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Private Prisons Are Behind the Push for Homeless Criminalization
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Open drug scenes[0] are behind the push to end open drug scenes.9% of prisons are private, which is 9% too many, but it's the citizens who have to endure open drug scenes who are behind the push to end them.[0]: https://www.karger.com/Article/Pdf/259053This problem is described, wrongly, as homelessness, by both advocates for ending open drug scenes, and by activists who view themselves as working on behalf of the unhoused.That's not the effect of their activism. The effect of their advocacy is to increase misery. Open drug scenes make the city unsafe. Open drug scenes draw the temporarily homeless into a shadow market of addictions and prostitution.Open drug scenes are bad for everyone who has to be near them, but they are particularly destructive to the mentally ill addicts who constitute them.I'm sure private prisons would love to turn all of us into literal slaves, but if we reduced the number of them down to the correct 0%, urban residents would still be demanding the end of open drug scenes.They are right to do so. Supporting open drug scenes is supporting misery, harm, assault, theft, overdose, rape.Don't support open drug scenes. Make sure your donations to help the unhoused don't support open drug scenes (this is difficult).Also, let's end private prisons. It was never a good idea and it won't get better with time.
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Apple to allow outside app stores in overhaul spurred by EU laws
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Honestly this is going to have 1 or 3 outcomes:1. Nothing is going to change and I will continue to use my phone as it was before because the App Store is still the primary driver.2. I will be forced to use third party stores because critical apps are no longer distributed through the App Store.3. I will just be using my phone less and less.The EU, Developers, and Many here continue to forget that the reason many of us use an iPhone is because of the walled garden. If I wanted an open platform I would switch to Android and mod the hell out of it.I don't want that. I want the precautions that Apple has in place to make it so developers can't employ dark patterns to keep me as a paying subscriber. To mine the data on my phone for their profit.With one or 2 clicks of a button I can cancel any subscription I want that I did through the App Store. I also get alerts when anything yearly is about to charge (from Apple) or when things are about to cost more than they used to. Instead of hoping that we just wouldn't see the alert like too many sites do.People keep saying that this is about choice, which frankly... is bull. This is about choice for the developer not the consumer. Most consumers don't care, but developers will jump ship to another App Store if they can start doing all of the negative practices that they are not allowed to do on the App Store. Especially if they are big enough, Seriously think that Facebook won't try to have their own App Store? Considering what they have gotten up to very recently.We already have enough developers purposefully trying to deceive users right before they get the prompt about allowing the app to track.Anyone... please tell me how this actually benefits ME as a consumer and not developers?Edit: Instead of replying to each one I am going to just post here.Many of you are saying Android does not have this issue. But unless I am mistaken Epic Games did exactly this?Also unless I am mistaken, many of the consumer protecting restrictions are not on android. Especially around subscriptions and billing issues. I know google is cracking down on it, but from what I understand it is not as universally in place.So developers don't have the incentives to move to another App Store on Android like they do on iOS (again benefiting developers while hurting me as a consumer)Edit: I am going to make one last point here. I spend a fair amount of money on App Store subscriptions. (or buying apps but that is sadly not as popular anymore). I do this because I don't worry about singing up to try something, knowing that I can very easily cancel it. I don't even have to talk to the company.This leads me to signing up for apps that I would never have considered paying for if it was through a traditional website that would make me jump through who the hell knows what hoops to cancel.They complain about the 30% cut, but from me. It is you get 70% or I give my money to someone else.I cannot imagine I am the only one that does this.
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A Heisenbug lurking in async Python
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I really think this writer doth protest too much.Yes, the base async interface is confusing and overly complex. It's a downside! As they note lots of people have stepped in to provide better helpers (like TaskGroups) - but these are the docs for the base library!> But who reads all the docs? And who has perfect recall if they do?Everyone reads the docs? That is why you don't need perfect recall because you can read them whenever you want.Python has lots of confusing corner cases ("" is truthy, you need to remember to call copy [or maybe deepcopy!] sometimes, all the other situations where you confuse weak v.s. strong references). They cause really common bugs. It's just a hazard of the language in general and the choices it makes (much like tasks being objects is a hazard). I do understand why people think they can throw away task references (based on other languages) - but this is Python! The garbage collector exists and you gotta check if you own the object or something else does.Edit: this feels like an experienced Python developer, who has already internalized all the older, non-async Python weirdness, being taken aback by weirdness they didn't expect. Like, I feel you, it does suck - but it's not a bug that values you don't retain may get garbage collected.
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Short session expiration does not help security
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> Also, it would be better to protect against this by securing the logs or using hard drive encryption.This one line is emblematic of the flaws in the article.My take on the article is, “Imagine that everything else in a system is done correctly, and the system, overall, is perfectly secure. In this imaginary world, short sessions don’t help.”One fact about security which you cannot avoid is that any one particular security feature may fail or be bypassed in some way. What are the consequences of this? Well, it means that you want multiple layers of security. Your server runs its daemons with minimal privileges so that a remote execution vulnerability needs to be combined with a privilege escalation vulnerability. You don’t think about the “right way” to secure something, but you think about multiple ways to secure something, and don’t stop securing it just because you’ve found one good option.Short sessions are there because there are various ways that sessions could be compromised.
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Fucking Sue Me
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Contract reviews done by lawyers need to follow good-sense guidelines.Some contracts are routine and don't need any form of customizing. The review in such cases is minimal and can even be skipped if the routine nature of the contract is obvious or if the entrepreneur is seasoned enough to identify a clean situation without lawyer help. Most such routine contracts cover simple cases, such as a simple nda or a recurring situation in which a basic template is used with no material variation apart from non-legal business items that typically get customized in an exhibit.For most cases, though, the whole key to doing a contract right is to customize it properly on its material points. This means it should be clear, it should accurately reflect the intent of the parties, and it should contain basic legal protections for each party. It is vital to this process that both the lawyer and the entrepreneur understand what is material. Why? Because that determines the proper cost-benefit analysis for how it should be reviewed.For example, say a startup is negotiating a 1-year office lease for only a few hundred square feet of space at a modest rental rate. That sort of lease needs very little lawyer review because there is not much at stake (the money is small, the location itself not particularly important to the startup, etc.). A quick read-through by the lawyer is the max that this needs and then only to see if there is anything wildly out of line in the document. What about a 3-year lease with more square footage and a higher rent? In that case, maybe a good high-level review is in order, with comments and mark-ups on a range of important points but little or no attention paid to boilerplate clauses that may be highly unfavorable to the tenant as worded but that are also highly unlikely to occur. And what if the lease is for 5 years with two 5-year options to renew, with a location that is very important to the business involved, and with risks (such as potential environmental liabilities) that can far exceed even the value of the lease itself if mishandled? In that case, lawyer review is normally vital and needs to be pretty thorough (including even haggling over much of the boilerplate language) because it is far more likely that contingent risks can come about over a lengthy period, the amounts at stake are greater, and the lease itself may be important to the business (e.g., a restaurant that depends heavily on having a particular location).This same sort of approach applies to a whole range of contracts. What if your business is getting acquired or if you are buying a business? Well, if it is a little business and the purchase price is very small (say, $50,000), you can very likely be well-served by a canned form used for small business sales (brokers who do these deals use these all the time). Such a form will have basic provisions covered and will usually contain the most important warranties and representations but all of it will be bare-bones. This normally works fine for a small sale. Again, lawyer review can be skipped or done at the quick read-through level. But what if the business you are buying is going to cost you $1,000,000. In that case, you still are in the small-business category but the money is more significant. This likely warrants an intermediate level of lawyer review (contract needs to be customized for the deal, with proper account taken of whether it should be structured as an asset sale, stock sale, or merger - each having different tax consequences - and with careful attention paid to reps and warranties, to conditions for closing, and to collateral matters such as non-compete, etc.). This might take $5K or $10K or sometimes more in lawyer time but it is money normally well spent (it certainly is if you are a small business owner and $1M is a lot of money to put at risk for your situation). And, of course, once you start talking about acquisitions in the tens or hundreds of millions, you need major lawyer time to make sure the complex aspects of such deals are handled properly.What about a license agreement? A small deal, with non-exclusive rights concerning routine IP needs little or no lawyer review. But a core OEM deal involving the licensing of IP that is at the core of your company obviously warrants significant lawyer review, especially if it involves joint development efforts, sweeping indemnification clauses that might trigger major liabilities, or other complications that require sophisticated handling of IP and other rights. Of course, there is also the issue of weasel language and its nasty impact if it is not caught and deleted from any major contract.In short, lawyers and entrepreneurs need to be guided by good sense in handling these matters. It is not good sense simply to act as if lawyers are not needed. It takes only one really bad instance for most entrepreneurs to realize how bad a mistake it is to cut corners in really important matters. On the other hand, letting lawyers run wild with their reviews is foolish as well. Their time must be managed and managed well. It should be used where it matters and curbed where it doesn't.Let the barbs fly, then, but this is one lawyer who will insist that the advice given in this piece may have a grain of truth in it but is too simplistic to cover most serious business affairs. It may work in a number of cases but it can easily get you into trouble.By the way, I am not saying give an open ticket to lawyers. If your lawyer can't make good judgments concerning what is important and what is not, and can't manage time wisely, it is time to get a new lawyer.
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Web GL Ocean Simulation
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This runs at about 7 frames per second in Chrome on my 10-month-old 13" Macbook Pro at work.Are people with better graphics cards seeing 60 (or even 30) fps? I'd love to be able to see this in all its glory.
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ASCII Delimited Text – Not CSV or TAB delimited text
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Don't do this. Tsv has won this race, closely followed by Csv. Anything else will cause untold grief for you and fellow data scientists and programmers. I say this as someone who routinely parses 20gb text files, mostly Tsv's and occasionally Csv's for a living. The solution you are proposing is definitely superior but isn't going to get adopted soon.
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Now, I can see wifi signals
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That is slick. The wavelength of 2.4Ghz radio being 125 mm and 5Ghz being 62.5mm it looks like he is imaging standing waves in the 5Ghz spectrum. (if the cube is 360mm x 360mm it would have ~6 waves of 5Ghz and ~3 waves of 2.4Ghz RF energy. There is an experiment to see the standing waves in a microwave using chocolate - http://morningcoffeephysics.com/measuring-the-speed-of-light... which demonstrates the same sort of thing, but frankly I think this is much cooler.
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How Product Hunt really works
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Hacker News is a long-running, open, inclusive startup community that is subsidized by a related business, doesn't sell anything, and has proven time and again to do things good for the entire startup community.Product Hunt is a new, closed, exclusive startup community run by a for-profit company that will eventually have to start selling you something.Not sure why people complain about PH so much... just don't use it. There already is a perfectly good community of startup people out there that has much more incentive to stay "pure" than a for-profit one. Sure, HN isn't perfect, but fundamentally it is always going to be better than any for-profit communities.(And also this obligatory comment: If you want to build a successful company, stop wasting your time browsing startup communities and spend your time talking with users and building your product)
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React v15.0
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Is there a reason why the file size has exploded?react.min.js is now 145.4kb. For comparioson, angular.min.js is 155.2kb. One of React's biggest selling points was that it was much smaller than Angular/Ember/Backbone etc, but I'm not sure that argument can be leveraged anymore. I think React is a culmination of some great ideas, but in my view this is a big step back. Especially since Angular/Ember/etc. offer a lot more tools out of the box.I don't intend to tell anyone here that React is a bad framework because it's not, but I think it should be a big priority to tighten down the file size. When React is big pretty much all their selling points go out the window.Perhaps they can split files up so you can just import the APIs you want. I wonder how much that would help with the bloat.I feel like some of the smaller VDOM frameworks like Cycle/Mithril/Riot are a lot more appealing now, since they focus on small file size and low bloat.
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Namecheap live chat social engineering leads to loss of 2 VPS
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Disclaimer: I'm CIO @ Namecheap1. The credentials were resent to an already compromised email account2. This is an isolated case3. Established procedure was not followed4. With thissaid, we've used this as a learning example and additional training has been provided to the individual involved5. Anyone with any self-managed server with ANY provider should always keep their own multiple backups
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Ian's Shoelace Site
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I'll vouch for the "Ian Knot". Throughout my life I had to double-tie the classic shoelace knot or else it would come loose a some point during the day. Then I tried the Ian Knot. It is significantly faster and easier. And, now I have some laced shoes that I just slip on because they stay tied for weeks instead of hours.http://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/ianknot.htm
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Why I left Mac for Windows: Apple has given up
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I used to be hardcore windows guy...Then 10 years ago I got a mac. I never went back..But what am I saving money for right now? To build a nice PC again.Mostly because of the exact reasons in the article.I have a fondness for apple... but they have definitely lost their way. First, they were a computer company driven by a man who loved computers ("first" here is the Jobs return era) ... then they became a Computer company who also made a phone. Then they became a computer company who also made a phone and a tablet. Then they became a phone company who also made computers and tablets.Now they are a phone company who presides over the death throws of an amazing operating system that is going to be killed off to make it more like a phone. The new "features" every cycle are more "lets put this phone feature on the desktop"It makes me sad, as a mac fan. The hardware is getting worse. The decisions are getting dumber every time. I wont buy a laptop without a magsafe or similar connection, i have kids and animals, and the magsafe has saved a laptop more than once.. to remove something that was as core and identifiable a part of their computers was just a stupid move and served no purpose.They don't listen to the industry or the consumers anymore, they stick their fingers in their ears and pretend to know best.Jobs was hardheaded, but reasonable. Cook is trying to emulate the hardheadedness but fails to recognize the reasonability needed to balance that.
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Strava heatmap can be used to locate military bases
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In some cases where the data is sparse, you can find where individual people live, because the trails sometimes lead back to a starting point. Like this person who runs around the park regularly. Of course you could also just follow them IRL if you were there, so I'm not sure this is a big deal.https://labs.strava.com/heatmap/#14.20/100.20693/40.99133/ho...
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Learning Math for Machine Learning
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This is excellent. Thank you for taking the time to write it.I don't know what is it about math -- especially when it involves manipulation of symbols as opposed to pictures or lay language -- that turns off so many people.The fact that so many software developers "don't like math" is ironic, because they're perfectly happy to manipulate symbols such as "x", "file", or "user_id" that stand in for other things every day. The entirety of mathematical knowledge is very much like a gigantic computer language (a formal system) in which every object is and must be precisely defined in terms of other objects, using and reusing symbols like "x", "y", "+", etc. that stand in for other things.Perhaps the issue is motivation? Many wonder, "why do I need to learn this hard stuff?" If so, the approach taken by Rachel Thomas and Jeremy Howard at fast.ai seems to be a good one: build things, and then fill the theoretical holes as needed, motivated by a genuine desire to understand.
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A Solution for Loneliness: Get out and volunteer, research suggests
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Folks can say what they want about religion, but I have a feeling that church plays a larger role in maintaining a healthy society than it is given credit in some circles.
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Twitter was down
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Ok, this is too many high-profile, apparently unrelated outages in the last month to be completely a coincidence. Hypotheses:1) software complexity is escalating over time, and logically will continue to until something makes it stop. It has now reached the point where even large companies cannot maintain high reliability.2) internet volume is continually increasing over time, and periodically we hit a point where there are just too many pieces required to make it work (until some change the infrastructure solves that). We had such a point when dialup was no longer enough, and we solved that with fiber. Now we have a chokepoint somewhere else in the system, and it will require a different infrastructure change3) Russia or China or Iran or somebody is f*(#ing with us, to see what they are able to break if they needed to, if they need to apply leverage to, for example, get sanctions lifted4) Just a series of unconnected errors at big companies5) Other possibilities?
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Show HN: I wrote a book for engineers that want to become engineering managers
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OT: for those who have never been in leader/managerial positions:- Leading people is 1000x less fun than coding- Leading people makes your more money than as an avg coder- Leading people too long makes you lose your technical skills slowly- At some age and for most, there's no other option than leading, 'go or grow'- Leading bigger headcounts is comparable to competitive sports 24/7 and shouldn't be underestimated
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Andreessen-Horowitz craps on “AI” startups from a great height
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"Huge compute bills" usually come from training, or to be more precise, hyperparameter search that's required before you find a model that works well. You could also fail to find such a model, but that's another discussion.So yeah, you could spend one or two FTE salaries' (or one deep learning PhD's) worth of cash on finding such models for your startup if you insist on helping Jeff Bezos to wipe his tears with crisp hundred dollar bills. That's if you know what you're doing of course. Literally unlimited amounts could be spent if you don't. Or you could do the same for a fraction of the cost by stuffing a rack in your office with consumer grade 2080ti's. Just don't call it a "datacenter" or NVIDIA will have a stroke. Is that too much money? Not in most typical cases, I'd think. If the competitive advantage of what you're doing with DL does not offset the cost of 2 meatspace FTEs, you're doing it wrong.That, once again, assumes that you know what you're doing, and aren't doing deep learning for the sake of deep learning.Also, if your startup is venture funded, AWS will give you $100K in credit, hoping that you waste it by misconfiguring your instances and not paying attention to their extremely opaque billing (which is what most of their startup customers proceed to doing pretty much straight away). If you do not make these mistakes, that $100K will last for some time, after which you could build out the aforementioned rack full of 2080ti's on prem.
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Facebook sues Namecheap
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As a Namecheap customer, I am glad that they aren't giving up their customers privacy. Facebook claims they have an obligation to do so- but they don't provide any citation for such an obligation.ICANN has an established process for handling these types of disputes, and Facebook should avail themsleves of that process. https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/help/dndr/udrp-en(It isn't clear if Facebook is seeking a financial judgement or just a court order to delete or transfer the domains to Facebook?)
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IBM employee forced to stop kernel work under personal email address
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"You are an IBM employee 100% of the time"What a joke - hope the salary makes this indentured servitude worth it.
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Firefox 91 introduces enhanced cookie clearing
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This version of Firefox is also the first major piece of software to be translated into Scots - a language spoken / understood by 1.3m people in Scotland.My previous company worked on the translation and they told me they had fun trying to come up with suitable equivalents for technical words such as "minimise" and "maximise".https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2021/08/10/firefox-91-intr...https://www.thenational.scot/news/19494171.major-web-browser...
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Apple agrees to settle potential class action suit by U.S. developers
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>Apple agrees to make sure the search results in the App Store are based on objective criteria.I cant help but laughed when I was reading it. What were they doing before that?I thought the most important part was the next bit,>The settlement, which must be approved by Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, comes as Apple is awaiting a ruling in a separate lawsuit, brought by Fortnite developer Epic Games, which seeks to force Apple to allow rival in-app payment and store options.>The same federal judge is hearing the Apple-Epic case and a ruling could come at any time.My guess is that the way things are going in these cases are not in Apple's flavour. And for all the court case I followed over years Apple tends to be the favourite in court. Rightfully or not. ( Some of the Judge are very clearly biased ) But Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers was clearly trying to get to the bottom of things. And asking some very hard questions.Is this enough? I am not sure if Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers is easy to please either. And let's not forget this is US only. EU are grinding their teeth. Then there are South Korea and Japan. And China is surpassingly quiet in all of these.Phil Schiller was right, if Apple were to ever change its fee structure, that it should do so “from a position of strength rather than weakness”. It was unfortunate Steve passed away soon after that email.
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Beyond Smart
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Being even a little clever—and that's the best I can claim—is living life on easy mode. It's so great. Once I realized that the other people in the room weren't not-saying the obvious thing because they'd already dismissed it for some reason I couldn't see, but because it wasn't obvious to them, it was like I unlocked a superpower. God, it's so wonderful. I half-ass my way through everything and get well-rewarded for it. Praise, money, recommendations. There is no chance I could do that without this (again, quite mild, I cannot emphasize enough that I'm not even all that smart) gift, the credit for which mostly goes to sheer chance and lucky circumstances.> I grew up thinking that being smart was the thing most to be desired. Perhaps you did too. But I bet it's not what you really want. Imagine you had a choice between being really smart but discovering nothing new, and being less smart but discovering lots of new ideas. Surely you'd take the latter.Shit no, because the whole rest of the time I'm not coming up with those handful of new ideas, I'm less-smart. Reading is harder. Math is harder. Learning anything new is harder. Following complex conversations is harder. Picking out subtext, allusions, et c., in all media, is harder. Keeping up with, let alone constructively challenging, my smarter-than-me kids is harder. I'd hesitate to take that deal even if the ideas themselves made me rich enough I wouldn't need to work again. I might take it, but I'd have to give it a good think. It'd radically change the entire way I relate to the world.
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BlazingMQ: High-performance open source message queuing system
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it never ceases to amaze me how the software engineering profession has very smart folks reimplement the same conceptual primitives over and over again. I'm curious if hospitals (if that's even analogous to a company) do similar things by having different processes to solve the same problem.I imagine this is used for Bloomberg (the terminal) and not Bloomberg (the website)?going back to the article - fantastic animations. I'm just as curious to how that was made as the queue itself.
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Notch gives his $3,000,000 Minecraft dividend to his employees
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I'm extremely interested to see how this plays out. Giving large cash bonuses seems like it could wreck morale just as easily as it could boost it. And now when they're hiring in the future, they have to wonder whether the candidate is more motivated by the money or the love. And will the employees expect a similar bonus next year?I'm not saying he shouldn't've done it. I am, however, extremely curious. This is the sort of thing that I have wondered why more companies don't do.
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Recursive Drawing
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Old trick. Go search for [postscript snowflake] sometime. Great fun for drawing psychedelic images and/or crashing network printers. (It turns out that .ps is actually an archaic programming language and not just a page description language.)
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Are You a Robot? Introducing “No CAPTCHA ReCAPTCHA”
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"If we can collect behavioural data from you, and it matches closely the behaviour of other humans, you are a human. Otherwise you're not a human."Does anyone else get that feeling from the description of what Google is doing? I've tripped their "we think you are a bot" detection filter and been presented with a captcha countless times while using complex search queries and searching for relatively obscure things, and it's frankly very insulting and rather disturbing that they think someone who inputs "unusual" search queries, according to their measure, is not human. I have JS and cookies disabled so they definitely cannot track my mouse movements and I can't use this way of verifying "humanness", but what if they get rid of the regular captchas completely (based on the argument that eventually the only ones who will make use of and solve them are bots)? Then they'll basically be saying "you are a human only if you have a browser that supports these features, behave in this way, and act like every other human who does." The fact that Google is attempting to define and thus strongly normalise what is human behaviour is definitely a big red flag to me.(Or maybe I'm really a bot, just an extremely intelligent one. :-)
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Too many people have peed in the pool
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I have a theory about FB and Twitter -- or maybe more of an observation. Anyway, back in the stone age, people had bumper stickers with little slogans on them. And in the break rooms of various places of work, there was always a bulletin board an on a corner of it there was always some faded-from-to-many-xeroxes bit of humor/racism/sports fandom/sexism/dirty joke or other us-vs.-them thing on it that people would look at and amuse themselves with.Now thanks to Twitter and FB, these little types of tribal territorial markings are just about all that's left of public discourse.I see things get passed around and think, 20 years ago this would have been mimeographed and hung on a break room bulletin board, where it might have acted as a crude conversation starter about some aspect of "who are we?". But now people consider sharing and liking these things as their /contribution/ to a conversation.It's like the way that millennials communicate with emoji, except it's image macros and memes and slogans and "gotchas" and hot takes that we consume, copy, and share. The copying and sharing of all that stuff is what passes for discourse now.Me, I think that this development is double-plus bad.
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How to Tell a Mother Her Child Is Dead
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My twenty one year old daughter died two months ago. A young policeman came to my door. It was the first time he had to do the job mentioned in the article and he did it very well.I have very little memory of those first few hours. I now know what it is to be insane. I was so disconnected from reality that people have told me that I had long conversations with them that I have zero recollection of. The only thing I clearly remember was telling the officer that I had a gun upstairs and that if he didn't take it, I was going to murder the man responsible for her death within the hour. It was the most matter of fact confession of planning a murder imaginable.After a couple of hours, I saw a Facebook post of hers and lost it, the insane calm left me and I bawled my eyes out.It's her birthday tomorrow. I miss her so, so much.Anyway, the point of this post: my daughter died of an overdose. She was at a party, a man gave her powdered pure fentanyl claiming it was cocaine. I have no idea why. She snorted some and overdosed soon after.All I want to happen is that someone somewhere reads about what happened to my daughter and reminds their kids that without proper testing kits, they have no idea what the fuck they are taking. Drugs may not be bad, but some people certainly are.
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Machine Learning from scratch: Bare bones implementations in Python
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Would you suggest any books/resources to learn the theory behind these implementations so a newbie can follow along?
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Let them paste passwords
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Of course it reduces security. It makes you resort to either1.) typing it out manually while you can't see if you made a mistake2.) using developer tools to set the 'value' attribute directly"SPP" discourages use of a password manager. End of story. I also see this pattern used on banking websites for inputs like an account number. This drives me crazy as well for the same reason. The computer can get it right more reliably than my eyes and fingers.Whenever I see a website that blocks paste I immediately assume it's built by incompetent people and trust it with as little as possible.
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A hands-on introduction to video technology: image, video, codec and more
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It's interesting to note
that the architecture of the first ISO codec MPEG (1)
is almost identical to the one we have today H.265
That codec was standardised in the late 90s
So this design has carried through for about 20 years.
Most of the changes relate to the targeted parameters
such as frame size, frame rate and bitrate.
Only the last step 264 --> 265 seems to have added new features.This is a very well written introduction
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EU government websites have undisclosed adtech trackers from Google and others
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What are y'all using for self-hosted analytics? I have used Google Analytics and Mixpanel out of sheer convenience, but I know many users are uncomfortable sharing their data with those sites.To relate this to the article: what should these government agencies be using? Or should they not be looking for Javascript errors, A/B testing, etc. at all?
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Firefox Preview adds support for recommended extensions, including uBlock Origin
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Question for HN: What will happen to the web when uBlock Origin becomes prevelent enough? Currently the vast majority of the internet is completely (or mostly) ad funded: Twitter, Facebook, newspapers, Reddit, YouTube, etc etc. Adblockers like uBlock Origin hurt these sites by deriving them of revenue. Currently, there hasn't been too much of an effect because the adblock usage rate is low enough that adblocking free riders don't cause enough harm.However, this calculus changes quite a bit when adblock penetration reaches high enough levels. Once 80-90% of users use adblock I don't see how these sites will survive. And that adblock penetration rate increases year over year due to efforts like this.The real question is what will happen next. Will the government move to rule adblocking illegal? Will websites engage in sophisticated technical anti-adblock measures? Will companies like Google and Twitter give up on advertising and shutter their existing businesses? All I can say is that the current situation doesn't seem sustainable.
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Winamp Skin Museum
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Winamp skins make me miss the fun of software circa 2000. The sun was bright and the possibility space wide open. A piece of software would come out, make huge strides in enabling a new use case effectively, leave the door open for people to make it theirs - and boy did they ever!In the last 20 years how have software music players changed? The files come from a subscription service easier to use and with much better metadata than tracks from Napster ever did. That's awesome! Also the subscription dictates you use their hot turd of software, with dreary spartan UI and zero room for functional customization to be had. Welcome to the future, now learn to like it or get called a luddite.
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Cover Your Tracks
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I often see this stuff and every result from every person I've seen is that fingerprints are unique. Even with DNT enabled, tools like uBlock, privacy badger (an EFF tool!), etc people are still unique. How does one actually become not unique? I'm on Apple hardware, so I can't imagine my hardware is unique (other than silicon lottery) and using Firefox. Testing in Safari shows "nearly unique" (1 bit difference than my FF results) so I gotta imagine that near is myself.How does one actually make themselves non-unique?And can we make things more transparent? How many bits is enough?
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Focalboard – a self-hosted alternative to Trello, Notion, and Asana
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> Download Focalboard from the Microsoft App Store.I am life-long Windows user and I am yet to meet someone who uses Microsoft App Store. A standalone regular installer is an absolute must.
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“One Day Longer and Those 13 Boys Would Be Dead”
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The most harrowing thing I have read in a long time.
I can't even begin to fathom the immense bravery of these divers - and that of the boys.
I didn't really follow the Musk bit of the story, but the fact that he had the audacity to shitpost about any of these guys make me think vastly less of him (and I'm usually in the Musk-respecter camp)
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Swiss Ph.D student’s dismissal spotlights China’s influence
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The professor should be fired and the university punished (doubtful), but the student was also an idiot to do what he did. It’s not like he was some random guy who just tweeted at China, he lived in wuhan for years and has actual family there now, being critical of a totalitarian government in that scenario is the height of monumental stupidity. It’s ironic that the article paints him as methodological and thoughtful because he seems anything but in his actions.
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No More Medium – Build Your Own Site (2019)
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I chose random blog post on Medium and tried to copy a sentence out of it. It offers to let me "create an account to highlight a passage", or tweet it out via Twitter, but I can't just copy it and paste it into my notes elsewhere.Whose idea was it to assert this level of control over written material, especially user-generated material? It's a very unpleasant experience.EDIT: Dialing down my tone a bit here, I should have taken a minute between trying the frustrating thing and posting about it.
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Red Light Green Light
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Similar things happen surprisingly often in companies. Many intense arguments can be diffused by first being specific about what we agree upon.Just to add to this, one strategy from the rationalist community that I rarely see practiced is to 'taboo' certain words. For example if two engineers are arguing about a solution not being scalable, taboo the word scalable. They both re-explain their POV without using the word scalable at all. It often works like magic and they quickly reach a shared understanding.
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Writing by hand is still the best way to retain information
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I'd be curious if anyone had good advice on how to improve your handwriting ability well into adulthood (I'm 35). My penmanship was so bad in grade school that I attended special education classes to improve it, but it still was and remains horrible. This is a source of insecurity for me and since I've always been glued to a keyboard it has been easy to handwave away as "screw this, the world is all typing-based anyhow".But I have seen evidence before that handwriting notes leads to improved retention, and seeing it here now, I'm wondering if there's a framework or resource that can help me feel a little bit more confident in my ability to, you know...write words with pen and paper. It's embarrassing even talking about it, honestly.
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Notes apps are where ideas go to die (2022)
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I love this, and I love how disturbing it is for a lot of people (especially those who only read the title)!We think we write to remember, but it's really the act of letting go as the article gets into as a theory, that really lets those notes become effective to us. We can revisit these notes at a later date, with fresh eyes, having forgotten about it entirely. It adds value, not because the original idea or note was particularly great, but because of what we are then combining it with (action and experience).This is also why blindly making notes isn't effective as a form of memorizing. You are writing just to write, you have to revisit them blindly in a new way for them to become effective with a new combination. As if you are a chemist creating a new concoction previously thought impossible.So let your notes app become a giant trash pile. It's better for you, and they should do their job with proper search anyways. Don't spend time optimizing for note link graphs or any of that BS that doesn't help you and you absolutely will stop caring about those "features" in 5 months anyways. Such features are just productivity industry nonsense to make you feel productive while the content remains elusive to your mind.
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Downloading a video should be “fair use” as recording a song from the radio
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The problem is that whether or not downloading a YouTube video can be fair use, the RIAA is alleging that youtube-dl is a copy protection circumvention tool. 17 USC 1201(a)(2) does not care about your fair use, it only cares about keeping copying tools off the market.To bring this back into the home recording of radio, it'd be as if Congress decided to ban the sale of tape decks that could record radio transmissions[0]. That ban would work regardless of fair use.This is why Section 1201(a)(2) needs to be struct from the law, BTW - your access to copying tools should not evaporate because of a lack of ability to enforce copyright on you.[0] How this ban is actually implemented is immaterial, but perhaps radios can't have detachable speakers or audio out ports to hook a tape deck into, or tape decks have to only have an integral speaker and no audio in ports. This wouldn't stop home recording of radio but it'd be significantly worse.
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Google permanently bans popular application from Play for not using IAP
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I know Google's policy on this, but I completely understand where the developer is coming from.Google has been taking a collective shit on every developer out of its list of seller countries[0], which is ridiculously short and hasn't been expanded in god knows how long, and even then, there were only a handful of countries added.On Google's page about seller countries they say: "We're working hard to add more countries, but we're unable to provide any guidance on timelines."No, you're fucking not working hard, you added the last ones a year and a half ago. EU countries are missing, for fucks sake. These are countries where Android has 70, 80% of the market, and you're killing any sensible chance of developers making a living on mobile. And you're not allowing any other payment option, because hey, fuck the developers, they don't need to make a living.And then you send me fucking developer feedback polls year after year, which you seemingly throw in the trash, because every single Android dev I know tells you the same damn thing, let us sell apps, everything else is irrelevant.Wake the fuck up Google.[0]https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...ps. sorry for the language, this has been boiling for more than two years now...
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A story about
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That was really well written; I hope she writes more stuff, it looks like the blog is updated really sporadically.Bonus easter egg: place your mouse over the author's photo.
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Evidence-based advice we've found on how to be successful in a job
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Hey, I'm the author of the post. Happy to take questions, and keen to hear ideas about what else we might add.
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How to get your first 100k active users
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BTW, I'm the OP and am happy to answer questions here. My expertise is obviously in consumer internet products but I spend a lot of time thinking about growth. It's my superpower!
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Algorithms for Decision Making
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I can also recommend "Algorithms to Live By", by Brian Christian & Tom Griffiths. https://www.amazon.com/Algorithms-Live-Computer-Science-Deci...Super accessible.
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The health benefits of better air
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This article seems to make fantastic jumps from the believable -- mortality from overall air pollution (e.g. in Delhi) to the frankly unbelievable -- your ultrasonic humidifier supposedly reducing your life by nearly an hour each night, or that a daily commute between Newark and NYC takes half a year off your life.According to this logic, anyone who works in the subway should be dying, what, 10 years earlier? Which is obviously not happening.Similarly, it seems impossible to believe that the minerals in the air from humidifiers are equivalently dangerous to factory pollution or cigarette smoke. Different categories of particles are going to affect the body differently, no? I mean, our body requires minerals -- we're drinking them in our water all day long -- while certain factories may be belching out straight-up poison.These statistics are just not passing the smell test. They seem to be extrapolations of extrapolations of extrapolations. This article's conclusions don't seem even remotely convincing.
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Gooey: Turn almost any Python command line program into a GUI application
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Gooey is a brilliant bit of software.We use it in combination with Python Fire [0] to easily convert python code to something that users can interact with. Python fire converts our python code into a CLI without all the manual parameter parsing, and Gooey turns the CLI into a simple GUI.[0] https://github.com/google/python-fire
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Stripe banned us for payment disputes but we never had a single dispute
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(Stripe cofounder.)Ugh, apologies. Something very clearly went wrong here and we’re already investigating.Zooming out, a few broader comments:* Unlike most services, Stripe can easily lose very large amounts of money on individual accounts, and thousands of people try to do so every day. We are de facto running a big bug bounty/incentive program for evading our fraudulent user detection systems.* Errors like these happen, which we hate, and we take every single false rejection that we discover seriously, knowing that there’s another founder at the other end of the line. We try to make it easy to get in touch with the humans at Stripe, me included, to maximize the number that we discover and the speed with which we get to remedy them.* When these mistaken rejections happen, it’s usually because the business (inadvertently) clusters strongly with behavior that fraudulent users tend to engage in. Seeking to cloak spending and using virtual cards to mask activity is a common fraudulent pattern. Of course, there are very legitimate reasons to want to do this too (as this case demonstrates).* We actually have an ongoing project to reduce the occurrence of these mistaken rejections by 90% by the end of this year. I think we’ll succeed at it. (They’re already down 50% since earlier this year.)
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Show HN: Pony – a messenger for mindful correspondence
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Thanks for working on this. It reminds me of a social app called Slowly (https://slowly.app/en/) where you write "letters" to people and they are delivered based on the approximate physical distance between them.It's common for letters across countries to take >12 or sometimes even >24 hours. It's led people to a lot of meaningful relationships/friendships, they publish some as stories: https://slowly.app/en/story/featured/
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Amazon worker chat app to ban words such as “union”, “pay raise”, “slave labor”
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> The major goal of the program, Amazon’s head of worldwide consumer business, Dave Clark, said, was to reduce employee attrition by fostering happiness among workers — and also productivity. Shout-Outs would be part of a gamified rewards system in which employees are awarded virtual stars and badges for activities that “add direct business value,” documents state. At the meeting, Clark remarked that “some people are insane star collectors.”Truly insane, there is nothing stranger (or more dystopian) than fiction after all. Rather than fix the system of working their employees to death (literally in the case of the tornado) or improving their conditions, Amazon tries to use virtual gold stars (not even physical stickers like kindergarten) as a band-aid. That list of banned words is right out of 1984 (as cliché as it is to reference at this point): ethics, fairness, freedom.I cannot imagine anyone here seriously defending this unless you’re just looking to be a contrarian. This is not “par for the course” for manual labor jobs as some people are claiming. Most manual labor jobs do not restrict you from talking about ethics or justice with your coworkers or have even a need for some virtual gold stars beyond a little whiteboard in the building with number of sales, employee of the month, etc. The fact that these techniques won’t work for Amazon just shows that their laborers are really over-worked compared to the norm. Unfortunately, Amazon is able to use their massive resources and capital to pay just more than the local factory, packing gig, etc. so they have a stream of desperate people willing to take it.
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Blue Zones, where people reach age 100 at 10 times greater rates
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My bet is blue zones are just places where they don't have good longevity records so you get a bunch of fake centenarians. That turned out to be the case in Japan: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-pacific-11258071 and I think also in Greece.People were just keeping dead relatives "alive" for the social security or rent control.
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Is tipping getting out of control? Many consumers say yes
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I've just opened a coffee shop in Los Angeles last month, and we don't take tips. We only use self-ordering iPads (I've custom coded an iOS app w/ Stripe Terminal for it), and we don't accept cash either.We've had a few customers baffled by the no-tipping policy, and still insisting that they leave a tip. Some even left cash on the counter or on the table. We had to chase a few of them down to return their money. Also, some customers seem to think that the screen froze at the very end because it didn't ask for a tip.While it has been strange to see some customer's determination to leave a tip, I think overall it was well received by the great majority of people that just didn't say anything about it and made a mental note that the prices they see on the menu is what they'll actually end up paying.We will probably need to highlight that we pay a higher wage for baristas & cooks to account for the lack of tips, and give customers an option to donate to a charity if they still wish to part with additional money.I do believe that the incentive tips provide for employees to "act" friendly to customers can be transferred over into a review/feedback program, which is what we will be testing out. If customers rate their order and interaction with the barista to be satisfactory, a bonus payment will be made to the baristas on shift. Once we introduce this, I'll share the results.
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Sqrt(x*x+y*y)+3*cos(sqrt(x*x+y*y))+5 from -20 to 20
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This works great in Firefox 11. It doesn't work in Chrome 18 which has WebGL disabled (on Linux).EDIT: I really doesn't work because "NVIDIA cards with nouveau drivers in Linux are crash-prone." Firefox has no trouble, strangely.
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Dr. Arjun Srinivasan: We’ve Reached “The End of Antibiotics, Period”
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The interviewed expert has very good credentials and clinical experience to be talking about what he is talking about, and his warnings should be taken seriously. But even at that, the fallacious teleological language he uses about biological evolution by natural selection suggests a way out of this problem. When he says, "Bacteria, like any living organism, want to survive," and "So anything that we do to try and kill bacteria, or anything the environment does to try and kill bacteria, bacteria will eventually discover ways or find ways around those" he is making factual statements that are plainly incorrect on their face. Bacteria don't desire anything, and they don't seek out anything or plan anything. Moreover, it is perfectly possible for lineages of bacteria to go completely extinct, and that has undoubtedly happened more times than human beings are aware.Current antiobiotics are themselves mostly derived from "natural" chemicals emitted by microorganisms so that those microorganisms survive natural selection to go on reproducing in a world full of bacteria. Many of the early antiobiotics, for example penicillin, are derived from mycotoxins produced by fungi. Human medicine can use chemicals from fungi for protection against bacteria because human beings and all animals are more closely related to fungi than either fungi or animals are related to bacteria,[1] so fungi have a biochemical similarity to animals that makes it likely (although not certain) that a mycotoxin that is lethal to bacteria will be relatively harmless to human beings.And this is the way forward to developing new antibiotics. As we reach a deeper biochemical understanding of the basis of all life, we will eventually understand the differences, which are biochemical differences at bottom, between human beings and bacteria, between human beings and protists, between human beings and fungi (yes, there are some systematic differences between animals and fungi) and between human beings and all other harmful microorganisms. Only human beings have science labs and clinical research studies to come up with new defenses against the thoughtless, largely immobile threats from other living things. We can form hypotheses, test those hypotheses rigorously, and perhaps make some lineages of harmful microorganisms as extinct in the wild as the smallpox virus and rinderpest virus now are. The intelligence that the hominid lineage has evolved gives human beings advantages that bacteria will never possess.[1] http://ucjeps.berkeley.edu/DeepGreen/NYTimes.htmlhttp://www.nytimes.com/1993/04/16/us/animals-and-fungi-evolu...
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China's Man-On-the-Side Attack on GitHub
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I still don't really get it. What's the actual goal behind the attack? When the Chinese government decides to block a website, I can at least understand their motivations, as bad as they may be. But DDOSing Github just seems to be pissing the whole world off for a few hours without any actual long term consequences.
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Ask HN: What's your favorite HN post?
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My YC app: Dropbox - Throw away your USB drive
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
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How to start a company with no free time
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I have a related question for the author or anyone:How do you keep your energy up to code in the evenings on your own project, after a full day of coding at the office?
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Lessons from 3,000 technical interviews
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I am perplexed why anyone would think that interview performances has any interesting statistical relevance. Much more interesting would be how successful the candidate was after receiving a job at the company.
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Uncensorable Wikipedia on IPFS
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Strategically, this (advertising IPFS as an anti-censorship tool and publishing censored documents on it and blogging about them) doesn't seem like a great idea right now.Most people aren't running IPFS nodes, and IPFS isn't seen yet as a valuable resource by censors. So they'll probably just block the whole domain, and now people won't know about or download IPFS.We saw this progression with GitHub in China. They were blocked regularly, perhaps in part for allowing GreatFire to host there, but eventually GitHub's existence became more valuable to China than blocking it was. That was the point at which I think that, if you're GitHub, you can start advertising openly about your role in evading censorship, if you want to.But doing it here at this time in IPFS's growth just seems like risking that growth in censored countries for no good reason.
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Ask HN: What books have made the biggest impact on your mental models?
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Fantastic question.The selfish gene - for understanding human behaviorMeditations of Marcus Aurelius - for understanding how to be contentDebt, the first 5,000 years - for understanding money and finance from the ground upWright Brothers - for understanding how technological breakthroughs happenSnowball (Warren Buffet), Andrew Carnegie and Rockefeller biographies - for understanding the mental mindset to win in business (it's not what you think)Hackers and painters - for understanding startups and how/why they workZen and the art of motorcycle maintenance - for understanding beauty in the routineEssentialism, the disciplined pursuit of less and Walden - for understanding how "stuff" gets in the way of happinessLes Miserables - for understanding love
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Researchers find that one person likely drove Bitcoin from $150 to $1,000
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People do not realize how manipulated the traditional financial markets are otherwise known as Wall Street. Cryptocurrency is less manipulated as it's run by a different culture of people.
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Spotify opens on NYSE, valuing company at almost $30B
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I do love Spotify as a product, however I don't think it will scale the same way Netflix does. Spotify is at the mercy of major record labels, and as their books become more transparent the record labels will squeeze every dollar they can for licensing. That is, unless they find a way to upend the record industry entirely.Spotify has a unique position with their amazing discovery/recommendations engine- they could potentially start their own "label" and promote their own artists that sign on. Small/independent musicians could see more exposure and Spotify can deliver more music tailored for individual tastes. I've personally found myself listening to lots of small/indie artists as a result of their algorithms, to the point that these now make up the majority of my listening experience.I think getting into concert tickets/streams, merchandise etc could help them potentially capture quite a bit of value in the future as well.I know the comparison is similar to original content & Netflix - but keep in mind there's an opportunity cost with media (one can only consume X amount of shows/songs within a period of time). The more attention Spotify can divert away from the major record labels the better.
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No CS Degree – Interviews with self-taught developers
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I'm an engineer. No CS degree. I coded for fun on various side projects from 2006-2012. I didn't consider myself very good.I worked at a couple startups from 2012-2013. During that time, I became very proficient in Coffeescript and a couple popular frontend frameworks. I was very productive in terms of pumping out lines of code (that somehow resulted in a working product).However, I didn't know how to write a for loop. If you had asked me what "for...in" was, I wouldn't have had a clue. And forget about asking me how setTimeout has to do with the call stack.The problem with being self taught, at least in my experience, is that you end up being very strong in whatever areas it is that interests you, and whatever areas of CS are relevant to the projects you're working on day-to-day.In 2013, I began to realize my (glaring) deficiencies as a programmer. That was the point when I started spending all my free time doing online CS courses. They helped a lot with filling in the knowledge gaps that I didn't even know I had.The main reason I'm posting this is to give a shoutout to Project Euler.Project Euler (https://projecteuler.net/) is an amazing way to test yourself (and learn) CS concepts. If you've done a coding bootcamp and want to do a "gut check" to see how much you learned (or how much you have left to learn), I'd highly recommend Project Euler.(I'm happy to say that in 2019, I can write for loops all day long...)
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Advertising Is a Cancer on Society
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This is a dogmatic viewpoint I think often seen in very technical people who are unwilling to see the interconnectedness of how our society works.I bet there's any number of things this person values that simply wouldn't exist without advertising.It's a childish and immature opinion really.Anyone who hates advertising this much should show their commitment by working at an organization that does not advertise. Loathing advertising and at the same time depending on it for income is deeply hypocritical.
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Building a BitTorrent client from the ground up in Go
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Nice! Looks like a good idea to implement something from scratch to improve the understanding of a language and also a tool. Any other ideas about stuff to implement? Thanks.
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Time.gov was upgraded today
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There are two independent timekeeping authorities in the US, the NIST and the Navy, which maintain the official civil and military time respectively. By policy the civil and military time are synchronized, and the precise offset between civil and military time is monitored by the NIST as a form of quality assurance. The offset between the two is generally less than the error in the comparison method.The Navy offers a similar online time service although it is clearly far less developed from a design perspective (https://www.usno.navy.mil/USNO/time/display-clocks/simpletim...). However, what's perhaps more useful is that the Navy continues to offer a telephone time service (202-762-1401) while NIST does not. Additionally, the GPS time, while operated by the Air Force, is precisely synchronized to the Navy time plus or minus a known offset (due to the decision to no longer apply leap seconds to the GPS constellation to avoid leap-second-related problems).There is some history here. The NIST is interested in timekeeping from a metrological perspective since it is important to many commercial and scientific pursuits. The Navy, on the other hand, has long been interested in accurate timekeeping because it is required for celestial navigation. The transit telescope maintained at the Naval Observatory comes from the legacy of the Naval Observatory as a tool to correctly adjust the clocks used by ships at sea for navigation. Similarly, many of the most significant advances in mechanical timekeeping were spurred by the need for compact and reliable clocks for use at sea.The Navy operates master clock equipment at Schriever AFB for closer proximity to the NIST equipment at Boulder, but the primary means of comparison of the two time bases is by observing the GPS time. Because of the simplicity and low cost of GPS time sources, GPS is as ubiquitous for time measurement as it is for navigation.
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Congress should invest in open-source software
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For what it's worth, there is a lot of movement in the Federal government to open source code that is written for the government. The GSA, which is the kind of meta agency that helps other federal agencies do stuff talks a lot about this. They also have a site called https://code.gov/ that lists open source projects created for the Federal government. A lot of their own repositories are completely open source and they do development in the open.I work on a contract for the CDC and we open sourced an older version of the software we display data on maps in: https://github.com/CDCgov/CDC-MapsI'm working on switching our development to open so we use the same codebase that is available to everybody and adding other visualizations. It's slow going but there is movement there. I do agree it would be beneficial to fund open source projects, likely by including some requirement in contracts.I think them funding projects directly with cash could cause a lot of problems though. The increase regulations that would need to be added would probably not be worth it for open source projects. People who get funding would likely need to submit a lot of documentation, there'd also probably be weird rules about non U.S. citizens etc... and laws would need to be passed.
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US Cybercom says mass exploitation of Atlassian Confluence vulnerability ongoing
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The good thing about the fact that Atlassian offers both on-prem and cloud versions of their offerings is, everyone is now aware of the awful engineering practices that underpin their products. We have to assume that there are problems of a similar nature in their cloud service, which is way more of a problem considering the number of orgs that depend on the JIRA SaaS offering.Maybe the founders could have used some of that time spent planning a tunnel between their side-by-side $100M houses, or engaged in Twitter rants, to actually bother delivering value to customers. It’s only a matter of time before this product suite is disrupted, and it might represent one of the most obvious low-hanging opportunities in our entire industry.I still remember being in line at a WWDC a few years back, overhearing someone ask a developer, “where do you work?” When the developer responded with “HipChat,” the other person immediately chuckled and said, “oh — Atlassian... I’m sorry” — and then everyone around them also started laughing. It’s amazing that this company continues to fall up, and that the founders have taken on roles as the ruling digital gurus of Australia (shows you why it’s so easy for the government to run circles around the local tech industry and pass whatever laws they want).
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Computers as I used to love them
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I love syncthing as much as the next guy on here, but this article feels very much like "why doesn't this square peg fit my round hole?!" Dropbox (and iCloud) are meant more for cloud file storage than pure device-to-device synce. I couldn't go to a less tech savvy friend and say, "Oh, you use Dropbox for backups? Here, use syncthing instead!" For one, most people don't have multiple computers they want to keep in sync, and even if they do it's unlikely that those multiple computers have overlapping periods of being online, which syncthing will need to keep back ups!The author's baffling reaction to iCloud and Dropbox's warning just makes my point. Those warnings are super clear to people who use those services for backup - remove this file and it won't be backed up, hence not available elsewhere. That isn't those platforms begging for attention (???). Remove those warnings and see how many normies complain to Apple/Dropbox that they didn't know removing a file from their synced folder meant it wouldn't be synced anymore. This also applies to the bizarre complaint about cloud storage space limits - of course you need storage space on the service if those files have to live elsewhere!
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T-Mobile begins blocking iPhone users from enabling iCloud Private Relay in US
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I would think Apple has some leverage to force it if they really wanted.If Apple really wanted to force the issue, they could tell T-Mobile no more iPhone contracts unless you do it. Apple can survive and thrive on fewer networks - the iPhone was AT&T exclusive for a long time at the beginning.If that happened, there would be no way for T-Mobile to get a supply of iPhones. People would need to buy iPhones from Apple and then replace the SIM cards themselves. It would make T-Mobile bend pretty quickly unless they managed to get Verizon and AT&T to join them on the issue.But then Apple has a second card to play, and that's the court of public opinion. If Apple wanted to make a public ad lambasting the carriers for undermining people's privacy, the damage would also force them to bend.Finally, of course, there's the fact that carriers need Apple just as much as Apple needs carriers. However, between the carriers and Apple, who has $200 billion in the bank to do things themselves if they wanted?Edit: Heck, T-Mobile has a market value of $130 billion. AT&T has a market cap of $188B, and Verizon $223 billion. If Verizon and AT&T joined T-Mobile in protest, Apple could theoretically attempt (or at least threaten) a hostile takeover of any of them. That would cause a lot of discussion among the carriers and send a strong message very quickly.
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SPAs Were a Mistake
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It's been so frustrating watch this play out over the past decade.I keep seeing projects that could have been written as a traditional multi-page application pick an SPA architecture instead, with the result that they take 2-5 times longer to build and produce an end-result that's far slower to load and much more prone to bugs.Inevitably none of these projects end up taking advantage of the supposed benefits of SPAs: there are no snazzy animations between states, and the "interactivity" mainly consists of form submissions that don't trigger a full page - which could have been done for a fraction of the cost (in development time and performance) using a 2009-era jQuery plugin!And most of them don't spend the time to implement HTML5 history properly, so they break the URLs - which means you can't bookmark or deep link into them and they break the back/forward buttons.I started out thinking "surely there are benefits to this approach that I've not understood yet - there's no way the entire industry would swing in this direction if it didn't have good reasons to do so".I've run out of patience now. Not only do we not seem to be learning from our mistakes, but we've now trained up an entire new generation of web developers who don't even know HOW to build interactive web products without going the SPA route!My recommendation remains the same: default to not writing an SPA, unless your project has specific, well understood requirements (e.g. you're building Figma) that make the SPA route a better fit.Don't default to building an SPA.
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More invested in nuclear fusion in last 12 months than past decade
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But where are the fusion neutrons? (See Voodoo Fusion [1])[1] https://vixra.org/pdf/1812.0382v1.pdfI'm a professional fission guy. I started out in fusion and switched to advanced fission. These days I don't see why we don't just build lots more regular old LWR fission reactors.Imagining that somehow fusion is going to a) work, b) be cheap (fuel cost is only 5% of total nuclear fission cost so who cares), and c) not have the same stigma as fission is kind of weird in my mind.For example, there are leaks of tiny amounts of tritium at some fission plants and people lose their minds. Fusion reactors will have many orders of mag more tritium. Will people not lose their minds just the same? Tritium is notoriously hard to contain since it's so small. It can permeate through metal like a hot knife through butter.Also, lots of people worry about fission and nuclear weapons proliferation. So does fusion get around this? Not really. In fact it's worse. Did you know that the two materials you need to make thermonuclear weapons are tritium and plutonium? Tritium breeding is required by almost all practical fusion power plants (the other reactions are 100s to 1000s of times harder, I don't care what x random fusion CEO says, they're in it for the sweet billionaire side project money).Plutonium is made by irradiating natural uranium from the dirt with neutrons. Practical fusion reactors have lots of neutrons. Really high energy ones too.Anyway let's just do fission you guys. It's way easier. It has been working fine since the 1950s. It's zero carbon. Waste problem is solved (see Onkalo, and reprocessing). It net saves millions of lives by displacing air pollution. It runs 24/7 on a tiny land and material footprint. We have enough uranium and thorium to run the whole world for 4 billion (with a b) years using breeder reactors (demonstrated in 1952 in Idaho). Get the Koreans over here to build some ARP1400s or the Chinese to build some Hualong Ones until we figure out how to project manage again and then call it good.
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Show HN: Quake 1 ported to the Apple Watch
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When people ship impressive stuff like this, I can’t stop wondering what motivated them to 1) work on it for free 2) have the persistence to finish it. Incredible feat
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Why I will never pursue cheating again
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Hi Panos. I was actually a student in your class last fall semester. To alleviate any doubt you may have, the class was known as “Info Tech,” and you had two sessions on Mondays and Wednesdays (2-3:15, 3:30-4:45 pm) in KMEC.Now I have a couple of problems with your post. Firstly, you attribute your lower evaluation rating of 5.3 for last fall semester solely to your lower tolerance of cheating. However, there is something very wrong with this logic. As you may (or evidently, may not) know, correlation does not imply causation. In other words, your lower overall rating was not necessarily due to your increased surveillance of plagiarism; it could have been due to other factors. As someone who was a student in your class, I can speak for myself and say that I did give you a low rating, and it was NOT because you punished the cheaters—it was far from it. To put it rather simply and bluntly, you were unkind (that’s an extreme euphemism) out of the classroom. Sure, you had your favorites (my best friend being one of them) as most professors do. However, you had, what I perceived to be, an irrational disdain for some of your students, I being one of them. When I asked questions in class, you’d quietly giggle or give me a blank stare as if the question I asked was completely stupid (forgive me, I’m not technologically inclined), which of course discouraged me from participating in class. When I stayed after class to ask you questions I was too shy to ask in class, or to just discuss the subject material in greater depth, you’d answer in a very short, annoyed tone, as if you had more important things to do. My thank you’s went unanswered. My smiles to you were not reciprocated. Sure, it sounds silly, but it was very clear you did not like me. And I had no idea why. Some people noticed, while others in the class also felt like you hated them for no apparent reason. It got to the point where we, as well as others who experienced better treatment, discussed it and concluded you were just racist. Now, I know you and many others reading this post probably think I’m just a pissed off student who didn’t get the grade he wanted and is now bashing his teacher out of revenge. However, that’s really not the case; I just figured I’d give you my honest opinion of you seeing as your perception of your students’ mentality towards you is completely mistaken. I’ll just quickly recount one experience that perfectly illustrates my overall experience with you. For the WiMax assignment (which is what your blog post is based on), after all the students had received your email demanding those who plagiarized to come in to talk to you, naturally everyone, even those who didn’t cheat, felt very uneasy and worried. I, who collaborated with a friend on one small part of the assignment, got worried and came in to see you during office hours. When I arrived, there was one other student waiting in the seating area; she said you weren’t in your office. So we waited for a good 30 minutes until you came strolling in. She then went in to speak with you. About 20 minutes passed until she emerged. You then walked out, saw me, and then said “I’ll be back soon.” 50 MINUTES ELAPSED, and you finally returned. You were munching on a sandwich. As you walked by me, you mumbled “emergency.” So, almost two hours after I had come to your office, I finally was able to speak with you. We went in, you looked up my assignment, and then you said “there’s no problem with your assignment; you’re fine.” So I left. There was no apology.Now, aside from me having a bad experience with you, what really irks me about your post is your complacence with cheating because it’s not in your self-interest to pursue those who cheated. A true capitalist at heart, I guess. As a student who did not cheat, worked very hard, and still received a relatively low grade in your class, there’s nothing more infuriating. Is it not your job as an educator to make sure those who put in the most effort and demonstrate the highest level of achievement are awarded grades accordingly? Is it not your job to make sure the playing field is level, especially at a school where there is such a high pressure to do well as a result of a strict grading curve policy? I guess you don’t believe so. I mean, after all, you did give my friend, who consistently received a B average on assignments and exams throughout the semester, an overall grade of A (which he was very, very shocked by).Anyway, that is not to say I did not learn a lot from your class. You were a great teacher inside the classroom. However, teaching evaluations don’t just measure your ability to give good lectures; they are holistic--meaning, they also measure intangibles, such as the professor's willingness to help students, or his attitude. And that, Panos, is where you failed.
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Hackers Remotely Attack a Jeep on the Highway
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Some questions for the researchers, or anyone else who thinks this was okay:1) Were public roadways and speeds of 70mph absolutely necessary to demo this?2) What was the plan if the trucker approaching at 70mph hadn't seen the Jeep stalled early and had to swerve or panic stop, possibly crashing and injuring themselves or others?3) Anyone notify the Missouri State Highway Patrol about this? They may be contacting the researchers with questions about this demo if they weren't consulted in advance.4) What's the plan if they trigger a bug in the car software of the people they had tested this with earlier? The article mentions them tracking people remotely as they attempt to learn more about the exploit.I could go on but why bother? In case any of you think this was cool or even remotely (no pun intended) ethical, I'd like to know if you have a problem with letting these two test this on a loved one's car. How about they remotely poke around your husband or wife's car and explore, as long as they promise not to intentionally trigger anything?If I ever learned this had been tested on a vehicle I was in, I'd make sure this cost the researchers dearly.EDIT: I've just phoned 'Troop C' of the Highway Patrol at their main number, +1-636-300-2800 and they seemed pretty keen to follow up. The fact that the vehicle was disabled where there was no shoulder, was impeding traffic, and the demo not cleared with them in advance has them concerned. I'm all for testing exploits and security research, but this isn't the right way to do it. And to film it and post it to a high traffic site is nuts.
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LinuxBoot: Linux as Firmware
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IMO, the problems that [U]EFI introduces (that far exceed the historical limitations it overcomes) should be self-evident.IMO, he should not have to argue against having multiple, redundant copies of drivers, shells and utilties each accessible only in its own "OS" (UEFI, GRUB, OS). It should not be a debate. This is definitely not "defense in depth". IMO, whomever controls the first OS controls the computer because there is no need for the second and third OS in order to do work (make network connections, move files across the network, etc.).These "hardware features", whether its [U]EFI or ME or whatever acronym, IMO is a land grab by hardware vendors over what we know as the "OS". Less computer owner control, more vendor control. The sum effect of all these "features" is that verification that something is the way that the owner wants it and has not been modified is far too complex and is ultimately under control of the vendor, not the computer owner.I do most work on the commandline in text-mode (no graphics layer) and as such I only need one OS, with some basic utilities. When the news came that new computers would have [U]EFI, I considered whether I should just switch from the OS I am using to [U]EFI. It seemed to have all the utilities I would need to do work, along with the ability to extend with new programs.I only need one OS to boot to a working environment. I should be able to choose that OS. I hope that Minnich and Hudson and others will consider that the user may want to choose a kernel other than Linux as a source for drivers, e.g., BSD, Plan9, others incl. future OS not yet written, etc., even if it today it has inferior driver support compared to Linux, or Intels UEFI, or whatever.The speaker seemed a bit perplexed when someone in the audience questioned whether Linux is a "TCB". What is and what is not a "TCB" should be the computer owners decision, and not anyone elses. If the computer owner wants to cede authority for that decision to a third party, then she can make that choice. But IMO it should be a choice made by the computer owner, and not anyone else.
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The health care toll today’s work culture exacts on employees
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> I see a workplace that has become shockingly inhumane.A thousand times this. Very few of the lessons my parents taught me apply in the corporate world. Be honest and straight with people, assume good intent, take responsibility, etc.All that behavior will do is paint you as naive. Sure there's room for honesty and responsibility, but only when used appropriately (strategically). Strikes me as acutely inhumane every time my career is rewarded for suppressing those behaviors.I am not even allowed to tell a candidate (another human being that probably NEEDS a paycheck) why I didn't hire them and what they can do to improve their viability.Just because the company has discarded this person it also means I must discard them as well? It kills me every time, but I NEED my paycheck more than I prefer to help my fellow human.
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Omaha man ‘liked’ a tweet, then lost his job
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The meat of the story is that Omaha man worked for Marriott hotels on customer support. Their support system allows their agents to like tweets.The man appears to have inadvertently clicked like on a tweet while dealing with a large influx of support messages (due to a promo going on) thanking Marriott for listing Tibet as its own country which was a huge no-no due to Mariott's presence in China. Execs fire him as a part of their "sorry China" grovelling.My kneejerk is to believe fired man. I've clicked like on things by accident browsing regular Twitter, never mind a support system designed to skim through hundreds of requests. Unfortunately belief isn't going to restore the job, this is another lesson for the pile that companies will axe employees over fixing (heck, explaining) a problem with the system. It's the cheapest option.If liking a tweet will infuriate the largest (by population) country in the world, maybe $14/hr support agents shouldn't be able to one-click like tweets.Another question does occur - if it's such a big deal for them, why is/was Tibet listed as its own country in their system that prompted the liked tweet in the first place?
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FCC Authorizes SpaceX to Provide Broadband Satellite Services
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This is monumental - I claim every major advance in communication technology immediately precedes a major progress for society.This will make the 'Internet' truly global and ubiquitous.So excited for the developing world.
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Emails Show FDA Chemists Have Been Finding Glyphosate in Food
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From the article:“All of the official samples passed the test and were within the legal limits of glyphosate residue. But those off-the-record, unofficial samples, though done with the same equipment and tested by the same chemists, showed glyphosate.That’s right. The chemists found glyphosate residue on just about everything: crackers, granola, cornmeal, honey, oatmeal, baby food, and even corn. Their surreptitious corn test—one of the four items the FDA is actually testing—found glyphosate significantly over the legal limit set by the EPA. The chemists emailed their bosses to ask what to do. The FDA’s response (which was also captured in the FOIA documents): That corn was not an “official sample” and will thus be ignored.”I remember watching a lecture from Vandana Shiva who claimed that glyphosate was harmful and making it in to our food. She cited some European studies that found glyphosate in a wide variety of products. She claimed that there were shady things going on in the US government that seemed to obscure these facts. At the time, I saw people writing her off as a nut, or claiming that her masters degree in physics and PhD in philosophy meant that she didn’t have the expertise to evaluate the biological effects of glyphosate.And yet, I feel as though this article, if the claims are verified, does seem to back up her claims that glyphosate is more prevalent than our government would like to admit, and that there could really be official cover ups going on.I’d really like to know what’s in our food.
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Why did we wait so long for the bicycle?
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>Yet it was a simple mechanical inventionAs a mechanical engineer, this statement baffled me. All manufactured technology exists in the context of the manufacturing capabilities available to the designer. The manufacturing tech had to be tremendously complicated before a decent bike could be made. Hollow steel tubes aren't simple. Ball bearings aren't simple. There is a reductionist viewpoint among "theory" people that misses the trees for the forest.
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FLIF – Free Lossless Image Format
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Always cool to see new visual compression libraries hit the scene. That said I think the hardest part isn't the math of it, but the adoption of it.Likely the format with the best chance of overthrowing the jpg/gif/png incumbents is AVIF. Since it's based on AV1, you'd get hardware acceleration for decoding/encoding once it starts becoming a standard, and browser support will be trivial to add once AV1 has wide support.Compression wise AVIF is performing at about the same level as FLIF (15-25% better than webp, depending on the image), and is also royalty free. The leg it has upon FLIF is the Alliance for Open Media[1] is behind it, which is a consortium of companies including: "Amazon, Apple, ARM, Cisco, Facebook, Google, IBM, Intel Corporation, Microsoft, Mozilla, Netflix, Nvidia, Samsung Electronics and Tencent."I'm really excited for it and I hope it actually gets traction. It'd be lovely to have photos / screenshots / gifs all able to share a common format.[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alliance_for_Open_Media
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WhiteHat Jr’s founder files $2.6M defamation suit against critic
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They are the biggest scam in India capitalizing on FOMO of Indian parents. They charge heaftily (more than $2000) to teach app development (using Scratch, Firebase etc.). Their staff is poorly paid and just reads off scripts. Their staff doesn't know even the basics of CS (as evidenced in this video: https://youtu.be/1Y21eSn_zSM?t=64, when the student asks how files are stored in Cloud Storage, she says the files are stored in real clouds. There's another where the teacher can't tell the difference between Java and Javascript)Their ads are highly misleading and straight up false with made up names of students who earned millions of dollars in salary while their fellow peers are playing Cricket. (https://in.news.yahoo.com/wolf-gupta-byju-whitehat-jr-090945...). You can imagine the effect this will have parents (especially in India where parents are known be super competitive).This guy, Pradeep Poonia, has been actively campaigning against them. His youtube channels were taken down, Quora account was taken down, Twitter, even Reddit (if i'm not wrong). His current youtube (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdv4_YNXrIQtGHSVXnY-1mg) has lot of videos on this.He especially has a video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lN1DOE7GoYw) where he accessed their internal slack (shady I know, but even Whitehat Jr is also not playing fair) and showed their organized effort into suppressing online dissent by fake twitter accounts, trolling etc.WhiteHatJr was recently acquired by another firm Byju's (whose CEO is the plaintiff in this lawsuit) that also does the same thing, but for entire school curriculum.In a world, where there is Khan Academy, they sell their subpar product at a very high price, exploiting Indian parents' ignorance and willingness to do anything for their kids education.
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M1 Mac owners are experiencing high SSD writes over short periods of time
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The first line of the smartctl output everyone's bandying about says that a total of 1% of the drive's capacity has been used, which means that in about 16.5 years (2 months * 99 / 12) their drive will go readonly.What, exactly, is the problem with that?It seems like there are a lot of assumptions in play in this "headline news":(1) assuming that the reported numbers are valid for this measurement at all(2) that they are not a bug in the IOKit implementation used by smartctl(3) that they are not not a bug in smartctl itself(4) that they are directly comparable to non-M1 hardware without further processing(5) that they do not increment when Time Machine or other filesystem snapshots occur(6) that they do not increment when APFS copy-on-writes occur(7) that they do not include the total byte size of sparsely-modified filesI don't see anyone checking these assumptions yet, but if y'all do, supporting links on those points would improve this HN post considerably. There are other assumptions that could be tested too! Outrage is cool, but science is productive.
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Employees are happier when led by people with deep expertise (2016)
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"If Your Boss Could Do Your Job"Anecdote: in one of the law firms whole departments were sent to LWOP due COVID-19 and department heads had to do all the work themselves. They found out that they are perfectly capable of singlehandedly doing the job of the whole department.My take: if your boss can do your job, you're not needed.
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Terraform 1.0
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I hate Terraform with a passion but it is probably the best tool out there for managing cloud infrastructure so I use it at work with no plans to replace it.The biggest downsides are the awful half-baked language and the awkwardness of modules and passing values throughout your config. Also the staticness of providers are a serious pain, for example you can't create a kubernetes cluster then add a resource to it. The work around is to use two separate Terraform stacks which brings a lot of pain for passing values across the boundary. Furthermore you can no longer effectively plan any change that affects the boundary between the two stacks. "Luckily" Terraform's performance is so bad that you need to split the stacks anyways.The biggest feature I would like to see is the ability to dump a pure representation of your evaluated configuration. This would allow reasonable diffs in CI. There are of course complications, especially if you use `data` resources but technically it is possible to do a very good job here which would make it so much easier to make changes.
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Always Be Quitting
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What does one do when they live by this philosophy of documenting everything and making sure knowledge is captured, but your team mates just refuse to volley the ball back? I find myself documenting how the software works, writing up proposals with beautiful diagrams etc, but my teammates won't take the simple step to even read the dang thing without scheduling a meeting with me to spoon feed / read it aloud to them.
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Trapped in Silicon Valley’s hidden caste system
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The reason for my current user name here at hn was this exact form of racism. It is the first post I made when I created this throwaway. I was assured that my experience was unique and not widespread. I am both sad and happy to see this, sad because it exists, happy because it is getting some attention here at HN.I would like to take this opportunity to point out that everyone of us needs to be vigilant about this type of racism. One thing I recommend to my hiring managers is to not allow people from frictioned backgrounds to manage and interview people from the other side. Example problematic pairs for candidates/interviewers (not including the cast situation) include: Indians and Pakistanis, Serbians and Bosnians, Greeks and Turks, Chinese and Japanese.One way I solve this is by introducing an independent observer/participant when situations like this emerge. This is costly but it has really worked to not only address this problem but also created an amazing diversity in my teams because it takes care of some of the implicit bias we all have to some degree.
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The next Google
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I think 'more customization' which is a theme with a lot of these alternatives is a fundamental dead end. I don't know where this persistent myth comes from that people love choice and tinkering, because they clearly don't. There's a huge cost associated with having to make choices, and one feature of successful modern apps is that they're frictionless. That's why TikTok is so successful. There's no login, no user chosen social graph, everything's abstracted away.And that's by the way why Google is still successful as well. Because it literally still is a simple box where you put a question in and it gives you answers without needing to do anything else. The only way to beat that is to make it even better while not making it more complicated which is very hard to do.
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UK Government Officials Infected with Pegasus
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I'm surprised this isn't a major diplomatic incident between the UK and Israel too, since the Israeli intelligence company was supposedly "closely monitoring how their customers were using the software" or akin to that.Like, yeah, blame the UAE mostly for this but let's also have a discussion about why this was sold to anyone who would pay with no oversight at all. Western countries need to do better.
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Show HN: Mitmproxy2swagger – Automagically reverse-engineer REST APIs
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Wanted to show off my little project which helps whith reverse engneering APIs used by various apps. It takes HTTP traffic capturewd by mitmproxy and generates an OpenAPI specification for a given REST API.I have used it already on two apps and the results are good enough to write an alternative client or quickly automate some stuff.
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EU approves legislation to regulate Apple, Google, Meta, and other tech firms
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There's several very good provisions in this legislation (3rd party payment processors, non-preferential treatment for 1st party apps), there are several that have a mix of upsides and downsides (sideloading is one--I personally like knowing that Facebook can't ask people to sideload some privacy destroying crap on iOS).Then there's:- Allow developers to integrate their apps and digital services directly with those belonging to a gatekeeper. This includes making messaging, voice-calling, and video-calling services interoperable with third-party services upon request.- Give developers access to any hardware feature, such as "near-field communication technology, secure elements and processors, authentication mechanisms, and the software used to control those technologies."Apps will use near-field communication technology and other mechanisms to track us (consider how many device related APIs have restrictions in web browsers for just this reason), and I think it's credible that the interoperability requirements are going to be used to smash end-to-end encrypted messaging. You can have a decentralized end to end encrypted protocol. Can you retrofit every existing messaging service to use it in the short-term? Probably not.As an end user, the things that give developers maximum freedom are not necessarily the things that let me use my device with maximum freedom. I support people who want a FOSS device that is in no way locked down. I just don't want that, because I don't want to play systems administrator for an always on tracker in my pocket.
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Ask HN: Something you’ve done your whole life that you realized is wrong?
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When my then-gf/now-wife and I first moved in together, I got really mad at her because she kept "hiding" my stuff when I left it out for more than a day. I couldn't find anything!At some point, I yelled, "It's like you don't even want to see any of my things when I'm not using them!" Then I stopped for a second. For the first time in my life, it made sense.The whole point of putting things away is to hide them! No one wants to look at your crap when you're not using it.
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Path to a free, self-taught education in Computer Science
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Can someone point out where the science in all this is? At best, there are some courses in algorithms in the 'Core Theory' and others in the 'Advanced Theory' section, with a random spattering of in other sections.Computer Science would be computational theory, complexity theory, a proof based cryptography course, the mathematics of computer geometry/machine learning type stuff.About 80% of the courses here are software engineering courses - about using computers to build things. The quote 'computer science is as much about computers as astronomy is about telescopes', comes to mind.Just call it 'a self-taught education in Software Engineering'.
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Workers Leaving the Googleplex
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Interesting.My Dad once sued microsoft because they had many "temporary" workers who did not get the full benefit of full time workers. These workers were labelled as contract workers however, he was able to win his case because at the end of the day, they were working full time for Microsoft. Not only that, they were often employed by microsoft for many years, even though the claim was generally that these employees were fulfilling a short term need.He was able to get them damages for all sorts of things, including the fact that they were not entitled to store discounts while other employees were.Even though he won, many companies including Microsoft still do the exact same thing with their employees. The only difference is they are trying to keep it under wraps so they don't get sued again.Very likely, Google is trying to cover it's tracks in the same manner. They are probably less worried about racism than they are about this sort of permatemp law suit.Let's face it, if they were doing something legal they wouldn't care if they were getting videotaped.From my dad's firm's website:
http://www.bs-s.com/cases/c-microsoft-vizcaino.html
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