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John Carmack is reading and contributing to OpenBSD source code
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Here is your daily reminder to read "Masters of Doom", a book about the early days at ID Software. It's an amazing look into a really cool time in gaming and software as a whole.It's a great book, mostly about John Carmack and the guys at ID!https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masters_of_Doom
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Google keeps records of everything you buy, even if you delete the email receipt
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Googler, opinions are my own.Google has been doing this for a while, as can be seen when the reporters wrote about it 2 years ago: https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/17/18629789/google-purchase-.... HN discussed it at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19942219You can see the information it has already collected if you use Google, by visiting: https://myaccount.google.com/purchasesThough oddly my list is empty. I wonder if I disabled this feature at some point?The help docs: https://support.google.com/accounts?p=orders&hl=en, explain how you can delete this data if you want to.
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The FDA wants you to be able to buy a hearing aid without a prescription
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There are a number of healthcare areas in the US that have been protected by regulation, but it’s increasingly unclear if this is good for patients, consumers, or public health at large. The increasing sentiment seems to be probably not.Vision care is another area I’d expect to see more changes and disruption coming down the pipeline. Vision care is very important and advanced cases require special skills, but it’s also unclear why many routine checks couldn’t just be done by a family doctor.The US requires one to see a “doctor of optometry” to get a basic single vision prescription. That industry used to make its money turning around and selling you glasses from the same office but that whole industry has been turned upside down by online retailers like Warby Parker and such. Why the US can’t follow the models followed most elsewhere in the world is unclear, but it would remove a lot of extra steps and costs in getting a basic care of glasses. Ophthalmology (medical doctors) are still very much a thing but most countries don’t have this model of needed a “prescription” from an optometrist for a basic pair of single vision specs.
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If OpenSSL were a GUI
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This also demonstrates were CLI excels and where GUI's fall short. With the GUI your just stuck digging for the correct option and tab. With the CLI you can create aliases or shell scripts to make wrappers for complex CLI options. Not to mention building custom openssl.cnf configs.
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Factorio is coming to Nintendo Switch
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Please no. Someone tell me it's just an unconfirmed rumor. Why would they do such a thing?I am at very high risk for Factorio addiction, and the only reason I haven't played it yet is because I don't play PC games anymore. But I do have a Switch, and having Civ VI on there was enough of a problem, thank you very much.Goodbye everyone!
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Bay 12 Games has made $7M from the Steam release of Dwarf Fortress
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Glad to see this, because they have worked long and hard on this game. For the optimistic, divide ~$4m (post-tax) by team of 2 for ~20 years (they started work in 2002). They've made some money in the meantime obviously, but seeing the final profit doesn't accurately capture the overall investment. Just in case you were thinking of quitting your day job to become an overnight millionaire making indie games.
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Microsoft has not stopped forcing Edge on Windows 11 users
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I gave my old parents the latest hand-me-up laptop and installed ubutntu on it because of windows 11. The install process and default configuration is so user hostile to someone that "just needs to use chrome". My niece & nephew have only known ChromeOS/iOS/Android. They will never use windows until a college course requires some specific software, or they get a desk job. I think they will for sure eventually "learn windows", but I don't think the generation behind them will.I get the feeling more and more that peak Windows is upon us.
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Dear Mark Zuckerberg
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I don't understand what you think Facebook did wrong.They intend to enter this new space, using their technology and their people.As a courtesy they offered to hire you / throw a lot of money at you.What would you have had them do instead?Not compete with you, because you're a precious snow flake?Acquire you and treat you like a prima donna, giving you your own team and allowing you to take your own technical direction?Why should Facebook - or any competitor - do either of these things?Seems to me like they acted pretty reasonably here.Of all the things you said, this struck me as the weirdest:> Strangely, your “platform developer relations” executive made no attempt to defend my position.What do you think the purpose of the “platform developer relations” executive is? To advocate AGAINST Facebook and for random outside developers?I'm not a fan of the Facebook app (not a member) or the company...but in this case, the firm seems to be acting 100% reasonably.
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Flickr gets new UI, new Android app, 1 TB free space
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1TB isn't that impressive when you have to deal with a 300MB/month upload rate limit: http://www.flickr.com/help/limits/It'd take 291 years to fill up the 1TB allowance:
https://www.google.com/search?q=1TB+%2F+(300+MB%2Fmonth)(Also looks like there's a missing on that limits page, there.)Edit: Looks like the page is being edited right this moment - the page used to list the 300MB/month limit but was also mentioning the new account types, at the same time. Guess they forgot to review all the text
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Python is now the most popular introductory language at top U.S. universities
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a language without types, without extensive research? Then, why not C/D/Pascal. i strongly believe for universities sml/ocaml/haskell or even rust are far better choices. I prefer sml.
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Dropbox Project Infinite
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This feature is implemented at a low level, and works on the command line.For example if you have a directory that is all stored in the cloud you can `cd` to it without any network delay, you can do `ls -lh` and see a list with real sizes without a delay (e.g., see that an ISO is 650 MB), and you can do `du -sh` and see that all the files are taking up zero space.If you open a file in that directory, it will open, even from command line, then do `du -sh` and see that that file is now taking up space, while all the others in the directory are not.You can right-click to pin files and directories to be stored locally, and right-click to send them back to the cloud so they don't take up space.This is actually very different than traditional network file systems like SMB, NFS, WebDAV, and SSHFS. With a normal network file system over the WAN you would have major latency problems trying to `cd` and `ls` the remote file system. Most of them also don't have any ability to cache files locally when offline, or the ability to manually select which files are stored locally and which are remote. AFS does have some similar capabilities.
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Page Dewarping
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This is great! My wife is a music teacher and often scans sheet music so that it's more portable. She has been asking me for a while for something exactly like this. I'll have to tweak it to work on sheet music, since I imagine his methods to identify lines of text won't work for the music staff out of the box.
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Estimates that mineral levels in vegetables have dropped by up to 90% since 1914
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Something that has puzzled me recently: how is anyone supposed to get the daily recommended amount of potassium? If you look at foods like bananas that are supposed to be good sources of it, you still need to eat something like eleven bananas a day to get enough (according to US recommended daily intakes, anyway). At least with the minerals mentioned in this posting, you can fall back on supplements if you need to...but if you try to buy potassium supplements, the max dosage you can get over the counter is 99mg, which is only about 3% of the daily recommended intake. WTF?
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Supreme Court allows blind people to sue retailers if websites aren't accessible
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Blind programmer here. Just a glimpse of my life.
Blind people have to live in an environment where X% of web sites and programs are not accessible, where X varies somewhere from 20% (for web sites) to 50% (for desktop applications). That's just my approximation of the state of accessibility these days.
Now imagine that you live in the world where you don't know which printer or wi-fi router to buy, since maybe half of them you won't be able to use.
Imagine that you cannot order from some online stores. You cannot fly certain airlines. And apparently you cannot order some pizza online.
Worst of all you don't magically know whether a web site is accessible or not. You just go to web site and try it, spend some time to learn the layout - it typically takes blind peple longer to familiarize with new web sites, spend thirty minutes to fill out the details of your order and then when you try to click the submit button, you figure out that it wouldn't click for some reason. Being a developer you open HTML code just to realize that this is some weird kind of button that can only be clicked with the mouse, but not a screenreader. But hey, your screenreader can route the mouse cursor to this button and simulate a click. So you try a real mouse click and it still doesn't work for some reason, and I have no idea why. Finally, you give up.
I hope I managed to convey a typical sense of frustration with a web-site that is not that accessible. I do get arguments of other people that it might be hard for small businesses to make their web sites accessible. and I don't know where to draw a line, but I need to say that Domino's is a large enough company and even though I hate counting other companies' money, I must say they're big enough to be able to afford to make their web-site accessible.
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Engineer says Google fired her for notifying co-workers of right to organize
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> Kathryn Spiers, who worked as a security engineer, updated an internal Chrome browser extension so that each time Google employees visited the website of IRI Consultants — the Troy, Michigan, firm that Google hired this year amid a groundswell of labor activism at the company — they would see a pop-up message that read: “Googlers have the right to participate in protected concerted activities.”So basically, the Google employee added arbitrary javascript to an internal chrome extension used by Google employees that triggered a popup when employees visited a specific website.And Google fires her with the reasoning:> “We dismissed an employee who abused privileged access to modify an internal security tool,” a Google spokeswoman said in a statement, adding that it was “a serious violation.”I'm not at all opposed to Google employees organizing. But injecting javascript into an employer's internal chrome extension does seem like something that warrants some type of action by Google in response...
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A tech antitrust problem no one is talking about: US broadband providers
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Seriously, I feel like I say it every time it comes up: WHY aren't people taking action against ISP monopolies?It seems like such a cut-and-dried political issue: they're utilities and they overcharge you whether you're a Republican or Democrat. And taking action doesn't require new antitrust concepts, because it's just your garden-variety utility. It's the same established principles as electric or natural gas.Yet bizarrely this doesn't show up as an issue on Republican or Democrat platforms. Going after Google and Amazon and Facebook's free products is the sexy new issue, but the fact that we're all overpaying hundreds of dollars a year for broadband is just massively ignored.And I'm not talking about politicians being bought. It baffles me why voters aren't writing letters to their city councils, their mayors, their state reps, their governors. If voters actually care, politicians do respond.It would seriously be so easy to change if the voting population actually did care about it. But, inexplicably, we just pay the fees and deal with the crappy customer service and complain, but it never seems to occur to anybody to actually organize local political action against it.It's utterly baffling.
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ICANN Refuses to Accredit Pirate Bay Founder Peter Sunde Due to His ‘Background’
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> They basically admitted that they don’t like me. They’ve banned me for nothing else than my political views. This is typical discrimination. Considering I have no one to appeal to except them, it’s concerning, since they control the actual fucking center of the internet.Next-level deplatforming. From a non-profit. That essential controls the internet. Yay.
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Why I rewrote my Rust keyboard firmware in Zig: consistency, mastery, and fun
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After writing a lot of Rust, I recently did a small project with Zig to learn the language.I'm especially impressed with the C interop. You can just import C headers, and Zig will use clang to analyze the header and make all symbols available as regular Zig functions etc. No need for manually writing bindings, which is always an awkward and error-prone chore, or use external tools like bindgen, which still takes quite a bit of effort. Things just work. Zig can also just compile C code.Rust indeed can feel very heavy, bloated and complicated. The language has a lot of complex features and a steep learning curve.On the other hand, Rust has an extremely powerful type system that allows building very clean abstractions that enforce correctness. I've never worked with a language that makes it so easy to write correct, maintainable and performant code. With Rust I can jump into almost any code base and contribute, with a high confidence that the compiler will catch most of the obvious issues.The defining feature of Rust is also the borrow checker and thread safety (Send/Sync), which contribute a lot to the mentioned correctness. Zigs doesn't help you much here. The language is not much of an improvement over C/C++ in this regard. The long-term plan for Zig seems to be static analysis, but if the many attempts for C/C++ in this domain show anything is that this is not possible without severe restrictions and gaps.Choosing to forego generics and do everything with a comptime abstraction makes Zig a lot easier to understand, compared to Rust generics and traits. The downside is that documentation and predictability suffers. Comptime abstractions can fail to compile with unexpected inputs and require quite a bit of effort. They are also problematic for composability, and require manual documentation, instead of getting nicely autogenerated information about traits and bounds.Many design decisions in Rust are not inherently tied to the borrow checker. Rust could be a considerably simpler, more concise language. But I also think Rust has gotten many aspects right.It will be very interesting to see how Zig evolves, but for me, the borrow checker, thread safety and ability to tightly scope `unsafe` would make me chose Rust over Zig for almost all projects.The complexity of Rust is a pill you have to swallow to get those guarantees, unless you use something like Ada/Spark or verifiable subsets of C - which are both more powerful than Rust in this regard, but also a lot more effort.Some smaller paper cuts, which are partially just due to the relative youth of Zig:* no (official) package manager yet, though this is aparently being worked on* documentation is often incomplete and lacking* error handling with inferred error sets and `try` is very nice! But for now errors can't hold any data, they are just identifiers, which is often insufficient for good error reporting or handling.* No closures! (big gotcha)
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People Staring at Computers
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The most curious thing about this project is how people seem to have a visceral reaction to having photos of them made without their permission; but having their activity tracked online hardly evokes the same reaction.It's weird. What harm is a random picture of my face in public going to do? But still some people worry so much about that.Whereas only very few people show the same reaction to the fact that Google stores a copy of every word you typed into their search field ever. Or that Apple stores a copy of every message I have sent to a loved one with my phone on their servers.We accept that our most private thoughts are being captured, analyzed, sold; but the outrage is about someone taking an anonymous photo of us in a public setting.
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The Insecurity Industry
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I'm not going to comment on Snowden's view of what liberal western states do when it comes to surveillance. I have my own opinion, but he's been right about stuff I'd disagreed with him in the past before so I'm gun shy about confronting his ideas again.On the topic of unsafe language though, he's absolutely right. We don't have to put up with this. We could pass a law and ban new code in unsafe languages from national security threatening devices like phones or cyberphysical devices like self-driving cars and we would be the better for it in under a decade. We could even have taxes to give breathing room during a transitionary period to encourage it before outright banning it, but we don't. We don't because so often it is less of a hassle for the government to trust the private sector that it is to take some real position on the regulatory issues that matter. This will probably always be the case until the government is able to evaluate talent and pay salaries in accordance with that talent as the private sector is.
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The surreal experience of my first developer job
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There are lots of these half-arsed tiny tech companies in the UK (I've worked for a few). I wonder whether this is true all over the world, or is a peculiarity of the UK? It could be that we don't have a culture of VCs who would fund a company to the required scale and provide adult supervision. I remember when I ran a company, raising money or even getting a bank loan was impossible. (We just ran it on a shoestring and as a result were never able to scale.)
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Three ex-US intelligence officers admit hacking for UAE
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There is an incredibly well produced podcast episode on these ex-NSA engineers working for the UAE that came out a couple of years ago. Check out Darknet Diaries Ep47: Project Raven [1].Synopsis is that the UAE hires ex-NSA employees as "penetration testers" and when they enter the country for cybersecurity work, some are pulled aside to be briefed to an opportunity called "Project Raven" to assist Emirati intelligence with targeting, allegedly in the interest of counter-terrorism. The thing is, only Emiratis have "hands on keyboard" while the US engineers sit beside them and guide them, which supposedly dodges any legal concerns. Those who Jack interviewed decided to leave Project Raven when it became clear they were targeting dissidents, human rights activists, and later, Americans. As you might imagine, ex-NSA employees who target US citizens for a foreign government are breaking the law. I do wonder if it's these ex-Project Raven engineers that have led prosecutors down the road to where we are now.[1] https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/47/
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Canada bans foreign home buyers for two years
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These are boogieman policies that have zero influence on the root cause.Foreign investors jump into the housing market because the current system ensures that the supply of housing is limited so it is an attractive way to park your wealth.But that is not the root cause.The root cause is the system that is geared to keep houses always appreciating via supply constraints: aggressive zoning, discretionary permitting, NIMBYism.Until we liberalize zoning, legalize building, and reject the idea that houses have to be appreciating assets, the issue will continue.As it is often the case, politicians go for the headline with the highest electoral ROI, rather than tackle the real issues.
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Huawei phones automatically deleting videos of the protests?
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The bigger news to me was that Apple blocked AirDrop in China - specifically to limit dissent and for preventing people from organizing [1]. A company that misses no chance to showcase its liberal credentials, bending over backwards for perhaps the most dictatorial government in the world to suppress the most basic of freedoms.To quote from Apple's article on racism [2], "With every breath we take, we must commit to being that change, and to creating a better, more just world for everyone." I guess according to Apple, Chinese people don't deserve any of what's written in their post.[1]: https://qz.com/apple-airdrop-china-protest-tool-1849824435[2]: https://www.apple.com/speaking-up-on-racism/
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Ways to shoot yourself in the foot with Postgres
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"2. Push all your application logic into Postgres functions and procedures"Why are functions and procedures (an abstraction layer at db layer) considered harmful to performance when the same abstraction layer will be required at the application layer (introducing out of process overhead and possibly network traffic)? I don't agree with this advice. (Or I don't understand it.)
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UK pulls back from clash with Big Tech over private messaging
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It's a little unclear, but my reading of this is that the power to do it will still be in the law, requiring at most secondary legislation to put into effect (perhaps not even that) if they think they ever have enough leverage over messaging providers, or are willing to spend the political capital. Not a great place to be in really, but better than it actually being deployed.
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Microsoft UI has officially entered the realm of self-parody
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The first problem with the article here is that some of the buttons (Move To, Copy To) did not exist previously. They are also extensions of existing functions (Move, Copy) - so concluding that half the UI is covered by buttons that were not used is an inaccurate assumption.Secondly, the actions are being moved from the context menu to the ribbon. Most new computer users find it very hard to remember additional, non intuitive actions like right clicking & context menus. Each of these is a 'modifier' that power users are used to, but which make the mental model of file manipulation much harder for beginners to wrap their heads around. They have to remember to apply these modifiers to see if the functions they want exist. Moving the functions into a contextually aware ribbon will make life much easier for these users.Third, Move, Copy, Delete & Rename occupy the center of the ribbon. These are the most used commands (by far) and rightfully occupy center stage. Power users will call it clutter, but it will be extremely helpful for beginners.[Disclaimer: MSFT Employee, but I do not work on Windows]
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Organizing complexity is the most important skill in software development
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This is incredibly true. I once turned 60kLoC of classic ASP in VBScript into about 20kLoC of python/django including templates. And added a bunch of features that would have been impossible on the old code-base.It turned the job from hellish (features were impossible to add) to very nearly boring (there wasn't much to do anymore). So with this newfound freedom I built some machines to automate the data entry and once that got rolling the job got even more boring. Because it was a small company with a very long learning curve the owner didn't let people go, but instead kept them on so that he didn't have to hire and train new people as growth accelerated.But with all the automation some slack found its way into the system and problems that had normally required me to stop working on my normal job and help put out fires now got handled by people who weren't stretched a little too thin.Sadly there's (seemingly) no way to interview people for this ability so we're stuck with the standard "write some algorithm on a whiteboard" type problems that are in no way indicative of real world capabilities.
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Stripe Issuing – An API for creating physical and virtual cards
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That’s awesome. I wonder how easy would it be to code an easy service that generates a different card for every subscriptions. No more hassle to cancel this gym membership!
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uBlock Origin 1.20
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I am dumbfounded that uBlock Origin, arguably the single most important extension in modern web browsing, and one that makes millions of lives easier by making their web experience bearable at all, all of this depends on one single person, working for free.Now there's also the list maintainers, who also work for free. Still makes you wonder about how the world works. There's probably many other similar instances. In any case, I think these people deserve more recognition than they currently do and we shouldn't take anything they do for granted.
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How to overcome Phone Addiction
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Some ideas on this topic:1. Inconvenience based solutions don't address the problem: using apps to restrict phone use, physically hiding the phone etc. Once you leave those carefully constrained conditions, you are more vulnerable than ever. Not to mention the contradiction with the core issue that it's a symptom rather than a cause.2. Turning abstinence as an ongoing status condition (e.g. "X days since I did Y") is a trap. It sets you up for later failure by burdening you with a perpetually unfinished objective with psychological consequences that only increase as the 'highscore' increases. This could work with things that are less easily accessible like heroin, but it's not going to work with something as easily accessible as a phone or computer.3. The solution that works with 1 and 2 is probably urge surfing as it tackles the issue directly4. It's easier to think of it as an addiction to browsing rather than an addiction to the phone itself. You have to catch yourself during any browsing moment in any context to eventually make progress. Be intentional in almost every action instead of going on auto-pilot, although obviously resting at the end of the day is fine. It's more a general philosophy than a hard rule meant to exhaust you.5. The eventual goal is a rich life where you no longer feel the need to distract yourself
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Show HN: PDFs from HTML
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There is something really pleasing about reading PDFs. It’s perhaps how static it is and it won’t change on me. I can zoom in or “operate” on it without some reorganization. It puts the mind to ease. There is no reflowing. There is no columns shifting. It’s just is. Like a piece of paper as an analog - the intent of the author and the designer is retained and frozen in time. Fonts are embedded and chosen by the creator. Haters of PDFs do not understand the human aspects of it - they just see it as a specification (which is convoluted).
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AWS's Egregious Egress
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Working in realtime games that require high bandwidth usage, AWS and basically every other public cloud is fundamentally unusable for us because of this exact problem. Our bare metal infrastructure for the Hypixel Minecraft network uses 3-4PB per month, so we simply lease a 100gbps transit link billed at 95th percentile.Last I checked, AWS wanted ~$200k per MONTH, for just bandwidth (no compute, memory, storage, or anything else). We'd love to be able to use the cloud, but not at the cost of increasing our monthly expenses by an entire order of magnitude, so we just stick to bare metal colocation.I honestly believe that if you have the technical skill in-house, and are spending more than, say, $30k/mo on public cloud hosting, that you should seriously evaluate whether bare metal could significantly decrease your costs.
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Excuse me but why are you eating so many frogs
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As a Frenchman, it took me a while to realize it was supposed to mean "a painful thing to do"
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EVGA terminates Nvidia partnership [video]
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Having watched most of the GamersNexus video, my takeaways were:- Will maintain some stock for RMAs- Made pre-production boards for 4xxx, will not manufacture- 3080 and above are not profitable for EVGA- NVIDIA is not transparent about pricing with board manufacturers, they find out MRSP same time we do- NVIDIA limits MSRP heavily on cards so they can't do things to sell more profitable higher end cards- It sounds like (this is my takeaway from GN's description, not their words) EVGA's CEO is tired of dealing with NVIDIA, wants to refocus on family, and there isn't a clear person to replace him and hesitant to sell to people who would mistreat employees/cut corners/damage brand.- Will continue selling power supplies- No plan to work with AMD or Intel making boards, CEO sounded dismissive toward it
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This Guy Has My MacBook
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There's something very very wrong with the city of Oakland. I lived there for one year, before moving to SF and while everybody told me I should constantly be watching my back, I mostly ignored it and was fine. But after I moved to SF, I found myself in Oakland for a party and sure enough, with a couple friends, I got myself mugged at gunpoint by three scary-looking local gangsters.The scary part, though, is the cops' handling of the situation. Luckily for me, I was quick enough to react and hide away my most important item, my iPhone 4. As soon as they were gone (within 30s) I called the cops, and soon thereafter we had 5 squad cars show up. They interrogated us and made us write statements, but would not send a car after the suspects, who had fled in a direction we had indicated to them. After telling us there's no chance they'd recover our stolen stuff, they took off. We asked for a ride back to the bart station, to the police station, anywhere (it was night in a shady part of Oakland. We had nothing… no money for a cab, and we sure as hell didn't want to walk alone around Oakland.) They just refused, saying they had "other shit to do" and left.The fact that I got mugged at gunpoint in Oakland comes as no surprise to me—I shouldn't have been there in the first place. However, the police's blatant incompetence came as a terrifying shock.
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Kit Kat's homepage is currently a parody of Android announcement page
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This honestly makes me wonder: what is the point of web sites for stuff like KitKat? Clearly, they can replace the entire thing for the purposes of a joke so it can't be that high up there.Who visits those sites? What do they do on them? The Nestle/Hersheys site, sure. Standard corporate stuff. But a site specifically for KitKat?EDIT: there seems to be some confusion in the replies. I am not talking about this joke web site that was put up today. I am talking about the normal kitkat.com that has been around forever.
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John Carmack on the Joe Rogan Experience [video]
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He talks about AGI at https://youtu.be/udlMSe5-zP8?t=2776I wonder if all the really smart people who think AGI is around the corner know something I don't. Well, clearly they know a lot of things that I don't, but I wonder if there's some decisive piece of information I'm missing. I'm a "strict materialist" too, but that doesn't mean I think we can build a brain or a sun or a planet or etc within X years, it just means that I think it's technically possible to build those things.I don't see how we get from "neural net that's really good at identifying objects" to "general intelligence". The emphasis on computational power also makes no sense to me. If we had infinite compute today, what steps would you take to build AGI? Does anyone have any good ideas about that?Sometimes I wonder if AGI (and the concept of a "technological singularity") isn't just "intelligent design for people with north of 140 IQ". Maybe really smart people tend to develop a blindspot for really hard problems (because they've solved so many of them so effectively).
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Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival
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What I want is a decentralized Reddit not under the control of advertising needs. Reddit redesign has been bad for quality content. I actually find Reddit to be a better source of information and knowledge than Google at this point, mostly because Google has been inundated with paid blog-spam. It's a bit harder to get away with that in Reddit (for the time being, and for whatever reason).
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Web-assembly powered WYSIWYG LaTeX Editor, supporting nearly all LaTeX package
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Personally I hate Tex/LaTeX and I think it should be replacted by something else long time ago. First of all syntax is horrible, if you don't work with it on daily basis try to figure out what macro you wrote one year ago is doing. Each time you have to jump to manual and learn almost everythig from very beginning. Next thing is lack of utf-8 and TrueType fonts supports (I know there is XeTeX and LuaTeX) but today such features such be in very core of text system no in some software branch. Extensibility is next thing and here again it is very poor unless you use something modern like LuaTeX or you are an expert in TeX macros. Packages dependency hell is next thing side by side with stupid compilation process with meaningless error messages. Am I the only one who think this way?
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WireGuard Gives Linux a Faster, More Secure VPN
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Increasingly it seems like heavily opinionated foundational tools and frameworks are overtaking more highly configurable alternatives, at least in terms of breadth of usage or popularity.Could this be a positive change? Does this represent a healthy response cognitive fatigue in a world with configuration options at every possible layer?Or does this shift to less readily configurable tools represent an overall negative? Are we losing diversity in favor of a more vulnerable monoculture crop?Or both?Asking for real, not sarcastically. As a developer I’m a huge proponent of simpler, more opinionated frameworks for most projects but I’m also aware my perspective is more limited than many HN commenters.
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Over 90% of Indian techies in the US are upper-caste Indians
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The core issue in market heavy economies is that people with money make money and everyone else doesn't. Being smart and hard working and having poor parents means you will be poor. Being dumb and lazy with rich parents means you will be rich. Maybe with 3 or 4 full generations of nothing but hard work and luck you might make it up from working to middle class. Maybe.This is never really discussed directly. Only using a proxy like race or caste.
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Apple’s T2 security chip jailbreak
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Hi guys, I am part of the team working on all things T2. [1]The checkra1n support is just in a PoC state, it will successfully exploit and boot the T2. The payload support is partially broken, but being worked on.Additionally, we have SSH working over usbmuxd from a tethered device [2] and SSH working from macOS on device, with an SDK in the works [3].Some key takeaways from the T2 being jailbroken:- Custom Bootloaders (OpenCore, Coreboot, etc) are now possible as the T2 validates/sends the UEFI payload to PCH using a bridgeOS binary called MacEFIUtil, which can trivially have its signature checks patched.- Filevault and by extension Touch ID are more or less crippled, especially in light of the recent SEP exploits. Amusingly, Apple uses a hardcoded "passcode", analogous to an iDevice's unlock pin in plain text within the UEFI firmware.- Support for In-System Debugging of the PCH/Intel processor over USB. This works in a similar fashion to those Bonobo cable used for debugging iDevices [4]. We are working on building an accessory that you can purchase and plug into your Mac with a USB male endpoint exposing Intel's DCI debugging protocol.- Lightweight AppleSilicon Tinkering environment. With SSH support from macOS on device, and the T2's modest specs, its a nice sandbox for messing with arm64 stuff. It's a pretty peppy chip, at times coming close to my 8th gen i7...yikes.1. https://www.theiphonewiki.com/wiki/T8012_checkm82. https://twitter.com/qwertyoruiopz/status/12379043351845642243. https://twitter.com/su_rickmark/status/12868860106814627844. http://bonoboswd.com/
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Vietnam War images from the North Vietnamese side
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The US is repeatedly on the wrong side of history. And they cannot even face that.Red scare. Supporting neo-liberal-to-fascist govts. Yelling democracy but then killing democratically chosen representatives when they do not "suit de US likings". Bitching about some "meddling" in their election when the history is full of US meddling in democratic process of other nations. Giving "foreign aid" to apartheid regimes.US looked like a force of good after WW2, but that deteriorated quickly. Not that other western nation states are holy, but the US seems to be the ringleader.
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Something weird is happening on Facebook
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With those comment counts, something dodgy is obviously happening.The interesting question here is whether Facebook is somehow accidentally amplifying it. Certainly it is not in Facebook's interest to allow this kind of data harvesting. If it hurts you to think that Facebook somehow isn't maximally evil, at least consider that this is data that could be only Facebook's. Allowing somebody else to harvest it is money straight out of Facebook's pocket.So, given FB should not be complicit, what mistake could they be making to allow the system to be haunted? The obvious guess is that they have a feedback loop in the ranking algorithm. It values comments very highly as a signal of good engagement, but they weren't prepared for "content" that is this good at eliciting low effort comments and have wide appeal demographically. As long as one of these reaches a critical mass, it'll be shown to tens or hundreds of millions of people just by any engagement feeding even more engagement.Is there anything less obvious?
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We're improving search results when you use quotes
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> Years ago, many people used operators because search engines sometimes needed additional guidance. Things have advanced since then, so operators are often no longer necessary.In my experience, things have degraded since then, so operators are increasingly necessary.
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UnifiedPush: A decentralized, open-source push notification protocol
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Wow, that was submitted here quicker than we could do it!UnifiedPush has been a thing for a while, see the official website: https://unifiedpush.org/With this blog post, we† tried to clarify a few names. Feel free to point out things that are still unclear, the documentation is pretty much a WIP.UnifiedPush aims at replacing the push notifications mechanism provided by Google services with something independent, that anyone can self-host or any OS can provide without compatibility issues. It does require small adjustments server-side and client-side for applications assuming Google services.There is also a Matrix room at #unifiedpush:matrix.org and a Mastodon account at https://fosstodon.org/@unifiedpushNote: we'll be monitoring this topic for a while, you don't have to reply to this thread.† karmanyaahm and S1m are main authors
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Twitter restricted in Turkey in aftermath of earthquake
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Erdogan's first speech was almost 2 days after the earthquake and he said "We are monitoring who said what on the social media and tried to provoke the people. Today it's not the day to go after those but we take notes and when the day comes, we will go after them".Just look at his face when delivering this speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doy38aKbMw4It's like from V for Vendetta. The lighting choice is very particular.Twitter was heavily used to seek help by people in turmoil, even hundreds of people were posting from under the rubbles. The officials were claiming that everything was under control and they are helping everyone but people were posting videos showing the situation on the ground and the situation didn't look even close to being under control.The head of communications of Erdogan even introduced an app to streamline "reporting disinformation". Like, it's the second day after a massive earthquake and they published a f*king app to snitch people.
Here is the announcement of the app, early at 05:00 local time in the morning 24 hours after the quake: https://twitter.com/fahrettinaltun/status/162277720485259264...Also there were many incidents of the mainstream media cutting of talks or turning away the camera when people said or did anything discrediting the official narrative.Yesterday, some people with prominent accounts who shared the tweets from the people in the region began reporting that they were taken into custody by the police. I guess the day has come quickly.
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Remove “This incident will be reported.” from user warnings
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I was always disappointed it never summoned some grumpy graybeard unix admin from a dark server room basement to give me a chiding lecture.
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P ≠ NP
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I skimmed through the synopsis but this philosophical statement baffles me (although obviously it is unrelated to the validity or invalidity of the proof):"The implications of [P ?= NP] on the general philosophical question of [..] whether human creativity can be automated, would be profound."How so? If P!=NP, that is obeyed by the brain as much as by computers and whatever trick our brains does to be creative despite of this, will be available to computers as well, regardless of P?=NP. What am I missing?
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What Happens When You Install the Top Download.com Apps
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And this is why Apple created Gatekeeper and made the Mac OS X App Store so ridiculously onerous for developers[1]. The software world is, for all intents and purposes, a thin sheen of gold flecks and diamonds atop a veritable cesspool of shit.You can just imagine the conversation at 1 Infinite Loop: Marketer: The Panic guys are considering pulling
out of the App Store. Maybe we should reconsider
our App Store strategy to make it more inclusive.
Product Manager: Have you seen the top 10 downloads
from Download.com? They literally destroy your
operating system.
Marketer: ...
All that said, I'm disappointed with many of the restrictions that Apple places on iOS and OS X developers, but, after reading an article like this, I'm reminded why these restrictions exist, and that it's our own fault.[1] and sandboxed iOS apps, and made the iOS App Store the only way to install iOS apps without jailbreaking your phone.
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Gene Amdahl has died
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Honest question for those who got received CS/Engineering degrees in the last 10 years, did Amdahl's Law come up?I've seen programming courses go away from assembler/c/c++ over the years to Java and then scripting languages at a couple local schools.I wonder if the history/theory side changed as well.
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Ripgrep – A new command line search tool
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I'm the author of ag. That was a really good comparison of the different code searching tools. The author did a great job of showing how each tool misbehaved or performed poorly in certain circumstances. He's also totally right about defaults mattering.It looks like ripgrep gets most of its speedup on ag by:1. Only supporting DFA-able Rust regexes. I'd love to use a lighter-weight regex library in ag, but users are accustomed to full PCRE support. Switching would cause me to receive a lot of angry emails. Maybe I'll do it anyway. PCRE has some annoying limitations. (For example, it can only search up to 2GB at a time.)2. Not counting line numbers by default. The blog post addresses this, but I think results without line numbers are far less useful; so much so that I've traded away performance in ag. (Note that even if you tell ag not to print line numbers, it still wastes time counting them. The printing code is the result of me merging a lot of PRs that I really shouldn't have.)3. Not using mmap(). This is a big one, and I'm not sure what the deal is here. I just added a --nommap option to ag in master.[1] It's a naive implementation, but it benchmarks comparably to the default mmap() behavior. I'm really hoping there's a flag I can pass to mmap() or madvise() that says, "Don't worry about all that synchronization stuff. I just want to read these bytes sequentially. I'm OK with undefined behavior if something else changes the file while I'm reading it."The author also points out correctness issues with ag. Ag doesn't fully support .gitiginore. It doesn't support unicode. Inverse matching (-v) can be crazy slow. These shortcomings are mostly because I originally wrote ag for myself. If I didn't use certain gitignore rules or non-ASCII encodings, I didn't write the code to support them.Some expectation management: If you try out ripgrep, don't get your hopes up. Unless you're searching some really big codebases, you won't notice the speed difference. What you will notice, however, are the feature differences. Take a look at https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep/issues to get a taste of what's missing or broken. It will be some time before all those little details are ironed-out.That said, may the best code searching tool win. :)1. https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher/commit/bd65e26...
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Accidentally destroyed production database on first day of a job
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Lots of people in the thread are commenting how surprised they are that a junior dev has access to production db. Both jobs I've had since graduating gave me more or less complete access to production systems from day one. I think in startup land - where devops takes a back seat to product - it's probably very common.
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Exa, a modern replacement for ls
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exa is hard to type, bad choice of name for something I'd be typing many times a day
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After 37 years, Voyager has fired up its trajectory thrusters
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What does it fire out when firing the thrusters? How come there's propellant left?
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Growing a company that sells miniature construction supplies to $17k a month
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It still blows me away that people put their email address in forms, and that email marketing affects sales. I guess while they keep working, people will keep creating popups.
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To Remember Everything You Learn, Surrender to This Algorithm (2008)
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> "To Remember Everything You Learn, Surrender to This Algorithm"> "The winter sun sets in mid-afternoon in Kolobrzeg, Poland, but the early twilight does not deter people from taking their regular outdoor promenade"I find titles promising a specific piece of useful information combined with longform, author storyline based content to be one of the most fustrating things about reading traditional journalism on the internet. A form of bait and switch.
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Ask HN: What Hacker News comments have you bookmarked?
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A quote about salary, that I bookmarked as I could see myself making the same mistake:"Salaries never stay secrets forever. Hiding them only delays the inevitable.
Last year we were having a discussion at lunch. Coworker was building a new house, and when it came to the numbers it was let loose that it was going to cost about $700K. This didn't seem like much, except to a young guy that joined the previous year and had done nothing but kick ass and take names..." (edited for brevity)."...The conversation ended up in numbers. Coworker building the house pulled about $140K base (median for a programmer was probably $125K), and his bonus nearly matched the new guy's salary, which was an insulting $60K -- and got cut out of the bonus and raise in January for not being there a full year, only 11 months.Turns out he was a doormat in negotiating, though his salary history was cringeworthy. It pained everyone to hear it, considering how nice of a guy he was. In all honestly, $60K was a big step up for him. Worst of all, this wasn't a cheap market (Boston). The guy probably shortchanged himself well over a half-million dollars in the past decade. This was someone who voluntarily put in long hours and went out of his way to teach others, and did everything he could to help other departments like operations and other teams. On top, he was beyond frugal. Supposedly he saved something around 40% of his take home pay, despite living alone in Boston. He grew up in a trailer park.He spent the next day in non-stop meetings with HR, his manager and the CTO. That Friday he simply handed in his badge without a word, walked out and never came back.Until 3 months later. As a consultant. At $175/hour."https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2439478
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Amazon Accidentally Sold $13k Camera Gear for $100 on Prime Day
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It’s kind of interesting- the asymmetry of moral expectations and entitlement.If you accidentally purchased a bag of M&Ms from Amazon for 500 dollars instead of 5, they will let you undo it. On the other hand, if the matter is reversed, Amazon is expected to be a good sport and take the loss — even if the purchase was made in bad faith (ie- knowing Amazon mis-priced it but purchasing it anyways.)I’m not going to entertain any counter arguments that Amazon deserves this because they treat workers poorly or don’t pay taxes or whatever, those arguments are orthogonal. The same behavior would happen with a company with better public trust and respect. And it’s not like anyone is selling those cameras to donate money to a warehouse worker in need.I just think it’s amazing how frail people’s morality is, how it goes out the window when certain conditions are met.
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Rooms can be as bright as the outdoors
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I usually eschew labels, preferring simply "sleep weirdo", but I fit the pattern of "Non-24 Sleep-Wake Disorder", with my sleep and waking times drifting progressively later at semi-regular intervals. The result is that I'm often awake through the night. (This week I'm going to bed around 9:00 a.m.)Even with that, I've noticed some pretty big productivity swings based on the season. Interestingly, this hit me very hard in moving from where I'm from (southern Texas) to Michigan (for college) and then to Berlin (for the last 14 years). Right now, in Berlin, which is approximately as far north as Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, North America's northernmost large city, the sun sets before 4:00 p.m.I usually try to spend a month of winter closer to the equator to keep my productivity levels and spirits up.Between the seasonal adjustment (where the sunset time swings by a full 7 hours in Berlin) and my sleep weirdo-ness, I've also come to love me some artificial-sun-level lighting.I tend towards 400-500 watt halogen bulbs. I have an up-firing light of approximately that wattage in every room of my home.A question for other folks that compensate sunlight with artificial lighting:Do LEDs really work for you? I'm a wanna-be hippie, and I'd love to use energy efficient bulbs and have tried every generation of them, but the light just doesn't do it for me. I keep going back to halogen as the sweet-spot between black-body radiation and energy efficiency. I can immediately spot the difference between an LED or CFL and incandescent bulb. I've had some success in mixing them in about 50/50 ratios. They've already been banned for sale in the EU, but I have a stockpile that will last me a decade in a pinch. Does anyone else struggle with the light quality from modern lighting?
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Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance to develop connectivity standard
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10 years in the trenches here.Apple’s smart home protocol famously does not support multiple users. Amazon is choosy on what features you can implement (turn on alarms but not turning them off, locking doors but not unlocking them). Google loves using radio hardware no one else supports. Zigbee has delightful legacy security vulnerabilities and consortium drama.I look forward to these groups putting aside their differences, coming together, and creating a new standard that combines the best of all these anti-patterns.
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Ask HN: Anyone know any funny programming jokes?
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One of my all time favorites. Can’t remember where I first read it (Quora?), but it’s currently my top Google hit for “balloon programmer project manager joke”. [0]============A man is flying in a hot air balloon and realizes he is lost. He reduces height and spots a man down below. He lowers the balloon further and shouts:"Excuse me, can you help me? I promised my friend. I would meet him half an hour ago, but I don't know where I am."The man below says, "Yes, you are in a hot air balloon, hovering approximately 30 feet above this field. You are between 40 and 42 degrees North latitude, and between 58 and 60 degrees West longitude.""You must be a programmer," says the balloonist."I am," replies the man. "How did you know?""Well," says the balloonist, "everything you have told me is technically correct, but I have no idea what to make of your information, and the fact is I am still lost."The man below says, "You must be a project manager""I am," replies the balloonist, "but how did you know?""Well," says the man, "you don't know where you are or where you are going. You have made a promise which you have no idea how to keep, and you expect me to solve your problem. The fact is you are in the exact same position you were in before we met, but now it is somehow my fault."[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/2rn8qx/i_h...
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Ask HN: Advice for finding an entry-level remote job?
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One more angle since I haven’t seen anyone mention it.Instructions on how to bootstrap a software portfolio:Pick a language (sounds like you chose JS which would be my pick as well), buy a copy of cracking the coding interview, make a leetcode.com account, make a codepen.io account, and get to work.If you’re smart and dedicated you can teach yourself this stuff and these are the best tools to help you in my opinion.Spend your time solving problems on leetcode and then utilizing these techniques in codepen portfolio pieces.In my opinion with serious dedication you can have a junior swe worthy resume and portfolio put together within a year.[edit] since the question inevitably comes up with JS in my opinion you should not spend any time focusing on front end frameworks. Learn Vanilla JS, HTML and CSS, you will blow your interviewers away if you can solve their problems without a framework and it is overhead you don’t need as a beginner.
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A call to minimize distraction and respect users’ attention (2013)
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All I've heard for the past 12+ years is "engagement". The singular focus on that one word to the exclusion of everything else is astounding to me. As if it is some magic incantation on the part of BizDev (or whatever they're called these days) that instantly transmogrifies users into profits.At one company I worked at, we had a digital product that was part of a suite of services our company provided. It was useful to our customers but it's clear, if you see it, that they want to get in, get done what they need to do, and get out. It's a tool to help them do their jobs and nothing more.You'd think that simplicity and efficiency would be celebrated. The number of times I heard "engagement" and "gamification" used about that product from the marketing team, however...Finally I said, "Look. We shouldn't be trying to make our customers spend more time in this product any more than LG does trying to get us to spend more time in our refrigerators." It fell on deaf ears.I should note that, we didn't make any more money the longer someone spent on that product. There was no advertising model associated with it--it is a per-seat hosted solution. So I never could figure out why our marketing team was all about engagement other than they kept hearing that word said about other digital products and, so, naturally it applies to ours as well and we must do what everyone else is doing!
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I built a system that takes pictures of all the airplanes that fly over my house
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Hi! I am the guy behind this, awesome to see it posted here. Happy to answer any questions.To answer a question I saw pop up, I am using the FAA aircraft registration data to pull up the extra information about the planes. It lists who actually owns the plane, vs who is operating it. That is why you see so many banks. Places like Flightaware have much better data, but a pricy to look up.
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Binance to acquire FTX
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SBF said "We don't invest client assets (even in treasuries)". [0]He then says the purpose of the transaction with Binance is to "clear out the liquidity crunches". [1]How could there be a liquidity crunch if assets are not invested? You can't do a bank run on an entity that doesn't function as a bank and doesn't invest clients assets... Something is shifty.[0] https://twitter.com/sbf_ftx/status/1589598285798707202[1] https://twitter.com/sbf_ftx/status/1590012126701441025
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Twitter has officially changed its logo to ‘X’
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I don’t really see what Musk is trying to accomplish.Everything he’s done to Twitter carries the foul stench of Death by Private Equity. No product improvements, but worse reliability, more spam, and a weird desperate-looking rebrand. This is what it looks like when inept MBAs try to squeeze some more life out of a dying platform.The strange thing here is that Musk’s acquisition was supposed to be the exact opposite. He’s not beholden to private equity masters. He’s supposed to be a product genius. He was supposed to bankroll exciting new ventures. Instead it’s kind of like MySpace meets SourceForge.
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Asking 60 LLMs a set of 20 questions
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> Sally (a girl) has 3 brothers. Each brother has 2 sisters. How many sisters does Sally have?The site reports every LLM as getting this wrong. But GPT4 seems to get it right for me:> Sally has 3 brothers. Since each brother has 2 sisters and Sally is one of those sisters, the other sister is the second sister for each brother. So, Sally has 1 sister.
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Introduction to Modern Statistics
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What's often missing from these introductions is when statistics will not work; and what it even means when it "works". The amount of data needed to tell between two normal is about 30 data points -- between two power-law distributions, >trillion. (And this basically scuppers the central limit theorem, on which a lot of cargo-cult stats is justified).Stats, imv, should be taught simulation-first: code up your hypotheses and see if they're even testable. Many many projects would immediately fail at the research stage.Next, know that predictions are almost never a good goal. Almost everything is practically unpredictable -- with a near infinite number of relevant causes, uncontrollable.At best, in ideal cases, you can use stats to model a distribution of predictions and then determine a risk/value across that range. Ie., the goal isnt to predict anything but to prescribe some action (or inference) according to a risk tolerance (risk of error, or financial risk, etc.).It seems a generation of people have half-learned bits of stats, glued them together, and created widespread 'statistical cargo-cultism'.The lesson of stats isnt hypothesis testing, but how almost no hypotheses are testable -- and then what do you do
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RethinkDB: An open-source distributed database built with love over three years
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What the heck does "built with love" even mean?Is this just a hipster marketing term to tell us that it's small and cute and made by people who play ukuleles and ride unicycles in their spare time, and not by evil corporate people who commute to work and have mortgages?I find a lot of advertising eyeroll inducing, and the current trend of more-hipster-than-thou posturing is right at the top.
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Show HN: Ditch Black Text to Read Faster, Easier
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Hmmmm... I'm sure it'll need a linked scientific study to actually back up the claim. (And every speed-reading product I've seen has usually had a decrease in comprehension rate...)It's a clever idea, but anecdotally, from my experience, I'm finding it slows down my reading -- I'm having a hard time processing the blurbs because I don't read "linearly" -- I scan content to find the relevant parts, and the color changes are making it difficult to scan (because my eye can no longer use color to determine what is scannable and what isn't), and multiple columns is actually making it even more difficult (it looks like the blue in column 1 leads into the blue in column 2, instead of the blue at the next line of column 1). By trying to force me to read line-by-line, instead of scanning efficiently, it's making me read slower.But that's just for short-form stuff. It could turn out to be faster for some layouts, and slower for others. But honestly, I've never felt I had difficulty locating the start of the next line... is this a problem that needs solving? But nevertheless, it's certainly a good example of clever out-of-the-box thinking.
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Results of the GitHub Investigation
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I don't even know what to make of this. They say there was no evidence but he is still resigning.
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I’m Terrified of My New TV
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We need a Butlerian Jihad against surveillance.You know what will never stop this? Posts on hacker news. Letters to your congressman (LG can donate a fuqton more to his re-election campaign than you can). Voting with your dollar (people who know what a privacy policy is are few and far between).You know what will? Taking these TVs into the street, smashing and burning them. Mobs storming Best Buy and smashing the surveillance cameras built into these telescreens. Bricks through the window of every mercenary selling your privacy, selling a live feed right to your living room, to the NSA/FBI/creepy internet hackers.It's really hard to get people to commit to sustained, long-term action -- that's why boycotts are not effective and why this trend has continued. But people are actually angry about this and that anger can be fueled into displays of acute disapproval. Like burning a pile of spy TVs in the street and then flipping the cop car that comes to defend the surveillance state and burning that too.Pretty sure this will get downvoted because anything outside the blandly acceptable boring-as-fuck politics always gets downvoted. But just keep in mind that you need to break a few eggs to make an omelet, and the power structures of the world pretty much only respond to Arab Spring-esque events now. We need to make every digital dictator afraid of becoming the next Gaddafi.
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The Pixel Factory
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> Note: these slides have not (yet) been optimized for low-end GPUs or mobile.Wow, yeah. I'm using an old laptop with Ubuntu. Firefox ground to a halt, crashed and then my computer spontaneously rebooted.
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On average, skipping college and investing tuition costs nets a higher return
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As a culture, we really need to stop telling 17 year olds to not worry about money, go to college, and figure something out. There is always someone ready with a romantic appeal to a classical education, and it is so frustrating for me.Wasting four years is a huge cost. Years, decades of debt is a huge cost. Going to college with no plan about money? The costs are assured.Plus, the degrees people are actually getting aren't necessarily worth all that much to the educational romantics. Business administration is what it is.
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HSBC is killing my business, piece by piece
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I'm not entirely clear why the author felt it was a productive use of his time to write several thousand words on this. HSBC aren't likely to be swayed by such an article. They've been fined billions, they're probably not worried about being "called out".First of all:Why are you depending on only one bank account to run your business? It's very easy to set up two or more business bank accounts and use them both. Just like you have back-ups for your data (right?), it makes a lot of sense to also have financial back-ups for your business.Same with the debit/credit card - is that all you've got for business payments? Why don't you have more than one card? Why don't you move things over to a personal card while you open a second business card?It's too late for that now as the author didn't set that all up ahead of time, but instead of complaining on the internet, why don't they start moving things ASAP. I've found Santander incredibly easy to get up and running with (same day almost), compared to Barclays...etc.Look, you're running a business, and your job running a business is to keep it running. If you haven't thought ahead to such possible events, you're doing your business a disservice.So my advice - call Santander, start switching things over, stop broadcasting things online, and focus on keeping your business running. You can always do a recap later once things have died down.And I agree, HSBC are a complete PITA. It's far too much trouble even getting a personal account with them, so a business account would be far more effort than I would be looking for.Even Barclays wanted an in-person meeting (even though I've banked with them for decades) to open a business bank account. And the only date they had available was a month in the future. Yup, I cancelled that appointment.So, build redundancy into your business. At the very least a second bank account. It's easy, but as you can see, so very important. Just IMHO.
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“Google: it is time to return to not being evil”
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Google are really shitty with their web browser especially on mobile.If you run Firefox you get a stripped down version of Google Search also with no infinite scrolling for images and low resolution.Use a user agent spoofer like this:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/chrome-ua-on-...And it seems to work fine on Firefox.I'm sure their official excuse is that they only support WebKit based browsers on mobile, like it's the new Internet Explorer with some modern day ActiveX
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U.S. consumer protection official puts Equifax probe on ice
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I feel helpless with everything the current Administration is doing.
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A Heavily-Commented Linux Kernel Source Code [pdf]
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This is a really dumb observation, but my apartment is in the cover photo! (Vancouver BC, Canada)Sorry, I got super excited!
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Crystal 1.0 – What to expect
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It feels like Crystal it took all the best things from the languages I love, and put them together into one, beautiful language:- Elegance of Ruby- Statically type checked + global type inference- No Nulls- Go-like concurrency- Easy C ffi- High performanceI really hope the Crystal succeeds and the language goes mainstream - this release is a huge step forward towards that. Congrats to the Crystal team for reaching the 1.0 milestone!
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Write plain text files
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Another advantage to plain text files: source control. You can check your writing into git and get a history of all your edits.It’s something programmers take for granted, but it would be amazing if this got more widely adopted outside of tech. The number of files with names like “Report Final Final draft v3.docx” is truly staggering.“Git for everything“ would be a multi-billion dollar startup easily.
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“Clean” code, horrible performance
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I think the author is taking general advice and applying it to a niche situation.> So by violating the first rule of clean code — which is one of its central tenants — we are able to drop from 35 cycles per shape to 24 cycles per shapeLook, most modern software is spending 99.9% of the time waiting for user input, and 0.1% of the time actually calculating something. If you're writing a AAA video game, or high performance calculation software then sure, go crazy, get those improvements.But most of us aren't doing that. Most developers are doing work where the biggest problem is adding the next umpteenth features that Product has planned (but hasn't told us about yet). Clean code optimizes for improving time-to-market for those features, and not for the CPU doing less work.
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Megafail
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When I started the article I thought, "Oh great another speculative Mega bashing."Then you actually wrote the proof of concept and proved it to be a very real problem.Nice work. Also the mouseover on your site title is sexy.
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Unfit for work
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Means-tested social assistance is now a vestigial remnant of an economy strictly dependent upon labor as its primary input for growth. As the share of economic inputs tips increasingly in favor of capital (via automation), most laborers will steadily become unemployable at a subsistence-level minimum wage. As a result, we will see dependence and abuses of means-tested social welfare by these laborers who can no longer participate in the market.The only long term solution is a basic income system, which rewards consumption and allows the market to continuously reward innovation and efficiency. Without a redistribution mechanism to fuel consumption, the market collapses entirely as wealth is further concentrated.Further reading:1. http://www.naturalfinance.net/2013/02/nearly-all-of-us-suppo...2. http://amzn.com/B005WTR4ZI3. http://amzn.com/B002S0NITU
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An Engineer’s guide to Stock Options
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Really nice write-up explaining stock options. A few added thoughts sparked by some of the comments already made in this thread and otherwise:1. The value of options is inextricably linked to tax and you need to understand the tax basics in evaluating the economic risks and benefits of holding and exercising any kind of option. With NQOs, you are taxed on the spread as ordinary income on the date of exercise (meaning, on the difference between what the stock is worth and what you pay to exercise). With ISOs, the value of the spread becomes subject to AMT and you can wind up paying large taxes that way in spite of the supposed tax benefits of ISOs. The way to avoid having a large spread subjecting you to such tax risks is to exercise as early as possible before the company value goes up much but you then need to take the economic risk associated with having to pay hard cash for stock whose long-term value is highly uncertain. Moreover, early exercise is not possible if your options haven't vested unless you specifically get an early exercise privilege as part of your grant. With an early exercise privilege, and particularly if the grant is made for a bargain price, you can early-exercise, file an 83(b), and (as long as you hold the stock for at least 2 years) get the equivalent of a restricted stock grant by which you pay no further tax until you eventually sell the stock at a liquidation event. In that case, you are also taxed at the lower long-term capital gains rates. Of course, in the early-exercise scenario, you do not get to bypass vesting and your shares remain subject to their original vesting requirements and can thus be forfeited in whole or in part if those requirements are not met. But early exercise does provide an elegant solution to most of the tax risks associated with options provided you are willing to assume the economic risks of paying for the stock up front.2. Other than the early-exercise scenario, 83(b) elections are not required for option grants. Under 83(a) of the Internal Revenue Code, any service provider who gets property in exchange for services is taxed at ordinary income rates on the value of the property received. For example, if you do work for a startup and are paid in stock when you complete the deliverable, you are taxed on the value of the stock received. You are taxed on the value of that stock as it exists as of the date you receive it in payment for such services. So, if you do development work tied to a milestone, and you meet that milestone, and you get 100,000 shares for the work, you would be taxed on, say, the $1.00/sh that the stock is worth on the day six months or a year (or whatever) out when the milestone is met, and not on the $.01/sh that it was worth when the contract terms began. In contrast to this performance-based form of incentive, let us say that you get a time-based incentive by which you buy the stock up front for a nominal price but you must earn it out over time. With such a time-based performance incentive, which is what is called "restricted stock", you own the stock up front and you pay no tax at the time of purchase in the normal case where the amount you pay for it equals its fair value on the date of the grant. Because the stock must be earned out as part of a continuing service relationship, and is hence subject to a "substantial risk of forfeiture", there is a very important technical question under section 83(a) on what the date is on which you are deemed to have received the stock in exchange for your services. Well, the default rule under 83(a) is that you receive it on the date it is no longer subject to a substantial risk of forfeiture and that then becomes the relevant date on which the value of the stock is measured for purpose of computing the taxable service income on which you must pay tax. So, if you get your 100,000 share grant at $.01/sh, and you pay $.01 share, you pay no tax at inception. But, as that grant vests at, say, a monthly ratable rate over four years, the IRS treats you as having received 48 separate grants (one each month) over the four-year period. Thus, at each vesting point, you are treated as having received property in exchange for services under 83(a) and you pay tax on the difference between the value of the property received and what you paid for it. If you paid $.01 per share, and if the stock is worth $1.00 at a given vesting point, you realize $.99 worth of taxable income per share. In a venture whose value is rising quickly, in the absence of any saving mechanism, you might have as many as 48 separate tax hits (basically, having to pay tax on the difference between what you paid for your grant and the 409A valuation price placed on the common) just for the privilege of holding a piece of paper that may or may not ever have an ultimate cash value of any type. It is in this type of scenario, and only here, that 83(b) comes into play by providing that, in lieu of having to suffer under the default rule of 83(a), you can elect to pay all taxes up front on the grant and not be subjected to the often onerous workings of the default rule. This means that, for an 83(b) election even to be relevant, you must first own your stock (or other property) and that stock or property must be subject to a substantial risk of forfeiture. If you hold only an unexercised option, you do not yet own the stock and it is not subject to forfeiture (hence, 83(b) is not relevant). If you do an early exercise, though, and get stock under terms where it must still vest out and can be forfeited, then 83(b) does apply. But that is the only case normally where it becomes relevant at all to options.3. Options really shine when they wind up on a level playing field with the preferred stock and they tend to dim commensurately to the extent they do not. Optimum case is IPO when all stock is (typically) forced to convert to common prior to the public offering and, thus, all shares participate equally in the benefits. This can happen too in big-scale M&A exits but a drop-off occurs on lesser ones in at least two ways: (a) where the total acquisition price is largely gobbled up by the liquidation preferences and/or management incentive plans; (b) where an acqui-hire occurs in which a few founders get a disproportionate share of the total value through employment arrangements made on the other side of the deal.4. Given all of the above, and given that IPOs remain at far below the old bubble levels in frequency, it can be risky to lay out any excessive cash to exercise at any time before a liquidity event. Too many things can happen by which a seeming "sure thing" winds up evaporating before your very eyes, leaving you with no more than a pretty lousy capital loss that you get the privilege of deducting at the rate of no more than $3,000 per year unless you can find other capital gains to offset it against.5. The 90-day tail for exercise upon termination of a service relationship applies only to ISOs and not to NQOs but, of course, ISOs have other advantages and they are what is typically offered in VC-backed ventures. In other types of ventures, where the company value is already somewhat high at the time of grant, I have seen executives bargain for and get NQOs with long exercise periods following termination just to have the flexibility to leave the venture if needed without being forced to forfeit the options.6. In light of all of the above, having to pay an angel backer 25 or 30% of your gains to provide you with a risk-free exercise in an otherwise high-risk situation may be worth it even though the cost seems high on its face. It is a matter of preserving some decent part of your potential upside while giving up the rest to make the upside potential even a possibility for you given the tax risks involved. If IPOs come back strong some day, then you may be giving up too much at such a cost because they are the great leveler when it comes to weighing the value of options against other forms of equity holdings. Until that day comes, however, options remain a valuable but relatively high-risk way of deriving value from a startup if you need to part with any significant cash (either for the purchase or for the associate tax) for the privilege of hoping to profit from a startup. Again, for those who need to weigh their choices, this piece provides great insights and stands head and shoulders above the typical discussion of such issues. Great work by the author in making an otherwise dry and even formidable subject pretty accessible.
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The next version of DuckDuckGo
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I use DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine and have had a positive experience using it.This redesign incorporates two of the worst design trends today: very low contrast text and gratuitously, obnoxiously large fixed headers.I dislike fixed headers on any non-phone/tablet UI because almost all laptop and desktop screens are widescreen. Fixed position elements on the sides of the screen make much more sense, although poor implementations are very unpleasant and can create a jarring parallax effect. Unfortunately, fixed elements on the sides are soooo MySpace and have fallen out fashion, and many sites waste most of the space on the sides. The header in the redesign in obscenely large and the new page shows me less results at a time.I have young and healthy eyes with 20/20 vision. Even so, when I use my laptop for coding and reading text, I turn the brightness down because it is easier on my eyes and does not give me headaches. I believe that the best practice is to make text #000 on a white background or very light background (like news.yc does), and to let users adjust the brightness of their display if this is uncomfortable. There have been assertions by that lighter text with white is better (and unfortunately this is the latest and laziest design trend), but I have seen no formal evidence of this and believe that this is mostly a combination of overbright display screens and poor text rendering by OSes and browsers. If you turn the brightness of your screen down, you solve the "too much contrast" problem (if it ever truly existed) and can tell when any text isn't #000. For me, DuckDuckgo's current snippet display color is to light at #333, and ridiculous at #595959. If I set the brightness of my laptop to the maximum setting, the snippet text is more tolerable but still uncomfortable.I dislike the neo-flat, iOS-like buttons, but they don't really make the site any harder to use. I find that neo-flat buttons are almost have an underlying hypocrisy. The idea behind the flat painting movement is that you can discern what was called "optical depth" without using traditional perspective to mimic the depth you see with stereoscopic vision. The neo-flat movement is based on the idea that you don't need to underline hyperlinks or add perspective based shadows and gradients to distinguish what a button is because you can just use colors alone or make everything a link. If this were really true, then you wouldn't need to make the neo-flat buttons change colors when you mouse over them, because it should be obvious that they are links. You can see similar hypocrisy in Google's A/B testing of non-centered labels in certain neo-flat buttons on their websites (especially YouTube).Edit: I rewrote the first sentence of the third paragraph to make it more clear.
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Music for Programming
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Does anyone know of any actual conclusive studies in this area? Like most here, I have my own rules and preferences. The main rule seems to be it must be familiar, in fact it's best if I've heard it a thousand times already. But there are only three kinds of music that work for me:-1. Music I first got into during my teenage years when I was sitting up all night coding assembler (OK, I admit it, Pink Floyd) works well because I think my mind is conditioned in an almost Pavlovian way to go into programming mode when I hear it;2. Ambient EDM works well because it is very repetitive and doesn't have any strong lyrical structure - my trouble is, as an old fart, I find only a very small subset of the vast range of EDM that I actually like.3. A certain kind of loud, wall-of-sound rock music which is very heavy on distortion with subdued vocals works well but only at night.Received opinion says classical music is good for cognitive tasks, and I've tried over the years but never good great results.
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The Facebook Algorithm Mom Problem
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I find a lot of sites feel like they're overtuning their recommendation engines, to the detriment of using the site. YouTube is particularly bad for this - given the years of history and somewhat regular viewing of the site, I feel like it should have a relatively good idea of what I'm interested in. Instead, the YouTube homepage seems myopically focused on the last 5-10 videos I watched.
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Spamnesty – A Bot to waste spammers' time
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From glancing over some conversations, it looks like the bot is mostly talking to other bots.That said, I think it’s nice to be able to reflect the same attack vector upon the attackers to make the attack less efficient and hopefully less attractive.
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Matrix and Riot Confirmed as the Basis for France’s Secure Instant Messenger App
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I had to roll my own chat system recently because the open source solutions out there were surprisingly insufficient - nothing seems to support websockets. Looking forward to the French contributions to the ecosystem!For instance: at the moment Matrix server implementations expect clients like Riot to long-poll for JSON about each room/chat they're connected to. Alternatives like Prosody's XMPP server implementation dropped websocket support in favor of BOSH years ago.I wonder why this is - maybe there's just less developer interest since chat has gone mobile, and mobile devices break ws connections so frequently? But it's obvious that chat clients like FB messenger, whatsapp, slack, etc are establishing ws connections.Strange.
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Facebook's seized files published by MPs
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I worked at Facebook for 5 years on Workplace and Internal Tools. I am typically very critical of the company nowadays, but even so find the discussion here difficult to digest.People are complex. They are more complex than an action, or even a group of actions. To take a person and alias them into being "good" or "bad" based on an action or a series of actions is to explicitly dehumanize them for the sake of making the world simpler. It is a poor model, and in a Dale-Carnegie-way it leads to poor outcomes, as you close the dialog with that person that allows you to change opinions and outcomes. It is the same with groups or companies: some parts of groups do good from some vantage point, some do bad.I found myself inspired by a lot of what Facebook did. I loved working inside Infrastructure there, I was amazed by what people were innovating on every day. Projects like charitable causes have raised a lot for charity. I've seen the Are you Safe feature reduce so much stress during disasters. I keep meaningful dialogs going with friends I don't get to see often on FB and Instagram. It makes me really happy to see my friends thriving.One of Napoleon's great gifts was in compartmentalizing pieces of his life. His tumultuous and frankly soul-crushing personal life (which affected him deeply) with Josephine never got in the way of his military victories. I wonder if that's a good model, up-to-a-point for people and groups. With people, by compartmentalizing some unsavory perspective someone has, you have the ability to change it later on through discussion.... in groups: if everyone good leaves organizations because they're "bad," well, those organizations will just be filled with the worst of us soon enough.
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The Man in Seat Sixty-One
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Agree with all commenters here what a fantastic site this is - up-to-date (by and large), information dense, no nonsense.Has helped me travel from Bali to Jakarta, through Thailand, Namibia, and with the TransSib.A labour of love. So I wondered how one can support the guy, and was amazed that the only thing he asks for is donations to UNICEF in his name, see link below. Kudos kudos kudos.https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/seatsixtyone
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Google claims copyright on employee side projects
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Oh, please. It's standard industry practice for companies to claim ownership of everything a software engineer comes up with, even "on their own time". The problem is it's extremely difficult to say, figure out when someone might have invented some super clever idea which can be pantented "on their own time". This was true when I worked for MIT, VA Linux, IBM, and Google. At VA Linux it was the VC's which insisted on that clause in the employee's contracts. So anyone who think this is some evidence of Google being, or becoming, evil is either seriously misinformed, or just engaging in unthinking hate of Google, or both.In fact, Google has one of the most permissive IP policies that I've seen at any company except for VA Linux Systems.
The default is that the vast majority of work done by an employee can be released under an open source license. Sure, there's a process that you have to go through, and unless what you want to do intersects with work that you are doing for your team that isn't intended to be released publically, or competes with a critical company initiative, the default answer is that it will be allowed to be released.This is not true for many, if not most companies, and as a responsible open source maintainer, I make sure that people understand they have permission from their company before I accept their open source contributions. Otherwise, I would be putting them, and the project, at risk. (Note that because of this, there are many employees which are not allowed to participate in open source development, because their employers will not give them permission to release code written by an employee under an open source license, whether written "on their own time" or not.)At Google, once you get this (mostly pro forma) permission, you can work on open source projects on your own time, or on 20% time, using company laptops, or using GCE resources, etc. When I was hired at Google, my manager and I cut a deal such that I could work on Linux Kernel and community projects for 50% of my time, instead of the normal 20%. Sure, the overlap between what was good for Google and what was good for ext4/Linux was pretty broad, but Google also paid for me to travel to various conferences in Asia, Australia, Europe, etc.Also unique to Google is there is a process by which you can get permission for you to out-and-out own the work done on your own time, as opposed to Google owning it and releasing it under an open source license. If you take that option then it really has to be done on your own time, and must not use any company resources, meaning not on a company laptop, or on a company network, etc. This is rare, and I'm not aware of many other companies that give employees that option.
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Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics
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I turned off Google Analytics, because I realized that it doesn't actually report any useful or actionable data, just vanity metrics, and many of them of dubious quality.I run a SaaS and what matters for me is paid subscriptions. "Visits" (even if by humans, which is hard to tell) really do not matter much. Yes, I do want to increase conversion rates, and run bandit experiments, but I'm better off doing that myself.What also matters are search terms, but Google's search console (or tools, or whatever it's called this week) provides that.Turning off Google Analytics was hard to do psychologically — the Fear Of Missing Out is strong. But it turns out I'm not missing out on anything, except some dubious vanity data. And I'm making the web a better place in the process.
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Ask HN: Is all of FAANG like this?
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This thread is seriously in need of some tough love.@faang0722, you're being a slacker, and not doing right by either your company or yourself.You're at one of the top companies in the world, and are safe from the jobs disaster that's gripping the entire country. Millions of people are desperate to receive $600-1600 from the government this month because they are unable to work. Millions are putting on shitty facemasks and still showing up to work at grocery stores and warehouses and wherever, risking disease because they have no other choice. Meanwhile you can't be bothered to work at home on your laptop more than one day a week, because the build system and tech debt makes you sad?You say the company is evidently pleased with your work and that may be true, but now you're part of the problem. You think the company tolerates shitty work, so you've decided to tolerate shitty work. Don't.Since you don't think what you're doing is ethically wrong, have you told your manager that the work assigned to you is so simple that you only actually work one day a week? Of course not.So either start putting in your best work, or switch teams or company and see if it suits you better... or else accept that you're being a freeloader and pretending to do more work than you really are.
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Moving from YouTube to PeerTube
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anecdotally youtube seems to have aggressively increased the number of ads just in the last few weeks or soi see ads on almost all videos i watch now, there are two ads before the video (the first one i can’t skip at all, the second i can sometimes skip after a few seconds), and then some videos have more ads at different points in the actual video that show up out of nowhere.and then there’s the search ads that take up the entire mobile interface plus ads beneath the videogiven i’ve mostly been using youtube for recipes lately and skip around the video a lot the experience is like being forced watching 30 seconds of ads for every 5 minutes of content.it’s completely completely unbearable
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Brave Search replaces Google as default search engine in the Brave browser
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I’ve been using Brave search for several months now. I switched the day that it was announced. The quality is fairly good, but I’m having troubling telling whether it’s just my own halo effect or if the initial quality that experienced has started to slip a little as it indexes more widely or something. At first I was impressed with how little spam ended up in top results, but lately exact queries for Python functions or prominent API functions have lots of spammy content above the actual documentation. Talking about sites that just republish GitHub issue threads, republished StackOverflow questions, w3schools-likes, etc.I’m still rooting for them, but in general
I continued to be baffled why such blatant spam can consistently make it into top results on Google, DDG and now Brave. I really wish a search engine would empower me to provide a URL ban list that gets applied server-side instead of filtering on the front end (if anything).
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Why is Excalidraw so good?
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> There's no onboarding. No signup. No confirmation email. No OAuth. You're just in the product.You mean like pretty much every single darned productivity program before year 200X?It's sad that this even has to be an issue.
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Tqdm (Python)
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I really love the wave of new tools that are gaining traction in the Python world: tqdm, rich (and soon textual), fastpi, typer, pydantic, shiv, toga, doit, diskcache...With the better error messages in 3.10 and 11, plus the focus on speed, it's a fantastic era for the language and it's a ton of fun.I didn't expect to find back the feeling of "too-good-to-be-true" I had when starting with 2.4, and yet.In fact, being a dev is kinda awesome right now, no matter where you look. JS and PHP are getting more ergonomics, you get a load of new low level languages to sharpen your hardware, Java is modern now, C# runs on Unix, the Rust and Go communities are busy with shipping fantastic tools (ripgrep, fdfind, docker, cue, etc), windows has a decent terminal and WSL, my mother is actually using Linux and Apple came up with the M1. IDEs and browsers are incredible, and they do eat a lot of space, but I have a 32 Go RAM + 1TO SSD laptop that's as slim as a sheet of paper.Not to mention there is a lot of money to be made.I know it's trendy right now to say everything is bad in IT, but I disagree, overall, we have it SO good.
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