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Containers vs. Zones vs. Jails vs. VMs
Ignorance admission time: I still have no idea what problem containers are supposed to solve. I understand VMs. I understand chroot. I understand SELinux. Hell, I even understand monads a little bit. But I have no idea what containers do or why I should care. And I've tried.
Jupyter Receives the ACM Software System Award
Am I the only person in the universe who doesn't like Jupyter? I much prefer tools like Rmarkdown and Sweave.
Nobody knows how to cite 4chan mathematicians who solved an interesting problem
An "academically correct" solution (i.e., not to taint the prestige of a scholar who cites the solution) would be to cite a real, proxy scholar who checks the solution, but gives all credit to the anonymous 4chan user.Scientists often abhor citing from blogs, forums, and Wikipedia, as those publications "are not peer-reviewed by trustworthy professionals".
Self Studying the MIT Applied Math Curriculum
I did Strang's linear algebra course[0] (link goes to Youtube playlist of lectures) several years after graduating and recommend it highly. I was looking for refresher but I gained a deeper understanding of several important concepts; in particular it's fair to say I barely understood, or perhaps even misunderstood, SVD until Strang. If you're not sure if you need something like that, I suggest doing something like testing yourself on this video[1] or the MIT problem sets[2] it's easy to tell yourself that you "know" linear algebra when it would be closer to the truth to say that you used to know linear algebra, but can't answer even basic questions today. After Strang, Golub's book on Matrix Computations is also really incredible.[3][0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZK3O402wf1c&list=PL49CF3715C...[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cll03FUxjuk[2]: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-650-statistics-fo...[3]: https://www.amazon.com/Computations-Hopkins-Studies-Mathemat...
Patch Critical Cryptographic Vulnerability in Microsoft Windows [pdf]
None of these links describe how the exploit works.I found this: https://media.defense.gov/2020/Jan/14/2002234275/-1/-1/0/CSA...So based on my limited understanding:1. The certificates have a place for defining curve parameters.2. The attacker specifies their own parameters so that they match the start of a standard curve but choose the rest of the parameters themselves. With the right ECC math they are able to generate a valid signature for the certificate even though they don't own the private key corresponding to the original curve.3. The old crypto API -didn't- check that certificates were signed from a fixed set of valid parameters. It would just check for sig validity allowing for spoofing of the cert.Interesting stuff. So you might be able to cryptographically prove if there was ever any attacks in the wild from this at a given time (if we assume dates are checked at least)?I wonder what happens at the Microsoft Security Response Center when a big vuln hits like this? Does it tie up all their resources just working on the one vuln?
Linux 5.6 is the most exciting kernel in years
Wireguard!! Woot!I'll be putting this kernel on all production systems, without testing, on Sunday night while everyone is off.
French bar owners arrested for offering free WiFi but not keeping logs
I'm living in France, and "just" sharing the WIFI password is a very common practice in bars, coffee-shops, etc..I only know of few places that actually use a compliant captive portal that requires some PII (name, email, phone...) to let you use the free WIFI.My problem with these kind of laws is that they get ignored most of the time and then allow for selective enforcement when the police/local-gov has issues with you.
Coinbase from YC to DPO
I'm horrendously worried about crypto gaining more marketshare as long as proof of work crypto remains mainstream. It has significantly worse externalities than just about any company I can think of (including defense contractors/vaping companies), and, if it grows larger before we have clean energy, then we virtually guarantee we won't be able to tackle global warming. We are going to bestow a world that will be significantly worse than the one we inherited to our children, and, it's not like the carbon emissions that crypto is creating are used in the service of creating valuable technology - it's literally useless proof of work.I've worked in tech for a long time now, and I believe the stereotype about amoral techies is completely untrue - yet seeing the adoption of crypto among my peers is really depressing. I'm not sure how so many of my peers who would never ever work for a defense contractor or a vaping company are willing to work in crypto at this point. My objections are not ideological - if someone invented a cryptocurrency that was completely green and it would take over the market, I'd be totally in favor of it.I would genuinely like someone to explain it to me, because, the kinds of essays I've read that try to argue that crypto is actually good for global warming are so shoddy that I can't believe people would take them seriously absent a huge dose of motivated reasoning.
H.264 is Magic (2016)
PSA: For images, there's a finally successor to jpeg: JPEG XL (.jxl) - has lossy and lossless mode; is progressive (you can download just the first parts of the bitstream to get a lower resolution image; and other benefits!)https://jpegxl.info/
Firefox Android now supports Tampermonkey
Greasemonkey was the good one and then something happened with it and it was no longer the best choice. I'm not sure what.The same repeated with Tampermonkey. It now has telemetry built into it, at one time w/ no privacy policy.https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/6hs59w/tampermonke...The good one now is Violentmonkey. Has been for some time.Does Mozilla have an allowlist for these? If so I don't like it.
Good riddance, PayPal
The customer service angle sucks, no question, and I'm worried about getting into similar trouble (I sell downloadable games via PayPal).But I actually think holding an issues worth of revenue in reserve is a decent enough compromise. If the company goes bankrupt before an issue ships, for whatever reason, PayPal themselves are going to be on the hook for refunding every single payment, as well as chargeback fees that may apply.PayPal's fees are around 5% - what's their gross profit on each transaction, 1-2% at most?So if there's a 2% chance of an issue going awry and angry people starting chargebacks, a magazine 50 issues old could turn into a net loss for PayPal overnight, which is why even merchants with long and clean track records get stung by this.PayPal's freeze on that money means their end is covered, and you can still bring the sales to a bank and get a line of credit to cover the printing costs.The way PayPal handles the customer service end rightfully earns their horrible reputation. But too many people act like the risk itself is not there, or that there's a clear, obvious line between fraudulent businesses that con artists start and solid trustworthy businesses that we start. If PayPal wasn't as aggressive with their fraud prevention, they'd be skinned alive.And, as other people are pointing out in this thread, standard merchant accounts are not immune from the same level of shoot first, ask questions later fraud prevention.
Firefox Hello
I saw the tag line, liked what I saw until "powered by Telefonica".Seriously, I've lived in more than half of the European countries for a while, and never ever EVER saw such a shitty internet service as in Spain over their network. Lack of service for hours every day, substandard speeds... It made me anticipate a move to Portugal by one year because of their shitty service.
Freedom and security issues on x86 platforms
Unbelievable. Yet again, we have a post on finding x86 alternative that's most FOSS friendly. Yet again, the author is unaware of or ignores the only architecture that's open, has GPL cores, and an ecosystem. That's SPARC. Oracle's T1 and T2 cores are open-source to study. More appropriately, Cobham-Gaisler's Leon3 HW is dual-licensed under GPL and commercial. The Leon4 is 4-cores. SPARC ISA is open. Open Firmware exists.So, why is SPARC left off in all these analyses? It's right there ready to pick up and deploy. More open, easy to acquire, and trustworthy (far as licensing) than than a POWER chip although slower for sure.
Some bad Git situations and how I got myself out of them
I can't believe no one has responded yet with "use a GUI". After gaining a basic understanding of how branches and merges work, and I do mean basic, I've never been able to screw up a local repo with a GUI client enough that I haven't been able to recover with the same GUI tools.I understand that people need to know how to use their tools, but for git most people can get away with the very basic usage that GUIs provide. If you've made some unrecoverable mistake with an important set of changes, you can always review the history in the same GUI and reimplement the important changes in a new branch.
Why PS4 downloads are so slow
Want to see something like this for (Apple's) App Store. Downloads are fast, but the App Store experience itself is so, so slow. Takes maybe five seconds to load search results or reviews even on a wi-fi connection.
Twitter forces all new users to enter a valid phone number
They have been doing this for any account registered from a VPN or Tor. However, you can simply appeal the block and tell them you haven't tweeted and not broken any rules.They will send you an automated mail, offering to validate your phone number, or reply to the mail if your problem is not solved. Just reply to the mail.Unfortunately, processing the request takes anywhere between 10 minutes and 2 weeks; usually a couple days at least. I assume this is on purpose to make it cumbersome for spammers.They always reply with the same boilerplate, but the account will be unlocked: Your account is now unlocked, and we’re sorry for the inconvenience. Twitter has automated systems that find and remove automated spam accounts and it looks like your account got caught up in one of these spam groups by mistake. This sometimes happens when an account exhibits automated behavior in violation of the Twitter Rules (https://twitter.com/rules). Again, we apologize for the inconvenience. Please do not respond to this email as replies will not be monitored.
Joan Feynman has died
I read "Surely your joking Mr. Feynman" a few years ago, but to this day I somehow never knew he had a sister that was an accomplished scientist.
Google to end the “top stories carousel” benefit to AMP next spring
The article and some of the comments here seem to be over-interpreting this change.This is NOT ending AMP, and I don't know where anyone's getting that idea.It will continue to rank by "page experience signals", and presumably AMP pages will continue to be the standard to beat.In other words, if you can go ahead and replicate AMP's loading speed on your own (maybe self-hosted AMP?) then awesome.I do hope sites do that, because sites loading instantly rather than taking 5 seconds is a huge win.But in practice non-AMP news sites are still filled with bloat that makes them take 5 seconds to load.AMP has massively increased the performance of many news publishers forced to switch to AMP. We'll see if publishers are now motivated to try to make their native sites equally fast. I'm not holding my breath, though. I assume they'll stick with AMP because they don't want to re-architect their sites, or don't have the technical bandwidth to do so.But this way Google appears more neutral with "objective" page performance measures, rather than explicitly favoring any single standard.EDIT: the URL and title have since been changed by mods to a Google blog post. The original article/submission I was referring to was: https://themarkup.org/google-the-giant/2020/11/19/as-antitru...
Amazon illegally fired activist workers, Labor Board finds
I'm clicking through all the links in this article and can't find a single bit from Amazon's point of view. But my hazy memory says Amazon's story is they were fired because they were sending mass emails through the internal Amazon email system trying to unionize and wouldn't quit and use some other means of communication even after being counseled.You'd expect the NYT's to give both side's at a minimum, or is Amazon a cartoon villain ran by a duck who swims in a silo of gold coins?
Widelands is a free, open-source real-time strategy game
I've always liked OSS games, for the big reason that they're usually multi-platform, so you can play them on Linux and Mac OS too.I also recommend:Spring RTS (amazing RTS engine, clone of Total Annihilation) UrbanTerror (unfortunate name, reasonable clone of Counter Strike)
Show HN: Emoji to Scale
Goat: 45cmDuck: 50cmMight as well say “shuffled emojis with random data attached”
Copilot sells code other people wrote
Sorry for the unproductive tone of this comment, but there's something about the attitude of this tweet that really grinds my gears.Any time someone invents something new and incredible, there's always a crowd of negative nancies eager to discredit and explain why the invention is nothing new and a detrement to society.I don't understand why someone would willingly share their code on github where it is publicly available just to complain when others make use of that knowledge.'co-pilot just sells code other people wrote' is such a ridiculous understatement of what co-pilot does. Instead of marvelling at the human ingenuity that went into creating it, they sneer at the audacity of openAI to do something without first asking their permission.
ButtFish – Transmit Morse Code of chess moves to your butt
To complete the memetic conjunction, HN will surely be abuzz at the fact that the underlying buttplug library is, in fact, written in Rust. For when memory safety really matters: https://github.com/buttplugio/buttplug
Buy hi-resolution satellite images of any place on earth
What's interesting to me is that the pricing isn't that unique. That's pretty normal for a list price. $7 sq km + 25 sq km min (basically the size of the image).That's probably because they're (I think?) buying tasking capacity from other companies, so the pricing can't be below the rate they negotiate. That probably results in then negotiating a below list price from a few companies and then setting prices that wind up being close to the average list price for the industry.The difference is two very key things: 1) no minimum overall buy 2) fully public pricingThat price is pretty normal, but usually you have to commit to at least a few thousand dollars worth. 25 sq km min per target is also pretty normal, but the contracts usually require you committing to at least a few hundred of those.Next is public list pricing. Every company has list pricing, and that's basically what smaller customers will pay. Large customers negotiate it down, of course. But just explicitly advertising the list pricing is also a big deal and not normally done. It's usually way too hidden.A lot of folks (hi there Joe) have been pushing for more transparency in pricing, and a lot of companies have been talking about chasing the "long tail" of small customers for a long time, but it's really good to see someone actually doing it.
Open Assistant – project meant to give everyone access to a great chat based LLM
Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34654809.
Google Kills Wave
It failed because it was completely invisible.Facebook spams your inbox. They make sure you know that you have an account and that people are trying to reach you (or tell the world about their cat, etc).With wave, it's silent. There was activity on a wave I was following in January. I found out about it in March. Someone replied to something I said on July 21st. I'm only just finding out now. What kind of a communication tool is that? It's like they're selling a phone that can't ring.The other UI and social issues were important but weren't fatal. If Google had actually notified users when they got new messages, they would have logged into wave, sent more messages and wave would have lasted longer.Instead, messages were sent but never read, so Wave lost all the momentum it had.
I found Prezi's source code
Why even have a limited scope on bounty programs? (This is not the only time I've seen that.) Is it only to limit payout? Are their legal reasons? For example, their client tablet applications are ineligible. I just don't get the reasoning.In their position, I'd pay him the $500 and remove the idea of scope. I'm just curious if there's some counter-argument I'm not thinking about.
Google Cardboard
It's very cool that they are doing this. But, for anyone who tries it, there's something very important to keep in mind: Low latency is critical to VR! Unfortunately, Android sensors and graphics pipelines have very poor latency. If you try this and get terrible motion sickness, don't dismiss VR as a vomit inducer.In fact, many people have reported that spending time in VR, and taking a break whenever motion sickness creeps up, actually reduces motion sickness outside of VR. As in, people are saying "After playing in my Rift for a few weeks, I can suddenly read in the car for the first time!"
Universal SSL
I have very mixed feelings about this. Yes, on the one hand this is great news because a lot of websites who otherwise never would have bothered with SSL can now be protected from snooping or traffic manipulation on your local (possibly very insecure: your neighborhood Starbucks' wifi) network.On the other hand, this completely destroys the premise of HTTPS that you have an encrypted connection to the website you are visiting. If this catches on big time, seeing the padlock will only tell you that you have an encrypted connection to Cloudflare's network, and no way of knowing if the traffic is still encrypted beyond that, or that it's flowing in plaintext between Cloudflare and the actual target server. Worse, you will have absolutely no way of knowing if the content you're seeing is what the target server originally sent, or that it has been manipulated (or wiretapped) by Cloudflare itself or any of the other hops while en route.If you are going to use this, just keep in mind that you're giving Cloudflare - a US company subject to the Patriot Act and the whole shebang of 3-letter agencies - the ability to collect, intercept, store, and manipulate every single byte of traffic sent between your users and your servers.
What Doesn't Seem Like Work?
This excerpt -"what he really liked was solving problems. The text of each chapter was just some advice about solving them. He said that as soon as he got a new textbook he'd immediately work out all the problems—to the slight annoyance of his teacher, since the class was supposed to work through the book gradually."is literally me. I did that. Every year at my school I did exactly that. Once I actually turned in my solutions and my math teacher was quite upset because she didn't know what I'd do for the rest of the year in her class. She thought I was being arrogant and I should take in the material slowly, not swallow it all like a whale. But I wasn't arrogant or anything, because unfortunately this skill didn't transfer to the rest of my classes. I wasn't particularly good at history or physics or anything else, only math. Even now, I have tons of Schaums at my home. Like this one - http://www.amazon.com/Schaums-000-Solved-Problems-Calculus/d... I work problems in it just because it is a craving - I simply have to solve it. Sadly, society doesn't pay for this sort of addiction. I have been a professional programmer for the past 2 decades to pay the bills, but I secretly hate programming, debugging, programmers, git, the whole enterprise - just seems so stupid & futile. But hey, atleast I can spend my salary on Schaums.
Why's that company so big? I could do that in a weekend
I often hear this logic from inexperienced engineers. My answer to them is: Then why don't you do it? Recently a junior engineer said this to me about Uber, and I helped him to understand - His logic was "it's just a taxi app".There were loads of Taxi apps before Uber and loads of them after Uber. Yet none of them were uber?Sure that a medium complexity CRUD app can do the pickup and scheduling, and spit out some json to the app.But what if you have 100,000 journeys taking place simultaneously, and you must track their positions so that you can render the journey map on the invoice?Can you do live traffic planning and re-route around the busy traffic on the fly?Does your weekend include the full billing system? This is a mandatory requirement for a business.Can you spot busy periods and increase the fares according to the laws of supply and demand? All online in realtime? Can you continuously A/B test this to optimise profits?Can you deal with the fact that maps and roads are always changing?All of these and more are the things that make Uber, Uber, otherwise you're just one of those shitty taxi apps that failed.Still think you can build it in a weekend?
Build a digital clock in Conway's Life
Digging throught the Conway's Life rabbit hole is a fun trip back to what the WWW used to be like:https://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/ca/http://www.math.cornell.edu/~lipa/mec/lesson6.htmlhttp://kaytdek.trevorshp.com/projects/computer/neuralNetwork...http://psoup.math.wisc.edu/mcell/rullex_life.htmlI love it!
Stanford Professor Loses Political Battle To Simplify Tax Filing Process
This whole thread is full of comments from people who obviously haven't read the article / listened to the podcast in question[1].Joseph Bankman proposed ReadyReturn in California, which is the kind of tax return pretty much the entirety of the rest of the western world uses. I.e. instead of an empty return, it's pre-filled in with the details the government knows anyway. This vastly simplifies things for most people, especially those whose main income comes from working one job.This was in no way a change to the tax system, or what taxes people had to pay. The government would just hand you a filled-in form instead of an empty one, so you could make corrections instead of filling it in from scratch.It had north of 99% approval ratings by the people in the test groups for it, something unheard of when it comes to government programs.As a parlor trick Bankman would carry around a thick binder with the feedback the program had received from taxpayers. When he wanted to convince someone he'd start paging through it and ask the person he was talking to to say "stop", to ensure he wasn't cherry-picking. He'd then start reading raving reviews of the program starting at that page, some in all-caps from people who couldn't contain their excitement.It didn't make it into law, partly due to lobbying by the likes of Intuit, but more interestingly, I thought, because Grover Norquist, the well known promoter of the "Taxpayer Protection Pledge" took the counterintuitive view that just making the process easier equated to a new tax, since taxpayers might end up paying taxes already on the books that they might have previously unintentionally evaded.That to me is the most bizarre detail about this entire story. It's likely that it would have passed if not for the strange interpretation of one man to this not-a-new-tax of it effectively being a new tax, and his ability to sway the Republicans due to the political power his "Taxpayer Protection Pledge" holds over Republicans.1. http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/03/22/521132960/episo...
Google, Facebook, and Amazon have fundamentally transformed the web
Andre, you're a swell developer and running into you in open source repos and here has always been educational. I would love reading what you write a lot more if there was less click-bait and sensationalism.This problem (the fact Google has a large majority in web browser and mobile device sales) is very concerning to me - the data is interesting and the points are relevant but I have a very hard time reading past titles like "the web is dying". I hope you read this with the intended respectful tone I wrote it in.
A home-made lithographically-fabricated integrated circuit
Awesome. For those considering exploring some of these steps in their own garage -- the chemistry is dangerous, perhaps HF in particular, as it doesn't hurt, it just kills you a few hours later.Can you do this in a garage? Absolutely, but learn everything you need to know from an ensemble of safety-minded mentors before you strike out on your own.It's not just about safety for you, proper disposal of these chemicals is essential for the many generations to come. Sometimes it is inexpensive, sometimes it is costly. You need to know how before you start, or it costs a lot more.(Also, you can get someone else to pay for the hardware, the infrastructure, the material, the resists, the reagents, the safety training, and the waste disposal if you work/volunteer at a university's photolithography facility. They'll probably pay you, too.)
Paul Buchheit on Joining Google, How to Become a Great Engineer, and Happiness
> Someone who can do that is ridiculous. Talk about 10x engineers. That's more like 1000x. And it's good, clean code too. Literally no number of median engineers can do that. You can give me a million median engineers and they would never be able to do that. They would just make a huge mess.This is probably one of the most truest thing I've read about our profession.Linus Torvalds, Steve Wozniak comes to mind, who else?
Programming Fonts – Test Drive
It drives me crazy when fonts look at the old convention of "strike through zero" and for some reason decides they need to be different from the convention and allow the strike to pass the edges of the zero circle. "Anka/Coder" in the linked article is guilty of this.When the strike passes the edge of the circle, it's no longer a zero, it's a Danish or Norwegian "Ö" (Ø). It's been a part of their alphabet for centuries.The whole purpose of the "strike through zero" is to stop it from being mixed up with Omega. By badly thought out design and a need to be different for no reason, you just returned to square one, because the font is now unreadable for anyone that knows or works with the letter Ø.
Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize
Can we just get something straight about the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant?Although it was a 1960's design, the reason it failed the way it did was because of one design flaw...Its backup generators were not placed up on the hills above it. Rather, the backup generators were situated below sea level underneath the reactor buildings. DERP.Fukushima Dai-ichi survived the Magnitude 9 earthquake. It did not survive the tsunami because said tsunami overcame the tidal wall in front of it, and then the backup generators got flooded. But for that one event, if the generators were placed up on higher ground, the outcome would have been so much different.I have first-hand knowledge, due to..1) Knowing the area. I lived in my Japanese father-in-law's mountain house, situated 1.5km out of Miyakoji-machi, Tamura-shi. That town was just inside the 20km evacuation zone from the power plant, the mountain house was just outside at 21km - myself and my family lived in our own house in the outskirts of Koriyama city.2) My (now deceased) Japanese father-in-law was president of the Hitachi subsiduary company which built Fukushima Dai-ich No.4 reactor, which wasn't operating at the time of the earthquake and subsequent tsunami but did suffer an explosion thought due to hydrogen gas from the spent fuel situated in the Spent Fuel Pool in its upper level.3) Mentioned in point (1) above, I owned a house in Tobu New Town on the Eastern outskirts of Koriyama city, and I was working at Flextronics in Koriyama at the time the M9 quake occurred - things got a tad 'exciting' at the time. I should write a book.My point is that nuclear power is safe, as long as all disaster scenarios are taken into account - in Fukushima Dai-ichi's case, for some reason (possibly financial?), it was decided that the tsunami barrier was sufficient (it wasn't) for the job, and at some point in time it was decided that placing backup generators underneath the buildings was sufficient - that unfortunately did not turn out to be the case :/And lastly, I still fully support the idea of nuclear power.
Former Twitter Employees Charged with Spying for Saudi Arabia
What other tech companies have in house spies. NordVPN? Wikipedia? Facebook? Gmail?
The cost of 1GB of mobile data in 228 countries (Feb 2020)
Not all Internet experiences are equal though. 1 GB of internet in Pakistan ($0.69) ≠ 1 GB of internet in Canada ($12.55). I would gladly trade my Pakistani internet plan for my Canadian internet plan.Last month, when I was in Pakistan, my experience was:+ highly censored to the point where even services like Cloudflare's edge-node's within the country were being MiTM-ed by the censors [0];+ I couldn't use "any mode of communication such as VPN by means of which communication becomes hidden or encrypted is a violation of PTA regulations" in the words of the Pakistan Telecommunication Authoruty (PTA) —Pakistan's FCC-equivalent. I asked them if TLS/SSL was included but they never tweeted back; and+ I didn't have access to services like Paypal, and when a service hadn't rolled out "globally", it wasn't available to me.Oh, and while I had "unlimited" internet, I was subject to my carrier's "Fair Use Policy" which had an unspecified maximum download limit after which your internet would be cut off. This was reported by a lot of people during the initial work-from-home boost during the pandemic when home-data-usage spiked.Now that I'm in Canada, my internet is nearly unrestricted.Edit: previous said my ISP restricted IRC. Just rechecked, it no longer does.[0]: https://twitter.com/amingilani/status/1283448960666009601
The Ultimate Guide to Inflation
I've wondered what the effect our modern digital economy has had on consumer price inflation.Normally, an increase in money supply would cause consumer goods to increase in price, since more people are able to buy them and there is a limit on how much of any particular physical good is available.This isn't the case, however, for digital goods. If there are suddenly 100 million new people who want to buy a Netflix subscription, it isn't like we are going to see the price of a Netflix subscription go up because there isn't enough Netflix to go around. The marginal cost for a new subscriber is practically zero, so there should be no price increase caused by a shortage.It would be easy to see that inflation would be essentially zero if ALL goods people wanted to buy were digital ones... no amount of demand can eat up the supply, since supply is practically infinite.Of course, in the real world, some goods are digital and some are physical. If you gave everyone $5000, some of that would go to Netflix subscriptions, which wouldn't effect consumer prices, and some would go to buying TVs to play Netflix on, which WOULD cause inflation.I am curious how much of our current "low inflation even with an increasing money supply" is caused by our increasing spending on non-exclusionary goods.
LAPD Officer Killed During Training Exercise Was Investigating Cops About Rape
Lots of speculation and innuendo in that article.- Officer Tipping wasn’t investigating rape, but simply took the victim statement.- The officer in the training exercise that killed Officer Tipping has the same name as the officer in Tipping’s report, but they are not sure if it is the same person.- The medical examiner ruled the killing an accident. The article then quotes a tweet that says medical examiners undercount murders by police, implying collusion or coverup.- There is no recording of the training. The article states that often video recordings are made, implying a cover up.Abuse of power by the police is heinous. They are supposed to be our protectors, so I hate it as much as the next person.But we must be led by fact not belief or we are no better than those who believe the Big Lie.
Show HN: Turn your Pandas dataframe into a Tableau-style UI for visual analysis
I love this, it seems like the heavy lifting is done by the web app here: https://github.com/Kanaries/graphic-walkerI’m amazed that this is open source, it’s incredibly useful.I wish there was a profiler implementation, the best profiler is in GCP’s DataPrep.
Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies
A similar thing happened to me as a seller. I saw that one of my old textbooks was selling for a nice price, so I listed it along with two other used copies. I priced it $1 cheaper than the lowest price offered, but within an hour both sellers had changed their prices to $.01 and $.02 cheaper than mine. I reduced it two times more by $1, and each time they beat my price by a cent or two. So what I did was reduce my price by a few dollars every hour for one day until everybody was priced under $5. Then I bought their books and changed my price back.
Font Awesome, the pictographic font designed for use with Twitter Bootstrap
Brilliant. I absolutely love this, and will absolutely use Font Awesome in my next project.While the name Font Awesome is catchy, it doesn't say much about the product, and won't carry seo juice or meaning for your main selling point: better icons. A name like "fonticons" (pronounced like "emoticons") might be stronger, and you could own that term which may go generic (like "kleenex") if the technique is widely adopted.In fact, you could literally own it. After making sure a google search was relatively clean, and a USPTO.gov trademark search was clear, I just registered the domain fonticons.com, and would be happy to give it to you if you want it as a token of appreciation for your project.
Don't use Hadoop when your data isn't that big
Hooray! Some sense at last.I have worked for at least 3 different employers that claimed to be using "Big Data". Only one of them was really telling the truth.All of them wanted to feel like they were doing something special.The sad thing is, they were all special, each in their own particular way, but none of what made each company magic and special had anything to do with the size of the data that they were handling.Hadoop was required in exactly zero of these cases.Funnily enough, after I left one of them, they started to build lots of Hadoop-based systems for reasons which, as far as I could fathom, had more to do with the resumes of the engineers involved than the actual technical merits of the case.Sad, but 'tis the way of the world.
Minoca OS: A new open source operating system
Oh please. You have to start somewhere and this is where they're starting. By comparison, Linus' first announcement was: Hello everybody out there using minix - I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing since april, and is starting to get ready. I'd like any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat (same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons) among other things). I've currently ported bash(1.08) and gcc(1.40), and things seem to work. This implies that I'll get something practical within a few months, and I'd like to know what features most people would want. Any suggestions are welcome, but I won't promise I'll implement them :-) Linus ([email protected]) PS. Yes - it's free of any minix code, and it has a multi-threaded fs. It is NOT protable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that's all I have :-(. Good luck, guys. Post some docs to read.
Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2016)
Magic Leap | multiple positions | Dania Beach, FL; Mountain View, CA | Onsite | Full-Time; Intern | Visa (full time) | Computer Vision; Embedded; Machine Learning http://magicleap.com/Magic Leap is an eclectic group of visionaries, rocket scientists, wizards, and gurus from the fields of film, robotics, visualization, software, computing, and user experience. We are growing quickly, and this is the time to get on board and play a role in shaping the way people will be interacting with the world tomorrow.In the press: http://www.wired.com/2016/04/magic-leap-vr/We are hiring in the following areas: computer vision machine learning embedded systems software engineering hardware and pcb design android systems embedded algorithm optimization game dev tools (Unity, Unreal Engine) cloud computing/apis For more information or to apply: http://www.magicleap.com/#/wizards-wanted
Password Rules Are Bullshit
I agree with almost everything but the he loses me towards the end:> I had a bit of a sad when I realized that we were perfectly fine with users selecting a 10 character password that was literally "aaaaaaaaaa". In my opinion, the simplest way to do this is to ensure that there are at least (x) unique characters out of (y) total characters.Isn't that exactly what you're complaining about with your arbitrary password restrictions to begin with?I mean, I can imagine that a clueless user might have the illusion of safety if they're using something like "1q2w3e4r5t" but if I use "aaaaaaaaa" as a password on a website I know full well what I'm doing. So why even bother?I think there are two possible ways to look at this problem from a service provider perspective:- if the user getting their password stolen is a bad thing for you (i.e., you're a bank or something like that, and getting an account compromised will put you in trouble), then IMO the only satisfactory solution is to impose a password to the user. In effect these ridiculous password requirements are exactly that, except less convenient and secure. Cut to the chase and say "your bank password is Axei5aoc0i, write it down somewhere safe".- if the user getting their password stolen is not a problem for you because it's not your responsibility to handle these issues (like a hacker news account for instance) then just let the user pick whatever they want and deal with the consequences. If they care enough about it they'll care enough to pick a decent password. At most if you really want to be friendly give an indication that a password might be weak, but please don't disallow it.
Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub
The main thing I've taken away from the whole github situation is that, as a tech company, you should just entirely stay away from public involvement in the social justice sphere. That doesn't mean exclusively hiring white men and sending out Kalanick-style emails; it means keeping your work environment as professional and politically neutral as possible unless absolutely necessary.My employer does a good job of this. We have a lot of women and transgender (not so many POC) employees, but we don't have any special inclusivity initiatives or outreach programs, nor do we officially inject any related ideology into the businessplace. The expectation is that you conduct yourself professionally, and that you exercise your own discretion; the other side of the coin is that you correct what you might think is morally/terminologically wrong (such as confusing biological sex with gender) as diplomatically and non-confrontationally as possible; assume mistakes are honest and be polite in correcting them.As for Coraline herself, I would be skeptical that we are getting the full story here. In particular, I'm sure there is more to the "non-empathetic communication style" than the data scientist and other related incidents. Not to be a presumptive asshole, but I do get the impression from this kind of expose that she might be difficult to work with.
A Taxonomy of Technical Debt
This is a fantastic article.Contagion is a really great term. I've seen my poor abstractions be replicated by others on my team, to my horror -- "don't they see why I did that in this particular case, and not in this other case?" Of course, that's entirely, 100% my fault. I picked a poor abstraction, I put it in the code, I didn't document it well enough, and of COURSE other programmers are going to look to it when solving similar problems. They should!That said... Sometimes I spend a bunch of time finding the right abstraction for a feature that we end up not expanding. And then it feels bad that I spent all this extra time coming up with the "right" solution, instead of just hacking out something that works. Hmm...
Melatonin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know
Couple anecdotal points:- Used to have to sleep problems - mainly just my mind racing with all the (stress of) things I had to do. The symptoms were trouble sleeping and/or waking in the middle of the night with instant thoughts of projects, task lists.- Melatonin didn't help me much. Maybe their effect was too subtle on me - maybe I was using the wrong dose as mentioned in the post.- Magnesium Glycinate pills before sleep were a massive help in falling asleep and staying asleep. The only way I can describe its effects is helping me "control my brain waves". Sounds a bit non-technical but the effect is quite subtle . The idea to take these supplements were from previous discussions on HN.- Recently got a newborn baby - first child. These things will do more to knock you sleep cycle out whack than anything else I've experienced. Coincidentally, falling asleep and staying asleep is easier than ever. You just end up getting woken up by a tiny crying human at seemingly random times.
GnuPG can now be used to perform notarial acts in the State of Washington
So I get the impression GnuPG is considered obsolete by the security community. I'm unclear for which of the many possible scenarios it can be used for.Is there, right now, a better (security-wise and usability-wise) way to digitally authenticate a message (document/binary/payload)?
Build Your Own Text Editor
What I instantly liked is, how literally it starts from scratch and builds a couple of lines at a time.Can anybody refer to a similar step by step guide to building a compiler?
Habits of Expert Software Designers
Most of these points (like the crucial importance of context/looking around, of users, of figuring out what you're not doing, etc) are important parts of software development.But the problem is, unless you already have the requisite experience to show you what these bullet points really refer to in practice, you're not going to really make sense of this list, not in a way that will actually help you do anything differently."Always learn about the users" for example is much too vague: which users? how do you talk to them? when do you trust them and when do you not take their feedback at face value? I don't think you can learn this sort of thing outside of a real life context.
“Amazon is holding over 4.2M dollars, suffocating our business”
This basically happens for a good reason. Basically, the potential scam is to sign up to a marketplace and list very popular products at lower prices than everyone else. Then ship empty packages or boxes full of rocks. The marketplace will pay you every few days, and if you are "shipping internationally" they won't figure it out for a few weeks. So trust is gained slowly.The real takeaway here is that this guy pays $5,000 USD per month to get a support rep on a platform he sells a million dollars a month worth of goods on, of which it already takes a decent percent, and the support rep can't even talk to anyone with any power. This is the dark side of monopolies.
Cloudflare and the Wayback Machine, joining forces for a more reliable Web
Was worried about CF getting their claws dug into archive.org, but on reading, this is a decidedly non-evil deal, actually it sounds wonderful. Still, I worry if there might be some unseen long term interest in the archive.Never forget Dejanews
“User engagement” is code for “addiction”
I don't like the current trend of social media apps burying users under push notifications, calls to action, and other engagement hooks.However, there's a second, parallel problem adding fuel to the fire: The more we talk about overindulgence in social media (or Netflix, or video games, or fast food) as an act perpetrated by evil corporations on us helpless individuals, the less sense of individual agency we give ourselves. I'm not suggesting that we let social media companies off the hook, but battling this problem is going to require more than simply shaming them in Medium posts. We have to start reminding people that they are in control of their decisions, and that they can take steps to reduce their social media usage to healthy levels.I know the common refrain is "Delete Facebook!" but that's the equivalent of abstinence-only education. We need to start talking about how to configure Screen Time on iOS, or how to use Facebook's built-in tools to hide content you don't want to see. We also need to encourage people to take control of their feeds, muting users and topics who draw them into unproductive discussions.
This Blog is now hosted on a GPS/LTE modem
It's amazing that posting this on HN has not melted it down. Are you using an edge CDN like Cloudflare to provide caching?
Massachusetts health notifications app installed without users’ knowledge
Most of the comments on that app as well as here are probably wrong. I'd suspect that everyone who had the app "installed without their permission" opted into the Android COVID-19 Exposure Notification program. This was deployed by Google as part of an update to Google Play Services.When you go to your phone's settings with this update, there's an option to enable COVID-19 Exposure Notifications. When you turn it on, it prompts you for your location and will download your region's app that uses your phone's new capabilities to connect to the appropriate health authorities.Massachusetts just opted into this program in the last couple of weeks. I'm honestly not sure why they did it so late - this would have been helpful earlier. Apple iPhones also have this capability, including interoperability with Android phones, and iPhone users in Massachusetts are also able to turn on this setting.Now, if someone can actually prove that they didn't opt into the COVID-19 Exposure Notifications, then I'd be concerned. But my guess is they opted in when it came out, but there was no app for their region, so nothing was downloaded and the feature did nothing. Then, Massachusetts rolled out the app now and lots of people who configured their phones earlier in the pandemic got a new app. They granted permission for it, perhaps months ago.
Ocean drone captures video from inside a hurricane
In the article they say there are 50feet waves. But it's hard to appreciate that on the video. Is there a way to better look at these picture to get a better sense of the scale ?
Microsoft Exchange stops passing mail due to bug on 1/1/22
Phone numbers are not numbers. Zip codes are not numbers. Model numbers are not numbers. Characters are not numbers. Which part of this progression escapes you?Seriously, if you can’t add, subtract, multiply, and divide them, then they aren‘t numbers and you shouldn’t use a numeric data type for them. This is CS 101 knowledge. How badly does MS run their engineering?
Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?
Having been an interviewer at a FAANG for many years, I can explain some of the logic behind it. I'm not saying this logic is valid, but it's how we got here, imho.First: we no longer trust the hiring manager alone, because probably they aren't a strong developer. We instead trust strong developers that are well trained at evaluating good devs. At the same time, we don't want to thrust a dev onto a hiring manager, so they also need to interview you too and have a say.Second: Is it really fair to have just one or two developers evaluate you? When I first was an interviewer, I liked everybody! I would have hired them all. So getting multiple data points matters. Best to have at least a couple dev interviews.Then there's the whole problem of needing to evaluate you on multiple dimensions. Can one interview really tell if you're good problem solving, coding, algorithms/data structures, and any specialization the role has? What about the soft skills aspect? We're going to need to have at least 3 or 4 interviews to cover all these aspects. These roles pay a huge sum of money, so there's a lot of worry that someone will be hired who doesn't really meet the bar, you know?But now we have a bigger problem: if we're going to invest 4+ people to spend an hour of time with you each, we'd better have some data points that you're worth that investment. So maybe we need one or two initial interviews ahead of time to weed out any obviously unlikely candidates.After that, it's every other company going "Oh shit, Amazon does 6 interviews? We should do that too!".
Show HN: Pornpen.ai – AI-Generated Porn
Inevitable successor to this: a TikTok-style adaptive porn feed that learns exactly what you like and starts generating porn customized to your kinks and preferences.
Show HN: I open sourced the QR designer from my failed startup
> In order to maximize designer space, the url that the QR codes links to is expected to be exactly 25 characters longSeems like a cool QR code, but also limited for general use.
Ask HN: Is the market bad, or am I having the worst luck job hunting?
I hate to say this, stop applying.Find a recruiter on LinkedIn. This is what it has come to. There are thousands of resumes being sent at my company, yet the recruiter can't find anyone. Why? Because no one is applying through her link. The regular resume channel is reserved for bots at this point. Contact a person and you have more chances.
Don’t Be Evil: How Google Screwed a Startup
When things are this broken, it's an opportunity. Maybe it's time for someone to start an AdSense competitor whose focus is customer service. It seems to be deeply embedded in Google's DNA not so much to abuse AdSense users as to treat them like components in a machine. They treat AdSense users much as they do servers. Uncertain about a server? Toss it; the system is designed to be fault tolerant.Maybe Google thinks they have to behave this way to scale. But my gut tells me they could get away with being a lot nicer and still scale. If so there is an opportunity for a competitor to move in here and surprise people with better customer service, as Zappos did in shoes.It could help to have better fraud detection technology. The more accurately you can tell the innocent from the guilty, the less draconian you need to be with the innocent. And while it sounds unlike Google to have left room to do significantly better, the way they treat the innocent implies their technology may be insufficient.
You’re not anonymous. I know your name, email, and company.
Several people mention Ghostery[0] against trackers. It offers only partial protection. It is possible to fingerprint a browser without any custom tracking data.https://panopticlick.eff.org/ Instead of a script to embed, these firms could provide an API to identify users from the server side. The scripts that captures the profile would be served by the sites themselves rather than from third party services.Toast.A possible solution would be anonymize the browser fingerprint, at least in private mode, ie lie about the details of the system.Google, Mozilla, Opera, can you hear me?--[0] http://www.ghostery.com/
Square Cash
Seems to work amazingly although I'm a bit concerned about the security. A friend sent me $1. I get an email from square, link to website where I entered my debit #, expiry and postal. It deposited directly to my debit card (I didnt even know you could do that). The deposit already arrived!"Checking Card Adjustment POS Pin (Credit) $1.00"So I sent him $1 back (to: my friend, cc: [email protected], subject: $1). And it instantly sent it to him. I didn't have to verify my details or anything.I'd feel a lot more comfortable if there was a security blog explaining how they are validating that I indeed sent the email and it wasn't simply spoofed.Edit - I did this from Gmail which I presume authenticates all of the emails via dkim? I'm guessing this won't work as automatic for other providers?Edit2 - Just attempted with another friend and had to verify manually. The automatic-authorization appears to only apply when it's between two previously validated parties.
Only 90s Web Developers Remember This
Can anyone explain the bit about 1x1.gif being the only way, to this day, to vertically center elements? AFAIK there's still no way to vertically center a dynamic height element without javascript, so if invisible gifs can do it I'd at least like to know how.
A decentralized web would give power back to the people online
A real barrier to a decentralised web is the difficulty of installing software on a server. I know that sounds really mundane and inconsequential in the broader debate about a decentralised web, but consider the following...Imagine if installing a server-side chat app, message board, project management app, or CMS were as easy as installing a desktop app. In a desktop app, it's usually one click to start the install and then, if necessary, you're guided through a few screens to complete the install. Want to uninstall? The OS (operating system) will provide a feature to manage that.Now consider how complicated installing on a server is in contrast. Upload you files to a folder or directory, enable permissions, set configurations not just for your server but also the language the program is written in - the list goes on. No wonder SaaS (Software as a Service) is thriving like never before. Who, other than technical folks, could possibly have the time, interest or inclination to set up a self-hosted solution when the barrier is so high? Perhaps some in the tech field would like to keep it that way? Would Saas be less attractive if installing a self-hosted solution was simple, easy, quick and secure?Surely an essential part of a decentralised web is that companies, organisations and individuals choose to run their own software using open protocols and data formats. But until the ease, security and simplicity of installation improves for web software, it simply won't happen on a large scale.
Facebook admits it must do more to stop the spread of misinformation
This article criticizes Facebook for firing the human editors that had been keeping things sane. However they were pushed to that by accusations of bias in the right-wing media. Accusations that looked likely to lead to a Congressional investigation.See, for example, http://thehill.com/policy/technology/279361-top-republican-d....Now they are in a situation where they are damned if they do, damned if they don't. And people immersed in echo chambers will accuse them of bias no matter what.But the entire system is fundamentally broken. Pay per ad incentives lead to rewarding viral content. And content that induces outrage is far more likely to go viral than pretty much anything else. Plus it goes viral before people do pesky things like fact checks. And the more of this that you have been exposed to, the more reasonable you find outrageous claims. Even if you know that the ones that you have seen were all wrong.For an in depth treatment of the underlying issues, I highly recommend Trust Me, I'm Lying.
“The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason”
This book [0] was quite enjoyable to read.I realize the article is about far beyond the book, but in case anyone has not read it yet, I highly recommend it as some good grade Sci-Fi.[0] https://www.amazon.com/Seveneves-Neal-Stephenson/dp/00623345...
Ask HN: Best talks of 2018?
Recent but great talk posted here, What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System [1] by Prof. Michael Levin. He talks about how long term low energy electrical networks between all cells in living organisms shape how the organism grows. I think what he talks about will be the future of medicine as it allows for an amazing degree of high level control over how animals grow.1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjD1aLm4Thg
Off-Facebook activity
In my profile, they managed to obtain a `PURCHASE` event from Macy's -- for an in-person purchase at a physical store. Macy's has my email address and certainly linked it to my credit card number, but this is nonetheless seriously creepy.I just tried to change my email address on Facebook and discovered that they canonicalize plus and dot variations in gmail.com addresses, and thus claim that the new email address is already associated with an account. Ended up having to create a completely new email alias on my own domain.
Three free meals available daily for any New Yorker
One of those things I wish could out last this virus.We'd be so much better off as a society if we could at least keep our people fed.The comments in here seem a little negative currently but this is great news. Think of all the people in NYC who didn't have access to clean and regular food before the virus.
Inkscape 1.0 Release Candidate
I'm really struggling with the multiple comments saying that inkscape has buggy UI or bad UX.I used inkscape extensively about 5-6 years ago and had a really good experience. A couple of months ago I used the up to date version for some ad hoc work (designing a logo) to the same effect.I think this is a great milestone for a great app. Thumbs up to the people making this possible!
Amazon added a non-compete after the employee entered the U.S. on an L1B visa
Off topic but how much of Jeff's wealth would it take to transform Amazon into the best place to work in the world? Solid pay, fair employment, etc, the whole thing across the board.Even if it took 2/3rds, Jeff would still be one of the most wealthy individuals in the world.Jeff could make a real change and set and example. Yet he doesn't and I for one can not understand why after you have more than a billion in wealth you would need any more.
Reddit app got 50M downloads by making mobile web experience miserable
I want to thank the admins that made the app and the web one of the worst. You helped cure my reddit addiction. I now open it only once or twice a month.You cannot view comment replies on the web. You cannot view any sub on the web. You cannot even read full comments.Seriously. Thanks. I even started studying for my exams!
A former Uber engineer's disaster story
This may be an egregious question, but what does the Uber app actually do that makes it so big? It displays a map with some moving dots on them, allows you to pick a location, and asks the server for a route and price. Plus a bit of workflow for signup, credit card, reviews; not a huge number of screens.I appreciate the difficulties of getting an app to fit in a fixed space having worked on a point of sale system that had to run on a MIPS device with 32MB of Flash, of which half was occupied by Windows CE. It's not really clear to me why Uber's app needs to be so large and complicated other than the availability of a large amount of money, high-powered engineers, and shiny new unproven technologies.(The compact app fit in about eight megs in the end, plus another meg or so for the file which defined all the screens; it was written in the least trendy, unsexiest framework known to man, Windows MFC in C++)
Grafana, Loki, and Tempo will be relicensed to AGPLv3
All of the most important software of our lifetime is going through this relicensing effort as the creators attempt to capture the value of what it enables. This is not some nefarious plan to screw over the community. It's a very measured and thoughtful way to ensure the long term progress and continuity of these projects. If the core companies maintaining them did not do this they would eventually die and these projects would slowly rot. Hopefully over time rather than having everyone choose their own licenses we end up with some form of standardisation.
Ask HN: GPT-3 reveals my full name – can I do anything?
> I try to hide my real name whenever possible, out of an > abundance of caution. You can still find it if you search > carefully, but in today's hostile internet I see this kind > of soft pseudonymity as my digital personal space, and expect > to have it respected. Without judging whether the goal is good or not, I will gently point out that your current approach doesn't seem to be effective. A Google search for "BoppreH" turned up several results on the first page with what appears to be your full name, along with other results linking to various emails that have been associated with that name. Results include Github commits, mailing list archives, and third-party code that cited your Github account as "work by $NAME".As a purely practical matter -- again, not going into whether this is how things should be, merely how they do be -- it is futile to want the internet as a whole to have a concept of privacy, or to respect the concept of a "digital personal space". If your phone number or other PII has ever been associated with your identity, that association will be in place indefinitely and is probably available on multiple data broker sites.The best way to be anonymous on the internet is to be anonymous, which means posting without any name or identifier at all. If that isn't practical, then using a non-meaningful pseudonym and not posting anything personally identifiable is recommended.
Jacob Ziv has died
Sad news. Just recently Abraham Lempel [0] died, just days after I tasked my 16 yo daughter to implement an lzw compression as a part of her programming education. I chose this particular task for her because many years ago I have implemented an lzw compression myself, years ago, learning a lot about bits, masks and gifs in the process. R.I.P.[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Lempel
What happened in this GPT-3 conversation?
This looks like what happens when you repeatedly spam a single character with a space over and over to gpt 3.5. Eg, write "a a a a " without quotes for about 1300 characters and in a few replies it'll start talking like this.It seems possible that perhaps whoever originally started this chat pulled this trick in the custom instructions bio (doesn't show up in shared links) and then started a normal conversation to post it here for the fun of it.
Two things about SOPA/PIPA and then I'll shut up
A modest proposal for Joel:Ten years as a period for copyright? How about you go first.Since the tech industry understands copyright so much better than everyone else it might be good for them to set an example and show all the 'old' dodo-like industries how it's done.After ten years all code should be made open-source. Google has made plenty of money - and I think it's time that they release their algorithm so other innovative and disruptive companies can make better use of it. I mean, how many Google bikes can one ride behind?Fogcreek has had a nice run too - surely some open-sourced FogBugz would be of great value in second and third world countries that have emergent tech sectors but can't possibly afford the cost of the real service? Certainly, even 10-year-old Fogbugz is going to help society a lot more than license-free copies of My Big Fat Greek Wedding [2002] or Stuart Little 2 [2002].Anyway, since many of these places exchange rates means they could never purchase software in the first place, it's not like there would be any lost sales, right?Oh another thing: very important:: a short term of copyright like a few years would be the biggest boon to Hollywood ever as they could simply sit and wait for works to drop into the public domain before turning around and producing them without paying the creators a penny. There would be tons of creators strung along via a studio option - just long enough till the work dropped into the public domain. It would harder than ever for individuals to profit from their creative work and easier than ever for Hollywood to make money off of it.So - sorry to say - I'm a bit disappointed! But that's just my fault - assuming that people who knew so well the cure for the ills of the content industry would actually have an idea about how that world works. My bad.
You are committing a crime right now
Are you reading this blog? If so, you are committing a crime under 18 USC 1030(a) (better known as the “Computer Fraud & Abuse Act” or “CFAA”). That’s because I did not explicitly authorize you to access this site, but you accessed it anyway. Your screen has a resolution of 1280x800. I know this, because (with malice aforethought) I clearly violated 18 USC 1030(a)(5)(A) by knowingly causing the transmission of JavaScript code to your browser to discover this information.Jesus, Rob. You know this isn't true. Under the CFAA, you can't simply declare your blog "off limits" and then press charges. I have to access the site with the intent to commit fraud. And my access to your site has to further that fraud.
Hexagonal grids for games
This is an amazing resource. Bookmarked.I recently implemented the board game Hex[1] using canvas. I didn't need most of this stuff... really only "neighbors", "hex to pixel" and "pixel to hex".Hex uses a rhombus grid, a possibility surprisingly not mentioned in this article, which makes choosing a coordinate system easier. It's simply row and column, and finding a cell's neighbors is simple, if slightly counterintuitive. From my code: (let [possible-neighbors [[ col (dec row)] ; Upper left [(inc col) (dec row)] ; Upper right [(dec col) row ] ; Left [(inc col) row ] ; Right [(dec col) (inc row)] ; Lower left [ col (inc row)]]] ; Lower right ...) I found drawing the board unexpectedly tricky. In my first iteration I simply wrote a "draw hexagon" function that plugged in all the mathematical values, then called this function for each cell. The result looked terrible due to aliasing artifacts. Some lines were doubled and not all cells appeared the same size. In the end I precomputed integer values for the length of the vertical sides and the dy and dx for the diagonal sides, then used these integer values repeatedly to draw the board.For converting pixel coordinates to hexes I used a different method[2]. If the pixel is inside the interior rectangle of a hex (the part of the hex with top and bottom removed), we know it's in that hex. Otherwise it's in the top or bottom of a hex, and I use the direct algebraic formula (y=mx+b style) for the hex tops' diagonal lines to find out if the point is above or below that line.Maybe these approaches of mine would be helpful for someone whose needs are more basic, as they rely on less cleverness than the techniques in this article.[1] http://toxicsli.me/hex/[2] https://github.com/graue/cljs-hex/blob/master/src-cljs/locat...
Docker 1.0
I'm glad to see docker stabilizing but it's very disappointing to not see any changes addressing the logging support that was promised in 1.0 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7712138 reply by shykes). The infinitely increasing-in-size and unconfigurable logfiles generated by containers in docker are basically a dealbreaker unless you bake your own logging solution into each container and avoid stdin/stdout.
CoreCLR is now open source
I would be curious to see the effects of completely open-sourcing Windows. Businesses would continue to use it, because it's Microsoft and they want enterprise support. I think it would get even more love than it already does from the development community. Piracy of Windows is already rampant, so they're not really in a worse position from that (plus I think that most people who can pay for Windows do so already). Foreign governments who are concerned about NSA backdoors would have their fears allayed. Is there any way it could seriously damage their business model?
Operating Systems: From 0 to 1
I have on my list to read something along the lines like this, but this seems incomplete. Does anyone have anything similar?
Ask HN: Best way to get started with AI?
I'm in the same boat. For long time, I was interested in AI but at the same time intimidated by math. I'm relatively comfortable with discrete mathematics and classical algorithms and at the same time calculus and linear algebra is completely foreign to me. Also, I do not accept way to learn ML without good understanding of core principles behind it. So math is a must.A few months ago, I stumbled upon very amazing YouTube Channel 3Blue1Brown which explains math in very accessible way and at the same time I got feeling that I finally started understanding core ideas behind linear algebra and calculus.Just recently he published 4 videos about deep neural networks:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aircAruvnKkhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHZwWFHWa-whttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ilg3gGewQ5Uhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIeHLnjs5U8So my fear of ML was gone away and I'm very excited to explore whole new world for neural networks and other things like support vector machines etc
Today is the fifth anniversary of Aaron Swartz's death
This StackOverflow question from Aaron about using rsync to download and copy lots of files is like a piece of history frozen in time.https://stackoverflow.com/questions/48491/keep-rsync-from-re...
82-Year-Old Japanese Woman Finds Success in Coding
I wonder how much of brain elasticity in as adults is just due to attitude. I generally find kids more eager to jump into new things, while adults are more stubborn and complacent towards new experiences. Once you have money or kids it's a lot easier to just have someone else do it for you. Still, at 82 I imagine most people will start developing issues with memory so it probably isn't an easy feat, and she's found more success than I have...
MIT 9.11: The Human Brain (Spring 2018)
Hi all- I am so psyched to see that some are finding the videos interesting! Do send comments if you have them. cheers, Nancy
California law banning bots from pretending to be real people without disclosure
I am reminded of Thoreau's quote: "There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root."The root of the problem is not that we have bots, but that we have normalised lying and deception as part of everyday business. We allow companies to pretend that bots are human beings, and allow call-center employees in third-world countries to pretend (even sometimes though elaborate lying) that they are located in the same country as you. We allow companies to tell outrageous untruths in their advertising - see the Samsung ad which they're currently being hauled over the coals for in Australia.That's the real problem here, and the one we need to fix on a general level, not by band-aid regulations over whichever dishonesty has managed to irritate enough state representatives.
HTTP Security Headers – A Complete Guide
It's definitely worth repeating the warning that, while very useful, Strict-Transport-Security should be deployed with special care!While the author's example of `max-age=3600` means there's only an hour of potential problems, enabling Strict-Transport-Security has the potential to prevent people from accessing your site if for whatever reason you are no longer able to serve HTTPS traffic.Considering another common setting is to enable HSTS for a year, its worth enabling only deliberately and with some thought.
Stripe’s new funding round values company at $35B
[Stripe cofounder]Thanks to everyone here who took a chance on us in the beginning and shared helpful feedback over the years! How to serve startups/developers more effectively at scale is still the main thrust of our product focus. We've fixed and improved a lot of things since we launched here in 2011, but we also still have a lot of work to do. (Both "obvious things we want to fix" and "new functionality we want to build".) I always appreciate hearing from HN users (even if I don't always have time to respond): [email protected] anyone thinking about what they should work on: I started building developer tools when I was 15 and "tools for creation" is still, IMO, one of the most interesting areas to work in.
An Intuitive Guide to Linear Algebra (2012)
I... I still really struggle with this. I'm a smart person, I've got a bachelors of engineering, I've been a professional software developer for around 14 years now, and I've built a house. But there is something about degree-level maths and beyond that I find deeply unintuitive in a way that software development isn't.Through comments here I found 3blue1brown's (clearly much loved) videos. By the third video I was shouting, "why for the love of god would we be doing this"? Based on this reaction I suspect that the content neither has intrinsic appeal to me, nor does it have obvious use in my work, projects, or life.Pre-degree maths though, I love. My A-level maths really changed how I saw the world, and I make use of it reasonably often (well, often enough to not forget it).I think I'm writing this here because most other commenters seem to really grasp this subject, or feel that they grasp it better having seen these videos. I'm honestly happy for you. However, if anyone is reading this who doesn't feel like that, then know you're not alone :-)
We Made One Gram Of Remdesivir
In my former life I was a graduate organic chemist, but I “quit” with a Masters. I loved Synthetic Chemistry as an undergrad and thought I wanted a PhD in. There were three lousy things (for me) about the career that made me bail.1). So many syntheses have horrible yields just like this one. You’d start with grams of material to end up with micrograms. I loved solving these problems as an undergrad in books, but reality was far different. You don’t think much about side products until you start doing novel chemistry.2). So much trial and error. There were happy go lucky chemists that fell into projects that were smooth as butter, while brilliant chemists would toil 12 hour days to try and something to write up as a thesis. I was neither brilliant nor lucky and took 4 different projects over two years before finally landing on something marginally MS worthy. They need a journal of failed chemistry because only the working stuff gets published. So many failures could be logged so I didn’t waste my time doing non-working or poor yielding reactions.3). Suspicious results in journals. I would read about a reaction and someone would put a 75% yield as their result and I could barely get 20. I always thought I was just bad, but a really smart chemist challenged me one day and tried to do it himself and couldn’t do much better. He tried it 30 different ways over the year as he did other stuff. He never could get a good yield. We talked to our advisor and we wanted to challenge the result, but the advisor didn’t want to start trouble. It was past the time I decided to leave with a masters, but made me feel a little better about my lousy abilities. No one could ever possibly doublecheck every result from every publication anyways.All this said, there are some brilliant and patient scientists out there that drive the field forward. Just a few rough around the edge items I’d love to see change.
Most tech content is bullshit
I believe part of problem is Google SEO. Tech content maybe bullshit, but marketing content is even more bullshit.I remember times when we had slow internet and/or only subset of blogs we read from time to time. Most of development was done by reading books, specification of devices for writing drivers and so on.Now, literally everyone is trying to do SEO and use lots of words in articles, kind of creating content, but in reality copying from someone else and modifying a little and trying to get lots back links. I remember when Quora had quality content, now everything is sales pitch. I feel like people are not trying to create quality content, they are trying to sell and to sell you need more back links.