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Free Postgres databases for small projects | Fly is great.They’ve got Chris McCord there, who has already improved their Elixir deployment story. I tweeted a few weeks ago about improving the default Rails deployment experience to not require DB provisioning and configuration of env vars like SECRET_BASE_KEY and they said it would likely ship within the next 3 months.My hot take is they’re setting themselves up to ride the server-side rendered HTML renaissance we are experiencing with LiveView and Hotwire. It will become much more important to deploy applications geographically closer to customers to lower latency, which Fly makes sane for the rest of us. |
Amazon workers on Staten Island vote to unionize | A single successful effort of unionization at an Amazon facility is more than symbolic: It will encourage -- and serve as a blueprint for -- employees at other Amazon facilities to do the same. Moreover, it will motivate employees at other large companies to try. This has been brewing for a while.It's possible we'll see a generational wave of unionization. |
High-documentation, low-meeting work culture | My current employer was sold to me as a "high documentation" place. What it means in practice is that if you're trying to do something there are 5 outdated documents describing the decision making process for how the project was run, and no documents about how to actually use the resulting software. Occasionally if you ask how to actually do a task in Slack someone will yell at you that you should have searched for a specific, obscurely named document in Google Drive, Confluence, or Github. We've tried a bunch of search tools which successfully surface the million product documents, design documents, PM reports, planning docs, retro docs and standup and oncall notes related to any feature, none of which are up to date. |
Bored People Quit | Axiom: Boring work can never compete with Hacker News.Axiom: Hacker News can never compete with interesting work.Theorem: The interestingness of my work is inversely related to my Hacker News participation.Supporting data: Today I'm regression testing. I'll be here all day, folks.Idea: Employers, monitor your logs for Hacker News. Occasional spikes probably indicate boring, but necessary tasks. Chronic use probably means your devs are bored. Bored devs probably means you better take a deep hard look at everything else. |
33GB of public domain JSTOR articles, and a manifesto | If I weren't too timid to risk doing so, I would do the following (read I hope someone else does this).Process the pdf's with an OCR program to extract as much text from each document as possible. The extraction should be done page by page, so the extracted text can be referenced to a PDF page#.Then, provide a searchable/browse-able directory of the extracted content. Each page of text has link to the original PDF page so you can easily open up the PDF to the page the text was extracted from.I'd also make all text user editable wiki style. Combined with the inline PDF page references it would be super easy for any user to fix up translation errors from the OCR process. Tie in a karma system to the users profile so that edits can be thanked/kudos on a job well done to help with automating moderation of user edits by rating the user's current karma to decide if the edit should be accepted automatically or provided as an alternate version other users can check and rate up if they think it should replace current version.Maybe mash in an image cropping service so diagrams can be cropped from the PDF and inserted inline with the translated text. Provide simple wiki formatting markup to allow users to format the articles.Use ad revenue/donations to alleviate/cover hosting costs.1, 2, 3, go. |
Grindr Shares Personal Information With Third-Parties | For what it's worth, the most private data here is shared to analytics companies for Grindr's only analytical use. My guess is that Grindr's agreement with Apptimize and Localytics asks for the strictest possible protection of that data. If anyone at Apptimize or Localytics has access to that data, I'd be incredibly surprised.This sort of deal isn't the same as sharing the HIV status to Google or Facebook so that advertisers can target or exclude that user information for the purposes of advertising.For people who think this is still wrong, I'm curious what their pragmatic alternative is. How else are app developers supposed to analyze their app performance? The open source, self-hosted pickings are slim. (I can only think of Piwik, which in my experience has a dated feature set and severe performance issues.) Not everyone can afford to perform their own product analysis. Using a third-party analytics saas is kind of the only way to go and seems like a reasonable tradeoff of security for product visibility. |
WeWTF | For a contrasting view, consider this tweet from @patio11 https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1161796809741627392> In 2025, every Fortune 500 company will have 10k+ remote workers, and every purchasing department will approve a reimbursement for WeWork with no questions asked.The actual bull case for WeWork is similar to Uber: there may be a massive trend, and WeWork is positioning itself to be the winner. With Uber it's the push to self-driving cars, and with WeWork it's the corporate move away from massive campuses and office buildings. In this new landscape, WeWork has extremely strong branding, experience, and a valuation that suggests it is the biggest player in the space. |
FUSE for macOS is no longer open source | It is buried in the footnotes of the post, but the ultimate reason behind going closed source is that Google built their enterprise GDrive syncing client for mac off a fork of osxfuse. The original author of osxfuse feels entitled to some compensation for that and is doing his damnedest to make it happen. |
Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt | Is there seriously no way in AWS/Azure/GCP to specify "Here's my budget, shut everything down if I exceed $X"? I don't use those platforms much but was always surprised I couldn't find anything like that right off the bat. I'll build cloud stuff if it makes sense at work, but if I'm footing the bill I'll stick to something that can provide an actual upper limit. |
Google turned me into a serial killer | Google's Knowledge Graph info boxes are automatically-generated and littered with errors. I've been burned twice on operating hours, once for my local bank and once for a convenience store, driving over each time only to find the place closed. In both cases, the correct hours were posted on the business's website. I've also seen bad KG results for medical conditions, listing the wrong symptoms or describing easily-treatable maladies as "Incurable". Now I actively ignore the info box and intentionally click through to an authoritative non-Google website.To a non-technical user, I'm sure the box looks like a human-curated result which they're more likely to trust. Maybe that's the goal of Google's UI choices. Couldn't be further from the truth. |
Mozilla has defeated Microsoft’s default browser protections in Windows | The new Windows 11 defaults manager is amazingly user hostile. [1] Microsoft decided it's a great idea to make non technical users manually adjust 15 different file and protocol associations in order to change the default browser.Microsoft's statement on this: we are implementing customer feedback to customize and control defaults at a more granular level, eliminating app categories and elevating all apps to the forefront of the defaults experience.More granular control is nice and all, but I don't buy for a second that it couldn't be behind some "advanced" button. I think the most probable explanation for removing the app categories is a calculated move to steer people towards Microsoft products which have access to backdoor internal functions to change all of these automatically.I do remember how bad things were back in Windows XP days when every random toolbar would change all the associations. I don't wish for that experience to come back for non technical users either. Microsoft could perhaps look into allowing digitally signed apps to change the associations automatically (a single summarizing OS confirmation prompt might be wise), and non-signed apps would have to instruct users to manually change things.--[1] https://www.theverge.com/22630319/microsoft-windows-11-defau... |
Starlink lost 40 satellites to a geomagnetic storm | I have a genuine question, are we handing SpaceX a monopoly by allowing them to launch these satellites, or will competing companies be able to launch similar services?Will space be too cluttered for competition? (I'm guessing space is really big and that we can have _a lot_ of small satellites up there.) |
First images from James Webb telescope exceed expectations | Considering these 'deep space' images that capture these myriad of little galaxies so far away.... The number of galaxies that must be out there is inconceivable to me.Spitballing.Might there be some space/time mechanism at play whereby we're actually seeing the same handful or so of galaxies? Like maybe some lensing thing.Or weirder, we're actually seeing right around the universe itself — as though seeing the back of your head in a mirror if you look far enough. Not a topologist, but seems a toroidal universe would have a property like this: look far enough and you see the back of your head. So perhaps the same galaxies seen from multiple angles at the same time appear to be a greater number of galaxies than there actually are. |
Finland will seek NATO membership immediately | Usual caveats that I'm not a diplomat, don't have all the facts, etc etc., but this doesn't seem like a rational move for Finland or NATO. The UK just yesterday agreed to protect Finland in the event of an attack, and the UK's involvement would likely bring in many other NATO powers anyway, so arguably they're getting protection they'd otherwise have to pay for for free. And actually, officially joining NATO will have consequences, as Putin has lined out. We can't just go on ignoring that Putin exists and has demonstrated he is willing to follow through with his threats, especially when it comes to NATO expansion. I'm no fan of him nor his regime, but thinking he'll back down if we just escalate the situation a little more is fantasy.It's a fact that Russia feels threatened by having NATO on their border. It's a fact that Ukraine and Finland also share borders with Russia. It's a fact that Putin is not going to allow himself to be removed from power by the West without a fight (at this point it's a case of stay in power or get killed). Can the West not have a bit more nuance in its collective foreign policy, recognising these facts and that we're far from living in a perfect world with flowers and rainbows? The former USSR states in Eastern Europe have until now (or until the early 2000s NATO expansion at least) served as a half-decent buffer zone between the West and Russia, and it's served as a relatively stable diplomatic saddle point in keeping the peace.EDIT: sigh, are we really just reddit these days, using downvotes to express disagreement? I'm not going to change my mind based on downvotes. Comment to tell me how I'm wrong. |
ChatGPT can now call Wolfram Alpha | This is mind blowing. No mention of "cost" or "price" though, I wonder what we'll be looking for (subscription, or per-use). |
We Found Our Son in the Subway | Great story. Can someone explain why this belongs on HN? |
We are under attack | Move to OVH -- they offer free DDoS protection as standard, and unlimited bandwidth. I just moved to OVH after getting DDoSed. I'm paying $109/month for a quad core 3.7Ghz Xeon, 64GB RAM, dual 2TB software RAID. It's a pretty sweet deal, and I haven't had any problems so far. |
3D printed sundial whose precise holes cast a shadow displaying the current time | Can anyone tell me how OpenSCAD compares to something like SolidWorks for designing objects? I'd much prefer to learn something open and programmable, but if SolidWorks is much easier to use for common cases, then I'd go with that.I've never used any 3D designing program other than SketchUp. |
Bye bye BetterSlack | I think you can safely ignore this cease and desist. Just change the name and add a disclaimer so your users know that by using your extension they are violating their acceptable use policy.This is no different than any user writing a Tampermonkey script to modify any website they want to modify. Even further, this is no different than a user opening the Dev Tools console and modifying things there. |
Show HN: Mkcert – Valid HTTPS certificates for localhost | Do you really want a valid certificate for localhost?I can get a valid certificate for development by simply getting a valid certificate for localhost.example.com on my server through let's encrypt and then making localhost.example.com resolve to 127.0.0.1 in my /etc/hosts file.Some code can behave slightly differently on localhost than on localhost.example.com, for example in deciding whether to keep cookies on a third level domain, so tests are more reliable that way. |
HashiCorp – S1 | Holly mother of God. Mitchell was still on HN yesterday, as he was replying something about Backblaze IPO and its business. Today it is his IPO,$259 million revenue. 2100+ Customers, 1500+ employees, $10 Billion Valuation.........I mean I felt it wasn't that long ago Vagrant was "the" tool for the job.How it all started, the submission on HN [1], quote:>This project has been the love child of myself and John Bender (nickelcode.com) for the past 6 weeks. We're both daily HN readers and would like to use this as a starting point to show Vagrant to the public. Specifically, I'd like to open up to any questions and feedback, so that the HN community can get to know Vagrant. Your feedback is extremely valued. Thanks!>A bit of background on this project: I work at a development company (citrusbyte.com) in LA. I see new projects almost every couple months, and I'm often working on multiple projects simultaneously due to work, freelance, and personal projects. Managing the development environments between many projects on a local machine became a huge burden and a coworker once mentioned developing in a virtual machine. I thought this was a great idea, and Vagrant was eventually born from it.Really amazing achievement in such short space of time. Congratulations!Edit: I wonder how many company started or partially started on HN that went on to IPO. I know Dropbox is one. Do we have a list somewhere?[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1175901 |
Developers spend most of their time figuring the system out | People always struggle or avoid doing pair programming, and people always think it means that the developers' time now costs twice as much, but this is a total lie. When I worked at a place that did 100% pair programming with rotation every day, a new developer could hit the ground flying. Sitting next to someone who knows the system and can answer your question immediately means you get up to speed millions of times faster than screwing around by yourself. Pointed-haired bosses and accountants will never understand this. If you pair and rotate, the inexperienced person becomes experienced quickly, and it's viral if you also do rotating pairing. A team with one expert and pairing is now a team full of experts. |
Reddit's favorite products in one place | Co-founder here, thanks for posting!Let me add some context:Many people add "Reddit" to their search queries to find authentic product reviews. We fine-tuned a BERT model to extract product mentions from over 4 million Reddit comments and posts with Named Entity Recognition (NER). The result is a list of the most popular products across many subreddits.No platform (including Reddit) is resistant to fake reviews and spam, but we think it's happening less frequently here for various reasons:- Redditors and other forum members are more interested in boosting their ego by showing their depth of knowledge on the topic (and correcting others on the topic), whereas corporate websites are more interested in raking profit by displaying (potentially) dishonest information.- Enthusiasts in subreddits are pretty good at spotting dishonest or fake content, which results in immediate downvotes. The whole karma system helps with trustworthiness.- Most subs are moderated well and spam gets removed quite quicklyThat being said, good fake reviews are technically almost impossible to detect, even with sophisticated network analysis of the reviewer's profile.Looria is still in Beta and we're working on improving our classification, summarization, and sentiment analysis. Let me know what you think! |
Front end developers: stop moving things that I’m about to click on | A particular bane of mine is the self-oscillating UIs, youtube is particularly bad at it these days - if the mouse pointer is in 'just the right place' (which is bigger than it sounds) then you get the seek-bar preview frames popup, which moves things just enough that the mouse pointer is no longer over the area that triggers it, so it vanishes, and the whole thing starts again. |
Angular 2 Final Released | As someone who uses Angular 1 currently but would pick React for their next project, I'd love to see a list of reasons why I should use Angular 2 over React.If nothing else, Angular just stranded all their developers, while React has a huge head start on mindshare/plugins/tutorials/etc. |
Linux Journal Ceases Publication: An Awkward Goodbye | This quote is particularly biting:"It became clearer than ever to me that while Linux and FOSS had won the battle over the tech giants a decade before, new ones had taken their place in the meantime, and we were letting them win."It's true. We won it all, but we somehow still lost, and that's a difficult and sad thing to realize. Even though FOSS ate the world, we didn't win software freedom, we just enabled a bunch of new tech giants to put us into consumer roles with little to no freedom once again. |
98.css – design system for building faithful recreations of Windows 98 UIs | Author here! Thanks for all the nice comments (and helpful bug reports). This idea has been in the back of my mind for ~2 years now but I recently got a wave of motivation and decided to ride it - and here we are. Happy to answer any Qs :) |
I accidentally loaned all my money to the US government | The venn diagram of internet users that read about super specific financial products, decide to buy them, while not even understanding the need to keep an emergency fund such that a move like this leaves them with under $200 in their account seems to be growing.It seems to be a weird mix of wall street cosplay and financial ineptitude. |
Facebook acquires Instagram | How many photo-related startups has Facebook acquired now?And what do they gain from Instagram?A user base? Most of them are probably already on Facebook?Technology for handling photos? Doesn't Facebook already do this as well as anyone else?Design and UI talent for mobile apps? Don't they already have Mike Matas? |
The Amazing iOS 6 Maps | The "roller coaster" effects in the 3-d view are my favorite. They've got some smoothing algorithm going, or it wouldn't curve the way it does, but the elevation data must not have a high enough resolution. Google has made this sort of thing look so easy for so long, but it's clearly very hard to get this stuff right.So, I guess it's not that surprising that apple messed up something incredibly hard in their first attempt. I'm curious as to whether these issues are as widespread as they seem, or if they're more edge cases made to appear common by the internet. But the curiosity isn't enough to drive me to upgrade. I'm totally putting off that until I figure out a decent alternative app. |
The Truth About Aaron Swartz's "Crime" | I wasn't aware the closet was unlocked. And apparently used by a homeless guy to store his stuff. So, even the bare minimum real crime that I thought he was guilty of (Breaking into a closet) which is a crime serviceable by community service in this context - turns out not to have occurred.I've been sad all morning. Reading this article just makes me angry. |
What Is Ethereum? | There's one point in particular that took me a while to grasp: while you can write code that runs on the Ethereum network, every single node has to process that code.So if, for example, you had a big 3d animation sequence that you wanted to have rendered, you would not just send that code off to the network to be processed. You would have to pay to have every single person on the network process that job for you, and it would be so big the network wouldn't even accept it. Rather, you would create a simple contract that says "if you render this animation for me and prove that you did it right, I'll pay you X amount of Ether". Someone would take the job and the Ethereum network would process your contract and handle the payment. You would end up paying that person to do work for you, and you'd pay the network (using something called gas) to process the contract.You could use Ethereum to create all kinds of interesting contracts for financial purposes, voting systems, insurance, or whatever else. But it's not some giant compute cluster that will run some big program for you. |
AMD lands Google, Twitter as customers with newest server chip | Genuinely asking, since I have little to no concept of this space - how does the prevalence of either Intel or AMD affect developers? |
You either die an MVP or live long enough to build content moderation | Around 1 year ago we got hit badly on our [blogging platform][0] by people/groups submitting fake customer support description of other big companies, either being Microsoft, Facebook, Comcast etc.Rolled out a machine learning model and trained it on the database. 99% of them vanished.Next day, the machine didn't work and success rate was around 5%.Found out, they have learned the trick and now using symbols from different languages to make it look like English.Trained again, success rate went up again.Next hour, success rate fallen.This time, they mixed their content with other valid content of our own blogging platform. They would use content from our own blog or other people posts and mix it to fool the machine learning.Trained it again and was success.Once a while such content appear and machine model fails to catch them.It only takes couple of minutes to mark the bad posts and have the model get trained and redeployed and then boom, bad content is gone.The text extraction, slicing through good content and bad content, finding out symbols vs sane alphabet and many other thing was at first challenging, but overall pretty excited to make it happen.Through this we didn't use any platform to do the job, the whole thing was built by ourselves, little bit of Tensorflow, Keras, Scikit-learn and some other spices.Worth noting, it was all text and no images or videos. Once we got hit with that we'll deal with it.[0]: https://www.gonevis.comedit: Here's the training code that made the initial work https://gist.github.com/Alir3z4/6b26353928633f7db59f40f71c8f... it's pretty basic stuff. Later changed to cover more edge cases and it got even simpler and easier. Contrary to the belief, the better it got, the simpler it became :shrug |
Touch Pianist | Great choice of song! If you ever have access to a piano, I highly recommended trying to fumble your way through Beethoven's moonlight sonata, even if you don't know how to play piano.Not quite sure how to put it into words, but it's absolutely exhilarating hearing your own fingers produce these huge sounds and intense chord progressions. Every time I managed to find the right chord I'd get such a rush. "Oh no he didn't.. he went _there_!?"This webpage gives a little taste of that feeling. If you enjoyed it, try to give the real thing a go! |
Show HN: My SSH server knows who you are | FYI, this happens because SSH automatically presents a public key to the server when trying to authenticate. If the server doesn't know that key, then SSH tries the next one. You can enumerate all of someone's keys this way (like this SSH server does)If you want to disable this sort of behaviour you can disable SSH from sending keys automatically, and then tell SSH which identity files need to be sent to each host.In your .ssh/config, something like: # Ignore SSH keys unless specified in Host subsection
IdentitiesOnly yes
# Send your public key to github only
Host github.com
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa
This is also handy if you're security conscious and like to use a different private/public key pair for each host you have an account with! |
The Boring Company [video] | It's amazing to me the amount of negativity directed toward his projects and the millions of reasons people give for why they "won't work" (not necessarily on HN, but at least on general news websites).I'm starting to believe the only difference between those who start their own companies and those who don't is that the latter convinces themselves that it is impossible, never builds anything, and from their own lack of having ever produced anything, concludes that their original supposition was indeed correct. |
Prepack helps make JavaScript code more efficient | Hi, I am Nikolai Tillmann, a developer on the Prepack project. I am happy to answer any questions! |
#deletefacebook | 30 years from now, candidates for president of the United States will have their old social media posts under a microscope. Whatever dumb thing they posted in their teens will be brought to light.It's probably going to raise a lot of discussions about what constitutes normal human behavior. We might finally stop pretending they are perfect humans.After realizing that everyone, even future politicians post stupid things, We probably will stop caring about online privacy.It might also be a bad thing because society would expect oversharing as the norm and would consider anyone who doesn't put their private lives on display, to be hiding something.Either way social media is here to stay. But it will change, this is version 1. |
Calculus for Beginners and Artists (2003) | I sort of dislike this kind of "philosophical" introduction to calculus. Maybe I don't have the spirit of an artist.The best way to start with calculus is the one by Gilbert Strang, who explains everything on the first page of his book (and the rest of the book are "just" examples).The first half of the first page shows a drawing of the speedometer and odometer of a car and it explains what they are, and that they are not independent but related in a special way. On the second half of the first page it says that differential calculus is the task of computing the speed from the distance, and integral calculus is the task of computing the distance from the speed. Then it says a lovely sentence "this is not an analogy, this is the real deal and we have already started with the subject, and this is actually all there is to it". Then in the rest of the page it explains in a couple of sentences how can you compute speeds from distances and vice-versa, and why you need a constant of integration, and so on. It also proves the fundamental theorem of calculus. The rest of the book consists in concrete examples and a few more constructions, up to Taylor series. |
Ranked-choice voting is on the ballot in New York City | I absolutely support ranked-choice voting as an improvement to the current system.BUT, the proposed system is specifically Instant Run-Off Voting (IRV), which does not make a centrist third-party candidate likely to win. Because it removes whoever gets the least first-place votes, the only improvement it gives is that a third-party candidate doesn't spoil an election, because your second-place vote will still count.
(E.g. Nader wouldn't have taken votes from Gore, so Gore would have won instead of Bush.) But you're still stuck with one of the polarizing two-party candidates who will win.Contrast this to the Borda Count [2], where points are assigned by rank. In this case, suppose about half of everyone votes first-place for an extreme liberal, and the other half vote first-place for an extreme conservative. But everyone votes second-place for a moderate centrist they can live with, and third-place for the opposite-party candidate they detest. With IRV, the centrist is ignored and one of the extremists will win. But with Borda, the centrist candidate will win.So to really get away from the poisonous political polarization of our times, ranked choice is necessary, but it needs to be Borda or similar, not IRV. Still -- it's a start, and I'm grateful for that alone.[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borda_count |
Santa Cruz, California bans predictive policing in U.S. first | The problem with predictive policing is in the name. Inference (ML) predicts the future from the past. If the past is racist, then inference will create a racist future. Since racism is systemic[1], especially when it comes to policing, predictive policing is actively working against an anti-racist future.There may be statistical ways to factor out systemic racism. There are two reasons I don't think that works:1. I don't see how one evaluates the correctness of the process that controls for racism. What is ground truth for anti-racist policing?2. These systems are likely snake oil and the vendors of these systems are (possibly inadvertently) profiting off racist policing. If cops arrest more black people per capita, then send the cops to black neighborhoods and have them follow black parolees. The system works (according to an objective function which maximizes arrests.) Remove racism and send the cops to white neighborhoods. Now the cops don't arrest as many people. The system fails. So I think it's likely that if you remove racist policing from predictive policing, you get the null hypothesis.I'd be happy to hear a counterargument from someone who has actual statistics on this though.[1] If you don't believe this, you're in the minority now: https://www.vox.com/2020/6/11/21286642/george-floyd-protests... |
Htmx Is the Future | It's kinda funny to me that many of the "pros" of this approach are the exact reasons so many abandoned MPAs in the first place.For instance, a major selling point of Node was running JS on both the client and server so you can write the code once. It's a pretty shitty client experience if you have to do a network request for each and every validation of user input.Also, there was a push to move the shitty code from the server to the client to free up server resources and prevent your servers from ruining the experience for everyone.We moved away for MPAs because they were bloated, slow and difficult to work with. SPAs have definitely become what they sought to replace.But that isn't because of the technology, it's because all the devs writing shitty MPAs are now writing shitty SPAs. If this becomes popular, they will start writing shitty MPAs again. Nothing about this technology will stop that. |
Pythagorean Theorem found on clay tablet 1k years older than Pythagoras (2009) | Every group who ever managed to build a building with a rectangular foundation figured out the relation between the side lengths and the diagonal. The Egyptians used Pythagorean triples to measure right angles way before the birth of Pythagoras.But that's not a theorem, just an observation. It becomes a theorem when you prove (i.e. explain why) this relationship always holds, based on more evident things. The Babylonian tablet mentioned in the article doesn't seem to do anything like that, whereas the Greeks definitely did (we don't know whether Pythagoras himself did it, as no writing of his survives, but later Greeks knew how to do it, and attributed it to Pythagoras). |
He got 1%, we can't hire him | Improving a company 101:* Get rid of HR people.* Profit. |
The Indian sanitary pad revolutionary | I want to hug this guy. Like, really. Buy me a airplane ticket.Arunachalam Muruganantham is a hero. I use that word in its full magnitude. Since I am now an expert on the matter, having read the entire article, I'll speculate on what motivates this man:- Grit. Crazy amounts of grit. The article is full of good quotes, but my favorite is what he said after being abandoned by his mother:"It was a problem for me," he says. "I had to cook my own food."- Humility combined with hunger:"Luckily I'm not educated," he tells students. "If you act like an illiterate man, your learning will never stop... Being uneducated, you have no fear of the future.""Every time he comes to know something new, he wants to know everything about it," [his wife] says.- Love of humanity, on some level at least:"Anyone with an MBA would immediately accumulate the maximum money. But I did not want to. Why? Because from childhood I know no human being died because of poverty - everything happens because of ignorance."As an aside, I LOVE the picture of his wife and daughter toward the end. This one photograph lends better context to the story than all the others combined. I know a single picture means nothing, but the look in his daughter's eyes makes me think she'll inherit something of her dad's baddassness.And as another aside, bloody god-damn fucking hell, are the following bits really true?There are still many taboos around menstruation in India. Women can't visit temples or public places, they're not allowed to cook or touch the water supply - essentially they are considered untouchable.There are also myths and fears surrounding the use of sanitary pads - that women who use them will go blind, for example, or will never get married. |
Seeing AI for iOS | Yes, YES, this is what I'm talking about Microsoft. I'm surprised how muted the reaction is from HN here.On the technical side, this is a perfect example of how AI can be used effectively, and is a (very obvious in hindsight) application of the cutting edge in scene understanding and HCI. There are quite a few recent and advanced techniques rolled into one product here, and although I haven't tried it out yet it seems fairly polished from the video. A whitepaper of how this works from the technical side would be fascinating, because even though I'm familiar with the relevant papers it's a long jump between the papers and this product.On the social side, I think this is a commendable effort, and a fairly low hanging fruit to demonstrate the positive power of new ML techniques. On a site where every other AI article is full of comments (somewhat rightfully) despairing about the negative social aspects of AI and the associated large scale data collection, we should be excited about a tool that exists to improve lives most of us don't even realize need improving. This is the kind of thing I hope can inspire more developers to take the reins on beneficial AI applications. |
New law bans California employers from asking applicants their prior salary | I'd prefer to see this go in the other direction and make all salary information public.Right now, employers have far more information than employees, and I don't think this law will do much to change that. To me, it's similar to real estate - imagine if only sellers had access to the database of exactly what every house sold for and when, but buyers had to go with unsubstantiated, scattered rumors. Or vise versa. The side with information would have a monumental advantage.This law won't do much, if anything, to change the basic dynamic. For what it's worth, I work for a public institution and my salary, and the salary of all my coworkers, is public. The sky hasn't fallen.If tech companies balk, one approach would be to say that any company using the H1B or other work visas must make all salary information public as a condition of using the visa. After all, if you're experiencing a desperate shortage of workers, it's reasonable for the public to know what salaries you're paying these desperately needed workers in short supply. |
Amazon fires worker who led strike over virus | > Despite that instruction to stay home with pay, he came on site today, March 30, further putting the teams at riskThe employee was exposed to another employee who tested positive for covid-19. They asked him to stay home with pay for 14 days and he came back to the building to protest, putting other employees at risk. |
A 2020 Vision of Linear Algebra | It's ridiculous how much random college-level linear algebra textbook material I stared at before things clicked in the course of just jumping in and exploring 3D graphics and writing my own 3D vector, matrix multiplication and 3D transform headers and using them in making some games in plain C.At some point it's like "Wait, is linear algebra really just about heaps of multiplication and addition? Like every dimension gets multiplied by values for every dimension, and values 0 and 1 are way more interesting than I previously appreciated. That funny identity matrix with the diagonal 1s in a sea of 0s, that's just an orthonormal basis where each corresponding dimension's axis is getting 100% of the multiplication like a noop. This is ridiculously simple yet unlocks an entire new world of understanding, why the hell couldn't my textbooks explain it in these terms on page 1? FML"I'm still a noob when it comes to linear algebra and 3D stuff, but it feels like all the textbooks in the world couldn't have taught me what some hands-on 3D graphics programming impressed upon me rather quickly. Maybe my understanding is all wrong, feel free to correct me, as my understanding on this subject is entirely self-taught. |
FCC: TikTok is unacceptable security risk and should be removed from app stores | I don't have a horse in this race at all, but the annoying part is that the same rules don't get applied across the board. Everything they're accusing TikTok of - from data harvesting to the government having access to said data - is true for western companies as well and that should be the problem. Not the fact that the data is now in the hands of the Chinese but that the data is being collected at all provided to the government.The problem should be that the data is collected and provided to the government whenever they want - not that it's not the Chinese government. We had this discussion after the Snowden leaks and nothing changed whatsoever. Back then it was the US government and the US gov had the chance to change the rules so this could not happen. Now they're up in arms because other governments do the exact same thing. It's really annoying.Ban every app that collects "problematic" user info. Make the collection itself illegal, give users control about their data but don't argue that the practice suddenly becomes problematic when others do it. |
Path uploads your entire iPhone address book to its servers | I find it mind blowing that (in the comments of the blog post) someone asked the Path CEO:> Why wasn't this [sending all the contacts to your servers without users knowing] an opt-in situation to begin with? Isn't that against Apple's own T&Cs?and the Path CEO replied:> This is currently the industry best practice and the App Store guidelines do not specifically discuss contact information. However, as mentioned, we believe users need further transparency on how this works, so we've been proactively addressing this.Really guys? REALLY? This is why developers need explicit guidelines, because as they just demonstrated if there are no guidelines companies default to the thing that exploits the end user! (incidentally, its unfair to pick on Path too much as almost all social networking applications do exactly this also.)I actually cringed when I read this "however, as mentioned, we believe users need further transparency on how this works" ... which is why it took someone running a proxy and writing a blog post for you to suddenly be transparent about it. Mind blowing. Why even say that?Btw, times like this? You destroy any and all credibility when you say you are trying to build a company that is built to last or one that is going to follow in the footsteps of Apple.Apple would never do this to their users.(do not make this a discussion about the evil and good sides of Apple. Apple has repeatedly not bowed to companies desires for owning contact information and I expect they will fix this contact hole in the near future.)It's sad because I respect Path and their love of design. But design isn't just about how it looks. It needs to resonate through the entire vision, company, product, and how you treat people. |
NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants | So that's not good.You can see how that could be happening; NSA has trunk-level access to telephony circuits. Telcos are engaged in a long-running game of footsie with the government that makes billion dollar Internet companies look like anarcho-capitalists.But I'm not seeing how we get from there to the contents of email. To have the email of arbitrary Americans without a warrant, the NSA would need direct access to the servers that run Google Mail. They do not have that access; Google has categorically denied it, and the Guardian walked the claim back. The "optical splitters on the Internet backbone" thing doesn't hold water either; most people need to go through some effort not to use strong crypto when communicating with people using Google Mail. |
What It's Like to Fail | So, oddly enough, the thing that bothered me the most about this article was the way his wife left him. I read stories like this a lot online, where two married people are prospering and living happy lives, and then despite the vow they made for "better or worse", one just gives up on the other person when times get hard.Is it really that easy?I'm currently 23, and if/when I ever get married, regardless of who brings in the income (both of us, just me, or just her), I would support whoever I married even if they lost their job or had some other hardship. You hear about people getting cancer or some other sickness and their spouse leaving them because they don't want to deal with it. It boggles my mind that these things occur.If you weren't going to truly commit to the person, why would you get married? Just live together instead. Or get married without saying the vows if you just want the government benefits. I don't understand.It's not just limited to spouses. It sounds like some of his children could have supported him as well. If something happened to my father, I would do everything I could to take care of him, regardless of what it cost me.I'm curious of other HNers take on this. Has anyone been in a situation like this? |
I Got Myself Arrested So I Could Look Inside the Justice System | I'm sorry to be a curmudgeon but I don't like this guy at all. He wasted valuable city resources on an experiment the outcome of which he should have predicted, being a criminal attorney in Roxbury.Why were the police and the criminal justice officials apparently angry with him? Because while he was playing his little game, to "prove" that police profile people and to "prove" that getting arrested and jailed can be a violent and unfair experience, someone else was getting away with a purse snatching, or beating up an ex-girlfriend, or playing the knock-out game, or emptying a cash register.It's not so much that he prevented one of these other cases from being pursued, but that he seems so oblivious of the effects of his actions. Thus, it seems perfectly natural and reasonable for them to say, "OK, you make twice the salary we make yet you wanna be a petty criminal? Poof, you're a petty criminal. Enjoy sleeping in the bed you made, and here's hoping you will be permanently cured of f##king with us in the future, a##hole."The police are set upon from all sides. If they bend the rules, they are severely punished. If they don't bend the rules, and the rules don't always apply the way liberal suburban white folks might imagine they do on the street, then they get castigated for not "doing their job" i.e. catching the bad guys. At the end of the day, not catching the bad guys is the biggest sin in law enforcement, because it's the mission. If you fail the mission, you're facing demotion, punishment, deprivation of public support and sufficient budget, and the public will view you with contempt and disgust.I'm not justifying that that diabetic guy who wanted his sugar pills should be denied his pills. I'm not justifying that the police handle the lower socio-economic cases more brutally, giving them bruises and cuts that the suburban white boy somehow was spared. I'm not justifying racial profiling.Yet, to walk a mile in their shoes, both the police and the criminal justice system as a whole, is to see the world a little differently from the average Atlantic Monthly reader or Hacker News reader.Just my 2 cents. |
Chrome 59 has cross-platform headless support | Please let this be capable of generating PDFs from HTML from the command line. |
Georgia Tech's free math textbook collective | This is awesome. At some point in the next five years I plan on taking a sabbatical and focusing almost exclusively on redoing my math education and moving deeper into advanced topics than I did as an undergraduate.Is there anyone who has done something similar who might share some suggestions for success? |
International System of Units overhauled in historic vote | This is probably the dumbest thing I'll type on HN.In university I just gave up trying to understand why we even needed the Avogadro constant / mole as a fundamental constant. It still confuses me. Why have a difference between molar mass and mass? Why couldn't it just be "1" and everything else change around it? |
Jeff Bezos's phone 'hacked by Saudi crown prince' | Pavel Durov argued that WhatsApp's vulnerabilities are intentionally created as part of surveillance programs with government agencies. [1]If that were true, Bezos's case would be an example of how that approach to security is double-edged. Backdoors can be just as useful to foreign intelligence as they are to whoever pushed for their implementation.[1] https://t.me/s/durov/109 |
A two-person startup already uses twenty-eight other tools | I am the CIO of a mostly remote, cybersecurity startup (50 FTEs). I balance between not single-threading all choices through me and not letting things get too out of hand. That means no one is every really happy.E.g., we use Uberconference for videoconferencing. We thoroughly looked at a bunch of others and chose UC for its functionality, price, and simplicity (every conference gets a simple phone number, no stupid 9-digit code plus pin plus participant id). Six months after signing a 3-year agreement (my bad. rookie mistake) I had to resist my CEO’s insistence that we switch to a different provider when we were courting them as a client. A few month later, sales went out and bought 10 mf’ing Zoom licenses without consulting anyone because some client hadn’t heard of UC and asked if it was the budget solution.Thank god our new CFO confiscated all the corporate credit cards and moved us to reimbursement with Concur. Of course, he later unilaterally selected NetSuite (for something like $40k a year!) and insisted on coordinating the roll out himself. It has been a months long dumpster fire, but he still won’t give my team admin privileges lest we try to see other’s salaries.We use a lot of AWS. One of our red-teamers mostly used but occasionally built some of our infrastructure. He left the company last month. Yesterday, salesman from Digital Ocean reached to ask if we are still interested in going forward with the departed colleague’s plan to move all our infrastructure to DO.So for all you folks stuck in big companies, when you wonder why your IT department is so behind the times and won’t let you use Postgres instead of MariaDB or Gitlab instead of Bitbucket, remember my experience. It’s because no matter how smart you folks are as individuals, in the aggregate you are like toddlers. You dump all your toys on the floor and then chase after some other kid’s shinier toy. Your poor CIO is left cleaning up your mess in the middle of the night after stepping on a Lego brick.(All that said, my job isn’t bad and my company is way less dysfunctional than most start ups. I get that start ups are chaotic, and the basic nature of my job is to wrangle it.) |
Omg.lol – A lovable web page and email address | I would kill to know how many people converted despite these comments. |
Eye Candy | Hello! My name is Jacobi. I made Eyecandy. I'm appreciating seeing suggestions. Is there anything you want me to try on the website? Anything I could improve? |
This JPEG is also a webpage | That's a chipmunk, not a squirrel. |
I gave commit rights to someone I didn't know | Ha, Same thing happened to me with the SAME contributor!! Benjamin Bach is an awesome dude. He helped me maintain django-dbbackup for quite some time then we found a third contributor, Anthony Monthe, who is also very interested in the project and I would say owns it now. It's been maintained by those two for quite some time now. I wish there was a way for me to buy them both a bunch of rounds of beer. :D |
GitLab Made $10.5M in Revenue with Every Employee Working from Home | One thing I don't like about Gitlab is their salary formula. They dock you in pay if you are in a lower cost of living area.First, I think I should be paid based on the value I bring to a company, not my location. Otherwise, aren't we subsidizing those who choose to live in an expensive place like SF or NYC over those who are happy with a smaller city like Portland of Austin?Second, while many cities have growing tech scenes, SF and Seattle remain fairly unique job markets. If you're outside those cities, you may have less expenses, but you also lose out on networking and may find it harder to find your next job (if for no other reason than the fact nonremote companies will shy away from relocating you if another qualified candidate is local). |
What’s New in Python 3.8 | As a developer who has primarily developed applications in Python for his entire professional career, I can't say I'm especially excited about any of the "headlining" features of 3.8.The "walrus operator" will occasionally be useful, but I doubt I will find many effective uses for it. Same with the forced positional/keyword arguments and the "self-documenting" f-string expressions. Even when they have a use, it's usually just to save one line of code or a few extra characters.The labeled breaks and continues proposed in PEP-3136 [0] also wouldn't be used very frequently, but they would at least eliminate multiple lines of code and reduce complexity.PEP-3136 was rejected because "code so complicated to
require this feature is very rare". I can understand a stance like that. Over complicating a language with rarely-used features can definitely create problems. I just don't see why the three "headline" features I mentioned are any different.[0]: https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3136/ |
My FOSS Story | I wish there was a well-understood convention to opt out of "social coding". A way to put up a project under an open source license (or CC0/public-domain) along with a notice that says effectively, "feel free to fork, but don't file issues or submit patches."You can put that in a README, but people won't read it. Github won't let you disable i̶s̶s̶u̶e̶s̶ ̶l̶a̶s̶t̶ ̶I̶ ̶l̶o̶o̶k̶e̶d̶ pull requests, unless you archive the project (making it read-only). Is it possible on one of the other hosting services, like Gitlab?We need better ways to draw boundaries around open source projects and contributors.ETA: How can we counter the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit#Bullshit_asymmetry_pr...> The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it. |
Rocky Linux: A CentOS replacement by the CentOS founder | I am really interested to know why should anyone go with this when Debian or Ubuntu LTS exist. The two later have not changed their policies in the last decade, and they have a clear path for upgrading. CentOS was always a clear choice for device drivers support, but I never understood the stability claims. |
Ask HN: I was hit with a patent troll lawsuit, how do I deal with it? | I am an IP litigator, and I have dealt with patent trolls repeatedly. I have taken these kinds of cases pro bono in the past for small companies (including through the EFF attorney referral list, https://www.eff.org/pages/legal-assistance), and I know that others have as well.There are definitely low-cost and pro bono (free) options out there for very small businesses. The EFF attorney referral list is a good place to start.I'm also happy to talk it through with you if you'd like more specific information - my contact information is here: https://shawkeller.com/attorneys/andrew-e-russell/ |
DreamFusion: Text-to-3D using 2D Diffusion | Did we hit some sort of technical inflection point in the last couple of weeks or is this just coincidence that all of these ML papers around high quality procedural generation are just dropping every other day? |
I want the world to scroll this way | This seems to result in a large number of cases where the visual experience is pointless. The line separating the previous and next page is tiny and easy to miss, and I don't see the use in two torn half-pages on screen.I agree that smooth scrolling long text is hard to read and trips up line scanning, but this UX seems be like playing an cruel game where I have to drag just enough to scroll a whole page. Any more or less and I get a torn page that's even harder to read than normal scrolling.I have an alternate solution to this problem: just hit space or page down when you're reading a long web page. It scrolls a whole page, with just enough animation to help you track where you are. |
My Friends and I Bought an Island | Just for people new to who Tynan is, he's a pretty far out guy. Some things I recall (sorry haven't kept up over the years)1) Ran a successful professional online poker playing business, actually hired employees and trained them to predictably win.2) Was one of the main characters in the book The Game (yes, that PUA one).3) Did polyphasic sleep experiments in earnest (was it a couple months or so?).4) Had a giant inflatable outdoor pool inside his house, taking up his entire livingroom.5) Sold all his belongings, including said house, and travelled the world for a year with almost nothing... probably in 2k8 or so before such an idea became more commonplace.There's probably some much cooler stuff I'm forgetting, but hey it makes perfect sense he'd be part of an island buying crew. |
The Cuban CDN | Awesome article! Does anyone have any further information? A few things stick in my mind:1. FTA: "You'd need to be downloading at over 11Mbps 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to get the equivalent of El Paquete"2. The AV update is 4 days old, the offline copy of Revolico is 3 days old3. The article as a whole implies that El Paquete Semanal is a regularly distributed, ~850GB weekly curated samizdataThus: what the fuck!? It'd take me weeks to assemble this kind of thing, especially given point #1 above. Sure, a lot of this stuff could be farmed out to scrapers/sickbeard/whatever, but this level of curation plus the quick turnaround plus the distribution (how many portable 1TB drives are circulating?!) plus the download speed requirements... Who is doing this, and how? There's clearly some really great high speed connections in Cuba. Are these guys backed (or at least tolerated) by the state or something? |
An account of a serious medical emergency on a transoceanic flight | In contrast to this story, my wife (a doctor) did attend to an ailing passenger on a transoceanic flight. The attendants were more than helpful, and my wife expressed surprise at how well stocked their medical kit was (drugs etc).After the flight, the airline gave her some duty free goodies on the spot, and a few days later, a one-way business class ticket (I guess to make up for the fact that she sat with this ailing passenger for most of that transoceanic flight).The article didn't mention what airline. We were flying Singapore Airlines. Service does make a difference. |
Compare career levels across companies | Here's a slightly related open question: Are Engineers in the US just much richer than in the UK?For perspective, I started my career with an MEng in Electronic and Electrical Engineering as a Hardware Design Engineer at £35k (I out-earned most of my fellow graduates). It seems like these salaries are just comically disjointed from my entire experience of life. Can anyone here speak to the differences? Everything I've seen points me to Californians just living an incredibly well-off lifestyle, but everything I read also indicates the people who have those lifestyles do not feel well-off? |
How I, as someone who is visually impaired, use my iPhone (2020) | It's really remarkable what Apple has achieved here.Random thought: She could turn down the screen's brightness all the way to save battery and improve privacy... ;-) |
I was rejected by Codecademy three times, so I built my own | >My favorite part of the photographic process was watching prints come to life. I loved starting with a blank sheet of paper and applying various photographic methods to bring the image to life.>I found that building websites was similarly satisfying. For example, click the "Reveal Image" button to watch an image fade in to the blank canvas!I think a lot about why I went into computer science and this is the same conclusion I came to. There's something really cool about starting with a blank page and coding in elements that appear one by one and adapting the code to be what you want. Maybe there's other ways to do it but programming seemed to be the most powerful.Just to be clear, it was video games, not photography that kinda nudged me into programming, but same idea with a blank canvas and having control of it. |
E-ink is so Retropunk | Retro? Sure. Punk? Not when the patents are tightly held by a greedy patent troll who seems to do everything in their power to stop hobbyists and hackers |
Fully Functional 1KB Hard Drive in Vanilla Minecraft | This is really cool. I really like Minecraft computer components, but I could never help to think that if the guys who build them, started playing with something practical, the results might be more tangible. |
Twitter refuses US order to disclose owner of anti-Trump account | Would HN be so proud of Twitter if they had refused to disclose the owner of an alt right account? |
Pay up or we’ll make Google ban your ads | I don’t understand: Why can’t Google just count those clicks as invalid and keep the AdSense running with no ban? If Google has the ability to detect fraudulent clicks, then there is no reason to ever ban any website for AdSense fraud. |
GM’s CEO Offers to Make Ventilators in WWII-Style Mobilization | Yeah, I'm personally not too concerned with the "stuff" end of things. This is America; in spite of rhetoric to the contrary, we remain a manufacturing powerhouse. Apply enough money and we'll get whatever "stuff" we need on pretty short order.I think the big problem is medical technicians and doctors. My feeling is that we should be focusing on training up medical people on a massive scale, as that's something that the USA is notoriously bad at. Perhaps the military could provide medical technicians the fastest? lots of healthy young people who are trained in the use of serious PPE? (I wonder how the procedures differ between nuclear, chemical and biological threats like these?)People talk about beds... but the problem isn't physical beds. I could make you a physical bed. the problem is doctor and medical technician labor to make the bed useful. |
Zig cc: A drop-in replacement for GCC/Clang | Thanks everyone for the kind words! It's been a lot of work to get this far, and the Zig project has further to go still.If you have a few bucks per month to spare, consider chipping in. I'm hoping to have enough funds soon to hire a second full time developer.https://github.com/users/andrewrk/sponsorship |
Written communication is remote work super power | Async communication is suitable to resolve some kind of issues. But it has two drawbacks: participants need to be competent at writing and reading prose (it’s harder than it sounds) and even with the best of care your ideas can easily be misinterpreted resulting in the loss of an async cycle.For problems which are not well defined, and where a lot of decisions need to be taken, especially when they verge toward the arbitrary, it’s a lot easier to have people in a room and hash it out. A remote meeting can work too.The problem with meetings are those which are not well prepared. There shall be an agenda and proper minutes should be produced.For most complicated matters actions/investigations are supposed to be followed up. In a way that’s how you mix async with sync communication. |
Pfizer is testing a pill that, if successful, could cure Covid-19 | > Pfizer is keeping schtum about the detail of the lab tests it has completed but says it has demonstrated “potent in vitro antiviral activity against SARS-CoV-2”, as well as activity against other coronaviruses, raising the prospect of a cure for the common cold as well as future pandemic threats.I have wondered if the COVID-19 pandemic might lead to some results, like extermination of the common cold, that humans would look back on and say that it was a net benefit. Something along the lines of, "yes, 4 million people died, but in fighting COVID-19 we created highly-effective therapeutics for the flu and common cold. Over the following 10 years, these inventions saved 4 million lives and saved 15 million days of lost work/school".It's hard to think about these things as we are going through the pandemic, but hopefully there will be some good that comes of it. (Of course, it's also possible that by thinking we've 'cured' the common cold, we will open ourselves up to a once-a-century pandemic, where millions are wiped out by what used to just be a common cold.) |
Magic-trace – High-resolution traces of what a process is doing | Hi HN! I'm Clark, one of the maintainers of magic-trace.magic-trace was submitted before, our first announcement was this blog post: https://blog.janestreet.com/magic-trace/.Since then, we've worked hard at making magic-trace more accessible to outside users. We've heard stories of people thinking this was cool before but being unable to even find a download link.I'm posting this here because we just released "version 1.0", which is the first version that we think is sufficiently user-friendly for it to be worth your time to experiment with.And uhh... sorry in advance if you run into hiccups despite our best efforts. Going from dozens of internal users to anyone and everyone is bound to discover new corners we haven't considered yet. Let us know if you run into trouble! |
Tesla created secret team to suppress thousands of driving range complaints | I have a model Y. I hate almost everything about it. But most germane, The "Battery meter" at the top of the display is total bunk. That's got to be "rosy" numbers. It'll display a the battery in miles, but it's at least 25% inflated.However if you punch in a destination, you'll get exact numbers, and those are insanely reliable. It claims (and I don't believe any claims coming from tesla) that it'll factor wind, elevation, temperature, etc. But regardless of what it factors in, it's on the money. |
We have used too many levels of abstractions | I think there is one interesting angle to this problem.I am someone who grew up with the technology, as the levels of abstractions were being added. I am now benefiting from all those accumulated decades of knowledge.As the IT / development world was changing, I had enormous privilege and comfort to learn the things at the pace they were happening. Being able to assimilate changes over long decades. Be a witness to the problems and logic behind all those new solutions. Understand how we come to have JavaScript and the browser mess we are in and so many other curious features of todays digital world.I understand pretty much all of the layers of the computing from how CPUs achieve some of the things they are doing to bus protocols, to instructions, physical memory, low level OS internals, high level OS internals, virtual memory, userspace platform communication with OS, programming language runtimes and linking, shared libraries, IPC, networking, virtualization, etc.The issue, as with any automation, is that new players on the scene (younger devs, devops, etc.) simply have no chance to learn the same things and go trough the same path.For them, spending a decade working with a low level programming language before you jump into high level programming language is simply not an option.We, people who really understand the technology that the world runs on, are a slowly dying breed. We are still here as tech leads, managers, directors, business owners. But there will be a point in time when we will go on retirement and there will be only precious few people who had perseverance to really understand all those things by diving into obscure, historical manuals. |
A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design | The article focuses on "everyday object" manipulation, but he's right about technology too: there are a wealth of common HCI tools that glass cannot accommodate.- The textual keyboard remains one of the fastest methods of text entry. It can be used without looking, offers high bandwidth, affords both serial and chorded inputs, and works well for precise navigation in discrete spaces, like text, spreadsheets, sets of objects like forms, layers, flowcharts, etc.- MIDI keyboards are comparable, but trade discrete bandwidth for the expressiveness of pressure modulation.- The joystick (and associated interfaces like wheels, pedals, etc) are excellent tools for orienting. They can also offer precise haptic feedback through vibration and resistance.- The stylus is an unparalleled instrument for HCI operations involving continuous two dimensional spaces. It takes advantage of fine dexterity in a way that mice cannot, offering position, pressure (or simply contact), altitude, angle, and tip discrimination.- Trackballs and mice are excellent tools for analogue positional input with widely varying velocities. You can seek both finely and rapidly, taking advantage of varying grips. Trackballs offer the added tactile benefits of inertia and operating on an infinite substrate.- Dials, wheels. A well-made dial is almost always faster and more precise than up-down digital controls. They offer instant visual feedback, precise tuning, spatial discrimination, variable velocities, can be used without looking, and can be adapted for multiple resolutions.- Sliders. Offers many of the advantages of dials--smooth control with feedback, usable without looking--but in a linear space. Trades an infinite domain for linear manipulation/display, easier layout and use in flat or crowded orientations.And these are just some of the popular ones. You've got VR headsets for immersive 3d audio and video, haptic gloves or suits, sometimes with cabling for precise pressure and force vector feedback, variable-attitude simulators, etc. There are weirder options as well--implanted magnets or electrode arrays to simulate vision, hearing, heat, taste, etc...Dedicated interfaces can perform far better at specific tasks, but glass interfaces offer reconfigurability at low cost. That's why sound engineers have physical mixer boards, writers are using pens or keyboards, artists are using Wacom tablets, nuclear physicists are staring at fine-tuning knobs, and motorcyclists are steering with bars, grips, and body positioning; but everyday people are enjoying using their ipad to perform similar tasks.Glass isn't going to wipe out physical interfaces; it's just a flexible tool in an expanding space of interaction techniques. More and more devices, I predict, will incorporate multitouch displays along dedicated hardware to solve problems in a balanced way. |
HN: Please replace grayarrow.gif with Unicode character ▲ | Very good proposal. There are more unicode symbols to choice from: http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/geometric_shapes.htmlDown arrow/triangle: ▼It is not only matter of resolution but I personally like bigger fonts and have zoomed in HN so triangles look bad:http://i.imgur.com/fpA7N.png |
The DDoS that almost broke the Internet | What are the incentives for the maintainers of open DNS recursors? How can we alter their incentives so that they can no longer be used in DNS amplification attacks? |
Drug Goes from $13.50 a Tablet to $750, Overnight | I am a fund manager and I have followed Martin Shkreli since his prior company, Retrophin, went public about two years ago. Simply put, Martin is a sociopathic criminal with a well-established, and consistent track record of deceit, recklessness, failure, and just plain old stupidity. But he is also hyper-aggressive. He is currently living in Switzerland, and it's my understanding that he fled the country in order to avoid prosecution and asset forfeiture.Anyway, Martin is running the same playbook at Turing that he did at Retrophin, which is to find some old orphan drug and raise the price by orders of magnitude. It's believed insurers won't have a choice but to pay since there are no competitors. If you want to see how this has worked out in the past, feel free to google "KV Pharmaceuticals Makena" which did something similar a few years ago, only to have it bankrupt the company (which would be an outcome completely consistent with Martin's history and tactics).For a fun read, check out the lawsuit filed against him by Retrophin. In all my years of investing, he is one of the most unique scumbags I've ever come across.http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1438533/0001193125152... |
Google Puts Boston Dynamics Up for Sale in Robotics Retreat | This is surprising to me. It seems that many prominent Googlers are very optimistic about robotics.For example, in the FAQ of Jeff Dean's recent talk in Seoul, he mentioned how Deep Learning has a lot of potential to reinvent the field of robotics. Also, Demis Hassabis recently tweeted about progress in learning 3-D environments. I'd be surprised if Google wasn't looking into general purpose robotics...Perhaps Google is disappointed in their robotics acquisitions and wants to start from scratch? It seems that they are farther on the software front than anyone at the point. I wonder what they'll do in their hardware/power divisions...(Also, it kind of seems like Tesla and Google are on a crash course here. Tesla is ahead in power/hardware and is developing a top-tier AI team for self-driving cars. Elon also seems very interested in Robotics + AI. Google seems to be working from the opposite end.) |
Infinit announces Project Dropboxe | Both of them remind me Plan 9's "single most important feature"[1]:> all mounted file servers export the same file-system-like interface, regardless of the implementation behind them. Some might correspond to local file systems, some to remote file systems accessed over a network, some to instances of system servers running in user space (like the window system or an alternate network stack), and some to kernel interfaces. To users and client programs, all these cases look alike.And Rob Pike once said[2]:> When I was on Plan 9, everything was connected and uniform. Now everything isn't connected, just connected to the cloud, which isn't the same thing. And uniform? Far from it, except in mediocrity. This is 2012 and we're still stitching together little microcomputers with HTTPS and ssh and calling it revolutionary. I sorely miss the unified system view of the world we had at Bell Labs, and the way things are going that seems unlikely to come back any time soon.[1] http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/plan9.html[2] https://usesthis.com/interviews/rob.pike/ |
Bose Hearphones | Wow, this address a major problem I have.I have decent hearing, but when I'm in a noisy environment like a bar, I can hear but can't understand what other people are saying. It's why I don't like going to bars/pubs with live performances or ambient music.People think I'm bored or brooding because I'm not talking to anyone, but I just can't understand anything anyone says, so I can't participate in a conversation. |
George Orwell’s 1984 is currently the top selling book on Amazon | I must admit, I'm really confused by how impeachment works in the U.S.. Clinton was impeached for perjury and abuse of power because he took advantage of his position (and a political intern) and then lied about it.Now we have a president who is not giving up his business interests while in office and who has already told some absolute whoppers, including the release of official press releases that were nothing but "alternative facts". Why tell such obvious falsehoods? We're all laughing (nervously) now because the lies seem to be harmless, self-serving vain ones. However, is Trump just a little insane, or is he actually finding out who is willing to say "We've always been at war with Eurasia" and who isn't?This is probably a good time for people to be reading 1984. |
The Horror in the Standard Library | Actually it is C's malloc and free that is "broken". malloc() takes a size parameter, but free() doesn't. This imbalance means it can never be maximally efficient. Whatever GNU stdlibc++ is doing is probably, on balance, a net win for most programs.It's not exactly roses in C++ either of course. You can do better than the standard library facilities. Andrei Alexandrescu gave a great, entertaining, and technically elegant talk on memory allocation in C and C++ at Cppcon 2015 that is well worth watchinghttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIb3L4vKZ7U |
Hello, world: this is WikiTribune | As somebody who ran a (now defunct) journalism startup and is still heavily involved in crowd-sourced muck-raking: I think this is exactly the wrong approach to massively collaborative journalism.The thing we need _less_ of is "news". The thing we need more of is investigation. Even before the digital age, "news" was a way to sell paper with a mark-up. Now it's a way to sell eyeballs to advertisers. The fact that the fourth estate emerged was just a lucky byproduct of the "news" industry, even though it is the foundation of the modern respect for the role that journalism plays in society.When it comes to massively collaborative investigation, the key thing is _process_, not product. Even though it has been tried unsuccessfully or semi-successfully many times (ex, old school WikiLeaks, OpenWatch, WikiNews, MuckRock), I still think that this is absolutely the problem that should be focused on.The product of this investigation shouldn't be an article with mass market appeal, but really high-quality information that is useful for decision makers in relevant fields.I think in terms of what is needed of tools to be developed and used, the keys are: transparency, data science, and communications process. Various initiatives have been successfully cobbled together using Google Docs, Facebook and Slack, but these are usually projects with finite scope and a handful of participants. Nothing has ever come close to the kind of impact and reach that Wikipedia has had.I currently run the service https://pubmail.io as a tool for investigators and reporters to be more transparent in their email correspondence. Additional tools I'd like to see are tools for aggregating, combining and slicing relevant datasets for interesting patterns, and a central hub for mission-driven investigative collaboration. This is what my startup made, but it turns out that this is not a very capital-friendly or profit-friendly idea, so I think it would require a patron like Jimbo to really make this happen in a scalable, impactful way.Still, I wsh this endeavor all the best of luck and hope that it pushes the needle in the right direction. |
Astronauts escape malfunctioning Soyuz rocket | > There is already much discussion about the current state of Russian industry and its ability to maintain the standards of yesteryear. Whatever the outcome of the inquiry, this event will only heighten those concerns and will underline to the US in particular the need to bring online new rocket systems. These vehicles, produced by the Boeing and SpaceX companies, are set to make their debut next year.Is it just me, or is this unnecessarily hostile writing? This is literally rocket science, and the escape mechanisms seem to have worked perfectly. And at least the Russians do have (had) a working way to get stuff to iss, so I don't think these (uncited!) accusations are called for |
CenturyLink is blocking customer internet, saying Utah legislators told them to | And here we see the disconnect between what politicians say, and what they write into law.The bill's sponsor's response to the blog authors query:SB134 did not require that ...They were only required to notify customers of options via email or with an invoice.And here is the text of the statute that was written: (ii) A service provider may provide the notice described in Subsection (2)(b)(i):
(A) by electronic communication;
(B) with a consumer's bill; or
(C) in another conspicuous manner.
Note the difference in language breadth. Bill sponsor: "via email" - text of statute: "by electronic communication".And note clause (C): "in another conspicuous manner".Century link is notifing by: "electronic communications" (DNS hijacking to force viewing of the page is "electronic communications") and/or by "another conspicuous manner" (it is definitely "another" and it is clearly "conspicuous" (one will not miss it)).So, the fault here lies with the politician. He wrote a law that allowed Century link too much leeway to "do whatever they wanted to do to notify". If they were really only required to "notify ... via email or with an invoice", then clause (A) should have said "via email" and clause (C) should not have been present. |
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