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How io_uring and eBPF Will Revolutionize Programming in Linux
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Ah the funny things we resad about in 2020.In 1985... yes I said 1985, the Amiga did all I/O through sending and receiving messages. You queued a message to the port of the device / disk you wanted, when the I/O was complete you received a reply on your port.The same message port system was used to receive UI messages. And filesystems, on top of drive system, were also using port/messages. So did serial devices. Everything.Simple, asynchronous by nature.As a matter of fact, it was even more elegant than this. Devices were just DLL with a message port.
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Germany bans Facebook from handling WhatsApp data over privacy concerns
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The aspect I find most interesting and internationally relevant is that as these local rulings proliferate, they kinda make it visible to what degree companies finance their operations by selling user data. The more the business model relies on this, the more likely companies are to get hit with a ruling like this — and it's not just the ruling that's interesting, but also what Facebook's reaction will be. If they stop offering or reduce WhatsApp services in Germany (or India), that's a great indicator that the service isn't profitable without the sale (or other commercial exploitation, Facebook is an ad company after all) of large amounts of user data.
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Reviews of Android TV launcher after Google added ads to the homescreen
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I hate to be that guy, but this is exactly why I happily paid for an Apple TV. Yes, it’s $100 more than basic streaming sticks, but I have never had to worry about ads suddenly appearing after an update. This whole space is a race to the bottom with sticks being sold at or below cost because you are the product. For example, Vizio revealing in their first quarterly report as a public company that they get nearly as much revenue from selling ads and viewer usage data than from selling physical televisions.https://www.engadget.com/vizio-q1-earnings-inscape-013937337...A smooth, clean ad-free experience is certainly worth the extra price if you can afford it.
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90% of Black Friday deals were the same price or cheaper six months before
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This have been a joke for a few years here in Brazil, we call the day "Black Fraud" (sounds a little better in Portuguese)The relevant point is that Black Friday is an "artificial" event here: we do not celebrate Thanksgiving Day so there is no need for a the stores to get rid of unsold inventory. It started just ~10 years ago when marketers began advertising it as a sales day.
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Oh, 2022
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> low-lying coastal nations like BangladeshAnd lots of other places. About 1 billion people live along coastlines at 20 meters or less above sea level, and 200 million at 5 meters or less. I live in a wealthy country but well within the 5 meters range and am already having to think about whether it wouldn't be more prudent to sell my house today, now that it's still worth something, and emigrate to somewhere with a more future-proof elevation.Worst case if Greenland's ice sheet melts, that adds 7 meters to sea level, and Antarctica's another 60 meters. I won't see that in my lifetime but my children might.
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Epic Games acquires Bandcamp
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This feels like a major blow, as someone who just semi recently (probably around pandemic start) started getting into purchasing flac music from indie artists, Bandcamp was a great source of music. I understand nothing will change in the short term, but long term I am very concerned. Especially as streaming becomes more dominant and companies are less willing to provide flac based music and physical discs (where I can rip my own) continue to disappear.This feels like a potential last step of true music ownership and that makes me incredibly sad.That being said if anyone knows of any place to buy flacs of music with great selection would love to know (especially for Japanese music which I generally have to import, thankfully they love CDs).
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Paper Airplane Designs
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I'm surprised they don't have the "lock fold" or "Nakamura Lock" design. When I was younger, that was the most consistent design for a good plane. Not always the best, but never the worst. Somebody talented could fold up a dart to beat it on distance, or a glider to stay up longer, but everybody could make a decent "lock fold".https://origamimag.com/nakamura-lock-paper-airplane/
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Discovering that a Bluetooth car battery monitor is siphoning location data
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Phones already have app permissions: can access you contact, can access your location...But no major phone OS provides a reliable "can access the internet" permission (without jailbreak/root). This would solve this issue much above the stack. I can install the dubious app. If the app can't access the internet at all (properly enforced by the OS) then by definition it can't leak anything.I find it particularly disappointing from Apple. If they were truly committed to privacy as they claim, this would be a feature already.
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Tire dust makes up the majority of ocean microplastics
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Has anyone here ever lived near a freeway or even moderately busy road?I made the mistake of renting next to the freeway. Noise was perfectly tolerable, but I could not use my back porch, because after just a few weeks, everything had a fine coating of black dust. I could not keep my windows open in the summer. I was certainly breathing this vile shit the entire time I lived there.This doesn't surprise me in the least. Every time it rained you could see streaks of black sediment trails where rivulets would collect and concentrate it. It flowed completely unfiltered straight into the ocean. Poison.The negative externalities around cars are incomprehensibly huge. And yet, we have more of them than ever, they are getting bigger and bigger, and they laugh in our face with "green leaf" or "PZEV" decals. It's demonic.
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Everything You Know About Fitness is a Lie (2011)
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So what do you do if your gym only has a smith machine and dumbbells? It's dangerous and hard to bench without spotter.
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Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues
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I feel bad for the game devs who got to see their hard work turn into something they don't intend.I suppose this is a great advertising technique for small firms, startups, indie shops, etc. "Don't want this[http://amazon-pulls-sim-city] to happen? Work for our small team. We won't destroy your work."I know it's standard to say "you get a part in the decisionmaking process!" That's part of it. But a lot of people are willing to let go of the big decisions if they get to be a part of something great. But they have to trust that it will come out well in the end.
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I Bought A Firetruck
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Is there some sort of crazy game of one-upmanship in the USA as to who can drive the most impractical gas guzzler?First it was stretch limos, then Hummers, then Hummer stretch limos. I wonder if we're gonna see stretch limo fire trucks…Edit (since I'm being downvoted): The story is cool, I just find the fact that he's driving it daily to work completely retarded. What the hell I consider driving a car to work to be hardly justifiable at all in our trade, but a 31 year old fire truck is sending a giant fuck you to anyone else trying to reduce their carbon emissions.
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The Drone that Killed my Grandson
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The American citizenry tends to be OK with this kind of thing as long as it happens far away from us. But imagine the reaction if the cafe where this occurred were in the US, and the drone was controlled by a foreign government. That singular event would ignite a US invasion or possibly nuclear assault against the country responsible.People in other countries are also people. They have the same reactions and emotions that we would when a foreign entity blows up their businesses, families, and friends. We have so far been lucky that none of our victims have had the military power and political will to retaliate in the vicious and violent manner that we would. That will not always be the case, and I do not look forward to the day when our own brutality is visited upon us.
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Rolling Shutters
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I can see it now. Soon Adobe will include some tool or setting in Photoshop that will automagically "fix" rolling shutter.
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Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace
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I'm so glad that this is getting more visibility. I spent 5 long years at Amazon Web Services from 2008 - 2013 as a Software Development Engineer, and was at some point promoted to SDE II ;)It's a shark eat shark environment. I never cried, but I saw others (specially female colleagues) do. After 2 years of waking up in the middle of the night for bullshit on-call pages (wack-a-mole with production issues) and increasingly heavier deadlines, I developed stress related medical issues. That was a wake up call for me, and as soon as I realized the shit place that I was in, I started showing up at the office detached, practicing interview questions and doing phone screen interviews from work. I eventually got offers from Facebook/Google, and moved on. It was only then that I realize I was actually paid at the 50th percentile for my position's level and experience all along.Since I left, I've helped multiple other friends/colleagues detach emotionally from the need for approval, practice for interviews and get job offers from Apple/FB/Google for substantial (> %75) raises.I get Amazon recruiters contacting me all the time, and I'm always nice to them because I know the shit environment they're stuck in. Though in the back of my mind I'm thinking "there's no way in hell I'd ever go back"Fuck Jeff, fuck Amazon, fuck AWS, and fuck their leadership principles.
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AlphaGo Beats Lee Sedol in Final Game
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This was probably the closest game in the series. Livestream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzpW10DPHeQA few months back, the expert consensus was that we were many years away from an AI playing Go at the 9-dan level. Now it seems that we've already surpassed that point. What this underscores, if anything, is the accelerating pace of technological growth, for better or for worse.In game four, we saw Lee Sedol make a brilliant play, and AlphaGo make a critical mistake (typical of monte carlo-trained algorithms) following it. There's no doubt that with further refinement, we'll soon see AI play Go at a level well beyond human: games one through three already featured extraordinarily strong (and innovative) play on part of AlphaGo.Previous Discussions:Game 4: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11276798Game 3: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11271816Game 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11257928Game 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11250871
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Tesla Makes Offer to Acquire SolarCity
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Some people think SolarCity is doing terribly because they're losing so much money. Actually them losing money is an incredibly great sign for the long run (assuming they don't run out of money - which Elon won't let happen).Here's how their business model works:- They will install solar panels on your house for free (or cheaper than the full cost).- You pay them a much lower rate than what the public utility company charges for the electricity generated from those solar panels.- You save tens of thousands of dollars and lower your carbon footprint by hundreds of thousands of pounds of CO2 over 20-30 years.- They lose a ton of money installing those expensive panels but make a TON of money in the long run selling you that electricity that is generated for next to nothing.So as you can see, SolarCity losing money is actually a good thing because it means they're making so many damn sales that in 10 years they're going to be reaping the profits from those sales like crazy.
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Employees Who Stay in Companies Longer Than Two Years Get Paid 50% Less
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Best way to increase salary at current workplace? Get offers from other companies & ask for a meeting with your boss (or whoever decides your pay, so HR etc.).Bring up the offers, discuss what you'd get from there and also go through the potential career you could build at those companies. For example: Consultancy X would pay me $k/mo and every 6months it will go up the ladder if I perform well.With this kind of discussion you should be able to get a raise that brings your pay even above the competing offers.Treat your current as one of the options you can make that day; make your employer fight for you every 6-12 months. And remember it's not personal, it's just business. Your employer would let you go and throw you under the bus if it made business sense.tldr; don't get too emotionally attached to job; that's when they get you.
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Machine Learning Guides
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One of my random question is that what does Google gain by spending resources on developing course like this? Do they want more people to do machine learning as there is a short age of developer with this skill in the market or is there something else involved in the mix?Secondly, for some reason data science just doesn't excite me as much as typical software development goes. Like, why am I not excited enough to go down the path of specializing in data science in field of machine learning? Even if there is more money in it, I'm still not extremely motivated to learn it.What i do particularly enjoy is good ol' back end web development. I don't have a degree in computer science but working on a information system degree with focus on "programming", I dream/working my ass to become cult of "software engineer" type II, a sophisticated software developer/programmer. I love building layers, optimizing code, learning new tools, algorithms data structure (without knowing math), creating unit tests, following programming paradigm. It excites me so much. And my core skills to dive into is block chain.. I love studying that topic too and all the algorithms it comes with it.But when I see data science, no excitement. All I imagine is image manipulation and fancy charts. I know I sound a bit ignorant but, that's how it is.
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Whitespace killed an enterprise app
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Hallelujah. It's not just enterprise apps, either. I've seen more than a few consumer app redesigns that just seemed to tack on the "clean", "minimalist", "whitespace" ethos, without really having a clue of an understanding of how users actually used the product.I think this is a big factor in what killed slashdot. They did a big redesign years back that added a lot of whitespace but actually made it incredibly difficult to easily browse comment threads and see quality comments. Similarly, despite the old Reddit interface having a reputation as being "ugly", I hate the new interface and always browse on old.reddit.com, mainly because of the higher density of information that makes it easier for me to scan for posts I want to read.
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Uber S-1
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So... Let me see if I have this straight:1. Uber is unprofitable and the only way it can become profitable is to get SDC's2. Uber is significantly (years) behind Waymo in the SDC space.3. Waymo will launch SDC taxi services first meaning:- When it puts in an order for SDC components no one else is going to be buying in bulk and thus it can have effectively 100% of capacity of these specialized equipment makers- It is going to be competing with other taxi/ride share services with all the cost advantages of SDC vehicles while its competitors are paying human drivers (and have basically no fat to cut from their current pricing)- It will be able to improve its services so when someone else does launch their service will be inferior.4. Uber expects that its users will stick to it over the course of years in the face of significantly cheaper competition.5. Uber expects that it is going to be able to continue to use human drivers even while it competes against those same people with its SDC's (i.e. when your employer hires your replacement but expects you to train them).I simply can't imagine how Uber is worth anything at the moment.
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RSA is a fragile cryptosystem
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I'm a developer, not a cryptographer, and like most crypto articles, most of this post is gibberish to me. I really tried to follow it in the beginning, but then I gave up, scrolled to the "what should you use instead", and then realized I didn't understand that either.If this is article is "easy" crypto, and I shouldn't roll my own crypto, then what should I do? "Just use elliptic curve crypto but make sure you choose the right curve! Here's an abbreviation for you, libsodium has it so you're all set" doesn't comfort me much. I don't have a good intuition of what a curve even is and why my sensitive data can't just go straight ahead like all the other data. I mean, when I call into libsodium with parameters I do not understand, then aren't I, for all intents and purposes, rolling my own crypto anyway? How is any of this of help?If I want to allow my customers to send me encrypted data via an untrusted channel, then what do I do? I need public key crypto for that, right? Basically, I want the public key cryptography version of Coda Hale's classic blog post about password hashing [0], does that exist?EDIT: thanks for all the comments folks, great insights! I particularly found [1] by CiPHPerCoder to be a great starting point (akin to Coda's password article) for all kinds of scenarios. I feel much more confident about this stuff now than I did 2 hours ago.[0] https://codahale.com/how-to-safely-store-a-password/[1] https://paragonie.com/blog/2017/06/libsodium-quick-reference...
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For the first time on record, the 400 wealthiest Americans paid a lower tax rate
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What a shit article.It's well known that despite the high marginal tax rates of the past, very few people ever paid those. Deductions abound that have since been eliminated.What you should really look at is real effective tax rates by income level.[1] What you'll find is that the top 1% make 19% of all income, but pay 37% of all taxes, with an average tax rate of 27%.The bottom 50% earn 11% of all income, but only pay 3% of all taxes, for an effective rate of 3.73%.[1]https://taxfoundation.org/top-1-percent-tax-rate/
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Ultrasound destroys 80 percent of prostate cancers in one-year study
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>The minimally invasive technology involves a rod that enters the prostate gland via the urethraOuch.
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School or Prison
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A more meaningful comparison would be bathroom privileges.In prison you can pretty much poop or get a drink of water whenever you want. In school you need special permission, and hope the teacher wasn't in a bad mood or that 3 other kids hadn't needed to pee in the last half hour, meeting some mental quota the teacher has for the appropriate # of people that should have to use the toilet during a given period of time.Seriously, it seemed like a revolutionary concept when I hit college and realized "Hold on, I can just get up & go?." Or that (absent computer labs) I could bring a cup of coffee or bottle of soda with me to class, and that common etiquette even allowed for a bit of food if it wasn't noisy to eat or have a powerful smell.
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Intel's $20B Ohio factory could become world's largest chip plant
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Really disappointed in many of the negative and insecure comments coming from members of this community saying “Ohio sucks” or “Ohio State University sucks because it’s not Stanford” or “how many startups does Ohio have”. It really reflects poorly on those making these comments and I can’t help but think seeing a state not on the east or west coast being selected is causing fear and uncertainty in the lives of those who wrap up their personality in being in California or something.People in Ohio are excited about this and all of the negativity, frankly, is just unwelcome.Think the Midwest and Ohio suck because there aren’t mountains or an ocean? What good is any of that from behind your keyboard with the A/C on or sitting on your couch watching the same Netflix special as everyone else? Meanwhile in 5 hours I can be on your beach and enjoying all the best parts of where you live with 0 downside.Think Ohio State sucks? Right because Stanford has always been a top 5 university from day one and everything is static forever.Intel employs “low skill people and they’re not startup software engineering jobs” ok? What actual value does your privacy-evading ad tech addiction company add over honest people who just want a job making actual things? I guess Tesla employs low skill people in Austin at the Gigafactory too?Don’t like Ohio? Good we don’t care. You don’t have to live here and we have never needed to care about your opinion. You don’t have a monopoly on talent or anything else except maybe people who think that because their license plate says something different that somehow they’re better than us. Seriously grow up.-edit-It’s not just comments here. Here’s one out in the wild: https://twitter.com/terronk/status/1484599015828176898?s=21Piss off.And you know what? For all those comments “blah blah there’s only family to move there for” like yea. Exactly. Maybe you should too. I don’t have to get my social life from doomscrolling on Facebook and making myself depressed. I actually have friends and family that I see everyday and can count on. We cook meals together and help each other. We play board games, celebrate birthdays, and like being near each other. These social media apps are filling a void that you created for yourself. I like visiting California and can live there if I want to. I choose my family and friends. Maybe you should too and get off your holier-than-thou attitude.
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“Open source” seeds loosen Big Ag’s grip on farmers
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Most people support patents because they have this romanticized notion of some little guy in his garage inventing the next light bulb. That’s not representative of the mass offensive and defensive patterns of use by modern corporations.We should just end patents, period.
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Show HN: Mofi – Content-aware fill for audio to change a song to any duration
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This is neat, I have wondered if anything of this nature existed, in the past, as a child of the 80s/90s attempting to master the art of the perfect mixtape… 30 minutes a side down to the second the tape runs out, would be a win.But for today’s music, shortening the 2010s/2020 already shorter lengths would mean a song might not be more than a minute in length. On average, full unedited tracks today end up being a bit shorter than they used to be, solely due to the economics of streaming. Rather than paying for the content second by second, it is done by paying per track play. The result is a lot of 2 minute tracks, which were produced with the “verse” parts getting jammed together into the “chorus” with no break in vocals, which also uses pitch adjustments, “the “bridge” is an afterthought that is terrible, or more recently, nonexistent……… Instrumental solo? Anyone? Bueller?Music is no longer anticipated, budgeted for, and purchased on launch day with great fanfare. We have grown accustomed to the idea that we should have everything available at our fingertips, and as a consequence of this we get exactly what we pay for.
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µBlock for Firefox
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I have been using µBlock for 3 weeks now.(previously adblock plus). There is one irritating thing it has that almost makes me go back to adblock again.It is often blocking the false positives.So if developer has named one of their assets file with social media names like "twitter/facebook/etc", it blocks the file right away. Since it does not have custom configuration options for each site, you can either disable µBlock or go with the crashed site.Not all the sites are written professionally by experts, and this becomes an issue when you are trying to purchase stuff from small online shops. (to support local sellers)I am too busy for a pull request these days, but maybe this will be fixed soon by someone else. My point for µBlock is for now 5/10.
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The Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity
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Bards pre-literate-times in Greece purportedly could recite Homer's Odyssey themselves after one hearing. Writing destroyed that all.
(Maybe I don't have a citation right off, but I've read that on the web or heard it in some college class years ago ... in any case, ability to retain heard information has likely declined since then). But ... few people complain about how books corrupt our memory.So we're the first generation shifting cognitive burden of some kinds of memory (all those phone numbers) elsewhere. I welcome it. My wife hates it, but she likes the books. In a couple of generations it all will be irrelevant.
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Disabling the Intel Management Engine
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It makes me so unhappy that this is what things have come to. They make hardware that we can't control, there's no real alternative to buy, and now we gotta rely on volunteers and wiki pages to give instructions that might work but who knows you might brick it.I wish there was more widespread outrage over ME and PSP and "trusted computing" so we could collectively tell them to stop selling this garbage. There's so much cynicism out there, though, that I think the public would hardly bat an eye if they knew that all hardware since 2008 or so has secret backdoors. We're just used to this kind of abuse and control.I haven't bought a new computer since 2007 because I don't want backdoored hardware. If it really is For My Own Safety, as they advertise it to us, then let me control it!
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Making sense of the alleged Supermicro motherboard attack
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Where did all the boards in question go? Why wouldn’t a company notice any of the outbound traffic using firewalls?Two pieces of the story that don’t add up for me.
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Companies Manipulate Glassdoor by Inflating Rankings and Pressuring Employees
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I've had negative reviews flat out removed by a company that was paying glass door for some sort of premium service. I extensively reviewed the rules and reworded my comments and they were removed yet again. My points were fully factually true and were not anything too untoward (pay raises were promised to members of a new team, they never materialized, most team members left). For what it's worth, Path Forward IT is not a great place to work. advancement rarely comes with rewards and abuse of salary agreements abound(work all night to get a system up and running, they still require 8 hours behind a desk even if it would be unproductive. Flexibility works one way there).
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Microsoft acquires Citus Data (YC S11)
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In the latest world of Postgres:- we now have closed source Amazon Aurora infrastructure that boasts performance gains that might never see it back upstream (who knows if it's just hardware or software or what behind the scenes here)- we now have Amazon DocumentDB that is a closed source MongoDB-like scripting interface with Postgres under the hood- lastly, with this news, looks like Microsoft is now doubling down on the same strategy to build out infrastructure and _possibly_ closed source "forked" wins on top of the beautiful open source world that is PostgresPlease, please, please let's be sure to upstream! I love the cloud but when I go to "snapshot" and "restore" my PG DB I want a little transparency how y'all are doing this. Same with DocumentDB; I'd love an article of how they are using JSONB indices at this supposed scale! Not trying to throw shade; just raising my eyebrows a little.
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Magic Lantern
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I'm sort of amazed at the cost of high-end cameras, especially when what separates it from a modern smartphone seems to be nothing but bigger/faster sensors and the ability to use big lenses. The camera manufacturers use the lowest powered CPUs they can get away with, running proprietary real-time operating systems with horrible UX and no third party support. For the price of a high end laptop. It really seems like something is off in the market - but there doesn't seem to be any sort of real change happening.I needed to do some video work last year, so I basically followed Casey Neistat's suggestion for a Canon camera, only to find out it wouldn't allow me to export the video live via an HDMI cable without the camera's overlay on top. Turning all the elements off still left me with a red dot in the corner. Apparently I got the wrong model and the one $800 more expensive would do this. After a while I gave up, went back to the store and got a cheap video camera that could do it, BUT again, I had to get the more expensive version, because the same model in the cheaper option didn't allow this particular use case.I was really surprised by how backwards this all was! Proprietary OSs, artificially limited functionality, anemic processors, interfaces out of the 1980s. It's crazy!Has someone slapped Android on a decent camera yet?
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Support for right-to-repair laws slowly grows
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Here's another way Apple may be killing "right to repair":I own a chain of independent cell phone and computer repair shops. Last year, Google unilaterally took away AdWords in our industry. The day after Thanksgiving, we woke up to find none of our ads were running.Google claimed this was because "third-party tech support providers" were scamming customers--i.e. people were buying AdWords for virus removal and tech support queries and then trying to scam people for money.Google also claimed an independent verification service was coming for those of us who had actual physical repair shops and weren't scamming people.Despite Google's promises, none of this has been delivered. Our business has dropped significantly since AdWords disappeared 8 months ago. This Google action has really hurt legitimate small businesses.I write all of this because the prevailing theory in our industry is that this is Apple's way of fighting against right to repair.If only Apple authorized service providers are allowed to advertise on Google for repair-related keywords, Apple will have taken more teeth out of "right to repair."It reminds me of the quote from The Matrix: "Tell me, Mr. Anderson, what good is a phone call when you are unable to speak?" If independent repair shops can't be found on Google, is that Google and Apple's way of muting third-party repair?Right when Google ads disappeared, Amazon and Apple made a deal that meant third parties could no longer sell Apple products on Amazon: https://9to5toys.com/2018/11/09/apple-and-amazon-deal-iphone...This is just a reminder that Apple is fighting in every way possible against right to repair.
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How the Dat Protocol Works
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Dat (and Beaker Browser) is one of those things that I think about playing with every time I see it pop up somewhere. The technology truly feels like something special.Then I sit down to actually start playing with it I struggle to think of anything to build that would actually take advantage of the tech aside from purely static sites. I would really love to see more complex examples folks have seen in the wild.
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Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms
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I think this is going to be a discussion thread that is almost inevitably going to be a shitshow, but anyway:There are people who advocate the idea that private companies should be compelled to distribute hate speech, dangerously factually incorrect information and harassment under the concept that free speech is should be applied universally rather than just to government. I don't agree, I think it's a vast over-reach and almost unachievable to have both perfect free speech on these platforms and actually run them as a viable business.But let's lay that aside, those people who make the argument claim to be adhering to an even stronger dedication to free speech. Surely, it's clear here that having the actual head of the US government threatening to shut down private companies for how they choose to manage their platforms is a far more disturbing and direct threat against free speech even in the narrowest sense.
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Space Jam's 1996 website is still alive
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I was webmaster for this site (and thousands of others at WB) back in 2001! I believe this was when we did the great www -> www2 migration, which was of course supposed to be temporary. In fact I think that was when we migrated from our own datacentre to AOL's but I could be getting the timing wrong.Back then it was served from a Sun E4500 running Solaris (7?) and Netscape Enterprise Server. Netscape had been acquired by AOL which had also just bought Time Warner (that's why we moved to their datacentre) but somehow we couldn't make the internal accounting work and still had to buy server licenses.Fun fact, unlike Apache, NES enabled the HTTP DELETE method out of the box and it had to be disabled in your config. We found that out the hard way when one of the sysadmins ran a vulnerability scanner which deleted all the websites. We were forbidden from running scans again by management.Another fun fact about NES - they were really pushing server side Javascript as the development language for the web (and mostly losing to mod_perl). Also back in 2001 but at a different place I worked with the person who had just written a book on server side js for O'Reilly - he got his advance but they didn't publish it because by the time he had finished it they considered it a "dead technology".Our job was basically to maintain an enormous config file for the webserver which was 99% redirects because they would buy every conceivable domain name for a movie which would all redirect to the canonical one. Famously they couldn't get a hold of matrix.com and had to use whatisthematrix.com. Us sysadmins ran our own IRC server and "302" was shorthand for "let's go" - "302 to a meeting". "302" on its own was "lunchtime".I still mention maintaining this site on my CV and LinkedIn - disappointingly I've never been asked about it in an interview. I suspect most of the people doing the interviewing these days are too young to remember it.
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The AMD Radeon Graphics Driver Makes Up Roughly 10.5% of the Linux Kernel
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The real shame is that Nvidia is still doing binary blob drivers 15 years after I started caring about Linux. Are they really that afraid of someone taking their Lucky Charms?
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Robinhood Play Store listing went from 329K reviews to 180K in few hours
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How were these not overall real reviews? If they can't prove otherwise, this just entrenches the idea that big money is vastly more powerful than small voices. I honestly don't see how if this trend continues how things will end well. It's not just about Robinhood, etc, it's deplatforming, using AWS, etc as a weapon against smaller voices. I can't see this ending well.
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It's your device, you should be able to repair it
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This article moves the goalposts on what "right to repair" is several times. It generally means that manufacturers should not hide schematics from device users or disallow third party manufacturing of first party parts. However, the author states:> The law doesn't yet cover smartphones and tablets that she says are getting harder to fix. One problem is keeping older devices updated with new software.Now "right to repair" includes not only designing devices to be easier to repair but also includes legacy software support? Where do we draw this line? If your M1 dies, you can't fab one yourself or run older software on it indefinitely.Further down, the author writes:> But markets have now become flooded with products that are less repairable.> "It requires laws in place that prevent manufacturers from stopping [supporting] a product too early, or making it pretty much impossible to repair it by design."Now the author has shifted "right to repair" to mean mandatory first-party device support and design requirements around repair-ability.We must very carefully define our terms here, because requiring someone else to provide on one's behalf presumes a right to the product of their labor.
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Collusion rings threaten the integrity of computer science research
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Sometimes the collusion is blatantly obvious.Back in grad school a colleague of mine spent nine months on an experiment in a new field and submitted it as a paper to a quality journal. Six months later, the paper was rejected for lack of novelty: One of the reviewers had found a paper with a figure-by-figure duplication of the same experiment -- published on arXiv a week before the rejection decision. Both the managing editor and the author on the arXiv paper were from Chinese universities.We wrote a rebuttal and submitted a complaint to the journal editor, but no justice was forthcoming. My colleage switched research directions to avoid the collusion and now takes pains not to submit papers without a coauthor who has enough clout in the field to deter blatant research theft. He also avoids dealing with editors from institutions in China.He ended up graduating two years later than planned.
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Serving Netflix Video at 400Gb/s on FreeBSD [pdf]
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These are the slides from my EuroBSDCon presentation. AMA
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Show HN: I made a Chrome extension that can automate any website
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If this could take screenshots, I would signup in a heartbeat.Here is my need (and I've had this need my whole working career": What does production look like?If a tool could automate loggin in, browsing specific flows, take screenshots of every page, and add them to a folder of the day, it would invaluable.
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In-flight surgery with a coat-hanger and silverware
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I've had an spontaneous pneumothorax when I was a teenager. Had to undergo emergency surgery with only local anesthesia. The surgeon while cutting my chest asked: "You're sure it is this side, right?", which I confirmed. He then said: "Ok, if you're wrong I'm not going to jail alone."
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I Fell 15,000 Feet and Lived (2009)
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It amazes the quantity of resources that will sometimes be deployed to rescue a sole man (or a handful) lost at sea. Not to say this is a bad thing; I would certainly appreciate it if I were lost at sea. But it might be questionable to a pure utilitarian.I counted at least one plane, two ships, and a helicopter all being diverted for the rescue. That's a great deal of expense in terms of fuel, I assume hundreds of crew, and lost time in whatever they were supposed to be doing.One might argue that the pilot himself is a valuable resource to the military (cost of training plus his experience, fighter pilots aren't cheap) but there are similar rescues of civilians every once in a while.
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A 3D-printed ethernet RJ45 clip to secure/repair/fix broken tab (2020)
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Can also just buy a bag of 'em: https://www.techtoolsupply.com/RJ-45-Quick-Plug-Easy-Repair-...I'm still working my way through the 50-count bag I bought in 2018; evidently I don't actually encounter that many broken cables, they just exert an outsized effect on my psyche when I do.
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The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned
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I work in the field of Data Science and one upsetting reality has started to sink into my mind over the last year.In a business there is top line and bottom line. There are a lot Statistics/ML/Data Science jobs that are about moving that bottom line. You build something to optimize something to reduce costs.The value provided by the bottom line people is less visible than the value of top line people. The easiest way to move the move the bottom line is by just getting rid of people. So when the axe falls the bottom line people get cut and it's hard to understand why.It's the same thing as people say about fires. When you put out a fire you are a hero. When you prevent the fire in the first place, everybody thinks it's business as usual and nobody understands why you are needed.
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Just use Postgres for everything
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I think that the job of a CTO is to minimize the surface area of "built in-house" so that your team can focus on things for which your customers actually pay you.Sure, PostgreSQL can be used for sessions, but Redis has solved this problem on virtually every single platform a long time ago. Your customer probably doesn't even know what a session is, but they will definitely learn about them when your in-house implementation inevitably encounters an edge case.Of course, PostreSQL has wonderful search capabilities but it was never intended to be used as a search engine. Solr was created in 2004 and is still being improved and used in production every day. Do you know what will happen to your full-text search when your customer types in a mix of English and Chinese characters?Yes, PostgreSQL addition of SKIP LOCKED was neat but AFAIK the author of that feature himself recommended using a traditional job queue unless you had a very good reason against it. RabbitMQ was designed as a message queue and when you read the documentation you realize that they had encountered virtually every single problem and figured out a way to deal with it so that you don't have to. The documentation pretty much tells you what problems you are going to have later so that you can plan for them today.Choose boring technology (tm), follow industry best practices, and enable your team to get their work done using the right tools for the job, so they can deliver the product to the customer, and leave the office on time.
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Help make mass surveillance of entire populations uneconomical
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In general it's a good thing that more and more people are aware of the necessity for good security practices for all online interactions - but the belief that individual technological efforts can defeat large-scale corporate and nation-state monitoring is pretty silly. At best you'll just have an added layer of security against things like theft of credit card information by criminal gangs.If you actually want to do something like communicate with a journalist while hiding your own endpoint from exposure you have to go to fairly ridiculous lengths, such as acquiring a laptop used only for that purpose and which has no associated identifying information, use random open Wifi networks to log onto, and have a decent understanding of the concepts of public-key, asymmetric and symmetric cryptography.Note that there is simply no way for two known parties on the internet to hide the fact that they are communicating with one another from government-corporate managers of the Internet - although it's possible to keep the content hidded, to some extent, unless your passwords get compromised, which seems fairly easy to accomplish for such actors via keylogger malware installed through backdoor attacks using secret zero-day exploits and so on.The only real solution is the passage of data privacy laws that provide criminal penalities and which allow class-action lawsuits against corporations and governments that engage in warrantless mass surveillance or the retention and aggregation of customer's personal data in searchable databases.
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Llama2.c: Inference llama 2 in one file of pure C
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Yay fun to see it make its way to HN :)
It turns out that my original checkpoint runs _way_ faster than I expected (100 tok/s) on MacBook Air M1 with -O3 when compiling, so I am now training a bigger 44M model, which should still running interactively. Maybe the 7B Llama model is within reach... :thinking_emoji:
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Writing about what you learn pushes you to understand topics better
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I've tried to create a tech blog for a long time. But because I'm quite OCD about my writing, it took ages to create a post.In the end, writing became such a chore that I stopped altogether.
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Don't use MongoDB
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From CTO of 10genFirst, I tried to find any client of ours with a track record like this and have been unsuccessful. I personally have looked at every single customer case that’s every come in (there are about 1600 of them) and cannot match this story to any of them. I am confused as to the origin here, so answers cannot be complete in some cases.Some comments below, but the most important thing I wanted to say is if you have an issue with MongoDB please reach out so that we can help. https://groups.google.com/group/mongodb-user is the support forum, or try the IRC channel.> 1. MongoDB issues writes in unsafe ways by default in order to win benchmarksThe reason for this has absolutely nothing to do with benchmarks, and everything to do with the original API design and what we were trying to do with it. To be fair, the uses of MongoDB have shifted a great deal since then, so perhaps the defaults could change.The philosophy is to give the driver and the user fine grained control over acknowledgement of write completions. Not all writes are created equal, and it makes sense to be able to check on writes in different ways. For example with replica sets, you can do things like “don’t acknowledge this write until its on nodes in at least 2 data centers.”> 2. MongoDB can lose data in many startling ways> 1. They just disappeared sometimes. Cause unknown.There has never been a case of a record disappearing that we either have not been able to trace to a bug that was fixed immediately, or other environmental issues. If you can link to a case number, we can at least try to understand or explain what happened. Clearly a case like this would be incredibly serious, and if this did happen to you I hope you told us and if you did, we were able to understand and fix immediately.> 2. Recovery on corrupt database was not successful, pre transaction log.This is expected, repairing was generally meant for single servers, which itself is not recommended without journaling. If a secondary crashes without journaling, you should resync it from the primary. As an FYI, journaling is the default and almost always used in v2.0.> 3. Replication between master and slave had gaps in the oplogs, causing slaves to be missing records the master had. Yes, there is no checksum, and yes, the replication status had the slaves currentDo you have the case number? I do not see a case where this happened, but if true would obviously be a critical bug.> 4. Replication just stops sometimes, without error. Monitor
> your replication status!If you mean that an error condition can occur without issuing errors to a client, then yes, this is possible. If you want verification that replication is working at write time, you can do it with w=2 getLastError parameter.> 3. MongoDB requires a global write lock to issue any write> Under a write-heavy load, this will kill you. If you run a blog, you maybe don't care b/c your R:W ratio is so high.The read/write lock is definitely an issue, but a lot of progress made and more to come. 2.0 introduced better yielding, reducing the scenarios where locks are held through slow IO operations. 2.2 will continue the yielding improvements and introduce finer grained concurrency.> 4. MongoDB's sharding doesn't work that well under load> Adding a shard under heavy load is a nightmare. Mongo either moves chunks between shards so quickly it DOSes the production traffic, or refuses to more chunks altogether.Once a system is at or exceeding its capacity, moving data off is of course going to be hard. I talk about this in every single presentation I’ve ever given about sharding[0]: do no wait too long to add capacity. If you try to add capacity to a system at 100% utilization, it is not going to work.> 5. mongos is unreliable> The mongod/config server/mongos architecture is actually pretty reasonable and clever. Unfortunately, mongos is complete garbage. Under load, it crashed anywhere from every few hours to every few days. Restart supervision didn't always help b/c sometimes it would throw some assertion that would bail out a critical thread, but the process would stay running. Double fail.I know of no such critical thread, can you send more details?> 6. MongoDB actually once deleted the entire dataset> MongoDB, 1.6, in replica set configuration, would sometimes determine the wrong node (often an empty node) was the freshest copy of the data available. It would then DELETE ALL THE DATA ON THE REPLICA (which may have been the 700GB of good data)> They fixed this in 1.8, thank god.Cannot find any relevant client issue, case nor commit. Can you please send something that we can look at?> 7. Things were shipped that should have never been shipped> Things with known, embarrassing bugs that could cause data problems were in "stable" releases--and often we weren't told about these issues until after they bit us, and then only b/c we had a super duper crazy platinum support contract with 10gen.There is no crazy platinum contract and every issue we every find is put into the public jira. Every fix we make is public. Fixes have cases which are public. Without specifics, this is incredibly hard to discuss. When we do fix bugs we will try to get to users as fast as possible.> 8. Replication was lackluster on busy serversThis simply sounds like a case of an overloaded server. I mentioned before, but if you want guaranteed replication, use w=2 form of getLastError.> But, the real problem:> 1. Don't lose data, be very deterministic with data> 2. Employ practices to stay available> 3. Multi-node scalability> 4. Minimize latency at 99% and 95%> 5. Raw req/s per resource> 10gen's order seems to be, #5, then everything else in some order. #1 ain't in the top 3.This is simply not true. Look at commits, look at what fixes we have made when. We have never shipped a release with a secret bug or anything remotely close to that and then secretly told certain clients. To be honest, if we were focused on raw req/s we would fix some of the code paths that waste a ton of cpu cycles. If we really cared about benchmark performance over anything else we would have dealt with the locking issues earlier so multi-threaded benchmarks would be better. (Even the most naive user benchmarks are usually multi-threaded.)MongoDB is still a new product, there are definitely rough edges, and a seemingly infinite list of things to do.[1]If you want to come talk to the MongoDB team, both our offices hold open office hours[2] where you can come and talk to the actual development teams. We try to be incredibly open, so please come and get to know us.-Eliot[0] http://www.10gen.com/presentations#speaker__eliot_horowitz
[1] http://jira.mongodb.org/
[2] http://www.10gen.com/office-hours
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Making the web fun again
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I wanna share a thought I had about this a couple years ago.I'm 33, so I was 14 in 1994, the first time I got onto the web. It was as bare bones as it got. I think I beat the IMG tag by a few months, maybe. Anyways, don't hold me to facts here, I am just imparting a general time frame.The idea of the Internet, and the world wide web, was terribly abstract, new, confusing, delightful. It made wizards of us that could navigate it. As a burgeoning geek in desperate need of a personal identity, this digital playground was an infinite resource to push against. Each chance encounter with an online stranger a blank slate. It was exotic and alluring and exciting.During this era, a huge swath of us all were experiencing this at the same time. It was an overlap of our youth, the loss of innocence, and the explosion of this new universe. It was a hell of a drug.And we got addicted to the newness of it all. There's a word for this.Neophilia.And this concept, I feel, best describes the ennui I have felt for years now, the booming homogeny the web has turned into. The web has long since succeeded, but we were children of the laboratory. We lost our home and we've been trying, in vain, to find a new one ever since. I can't believe I am alone in this sensation.
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Groklaw legal site shuts over fears of NSA email snooping
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I hope those who treated me with scorn for suggesting the politicians and business people are effectively blackmailed by the mere existence of NSA type spying can now see it for real.No direct threat, not conversation, no deals. Just the fear of the knowledge that one is being comprehensively watched, and what "they" might have. This fear is enough to alter behavior, to conform.Again, at what stage can we describe the US and UK, and their co-conspirators as fascist, police state, oppressive, and so on?Or, do we have micro targeted oppression? Is that the modern way?
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GitHub's new text editor leaked on Twitter
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holy cow this thing has like 70 repositories!And I found a screenshot... looks very much like sublime text: https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1424/1228569/cce6eb26-27a6...edit: based on this[1], it looks like this is a GitHub-aware/integrated text editor that targets both desktop (Mac, at least) and web[1] https://gist.github.com/elcuervo/eb68883f233baf5a46c8
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A SWAT team blew a hole in my 2-year-old son
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This was the result of a no-knock warrant: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-knock_warrant, which allows police to enter a home without prior warning, on the theory that giving notice will allow people inside to destroy evidence. They are almost uniquely a product of the drug war. One can imagine very few situations outside of drugs were evidence could be so easily destroyed as to justify a no-knock warrant.
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No More Deceptive Download Buttons
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This is a joke right ? We run Adsense display ads on our site and have to spend significant time every day reviewing and blocking new ads which try to use these deceptive practices.Since Google clearly has the tech to detect this they should be implementing it at source on the advertisers (malvertisers). Instead they are pushing this down to the publishers and hitting them with penalties.It's a clever ploy in some ways - Google gets the revenue from the ads and also the kudos from Joe Public for "being on the side of the consumer".
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Machine Learning and Ketosis
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This is all good if your goal is weight loss. However weight loss doesn't necessarily means higher fitness. Glycogen is fundamental if you do sports, and exercise is a major ingredient in getting fit. If I read correctly, exercise was not a big part of your experiment, how would you suggest modifying the experiment to accommodate one's exercising needs?On a side note, I reached a similar conclusion on the role of "carbs at night", sleeping, and fats, and I read this interesting article https://aeon.co/essays/hunger-is-psychological-and-dieting-o... on the importance, for effective weight loss, of feeling satisfied (I believe there is also a reference to the relationship between eating fats and feeling satisfied).
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Sandboxed Mac apps can record screen any time without you knowing
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I was an AppKit engineer when the Mac app sandbox was introduced in 10.7. Much of our effort that release (and in following releases) was dedicated to making Mac features work within sandboxed apps. Think open and save panels, copy and paste, drag and drop, Services menu, Open Recents, etc.We did our best but the fact is that sandboxed apps run more slowly, have fewer features, are more isolated, and take longer to develop. Sometimes this cost is prohibitive (see Coda 2.5).IMO the app sandbox was a grievous strategic mistake for the Mac. Cocoa-based Mac apps are rapidly being eaten by web apps and Electron psuedo-desktop apps. For Mac apps to survive, they must capitalize on their strengths: superior performance, better system integration, better dev experience, more features, and higher general quality.But the app sandbox strikes at all of those. In return it offers security inferior to a web app, as this post illustrates. The price is far too high and the benefits too little.IMO Apple should drop the Mac app sandbox altogether (though continue to sandbox system services, which is totally sensible, and maybe retain something geared towards browsers.) The code signing requirements and dev cert revocation, which has been successfully used to remotely disable malware, will be sufficient security: the Mac community is good at sussing out bad actors. But force Mac devs to castrate their apps even more, and there won't be anything left to protect.
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Users Abandon Facebook After Cambridge Analytica Findings
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The question is - will this be just a minor blip to Facebook and then normal services will resume after the indignation wears off? Or will it the beginning of the end of the social media dominance of the platform?For me personally, I use FB primarily to keep in touch with friends, family and old colleagues who are spread all over the world. It is purely a contact tool, and not really used to market products of services etc., so my attachment is purely an emotional one.However, I must admit that this latest episode has really hammered my trust in the platform FAR more than any other previous ones (and there have been many). Yesterday, for the first time ever, I went through my FB settings and removed a lot of personal information as well as stagnant apps that I had approved YEARS ago from my permitted apps list.I am also seriously reconsidering what I do post on there from now on, as well as drastically reducing the number of times I post. I've also turned off location tracking for the FB app on my phone, and am considering deleting it altogether and just sticking to the web platform.Will I change my mind in a months time? It's unlikely, but who knows? I like being able to talk to family that are literally on the other side of the world, and it is too hard for me to get them all to adopt Telegram or any other communication tool outside of FB Messenger, so I may find myself drawn back in.
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Graying Out
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The internet was way more social before "social media" came along.
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Apple is now a privacy-as-a-service company
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Lots of negativity/skepticism here which is reasonable I would say given tech companies' abuse of our trust. I for one, am happy that Apple can afford to offer privacy as one of its strong suites. Whether they can do it because of their business model or not is moot IMO. Everyone is here to make money, I would rather have someone who doesn't have to sell every aspect of my life to do it.
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Stripe CLI
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In the Twilio world, I can do something like this, via the command line and their API:- activate new phone number- send SMS from that number- deactivate numberI have not ever done that particular workflow, but I could.Who is the Twilio of payments/fintech wherein I could perform a workflow like this:- generate new CC number in my name- set transaction limit(s) and expiry 10 days from now- (go use that CC in real life)- deactivate the CCor maybe:- disable existing card- reenable existing cardI know I could do this if I wrote the API myself and had a big, complicated, sticky relationship with a bank ... but does someone let me do things like this if I am just an end-user (like Twilio does) ?
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DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux
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It appears that Microsoft has now initiated the "Extend" phase of their classic Embrace, Extend, Extinguish playbook. The key is that the proprietary Microsoft specific API added by this patch is only usable in a WSL environment as it relies on many pieces of proprietary closed source software that Microsoft is unwilling to open source. This patch does nothing but fragment the Linux ecosystem and encourage people to develop software that only works in WSL environments. With the "benefit" of forcing the Linux kernel developers to pay the maintenance costs of course.
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Web by Google (TM)
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A lot of talk in this article about Google capturing the whole web, all valid points, but I find the Facebook walled garden even more terrifying. I see people now, often in online school parent groups I'm a part of, etc. who cannot even use email anymore, who don't use web pages at all, they get all their information through Facebook groups and Facebook, and only talk through Facebook messenger or sometimes SMS. E-mail is seen as arcane and tricky, lots of these people do no searching, and rarely leave Facebook. If they can't find it through Facebook (or a Twitter feed sometimes) they act bewildered. This may sound like exaggeration, but there really are people like this. I think this is even more problematic.
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Linux Journal Is Back
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That's a nice announcement to see. How are Sourceforge and Slashdot these days? It's cool to see this umbrella opening up. Have the dynamics changed for SF and /. since the purchase? I interact with Sourceforge for downloads a few times a month, but I don't spend much time there otherwise.
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OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana
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It's hard for me to know whether to feel bad for ES in this case. Did they bring it on themselves? Is Amazon too big and a bully?From my perspective, Amazon has made most of its profit price gouging consumers on bandwidth after vendor locking them into their ecosystem, where they bootstrap new services by wrapping open source software with some provisioning scripts, management dashboards and cookie-cutter API / console templates. Indeed, most of this is templated -- AFAIU, for example, each AWS service autogenerates its Boto bindings and parts of its console frontend via code generators. Amazon has really mastered the factory process of churning out new services, and when they find a popular one, they can invest more resources into developing it than the original team ever could.And therein lies the rub. If Amazon is improving the software in a way that the original team couldn't, it's hard to say that the community isn't benefiting. I think what strikes me the wrong way is that Amazon is not doing it for any altruistic reason. In fact, Amazon contributes very little to open source in general, considering how much they take from it. Compare them to Facebook (React, etc) or Google (tons of dev tools) or Microsoft (VSC, TypeScript). What does Amazon have? Firecracker, kind of? And now a fork of ES because that's the only way they could continue making money off it without violating the license a small startup put in place to stop them?Well, good for Amazon, I suppose, but I find myself instinctively disliking them for this. I'm not sure what the solution is. Hopefully technologies like Kubernetes and Terraform will encourage big customers to become at least cloud-agnostic, if not cloud-independent. At the very least it would be great if Amazon / Google / Microsoft stopped gouging bandwidth at such absurd margins. Or not. Maybe it will be their downfall as startups differentiate along those lines. That would be ironic, coming from the originators of "your margin is my opportunity."Personally I'm doing my part by not building anything with vendor lock-in. It's great to be able to deploy to any cloud, if you value either robustness or flexibility.
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The most copied StackOverflow snippet of all time is flawed (2019)
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I'm the author of #6 on the same list. It's definitely interesting to see it has been used thousands of times on GitHub, and who knows how many more in proprietary code. I don't think it's buggy, but I now think it could definitely be improved.I think this shows an example of a big problem with StackOverflow compared to its initial vision. I remember listening to Jeff and Joel's podcast, and hearing the vision of applying the Wikipedia model to tech Q&A. The idea was that answers would continue to improve over time.For the most part, they don't. I'm not quite sure if it's an issue of incentives or culture. Probably some of both. I think that having a person's name attached to their answer, along with a visible score really gives a sense of ownership. As a result, other people don't feel enabled to come along and tweak the answer to improve it.Then, once an answer is listed at the top, it is given more opportunity for upvotes, so other improved answers don't seem to bubble up. This is a larger issue with most websites that sort by ratings. Generally they sort items based on the total number of votes, including hacker news itself. Instead, to measure the quality of an item, we should look at the number of votes, divided by the number of views. It may be tough to measure the number of views of an item, but we should be able to get a rough estimate based on the position on a page, for example.If the top comment on a HN discussion is getting 100 views in a minute and 10 upvotes, but the 10th comment down gets 20 views and 5 upvotes, the 10th comment is likely a better quality comment. It should be sorted above the top ranked comment! There would still need to be some smoothing and promotion of new comments to get them enough views to measure their quality as well.Such a policy on StackOverflow would also help newer, but better answers sort to the top.
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BirdNet – Identify Birds by Sound
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I had this idea nearly 10 years ago when my wife and I started dating and she introduced me to (very amateur) birding. I even talked about contacting Cornell for their database. But it was always going to be a hobby project.So when she read about this a few weeks ago, she literally smacked me for not building it. Now if I tell her it's on the front page of Hacker News AND everyone here loves the idea even more, I'm going to get another, harder smack because she knows how HN is full of others like me!(yes I'm aware that this community more than others will agree that ideas by themselves are a dime a dozen, but nonetheless, it would've been a really fun project)
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TeamViewer installs suspicious font only useful for web fingerprinting
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The font is used by the teamviewer website. When inviting a partner to a teamviewer session, one can do so by sharing the invitation url.The invitation url looks like this (where XXXXXXXX is the session code). https://get.teamviewer.com/v15/en/sXXXXXXXX
The website will check if a teamviewer font is installed (using javascript). If the font is found, the web site assumes that teamviewer is installed. The teamviewer installer also registers a protocol handler in the operating system.
The website (javascript code) will thus try to launch teamviewer directly using a url like the following: teamviewer8://instantsupport/?sid=XXXXXXXX
Otherwise, if the font is not found, it will prompt the user to download and install the teamviewer application.Source:
Font detection routine: https://get.teamviewer.com/get/res/scripts/fontdetect.js
Connect routine: https://get.teamviewer.com/get/res/scripts/connect.js
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Scar tissues make relationships wear out (2013)
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My ex was a relationship therapist. She was absolutely allergic to letting scar tissue build up. She would tell me about every little negative thing that happened between us. And she would phrase it by talking about her feelings rather than about my actions. ("I felt hurt when I heard you say X," rather than "You shouldn't have said X.")Suffice it to say, it freaked out. I wasn't used to people sharing their feelings with me. In normal relationships, by the time someone is telling you they feel , a ton of scar tissue has already been built up, and they're at a breaking point. So I was conditioned to believing that sharing feelings = things have gotten really bad.But early on she would calm me down, and say no, things aren't bad, she's fine, she's just into sharing feelings early and often to prevent the buildup of resentment. So I got used to it, and even started doing the same thing back.Eventually our relationship ended, but I brought the practice to new relationships I entered afterwards. And, unsurprisingly, it kind of freaked people out! Almost nobody is used to it at first, just like I wasn't. It's incredibly easy to get defensive when someone lets you know that they felt bad in response to something you did. And it's usually vulnerable and risky to find the words to share feelings without arousing the other person's defenses.Still, when I look back at how I've evolved as a person, I credit this "scar tissue" view of relationships with a lot of personal growth. It's given me a habit of confronting people problems head on, something past-me was unconsciously avoidant of. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and being willing to have uncomfortable conversations instead of kicking the can down the road is one of the hallmarks of adulthood and maturity.
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Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid
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I'd like for someone to throughly research and write about how it became taboo to discuss the virus leak theory. How researchers who discussed it were shunned, tagged as racists, and in some cases had their posts banned from Social Media. About how almost the entire scientific community discarded the idea as impossible. How during the early pandemic years, no mainstream news media dared talk about the possibility.Tech companies too had a role to play here. For the sake of free speech, what happened here is worth discussing.
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Lithium discovery in US volcano could be biggest deposit ever found
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As with all the 5000 news articles talking about lithium discovers, please remember, lithium is very common, discovering it is easy, there is plenty around and plenty of known location.However lithium operates more like a advanced chemical then a base metal. Each mine lithium mine is different and has to be separately qualified for each battery manufactures/car company.There are very, very few companies who have actually managed to produce battery grade lithium and many, many company who have been struggling for years to achieve it.We simply don't have a lithium problem, what is lacking is the expertise to actually bring deposits like this to use.
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Starlink Direct to Cell
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This is for very low bandwidth text communications when you're out in the country and can see the sky.Stuff like this has existed from companies like garmin for some time. This is very cool, though.Here is when this was announced: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qzli-Ww26QsPretty cool! Also kindof funny to see the TMobile CEO trying to hype people up and Elon sortof reigning it in.
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An Indian Inventor Disrupts The Period Industry
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Wait a minute...According to the article and his website the machine costs $2,500 each, can produce 2 napkins per minute and requires 746W of power. Each machine employs a crew of four people.A full scale industrial machine is claimed to cost $500K and, from a quick bit of google-ing can produce 350 napkins per minute and requires about 80KW of power. Each machine seems to be operable by a small team of five or so, but let's double that to ten people.In order to match the production rate of a single industrial machine you would need:Machines: 175Cost: $437,500Power: 131KWWorkers: 700According to this (http://mahadiscom.com/emagazine/jan06/india1%5B1%5D.pdf) electricity cost in India runs around 1.5 rupees per KWh for residential and 3.5 rupees per KWh for industrial applications. Assuming ten hours per day (for easy math) the power costs compare as follows (converted to USD):175 low cost machines @131KWh in household settings: USD $37 per day.Industrial machine @80KWh in industrial setting: USD $52.87 per day.The industrial machine cost a little more to run (power) but it produces 175 times more product per machine. Put a different way, around USD $0.03 of power is required per napkin with the household machine. The industrial machine --even at more than double the electricity cost-- only requires USD $0.0003 per napkin in power.In terms of labor costs --assuming $1 per hour-- the household machine would cost about $0.033 per napkin while the industrial machine runs $0.0005 per napkin.According to the linked statistic the TAM (Total Addressable Market) is around 300 million women:http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2011-01-23/india...If his dream to "make India a 100% napkin-using country" is fully realized you would need to produce a minimum of 1500 million napkins per month (assuming five pads used per period). The solutions compare as follows:Assuming that the machines are run 24 hours per day for 30 days.- Household solutionMachines: 17362Cost: $43,405,000Power: 12MWLabor cost per 30 days: $25,001,280- Industrial Solution:Machines: 100Cost: $50,000,000Power: 8MWLabor cost per 30 days: $90,000Unless my numbers are grossly wrong (please check, I threw them together quickly) this is not as good a solution as it has been made out to be. In fact, it looks like a really bad solution to a large scale problem. The costs are staggering. Power consumption is at least 50% greater. I'll bet that product quality and consistency also suffers a great deal. And, of course, we haven't even covered maintenance costs and MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) of 18,000 low-cost machines versus 100 industrial grade machines.Good job. Lots of work. But I'd invest in a used industrial machine out of China over making thousands of these low cost household devices.
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GoDaddy: A glimpse of the Internet under SOPA
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Out of curiosity, what made many of you even use GoDaddy? I've always felt it was a bit sketch due to its:- Commercials- And it's shady ability to add $60 worth of crap to your cart when you want to buy a $9 domain.I found Namecheap and never found anything simpler and less sketch. Even looking for domains on Namecheap 3-4 years ago was much simpler.Was it just the registrar you had heard of first?
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Meet Watsi, Y Combinator's First Nonprofit
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This is really cool, but I'm curious how an investment in this is different than a charitable contribution. The contribution is awesome for the network it introduces Watsi to, but I can't imagine there will ever be a return on this kind of investment.(This is not meant to sound negative. I am truly excited to see it, interested to see what the YC network can bring to it, and very curious about the investment thinking behind it.)
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Apple starts rejecting apps with “hot code push” features
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I'm Erez Rusovsky, the CEO of Rollout.ioRollout's mission has always been, and will always be about helping developers create and deploy mobile apps quickly and safely.
Our current product has been a life saver for hundreds of apps by allowing them to patch bugs in live apps.We were surprised by Apple's actions today.
From what we've been able to gather, they seem to be rejecting any app which utilizes a mechanism of live patching, not just apps using Rollout.Rollout has always been compliant with Apple's guidelines as we've detailed in the past here:
https://rollout.io/blog/updating-apps-without-app-store/Our SDK is installed in hundreds of live apps and our customers have fixed thousands of live bugs in their apps.We are contacting Apple in order to get further clarification on why Rollout doesn't fall under the clause that lets developers push JS to live apps as long as it does not modify the original features and functionality of the app.I'll post updates as I have them.Erez Rusovsky
CEO Rollout.io
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Security.txt
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Good luck getting this adopted. A couple of months ago I was trying to responsibly disclose the complete exposure of every customer's name, email address, phone number and the last four digits of their credit card to a public QSR company that allows online orders. It was straightforward enough that I found it passively while trying to login.It took over a week of me searching the website for a security page, trying to contact support on Twitter, emailing security addresses that turned out to be undeliverable, looking through my network for a contact, etc. Someone with a better network than me finally put me in touch with the right person in the security org, and the first response I received was, essentially, "Are you trying to sell us something? This seems manipulative. Why didn't you email our [undeliverable] address?"As far as I'm aware, the vulnerability still hasn't been resolved. Here are the problems I see:1. I don't know if this is a good implementation of this idea in the first place - how does this handle liability? I agree with what tptacek mentioned in this thread already: this seems underspecified, and companies looking to adopt this will want to have specific assurances with regards to liability and what's allowed. What exactly does "Disclosure Type: Full" mean?2. If a company is not already in the tech trendy group that like to host security pages and use bug bounties, this is probably not even going to be on their radar. What is different about this that will appeal to them? How do you get a large, faceless organization which regards its security organization as more of a risk/compliance/continuity division than a technical software security division to adopt this standard?To be clear, as someone who has gone through this song and dance several times, I absolutely would like to see improvements. But I don't know that this is the best way to do it. A more realistic standard might be a central tracker that maintains a list of key security contacts and their email addresses at various organizations. There are already lists like this floating around on GitHub, but they tend to be extremely out of date. Other than that it would be helpful to try and standardize a /security.html page with details about who and where to contact (instead of, say, a page that assumes every customer looking for a security contact mistakenly believes their accounts have been "hacked").
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Building your color palette
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> Ever used one of those fancy color palette generators? You know, the ones where you pick a starting color, tweak some options that probably include some musical jargon like "triad" or "major fourth", and are then bestowed the five perfect color swatches you should use to build your website?> This calculated and scientific approach to picking the perfect color scheme is extremely seductive, but not very useful.Just recently I wondered if there is any scientific basis behind these approaches.
I skimmed all research papers that I could find but not a single one of them provided serious data based support. All justification for these methods I found were historical, i. e. artists used color wheels and different methods of color selection on the wheels for a long time.My conclusion so far is: There is no science what so ever behind these color palette generators.I only spent about a day on this research and I'm not an expert, so if anyone has some pointers to serious research in that direction I'd be happy to know.
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Mozilla releases the largest to-date public domain transcribed voice dataset
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I have a (probably dumb) question: why don't we just use audiobooks for this? There are thousands and thousands of hours where the transcripts were written, and then read aloud. Some of them are now public domain. I'm sure some validation would need to be done, but it seems like there would be an endless validation set there. Am I missing something obvious?
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Source code for Zork, Hitchhiker’s Guide, and other Infocom games
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Hitchhikers Guide was one of the first PC games I ever got. I had no idea it was a “text adventure.” Nor did I understand it was based on a book.My dad got it for me used from The Computer Club in downtown Lake Oswego, Oregon. I picked it out largely due to the green guy on the front of the box.I remember being delighted by all the weird stuff it came with, including a small packet of fuzz, and other artifacts from the story. I didn’t know why they were in the box but it was weird and that appealed to me.Even though I was raised by Nintendo games like RC Pro AM, I spent many hours trying to figure out how to advance in HG. Often starting over from scratch.Eventually, I got the book, read it and attempted the game again, and though the context made it more fun, I think I still got stuck somewhere around where you put the Babel fish in your ear.
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I just had over a thousand Euros stolen and Revolut is siding with the thief
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Revolut's CFO recently 'resigned' from the company in light of claims that Revolut switched off an anti-money laundering system that flags suspect transactions.Revolut cited 'personal and health reasons' for the CFO's resignation. Whatever those personal and health reasons really were, they clearly passed quite quickly as within the space of a few weeks, said CFO has joined another FinTech company as their new CFO.The company quite literally has the words "get sh*t done" in giant neon letters on their office wall. They live by the mantra of move fast and break things. That mantra is inevitably going to cause problems when your entire business is dealing with real money owned by real people in one of the most heavily regulated industries in the world.
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Fibery – yet another collaboration tool
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"Mobile last" is actually a strong feature. Screw working on your tiny phone; make the desktop the target environment.
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Building a new Windows 3.1 app in 2019: A Slack Client
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I built a Win 3.1 app during a company hackathon just for fun. Here, I detail learnings and process for how a new old app can be created with the aid of modern tools and hindsight of old technologies. And perhaps what lessons can it offer us today.Without the benefit of modern libraries and languages, I had to read up and take care of many low level details, socket programming, HTTP, JSON parsing, UI design in code all under tight memory constraints. Nevertheless, it was a terrific lesson in understanding how things work under the hood.I had to do things the old-fashioned way reading books and header files due to the dearth of online documentation. I can empathise with the plight of the programmers of yesteryears who had to code without the benefit of online search engines.With this blog post, I hope you'll find it interesting to learn about developing a modern-ancient app for Win 3.1.https://github.com/yeokm1/w31slack
https://github.com/yeokm1/http-to-https-proxy
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Ask HN: What's the best paper you've read in 2020?
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For me, it was "Erasure Coding in Windows Azure Storage" from Microsoft Research (2016) [0]The idea that you can achieve the same practical effect of a 3x replication factor in a distributed system, but only increasing the cost of data storage by 1.6x, by leveraging some clever information theory tricks is mind bending to me.If you're operating a large Ceph cluster, or you're Google/Amazon/Microsoft and you're running GCS/S3/ABS, if you needed 50PB HDDs before, you only need 27PB now (if implementing this).The cost savings, and environmental impact reduction that this allows for are truly enormous, I'm surprised how little attention this paper has gotten in the wild.[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...
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Why Robinhood disabled buys but not sells
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Everyone assuming a conspiracy theory needs to read this.Keep in mind that Robinhood also gives everyone a margin account by default. They also let people invest on margin before their inbound bank transfers arrive (Robinhood Instant). The influx of new traders sending money to Robinhood or selling other stocks to buy GME quickly drained their credit lines, reducing the capital they had available for collateral.Keep in mind that when someone sells a different stock to buy GME in the same day, they're buying GME on margin. Stock trades don't settle until T+2, so any new purchases using those proceeds are done on margin.This was a capital crunch at Robinhood due to an unexpected herd of new traders all looking to do the same thing in unison. It violated the assumptions of their business model, and the only way to keep the platform from grinding to insolvency (or violating regulations) was to slow down the unexpected event by slowing meme stock purchases.Is it really so hard to believe that such an unprecedented mass movement would break the underlying business assumptions of a pre-IPO startup that was heavily dependent on their credit lines?The biggest problem is Robinhood's poor messaging. It's clear their highest priority was to avoid admission that they were running out of money. They didn't want to trigger a bank run or shake the confidence of their newly acquired users, so they tried to obscure the message as much as possible. As a result, the popular narrative assumed some sort of evil conspiracy theory.
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The Problem with Perceptual Hashes
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The problem of hash or NN based matching is, the authority can avoid explaining the mismatch.Suppose the authority want to false-arrest you. They prepare a hash that matches to an innocent image they knew the target has in his Apple product. They hand that hash to the Apple, claiming it's a hash from a child abuse image and demand privacy-invasive searching for the greater good.Then, Apple report you have a file that match the hash to the authority. The authority use that report for a convenient reason to false-arrest you.Now what happens if you sue the authority for the intentional false-arrest? Demand the original intended file for the hash? "No. We won't reveal the original file because it's child abusing image, also we don't keep the original file for moral reason"But come to think of it, we already have tons of such bogus pseudo-science technology like the dogs which conveniently bark at police's secret hand sign, polygraph, and the drug test kit which detect illegal drugs from thin air.
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Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web
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In FireFox I have my ad blockers disabled in Private Mode so nothing is getting in the way if I'm testing or some site is being weird. Sometimes it's SHOCKINGLY different how a page looks with the blockers in place. I really can't believe anyone would user a browser without an ad blocker if they knew how things would look while using one. The web is a much better place with a blocker in place.(Yes, I know, we get a huge amount of amazing "free" content thanks to the ads and assorted trackers and other garbage out there)
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Former Coinbase PM charged in cryptocurrency insider trading tipping scheme
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Unpopular opinion incoming: the concept of insider trading is stupid, and even more stupid applied to cryptocurrency. People will always find ways to profit from privileged information. The least careful ones will just keep getting caught while the most careful reap the rewards and get away with it. Cryptocurrency isn't even a regulated asset, how can someone be 'insider trading' it?What insider trading really means is a middle class person profiting in a way the ruling class don't like. Apparently it's legal for Congress to insider trade. It's legal for CEOs to insider trade.
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Korean nuclear fusion reactor achieves 100M°C for 30 seconds
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Let's say they manage to scale this up. What effect would it have on humanity? Climate change is solved. What else?
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India lifted 415M out of poverty in 15 years, says UN
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One of the best things about living in India is watching families move from lower or lower-middle class to middle-class status. Usually, all it takes is someone from the family landing a white-collar job.While the tech bodyshops (TCS, Infosys, etc.) might have a poor reputation in the US, these companies have been absolutely critical in helping move tens of millions into middle-class respectability.
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Math breakdown: Anime homing missiles
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My first job out of college was working for a lab that did stuff for Air Defense. We did stuff like missiles that shot down other missiles for the Navy. Anyway, in my naivety, I asked the more senior engineers why we don't shoot missile plumes. Lots of cheap missiles in the hopes that one hits. (I didn't mention the idea was from watching anime.)They told me that the backfire from the exhaust of one missile might ignite the one behind it if we did stuff like that. That said, I've seen videos of ships firing missiles in relatively quick succession. Just not like the Itano Circus, however.
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Meta AI announces Massive Multilingual Speech code, models for 1000+ languages
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I would like to use stuff like this as a side-project. Buy a Nvidia Geforce GPU and stick it into my 24/7 server and play around with it in my free time, to see what can be done.The issue with all these AI models is that there's no information on which GPU is enough for which task. I'm absolutely clueless if a single RTX 4000 SFF with its 20GB VRAM and only 70W of max power usage will be a waste of money, or really something great to do experiments on. Like do some ASR with Whisper, images with Stable Diffusion or load a LLM onto it, or this project here from Facebook.Renting a GPU in the cloud doesn't seem to be a solution for this use case, where you just want to let something run for a couple of days and see if it's useful for something.
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HBO Max new Captcha system
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I experienced the HBO Max captchas just a few days ago. Everyone did since they launched a new app and made everyone switch to that and re-login.Some of the solutions are clearly just wrong. I have a PhD in Computer Science and if I am failing multiple basic addition problems, I assure you that it isn't me, the answers are wrong.I had to do the same audio puzzles and got the first audio puzzle wrong too, and I even had my partner helping me. It is clearly just a bad test bank. Which begs the question, if the answers are wrong and there are only 3 choices, then what's the point? Regardless of whether you are human or not you are going to guess it eventually in about 5 tries, which is what it gives you before locking you out.
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Mea Culpa: GitHub works well, my mistake made them look bad
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Wouldn't it be great if your scm actually kept all your changes no matter what?
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X to close
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They mention X and O on the PS controller but usually in games O is for no and X is for yes. Completely opposite of the batsu/maru, incorrent/correct they were discussing.
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The Other Side of Diversity
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Yet another white, male engineer here. I agree with the "what am I supposed to do about it" responses. I don't think I'm doing anything exclusionary (my team does have a lot of non-whites, mostly Indian and Chinese). The guy she uses as the main example - the teammate who made the domestic abuse "jokes" - clearly should be out on his ass with a lawsuit. I think we can all agree with that. But what exactly do you want the other 99% of us who just happen to have been born into the majority to do?One theme from the article that bothered me:>diversity lightning struck: I was a black woman reporting to another black woman in a technical role. Moreover, our team was predominantly black.This sounds like she's most comfortable working only with black people - in which case, the pleas for all-inclusive diversity sound a bit hollow...
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