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Lithuania says throw away Chinese phones due to censorship concerns
Are there any good non-Chinese smartphone besides Samsung? Preferably someone who delivers a stock android?
Show HN: Get conversational practice in over 20 languages by talking to an AI
First, I’d like to say I really love this product. Thanks for making this.Second, where are the companies that are doing this type of thing for NPC dialogue in games.Imagine playing Mass Effect or Skyrim but where you get to ask whatever and the NPC responds with something that fits within the space of possible answers based on the prompt that defined their existence.
Granting Pardon for the Offense of Simple Possession of Marijuana
Note: The vast majority of people arrested for marijuana possession are not charged Federally. This only applies to the Federal charges specified, Biden can't do anything about the State level charges most people are charged with.Just noting for non-American readers.
Sloth – A Mac app that shows all open files, directories, sockets, etc.
I wish there was a way to see which files were being actively written to sorted by amount of data written. Various times I've seen my disk space rapidly dwindling with no way of know what file was responsible..
I would rather see my books get pirated than this
I think this is the future of computers for people. they will open their phone and say "hey siri get this book or computer or car" and the browser will show them a bunch of made up products generated by an AI and they'll get the product drop shipped from china and it'll be a shitty counterfeit just like the $5 256GB USB drives.But they won't know because when you look for reviews, the review websites will also be generated just for you, filled with AI-made reviews and users. The entire internet will just be a computer that guesses what you want and shows you its best guess as the truth. a little matrix-y.Reading back I sound like T*d K but the next 100 years is going to be unimaginable in terms of what silicon is going to be able to do. It doesn't have to be perfect, just good enough most of the time. Like a mcdonalds drive thru.
Ultimate Tic Tac Toe
I think the Orwin gambit can be extended to win the game every time.- Force opponent to fill center miniboard, as he describes.- Force opponent to fill (e.g.) northeast corner in the same way. Opponent now has taken two miniboards, and you have none, but you are one turn away from taking each of the remaining seven.- Pick SW corner of SW corner. You have taken SW corner miniboard. Opponent is forced to play in same SW miniboard, already won by you.- Pick SW corner of S. You have taken S miniboard. Opponent is forced to play in SW corner again, already won by you.- Pick SW corner of SE corner. You have taken SE corner miniboard.- Done. You win.Like regular tictactoe, there is an advantage to going first. Unlike regular tictactoe, the advantage can't be compensated for. Otoh, the second player can use the same strategy with a little more carefulness, as long as they start early.So either player can force the other into a protracted certain loss, unless there's an agreement or a rule against it. That's no fun.EDIT: actually, you can win every time, in far fewer moves, and not using the Orwin gambit at all. It's not necessary to force your opponent to fill any of the miniboards, not even the center.I think this will win in ten moves and never lose driver control (excuse the notation): C/C, C/SW, C/S, [opponent takes C], C/SE, NE/SW, NE/S, NE/SE, [opponent takes NE], SW/SW [you take SW], SW/S [you take S], SW/SE [you take SE, and win]. A variation can be used by either player early in the game, but whoever starts with control would be foolish to lose it.If this is a game played by mathematicians, either I'm wrong, or there are additional rules. :)EDIT2: C/C (first move above) is unnecessary. Nine moves. Perfect inning.
A Thank-You Note to the Hacker News Community from Ubuntu
Hey Dustin, thanks for the follow-up!In your original story, I posted a request for Canonical to come up with some viable strategy to get Adobe CS (and related color-calibration HW/SW) usable on Ubuntu.I expected a lot of traction for that suggestion, because AFAICT a lot of creative professionals are looking for a way to escape the Windows/Mac duopoly.However, it looks like my suggestion didn't make the cut for the list you just posted.Can you share any thoughts on why getting Adobe CS usable on Ubuntu is / isn't a strategic priority for Canonical?
Buffett wins $1M decade-old bet that the S&P500 would outperform hedgefunds
And I'm just going to self-promote a bit and say that the bet was registered via a project I worked on, the Long Now Foundation's project Long Bets:http://longbets.org/We've been going since 2002: https://www.wired.com/2002/05/longbets/We are happy to host bets of long-term significance, and the minimum bet is only $200/side. I am glad to personally help shepherd people who are serious about bets to make sure you get through the process.I would especially like to see HNers making bets about the things we argue a lot about. Bitcoin! VR! Uber! If you're tired of people posting waffle on some topic where you have a strong opinion, then challenge them to put money down.
I Can’t Stop Winning
> What does the future hold for Pinboard? Death! The bus that one day comes for us all! The skeletal, icy hand on an unprepared shoulder! Pain, a flash of light, then numbing darkness. So back up your bookmarks.Is he shutting saying he's shutting it down, or just saying that's the future eventually?
Highest French court reclassifies Uber drivers as employees
> The criteria for self-employment include the possibility of building up one's own clientele, the freedom to set one's own rates, and the freedom to set the terms and conditions for providing one's services.Immediately I'd seem to agree with this statement. I think of typical self-employment businesses; hairdressers, freelance developers, etc and this seems to apply. You can set your own rate and your own terms, even if those may kill your chance at being competitive.But if you think deeper into this, then this criteria isn't always true.Here's a scenario: I publish an ad on a handyman site asking for a new shed built for £100. People can place their interest and their proposal. The price is fixed at £100, and I may set other terms and criteria. Nobody is going to argue that the builders are employees of the exchange site. Uber isn't entirely different (it just simplifies the process). Its drivers are allowed to deny a ride, and can see the cost upfront.Really the difference in these types of self-employment seems to be that the customer approached a set of potential suppliers, rather than vice versa, and the customer set the terms and the self-employed get to accept/deny. In the typical scenario (hairdressers, etc) they set the terms to potential customers who get to accept/deny.I don't agree or disagree with the classification of Uber drivers as employees, I just don't agree with the criteria of the court in this case.
The Return of the 90s Web
What I miss most from the early days of the Internet is the content. It was all created with love.My theory is that the high barrier to entry of online publishing kept all but the most determined people from creating content. As a result, the little content that was out there was usually good.With today's monetized blogs, it is often content for content's sake. People don't try, or they write about topics which they are not really interested in, but did just to have a new post. Or often the writing is bad.Maybe today's problem isn't the blogs, but the SEO that puts the crap blogs at the top of the search results. Or maybe I'm misremembering and the old content was crap too, or maybe my standards are higher than they were in my teenage years.
SerenityOS demo at Handmade Seattle 2021 [video]
I've been thinking recently that Windows 95/98/2000 had better UX than you can find nowadays on most websites, and while not "beautiful", it was still aesthetic.That + a good console? Great idea. I'd love to see some innovation with the old school design ethos too; maybe there are even better ways of displaying controls? Or maybe a new way to think about controls that weren't around back then.
Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus
Whether PoS will work, I don't know. But the author didn't realize that PoW is certainly doomed.PoW miners tend to spend more and more resources on finding blocks, until the cost approaches the rewards. But the rewards go up as the cryptocurrency becomes more popular, because the price and transaction fees go up. Therefore, a PoW cryptocurrency tends to "eat the world" as it becomes bigger.That's why Bitcoin is already approaching 1% of global electricity consumption, if it hasn't passed that point already. If the price were to go up tenfold, then so would electricity usage (roughly). That's not sustainable, both technically for grids and economically because electricity prices go up.Because of that, I foresee two possible futures for PoW cryptocurrencies:1. The resource usage overshoots and PoW collapses because it gets banned everywhere. (This seems to be playing out now with China having banned crypto mining, Kazakhstan running into grid issues because of the miner influx, and Sweden arguing for a ban in the EU.)2. The popularity of these currencies stops growing and only some niche applications remain. Speculators leave because there's no more money to be made. Prices go down.
Astronomers reveal first image of the black hole at the heart of our galaxy
I am very skeptical of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) images because they are not following a scientific method that results in a true representative image of their target. In my opinion astronomy is jumping the shark with these images by making this a big PR stunt.I've looked at their methods for their earlier images and they seem to be hunting for a circle that looks like a black hole in their data. The EHT's full imaging stack has never been calibrated by looking at a known celestial body to compare images to validate their algorithms. They have calibrated their signals from results of other instruments, but their imaging algorithms change to fit their wanted results. This is my biggest problem with their approach. Anyone can modify algorithms of any arbitrary data to get an image of a glowing circle. A better method that shows a more true image would be to calibrate their imaging algorithms against a known celestial body to make sure their techniques produced comparable results from other instruments. Then they should have taken their calibrated imaging algorithms and gave it data from their target.I'd have more confidence in the EHT if they would not change their imaging algorithms across images and give a side-by-side comparison of a known celestial body that other radio telescopes have imaged to verify their whole imaging stack.To me this a just a big PR stunt and I'm very skeptical of their image.
The Silencing of Maya
The biggest culprit here, in my view, isn't Apple, PRC, or the patent system.It's the death of physical media and the rise of the "app store" model.I have programs for my Apple //e computer that are over 30 years old. Most of the companies that made the software have long since disappeared, and the computer hasn't been supported since the '80s, but I can still use them.That software is my property. I own it, and I can use it for as long as the disks hold out.By contrast, the software on my iPad isn't really mine, in any practical sense. I'm licensing it, and it can be taken away, or I can be forced into "updates" that may change it in ways I don't want. Sure, I can avoid updating my apps, keep the iPad offline, and only use apps that run 100% locally, but that's an impractical solution, at best.Consumers are becoming trained to think of their devices as barely more than hermetically sealed dumb terminals (although they wouldn't use that phrase). The notion of "owning" things by paying for them is fading. "Cloud" apps that are free or subscription-based, music and movies that you stream rather than buy, the books on your Kindle, even the seeds that farmers buy from Monsanto aren't theirs to own and use as they please.Steven Hawking famously continued using the same 1980s-era speech synthesizer for decades because he felt the voice was part of his identity. The company that made it went out of business, but he didn't lose his voice. He could have gone for constant updates, a new and "better" voice every year, but he chose not to. Because he owned his speech synthesizer, it was his choice to make.There is a lot of obvious benefit to the app store model, from convenience to cost savings to ease of use. There are also many cases where it's vitally important that people own their software and their data. I don't know if it means we need more options for physical media and manual installs, or legislation protecting people's purchases from unwanted updates and removals, or something else, but I see this as a problem that's not limited to just this one situation.
Patent war goes nuclear: Microsoft, Apple-owned “Rockstar” sues Google
It's a little early to say for sure, but I predict this will do more to hurt Apple's reputation in the tech community than anything they've done before. And that is not a good community to alienate. I would not be surprised if they look back on this move one day and feel that they ended up net worse off as a result.Apple used to be careful not to alienate hackers. And Microsoft has been gradually digging itself out of a hole in that respect for several years. Now in my mind they are both the enemy.
Let Snowden Come Home
If he were to come back to the USA and then subsequently be detained, I would join the hopefully overwhelming protests in favor of his release. I am hoping if such a time comes, that there will be a historic level of demonstration advocating for his freedom.
CyberChef – A Cyber Swiss Army Knife
This looks like a handy tool, certainly for puzzles and exploring encodings. It makes decoding puzzles like this very quick! 11100111 10111011 10011101 11100100 10111000 10001101 11100100 10111100 10011010 11100110 10010100 10111110 11100101 10111100 10000011 11100100 10111101 10100000
I am not a self-made man
This guy is one of the most under-rated celebrities out there. Sure the films in which he played didn't help - I actually felt to the trap too.His autobiography is just amazing - you realize he's just extremely smart, hardworking dude that also happens to have a vision.
Waymo: Google's self-driving car company
I'm interested to see where all the major players end up in 5yrs:• Tesla bootstrapping a ride service on the backs of buyers• Waymo directly rolling their own fleet• Uber trying to get a self-driving fleet up, burning mountains of money to maintain their "monopoly" on Uber for rides• Lyft working with GM to get a fleet up• All of the other car manufacturers trying to get autonomous vehicles going, presumably hoping for consumers to still want to own a vehicle rather than just pay $1 to get a rideSo: How much is Uber's market share worth? I suspect it'll evaporate overnight in every market where another service has autonomous vehicles and they don't.Also: Private car ownership is going to fall off a cliff shortly after autonomous ride services arrive. Which probably means general demand for vehicles will fall off a cliff.I predict blood on the walls.
World Energy Hits a Turning Point: Solar That's Cheaper Than Wind
I have high hopes for ARES [1]. just a heavy train on a hill with a regenerative break. Add lots of tracks, multiple trains per track, solar above the rails. Avoids needing all the water for pumped hydro storage. none of toxic stuff to deal with when batteries have reached their end of life. Zero carbon emission (aside from whatever is required for manufacturing) is just hugely appealing.If solar prices continue as they have for another 3-5 years, the question is going to be pretty clear, how do we store all of this insanely cheap power. I'm a little mystified we're not taxing carbon emissions and subsidizing storage. But hey, there are clearly powerful forces at play, that don't agree with me.[1] http://www.aresnorthamerica.com/
Amazon warehouse workers 'peed in bottles' fearing punishment for taking breaks
My fear is that the future of work for most people is not unemployment, but shitty jobs like this.My feeling is that in order to avoid this and prosper, the people need to own the robots that do all the work (Marxism heyy). If robots provide huge productivity gains, then they will provide those gains for their owners. If it’s the big corporations that own them, they will see the gains. But as long as people are treated like machines, they will be left out of this prosperity. Instead, if the people own the machines collectively, then they can enjoy the productivity gains themselves as a group.What do you all think of this?
Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces
The animations serve a valuable purpose, though, especially for new users. They show what's happening. Lots of old UIs (like those running in VT100 emulators) had instant wipes from one view to another, but made it impossible to tell what had happened, or why. Even when I wish animation was faster (like with Spaces, sometimes), I rarely wish it didn't exist at all.I often have people watching me, and with animations they say "you're working fast!", while in environments with no animation (like Emacs), it's just "I have no idea what you did". I want computers to seem efficient, not unapproachably magic.What if animations started at a slightly slower speed, and gradually increased in speed the more you used them?We shouldn't need to pick one animation speed for all users, but we also shouldn't make expert users tweak it manually. And I definitely want to see full animations for new applications that I'm not familiar with yet, but not those in old applications which I've seen 1000 times.
$35,000 Tesla Model 3 Available Now
It's so shady that their advertised price includes some hypothetical "potential gas savings", and the actual price is behind a tiny "learn more" link.
Nim 1.0
Congratulations Nim team! :DI've had Nim installed on my laptop for a long time and I've always enjoyed tinkering around with it over the years. Maybe now it's time to find a bigger project to try it out on.This is a tiny thing, but just to highlight something unique I like about Nim, using `func` to declare pure functions (and `proc` for others) has been a small, but really nice quality of life improvement. It's something I've been wanting in other languages since Nim added it.It seems like the 2010s have been a pretty amazing time for new programming languages. The ones that I can think of that I've at least tried are Rust, Go, Nim, Crystal, Zig, Pony, Fennel, Janet, and Carp (I know, some of these are pre-2010, but I think they've all either 1.0'd or had a first public release post-2010), and every single one has made me really excited about some aspect of it. I hope this experimentation continues into the 2020s!
Microplastics found in 93% of bottled water tested in global study
I wonder if all the articles talking about the prevalence of microplastics, are in actuality demonstrating the safety of microplastics.If it is in 93% of bottled water, and bottled water is used by millions of people (according to https://www.consumerreports.org/bottled-water/should-we-brea... around 110 Million people in the US avoid drinking tap water), then there has been widespread exposure to microplastics.It does not seem like there has been huge health consequences due to microplastics, so microplastics are probably pretty safe for humans.
In 4 US state prisons, 3,300 inmates test positive, 96% without symptoms
One of the super-interesting things here, is that apparently everyone was in the specific window where they test positive for the virus. This implies the population was recently infected, had not been previously infected, and it spread almost completely within a tight window.This implies a shocking high R(effective) for that population. In 2 weeks we'll have super interesting data one way of the other on the CFR.
Show HN: Plotting 3 years of hourly data in 150ms
Unfortunately, I have to use Google Analytics and Google Ads at work every day, and these UIs have absolutely terrible performance :(A small part of the problem is drawing the trend charts. So I decided to make uPlot [1] to see what was really possible.[1] https://github.com/leeoniya/uPlot
Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead
This seems to be a new trend now. I'm skeptical. Many of the most successful people I know don't have complicated systems like this - instead of spending time on optimizing note taking, they actually get stuff done. In fact, many don't have systems at all. On the other side, most people raving about the systems are "productivity gurus" writing articles and books, not people who actually get stuff done or would be considered "successful" in the economic sense.I see a similar trend with org-mode users. It's great and all on a technical level (I've used it myself in the past) but it's easy to fall into the elisp and customization rabbit hole. Over time, the few hours spent here and there to optimize the system add up to thousands of hours that could've been used to get stuff done.These complex systems are the perfect excuse for procrastination because they make you feel like you are doing something productive while you actually aren't. Just get stuff done.
A ride that takes 10^20k years to complete in Roller Coaster Tycoon 2 [video]
Less than 48 hours after that video was published, OpenRCT2 patched their pathfinding algorithm to not prefer some directions more than others: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-5aX2oLOgU.The GitHub commit message says it was just to mess up MarcelVos, the videomaker
Rust for Windows
Rust needed a GUI and Microsoft provided one. They seem to be very focused on giving developers what they need, but only to a point. I've been doing some system glue stuff and while it's nice that powershell has ssh an scp they are missing some options I want. I was going to use curses with python (batteries included!), only to find out it's not supported on windows.It almost feels like a strategy - be standard enough to bring people in, but idiosyncratic enough to lock them in.I'll be using gtk-rs thank you very much.
I think I know why you can't hire engineers right now
There comes a point where the money just isn't a motivating factor anymore, and companies are struggling to figure out how to work in that environment. This bit from the author hits the nail on the head:>Is an extra $10k per year worth learning a new org, a new skillset, a new set of expectations, a new set of coworkers, and a new boss?For many engineers, the answer is: “No.”Yes I could quit and get a ~20k raise by shopping my resume around, but I don't need the money. I have enough for a down payment on a house, I meet my expenses for the month with 1/2 of one paycheck, I can buy a new car on a credit card if I wanted to. More money would be _nice_, and I imagine I'd be singing a slightly different song if I had kids, but it's much less important than knowing the work that I do has meaning and an immediate impact on the world, and about as important as working with new/interesting technology. I imagine there are a lot of early career (26-30 year old) software engineers who are in a similar boat. If money was a motivator I'd be serially founding companies and striving to be The Next Big Thing. I'm just not. I'm happy being hire number 13, or 99, and working with people I like doing work I find value in.Edited for spelling
Building an Internet Scale Meme Search Engine
My #1 recommendation for anyone thinking about the convoluted OCR solution: use a cheap OCR API and save yourself months of time / hassle / upkeep. Google's OCR API is a good place to start, but AWS has one too and dozens of others out there.
Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda Resigns From Slashdot
I don't visit /. anymore, but definitely grew up on it. I don't think you can understate the impact it had on a generation of geeks. Especially when it comes to Open Source, I think /. was incredibly important in educating people on a concept, history and philosophy many of us take for granted now.And hot grits aside, it really did set the bar for intelligent discussion. /. was the first site where the comments were always more valuable than the articles. RTFA's were common, sure, but so was incredible insight and inside knowledge. That's what made it all so addictive.I remember hitting refresh constantly on /. during 911. Personally, I found it the best source of information anywhere, though you had to have your own sanity filter on as well.Thanks cmdrtaco, and congratulations on a real legacy. For me at least, /. is mostly replaced now, but that doesn't diminish what it was.
Feds Threatened to Fine Yahoo $250K Daily for Not Complying with NSA's PRISM
Weren't these requests, which Yahoo objected to, intended to stay secret, by the wishes of the government?Consider if Yahoo refused to honor the requests, and began accruing the fines. Presumably, if they didn't pay the huge bill for their fines, what would happen?Surely, $250k/day would rack up fast... As I see it, eventually Yahoo would rack up such a bill that they couldn't afford it, and any collection of the fee by the government would force Yahoo to close its doors. At that point, surely they'd have to reveal something to the general public about said requests, and the fines, and everything else going on behind the scenes...
Whiteboard Clock
How do you go about setting up a custom device file like that (/dev/whiteboard)? Is it just writing a device driver?
Julie Rubicon
Usually I read comments on HN before the article, but there were no comments when I saw the link, so I went straight to reading it.What a bizarre piece. How long did it take everyone else to realize it was fiction? For me, I did not realize until the very end -- and even then I still wasn't sure. It could just as well have been written by some delusional non-technical employee at Facebook.
Donald Trump’s Contract with the American Voter [pdf]
Some of this sounds great - term limits on congress, a measure to reduce the revolving door effect of government officials going into lobbying.Some of it sounds ridiculous - for every new federal regulation, 2 existing regulations must be eliminated. How is that considered feasible by any rational person? It might sound great if you don't think too hard about it.The scariest things for me are the backing out of climate change accords and the opening up of additional shale/gas/etc resources. We really don't need to be heading in that direction, energy-wise.
Fuchsia is not Linux
To people which don't understand the overall decision to create another system, I'll talk about at least one benefit to create a system that is not Linux: make software more simple and efficient. Do you really think that Linux is so great? Linux is a bloat system [1], POSIX is not so great as well (do you really read the WHOLE POSIX spec?).It's important standards, it's important sometimes (SOMETIMES) compatibility. But not all this stuff defined in POSIX it's important. POSIX sucks sometimes [2], only GNU can be worse about being bloated [3].Only users which don't touch in code can think that Linux, POSIX and GNU are entities following principles based in simplicity. Linux following Unix guidelines? This only can be a joke of Linus.Creating custom software, maintaining and other stuff on things THAT YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND has a massive cost. As well, the cost to understand complex things, it's even worse.Sometimes it's even more simple re-inventing the wheel than understand why a wheel was build with a fractal design [4].[1] Linux LOC overtime https://www.linuxcounter.net/statistics/kernel[2] POSIX has become outdated http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~vatlidak/resources/POSIXmagazine...[3] Code inflation about /usr/bin/true https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/a417/055105f9b3486c2ae7aec2...[4] The Linux Programming Interface https://doc.lagout.org/programmation/unix/The%20Linux%20Prog... (that cover of book has a reason and yes: it is what you think)
Sweden ends contract with Elsevier, moving for open access for science articles
I am surprised that it took so long after the invention of the Internet. In the pre-Internet era, these journals used to play a significant role in distributing research papers in physical paper form. It made sense then. There was no way to copy a 10 page research paper from Germany to China with a few finger taps at low cost. But with the advent of the Internet and its pervasiveness, it no longer makes sense to rely on a costly media based on physical printing, distribution, and centralized organizations milking money out of it.I remember Timothy Gowers calling for a boycott of Elsevier back in 2012. It's 6 years since then and Elsevier is still alive. Influential researchers still submit their work to Elsevier! It took less time (a few weeks?) for everyone to boycott Digg!It's surprising how the Internet has been used to distribute cat videos, advertisements, time-draining, and attention-draining content to a sickening degree but it is still underutilized to distribute good content like research papers such that the Internet becomes the primary and de facto media for such content.
How I Run a Company with ADHD
My reaction to this article has been... complex.-----Bah! Another article about ADHD. ADHD's over diagnosed and not not as big a problem as people make it out to be. But, I'm curious all of a sudden, so I might as well read it.> For the first 19 years of my life I knew I was lazy.Yeah, I'm pretty lazy too. That's just who I am, though. I don't have ADHD...> So what, you can't stop bouncing your leg at the restaurant?I thought I was the only one that did that. It drives my aunt crazy.> I'll be halfway through a team meeting and realize I haven't heard anything that was said. That's ADHD.THAT'S ADHD? I do that all the time. I can't listen to podcasts either. But I just have difficulty processing the spoken word. I'm much more of a book learner anyway.> I was happiest with my nose in the bookI'm seeing a disturbing pattern take shape.> I'll take a break to read an article and hours will go by before I realize what's happened. Not minutes, hours. That's ADHD.Wat.> I'm horrible at completing simple, repetitive tasks. I'm terrible at time management, and conceptualizing time in general.Uh oh.Other comments here have mentioned that stimulants help ADHD sufferers focus. I recently cut back to 2 20oz cans of red bull a day, but I was up to 4 a few years ago. I just thought caffeine was my drug of choice. Everyone's addicted to something, right?I currently have 52 open tabs on my laptop and another 37 open on my desktop.I'm not quite sure what to do with all of this. I just thought I was lazy.
Macron says France will build new nuclear energy reactors
I get the fascination with base load and the incredible amount of energy compared to chemical based alternatives. But: 1. What will the net online time be? (Lots of these plants go in maintenance for long stretches of time) 2. Spent fuel? 3. Proliferation risk? 4. Accident mitigation?
Nvidia prepares to abandon $40B Arm bid
Quick summary on why it matters that Nvidia abandons ARM takeover:1. ARM doesn't own any factories. Its entire workforce publishes blueprints for making chips (like a software company where the entire asset is intellectual)2. Buying this type of intellectual asset, means owning and controlling a technology.3. This also means, all the other customers who depend on this tech (Apple, Samsung, Amazon, pretty much all big tech companies) are now at a disadvantage with NVIDIA as a competitor.4. China heavily depends on ARM (Huawei, the company's biggest tech manufacturer rely on ARM)5. This means, the after ARM gets owned by a US company, the US can possibly just cut-off ARM supply to China6. Since ARM is basically like a software company, it's better to not be owned by a hardware maker. That way, it can prioritize demand from several hardware makers instead of being directed to cater to one market)So, all-in-all this is a good thing :)
Little Snitch Mini
Is there a Little Snitch alternative for Windows?
Steam Controller
I'm skeptical that the trackpads will provide the same precision feel that a good analog stick can do, even with the haptics.But I'm not going to count it out. I'll reserve all judgement until I get to try it. And that's the only real sticking point for me on this announcement; everything else about this controller I love.
#c0ffee is the color
Got to admit I was hoping it'd be a coffee-ish colour before I sorta parsed the colour in my head and realised it was mostly green.With that said there are some pretty cool ones (e.g. 5afe57 = safest = a green) that do match up. Can't say I can think of many hugely practical uses for this, but it's kinda neat!
Let’s Build a Simple Database (2017)
I have spent quite a lot of time building a database in Java. It's not a small undertaking.I've gone through as many books and papers as I can, and there is only one, one, that gives an overview and actual examples of building a system that processes SQL. Everything else is theoretical or so general that you don't get enough direction to get started.It's "Database Design and Implementation" by Sciore. It's a little dated, but not by much. It is an underappreciated resource.
Comparing the Same Project in Rust, Haskell, C++, Python, Scala and OCaml
I think the big big result from this study is: "Python: half the size !".A dynamic language like Python is better here, 2x better. I assume similar results would apply to other dynamic languages like JavaScript, Lisp, Smalltalk, Groovy etc.This does not say that static typing should not be used but I think it shows unequivocally that there is a considerable extra development cost associated with static typing.You might say that surely that additional cost would be compensated in reducing the cost of maintenance later. Maybe but I'm not sure.Any development effort of significant size (like writing a compiler here) is a combination of writing new code and adapting and modifying code already written. "Maintenance" is part of development.This is quite a quantitative study which gives credence to the claims of advocates of dynamic languages.
Apollo 11 in Real Time
Thanks for the share. I'm the author of the site and am happy to answer any questions.
Linus Torvalds: Git proved I could be more than a one-hit wonder
To me the beauty of git stems from the fact that it is an implementation of a functional data structure. It‘s a tree index that is read-only, and updating it involves creating a complete copy of the tree and giving it a new name. Then the only challenge is to make that copy as cheap as possible - for which the tree lends itself, as only the nodes on the path to the root need to get updated. As a result, you get lock-free transactions (branches) and minimal overhead. And through git‘s pointer-to-parent commit you get full lineage. It is so beautiful in fact that when I think about systems that need to maintain long-running state in concurrent environments, my first reaction is ”split up the state into files, and maintain it through git(hub)“.
The latest version of Slack has a setting to disable the WYSIWYG editor
In case anyone's interested, here's the Chromium bug(s) that's one of the main reasons the WYSIWYG editor has such issues in Chrome(/Electron):- https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=102937...- https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=608393- https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=608162The gist of it is that they "canonicalize" the DOM selection when you have two adjacent inline elements, so that it can only ever be at the ending edge of the first inline element. Which makes certain selection states impossible. And on top of that, they don't draw the cursor in the right spot when doing the canonicalization. So for instance, it might look like your cursor is here: one|two But it's actually here: one|two Drawn in the wrong place. And impossible to put it at the beginning of "two" at all! It's crazy!I don't know how much the take "starring" into account, but it can't hurt to star them in the hopes they're fixed sooner.---Edit: If you want to see the craziness in action, check out this sandbox:https://codesandbox.io/s/amazing-breeze-6elsy1. Try to put your cursor at the end of the word "one"2. Try to type a character at the start of the word "two"
An updated daily front page of The New York Times as artwork on your wall
I have been constantly hearing about eink getting cheaper/better for over a decade now, but the price that the author paid (2300 euros for a 32-inch screen) seems ridiculous. At that price point does it make any sense to not just get a regular LCD for a small fraction of the cost? Dimming the brightness and adjusting the color profile will get you pretty close in terms of experience. The few dollars a year in electricity savings isn't relevant either.
Russian opposition leader Navalny dupes spy into revealing how he was poisoned
https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2020/12/21/if-...The Bellingcat story has a weird number of just-so leaps "e.g. this telephone number is one that regularly called these spies" that suggests either that they hired a bunch of actors and put on a show or they received high level intelligence from a nation state actor (e.g. CIA).
Why can’t you buy a good webcam?
The real reason is buried in the article:You can’t buy a good webcam because the number of people willing to pay a lot of money for a high end webcam is very small.At the lower end, people are satisfied with their built in laptop parts or a cheap webcam that sits on top of their monitor.At the high end, people go down the rabbit hole of buying a do-everything mirrorless camera that they can use for so much more than just a webcam.A high end webcam would have to be cheap enough that the first group doesn’t mind spending a bit more, but not so expensive that the enthusiast target audience just decides to buy a full-featured mirror less camera instead.Granted, there is a lot of room for improvement in that budgetary middle ground, but how many people actually care? Common webcams actually perform decently when given proper lighting conditions. We’re not streaming high-bitrate 1080p H.265 on our 5-person Zoom calls. After compression and denoising the extra sharpness and low noise of a high end camera doesn’t add much benefit.Enthusiasts are a difficult group to market to because they have extremely high expectations. They’d also rather spend weeks scouring the Internet for the perfect deal on a used mirrorless camera than to spend a dollar more than necessary to buy a high-end webcam.
Orb Farm
Just seeing a black screen. Is my sin Firefox, or adblock?
Deepmind Alphadev: Faster sorting algorithms discovered using deep RL
> AlphaDev uncovered new sorting algorithms that led to improvements in the LLVM libc++ sorting library that were up to 70% faster for shorter sequences and about 1.7% faster for sequences exceeding 250,000 elements.As someone that knows a thing or two about sorting... bullshit. No new algorithms were uncovered, and the work here did not lead to the claimed improvements.They found a sequence of assembly that saves... one MOV. That's it. And it's not even novel, it's simply an unrolled insertion sort on three elements. That their patch for libc++ is 70% faster for small inputs is only due to the library not having an efficient implementation with a *branchless* sorting network beforehand. Those are not novel either, they already exist, made by humans.> By open sourcing our new sorting algorithms in the main C++ library, millions of developers and companies around the world now use it on AI applications across industries from cloud computing and online shopping to supply chain management. This is the first change to this part of the sorting library in over a decade and the first time an algorithm designed through reinforcement learning has been added to this library. We see this as an important stepping stone for using AI to optimise the world’s code, one algorithm at a time.I'm happy for the researchers that the reinforcement learning approach worked, and that it gave good code. But the paper and surrounding press release is self-aggrandizing in both its results and impact. That this is the first change to 'this part' of the sorting routine in a decade is also just completely cherry-picked. For example, I would say that my 2014 report and (ignored patch of) the fact that the libc++ sorting routine was QUADRATIC (https://bugs.llvm.org/show_bug.cgi?id=20837) finally being fixed late 2021 https://reviews.llvm.org/D113413 is quite the notable change. If anything it shows that there wasn't a particularly active development schedule on the libc++ sorting routine the past decade.
The purpose of DRM is not to prevent copyright violations (2013)
Had CDs been encrypted, iPods would not have been able to read their content, because the content providers would have been able to use their DRM contracts as leverage to prevent it.Moreover, the iPod most likely would have never been invented. How about that for killing innovation?
Wikileaks: Julian Assange's internet access 'cut'
We're in the middle of some crazy propaganda war right now, and it's been this way for quite a while. It became completely transparent when the Podesta e-mails were released mere minutes after Trump's videos regarding possible sexual assault were released.Ever since the DNC leaks and the subsequent accusations against Russia, it became clear to me that, at some point, the attempts to tarnish Wikileaks's name was to prime the listening audience in a way such that when information so irreparably damaging would get released, the voters would have to choose between continuing a corrupt government and choosing an apparently mad authoritarian, and to soften the landing on the former. Since the RNC, Trump's campaign has been entirely pushing "Don't believe their lies", and the gaslighting from both sides seems to be hitting a nadir at this moment. It's becoming far more difficult to find reality in the fog.These are indeed interesting times.
What programming languages are used most on weekends?
The funnel shape of the scatter plot immediately reminded me of an article on the insensitivity to sample size pitfall [0], which points out that you'll expect entities with smaller sample sizes to show up more often in the extremes because of the higher variance.Looks like the tags with the biggest differences exemplify this pretty well.[0]- http://dataremixed.com/2015/01/avoiding-data-pitfalls-part-2...
Qualities that I believe make the most difference in programmers’ productivity
In this thread: mostly people responding to the headline, not the actual content of the article.There's some fantastic stuff in here about how great design is the key to increased productivity. For example:"It is very important for a designer to recognize all the parts of a design that are not easy wins, that is, there is no proportionality between the effort and the advantages. A project that is executed in order to maximize the output, is going to focus exactly on the aspects that matter and that can be implemented in a reasonable amount of time. For example when designing Disque, a message broker, at some point I realized that by providing just best-effort ordering for the messages, all the other aspects of the project could be substantially improved: availability, query language and clients interaction, simplicity and performances."redis itself is a masterpiece of pragmatic design - the feature set is brilliantly selected to make the most of what you can do with shared data structures exposed over a network. Let's talk about that.
Deep image prior 'learns' on just one image
Wow:"In this work, we show that, contrary to expectations, a great deal of image statistics are captured by the structure of a convolutional image generator rather than by any learned capability. This is particularly true for the statistics required to solve various image restoration problems, where the image prior is required to integrate information lost in the degradation processes.To show this, we apply untrained ConvNets to the solution of several such problems. Instead of following the common paradigm of training a ConvNet on a large dataset of example images, we fit a generator network to a single degraded image. In this scheme, the network weights serve as a parametrization of the restored image. The weights are randomly initialized and fitted to maximize their likelihood given a specific degraded image and a task-dependent observation model.We show that this very simple formulation is very competitive for standard image processing problems such as denoising, inpainting and super-resolution. This is particularly remarkable because no aspect of the network is learned from data; instead, the weights of the network are always randomly initialized, so that the only prior information is in the structure of the network itself. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that directly investigates the prior captured by deep convolutional generative networks independently of learning the network parameters from images."PS. This makes me wonder whether and to what degree the structure of the brain's connectome might be a necessary prior for AGI.
Do not remain nameless to yourself (1966)
Great read. I've always loved Feynman - but the word "ego" might apply. "I was working on problems close to the gods", and his list of solved (and to be fair, unsolved) investigations remind me of his "Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman". Clearly the most brilliant man, and also clearly with a healthy regard for himself. One has to look out at the world and, taking in the successful and unsuccessful, conclude that some ego about oneself might be more or less required for success.I think we all want to believe that success can "go to your head", but I am beginning to believe the opposite: it's those with temerity and a certain precise lack of hubris who go on to do great things and do not "remain nameless" to the human race. Too many engineers eschew ego as much as possible, but (as Feynman points out) sometimes it's important to congratulate yourself.
Memory leaks are crippling my M1 MacBook Pro
I wish it was just memory leaks on my M1 Mini!Sometimes it just crashes. This has rarely happened on Linux. This sometimes happen on MacOS to the point where I don't trust it. At all. Ever. I have to save everything I'm working on constantly, just in case. Sometimes apps just stop working. Right now telegram just won't start. No matter what. Never happens on Linux. Sometimes it won't wake up from sleep. Never on Linux. Sometimes it loses the keyboard and/or mouse. This never happens on Linux. Sometimes the screensaver works, sometimes it doesn't. Grep is slow, waaay slower than on Linux. So are other random CLI things. How? Why? Docker... don't get me started, and don't make excuses. (~700 people at Mirantis and ~150k at Apple can't figure this out?) Everything runs slower on MacOS. Every. Thing. grep, sed, awk. Why don't sed, awk, grep, etc.. all the Linux things work quite right? I need to add something else on macOS to get them to work like they did on Linux. It's always "almost" but never do they work like I'd expect. I need to remember to turn off my monitor at night, because some nights it just randomly turns on. Never on Linux. Maybe it'll wake up, maybe not. I figured out if I unplug my headphones and/or webcam I can force it. All of these super basic things just DON'T work. It sucks. I could forgive Linux, but not an OS and Hardware made by the biggest company on the damn planet. I get it, this is faster than a 4 year old laptop. But that's not what I'm comparing it to. I'm comparing it to a 5 year old system I built myself from random parts that runs an open system operating system. That's a pretty low bar, and it doesn't win.
Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2021 – Show and tell
I have two!An app for making wedding place cards that does about $1000/mo https://www.placecard.me/A boilerplate for making SaaS apps with Python/Django that does $5k/month (highly variable) https://www.saaspegasus.com/I also have a third that does around $150/mo. It's an app that adds analytics to GroupMe which is a WhatsApp alternative. https://chatstats.co/I keep complete revenue and effort data here if you're curious: https://www.coryzue.com/open/
The dark side of Shopify
Also sad that Shopify isn't all that good. Their scale enables them to have a community with helpful guides and videos and stuff, but the actual product is arguably less sophisticated than what competitors offer. What they have is a zinger of a name and a big marketing budget. Anyone in this space should really check out alternatives. Unless there is a specific plug in or use case you want to use there is not much good reason to choose Shopify.
Two weeks in, the Webb Space Telescope is reshaping astronomy
I like to imagine the possibilities if we stopped spending money on military and instead spent it on research and science. [edit - perhaps this is misunderstood as me suggesting money spent on the telecope is wasted; quite the contrary, I'm arguing that we should be spending MORE on efforts like this!]Granted, there are some breakthroughs that come from military research, being generous that would still amount to a small fraction of what we could be discovering and improving if the goals were different.And honestly, we should be spending $$$$ on food development research. We're going to need to know how to grow food in new ways soon, as the old ways have reached their limits. Food seems kind of important...
Google Maps has become an eyesore
I worked on Google Maps monetization, and then on Maps itself.Monetization was a dismal failure. I don't know how well they're doing now, but Maps was a gigantic money-loser, forever. I'd be a little surprised if it didn't still lose money, but maybe less. I don't what those "pin ads" cost, but I'd bet it's way less than a search ad.If you don't believe that, that's fine. "What about indirect revenue?" you ask? Google consciously does not want to estimate that, because such a document could be discovered in patent litigation. As it is, there are tons of patent lawsuits about Maps, and the damage claims always tried to get at Ads revenue, because Maps revenue was nil.Caveat: I could be way out of date here. I've been retired a while now.As for the UX: "enshittification" and big-company bureaucracy describe it pretty well.
Level3 is without peer, now what to do?
There is an interesting unbalance because Comcast has so much leverage by owning the last mile, they can push around Tier 1 providers. I'd like to fix that, mostly by creating a public policy around municipally owned Layer 1 infrastructure between customers in their cities and a city exchange building. Conceptually it would be no different than the city owning the sewers and outsourcing the water treatment plant to a contractor (or two). Creating a new "ISP" would involve installing equipment in the City Exchange(s), providing compatible customer premises equipment to subscribers, and then patching their 'port' at the City Exchange to the ISP's gear.Its going to be a long conversation :-)
Things I Wish I'd Known About Bash
I wrote a book on Bash too. The most important thing for anyone to know about Bash is that it's intended as a command language, not a general purpose scripting language. If it's longer than 10 lines, or if it uses two or more variables, you should probably have written it in something other than Bash.
How to Fall Asleep in Two Minutes or Less
Regarding falling asleep - I've noticed an interesting phenomenon in myself. Usually it takes me around 30 minutes to fall asleep, during which period I seem to gradually mellow, my internal narrative becomes weaker until I finally fall asleep. During the final stages of that process, I sometimes imagine beautiful and quite complex music or art that I like a lot (unfortunately, I'm nowhere skilled enough to try to create actual pieces based on this). This does not happen to me in any other state - it's as if there's a temporary imbalance between my mental functions (perhaps the logical brain shuts off first) that generates this unsolicited creativity.
Tesla's giant battery saved $40M during its first year, report says
This is going to become more and more common. Li-ion battery costs are falling at a constant ~15% per year and there is no real reason why this shouldn't continue. Similar to what Moore's law did to semiconductors, this will mean that batteries are poised to have a massive impact and eat any energy application that can't keep up. New tech will have a hard time to keep up simply due to momentum this has already developed, aka it will have to be at least a magnitude better AND keep on scaling.This is why Tesla is valued higher than GM, Daimler or pretty much any other car company. Tesla at it's heart is a battery company with products built around that. From what I've read, from 2025 onwards traditional internal combustion engines will not be able to compete on price with electric cars.Something similar will likely happen to energy storage, though this is of course still a relatively novel industry that has been spurred on by renewable energy's intermittent availability. Interesting times..Edit: percentage of annual battery price drop after doing some googling
I was just subjected to the most credible phishing attempt I’ve experienced
OP here. Just a couple of the things I learned since I posted the Twitter thread:- The caller spoofed the phone number of the bank. The bank was not in my contacts, so I did not notice. Someone else in the thread noted that they did have the bank's phone number stored, which upped the credibility of the call to them.- The caller called me twice in rapid succession (First ignore the call from a number you do not know. Then they call back again immediately: "maybe this is urgent / important"). Another person in the thread, who fell for the scam, noted this same pattern.- It is better if banks include a security warning / specific reason the code is sent with the password reset pins and similar credentials. My bank did not. Another twitter user noted being subject to the scam, and just glancing over the warning copy. So it helps, but it is not perfect. Especially pre-coffee.- My bank no longer allows me to reset my password without calling them (thanks bank).When I read the thread now, it's obviously full of red flags. I was successfully manipulated, and whilst I'm certainly not as clever as all the people pointing out they would have caught this from sentence one, I believe I'm also not the lowest hanging fruit in terms of a target :-) Makes you wonder what this will look like when these scams evolve another couple of generations in terms of complexity ...
Ask HN: How do you share/organize knowledge at work and life?
I have a personal "knowledge base" that is publicly available at https://maxmasnick.com/kb/.This is partially inspired by Chris Albon's excellent data science technical notes: http://chrisalbon.com.I find it very helpful to have this kind of information on a public website. It's easy to search myself, quick to edit[^1], and helpful for sharing with others when someone asks me a question.For notes I don't want to make public, I use OneNote. It's available on every platform, has a documented file format, and the sync works well. Of course, I have some more detailed notes on why I prefer this to other options: https://maxmasnick.com/kb/note-apps/.[^1]: My whole website is built with https://gohugo.io. I use the GitHub Actions beta to automatically update the public site every time I commit to master. This means I can edit on a computer with a standard text editor, and also on iOS using https://workingcopyapp.com.
Why Taxpayers Pay McKinsey $3M a Year for a Recent College Graduate Contractor
I was a technical project management consultant for a long time. The value that most orgs get from a consultant isn't really in the advice the consultant gives them, it's the political cover to make changes they knew they should make all along, but didn't have the social capital or the focus to make those changes until they had a person in a chair across from them.
Apple News No Longer Supports RSS
The weirdest thing about this is that Apple News still hijacks links to Atom/RSS feeds - so if you click on one of those links in Mobile Safari you'll be bounced to the News app, which will then display an error.Here's a video I recorded of this behaviour: https://twitter.com/simonw/status/1210622908143415297I think I'd rather they displayed a dump of ugly XML in the browser, just so I could copy and paste the URL into a feed reading app (I quite like Reeder for iOS and OSX these days).
iOS 13 app tracking alert has dramatically cut location data flow to ad industry
I'm probably saying the complete obvious, but Apple can completely crush Google if they execute this angle properly.Google has no choice but to support ads. They're an ad company. Apple has to keep hammering how bad the ad and privacy experiences are with Android. Make iOS an absolute delight to use in contrast.I'd pay a premium for that. Android has done a great job making me want an iOS device again, these last ten years.
My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day
People tend to severely underestimate how fast modern machines are and overestimate how much you need to spend on hardware.Back in my last startup, I was doing a crypto market intelligence website that subscribed to full trade & order book feeds from the top 10 exchanges. It handled about 3K incoming messages/second (~260M per day), including all of the message parsing, order book update, processing, streaming to websocket connections on any connected client, and archival to PostGres for historical processing. Total hardware required was 1 m4.large + 1 r5.large AWS instances, for a bit under $200/month, and the boxes would regularly run at about 50% CPU.
Deck.of.cards
Oh man this would be awesome to have as a shared web space where I could play arbitrary card games with friends like a hyper restricted Tabletop Simulator.Nice and slick as is, though
Reddit App – Suspicious high number of recent 5 star, one word reviews
This Reddit thing is starting to border insane conspiracy. This is a boring legacy tech company who’s best selling point is being a discussion forum for the chronically mid. The employees are probably checked out and hiding at home, I can’t imagine anybody has time to do all the random stuff they’re being accused of.
Textmate2 Goes Open Source
If we are completely honest, Textmate was always a sub-par editor.No Vim or Emacs style brilliantness, no BBEdit style tons of features and mature engine, no IntelliJ like, er, intelligence, no ST2 comprehensiveness, etc etc.Plus, the Textmate 1.x text engine was probably a mess too -- I remember the very first versions being laggy (and that's coming from someone who doesn't find even Eclipse laggy). That he couldn't easily fix the one-character-undo is another pointer to that (and, for all I've seen, the 2.x engine is not that better).It's main saving grace was the many extensions it had, and looking half-decent and native on OS X. Basically, it caught on because it appeared on the right time, and appealed to OS X users like web programmers etc, that wasn't old-time unix buffs, and wanted something native looking without forking for BBEdit (which itself was/is Carbon based and with a custom text display widget).I don't think Textmate deserved all that success --it should have happened to a better editor.
Pokemon Go is a huge security risk
It's worth noting that Niantic Labs (the folks who licensed Pokemon from Nintendo and made Pokemon Go) are actually owned by Google [0]. This is Google giving itself permission to do Google things. Dollars to doughnuts they tried to use some internal-only API because things kept falling over at pokemon.com. Is this a massive UX failure? Certainly. Is giving Google permission to access Google stuff a "Huge security risk"? No more than putting your stuff in Google's hands in the first place.Niantic are also the folks behind Ingress, if you've heard of that.[0] Specifically, Alphabet owns a significant portion of Niantic, along with Nintendo: https://nianticlabs.com/blog/niantic-tpc-nintendo/ (they were previously wholly-owned by Google).
HandBrake 1.0.0 Released
I ask as someone who uses ffmpeg regularly, what does Handbrake offer over ffmpeg?
Netflix Stole My VHS Cassette Photos for Its Stranger Things Boxed Set
What’s actually happened here is that a designer has lifted an image off the web (probably through a google image search) for a design, and that design has made it through to production.I’m not saying it’s ok. But I’d be willing to wager that no one at Netflix had any ideas where those images came from. The design was most likely from a design agency, and even the top brass at the agency probably had no idea where those images came from. At the root of this there’s a designer who’s probably been asked to rush out a design, they’ve taken a shortcut and they’ve been rumbled.Again, it’s not OK to steal images, but I seriously doubt Netflix knew that’s what they were doing.
How I went from programming to consulting (2012)
To this day, I'm still not quite clear about what a consultant actually does. I mean, beyond some vague idea ("goes to some company, talks with people, gives some recommendation"). I'd really love for someone to give some example or describe in a tangible way what the work of a consultant entails, what skills one typically needs and actually employs, what a typical gig looks like from beginning to end and so on.If anyone here on HN could share some insights, I would highly appreciate it.
Intel Has a Big Problem
Intel is a hot mess even without these security disasters.Just look at their product release lifecycle: In years past, they'd get maybe one extra product release off each new arch (tick/tock); for example, Sandy Bridge bore Ivy Bridge and Haswell bore Broadwell.Skylake has born SIX new product lines; Goldmont, Goldmont Plus, Kaby Lake, Kaby Lake Refresh, Coffee Lake, and the upcoming Cannonlake. Their failed 10nm shrink has forced product delays; remember, Cannonlake (the 10nm shrink of Skylake) was supposed to be released in 2016, and its not even out yet. Just at CES this week they said they've shipped mobile Cannonlake CPUs.They have zero presence in mobile. Their best efforts involve competent Y-series processors. Then Apple comes around and, seemingly without even trying, destroys them [1] with a product that's more thermally efficient and, in some ways, more powerful than Intel's best mobile processors, not just their thermally efficient ones.They have little presence in HPC/AI, where Nvidia is slaughtering everyone and its not even close.Its completely inevitable they're going to lose Apple as a customer for consumer products; its just a matter of time. AMD is gaining traction with Zen, and they're moving in the direction enterprise cloud provider want (lots of cores, not much $$). How much longer can Intel keep holding on? Do they have an ace they've been hiding? Will people even trust their ace after Meltdown?[1] https://9to5mac.com/2017/06/14/ipad-pro-versus-macbook-pro-s...
Product Updates Based on Your Feedback
Won’t change my mind and will stick to Firefox after having switched because of this. First I don’t want to be logged in in my browser at all. Second, and probably more important, software is about trust. Even for an open source project, no one has the time to review millions of lines of code. So unfortunately one has to rely on what one believes is the behavior of the authors of the software. And what google did is to shatter that trust by sneaking that change discretely.
Big List of Naughty Strings
Repo maintainer here....can someone explain how the repo keeps resurfacing? I haven’t promoted it in a long time. (Looking at the repo traffic, it recently spiked on the 6th, but nothing since then.)
A janitor at Frito-Lay invented Flamin’ Hot Cheetos (2017)
The days when someone can start as a janitor or in the mailroom and climb to the top is done.Companies used to hire everyone in the company. Janitors were part of the company. So was mailroom staff. So were secretaries. Everybody was part of the whole.Now, companies contract out everything but their core thing. Janitors come from a low-paid 3rd party service. Mailrooms are no longer a thing (there's no such thing as emailrooms, unless you count exchange admins). All those things that allowed somebody to start at the bottom rung in a company and climb up have been systematically destroyed and/or removed.
Ask HN: Dark mode for HN please?
Ok, you guys, this isn't the first time we've heard this request (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). I'm willing to do it (edit: not to change the default! just to add the option). It's just that any CSS issue that goes more than a quarter-inch deep is equally outside my expertise and my interest, so help would be welcome.We can add CSS to https://news.ycombinator.com/news.css for prefers-color-scheme: dark, but that leaves open the question of specifically what CSS to put in there. Anyone who wants to make a suggestion is welcome to. Post it in this thread so others can comment, or email it to [email protected]. I've roped Zain, YC's designer, into helping with this, and we'll come up with something.p.s. If you're inclined to post "this is 2020, how come HN doesn't $thing", remember our motto: move slowly and preserve things: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... When I say slowly I mean slowly. This is also called alligator energy. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16442716
Show HN: Linux sysadmin course, eight years on
Thank you very much for this! I am sorry that I did not know about it sooner.Anyway the question for HN - is it too "late" for a person to consider career change in 33? To clarify, I am not in IT business, my formal education (and job) is in business administration, however with recent and important changes in my private and work life, I am considering to bite the bullet. Initially, I considered back-end development, but actually Linux sysadmin might be more appropriate for me.
Twitter and Facebook's action over Joe Biden article reignites bias claims
I have no idea what happened during the early 2010s. I grew up during the late 90s (born in late 80s) learning about the internet and its philosophies. Allowing Free speech still is the hill I'd like to die on. But the new generation of people, even here on HN and the internet hacker personalities I used to align with have turned so pro-censorship that I don't believe I'm in a proper reality/timeline anymore.
Moderna Covid vaccine candidate almost 95% effective, trials show
Re-paste from my comments below, because I believe people should share their experiences:I currently have coronavirus. I'm a young male in my 20s (don't want to divulge too much info), 6'1", 170 lbs, non-smoker, rarely drink, pretty healthy. Waiting on test results.Started off about 2 weeks ago, rash on my chest, lots of night sweats and chills. Didn't think it was covid at first. given the weird symptoms. I did not feel too sick, in general. Slight fever, slight cough and sore throat. For most of the time, it felt mild. Still have the rash, night sweats, and sore throat at the moment.However, 4 days ago I started having issues breathing. I felt out of breath multiple times throughout the day, and at times it was hard to even suck in air (like my diaphragm was calcified or something). I woke up a few times at night, trying to suck in air. Today was better but the difficulty breathing is still there. I realized today, that even though it's not as bad as the worst flu I've had, it involved a symptom (difficulty breathing in air) that I have never experienced. Not with strep, not with the flu. This is something to note for everyone, in my opinion.I think it's both milder AND worse than people think it is - I'm a healthy young male who exercises and eats well, and yet I'm having trouble breathing. This is a symptom that has continued for multiple days, and while it hasn't gotten worse, it's not getting much better. The rash is still there, my throat's still sore. If you are part of the obese/overweight American population (35% of us, including my family), and are a chronic smoker/drinker, and have chronic conditions (diabetes, hypertension, mental health conditions), I think you should still be careful.Unless you have a respirator, there isn't anything you can take to resolve "difficulty breathing". It's not like fever/sweats/nausea - where you can just take a Nyquil and it's all gone. Not to mention, we have antibiotics and antivirals to attack the flu/cold/strep infections as well. Covid's a bit different - difficulty breathing can only currently be helped by equipment that's located in hospitals. There isn't some magic pill that will get your diaphragm pumping up and down again. This is something to note, in my opinion.I'm not sure how much longer my symptoms will continue. The initial symptoms started 2 weeks ago, but the breathing related ones only started recently. I hope it gets resolved soon - I may provide a comment as an update.Please wash your hands, avoid touching your face/eyes with your hands, socially distance if you can, and wear a mask when in public. Having trouble breathing is no joke.
Software effort estimation is mostly fake research
The issue with estimates are expectations. While nobody acknowledges it, you're not actually asked for an estimate, you're being asked for a quote.The difference is when you're asked for a quote, you're asked how much you will be charging, with the expectations that you'll be willing to eat into your own margins to give a lower quote. That's why it's a negotiation, where you negotiate how much extra effort, time and headcount you're willing to give, how much tech dept you're willing to take, etc., for the privilege of getting their business.If you see it for what it really is, you'll see that it works pretty well actually. The business gets more out of you for less to them. It was never about having an accurate timeline or helping with planning or prioritizing, and always about negotiating a better contract with the dev team.Now keep in mind that the "business" in this case is a person who need to report that through their amazing prowess of administration and management, they personally managed to get X feature out during their last review cycle at Y cost with impact Z. This person will not need to deal with developer satisfaction, retention and performance. They will not need to deal with the impact the lower margins they pushed for had on the next feature delivery, or the continued maintainance of the systems. And if the dev team had to lower the quality too much in order to meet the quote they put out, that will be 100% their fault, the "business" will know not to use them for their next contract, or they'll expect the dev team to take on fixing all the issues at their own expense once more.
Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B
So what we're seeing is a repeat of the film industry from 1930's-1950's. You want to see a Paramount movie, you must go to a Paramount theater. Today you want to watch an Apple show you must go to Apple's VOD.We could really use laws that force, once again, some sort of separation between production and distribution. Better stuff gets made in this kind of ecosystem.
Boeing 777 departing Dubai nearly had a major incident after takeoff
The memo from Emirates about not setting altitude in system to airport altitude is so weird. I really hope that's not the actual message Emirates is putting out there.It doesn't matter was in system. You run your checklists and configure for your own flight / your own departure etc. Memo should be to training / recruitment - where did you find these pilots to fly a 777?So they obviously didn't pre-flight the flight. And they don't seem to have used their takeoff checklist either? That should get them through flap retract and 2,000 feet or so.Takeoff checklist might have rotate at 160 or so. Then you get to positive climb and V2. You then clean up the plane (flaps / gear etc), maybe hit 2,000 feet / 210kts?This is all checklist stuff. I've no idea what's Emirates has as checklists, but this is like 101 entry level flying stuff. What was pilot monitoring doing during all this?They still on ground at 215 kts? 262 kts at 175 feet?!
Things people blamed on bicycles
Cycling is cheap, often faster than driving (in my city), healthy, less noisy, creates vastly less pollution, less dangerous to pedastrians...And I'd guess that about 95% of drivers that I come across are respectful of the danger they present - overtaking with enough space, and not at too high a speed (my city doesn't have great bike lanes). Unfortunately, a typical journey involves passing more than 20 cars, which means experiencing at least 1 very close pass, or some kind of dangerous driving.And the frustrating thing is that the drivers who impatiently pass dangerously are putting people at risk for the sake of ~10-30 seconds (or less). Often I'll catch up with them at the queue for the traffic lights.. Average traffic speeds for cars are around 8-12mph, including stopping for lights, congestion, etc, [1] which is fairly easy to surpass on a bike..[1] https://www.london.gov.uk/questions/2019/19767
Improving Firefox Responsiveness on macOS
I tried Firefox again a few days ago, and it was indeed noticeably snappier. In fact, it felt snappier than Chrome on the handful of sites I tried.With all the things they've addressed in Firefox recently and with Chrome's manifest v3 nonsense, I'm running out of reasons not to switch.
Low Earth Orbit Visualization
Those long, straight-line convoys of Starlink satellites are fascinating. There's a few of them I could see scattered around the Earth. At what point do they start breaking up into unrelated orbits?Looking forward to using this website to try spotting satellites at night. There's something strangely thrilling about seeing objects in the night sky that were placed there by people.
CRISPR cancer trial success paves the way for personalized treatments
MD and I work in the field. The technology is called CAR-T, as the article mentioned. It’s been used pretty widely for “liquid” tumors for a while (eg leukemia, lymphoma, and multiple myeloma),but solid tumors are particularly difficult to target using current CAR-T therapy. If this CRISPR tech can be applied widespread to solid tumors that opens up a huge swath of patients that can be treated.However cost and logistics are a huge factor. CAR-T therapy currently cost about $300,000-$500,000 to treat a patient. Beyond the cost of the immunotherapy you require a huge institutional investment because there are characteristic side effects that occur within the first 30 days of treatment which necessitates patients to be either admitted to the hospital for 30 days or stay in close proximity with daily check-ins (yes the cancer is getting treated BUT now your immune system is hyperactive which can be very dangerous in the short term).Very few academic hospitals, let alone community hospitals, have this bandwidth which will lead to cancer care being concentrated in a handful of a few very large cancer specific institutions.
The Camera-Shy Hoodie
Off camera it's just a generic, anonymous hoody, but on camera it is readily identified as the unique and unmistakeable camera shy hoody!