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Automatic: Your Smart Driving Assistant
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So it's a $10 elm327 ?http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=elm327&_sacat=0With a Torque clone?https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.prowl.torq...
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Ubuntu's Bug #1 is fixed
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Oh, we're still fighting this "war"?Software is about choice and productivity. It's great that we have choices and I embrace a variety of them throughout my personal and professional life, but this "us against them" philosophy belongs in a boardroom and not in the hands of users and creatives.We can say Ubuntu has come a long way (and it has) and that it's done a lot for gaining mind share (bingo), but a huge turn off for me in OSS is this "us against THE MAN" philosophy, why can't software just be software, a means of expression that you gives you choice?
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Scott Adams: How to Be Successful
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This insight is huge: Had I been goal-oriented instead of system-oriented, I imagine I would
have given up after the first several failures. It would have felt like
banging my head against a brick wall.
But being systems-oriented, I felt myself growing more capable every
day, no matter the fate of the project that I happened to be working on.
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Chrome removes Backspace to go back
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Chrome / Chromium have a habit of making these arbitrary changes that seriously annoy some (arguably small) percentage of their users, while claiming that it makes it simpler / better for everyone else, while explaining impatiently why it's infeasible to make the now missing feature a configuration option.Evidently the kinds of people that can't be bothered going into the Advanced Configuration Settings page would be confused by an additional item in the Advanced Configuration Settings page.I never used the backspace button for back (though it's probably what's mapped to my mouse button #8 - I'll know on the next upgrade), but I did get mightily annoyed by two changes a while back, and am always happy to bring them up whenever there's a story about Chrom* devs doing this kind of thing.1. snap-to-mouse - while dragging the scrollbar, if you move the mouse further than ~80 pixels away from the scrollbar column, the page jumps back to the original location - apparently MS Windows users love this feature, but chrome/chromium is the only application I've found on GNU/Linux that does this, and2. clicking inside the URL bar selects the whole contents - apparently MS Windows users are used to this feature, but chrome/chromium is the only application I've found on GNU/Linux that does this.No idea what the defaults are for OSX, and, really, it doesn't matter - these features should be sensitive to extant defaults on whatever desktop environment the browser finds itself running on.
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Web fonts, boy, I don't know
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I have had the exact experience in the last month. Being on a slow connection, I've come to loath web fonts. There is nothing wrong with them in general but it's just that they've come to symbolise over-indulgence and a myopia towards the users actual task-focused needs as opposed to aesthetics.Part of the issue is dealing with progressive enhancement as far as slow internet connections go. How do you solve that problem? There is no native browser API to my knowledge that does not depend on using JS which isn't ideal imo.Would love an attribute on script and link tags that could be conditional based on connection speeds.P.S
Would also encourage those who have the choice to use system fonts (https://medium.design/system-shock-6b1dc6d6596f) instead of web fonts. Seems more in-line with the spirit of the web and these fonts are very well tested in general.
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The moving sofa problem
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Of course, in the real world, furniture is 3D, and the obstacles you move move furniture around are also 3D. Bannister that's 3 feet high, couches with curved arms, ceilings have heights, stairwells...Part of the fun of moving is trying to figure out how to orientate furniture to get it into a room - or out of the room, since someone already got in there so of course it must come out.
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Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2017)
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IBM Canada | Eclipse OMR Developer | Toronto, ON | Full-time, ONSITE | https://ibm.biz/BdsBQDThe IBM Runtime Technologies team is looking to hire motivated software developers to join our mission to nurture an open source community around the Eclipse OMR toolkit for languageruntimes (https://www.eclipse.org/omr).We develop the Just-In-Time compiler for various language runtimes (Java, JavaScript, Python, Ruby etc.) built on Eclipse OMR: https://github.com/eclipse/omr. The IBM runtime compiler teamalso ports and optimizes industry standard open runtimes such as Google V8 and Node.js. We contribute industry-leading performance and capabilities across multiple hardware platforms(Intel, ARM, IBM Power and z Systems) and operating systems (Windows, Linux, AIX, z/OS).We are looking for software developers comfortable in an environment that is predominantly C and C++ based, but also willing to go down to the assembly language level. Polyglot skills arean asset, as we work in a variety of exhibited scripting languages.We want to hear from you, please apply here: https://ibm.biz/BdsBQD
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Solar Roof
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Yikes. I just signed a contract for a new roof here last month, it's going to cost about $12k. Just did the estimate for the Tesla Solar roof... $80,300, so $87k if I want the battery too. I can barely afford the $12 right now, the $80 is just so far over it's not even close, even with how much I save over the years in electricity.That being said, I love these things, so hoping it gets cheaper in the coming years.
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European Commission fines Google €2.42B for abusing dominance
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I might be in a minority here and I'll probably get down voted but this result scares me... and I used to be CTO one of those competing price comparison sites that show up lower in the results so if anyone should agree it should be me.While it made me angry when Google put their results above ours, I never questioned that they had a right to do that. It is their website. They are not a utility. At what point does a company cross the line and become one that the EU feels can no longer promote their own product?After all, the actual products here are the products being sold not the comparison sites. If I search for baseball bat the product is the bat not the competing search results.What's next? Having to give equal ranking to Yahoo! search results in their search page? It sounds extreme but I would have also thought this was extreme until 2 minutes ago.Or perhaps more accurate... having to completely do away with One Box entirely. After all, when I search for a movie it displays the actor information and movie times before it displays the link to the theater website or IMDB.
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Magnasanti: Large and Terrifying SimCity (2010)
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What's almost more amazing is that the developer spent 1.5 years planning and 3 years developing.I find it absurd but also inspiring that someone can devote that much time and energy to a hobby or unfunded personal research project.
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Apple announces Apple Card credit card
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I don't thing it is healthy to have big entities like this control fundamental services like payment processing. How long before the opaque governance of the App Store is applied to their payments offering? How long before activists start making this a new vector for deplatforming? Apple also announced a news offering (https://www.techradar.com/news/apple-news-plus) and I think the same concerns apply there.
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Trump Signs Executive Order Compelling Disclosure of Prices in Health Care
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The entire exercise is pointless because the health care market isn't actually a free and open market. There's lots of regulation on health services (obviously, as there should be, because safety is important), but more importantly, when a person is sick or injured, they usually are not able to comparison shop. Emergencies make it impossible, but even a relatively common illness makes comparison shopping unrealistic. What we have is not a market and efforts to help comparison shopping really do almost nothing to fix things.Has anyone else had a doctor or nurse filed the wrong paperwork for a blood test, and then you get stuck footing the bill for an obscenely expensive test you didn't need or want? It's happened to me several times. And you have to pay whatever price the test facility sets, period.The system is broken and until the insurance industry's grip is broken, we are not going to get relief.
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Employee happiness and business success are linked
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I use a book called "first break all the rules"It is also based on gallup data. They determined that employee happiness was not correlated to company success. They did find that the following questions in order were highly correlated to company success.1. Do I know what is expected of me at work?2. Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right?3. At work, do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day?4. In the last seven days, have I received recognition or praise for doing good work?5. Does my supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about me as a person?6. Is there someone at work who encourages my development?7. At work, do my opinions seem to count?8. Does the mission/purpose of my company make me feel my job is important?9. Are my co-workers committed to doing quality work?10. Do I have a best friend at work?11. In the last six months, has someone at work talked to me about my progress?12. This last year, have I had opportunities at work to learn and grow?
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Collection of Jupyter notebooks for quantitative finance
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One thing to keep in mind before starting any finance project is the efficient market hypothesis. In order for you to make a profit relative to the market, you must by definition be better at modeling than everyone else. (There are certain caveats in terms of liquidity and leverage, but the general theme is correct).I'll only note that beating everyone else is quite challenging, especially when you are competing against very well funded trading firms.EDIT: Slight fix of wording as suggested by comment below.
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Crows could be the smartest animal other than primates
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This article focuses mostly on problem solving, planning, and tool use as the primary hallmarks of intelligence. But what problem does writing a poem solve? Do you have to be intelligent to write a great poem? What about the intelligence need to compose a great whale song[1]? Or paint a great painting?These are things not measured on intelligence tests and that don't fit well in to scientific experiments because they can't be "objectively" judged or quantified, but my intuition is that they do in fact have to do with intelligence -- just not the sort of intelligence that problem solving, planning, and tool use demonstrate. Though they may require problem solving, planning, or tool use to accomplish, there seems to be something else going on there.I'm reminded of the Douglas Adams quote: "... on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much--the wheel, New York, wars and so on--whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man--for precisely the same reasons."[1] - ...if such criteria could be applied to them -- we don't know, and that's part of the point. If we don't know how can we judge one animal who does one thing to be "smarter" than another who does something else?
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21 years after the request OpenPGP support gets added to Thunderbird
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I do think there ought to be a way to do good cryptography in email. Email is not going away anytime soon, so giving up on it as a legitimate place where cryptography is needed seems too ivory tower for me.The “dead simple solution” is to just run the Signal protocol over SMTP, although I’m sure it’s possible there is a better design if you were to think about the specifics.
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Deprecating scp
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From someone who knows nothing about the semantics of what and why, how is this deprecated without a replacement?rsync is not a replacement, sftp is not a replacement. If I can't use cp like syntax, it's not a replacement.I use scp almost daily to copy things to/from/between remote machines, the syntax is quick and easy.If the issue is with the protocol, why is the protocol not being fixed or updated while continuing to support the syntax?
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Being kind to others is good for your health
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The only issue that I have, is that so many people (in my industry/nation/orbit) mistake kindness for weakness.I live in New York, which has a basic culture of "hyper aggressiveness." It isn't "rudeness," as so many people like to think of New Yorkers. They can be aggressively kind and generous. They are just aggressive.I'm also in the tech industry, which seems to have a very aggressive and competitive culture.It doesn't stop me from being kind and courteous, but it gets grating.My experience is that, when someone mistakes courtesy for weakness, they start trying to "game" me. I put up with it for a bit, until they push too far.Then the till gets slammed on their fingers.They get very, very upset. Far more upset than if I had just disabused them early on.I'm learning to enforce my boundaries earlier. It doesn't make me as popular, but it also prevents those "psycho freakouts."
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I logged my activities at 15-minute intervals for the whole year
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I am always baffled how sad this extreme focus into productivity makes me.If you discovered you were going to die in a year, would you continue to spend all your time being "productive"? I figure almost everyone would shift all their focus on doing things that "really matter".Sadly I believe the world managed to make us feel guilty when we're not doing something that makes someone else rich (majority of jobs).I'm a pessimist so I'd probably get very sad at some real data telling me how many hours I have wasted making someone else money.
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Scala 3.0
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Always wanted to look into Scala but it seemed very intimidating. Is there a good intermediate 'How to' for Scala 3 anyone can recommend?
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OnlyFans drops planned porn ban
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My biggest shock was how much "PR" was generated on Reddit, and how many sexworkers really do use the platform.I knew it was a thing, I knew of the memes, but to see both sides in arms over a company vs branding, creating their own website and content - and vanity domain as well.People really do just want a one click solution for creating adult content, and consuming adult content.And the memes, I think they're pretty toxic, 4chan, incel, reddit, twitter memes - I never knew there was that much angst.
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Apple execs: Let's take a 30% cut of Uber and Lyft's membership programs (2018)
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Apple execs might have convinced themselves that they are entitled to a huge cut of pretty much everything that goes on an iPhone/iPad/etc.To everyone else, this just looks like mustachio-twirling, cackling evil and unfathomable greed from a company that’s already the world’s richest and sitting on a mountainous pile of cash.
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Don't Copy-Paste from Website to Terminal
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Why would I bother copying and pasting the code to my clipboard when common industry practice now is just to invoke the output of curl directly?ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.github.com/mxcl/homebrew/go)
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Moon
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Just a warning: if you haven't yet seen the movie, the article contains significant plot spoilers. Moon is a fantastic movie, so go watch it on Netflix then read all about the typography afterwards.
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Courts: Violating a Website’s Terms of Service Is Not a Crime
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This is positive news. It seems like the more liberal approach taken when protocols were written is being challenged more by young users who grew up under more stable rules that accepted terms of service as very strong.When I was growing up you went by what the protocol allowed. If an http response came back you have access, if it prompted for credentials, then you didn’t have access.The mere idea that a web server gives you info and then you have to check a TOS that you might not even know exists is foreign to me. But when I talked with a young programmer they kind of agreed with Oracle saying “otherwise you could just request everything from every possible address.” They were unfamiliar with war drivers or even how early web crawlers started.
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More than 9M broken links on Wikipedia are now rescued
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I've always wondered this - How does Archive.org work in terms of storage? Internet is massive and caching every single site periodically for years on, isn't that unreasonably huge amount of data?Edit: I just checked Wikipedia, it says they're using about 15 PB of storage.Edit 2: 15 PB cost => 15,000 TB x $30/TB = $450,000. Ofcourse, back of the napkin cost (no maintenance, power, etc). That's not too bad actually.
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JPEG image of Shakespeare which is also a zip file containing his complete works
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Just tried it out and it does indeed work. curl 'https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DqteCf6WsAAhqwV.jpg' > shakespeare.zip
unzip shakespeare.zip
unrar e shakespeare.part001.rar
I'm excited for the inevitable curl | unzip | bash method of installing software directly from twitter that is sure to follow.
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Why Do Hospitals Hate Sleep So Much?
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I'll push this one step further: why is our entire society built around the idea that sleep literally doesn't matter?- Elementary school starting so early all the kids are half asleep in class.- College + Sleep? Not gonna happen.- 24 hour construction in certain part of NYC, check!- Most cities quiet hours are very precisely 8 hours. Hope your days start at 6:30/7:00 and you're falling asleep precisely at 11pm, and all your neighbors do the same!- Having attention deficit? Lets start with ADHD medecine, not with a sleep study, no sir.- Bazillion jobs requiring on call, waking people up at all manner of time, as a standard thing.- Neighbors woke you up? Toughen up bro!- Myth around how so many people apparently can do just fine on 5 hours of sleep.The hospital thing is just a symptom of a society built around lack of respect for sleep. No one seems to consider it an important thing. If you're drowsy because you couldn't sleep, it's considered a minor inconvenience and little more.
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93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs
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I miss Perl. Why did PHP win again, in the late 90s? (though I'm mostly Python these days and shan't complain, there was a good 10 year stretch of PHP there I'm not proud of).
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Vienna Opera opened its archive for free streaming
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Some might consider J.S. Bach to be "Baroque" not "Classical."https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Sebastian_Bach
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Olympus quits camera business after 84 years
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Sad to see them go - photography's such a great hobby and having competition in the space is healthy. There's a few brands out there still, but there is a noticable stigma in the professional community around equipment that isn't Canon. If you're not using L-glass, it feels like you get the same kind of judgement that Android users experience when they show up with green texts in iMessage.As a matter of principle, I've been buying exclusively Nikon for almost my entire time in the hobby. I always saw Canon as a large conglomerate who tacked on photography as another arm of their company, where to me Nikon feels more focused on optics as a primary business line. Honestly, I should almost start buying more Pentax gear.I worry we're slowly approaching a monoculture in photography, but it's hard to convince folks outside of the hobby to care.
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Ask HN: Why does Pinterest dominate Google text search results?
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There's no intentional or manual effort at Google to promote pinterest.Pinterest shows up because they understand how the Google algorithm works and built their website to display all the signals that Google looks for in relevant image content.They understand user intent and generate URLs that present content in a way that google expects to see.Examples of how they do this from their engineering team:https://medium.com/pinterest-engineering/demystifying-seo-wi...More:https://medium.com/pinterest-engineering/tagged/seo
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WallStreetBets members adopt 3,500 gorillas in six days
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Just to put this in perspective, the global population of mountain gorillas is 1,063, so this represents the symbolic adoption of over 3 times the mountain gorillas alive in the wild!I hope this unexpected boon in capital will allow for some meaningful work in preserving and protecting these rare animals. It would be an interesting footnote in history if we can look back in 50 years and draw a line between an internet meme, reckless asset trading, and a change in the trajectory of the fate an endangered species.
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Docker without Docker
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Article aside, EVERYONE with a marketing/technical blog should have an intro like fly.io does: a one paragraph explanation of what the service does.It gives context for the article and immediately creates the possibility of converting people off nothing but the article, right off the gate. Blows my mind that it's one of the first times I see this done.
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Apple sued by teen wrongly accused of shoplifting by unreliable facial-rec tech
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If I understand the story correctly, they had the suspect in custody and yet failed to positively ID him, relying on an ID he had stolen from an innocent man named Ousmane Bah. The ID had no photo and was labeled "not to be used for identification". SIS filed a police report which said they had video evidence showing the perpetrator.They then put out a "BOLO" with the innocent man's name, had him arrested, figured out they have the wrong guy, do nothing about it and had him arrested again.When Bah appeared in court to answer charges and Apple was asked to present the video that would have cleared Bah, Apple claimed that the video had been deleted. The video was later found by Bah's attorney during discovery. This happened more than once. A warrant was issued for Bah’s arrest and contained the photo of the imposter. Bah was arrested even though the he doesn't resemble the imposter, other than being Black. Prosecution against Bah continued in multiple states through June 2019.Hmmm, seems like a lot of people involved in this case should be fired, including the Apple Employees, SIS Employees and Police officers, reguardless of whatever other outcomes there are.
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Workerd: Open-source Cloudflare workers runtime
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Is this just to cover their tracks so startups don't think they'll get locked in?
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Google DeepMind
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I have commented this many times on such articles, and will say it again:Google still thinks of AI as a research project, or at best a way to produce better search results. They essentially created the entire current generation of the AI space and then... gave it away, because no one on the product side understood what they had actually built. Handing the reins to the DeepMind team – who have never launched a single product in their history – seems to be a doubling down on that same failed strategy.Google doesn't need more smart AI researchers, academics or ethicists. They need product managers who understand the underlying technology and can commercialize it. They need pragmatic engineers who can execute, launch and maintain services. That has always been their problem as a company.
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The Fall of Stack Overflow
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The problems I’ve noticed with Stack Overflow are a few and hard for me to narrow down but basically:- google used to return really relevant results for SO, and it stopped doing so at some point a while ago- moderation on SO has gotten progressively more horrible. can’t tell you how many times I found the exact, bizarre question I was asking only to see one comment trying to answer it and then a mod aggressively shutting it down for not being “on topic” enough or whatever.- because of the previous bullet, oftentimes the best answer is buried in comments and has very negative feedback despite answering the exact questionDue to a combination of these things, filtering against the noise for what I wanted became increasingly more difficult and often the solution to my problem was easier found searching github comments or random blogs.
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Your computer should say what you tell it to say
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I mean, devil's advocate here, this tech already exists and the question is do we do client attestation in a browser or pretend remote attestation doesn't exist.If this gets rejected, would that mean that services that need a "trusted client" simply deprecate their web apps and rely on a iOS/Android app?I'm not trying to argue in favor of WEI, I just think this doesn't magically disappear if Google doesn't implement in Chrome, it just moves the problem elsewhere. The fight was implementing TPM in the first place.
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What Happened to Yahoo
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Apple is very conspicuously absent from this article....the kind of single-minded, almost obnoxiously elitist focus on hiring the smartest people that the big winners have had.Is Apple a big winner, like Google, Microsoft, and Facebook (the other companies he mentions repeatedly)? Bigger. (Check the last 1, 5 or 10 years on Google finance for the GOOG or MSFT comparison. FB is not public, but...) Do they have this obnoxiously elitist focus? No. They still manage to hire great engineers, though.So which companies need to have a hacker-centric culture?... any company that needs to have good software.I wouldn't say that Apple is dominated by a hacker culture at all. It's dominated by Steve Jobs and a focus on design and attention to detail. Yet that seems to produce much better software than Google or Microsoft, IMHO. That's very subjective, I realize, but the market seems to agree. At any rate, Apple does produce good software.So are the hacker culture and the elitist focus really necessary for a technology company to succeed? Is Apple a complete anomaly while Google, Microsoft, and Facebook are typical? What say you, pg?I realize it's borderline suicidal to post an HN comment that simultaneously calls out pg and lauds Apple, but it's criminal to completely leave the best (imho) technology company out of a discussion about attributes of great technology companies.
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Google algorithm change launched
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Matt, I just went through my search history because i remembered a very specific instance of seeing this. Here's the query.http://www.google.com/search?q=nstoolbar+bottom+bar&ie=u...You'll notice that efreedom.com shows on the first page with content taken directly from stackoverflow. While stackoverflow does show in the results, the exact page that efreedom copies does not. Anyway, I'm glad you guys are taking this seriously.For reference here is what I see right now - http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1437645/googlesearchresult.png
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Incredibox - Background music for programming.
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I can hack/design for hours without even knowing it while listening to Kap Slap.It also helps you run a 5K faster than you might have originally imagined :)Anyone who likes remixes/house/dubstep I'd encourage you check it out! The spring break mix is an hour long and it's full of goodies.http://soundcloud.com/kapslap/kap-slap-spring-break-mixp.s. I'm only evangelizing this stuff so much because honestly if I set out to run 10k I'll listen to this and it will help me get there more than anything else. Or if I wanna kill a new comp or a handful of bugs, [PLAY] and it sucks me in like a vortex.
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The Cab Ride I'll Never Forget
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This story just sold a book.Off topic question: I know many here aren't necessarily religious (Though some would say they are spiritual)... Do the non-religious among us still find value in the writing of overtly religious authors? I'm not interested in arguing about religion. I'm just curious if the HN crowd find value in the words of people with differing opinions.
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Conway's Game of Life, using floating point values instead of integers
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Awesome, but the results/behaviour (in the video) don't seem very complex like the original Conway's game of life.
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How We Went from 30 Servers to 2: Go
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> "We also weren't sure if we would be able hire top talent if we chose Go, but we soon found out that we could get top talent because we chose Go."I feel[1] that a smart/talented C/C++/anything developer can go from someone who has never seen or heard of golang to a proficient and productive Go developer in a matter of a few weeks, maybe even _days_, if not less.That's how long it takes to go through the following materials (and fav some for later reference) and play with the language a bit.http://golang.org/ref/spechttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytEkHepK08chttp://commandcenter.blogspot.com.au/2012/06/less-is-exponen...http://tour.golang.org/http://golang.org/doc/installhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCsL89YtqCshttp://golang.org/doc/code.htmlhttp://golang.org/doc/effective_go.htmlhttp://golang.org/pkg/ - use as referencehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6kdp27TYZshttp://talks.golang.org/2012/splash.articlehttps://gobyexample.com/http://golang-examples.tumblr.com/And a some more similar things that you can mostly get to from golang.org site. The beauty of how concise the language and even its website are, is that you can literally just go through everything there one thing after another.[1] This is my personal opinion based on playing with go the last few weeks/months. I'd love to verify this theory. It's not yet the primary language in which I do things in (I use C++11 atm), but for all my side tasks[2] it proved to be indispensable. And I found it very easy to pick up. I can't wait until I start doing all my work in Go, that will be a true test of its productivity efficiency.[2] https://gist.github.com/shurcooL
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What Hard Drive Should I Buy?
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> The drives that just don’t work in our environment are Western Digital Green 3TB drives and Seagate LP (low power) 2TB drives. Both of these drives start accumulating errors as soon as they are put into production. We think this is related to vibration. The drives do somewhat better in the new low-vibration Backblaze Storage Pod, but still not well enough.Another reason to avoid the WD Green 3TB: these drives aggressively put themselves to sleep to save power. It's literally a matter of streaming a video from disk and if the OS caches enough of the file, the drive will see there haven't been any accesses in a few seconds and stop spinning.The video will of course glitch when the cached data runs out and the drive needs to spin up. Great design.
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Put.io
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It seems as though the primary use case being discussed and implied is torrenting of media that is not legal (however ethical you feel it may be) to torrent in many countries. Please remember that when you do so, you weaken the case the rest of us have against the same laws you're ignoring, against DRM, against intrusions into our privacy, and against unfair ISP practices.
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UnGoogled Chromium: Chromium with enhanced privacy, control and transparency
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While I applaud the effort that's gone into this, I urge people to consider (and use and contribute to!) Firefox. It's one of the last truly open-source browsers - both in terms of source code visibility (which Chrome(ium) has), and in terms of being able to contribute (which Chrome(ium) has not).
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How to never complete anything
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Ship dailyThis is the advice I can give to anyone who has a side project. Get to the point where you can show something to the users and just start adding stuff.Even if it's just two lines of code or changing the favicon - still worth it. In practice, it's harder to do than it sounds, but I've been doing it for some time and it's been going great.In reality, you won't have millions of users on day 1 no matter how great your product is. If you start small and keep adding stuff you will have more success.In fact, the biggest challenge for side projects is marketing and not the tech or infrastructure.However, it also depends on the goal - if you want to build the project that makes money it's completely different story to experimenting with tech. In the end, you get the experience.For example, a few years ago I managed to build an overengineered CDN product that compressed images on the fly (almost on the fly). I shipped the project and it even worked great for testers, but I didn't get to the point where it makes money, so I shut it down as with half unfinished features as it was taking too much time.While building it I managed to learn Go, improve my AWS skills, plus some other tricks. Now it sounds like a great investment even though I feel that I haven't completed the project.
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We're Baking ‘Have I Been Pwned’ into Firefox and 1Password
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I have such great respect for Troy and all the work he's done/is continuing to do to promote good security practices. I just went on HIPB though and noticed the advise for better security is "use 1Password" (after checking your email for compromises).This just seems a little too commercial to me and I'm not sure I like the phrasing. I fully understand the need for Troy to be sponsored and it's great that 1Password works well with his tooling, but it's not the only solution. I'd feel a little less uneasy if it was phrased in such a way as "Use a password manager, like 1Password".
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Practical Go: Real-world advice for writing maintainable Go programs
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> Naming the Config parameter config is redundant. We know its a Config, it says so right there.> In this case consider conf or maybe c will do if the lifetime of the variable is short enough.This seems petty. Is it really that problematic to type out a few extra characters?
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Bullshit.js
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Any good websites to try this on?
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How These Things Work – A book about CS from first principles (2016)
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I never heard of "first principles" until Elon Musk used it. (Not a native English speaker) Now I see it everywhere.Must be the new overhyped term. "We start from first principles, just like Elon Musk".After looking at Google trends, I might be wrong, so nevermind ;) https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=First%20...
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Product Marketing for Engineers
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I’ve often found engineers really struggle to jump over their own shadows when it comes to marketing. Things like...- “Marketing is evil!” ... perhaps but it’s also a necessary evil if you want anyone using your product- “Build it and they will come” ... except they won’t unless you tell people- “I hate spam/push messages/ads therefor everyone else must do to” ... but engineers tend to be the grumpiest about this stuff. Drip marketing to get users to engage progressively with your app, for example, can be valuable to users that even forgot they installed your app in the first place, because something distracted them right after- “We have all these features / options so let’s so let’s just show them all to the user and let them figure it out” ... paradox of choice etcAnd many more. You could _almost_ argue that some jobs, like PM, UX researcher, designer, digital marketeer largely exist because of the narrow mindedness of engineers... I don’t mean that seriously for obvious reasons but think there’s some truth in it
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HTML Tips (2020)
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I want a cachebust="yes" attribute that invalidates an image when it changes, yet never contacts the server when the image is unchanged.
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Google’s ‘Project Hug’ paid out huge sums to keep game devs in the Play Store
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In 2001, Microsoft "constituted unlawful monopolization" under Antitrust Act for bundling a web browser with their operating system.20 years later, Apple and Google bundle not only their browsers, but whole irreplaceable app stores with no legal consequences.I don't know how the law sees it, but it's simply illogical from the common sense standpoint.
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IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts
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I do not understand how IBM stays in business.As far as I’m concerned the only cool engineering thing IBM does anymore is POWER, which has a sort of unique memory architecture but otherwise is well behind everyone else.What else did they do in my lifetime? They took a profitable RedHat and gutted it, they took the best Laptop line and sold it to Lenovo and almost ruined it, they tried to be a front runner in ML but blew their budget on marketing (remember Watson on Jeopardy?)The final straw for me was watching football with a techhy friend and a commercial for IBMs “hybrid cloud” came on. There’s some executive mulling over whether to “go to the cloud” or whether to go with on premises, and they have a eureka moment where they learn about IBM hybrid cloud and they go into a board meeting and save the day. We both just burst out laughing.IBM doesn’t make stuff anymore. That’s the core problem.
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France to Build Six New Nuclear Reactors
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I am skeptical to current nuclear power, would have liked Molten Salt Reactors instead. However I see leaders having to do something. Environmentalists are blocking construction of more wind power, and crisis with Russia makes gas less accessible. France has a relatively good track record on nuclear power. They may pull this off. 2035 is a really long time to wait for new power to the grid though.
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I hacked my car
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Most development at very large companies happens by hordes of people who call themselves developers but do not care about development and barely understand anything they are doing. Most coding happens by copying and pasting from Stack* and then restarting the application hundreds of times and tinkering with the code mindlessly until it happens to work. Anything besides getting the "happy path" (sic!) to work is a secondary concern.Add to it that most developers from Asia do not really expect or care about privacy and are super quick to drop any quality standards to meet deadlines. And the management that likewise does not value quality besides things that can be easily seen and typically does not tolerate any delays for anything that is not absolutely necessary.I worked for a well known, huge Korean company. When I was there I learned they shipped a mass produced device with a telnet server with a simple default password. This wasn't done for any evil purpose -- the development team decided this would improve their ability to debug any production problems they might face. They were not trusting their own code and were looking for a quick and easy solution to deal with inevitable deluge of support tickets.
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“How America took out the Nord Stream pipeline”
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All: Whether he is right or not or one likes him or not, Hersh reporting on this counts as significant new information (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...), so I've turned off the flags on this submission.If you're going to comment in this thread, please make sure you're up on the site guidlelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and note this one: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive." We don't want political or nationalistic flamewar here, and any substantive point can be made without it.
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Show HN: BBC “In Our Time”, categorised by Dewey Decimal, heavy lifting by GPT
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Some unlinked features...If you put the Dewey division in the URL, the directory auto-opens. e.g. here are episodes about prehistoric life (my current jumping-off point)https://genmon.github.io/braggoscope/directory#560There's a visual map of episodes. After principal component analysis of the episode embedding vectors, these are the most significant two components as the x,yhttps://genmon.github.io/braggoscope/map.html(it's not super useful tbh -- e.g. the Manhattan Project and the Cambrian Explosion have the same x,y... presumably because they are both about explosions?)Many episodes have a reading list, and these are all linked to Google Books (so you can purchase/check out from a library), e.g. this episode pagehttps://genmon.github.io/braggoscope/2022/10/20/the-fishtetr...There are ~4,600 books, and I have ~88% coverage on getting a Google Books page from the original data. Any ideas about what to do with this big list of academic-recommended books v welcome!
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PayPal has restricted our account after we invoiced a key containing “ALEP”
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At least they were given the reason and a chance to respond. I'm just an infrequent, individual user and one day I got an email from Paypal that I was banned for life with my account closed and the same would happen if I tried opening any new accounts. It also banned my Zelle account for life.Thank god I never left any money in there or it would have been stolen. And to this day I still get emails from them as if my account isn't banned, but logging in just takes me straight to the ban notice and I can't actually close it or opt-out of emails.
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Apple brings Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro to iPad
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Having a full DAW on the go is a killer feature imho.The promise has been there since stuff like 8tracks on the iPhone 3G, and various Audio Units already on iOS. But I’ve always found the workflow very limiting or clunky. (Edit: I’m a Logic Pro user on macOS so my comments reflect getting things into that specifically)The divide from putting down an idea when it hits, to working it into something, has always been really high.Having something where I can potentially work out an idea with just my iPad , and then take it to my desktop is really exciting to me.FCPX seems neat as well. I doubt it’ll be something people use in touch mode, but I can see some folks using it for quick on the go edits for things like social media stings. Go to an event, shoot, edit and upload. I don’t see it being used for more than that level of work.But also, as much as both the things I mentioned are very spur of the moment things, I think the real value here is having a step ladder through the ecosystem.A lot of people, especially youths, only need an iPad for more of their computing use. Having more pro apps on the iPad signals to them that they can shift more of their computer life to it. A lot may just even need to add a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse.Conversely, the people who do want to use it more seriously after whetting their teeth on the mobile platform, will then see the Mac as the next logical stepping point.It’s a smart way imho to get people on either side of the fence to consider the other side.
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Language models can explain neurons in language models
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"This work is part of the third pillar of our approach to alignment research: we want to automate the alignment research work itself. A promising aspect of this approach is that it scales with the pace of AI development. As future models become increasingly intelligent and helpful as assistants, we will find better explanations."On first look this is genius but it seems pretty tautological in a way. How do we know if the explainer is good?... Kinda leads to thinking about who watches the watchers...
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Sao Paulo: A city with no outdoor advertisements (2013)
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Some additions:Stores also cannot use their full façade for advertising. Branding colors and details are OK, but logos cannot be too large (don't know the exact rule). The law is picky.Some stores cheat by having a glass façade, and using LEDs inside that glass. Like this: https://imgur.com/a/CLdUD1CSince this law was adopted, there's been an increase in full building graffiti, which is not banned. Now 10 years later, it is more likely to see one of these nowadays than an empty outdoor frame https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=sao+paulo+full+buil...
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Why Do Google Maps’s City Labels Seem So Readable?
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A common complaint is that Google is engineer-driven rather than design driven. Some very impressive counter-evidence in the article -- lots of nice design hacks.
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My winter break project — Silk
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That looks pretty amazing.Check out Fracture - http://www.fractureme.com/ - I bet they would look unreal printed with their tech.
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Internet giants place full-page anti-SOPA ad in NYT
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The tech industry has enough money to buy 10x more lobbyists than the entertainment industry. This would be a wiser investment than the ads.
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New: Apply to Y Combinator without an Idea
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I'm surprised by how many negative reactions there are here. Some people seem almost offended, presumably because we're turning down people with ideas and funding some without.This really just reinforces the fact that we fund people, not ideas. The way it works in practice is that we work with the founders to find a good idea that will work for them (the idea needs to match the founder). The truth is that most people have good ideas in them, but just don't realize it. We aren't necessarily providing the idea so much as helping them to discover the idea that they already have :)
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How to Advertise on a Porn Website
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Why is there so little non-porn advertising on porn sites? If CPMs are low, and conversions are good enough, what's up with the ROI gap? Is this really the cost of social outrage? I'm really curious to see if anyone has any theories/answers...
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Edward Snowden, after months of NSA revelations, says his mission’s accomplished
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I wish Snowden would roll up his sleeves and start working on the same problem in Russia, where he now lives, and in China, where he stayed briefly on his way to Russia. His mission has hardly begun.
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Magic+
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A lot of skepticism here, which is understandable given the somewhat unbelievable scope of what they are promising.I'm a very active user of Magic+, so I'll give my perspective. (and of course I've been working with them from the beginning at YC, so you're also free to discard my opinion as biased)For me, Magic+ is basically the impossibly good personal assistant, kind of like Jarvis in Iron Man, or Emily in The Devil Wears Prada. Unlike a conventional assistant, it's available 24/7, always happy to take on more work, and capable of accomplishing just about anything.Obviously the $100/hr price point puts it out of reach for most people, but my expectation (as an investor) is that as the tech improves, they will be able to bring down the price while maintaining or even improving the quality of the service (I call this the Tesla strategy).For me however, $100/hr is totally worth it since it effectively increases my leverage and enables me to get more done in less time. I've used it to plan events for YC founders, answer questions that are hard to Google (they will find the right experts and ask them), and provide unique and memorable gifts to friends, family, and business partners. I'm used to paying a high price for quality professional services such as accountants or lawyers, so $100/hr for the best possible assistant feels completely reasonable and rational.
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India Is Winning Its War on Human Waste
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> Unfortunately, in many places, it’s not
> feasible to lay down sewer pipes or build
> treatment facilities. [...] But giving
> people access to toilets isn’t enough. You
> also have to persuade them to use the
> toilets.
I can't find it now, but there was a news video making the rounds a year or two ago that showed that this problem is much more fundamental than that.It showed a Indians in a tiny village who were falling ill because they were literally taking a shit in the same river that they were getting their drinking water from, just a few meters away.These people all knew each other, and even if they didn't have any toilets or basic infrastructure I would have thought that something as basic as "if you shit where you drink, you get cholera" would be common knowledge anywhere in the world by now.Of course it would have been nice for those people to have sewer pipes, toilets etc. But in that case the problem could have been solved with a few shovels, and a marked area indicating where you should be going to do your business, preferable in some open field far from the drinking water.For those people toilets would be nice, but unnecessary. They clearly all have a shared interest in not drinking each other's shit. If by some magic they aren't aware that mixing shit with water leads to bad consequences that seemed to be solvable by some one-time government presentation on the consequences of them keeping doing what they were doing.But somehow the problem persists, it's unbelievable.
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An Intro to Compilers
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BTW, can anyone please suggest a good online compiler course for creating your own programming language with labs/exams/certs? I can find pretty good courses for almost anything but not for compilers... Something that would focus on handling grammar (LALR, LL, CYK etc), ASTs, semantics, types, code-completion, imperative/OOP/functional/logical/self-modifying constructs etc. or even NLP-to-AST conversion...
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Top medical experts say we should decriminalize all drugs (2016)
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Finally. I hope this will signal a turning point on this insane approach to national health in all countries. Drugs are a health problem, not a criminal problem.Lone experts have been fired in western countries when they have expressed this common sense sentiments alone [0]. I hope this groups fares better.Nixon started the war on drugs anyway as a mean to attack left and black activists [1]. Any previous legislation for control has been instigated on behalf of race and class warfare.The fact that some drugs have been the staple narcotic in some groups has been used as a control mechanism upon those groups by criminalizing the substance.Substance distribution should be controlled by law. But that is status quo anyway - governments control the distribution of any number of dangerous substances at any point.[0] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2009/oct/30/drugs-advis...[1] https://qz.com/645990/nixon-advisor-we-created-the-war-on-dr...
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Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance
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Did anyone else notice how corporations like Twitter and Facebook quietly tried to kill RSS in the past 10 years?RSS is a wonderful technology with embodies the spirit of the Internet. Facebook and Twitter are, by comparison, cancer.I often recommend WordPress to folks as an alternative for blogging, because it is free and has RSS functional out of the box.
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Ask HN: What to do after $8M (all cash, post tax) exit?
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This is a great thread. Throwaway also. Gonna write some stream-of-consciousness here, because I have to start my work day, but I personally made approx. this amount from an exit, and it has gone very well for me and my family (wife + 3 kids). Some additional fine-tuned advice of what worked for me: (1) don't be afraid to spend money - high hourly rates - for a good accountant and good tax attorney. (2) if I were you I'd sign up for a couple different brokerage accounts (e.g., Charles Schwab and one other) and split the money between them. It takes almost no time to do this, and it's nice to have some diversity there in case something catastrophic happens to one of them and your assets are locked up for a long time while it gets sorted out. (3) as others have said, just buy US treasuries (interest rates are good right now) while you sit back and think about it. (4) Eventually if you're not into picking things yourself, you'll just want some healthy mix of asset classes, which (5) you'll learn about by reading some books. (6) Those brokerages will put someone on the phone with you and help you buy the treasuries, if that's confusing. (7) The one thing you want to avoid is letting the brokerages sell you their own personal wealth management. Everyone from your bank to your brokerage will try to sell you the "we'll help you for 1% of your money per year" -- avoid this. Suddenly 10 years have gone by and $800k-ish of your $8million is in someone else's hands, who simply threw darts at a dartboard and did their best to obfuscate their performance during bad times. (8) AVOID PRIVATE INVESTMENTS. Unless you're a professional private equity investor, don't buy a piece of that friend's restaurant, that store that's opening up, that tech startup, whatever. This money tends to disappear. If you're ok losing money to support your cousin who's starting a new company, just give them some money and be honest to yourself and them about the whole thing (not that I advise this either, but don't confuse charity and investment.) Just don't invest in private stuff. The problems with private investments: (a) you lose all liquidity, (b) markets aren't efficient so you can actually do a veeeeery bad job, (c) it can get personal and/or skeezy. So seriously, avoid any kind of private investments. (9) Avoid starting your own business and pouring all your money into it. People tend to burn through windfalls in that way and regret it. (10) Don't race into fancier real estate. (11) Make no lifestyle upgrades at all during the next year. (12) Take your time with charities. It can be a fun family project in the years to come to pick charities together. You'll have income in many years from this money, so you're not missing an opportunity for deductions by not giving money in the first year. (13) OH ! When signing up for brokerages, don't enable options or margin trading. In addition to this being dangerous for you, I believe it allows them to be funky with your cash and holdings, and it complicates your relationship with the brokerage should they or a bank they work with ever go under. (14) don't rush into estate configuration, just start with a simple will. Then consider trusts and things like that in future years. From my and my friends' experiences, they tend to overcomplicate things. (15) TELL AS FEW PEOPLE AS POSSIBLE. (16) Keep working, but only on something you enjoy. (17) Stay or get in shape. Your body is more important than money.Seriously, AVOID PRIVATE INVESTMENTS.Kobe Bryant on taking care of family after a windfall: "You will come to understand that you were taking care of them because it made YOU feel good, it made YOU happy to see them smiling and without a care in the world — and that was extremely selfish of you. While you were feeling satisfied with yourself, you were slowly eating away at their own dreams and ambitions. You were adding material things to their lives, but subtracting the most precious gifts of all: independence and growth."https://www.theplayerstribune.com/en-us/articles/kobe-bryant...
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DOOMBA
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This is really cool! I see a lot of these sorts of projects, where DOOM is either ported to another platform, or some additional integration is done...Having not played it, is there something specific about DOOM which makes it so easily accessible to these sorts of hacks?
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Leon Sans, a geometric typeface made with code
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Combine this with eye tracking for a page of text that grows just the words or figures you're looking at. You could display a larger page on a smaller one. E.g. show a multi page newspaper section on a single page, illegibly small until you focus on a particular headline. As you focus on that its teaser becomes visible, then the leading paragraph, etc.You could display a link that when you look at it, it grows and resolves into its own content, recursively. Surf links by zooming in. The back button zooms out. It could be a natural way to navigate a graph of text.
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No person who was born blind has ever been diagnosed with schizophrenia
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If you’re wondering about how common this should be:if schizophrenia occurs at a rate of 0.72% in the population (McGrath et al., 2008) and congenital blindness occurs at an estimated rate of 0.03% in people born in the 1970s and 1980s (based on Robinson et al., 1987), then the joint probability of a person having both conditions, if the two are independent, would be 0.02% or 2 out of every 10,000. Although this is a low prevalence rate, it is higher than the rates for childhood-onset schizophrenia (Remschmidt and Theisen, 2005), and many other well-known medical conditions (e.g., Hodgkin's lymphoma, Prader Willi syndrome, Rett's Syndome). Based on this estimated prevalence rate, in the United States alone (with a population of 311, 591, 917, as of July 2011, according the US census), there should be approximately 620 congenitally blind people with schizophrenia. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3615184/That does do rule out misdiagnosis etc, but it does seem to support a correlation.
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Computer vision basics in Excel, using just formulas
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I'm beginning to wonder who/what does/did more harm to technological progress - Microsoft or aversion to Microsoft?Sounds of the stuff they do is incredible, just not talked about.
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How Big Oil Misled the Public into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled
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The whole recycling scam makes me upset. For decades the message was to recycle for the environment. But it was all just shipped to China and then dumped into the oceans. It actually would've been better if it went to landfills, at least then it's safely contained. Another lie was that we're running out of landfill space, there's so much land out there.Like most environmental issues, the focus should've been on producers not consumers. Tax plastic usage and producers will use less of it.
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Pidgin – A Universal Chat Client
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Does nobody remember Pidgin? It was one of the first things a lot of people installed on their machines 15 years ago along with Firefox. We used it as an alternative client to AOL Instant Messenger and Yahoo Messenger. It used to be called GAIM.
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Father builds exoskeleton to help wheelchair-bound son walk
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This is amazing. I built one to help my nephew walk, and now selling commercially ( http://trexorobotics.com )I am fed-up at the lack of options available to individuals. People thought that everyone will get an exoskeleton and be able to walk with it everywhere. But the industry ran into many challenges.A big one that many dont understand is getting insurance coverage. The way the US healthcare system is designed, it will only cover restoration of mobility, not a restoration of function. So, from their perspective, a wheelchair and some pain meds can do the job easily.I believe that they key is to start with children, this is where you have families desperate for a solution, higher costs due to them growing and spending their entire life in a wheelchair, and the option to truly have a life changing impact.But things are changing, people are starting to notice the work that we are doing. We need a lot more people building exoskeletons and similar powered orthotics!!
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How percentile approximation works and why it's more useful than averages
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Awhile ago I wrote a Python library called LiveStats[1] that computed any percentile for any amount of data using a fixed amount of memory per percentile. It uses an algorithm I found in an old paper[2] called P^2. It uses a polynomial to find good approximations.The reason I made this was an old Amazon interview question. The question was basically, "Find the median of a huge data set without sorting it," and the "correct" answer was to have a fixed size sorted buffer and randomly evict items from it and then use the median of the buffer. However, a candidate I was interviewing had a really brilliant insight: if we estimate the median and move it a small amount for each new data point, it would be pretty close. I ended up doing some research on this and found P^2, which is a more sophisticated version of that insight.[1]: https://github.com/cxxr/LiveStats[2]: https://www.cs.wustl.edu/~jain/papers/ftp/psqr.pdf
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Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt
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If this comment thread is the way the self proclaimed smartest forum on the web deals with articles like this then we're doomed.This article contributes zero actual evidence, is littered with out of context quotes (including of all places the title), doesn't appear to understand the science or the probabilities involved and finally is clearly written with an agenda.It shouldn't have been posted to HN in the first place, it just serves to divide, not to find fact. If there is an article that deals with the actual evidence available in a neutral manner it would be nice to read, but opinion-masquerading-as-fact is not.
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Roblox October Outage Postmortem
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>> We are working to move to multiple availability zones and data centers.Surprised it was a single availability zone, without redundancy. Having multiple fully independent zones seems more reliable and failsafe.
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Why is the Zoom app listening on my microphone when not in a meeting?
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This kind of thing is why software I don't fully trust only runs in my browser.With how good the browser APIs have become, there is little reason to run native apps, which nowadays are often just an outdated browser with a packaged web app anyways (Electron). Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and even Zoom have demonstrated that web is good enough if they want it.If you try to force me to install a native app, that's a strong signal that the app is going to do something against my interest. Given how aggressively Zoom has pushed the app, it was very clear to me that this thing is never going to hit my main machine (I think I have a VM somewhere that I used for a job interview that needed the more advanced features).
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Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus
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People should understand this:A free tier is a loss-leader, intended to support sales of the paid product.If too many “…have been happily using Slack’s free plan for years”, then Slack will have to change the terms.Generally, storage and access to storage cost money. If you aren’t paying for it, it is definitely temporary, whether anyone says it explicitly or not. I don’t just mean in a “nothing lasts forever” way, but that it will gone in the relatively short term. This is just reality.
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Apple doesn’t want you developing hobby apps
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What bothers me about this -- and it bothered me enough to leave the platform -- is not fees, or "hobby computing," or "it's just for my own use," or trying to figure out why this or that would be in Apple's interest. What bothers me is that it feels like an offense against the entire notion of what a computer is.I am, of course, aware that many (perhaps most) computers in the world are effectively appliances, but at some level, the great glory of this glorious, epochal machine -- the "personal computer" -- is one's ability to program it and make it do something new. It is not just a machine; it's a machine for creating machines.Take that away, and . . . to what shall I compare it? It's like giving someone a deck of cards and telling them that these cards can only be used to play blackjack. You can't invent a card game, or change the rules, or build a house of cards, or do card magic. Putting such stipulations in place isn't just annoying or inconvenient. It's a kind of basic betrayal of the concepts and affordances that underlie the thing itself.[edit: grammar]
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Squeeze the hell out of the system you have
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The bit on the database performance issues leads me to my hottest, flamiest take for new projects:- Design your application's hot path to never use joins. Storage is cheap, denormalize everything and update it all in a transaction. It's truly amazing how much faster everything is when you eliminate joins. For your ad-hoc queries you can replicate to another database for analytical purposes.On this note, I have mixed feelings about Amazon's DynamoDB, but one things about it is to use it properly you need to plan your use first, and schema second. I think there's something you can take from this even with a RDBMS.In fact, I'd go as far to say as joins are unnecessary for nonanalytical purposes these days. Storage is so mind booglingly cheap and the major DBs have ACID properties. Just denormalize, forreal.- Use something more akin to UUIDs to prevent hot partitions. They're not a silver bullet and have their own downsides, but you'll already be used to the consistently "OK" performance that can be horizontally scaled rather than the great performance of say integers that will fall apart eventually./hottakesmy sun level take would be also to just index all columns. but that'll have to wait for another day.
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Go is moving to GitHub
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Google hosting Go on GitHub. Microsoft hosting .NET on GitHub. It must feel like an accomplishment to be implicitly endorsed by these companies.Considering open source's history, you'd think its primary management tool would be open source as well. I guess it's GitHub's combination of accessible design + performant version control + lack of ads + reliability that made it the premium source for anything open source.I'm impressed.
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How You Know
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There's also a danger associated to this phenomenon. If the source of your mental model is later debunked, you may not realize that you need to revise your model precisely because you don't remember what your source was. You may even read about the debunking of the source but fail to draw the connection and realize the implications that it has for your own view of the world.I think that perhaps very squishy subjects like politics are particularly vulnerable to this sort of disconnect, where a complex viewpoint is formed based on the hot topic of the day, and this viewpoint persists for years or decades even if the basis for its formation is completely forgotten.
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Microsoft Edge records browsing history in InPrivate mode
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I'm betting this isn't a bug but isn't malicious either. Possible scenario:Product: So Sue, how's the restore-session-after-crash feature going?Dev: Great, just about done.Product: So it's working for all sessions now? Fantastic!Dev: Yep! Well, all sessions except private ones of course.Product: ... so you haven't finished private sessions yet?Dev: No, it's just that we don't store anything on disk for them, so there's nothing to restore.Product: ...Dev: ...Product: Users don't know what "stored on disk" even means. They're going to be very upset if we lose their work after a crash, just because the session happened to be private. Maybe even more so.Dev: But with nothing on disk, that would be impossible.Product: You devs have such a fixed mindset. If I had a penny for every time I'd heard one tell me something was "impossible." So store what you need on disk, and ...Dev: But history ...Product ... and flag it so it doesn't show up in history or as a visited link. Wouldn't that work?Dev: Well, kind of, but ...Product: Great! So we have a solution. How long to get that coded up?[Later] Product: "Impossible" laugh Hah!
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Neural Networks Demystified
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Hey, everyone! I'm the founder of lumiverse.io, it's pretty incredible to see our website on the front page of HN!I want lumiverse to become an awesome community where people can discover and discuss great educational videos.We've launched only recently, the site is still in active development, I'm improving it every day. If you have any feedback - please let me know =)(Also feel free to contact me at [email protected])
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RethinkDB Relicensed under Apache 2.0
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This really bugs me. Copyleft has always been feared by lawyers and corporate people alike. Let's not forget how Ballmer called the GPL a cancer that infects everything it touches. Yet, copyleft is our only defense against abusive proprietary software and without copyleft we might not have the fertile collaboration of projects such as Linux, git, or OpenWrt.The AGPL is just an updated GPL. Back when software mostly came in boxes, the GPL was as feared as the AGPL is now. Now that software mostly comes from the internet, the AGPL is there to address this new distribution method. Now the AGPL is the new cancer.Overzealous lawyers trying to "protect" copyrights have indoctrinated an entire generation of hackers that sharing code is a danger and the AGPL is the prime threat. I have spoken to too many Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, or Google employees that are convinced that sharing their source code would be tantamount to death. The result is a world where their secret software controls the news we read, the ads we see, the people we talk to, and even the emotions we feel."Open source, but licensed under the AGPL.", says the article. There is no "but" here. The AGPL is the very definition of "open source", because it defends openness. If you have nothing to fear from open source, you have nothing to fear from the AGPL.
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Ask HN: Best way to learn modern C++?
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- Tour of C++ (http://www.stroustrup.com/Tour.html)- Principles and Practice Using C++ (http://www.stroustrup.com/programming.html)- From Mathematics to Generic Programming (http://www.fm2gp.com/)- The Scott Meyers booksSome of the Bjarne Stroustrup videos,"Learning and Teaching Modern C++" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fX2W3nNjJIoSome of the Herb Sutter videos,"Writing Good C++14... By Default" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEx5DNLWGgA"Back to the Basics! Essentials of Modern C++ Style" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnqTKD8uD64Some of the Kate Gregory videos,"Stop Teaching C" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnWhqhNdYyk"10 Core Guidelines You Need to Start Using Now" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkDEzfpdcSg"It's Complicated" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTexD26jIN4
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Google bans cryptocurrency ads
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I was listening to terrestrial radio the other day and was surprised to hear a radio advertisement beckoning retirees to cash in their 401ks to join the cryptocurrency future of Bitcoin and Ethereum. The bubble is too big for Google to slow it down and it has grown beyond the realm of tech savvy geeks into something fueled by hype and hubris.
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Amazon’s own ‘Machine Learning University’ now available to all developers
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All that machine learning and they still send me reviews for products I haven’t received.
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Zdog – Pseudo-3D JavaScript engine for Canvas and SVG
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I notice that there are some issues with depth sorting (which I guess would be expected). It'd be complicated, but one way you could do the same effect without that issue is to use signed distance fields in a shader:https://www.iquilezles.org/www/articles/distfunctions/distfu...(Demo at the bottom of the page)
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