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GraphQL kinda sucks
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The biggest problem with graphql is that you have to do a lot of non-obvious work to harden your system against DOS attacks or people that want to fly by and download your whole database. It's easy to construct a query which puts unreasonable load on your system.The more fine-grained nature of boring REST calls makes it more easy to control client impact on the system.If you want to see the kind of work you actually need to put in to make a graphql API, look at Shopify. They have rate limits based on quantity of data returned. Cursors and pagination. The schema is a huge ugly mess with extra layers that never show up in the pretty examples of GraphQL on the internet.Note that even if you use graphql for a private api to your web client, folks will reverse engineer it and use it for their own purposes. There are no private apis on the web.I'm not a fan of graphql for anything that the public could see. It's somewhat akin to exposing a SQL interface; it opens up too many avenues of trouble. Keep public communication channels as dumb as possible.
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Hardware microphone disconnect (2021)
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They have this feature but closing the lid on a MacBook or even putting it to sleep allows Bluetooth devices to stay connected. Heck, a MacBook even while in sleep mode will connect to Bluetooth devices. As far as I can see, this requires a third-party app to fix. Can an application still use the microphone on a Bluetooth device that’s connected?
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Tuition costs have risen 710% since 1983
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Makes sense when you have student loans backed by the federal government. If an 18 year old with no money and no credit history gets accepted into a qualifying university, she will be able to receive a loan since the bank knows that the government will protect their investment if she fails to pay them back. So now young people have this easy access to credit, and universities can greatly increase tuition and fees with the confidence that their admitted students will be able to pay.
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Cap'n Proto 1.0
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While I never used Cap'n Proto, I want to thank kentonv for the extremely informative FAQ answer [1] on why required fields are problematic in a protocolI link it to people all the time, especially when they ask why protobuf 3 doesn't have required fields.[1] https://capnproto.org/faq.html#how-do-i-make-a-field-require...
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Live Coding in VR with Oculus Rift, Firefox WebVR, JavaScript, Three.js [video]
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While there's a lot of talk here about the future of IDEs, difficulties with current hardware and other challenges, I'd like to take a moment to talk about what's actually in the video.This fills me with almost childish glee. This is a virtual reality, where you can pop up a "god window" and create/mess with a world around you. Even just what's in the video, making some cubes move and change colour is wonderful. It's fun!Remember the early bits of amazement at programming? Where you could make the computer say your name or draw a square? How much cooler would that be in VR?
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Dear Google Mail Team
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I could see 20% false positives on spam for Linus equating to 0.1% of false positives across the board since I suspect the people emailing Linus are 200 times more likely to be running their own mail server than the general public.
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Don't add your 2 cents
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I can't agree with this article at all. From my experience on contributing to FOSS projects, I feel much better when somebody senior makes adjustments to my code rather than leaving it as-is.Not only does it tell me that they actually read my code and spot errors (the added bug safety net makes it much less stressful for me to write new code), but it also makes me feel like I'm learning something new that I wouldn't otherwise have. Finally, it inadvertently means that the rest of my code passed their “high” standards for quality, which is gratifying - especially for large commits in which I only need to change little.I guess the key difference between my experience and this article, though, is that the article seems to be mostly focused in a non-technical boss commenting on benign/arbitrary opinions (like shades of color), rather than a technically skilled superior commenting on his area of expertise. That might explain why I have such a 180° reversal from this article's stance.
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Lyft and Waymo Reach Deal to Collaborate on Self-Driving Cars
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When I use lyft now, I'm coming across drivers that only drive for lyft. The tide has definitely shifted against Uber. I'm not really sure there's a way back at this point. The one advantage Uber had was network effect, but in my experience that has diminished. Lyfts come just as fast as Ubers now because they have enough drivers on the road to support the response time. I'll never go back to Uber.
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The struggles of an open source maintainer
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He missed a big one: you have no way to stop Linux distributions from hacking up your software, and you'll suffer the consequences of whatever they do.I hit this with procps. (a package with ps, top, vmstat, free, kill...) It was horrifically demotivating, helping to end my involvement as the maintainer from roughly 1997 to 2007. (the other big issue was real life intruding, with me joining a start-up and having 5 kids)I had plans for command line option letters, carefully paying attention to compatibility with other UNIX-like systems, and then Red Hat would come along and patch their package to block my plans. They were changing the interface without even asking for a letter allocation. I was then sort of stuck. I could ignore them, but then my users would have all sorts of compatibility problems and Red Hat would likely keep patching in their own allocation. I could accept the allocation, letting Red Hat have control over my interface.Red Hat sometimes added major bugs. I'd get lots of complaints in my email. These would be a mystery until I figured out that the user had a buggy Red Hat change.Patches would often be hoarded by Linux distributions. I used to regularly download packages and open them up to look for new crazy patches. Sometimes I took the patches, sometimes I ignored the patches, and sometimes a wrote my own versions. What I could never do was reject patches. The upstream software maintainer has no ability to do that.The backlog of unresolved troubles of this sort kept growing, making me really miserable. Eventually I just gave up on trying to put out a new release. That was painful, since I'd written ps itself and being the maintainer had become part of my identity. Letting go was not easy.Maybe it had to happen at some point, since I now have more than twice as many kids, but I will be forever bitter about how Red Hat didn't give a damn about the maintainer relationship.
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“Let’s use Kubernetes.” Now you have eight problems
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The odd thing about having 20 years of experience (while simultaneously being wide-eyed about new tech), is that I now have enough confidence to read interesting posts (like any post on k8s) and not think "I HAVE to be doing this" – and rather think "good to know when I do need it."Even for the highest scale app I've worked on (which was something like 20 requests per second, not silicon valley insane but more than average), we got by perfectly fine with 3 web servers behind a load balancer, hooked up to a hot-failover RDS instance. And we had 100% uptime in 3 years.I feel things like Packer (allowing for deterministic construction of your server) and Terraform are a lot more necessary at any scale for generally good hygiene and disaster recovery.
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Western Digital admits 2TB-6TB WD Red NAS drives use shingled magnetic recording
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So is the independent product review industry so broken that nobody spotted this in testing?
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Pose Animator: SVG animation tool using real-time TensorFlow.js models
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It would be cool privacy-wise to have some sort of virtual webcam that could share such an animation rather than what the webcam actually sees.
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Elevator.js – A “back to top” button that behaves like a real elevator
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The "back to top" functionality is so useful in web pages. I wish they would make a dedicated button on keyboards that just takes you to the top of the page. Better yet, it can work in other apps too! It could, for example, take you to the beginning of a line when you're writing text.Edit: Wow, I thought I was going the extra mile to make the joke obvious by saying the key should also take you to the beginning of a text line, but I guess it wasn't obvious enough for the first 3 commentators.
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In spite of an increase in Internet speed, webpage speeds have not improved
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I think this is a general problem with technology as a whole.Remember when channel changes on TVs were instantaneous? Somehow along the way the cable/TV companies introduced latency in the channel changes and people just accepted it as the new normal.Phones and computers were at one point very fast to respond; but now we tolerate odd latencies at some points. Apps for your phone have gotten much much bigger and more bloated. Ever noticed how long it takes to kill an app and restart it? Ever notice how much more often you have to do that, even on a 5-month old flagship phone? It's not just web pages, it's everything. The rampant consumption of resources (memory, CPU, bandwidth, whatever) has outpaced the provisioning of new resources. I think it might just be the nature of progress, but I hate it.
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Remote work is reshaping San Francisco, as tech workers flee and rents fall
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I am living in SF now and this confirms a very clear pattern that I have seen emerging, particularly of tech workers. I would say that >50% of the people I know who were living in the city have left, or are in the process of leaving. Some examples (there are countless):1) All three of the roommates that I had are choosing to leave either permanently or temporarily.2) A friend who works for google who is going on a 6 month road trip in a camper van3) A friend who is moving to Santa Cruz just to be closer to surf while we are remote4) A friend who moved home to Australia because of how the US is handling the virus.5) A friend who is going month to month in different cities, staying in Airbnbs, and still paying less for housing then his one bedroom in the bay area6) A friend who moved to Austin to live with her sisterWhat I am seeing here is very clear also. The SIP order has removed many of the greatest parts of SF, the food, the bars, the culture, the density to be able to go anywhere and see your friends easily, and whats left are many of the problems that the city has, trash, homelessness, and exorbitant housing prices.
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Please read the paper before you comment
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Some years ago, Ars Technica ran a story on guns.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2011/04/guns-in-the-home-lot...About halfway through a one-page article was this quote."If you have read this far, please mention Bananas in your comment below. We're pretty sure 90% of the respondants to this story won't even read it first."Sure enough, there were about 3 pages of comments before someone mentioned bananas.Read the paper? You're lucky if they read the article
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Show HN: What would mechanical programming look like?
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That's pretty cool! It seems like a weird mixture of physical contraptions (lego/meccano etc) or minecraft redstone circuits, and something you'd see in Media Molecules' Dreams (especially the graph-motion).I just watched the Tetris video and it reminded me of this mechanical pong game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBoe3yM9IKsWhat inspired you to create this?
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AMP pages no longer get preferential treatment in Google search
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The complaints of web users still have power for now.Slow, tracker-laden web pages are still terrible, AMP was just the wrong solution.
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Seven years on, what do we know about the disappearance of flight MH370? (2021)
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> ... reaches up and flips the pressurization switch, cutting off bleed air to the cabin. The airplane rapidly begins to depressurize ...I cannot believe that a "kill everyone" switch actually exists, and if it really does this seems like a bug. Especially because not hitting the switch would also kill everyone.
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No New Accounts Today
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I am surprised you would think of it as 'stealing' users. More likely you are trying to avoid too many of a certain type of user that is only on HN because reddit is down.
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Three Years as a One-Man Startup
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Great job, I admire you for sticking with for so long despite the (slower than expected?) growth. You must be really passionate about what you're building, which is what counts most. I'm an avid language learner myself.Here are a few things I'm thinking. You probably have thought about these yourself, but anyway:- Have you ever thought about increasing the price? I find $5/month to be at the very low-end for something that a language learner may be using regularly. If I find the product useful I'd be happy to pay $25/month or more for it. Increasing the price also has the side effect the you'll get "serious" language learners to sign up, which is probably what you want.- Have you thought about recommending appropriate texts your users based on their difficulty? I don't know anything about Chrome plugins, but I assume that you can collect data about which pages and texts users are browsing, how often they're clicking on stuff, and so on. That sounds like very valuable data that you could use to add more value and data network effects to your product.- Have you thought about selling to organizations (schools, classes, meetup groups) instead of individuals?
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New York City bans employers from asking potential workers about past salary
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I never answer questions about my past or expected salary, not to employers and not to recruiters.Most employers don't ask, and the few that have (perhaps by having a part of an employment form ask for previous salary) have never made my leaving that information out an issue.Most recruiters, if they even ask, respect my decision not to talk about it, but I've been pressed hard on this by a handful of recruiters, and have had this be a deal breaker for a couple of them. One recruiting firm admitted that they were paid by the employers to get this information. I wasn't getting paid to give this information out, however, and it's worth more to me to keep it private as I'm placed at a disadvantage in negotiations if I name a number first.It's still a seller's market for IT talent, and there are plenty of other fish in the sea, so if some recruiters can't accept that I won't name a number, it's their loss.It's great that NYC is taking the lead on this, and I really hope the rest of the US follows suit.
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EFail – Vulnerabilities in end-to-end encryption technologies OpenPGP and S/MIME
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While HTTPS is taking over web traffic, encrypted email could be considered a failure, at this point. I wonder what percentage of emails are encrypted using GPG. Based on my experience it's probably less than 0.001%.
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Apple is rebuilding Maps from the ground up
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Is the consensus that Apple Maps _still_ sucks? Sure, the launch was horrible, but it's seen years of progress and nowadays I find it perfectly usable. I use it over Google Maps without hesitation.Now I'm scared they're gonna break it again by rebuilding it. If it ain't broke (any more), don't fix it.
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Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People
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Most of the comments here are either elaborating on the OP, or justify lurking. I am a mostly-lurker myself, but I felt the need to comment here, since I was hoping to see the discussion go into a different direction.The OP uses the word "insane", not outlier. It's clickbaity, and used in jest, but I think it better captures a subtlety of this phenomenon: The prolific commenters are molding every discussion in their image. They might have an interesting angle on the story, or they might just be saying trivial things with beautiful prose. In any case, there is a lack of diversity in general -- discussions are driven by the worldview of a few.That would be an argument for lurkers to make an effort, even if, like this comment, it's just a barely-formed idea.Edit: "molding the discussion" -> "molding every discussion"
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Don't touch my clipboard
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The wrongest thing about this, from my perspective, is that my browser fires off a js 'copy' event when I press control-c. There are times when I've found it helpful that a browser can copy text to my clipboard when I click a button, but I can't think of a single time when I want a site to react to my attempt to copy text off if it.Is there any way to configure my user agent (Firefox) not to do this? A hack is ok.
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We don't need data scientists, we need data engineers
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My experience is in quant hedge funds, where sometimes you get some guys who develop the strategy and some guys who put it into production.Yes, I do admit there can be some specialization in terms of time spent on science vs engineering.But you really need people who understand both. Particularly if you have a strategist who thinks his job is just to dream up profitable models, he ends up carving that role out in a way that's detrimental to the rest of the team. You get people who just don't appreciate that there's other work to do than finding models, and that models depend on that other work to function.You also get a huge prestige gap, because inevitably management will think that there's a magician and a blacksmith. One guy needs to be paid a lot, and the other guy needs to be paid enough.These effects feed each other. Magician will say "where's my data" and expect blacksmith to make it, promptly. He won't do it himself, because spending time on mundane stuff makes the magic disappear. And not doing it yourself, or taking the time to understand it, will eventually lead to problems with the magic.
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Germany wants smartphone makers to offer 7 years of software updates
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Software updates should be indefinite, like Linux distros, which can still run on 15 year old hardware just fine.The future ought to be something like PinePhone (but with better hardware) that can be customized to run a variety of OS with consumables such as batteries easily user replaceable.
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Google digital advertising antitrust litigation [pdf]
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249. The speed benefits Google marketed were also at least partly a result of Google’s throttling. Google throttles the load time of non-AMP ads by giving them artificial one-second delays in order to give Google AMP a “nice comparative boost.” Throttling non-AMP ads slows down header bidding, which Google then uses to denigrate header bidding for being too slow. “Header Bidding can often increase latency of web pages and create security flaws when executed incorrectly,” Google falsely claimed. Internally, Google employees grappled with “how to [publicly] justify [Google] making something slower.”I’d be seriously ashamed at this point if I was a Google employee assigned to AMP.
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New MacBook Pro has first ‘DIY-friendly’ battery replacement design since 2012
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A lot of comments seem focused on the incentives to apple and what's motivating the change. All fair questions. To me, though, it feels like just a radically different approach this year.2016 macbook felt like leadership got in a room and said "okay, let's make a list of all the sexy things we can think of that would make the macbook unique". This netted things like thin-beyond-practicality, touchbar, removing all the ports, etc.2021 macbook feels like leadership got in a room and said "okay, let's make a list of all the top things everybody is complaining about most." And they just fixed everything (well, most things) on that list one-by-one.
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Boards are dangerous to founder/CEOs
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I always thought stuff like this happened to OTHER founders, but would never happen to me. But my board fired me six months after closing our series A.The advice in this article is 100% spot on. I didn't know any of this. I was totally focused on building my company. But if you raise money you can't do that anymore. 50% of your time will always be occupied with working on your next round of funding or managing your board of directors.I noticed super early that VCs were not "helpful" at all like they had claimed during the fundraising process.So I got fired, and I thought, "well, at least I still have my founders stock!"Then a year after I got fired the series A investor led the next round of funding and decided to value the company at $0, so I got diluted by 99.99%. Sounds illegal, right? Well, it probably was, but what am I going to do about it? They have billions of dollars and I had no money.I just let it go and started something new - bootstrapping of course. On the bright side, the new CEO ran the company into the ground. Meanwhile my new company is doing well and I love my job.Anyway, do what this guy says to manage your board and just plan on being fired at some point if you raise VC money.
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Fleet, a Lightweight IDE from JetBrains
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There’s a real opportunity here for JB.If they’re prepared to give this away for free, and make money off of upselling folk on hosted remote dev envs (or licensing the server side to cloud providers) then this could actually compete with vscode.They basically don’t have any other product that is competitive with vscode.…but, I’m skeptical they’re willing to make the jump to freemium based on their other SAS product offerings which have… hm… not been hugely lucrative.
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Chrome users beware: Manifest v3 is deceitful and threatening
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While a good message that does have actual merit if you know what's happening already, I don't see how this is a legitimate consideration of MV3.The entire argument regarding security doesn't mention any of the reasons Chrome developers cite its security improvement, instead it brings up that Firefox "does good enough already" and that malicious extensions can still get past the review process. the review process is by itself improved with V3 as extensions that pull in code remotely can no longer get past the review process[0], especially with how many current extensions implement RCE C&C intentionally. They also say extensions are "usually interested in simply observing the conversation between your browser and whatever websites you visit" - that's 'usually', though; malicious extensions intercepting and modifying requests for their own benefit isn't unheard of.Instead of only stating 'this is bad', it would be beneficial to include both (A) what they say (B) their basis for the decision, if any (C) why that line of reason is incorrect/deceiving.0: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/mv3/intro/mv3-o...
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I have written a JVM in Rust
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When I see such cool projects, I feel very overwhelmed. How do you get started with Rust and master basics to even attempt doing such a thing? Can OP explain?
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Salesforce Buys Heroku (YC W08) For $212 Million In Cash
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This is great news for Heroku and YC (congratulations folks!). That said, does anyone have any insights on why exactly SalesForce would buy Heroku? What is the business rationale?"This is Salesforce’s fifth acquisition this year. Earlier purchases include Activa Live, Sitemasher and Jigsaw. Salesforce.com also spent $170 million to fully acquire its Japanese subsidiary, Salesforce Japan."Anyone see a pattern? I don't, but then I am not that business savvy.
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Page Weight Matters
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While I appreciate (and agree with) the overall theme (Make your pages light, so people on At two minutes, there are people out there with 6.6 kilobit links connecting to youtube?I suspect there might be a bit of hyperbole in this article as well, because, even if there were people connecting on ultra slow links, the average latency of those connections is likely to be be wiped out by the tens of millions of broadband links.
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Learn Git Branching
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Wow! Author here, did not expect this to get submitted to HN yet (was going to finish out a few more levels this weekend and clean everything up). Forgive the giant "TODO" in the help dialogThe link everyone should see is the demo:
http://pcottle.github.com/learnGitBranching/?demoThat shows a few example commands, the completion of a level, and finishes with the help dialog.Some interesting technical highlights- I made heavy use of javascript "Promises" to route control through the entire app. The source code has some nice examples, but it would be callback spaghetti without it- You can import and export trees to share with your friends ("import tree" and "export tree" commands)- You can build levels from within the app with "build level". The intro diaog should step you through the process- It even supports interactive rebasing! Try it out with "git rebase -i HEAD~3"Git is a fairly complex too that can be explained really well graphically. I never understood what I was doing until I saw diagrams in the git manpages and various books around on the internet. I wanted there to be an interactive form of these diagrams but it didn't exist --- so I built it.9,000 lines of JS later I have this. There's still some polishing to be done, but I'd love for the community to share their knowledge about different git workflows and different ways to explain git concepts.I tried to make the bar for contributing as low as possible. You can build a level and submit a pull request without even cloning the repo!
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Taping of Farm Cruelty Is Becoming the Crime
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I love these short pieces on stupid legislation in the land of the free.Makes me so happy I don't live there.Who in their right mind would even propose such legislation. What kind of immoral, capitalistic people are in charge in the US.
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Asking the U.S. to allow Google to publish more national security request data
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The issue here is that Google doesn't know how much data the NSA collects. The NSA has access to the internet backbone that Google uses and can read whatever traffic it wishes that leaves the Google network. Obviously this is not everything but most everything. It is a low view of the NSA to think that they do not have the ability to real-time decrypt SSL certs from every major SSL cert authority. So while Google can claim they do not allow the NSA direct access to it's servers that is only a small comfort in the big scheme of things.This sort of response from Tech companies is just a distraction from the real issue.
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Show HN: Kimono – Never write a web scraper again
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The presentation is beautiful and the website is great, but the tech broke so I have no idea how or if this even works. This is a wonderful concept and one I've talked about doing with others. I was really excited to try this. I watched the demo video and it seemed straightforward.I went to try and use it on the demo page it provides, going through and adding things, but when I went to save it, I just received an error that something went wrong. Well, crap. That was a waste of time. Oh well, maybe it's just me.Alright, I'll give it another shot using the website they used in the demo. Opened up a Hacker News discussion page and started to give it a try. Immediately it was far less intelligent than the demo. Clicking on a title proceeded to select basically every link on the page. Somehow I clicked on some empty spots as well. Nothing was being intelligently selected like it was in the demo. Fine, that wasn't working tremendously well, but I wanted to at least see the final result.Same thing: just got an error that something went wrong and it couldn't save my work.Disappointing. I still might try it again when it works 'cause it's a great idea if they really pulled it off. So far: doesn't seem to be the case.
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Richard Lynch, an awesome PHP community guy and former colleague needs our help
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It's so sad that the country where Richard lived, worked and paid taxes for about 30 years can't provide for him. I'm glad to be able to help. But what happens to those that don't reach the front page of HN? No one enduring the stress of a terminal cancer should have to stress about getting ends to meet during their last months alive. EVER
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Edward Snowden: The Untold Story
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So there's a bigger story here: good lord is the web-design here irritating.They've overridden scroll events so they at best don't work properly. Scrolling on a laptop gives you a weird non-mapping slide animation.This is seriously one of the most unreadable articles, from a design sense, that I've ever seen.
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Announcing .NET Core 1.0
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FYI, from the announcement. Probably the most important part at the end, italicized by me. Also note (elsewhere) that licenses are MIT and Apache2:.NET Core Tools TelemetryThe .NET Core tools include a telemetry feature so that we can collect usage information about the .NET Core Tools. It’s important that we understand how the tools are being used so that we can improve them. Part of the reason the tools are in Preview is that we don’t have enough information on the way that they will be used. The telemetry is only in the tools and does not affect your app.BehaviorThe telemetry feature is on by default. The data collected is anonymous in nature and will be published in an aggregated form for use by both Microsoft and community engineers under a Creative Commons license.You can opt-out of the telemetry feature by setting an environment variable DOTNET_CLI_TELEMETRY_OPTOUT (e.g. export on OS X/Linux, set on Windows) to true (e.g. “true”, 1). Doing this will stop the collection process from running.Data PointsThe feature collects the following pieces of data:The command being used (e.g. “build”, “restore”)The ExitCode of the commandFor test projects, the test runner being usedThe timestamp of invocationThe framework usedWhether runtime IDs are present in the “runtimes” nodeThe CLI version being usedThe feature will not collect any personal data, such as usernames or emails. It will not scan your code and not extract any project-level data that can be considered sensitive, such as name, repo or author (if you set those in your project.json). We want to know how the tools are used, not what you are using the tools to build. If you find sensitive data being collected, that’s a bug. Please file an issue and it will be fixed.
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The Wrong Abstraction (2016)
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Yup.On the one hand, often there can be shared lines of code without a shared idea, this shouldn't be a candidate for being factored out into some new abstraction.On the other hand, you may want to introduce an abstraction and factor out code into a common library / dependency / framework when there's a shared well-defined concern/responsibility.That said, on the gripping hand, I say may because even if there's the opportunity to introduce a clean future-proof abstraction, introducing it may be at the cost of coupling two things that were not previously coupled. If you've got very good automated test coverage and CI for the new common dependency and its impact upon the places it is consumed, then perhaps this is fine. If the new common dependency is consumed by different projects with different pressures for change / different rates of change / different levels of software quality then factoring out a common idea that then introduces coupling may cause more harm than good.
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Feynman's Lost Lecture (ft. 3Blue1Brown) [video]
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3Blue1Brown is one of the best math educators on YouTube. As a matter of fact, I would say he's the best I know of at the moment. I'm currently working my way through his series on diff-eq.
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Apple's best product is now privacy
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Though I think apples "pro privacy" stance is likely just a happy accident I tend to agree.Either you choose a somewhat open platform, or you choose privacy. One would have thought/hoped that they were tightly coupled.As it is today I can not buy a phone without having a deep bottomless disdain for it. Not the hardware but the software. And I don't even expect that much.I have given up entirely, the slither of hope is that in the future we can decouple the smart in smart phone with the phone. A truly dumb phone that I can interface from another device, a device I have some control over that I don't have to sell my soul to.
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Ask HN: What are some of the best technical talks you've heard?
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Fork Yeah! The Rise and Development if illumos by Brian Cantrill https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhcQuote copied from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5170246"As you know people, as you learn about things, you realize that these generalizations we have are, virtually to a generalization, false. Well, except for this one, as it turns out. What you think of Oracle, is even truer than you think it is. There has been no entity in human history with less complexity or nuance to it than Oracle. And I gotta say, as someone who has seen that complexity for my entire life, it's very hard to get used to that idea. It's like, 'surely this is more complicated!' but it's like: Wow, this is really simple! This company is very straightforward, in its defense. This company is about one man, his alter-ego, and what he wants to inflict upon humanity -- that's it! ...Ship mediocrity, inflict misery, lie our asses off, screw our customers, and make a whole shitload of money. Yeah... you talk to Oracle, it's like, 'no, we don't fucking make dreams happen -- we make money!' ...You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle."
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How Apple, Google, and other tech companies conspired against their own workers
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So I was at one of these companies when the scandal broke. I didn't get screwed quite so much as my coworkers, since I'd only been working there for a year or so. The settlement was a joke - I got about $1100, but my compensation increased by roughly $100K/year the year after the cartel broke, and kept rising. Can't say I'm terribly pleased about either the wage-fixing or the settlement, but...My wife works in philanthropy, and one of her jobs is investing in homeless shelters. We were talking the other day about how the Bay Area's housing/homelessness crisis is a direct consequence of the collapse of the high-tech wage-fixing cartel. Before 2010, the wage distribution from one of these huge companies was that founders and VCs would make billions, ~1000 early employees would end up with millions, and the rest of the employees live comfortable upper-middle-class lifestyles. The ~1000 employees who could cash out pre-IPO stock options would bid up prices in Hillsborough/Atherton/PacHeights/Woodside to ~$5M, but the rest of the Bay Area would be priced at what an ordinary professional could afford. After the cartel broke, the compensation structure changed so we have ~100K engineers each making ~$300-400K/year. That's enough to buy all the available housing inventory in the region. So now house prices in Mountain View and Sunnyvale go from $800K -> $2.4M, and you must be a dual-tech-income family to afford a house.I say this not to imply that the cartel was a good thing (cartels are bad, and I'd much rather the solution be greater wage equality for everyone and building more housing so everyone can stay in the area), but to highlight the problem of unintended consequences. I've seen many people ask "Why don't companies hire remote workers at Silicon Valley wages?" and in the same breath say "Because I would never move to the third-world hellhole that the Bay Area has become", not realizing that if they did hire remote workers, the same thing would happen in their communities. Inflation is the flip side of higher wages; when everybody gets paid more, everything costs more.
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Four kinds of documentation
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My pet peeve is auto-generated documentation from configuration files or source code. It is absolutely useless and I would rather prefer no documentation than auto-generated.Some time ago Swagger (nowadays OpenAPI) got really popular and many projects "had an API" and pointed users to their green autogenerated API documentation clusterfuck. When time went on this green page would become an indicator for me, that the project does not work and I should be very sceptical - I am sure there are projects that do it better, but for me no-content auto-generated documentation is a real code smell.
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Reverse engineering my router's firmware with binwalk
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A slightly related question for HNers: Is there any easy tool for a non-cs guy to reverse engineer a binary file containing numbers and text in some specific format?I have to work with some old structural analysis software. The material and element definitions come in an obscure file format ".PF3CMP". I know it contains text like the material names, and numbers/letters for the material properties.Ultimately its my goal to be able to write these files from matlab or python, instead of using the horribly clunky user interface. But first I need to know the structure of the file, and I'm not even sure how to begin figuring that out.[0] is what it looks like when opened in a hex editor[0] https://imgur.com/a/jvqV3k8
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I Want Off Mr. Golang's Wild Ride
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The author spent a lot of time dwelling on Window's filesystems, at which point many of the readers got bored and started commenting. There are actually a couple of excellent points in here, the majority of which relate to Go's tendency to just be silently completely wrong in its behaviors from time to time, and is absolutely packed with hidden gotchas.
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Linus Torvalds' good taste argument for linked lists, explained
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I understand the general point (and value) of reframing the problem or the solution in a way that removes special cases ... but in this case I would actually prefer the first solution over the second. The second solutions reminds me of the old-school perl culture, and JavaScript culture, where 'cleverness' (which always manifests itself as terseness as if lines of code were expensive), takes precedence over maintainability and understandability. Your code is going to be potentially maintained years in the future by developers of all levels - make it easy on them by practicing the principle of least surprise. In this case, this means using a traditional implementation of a linked list that most developers would be familiar with.
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Few people know that Google voluntarily removes some search results
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This is an example of a large central authority censoring information.How does the notion of a purely distributed, unregulated, uncensorable, blockchain-backed internet handle "revenge porn" or other genuinely harmful content?An argument I hear from the crypto community is that blockchain is good because it enables freedom of speech that can't be banned by governments or other central authorities.The crypto community needs to address the other side of that coin too. Are there circumstances when something should be banned, and how does that work on a blockchain?
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Naval Architecture
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"It’s worth stressing that in these static cases the pressure at a given level depends purely on the height of the body of water."How did I not know this? It's so counter intuitive that a thin column of water can cause the same pressure as a wide one.The video they link shows this in action:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJHrr21UvY8One mind bending fact she shares in the video is that a thin layer of water, touching the damn wall, is the same pressure as an entire lake.
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Phrack Issue 70
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nice to see phrack back again. I still remember "Smashing the stack for fun and profit", the article that back in the days made me have an epiphany about C, pointers and memory in general.
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More than 1M fewer students are in college, the lowest numbers in 50 years
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There are three problems that colleges need to fix.1) Skilled trades pay better than most bachelor's degree track jobs. My kids can make more money with a six month apprenticeship than they will with all but a few 4 year degrees. If you can drive a forklift, you can make $45K/yr... which is identical to what an firsty year teacher makes.2) There are better options than college for many. One of my daughters did a six month digital marketing bootcamp. She made $45k year one, and a year later is the director of marketing at her company making over $100k/yr.3) College is way over priced. They claim graduates make 40% over their lifetime vs. non grads. JP Morgan Chase did a study two years ago that shows kids that had a job, any job before age 18 make 35% more than their peers over their lifetime regardless of degree.4) Student loans are a horror that needs to stop. Young people should not be put in debt-bondage. Imagine America's financial health if we let young people start families and careers debt free.
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Automerge 2.0
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See also, Autosurgeon (with a 0.3.0 release today), which is a higher level API on top of Automerge for Rust:I'm building a mobile app with a server backend, and I was looking for resources to build them in an offline-first way (since unlike on the browser, people expect to use apps offline, if they can, such as fitness or habit trackers).I found the concept of conflict-free replicated data types (CRDTS) interesting as it allows you to have fully offline experiences while also having a conflict-free syncing experience. I was looking for some good libraries and came across automerge [0] and yrs [1], but both had some rough APIs as they're primarily low-level Rust libraries that are wrapped by higher-level TypeScript APIs.Autosurgeon wraps the low-level API of automerge to make it much more ergonomic, closer to the TypeScript experience, but in Rust of course. You can for example use `struct`s which autosurgeon will serialize and deserialize automatically, which is not present in base automerge, which focuses more on string keys and arbitrary values.I am planning on using this together with Flutter and flutter_rust_bridge [2] in order to use this same Rust library everywhere. In this case, the server just becomes another (albeit more privileged) client.[0] https://github.com/automerge/automerge-rs[1] https://github.com/y-crdt/y-crdt[2] https://github.com/fzyzcjy/flutter_rust_bridge
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Ask HN: What programming blogs do you read daily?
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this stuff never seems to be highly upvoted on HN anymore, and if it gets to +30 there's only a few comments, i speculate because new-school HNers don't understand or care. so i track them myself.best two advanced swegr blogs ever: http://prog21.dadgum.com/ -- swegr, fp theory
http://www.johndcook.com/blog/ -- swegr, fp theory
other advanced swegr blogs. we're not talking atwood and joel, here, that stuff is for college kids. http://blog.tmorris.net/ -- swegr, fp/tactics
http://james-iry.blogspot.com/ -- fp/tactics
http://playingwithpointers.com/ -- philosophy, fp/tactics
life http://www.jasonshen.com/ -- "Art of Ass Kicking" (life)
http://www.sebastianmarshall.com/ -- "Strategy, Philosophy, Self-Discipline, Science. Victory." (life)
http://dilbert.com/blog -- politics & life
fwiw, after having digested much of this material, I've moved on to reading all the interesting whitepapers I can find, mostly via my social networks. That's the really advanced stuff. I've been meaning to collect them and summarize many to post to HN. nag me.
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A Woman’s Story
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There were a lot of questions about numbers such as guessing the next number in a sequence. There were some logic puzzles, the kind where you have to figure out that it’s the baker who rides a bicycle and the mechanic who lives in the house with a red door. There were some strange questions where she was given a sketch of a three dimensional figure such as a cube with some missing pieces, and she had to guess which shaped piece would fill the missing space, or guess which of several other pieces was the same thing rotated or reflected.This is essentially an IQ test, and what they discovered is that Gwen was highly intelligent. They then did the smart thing and judged her based on her demonstrated aptitude rather than on the prevailing prejudices of the day. Indeed, there was an obvious financial incentive to do so, which serves to remind us that unfounded prejudice is unstable in a competitive market for labor.Nowadays, it is effectively illegal in the U.S. to give IQ tests to job applicants, and in the state of California it is illegal to give a black child an IQ test even when administered by a school psychologist as part of a professional assessment. To their proponents, such laws are mere "progress", but stories like Gwen's show how misguided these rules can be. When there is a clear incentive to discover the truth, objective assessments undermine prejudice rather than promoting it. It's a lesson we would do well to remember.
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Show HN: Weekend project, Intro.js
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This is very nice but I have some suggestions to improve:Navigation: The “next” link is very small and it's in different place on every step. A fixed navigation and/or bigger link would be nice.Also, showing me that it's “Step 3” is useless to me - I can count myself and even if I couldn't, I don't really care how many steps I've already seen. I'm more interested in how many more there are.There should also be automatic scrolling so that I could actually see the next highlighted area. If you already do the scrolling, remember to scroll in a way that guarantees to show whole area, not only top line.Thanks for the great work, I think I might use it in my next projet!
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New Requests for Startups
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> What comes after programming languages?I've been working on this for several years, though a startup seems the wrong vehicle for it. I think the description in the RFS is misguided:"We’re interested in helping developers create better software, faster. This includes new ways to write, understand, and collaborate on code, and the next generation of tools and infrastructure for delivering software continuously and reliably."There's a blind spot in prose like this that gets repeated all over the place in our community: it emphasizes writing over reading. I think we have to start with reading. My hypothesis is that we need to reform the representation of programs to address this use case: I download the sources for a tool I use, wanting to make a tweak. How can I orient myself and make a quick change in just one afternoon? This is hard today; it can take weeks or months to figure out the global organization of a codebase.You can't "deliver software continuously and reliably" until you rethink its underpinnings. Before the delivery problem there's a literacy problem: we programmers prefer to write our own, or to wrap abstraction layers over the code of others, rather than first understanding what has come before.More on my approach: http://akkartik.name/about
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Amazon Will Ban Sale of Apple, Google Video-Streaming Devices
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I don't think this move is in Amazon's best interests long term. Their competitive edge with Prime is that I go to them first because I assume they'll have what I want, at a fair price and the highest level of convenience.If they are no longer the "Everything Store" then they won't be where I go to for everything...
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My time with Rails is up
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> Now, this line of code is not simple, it’s easy to write it, but the code is extremely complicated under the hood because:Every time I hear someone complain about Rails, I ask myself if this person is really just complaining about how complex web dev is. I've never seen a complaint that passed this smell test.Yes, Rails abstracts over a veritable shit-ton of complicated domains. The problem is, that complexity isn't going to go away if you decide not to use those abstractions. Every single one of that laundry-list of things that ActiveRecord::Base.create does will have to be implemented again, by you, badly, if you choose to roll your own.It boggles my mind why developers don't take the web seriously as a domain, like it's not real coding or something. It's the worst instance of bike-shedding I've ever seen.Rails isn't perfect, by any means. But Rails is not a black box, it's all free software. You are more than free to re-implement anything Rails does yourself and release it as a gem. Modularity and flexibility are built right in. It seems incredibly odd to leave Rails over this. For what, Java? Unbelievable.
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Htop explained
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I switched to macOS from Linux two weeks ago and I am starting to regret that decision. Most — if not all — the commands that I thought I had mastered after years working on Linux environments stopped working because their BSD counterparts have slightly differences that completely break everything I try to do. It is even more frustrating when I realize that I have to deactivate security features built-in the new Apple computers in order to make things like "dtrace" (the strace alternative) work.
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$80k/month App Store Scam
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How does garbage like this get through the App Store? I thought Apple was notoriously strict on approvals?Also, do people still use the App Store? I don't think I have casually browsed for apps in 5 years or more.
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Deep Learning for Coders – Launching Deep Learning Part 2
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My feelings on Part 1:I felt like the setup of the first part was at time a little frustrating, since I started it during a time when Keras had switched to a newer version which wasn't compatible some of the utility code that was written. Add this to the newbie factor to notebooks, and it was a pretty rough first week or so to setup and get actual learning done. It took me a bit of time to realize notebooks were more like repeatable trains of thoughts than well-written production code.The other thing is that some of the supplementary material was really long and at times made me feel like, why take this course instead of just going through a course mentioned in supplementary material (e.g. CS231n wrt CNN's)? I think I ended up spending hundreds of hours reading/watching/practicing CNN's by reading papers, watching Karpathy's 231n videos, and doing a couple tutorials from data scientists who elaborated on a specific problem they were solving. I guess at times when watching Part 1's videos and doing the notebooks, I didn't feel like I was 'getting it' as much or as fast as when I was getting the information from other means.While the forum discussions can be helpful, it was also wadding through a ton of unstructured content. And the service they used for the forums hotmapped the find shortcut to their own built-in search, which was a little annoying. I don't know a great solution to having more structured data, but perhaps adding some of questions that were answered to the lesson's Wikipedia. Or maybe splitting the technical issues from the high level concepts.Lastly, I think it was either HN or /r/MachineLearning but someone had suggested a book regarding Machine Learning and hands-on Tensorflow usage which I picked up, and I felt like my pace of learning really sped up afterwards. I think part of it was Tensorflow has a lot more written about it so when you encounter an odd problem, chances are someone else has something to say about it.All criticisms aside, I think I'll try going through Part 1 a second time around prior to going through Part 2.
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Mastercard will stop free trials from automatically billing once they're over
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Hurray! This is stupendous! I wish other CC brands follow the lead here in slaying this nefarious anti-pattern. There are so many services which require _you_ to actively go and cancel when all you wanted was to trial something, but they required you to commit a CC knowing there'd be a large percentage of people who forget to cancel.Thank you MC for raising the bar for other CC brands.
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HTTP/3 explained
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So much negativity in this thread.Personally I am _very_ excited by HTTP/3 (and QUIC), it feels like the building block for Internet 2.0, with connection migration over different IPs, mandatory encryption, bidirectional streams and it being a user-space library – sure, more bloat, but from now on we won't have to wait for your kernel to support feature X, or even worse, your ISP-provided router or decade old middleware router on the Internet.I haven't had the chance to read the actual spec yet, but it's obvious that while the current tech (HTTP2) is an improvement over what we had before, HTTP/3 is a good base to make the web even faster and more secure.HTTP/3 won't be IPv6: it only requires support from the two parties that benefit from it the most: browser vendors and web server vendors. We won't have to wait on the whole internet to upgrade their hardware.
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U.S. to ground Boeing 737 Max 8
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Boeing 737 Max 8 has a different software system. That software is now a focus of investigators.
The Max 8 is outfitted with bigger, more fuel-efficient engines than earlier 737s, and the weight and positioning of those engines shifted the plane's center of gravity forward, increased the potential for the nose to pitch up after take-off. To counteract this risk, Boeing developed software known as the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, or MCAS.Max 8s come equipped with a sensor that reads the plane's angle relative to the wind flow, prompting MCAS to automatically trigger the plane's nose to angle downward if it gets a specific reading.However, problems could arise if the MCAS system gets erroneous sensor readings. The system automatically pushes the plane's nose down, potentially surprising pilots who are unfamiliar with the system and overriding their commands.This is what investigators believe happened to Lion Air Flight 610 before it crashed in Octobermore details https://www.cbsnews.com/news/boeing-737-max-8-boeing-737-800...
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Show HN: Angeldust – a fast and efficient video game
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You seriously may want to reconsider the name. ‘Angel Dust’ is a slang for the narcotic PCP - I immediately was confused and only clicked so I could tell what it actually was.Not sure how this didn’t come up before? At any point in development? O.oEdit: whoa, downvotes, really? Care to say why? This is a legitimate concern?
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A (possible) solution to Covid-19
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I'm glad people are realizing that all this social distancing is merely a pause button on the virus. Once we press play on society, exponential growth will happen again and we will have effectively rolled back the clock until we reach herd immunity through things like the OP's suggestion.At least this next time we'll hopefully have more PPE.
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Blackballed by PayPal, Sci-Hub switches to Bitcoin
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How successful has it been to switch to Bitcoin? I hear mixed things about it and wonder how many actually use this currency.
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Amazon Liable for Defective Third-Party Products Rules CA Appellate Court
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Shopping on Amazon has become unbearable for like 95% of categories these days. The experience is like rummaging through some shady tourist market with a dozen stall owners trying to scam you. The pricing is all whack with lots of counterfeits that have gamed the ranking and review systems. It’s just not worth trying to filter and find things that are actually competitively priced and sold directly by Amazon.Have no idea how they are so dominant still when they seem to not care at all about these things.
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Why are Amnesty International monitors not able to observe the Assange hearing?
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I am baffled to see that the majority of the comments here are at best showing no support for what Assange did and at worst are trying to find excuses not to be disturbed in their belief that since we are in a democracy hence everything that's happening is normal. I thought the people here had a sharper political view on what kind of society we could/should live in but I just read people that are always in a hurry to put themselves on the good side of the stick, praising the stick and telling themselves "Everything is normal. Everything is normal. Everything...". Forgive the bitterness, I am still young and unruly. I'll settle down later and me too I'll accept how impotent I am at changing the order of thing and banter about humanity's real problem as a lack of universal love and and understanding.End of rant. Have a good day.
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Full-Bleed Layout Using CSS Grid
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I hate that people use CSS Grid like this. For some reason, I see so many people reach for CSS Grid like it's the de facto solution for responsive design.This is a bad design because you're tying the child elements to the grid layout of the parent. If you added an extra column in the grid, you'd have to go and adjust it for the full bleed elements.IMO a better solution would've been to just use a column layout with flex box, where the children are containers at standard sizes (e.g. full-bleed, 80-characters, etc.).Yes it adds like another tag or two, but it's semantically more sound. And from that extra markup we get a lot more flexibility, e.g. going from column layout to a slide show or something if someone wanted.CSS Grids are good for grids i.e. layouts where you want control over flow in both axes. This is not a grid. You have one column of data where you are controlling whitespace.This has become a real pet peeve of mine because it seems like so many people love css grid when it's actual use case is fairly rare.Edit: I also want to add that this creates an uglier layout if you have variable width children. Because you'd essentially create a full-bleed container element just to add a non-full bleed child to it.And I am sorry that this came across as kind of aggressive, this is something that's really been irking me with recent web dev trends. And I feel like a crazy person confused over why the world suddenly decided on Css Grid all day every day.
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“Facebook has taken the name of my open source project ”
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Submitted this here as the issue first got raised in another submission I participated in (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25100810).Let me guess how this will go1. This issue will get traction on HN and maybe Twitter2. Facebook engineers responsible will apologize, tell us they meant no harm3. Facebook will change the name of the project and give it back to it's rightful owner, maybe even reinstate their Facebook account (although unlikely)4. In 3-6 months the very same thing will happen and we'll go back to step 1Hopefully at one point the engineers at Facebook (at least the ones that hang around HN) will realize what their employer does to the open source ecosystem and finally leave the company. This is not the first case, and will not be the last case of similar things happening. But when you're getting a large salary that is hard to get elsewhere, I guess it's really hard to leave.Edit: HNers please! Don't fill the issue with any more comments as it's likely to be locked and not really achieve anything more than that (specifically looking at you " dsignr")
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Teddit: a free and open-source Reddit front end focused on privacy
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No cruft, no cdn domains and no javascript.I gave up on reddit a couple years back, but this might make me rethink.With so many things turning to mud, this is a good thing.What I cannot figure out is how they do the [-] show/hide stuff without javascript?Even hacker news - which is relatively lightweight - uses javascript for that.EDIT: ...and I'm back. It's like eating a box of candy for dinner - sugar rush and no nutrition.
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My Room in 3D
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Although libraries like threejs (or softwares like blender) give you so many tools and knobs to play around, I cannot for the life of me make a scene look so great. The lighting, the composition, the textures, the even level of detail…I would recommend everyone try it out for themselves to see what I’m talking about. No matter how much you try, there is always something too dark or light. Always something that looks like made from minecraft blocks and something too detailed for those 2 objects to be from the same universe. Animations are either too stiff or move like jelly blobs.How is this so perfect?! I just can’t comprehend how do 3d artist’s brains work.
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My self-hosting infrastructure, fully automated
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This is very cool!Have you considered something like Tailscale so you can securely access it from outside your home? I've been thinking about spinning up my own home server that way, seeing as Tailscale makes it easy to securely access it from my phone when I'm out and about.
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TSMC to make 4nm chips in Arizona for Apple, AMD, Nvidia
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Great news for the US. Great news for Apple, AMD, and Nvidia.
Not so good news for Taiwan. The fact that the whole tech world is dependent on chips produced in Hsinchu is a huge advantage for the safety of Taiwan. Moving the fabs and talent further away from the island will not benefit the people of Taiwan at all. TSMC with its global influence has been a huge factor for guaranteeing safety of the island and peace in the Taiwan strait. On the other hand, TSMC is a corporation like every other and does what's best for their business. Most likely it's a huge win for everyone holding their stock. Are we going to see fabs in Central/Eastern Europe next? I'd hope so.
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The drama in trying to convert election PDFs to Spreadsheets
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I still don't understand how we ended up with PDF as sort of standard to archive data. PDF is already pretty bad for things like manuals but for things like spreadsheets we basically collect the data, then we destroy all the structure by putting it in into POF, and later on we painstakingly try to restore the data from PDF which is often almost impossible to do with accuracy.It just shows that bad solutions often win.
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Meta is banning people from advertising after running ads for Python and Pandas
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The whole issue around not telling you what rule you broke "because then you might work around it" is total BS. It's like a company I complained to the other day because they didn't label one of the inputs on their password reset form because "it would help a hacker know what to type in it" (it was the password reset password they expected but you wouldn't know).How much quicker would this be resolved if the first AI said, "your account has been blocked because we detected an advert related to live animals" to which you could appeal with your one sentence reason, "these are not animals, they are programming languages with the same names as animals" which would take a very cursory check and continue to bring in advertising revenue.I think like another poster it is probably true that if you were spending a lot, you would have been given more time to argue your case. For someone who brings in $10 a month, it's not worth their time.
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Larry Page addresses PRISM
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I can't understand the repeated use of "direct access". It's the kind of language a lawyer would use to qualify a patent clause.- We do not provide direct access to our servers.- We do not provide direct access nor is there a backdoor.- O, but we do still pipe all of your data to external NSA servers. Every company named (I'm not just picking on Google here) has come out with the same overarching statement. "We do not provide direct access". It just smells of being rehearsed, and carefully coordinated to select such language.
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Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud
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What Google Cloud needs is a better sales story. AWS consistently beats out Google in this respect. This story is welcomed and there should be more success stories published like this.My business is a heavy GC user (AppEngine, Datastore, CloudStorage, BQ, ComputeEngine, ManagedVM) and I couldn't imagine achieving what we have achieved in such a short amount of time on any other platform.We (myself and another guy) started at zero and shipped our product in 3 months on what is effectively an infinitely auto-scalable platform where we don't have to do any devops or carry a pager. I'd much rather work on features than chores. =) 4 months later and we've had profitable growth and zero downtime (knock on wood) and we're hiring.Thanks Google!
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Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative to Mailgun or Sendgrid
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Isn’t part of the reason for using Mailgun, Sendgrid etc that you get to send via IP addresses with good reputation?
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With SESTA/FOSTA, lawmakers failed to separate good intentions from bad law
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What exactly is the intention behind this bill? Do they hope the demand for prostitution will drop, and thus trafficker revenues and incentives? That seems ridiculous, as demand for prostitution existed throughout human history and across civilizations, mainly as a cultural artifact.So we expect the services to simply shift to use other facilitators. Do they hope the new facilitators will be better for the victims? That, again, seems misguided: we know for a fact that traditional, pre-internet facilitators, like pimps and underground brothels, are exceptionally damaging for victims, physically, emotionally and economically. Any underground, high friction market, will have large margins for the traders (traffickers) and make the producers worse off.Is the intention to drag prostitutes into legality, in supervised establishments where they can be protected by the state? Shouldn't that start with a nation-wide ban of anti-brothel laws that effectively force prostitutes to work underground?So what exactly is the point of this bill? Denying independent prostitutes autonomy and forcing them in the hands of traffickers? Did they even ask themselves these questions? Do they even understand the purpose is harm-reduction across a whole at-risk social class, not some crusade against a Hollywood vision of innocence abused?
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MailChimp deleted my account with no warning
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Hmmm... This poster has noticed an issue on 17th, mailed support and without waiting to see if there's any reply or resolution, decided to blog publicly about it the same day... seems definitely premature, maybe borderline of questionable professionalism.It appears MailChimp has a chat option for support on weekdays for paid users but since this hasn't been used, one would assume the poster is using a free plan - not exactly exemplary practice for handling anything "mission-critial".
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The EARN IT act is an attack on end-to-end encryption
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The argument from those in power against encryption is mind-bogglingly stupid, and I don't know if it is due to an extreme ignorance, or because of a lust for the power and leverage that mass surveillance grants a governing entity (I suppose it could be both?)Regardless, using the argument of child pornography and sex trafficking is an emotional play, and it is solely designed to resonate with those who also do not understand the technology.If this same argument took another form, e.g. if this were an attempt ban walls made out of non-transparent material because opaque walls allow child abuse to occur hidden from sight, the obvious violation of privacy would be evident to the average person.What inevitably happens with laws that create such a drastic power imbalance between your average citizen and the governing entity is that those with power and status are exempt.
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React Native for Windows and Mac
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React Native scares me with its dependency webs:http://npm.anvaka.com/#/view/2d/react-nativeFrom my experience, it's really great to work with and definitely saves a ton of work, but the depgraph above fills me with doubt for use in sensitive applications such as in finance or healthcare. For this reason, I've been trying out Flutter or even considering to go back to native apps. Perhaps there's some kind of middle ground where we can create a tight microkernel-like thing natively using secure enclaves and key managers, but expose an API to the "untrusted" parts of the program. This approach is not without its own downsides, such as dark patterns in a compromised UI. However, as one friend pointed out, a lot of those deps are indeed for build time only, which have different risk profiles.The depgraph of reactjs is far simpler and easier for me to understand and therefore feel trust:http://npm.anvaka.com/#/view/2d/reactDoes anyone know if there has been reliable research towards the security of the entire RN dependency tree? Seeing a stray dep there that has 1 maintainer on npm/GitHub who has been inactive for over a year makes me nervous. Any one of those JavaScript projects could do something nefarious deep under the hood, and this to me seems to expose a huge surface area for attackers.Here's a classic throwback to keep us on our toes :)https://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/linux/hh/thompson/trust.html
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SpaceX Starlink is now its own ASN and present at the Seattle Internet Exchange
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They just launched the next batch of Starlink satellites minutes ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4xBFHjkUvw. The 60-satellite train should be visible in the sky over the SF bay area around 9:35 tomorrow night: https://james.darpinian.com/satellites/?special=starlinkRandom FAQ about Starlink below:The combination of low latency (20-40ms) and high bandwidth (100+Mbps) has never been available in satellite internet before.A public beta may start later this year for some users in the northern US, around the 14th launch. Today is the 7th launch of v1 satellites. SpaceX is hoping to do more than two launches per month but haven't reached that pace yet.The ground stations look like this: https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/gkkm9c/starli...
The user antennas can be seen in that picture; they are the smaller circular things on black sticks. They are flat phased array antennas, and don't need to be precisely pointed like satellite dishes do. They are about the size of an extra-large pizza, so you won't be able to get a Starlink phone.The user antennas are likely to be quite expensive at first (several thousand dollars). Cost reduction of the user antennas is the biggest hurdle Starlink currently faces. Nobody knows yet how much SpaceX will charge for the antenna or service.Starlink can't support a high density of users, so it will not be an alternative to ISPs in cities. Rural and mobile use are the important applications. The US military is doing trials with it. Cell tower backhaul may also be a possibility.Starlink V1 doesn't have cross-satellite links, so the satellites can only provide service while over a ground station. There will be hundreds of ground stations in North America; no information about other regions yet. Starlink V2 is planned to have laser links between satellites, which will enable 100% global coverage 24/7, though local regulations are likely to prevent SpaceX from providing service in many places.Because the speed of light in a vacuum is 30% faster than in optical fiber, the latency of Starlink over long distances has the potential to be lower than any other option once laser links are available.Each launch of 60 Starlink satellites has nearly as much solar panel area as the International Space Station. Once SpaceX's Starship is operational they should be able to launch several hundred satellites at once instead of just 60.Starlink's only current competitor, OneWeb, just filed for bankruptcy after only launching a handful of satellites, and is fishing for acquisition offers. Amazon is also planning something called Project Kuiper but not much is known about it.Starlink V2 will have 30,000 satellites, requiring hundreds of launches. Even once the initial fleet is launched, SpaceX will still need to maintain the constellation with many launches per year indefinitely.SpaceX's FCC application has many interesting details: https://licensing.fcc.gov/myibfs/download.do?attachment_key=...
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Woodworking for Engineers
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Has anyone found any good non-American-continent woodworking YouTube channels?Nothing against the Americans/Canadians etc, but this is one area where regional differences make a pretty huge difference in terms of wood and products available. If, like me, you're in the UK and looking for vaguely specific details regarding woodwork online, you're going to find an awful lot of American content and very little local stuff (a blog opportunity there perhaps).A good recent example of this effect for me was when I was looking up pine stains. You will find constant references to something called "pre-stain conditioner" online; this basically doesn't exist in the UK. Everyone online is insistent that you need it, and you can just about buy it here (it's expensive), but it turns out it's pretty irrelevant. In the UK our pine is typically a different variety, and so therefore has a different composition, and our terminology is different here too; wood stain in the UK is, I think, "wood dye" in the USA? Please correct me if you know better :)For reference I use this stain: https://www.wood-finishes-direct.com/product/manns-pine-wood..., which makes no mention of pre-stain conditioner, and I've had very good results with it so far.
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Althttpd: Simple webserver in a single C file
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Here is the actual single C-code file: https://sqlite.org/althttpd/file?name=althttpd.cSomething I absolutely love about text based protocols such as HTTP/1 is how easy you can implement it in any virtually programming language. Sure, the implementation is not top-of-the-notch, but it just damned works, it is portable, it is understandable by humans. That's something what's got lost with HTTP/2 and HTTP/3, respectively.
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Making bracket pair colorization faster
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That sounds awesome for VS Code users in general, but I guess it's sad news for the independent developer (CoenraadS) who made the pair colorization extension popular and famous.With the editor's native performance 10,000 times better, I suepect the number of installs of their extension will plummet.It's hard to compete with 1st party powers, as all the hoopla around app stores (and before that, the famous "Embrace, extend & extinguish" [1] strategy) show all the time.That said, I'm not saying it's a hostile move, it's just ... interesting.[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
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Windows 11 Officially Shuts Down Firefox’s Default Browser Workaround
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So far in the last year or so, I've heard 0 reasons why I'd even need, want or benefit from Win11 over Win10. Tons of reasons in the negative column though. There isn't even anything to salivate over that might make you think it might be worth it to deal with the other tradeoffs. Hard pass.
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Tauri 1.0 – Electron Alternative Powered by Rust
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Not to rain on the parade, but:- What's the point of mentioning Rust when the heavylifting is done by the system's webview widget, and applications are written in HTML/CSS/JS, just as in Electron?- Isn't the whole point of Electron to have version/feature stability for the browser APIs by bundling a specific Chromium runtime? Without this requirement, it was also trivial before Electron showed up to write a small native wrapper application around the system-provided webview widget.
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Python 3.11 vs 3.10 performance
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These speedups are awesome, but of course one wonders why they haven't been a low-hanging fruit over the past 25 years.Having read about some of the changes [1], it seems like the python core committers preferred clean over fast implementations and have deviated from this mantra with 3.11.Now let's get a sane concurrency story (no multiprocessing / queue / pickle hacks) and suddenly it's a completely different language![1] Here are the python docs on what precisely gave the speedups: https://docs.python.org/3.11/whatsnew/3.11.html#faster-cpyth...[edit] A bit of explanation what I meant by low-hanging fruit: One of the changes is "Subscripting container types such as list, tuple and dict directly index the underlying data structures." Surely that seems like a straight-forward idea in retrospect. In fact, many python (/c) libraries try to do zero-copy work with data structures already, such as numpy.
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Facial recognition tech gets woman booted from Rockettes show due to employer
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I am torn actually unsure on what would be morally correct:1. I, as an individual, am allowed to deny entry to persons I dislike from my private property.2. I, as an individual, am allowed to deny entry to persons affiliated with a business I dislike from my private property.3. I, as a business owner (eg: a restaurant), am allowed to deny entry to persons I dislike (eg: a previous patron who was violent) from my business.4. I, as a business owner (eg: a restaurant), should I not be allowed to deny entry to persons affiliated with a business I dislike (eg: the next door restaurant employee who is copying my menu) from my business?
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Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely
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I was really skeptical of lemmy [1] when I first heard about it during the blackout. I joined yesterday and it completely changed my mind. Yes, it is going to face some growing pains (see the total user growth in the past few days) [2] in the coming weeks and months but it really has the potential to replace Reddit with a federated system of communities. One that won't be damaged by investors or executives attempting to pivot over to the latest social media trend.As many people have recently noted, Reddit quietly became an extremely important repository of text-based knowledge. Distinct from Wikipedia and Archive.org, but no less important, Reddit is full of valuable procedural (how-to) and consumer (product-related) knowledge. Reddit has countless small communities built around hobbies and other niche interests, which places it in the same role once fulfilled by Usenet and later independent web-based forums.While those technologies still exist, they face enormous challenges with discovery (try to find a new forum on Google recently?), single-sign-on, and moderation. These were all solved by Reddit and I believe lemmy solves them too. The fediverse [3] truly has the potential to liberate small internet communities from the vagaries of Big Social Media, of which Reddit is only the latest example.[1] https://join-lemmy.org[2] https://the-federation.info/platform/73[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse
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Firesheep: Easy HTTP session hijacking from within Firefox
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There are probably going to be a lot of people negatively affected by this for quite some time to come. One thing to point out is that there are grades of things. There is "public", and then there is "top hit on Google". Similarly, there is "insecure" and then there is "simple doubleclick tool to facilitate identity theft".How many millions of dollars and man hours is it going to take to lock down every access point? How many new servers are going to be needed now that https is used for everything and requests can't be cached?America was a better place when people could keep their doors unlocked, and when someone's first response to a break-in was to blame the criminal. By contrast it's fashionable among a certain set (no doubt including the author of this mess, Mr. Butler himself) to hold that the real culprits are the door manufacturers. What said facile analysis excludes, of course is that there is always a greater level of security possible. The level we currently employ reflects our tradeoffs between the available threats and the cost/convenience loss of bolting our doors and putting finials on our gates.Butler has simply raised the threat level for everyone. He did not invent a new lock or close a hole. He's now forcing lots of people to live up to his level of security. Congratulations to the new Jason Fortuny.
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Apple - Think Twice
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Revision A Apple projects have had issues for as long as Apple has been making products.Second gen Macbook Air's had Logic board issues, 2007 era RevA Macbook Pros had video card issues, dodgy graphics cards on the early Mac Pros, the iPhone4 antenna, the list is endless. Often it's taken years for the issues to be resolved and Apple to pay for repairs, if at all.It's simple, if you want the shiniest tech, buy whatever Apple is selling today. If you want reliable hardware, wait for the first revision when the kinks have been worked out. That way we don't all get spammed with the histronics of endless bloggers who think this is a new phenomenon.
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