prompt
stringlengths 0
90
| completion
stringlengths 1
26.3k
|
|---|---|
Intuit sabotages the Child Tax Credit
|
Given how much H&R Block and Intuit have unethically and corruptly leeched from the government and the taxpayers directly, I think the should literally be nationalized and have their tax software platforms absorbed into the IRS. Their company activities over the last few decades are so flagrantly, indisputably bad for the country. There's literally no upside, none at all. They have intentionally sabotaged tax filing and leeched off the people by corruptly inserting themselves as middlemen. At least the tax prep portions of the companies.
|
Replacing a SQL analyst with 26 recursive GPT prompts
|
Anyone who's been asked more than a couple of times for data that requires a non-trivial bit of ad-hoc SQL will know the sinking "oh shit" feeling that comes when you subsequently realise you borked the query logic in some subtle way and have accordingly emailed out a completely bogus answer/report.From the article it doesn't seem that GPT is significantly better or worse than a human in this regard, although an experienced analyst would over time decrease their number of such errors.The best fix imo is to slather a battery of views over your data to minimise the risk of getting the joins wrong, and it'd be interesting to see how that approach could improve the bot's quality.
|
Microsoft announces new Bing and Edge browser powered by upgraded ChatGPT AI
|
This is a potentially momentous occasion here. Microsoft is betting hard that they can mount a challenge to Google, and I think ChatGPT can credibly attempt that. The answer from Google so far is weak. The thought that Bing may actually overtake Google would be hilarious a few months ago, and now it looks... possible?
|
Everything authenticated by Microsoft is tainted
|
He's absolutely right, you really can't trust anything they sign anymore. This is why Microsoft has been so defensive about their stance since it occurred. I've said the same since the news got out, but all my Microsoft-y friends I told didn't care. In fact, they all shrugged it off like "what are ya gonna do?"That's exactly the problem - what ARE companies going to do? Migrate OFF windoze? Migrate out of Azure? To Linux?Certainly not, Microsoft-y admin only know Microsoft, they usually can't do much else, it's all they know. They certainly won't bite the hand the feeds them. That means the organizations are stuck, which is exactly what Microsoft wanted all those years ago with a monopoly, and got it.Customers too stuck in their own ways to do anything but be a slave to Microsoft and their constant insecurity deserve what they get sadly.
|
Procrastination is Not Laziness
|
I'm reaching out here because I really need some advice. This is a great thread, but I think it only semi-applies to me.I am 24 years old, and I seriously struggle with motivation to do... just about anything. I have a midterm tomorrow in Dynamics (a mech engr course), and I have pretty much neglected the class entirely, and I am most certainly going to fail it, and I'll have to withdraw. This isn't surprising, because I've been in this situation many, many times before. But the issue goes much deeper.For my entire life, I have struggled to do many basic things other people have no trouble with, like keeping my room clean or being on time. (I am chronically late). For high school I had bad grades, and for college I've had abysmal ones. I took Calc 2 three times, and Calc 3 four times. Business 1 three times, and I've repeated probably 3 or 4 engineering and other easy classes just a single time as well.After my third year at university (a complete disaster), I investigated getting tested for ADD, and lo- and behold I "had" it, along with mild depression. Now I live on my own, and aside from not having enough friends as I'd like / once had, I don't really have any real reasons to be depressed. I started Adderrall a few years ago, and it showed me how backward I am. I'll get to this later.A recent talk with my half-sister really opened my eyes by showing me she is very much like me when it comes to getting things done.
For just about everything, I get no mental stimulation out of "doing it now," so I put it off. And off. And off. I have some kind of huge mental resistance, anxiety, or pain associated with doing it (for all you neuroscientists out there). I straight-up simply CAN NOT get myself to do it. In fact, I have never, EVER, just sat down and done something long before it absolutely _HAD_ to be done. Instead, it gets to a critical point where I realize, HOLY CRAP I am going to fail if I don't start now. Essentially, the things that actually motivate me are fear-driven (embarassment or failure). It's at this point I am now under huge pressure to get it done, and not surprisingly, I have totally inadequate time to do it, and my ability to focus and actually complete the task is completely compromised. Sometimes the stress gets so bad, I have to just quit what I'm doing and go to sleep, to alleviate the stress.This trend goes on, and on, and on. I didn't finish school, and I'm trying to transfer right now, but my GPA is so low I can't get in anywhere. I've applied to universities over and over, where I've written essays about how I've grown and am a better, more mature person now, but the truth is I'm not. In full honesty, I know full-well the formula for success, but no matter how well I plan or organize my time, when it comes to physically doing it at the most primitive level, I fall flat on my face. Thus, that simple action-component of the master plan goes unfinished, and the house of cards begins to fall from there.If it is of interest, my father has had very similar if not worse issues for his whole life, as well as my mother, but not quite as bad. My mother has serious lack of motivation issues and has had longstanding depression, and both my half-sisters seem to have the similar difficulties with focus and motivation.This fits in to what I perceive as a greater trend: I generally lack stimulation, and I gravitate towards things that give me that kind of instant gratification.... primarily the Internet (and HN!), extreme sports, and playing guitar. I have actually become quite a jack of all trades, lacking follow-through to finish anything to my desire.I've learned that really to get anything done right, it takes slow and consistent focused work, which unfortunately for me, is just very boring, and I never do it. I _can't_ do it. When I try, my mind wanders uncontrollably.I've long been criticized as being lazy, and perhaps that's what I am, but I don't view it in that sense. I want _desperately_ to be able to work. I want to work long and hard on things, and have follow-through, but I am unconsciously prevented from doing so. I have tons of ideas and a wild creative side, but I have, as a marriage counselor put regarding my dad, "an aversion to doing."The lack of stimulation seems to carry over into my relationships too. I have a hard time getting along with most people. Most people are just kind of boring; I don't get much out of their presence. Not in that I can't have a conversation for a short while and appear sociable (which I am), but truly making friends seems very, very difficult for me. I try to, but it just doesn't work. I rarely make actual friends that I feel comfortable with, until I randomly will make one, with no effort whatsoever (about 1 per year). Very interestingly, most of my friends are similar to me; they are of fairly socially-akward sort, and many are very ADD-ish.I'm 24, and my life is in shambles, compared to what it could be. Very recently I almost got an amazing job at Apple (corporate), but after nine interviews, I was ultimately denied because I lacked the degree and had an "unprofessional" LinkedIN, Facebook, and email address. (okay the last part wasn't relevant). Anyway, that hurt, and I need to finish school. All my friends from high school are in _TOP_ law and grad schools, and I'm still semi-unsuccessfully drudging on with my undergrad and working at a startup that won't go anywhere, making $12/hour.I don't know what plan of action to take. What can I do to fix this? Do I go see psychologist/psychiatrist? I've heard so much about the brain's plasticity, so is this something I can fix ? I had some level of success with Adderrall, and it showed me what it's like to _FEEL_ motivation to do things at the appropriate time and similarly the anxiety to _NOT_ doing it "now." It also made engaging with people much easier. It was pretty profound.However, I really don't like the idea of being on a drug all the time, and I felt like I quickly grew tolerant to it, which is a trend I'm more afraid of than anything.Nothing is working out for me, and I want to get things on track before I've wasted my life away. I have huge ambitions, but I cannot accomplish them, and being brutally honest, while it's still a long ways away, I wouldn't want to raise a kid with my habits as they are now. That's a big deal.So, HN, any help or advice would be very appreciated.Thanks.
|
Induction powered LED lit engagement ring
|
Cool piece of work! How about making the ring glow in a particular color when the guy is in proximity? Imagine how awesome it'd be for the girl to get up and say "well, my boyfriend is here..."And on another note I figured that this is exactly how machines creep into our lives - emotional pitch. Live example!
|
Voxel.css
|
Cool demo.But, for those thinking they're going to make a minecraft clone with this it's not going to work. Making games is all about drawing as little as possible and making as few draw calls as possible. Since CSS only supports planes (3d rectangles oriented in space) that means every cube is 6 draw calls and worse, if you want the browser to draw them correctly they have to be sorted. So let's say you had a 16x16x16 voxel area, that's potentially 24000 planes+ and 24000+ draw calls. That assumes worst case, all cubes with transparent bits like tree leaf blocks. For comparison many AAA games do little than 5000 draw calls per frame, possibly less.Compare to a functional minecraft clone all of that would be condensed into a single mesh representing a 16x16x16 area. One draw call.So yea, neat demo but you're going to quickly hit the limits past a few boxy logosIf you're looking for something that actually does do the optimizations necessary for a minecraft clone in the browser see http://voxeljs.com
|
A Farewell to FRP
|
I moved from React/Redux/Typescript to Elm a few months ago, and I'm now on my second serious project with it, making mobile application with Cordova. I've found it an absolute pleasure to use, and I especially like that you can be pragmatic about it; if there is something that is annoying to do in Elm then you can simply drop into Javascript/Typescript using ports.Coming from languages like Actionscript/Javascript/Typescript/PHP I have found the whole Elm experience quite mindblowing; if it compiles, then it just seems to work. I hardly ever find myself poring over bits of code trying to debug a subtle error, and if I do the problem is going to be in the Javascript/Typescript bit.Basically, I'm sold :)
|
I have no side code projects to show you
|
I’m not mad at you, but as the dude on the other side of the desk, I have to decide whether you can cut it and I’m fine saying no. I could make you do some whiteboard problems, but I think whiteboard problems are pretty far removed from your day to day development and I am uncomfortable relying on them as a proxy for your ability to ship code.I don’t really disagree with your philosophy of working while you’re working and NOT working in your downtime. I think the same way.But I have a whole pile of stuff I can show you that I’ve worked on. I don’t ask anybody to take my word for it. In computing, you just can’t. The signal to noise ratio is too bad, there are too many guys out there making unmaintainable junk, if they actually ship anything at all. There are shops out there that can afford to hire a bunch of maybes and just weed out the duds when they wash out, but I don’t have that luxury. Nor am I going to go on some weeks long hiring safari where I hire you for a week or two and see if you can cut it. No time man. Sorry, don’t have it. I’m going to give you the job or I’m not going to give you the job.
|
The password “ji32k7au4a83” has been seen over a hundred times
|
Related story: For some weird reason, I memorized the serial key for a very popular software (I must be fifteen then). Even today, I can recite the 25-letter key without a hitch. And I have used its first ten letters as a password to one of my accounts. Guess what? The password has been used 4000+ times before [1]. It's hard to digest the fact that there are at least a thousand people in the world who did the same thing.[1]: https://haveibeenpwned.com/Passwords
|
Zero Rupee Note
|
I wonder how similar bribery culture is to tip culture. In the US where we tip restaurant workers, restaurant wages are often much lower than comparable positions in industries that don't have tipping, so much so that the difference is often explicitly included in minimum wage laws. Do countries with more bribery experience a similar effect, where the wages of police officers and other bribery-prone worker are much lower than they would otherwise be?If so, that creates a pretty tricky equilibrium problem. Even if I think bribery is ethically wrong, I don't want to be in a position where I'm asking someone else to accept less than their "fair"/expected/equilibrium wage. Higher wages might be a prerequisite for getting rid of a culture of bribery, but at the same time, raising wages per se probably doesn't do much to reduce bribery in the short term?
|
PostgREST
|
Related graphql implementations with similar concepts:- https://www.graphile.org/postgraphile/- https://hasura.io/Love the idea of having APIs flow out of a single set of schema definitions. The Rails style of speccing a model, migrations, and controller/serializer or graphql types feels overly verbose and repetitive.To me the biggest thing these groups could do to speed adoption is flesh out the feature development / test story. For instance, the postgraphile examples have development scripts that constantly clear out the DB and no tests. Compared to Rails, it's hard to imagine how you'd iterate on a product.Are there other reasons this hasn't seen more widespread adoption? Is there some inherent architectural flaw or just not enough incremental benefit?
|
Hardware Microphone Disconnect in Mac and iPad
|
It's weird how the "hardware disconnect" term for the pre-2019 devices was stretched to include a firmware, that is software-only, feature. Kinda like the "end to end encryption" of Zoom. Glad that Apple resolved this for newer devices. I'd still love to see wiring diagrams or explanations how it actually works. Which kind of circuit do they use? Is it the power line that's suppressed or the data line? Is it only an analog line that's suppressed and if you tune up internal amp you might be getting some residual?About the iPads, what does their "hardware" based microphone disconnect entail? It has to be some electro-magnetic based communication instead of currents so the circuit has to be more complicated. I doubt it's done without using any kind of software but would be glad to hear otherwise.Overall, I'm glad that they are responding to concerns and working to address them.
|
A Google Cloud support engineer solves a tough DNS case
|
This is a fun debugging story, but is a great example why servers should be cattle not pets. Having trouble with a VM? Blow it up and get a fresh one. Still having trouble? The provisioning steps are codified, you can walk through them and find the one that causes the issue.
|
Apple takes legal action against small company with pear logo
|
I actually had something somewhat similar happen to me, but with Twitter.https://breue.com/twitter
https://breue.com/86851616.pdfI was working on a project called Scoper, which let you do video streaming. It had done fairly well at SXSW, and we had a decent amount of users. Just before we thought we were gonna be awarded a trademark for the name, we got a not so friendly letter from Twitter's counsel at Fenwick and West, telling us we were infringing on their "Periscope" brand, and listing some pretty clear demands. We never really thought of our app as a competitor to Periscope.Our lawyer let us know that they had no strong grounds against us, but would drain us in a legal battle we could never afford. We told Twitter we knew they had weak grounds and that the case would just drag on, and we would rather save both sides money, if they would just buy us out.They gave us a super low amount of money to drop the trademark application, transfer the domain, all brand related stuff, and remove our app from the App Store. It was kinda depressing, but it could have been a worse outcome.To be fair, this wasn't outrageous like this pear logo case, but it was just a feeling of being bullied and knowing you don't stand a chance.
|
Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast
|
Here's a crazy idea: Don't use analytics at all but focus on your product. If your success relies solely on "improving conversions" by tracking your users and then changing the position and color of your "Checkout" button then maybe try setting yourself apart such that customers want to buy your product even despite an obnoxious purchasing flow. Only then start optimizing it.More serious thoughts: Google Analytics introduces performance overhead for your website and now you have to explain to your users which third party is responsible for processing their data on top of yourself. Why introduce those headaches? Are the insights from Analytics really valuable enough to justify the cost? I personally haven't seen it.
|
The Worst
|
Thank you. That article about "The Best" bothered me in a way I couldn't completely verbalize. Beyond a certain threshold, the quality of objects just simply doesn't matter.The example of flatware was particularly annoying, because, really, in what way does a fork ever actually "fail"? Have you ever had food halfway to your mouth when the fork just suddenly collapses or something? As a tool, flatware is completely superfluous. Just ask the billion some odd people who eat with their hands.Anyway, maybe some people enjoy the process of endlessly researching and hunting around for "the best" of something. If you do, more power to you. Personally, I think when you look back at the end of your life you're going to remember the meals you ate and the people you ate them with more than the utensils you used.
|
The Star Wars Route: Do a traceroute to 216.81.59.173
|
Don't forget to watch Episode IV in the terminal! $ telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl
When I was younger I went out of my way to get a V6 address just to watch it in color ;)
|
BitTorrent’s Secure Dropbox Alternative Goes Public
|
Really nice, but the thing is... Dropbox has gone beyond just file sharing.One example: I used to use Flickr for photo sharing, but cameras got better, images got bigger, and I have a lot of photos. I moved from Flickr to Picasa as it could cope with the directories full of photos and I didn't have to manually upload them and Google's storage space was cheaper. Then I ran out of space... over 100GB of photos, where next?Hello Dropbox: https://www.dropbox.com/sc/um5zf95urdk3zmg/2SaSCUIQd8And I've told a few photographers about this, and a few weeks later a friend of a friend of a friend excitedly told me on a forum how you can photo share in Dropbox.And what I'm basically seeing is that the problem of "file sync" is being considered as solved by lay consumers, who really aren't prioritising encryption, and the problems that they now have is "share this directory of photos", and "share that directory of videos", and "sync this music privately, but let me play it back".Dropbox isn't just file sync anymore.What it is, is a serious threat to Flickr, Picasa, YouTube, Amazon MP3 Locker, Google Play Music, iTunes, etc.And consumers are not thinking in terms of encrypted sync, they're just thinking in terms of "I just want to do X, why is it so hard", and so I can't see this (very nice) solution really solving the problems that consumers have, that will make them prioritise security.
|
How to steal a developer's local database
|
These have a fairly simple fix that you can implement yourself as a developer. Don't let your services listen on (AKA bind to) 0.0.0.0 or 127.0.0.1.The entire 127.0.0.0/8 block is dedicated to the loopback interface [1]. That's 2^24 - 2 unique IP addresses you can choose at random. This basically eliminates the feasibility of the DNS rebinding component, as it would take prohibitively long to find the actual loopback address that your services have bound to.It's important to note that this is much more effective than not using the default port. It's much faster to iterate all 2^16 ports on the same IP address than it is to wait for DNS TTL to expire so you can rebind to another IP address.As a bonus, you don't have to worry about port collisions when nobody's allowed to listen on 0.0.0.0. Everybody can use 8080 if they want.[1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5735#section-3
|
Ask HN: Favorite teachers on YouTube?
|
Sentdex has some excellent videos on python, surprised nobody mentioned him yet.general engineering/science: Applied science is just so so goodChemistry: NurdRage and Nile red are both good, although I prefer NurdRage.Electronics: Mike's electric stuff, Mr Carlson's Lab,and bigclive.Math: Can't beat 3blue1brown, although numberphile has some good content as well.Maching/shop: This old tony and mrpete222. Ave is entertaining but not too educational.Comp Sci: sentdex (python) and liveoverflow (security/Rev eng).Most of these aren't courses, although they are all educational. For instance, applied science isn't trying to teach anything, he's just presenting his projects. But unless you are a true rennisance person I guarantee you will learn something from every video.Edit: forgot to mention, check out speeches from conferences like cppcon and defcon, excellent sources that are sometimes easy to miss.
|
Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation
|
This is very cool.I looked up words that have always tripped me up, including banal, brood, indefatigable, preternatural, conch, niche. Indefatigable, banal, and conch had some conflicting ones but the "correct" one occurred enough times that I got the idea. ("Brood" probably isn't commonly mispronounced, I just got it mixed up early in life and never quite got it sorted it out. :)The results for "niche" are consistently mixed up though, which means that word will continue to drive me insane. Neesh or nitch!? I mix it up when I use it without any rhyme or reason.
|
Calculus Explained with GIFs and Pics (2014)
|
author here; i wrote this quite some time back (2014). I'm now studying Chinese and would like to write a Chinese version for Sinophone audience (with more Chinese humor, etc). Anyone knows a good place to share articles like this if it's in Chinese? Thanks!
|
4.2″ and 7.5″ NFC-powered e-Paper Displays Work without Battery
|
This could replace your printer really nicely. Anytime you want to print something out, you swipe your phone by this and use it instead.Any kind of reference, recipe, directions, notes. This would even be cool instead of a second monitor. Just to put up a reference page or cheat sheet.
|
Show HN: FalsiScan – Make it look like a PDF has been hand signed and scanned
|
I don't get the magical power of a signature at all. Everybody can write my name under a document.This project basically allows you to forge your own signature. Is it still legally binding? Do these rules even remember the original intent?
|
SSH hacks – a little sanity for remote workers
|
> What are your favorite SSH tips & tricks? $ ssh -J user1@host1 user_final@host_final
or $ ssh -J user1@host1,user2@host2 user_final@host_final
Not many people know it, you don't need to launch a SSH within a SSH session - SSH has built-in support of using one SSH server as a proxy to another SSH server. Useful for hacking servers accessing servers behind a firewall, or using your own server as a proxy to bypass a bottleneck in the network.
|
Buttplug: An open-source software suite for teledildonics
|
Hi! Buttplug Project Lead here! AMA!
|
I got an FBI record at age 11 from dabbling in cryptography (2015)
|
My FBI file was for hacking into my school district's AS/400 that handled my school's attendance and grading system. Somehow using a public IP address with no access restrictions allowed a clear telnet path in from home. Compounding username and passwords that were all the same for every employee. I didn't change a thing, just LOLed and told someone. Bad mistake.
This was the late 90s.Oh well, 2 week suspension and kicked off the computers for less than a year. A nice conference with FBI, police, my parents, IT and school administration. Fun times.I learned my lesson to not talk about such things because their egoes were too fragile.When they decided to give students in their website design class ftp accounts on the district wide web/email server running an ancient version of Debian, they didn't disable the shell, just added a login script to a menu for pine, etc. for people who telnetted in, which I'm sure the sysadmin was proud of. However, a few fast CTRL-C's broke out of his script menu loop and got me a shell, and they didn't shadow protect their password files. Ran it through john the ripper and had half the district's e-mail passwords in a default dictionary file including the root pw in a few minutes. LOLed and never told anyone about that.Good times, the 90s....
|
Productivity porn
|
Hustle and grind. Create 7 streams of income. Work 18 hour days - anything less and you're a loser destined for mediocrity. Read 5 books a week. Start trading stocks and crypto. Take cold showers, hit the gym. Optimize your schedule, log every minute spent. Ditch your loser friends and only hang out with likeminded - success breeds success. Sigma grindset. Moon or bust. If you're not worth $1 million liquid before 30, cut off your finger and work even harder. Analyze your productivity and always look for places to cut fat.
|
Stable Diffusion Public Release
|
The most interesting part, to me, of a release like this is the amount of "please don't abuse this technology" pleading. No licence will ever stop people from doing things that the licence says they can't. There will always be someone who digs into the internals and makes a version that does not respect your hopes and dreams. It's going to be bad.As I see it, within a couple years this tech will be so widespread and ubiquitous that you can fully expect your asshole friends to grab a dozen photos of you from Facebook and then make a hyperrealistic pornographic image of you with a gorilla[0]. Pandora's box is open, and you cannot put the technology back once it's out there.You can't simply pass laws against it because every country has its own laws and people in other places will just do whatever it is you can't do here.And it's only going to get better/worse. Video will follow soon enough, as the tech improves. Politics will be influenced. You can't trust anything you see anymore (if you even could before, since Photoshop became readily available).Why bother asking people not to? I guess if it helps you sleep at night that you tried, I guess?[0]A gorilla if you're lucky, to be honest.
|
Visual effects for the Indian blockbuster “RRR”
|
Who cares if they used Blender or Maya. As an Indian (and a South Indian at that), I must say I’m embarrassed at the level of attention this movie is getting for its over the top use of cringey special effects. There are so many other worthwhile Indian films to watch and enjoy.
|
UK: Food inflation rises to 18.2% as it hits highest rate in over 45 years
|
As a person living in the UK, I have definitely noticed a considerable rise in unit prices. One of many examples is that a loaf of my favourite bread increased from £3 to £4 recently, which was a shocker. Toilet roll prices, as ever what the news loves to talk about, has exploded, increasing by around 70% since 2020 by my anecdotal observation.A sad thought I have about inflation is the fact that it is, wittingly or not, a weapon wielded by the rich against the middle and lower classes. In an inflationary economy, the winners are rich who have valuable assets whose value skyrocket - think real estate, businesses, etc.The lower classes rely on A) proportionately much more on fiat, i.e. monthly paycheck going into current and savings account, and B) a blue-collar job, the wage of which always lags further behind inflation than white-collar jobs.Those two factors combined means that the lower classes get absolutely battered, while the rich just sit gleefully as their asset values balloon and pass down wholesale price increases, etc.It's the dark, sinister side of inflation, and I think we are all beginning to see the societal tensions that it is breeding, e.g. endless blue-collar UK worker union strikes, riots, protests, etc.Not saying that it is only one class that is affected, but let's face reality here - the lower class suffers by far the most in this situation.
|
United States loses AAA credit rating from S&P
|
(Reference: http://www.federalbudget.com/)Steps to recovery:1) End all offensive military actions overseas. Finish winding down Iraq and abandon Afghanistan wholesale. These actions have cost several trillion dollars over the last 10 years. We can't get that money back, but we can stop spending more.2) Defense spending is in the top 3 highest budget expenditures. Cut it by 1 third across the board. Maintain important overseas installations such as Japan and Taiwan. Given China's rise, its wise long-term to keep a presence in the region. Scale back deployments in Europe unless Russia still is still a threat to western Europe.3) The most amount of money the U.S. spends is Health and Human Services. The U.S. health system is a fucking mess. Somehow we spend the most on healthcare and get some of the worst societal benefits out of any industrialized country. I don't have an answer here, but it likely involves completely tearing down the existing system to its nuts and bolts and building it back up. I'd love to hear ideas on this point from others that know more about it.4) Social Security is the other one. My mom relies on it, so does a lot of my family. We're from meager backgrounds and traditionally have come from poorer parts of the nation. That being said, cut it.When I look at my paycheck and see that upwards of 40% of my income is being sucked out by the government and used more for things I oppose than things I support (e.g. war spending versus scientific investment) it pisses me right off.Yes, I have heard the naive argument "But taxes are there to run the things you use like roads and government services that you use every day". This is true only in part. Yup, we need an army. Yup, we need local police. Yup, we need roads. Yup, we need a justice system. But it doesn't take trillions of dollars a year to run those things.The government shouldn't interfere with business like propping up failing business models. It should work to make sure that business plays fair, i.e. anti-monopoly or collusion, etc.I'm more liberal than conservative, and definitely not one of these people that wants business to have free-reign over everything. But there are bottom lines that we have crossed and need to back off.
|
Mexican Newspaper Shuts Down, Saying It Is Too Dangerous to Continue
|
I truly love the country of México - I have spent a large periods of time there for the climate, as a place to work and have a wonderful life, away from the chills of winter. I often thought about making a permanent relocation, but this terror is too real and I found myself living in constant anxiety of my friends and colleagues being in danger, and the fear of speaking your mind weighs on you after a while. I am saddened because the people, the food, the weather, the architecture (particularly D.F.) makes for a crazy, exciting mix where the wealth and treasure of history and (deserved) national pride contrasts with poverty and the political and social conservatism that goes alongside. México: may things improve for you, though I really have no idea how that will happen.
|
How to hack a turned-off computer, or running unsigned code in Intel ME
|
In case you haven't already used the following, please note that the NSA had an undocumented "backdoor" included which "disables" the ME. (Man, oh man, I wish I was making this stuff up.)http://blog.ptsecurity.com/2017/08/disabling-intel-me.htmlI put quotes around "disables" because the ME is not fully disabled. The blog's analysis does show how it is in a "safe" state, i.e. forced to ignore the outside world very early in its code path. Also, not likely to brick your computer, assuming unscrewing your case and using a SPI flash programmer hasn't already bricked your computer.Edit: "backdoor" in quotes too.
|
Using FOIA Data and Unix to halve major source of parking tickets
|
This is awesome. Question though: how is producing license plate data like this not a disallowed privacy invasion? It seems like you could totally track who's parking where and potentially do nasty stuff, if you know (say) someone well-off whom you don't like and who doesn't seem to mind getting tickets on a regular basis.
|
European Parliament approves copyright reform
|
This will be an unpopular perspective on the matter, so you have been warned: Article 13 only affects for-profit platforms that host and share copyrighted material. These platforms are run by big corporations that turn a huge profit by way of selling your personal data, violating your privacy, and having a persuasive (addictive) design in order to glue you to the screen so they can maximize their ad revenue, dismissing any human cost those practices entail.You want to regain your freedom? Use not-for-profit, decentralized platforms instead. You can use Mastodon [0] instead of Twitter, PeerTube [1] instead of YouTube, Aether [2] instead of reddit, etcetera. Other interesting P2P projects are DAT's Beaker Browser [3], and ZeroNet [4]. None of those will have problems with Article 13.[0] https://mastodon.social
[1] https://joinpeertube.org
[2] https://getaether.net
[3] https://beakerbrowser.com/
[4] https://zeronet.io/EDIT: "Such [content-sharing] services should not include services that have a main purpose other than that of enabling users to upload and share a large amount of copyright-protected content with the purpose of obtaining profit from that activity." This is from page 62 of the document wherein Article 13/17 is to be found.
|
Pricing niche products
|
I have a $600+ keyboard so I'm a part of this hobby. However, only a part of this can be explained by the expense of manufacturing at a small scale. The hobby fully embraces the drawbacks of the small scale and intentionally does nothing to try to improve it because the exclusivity drives prices up to an insane point.A typical group buy for a popular case sells out in minutes or days time after time. Clearly some of the exclusivity is artificial.An aluminum case that costs $300 is often 99% as nice as one for $1000.There are designers lauded as geniuses that make cases that are almost identical to generic ones. It might have some kind of logo or inlay or a different color of anodized aluminum. Aftermarket they'll be worth insane amounts of money.And with keycaps pretty much the entire thing is artificial exclusivity. $300-400 aftermarket for a set of keycaps is not unheard of.There's nothing wrong with any of this, but as a happy participant I have to say the diminishing returns show up hard and fast in this hobby. Its all about fashion.My $60 GMMK, with 20 minutes of easy modifications, a $30 set of keycaps, and a $90 set of healios switches was the smoothest linear keyboard I've ever used.If you want clicky, the same setup with a $30 set of Box Jade switches will get most people the best keyboard they've ever used. Mx blues feel like rubber domes afterwards.Interesfing article that talks about some of this. I recommend reading it.Why did I pay $600+? I wanted an Ergodox split keyboard with helios switches + backlighting, to see if my wrists would feel better, and I didn't think I was ready to build a kit that required soldering.My Keycaps cost 170 of that. They are modelled after the Space Cadet keyboard from an old LISP Machine. This was uneccessary obviously but I liked them.
|
Jepsen: PostgreSQL 12.3
|
By the way: where does the Jepsen name come from?I have wondered more than once and my browsing and searching skills are failing me on this one.Edit: The closest link I can find is "Call me maybe" but I am not able to find a causation or even a direct link or mention for now.
|
On Trouser Pockets
|
The dismissiveness in this thread is unreal. From the comments you'd think the article only had one sentence insulting the Sanctity of Cargo Pants. If you happily wear baggy jeans or cargo pants, these are not for you and you don't have the problem they solve.It's an elegant solution to wear slim fitted pants without awful hip pocket bulges. Cargo pants are not the solution here, as they are huge and baggy and the pockets flop around with anything in them.I'd love to try these.
|
Uber and Lyft ordered by California judge to classify drivers as employees
|
It strikes me that these articles are always biased in the direction of the benefits of being an employee. I have several friends that actively choose to be contractors because they prefer the (legally protected) flexibility to decide their own hours, among other things. It's a personal decision, and there are upsides and downsides in both directions.Sure - some (non-insignificant) portion of Uber and Lyft drivers would like to be employees. But surely some (also non-insignificant) portion would prefer to be contractors for Uber and Lyft and keep the legal protections that come with that.These articles always make it seem like it's a no-brainer win for all drivers no matter what, but it's never seemed so clear cut to me.
|
Tokio 1.0 – async runtime for Rust
|
I don't really get these modern async APIs. In languages like Javascript I thought they only made sense because JS interpreters are (historically) single-threaded, so you really have no choice but async to express some concepts. Fine.But in Rust you can just spawn threads, share data through channels or mutexes, use OS-provided async IO primitives to poll file descriptors and do event-driven programming etc...I tried looking into Tokio a little while ago and I found that it led to some incredibly complicated, abstracted, hard to think about code for stuff I usually implement (IMO) much more simply with a basic event loop and non-blocking IO for instance.I'm sure async can get the upper hand when you have a huge number of very small tasks running concurrently because that's generally where OS-driven parallelism tends to suffer but is it such a common scenario? That sounds like premature optimization in many situations IMO. Unless you actually think that async code is more expressive and easy to read and write than basic event loops, but then you must be a lot smarter than I am because I have to take an aspirin every time I need to dig into async-heavy code.I guess I'm trying to understand if it's me who's missing something, or if it's web-oriented developers who are trying to bring their favourite type of proverbial hammer to system development.
|
Request for comments regarding topics to be discussed at Dark Patterns workshop
|
The worst one is probably trying to make it hard for users to stop paying for a service, like cancelling a subscription. That shit should be punishable by literal prison time.
|
Show HN: Print a WiFi Login Card
|
Asking as a person who understands the fundamentals of all of the technologies involved but is horrified by much of what goes on in the minds of today's web developers and designers, what motivates the decision to make this repo use make, docker, yarn, npx, nginx, react, and jest rather than a bit of static HTML and css and something like qrjs2.js or VanillaQR.js with a simple canvas or datauri update in onInput?
|
uBlacklist: Blocks specific sites from appearing in Google search results
|
Some basic filters for stuff that pops up all the time and is never what I'm looking for:/.pinterest.\..//.torrent.\..//.spankbang.\..//.mp3.\..//.proxy.\..//.block.\..//.addiction.\..//.recovery.\..//.detox.\..//.clinic.\..//.rehab.\..//.rarbg.\..//.hydra.\..//.123.\..//.stock.\..//.linkedin.\..//.subtitle.\..//.shopify.\..//.dreamstime.\..//.depositphotos.\..//^(m|mobile|it|es|ja|fr|pl|at|ru)\.\w./Also recommend TLD filters:/.\.(tk|photo|dev|page|science|ninja|monster|st|cricket|store|website|help|bg|party|work|xyz|link|camera|computer|click|cc|club|pw|space|info|rocks|review|faith|date|win|racing|site|online|tech|news|life|design|nyc|guru|photography|global|today|solutions|media|world|biz|gq|rest|ga|casa|buzz|cam|ml|fit|ly|it|vip|php|pl|ru|app|name|tr|asia|surf|top|cf|tw|uz|am|krd|is|cz|pt|pk|cl|il|in|hu|hr|si|ee|bid|vn|kw|ro|mx|me|market|nu|how|red|guide|mobi|cafe|tn|xxx|icu|fun|pro|desi|id|live|one|ir|forsale)\/(.*)/(modify for your personal needs, it'll save you many, many hours in the long term)
|
Coinbase is reportedly selling geolocation data to ICE
|
Crypto's biggest friction point imo has been that people are used to interacting [primarily with centralized services. Average people don't want to manage their own crypto wallet because they aren't used to being the sole person responsible for managing things like that. They don't want all their money to be tied to a single computer, or QR code, or device, they want it tied to an account held by a big company, where all they have to do is prove who they are to access their stuff.
Because of this habit it feels like decentralized services will always end up as a collection of siloed centralized services. And with centralized services you get things like this data selling. Unless there's a paradigm shift in how non-technical people interact with decentralized services things like this are going to keep happening. That said, they're saying they're only providing publicly available data to ICE, but if it's publicly available and non-identifiable, why does ICE even need it, and why wouldn't they be able to get it themselves? (I'm actually asking, if you know I'd love to hear).
|
RavynOS – Finesse of macOS, freedom of FreeBSD
|
Ex graphic designer here, but don't (and never have) used Mac. I highly respect this project and initiative, and the following is more a commentary on my own reaction than your product.I read the title--finesse of MacOS. I open the link, and the first thing I see at the top is the circular raven logo vertically misaligned with the header on mobile.That made me think, okay let's try desktop version instead, so I switched to desktop render (still on mobile browser) -- this time the logo is vertically aligned but the padding / margin on top and bottom are lower than on the left.This is of course nitpicking in the larger scheme of things--I haven't tried the OS, but the screenshots look great and definitely look like MacOS. However, with the title setting up expectations and the first impression being of a misaligned logo made me (unfairly) dismiss the project since I felt you were trying to claim a level of finesse that might not be there.I don't use Linux, so I'll never really use this product, but it's interesting to me--why do people / projects/teams (in general--not just this product) try to emulate the "finesse" of Apple products? To me, it sets up unrealistic expectations from that product, and I might dismiss an otherwise excellent solution if it doesn't live up to that comparison.
|
Sam Zeloof and Jim Keller start a new semiconductor fab
|
Judging from [1], Sam Zeloof's plan might include using electron beam lithography, which scans an electron beam over a wafer surface, instead of normal photolithography. This can get high resolution (10nm) comparable with EUV, and could theoretically be built out of a hacked scanning electron microscope. Photolithography is the step that limits fabrication size, so e-beam litho allows cheap transistors comparable with state-of-the-art.The main problem is e-beam litho is extremely slow. It might take ~1 day to do a single photolithography step for a 1x1cm chip, whereas an EUV machine can pattern a 300mm diameter silicon wafer in Maybe that's enough for extremely-low-volume production?[1] https://mobile.twitter.com/szeloof/status/154993704406717235...
|
Semantic UI
|
I've always found it ironic that this library calls itself "Semantic UI" but doesn't follow the practice of semantic HTML/classes[0]. W3C suggests[1] that classes should be used for semantic roles (e.g. "warning", "news", "footer"), rather than for display ("left", "angle", "small" -- examples taken from Semantic UI's docs). So instead of giving a button the class of "button" it would be better to give it a class such as "download-book." The benefit of this is when it comes time to redesign parts of a site, you only have to touch your stylesheets instead of manipulating both the stylesheets and HTML. That is, so we don't fall into the old habits of what amounts to using tags.0. https://css-tricks.com/semantic-class-names/1. https://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/goodclassnames
|
Demon-Haunted World
|
Doctorow mentions the cases where a printer company has made their software lie about how much ink was left in a cartridge to make consumers replace them more often. I always wondered why a manufacturer would want to do that. I mean, I understand the motive of making consumers buy ink more often, but from the manufacturer's point of view, why would they want to throw perfectly good ink away? Colour ink isn't as expensive to manufacture as they like to claim but it's still worth something. Why didn't they just put less ink in the cartridge to begin with (and maybe lie about how much was in it), instead of lying about how much was left toward the end of its life and throwing ink away?
|
Anatomy of a Killing
|
A brilliant piece of work to place the location.On the other hand, this seems to be...below...the BBC:"The government statement makes clear that all these men enjoy the presumption of innocence, and that they will be given a fair trial.""The two women killed outside Zelevet received no trial at all."No presumption of innocence was extended to the children who died with them."
|
Amazon raises minimum wage to $15 for all US employees
|
>In addition, the company also pledges its public policy team will lobby for an increase to the federal minimum wage from $7.25 — it doesn’t identify a specific wage that it’s targeting, but instead says, “We believe $7.25 is too low. We would look to Congress to decide the parameters of a new, higher federal minimum wage.”I'm going to take a wild guess and assume it will be $15/hour. That way they'll get to look progressive for adopting this wage early, while mitigating their competitive disadvantage by forcing every other company to raise their wages too eventually.
|
Hubble is back
|
“Last week the operations team commanded Hubble to perform numerous maneuvers, or turns, and switched the gyro between different operational modes, which successfully cleared what was believed to be blockage between components inside the gyro”And here I am on Earth, barely capable of debugging JavaScript code.
|
Coffee Is Hard
|
As a geek and a fan of 80s-90s PC games (not just Sierra but also LucasArts adventure games and so on), this was a super entertaining read on its own; but I also enjoyed some of these insights about life in general from it:> Living is mostly a series of repetitive and unrelated tasks. It makes sense that the most tedious things to code are the tedious things that just have to be done. There are no life lessons or gymnastic skills involved in doing dishes, there’s no underlying theory of housework that will reveal itself after a thousand vacuum cleanings. Making coffee is a boring sequence of steps people feel stupid for getting wrong, even though they’re statistically doomed to screw it up now and then. The hard parts of of life are driving to work, eating properly, flossing, ....Perhaps I found it particular insightful because I just became a parent a year ago. Prior to this, I thought I had optimized my life so well that most tedious work were gone from my life; with the peak being having switched to remote work and not having to even commute anymore.Then I became a parent, and had to come to terms again with having to do a long series of repetitive and routine work every day -- washing bottles, dishes, changing diapers, etc. It was a bit of a cultural shock to my system since over the past 10 years I had slowly gotten used to / gradually removed or optimized aspects that are frictions / repetitiveness / tedious routines from my life; and suddenly it's 10x of it all coming back. Over the past year, I've come to realize this is what life is, which is exactly as the author said.
|
0.30000000000000004
|
I remember in college when we learned about this and I had the thought, "Why don't we just store the numerator and denominator?", and threw together a little C++ class complete with (then novel, to me) operator-overloads, which implemented the concept. I felt very proud of myself. Then years later I learned that it's a thing people actually use: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_data_type
|
WireGuard 1.0 for Linux 5.6
|
Very exciting! Does anyone know a good howto or a tutorial about it?
|
YouTube bans coronavirus-related content that directly contradicts WHO advice
|
Current WHO advice: "If you are healthy, you only need to wear a mask if you are taking care of a person with COVID-19." [0]Where we live, due to local laws, we are now obliged to wear a mask to go shopping. Can one discuss that on YouTube, or would one be contradicting the WHO?I fear there isn't "one truth" out there, despite the content providers' and fact-checkers' attempts :(We keep trying to encourage our kids to ask good questions, then I see what's happening out there in the world, and I wonder when the grown-ups are going to start asking good questions...[0] https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2...
|
Vue.js 3
|
Vue is the only one of the most popular 3 frameworks that can easily be used on a minimal basis to sort of "spruce up" old applications by selectively adding it here and there in the templates.Seems like they should try more marketing and community outreach toward that end.Gradual adoption is a feature / selling point not many web development frameworks can claim.
|
Why is Apple's M1 chip so fast?
|
Unlike what has been said on Twitter the answer to why the M1 is fast isn’t due to technical tricks, but due to Apple throwing a lot of hardware at the problem.The M1 is really wide (8 wide decode) and has a lot of execution units. It has a huge 630 deep reorder buffer to keep them all filled, multiple large caches and a lot of memory bandwidth.It is just a monster of a chip, well designed balanced and executed.BTW this isn’t really new. Apple has been making incremental progress year by year on these processor for their A-series chips. Just nobody believed those Geekbench benchmarks showing that in short benchmarks your phone could be faster than your laptop. Well turns out that given the right cooling solution those benchmarks were accurate.Anandtech has a wonderful deep dive into the processor architecture.https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de...Edit: I didn’t mean to disparage Apple or the M1 by saying that Apple threw hardware at the problem. That Apple was able to keep power low with such a wide chip is extremely impressive and speaks to how finely tuned the chip is. I was trying to say that Apple got the results they did the hard way by advancing every aspect of the chip.
|
Normalized crash data shows Autopilot is much less safe than Tesla claims
|
I have felt since day 1 that "autopilot is better than the average driver!" is the most misleading fact/statistic in the industry.The "average driver" involved in an accident includes drunk drivers, road ragers, habitual speeders, teenagers, people driving in bad conditions (rain, snow), people driving without sleep and several other risky groups that most people buying Teslas aren't part of. To be worth it, the car has to reduce my personal accident risk under the conditions I usually drive, otherwise I prefer to keep my own hands behind the wheel over handing over control to an algorithm.
|
Zotero 6
|
The only thing holding me back from using Zotero is that, afaik, you need to use a Zotero account to reliably sync metadata between devices (the Zotero Data Server isn't supported). I wish it was easier to self-host; there's no reason for me to interact with their servers.It's always a disappointment to find otherwise great open source projects that have key components that deny privacy.
|
The computers used to do 3D animation for Final Fantasy VII in 1996
|
Ah yes, good ol' SGI, it always brings a smile to my face reading these old war stories.I wish we could get some insight on the development of the first successful 3D game on PC, Quake by I'd software as there's a famous picture of John Carmack sitting in front of some SGI workstation with a monitor with a resolution ox 1920*1080( in 1995!)Also, SGI powered most VFX Studios of that era, so many great movies went through those machines before ending up on the big screen.It's insane how quickly 3dfx, Nvidia and Intel X86 consumer hardware made SGI workstations overpriced and completely obsolete within the span of just a few years. The '90's were a blast.But still, I'm sad to see SGI go, as their funky shaped and brightly colored workstations and monitors had the best industrial design[1] in an era of depressing beige, grey or black square boxes.[1] https://preview.redd.it/tt3ziuwt98o31.jpg?auto=webp&s=e5cc61...
|
ThumbHash: A better compact image placeholder hash
|
I hate these blurry image thumbnails, much prefer some sort of hole, and just wait for a better thumbnail (look at youtube for this, or basically any site). I'd much rather see engineers spending more time making the thumbnails load faster (improving their backend throughput, precache thumbnails, better compression, etc). The blurry thumbnails have 2 issues 1) trick person into thinking they're loaded, especially if there's a flicker before the blurry thumbnails are displayed!!! so then the brain has to double back and look at the new image. 2) have a meaning that content is blocked from viewing
|
When Your Former Boss Sues You for Starting a Startup
|
My first instinct is to congratulate Shred for standing up to the big bully. That was really almost what I posted.But pick apart Shred's note, and really it's an emotional appeal based on two ideas:1. That the sole test of stealing ideas is source code that has been copied verbatim.2. That the only possible secrets of Smule are features implemented in released products.These are pretty weak legs to stand on. They're actually preposterous.Lawyers will tell you that it's really hard to prove theft in court without a smoking gun like "stolen source code", and the chances are, if they've stolen ideas in other ways, they will probably get away with it.Almost certainly, Shred's lawyers are playing a key strategy role in this PR campaign.So my advice is to be wary of emotional appeals from either side of litigation. We don't know what happened, and we learn less than we think from these notes.ps. Yes I read the remarks in Business Insider too. I'm not advocating that Smule is the innocent party here. Most likely this is some bullshit pissing contest with 0 innocent parties.
|
Polymagnets
|
https://youtu.be/IANBoybVApQ?t=2m1s
|
Show HN: Termtosvg – Record terminal sessions as SVG animations
|
The example animation looks broken in Safari (including Tech Preview 59), works in Chrome 67 (of course), and in Firefox 61.[Edit: This seems to be a macOS/driver bug affecting only some models]
|
Eloquent JavaScript 3rd Edition (2018)
|
I would consider myself pretty close to an expert with JavaScript. I've been using it for 5 years professionally, currently use ES2020. Fairly familiar with Node 12, V8, etc. But I'm always worried about those situations where you dont know what you dont know. This might sound strange, but would anyone recommend any reading material or blogs for someone at my level?
|
Large Hadron Collider discovers three new exotic particles
|
I had a great conversation this evening with a marine biologist studying the recent collapse of a 100,000 sq km California kelp forest. The grants for the science of ecosystem stewardship are in the 10k-50k$ range.Over the past few years, something killed over 5 billion giant starfish and “science” has no idea what did it. Without the starfish, the sea urchin population exploded, turning kelp forest into desert.I love the LHC. But we need to seriously grow the science pie and prioritize the science of ecosystem collapse and management. There simply aren’t enough trained scientists.
|
NASA finds super-emitters of methane
|
Will be interesting to see how this capability unfolds. They’ve proven this can be done using an instrument not even designed for the task. A specialized instrument may be able to detect other greenhouse emissions. Imagine the kind of high resolution accountability that might be possible. But does the political will exist in the US to expose ourselves that way? Our political donors that way? Our country as one of the largest emitters?
|
Music theory for nerds
|
I've skimmed a lot of articles on music "theory" but none of them provide anything like what I'm looking for. A music theory should explain:1. Why do we like pieces when played forward but not backward or inverted?2. Why do certain sounds evoke certain emotions?3. How could you write a program to pick out music that people find especially good (versus music that has surface similarities)?In other words, why does a particular sequence of sounds A, B, C lead to a mental state M that has particular internal qualities?
|
More Than a Million Pro-Repeal Net Neutrality Comments Were Likely Faked
|
FCC has explicitly said that they have ignored any opinion comments. They have only considered comments which bring new facts or a legal opinion. So the fact that many comments were faked is irrelevant anyway.
|
How I recorded user behaviour on my competitor’s websites
|
I’d like to defend this guy. What he is doing is testing the trust mechanism.If he went to Google and said ‘I think the trust mechanism is broken’ Google would say: ‘We know, that’s why we are pushing to move everyone to https.’‘That isn’t enough. The padlock on the https page gives users a false sense of security.’‘We don’t agree with that. Where’s your data?’Google wouldn’t have accepted this. They have pushed full HTTPS hard, and suggesting that it has a negative consequence is unacceptable to them.His experiment has proven the problem. How else could it have been demonstrated?Ideally this would have been a large scale study done by academics. But this guy doesn’t have those resources. Nobody is going to fund this research.The depressing thing here is that everybody is more interested in calling this guy a jerk than dealing with the issues he has raised.Trust on the internet is broken. This guy did it with ease. Imagine what is being done by those who want to scam
millions?But yeh, call him a jerk and then you can bury your unease beneath a big pile of outrage. It’s fine. Fine. He’s a jerk.
|
Ask HN: Advice for a new and inexperienced tech lead?
|
Few things I would like to say:It will no longer be about you. It will all be about your team. Make sure you create a great team, nurture them, train them, teach them how to think critically (in doing so yourself).Ask your team to write out everything they plan to do before they actually do it. Reason with them on what they wrote and what approach decisions they plan to take. Teach them to think long term. Writing before actually doing the task helps get a lot of clarity to them and also helps you in assessing what they were planning to build. (It also makes for a great log of what we did and why we did it. This will be the product documentation for your entire product tomorrow.)Treat your team like your family. Do not stress them out with too much work. Be respectful of their time and effort. Give them breaks post completion of major tasks. Every second that you let them rest and breathe is a second you have invested in the future. They will recharge and put their best in the next task.You have a tough job of standing up for the right long-term tech decisions. Stay loyal to your product. Work for your product - not your company. Take tough tech decisions that will stand for the long term stability and robustness of your product. But occasionally make allowance for your business team too.Sometimes your teammates might shy away from a big daunting challenge - step in and work side by side with them to tackle it. But do this infrequently.There is a lot to add to the above list but in general the idea is to help your teammates grow, help them think critically, stand for your product - make the tough calls.All the best!
|
Real-time, in-camera background compositing in The Mandalorian
|
Hi all, really cool that you have taken an interest in this project, a lot of your comments below are very insightful and interesting. I work on the team that deploys this tech on set. We focus on how the video signals get from the video output servers to the LED surfaces, coordinating how we deal with tracking methods, photogrammetry, signal delivery, operator controls and the infrastructure that supports all of this. As noted in some of the comments, the VFX industry solved tracking with mocap suits a long time ago for the post-production process. What we are exploring now is how we can leverage new technology, hardware, and workflows to move some of the post-production processes into the pre-production and production (main/secondary unit photography) stages.If you are interested in checking out another LED volume setup, my team also worked on First Man last year. This clip shows a little more of how we assemble these LED surfaces as well as a bit of how we use custom integrations to interface with mechanical automation systems. [https://vimeo.com/309382367]
|
Belarus diverts Ryanair flight to arrest journalist
|
Why does this post have two comments but over 700 upvotes?
|
Poisson's Equation
|
I could have used this 32(!) years ago when I was struggling in college. (This and 3b1b.)It amazes me just how many key topics were so inaccessible to the majority of the class at engineering school. I base this on observations from group study sessions and the hyper-aggressive test curves.I knew lots of people who never got the hang of div/grad/curl, or a Jacobians, or eignenvectors, or Z-transforms... These are key engineering concepts, you'd think colleges would bend over backwards to make sure these concepts are learned as succinctly as possible rather than add a curve to a test that makes a 23 out of 100 an "A" grade.I'm digressing, and complaining, but the counter argument has always been: you're not supposed to learn everything in college, you're supposed to learn how to learn. Sure, right, but who has time to keep learning advanced calculus after college? (Well, I still study math & physics for fun, but over the course of decades, not years.) Not being able to see the world through these lenses I think means missing key engineering perspectives and relationships.Anyway, very well written article.
|
We handle 80TB and 5M page views a month for under $400
|
I was running www.Photopea.com with 10M page views a month for $40 a year.Now, I upgraded to $60 a month. I never used any CDN.
|
Thank You, Valve
|
I dig most of this article, and I do applaud the work Valve is doing for the Linux gaming ecosystem, but I draw a line at supporting kernel level anti-cheat drivers. That trend in gaming bothers me to no end, and I refuse to knowingly install a game that features one.The presence of 15 year old script kiddies using aimbots does NOT IN ANY WAY justify having kernel level control over my machine, Linux or otherwise. Valve, and every other company that contributes to gaming in general, kindly stay the fuck out of our kernels.EDIT: I feel a few folks in the comments are getting mixed up between the concepts of DRM and kernel-level anti-cheat drivers. DRM is what keeps folks from pirating software, as well as diminishing the freedom of where and how you can install the software. It sucks, but I understand why it exists, and that isn't what I'm talking about hereKernel-level drivers, on the other hand, are drivers that run outside your sphere of influence (so-called user-space) and exist outside the checks and balances of your operating system that keep programs from doing whatever the hell they please.Add on the fact that these programs are black boxes by design, and all of the sudden a company essentially has free reign to do whatever they want with your machine under your nose. This is dangerous and unacceptable.
|
GitHub user sends notification to 400k users
|
There are quite a few other, uh, interesting PRs for that repo.https://github.com/EpicGames/Signup/pullshttps://github.com/EpicGames/Signup/pull/10/fileshttps://github.com/EpicGames/Signup/pull/18/filesWhat is going on?
|
How much health insurers pay for almost everything is about to go public
|
I'm one of the co-founders of Turquoise Health, mentioned in the article here. We've been downloading and parsing this data all day. It's a really big deal in the industry that the prices that insurance companies pay doctors are now being shared publicly. It will have all sorts of positive impacts over time, hopefully making rate negotiations more consistent and fair between different insurance plans. Right now, 10x differences in prices paid for the same healthcare service from the same doctor between insurance plans is not uncommon.
|
Congress.gov API
|
Not directly related, but I dream of a future where laws are published on GIT. New laws, or updates get pull requested, approval is voted on, then merged to master.
|
It's time to halt starting any new projects in C/C++
|
I tried Rust about five years ago and I had trouble expressing cyclic data structures because there is no clear "owner" in a cyclic data structure. The "safe" solution recommended by the rustaceans was to use integers as references to the data in a vec or hashmap. I was rather put off by this: Instead of juggling pointers I was juggling integers. It made the code harder to debug and find logic errors. At least when I was troubleshooting C I could rely on the debugger to break on a bad pointer, but finding where an integer became "bad" was more time consuming.The borrow checker worked fine when all I needed to do was pass data up and down the callstack, but anything beyond that was difficult or impossible to express. Has the borrow checker become smarter since then? At the time I was very put off.
|
Avoiding homework with code and getting caught
|
Everyone has to start somewhere. These young lads “worked around” couple of educational platforms. 35 years ago I was hex dumping ZX Spectrum game saves and disassembling the program files to get more lives, infinite lives or just more ammo or whatever. That seemed easier and more interesting than getting good at games themselves.I sometimes wonder if that kind of “not approved” intellectual curiosity can be used to augment education. Sort of like having old school alarm clocks that are designed to be disassembled.
|
The image in this post displays its own MD5 hash
|
I keep imagining the fantasy scenario where some day I stumble on a software download or repo or something. Nothing special, no fanfare, just a random piece of code to do some random task.Inside the repo or zip, is a simple text manifest file. The file has some bog standard readme stuff and then lists all the files and their hashes, you know, so you can check nothing's corrupted whatnot.But in that list of files, is a line item for the manifest file itself and along with its own hash! Something that on the surface looks completely innocuous but becomes profoundly impressive as you ponder it.Kind of a low-key [fridge brilliance](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FridgeBrilliance) kind of flex.[Bonus] I'm also reminded of this paper: https://vision.cornell.edu/se3/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/ge...
|
Musk’s first email to Twitter staff ends remote work
|
Let's say you run a company and you want to reduce staff. Let's also say you want to make an unpopular decision (or multiple unpopular decisions) that you know will drive a certain percentage of your staff to leave the company. Wouldn't it make the most sense to announce those decisions before making layoffs? Let people self select whether they want to stay and work for you and then make your layoffs after to ensure all teams are properly staffed. Instead, Musk has already laid people off to the point that they are trying to hire back people previously laid off and current employees are sleeping in the office. Now he is pushing even more people out the door with no control over what teams will be hurt the hardest.
|
Show HN: I spent 2 years building a personal finance simulator
|
"ProjectionLab has no link to your real financial accounts and the data you enter stays in your browser unless you choose otherwise. "I don't see why this would be a positive? I'd love an alternative to Personal Capital (since it got bought out), but without a direct connection to my banks/creditcards/etc, that connection just ends up being less secure.
|
PHP: A fractal of bad design
|
If this one thing that annoys me on HN it's the pervasive anti-PHP snobbery. A selection from the OP:> Because of the @, the warning about the non-existent file won’t be printed.So your complaint is that when you use @ to suppress an error it... suppresses the error?> The language is full of global and implicit state."Global" is one of those dogmatic points. Nothing is truly "global" in PHP. The "global" in PHP just means it is request-scoped (ignoring $_SESSION, which is explicit anyway).Do people complain about request-scoped data in any other language? No. The PHP haters just decide to hate this largely due to the (somewhat incorrect) label of "global".> There is no threading support whatsoever.That's a good thing. It forces you to use async HTTP programming or something like beanstalk, both of which are better than the complexity of threading.> array_search, strpos, and similar functions return 0 if they find the needle at position zero, but false if they don’t find it at all.So, it's a problem that array_search returns 0 when something is at... position 0? And returning false is just a sentinel value, much like functions in other languages might return -1. So what?> In, say, Python, the equivalent .index methods will raise an exception if the item isn’t found.I, for one, hate throwing an exception when an item isn't found. This sucks: try:
index = a_list.index(a_value)
except ValueError:
# do something
- If you use FALSE as an index, or do much of anything with it except compare with ===, PHP will silently convert it to 0 for youYes, you have to use --- and basically understand that otherwise 0 == false. So what? In C/C++ you also have to remember to use == not -.> [] cannot slice; it only retrieves individual elements.Much like Java/C/C++. PHP has array_slice() if you want it.It's since been redacted but the OP originally claimed that Facebook doesn't really use PHP (because, hey, that fits his world view).Look, I could go on but really what's the point? Haters gonna hate.Sure it would've been nice if PHP had been consistent with, say, parameter ordering (needle, haystack vs haystack, needle) and function naming (sometimes using underscore, sometimes not) but really none of that matters. If you use it, you soon remember. Humans are built to understand inconsistent languages. If we weren't, we wouldn't be able to speak to each other.Some like to argue that PHP is a beginner's language. I disagree. I think PHP is a fine language for just throwing something together... if you know what you're doing. Otherwise it's just a recipe for SQL injection and XSS vulnerabilities.A common mistake with PHP is people try and turn it into Java with complicated object frameworks. There is typically lots of hand-wringing about OO'ness.The procedural style is actually very natural for serving HTTP requests. The core of PHP is a stateless core of API functions. This is incredibly useful for keeping resource usage down. Much like the old CGI model, the entire environment is created, used and destroyed on each request.This is a feature not a problem. Anyone who has done Java Web development (with stateful servlets or any derivative) should know this as it is virtually impossible not to have come across resource leakage and concurrency issues at some point. The stateful model, while useful, has a significant cost.I really don't understand this need to complain so vocally about something like this. Possible reasons:- It affirms the OP's sense of superiority somehow;- It's about "street cred" with [Python, Ruby, Node.js, insert other language here]; or- One is so obsessed with "purity" that one spends all one's time complaining about how everything isn't Lisp.Use it or not. I don't care. If you're not going to use it, why complain about it? If you are using it, what does the public snobbery (which is really adding nothing new to all the other PHP rants) really add?I'm a big fan of pragmatism and the fact is that 4/20 of the most visited sites on the Internet are written in PHP.EDIT: /sigh/ I get the inevitable "you must be a PHP programmer" retort (like that's actually a retort and not just more snobbery). For the record, I've only used PHP for ~6 months. My main experience is Java (~14 years), Python (~2 years), C (~5 years) and C++ (~4 years).
|
Show HN: My x86 emulator written in JavaScript
|
I want to write an emulator as a learning experience. Any tips how should I start?
|
Girls and Software
|
>Parents are warned to keep kids off the computerThis point cannot be overstated. I'd never have been a hacker without vast quantities of unsupervised, unfiltered internet time around age 9-12.The largest enabling step for me was when I got my own laptop which I was free to break (software-wise) and free to take into my room so I could focus away from the distracting noises of the kitchen/living room.Much of even the HN community would consider this irresponsible parenting. Probably even my parents wouldn't have let a daughter talk to strangers on IRC about something they don't understand. But how else is someone with nontechnical parents supposed to get started?It's sooo much different when it's something you choose to do with your free time, rather than something half-assedly forced on you by parents or school curriculum. Especially to a kid.
|
Stop using tail -f (mostly)
|
This _almost_ touches on the useful part of this:
If you search in less and then put it in follow mode, it continues to highlight the search terms. This is very useful for trapping an exception or webcall in the wild.The downside:
less buffers and tail -f prints directly. On a slow printing log this can cause events to show up slowly, and can cause performance issues on a fast moving log.
If you're piping through a script for processing, tail -f is still the best bet. If you need multiple files, multitail is probably better.
less +F hits a quick+easy operational niche and is available almost everywhere (whereas multitail is not).
|
How to make a friend fast
|
I think I might have permanently damaged my vision with that #FFF on #000 color scheme. I still see text floating in the air.
|
DigitalOcean launches its container service
|
Been a user of DOs beta kubernetes service and it works well.Though I would say the title of the linked article is a bit misleading. It is a Kubernetes as a service, like EKS, GKE and AKS.But not vanilla container service a la ECS, Fargate, the former Docker Cloud, etc.
|
SwiftUI
|
I’m one of the engineers that spearheaded this initiative inside of Apple. I just wanted to thank the HN community—I’ve been reading HN for 10 years now and it’s been formative in my development as a software engineer.If you’re at WWDC stop by the labs and say hi!
|
BBC News launches 'dark web' Tor mirror
|
I know there are good reasons why it's not fully secure, but I'd really like to be able to access `.onion` addresses in my regular browser over TOR and everything else directly as usual. In _this_ I'm not over-worried about the risk of deanonymisation as my aim is on one hand access to resources I don't have access to now and on the other hand legitimisation of TOR as something that anyone could reasonably use, even (or especially!) if they have "nothing to hide".
|
The First Rule of Machine Learning: Start Without Machine Learning
|
I recall attending a technical talk given by a team of senior ML scientists from a prestigious SV firm (that I shall not name here). The talk was given to an audience of scientists at a leading university.The problem was estimating an incoming train speed from an embedded microphone sensor near the train station. The ML scientists used the latest techniques in deep learning to process the acoustic time series. The talk session was two hours long. This project was their showcase.I guess no one in the prestigious ML team knew about the Doppler shift and its closed form expression. Typically taught in a highschool physics class. A simple formula that you can calculate by hand: no need for a GPU cluster.
|
What I learned as a hired consultant to autodidact physicists (2016)
|
> Science writers should be more careful to point out when we are using metaphors.I think she should replace "science writers" with physicists. In my experience, it's when physicists give overflowing and superfluous explanations of things that cause the most trouble, because they are viewed as authorities. Neil deGrasse Tyson, Michio Kaku, Brian Greene, PBS Space Time, and many others. It's interesting, because I once read an interview with Brian Green, and the question was: what career would you have chosen if you weren't a physicist? His answer was both surprising and unsurprising: a Baptist preacher. One should note that he actually has the speaking style of one.It brings up an interesting point in that physics at the highest level sounds almost like what ill-informed amateurs produce. I have degrees in mathematics and some understanding of physics, but I've watched a few lectures of Ed Witten before, and he might as well be just making it all up. I know, it can all be backed out such that it all follows from known mathematics and physics, but one does have to marvel at the similarity, and I think this is what so-called cranks get emboldened by. It makes it worse when physicists use words like "believe".I think physicists have done a poor job explaining that what they do is model building. The models are not reality. What reality is currently lies in the realm of philosophy. The models physicists build are simply our best descriptions based on what we observe (string theory aside). The article gets at this a bit with mentioning metaphors, but it still doesn't drive home the point because she's referring to metaphors of metaphors (i.e., metaphors for the physical models). Once you understanding that physics is about building models that describes what we observe in physical reality, it lowers the barrier of "authority". In that, in some sense, the entire point of physics is often to find out how we're wrong just as much as it is to clarify where we're right. I think many don't understand that when "is" is used in physics, it really means "is modeled by" (or something to that effect).I'm reminded of this scene from one of my favorite movies, A Serious Man: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbzWYjVrvpI
|
SQLite 3 Fiddle
|
I've noticed a large number of stories on HN related to SQLite over the past few weeks. Maybe it's just random or I'm only now just noticing it, but is there some renewed/newfound interest in SQLite lately? If so, what's behind that?
|
DreamWorks releases OpenMoonRay source code
|
i'm curious: what is the incentive for dreamworks to open-source this? surely having exclusive access to a parallel renderer of this quality is a competitive advantage to other studios?
|
Hyundai promises to keep buttons in cars
|
When researching family cars recently, I literally avoided the Honda CR-V just because the AC was controlled via the touch screen.There's a "Climate" button, which brings up a screen on the display where you can turn the aircon on/off, up/down, etc. It's just horrendous. Give me my dials.My worst gripe - which all modern cars have - is the aggressive bluetooth auto-connect. If my wife takes the car, it will automatically connect to my phone in the house and start playing whatever was last playing. If I'm using headphones, it will just pinch the audio from them. I cannot disable this. Drives me absolutely nuts (no pun intended).
|
Diaspora Co-Founder Ilya Zhitomirskiy Passes Away At 21
|
The founders of Diaspora were in a really unenviable position. They started off with a wave of national press as well as solid financial support from grassroot users. As time went on, it became increasingly clear that they would not be able to accomplish the goal they originally set out to do. They had failed. Publicly. This can be very devastating psychologically to someone who has always 'succeeded' in life.I'm not saying this was the case for Ilya, or had any part in his death, but I know for me it would have been hard to swallow. There are many silent founders out there that gave up everything for an unrealized dream in the path to startup success and it has a real toll on psyches.Best wishes to his family & friends.EDIT: This appears to be a very controversial comment. The vote count seems to be oscillating up and down very rapidly. I don't want to make this out to be a discussion about Diaspora, so I won't comment further on that point. But the mental health of founders is a real issue and rarely discussed. Maybe there should be a more open discussion about this issue.
|
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.