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Norwegian Consumer Council report on how tech companies use dark patterns [pdf]
What a surprise! Microsoft villianised over the decades seems to be better than Google and Facebook. This brings us to the question. Have you paid XX money for a service that doesn’t show ads. Are you happy with it?
Google Doesn’t Want Staff Debating Politics at Work Anymore
It's funny how we pigeonhole "things that actually matter" as "politics" and that those things are somehow taboo. I mean, what's MORE worth talking about than human rights, the environment, history, etc.?
Chelsea Manning ordered to be released [pdf]
What's the legal reasoning (if there's any) to keep her locked up and ruin her financially while not being able to swing the same punishment at all those people who refused to testify in the recent impeachment?
Trello handed over my personal account to my previous company
GitHub did this to me a few years ago. I still feel violated. Not by my idiot former employer. I feel violated by GitHub. I got my account back. Sort of. They detached a significant amount of my content from my account, and returned to me a gimpy lobotomized version of myself.All my old GitHub comments are credited to “ghost” now. I was somewhere in the first 12,000 GitHub accounts.My relationship with GitHub significantly predated my dalliance with this one employer years ago. I trusted GitHub. My GitHub account was a formative part of my identity. I still can’t believe it and I still can’t forgive them. I lost some of my sparkle that day.
Biohacking Lite
I'm French (and incidentally a doctor,and my post is not judgemental in any way, this is not the point). Everytime I travel to the USA, I'm puzzled by how difficult it is to "eat normally" (= by my own standards). You can find really good junk food everywhere, or pay a really high price to eat in high-level Italian restaurants for example, but it is very difficult to eat standard meat-with-vegetable-without-sugar-added, except in Asian restaurants (and even there, food is often sweetened). Of course it is biased because I have no access usually to a kitchen when I travel.I think sugar is the main problem (not fat) and I'm not convinced calory count is key. We did not evolved to eat processed sugar, which is not easily found naturally in the environment.My 2 cents: - eat as much vegetables as you want (learn to cook them, with a little bit of olive oil) - eat as much fish as you want (no need to cook! Low temperature baking, 1h at 70-80°, the best cooking you'll ever have) - eat meat in reasonable, "as-if-you-had-to-hunt-it-with-a-bow" quantities - ban every processed food, sauce, appetizer.... If you would not eat a spoon of every single ingredient of some food, don't eat it. - ban all added sugar, except (real) honey in reasonable proportions.This implies to know/learn how to cook (not so hard but this is easier when the local/family culture allowed you to learn passively).It looks like this is hard to do in the USA: you don't easily find, for example, yogurt without sugar added. (Or I didn't look at the right place, once again this is not judgemental).Generally speaking, it is easy to find online high-level cooking courses, but hard to learn the basics of how to cook your onions or tomatoes in different ways in everyday life, or make an healthy meal with what's left in the fridge; this could be interesting to have.--edited for typing errors
New German law would force ISPs to allow secret service to install trojans
What does "trojans at ISPs" even mean? TLS works end-to-end and ISPs can do absolutely nothing to see the plaintext. It's unless the CAs at users-side are manually replaced with fake ones nothing can be done. I've never used Windows since I was a kid but I am sure this is pretty much impossible on Linux for example since adding CAs require root privilege.
My product is my garden
I love this and I aspire to eventually, if I come out of the grinder with any ambition, drive, or passion left, do something similar.I abhor big corpratism, and love the way software can be independent and disconnected from it, if not usually in practice.I deeply admire Basecamp's style of "you don't need VC money, keep it small, keep building something useful that gets you paid." I want that someday but someday is not this day.I'm not much of an idea guy. I can build stuff. I can get really passionate about how things "should be" and implement process and infrastructure to get there. But whatever "it" is, just hasn't come to me yet.I long to be an indiehacker but for all the supposedly wrong reasons.I want to putter but don't know where to get the right seeds to be puttering for.
Reddit is banning any Aimee Challenor mention. UK public figure and Reddit admin
HN is also penalising threads that discuss this. This post has 74 upvotes in 27 minutes and 11 comments at time of writing. Ordinarily it would significantly outrank most of the other posts on the front page, but it doesn't seem to be able to break past #15. Either this is because HN users are flagging it, or because something else is going on. As Reddit is a YC company it'd be really nice to hear an explanation.This exact same thing happened with the previous threadshttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26554697andhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26556187There are some awful transphobic comments in those threads, but they appeared _after_ the threads had been penalised.
Show HN: A color picker for named web colors
In case the named web colors aren't enough, we're making excellent progress naming every color in the RGB space.https://colornames.org/
Show HN: Beepberry – a portable e-paper computer for hackers
i almost didn't open this because it said 'e-paper' and i've sort of dismissed e-paper for this kind of thingthis is much more interesting than an e-paper device; it's a memory-in-pixel lcd device, which means 100 times better refresh rate and 1000 times better power consumption than e-paper. the lcd in question (ls027b7dh01, i assume, though that information is missing from the web pages) is supposed to run on 175μW at 20fps, so you can get a full usable computer system in submilliwatt territory, so the 2.2 kilojoules in a cr2032 can power it for weekshowever, i think that, as a low-power device, this is probably fatally flawed. the rp2040 dooms it; the rp2040 lacks a reasonable deep-sleep mode; its lowest-power mode is nearly a milliwatt, so it will drain the battery flat when it's not being usedalso it's unclear, in this design, how much the rp2040 can do without powering up the pi zero, which is a humongous power hog, using over 1000 milliwatts. so instead of weeks of active use from a cr2032 (and months of standby if you use a low-power micro instead of an rp2040) you get hourswhat's the point of using a super expensive memory-in-pixel lcd to get the display power consumption down from e-paper's 10-100 milliwatts into submilliwatt territory if you're just going to burn a thousand milliwatts in a raspberry pi? just use a conventional lcd then, maybe one with nice 24-bit color. old nokia lcds will run on a milliwattmaybe an esp32 would be a better middle ground if you aren't willing to go all the way to an ambiq apollo3 or something, which can (hypothetically) give you submilliwatt power consumption with workstation-class performance, as long as you don't need virtual memory; you probably want an esp32 or equivalent in there anyway for wi-fiusb-c is a great way to be able to hook up a full-size external keyboard, but speaking usb-c to a keyboard is also probably beyond the capabilities of the rp2040, and so would also need to power up the giant power hog pi zero
Are coders worth it?
Wonderful writing, I loved the way it circled several times around the central issue - the value of work, and I particularly liked this conclusion - much validation and reward in our society is driven by how much people are willing to pay you for your chosen work, and it's very hard to separate your self-worth and confidence from that. It's hard to reconcile when your values don't meet those of the people around you, as expressed in the salaries for various jobs, which vary wildly without much sign of reason or relation to what society ostensibly values. I think what he's trying to get at is why we overvalue these jobs, which on the face of it are not particularly rewarding either to society or the individuals doing them (apart from monetarily). If you ask people in the street whether we need another Facebook, most would say no, and yet we have hundreds of inchoate and uninspiring replacements being worked on and funded right now, so it's hard to see where the demand is coming from, or why this work is valued so highly, and whether it is in fact a bubble which will burst.Going back to 17C Holland there was probably a huge demand for market traders able to distinguish fine differences in and trade tulip bulbs, until all of a sudden there wasn't - this is the kind of illusory value the writer posits for today's fêted startup web workers. I'm not sure I entirely agree, but it shouldn't be dismissed out of hand, because he's not just saying it's unfair, but that it may be unjustified.The price of a word is being bid to zero.This sentence near the end cuts to the heart of the matter for me - for writers or other producers of original content like photographers there is a cruel and dismal comparison to be drawn between the wages of those paid to frame content and present it to the world, and the wages of those who produce the content. The creative content (writing, photography, art, travel guides etc) is all in demand, but no-one wants to pay for it, perhaps because it's so easy to produce something yourself, and so hard to distinguish the fine differences in quality which separate a remarkable piece of writing or photography from the mediocre.
Are You A Typing Hacker? Prove It
I'm asking myself what the minimum system requirements for those web tech demos are. Until some time ago I had an old Core 2 Duo Macbook Pro from 2009 and whenever I tried running something like this the browser came to a halt.I assumed that it was because of my ancient hardware. But now I got a new Haswell i5 quadcore system and the game still locks up my browser.So where's the secret to being able to enjoy these tech demos?
EFF Wins Petition to Inspect and Modify Car Software
It should be noted that this is a very limited ruling. Only the owner can modify the car, and you can't go to a mechanic or third party to modify it (or inspect it), which will greatly restrict the application.Also this doesn't apply to Entertainment or Telemetrics portions. So your car could be straight up spying on you, or your manufacturer can leave unpatched security holes in your "Entertainment" system (which has already been used ( http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/syst...) to remotely hack your car), and there is nothing you can legally do. You can't even deeply look into the system to find such vulnerabilities.I mean a win is a win, but this isn't as big as one would hope.
Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation
250k a year in 5 years at a big corporation, really? Yea if you're lucky to work on a project/team higher-ups care about and are also willing to bust your ass working long hours to meet insane deadlines. Also, you better be someone who is excellent at communication and charismatic if you want to get invited to the table of interesting work.There are a lot of brilliant hyper-competitive people who work at these big companies and you will be a small fish. So I think this article is spreading a myth that there is guaranteed piles of money to be made by working at Google, Facebook, Apple, etc.
Disney acquires own streaming facilities, will pull Netflix content
If every studio thinks I'm going to pay them $10+ a month to stream their content, they are going to be very mistaken.I can't imagine that a lot of people want to spend the collective hundreds of dollars to sign up for all the streaming services. It's almost asking to drive people to torrents.Now, if Disney does something like $30/year or something really affordable - sure. I might do that on a whim. I guess it's all about volume vs. price.Netflix, however, I'll keep paying for gladly because of the library size. For the streaming price, it is well worth the value.
Guidelines for Brutalist Web Design
If you’ve never tried, load something like "lite.cnn.io" and be amazed at how quickly you can see 50 different headlines and links, on any type of device. Similarly, "old.reddit.com" and other simplified designs.I now strictly bookmark only what I consider the “sensible” versions of a site. And if there isn’t a sensible version, I stop using the site entirely.Also, in 2018 you are doing yourself a disservice on the desktop if you don’t have the best content blockers installed. (I use "uBlock Origin" and "uMatrix", not because I want sites to suffer but because web browsing IS intolerable without a blocker.)
.NET 5
I'll be honest, as much as I love the improvements with .NET Core/.NET Standard, Microsoft's branding strategy leaves a lot to be desired.vNext has already been historically used in the context of ASP.NET to refer to ASP.NET (not to be confused with ASP.NET MVC) v6. We restarted the versioning back with ASP.NET Core, now on version 2. Entity Framework used to be a .NET framework component but is now standalone, and has a Core version? Does Blazor (or is it Razor Components now) share the .NET branding?Separate to the web stuff, we have the .NET platform - .NET framework is the non-cross platform version for which we're on version 4, but it implements .NET Standard v2 along with .NET Core, which has a Linux runtime. Mono also implements .NET Standard v2 and has a Linux runtime.I remember many years ago when we also had Microsoft .NET Passport.. which was completely unrelated to everything else that I've mentioned related to the .NET brand.And now we have .NET 5 which is neither Framework nor Core - so will ASP.NET drop this Core branding too? Is it just me, or is this all incredibly convoluted?
Blender Is Free Software
It's nice a high profile project such as Blender speaks about freedom to push back against the "source available" movement.I've always wondered why niche specific software such as Blender doesn't have a ton of industry backing. Any medium sized graphics shop could have a full developer on the payroll for a fraction of the repeated licensing costs of proprietary solutions, that is, someone who works full time on Blender and whom you can directly approach, in-house, for features and fixes.And it wouldn't even interfere with their competitive edge, since the software isn't their business. They don't have to care about the GPL as long as the software does what they want.I think it has something to do with appealing to an employee's vanity, where getting a very expensive software package "for free" to do your job makes one feel appreciated.
ACLU sues Homeland Security over 'stingray' cell phone surveillance
Stingray use requires a warrant and every case should be dismissed where one was used without a warrant. I'm sure that's the main reason they want to hide the use of stingrays, they know they're doing something wrong.Police having the ability to spy on everyone with little to no oversight is nightmarish authoritarianism, it's completely against the spirit of American democracy, not to mention in violation of The Constitution.
HR is not your friend, and other things I think you should know
Many people think that they live in a free democracy.In reality, something like 50% of all working people are employed in a strict hierarchical organisation that is essentially feudal in its nature.Most employees are the equivalent of serfs, overseen by lords, with a king in charge. The common employees don't get a vote. Their managers are not elected. They don't get a say in policy. The managers in turn form a strict hierarchy, much like in feudal times, with a top-down structure. A junior manager cannot say no to a senior manager. Nobody can say no to the CEO.In this picture HR is essentially the inquisition. The inquisition was most certainly not the friend of the common man!If you buck the system, if you step out of your place, if you're a commoner upsetting a lord, then you will be treated much like your ancestors would have been treated long ago: You will be put to the question. The inquisition will spare no pain to determine exactly why you stepped out of line and upset the natural order of things.
Things to know about databases
#1 thing you should know, RDBMS can solve pretty much every data storage/retrieval problem you have.If you're choosing something other than an RDBMS - you should rethink why.Because unless you're at massive scale (which still doesn't justify it), choosing something else is rarely the right decision.
'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
As a consultant, I come around a bit.I have seen many companies with very poor productivity, and in zero of those cases was it laziness of the employees. In fact they usually would have loved to be more productive. Nobody wants to spend their life being dead weight.But as companies grow they install more and more rules and regulations that end up making sure nothing ever gets done. It is not unusual to meet "developers" whose company calendar is 80% filled with meetings. Well no wonder they don't get anything done!Also remember that this is only half the problem. The other half is that agile makes you iterate through pseudo productivity before you actually understood the problem, accumulating cruft that you need to maintain and extend as you go on. I wouldn't be surprised if of the productivity that is left, more than half gets wasted on crufty software structures and writing code before you understood the problem.And then nobody wants to throw code away that turned out to be not what we need. Wasting yet more productivity on working around bad decisions from before we knew what we are actually building.
Small SaaS banned by Cloudflare after 4 years of being paying customer
OP, you have garnered a lot of sympathy by the HN community which I believe in part contributed to your problem being resolved. I think it would be fair to provide more info about what the issue was in the end. It's not OK to be like "HN I had a bad experience with Company X" and then be like "k, thx @jgrahamc, bye" when your complaint gets resolved due to the attention it received.There are so many questions this leaves unanswered:- Was this a one-off error in Cloudflare's processes? (These things happen on a big enough scale.)- Were you violating a specific clause of Cloudflare's T&C? How clear was the clause? What did you do to fix this?- Was the issue that Cloudflare estimated that you're not paying enough given the bandwidth you're consuming? Did you end up signing up for the Enterprise plan?Transparency would benefit both Cloudflare (in not making people unnecessarily apprehensive about becoming/remaining a customer) and you (in demonstrating that you're handling this issue in a professional and responsible manner).
Blink: A rendering engine for the Chromium project
I can't help but think that forking WebKit is a business based decision since Apple controls WebKit.This blog post doesn't make an engineering based argument* so I'm left with the business ones. Which sucks.* - Just vague "we need to innovate faster" boilerplate. Which is what business people say when there's not a solid engineering based reason.EDIT:At the bottom of the project page are some engineering reasons:http://www.chromium.org/blinkEach person can judge whether it's worth forking or not.
This Is Not a Day Care. It’s a University
I have a friend who attended OKWU a few years ago. She shared this piece on Facebook in approval. From what I know from her education there, this place is essentially a "safe-space" for Christians. If you say anything negative about the religion or its teachings, you are kicked out. If you don't follow its rules, you are kicked out. If you drink, smoke, have premarital sex, are lgbtq, don't follow their strict ethics code you are kicked out. Their philosophy classes are all Biblical, if you question them you are kicked out. Until a few years ago, you could major in something that amounted to being a 'preacher's wife' (I can't remember the name of the major, but that was its goal).Isn't this just an extreme safe-space for Christianity? It's exactly what they're arguing against, but backs up their worldview so it's not an issue.It's honestly baffling because I am sure there are hundreds of very smart people there who must realize this, including the professors and administration.
Largest-ever study of controversial pesticides finds harm to bees
Losing bees would suck so bad. Lots of plants co evolved, requiring pollinators. Orchids are the weirdest, with special moths unique to them [1]. But so much stuff depends on bees. A whole bunch of kinds of fruit trees, different kinds of beans, even celery.Hand pollination is possible, of course, but that seems like such a pita. Perhaps it's possible to automate.We have a perfectly good, self optimizing system that constantly moves to optimality. If we could just lighten up a little, not push quite so hard, or even just do localized trials of intensive use pesticides and fertilizers, we could find a balance of what the system can support.Either go slow and look for local optimizations that are then distributed widely, or engineer immunity, or both.Ugh. I guess if it was easy, it wouldn't be a problem.
App sizes are out of control
I have been replacing traditional apps with PWA's or mobile websites wherever possible (on Android). They hardly take up any space and also seem to behave well (drains less battery) compared to traditional apps.I could replace the following with PWAs:- Twitter- Uber- Lyft- Google news- Instagram- Flipboard- Shopping sites like Walmart, Wishand many more.Facebook and Amazon have no PWA's but have mobile websites. (Facebook mobile web works well with Opera. On other browsers it annoyingly redirects to play store to install messenger)
I Lied When I Said We Did Everything We Could
I want to go out as a result of a series of violent mistakes trying to save my life. Why would anyone want anything else? Peaceful death is basically suicide.Why do doctors continually perpetuate this notion that slipping softly into death (palliative care, hospice) is preferable to continually trying to avoid it by way of riskier and riskier attempts at treating the root cause?At the very least, we could be honest about it and say what the real reason is: we don't have the resources to try everything for everyone, and normalizing a set of not-quite-everything standards is the best way to keep the average level of care up for everyone.
3D Ken Burns Effect from a Single Image
Cool. But that’s not what we call the Ken Burns Effect in the industry. This is 2.5 D parallax shift as seen in the documentary The Kid Stays in the Picture.Ken Burns Effect is panning and zooming to highlight features in a photo then fading into another.
Post Mortem of Google Outage on 14 December 2020
I've been bitten by quota grace periods before, they're the "buffer bloat" of cloud platform management systems. You build something, it seems fine, and then a month later it keels over.My tiny disaster was caused by Amazon EFS. They provide a performance quota grace period of a month, during which all tests passed with flying colours. Turns out that EFS rations out IOPS per GB of stored data, and this particular application stored only a few MB at the time, because it was brand new and hadn't accumulated anything yet. I had a very angry customer calling up asking me to please explain why they were seeing an average of 0.1 IOPS...From: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/efs/latest/ug/performance.html"The baseline rate is 50 MiB/s per TiB of storage (equivalently, 50 KiB/s per GiB of storage).AWS now provides a performance floor of 1 MiB/s, but at the time there was no floor. If I remember correctly, this application had something like 2 MIB of data, which was constantly being updated by various processes, so there was no quota being accumulated. The system performance went from something like 1 Gbps to 100 bytes per second instantly. It took 10 seconds for a 1 KiB I/O to complete. Fun times, fun times...
Ask HN: Best Talks of 2020?
For me, it was Art of Code by Dylan Beattie, but mostly because that talk has the best ending[0] I have seen. Also, introduced to me a side of programming that I instinctively knew existed but never sought out.[0]: https://youtu.be/6avJHaC3C2U?t=3366
RIP Google Reader
Whatever was said at the time, I’m convinced Google Reader was collateral damage from the Bay of Pigs Google Plus effort. It had social features (which I honestly never used) and anything social had to be G+.Still, I honestly don’t understand why this is the hill people want to die on, what they feel most betrayed about. Like I haven’t seen some people this upset since Firefly was canceled.
Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco
What is the benefit of a taxi being driverless, for the passenger? Is it cheaper?
Thousands of Mazdas in the Seattle area are stuck on a single FM radio station
Growing up in the 90s you could tell when digitification came in - radios and tvs started to take forever to change stations. Radios used to be mechanical devices - punch a button and the new station would immediately start playing. Same for tvs.I feel like the invisible degradation of responsiveness in TV and radio is an un-noticed contributor to their decline. Most of the time I don't bother even scannig the airwaves when I get to a new town cause it's too annoying.More generally it seems like when industries are growing, there is competition in this kind of area, but later on this dies off. I wonder if there's a structural reason for this?
Map of Reddit
Careful exploring 'Australia'
Outhorse Your Email
I have a few qualms with this app:1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by streaming from /dev/urandom, mapping to cardinal directions and simulating a random walk on the keyboard.2. It doesn't actually replace an email autoresponder. Most people I know will put things like their return date in the auto-response.3. It does not seem very "scalable" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but it seems that down the road this may require a lot of horses.
I've locked myself out of my digital life
First, I’m so glad this turned out to be hypothetical, and you didn’t have to suffer through such a catastrophic loss. Second, if you had actually suffered such a loss, your digital life would hopefully be the last thing on your mind, and you’d just be glad to have your life and your family - the only real things that matter in this world.That said, planning a strategy for offsite data storage or a secondary authenticator is of course wise. A safety deposit box or other offsite location that you can frequently refresh and keep up to date would be a good investment. If you’re worried about keeping a master key to your life in a single place, you could separate your data and your authenticator. The how likely depends on your threat model, several people on this site may find it insufficient. To whatever degree you obfuscate or complicate your recovery path, you also increase the risk of losing access to it yourself.You might also consider it’s not necessarily the “thing you have” that might go MIA, but due to physical injury, age, or just forgetfulness, the “thing you know” could also be at risk. I realize this the older I get. Finding a secure way to store a master password in the event you cannot recall it, or perhaps in the event of your death, is something you may also consider. In this case, I would avoid a cipher or something else you’re likely to forget.
Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
Probably this JavaScript function I posted on my blog in 2003 https://simonwillison.net/2003/Mar/25/getElementsBySelector/
European Union votes to bring back replaceable phone batteries
The problem is not really the battery anymore, it's the software mainly. It's all closed source and is often deprecated before the hardware is dead. Then the manufacturer makes it hard to unlock bootloaders; keeps drivers closed source and effectively bricks the device. For recurring sales are the backbone of modern economy so we must force obsolescence.Why would you want to replace a battery in a useless device?Please, EU: bring a law that forces manufacturers to release their drivers / firmware whenever they stop updating a digital device.
Encrypted traffic interception on Hetzner and Linode targeting Jabber service
>The attacker managed to issue multiple SSL/TLS certificates via Let’s Encrypt for jabber.ru and xmpp.ru domains since 18 Apr 2023Why is it even possible to issue more than 1 certificate on the same domain via Let’s Encrypt? Shouldn't the previous certificate be revoked when a new one is issued?
Kim Jong-il's Sushi Chef
After eight years in captivity, she made a life-or-death escape from her guards after being sent to Vienna to promote Kim's latest film.Could someone explain how Austria permitted slaves to be held within its borders? Is this some sort of diplomatic privilege? This would be 1986 [1].edit: Or a parallel (?) situation, Cuban athletes "escaping" from government minders inside the USA (2002 [2]). What power do foreign government agents have in these situations?[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choi_Eun-hee[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Cuban_soccer_players_w...
Megaprocessor
I hadn't realised people would be so interested ! I'll try and answer some of the questions that have been asked.I just use a single type of MOSFET, the 2N7000. I did look at BJTs (in fact the whole thing started because I wanted to teach myself about "proper" transistors) but working out what resistor values to use to cope with varying fanouts/ins etc was too scary for me. One of the fundamental drivers when making design choices was that I really really want it to work when its built, it'll be heartbreaking if/when it doesn't, so I try to favour robustness.The single MOSFET is also, I'm currently guessing, the cause of the slow speed. If you look at how the professionals (chip makers) do gates they tend to have two versions of the logic, one driving the positive case and the other driving the negative using both P and N MOSFETS. So the output is actively driven either way. My circuits only actively drive in one direction and rely on a pullup resistor (the 10ks) to generate a 1 output. Halves the number of transistors I need, but cripples the speed. I need to do some experiments to prove/disprove that.I am planning on putting the design files on the website.And I'm in Cambridge UK as opposed to Cambridge MA.
Node.js v6.0 Released
babel sucks - I never though I could hate something so strongly.Just today I had to deal with the fact that babel wraps ALL your generators in some shit function.Why ? just why ? generation function was supported in browsers longer then the age all the babel maintainers combined.The worst part is I do not use babel myself - I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole but am forced to use it due to my stupid cowokers writing everything using babel - ( why does babel need .babelrc file ?? - is babel such a prominent part of your life that you need .rc files ?? and why does the .rc file need to be specified in every freaking folder ! )1) babel's docs are also terrible2) The people maintaining babel seem to actively market babel and then at the same time ignore questions and requests for better docs from the community.3) Slowest compiler I have had the pleasure of dealing with - my babel watch process consumes a grand total of 150 MB of memory !!Edit - had to follow HN guidelines
Show HN: A guide to all HTML5 elements and attributes
I believe your kbd example is incorrect. You suggest> To save, press Ctrl + S.But the spec (both W3C and WHATWG) suggests that individual keys should be nested inside an outer tag: "When the kbd element is nested inside another kbd element, it represents an actual key or other single unit of input as appropriate for the input mechanism."Thus, the example should be:> To save, press Ctrl + S.Cite: https://w3c.github.io/html/textlevel-semantics.html#the-kbd-...On the face of it, this seems ridiculous. It's too verbose, the tag name is misleading, and if you actually use the correct markup on GitHub or StackOverflow, it will render incorrectly because both sites assume the standalone element represents physical keyboard buttons.On the other hand, what's the value in semantic markup if we don't adhere to its semantics?Practically speaking, I would be a happier person today if I hadn't read that part of the spec, and instead persisted on in blissful ignorance of the element's intended semantics. Thanks, specs.
Operation Luigi: How I hacked my friend without her noticing
One of my favorite low key social engineering hacks is that I used to have a keylogger installed on every machine I own. Whenever a friend needs to hop on my machine to show me something, they'd log into an account they own and I would have their password.Then I'd do the same Luigi-like low key messing with them for a while. My favorite was when a friend had a VNC server running on their machine with control capabilities. I would sit next to them and subtly jerk the mouse pointer right before they were about to click on something and it drove them mad for a good 20 minutes before I couldn't hold onto the giggles anymore.edit: To add a bit of context, this was in the Windows 98 era, before the age of social media where we started putting all of our secrets onto our machines. And it was among a group of friends where everyone was trying to hack everyone else and pretty much anything was considered fair game. All of us were high school kids so there wasn't some super serious reputation we had to protect.
Nasa’s Mars Rover Opportunity Concludes a 15-Year Mission
Was looking through Opportunity's Wikipedia page, and found this cool comparison of the embedded systems used in Mars rovers:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_embedded_compute...That lead me to the RAD6000 page, which was new to me:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_RAD6000"Reported to have a unit cost somewhere between US$200,000 and US$300,000, RAD6000 computers were released for sale in the general commercial market in 1996"Anybody know why the per unit cost is so high? Low yields or is it that much more expensive?
WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO
I'm so glad I read hacker news. I almost took a job at WeWork just 2 months ago with a recruiter working very hard to convince me I'd be rich when they IPO. Now I'm at a much smaller startup called Weave which is a really phenomenal place to work. I didn't discover until recently that it's also a YCombinator company.edit: to clarify, hacker news has been extremely skeptical of WeWork for some time, due to this, I was extremely wary of their offer and leaned towards (and eventually chose) other options.
N8n.io – Workflow automation alternative to Zapier
Thanks a lot for posting! Even though I had actually planned to post it later myself ;-) Happy to see my project finally live on hacker news!n8n is a free node-based "Open Source" (Apache 2.0 with Commons Clause) Workflow Automation Tool. It can be self-hosted, easily extended, and so also used with internal tools. Currently, there is no hosted version yet but you can sign up on the website if you are interested to get informed once it is ready.I created it initially because I realized that every time I wrote a script to automate a small task it took me a very long time. Depending on the task it normally involved: reading documentation, writing code, committing to Github, deploying on a server, error reporting, SSL, make sure it restarts on a crash, and so on. So even very small tasks took at least half a day or day till everything was up and running properly. Existing Open Source solutions were not up to the task and also commercial ones like Zapier did not work for various reasons. Some being that they do not work well with in-house tools or complicated tasks and it gets expensive quite fast, ...So hope n8n is as helpful for other people as it is for me. Also, all help with further improving the project and create more integrations is very welcome!The project website with the nodes which exist and example workflows:https://n8n.ioYou can find the source code on Github: https://github.com/n8n-io/n8nThe whole project is written in TypeScript and uses Vue for the frontend. So it should be easily extendable for everybody with web development experience.If you have any problems, questions or need an integration which does not exist yet you can post it to the forum: http://community.n8n.ioDocumentation can be found here: https://docs.n8n.ioYour feedback is highly appreciated!Thanks a lot!!UPDATE:[Sorry are unable to answer any questions right now as it always displays me that I am posting to fast. Will answer as soon as HN allows me!]
Twitter funding a team to develop an open standard for social media
They should at the very least evaluate ActivityPub. It's a W3C standard that reached "Recommended" status almost two years ago, is flexible enough for future use-cases, and already has multiple implementations like Mastodon.In fact, any app can be made to act as a source, sink or both of ActivityPub events. I recently added ActivityPub support to learnawesome.org so that reviews can be consumed in any ActivityPub client. Implementation was easy and the data model is quite easy to understand.ActivityPub is real-time pub/sub for the entire Web, something that Twitter could have been.https://w3c.github.io/activitypub/http://activitypub.rocks/
ICANN Delays .ORG Sale Approval
I can't tell if ICANN is trying to publicly clear their own name of any wrongdoing, or if all the added attention has woken them up to how seriously flawed this whole ordeal was (which either by policy or procedure they managed to miss) or both. None of those answers are satisfying. Here's hoping they do the right thing and kill the sale... but even then, I'd be concerned they'd restructure the deal and try again.I thought ICANN was supposed to be the good guys? You know, the responsible managers of the Internet and providing solid governance which serves as the best argument against any kind of government intrusion? I'm hoping they didn't just grow bored with it and decide to get rid of it. As though it was some sort of dearly loved Google service with mild profitability and little-to-no opportunity for internal career development. ;)
Hard Startups
The problem with startups building hard tech is it takes a long time to fail. Failures that take decades doesn't work in the startup model. Image working on a fusion reactor. It might take 25 years to fail. The failure may not be that your idea doesn't work, but because some other kind of reactor comes along that is a better business (ie, cheaper). At this point, you are now a world class expert at a technology that is not economically viable. But, you can't transfer that knowledge, or at least most of it. You are also now 50 years old, give or take. You don't have 25 years to work on the next hard problem. You certainly don't have time to fail again. Back in the day when lots of people worked on hard technology, they were paid well to work on the problem; their life time earnings did not depend on creating a viable business. Because of that, they usually earned a pension, too. Because if you failed, you could retire comfortably, or, at least have enough to choose a second career that didn't pay as well. That model doesn't work for startups.
Siri, What Time Is It in London?
It's ridiculous how Siri is still this shitty. I have an 11 Pro and even on such an expensive phone I can't really trust it to do anything more advanced than set timers. Every few months I try to do something else and just get annoyed at how bad it is.Before lockdown I even had it disabled entirely because it would get activated randomly from time to time, even if nobody in the vicinity said anything remotely close to "Hey Siri".
Htmx – high power tools for HTML
hello, I'm the creator of htmx (and originally intercooler)I just released 0.0.4, so htmx is still very young, but it's got a decent test suite: https://htmx.org/test/0.0.4/test/there is a nice extension mechanism:https://htmx.org/extensions/and some very rough docs on how to pull off pure HTML animations:https://htmx.org/examples/animations/happy to answer questions
Permission.site
Absolutely blown away by the number of things you can do from a web browser these days. All of this would've been unimaginable a mere 10 years ago, right around the time when Google Chrome was in its infancy (or just out of it, to be precise) and the web browser market was still dominated by Internet Explorer, with Opera, Firefox and Safari (back when there was a Windows version of Safari) taking up small slices of the market share.Another cool site to check out: https://coveryourtracks.eff.org -- a great tool to see how unique your browser's 'fingerprint' is and how well it protects you from trackers and other annoyances online.
Mozilla Common Voice Adds 16 New Languages and 4,600 New Hours of Speech
Going along with this: What are the latest and greatest open source speech-to-text models and/or tools out there?Would love to hear from experienced practitioners and a bit of detail on the experience.Thanks HN community!
Brute.Fail: Watch brute force attacks fail in real time
So funny story, for a while I worked on a 'reverse' exploit. Which is to say morphing the response from ssh to the client with large malformed packets. The idea was to crash the client making the request. In my case I found these attacks would have like 6 to 10 attempts from the same source address. By time stamping the requests, I could evaluate if the next attack from the same address came more quickly or more slowly. I then had my server "morph" the return payload somewhat randomly and keep the three responses that caused the most slowdown. When I got to 100 variants that had "won" this selection criteria I took the three best and started over from there. After a couple of months of this I finally got a response where after one request I would not get a second.I felt extremely pleased with myself for about another month, and then my server address got hit with a massive DDOS attack (for me anyway) over my 6MBPS DSL line. So clearly I had hit a nerve somewhere :-). Anyway, I moved my server to a different address and used fail2ban to just note source IPs and put them into the IP tables as banned addresses. That works great and hasn't resulted in the same sort of drama as last time.
Llama.cpp: Full CUDA GPU Acceleration
llama.cpp is great. It started off as CPU-only solution and now looks like it wants to support any computation device it can.I find it interesting that it's an example of an ML software that's totally detached from Python ML ecosystem and also popular.Is Python so annoying to use that when a compelling non-Python solution appears, everyone will love it? Less hassle? Or did it take off for a different reason? Interested in hearing thoughts.
Civilized Discourse Construction Kit
Judging from the beta (http://try.discourse.org/) it doesn't seem to provide anything new in terms of managing a civilized discourse. The structure of the posts is very similar to regular forums; the only difference being the explicit replies, but they almost do more harm than good in the current implementation (it's just an expandable and doesn't really help me understand the context).What I want from a "civilized discourse construction kit":- Build it for a real community and try to make it work within that community.- Make it possible to close threads, write summary for threads, group threads together, explore a topic. In general: Don't make the threads all about real-time, but rather focus on how they can be useful in the future.- Bring more structure than linear comments, but less complexity than threaded comments.- Encourage longer responses.There was recently a good thread on Reddit about this: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/171xod/the_joys...
Show HN: Tesseract.js – Pure JavaScript OCR for 60 Languages
The text detection is lacking in comparison to Google's Vision API. Here is a real-life comparison between Tesseract and Google's Vision API, based on a PDF a user of our website uploaded.Original text [http://i.imgur.com/CZGhKhn.png]:> I am also a top professional on Thumbtack which is a site for people looking for professional services like on gig salad. Please see my reviews from my clients there as wellGoogle detects [http://i.imgur.com/pSJym1x.png]:> “ I am also a top professional on Thumbtack which is a site for people looking for professional services like on gig salad. Please see my reviews from my clients there as well ”Tesseract detects [http://i.imgur.com/wwbLU6g.png]:> \ am also a mp pmfesslonzl on Thummack wmcn Is a sue 1m peop‘e \ookmg (or professmna‘ semces We on glg salad P‘ezse see my rewews 1mm my cuems were as weH
Operation Rosehub – patching thousands of open-source projects
So many questions... What does this say about Google's hiring, about its employee's values, about values across the tech community? I can remember a time when managements would have shut this down, when employees would have said, "not my problem", when entire industries would have buried their heads in the sand.Is it the lack of liability and regulation that clears the way for this kind of corporate citizenship? Is it cultural?
DuckDuckGo moves beyond search to also protect you while browsing
Google started this really annoying habit of including results that don’t have the words you are searching. You can get around this by including the word in quotes but it’s frustrating to spend a few minutes looking items returned by Google to not find what you’re looking for to realize they showed it to you even though it didn’t have your search terms.I bet this is great for current events like “when is Star Wars 1 playing” when the person probably meant Star Wars 8. But sucks when researching items or searching for a paper or particular product.I started using Duck Duck Go and it works great. The privacy is an added bonus.
Be careful what you copy: Invisibly inserting usernames into text
I did this (non-publicly) many years ago for my eve online alliance. A substantial problem exists in that forging the identity of _someone else_ is fairly easy in a naive scheme if someone detects these characters. That means you can sow chaos by blaming innocent folks. In practice you'll want to "sign" the inserted data as well.Also because of the overhead here and the fact that you will want the signature to occur at regular intervals a better compression scheme than 0=>char1 1=>char2 is needed. Combining zero width chars and homoglyph substitution* can produce codings which hold signed usernames in only a few characters.There are other, far more interesting ways, to watermark text than this that are both harder (to impossible) to detect that produce better results.*https://www.researchgate.net/publication/308044170_Content-p...P.S. It's nice to see people publish conference papers on this stuff. I always had to hide it because we actually used it.
Mickey Mouse and Batman will soon be public domain
> So if the usual suspects had pushed for another copyright extension, they would have had a serious fight on their hands. Digital rights groups, online activists, and lobbyists from big technology companies would have swarmed Capitol Hill making the case against copyright extension. Evidently, major rights holders didn't have the stomach for another battle like that.The fight now should go the other way - reverting current insane copyright term to its previous lengths. Copyright lobby might not be able to extend it more, but it doesn't mean that the current one is acceptable.
Daytripper
Looks like it doesn't work anymore, but at one point someone styled reddit to look like you were reading a Word document: https://pcottle.github.io/MSWorddit/
DuckDuckGo Traffic
Bang commands[0] really sealed DDG for me. I know Firefox had install-your-own search plugins forever, but the total lack of friction of typing “!yt badgerbadgerbadger” to get specifically YouTube results was fantastic.!g (search on Google) also makes it far easier to switch. Don’t like the results? Prefix !g and try again.My other favorites: !sr [name of subreddit] - much faster than “reddit.com/r/[name]” !r - Reddit !w - Wikipedia !cache - get Google’s cache of a page !hn - HN Search !godoc - Search godoc.org for documentation on a Go package. Your favorite language is probably represented EDIT: formatting[0] https://duckduckgo.com/bang
Open-plan offices decrease face-to-face collaboration: study
I am not sure why employees would message and email more if they can just turn their chair around to chat about something they are working on.Does anyone have experience of this? I have worked in open plan offices since 1999 and I've never experienced productivity problems. If anything I'd expect working in a cube would lead to more time wasted cruising websites since your screen is more obscured. I dunno, I've only worked in cubes a handful of times.
Rules of thumb for a 1x developer
I used to get called a 10x developer, I was also called a rockstar and a ninja and a 100x dev and every other compliment that was hip.Then I hit 30. That type of talk stopped.Then I hit 40. Now I will not be considered for any entry level, mid level, or senior level software dev job anywhere in the United States, despite being very desperate and willing to relocate for anything. Doesn't matter. Too old. I'm supposed to be doing something else by now.Make a backup plan now.
Uppestcase and Lowestcase Letters
Fun fact (not fabricated BECAUSE IT'S APRIL 2ND OVER HERE):Japanese alphabets (kana) doesn't have a concept of upper/lower cases. There are two different types of kanas (round ones and square ones) but they are kind of equal in terms of strength/stress so they can't be used to express anger.People on 2-Channel forum (Japan's 4chan, basically) came up with a brilliant idea, which is to insert a space between each letter so that it looks a bit wider and has an extra oomph.Example:- normal: 今日はいい天気だね。 (it's a fine day, isn't it.)- angry: 今 日 は い い 天 気 だ ね 。 (IT'S A F*KING NICE DAY ISN'T IT)
2022 Ford F-150 Lightning
There’s a lot of stereotyping of truck owners going on in this thread which is kind of funny given how pro-EV HN normally is. It’s like the aesthetics of a pickup truck is offensive to some people. Kind of bizarre and not something I’m used to seeing but I guess I live in Ohio so that probably has something to do with it.A lot of people just want to move stuff, they don’t want to like…burn your house down while wearing a MAGA hat or something. There’s no reason to have an irrational hatred of a vehicle that is pretty practical in non-urban settings.Edit: since this ended up as the top comment I’ll add some thoughts on the truck itself in the spirit of not being overly-negative. I’m interested to see what exactly is included in the base model and when that will become available since they’ve only given us information on higher trims so far. $40K for this vehicle is very affordable, that’s about as cheap as you can get a new Model 3 right now but at least for awhile it could be eligible for electric vehicle tax credits. Especially if the government extended these credits they could get A LOT of people to buy these trucks (and more Teslas which would help with EV adoption since demand for the Bolt and Leaf seem pretty low)
Tell HN: If You Are in Russia
This whole situation is so surreal and disappointing. I grew up on Star Trek and somehow I just though we had (almost) arrived in a post-war, federation-like world. We know things should be solved with words because otherwise there are only losers. It’s how we raise our kids.I just keep thinking about how Jean Luc is looking down on us from orbit, slowly shaking his head whispering “Savages.”
Diffusion Bee: Stable Diffusion GUI App for M1 Mac
This really is a one-click installer, which is excellent. As far as I know it's the first and only one for M1. It's quite a polished UI, but there are a lot of features missing. The first ones that come to mind are:- No way to specify a seed. This is an important part of SD workflows, letting you redo an image with a slightly tweaked a prompt.- No way to specify a custom model. Alternative models (such as Waifu Diffusion) are fun to play with too.- No way to generate batches of images.- No way to specify which sampler to use.- No way to adjust the weight of specific sub-phrases, or use negative weights.There's also no img2img yet, but it sounds like that's a planned feature.Other GUIs such as https://github.com/sd-webui/stable-diffusion-webui, https://github.com/AUTOMATIC1111/stable-diffusion-webui have many more features - but not all will be trivial to port to M1.P.S.: For the people asking - yes, it can do NSFW images. I checked.
NASA’s Webb takes star-filled portrait of Pillars of Creation
I compressed the full PNG via Guetzli (Google's high-quality jpg compressor) which took a couple of hours (now 15MB at 84% quality), so here it is:https://github.com/dvasdekis/images/raw/master/pillars.jpg and https://mega.nz/file/BTdWSb6b#NHK9lAtGMIr1UxabLiC174ZvJWo7KS... and https://www.mediafire.com/file/n0qjxogsp203z0w/pillars.jpg/f...The original crashed Windows when set as desktop background, but this one works.
Tweetbot. April 2011 – January 2023
I don't think they realise the damage this change has done.I have been on board with or ambivalent about most of the changes. I don't care if there's less moderation, I think Twitter probably did have too many employees, and I like the idea of a paid account with fewer (preferably no) ads. I'd even have happily paid Twitter to continue using Tweetbot.But this has destroyed the trust and the user experience of many of the power users who are most engaged with Twitter and who make it a thing other people want to engage with.I have sent 10,000s of Tweets but I can't see it being much more than a handful more.I don't think Mastodon is a good replacement for Twitter at all, but I am going to have to try it. The fact that Tapbots are enthusiastically supporting it with Ivory is a good sign (though @tapbots, if you're listening, I'd happily donate 10x more to Ivory as an open source project than you'd make from selling it to me as a closed source app ;-).
Tesla recalls 360k vehicles, says full self-driving beta may cause crashes
It seems like there is a huge disconnect between people who know about FSD from using it and people who know about FSD from things they read on the internet.I have FSD, I use it every single day. I love it. If every car on the road had this the road would be a substantially safer place.
TypeScripting the technical interview
Well written and super funny. Reminded me a bit of Scott’s writing, particularly the descriptions of the horrified interviewer.I’ve never worked in a Typescript shop, is there any truth to the satire here? The sea of confusing types to solve any problem?
I worked at Google for -10 days
There’s no great solution to this apart from the economy and company doing well so that this doesnt happen. I’ll lay out the reasons below:1. Let’s say we pass a law that prevents offers from being revoked. This will make hiring much harder and increase 5 rounds to like 10 and involve many more committees and even then most candidates other than sureshots getting rejected.2. Ban revoking offers only for overseas employees (who are hurt most by this). This will ensure that the hiring bar for overseas employees is set sky high and it will already be harder for them to compete since they likely won’t have prestigious firms on their resume already compared to FAANG that American Employees would have.Open to policy suggestions but I don’t see any good methods that prevents new candidates from being unfairly disadvantaged and stops months of preparation being put to waste due to offers being revoked
Show HN: San Francisco Compute – 512 H100s at <$2/hr for research and startups
I hope you succeed. TPU research cloud (TRC) tried this in 2019. It was how I got my start.In 2023 you can barely get a single TPU for more than an hour. Back then you could get literally hundreds, with an s.I believed in TRC. I thought they’d solve it by scaling, and building a whole continent of TPUs. But in the end, TPU time was cut short in favor of internal researchers — some researchers being more equal than others. And how could it be any other way? If I made a proposal today to get these H100s to train GPT to play chess, people would laugh. The world is different now.Your project has a youthful optimism that I hope you won’t lose as you go. And in fact it might be the way to win in the long run. So whenever someone comes knocking, begging for a tiny slice of your H100s for their harebrained idea, I hope you’ll humor them. It’s the only reason I was able to become anybody.
Jonathan's Card
This reminds me of something that happened when I was just a bit younger... My girlfriend and I were graduating from pharmacy school and she was applying for residency positions (yes, they have those for pharmacists). Well, she found out she got the one she really wanted and so that night we went out to a nice dinner to celebrate. We did it up like you would expect a happy couple to - nice bottle of wine, share an appetizer and dessert, etc. We were still living on loans at the time and so in my head I was keeping track of about how much the meal was going to run me at the end of the night (for better or worse - keep in mind we were in college at the time). We had easily cleared a hundred bucks (quite the meal for college students who usually eat $7 sandwiches or more likely cook for themselves!), and when it was time for the bill, our waitress told us "The couple that was sitting over there paid for it."!You wanna talk about made our day? Try made our week. We had seen the older couple earlier, but we didn't know them, and they were gone by the time we got our bill. We couldn't even thank them, and we were just so... shocked. Since then, whenever we go out for a nice meal, I look for a young couple who looks happy and in love, just waiting to return that favor.C.S. Lewis described altruism in one of his apologist books as a "good infection" - kindness that spreads uncontrollably. I can't do anything but agree.
Bitbucket now rocks Git
Bitbucket (a popular mercurial hosting site) has added git support.Has any popular git hosting site added mercurial support?This shows which DVCS is winning.
Oculus Rift co-founder killed by gang trying to escape police
This is a good reminder to always be a defensive and aware pedestrian. Just because you have the light or the right-of-way doesn't mean you are guaranteed a safe crossing of the street. Whenever I cross an intersection as a pedestrian I always look both ways (even on one way streets) and I always keep an eye on cars that are still in motion, especially those that don't appear to be slowing down. It's good to make these sorts of things just an innate habit, it could safe your life one day.
To my daughter's high school programming teacher
The entitled and largely unconscious male privilege in most of these HN comments is pretty hard to stomach against the large and steadily-accumulating picture of just how very different this industry presents itself to men and to women. Just because you don't directly experience or see it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Just because you haven't been (consciously) chauvinistic to a woman doesn't mean women don't experience deep and pervasive chauvinism.It's not a fucking "free choice" that women are making when they steer away from programming in the face of the grotesque pastiche of misogyny and bullying that underlies our vocation, in which most of the people who aren't actually bullying women are falling over themselves to deny its existence or make excuses for it.Male programmers need to stop congratulating ourselves on how "libertarian" and "meritocratic" we are and start taking responsibility for how profoundly hostile and off-putting we have allowed this field to remain for most women.
Fired? Speak No Evil
And I was soon informed that the president wished to assure me that there is nothing unusual about such clausesWhoop whoop whoop! This sets off giant alarm bells in my head.It might be totally normal. That doesn't mean you should sign it.It's also an older-than-dirt salesman tactic to say that something you just made up is "totally common."Of course, the company can attach whatever clauses it wants to a separation agreement. You aren't entitled to a severance payment. I'll tell other engineers that two weeks' salary is a piddly amount for the company for you to surrender such rights. You can just walk away. They are the ones who want you to sign that.(It's kind of ironic, but after you have been given notice you are fired, you have power. They want you to do certain things, and what are they going to do? Fire you? Already did that. Withhold pay? Illegal.)
Dark Patterns by the Boston Globe
I absolutely hate the dark pattern of fully controlling your subscription online, including changing it to a different service, but canceling requires a phone call during very specific business hours where you are very likely to forget.It's disgusting and way too many companies are utilizing these tactics rather than building a solid business model.More companies that are doing this should be called out. Ive seen naturebox, justfab and others just to name a few.
Post a boarding pass on Facebook, get your account stolen
And this is also why I almost never give my real birth date when registering on websites (except on financial websites or websites where I'm legally obligated to) and I never ever give real answers to the security question..My typical answer for a security question is something like "39arsrc uyrsrsaulsr8832r" and that's saved in a password managerSecurity questions weakens the security of an account, they are easily found information that people can just guess.
How the Elderly Lose Their Rights
This is one of the most infuriating things I've read in a while. How did our legal system end up i this quagmire?
Accessing Publicly Available Information on the Internet Is Not a Crime
>good botsYou mean, bots that obey robots.txt?https://www.linkedin.com/robots.txt very specifically prohibits scraping by any bot besides a small whitelist.robots.txt compliance is not difficult to build. I'm fine with robots.txt violations being considered hacking.
Curry spice turmeric boosts memory by nearly 30%, eases depression, study finds
>Because curcumin's anti-inflammatory properties may protect the brain from neurodegenerationMy very first question was: Please provide a possible physiological pathway for this. I'm so glad it was answered in the very first sentence. So many of these "Superfood does X" studies are just trials with 10 people over a month, with no explanation as to __how__ it could possibly happen. It significantly increases the skepticism I have whenever something like this comes upI also did not know Turmeric had anti-inflammatory properties. I guess I have reading to do.Also interesting that they used (what seems to be) a name brand supplement instead of Turmeric
Stacking concrete blocks is a surprisingly efficient way to store energy
I would think storing energy using compressed air would be more practical. Excess electricity pumps air into a compressed air tank. When electricity supply is low, the compressed air is released turning a turbine to generate electricity. It's basically the same principle as the pumped hydro mentioned in the article but using compressed air. The advantages are size, cost, and availability. You can put it anywhere and scale when necessary.
My somewhat complete salary history as a software engineer
I am a brown male working in India. The salaries are rounded to the nearest 100000 INR. USD values are rounded to the nearest 1000 USD. These are salaries per year. Need to emphasize this because when you see numbers like 3000 USD you may think this is per month. No it is indeed 3000 USD per year. When there are stocks involved, only the stocks that vest per year is included as part of the yearly salary. 2003 - 0 YOE - 200000 INR ( 3000 USD) - Software Engineer - One of the very popular Indian IT firms 2005 - 2 YOE - 300000 INR ( 4000 USD) - Senior Engineer - Same as above 2007 - 4 YOE - 1000000 INR ( 14000 USD) - Software Engineer - A small American company with their office in India 2009 - 6 YOE - 1500000 INR ( 20000 USD) - Senior Engineer - Another small American company with their office in India 2011 - 8 YOE - 2000000 INR ( 28000 USD) - Principal Engineer - Same as above 2013 - 10 YOE - 3500000 INR ( 47000 USD) - Principal Engineer - A big American company with their office in India 2015 - 12 YOE - 7000000 INR ( 95000 USD) - Principal Engineer - A big American company with their office in India 2017 - 14 YOE - 9500000 INR (128000 USD) - Principal Engineer - Same as above
To get good, go after the metagame
Getting good in almost all games is based on understanding and mastering the fundamentals to the extent that you can make consistently correct (or at least a high degree of 'correctness') decisions based on them. This is true for all esports titles, and probably all games in general.Mastering the fundamentals will make you 'good' to a level that very few people ever reach. It's not until you reach a level where everyone around you has a mastery of the fundamentals, that the meta comes into play.source: coached and managed professional esports players, in multiple games, who have competed in the world championship of their respective titles.
New 13-inch MacBook Pro
I was curious how the 13 inch was priced so I compared it to a new Dell XPS 13. Dell has a better processor (maybe, [2]) , but I couldn't find the option to upgrade the Dell to 4TB internal SSD, so I compared both with the 2 TB option. Ram is the same at 32GB.Dell came out to $2399[0] USD and Apple came out to $2999[1] USD.Dell Pros:* Row of function buttons (I've used BTT to customize my touch-bar to the point where it's a little bit of a tossup, but years of muscle memory still haunt me)* Better processor (maybe [2])* Cheaper* MicroSD readerApple Pros:* Better Trackpad* More Ports (Upgraded Dell only has 2 USB-C, while Upgraded MBP has 4)* Better hardware support* Better resale valueObjectively, seems to me that list used to be a lot longer on the Apple side. IMHO I think the Touch Bar disappointment is probably over dramatized by developers, it's not too bad a couple years in and BTT has made it so I can run whatever macros I want in any application, so overall tossup in my mind. I still miss mag-safe adapters though. I still don't understand that decision.Also, I'm happy with the new Magic Keyboard. I have the 16 inch MBP right now, and I will say that even though I prefer the travel of the '12-'15 era keyboards, this typing experience is far superior than the faulty butterfly keys.I'm hoping given how they've walked the keyboard back, and how the new Mac Pro is actually a Pro machine that they're headed back in the right direction (post Jony Ive). A $600 price difference for this machine is probably worth it in my mind, just given my experience with resale value, longevity and lack of competitors, but there's a lot of room improvement.[0] https://imgur.com/a/p6RA9HF[1] https://imgur.com/a/f6ii7h9[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23067768
Ask HN: Keybase Alternatives?
I am also curious here. I have used and advocated strongly for Keybase with a couple of local government clients to send sensitive files back and forth (not sensitive in the sense of national security, but more to preserve privacy and store encrypted at rest).But I want to get ahead of the concern that Keybase is now owned by a Chinese company, which instantly compromises it.PGP is dead on arrival, since it's an overcomplicated mess.Keybase felt like WireGuard for its use case, just dead simple and also secure.Update: I just want to clarify that I am happy for the Keybase team. This is clearly an Aquihire meant to bolster Zoom's security talent. And as a Zoom user, I'm generally happy about this development. But there will definitely be a concern about them being acquired by a Chinese company.Update #2: I thought about FooBarWidget and others' comments, and I'm going to alter my wording. Zoom isn't a Chinese company, but their development team has been entirely based in China all this time and there have been concerns about that (which are entirely legitimate for certain groups like governments, in my opinion), especially given their communications aren't e2e encrypted.
Show HN: I Rebuilt MySpace from 2007
As someone with extremely deep contempt for Silicon Valley, Big Tech monopolies, and modern social media culture, this brought a tear to my eye.It was so easy to make new friends online once upon a time.The fascist uniformity of modern social platforms has left a generation creatively stifled and alienated from each other. I miss the ugly comet cursors, the crummy MIDI tunes, the bad HTML, the encouragement to make new friends, and the ability to reach people without paying thousands in garbage ads.I miss dating online without bribing some shitty algorithm. It used to be that I could click "browse," find a cute girl's profile, say hi, and set up a date within a few days. Modern social media is cold and hostile. Stay in your friend group. Avoid strangers: They're all scary and bad. Don't trust anyone (except for us, the tech company. Give us all your data for free.)The internet used to be bohemian, weird, creative, tacky, and friendly. It was my favorite place to be. Where did that joy go? What have we become in the last 8 years?
Null
I worked on an API that regularly got requests from the mobile app for GET /users/(null). I think that's Swift, or Obj-C's way of to-string'ing a null?I have a generational suffix on my name. I often include it, and quite often as the proper Unicode character, e.g., "Ⅲ". (Assuming HN displays it after I post this, try to select it; that's one character.) That wreaks a fair bit of havoc.When I was in high-school, I took physics. I was assigned to room, say, 309, to a teacher whose name I didn't recognize. But I knew the teacher in room 309, and she even taught physics. So, I approached her, and asked, "I've been assigned 'Ms. Stewart', but it lists her as being in your room. Do you know what the correct room number is, Ms. Cook?" Right room; it was her maiden name, of course.In my company's HR system, we have to note some contacts, for things like life insurance payouts. My fiancée is one. Then we transitioned to a new system, and the data from the old system was migrated over. Now she's my "fiancée". (And in a separate system, she's a he, because there was no option for "fiancée", only "fiancé".) Similarly (and a long time ago) I had to fix a contact/directory system when it escaped a '. E.g., it would emit "Marie O\'Conner". PHP magic quotes… shudders(Character encodings and anything outside of ASCII, in particular, are an unending fountain of bugs.)Just today, Azure's support system can't handle (among many things) the outlandish characters of "". Which is great fun, since it's not like anyone would file a highly-technical support request with Azure… right?The missing hour in the DST spring-forward and the duplicate one on the fall-back are great hunting grounds for bugs, too. E.g., Google Calendar has issues with them.We have a git branch prefix at work that triggers a special CI action. Let's call it "branchprefix/". Every now and then a dev will make a branch with "BranchPrefix/" and the OS X machines all start having issues since OS X's file hierarchy isn't case sensitive. (We've also had issues w/ two files, same name different case. git supports it, but OS X can't cope.)(All the names in this post are changed from their originals, of course. But you get the idea.)
Flu has disappeared worldwide during the Covid pandemic
This should not come as a surprise, and it was largely predictable from the outset.The flu has a base reproduction number (R0) less than 2 (https://www.vdh.virginia.gov/coronavirus/2020/12/07/covid-19...). Covid has an R0 in the vicinity of 2.5 (https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...).In the meantime, public health measures like masking and distancing will work against both viruses. If people become reluctant to socialize because of covid (whether or not there be legal restrictions), they will also not spread the flu.As a broad conclusion, if public health measures reduce the effective reproduction number of Covid to about 1 (stabilizing exponential growth), they will also reduce the effective reproduction number of the flu to something substantially below 1. Since the flu would have also had a low baseline prevalence in the summer of 2020, it is no wonder that we failed to see a flu season.There's really no need for conspiracy theorizing.
Go Replaces Interface{} with 'Any'
Their code is full of things like: type fileOps []any // []T where T is (string | int64) Go does not have neither generics nor union types. So people have to do this kind of thing :( I feel sorry for them.Reminds of Java 4 (15 years ago or something) where code was full of this crap: List /* */ values; Map /* */ map; Some devs spent a whole week doing nothing other than removing those commented out generic type declarations once Java finally got generics!
Fixing stutters in Papers Please on Linux
Why is the engine even checking input devices so often? Shouldn't the input device be registered via settings and then assumed to exist when the game runs? It seems wasteful to check all input devices every few seconds.
An unwilling illustrator found herself turned into an AI model
I know this website is not a hivemind, but it's interesting every time an article like this gets posted the majority opinion seems to be that training diffusion models on copyrighted work is totally fine. In contrast when talking about training code generation models there are multiple comments mentioning this is not ok if licenses weren't respected.For anyone who holds both of these opinions, why do you think it's ok to train diffusion models on copyrighted work, but not co-pilot on GPL code?
Email: Explained from first principles
I love such thorough expositions, although it isn’t quite as thorough as I would like. Two examples that caught my attention in the parts I read:1. It doesn’t mention the old convention for writing an email address with display name as [email protected] (John Doe) instead of: John Doe 2. It states that subject prefixes like “Re:” have no technical relevance. That’s not entirely true, because email clients recognize existing prefixes when replying/forwarding, in order to not add a redundant one. There are several issues here:- Localized email software sometimes uses a different prefix than “Re”, based on the local language. This is an issue when having an email thread between email clients who don’t recognize each other’s local-language prefixes. (Arguably, it would be better for everyone to stick with “Re” regardless of language.)- Some email clients have the convention of adding a count to the “Re”, e.g. “Re[2]:”, “Re[3]:”, and so on. When you write an email client, you may want to consider recognizing those.Due to the variety in subject prefixes, some email clients allow users to configure a regex.
Goodbye integers, hello UUIDv7
I find it interesting that it’s quoted random IDs are bad for performance, because it’s actually better for distributed storage systems because you don’t hotspot on a single node. For example see: https://stackoverflow.com/a/53901549 and https://medium.com/google-cloud/cloud-spanner-choosing-the-r...