prompt
stringlengths 0
90
| completion
stringlengths 1
26.3k
|
|---|---|
Ask HN: How Do You Read?
|
Great question! In my fourth decade of life I’m finally figuring out the optimal way to do this myself. I’ve forgotten so so many books over the years that I supposedly read.Read How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading by Mortimer Adler. (https://www.amazon.com/How-Read-Book-Classic-Intelligent/dp/...)
I’ve given this book to a bunch of people on my teams as it also helps with communicating ideas which is vital as a programmer.The wikipedia page for it is a good place to get an overview of what it’s about. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_a_BookSince reading it I’ve been keeping a notebook, some people might call it a Commonplace Book, with interesting stuff from the book. I find that I get a lot more from books from the act of writing it down and then reading those notes later when I glance at them while looking something else up in the notebook.One big big big thing I learned from the book is to not read a non-fiction book like it was a novel. There’s nothing wrong with skipping ahead and finding out what happens later, in fact you should absolutely skim the book first. I end up finishing a lot more books by doing this since so many books aren’t actually worth careful reading. I am able to systematically skim a book including the TOC and index and determine if it’s worth reading carefully. A lot of books are so sparse with ideas that you can get most of them through this method. Only the good books are worth going on to the second and third stages and only the great ones the fourth stage.
|
NSO hacked WhatsApp to spy on top government officials at U.S. allies
|
What are Israel doing to get so good at this and chip design and weapons making and everything else they seem to be really good at?There’s only about 8 million people in the whole country. There are plenty of cities with more people than that.How come they punch so far above their weight?
|
Ask HN: How can I pick a side project and stick with it?
|
I’m just like you.I stumbled upon a book called Refuse to Choose and it’s about a personality type (that is definitely not ADHD) that happens to want to do a lot of things (sometimes in parallel or in sequence). It was very comforting to know others struggle with this and this book helps you to be ok with it. I wouldn’t say it “cured” me but I think about it differently now and use it more to my advantage. Worth a read at a minimum.There was one very profound idea in this book that goes like this:“If you are no longer interested in a project you started, maybe you already got what you came for”.In essence, maybe it’s not the finishing of the project you came for but maybe the learning or understanding of how it could be done if it were to be done.This realization is interesting for someone who exhibits this behavior. When I was a kid, I loved to build legos but after following the instructions and building a kit, I wouldn’t touch it again. As I think back now, it likely was because “I got what I came for” (the challenge of putting it together was more interesting to me than the end product).
|
The solution of the Zodiac killer’s 340-character cipher
|
This cipher is pure security-through obscurity and it held up well.
|
Faster CRDTs: An Adventure in Optimization
|
Hello HN! Post author here. I’m happy to answer questions & fix typos once morning rolls around here in Australia
|
Submarine cable map rendered onto a globe
|
It's interesting that there are so many cables running through the Suez Canal. I wonder if it's because of geopolitical reasons for avoiding going over land through the Middle East.
|
Washington state shuts down Amazon price-fixing program nationwide
|
Former Amazonian here. When i was there, they made us take this antitrust training course that had things like "don't use terms like 'market share' in internal communications", but all along there were people doing this? I mean...
|
Moscow police officers stop people, request their phones to read their messages
|
Seems like a really slow, cumbersome technique to monitor people. The one officer was rapidly scrolling looking for who knows what. No one can read or even scan text that fast, so I guess looking for photos?At the human level there are probably plenty of low-tech techniques to keep yourself safe like deleting messages or using coded language.It’s sad to watch Russia descend into totalitarianism.
|
Tell HN: IPv6-only still pretty much unusable
|
IPv6 has been one of the biggest failures in the last couple of decades.And I don't mean adoption, I mean the standard itself.If IPv6 were IPv4 with more octets, then we would all have been using it for like a decade.Yes, I understand it would still require some breaking changes, but it would have been a million times easier to upgrade, as it would be a kind of superset of IPv4 (1.2.3.4 can be referred as 0.0.0.0.1.2.3.4).Not having two sets of firewall rules and two sets of everything. I always disable IPv6 because it can bite you so hard when you don't realize that you are wide open to IPv6 connections because of different firewalls.Edit: To make everything a bit clearer, the idea with this "ipv4+" is that you don't need the complexity of running both ipv4 and ipv6 as you do now.And regarding compatibility, with ipv4+ if you have a 0.0.0.0.x.x.x.x ip address you would be able to talk to both ipv4+ aware and legacy ipv4 devices natively without any tunneling (because you also own the legacy, non quad 0 ip address). If you don't have such "quad 0 ip" (you are 1.1.1.1.x.x.x.x), only ipv4+ aware devices would be able to to connect to you, and for you to connect to non ipv4+ aware devices you would need either tunneling, or having a secondary, cgnat, "quad 0 ip".
|
The boiling frog of digital freedom
|
The other day I read an HN comment that thought that when you buy consumer PC hardware, it comes with a ToS that limits your property rights as the owner. It's the kind of uncanny experience I run into more and more often lately: talking with people so immersed in our new normal of cyberpunk dystopia, they seem not to remember how things were in the before-times. So accustomed to exploitative corporate gaslighting, we're forgetting the basics of civilization, like, what are ownership rights?In the before-times, when you bought something, the seller relinquished all claims to it, as an established legal principle (and a social norm and a moral obvious-ity). You can do whatever the fuck you want to your own PC, in your own house! Who would step into your home and tell you "no"?Stallman was right: if you erode the norm that you control your own software, you lose the hardware, too. Free software is sort of a consumer right that enshrines what ownership of computing hardware means.
|
Sacked by a Google algorithm
|
...long story...Oh yes, I was also running little blocks of adverts provided by Adsense and, yes, I told my subscribers that I got some money if they visited the websites of those advertisers – all of whom were interested in selling stuff to sailors....long story...In the end it was click-fraud-ish.There's a huge fear for those dependent on google adsense that they will get terminated out of the blue like this. The problem is, there's no great alternative. But instructing your visitors in some way to click on your ads does cross the line.
|
What the Fluck
|
Wow! This may be the most brilliant, cheeky, inventive and yet incisive piece of journalism I've come across in recent times. And it's on BBC (I had to check multiple times to be sure).
|
Apple ordered to bypass auto-erase on San Bernadino shooter's iPhone
|
Remember, this is an iPhone 5C, which doesn't have Touch ID or the Secure Enclave; the security model for this phone is significantly different from that of more recent iPhones.On phones with a Secure Enclave, the wipe-on-failures state is managed in the coprocessor (which runs L4), and is not straightforwardly backdoor-able.If you're worried about the police brute-forcing your phone, enable Touch ID and set a passcode that is approximately as complex as the one on your computer.
|
Sergey Brin joins protest against immigration order at SFO
|
Where were all these millionaires and billionaires when we were droning people in some of these countries? They all donated to Clinton's election campaign and under her watch as Secretary of State we dropped thousands of bombs. They supported the pro-war candidate.Why is restricting our borders considered so inhumane as to cause an Internet-wide outcry, while killing people for years hadn't?
|
Ask HN: What are some examples of successful single-person businesses?
|
Careful with your terminology. "Successful" has different meanings for different people.By my definition, for example, I run the most successful single-person business that I'm aware of. But it doesn't make millions, so it might not meet your definition at all.My goal was to replace my day job with a software business that required as close to zero attention as possible, so that I could have time to spend on the things that actually matter to me.The business brings in the equivalent of a nice Senior Developer salary, which is not what most people think of when they imagine a successful Startup. But it lets me work with a bunch of cool tech when I want to, and, more importantly, is automated to the point where Customer Service involves a quick 30 second - 10 minute email sweep over morning coffee. For me, that's a lot more valuable than a few more million dollars in the bank.The cool thing about running your own business is that you get to decide on your own definition of success.EDIT: I wrote a bit about how I got into this position, in case anybody is interested. It's not actually all that hard to do:http://www.expatsoftware.com/Articles/guy-on-the-beach-with-...
|
Is it unethical for me to not tell my employer I've automated my job?
|
This question is a beautiful example of typical incentives workers feel and how screwed up they are. On HN people talk often enough about how if you have a worker who gets their job done in 30 hours instead of the company's usual 40-60 hours, you should give them 30-100% more responsibility, but much more rarely "and 30-100% more pay." Butt-in-the-chair hours are super important culturally and it's been that way for a while. Incentives are screwed up enough we're getting questions like this.If you've ever thought "I'm done for the day, but I'm going to hang out a little longer to leave at a more respectable time," then you're feeling (and doing) the same kind of thing.
|
I usually run 'w' first when troubleshooting unknown machines
|
Genuine question: how many HN readers log on to boxes with user accounts that belong to humans, where some state may have been mutated?My experience of the last five years is so heavily weighted to (effectively) immutable infrastructure that checking to see who had been on a box hadn't event crossed my mind.
|
Software Engineering at Google (2017)
|
I used to be proud of many things in the article when working at the G.Not anymore. Let me talk startup anti-Google pattern here.* Most of Google’s code is stored in a single unified source-code repository, and is accessible to all software engineers at GoogleThis can be the worst nightmare from a management POV in a startup. Sure it sounds wonderful everyone can see/fix anyone else code but 99% people shouldn't have time to do so (if they do their work load is not full, increase the load). The 1% I guarantee all your codebase has just been stolen by an ex-employee with malicious attempt. Instead divide your codebase into different projects/roles and people only gain access when needed.* Software engineers at Google are strongly encouraged to program in one of five officially-approved programming languages at Google: C++, Java, Python, Go, or JavaScript.We use Go for backend programing and vue (javascript) for frontend. Don't use Java if possible, keep away from C++ and definitely never Python which is a maintenance nightmare.* The next step is to usually roll out to one or more “canary” servers that are processing a
subset of the live production traffic.Not necessary when your misery not-product-market-fit-yet website only gets 100 users. Just roll-the-f-out , let it break and fix later. Building the canary system is a huge overkill in the early stage.* All changes to the main source code repository MUST be reviewed by at least one other
engineer.Same as above. Just build and RTFO.
|
What Working at Stripe Has Been Like
|
I left Stripe a little over 6 months ago to join an exciting startup with a number of my friends. What I miss most about working there is the culture of shipping. There are a number of 'shipped' email lists at Stripe where people can tout their accomplishments large and small. These lists are widely read and commented on, and folks put in a fair amount of effort making their "shipped" emails informative and entertaining.That feeling you get when you finish a challenging project, write a great shipped email, and get a bunch of feedback from folks throughout the company is pretty amazing. Once I was invited to convert one of my shipped emails into a presentation for a company all-hands meeting. I had a less than a week to get it done, which was pretty hectic, but in the end it turned out great and it was perhaps my favorite memory of my time at Stripe.I enjoy my current job, and those little dopamine hits I get from checking things off my list as well as the bigger ones from finishing projects, but now only my boss and some teammates notice when I finish something. One thing I learned about myself, is that I really do care about what other people think about my work.
|
How to build a plugin system on the web and also sleep well at night
|
This is one of the cleverest things I've seen in JS in a while.In a nutshell, they use a same origin iframe to ensure the plugin gets its own copy of globals (so it can't mess up the globals your app uses), coupled with a proxy object which whitelists certain globals for the plugin to use along with certain vars from your app.Really rather clever, although the guys who develop browsers should consider an API for something like this as it's becoming such a common use case.
|
Smart TVs sending sensitive user data to Netflix and Facebook
|
When can I buy a TV without smart features? I don't doubt that my smart TV is reporting some data about my usage, but I barely have a choice in the matter.
|
After China Objects, Apple Removes App Used by Hong Kong Protesters
|
Earlier discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21210678
|
Encoding your WiFi access point password into a QR code
|
Is it only Android 10 that can do this with scanning a qr code, or also v9?
|
Simple Systems Have Less Downtime
|
The only language that I have worked with that realizes that in the real world simple is _always_ a lie, is common lisp. It is the only language that has actually embraced the fact that its designers/committee were not geniuses and provided the tools for dealing with the complexity of the system. When unix tools fail, hope that you are on a system where it is possible to get the symbols and/or the source code, and even then good luck fixing things in situ. Most existing systems do not empower the consumer of code to do anything if it breaks. CL remains almost completely alone in this, because the debugger is part of the standard. Most of my code is written in python, and I can tell you for a fact that when python code really fails, e.g. in a context with threading, you might as well burn the whole thing to the ground, it will take days to resolve the issue, roll back the code and start over. The fact that people accept this as a matter of course is pure insanity, or a sign that most programmers are in an abusive relationship with their runtime environment.
|
Show HN: Bear – Minimal blogging platform
|
Things I would like in a blogging platform:* Generate lightweight static website* Good clean default CSS so I don't have to mess with it* Automatically upload website to CDN and trigger expirations as necessary.* Self-hosted* Runs on AWS Lambda or any other Function as a Service equivilient* Has a super lightweight CMS that I can easily use on both desktop and mobile, so if I have ideas I can start writing anywhere, and can also make minor corrections to existing posts while on the go.* The CMS can be a frontend to git, but git is hard to use on mobile, so I don't want the CMS to just be git.If anyone knows of something that meets these requirements I'd be super grateful!
|
Zoom executive charged with disrupting meetings commemorating Tiananmen Square
|
What other platforms compete with Zoom with comparable API integrations?We need features including: OAuth, Meeting scheduling, meeting link generation (without requiring user accounts), managing recordings, meeting status webhooks, etc.https://marketplace.zoom.us/docs/api-reference/zoom-api
|
Survey shows people no longer believe working hard will lead to a better life
|
Starting conditions (where one was born, levels of wealth and opportunity there, one's parents' education and jobs) are shockingly predictive about an individual's future. Hard work leading to social mobility has always been the exception, not the rule. Most will not beat the odds since if they did, those wouldn't BE the odds. A lot of us are just so deluded by survivorship bias borne of listening only to success stories, but it seems more and more people are seeing through the illusion. In my opinion, that's a good thing, as recognizing the true state of things is the first step to improving them, and this combination of consciousness and lived experience can prove to be potent immunization against bad faith actors who want to maintain the illusion of widespread social mobility.
|
E-Ink Magic Calendar that runs off a battery powered Raspberry Pi
|
Can’t explain why but all these E-Ink projects are so awesome and attractive to me. I’m surprised I can’t just buy a bunch of E-Ink style gizmos from some company to decorate my home and office. My wallet would be wide open to it constantly.Great work and congrats on this!
|
Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return
|
No. That’s what people like us and all the main stream media hope for.But: most people I know don’t have the slightest clue that Insta and WhatsApp belong to the FB group.And even worse: most of them don’t give a shit about the reputation of FB. They just want to send messages and share pictures through those apps.
|
What software engineers can learn from the rapid collapse of Fast
|
I think the most applicable warning for engineers when it comes to the actual work, as opposed to whether one should join a particular startup, is this:> Engineers calculated the load Fast had in needing to serve their traffic. The Fast button was rendered less than 500,000 times per day - rarely needed to ever serve more than a few requests per second.> One of the few warning signs engineers noticed is how Fast spent far more on infrastructure than the scale of the operation would have called for. Engineers sometimes brought up suggestions to scale infra down, and save costs - given there was not much revenue generated.Sounds like the whole thing could have run on a single cheap VM, perhaps with a second one for redundancy.
|
Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?
|
Yes, this is true. This is why Netflix runs fast.com: it serves Netflix content from Netflix servers, so if ISPs want to prioritize fast.com content they'll have to prioritize Netflix content as well. Of course, that doesn't help non-Netflix sites...
|
One kitchen, hundreds of internet restaurants
|
I mean, why not?Companies like Unilever have been doing this for far longer than anyone in the restaurant space. Churn out thousands of brands that supposedly "compete" with each other in the marketplace. If one of those brands has a reputation problem, shut it down and replace it. Rinse and repeat.If the practice is distasteful, then change the law, but beware the lobbyists.
|
Conversation skills essentials
|
> If she asked to see a hall pass from a freshman, they’d give her the finger. They swore at her and were generally rude. The behavior was so out of line that seniors would step in and tell them not to talk to her like that.Shouldn't such students be expelled from school immediately?
|
Could we make the web more immersive using a simple optical illusion?
|
Imagine, for example, opening your favorite brand’s website and being presented with a miniature virtual storefront. You could look at their most popular products as if you were standing on a sidewalk peering into their shop.I imagined this as instructed as was simultaneously bored and depressed.Why does it always have to be about shopping.
|
First people sickened by Covid-19 were scientists at WIV: US government sources
|
I don't trust this article at all.> Sources within the US government say that three of the earliest people to become infected with SARS-CoV-2 were Ben Hu, Yu Ping, and Yan Zhu. All were members of the Wuhan lab suspected to have leaked the pandemic virus.> It is unclear who in the U.S. government had access to the intelligence about the sick WIV workers, how long they had it, and why it was not shared with the public.At absolutely no point in this article are any new "sources" pointed out.The authors make that statement early on so as to make the reader think something new in the article is going to be revealed.Instead we get multiple paragraphs of links to various quotes and suppositions from various people, some of whom were involved in investigating the origins and some who work in the field.
|
Maps distort how we see the world
|
Every flat map projection distorts something, so every projection has to optimize some parameter and trade off other utility. I'm constantly amazed at how hung up people are on apparent size of countries. If size is your thing, use some other projection!Mercator is and remains popular because it preserves local angles and shapes, which makes it simple use this projection to navigate by rhumb lines (compass headings). Because most maps people are exposed to are designed for navigation, it is the most commonly seen projection. And yes, it distorts size and is largely unusable past about ± 70º latitude. Every map is a compromise.
|
How Is LLaMa.cpp Possible?
|
In case anyone is wondering, yes, there is a cost when a model is quantized.https://oobabooga.github.io/blog/posts/perplexities/Essentially, you lose some accuracy and there might be some weird answers and probably more likely to go off the rail and hallucinate. But the quality loss is lower the more parameters you have. So for very large model sizes the differences might be negligible. Also, this is the cost of inference only. Training is a whole other beast and requires much more power.Still, we are looking at GPT3 level of performance on one server rack. That says something when less than a year ago, such AI was literally magic and only run on a massive datacenter. Bandwidth and memory size are probably, in my ignorance mind, easier to increase than raw compute so maybe we will soon actually have "smart" devices.
|
Asteroids JavaScript Bookmarklet to blow up any web site
|
Awesome. Now someone needs to combine it with websockets/node.js (or similar) so I can see the other players on the same page!
|
Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results
|
I had a front row seat for this test. I believe the experiment we ran provides conclusive proof. I'm on a panel with a representative from Bing later today and I'll ask Bing about this directly.
|
Google to Acquire Nest
|
Am I the only one who thought "well, good for the Nest guys" followed by "too bad, it looked like a good product"?
|
India bans discriminatory pricing based on source/destination/app/content
|
This has been like watching one form of misinformation battling another form of misinformation. One set of misguided people battling another set of misguided people.NetNeutrality is a concept that makes sense in a western context where carriers are basically monopolies. It's unbelievable how good arguments in one context, have been blindly applied to a completely unrelated context.Activists in the West (who's rep and rent are based on their commitment to netneutrality) without knowing anything about the local context have been cheering on local activists.Local activists (led by stand up comedians ofcourse similar to Glenn Beck\Jon Stewart) getting carried away by this support (cause Urban India has this strange craving for western validation which I still don't fully understand) have now convinced the regulator to step in and are celebrating victory.This is similar to how the Egyptians celebrated victory after the army stepped in to depose a democratically elected govt. Just Unbelievable! Free markets are dead. Regulation driven by manufactured outrage or vested interests manufacturing outrage are alive and thriving.Ofcourse it doesn't help that Facebook and their games are involved which automatically swings every debate into deeply religious territory. As much as I can't stand Facebook and will have nothing to do with them ever, the point of a free market (which produces innovation) has been lost.If Christian missionaries or Hindu missions go and setup schools and libraries for free in Rural India is someone protesting differential pricing in Urban India. It's ridiculous.The people who loose out are the farmer\weaver who just need an email address to be linked to the cities. Who is going to provide that now? Rural India is so vast and voiceless that they are the automatic loosers in such a debate.Congratulations NetNeutrality activists! Well done.
|
Cognitive bias cheat sheet
|
I find the treatment of psychology on HN to be perplexing. On one hand, there have been attacks on psychology as a field [1] due to legitimate concerns related to replication. On the other hand, blog posts such as this come up every few days that take the same results for granted and frame them in everyday terms.I wonder, are there different groups of HN readers with different attitudes towards psychology? Or does the treatment also depend on the presentation, e.g. in the form of a scientific publication vs. a brain hacking tips or cheatsheet.[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12643978
|
When You Are Depressed, Make Something
|
The problem with trying to create something is once you begin to work hard at it, you realize that you're not very good and others have done it far better than you. I have notice this a lot with math.I will work on a problem and then a Google search later reveals that the problem is not only completely solved but in a way that is far better than I could have ever conceived. Another problem is when you run out of ideas or if the creative endeavor doesn't produce sufficient results. Creativity and execution is really hard, that I'll grant.
|
Author of cURL denied entry to the USA
|
This may be unpopular on an US-centric site like HN, but the US looks more and more like they want to isolate themselves from the rest of the world: very strict immigration policy, travelers molested by TSA on airports, ...These conferences where people around the world meet should start to be hosted somewhere else. Not in the USA anymore. Somewhere in a country that welcomes people instead of treating all of them like possible threats.Just organize All Hands in Berlin next year. Or Barcelona, or Munich, or Stockholm, or Amsterdam, or whatever. Just not the US anymore. Americans don't want foreigners on their soil. Or at least everything looks that way from the outside. Let them be that way.
|
Firefox Focus – A new private browser for iOS and Android
|
According to F-Droid [1], it contains `com.google.android.gms:play-services-analytics`.[1]: https://gitlab.com/fdroid/rfp/issues/171#note_30410376
|
Python 2 will be replaced with Python 3 in the next RHEL major release
|
This is good:- Python 2 support officially ends somewhere in 2020- most popular packages are now compatible with Python 3- Python 3.7 performs about as well as 2.7 with future release expected to be betterAlthough it still took way too long, if you consider Python 3.0 was released about 10 years ago.
|
Learn just a little Awk (2010)
|
Recently, I was helping out a friend in analyzing some RNA samples for her work. These samples are huge - like nearly a gigabyte of data. There was this tool which was recommended for the job - mirexpress. It was a small job, perhaps 10 minutes worth of effort. To make my work easier, I provisioned a beefy (and costly) machine on Azure to do the job, took a quick look at the clock (it said 11 PM), ran the tool, and relaxed. The tool crashed while reading the file.In an attempt to fix the bug, I opened mirexpress's code. And all my confidence in my programming ability vanished when I saw its innards. I understand that the code may have been written by scientists who had no experience in programming, but I have never been so utterly _disoriented_ by bad code. Anyways, after hacking away at the mess for about 3-4 hours, I realized that this was a fool's errand and thought I'll just phone it in the next day saying I couldn't do it. I went to sleep thinking that it was already late and I'd get late for work the next day.- 5 minutes later -I woke up with a start, recalling this nifty tool called awk. I had last used it maybe 3 years ago, and before that only in college. But I could see how awk could do some of the things which mirexpress was claiming to do. So I fire up my computer, write an awk script - 2 lines only! TWO FUCKING LINES! And it runs like a charm - eats away at megabytes of sample data and gives me results I can show. So then like any rational person, I spent the remaining hours re-discovering awk and forgot to sleep. Pissed away the whole next day (and some part of the day after that too!) :-DIt's really fascinating that this nifty little tools invented DECADES ago are still going strong, and there's been no _evolutionary_ leap in areas where tools like awk/grep/sed excel at.
|
Certificates for localhost
|
I’ve always liked the concept of a localhost’d web app talking back to a localhost web server. It seems like a great way to get the cross-platform ease of use of developing the UI without having to do everything in browser, so you can optimize the heavy lifting and don’t end up with an Electron app pulling 8Gb of RAM and 100% Of 16 cores.But I could never quite satisfy the nagging feeling that the localhost server could adequately be secured against outside network requests being routed to it, or as TFA mentions, inside network requests being routed away from it to an outsider!This article helped enumerate some of the difficulties of securing such a service. Things like a memory-safe parser, checking origins, etc.I wonder is there a definitive guide someone had setup, or even better a sample Golang or similar localhost server, which demonstrates the dozen-odd layers of checks and protections and magical incantations necessary to have such a server “secure” in the sense that a localhost UI is able to make requests to it to receive sensitive data but it should be safe from external attackers trying to spoof the same requests?
|
Elon Musk Settles SEC Fraud Charges
|
I think this is the best outcome we can have (although there might be other lawsuits from the short sellers).Elon will learn a hard lesson, there will be a committee and procedures to control his communication channels. He will still be CEO and the spirit of Tesla will be unharmed in the long run.As much as I see myself as an objective person, Elon is genuine in his passion and his vision. Derailing him to jail time or prison would be a net loss for humanity, however objectively and legally inconsistent it may be.Edit: The news cycle and PR things have a very short term memory. Just a year ago, people were praising him for his style and overall he was considered an extraordinary leader, CEO and a visionary.
|
Thelio – System76
|
Was excited AF until I read this:"Perfect with Pop!_OSPop!_OS by System76 and Thelio together form the perfect platform to create and discover. Thelio is optimized for maximum performance. Pop!_OS provides tools and development platforms that are always up-to-date and just a single click or command away. "Forgive me but I'm just not interested in running an obscure custom Linux. I feel the same about Amazon's AWS Linux distro.Give me one of the following, in order of preference, and we'll talk:- Arch
- Ubuntu
- Debian
- Fedora
- RHEL
|
Dive – A tool for exploring each layer in a Docker image
|
This is amazing, thanks for sharing it! A very useful feature that I always missed but never actually tough about.I've had a hard time understanding the slices on the beginning will be very useful for troubleshooting bad images also while optimizing image sizes.Can probably help to understand problems like the one bug where the image size got almost a 2x increase after a CHOWN, because the slice is added again with different owner ( I think ;) ) would be so much easier to see with this.Ref for the old bug
https://github.com/moby/moby/issues/5505
|
Write yourself a Git (2018)
|
I have an admission to make: I don't understand git. By this I mean I have a few simple commands I use (status/add/commit/push/pull) and if I try to do anything more complicated it always ends up with lots of complex error messages that I don't understand and me nuking the repository and starting again.So I think: there must be a better way.I have often thought about implementing a VCS. The idea behind one doesn't seem particularly complex to me (certainly it's simpler than programming languages). If I did I would quite probably use WYAG as a starting point. My first step would be to define the user's mental model -- i.e. what concepts they need to understand such that they can predict what the system will do. Then I would build a web-based UI that presents the status of the system to the user in terms of that model.
|
Europe is edging towards making post-car cities a reality
|
I’m personally not a huge fan of driving everywhere. But I wonder whether HN’s view on this isn’t out of touch with the average middle class American’s. The average American commute is 48 minutes round trip, significantly shorter than France (71 minutes), Italy (65 minutes), or Spain (61 minutes): https://www.oecd.org/els/family/LMF2_6_Time_spent_travelling...That’s mainly because Europe has higher public transit use, and public transit is slow. Parisians who work and commute by public transit spend an average of 116 minutes a day on public transit: https://www.thelocal.fr/20160418/parisians-spend-23-days-a-y....Viewed from a different perspective, a country where most people can spend 48 minutes a day commuting, because it’s rich enough for everyone to afford a car,[1] might be considered better than one where many people have to endure two-hour public transit commutes. Maybe utopia isn’t Paris, with rich people living in beautiful walkable downtowns, but rather Houston, where middle class people can afford big houses with a pool and a short, direct commute.[1] The median disposable income per US household is a staggering 50% higher than for a French household.
|
Guide to running Elasticsearch in production
|
Mostly good stuff but a few comments:- article doesn’t clarify if it’s on hardware or VMs- 140 shards per node is certainly on the low side, one can easily scale to 500+ per node (if most shards are small, typically power law distribution)- more RAM is better, and there is a ratio of disk:ram that you need to keep in mind (30-40 for hot data, 200-300 for warm data)- heaps beyond 32g can be beneficial but you’d have to go for 64g+, 32-48g is a dead zone- not a single line about GC tuning (I find default CMS to be quite horrible even in recommended ~31g sizes)- CPUs are often a bottleneck when using SSD drives
|
We’re working on 1M Covid-19 testing capacity per day
|
I'm the co-founder and CTO at BillionToOne. I'm happy to answer any questions here. I've also posted a slightly more technical explanation of how the test works and why it can scale here: https://twitter.com/dtsao/status/1247642005510873088?s=21Edit: Since our site seems to be overwhelmed at the moment, here's a recap:We’ve been working hard at BillionToOne on a new COVID-19 test that scales testing to everyone in the US. Our test (1) re-purposes existing infrastructure, (2) eliminates time-consuming RNA extraction, and (3) enables a distributed system for COVID-19 testing.We need 1 million tests per day to end the stay-at-home orders. Schools are still open in Iceland because they test 15x more than the US does, per capita (https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2020/04/02/free-coronav...).The first thing we figured out is how to run COVID-19 tests on existing automated Sanger sequencers. One sequencer can process up to 3840 samples per day. There are hundreds of sequencers of excess capacity because they were built for the Human Genome Project over 20 years ago.It would take only 2 sequencers to surpass the current test capacity for all of California. There are far more than 2 sequencers in California (some individual labs have 10 or more).We tweaked the protocol so COVID-19 could be detected from sequencing data using linear regression. Basically, we add ~100 copies of a known DNA sequence to help us calculate how much virus nucleic acid is in the specimen. It works just as well as gold-standard RT-qPCR.Lab workflow for COVID-19 testing is traditionally 1. Specimen accessioning, 2. RNA extraction, 3. RT-qPCR 4. Reporting. RNA extraction, in particular, has been a huge bottleneck in terms of reagent shortages and labor-intensiveness.We showed that we can skip RNA extraction entirely without affecting test sensitivity and limit of detection.By skipping RNA extraction and using automated Sanger sequencers, we think we can get to an additional 200,000 samples per day test capacity in existing clinical labs.A distributed system is often the only way to operate at massive scale. A fully distributed system could have different sites and labs responsible for each process and dynamically re-allocate resources based on availability and capacity.The Broad institute COVID-19 lab has already started doing this. They are asking for specimens to be submitted in a standardized tube format and pre-barcoded. They have essentially distributed the specimen accessioning work.Because there is a highly developed service industry for Sanger sequencing with Distributed testing could scale from 200k to >1 million tests per day, but would require a change in regulations that currently prohibit it.Thanks to the BillionToOne team for pulling this work together! Next step is to start manufacturing test kits and obtain Emergency Use Authorization from the FDA. We’re eager to work with clinical Lab Directors and contract kit manufacturers.Edit 2: Link to scientific manuscript: https://www.dropbox.com/s/07esyehsvfpmllc/A%20Highly%20Scala...
|
Brow.sh: a modern text-based browser
|
Yes it's super slow, but many of the criticisms are missing the point. This enables browsing over SSH when you have low bandwidth. The heavy internetting is done on the remote machine (like a cloud VM for example) using blazing fast data center internet. A personal example may explain why I love this.For several years I lived in rural Alaska where the fastest internet one could buy was $120 a month (I think) and a blazing 512 Kbps. I was a developer (working remotely) who's shop had adopted Docker, and it literally took more than 24 hours sometimes to download a docker image. By necessity I switched to having my whole development environment on a cloud VM. The Cloud VM had gigabit connection so docker downloads were blazing fast. All I needed to send across the wire was a tiny bit of text. Mosh was an absolute life saver by the way. I once flew from Anchorage to Salt Lake and had the same mosh session pick up like nothing had happened thanks to roaming abilities.Browsing heavy (i.e. modern) websites was often very difficult too. With high latency and a lot of heavy Javascript sites requiring 10 MB or more, it was a nightmare. I occasionally went up to Eagle Alaska, where internet was even worse. The nearest cell tower was a 4 hour drive away, and the only internet was at the "library" or a crappy satellite link (that far north satellites get less useful). A tool like Browsh is a life line to people in situations like that.In related news, when people talk about the merits of developing with just Vim vs. an IDE, I also recount the same story.
|
Rga: Ripgrep, but also search in PDFs, E-Books, Office documents, zip, tar.gz
|
One a related note there is one program that I absolutely miss on Linux called everything (on windows).The closest I can find is mlocate but it does not have a GUI but more importantly it does not index my Windows or NTFS drives.Would appreciate any suggestions if someone knows something like 'everything' for Ubuntu.
|
Apple sued for terminating account with $25k worth of apps and videos
|
> Apple countered by arguing that “no reasonable consumer would believe” that content purchased through iTunes would be available on the platform indefinitelyRemember this sentence to change your mind for the next time you see some movie to buy online.
|
Farming robot kills 100k weeds per hour with lasers
|
Given where ML and CV are today, I'd bet on open source models trained on weeds within 3-5 years. This company can scale, but their unit price is going to plummet. Also, it sounds like they're using cameras, where it's concievable that other future sensors could be more efficient. An iteration of this with higher resolution cameras and small flying drones seems like an intuitive next step.This is a super interesting problem because the confusion matrix (fp/fn/tp/tn) rate that makes this economical is going to be variable across both crops, and market demand.If there suddenly there was a demand jump for peas, you could afford to use a model with less accuracy, because you are optimizing betwee a sunk labor cost and margin on your yield. You could literally tune your detection parameters based on futures price data, since if if prices were high, you could optimize compute on your model. Anyway, spoken as a total outsider, but what a cool and interesting set of problems.
|
EU says Apple’s App Store breaks competition rules after Spotify complaint
|
Lots of comments around the line of "ok maybe 30% is too much, but we can all agree they offer a valuable service, so what percentage should they take ?"Uhhhh, not a percentage ? Do you imagine AWS billing you a % of your revenue instead of a given price for a given service ?Give a price to be listed in store, to be reviewed, to be downloaded by a user, ... And let company pay what they owe you. Let them pay through the provider they can negotiate and then pay you back the cost they owe you.It's ridiculous that it doesn't matter if my app has a 5$ sub or a 50$ sub, I owe them 30% anyway. What they provided is the same in both cases, they should be able to price it out to me. Their current pricing structure is not setup like a fee for services and infrastructure usage, it's setup like a tax.
|
What I learnt roasting 200 landing pages
|
(Rant) What a snobby, begrudging comments section. Well done to OP for writing a detailed summary of a succesful productised service that they got off the ground as well as a solid list of actionable tasks you can take to improve your own product.They've outlined how their clients have loved the service, it's been financially successful and everyone is happy, yet all people here do is complain about a) how this is the downfall of the internet b) there's some technical or editorial minutiae of the post itself they dislike c) how they could have done it better d) what they're doing is just plain wrong or unimportant.If HN had its way, every product and service on the planet would be devoid of marketing, sales or design and the only way you could buy it was via the command line. Infuriating.
|
Bosch opens German chip plant
|
1B is like three last-gen ASML machines, good start I guess, but chip manufacturing can easily absorb 10x of that.As I understand it, there are no plans to turn Europe into a chip leader, they just want to protect automotive supply chain.
|
Waydroid – Run Android containers on Ubuntu
|
Has anyone had success getting any of these containers to work with a camera?Recently, my bank discontinued their website based deposit system for checks in favor of their app. I'm reluctant to keep an app with full access to my account on my phone, so a container system like Waydroid or Anbox would be great if I could just emulate the app when I need it. Has anyone else run into this issue and, if so, how have you dealt with it?
|
How our free plan stays free
|
For me it’s the opposite: I actually don’t mind paying for a great product such as Tailscale (which I really like), but have security and privacy concerns!Mesh VPNs have substantial control over networks that they manage (they bypass firewalls by having users instal agents from within). They could add hidden nodes to networks, which is a major security concern, and see who is taking to who, how long, what service they are running, etc, which can be a privacy concern. They are targets.Is there a way to address these concerns, and make them “really” (not just on website) zero trust or at least minimal trust? Will Wireguard preshared keys as an option help (a maliciously added public key lacks a secret key exchanged among peers out of band)?What are the implications of the substantial control that Tailscale has?Or we have no way, but to trust someone? Looking at events of the past decade, I don’t have a good feeling about this!
|
Enclave: An Unpickable Lock
|
Interesting design. I made a lock a couple years ago that is quite similar in principle (though this design is different and has a couple nice improvements).https://youtu.be/_7vPNcnYWQ4One of my main goals is to be an inspiration, though if it was based by my design I wish they’d credit it. Especially since they’re patenting it.
|
The leap second’s time is up: world votes to stop pausing clocks
|
In 2015 I was working at a "fintech" company and a leap second was announced. It was scheduled for a Wednesday, unlike all others before which had happened on the weekend, when markets were closed.When the previous leap second was applied, a bunch of our Linux servers had kernel panics for some reason, so needless to say everyone was really concerned about a leap second happening during trading hours.So I was assigned to make sure nothing bad would happen. I spent a month in the lab, simulating the leap second by fast forwarding clocks for all our different applications, testing different NTP implementations (I like chrony, for what it's worth). I had heaps of meetings with our partners trying to figure out what their plans were (they had none), and test what would happen if their clocks went backwards. I had to learn about how to install the leap seconds file into a bunch of software I never even knew existed, write various recovery scripts, and at one point was knee-deep in ntpd and Solaris kernel code.After all that, the day before it was scheduled, the whole trading world agreed to halt the markets for 15 minutes before/after the leap second, so all my work was for nothing. I'm not sure what the moral is here, if there is one.
|
Platform certificates used to sign malware
|
I had speculated for a while that Secure Boot, Widevine, Trusted Computing, all of it seems like they have some pretty serious central points of failure. So much so, that it would be a modern heist of the century if they were stolen.If someone (for example) got Apple's iOS signing key and Apple's HTTPS certificate, Apple could suffer catastrophic damage. If someone got the PlayStation 5 signing key or the Xbox One signing key, catastrophic damage there. In a way, it's a beautiful, super-secure house... built on a single ludicrously powerful point of failure. Good thing we don't have any corrupt government agencies who might want to bribe someone for keys... yet... hopefully...This is actually something I would fear for the future. There have been countless physical heists - most recently in Antwerp, Belgium, where over $100 million in diamonds were stolen in 2003. We haven't had a major signing key stolen yet, but there's always that first day... if you can't keep $100M in diamonds safe, can you really be sure that you can keep a hardware signing key safe forever? Heck, the logistics of stealing the diamonds is insane - but stealing a key only takes a pencil and a piece of paper.
|
Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity
|
Stuff like this is why I will remain a proponent for true vouchers for the rest of my life. No parent should be stuck without options when educational governance goes sideways like this.Pull your kid. Find them a school that gives them the greatest opportunity to succeed and use the funds earmarked for their education to ensure they receive it.Currently, options are restricted to parents who can afford to move to a different school zone, afford private school or have a parent available who can facilitate a home school environment.Letting parents vote with their kids placement will force schools to truly advance.
|
The Top Of My Todo List
|
When I first saw the title of this essay, I thought I already knew what I was going to say...Something about how my own todo this now has only one item on it, the single most important thing to do next. I gravitated to this based on the great quote by chess master Jose Capablanca:[When asked how many moves ahead he looked while playing]: "Only one, but it's always the right one." (from http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Ra%C3%BAl_Capablanca).Then I read pg's essay and Bronnie Ware's blog post and realized that this post was less about work and more about life.Then it hit me: My life's todo list still has only one item on it and always has:"Always do the right thing."I realize that this can be very hand wavy because the "right thing" means something different to everyone and even something different to me at different times. But still, it has been the perfect #1 for my todo list.Several years ago, my mother, who lived 1000 miles away, was diagnosed with Alzheimer's and could no longer use the phone. So I began flying back to Pittsburgh every other weekend to be with her. After a while, even this wasn't enough. So I moved to Pittsburgh to be with her every day.People tried to say the right thing to me, but it never was right. They'd say things like, "I admire your doing this, but you really don't have to because she doesn't even know who you are," or "You may be making a sacrifice now, but in time you won't regret it; you'll have nothing to be sorry for." And I thought, "How sad. After all these years these people still don't get it. This isn't a sacrifice from me to her. It's a gift from her to me."I'm a little uncomfortable distilling pg's and Bronnie Ware's five thoughts from down into one, but "Always do the right thing" just works for me. I just hope the others in my life find something that works as well for them.
|
The NSA story reinforces why an entity like WikiLeaks is important
|
I don't agree. The traditional news outlet that broke this story (The Guardian) has a lot of advantages over WikiLeaks. It has experienced reporters who understand the issues involved. It has a well-known and respected editorial process that can weigh the consequences of a leak versus the potential value to the public. It has a process through which the public can contact the organization and correct errors. When WikiLeaks put out the cables I noticed that there was one cable where they redacted the names of people who had met with US diplomats from the body of the document but not from the title of the document. I looked very hard for any way to contact WikiLeaks to get the matter fixed and found nothing - their website suggested that people interested in providing feedback contact human rights organizations or a couple of law firms in the UK. On the other hand, traditional journalists typically post their email addresses and twitter handles and will often respond to queries.Yes, the administration is aggressively challenging leakers, but newspapers have a long, successful history of defending their first amendment rights in the courts. Nor is it clear that a UK-based newspaper such as The Guardian would be subject to Justice Department subpoena's or prosecution.WikiLeaks, particularly under Julian Assange, has demonstrated a complete lack of transparency and biased reporting (c.f. the Collateral Murder video). I have a lot more confidence in, say, The New York Times or The Guardian than Wikileaks.
|
Show HN: Probabilistically Generating HN Post Titles
|
I was inspired by this comment
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6813162I find that lookback of 2 generally creates more entertaining titles. Lookback of 3 usually seems to just splice together two titles (which can be hilarious, and is usually more grammatically correct), and lookback of 1 tends to generate more nonsense.Some fun ones I found just now: The Neuroscientist Who Discovered He Was a Teenage Hacker
How my comment on TechCrunch got me a new, useful superpower?
PHP Sucks But I Didn't
Windows 8 is 20% faster than C
The Navy’s newest warship is powered by WebGL
Cards Against Humanity has made comments even worse, I'm leaving
How Porsche hacked the financial system and made a html5 game, polished it many many times
Interestingly, if I change the code to pick the most likely word, followed by the most likely word, etc. the "most probable" post is "The New York Times and The Internet"If I limit it to just 2013 posts, it is "The NSA surveillance".My site is running on the smallest Digital Ocean droplet (512MB), if it goes down, I will feel silly. If it does, code can be found here: https://gist.github.com/grantslatton/7694811
|
SF’s Housing Crisis Explained
|
Just pack up and leave the damn place already.Sorry to be blunt, but that's how "supply and demand" is really supposed to work. If Seattle supplies the same quality of housing for half the cost of San Francisco, buyers/renters should flock to Seattle, thereby reducing demand in SF and eventually causing SF housing prices to come down until the market finds an equilibrium. Trying to lobby for "below-market-price" housing is always going to be a losing game; the only long-term solution is to make the market price lower.Unfortunately, competition among cities to attract residents is not like competition in other industries. A lot of people are stuck in a relatively small geographical area their whole lives due to employment, their children's education, various kinds of emotional attachment, and the sheer difficulty of uprooting themselves from a familiar neighborhood. This creates a captive market, severely limiting the effectiveness of inter-city competition. And of course, whenever there's a captive market, there's somebody who profits from it. In the case of SF's housing market, entrenched neighborhood groups and "below-market-price" renters enjoy benefits at the expense of newcomers to the city. Perhaps they actually deserve those benefits. Still, it's unfair to everyone else.But there's one group of people who can afford not to be bound by the usual excuses that keep people stuck in a captive market. That's us, the techies. We don't need to be in any particular city in order to write code. Most of us are young and don't have kids. Few of us have any "root" in the Bay Area, so we couldn't care less about being uprooted [1]. There is no reason for us to be a part of San Fran's captive housing market. We can pack up and leave, all 8% of us if possible. That would be "supply and demand" doing its work.Of course, there are a few problems with this proposal, including the fact that there really is such a thing as social networking of the offline kind. The Bay Area undoubtedly has one of the best tech "scenes" in the world. But I see it as a problem that needs to be fixed, not merely an advantage that we're free to exploit. HN, for example, requires everyone to move to the Bay Area, perhaps for a good reason. But in doing so, they directly contribute to, and exacerbate, the hideous distortion of the Bay Area's housing market. It's like mandating that everyone meet at a particular Starbucks. It makes sense when everyone you want to meet is already a regular of that Starbucks, but when the manager of Starbucks begins to take advantage of its captive clientele, you should seriously start considering an alternative.Remember, the only vote that the market respects is a vote with your feet, i.e. a realistic threat to do business with a competitor.[1] Disclaimer: I've lived in at least seven different cities in three continents, and harbor no particular emotional attachment to any of them. Apparently I'm incapable of developing an emotional attachment to geographical coordinates. But I must confess that I kinda like it that way.
|
Google’s look, evolved
|
Just when I thought we might be starting to pivot away from flat design - does anyone know of a different design paradigm that is being used by smaller/fringe designers who are tired of flat/minimal UX/UI?
|
Google Will Soon Start Punishing Mobile Sites that Use Annoying App Install Ads
|
Does that mean they'll block youtube? Try playing a video on a phone that does not have the youtube app installed, it's just about impossible to get it right, it's a roulette that's rigged with more than half the links going to the youtube app page on google play. Highly annoying since there is no reason why the youtube page of some video should even have that app installation link at all.
|
Chicago Police Hid Mics, Destroyed Dashcams to Block Audio, Records Show
|
Though I agree that this behavior is reprehensible and probably criminal, the comments here seem to miss at least some of the human dynamic here.I can't hardly imagine that most people posting here would ever consider a job where literally every word or sound that came out of their mouth during their entire working life was recorded, and likely subject to public disclosure. Saying that this is what cops signed up for is not a compelling counter argument either, as this is new and most of the cops in question didn't sign up to work in an environment like that at all.It seems odd to be even somewhat defending Chicago cops but someone should point out that there are two sides to this.
|
Study Finds No Gender Gap in Tech Salaries
|
This is fairly consistent with other studies. The "77%" number is arrived at by comparing the median wage of full-time male & female employees. It doesn't account for differences in industry, job title, experience, etc. It's super broad. That doesn't mean we should ignore it, but it means we need more granularity.Coming out of uni/grad school, male and female salaries are equal in comparable fields. They depart a few years after that. Women tend to find themselves funneled into specific career paths that prioritize flexible hours and often pay less. Men face an opposite pressure - toward inflexible hours but higher pay. This is in large part because care for family members(children and elderly parents usually) is more often foisted upon women in our society than on men.That doesn't mean the "gender gap" doesn't exist, or that it isn't an issue to address. It means that the way we tackle it isn't as simple as "pass a law mandating equal pay for equal work".We need to de-stigmatize flexible schedules. We need to upend the idea that family care is solely the domain of women (normalizing parental leave for fathers with newborns is a good start).*edited for typos
|
In defence of Douglas Crockford
|
Why is crybullying so rampant in the tech community?
|
Practical Deep Learning for Coders
|
Hi all, Jeremy Howard here. I'm the instructor for this MOOC - feel free to ask any questions here.
|
Facebook suspended the account of whistleblower who exposed Cambridge Analytica
|
I have a personal story from inside facebook to share. and when I shared this story on my facebook my personal facebook was suspended too.5 years ago Facebook recruiter reached out to me and invited me to the W hotel in Chicago. I was very excited -not for the job- but for the opportunity to meet with senior Facebook managers and tell them about an evil thing Facebook does.
Here is the background story:I am Kurdish from Iran. And Iran has many provinces. one of them is called Kurdistan. In Facebook profile section for Hometown you could pick all of the Iranian provinces except Kurdistan.And at first I thought it was a bug. For years and years we submitted bug reports and collected petitions for Facebook they never responded why the Kurdistan province cannot be picked while other provinces could be picked.Till one day, An internal document -guidance- leaked out of Facebook. That explained it all ! One of the pages was talking about Kurdistan. In which they had explained any reference to Kurdistan is considered terrorism. That was on the request of Turkish government.In "Turkey", the word Kurdistan is forbidden. and many people in Turkey been prisoned for speaking Kurdish. however in "Iran" we officially have a province called "Kurdistan Province). and Iranian government recognizes the name Kurdistan for my homeland. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provinces_of_IranBut Facebook decided to enforce the Turkish government racist rule on other countries that have Kurdistan (Iran, Iraq, Syria...)Also in that leaked guidance memo. Kurdistan flag was considered illegal. And hundreds of Kurdish pages and accounts got banned for having Kurdistan flag.While Kurdish flag is illegal in Turkey. Kurdish flag is officially recognized in the Constitution of Iraq for Kurdistan regional government.So when they invited me to W Hotel to recruit me. I was like yes finally I can meet the people in person. Because as a Kurd I have no importance and they will never respond to me but a software engineer I am pretty attractive on the market.So I asked the question from one of the managers. And told them my story this for years and years I send them emails and nobody got back to me and we made petitions about this so-called bug.He said these things are decided by higher management.I told him how often do you show this disagreement to higher managers or Mark Zuckerburg's policies if you have a different opinion. He responded if I disagree with them I wouldn't work there.I left the W Hotel in Chicago 5 years ago refusing to proceed with a job on FB. I knew Facebook is on the wrong path. And today I see that prediction coming true.Even today when Turkey committed a massacre in Kurdish city of Afrin, Facebook blocked many voices inside the city who were showing massacres by Turkish government.10 years ago FB came after kurds and you said not my problem. Today they are coming after all of u
|
Practical Linux Hardening Guide
|
Also...stick the SSH on a non-default port. Cuts login attempts down to near zero.
|
New York City Neighbors Build Cheaper Way to Connect to Web
|
Shameless plug: My company Althea (https://althea.net) is making router firmware that makes it easy to people to set up incentivized mesh networks in their communities. It allows routers to pay each other for bandwidth which means that everyone hosting a node earns money for the packets they forward.We have 2 networks live, one in rural Oregon and one in Medellin, Colombia. Also, 4 more networks people are currently pre-registering subscribers for in their communities, for example https://althea.net/hilltop.
|
Finland to give dads same parental leave as mums
|
But will they force Dads to take it? As a Dad who had two kids, I would much rather pay for childcare than take paternity leave. Would someone like me be held back artificially to promote equality?EDIT: Not a freak, don't care for the infant stage. Happy to dote when they start to turn into people.
|
The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free
|
I would be willing to pay an amount for better quality news than what can be found for free, however news outlets always seem to lean one way. I want somebody to just report and not tilt it in one direction.
|
Fed announces details of new interbank service to support instant payments
|
One thing I don't see mention regarding the existing US ACH (or whatever interbank) system is that there is absolutely no verification or security in this system. Just like verification of paper check signature and a whole lot of other financial items - most banks allow anything until questioned. The easiest and cost effective way is to let it happen and reimburse for failures.1. I have linked a non-joint account in my name at bank A to another (non-joint) account of my wife at bank B (accidentally) without any verification of any kind. I call BS on anyone claiming they magically checked the home address link or know we are married.2. I have walked in to my bank and did a wire transfer of a large amount without any kind of verification. They didn't check my ID. I am not kidding. I did enter my ATM card and PIN. Then why do they have a $500 or $1000 limit at ATM. If someone did get my ATM card and PIN, they just had to appear confident and walk in to the branch. This is one of the largest banks in the US.3. Because my wife doesn't like to deal with customer service of various financial items (credit-cards, 401k etc). I regularly call and just say I am her (clearly feminine name) and the conversation carries on as if nothing is surprising/suspicious.4. On the other extreme, IRS's "MyIRS" site let us authenticate yourself (first time setup) using a security question that allows one to type any financial account number. CC, Bank, 401k, whatever. I mean how tf did they get all that data on me? legally? Why does IRS need my CC number?IMHO, the only thing keeping us secure is that nobody from outside US has really tried to mess around with US banks.
|
Actually Portable Executables
|
Cosmopolitan Libc author here. When I saw this article earlier today, it put a big smile on my face, because I would have thought there'd be so many more issues than there turned out to be! For additional context, we've got a GitHub issue that's tracking progress on the changes that need to be made based on what we learned: https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/issues/61
|
Show HN: A portfolio website simulating macOS's GUI using React
|
Hi! I'm recently working on a portfolio website simulating macOS using React and tailwindcss. The style is between macOS Big Sur and Catalina (in another word, I picked out and combined my favorite parts from these two versions).Here's the link to website and Github:Website: https://portfolio.zxh.ioGithub: https://github.com/Renovamen/playground-macosI appreciate any feedback or suggestions.
|
A new wave of Linux applications
|
Until there is as “simple” to use an app like Preview on the Mac, most of these new generation apps are garbage.I’ve just switched to Ubuntu on a workstation I have lying around. And man, is it hard to use for just normal everyday use.Yes, it has the basics covered, but like many others my job has a lot of simple image manipulation related stuff.Convert pdf to png. Assemble multiple images into a pdf. Quickly share with someone else over chat. Normal productivity stuff.Take a simple thing like screen capture - you have to remember to save the screen that you captured otherwise it just sits there doing nothing in the screen capture app.The thing that saves most Linux desktops for office productivity workers — is Firefox and Chrome. Otherwise, outside of programmers and highly specific use cases, hardly anyone would use a Linux desktop.And that’s kudos to the fact that so much of what we do these days is in a browser.But if you look at the small pieces of software to do everyday things - they are awful.Dropbox barely works in a sustainable way.I have to keep pulling out my laptop every now and then to do simple office productivity things.Yeah yeah, I know that Apple is a trillion dollar company that had a room full of people just working on the screen capture feature alone.And yeah, I use Linux every day for programming. But Brah, all the little widgets and do-da’s need some serious polishing.
|
Moving the Linux Kernel to Modern C
|
I'm one of those people who think OS kernels should stay as portable and simple as possible (i.e. C89 or some other easily-bootstrappable language, to avoid Ken Thompson attacks), so this isn't great news to see "the ladder being pulled up another rung". Then again, Linux has already become immensely complex.
|
The day Steve Jobs dissed me in a keynote (2010)
|
If I understand the article correctly, are (some/most) files for sale on the iTunes store taken from CD rips rather than made directly from the masters?That sounds impressively sketchy; anyone who has used AccurateRip can probably testify that CD ripping errors and manufacturing errors are surprisingly common.
|
IBM's Asshole Test
|
When I interviewed at Google in 2006, one of the interviewers asked me to write code for solving a particular problem. I replied along the lines of "ok I need to think about this, it's not obvious how to solve it" and started thinking. Time ticked away. Five minutes. Ten minutes. Fifteen minutes. The interviewer started reminding me that he needed me to write some code and if there wasn't anything for him to copy down into his interview notes I wasn't going to pass the interview. (Why interviewers were all transcribing the whiteboard rather than taking photos I have no clue.)Eventually I ran out of time, having written no code on the whiteboard. I asked my interviewer "ok so what is the algorithm for solving this" and he admitted that he had no idea.At the time, I thought he just meant that he had no idea what the solution was; but in hindsight I wonder if the real test was to see if I would crumble under pressure and write code I knew didn't work.(I got a job offer, but turned it down to start Tarsnap instead.)
|
Facebook's TikTok-like redesign marks sunset of social networking era
|
Nobody hates Facebook users more than Facebook, I guess. :-/I've tried to type out several pithy comments, but the bottom line (to me) is that Facebook just doesn't respect its users or care about their needs.Can you imagine if brick-and-mortar businesses tried to do this? You go out for a Big Mac, but it's not on the menu anymore because Taco Bell had a few really good quarters, so McDonald's decided to pivot to tacos. Maybe you can still order the Big Mac if you know to ask for it, but most people won't, and they'll leave disappointed instead of getting what they wanted.Edit: To clarify, this example is contrived and the details are not the point. The point is that Facebook offered something to their users, spent years and billions of dollars making sure that as many people as possible got it from Facebook, and then decided to just yank the rug out from under all those people to chase the fairy tale of endless growth.
|
Reverse Engineering TikTok's VM Obfuscation
|
It is interesting, that while technologies like canvas, WebGL or WebRTC were intented for other purposes, their main usage became fingerprinting. For example, WebGL provides valuable information about GPU model and its drivers.This shows how browser developers race to provide new features ignoring privacy impact.I don't understand why features that allow fingerprinting (reading back canvas pixels or GPU buffers) are not hidden behind a permission.
|
Google doesn’t want employees working remotely anymore
|
I will say. I'm gonna be burned for this here, but... yeah I can tell that remote is far less effective.As a worker I like it! And there are some positives - mainly, you don't have to commute and live in a cheaper place. But as a manager, I see that it's just so far less effective, and I see how much more we can do it we meet together once in a while. One thing that's good is that it gives you access to a bigger talent pool, and you can pay people less, because they are happy they can work remote.I was originally against hybrid, because it's not really one thing or other thing, but now I start to see its positives too.
|
Guide to running Llama 2 locally
|
> curl -L "https://replicate.fyi/install-llama-cpp" | bashSeriously? Pipe script from someone's website directly to bash?
|
Official Statement from the family and partner of Aaron Swartz
|
I am removing MIT as a benefactor from my will and ceasing donations to the alumni association. I will not reconsider until the institution provides a full accounting and takes responsibility for the actions of its legal counsel in deciding to refer the matter to federal authorities.If you are a current member of the student body or faculty you have a lot more power than me. Please read about this matter and learn what your institution chose to do on your behalf and take some action fully in the spirit of MIT to reclaim what it has lost.
|
Kathy Sierra: Your app makes me fat
|
For those people wondering why so many comments here are saying 'Glad to see Kathy blogging again', it's because she stopped blogging in 2007 after getting severely harassed online. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathy_Sierra#HarassmentAs someone who followed her previous blog 'Creating Passionate Users', I'm really glad she's back writing publicly - not so much for this particular post (which wasn't anything novel), but more that it means her scars have healed enough. Hope to see more posts from her soon!
|
Basic Data Structures and Algorithms in the Linux Kernel
|
My favorite algorithm has been the linked list implementation, pretty useful for implementing list on embedded platforms.
|
“Just remove the duck” (2013)
|
Putting on my client/product manager hat for a moment, this is incredibly annoying. You are putting me in the position of either (a) fixing the obvious ducks and not looking closely at the real problems, or (b) having to micromanage you and scheduling another review to make further changes. Maybe you get your desired result (a), but my opinion of your work is going to be much lower since you are making obvious duck-sized mistakes.If you are a developer who takes this approach, you may want to consider whether the short-term benefit of avoiding criticism is worth the long-term downside of having me think you are incompetent.
|
I no longer understand my PhD dissertation
|
TLDR: The author independently re-discovered what you may know as Old Code Syndrome.I think that's because mathematical papers place too much value on terseness and abstraction over exposition and intuition.This guy's basically in the position of a fairly new developer who's just been asked to do non-trivial update of his own code for the first time. All those clever one-liners he put into his code made him feel smart and got the job done at the time. But he's now beginning to realize that if he keeps doing that, he's going to be cursed by his future self when he pulls up the code a few months later (never mind five years!) and has zero memory of how it actually works.I'm not intending to disparage the author; I've been there, and if you've been a software developer for a while you've likely been there too.Any decent programmer with enough experience will tell you the fix is to add some comments (more expository text than "it is obvious that..." or "the reader will quickly see..."), unit tests (concrete examples of abstract concepts), give variables and procedures descriptive names (The Wave Decomposition Lemma instead of Lemma 4.16), etc.
|
2038: Only 21 years away
|
This is (serious) a part of my retirement planning. I'll be mid-50s when this hits, and have enough low level system knowledge to be dangerous. In about 15 years, I'll start spinning up my epochalypse consultancy, and I'm expecting a reasonable return on investment in verifying systems as 2038 compliant.
|
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.