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The PS5 Has Been Jailbroken
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While I applaud people being able to use their hardware the way they want to, I know that this inevitably leads to rampant cheating and will ultimately ruin games across consoles as most of the big games these days support cross play.
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Everything I wish I knew when learning C
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I like it, but the array details are a little bit off. An actual array does have a known size, that's why when given a real array `sizeof` can give the size of the array itself rather than the size of a pointer. There's no particular reason why C doesn't allow you to assign one array to another of the same length, it's largely just an arbitrary restriction. As you noted, it already has to be able to do this when assigning `struct`s.Additionally a declared array such as `int arr[5]` does actually have the type `int [5]`, that is the array type. In most situations that decays to a pointer to the first element, but not always, such as with `sizeof`. This becomes a bit more relevant if you take the address of an array as you get a pointer to an array, Ex. `int (*ptr)[5] = &arr;`. As you can see the size is still there in the type, and if you do `sizeof *ptr` you'll get the size of the array.
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Poll: Full-time software engineers in the Bay Area, what's your annual salary?
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depressing, midwest software engineer here, 6 years experience 60k.
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A Decade-Old Gag Order, Lifted
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This is reporting that Nick Merrill, who was under a gag order restricting his ability to talk about a subpoena he received in 2004, is no longer gagged. It links to an editorial he wrote (anonymously) about that gag order, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03... , in which he writes:> "Based on the context of the demand -- a context that the FBI still won't let me discuss publicly -- I suspected that the FBI was abusing its power and that the letter sought information to which the FBI was not entitled."This new article does not disclose who that subscriber was, but the article, and the earlier op-ed, seem to imply that the subscriber's identity alone is enough to suspect an abuse of power. We'll probably hear more about that in the near future, but I'd like to make a prediction. The most likely interpretation is that this was a critic of the FBI or of the US government as a whole, and that the subpoena - which seeks to unmask the subject's identity - would be a prelude to retaliation.The article goes on to describe how the FBI has materially misrepresented its use of National Security Letters to Congress, and that the practice of sending them has twice been struck down by the courts as unconstitutional. By all appearances, a significant chunk of the US law enforcement apparatus has simply gone rogue, stopped respecting Congress and the courts and is instead focused on increasing its own power.
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How Smart People Sabotage Their Success
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> 4. Smart people get bored easily. Being smart is not exactly the same as being curious, but if you have both these qualities you might find yourself becoming easily bored with executing the same behaviors over and over. Some types of success stem from creativity, but other types come from becoming an expert in a niche and performing a set of behaviors repeatedly. If you’re smart, curious, and have a love of learning, you might find you quickly lose interest in anything once you’ve figured it out. The execution side of performance might bore you, and you’d rather constantly be learning new things. This can end up being less lucrative than finding a niche and repeating the same formula, but that might seem too boring or unchallenging to you.I've been wrestling with this for most of my career so far. I think it's all about striking the right balance. If you're not constantly learning you will stagnate. At the same time, jumping continuously from learning one new thing to another (esp. if the things are not very inter-related) can spread yourself too thin: you need to "go deep" on some things to become an effective/valuable contributor.I sometimes feel resentful of the amount of time I've spent as a software engineer dealing with what I often feel is boring or pure B.S. (e.g. almost everything other than designing/building some novel complex system from scratch). But in reality looking back I see that a lot of that sh*t-shoveling has actually made me much better and wiser at my profession, despite how mind-numbing and boring it often was. So I'm trying to keep that perspective to get me through those really dull days when I want to just rage-quit and move to a rural commune :)
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Finally, I Closed My LinkedIn
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From a professional standpoint LinkedIn gave me a lot of value for free so I'm mostly feeling positive about it, but I agree that like any social network it has downsides and can lead to psychological stress.Personally I live by the mantra that "scrolling is dangerous", i.e. I try to never interact with social media or news platforms that incite me to scroll down a feed of algorithmically curated news or updates, as I find this to be the primary mechanism by which these platforms try to suck people into their content machine (there are other mechanisms like notification spam). Most of these systems seem to target dopamine-releasing pleasure mechanisms in the brain, but some are built around darker psychosocial patterns (e.g. success relative to others, the feeling of adequacy and social confirmation).HN is like a diet to my brain in comparison as it just presents a single page of news without inciting me to scroll to the next page and doesn't show any notifications to me either. Please keep it that way!
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Historical programming-language groups disappearing from Google
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It's funny, when I took a tour of the US Geological Survey, the curator of the collection hated Google (which was just a few blocks away). He said Google is great now, with all their maps, which were far more accurate and had better coverage than the USGS.But what happens when they get bored with map data and get rid of it?He had been ordered to turn over all of their historical arial archives for scanning by Google, and then told the USGS would no longer do arial scanning since Google was doing it. But there was no agreement for Google to turn over their arial scans back to the USGS.At the time we all told him not to worry, Google would never remove data it had collected. Looks like he was a lot smarter than us.
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“User Engagement” Is Code for “Addiction”
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I did an internship with a very profitable Swedish mobile game before the pandemic, and it was really interesting to see the doublethink: everyone knew we were making a drug, but people avoided speaking of it in that way. It was always "our most engaged players readily spend on in-game items", and never "the most addicted users spend money so they can continue playing"It was a great workplace, but I don't think it was adding much value to the world.
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An enormous thread on alleged Google Facebook collusion
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I remember when google was the shining light of “be nice company” that we all dreamed of working for, at odds with the evil that was M$crosoft.And, from reading all the “why I left google” posts and hearing about them leaving China, the old google of 20 or even just 10 years ago was the good or even just a better google.With how google went from “do no evil” to this, with how Facebook has always been profits over ethics, with how Amazon treats employees generally, etc:Which employers are the “nice company making nice things and you’ll be able to sleep at night” tech companies nowadays?Who should we safely not feel bad about wanting to work for?
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Sleep technique used by Salvador Dalí works
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Wow. I didn’t know this, but I was actually able to observe this state on myself. When going to sleep, my mind is wandering. But at one point it drifts from real world thoughts to completely abstract concepts and wild imagination that sometimes makes no sense. It’s almost like a hallucination. What’s most interesting is that sometimes I am able to notice the transition to this state and consciously observe it. Usually it makes me happy because I know I’m about to fall asleep within the next few seconds (which I often have problem with, writing this comment at 1:26am again..). I am also able to consciously observe the images being generated. It’s very weird, because it feels like one brain looking into someone else’s brain to the extent that is impossible by any technology or in any other way. Sometimes I’m able to consciously wake up from this state, because I have weird “sleep phobias”. Sometimes I am fascinated by the idea generated at that stage. But unless I write them down or really get up, they are typically lost if I fall asleep within next 5 minutes - maybe I’d have a Nobel prize already, if only I kept a pen and paper ready next to my bed. Or apartment full of crappy kitch paintings..
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Ask HN: What is new in algorithms and data structures these days?
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It's not particularly new, but recently I've been involved a lot with solving large combinatorial optimization problemshttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combinatorial_optimizationAlgos to solve those both exact methods and heuristics are super useful in real world applications, and very underappreciated by the HN crowd IMO.
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All foster kids in California can now attend any state college for free
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This is what affirmative action should be... helping people out based on their individual situation, not because their skin color or gender.
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The FTC sues to break up Amazon over an economy-wide “hidden tax”
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An excerpt from: https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/25/greedflation/Amazon binds its sellers over to something called Most Favored Nation status. That means that sellers can't offer their goods more cheaply than they do on Amazon – even if it costs them (lots) less to sell in Target or direct from their websites. This means that every time a seller adds a dollar to their Amazon sale price, they have to add a dollar to the price of their goods everywhere else, too.After a bunch of state AGs filed lawsuits against Amazon over this, the company promised to cut it out.They lied.A new filing in California's suit against Amazon reveals that sellers live "in constant fear" of retaliation from Amazon if they allow their goods to be sold more cheaply elsewhere.
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Add Reactions to Pull Requests, Issues, and Comments
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-1 or the thumbs down reaction, I think is a mistake. They aren't usually that constructive, because most of the time they are used as retaliation against a specific user, instead of constructive criticism. If someone downvotes you, you tend to downvote them. At the least, it should be a privilege to down vote, like SO and HN do. http://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges/vote-down
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Introducing MIR
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I'm incredibly psyched for MIR. It'll represent the first conceptual "leap" for the language since Rust 1.0, checking off (or at least unblocking) a ton of the improvements that we've had in mind for years now (the list in the OP is hardly comprehensive!).It's also interesting that Swift, another LLVM-based project, has also transitioned to using their own language-specific intermediate representation (SIL). I think it's fascinating that, despite the availability of a robust and mature pluggable language backend, two professional languages independently decided that they needed another layer of abstraction between AST and LLVM IR. Not sure if this should be interpreted as a bug report against LLVM IR, or if it possibly represents a future trend in compiler design.EDIT: I should also mention that MIR has been available on play.rust-lang.org for a while, if anyone would like to play with it in their browser: https://play.rust-lang.org/?gist=fee8ccf28bae2c89107d&versio...
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Facebook Asking for Some New Users' Email Passwords
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All of these types of "hey, give us your password to this other system" are just training users to get phished.IMO the worst offender in this is Plaid, which has created a service where millions of people are giving their banking credentials so some random startup can mine your transaction data. And people think FB has privacy implications...
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Epic Games Supports Blender Foundation with $1.2M
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Commoditize one's compliments: https://jasongriffey.net/wp/2012/04/19/commoditizing-our-com...Unreal Engine, like Unity, right now has to be used with Autodesk products like 3DS Max or Maya, or at least that is the case with the large majority of professionals. This is an impediment to using Unreal Engine and thus makes Epic Games sort of dependent on Autodesk.There is probably no coincidence that the new general manager of Unreal Engine is an ex-Autodesk SVP, Marc Petit, who used to be in charge of Maya, 3DS Max, etc for a decade (https://www.awn.com/news/marc-petit-leaves-autodesk). He definitely sees the value of building up Blender to remove the dependence of Unreal Engine on expensive tools from other vendors.
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Florida scientist fired for refusing to manipulate Covid-19 data
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makomk posted an interesting comment on another thread here 12 hours ago, which I'll paste below. (from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23233097)I think I've got a good guess what data she didn't want removed or changed, and it's not exactly good for her case. On May the 5th, they day she was removed from her position, there was an all-time high spike of 113 reported coronavirus deaths due to Florida reporting a bunch of old deaths all at once: https://www.tampabay.com/news/health/2020/05/15/florida-adds...This did not represent an actual spike in deaths which had in reality been declining, but if I remember rightly some people did spin it as deaths increasing due to the lockdown being lifted. Deaths by date reported are conspicuously missing from the current version of the dashboard; it only has dates by date of death, which is far less favourable to the claim that lifting the lockdown is causing an increase in deaths.
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Another free CA as an alternative to Let's Encrypt
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How do these services make money?edit: thanks for the replies!
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80% of orgs that paid the ransom were hit again
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“Never negotiate with terrorists” is a simple and clear mantra, and as most clear and simple concepts it hides a lot of assumptions.One of them is you are ready to lose the hostage in the worst case scenario. That’s how the police sees it, because the society benefits more from being firm in individual cases than losing a few of its members that might not come back anyway.That’s a hard one to swallow, hard enough that govs also sometimes can’t follow the mantra and just pay the ransom.It’s crazy hard to get people to sacrifice themselves for the better good, it’s yet a bigger ask for corporations who already screw the public day in day out.
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Key senators have voted for the anti-encryption EARN IT act
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I guess this is the end of "sending customer data to the us".
Quite impressive how fast the US-politics can burn billions in $, endanger the technological lead and build a massive opportunity for Europe!I, as a European could not be happier about this, from a economic standpoint.Hope you guys over there are not drifting to a surveillance dystopian.
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What are your most used self-hosted applications?
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I REALLY want to start self-hosting but I can't afford a separate homeserver. I have a personal list of software to self-host and have looked into VPS providers like DO, Vultr, Linode & Hetzner.While they're cheap, should I really self-host on shared CPUs because that's all I can afford right now.My basic system would be Pi-Hole, Miniflux, Linkding. Maybe Bitwarden.What would be a good way to get started? Any suggestions are welcome.
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YaLM-100B: Pretrained language model with 100B parameters
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I have to wonder if 10 years down the line, everyone will be able to run models like this on their own computers. Have to wonder what the knock-on effects of that will be, especially if the models improve drastically. With so much of our social lives being moved online, if we have the easy ability to create fake lives of fake people one has to wonder what's real and what isn't.Maybe the dead internet theory will really come true; at least, in some sense of it. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2021/08/dead-...
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Apple’s ad business set to boom on the back of its own anti-tracking crackdown
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I know everone hates ads, but isn’t targeted ads better than wholesale bombardment? Did Apple’s blocking of facebook’s targeted ads improve the consumer experience? Or did that just make advertising more inefficient which then led to just more irrelevant ads. A good example would be American tv. Everyone has to suffer to through those stupid viagra and antidepressants ads because there is no targeting.
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Apple kills plans to scan for CSAM in iCloud
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I'm really surprised that they tried it in the first place. I'm sure governments want it (China would love to see your Winnie the Pooh meme stash), but Apple is pretty good at fighting the US government and should have felt 100% free to say "in the absence of a law that compels us to write software, which is unconstitutional btw, we're not doing it". They have done it many times, so it felt really out of character. There must have been some contract / favor they were going after, and the opportunity must have expired. (I'm sure some large department of the federal government has some shiny new Android phones today.)It would be interesting to figure out the real story.My favorite part of the whole saga is that leaked letter that said "the screeching voice of the minority" will kill the project. We did indeed, and I'm happy to screech again the next time the government wants a tool they can use to scan my phone without a search warrant.
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A Linux Evening
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1. If you don't encounter any trouble daily driving GNU/Linux, that is actually a sign of inexperience. That or you're doing nothing interesting.2. If principles mattered more than convenience, most Linux users would be on FreeBSD or OpenBSD instead of GNU/Linux. Either follow your arguments to their conclusions, or understand that Windows/macOS users are doing the same thing as you—making practical tradeoffs.3. Unless you are doing tons of system administration on your daily driver, most of your time is spent in applications, and the choice of operating system doesn't matter too much.
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What happened with ASUS routers this morning?
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Boy am I glad I replaced stock firmware with OpenWRT the moment my router came out of box last week. It was also extremely painless experience, and I'd really recommend people to buy routers with OpenWRT support, even if they cost a little more. A router is something you buy for a decade or more, and it's worth the investment. Our livelihood depends on network availability, and depending on whims of terrible router firmware is not something to rely on.
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DreamBerd is a perfect programming language
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This is great. Usually with the joke programming languages, you can get at least one person arguing that "x feature" really isn't all that bad, or could maybe be useful. DreamBerd beats them all in that regard. It is 100% terrible! I lost it at the lifetimes implementation.
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Unity’s new pricing: A wake-up call on the importance of open source
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>> While Unreal engine currently does not have terms like Unity’s, there’s nothing stopping them from doing something similar. In fact if Unity manages to get away with this it seems likely they will follow suit.Unreal has licenses which allow you to use one version of their engine FOREVER and they cannot revoke that license. So the author didn't fully research this. It is true that for NEWER version Epic can change this.Tim Sweeney explicitly mentioned this often + the fact that they are trying to break the Gplay/Apply monopoly shows that the Epic games leadership are not corporate piranhas like Unity's.But what about Godot? He says as if "it's open source so no issue". Yeah but what if the devs stop supporting it? This "community will continue to work on it" is BS: in reality it's usually one or two guys who actually do the actual work.So if Godot devs stop working on it you're stuck with a project with zero support. Good luck developing it further instead of focusing on your game.The same goes for his very own product.
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Oracle v. Google - Judge Alsup Rules APIs Not Protected By Copyright
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How does this effect the GPL? Is this no longer something that the GPL can restrict?http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#LinkingWithGPL
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Gotham 7.5K: A Rare High Altitude Night Flight Above NYC
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The images truly are breathtaking.His note about the streets seeming like neurons is interesting, but I hope I'm not the only person who immediately thought the shots resembled an exaggerated extruded version of a chip's layered layout.(Here's sort of a small version:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e0/Cell-Proc... )It's a bit odd: the scale of the city is not quite large enough to look like a modern processor's layout, yet is tens/hundreds of thousands of times larger. The scale of complexity is boggling.
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Nest Reminds Customers That Ownership Isn't What It Used to Be
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> In an ideal world, Hub owners would be free to point their devices at a different central server, run by a third-party competitor or a trusted friend, or even run such a server on their own. They would likewise be free to collaborate on improved software that would unlock the potential of the Hub hardware or purchase such software from a competitor to Nest.This ideal world exists, and it is glorious. I somewhat recently set up a Raspberry Pi 2 with https://home-assistant.io and a cheap z-wave USB stick. The interface is through a webpage (not an app), and I access it remotely using a OpenVPN server on my router.It's interfacing with door sensors, motion sensors, wall switches, cameras, my stereo, HUE lights, etc. It can email me or send me SMS for notifications. When I wake up and walk past a motion sensor, the lights come on in a dim scene. When I come home and open the door, the lights turn on. I have tons of rules and it's super fun. Totally self-hosted, and the main server is completely open-source (written in Python3).I haven't set it up with a thermostat but lots of other people have.
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Bootstrapping a SaaS Startup from Scratch
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"Instead of coding, the vast majority of your time is going to be spent marketing, selling, optimizing funnels, and providing support. Those are the things that get (and keep) customers. Those are the things that you do when you run a business. Not writing code."This is the best part of this article for me. A lot of solo bootstrappers don't get it. They struggle. But the fact is that you have to market and sell. Talk to customers and do the shittiest but most important thing: Support. No matter how much automation you create, clients will send you emails and say "I cannot do anything. please help" before even explaining what exactly is broken.There is a lot of dirty work you have to do every day as a bootstrapper and you get no relief from it. You can surely add team members or "outsource" some of it, but you can never outsource talking to clients (both pre sales and post).
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Apple blocks Facebook from running its internal iOS apps
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While I have no sympathy at all for Facebook, this is a rather chilling reminder of Apple's ability to decide what you're allowed to run on your own phone.
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Generative.fm – Endlessly unique ambient music
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Hey folks, I'm the creator of the site and the music on it. I'm happy people are enjoying the music.I see some people are having a rough time on mobile devices so I wanted to help with that. I have found that iOS Safari will mute the site if you have your iPhone in silent mode (there might be a way for me to fix this but I haven't explored it much yet). However, you'll probably find that many of the pieces snap crackle and pop a bit on mobile devices. I'm looking into ways to improve that but for now unfortunately the best advice I have is to try it on your desktop or laptop or to try some of the less complex pieces towards the end of the list. I really appreciate the feedback; I've only done so much testing with the devices I have available so hearing from more people with a larger range of devices is super helpful. Feel free to open issues on Github as well: https://github.com/generative-music/generative.fm/issues
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Give Firefox a chance
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I switched to Chrome from Firefox years ago because Chrome has a better UX (faster, snappier, cleaner UI). A couple years ago I tried to switch back to Firefox (right after the Quantum project landed, and Firefox was meant to be a lot faster), but found FF to still be bloated, slow, and painful to use.A couple weeks ago I made another try to switch back to FF, and I have found the experience to be very pleasant this time; desktop FF on both Windows and MacOS are, for me, better than Chrome. I recommend others give Firefox a try.(There are a few reasons why you might want to: Privacy, fighting mono-culture, recent decisions by Google to neuter ad blocking addons, a general aversion to the power of the largest tech companies, just chasing the latest and fastest browser, a fondness for novelty or contrarianism. Some of those reasons may resonate; others may not, but if any of them do, give it a shot!)
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How I Got my $3500 Camera Kit Stolen on KitSplit
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Still no compensation offer from the CEO/Co-founder Lisbeth Kaufmanhttps://medium.com/p/4530d0062e60/responses/showhttps://medium.com/@lisbethkaufman_82625/im-one-of-the-cofou...She also claims their assessment of people signing up to KitSplit is effective at blocking 99.99% of bad actors and stopping millions of dollars of theft on the platform, almost surely an exaggeration.
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The Baseline Interpreter: A Faster JavaScript Interpreter in Firefox 70
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The Mozilla tech blogs are always a good read.Informative and easy to digest. I can only think of one other company blogging with similar consistency/quality: Cloudflare.Firefox performance has seen tremendous gains since their Project Quantum efforts.It mostly feels on par with Chrome for me pretty much everywhere.There is one glaring omission though: a single company where I have problems with FF on multiple apps - Google.Gmail was still dog-slow the last time I tried, Youtube can send my fan into a frenzy and Docs is also regularly problematic. (on Linux)
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When good ideas make bad business
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Oof. The site was practically named after WebMD, and the founder didn't do any market research on that competitor to gauge how viable the business was before quitting their job? This person probably should have known that their main competitor made $0.50/user before they quit their job. Also:>It had been a bit of a working assumption of mine over the past few weeks that if you could improve the health of the patients then, you know, the doctors or the hospitals or whatever would pay for that.This person uses the "X% of Americans" line, so they live in the United States, right? The one in North America that views healthcare as a business to wring money out of? They definitely should have done more market research if they could type that with a straight face.But hey, hindsight is 2020 and they only spent $40k on some very valuable firsthand experience. Sounds like a win if they're planning to run businesses in the future, but for ideas without a clear path to making enough money to sustain themselves, try to use other peoples' money next time :)
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What You Should Know Before Leaking a Zoom Meeting
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Some articles found by googling [1] [2] from two years ago describe this capability as "ultrasonic watermark" so it is not new. I think this is coming to light as Zoom has become popular with the pandemic. For a journalist wanting to sanitize audio I would think they need to remove anything higher than 15kHz.[1] https://www.nojitter.com/video-collaboration-av/zoom-takes-v...[2] https://venturebeat.com/2019/01/22/zoom-is-bringing-ultrason...
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Robinhood is said to draw on bank credit lines amid tumult
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The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation settles most listed securities transactions in America; in 2011, it did $1.7 quadrillion [1]. You've never heard of it unless you're a professional trader, but it's actually quite fascinating to read up on.Trading looks instantaneous. But settlement takes a few days. In between are a series of credit agreements. From your broker to you. From the clearinghouse to the brokers. DTCC is the clearinghouse. Robinhood is the broker.There are rules and contracts between DTCC and its members, including Robinhood [2]. Those contracts ensure that when you buy shares through your broker from a Robinhood customer, if Robinhood falls down two days later, there is collateral sufficient to make you whole. Those collateral requirements change in reference to, amongst other things, the volatility of the security. (If a broker falls down, the clearinghouse liquidates their collateral and makes their counterparty whole. More volatility means more chance the collateral will be insufficient.)In this case, collateral requirements on GME went up. Because of its volatility. So while before Robinhood had to pony up collateral for a few shares of GME for every hundred it traded, it now had to, at close of business, pony up one hundred shares' worth of collateral for every hundred it traded. That creates a cash crunch. One that exacerbates itself with every additional trade in the security. If Robinhood fails to satisfy those collateral calls, they go out of business overnight. Into receivership. Done.Most brokers have policies for these situations. Higher brokerage fees for securities on a schedule. Not making shares and cash from trades available until the trade settles, sort of like what banks do for large cheques. But I don't know if Robinhood is able to do that quickly. So instead they pulled the plug.[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depository_Trust_%26_Clearing_...[2] https://www.dtcclearning.com/products-and-services/settlemen...
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Your CPU may have slowed down on Wednesday
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We've entered Inverse Moore's Law: every two years single core performance drops 20% as optimizations exploits are mitigated.
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What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?
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He's right to point out that the obsession with RoE is a big part of the problem.He's wrong to suggest that the billionaire class and founders will solve the problem if we only trust them and let them keep their money. Founders have just as much incentive to optimize the excess out of the system, they just call it "disruptive innovation" by which they mean tweaking how the system works so that they can squeeze out profit for themselves.I think economists call it rent-seeking.
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Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know
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While reading this piece I got a little depressed that most journalism is just such utter trash compared to it. I've read so many articles on ivermectin and none of them gave me even ten percent of the clarity that this article gave me. Can you imagine if writing and journalism of this calibre was commonplace among practising "journalists"? And look at how this piece compares to the CDC's and WHO's science communication. It's a shame that clear thinking and communication is so scarce.
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The last person standing in the floppy disk business
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I miss the physicality of floppy disks. Picking up a caddy of disks, thumbing through reading the labels, sliding them into the drive and hearing the motor whirr.Nowadays, my caddy has been replaced with a small plastic bag full of chips and thumbdrives. Even though my small bag can easily hold millions of times more data, the little chips aren't a joy to use. None of them have labels telling their contents. All of them are fiddly. They are obnoxiously easy to loose.
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Pelé has died
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Football fans always argue about who's the best player in the history.
In Pele case, it's not only about what he did on the field, it's also about what he did outside. Coming from a poor family, Pele dad taught him how to handle a football by practicing with mangoes. Not so many years later he carried Brazil for 3 world cup winnings (in the first win he was only 17 y.o!), making Brazil popular all over the world and bringing a lot of respect for his country and South America.Without Pele football might not be popular as it's today. His skills, personality and charm made millions of people all over the world fall in love with the game.Such a great person and amazing player.RIP
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Tarkovsky's films online for free
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IMHO, if you’ll be watching your first Tarkovsky film start with Stalker, which is how my girlfriend (now wife of 27 years), introduced me to him many years ago. I was very much a Fellini person, and the Bergman-Tarkovsky school seemed cryptic (at best) at the time. When finished, ask yourself (1) if you would have gone into the room and (2) what the dreamlike sequences with Stalker’s son meant.Second one should be Solaris, if you’re into SciFi or The Mirror if you’re not of if you’d like a challenge. I think The Mirror is the better movie, the woman (stand in for T’s mom) looking at the wheat field (T had these specifically planted for the film!) haunts me to this day.I personally couldn’t relate to The Sacrifice, perhaps his most personal film. His earlier films (Ivan and Rublev) I could not watch at all.To be a genius artist like him in the Soviet Union meant privileges unheard for art film directors in Europe (let alone US), eg see the wheat field thing above. It also meant you’re at the mercy of the “masses”. I had read an article once that included a comment for The Mirror from a regular filmgoer, saying after 30mins it caused such a headache! The funding was based on such feedback and the movie was labeled as elitist (it is) which greatly impacted his career. It’s infuriating to think T lost time due to such petty interference (OTOH, I could only finish the film on my third try, falling asleep in first two attempts! So she had a point)
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The Fight
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This, as any would be, is certainly a valid way to respond to a brush with death. But implying that this is somehow a lesson to be learned by everyone, suggesting that others should live their life this way, seems misguided to me in context.Contemplating your mortality shouldn't necessarily convince you to double down on your current priorities (especially if those priorities are centered around banal platitudes like "doing something remarkable with your life," which are probably masks to keep you from thinking about what really motivates you.) It should cause you to reevaluate them.The fact that you will die, the fact that everyone you know will die, and the fact that eventually the universe might become a field of equidistant neutrinos means that it really, really doesn't matter what you accomplish. All roads, if you stay on them long enough, lead to the same place. There will be no progress. There will be no one remarking.I would say that the lesson to be learned from thinking about death is just that there's no reason to adhere to anyone else's values, or to feel pressure to do anything in particular. You should do what you want, what makes you happy, even if it's humble.Existential steps backward can be a tool to remove yourself from things that aren't really helpful, like for example a hyper-competitive capitalist rat-race justified by language like "fight the status quo" or "great visions of the future" that, instead of contributing to humanity, is mostly really about love, insecurity, and fear of death (like so many human pursuits)."Fighting" here, the battle between the heroic pursuit of accomplishment on the one hand and the "insidious machine called quo" on the other, is just the author reporting his own conflicts about what he wants to do. Part of him wants to expend massive amounts of energy attempting to out-compete the people he sees as his peers. But another part of him doesn't want to do that, which is why he loses motivation and doesn't always end up behaving the way a hero-CEO might. There is not some kind of evil, inherent inertia at work that all people must fight against. Instead, there is only ambivalence and subconscious motives.In my opinion, if you really internalize death and it's implications, the notion that you can justify prescribing ways of thinking or behaving just starts to look absurd.
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Packets of Death
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As someone who works with FPGAs/ASICs, this isn't that weird.Everything gets serialized/deserialized these days, so there's all kinds of boundary conditions where you can flip just the right bit and get the data to be deserialized the wrong way.What's more interesting is that it bypasses all of the checks to prevent this from happening.Here is the wiki page on the INVITE OF DEATH which sounds like the problem you hit:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INVITE_of_Death
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Jolla
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They seem to put a lot of effort into telling you things other than "what is this thing?"It sorta looks like a phone. Is it a phone? "Jolla is powered by Sailfish OS." Sweet. How is that relevant? It must be important because it spends the rest of the page telling you about the OS.I'm back here, with honestly no idea what it is. Probably not the impression they want to leave on people, assuming (as a guess) that this is a consumer product of some kind.It seems they put the engineers in charge of designing the website.
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Disabling Intel ME 11 via undocumented mode
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This is why I support Power/MIPS/RISC development going forward. It's just a shame that we allowed intel and amd to both put in cpu backdoors at such an obvious level (I like x86 but it's not the cpu of the future unless it's open). I highly suspect some national security letter type shit is going on in the background, ala Promis and William A. Hamilton who has claimed on Bruce Schneiers blog they (intel agencies) were infiltrating even low level chip manufacturers. Danny Casalaro's death was likely a required nastyness to keep it covered up.
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Open Source is Not About You
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Though Rich is right, it pains me to read this because it is indicative of some disputes in the clojure community. I might be mistaken, but it seems that Rich is reacting to Chas Emericks' twitter post (https://twitter.com/cemerick/status/1067111260611850240).
In his comments he has stated: "Finally, from a practical perspective, my core-level contributions always came from some source of pressing need in an actual, present, needs-to-work project. If I know a problem isn't going to be triaged for months and solved for years, then I'm out."So this is not some grieving random person from crowd - Chas is a person whose libraries and contributions I value tremendously and he certainly made LOTS of contributions to clojure OSS landscape for free and out of his good will as well.
So ultimately this feels like your parents are arguing (which is never a good thing) - you like them both and you just want the arguing to stop and you just want everybody to live together in harmony. But here you go, Chas has moved away from clojure now. And I have to say I am very sorry to see him go.
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Cisco Fixes RV320/RV325 Vulnerability by Banning “curl” in User-Agent
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I don't see what the fuss is about. This is an effective mitigation, given that software can't just arbitrarily lie about its user agent.
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A video game community filled my nephew's final days with joy
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I couldn’t find it inspiring, only heartbreaking and anger-inducing. It makes me so geared up to think how shitty the world is to some people who have done nothing to deserve it and so generous to some who have done everything to not deserve it. Just one more reminder of how the world really feels like one wretchedly sick joke concocted in the mind of a wretchedly sick fuck.
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Python dicts are now ordered
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Am I the only one that thinks this is a stupid decision? This will silently break code that starts to rely on this behaviour that gets executed on Python3.5 and lower.
I would consider changing how a builtin works to be a major breaking change. It would have been fine if this was a change between 2 and 3 but on a minor version? Thats insane.
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Why are Soviet math textbooks so hardcore in comparison to US textbooks? (2017)
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Disclaimer: I graduated from one of the top math high schools in Moscow in early 90s, I have MS in Math from Moscow State University, and a half finished PhD from the same place.I think on average the difference between a high school student from Russia and US is negligible. Either country doesn’t really require much to finish school and many kids just do the tests without understanding what is going on. What separates Soviet Union (and now Russian) system is the practice of selecting kids with interest in mathematics / physics into special classes or schools for gifted kids. This government program feeds the mathematics and physics departments in the universities and allows kids who go through this program to get a very early start in mathematics. This is very similar to government sponsored sports programs with talented kids getting help with summer camps, or even all year round training schools.
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When in doubt: hang up, look up, and call back
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This also applies to offline solicitation. Someone came to my door and asked me to sign on to switching my gas supplier. He said it is a supply chain change and will not affect anything beyond I getting a smaller monthly bill, still coming from PG&E. I told him that it sounds wonderful but this is the first I'm hearing of such a thing and I need to research online what it is about before signing anything. He said he has all the details in his paper folder and I can read it. I insisted on doing my own research. He said the deal is off once he leaves and it is my last chance. I told him, "so be it, such is life".Did a quick Google search the next day and figured the process is legit but people out there have gotten higher bills than before.Moral is to fight the human-interaction pressures and be adamant on doing your own research. No shame in that.
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US to ban transactions with ByteDance and WeChat in 45 days
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The entire western world should treat China exactly the same way China treats them.Western companies have a difficult time operating in China, but Chinese companies have zero problems operating in western countries. It’s completely unfair and if we follow this to conclusion, the future will be one of only Chinese international corporations.Would WeChat or TikTok even exist if the Chinese market were open to existing western chat and social media software?? Unlikely.If China wants their companies to be able to access western markets then they must allow western companies to access their markets.Quite frankly, the entire western world should be banding together to oppose this nonsense from China. We should outright ban any goods or technology that originates in China until China changes its behavior and opens its economy.
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How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based invoicing application
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Please correct me if I'm wrong but this is not how I understand the meaning of "open source software".It sounds rather like customers get source access. Do they have the right to sell the source code or re-release it in any way by following an open source license?
( https://opensource.org/licenses )P.S. I'm not criticizing your business model or anyone elses.
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For some searches the whole screen on Google is now ads
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The Facebook stock debacle from yesterday makes me think that maybe there is a limit to how user-hostile a tech giant can be before it really starts to hurt their bottom line. For a while it seemed like companies like FB had captured enough of the market that they seemed impervious to backlash from their many controversies, too big to fail in a way. It’s too early to tell if this is the beginning of FB’s demise, but it looks like letting resentment towards your product build among your user base can come bite you in a very real way after all.FB used outrage as a way to increase engagement and it worked for a while, but now FB is increasingly a non-desirable place to hang out. Instead you can go to TikTok where you will find mostly amusing and at times informative content. When Apple added restrictions that cut off oxygen to FB, FB started a PR campaign to paint it as one grave injustice. It seems like that was met with a collective shrug. Who cheers for the bad guy?All that is to say, it seems like Google has been in this value extraction mode for a while and I don’t see what the long term plan is. They don’t seem to be innovating much, but are instead intent on squeezing as much money as they can from their existing assets. And while that may work in the short term, FB has shown tech giants are not invincible. I’ve seen a lot of talk online lately about how bad the quality of search results have gotten. If a credible competitor emerges, I think a lot of users would gladly switch. If/when that happens, Google better hope they don’t find themselves in FB’s position where they can’t acquire their way out of their rut.
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Taking a break from social media makes you happier and less anxious
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Consider the following scenario: You're pleased and content one minute, thinking your life is going fine the next. You have a few minutes to kill, so you log onto Facebook and begin scrolling...First, you notice a friend's post stating that she has accepted her ideal job.Then you read a coworker's too political rant.You continue browsing and see a video of your neighbour enjoying a fantastic tropical vacation.And now your cousin has uploaded a before and after photo that makes you want to hide your thighs for the rest of your life.The next thing you know, you're second-guessing your profession, irritated by politics, wondering why you can't afford a trip, and researching your next diet.Social media is nothing but roller coaster,
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Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides
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What I want is Little Snitch on steroids built into the OS where every process, including all native ones, including UI apps, are blocked from network connectivity by default, and the user gets an easy monitor of outgoing traffic with TLS/SSL inspection built in (you'd need some OS API to enable that).Kind of like granular oauth permissions, apps should have to declare which outgoing they have, a description/why, and allow inspection of the actual traffic.What Adobe CC, Google Chrome, MS Office, and macOS/Windows itself do with this background network connectivity is completely out of control and abusive to the user. They get away with it because the vast majority of users are non-technical and don't realize it's happening.I've profiled and decrypted the background traffic on a stock Android install and the volume was also appalling. Getting macOS to 0 background traffic involved blackholing large Apple IP blocks at the router, whereas some of their processes use random IPs from these ranges and don't use DNS.Just as the general public doesn't have the awareness or ability to fight for their privacy rights I doubt any of this will ever be remedied.
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The FBI now recommends using an ad blocker when searching the web
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Any recommendations for a good ad blocker and other precautions to take?
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JPMorgan Chase and Co tracks employees to dystopian extents
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I think the most interesting part is> I think everyone expects their employer to track them to some extent. It is pretty standard practice for employers to monitor and run analysis on things like building badge swipes and the amount of time spent connected when working from home. It has also become very common place for employers to record audio and video at the office.That sounds dystopian to me already (maybe because I'm not in the US? Or haven't spend much time at BigCorp? But is that really the default minimum these days?)If you asked someone 10-20 years ago if that description sounded dystopian, would you be more likely to get a "yes definitely" than you are today?I'm way more worried by the dystopia society accepts as "normal" than one that is forced on us and that we could potentially fight against.
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Up and Down the Ladder of Abstraction
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Looking at his website, his resume and his project, I just feel like stopping everything I do. A little bit like if you start to run for a couple miles and after 5-6 when you're pretty tired, you ask your friend how much remains. And he smile at you, start running even faster and says 195miles.Or, it's like playing Starcraft agains a good player. You get beaten pretty hard but you still played your best and are proud. But then, somehow, you play a real professional gamer.. and you just feel like stopping playing that game. Nothing works, you look like a total beginner, you get 5/0-ed, and then, you learn he was on the phone the whole time.Meh.
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HN comments are underrated
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HN comments are full of naive political opinion, groupthink, and a tendency to blind optimism on all things technology or new. Often older ways have merit too.It's also probably the only place left on the net where, from comments, I'll find out rapidly, and bluntly with citations, when I'm wrong (and, yes I'm often wrong on the Internet!), usually learn something new on the topic, and sometimes talk with the guy who invented it. My ADHD brain loves the depth that side topics can get explored and being surrounded by people far cleverer than me.I wouldn't have it any other way.
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RethinkDB joins the Linux Foundation: What Happens Next
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Sorry if this should be obvious but what is/are the killer feature/s of RethinkDB, what differentiates it from something like Redis or even CockroachDB?
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Is Facebook a Structural Threat to Free Society?
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When I was a kid in the 70s I remember reading a national magazine article about another kid my age who had his own computer. Amazing! This was something I wanted.Reading on, it described how he had built his computer from electronics and operated it from his attic. He had quite a few programs for his computer. One he liked the most allowed him to simulate buying and selling of stocks.If you've ever read any ads from that period, the implication is clear: computers are awesome because they are going to challenge us to become better people. They will teach us at a speed we can learn, they will reward us as we progress, and the obstacles and learning will get more and more advanced.People who don't have computers are going to be missing out -- on self development.Contrast that to my trip the other day by commercial air travel. Everywhere I went, people were on their phones. Were they learning foreign languages? Becoming experts at symbolic logic or global politics?They were not.Instead they were playing the stupidest games imaginable. Facebooking, taking quizzes where any moron with the ability to type would get 90% correct -- and then sharing the results with their friends.Zuck and others figured it out. Computers don't have to be computers. They have to be video games. Who gives a shit whether the guy on the other end is learning to be a better person. Challenge them with idiotic trivial tasks, then reward them with blinky lights, sound effects, and the imagined praise of their peers. They'll do that shit all day long. All they need is more batteries.Yes. It's a problem.
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Robert Scoble and Me
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I knew Robert Scoble online 2004 - 2007 during his time as a blogger and an (unpaid/unofficial, if I'm not mistaken) Microsoft evangelist during the Longhorn beta days. I remember him as a bully who was not afraid to use his pedestal to call people out on personal whim and took great pleasure in his sense of power and fame.He often blogged out of ignorance on trending topics (TechMeme, anyone?) yet always got that traffic and those backlinks - one of those people that believed that if you spoke loudly enough what you said would magically both become important and true. It worked for him though, that I remember.He was a bully then and I'm not surprised to hear he still is one now, but presuming that this article is true I'm very sorry to learn that he didn't contain his behavior to online only.What I remember hating the most was just how successful people like him - and there are plenty - are at being popular. It just felt so unfair how this unintelligent bloke managed to con everyone into thinking his opinion mattered, got himself invited to all these exclusive events, and was somewhat of a mini-celebrity for no discernible reason at all. He wasn't someone you wanted to call out or cross because he never hesitated to fire back with all guns at anyone who gave him any flack and you didn't want to be the person everyone woke up to find shredded to pieces in their RSS inboxes the next morning.I wisened up at some point and tuned him out. I stopped trying to blog about how his latest piece was inaccurate and unsubscribed from his feeds, realizing he simply wasn't worth it, and, to be honest, that it wasn't a game I could win. The thing about people like him is that they largely live in an echo chamber. They don't really matter. If you can tune them out and cut them out of your life, you won't be missing a thing. And if enough people do that, then they lost at their game. I imagine there are a lot of people that saw this headline and hadn't a clue who Robert Scoble even was - that wasn't the case 12 years ago. Bullies fade.
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Elementary Knightship found in Conway's Game of Life
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Here's an idea that I once had about how to visually determine if a program terminates or not:Convert a program to a Game of Life equivalent program. Observe if there are any run-away gliders. If there are, the original program doesn't terminate.
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De Beers admits defeat over man-made diamonds
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"Lightbox will transform the lab-grown diamond sector by offering consumers a lab-grown product they have told us they want but aren't getting: affordable fashion jewelry that may not be forever, but is perfect for right now"This is clearly a play to devalue the image of man made diamonds. "May not be forever" my ass, it's the exact same thing. Their goal is probably to try to quickly drive the price of man made diamonds down to the price of Moissanite, and create a artificial distinction between natural and man made dimaonds. All of this so the price of man made diamonds doesn't bring down the price of the natural stones with it.
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Ask HN: What's your favorite elegant/beautiful algorithm?
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Diffie–Hellman. I know that cryptography can get much fancier and more clever, but Diffie–Hellman took a concept my intuition told me was impossible and showed that it's possible in a really simple, elegant way. Learning about it was the first time I realized how beautiful the math behind computer science is.It's also a great insight into just how fundamental the concept of computational complexity is.
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I Can No Longer Recommend Google Fi
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The lede here is somewhat burried:"From what I’ve since learned, if a card in your Google Pay is stolen, or someone uses your Payments account fraudulently, or anything happens that leads to a security flag being raised, it can lead to your Google Payments account being frozen....If you can’t use Google Payments, you can’t pay for Google FiThis, fundamentally, is why I can’t suggest anyone use Project Fi anymore....Getting this fixed is actually impossible, and I say that as someone who really, truly, loves solving problems and has made a living off getting phone agents to want to help me.We have submitted copies of his ID four times, my ID twice, multiple photos of credit cards, and various credit card statements. We’ve talked to agents and supervisors at Google Payments and Google Fi. No one is empowered to do anything, and even a well-intentioned agent doesn’t get the same answer from the “security department” twice.I’ve since found hundreds of comments and Reddit threads from people having similar experiences, with almost zero positive conclusions.The only suggestion of a solution we’ve been given is that he abandon both his email address and phone number of the past twenty years and start fresh."
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Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon
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How about going after Comcast and Verizon first, the actual tech monopolies? I already don’t use Facebook, I buy things online from places other than Amazon, and have email accounts that aren’t hosted by Google. However, all of that goes over Comcast’s network because that’s my only viable choice for Internet service. Also, while FAANG occasionally do things I don’t approve of, they don’t actively lobby congress for things that will make my use of the internet objectively worse (NN, SOPA, etc...).But no, because Comcast has -bribed- donated to way more congresspeople than Google, because they’re better at playing that game.
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Addressing Spotify’s Claims
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> Spotify wouldn’t be the business they are today without the App Store ecosystem, but now they’re leveraging their scale to avoid contributing to maintaining that ecosystem for the next generation of app entrepreneurs. We think that’s wrong.I think that's a very hypothetical claim.> Let’s be clear about what that means. Apple connects Spotify to our users. We provide the platform by which users download and update their app. We share critical software development tools to support Spotify’s app building. And we built a secure payment system — no small undertaking — which allows users to have faith in in-app transactions. Spotify is asking to keep all those benefits while also retaining 100 percent of the revenue.I think we should be clear that Apple built the app-store ecosystem to improve its iPhone adoption and lock-in. And Spotify isn't asking to keep 100% of the revenue. Spotify is asking for a choice of letting users pay how they wish.The problem really is Apple wants to milk its App store ecosystem now that its popular and 30% / 15% is a very steep price / revenue loss for any significant player in that eco-system. And FWIW, Google provides a similar App store service, while also allowing users to what they choose with their phones (i.e., install side-loaded Apps).
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What's so hard about PDF text extraction?
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I’m a contractor. One of my gigs involved writing parsers for 20-something different kinds of pdf bank statements. It’s a dark art. Once you’ve done it 20 times it becomes a lot easier. Now we simply POST a pdf to my service and it gets parsed and the data it contains gets chucked into a database. You can go extremely far with naive parsers. That is, regex combined with positionally-aware fixed-length formatting rules. I’m available for hire re. structured extraction from PDFs. I’ve also got a few OCR tricks up my sleeve (eg for when OCR thinks 0 and 6 are the same)
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I think Catalina 10.15.4 broke SSH
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Catalina is broken in many ways.This complain and Remote Access in (so I can SSH to my $4k MacBook) disables itself anytime the computer is restarted.But more importantly, I’ve still not found a Thunderbolt Display that doesn’t routinely crash screen manager services upon idle user activity. 3 x $300 thunderbolt3 dock solutions later and not a one hasn’t crashed this computer. All main brands, two of which sell accessories in the Apple store.Problem also existed with a top of the line 13” MacBook Pro.I’ve just gotten used to the shoddy-ness that is Catalina. Figure if I go to the bathroom, upon return I have a fresh, new clean desktop environment. Feature not a bug. Yay!
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Wikipedia is 20
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I am surprised that the comments haven't mentioned the role of SEO in Wikipedia's growth and defensibility.Wikipedia's habit of deep interlinking helped it rank back in the early aughts when the SEO rules were rather simple. Add to that the subdomain-driven localization strategy and many other moves that were considered SEO best practices back in those years when the on-page factors used to matter.But that was just the start. Wikipedia killed it in SEO when it was easy to do so, but it also did one other thing that most SEO-driven sites (eg: About) didn't do correctly - it cared deeply about the content quality and also resisted to run ads (anyone remember Jason Calacanis' articles on how they are leaving $100m on the table? See [1]). So when Panda came around, Google correctly rewarded Wikipedia with #1 rankings for over 50% of its terms (!!), and Jason Calacanis had to shut down Mahalo which got destroyed by Panda.Wikipedia's dominance continues because it's basically impossible to overcome its lead in inbound links and domain authority. Add to that a surprisingly under-the-radar company culture which has avoided any major blow ups despite its community wielding so much leverage over the world's education and having to make a lot of difficult calls on a daily basis.Well done.[1] https://calacanis.com/2006/10/28/wikipedia-leaves-100m-on-th...
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WhatsApp loses millions of users after terms update
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WhatsApp worldwide usage is estimated to be more than 2B+ users. Even if this article is accurate, it doesn’t really mean much. In the HN bubble lots of people have migrated to Signal with all of their contacts but outside of that bubble nothing much seems to be happening. Note that I’m not agreeing with these changes, I’m just observing reality.To put things into perspective, let’s assume that 25M users (as stated in the article) actually moved to Telegram - which I use and like by the way. Let’s assume they fully moved and stopped using WhatsApp (very unlikely). That means less than 1.25% users moved to another platform - and this means assuming many things that aren’t probably real.It reminds me a bit of the articles about DuckDuckGo vs Google where many people think big changes in usage are happening while ignoring that the average Joe will keep using whatever it’s using unless there’s way too much trouble to continue using it.
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It's probably time to stop recommending Clean Code (2020)
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Yes let's please do this. I'm tried of this book being brought up at work.My clean code book:* Put logic closest to where it needs to live (feature folders)* WET (Write everything twice), figure out the abstraction after you need something a 3rd time* Realize there's no such thing as "clean code"
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The Dangers of Microsoft Pluton
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I'm completely missing how his example of a Word document that can only be opened by approved users on approved hardware within the corporation is supposed to be a bad thing.Honestly, that sounds pretty fantastic. I've been using 3rd party tools/extensions to do this sort of thing in corporate and government environments for years, but having the attestation go all the way down to the hardware level is a big value-add, especially with so much ransomware/spyware/extortion/espionage going on these days.Can someone please explain to me how the author might see this level of security as a bad thing?
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Spotifyd
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Always great to see new ways to integrate with Spotify. I think that if you're paying for a Spotify Premium subscription you should be able to stream music wherever you want!However Spotify doesn't agree. If this is based on librespot its using stuff Spotify doesn't support and could easily shut down for unauthorized clients any time.Their supported paths are iOS and Android SDKs for mobile, and the Web Playback SDK for desktop [1]. I've been using the web SDK in anger to build a jukebox app [2] and its only so-so.First, you're under the confines of a web browser which has some pretty big tradeoffs over the experience and system integrations you can build.Next, song playback works as advertised but there are many things you can't do like introspect the queue or prevent Spotify Radio from kicking in.The latter is downright hostile to controlling exactly what songs you hear. I assume that always going into auto-recommendation mode is intentional to juice playback stats.Kudos to spotifyd for offering total control over how and where you stream music you're paying for.1. https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-playback-sdk...2. https://www.getjukelab.com/
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Willingham sends Fables into the public domain
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I don't know Fables, but I'd love to see more things going to public domain. All fictional characters and stories, after 10 years. All software stuff, API/ABI, formats, UI and leaked source code, you should be able to use it, modify it, or even sell it. Everyday products like a washing machine, or a microwave, someone created a reliable and easy to produce microwave, now anyone should be able to mass produce it, and sell it cheaper. Produce and sell an iphone, a compatible, a partially compatible, an improved version, or whatever you want. And so on.
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There is no point to distributing music in 24-bit/192kHz format.
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I must say I get rather irritated when people spend time worrying about dubious 'tweaker' methods to improve their audio, when the most under-performing component of most people's sound equipment also has the lowest-hanging fruit: The room itself.When people ask me where they should spend money to improve the quality of their hi-fi or home theater system, in nearly every case my response will be something like "get a thicker rug" or "put something on this wall to absorb sound reflections, even if it's just a bookshelf."Beyond that, I'd tend to say something like "stop being so paranoid about what you think you can't hear, and enjoy the damn music."
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Autodraw – Fast Drawing for Everyone
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It's not really "auto-draw" as much as it's a visual search in which you suggest shapes and it looks across the collection for visually similar icons. Impressive and fun, but not yet a huge advancement over just typing "house" or "cake" to search the image library.
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Vue.js vs. React
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You'll see quotes in this thread like "The demand for both React and Vue.js is growing tremendously" thrown around. It's good to check out npm install stats to get an unopinionated comparison.https://npm-stat.com/charts.html?package=react&package=vue&p...In reality, React is downloaded roughly 4-5x more than angular and 7-8x more than Vue. In August so far, React has 75% market share among these three libs. Interestingly, this share has grown in August compared to both last month (July) and beginning of year (January).While this thread and the license thread might indicate that React is dying, it's not. It's growing.If Vue is going to be what React is today, it has quite a long way to go.
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Serious Chrome zero-day
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I'll be that guy.Chrome has probably invested > 1 billion dollars into their codebase at this point. Certainly >100million into security.They sandbox their code aggressively. They build this project with security in mind from day 1 - it's been architected for it.The Chrome security team(s) has a lot of power for a product security org.They fuzz. They invent new fuzzers. They cluster their fuzzers.They have a world class bounty program.They have a world class research team for finding vulns.They invent or otherwise aggressively adopt mitigation techniques.But someone out there did it.Their track record for security is something to really be proud of - this is the first public ITW exploit of its type that I am aware of. But users are getting owned because of, at the very least, a Use After Free vulnerability.Let's just collectively admit it, finally - you can't write safe C++ in a codebase this complex.edit: (From a post below)To be clear, I'm not saying "Chrome should be rewritten in a memory safe language", I'm saying that Chrome is an excellent project to point to, say "Wow, no one does as much to secure a codebase as them", and to follow that up with "and they still got owned by UAF".
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The shittiest project I ever worked on (2013)
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Having followed HN and similar dev culture (Dilbert etc.) for some time now, I feel a growing contradiction that I cannot fully resolve.On the one hand big corporations are presented as these incompetent behemoths that are locked in their internal petty office politics, managers are clueless as to what is being or should be developed, and tons of money is wasted, they are wooed by empty marketing etc.On the other hand these organizations are immensely wealthy and successful.It may actually be that they are right, and for non-tech-centered companies this whole software stuff is really peanuts and their mental energy is better spent on other business-related stuff. So they will come up with random low-effort comments on all sorts of details because ultimately they (rightly) don't care. What actually matters is to negotiate deals like referral fees, or coming up with other contract ideas that will bring a lot of revenue in.Or maybe it's just an equilibrium, a local optimum. You don't have to produce "good" stuff (in the developer's sense) without waste, precisely because the other company that you're targeting is also inefficient in similar ways.I'm really not sure but I think it's important to look beyond just "haha, stupid managers, they can't make up their mind". There must be deeper reasons.
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We Wasted $50K on Google Ads So You Don't Have To (2019)
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Left a comment on the IndieHackers page. Keeping a copy here for those who aren't reading the comments section. I have noticed this a lot in various websites I have helped in ad campaigns. Their biggest problem is their landing page. Just like this article uses lots of jargons to explain simple concepts, their landing page reflects the same. For those of you wanting to know more about landing page optimization just watch Isaac Rudansky's excellent videos on Udemy. One of the most important rules is the 5 second test. Show your landing page to your colleagues/friends/family depending on your target audience. If they can't understand what your business proposition is in 5 seconds you have failed landing page optimization. As simple as that.The comment I posted on the IndieHackers page:------------------The landing page is too complex. Like what does "Full stack adaptive delivery" even mean? I am sure 90% of your paid visitors are just bouncing because that landing page tagline is alien to them. Dumb it down. Make it simple.Surprisingly, the description in the Indiehackers page makes so much more sense than the one you put up: "File-system-as-a-service that does uploads, storage, and media processing for Web and mobile apps, so you can ship products faster and scale them painlessly"If you told me that the first time I would have understood your value proposition. Don't get too fancy with your taglines. People don't have time to understand what you are saying. People don't like fancy terminologies except for what is popular. There are too many jargons already. Don't complicate it further.Instead of "Full stack adaptive delivery" just try: "File-system-as-service". Instead of "Serve ultimate UX with better images on any website. One script to rule them all." just have: "Ship products faster with better images on any website". That's it. You will get 50+% higher conversion rates with just this one change.
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Amazon let a fraudster keep my Sony A74 IV and refunded him
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This is such a basic issue that I don't understand why USPS or some other shipper w/ bricks-n-mortar haven't stepped up to offer some sort of package shipping certification.If I was the seller it could work as simply as me bringing the item to a shipper who would take their own photos and weigh the items being packaged up as well as some check that the item is as being described to the recipient. In turn the shipper would get an extra fee.For high value items (i.e. like OP's camera) it would certainly be in everyone's best interest and platforms like ebay, Facebook, Amazon could insist that all parties use this type of service or relinquish their ability to dispute.Too over simplified??
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Why I’m Leaving Elm
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These posts (and HN comments) really make me wonder if adopters of fringe languages are always going to be thin-skinned developers who get emotional when they realize they won't be part of the language's design decisions. That "On Whose Authority" rant about Clojure complains about the exact same things. And I'll refer to Rich Hickey's response: https://old.reddit.com/r/Clojure/comments/73yznc/on_whose_au....Elm in particular has this weird problem where there are vocal people in the community who you can count on to drape a wet, accusatory blanket over every discussion, and you wonder why they can't just find another language that they do like. Sometimes you need to leave the theater so other people can enjoy the show.Also what are these languages yall are using where you're part of steering committee level decisions?This blog post is full of the usual suspect complaints, like being annoyed that a language can use features like custom operators but they can't in their user lib even though most people would agree that user packages shouldn't be able to invent yet more custom operators. It's such a weird jealousy for a point to be "but core libs can do it, why not me? :(". Well, simple: think of the rest of us who don't want every user lib to define its own custom operators. But the complainer here gets hung up on what seems like an ego / entitlement issue.
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Show HN: Twitch Roulette – Find and chat with streamers who are streaming alone
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twitch is one of the platforms where I feel like I've struggled the most to get viewers. just playing my main game like Dota wasn't too productive since I'm not a pro or super hot so my value proposition there isn't too compelling. Instead I've been trying to focus more on streaming myself programming and learning new scientific or game programming libraries and have been enjoying it quite a bit. My viewer count is veeery slowly increasing but almost noone is subscribing, many of my friends have expressed interest in watching me so my plan is to start letting them know when I'm about to stream to seed some viewers. Also I've realized that the more specific your brand is on social media the more effective, I've been looking at branding myself as a strategy game buff/developer so will be streaming niche strategy games and Unity game development every weekend. I'll re-asses after a month to see if this plan was effective.I really appreciate this project as going from 0-1 viewers on Twitch where the 1 isn't your friend is challenging.
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iPhone camera app replaces person’s head with a leaf in photo
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I hate how much phones lately alters the images. Of course it most of the time makes the images look better, and cameras are a big selling point on a phone.But I don't like how my photos of people suddenly have a filter applied to the faces, how a picture of leaves during fall have vibrance exaggerated, how the sky looks clearer than it really did.
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Firefox Translations: Translate websites in your browser without using the cloud
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I've just installed it, and I'm impressed so far. I've only run it against some sample German Wikipedia articles (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clan_of_Xymox), but it produces surprisingly readable text. I also particularly like the "highlight potential errors" option to flag stuff that even the translation service thinks might be a bit off.It's not nearly as speedy as Google Translate, but I'll take that happily if it means keeping it local.
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Richard Stallman Was Right All Along
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It's worth noting that Obama, upon signing, issued a signing statement that said that he was against the indefinite detention provision, and importantly, that he would not indefinitely hold Americans without trial:"Moreover, I want to clarify that my Administration will not authorize the indefinite military detention without trial of American citizens. Indeed, I believe that doing so would break with our most important traditions and values as a Nation. My Administration will interpret section 1021 in a manner that ensures that any detention it authorizes complies with the Constitution, the laws of war, and all other applicable law."
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Get HTTPS for free
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This is my project, happy to answer questions or receive feedback. The goal was to let people experiment with getting a Let's Encrypt cert before the had to install anything on their server. The static/unhosted property is to strengthen trust that nothing shady is going on here.
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Why Uber Engineering Switched from Postgres to MySQL
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I would argue that most of these Postgres "flaws" are actually advantages over MySQL when you look at them holistically rather than the very specific Uber use-case.Postgres's MVCC is superior (can rollback DDL, can add indexes online, can have open read transactions for a VERY long time without impacting other parts of the system)Postgres supports many types of indexes, not just b-tree. One thing it doesn't have is clustered b-tree indexes... which is really what MySQL does that makes it somewhat "better." I wonder how Uber adds an index to a table that already has 1B+ rows in it with mysql?Postgres have WAL level replication is a better guarantee of actually replicating the data correctly. I cannot tell you how many times I've had to tell my boss that the "mysql replicas might be slightly out of sync with the master" because of various replication issues. The way it handles triggers and scheduled events alone is garbage and can very easily break replication and/or silently cause inconsistency.As for data corruption, if there is a bug that causes corruption, then there is a bug. I don't think that is a fundamental design flaw as implied in this article. You shouldn't rely on 1/2 assed replication design to accidentally save you from the data corruption bug. There are many downsides to the design MySQL has that are simply not listed here.I have been both a professional MySQL administrator as well as Postgresql (as well as SQL Server and many NoSQL engines). Many of these Postgres issues are only issues at crazy huge scale, and I would say at that point you probably want to move away from relational anyway. MySQL has its own very large set of problems at scale as well.It sounds like Uber is using MySQL as just a data bucket with primary keys ("Schemaless") which is good -- because you can't alter tables to save your life with MySQL.At the end of the data each developer/business needs to use what works for them, but I would really shy away from pointing to this article as a linchpin in the "MySQL vs. Postgres" war (if there even is such a thing.)
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Megaprocessor – A micro-processor built large
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Question: is there a market for servers twice the size they are. But a fraction of the cost.I for example have really consolidated servers in recent years. VMs are fantastic. But the result is that I have lots of Data Center space spare.I would love to buy servers of similar power consumption but larger foot print, for less dollars than small ones. Assuming that a lot of limitations and cost go into shrinking current systems.Or are there other issues like distance between components that then come into play?
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The Nobel Prize in Literature 2016 awarded to Bob Dylan
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Despite being a massive admirer of Dylan's work, I'm not sure that I'm good with this> for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song traditionThere's no doubt he did this, but ... do songs count as literature? I'm not really sure they do, and much as I love the songs, the lyrics by themselves don't have anything like the impact (on me at least) of top-notch poetry
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GraalVM: Run Programs Faster Anywhere
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Am I correct in reading the license in Github that this is all GPL? Albeit GPL2 but still not some Oracle proprietary license."One VM to rule them all" reminds me of Parrot VM (for Perl 6). Looks like development slowed down a year or two ago. Back then, it got me excited as it looked like the "open source community" alternative to "Big Corporate Java".https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parrot_virtual_machine
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