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Apple Developer Documentation Is Missing
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Some time ago, I was contacted by Apple to apply for a job.
My code is insanely well-documented. I like to think that a lot of the inspiration for my code docs comes from Apple's open codebases. Their code is exceptionally well-documented.In any case, as is usual with all employers, these days, they completely ignored the focused, relevant links that I sent them to elements of my extensive portfolio of repos, and, instead, based the entire interview on a 50-line binary tree test in Swift.I'll make it clear that I'm NOT a fan of these. I am mediocre, at best, at them, as I don't come from a traditional CS background (I started as an EE).In any case, during the test, I did what I always do when I write code. I stopped to write a header document for the function.This was clearly not something the tester liked. Also, to add insult to injury, they dinged me for not writing a cascaded nil-coalescing operator. The code they wanted me to write was difficult to understand, and absolutely not one bit faster.What makes this even funnier, was that this was for an Objective-C job, and the links that I sent them (that they ignored), were to ObjC repos.After that, I just gave up on them. It kind of shows where a lot of this is coming from.Dynamically-generated documentation can be great (It's clear that the lions' share of Apple's developer documentation is dynamically-generated), but it requires a VERY disciplined coding approach. I suspect that they may be hiring less-disciplined engineers, these days.
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Being OK with not being extraordinary
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> Climbing to a higher vantage point can also unlock new forms of extraordinary that you might have never noticed before.I read an article once about how the amount of work to get into the top tier in a single area is astronomical, but the amount of work to become top tier in a combination of 2-3 fields is attainable by almost anyone.For example, becoming a top tier statistician is hard. But becoming a top tier statistician/programmer is easier. In other words, if you can get to a state where you know more statistics than your average programmer and more programming than your average statistician, then suddenly you are an above-average programmer/statistician. Keep improving those two skills and you may start to "unlock new forms of extraordinary". Or maybe you are a music teacher, and also pretty good at programming, and so you can make extraordinary music teaching software that is way better than the competition's because you understand the nuances of music teaching intimately enough that you capture them clearly in software requirements. Or maybe you are pretty good at art, pretty good at music composition, pretty good at programming, pretty good at story telling (not necessarily top tier in any one category though)... and you combine all of those skills to single-handedly create a game that by many measures is extraordinary[0][1].Something like that. Anyway, the point being, you may not be extraordinary in any one field, but it isn't too hard to achieve extraordinary things due to a combination of skills in multiple fields if you work at it.[0] https://undertale.com/[1] https://www.cavestory.org/
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Apple Announces App Store Small Business Program
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I’m seeing a lot of positive comments on HN about this: to me it seems to be purely a cynical piece of PR on Apple’s part.They hope to significantly reduce the pressure on politicians to take a close look at their App store practices by significantly reducing the absolute number of developers suffering the full impact whilst taking the minimum possible hit to their revenue. This has nothing to do with “doing the right thing” or “accelerating innovation” and everything to do with limiting the number of outraged letters to senators from devs, the number of newspaper interviews with prominent indie developers & so on.Indie devs have an outsize PR impact relative to their revenue contribution, so buy them off with a smaller revenue tax that delivers outsize returns if it prevents the 30% house rake on the majority of Apple’s App Store income coming under scrutiny.Apple / Google’s 30% take is the anti-competitive elephant in the room here, not a few crumbs thrown to small developers.
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Arecibo telescope, on the brink of collapse, will be dismantled
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The thing was iconic... even if not everyone watching/playing Goldeneye knew it was a real radio telescope, it was nevertheless one of those science megaprojects that featured prominently in the popular zeitgeist and got more than one young kid excited about what's out there in the stars.But infrastructure ages, and 60 years isn't a bad run. What comes next? Clearly there's going to be a capabilities gap for a while, but now that it's 60 years after its original design, what kind of design is going to replace it? Do we even need giant monolith dishes anymore?Hoping a radio astronomer can chime in here. For example, I know out in New Mexico they have a distributed array of dishes (literally called the "Very Large Array", oh scientific creativity [0]) where, my understanding is, a bunch of computers stitch together all the individual signals and effectively get a resolution better than any single dish can. Is a design like that now state of the art, or does a monolithic design like Arecibo still give capabilities unique to single large dishes?[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_Large_Array
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Intel Microcode Decryptor
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Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32145324, which was posted a bit earlier. Also the Github page is probably a better source than the Twitter one.
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Podman Desktop: A Free OSS Alternative to Docker Desktop
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Recently I started using colima[0], a drop in replacement for Docker Desktop on Mac, and have seen an increase in performance and battery life. You can use all the normal docker and docker compose commands.
It does not have a GUI but you can use the Docker extension on VS Code to have an overview of running containers.[0]https://github.com/abiosoft/colima
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How in-app purchases have destroyed the game industry
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I suspect many game developers find themselves in an awkward spot:1) People seem to balk at paying >$5 for a mobile or tablet game. (With some notable exceptions.)2) The $0.99 or $1.99 price point is not financially viable for most games.3) People do seem willing to purchase coins or lives or more daily playtime via in-app purchases. Some spend tens or hundreds of dollars on a single game.If you're building a game for a large company like EA, you're probably forced to take the most lucrative path. EA's not an atelier for starving artists. And if you're a small, struggling game studio, you probably can't afford to leave money on the table.So what's the solution? If people are unwilling to pay reasonable prices up-front for games, how besides in-app purchases does a game company profit from their work?This is an honest question, because I also generally hate how IAP is integrated into most games. I'd much rather pay up-front.
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New antibody attacks 99% of HIV strains
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Well, 99% means eradication of the virus very quickly. People won't become totally sexually irresponsible after the preventive shot, because there are many other hard to cure STDs now, especially as antibiotics are not as potent as they use to be, so i think there is no threat of 1960s style of unprotected sex wave.
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A military technique for falling asleep in two minutes
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Usually when I suffer from an inability to sleep it's because my mind ends up focusing too hard on things that ground me to reality. Existential dread, worrying about work, thinking about technical problems etc.So often my technique to fall asleep has been to focus my mind on the fantastical. Stimulate my imagination a bit, like what if I was a dwarf in a fantasy universe. This tends to focus my thoughts inwards and naturally segues into sound sleeping. Letting my mind wander only becomes an issue when it's anchored to real life.
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Programmers generate every possible melody in MIDI to prevent lawsuits
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It's about fourteen kinds of ridiculous, as summarized in other threads. No rhythms, no meter, no tempo, melodies are longer than 12 notes, it's diatonic, single octave, no concept of underlying harmony, the headline is literally false, etc.Some of the copyright lawsuits are dumb and this is effective satire or performance art but that's all it is.
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Tell HN: C Experts Panel – Ask us anything about C
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Now that C2x plans to make two's complement the only sign representation, is there any reason why signed overflow has to continue being undefined behavior?On a slightly more personal note: What are some undefined behaviors that you would like to turn into defined behavior, but can't change for whatever reasons that be?
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US regulators will certify first small nuclear reactor design
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"The SMR’s 12 modules, each producing 50 megawatts"So each module is a little smaller than the reactor of the 1960's era submarine I served on and is based on the same pressurized water technology. I was a "nuke" so had to go in the reactor compartment several times. As far as I can remember, the reactor was about 10 feet in diameter. We went in the shipyard for refueling after the lifetime of the rods, which was 15 years. I could never understand why we didn't build these for civilian use (cost I figured) but now we will. Cool.https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/news/2022/22-...
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Looking Forward: Support for Secure Shell
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For all Balmer's thing of dancing on a stage and chanting "developers", there was no point under Gates or he at which Microsoft felt like a pro-developer company.That has completely changed in the last eighteen months. Each time I think "wouldn't it be cool if" I'm finding a few weeks later that someone at Microsoft is well ahead of me. How much easier it will be to ship my sucky roguelikes to Windows users in this new world!Hmm. They can now have a path to obsolete cmd. As long as they ship a decent ssh client with the system, users will become accustomed to ssh-ing to their own box instead of using cmd.Wishlist: tmux, emacs, vi, netcat, shell option for vi-mode, rc-file with preferences, ncurses library, something simpler than curses, zip and unzip. 256 colour is fine, although 24-bit would be impressive. /proc would be cool, but also a big ask I assume. They already have a strong compiler. Make it really easy to find the hex fingerprint required to log on to the sshd-server. Something like inetd could be useful, too.
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Tracking friends and strangers using WhatsApp
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I suspect a fairly small percentage of users is active enough that you get usable hourly data.
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Facebook users in Romania see content related to street protests reviewed
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I'm a Romanian and I can confirm that posts and accounts have been blocked, probably because of being reported by the other side.On the other hand, folks, this is a little reminder that censorship is a doubly edged knife ;-) So next time you call for censoring "fake news", think again, because it's not you who will benefit from it.A couple of years back I was enthusiastic about the rise of social media for informing and coordinating citizens to fight injustice. Now that I'm older and wiser, I can tell you that no evolution or revolution can happen because of Facebook, only regression. Facebook is poison.
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Gitlab considers not hiring SREs and Support Engineers in China and Russia
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I am Chinese living in China. Nationalism is on the rise lately in China, not just for domestic reasons, but also as an reaction to nationalistic moves from "the West" like this one. It's a recurring theme, not just in governmental propaganda, but also in daily conversations, that "the West" would talk about fairness and justice then commit blatant discrimination and double standards.As a founder of a tech company based in China, I benefit from US companies blocking Chinese (and Russian) engineers; still I am saddened by this. I hope they could come up with more intelligent policies to protect their OPSEC.
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Apps Getting Worse
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The worst offender recently in my opinion is Spotify on desktop.It used to be that when you clicked on an artists page you would see all the music tracks listed. Now it's all buried deep in and you have to search through the individual albums. Even the list of albums itself is not shown on the main artist page, you have to click "See Discography" first.The "Home" page is even worse. Where is my discover weekly playlist? Sometimes it's near the top, sometimes it's in this "Made for you" section. Sometimes you have to click "See All" next to that to find it.I mean moving shit around when you update your software is bad enough. Spotify moves shit around every time you boot the app!
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A simple system I’m using to stay in touch with hundreds of people
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So he's treating people like assets, not friends, and these assets need to be checked on on a regular basis. If there were friends, he'd not need to be reminded of contacting them.He'd miss contacting them.So instead he needs a tool to remind him of that "friend" he needs to contact, because pretending to care is beneficial. One might some day need them.It's incredibly sad that his social life, or rather: the illusion of a social life, is being dictated by a machine.
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Why I will never buy another Samsung device
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I avoid all things Samsung for a much more important reason: They spy on you mercilessly, up to about the same level as Facebook.For example, they take screenshots of what you watch on your Samsung Televisions!Don't believe me? Take it from them: https://www.samsung.com/us/business/samsungads/resources/tv-... and https://www.samsung.com/us/business/samsungads/insights/You're not their customer, you're the product.Additionally, Samsung have a habit of releasing forced updates that almost-but-not-entirely brick their TVs, slowing them down to molasses. They do this right before the next model becomes available for purchase.Last but not least, a colleague worked there as a consultant, and his stories of their lax IT security were nearly unbelievable. Even though they spy on you like Google or Facebook, they are not like a FAANG when it comes to protecting your private info! They've been hacked for sure, probably by multiple nation state actors. Whatever you watch or do with their TVs is being relayed to the US, Russians, Chinese, or whomever. Assume that nothing you do with a Samsung device or Samsung software is remotely secure or safe.They're a slimy company made up of unscrupulous people trying to squeeze every last drop out of every rock.Don't give them your money. There are many other companies with much better track records.
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PhD Simulator
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I notice a lot of negativity and "do not recommend" regarding pursuing a PhD on HN recently. That raises the question: Why would you go for it?
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Displayport: A Better Video Interface
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With HDMI, I have both video and audio traveling over a single cable. That is _extremely_ convenient. DP _theoretically_ supports audio too, but AFAIK that's not widely implemented.
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This is a bit f'd, Quora
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I can't help bit feel vindicated by moves like this because they're a sign that Quora isn't the Next Big Thing that many inside the bubble that is Silicon Valley seemed to think it is (eg [1]).Actually Quora is better than that (for me) in that it's a double hit on the hype on both Q&A and social.These kinds of moves:- requiring login to view content;- partially obscuring content on Google results to maximize sign-ins; and- showing what you view to other people.come across to me as a company coming off hype and approaching a crunch point. I believe now, more than ever, than Quora will end up an acquisition for Google or Facebook or will simply slide into irrelevance.[1]: http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2010/08/23/the-power-of-q...
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Google Maps for iOS
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Wow. New GMaps totally annihilates Apple Maps in every which way. Not that this comes as a surprise...Navigation is great, so much better than Siri's dreadful voice, easy to navigate from A>B with a tap of your destination. Let's not even mention the street data.Great 3D flyovers, but no satellite-3D flyovers (if you're worried about that you probably have too much time to waste during the day - this is a maps app, to take you places, not give you a tour of Los Angeles).UI feels great - intuitive, fluid, multi-touch works fantastic. Heard someone mention that it "lacks polish" or feels "laggy" - not sure I agree with that - feels fast on an iPhone 5 and on a 4S side-by-side. UI is clean and not cluttered, that's a plus. Someone else mentioned that it's simply GMaps in a UIWebView - no chance for that.Of course, the public transport data is second to none. The data in general - we won't discuss that.Great release - welcome back
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Has the US become the type of nation from which you have to seek asylum?
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Americans might not realise this but we see the USA in the same light as China and Russia when it comes to freedoms. We might be wrong, but thats the perception myself and many other people from outside the USA see the current state of the situation.To think anyone would feel safe in the USA is ridiculous, the USA is one of the last places anyone should seek refuge in modern times. What scares me most is the United States influence inside Australia.
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Be My Eyes – Lend your eyes to the blind
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Nice idea, but I think it would be better if it were commercial, with the blind user paying, the sighted helper getting paid, and the app developers getting a cut. The payment could be by the minute. I think the general public will be more inclined to treat blind people as equals if we demolish the notion that blind people require charity.Addendum: Lest anyone think I'm talking out of my ass, here's a blog post from a blind programmer who previously had the idea of doing something like this as a business. Unfortunately, it looks like he abandoned that project, since the home page now redirects to something else.https://thewordnerd.info/2014/04/01/perceptron-the-first-rea...
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Dear Skype/Microsoft: Problems with Linux client
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Skype worked far, far better 10 years ago than it does today. From all indications I've seen, Skype is getting dramatically worse all the time. From a personal standpoint, it crashes for me multiple times a day and I can rarely get group calls working on the first try. Often Skype requires a force-quit and then it crashes twice more when it is being restarted. This is on Mac and Android.Fun fact: I have a friend who worked for Skype in Prague. He said the codebase is a true horror, an extreme mess, and that soon it would "reach a singularity" :-) He also said that there are whole parts of the codebase that he was not allowed to see, all indications pointing to stuff related to routing the traffic through servers of "the man" ;-)
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VLC 3.0 release
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VLC is one of those programs that has really proved itself a stalwart of the FLOSS community. I feel like VLC is in a rare category of software that is great because:1. It's existed for long enough that we know it won't just go away and break our hearts. (I used VLC to play videos on BeOS back in college in the late 90s.)2. No matter how many iterations it goes through, it's still intelligible to would-be time travelers from the past. I.e. didn't get caught up in the "must change the UX around for change's sake" epidemic that still seems rampant.3. It's always had acceptable performance, perhaps owing to being born in a time of no goddamned Electron apps.4. It's dependable across platforms, even platforms that I'm unfamiliar with or don't like. Need to play a video on Windows? I don't even know what crapware to download, because I download VLC, because I know VLC runs on Windows and will greet me as a familiar friend in this strange and foreign land.My hat is off to you, VLC!
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China to bar people with bad 'social credit' from planes, trains
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To me the principle of “once untrustworthy, always restricted” sounds like the beginning of a new caste system.Everyone's children are going to make mistakes. The wealthy are going to be able to cover up their children's mistakes, the poor are going to be put on 'the list' and become 'restricted.'The restrictions will grow, and eventually you'll have a new group of 'untouchables'
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I wrote Task Manager and I just remembered something
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More stuff like this needs to be recorded. It saddens me to think how much of this kind of stuff is already lost from earlier times in computing. A lot of interesting stuff like this is captured from the history of the Mac[1] and from Atari[2], but the "folklore" from so many other companies and products is being lost.Who are others who are doing this kind of work?[1] https://www.folklore.org/
[2] https://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/
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Google resumes its attack on the URL bar, hides full addresses on Chrome 86
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Something I haven't seen anyone here bring up yet: many URLs are meaningless to humans past the domain. For an example, look at the top of this page. The only semantic meaning in the URL for this post is `news.ycombinator.com`. The rest, `item?id=24156986`, is meaningless to a human. (But, of course, meaningful to HN's backend.) A lot of (most?) of the URLs on the web are not semantic. They're naked application look-ups. I claim that for this current page, there's no meaningful loss of information by just showing the domain.But some URLs are semantic. I think losing those would lose useful information for human readers. If we could perfectly know which URLs have useful semantic information for users and which don't, and then only present those with full semantic meaning, I wouldn't mind much.Main point: I see people saying things like "these designers think people are too stupid to understand URLS." But that ignores that some URLs are not actually meaningful to anyone.Anticipated responses:1. You are losing information by taking off the "application lookup" part: the information that an application lookup was made. Fair enough. But I claim it's a small loss.2. We can never perfectly separate out the URLs with useful semantic information. Which, also probably true. But I think we can do a decent job, and as long as the full URL is present when I mouse-over it, I probably wouldn't object.
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Advanced Compilers: Self-Guided Online Course
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I’ve worked on multiple compilers (optimizations expert) at MSFT on VS and CUDA and gave developed a DSL and worked on Database Compilers.
I can’t hire compiler people with right skills.
We’re building an IDE and those parsers are written differently, and we use Scala packrat parser combinators.
These courses teach very little judgement or industry relevant stuff. When do you use packrat parser vs LALR vs LL? Good luck hiring an engineer with advanced compiler courses knowing any of this.
I’d like to sit down all university professors who teach compiler courses and teach them a course on what’s relevant.
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Windows 11 calls a zip file a 'postcode file' in UK English
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I remember reading an interview with a British author, it might have been Neil Gaiman. He was just about to get his first book published in the US, and the American publisher contacted him and asked if it was OK if they changed a couple of British words to American, like "flat" to "apartment". Not wanting to risk the publishing deal, they said sure. A couple of month later they got the first edition of the US version back and found lines like."He looked out over the apartment landscape"and"'Come with me', he said apartmently"
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Comcast, CenturyLink fail to derail Utah community-owned gigabit fiber network
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I had a call with a Comcast sales/tech dude just yesterday. I really ripped into them. We pay $225/mo for coax 200/20 right now. They wanted more than $600/mo for fiber, didn't even say the speed, but I assume it was 1Gbps up/down. I have 10Gbps Sonic.net for $50/mo at home.Mostly what I spent time ripping on him for was not being able to disable SecurityEdge (DNS hijacking) and outages (~7 multi-hour ones this year). His only answer was "if you want an SLA you need to get fiber" which is 100% BS.The second there is an alternate (other than AT&T) I will jump to them. Too bad Sonic doesn't have fiber in my office area, but I hope they will at some point.Comcast is my 2nd most hated company. First is AT&T.
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ChatGPT’s system prompts
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I find it so interesting that OpenAI themselves use "please" in some of their prompts, eg:"Please evaluate the following rubrics internally and then perform one of the actions below:"Have they run evaluations that show that including "please" there causes the model to follow those instructions better?I'm still looking for a robust process to answer those kinds of questions about my own prompts. I'd love to hear how they make these decisions.
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My experience with using cp to copy 432 million files (39 TB)
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I would probably have used tar|tar for this, or rsync.
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CocoaPods downloads max out five GitHub server CPUs
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From CocoaPods.org:> CocoaPods is a dependency manager for Swift and Objective-C Cocoa projects. It has over ten thousand libraries and can help you scale your projects elegantly.The developer response:> [As CocoaPods developers] Scaling and operating this repo is actually quite simple for us as CocoaPods developers whom do not want to take on the burden of having to maintain a cloud service around the clock (users in all time zones) or, frankly, at all. Trying to have a few devs do this, possibly in their spare-time, is a sure way to burn them out. And then there’s also the funding aspect to such a service.--So they want to be the go-to scaling solution, but they don't want to have to spend any time thinking about how to scale anything. It should just happen. Other people have free scalable services, they should just hand over their resources.Thank goodness Github thought about these kinds of cases from the beginning and instituted automatic rate limiting. Having an entire end user base use git to sync up a 16K+ directory tree is not a good idea in the first place. The developers should have long since been thinking about a more efficient solution.
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BYOT: Bring your own team
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There are already groups that function this way, they are called consultants. If you are a high functioning team and want to keep working together, then form a consultancy together. You will probably get paid more over time.The idea that all will be hired or none will be hired is kinda odd as well. You are ceeding your career to bunch of other people in a non-entrepreneurial way. You are doing more work, giving more to Stripe than you are getting back. You are lowering their risk and not being compensated for that. Neither as a team nor as individuals.It'd be interesting if you could collaborate and bid for your salaries as a group and/or make sure everyone got at least a minimum. It would be a failure if everyone in the group got the same amount.The collective bargaining that would go on would be force multiplied in either direction. Either people wouldn't negotiate and companies like Stripe would get a great bargain of a team that already works together or they would get reamed as the team realizes that together they are more valuable than what they could bargain for individually.Lastly, it's probably a risky move in that if a group leaves one company together successfully, they are more likely to move on from the second company together as well. If they are all working on the same project, you could have a disastrous and instantaneous brain-drain.It's like building in a massive artificial bus factor into your company.If people took an adversarial or merely valued their small in-group more than the company, they could get hired as a group, build an important system for Stripe and then en-masse, quit to create a consultancy and have Stripe as their first (reluctant) customer because they have knowledge of an important subsystem. In fact, this would be an excellent way to launch a consultancy.Stripe, you may have opened a can of worms with this move. Teams hopping from startup to startup like individual employees do now would make startups even more chaotic.Maybe they are banking on the downturn and think they can get high quality teams on the cheap. Seems like a way to open the business to alot of risk.
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Grand jury subpoena for Signal user data
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It'd be better, of course, if we didn't rely on Signal not storing all that metadata and instead used a protocol which made it impossible for anyone to be in a position to choose whether or not to store it. Unfortunately, the protocols that enable truly traffic–analysis-resistant messaging (I believe the Pynchon Gate[1] is currently the best-of-breed) tend to have increased latency and consume greatly-increased bandwidth.I don't really know what the solution is, but I'm very uneasy about the central point of failure Open Whisper Systems is. Moxie's previous points about the difficulty of upgrading a federated protocol[2] are correct, but I think that despite the difficulty it's important to do.[1] http://freehaven.net/anonbib/cache/sassaman:wpes2005.pdf[2] https://whispersystems.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/
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NASA’s IMAGE satellite, lost since 2005, is alive
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Wow, I didn't know there was such a cool hobby out there waiting for me. I know nothing about modern radio scanning but I'm suddenly fascinated to learn.
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I found two identical packs of Skittles among 468 packs
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>So, what’s the point? Why bother with nearly three months of effort to collect this data? One easy answer is that I simply found it interesting. But I think a better answer is that this seemed like a great opportunity to demonstrate the predictive power of mathematics. A few months ago, we did some calculations on a cocktail napkin, so to speak, predicting that we should be able to find a pair of identical packs of Skittles with a reasonably– and perhaps surprisingly– small amount of effort. Actually seeing that effort through to the finish line can be a vivid demonstration for students of this predictive power of what might otherwise be viewed as “merely abstract” and not concretely useful mathematics.
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All problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone (2014)
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Sorry for the morbid take, but the reason why we cannot sit quietly alone is to distract ourselves from our eventual demise.
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Apple Joins Blender Development Fund
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It's great to see Blender get the support. The user numbers seem to be arcing upwards.https://www.blender.org/news/blender-by-the-numbers-2020/If you've ever had a passing interest in Blender or 3d modeling I recommend checking out the donut tutorial, which is fast becoming the "hello world" of blender -https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPrnSACiTJ4And check out all the donuts -https://www.reddit.com/r/BlenderDoughnuts/
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Overly analytical guide to escorting
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1,200 an hour!Jeez, that is insane! good for them.Once in a while, I come across something like this and wonder, what is it like to be that rich to casually drop 1,200 an hour, for anything, let alone on escorts.
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Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to election fraud charges
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It's weird that you can bribe individual EJ's in Philadelphia like this. In Chicagoland, every polling place has a team of 4-5 judges, and they all have to sign off on the final election result, and all the procedural steps that arrive at that number; every individual vote is recorded in the pollbook. I don't even know how you'd generate fake votes in the first place, even if you bought off all 4 EJs.You can't just make people up! Every vote is tied to a specific registration. We do same-day registration, but those votes are cast provisionally, with a paper log; there aren't many of them, and they can all be set aside and audited after-the-fact.You certainly can't just make up a final tally. The numbers from the individual voting machines and the paper ballots have to match up; we had to stay an extra 2 hours after the polls closed last time I did this (in 2020) because of an equipment screwup that kept us from doing the final certified count/reconciliation.
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Apple GPU drivers now in Asahi Linux
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Isn't it a shame (and waste of human life really) that everything has to be reverse engineered?
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Atom was archived today
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Sad to see this go. I was an early adopter of Atom, and I wrote two extensions for it, one of which while it was still in beta.The Atom developers made some technology choices that in retrospect were ill-advised, CoffeeScript being the worst of them and splitting everything into dozens of packages a close second. They tried to backpedal on both of these later on, but by that time VSCode, with its far superior engineering built around TypeScript, was rapidly taking over.Of course, the GitHub acquisition was the last straw, but to be fair Atom was already pretty dead by then.While the Atom project ultimately failed, it did give us Electron and Tree-Sitter, two technologies that will certainly outlive it.
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GoDaddy has not withdrawn its official congressional support for SOPA
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Ok, seriously, enough. SOPA isn't going to collapse in on itself if GoDaddy comes out swinging against it. This reminds me of the phrase "security theater" as applied to the TSA. This is "activism theater" -- it accomplishes nothing but it puts on a show and makes people feel better.Applying this pressure to your congressmen is the only real way to affect change. I've called each of mine and have the vapid "We're studying this closely" response letters to prove it. I agree that action against individual companies can be effective, but there is an extreme focus on GoDaddy like they're the linchpin of this whole thing, some kind of mob boss when they're just another company who has lent their weight to this legislation.
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OpenBSD will shut down if we do not have the funding to keep the lights on
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Just to make the call to action a little more direct, the donation link is here:http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/donations.html
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Show HN: New calendar app idea
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Hi all.
Just wanted to show you my latest side project (been working on it for a couple of years now). It's a calendar app with a twist.It's developed as a web app, thats wy it could be integrated directly on the landing page. It can also be run on any device directly from http://app.oneviewcalendar.comInstead of the traditional monthview and day view I have used a timeline that is zoomable and scrollable.
Give it a try, it's quite a different experience.Please leave me a comment :)
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Acing the technical interview
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In most cases when a company rejects you because of "culture fit", chances are there's something wrong with yourself. Not the other way around.Companies are NOT out there to bring you in, waste several collective hours of their employees time who could be working otherwise, just to reject you. They WANT You to pass the interview.If you don't pass the interview because they think you are not qualified, then that's something that can be fixed. You just need to study more and get more experience.But if you don't pass because you're not a "culture fit", it means you probably came off as a difficult person to work with. And this article shows why.
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YC’s Essential Startup Advice
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I am looking for startup advice for founders that don't want to build a billion-dollar company or need VC funding. How to efficiently target a local market? Or perhaps start a niche business that appeals to a small market.Every time I see a startup advice book, article, Stanford lectures, whatever it may be - it is always shooting for becoming the next Uber or Airbnb - including this article.
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US Customs Database Of Traveler Photos Was Hacked And Stolen
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> On May 31, 2019, CBP learned that a subcontractor, in violation of CBP policies and without CBP’s authorization or knowledge, had transferred copies of license plate images and traveler images collected by CBP to the subcontractor’s company network> CBP ... is closely monitoring all CBP work by the subcontractorWhat. In the private sector, they'd have been fired and probably legal action levelled against them. The CBP's punishment for this is 'monitoring'? Please tell me I'm reading this wrong...
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“Just walk out” technology by Amazon
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My biggest problem with this is that from what I can tell, the only way to know how much you're going to be automatically charged (as well as what items the tech thinks you're purchasing), is to go to a kiosk in the store and get a receipt. Which seems to completely defeat the convenience of just walking out in the first place.I wouldn't feel comfortable just walking out without knowing how much I'm going to be charged, so this tech is essentially useless to me.
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Write code. Not too much. Mostly functions.
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I would say functions are important, but absolutely pale in comparison to modeling[1].If you are unable to describe, on paper, what your problem domain actually is, then you have no business opening up an IDE and typing out a single line of code.I will take that further. If, with your domain model, you are unable to craft a query that projects a needed fact from an instance of the model, the you should probably start over. Dimensionality and normalization are a big deal with your model. You have to be really careful about nesting collections of things within other things if you want to allow for higher-order logic to project required views. This is something we struggled with for a really long time. Every rewrite conversation began something like "well customer and account need each other in equal measure...". And it took us god knows how many iterations to figure out the relationship should not be an explicit property either way.Put shortly, Modeling is the core of it all. Start with simple top-level collections of things. E.g. instead of modeling Customer.Transactions[], model Customers, Transactions and CustomerTransactions. This fundamental principle of keeping your model dimensions separated by way of relational types can help to un-fuck the most problematic of domains. These will start to look a lot like EF POCOs for managing SQL tables...At the end of the data, data dominates, and SQL is the king of managing data. If you embrace these realities, you might be encouraged to embed SQL a lot deeper into your applications. I spent a long time writing a conditional expression parser by hand. Feels like a really bad use of time in retrospect, but I did learn some things. Now I am looking at using SQLite to do all of this heavy-lifting for me. All I have to do is define a schema matching my domain model, insert data per instance of the model, and run SQL against it to evaluate conditionals and produce complex string output as desired.[1] https://users.ece.utexas.edu/~adnan/pike.html
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Why did I leave Google or, why did I stay so long?
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Another "leader" who complains about employees wanting work life balance and they are extremely entitled. These are the type of managers you want to avoid. I'm sure many Googlers are happy you left.
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ALiEn – a GPU-accelerated artificial life simulation program
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This is amazing. My question is whether there are emergent structures in a long-running sandbox environment? The videos that were posted appeared to have quite complex structures but it was unclear whether they were designed or if they "evolved" from earlier more-basic structures. Would be curious to get the author's take.
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DigitalOcean acquires CSS-tricks
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Good for CSS-Tricks team but
Why does DigitalOcean need it in the first place?Is it some kind of purchase of real estate for future permanent advertisement of DO?
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Column – a chartered bank for developers
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Hey founder (and OP) here. This has been a labor of love for the past few years and I'm super stoked on what we shipped. Would love any and all feedback, thoughts and questions!
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PostgreSQL reconsiders its process-based model
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I'm honestly surprised it took them so long to reach this conclusion.> That idea quickly loses its appeal, though, when one considers trying to create and maintain a 2,000-member structure, so the project is unlikely to go this way.As repulsive as this might sound at first, I've seen structures of hundreds of fields work fine if the hierarchy inside them is well organized and they're not just flat. Still, I have no real knowledge of the complexity of the code and wish the Postgres devs all the luck in the world to get this working smoothly.
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Want employees to return to the office? Then give each one an office
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People who like WFH will never want to return to the office unless perhaps the office is a 5 minute walk from home (they may be forced to, but they won't want to). For many people the time and cost savings of avoiding a daily commute cannot be offset by a nicer office.Those who are happy to return to the office in general are those who do not like WFH and prefer more contacts and a change of scenery.A nicer office makes things better but it will not change people's minds on WFH.
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API Design Guide
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Seems pretty good. Specifically this part of the guide is pretty well written: https://cloud.google.com/apis/design/resources. One thing that is surprising to me however is that their is no mention of using HTTP Status Codes in responses.
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Google plans ad-blocking feature in Chrome browser
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At first it sounds insane that Google would do such a thing since while ad blocking is growing, enabling the feature natively especially by default would incredibly increase the number of ads blocked.My guess is, that where other blockers by default can easily block all google ads, Chrome blocker would not block Google Ads because it would classify them as acceptable. And Google would then hope that people would use their built in blocker rather than downloading a third party extension which would highly likely block there ads. And if people have a built in blocker that blocks the mostly bad ads, the people would start to hate ads less and be okay with 'good ads'. Also since people wouldn't use third party blockers as much those companies would go out business more likely.It's a very risky move on Google's part, so would be a bit surprised if it happens. But doing nothing, is equally if not more risky in the long run for there business model.
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NSA’s top talent is leaving because of low pay, flagging morale, unpopular reorg
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It seems like it's pretty hard for the government to compete with private industry in compensation. Federal pay grades are capped by Congress, and the top grade is around ~$150k a year [1]. And note that since it's the top of the scale, you have to start people off lower so that there is salary progression.Pretty sure a top cryptographer or security expert should be worth several times that, especially if they are also dealing with classified information and safeguarding all the data collection (e.g. if the NSA is going to spy on us, wouldn't you like that to be as secure as possible?).This is another reason why we're going to enter an era of corporate feudalism. There has been a cycle of:1. perception of gov't incompetence2. normal people ask 'why are we paying people so much for doing a bad job?'3. gov't pay scales fall further behind private industry4. rise in relative mediocrity5. repeatI think voters largely don't realize how much competence actually costs in the market now and will vent about their justified perceptions of inequality by preventing equalization of pay between the gov't and private sectors, but that will paradoxically just make things worse in the long run as the private sector snaps up all the talent and we end up with a barely-functioning federal bureaucracy.[1] http://work.chron.com/nsa-pay-scale-16399.html
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Teenager Finds Classical Alternative to Quantum Recommendation Algorithm
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Scott Aaronson posted about this on his bloghttps://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3880I like his update - a message to Hacker News commenters:"On the Hacker News thread, some commenters are lamenting that such a brilliant mind as Ewin’s would spend its time figuring out how to entice consumers to buy even more products that they don’t need. I confess that that’s an angle that hadn’t even occurred to me: I simply thought that it was a beautiful question whether you actually need a quantum computer to sample the rows of a partially-specified low-rank matrix in polylogarithmic time, and if the application to recommendation systems helped to motivate that question, then so much the better. Now, though, I feel compelled to point out that, in addition to the potentially lucrative application to Amazon and Netflix, research on low-rank matrix sampling algorithms might someday find many other, more economically worthless applications as well."
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Firefox desktop market share now below 9%
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Reading this breaks my heart. I have been a Firefox user for almost a decade now and I have good and bad memories with it. Since Quantum release my experience with FF has been nothing but exceptional. On a general day I have around ~15 pinned tabs and more than 50 other tabs open and FF handles it like a breeze. The memory usage is good given the fact that my workload is heavy. On a dual-core machine, I am able to restart FF under ~3 seconds.I have read comments in this thread suggesting that FF's performance is not that snappy but I cannot seem to notice any difference. Maybe my dev senses are not that strong ... maybe the benchmarks do show a difference but I have never felt FF to be any less performant than Chrome.I am tired of listening to people screaming their lungs out about privacy when their actions don't reflect their opinions.
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When will Google shut down Stadia?
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I understand the cynicism of this community to Stadia but implore you all to think a little broader.Stadia is different, with this product Google is trying something really innovative. For one, the fact that Stadia actually costs money should be a signal of Google's long term ambition here. Yes, Fiber also cost money but was bogged down by the hell that is infrastructure development.Stadia will require a substantial engineering effort from Google to make this work. The latency and network requirements are a great test to gauge network requirements as we move into 5g, AR, and self driving cars.Gaming is huge and if Google can be the first to provide (viable) steaming as a service they can really threaten some of the incumbents like Twitch, Sony, Microsoft, etc.Obviously Google doesn't have the best track record here but I'm excited to see them tackle this challenge.
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Facebook iOS SDK Remotely Crashing Spotify, TikTok, Pinterest, Winno and More
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For those wondering why the Facebook SDK is so widely used in popular mobile apps: Facebook Login is actually in the minority of reasons to add the Facebook SDK to your mobile app. The vast majority of apps will add the Facebook SDK because it contains Facebook App Ads; a library that "completes the circle" in terms of finding out how effectively the ads you ran on Facebook were at getting people to download, install and run your mobile app. So really the Facebook SDK is there to collect data of that advertisement being effective and provides both Facebook and the mobile app developer with knowledge of how their ad spend went.Is that "spyware"? Some would call it merely wanting to know if your marketing budget was wisely spent - I suppose a lot depends on what data it collects on people.More info: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/app-ads
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DuckDuckGo browser seemingly sends domains a user visits to DDG servers
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DuckDuckGo staff here. As mentioned in the linked page, the purpose of the request is to retrieve a website's favicon so that it can be displayed in certain places within the app or on the results page. We use an internal favicon service because it can be complicated to locate a favicon for a website. They can be stored in a variety of locations and in a variety of formats. The service understands these edge cases and simplifies retrieval within our apps and our search engine.Like our search results, the favicon service adheres to our strict privacy policy[1] in that the requests are anonymous and we do not collect or share any personal information.[1] https://duckduckgo.com/privacy
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Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests
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It's not surprising that every time Telegram pops up here, many comments miss the fact that Telegram has a great UX, a great feature set and also provides the kind of privacy protestors value, i.e., not having their phone numbers flashed to every random stranger in groups or to random channel owners whose channels you've subscribed to. With Telegram you cannot even do a phone number enumeration attack (this can be changed in settings) by adding phone numbers to your contacts list to find out who's using it.And nope, Signal doesn't make the cut for the above reasons because it exposes your phone number to everyone else. WhatsApp is the same in this respect. Neither of them prevent enumeration attacks (they may slow that down a bit, but not sufficient enough to protect against state actors).Wire and Element (Matrix) are comparatively better than Telegram, Signal and WhatsApp because you don't need a phone number to sign up and they also have end to end encryption for all chats (with Element it's a bit more recent). Hopefully more people can soon ditch phone number based apps that cause them to be vulnerable because of that vector.
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Don't End the Week with Nothing (2014)
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"Don't try to make a career out of optimizing the SQL queries to display a preference page on a line of business app at a company that no one has ever heard of. That is not the straightforward path to having other people learn you are capable of doing meaningful work."This is so sad. Optimizing that SQL might require being really clever and can bring enormous value for the company that maybe nobody heard about but might be providing some not so sexy but useful service for half of the country.I've never heard about company that is building software that runs nearby power plant, but certainly this company is much more useful and have more positive feedback for the society than something "sexy" like Facebook.
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“Great resignation” wave coming for companies
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> Surveys show anywhere from 25% to upwards of 40% of workers are thinking about quitting their jobs.This number is meaningless without previous year trends. In my circles, everyone from 25-35 is simultaneously preparing to FIRE and no-one that's 35+ has actually changed jobs despite being 'financially independent'. Expressing intent to resign, and actually resigning are completely different things. (edit: to clarify, I mean changing jobs specifically in the context of making inroads toward the retire early portion of their goal. Changing jobs to increase compensation is as strong as ever)Real Translation: Covid has made people miserable in their jobs. The only way people can keep going is idle fantasies about a nondescript future date where this suffering ends.> Workers have had more than a year to reconsider work-life balance or career pathsIMO, over the last year, people have only dived deeper into their delusions and relative sense of privilege. Suddenly, having good health insurance, WFH 'flexibility' and a stable jobs are now being viewed as things to be grateful about rather than the norm for well educated and employable adults.> "Hopefully we’ll see a lot more people in 2022 employed and stable because they're in jobs they actually like," she says.Press 'X' to Doubt
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Almost everything on Amazon is becoming an ad
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Amazon is unusable at this point, and I don’t get how they have so many customers. Free and fast shipping is no longer exclusive to them, and there are others out there with far nicer websites and no shitty ad listings.
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Google supercharges machine learning tasks with TPU custom chip
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I'm happy to hear that this is finally public so I can actually talk about the work I did when I was at Google :-).I'm a bit surprised they announced this, though. When I was there, there was this pervasive attitude that if "we" had some kind of advantage over the outside world, we shouldn't talk about it lest other people get the same idea. To be clear, I think that's pretty bad for the world and I really wished that they'd change, but it was the prevailing attitude. Currently, if you look at what's being hyped up at a couple of large companies that could conceivably build a competing chip, it's all FPGAs all the time, so announcing that we built an ASIC could change what other companies do, which is exactly what Google was trying to avoid back when I was there.If this signals that Google is going to be less secretive about infrastructure, that's great news.When I joined Microsoft, I tried to gently bring up the possibility of doing either GPUs or ASICs and was told, very confidentially by multiple people, that it's impossible to deploy GPUs at scale, let alone ASICs. Since I couldn't point to actual work I'd done elsewhere, it seemed impossible to convince folks, and my job was in another area, I gave up on it, but I imagine someone is having that discussion again right now.Just as an aside, I'm being fast and loose with language when I use the word impossible. It's more than my feeling is that you have a limited number of influence points and I was spending mine on things like convincing my team to use version control instead of mailing zip files around.
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The Best Textbooks on Every Subject
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How do I re-learn math up to a level just before say a US undergrad in Math?I hated math when I was in secondary-school, but loved computers so did a computer science course which was heavy-ish math in its final year.Passed that course and now am in a pretty decent programming role, but I feel like my maths is just built on such a shaky foundation that I maybe could improve my programming and problem solving if I solidified the base.Is there any one text book I could get which would teach me up to that level of Math?I suspect no, because Math is so broad, but generally if I could get an entire pre-university schooling in Math I would be very happy.
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SQL Murder Mystery
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I always wanted do invest my 20 hrs into SQL.I've already put 10 with a data analyst course so i know what a sqlite , select and joins are. I've created a not trivial query once.
Is this OK for learn some more ?
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Apple and Google partner on Covid-19 contact tracing technology
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Promising opt-in is a bit disingenuous. These tech giants are creating a technological capability. Whether or not it is opt-in, opt-out or mandatory is then decided by governments, now and in the future.This is of course nothing new. But it's worth noting considering how high the tolerance for extremely intrusive government action currently is and how extremely weak any resistance is bound to be.I'm not saying I'm against contact tracing in the current situation. But that shiny new button that governments get to press will never go away.Edit: Reading the spec, I found a piece of information that may be of interest: This technology allows contact tracing without necessarily revealing the location where that contact has taken place. So that could indeed be a privacy benefit over alternative approaches.https://covid19-static.cdn-apple.com/applications/covid19/cu...
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Duke Nukem 3D Mirror Universe
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That's one of the things I loved most about games in the 90s. Everything is a pile of hacks and tricks.I remember doing "reverse engineering" on a bunch of those as a kid and I can definitely attribute my passion for software to those experiences.I was actually feeling a bit disconnected from my career at the moment and reading this thread awakened some of the excitement that was sleeping inside me! The 90's are a huge source of nostalgia for me.Edit: It reads better in a thread reader such as https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1372766463556083715.html
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Tether starting to lose its peg too, after Terra did
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The fact that they've been minting billions of tether without collateral should make it abundantly obvious that this isn't a stablecoin and never had been. Anyone can pretend to have a peg in the good times, that doesn't mean there's really a peg or that the peg will remain in bad times. And if you can't count on the peg in bad times, it's not a stablecoin. If you've been honestly working on the assumption that it is, then you deserve to lose your (real) money to some crypto VCs on an island somewhere.And this doesn't only apply to crypto, look at how many countries with currency pegs can maintain that when their economy turns down, and then look at how many people actually seek to own the currency at that point rather than a currency backed by something (like a gigantic economy).
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We're going to need a lot of solar panels
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We're going to need a lot of solar panels and an efficient way to transport power from a very sunny place to another location where the loads are.For instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_DC_IntertieThe pacific DC intertie right now often ends up being used to transport power from hydroelectric dams in WA/OR to California. But there's nothing to say that something couldn't function the other way if there was enough willpower and budget to cover, for instance, a huge chunk of the desert near Edwards AFB in CA with hundreds of megawatts of photovoltaics.I searched for "high voltage DC" in that article and didn't see a mention of it, or anything much else about long distance transport of power.The technology now exists to theoretically cover many hundreds of square km of Libya in photovoltaics and take the electricty to Europe through a sub-sea cable, or series of cables. It's a matter of the political will and budget to do it.https://powertechresearch.com/the-worlds-longest-submarine-h...
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Lisp-powered laptop with a battery life measured in years
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Hey HN! This is my project. Hope you find it interesting. AMA.
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As I am currently in a war zone, I don't have many options for cabling
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The risks of using steel cable for power are going to be corrosion/rust. The primary way this will cause problems is around connections, but long term it is also an issue away from connections. At connections, corrosion can cause the wire to become loose, something like ox-gard can be used to delay this significantly. It isn't designed for steel but some kind of protection must be done at connections or arcing will be a major risk. Longer term the wire itself will rust, and at some point the conductive cross section of the wire will be compromised to the point it overheats and melts. This might be a year and it might be 100 years depending on factors which are hard to predict and control.TLDR: connections must be protected by some kind of anti oxidation coating, if you have nothing else use grease but something designed for electrical connections is better. If you have nothing else, melt some lead and dip the exposed part of the wire in that to coat it. Lead should be readily available in a war zone? Long term the wire WILL melt at some random point along the wire so it is much better if this wire is kept away from anything flammable.
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Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?
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Yes. I feel like we're in the dark ages right now.JavaScript - Dynamically typed, does not scale what so ever. Code written in it becomes 'read only' very quickly. Impossible to refactor.CSS - Also becomes impossible to manage. Who knows if the class you wrote is or isn't being used in HTML or JavaScript somewhere. Same problem, read-only, it only gets bigger and more unmanageable.HTML - At the heart of it, the foundation is the layout engine and positioning, and it sucks. Flexbox was supposed to bring sanity, but I feel like we're still waiting on it.Put these three stooges together and you get where we are today. Rewriting the same damn app every year in another framework in what can only be described as some sort of high paying purgatory.
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Tesla reports first quarterly profit in more than three years
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Really great news! But something that shouldn't be overlooked is the discounts they gave in Q3 to push deliveries up.First, those that know me know that I am a Tesla FANATIC. My girlfriend once challenged me to not talk about Tesla (motors, energy, something) for a 24 hour period. I dunno if I've ever done that honestly. I'm also an owner (no surprise given my fanaticism, lucky to be able to afford one). And I also own some TSLA.Elon sent a company-wide email in Q3 to push sales to show profitability. I don't think its a fluke but they did something they never really do to help reach this number: they offered significant discounts on vehicles (new, pre-owned, showroom). Like, really big discounts (relative to the price of the car).That certainly helped. Elon also sent an email at the start of Q4 that NO MORE DISCOUNTS are allowed. So I'm really very interested to compare Q3 to Q4 when that comes.I also happen to know a lot of the people who bought a heavily discounted Tesla in Q3 feel kind of burned that right at the beginning of Q4 Tesla announced the new Autopilot hardware (that isn't retrotfitable on old vehicles). If you did your homework on Tesla though, this wasn't a surprise. It was expected that Tesla would make some big announcement to spur Q4 sales especially after Elon said there wouldn't be any capital raises in Q4 while he expected to hit Q4 numbers. You generally can't do that without some big news.Just wanted to color this news with that. I'm still very excited!
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RethinkDB versus PostgreSQL: my personal experience
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>Everything is an order of magnitude more efficient using PostgreSQL than it was with RethinkDB.A large part of the sales pitch of "NoSQL" was that traditional RDBMSs couldn't handle "webscale" loads, whatever that meant.Yet somehow, we continue to see PostgreSQL beating Mongo, Rethink, and other trendy "NoSQL" upstarts at performance, one of the primary advantages they're supposed to have over it.Let's be frank. The only reason "NoSQL" exists at all is 20-something hipster programmers being too lazy to learn SQL (let alone relational theory), and ageism--not just against older programmers, but against older technology itself, no matter how fast, powerful, stable, and well-tested it may be.After all, PostgreSQL is "old," having its roots in the Berkeley Ingress project three decades ago. Clearly, something hacked together by a cadre of OSX-using, JSON-slinging hipster programmers MUST be better, right? Nevermind that "NoSQL" itself is technically even older, with "NoSQL" systems like IBM's IMS dating back the 1960s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Information_Management_Sys...
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Canada legalises recreational cannabis use
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Meanwhile in Britain, the former leader of the Conservative Party, William Hague, spoke out and claimed that the war on cannabis had been "irreversibly lost".He was quickly shut down by Theresa May, who categorically ruled out legalisation or even decriminalisation [1].I don't understand how politicians can stand up and claim that legalisation would have substantial negatives, when every experiment with legalisation has been a success. It's the same blinkered thinking as the anti-gay marriage politicians claiming that it will cause the breakdown of families, or politicians claiming that universal healthcare in the USA clearly wouldn't work.Drug prohibition has been a categorical failure in every outcome it was intended to achieve. It has cost governments trillions of dollars and incarcerated millions, funded terrorism and civil wars, and caused the deaths of millions of people from both violence and drug related harm. Plus the harm caused by the demonisation of drugs that have potentially powerful positive effects as part of psychiatric treatment such as LSD and MDMA. All due to some concept that taking "recreational drugs" is a moral failing and hence should be illegal.At least society in genera has finally come around to realise that drug addiction and drug use are not moral failings (although my parents aren't quite convinced).Obviously we want to restrict access as much as possible to particular drugs, such as heroin or methamphetamine, which are so harmful and addictive that nobody should be using them, or GHB, where the potential for fatal overdose is so high. But penalising the end user is not the solution. People who want to take drugs will take drugs. I have never met somebody who has decided to not take a drug because it's illegal. Whether it was alcohol when underaged, smoking a joint, injecting heroin, or snorting cocaine. I know plenty of people who don't take drugs as a personal choice or because they get drug tested at work, but never was the law a reason why the abstained. It doesn't restrict supply either. Drugs are easy to find and readily available practically everywhere in the world, all that prohibition does is push up the price, fund criminals, and increase harm due to poor quality control and cut drugs.[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-44526156
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US Navy will replace touchscreen with mechanical controls on its destroyers
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Wait. Let me get this straight.Touchscreens, which are ideal for representing multiple user unterfaces in an intuitive way, but requiring constant visual contact are being replaced by a physical user interface that can be used by both touch, and memory?Why was touchscreen ever even a consideration for controls you're not looking at?Touchscreen is great for phones. It is awful for keyboards (see macbook pro). And if is even more awful for controls. Has nobody researched this before spending a few hundred million dollars?
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People kept working, became healthier while on basic income: report
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This is very misleading reporting. First: All studies so far show a pretty consistent ~10% work disincentive. This is what all the detractors say when they say it disincentivizes work. So how about this one? From actually reading the study's conclusion:> Slightly less than one-fifth were employed before but unemployed during the pilot (17%)So even worse than what we've seen so far. 17% dropping out of the labor market when its a short-term study is huge.For the ~10% figure, Chris Stucchio has a fairly succinct roundup of the work disincentive of other studies so far: https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2019/basic_income_reduces...~~~Personal opinion: If you consider multi-generational entrenchments of poverty as its own problem, worth serious merit, then the work disincentive could be a disaster. In UBI long run, the children of parents who have never worked are probably going to be at a large disadvantage. I think its already a problem today for children of SSI recipient parents (even compared to children of SSDI parents), but its not easy to prove.
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Activists rally to save Internet Archive as lawsuit threatens site
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I warned about this very outcome when they announced the initiative [0]. The Internet Archive is too big and too important to gamble on this short term of a win (giving everyone free and unlimited access to all books for a few months at most). Assuming the organization continues to exist after this ordeal, their entire board should step down for putting at risk one of the most invaluable archives in existence.I’m an executive board member for a much smaller IRL non-profit and could never imagine opening us up to such liabilities. I honestly cannot fathom how this came to pass.[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22732640
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Yt-dlp – A YouTube-dl fork with additional features and fixes
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haven't paid attention to this since all the drama last year but again - what are all of you using youtube-dl for? Archiving your channel subs?
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A lesson on the importance of encouraging your children with their projects
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This sort of story makes me sad. We don't have a tree house, we don't even have a tree. We don't have money to spend at the DIY store to keep the house in shape never mind making checkers boards for fun. I thought I was getting pretty good at quenching the covetousness that society seemed to have imbued me with but when one realises that stuff is needed for many uplifting experiences.Realising the great joy certain things brought me as a kid and realising that those things are beyond the reach of my kids ... Gah.A happy story made me sad; I'm too easily depressed.Aside: email games seems really retro.
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R.I.P. Ray Bradbury, Author of Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles
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He was the last of the giants, along with Heinlein, Clark and Asimov. As a kid in the 70s, I devoured their novels and stories from the 50s and 60s. Bradbury was probably the most sophisticated writer of the four, though I preferred Asimov's straightforward, techie prose more back then. But we did get to read Bradbury in school, while none of the others was deemed lofty enough for the curriculum (except Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, and that wasn't until college).
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Suite of 300 icons for web and user interface design
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Thanks for the link. Here's 5 Gigabyte free ui/icons/psd interface. http://www.bypeople.com/
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An Email Thread Between a Developer and Gigster
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That classic "well, nobody else has had a problem, so you must be the problem" response.I remember at one of my first jobs, myself and another programmer were working on a side project (outside of work hours, not using company resources in any way) that were considering monetising. Our contracts stated that the company we worked for owned all of our code produced in and out of working hours.We got to the business end of the project and decided to consult our workplace to find out how strict they were on this. The conversation with HR went something like this:> Us: Oh hey there, can you clarify clauses X/Y/Z in our contracts regarding ownership of code. We are working on a project we are planning on monetising at some stage and we need to know if the company is going to do anything about this. Our project has no conflicts of interest and we haven't stolen any IP of the company.> HR: Oh... We've never had a question like this before... We can't say exactly. We'd have to consult our lawyers.> Us: Cool - can you consult them and let us know what they say, please?> HR: Sorry, we can't consult them as they charge by the minute and it's too expensive to warrant a conversation with them.> Us: So... you're not going to answer our question.> HR: Exactly. You'll have to do it at your own risk.
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Has There Been a Nuclear Incident in the Arctic?
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I do have to complement the authors of this article. It presents the facts and leaves out political rhetoric and noise. I'm pleased with the title too; if the article were featured on a mainstream news site in the USA, it would have declared it as a definitive event and give a list of what products to buy from their advertisers.
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SQL: One of the most valuable skills
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SQL is a mind bender for me. I do a lot of work on Data, use python and pandas to do a lot of data magic, but the problem with me is my mind is too procedural in thinking.- Step 1
- Step 2
- Loop through results in Step 2
- Curate and finish output.I try very hard to transform the above steps into an SQL statement spanning multiple tables, but always fail and I usually fallback to python for manually extracting and processing the data.Does anyone else face this problem?Any suggested guides / books to make me think more SQL'ley ?
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How to Write Usefully
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PG speaks of writing usefully while not writing well. Many of his sentences are phrases. The subject of his sentence is often unclear. He begins sentences with the preposition, "But". Yet, his writing remains useful. I'd rather the latter than the former if I had to choose, but considering the volume that he writes, it's surprising that he hasn't put effort into writing well. He just doesn't care to improve his work.
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WireGuard 1.0
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Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22724768, which was posted earlier.
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You can bypass YouTube ads by adding a dot after the domain
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Tangential rant: I hate it when sites ask for your domain name (eg. for setting up hosting) and say that they want the "fully qualified domain name", but they don't actually accept the FQDN. eg. they reject "www.example.com.", but accept "www.example.com" (without the trailing dot). But the FQDN by definition includes the trailing dot. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fully_qualified_domain_name
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An incomplete list of skills senior engineers need, beyond coding
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> How to explain a technical concept behind closed doors to a senior person too embarrassed to openly admit that they don’t understand itThis list should also include: How to admit you don't know something as a senior engineer and learn from junior engineers who are closer to the new technologies.As a junior engineer I found that I respected senior engineers more when they asked me to teach them something they didn't know.As a senior engineer I feel like I get a lot more respect from the junior engineers when I just admit, "I don't know that can you teach me more or point me at some good resources?". For that matter, I get a lot more respect from other senior engineers when I give them exactly the same response.
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Everything with a battery should have an off switch
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Examples lying around in my house:Bathroom scale: lovely it powers up when you tap it, but eats up 2 button cells a year for a few dozen uses a yearKitchen scales, bit more use, at least once a day but again 2 button cells a yearelectronic caliper: Same, eats up 1 button cell a year, just sitting in my toolboxStrangely enough none of our kids toys with batteries seem to suffer from this problemHow much extra cost does a hard on/off switch add to the bill of materials?
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