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Valve's Proton Has Enabled 7000 Windows Games on Linux
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The problem with Proton is it is leading many game developers to actually drop Linux support. They basically say players seem to be able to get the game to work on Proton and that's that.But with no official support there is no guarantee it will continue to work with updates. There is no promise to even try to make it work if it breaks. And that's the major stuff. Imagine spending 20, 30, or 60 dollars on a game that can break at any moment and know there will be zero support waiting for you. And that's hard breaks. Performance hiccups will be given zero attention by the developers.There is all this talk that Proton will make people want to develop native Linux ports but I don't see any data or logic to back that up.
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Show HN: Static.wiki – read-only Wikipedia using a 43GB SQLite file
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I'm nervous on your behalf for your S3 bill, have you done napkin maths for how much this will cost to host, especially given the relative inefficiency of the autocomplete queries?A trick that might help: create a separate SQLite table containing just the article titles to autocomplete against. That might give you queries that use smaller ranges of the file.
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The case for expanding rather than eliminating gifted education programs (2021)
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There are so many topics that are hard to talk about nowadays without getting into politics but politics and structural inequality are at the core of this.For the benefit of non-US readers, know that how the US funds public education (K-12) is rather unique. It's done through property taxes essentially. Depending on your state and city your property taxes can vary a lot with the same value property.But what this means is the wealthier localities have more tax revenue and thus better schools. This can be a vicious cycle of improving property values by having better schools and thus generating more tax revenue and so on. I say "vicious" because it is absolutely exclusionary to lower-income people who cannot possibly afford to live in these areas. And that's by design.Twenty years ago Bush (43) passed the No Child Left Behind Act, which many dubbed the No Child Gets Ahead Act. A lot of this was also in the name of "equity".I know people who send their children to public schools in NYC. NYC seems to be in the mood to eliminate these "gifted" programs because of "equity" too. The result? Those who can afford to send their children to private schools will. For those who are left, there are no more gifted programs.How does that help anyone?
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“It’s time for Apple to fix texting”
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Most businesses, consumers, and developers universally continue to ignore the primary reason that iMessage is a closed platform, rather than an app on every platform as iTunes is:Apple is using device serial numbers for anti-spam, supported by a fully-authenticated hardware and software stack that does not allow user modification. This permits Apple to simply “console ban” any Apple device that spams on iMessage. This makes it prohibitively expensive to send spam over iMessage. They have been doing so since iMessage was launched.Android offers no such attestation that I’m aware of. Windows, on Pluton, could offer this attestation securely — and that is a key deliverable of Pluton.It’s easy, then, to predict what Apple’s first non-Apple platform will be: Microsoft Windows 12, only if secure-booted, with Pluton-signed attestation that the kernel is unmodified. And it’s easy to predict how Apple will implement anti-spam: by applying “console” bans to specific Pluton chips by their serial number.If Android wants to join the party, then Android phone builders need to implement secure boot with hardware-signed attestation of non-rooted-ness, in the style of Apple T2 + macOS or Microsoft Pluton + Secure Boot. Until then, Apple iMessage will remain single platform.(I recognize that this is extremely unpalatable to device hackers, but the same freedom to modify an OS kernel that hackers desire is also the freedom to spam all users, as we have seen repeatedly with all messaging software platforms operated without hardware-backed attestation for the past thirty years — including email, Jabber, and HN itself.)(No, I do not work at Apple.)
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A Government Error Just Revealed Snowden Was the Target in the Lavabit Case
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Couldn't even read the article due to Wired's anti-adblock banner.
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Jessica Livingston’s Pretty Complete List on How Not to Fail
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Yeesh. #2 hits close to home.I think I've asked this question but I found myself a cofounder with 2 others that prioritized too highly IMO coffee meetings with "investors", no name board advisors, expensive conferences, and basically everything on that list. My approach was to gently voice my concern and but also let them do it in the hopes they'd see how useless it was. The other thing that didn't help was I was the "technical cofounder" and the attitude essentially was I didn't "get" business, and sometimes I wondered if they were right.Interestingly both were woman, and I don't recall too much of #3. They definitely participated in women in tech type groups but I thought it was no different than any other useless networking others that aren't focused would do.This will be definitely something I probe for in the future. Anyone looking for a cofounder? (I'm serious, and I have a cool little project we could do to see if we can build something people want together)
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The fake Facebook profile industry
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Using a throwaway account to keep things privateLast year I was "sex-torted" on Facebook but not by a ring of French criminals. Instead, it was by someone I had chatted with on the internet years ago (while we were both still teenagers)She had recently gotten divorced and contacted me after many years away. We spoke about intimate things (I never shared intimate images, though she did) and were getting closer and closer to each other.She eventually asked me for money to cover an expense for her daughter, but I didn't send it fearing I was being scammed. In exchange, she took screengrabs of the most intimate parts of our conversations and shared them to all of my professional contacts via LinkedIn as well as friends , colleagues and family on Facebook.The experience haunts me to this day, I discussed consensual kinky stuff with her and she used this to paint me as a freak and deviant. The only people who understood it were those who had been in a similar situation or those who were in the "lifestyle" as well. Strangely, most of the support I received after the fact were women who have been similarly extorted. Men in my entourage just whispered and snickered.To this day, I still feel shame in certain circles because of what is unsaid. The police have done absolutely nothing even in the face of evidence (reports filed with local police and FBI) but it's simply not a priority. Facebook won't even pull the posts because no intimate images were actually shared and it doesn't technically violate their "guidelines"Net result: I've deleted my social profiles. Every last one of them (and feel better as a result). However, the damage is done and I'm totally still feeling PTSD as a result of the ordeal.I consider myself very tech savvy (engineer, infosec background, on the internet since the early 90's) and able to smell a scam. However, it's really really easy to fall victim to something like this. Be careful.
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Exercism – Level up your programming skills
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I just signed up and while it looks like a great resource I really wish they would grade your submissions on pass/fail based on the test cases that are included with each module. I thought it was weird that I submitted something that was not passing but it didn't complain... because if that's the case, why even submit? As a commentator I would like to know if I'm commenting on solutions that are passing or failing first, before writing any comments. Just my thoughts.
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WhatsApp told to stop sharing user data with Facebook by French authorities
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EU is one of my best hopes when it comes to privacy and really wish they start going after tech behemoths. I have given up on US authorities doing anything to reign them in. And policies in other significant countries (eg. China) would be even worse for user privacy.
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What ORMs have taught me: just learn SQL (2014)
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This was my position for a while. ORMs introduce a layer of magic which obscures what's actually going on under the hood. I decided I would just make raw SQL queries and handle mapping data explicitly.I quickly ended up with a lot of duplicated code. So then I thought, "Well ok, I should add a bit of abstraction on top of this..." I started coding some simple functions to help map the tabular data to objects. One thing led to another and suddenly I looked at what I had done and said, "Wait a minute..."
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The world needs more search engines
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Google's dominance is almost entirely due to the fact that its by far the best at search. I use ddg, but I use google search via !g about 25-50% of the time after a failed attempts. And 9 times out of 10 Google gives me exactly what I'm looking for.For instance:"the actor that plays the news guy in spiderman"ddg:Tom Holland (side bar)Spider-Man Homecoming (imdb)Tom Holland (wiki)Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (imdb)google:Jonathan Kimble Simmons (splash, link to wiki)J. Jonah Jameson (wiki)J. K. Simmons (wiki)The google result is exactly what I want. And the results were made in incognito mode so Google wasn't able to cheat with privileged information about me as a user.At the end of the day, most people care about the product. I'm only willing to sacrifice so much to satisfy the ideal that there should be less concentration. Make a better search engine but trying to pull at the heart-strings of users about how Google is an empire and too powerful just won't work and it undermines your product and mission.
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COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator
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Edit: contact made, thank you!If anyone is reading this with connections to the Gates Foundation: Please contact Dr. Robert Kruse at John Hopkins. https://twitter.com/RobertLKruse. I have been trying to get in touch with people at Gates. This announcement unfortunately features no contact email address :(Dr. Kruse is developing an extremely promising therapeutic, ACE2-fc, which will both neutralize the virus and treat the symptoms of the disease. It has been shown to work in vitro; variants have been tested in animals models; and its been through Phase II human trials for a different indication. A variant of the therapy, soluble ACE2, is being trialed in humans now in China.Details on the approach can be found in his paper here:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7029759/ see "ACE2 immunoadhesin strategy"
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Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse
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Worth taking note that in today's climate, you really cannot win when you are in a position to moderate important things that a lot of people use.There is constantly tremendous pressure on you to perform opposing actions, and even making no decision at all will cause you significant mental stress and harassment, regardles of what the issue is.You have to pick who you want to cave to, and to what extent, and no matter how good of a job you try to do, a lot of people will really really hate you.This is even more apparent when you see that Reddit has been taking action against a lot more subreddits recently, some of which are listed in the article, and many of which clearly have little to do with the president. The attitude of some of these communities may be abhorrent, but they are still communities, and people do not react well to their communities being deleted, whether a company had the legal authority to, or was justified in doing so, or not.It's very tough and I wish that we didn't have to go through these things to begin with, and could have more federated and decentralized platforms, or at least more client-side filtering inside of centralization curation. I can always dream.
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Don't Feed the Thought Leaders
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Being a hedgehog is useful on the journey to domain mastery because sticking to frameworks saves you time and headache compared to not having any frameworks at all.The 3 stages of domain mastery:Stage 1 - No knowledge or structure to approach a domain (everything is hard, pitfalls are everywhere)Stage 2 - Frameworks that are useful to approach the domain (Map to avoid pitfall areas)Stage 3 - Detailed understanding of the domain (in which you can move through pitfall areas freely and see where frameworks fall short)Hedgehogs are at stage 2. You move from stage 1 to stage 2 by adopting frameworks; hence, hedgehogs are seen as "thought leaders" because they teach the frameworks that lead MOST people to more mastery. Except when you're at stage 3, in which case frameworks lead you to more inefficiencies compared to your own understanding.All good decisions must be made by stage 3 persons, but ironically, training is most efficiently done by stage 2 persons. Hedgehogs get more limelight because 90% of the population is at stage 1 and values the knowledge of stage 2 (and can't grasp the complexities and nuances of stage 3).Many hedgehogs struggle to touch stage 3, and instead see stage 2 as mastery. This is compounded by the positive feedback loops of success - the frameworks save time, it gives them reputation, it allows them to save stage 1 persons from their ignorance, and it's the foundation of their current level and achievements. Frameworks are also convenient and broadly applicable to many problems; detailed domain mastery in contrast is difficult, time consuming, and highly contextualized.All of this makes it hard to move beyond stage 2 into stage 3.
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Node.js and io.js are merging under the Node Foundation
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BTW, what's the status 'Node programming'? After the initial hype it seemed to have landed in the 'trough of disillusionment'.
Are companies still creating new Node applications? Or just maintaining the old until they are replaced?
Will Node be a valuable skill in 2 years?
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A previously unnoticed property of prime numbers
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"If Alice tosses a coin until she sees a head followed by a tail, and Bob tosses a coin until he sees two heads in a row, then on average, Alice will require four tosses while Bob will require six tosses (try this at home!), even though head-tail and head-head have an equal chance of appearing after two coin tosses."How does this work?
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The Limitations of Deep Learning
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As someone primarily interested in interpretation of deep models, I strongly resonate with this warning against anthropomorphization of neural networks. Deep learning isn't special; deep models tend to be more accurate than other methods, but fundamentally they aren't much closer to working like the human brain than e.g. gradient boosting models.I think a lot of the issue stems from layman explanations of neural networks. Pretty much every time DL is covered by media, there has to be some contrived comparison to human brains; these descriptions frequently extend to DL tutorials as well. It's important for that idea to be dispelled when people actually start applying deep models. The model's intuition doesn't work like a human's, and that can often lead to unsatisfying conclusions (e.g. the panda --> gibbon example that Francois presents).Unrelatedly, if people were more cautious about anthropomorphization, we'd probably have to deal a lot less with the irresponsible AI fearmongering that seems to dominate public opinion of the field. (I'm not trying to undermine the danger of AI models here, I just take issue with how most of the populace views the field.)
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Signal partners with Microsoft to bring end-to-end encryption to Skype
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While on topic of Skype: My God the latest Skype design update is abysmal, whoever come up with that horrible mess should be fired and never touch any design or management role at all.And it’s not only design but the ux is horrible too, when you switch between conversation - it does not focus on the chat box field so you can start typing right away, instead you have to click it first. This is a basic stuff for a chatting app and whoever missed that is apparently clueless about uxEdit: also if any of Skype iOS app developers is reading this - on iPhone X when you accidentally click top left corner of the phone where the clock is - for some inexplicable reason the whole conversation scrolls all the way to the top, which is incredibly annoying!
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American society is so focused on race that it is blind to class
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Indian-American father here, living in the Bay Area. My wife and I came to this country with a few hundred dollars between us and have worked hard to reach where we’re at. We're far from privileged.I am 100% against affirmative action on the basis of race. I think there should be some measure of AA on the basis of economic status. It's quite personal for me this year.My 17-year old is applying to universities to study CS for fall 2023. We live in a highly competitive school district. He's hardworking and studious, as reflected in his 4.0 GPA and perfect 1600 SAT score (thankfully, some schools like MIT have brought back the SAT.) He has always taken the hardest possible AP and college-level classes and has strong extracurriculars. In a normal world, his chances of getting into top-ranked CS programs (Stanford, Berkeley, MIT) would be decent, but we're Indian-American and are considered over-represented on elite college campuses.Our school counselor and other parents we've have spoken with have flat-out advised us to: Apply to more lower-tier schools. Amongst the elites, target "hard STEM" schools like MIT, Caltech, Harvey Mudd, where he’s more likely to get a fair shot (Asians are 40+% of the incoming class at these places.) Forget the Ivies — the last thing they want is “another smart Indian male” (the counselor's words, not mine.) You see, that won’t help with “diversity.”Also — we use a system called Collegevine to keep track of applications. Applicants can input their GPA, SAT scores, extracurriculars etc. to understand their acceptance rate at specific universities based on historical data. For my son, keeping everything else the same but simply changing his race from Asian to Black/Hispanic increases his chances of getting in at the above elite schools from 4-8% to 60+%. I am not making this up — you can test this yourself.Is it fair to penalize my son for working hard and being an excellent student?
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Investigating why Steam started picking a random font
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> 2038 is going to be a lot of funIndeed it will be!
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Don't Be A Free User
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This article operates under the very incorrect assumption that paid services never shut down and free services are never carried on by their purchasers.See Flickr or YouTube or PayPal or Skype or Picnik or Grand Central or Picasa or Siri or mySpace or FriendFeed or FeedBurner or even pinboard's biggest competitor Delicious for examples of the latter.As for the former, there's an unlimited number of examples (for a few, try http://techcrunch.com/tag/deadpool/)Unfortunately, $7/month from a few people can't keep things afloat.
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Cowards
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There's a meme on Reddit that revolves around 'so brave': basically calling people/posts/comments out for obvious pandering.This reads like a pastiche of Keith Olbermann, all bravado and empty gusto. Arrington writes:What has these people, among the wealthiest on the planet, so scared that they find themselves engaging in these verbal gymnastics to avoid telling a simple truth?and then acknowledges that doing so, if it meant breaking FISA, is illegal.Because their lawyers might be telling them what they are required to do. But their soul should be telling them what they must do.What the hell does this even mean?Listen, I completely agree with the central premise that we need to have an actual conversation both about privacy in the age of Facebook and the Kafka-esque way the U.S. government has engineered these catch-22 gag orders. But given Arrington's experience both with AOL and with the overall notion of privacy, I'd expect something with a little more substance and perspective.
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Ask HN: What is your favorite CS paper?
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I've been trying to get it frontpaged because, despite it's length, it's perhaps one of the most startling papers of this decade. Sadly, it seems like the HN voting gestalt hasn't decided to upvote a paper that's the CS equivalent of breaking the speed of light:"Generic Top-down Discrimination for Sorting and Partitioning in Linear Time" ->http://www.diku.dk/hjemmesider/ansatte/henglein/papers/hengl...(if you're daunted by an 80 page paper as I am, there is also a talk on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sz9ZlZIRDAg)It is possible, with some proper insight and approaches, to sort general datastructures in linear time on modern computing hardware. The speed limit of sort is O(n) with some extra constant cost (often accrued by allocation). It works by decomposing and generalizing something akin to radix sort, leveraging a composable pass of linear discriminators to do the work.There's a followup paper using this to make a very efficient in-memory database that one could easily generalize under something like kademelia and with care I suspect could make something like a better spark core.http://www.diku.dk/hjemmesider/ansatte/henglein/papers/hengl...I keep submitting and talking about this but no one seems to pick up on it. This paper is crazy important and every runtime environment SHOULD be scrambling to get this entire approach well-integrated into their stdlib.Unsurprisingly, Kmett has already implemented it in Haskell (it generalized neatly under the dual of the applicative+alternative functor): https://hackage.haskell.org/package/discrimination
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Google Critic Ousted from Think Tank Funded by the Tech Giant
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The thing is that Google has absolutely gone down questionable path from their early days.It is a little unfair to think this problem exists only within Google. Time and time again we are reminded why corporations will evolve to become as greedy and as protective of their turf expansive of their power and monopolistic as they can get, even if good people are running them. It is the system itself that does this, corporations evolve to survive and to thrive. That in of itself isn't a bad thing but you need checks and balances. Things like the Supreme Court saying that Corporations are people or all the money pouring into our political process those are things that have to change.Even the best of them will eventually become the worst of them. Google is now evil for sure, no doubt about that, but there have been and there will be many others.
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Terrain rendering in fewer than 20 lines of code
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I stumbled upon this very good explanation (and demo) of the Comanche Voxel 2.5D engine reimplemented in JS and thought it might interest some HNers. I did not had the pleasure to play Comanche though I have fond memories of playing Apache in 1996.I've been investigating the terrain generation / rendering quite a bit for the past ten days and have started to play with https://threejs.org/, webgl and shaders, the current result (https://twitter.com/maxmre/status/933860624773283842) is quite humbling when I see how nicely the Comanche engine works :)
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Microsoft Adds an OpenSSH Client to Windows 10
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"For years, Apple MacBooks have been the go-to choice for many admins partly because getting to a ssh shell is so easy."I really can't believe somebody ever bought a MacBook because they found installing putty too much of hassle.
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Teenager facing prison for downloading unsecured files from government website
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This might be a controversial opinion here, but intent does matter. If I see a bunch of stuff sitting the sidewalk and I take some because I think it's free, that's a reasonable thing to do. But going into someone's house and taking their tv is not. "It's their own fault for not locking the door" isn't a valid legal defense, and I would prefer not to live in a country where victim-blaming becomes a get-out-of-jail-free card.Based on what little I've read thus far, the teenager does indeed seem to have good intent. If that's the case, I'm cautiously optimistic that the court system will set him free without any consequences. But if the prosection can prove that he was aware of the data's confidentiality and was acting with malicious intent, then he deserves a conviction. Let's let the legal system run its course, before gathering our pitchforks.
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Robot treats 500k plants per hour with 95% less chemicals [video]
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This is an improvement within the current paradigm of "big ag", but IMHO tech is opening the possibility of a completely different way of doing things. For example, this comment which is below the linked video imagines a robot-maintained food forest, I think it's on point because I, too, believe that the future is swarms of small robots rather than a few big tractors:> Imagine, a few years down the line, applying these principles to maintaining an edible polyculture ecosystem-farm. Not necessarily a big machine going through a flat field, but small drones tending to trees, vines, herbs, plants, pollinators and water features all in the location that is best for them based on local features. It could micromanage weeding and harvesting, but also composting, planting, grafting and nurturing keystone species and rare species while avoiding pesticide, nitrogen imbalance and soil compaction. A productive farm could look like the garden of Eden.
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SQLite developer must have received a lot of phone calls
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Does anybody else have any stories similar to this they could share? I always find this sort of thing fascinating.Here's one[0] about when Facebook changed something about their login, and someone wrote a blog post about it. The blog post ended up being top Google result for "facebook login". A lot of people, it seems, were getting to facebook not by the address bar, but by typing "facebook login" into Google, and clicking whatever the first result was. Hence, they found the site, then proceeded to leave tons of comments, complaining that they couldn't log in to FB.[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20120201181225/http://www.readwr...EDIT: This was similar to what happened to rapgenius a bit back. Google blacklisted their site, and people thought the site was deleted, and were complaining to rapgenius on twitter. It blows my mind that there are a lot of people that don't know how to use an address bar properly.
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Phoenix 1.0
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If you were choosing today, would you recommend choosing Elixir over Go for web/back-end development? Would you say Go is more suited for high-performance command-line tools, and Elixir for long-term running stuff?I'm an indie developer building such a back-end (social networking/chat space), have full choice of language. Started using Go earlier this year and mostly happy with it.Should I switch to Elixir in my next iteration? Would it make me more productive, or save me from various deployment hurdles in long-term?(Please don't take this as one of those mostly aimless "Hey, is Ruby or Python better?" type of questions. I hate those myself. I'm going to be investing thousands of hours into Go at this point. Hoping for some serious pro-vs-con discussion, hoping people who have architected something big in either language could chime in -- such is the major plus of asking on HN.)I tried Googling, and the best/most recent I found was this thread. [1][1] https://www.reddit.com/r/elixir/comments/3c8yfz/how_does_go_...
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Paper Planes
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Maybe it's just because the site is getting hammered, but whether I view it on my phone or computer, I just see a cool visualization of paper planes flying around the world, but I see no way to interact with it at all... Nor is there any explanation of what I am looking at. It looks pretty, but is rather confusing.
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Project Euler
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I guess I'm becoming an old fart. I used to like programming puzzles, challenges, things like this. But as time marches on, I realize that the real-world problems I have to solve are already so challenging and require enough critical thinking, that I'm best served just focusing on them. Between family life, doing real-world challenges for income, downtime to breathe, diverse hobbies for the spiritual good of my person, I just don't see how to fit in Euler problems and other similar endeavors. Perhaps if I was a teenager again, I'd be jumping into them with much enjoyment.
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A Career Cold Start Algorithm
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I don't think I agree with this.We had a programmer that tried from the start to impress us. They were constantly suggesting new tools, or changes to the system, or trying to abstract some code.What they weren't doing was what we asked them to do. They'd put a token effort into that, do it wrong, and then call it done.On the other hand, all my best newbie programmers came in, buried themselves in their tickets until they understood them, fixed them, and went on to the next ticket. There was very little attempt to change the system in their first year.I'm much happier with people who focus on doing their job instead of focusing on trying to impress people.
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Facebook Gave Device Makers Deep Access to Data on Users and Friends
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Most notable pieces I took from the article: 1) Facebook does not see third parties (such as BlackBerry) as “third parties.” 2) Facebook told Congress that it disabled third party access to user data, but in actuality did not.My own strong interjection: Facebook’s competitive advantage is its disregard for ethics. Somehow, Zuckerberg has been able to convince a lot of smart people to do unethical things and build unethical technology, while the competitors have a harder time doing the same. This disregard for ethics has allowed Facebook to “grow at all costs.” Meanwhile, the more conscientious programmers and entrepreneurs (or at least those held more accountable) are busy wrangling with the real challenges and intricacies of civilization. (I personally prefer it that way - I like my work being tied to the well-being of society.)
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Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000
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1. Never once seen an issue with USB-C to HDMI or VGA connections. It doesn't even make any sense since MacBook Pro users with external, third party monitors are an extremely common combination.2. I just downloaded Caret (Markdown editor) from their website and used Homebrew to install a CLI tool. Nothing has changed between the current OSX and previous ones.3. If you have a tech support issue go into the Apple Store and work with them 1-1. Very rare to find anything that someone in the store doesn't know.4. MacBook Pro has 4 USB-C ports.5. If you resort to calling groups of people "condescending elitist hipster latte drinkers" then pretty sure you've lost the argument.
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Top Paying Tech Companies by SWE Level
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As a FAANG engineer going on 9 years now, let me address the usual rebuttals:- There is a selection bias. Nope, this is pretty much accurate.- These aren't real. Yes, yes they are.- Self-reporters are lying. Maybe some do but these numbers are pretty accurate. If anything, I question Lyft and Airbnb as such outliers. I wonder if this factored in Lyft's post-IPO stock performance and makes unrealistic valuations of Airbnb's RSUs/options. But for any listed company, these numbers are accurate.- You have to work incredibly hard for this compensation. no, you don't. In fact you'll typically find significantly better work-life balance at a FAANG than a startup.- These numbers are inflated by years of stock growth that is unlikely to continue in the future. This there is some truth to but not as much as people claim. Amazon, of all these companies, builds in expected stock growth into their initial grant valuation (which I think is total BS; if any Amazon recruiters are reading this, please stop). But I know what offers new hires can get pretty accurately so at current stock prices as a new hire these numbers pare pretty accurate.- Newer offers are likely to be less. False. If anything, initial offers continue just climbing such that anyone who is interested in maximizing their compensation should probably move companies every 3-4 years, especially 4 if you don't get an additional grant after your initial grant has fully vested.There are some things to be aware of though and these can make it nontrivial to compare competing offers. Some examples:- Most FAANGs have a 25/25/25/25 vesting schedule. Amazon does not. It's vesting schedule is 5/15/40/40 with a vesting signing bonus in the first 2 years to (partially) compensate for this.- Amazon, as noted earlier, assumes stock price growth in their offer.- Amazon (noticing a trend?) has vesting on 401k matches that can take 2-3 years. Most FAANGs do not.- Anything less than a 50% 401k match is below market.- Some FAANGs have caps on 401k matches. Some don't.- I think the most generous 401k match I've seen is Google's at 50% of your contribution with no cap or vesting period or 100% of the first $3,000 at year's end, whichever is higher. The really nice thing is because there's no cap you get it immediately. It's fairly common to get your bonus in January, put it all in your 401k, get your 50% match and you're done for the year.- Some offer the ability to make contributions into after tax 401k (Google "mega backdoor Roth" if you're interested in this). This is potentially huge beneficial. You can use it to invest money you can withdraw at any time at no penalty but the investment returns are tax free. If you withdraw the returns (not the initial investment) prior to being aged 59.5 you pay taxes plus a 10% penalty, however.- Vacation days vary but 4 weeks (20 days) should be considered the norm for the US (30 for Europe/Australia).- Some companies (eg Google) start you on less vacation days but you get more with length of service.- Unlimited time off is bullshit. Think of this as no time off.- Health insurance can differ but I imagine pretty much all FAANGs at this point have good health insurance. The gold standard is probably Kaiser for CA residents.- Some FAANGs have a 1 year cliff. Some do not (eg Google, FB).- Vesting schedules can vary. Some are monthly, some every 3 months, some annually. Try to avoid anything less frequent than once every 3 months. It can create bad incentives for the company to get rid of you before a big vest date.- FAANGs will give you performance-based RSU grants annually. The time of year can vary. The eligibility can vary. For example, Google gives you a refresh grant at, after Q2-Q3 calibration (based on your previous two halves). And I believe in recent years it changed that if you joined that calendar year you aren't eligible.- Because of refresh grants and your initial grant running in tandem, years 2-4 can often be your most lucrative. If you don't get promoted or an additional grant you can get significantly less compensation in year 5. Why these companies let people leave because they won't give them additional equity rather than competing for a new hire is beyond me. But they do.- Because of the inflation in initial offers, a new hire can often have a significantly better offer than someone who joined 3 years prior. The veteran may only have higher total compensation because of refresh grants and/or stock growth.- FAANGs tightly control salary within bands for a given level. Going beyond this is unlikely to happen however there is FAR more movement on RSUs in an initial offer and/or signing bonus.So this is all another reason of why from a financial POV working for a startup is--how should I put this?--suboptimal. Your equity is probably worth nothing (even if you get acquihired, liquidation preferences probably mean all non-founder stock is worth $0). The hours are worse. The benefits are worse. There may be reasons to do this that aren't financial (as a non-founder) but personally I'd suggest people use their most productive years to ensure their financial independence and then chase whatever moonshot tickles your fancy without the pressure of having to pay for food.
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My family saw a police car hit a kid, then I learned how NYPD impunity works
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> “I blame myself,” she kept saying. “I never let him out on Halloween. A bunch of Black boys together. I shouldn’t have let him out. But he begged me.”Notice that while average white parents might worry about criminals before letting their kids out on the street, the black parents worry (with good reason) about the police.(Just to spell it out: this is why so many BLM activists feel comfortable saying "abolish the police" or "defund the police", because from their point of view the police are the people most likely to assault or kill them or their children on the street, more so than random criminals)> “Young teens or pre-teens of color were handcuffed, arrested, or held at gunpoint while participating in age-appropriate activities such as running, playing with friends, high-fiving, sitting on a stoop, or carrying a backpack.”This is child abuse.
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I want to have an AWS region where everything breaks with high frequency
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For those saying "Chaos Engineering", first off, the poster is well aware of Chaos Engineering. He's an AWS Hero and the founder of Tarsnap.Secondly, this would help make CE better. I actually asked Amazon for an API to do this ten years ago when I was working on Chaos Monkey.I asked for an API to do a hard power off of an instance. To this day, you can only do a graceful power off. I want to know what happens when the instance just goes away.I also asked for an API to slow down networking, set a random packet drop rate, EBS failures, etc. All of these things can be simulated with software, but it's still not exactly the same as when it happens outside the OS.Basically I want an API where I can torture an EC2 instance to see what happens to it, for science!
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Dyson air purifier outperformed by cheap DIY box fan filter in Marketplace test
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Dyson : Air Products :: Beats : Audio ProductsPretty much every Dyson product I've used, from the public bathroom air "blades" to the vacuums, seem like a gimmicky, inferior products with a premium price tag. None of them do their intended job better than older, cheaper products in their category. I know James Dyson is regarded as a genius engineer, but the consumer product company bearing his name seems to be 99% marketing.
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On the Experience of Being Poor-Ish, for People Who Aren't
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Throwaway because I don't want my co-workers to know.I was poor. My father left home when I was a kid in middle school. My mom worked part time cleaning houses and left us when she found a new husband. I dropped out of high-school in the 9th grade and went to work. Low paying jobs. I lived with my aunt on the bad side of town.Fast-forward 35 years. Today, I make about 200K per year. I got a GED, went to trade school, then got into college (full Pell Grant because I was so poor) and came out with a few degrees.Everything I own is fully paid for. House, cars, etc. because I'm always afraid I'm going to be poor again. Of course, I only own modest things. Nothing fancy.If you have never been poor, you may not realize how awesome Small houses and Toyota Corollas are.My fears about being poor again drive my wife and kids crazy. They think I'm nuts and say I need counseling. I probably do.Anyway, people think I'm 'privileged' now because I earn a lot of money, but they have no idea that I used to sleep on the floor and eat in soup lines.I made it and you can too. Poverty has no color. It impacts everyone. You can't tell just by looking at someone.
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“Shared libraries are not a good thing in general”
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As Linus points out, the utility of shared libraries depends on the situation. Widely used libraries like libxcb, libGL, and zlib that tend to have reasonably stable ABIs are good candidates for sharing, while the "couple of libraries that nobody else used. Literally nobody" should obviously be statically linked. Software engineering is mostly about learning how to choose which method is appropriate for the current project.However, there important advantage of using .so files instead of building into a big statically linked binary is NOT that a library can be shared between different programs! The important benefit is dynamic linking. The ability to change which library is being used without needing to rebuild the main program is really important. Maybe rebuilding the program isn't practical. Maybe rebuilding the program isn't possible because it's closed/proprietary or the source no longer exists. If the program is statically linked, then nothing can happen - either it works or it doesn't. With dynamic linking, changes are possible by changing which library is loaded. I needed to use this ability last week to work around a problem in a closed, proprietary program that is no longer supported. While the workaround was an ugly LD_LIBRARY_PATH hack, at least it got the program to run.
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Apple’s app review prevents developer from submitting fix to game for the blind
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Hi,
I am the developer of the app in question, accessible hangman, as well as the other games I hve made for iOS.
I am a blind developer myself, that is why I thought htat making games for the blind would be the best approach for me. I chose Apple's platform, instead of Android, because of the way that SwiftUI lets me write the UI via code and change visual appearance of buttons, etc just by adding button shapes, icons, etc.Now, I do understand that every app needs to go through review every time it is updated, of course. But this is verion 2.5 of the app, this is in no way the first or second version.
So yes, Apple seems to find a new issue when someone just finds a little light in their brain clicking into place, the first version had no such issue. But after 4 or 5 versions, oooooh wait, your app does not comply with blah blah blah.
So, yes, I think this is unfair.
Anyway, I have some news regarding this whole hing, the update was pushed through and approved finally so I'm a bit less worried, they still say I should talk to them on the phone so they're going to schedule a call with me.
Let's see how this turns out. Thanks all.
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Fingerprints can be hacked
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My favorite photograph of a fingerprint is when the Chaos Computer Club reproduced the German Foreign ministers fingerprint from a photo. So much for military grade security.https://www.dw.com/en/german-defense-minister-von-der-leyens...-The core problems with biometrics are that:1) Not revokable (unlike compromised credentials)2) Not a secret3) Usually trivial to reproduce and spoof (even "liveliness" tests)
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Show HN: I'm writing a free book called Computer Networks from Scratch
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I feel like walkie talkies are something all network engineers need to play with. Furthermore, remember that real world telephone and radio networks were in fact... Networks. (Called 'nets' in the radio world)Ethernet, and 802.11, are both based on the concept of a singular channel shared by many individuals. When Alice talks, she says 'I'm Alice calling Bob, can you hear me Over'.Alice is the source address. Bob is the destination address. Over is the stop code/stop bit signifying the end of frame. The payload is 'can you hear me'.-------This is everything up to layer 3. But if you wanted to send a radio/telegram across the country, you need one more layer, IP4 or the ARRL protocol (American Radio Relay League meets on the air at predestinated times to pass messages to each other on Ham radio frequencies. It's a human network)I'm Alice, calling the Eastern Operators. I'd like you to relay a message to Bob for me. The message is 'Can you Hear me', Over.This is a radio frame like all others, but an additional layer has been added. The radio operator has its own protocol built on top of the Frames.------Dave may overhear all of this chatter, but Dave knows to stay off the channel (otherwise he will cause interference). Only if Dave is addressed specifically would Dave respond (Ex: This is Alice, calling Dave. How are you doing? Over)We can see that the operator is itself just another person on the network. The operator may have a message from the rest of the world.This is the Eastern Operator calling Alice. I'm relaying a message from Bob. The message is 'I got your message Alice!'. Over.This is how a router may take a message from the greater internet and pass it to your local network.
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Hexwords: Hex colors that are similar to words
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So which of these actually spell the color they represent (or something closely related)? From a quick glance, I have no found any. Do color-words like that exist in other languages maybe?
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NASA selects SiFive and makes RISC-V the go-to ecosystem for future missions
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The article (nor the product page for the X280) doesn't say whether these chips are radiation hardened, or whether NASA is now more comfortable with software solutions to the difficulties of reliable computation in space.If the latter, that seems (to a layperson) quite exciting, since more local processing capabilities will hopefully lead to more efficient use of the very limited radio bandwidth these missions have available at such vast distances.
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Apple’s iPhone 14 Redesign for Repair
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I’m not sure I care much about repairability. For me, makers should have the freedom to design products as they wish. I don’t think that phones and laptops would be as light and portable as iPhones and Macs are if Apple was inhibited by the Right to Repair movement from arranging internal components in such a jampacked way.I also think that makers should have the freedom to design computers whose software tightly integrate with the hardware. Repairing a broken part with a third-party is exactly the opposite of tight integration. If people didn’t want tight integration, then products that are built specifically for tight integration are just not the right tool for the job that they want to do, and I don’t understand why they can’t simply choose not to buy the product. It’s not like the phone and computer markets are monopolies either. Androids and PCs of all form factors and OSes exist.It would make more sense to me to call for regulation against pricing abuse for the repairs of tightly integrated products. The Right to Repair movement as it stands just doesn’t resonate much with me, nor do I agree with it, because integrated products that come with everything you need make for great user experiences.
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The DROWN Attack
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The vulnerability here is tricky to exploit but actually simple to describe.There's a padding oracle in the form of RSA used by both TLS and SSLv2; by repeatedly sending permuted versions of a ciphertext to an SSLv2 server, you can gradually discover the plaintext†. Both SSLv2 and TLS have countermeasures for this attack.But SSLv2's countermeasures are sabotaged by the crappy ciphers it also supports. In both TLS and SSLv2, the anti- padding- oracle trick is that the server detects bad messages and then generates a fake message to continue running the protocol with, instead of aborting (which would reveal to the attacker that the message was corrupt, thus enabling the padding oracle). But when SSLv2 does that, the attacker can detect that it did, because the cipher key lengths in SSLv2 are so short that they can be brute forced. The attacker knows when the SSLv2 server replaced its message with a fake one, and thus has a working padding oracle.The big problem here is that people run old SSLv2 servers with the same RSA keypairs as their TLS servers. So you can take messages you captured from the TLS servers, and, with some very clever message manipulation owing to an older Bardou paper, make them intelligible to SSLv2, and use the SSLv2 padding oracle to decrypt them.It's a great, great paper. The Bardou "trimmer" stuff was news to me too! :mind-blown-emoji:The top line takeaway on DROWN for most people seems to be "export ciphers are evil". I think: (a) boring! (b) misses the more important point.To me, the real problem here is RSA. Virtually every system on the Internet that does RSA uses PKCS1v15 padding (DNSSEC, which is only now being rolled out after nearly two decades of standards work, uses PKCS1v15 padding!). Moreover, RSA directly exposes an encryption primitive, unlike DH+signature forward-secure protocols, and RSA ciphertexts are surprisingly malleable.To me, the real takeaway: RSA is obsolete. Stop using it.† We walk you through this vulnerability in our challenges here: http://cryptopals.com/sets/6/ --- start with #46
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Donald Trump Is Elected President
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Now that the voices of the disenfranchised blue collar workers have been heard, what actually can be done to help them? I'm less worried about the accusations of racism, etc. because it appears to me a majority are voting because their livelihoods have been lost and, despite economics saying globalization will bring new jobs, they aren't showing up in the critical areas where they are needed.So, what policies can be put in place specifically to help this demographic? I genuinely don't know.
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I’m an Ex-Google Woman Tech Leader and I’m Sick of Our Approach to Diversity
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Some of the reasoning in this post is very weak.It's not very long, and its kernel is an anecdote about how her son is interested in programming and her daughter in photoshop. My daughter is also more interested in art than my son (who is more interested in video games). Both would make exceptional programmers, and both have a latent interest. Both are setting a course for STEM careers, but, like all 18 and 16 year olds --- let alone 9 and 7 year olds --- neither has any clue what they're really going to end up doing.The piece culminates in a recommendation that we focus our diversity efforts on college admissions and earlier stages in the pipeline. But that's a cop-out. We should work on all stages of the pipeline. It's unsurprising that a Google engineer would believe that gender balance can't be addressed without fixing the college pipeline, but the fact is that virtually none of the software engineering we do in the industry --- very much including most of the work done at Google --- requires a college degree in the first place.Most importantly, though, the only contribution this post makes to the discussion is to add "I'm a woman and I agree with one side of the debate" to the mix. Everything in it is a restatement of an argument that has been made, forcefully and loudly, already. Frankly: who cares?Edit: I added "some of the" to the beginning of the comment, not because I believe that, but because I concede that there are arguments in the post that can't be dispatched with a single paragraph in a message board comment (through clearly there are some that can.)
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An error message, still found in Windows 10, is a mistake from 1974
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Back in the good old days of the early(er) internet, back when you could do a port search on 21 to find random machines with anonymous FTP access, a lot of the machines you'd find were inevitably Windows machines.A 'trick' used by the file-sharing community in order to hide their files on these anonymous FTP servers was to create some nested directories with these kind of keywords. The FTP server allowed you to create the directories as well as access them (if you knew the full path) but on Windows they would just cause errors or crashes if someone tried to access them. Combine that with the ability of creating directories with just spaces as names and you could hide quite a bit of stuff from the unsuspecting FTP server administrator.
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Citing revenue declines, Airbnb cuts 25% of workforce
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Separated employees will receive 14 weeks of pay, and one more week for each year served at the company (rounding partial years up). The firm is also dropping its one-year equity cliff so that employees who are laid off with under 12 months of tenure can buy their vested options; Airbnb will also provide 12 months of health insurance through COBRA in the United States, and health care coverage through 2020 in the rest of the world.That strikes me as a pretty generous severance package.
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Jepsen Disputes MongoDB's Data Consistency Claims
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You can tell a lot about a developer by their preferred database.* Mongo: I like things easy, even if easy is dangerous. I probably write Javascript exclusively* MySQL: I don't like to rock the boat, and MySQL is available everywhere* PostgreSQL: I'm not afraid of the command line* H2: My company can't afford a database admin, so I embedded the database in our application (I have actually done this)* SQLite: I'm either using SQLite as my app's file format, writing a smartphone app, or about to realize the difference between load-in-test and load-in-production* RabbitMQ: I don't know what a database is* Redis: I got tired of optimizing SQL queries* Oracle: I'm being paid to sell you Oracle
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.NET 5.0
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So, on the plus side with the new .net, I recently made a .net core web app on Linux, and generally it's been pretty easy.I'm also impressed at just how fast asp.net core is compared to asp.net, the time it takes to open your site in debug mode has dropped dramatically, from what used to be 1/2 minute in asp.net to a few seconds in .net core.On the bad side? Mainly the asp.net core team and their push for Dependency Injection and the really poor async code has got to be the most frustrating thing about the whole thing.My biggest bugbear is the way you access your config, which is an absolute and utter kafka-esque mess. Because someone at MS was drinking the DI kool-aid you have to add a minimum of 5 lines of code to any class you want to access config values in, and you're in for an even bigger nightmare if you want to separate business logic and web code into two projects (which is a pretty common design). I've given up with the config DI and just assign them all to static variables. I still don't get why you'd even want your config injected!The entire authentication uses async code too, which still has all the normal problems of being hard to debug, silently failing if you invoke it wrong and completely overwhelming the callerstack with a bunch of redundant calls.Huge disadvantages with absolutely zero performance gains for 95% of programmers.Having been using express again recently, I'm seriously thinking of ditching the asp.net core stack despite my general preference for statically typed languages. C# is great, but the asp.net core are so obsessed with shoving DI and async down your throat and making you write really unpleasant, boilerplate code. Feels like you're back in 1990 with all the FactoryFactoryFactories.
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Flutter 2
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We're all complaining about how js is a bad language, tooling is a mess, and how the web is fundamentally built for documents and makes it hard to create app-like experiences. Now, Google comes and creates a whole new UI toolkit from scratch, couples it with a very beautiful SDK and component framework and offers a far better programming language than js could ever be but we're still nagging. I was also pretty disappointed with the demo at flutterfolio.com that is supposed to show how great Flutter 2.0 for the web is. It's not that good but it's gonna get there eventually, given the hype around wasm and technologies. Not to mention that Flutter is already better and easier to use than the existing native tools for both Android and iOS. I believe Flutter is an extremely ambitious project and I appreciate that Google is really trying to give an answer to the problem of cross-platform UI development.
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Fresh – Next-gen web framework
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> Island based client hydrationSoftware development already has its own vocabulary, but I feel quite ignorant now.
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Google and Mozilla are working on iOS browsers that aren't based on WebKit
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I'm looking forward to running "real" firefox on ios. If only so that there is another alternative if a page renders poorly in webkit.
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First UK child to receive gene therapy for fatal genetic disorder is now healthy
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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atidarsagene_autotemcel> The National Centre for Pharmacoeconomics (NCPE) in Ireland recommends "that atidarsagene autotemcel not be considered for reimbursement unless cost effectiveness can be improved relative to existing treatment."Wow… instead of a lifesaving cure they recommend the treatment of the symptoms until the kid dies because it’s cheaper.
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The LLama Effect: Leak Sparked a Series of Open Source Alternatives to ChatGPT
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I've spent an embarassing amount of time since the llamas leaked playing with them, the tools to run them, and writing wrappers for them. They are technically alternatives in the sense that they're incomparably better chat bots than anything in the past. But at least for the 30B and under versions (65B is too big for me to run), no matter what fine tuning is done (alpaca, gpt4all, vicuna, etc), the llamas themselves are incomparably worse at doing useful tasks than openai's gpt3.5 models like text-davinci-003, or even the gimped gpt3.5-turbo.I wish it wasn't so, but the llamas are toys. Amazing toys, but toys. What openai is getting out of gpt3.5 (and presumbably 4, though I have no access) are actually useful responses for getting work done.
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Sam Altman for President
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I’m very excited about this. YC is the smartest group of people I’ve ever worked with, and I believe that startups are going to be the major driver for innovation and economic growth going forward.I was thinking this morning about what it was like to start a startup in early 2005 and how much it’s changed now. PG has done a remarkable amount to improve the startup ecosystem for founders—in fact, it’s hard to think of anyone who has done more.(Also, maybe someday soon we’ll make Hacker News work well on mobile :) )
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A letter to our daughter
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Okay, maybe it's just me, but after reading the introduction and getting through the list of extremely difficult "Can we..." challenges followed by the "We must..." directives, the first quote that popped into my head was a variation of “a poor man is crazy, but a rich man is just ‘eccentric.’”I get the desire to solve the world's ills, of society's shortcomings, of essentially fixing the thousands of years of evolutionary programming to craft a utopia. What sane person would sit down and say "You know, when I die, I want to leave the world a chaotic fireball of pain and suffering" in all seriousness? Maybe I'm significantly jaded, but I hope I'm not the only one who finds such a letter a little bit narcissitic, brought to you by the originator of one of the most narcissitic platforms of the modern era, and hosted on that very platform, naturally.>Our generation grew up in classrooms where we all learned the same things at the same pace regardless of our interests or needs.This isn't true at all. "Our" generation grew up with having to work to acquire knowledge. To spend time in the library. To sit down and read. To think. It took time, effort, opportunity, and personal investment - so much of which is no longer a priority now.>The internet is so important that for every 10 people who gain internet access, about one person is lifted out of poverty and about one new job is created.Citation needed. Like, really.
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Windows 93 (2014)
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WIndows 93 does not work on Safari mobile :/
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An open letter to FB, Twitter, Instagram regarding algorithms and my son's birth
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This seems to happen a lot when one's experience is statistically unlikely, or when it doesn't neatly mesh with a commercial opportunity.For instance, I am a transgender woman and I get THE WEIRDEST ads. Makes sense, since an algorithm meshing together my engagement histories from ten years of social platforms must see something quite strange.The only appropriately targeted advertisements I get are from academics interested in studying me. Like: "are you a trans woman? Take this study and win a gift card."When platforms attempt to monetize me, they wind up pushing the brooks brothers dress shirt deals and so on that I used to gobble up in my prior life.I've taken my business local as a result, but the algorithmic rejection of my reality on these platforms takes a pretty consistent toll. I don't know what the solution is, but wanted to underscore that this is a broader problem.
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TikTok told moderators to suppress posts by “ugly” people and the poor
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How is this different from nightclubs having a high bar to entry?I am not saying this is an ethical thing to do, I am saying these apps are no different from nightclubs and they gotta do what they gotta do to survive. And no matter what you may say, humans prefer non ugly people over ugly people. I am sorry but this is simply how humans work. If you disagree, then you are a hypocrite.So should high end nightclubs be publicly shamed for doing what they do (when what their "users" want is exactly non-ugly people) and driven out of business?
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A free-as-in-freedom re-implementation of Google’s Android user space
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I've been using a custom AOSP build with MicroG for a few months now and it actually works pretty well _if your goal is to avoid Google_.What I mean by that is that if your goal is to use Android Pay, Chrome, Gmail, Google Maps, Google Drive, Google Fi etc. and somehow retain some level of privacy, MicroG isn't going to help. It doesn't fully implement _all_ of Play Services' APIs.The point of MicroG is to make Android usable without having Play Services installed. With neither MicroG nor Play Services, many third-party apps fail to function. For example Lyft and Uber depend on the Play Services API for maps and many other apps depend on Google's network location service. If you try to use these apps without some replacement, the apps complain and shut down. MicroG gives you a way around that.I'm quite happy with my MicroG-based phone but I use:- OSMAnd or the open-source equivalent of Maps.me for maps- My country's public transport app for public transit directions- FairEmail for email- Element for messaging- Slide for Reddit- Firefox for web browsingAnd actively avoid all of Google's apps and services (except the occasional search and YouTube).
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Drop a raindrop anywhere in the world and watch where it ends up
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I don't recall what book I was reading that suggested than a civilization based on ecological awareness should be built around watersheds.Maybe half the borders in the world are ridge lines (a natural watershed boundary), while the rest are bodies of water. That means that the consequences of what goes into that water are split between me and perhaps 20 other states/nations. That sort of cross-border negotiation has a lot more friction involved with it.The watershed society would have jurisdictions nested around streams, tributaries, and rivers. I think if you sited your seats of power where your watershed meets the next higher jurisdiction, we probably would have a lot fewer industries running effluent pipes directly into our rivers, because the stuff the mayor is letting into their stream is running past the governor's house on its way to the president's.
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Career advice nobody gave me: Never ignore a recruiter
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Strong disagree. I've made it my policy to never work with a recruiter that isn't affiliated with the company they're hiring for. Recruiting farms like Cyber Recruiters (yuck) will do everything in their power to waste your time out of sheer incompetence and disinterest.I've "doubled" my salary plenty of times through this policy.But the real secret sauce is referrals. Companies always prioritize a strong referral, ignoring mediocre interview performance, and will even skip the reference checks so I don't have to bug my network.
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Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes
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> During last year’s election campaign, Trudeau’s party also proposed a ban on “blind bidding” for houses -- the prevailing system by which offers are kept secret when someone is auctioning a home.This is such a huge deal. Anyone who has had to go through the process of buying a home through a bidding war knows how unfair and one-sided this process is. It take a high-pressure emotional situation, and gives all of the information to one side (the sellers), while leaving the buyer stuck guessing at what the real price for the house is supposed to be. An absolutely horrible process that should be banned. Banning this is such a simple reform. I sincerely hope it happens, though I doubt it it will.
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Vangelis has died
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Imo, Vangelis brought the synthesizer from an experimental novelty to an instrument for composition. The two sounds I associate with him are the long brassy triangle with a steep envelope that we know from both Blade Runner and the accompaniment to the piano in the Chariots of Fire theme, and his effective use of chimes.I have tickets for Olafur Arnalds next week, and there is a younger generation of composers like Arnalds, Frahm, Richter, Tiersen, Aphex/James, and even Reznor/Ross, who could not have avoided Vangelis' influence marrying the synth with classical techniques. He was a big part of what inspired me to start making synth music and more than a few of my tracks have homages to his work, and this note triggered a memory of playing the Chariots theme on piano as a really young child and it seemed to be everywhere at the time. A loss, but hard to mourn such an exceptional contribution as well.
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Select * from cloud
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Since starting my career, the tech stack I use has changed numerous times. Technologies have come, gone, evolved. But except for a brief period in 2010 where we thought we could kill it, SQL is the one technology that has stayed around. It might be the only TECHNICAL knowledge I learned in the first year of my career that is still relavent. You're probably not making the wrong decision if you decide to build on top of SQL.
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Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments
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This is crazy! I like the following comment on kbin:> I said it before and I say it again: if you have the patience to do so then make sure you overwrite your content with chatgpt generated content, as the future AI that will feed on your post HATE feeding on already AI generated stuff. It makes the AI diverge.People should not be deleting their posts but actually just replacing them with random AI generated content. This will make Reddit a mess.
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What Dreams May Come
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Jonathan here. Being woke up by my wife crying because the donations just aren't stopping is both heart-breaking and comforting.For those of you who haven't seen the 'Bucket List' post, here's what it says at the very top:As I try to deal with the reality that is my impending death I can't help but wonder how many things I might have been able to accomplish given just a little more time. When I was diagnosed, I had only one thing that I wanted; to live long enough to see my children grow up. The reality is that the odds of me living long enough to see my children grow are quite slim. The only available treatment will eventually stop working and then it's just a matter of time.This is the list of things that I want to accomplish while I still have time. Many of them aren't for me. They are for my family. They are meant to provide security for my wife and kids so that they can celebrate my life instead of mourning my death when that time comes.My priorities are taking care of my family just as they always have been. Sometimes, we just can't plan far enough ahead to deal with something like this. If you saw the original page you would also note that Trips and meeting celebrities is not high on my list of priorities. Those are things that would provide me with a small boost on an emotional level but I don't consider them something that must happen before I die.Life Insurance: I changed jobs and don't have any and now that I'm terminal, the cost for obtaining it is prohibitive. I agree that this is poor planning on my part, however, I'm 35 and no one expects to find out that they are going to die at 35. We all think we have plenty of time and the reality is that we don't.Health Insurance: Thank god that I have this or we would've been sunk from the beginning. Despite having insurance, there continue to be ongoing costs and once I go on long-term disability I'll be paying cobra rates to keep the same coverage. I have no idea how expensive this will be but I don't expect it to be cheap.This really isn't about me or the money, this is about my family and trying to ease their pain. I know that I'm living on borrowed time right now and I could be dead at any moment. All I want to do is spend as much time as I can with my kids so that they know I loved them. You try telling a 6 year old that her daddy has cancer and will be dead before she turns 8. Hardest thing I've ever had to do and I would never wish it any one.For those of you that have helped us, thank you is not enough.
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Voters say “yes” to city-run broadband in Colorado
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What are the odds that the city will run an ISP better than, say, the DMV?
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Latest Firefox rolls out Enhanced Tracking Protection 2.0
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Off topic, but every time I see an article like this I load up Firefox and try it out to see how it has progressed. I inevitably stop using it, and this time I decided to introspect and see why. It turns out that it's mouse wheel scrolling doesn't feel as snappy as other browsers, and for some reason it bothers me a lot. I'm going to try changing the scroll wheel settings and see if I can stick with it.
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50 Years Ago, Sugar Industry Quietly Paid Scientists to Blame Fat (2016)
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The lies we are told go on and on. The only defense seems to be a combination of strong analytical skills and healthy skepticism of all information we consume.Some other examples you already know:- Big tobacco and lung cancer, cigarettes sold has healthy for decades [0]- Big Auto and seat belts, they fought mandatory seat belts for decades [1]- Big sugar (this article)- Big Media and the apparent massive degradation in truthfulness of the 2010'sIt seems that the truth can be purchased at the right price from the right organizations.Teaching analytical skepticism needs to become a core curriculum for our schools.[0] https://cebp.aacrjournals.org/content/16/6/1070#:~:text=Seni....[1] https://www.wpr.org/surprisingly-controversial-history-seat-...
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I’m a freelance copywriter
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If you want a general term for this sort of thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StretchText. (The original note describing the concept: http://i.imgur.com/jOCOQGI.png)
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Tea if by sea, cha if by land: Why the world only has two words for tea
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I'm no Chinese expert, so somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but I've found that the Chinese word 茶 (cha) doesn't always necessarily mean tea, but can refer generically to a number of different brewed drinks. e.g. barley tea (大麥茶), ginger tea (薑茶), golden oats tea (燕麥茶), etc. all of which translate to tea, but often contain no tea leaves. It may seem like a nitpick, but when you're in China and order what you expect to be a ginger flavored tea, only to receive a cup of hot water with chopped ginger at the bottom, the distinction can be important. That isn't to say you can't simply order 茶 in China and receive what you would expect, as long as you're expecting green tea. Likewise, if you simply order tea in England, you'll likely receive what the Chinese call 紅茶 (red tea). So in my mind, the words aren't exactly equivalent and I wonder how much the different variations of tea and cha relate to themselves and each other.Edit: Applied jpatokal's correction.
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Medieval Fantasy City Generator
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I love this sort of thing, but the far more interesting challenge to procedural games is engaging the player emotionally and intellectually, and giving them a sense of long term narrative progression. I'm mainly thinking of RPGs here, but it's a problem that surfaces up to this day in things like No Man's Sky. Even in non-procedural games that nevertheless allow you to continue playing in a world after all the storylines are concluded (e.g. GTA, Assassin's Creed), you still have this sense of emptiness when you realise these houses don't really have anyone in them, and there's just a city full of mostly silent people walking aimlessly around. Accumulating money or equipment isn't interesting anymore because there's nobody left to fight.Dwarf Fortress puts in a lot of work to keep worlds and interactions rich. Even games like Football Manager are fundamentally role play, and the constantly evolving rivalries and personnel involved keep things fresh well into the game. Honestly think small but rich villages would be more interesting than massive but realistic looking cities, but this is still impressive stuff.
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Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand
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Warning: Personal opinion aheadTo understand why this keeps happening, you need to understand the product and engineering culture at Google. As a group, Google engineers and PMs are obsessed with promotion. At the heart of every conversation about system design or product proposal lies an unspoken (and sometimes spoken) question: will working on this get me promoted?The criteria for promotion at Google, especially at the higher levels like SWE III -> Senior and especially at Senior -> Staff and above, explicitly talk about impact on the organization and the business. This has consequences for the kind of teams people try to join and kind of work they choose to do. Maintenance engineering is so not-rewarded that it's become an inside joke. Any team that isn't launching products starts bleeding staff, any project that isn't going to make a big splash is going to be neglected, and any design that doesn't "demonstrate technical complexity" will be either rejected or trumped up.This is as important in the product management, people management, and general leadership roles as in engineering. The incentive throughout is to create a product, launch it, apply for promotion, and move on to bigger and better things as soon as possible. In my time at Google I saw organization after organization pay lip service to rewarding maintenance and "preferring landings over launches" and “improving product excellence” but (at least in my experience) nothing stuck.Usually an organization starts with a top-down direction and the rest of the company is compensated for executing it. Not at Google. The "let a thousand flowers bloom" approach that developed from the early days of twenty percent time and total engineering independence has created a disorganized mess of a company. Multiply the individual incentives fifty thousand times and you get a company that throws stuff at the wall to see if it sticks, and if it doesn't kills it immediately.Edit/Addendum:This is also why GMail, YouTube, Search, GCP, Android, and others aren’t going anywhere. They’re making money, they’re core to the business, and there’s plenty of opportunity to work on them and get promoted. They all also share one thing in common: deep down they’re frontends for search or advertising (GCP and Apps are an exception because they make money on their own). Measuring and proving impact on search numbers is a well-known promo narrative at Google, so those products are a safe bet for employees and users. Streaming game services, not so much.
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Ask HN: Are there books for mathematics like Feynman's lectures on physics?
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When I was studying physics, I found Feynman’s books in the library, read them all, and had the feeling I understand everything!But then I tried to solve some final exams from previous years, and realized the feeling is false. These books gave me great intuition - but they made all the math look deceivingly simple, and as a result it is hard to develop the actual problem solving skills and intuition.I know my experience is not unique - in fact, everyone I know who tried to learn exclusively from Feynman had the same experience.
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New Grad vs. Senior Dev
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I'm the senior dev on my team, and whenever a new dev joined my team they would look at the codebase and go "ew, python2? Just use python3."That gave me a chance to explain the testing and refactoring cost that would come with changing python versions, and how the benefits to users would be almost zero. And then at some point one of the new juniors said, "hey, there's a lot of filesystem performance improvements and readability improvements (f-strings) in 3. I can get the test/refactor done in a month, and I think it's a net positive." They were right, and now we're on python3.So, sometimes we all learn something.
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How to Get Promoted
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This is going to sound a little touchy-feely, but I'm going to write it anyway.There are a lot of games in the world, and what the author describes here is one of them. And you can play this game if you want to, and you might even win at it. But it's worth remembering that you have one existence, one set of time and energy to spend in this life. If you decide to look at the world this way, and operate with this mindset, then that's how you're choosing to spend it. You will not "make it" some day and suddenly reverse course.More and more these days I think that people who are unhappy in the modern world live in prisons of their own making. Yes, a lot of people think this way and work this way. I think it's good to know the game is out there, and that you'll encounter people with this mindset. But you do not have to play the same game. Yes, you probably need a job. Yes, your material rewards might be lesser if you don't engage in this kind of stuff. But you can still live a perfectly good life—perhaps even a better life—by building it around other principles.I don't mean this to be a lecture, or condescending, or anything other than a reminder that just because you have to work, it doesn't mean you're stuck playing the games other people are playing.
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Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive
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Really excited about this, and so happy we were able to roll it out before Flash's official deprecation at the end of the year. If you have old SWFs you'd like to share, these are the directions for uploading them so that they'll be emulated in-browser: https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/datahub/Uploading_SWFs_for...
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September 11, 2001 media synced in real-time
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When reviewing 9/11 attacks (likely the biggest and most disastrous intelligence failure in U.S. history, give or take Pearl Harbor), it's worth remembering that it could have been much worse. If the first plane had hit Indian Point nuclear reactor what, 30 miles from NYC and upwind? It's likely a Chernobyl/Fukushima disaster would have resulted with an exclusion zone well into NYC. That was reportedly part of the plan but as I recall they wanted a more media-friendly target.Additionally, the fact that members of the Saudi government aided and assisted the hijackers, and that they were tracked and monitored by both the FBI and the CIA, yet no action was taken to stop them, not even a simple warning to airlines to increase security after that Aug 6th Presidential Daily Briefing? What a debacle.We should have left Iraq and Afghanistan alone and done the regime change op in Saudi Arabia, except that Wall Street likes its petrodollars so Washington props up the House of Saud and its theocratic dictatorship. And that's still going on.
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Tokio Console
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Very interesting! I can't help but wonder why these technologies (the framework, and accompanying observability) aren't an OS-level feature; wondering if at this point we need an OS at all, and why not ship a minimal kernel + the binary of an application built w/ this to run directly on the VM.
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What “work” looks like
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I've had more ideas come to me after hiding in my office to take a nap than sitting at my desk. It got to be such a gold mine of solutions that I still to this day allocate 30 minutes of my day to a nap. Non-negotiable. So many hard problems that have been brought to me, or complicated needs for architecture, etc were solved by simply turning my active brain off. When I was in graduate school I'd regularly get stuck on some stupid thing I didn't understand and slamming my head against the paper/book/whatever didn't help. Again, a quick nap and I was good (or at least better than I was).Performative work is a disaster. I worked in a stuffy IT office of a company before I got my degree and became a software engineer. It took YEARS to deprogram performative work. I still hide when I take a nap. I suspect that if my current company found out I was sleeping on the job they'd still be upset with me. However, my output is so good the results speak for themselves. It would be difficult to fire me for napping.
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I record myself on audio 24x7 and use an AI to process the information
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> My biggest problem with “OK Google” is that I don’t know by heart what it can do interactivelyMaybe it’s just me but this feels unaddressed and that seems ridiculous.Why is it so hard for me to find a single, precise location on my phone with an enumerated list of every command Siri or Google can work with?
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Show HN: Codecademy.com, the easiest way to learn to code
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I've been a longtime member @ HN, but I haven't been a developer. In fact, my only HN submission has been one asking how to learn to code (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=820741). We decided to solve the problem by making a simple, interactive way to get started with Codecademy. We'd love your feedback. If you're interested in helping us to get more courses up (on any topic!), please send us an email at HN (at) codecademy.com.
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A VC-funded startup called WhosHere is trying to steal my social network
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Put up something to accept donations, I'd be happy to kick back a few bucks to the cause.
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Boom (YC W16) – Supersonic Passenger Airplanes
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Hi - I'm Blake, Founder/CEO at Boom. After watching no tangible progress in supersonics since Concorde was shut down, I started Boom because I want supersonic flight in our lifetime. Not just as a private jet, but something most anyone can afford to fly.Will try to answer as many questions here as I can.
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Samsung Acquires Joyent
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In case anyone's curious, I blogged about the backstory of the acquisition.[1] tl;dr: We at Joyent are elated, and we believe that this will be a huge win for our customers, for our technologies and for the communities that they serve![1] https://www.joyent.com/blog/samsung-acquires-joyent-a-ctos-p...
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How the Maker of TurboTax Fought Free, Simple Tax Filing (2013)
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Serious question: Is it possible for society to criminalize rent seeking behaviors like this? It seems clear that there's no benefit to keeping the status quo tax filing system except for the benefit of tax preparers. What's stopping the US from creating a law that says if a company attempts to lobby for something in bad faith (like the tax example), they will face sanction?
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Painting with Code: Introducing our new open source library React Sketch.app
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Hi HN!Super excited to open source this — I'm trying my best to bring design & engineering closer together at Airbnb (and in the world), this has been a super useful project.I'll be hanging out in this thread all day if you have any questions / want to flame me :)
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Feds Can't Force You to Unlock Your iPhone with Finger or Face, Judge Rules
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Relevant excerpt:> “The undersigned finds that a biometric feature is analogous to the 20 nonverbal, physiological responses elicited during a polygraph test, which are used to determine guilt or innocence, and are considered testimonial.”So it's analogous to a passcode because you're divulging something stored by your body, as opposed to e.g. a metal key which is artificial.Tangentially related, it's astounding to me that polygraphs are still considered valid evidence given how widely they've been discredited.
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Why Nukemap Isn't on Google Maps Anymore
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Maps has gotten progressively worse in most ways over the past decade, and it drives me crazy. I asked a google employee about this who told me a lot of the changes I hate stem from a refactor around 2014-2015. Obviously there was some big culture shift on the team though...Google maps is* Much, much slower than it used to be. My machine in 2012 was able to drag the map around and everything would load just fine.* Harder to read/understand, especially street names. A lot of the time I have to zoom in 100% and scroll up and down a street to see what the name of the street I'm looking at is.* Much worse at text parsing e.g. I can no longer loosely type something like "10th and grove to Jim's Hardware" and get directions. In fact most of the time I can't even type in a major intersection and get what I'm looking for.* Obnoxiously spammy: they push new "features" on me all the time that I don't want to use (including a recent popup mid-directions when I turned on location tracking because I was lost on a busy, complicated highway intersection. It felt pretty dangerous, getting confused by a popup in the map like that mid-intersection), and the phone version asks me to turn on location tracking EVERY SINGLE TIME I OPEN THE APP.* Addresses seem to be getting replaced by some weird google maps-designed address format in Colombia (maybe other countries?) that are useless to humans* While every good review site seems to fail for whatever reason (tough to monetize, and fighting spam/fraud is also hard?), Maps seems to have become the de facto review site in many places. But the UX is so godawful I can't even wrap my head around it. For example, search for a restaurant, and you get one (ONE) possible filter in browsers: star rating. There's also a "more filters" button which brings you to a separate view where star rating is the only available filter. On the phone app, sometimes I can select "open now," and a few other things about 20% of the time I use the app, and it's not clear why those options are gone the rest of the time...I think it's a real shame, because I remember in, e.g. 2012 I thought Google Maps was an incredible revelation. It was so much better than MapQuest, it was free, fast, and just worked. If only they had open-sourced the old version before the refactor...---Anyway, I hope someone writes a nice open-source view layer that sits on top of OpenStreetMaps someday. Like a wikipedia for maps
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Italy is extending its coronavirus quarantine measures to the entire country
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I was not very surprised that Italy turned out to be the (first?) major hit in Europe. Considering the strong business connections, it had to be either us or Germany.We are, as much of the world, importers from China, but many enterprises here are also, somewhat, strong exporters to China (I can see it from my dayjob as industrial automation SI), and if you factor in the small average size of Italian companies requiring many individual contacts (contrast with Germany where companies on average are bigger), you can imagine that there is a strong flow of people to and fro. Maybe the small size of companies requiring more people to establish commercial links + population being more uniformly settled across the country (no huge wildland or sparsely inhabited area left in Po Valley, except maybe some parts of Piedmont?) + a certain cultural inclination for useless quarreling hindering political action + inefficiencies in the administration + an unsolved conflict of power between central gov't and periphery possibly causing some waste of time in other quarreling + having to keep the vast group of small business owners somewhat quiet has resulted in a vast spreading of the virus.The interesting thing is that, if you replace China with Germany in the paragraph above (wrt. the possible German origin of the outbreak in Italy), the consideration about business links would still apply.Another interesting thing I have just noticed is that some journalists are now openly praising the Chinese handling of the crisis. Maybe this may sound strange to an American :D but there has been for some time a growing cross-partisan movement calling for stronger links to China. In fact this movement is somewhat present in European business community, so it is not so special to Italy, but nonetheless it is interesting to see these comments of open praise.
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Don't close your MacBook with a cover over the camera
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This statement has a number of issues.First, you have to trust Apple that the indicator _really_ can't be disabled. You also have to trust that there isn't a vulnerability Apple is not aware about that could allow rolling the camera without the light coming on. This has happened in the past [0] and there are known Apple products that are vulnerable, yet the statement never mentions this making you believe it's impossible.Second, once the camera light is on, the data has already been captured. The light just told you about it, not prevented it. The plastic cover or a piece of tape does prevent it even if your laptop security is compromised.Third, in a world where remote conferences are more and more common, more and more software doesn't do a very good job at letting you know when it's about to enable your camera. You might click on a link to an all hands conference to listen in while you're changing only to have the software helpfully enable the camera and broadcast you for the rest of the company. I believe in big conferences organizer may sometimes control other ppl's camera as well. You can totally imagine a scenario when the organizer misclicks and enables the camera for the wrong person instead of a scheduled presenter.Camera covers solve all of those problems.[0]: https://jscholarship.library.jhu.edu/handle/1774.2/36569
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One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020
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As an Indian, I think here some points I think western world needs to know about India.* "Gaming the system" to get your desired outcome is widely accepted in Indian society. Especially if it doesn't involve breaking any laws (not ethics). Even in many cases Gaming the system by breaking the law is considered OK as long as one doesn't get caught doing it. (In fact this might be the only way to come up in politics in India, but that's another debate.) Once they are caught the general attitude is "they had it coming".Consider this highflying Indian start up, Unacademy[1][2]. Here is their anthem [3], "Let's crack it". This "crack it" is basically about "Gaming it" and succeed at it any how.* Majority of Indians have a lot of attraction towards free. I have seen even people from millionaire families, spend 10-15 minutes of their time to get something free that is of $1 or $2 in value. The attitude is like, am I doing anything else productive here? If not I might as well do this and earn Rs. 100. In fact this attitude is cultivated from childhood in certain business class families. Don't let go of any opportunity of earning a profit, however small it might be.Here we are talking about student population which is generally low on cash anyway.So if you are any company offering something free to Indians, expect them to come in droves, and milk you as much as possible. Here I think Digital Ocean doesn't mind being well known in Indian students. Many of these Indian Students are going to make purchasing decisions on servers in a few years to come. Unfortunately, it's the OSS community suffering because of it now.[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unacademy[2] https://unacademy.com/[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvIfiblHz1I
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Inside a viral website
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One thing I don't understand about monetizing on the Internet.I see the author considered ads, tried an affiliate scheme and even did an NFT. But what about plain old, honest to God payment? Couldn't they just put a paragraph of text on the site, "Hey folks, I'm worried about hosting costs, if you find this page useful, please [Donate]", with a button redirecting to Paypal or Stripe or whatever, collect the money and declare it as donations on the IRS form? Why try all these convoluted schemes, instead of giving a straightforward way for people to tip?They had 50 million views. If 0.01% of these visitors left a dollar, the author would've still come up way ahead over all the crazy schemes, even post-tax.
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DarkSide ransomware gang quits after servers, Bitcoin stash seized
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It was a mistake to attack the business side of the oil company, because it created what could be sold as reasonable doubt to shut down the pipeline.As a result, the ransom had the optics of an attack on infrastructure. As evidenced by the coverage of Americans desperately filling up containers.This created the impetus for the US to treat this as an incident far and above the ambient ransomware activities leading up to this.It also gave the US an opportunity to show how effective it could be when it had the political cover to do so.
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