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Leaving Google Fi
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This is the difference between Google and Amazon.People have lots of criticism of Amazon, some I even agree with, but working here[0] one of my favorite little cultural things is that customers can and do email Jeff when stupid things happen. And Jeff reads them. Every now and then he'll forward one of them to a senior VP with a simple "?" added to it.[1]That question mark indicates two things: that you have 24 hours to explain how this terrible customer experience happened, and that not long afterwards you'd better have a plan for how it isn't possible for this kind of problem to happen again. A lot of incredible changes have been made based on those question marks.Google does not have such a customer-obsessed culture. So bad things like this happen and then nothing seems to change. Next week, it will happen again. Because (in my view) Google is an ideas-first culture, not a customer-first culture. Those ideas have rocketed them to success but I wonder if it can sustain them indefinitely.[0](All my views are obviously my own and don't reflect speaking on behalf of the company)[1]https://www.inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/customer-service-jeff-bez...
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OpenDrop: An Open Source AirDrop Implementation
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It is 2019, and it is quite surprising - and disappointing - that we STILL haven't universally solved the means to easily, securely, and (yes, I'll use this term again) universally share files. I wish we could share files in a peer-to-peer fashion securely without hindrance of mobile platform, nor blockage of network MiTM, etc.
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Making the Tokio scheduler 10x faster
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Author here. I'll be watching the comments and can answer any questions!I do want to make clear that most of the optimizations discussed are implemented in the Go scheduler, which is where I discovered them. I wrote the article to call them out as they were not easy to discover.
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Fastly hires entire Wasmtime team from Mozilla
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My money was on Cloudflare to have hired them wholesale. Regardless, congratulations to everyone involved!This deal has got me thinking... whether a right way to "lay-off" a supremely talented bunch is to actually see if other companies are willing to offer them jobs? Kind of how player transfers happen in Football (soccer).Either the team goes to the newer company wholesale or you help find your engineers suitable roles elsewhere.One might argue there's no advantage to the company laying-off people, but they could save on the severance package, and frankly, two companies entering an understanding like this bodes well on other levels where someone could probably explore a "cross-company" job change with blessings of the employers on both sides of the table.Of course, things like salary negotiations take a hit for the candidate especially, but internal transfers to different teams / location in bigger companies already work this way. May be year-end reviews and code can be shared on a need-to-know basis between the companies with employee consent.In particular, such arrangements between smaller / crash-strapped companies and bigger / well-funded companies might work out for the good. Then again, you never want the bigger company to start poaching wholesale from the smaller one. May be there's a balance in here somewhere that can be worked out given enough time and data.
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South Park creators have new political satire series with AI-generated deepfakes
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This feels like the start of something very bad - they are going to be upfront about the deepfakes... others are not.It’s going to get to the point where you can’t even say in a court room “well we have video of him doing this”. The fact that deepfakes will exist will erode confidence in even those things that are true. At the same time it will add additional fake situations to the conversation.Worst part is that eventually even the AI-powered counter measures are going to fail eventually. The moment a computer knows what gives away a hint that it is a deepfakes and not real, a computer can solve to not present that give away. The “good guys” and “bad guys” will iterate with each other until it is perfected.
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A Minimum Viable Computer, or Linux for $15
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> It costs $10,000 USD to build one of these> The ten thousandth one costs $15As a software engineer, I'm used to being able to build essentially whatever I want, with the only cost being my time. I'm often unpleasantly reminded that software is an outlier in that regard and as soon as physical items are concerned, especially hardware, it turns out that manufacturing even a simple thing is prohibitively expensive if it's done at a small scale.
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Software I’m thankful for (2021)
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Strangely enough: Windows.Yes, I fucking hate Windows 10/11 for several laundry lists' worth of reasons, but you know what? At the end of the day, Windows is the only desktop OS that enables me to use my computer to do the shit I need or want to do.So long as that fundamental principle as a tool is not violated, I will forever be thankful for Windows regardless what criticism I might have for it.
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An interactive guide to Flexbox
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As someone who only needs to use Flexbox/Grid every once in a while, this is precisely what I needed.I've been struggling with static documentation like the one from Tailwind [1] or MDN [2]. Writing good and intuitive documentation is hard, surely this must have been quite an effort.[1]: https://tailwindcss.com/docs/flex-direction[2]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/CSS/CSS_layou...
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Beating GPT-4 on HumanEval with a fine-tuned CodeLlama-34B
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Why is FB doing this. I am so perplexed. Like, I am still waiting for the "gotcha!". Purely to mess with MS?
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Apple RIP Logo design
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I know normally this (an image) wouldn't fit here, but I thought it was poignant and relevant considering the front page.
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Debunking Princeton
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I hope this becomes a bigger story than the original. I can't tell you how many times someone has thrown a junk science article in my face, thinking that the issue in question was now settled. A survey with a small sample size, outsized extrapolations and numbers that don't match the accompanying conjecture.There should be consequences for the people who publish these things. People have a tendency to believe anything that someone in a lab coat says, especially if it supports their point of view or anecdotal experience. In many cases the people who do the research present it with few qualifications while not standing behind assumed implications. If someone publishes sensational and link baity findings they should say, unequivocally, "I'm willing to stake my reputation on the idea this trend is real and will continue" or "These are just data and I'm not willing to say that they have any bearing on reality".Facebook may not have been right to dignify the initial post with a response, but I hope it works for the best. They say that some attention is better than no attention at all. It's important that this applies to self promotion and persona creation and not science. If somebody has something crazy to say, they should start a personal blog. Those who want to intentionally attract media attention should present themselves as such, instead of pretending to be doing any kind of meaningful experiment and hypothesis testing.
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Command-line tools can be faster than your Hadoop cluster
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To quote the memorable Ted Dziuba[0]:"Here's a concrete example: suppose you have millions of web pages that you want to download and save to disk for later processing. How do you do it? The cool-kids answer is to write a distributed crawler in Clojure and run it on EC2, handing out jobs with a message queue like SQS or ZeroMQ.The Taco Bell answer? xargs and wget. In the rare case that you saturate the network connection, add some split and rsync. A "distributed crawler" is really only like 10 lines of shell script."[0] since his blog is gone: http://readwrite.com/2011/01/22/data-mining-and-taco-bell-pr...
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GitLab Pages
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Yes. I lobbied several companies to terminate their enterpise contracts with github because of their racist attitudes. All switched within 2 weeks. Some to VS Team Services, some to Gitlab. My work projects went to MSFT, but I think I will transfer my side projects to gitlab from bitbucket, since they have pages now.
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Uber Now Tracks Passengers’ Locations Even After They’re Dropped Off
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I really wish that both Android and iOS had an option to outright prevent an app from doing anything in the background. No sensors, no location, no push notifications, no network access, no CPU time, URL protocols, no nothing. If I don't click the little app icon, the app shouldn't run, full stop.
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Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile
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I was working in Microsoft about 5 years ago and Satya's not lying when they say they tried everything to incentivise app developers. It was a big focus of the company at the time. For keystone apps they tried to partner with developers doing most of the work for them. For more niche apps they ran promotions for students and independent developers giving away free phones etc. But nothing was enough to get over the problem of the lack of an initial user base.Most Windows phone owners I know (myself included) loved the design (hardware and software), the customisability, etc. but the lack of apps ultimately made us move to another ecosystem.
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Mumbai bans plastic bags, bottles, and single-use plastic containers
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Instead, government could've imposed ban on the consumer products which are wrapped using plastic material. Almost 50% plastic come directly from such consumer products sold by all FMCG companies. Such plastic material which is used as a wrapper (e.g. mineral bottles, wrappers of chocolates, biscuits, wafers, tobacco, etc.) is often useless and people tend to throw it right away.I agree that "we", the people need to take a pledge to stop using plastic as much as we can. But if there's no restriction put on giant FMCG companies such as Hindustan Unilever, ITC, Patanjali, Netsle, Procter and Gamble, etc. from supplying their products wrapped in plastic, I consider all of these government initiatives merely as a gimmick.EDIT 1:
Another comment I left on this thread - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17400028.EDIT 2:
In India, plastic is a major contributor of blocking sewers and rivers, especially in rainy seasons. Another important problem plastic waste produces is that since government bodies (such as, municipal corporations, gram panchayats, etc.) are unable to dump and/or recycle plastic waste properly, it is accidentally consumed by animals and is the major reason for their deaths. Another issue is that, often "dumping waste" is considered as "burning" it. Burning plastic waste disturbs healthy air and is a major factor among others responsible for the increased air pollution in Indian cities recently.
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My name causes an issue with any booking
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I have a suffix (the Roman numeral Ⅳ), and it causes all sorts of problems. Some sites will have me "prove" that I'm me by asking questions about "my" credit history, and very often I'll get my father's. Half the time I've already supplied a SSN… which makes it even more appalling that they can't get this right.I've also been issued a driver's license for a "4TH". I have no idea how TSA would ever spot a fake. (Since they don't flag me! But I'm also in a demographic that tends to get passes in the security theatre…)
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RSS is wonderful
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How can we reverse the trend that a wonderful piece of tech such as RSS is obliterated without any regard to implications? If you have been using RSS readers you'll have noticed that over time even quality sites (not ironic) slowly remove their RSS feeds and leave only the usual social media links.This means that they are providing their audience with no option but to have a social media account (where their interests can be tracked and cross-referenced, data mined etc), not to mention that they endorse and promote particular for-profit private companies (which is in general not done lightly, unless there is a partnership or other disclosed interest)New open source tools like this engine, especially if they integrate more with this other wonderful piece of tech, the email client could create a more healthy information retrieval environment. The time to think anew about how to evolve a positive digital life is now and the pieces of the puzzle are all around us.
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Spy camera detection using smartphone time-of-flight sensors
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Hey! Sriram here, author of this work. I'd be glad to answer any questions. There's also a short talk I gave about this here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4Txdhlji4k) if that's helpful!
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Three Companies Impersonated Millions to Influence Internet Policy
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"An investigation by the Office of the Attorney General (OAG) found that the fake comments used the identities of millions of consumers, including thousands of New Yorkers, without their knowledge or consent."$615k seems like a slap on the wrist for what they did.
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Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs
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Hi, this is Alexander. I'm an engineer on Chromium team working on scheduling and on background tab throttling in particular.Firstly, I want to make clear that we are not shipping this in Chrome 56. We have enabled throttling as an experiment in beta channel to measure impact and collect feedback from web devs. We will aim to ship it in Chrome 57, subject to further feedback.In response to concerns voiced we will disable aggressive throttling when active websocket connection is present. Tabs playing audio are already unthrottled.We will also consider more signals to use in exempting a page from this throttling: metatag, pinned tabs, permission to show notifications from user. Please leave a comment in the bug (crbug.com/650594) if you have other suggestions.Looking forward to your feedback,
Alexander.
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Google Spreadsheets and Python
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I love Google Sheets. It is so much more powerful than 99.9% of the users appreciate. Here is how I use it at my day job as head of PM at New Relic: - Fetch deals closed and lost hourly from Salesforce
- Fetch for each of our 14k+ paid accounts usage metrics using our Insights product
- Pull both items into a nice color-coded business dashboard that is near realtime
- Send said dashboard out as a PDF to a bunch of stakeholders daily/weekly
- Save PDF snapshot into Google Drive so I can easily pull up historical reports
If you haven't tried out Google App Script and supercharged your spreadsheets, give it a shot. It's also basically the only way the engineer in me gets to code much these days, so I have fun with it too :)PS: Google Sheets is definitely much slower for pure spreadsheets than Excel, no question about that. But by using cloud-based JavaScript + custom code, I can often work around that issue by writing functions that process the data quickly and report on what I need. Ultimately I end up getting much more out of it than Excel.
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CockroachDB 1.0
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I think the name "Cockroach" was a really poor decision from a marketing standpoint. The team intended to convey durability, since cockroaches can live through anything. But when I think of a cockroach, I think, gross, disgusting, etc.
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Statement on Cryptocurrencies and Initial Coin Offerings
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> I believe that initial coin offerings – whether they represent offerings of securities or not – can be effective ways for entrepreneurs and others to raise funding, including for innovative projects.> We at the SEC are committed to promoting capital formation. The technology on which cryptocurrencies and ICOs are based may prove to be disruptive, transformative and efficiency enhancing. I am confident that developments in fintech will help facilitate capital formation and provide promising investment opportunities for institutional and Main Street investors alike. I encourage Main Street investors to be open to these opportunities, but to ask good questions, demand clear answers and apply good common sense when doing so.I don't know much about Jay Clayton (SEC Chairmain) but he seems to be taking a very pragmatic stance on tokens. From what I gather, he's saying that some of these tokens should be classified as securities, while others should not. And we as investors should be be diligent to probe the creators to see if these tokens are subject to regulation and are legal.This is amazing! The SEC haven't quite stepped in yet. But I fully expect them to. And this gives some great insight into what we can expect in the future.
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Facebook’s Data Deals Are Under Criminal Investigation
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There has been a tremendous amount of grassroots lobbying, fundraising, and private investigation in New York over the past two years with respect to Facebook. It’s a serious area I feel Silicon Valley has abdicated its moral obligation to stand up to its own. Hoping we can develop the evidence that comes out of this case into criminal charges for individual engineers and senior officers.
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I got my file from Clearview AI
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This website does some crazy redirect loop between medium at the sub domain when opened without JS. How is that even possible?
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Physics Student Earns PhD at Age 89
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This is really cool. I'm 30 right now, and only just recently finished my bachelors and have been looking to get a PhD, but it's really hard to find a program that will let you work full time while doing it. It doesn't help that a part of me does sort of feel "too old" to do this sometimes. The PhD system in the US is really tailored around the assumption that you haven't entered the corporate world yet.Anyway, it's really inspiring that someone almost three times my age pushed himself through the program. I guess it's important to remember that you really shouldn't give up on your dreams.
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Audiblegate
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I worked on a tool at Amazon once that incorrectly calculated royalties, not because Amazon was greedily trying to steal from publishers, but just because of general incompetence (or, lack of sufficient competence maybe).Basically, of the people who wrote the tool, tested the tool, and used the tool, none of them knew exactly how royalties should be calculated and none of them could tell whether or not they were being calculated correctly. They weren't. We eventually figured out something was wrong and went through a very annoying process of learning about royalties and how they interplay with prices, discounts, and other factors and then set things right.Still, if I were paid by Amazon royalties in any capacity I would carefully double check their math and read the fine print.Maybe it's greed in this case, but in my time at Amazon I saw many teams in "Keep Lights On" mode where one or two people with vague memories of how services are supposed to work try to keep them running. There's also high turnover, so it's very easy to be the person on your team with the longest tenure and also be mostly in the dark about how your services should and do work. As I say, maybe it's greed, but I would never rule out the people responsible just not understanding (or doing) what they should be doing.
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Veloren is a multiplayer voxel RPG written in Rust
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I'm a little curious, is there a technical reason why voxel games are easier to build than non-voxel ones? The docs mention that all of the assets are community-contributed. Does making them voxel-based just drastically lower the skill theshold to make a contribution, vs. smoother ones in something like Blender? I guess I'm a little curious about the relative amounts of effort that would have been required to make this kind of game (procedurally-generated open world, I believe) using non-voxel assets and mechanics, since the existing set seems to be pretty fully-featured.
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I built a receipt printer for GitHub issues
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This is a fun idea, but I've read thermal paper is surprisingly nasty stuff. [Edit: unless it's advertised as "phenol-free".] It's not just paper. It contains plastics (BPA or BPS) that you absorb through your skin when handling it. I'd avoid working with receipts at my desk all day. (I'd also avoid being a grocery store cashier...)https://www.pca.state.mn.us/green-chemistry/bpa-thermal-pape...
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Actual is going open-source
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I am curious, what do people use for budgeting?Mint seems like the most feature rich, but not only do I not want to support their parent company because of their Tax lobbying... but I don't trust them from a privacy standpoint (Considering its free).YNAB and Monarch both seem like really good options. But I have not looked into them much yet.I currently use Copilot (iOS only... really just iPhone, no iPad app). I have found it really nice but the lack of a web or iPad app makes doing some tasks more of a pain.I am curious if anyone has found any that work well for couples that don't have joint finances but do obviously share some expenses. My partner and me struggle with figuring this out and inevitably loose track of certain small things. Rent and standard expenses are easy. But going out, groceries, etc. those are the complicated ones.I know there is an app you can use that you can mark transactions as shared, but I don't want to use that for privacy reasons. I would love if there was an app that had some functionality like that built in without making it so we have one account that just has all of our accounts in it.
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Thunderbird 102
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I'm on an Ubuntu 22.04 Desktop computer. I click on the big green Free Download button. It downloads a .tar.bz2 file. I double-click on that in the Firefox download manager. It opens the Gnome archive extractor. I'm looking at... .gif files? .so files? I see something called "thunderbird" and another thing called "thunderbird-bin". I double-click on those and some other dialog pops up that says "No applications found for 'thunderbird'".Will desktop Linux ever solve these basic usability problems?Or will this always just be user error! you're doing it wrong!
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Large language models are having their Stable Diffusion moment
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Currently right now there's too many caveats to run even the 7B model per the workflows mentioned in the article.The big difference between it and Stable Diffusion which caused the latter to go megaviral is a) it can run on a typical GPU that gamers likely already have without hitting a perf ceiling and b) it can run easily in a free Colab GPU. Although Hugging Face transformers can run a 7B model on a T4 GPU w/ 8-bit loading, but with its own caveats too.There's a big difference between "can run" and "can run well". VQGAN + CLIP had a lot of friction too and that's partially why AI image generation didn't go megaviral then.
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Bézier Clock
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My crappy addition to clocks: http://myoldclock.appspot.com/Did it in about 12 hours for a Google I/O competition 3 years ago. It's a countdown clock instead of a normal clock, but similar idea.
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Fidel Castro has died
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I would encourage the commenters in this thread who see Fidel's legacy as a black-and-white matter of an "evil dictator who did bad things and was wrong about economics" to step back, bear witness to the objective facts about Fidel Castro's life (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fidel_Castro), think sincerely about what could lead a highly intelligent and charismatic person to become or follow Fidel Castro (as many have), and take a moment to reflect on the complexities of global politics in the 20th century.I am not a fan of Fidel Castro - quite the opposite - but humans are cut from a common cloth. When we see revolutions turn into dictatorships, and idealism deteriorate into a cynical fight to survive, it is foolish and dangerous to dismiss the dictators and revolutionaries as "evil" or "idiots" or some similarly otherizing term. It is dangerous because it means we are refusing to learn from history, and to apply the lessons of other lives to our own. Fidel Castro's mistakes are our mistakes to repeat, or to learn from.If you hold yourself holier than Fidel Castro, and think that celebrating the death of someone you perceive as "evil" is prudent, take a deep long moment and try to learn something non-trivial from his life. "Fidel Castro" in the particular was not some kind of unique demon who plagued humanity. He was a charismatic revolutionary who occupied a very complex time. His life's trajectory was in many respects one of tragic failure. He may have, in reality, occupied a very dark corner of history, but that is for us to learn and judge, not to assume.If you think you're better, then do better. Be better. Don't refuse to acknowledge the humanity of another person because you believe you can totalize their entire life under a cheap tagline.
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Google is acquiring Kaggle
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This is obviously a talent acquisition in more ways than one (the Kaggle team, but also their ability to source machine learning talent). I wonder to what degree it's also a Tensorflow promotion move? It seems like Google is very interested in growing a community around it.For example: some friends who run a seed-stage biotech deep learning startup were offered a considerable discount by the Google Cloud folks. Their ask? That the company switch to Google Cloud, rewrite some proprietary software in Tensorflow, and heavily publicize both moves.I wonder if we'll see Kaggle gain a specific bent towards that ecosystem.
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My Chromecast Ultra would not start until I began answering 8.8.8.8
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I'm always shocked at how easy it is for people to fall into the "Google is evil!!1" trap on such trivial stuff (and funnily enough, much more serious privacy issues related to Google are ignored/downvoted).Hardcoded DNS servers are common. Extremely common in a bunch of IOT devices, given how broken some ISPs are. This is a non-story and the only reason it's being upvoted is because Google is doing it, and they also control the DNS server.You know what would be an actual story though? If Google used Google DNS to spy on people. If anyone has concrete evidence that they're doing that, that is a big fucking deal. Not some email about a google-complaint-of-the-week.Edit: To be clear I'd agree that in a high quality product there needs to be a way to change the DNS servers. Then again, this is a $30 device to hook up TVs, and I've seen $200 routers lacking that ability.----Edit 2, elaborating on the above: You make a cheap device that will likely end up in millions of homes and your #1 support issue is "It doesn't work [because my ISP is terrible therefore my network configuration is shit]!". What do you do? Do you tell your consumers to suck it up and talk to their ISP? Or do you… hardcode a DNS server that you at least know will work?"Issues" like this one are non-issues and distract from the myriad of very real privacy issues coming out of Google. Yes, this should be configurable at the very least… then again, Google products aren't exactly known for their wonderful configurability.
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“This is why I use ad blockers and a pi-hole server”
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Shout out to nextdns.io, they run a global pi-hole grid. OK, it’s better, but conceptually.”Block ads, trackers and malicious websites on all your devices. Get in-depth analytics about your Internet traffic.
Protect your privacy and bypass censorship. Shield your kids.”All you do is point your DNS at it. (Or let one of their apps point DNS for you.)But I really like the ethos:”NextDNS was founded in May 2019 in Delaware, USA by two French founders Romain Cointepas and Olivier Poitrey. Olivier has been working on Internet infrastructures for the last 20 years. In 2005, he founded Dailymotion, the largest video sharing service after Youtube and the most popular European website in the world at the time. He is currently Director of Engineering at Netflix, working on Open Connect, Netflix's home CDN also known as the CDN moving about 30% of the total US Internet traffic. Romain and Olivier closely worked for years at Dailymotion on many different projects. Romain ended up leading the mobile & TV department.””We are true supporters of the net neutrality and Internet privacy. We believe that un-encrypted DNS resolvers operated by ISPs are detrimental to those two principals. Alternative solutions like Google DNS or Cloudflare DNS are great, but we think more actors need to step up and provide alternative services to avoid centralization of powers.”In ~8 months it’s gotten mom proof while also being something I can recommend to techos. For me, it’s been more reliable than the enterprise Zscalar DNS filtering, and more configurable than other filters, particularly in allowing ad blocking and custom block lists and white lists along a rich set of built-ins.I’m at 7% blocked out of 4 million queries in last couple months. Ads & Trackers 256,212
Facebook 7,150
Spotify 1,245
Messenger 1,027
Snapchat 938
Twitter 916
I should note that I don’t use Facebook, Spotify, Messenger, Snapchat, or Twitter.
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Markdoc: Stripe's Markdown-based authoring framework
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Does anyone know of tooling like this but not for only making websites?I have an asciidoc based chain that mostly works for generating both PDF manuals and standalone html docs but it's a bit of a faff to install and set up especially for non-technical users.My dream is something like pandoc but with one or more diagram libraries integrated, native PDF output and all wrapped up in a single binary, maybe with a nice web UI/editor built into the binary. Oh, and if it could manage multiple documents and versioning that would be great too. Looking for a Fossil SCM kind of feel?Closest thing I've used would probably be LyX but that's almost too capable!I do appreciate this is a really hard thing to do and I'm wondering what toolchains other people are using?
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US border forces are seizing Americans' phone data and storing it for 15 years
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Terrifying for only 2 reasons:1. Any malicious person savvy enough to pull off a crime of interest to the Feds is smart enough to provide a wiped or burner phone to DHS/ICE, and they have to know this. So, what is the point in doing this if not to target law abiding citizens.2. USGOV has a spotty track record of keeping this information secure. A foreign actor is likely to access this info eventually. As one former government official once joked many years ago - concerning Chinese hacking - "Well, its probably more secure in the CCP's data center, so I wouldn't worry."This is the problem when a non-technical generation makes the rules and regs. Luddites ought not be permitted to ascend the GS ranks.
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Excellence is a habit, but so is failure
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Life is about taking risk. We make daily decisions that involve big and small risk constantly.Choosing to enjoy life today instead of waiting for tomorrow for that enjoyment isn't a failure, it's a choice. It comes with risk and tradeoffs.Everyone thinks there's a magical line that everyone else should take that straddles that line between enjoyment today and tomorrow. That lines doesn't exist, and isn't even the same from day to day.Looking back and regretting a lifetime of decisions is caused that the consequences from those earlier decisions. Once that weight becomes too heavy, the regret sets in.IMO, the way to combat that is two-fold.First, in the moment, be conscious of what the risks are, and if they are worth it. If they aren't, take pride in settling for less at the moment so you can safeguard your future. You're doing something hard and good, and it should feel good in itself to do it.Second, when you look back, remember the joy you had at the time. It was judged, to the best of your ability, to be worth it at the time, and you should continue to feel warm and fuzzy from that joy today, even if bad things have come about as consequence for it.For instance, like the author, I gained rather a lot of weight. Then I lost most of the excess. Then I gained half of it back. Every day is now a struggle to try to get my weight back down, and my blood pressure is back up so high I couldn't have dental surgery safely the other day, and I'm back on medication.According to the author that's a failure, but I had a lot of really, really enjoyable meals. I ate the vast majority of them with friends and family. Many of them were either cooked by family, or were special occasions. Calling those meals "failures" now would be saying that it was a mistake to enjoy that time with my family and friends, and it absolutely wasn't.
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Larry Wall Unveils Perl 6.0.0
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I honestly did not expect to see the day Perl 6 gets finished. This must have been one of the most difficult - if not the most difficult - births in the history of programming languages.At work, I have been using Perl 5 increasingly often over the past two years, mainly because handling unicode in Python 2 is not a lot of fun (and I still haven't come around to learning Python 3), and I have rediscovered why I used to like it so much.So far I have not looked into Perl 6 seriously, because I did not see the point to do so before it was finished. Guess I know now what I'll be doing this Christmas. :)Also, you gotta love Larry for quotes like this one: "This is why we say all languages are religious dialects of Perl 6..."
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Microsoft Joins the Open Invention Network
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It's hard to let past Ballmer / Gates era sins go, and I'll probably take a lot of heat here, but moves like this continue to reinforce the Nadella era is truly serious about advancing OSS both within Microsoft and within the broader community.
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Firefox 66.0 Aims to Reduce Online Annoyances
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I think the core problem is still tab clutter. Every time I hop onto my iPad to do some light browsing, I have less anxiety. I don't keep many tabs open on mobile/tablet, but I'm already counting 8 opened here as I'm typing on my laptop.Sure, almost everything mentioned in the article is problematic. Then again, maybe it's just us programmed to hit Ctrl-T too much over a decade...
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Ask HN: What projects are you working on now?
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I'm making a new tool for writers. With it, you'll be able to write your essays on "layers"The problem? Tweets are easier to read than long-form essays, as they require less time commitment. If the content is not good on a long-form article, you'll find out way too late. With this tool I'm developing:Layer 1 is the shortest version of your essay, the 1 min read — like a tweet. The idea boiled down to the shortest versionLayer 2 is the same text from layer 1, but with extras added here and there. What's already read by you is in black ink. What's new is in blue ink. This is the 2 min read versionLayer 3 shows everything from Layer 1 and 2 in black ink, but what's new is now in blue ink. and you keep doing that until you get to the full version.I can post some screenshots here of my mockups, as I'm a designer. PM me if you find this intriguing!——Edit: Since people are showing interest, here's how I see it happening — https://invis.io/GQWINO2YKU2#/410298082_1_Min_VerisonThe first thing that you see is the first layer (1 min version). Go right for 3 and 5 min version!——Edit 2: since I'm seeing the upvotes and the emails, I quickly made this sign-up form for the people who want to be updated when the product is done: https://layered-ink.webflow.io/I would put up the https://layered.ink link but the domain hasn't been propagated yet.@Admins — please do let me know if this is not permitted so I can take it down. Apologies if so.
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After killing investigation, Bloomberg News sought to silence reporter's wife
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I've seen it here in small amounts before, but it's rather shocking to observe so much obviously biased downvoting and flagging in one story. A number of anti-CCP posts already dead, and others on their way...I suppose it's rather predictable that people can't post something about the CCP on a meta-story about the CCP killing news stories, without their posts in turn being killed.
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Amazon reportedly has Pinkerton agents surveil workers who try to form unions
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In 1920 Appalachia, coal companies owned all the land, the homes and stores. They also paid workers with their own special money (that was useless everywhere else). The security companies they hired where armed and violent towards miners and their families.https://explorepartsunknown.com/west-virginia/coal-minings-d...Today, people can tour these old towns and learn the history of how the coal companies trapped and abused workers. A lot of unions and labor rights groups came out of the abuses that occurred in Appalachia.
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Element raises $30M to boost Matrix
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The Element foundation should use some of that sweet money to:1) buy FluffyChat and some serious UI designers, because Element is probably one of the worst matrix clients in terms of UX.2) fix decryption issues that happen randomly even by just using Element on the matrix.org server: https://github.com/vector-im/element-android/issues/1721 as it's a real show-stopper once you hit it3) add support for multiple accounts and identities (too many requests to list on the issue tracker), since federation is great, but it's not always wanted.Disclaimer: I managed to convince a group of technical users to switch over to matrix. We stay for the principle, but not really for the experience so far. FluffyChat is the best client we tried on mobile. On desktop, I'm glad weechat-matrix and gomuks exist, because all the other clients "reek" to us. And even if you like the modern chat UIs, they're really not bug-free either.Overall many clients and some severs to choose from, but I did prefer irc just for the simple-no-BS-clients alone (the protocol has nothing to do with it).
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Finding the B-21's hangar location from the stars in its press image
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Related unrelated question : how come this is public?F117 was a dark skunk project shown years after being operational. That made sense to me for a super secret project with wildly new technologies and capabilities.I don't understand the announcements of such projects from the vision stage, with the details of capability, purpose, strategy, photos,etc.Is it commoditized sufficiently? Is it deterrence? Is there enough misinformation?
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You just went to the Google homepage. What actually happened?
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You just pressed a key on your keyboad.Simple, isn't it?What just actually happened?You engaged a cascade of motor neurons to coordinate the contraction of thousands of muscle cells, which pulls a lever attached to your calcium crystalline framework, grinds across a glucosamine joint. This forces your calcium crystalline frame-member to depress, compressing your saline-filled lipid-polymer foam skin against the keyboard. As you do this, you constantly measure the pressure against the lipid-polymer walls to ensure you are not deforming your muscle cells too much or too little.---Reality has inordinate complexity. When humans build roads or build narratives or build websites, we are simplifying reality for ourselves and others, including other animals.
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EFF in Court to Argue NSA Collection from Internet Backbone Is Unconstitutional
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All these comments about donating to the EFF. Any way I can donate money to the NSA to balance things out a bit?
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GitHub is undergoing a full-blown overhaul as execs and employees depart
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> "We’re trying to build a new kind of enterprise company where the playbooks of old won’t always work"By replacing flat meritocracy and remote work with traditional top-down management?> "don't think we'll succeed teaching white, male middle managers empathy and compassion anytime soon, so let's limit their scope of damage"So the technical director and member of the social-impact team is a blatant racist.
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NHTSA’s full investigation into Tesla’s Autopilot shows 40% crash rate reduction
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Tesla comes off extremely well in this report. For one thing, the 40% statistic cited in the headline appears to be well supported by the NHTSA report (section 5.4) and actually manages to frame the incident in a very positive light:ODI analyzed mileage and airbag deployment data supplied by Tesla for all MY 2014 through 2016 Model S and 2016 Model X vehicles equipped with the Autopilot Technology Package, either installed in the vehicle when sold or through an OTA update, to calculate crash rates by miles travelled prior to and after Autopilot installation. Figure 11 shows the rates calculated by ODI for airbag deployment crashes in the subject Tesla vehicles before and after Autosteer installation. The data show that the Tesla vehicles crash rate dropped by almost 40 percent after Autosteer installation.I had hoped to see more information about this specific incident. For instance, any data on whether the driver had his hands on the wheel, what steps the car had taken to prompt his attention, etc. But that doesn't seem to be included.
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Dependency
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What are some examples of this?
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WTF Happened in 1971? (2019)
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The author obviously wants you to believe that it was the abandonment of the gold standard, but there are several other theories that have more credence with mainstream economists.The early 70's was the start of a horrible period of stagflation: stagnation coupled with inflation. Some do blame the loss of the gold standard, but the leading theory is the OPEC oil crisis. Others blame market regulations, the EPA was passed in 1970; the late 60s and early 70s saw many financial and environmental regulations passed.I like the oil price theory. The period of growth was a period of massive decline in the price of energy. We've since had 50 years of stagnation in energy prices. But that looks to be breaking now. If solar energy & battery prices continue to decline the way they have been, we could see energy prices decline at a rate reminiscent of Moore's law.And energy is a massive component in the price of almost everything we consume.
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Google 'colluded' with Facebook to bypass Apple privacy
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Can we just step back and recognise that the elephant in the room here is advertising?No matter your views on Google, Apple or Facebook, the issue here is nefarious practices predicated on the implied right for these companies to make money from you by polluting your internet experience with injected, paid for, content.I'll play devil's advocate for a second and say that "not all advertising is bad", but the fact that this even reached court should tell you what the companies involved care about.We really need to regulate online advertising. My personal opinion is that we should eradicate it and let the cards fall where they will, but that's unpopular and unrealistic for many valid reasons.
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Hacking my “smart” toothbrush
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Great article, the most interesting part of which is that you can lock your self out of your toothbrush head after three wrong password attempts. I didn't dig into the data sheet for the NFC chip very deeply, but I imagine that it's just the default that the chip ships with. Or maybe Philips really wants that $25 for a new toothbrush head. :-)EDIT: nope, not the default. From the data sheet, last sentence:"To prevent brute-force attacks on the password, the maximum allowed number of negative password verification attempts can be set using AUTHLIM. This mechanism is disabled by setting AUTHLIM to a value of 000b, which is also the initial state of NTAG21x."So Philips went out of their way to secure that toothbrush head. That's reassuring.
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The Quiet Ones
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My life has been a search for quiet for as long as I can remember.I think the fundamental problem with noisy people is not that they're inconsiderate, but that they don't have any train of thought to interrupt, and they thus don't realize the havoc they're wreaking.When I was living in Providence, working on On Lisp, I told my loud but well-meaning neighbors that I was writing a hard computer book, and that made them be quiet. Ordinary people can understand that you need quiet if you're working on some specific, hard task, like doing math homework. What they don't grasp is that someone would want their mind to work that way all the time, as a matter of course.
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Chrome is Not the Standard
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"Safari ships new features on a much slower cadence, but they’re usually solid and always perform incredibly well"Well, clearly this person doesn't have much experience with web development... The webengine in iOS is the biggest pile of crap I've ever worked with since IE6."Oh? You want to click this? OK, let's wait for 300 ms just in case you want to double tap to scroll!""We finally fixed it, no more delay on clicks! Yo Apple, the delay is still there if it runs as standalone, good job..!""OK, you've added the page to the home screen, now, if you click another URL on the same domain you definitely want it opened in the browser, right? Good guess Apple, that's why I added it..""Wait, are you saying that if you switch to another app and back again to the standalone site you don't want us to reload the URL that's added to the home screen? You would prefer us to let you continue where you left off, what!?!?""Oh, so you think momentum scrolling is a good idea? Too bad, we don't support it on elements that overflow, but we do have it elsewhere, have fun! PS we do have an experimental flag to enable it, but then I sure hope you're not using animations with gpu acceleration, cause then we have som nice race condition bugs in store for you, so who knows if scroll will work or not.."Seriously, iOS is the worst of them. Sure Firefox and Chrome often has experimental features with bugs, but both of them are much more "solid" when it comes to features you'll actually use in production.Safari on iOS is the IE6 of today.
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Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud
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Googler here. My opinions are my own; I have no non-public knowledge on this topic.I do not understand the hyperbole around this report. Nowhere does it say that Google plans to shutter GCP if it doesn't reach #1 by 2023.> said people with knowledge of the matter.As in, people who may not have even been at said meeting which took place nearly two years ago, under a different VP and now a different CEO, and saw some meeting notes.> The group’s leaders told staffers that if Google couldn’t reach a certain size with its computing and storage business—two of the most commonly used cloud services—the cloud unit might never become profitable, the person said. To reach such scale, they said, Google would need to be in a top two position in the market.So it's not about being #1, it's about being profitable.In other words, this was a conversation about literally every product at an executive level ever.You set goals, you decide what happens when those goals are met. Furthermore, there is no concrete assertion here that what happens if this deadline is passed. "at risk of losing funding" can literally mean anything from changing FTE allocation to capital expenses to a million other things that get discussed at an executive level.And finally:> A Google spokesperson declined to comment prior to the publication of this story, but after it appeared released the following statement: "Reports of these conversations from 2018 are simply not accurate."There may be some truth to these accounts--reality is often between the lines--but this is extremely soft on details and actual first person accounts.
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Show HN: Fraidycat
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So I built this - and its initial purpose was just to help me keep up on public TiddlyWikis (like philosopher.life) that I had discovered. But I couldn't get myself to rip off other news readers - I've not been satisfied with RSS and I disliked Google Reader. I didn't like that it basically created a second read-only email inbox - where I'm supposed to look through every message. And I didn't like that I lost the formatting and styling of the original hypertext. I much preferred just surfing my favorite sites periodically.As I began to add blogs, Twitter, YouTube support - it felt like I was connecting the whole Web, as if it was all one network, almost as if I viewed it like the government does. (Equipped with my own personal XKeyscore Lite.) I had felt isolated before - unable to see past whatever was being recommended to me on Twitter - but now I had a tool that forced me to rouse my dormant research skills. The task of reading, writing, publishing and hunting on the Web is a formidable one - and we're far from mastering it. It's no wonder that we abdicated to social networks that attempt to do it all for us.So yeah - Fraidycat is a very small attempt to move toward tools that give us some power. It really only adds the ability to assign "importance" to someone you are following - allowing you to track them without needing to be aware of them every second. But hey - it's four months old - I think it's a good start and hopefully others here can be encouraged by it to work on tools for the World-Wide Web again.
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TurboTax’s 20-Year Fight to Stop Americans from Filing Taxes for Free (2019)
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I forget from what country. Years ago with a bunch of international friends one mentioned you don't really do taxes at all. If you received wages, it is the company's duty to file them and it's done.Filing taxes does seem complicated here in the U.S. when you may have also other forms of ordinary income. So many rules, forms, etc. I wonder if people use something like TurboTax because they are just not aware how to complete this task, unless, systematically hand held in a way and just walk through getting it done before the deadline.
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YouTube deleting comments who criticize their hiding of the dislike count
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Do people actually look at the votes before watching a video? I don't think I've ever done that on YouTube. The outrage over this just seems so manufactured to me.
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An incident impacting 5M accounts and private information on Twitter
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>If you operate a pseudonymous Twitter account, we understand the risks an incident like this can introduce and deeply regret that this happened. To keep your identity as veiled as possible, we recommend not adding a publicly known phone number or email address to your Twitter account.I'm so sick of this kind of victim blaming, you're forced to add a phone number to use twitter.
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Police sue rapper Afroman for using footage of home raid in his music videos
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The article doesn't mention how the police disconnected his security cameras and stole $400 (which they later returned). Also, it seems to fail to link to the source video itself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oponIfu5L3Yhttps://www.complex.com/music/afroman-sued-by-ohio-sheriffs-...
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Show HN: OpenAPI DevTools – Chrome extension that generates an API spec
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My most common use case here is to then want to hit the API from python, and adjust the params / url etc.Would love a "copy to python requests" button thatgrabs the headersgenerates a boilerplate python snippet including the headers and the URL: import requests
import json
url = ''
headers = {
'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 ...',
...
}
data = {
"page": 5,
"size": 28
...
}
response = requests.post(url, headers=headers, data=json.dumps(data))
if response.status_code == 200:
print(response.json())
else:
print(f"Error {response.status_code}: {response.text}")
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Show HN: OpenAPI DevTools – Chrome extension that generates an API spec
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My most common use case here is to then want to hit the API from python, and adjust the params / url etc.Would love a "copy to python requests" button thatgrabs the headersgenerates a boilerplate python snippet including the headers and the URL: import requests
import json
url = ''
headers = {
'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 ...',
...
}
data = {
"page": 5,
"size": 28
...
}
response = requests.post(url, headers=headers, data=json.dumps(data))
if response.status_code == 200:
print(response.json())
else:
print(f"Error {response.status_code}: {response.text}")
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Why I was forced to shut down Lavabit
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This summary is probably misleading. A different perspective on the facts of this case is on display in the 4th Circuit ruling on Levison's contempt charges:https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/1114...In short: Levison claims that the DOJ demanded access to the content of all his users messages, and implies that after he complied with that order, they escalated to demand his TLS keys.But that doesn't seem to be what happened. A fuller timeline of Lavabit might (please correct me) look like this:t-n..t: Levison complies with numerous court orders demanding information about users of Lavabit.t: Levison is served with a court order demanding the metadata associated with Snowden. It is unclear whether this demand is actuated by a device that DOJ mandates installation of, but what is clear is that there was a debate between Levison and the DOJ about Levison's capabilities w/r/t/ furnishing the DOJ with information about Snowden's account.t+1: Levison refuses to comply with the DOJ order, while indicating that he has the technical capacity to comply with at least some of it.t+2: DOJ escalates with a magistrate court order requiring that Lavabit use its technical capabilities to defeat its encryption of Snowden's information --- a capability that Levison acknowledges having, that is obvious from the design of Lavabit, and that has a precedent in other "secure" email providers.t+2..t+13: Levison spends 11 days stonewalling DOJ, refusing not only to comply with the order but also to meet with the DOJ. Per the 4th Circuit: "As each day passed, the Government lost forever the ability to collect the target-related data for that day.". Levison is playing chicken, and DOJ is now furious.t+13: DOJ arranges to compel Levison to appear at a district court hearing, while reiterating that it requires only the metadata information surrounding Snowden's account.t+14..t+17: Levison delays 4 more days.t+17: Levison, via his attorneys, replies to the DOJ's order with a counterproposal that involves billing DOJ for his time, collecting a limited set of information, and furnishing it to DOJ only at the conclusion of the entire collection period.t+20: DOJ, furious and contending that they've lost all reasonable faith in Levison's cooperation with their investigation, demands the TLS keys for Lavabit in order that they can control the collection of the data they need from Lavabit.Again: please correct details here where I'm wrong.Most readers of this thread will have enormous sympathy for Levison and his efforts to stymie the DOJ's investigation of Snowden through his account on Lavabit.However, a jaundiced, cynical, or purely pragmatic reader might also find grave flaws in Levison's response to this situation. His position on the matter does not appear to have been content-neutral: he complied with previous orders. More importantly, when an order came in for an account he had a personal interest in, he escalated matters so that DOJ would end up compromising everyone's information, by playing a game of chicken he was sure to lose.
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Ask HN: The “I want to do everything but end up doing nothing” dilemma
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Been there, done that (over and over again).You don't have time for everything. Therefore, you must choose what to do, but also you must choose what not to do. That is the hard part - choosing what to let go. Once you did that, the rest is (comparatively) easy.Ideally, devote yourself to one subject and immerse yourself in it. Stay focused, refuse to do anything else. You'll have distractions, you'll doubt your choice, but don't start anything else until you finish what you've started.If you have to do two things at the time, split your day in two. In the morning do one subject, then take a break (have a lunch, go to walk,...) Then, you study the second one. This break is important, don't jump from one subject to the next without it.In summary, make your choice and stick to it until completion. Ignore everything else.
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AI Playbook
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I found this really frustrating to read; on 'training your own models':> Deep learning is a class of machine learning that has gotten a lot of well-deserved attention in recent years because it's working to solve a wide variety of AI problems in vision, natural language processing, and many others.What others? Be specific.The problem is not that people don't know how to build neural networks.The tensorflow tutorial is extremely comprehensive and there are lots of resources for people who know what problem they're solving to try to build a solution.The problem is that people don't understand what they can do with this technology, or even, in a meaningful sense, what it is.Given a array of input numbers [i1, i2, i3...] it provides a black box that can map that input to a set of output numbers [o0, o2, ...] where the dimension of the input and output are different.That's. All. It. Does.It takes an input array and outputs an output array; a magic f(x) function.The thing people don't understand well is not how do I implement f(x); the problem is how do I convert my domain problem (I have 2000000 shelf products in my database and a tonnes of sales information) how to convert that into an input array of numbers? What is the output array of numbers I want out of the function?The reason this works well for images is because you can say, ok, this output number represents a tag (dog, cat, etc) for each discrete value, and the input numbers are just an array of the raw pixel data.That's why its good for images; because a traditional function implementation of f(x) that takes a I of dimension say, 65535, and produces an output of dimension 1 is a hard problem....but if your problem is, given an input of say [price, date, origin] and an output of [value to business], you can solve that problem quite trivially without needing any neural network.tldr; The problem people are having is figuring out input and output for domains other than image processing; not how to build a NN, or how to choose which NN to build.Guide misses the point entirely.(You might argue this is somewhat uncharitable to what is actually a well written guide to ML; but you can read the about section for yourself and see what you think; I feel like the guide needs to focus sharply on practical business outcomes if it wants to do what it says its doing)
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Chrome 68 will mark all HTTP sites as “not secure”
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The people who are pushing back against HTTPS really bug me to be honest. They say silly things like “I don’t care if people see most of my web traffic like when I’m browsing memes.”That presumes that the ONLY goal of HTTPS is to hide the information transferred. However, you have to recognize the fact that you run JITed code from these sites. And we have active examples of third parties (ISPs, WiFi providers) inject code into your web traffic. When browsing the web with HTTP you are downloading remote code, JITing it, and running it on every site you visit if you aren’t 100% noscript with no HTTP exceptions. You have no way of knowing where that code actually came from.Now consider that things like Meltdown and Spectre have JavaScript PoCs. How is this controversial?
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Joi Ito Resigns from M.I.T. Media Lab After Outcry over Jeffrey Epstein Ties
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Good. Here’s a particularly damning passage from Ronan Farrow’s New Yorker article [1]:> According to Swenson, Ito had informed Cohen that Epstein “never goes into any room without his two female ‘assistants,’ ” whom he wanted to bring to the meeting at the Media Lab. Swenson objected to this, too, and it was decided that the assistants would be allowed to accompany Epstein but would wait outside the meeting room.> On the day of the visit, Swenson’s distress deepened at the sight of the young women. “They were models. Eastern European, definitely,” she told me. Among the lab’s staff, she said, “all of us women made it a point to be super nice to them. We literally had a conversation about how, on the off chance that they’re not there by choice, we could maybe help them.”Ito worked with someone whom his staff suspected of continuing to traffic women — right there in their own office.He also enriched himself from this relationship. From this NYT article:> Mr. Ito acknowledged this past week taking $525,000 of Mr. Epstein’s money for the lab, as well as $1.2 million for his personal investment funds.Truly despicable.[1] https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-an-elite-univer...
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Golang disables Nagle's Algorithm by default
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> I would absolutely love to discover the original code review for this and why this was chosen as a default. If the PRs from 2011 are any indication, it was probably to get unit tests to pass faster. If you know why this is the default, I’d love to hear about it!Please hold while I pick my fallen jaw up off the floor.The parents of the Internet work at Google. How could this defect make it to production and live for 12+ years in the wild? I guess nothing fixes itself, but this shatters the myth of Google(r) superiority. It turns out people are universally entities comprised of sloppy, error-prone wetware.At the very least there should be a comment in caps and in the documentation describing why this default was chosen and in what circumstances it's ill-advised. I'm not claiming to be remarkably exceptional and even I bundle such information on the first pass when writing the initial code (my rule: to ensure a good future, any unusual or non-standard defaults deserve at least a minimal explanation) (Full-Disclosure: I was rejected after round 1 of Google code screens 3 times, though have been hired to other FAANG/like companies).Yeesh.p.s. Be sure to brace yourself before reading https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34179426#34180015
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Showoff
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If you have a public facing server then this can be had for free: ssh -nNT -R 8080:localhost:3000 myserver.com
Et voilà, myserver.com:8080 now points to localhost:3000.
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Integrating GTA V into Universe
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I'm not sure I would like to live in a world with autonomous vehicles that were trained in Grand Theft Auto.
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Announcing GVFS: Git Virtual File System
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It's interesting how all the cool things seem to come from Microsoft these days.I still think we need something better than Git, though.
It brought some very cool ideas and the inner workings are reasonably understandable, but the UI is atrociously complicated. And yes, dealing with large files is a very sore point.I'd love to see a second attempt at a distributed version control system.But I applaud MS's initiative. Git's got a lot of traction and mind share already and they'd probably be heavily criticized if they tried to invent its own thing, even if it was open sourced. Will take a long time to overcome its embrace, extend and extinguish history.
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The Other Half
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I sat on a "weird pain" in my chest for a few days. Basically it was uncomfortable to sleep on my left side, and I felt a bit short of breath. Turns out I was suffering from a double pulmonary embolism, and that the only reason I wasn't doubled over in pain is because by an odd fluke of nature, the interior of the lungs do not have nerve endings (only the exterior) and had I waited any longer I could have died. At that point, a third of both of my lungs was basically gone already. And so, I ended up having to stay for an entire week in the hospital while they dripped anticoagulants into me. If my girlfriend hadn't strongly encouraged me to call my doctor... Who knows.Guys/gals... If there's any unusual pain in your chest cavity at all, just drop whatever it is you're doing and get it checked out. It might not even seem that bad at the time... it didn't to me and it didn't to Jason Scott... just do it.
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Saying Goodbye to Firebug
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Firebug was the greatest thing to happen to web development. Honestly I still prefer it to the native dev tools. I especially love how most things go to the console so I don't have to jump all over the place to find the information I'm looking for. I absolutely abhor the network panel in Chrome. It's like they're purposefully trying to make it difficult.
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Thousands of AI researchers are boycotting the new Nature journal
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Some heavy hitters on the signatory list: Jeff Dean, Yoshua Bengio, Volodymyr Mnih, Ilya Sutskever, Geoffrey Hinton, Chelsea Finn, Sergey Levine.Would like to see Demis Hassabis and David Silver join the effort.If Deepmind, OpenAI and Berkeley (well represented here) all boycott, that's a huge chunk of key AI researchers.
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I still miss my headphone jack, and I want it back
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We need to take into account _Accessibility_. A large use case that I've found most people seems to miss are individuals who are older and don't have much experience with bluetooth or wireless technology. I'm fine with Apple removing the headphone jack, but they've alienated so many people to find their own path when they don't include the adapter.Anecdotal example: I recently purchased headphones for my 65-year old father and showed him how to use it, in preparation for his "headphone jack-less" future. After about a month (he lives in China, so I see him only a couple times a year), I asked him how it's going and he said he doesn't use them anymore because he just couldn't figure it out. I tried to explain "Turn on Bluetooth on your phone, then turn on your headphones, then hold down the button to pair, etc", but it was actually quite complicated because once he did this dance, 2 months later his phone restarted and bluetooth was off and we had to do it again. Software-wise, I can just send a link, but when it comes to hardware + software like printers, things become really challenging to explain.I bring this up because if we're moving to the "wireless" world, we need to really consider accessibility for the elderly. My father ended up throwing away these really expensive Beats headphones, went to his local market and bought some cheap Sony headphones and is now listening fine. I'm not really sure what's going on happen when his next phone doesn't have the headphone jack.
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AlphaStar: Mastering the Real-Time Strategy Game StarCraft II
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This is really impressive, I didn't expect starcraft to be played this well by a machine learning based AI. I'm excited to read the paper when it comes out!That said, I'm not sure I agree that it was winning mainly due to better decision making. For context, I've been ranked in the top 0.1% of players and beaten pros in Starcraft 2, and also work as a machine learning engineer.The stalker micro in particular looked to be above what's physically possible, especially in the game against Mana where they were fighting in many places at once on the map. Human players have attempted the mass stalker strategy against immortals before, but haven't been able to make it work. The decisions in these fights aren't "interesting"--human players know what they're supposed to do, but can't physically make the actions to do it.While they have similar APM to SC2 pros, it's probably far more efficient and accurate so I don't think that alone is enough. For example, human players have difficulty macroing while they attack because it takes valuable time to switch context, but the AI didn't appear to suffer from that and was extremely aggressive in many games.
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What Silicon Valley gets about engineers that traditional companies do not
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I've worked at both SV and traditional companies, and I feel like this very closely matches my experience.One of the things I worry about is that even at companies that are doing "Agile transformations" and adopting methodologies like Scrum, in practice have "Product Owners" who are there to give instructions via Jira tickets. Other roles like "Business Analysts" are there to ensure that lowly developers never have to worry about things like understanding the business themselves.So I get funny looks when I suggest that engineers should go talk to people in the business, and write design docs. Silicon Valley engineering practices can look very non-Agile to a lot people from traditional companies that are doing Agile.
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Computer Graphics from Scratch
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A long time ago, due to an improbable sequence of events, I found myself teaching Computer Graphics at my alma mater, a year after I took the class myself. Over the following five years or so, my approach to the subject evolved, and I really got the hang of it.
After I stopped teaching, I took my notes, handouts and slides, and made them into a series of articles that I put on my website, where they remained in relative obscurity. Hacker News managed to find it every once in a while, and it was generally well received, but nothing came out of this. Until April 2019. It made the HN front page again [0], except this time it caught the attention of an editor in No Starch Press [1].Long story short, today I’m incredibly grateful and excited to tell you that CGFS is coming out as a real book, with pages and all [2]. The folks at NSP graciously agreed to let me publish the updated contents, the product of almost two years of hard editing and proofreading work, for free on my website [3]. But if you’d like to preorder the printed or ebook version, you can use the coupon code MAKE3DMAGIC to get a 35% discount at https://nostarch.com/computer-graphics-scratch.I’m still somewhat in disbelief that my work is getting published as a book, and this genuinely wouldn’t have happened without your support. So once again, THANK YOU :)[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19584921[1] http://nostarch.com[2] https://nostarch.com/computer-graphics-scratch[3] http://gabrielgambetta.com/computer-graphics-from-scratch
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Aaron Swartz Rememberance Day This Monday
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I don’t understand the cult of personality around Aaron. It’s like a self insert for people that fantasize about sticking it to the man or something; the tragic hero, the genius boy who died not realizing his potential, the man who dared to defy the authorities. Yawn.Fact is Aaron was an angsty teen with an axe to grind with the authorities . Reading Chomsky certainly didn’t help. Acting out childishly by spreading copy righted material, getting caught and whining about how all of this is so unfair…Look, he was no genius. Genius does not invent reddit; it invents facebook and then proceeds to take over the world because actual, real, genius understands the rules of the game.Aaron was smart enough to understand just how fucked things are but oh so very dumb to act out on his aggressive impulses. The very same impulses that later lead him to kill himself.Ironically his suicide accomplished far more than his technical know how could ever hope to achieve.p.s. aaron was no hero. You dont ever want to be him and you certainly dont want your children to be him. His ideals were pure and correct, but he could not accept we’re living in a world filled with trash humans. Should’ve played the game correctly imho.
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What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)
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The reality is that no such projection is plausible. Could a human being living in 1903, before the Wright Brothers have predicted a moon landing only 66 years later? Could anyone in 1990 have predicted the smartphone, let alone 1922? Only one prediction is worthy of confidence - the world of technology will increase at an exponential rate...and the world will improve.We lament progress, but few of us would choose 1922 over 2022 (I mean, the sanitation and medical care alone makes the decision trivial on my end). Even fewer would choose 2022 in 2122.
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Starting February 9, we will no longer support free access to the Twitter API
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- announced at 10pm
- basically a week to decide what to do with your dev project
- No information to help you make that decisionThis seems like more management by manchild. I strongly suspect that Musk realized his promises of cutting down bots etc. were failing and that they either couldn't or wouldn't develop abuse detection, so he's decided to solve the problem by making it cost money, with the (perhaps desired) side effect of crippling academic/analytic research.As an amateur network science researcher, I'm pretty steamed. I enjoy doing my own network analyses using tools like Gephi and have monitored probably a hundred breaking news or trending issues, as well as amassing a great collection of academic papers by smarter folk than me. I don't run any kind of app or service that sits on top of Twitter, but those who do run legitimate services are now being held hostage because of the unchecked abuse. Ant the failure to deal with botspam is lamentable. Twitter has refused for years to implement even the simplest things like hashing tweets and looking for collisions, or considering the count of edges to the hashtag graph, or even looking at tweet frequency. Many of their abuse problems will continue unabated; the sellers in the market for bogus twitter accounts are likely delighted because they now have a great excuse to raise prices, even though most of their 'product' is produced by hand with cheap labor in poor countries.
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Edward Snowden, Whistle-Blower
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I find it pleasantly surprising -- almost unbelievable, in fact -- that a highly sought-after fugitive accused of treason and practically certain to be found guilty of serious crimes is so widely supported by the public and the media.Has there ever been another person whom the executive has done everything in its power to paint as a dangerous enemy of the state, whose approval rating was several points higher than the President's and several times higher than that of Congress? Or is this a never-before-seen situation?The inverted totalitarianism[1] we live in can seem almost invincible, but this to me is a big glimmer of hope that some people at least are still unwilling to swallow the (two-)party line.I hope this leads to some real change, but then again, I can't exactly hold my breath.[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
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Facebook is misleading Indians with its full-page ads about Free Basics
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Indian here. The manipulation has been incredibly blatant and scummy. It's not even funny anymore. Friends who categorically denied having sent a mail to the Indian telecom regulatory authority on Facebook's behalf (conveniently supplied by Facebook) show up on my feed as having signed the mail.It's an all-out blitzkrieg. I've seen full page ads in newspapers, banners at bus stops, even ads on local Indian websites.It's one of the scummiest things I've seen from a major company.
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LuLu: An open-source macOS firewall that blocks unknown outgoing connections
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What I want for all these services (Little Snitch, ESET, etc) is an EasyList-like ... list. A community-aggregated and reviewed list of servers that don't merit my connection. I'd pay a monthly subscription fee for that.I'd also like separate lists for* "this wifi is public, be extra cautious"* "this wifi is public, be nice and don't torrent, do backups, etc"* "I'm on a metered connection (e.g. LTE), don't run torrents, backups, etc"edit: for anyone looking for a monetizable idea: this post has 41, no 42, no 43 points in about an hour. Probably a good idea...
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A deep dive into iOS Exploit chains found in the wild
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> It is worth noting that none of the exploits bypassed the new, PAC-based JIT hardenings that are enabled on A12 devices.I'm surprised Apple doesn't talk more about how they're continuously upgrading the security of iPhones with new chip generations. I remember the BlackHat presentation on iPhone security from a few years ago [0] also found that there were attacks on older iPhones which didn't work on the (then-)newer ones. Is Apple afraid it will give the impression that existing phones are not secure?[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12231758
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Stripe Capital
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The way Stripe Capital has structured repayment of the loan -- fixed fee, dynamic loan term -- is is an interesting way to make it hard to compare against other lenders, which typical express their fees through APRs.The term of the loan is variable, and depends on daily sales, but assuming you have a high volume of sales and take out a small loan, the effective APR is going to be through the roof!For instance, suppose I take out a $25K loan with a $2.5K fixed fee. Now 15% of my sales go toward repayment. Let's say I pull in a little over $30K in sales a month. The loan will be repaid in about six months, and my effective APR is 20%! Might as well put it on a credit card!You can get a small business loan at FAR better terms elsewhere: https://www.valuepenguin.com/average-small-business-loan-int...So it seems like the main reason you'd go with Stripe Capital is that they've made the whole process practically effortless.But one thing strikes me as odd about this whole arrangement. The better a business performs, the quicker it is able to repay the loan, and the higher its effective APR becomes! It's essentially a prepayment penalty in disguise. So you'd better make sure the loan doesn't help your business too much, or you'll end up getting hosed by the loan fee.
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Drive through cities in the browser while listening to local radio stations
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I absolutely love this.As the creator of Dream Catalogue once wrote:"I spent a lot of 2013 listening to spacey drum & bass mixes while watching Hong Kong and Tokyo night driving videos on YouTube and drinking beer, just because the combination of it all created such a weird feeling I have never experienced before."I love these kinds of videos. Pairing it with a local radio station gives me the kind of feeling that you get whenever you first arrive in a new city.You're gawking out of the window of the taxi/bus/train as the city and landscape goes whizzing past. Just drinking it allll inIn those moments you feel there is a whole world of opportunity that awaits you. You don't know what you'll find there. You get lost going over the possibilities that await. Will you find friendship? Opportunities? Love? Enlightenment? Anything could happen.But in that moment, those are all just possibilities. So you sit. And you watch. And you think.And then you snap back to reality when you reach your destination. You step outside, are briefly assaulted by the heat and moisture - or lack of it - and sometimes you see or smell things you've never encountered before.You blink, breathe in, and take your first steps in this new place that you will be calling home.
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How to stop procrastinating by using the Fogg Behavior Model
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Some time back, I read all I could on procrastination, and watched dozens of videos on it, and by far the best thing I found on it was this video by Tim Pychyl: [1]It focuses particularly on procrastination in graduate school, but is widely applicable elsewhere.One of the key insights that Pychyl, a psychologist who studies procrastination, had is that procrastination is not (as is commonly believed) a time management problem but a problem with managing negative emotions.He has lots of really useful, practical tips for overcoming procrastination in the video, which I highly recommend.[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhFQA998WiA
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Apple removes first-party firewall exemption in macOS 11.2 beta 2
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I am glad that the public backlash forced them to fix a deliberate BACKDOOR that they had introduced (by design) in the Network Extension Framework that macOS Big Sur now forces all the firewalls to use. (At least, they claim to have removed it). But it is hard to trust them again, and I would prefer to use a firewall that uses its own kernel extension to manage the network than using Apple's API again. (Obviously that's going to be really hard with the changes they have made to the OS).I know many Apple's fan see this as a positive move.But let's not ignore the pattern of privacy violations and user data collections due to deliberate design and the "apology" and "changes" that follow once CAUGHT. A few of these that immediately come to mind are:- Apple selling user data to US government: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants...- Apple iPhone 11 tracks user location even when location services are explicitly turned off by user (another BACKDOOR): https://www.silicon.co.uk/mobility/smartphones/apple-iphone-...- Apple macOS tracks every app that you use: https://sneak.berlin/20201112/your-computer-isnt-yours/- Apple introduces BACKDOOR in its API to allow Apple apps to bypass application firewalls: https://www.patreon.com/posts/hooray-no-more-46179028(For those who want to diss me for the above, realise that Apple's new found love for privacy doesn't mean shit without such public scrutiny and discussions. And if you want it to last, remain suspicious and VOCAL on any such possible violations.)
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Steve Wozniak announces private space company to clean up space debris in orbit
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I'm very skeptical of the technical challenges associated with this problem (business model and financing aside). The amount of delta-v required to perform maneuvers to repeatedly "dock" with different pieces of space junk, and then again to de-orbit is very high. You MIGHT be able to de-orbit on the order of magnitude of ~10 pieces of low-earth orbit debris per mission. Maybe. If you're really good. And low-earth orbit junk isn't the major issue since it will de-orbit naturally in a reasonable time-frame. Higher orbit junk is what really matters, and will require much more delta-v to reach, and then again to de-orbit after "docking".Allow me to blindly speculate here: a space-junk company is going to take one of the two following paths:1) Perform low-earth orbit missions to de-orbit a few pieces here and then there, use the good PR to drive funding (let's just assume they can make the finances work via getting governments to pay for it or something). It will technically work, but it will only deorbit pieces that would naturally decay anyways at a meaninglessly low-volume. But the PR will be good and regulatory capture will ensure their investors get paid. The real problem will remain.2) Go after the really big pieces in higher orbits. These pieces tend to be well-tracked and aren't really a large problem, but all the same outcomes in option 1 will occur. Investors will get paid, and of course, the real problem won't be solved.Maybe I'm being pessimistic, but I see space-junk removal companies largely relying on the general public's lack of knowledge on how orbits work to drive PR. Maybe Kerbal Space Program 2 will go viral enough to fix that problem? We can only hope
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Do-nothing scripting: the key to gradual automation (2019)
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I did this after seeing this before on HN. There were a few processes that were manual that benefitted from the technique in the article.Learn from my folly: I even called them “do nothing scripts,” referencing this article. However; I was judged by peers for not writing the full automation versions as they didn’t appreciate the idea of gradual automation (programmer hubris?). Saying “do nothing scripts” in meetings did catch the awkward attention of leadership.As a description, “do nothing” communicates a lot. As a brand, “do nothing” can use some improvements.My short prescription of turning “do nothings” into “do some things” into “do all the things” didn’t help. We had some new people join the team and they had fun turning the do nothing scripts into a document. * Sigh *I still build these type of process description scripts still. I usually don’t advertise them to peers until they do some of the things nowadays.
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U.S. surgeons transplant pig heart into human patient
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You might be asking, why a pig? I don't know, but forever ago I wrote software for a cardiovascular imaging lab and pigs were their primary test subjects. I was like, "why pigs?" and the PI was like, "Imaging-wise, pig hearts aren't too different from humans. Plus, we can give them a heart attack in the scanner and not go to jail. Some labs use dogs. I just can't do that."
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TurboTax’s fight against free tax filing
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The upsells on TurboTax are getting a lot more shameless in recent years. I saw the exact same one pop up at least 2-3 times.The one that really aggravated me though was the one at the end: after you FILE your taxes, they present this damned progress-bar looking thing as if you are somehow “not done” yet, as if this totally optional product sale is a required step!! No, no, no, that is just misleading garbage, and it is so annoying to have to constantly hunt around the page for the magic text to get around these things. I mean, I couldn’t even reach the page that lets me download my forms as PDF until I skipped this upsell.What’s more, the product itself is getting more expensive but worse. On desktop, the whole thing is just a blown-up mobile UI (are that many people doing taxes on their phones!?) with all kinds of things unnecessarily hidden. On page after page, there is more than enough space to show everything but instead it’s giant white space everywhere; they HIDE things behind disclosure arrows, and with no logic whatsoever; e.g. on one page it shows the 2020 numbers by default but hides all the 2021 numbers behind arrows!?Guess what isn’t an insultingly-small, truncated experience on desktop? The ads, the upsells. THOSE are full-page, taking full advantage of screen space and even scrolling off the edges.Really shows their priorities.
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Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?
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I've been struggling with wrapping my head around asynchronous programming with callbacks, promises and async/await in JS, however I think it's finally clicking after watching these YouTube videos and creating a document where I explain these concepts as if I'm teaching them to someone else:* Philip Roberts's What the heck is the event loop anyway? - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aGhZQkoFbQ* The Story of Asynchronous JavaScript - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rivBfgaEyWQ* JavaScript Callbacks, Promises, and Async / Await Explained - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRNToFh3hxU* Async Javascript Tutorial For Beginners (Callbacks, Promises, Async Await). - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8gHHBlbziw* Jake Archibald: In The Loop - setTimeout, micro tasks, requestAnimationFrame, requestIdleCallback, - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCOL7MC4Pl0Edit... I've been rewatching these videos, reading the MDN docs, the Eloquent JavaScript book, javascript.info, blogs about the subject, etc. This further proves you shouldn't limit yourself to a single resource, and instead fill up the laguna with water from different sources if you will.
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Transformer architecture optimized for Apple Silicon
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i'd say within 5 years apple will have optimized apple silicon and their tech, along with language model improvements, such that you will be able to get gpt-4 level performance in the iPhone 19 with inference happening entirely locally.openai is doing great work and is serious competition, but I think many underestimate big tech. once they're properly motivated they'll catch up quick. I think we can agree that openai is a sufficient motivator.
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