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Ellen Pao: My lawsuit failed. Others won’t
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It's easy to get hung up on the particulars of Pao's story and get sidetracked into defending or judging her, but I feel that is besides the point. I am more interested in the wider notion of why she wrote this article: to point out that sexism in tech is a thing, and that it shouldn't be.I'm wondering though: is this just about sexism, or is it about professionalism and maturity? Getting hit on by someone higher up the hierarchy than you can make it impossible to do your job, so that behavior is clearly unprofessional. But getting yelled at by your boss for shipping a bug is also unprofessional, and can also make it a toxic work environment. I'm not saying the two are the same, just that both are examples of unprofessional behavior that many places will tolerate.Isn't it time we have conversations about what it means to be a professional in tech? Maybe other industries suffer less from these things because they have a longer history and have more guild-like working practices, where professional behavior is more clearly defined. In tech people get away with wildly unprofessional behavior as long as "they get stuff done", and personally I never felt that was acceptable.Maybe this stuff is also sort of everywhere. Plenty of industries have toxic working relationships. Why isn't professionalism part of standard education tracks? I studied CS and I never learned about what it means to be a professional software developer. How do you have productive conversations with coworkers? How do you organize your work effectively? All of these things you're supposed to figure out on your own, but looking around I can tell that mostly people never do, or only do so after decades of getting it wrong.
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Avoid Else, Return Early (2013)
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Programmers with lots of hours of maintaining code eventually evolve to return early, sorting exit conditions at top and meat of the methods at the bottom.Same way you evolve out of one liners.Same way comments are extra weight that should only be in public or algorithm/need to know areas.Same way braces go on the end of the method/class name to reduce LOC.Same way you move on from heavy OO to dicts/lists.Same way you go more composition instead of inheritance.Same way while/do/while usually fades away, and if needed exit conditions.Same way you move on from single condition bracket-less ifs. (debatable but more merge friendly and OP hasn't yet)Same way you get joy deleting large swaths of code.and many others on and on.Usually these come from hours of writing/maintaining code and styles that lead to bugs.
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Keyboard Service Program for MacBook and MacBook Pro
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The quality at Apple, in both software and hardware, has obviously declined in the past couple years as their supply chain has come under strain.In the past three years:my MacBook has had replaced- The screen- The battery- The keyboardMy iPad had it's screen replaced, and my iPhone had its battery replaced.None of these are covered under AppleCare, they've all been replaced under individual recall programs.Sure, they have fixed each issue for free, so that's fine, but for what is supposed to be the most dependable consumer hardware on the market, it's rather surprising.
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LEGO built a life-size, drivable Bugatti from over a million Technic pieces
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Honestly the original source is probably better than the techcrunch link. No ads, more writeup.https://www.lego.com/en-us/aboutus/news-room/2018/august/tec...
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Maker Faire halts operations and lays off all staff
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Couple of points.When I was a lad, making electronics meant you could listen to shortwave radio or talk to people around the world, when there was little other opportunity.Plus, things like cars were still hackable with a few transistors and passive components, you could make a customised indicator timer, or turbo timer or what ever, and it was probably way cheaper if you knew what you were doing.Fast forward, very little you can now make is cheaper, or creates a functionality not otherwise available retail/off the shelf.Now for me, it was great - my dad was a radio amateur, I grew up with the those things, he lectured at uni and I had access to PDP-8 and 11 when no one had a computer at home and most people interacted with punch cards.I spent literally years of my younger life tinkering and discovered/learned by direct exploration and experimentation all sorts of things eg the rectification of copper oxide, Q factor and how to get it and use it, all the things you can use as earthing and antennas in radio systems (some pretty strange things in there), I wrote and sold Atari 400 games when I was 13 on, learning things like how to write a floating point library in a 6502 in minimal space, create physics engines for games, just to name a few, the list goes on.Now I have worked as an electrical engineer designing and building large and small industrial power and control systems for over 30 years.Most days I draw down on some former hobby or tinkering experience in some way in my work.Not sure the maker movement we have seen recently will create the same trajectory for too may others, maybe I am wrong, but a lot of what I did was because there were no equivalent consumer goods and the best info available was at the local library or maybe the odd magazine if you were lucky.
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Say goodbye to hold music
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Does anyone else find this to be a pretty hilarious example of a tech arms race? It solves a real problem, assuming it works, but what a strange, rube-goldberg-esque use of technology.Service Provider buys voice recognition software and sets up complex maze of phone tree options to drive users away from the human support agents (even though the users can't solve their problem without human intervention - if you don't want to pay for enough support agents for your call volume, wouldn't it just be simpler to let me cancel my damn account online??).Now user can deploy their own speech synthesis bot to wait on hold, with what is presumably a complex system of AI decisionmaking to be able to navigate the maze and find a human support agent to connect you with.
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I hope work from home continues
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Covid WFH is a real issue for our new developers. Especially the ones who are fresh out of college. They're missing out on so much institutional knowledge transfer. Especially the kind of monkey-see-monkey-do experience you need to build confidence using tools such as git.They're also hesitant to ping coworkers and ask for screen sharing time because they can't sense if the more senior developers are working on something. Mentorship has also been difficult when the mentor and mentee cannot work side by side.Management is looking into alternatives, such as having volunteers come into the office on a rotating basis.
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Can I Email?
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It's tempting to make shouldiemail.com and just answer "No" for all these features. Seriously though, it must be years between every time I see an HTML email which would not have been improved by being plain text.
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I started SaaS companies in 2013 and 2021 – how things have changed
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My impression is that every SaaS that is successful on ProductHunt (PH) or HN gets copied dozens of times within a few months. That's especially true for technically simple products. A good example is maybe privacy-friendly web analytics: I think products like Fathom and Simple Analytics were the first to really go after this angle (undoubedtly there were others before them though), and in less than 6 months dozens (hundreds?) of copycats turned up with exactly the same USP and the exact same look & feel. And interestingly it isn't the first mover who seems to win that market but rather the company with the most agressive (and sometimes outright misleading) marketing. So being the first doesn't guarantee your success anymore, at least if you don't have enough time to grow undisturbed.Personally I'd avoid posting products on PH or HN for that reason and instead focus on growing organically in a niche market where you're not immediately discoverable by copycat founders. In general PH feels more and more phony to me and I think there's a lot of astroturfing going on.
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It's weird that most of “Hacker” news is dominated by business news
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Something I noticed about Slashdot was that it started out talking about the latest processors, software, and Linux kernel patches. Then the conversation ever-so-slowly started drifting towards CEOs, the sharemarket, politics, and the like.It's a side-effect of an aging user base. Young people get excited about New Things! With big numbers!Older people get bored of the latest technological advancements and instead become interested in whether Zuckerberg will get dethroned or not.
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A New Coefficient of Correlation
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How is it possible to make a general coefficient of correlation that works for any non-linear relationship? Say if y=sha256(x), doesn't that mean y is a predictable function of x, but its statistically impossible to tell from looking at inputs/outputs alone?
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A one in a million bug in Switch kernel
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offtopic: I really wish reading preformatted text files on ios safari was good.. I have to export the file to Books in order to read it properly
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YouTube removes criticism of dangerous fractal wood burning, but leaves up tips
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There is a massive YouTube and Instagram industry of outright faking craft and cooking tips. They're not just bad or a stretch, they're intentionally fabricated, made at scale by TheSoul Publishing with 550 employees. That's because making cool things looking surprisingly easy goes viral way better than actual reality-grounded instructions, and for the adtech giants nothing matters except the number of clicks.Before people realize that they can't really make a 3-layer cake in a toaster, the fakers already cash in on the views. Usually the risk of these faked craft hacks is just cut fingers and kitchen fires, but the "just grab 2000V, it's so easy!" videos take it to another level of lethality.
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Tell HN: HP printers force you into agreement
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I've given up on virtually all brands of printers. The last brand standing that doesn't seem like absolute shit is Brother. I have an ~~inkjet~~ laser printer of theirs that I have connected to the network, which I use with IPP and AirPrint with no issues. HP printers have been horrible anti-consumer garbage for as long as I can remember at this point.
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Running large language models like ChatGPT on a single GPU
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Any chance these work on CPUs with any acceptable performance?I have a 10-core 20-thread monster CPU, but didn't bother with a dedicated GPU because I can't control something as simple as its temperature. See the complicated procedure that only works with the large proprietary driver here:https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NVIDIA/Tips_and_tricks#Over...
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Framework Laptop 16
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I’m happy to answer questions that folks have on this. There was also an earlier HN thread on our full launch event where we announced 13th Gen Intel Core and AMD Ryzen 7040 Series versions of the Framework Laptop 13, along with a bunch of other stuff: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35277660
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Passkeys will come at a cost
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Is it even a good idea to use physical security keys as passkeys in the first place? Passkeys are meant to be a password _replacement_, and for that you probably want the 2-factor properties afforded by phones or desktops which usually require "something you know" or "something you are" to unlock in addition to the "something you have" afforded by physically possessing them.IMO physical security keys are better left as second-factor authentication, to be used _in addition_ to passkeys in certain high-security contexts; particularly where resistance to cloning is a critical feature. Resident keys aren't necessary for that use case since by the time you get to the second factor step you already know the account you're trying to log into.Further, the autocomplete functionality afforded by resident keys is important for the UX of passkeys in my opinion. I don't think it makes sense to sacrifice that in order to to retain backwards compatibility with a small number of keys that only security nerds use. (Though if there were a way to maintain that UX without using resident keys I'd be cool with that.)
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Unity has seemingly silently removed its GitHub repo that tracks ToS changes
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This could have been done in a much better fashion to achieve the long term desired outcome (more income) while also ensuring continued trust and transparency with their community.Simply, they could have not made this retroactive on existing released games. Rather just be clear that going forward, games build using the new Unity versions would have a per-installation fee. And they would slowly discontinue support for the older versions on a specific schedule.There are new devices coming out like the new Switch, the Apple Vision Pro, and then the new features Unity is adding like AI, just add those to the new versions that have the run-time fee. People will upgrade to it on their own terms!By making it retroactive and forcing it on everyone, they have basically screwed over their existing customers who shipped games expecting a certain cost structure and now it is higher.Deleting this GitHub license archive repo where they make it clear that their license changes are likely unenforceable is icing on the cake.EDIT: To remove the claim that Unreal Engine had a similar per-install fee, it doesn't.
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Nomnoml
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These tools show up from time to time here, and I can appreciate the technical side of things and effort put into building the tool. However, I cannot imagine using something like this in practice - either at work or for my own uses. It's so much easier just to select, drag and drop graphical elements instead of spending time learning a specific markup language and typing everything out, hoping that the elements will appear approximately where you wish they would. Maybe it's not too bad for very simple diagrams but unmanageable for anything complex. All in all, I think it does not solve any problems and merely adds an additional layer of complexity.
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I took "abusing the HTML5 History" to the next level.
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Around the launch of IE9 beta I asked Dean Hachamovitch (IE honcho at MSFT) what he thought about people typing random things (besides URLs) into the navigation bar. I'd noticed not entirely tech-savvy people in my life using the navigation bar as sort of a launch bar for their whole browsing experience, using it for new searches, history exploration, etc.Hachamovitch reminded me that this was not really a new thing, as people have been using the command line since the dawn of time. Never did this really sink in until I saw this demo: The URL bar is a command line for the people. Behold its power.
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Dear Internet: It's no Longer OK Not to Know How Congress Works
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American geeks: if you want to fix your congress using your preexisting l33t hacker skillz rather than getting directly involved in politics (and who could blame you,) then here is my best advice:Force your legislature to start using version control.* No more sneaking revisions through in the middle of the night without anyone noticing.* Being able to do `git blame` style operations to resolve individual clauses down to individual lawmakers, then back to lobbyists.* Simple diffing would prevent deliberate obfuscation tactics like burying provisions deep inside piles of irrelevant stuff.* You could build a sweet github-style outward facing interface allowing the public to track the progress of bills in real time, increasing democratic awareness and participation.* Legally mandated commit messages accompanying each change justifying and explaining it; force them to write these in simple english. This alone would spin 'em around so hard they wouldn't know what day it is.* Use your imagination. I'm sure you can think of 100 reasons why this would be awesome.Build it, open source it, then start your own lobbying/PR machine to demand that they use it. Constantly ask for justifications as to why they are not willing to use it, given the massive, obvious benefits it would bring. Ask what they have to fear from the extra scrutiny and accountability it would bring. Surely the "social media generation" can out-lobby the lobbyists? That sounds like it should be the kind of thing we're good at.Or just forget about that entirely and try to think of some way to decimate the lobbying industry in the same way that hackers are destroying the content distribution industries and all that other stuff.
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HN Spoof
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I know these kinds of things aren't the best for HN, but every once in a while, you gotta have some fun.Great job, OP.On 12/31/09, I did one of these as a 10 year prediction. Funny how some things change and some don't:Hacker News 12/31/2019 new | comments | leaders | jobs | submit login 1. Tell HN: Congratulations Patio11 - first to reach 1,000,000 karma
4 points by iamelgringo 1 hour ago | discuss
2. Ask HN: Any Predictions for the Year 2029?
11 points by DanielBMarkham 37 minutes ago | 8 comments
3. The Apple Tablet to Launch 1st Quarter 2020 (cnet.com)
210 points by vaksel 20 hours ago | 122 comments
4. President-Elect Graham to Appoint Sam Altman to Cabinet (msnbc.com)
14 points by muriithi 4 hours ago | 2 comments
5. Trevor Blackwell's Robot Collects Rocks on Mars (science.com)
143 points by ojbyrne 18 hours ago | 81 comments
6. Tell HN: Hacker News is getting too much like reddit
17 points by jamesjones 6 hours ago | 3 comments
7. Last Land Line Disconnected at Midnight (cnn.com)
6 points by chickamade 3 hours ago | discuss
8. Mark Zuckerman buys Portugal (worldnews.com)
51 points by larryz 14 hours ago | 16 comments
9. How Half Our Staff Telecommutes from Space (joelonsoftware.com)
45 points by jspolsky 13 hours ago | 2 comments
10. No Deadlines Needed After Singularity is Reached (wired.com)
44 points by bxgame 14 hours ago | 28 comments
11. Ask pg: Why do YC teams only get $1,000,000?
19 points by abcklm 9 hours ago | 5 comments
12. KidneyExchange.com has 10,000th successful transplant (yahoo.com)
23 points by phsr 10 hours ago | 7 comments
13. Walmart Acquires Microsoft (wallstreetjournal.com)
76 points by francis24 20 hours ago | 17 comments
14. Baby Communicates from Womb via usb23.7 (scientificamerican.com)
13 points by johnson 8 hours ago | 7 comments
15. Mark Bao Starts 1,000th Start-Up (startupnews.com)
4 points by MarySmith 3 hours ago | discuss
16. unalone accepts Pulitzer for blog (cnn.com)
20 points by bootload 10 hours ago | 11 comments
17. Ask HN: Review my app: NoMoreAds.com (nomoreads.com)
17 points by fred 10 hours ago | discuss
18. Poll: Favorite Language, Ruby 92.7 or C++++++++
37 points by uafes 17 hours ago | 5 comments
19. Feds Force Google to Divest its Apps Business (news.com)
38 points by pete 17 hours ago | 5 comments
20. Burrito Tunnel Between Calif & NYC Finally Completed (onion.com)
50 points by jose 20 hours ago | 20 comments
21. In 2020 Belize will become the world’s second-largest economy (economist.com)
30 points by pg 16 hours ago | 23 comments
22. Ask HN: What was Microsoft Office?
63 points by yahfsh 23 hours ago | 6 comments
23. Wikipedia Available on Gumwrapper (abc.com)
3 points by lapenne 3 hours ago | discuss
24. Boeing Dreamliner Delayed Until 2022 (airlinenews.com)
4 points by mitchel 5 hours ago | discuss
25. Ted Williams becomes 1st to win MVP with 2 different bodies (mlb.com)
5 points by johnson 6 hours ago | 2 comments
26. Ask HN: Review my app (virtualsex.com)
125 points by ghpoa 1 day ago | 13 comments
27. Science: Cigarettes Were Healthy After All (science.com)
43 points by woodyallen 20 hours ago | 14 comments
28. Broadband Finally Reaches Flint, Michigan (cbs.com)
133 points by johnguest 1 day ago | 20 comments
29. GO TO Added to Python, 27 Programmers Jump Out Windows (python.org)
149 points by swert 1 day ago | 20 comments
30. Wipe The Slate Clean For 2020, Commit Web 9.0 Suicide (techcrunch.com)
2 points by nreece 2 hours ago | discuss
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(Original link and discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025798)
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David Miranda, schedule 7 and the danger that all reporters now face
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With the NSA debate, I keep wondering if there is something people in positions in the government and security agencies know that makes them keep doing what they're doing.I mean some of these people are really smart and understand how this spying can be abused. There must be something they know that makes them build or support these programs.
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An Open Letter to HN from EFF, Demand Progress, and Cory Doctorow
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As foreigners, should we care?Next time someone organizes something similar, can they think of a worlwide action? Can they make something which doesn't sound like "Worldwide anti-american day" but rather "Worldwide day of support to the debate that US citizen started"?US citizens are only 313 millions and the US law protects you against surveillance. We, the rest of the world, are all subject to this surveillance in unlimited way.
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Docker without Docker
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Author here - I'm working on a blog post for this and didn't expect this to be posted on HN so soon, but I guess that's what I should expect for posting a link to it in another HN comment! :)These slides correspond to a workshop I conducted a week ago demonstrating the internals of Docker and how Docker containers can be run without using any of the Docker tools or runtime.Docker is a great tool, and I'm glad it's gained so much traction. But containerization is still new to many people, and even then there's still a lot of confusion about the difference between Docker and containerization in general. The goal of this presentation isn't to discourage anyone from using Docker, but to outline the lay of the land for people interested in using containers.Personally, I run containers both with systemd and with Docker. The good news is that it's really easy to switch from one to the other, so there's very little cost to trying it out both ways.
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Show HN: I spent a year making an electro-mechanical prototype of a liquid clock
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author here, i will be glad to answer any questions you guys have
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EU wants to require platforms to filter uploaded content, including code
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The other issue not discussed here is that Google and the rest will be required to remove offending content within an hour.Notwithstanding the rest of the discussions, this will only create more jobs. I realize Google may not like the hit to the profit line, bit it's a bit disingenuous to ask only the developers to sharpen the axes and fight the Google's war while not informing them of the rest of the legislation: "Illegal content means any information which is not in compliance with Union law or the law of a Member
State, such as content inciting people to terrorism, racist or xenophobic, illegal hate speech, child sexual
exploitation, illegal commercial practices, breaches of intellectual property rights and product safety. What
is illegal offline is also illegal online."I guess I object the delivery. Tell us everything, and then ask us for support. This way they are just spinning it to fit their agenda in a way that keeps us less informed: "they are after your GitHub". Classical FUDEdit: Here is a much better overview
http://ec.europa.eu/newsroom/dae/document.cfm?doc_id=50096
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Make front end shit again
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I love the point the site is trying to make but I'm confused as to why this is built with a vue.js static site generator requiring node/npm/yarn and an almost 7,000 line yarn.lock file.Shouldn't this literally be a single page, hand-built HTML file with inline CSS? Is this trying to be self-ironic or something?
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Am I logged in or not? GDPR case study on the example of Chrome browser change
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I don't understand why the Chrome team is picking this hill to die on- their team (managers and developers) are all over twitter and reddit trying to explain the privacy violations away as if the people upset about this are just not understanding what's going on.I really expect this change to push a lot of people away from Chrome, and frankly I wouldn't be surprised if it started opening up more antitrust possibilities due to how they're using their browser to give their services special functionality others can't get.
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Ask HN: Which tool do you use to create beautiful diagrams?
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http://plantuml.comI've been doing a lot of flow diagrams and PlantUML has been invaluable.
I specifically like it because sharing the flow means sharing some text, which itself is vaguely human-readable.
There's an online renderer (bottom of the page in the above link), which means simple diagrams are also quick to create and view.
It's got a few different modes that it understands but I'd definitely add it to the list when you need simple vector graphics.
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Calgary student has been studying decibel levels in hand dryers since age nine
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My kids get nervous as soon as they even see a hand dryer. They start crying when it's on. I thought they were exaggerating, it never occurred to me that sound levels for kids are different because they are smaller (though it makes complete sense). That, coupled with higher sensitivity to noise and more delicate hearing canals of youngsters kind of make me feel like a bad parent for trying to let them use the dryers anyway (Even though I have long since given up). This kids research proves my kids right, and I am not easily convinced ;) Great accomplishment for I should listen to my kids.Already an impressive combination of curiosity and perseverance to get a scientific paper published for any non-academic, let alone a 13 year old!!edit: The absolute worst things are these https://www.ehanddryers.com/hand-dryers/tap-hand-dryers, my kids just plain refuse to wash their hands out of fear of accidentally triggering the dryer
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YouTube video has its own URL in it
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Anybody knows how?
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Mapping Coronavirus, Responsibly
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As someone living here in the Bay Area, I have little to no interaction with the current ongoing Coronavirus outbreak. Why are Asian countries taking such dramatic measures right now?To be willing to take on such an economic drain in order to do so makes it seem like they're treating the virus like a potential pandemic. Are the death rates for the current coronavirus outbreak substantially higher than the regular flu? What else am I missing here?
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The Anti-Amazon Alliance
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As a consultant, I see companies struggling to compete with Amazon (or Amazon-like companies). Most companies struggle for a couple of reasons- They are ego driven, with legacy execs & others relentlessly protecting their status - whereas Amazon is relentlessly data-driven- They have poor incentive structures and are feature factories. They value velocity over outcomes. Amazon, by being more data driven, is focused on being extremely outcome oriented- Because of the first 2, Amazon can give people and groups a tremendous amount of autonomy, whereas other orgs heavily micromanage or have structures that create more politics than value- There's little place to hide at Amazon (which means you might work your ass off!)To compete with Amazon, you have to learn from them, and be prepared to adopt their practices as the new industry norm. Not just dismiss them as some relentless and heartless evil empire.
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Coinbase offers exit package for employees not comfortable with its mission
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Why is a company wanting to be apolitical is controversial? That should be the default, is this an American thing like how masks and healthcare are controversial?I would expect a government to have proper separation from church and state, so why is it weird to want a company to separate politics and mission?I can't see any good coming from being in a work environment where the company supports a political issue I'm strongly against, it would make co-workers and myself feel like opponents and likely make for a hostile work environment.
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ProtonMail CEO calls Apple's forced in-app purchases 'Mafia extortion'
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I'm actually happier to pay a small premium for IAP based subscriptions because of the cancellation options.Having been subjected to asinine "retention" policies that make ending a subscription service an onerous and time consuming process (ex: NYT), and having seen first hand how a company purposefully makes subscription cancellations difficult, being able to open a single interface and click `Cancel` is a massive UX benefit.I'm not debating if a 30% cut is reasonable, but in the drive to move everything to a subscription model, I have started avoiding services without an IAP option.
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Google made it nearly impossible for users to keep their location private
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Google had a brilliant advertising business with AdWords originally, where the ads were simply based on the search term and not a bunch of Orwellian surveillance on the person searching.From the research I've seen, all this privacy-invading crap doesn't even improve ad performance much - it's small incremental gains at best. And per this article, those gains are clearly coming at the expense of user trust and goodwill, something not reflected in click thru rates and RPM.Here's hoping we can get past all this invasive retargeting / surveillance / privacy-invading crap and get back to straightforward contextual ads, like car parts ads on a hot rod website - our world would be better for it, and maybe Google could restore a little of its rapidly fading goodwill.
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ProtonMail deletes 'we don't log your IP' from website after activist arrested
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Be careful when companies market themselves as Swiss or that due to them being located in Switzerland means there is some extra layer of security or privacy.Sure, it's a more stable country than many other countries in the world, but not much different from most EU countries for example. And privacy wise there is no difference.Be also aware of the fact that many companies market themselves as Swiss, but all it means is they have a head office in Switzerland due to tax reasons. In one example, it's a cloud storage company, they say on their marketing page and their about page that they are based in Switzerland and under Swiss law, but if you look at the legal pages the company you sign up with are actually based in Bulgaria. Their servers are based in Texas, USA and Luxemburg, Europe and their development team in Bulgaria.
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Show HN: Time travel debugger for web development
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Co-founder here. It feels incredible to be sharing Replay with all of you. It's been a labor of love the past five years!Replay started off as a simple experiment in what would happen if we added a step back button and rewind button to the Debugger. We quickly realized two things. First, nobody uses breakpoints. Second, being able to share is so much more powerful than being able to rewind.Here’s how Replay works today. Somebody on the team records a bug with the Replay Browser and shares the replay url with the team. From there, developers jump in and add print statements. The logs appear in the Console immediately so you don’t need to refresh and reproduce a thing.Over the past year we’ve talked to hundreds of users, recorded 2.5 million replays, and worked incredibly hard to ensure Replay would be fast, secure, and robust from the get go.Want to check it out? You can download Replay today. Can’t wait to hear what you think!Interested in learning more, here is our announcement blog post https://medium.com/replay-io/launching-replay-the-time-trave...
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1Password Has Raised $620M
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"1Password Has Raised $620M"Ah fuck. They now need to grow at any cost to earn all that money back. And they'll throw their users under the bus, if they have to, because it's either grow like a unicorn or go bust.Also, I sincerely have no clue how a password manager could be so expensive. Last time I checked, the excellent KeePassXC was still free open source and developed by volunteers in their free time. How come 1Password needs the equivalent of 7750 years of $80k annual salary to build the same?
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Apple removes Python 2.7 in macOS 12.3 beta
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What? In a point release?We all knew this was coming, but doing it in a point release seems like exceedingly bad form, particularly as Apple does major releases annually. I never expect point releases to break stuff, at least not on purpose.
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Scrcpy: Display and control your Android devices connected over USB or TCP/IP
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Is there a reverse scrcpy where I see my computer screen on Android? No need for control, just mirroring screen is enough.
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XML is the future
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I've been working in the tech industry in the US for about 5 years. Ever since I knew myself I've been coding. From middle school to high school, given any problem, like Sudoku, or keeping up daily chores, my solution was Programming! Programming wasy homebase. Then I studied it in uni, thought I was kinda good at it, and loved it.But when I started working in the industry, I realized that it's absolutely exhausting. Hype after hype, fad after fad, modern after modern, refactor after refactor. I have a workflow, I know how to build apps. Then one day director of Ops comes and completely and utterly changes the workflow. Ok fine, I'm young, will learn this. Month passes, it is now Terraform. Ok fine I'm young, will learn this. Now we're serverless. Ok fine, will learn. Now everything is container. Ok. Now everything microservice. K. Now turns out lambdas aren't good, so everything is ECS. OK will rewrite everything...Look I'm not even complaining. But it feels like I'm stuck in a Franz Kafka novel. We just keep changing and changing the same things again and again because that's the new way to do. Big distraction. Destroys your workflow. Forget about all the util scripts you wrote last 6 months being useless.I don't even know how I would do it. Maybe I would do this the same way if I had any power. But that doesn't change the fact that it's a bit ridiculous. Fun but tiring. Entertaining but exhausting. Cute but frustrating.
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GitHub for Mac
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I hate all the visual clutter and unjustified complexity the new stylish iOS-like interfaces bring. Those interfaces are only good for Twitter and friends (and for screenshots).Some feedback:* Get rid of huge spacing everywhere (for example here: http://github-images.s3.amazonaws.com/blog/2011/mac-screensh...)* Make animations go faster.* History should have preview pane with diffs (see Mail) instead of making me click on commits.* There are windows on Macs. You can use them instead of [edit: or in addition to] making me navigate inside a single window.* Loading indicators are annoying. Move them to bottom (there it won't distract me, but I'll know that it's still loading).Oh, and congrats on release.
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Replacing Photoshop with NSString
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Shameless plug - Monodraw [1] is perfectly suited to create the ASCII diagrams for this. I'm planning to add special support for ASCII Image if there's enough demand - so definitely let me know.[1] http://monodraw.helftone.com
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What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt
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To everyone complaining about the $250K (see edit, it's actually 200K) per person in salary (which seems to be everyone at the moment), a few things to keep in mind:1) That includes benefits2) They are in Silicon Valley and have to compete with everyone else in Silicon Valley3) Given what they have accomplished with such a small team, these are probably high caliber people.4) In SV there is a good 25% premium you pay for engineers with security expertise.As someone who runs a business and has to hire talent, I can say that I'd consider myself lucky to get such a team for such a great price.Edit: A bunch of people are saying "why not remote". I think they are in fact mostly remote, but they still have to compete with SV wages because really good people command those wages whether they are here or not.Edit2: As has been pointed out multiple times, the blog post was not clear, and it is actually 200K per person, all in.
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What if jobs are not the solution but the problem?
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The essay suffers from Ted-talk disease: lots of grand gestures and bromides, not as much rigorous thinking. The underlying problem is an important one, however.A little-discussed solution to this problem is one I would like to see tried, distributism:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DistributismA book I am currently reading (and enjoying) on it is:https://www.amazon.com/Toward-Truly-Free-Market-Distributist...
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How to leak to the press
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So much more to opsec than using tor. I hope leakers are either ready to be unmasked, or have countermeasures against things like document fingerprinting.
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Android overtakes Windows as the internet’s most used operating system
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I guess this means we can officially stop hating on Microsoft for having such a lax attitude towards security, considering their last OS to suffer from that attitude was released 16 years ago, and it accounts for less than 3% of present day traffic according to statcounter.comMeanwhile according to the same stats, Android sits around 37.9%, and I have to wonder just how many of those devices are still impacted by for example the 2015 libstagefright vulnerability. Given Google's guiltless ongoing "throw code over the wall" approach to security and passing the buck on to vendors who almost never ship firmware updates for old handsets, perhaps now is the time for us to begin holding Google to the same standard we applied to Microsoft a decade ago.Google Security Team, here's your call to stop pontificating on the Project Zero blog and throwing cheap muck at Microsoft. You've got an even bigger and more complicated mess to clean up, you dug the hole yourself, it's going to take you longer, and you should have started on it years agoedit: If it weren't clear, the tragedy here is that instead of most devices being governed by a well-tested security process owned by a single responsible vendor, they're at the mercy of a plethora of downstream vendors who do nothing, with the ultimate upstream washing its hands and paying little more than immature lip service to the issue, never mind having anything that even remotely resembles a solid process.
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Nginx Unit
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It's worth noting that it's rarely necessary or desirable to put an app server like nginx in front of Go HTTP server applications. The Go standard library http and TLS stack are production quality and rock solid. Putting something in front is mostly cargo culting from people more used to the worlds of PHP/Python/Ruby/etc.
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Show HN: Open Logos – Free logos for open source projects
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A few of these are great, however if you are serious about your OSS project, IMHO you should identify one that seems like a fit, and work with the author (paying him/her) in order to start a process to reach a logo that very uniquely and precisely represents your project.
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The Google Cemetery – A list of dead Google products and why they died
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I know we bash Google for discontinuing services here a lot.I definitely bemoaned the demise of Google Reader.But if this list is complete, it's really not so bad, considering the size and age of Google.
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Airbnb and security camera disclosure
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I've lived in Airbnbs full-time for about 18 months while traveling, and Airbnb has lost my trust repeatedly in terms of reliability, safety, and user-friendliness.- Host listing quality has gone consistently downhill. Now, it's many slumlords just trying to make a quick buck rather than support the original community idea or provide a great stay.- Airbnb support response times are horribly slow. They hide their phone number, then force you to go through a ticketing system for urgent issues. Then, they start assigning you a new "case manager" every few hours as their shifts change, which means the rep never is caught up on the issue. Sometimes, they forget to transfer you to a new rep before ending their shift, which could result in zero responses for days until the rep works again.- When there is a problem, Airbnb supports the host and makes little to no effort to relocate users. For example, when our unit flooded, among other problems, the feedback was basically "well we can book you into another available unit". The problem was that it was peak Summer in Barcelona, we were there for a long period of time, and the only available units were minimum 5x the price.- We had an Airbnb burglarized. Again, we waited hours for a response, as a police forensics unit was dusting the unit for fingerprints. We suspect that the host was complicit after realizing that previous tenants were also burglarized. Airbnb's insurance policy covered none of our losses ($10K+ in electronics, jewelry, watches, clothing, etc). We ended up feeling unsafe and canceling the reservation with 3 weeks remaining. As a "courtesy", Airbnb support credited our account for less than the cost of one night at a local replacement unit. Because we accepted the credit, they considered the matter "resolved" and did nothing else.I've spent $30K+ on Airbnb. It started as a great alternative to hotels. Now, I can no longer recommend it, and I prefer a hotel.
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Twitter migrates data to Google Cloud
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Disclosure: I work at Google Cloud (and directly with Derek and the Twitter team).I’ll try to edit this page tomorrow when I’m at a computer, but there’s much more information in Derek’s talk at NEXT [1]. They (rightfully) didn’t want to get into a detailed “this is what we saw on ”, but Derek alludes to their careful benchmarking across providers.While you should always assume smart people make economically reasonable decisions, Derek’s point about savings is about list price differences that result from total system performance (and not any sort of special discounting). I’m hoping a follow-up talk will let us say more about how the migration is going, while this talk was focused on the decision to move part of (!) their Hadoop environment to GCP.[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4FLFcWgZdo4
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Websocketd
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This is the second or third "it's CGI again" thing I've seen in the past year. While these things are cool and definitely have their place, it's still worth noting that process per connection scales fairly poorly, simply because processes and forking are relatively expensive, and therefore it's probably unwise to deploy something like this in production anymore. It is what it is, I suppose.
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H.264 is magic (2016)
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Chroma subsampling is a terrible idea in the digital era. You should just assign a different compression factor to the chroma channels instead. I don't understand why we keep using this system of discarding 75% of the color data BEFORE applying the lossy compression algorithm. (Well I do know of one argument - apparently it reduces the amount of CPU time required to compress and decompress the data, but I think that's a pretty lame reason)
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YouTube was launched as a dating site
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I didn't realize The Wayback Machine had so much YouTube content from the early days. Really interesting going back and seeing what was on the front page on some random day in 2006.Looking at what people were uploading and what people were watching leaves me feeling a bit wistful. It seems like it was a more authentic place before the money caught up with it.
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GitHub Actions now supports CI/CD, free for public repositories
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This is very interesting to me. It also makes me think about the natural rise of monopolies and monoculture in tech. GitHub has really been extending to "eating the world" as of late. Recently in terms of their package registry that must have folks like Artifactory and Nexus a bit shaken, and now this, which is bad news for folks like CircleCI (and I say this as a CircleCI user).As a developer, in the short term I love this. Fewer things I need to cobble together and worry about how to integrate. I mean, it's already the case that if GitHub goes down that my CircleCI jobs won't work, so having one company to yell at and monitor alone is a plus.But long term it makes the competitive ecosystem much less robust. And as a startup employee, makes me feel how disrupting established platform competitors gets that much more difficult - even if you have a better product, it's hard to fight against the "platform" as they have more integrated points of value.
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Bert Sutherland Has Died
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I knew Bert for well over 50 years, and the first word that comes to mind to describe him is "lovable", and the second is "foundational".It is too early for those of us who loved him to recount "Bert stories" and especially "Bert and Ivan" stories, but Dan has provided the links to the YouTube video CHM tribute to the two brothers. Everyone should also read the Wikipedia article about Bert.Bert's PhD thesis is most often characterized by its title "Online Graphical Specification Of Procedures", but once you look at it you realize that he was one of the first (if not the first) inventor of "dataflow" programs, and in fact this thesis was central to the many "prior art" definitions to quash lawsuits about dataflow ideas.Another dimension to Bert's scientific and engineering career that is not mentioned enough is that he was one of the earliest and main drivers of what is called CAD today (a rather small number of people in different places made this happen in the early 60s -- including Bert's brother Ivan -- and Bert focused some of the powerful human and computing resources of Lincoln Labs on this vital technology).Bert's personality was sunny, friendly, and "sweetly firm", to the point that many people clamored to have him as their manager (including only half-jokingly: Ivan). I was completely thrilled when Parc brought in Bert to run the Systems Science Lab in which my group, Lynn Conway's group, Bill English's group etc were all ensconced.Bert, as with the other enlightened ARPA research managers knew that "the geese wanted to lay their golden eggs" and the manager's job was to support these efforts, not to try to tell the geese how to lay the special eggs). He was superb at this, and many critical inventions and systems happened because he was the nurturer.I guess I should tell a "Bert and Ivan" story. Their father was a civil engineer who brought not just blueprints home but gadgets and kits for the two brothers -- who were just two years apart in age -- to play with. Bert would recall that Ivan was so smart that he would just start putting the stuff together while Bert read the manual. At the 95% point Ivan would get stuck and Bert would know what to do next. The two brothers with very different personalities got along wonderfully well over their entire lives, and would occasionally do a company together.A big deal when the kids were young was their mother driving them down from Scarsdale to Murray Hill to Bell Labs to meet Claude Shannon. Years later at MIT, Shannon wound up being a thesis supervisor of both of their PhDs done a few years apart.I think most of us from 50+ years ago in the ARPA community just revered and were in awe of the research generations that came before us, especially the one right before us. It was tough to do computing back then, but they didn't let this bother them at all. They would program anything they wanted to have happen -- mostly in machine code -- and they would design and build any hardware they needed to run the programs they needed -- mostly with discrete components and relatively high voltages over sometimes acres of computer.They showed us how to work and play and design and sculpt and the deep art that lies behind the components. We can never thank them enough, and can only "pay forward" by helping those who come after us.
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Redis 6.0 GA
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I have a bit of a tangent question for more experienced back-end developers: where do you fit Redis (or other caching mechanisms) in the traditional MVC model? I haven't had a use-case for Redis yet, but I'd like to know how should I approach the architecture of an app using Redis.
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Google sued: Idle Android eats mobile data to send telemetry and preload ads
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> Under active use, Android devices transfer about 11.6MB of data to Google servers daily, or 350MB per month, it's claimed, which is about half the amount transferred by an iPhone.Interesting, so 350MB of data per month is abuse, iPhones 175MB per month isn't. I guess Google now has to half their data use for it to be at parity with Apple and we're all fine?
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LosslessCut: lossless video/audio editing
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> This app is not for exact cutting. Start cut time will be "rounded" to the nearest previous keyframe, which may be a fraction of a second before your desired cut point, or up to several seconds, depending on the encoding.I found this problem with all ffmpeg-based editors...does anybody know of an editor capable of cutting between inter-frames? The same happens with sound files, which is inconvenient.
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The Future of the Vim Project
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What is it that prevents the rest of the vim community from adopting neovim? From what I can observe, a great deal already have. But for the folks holding out, what is it that outweighs all that neovim has to offer?
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Undermining Democracy: The EU Commission's Controversial Push for Surveillance
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The title should be shortened from "Undermining Democracy: The European Commission's Controversial Push for Digital Surveillance" simply to:"Undermining Democracy: The European Commission".The EC is sheer horror. The thousands of years old saying: "The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the state" has never been truer.I've done a short consulting gig at the European Parliament, which at least tries to be the good guys. But the EP is tiny compared to the EC and the EC is pulling the strings: the EP is supposed to bring some kind of democracy but there's none.All these rules are benefitting people in power and they're all ever more intrusive.For example the MiCA one (Markets in Digital Assets), which is not at all only about cryptocurrencies/crypto-tokens (it's also about upcoming centralized "euro coin" emitted by EU central banks), is sheer horror too. I've read it all and it's madness. Insanity.It's all about control. Complete, total and utter control over every single aspect of EU citizens' lives.They want to know everything about everyone: nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.Those who believe it's "for our own good" are out of their minds.
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Eric Schmidt: On April 4th I Will Step Down, Larry Page to be CEO
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I wonder how much of this is due to some of the bad decisions Eric Schmidt has made with google.
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FCC approves plan to consider paid priority on Internet
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I don't get this whole net neautrality discussion that is going on in US (and maybe somewhere else, just haven't paid attention).Consumers pay based on speed of their connection. If ISP feels like the consumers are not paying enough, raise the prices.Service providers (not ISPs, but the ones who run servers that consumers connect to) pay based on speed of their connection. If the ISP feels like service providers are not paying enough, raise the prices.Why in the earth there is a need for slow/fast lanes and data caps?I'm four years old. So please keep that in mind when explaing this to me. :)
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Stripe Is the New PayPal
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--PSA regarding Credit Card Validation--Last year I was testing Stripe integration. I tried using my own credit card with a fake name. Surprise, it went through. I emailed Stripe support. After half a dozen emails discussing CC authorization I learned that Stripe does not and can not validate Name & Address on credit card.Stripe told me that Credit Card companies do not disclose this data to Payment Processors like Stripe. Thus, Stripe simply passes on the name & address to the CC API.Interestingly enough, Name & Address are NOT validated by major credit card companies. You can use junk names on your name & billing address and that will NOT stop your credit card transaction from going through.Try for yourself next time you order something online. Makes me wonder why they even collect the data in the first place...
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Congratulations You’ve Been Fired
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Does anyone have more context on Dan Lyons?After reading this article, and the one from Fortune[0], and his post on LinkedIn[1], it feels like he's out there scraping together blatant PR for his new book. And it makes me honestly wonder whether he went to work for HubSpot looking for a story to write in the first place... and being a writer for the "Silicon Valley" TV series doesn't really help his credibility in that sense.Disclaimer: I really don't know anything about this story. Something just feels off. Maybe HubSpot really is that bad, who knows.[0]: http://fortune.com/disrupted-excerpt-hubspot-startup-dan-lyo...[1]: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/when-comes-age-bias-tech-comp...---Edit:After listening to the interview from @CPLX's response[2] I have to agree, he doesn't seem outlandish or anything. And all of the points he makes about HubSpot's content model being complete spam I agree with. I've definitely never liked interacting with HubSpot as a consumer, that much I know.I feel like in these scenarios he's incentivized to get outlandish PR for his book, so some of the things I'd take with a grain of salt--sentences like, "The offices bear a striking resemblance to the Montessori preschool that my kids attended: lots of bright basic colors, plenty of toys, and a nap room with a hammock and soothing palm tree murals on the wall." But there is probably a lot truth to his story as well.@ghaff also summed it up well: "That said, I find it's a cogent perspective even if it probably shouldn't be taken as literally accurate reportage."[2]: http://www.npr.org/2016/04/05/473097951/laid-off-tech-journa...
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Electron 1.0 is here
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I'm happy and grateful for any and all open source software, because it enriches everybody, well beyond the scope of its creators. But someone has to say it:Electron is the cancer that is killing desktop computing.It all started years ago with Firefox, whose interface itself was built using web technologies, in a "brilliant stroke." DOM, CSS, Javascript... maybe not HTML per se, but an XML substitute, and so on. I dare anybody say that Firefox's interface has ever felt as fast as IE, Chrome, Opera, or Safari (on Mac.) It never did and still does not.Then someone at GitHub had the bright idea to take this "winning" concept and apply it to a developer's text editor, of all things! I still cannot fathom how Atom can have more than 3 users. Every time I've tried it, I've ditched it after 30 seconds. Slooooooooooow!Fast-forward to 2016: now I see new Electron apps popping up every other day. Even something as simple as a text-only WhatsApp IM client, which could be written in a dozen of C++ files, is a bloated monstrosity that eats RAM for breakfast and contains an entire Node.js interpreter and a Webkit layout engine.Cancer, I say!Kill it with fire!
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Options vs. Cash
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I know 100+ people from a dozen companies who've made $1mm+ on equity. None of my friends would write a post like this.That said, valuing equity is complicated:- most offers include a healthy mix of cash and equity and benefits. Evaluate the whole package.- unless you can pre-exercise via 83(b), I generally avoid options. RSUs are fine and many companies are offering them. Clever hack: counter the offer with a demand that the company pay 2% of the cost of exercising for each month you're employed, grossed up for taxes.- watch out for illiquidity: whales often delay IPO which locks up employees. This compounds the exercise issue. Clever hack: counter the offer with a requirement that the company offer to buy back the equity at the most recent preferred share price, if the company accepts investment at a valuation exceeding $100mm.Stay positive!
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In a swipe at Chrome, Firefox now blocks ad trackers by default
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Those who want a world where Firefox has a higher market share and mind share, please consider doing the following:1. Evangelize Firefox to people you know any chance you get and show them all the reasons why its better than Chrome (focus on privacy as an important point). Show them how great browsing can be with a few key extensions (like uBlock Origin, Containers, Privacy Possum, etc.). This does not imply that Mozilla is beyond criticism or that Firefox should not be held to a higher standard.2. If you can, donate money to Mozilla regularly. [1] As of a couple of years ago (IIRC), more than 90% of Mozilla's revenue was from its partnership with Google for being the default search engine in many geographies. As long as this remains true, Google will only tolerate Firefox being a viable competitor while Firefox still remains as small to moderately sized competition (to avoid antitrust action). If/when Firefox gains a much larger piece of the market, Google will (as it has been doing all these years) even more forcefully use its money and marketing muscle on all its properties as well as add more tiny annoyances on its properties to make Firefox seem buggy citing tangential things like "web standards" or "pushing the web forward" and other euphemisms that companies like Google use to crush competition.IMO, there needs to be a lot more individual funding of Mozilla while keeping it accountable to users and as per its own manifesto. The level of competition among browsers right now leaves us all vulnerable.Edit: After seeing a reply to this comment, I did a quick search and found that donating money to Mozilla means donating to the Mozilla Foundation, and that the money may not go to funding Firefox development, which is part of Mozilla Corporation. See this discussion from December 2018 on reddit. [2] It may be desirable for at least part of the donation (as decided by Mozilla Corporation) to go to Firefox development. Does it already happen that way or is there a way to get this result, like in the case of Mozilla Thunderbird where donations go to that project (alone)?[1]: https://donate.mozilla.org[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/a98gmi/donations_t...
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Ask HN: Great fiction books that have had a positive impact on your life?
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Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy, aka Three Body Problem. Explored existential topics in a way I've never encountered anywhere else. I truly believe that decades from now this series will be viewed as the LOTR of our time.I've recently been reading the Foundation series, and have found the concept of The Mule character to be incredibly eye opening. I can't say directly it's had a positive impact on my life but it's definitely changing my outlook and I feel its expanded my horizons.
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If founders treated their investors the same way they treated their employees
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Valid reasons to work for a startup:- You are a cofounder.- You have little experience and you are using this to break into the industry, and get experience on many different technologies ("wear many hats").- They are working on a very specific problem or using a specific technology that you strongly desire to work on and it's difficult to do it anywhere else.- You want to work a certain way (remote, on the beach, whatever) and they are willing to go this route.Invalid reasons for working at a startup:- Getting rich off stock options.- Making a lot of money in salary.- Work / life balance.- Stability.
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Remembering my father
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Every time Bill Gates comes up in the news I'm reminded by how insane the conspiracy theories surrounding him have become on social media, more so now than ever.
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Crows possess higher intelligence long thought a primarily human attribute
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> crows know what they know and can ponder the content of their own minds, a manifestation of higher intelligence and analytical thought long believed the sole province of humans and a few other higher mammals.I've always found the common thought that only humans and a select few of other animals are the only ones that posses higher intelligence to be incredibly arrogant of our species. Why wouldn't they have higher intelligence? As far as I can tell, it's because there's no simple test that could be applied to confirm or deny whether higher intelligence exists within an animal, so we then jump to the conclusion "Because I can't prove that they do have higher intelligence, then they must not have higher intelligence" - logic doesn't work that way! Glad to see some people are willing to dig a little deeper and take the time to show that crows do have this capability.
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Google Widevine Content Decryption Module DMCA
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Isn't DRM... Completely fucking pointless? I can go on The Pirate Bay and find 4K rips of all movies and shows I want. If DRM can't prevent that, what's the point?All it does is infringe on our rights to be able to do what we want on our own devices. It's crazy.
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WRT54G History: The Router That Accidentally Went Open Source
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It's one of the most successful routers ever sold and yet network equipment manufacturers are still fighting tooth and nail to keep their devices closed source. It just doesn't make sense to me.
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Zero arrests in 6 months of health care professionals replacing police officers
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No one is talking about the very big risk associated with this, that mental health professionals can commit you against your will with no trial, which is an erosion of civil liberties (incarceration without trial). Having known several friends who got committed and held against their will in psych wards when there was no good reason to, because their insurance was good, this is an issue.Notice they don't give any stats about outcomes, but the primary cited issue is "mental health" which is very vague and a subjective assessment.We should not create an extra judicial system that has no checks and balances. Otherwise we will head towards medical authoritarianism which could easily be abused by those in power (psychiatrists and others) for their own personal gain.See https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/rosalindadams/intake for an example of what I mean.
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Before the iPhone, I worked on a few games for what were called "feature phones"
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I'm not sure that in the present day of massive teams and > $100 million budgets that there's much room for new celebrity game developers to emerge on that scale. Pretty much every gamer knows who he is.Now, even the biggest breakthrough indie game with a 5 person dev team wouldn't become a household name. These days it's the studios themselves that get most of the credit. Which may only be fair: When there's 100+ people on a project, it's such a group effort that singling out a handful doesn't really represent the achievement.
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I switched from macOS to Linux after 15 years of Apple
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I manage hundreds of linux servers... from my windows desktop and mac laptop.This will be super unpopular, but Linux missed the desktop boat 20 years ago, and my feeling as someone who at the time built his gentoo OS's from source, it was the fault of a few things:1) Fragmented gui development. There were too many projects with none focusing on really making a better gui than mac/windows.2) A lack of bread and butter 1st class "business" apps - you know, office. OpenOffice is fine, IF you are ok with the janky ui and no one knowing how it works.3) lack of open source exchange type mail/cal/etc server and outlook-like client). Holy fudge, I tried to get this going and people just crapped on me for suggesting it.4) Until recently, installing on laptops was an absolute crap shoot.5) Just, apps, in general. Gimp is fine, but it has never been close to photoshop. GUI standards are all over the place, etc. People go to a platform because it has the tools they want. The real fallout from point 1 is no one would ever port apps to linux (a little hyperbolic - a lot of high-end post production apps and audio apps all made it over). Open source yadda yadda, thats nice (this is not a brush off, it IS nice), but the ecosystem could be light years ahead of where we are now.
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Sony to join TSMC on new $7B chip plant in Japan
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"Bloomberg noted that India is currently studying possible locations with adequate land, water, and manpower resources. India reportedly said it would provide financial support by fronting half of the capital expenditure needed from 2023, along with tax breaks and other incentives."India is going to put up half of the capex up front w/tax breaks and incentives. India govt. also going to scout out land for Taiwan.TSMC will be in Taiwan, China, Japan, US, and India.https://techhq.com/2021/10/heres-why-a-mega-chip-deal-betwee...
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Esbuild – An extremely fast JavaScript bundler
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Often overlooked things when discussing esbuild here:1. It's not just a faster replacement for a single %tool_name% in your build chain: for the vast majority of cases, it's the whole "chain" in a single cli command if you're doing it right.That is, you don't just stick it inside, say, webpack as a faster replacement for babel (although you can). No, you look carefully through your webpack configs and its myriad of plugins, ask yourself whether you really need to inline css in jsx in png while simultaneously optimizing it for IE 4.0, realize you don't, through out the whole thing, and use esbuild instead.I have two 50K+ LOC projects using esbuild, and I would use it even if it was slower than webpack/babel/tsc simply not to worry about the build chain breaking due to an update to some obscure dependency or plugin.2. It is fast because it's written from scratch to do a set of particular things and do it fast, not just because it's Go and parallelized.If you look at the commit log you will notice a lot of performance tweaks. If you look into the issues, you will find a lot of requests for additional features rejected, often due to possible negative performance impact.3. The most impressive part about esbuild development is not just that it's one guy writing it: it is the level of support and documentation he manages to provide alongside.The release notes alone are a good course into nitty-gritty details of the web ecosystem: all the addressed edge cases are explained in detail. To top it all off--all opened issues, no matter how uninformed they seem, find a courteous response.
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Is the madness ever going to end?
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The author is fighting a strawman. Rather than engage with the specific problems these solutions were built to solve they dismissively regard them as just flavor of the week trends purely for the sake of chasing newness. This is true of the entire post, but I'll tackle just one since it's emblematic of my issues with all the rest:The argument for Electron and React Native isn't "it's modern", it's "it's much cheaper". Hiring experienced desktop application devs to build a quality native app for each platform is going to be expensive, hiring a few JS bootcampers to build one react UI that works on every platform is extremely cheap - shittier performance is the tradeoff to instantly have access to every platform. It's not a coincidence that Electron apps like e.g. Slack, Spotify, Discord are massively dominant players in their markets, I doubt you'd look the engineering leads of these companies in the face and tell them that you believe they put no thought into the tradeoffs of Electron and that they're just following trends.
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Fetch API has landed into Node.js
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Hey, Node core person here (and the person who triggered the land) - we're super excited for this and would love help and feedback.This is still experimental and we'd love to hear from the community what you'd like to see.
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SomaFM
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Radio Paradise [1] is also going strong after 20+ years. Fantastic curation and you can even stream in lossless for free (or at least I seem to be able to from the Android TV app).[1] https://radioparadise.com/
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Nginx Unit – Universal web app server
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Well I commend the Nginx team for trying something new and launching this, even though I'm not sure what I would use it for personally.Slightly tangental, but it always irks me when I see these kinds of responses in JSON: {
"success": "Reconfiguration done."
}
Really this should be something like "result": "success". Using "success" as a key name tells me nothing about the data it's representing.
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Burning money on paid ads for a dev tool – what we've learned
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The Twitter 'thick skin' part made me laugh.A past startup had the same experience with Reddit ads. The initial replies were so negative ("I could do this 3x cheaper myself" etc), and often negative for the sake of negativity. It took a little time, but we replied to most of them with gentle words along the lines of "thank you for your thoughts and comments; we're a small business trying to do things ethically; getting it from us saves you the time/cost of leaving the house and we know how valuable your time is" - and it actually ended up quite a decent ad.People just love to hate, especially when there's no human face to something. Or, I think in the case of places/networks where the community is tight and niche, if you're going to interject your product you'd better have enough of an understanding to answer as if you belong/have been a silent part of it all along.Complete aside - I'm glad I've never had to market to devs, haha.
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Using Goatse to Stop App Theft
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Ah, I had a similar idea. There were too many bots or vulnerability scanners hitting /wp-admin.php on my blog. It was flooding my access logs with 404s because I don't rock wordpress. Irksome stuff.So I threw up a little 'surprise' for the ahem penetration testers ahem, if you feel brave: https://www.thran.uk/wp-login.php
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8.9 earthquake hits Japan
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Red Cross and others will likely be jumping to the aide of those who have been affected by this disaster.If you have a website, please consider adding a message and link to the Red Cross donation website or the link to the donation page of any other website.To get it up ASAP, I've used the HelloBar (http://www.hellobar.com) on my site. You can see a working version of it at http://www.webdesigncompany.net but really any way that grabs attention would be a good way.PS: I'm not associated with the HelloBar product but I've sent them an email requesting that they allow those who want to use their product to participate to get an invite to their beta. Hopefully they'll reply here soon.If you don't want to setup an account or don't have an invite yet, you could copy/paste the following code:
new HelloBar(3823,9104);
The text and link will never change.
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High Frequency Dating
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This is hilarious and as a bonus it induces the warm, smug feeling I get when reminded I'm thankfully out of the dating game and happily married to a beautiful, smart woman. Good luck, kids.
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EFF’s Game Plan for Ending Global Mass Surveillance
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An organized, carefully executed plan to thwart global surveillance is a good thing. But EFF laid its plan out, and critiques of that plan are fair game.So: our industry has largely Google to thank for:* The development and deployment of TLS forward secrecy, a technology that has very little operational importance to big companies but that is critically important for increasing the cost of NSA surveillance.* The development and adoption of strong, modern elliptic curve cryptography in browsers (the Curve25519 CFRG recommendation has Adam Langley's name on it).* TLS certificate pinning, which Google pioneered in Chrome, which not only drastically reduces browser susceptibility to CA-based attacks on TLS but also transforms the Firefox and Chrome installed base into a worldwide anti-spoofing surveillance system.* EndToEnd, the Chrome Javascript implementation of PGP, the team for which includes Thai Duong, of BEAST, CRIME, and POODLE fame, who Google was smart enough to snap up.* Years and years of the Chrome sandbox and runtime hardening, which has significantly driven up the cost of viable browser clientsides, which are probably the most important software security weapon in NSA's arsenal.* Years and years and years of Chrome browser security work from people like Michel Zalewsky --- see things like "Notes On A Post-XSS World" for a taste of the security ideas that will be banal and commonplace 10 years from now but that people will forget Google funded.* One of the industry's best organized large-scale fuzzing and bughunting operations, shaking out hundreds and hundreds of bugs in things like video and image codecs.I think that first section in this plan could have been written more carefully. I do not see how it could have been written carefully and retain the sense of urgency that the rest of the document has. And that bothers and worries me.Hey: on the other hand, maybe Google is just as happy with it as EFF is. After all, if they're setting a high bar for themselves, all the better if a bunch of other companies are required to clear that same bar. I know a fair bit about the technical work Google is doing, but virtually nothing about EFF's motives for phrasing things they way they do.
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Miyazaki Tribute
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I was essentially raised on Miyazaki. Some kids grew up with Toy Story and Finding Nemo, I grew up with Kiki's Delivery Service, Howl's Moving Castle, and The Cat Returns. I mean, I watched other films to (a lot of other films), but Miyazaki had a huge influence me: without him, I would have likely never gotten into anime. To this day, his films are still some of my favorites.Whoever made this tribute, you have my salute: The 3D CG, while quite obvious, blends very well with the rotoscoped animation, something that doesn't always happen (just look at some of Cowboy Bebop). It also captures the feel of Ghibli's animation amazingly well.I salute the animator, and I also, of course, salute Hayao Miyazaki: Farewell, and may your legacy live on.
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Uber Investigating Sexual Harassment Claims by Ex-Employee
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One thing that every employee needs to understand is that HR is not your friend. No matter how friendly or helpful they seem, their job is not to protect you. It's to protect the company.
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Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2017)
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Blockchain Trading Platform | Several positions | Remote | Full-time | $160k-$220k + EquityHi! join us and help us build a trading platform for digital assets from scratch! We are a group of HNers with experience working with top financial firms, that have united to explore and push the boundaries of financial innovation launching a next-gen cryptotrading platform. You'll be able to participate in the initial architectural and design decisions building a product in a fast-moving and thriving industry.Positions (all $160k-$220k) : Senior Trading Systems Engineer (C/C++, KDB+/Q, HFT, Trading Engines, Risk Management)
Senior Front-end Engineer (React, Redux, ES2015/Typescript, RxJS)
Senior Back-end Engineer (Node, REST, Microservices, Websocket servers)
Blockchain Engineer (Crypto, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Smart Contracts)
Principal Security Engineer (Nessus, WAF, IDS, DMZs, DDoS mitigation, Pentesting, Code review)
Senior Infrastructure Engineer (AWS, Kubernetes, Docker, HA, Monitoring, Logging)
Benefits & Perks: - 0.5 to 2.5% stock options or revenue sharing
- 100% remote position (looking also offices in the City of London)
- 40h/week organised as you want
- Friendly startup atmosphere
- No hard deadlines
If you are interested ping me (email in my profile)Cheers!
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The First Rule of Microsoft Excel: Don’t Tell Anyone You’re Good at It
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I do not understand the mindset of not wanting to help other people. Enabling people to learn more about the software they use every day is better for everyone involved. Yes, some problems are too complex to solve in a few minutes, but pointing someone in the right direction requires little to no effort.Excel lacks the community programmers have and also lacks the learning opportunities given by open-source software. A lot of people struggle to find answers specifically because of this lack of community around using Excel as a tool. I know I personally have floundered learning things that would have been simple to understand had there been someone to guide me, so I try to provide that same support to other people when they face the same obstacles.Yes, its fun to cringe at people's inexperience. It is also important to recognize we all started there.
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Startup Stock Options – Why a Good Deal Has Gone Bad
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Valid reasons to work for a startup:- You are a cofounder.- You have little experience and you are using this to break into the industry, and get experience on many different technologies ("wear many hats").- They are working on a very specific problem or using a specific technology that you strongly desire to work on and it's difficult to do it anywhere else.- You want to work a certain way (remote, on the beach, whatever) and they are willing to go this route.Invalid reasons for working at a startup:- Getting rich off stock options.- Making a lot of money in salary.- Work / life balance.- Stability.
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Invert, always, invert
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As a software developer I have been doing this exact thing for the past twelve years: think of all the possible reasons why something can fail.The downside is that I have trained my mind in such a way that it is difficult to turn it off outside of work and it is influencing my personal live negatively.(or maybe I'm just wired to be a doom thinker and that is what makes me a good software engineer)
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The account of realDonaldTrump will be locked for 12 hours
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This will be an extremely unpopular comment and will probably be the end of my ability to post on HN, but it needs to be said:What we saw today was precipitated by mass deplatforming and censorship. When you take away the ability of people to participate in peaceful political discourse, you push them towards violence. Half of the American electorate currently feels profoundly unheard. They've lost their public voice and their ability to vouch for themselves, which has enabled mass media to flood every publication channel with parodies of them. The longer this continues, the greater the risk of violence will become. You can't make people's beliefs go away by silencing them.
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Monkey MindPong
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That was difficult to watch. While the technology is impressive, it is sickening to watch. The part where they can pair the phone via bluetooth made me want to vomit. It is obviously unnatural, but I can't quite put my finger on it. Something about seeing that animal, oblivious to what's happening, and that implant with the ability to directly record thoughts and/or remote control. The whole thing doesn't sit well with me.
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Get better at Googling
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Google is okay for research on how other people have achieved something. But generally these days I am of the opinion it just teaches you bad habits.I really wish people would just read the docs instead of just googling. I am working on a large typescript solution and almost every error in the application is due to the original developers not reading the docs and instead just googling stuff from stack overflow.Also I am against the promotion of google generally. The search engine isn't that much better than Duck Duck Go anymore (especially for dev stuff). Also we should all know the problems with Google's defacto monopoly on search.
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