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Pixels don’t care
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What a strange claim. "Looking back", he can't help but feel discriminated against due to his height.It couldn't possibly be because of his "no formal eduction, no experience with any big clients", could it?
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Show HN: A tool that transforms your whole list with just one example
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Amazing tool.Feature requests: allow for more than one example. Input:
{"class": "101", "students": 101}
{"class": "201", "students": 80}
{"class": "202", "students": 50}
{"class": "301", "students": 120}
Example:
Class 101 has 101 students
Output:
Class 101 has 101 students
Class 201 has 201 students
Class 202 has 202 students
Class 301 has 301 students
Right now the first line cannot have any ambiguity. This is fixable by reordering, but with large enough data sets I may have some ambiguity in all lines, at different places. Multiple examples would fix that.Again, loved the tool. I can see this going very far, specially with non-technical people.
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Mercury Spill
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It may have cost you $50,000 but you now have +50 karma on HN and rising. Some would say a bargain! ;-]In all seriousness, cool story, glad you're okay, and this makes me think "insurance" as a business needs to be re-thought entirely. How many times has it happened that insurance companies weasel out of paying? Objectively you might think THAT was their primary job.
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German research institutions boycott Elsevier
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The thing is, scientists have a much more powerful tool to stop bad publishers: Don't give them your texts.
And maybe even more important: Don't demand from your applicants that they have published in high impact journals from the very same publishers that make your life hard.That might really change things.Everyone has been complaining about Elsevier for years now. They still have publications and they still seem to have no problem to fill them. That's the problem.
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Whistleblower uncovers London police hacking of journalists and protestors
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London? Why does anyone have an anticipation of privacy in the UK? This is the city with police cameras on every block, surveillance vans, and a prime minister who literally called the privacy of encryption evil.
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Infinite procedurally-generated city with the Wave Function Collapse algorithm
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I imagine a counter strike scenario where the area of engagement is constantly moving throughout this infinite city, so the fight is waged over a constantly changing landscape. Hecka fun or hecka confusing?!
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P2P Matrix
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Does anyone have a guide/instructions for self-hosting a Matrix server? I'm not sure which server to run, I heard Synapse is a bit heavy and there's a lighter Rust alternative? Which one should I use?Is it okay to run it at home, or will I lose messages on downtime? I assume other hosts will retry when my connection is back up?
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Burn My Windows
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Compiz was probably the single most impactful event for desktop linux of the mid 2000's. Not that it itself made much of a difference, but the ripples affect many areas we take for granted today. A few reasons: - it put linux ahead of windows and mac in terms of appearance;
- it brought many new users and most were a good mix technical and enthusiasts;
- it showed the advantages of modular software;
- many plugins were useful and these useful plugins influenced desktops to this day;
- it was fast, stable and cool enough;
- it brought many new developers;
- it was an incentive for vendors to improve 3d linux drivers;
- it made X.Org developers improve redirection,
- it came by default on the most popular distro from 2006 to 2012.
Yes, most of the effects were useless but even they helped developers and designers to decide what not to include or do in the future. It pioneered useful things like selecting an area of the screen and saving it directly to a file, useful zoom and quick visualization of non-visible windows. It also showed how important compositing was on the desktop. Although probably not in direct influence, there is a reason android, wayland and whatever comes with ChromeOS all have compositing features.At the time, there was some interesting developments and experimentation: métisse, sun's looking glass, bumptop, deskgallery... none of them was as successful as compiz. I'm proud I was myself part of it (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-X9bcrJ3TjY) and have my name written in some of its source files to this day, even if almost nobody use it anymore.
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The ACLU Has Lost Its Way
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> Progressive causes are near and dear to my heart. I am a feminist and staunch Democrat. As a federal public defender turned law professor, I have spent my career trying to make change in a criminal legal system that is riven with racism and fundamentally unfair to those without status and financial resources. Yet, as someone who understands firsthand that the fundamental rights to free speech and due process exist only as long as competent lawyers are willing to vigorously defend extreme positions and people, I view the ACLU’s hard-left turn with alarm. It smacks of intolerance and choosing sides, precisely what a civil-liberties organization designed to defend the Bill of Rights is meant to oppose.What an incredibly level headed take. It's so level headed that it seems fake when projected onto the landscape of modern political discourse.
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The James Webb Space Telescope is finding too many early galaxies
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I don't know if this instance qualifies as one, but I think its fair to say that cosmology is the one domain of "fundamental" physics where "discrepancies" or question marks keep piling up and not really resolving.It the pattern of previous science revolutions repeats, there could come a point where reinterpreting the large existing body of knowledge using a different paradigm would explain an number of "oddities" in a more economical way.I don't know if this generation of telescopes will get us there but it feels that this is a plausible outcome over the next 1-2 decades. Which would be very exciting :-)
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Google Glass
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I am seriously concerned about this.I was in a long-distance relationship this summer. We would take turns visiting each other in our respective cities roughly 5 hours apart. It was a pretty long journey for a weekend - it would sometimes take 10 hours one way since you had to go through New York. Of course, it was worth it.But whenever we would go on a walk, or I'd take her out to dinner, I got as much face time with the back of that fucking iPhone as with her. We'd be strolling down the street during a beautiful summer sunset, and she'd be holding my hand with one of hers, and with the other she'd be scrolling through Instagram. Craning her neck to stare at that stupid dim little screen instead of just looking around at the beautiful neighborhood I lived in. Same thing while I tried talking to her during dinner. She literally preferred it to looking at what was around her.Gawking at fake vintage photos. Or reading her horoscope. Or online shopping. Or whatever.I asked her to stop, I said it was rude. She couldn't. I started to resent the iPhone, for stealing my limited time with her. I know, I know. It was a flaw in her, and not everybody does that, right?Certainly not everybody. But I go to coffee shops now, I go to events, and people are just in cell phone huddles. A group of people will go out, and unanimously decide to prick and pinch and swipe their glass worship stones instead of having a fucking conversation or looking around them. This is everywhere. Every year it's more of a common sight. It's actually surprising now to see someone at the local cafe reading a book, or playing chess.I might notice this more than most because I made a life decision to not use a "smart phone" and have kept using the same shitty Blackberry for 6 years now. It can only do calls, texts, and Sudoku. I couldn't do this kind of thing if I wanted.I'm 20 now. I remember junior high, when the best cell phone was a Motorola RAZR. People never did this shit back then, because they couldn't. People spent time with each other. The cell phones would come out to facilitate people getting together, and then they'd go back in your pocket. That was it. They were actually phones. It was all they could do.Phones today just aren't phones anymore. I don't know what to call them. They're more integrated with our lives. More intrusive. More attractive. They're addictive.[1] And they're used mostly for useless things.Well, Google is taking the last remaining effort out of letting technology intervene with your actual life. And they know what to call it. Glass. Now you can wear it. It's a default. You don't have to pull it out. It's just always there. If this becomes normal, I will probably have to run away to the Third World or something.I am crossing my fingers that we just stop at smart phones, and this never takes off. But I'm scared, because in the back of my head I am pretty certain it will. Eventually there will be no strangers, and there will be no friends. Everyone's name will be public, and nobody will get to know each other. Despite your dinky little social networks and social apps, you are forgetting what it is to actually know someone.I really hope I don't ever have to go on a date with some girl who's getting conversation tips from Google's magic headgear. Fuck that.[1] http://paulgraham.com/addiction.html
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Ask HN: Why the Microsoft hate?
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I'll tell you the story of my friend Greg.Greg has been a believer in Microsoft. He went to all the Tech-Ed conferences, attended every MSDN event he could. Conferences are grand stages that leave an impression. He drank all the cool-aid that was served at these conferences.Things were really good early on, this was the last decade. The computing scene at that time revolved around Microsoft like the many moons of Jupiter. Greg and his team built products with Silverlight, WPF, .Net, Windows Workflow, Biztalk, Remoting, and the like. Every conference offered something new, something exciting. The apps they built worked great, looked great.Fast forward to now. Greg is a decent programmer, but he wants a new job badly. The problem is that nobody wants to use all that stuff that he knows. People want to build on standards; apps that work on every device. Not just on Windows and not just on Internet Explorer. Greg still doesn't get it. He hasn't seen much of the world outside Microsoft, and still wonders why people don't want Silverlight. Still tells me how WPF is so much better that anything else out there. And running only on IE, why is that even a problem? Everybody has IE. Poor Greg, tough times.There may be many issues with Microsoft. But more than anything else, I would fault them for building their entire ecosystem with total disregard for standards, their refusal to work with whatever community existed outside. This probably wasn't intentional, they must have probably believed in what they told their developers. Even though so much has changed since their glory days, there's a part of Microsoft which still refuses to engage.There was a Steve Jobs interview from the late 90s in which he said, "The problem with Microsoft is that they have absolutely no taste". Jobs wasn't talking about aesthetics; it is true of pretty much everything from Microsoft. From UIs, to development frameworks, to tools, to shells and even APIs. Back then, having "no taste" was totally fine because people communicated far less.Now we have a whole bunch of people who are stuck using this stuff. And many of them don't really get it yet.Edit: I just saw that you work for Microsoft, and specifically Microsoft Research. You guys make awesome stuff. The above is mostly about the Windows platform.
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How to be like Steve Ballmer
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So Ballmer is the ultimate PHB?This is a great way to build a career, but if you look at his track record at Microsoft, I'm not sure Ballmer is the guy we want to be emulating. He was hard-headed, amazingly risk-averse when it came to Microsoft's core platforms, and was not a great manager (he was unable to control a lot of the culture problems that plagued Microsoft in the early 2000s).It's fine to make bold moves that fail, but Ballmer's failed moves weren't really all that bold. They were big, but not incredibly bold, and were often doubling down on a failing business inside Microsoft.
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GitHub responds to Dear GitHub letter
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I complain every 6 months about their "releases" page - eg this one for my project https://github.com/rogerbinns/apsw/releasesThey unhelpfully add a "Source Code" link, which would be great if that is what it was. Instead it is actually just a zip file of the repository at that tag. But the repository is in a maintainer state, so the "Source Code" isn't useful to an end user because various tools need to be run (eg building help, automake/autoconf, dependencies). The people mislead by Github due to this "Source Code" contact me, not github.Every six months for several years, I send the email explaining how this doesn't serve anyone's interest, how it hurts, and that I am happy with any solution (eg don't auto add, change the name to make it clear, be able to label an existing file as the "Source Code" etc). I get the usual response of understanding and sympathy, and vague suggestion that it may be addressed. Three years and counting ...
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Citus Unforks from PostgreSQL, Goes Open Source
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Being burned before,I will never use an OS infrastructure project that has enterprise features you need to pay for. They always try to move you to paid and make the OSS version unpleasant to use over time as soon as the bean counters take over to milk you"For customers with large production deployments, we also offer an enterprise edition that comes with additional functionality"
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E Ink announces a full color electrophoretic ePaper display
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What are the practical applications of this in the near term though?Can't really think of any. Signboards would be good but I doubt the scale/price/size works out well (for now). ereaders don't really need colour IMO though it would obviously be a benefit.
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Why is it hard to make friends over 30? (2012)
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> Thayer Prime, a 32-year-old strategy consultant who lives in London, has even developed a playful 100-point scale (100 being “best friend forever”). In her mind, she starts to dock new friend candidates as they begin to display annoying or disloyal behavior. Nine times out of 10, she said, her new friends end up from 30 to 60, or little more than an acquaintance.> “You meet someone really nice, but if they don’t return a call, drop to 90, if they don’t return two calls, that’s an immediate 50,” she said. “If they’re late to something in the first month, that’s another 10 off.” (But people can move up the scale with nice behavior, too, she added.)OK, here is one case where the lack of friends is not mystifying at all.
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Germany to make it a crime to run a Tor node or website
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I skimmed through that law draft. Translation: They want you to face jail, if you provide an "internet based service", which "accessibility is restricted due to specific, technical precautionary measures", and which "purpose is to allow or encourage specific illegal actions".They refer in particular to the Tor network and its abuse by serious crime, but how I read this law, you could apply it for all kind of things. For instance if somebody runs an encrypted IRC channel or email service. This is yet another attack on freedom in Germany thanks to the Christian Democratic Union.EDIT: The original law draft can be found here:https://www.bundesrat.de/SharedDocs/TO/975/erl/10.pdf?__blob...
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Google disabled my husband's account
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It's incredibly Kafka-eqsue that you get banned for a supposed violation that you're supposed to appeal, but you don't know what you're being accused of doing.This is exacerbated by the fact that 9 out of 10 times a story like this appears it's an algorithm gone rogue which its billion-dollar shepherd assumes is infallible.The remaining 1 time it's because someone knows how to abuse reporting systems to get someone locked out on purpose.The only reason these tech companies managed to get so big is because they'll cheat at anything that requires human scale. Support, moderation, taking responsibility for the content they host. They somehow managed to skirt on that just as the web was transitioning from a wild west to a somewhat ingrained, regulated place and the world is worse off for it.Because they skirted on all this, they are now somehow the world's gatekeepers on modern communications. If you don't play ball with them, you're cut off from almost everyone. Their recklessness and callousness ironically put them in the position to rule over the rest.
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The most effective malaria vaccine yet discovered
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What blows me away is in a study group of 734 infants, which benefited from maternal antibodies against malaria, 717 were infected by malaria in the first year of their life. That's nearly 100%, in the first year since birth. That's devastating.The vaccine is showing 77% efficacy in trials in Burkina Faso.That's an ongoing pandemic that makes covid-19 look like a case of the sniffles. Malaria deaths peaked around 930,000 a year in 2004, and is around 600,000 a year now. I believe covid-19 death toll stands around 3 million deaths, most above the age of 70. Malaria is over 100 million, most under the age of 5.Source: https://ourworldindata.org/malaria
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Internet Explorer 11 (IE11) to be retired on June 15, 2022
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I smell a lot of nostalgia in this thread, and rightfully so! IE has been a terrible browser, but it was our terrible browser.But fear not! Outlook still uses the HTML parsing engine from MS Word (!) to display your HTML emails, and it's not going anywhere.
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Linus Torvalds on mRNA Vaccines
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Absolutely agree with everything Linus says here. But I'm almost equally concerned that there's an awful lot of people on the pro-science bandwagon who don't actually support science, but simply don't tolerate dissent or questioning, and that's unscientific and potentially harmful too.I scanned most of the Pfizer trial and was wondering why we expected the immunity after the vaccine to last longer than natural immunity. A typical infection can last for several weeks, so your immune system is presumably exposed to the virus for a similar period of time. And after a natural infection I hear 6 months being thrown around as a typical window of immunity. But I was hearing claims of vaccines lasting for years, when they were only in the trials for less than 6 months. Why is this?Fortunately I know a lot of people in the medical field. I asked a nurse who had been in a COVID ICU ward since this began. No idea, he said. Good question. I asked a few others: same answer. I asked several anesthesiologist friends: they did more med-school after all. Mostly no idea. One suggested that the vaccine might be more targeted and get a more potent response, maybe?I tried casting a wider net on Facebook, and got a few nastygrams about how I was spreading uneducated FUD. I asked if they knew the answer but I was told to listen to the experts and read the science, whatever that means to these people. One friend did send me a link to a quote by the Moderna CEO that implied they have machines that can count antibody concentrations and they tracked it over time - I had no idea about that, so that was cool.Eventually someone referred me to their cousin in nursing school who referred me to their brother-in-law who is actually an epidemiologist, and he told me it was a good question and explained all sorts of things about the various types of cells involved in the immune response and how the vaccine delivery invokes a very specific response that is, as one of the doctors suspected, much more targeted at something less likely to change, and how those immune cell types produce longer-lasting immunity. Now I was satisfied and learned something.But those people in the middle think of themselves as being pro-science but they're really not. And the more they engage with anti-vaxxers the more ammunition anti-vaxxers will think they have and the more they'll dig into their beliefs. It's not good.
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GitHub – nushell/nushell: A new type of shell
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Thinking this is so cool! I was wondering if seriously buying into an alternate shell like this would be worth it in the long run.Would really love to read from people who use(d) an alternative shell, both success and failure stories.I cannot shake from my head the idea that buying into a non-standard shell will only work for personal projects in one's own workstation, but it won't fly too far for company work because you'd then be introducing an implicit dependency on your special snowflake non-standard runtime. Which is something we came to accept and assume for interpreted languages (Python, Ruby, Node, etc.) but I'm not yet ready to assume for shell scripts.So right when I was going to test Nushell, I discover there are also other shells like Elvish [0] and Oil which supports structured data [1]. Now on top of my hesitations I'm adding decision paralysis :-][0]: https://elv.sh/[1]: https://www.oilshell.org/Lots more shells: https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Alternative-Shells
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The worst volume control UI in the world (2017)
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I think the worst UI is simply the Teams one, because it presents as an app volume control but then simply controls the global device volume. Fuck off, you are not the only app running.But that comes second to the microphone gain control, which Teams similarly exerts unilateral control over - only this time through an automated algorithm that for some microphone types just ends up muting them entirely. It's wild, you can go into the Windows gain control settings and see the slider wiggle around.
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PAM Duress – Alternate passwords for panic situations
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There are multiple levels of protection one might want.I.e. when you are being selected for random questioning entering US as a non-US citizen, you'd benefit from steganography-like approach: you give a password, and relatively bland, non-personal stuff shows up, giving appearance of full access to a system.If you only care about your privacy, the next one is to have a destroy-everything script (and it's not that hard: usually, passphrases are only used to decrypt the actual encryption keys, so overwriting those keys should be super fast). This would also work against unsophisticated attacks which are not going to really cost you your life.If there is a potential for you to be a target of a sophisticated attack and the attacker does not care about taking your life, the biggest benefit is to have a way to inform someone of your whereabouts while you are actually giving access, ideally in a way that buys you time (eg. "webcam has detected stress on your face, please wait another 6 hours before trying to log in again" — sorry, company mandated software, when it happens usually, we call support).
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Australia’s new mass surveillance mandate
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I've lived in Australia for 10 years and really considering my familys future in this country. We are sleep-walking towards a very average future.An undiversified export economy, out of control house prices, a job-market primarily focused on two cities, a government intent on selling all public assets, very limited political interest in positive climate policies. The latter is simply addressed with "technology will help us out when we need it to".It really feels sometimes that the only thing the average Australian cares about is the price of their property portfolio.Or maybe 3 months into the Sydney lockdown is finally getting to me.
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Paid influencers must label some posts as ads, German court rules
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Why does YouTube or Instagram tolerate sponsored content?They don't get a cut from a sponsored video or product placement, and their dominance in the advertising
space means this is also cutting into their ad revenue.
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See what JavaScript commands get injected through an in-app browser
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I just don't understand how we can allow a Chinese social media app in the west, while any non-chinese social media apps aren't allowed there?Same with housing, why can Chinese nationals buy housing here, while I can't do so there?
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How to build a personal webpage from scratch
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90% of the challenge of making my personal webpage is picking the colours. I still hate the green and it drives me nuts. But blue is too comfortable and boring. Maybe an auburn?Ugh. Is there a place I can share a link and get two minutes of free designer advice?
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GPT-4 API General Availability
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Practical report: the OpenAI API is a bad joke. If you think you can build a production app against it, think again. I've been trying to use it for the past 6 weeks or so. If you use tiny prompts, you'll generally be fine (that's why you always get people commenting that it works for them), but just try to get closer to the limits, especially with GPT-4.The API will make you wait up to 10 minutes, and then time out. What's worse, it will time out between their edge servers (cloudflare) and their internal servers, and the way OpenAI implemented their billing you will get a 4xx/5xx response code, but you will still get billed for the request and whatever the servers generated and you didn't get. That's borderline fraudulent.Meanwhile, their status page will happily show all green, so don't believe that. It seems to be manually updated and does not reflect the truth.Could it be that it works better in another region? Could it be just my region that is affected? Perhaps — but I won't know, because support is non-existent and hidden behind a moat. You need to jump through hoops and talk to bots, and then you eventually get a bot reply. That you can't respond to.My support requests about being charged for data I didn't have a chance to get have been unanswered for more than 5 weeks now.There is no way to contact OpenAI, no way to report problems, the API sometimes kind-of works, but mostly doesn't, and if you comment in the developer forums, you'll mostly get replies from apologists that explain that OpenAI is "growing quickly". I'd say you either provide a production paid API or you don't. At the moment, this looks very much like amateur hour, and charging for requests that were never fulfilled seems like a fraud to me.So, consider carefully whether you want to build against all that.
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ASUS delivers BIOS/UEFI auto-updates over HTTP with no verification
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Very nice find. What are the business unit motivations behind critical suppliers like ASUS repeatedly violating customer trust in this manner? At what point in the management chain is the decision reached to sacrifice reputation for - whatever cost savings there are from not implementing TLS/blob signing?edit: This is not rhetorical. Actually curious if someone on HN familiar with this class of companies (ASUS is not unique among OEMs) can educate.
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Beautiful Online SICP
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I've just skimmed through the first couple of pages, but didnt find anything about which lisp to use/howto. Any ideas?
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Intent to Deprecate and Remove: Trust in Existing Symantec-Issued Certificates
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>All Symantec issued certificates. GeoTrust and Thawte are CAs operated by Symantec, simply afforded different branding.>While this list may need to be updated for some recently created roots, https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/net/... may accurately capture the state of impactDamn. There goes my certificate (Rapidssl). Anybody know what are the remaining, trustworthy certificate issuers ?No we cannot use LetsEncrypt for convenience reasons (we bake our certificate pub key in many places)
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If you opened your PayPal account before you were 18, close it
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Just close your account if you have a PayPal account at all. They limit and freeze funds at random and good luck resolving it.OP, You can refund the funds to the sender less Paypal's 30¢ cut, I believe. That might be the best way to get the money back to your friend, and then they can re-send it to you with something sane like Google Wallet.
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Modern CSS Explained
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Excellent article for a dinosaur like me.So much of CSS seems like a square peg trying to fit into a round hole.I've had to occasionally delve into webdev since 1994 and despite progress CSS still seems clunky.Currently I am going through Udemy's Jonas Advanced CSS courseI love the idea of grid layouts, SCSS rocks, BEM sort of makes sense.Still I hate the fact that I can't quickly iterate layout/design with CSS unless I am really proficient with CSS.I do not want to keep all the CSS quirks in my head!Reading questions like this(oldie but still): https://stackoverflow.com/questions/396145/how-to-vertically... makes me recoil in horror.For one there is no software tool that can let someone visually move elements around and still produce reasonable CSS.On one end you have mockup(Mockplus for one) and beginner(shades of Frontpage) level tools which produce monstrous write only CSS.On other end you have regular developer tools(VS Code, browser dev tools etc), which do not really help you with layout.So it seems for making SPA you need 3 people: 1. Designer making mockups
2. CSS expert converting said mockups to usable HTML/CSS
3. Programmer actually working with DOM manipulation
My complaint is that when I am doing regular desktop development, I can wear all 3 hats only consulting designer ocassionally.With webdev it seems incredibly hard to go alone.SVG seeems such a normal standard compared to CSS.
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DuckDuckGo Raises $10M
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I have been using DDG for about a year now, although I had tried using it years ago. It works fine for simple queries( e.g. search name of company rather than typing out url). But I basically have !g programmed into my fingers for everything more complicated. Many times when I don't find the results I am looking for, I subconsciously assume that google would be able to find them. This is in comparison to when I cannot find something on google, I assume the website owner either sucks at SEO or it doesn't exist. I am rooting for DDG, but it is going to be really hard for them to make up the literal cognitive difference in my mindset.Side note, if they get bought out by a big player, I will feel like my use of them for the last year has been for naught.
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Why All of Our Games Look Like Crap
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> People who grew up with Nintendo and Sega really like pixel art.As one of those people, I really don't like pixel art at all.Today's pixel art looks nothing like games did back in the day. The simple reason is that those Nintendo and Sega games weren't played on 27" 4k LCD monitors or 65" OLED TV's but on on the barely 14" CRT in my bedroom. We didn't have huge pixely sprites, they were small and blurry. It had a way softer look than todays pixel art does.To me, the whole pixel art craze looks like false nostalgia. People longing back to something that never existed that way.this image demonstrates it nicely: http://i.imgur.com/lQFPG14.png
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Awk in 20 Minutes (2015)
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So, I don't use awk right now. This answers "how to awk" more than "why use awk" for me (understandable given the 20 min claim).Does anyone have concrete, practical examples of use cases where awk made your life much easier?
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NoDesign.dev – Tools and resources for non-artistic developers
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If I could give one piece of advice for technical developers it’s that design isn’t all about the way it looks, it’s about the way it works.To expand on that, it’s how the pieces fit together within your set of constraints. There’s a LOT in common with what makes code beautiful or not. You get to the essential; nothing more, nothing less. This doesn’t mean “minimalist” , per se — just be wary of ornamentation that doesn’t add value.A design can be award-winning without much “flash”. A readable font. A thoughtful, consistent, grid, that gives the content some air. Color choices based on accessibility, constrained to a palette that has some meaning for the project, etc.Don’t be afraid to learn about design! Look to resources like IDEO, who take a principled approach to design that’s not superficial. Think about the field of Architecture, where engineering and aesthetics have been combined for centuries — and where the same concerns of “essential” vs “ornamental” remain an active area of debate to this day.
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Git undo: We can do better
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Damn, this is such a GREAT idea.
I've messed up repos a few times, and it's never good.
It's always -- "what's the magic want I have to wave now"?The truth is, while we use git every day, most people really don't understand how it works.There I said it. And I'm not ashamed.I don't really know how Git works. And I think I'm not the only one.What does "git reflog" or "git reset --hard ...." do? What are the implications?We don't really know.I feel stupid. But hey, at least I'm honest.
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Terrible real estate agent photographs
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About 10 years ago, me and my wife took LSD on a vacation, and the sheer uselessness of a real estate agent appeared to us.What does a real estate agent do? They unlock doors.Who are real estate agents? We can all think of a few real estate agents, none of them are top performers. They are usually on their ~4th career before the age of 30. They are the type of person to wear a suit in public to pretend that it makes them important.I know an exception to the rule, except he sells multi-family real estate, and owns ~10 single family homes himself. I'd hardly call him a real estate agent at this point, he is a landlord.
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Choose Postgres queue technology
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For several projects I’ve opted for the even dumber approach, that works out of the box with every ORM/Query DSL framework in every language: using a normal table with SELECT FOR UPDATE SKIP LOCKEDhttps://www.pgcasts.com/episodes/the-skip-locked-feature-in-...It’s not “web scale” but it easily extends to several thousand background jobs in my experience
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Design Tip: Never Use Black
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Unless, you know, you want highly readable text. In which case there's nothing better than pure black, as your text color or as your background (but not both at once, please.)
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Why I Ripped the Same CD 300 Times
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This is a little awkward. The Touhou album in question is already in the Touhou Lossless Music Collection (at least the last release: http://www.tlmc.eu/2018/01/tlmc-v19.html since it's from 2005, it's probably been in most of them), and has track 3 ("The End of Theocratic Era" by "弘世"). I just checked the TTA and track 3 sounds fine.If anyone is terribly curious what it sounds like, I've put up an OGG copy here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/u88u1xpdmdxbqal/03%20%E5%BC%98%E4%...Oh well. I'm sure it was a great learning experience anyway. :)
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AMD Zen 3/Ryzen 5000 announcement [video]
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I was somewhat taken aback by this complete focus on gaming. Gaming this, gaming that, FPS this and that.Buying a 3900X was one of the best purchases I ever made, but from the video, as a non-gamer, it's not entirely clear to me why I should consider upgrading to the 5900X. A non-gaming benchmark would have been helpful.Perhaps I just misunderstood the target demographic of the Ryzen 9, and maybe what I'm thinking of (and should be looking at) is Threadripper after all.
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Apple watch keyboard developer put off by app store scammers
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Oh my god, they don't even bother implementing the app any more...It reminds me of my first App Store experience. I made an app that was somewhat successful (about 2000€ a month, enough to pay for a students living expenses).Within short time, a chinese speaking developer cloned it. They copied the icon (slighlty different color), they copied the UI, they even copied all the text in the dialog boxes. They released the app with a slightly different name.I contacted Apple to complain about the obvious copyright infringement, but they only forwarded my complaint to the developer. Interestingly enough, the developer actually replied to me. They sent an email threating legal action. I asked them to at least change the icon, and they did. But until today, the rest of the cloned app is still on the app store and competes with my app.It's not comparable to your case, since in my case the competitor wasn't a scammer, just someone with a very lose interpretation of intellectual property.But it makes me feel that Apple really doesn't give a shit what goes on in their store, as long as they make their 30%. (or 15% from small fish like me now)
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Major U.K. science funder to require grantees to make papers immediately free
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Slowly and almost imperceptibly if you look at it day-to-day, public research repositories like arxiv and biorxiv, along with public code repositories like github and gitlab, are becoming or maybe already are the world's most important academic "journals."All research and code posted on them gets a quick once-over; good work gets the attention it deserves; bad work is quickly ignored. Reviews take place over the Internet via both public and private forums.Gatekeeping power lies more and more in the hands of a global, distributed scientific community open to anyone willing and capable of doing and reviewing the work. It's fabulous IMHO.
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Show HN: My seven minute workout timer evening project
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Great idea, you could make a pretty cool app out of this: let people create routines by letting them associate pictures with exercise names and amount of seconds.They could then create workouts by creating a list of exercises and rest periods and play their routing with the timer you created.Does this exist? I want one.
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fork() can fail
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When I was young and really didn't understand Unix, my friend and were summer students at NBS (now NIST), and one fine afternoon we wondered what would happen if you ran fork() forever.We didn't know, so we wrote the program and ran it.This was on a PDP-11/45 running v6 or v7 Unix. The printing console (some DECWriter 133 something or other) started burping and spewing stuff about fork failing and other bad things, and a minute or two later one of the folks who had 'root' ran into the machine room with a panic-stricken look because the system had mostly just locked up."What were you DOING?" he asked / yelled."Uh, recursive forks, to see what would happen."He grumbled. Only a late 70s hacker with a Unix-class beard can grumble like that, the classic Unix paternal geek attitude of "I'm happy you're using this and learning, but I wish you were smarter about things."I think we had to hard-reset the system, and it came back with an inconsistent file system which he had to repair by hand with ncheck and icheck, because this was before the days of fsck and that's what real programmers did with slightly corrupted Unix file systems back then. Uphill both ways, in the snow, on a breakfast of gravel and no documentation.Total downtime, maybe half an hour. We were told nicely not to do that again. I think I was handed one of the illicit copies of Lions Notes a few days later. "Read that," and that's how my introduction to the guts of operating systems began.
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The Web We Have to Save
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I really hope the current centralization of the web is an evolutionary step. At first, the web was decentralized with newsgroups as open as NNTP provided. Then, the lack of controlling features killed the decentralized protocols and medium: namely the inability to control spam and the inability to have participants pay for the cost of the medium.Blogs suffered from the inability to provide a good reading platform, which is why the death of Google Reader was so mourned. GReader, not G+, was Google's best weapon against Facebook (with proper development, not stagnant as it was).It is easier to add features to centralized architectures, but it does not mean the death of distributed protocols. I do believe a distributed publishing platform will be born sometime in the future. It is unthinkable that Facebook will still be the top destination, say, 20 years from now.
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Sci-Hub: Removing barriers in the way of science
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Silicon Valley and YC don't exactly have a stellar reputation for ethical behavior. Having a "pirate website" at the top of the news page doesn't exactly change that perception.I totally get that journals are evil, and charging money for research generated with public funds is questionable. It's very frustrating as a small entity needing to view articles, and being asked to cough up $25-50. That said, there are legitimate alternatives (like emailing the corresponding author, or professional society memberships, or alumni library access, or DeepDyve). The linked website is flagrantly violating copyright and that should be cause for concern; not breaking the law is part of every engineering (and professional) ethical code.
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“We have obtained fully functional JTAG for Intel CSME via USB DCI”
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One way to think of ME is, we all woke up one day and discovered we have had high resolution night vision spy cams installed in our bedrooms.The next realization is there is no way to turn them off or remove them. It’s posisble even moving won’t help.And yet we really don’t seem to care much. Lesser issues generate national outrage and high volumes of press coverage. Why?HN may be uniquely positioned to show us the answer. Take a community of people with generally above average interest and/or knowledge in this stuff, and the comments are filled with questions asking what the hell ME even is.Apparently, ME is the perfect combination of opaque, obtuse, and obscure. It’s not rocket science, but complicated enough it’s hard to explain well quickly. It’s easy to be a highly technical person yet never have the need to cross paths with the subject. There has been some press, some activity, but all of that is simultaneously dampened for the same reasons.
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Meltdown Proof-of-Concept
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I'm curious if someone can point me to any source that discusses how the next generation of CPUs that Intel, AMD, ARM might be working on is actually going to address this & the Spectre issue architecturally.. It's great that we have a potentially performance killing fix but the real "fix" or rather, solution, is to alter the architecture. Since I'm not an EE/CE dude... is anyone aware of where such discussions on the WWW might be taking place?by the way, that PoC was intense. Makes you wonder if the NSA knew about it all along :)
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How to balance full-time work with creative projects
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My experience is that if you can afford it, allow yourself 2–3 months sabbatical, and after some time (for me it is about 2 weeks), you'll start to produce creative projects.I personally write down all ideas and when I have time to implement them, choose what looks the most interesting (and feasible).With this strategy, in the last couple months, I was able to implement:https://2018.bloomca.me/en – just a website showing how bloated web ishttps://real-local-food.com/ – project about local foodhttps://nameless-hamlet-12227.herokuapp.com/ – check your allergies application, built for a hackathon.Now, you can notice they are not perfect, and by no means are finished, but before I was not able to produce that much.edit: formatting
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Tech Interview Handbook
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I realize everybody's going to jump in and rant about algorithms in interviews, but I wish you'd all add something constructive as well.I just had to conduct a round of interviews in a non-SF large US city, and it was a hellish crapshoot. Resumes are meaningless, and often re-written by recruiters to match the job anyway. Everyone has the same canned answers to the stupid behavioral questions. And as for the code, we included what we thought was a trivial nested for-loop problem and virtually nobody could even get started on it.Is this kind of code problem too complicated in your opinion? For all I join in when complaining about irrelevant algorithmic questions, I have to admit that they at least test something, even if it's just willingness to study for the interview.Instead of reading everybody's complaints about interviewing, I'd love to hear how you think it should be done. Because I have to admit I'm pretty much lost right now.
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Radical hydrogen-boron reactor leapfrogs current nuclear fusion tech?
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Always happy to see people doing new and interesting stuff with fusion. I got into nuclear technology because of ITER back in the early 2000s. Worked on it continuously (mostly in advanced fission) ever since.> "The timeline question is a tricky one," he says. "I don't want to be a laughing stock by promising we can deliver something in 10 years, and then not getting there. First step is setting up camp as a company and getting started. First milestone is demonstrating the reactions, which should be easy. Second milestone is getting enough reactions to demonstrate an energy gain by counting the amount of helium that comes out of a fuel pellet when we have those two lasers working together. That'll give us all the science we need to engineer a reactor. So the third milestone is bringing that all together and demonstrating a reactor concept that works."The fourth step is to deliver the reactor concept as promising machine. The fifth step is to attach it to power generating equipment and demonstrate the power plant. The sixth step is to scale up a supply chain capable of delivering multiple units that compete with other sources of commodity electricity (or other energy products). The seventh step is to scale to large scale without being unduly burdened by either supply chain (raw material, skilled labor) or regulatory impact/public concern that inevitably scales with any large fleet of any new tech.Fission made it to step 7 and then faltered and is now teetering depending on where you look. It never scaled past 5% of total world primary energy.The promise of fusion is to deliver nuclear energy with less public concern than fission because it makes less radiologically hazardous material. The challenge is to go through the physical, engineering, and commercial viability phases as a power plant.
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Show HN: Obsidian for Mobile – Plain-text knowledge base on the go
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Has anyone used Joplin (https://joplinapp.org/)? How does it compare to Obsidian?I've used Joplin for a while. It's Markdown so I like it. The UI is dry (compared to Evernote).
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Internet addiction and the habit of book reading
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An aside, I find it a bit interesting that at some point we stopped talking about internet and game addiction. It used to be a hot topic, but I guess now that we are all completely addicted after decade of intense behavioral experimentation, none of us are interested in reading about it anymore.
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New(ish) command line tools
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I could really use a better workflow to refine grep matches. Has anyone made a tool that combines grep (regex search) with fzf (multiple positive/negative patterns)? What I really want is something like: grep pattern1 **/* | grep pattern2 | grep -v exclude_these | grep -v also_exclude
The problem is this loses filenames and context lines in the output. I want to apply several positive and negative regexes, and only at the very end annotate with filenames and context. Anyone have a good workflow for this?
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Google cancelled a talk on caste bias
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Is there a Wikipedia list of obscure 'race'-isms? I find reading about other cultures or other time period's biases to be informative and wonder what the common elements might be.Off the top of my head, issues I can think of where an outsider may be oblivious between the "sides" are:Indian casteJapanese Barukumin casteProtestant/Catholic in EuropeJewish people in Europe/US/USSREnglish Class System, or Southern/NorthernJim Crow, or North/South or Midwest Vs coastal, WASPs, or Nativism.Ainu in Hokkaido.Ukraine vs Russian is topical at the moment.
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A chill driving game with procedurally generate scenic landscapes
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A small note: 80 miles an hour on windy roads, driving in the middle of the road, is not slow and chill. That's "I want to die" fast and reckless... maybe have two autodrive settings. "slow and chill" going appropriate speeds and driving correctly (left/right toggle?) and "landscape zoomies" or something for what it currently does. Right now auto pilot is literally stress inducing =D
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Ask HN: Do you hate software engineering but love programming?
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> I have come to a realization that I don't really enjoy Software Engineering(& the processes that it comes with) but I do love programming & solving problems.I can almost guarantee that you’re just at the wrong company.Some software companies can turn even the simplest tasks into a grueling series of processes, endless meetings, and joint work across a big number of “stakeholders”. These companies will take the joy and productivity out of programming and replace it with a series of rituals and set of language that people use to go through the motions every week so they can collect paychecks.Start interviewing around. Talk to your network. Find a company that values programming and real productivity but discourages unnecessary meetings and process. You will be much happier. There is no escaping the fact that you’ll have to work on legacy code, document your work, and meet with people some times. However, it doesn’t have to be a miserable process-filled slog.
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Keep your AI claims in check
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“It’s an ambiguous term with many possible definitions.”“Does the product actually use AI at all? If you think you can get away with baseless claims…”Last I checked basic optimization techniques like simulated annealing and gradient descent - as well as a host of basic statistical tools - are standard parts of an introductory AI textbook. I’ve been on the receiving end of government agency enforcement (SEC) and it felt a lot like a shakedown. This language carries a similar intent: if we decide we don’t like you, watch out!
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Defeated
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There is an extremely simple solution: leave.I've not lived in the US for almost two years now. I've only had to travel back twice in that time. Meanwhile, in the same time I've visited France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany multiple times. None of those travel experiences were nearly as unpleasant or stressful as my two trips to the US. Furthermore, the technology communities that are growing up in these places have a vigor and sense of excitement that rivals or even surpasses anything you'll find in Silicon Valley.
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One of the FBI’s Major Claims in the iPhone Case Is Fraudulent
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I wonder if the FBI has checked for any ways to circumvent the passcode screen using software bugs.Edit: Not sure why I got downvoted. I can currently circumvent my keyboard passcode with a number of steps, and I'm on iOS 9. Steps to try for yourself:Edit: Ok I've been tricked. The steps below are unnecessary as the first step actually unlocks your iPhone in the background. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ The fact remains though that these bugs have existed in the past and may exist on the device the FBI wants to unlock.1. Invoke Siri, "what time is it?"2. Press the time/clock that is shown3. Tap the + icon.4. Type some arbitrarily long string into the search box. Highlight that text and copy it.5. Tap on the search box. There should be a share option if your device is capable. Tap the share option.6. Share to messages.7. Press the home button.Congrats, you're more effective than the FBI.
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WebAssembly Browser Preview
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Is there any sort of open source non-browser interpreter for Webassembly?
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The growing body of evidence that digital distraction is damaging our minds
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I am terrified about giving smartphones to my kids.France's new rule (no smartphones in schools - no exceptions) is genius, and I applaud them for that.What is a supercomputer in your pocket, with access to a significant portion of the sum total of human knowledge, good for, for most people?Playing fucking candy crush.We wish that we, humans, were better, but we are not.So what can we do about it? I have no idea. The economic model already exists for games and facebook, and so on. And people have since the beginning of time been amused by trivial entertainment.I guess the fact of the matter, or one way of looking at it is, there will always be people who choose trivial entertainment, and there will always be folks who chase knowledge and self improvement. And now, like always, we can do both of those things. But at least now, we can quantify ourselves better, and know more about the benefits and risks. And in that way, maybe more of us will choose to improve ourselves with these amazing tools.
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737 Max Explanation by a Software Engineer
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I'm an assistant professor of aerospace engineering and I find this analysis quite spot on, in which this is representative of a much larger issue of economic and regulatory negative incentives, rather than just a "software issue" as some news outlets have reported. What I find downright criminal is this:> Boeing sells an option package that includes an extra AoA vane, and an AoA disagree lightThe fact that the redundancy of a sensor on which a system capable of sudden, large control inputs relies is an optional package to be purchased separately... I simply have no words.How was this package advertised in the brochure? Pay extra and when the airplane nosedives at high speed, this useful indicator will helpfully warn you it's because AoA reading disagreement?
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Edward Snowden: Permanent Record
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Customers who bought this item also bought- ALFA AWUS036NEH Long Range WIRELESS 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi USBAdapter- Yubico - YubiKey 5 NFC - Two Factor Authentication USB and NFC Security Key, Fits USB-A Ports and Works with Supported NFC Mobile DevicesEDIT:formatting
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Leaked documents expose Avast antivirus subsidiary selling web browsing data
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Most antivirus software feels sketchy in general (snake oil).The only antivirus I run at the moment is Windows Defender. For me the main reason is that Microsoft actually benefits from a virus free system because it improves Windows as a platform. Antivirus software vendors benefit from viruses spreading around because it improves sales of their products.Also Windows Defender is fairly non-intrusive, it doesn't advertise a sketchy VPN, a sketchy adblock, a sketchy torrent or any other tool that usually anti-virus vendors try to bundle together.
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Tailscale SSH
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I'm one of the authors of this. Happy to answer any questions.One of the fun technical details is that, when enabled on a machine (tailscale up --ssh), the userspace tailscaled process takes over all TCP port 22 packets after the WireGuard decryption and doesn't even feed them into the kernel over TUN. We use gVisor's netstack to handle the TCP connections in-process.So it doesn't matter whether you have other processes (or iptables rules, etc) that would prevent the Tailscale SSH server from binding to port 22. This lets people gradually use Tailscale SSH over time without messing with their system one.The Tailscale SSH server currently only runs on Linux but there's support in git main for macOS too but it's not super well tested yet and not included in the sandboxed GUI builds currently.
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Ask HN: YouTube Channels for the Intellectually Curious
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- Technology Connections for general household "how stuff works"- DIY Perks, which is on the project/creation end of things- Xyla Foxlin for a variety of projects- Veritasium for well basically anything and everything science- Simone Giertz does a lot of projects to solve problems in both ridiculous and entertaining ways- Element14 Presents, if you're interested in building your own electronics- Hugh Jeffreys for device repair- Both Steve Mould and Joe Scott for miscellaneous general science learning- Major Hardware, all you wanted to know about computer fan design and then some- Primitive Technology, an almost zen-like demonstration of building things the way our ancestors mostly had to- The Modern Rogue, for all things shady and interesting- Electroboom for all things electricity (and loud noises)- Undecided w/Matt Ferrel, for a look at emerging tech- The Hook Up for a wide variety of Home Automation and IoT reviews and projects
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Which emoji scissors close (2020)
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That's the first time I've heard that there are left- and right-handed scissors. Is there actually a noticeable difference in usage?
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Mom handcuffed, jailed for 8-year-old son walking half a mile
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>A woman one block away had called the cops to report a boy walking outside alone. That lady had actually asked Aiden where he lived, verified that it was just down the street, and proceeded to call nonetheless. The cops picked up Aiden on his own block.this is the real problem here. who in their right mind calls the cops on a kid walking around his own neighborhood?
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ChakraCore GitHub repository is now open
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Good that it's open source, but I found this blurb from their contributing guidelines [0] to be contribution inhibiting:You will need to complete a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) before your pull request can be accepted. This agreement testifies that you are granting us permission to use the source code you are submitting, and that this work is being submitted under appropriate license that we can use it.[0] https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore/blob/master/CONTRIBU...
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What Makes a McMansion Bad Architecture?
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I conjecture that the entirety of architectural design theory is just an attempt to create a formal system such that the styles preferred by people that architects don't like are "bad", and the styles preferred by people that architects do like are "good".The class of people who own McMansions are not very popular among the class of people who write about architectural design on tumblr.If the conjecture is true then it should be possible to find cases of houses that clearly defy these principles of "mass", "balance" etc., but which are deemed "good" through a series of ad-hoc exceptions and explanations. Those houses will probably not be suburban.De gustibus non est disputandum. This is equally true when you can create a low-dimensional approximation to your taste in terms of abstract principles such as "mass" and "balance".
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Kids in ‘Netflix Only’ Homes Saved from 230 Hours of Commercials a Year
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I accidentally watched some TV the other day. Having not seen any regular programming for at least a year, I was amazed at how much ... dumber it has become. Also, why did we sit through so many commercials for so long? It feel a little like a twilight zone episode, where we sit there watching a box telling us what to buy.
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Firefox 72.0
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Re: picture in picture - anyone else here think that this feature doesn't belong to a browser? It just seems so... erm... random, basically.Looks like something that was cloned from some other product and rather crudely shoehorned in. At the very least it should have been introduced after an update and given an option to opt-in to using it, rather than automatically enabling it without any notice.
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ACLU sues Minnesota for police violence against the press
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As so many of these incidents have happened over the last few days it seems like there should be a law that heightens the penalties when cops attack the press compared to the current penalties.
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Tesla buys $1.5B in Bitcoin, may accept it as payment in the future
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Bitcoin is a mystery to me. Somehow it's hailed as revolutionising the economy, by replacing currency with a worse kind of currency.It feels like this is where all the "how to get rich quick" book writers and other hustle bros went and created one giant financial pyramid, which works in quite simple way:
- buy bitcoin
- tell everyone around how revolutionary it is, so they buy it and what you holding increases in value, then tell them to do the same.Keep repeating the above two steps through different layers of abstraction, so it's not so obvious anymore.The other thing that comes into play and makes it grow even bigger is when people see others who made money on this bunch of bollocks, and think that the fact they are rich somehow makes them smart. Then they buy into all of the cryptocurrency platitudes wholesale without stopping for a moment to critically evaluate it.I think I'm a bit sour, because this whole crypto-crap infested the idea space of decentralisation, which is imho very important step that we should try to take take as a society. Now it's just forever tainted with bitcoin and all the greed fuelled people there, while the decentralisation should be quite the opposite in nature.You know what would be revolutionary? Getting rid of currency altogether.
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4x Smaller, 50x Faster
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The immutable hype is finally fading. People starting to realize the drawbacks of treating hardware as an infinite resource.
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Why “go nuts, show nuts” doesn’t work in 2022
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It's sad to me how successful people have been sanitizing the internet.The whole point was to be decentralized, and now we have Visa, Mastercard, Apple, Google, Amazon and Cloudflare deciding what we are and are not allowed to see, read and buy. And virtually in lockstep, they are becoming increasingly prudish.I'm curious if this could be addressed with laws that force companies to either be utilities or publishers. If you're a publisher, you take liability for your content and can edit it at will. If you're a utility, you do not take liability for your services, but you cannot pick and choose which customers you service so long as it's legal.
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Show HN: Restfox – Open source lightweight alternative to Postman
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I switched to insomnia when postman changed their pricing pulling the rug out from everyone wanting us to pay like $300 more per month. (Before they back tracked)https://insomnia.rest/I actually prefer it.
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ByteDance confirmed it used TikTok to monitor journalists’ physical location
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Yeah. Ban TikTok, have an American company make a clone.Why is this insanity allowed ? China doesn’t allow Western social networks. Why do we allow our strategic enemy to have software on our phones? End this madness. Stop the sale of Chinese tech in the West, period. It’s all backdoored.(if you think they are interested in “co-living” go talk to the Kremlin on how that went. China is bidding its time but their intention is to end US dominance. They tell us this and they release papers on how they intend to do it. If you think that’s ok, great. I don’t see how a democratic rule of law country, flaws as it may have, being replaced by a brutal dictatorship, is a good option).
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We turned $140k on Kickstarter into $40k debt and broke even
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Facebook ads: spent $1000, got 20 clicks and 0 salesIs that for real? Is everyone else's experience with Facebook advertising similar?
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Chess.com stopped working on 32bit iPads because 2^31 games have been played
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It's fascinating... the Y2K problem never came to fruition because - arguably - of the immense effort put in behind the scenes by people who understood what might have happened if they hadn't. The end result has been that the entire class of problems is overlooked, because people see it as having been a fuss over nothing.I sometimes think it would've been better if a few things had visibly failed in January 2000.
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Unknown Mozilla dev addon "Looking Glass 1.0.3" on browser
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Many people seem to be shocked because Mozilla installed an add-on automatically. In my opinion, it doesn't really matter since the code is coming from Mozilla - they're building the whole browser, so they could introduce functionality anywhere. If someone distrusts their add-ons, why trust their browser at all?The main question is what behavior is being introduced. I haven't researched deeply, but apparently the add-on does nothing until the user opts-in on studies.
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Microsoft disables Spectre mitigations as Intel’s patches cause instability
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Linus was right
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Slack's bait and switch
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With all the (appropriate) smugness of "I told you so" surrounding this issue, I think that many people's attitude around sticking to IRC and mail is a reason why something like slack could even take off so quickly.I regularly speak to people like that, who just plain refuse (are unable?) to even see the difference between a chat like slack (or telegram, or mattermost, or or or...) where I can post images/videos inline, use proper markup etc, and a combination of IRC and email.
"But you can just send images by mail!" they shout. Yes, you can. But the user experience will be a different one. And it doesn't even matter that I personally prefer the slack-like UX.
Many other people seem to prefer it too, that's what matters.
For anyone who's only mildly technical, setting up IRC is only a small hurdle, but it's one of many.IMHO, if you want people to use anything else but slack, sticking your head in the sand and screaming "you can do all of that in IRC" won't get you anywhere and is equivalent to complaining about the very nature of humanity. It might feel good to scream out your weltschmerz, but it won't change anything.
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UTC Is Enough for Everyone, Right?
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So the article seems to imply you should store all timestamps as UTC (with an additional timezone string ID). But for events in the future that needs to happen on a specific "wall clock point in time", it might be better to actually store the yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss as a string with a timezone next to it, because timezones can and do change often unpredictably. If you pre-calculate what "4.00pm next August 1st" is as a UTC timestamp today, and the timezone rules are updated between now and then, your UTC timestamp may end up being incorrect. I guess you could have an additional "precalculated-utc-timestamp" column but regularly re-calculate this from the "yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss + timezoneID" (especially when you upgrade your Olson tzdata).
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Mozilla Project Fusion: Tor Integration into Firefox
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Why does the Tor Browser Bundle ship with HTTPS Everywhere? Surely if you're connected through a Tor circuit, HTTPS provides no extra security?
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User Inyerface – A worst-practice UI experiment
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We should make a website that does everything in the opposite way:1) Require adblock2) Banner saying the website doesn't use cookies, which goes away if you mouseover3) If you're on mobile, show a banner saying the website doesn't have an app4) A signup form, but when you try to focus it, it turns into a banner saying "jk this website doesn't have signup"
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Equifax securities fraud class action [pdf]
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This is quite strong policy. Usually in most sinister incompetent companies, the user name is "admin" and the password is "password".On a serious note: there should be a mandated, periodic, third-party security audit by neutral parties for all entities which deal with user data beyond a certain specified level of sensitivity. It should not be left to their discretion when to run such an audit from their end. Whether an entity similar to SEC for the stock exchange is desirable can be debated, but the current laissez faire approach to data will lead to even more such disasters.
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Linux Kernel Teaching
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Started getting into kernel stuff for work. Does anyone have a good idea what kind of market demand there is for kernel devs or similar skill sets? Being new to this I absolutely love it, but have no idea.The resources shared by everyone here are so helpful! I’ve been muddling through by reading the docs, source code, and various messages on the mailing list and... it’s been a little painful.
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Face ID and Touch ID for the Web
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These all seem to be examples that use faceID/touchID as a password. That’s not what biometrics should be though, they should be the username. I hope that this is supported as a flow as well. Identify who you are with biometrics, and prove your access with a correlated password.
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More challenging projects every programmer should try
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Write a toy compiler for a basic like language, you'll learn about what your languages are actually doing.
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Self-hosted photo and video backups directly from your mobile phone
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I prefer SyncThing on both mobile and desktop devices. It's open source and mature, the server only makes devices findable between each other. It allows 1 or 2 way sync. And it has advanced settings for keeping removed files (e.g. trashbin that cleans anything older than X days.)
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Microsoft makes source code for MS-DOS and Word for Windows available to public
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Under what license?Can we view, modify, redistribute?No one wants to get sued for these things, or being found to violate some end user license agreement with some other Microsoft software.On the other hand, I'd love to find out that people viewing this code contribute an improvement that no one in Microsoft saw in decades that helps them improve something today, leading them to soften their stance on Free Software and copyright.We can dream.
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T-Shirts Unravelled
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I'm the founder of threadbase. Thanks everyone for your kind words. I'd love to hear any comments or suggestions for what you'd like to see next or how we can improve the user experience. We're also looking for front-end/design help, as well as help with computer vision tech. Feel free to email me [email protected].
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The price of solar power just fell 50% in 16 months
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This might seem like a weird thing to complain about, but am I the only person who is sick to death of headlines of the form "X just did Y"? It's the "just" I object to. It seems to be some sort of trend over the last couple of years.I think it's to make it seem more dramatic or something. It just happened! My god!In this case it is especially ridiculous, since the article describes something that happened over the course of 16 months.
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