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Facebook Loses Much Face In Secret Smear On Google
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I wonder what the ex googlers who moved to FaceBook think of such slimy tactics. Might be interesting to hear the perspective of someone who moved from a company that (at least) professes an adherence to "Don't be evil" to a company that apparently has no problems with jumping into the slime. If I worked for Facebook, I'd be ashamed of my employer today (and would probably protest and then get fired!).And, as someone said above, Facebook professing a concern for abuse of privacy is a bit much to swallow.
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Send money with Gmail
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Hi everyone. I've been working on this at Google for a while and would be happy to answer any questions you might have. If you don't want to ask here, feel free to email me at AT google.com. There might be a delay in responding if I get a lot of messages or if you have a particularly challenging question.
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I got arrested in Kazakhstan and represented myself in court
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This dude just grassed on all the people who bent the rules to be nice to him. With pictures. For a moment of blog fame. Very uncool.
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Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?
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Young hackers who have a surplus of income and have funds to spare that aren't being channeled toward debt / family / donations, heed me: save as much of your salary as you can, and put it in boring investments (index funds / etc), probably through vanguard.com (no affiliation, I just use them and have heard nothing but good things from people I trust). You can pretty easily set up your job's direct-deposit system so that a portion of your salary goes directly into your investments without you ever seeing it, it's a good set-it-and-forget-it system. It adds up over time![Somewhat related: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-sim... ]
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U.S. judge says LinkedIn cannot block startup from public profile data
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I fully support this decision. If you're offering a service that is public, with the intent to your users that such information will be available publicly, you cannot then police what users of that data you consider to be "public" because it serves your business interest.LinkedIn, of course, wants to get all the benefit of the public Internet with providing as little as they can. This, coming from someone who used to work at LinkedIn.These companies have built their fortunes on the public Internet and now that they are successful they seek to not pay homage to the platform that give them their success. It's very clearly anti-competitive, and bad for users. LinkedIn should be forced to compete based upon the veracity and differentiation of their service, not because they have their users' public data held hostage from competitors.
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Markov Chains Explained Visually (2014)
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Is there a standard way to build markov chains with deeper memory than just the current state? For example in the rainy sunny markov chain our rainy probability should/could decrease as the number of rainy days in a row increases. In a pure state machine this would require an infinite number of states for SS...SSS and RR...RRR.
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Google Kubernetes Engine's third consecutive day of service disruption
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A generic question: Our company is completely dependent on AWS. Sure we have taken all of the standard precautions for redundancy, but what happened here could just as easily happen with AWS - a needed resource is down globally.What would a small business do as a contingency plan?
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Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
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Like many others have pointed out: Cost.I'm the CTO of a moderately sized gaming community, Hypixel Minecraft, who operates about 700 rented dedicated machines to service 70k-100k concurrent players. We push about 4PB/mo in egress bandwidth, something along the lines of 32gbps 95th-percentile. The big cloud providers have repeatedly quoted us an order of magnitude more than our entire fleet's cost....JUST in bandwidth costs. Even if we bring our own ISPs and cross-connect to just use cloud's compute capacity, they still charge stupid high costs to egress to our carriers.Even if bandwidth were completely free, at any timescale above 1-2 years purchasing your own hardware, LTO-ing, or even just renting will be cheaper.Cloud is great if your workload is variable and erratic and you're unable to reasonably commit to year+ terms, or if your team is so small that you don't have the resources to manage infrastructure yourself, but at a team size of >10 your sysadmins running on bare metal will pay their own salaries in cloud savings.
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Ruby 3.0
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I've been considering learning Ruby to replace Python for high level coding and scripting, Python is what I use for most of what I do. Should I? The main reasons I have not are inertia, massive selection of data manipulation libraries in Python, difficulty of async and multithreading in both languages means not much benefit from a usability perspective, and I'm not a fan of the Contributor Covenant CoC.But I have looked at the syntax of Ruby and find it to be more elegant. Does anyone knowledgeable about it have any useful information?
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How People Get Rich Now
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It's a classic PG article. Many true facts in there, lots of good analysis with just a few questionable claims thrown in here and there. At the end, there's a massive claim that isn't fully stated but implied. "Of course the Gini coefficient is increasing" translated means "income inequality is not a problem".Firstly, Gini coefficient is based on income, not wealth. That isn't stated clearly. Secondly, there's absolutely no data on what proportion of income flows to which decile. The conclusion (income inequality isn't a problem) is simply based on an assumption that the rise in the Gini coefficient is based entirely on the wealth accumulated by founders, and that this is a good thing.I think this post boils down to "people like me are creating a lot of value, please acknowledge it. Also there are no downsides to this accumulation of wealth". This would be fine if PG also didn't argue that policies like wealth taxes are harmful (http://www.paulgraham.com/wtax.html). It just seems like a desperate play to keep his wealth intact.
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How to write more clearly, think more clearly, and learn complex material [pdf]
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One useful first step in becoming a better writer - in particular if your subject is complex - is to to delete your Twitter account and never look at another Twitter thread. Character limits kill creativity and complexity.The presentation does leave out one very necessary requirement for becoming a good-to-great writer: you have to do a lot of reading. If you're going to write about a complex scientific or technical subject, you should have some examples in mind of great texts that you've read. What did other writers do that you liked or that stuck with you? Equally true, what are some really bad examples, some things to avoid?For example, here's what I think is an excellent popular history book, and if I ever wrote something with a historical bent, I'd flip though it first:
"By Steppe, Desert, and Ocean: The Birth of Eurasia" by Barry Cunliffehttps://www.amazon.com/Steppe-Desert-Ocean-Birth-Eurasia/dp/...The point about Twitter is really this: you have to develop the skill of composing a paragraph as a coherent entity in order to become a decent writer, and Twitter doesn't allow for paragraphs, just sentences (and short ones at that). Paragraphs should have an internal cohesion to help the reader absorb the concept being presented. Once you have that, you can start chaining paragraphs together, reordering the sequence of paragraphs, with the goal of constructing a path that the reader can follow through the whole essay or chapter. Getting the order right is important for complex topics, as point D might rely on a good understanding of points A and B, and so on. Your goal should be to make the reader feel smart.Of course that's just advice for non-fiction writing; if you're doing fiction or poetry basically anything goes. The public might like it or hate it, but the literary critics can safely be ignored.
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Advanced Python Mastery
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Something I hate in my own code is this pattern of instantiating an empty list and then iterating on it when reading files. Is there a better way than starting lst= [] and then later doing lst.append()This is an example from the linked course https://github.com/dabeaz-course/python-mastery/blob/main/Ex...:```
# readport.pyimport csv# A function that reads a file into a list of dictsdef read_portfolio(filename): portfolio = []
with open(filename) as f:
rows = csv.reader(f)
headers = next(rows)
for row in rows:
record = {
'name' : row[0],
'shares' : int(row[1]),
'price' : float(row[2])
}
portfolio.append(record)
return portfolio
```
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Observation of zero resistance above 100 K in Pb₁₀₋ₓCuₓ(PO₄)₆O
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Summary of events so far:The claim: Room temp (~300K) superconductor exists and we got it!The replication attempts: The production method is so poorly documented only a fraction of the samples being made shows any interesting properties. And among those interesting ones, results varies. Very few, if any, attempt actually completely shows the entire spectrum of properties and behaviors of a true superconductor at room temperature yet. But those kinds of experiments take time so it isn't an indicator of problem.My take: It is probably something interesting but not well understood. Best case scenario, the original sample in the Korean lab probably won the synthesis lottery and is actually a true room temp superconductor. Worst case scenario, we got another class of high temp (warmer than liquid nitrogen but cold enough that applications are limited) superconductor but nothing revolutionary since at this point, it is pretty conclusive that there is something interesting with LK-99.
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Show HN: Pangoly – Build your shiny new PC
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Thanks!
I'm the owner, so here's a brief overview of the available features: - Build configuration starting from user's preferred budget. The suggested components are always safe to be used in the same build and it's also possible to add optional parts like peripherals.
- Automatic build creation starting from user's preferred component.
- Sharing: once the build is completed it's possible to share it on the most popular social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Reddit), on forums (BBCode) o by Email.
- Build guidelines: for every component type we provide general guidelines and best practices for the picking, also suggesting the highest rated products currently available on the market.
- Product reviews: our rating, pros and cons, q&a, price history, suggested PC builds for the selected component and compatibility.
- Price analysis and trends.
- Multilanguage and multicurrency.
- Responsive design: the website provides an optimal viewing experience on all devices (desktops, tablets and smartphones).
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Node.js in Flame Graphs
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The moneyquote:"We made incorrect assumptions about the Express.js API without digging further into its code base. As a result, our misuse of the Express.js API was the ultimate root cause of our performance issue."This situation is my biggest challenge with software these days. The advice to "just use FooMumbleAPI!" is rampant and yet the quality of the implemented APIs and the amount of review they have had varies all over the map. Consequently any decision to use such an API seems to require one first read and review the entire implementation of the API, otherwise you get the experience that NetFlix had. That is made worse by good APIs where you spend all that time reviewing them only to note they are well written, but each version which could have not so clued in people committing changes might need another review. So you can't just leave it there. And when you find the 'bad' ones, you can send a note to the project (which can respond anywhere from "great, thanks for the review!" to "if you don't like it why not send us a pull request with what you think is a better version.")What this means in practice is that companies that use open source extensively in their operation, become slower and slower to innovate as they are carrying the weight of a thousand different systems of checks on code quality and robustness, which people using closed source will start delivering faster and faster as they effectively partition the review/quality question to the person selling them the software and they focus on their product innovation.There was an interesting, if unwitting, simulation of this going on inside Google when I left, where people could check-in changes to the code base that would have huge impacts across the company causing other projects to slow to a halt (in terms of their own goals) while they ported to the new way of doing things. In this future world changes, like the recently hotly debated systemd change, will incur costs while the users of the systems stop to re-implement in the new context, and there isn't anything to prevent them from paying this cost again and again. A particularly Machievellan proprietary source vendor might fund programmers to create disruptive changes to expressly inflict such costs on their non-customers.I know, too tin hat, but it is what I see coming.
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Blowing the Whistle on the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department
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Unpopular opinion, but I think he's being overly dramatic."My Fall 2013 Math 1A students were tracked into the next course in the sequence, Math 1B, and it was found that their average grade in Math 1B was 0.17 grade points higher than that of those students who took Math 1A with another instructor."0.17. Not even a whole point.Student evaluations don't really count since those are highly subjective. Students tend to hastily mark whatever they want on them because they want to get the evaluations over with as soon as possible. If a professor is somewhat amicable and invests a moderate level of effort into his/her teaching, then it's not hard to score at least a 6 on average on these evaluations (as students would mark either 6 or 7 in such a case).Anyway, his performance as a lecturer is irrelevant to his argument. There are three criteria that junior faculty are assessed against in order to become tenured at UC Berkeley (or, otherwise, dismissed): teaching quality, reputation and research. Funny how he left out the last bit. He hasn't published anything since 2013.And the university is probably firing him to hire another professor at a cheaper salary in order to save money, contrary to his belief that the university is firing him because of disagreements with his teaching philosophy. Universities tend to do this to professors who don't have much research potential and don't teach specialized, upper division courses. The UC system is crippled financially, so departments are more inclined to carry out dismissals of non-tenured professors who don't publish much and who solely teach lower division courses. Non-tenured professors can be fired at will. That's just another day in the life of academia.The part about the micro-managing harasser and treatment of women, staff and lecturers is definitely worrisome, though. But we need to be careful about believing in these implications absolutely because of Coward's state of mind at the moment. He has already blown the quality of his teaching out of proportion.
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Linux Foundation quietly drops community representation
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I am sorry that I have to say this, but large parts of the GNU/Linux community are just irrational idealists hard to work with. Read the GPLv3, it's a great political document, and somewhere in there there also is a software license, hidden between the lines.Linus always said: He cares about the code back and otherwise not what vendors do with it. He is not in any sense one of those GNU-people about Software Freedom everywhere and for all. When the Free Software Foundation (FSF) created the GPLv3, indeed during the process, Linus already spoke out against it and said he would never ever use it[1]. He cited reasonable use-cases for which vendors have no other way than to not to give open access to devices, in part for example commercial license agreements.The GPLv3 - from the perspective of the FSF - fixes some vital flaws in GPLv2, from Linus' perspective however is just too strict, forbids use-cases Linux has been used before previously and is extremely anti-business and would hurt the Linux project.Whether this step of the Linux foundation is right or not, can't say for sure, but I totally understand it. A political anti-business pro-freedom-everywhere radical who already is involved in suing some of the companies she is supposed to work with on that said board? Sounds like a headache you would want to avoid at all costs.[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaKIZ7gJlRU
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Android Oreo
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Android has really been annoying me lately. Maybe I didn't care before but now that I can't root my phone I am forced to deal with it.Still can't disable or customize to stupid "share" menu that puts you one click away from accidentally sending something to a stranger you contacted once on sms or facebook messenger or email.Still can't revoke certain permissions from apps (like vibration). There is zero reason why my browser should need to ever vibrate or use the accelerometer/gyro.Still no good system wide ad blocking solution. (not likely, but one of the biggest things I miss from having a rooted phone)How about those superpowers, Google?
I have been an Android user since 2010 but I am quite sure my next phone will be an iPhone (with a headphone jack).
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Firefox 59 to strip path information from referrer values for 3rd parties
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In about:config, setting 'network.http.sendRefererHeader' to 0 (default is 2) will stop the referer header from being sent, and the document.referrer from being set. See http://kb.mozillazine.org/Network.http.sendRefererHeader for more information.
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Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google
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I think the part that gets lost in all of this is that Sun offered to license Java to Google previously for $100M. [1] Google turned that down and bypassed Sun because they didn't want to pay (or license). At the time, Sun was happy to see Java being used by Google, even without the license. Still, Google knew exactly what they were doing. [2] My point is, they did this to themselves and they knew what they were possibly getting into.[1] https://www.computerworld.com/article/2509401/technology-law...[2] https://www.cnet.com/news/why-oracle-not-sun-sued-google-ove...EDIT: Added the second reference and cleaned up thoughts. Included note regarded license as well as pay.
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Ex-Google Employee Urges Lawmakers to Take on Company
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I actually applaud Poulson for leaving Google in protest of Google's Chinese business practices.Having mentioned that, I think I have to part ways with him when he implies that the correct way to "fix" this is to have the government come in and make these sorts of business decisions for the company. I don't believe in the government obliging businesses to do things. Especially when it looks like this whole thing is Google specific. That's unfair to Google.What about all the other American companies doing business in China? Do they get to keep doing business because they are politically popular companies but Google is not? Or would this be a government mandate of a broad based American pull out?Or just forcing Google to let its employees have a say in how it's run? (But again, you gonna force every company? Or just Google?)Etc etc etc.Once government gets involved and starts playing favorites, everything gets messed up.
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Show HN: Caddy 2
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Hi HN -- this is what I've been working on for the last 14 months, with the help of many contributors and the backing of several sponsors. (Thank You!)Caddy 2 is a fresh new server experience. Some things might take getting used to, like having every site served over HTTPS unless you specify http:// explicitly in your config. But in general, it will feel familiar to v1 in a lot of ways. If you've used v1 before, I recommend going into v2 with a clean-slate using our Getting Started guide: https://caddyserver.com/docs/getting-startedI'm excited to finally get this out there. Let me know what questions you have!
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Container technologies at Coinbase: Why Kubernetes is not part of our stack
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> We would need to build/staff a full-time Compute teamThis actually was a very real problem at my current job. The data pipeline was migrated to k8s and I was one of the engineers that worked to do that. Unfortunately, neither myself (nor the other data engineer) was a Kubernetes guy, so we kept running into dev-ops walls while also trying to build features and maintain the current codebase.It was a nightmare. If you want k8s, you really do need people that know how to maintain it on a more or less full time schedule. Kubernetes is really not the magic bullet it's billed to be.> Managed Kubernetes (EKS on AWS, GKE on Google) is very much in its infancy and doesn’t solve most of the challenges with owning/operating Kubernetes (if anything it makes them more difficult at this time)Oh man this hits home. EKS is an absolute shitshow and their upgrade schedule is (a) not reliable, and (b) incredibly opaque. Every time we did a k8s version bump, we'd stay up the entire night to make sure nothing broke. We've since migrated to cloud functions (on GCP; but AWS lambdas could also work) and it's just been a breeze.I also want to add that "auto-scaling" is one of the main reasons people are attracted to Kubernetes.. but in a real life scenario running like 2000 pods with an internal DNS, and a few redis clusters, and Elastic Search, and yadda yadda... it's a complete pain in the butt to actually set up auto-scaling. Oh, also, the implementation of Kubernetes cron jobs is also complete garbage (spawning a new pod every job is insanely wasteful).
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Kids find a security flaw in Linux Mint by mashing keys
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Does anyone know why lockscreens in Linux have been such a joke? I remember trying Ubuntu couple years ago and when waking up my laptop it would show me my entire desktop with all the information displayed right there in the open for about 10-20 seconds before suddenly engaging the lockscreen. All you had to do was close the lid and open it again and you could just copy whatever was on the screen before the lock screen appeared. I guess it's because the lockscreen was a separate process that had to start up? Still, what an awful awful design.
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Nixos-unstable’s ISO_minimal.x86_64-Linux is 100% reproducible
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This really deserves more love.Who remembers Ken Thompson's "Reflections on Trusting Trust"?The norm today is auto-updating, pre-built software.This places a ton of trust in the publisher. Even for open-source, well-vetted software, we all collectively cross our fingers and hope that whoever is building these binaries and running the servers that disseminate them, is honest and good at security.So far this has mostly worked out due to altruism (for open source maintainers) and self interest (companies do not want to attack their own users). But the failure modes are very serious.I predict that everyone's imagination on this topic will expand once there's a big enough incident in the news. Say some package manager gets compromised, nobody finds out, and 6mo later every computer on earth running `postgres:latest` from docker hub gets ransomwared.There are only two ways around this:- Build from source. This will always be a deeply niche thing to do. It's slow, inconvenient, and inaccessible except to nerds.- Reproducible builds.Reproducible builds are way more important than is currently widely appreciated.I'm grateful to the nixos team for being beating a trail thru the jungle here. Retrofitting reproducibility onto a big software project that grew without it, is hard work.
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Coinbase Announces 18% Layoffs
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> If you are affected, you will receive this notification in your personal email, because we made the decision to cut access to Coinbase systems for affected employees. I realize that removal of access will feel sudden and unexpected, and this is not the experience I wanted for you. Given the number of employees who have access to sensitive customer information, it was unfortunately the only practical choice, to ensure not even a single person made a rash decision that harmed the business or themselves.How typical is this? Is he really talking about the hot wallet and/or cold storage?Those claiming that this is a "crypto" sentiment thing should consider the possibility that the front page of HN will be filled with stories like this from all over the economy within one month.
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ARM64 Linux Workstation
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I cannot wait for Linux to be fully usable on my Apple Silicon MBP. That is going to be such a killer environment to develop on.Crazy fast hardware, great high refresh screen, insane battery life, fantastic touchpad, gestures and keyboard.There is the potential that Windows games could run on it with some combination of x86 translation and Proton.Using MacOS on it feels like I have a ferrari with square wheels.Want to play games? Not unless the developers use Apple graphics APIs (not happening for new titles and never happening for old titles).Want to run containerized workloads? Enjoy a cumbersome, slow, virtualized experience.Want to use FUSE? Not on your work computer locked to high-sec mode as you cannot install kernel extensions (where is our user space FS Apple?).Want to write a program that targets MacOS? Expect a cumbersome CI/CD experience because Apple expects you to manually compile distributables.I could go on but as someone who has used MacOS for years and generally appreciates it, Apple really doesn't care much for developers. Other than its POSIX shell, MacOS doesn't have much going for it.At least with my Intel MBP I could dual boot Windows so I could carry one laptop and switch between work and play. Now I have to carry around two computers when I travel for extended periods if I want to game.
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Credit card debt collection
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It might be a very European view to the problem but: Why does the American government does even tolerate this credit card garbage business in the first place ?We are in the 21th century. Most payment can be validated electronically and processed under 200ms. I can pay something with my phone and get money taken directly from my bank account within seconds. There is absolutely no need of Credit Cards where Debit Cards can perfectly do the job.So Why ? Why sponsor a system that fuck up entire families and push vulnerable people to suicide by giving them a way to pay things they can not afford in the first place ?Why tolerate an entire industry of debt management that put people to their knees and bring literally Zero value to the real economy ? For the sake of few profits in Wall Street ?This is complete nonsense.I understand why the credit card business was born in the first place: Amex, Visa and MasterCard has been invented in a time where electronic payment was still a dream.
In the 60s, indeed, holding a debt record to every card holder was probably the only way to get a non physical payment system to work in the first place.We are not in the 60s anymore. A cashless payment system does not need debt.So: Why ?
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Create React Apps with No Configuration
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> Having just attended EmberCamp a week ago, I was excited about Ember CLI. Ember users have a great “getting started” experience thanks to a curated set of tools united under a single command-line interface.This is one of the best things about Ember. `ember new`, `ember serve`, ember generate component my-component`, `ember build`, `ember deploy`, `ember install`. It's opinionated but it lets you get productive right off the bat. I tried React but after a couple of days I just couldn't get it working, waaay to many options. So I switched to Ember and haven't looked back.
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How poverty changes your mindset
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I hate seeing people's comments on stories around this topic. I grew up in poverty and food stamps from time to time. My dad was a roughneck and when the oil bust happened in the 80's there was a time we lived out of our car -- my whole family. here was literally nothing to do in the oil patch during that bust. There was literally no work. But people don't understand true hopelessness. My dad did everything he could to find a job during that time... for three months time we hardly had any food I guess because it wasn't easy to get on the program fast back then. Those that come out of a dire situation think everyone else can.The ramifications of that happening to my dad will probably last multiple generations. He went from a loving father to a loathsome troll of a creature working nights in a oil refinery (I thought at the time) finally. From that my mom and dad divorced. My wife doesn't understand why I have severe dentals problems now in life, or other health issues that doctors told me are from stress. She doesn't understand why I stress so much about money and stay up at night.I don't know why I'm saying all this the solution is simple but the problem is hard to acknowledge. The poor and destitute simply need help. We live in a society though that thinks someone else is going to take care of the problems. When we do finally give help it's so conditional and shamed that the hole of guilt someone fell in is practically inescapable.
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Sales mistakes that software engineers make
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> Sales Mistake #1 - Building Before you Start Selling (...) If you’re wrong, you’ll save time and money by not building something people don’t want.I fell into this trap often, so I know it well. The reason why we don't ask first is, we want to build something. Anything. If we're "wrong", we won't "save" time and money, we will delay the moment we start making, maybe indefinitely. What if we never find something people want?The worst outcome is not to build something nobody wants -- it's not to build anything. We don't ask not because we forget about it, but because we're afraid of the answer.Yes, it's irrational, and probably stupid (because, what's the point of building something nobody wants?) but the desire to build is the driving force, and finding an audience first, is perceived as an impediment.
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Questions to Ask Before Joining a Startup
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the answer to every question on this list:"We are a private company and don't share this information."Outside of the room, the Engineering team laughs at your questions, Operations and the CEO give each other quizzical looks before laughing too, and they go on to the next candidate.You get smug satisfaction for not going with "THAT Company who cant answer simple questions", until a reminder about the rent payment comes in due and all you want is a 30% pay increase over your last/current role.
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Brexit Deal Fails in Parliament
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I'll be the first to admit: I'm an American. I fundamentally do not understand Brexit.I understand the following timeline:1. A largely disseminated, nation-wide vote occurs, bolstered by nationalist sentiment, that the EU is bad for the UK. This vote results in a conclusion that UK should leave the EU.2. This is controversial, due to the majority of the populace in general not desiring to leave the EU, but not voting as such individually. Some portions of the UK, itself a Union, are strongly aganst this voting result.3. May, a woman of great importance in the UK government, chooses to try and make a deal with the EU for favorable leaving conditions for UK.4. Nothing May is presenting is considered acceptable by anyone.On its face, this makes no sense to me. Why is May being held responsible for this? Where are the people who initially brought in Brexit- why are they not supporting May? What is preventing the referendum from being declared stupid and that the UK gov't is not going to do it?EDIT: Thank you all for your excellent responses. I'm now under the impression this is like when a significant portion of a dev team with (actual, hypotehtical) equal or flat hierarchy believe that code needs to be refactored to a serious degree, but no majority of devs can decide on what the refactored code will look like. (Extremely simplified!). If this is largely incorrect please let me know.
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Reducing notification permission prompt spam in Firefox
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Serious question though: has anyone here ever used the notifications for anything other than web based IM (slack, whatsapp)?I think the use case for legit notifications is very small, thus the UI should be an opt-in, rather than an intrusive pop-up.I never understood why browser makers gave it such a prominent UI, and of course in this attention seeking market it was bound to be abused. The new UI that Firefox is suggesting in the article is good, this should have been like this from the first day. I hope other browser vendors quickly follow.
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Google’s robots.txt parser is now open source
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Is Golang significantly slower than c++ ? I thought Google had invented Golang to solve precisely these kinds of code for their internal use.I had thought most of the systems code inside Google would be golang by now. is that not the case ?
the code doesnt look too big - I dont think porting is the big issue.
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Crafting “Crafting Interpreters”
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> I used to do graphic design, and I have this weird tic where any time I see something that looks handwritten, I look for multiple instances of the same letter to see if they are different or if the design just used a handwriting font. It’s almost always a handwriting font and I die a little inside to see the illusion evaporate.Not a graphic designer, but I do the exact same thing and feel the exact same way... Happy to see I'm not crazy aloneAnd his look like really neat hand-drawn diagrams! I certainly appreciate the degree of craftsmanship and care displayed throughout both booksAs a someone put it on YouTube, the time-lapse video of the entire process is like ASMR for geeks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iN1MsCXkPSA
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Honda quits F1, invests in carbon-free tech instead
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F1's problem is that it is a technological marvel that is simultaneously obsolete. Like the XB-71 Valkyrie project of the US AirForce, the technology powering modern F1 hybrid power trains is just outstandingly brilliant. However, just like the XB-71 was made obsolete by the advent of ICBMs, the hybrid power train's future for road cars has been overtaken by the advent of Tesla and battery electric vehicles. The metaphorical comparison with XB-70 ends when performance is concerned. F1 hybrids are still far superior to pure battery electric vehicles. So F1 is essentially stuck in the upper-left corner of the price-performance envelope. They are too good to move to pure electric, but their tech is obsolete for road cars. In a few years battery electric vehicles will get to the performance levels of current F1 hybrids, but by that time the mantle of the pinnacle of auto-racing will have been taken by FormulaE. Not a good place for F1 to be. In effect Tesla killed F1.
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Billing systems are a nightmare for engineers
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Just wait until you meet billing's angry roommate: invoicing.In the US, an invoice is just a weird PDF that you might glance at before sending off to your accounts payable team. But in other countries, especially those that use VAT style taxing systems, an invoice can be a legal document that expresses costs and taxes in a legally prescribed way for accounting purposes. Many countries have prescriptive rules over how you invoice, who can write invoices, when you can invoice, what goes on an invoice, etc. And every country does it differently.Are you building a service that charges incrementally many times per period? Or even worse, refunds incrementally? You might be sending a truckload of expensive accounting papers to your customer every month, one per transaction. And each of those pages was printed using government prescribed software from oddball vendors you must use or else.
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Digital books wear out faster than physical books
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Physical books wear out in decades to centuries, computers break in years to decades. Also digital formats are constantly evolving and backwards compatibility for old formats is removed. Even without publisher/legal issues it's clear that preservation of digital media for even the next 10 years, and especially for the next 100 or 1000, is at risk.But I really wonder why is there no other major service like the Internet Archive? The way to preserve media is to distribute it and store it in many places, not just one central location. Does the Internet Archive store redundant copies in many locations? Does it use long-term physical formats?Also, figuring out what information is "meaningful" and which is completely useless or redundant is extremely important. Because we want to store everything with the potential to be important in the future, but we also have an incredible amount of data (hence one of the reasons why IA is the only major archiver). It may be good to strategize data collection, e.g. a shallow list of all sources and a deeper list of popular sources, a sample of various sources from every region, etc
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Ask HN: What's the best lecture series you've seen?
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Andrej Karpathy's "Neural Networks: From Zero to Hero".
https://karpathy.ai/zero-to-hero.htmlJust watch the first lecture and you won't be able to not watch the rest. It starts with making your own autograd engine in 100 lines of python, similar to PyTorch and then builds up to a GPT network. He's one of the best in the field, founder of OpenAI, then Director of AI at Tesla. Nothing like the scam tutorials that just copy-paste random code from the internet.
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Keep calm & carry on: What you didn't know about the reddit story
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Meh.Am I the only one who wishes all this personal stuff had nothing to do with the business?Is it some new rule these days that startup founders have to prove they are 'real people' by sharing all the details of their lives? I mean, sure .. its sad to have to go through all that, but that stuff is personal.This story really has very little to do with reddit, other than to serve as a social means of establishing 'personality' behind the scenes of the service.Downvote me into oblivion, but I really have to say - fair enough, dude. You had a rough time. But that is life, you know? Need the whole world know you are suffering the normal, perfectly mundane, plain ol' human condition?I suppose in these techno-fuelled racey days of million-dollar teenagers it helps to have a little soap opera, to keep the balance, eh ..
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The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Volume I
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I was the project lead on this, which involved converting the Feynman Lectures from LaTeX to HTML. I'd be happy to answer any questions.Update: Most of the questions center on cost. I've answered in more detail below, but the short version is simple: no off-the-shelf converter was remotely sufficient for our needs, so we had to write lots of custom software, and writing custom software is hard.
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Verizon's accidental mea culpa
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The claim from Verizon that still stands after this blog post is the fairness argument to peering. If you peer between symmetric networks, it's typically free. That's not the case here, so Verizon wants to be paid for the asymmetry.I actually don't know. Is that legitimate?
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Nasa just made all its research available online for free
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I'm actually curious what is new within this. As it stands, NASA research pre-prints are available on the tech reports server (http://www.sti.nasa.gov/), typically right after the export control review process.edit: maybe it's related to certain journals where there wasn't access on the STI server? Seems odd to me. For the 8 years that I've been at NASA, it's always been expected that my group's work had to be accessible.edit2: not all rules are universal across the agency, so my experience may be too specific to Glenn Research Center/my division. In any case, the more open, the better.
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Euro MPs back end-to-end encryption for all citizens
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Serious question:If we had perfect encryption on all devices and no government would be able to listen in on anything (spoken conversation, mails, whatever) we would be pretty much back to where we were a couple of decades ago. I suppose the government would need to employee more real people to monitor other real people.Is there any way we could have encryption / security with a state actor still being able to decrypt the data if needed?I'm not saying that I personally am for the state actor, but I'm just imagining a scenario where all communications of bad actors would be via encrypted channels. No possibility to gather chatter, no possibility for rumors, everything encrypted and hidden. I mean this is the scenario state actors are afraid of, and frankly I would be too.How would we live in a world with perfect encryption? More anonymous, sure. But safer?
I'm really trying to see "the other side" (state) right now. Help me out and tell me how we can have perfect encryption, but don't undermine security / possibility of investigation.
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After 3072 hours of manipulating BGP, a Nyancat was drawn on this RIPE interface
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That is amazing. Does anyone have similar examples of weird technological art?
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uBlock Origin Maintainer on Chrome vs. Firefox WebExtensions
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I found this disturbing:"Chromium-based browsers are being “infested” by Instart Logic tech which works around blockers and worst, around browser privacy settings (they may start “infecting” Firefox eventually, but that is not happening now)."From his linked post:"Instart Logic will detect when the developer console opens, and cleanup everything then to hide what it does"Is this implemented via a CDN-delivered script? Why would Chromium-based browsers be more susceptible?
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GitLab Web IDE
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Wow, very cool. Lots of new players in this space: https://repl.it, https://glitch.me, and now GitLab (and I'd be surprised if GitHub doesn't follow in tow).Cloud9's acquisition really left a big hole in the market. AFAIK there's still nothing out there that gives you a decent code editor (edit multiple files, have multiple tabs open, etc) that also gives you access to a Linux shell and ability to expose ports like Cloud9 did.Personally I'm most optimistic for https://repl.it. They already have a core userbase in high school classrooms and have been adding a ton of support for serverside applications to make it more appealing outside of the classroom.
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Google's new logos are bad
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One time I learned from Google's documentation that it was best not to spawn content after loading which affects page layout.Sometime in the last few years, Google started doing that very thing in their search results. After 1-3 seconds, sometimes a widget pops up which pushes all the search results down. I have countless times gone to click a URL after 2 seconds of searching and had it suddenly move and end up on a different website.It's incredibly disconcerting. Because of the inconsistency, I've become hesitant and scared to click anything for the first ten seconds of loading the page. I'm being habituated by negative stimulus. Nothing has ever made me want to ditch Google search more strongly because it's now literally giving me anxiety to view the search results.Anyone who was in charge at Google and had good design sense is long gone, and an empty-headed cargo cult remains.P.S. I organize my bookmarks bar by favicon color without labels. Gmail was fourth, after the EFF, Youtube, and SMBC. Now I will be kicking gmail to the end of the bar with the rest of the multi-colored icons which can't be sorted and remain indistinguishable from each other. I may be a small data point but Google just effectively killed their premium placement in my bookmarks which will lead to checking my web mail less frequently.
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Arecibo Observatory Collapsed
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The logical thing to do here is to simply rebuild it, right?I mean all the infrastructure is there. Power, networking, housing, staff, etc., etc. Like there couldn’t ever be a more convenient place to drop a similar type of instrument, right?And it seems that the towers are still up, surely the anchors for the cables are no worse for wear. The actual dish itself looks to be composed of a bunch of panels that are probably designed for easy replacement. And most of them seem to still be intact.Just string up a newer, lighter weight, more powerful state of the art instrument array on a newer, stronger, lighter set of cables.Or am I missing something obvious?
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Ever-expanding animation of the life of the 796th floor of a space station
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This is amazing. So many easter eggs to click through.If you're a fan of this type of art, https://www.reddit.com/r/wimmelbilder/ is full of good stuff.
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A search engine for searching books in the Z-Library index on the IPFS network
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A question about z-lib, libgen, and regular librariesSuppose I check an e-book out of my local library. Because Reasons, the library doesn't "own" unlimited "copies" of the book, so each "copy" can only be checked out to one patron at a time and if there are enough holds then a patron can't renew a checked out book. In short, ebooks in libraries are just like regular paper books, except to you don't have leave your house.I had this ebook on hold for three months because it's very popular, but finally have it on my device, but I only have 3 weeks before I can no longer read it because of holds. I get about 2/3rds the way through before lock closes on the bits on my device. It's a very popular book, it will be 3 months before I can read it again.I go online, use some service, find the exact same book, down to all but the locking bits, and download it, finish reading it a few days later, and then forget about it. I might delete it later if I need room.Is that a crime? Have either the author or publisher lost money? On the one hand, I can say yes because if the libraries purchased more "copies", the waiting list wouldn't be so long, I might have been able to renew it and finish it. On the other hand, I wasn't going to buy the book myself, and the library has to balance budget and demand, so they probably wouldn't purchase additional "copies".What ethical questions do authors and readers see here?
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Production Twitter on one machine? 100Gbps NICs and NVMe are fast
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Most projects I encounter these days instantly reach for kubernetes, containers and microservices or cloud functions.I find it much more appealing to just make the whole thing run on one fast machine. When you suggest this tend to people say "but scaling!", without understanding how much capacity there is in vertical.The thing most appealing about single server configs is the simplicity. The more simple a system easy, likely the more reliable and easy to understand.The software thing most people are building these days can easily run lock stock and barrel on one machine.I wrote a prototype for an in-memory message queue in Rust and ran it on the fastest EC2 instance I could and it was able to process nearly 8 million messages a second.You could be forgiven for believing the only way to write software is is a giant kablooie of containers, microservices, cloud functions and kubernetes, because that's what the cloud vendors want you to do, and it's also because it seems to be the primary approach discussed. Every layer of such stuff add complexity, development, devops, maintenance, support, deployment, testing and (un)reliability. Single server systems can be dramatically mnore simple because you can trim is as close as possible down to just the code and the storage.
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Poll: HN readers, where's your residence?
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Being from the (rest of the) US, what disturbs me about this poll is how much entrepreneurial talent we might be missing out on.At current count, ~2/3 of readers are from outside the US. These results seem to be backed up by pitdesi's post.Since HN is so centered on startups, that's quite a few founders and potential entrepreneurs who could be working on the next Google. And all things being equal, there is a 2/3 chance that that next Google won't be happening in the US.The Valley is amazing, but it's nothing without talent. Making our immigration law more amenable to founders obviously won't cause a mass migration of founders here, but surely some will be attracted to our awesome startup hubs. And we need every edge we can get.We really need a startup visa.---Edit: A couple of the responses have misinterpreted what I was hoping to convey. Of course I don't think everyone is dying to come to the US. What I am simply arguing is that 1) HN is a decent proxy of the startup community, 2) much of that community is outside of the US, 3) is there anything the US can do to attract some of that talent?This is a question every country should be asking themselves, because startups are engines of prosperity.
For the US, I think the startup visa is a good solution.
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How I attacked myself using Google and I ramped up a $1000 bandwidth bill
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This really underscores Amazon's glaring omission of a billing cutoff on Amazon web services. How hard would it be for them to let me say, cut off my services at $100/month?This is the main reason I'd never use AWS to host anything public.
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Yale censored a student's course catalog site. I made an unblockable replacement
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When I first left America, I disliked and felt disillusioned with the country.I've now spent more of my adult life outside the States than in the U.S., and I've also come to the opinion that the U.S. is one of the most amazing places in the world.Sometimes it's hard to point to exactly why America is so amazing. And the answer, maybe, is on display here.An undergraduate student at an elite university just innovatively, publicly, aggressively pushed back against the Dean.He cited his values and reasoning for doing so. He took care to make sure his work wouldn't damage their physical resources or break the letter of the law. And then he openly acknowledges they could punish him, and welcomes the attempt.And it's not really even a big deal. It's just standard being-an-American stuff.All kinds of bad things in the States. And sometimes the spirit of defiance can get tired or come across overbearing. But it's really cool that it's a regular, run of the mill occurrence for people to push back against norms and restrictions in American society without any fear of long-term repercussions.It's also really, really, really weird. Seriously, stop and reflect on this for a moment. I spend a lot of time in Asia, and doing this in just about any Asian country would ruin a lot of your life prospects.And for us, it's just a matter of course. How strange. And wonderful.
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Explain Shell
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Optenum to enrich the database of arguments:https://github.com/mattboyer/optenum
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Helping a Million Developers Exit Vim
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I'm somewhat amazed but mostly amused that the Vim developers care so little about user experience that they continue to ignore that people have trouble with exiting their tool and refuse to adapt to a more expected convention for exiting it.
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Google: Security Keys Neutralized Employee Phishing
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For those interested, I recommend reading how FIDO U2F works. There's more in a security key than just FIDO U2F, but FIDO U2F is easily the most ergonomic system that these security keys support. Simplified:* The hardware basically consists of a secure microprocessor, a counter which it can increment, and a secret key.* For each website, e.g., GitHub, it creates a HMAC-SHA256 of the domain (www.github.com) and the secret key, and uses this to generate a public/private keypair. This is used to authenticate.* To authenticate, the server sends a challenge, and the security key sends a response which validates that it has the private key. It also sends the nonce, which it increments.If you get phished, the browser would send a different domain (www.github.com.suspiciousdomain.xx) to the security key and authentication would fail. If you somehow managed to clone the security key, services would notice that your nonces are no longer monotonically increasing and you could at least detect that it's been cloned.I'm excited about the use of FIDO U2F becoming more widespread, for now all I use it for is GitHub and GMail. The basic threat model is that someone gets network access to your machine (but they can't get credentials from the security key, because you have to touch it to make it work) or someone sends you to a phishing website but you access it from a machine that you trust.
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My dog was killed on a walk with a walker ordered through Wag
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Incredibly stupid decision to respond this way by Wag.How bad to you have to be at PR to screw this up? It's not hard. Liability in the case of harmed pets is extremely limited, so you just pay it all and apologize profusely. There's no way the bad press will be worth saving a couple thousand maximum.Absolute idiots.
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After 15 Years, the Pirate Bay Still Can’t Be Killed
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I stopped torrenting a long time ago. But if the media streaming market shards too much I would start again.
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Show HN: Cyberpunk web design made easy, really easy
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Normally making designs like this on the web is really tedious and a bit challenging. You'd have to do things like add a new element to the dom, rotate it 45deg, position it perfectly, draw just one border and make the background match what's outside the box to cover up the square border underneath the main element. (and that's just one corner of one element)For example: https://i.imgur.com/yY66cdv.png and https://i.imgur.com/A2Pyeur.png on Cyberpunk 2077's website this is roughly how they do it.I set out to fix that with augmented-ui.All you have to do now (after including the CSS file (no js or images, etc)) is this: ...From there, there's a bunch of options that are just CSS. (and there are several other options, not just a simple corner clip!) You can set the size of the clip, change the border on the element to anything, including images and gradients (which is nearly impossible when done the traditional way). You can give it a background inset a distance from the border, leaving a transparent gap (so it'll work over any background at all) and much more!Here are the docs on the border: http://augmented-ui.com/docs/#--aug-border-bg (click show in codepen if you want to play with it, jsfiddle's post feature is currently down)I made all this possible with the polygon feature of clip-path so full-support reaches over 91% of global web users. Check out the CSS behind it all here if you want to see CSS being used as a programming language: https://unpkg.com/augmented-ui/augmented.cssAaaand this is all free to use in any project! Check it out on NPM, I'd really really love to see what you make with it: https://www.npmjs.com/package/augmented-uiHappy to answer questions! <3 Get augmented! ;)
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UnDraw: Open-source illustrations for every project you can imagine and create
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I have used undraw.co and the illustrations are plenty, neat, and customizable to a degree. For something that's royalty-free, it is an incredible body of work.Here are some more related resources I've seen recommended by others:Photoshop but for Illustrations (paid): https://www.drawkit.io/peachhttps://icons8.com/ouchhttps://www.humaaans.com/https://www.manypixels.co/gallery/
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YouTube deleted an electronics repair channel [video]
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Googler here, who doesn't work in the YouTube PA.It does certainly seem like this was an erroneous take-down. I'm not familiar with the content, but I can't imagine a more innocuous channel. If JPdylon is out there, the first recommendation is to appeal the decision [1].Granted that doesn't always work, and it's unfortunate that common next step is to resort to "Support via Hacker News". That being said, content moderation is a super hard problem. It needs to get better and more fair on both sides (i.e. taking down what should be; leaving up what is quality content), but the scale here is often forgotten.There is far, far too much content posted to manually review. If EEVblog's suggestion was taken and
Susan (YouTube CEO) had to manually review every moderation action on channels with 5K+ subs, she would not be able to keep up. If you had a team of people, they would not be able to keep up. Even if you had a fleet of people, the scale is just unreal.EEVblog's suggestion to diversify platforms is reasonable. The fact that those platforms don't have some of the same problems doesn't necessarily mean that they're better at content moderation, however. They just don't have to operate on the same scale.[1] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/185111
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Microsoft's underwater data centre resurfaces after two years
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Why heat the oceans indirectly when you can just place the heatsource directly in them? Much less chance of losing precious ergs.Seriously though, what is the direct ecological impact of doing this at scale, would the local increase in temperature have an immediate effect on the life around it? If so how much of an impact?What about the effect on surface life and life in intermediary layers of the water? After all, a body this size radiating 10's of KW of heat would cause substantial convection. At data-centre scale could it conceivably shut-down ocean currents or re-route them?
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The campaign to shut down YouTube-dl continues
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The interesting thing about this is that YouTube is clearly trying to make it more difficult for non-official clients to stream video, as is evident from the required workaround described here:https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/issues/29326#issuecom...The legal defense of youtube-dl is premised on the idea that there's no circumvention occurring [0]. I 100% support youtube-dl and I want YouTube to stop interfering with it, but I also think we're being a little too cute when we pretend like ytdl isn't circumventing anything... it seems obvious to me that YouTube is trying to put up roadblocks and we're trying to get around them. I would feel better if we could find a way to defend ytdl without the pretense of acting like this cat-and-mouse game isn't going on.[0] https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2020/11/2020-11-1...
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FB feed is 98% suggested pages and barely any friends' posts
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I suspect part of it is that Real People are posting less. Since the feed doesn't have a bottom anymore it makes up the difference with sponsored and suggested junk rather than going empty.
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Tell HN: A disabled 40-year-old person founded a startup and makes a living
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I edited this for readability while maintaining as much of the style as possible. If doing that was offensive or not socially correct I can remove it.***I am Michael Cao. I am from Viet Nam. I suffered from polio and became disabled when I was one year old.When the covid-19 pandemic hit the world, all people suffered a lot. My Canadian friend and I decided to cofound 2HAC Studio because we thought that we need to do something to help people.We don't want to hire any employees to keep the cost at a minimum (only spend 9.99$ per year for domain). I kept my job at American company in Viet Nam and my cofounder continued working at a Bank of Canada. We spent our free time implementing and marketing our products.We have been developing the Google workspace addons. Out technology stack is App Script, VueJS for addons, and Hugo for our website. We hosted our website in Google Cloud, use Paypal as our payment system, and use Tawk for customer support. All of them are free.In 2020, we had a pain point in Viet Nam because health official required to do contact tracing when people went to events, churches, schools so we scratched our own itches and developed a QR Code Attendance addon: https://workspace.google.com/marketplace/app/qr_code_attenda.... After that, we provided our addon in G Suite marketplace and a lot of customers used our addon for contact tracing, for example take temperature, name, health status of attendees and give data to health official.Currently, we are continuing to work on QR Code and barcode solutions. Our startup has survived and thrived during Covid-19 while a lot of startups have failed miserably. Our business model is both subscription and lifetime pricing. We have more than 5 million users for all our Google workspace addons.We make a decent living but we don’t want to risk to give up our main jobs. A financial recession is coming and a lot of pain is ahead. We highly recommend that most founders keep their jobs and reduce spending as much as possible for a while during early stage of their startup. Also, I would like to encourage disabled people and older people to escape their comfort zones and make changes in the world. All of us could develop outstanding products with open source or very cheap tools. If you have any questions and feedback, please fell free to contact me and send me an email.Have a great day, everyone.
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Mullvad VPN was subject to a search warrant – customer data not compromised
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I don't understand why go after the VPN, I think most people don't use a VPN correctly.What good is a VPN when multiple apps on your computer are phoning home?If the law has a suspect IP, couldn't they just ask google, microsoft and facebook what accounts were accessed with that IP?To use a VPN correctly wouldn't have to use a fresh OS and absolutely not login to any accounts connected to the IP you are trying to hide?
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Reddit Threatens to Remove Moderators from Subreddits Continuing Blackouts
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We (the internet community) made such a terrible mistake with social media. We formed connections and communities and friendships on sites like Facebook and Twitter and Reddit, but those companies need to make money, so those connections are only allowed to exist as long as they are part of a profitable system. How awful it is to reduce human connection to that. To think that I am only allowed to maintain certain social connections as long as they continue to produce monetary value for an intermediary. An awful, awful mistake.
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Here's how I deal with users who steal
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Interesting that the "scholarship" (free) plan isn't mentioned on the homepage. It seems you have to try and steal the product before being offered the free plan.I also like the subtle dig, "if you can't afford it." I've certainly pirated things myself. If iTunes asked me, "We noticed you've pirated The Walking Dead. If you can't afford $3, click here to get it for free." By reframing it as charity I might be shamed into purchasing it. :)That's certainly a novel approach. I would love to hear how it turns out.
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Reddit is raising a huge round near a $3B valuation
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I've been a fan of Reddit for a very long time (as the amount of data science work I've done with their data can attest to), but lately it seems like the incentives between Reddit as a business and Reddit as a community leader are not aligned, and that is a problem.The increasing amount of dark patterns Reddit has been employing lately is concerning. (recent example: Reddit now gates content in mobile Safari to push users to the app: https://twitter.com/minimaxir/status/1086002848926593025 )That said, it seems like the really bad dark patterns I reported 7 months ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17446841) no longer appear to be in place.
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Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers
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I need to send this to the people who designed the website for one of my favorite local pizza places, Dino's (https://www.dinostomatopie.com/) -- they did _really_ well, generally, but no matter how hard you try, some things come through: the fonts rendered as text are perfectly crisp at whatever absurd DPI this Chromebook has.
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Pip has dropped support for Python 2
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This is awesome in terms of avoiding all of the weird things when a person typed pip rather than pip3 and module didn't seem to get installed anywhere. That said, watching perl trying to kill perl5 with perl6 (unsuccessful) and python trying to kill python 2 with python 3 (more successful) it struck me how ridiculous it is that open source languages have to put up with this. Clearly "major" numbers are insufficient, the only real answer is to rename the entire freaking language when you make incompatible changes to it.
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Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in adolescents
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Social media (and the attention economy) are worse for young brains than drugs.If you came up with a substance that caused young people by the millions to become totally addicted, cost them multiple hours per day, pushed them into depression and suicide, and contributed to inactivity, obesity, loss of attention span, and overall ennui, it would be banned almost immediately.Heck, if you proposed a tracking system that kept track of kids' whereabouts, social connections, and required them to post identifying information and photos, as well as gather their interests and political leanings, it'd be illegal.The fact that we allowed companies to do these two things together while making money off it is absolutely astounding to me.
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Young female Japanese biker is 50-year-old man using FaceApp
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What really worries me about the DeepFakes stuff is not so much the fakes -- I'm worried about that, but that's been written about to death -- but that now it adds plausible deniability to anyone caught on camera doing anything.If we had video footage of, say, a politician doing something clearly illegal on camera, then it's simply the word of the politician against the word of the source -- the latter of whom may need to remain anonymous.That said... the other way around is still the more dangerous, I guess. If, say, a US adversary creates a great-looking video of the US president doing/saying something really heinous, that has the potential to inflame the world long before the truth can get its boots on.
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Individuals Matter
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I am a security engineer but have been a business leader from time to time. Business leaders often need to plan around dates- eg ”should we spend $50k announcing at conference Y in month Z, or should we wait until month A?” “Our competition just launched; will we be able to launch this quarter (the board wants to know, and we have to report material financial impact items quarterly or face SEC fines)?”Every team I have ever worked with hates planning; every team hates their methodology and thinks it’s stupid and inaccurate and why are those pinhead business people insisting on a date; it’ll be done when it’s done.One of the primary jobs of managers at all levels is to plan and then execute in accordance with the plan. Some managers are good at it, many aren’t- the world is populated with people nearer the center than the ends of the bell curve.So show me a methodology that mere mortals can implement successfully. If all you can do is complain and point out unicorn 500x engineers (yeah try hiring for that characteristic, good luck), then I don’t want to hear it. But if you have a practical idea on how to “solve” planning, then you have my full attention.
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Serverless Video Transcription inspired by Cyberpunk 2077
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People complain that the magic of programming has been lost because all we do is stitch together APIs. They're oversimplying the work done, those people are cynical, this is amazing.
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Bootstrap 2.0, From Twitter
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I am going to chime in being negative against the wave of positive feedback here.Twitter has done well releasing this and when I first saw it ages ago it looked neat and fairly professional.However, like a pop song which has been completely overplayed on the radio it has become tired and frankly a bit annoying. It has its uses offline to quickly get a demo up and running but it shouldn't be used on a live site. At least not in its entirety.If you have to use this for your project due to convenience or lack of design skills then do everyone a favor and mix it up a little bit. Change the colors on the buttons. Avoid the black bar running along the top of your website. Just don't look 100% like a vanilla bootstrap site.
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US government commits to publish publicly financed software under FOSS licenses
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It seems like they've cut a wide swath for (probably) exempting the most interesting of the software that could have been developed in the open.> Applicable exceptions are as follows:> The release of the item is restricted by another statute or regulation, such as the Export Administration Regulations, the International Traffic in Arms Regulation, or the laws and regulations governing classified information;> The release of the item would compromise national security, confidentiality, or individual privacy;> The release of the item would create an identifiable risk to the stability, security, or integrity of the agency’s systems or personnel;> The release of the item would compromise agency mission, programs, or operations; or> The CIO believes it is in the national interest to exempt publicly releasing the work.[1] https://sourcecode.cio.gov/Implementation/
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A customer reported an error in the map used by Flight Simulator
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It's very impressive to me that Microsoft took the technical details of Flight Simulator so seriously that it fielded questions from customers like this. What's doubly more impressive is that Bill Gates got directly involved with what is essentially a bug report.
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Show HN: HN.Academy – Top online courses recommended by Hacker News users
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This list mostly passes the gut check: the courses near the top are almost universally high quality, and quite reputable.Now, why did I say "mostly" and "almost"?Two reasons:1. The best technical courses are on Udacity. You may disagree but I think enough people would agree that it ought to be somewhere on the list.2. Learning to learn is popular but its kind of vacuous. (You may disagree, and this time I may be in a tiny minority who hold this view). So I think the sentiment reader might need tweaking.Still, all in all, a great resource. I am bookmarking it and am glad you did this.
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Sears has another chance to avoid closing down
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Sears had everything. Global supply chain, check. Top notch distribution operation, check. System and infrastructure to take orders and handling billing, check. Name recognition and established customer base, check.They threw it all away, ending catalog operations in 1993 a year before Amazon.com opened in 1994. They owned part of Prodigy in 1984! Yet somehow thought it was a better move to expand into bigger box retail. Anyone remember The Great Indoors from 1997? It was going to have huge potential.What a waste.
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Yann LeCun, Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio win Turing Award
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I think NVidia deserves part of the award, as they have been a major factor in the progress of NNs.
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Apple Confirms $1M Reward for Anyone Who Can Hack an iPhone
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What Apple is doing here is really smart. An under-appreciated wrinkle is that grey-market sales are valued on continuous access; you get paid over a period of time, and if the bug you sold dies, you stop getting paid. Apple isn't just bidding against the brokers and IC in lump-sum payments, but also encouraging people to submit bugs early, before they're operationally valuable for bad actors.
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The Real Class War
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I've spent my career working in public policy circles, and this rings true to me.> At most, working-class voters can cast their ballots for an “unacceptable” candidate, but they can exercise no influence on policy formation or agency personnel, much less on governance areas that have been transferred to technocratic bodies.> Unlike the working class, the professional managerial class is still capable of, and required for, wielding political power.I've never seen actual grassroots activism accomplish much, if anything. Protests in DC are like rain; bring an umbrella, but no need to pay it much attention because it will blow over in no time. It's always insiders who make a career out of policy that ultimately shape it. Hill staff, think tank wonks, professional bureaucrats, etc--it's that professional Washingtonian class that really shapes the government's policy, because they are the ones that show up to do that work every day.
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U.S. Treasury breached by hackers backed by foreign government – sources
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So apparently Russian hackers were able to infiltrate the Office 365 accounts of multiple federal agencies.They were able to do to this by targeting one of the government's suppliers, a company called "SolarWinds" in Austin. The hackers were able to slip their software into a software update from SolarWinds over the summer.And get this: "SolarWinds says on its website that its customers include most of America’s Fortune 500 companies, all top ten U.S. telecommunications providers, all five branches of the U.S. military, the State Department, the National Security Agency, and the Office of President of the United States". Yikes.
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The Coronavirus Is Here Forever
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That's why I don't really understand why there are still covid restrictions in countries that are close to full vaccination, like the UK. There isn't really a next step after having vaccinated the population, it is "steady state". So do they want us to have these restrictions (countries you can't travel to, endless testing, mask requirements) forever?
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Go 1.18
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This is very exciting! Generics will be helpful for some, I'm sure, but my reading of the winds is that people will find other idiosyncracies of Go to latch onto and complain about. It seems to me the next object of hatred is the lack of sum types.I would like to understand a bit more about where a lot of the Go criticism comes from. Of course some amount of it comes from direct frustrations people have with the language design, but I suspect that doesn't account for all of it. It seems to me that the intensity with which some people fixated on the absence of generics cannot be explained just by frustration with writing non-generic code, which by all accounts was annoying but not overwhelmingly so.So, for those of you who are willing to explore the part of this that goes beyond a simple rational analysis and criticism of language design, whats bugging you?Sometimes I think the core irritation with Go is its simplicity. The suggestion that easy to learn languages can be effective too is somewhat humiliating, as we get attached to the pride of mastering more complex languages, and the suggestion is that some of the struggling we went through was unnecessary, and that folks who wont struggle as much might be able to be effective too, in fact the suggestion is that maybe our pride was misplaced.Theres also a suggestion, in the fact that Go has opinions, that other opinions might be "wrong". I think this may bug people, who would take up those other opinions or see merit in them, a lot. There's also a bit of an anti-expertise "who are you, Go creators, to say you know better than me how to design this program/engage in software development?"In any case, it's something I've been trying to figure out for a while and I don't think I have a complete explanation still. Curious to see what others think.
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macOS Internals
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It’s funny how I used to think that operating systems, databases, and cloud systems, as these kind of arcane things that were somehow apart from the rest of software.I could not begin to grasp how they could deal with running programs, access control, or any of these things that once seemed so foreign and mysterious to me.And realising that it’s actually just software, that there’s no black magic to it, just lower-level APIs, less pre-built batteries-included stuff to rely on, and probably a whole lot of more complexity, that was… both mind blowing, exciting, and kind of a let down.And it has enabled me to have more realistic expectations from these tools.It however doesn’t take away any of the brilliance and effort that went into the these things, or lessen the credit due to those behind them. I can only begin to imagine the complexity involved in a full-fledged modern OS.
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Poll: Do you think HN should go dark in protest of SOPA?
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The answer is no, people who say yes are wrong.You black out your website to raise awareness to the cause. I think it is a fair bet that an extremely high number of HN users know a lot about SOPA / PIPA. So there is no point doing this to educate regulars.Perhaps news will spread. Sure, it will spread in the tech community. In the tech community knowledge of SOPA / PIPA is well known. Shock waves from HN being blacked out won't travel to the general public or politicians.But what if it does travel to the public / politicians. "A website called Hacker News blacked out? Hackers are bad right? A bit like pirates which this bill is protecting us against? Shouldn't this site be blacked out anyway?"HN has an unfortunate name. You black out a website to make a statement. With HN which is so obviously anti-SOPA/PIPA I don't see the point.Now.. if gravatar blacked out all of the avatars for a day. Or Google + Bing + Yahoo turned off the switch for a couple of hours at the same time... that would be a statement.
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Restore the Fourth
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I have to admit, I didn't realize before this how explicitly the Bill of Rights forbids fishing expeditions. If I were working at the NSA I'd be worried about that. It may be inconvenient to be restrained by the constitution, but violating it seems the policy equivalent of selling one's soul to the devil. Once you've started down that road, where do you stop?
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Dark spot under cockpit of A-10s
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My dad has always said that the A-10 is an infantryman's best friend. an F-16 or F-18 will straff over the battle field and is gone. an A-10 will just hang around.When I was younger we went to a nature preserve that is adjacent to the gunnery range at Moody Air Force base. We went up in an observation tower overlooking the preserve and watched A-10s do strafing practice. The sound of the GAU-8 main gun is something you have to hear to believe. If bad intentions have a sound it's that gun.
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Otto, the successor to Vagrant
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All Ruby development environments look alike, all PHP development environments look alike, etc.Did they do any user research? Doesn't feel like it based on the above statement.
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Ubershaders: A Ridiculous Solution to an Impossible Problem
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Why not take a profiling approach and cache the configurations rather than the compiled shader? You could then compile them on startup. By caching the configurations, you could then share this data between hosts and don't have to invalidate them as often.
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Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role
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Number 2: No One Believes Anyone Can Actually CodeIt's surprising to see the number of people who interview for lead technical roles that cannot code, or whose work is exceptionally sloppy. Incompetence is more commonplace than the author believes, even at the highest level.
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RIAA’s YouTube-dl takedown ticks off developers and GitHub’s CEO
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The takedown didn't backfire at all just because some people decided to publish on Twitter a tarball that still happens to be hosted in many other places so there is absolutely no risk of it getting lost.The problem is that the project may not survive this.Major distributions for example will no longer carry the project and likely refuse to touch it even with a ten-foot pole (think media codecs situation). It will be relegated to 3rd party repos. They will lose users, they will lose contributors. And how long until YT's (and/or the other supported websites) HTML changes more rapidly until the remaining manpower can't keep up?
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NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap
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NFTs make perfect sense for representing a claim on things that can be used, like event tickets or in-game virtual goods. But as certificates layered on top of collectibles... I'm not so sure.With something like CryptoKitties, you can do something with the tokens (play a virtual pet game). But with something like CryptoPunks you're essentially paying for digital beanie babies, which are worse than real ones since anyone can display and enjoy the image you paid for.You can brag about owning such-and-such an image, but only as long as enough other people desire images from that particular set. When a set's popularity wanes, so does your token's value, and your ability to show it off.I'm always happy to see artists being paid for their work, and if they can make some money during this craze - more power to them. Beyond a few creators being rewarded, it seems like this is going to be 90% bubble (with plenty of hucksters), and 10% real use cases that stand the test of time.
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Freesound just reached 500K Creative Commons sounds
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Is there anything similar for entire songs?
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Why I prefer making useless stuff
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I definitely identify with the author. A big mistake I made in the past was to assume that other software engineers are equally enthusiastic about these kind of projects, or the least bit impressed by them. I was asked for a job interview to prepare presentations on two projects I was particularly proud of. I chose a hobby Operating System kernel I'd developed from the ground up, and a fully-functional MIPS assembler I had written. The interviewers (senior developers within the company) really just did not get it. Responding with questions such as: "Is this going to make you any money?", and "When do you expect this to be complete?". They really couldn't understand my motivations. I did these projects for no other reason than that I love programming, and I have never stopped loving learning about it. I have never needed to consider, or justify to myself why I did these things. I do them because I enjoy what I do.I ended up pivoting to discuss some comparatively banal professional project migrating a mid-sized financial product to a new tech-stack, which managed to captivate their attention. I found this experience extremely disheartening, however important a lesson it was to learn. I don't think it's changed my outlook in any way though, admittedly. I still work on the same kinds of projects, and I still think the best developers are the ones who do work on toy projects for their own enjoyment.
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