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Building and operating a pretty big storage system called S3
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Great to see Amazon employees being allowed to talk openly about how S3 works behind the scenes. I would love to hear more about how Glacier works. As far as I know, they have never revealed what the underlying storage medium is, leading to a lot of wild speculation (tape? offline HDDs? custom HDDs?).
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The Absurdity of LinkedIn
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I can't believe people still use LinkedIn.And when I say that, I am talking about the HN crowd. It's one thing to say "I can't believe people use IE6", but this is tech-savvy people using a joke of a social media.Guys, if you want to look professional, buy your own domain name. Something professional, like yourname.me, or clever like "yourna.me". Build your own web page with your own damn profile and don't leave control over a company on how you look on the web. Be in control of the first point of entry to your identity.For god sake guys. LinkedIn has had so many security issues, so much scummy behaviour regarding spam, user retention etc... yet you are still blessing them with your presence. (Obviously this doesn't apply to those that don't)PS: Use gandi.net as a registrar for your name. They offer a free ssl cert along with the domain (and support almost every tld) for added "professional-looking" value to your site. I am not affiliated with them, I just love Gandi.Edit: I'm being called out for "living in my own bubble" it seems. Yet LinkedIn is the very definition of a bubble. I used to have a LinkedIn profile and from it all I got were the most awful recruiting experiences, and all of them through cold calls. Your own site with CV + portfolio + Github + contact details is a LOT better.PS2: Downvote or not I don't care, but please reply if you disagree; I'd love to disagree even harder!Edit 2: I'm starting to think there is correlation between finding LinkedIn useful and not having a Github profile. A lot of the points people are bringing up here are solved in a very similar way by Github (which is in many ways a social network). This does bring me back to my original point though, why use LinkedIn when you can use a company that isn't scummy and actually have your real work experience on there and a link back to your personal website with more portfolio etc?
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The future of Unreal Tournament begins today
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> When the game is playable, it will be free. Not free to play, just free.> We’ll eventually create a marketplace where developers, modders, artists and gamers can give away, buy and sell mods and content. Earnings from the marketplace will be split between the mod/content developer, and Epic. That’s how we plan to pay for the game.What distinction are they trying to make between "free to play" and "free"? To my understanding, "free to play" means the game is largely free, but with the implication that there is additional content that can optionally be purchased. "Free" means the game is free, with no implication either way of whether optional purchases exist.
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Bootstra.386 – A Bootstrap theme from the 1980s
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Needs keyboard arrow navigation :)
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Show HN: This page exists only if someone is looking at it
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Author here. Amusingly, I wanted to link to the HN discussion on the page, but couldn't figure out how to... I don't think it's possible! Something I hadn't considered until just now with a content addressable web is there are no cycles in the links.Edit: Another amusing anecdote. I've been following this on log2viz (the heroku realtime performance monitoring tool), and was aghast to see high response times and memory usage. Then I realized I was actually looking at the dashboard for one of my rails apps! Phoenix is sitting pretty at about 35MB memory usage, and a median response time of 5ms, so far.
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Kazakhstan to MitM all HTTPS traffic starting Jan 1
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Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft, Salesforce, Box, Dropbox, Twitter, etc. could have a very strong influence on changing this if they banded together to respond to this in some way.The government might be doing what they think is right, but public backlash can change policy almost overnight. We saw this in the US recently with SOPA/PIPA. The "Internet" response was unprecedented.The people of Kazakhstan can achieve the same outcome.
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A Grain of Salt
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70,000 miles is an incredible distance. I am impressed the car held together that long.I see nothing wrong with the agreement. If I fix your car for free, I will make you agree to not thank me with a lawsuit. It's very simple, really. The customer gets a free repair, Tesla does not have to deal with lawsuit-wielding psychopaths.
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How did Google Talk change from a dream to a nightmare?
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Instant messaging is an example of something that used to work, and now doesn't. It used to be that everyone was basically on AIM, which functioned as an open enough network. Status information worked pretty well - you could fairly easily tell if someone was online, and so people could respond.And now - we have dozens of clients, such that there's no way of knowing which subset your contacts use. With the prevalence of phones, it's hard to tell if someone is available or not, so you just send messages in the ether, and get surprised if anyone responds.And the worst part is, there's no obvious fix, since any new system will just add to the fragmentation.
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Who Killed the Junior Developer?
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There were never any junior dev jobs. You have always had to lie, cheat, and steal your way into the field. I have a buddy who legit cheated his way to the top Magento certification and now cycles through $150k+ jobs where they keep him on long enough to realize he doesn't have any coding skills then they fire him.Reason is software is always an ancillary concern to the business. You see this in other fields, like say accounting, but the difference is that accountants leave school fully capable of employment. HR understands how to hire and manage accountants.But programming is this black box in the corporate world that no one knows how to understand, value, or hire for. This is why every company wants rockstars, they're hoping that someone whose at least confident to present themselves as a rockstar won't be a net negative to the company.Eventually they'll figure it out, took them a decade to figure out how to manage IT. Then companies will learn that they can't skimp on middle management for software developers. Some companies will need to give software a legit seat at the table and hire upper management. The political cover will allow shops to stabilize and with stabilization, you'll finally start seeing small and midsize organizations open up positions for juniors.But it'll never happen so long as companies don't take software development seriously by giving them political cover. If you are a software developer nearing the middle or end of your career, you're pulling the ladder up behind you if you don't seriously consider moving into management. It's too important a job to ignore to go chase your dreams.
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Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors
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More and more websites are getting rid of user comments on their websites. Just in the last couple of months the National Review and The Atlantic have got rid of comments.In simple terms they couldn't keep up with comment moderation and were not able or willing to invest in enough moderators.So I have to give credit to HN to having one of the most civil comment sections on the internet. What I like about HN is that the comments VERY RARELY descend into the inevitable political sniping that seems to happen almost everywhere else on the internet, even when discussing controversial topics like Trump, and even the percentage of snarky and dismissive comments is kept pretty low.So, keep it up, dang and sctb!
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Software Architecture Guide
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Whenever I see yet another article by Martin Fowler, Kent Beck, Robert Martin & co I ask myself - where is the evidence for what they are preaching?
What are the graphs based on? What is the evidence behind the proposed rules?These authors are clearly accomplished blog and book writers, but anyone whose software-related accomplishments are not open source or at least well known should have their statements scrutinized more closely.I don't see any studies cited, case studies presented or concrete examples. All I see is yet another reasonably sounding yet unsupported piece of folklore.
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Sweden Drops Julian Assange Rape Investigation
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It's not torture if you can leave at any time. He wasn't being held in the embassy, he was hiding there.
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What are those grids of glass in the sidewalk and why are they purple?
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I thought this was going to be in Seattle. :) It is neat to notice these all over the place.The underground tour is more than a little crazy to see just how built up the city literally is. My favorite related topic were the spite mounds.
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ClearURLs – automatically remove tracking elements from URLs
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While I greatly value my privacy to the point where I donate to noyb.eu, removing utm campaign tags feels too much. Those do not commonly contain private information. I believe that marketers should feel free to use those to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns, instead of relying on more privacy-intrusive and opaque methods (e.g. cookies, fingerprinting, IP address collecting, etc.).
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U.S. to give ransomware hacks similar priority as terrorism, official says
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I'm surprised at how dismissive the comments are. We need many angles of defense against these criminals. Dismissing this because companies should do better security is like dismissing doctors because people should get more exercise. That's silly. We need preventative care and treatment.I'm not surprised by this announcement because the way that the pipeline-company ransomware hackers beat a hasty retreat was noticeably unusual, and already seemed to telegraph that the state was getting involved more...actively. Good.
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SparkFun Hooks a Patent Troll
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I wonder if it's possible to make some sort of patent troll insurance company.Basically a company that attempts to collect as many patents as possible to weaponize against trolls and then provides legal protection to clients from trolls. The clients can share their patents with the insurance company too to help them become more powerful.Then when sued by a troll the insurance company goes scorched earth to destroy them as a matter of policy. So their clients get the benefit of also deterring suits just because they're represented by this insurance company.
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Vscode.dev
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This seems really cool, and seems like it took a lot of man hours to put together.However, I'm not sure who this is for. Downloading and installing an application is not a particularly big ask for the type of people who use VSCode. The browser version will always be a compromised experience, given the inherent limitations of browser applications. Even if it works 99% of the time, that 1% would add enough friction to make it more of a hassle then it's worth.The post gave some use cases involving hardware that can't easily run Desktop VSCode (e.g. iPads and Chromebooks). I just don't see that being much of a use case though, except in desperate circumstances where a more capable dev machine isn't available.If there are some use cases I'm missing, I'd love to hear about them! This is a pretty new concept, and I certainly don't know how everyone likes to code. But from my perspective, I struggle to see any situation where someone would choose to use this, and few situations where someone would have to.
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New York State Senate passes prohibitions on non-competes
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Are there a lot of issues with non-competes? I've def heard stories, but it's usually related to poaching scenarios where a contractor gets hired by the company that they are contracting with.That said, I also know that multiple states basically have mechanisms to prevent a non-complete from preventing work. For example, if I'm a mechanic, a non-complete can't keep me from being a mechanic and making a living because a former employer claims that every repair shop is a competitor.
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Goodbye MongoDB, Hello PostgreSQL
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As a greying developer I am most amused by people discovering that 'old' technologies like SQL databases work really well.The only useful piece of advice I can give a younger developer is... be careful when drinking the newtech koolaid.And one more thing: star = Sequel.lit('*')
User.select(:locale)
.select_append { count(star).as(:amount) }
.select_append { ((count(star) / sum(count(star)).over) * 100.0).as(:percentage) }
.group(:locale)
.order(Sequel.desc(:percentage))
just makes me want to cry. Learn SQL rather than wrapping it.
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Show HN: Twitch Installs Arch Linux – A cooperative text-based horror game
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Hey guys, author here. Feel free to ask any questions, and I'll try my best to answer them!
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Browser auto-fill phishing
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Wow, great demonstration. I'd never thought about this being exploited. I wonder if the fix could be something as simple as the browser only allowing non-hidden [Edit: "not visible to the user", I should have said, as this does not appear to auto-fill ] fields to be auto-filled. Otherwise, a warning about what auto-fill information (IE "Your name and credit card information are going to be submitted, continue?") has been filled in would be a nice touch. Maybe a browser extension could accomplish this?
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How Discord Scaled Elixir to 5M Concurrent Users
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I know that the JVM is a modern marvel of software engineering, so I'm always surprised when my Erlang apps consume less than 10MB of RAM, start up nearly instantaneously, respond to HTTP requests in less than 10ms and run forever, while my Java apps take 2 minutes to start up, have several hundred millisecond HTTP response latency and horde memory. Granted, it's more an issue with Spring than with Java, and Parallel Universe's Quasar is basically OTP for Java, so I know logically that Java is basically a superset of Erlang at this point, but perhaps there's an element of "less is more" going on here.Also, we're looking for Erlang folks with payments experience.cGF0cmljaytobkBmaW5peHBheW1lbnRzLmNvbQ==
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Ask HN: Is it 'normal' to struggle so hard with work?
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I can relate a lot. I'm still burning through self-motivation hacks at 35, some of which are helping while most don't.Eventually, the hack with by far the largest impact (which brought me to currently being cofounder and CTO of one of the more successful German startups) was realizing that while I simply suck at self-motivating, I never had a problem getting stuff done when working for others. I effortlessly produced two albums for other artists, while I still haven't finished my own single release after 20 years. I tried to build my own company three times and failed miserably.Eventually, I "just" found the right teams and eventually cofounders with a great vision and lots of focus who constantly pull and motivate me to do the stuff I'm really good at (which is building teams, sharing knowledge and architecturing systems).So I've just made my peace with the fact that I need someone else to get me started every day and just stopped fussing around it. My talents are somewhere else and I've got lots of creativity and intelligence to make up for my lack of structure.Stop focusing on your weaknesses. KNOW your weaknesses, but don't beat yourself up for it. Also know your strengths (which is often times the other side of ADHD). Practice self-love every day. Don't be afraid to ask for help.Let me end with a quote of probably one of the greatest procrastinators out there:> "I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."
— Douglas AdamsYou're not alone. And it's gonna be fine.
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Kuo: Apple to include new scissor switch keyboard in MacBook
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Apple has squandered a lot of its goodwill. It reminds me of my relationship with Microsoft products. As long as they were shipping, they were making money in the short term because people were coerced to buy in.For 5 damn years the Air didn't get a Retina display. Right now, I can't buy 2.8Ghz Macbook Pro unless I get the TouchBar. I can't buy an Air unless I settle for much lower specs.The dongles and USB-C are a mess. The 2-meters-at-most charging cables are a downgrade which will mean shorter battery life due to lesser plugging in. The lack of Magsafe is a downgrade, they removed a feature. The lack of any port variety which my 2013 Macbook Air did exceedingly well is a major downgrade. Consumers must carry a variety of dongles because the laptops don't offer a variety of ports.Profits are fine as long as they don't lead to perverse behavior. Apple needs to stop playing these fucking games and ship some pragmatism.The Apple of Cook is reminiscent of the Microsoft of Ballmer. He is totally out of touch with the product -- the very thing that Jobs inculcated.
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Sites using Facebook ‘Like’ button liable for data, EU court rules
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Sites using the like button are dumb to begin with, especially if they are in e-commerce. You’re handing your competitors an ability to do lookalike targeting of your customers via Facebook ads. This is one of the biggest advantages of that platform. Surprised nobody writes about this while gasping at Facebook’s profits.
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Soli
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Those growing up with Remote Controls of the kind: https://i.imgur.com/AIqz63k.jpgAfter a few days, the user develops a muscle memory of sorts. User doesn't even have to look at the controller and all actions (and feedback) are executed through the tactile interface. From cockpits to nuclear power plants to home tv remote control, there is absolutely nothing that replaces physical buttons, encoders, sliders and toggles.I haven't formally studied UI/UX, but these are important:- Feedback for an action- Predictable steps to take an action (Muscle memory)- Fast response- Expose current state (sliders, toggles do this)There should be 0% ambiguity or the user gets frustrated. Any piece of technology that puts impedance in this process is no fucking good. User shouldn't have to "guess and wait" whether the device recognized their gesture to swipe. A physical button guarantees that the action was performed by the means of feedback. Nope, sound feedback or taptic stuff still isn't as good as the click of a button. It can be but no one engineers it well. For example MacBook Trackpad that "clicks" without moving is excellent. Seeing touch screens (one exception, phone), cap buttons, gesture controls, etc everywhere makes me sad because it has nothing to do with UX but everything to do with the bottom line (cost) and marketing, and in this case perhaps better ad tracking? I will put this in plain words - Don't trust a company that sells ads at the same time as building hardware. Either sell ads or sell hardware, not both. Google already serves software which relies on trading off privacy (even if it is anonymized). When it comes to hardware, I freak out and no way in hell this thing sits in my home.
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Encrypted web traffic now exceeds 90%
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We often hear the complaint here that nobody cares / cared about Snowden's revelations. But to me it seems he did provide a lot of the impetus for having HTTPS virtually everywhere and a lot of the instant messenging apps being end-to-end encrypted. Most of WhatsApp's users are as non-technical as it gets, and yet they use the kind of encryption that only computer enthusiasts were interested in just a couple years ago. It's a great development (all the limitations and caveats notwithstanding) IMO.
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Baserow.io – Self-hosted Airtable alternative
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I will be using this, and dropping a lot of my paid AirTable bases...and let me please explain why.Airtable makes it VERY hard to collaborate with people outside my organization. We are a team of 7 people. No longer a scrappy 1-person startup, but not an enterprise client by any-means.If I want to add a single person to an Airtable base, that's $24 a month please. I have one client with 12 people that want to collaborate on the base by posting comments. I can't justify $288 a month just to keep the comments for all time.I contacted Airtable about this and was told the "Enterprise Plan" would be a perfect fit. Minimum $15k a year commitment.Why is this happening in the SasS world??? Everyone seems to be either single Pro user, or Enterprise. Do they really think there is nothing in-between?
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How we got to LiveView
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Creator of Phoenix here. I'm happy to answer any questions folks have about LiveView, Phoenix, or Elixir in general. We've had some big LiveView features land recently with uploads and HEEx so now's a great time to jump in!
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Subtle Patterns: Free textures for your next web project
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There is a huge community around website colors, palettes and patterns over at http://colourlovers.com . You can also create your own starting from scratch or from already existing patterns.
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Petition the Whitehouse to remove Carmen Ortiz from office
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Some more context about the prosecutor:She was named "Bostonian of the Year" for her successful cases against mob bosses and drug companies:
http://www.mainjustice.com/2012/01/03/massachusetts-u-s-atto...Out of the 94 U.S. DA offices, her office alone collected ~67% of the total criminal and civil fines in 2012, mostly owing to the successful prosecution of drug companies. Her success led to speculation that she would run for higher office:
http://www.mainjustice.com/2013/01/07/mass-u-s-attorney-carm...She is no stranger to being part of a disenfranchised group, as she was the first Hispanic and first woman to hold the position of U.S. attorney in Boston. Her first internship was with the DOJ's public integrity unit, created after Watergate:
http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2011...She's not of the "evil prosecutor" mold as is commonly thought and her background, particularly her history of fighting white-collar crime and corporations, doesn't strike me as someone who is intent on screwing the little guy over. That said, the seemingly-excessive charges could stem from a result of misconception and, let's face it, technological ignorance (hacking sounds bad, period). But in solving the overall problem in the justice system, let's not attribute to malice what can be attributed to other issues just yet.--
One edit: a link to a piece by Aaron on yelling at the machine, rather than the person:
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/nummiMy intent is not to say that the petition is wrong, but to argue that if people are going to call for action, call it for the right and productive reasons, rather than simplifying cause and effect to just one main person (even if the buck technically stops with her).
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What I Would Do If I Ran Tarsnap
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There is this hole-in-the-wall looking place in NYC chinatown that serves Chinese comfort food meal. It closes real late and remains affordable while serving great meals. It is frequented by Michelin star rated restaurant chefs (of all cuisines) for the after dinners hours mostly through word-of-mouth.Now I'm certain that the owner of the place knows he can charge more and rebrand to the mass audience. But I'd like to think it is a point of pride that his successful peers enjoy his services and that trumps any desire to change from the status quo.He is happy being Chef2Chef and I'm glad Colin is happy being Geek2Geek.
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Reverse engineering guide for beginners: Methodology and tools
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I'd love to know more about disassembly. I've recently had more and more reason to go deeper into applications I'm running as dependencies. A few issues I've found and fixed just by using strace to get an idea of the system calls.There was one thing in particular where I knew there was a jump somewhere (if some_length I wanted something that could give me a few seconds worth of samples of where the instruction register was spending its time as a starting point, but couldn't find any such tool (linux).Within my control: - giving input files to explicitly set unique numbers to watch out for
- giving inputs that would generate bad output numbers only in the bad code path
- giving inputs to force a load of jumps down the bad or good code paths
Does anyone have any advice on how you might approach such a situation?
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Facebook open-sources Detectron
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Does anyone know an alternative that works on RaspberryPi? This states: "Detectron operators currently do not have CPU implementation; a GPU system is required."Even low FPS (3-5) would be acceptable.
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Berkeley offers its data science course online for free
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I find it curious that there are so many courses for data-science related subjects, which superficially seem to cover the same material, and relatively few courses covering more traditional CS topics such as computer systems, networks, OS. I suppose it has to do with the market, but also feels like colleges are skating to where the puck is, rather than where it will be (or perhaps, where it could be).
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Build a do-it-yourself home air purifier for about $25
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I built my own air purifier in 2016, living in London, I was living in a basement and was having breathing problems due to mould. My landlady was gaslighting me at the time, so I built the air purifier. It worked for a while but mould spores cling to the paper filter and eventually grow into the filter material. I think Dyson uses glass fiber filter to stop this problem. My filter helped a lot, but eventually I had sclerosis infection on my brain and ended up in hospital with lung infection and brain lesion, still recovering after two years, and I will never be my old self again. I was subletting so had no grounds for complaint, I had to choose between homelessness or phoning a distant relative I hadn't spoken to for 24years, I chose the latter and I think it's the reason I'm still here.
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Microsoft's Linux Kernel
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My brain threw an exception when I read this title. Awesome that this is a reality though. Now that we have a Linux kernels running and accessible on both Windows and Chromebooks I feel like we can finally say: 2019 actually is the year of Linux on the desktop. It's not a meme anymore, it's finally just a true statement.Edit: To those questioning if this really counts as Linux on the Desktop. Yes, I understand what you're saying, I too am a bit of a blowhard about Linux and prefer to use the real deal, not some kernel on a kernel bs. But I think this is still a huge deal in terms of the accessibility of Linux, think of how many young programmers will be able to dip their toes in the Linux pool on their gaming rigs without having to go through an Ubuntu install process (I write, thinking in the back of my mind that I had to go through that, and so maybe they should too.) Yes there is something of an ideological compromise here, because the Linux they're running is sitting on a binary blob and not truly free... but Linux still exists in it's gloriously free form for them to use when they decide that's important to them, I see no harm in them reaping some of the other benefits of Linux without the freedom, it will hopefully become an on ramp to more Linux adopters and programmers.
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“My Google account got suspended because of NewPipe”
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Entire lives are wrapped up in Google accounts! They're used for administering other accounts, taxes and payroll, subscriptions, keeping in touch with family, photos...This could easily ruin someone's life.What the fuck, Google.We seriously need to break this company up into its constituent pieces. This is beyond unacceptable.
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DuckDB – An embeddable SQL database like SQLite, but supports Postgres features
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I spent a while looking at this today. It's really interesting.It's not based on SQLite at all (except for borrowing the SQLite shell implementation) but it looks very much like SQLite, in particular:- It's designed to work as an embedded library, eliminating the network overhead you usually get when talking to a database- Each database is a single file on disk- It ships as an "amalgamation" build - a single giant C++ file (SQLite is a single giant C file)Impressively, if you run "pip install duckdb" it Just Works - you can then "import duckdb" and start using it, with an interface that looks very similar to the sqlite3 module that ships with Python.The key reason this exists is that it's a column store, with vectorized operations across columns - making it ideal for analytical workloads. This blog entry has some benchmarks that illustrate how well it works in that regard: https://uwekorn.com/2019/10/19/taking-duckdb-for-a-spin.htmlIt's also backed up by some strong computer science. It's by the academic researchers behind MonetDB and includes implementations of a bunch of interesting papers: https://duckdb.org/docs/why_duckdb#standing-on-the-shoulders...It's a really interesting piece of software, and unlike many other "new databases" it feels like it fills a very genuine gap in my toolbox.
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Gravity is not a force – free-fall parabolas are straight lines in spacetime
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I heard an interesting question at one point: "how come, when you throw a ball up on Earth, the parabola is so strongly curved? Spacetime is nearly flat, so how can a straight line become such a steep parabola?"I'll answer this question as I understand it, but I only took four lectures of General Relativity before I gave it up in favour of computability and logic, so if there is a more intuitive and/or less wrong answer out there, please correct me.Intuitive answer: the curve is indeed very gentle, and (e.g.) light will be deflected only very slightly by the curvature; but the ball is moving for a couple of seconds, and that's an eternity. On human scales, the time dimension is much "bigger" than the space dimensions (we're quite big in the time dimension and quite small in the spatial dimensions); the ball moves only a small distance through space but a very large distance through time, amounting to a big distance in spacetime, and so the slight curvature has a bigger effect than you might expect.
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YouTube suspends account for linking to a PhD research on WPA2 vulnerability
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>Anyhow, I truly believe humanity has to rollback to operating at a human scale.>Using algorithms to flag content is totally fine… problem is when humans cannot interact with humans anymore and AI gets to chose what is right and wrong.Can't agree more.
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Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate
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I've often thought the same thing about becoming an adult, especially a parent, in general. There are so many choices that I harshly judged older people for making (how to allocate their time and money, where to live, what to allow or not allow the kids to do, how to behave at work, etc.) that I now find myself making as a married guy in my mid-30s with four kids. It makes me sad, but on each point I'm like, "Oh, now I get it." I fear that this pattern could continue until I become my father in my 50s and 60s. I try not to judge people so much anymore.Anyway, I appreciate the article as someone who will soon try my hand at teaching. I will have a lot to learn.
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Web3 is centralized and inefficient
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People use centralized systems because they actually like the convenience that comes with it. And with that, comes the decentralized system changing in such a way that it changes to almost NEEDING centralization. The problem is that engineers and cybersecurity people all think that everyone else thinks like they do, when in actuality the complete opposite is true.The biggest example is the internet itself - the internet is a completely decentralized network until it wasn't, with website certs becoming required. People use popular web hosting because it's easier and just better than what they could do. Email is completely decentralized, and it's very easy to set up your own web server - as long as you want every single spam system to immediately block all of your messages."Decentralized" systems will all go the exact same way. And it's because people don't want to spend time setting up their own shit, they are very happy to pay in either money or data to have someone else do it for them. Yeah, it's very easy to say "well just set up your own thing" but once you get to a critical mass of everyone using Gmail instead of their own server then the system becomes unusable without centralization.Decentralization is a fantastic idea, and it works great in theory, but it fails to actually consider any of the practical problems that come with decentralization and doesn't consider what people who aren't programmers actually want to do with their time and money.
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CNET is deleting old articles to try to improve its Google Search ranking
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So google's shitty search now economically incentivizes sites to destroy information.Can there be any doubt that Google destroyed the old internet by becoming a bad search engine? Could their exclusion of most of the web be considered punishment for being sites being so old and stable that they don't rely on Google for ad revenue?
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Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
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Back in August I launched https://IndieHackers.com, a site where the founders of profitable online businesses share their stories and revenue transparently. I actually got the idea after reading lots of threads like this one on HN :DIndie Hackers is my full-time job now. Is it "successful"? I think so! I've done over 90 interviews, and they've been read over one million times in the past 5 months, largely by you guys! I also made $2239 in December and hope to grow revenue another 50% in January. (As I do every month, I just blogged about that here: https://IndieHackers.com/blog)I'm working on a podcast as well that I'm really excited about, as I've found it's a bit easier to get famous founders to agree to that format and to speak transparently about behind the scenes details.
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Pinboard Acquires Delicious
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I am still waiting for a better experience in save what I like.Pocket is great for text, but only for that. Pinboard is cool and safe but is not for me. I still use google to find things that I have saved before, since 96, I have countless files called Temp on bookmarkers for things that I need organize, things saved on twitter, Medium, Reddit, Pinterest, Instagram, Google Keep, HN, Evernote and on mobile, there are tons of screenshots of things that I could use later. And that is for things that I already have seen, but, unfortunately, nothing of this is used to refine my experience in discovery new things that I could, potentially, like to see.I really hope that more people attempt to compete with Pinboard.
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Facebook scraped call, text message data for years from Android phones
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Android's permissions system for stuff like that is indefensible. Anything with severe privacy implications like "years of text message history" should explicitly opt-in with a permission request popup at runtime like iOS has done for features like camera since launch.Of all the things to not copy from iOS, of course privacy is the one that they decide to skimp out on. I'm glad they've started to catch up, but they have a ways to go yet.
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Thank HN: My SaaS paid my rent this month
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Congrats for getting from zero to one! It seems like you have some product market fit, that's really great.As others have pointed out, I'd recommend:- please rename "amateur" to something more positive. no customer wants to be called an amateur- Increase prices for the pro tier- Improve your "pricing plan" page, take a look at other (more successful) SaaS products and change button labels accordingly. Just take the best things from their landing pages!- create a proper comparison matrix / table for all the plans- visually de-emphasize the free tier, and focus on the 3 paid plans in your comparison table. people will always buy the middle option, so you can increase the price of the "best" option by a lot in order to anchor your value- add features which are available only in "pro" and "pro plus", e.g. support, direct email to developer, etc!- maybe build a mobile app for this? it seems like something that could be nicely integrated into a mobile-first experience. you could make it exclusive for pro users
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Ask HN: Have you been laid off?
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At the beginning of the year, I decided it was time to find a new job after 10 years with my employer. I spent February doing interview prep and conducting interviews. Back then, the COVID-19 was mostly limited to China, markets and governments weren't terribly concerned about COVID-19.I accept a job offer, put in my two weeks notice, and my last day at was last Friday. Hardly anyone was seriously concerned about COVID-19 when I gave notice. A week later, business travel was suspended and WFH policies implemented. My last day, schools were closing, and the economy tanked. This week, we're sheltering in place.I gave myself 3 weeks in between the old and the new job, you know for relaxation and travel. Instead, I'm sequestered to my house for 3 weeks.Everyday, the news got worse and worse and continues to get worse and worse. Now, I'm in between jobs, and am a little worried my new employer will revoke my job offer. To add insult to injury, one reason I didn't leave my previous job was job security. But in February, there wasn't any sign of an economic downturn. Everyone was enjoying the bull market.
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I should have loved biology
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I read this and it it fills me with so much melancholy.I took biology 101 in college and what I thought would be really interesting turned out to be SO unexpectedly meaningless.Now years later all I recall is the memorization of phylums and kingdoms on one test and cell structures on another test and sitting in a large auditorium looking at the map and not the territory.The course was so much about WHAT and never about WHY.I don't know if I was immature, or if the biology course was a "weed out" course designed to filter out all but the most dedicated, or if biology education is off the rails.I do know that every subject would benefit from a little storytelling, a little excitement and a good helping of why.
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Observing my cellphone switch towers
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At this one industrial customer I visit every week for a full day, my Verizon cell phone date/time time will suddenly change back by 19 years, six months, and some days (I don't have the exact value). This has been going on for almost a year. My pet theory was that law enforcement turned on a stingray nearby back in 2020, it came up with a default date of 1/1/2001, and has been running ever since. Steel building with warehouse plus office space. No one in the building is running one of those cell phone boosters that plug into customer internet and act as a mini tower. My newish pixel 4 and my previous Moto phone both demonstrate the problem. I don't have the fortitude to call Verizon and work through support to get to someone who would understand the problem. Has this happened to anyone else? Any other theories on what it is? (My workaround is to turn off updating date and time from the network)
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Huge data leak shatters the lie that the innocent need not fear surveillance
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I don't think the problem is with the "lie" that the innocent need not fear surveillance. Most people will agree that mass-surveillance will negatively affect some people that are indispensable to healthily functioning liberal society: journalists, activists, academics, public figures...The problem is that even if most people don't subscribe to the "nothing to hide" argument in general, they do not care about themselves being the target of surveillance.Having unsuccessfully tried to make family and acquaintances more aware of privacy issue, I can confidently say that the "nothing to hide" argument is nothing next to the "I don't care" attitude. It's not just being the target of a wrongful accusation, arguments about unintended public shaming, identity theft, negative economic consequences (higher insurance premium or mortgage rates if your bank has more information about you), none of it will work.I think there is some sort of a Tverskyan study to be done here about expected value and perceived risk. Overall for most people the equation is always: (probability of data being mishandled) * damage < time and effort required to maintain my privacy.
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Imagen Video: high definition video generation with diffusion models
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Google continues to blow my mind with these models, but I think their ethics strategy is totally misguided and will result in them failing to capture this market. The original Google Search gave similarly never-before-seen capabilities to people, and you could use it for good or bad - Google did not seem to have any ethical concerns around, for example, letting children use their product and come across NSFW content (as a kid who grew up with Google you can trust me on this).But now with these models they have such a ridiculously heavy handed approach to the ethics and morals. You can't type any prompt that's "unsafe", you can't generate images of people, there are so many stupid limitations that the product is practically useless other than niche scenarios, because Google thinks it knows better than you and needs to control what you are allowed to use the tech for.Meanwhile other open source models like Stable Diffusion have no such restrictions and are already publicly available. I'd expect this pattern to continue under Google's current ideological leadership - Google comes up with innovative revolutionary model, nobody gets to use it because "safety", and then some scrappy startup comes along, copies the tech, and eats Google's lunch.Google: stop being such a scared, risk averse company. Release the model to the public, and change the world once more. You're never going to revolutionize anything if you continue to cower behind "safety" and your heavy handed moralizing.
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How to Befriend Crows
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I can vouch for this approach. I lived in the territory of a couple of ravens (close relatives of crows; just as smart and twice as large) and it took me maybe 18 months to build a close relationship.I started out just talking to them and throwing whole peanuts (roasted, unsalted) on the ground while I was doing it. They looked at me warily and did not come close. Later on, the peanuts would disappear, but I was never sure why. This period lasted months.Eventually they would come down when I threw a peanut and approach it warily. If it was closer than 15 or 20 feet to me, I'd have to back away to give them enough room. Then I could throw another peanut near (but not at!) them and they'd walk over to get it.After many more months of this (six, I'd guess) they were somewhat less wary of me and would hang out on our back fence sometimes. So we worked out a ritual. I would place a piece of food on the fence rail and back away; they'd hop over and get it. As he suggested, I would talk with them as I did it. I'm sure the words didn't matter, but I suspect the tone did, and it helped me focus on being soothing with voice, body language, and behavior.Toward the end of my time there we got so that one of them would take high-value food, like a chicken bone with bits of meat left on it, straight out of my hand. That one, who we called George, would happily sit pretty close to me after eating. Out of arm's reach, of course; they were still a bit wary. But it would settle down and chill out. Truly a magical experience to just hang out with a big, smart bird like that. You looking at one another, both trying to figure out exactly what the other's deal is. And me, at least, knowing, that I'd never fully know.
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40 years ago yesterday Air Canada Flight 143 ran out of fuel mid-flight
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Here is a better article about Flight 143 from the brilliant admiralcloudberg crash analysis blog:
https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/a-mathematical-miracle-t...The linked article is not bad but reads a bit too much like a Dan Brown novelization for me taste… “ The mustachioed Captain Pearson pulled out the trusty Boeing handbook, his fingers dashing through the pages…”
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No, I'm not going to download your bullshit app
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I agree for the most part with this article. I think the major problem is that apps are being developed that offer absolutely no advantage over viewing the website in a browser - in fact many offer disadvantages. This is what happens when a market crowded with some shockingly bad app developers is combined with ignorant executive mandates that companies must have apps simply to be able to say that they have them.
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Google Acquires Boston Dynamics
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>It is the eighth robotics company that Google has acquired in the last half-year.This is a crazy aggressive acquisition strategy. Does anybody have a list of the other companies?Where could google be heading to? They already have self-driving cars and a big stake in Uber. Somehow I am missing a connection to a manufacturer that already has an established stake in the vehicle/robotics industry. All they have so far are design companies.
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The Sixth Stage of Grief Is Retro-Computing
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The writing in this post is superb. One of my favorite lines:"Windows is the Superbowl Halftime Show of operating systems. Given what everyone got paid, and how many people were involved, you’d think it would be a lot more memorable."As someone who spends a lot of time with Windows...yeah. But the post is really an amazing blend of technology and sentiment, kind of reminiscent of Neal Stephenson at his best. Makes me want to dust off my PDP-11 emulator and take another crack at Unix V6.
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Post-Mortem for Google Compute Engine’s Global Outage on April 11
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This is a very good Post-Mortem.As I assumed it was kind of a corner case bug meet corner case bug met corner case bug.This is also why I am of afraid of a self driving cars and other such life critical software. There are going to be weird edge cases, what prevents you from reaching them?Making software is hard....
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Tell HN: I just wanted to say: thank you, Hacker News
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I am finishing my bachelors in CompSci at Harvard Extension and just got hired by Google. And I've got about 20 years on you. So yeah, absolutely, this can work!It was fun and challenging competing with top computer science students. In the long run, my organizational skills, focus, determination and world experience outweighed their raw brainpower and better memory.It's an ultramarathon, not a sprint.
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Spotify will now suspend or terminate accounts it finds are using ad blockers
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Good.Spotify has a pretty cheap paid option that removes all of that. To those who justify wanting the paid service for nothing by saying Spotify won't "take responsibility" or "assume liability" for their ads or those ads "might deliver malware" or are "intrusive" as a weak rationalization, you present a false dichotomy. There are at least three options:1. Pay for the service2. Suffer through the ads3. Don't use the serviceThis thread is an object lesson in why basically every large service on the Internet is ad-supported. When people aren't willing to pay for 1-2 coffees for a month of unlimited music streaming are you really surprised that companies have no choice to use an advertising revenue model?
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Fast.ai releases new deep learning course, libraries, and book
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I do recommend getting the book that just came out (I did, it is fantastic)https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Learning-Coders-fastai-PyTorch/d...that said: fast.ai also released a draft of the book available here (including the notebooks) https://github.com/fastai/fastbookedit: if you can afford it, getting the book is a great way to support the authors
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Sriracha hit revenue of $150M a year with no sales team or ad spend
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My guess as to why it's successful is that it's always been moderately priced and Huy Fong is recognized as the originator of the "Americanized Sriracha" sauces.If a company tries to sell a cheaper version - then it feels like a cheap knock-off. And as everybody can afford to buy the original, why wouldn't you?If a company tried to sell a more expensive premium product in flashier packaging - then it would feel inauthentic. What are you paying more for?Plus whilst they've not paid for advertising, they've performed an excellent job of ensuring I'm aware of their history. I've no idea of the history of say Tabasco or Franks - but I've many times heard the history of this plucky little immigrant founded company (and this thread is just a continuation). Maybe the key is to just have a likable story - and let others tell it.
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A patent troll backs off
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Wow is that a PDF of a Microsoft Word document with inline comments written by the judge? I don't think I've ever seen a document in that style in PACER before (linked in the blog post at https://cdn.sparkfun.com/assets/home_page_posts/3/9/7/0/Alta...) .I think there's a typo in the blog post ("parent" should be "patent" below):> Do you ever wonder what parent trolls tell their children they do for a job?I read a story somewhere that claimed that "Captain Planet" had to be edited to feature cartoonishly evil villains, rather than the mundane day-to-day polluters, because they were worried that kids would ask uncomfortable career questions of their parents in sectors like disposable consumer goods, plastics, petrochemical, cigarettes, etc.
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The curious case of the Raspberry Pi in the network closet (2019)
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Author of the article here. Since I first published this blog post I was getting messages from people asking how it ended.Sadly it's pretty anticlimactic as the owner of the place had a meeting with the guy who put the Pi there (without me as he didn't want the Pi-dropper to feel ambushed) and in the end decided not to escalate it to legal and just basically told him to pack his things and get out.So no legal after play and just a slap on the wrist
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The Uselessness of Phenylephrine
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I've recently had to deal with the medical profession a lot more than in the past and I'm finding this sort of thing everywhere. OTC medicines that by current standards would not be made OTC, surgeries that are extremely common but have never had quality randomized trials, official sounding diagnoses that on inspection are actually defined as "we have no idea", lack of consensus about how to treat some of the most common conditions in the human population (e.g. back pain), medical device approvals abusing the shortcut of being "substantially similar" to an existing device to evade regulatory scrutiny, the complete lack of enforcement of what goes in supplements... I feel like my entire understanding of the medical system in the US was a lie. We're constantly touting that we have the most advanced technology but if you have a complex condition you are likely to fall prey to multiple kinds of grift.
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Atkinson Hyperlegible Font
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I like this idea, but when I go to the web page...> Download the Font… and change the world! By downloading, installing and/or using the font software, you confirm that you have read and agree to be bound by the terms of this End-User License Agreement...Sigh. I guess I need to read that EULA.Anyway, clicking on that then downloads a pdf rather than a nice link to some web page text. Sigh.So then anyway, trying to open that pdf then fails in the first two readers I tried. Sigh.Why must everything in the world be so hard? Fuck it, never mind. I'll let someone else change the world and wait for widespread adoption for this font to reach me in whatever other ways.
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What’s wrong with medieval pigs in videogames
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Definitely an example of the Coconut Effect [1]. If they had consulted a historian versed in swine culture and produced period-accurate pigs it would have been a meme about how weird and alien the pigs look. People don’t care about period accuracy, they care about art that matched their expectations.Suspension of disbelief is the operative word here. Trying to fight against it is tilting at windmills.[1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheCoconutEffect
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Desktop Neo – rethinking the desktop interface for productivity
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The problem with the tablet analogy is nobody seems to know how to design complex, professional-level (like Photoshop, or Blender) applications in that paradigm. Tablet apps are overwhelmingly consumption-oriented, and those that aren't all seem to be oriented around popular (and populist) appeal.Why is everyone out for the blood of the desktop/windows paradigm? Why can't the simplified-tablet market and the desktop-power-user markets coexist? Windows and taskbars and start menus are wonderful and my favorite way of interacting with computers, why must it be taken away?
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Show HN: Primitive for macOS
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About two months ago I shared my "primitive" project and it was well received: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12539109As a result, I decided to follow through and make more of it. So today I am announcing Primitive for macOS, now available on the Mac App Store.The core is still implemented in Go. The GUI is written in Objective-C (haven't bothered to learn Swift yet!) and communicates with the Go process over stdin/stdout via NSTask and NSPipe. The rendering is done on the front-end; the backend just sends shape coordinates and such.I spent a lot of time fleshing out the GUI layout to make it as simple yet powerful as possible. I hope you find it to be intuitive and I hope that you are pleased with the resulting images. I look forward to seeing what people do with the app. :)Let me know if you have any questions!
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An easter egg for one user: Luke Skywalker
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Well Hamill is a better man than I.I would hate this. If I imagine being him, this is like having to turn up to the office at 7am on a Saturday for a meeting. It's work. In analogy we're watching Mark Hamill get out of bed on a weekend, groan, drink some Pepto-Bismol and get his best shit-eating grin on his face.
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SETI spots dozens of new mysterious signals emanating from distant galaxy
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I have a question... and this is probably a stupid question, but... does anyone know if there is any theory to support the idea that sufficiently advanced civilizations rely on something other than radio waves or light to perform communications? My dumbass-self wonders about quantum entanglement or teleportation as means of communication we have yet to master; may be, the medium of communications for the super civilizations of the universe.Note: Just wanted to say, I'm less trying to talk about "FTL" and more so that we may just not be able to intercept, decode, or "see" the communications via our current technologies.P.S. Thanks for the thoughtful replies.
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Five Hundred and Seven Mechanical Movements (1908)
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Can anyone explain movement 38? [1]Two identical gears start moving at the same speed. Suddenly, one gear slows down, then lurches forward at a much faster speed, and then returns to its starting speed.While the other, identically shaped gear, spins at a constant speed the whole time.[1] http://507movements.com/mm_038.html
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Makers, Don't Let Yourself Be Forced into the 'Manager Schedule'
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I had this exact situation come up with an engineer that I can only call brilliant, with the most conservative of overtones. He was more than that. Being a maker myself I gladly encouraged him to work when he wanted, sometimes that meant he'd work 48 hours straight and sleep for two days and show up Friday. His 3 days of work (as his peers would describe it), easily was double the quality and output of his closest colleague. I loved having him on my team.Eventually, other people started asking to work 3 days a week, suggesting that they too would pull all-nighters in an effort to have 2 mid-week days off. I let a few experiments happen but sadly in most cases the result was less than 50% of what they had been previously able to accomplish.This led to a new merit based working system when we placed emphasis on sprints and achieving. This too ended up failing because the interconnected dependandcies of sprints were always bottlenecked by the slowest operator.The final result was the eventual departure of my most prized teammate, and mostly due to peer pressure. I often think about how I could have better allowed his brilliance while not alienating the rest of his team, but in the end I failed.
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Products I Wish Existed
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> 4. ADT 2.0: Digital neighborhood watch.That this is not only a market, but a "wish" which seems to get traction even here on HN confirms to me that the old joke "1984 is not a manual" is more relevant than ever, and scarily not only in regards to the usual suspects, corporate and nation states, but people themselves.Can anyone explain to me why anyone would advocate a profit-driven, systematic eradication of soul and character around each and every human residence?Why would you trade the vibrancy of your young urban block or the sense of trust and community in your suburb against prevention of low-impact black-swan events like serial packet thiefs?Why would you surrender your home, not only your safe haven in life but also your gateway to low effort exploration of your surroundings to wide-spanning AI surveillance and automated purge of any nuisance?Maybe I am just weird or out of touch but I can absolutely not get in my head how people surrender to such a dull dystopia based on an apparent fetish for weaponized gossip and abnormal levels of fear of petty crimes...
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It’s Time to Get Back to RSS
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RSS is dying (or dead) because it was incompatible with the dominant business model on the internet -- advertising. This is why Google killed it. This is why lots of professional publishers hated it. With HTTP you'd be able to earn money via embedded ads but you'd earn exactly $0 via RSS since the feed was stripped of ads, just content. This forced publishers to put useless blurbs, redirecting to the HTTP version, which was a bad user experience and just sucked.I'd like to see new innovation around protocols and client 'browsers' that were made with monetization built-in as a first-tier specification.1) client sends request for content with some header with payment information attached.
2) server verifies payment transferred.
3) server responds to client with content after payment verification.If this existed, RSS would be alive and well. Internet publishers would be alive and well. The internet would be a more beautiful place with a viable first-party alternative to ads.Challenges here would be:- Sufficiently low transaction costs to make micropayments viable. (Bundle payments?)
- Verifying proof of payment extremely fastSomeone(s) should create a new protocol.FTP was invented in 1971.
SMTP was invented in 1982.
HTTP was invented in 1989.
RSS was invented in 1999.
Bitcoin was invented in 2008.The amount of innovation around protocol has been abysmal relative to the explosion in creativity around applications on top of these protocols. And SMTP/HTTP are the only ones with any real mass adoption today.
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Abstract Wikipedia
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truly love the mobile design of wikipedia and find myself adding ".m" to every link that i visit on wikipedia. it has larger fonts, more readable copy (for me at least), and works great on mobile. surprisingly the trick worked with this one as well!how come the mobile design is not the default?
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Learnings from 5 years of tech startup code audits
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That's a very interesting set of findings. What is important to realize when reading this that it is a case of survivorship bias. The startups that were audited were obviously still alive, and any that suffered from such flaws that they were fatal had most likely already left the pool.In 15 years of doing technical due diligence (200+ jobs) I have yet to come across a company where the tech was what eventually killed them. But business case problems, for instance being unaware of the true cost of fielding a product and losing money on every transaction are extremely common. Improper cost allocation, product market mismatch, wishful thinking, founder conflicts, founder-investor conflicts, relying on non-existent technology while faking it for the time being and so on have all killed quite a few companies.Tech can be fixed, and if everything else is working fine there will be budget to do so. These other issues usually can't be fixed, no matter what the budget.
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Ask HN: Burnt-out, directionless but want to turn it around
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1. Take time off, like a month or more. [1] Use it to do anything other than coding. Hone a hobby, travel, volunteer, etc. No-one will care about a month or two gap on your resume.2. You are worth more than you currently think you are. Internalize this, know this, that is key. "I am a sole developer for Mobile and Web platforms at this startup in a very small team" --> is a desirable skill in and of itself.3. Stop working 80 hour weeks, stop working weekends. When the only thing you do has little/no reward, that is what causes burnout.4. Fill your time with something else that you prioritize above work. Make it hard to find time to work. This both prevents slipping back to 80 hr weeks, and forces your brain to prioritize important things within your work life (like executing and finishing projects).5. Networking is key. I don't have good advice here as this is a challenge for me also. But -- switch jobs often (every couple years), and be friendly and helpful (within reason) to your co-workers. They're now your network.My background -- coding since I was 6, now 36 -- but I've shared many of the same feelings.[1] I am assuming you have the basic financial stability to support this. My apologies if not.
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Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes
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There’s an audio version of the same point here: https://podcast.strongtowns.org/e/the-drip-drip-drip-of-traf...A ”best effort” summary of this article: if thousands of people die in once place, it’s one of the great tragedies in American history. However if thousands of people die in thousands different places, it is ignored and considered a fact of life.When a plane or train crashes, we stop everything and redesign the entire network to prevent this from happening again. But each individual death from car accidents is not enough to trigger the same response in cities, planners, and civil engineers.
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Anything longer ago than yesterday should just say the actual date
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Especially because it becomes so imprecise.
On YouTube, "1 year ago" can mean anywhere from 365 to 729 days. Anything between 1 and 2 years ago becomes "1 year ago".So if I see two videos that were both uploaded "a year ago", it's impossible to know which is more recent without actually opening the videos, going to the description, and looking at the date.
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14 years ago: the day Teller gave me the secret to my career in magic.
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Why does transferring knowledge across domains have such exponential returns?Is it only because the time it takes other fields to adapt to new methodology is longer - or are there other factors?EDIT: Holy crap, I worded this terribly.Rewritten: Why does going across domains with new ideas have such high returns? Obviously you're a fresh idea but are there other reasons that influence your success?
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How Silicon Valley CEOs conspired to drive down tech engineer wages
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It seems like we should be able to measure whatever effect there was. There must be sources of data about salaries in the Bay Area. Has anyone tried looking to see if there is a depression in tech workers' salaries, relative to people in other fields, during the time this agreement was in force?
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TrueCrypt suggesting migration to BitLocker?
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In order of likelihood: * Defaced site, timed to screw up a big announcement
* Rogue content maintainer
* Phase II of audit turned up something rather bad
(edit: NO - see tptacek below)
edit: Variations on "developer forced to do this" (cf simmerian's comment): * Developer was big brother all along and they are shutting it down
* Security vuln about to be disclosed, dev scrambles to inform (albeit poorly)
* Legally or otherwise compelled to compromise source code,
dev complies and/or nukes project from orbit
The last alternative would be suggested in part by the strange content of the page, assuming it is legit from the developer: Normally I'd expect at least something like "there's a major vuln that is unfixable and we'll disclose formally in a week/two, migrate now.".
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Inceptionism: Going Deeper into Neural Networks
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The fractal nature of many of the "hallucinated" images is kind of fascinating. The parallels to psychedelic drug-induced hallucinations are striking.
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Brooklyn Judge: Feds Can't Use All Writs Act to Force Apple's Hand [pdf]
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Isn't the All Writs Act just a red herring in this whole debate? What's preventing the Federal Government from issuing Apple a National Security Letter and forcing them to comply in secrecy?I don't understand how all of a sudden the government is publicly and calmly asking permission to do something digitally when they have been so forceful and demanding in the recent past.
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Investing for Geeks
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Great post!!I'd add a few things that I've learned over the years:1) Always be invested in the market. Corollary, don't time the market. This is by far the largest mistake people make.Investors typically pull money out at the bottom after they've suffered a physiologically devastating loss, like at the end of 2008 and hence they miss the rebound, like 2009-now.
This isn't quite the same but it shows what missing the top 25 days in the market over the past 45 years does to your returns.http://www.marketwatch.com/story/how-missing-out-on-25-days-...If you are an investor you need to be in the market, period.2) Accept that you will lose money some years. If you are buying index funds then you will get market performance, ex fees. Markets go down sometimes. Stay the course.3) Don't look every day or you will go nuts.Keep in mind that the largest draw down (top to bottom) will be larger than what the returns look like if you just look year over year. Ie if you look and see the S&P lost 28% in 2008, understand that if you watched the S&P every day of 2008 then it probably lost more than 28% from its top to its bottom but rebounded slightly at the end of the year to make the year over year loss less than the maximum loss.4) Have some exposure to outside of the US markets. Consider the scenario of investing all your money in the company you work for. In a rough time for your company you get the double whammy of losing money and possibly your job at the same time.Similarly to how you are told to not invest all your money in the company you shouldn't invest solely in the country you live in, same principle.EDIT see child comment, I mangled the English language in point 4
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John Glenn has died
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RIP.I have to wonder, these first missions, did the astronauts have any assurance they would make it back to earth? What was it like to say goodbye to family, not knowing if you would return or not.Am I way off here? Was this mission uncertain or did NASA have reasonable assurances?
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58 Bytes of CSS to look great nearly everywhere
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Author mentions this took a long time to arrive at.I recommend "Web Design in 4 Minutes" from the CSS guru behind Bulma:https://jgthms.com/web-design-in-4-minutes/
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SpaceX Gets FCC Approval to Sell Wireless High-Speed Home Internet from Space
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Every story about SpaceX satellite Internet (Starlink) is plagued by questions about high latency. I think Elon needs to plan on spending a lot of marketing money to overcome this specific misconception.Starlink latency is quite good. LEO is a lot closer than GEO (less than ~1000 km* vs 35786 km.) SpaceX actually intends to compete with terrestrial systems on latency; many important routes will have significantly lower latency than any feasible terrestrial system.Remember, fiber isn't latency free. It isn't even speed of light. It's about 70% SOL. Radio, on the other hand, is SOL (or so close it doesn't matter.) So there is a cross over point where the latency of a LEO satellite system is actually superior despite the uplink/downlink path.*depending on which orbital "shell" is involved. figures range from 340 km to 1200 km.
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Insect 'apocalypse' in U.S. driven by 50x increase in toxic pesticides: study
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If I ever get rich enough to do so, I'm going to buy some land somewhere - perhaps old farming land that's no longer profitable, and just let it return to nature. Let the trees and bushes grow, let the insects, birds and whatever else breed there.I'm beginning to think that's one of the best things one could do for the planet right now.
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Microsoft says mandatory password changing is “ancient and obsolete” (2019)
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The article kinda misses the reason why mandatory password changes existed in the first place -- unknown breaches. The idea was that if there was an undetected breach, the attacker would have a maximum of the mandatory password change to use credentials. You would still have mandatory password changes upon discovering a breach, which would reset the counter. And the article wasn't very clear as to why this is no longer recommended, but when mandatory password changes are enforced, users tend to make new passwords which are trivial to crack if you have a known old password. So if there's an unknown (or even known) breach, users will tend to make a new password which an attacker can easily guess given the older known passwords, losing any benefit gained from mandatory password changes. And this is worse than not having mandatory password changes, because rare password changes (when a breach is discovered) don't put people into the habit of just iterating off of an old password.
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AWS is playing chess, Cloudflare is playing Go
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I'm a huge cloudflare fan. Massive advocate for them but when I do see this talk of them as a new kind of cloud platform I cringe a little. Are we going to under go the same lock-in like experience we've had over the years by using very bespoke closed sourced systems like workers and durable objects. It's one thing to buy into something that does have wide portability like a postgres but much harder to buy into the platforms that aren't open source.
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I tested four NVMe SSDs from four vendors – half lose FLUSH’d data on power loss
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I always liked the embedded system model where you get flash hardware that has two operations -- erase block and write block. GC, RAID, error correction, etc. are then handled at the application level. It was never clear to me that the current tradeoff with consumer-grade SSDs was right. On the one hand, things like the error correction, redundancy, and garbage collection don't require the attention from CPU (and more importantly, doesn't tie up any bus). On the other hand, the user has no control over what the software on the SSD's chip does. Clearly vendors and users are at odds with each other here; vendors want the best benchmarks (so you can sort by speed descending and pick the first one), but users want their files to exist after their power goes out.It would be nice if we could just buy dumb flash and let the application do whatever it wants (I guess that application would be your filesystem; but it could also be direct access for specialized use cases like databases). If you want maximum speed, adjust your settings for that. If you want maximum write durability, adjust your settings for that. People are always looking for that one size fits all use case, but it's hard here. Some people may be running cloud providers and already have software to store that block on 3 different continents. Some people may be an embedded system with a fixed disk image that changes once a year, with some temporary storage for logs. There probably isn't a single setting that gets optimal use out of the flash memory for both use cases. The cloud provider doesn't care if a block, flash chip, drive, server rack, availability zone, or continent goes away. The embedded system may be happy to lose logs in exchange for having enough writes left to install the next security update.It's all a mess, but the constraints have changed since we made the mess. You used to be happy to get 1/6th of a PCI Express lane for all your storage. Now processors directly expose 128 PCIe lanes and have a multitude of underused efficiency cores waiting to be used. Maybe we could do all the "smart" stuff in the OS and application code, and just attach commodity dumb flash chips to our computer.
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Fly.io Postgres cluster down for 3 days, no word from them about it
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Y'all, this is going to be deeply unsatisfying, but it's what I can report personally:I have no earthly clue why this thread on our community site is unlisted.We're looking at the admin UI for it right now, and there's like, a little lock next to do the story, but the "unlist story" option is still there for us to click. The best I can say is: I'm reasonably sure there wasn't some top-down edict to hide this thread (the site is public, anybody can sign up for an account and see the thread).Say what you want about us, but hiding out from stuff like this isn't one of our flaws. When I find out more about what happened with this thread, I'll let you know (or Kurt will reply here and tell me I'm wrong).I don't know enough about what happened with this Sydney server to be helpful to people who had instances running on it. When I know more about it, I'll be helpful, but I'm just learning about this stuff right now, after getting back in from a night out.Almost immediately afterwardsIt looks like... all the posts in the app-not-working category are "private"? Like it's some setting on the category itself? "Private" here means you need to have signed up for a Discourse account to see them?
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India Orders 32 Websites Blocked, Including GitHub, Archive.Org, Pastebin
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Arvind Gupta, the head of IT Cell, BJP Tweeted: "The websites that have been blocked were based on an advisory by Anti Terrorism Squad, and were carrying Anti India content from ISIS. The sites that have removed objectionable content and/or cooperated with the on going investigations, are being unblocked."This is bad. archive.org by default should have all sorts of offensive things on it. Pastebin and github should not be responsible for people hosting code they don't like. May as well block google too, I'm pretty sure you can find pro-ISIS sites on there as well.
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Microsoft and GitHub team up to take Git virtual file system to macOS, Linux
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"Git wasn't designed for such vast numbers of developers—more than 20,000 actively working on the codebase. Also, Git wasn't designed for a codebase that was so large, either in terms of the number of files and version history for each file, or in terms of sheer size, coming in at more than 300GB. When using standard Git, working with the source repository was unacceptably slow. Common operations (such as checking which files have been modified) would take multiple minutes."These sentences in some parts gloss over the details, and in others it is flat out wrong. Git was designed for tens of thousands of developers (the Linux kernel), it was designed for huge numbers of files (but large numbers of files works fine on Linux due to the dentry cache, it sucks on Windows because they don't have a cache that has the same behaviour as the Linux dentry cache). Admittedly it is slow for files that are large in size, but it was designed for source code; what sane developer would have source files that are hundreds of MB in size?That said, monorepos with several dozen software projects can be very slow due to O(n) functions such as git blame and the like. It's true that git wasn't designed for large numbers of projects in one repo that are only indirectly shared by library code and the like.Unfortunately that was not written in the article.
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Round Peg in a Square Hole [video]
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I wish HN would loosen up and admit that videos are a new medium, worth taking seriously. It might bother us that longform writing is dying, but when the new generation decides that this is the way new ideas should be communicated, we'll be left with no audience.For example, I've been working on an essay for some time now, but I'm seriously considering making it into a companion video. I have no video experience whatsoever, so that's a tall order. But what are you to do? If you want to make an impact, are you sure it's still possible to do it by writing 173 essays over 15 years? It used to be, but the world seems to be changing.(This is mostly a reaction to this post being one of the rare videos Deemed Worthy to be on the front page, when there are tens of thousands of others. It's not a good idea to mix up the content too much, but there really are a lot of quality videos and no central curation mechanism. Unlike articles. /r/videos is for mainstream content, like https://youtu.be/kJGGlVg5PpY. There really isn't any place that collects intellectually gratifying content like the current submission.)
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How the Zoom macOS installer does its job without you clicking ‘install’
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Not that I'm in favor of this practice, but the one key feature that conference software must have is: it just works™.Nothing turns you off more from a conferencing solution than: any problem getting it working right now.When there is just the slightest issue, one person not being able to join, one person not getting voice to work, bad audio, your entire team is blocked/distracted. Which results in a collective distain for the solution and video conferencing as a whole.This extends to getting the solution working for greenfield installs as simple as possible. Because who knows which non-tech users from which department all need to join and can't figure out how to set the permission in their browser right or install/use the other browser that is compatible.So sadly, from a functionality point of view, you want have the software be able to force itself onto the user in the most usable state it can.
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Signal WhatsApp Chats Import
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I have been using Signal for two years now and I love it.However I really, really hope they can work on a good backup and restore process as losing my message history because I have to reinstall the app on my desktop[1] or have to reset my phone is a horrible experience.Just build an encrypted blob and zip it up and pop it on my iCloud or Google Drive or leave it local and let me deal with it but I need something. As my Signal use moves from just messages with friends and family to business contacts I need a reliable way to backup my messages![1] I should state I mean losing the desktop copy as it starts "fresh" and does not import any messages from the phone.Edit: I should probably clarify I am talking about the iOS/macOS applications as these are what I use. iOS does have a migration feature but that doesn't help if your phone is lost/damaged. I need a proper backup and restore process as well as the ability to import messages from the phone to the desktop app.
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