prompt
stringlengths 0
90
| completion
stringlengths 1
26.3k
|
|---|---|
Goodbye, data science
|
> Nobody knew or even cared what the difference was between good and bad data science work. Meaning you could absolutely suck at your job or be incredible at it and you’d get nearly the same regards in either case.In my experience it's even a little bit worse than that. Approaches that are wrong from a statistics point of view are more likely to generate impressive seeming results. But the flaws are often subtle.A common one I've seen quite many times is people using a flawed validation strategy (e.g. one which rewards the model for using data "leaked" from the future), or to rely on in-sample results too much in other ways.Because these issues are subtle, management will often not pick up on them or not be aware that this kind of thing can go wrong. With a short-term focus they also won't really care, because they can still put these results in marketing materials and impress most outsiders as well.
|
A hacker's guide to language models [video]
|
Thanks a lot for this video, best LLM usage tutorial I've seen so far.At https://youtu.be/jkrNMKz9pWU?si=Dvz-Hs4InJXNozhi&t=3278 when talking about valid use cases for a local model vs GPT4 is: "You might want to create your own model that's particularly good at solving the kinds of problems that you need to solve using fine tuning, and these are all things that you absolutely can get better than GPT4 performance".In regards to this, there's an idea I've been thinking about for some time: Imagine a chatbot that is backed by multiple "small" models (such as 7B parameters), where each model is fine tuned for a specific task. Could such a system outperform GPT4?Here's a high level overview how I imagine this to work:- Context/prompt is sent to a "router model", which is trained to determine what kind of expert model can best answer/complete the prompt.- The system then passes the context/prompt to the expert model and returns that answer.- If no expert model is found, just use a generic instruct tuned general purpose LLM to answerIf you can theoretically get better than GPT4 performance on a small models fine tuned for that task, maybe a cluster of such small models could collectively outperform GPT4.Does that make sense?
|
I was annoyed with sites asking for too many Facebook privileges and made this
|
I hate the security model where all the permissions are requested up front, and you have to approve them all (e.g. Android and Facebook without this plugin).All permissions should be off by default, and the user should be asked the first time a permission is needed to perform an action (a'la GPS on iphone) - at least that way you know what it wants the permission for, and the app can gracefully handle rejection.
|
Make the Metric system the standard in the United States
|
Before we start with the standard junk about "imperial measures are better because they are easier to understand / better suited to human scale / etc." can I say nope.The only advantage that imperial measures have (for some) is that they are familiar. That's the sum total of it. People where were raised metric find these apologies for imperial measures to be pure gibberish.
|
Seymour Papert has died
|
Just yesterday I finished "Turtles, Termites and Traffic Jams" by Resnick who builds heavily upon Papert's work.Mindstorms is on my backlog.I have fond recollections about my first contact with Turtles. It didn't shape me or anything like that, but I'd like to take Logo out again and play with it.Is there a recommended modernish Logo (running on Windows), or should I simply go to Processing?
|
Python moved to GitHub
|
Part of Github's secret sauce: Web source tree browsing that's front and center, that's relatively decent, with OK search. (versus making the log/history the central part of the Web UI as other tools seem to do)There are SO many times I need a short peek at something, and am glad don't have to clone/download, etc.
|
Standard Ebooks: Free public-domain ebooks, carefully produced
|
BTW does Kindle let you load your own DRM-free ebook files instead of buying books on Amazon? I use a PocketBook (pocketbook-int.com) which emulates a mass storage device and lets me read everything. I once considered buying a Kindle but heard it won't let me load bare files this way. Is this true?
|
Issue 914451: Autofill does not respect autocomplete="off"
|
I guess this will lead to a horrible coding style where instead of having this in the form:
We will see stuff like this:
Where developers use some type of abstraction that generates a random id for each field and then assigns it to the original value server side or in javascript.Just like they already randomise asset filenames to avoid caching.
|
A 1/48 scale model of the SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket
|
This is all the more impressive when you realise all the design, build, programming, filming, editing and even the music is done by one guy. I highly recommend subscribing to his YouTube channel to keep up with his current project: https://youtu.be/eh8ic1-5wFo
|
Umami: Self-hosted open-source alternative to Google Analytics
|
Looks neat! will explore.Also, I did research on alternatives to GA few days back, might be helpful of someone:https://github.com/Open-Web-Analytics/Open-Web-Analyticshttps://matomo.org/https://github.com/matomo-org/matomohttps://github.com/usefathom/fathomhttps://www.goatcounter.com/https://plausible.io/https://github.com/PostHog/posthoghttps://www.usertrack.net/
|
Monolith First (2015)
|
A more common scenario I see is that people start with a monolith that ends up inheriting all the conceptual debt that accumulates as a project evolves. All this debt builds up a great desire for change in the maintaining team.A champion will rise with a clean architecture and design in microservice form that addresses all high visibility pain points, attributing forecasted benefits to the perceived strengths of microservices. The team buys into the pitch and looks forwards to a happily-ever-after ending.The reality though is that the team now has multiple problems, which include:- Addressing conceptual debt that hasn't gone away.
- Discovering and migrating what the legacy system got right, which is often not documented and not obvious.
- Dealing with the overheads of microservices that were not advertised and not prominent at a proof-of-concept scale.
- Ensuring business continuity while this piece of work goes on.I would propose alternative is to fix your monolith first. If the team can't rewrite their ball of mud as a new monolith, then what are the chances of successfully rewriting and changing architecture?Once there is a good, well functioning monolith, shift a subset of responsibility that can be delegated to a dedicated team - the key point is to respect Conway's law - and either create a microservice from it or build a new independent monolith service, which aligns more to service oriented architecture than microservices.
|
Life is not short
|
> You should organize each day as if it were your lastI never understood this. If you live every day as your last, surely you would only engage in short term pleasures instead of pursuing longer term hobbies/goals?
|
Photography for geeks
|
If anyone wants to move beyond using the "auto" setting on their camera (or phone), I would recommend the book Understanding Exposure by Bryan Peterson, the first edition of which was published in 1990:* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/142239.Understanding_Exp...The principles involved haven't changed much in the intervening decades; the current fourth edition was publish in 2016.If all you have is a phone you don't have to get new equipment: just perhaps a third-party 'camera app' that allows you manual control of aperture, shutter speed, ISO/sensitivity.Once you know how each of these settings alter the resulting photo you can use them to alter the composition of photos, which is a whole other craft.Edit: seems recent smartphones have little-to-no adjustable camera settings.
|
India ruling party's IT cell used AI to show smile on arrested protesters' faces
|
What's with India and the shift towards the right? I thought it had too many religions and different cultures to pull this off.
|
Reddit.com appears to be having an outage
|
Lots of speculation on Twitter about this—a failed attempt to re-open all closed subreddits and instate their own moderators. I can't imagine it'd be that, although I do enjoy the conspiracy, and more likely they were using the window of reduced traffic to make some larger changes and they went awry
|
Hackers manage to unlock Tesla software-locked features
|
I'm torn. On one hand, I absolutely think that a capability available in the vehicle/device when you purchased it should be available for you to use, and not behind a software lock (heated seats, etc). On the other hand, an "upgrade" or 100% new software delivered via OTA (self driving, etc) seems a little more like it should be a separate thing.
|
Confessions of an ex-TSA agent
|
Why we don't take a page out of the Israeli's book is beyond me. They have been dealing with this for much longer, have made the mistakes we are currently making, and have learned from them.Their airports don't have long lines and pat downs by ill-trained employees (lines of course exist, but they are shorter and not what we in the US are used to). Instead they hire fewer, educated and skilled persons, many of whom are, behaviorists to determine potential threats. It works; the last successful airport attack in Israel was in 1986, and they have prevented many since.I remember reading about this in an interview with an ex Israeli defense minister years ago, but I couldn't find that article. This one sums it up though: http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/01/11/yeffet.air.security.is...
|
Show HN: I've been writing daily TILs for a year
|
I don't understand the enthusiasm for this or the rampant forking going on.Most of these fall firmly under "let me google that for you." How do I check my Ubuntu version?
How do I split a tmux window?
How do I expand a clojure macro?
Repeat for 300 more easily google-able questions...
Actually I just realized, maybe I'm too old. If that's the case, here's a great tool: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=How+do+I+check+my+Ubuntu+version%3F
|
Smaller and faster data compression with Zstandard
|
The modern trend of compressors is to use more memory to achieve speed. This is good if you're using big-iron cloud computers..."Zstandard has no inherent limit and can address terabytes of memory (although it rarely does). For example, the lower of the 22 levels use 1 MB or less. For compatibility with a broad range of receiving systems, where memory may be limited, it is recommended to limit memory usage to 8 MB. This is a tuning recommendation, though, not a compression format limitation."8MB for the smallest preset? Back in the mid-2000s, I was attending a Jabber/XMPP discussion, about the viability of using libz for compressing the stream. It turned out that even just a 32kb window is huge when your connection server is handling thousands of connections at a time, and they were investigating the effect of using a modified libz with an even smaller window (it was hard-coded, back then).I know Moore's law is in ZStandard's favor w.r.t. memory usage (what's 8MB when your server's got 64GB or more?), but I think it's useful to note that this is squarely aimed at web traffic backed by beefy servers.
|
Suspicious court cases, missing defendants, aim to get webpages taken down
|
I know there's a few lawyers here. Assuming that these lawsuits were filed against non-existent defendants, and that the agreements from these "defendants" were actually written and submitted by the plaintiff -- What's the realistic punishment here? Would these false documents be sworn statements, and if so, would that put perjury on the table?
|
Taking PHP Seriously
|
I work on PHP at my day job (in a public company), before this, I came from Ruby, and .NET before that.I'm convinced the reason so many successful projects use PHP, is not because of any inherent nature of the language. I think it's the people who use it. They just don't care. A successful project needs to be started by someone that cares just enough, but not too much.If you're programming in PHP, you're not running around talking about "convention over configuration" giving talks, or trying to make your code beautiful. It's a garbage language, and you know it. But it allows you to get something up and running, so dang quick. You're failing while the other guy is still updating his gem file. You're advertising while the other guy is trying out some fancy new deploy script. You're incorporating feedback while the other guy is just starting to get to work. When he finally fails, he's used up half his runway, whereas you, the guy who didn't give a fuck about your code has gotten past that first failure, and are finally getting some traction.Hopefully, the next guy to join the company will clean up your shit. The other guys code may not look like shit, but it doesn't solve any useful problems... so they never got the chance to hire that next guy.
|
TLDR Stock Options
|
Yep, IMO unless you are a founder, if your company isn't one of the top companies of the decade your 4-6 years of pay-cut toil as an early employee will likely just not be worth it, at all.The expected value of working at an early startup gets overestimated, by a lot. If you're optimizing your career, either make the most you can at an established company, or start a startup.Or... work at an enlightened startup, that understands the state of affairs, and offers really generous lifestyle advantages - i.e. go work remotely for a couple months if you want, otherwise they are just exploiting misinformed young people and their founders likely have some ego issues.
|
Daniel Kahneman “I placed too much faith in underpowered studies”
|
People are starting to learn that the vast majority of "science" are poorly-controlled white papers that get accepted and are never looked at again unless it is by a group of replication-crazed people (or what I like to call "actual scientists") reviewing conclusions drawn from decades-old papers.Discouraging replication in the tenure track is a large contributor to this. "Novelty" is literally written in the "guidelines for authors" sections of many journals. They want the newest, brightest, most headline-catching "research" to disseminate. And so do the educational institutions. No wonder why the incentives are so perverse.On top of this, most accepted research is allowed to be published without open access, open data, open peer-review history (how many rounds did it go, what were the objections, how did the researchers answer them, etc), and with the aforementioned lack of replication.It's incredibly frustrating being someone who loves science, works in the field of science, and is skeptical about the system, which used to be a prerequisite and is now looked at like luddite behavior.
|
Valve Rolls Out Wine-Based “Proton” for Running Windows Games on Linux
|
I used to be a big Wine user back when I believed in the potential for a commodity Linux desktop for normal people. These days I can’t for the life of me figure out why someone would want to run games on Wine instead of dual booting to Windows when it’s game time.
|
Google paid Andy Rubin $90M while keeping silent about a misconduct claim
|
This is such a thorny ugly issue to which there are really no right answers. It should be very clear that using a position of authority to coerce someone into a relationship of any kind is wrong. But at the same time it's pretty much impossible to prevent people from dating within the work place. You simply spend to much of your life there for it to be at all realistic. Many relationships end poorly, regardless of the obvious incompatibilities of these sorts of power dynamics. It's guaranteed to be a mess more often than not. I'm honestly not sure how you both given people the benefit of the doubt (innocent until proven guilty) while also ensuring that predators aren't allowed to abuse the people around them. Andy Rubin sounds like a sleazy guy. Paying him lots of money to go away seems like a no brainer move here from Google's perspective, but I'm not sure what else they could have done.
|
Why is modern web development so complicated?
|
It doesn't have to be complicated, if you get support from above.A few weeks ago I launched a new web site for a health care company. HTML, PHP, CSS, and MySQL. No frameworks. No javascript. No garbage.It replaced a site that was a mess of javascript libraries on top of frameworks on top of a half dozen jquery version and on and on and on.The company administrators, doctors, practitioners, etc... are so happy with the new no-nonsense site that they raved to the parent company about it. The parent company's IT department looked into the site, asked me some questions about it, and yesterday I was been asked to do the same type of cruft-free rebuild of three other sites that the company owns.Not buying into the framework-of-the-day hype just landed me job security for the next two years.
|
Relativty – An open-source VR headset
|
This might be a fun weekend project to work on, but cannot be built for $200. The displays alone (and their driver PCB that accepts DisplayPort) cost $195. They are also not 2K but rather 1440x1440 (or 2.0736M pixels). Maybe the displays were cheaper when they built this. They also hookup a 6-axis tracking chip (MPU-6050) to an Arduino board and feed it to a PC via usb. Even if tracking was working perfectly, this would be a cut down version of an Oculus Go, which additionally has smartphone electronics integrated, can run VirtualDesktop, and can be had for $150 as of this moment.
|
Barcode scanner app on Google Play infects 10M users with one update
|
Even legitimate app developers have no incentive to keep their apps sterile. Someone just has to approach you with your 10+ million users barcode scanner app and offer you +50,000$ in order to install some automated ad clicker for them.Don’t be naive, the majority will accept the money and gladly.I believe that particularly makeshift applications such as e.g. barcode scanners are susceptible to this kind of overtake. Apps that offer what should have been offered by the OS vendor in the first place. Why should the app developer refuse the money if what their app offers will be incorporated in a next OS update by anyways? Why defend your mini-adapter-app in an ocean of mini-adapter-apps, with yours becoming so large just because of a random seed and path dependency?This can have a big impact for end users. Imagine an authenticator app ending service to all their users in such a scheme and how you will be cut out from all your accounts by this. How many authenticator apps do you have to use in parallel to mitigate this risk of a single point of failure?
|
Ask HN: Favorite Blogs by Individuals?
|
A couple of my favorite blogs- http://antirez.com/- https://martin.kleppmann.com/archive.html- https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing- https://ma.tt/- https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/- https://jvns.ca/- https://www.johndcook.com/blog- http://feross.org/- https://ridiculousfish.com/blog/- https://blog.andrewcantino.com/- https://nickcraver.com/blog/- https://blog.acolyer.org- https://blog.codinghorror.comI have been also building a developer blog aggregator called https://diff.blog to make it super easy to disover and follow dev blogs. Would love if you folks can give it a try :)
|
Sorry everybody, I failed with you
|
Seeing a lot of posts like this. Open source is wonderful in its way, but it's really not sustainable to work on projects that make money for other people - including big commercial interests - when they don't help out in any fashion. I'm not just talking money or contributions. I'm talking about simple acknowledgement: "we use project X" - even privately.A open source library that I worked on at Intel (the Hyperscan high performance regular expression library) had to shed most of its staff (including all the original folks who worked on it, including me). One of the big contributing factors was a sense that "well, who really uses this". The answer was "tons of people, including some major Intel target customers" but a number of Hyperscan users picked up the library and never told anyone (not asking for public plaudits, but even a private communication would have been something to show our management).When you can't even say "thank you, we're using your library now, it's great" in a goddamn email, don't be surprised when 75% of the people maintaining and advancing it don't have jobs anymore. Never mind paying money or contributing - even acknowledgement.Open source is a recipe for burn-out. If something is important to people - especially corporate interests - there needs to be a way of getting paid. Much as I dislike those wacky "free for non-commercial use, otherwise, give me a call" licenses, I'm starting to see the point.
|
Connecticut parents arrested for letting kids walk to Dunkin' Donuts
|
This makes my blood boil. It's obvious that Killingly cops are just bored assholes on complete power trips. In general, centralization of power leads to unequal society. There should be quick and immediate recourse against police officers acting like this. No police officer should feel safe or beyond swift reproach when making comments like the ones in this article, yet there is absolutely no justice available for those affected. Even in a best-case scenario where charges are dropped a few days later, this is the psychological equivalent of a home invasion, and attempted kidnapping of their children. Dropping charges is not justice. Those officers should lose their jobs (but won't, because Killingly, like all of the 'Quiet Corner' is a complete boys club), and everyone involved in the decision tree should be heavily scrutinized. The town should issue a public apology. And whoever may or may not have called 911 should be publicly berated.This is unacceptable. This is Eastern bloc level authoritarianism. Police are out of control.No police officer in the country should feel comfortable making those threats. They are out of control
|
Bank Failures Visualized
|
That needs to go back to the 80s to capture the SnL crisis. It dwarfs 08 in bank failures. It better indicates the conglomeration of the many banks into the few we have today.
|
I'm fed up with it, so I'm writing a browser
|
OP here. Thanks for the pos/neg/neutral comments everybody. Some remarks:Yes, there are a lot of browsers out there where I can contribute to which would be more efficient. But that would result in just a few browsers instead of a lot of browsers. I'm all for the last one, as this would give people options.This IS a pet project. I never told anyone otherwise. I would start writing it even when I wasn't fed up with the tech industry. But I get angry about not being able to do anything about anything. And this is my way of trying to do something about it. It's the best I can do.I think this project will not result in an actual browser. That's not why i'm writing this. I want people to see my code, either laugh at it, or get some own idea's to make things better. For instance, I LOVE the whatwg site where the whole html5 tokenizer and parser algorithms are step by step described. This means it should be easy(?) enough for anyone to write their own html5 parser. What would happen if google and/or microsoft decide to create their own custom html5 (html5, ghtml) as a closed format? Who would be able to stop them when they have such a market share?I want to start for scratch - BECAUSE i want to know more about the underlying technical challenges.
|
Doing Business in Japan
|
The whole time I was thinking "Man, this is crazy, don't they see how that hurts productivity?" And then I thought about Europe compared to the United States. To our European colleagues: Do you think of us as working ourselves to death?
|
Facebook Launches Flow, Static Type Checker for JavaScript
|
This looks like such a better step in the right direction than than the types of tools MS and Google have been putting out. Dynamically discerning the underlying code, and allowing optional type annotation works _with_ javascript, as opposed to attempting to turn js into a completely different (and weakened) language.That said, I am curious what solutions this solves that isn't already solved by enforcing good code coverage. Full disclaimer, the largest js projects I've worked on were in the tens of thousands of lines, not hundreds of thousands, but type checking just seemed completely unnecessary provided a good coding guide and test coverage were maintained and enforced.
|
Git client vulnerability announced
|
Short panic summary: your git/hg remotes can get code execution on your machine when you clone/pull if you are on OSX or Windows.Summary: on case-insensitive/normalizing filesystems (default on OSX and Windows) it's possible for .git/config to be overwritten by the tree, probably due to a case-sensitive sanity check when the actual file is insensitive. .git/config can contain arbitrary commands to be run on certain events/as aliases, so it leads to code execution. This is a risk when you get a tree from a third party, so on pull/fetch+checkout/clone...There's an analogous vulnerability in Mercurial.Update, then run git --version and make sure it's one of v1.8.5.6, v1.9.5, v2.0.5, v2.1.4, or v2.2.1. And be careful when pulling/cloning from third-parties.EDIT: right, no "or", what are you doing reading this instead of updating?
|
Essential Phone, available now
|
I admire the gumption of making a new phone.But controlled obsolescence kills me. The real feature that improves in phones the past few years for me is the software and apps, not the hardware.My wishlist:- Give me a lighter, snappier OS. Not something clunkier and slower and uses more ram, gpu/cpu (aka battery life).- Actually support updates to the things for longer than 2-3 years.- (Not related to this phone) Use stock android, unless you're removing bloat. Why? Because inevitably there's going to be apps. What I want is a nice flat surface that includes wifi, bluetooth, and nice API's and permissions for those apps to plug into.- The biggest feature you can give me on a phone? Battery life, Replaceable battery, Data/Cell reception, Speaker/Microphone quality.- SIM card that's easy to get out.- Actually, Dual SIM's.- Support for carriers globally.- And physical keyboards. Something for SSH'ing with.
|
Htop Explained
|
The problem with htop on Linux is that once there are 200+ processes running on the system htop takes significant portion of CPU time and utilization. This is because htop has to go through each process entry in procfs (open, read, close) every second and parse the text context instead of just calling appropriate syscall like on the OpenBSD and friends to retrieve such information.It would help if kernel provided process information in binary form instead of serializing it into text. Or even better to provide specific syscalls for it like on macOS, Windows, OpenBSD, Solaris and others.
|
I sold Baremetrics
|
At the time I write this comment, half my screen is full of people calling Josh not so nice things.Folks, this is a founder who's openly sharing the kinds of things we usually keep hidden. I doubt there's been a startup exit in the last decade where a healthy skeptical HN'er couldn't find some wrongs being done, if the details had been available. It's extremely hard to get everything right, from every perspective. The only difference here is that the details are actually available.Please go easy. We want more posts like these, not fewer.
|
We replaced rental brokers with software and filled 200 vacant apartments
|
Caretaker: The redfin of brokers. Take all the value for themselves freeze out the brokers (who provide a service but are universally disdained). Ride that wave of positive news for a couples years. Eventually everyone will hate the fraction of the market Caretaker has as they raise prices to make investors happy and people realize there are problems.It's like the same idea of Uber and Lyft. Less human involvement = better world /S.
|
The FBI's internal guide for getting data from AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon
|
Essentially the government has built a surveillance state by outsourcing it to private enterprise.I think it would be interesting to know how people really feel about this. I would love to see a survey that actually truly explained the trade-offs and see how people felt about it, eg avoiding the “ should government be able to subpoena records from private business” but actually ask questions like “is it OK with you that with a subpoena that the government can get a list every website that you have visited?” And then present the trade offs and abuse cases. I really think that we’ve allowed the surveillance state to form without actually having a meaningful public debate about it.
|
Teen mental health is plummeting and social media is a major contributing cause [pdf]
|
Unpopular opinion: Social media is a great scapegoat, but it is not the source of the problem. It is where they go to communicate and cope. My sole qualification to post this: I have four kids that are either teens or in their early 20s, and one who will be a teen next year. Here is what I see out there:1. Kids have little or no slack in their schedule. This means very little freedom, and very little time to work things out mentally. School, practice, volunteer, homework, bed, do it all again. This builds up to a very difficult to unwind ball of stress, anger, fear and despair.2. Everything is conflicted and unclear. Schools teach cultural tolerance while enforcing zero-tolerance policies. Diversity is good, but being ____ is bad. So many areas where what we teach and preach are the opposite of what policies and actions actually do.3. The stakes are too high. View the wrong website on your chromebook and get referred to law enforcement. Have a kid send you the wrong selfie and get charged with a sex crime. Get a bad grade and you are off the volleyball team, and you won't make the team next year - so done forever. Misbehave and you'll be arrested by the resource officer and face time at juvi, and potentially a conviction that will be held against you for a very long time (in some states juvi convictions count against three strikes laws).3. Kids are targeted. Sexual predators, gangs, fringe and mainstream ideologues looking to recruit followers, sports agents and talent scouts all have one thing in common: they want to exploit kids or sell them something.It's really hard to be a kid right now, and that needs to change. We need to lower the stakes, the stress and have something that resembles consistency.
|
Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent
|
My next door neighbor (we share a wall) had their bicycles stolen twice, so they installed Ring (floodlight) cameras in both the backyard and the front porch. After a year, the cameras have yielded no added security, or caught any "bad guys" as far as I can tell and from what they told me.What I realized, is they use it to keep track of their kids, funny cat videos that trigger the recording, and most importantly, as a 2 way radio to talk or listen to the kids. That last point, well, I found out they can also listen to my conversations an my kids.I asked them to point their front porch camera so that it doesn't record my front driveway, just theirs. and they lost their shit. They confirmed they record audio and video. They asked if there was a problem. I said no problem with them. I'm not comfortable with the audio/video recording me or my friends conversations if company comes over to talk to me on my porch or driveway.I really didn't need to tell them anything, it's self evident why someone wants a camera point away. Needless to say, after I asked them in the winter, one of them refuses to speak to me and crosses the street and avoids me.These people use surveillance to supervise their kids, and don't care about the fact that their neighbors (me) could be recorded, and they could be hacked or footage access by random people, because Amazon isn't exactly the king of privacy.I believe these cameras haven't decreased crime. They also don't really add more security. It's a shame though they are everywhere, with disregard for privacy right on people's property. So yes, I'm biased. I have no love for Ring.
|
Headless mode in Firefox
|
As a UI designer, I dream of strikeheadlessstrike chromeless browsers, where the UI appears when you need it, intuitively, even when NOT in full screen. The top bar simply takes too much unnecessary space. If there's any dev that wants to collaborate on this, let me know :)
|
Adventures of putting 16 GB of RAM in a motherboard that doesn’t support it
|
> In order for the document to help me, I clearly needed to find the four error parameters that used to be displayed with the blue screen on older versions of Windows. Windows 10 hides all the information by default, but I discovered that it’s possible to re-enable display of the extra error information by adding an entry to your registry.I hate stuff like this. What's the point of hiding the parameters, instead of tucking them away in the corner of the screen or something? It just makes things needlessly difficult.I know the answer is going to be "but it makes the UI look beautiful and most users don't know what the parameters mean anyway!" Error UIs don't need to be beautiful, they need to be functional. Definitely have a nice, clear user-friendly error message, but keep the overall screen technically informative. I can imagine that the only thing more infuriating than having a computer that won't boot, is having one that won't tell you the problem unless you change registry settings (which you can't, because it can't boot). Leaving the extra information there does not harm, and it give people something to Google if they do run into a problem.
|
I/O Is Faster Than CPU – Let’s Partition Resources and Eliminate OS Abstractions [pdf]
|
We need entirely new OS abstractions to replace the dated notions of hierarchical file systems built around the metaphor of file cabinets, I/O as streams of bytes, terminals, process hierarchy. Essentially, say goodbye to the Unix model after 50 years. It would open up an entirely new world of software experimentation and craftsmanship.
|
Adobe charges subscription cancellation fee
|
Is this really a cancellation fee or is it just honoring your contract? AFAIK it's very clear on Adobe's page that your options are (1) Annual plan paid monthly, (2) Annual plan prepaid, and depending on the product (3) Monthly plan at usually 150% higher price.https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/plans.htmlIf you signed up for a yearly plan paid monthly, the cancellation fee is finishing your contract.If you didn't want to agree to pay by the year maybe you shouldn't have signed up for a year of service?
|
NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites
|
There’s a lot of confusion here about why NFTs are valuable if the buyer doesn’t get to own the image copyright. This should not feel mysterious - NFTs are just like baseball cards.If you buy a Barry Bonds baseball card for $1,000, you don’t own the artistic rights to the image on the card. All you own is the card itself, which has negligible manufacturing cost. It would be trivial for any card company to produce a million functionally equivalent Barry Bonds cards.When you buy a Barry Bonds baseball card, you hope that the card company won’t dump a million more on the market. You also hope that if another baseball card company springs up and prints their own Barry Bonds cards, people won’t be as interested in that brand of cards. Attention and scarcity drive value; the nuance is that other speculators must care about scarcity along the same dimension that you possess it (in this case: the brand of the baseball card company and the year the card was made). There are a hundred tokens functionally equivalent to Bitcoin, but none approach Bitcoin’s value - purely because Bitcoin sustains more consumer and media attention. This position is fairly stable because attention has strong positive feedback loops.There has always been interest in speculative collectibles. A purely digital collectible solves a lot of practical problems related to exchange: you don’t have to wait a week to receive the item in the mail, you don’t have to worry about its condition because it does not degrade with time or use, there is minimal counterparty risk due to online escrow contracts, and counterfeits are harder to fake (along the relevant dimension of scarcity, which is the origin address).People have been speculating on collectibles for thousands of years. Crypto just makes it easier to trade them back and forth.
|
John Carmack pushes out unlocked OS for defunct Oculus Go headset
|
> allowing for a randomly discovered shrink wrapped headset twenty years from now to be able to update to the final software version, long after over-the-air update servers have been shut down.This resonates so much with me. Each time I setup a new device that requires an Internet connection, I think about how we can enjoy booting 30 years old retro computers and how the next generation will not be able to do the same because of locked down hardware.
|
Apple Passkey
|
I don't get what it's all about this passwordless. I make my browser (Firefox) generate strong password and store them in its password manager, this is synchronized with end to end encryption to all my devices, I have only to remember a master password. It's kind of the same but it works with every website. It is not complicated, doesn't require certificates that you may loose, and that sort of things.
|
I booted Linux 293k times in 21 hours
|
Before clicking I thought someone kept note of how many times Linux booted in regard to their computing habits, and not testing software. I know for me I boot roughly 3 times a day into different machines, do my work, shutdown, then rinse & repeat.Then you have those types who put their machine into hibernate/sleep with 100+ Chrome tabs open and never do a full boot ritual. Boggles my mind that people do that.
|
Alan Eustace Jumps from Stratosphere, Breaking Felix Baumgartner’s World Record
|
So the guy straps himself to balloon, rides straight up for 2 hours, 25 miles high.So 12.5 mph, a little faster than the average bicycle pace. Straight up.Works with other engineers in secret for 3 years to knock out a badass space survival suit.And then, just for us kids, "cut himself loose from the balloon with the aid of a small explosive device . . ." and achieves 800mph+, setting off a "small sonic boom".I !@%! love engineers.
|
How the Sugar Industry Shifted Blame to Fat
|
It took almost 50 years to starting to debunk health issues created by Sugar. It took decades to accept the health issues created by Lead and Asbestos.Sometime I wonder if chemicals from bottled water, radiation from Cellular/Wifi/Bluetooth pose health risks and we will find it out decades later.
|
Go 2, here we come
|
I tried Go a while ago.
I was hooked by the performance , the community around it and vendors support ( AWS , Heroku , GCloud etc...) but I got quickly fed up by the awkward package management system, the weird syntax and the horrible idea of $GOPATH, especially on Windows.Haven’t tried it since.Hope lots of this change to make the language more welcoming for Newcomers to the language.
|
You probably don't need a single-page app
|
This. So much this.My company (4,500+ people) ordered all products in their portfolio (~12 web apps) to migrate to SPA front ends about a year ago as a way to stand out from our competitors, and boy has it been painful.Prior to that initiative, we had been using the hybrid approach mentioned in this piece, embedding SPAs only where necessary and sticking to SSR everywhere else, which worked really well.Since the announcement, our productivity has diminished dramatically since so much of our time is now focused on re-working functionality that already exists into an SPA, and it's completely unnecessary. Not only that, but extending these UIs will take more time in the future than their SSR versions due to the added complexity of the front end frameworks, and we're definitely going to make mistakes along the way that we weren't making before.It drives me crazy to think that some exec came up with SPA-ing everything as a sales pitch to clients, when 99.9% of our clients have no idea what an SPA is. And the amount of money being spent on turning already-working apps into SPAs is astronomical.
|
A man who destroyed his multimillion dollar company in 10 seconds (2018)
|
This is really applicable to any products that are valued based on their marketing efforts instead of intrinsic value or utility. Costume jewellery, designer clothes, some kinds of art, all derive their value from the story the creators tell. The most expensive art seems to be that which has the most thoroughly verified, or at least the most believable story.I like to think I’d prefer Apple products over the competition and pay a premium for them even if I didn’t know Jobs or Ive, or watched the marketing videos - but I’m not entirely sure these days. I Tim Cook said Apple products were super cheap to produce, or Ive said he didn’t design any of them and had some intern do it, would sales tank?
|
DigitalOcean is laying off staff
|
Hey folks,Cofounder of DigitalOcean here.Letting people go is always a complicated matter at any scale. Whether you are a ten person company and firing one employee or you are 500 people and firing a larger number.Wanted to address a few statements from the hackernews community here.We are not prepping the company for sale.As unfortunate as the layoffs are they were really due to two CEO changes in the past 18 months and leadership changes that created competing directions in the business, which Yancey our new CEO, is now addressing.We are not running out of money, nor do we have an immediate need to raise capital, and the lay-offs aren't related to any sort of "cost-cutting".We last raised an equity round in the summer of 2015 and haven't had a need to raise capital since. This is because we are very capital efficient and have been since our founding.There are no profitability issues with $5/mo customers as the unit economics are the same as larger accounts. As we have grown we have added more products and features so that scaling teams and companies can also be successful on DigitalOcean, but we are not changing our commitment to the individual developer and those who are just getting started.Lastly, it pains me to see people let go, having been on both sides of the table, it honestly just really sucks.
|
Lyme disease bacteria eradicated by new drug in early tests
|
Note that they're carefully dancing around the elephant in the room: As far as I know, no one has ever demonstrated that Lyme spirochetes survive a course of standard antibiotics (Emphasis mine):> Standard treatment of Lyme disease is oral antibiotics, typically doxycycline, in the early stages of the disease; but for reasons that are unclear, the antibiotics don't work for up to 20% of people with the tick-borne illness. One possibility is that drug-tolerant bacteria cause the lingering symptoms.Many people experience lingering symptoms after contracting Lyme disease. Officially, this is known as "Post-Treatment Lyme Disease Syndrome". The CDC page for the PTLDS has more information: https://www.cdc.gov/lyme/postlds/index.htmlThese PTLDS symptoms are definitely real, but the idea that persistent lyme infection is the cause of the lingering problems is more of a hypothesis at this point.It will be interesting to see if this new antibiotic produces different outcomes in PTLDS patients, but it's misleading to claim that this is the only antibiotic known to act on the Lyme disease spirochetes. The original study specifically explored the action of Azlocillin on Doxycycline-resistant spirochetes. From the study:> Our results also demonstrate that azlocillin and cefotaxime can effectively kill in vitro doxycycline-tolerant B. burgdorferi.The authors point to indirect evidence suggesting that spirochetes might still be present in PTLDS patients, but acknowledge that no one has yet been able to culture a viable spirochete from PTLDS patients:> A recent study in humans demonstrated that B. burgdorferi DNA was identified in PTDLS patient by xenodiagnosis but unable to culture viable spirochete17. In about 85% of Lyme arthritis patients, B. burgdorferi DNA was detected in synovial fluid by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testingIt would be great if this antibiotic could produce positive outcomes for PTLDS patients, but I wouldn't get too excited until we see some human studies. PTLDS (aka "chronic lyme") has a long history of promising treatments failing to produce results in patients.
|
How to Understand Things
|
Great post. Personal anecdote:I don't think I really understood anything in school, but I was decent at going through the motions of carrying out certain methods and recalling certain facts when I needed to.I went on to study Maths at university, and for most of my first year, I had the same surface level "methods + facts" knowledge that got me through school. After some studying, I could recite definitions and theorems, I'd memorised some proofs, and I could occasionally manipulate a problem to get an answer. I think about half of the cohort was in a similar position. But it was clear that there were others in a completely different league.When we were studying for our first year exams, I was struggling to remember the proof of a specific theorem (it felt quite long). A friend was trying to help me learn it, and he asked me what "picture" I had in my head for the theorem. I didn't have any pictures in my head for anything.It turned out that a simple drawing could capture the entire statement of the theorem, and from that drawing, the proof was trivial to derive. It was long-ish to write out in words, sure, but the underlying concept was really simple. This blew my mind — I realised I didn't have a clue what we'd been studying the whole year.The worrying thing is that I actually thought I understood that stuff. Before that incident, I didn't know what it feels like to actually understand something, and I didn't have an appreciation for the layers of depth even within that. I suspect lots of people go through the entire education system like this.
|
DigitalOcean's Hacktoberfest Is Hurting Open Source
|
I'm appalled by this behaviour but also bemused. What's the motivation for spamming repositories just to get a t-shirt? I mean, are the t-shirts really that good?
|
Google collects 20 times more telemetry from Android devices than Apple from iOS
|
" Modern cars regularly send basic data about vehicle components, their safety status and service schedules to car manufacturers, and mobile phones work in very similar ways." -GoogleThis is a beautiful quote because it is an example of one industry's bad behavior leading to another industry's bad behavior, upon which the first industry then users the second's similarity to justify themselves. Cars only started doing this because phones made it normal. It's wrong in both cases.It's similar to when Apple defended it's 30% store cut by claiming it's an "industry standard"... specifically, an industry standard that Apple established.
|
Oculess – Removes account requirements and telemetry from Oculus Quest devices
|
Facebook keeps asking Congress to make laws. How about this one:Peripherals, including mice, monitors, keyboards, VR headsets or any other device used to process input or output from a computer, may NOT be connected to any cloud service with an account. Any such cloud connections MUST be for software updates only and software updates MUST be capable of permanent opt-out without any loss of usage.I mean I grew up with my logitech mouse, keyboard and monitor not connected to a cloud account and I expect to die that way. Why does Facebook get to do things differently.
|
The chat control proposal does not belong in democratic societies
|
Suggested alternative: The "End Political Corruption Proposal""Given that political corruption is rife in European countries, with great detriments to the healthy function of government, all politicians in positions where they may be engaging in corrupt behavior must submit to 24-7 audio and video surveillance, which will be piped over public platforms for crowdsourcing of corruption detection. All personal communications of politicians and of government bureaucrats will become matters of public record for the same reason. Since we cannot trust a corrupt head of government to investigate their own corruption, or one of their underlings, this kind of public exposure of all politicians and bureaucrats is the only reasonable, rational solution to the problem of endemic government corruption in the EU."
|
Man found guilty of child porn because he ran a Tor exit node
|
The eternal struggle. Information wants to be free, and then people use those freedoms to do the most screwed up things imaginable, and people like this pay the price.It’s a damn shame how the original cyberpunk dream played out. We could’ve had a world where companies couldn’t do anything about people using their ideas. Instead we get one where you can’t even be anonymous without rubbing elbows with child predators.It’s surprising how much anonymity and the subject at hand are correlated. In my 20s I liked to explore, as I’m sure many of you do too. I once met someone in the Whonix community who wanted to nix google maps entirely; he spent a lot of time downloading maps and trying to make a way to view them locally, which I think is going to be prescient one day. It already is in many parts of the world — you don’t have cell service, so you can’t just pull up google maps. Nowadays starlink solves that problem, but back then it wasn’t clear that we’d ever be able to have maps at our fingertips regardless of internet access. This was back in the era of that poor CNET reporter that got lost with his family in the mountains precisely because of no maps, and ended up dying to exposure when he went to get help. Never leave your car.I found all of this fascinating. What a project! Make all of google maps accessible right from your phone, with no internet. I briefly fell in love with that community.Ultimately what drove me away was the literal flood of child porn that was always right next to anything to do with tor, whonix, or anonymity in general. I have a pretty high tolerance for “operating in gray areas,” like this guy. But one of the tragedies of the cyberpunk dream is that the entire scene has been coopted by cp. In some sense cp is the ultimate test of anonymity, since you’ll be thrown in prison pretty much instantly if caught. So perhaps it’s no surprise that it’s the most common and pervasive result of anonymity, but it sure is a shame.
|
Project Tango
|
"Imagine measuring your room by just walking around in it." Yes, and imagine transmitting each of those footsteps in real time back to Google, so they can have a map of your room, too, in case they, or other parties, ever need it.I was just having a discussion yesterday with a friend who works at Google about what data they store when you query their search engine. Every single keystroke, including backspaces, is stored. They don't just know what you ask. They know how well you can spell and know how well you type, not just in general but down to specific letter sequences. With this data, they can tell if you are regularly more impaired (fine motor control) at some times than at others, or if you're growing more impaired over time and match that against the content of your queries, etc."Phones that don't limit their boundaries to a touchscreen", meaning, we're not satisfied limiting our knowledge of you to just what we can extract from what you enter and how you enter it and when on a touchscreen. We want to know every step you take, when you sit, when you stand, how and where you walk.... SO much more data about you and your world that we can mine for treasure!I'm not saying that Google is evil. My friends at Google certainly aren't. It's just that they are like kids in a candy store with unprecedented access to data and so many great, new algorithms for extracting information from it that they are just loving it, the way geeks would. But we're really going down a rabbit hole here.
|
Dwarf Fortress is coming to Steam with graphics
|
One thing that amazes me about Dwarf Fortress is that the creator(s) don't use version control[1] (as of 2014, things may have changed):"I don't use version control -- I didn't like the feeling of having the code get committed into a black box thingy with no immediate upside."I can't fathom how you can manage the complexity of a game like DF without a VCS.[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1avszc/im_tarn_adams_...
|
I Was Google’s Head of International Relations
|
” At a different all-hands meeting, the entire policy team was separated into various rooms and told to participate in a “diversity exercise” that placed me in a group labeled “homos” while participants shouted out stereotypes such as “effeminate” and “promiscuous.” Colleagues of color were forced to join groups called “Asians” and “Brown people” in other rooms nearby.”Wow this literally sounds like an episode of The Office (S1 E2)Definitely not the most damning thing in this article but the one that really jumped out for me.Can’t even wrap my mind around why someone thought this would be a good idea
|
Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions?
|
Here are mine:1. Still no level 4/5 autonomous cars anywhere in sight. The promise of being "just around the corner" fizzles down and people just forget the hype.2. Same with AI. The panacea hype dies down. No AGI at all. No major job losses due to AI automation.3. Facebook (the SN) still exists but ages along with it's current user base. i.e it's the "old people's" SN. Facebook (the company) is still going strong, with either Instagram or one of it's acquisitions being the current "hip" SN.4. Google still dominates search and email but losses value and "glory" compared to today.5. Majority of people still don't care about privacy.6. But a small yet growing culture of "offliners" becomes mainstream. Being offline is the new "Yoga" and allows bragging rights.7. Increase in adoption of non-scientific beliefs such as astrology/anti-vaxx/religion/flat-earth as a counterbalance to the increased complexity of everyday life.8. Web development matures and a "standard" stack is accepted, all in JS.9. Global carbon emissions are not reduced, mostly because of lack of initiative by China and 3rd world countries.10. Still no hoverboards.
|
Why the US military usually punishes misconduct but police often close ranks
|
We give the police some slack because its a dangerous job. They are often paid quite well because its dangerous.But how dangerous is it?1 Logging workers2 Fishers and related fishing workers3 Aircraft pilots and flight engineers4 Roofers5 Refuse and recyclable material collectors6 Driver/sales workers and truck drivers7 Farmers, ranchers and other agricultural managers8 Structural iron and steel workers9 First-line supervisors of construction trades and extraction workers10 First-line supervisors of landscaping, lawn service and groundskeeping workers11 Electrical power-line installers and repairers12 Grounds maintenance workers13 Miscellaneous agricultural workers14 Helpers, construction trades15 First-line supervisors of mechanics, installers and repairers16 Police and sheriff’s patrol officersSource: https://www.ajc.com/business/employment/these-are-the-most-d...EDIT: Be nice to your fellow HNer's. Also, no one could pay me enough to be a policeman.
|
Google Removed ClearURLs Extension from Chrome Web Store
|
anyone using this site that still uses chrome, why?
|
Universities have formed a company that looks a lot like a patent troll
|
During my time as a research assistant / grad student there was a remarkable shift in the atmosphere. It started with massive layoffs of research staff, linked to the more general savings of our government.More esoteric professors were replaced with more efficient manuscript machines submitting manuscripts to more prestigious journals. Soon after the layoffs, the university's innovation and commercialization services became extremely active. Recurring events at lecture rooms where we were blasted on how our work is IP of the university, how the university takes only 50% cut if something works, how cool is it to be a researcher who commercializes ideas in comparison to being one those dusty farts in the science cave studying one protein or butterfly for their entire life.Being a believer and practitioner of open source, I once asked how does this all this apply to computational science. Basically all algorithms and tools should be passed through them to see if they have commercial potential - if no, we can go ahead. Found it appalling and interfering with my intellectual freedom, one of the many events that made me pursue life outside the academia.
|
An old hacker's tips on staying employed
|
I’m 61 and have been working in high tech since 1983 or so, writing embedded software, doing system administration, and managing people.The article strikes me as good advice. I didn’t find anything to disagree with in it.Ageism is a thing. People have all kinds of biases of which they may or may not be aware. You have them too, and so do I.A line from another source that I keep in mind is this: “If you’re always getting angry, you’ll turn your nature against the Way.” [1] It doesn’t pay to be the angry, unapproachable person in life.[1] https://www.dailyzen.com/journal/bloodstream-sermon
|
Show HN: A central bank simulator game with a realistic economic model
|
After a rather dismal first couple of runs I read the blog post for some hints. The best I found was to try to raise rates during the good times so there is wiggle room during downturns. I was able to get 443,904 by raising to over 10% during the initial prosperity period and was able to cut rates in half as soon as there was a crash. Ultimately I stabilized at around 3.5%. As of the time of this post I think that is the highest or close to highest score, only slightly higher than those that did a constant -0.5%.I’ve always been apprehensive of how low interest rates dropped around 9/11 and nobody had the political courage to raise them after that, leaving little room for leverage. What I have learned from racing games is that in order to win, it’s not all about holding down the gas pedal the hardest. Its about keeping on the track first, which requires lower speeds to navigate complexity, and only using max speed in straightaways.Or to quote the eminent Charlie Sheen, right after his infamous ’banging 7 gram rocks’ he said, “I only have one speed, I only have one gear: GO.” History tells how well that worked out.That may work on a straightaway, but in this world, there’s people and there’s pandemics and wars and politics. Had rates been at a higher level they could have been slashed at the start of the pandemic, but there was no room to drop at that point.
|
Twitter has re-suspended ElonJet account
|
Elon posted some info[0] that gives it some context:"Last night, car carrying lil X in LA was followed by crazy stalker (thinking it was me), who later blocked car from moving & climbed onto hood.Legal action is being taken against Sweeney & organizations who supported harm to my family."Make that what you will.[0]: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1603190155107794944
|
Why Not Mars
|
We have places on Earth, which are probably 10x if not 100x or 1000x more habitable than Mars, which we still do not and cannot inhabit long term with more than a handful of people. I'm not sure how we expect to establish any kind of working colony on Mars, where there is no atmosphere or accessible oxygen, food or accessible water, magnetic field to keep radiation away, reliable supply chain for delivering anything else we need.Let's figure out how to house and sustain, say, 20K people in Antarctica for 100 years before we even dream about doing the same on Mars.
|
Is Y Combinator worth the money? Brutally honest review of W22 batch experience
|
Did YC S21 which was an all remote batch. my 2c.YC is 100% what you make of it. It's not a lean back experience.I did not meet most of the companies in my batch but I've gotten to know many founders through YC that I would not have otherwise. Founders that have been source of advice and support.Network of clients - yep don't go into YC expecting to sell to other YC cos. It is easier to get warm intros through the network though.YC advice, office hours specifically - it's what you make of it too. Expecting a group partner to know your space in great detail is unreasonable but if you recognize that they've seen hundreds of companies with similar problems and make use of that pattern matching, you can get very valuable advice. Some of the advice I did not take and did the opposite and it was the right decision. And some advice that I did not take was exactly right, but I only saw it in retrospect months later.Fundraising - being a YC company definitely opens doors, and also helps protects you from bad actors who have to think twice before fucking with a YC co. Very valuable for any first-time founder. You have someone to sanity-check everything, terms you're not sure about etc. The bump in valuation is real too.I'd do YC again in a heartbeat.
|
Tell HN: Eid Mubarak
|
Eid Mubarak!> no food or waterBut really no water? That doesn’t sound healthy. Of course you can easily make it through a day without fluids but…
|
Show HN: I automated half of my typing
|
This is a very clever idea.However, I realize that I would never want to use something like this that would change over time. E.g. if I ran it every 6 months and last year "db" produced "debug", while this year it produces "database". Because talk about messing up my muscle memory and habits. And the language I write changes very much over time.So I'd actually be much more interested in a "universal" version of this -- if you ran it across books and e-mails and text messages from thousands of authors covering diverse backgrounds and contexts, then what would most reliably help everyone?E.g. expanding "t" to "the" seems like a no-brainer, just like "st" to "something". Is there a minimal set of, say, 200-500 of these that could simply be turned into a "standard keyboard" that everyone could learn?
|
Tesla Model S achieves best safety rating of any car ever tested
|
I'm sorry, but as a car enthusiast who spent much of his younger years devouring every ounce of Road&Track/Car&Driver mags, the phrase "any car ever tested" is a bit over the top... I'm almost positive the McLaren F1 (a car 20 years older) fared better than the Tesla in safety testing and was capable of being driven away after the testing finished...F1 @ 30mph: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v482/Peloton25/McLaren%20F...F1 @ 40mph: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUPq760LC00I'm more than willing to acknowledge Tesla has fantastic results, especially for the price... but that top spot still belongs to my childhood automotive idol. ;)
|
SpaceX lands rocket at sea second time after satellite launch
|
I always try to watch the webcasts and I can't help but cringe so hard when they start chanting 'USA USA USA', every single time.What is up with that?
|
Total Nightmare: USB-C and Thunderbolt 3
|
Personally, I am rather sad to see the Magsafe connector go, and having to sacrifice IO for charging while mobile seems like quite the headscratcher.It's somewhat funny that not only will you have to carry dongles for everything for a few years time, but also make sure you carry the right USB-C cables, as your friend's might not work. Yay we have superlight laptops, but need to carry a backpack full of spaghettied cables.
|
My dad’s resume and skills from 1980
|
Isn't this a misuse of Github? Surely there's a more suitable website for hosting a page with text and pictures than a source control system?I don't mean to pick on this guy - I've seen an several repositories like this recently.
|
For First Time in More Than 20 Years, Copyrighted Works Will Enter Public Domain
|
I wonder if we will see another extension since Mickey is getting close to the chopping block again.
|
MuseNet
|
This seems incredibly applicable to musical scores in movies. I can imagine a product where the editor/director/someone inputs a handful of variables (mood, genre, instruments, etc) and timing requests (crescendo beginning at 30s and ending at 75s, calm period from 90s - 120s, etc) and out comes a musical score for the movie that matches up with their scene editing.
|
ZedRipper: A 16-core Z80 laptop
|
Tangentially related question: how does one learn "computer architecture" or "computer engineering" as a hobbyist? I'm actually not even sure what those terms really mean.I'm amazed that people can build homebrew computers using Z80, MOS 6502/6510, or Motorola 68k series microprocessors.I could buy one of those homebrew Z80 kits and assemble it, but I don't think I'll gain much real understanding just from the act of assembling the kit.I have long wondered how things work down to the bare-metal level. What does it take to be able to design (and program?) a homebrew computer? Let's say I leave out the FPGA route and only focus on using real, off-the-shelf ICs.I'm mostly just a software guy (I write Python, I've learned automata theory at University) but I haven't learned any real electronics beyond things like Ohm's law, KCL, KVL, capacitance, impedance as a complex number. I don't even know my transistors or diodes.
|
EA is permanently banning Linux players on Battlefield V
|
Vulkan being around to compete with DirectX was supposed to break down the last big barrier stopping Linux from being able to game as well as Windows. I guess that only works if game companies are willing to code up the Linux version to begin with, though.
|
Shit – An implementation of Git using POSIX shell
|
Hiya HN. I was ranting on Mastodon earlier today because I feel like people learn git the wrong way - from the outside in, instead of the inside out. I reasoned that git internals are pretty simple and easy to understand, and that the supposedly obtuse interface makes a lot more sense when you approach it with an understanding of the fundamentals in hand. I said that the internals were so simple that you could implement a workable version of git using only shell scripts inside of an afternoon. So I wrapped up what I was working on and set out to prove it.Five hours later, it had turned into less of a simple explanation of "look how simple these primitives are, we can create them with only a dozen lines of shell scripting!" and more into "oh fuck, I didn't realize that the git index is a binary file format". Then it became a personal challenge to try and make it work anyway, despite POSIX shell scripts clearly being totally unsuitable for manipulating that kind of data.Anyway, this is awful, don't use it for anything, don't read the code, don't look at it, just don't.
|
USA vs. Julian Assange Judgment
|
Reading the judgement the key points are on pages 116 onwards and the extradition is denied under section 91(3) of the EA 2003 which reads:> The condition is that the physical or mental condition of the person is such that it would be unjust or oppressive to extradite him.The judge states:> it is my judgment that there is a real risk that he will be kept in the near isolated conditions imposed by the harshest SAMs (special administrative measures) regime, both pre-trial and post-trialAnd goes on to contrast with the conditions at HMP Belmarsh:> many of the protective factors currently in place at HMP Belmarsh would be removed by these conditions. Mr. Assange’s health improved on being removed from relative isolation in healthcare. He has been able to access the support of family and friends. He has had access to a Samaritans phone line. He has benefited from a trusting relationship with the prison In-Reach psychologist. By contrast, a SAMs regime would severely restrict his contact with all other human beings, including other prisoners, staff and his family. In detention subject to SAMs, he would have absolutely no communication with other prisoners, even through the walls of his cell, and time out of his cell would be spent alone.These conditions sound barbaric to me and I'd go as far to describe them as torture. Amnesty International do a better job of outlining the problems with this regime than I can: https://www.amnestyusa.org/reports/entombed-isolation-in-the...Frankly I don't understand why the UK continues to maintain an extradition treaty with a country which clearly has a poor record on human rights and fails to maintain a justice system that meets the UN's Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners.She concludes:> I am satisfied that, in these harsh conditions, Mr. Assange’s mental health would deteriorate causing him to commit suicide with the “single minded determination” of his autism spectrum disorder.> I order the discharge of Julian Paul Assange, pursuant to section 91(3) of the EA 2003Whilst a victory nonetheless for Assange, it is unfortunate that the entire judgement seems to come down to this point alone. Let's hope it is not overturned.
|
GitHub Should Start an App Store
|
> They already host source code of millions of apps. Release integration should be trivial to implement.Release integration is trivial for anyone. It's the easiest and most irrelevant part of the app stores.> Unlike Google they actually listen to their users. They were awesome during youtube-dl debacle.And controversial on others, like shutting down Popcorn Time's repository. As any other, they'll listen if there's enough outcry.> Backed by Microsoft. Microsoft has been playing good by the developers for years now. I trust them more than Apple and Google.This is situational and opportunistic. It can change any day. In fact, managing an important app store is exactly one way to re-(un)-balance this relationship.> They could finally give the desktop the app store it deservesMicrosoft won't have GitHub compete with the Microsoft Store and its newer efforts like winget. It would unermine their unifying vision that has been in the works for years for no benefit.> This is a minor but users will be able to raise issues with developers directly instead writing comments over app pages which I think you would agree completely suck.Sure, lets pipe user feedback directly into GitHub issues. Good luck with that if you have a hundred issues a day.I don't think there's a single angle that would paint this as a good idea. Phone manufacturers like Samsung are in a much much better position to try. And indeed they have been trying an failing.
|
Fuckin' user interface design, I swear
|
I just had an idea that might explain why this happens.Firstly, I've observed a phenomenon when I talk to a programmer about a problem I want to solve. They might get excited, learn a bit of the problem domain and then go off and build something that kind of solves part of my problem. But then I'm stuck in a endless cycle of explaining the rest of the problem, to someone who isn't really interested, then waiting for a new iteration and then evaluating how it doesn't completely the solve the problem until the programmer gets bored and goes off to find something new and exciting to do with computers. Programming the computerwas always the end for them. They don't actually care about the problem. I care about the problem. So for me computers are a tool to solve my problem. I might as well write the program myself because it's less work to become a mediocre programmer than to intimately understand the problem.My theory is that something like this happens in interface design. There are designers who love to create beautiful designs, and we love that, but beauty is the end of it for them. They don't actually care about the problem that the program (website, app, whatever) is supposed to solve. If they were stuck in a job filling out forms all day they would quickly learn the lesson to put the reset button out of the way. If they were intimately familiar with the problem, the better design would be obvious. And so it is that people with no "design skills" can point out the obvious mistakes of the designers.It's also true that good design is hard. Starting with a blank sheet and creating something, let alone something good, is daunting. Perhaps the hardest part is having the humility to admit, "I don't understand the problem sufficiently" and the empathy to care about the problem enough to learn it well.
|
PayPal faces lawsuit for freezing customer accounts and funds
|
Thing that amazes me is that people leave huge amounts of money in their PayPal instead of withdrawing it regularly. Why not just withdraw it, and then PayPal has nothing to seize!
|
Passenger with “no idea how to fly” lands plane after pilot incapacitated
|
I bet this was a guy raised on video games. I was about to make a joke about it but I'm actually serious.Once I, a former Houstonian with no experience driving on ice, was driving through the snowy mountains and lost control of my car. Instead of panicking, my video-game-induced laser focus kicked in and I calmly piloted the car until the wheels gained traction and I could park the car on the side of the road.But learning how to focus in the midst of chaos, instead of panicking, is a technique I specifically had to learn in childhood to beat challenging levels of Super Mario Brothers.Thanks, video games.
|
Learn Postgres at the Playground – Postgres compiled to WASM running in browser
|
Craig here from Crunchy. Pretty excited to ship this. It started with one of our engineers showing up in slack 6 weeks ago "So I did something crazy over the weekend..." from there it evolved into much more.The post explains a lot of the high level, but we're going to being doing some deeper dives as well including the build process, but also some of how the tutorials are powered by an internal notion doc which allows us to easily iterate and collaborate on the tutorials themselves.Perhaps our favorite easter egg is that you can bring your own SQL into it for example: https://www.crunchydata.com/developers/playground?sql=https:...
|
Wavacity – a FOSS port of Audacity to the web
|
Alright, it's at a kind of uncanny valley situation where we have Windows XP applications running real-time in our browsers. Is the end-game just a universal sandboxed VM that's cross-platform? What do we do next?
|
Sublime Text 2.0 Released
|
Hm, Am I the only one who spends hours in vim each day with ~15 lines in my .vimrc and almost zero plugins?At some point I think I realized that no matter how feature-rich my editor was, the main thing stopping me from writing good and fast code was _thinking_, not configuring my text editor.
|
Bitcoin: the Stripe perspective
|
This is my favourite article about Bitcoin to date, and properly describes one of the main ideas I wish Bitcoin detractors would come around to. Bitcoin has a lot of problems as a unit of account and as a store of value, but that is not primarily what Satoshi was building (https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf). Bitcoin is, and has always been, a medium of exchange first and foremost. It still has some shortcomings in that regard, but it is the closest thing we have to solving the trust issues of peer-to-peer exchange in a purely technical fashion.Comparing Bitcoin addresses to the IP layer of the internet is brilliant. Something that the Bitcoin community has been a bit slow to accept is the idea that "peer-to-peer exchange" may be occurring at the corporate level rather than at the individual level for most people--it's hard to imagine a world where that isn't true due to the points outlined in the "Comparison to the card networks" part of this article. However as long as the corporate implementation is done in such a way that anyone could jump in as an individual if they wanted to bear their own risk, then we are still miles ahead of how the traditional financial system currently works ("net neutrality" for money).
|
Save Netflix
|
Many companies that exist today seemingly couldn't begin in 2016.The major computing platforms now have gatekeepers (Google Play, iOS App Store).Personal computers with attached storage are disappearing and giving way to thin clients attached to the mainframe - without computing power, individuals have less choice.I think we need to focus far more on hardware - it's never looked darker - Secure Boot and the ME make me worried for the future of x86, even.I'll be fine as long as my old machines survive - but how are businesses going to produce mass market software when all the popular hardware is locked down?Just to pick an arbitrary example - how does a project like Bitcoin take off when all we have are tivoized devices that won't run un"trusted" code? The community of a few hundred hardware hackers isn't big enough.Not only that, despite the fact that 256GB of flash can be had for ~40GBP, the latest smartphones come with piffling amounts of storage and seemingly no expandable slots. It's a deliberate design decision to force the use of the network.The IBM compatible desktop computer produced the revolution we see today. What's the next step?
|
Ask HN: What are some books where the reader learns by building one project?
|
Michael Hartl's Rails tutorial (https://www.railstutorial.org/) is a great example of this.It'll run you through building a twitter clone and introduce you to git, heroku, a bit of CSS/HTML, and even goes into AJAX a bit.I can't recommend it enough to people looking to get into rails.
|
Show HN: Is the stock market going to crash?
|
If you're looking for The Single Greatest Predictor of Future Stock Market Returns[1], here it is: http://www.philosophicaleconomics.com/2013/12/the-single-gre...This is a long read, but it's worth it. The metric can be calculated in FRED[2], and as a predictor of future returns, it outperforms all of the most common stock market valuation metrics, including cyclically-adjusted price-earnings (CAPE) ratio[3]. (Basically, the average investor portfolio allocation to equities versus bonds and cash is inversely correlated with future returns over the long-term. This works better than pure valuation models because it accounts for supply and demand dynamics.)[1]: http://www.philosophicaleconomics.com/2013/12/the-single-gre...[2]: http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=qis[3]: http://www.multpl.com/shiller-pe/
|
How SQL Database Engines Work, by the Creator of SQLite (2008) [video]
|
I don't like to use SQL engine because I don't understand how they work, I never really know if my query will be O(1), O(log(n)), O(n), etc, or what kind of algorithm will optimize my query.Who really does understand how a SQL engine work? Don't you usually require to understand how something work before starting using it? Which SQL analyst or DB architect really knows about the internals of a SQL engine? Do they know about basic data structures? Advanced data structures? Backtracking?That's why I tend to avoid systematically using a SQL engine unless the data schema is very very simple, and manage and filter the data case by case in code. SQL is good for archiving and storing data, and work as an intermediary, but I don't think it should drive how a software works. Databases can be very complex, and unfortunately, since developers like to make things complicated, it becomes hairy.I think SQL was designed when RAM was scarce and expensive, so to speed up data access, it has to be properly indexed with a database engine. I really wonder who, today, have data that cannot fit in RAM, apart from big actors.I tend to advocate for simple designs and avoid complexity as most as I can, so I might biased, but many languages already offers things like sets, maps, multimaps, etc. Tailoring data structures might yield good results too.Databases still scare me.
|
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.