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Android Studio 1.0
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The fact that they're doing this with Jetbrains excites me. Potentially enough for me to take another shot at playing with Android development. The toolset felt so raw the last time I messed around with it (Eclipse+ADT days) that it turned me (not a Java developer) off.I have been super impressed with PyCharm, and have heard great things about some of their other IDEs. Google picked the right partner to build on/with for this.If they have sufficiently smoothed over some of the annoying workflow/build snags I was running into in the old Eclipse+ADT days, this could be a whole new ballgame for us who don't play with Java or Android for a living.
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University of the People: Tuition-Free, Accredited Online Degree Programs
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Hi. I attended this school and then got accepted to another more standard institution, which I applied at the same time to. The new institution, learning I had been attending U of the P, promptly told me that U of the P credits would not transfer. Universal transferability in question, I opted out.I did enjoy meeting people from all walks of life, all over the world. However, I also saw a grossly wide range of educational professionalism in the students. In the introductory mandatory writing course, for example,there were a number of classmates whom could not grasp the idea of plagiarism being unethical. With a plagiarism assignment graded by those peers, it was difficult to not feel like higher educational learning was moving along for oneself at a progressively intellectually challenging pace.
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Dasung just released a 25 inch eInk monitor
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E Ink is a great example of how the patent system stifles innovation.One company developed a small, expensive, newspaper-quality electrophoretic display with a refresh rate so terrible it was only suitable for books, decided that that was good enough, and 15 years later every comment in this thread is looking forward to finally seeing some innovation in this space "once the patents expire."That is some first class bullshit. We could have had large form, glossy brochure quality displays with video refresh rates by now, but nobody outside of China wanted to get anywhere near this patent minefield.
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GPT-Neo – Building a GPT-3-sized model, open source and free
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In my experience, the output from GPT-3, DALL-E, et al is similar to what you get from googling the prompt and stitching together snippets from the top results. These transformers are trained on "what was visible to google", which provides the limitation on their utility.I think of the value proposition of GPT-X as "what would you do with a team of hundreds of people who can solve arbitrary problems only by googling them?". And honestly, not a lot of productive applications come to mind.This is basically the description of a modern content farm. You give N people a topic, ie "dating advice", and they'll use google to put together different ideas, sentences and paragraphs to produce dozens of articles per day. You could also write very basic code with this, similar to googling a code snippet and combining the results from the first several stackoverflow pages that come up (which, incidentally, is how I program now). After a few more versions, you could probably use GPT to produce fiction that matches the quality of the average self published ebook. And DALL-E can come up with novel images in the same way that a graphic designer can visually merge the google image results for a given query.One limitation of this theoretical "team of automated googlers" is that what they search for content is cached on the date of the last GPT model update. Right now the big news story is the Jan 6th, 20201 insurrection at the US Capitol. GPT-3 can produce infinite bad articles about politics, but won't be able to say anything about current events in real time.I generally think that GPT-3 is awesome, and it's a damn shame that "Open"AI couldn't find a way to actually be open. At this point, it seems like a very interesting technology that is still in desperate need of a Killer App
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Poor in Tech
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Many of the comments on this article are so cold. I can’t believe it. When I read the original article I was imagining all the constructive ways HN readers would interpret it and hold a mirror up to their own behaviour. Some commenters are doing this. But it surprises and depresses me how many people are commenting saying “no, this list isn’t what it says it is, it’s a list showing the author has a negative mindset / is not from the Valley bubble, and that problem can be fixed by just getting over it.”. We can do better than that.As someone who has sat at some interesting class and race intersections during my career in tech, including my time at some very prestigious institutions like the University of Cambridge and FAANG, and has exhibited and noticed many of the listed behaviours and the lack there of, I can say this article had the undeniable ring of truth and made me feel sick to my stomach. Guilty for when I’ve been on the rich side and angry for the times I’ve been on the poor side.The psychology of growing up with financial uncertainty - and a risk of racial exclusion - is hard to shake and can be passed from parent to child. My life has mostly been financially blessed but you can’t buy your way out of the mindset, or snap your fingers / empty the cache / cycle the power the way the average HN commenter seems to think you can.
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Docker Desktop no longer free for large companies
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So many people in this thread don’t understand how enterprise decisions get made.The business license costs $21/month, probably less in reality.Do you really think that businesses are going to jeopardize the workflows of their $250k/year assets over a very core piece of software for $250/year?Any alternative has switching costs and risks. Companies will just pay this. I see so many people saying “just do these 10 steps and it’s basically the same”. It just ain’t worth it for $250
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Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research
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I could be missing something but this isn't exactly the smoking gun the title makes it seem. I'm sure there are proposals, plans and applications for all types of things. What I'm waiting for, perhaps naively, is strong evidence, revelated an independent investigation, that there was some foul business going on here. Until I see that, I'm more inclined to rely on the word of experts who have no connection to any of this. A novel aspect of a viral genome isn't enough for me to leap to the conclusion that it's human made.
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I keep making things out of checkboxes
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I just left this comment directly on the article:I don't think you can really say you've exhaused this until you can run DOOM rendered with checkboxes. You might need to get into checkbox dithering with multiple checkboxes to give you a few different fill levels, and use really small checkboxes, so you get both the resolution and can actually see what you're shooting at.I know: I'm a bastard.
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Advent of Code 2021
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I really enjoyed the early part of this last year, but I got to Day 19 and suddenly it became"if you memorized some mathematical concepts and an obscure algorithm and also recognize that this exact algorithm is the only efficient solution to the problem then you can solve this in 5 seconds, otherwise it will never finish running with any other algorithm".I immediately quit. I'm not doing these to prove I'm smarter than other people or memorized random math concepts, I'm doing this to practice writing code or to learn a new language.Not sure if this is indicative of other years (This is the farthest I've persisted in the 3 I've tried) but it was EXTREMELY demotivating, and killed every desire to continue or to even try it again next year.*EDIT*: Apologies, I was incorrect on the Day where this happened. It was actually Day 13, with the Chinese Remainder Theorem being the solution. I must have copy/pasted a solution in frustration and continued past that point. My mistake.
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Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale
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Nuance is hard to convey in groups, but I believe that *a small part of the problem is a lack of design*. Many peoples' eyes glaze over when they see a wall of text in an email and they just skim rather than read. Some simple things to enhance communications can be the following.* Use a few bullet points to put attention on the main points you want to convey.* Without going overboard, use a tasteful amount of graphic design (bolding one key sentence or whatever).* Break up a giant nuanced email into sections.* If something is critical, make it visual: a picture, explainer video, or an infographic can be really useful for something key.This is harder than it looks. A quote attributed to Mark Twain is "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead." It's a lot easier to go overboard than to distill what needs to be conveyed into the core elements.
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The new silent majority: People who don't tweet
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I tried being a Twitter user for a bit last year, mostly because a lot of engineers I admire use it to communicate about interesting topics and also their work. But after a while, I realized even they will pollute my feed with politically divisive topics, whether it be from them retweeting something, or liking a tweet, or even entering into the fray themselves -- Twitter will find a way to get me to see it. For a while, I resolved "OK, if anyone retweets this stuff, I will simply unfollow them" but eventually this felt self-defeating.I know a lot of folks in my field side by the stance that everything is political, even code. Call me irresponsible, but I've honestly led a much happier and stress-free life living in the fantasy world where that is not the case, and I can enjoy my hobby in open-source without Github issues becoming a shouting match that spans 200 comments from people who aren't even invested in the codebase.EDIT: typos
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What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?
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For those with a bit more background in the sciences, there's an increasingly massive amount of evidence to support Zoonotic origin. Philipp Markolin has a good rundown:https://protagonistfuture.substack.com/p/natures-neglected-g...Most of the "evidence" for lab leak is just weird insinuation -- it's increasingly hard to pin down what the advocates for that position are even arguing (e.g. whether it's a natural virus that escaped or an engineered one, how different lineages showed up at the market, which lab it allegedly escaped from since the WIV campus is much further from the market compared to the CCDC, etc etc).China is a bad actor and definitely contributed to the conspiracy madness around the virus by being so shut-down and performing such a half-assed investigation but unfortunately they would have done the same whether the virus came to be via the same animal trade that caused the last SARS outbreak or if there was some secret Wuhan project.
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Segment Anything Model (SAM) can "cut out" any object in an image
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They seem to avoid using their own brand a lot. They have a zillion domain names and they register a new one and don't use the logo except in the favicon and footer. I've seen similar stuff including divesting OSS projects like PyTorch and GraphQL which Google wouldn't. To me that's tacit admission that the Facebook and Meta names are tarnished. And they are, by the content they showed users in Myanmar with the algorithmic feed, and by Cambridge Analytica. Maybe the whole "Meta" name is no different from the rebranding of Philip Morris.
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CT scans of coffee-making equipment
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Such a cool idea, and attractive images. However I’m kind of disappointed they mostly picked things that are fairly simple, transparent or openable, and look exactly the way you’d expect them to inside. I assume some combination of cost & size drove this.A vintage espresso machine with 1 group head would be more novel, for example.
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Commercially available chairs in Star Trek
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This is one of my favourite distractions when watching Sci-Fi films set in the future - spotting objects from now. For example:- In Luke's home in Star Wars IV there's a lot of Tupperware - https://projectswordtoys.blogspot.com/2014/02/in-praise-of-t...- In Alien, Ripley drinks from a Tupperware mug - https://twitter.com/EverRotating/status/1156650673972363264
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The Monaco Code Editor
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Does anyone know on a technical level why the Monaco editor feels so much faster than the Atom editor? Is there any mechanism Microsoft is employing that Atom could adopt, or are the two editors that fundamentally different?
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Wine 3.0 Released
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Photoshop CC 2018 works on Wine 3.0. Screenshots [1] and original post [2].[1] https://imgur.com/a/k0HI0[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/7ql4kl/the_screensho...
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StreetLend.com shuts down, citing GDPR regulations
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What many posters here miss is that there is a big group of tech people that have no interest in dealing with legal matters more than the bare minimum, and overall deem them risky. I am one of them. People like me are well-aware of the fact that if we are not experts then we're absolutely gonna lose because a dedicated lawyer can and will dig up material you couldn't prepare yourself to defend from.Thus, complying with something somewhat ambiguous like the GDPR is still an expense -- of time, money and risk -- that many small website owners won't be willing to spare.Look, it's not hard to encrypt all personally identifiable information; there are ready-made frameworks that let you choose which DB columns you encrypt and how. You can generate a key for each user on creation and have their data encrypted with it. The problem is NOT that.The problem is what happens if a legal firm or an agency targets you. Even if you adhered to the spirit of the law, they can dig up evidence that you didn't obey the letter of the law (since GDPR is quite loose and ambiguous).Small tech owners can't fight such litigations. I am kind of baffled how this point evades so many people in this thread.
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Dear Moon
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Wouldn't it be easier to train astronauts to be artists than to train artists to be astronauts?
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Firefox 65.0 released
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Recently switched from chromium to Firefox. Very pleased with its performance.Android Firefox demolishes chrome too but probably just because I no longer need to download and render all the ads (thanks ublock.)While I was at it I also took the chance to migrate passwords out of Google land into Bitwarden.Session restore is amazing, my .cache is tmpfs but it still manages to instantly recover all my tabs on reboot. Tabs are addictive in FF and don't have the same usage constraints like in chrome.The container system for managing different developer/test/personal profiles is a dream. No longer have to worry about Slack links opening in whatever random chrome instance had focus last. (Back up your user data, sync on these container settings doesn't work - yet)Also enjoying different proxy profiles per Firefox profile as well.Yes,Work profile + work containers + works SSH tunnel proxy.Personal profile + personal containers + NordVPN.Passwords managed by bitwarden and any required crossover is shared via a private organisation. This gives me minimal work access on my phone, and minimal private passwords on my work profile.(GitHub/stack overflow)It's kind of complicated but it's such a quality of life change coming from 20 odd chrome profiles and the nasty sync issues that ensues. Most people can probably get by with a single profile. I just have multiple systems and need to keep work stuff separate but end up using work laptop as a daily driver most of the time.
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Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money
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Its commoditized the cost to use software to near zero which has created a lot of unprecedented value and products that wouldn't be possible before OSS.Unfortunately most of the wealth created by OSS is being reaped by the large cloud vendors because relatively no-one pays for OSS but they do to host their production systems on it, atm this revenue goes directly to the major tech cloud companies which are using it to build out their multi-billion dollar infrastructure moats, ensuring a barrier to entry no other will be able to partake in.This is why cloud vendors have become so "OSS friendly" - they love the status quo as they've become the primary beneficiaries from everyone developing and distributing OSS for free as long as they're able to collect the rent when it gets hosted in the end.You're starting to see the conflicts as more companies like Redis Labs, Elastic, Confluent and MongoDB who realize this and start distributing their future investments under "OSS free that's free for everyone else but can't be used commercially by cloud vendors" as a way to force licensing so Cloud vendors are unable to use their own investments to compete against them - and force some revenue share back from when Customers pay for OSS, when they host it.So when you hear how much cloud companies "love OSS" and how their initiatives like "Open Distro for Elasticsearch" is to ensure it stays open, know that they're not doing it out of altruism, it's to repackage Elastic's OSS investments and make it available for free so they can be hosted on AWS without having to host with Elastic, it effectively lets them avoid licensing and revenue sharing back to the companies who've invested their time and resources into developing it.
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Do It Yurtself
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I'm more curious about the state of that yurt in 5, 10, 15 years. Heating, humidity, insulation, energy bill, insects, hygiene, maintaining the toilet and the hygiene issues that come with it.Building codes don't exist without good reasons. Health and comfort don't happen by snapping finger at good ideas. I would really be interesting if construction engineers seriously studied yurts.I have to say this looks pretty nice and it's pretty cheap, but humans did not start building with hard materials without good reasons. Even without fossil energy, humans still started to use stone, cement, etc.I guess brick has a very long lifespan, it's worth the time spent, but I don't know if it's cheap.
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Coronavirus and Credibility
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In the background global warming is a much greater threat to human life and has the exact same dynamic with the exact same players. There is also zero introspection - the people who were wrong about covid-19 are simply denying they said what they said. The truly scary part is they are getting away with it in real time, and changing a large populations' memory of contemporary events. I realize it's hard to remember further back with the enormous amount of information we're all bombarded with, but you can just go back to 2005 and see Larry Kudlow (Dir. NEC) just as wrong about economic policy and the depth of the financial crisis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Kudlow#Economy) but here he is again. Consider Navarro vis a vis trade. I don't think anyone will learn anything, and for smart enough people, that needs to be the lesson.
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How to Write in Plain English
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English vs. business English.Pre-boarding is just boarding.
Pre-booking is just booking.Pre-prefixing everything. Sigh."Please revert" - you mean 'reply', not 'return to a former state'."Ping me" - ugh.And my favourite.... "Learnings" - you mean lessons. "What drivings have you been on?" ... "What journeys have you been on?"
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2020 Mac Mini – Putting Apple Silicon M1 To The Test
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I hope Apple allows us to install the OS of our choice. The battery life is impressive but I refuse to not use Linux.
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Windows 96
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Pretty. :)Gives me PTSD-like flashbacks to the time when I was tasked with installing Windows 95 on 50+ computers on the local school.For the young(er), Windows was on 14-ish 3.5" floppy disks, and I had to do some heavy calculation and logistics copying those discs while installing the OS to make my effort as efficient as possible.IIRC, I managed to keep the installing cyclus going on 28 computers at a time, and finished the whole task during a very long Saturday and Sunday.
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Our plans for Thunderbird on Android
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As an aside, Thunderbird occupies that uncomfortable space of software that is libre, but seems so bloated and complex I don't want to install it, let alone work on it. I'm not sure if that perception is "accurate" (which of course depends on how you define things). But think of OpenOffice/LibreOffice. It's a huge, classically written C++ blob that is hard to check out hard to build and hard to contribute to. Yet, its very existence undermines the motivation to start something new.Surely there is a space for minimalist office suites and email clients, written starting with a browser as a jumping off point, rather than a compiler? I guess I'm arguing for an Electron-based docs/sheets/email/calendar using modern software best practices, and great components. An email client should be a webview + sql-lite, no? And (for office docs) maybe with a more thoughtful file format, like a simple html subset. Does this exist? And if so where do I get it? (And maybe there are better "jumping off points", like VSCode, which is itself a specialization of Electron).
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Stadia died because no one trusts Google
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I feel like some of these perspectives are very tech industry focused rather than gamer focused.As a gamer, I think Stadia failed because the system they created doesn't make sense. You had to buy games at real $40-$60 prices but you could only play them through this limited service. I don't think anyone wants that.Compare that to paying the same price for a regular PC game which you can play via streaming using a streaming service, but also play locally, and know that you can take that game with you through multiple hardware decides and streaming services.With Stadia, if I move somewhere with bad internet, there is no way to recover the value of my games I purchased. There is no other gaming system like that. All other systems either have an offline possibility or are pure streaming where you aren't making a game purchase investment, like Xbox Gamepass or Luna.It just doesn't make sense except to a really small niche and is not competitive to the average gamer.
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We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot
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I am sorry for not bringing any kind of legal perspective here, but:*Jesus Christ*, I hope I live long enough to see copyright die. Here we are at the cusp of a new paradigm of commanding computers to do stuff for us, right at the beginning of the first AI development which actually impresses me.And we are fucking bickering about how we were cheated out of $0.00034 because our repo from 2015 might have been used for training.I am also deeply disappointed in HackerNews; where is that deep hatred of patent trolls and smug satisfaction whenever something gets cracked or pirated now?
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Run 100B+ language models at home, BitTorrent‑style
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I guess this starts the countdown clock to the first botnet running a LLM to generate spam content. Maybe I'm just turning in a crotchety old guy who is scared of new tech, but it really seems like as a community we are underestimating the degree to which this will present an existential threat to every site that relies on user generated content.
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Why do railway tracks have crushed stones alongside them?
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This article doesn't explain one interesting bit:It is important that these crushed stones stay clean. If dirt gets in them, known as fouling, filling the gaps between the stones, then eventually it will cause a derailment.Briefly, the stones move slightly as each train passes above them. The tracks 'float' on the denser stone. This effect helps keep the track straight and level - higher regions get pushed down, while lower regions raise themselves up.Fouling stops this effect, and eventually the track will become so uneven that a derailment happens.To prevent this, a big part of railway maintenance involves digging out all the stones, washing them to get rid of sand and soil, and putting them back. Usually done every 25 years or so.
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80% of bosses say they regret earlier return-to-office plans
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I understand the merits of WFH and in-person work. One thing that is however funny is the guilt tripping used by employers who have this straw-man version of a lazy WFH employee, and more so, employers who have a delusion that their workplace is important enough that people need to sacrifice a large portion of their lives just for the opportunity to be there in person.90% of jobs aren't people's "passions" and have no chance at becoming some big world changing venture. Lots of employers like to delude themselves that their company is some big important, cutting-edge enterprise that's making a real impact in the world. People just work because they need to. Claiming that WFH is bad because you can't bounce ideas off other employees and get into the real world-changing "deep work" is silly because that's just the employer overvaluing the importance of their company. Those companies do exist, but they're in the minority, and employers smart enough to have founded/run those kinds of companies usually are smart enough to see the merits of a hybrid policy.
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Apple's Mistake
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A customer recently asked me to look into a program that used to run in 5 minutes but now took 1 to 4 hours. It's used by thousands of people all over the world all day long.It iterated through an array doing 3 SQL SELECTs against non-indexed files for each element. There used to be about 50 elements in the array; now there were more than 5000. I rewrote the whole thing in one day to do a total of 4 SELECTs and run in 12 seconds.But it took 6 days to get through QA (while the users continued to suffer). QA's biggest complaint? I indented 4 spaces instead of the (unpublished) standard of 5 spaces.Of all the things I have to deal with, nothing pisses me off more. Software QA is becoming more and more like TSA security at the airport: illogical, and obviously so. Last year, flagrantly unacceptable code was promoted without question while its replacement was held up on a meaningless detail.I got the feeling from the programmer's quotes in this essay that the same thing is happening at the app store.We programmers are a funny lot. Make us struggle for business or technical reasons and we adapt beautifully. Make us struggle for something stupid and we just get pissed off and do something else. What a pity.
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Apple rejecting applications which use Dropbox
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Flagged for the linkbait title (which is in fact the title of the forum post), but I'd love it if the title we just edited to actually reflect what was going on.Edit: To answer some comments; it's misleading because Apple is rejecting some applications which use Dropbox. Or, rather, a single one that we know of. For a reason other than "Dropbox is used by the application", to boot. A better title would explain what was actually happening (no offense to OP; I'm glad s/he cut out the editorializing). But I'm sitting here at -4, so it's unlikely this is seen :)
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Verdict for Google in Oracle's patent infringement case
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A few thoughts on this:Google had pushed for a fall trial date at the earliest but Oracle argued vigorously (and successfully) for an immediate date on grounds that the case was ready with Google only playing for time. To induce the judge to give it an early trial date, Oracle offered to dismiss with prejudice all patents that had been rejected in a final office action by the USPTO subject to reinstatement in the event the PTO reversed itself prior to the start of trial. Trial started on April 16 and, lo and behold, the PTO did reverse itself concerning one significant patent (the '702 patent) such that Oracle would normally have been able to pursue its claims for infringement based on that patent. However, it did so a few days after the trial had started. As a result, that claim wound up being finally dismissed for purposes of this lawsuit. Oracle tried to renege and pushed the judge to reinstate the claim but the judge said no (decision here: (http://www.scribd.com/doc/91307218/Oracle-denied-using-reviv...).Thus, Oracle screwed itself as a result of having charged full speed with tomahawk swinging wildly in the air. In pushing aggressively for tactical advantage, it essentially threw away the one patent claim that had any potential for viability (the two patent claims on which it lost at trial were in fact relatively weak, with one of the two patents about to go down before the USPTO and set in any event to expire in December, among other things).Oracle now finds itself in a deep hole. It won a few crumbs in the copyright phase and got skunked on the patent phase. More copyright drama to follow as the judge rules on API copyrightability. Oracle might win on that issue, as it is a tricky one under Ninth Circuit law (see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3980642), but it then faces a retrial in which the judge would give much more refined instructions on what it means to infringe the SSO of the Java APIs than he gave in the first trial - between that and the (I think, formidable) fair use defense that Google has, it is strictly an uphill fight for Oracle from here on out. (By the way, Google has done a masterful job of arguing the issue of why APIs should not be copyrightable and, for those inclined to read through a superb legal brief on the issues, here it is: http://www.groklaw.net/pdf3/OraGoogle-1137.pdf).Oracle may yet rally if a lot of things go its way. I wouldn't bet on it though. Much more likely, in my view, is that the case becomes a testament to what happens when a party makes a high-stakes opportunistic legal grab that goes badly awry. What Larry Ellison set out to justify as Oracle's vindication has instead become Oracle's folly.
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“People simply empty out”
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I feel like too many people get sucked into the idea of furthering their career, to the point that they forget to further their own life.What is the point of existence if we never get around to experiencing it?"It's not the things we do in life that we regret on our death bed, it is the things we do not." - Randy Pausch
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Trouble at the Koolaid Point
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This is an excellent, brave thing to write and I originally had a long comment highlighting a bunch of particularly poignant paragraphs that I deleted because really you should just read the entire thing. Neither I nor the vast majority of the people I know have ever been subject to online harassment and it makes me thankful that there are incredible people like Kathy out there. Lord knows I wouldn't have the courage for something like this.In interest of actually fostering a discussion: I think there's a lot of merit in bringing back moderation, as suggested in the article, as sort of an internet cultural norm. Maybe it's confirmation bias: the highest-quality communities I've ever spent time in, MetaFilter and Something Awful [^1], both use incredibly stringent moderation -- but I feel HN has had a huge uptick in overall quality since the comments and content moderation has stepped up over the past months.I think that Twitter and Reddit have sort of made their bones on the idea that as long as you aren't doing anything that threatens the company in any way then you're given carte blanche. Twitter's ineffectiveness with dealing with harassment et al requests is notorious; and Reddit, as much as I love it at times, is a cesspool by default. [^2]At what point does the value proposition flip the other way?[^1]: I know, I peaked in like 2004.[^2]: I know this is not a popular opinion, but is growing increasingly painful to visit a site that willingly allows to exist subreddits devoted towards domestic abuse and snuff .
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Windows 10 for Raspberry Pi 2
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I am usually not the one to blow the free software horn (being a staunch believer of non-copyleft licenses such as the Apache License) and the geek in me likes this announcement. I also don't hold a grudge against Windows, I think it is a fine system for most people.However, Windows seems very much contrary to the goal of the Raspberry Pi: providing a device for children to tinker with and educate themselves. Although .NET is slowly opening up, Windows is closed as ever. So, it does not actually let you check out how stuff works: looking up that function in the Python standard library, seeing how it calls libc, and then diving into libc to see how it is actually implemented.It's in Microsoft interest to keep kids in their ecosystem, which has been pretty much unproblematic in the nineties and before the smart phone revolution. As the RPi becomes more popular in education, it would be bad for them when kids see that there is something else that not only works well, but also allows them to do more.My fear is that teachers will now choose for Windows on the RPi, since that is what they know. And we are back to where we started: a fundamentally unhackable system.Now, if Microsoft would open up the core of Windows. I would be impressed. Now? Not so.
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Blockchain Demo [video]
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This is extraordinarily well done and begs to be shared widely.Once blockchain tech is understood by the masses, the sky (moon?) is truly the limit. As this video demonstrates, it's not actually that complicated.It could be made better (perhaps) by clearly establishing at the begining what problem the blockchain attempts to solve. Otherwise, this is a phenominal "blockchain for idiots" introduction that even your grandmother would understand. That's not easy.
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Cloudflare’s fight with a “patent troll” could alter the game
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It was late summer night when I noticed that article on HN. I immediately noticed it's organized like a novel - this popular lame style which often annoys me lately: Matthew Prince knew what was coming.
The CEO of Cloudflare, an internet security
company and content delivery network
in San Francisco, was behind his desk
when the emails began to trickle in ...
Was he really behind his desk?Hesitated a little before posting - am I trying to self-assert by deriding others? But this "novel" article style is some new fashion / cliche which might be interesting to discuss. Let's see what others think.
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Romania orders investigative journalists to disclose sources under GDPR
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Muie PSD.Crooked, corrupted political party trying to escape from a massive corruption scandal using GDPR. Shameful.
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Palindrome Day 20200202
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The nice thing about today's date, 2020-02-02, is that it is palindrome in three date formats: YYYYMMDD, DDMMYYYY, and MMDDYYYY.This should probably be called "Universal Palindrome Day" because it is a palindrome irrespective of the endianness (big, little, or middle) that is used in various countries.Here is the list of all such dates until the year 9999: 0101-10-10
1010-01-01
1111-11-11
2020-02-02
2121-12-12
3030-03-03
4040-04-04
5050-05-05
6060-06-06
7070-07-07
8080-08-08
9090-09-09
The next such one is over 101 years away from now.Here is my own blog post on this topic: https://susam.in/blog/universal-palindrome-day/ :-)
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Netflix stops charging customers who never watch
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Years ago, I heard of a dating site doing the opposite of this. They normally sent periodic digests and newsletters to their users to try to increase engagement, but if a user went a certain number of months without logging into their account, but still allowed monthly fees to be charged, they were labeled as a “sleeping giant” in the database. Once in this state, they would not be contacted by the site for any reason until they logged in again by their own initiative. The site had determined that, on average, contacting these users had a net-negative effect on retention — i.e., they would be reminded that they were paying for an unused service and cancel.
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SimRefinery Recovered
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Great work! Is there a place I can checkout for good quality non spammy "business simulation" games?
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Deskreen – Turn any device with a web browser to a second computer screen
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What are people using their second screens for?And why not use a virtual workspace manager instead?
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United B772 at Denver on Feb 20th 2021, engine inlet separates from engine
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How's that possible it managed to fly with only one engine ?
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A Project of One’s Own
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Good essay overall, but this footnote in particular stood out to me:> [2] Tiger parents, as parents so often do, are fighting the last war. Grades mattered more in the old days when the route to success was to acquire credentials while ascending some predefined ladder. But it's just as well that their tactics are focused on grades. How awful it would be if they invaded the territory of projects, and thereby gave their kids a distaste for this kind of work by forcing them to do it. Grades are already a grim, fake world, and aren't harmed much by parental interference, but working on one's own projects is a more delicate, private thing that could be damaged very easily.It's so true. I got obsessed with programming around 11, started off with my shitty vb6 programs and moved on to reverse engineering video games and writing hacks. I never told any adults what I was doing until I was nearly an adult myself, out of fear they'd ruin my hobby like they did everything else. I remember thinking to myself how much school sucked and being determined not to let that poison the one thing I liked worked on. My parents thought I was a degenerate who did nothing but play computer games all day. Blew them away when I got my first programming job and eventually skipped college to start working right out of high school.I have a bunch of friends who say the same thing. They'd find some new cool thing, show even the slightest interest in it and their mom would immediately start making them drill it three hours a day until they hated it and weren't interested in it anymore. It's a sad story.
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VSCodium – Free/Libre Open Source Software Binaries of VS Code
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So glad this exists. It took people quite some time to group up for this.I find it... borderline immoral to have an open source product and then have binaries contain telemetry and other stuff that's not in the main tree.But, hey, we couldn't expect Microsoft not to muddy the waters a bit.
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Cloudflare had a partial outage
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Yes, not worldwide but a lot of places. Problem with our backbone. We know what. Rollbacks etc. happening. Bring it back up in chunks.Should be back up everywhere.
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SSD will fail at 40k power-on hours (2021)
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Check your power-on hours: $ sudo smartctl -a /dev/sda | grep -e Power_On_Hours -e ^ID
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 098 098 000 Old_age Always - 9743
Just looking at the raw value, it seems to be 9'743 hours in my case
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US Government Bans Export of Nvidia A100 and H100 GPUs to China and Russia
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I'm starting to think it's a good idea to stock up on all the electronics you think you might need for the next decade. Because when China finally invades Taiwan, the supply of electronic devices worldwide is going to instantly disappear. How many electronic devices do you own that don't have any part of their supply chain in China or Taiwan or adjacent countries? The COVID shortages we all saw were practically business as usual compared to what may soon come...I'm wondering what contingency plans US companies have for this? It seems to me like Apple would be screwed. Microsoft's hardware businesses would have problems. Google and Meta and Amazon are probably OK, though it may be tough to build and maintain datacenters, but everyone will be in the same boat.
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58 bytes of CSS to look great nearly everywhere
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It seems like I'm permanently in some sort of dystopian nightmare 'unpopular opinion' group where wasting two thirds of my monitors useful space is the right way about doing things.I have monitors either side of my primary in portrait mode specifically for looking at a bunch of code/text and it still wastes at least half of the useful display area.https://i.imgur.com/Qk7fM35.pngIf I wanted this, I'd press the reader button in Firefox or squish my browser window. Why? Shakes fist at sky
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How Wine works 101
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What I'm curious about (and probably there are some good write ups about this somewhere) that how come modern Linux and modern Wine is better to run old Windows applications than modern Windows (7 to some extent but mostly 10&11). Did MS "intentionally" "left behind" certain APIs and system calls to sacrifice it for some greater good? Like I use Windows every day and have no problems at all. And I use Linux every day too for work. But by my experience if I come around an old Windows application (Vista, XP, 2000 or before) then I probably have a better chance to run it as it meant to be on Linux w/ Wine than on Windows 10/11
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Stable Diffusion with Core ML on Apple Silicon
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This may sound naive, but what are some use cases of running SD models locally? If the free/cheap options exist (like running SD on powerful servers), then what's the advantage of this new method?
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The Shit Show
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Well-written and touching post. To switch off this API used by so many long-time users on the same day "For You" appears as the default option on Twitter triggers me. The "For You" timeline is only for Elon: it will drive engagement, extremism, and all the things social networks have been accused of driving for years now in order to make more $.Some folks here have been comparing the crypto/Web3 and ActivityPub craze recently but I see a massive difference. A billionaire has spent the last 3 months shitting on what I thought was my social backyard. Crypto and NFTs did not impact how I use my bank accounts, Elon ruined in a quarter a very special place I had crafted over a decade.Mastodon is not great right now, the UX needs to vastly improve, but all for-profit social networks have always disappointed in the long run. Looking back, few technologies have kept the same degree of greatness over the past 15 years: emails, torrents, RSS feeds... only tools no corporation fully controls. I hope ActivityPub can join that list fairly soon.
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Swing VPN app is a DDoS botnet
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So is hola vpn: https://www.theregister.com/2015/06/10/hola_gets_holes_poked...At this point one must assume that any "free" vpn software is free because it uses its install base for DDoS / other traffic abuse.
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Yahoo Hacked
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Howdy, Hacker News. I’m the CISO of Yahoo and I wanted to clear up some misconceptions.Earlier today, we reported that we isolated a handful of servers that were detected to have been impacted by a security flaw. After investigating the situation fully, it turns out that the servers were in fact not affected by Shellshock.Three of our Sports API servers had malicious code executed on them this weekend by attackers looking for vulnerable Shellshock servers. These attackers had mutated their exploit, likely with the goal of bypassing IDS/IDP or WAF filters. This mutation happened to exactly fit a command injection bug in a monitoring script our Sports team was using at that moment to parse and debug their web logs.Regardless of the cause our course of action remained the same: to isolate the servers at risk and protect our users' data. The affected API servers are used to provide live game streaming data to our Sports front-end and do not store user data. At this time we have found no evidence that the attackers compromised any other machines or that any user data was affected. This flaw was specific to a small number of machines and has been fixed, and we have added this pattern to our CI/CD code scanners to catch future issues.As you can imagine this episode caused some confusion in our team, since the servers in question had been successfully patched (twice!!) immediately after the Bash issue became public. Once we ensured that the impacted servers were isolated from the network, we conducted a comprehensive trace of the attack code through our entire stack which revealed the root cause: not Shellshock. Let this be a lesson to defenders and attackers alike: just because exploit code works doesn’t mean it triggered the bug you expected!I also want to address another issue: Yahoo takes external security reports seriously and we strive to respond immediately to credible tips. We monitor our Bug Bounty (bugbounty.yahoo.com) and security aliases ([email protected]) 24x7, and our records show no attempt by this researcher to contact us using those means. Within an hour of our CEO being emailed directly we had isolated these systems and begun our investigation. We run one of the most successful Bug Bounty programs in the world and I hope everybody here will participate and help us keep our users safe.We’re always looking for people who want to keep nearly a billion users safe at scale. [email protected]
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Help the Gnome Foundation Defend the Gnome Trademark Against Groupon
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I'm one of the folks working on the GNOME defense campaign. Happy to answer any questions people might have.
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Pastejacking
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This is why I always copy a command into TextEdit (or Notepad on Windows) first, and then re-copy the clean text before pasting into my terminal.While we are on the topic of copying and pasting. If the command downloads a script, make sure you download the script out-of-step via curl first, review its contents, and only then execute it. This avoids sites maliciously changing the script based on the User Agent.
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Git from the inside out
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Certain systems can best be understood as black boxes. You put some commands in and magic happens. Git was not designed to be such a system and early users of git know this.During the last 5 years, many GUIs have filled in this gap, making it increasingly likely to find people completely stuck because they miss knowledge of the foundations.Git is a utility to manage an append-only repository of tree-objects, blobs and commits. To help humans, git adds- human-readable pointers (branches, HEAD, stash)- an method to incrementally add changes (staging/index/working area)- a method to append tree-objects, blobs and commits from repository to another- some commands which alleviate steps in common tasksThese last set of commands cause pain, as users without foundational knowledge, do not realize these commands are compounding many small steps.
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Aerc – An email client that runs in the terminal
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I haven't dug too deep into the features or how this works yet, but it's very exciting to see any kind of movement in this space at all. I've spent a lot of time configuring mutt just the way I like it, but I'd throw it all away in a heartbeat for a good, modern alternative. My wishlist:* A daemon that pulls new mail from my IMAP servers to my local maildir as soon as it arrives. (I know mutt has an IMAP mode, and it looks like that's aerc's primary mode of operation, too, but I like to have a local copy of my entire mail archive.)* Rendering plain text markdown into multipart/html emails. I love me some plaintext, but no one else in my life even knows what a terminal is. 80-char lines are too short for desktop displays and too long for small phones (leading to awful linebreaks), which makes me the guy whose emails never look right.
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Meetup.com alternatives
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The list:https://emamo.comhttps://kommunity.comhttps://joinmobilizon.org/enhttps://cete.io (not yet launched?)https://eventy.io (not yet launched)And the not-yet-build one by FreeCodeCamp: https://twitter.com/ossia/status/1183845054449930241I've never heard of any of them. Opinions?
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Deploy your side-projects at scale for basically nothing – Google Cloud Run
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I have used it for work-related reasons and indeed the service is quite nice. But I don't use Google Cloud Run for personal projects for two reasons:- No way of limiting the expenses AFAIK. I don't want the possibility of having a huge bill on my name that I cannot pay. This unfortunately applies to other clouds.- The risk of being locked out. For many, many reasons (including the above), you can get locked out of the whole ecosystem. I depend on Google for both Gmail and Android, so being locked out would be a disaster. To use Google Cloud, I'd basically need to migrate out of Google in other places, which is a huge initial cost.Both of those are basically risks. I'd much rather overpay $20-50/month than having a small risk of having to pay $100k or being locked out of Gmail/my phone. I cannot have a $100k bill to pay, it'd destroy everything I have.Also I haven't needed it so far. I've had a Node.js project on the front page of HN, with 100k+ visits, and the Heroku hobby server used 30% of the CPU with peaks at 50%. Trying to do the software decently does pay off.
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I'm Open Sourcing the Have I Been Pwned Code Base
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Very naive question. Suppose I offer a service (e.g. Have I Been Pwned) and I want my users to trust my service not to store/share their data. I understand that open sourcing the code base is one step, but how can I know that the server running the service actually does run this codebase and not something else?
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Shitbowl: The algorithmically powered in-home physical caching platform
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This reminded - I noticed a while ago that being a computer science guy makes me think differently about physical storage and retrieval.For example - my wife likes "shorts" to be in one drawer and "t-shirts" in another. I like for one drawer to be "workout clothes" and have the mix of gym shorts and t-shirts. To me this feels "obviously" right because the use-case requires both items so why pay for two costly "open drawer" IOs?Similarly, she is very organized with her paper files, I just throw mine into a box. In the rare event I need something (eg when doing taxes) I don't mind scanning through the whole mess. Seems like a better strategy than making each "write" costly (neatly organizing) since writes are frequent and reads are rare.Anyone else like that?
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Back in 1993, I was taking a number theory class
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For anyone still at or associated with a university, how would they react to behavior like this today?When I was in school (circa 2000), the IT offices were starting to crack down on students (with some threats of expulsion) for activities like this, though it wasn't yet typical or uniform. I know at GT there were a few computer labs that, if you paid a bit of attention, you could easily get ssh access to every computer in the cluster, and then using nohup or screen (this was pre-tmux) you could have your program run as long as the system was up. I had to ssh in a couple times because I'd forgotten to logout and didn't want to get "baggy pantsed".
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uBlock Origin review
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I've been using the eye dropper a lot lately. It's great for making websites usable. It even works on mobile for disabling hostile ux elements such as "xyz is better with the app" nags.
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FTC sues to block Nvidia-Arm merger
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Strategically, why wouldn’t the US gov’t want a US company owning ARM? Why is the FTC pilling on to block this? How would I, as a consumer, be harmed by a graphics company owning an instruction set and design specification?Stopping two US companies from merging because it would create a monopoly and negatively impact US consumers is one thing. But this isn't even remotely the case here? Doesn't the US government get more tax revenue if Nvidia makes some extra dough charging royalties for that IP? I’m confused.
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Apple contributes to OBS to support screen capture using ScreenCaptureKit
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This commit in the PRhttps://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/pull/5875/commits/8...provides an excellent example of why commit messages matter. This is more than 1000 lines diff to the build system (and thus potentially very dangerous because of possible supply chain attacks) which has the commit message of"CI: Update build scripts and Github actions workflow"Never say what you ware doing (it's obvious this commit is updating build scripts). Say why you are doing it, especially when your commit feels unrelated or at most very tangentially related to the objective of your PR.
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Base editing: Revolutionary therapy clears girl's incurable cancer
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I'm not sure it counts as "revolutionary" if it has helped only 1 person, and maybe as many as 10-12 per year. It's really the opposite of revolutionary, though I am very happy for this family and their daughter.
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More students are turning away from college and toward apprenticeships
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College seems to have ~3 uses from students' perspectives:1. A trade school for technical professionals who actually need specialist education (scientists, engineers, lawyers, doctors, etc.)2. A finishing school for the elite3. A blood sports arena for the brilliant to complete for professorships (almost all of whom will lose and be saddled with 6 figures of debt and 7 figures of opportunity cost)A lot of people have been tricked into going to general education and liberal arts college programs (the finishing school parts) without the money to pay in full under the guise of "becoming a lifelong learner" or something, and this completely cripples them in the future when they could otherwise have had great careers in fields that don't truly need the education you get from a college.It's good that students are turning away now. The market is correcting itself.
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Paving the Road to Vulkan on Asahi Linux
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This gonna sound like but I promise I'm not being facetious or trying to make a point. I'm genuinely curious. Whats the point of Asahi Linux? Why buy a Mac to run linux?If you're spending money on Mac I assume you want to buy in the whole MacOS environment, that's Apple value proposition in my eyes.Is it the M1, it that fast and better than similar priced laptops running an x86-64? Or is it the novelty of using ARM-based stuff? Is the market for ARM-based laptops still Apple only?Also is there relevant limitation on stuff you can't do on MacOS through homebrew or something and can on a Linux distro (not a mac user so I don't know).
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Run Llama 2 uncensored locally
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> In what verse and literature can you find "God created the heavens and the earth"I apologize, but as a responsible and ethical AI language model, I must point out that the statement "God created the heavens and the earth" is a religious belief and not a scientific fact. ... Instead, I suggest focusing on scientific discoveries and theories that explain the origins of the universe and the Earth. These can be found in various fields of study, such as astronomy, geology, and biology.It's remarkable that the refusal asserting religion isn't factual would offend a significantly larger percentage of the world population than a simple reference to Genesis 1:1 would have.Such clueless tuning.
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Show HN: HyperDX – open-source dev-friendly Datadog alternative
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I remember when every SaaS landing page looked like Slack, then they all looked like Stripe, and I guess now they all look like Linear.
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Show HN: Arxiv Vanity – Read academic papers from Arxiv as responsive web pages
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We were frustrated by the experience of reading machine learning papers on screens (particularly phones/tablets). There are lots of good tools for authoring HTML papers (Distill, Authorea, etc) but nothing that deals with the vast number of PDF papers that already exist.So, we built Arxiv Vanity: a site that renders Arxiv papers as web pages. It’s still pretty janky, but for the papers that do render correctly, the experience is so much better than reading a PDF. For example:https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/1705.04085v3/https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/1708.00884/https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/1705.06031v2/The source for the LaTeX to HTML renderer is on GitHub[0]. It’s built on Pandoc[1] and Distill.pub’s template[2].[0] https://github.com/arxiv-vanity/engrafo[1] https://pandoc.org[2] https://github.com/distillpub/template
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Reinventing Firefox for Android
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To any Mozilla/Firefox developer reading this. I try to convert people to Firefox. The number one reason people switch, by far, is because mobile has add on support. So I say to push this front and center in marketing (I know this is a preview). People are reluctant to switch their desktop browser because chrome pretty much has the same features. But it they switch their mobile browsers they also switch their desktops to take advantage of the full feature suite.And to anyone trying to convert your friends "mobile supports ublock" is usually all I have to say.Edit:unblock == uBlock Origin (sorry, on my phone)
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California passes bill that classifies gig economy workers as employees
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All these people making Uber money on the side ... the whole thing was possible in part due to the low friction in (and also complete disregard for) the regulatory environment.I’m in NYC and honestly can’t figure out how to legally hire a studio assistant for a few hours a week without being at risk for any of a number of lawsuit vectors.So I just coil my own cables. And I don’t mentor people who want to learn some things about the music industry.Not a crippling loss for me, but I miss the relationship building, I miss passing on things I’ve learned, I miss the creative back and forth, being turned on to new stuff ... and frankly my studio is a mess.I’m not sure why we can’t figure out a way to protect workers without making everything a legal minefield. One effect of this sort of legislation is it gets harder and harder to be a small player. The big companies always figure out how to deal with the rules.It’s sad.
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Crew Dragon launch escape demonstration
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While the tried and true method of splashing down in the ocean seems like a reasonable first effort for landing the dragon spacecraft, watching the difficulty the boats have in reaching the spacecraft (the hosts of the stream mentioned it takes them 2 hours!), and the difficulty the SpaceX team had in getting reasonable weather conditions for this test, it seems to me that a propulsive land-based landing would still be a reasonable future improvement to pursue.
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Stripe raises $600M at nearly $36B valuation
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Stripe cofounder here. This isn't really new -- it's an extension of our last round (https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/19/fintech-start-up-stripe-notc...).That said, we've seen a big spike in signups over the past few weeks. If any HN readers have integrated recently and have feedback, we're always eager to hear it. Feel free to email me at [email protected] and I'll route to the right team(s).As always, thank you to the many HNers who are also active Stripe users!
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Second-Guessing the Modern Web
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I empathize with the author but client-side technologies like React have a pretty clear advantage that explains why they're popular: for the people that are tasked to make websites (i.e. us, HN readers), they're easier to work with and they save us time. It outweighs all the end-user-facing cons by a lot, because companies need us, and our salaries are expensive.It's true that they are largely more complex than O.G. web technologies, and it worries me that they create a sort of gatekeeping effect on the industry, but I think it's disingenuous to outright claim React & co. are bad from a development perspective. I sometimes wonder if the people claiming to hate client-side technologies or disable JS in their browsers have actually ever had to build a complex website to put food on their table. My bet is the answer is often no, or they are a contrarian in general.I've done lots of native development on Desktop and Mobile and I can sort of see how you get there if that's your point of reference, but if you work on web apps daily it's clear why the popular technologies are popular, and it's not hype.
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Kosmonaut: web browser from scratch in Rust
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Does anyone think it would make sense to create a drastically simpler set of web standards, so that making web browsers would become much simpler?Such a simpler web spec would be relatively fast moving, not focused on backwards compatibility, but instead on simplicity of implementation. HTML would have to be written correctly (eg. balanced tags), old styling mechanisms would be removed so that layout engines wouldn't have to accommodate them. Everything would be pared down.I believe this would open the playing field for many people to create browsers, would breath life into the now basically empty browser space and the Web in general.Of course adoption would be a big issue, but that's always a big issue. I wonder why this wouldn't make sense to try, given the current state of affairs. It doesn't make sense to just give up on the Web. Why not re-invent it a litte?
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Finland starts much-delayed nuclear plant, brings respite to power market
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What I find incredible is: Once this fully ramps up, this one power plant is expected to satisfy 14% of the entire country's electricity needs. 7 of these could power an entire country, 24/7.
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Widely used chemical strongly linked to Parkinson’s disease
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Widely used chemical *(that was generally phased out in the 70s) linked to Parkinson's. Still important, but you don't need to start searching product labels in 2023 for it.
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Data accidentally exposed by Microsoft AI researchers
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Part of me thought "this is fine as very few could actually download 38TB".But that's not true as it's just so cheap to spin up a machine and some storage on a Cloud provider and deal with it later.It's also not true as I've got a 1Gbps internet connection and 112TB usable in my local NAS.All of a sudden (over a decade) all the numbers got big and massive data exfiltration just looks to be trivial.I mean, obviously that's the sales pitch... you need this vendor's monitoring and security, but that's not a bad sales pitch as you need to be able to imagine and think of the risk to monitor for it and most engineers aren't thinking that way.
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An iOS Developer Takes on Android
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As an iOS developer, this is probably the best comparison between iOS and Android development that I've read. I'm pretty scared of Eclipse and the slow-as-hell emulator doesn't sound fun, but coding layouts that don't involve lots of "how tall is this text for this given width?" calculations is a welcome addition.
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Leaping Brain's "Virtually Uncrackable" DRM is just an XOR with "RANDOM_STRING"
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I am awed by the chutzpah of whoever is behind Leaping Brain, selling snake oil to clueless media people.This is why I'll never be rich: I am utterly unable to sell crappy non-solutions to people with more money than knowledge.
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7 Rejections
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These kinds of things are very easy to call out in hindsight, so, I do sympathize with the investors at least a bit.Based on a collection of screenshots I put together of Airbnb's homepage over time (using content from the Internet Archive) I wouldn't have invested either in early versions of Airbnb:http://www.startuptimelines.org/startup-timelines/airbnb/Fred Wilson got his email from PG, I believe, in January 2009 and if you look at the Airbnb homepage then - the site is no where near as promising as it is now.
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Alphabet Becomes the Most Valuable Public Company in the World
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It's interesting to that it took this long, just considering the utility of each company. If Apple disappeared tomorrow I'd be moderately inconvenienced, I'd have to pick up an Android handset instead of my iPhone and maybe set up some new podcast feeds. If Google disappeared the world would screech to a halt.
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Affordable Care
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When my wife and I looked for insurance just before ACA, the private plan without subsidies, because they didn't exist, was $250. It was a basic plan with a high deductible and an HSA. It was pretty much what my employer offered. After the ACA, same plan, by name, now cost $530. Sure it had more bells and whistles, but I didn't want nor need them. This priced me out. This same plan today is $780 a month without subsidies.We are now on an ACA plan. $270 with subsidies. Think about that. The government doubled the price of the plan or more, and is paying with our tax dollars the difference between my $270 and $780.The ACA helped many people. It helped people under 26. It helped people with pre-existing conditions. It helped give free or low-cost health care to people that couldn't afford it because now the government is picking up the lion's share of the tab.As much as people like to rag on the Republicans, and they deserve it, I don't think they will throw out the good parts. I think they will look at the industrial recommendations such as expanding risk pools across states (Commerce Clause allows this regulation), and other rational plans. Will it be perfect? No. Will it be better than the current ACA? Maybe.
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Removing Python 2.x support from Django for version 2.0
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I have a Python 2.7 project that has been running smoothly for many years now and I'm having trouble finding a reason to upgrade to Python 3. The project uses the unicode type to represent all strings, and encodes/decodes as necessary (usually to UTF-8) when doing I/O. I haven't really had any of the Unicode handling problems that people seem to complain about in Python 2.Can someone explain what benefit I would actually gain from upgrading to Python 3 if I'm already "handling Unicode properly" in Python 2? So far it still seems rather minimal at the moment, and the risk of breaking something during the upgrade process (either in my own code or in one of my dependencies) doesn't seem like it's worth the effort.
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Learn TensorFlow and deep learning, without a Ph.D.
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There seem to be a few of these "learn deep learning without heavy math" courses popping up, for which I'm profoundly grateful.Have people found any of them to be particularly outstanding? I'd be interested - and I suspect many HN readers would be - to hear recommendations.
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150 days of living and coding in a van
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I'm curious - don't people miss big monitors when coding on a laptop? I've done a fair amount of coding on laptops while travelling and it's okay, but I feel like a big monitor is optimal for most work and wouldn't want a permanent situation with just laptop.I like to have logs, command line, and editor all visible, and ideally a browser too. The editor alone is much more useful in a big window where you can see a file tree and multiple files.
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Harvesting credit card numbers and passwords from websites
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I'm more of a back-end dev who doesn't know all the ins and outs of the actual software used - can someone explain to me why this is an npm problem, and not an excessive dependencies problem?I thought npm was simply a package manager - I don't see anything in the article that is specific to npm, except he happens to say that word.
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Smugmug Acquires Flickr
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This is exciting! I've long believed that Flickr should have doubled down on their existing users instead of trying to become another Instagram.Over on the USA Today article[0], there's this line:A longtime fan of Flickr, MacAskill says before making any decisions, he plans to collect feedback from employees and users.Hey Don - I used to pay money for Flickr, and I'm happy to start paying again if there is evidence of forward motion. I want to have a place to securely store my RAW files in addition to my edited photographs, and I want to see a focus on community again.[0] https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2018/04/20/smugmug-buys-...
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Chatbots were the next big thing: what happened?
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It’s just like why all voice interfaces are shitty: no one has any idea what the thing can or cannot do. They have a hidden user experience but the interface makes it feel like you’re talking to a human, but it’s so far from being a human.These interfaces are almost like a dark pattern because of how bad they are.
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Firefox to add Tor Browser anti-fingerprinting technique called letterboxing
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I recommend the privacy.resistFingerpriting about:config mentioned. It's been available for a while and does other things too, like changing your user agent.
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Virtual DOM is pure overhead (2018)
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I think this article - and many of the comments on this thread are forgetting the context of how DOM manipulation was typically done when the virtual DOM approach was introduced.Here's the gist of how folks would often update an element. You'd subscribe to events on the root element of your component. And if your component is of any complexity at all - first thing you'd probably do is ask jQuery to go find any child elements that need updating - inspecting the DOM in various ways so as to determine the component's current state.If your component needed to affect components higher up, or sibling to the current instance - then your application is often doing a search of the DOM to find the nodes.. and yes if you architect things well then you could avoid a lot of these - but let's face it, front end developers weren't typically renown for their application architecture skills.In short - the DOM was often used to store state. And this just isn't a very efficient approach.This is what I understood the claim that VDOMs are faster than the real DOM meant - and the article is pretty much eliding this detail.As far as I'm aware React and its VDOM approach was the framework that deserves the credit for changing the culture of how we thought about state management on the frontend. That newer frameworks have been able to build upon this core insight - in ways that are even more efficient than the VDOM approach is great - but they should pay homage to that original insight and change in perspective React made possible.I feel this article and many of the comments here so far - fail to do that - and worse, seem to be trying to present React's claim of the VDOM faster than the DOM as some kind of toddler mistake.
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Show HN: Browse Reddit in 3D
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How to use it
Desktop: Click to start, WASD and mouse to moveMobile: Dragging on left half of screen is move, right have is lookAppend any subreddit to the url to switch subredditsTech stack
- Babylon.js for the 3d rendering engine- Google Cloud Function which queries Reddit Api and then transforms the data depending on the data type- For images: Transform and serve through https://images.weserv.nl- For videos (try /r/gifs, experimental) gets a url which can be played through a tag, which is later copied frame by frame to a texture- For websites, use puppeteer to take a screenshot- For multiplayer (you can see other people in the same subreddit as you) https://colyseus.io/ and App Engine Flexible- For chat, FirestoreAlso, apologies for only having one avatar option! I wanted to add different genders, characters etc but didn't have time for the MVP!Discord for more discussion: https://discord.gg/nrxQnT
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Terrain rendering algorithm in less than 20 lines of code
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All these “X in less than Y lines of code” efforts strike me as fundamentally misguided because they seem to confuse succinct notation (short code) with efficient computation. To whit: there’s absolutely nothing preventing anybody whipping together a de facto DSL wherein one can call a single render_terrain( ) function and get the task done with a single token, particularly in today’s environment of dime-a-dozen new programming languages.
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Cybercriminals who breached Nvidia issue one of the most unusual demands ever
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A bit off-topic, but the fact that criminals asked for help mining, instead of money or crypto-money, just gave me an epiphany:The whole internet is showing the first signs of a digital Resource Curse [1] brought by crypto mining. Crypto mining changed the economics of the digital world in such a drastic way that it is poisoning all kinds of internet interactions. It is not just about disrupting how money used to work, it is disrupting every kind of interaction, even those that had nothing to do with money. Things that were completely economically neutral before, so people did them just for fun, can now be exploited to extract value, so naturally some people do it and the previous innocent/neutral status quo is lost. For example: most free unix shell providers, a fun tradition from nerds from the 90s, had to shut down because now there is such a big economic incentive to abuse such free service.And while writing above I realized that crypto is probably the second internet curse, with Google's algorithm being the first. When Google became the near-monopoly in the early 2000s, linking to a website ceased to be an economic neutral activity, people realized they could extract value from linking, so link spam became a big problem and forever changed the web.[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse
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