the way of preservatives, is a common source of listeria bacteria. To prevent serious health issues, the machine must be sanitized regularly. As I understand it, the process is involved, and any given McDonalds may not have a person with the time and skills to complete it. So the machine shuts itself down rather than produce an unsafe product. This is translated to "broken" when you order ice cream. |
HTTPWTF | I'd add to this list:Chunk extensions. Most people know HTTP/1.1 can return a "chunked" response body: it breaks the body up into chunks, so that we can send a response whose length we don't know in advance, but also it allows us to keep the connection open after we're done. What most people don't know is that chunks can carry key-value metadata. The spec technically requires an implementation to at least parse them, though I think it is permitted to ignore them. I've never seen anything ever use this, and I hope that never changes. They're gone in HTTP/2. (So, also, if you thought HTTP/2 was backwards compatible: not technically!)The "Authorization" header: like "Referer", this header is misspelled. (It should be spelled, "Authentication".) Same applies to "401 Unauthorized", which really ought to be "401 Unauthenticated". ("Unauthorized" is "403 Forbidden", or sometimes "404 Not Found".)Also, header values. They're basically require implementing a custom string type to handle correctly; they're a baroque mix of characters & "opaque octets". |
Brave Search beta | Previous related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26328758If things go as planned, this may become a paid, ad-free, zero-tracking search engine. I can't express how exciting this is to me.Over the past few years, I have made several attempts to replace Google Search with DuckDuckGo. But they have all failed and I always ended up changing the default search engine back to Google. I mean, DDG worked fine for 95% of time, but the remaining 5% failure often led to some extreme frustration that I just couldn't stand. I would imagine Brave Search to have similar issues, at least in the beginning, but they did something smart to make it less painful:> Brave Search beta is based on an independent index, the first of its kind. However, for some queries, Brave can anonymously check our search results against third-party results, and mix them on the results page.So, if I am not satisfied with Brave's result, Google's result is on the same page, or just one click away. |
DPReview.com to close | Dang, I'm actually surprisingly sad about this. DPReview is _the_ site for extremely detailed analysis of cameras. When I want to buy something I go through their report first, and it's always extremely informative.It feels like this kind of layoff is part of an end of an era. Amazon used to NEVER cancel projects that customers were using. They just straight up Did. Not. Do. It. I once had to get approval from my VP's VP because we wanted to turn off a product with eleven daily users. 11. The number after ten.A whole lot more than eleven people used DPReview, and they provided a service that I'm not sure is well replicated from other sources. A loss for the internet, and it makes me sad that these kinds of quasi-public-good projects are getting canned across the industry.I get that big companies are not retirement homes for nerds but... with as much profit as the profit centers bring in, there was a little wiggle room for passion projects. Now it feels like that wiggle room is being squeezed right out of the industry as we all brace for the recession that hasn't quite shown up yet. |
Write more "useless" software | Apple once rejected an app of mine for being "useless". App review even called me to tell me my app is useless and will not be approved to the Mac App Store.~12 years later thousands of people have used that little useless app
(KeyboardCleanTool, a very small free app to block all keyboard / touch bar input). People have used that app in ways I'd never have imagined (e.g. letting toddlers hack on their keyboards or letting their cats sleep on the laptop).What is useful or not is really subjective. |
Xkcd "Click and Drag" in a "map" interface | you guys have totally destroyed this thing ;) the beauty was that it got me to wander around like a little kid for a while. the little spots by the beach, textures, jokes, wondering which way was out of a mine shaft, the sense of taking a hike for a while. not zooming around like an all knowing cyborg.not that I'm trying to spoil your fun of course. |
Feather: Open-source icons | Great site and there are also other quite helpful suggestions in the thread such as Icomoon.Problem is that the next time I need SVG icons I will forget these sites, try to google them and ending up on those sites that perform well on Google's SERPs but want money for clean SVGs.This happened to me two days ago and I just fired up Inkscape and remade those icons. However, this took too long.How can I remember such sites the next time I need them? |
Cutting your salary by 40% | As much as I'd love to believe the "work more than 40 hours a week, because SCIENCE!" party line, I have a hard time accepting it, and I think so do most people who hear it (outside of HN, at least).For one thing, it's highly convenient that the standard US work-week happens to be the exact "correct" amount of hours to work to maximize productivity.For another, anecdotally at least, most people know plenty of people who work longer hours and do it successfully. And most of the really successful people out there will mention that they worked insanely hard at some point. Are they all lying? All wrong?The article itself mentions people doing extra hours of coding on personal projects, and we all know some people who have started companies that way. What, do these projects simply not exist? How does that make any sense?You can think it's exploitation to ask people to work hard, but this is to work on a team with a world-class researcher who most people would love to work with. Is it too much work for some people? Sure. Are there others for whom it is worth the trade-off? Probably. Why does everyoªne on HN just assume they know better than those people themselves, and set off to make them feel bad and exploited? Working really hard is a totally legit and rational choice under some circumstances.(Btw, worth pointing out that this article is at least partly a pitch for a book about working less hours. Not saying this invalidates its points, but it is certainly taking advantage of the publicity Andrew Ng's post has gotten to sell a product). |
Common color mistakes and how to avoid them | I think the colors look nice in these visualizations, but I do believe it is possible to drift so far in making visualizations pretty to the detriment of being clear!First of all, one advantage of highly distinct colors which is discouraged in this article is that.. the colors are more distinct across all sorts of mediums. Sometimes you don't know if your chart will be printed off on a cheap inkjet and showed to the CEO, or blurrily presented on a zoom call over poor WiFi to someone who is colorblind. I think the push to usability should consider these types of scenarios. |
Why Is There a Bucatini Shortage in America? | The writing style is awesome, I literally laughed out loud.Beyond that, the article reminds us that in every industry there are powerful actors that protect their monopoly, and will coerce the government into helping them.I read an article about import taxes on sugar that were created to keep out competition, and as a result everything uses corn syrup. Other examples abound.Unfortunately, the solution of government oversight of itself (such as FBI breathing down the neck of the NSA), has obvious circular drawbacks. |
Richard Stallman is coming back to the board of the FSF | I think it is strange that, on the one hand, the tech world has been advocating for the rights of neurodivergent people – society should accept that people on the autism spectrum are different and that’s OK. But at the same time RMS has been attacked for some statements very probably stemming from his autism that, while they may seem a bit shocking and at odds with the mainstream, were not illegal or intentionally offensive. |
The Bitcoin whitepaper is hidden in every copy of macOS | Honestly If i had to guess, I'd say the answer is as simple as: a freely distributable, easily verifiable document was needed for testing purposes, and some engineer thought it'd be a cheeky little easter egg to use that file as bitcoin was starting to gain back traction in 2019 after it's first big surge and fall the years prior. |
BPG Image format | I appreciate the historical tradition of using the photo of beautiful young Lena Söderberg as a test image, but it's time to move on. It's fun for us hetero males, but like it or not, this sends a message to young women that they aren't welcome in this field. I wish Fabrice Bellard would have left them out of the demo set.Having said that, all those demo photos do look good. I was wondering how we were going to see a demo in the browser without built-in support, but leave it to the man who put Linux in the browser to write a decoder in javascript. This is an encouraging project. |
Container Tabs | I would like to be able to configure my browser to open every URL in a domain-specific "container", unless I say otherwise.Say site www.a.org includes an image from www.evilcorp.org, and www.evilcorp.org sets a cookie. When I then go to www.b.org and it includes an image from www.evilcorp.org, I don't expect the cookie to be sent back.In other words, the cookie should be tied to www.a.org, even though it actually came from www.evilcorp.org. It should only be sent if my URL bar says www.a.org AND the image is coming from www.evilcorp.org.I feel that this is how browsers should have been designed in the first place. I welcome this Container Tabs feature, but I don't think it quite goes far enough to restore my privacy. |
Heyyyyyyyyyyyy.com | Hey all :) creator here (and yes, you can reach me at [email protected]).Was talking with a friend last night and I bought this domain on a whim because I thought it would be funny. And then spent a couple hours making this landing page and it's since turned into this elaborate joke. Hope it added something to your day~ haha |
Looking Glass: Run a Windows VM on Linux in a window with native performance | I run a VFIO setup with a single GPU - the linux host is headless, and Windows runs on top with the GPU. Its pretty awesome. Windows runs at native performance - no problem gaming or running other heavy workloads. The linux host acts as a devbox and runs a few other homeserver style services.It's difficult to set up right but it taught me a lot about VMs and hardware. Once you get it setup well enough, its relatively painless. Like I haven't messed with my VM settings in over a year, everything just continues to work smoothly. Including windows updates, driver upgrades, most online games with anti-cheat etc. If i upgrade my hardware, it might take a day or two of tinkering to get it back up. Based on my benchmarking it runs within ~5% of native perf.This is still the best guide IMO if you want to set it up - https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PCI_passthrough_via_OVMF. Single GPU is basically the same as dual GPU, except you have to ensure the linux host does not take over the GPU or load any drivers for it during boot. |
An app for M1 Macs that plays the sound of a fan as CPU usage goes up | Pre M1, I've always preferred a PC.When I'm using a laptop, especially doing real work, they heat up, the fans go crazy, the laptop is hot to the touch and everything slows down.It almost makes you anxious. You're wondering if it's about to crash or go on fire.I've always kept a Desktop PC on the go for this reason, a well cooled desktop just doesn't have these issues. With a laptop, I always feel like I'm compromising a bit.I got an M1 Macbook Pro recently and it just doesn't have these issues, I fire up my whole dev environment and get busy, and it's still quiet and (mostly) cool, and I can't notice anything slowing down.I don't care so much about the architecture differences, x64 vs ARM etc, but the fact that I can finally use a laptop like a desktop is massive. |
Elon Musk to join Twitter’s board of directors | I think people are really over-analyzing this move. I think it's motivated by prestige, not money, nor is free speech the heart of the matter.Twitter is a stagnant company. They have thousands of engineers that in the span of a decade don't seem to produce much at all, nothing visible or memorable anyway. Long-lasting Twitter problems (culture, spam, algorithm issues) never seem addressed. User growth is stagnating as Twitter fails to appeal to "normies" in a way Facebook and other networks can.A perfect target for Musk to come in, do a few sweeping changes, and get out. Thereby proving once again that he gets shit done where others can't. Case closed.It doesn't take much. People have been begging for an edit button for a decade. If he'd get only that feature implemented, it will be remembered forever. |
Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative | It's pretty remarkable that this conflates:- Well-known slurs like "Jewed"- Outdated, now-offensive terms like "hermaphrodite"- Touchy metaphorical language like "slave replica"- Gendered terms that if you're being assiduous you probably want to avoid, like "manpower"- Words that have long since lost any stigmatizing meaning by virtue of the original use being so ancient ("lame", "dumb", "stupid")- Words that, if you look into their history, originally had something to do with some racist practice ("grandfather" something in)- Words that never had anything to do with racism, but someone who was really on high alert might wonder if they ever did ("tarball" for "archive made with the tar tool")- Anything that might be derogatory to anybody ("Karen": "This term is used to ridicule or demean a certain group of people based on their behaviors.")- Terms that I genuinely have no idea how anyone could view as harmful in their actual context: "user" ("it can also negatively be associated with those who suffer from substance abuse issues"), "submit" ("Depending on the context, the term can imply allowing others to have power over you.")Very much an "arson, murder, and jaywalking" approach. |
For 40 Years, This Russian Family Was Cut Off From All Human Contact | > having slept in the open in 40 degrees of frostI'm no scientist, but I don't believe frost forms until 32 degrees. Maybe this was a mistranslation...? |
Network Protocols | As a front-end web developer with no formal computer science background or traditional programming experience I find these kinds of articles extremely valuable. I like to understand as much as possible, at least conceptually, what happens throughout the stack even if I don't touch it. Does anyone have any links to anything similar? perhaps for the Linux kernel or other lower level systems but with a top down overview like this? Especially anything that would build on this article. Effects and unexpected phenomena that manifest in networks like this also would be interesting. |
"Pwned Passwords" V2 With Half a Billion Passwords | Bit off topic, but I was searching for a better way to manage passwords a few weeks ago (rather than have 1 or 2 master passwords across all websites).I found KeePass through an old ask HN thread. It's a great little free, open source key/password storage app that works across all my devices (iOS, macOS, windows). https://keepass.info/I'd be interested to hear any suggestions for similar apps I could recommend to my parents, who expressed concerns about their online passwords. KeePass would be the ideal solution, but I don't think it would hold their hand through download, setup, and password generation enough to be 100% ideal. Any suggestions? |
Ask HN: Favorite nonfiction books of 2018? | 12 Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson. |
Interested in improving your relationships? Try Nonviolent Communication | Nonviolent communication comes up on HN every few months and it's always the same praises and criticisms. I've been on the receiving end of NVC quite a few times in my career, and every single time it comes off as patronizing bullshit. I'd rather people yell at me than couch everything in, "I feel X" or "Would you be willing to Y". When important things must be done well, do you think this sort of language is used? Of course not. In those situations, everyone is assumed to be an adult who is strong enough to take direct criticism.Brilliant marketing move though, calling it "nonviolent communication", implying that any other form of communication is violent. The only better example of this tactic I've seen is "pro-life" (implying that those who don't want to ban abortion are anti-life).If you use this conversation style, you will get a bimodal response. Conversations with some people will be a little smoother, but conversations with others will be much worse. To those people, you will come off as assuming that they are weak and can't take criticism. Or worse, you'll come off as a mealy-mouthed phoney.I cannot emphasize enough just how condescending I find this style of speaking. I think the only way a conversationalist could annoy me more would be to clap between every word. |
Don't use third party auth to sign in | I'm honestly not sure where we went so wrong as a society so as to reach this point. Whether it's overzealous AI or the AMPification of the web. Google act with impunity and without remorse, every action designed to further their goals and agendas without respect to humans caught in the crossfire.If Google can, without due process and fair warning, remove your existence then this is a power that should be delegated to the relevant authority, namely the "justice" system to make such considerations.If your house could be removed at a whim because a bot decided you were a bad person it would likely cause an uproar, it wouldn't be tolerated.Yet here it is. Google can offer their services and the legal system seemingly doesn't want to be involved.Why? |
Sci-Hub Is Now on the ‘Uncensorable Web’ | I’m supportive of free distribution of scientific knowledge, BUT HN has a significant bias against believing in the power of legal systems.No matter how good the technology, it can eventually be censored if the law is strong enough.In the past, it was hard to separate “useful” internet activity from “illegitimate” because things were changing quickly. Today, a government might say its simply illegal to use end to end encryption without government ability to tap (with warrant and court approval) and even if you have innovative use cases that get killed, that’s ok because 99% of the value of the internet is available.Some say that math triumphs law, but you can see with Parler’s experience (ignoring political affiliation) that once a large group of people are organized against you, it’s simply in feasible to rebuild decades of infrastructure in isolation.All of this is to say, it’s a good start to restore sci hub, but it’s important to win the hearts and minds of society and lawmakers to legitimize free information. Otherwise, eventually, it may become suppressed for practical widespread access, destroying most of the value.EDIT RESPONSE TO RESPONSESThanks for the thoughtful responses. A few counterpoints:* *Past encryption bans didn’t work.* Yes I agree. But I would argue it’s because lawmakers of the 90s really didn’t understand/care of the significance. Bans on pirated content in the 2000s worked well enough that my parents never really got into pirating, it was a young/hacker thing for the most part. Consider that just because hackers (in the PG/RMS sense of the word) can get info, doesn’t make it as useful to society as everyone getting it.* *Parler’s mistake was using AWS.* This is my broad point - it’s impossible to be an island unto yourself. At some point, they have to use fiber laid in ground, buildings cohousing data center, electricity from the grid, peering, LTE networks, etc to transmit information. Either you argue that every single layer can be vertically integrated into a parallel universe of thought (which certainly doesn’t sound friendly to new idea entrants) or acknowledge that we need some kind of rules to ensure equal access (requiring law or some other consensus mechanism).* *Law is different than public opinion.* Short run yes, long run not really. If the majority of people believe it’s more important to police child porn than ensure distributed ownership of the internet (whether they can articulate it as such or not) that will be the direction of law. If most people don’t care, but the ones working in lawmakers offices do, that’ll become the law. The purpose of law is to formalize social conventions and uniformly enforce them.* *We can hack/route around law.* By all means, please do continue. My point is just to also view law itself as something that is malleable. Do both. Build censorship resistant tools, and advocate and change law to reduce censorship. Both are necessary, neither one alone is sufficient. Information both needs to be technically accessible, and actually widely available for a democratic society to function well.I appreciate deeply that HN as a community can have thoughtful discussions on this topic. I’m glad I found you all. |
Learn CSS | Looks great! Small pet peeve regarding tutorials: When learning a new technology I don't care about the headaches people had 20 years ago. My first concern is how I use the technology and what it can do for me.The section about layout starts with: "In the early days of the web, designs more complex than a simple document were laid out with elements. Separating HTML from visual styles was made easier when CSS was widely adopted by browsers in the late '90s." etc. etc.This history lesson is not really relevant for newbies. It is basically a "you kids have it easy, when I was your age...", something which every generating find really tedious to listen to, since it is irrelevant for their current situation.Knowing history is fine when it is relevant (e.g encountering legacy code), but it shouldn't be the first thing in a tutorial. Put it at the end or in a footnote or appendix.I think it happens because writers tend to explain stuff in the same order they learned it themselves. But this is not always the most natural order to learn things for newcomers. |
A terrible schema from a clueless programmer | This post is bizarre, precisely because there is nothing particularly wrong about the original schema, and the author seems to believe that the problem is that the column values were stored as strings, or that the schema wasn't in "third normal form".Which is nonsense. The problem with the original DB design is that the appropriate columns weren't indexed. I don't know enough about the problem space to really know if a more normalized DB structure would be warranted, but from her description I would say it wasn't. |
Danish government makes its new economic model open source | Economics is not a science like physics. We can't do controlled experiments, we can't falsify hypothesis. This leads to very muddy waters and what you are left with are two kinds of economists: Those who tell people what they want to hear and those nobody listens to.Econometrics gives people everything they want to hear, and with a scientific veneer as a bonus. The HN crowd should however appreciate how susceptible this is to the tyranny of metrics. Claude-Frédéric Bastiat warned of this over a century ago with his parable of the broken window: Think not only of what you can see (the glazier who is employed to repair the window), but also of what you cannot see (the alternative purchase of a suit) had the window not been broken. |
Just don’t | I get a lot more mileage out of "have you tried..." than "why don't you just...".As a recent example, I wrote a system that auto-generates PDF packing slips from an order form, to send to a warehouse for picking and packing.Yesterday a client told me to "just make it landscape" while I was explaining why "just making it landscape" won't solve the problem of giving the warehouse whitespace to pencil stuff in, because even though "just making it landscape" solves this same problem in Excel, when the client was sending out Excel files as packing slips... the current system is not Excel".I couldn't find a way to get the client to get from "just make it landscape" to listening to me ask "what is the warehouse actually trying to pencil in?" and "how much space do they need? Are they penciling in notes globally at the top of the document or on a line-item basis next to each SKU?"To the client I was wasting their time because "just make it landscape".Needless to say working with this client is challenging on an interpersonal level. The work itself is fun though, and it's improving my EQ handling a client like this. |
Going full time on my SaaS after 13 years | A product built by an ex-soldier who was part of an occupying force that committed countless war crimes? No thank you.Question for other HN users - would you use a product built by an officer of the Russian army who was part of the war in Ukraine?Edit: Those downvoting me, did I say anything that is not true? |
Same Stop: Life after 26 years as a programmer for Apple | > I am not sure though if this is still the case for software engineers. Are there younger engineers, new to the career, for whom programming is not merely a job but something they can imagine doing in their spare time? I think I met a few as I was winding down my career. I do feel though that back around 1988 or so when I started getting serious into programming that all fellow programmers I met were also doing it with a kind of passion. How is it you can love a machine?As someone who went into software development because it was my passion and my hobby, its always disappointing how often that isn't the case for so many people in this industry. It's draining actually; The lack of enthusiasm and genuine interest is replaced by a clock-in and clock-out mentality. Bootcamps have just become farms for people who need a job, but not those who really want this job.I want to work with more people who LOVE software and find the development of machines and the code that runs on them as fascinating as I do. Unfortunately, its less and less these days. |
Roger Ebert dies at 70 after battle with cancer | Someone needs to find 100% cure against this deadly disease. So much money is spent on cancer research every year and what are the results..almost zero. |
Y Combinator has filed an official comment with the FCC | I appreciate what Alexis is trying to do here but I hope he isn't assuming that the FCC just doesn't understand the problem. That's how this reads to me. Maybe the idea is to be diplomatic. I don't think the FCC cares. The FCC understands what is going on and it wants to do whatever is best for the FCC.The best thing for tech companies to do is to start destroying some political careers. That's the only thing the machine understands and the only thing it's really going to respond to. |
I switched to Android after 7 years of iOS | I did the opposite and can't believe how much better my life had gotten because my iPhone is just a simple tool that I use for communications and don't think about it as a project. With Android, I always wanted to tweak silly things and run Cyanogenmod because the handset firmware was always so bad and vulnerable. On several occasions I'd bricked my phone requiring hours of recovery, or had transient failures of cell service and communications issues. I guess if you have the right level of discipline, apathy, or use a Nexus device that may be more Apples to Apples (harhar). |
Bob Taylor Has Died | If you're not too familiar with the story, Where Wizards Stay Up Late is a good history of the beginning of the internet. https://www.amazon.com/Where-Wizards-Stay-Up-Late/dp/0684832... |
The Depression Thing | I was diagnosed with "major depression" when I was 14, did the medication and therapy thing for a bit but the medication made me a zombie. Therapy helped me learn to cope a little better, but I was never "cured" of my depression.My 20s have been pretty bad, but in the last year and a half I've lost 100+lbs and have been running and lifting.It turns out the common sense advice to depression was really what I needed all along.* Sleep
* Proper diet
* ExerciseIf you're struggling with depression like I was - try and take baby steps to improving those 3. You don't have to be perfect and it doesn't have to be all at once, but through continued effort it has only gotten better and better for me. |
Asking members to support journalism, The Guardian raises more revenue than ads | This. Years ago it was obvious to most newspapers that paid subscribers are their lifeline. Advertisers come and go, daily sales come and go, but long-period subscribers keep you afloat. Somehow, when the respected newspapers moved to the web, they forgot that, and kept pumping ads like crazy. This, in essence, moved the sense of their product from quality content to clickable content - these two don't mix. Consequently, this eroded quality journalism, investigative, explanatory view of the world (and let's face it, TV could never replace that void, as they are solely relying on ads to survive). And then, a lot of bad things happened with peoples' opinions and understanding. I am glad many outlets are now seeing the correct path. The best news source in Poland nowadays is a wealthy, but niche, "Dziennik Gazeta Prawna" ("Daily Law Newspaper") with great, balanced content on serious issues - that relies mostly on subscribers. The best English periodical I have found is Foreign Affairs, also a very subscriber-focused outlet. Note that both of these seem to offer much better content in their paper issues than online. |
Hong Kong protest safety app banned from iOS store | Apple is at fault here, not for moderating their store, but for disallowing people to install software of their own choice on their own devices. This is completely unacceptable as a user and I do not understand how apple users put up with this. |
New ‘Meow’ attack has deleted almost 4k unsecured databases | Somehow I feel good about this. The article claims nothing good can come of deleting exposed databases, but I strongly disagree - I'd by far rather my data be deleted than stolen and shared. If the owner doesn't have proper backups AND can't secure a database, they have no business hosting such data, period. IMHO. |
Do you really need Redis? How to get away with just PostgreSQL | You really don't need anything fancy to implement a queue using SQL. You need a table with a primary id and a "status" field. An "expired" field can be used instead of the "status". We used the latter because it allows easy retries.1. SELECT item_id WHERE expire = 0. If this is empty, no items are available.2. UPDATE SET expire = some_future_time WHERE item_id = $selected_item_id AND expire = 0. Then check whether UPDATE affected any rows. If it did, item_id is yours. If not, loop. If the database has a sane optimizer it'll note at most one document needs locking as the primary id is given.All this needs is a very weak property: document level atomic UPDATE which can return whether it changed anything. (How weak? MongoDB could do that in 2009.)Source code at https://git.drupalcode.org/project/drupal/-/blob/9.2.x/core/... (We cooked this up for Drupal in 2009 but I am reasonably sure we didn't invent anything new.)Of course, this is not the fastest job queue there is but it is quite often good enough. |
A viable solution for Python concurrency | If this effort succeeds (and I hope it does) now Python developers will need to contend with the event-loop albatross of asyncio and all of its weird complexity.In an alternate Python timeline, asyncio was not introduced into the Python standard library, and instead we got a natively supported, robust, easy-to-use concurrency paradigm built around green/virtual threading that accommodates both IO and CPU bound work. |
Tailwind CSS v3.0 | I'm not sure I get Tailwind still. Doing everything with utility classes and OOCSS / BEM are things we stopped doing literally decades ago. CSS modules still seem to solve every problem Tailwind solves, and better. CSS modules combine the power of global utility classes with locally styled components/locally scoped classes, and compile to static stylesheets, a requirement for performance. I'm not sure how Tailwind works, but any CSS that's built at runtime and JS and inserted into the DOM dynamically should be avoided, and is an example of favoring developer experience over end user experience. It's always surprising to me when the build process isn't front and center of any CSS framework, since that's the most important performance aspect. I'm not concerned about Tailwinds verbose CSS use since that's gzipped away, but the static stylesheet compilation aspect worries me if it's not front and center of the framework.CSS modules let you use the full power and control of vanilla CSS, without having to worry about styles bleeding across components. Sprinkle in your global utility classes for your design system and you're good to go. Or sometimes even better, abstract design into components like `` `` etc and not even worry about the classname implementation.I know I'm missing part of the picture, because of the hype and joy that people report from Tailwind. What part(s) am I missing that move folks from the power, beauty, and simplicity of CSS modules, to all-utility-classes-all-the-time Tailwind? |
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