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iPhone 7
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I still can't get over the headphone jack. Apple does have a good record of abandoning technologies at the right time (floppies, CDs, Flash, etc) but the biggest difference is that those technologies were all on the downward slope of their popularity when Apple made the move and all had solid replacements available at the time. The headphone jack is just as popular today as it has ever been and it is still more convenient and dependable than wireless headphones for most people in most situations. Maybe that changes soon or maybe AirPods solve this for iOS users (they by design can't be a universal solution) but I can't help but feel that Apple is jumping the gun on dropping the jack. Although as an iPhone user, I hope I'm wrong.Side note, I think it is hilarious that Apple can't get the AirPods to ship at the same time as the iPhone. Anyone who buys the new phone on release is going to be stuck with the crappy lightning headphones for at least a month and a half.
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Employees are happier when led by people with deep expertise
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At a unicorn I was working at, MBAs were being hired to be engineering managers. I did not see a single engineer promoted to management, it was mostly all MBAs. The few I had direct contact were really useless at helping engineers out, all I ever heard from them was "Just get it done.". If I asked for help, they'd say "Well who else is gonna do it then?".I felt demoralised and lost some of my confidence. But the company was bleeding talent at the engineering level, plenty of engineers called out this crap and asked the CEO for answers. CEO would make excuses and not do much. Now the company is not doing well at all, even the senior leadership is leaving in droves, the CEO has even been replaced, the valuation has also declined quite a bit.I am not in silicon valley, so not sure about there but over here, it seems to be a trend to have MBAs in all management positions above engineering and even CTOs of startups who are MBAs.I had no interest in an MBA until I saw this trend. Now I am seriously considering that route, because it seems there is a serious glass ceiling. Doing an MBA might be necessary for me to move up the ranks.
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Growing Ubuntu for Cloud and IoT, Rather Than Phone and Convergence
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I may be a minority, but I am very saddened by this. Not because I have any particular love for Unity, but rather I share Mark's conviction that convergence is the future.Love or hate it but Unity was IMO the best shot we had at getting an open source unified phone, tablet and desktop experience...and now this is effectively Canonical not only shutting down Unity, but refocusing efforts away from convergence and towards more traditional market segments. I mourn the death of this innovative path.That said, hopefully this convergence with GNOME will eventually lead back to convergence...but for now that dream is dead it would seem.
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European leaders call for open access to all scientific papers by 2020 (2016)
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I don't understand how governments have the authority to make private companies (journal publishers) give-away their product for free. The fact that much of the research is funded by taxpayers is not relevant -- scientists have voluntarily submitted their work to private publishers for publication. Going forward, perhaps they should stop doing that. But for work that was previously published? It's rightly owned by the publishers.Note, that here the "product" I'm referring to is the final formatted article. If governments want to mandate that universities release internal versions of their published works that seems fine, but that work should be for the universities or governments to undertake. They should not be allowed to release Nature's formatted/published version. This is how Pubmed Central works currently in the US (unformatted manuscripts are released, not the journals' version). When Nature releases an article, they put a lot of work into formatting it for publication so it looks nice. That final product does and should belong to them.It's fine if people think that publicly-funded research should be freely available. But the fact remains that scientists have been voluntarily publishing their work in private for-profit journals for 100+ years. You can't just "undo" that. And they're still doing it today. If scientists truly felt strongly about these issues they'd only publish in OA journals, but most of them don't care (source: I'm a scientist).
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The Big Vitamin D Mistake
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Has anyone had experience ordering blood work (e.g. the vitamin d 25 hydroxy test) without visiting a doctor? I've seen very few references to the set of sites that pop up first online [0, 1, 2, 3] when I've gone looking for reviews in the past. Any suggestions? I'm in CA.[0]: https://www.privatemdlabs.com
[1]: http://www.directlabs.com/
[2]: https://www.walkinlab.com/
[3]: https://www.health-tests-direct.com/
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Show HN: TinyPilot – Build a KVM over IP using a Raspberry Pi
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Author here. Happy to answer any questions or take any feedback about this post.
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Pandoc – A universal document converter
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One thing I love about pandoc that I don't see mentioned here is the ability to apply filters to transform documents mid-conversion.I'm using Pandoc to write my PhD thesis at the moment, from Markdown source, using certain filters to "augment" what Markdown can do. Examples:https://github.com/LaurentRDC/pandoc-plothttps://github.com/lierdakil/pandoc-crossrefMore info here: https://pandoc.org/filters.html
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The gift of it's your problem now
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This was a long, thoughtful read. I really enjoyed it and mostly see things as the author does.> So it is with free software. You literally cannot pay for it. If you do, it becomes something else.This is really the crux. Everyone is mad there’s no money in writing free/os software, but if there was money it wouldn’t be free/os software. It would just be like what we do at our day jobs.You can write the code someone else wants and get paid for it (aka a day job). You also have the option to write the code YOU want to write, but in this case you’ll need to figure out a plan for making money on your own.
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YouTubeDrive: Store files as YouTube videos
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Turns out any site that allows users to submit and retrieve data can be abused in the same way:- FacebookDrive: "Store files as base64 facebook posts"- TwitterDrive: "Store files as base64 tweets"- SoundCloudDrive: "Store files as mp3 audio"- WikipediaDrive: "Store files in wikipedia article histories"
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Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll
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It's instructive to contrast what other billionaires did with media properties they owned:- Jeff Bezos personally bought Washington Post but he left it alone and let the editors run it. What Jeff did do was invest some money into the IT department to modernize the workflow tools (metrics dashboards, etc) for journalists. He stayed out of the decisions of what stories get run on the front page.- Rupert Murdoch owns Wall Street Journal but when Elizabeth Holmes asked him to squash negative stories about Theranos, he refused and stayed out of it. He let his editors run the stories even though it embarrassed him because he was a big investor.Both those guys are more detached from those media outlets and don't meddle in it day to day.What tech people like Paul Graham and others were hoping was for Elon to apply his scientific first principles type of thinking that he demonstrated previously at SpaceX+Tesla to Twitter. E.g. Tesla A.I. competency to clean up the bots and make the platform better.Instead, Elon let the Twitter monster abuse his ego and his reputation as a savior is ruined.Best thing Elon should have done was to focus only on the technical aspects of Twitter and let some more level-headed less-emotional people manage the editorial aspects.Hopefully, Elon notices that we don't have endless HN and reddit front page articles about Rupert Murdoch's jet.
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January 1, 2023 is Public Domain Day: Works from 1927 are open to all
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Our current copyright is far far too long. 20 years would be far more reasonable. We can talk about side issues all we want, but at the end of the day, copyright is about protecting the ability to generate profit. 20 years is more than enough time to profit from creative works. Are we as a society really saying that 75+ years is how much time people ought to be profiting from creative works? An absurd proposition in almost any other industry or pursuit.
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Tell HN: Sometimes you don't realise how bad something is until you leave
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Thank you for sharing.I can relate. This is my first “real” full time job, and I’ve now been there 10 years with little to show for it, and not for lack of trying.Software engineer for a small company, report directly to the owners.Repeatedly, I pour my heart and soul into a project that I believe in, only for ownership to trash the project for superficial reasons.I’ll do small things and get overly patronizing praise, and then when I try to initiate or lead something bigger, they crush it with passive aggressive, belittling remarks. They mostly just want me doing grunt work, despite my desire to do larger, “force multiplier” type work. Work that my coworkers and customers are asking for.My self esteem is terrible and I haven’t left for fear that I won’t be able to “make it” anywhere else, paralyzed by the fear of ending up unemployed.I’m angry that I have a 10 year career full of ambition that went absolutely nowhere, I want to leave, but it’s scary.Your story gave me a great boost of encouragement to start seriously planning my exit.
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Unpacking Google’s Web Environment Integrity specification
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How exactly is WEI any worse than say a peep-hole on a door? At the end of the day bots are a huge problem and it's only getting worse. What's the alternative solution? You need to know who you're dealing with, both in life and clearly on the web.I'm probably alone in this, but WEI is a good thing. Anyone who's run a site knows the headache around bots. Sites that don't care about bots can simply not use WEI. Of course, we know they will use it, because bots are a headache. Millions of engineer hours are wasted yearly on bot nonsense.With the improvements in AI this was inevitable anyway. Anyone who thinks otherwise is delusional. Reap what you sow and what not.edit: removing ssl comparison since it's not really my point to begin with
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Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip
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Slack, Zulip, this feels like we are back in 1999, when the internet was divided by ICQ, AOL Instant Messanger, Windows Live Messanger, and Yahoo Messanger. (Instant/Live was a plus back then). And the only innovation over IRC was a backlog and buddy list.
I wonder when the Trillian of Slack+Zulip will come out. I hope Trillian (which still exists) is already working on it.
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Text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership
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I suspect it will take a while for all of this text to be digested and for people much smarter than me to find a lot of nasty stuff in there.Meanwhile, I found the New Zealand and US side letter amusing:>To the extent contemplated in the Code, New Zealand shall not permit the sale of any
product as Bourbon Whiskey or Tennessee Whiskey, unless it has been manufactured in
the United States according to the laws of the United States governing the manufacture of Bourbon Whiskey and Tennessee Whiskey and the product complies with all applicable
regulations of the United States for the sale or export as Bourbon Whiskey or Tennessee Whiskey.I assume this must be quite prevalent in New Zealand if they wrote a letter specific to this one issue. I didn't see a similar letter with France regarding cognac or champagne.
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WebKit is now 100% ES6 complete
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Is anyone using Safari Technical Preview as their main Browser? I was hesitant to use it, but I've heard a few people say that it's stable.
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Google Cloud SQL for Postgres
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Cloud SQL for Postgres is launching today and will be available for all users early next week.Source: Work on Cloud SQL.
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GDPR for lazy people: Block all European users with Cloudflare Workers
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I’ve been reading hacker news for about a decade, and it’s getting to the point where I don’t think there are many entrepreneurs and/or technical people on here anymore.The number of people who are saying it’s no big deal to comply with this huge law, especially for very small startups, is mind boggling.Let’s just take one feature: the requirement that you can permanently delete all of your information. Most early-stage startups use the (in 2008, when I did mine) best practice of “delete=1”. Changing your whole database over to permanent cascade delete is only easy if you’re a very experienced programmer or who knows what he’s doing. And that sets aside the fact that even if you know what you’re doing technically, there are lots of business logic problems with just deleting things out of the database and anonymizing users is very tricky.I was not a great programmer when I started my first startup. I was learning as I went along.We couldn’t afford a lawyer, and the amount of time for me (the only programmer) to go through and read all the regulations and make all the requisite changes in the product I would estimate might take on the order of a month or two, which if timed poorly would’ve killed our company. I say again: at an early stage startup with one programmer, you cannot have that one programmer spending two months on compliance.It’s just gotten to the point that there’s one comment after another responding to this regulation or that regulation or this situation or whatever with “well, just call HR“, or “I can’t believe you don’t have a company policy for that!”Or “well just ask your lawyers“. It ain’t that easy. Do you have any idea how much it would cost to have “your lawyers” go through the GDPR, tell you what you need to do, and deal with all of the edge cases and gray areas? $20k or $30k doesn’t seem too high.My biggest fear is that all of these complex bureaucratic laws are just raising the bar for doing a startup. Maybe the days of two people doing a startup in someone’s garage should be in the past? If so, that makes me kind of sad.Regardless it’s not obvious that GDPR is the right policy or that it’s well designed or clear.
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SpaceX Crew Dragon Docks with International Space Station
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Fantastic, very impressive.But somewhere inside (my little star-wars/trek spirit), I wish that it was not so tricky. That we all could just travel and explore the universe.Everybody always talk about how difficult it is in space and how much better earth is. Wish the debate would be more about all the possibilities in space or on other planets. What can we do with zero gravity? For all the bad things with living on Mars, could there be some amazing benefits, new materials and so on..
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Fewer Than Half of Google Searches Now Result in a Click
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I think what folks are missing is that a lot of these "zero-click" searches happen as a result of Google scraping your website, and displaying the results as a "featured snippet."Yes, they link to you below the featured snippet.No, more people don't click, because they've taken the answer from your website and displayed it right in their search results.For example: If I'm searching for "best nail for cedar wood" Google gives me the answer: STAINLESS STEEL - and I never had to click through to the website that gave the answer: https://bit.ly/2MdovdP• Yes, this is good for users (it would also be good for users if Netflix gave away movies free)• Overall, the publishers who "rank" for this query receive fewer clicks• Google earns more ad revenue as users stick around on Google longerIronically, Google has a policy against scraping their results, but their whole business model is predicated off scraping other sites and making money off the content - in many cases never sending traffic (or significantly reduced traffic) to the publisher of the content.
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Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?
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Main benefits of Kubernetes:• Lets companies brag about having # many production services at any given time• Company saves money by not having to hire Linux sysadmins• Company saves money by not having to pay for managed cloud products if they don't want to• Declarative, version controlled, git-blameable deployments• Treating cloud providers like cattle not petsIt's going to eat the world (already has?).I was skeptical about Kubernetes but I now understand why it's popular. The alternatives are all based on kludgy shell/Python scripts or proprietary cloud products.It's easy to get frustrated with it because it's ridiculously complex and introduces a whole glossary of jargon and a whole new mental model. This isn't Linux anymore. This is, for all intents and purposes, a new operating system. But the interface to this OS is a bunch of punchcards YAML files that you send off to a black box and hope it works.You're using a text editor but it's not programming. It's only YAML because it's not cool to use GUIs for system administration anymore (e.g. Windows Server, cPanel). It feels like configuring a build system or filling out taxes--absolute drudgery that hopefully gets automated one day.The alternative to K8s isn't your personal collection of fragile shell scripts. The real alternative is not doing the whole microservices thing and just deploying a single statically linked, optimized C++ server that can serve 10k requests per second from a toaster--but we're not ready to have that discussion.
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Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)
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I still don't know why they stuck the "Java" name on JavaScript. Very confusing when the two languages are completely unrelated.> Java programs and JavaScript scripts are designed to run on both clients and servers, with JavaScript scripts used to modify the properties and behavior of Java objects, so the range of live online applications that dynamically present information to and interact with users over enterprise networks or the Internet is virtually unlimited.Was this level of integration ever achieved? Did Java applets actually have a JS API? Or is this just corporate double speak.
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Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders
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I have been using a starlink beta terminal for 3 months now, ask me whatever you want. Day job is senior network engineer for a regional-sized (4 US states) fiber based ISP.My most important message to everyone reading this is that it's not intended to compete with properly implemented wireline based services. It's going to absolutely blow away consumer-grade highly oversubscribed, bottom of the barrel ku and ka band geostationary satellite services (hughesnet, viasat in the USA, xplornet in Canada), and any WISP that can't keep up with a 150 Mbps figure.And eventually for really hard to reach places in the developing world, and much of the same offshore/aviation/maritime industry that right now pays tons of money to Inmarsat.
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Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
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The results keep getting "refined" so as to suit the popular 80% of queries, while getting much worse for any technical or obscure queries. Forced synonyms and "people also searched for" are typically useless and almost infuriating. Once you get off the first or second page, the results get even worse-- with pages entirely unrelated to the query (e.g. not even containing the searched phrases). They are probably testing/already implemented some sort of multi armed bandit type optimization like on Youtube's search results where they just show any popular pages (ignoring relevancy) to see if they yield a click.I've used DDG for the past ~5 years, and it is typically worse without using a hashbang like !so for technical queries. I guess that is what the web has evolved to-- knowing which mega-site you want to search against rather than discover new sites?
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Scientist busts myths about how humans burn calories
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> “You can’t exercise your way out of obesity,” […] “you can’t outrun a bad diet.”While this article is being a bit dramatic and possibly understating the impact of exercise slightly, I feel a little dumb that I didn’t know this earlier. It took me several decades too long to understand the obvious, that exercise is for building strength, and losing weight happens by eating less. I tried for way too many years to exercise my fat off, and it never really worked because I’d unconsciously eat to compensate. Once I tracked what I ate, exercise actually became more effective.A lot of people know this already, so it’s not busting everyone’s myths, but we also do have a strange narrative surrounding exercise and weight loss that I bought into. It makes me wonder if we’re physiologically wired to be allergic to the idea of less food, from an evolutionary perspective, because being hungry is literally risking death to our alligator brains.
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A career ending mistake
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I changed careers at 40+ years old. I'm very happy that I did it.People have all sorts of constructs / ideas about how careers work (based on experience) or how they think it works, or how they want it to work. I talk to some college graduates who tell me what they're planning for and have ZERO clue what industry they're talking about, their description is unrecognizable to me ... even tho I know it is the one I work in.I find your experience and paths can vary greatly company to company, even job to job.We all find truths we want to hold on to about work. I recall trips to the valley where my coworkers where astonished to hear tales of people doing the same work they did, but doing it slightly differently elsewhere in the country. Their view of how that job was done was entirely shaped by the couple places they worked (and everyone seemed to cycle through those couple companies). You'd think these folks though that if you didn't fill out the TPS report right to left that the world would end... I'm pretty sure the vast majority of people fill them out left to right but I didn't feel like telling them that, it might have been too much for them to handle."
I think there are three main kinds of career destination, at least in the tech industry: Independent
Senior individual contributor (IC)
Management
"I have no idea why those are the only destinations ... for an article worried about being happy that seems kind of limited.The whole article feels very pie in the sky to me.
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CVE-2022-41924 – tailscaled can be used to remotely execute code on Windows
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Technical write up by the security researcher at https://emily.id.au/tailscaleps. she's looking an employer rn // hire her!
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Daniel Ellsberg has died
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I see that New York Times is careful not to mention Manning, or Snowden, or Assange, or indeed draw any of the lines to the present day situation - lines that Ellsberg himself tried so desperately to draw in the last months of his life.In the book of Genesis, there is a part where Abraham haggles with God(!) trying to save the city of Sodom. If there's 50 honest people, will you spare it? How about 45? 40? He gets all the way to 10. Famously, that wasn't low enough.I feel like Sodom lost one of the honest men covering for it today.
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Fun with math: Dividing one by 998001 yields a surprising result
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This can be seen in python with (I had to dig into the docs for this, so here are the fruits of my labor :) ) import decimal
decimal.getcontext().prec=1000
dec = decimal.Decimal(1)/decimal.Decimal(998001)
#now doctor it up to see the numbers
strdec = str(dec)[2:] #chop off the '0.'
nums = zip(strdec[::3],strdec[1::3],strdec[2::3])
print nums
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Bruce Schneier joins EFF Board of Directors
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>Author and Critic Deepens EFF's Security Expertise as NSA Scandal IntensifiesGreat news - I've read a couple of really interesting articles that Schneier's put out in recent weeks - but is the scandal actually intensifying? I'm afraid somebody is going to need to fill me in on the current state of the reaction from the public/media at large; I tend to lock myself in a filter bubble of news relevant to my interests.
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Waze Carpool
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The reason why I would not consider Google to legitimately compete with Uber/Lyft at scale in this arena is because it's not part of their nature to staff customer support at the level required to run operationally-intensive businesses.The rate in which something goes wrong in the real world (esp where money in exchanged) is much higher than in a pure software world, and Google is going to try to take the FAQ/chatbot/no phone approach to service when it's going to need to staff entire buildings with agents if it doesn't want to completely piss off a nascent user base.
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Senate votes to reinstate net neutrality
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Time to call your Congressmen. I live in a purple district, and I'm going to make it clear to my Republican representative that:1) I'm going to vote in November,2) I will vote for him if he votes to keep the pre-existing title II net neutrality regulations, and against them if he does not, and3) Net neutrality is even supported by a majority of Republican voters [1], so if he votes against it's clear he's voting against his constituents.[1] http://www.publicconsultation.org/united-states/overwhelming...
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How to Start Learning Computer Graphics Programming
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Start with WebGL, Shadertoy.com, and jsfiddle.net.No other tooling needed until you've got the basics of vertex buffers and shaders down.(20 year graphics veteran here who's boostrapped some coworkers)
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The Sci-Hub Effect: Sci-Hub downloads lead to more article citations
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Maybe I misunderstood something, but it seems to me their data demonstrate that less interesting papers that nobody bothered to download from SciHub tend to have fewer citations than more interesting ones that are downloaded? How does that support the conclusion “Sci-Hub downloads lead to more article citations” (emphasis mine)?(Yes I read the paper and I’ve seen all the other factors they considered, but those factors simply aren’t as good predictors/indicators of interest as an organic download number from any channel, whether it’s ScienceDirect or SciHub.)Edit: To be clear, papers in their supposedly "limited access" (if we want to draw the same conclusion) control group appear to be available on Sci-Hub, i.e. as open access as their Sci-Hub group. Details in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23710992
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Bypassing Firewalls in macOS Big Sur
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Ugh. I'd love to switch to Linux, but as a designer, I'm stuck. It's not a lack of understanding of how it works— Before I was a designer I was a developer, worked in IT for a while, worked in upper-level support for a while, and Linux was my primary personal and professional OS from the late 90s to like 2010.Why don't I just run a closed-source OS in a VM? They are fussy. Having some weird graphics tablet driver problem or something can really kill the creative connection between me and my work, and if I'm coming down to the wire on a deadline, it can cost me a contract.What about tools that work natively on Linux? They generally just don't work for professional design use. Whenever I say that, a billion people always jump in and say "Gimp and VivaDesigner and Natron and XYZ and PDQ" work fine for me," and to my astonishment, they always seem surprised that the same just isn't true in most (any?) professional workflows. Sure, with varying amounts (usually non-trivial) of extra effort I can cobble together a disparate set of tools that might sometimes yield similar results to professional design programs, but it's going to take significantly more work to produce possibly lower-quality results, and that's just not an option for a pro. If you were hiring someone to craft the image of your company in a crowded, competitive marketplace, would you pay them more to take longer and potentially end up with a suboptimal product just because they were only using OSS to do it?A software developer could feasibly use something like windows notepad or pine to achieve the same results as an IDE, or even a more powerful text editor like SublimeText. For many non-professionals, people just editing a config file, or people making the occasional shell script, it does work fine. Better even, considering that the extra baggage of complex tools would actually slow them down rather than speed them up.
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The web is 30 years old today
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I still find the web to be so beautiful.I can talk and meet people all around the world.I can stream hundreds of videos around every conceivable topic, in 4K60 resolution, on-demand.I can make a livelihood without ever stepping feet out of my home; and conversely, work from almost anywhere that'll give me a visa.The digitized information of our civilization is just one search away.
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James Webb telescope reaches its final destination in space, million miles away
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I'm a little embarrassed to say this and I don't know exactly what I pictured in my head, but I had no idea these telescopes were so big[1].I guess I never saw one pictured next to a human. I've only seen pictures of satellites being worked on so I expected something more human sized? It seems so stupid now, especially since earth telescopes are huge.[1] https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a010000/a013500/a013522/JWST_v...
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SimulaVR Has Been Subpoenaed by Meta Platforms, Inc
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This is not Meta demanding to see some privilege information that exists in Simula's drawers, but rather commandeering the entire competing organization to do market research for Meta. It is clever and evil, and nothing anybody says after this will make me think that Meta is not anti-competitive nor that they have an once of ethics. As a consumer, I doubt I will ever again consider their VR products; I rather give my money to Satan, or even Google.
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Dozens of malicious PyPI packages discovered targeting developers
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I think a proper way to solve this issue, not specific to python but languages running in a VM in general, would be to have some sort of language support where you specifically define what access rights/ system resources you allow for any given dependency.Example of defining project dependencies: {
"apollo-client": {
"version": "...",
"access": ["fetch"] // only fetch allowed
},
"stringutils": {
"version": "...",
"access": [] // no system resources allowed for this dependency, own or transitive
},
...
}
It would probably require the language to limit monkey-patching core primitives (such as Object.prototype in javascript),
and it would be more cumbersome for the developer to define the permissions it gives to each dependency.
These required permissions could be listed on the package site (eg npm or PyPI) and the developer would just copy paste the permissions when adding the dependency.
But if you upgrade a dependency version and it now requires a permission that seems suspicious (eg "stringutils" needing "filesystem"), it would prompt the developer to stop and investigate, or if it seems justified add the permission to "access" list.
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The negative impact of mobile-first web design on desktop
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Over the years it's become clear to me that frontend is probably the hardest part of the stack. People think they can just shit out some bootstrap react app and it's perfect, but being able to write complex UIs that can work on any browser, any device, with all assistive technologies, and all languages, is extremely hard. You need someone with a deep knowledge of html, css, and the supportive web apis. A good frontend engineer is incredibly rare, even at big tech. What's even more rare is a UX designer that also thinks about these things, who are worth a million bucks.
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The negative impact of mobile-first web design on desktop
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Over the years it's become clear to me that frontend is probably the hardest part of the stack. People think they can just shit out some bootstrap react app and it's perfect, but being able to write complex UIs that can work on any browser, any device, with all assistive technologies, and all languages, is extremely hard. You need someone with a deep knowledge of html, css, and the supportive web apis. A good frontend engineer is incredibly rare, even at big tech. What's even more rare is a UX designer that also thinks about these things, who are worth a million bucks.
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Linode hacked, CCs and passwords leaked
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From a purported abridged chatlog with the alleged hacker:> 05:42 credit cards were encrypted, sadly both the private and public keys were stored on the webserver so that provides 0 additional security> 06:00 They did try to encrypt them, but using public key encryption doesn't work if you have the public and private key in the same directoryhttp://turtle.dereferenced.org/~nenolod/linode/linode-abridg...
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Safari is the new IE
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Nolan, I'm not familiar with what you do or have done, but have you ever tried to make a website back in the day? Ever tried to support IE6? 7? 8? IE literally broke the web. CSS rules which worked in every browser ever wouldn't work in IE. Entire webpages weren't formatting correctly, having to spend hours, days, on workarounds. Comparing Safari to IE is just wrong. Safari doesn't break the web, it 'just' lacks support for some new javascript functions, not break standards/rules that had been there for tens of years.But I'm sure this title gets you more clicks.
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Pixar in a Box – Khan Academy
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Hey HN! My name is Brit Cruise and I'm the lead content developer on the Khan Academy side of this equation (working alongside Tony DeRose from Pixar...plus a village of others), if you have any specific questions about this project I'll be happy to answer as best I can.
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What Happens Next Will Amaze You
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The correct answer is to never use programmatic ads.Ever.If you own a site, just curate a set of ads on your site that actually enhances your sites appeal. A fashion site should have matching fashion ads. A tech site should have matching tech ads. A local site should have matching local ads. Reach out to advertisers to get these ads. Never use an algorithm. You, as an editor, should be better than the algorithms. Ads are supposed to be useful to your audience, instead of being annoying. People buy fashion magazines - filled with 600 pages of ads- and Sunday newspapers BECAUSE of the ads. They should want to visit your website as well because of your ads.The worst thing you can do for your site is to place out-of-context ads in the middle of your site. Can you imaging if Vogue.com decided to place Flash SSD ads on their site? This is how you destroy an audience, and as a publisher, your number one concern should be to grow your audience.Once you curate a set of ads for your site, you'll find that click-through rates and conversion are far higher than random programmatic ads. You should know your audience, and the kind of ads that would appeal to them. Mark ads as content in your CMS. This avoids ad-blockers.Curating ads is how advertising has always worked, and will continue to work, after all these programmatic garbage goes away.
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Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)
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I hate to be that person, but I doubt the story is true. The variance in time spent waiting in the checkout line is far greater than the time it takes to walk to the front vs back of the store.What do you know? I google "snopes car allergic to ice cream" and find that it's an urban legend: http://www.snopes.com/autos/techno/icecream.asp
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“Oracle laid off all Solaris tech staff in a classic silent EOL of the product”
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@Oracle, please do the right thing and open-source Solaris. At least that's a proper way to die!
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Things I Don’t Know as of 2018
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This is an awesome article! I like the idea of being more forthcoming with what we don't know.> Containers. I have no idea about how to use Docker or Kubernetes. (Are those related?) I have a vague idea that they let me spin up a separate VM in a predictable way. Sounds cool but I haven’t tried it.> Deployment and devops. I can manage to send some files over FTP or kill some processes but that’s the limit of my devops skills.I'm working hard on trying to tease out a method to educate developers about DevOps / Kubernetes... It's hard to explain to people who have not been on-call or walked into a company on their first day as a devops, but I am strongly in the camp of "Kubernetes is live-saving, game-changing, etc". I tend to fail to explain to most product-focused developers successfully - Either too low level, too high level and hand-wavey, or they walk away with a sense of "man one day, that might be cool", rather than "We could get going on this _today_!". The most success I've had is in demonstrations (I have a raspberry Pi Kube cluster with 4 pies, with which I can physically unplug power, network, disk, etc and show off Kube's self-healing and auto-discovery powers), but at companies with day to day stresses, not so much. Plus the demo only scratches the service of cool features of even the Deployment API object.Shameless self promo, but I'm working on a project with a friend that hopefully helps. I want product-focused developers to have a "Heroku" moment about kube and understand the immense benefits they get from designing their applications with a "cloud-native" mindset. That the small cost is _vastly_ worth the benefit. The project is here: https://kubesail.com/.My "thing I dont know as of 2018", just for good measure: How to build complex front-end applications without making a complete mess of things!
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Collapse OS
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I don't think just developing a Z80 operating system is enough. The whole ecosystem needs to be preserved.In agriculture, we have the doomsday seed vault [0] just for this purpose. If we anticipate collapse of the current economic system or society, I think we should build a doomsday computer vault, that keeps everything we need to rebuild the computing industry in a underground bunker. It keeps everything we need in a controlled environment, such as 8080, Z80, m68k, motherboards, logic chips, I/O controllers, ROM/RAM, generic electronic parts, soldering irons, oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, schematics, documentation, textbooks, software. We also keep some complete, standalone computer systems such as desktops and laptops, and all the parts that need to service them. We also need to preserve the old semiconductor production lines around the world, although probably not in the same bunker. Even if we fail to build better systems, 8080s are already useful enough!Meanwhile in peace time, we need to form a team of experts that makes a roadmap to rebootstrap the computing technology for the future using parts from the bunker, with a step-by-step plan, that can be easily followed and executed.[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Global_Seed_Vault
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Show HN: I shot high-res stitched panoramas in Iceland using a thermal camera
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Why are Thermal cameras lagging in resolution? Visible wavelength cameras can be had upwards of 50MP for $5k.
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Apple is sued for telling you that you're “buying” movies
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Physical media lets you have privacy without logging when you watch media, what media you consume, how many times you consume it, or how long you consume it. You can enjoy it offline, and in 20 years long after the studio that licensed it is gone. You can give it to a friend or loan it out. Or sell it. It is yours.Meanwhile DRM media we pay full price for, or if the content is only available via streaming we pay for it indefinitely. In neither case are we assured access a decade from now on different devices and we certainly don't get any privacy as studios track every second we consume. Worse, when big companies decide it is not profitable enough to keep "purchased" data around anymore, they just cut it loose.Try opening a book from the Microsoft eBook store. It will fail because they closed down the DRM servers. The books stopped working. PlayStation 3 store? Wii store? Same story. You can no longer access your purchases.Literally the only way to get the same freedoms with modern digital media we had with physical media, is piracy.We got scammed.
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Neovim 0.5 is overpowering
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I have an honest question, the real advantage of Vi is its installed everywhere, and just works over ssh.
What is the benefit of a terminal IDE like neovim or vim with tens of something plugins?
Vscode or other powerful IDEs do the work much better.
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The deceptive PR behind Apple’s “expanded protections for children”
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I have a newborn at home, and like every other parent, we take thousands of pictures and videos of our newest family member. We took pictures of the very first baby-bath. So now I have pictures of a naked baby on my phone. Does that mean that pictures of my newborn baby will be uploaded to Apple for further analysis, potentially stored for indefinite time, shared with law enforcement?
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My upgrade to 25 Gbit/s Fiber To The Home
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Firstly … 25Gbit symmetrical … WOW.Secondly - as a person living my whole life in IT - both passion and professionally - I have no idea what would 25Gbit be good for. I’m currently paying about $80 for symmetrical 1Gbit fiber and have the option to upgrade to 5Gbit for about $180 but it seems so pointless.Here is the reasoning behind my grumpy opinion:1. Living in a home with Cat5 throughout so the best I can do is to route 1Gbit. Running cables in multilevel (American) homes is a major PITA.2. My Wi-Fi (802.11ax) is heavily affected by homes around me so only one AP can run with 80MHz channel width and the rest is 20-40MHz. Throughput ends up being somewhere between 150Mbit-500Mbit, depending on where you are.3. I have a few smaller servers running ..stuff. The trouble is not about server performance or bandwidth.. it’s about reliability. Running any business on consumer line (in the USA) is just signing up for trouble. (Eg. “Is your line down because your modem received a fault firmware? No worries, the tech is going to be there within next 4 days to check your cables…”).4. Things like game downloads on PS5 .. yes, they are amazingly fast (even on 1Gbit. They install faster from internet than from the built-in BD-ROM). But many games need to also “install” (whatever that means on PS5) and that takes 2x the time of download anyway. I can live with that once a month.5. Big fan of streaming services, however many providers limit bitrate on their side so I am still watching the sometimes blurry 4k …Back to original question and with genuine curiosity - what is 25Gbit for???
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7GUIs
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I implemented these a while ago in Clojure because it was part of the job application process at roam research.Didn't even get a reply... it cost me quite some hours to do this in a language I have almost no experience in.At least there was the upside that I got to experience Clojure and Om which was great to learn about :D
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A 17-year-old designed a novel synchronous reluctance motor
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This is great, I'm happy for him! But I miss the creative aspect in myself. I used to be so creative like him, with so many half-finished inventions scattered around the house.Today there's nothing. I finally managed to carve out a day or two per week away from my job to work on personal projects after many years of failed attempts to get away at great personal expense. But the last 3 days that I went to work on something, I picked up the metaphorical brush and there was nothing there. No creative impulse, just worries about chores/bills/obligation and painful memories from 20 years of negative reinforcement after failing at business or going through traumatic life events in 2000, 2001, 2003, 2008, 2012, 2016, 2019 and during the pandemic. Probably many more that all blur together. Now I just project my frustrations onto the world with negativity and accomplish no forward progress towards my life goals.Does anyone know a way to truly rekindle the creative spark after it's completely died? I feel generally happy and capable, but in borderline crisis that I can't self-start anymore or do work that isn't demanded of me externally. I'm coming to terms with the harsh reality that I'll likely never accomplish even one thing of any importance in all of the remaining years of my life. There's only work now and the daily grind. Pedal to the metal in first gear. Like I started out as Wesley Crusher but today am Paulie from Rocky with no prospects, only long slow decline.
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Show HN: I trained an AI model on 120M+ songs from iTunes
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This is very interesting, but unfortunately I haven't had the greatest luck in finding new songs I would enjoy listening to. It absolutely finds similar sounding tracks, but it doesn't distinguish which part of the song made it enjoyable. There's no tempo consistency or genre consistency or even main instrument/vocal timbre consistency between recommendations. I think locking one or more of those dimensions would allow for much better recommendations. I'm not sure what aspect you're using to order the results, but having extra metadata to filter or group the results in some way would help a lot.Take Raga's Dance by Vanessa-Mae, A R Rahman, ... Royal Philharmonic https://maroofy.com/songs/476841571 . I put in this track expecting other fusion songs to pop up, and arguably some do, but much more often it feels like a 20 second section was used to define the original song and it misses the underlying concept. Like it got, in my subjective description, the epic violin in orchestral music, but it completely ignores the fusion between the distict styles of traditional indian singing/instrumentals and western ochestral and also ignores the call response structure between the violin and carnatic players, which is the what I actually care about. Other songs have the vocals but no epic backing. It feels like it's matching multiple samples from the song instead of the whole song.This feels very promising since it clearly is picking up the styling of the specific songs across different genres and languages. I look forward to seeing where this goes.I also think it would be interesting if there was a way to specify two different songs to find either only the common things and/or to find what the fusion of those two tracks produces.
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Linen.dev: A 500 kb Slack alternative
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Not enough discussion here of the parts under "Our Optimization Strategies", which was the most interesting to me. Assorted reactions:> We found that react-icons had an issue that lead to everything being imported. This meant that we were including every single react-icon in our package whether we need it or not.Kudos to the Linen team for proactively finding this - I have a feeling tons of projects blindly trust that tree-shaking their dependencies will "just work" even though for many libraries it won't!> We also noticed that we were only using AWS client for s3 upload on the client side and it was taking up significantly more bundle size we need so we replaced the entire client side package with a 2 api calls to the AWS api.For such a minimal use case, this feels like a logical choice even if it's slightly more work to implement.> We ended up moving the code highlight code to a backend api that would cache the results.Love seeing websites make smart choices about which work to handle in the server versus the client.
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I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it
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Best quote: "People working for Didi apply for intern jobs at Uber China and then exfiltrate our data. We can’t let them see the formulas or they’ll just copy what we do!”This is so true. People in the US just don't understand the level of economic and industrial espionage that happens in China on a daily basis. I was responding to an unrelated breach at an unnamed tech company back in mid-2000s time frame and had a side bar conversation that went like the following:Them: "Yeah, we just opened a tech center in Xinjiang and ... wow, we've had quite the rash of lost ID badges there recently"Me: "Have you considered that they're not 'lost', but rather 'sold' for profit?"... silence ...I don't know if executives are aware but just don't care, or if they're simply incompetent, but China has productized industrial espionage on a massive scale. GE Aviation was a victim more recently: https://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/2022/11/16/accused-chi...
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White House Response to “Make Unlocking Cell Phones Legal”
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Hey guys, petition starter here. Just wanted to thank anyone who signed for their support. I just got off the phone with the White House and they're really enthusiastic about getting this fixed. We also discussed fixing Section 1201 of the DMCA permanently, and they've agreed to continue the conversation on that.When I originally posted this to HN at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5112020 there were a lot of very skeptical responses to the effect of "petitions don't have any effect". The optimist in me is glad they were wrong. The White House seem to be genuinely committed to helping push through a piece of legislation to fix this. If there's something about government that bugs you, it's worth trying to do something about it.Also, we're launching a campaign to ask Congress to change Section 1201 of the DMCA, with backing from the EFF, Reddit and others.Sign up at http://fixthedmca.org - should be launching the site tomorrow.
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TTIP Leaks
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So business groups and lobbyists for companies like IBM, Apple, Google et al. are deeply involved in the US side of negotiations (far more than any public interest groups).Then on the EU side, business groups and lobbyists for companies like IBM, Apple, Google et al. are deeply involved in negotiations to the detriment of all public groups.So this is really lots of big US companies negotiating with themselves on how to screw over Europe.This is a takeover attempt through the backdoor.
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A subway-style diagram of the major Roman roads, based on the Empire ca. 125 AD
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It's strange there are so many coastal routes. Shipping virtually anything by sea has been cheaper than moving it over land for a long time, and that probably includes troops. I would have expected roads to connect coastal settlements inland, not along the coast.
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It is as if you were doing work
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I love the "busywork" aspect of this game. You work like a drone, doing simple tasks with no intelligence whatsoever. This must be what most people working on a desk must feel like (not sure people on HN can relate to this).It's also a reflection on modern gaming in general. If only some games had busywork as part of their gameplay, they'd feel less tiring and more fun.
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Martin Shkreli is found guilty of securities fraud
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I use to hate this guy, then I saw the Vice interview on him. It was nice to see his side of the story.I don't know much about this case in particular. It was kinda sleazy to see the congress question him about his price increases when they knew damn well it was perfectly legal and they haven't done anything to stop it. Shkreli seems to be trying to expose this hypocrisy, but the news loves their stories.Vice interview:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PCb9mnrU1g
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1060-hour image of the Large Magellanic Cloud captured by amateur astronomers
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Full image http://www.cielaustral.com/galerie/photo95.htm?fbclid=IwAR3G.... (Linked in article) Really incredible.
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Microsimulation of Traffic Flow
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I think cars should “tug” on each other (communicating to eachother over RF somehow) and also act as a cushion (braking).When an intersection light turns green - all cars should begin rolling together. Waiting for cars in front of you in succession is burning time.
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Ask HN: One-person SaaS apps that are profitable?
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Key Values (https://www.keyvalues.com) is a one-woman show (oh hi!). I started Key Values as a side project two years ago, but it quickly turned into my full-time passion and business. I'm doing ~$30k/month and it's almost all profit since I don't have an office or any employees. I recently talked to Courtland of Indie Hackers (already mentioned in the comments) about how I got here: https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/086-lynne-tye-of-key-va...I would never have started Key Values w/o Indie Hackers, so I highly recommend you spend some time there. It's a bottomless treasure chest of inspiration.
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I turned my interview task for Google into a startup
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This reminds me of a take home software engineering interview I was once given via email. Same deal, I was told about 5 hours. I’m an iOS developer, so I was expecting a pretty simple app.I opened the PDF to find not one, but three separate tasks. Completion of all three was expected, with an estimate of about two hours each. One of the tasks was to replicate Apple’s ‘Reminders’ app in its entirety, backend sync functionality included. Another, a task requesting Visual Studio (iOS devs have no need for any experience with this).I promptly replied declining to continue the interview process. If you’re ever in a similar situation, interviews can sometimes tell you more about the company than they can learn about you. Good chance I dodged a bullet, and could have been working for someone setting highly unrealistic client deadlines, with the expectation that I can build something in any technology proficiently.
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Decades-Old Computer Science Conjecture Solved in Two Pages
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Can anyone explain the significance of this finding? Any technologies that can benefit from the application of this?
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The State of Machine Learning Frameworks
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Whatever happened to Julia? Wasn't it supposed to incorporate all these incredible abstractions at the language level and run quickly on GPUs and everything in-between? Is it just lack of adoption or is has it something else?
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Facebook being investigated in Germany for tying Oculus use to Facebook accounts
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If this separates Oculus into it's own company I'd probably buy one of the new headsets. The things Facebook is doing here definitely detracts from the product. I don't have to give Logitech my drivers license to plug in a mouse.
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EU Signs €145B Declaration to Develop Next Gen Processors and 2nm Technology
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EU has the tech. ASML is #2 company in EURO STOXX 50 index with 5.69% weight.ASML is the world's largest photolithography systems manufacturer and the only one producing extreme ultraviolet lithography machines. These EUV scanners are expensive as hell. Last years model costs $120 million per piece and you need 10-15 of them for TSMC gigafactory.TWINSCAN NXE:3400C (7 and 5 nm nodes, >170 wafers per hour) is probably the most expensive machine in the world.
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Dolt is Git for Data: a SQL database that you can fork, clone, branch, merge
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This is absolutely fascinating, conceptually.However, I'm struggling to figure out a real-world use case for this. I'd love if anyone here can enlighten me.I don't see how it can be for production databases involving lots of users, because while it seems appealing as a way to upgrade and then roll back, you'd lose all the new data inserted in the meantime. When you roll back, you generally want to roll back changes to the schema (e.g. delete the added column) but not remove all the rows that were inserted/deleted/updated in the meantime.So does it handle use cases that are more like SQLite? E.g. where application preferences, or even a saved file, winds up containing its entire history, so you can rewind? Although that's really more of a temporal database -- you don't need git operations like branching. And you really just need to track row-level changes, not table schema modifications etc. The git model seems like way overkill.Git is built for the use case of lots of different people working on different parts of a codebase and then integrating their changes, and saving the history of it. But I'm not sure I've ever come across a use case for lots of different people working on the data and schema in different parts of a database and then integrating their data and schema changes. In any kind of shared-dataset scenario I've seen, the schema is tightly locked down, and there's strict business logic around who can update what and how -- otherwise it would be chaos.So I feel like I'm missing something. What is this actually intended for?I wish the site explained why they built it -- if it was just "because we can" or if projects or teams actually had the need for git for data?
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Feds order Google to track people searching certain names or details
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I'm not a Constitutional scholar, but I would bet SCOTUS rules this kind of warrant illegal. Google certainly has the resources to take the case that far.AFAIK a warrant usually is tied to a specific person or a specific crime. In other words, if an explosion killed Harry McHarryface, then it would be constitutional to ask for names of people who searched for Harry.Or if the fertilizer used in the bomb was shown to have been purchased on March 10, then maybe a search for "fertilizer" in the weeks before March 10 would be allowed.But not a generic search.Just my opinion that's not legal advice.
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YC’s $500k Standard Deal
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A significant part of how YC thinks about this deal has not yet been articulated in the thread. (This is just my personal interpretation, not anything official.)Some comments are describing $500k as "not much". Most people would gasp at hearing that. Only a tiny slice of humans are a position to think that way—for example, people who have family wealth (or maybe an elite educational credential) to fall back on, or who have already managed to break into the fundraising scene (or maybe a FAANG job) and have gotten used to comparing themselves to all the $multimillion deals they keep hearing about.A big part of what YC is about is to be a bridge for everybody else to enter this space—no matter who they are or where they live or what demographic they belong to. YC has a long track record, right from the beginning, of funding founders who never would be given a chance by more mainstream institutions [1]. The new YC deal is particularly important for these sorts of founders. Geoff said it in the post, but I haven't seen anyone pick up on this yet:We also hope that this deal will encourage more founders of any age and from every demographic group and geographic location to take the leap into the startup world.YC does that because it's in its interest to do it and because it's good for the world. The idea that those two things go together, and that the way to maximize them is to help founders as much as possible, is in YC's DNA: https://www.ycombinator.com/principles/.Capital-rich climates notwithstanding, many founders are not necessarily in a position to step out of YC and raise millions right away. Geographic and demographic disadvantages don't suddenly disappear. (And let's not forget the disadvantage of just working on something weird.) Being in YC helps, of course, but all the same imbalances are still in play.For those founders, YC going from $125k to a $500k deal is a gamechanger because it gives them a lot more runway—more time to build, to grow, and prove what they can do, before stepping back into fundraising. Then they can hopefully raise from a position of strength instead of potentially having to accept less favorable terms.[1] Me, for example. I wouldn't be here right now if it weren't for that, and I could tell a long story about how most investors weren't interested in us even after we got into YC.
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Zig self hosted compiler is now capable of building itself
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I was thinking of learning Rust but it seems a bit overkill due to manual memory management as compared to languages with similar speed like Nim, Zig, and Crystal. How would one compare these languages?Is it worth learning Rust or Zig and dealing with the borrow checker or manual memory management in general, or are GC languages like Nim or Crystal good enough? I'm not doing any embedded programming by the way, just interested in command line apps and their speed as compared to, say, TypeScript, which is what I usually write command line apps in.
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Show HN: Slow Social, a social network built for friends, not influencers
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Hey everyone, OP here.I, like many others tend to waffle between loving and hating social media, so this is my take on what I think a better solution looks like. This is something I've been working on for the past couple of months and a concept that I think will be though provoking, if nothing else, to the HN community. If you want to read more on my thoughts and the story behind this, you can check out my blog post here: https://dev.to/duensing/introducing-slow-social-4a90Besides that, I'm happy to answer questions and take criticism.
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Goodbye Zachtronics
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I've found it difficult after starting to work full-time to fully enjoy Zachtronics games, since they use much of the same parts of my brain as my day job, but the sheer joy I got out of Zach's earlier games (SpaceChem, KOHCTPYKTOP, Codex of Alchemical Engineering) contributed a lot to my decision to work in software. I've experienced little else that scratches the "design itch" in such a pure and thoughtful way, whether games from other developers or actual software development.
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Airbnb removed my negative review
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My nextdoor neighbor sold their house last year and now it's an Airbnb. Despite the fact that I live in a house in a normal residential neighborhood, I'm now forced to live next to a hotel. And I have no say in the matter. Super frustrating.I've read people talking about how Airbnb screwed the host or the guest. But few people talk about how it screws the neighbors.
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Windows NT on 600MHz machine opens apps instantly. What happened?
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It blows my mind how unresponsive modern tech is, and it frustrates me constantly. What makes it even worse is how unpredictable the lags are so you can't even train yourself around it.I was watching Halt and Catch Fire and in the first season the engineering team makes a great effort to meet something called the "Doherty Threshold" to keep the responsiveness of the machine so the user doesn't get frustrated and lose interest. I guess that is lost to time!
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HP to Contribute webOS to Open Source
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"under an open source license" is vague. I hope more details emerge soon. If it's a liberal license this could be very interesting.Without a group leading development the project may languish so ideally a competent group, with a vision, decides to run with webOS.
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Google, what were you thinking?
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I'm curious to see how this ends up.The upsell is the part that makes me suspicious, because that doesn't sound like the type of thing that Google would do.My guess is this. It is someone claiming to be Google and selling a service that is actually free. That's a pretty common thing to see in Africa, in Rwanda we see people 'selling' Google Apps for domains all the time.The WHOIS lookup does give me pause though.
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Dear Googles: Stop asking
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I was all enthusiastic about G+ for about 5 minutes - until they wouldn't allow my wife to sign up without giving them her phone number, and proving that it was hers by accepting a call from them. Just who the fuck do they think they are??There is no way I could suggest my friends and family sign up to such an intrusive service, so I quickly deleted my own account.It's an absolutely stunning achievement to create a web-site that's even more offensively intrusive than Facebook. I hope Google are proud.
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How I Built a Custom Camper Van (2015)
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I did something similar.I wanted a vehicle I could explore the world with, so I turned my Jeep into a house on wheels with fridge, drinking water and filtration, solar and dual batteries, interior cabinets and a custom modified pop-up roof so I can stand up and walk around in the Jeep.I joked about applying for a home owners grant :)The full pictures and story are in this album - http://imgur.com/a/OLK3oI'm driving it around Africa now.EDIT: I'm a Software Engineer too, and I decided there is more to life than sitting at a desk - a few years back I drove Alaska->Argentina, now it's around Africa for 2 years.EDIT2: I've hit my posting limit.Yes, I'm still alive!Follow along if you want to see if I stay that way!Facebook: https://facebook.com/theroadchosemeInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/theroadchosemeTwitter: https://twitter.com/dangrecYouTube: http://youtube.com/c/theroadchosemeAnd my website: http://theroadchoseme.com
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A Pre-History of Slashdot
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I never publicly announced this but I loved Slashdot’s friend/foe system so much that I built it as a cross browser extension for Hacker News. It’s called Hacker Smacker and it’s on GitHub.https://github.com/samuelclay/hackersmackerSupports not only friends and foes but also friends of friends and foes of friends. Makes it easy to scan the HN homepage and comment threads and see what’s good. Much like how Slashdot’s friend foe system highlighted the good stuff in threads.
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Effective Engineer – Notes
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This is totally an incomplete thought, and I'm not trying to be down on this author in particular:It's interesting to see a lot of management thoughts and colloquialisms slowly creep into the "other side" of software development (i.e. the actual developers) and become fairly well-tolerated.We still make fun of phrases like "paradigm" or "synergy", but we're all mostly on-board with phrases like "own " or "growth mindset". You can see the author using the word "leverage" here repeatedly in the same way that we often chide managers for using words like "synergy".Interestingly the conversation around "effective engineers" has also shifted to really de-emphasize that technical ability - the best engineer is a good teammate, first and foremost (and I think a not-so-subtle implication also is that a good engineer is mostly extroverted as well). In the past decade or so, it seems like the "effective engineer" has become one who straddles that line between management and technical ability.I don't really have an opinion on this yet (I think there's good and bad, as with most things), but it's just fascinating to watch.
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“Lifefaker.com makes faking perfection easy”
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Having been at the tail end of the age group that missed the normalization of 'likes' as a legitimate asset to accumulate, I'm curious what the turning point was when people no longer felt self conscious to openly admitting to collecting these virtual assets? Startups, media campaigns etc, we understood why they were doing it, money. But for most social-media users, that's obviously not the case.I'll admit, when I had a facebook account I felt vulnerable when a post of mine didn't get too many likes but it was considered 'lame' to worry about it. Just a few years ago, it was considered a personality flaw to be preoccupied with likes and follower counts. Now it seems it's a primary and openly admitted pre-occupation of many users if not a whole generation, from average Joe's to celebrities.Were there a set of key events that led to this normalization of what used to be a frowned upon behavior? Or was it merely a grinding away of cultural norms through persistent gamification mechanics?
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You know how HTTP GET requests are meant to be idempotent?
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When I recently added 'click to unsubscribe' functionality to my emails, the URL got wrote out into some logs. Those logs got written to a Slack channel and Slack loves to click any link it sees. Oh, and it doesn't respect robots.txt.But all I saw was every member of my list clicking 'unsubscribe'. It took a good hour to figure out exactly what was going on.Idempotence is not the problem here, by the way. That just means calling the method twice has the same effect. But GET should have no side-effect, in an ideal world. Of course, in the case of unsubscribe links, it needs to have a side-effect to comply with the law.
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Adults learn language to fluency nearly as well as children: study
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I have started to ponder a hypothesis that this thing applies to almost any learning. People claim that it is easier for kids to learn, but for most of the things kids learn, they use much more time than any middle aged could in practice. Like, "ooh, look, my nephew learned backflip on a trampoline so quickly and easily, I would never learn that". Yep, he just spent hours a day on the thing for the last couple of months. You do the same and I bet backflip is not that hard.
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Dutch brewery burns iron as a clean, recyclable fuel
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Just to spell out something that's been implicit in other comments: the entropy level of your energy matters a lot. Electricity > movement > heat. To go down the chain is almost free, to go up the chain you have to spend quite a lot.You can do a lot of things with electricity: you can heat things, but also move them around and run your TV, all without any loss. With heat you can just... heat things. So you can't call this an "iron battery", because you don't get electricity out of it, just heat. Maybe call it a "heat battery" or "high performance heat pad".Also note the efficiency numbers: "High-efficiency electrolysis of iron oxide can store as much as 80 percent of your input energy in the iron fuel" is the efficiency of the process itself. "Using this kind of cyclical process to generate electricity could approach a theoretical efficiency around 40 percent" is because you need to climb the ladder to low entropy again (probably by using the equivalent of a steam engine to run a generator).
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If it will matter after today, don't talk about it in a chat room
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The problem with "trying it with my team for one sprint" is that I now need to have a long conversation with legal. How will the service provider handle the content (discussions, screenshots, code snippets) that my team will upload? Do our current customer contracts contain any clauses that complicate the use of external discussion sites? In the unlikely event that the service offers the option to host it locally -- who is going to deploy it, configure it, set up security and authn/authz around it?The real answer is: just fucking use email. Why is email not one of the options suggested in the TFA? It's universally available, durable, allows long-form conversation and thoughtful deliberation, doesn't tell you that "someone is typing," and offers you the luxury of checking it at a set interval only a few times per day.The way many organizations have collectively abandoned email in favor of instant messaging is a travesty.
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Cloudflare's inaccessible browser contradicts the company's mission
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Why people are still using and promoting Cloudflare when the company is repeatedly trying to position itself as an internet gatekeeper?There is already a consensus that internet gatekeeping is bad for people, so why people are volunteering for this?This company already has a tremendous control over what people can or cannot see on internet since a lot of websites use it has CDN, but there should be a limit on what companies can do or cannot.In this particular case, we have blind people blocked from internet, and it doesn't matter if this is not on purpose or it is just a side effect, because in practice they are been blocked, and yet something like this is unable to make a scratch its reputation.
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Replacing my best friends with an LLM trained on 500k group chat messages
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While I love all these stories of turning your friends and loved ones into chat bots so you can talk to them forever, my brain immediately took a much darker turn because of course it did.How many emails, text messages, hangouts/gchat messages, etc, does Google have of you right now? And as part of their agreement, they can do pretty much whatever they like with those, can't they?Could Google, or any other company out there, build a digital copy of you that answers questions exactly the way you would? "Hey, we're going to cancel the interview- we found that you aren't a good culture fit here in 72% of our simulations and we don't think that's an acceptable risk."Could the police subpoena all of that data and make an AI model of you that wants to help them prove you committed a crime and guess all your passwords?This stuff is moving terrifyingly fast, and laws will take ages to catch up. Get ready for a wild couple of years my friends.
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The largest DDoS attack to date, peaking above 398M rps
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The fact that large cloud providers can handle huge DDoS attacks I think in the long run leads to a worse internet. It forces botnets to up their game and for websites the only solutions available are to pay Google, Amazon or Cloudflare a protection tax.I honestly don't see any other options, but I'd really wish for them to come through some community coordinated list of botnet infected IPs or something.
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How Not To Sort By Average Rating
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I love it and I hate it.Why I love it: It's precise. It's elegant. It's rigorous. It's based upon solid, proven science & theory. It's a perfect application for a computer. And most of all, it does what's intended: it works.Why I hate it: What human can understand it?I used to implement the first manufacturing and distribution systems that used thinking like this. They figured, "We finally have the horsepower to apply complex logic to everyday problems." Things like safety stock, economic order quantities, reorder points, make/buy decisions, etc.But the designers of these systems overlooked one critical issue: these systems included humans. And as soon as humans saw that decision making formulas were too complex to understand, they relieved themselves of responsibility for those decisions. "Why didn't we place an order?" "Because the computer decided not to and I have no idea why."I suppose the optimal solution is somewhere in between: a formula sophisticated enough to solve 95% of the problem but simple enough for any human's reptile brain to "get it". This isn't it.
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What's Really Warming the World?
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Cool visualization.It's worth keeping in mind that the modeled data lines up with reality because it's supposed to. That's how you calibrate your model, by making sure it fits reality.The real trick is to see how well your model extrapolates from the data you have out into the future. As in, if you feed it data up to, say, 1990, will it correctly spit out 2015 temperatures that fit the reality of 2015, or will it spit out crazy 2015 predictions like the models that were built in 1990 did. And, the bigger question: How will its predictions for 2040 (given 2015 data) match up to the reality over the next 25 years.We seem to be getting a lot better at the modeling side. That's a good thing, since the first couple decades of watching people panicking and fighting each other over whatever scary results came out of the first generation climate models wasn't any fun to watch.
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Xi: an editor for the next 20 years [video]
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Presenter here, feel free to ask questions.Also thanks to the awesome Recurse Center for inviting me to speak and making the recording, and the audience for their great questions.
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Facebook Really Is Spying on You, Just Not Through Your Phone's Mic
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It's worth nothing that the reason security researchers haven't just intercepted the traffic from the Facebook apps to see if its transmitting voice data is because the apps use Certificate Pinning, which prevents the SSL traffic from being decrypted using the SSL certificate generated by mitmproxy/Charles.In light of that restriction, what might be interesting is looking at the amount of data transferred by the Facebook app with/without the microphone/location services enabled. (this is a data project I have in the pipeline)
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Solid – Reshape the web as we know it
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applications :(Does anyone else feel nostalgia for the pre-"web app" days of the internet? I'm talking about personal sites on Geocities and web rings built on communities of shared interest.The browser was an application for navigating hyperlinked information. Other applications include email clients, news readers, FTP clients, and IRC clients. You never had to download a megabyte of minified JavaScript just to read a 500-word article; you never would, since it took about ten minutes to download a megabyte on a blazingly fast 14.4 modem.
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Ugly Gerry – Font created from congressional districts
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This needs to be coloured in shades of Blue and Red.
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