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Newegg vs. Patent Trolls: When We Win, You Win
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Please excuse my ignorance on this topic.- Why is this happening in the first place?- Who is this entity that grants a loose patent?- Why isn't this entity being interrogated ?
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The Fight for the “Right to Repair”
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I think this whole open source and right to repair/modify will be very interesting with self-driving cars, because of their interaction with the commons. Here are some issues.There have been some discussions about the ethics of self-driving cars if it should sacrifice the lives of the people in the cars to save more lives. In a right to repair/modify wouldn't a lot of people pay to have the algorithm changed for their car to always favor the people in the car no matter what?If the self-driving software is completely open source, you can exploit the collision avoidance algorithms to favor aggressive driving with your car. For example if the software tries to keep a 15 foot buffer between cars, you can"tune" your software to use a shorter buffer and cut in front of traffic more easily.Law enforcement will campaign for a remote "pull over" command to prevent people from fleeing police.The answers to these types of questions will be very important for open source going forward.
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Linus' reply on Git and SHA-1 collision
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Pertinent facts for the worried:1) Git doesn't rely on SHA-1 for security. It relies on HTTPS, and a web of trust.2) Even if git did rely on SHA-1, there's no imminent threat. What happened today was a SHA-1 collision, not a preimage attack. If a collision costs 2^n, a preimage attack costs 2^(2n).3) Even if someone managed to pull off a preimage attack, creating a "poisonous" version of one your git repository's objects, they'd still have to convince you pull from their repo. This requires trust.4) Even if you pulled it in, your git client would simply ignore their "poison" object, because it would say, "oh, no thanks, I already have that object". At worst, the code simply wouldn't work. No harm would be done.When it comes to git, an attacker's time is better spent creating a secret buffer overflow than wasting millions of dollars on a SHA-1 collision.
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Too Clever by Half
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I really enjoyed this article.SummaryCoyotes are too clever because they know that people shaking jars full of coins can’t hurt them. Thus the animal control patrol has to get called and when they don’t shoo, the animal control person who loves animals has to shoot the coyote.Coyotes are winning the mini-game of each human interaction, but they are losing the meta-game of what society will do if coyotes aren’t scared.Personal ConnectionThis reminds me of a turning point that I had in high school. When I was young, I would get in trouble and try to get around the rules each time I got in trouble. /“Well, technically…”/But at some point I realized that most of the time you aren’t getting in trouble because you are breaking the rules. You are getting in trouble because you are making the rule makers unhappy. Once I had that realization I was able to focus on relationships with the rule makers and figure out what they actually cared about. This allowed me to break the rules just as much but without getting in trouble.
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How to Acquire Your First 100 Customers
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I have an interesting question.Say there is an already established business that has more than proven the idea is viable.What does it take to... join the same market space? Can you offer the same features at the same price? Can you offer the same features at a lower price? Can you offer less features at a lower price?Are there cases where there is only room for one player and no matter what you do, you will not be able to steal any sizable amount of market share from them?
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The Polygons of Another World
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Traditionally some corrections for the author:>The Amiga 1000 could not boot by themselves, they had no ROM. The bootloader was on a floppy and you better not lose or damage it!Amiga 1000 has bootloader (Kickstart loader) in ROM, chips U5N and U5P - two 256Kbit EPROMs/mask ROMs, 64KB in total. What it didnt have was firmware(Kickstart, like PC bios) or system(Workbench, like PC DOS/Windows) in ROM. You can see chips containing A1000 bootloader on the motherboard picture, its the two with stickers, right below two 8250 CIA chips https://www.bigbookofamigahardware.com/bboah/media/download_...You cant boot(load) without a bootloader. Trivia: Back in the day Bill Gates held a record of writing the shortest bootloader for Altair 8800, computer with nothing but LEDs for output and switches for input. You had to input said bootloader every single time you wanted to load something (like BASIC) from tape. 'Computer Notes Volume 1, Issue 6, 1975' Page Twenty-One, Author Bill Gates: “I’ve written a bootloader that only takes 13 bytes of keyed-in data, but anything smaller than 20 bytes isn’t easy to use.”. He was finally beat by one byte in 2017 http://just8bits.blogspot.com/2017/03/doing-it-in-less-than-...>It was Commodore best selling product with an estimated 6 millions units shipped from 1987 to 1991other than you know, C64 ;-) and thats not counting other products like Datasette Commodore 1530, shipped with every VIC-20 and C64.>amiga_arch.svgChip RAM is not directly connected to CPU, its gated behind AGNUS https://www.pmsoft.nl/amiga/A500-block-diagram.jpg DBR signal is what switches CPU data bus access.
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After 10 years in tech isolation, I’m now outsider to things I once had mastered
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> "Caging me for a decade is not rehabilitating. I may be making excuses for myself, though there is a lesson that could have been learned with the same amount of value for justice if the sentence was 2 years, 3 years, 5 years, even 6 years." From the article at: https://forklog.media/ex-convicted-hacker-ghostexodus-severi...I don't consider myself a bleeding heart lib but I think that a decade in prison is excessive for most non-violent crimes. I'm American but I live in Asia so maybe I'm now an outsider. I'm not aware of any other country that punishes this harshly.Serious questions: Does any other country routinely punish so severely? To what end? At what financial and psychic cost to society? If we're unique (exceptional?) why do we do this to ourselves?
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Teacher's low-tech laptop hack to display handwritten notes for online class
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My wife is a kindergarten teacher, and has been back at (virtual) teaching now for 2 weeks. Whatever your political persuasion, it’s pretty mind blowing how little the districts prepared for and invested in a virtual year. It’s not exactly like this snuck up on them, we’ve been locked down for 6 months now. You’d think they’d have decided on common software platforms, provided some training for the teachers, something.Luckily, my wife is fairly tech savvy so is hanging in there, but even just general things like how to have an effective virtual planning meeting is just not something she’s really ever had to do. So I’ve been trying to help her and her coworkers, like recording a half hour video where I just explained all the different capabilities of Zoom, and another where I explained Trello and Google slides.Just sad how the school administration’s plan boiled down to burying their head in the sand and hoping it would all go away. Really bolsters the narrative that they just don’t care about the teachers.
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NES.css – NES-Style CSS Framework
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But wait! There's more!98.css https://jdan.github.io/98.css/XP.css https://botoxparty.github.io/XP.css/7.css https://khang-nd.github.io/7.css/Each iteration excoriating layers of usability, pragmatism and clarity heading towards absolute cluster fuck of UX/UI we have today!
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Chick Corea has died
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Chick Corea was a god.I learned Spain on the bass in the hopes that one day I could play my meager rendition for him. In a concert at SFJazz he picked people out of the audience to paint their portraits with his piano. How lucky was I to be placed upon such a seat where Chick dismembered me with his eyes, eviscerating my soul upon a platter. He stared at me with the eyes of a musician who had searched heaven and hell for the most tempestuous chordal mixtures. The two minutes I spent in that seat where he painted my portrait with his keystrokes are some of the most treasured moments of my life. I felt like I had been seen, chewed up, devoured, and reincarnated as the everloving Chick Corea sycophant I had always known myself to be.The man was a goddamn monster on the boards and we are all at a loss with his passing. Rest in Power Chick, you're in my heart forever.
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I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months
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Hey congrats on making it 10 months!"Urgent to not block progress, but also ironic that they are asking a person who has no clue what they are doing to deliver critical work"Friend of mine started a role there (this was 4-5 years ago) and was fired (sorry... more or less asked to leave, being told he could keep his signing bonus if he just left) within about six weeks because he wasn't immediately delivering on some insane amounts of work. Truly, he recapped it for me, the expectations were absolutely incredible and I'd consider him a hard worker who has found a ton of success in his current role.I bag on Amazon a lot on here (which if I were to review with my therapist is likely because I had an absolutely HORRENDOUS experience in an interview loop with them my first step out of college that still makes me nervous in interviews, even 15 years later). But living in Seattle, a notable chunk of my social circle works there. I'd say a few enjoy the scale of things they get to work on or perhaps the brand name, but overall none of them ever talk about liking the work environment/balance/culture.One friend, at a director level, just quit on a whim because he came back from parental leave and his direct reports had all been put on a PIP while he was out. He told his VP to fuck off, left, and is now on sabbatical. I've never seen him so happy.
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No one expects young men to do anything and they are responding by doing nothing
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This is an important read, especially this part.> This highly educated and affluent person prioritized stability for her own children. But refused to publicly endorse this value so that less fortunate children could also benefit from family stability.I’m from a rigidly socially conservative immigrant family that professes fashionably liberal values in public—imposing a double standard between “us” and “Americans.” Meanwhile my wife’s family is from a working class part of the Oregon coast. Watching and hearing about the family instability in these communities is heartbreaking. Half or more of everyone’s parents are divorced. The kids float around seeking stability and the adults can’t provide it.The article is right on the mark talking about the importance of social expectations for men. My family’s rigid expectations have been such a blessing. It made a difference that the way to earn their respect was to get an education and a good job and support my family, and knowing that I would lose that respect if I did anything selfish to destabilize my kids’ lives. The contrast made me realize that professing liberal social values that one doesn’t live by harms society. It matters what we say about what’s good and what’s bad, what works and what doesn’t. Creating a culture where men can attain dignity and social respect by providing for their family and staying with the mother of their kids matters. And creating a culture where men are told it’s okay not to do those things creates harm.This isn’t really a political point though it sounds like one. Social change has swept through America so thoroughly that the head of the “conservative” party is a three-times-divorced man of little character. The social and cultural guard rails have been removed from the whole country. But the impact is obviously felt most damagingly in parts of the country where men need to find dignity in working at the animal feed plant are harder hit by that cultural change than parts of the country where men can find dignity earning half a million dollars a year doing interesting knowledge work.
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We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us reproduce it
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> so that if another person is shown your sequence of digits from 1 to 6, he/she should not be able to tell whether these numbers were produced by a real die or just “made up” by somebody.That instruction is a flaw in the experiment. It's always impossible to tell, for any given sequence, whether it was produced by a fair die. There's nothing an experimental subject can do to make the impossible more impossible.> the kind of sequence you’d get if you really rolled a dieWell, there is no such sequence. The instruction is incoherent.You could take it as meaning "Construct a sequence that you think will convince others that it came from a random source". That would be coherent. And then it would be legitimate to eliminate responses that were all-heads ("clearly didn't even try"). But then what are you measuring? The comparative understanding of older and youger people concerning random sources, or the Gambler's Paradox? Their comparative expertise in human psychology? Their comparative willingness to move the mouse-pointer over the screen?
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Webcams aren't good enough
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I'm the cofounder at Lumina - we're building a modern webcam designed to solve some of these problems.There's really been a lack of innovation in the entire home office space, with the webcam being particularly bad. It sucks that a decade-old product (Logitech C920) is still the bestselling product today -- that would be like if Apple stopped releasing new phones after the iPhone 4S (launched 2012), and it remained the bestselling phone through now.A few thoughts to add to the article:- On why webcams aren't seeing innovation, I'd disagree that the market is too small. There's enough gross margin to produce a $B company just by selling webcams [0], especially if you can actually get customers excited about the product.- A big reason there hasn't been innovation is that the space doesn't attract entrepreneurs (because hardware is viewed as hard) or investors (because hardware is viewed as hard).- Size isn't everything. As the iPhone shows, you can get very good image quality from a tiny sensor and lens if you have the right tech supporting it. (At Lumina, most of our eng effort is on the software layer)I would've loved to see Lumina in his comparison. We launched a few months ago and are seeing many reviewers prefer us over the Brio (Logitech's flaghip) [1]. Personally, I'd guess we're 60% of where we can be in terms of quality and think we can achieve a quality level between an iPhone and a DSLR, hopefully closer to the latter.[0] https://s1.q4cdn.com/104539020/files/doc_financials/2022/q4/...[1] https://www.windowscentral.com/lumina-ai-webcam-review
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Woman ‘dehumanised’ by viral TikTok filmed without her consent
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The reason this act breaks a moral boundary is that it subverts a
principle of "ends" [1]. A genuine random act of kindness cannot occur
if it's being filmed. Filming the act turns it into a virtue
display. It also turns the subject into an object of utility, a means
and not and end in themself.[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Ends
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Every web search result in Brave Search is now served by our own index
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Just started testing Brave Search, and it scored a rare 100 on the first test: If you type in the name of a favorite boutique hotel, will you get that hotel's true website -- or the usual hairball of third-party intermediaries?(For anyone who's ever tried to modify a reservation, the difference is astonishing. If you're booked with the hotel, all kinds of adjustments are at least possible. If you're booked with Booking, Travelocity, Expedia, etc., it's somewhere between hard and hopeless.)Brave gets it right. Bing, Google and even DuckDuckGo do not.
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Show HN: Rarbg on IPFS
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A note of caution for those unfamiliar with how IPFS works.It's very similar to BitTorrent with how content distribution happens. Your local node will broadcast which content it has available (downloaded).If you access a piece of content you automatically become a host for it so you still need to use a VPN if you live in a country where you can get sued.
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Maybe Rust isn’t a good tool for massively concurrent, userspace software
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OK, I suppose I should write to this.As I've mentioned before, I'm writing a high performance metaverse client. Here's a demo video.[1]
It's about 40,000 lines of Rust so far.If you are doing a non-crappy metaverse, which is rare, you need to wrangle a rather excessive amount of data in near real time. In games, there's heavy optimization during game development to prevent overloading the play engine. In a metaverse, as with a web browser, you have to take what the users create and deal with it. You need 2x-3x the VRAM a comparable game would need, a few hundred megabits per second of network bandwidth to load all the assets from servers, a half dozen or so CPUs running flat out, and Vulkan to let you put data into the GPU from one thread while another thread is rendering.So there will be some parallelism involved.This is not like "web-scale" concurrency, which is typically a large number of mini-servers, each doing their own thing, that just happen to run in the same address space. This is different. There's a high priority render thread drawing the graphics. There's a update thread processing incoming events from the network. There are several asset loading and decompression threads, which use up more CPU time than I'd like. There are about a half dozen other threads doing various miscellaneous tasks - handling moving objects, updating levels of detail, purging caches, and such.There's considerable locking, but no "static" data other than constants. No globals.
Channels are used where appropriate to the problem. The main object tree is single ownership, and used mostly by the update thread. Its links to graphics objects are Arc reference counted, and those are updated by both the update thread and the asset loading threads. They in turn use reference counted handles into the Rend3 library, which, via WGPU and Vulkan, puts graphics content (meshes and textures) into the GPU. Rendering is a loop which just tells Rend3 "Go", over and over.This works out quite well in Rust. If I had to do this in C++, I'd be fighting crashes all the time.
There's a reason most of the highly publicized failed metaverse projects didn't reach this level of concurrency.
In Rust, I have about one memory related crash per year, and it's always been in someone else's "unsafe" code. My own code has no "unsafe", and I have "unsafe" locked out to prevent it from creeping in. The normal development process is that it's hard to get things to compile, and then it Just Works.
That's great! I hate using a debugger, especially on concurrent programs. Yes, sometimes you can get stuck for a day, trying to express something within the ownership rules. Beats debugging.I have my complaints about Rust. The main ones are:- Rust is race condition free, but not deadlock free. It needs a static deadlock analyzer, one that tracks through the call chain and finds that lock A is locked before lock B on path X, while lock B is locked before path A on path Y. Deadlocks, though, tend to show up early and are solid problems, while race conditions show up randomly and are hard to diagnose.- Async contamination. Async is all wrong when there's considerable compute-bound work, and incompatible with threads running at multiple priorities. It keeps creeping in. I need to contact a crate maintainer
and get them to make their unused use of "reqwest" dependent on a feature, so I don't pull in Tokio. I'm not using it, but it's there.- Single ownership with a back reference is a very common need, and it's too hard to do. I use Rc and Weak for that, but shouldn't have to. What's needed is a set of traits to manage consistent forward and back links (that's been done by others) and static analysis to eliminate the reference counts.
The basic constraints are ordinary borrow checker restrictions - if you have mutable access to either parent or child, you can't have access to the other one. But you can have non-mutable access to both.
If I had time, I'd go work on that.- I've learned to live without objects, but the trait system is somewhat convoluted.
There's one area of asset processing that really wants to be object oriented, and I have more duplicate code
there than I like. I could probably rewrite it to use traits more, but it would take some bashing to make
it fit the trait paradigm.- The core graphics crates aren't finished. There was an article on HN a few days ago about this. "Rust has 5 games and 50 game engines". That's not a language problem, that's an ecosystem problem. Not enough people are doing non-toy graphics in Rust. Watch my video linked below.[1] Compared to a modern AAA game title, it's not that great. Compared to anything else being done in Rust (see [2]) it's near the front.
This indicates a lack of serious game dev in Rust.
I've been asked about this by some pro game devs.
My comment is that if you have a schedule to meet, the Rust game ecosystem isn't ready.
It's probably about five people working for a year from being ready.[1] https://video.hardlimit.com/w/tp9mLAQoHaFR32YAVKVDrz[2] https://gamedev.rs/
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DALL·E 3
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Not only there’s no model weights or code released, there’s not even a paper. Nothing is revealed about the model. “OpenAI”, ladies and gentlemen.
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Black Swan Farming
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The counter-intuitive nature of startup investing is a big part of what makes it so interesting to me. In most aspects of life, we are trained to avoid risk and only pursue "good ideas" (e.g. try to be a lawyer, not a rock star). With startups, I get to focus on things that are probably bad ideas, but possibly great ideas. It's not for everyone, but for those of us who love chasing dreams, it can be a great adventure.
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Before the Startup
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So this is the third counterintuitive thing to remember about startups: starting a startup is where gaming the system stops working. Gaming the system may continue to work if you go to work for a big company. Depending on how broken the company is, you can succeed by sucking up to the right people, giving the impression of productivity, and so on. [2] But that doesn't work with startups. There is no boss to trick, only users, and all users care about is whether your product does what they want. Startups are as impersonal as physics. You have to make something people want, and you prosper only to the extent you do.The bootstrapper crowd (Amy Hoy, patio11, etc) often level this as a criticism of VC-backed startups -- that they are a gameable system, a series of hurdles from accelerator to series A to series B to acquihire. Whereas (they say) bootstrapping isn't gameable, it relies on making something users want, and it teaches you to deal with raw reality head-on. [1]Maybe they are only looking at a dysfunctional subset of VC-backed startups though? One common pattern seems to be that a person enters a particular field, notices that many people around them are unimpressive and focused on perception, "networking" and system-gaming -- and concludes that the field is corrupt.But in actuality, they'd only seen the bottom tier of the field, and the higher tiers have more genuine talents who also despise bullshitters.[2][1] http://unicornfree.com/2012/why-blacksmiths-are-better-at-st...[2] I'm thinking specifically of academia as another example of this pattern. Since bullshitters do manage to reach the higher tiers of both startups and academia, there's a genuine question as to whether the bullshitters will someday come to dominate both of these areas, and whether this has already happened. By definition, a field that has been taken over by bullshitters is not going to let you know that this has happened.
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Uber wants access to browsing history, bookmarks, and running apps
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From a reddit comment:> The permissions you see on the install screen are actually triggered by various permissions in the permission group. I've checked Ubers (there's a button on the web play store and you can see it in the manifest), and the only one from the Device and App History group they actually use is "GET_TASKS", or get a list of recently opened apps.> Furthermore, on Lollipop this permission doesn't even do anything anymore. The relevant function in the framework has been changed and only returns instances of the caller's own app now. So Uber can see when you last used Uber. Big deal.> Basically, this is a big fuss for nothing. Uber is not accessing your browser history, and if you're on Lollipop or above they can't access your app history either. They may do that on lower versions, but it's most likely to counter buggy behaviour on those older verions and not to spy on you.
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4-bit calculator made from cardboard and marbles
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Thought experiment: if sentient AI is possible with nothing more than software, does that mean if you "load" the sentient AI program into a "computer" made of cardboard and marbles, that the cardboard and marbles will be self-aware?
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Oh My Gosh, It’s Covered in Rule 30s
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I've long been a fan of Wolfram's ideas. But I wish he could write a single thing without most of it being about: how great he is, and how he has supposedly made the most progress in history with a cognitive step from already explored cellular automata. It's not even that I'm that bothered by the arrogance, it's just repetitive and boring.
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System76 ME Firmware Updates Plan
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I am the engineer at System76 currently working on this. We are using ME cleaner with -S on all systems where possible - HAP bit will be set AND code removed. All systems will then be tested thoroughly in this configuration before it is released to customers.Relevant source code can be found in the following places, keep in mind that it is still work in progress:- System76 Driver with Firmware Update support: https://github.com/pop-os/system76-driver/tree/firmware_artf...- Firmware Update Frontend: https://github.com/system76/firmware-updatePlease ask me anything
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How I'm able to take notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim
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I don't agree with this. Perhaps it's possible for someone with exceptional LaTeX and vim knowledge, but even after using both for 20 years I wouldn't do this.The point of the lecture is to assimilate structure and basic understanding, not to produce a neat set of notes instantly. To take notes to this detail means you're putting more time into the note taking than the work.Use a pen and paper. Write down structure as it happens. Write down things you understand, short hand. Write down things you don't for later review. After 2 hour long linear circuits lectures I regularly waltzed off with a couple of pages of loose A4 for review. A lot of the time, our lecturers would give us a copy of the OHP stack if we asked them as well.Write your notes up at the end of the day with reference material at hand and no compromises. You can structure, extrapolate and transform things into your own understandable language then.
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Running GitHub on Rails 6.0
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My comment on one of the previous discussions:I don't want to start a flame war here, but I think Rails (and gem ecosystem in general) is a better choice than Django, at least for SaaS apps.These are all my personal opinions, take it with a grain of salt. Having said that, here we go:* Authentication - it is a pain if you'd like to deviate from the standard Django User model (using username to login instead of an email). I don't like Devise either.* Asset pipeline, even though it is not updated anymore (sprockets) and partially replaced by the webpacker, is still better in Rails* Configuration spread across multiple files, by environment, instead of a single config.py file* Sidekiq has a better API compared to Celery. Also, Celery's default broker is RabbitMQ, not Redis. It is really hard to find managed RabbitMQ hosting, for Redis there are plenty* Mailer previews, small but quite useful utility* Better security by default: Rails comes pre-configured with a bunch of security headers[0].* Testing - Minitest and Capybara is just a joy to work with.* I prefer ActiveRecord over Django ORM* Rails isn't afraid to deprecate things and move forward. This isn't the case with Django, which is big on backwards compatibility. I don't like it, since it puts into a disadvantage folks who are starting new projects. Different strokes for different folks, I supposeI could go on and on, but I remember struggling a lot with Django/Celery when building a SaaS app. I decided to switch to Rails and haven't looked back (Rails has its warts as well). YMMV[0] https://guides.rubyonrails.org/security.html#default-headersEDIT: Added last point about backwards compatibility
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The Deep Sea
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I wonder what prevents a fish that goes down to 100 meters from going down to 300 meters or 3000 meters. Does it feel an internal pressure that tells it to not dive further, or is it the amount of light or availability of food it seeks? Since fish wouldn't suffer from decompression sickness, I wonder if they could dive much deeper if they wanted to.Now that I think about it, I've scuba dived to 130 feet and it didn't feel any different to me than being at 10 feet. The only reason I didn't go deeper is because the depth gauge, divermaster, and training told me not to go deeper, and not because I was feeling the pressure.
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MS Flight Simulator 2020 vs. Real life
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The thing I love most about flight simulators is the avionics. I would happily exchange flight realism for more depth in the avionics systems.I especially love the 90's / early 2000's style with a mix of analog and digital instruments. Lot's of physical buttons, multiple small screens, a somewhat poor UI compared to modern standards, etc.I'd love to play around more with these types of simulated systems. I almost literally would just like a button pushing simulator. Are there any other games / simulators which might scratch this itch for me?
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Small nuclear reactors: tiny NuScale reactor gets safety approval
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fyi, OSU college has a 1-megawatt research reactor.https://www.oregon.gov/energy/facilities-safety/facilities/P...https://www.corvallisadvocate.com/2012/got-nuke-state-of-the...
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Why I Built Litestream
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Awesome! I built a side-business that runs completely on Crystal + SQLite. Very light, fast service and makes ~$200k/mo.I just cp my sqlite file to S3 every 2 hours.From my app, i have a page[1] where i can load any snapshot database saved on S3. I can backup at anytime too with a click, which i do before deployment.[1]: https://i.imgur.com/Ls1Tnxc.png
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Lotus 1-2-3 For Linux
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> It turns out that the BBS also had a warez copy of Lotus 1-2-3 for UNIX. This was widely thought to be lost – I’m told it couldn’t compete with a more popular UNIX office suite called SCO Professional, so there were not many copies sold.I wonder if anyone still has a copy of Lotus 1-2-3/M? It was the port to the IBM mainframe operating systems MVS (nowadays known as z/OS) and VM/CMS (nowadays z/VM). [0] Not that I ever used it or saw it, but just I have become fascinated with it from reading descriptions of it. From what I understand, it is more different from 1-2-3 for DOS than the Unix or VMS ports were; the Unix and VMS ports work with character mode terminals (such as VT100 compatibles), which while rather different from the terminal model used on MS-DOS or text mode OS/2 (direct memory access to the screen buffer), nonetheless are close enough that the bridge can be gapped–which (on Unix) is classically the job of the curses library (and its various descendants). By contrast, 1-2-3/M was written to work with the block mode 3270 terminals commonly used on IBM mainframes, which send to/from the terminal whole screenfuls of data at a time, rather than individual characters (somewhat similar, in principle, to classic HTML forms). This forced greater changes in the UI compared to the other ports, because a lot of things which are easy to implement with character mode terminals are essentially impossible in 3270.[0] https://www.ibm.com/common/ssi/ShowDoc.wss?docURL=/common/ss...
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Cloudflare outage on June 21, 2022
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In a world where it can take weeks for other companies to publish a postmortem after an outage (if they ever do), I never ceases to amaze me how quickly CF manage to get something like this out.I think it's a testament to their Ops/Incident response teams and internal processes, it builds confidence in their ability to respond quickly when something does go wrong. Incredible work!
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DNS Esoterica – Why you can't dig Switzerland
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The DNS "master file"/"zone file" format is a bloody disaster for the same reason, and practically unparseable. Every implementation parses them differently when it comes to parenthesis.From the grammar in RFC 1035: []
[]
contents take one of the following forms:
[] []
[] []
All the columns being optional creates the ambiguity between the and columns in the TTL missing/2nd form. In the real world is always "IN". It's even worse since the set of 's is unbounded and the grammar depends on I believe this is one reason why tinydns has its own format https://cr.yp.to/djbdns/tinydns-data.html
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Gitlab to lay off 7% of staff
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> The current macroeconomic environment is toughNo, it isn't, and it's embarrassing at this point to continue insisting this. The macroeconomic environment is good, particularly in the United States. Business investment is growing at 3% a quarter (annualized), which is better than the average over the past decade. Employment is growing rapidly. Inflation has been tame over the past six months. And wages are growing steadily, but not rapidly in a wage-inflation spiral. In the US, the stock market is down about 10% over the past 12 months, but it's up over the past six months, and corporate earnings have been high.Everywhere you look, the economic indicators are solid.I do not have insight into Gitlab's customers, or the current state of Gitlab's business. But it is simply not true that the macroeconomic environment is tough. It is not. If there are problems, they are Gitlab problems, not macroeconomic problems.
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Multi-Account Containers
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I've been using this since it was new. I'm very frustrated to say the UI/UX hasn't seen any significant update.Containers are still synced separately, so any fresh install of Firefox will have the tutorial UX and the default 4 containers, even after syncing.Also, address bar completion is still monolithic, making it very easy to accidentally open a site in an undesired container. That can be worked around by adding every domain to a default container, but most of the utility of containers is to use several for a single domain, i.e. multiple email accounts each with their own container instances.Containers are a feature I find very valuable, but they really need their UX to be a core browser feature, not an addon.
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Tell HN: Do not store any funds in PayPal or use them for anything critical
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This happened to me when I was using paypal income to pay my rent while I was in school. They only locked up a few thousands dollars but that was life-or-death kind of money for me at the time. Taught me a very expensive lesson about never keeping money in paypal and never giving paypal your bank information. USe credit cards as your buffer between paypal and you. Paypal is like fire - you can harness it usefully, but it will burn you if given the chance.
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Disney, Netflix, and more are fighting FTC's 'click to cancel' proposal
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Netflix is such a crook. I had cancelled my subscription a while ago. They gave me the rest of the month to watch (since i already paid that month). Well, I had cancelled because I don't watch anymore. Guess what? Since it was a family plan, my father end up watching on his house, in another city. So Netflix renew the subscription. Fun right? I get a message everytime my card gets charged, that's why I noticed I was still being charged for Netflix. End up hoping in a chat with the support and they told me about this "feature" of automatic renewal.UPDATEhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36708881 - ReclameAqui is a Brazilian website where customers can file complaints about companies. Netflix seems to be doing that to a lot of customers...
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Animated AI
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Nicely designed. Here is another visualizer for CNNs, from research at Georgia Tech:https://poloclub.github.io/cnn-explainer/Another link to various visualization tools: https://github.com/ashishpatel26/Tools-to-Design-or-Visualiz...Another one: https://playground.tensorflow.org/
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Apple now rejecting apps with Pebble Smartwatch support
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It's a bit tricky. I agree with most comments here that Apple is in the right to control what appear in the description and metadata. Not just from a competitive standpoint but in a way to make the it better for the user experience.That being said, in the Pebble case, I think it makes the user experience worst for the user. I.e. if I have a pebble watch and am looking for an iphone app that play well with it, I'd want to see the name in the description/meta-data.I think it's different than saying "Also on Android" because this is a totally different device. I.e. saying it's on another smartphone doesn't add value to the description, but saying it supports some hardware device does.It seems like Apple is doing that as a way to kill competition and promote their own watch, which is fair from a business standpoint. But as a user, I don't like that approach of forcing everything into the Apple ecosystem. I got tired of that 2 years ago and switched to android, haven't looked back since.
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Squash your commits
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Sometimes I feel like it's a minority position, but I think it strange all the efforts people go to in order to essentially make the git DAG look like a (lie of a) straight-line CVS or SVN commit list. Seeing how the sausage was actually made (no rebases, no squashes, sometimes not even fast-forwards) isn't pretty, but it is meaningful and will tell you a great deal about a project and its developers... I trust that. It's real and visceral and how software is actually made and you can learn from that or find things to explore in that jungle. Projects with multiple developers that yet have straight line commit histories and super tidy commits are aberrations and full of little lies...Kudos to GitHub for providing this feature that a lot of people have asked for. I obviously don't plan to use it, but I appreciate that it's an option for those people that like their small, harmless lies. ;)
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Save Firefox
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> [The W3C] needs to hear from you now. Please share this post, and spread the word. Help the W3C be the organization it is meant to be.This isn't about the W3C.This is about EME, and about the companies that created it and promoted it: Google, Microsoft and Netflix (as you can see on the spec, for example https://www.w3.org/TR/encrypted-media/ ).Telling the W3C not to do DRM is not going to be effective. The only thing that can work is to put direct pressure on the parties behind EME, and their products: Google and Chrome, Microsoft and IE/Edge, and Netflix.Not only is it not effective to focus on the W3C, it's counterproductive - it shifts the blame away from the real culprits just mentioned. If you lobby the W3C against EME but still use products from the companies that created EME, you're sending mixed messages at best.Furthermore, even if somehow we got the W3C to not do EME, it wouldn't matter. Google, Microsoft and Netflix would still be implementing it. They would just find another standards body.
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Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors
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Eric Schmidt was the anti-privacy leader who dismissed privacy concerns."If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/12/google-ceo-eric-schmid...Keep in mind this is the same guy who blackballed CNET reporters for finding personal information on him through google search.https://money.cnn.com/2005/08/05/technology/google_cnet/The guy represents every wrong with tech. Privacy for him, but none for thee. And that's not even including on his shady ties to government.
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They're Made Out of Meat (1991)
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This is a classic story and fun in its own way, but thinking about humanity future reach for the stars (provided it happens) will most likely require us to move to some trans human form. Think transformers or sentient ships. The human life is too short and body is too fragile for cosmic voyages. If we are going to be advanced enough to build interstellar ships, we should be advanced enough to travel in a different vessel.
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Ask HN: Anyone else burnt out due to extended lockdown and work-from-home?
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Personally, I'm not burnt out.To void burn out, I did a few things which I feel are extremely helpful.1. Have a room that is a dedicated office. When I leave this room, I leave the "office".2. Establish communication throughout the day. This means having slack conversations (typed and video) that are casual. It's okay to vent on these calls.3. Have a defined schedule - Awake at 6am, washed/dressed by 6:30am, Red Bull (or if you like food) and at my desk by 7am. I do work long hours, but I enjoy it because I'm accomplishing something.4. Work on something that excites you or find joy in your work somehow.5. Lastly, realize most of the mental stress can be managed with a little mindfulness, learning to accept that you still can grow and find joy even when at home and cut back on social media; or if you're like me, I cut out 99% of social media.I hope everyone remains positive. Do something today, that makes you better tomorrow.
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Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio
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From the article:> J Balvin said: [...] With Lossless, everything in the music is going to sound bigger and stronger but more importantly, it will be better quality. [...]There have been tests showing we cannot hear the difference between minimally lossy audio (e.g. mp3 320kbps) and lossless. But Balvin can. And it sounds "bigger and stronger".The extra quality of lossless is nice when mixing/remixing the sound, as the inaudible loss of quality with minimally lossy audio (e.g. mp3 320kbps) is audible when the sound is sped up or slowed down.But, and this the article does not mention, is not what Apple Music wants you to do. The formats will be proprietary with DRM.I prefer FLAC/OggVorbis/etc when it comes to music. But then I like to be able to mix/remix.
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Lesser-known Postgres features
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I want to stress the importance of not using id int SERIAL
If you are on a somewhat recent version of postgres, please do yourself a favor and use: id int GENERATED BY DEFAULT AS IDENTITY PRIMARY KEY
An "identity column", the part here:https://hakibenita.com/postgresql-unknown-features#prevent-s...You might think this is trivial -- but SERIAL creates an "owned" (by a certain user) sequence behind the scenes, and so you run into massive headaches if you try to move things around.Identity columns don't, and avoid the issue altogether.https://www.2ndquadrant.com/en/blog/postgresql-10-identity-c...
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Julian Assange can be extradited to the US, court rules
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This should be a sobering view of how the world really works. Above a certain threshold, every veneer of civilization vanishes no matter what the country (some have a higher threshold than others).At this level, only power matters. And the first rule of power is: Don't embarrass the powerful unless you can call on a lot of power to defend yourself.Laws can't protect you; they can be thwarted and bent, and the legal process "guided" to the required outcome.International organizations can't protect you; they can only register complaints that will be duly ignored by everyone if the champion is important enough.Even countries can't protect you at this level; they're beholden to power themselves after a certain point.This is the message to would-be activists anywhere: Stay out of the big boy pool or we'll make you regret it.
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Do things, tell people (2012)
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Wow, I thought I would resurrect my HN account for this.I wrote this article a little over a decade ago, when I was still in college, and I knew almost nothing about the world. (I still don't, but I didn't then, either) It's fun to see that it still resonates with people despite the naivety and the slight sense of "I am headed for success" that makes it hard for me to re-read.My initial reflection on the article was that I had fallen off the "do things, tell people" wagon a little bit, having let go of my twitter account and with it much of the easiest path to doing things and telling people. I still work in tech but I haven't created anything I'm particularly excited about in a good while, so I felt that I was failing my own ideal.Then, of course, I remembered that I hiked all of Ireland's long-distance trails (https://toughsoles.ie) and have a reasonably successful, if niche, youtube channel (https://youtube.com/toughsoles). Funny that my mindset, especially regarding this article, is so tech-focused that I automatically discount something I've been doing for five years.All that said, I'm starting to look for new opportunities in the larger-than-startup space. Shoot me an email at [email protected] and let's chat.
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It costs $110k to fully gear up in Diablo Immortal
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It's even more frustrating, because the game is good. I really enjoyed playing the first 30 levels or so. Good story, good controls, very satisfying gameplay. If I could pay $60 and just have a "classic" Diablo on my phone, I might. But I won't spend a cent on consumable in-app purchases.It is so sad that "make good game, sell it" model no longer works. It's all a wonky curve of "free - couple of dollars - hundreds and thousands of dollars".
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Tell HN: Happy Thanksgiving
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It's an understatement to call HN a daily read for me. Does anyone else check the comments before following the link? The perspectives shared here are a valuable part of my information diet. Thank you and Happy Thanksgiving!
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AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects
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@Simon, I love this. And one day, in the not too distant future, a few old wizened graybeards, like you and I and the other folks on this site who have been writing code from scratch for 20 years, will be the magicians who walk the earth among mere mortals who only learned to code with the assistance of ChatGPT.We will be the ones with the preattentive syntax parsing in our brains that let us simply see basic syntax errors; we will be the ones who can point out simple but subtle errors immediately—because we’ve made them 10000 times; we will be the ones who can take a ChatGPT response and immediately identify how it’s lacking not just in outcome but in edge case handling. We came of age before stack overflow, and have matured to the point where we treat stack overflow answers as mere suggestions for a possible approach, not as code to be copied and adapted.And then, when we are no more, there will be no one left who can wrangle the turtles that reach the bottommost depths of the full stack.
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Dear Red Hat: Are you dumb?
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Disclaimer: I'm a former Red Hatter but my opinion is my ownRed Hat, you NEED to fix this. I get that it sucks to have your business built on selling support, and a couple of companies have popped up selling cheaper support but not taking on the cost of building the thing. I get that (you think) it's going to cause problems for you (it might, I'm not sure yet). But you're torching an insane amount of good will that was built up over 20 years of good and mostly selfless deeds. You are making yourselves an enemy and a villain, rather than a friend. You need to stop the bleeding.I don't have any answers, but I have some ideas:1. Continue to make it so that rebuilders like Alma or Rocky can exist as bug-for-bug by having access to the source, but reach an agreement with them not to offer or sell support. If those don't agree, other projects will emerge who will agree and will take their place. Don't make their lives unnecessarily hard by throwing up roadblocks in their way. There will probably be popup companies selling third party support for Alma/Rocky etc here and there, but I doubt that type of support competition makes a serious dent to enterprise sales. In fact, I think it helps you by increasing adoption. A rising tide raises all boats, especially in this field.2. Figure out a way to let individuals and small developers use real RHEL without having to dick with subscriptions or licensing or activation. Be liberal with this and make it easy
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Animated Knots
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One of the things I've learned from teaching knots to Boy & Girl Scouts in the BSA is that you must constantly re-learn them or your skills will founder. It's not like riding a bike for me. That could be a visual-spacial memory thing, but many of my co-knot-tieing scouting teachers seem to have the same experience... so this site is perennially useful.Favorite knot (involving a Rabbit going "through the hole, around the tree, and back down the hole"): Bowline Knot
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I got robbed of my first kernel contribution
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I can’t empathise with the author. It seems like they’re only interested in OSS when a) they get credit, and b) for only fixing problems that affect them.> instead he implemented his own version of the fix. I told him that I would really appreciate if he could accept a patch from me, so that I could receive credit for fixing this issue and become a kernel contributor.In other words, you asked a maintainer to accept an inferior fix just so you can put “kernel contributor” on your resume.> My company and I should have received proper credit for solving this issue, especially considering how much effort we put into it.No one asked you to do this. You aren’t owed anything when you do an unasked favour for someone else. Also, the only reason you put so much effort into this was to fix your own problem. Which, from my understanding, is now fixed. You seem to have no interest in fixing other problems (which you were given an opportunity to do). IMHO this attitude doesn’t qualify for contributor status.
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I am under surveillance by Canadian agents, my computer has been backdoored
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"I’ll be wearing a black suit."That should have been enough to make anyone suspicious.
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Update on Julie Horvath's Departure
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> We know we have to take action and have begun a full investigation. While that’s ongoing, and effective immediately, the relevant founder has been put on leave, as has the referenced GitHub engineer.Pretty much a full admission that everything that Julie said is true.This is great news, but putting these people on leave seems to be too nice. It's clear that these two people obey ethics that are in direct oppposition to the healthy growth of the company. Surely they don't want them back?> The founder’s wife discussed in the media reports has never had hiring or firing power at GitHub and will no longer be permitted in the office.Why did it take a Techcrunch article to reach this decision? Didn't anyone at Github see anything wrong with that founder's wife doing what she did, according to Julie's statement?> GitHub has grown incredibly fast over the past two years, bringing a new set of challenges. Nearly a year ago we began a search for an experienced HR Lead and that person came on board in January 2014Doesn't appear so. They did get an HR person, but an experienced one? Not a chance. No experienced HR person would have let any of that get as far as it got. That HR person should probably be put on leave or be fired as well.> Chris Wanstrath
>
> CEO & Co-FounderThis narrows down the choices: the "founder" who is the cause for all this drama is either PJ Hyett or Tom Preston-Werner.
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Pirated Courses on Udemy
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Lol you people are really amazing. No sense of irony? Really?Hey guess what, Silicon Valley has been doing this for nearly 20 years to other people. Funny how the HN crowd gets riled up when it happens to programmers.Movies cost tens of millions to make and employ hundreds if not thousands. Tv shows are maybe an order of magnitude smaller, records maybe one more. Any of those media products blow these aggrieved programmers out of the water, impact wise.But the founders of YouTube -- who played this little copyright game like a fiddle -- are heroes in the Valley. So are the founders of Napster, one of whom helped get Facebook going.I guess "move fast and break things" is a great motto until it's your stuff getting broken.
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People Call Me Aaron
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SF tech party culture sounds awful. It sounds no less superficial and dehumanizing than the worst of celebrity adulation in Hollywood.
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Require-from-Twitter
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> "dependencies": {
> "babel-preset-stage-0": "6.5.0",
> "babel-preset-es2015": "6.6.0",
> "babel-runtime": "6.6.1",
> "babel-plugin-transform-runtime": "6.6.0",
> "babel-cli": "6.6.5",
> "babel-core": "6.7.4",
> "twit": "2.2.3",
> "entities": "1.1.1"
> },
The problem right here. Just to run a script you now need to import a whole third party language runtime ? what other language does pull this kind of stunt ? Javascript is madness.
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Fake Linus Torvalds' Key Found in the Wild, No More Short-IDs
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I don't know why more folks don't display keys and fingerprints as Base64; it seems to me that "q68RxlopcLEwq+PEeb4+QwBBGIY=" (Linus's real key) and "D2oUZTLYaa7kOPdLYhGqOwBBGIY=" (Linus's fake key) are pretty easilt-distinguishable, and not terribly verbose.
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Your own company? You can do it (2011)
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I've done my own thing since high school with the exception of two years in offices (one as W2 and one as part time 1099). I'm now 35 and experiencing health issues and discovering that unless you earn "f$&! you money" group health insurance in the US is worth at least $75k a year in income. At least.If you aren't in a country with proper healthcare and are not earning AT LEAST $300k USD a year (consistently), understand that all your years of work can be destroyed by one diagnosis. And plan accordingly.I love my life. I've had a charmed existence moving to wonderful locales and doing what I wanted when I wanted; but the genetic lottery cannot be outwitted. You can be healthy one day and in debt the next.Plan accordingly. Don't let youth and good health lull you into complacency.It's completely possible and attainable for software developers to be independent anywhere on the globe, but understand the potential financial implications and limitations of the social safety nets of your country of citizenship/residence. Plan accordingly.
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HTML5 Version of the Tron:Legacy Boardroom Scene
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Glad to see some people are getting a kick out of this. I built it a few years back while learning webgl, css3, node.js, redis, and modern (at the time) js tooling. Source over at https://github.com/arscan/encom-boardroomI didn't build this with any real practical application in mind at the time. But some people have reused components in their own projects over the years, particularly the globe (https://github.com/arscan/encom-globe).
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How the US Pushed Sweden to Take Down the Pirate Bay
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The copyright industry has had far too much power for many years now. But when I talk to people about this nobody cares. For most people the products of this industry are just "content" which they use to waste their time so I suppose it makes sense that they don't care too much about it. The tragedy is that the copyright industry controls a large and continually growing part of our culture and their power is only increasing.I was there when a UK music tracker called OiNK's Pink Palace was shut down. The police raided the home of the site owner before dawn and even the home of his father who had no idea what his son was up to. Copyright industry writers wrote the news article, claiming it was "extremely lucrative" and included gems such as "Within a few hours of a popular pre-release track being posted on the OiNK site, hundreds of copies can be found".The site's owner was found not guilty in court several years later, but not before the copyright industry essentially ruined his life.But how does this happen? If you talk to most people they don't understand copyright at all. They think it's some kind of privileged status that you have to pay for, like a trademark or something. Most people are not even aware that they hold copyrights. And why would they? Can the average person summon the police to help protect their copyright? Of course not. It's not even a criminal matter. The police being involved seems nothing short of corruption.
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Neighbor's house alarm triggers when I put my car in reverse
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This reminds me of a “bug” I found when working for a company that sells package lockers to apartment buildings. We used iPads for the user interface and had monitoring in place to alert us if an iPad went offline.At only one location with two iPads one would go offline almost every day (but not every day) between 12pm and 1pm, for 10-20 minutes. Never the same time of day, and never the same length of time. It was always the same iPad, the other one on that network stayed online the entire time.We replaced the iPad and the problem persisted. Finally I got fed up, put my phone on silent, ignored everything, and watched the Dropcam feed for the 2 hours near the usual time. Slowly I saw the sun light up the lockers, eventually shining on the iPad. Ten minutes later, after sitting in direct sunlight, it went offline. As the sun moved, the iPad went back in to shadow and came online on its own.It was overheating and shutting itself off until it cooled down. The time changed because day lengths change, and the days it didn’t go offline were cloudy.
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Ask HN: What is your favourite tech talk?
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We Really Don't Know How to Compute: Gerry Sussman - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3tVctB_VSUZebras All the Way Down: Bryan Cantrill - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fE2KDzZaxvEJonathan Blow on Deep Work: Jonathan Blow - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Ej_3NKA3pkSimple Made Easy: Rich Hickey - https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-EasyEffective Programs - 10 Years of Clojure: Rich Hickey - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2V1FtfBDsLU&t=845sThe Last Thing D Needs: Scott Meyers - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAWA1DuvCnQ
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Towards Battery-Free HD Video Streaming [video]
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I think your response to this will depend on whether or not you've read Dave Eggers' The Circle, in which battery-free wireless cameras play a central role. (Spoiler: it doesn't go well).Imagine the current state of blanket surveillance, particularly in dense urban cities like London, but everywhere, invisibly. Cheap, battery-free, weatherproof cameras are a step towards this.P.S.: The book isn't great, but it's miles better than the film.
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U.S. Files Criminal Charges Against Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes, Ramesh Balwani
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Does anybody know if Theranos got started with at least an idea how to accomplish what they wanted to do? From what I have heard in interviews they started with the thought "Doing xxx would be super useful" but didn't have an approach for accomplishing this but instead took in money and tried to figure it out. It's like me saying "An antimatter drive would revolutionize space exploration" and starting to collect money but without even the faintest idea how to produce one.Does anyone know? Did Holmes have any insight that caused her and the investors to believe she could do the blood tests?
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I've reproduced 130 research papers about “predicting the stock market”
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This is unsurprising. P likely is not equivalent to NP [0], and predicting the market is NP-hard [1]. It's nice to see empirical work in the field, though, and especially nice to see reproductions of published papers.[0] https://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/pnp.pdf[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1002.2284Edit for downvoters and repliers: If enough market participants are irrational, then it can still be possible for people to predict other people, instead of the market, and make money that way.NP-hardness indeed doesn't rule out heuristic approaches, but experience with 3-SAT and other NP-complete problems suggest that there will be arbitrarily bad times, and that in those times, the amount of loss can be exponential in the length of time that the heuristic poorly predicts the market.
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Earth and Sun
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What a beautiful, well designed and informative explanation of the complex earth / sun relationship. Well done!One thing I would love to see is the path of the sun across the sky for different times of year, and different locations on earth.Here in Seattle, the difference is fairly dramatic between winter and summer, and I've come to realize that the sun is never directly overhead, not even in summer. It would be interesting to see the difference between polar regions vs in the tropics also.
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Quantum Supremacy Using a Programmable Superconducting Processor
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Interesting refutation by IBM here:In the preprint, it is argued that their device reached “quantum supremacy” and that “a state-of-the-art supercomputer would require approximately 10,000 years to perform the equivalent task.” We argue that an ideal simulation of the same task can be performed on a classical system in 2.5 days and with far greater fidelity.https://www.ibm.com/blogs/research/2019/10/on-quantum-suprem...
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Microsoft Wins Pentagon’s $10B Contract
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Since the early 2000s, Microsoft has done a significant amount of work for the NSA. AWS has had GovCloud, and it is true the CIA uses AWS, but MSFT has built out quite well some of the more exotic requests of the NSA.The crown jewel of the NSA’s MSFT partnership is the San Antonio, Texas data center. The “5150 Rogers Road” data center was chosen because Texas has cheap electricity, which is an enormous cost outlay for the NSA. Additionally, and the FBI chose San Antonio for a significant presence as well because of this, is Texas has a separate electrical grid from the rest of the US.Also San Antonio has something like 4 military bases. Ft. Sam Houston where the Army medics train, Lackland Air Force Base (home of cybercommand for the Air Force), Kelley Air Force Base, and perhaps even 1 or 2 I can’t recall.120 minutes to the north is the recently established Army Futures Command in Austin, along with Ft. Hood in Killeen, the Army’s largest base in the world.AWS does not currently have a data center in Texas, which has always frustrated the Texas government. They did establish a shipping center in San Marcos, but even GCO is building out in Dallas where IBM Cloud has a data center, and Oracle Cloud has an Austin data center.
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For tech-weary Midwest farmers, 40-year-old tractors now a hot commodity
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The technology itself is not the issue, the problem is that companies are at war with their customers. These companies will go to any length to extract as much revenue as possible. Milking your customers is not good for business, especially if you drive them into insolvency.I hope in the future there are more companies that try to align incentives with their customers, such that their business practices help customers be more successful (although many of them preach this, very few actually do). Many businesses these days seem to be geared toward making a quick buck, rather than really providing any value.
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Apple, Google ban location tracking in apps using their contact-tracing system
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I have to say, working at Apple and knowing all the hard work that goes into this and making sure your data stays private while also being able to combat this disease, it's very frustrating to read a lot of the comments here. I can understand why the public is skeptical, but I feel like as a society we've swung so far away from institutional trust that now nothing good can actually emerge. The anti-vax movement is a perfect example where the collective work of thousands of people over decades to save millions of lives just gets tossed aside because some celebrity 'feels' like there's a connection that isn't there, and in the process, the level of public harm becomes severe.Note: All opinions (in this comment and all of mine on HN) are my own.
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Ennio Morricone has died
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He never had the public recognition he deserved unfortunately. I'm still surprised at how many people can whistle many of his pieces without knowing who he is.
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Lightroom app update wipes users' photos and presets, Adobe says not recoverable
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In another story, I needed Lightroom for about a week to do some photo work. I started with their subscription for the month and I wanted to let go if I'm done in the first month.While trying to cancel my subscription, I realize I can only do that after paying for the remaining 11 months (rough calculation).With no other option, I paid my penalty and left Adobe for good. I have deleted my 15+ year old Adobe account.Alternatives and to serve nostalgic attachments, I bought the whole suite of Affinity[1] Products. I've also bought Darkroom[2] for photo editing on iPad.1. https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/2. https://darkroom.coP.S. (edit/addition) I ended a 25+ year relationship with Adobe. I paid myself through my school and college with PageMaker, and other softwares (both open source, free, and paid).
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Gitter is joining Matrix
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I really like to use IRC on the terminal via Irssi.Can Irssi be used to access this matrix thing?If not, is there some nice matrix command line client in the Debian repos?Or maybe someone could just make an IRC server which is a bridge to matrix?
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Helsinki Relocation Package: City as a Service
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Overall my experience in Helsinki has been hugely positive. I’ve been here now over a decade and have settled with work and family life.Work life balance is great, there’s a beautiful outdoors to enjoy all year, and the people are warm and kind, if not difficult to start with.All that said, there’s a lot of bullshit and hot air here in this thread:- public healthcare is great until you have something difficult to work with or non acute. Enjoy the months longs waiting times to see a dentist.- Yes, you can get by speaking English but your kid and partner might not. The tech industry employs foreigners here but there are countless people I know and hear of who end up here outside of the tech or sciences industry and cannot get work due to the language. Furthermore, don’t expect the same opportunities provided to Finnish speakers as you won’t get half the jobs at least. I work for an IT consultancy and only about 10-20% of client roles are available to me within the company.- Winter here is shit nowadays. It used to be cold and snowy. Now it’s just like slushy and miserable- Not all your services will be available in English. I have English banking for example but their department is slow and difficult to work with. Same with phoning utility services etc.- Yes the language is hard but the main problem is finding time to learn it. Trust me, you don’t want to spend your free time doing it or you’ll just work and study and not enjoy the lifestyle here.Don’t get me wrong. I love this place but look through the marketing and try and get some real experiences before you uproot your whole life. Happy to answer more questions here or privately (email through website in my profile).
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Open Source Smartwatch
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I'd be the perfect target for the products of a company like Pine. A long-time geek who uses open-source software on nearly all of his devices, a tinkerer who doesn't mind recompiling a kernel or picking a solderer to make things work, and someone who seeks for absolute flexibility from his devices with zero corporate compromises.Unfortunately, the mediocre hardware used in their devices keeps holding me back.First came a phone with a 9-year-old A53 Cortex chipset. Then a tablet with the same outdated chipset. Then a laptop that ships with a Rockchip RK3399 with 4GB of RAM, in an era when 4GB barely suffice to run a browser with a few tabs. And now they are releasing a smartwatch with a 64 MHz core and 64 KB of RAM - some specs you would have expected from a very cheap smartwatch released 7-8 years ago.Why should I use a device whose hardware is almost a decade old at the time of purchase? And how do they even expect anyone to actually use these devices as their primary daily drivers, and not as proofs of concept, nice toys to tinker on every now and then or show off to friends?I understand that Pine wants to use 100% open hardware, and that comes with heavy compromises, but are these compromises worth it?If you ask even the geekest user out there whether they prefer a device whose source code is 100% pure and doesn't contain any binary blobs, or a device that doesn't start freezing/lagging after a couple of minutes of normal usage, I bet that anyone would opt for the latter.
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Apt Encounters of the Third Kind
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I'm trying to find the lesson in here about how to prevent this kind of incident in the first place. The nearest I can find is: don't build any production binaries on your personal machine.
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Sorry, we replaced that old technology, “see-through glass”
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The year is 2050 and your dingy old toaster has finally given up it's last crumbs. You hop onto Amazon in hopes of finding a suitable replacement as there's no longer any box stores you can travel to. Dumb appliances have been phased out and newer internet connected appliances have taken over. It's better for the consumer they claim.Not wanting an overtly fancy contraption you pick a no frills unit that includes a touch screen along the side. A few hours later it arrives. Setting it up was almost as easy as your old one. Plug it in, enter your wi-fi password, and a credit card to start your free pro trial of the monthly subscription service that tweets at you when the toast is done. It says you can cancel at anytime but it requires a 5 day waiting period. It also requires access to your contacts.Tired and just wanting your toast you agree. You insert two slices of white bread and press the big red GO button on the touch screen. An electrical motor whines from inside the toaster at it begins to retract the toast into itself. There's a few seconds of silence as the toaster slowly heat ups. While awkwardly standing there you notice the touch screen flickers and begins to display a buffering icon. An ad for I Can't Believe it's Not Butter begins to play. To make matters worse you can't even ignore it by looking away due to a small tinny sounding speaker playing the company's jingle.This is your new morning routine.Welcome to the future.
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The most precious resource is agency
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One of the biggest tragedies isn't just that the childhood is wasted, but that many people never learn to have agency once it is available. I'm not saying you need to start your own business or anything like that, but it seems like most people live their lives never questioning the scripts that are given to them.The basic life script we all seem to have in western society seems pretty awful when you think critically about it. Essentially we waste all out vitality and youth making other people rich, so that one day when we're old and infirm, we can finally do the things we like with the short time we have left. I think most of us never even think about it because it's too bleak of a reality. I feel somewhat fortunate in that the work I do is something I would generally enjoy doing even if I wasn't being paid for it, but I still have a nagging fear that what I could be is much more than what I am yet I lack the proper tools and perspectives to become that person (and I don't think that just starting my own business, like a lot of people here want to do, is really sufficient, it's just a small part of inventing your own life script).
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My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry
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I work in finance. About 5 years ago I started building a FIX library on my spare time, out of curiosity. Over the years it has been countless fin tech start-ups as well as big companies reaching out to me about the library, suggesting fixes and features. Since then I have long lost the interest in the technology which enables connectivity to financial exchanges to automate trades, but I keep working on the library for the benefit of others and just the joy of creating something. But what’s the actual impact? Enabling companies getting richer? Greed?https://gitlab.com/logotype/fixparser
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Norm Macdonald has died
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My favorite joke of his: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJN9mBRX3uo
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Townscaper Running in the Browser
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It takes about 90 seconds to load for me, but once it does, it's buttery smooth on my M1 Pro. Unity's web story is still so bad for many reasons, but the initial load times are a huge one (~15MB of wasm for an empty scene last I checked). They were working on Project Tiny[0] to address exactly this, but they've now paused work on it indefinitely :( Someone please build tools to fix this![0] https://unity.com/solutions/instant-games
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Show HN: HN Avatars in 357 bytes
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Reply here if you just want to see how your username looks like, so we avoid noise and keep that Show HN on the top. comments are really interesting
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There's something off about LED bulbs
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There's a lot wrong with LEDs in general and retrofit (E27 bulbs) in particular. In no particular order- LED emitters driven hard for cost reasons, age and fail quickly- Power supplies driven hard for cost reasons, age and fail quickly- Poor CRI and SSRI- Flickering- Dim-to-warm is uncommon- Poorly designed power supplies that age and fail quickly- The same light quality is vastly more expensive to achieve with LEDs, even if you account for high electricity prices. Good indoor lighting is now something only people with plenty of disposable income can afford.- It is quite difficult to even buy high quality LEDs as a mere mortal- Retrofits generally work poorly on principle- LEDs mix exceptionally poorly, making things even more expensive
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Secret app on millions of phones logs key taps
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Remember when people were up in arms about how much location data iPhones stored locally?This is 1000 times worse.
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Toshiba says they made a mistake but they still cannot help me
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You probably aren't familiar with how "guarantees" work here in South America, ugh.See companies like Samsung and Toshiba have "certified" stores that "take guarantees" but they are not tied by their parent company, they are privately owned stores that just negotiated with the parent company to use their "sticker".I bought a Phillips shaver and under warranty, the Phillips station wanted me to pay 70% of the cost of a new one, despite being a DoA device.So while the sticker works as it should in the US and Europe, South America has a god damn wild west scenario. Anything goes, and if you don't like it, buy something else. Yep.(Source: I live in Bolivia)
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Britons: You Have 72 Hours to Stop the Snooper's Charter
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Strong guarantees of privacy are essential to enable political dissent. Without it, opinions opposed to the prevailing majority view point are not only side-lined, but the very expression of an interest in them becomes a cause for controversy and social rebuke.Without privacy individuals are unable to explore, consider and evaluate diverging ideals, and eventually reach new personal convictions which may in time turn the tide against the status quo. Instead, the fermentation of ideas is cut short, as most people are unable to stand the push-back inflicted on them by society at an early stage in their thought-process, leading to self-censorship and group-think.Society incurs much more damage from so many angles, ranging from murders to car accidents to diseases, that it does not need to jump in such abject terror at the thought of political violence - still a comparatively rare occurence in most places on this earth - so as to trample on the very foundation of every democracy:Which is the freedom of the individual in his own thoughts, to form his own personal opinions unimpeded by institutionalised social pressure.The mass-scale erosion of privacy must be stopped before it is too late to reverse the trend.
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How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the State Machine
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Eric Lippert's "Wizards and Warriors" blog posts seem appropriate here, especially as an example of how tracking state and OO can clash pretty badly.A common problem I see in object-oriented design is:A wizard is a kind of player.A warrior is a kind of player.A staff is a kind of weapon.A sword is a kind of weapon.A player has a weapon.But before we get into the details, I just want to point out that I am not really talking about anything specific to the fantasy RPG genre here. Everything in this series applies equally well to Papers and Paychecks, but wizards and warriors are more fun to write about, so there you go.OK, great, we have five bullet points so let’s write some classes without thinking about it! What could possibly go wrong?https://ericlippert.com/2015/04/27/wizards-and-warriors-part...https://ericlippert.com/2015/04/30/wizards-and-warriors-part...https://ericlippert.com/2015/05/04/wizards-and-warriors-part...https://ericlippert.com/2015/05/07/wizards-and-warriors-part...https://ericlippert.com/2015/05/11/wizards-and-warriors-part...
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Show HN: Select Star SQL, an interactive SQL book
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I really like your explanations. I have never been able to wrap my head around joins.You say that: "Programming is best learned by doing", but I am struggling to do anything...It would be great if there was some online area like SQL Fiddle with the data loaded, so I can run queries and see results in my browser without having to set anything up or am I missing something.
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Why software projects take longer than you think – a statistical model
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An important aspect of being a professional software engineer is having the backbone to sometimes say things like:- “I don’t know yet enough about the problem to give you even a rough estimate. If you’d like, I can take a day to dig into it and then report back.”- “This first part should take 2-3 days. 5 on the outside. But the second part relies heavily on an API whose documentation and error messages are in Chinese and Google Translate isn’t good enough. I’d need to insist on professional translation in order to even estimate the second part.”- “The problem is tracking down a bug rather than building something, so I don’t have a good way of estimating this. However, I can timebox my investigation and if I’ve not found the cause at the end of the timebox, can work on a plan to work around the bug.”You need to be willing to endure the discomfort of looking someone in the face, saying “I don’t know”, and then standing your ground when they pruessure you to lie to them. They probably don’t want you to lie, but there is a small chance that they pruessure you to. If you don’t resist this pruessure, you can end up continually giving estimates that are 10x off-target, blowing past them as you lose credibility, and your running your brain ragged with sleep-deprivation against a problem you haven’t given it the time to break down and understand.But when you advocate clearly for your needs as a professional, people are generally reasonable.
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Project Svalbard: The Future of Have I Been Pwned
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So why was the owner of LeakedSource arrested and charged, and this guy isn't?He did the same thing. Only instead of selling to hackers, he sold our hacked data to companies and governments.
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Downsides to working at a tech giant
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The pessimism in this thread really bothers me. I’ve read anecdotes on entrepreneurship being on the decline, but it pains me to read so many negative takes on startups. We’re actively training our young people to avoid taking risks, and it’s going to fuck us — especially if some of those young people have the ambition be early employees at, say, a startup that takes on climate change in a big way.Look — the fact that Garry knew Peter Thiel when he was 23 is nuts. When I was 23 I was broke and living with my parents in the suburbs outside Toronto. I didn’t even personally know any other software engineers. I think many people here would relate more similarly to that position.Just because he won the social lottery early, doesn’t mean his lessons are wrong. I got a junior engineering job in Toronto when I was 23, at a startup, making less than Garry. $57.5k CAD. I worked on my open source portfolio and next took a job in another startup in SF for $120k USD the next year.That startup failed. I took a brief job at a biotech startup after being turned down by Google and Facebook (twice). After three months I quit that startup to run the company I’m still running today, four years later. Today, we’re very fortunate to work with some of the largest companies in SV.Reflecting on this: I think a better story Garry could’ve told is not that he missed out on $200M, but that startups basically built his network so that — years later — he’d be a prominent VC working with Alexis Ohanian, funding the next round of exciting companies. $200M is an eye-catching clickbait headline, but not the real substance. The real substance is — how the fuck did he meet Peter Thiel at 23, and how can somebody recreate that?In the story I just told about myself, I got really lucky as a function of working at startups. I didn’t really make any money doing it. But a whole bunch of interesting things happened:- The first job in SF I worked at introduced me to a product manager who went to school with Aston Motes, employee #1 at Dropbox who would eventually be an investor in the company I run today.- The founder of that first failed company introduced me to AngelPad, the accelerator that gave me my first $50k in financing. The fact I stuck it out as an engineering lead at a failing startup helped: I gave it my all. (Aside: YC turned me down. Twice.)- The biotech company I worked at was founded by two early SpaceX employees, one who would also become an investor later on.Don’t work at startups to make $200M. Work at startups because you’ll work with people who have risk profiles that are much more likely to generate outsized returns as a group. You’ll have the opportunity to join or create a community of high-performing folks that, in aggregate, outperform anything you can do on your own. Maybe you’ll be the CEO one day, maybe not, but no matter what you are very likely to come out ahead if you apply yourself.And don’t let the comments here dissuade you. Startups are hard, but they kick ass. I’ve cried myself to sleep some nights — as both an employee and CEO — and still wouldn’t change the experience for anything. I’m a better person because of what I’ve been through.
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About iSH’s pending removal from the App Store
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This isn’t sustainable.Software developers can’t build on a foundation that is constantly, capriciously shifting. This on top of the App Store's already-onerous restrictions and the fact that it’s the only practical way to get your software on one of the world's largest computing platforms has already engendered a deep antipathy [1] among Apple developers, and there are no signs it’s getting better. Something has to give.1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23580762
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GitHub Releases Dark Mode
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Nice to see but it's too contrast-y for me compared to the stylus theme I've already been using which honestly looks better https://github.com/StylishThemes/GitHub-Dark
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CS193p: Developing Apps for iOS
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Is it weird that a /university/ is offering this course on how to work with a specific commercial product? Shouldn't this be the domain of Apple itself or a company that specialises in training?
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Use console.log() like a pro (2020)
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Another trick that might be more practical for actually debugging is using the object shorthand. For example, instead of... console.log(x, y);
which contains the information you need, but lacks any useful context, try... console.log({x, y});
...which will print out like an object, including the key names.
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I just don’t want to be busy anymore
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One thing that helped me is not to care so much about my employer's goals.It's almost heretical. But once you embrace this mindset, it does wonders. Or at least, it has for me so far.I think a lot of us want to be proud of the work we do, and we feel that if we slack off, then we shouldn't be proud. But it's the other way around. I think the slackers have it right.You're probably not going to get rich from working a day job. You're replaceable, and if you left your job tomorrow then you'll soon be forgotten. This is true for the majority of software engineers.In that context, why do so many of us take on so many unnecessary responsibilities? It's tempting to say "Well, my employer assigned them." But how often do you tell them no, or try to present a different approach that just so happens not to involve you?I know someone who is a chronic yes person. They will almost never say no, and they're pretty stressed day to day because of it. Whenever I point out that they're taking on too much, they say that they disagree and that it's their career.That's true, but they won't get rich from that career, so I don't understand why they care so much about it.Just remember to say 'no' for yourself from time to time. You often don't need to take on as many responsibilities as you have.
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