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Long Beach has temporarily suspended container stacking limitations
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Truckers are leaving containers all over Los Angeles.[1]Allowing stacking over 2 high is only useful if you have the equipment to stack over 2 high. A place that just stacks empty containers 2 high probably only has large forklifts. The special equipment for high stacking is far more expensive, and only bought if you need it.[2]A more useful proposal is a "peel pile".[3] This is a system which assigns outgoing trucks an easily accessible container to deliver, rather than a specific container that has to be retrieved. There's an app for that. This is being implemented by IMC, the largest marine drayage company in the US. They say they're already up to 8 high stacks in the LA area. The higher the stack, the longer the retrieval time."This keeps drivers moving and productive, even if they don’t know the exact load they’re getting or the delivery location." So it's really dumping the sorting problem on drivers. They have no idea where they're going next. There has to be some way to separate containers by approximate location to make this work, so a driver knows how far they're going to be asked to take the thing.How well this all works depends on how well the software organizing the stacking works.[1] https://jalopnik.com/the-streets-of-los-angeles-are-overflow...[2] https://www.bison-jacks.com/why-bison/blog/how-to-lift-a-shi...[3] https://www.peelpile.com/
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Competitive Programming with AlphaCode
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Calling it now: If current language models can solve competitive programming at an average human level, we’re only a decade or less off from competitive programming being as solved as Go or Chess.Deepmind or openAI will do it.
If not them, it will be a Chinese research group on par with them.I’ll be considering a new career. It will still be in computer science but it won’t be writing a lot of code.
There’ll be several new career paths made possible by this technology as greater worker productivity makes possible greater specialization.
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Van life (cancer edition) finale
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The only reason right-to-die isn’t something universal is because the dead can’t vote. They suffer immensely and the usual feedback loop that mitigates societal problems and suffering is cut off. So every day thousands of people suffer terribly for absolutely no reason at all.Doctors will actually euthanize patients by giving them morphine. They can only legally do it if they are using it to treat pain. They slowly increase the dose as needed. They will hover over an unconscious patient and claim that they are in pain and therefore the morphine dose needs to be increased. They repeat this until the patient dies. It’s a workaround. Because everyone is selfish and stupid, nobody wants to confront reality and just formalize it.
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Google Abandons Open Standards for Instant Messaging
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As a Googler (who does not work on Hangsout) my own personal opinion is that I fully agree with the EFF here:"In public explanations of its dropping XMPP support, Google has said that it was a difficult decision necessitated by new technical demands. But even if this new protocol responds to different technical requirements, that shouldn't prevent the company from making it public and interoperable. Releasing the specifications for Google Hangouts would be a good first step. Releasing free/open source clients and servers should follow. It's clear that some of Hangouts' video features have been implemented in some very Google-specific ways. But that's no excuse for leading us toward a world where the only practical choices are proprietary chat clients and protocols."I hope the specs at some point are opened. The Hangouts team probably has good reason at the moment to strictly focus on a core set of functionality and get it working with good UX on all the platforms. People are complaining that stuff like voice calling, and some Talk features are missing, but it's probably due to focus on shipping something that works good first. It's inevitable people will reverse engineer the client, as was done with MSN, Y! Messenger, and AOL. In the late 90s, early 2000s, I remember using reverse engineered Java libraries that could talk to these services.Google Wave was done in the opposite way, as was Open Social. They came with specs, but they did not focus on core user experience in the beginning. It's hard to win with open specs without getting consumer traction.
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Raspberry Pi 3 on Sale
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Can anybody actually share useful projects with Raspberry? Yeah I have links to some "common and cool" projects that you can find over the first page in Google, but there's rarely something really useful..
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The world in which IPv6 was a good design
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One big UX mistake of IPv6: it was not made backward compatible with IPv4. (v6)0.0.192.168.1.10 == 192.168.1.10(v4).This simple design when planning and rolling it out would have meant incrementally updating the networking stack to also support v6. Now it turns out v4 and v6 are completely different, and no one has a big enough reason to make the change until everyone else makes the change. Hard chicken-egg problem.
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Facebook’s Surveillance Machine
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I wish quite badly that the benefit of deactivating FB would outweigh the inconvenience, but FB has become such a mainstay that I'd lose touch with lots of people I really have no other way of contacting. I could say "good riddance," if there is no other way to contact them then perhaps they are not important enough to my life, but that's just not true. Or what about all the local forums (FB groups) in my city that have lots of immediate help about all sorts of things -- I'd immediately lose access to all that. I wish there was a better way, but I can't see myself getting rid of FB without a notable disruption to my life. #sad
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Surgeons urge people to throw out bristle BBQ brushes (2016)
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So what are some alternatives?
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Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines
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The biggest problem with touchbar is that Apple intentionally made non-touchbar model inferior in terms of hardware and the amount of USB-C ports to make sure ppl buy touchbar. This is truly infuriating and I'm sure, was done for purely marketing reasons.I'd buy a non-touchbar model if it had the same hardware as a touchbar model in a heartbeat.
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Why it took a long time to build the tiny link preview on Wikipedia
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> People seem to like it — we are seeing 5,000 hits to our API a minute to serve those cards that show when you hover over any link.Uhm, no. It just means that people are hovering over links with their mouse. It does not imply any opinion about the previews.> The original idea was conceived four years agoWhen I was active at Wikipedia/Wikibooks 12 years ago, there was a user script floating around that did the same thing, except I'm not sure if it included an image. (Mediawiki allows a user to define custom CSS and JS that get embedded in every page of their user session.)I don't mean to express dislike or downplay the hard work that went into this feature, just to add some context.
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You don’t need standups
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One thing I don't like about standups is that they can create a false sense of either blockage or someone being ineffective at their job. For instance, there have been many times where I've worked on a task or a set or related tasks for weeks or months, simply because the tasks required a lot of forethought and careful planning. There were times I somewhat dreaded standups because I knew that I'd say that I'm doing the same thing I'd been doing for the last several days, like a broken record. I don't want to have to say "Yup, still workin' on those bugs" every morning. When shit's fixed or I've completed a feature, I'll let you know.In fact, all I like about standups is seeing my team mates once a day. Besides that, there's almost no upside. Literally everyone can read the project board to see what we're up to. If you're really so curious as to what everyone is doing, why not just look at that?
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Popular iPhone apps caught sending user location data to monetization firms
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No surprise to see a number of weather apps on here. Seems to be such an incredibly scummy category.The built in Apple app is fine for basic information. There are plenty of high-quality third-party apps. Weather Line (my fav) is $2. DarkSky is $4.Instead people go for these weird free apps covered in ads with terrible UIs. The NOAA one isn’t made by the government, seems like using that name should be some kind of copyright infringement.Of course WeatherBug on desktops was adware/malware for a very long time. Maybe it still is.Then you get scareware stuff like the earthquake notification app. You better let us track everything you do otherwise you might die!There are so many good apps on the store made by good developers. It’s amazing how much better your experience is if you just avoid free apps when possible.Of course some of these apps, like the ones that you NEED to use for certain parking meters, are especially evil because there is an any choice. If you need that service, you’re giving up your privacy.I wish Apple would crack down on this stuff. I imagine a lot of these apps are doing things that already violate the App Store guidelines. If they don’t, they probably SHOULD.
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Hire people who aren’t proven
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I think hiring has become more difficult now that programming has been discovered as a well paying mainstream career. When I started in the 90s most people I worked with had a passion for the craft but now I find we interview a lot of people who have a CS degree just for the career prospects but not out of interest for the craft.I find it much easier to deal with someone who has no relevant experience but cares vs someone who had 10 years experience but doesn't care. Now someone who has 10 years AND cares is rare but pure gold.
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One of the Biggest At-Home DNA Testing Companies Is Working with the FBI
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I am torn on this, as on the one hand it does violate privacy to a very large degree and provide massive power to the government. Things I am very much against.On the other hand, essentially all this does is provide law enforcement a means to potentially quickly identify violent criminals via physical traits as opposed to the contents of their mind such as forcing someone to unlock a phone which I am very against.Assuming DNA technology is advanced enough to provide few false positives (which I am not sure it is) and prosecution is based on additional concrete evidence as well I think I am fine with this. I am not ok with this being accepted as all that is needed to bring charges but as a means to narrow the suspect pool.If the company did not disclose this in massive font to potential customers ahead of time, then I do think this company should very quickly go out of business.The slippery slope though is a near Gattaca situation where now law enforcement and government can screen people for genetics flaws and make hiring decisions etc. based on them. Private companies should absolutely have no access to this data unless it is for scientific research and highly anonymized and customers have agreed to allow it.
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Senate Stock Watcher
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It would be great if(a) elected officials could hold only cash, bonds, and index funds, specifically bonds and index funds that are open the general public and have at least $XX assets, to prevent engineering an index fund available only one one or a few people.(b) pay them better to make up for the loss of gravy. Sure, the pay raise would not be sufficient to make up for the lost income, but it should be high enough that none of them could complain they can't live on the salary. Paying the senate majority leader under $200K / year is not enough, considering they often have living expenses in Washington and their home state. Lower ranking members get paid less. Pay the leader $1M/year and everyone else $500K/year and then prohibit anything but vanilla investments.
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Thank you for helping us increase our bandwidth
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archive.org feels like an irreplaceable treasure, the Wayback Machine alone is a time capsule of our digital history.I donate to them monthly and know a lot of other people do as well, so I don't worry much about their financial stability. I'm more worried about external pressures taking content down. I hope the data is backed up six ways to sunday, and that somewhere there's a plan to make it all accessible if Internet Archive can't continue to play the role it does.
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The Vintage Beauty of Soviet Control Rooms (2018)
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I recently had the luck of spending several weeks/months on a Russian icebreaker from the soviet era. It was incredible. The engine control room was a work of art. Room after room of thoughtfully constructed controls with a huge emphasis on design. The bridge was also stunning. As someone who grew up post-cold-war in the United States, it was really something to be immersed in the aesthetic and culture of Russia in that era. I'll dig up some photos and post them here in a bit maybe.EDIT:Alright, here they are. I'm currently working on building a static website for my photography/work... but it's not done. So I'm sharing a small selection quickly in the stupidest way possible (google photos).https://photos.app.goo.gl/CL6Rc4TE7ddZd4Xo7
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After GitHub CEO backs Black Lives Matter, workers demand an end to ICE contract
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What a bummer that workers are publicly demanding this, and (presumably) seeking press attention on it.I'm no fan of ICE – a very large percentage of my friends in the US are immigrants, and I generally want my country to be a welcoming one. ICE has certainly committed unethical and probably illegal acts (probably true of most federal agencies).But to expect that a _federal agency_ will be denied service from a private entity, especially for essentially political reasons, is lunacy. It'd attract extreme negative attention from the rest of the government, and great fear from all paying customers that an internet mob could separate them from their code at any time.We should absolutely be lobbying hard for changes to immigration law, the restrictions placed on ICE, and justice for their wrongdoings.But I can't see how this helps improve immigration, and it certainly seems likely to cause a lot of negative consequences for GitHub. The employees are putting their employer in a "damned if they do, damned if they don't" situation.EDIT: Just to clarify, I love the vision of a world where executives don't take actions their workers will protest. I think that in order to get there, the protests need to be reasonable, and I think this one isn't.EDIT DISCLAIMER: I own a small amount of MSFT stock, which was not on my mind as I wrote this. I use GitHub's free service and have no other relationship I can think of with MSFT or GitHub.
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For black CEOs in Silicon Valley, humiliation is a part of doing business
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I thought this was a great article. One of the most interesting things to me was how the embarrassment/defensiveness of the white people involved was one of the biggest blocks to the black CEOs in their advancement, e.g. the VCs who "just wanted to get the hell out of there" after mistaking a white subordinate for the CEO.I've recently been reading/watching some videos and writings by Robin Diangelo on systemic racism - here's a great starting point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7mzj0cVL0Q. She also wrote the book "White Fragility".Thinking about that, I'm just wondering how different it would be if one of those people who mistook the employee for the CEO instead turned to the CEO and said "I'm sorry, please excuse me for the instance of racism I just perpetrated against you, I promise it won't happen again." I realize how outlandish that may sound writing that out, but I'd propose that the fact that it does sound outlandish is the main problem. Everyone in the US was raised in an environment that inculcated certain racial ideas, subconsciously or not. We can't address them if we're so embarrassed by their existence as to pretend they don't exist.
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PeerTube v3
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I like PeerTube, but the really important part of the puzzle is the advertiser network. What makes YouTube special is that Google takes care of the advertising side of things and makes it easy for people to monetise.If Silicon Valley continues to drift into ideological activism, at some point a hugely profitable opportunity to set up a new advertising network develops.
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Signed Char Lotte
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Brilliant explanation.Since its "hiring day"; I'll ask: If you were interviewing someone and they listed an IOCCC win, would you count that as a plus? would you have to go look at the entry first?And turned around: if you've won (or even submitted an entry) to IOCCC, would you mention it when applying for work?
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Wayfinder – a relaxing 'art game' in the browser
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Some people say they find my old Dot Dot Dot game relaxing http://lalo.li/ddd/Code: https://github.com/franzenzenhofer/ddd
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Our lawsuit against ChessBase
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> Due to Chessbase’s repeated license violations, leading developers of Stockfish have terminated their GPL license with ChessBase permanently.What do they mean by this?
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Twitter based map of Russian troop movements
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I'm in downtown Kharkiv, Ukraine right now (SaaS founder born in Canada). Woke up to explosions at 5 AM this morning. At 12PM still some explosions, can feel the ground shaking, but the streets are mostly calm. Went out to buy some groceries, long lines, but everything still works. Police cars are out patrolling in full force, but no signs of unrest. Church bells tolling nonstop. TransferWise is limited to $200 USD transfers but it worked -- Apple Pay worked at the grocery store. Obviously internet and electricity is still up for now, but water pipes have been shut off in many of my friend's places.
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Apple Maps location scan spikes WiFi latency every 60 seconds
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I wonder why they keep rescanning the wifi environment even though the fact that it remains connected to the same BSSID and the RSSI doesn’t fluctuate too much should suggest that it’s very unlikely the device moved far enough to warrant another scan.
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Find a good available .com domain
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But is it a good one? There are better methods for finding an actually good domain name, you just have to think outside the box and come up with new ideas constantly.For example these domains should be available wink wink:
editormag.com
geekyglossary.com
infiniteiterator.com
infographics365.com
minutequestions.com
museumology.com
onlinehistorian.com
webdesigndaily.com
donateyourcomputerpower.com
lazysites.com
scorchingearth.com
thechronoscope.com
24hourdigitalclock.com
adfunkr.com
aircontroltower.com
aracina.com
artistreferences.com
athletelite.com
askaboutamerica.com
audiofeedr.com
australers.com
babysnooker.com
beercounting.com
bipabit.com
bonfirekids.com
bookinthebag.com
cactusportal.com
californiculture.com
cheerfulservices.com
complimentopia.com
crocotin.com
dreadpirateradio.com
egoarbitrage.com
firsttimebuyeralert.com
gardenomat.com
gigaspeakers.com
hipsterian.com
kateke.com
messingwithyourmind.com
myfitnessdoctor.com
mypassword123.com
orgasmatron5000.com
panonyx.com
propmakerz.com
ricefactor.com
thrillerdomains.com
ulugulu.com
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I replaced all our blog thumbnails using DALL·E 2
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Am I one of the few people who finds these generated pictures really bad? They often have weird and unsettling details when you look closely.I mean, it’s an incredible achievement in AI that we can generate images at this level, but I don’t want them shown to me on a daily basis while I’m reading blogs.
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Grand jury votes to indict Donald Trump
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I've scrolled through the top ~10 or so comments, and none of them, describe or comment on the nature of the charges against Trump. To be fair to the commenters, most stories are vague.The charges relate to hush money payments to Stormy Daniels, but hush money is not a crime. It's also not a crime to have an affair with Stormy Daniels. So the most salacious parts of the story are not what the crime is.My understanding is that the crime is around how the money was delivered. I'm having trouble finding a good description, but CNN has this to say:> Hush money payments aren't illegal. Prosecutors are weighing whether to charge Trump with falsifying the business records of the Trump Organization for how they reflected the reimbursement of the payment to Michael Cohen. Falsifying business records is a misdemeanor in New York.> Prosecutors are also weighing whether to charge Trump with falsifying business records in the first degree for allegedly falsifying a record with the intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal another crime, which in this case could be a violation of campaign finance laws. That is a Class E felony, with a sentence minimum of one year and as much as four years.I'm not a lawyer and it's hard to parse the above, but it sounds very technical. It sounds like they have to prove two separate crimes, and connect them with intention. Intent of course is always hard to prove in court.Overall this seems like a weak case to me.
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Being deaf
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"The only good access service I’ve ever gotten is Cued Speech. In a basic sense, Cued Speech is a system that uses signs for sound. It was invented to battle the spectacularly low deaf literacy rate. (The average reading level of deaf 17- and 18-year-olds is at the fourth grade level.2) "Wow. That is seriously depressing. I can't even imagine being deaf and not reading a lot. (I actually don't think my life would be seriously negatively impacted by being deaf; it would be an excuse to take meetings on IRC and via email, which would improve productivity for everyone; I already largely prefer subtitled video content. The only thing I'd really miss is listening to audiobooks while driving.)(I've known several deaf and a few blind people who are amazing software engineers; over the Internet, it's pretty hard to tell.)
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Why Google Went Offline Today and a Bit about How the Internet Works
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“BGP is literally the glue of the Internet” - I think you’ll find BGP is figuratively the glue of the Internet ;)
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Free React.js Fundamentals Course
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Really can't decide to go ahead with an Angular approach (2.0) or use React. I know React is only for the view layer so what are people using with React to do stuff like api calls?
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PostgreSQL used fsync incorrectly for 20 years
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Years ago (2010 iirc), I reported to the Postgres list, with a patch, that (one of) the reason Postgres “didn’t work on NFS” was because it couldn’t deal with short writes. I got told the usual “you’re holding it wrong” instead of an acknowledgement of PG not sticking to the spec.I patched my own systems (wrap the calls in a loop as per standard practice) and then proceeded to run literally hundreds of thousands of PostgreSQL instances on NFS for many more years with no problems.The patch was eventually integrated it seems but I never found out why because I lost interest in trying to work with the community after that experience.
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The Outer Worlds: Fixing the “game thinks my companion is dead” bug
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I don't play video games, but if someone created one that was entirely glitches like this, I might start.
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US Secret Service: “Massive Fraud” Against State Unemployment Insurance Programs
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I find it ridiculous that you cannot buy pseudoephedrine without the pharmacy checking whether you've purchased any quantity of the OTC medicine in any other state via a inter-agency, multi-state networked solution... And yet this kind of stuff still exists.There is more than enough way to solve these problems, but for some f'n reason there is no will...
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Show HN: PSX Party – Online Multiplayer Playstation 1 Emulator Using WebRTC
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WebRTC is really cool. Is someone using for video conferencing (Eg Zoom) ? What are other example using webrtc?
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SolarWinds hackers were able to access Microsoft source code
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> This means we do not rely on the secrecy of source code for the security of products, and our threat models assume that attackers have knowledge of source code. So viewing source code isn’t tied to elevation of riskI don't know how much of this is true. Wouldn't it be helpful for bad actors to understand how Windows defenses work looking at the code thereby increasing the risk?
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Apple Card Disabled My iCloud, App Store, and Apple ID Accounts
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There’s a UX defect with Messages right now where if you delete some conversations in succession, randomly will a modal popup and ask you if you want to report the contact as spam.Some Apple articles will tell you not to worry if you’ve accidentally reported someone as spam, but it actually does something. It’s not a pedestrian crosswalk button.I found this out the hard way when my wife could no longer send or receive messages nor sign into Messages and we had to contact Apple support. I’ve accidentally reported tons of people as spam because of this stupid Messages experience, and I can only guess that I’ve reported my own wife so many times from clearing all of my Messages conversations that they disabled her Messages account.The support tech had the gall to tell me they’d reactivate her account as a one-time exception, and I practically wanted to kill the guy over the phone.
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Hackers break into thousands of security cameras, exposing Tesla, jail, hospital
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Putting surveillance video on the cloud is... kinda dumb. It's rarely viewed outside your network, and local drives cost drastically less than the bandwidth needs. Also it's incredibly sensitive data that shouldn't leave your network without really good reason anyways.The solution to this hack is simple: Shut this company down, because it's a bad idea.
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PowerToys – open-source Windows utilities
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PowerToys Run is fantastic as an app launcher. Not quite as good as Alfred on MacOS but then nothing is. There's a bunch of similar apps for Windows (I used to use Hain) but none ever worked quite right for me, PowerToys Run does though.FancyZones is awfully nice too for just putting a window somewhere at a reasonable size and location.As other folks have noted SysInternals is another similar rogue Windows product by Microsoft. Process Explorer from there is indispensible, as is Autoruns.
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Show HN: Can you lose at Wordle if you tried?
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Hello! I am the creator of Don’t Wordle. Really excited to see this took off today.I thought I would share some background about the game, some of the iterations I went through, and some of the future features I would like to add.Background:
Like many others, I have been playing Wordle daily. Recently, my Wordle win streak hit 99. I was admittedly very careful with my guesses on Day 100, not wanting to ruin my streak. Then I began to wonder…even if I wanted to lose intentionally, could I do it? Obviously, I could make intentionally bad guesses, but that would take the fun out of it. So I decided to build Don’t Wordle.Iterations I have gone through:The first version of the game was simpler and much worse IMO. I did not display the “Valid Words Remaining” at the top, and there was no concept of “Undos". Initially, I actually displayed the Wordle word at the top throughout the entire game! To be honest, that doesn’t change the difficulty of the game that much. However, given that the spirit of the game is not to guess the Wordle word, it seemed like the right decision to hide it.I created the “Valid Words Remaining” feature when I realized how challenging the game was. I kept getting stuck and wondering whether there were even any words left besides to Wordle word. When I saw how fast the count shrinks, I felt the game was a lot more interesting.I then added the concept of “Undos” when I realized the game was still too challenging. It’s particulary lame if you’re playing the game for the first time and you get eliminated after just 1 or 2 guesses.Current Tech Stack:-Route53 + Cloudfront + S3 + Create React AppUnexpected challenges:1. The animations. I obviously copied all the concepts from the original Wordle, but I failed to appreciate the complexity.2. The nuances of the repeat letter words.3. What makes a Wordle square yellow? The answer is not so simple4. Trying to get www.dontwordle.com and dontwordle.com to take you to the same URL (either www.dontwordle.com or dontwordle.com) and still support TLS and only use the tech I mentioned above. I actually still don’t have it working perfectly. I know of a solution, but it’s overly complicatedFeatures I would like to still add:1. I have heard from multiple people that it’s annoying how you could get the game in an unwinnable state without realizing it. For example, maybe 20 valid words remain, but there is no valid sequence of words remaining to finish the puzzle. While the “Valid Words Remaining” feature is nice, it would also be cool to have a “Valid Solutions Remaining” feature2. I would like to build a brute force solver that you can watch attempt to play the game in real-time. I have built something similar for a crossword puzzle and really enjoyed watching the computer try to fill the grid. I think it would be cool to do that same thing with this game.Question I don’t yet know the answer to:Do any words exist that would not have a single valid solution in this game?
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Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts
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Wow. This gives a lot of false positives, but it found all ~10 of my old accounts over the years.The most interesting thing is that my writing style changed pretty drastically since a decade ago. Searching for my oldest account matches my earliest usernames, whereas searching this account matched the rest.The details of the algorithm are fascinating: https://stylometry.net/about Mostly because of how simple it is. I assumed it would measure word embeddings against a trained ML model, but nothing so fancy.
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Abandoned island in the middle of NYC
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NYC loves to do all sorts of interesting things with its islands. Another island that most New Yorkers know nothing about is Roosevelt Island:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roosevelt_IslandIt has had a very long history including having a prison/small pox hospital/mental hospital.
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The State of JavaScript in 2015
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This only refers to frontend JavaScript and reflects the opinion of a dev who hasn't been using JS all that long. Angular was never that great a framework, it's popularity was by and large because it came out of Google. It's far too tightly coupled to the DOM and was therefore destined to have problems as HTML and browsers evolve.Npm is stable, Backbone is stable, Node is stable, Gulp is great, and devs like myself who have seen trendy frameworks come and go (Batman.js and jQuery templating come to mind) are still using the same great composable tools that were better designed from the start.Backbone (and my favorite, Spine) are built on more loosely coupled components and can be used on applications which have no DOM, such as Canvas games or native mobile apps. Browser fragmentation has been an issue since the dawn of JS -- and these days the JS ecosystem extends far beyond the browser.Take a look at the mature tools for front or backend that major companies rely on and be glad that the open-source nature of JS produces so many options and rapid evolution.
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Travis CI: From Open to Minimum Vacation Policy
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I've said it before and I'll say it again, unlimited days off (or "open") and zero days off are identical.If you have unlimited vacation people are inclined to take less and people respect the vacation you take less ("as you can always take more!").Here's a study[0] (PDF) called "Overwhelmed America: Why Don’t We Use Our Earned Leave?" It is biased (travel association) but interesting nonetheless.According to this study[1] you need at least ten consecutive days of leave to "de-stress" from work. Short vacations aren't as effective as long ones. In "europe" a two week vacation (10 work days) is common/standard. As opposed to American's "long weekends."A lot of these "unlimited" places have a "as long as your work gets done" policy, meaning you can take tons of short days off or afternoons off, but almost no extended holidays (e.g. travel abroad, out of state, etc).[0] http://traveleffect.com/sites/traveleffect.com/files/Overwhe...
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Lyft surges to the top 10 on App Store following the “DeleteUber” campaign
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Dan Primack summarised this well; Uber failed on messaging:"Uber has done a lot of questionable things over the years, but its actions this past weekend vis-a-vis Trump's immigration ban weren't among them. An actual timeline from Saturday, which may differ from what you saw on social media:• 4:20pm ET: CEO Travis Kalanick sent email to employees. It stopped short of explicitly opposing the ban, but did say: (1) The company would identify and compensate affected drivers. (2) Kalanick will raise the issue of how the "ban will impact many innocent people" this Friday during the first meeting of Trump's so-called CEO Council. This email was posted a short time later to Kalanick's public Facebook page.• 4:55pm ET: NY Taxi Workers union called for a work stoppage at JFK airport from 6pm-7pm. Uber does not suspend its own service, but also does not send out any promotions.• 7:36pm ET: Uber NYC sends out a tweet, saying that surge pricing to and from JFK has been turned off.The claim that Uber was trying to 'break the strike' by sending out its surge pricing tweet is belied by the timing (i.e., sent after the strike was set to end). And while it is true that Kalanick has agreed to be on Trump's CEO council, it's also true that execs from both Uber and Lyft have agreed to sit on a new automation council set up by Trump's Department of Transportation. Either a pox on both their houses, or a pox on none.”
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Malware identified in CCleaner 5.33
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As a kid, the only OS I was aware of was Windows. Once, my computer was infected to the point where it was almost unusable. A more experienced friend suggested a non-free antivirus and the CCleaner. After a lot of effort, I could get my machine back to working, but it became so slow that it led me to discover Linux. Now, on a Windows 10 machine, I’ve nothing but Defender, and since the aforementioned experience I’ve never had to use any other antivirus, a ‘junk’ cleaner, etc. Once bitten, twice shy :)Edit: I hated investing in anti-stuff.
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The sound of the dialup, pictured (2012)
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I get waves of nostalgia when I hear that screeching sound.At work, when the fax machine was still sitting in my office, I deliberately turned the sound on (for those who don't know: the initial handshake part sounds pretty much the same for modems and fax). Then we got a shiny new printer/scanner/fax that now sits in the hallway.When I had Internet access for the first time (1996), I used a 14.4 modem for about a year, before I could switch to ISDN. To me, sound always signified a window opening to a new, magical world, where the only boundaries were your imagination and available bandwidth.A friend of mine once dialed the wrong number, and a human picked up. Hearing a human voice from the modem was really strange.Ah, good times (except for the crappy bandwidth and the fact that the phone company charged by the minute).
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Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin
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It's for the same reason that no one wanted to touch zimbabwe dollar back in 2007, if the value of the medium of exchange differs from breakfast to lunch it's not really a good medium of exchange. Doesn't matter if value is appreciating or depreciating, currency needs to have a reasonably stable value to be useful.
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European parliament committee approves vote on ‘disastrous’ copyright bill
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This is what happens when those in control don't understand, know or care about the things they regulate.So I guess this is bad.--goes and reads article--> Article 11, requiring online platforms to pay publishers a fee if they link to their news content, was also approved.What the fucking FUCK?Pay to send companies actual traffic? Pay to be allowed to use the basic building-block of the world wide web on the world wide web?Just how is it possible to be so out of touch with how things work, and still be allowed to pass regulation?I'm honestly not able to come up with an analogy which sufficiently illustrates just how backwards this whole thing is.
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Twenty-two states ask appeals court to bring back net neutrality
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The system seems broken when states representing more than 50% of the population have to sue in court to try to change something like this. Instead with that much backing it should be done through the legislative branch. I'm concerned about the growing use of courts to try to decide policies because our legislative bodies can't work together and instead just try to force one sided issues through or block each other.> Together, the AGs represent states totaling 165 million people — more than half of the U.S. population.
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Ask HN: Why did your startup fail and what did you learn?
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We wanted to create a routing app for bikes, which would take in consideration cliffs, dangerous streets and the likes.With our internal team, we’ve managed to create a killer backend that would do all the hard routing stuff without issues. It was better than Google Maps in most cases!Now, we just needed the app. We used all our money to pay a third party contractor to make the app, and they failed miserably. We never received a working prototype. We ran out of gas.The backend still exists, in case anyone wants to give the app a shot. I might release the backend as open source. Ping me if this interests you.
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PySnooper: Never use print for debugging again
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Interesting project, though I'd suggest losing the line about "can't be bothered to set one up right now" regarding a full debugger. (i)pdb is built in and is simple to use. Perhaps focus on what this can add rather than framing the project as something like a lazy alternative (especially when this may actually be harder to set up than throwing in "import pdb; pdb.set_trace()")?edit: spelling
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Swift: Google’s Bet on Differentiable Programming
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IMO the first three lines of the program basically explain why academics and data programmers are never going to use Swift:Python: import time
for it in range(15):
start = time.time()
Swift: import Foundation
for it in 0..<15 {
let start = CFAbsoluteTimeGetCurrent()
This is why people like Python:- import time: clearly we are importing a 'time' library and then we clearly see where we use it two lines later- range(15): clearly this is referring to a range of numbers up to 15- start = time.time(): doesnt need any explanationThis is why academics and non-software engineers will never use Swift:- import Foundation: huh? Foundation?- for it in 0..- let start = CFAbsoluteTimeGetCurrent(): okay i guess we need to prepend variables with 'let'? TimeGetCurrent makes sense but wtf is CFAbsolute? Also where does this function even come from? (probably Foundation? but how to know that without a specially-configured IDE?)EDIT: Yes everyone, I understand the difference between exclusive and inclusive ranges. The point is that some people (maybe most data programmers?) don't care. The index variable you assign it to will index into an array of length 15 the way you would expect. Also in this example the actual value of 'it' doesn't even matter, the only purpose of range(15) is to do something 15 times.
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Zettlr – FOSS markdown editor for personal knowledge management and publishing
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I think this trend of better knowledge tools is missing two very important pieces of human nature1. If we have time to enter something into a knowledge base of any kind - then we have time to just jot it on a piece of paper.2. If we dont have time (or think it is important at that moment) then what solves the problem for us is not a knowledge base, but search.You see the thing about Google and Facebook etc, is that if they were collecting all this information about me, and it was treated like medical information about me it would be far more useful to me (and far less useful to Advertisers).I want a web browser that remembers every single page I have visited (#) and then lets me search them. Then someone could write a spaced reminder thingy for me - spent more than 5 minutes on a web page did he - he will want to refresh that page in 2 weeks and then 4 months.Yes, knowledge bases are excellent for clearly defined study efforts - like y'know, university, but for the rest of life, explicit note taking is a cost that we need some activation energy barrier for.Put it this way, once upon a time I had a study book for a new programming language, and i took notes of interesting examples on a ring binder. But the last time I learnt a new language I just relied on Google finding me the relevant StackOverflow pages - my cost/benefit line had changed.(And notes just got dumped into a text file.)(#) Ok maybe not those pages
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The real OnlyFans scandal is the unaccountable power of platforms and banks
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The reason the banks, and through the banks OnlyFans, attack sex is because they are accountable, and don't wish to take risks unless they are very profitable risks.The real danger of platforms and banks is how happy they are to censor for the government, or simply the loudest, richest mouth, in order to keep the profit flowing. If you want to fix it, you put in legal protections for people to do business, rather than this informal and/or ad hoc regulation through the shifting influence and agendas of arbitrary special interest groups.> The financial and tech industries’ prudishness is unfortunately increasingly reflected in government policy, typically under the guise of protecting children and other vulnerable communities.This is the Guardian getting causation extremely wrong.
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French fighter jet joy ride goes très, très wrong (2020)
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The copy of this article is so good. The entire piece made me laugh so hard. Thanks for posting this!
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Inkbase: Programmable Ink
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> Most of our examples were built entirely on the iPad, using Inkbase’s interface. Sketchy math was not. Much of the code that runs it ... was written on a laptop.> Building larger, more technical software systems in Inkbase becomes extremely difficult for many reasons, from the poor ergonomics of typing with an on-screen keyboardNobody has really solved the ergonomics problem of being able to type on a keyboard and also sketch, and have the entire system be portable and friction free.
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ChatGPT app for iOS
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I clicked on the link on my PC.Noted the name of the app ("Openai ChatGP") and the description ("The official app by OpenAI")I opened App Store on my iPhone and typed the name of the app, verbatim.The official/correct app was not in the first 20 entries (which is as far as I was willing to scroll).Which, to me:1. Shows why an official app is needed even though the web version works perfectly fine on iPhone and is probably easier2. Doesn't actually seem to solve the problem3. Puts to shame all the touted benefits of a "walled garden/closed ecosystem".
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uBlock Origin Lite now available on Firefox
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Unpopular take.Wouldn't it be more ethical to not visit ad supported websites in the first place? Instead of removing the source of their income while still consuming their content?Someone should make an extension "SiteBlock Origin": Everytime it detects the presence of an ad, the whole website gets blocked, not just the ad. That would be ethically consistent.
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Worse
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As an aside: for me, Amazon Instant Video is _much_ better than Netflix Streaming. I pay for both (Amazon unintentionally, because I bought Prime for the shipping), watch both on a PS3, and spend 2x the amount of time in Amazon as I do in Netflix.Apart from the free catalogs, which are comparable between the two services, Amazon also has an enormous paid streaming catalog. Like most nerds, the value of an hour of my time is such that even thinking about the price of paid streaming content is a waste of time, so Amazon's paid streaming catalog is a great win for me; 9 times out of 10, whatever I want to watch, I can get through Amazon.Amazon also does a better job of maintaining my library of past purchases and my wishlist than either of Netflix or iTunes.I didn't buy Prime to get the videos, but the videos aren't s small feature. Amazon executes streaming content as well as anyone else, and if you haven't checked them out (because you use Netflix, for instance) you should.Also: I don't think streaming media is at all out of place in Amazon's core offering. They started with books. Then digital media, just like Borders did. Then "everything else", which is what people seem to think of Amazon as now --- the Walmart of the Web. But: then Kindle (consolidating their reach into content), then streaming media, then publishing.It doesn't seem at all weird to me that the Internet's largest retailer of paid content would have a streaming media service; online content delivery would otherwise obsolete one of their original offerings.
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Don't Talk to Corp Dev
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I think anyones answer to "Do I want to sell my company right now?" is mostly going to be "It depends, what's the offer?"There are of course circumstances where people absolutely do not want to sell their company, but for the rest of us... it depends.
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Show HN: Parinfer – a simpler way to write Lisp
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This would make `git diff` an absolute nightmare.
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Muhammad Ali has died
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Muhammad Ali is something we won't allow public figures to be anymore. Being outspoken and standing up for his beliefs, against all repercussions, were his his greatest feat(s). I hope, over all else, his contributions to the human spirit reign over the rest of us. We need another (dozen) Cassius Clays.
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Chaos Computer Clubs Breaks Iris Recognition System of the Samsung Galaxy S8
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Based on the write-up, Samsung has lower quality Iris recognition than could be written by an undergrad in a few hours. I say that, having done so.Most obviously, the system should not tolerate a constant-size pupil, ever. The pupil has micro-dilations around twice per second, and your system is really terrible if you don't verify that changing diameter.Also, multi-spectral is a pretty good test, though I don't know enough about the capabilities of the S8 camera to know if that's feasible (shouldn't be that hard.) Capturing the patterns of the iris at 500, 800, and 1200nm results in three templates that are quite different from another.CCC were able to do this for about the cost of a S8. I would say this is one of the rare situations where defeating the attack would have been even cheaper. It's that simple a programming exercise.
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YouTube AI deletes war crimes evidence as 'extremist material'
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Youtube's response regarding one of these videos documenting abuses (emphasis mine):> "we've determined that your video does violate our Community Guidelines and have upheld our original decision. We appreciate your understanding."Can someone explain to me why corporations, when interacting with customers regarding complaints/appeals, seem to have "don't forget to add insult to injury" as one of their motto more often than not? Does that kind of patronizing tone sound polite to the ears of a PR drone?
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Why Does “=” Mean Assignment?
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Because K&R had terrible keyboards so they abbreviated everything as much as possible.Traditionally := was used for assignment, which makes sense since it is an asymmetric symbol for an asymmetric operation.
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Pee, Not Chlorine, Causes Red Eyes from Swimming Pools: CDC (2015)
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I've always wanted a product that you could add to the swimming pool water that reacts to human urine by coloring the water immediately surrounding the pee-er. Say a neon orange or red. Over time, the colored water gets diluted and disappears. Maybe pee-shaming is what's required to stop people from doing it.
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Apple introduces 8-core MacBook Pro
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We repair these as part of our business, and to be clear, both the keyboards and the screens are failing on these at an alarming rate.iFixit detailed the issues with the screens, which (in Apple's unending quest for "thinness") use a thinner flex cable to connect the display to the rest of the laptop. This thinner cable is prone to breakage, and we are already seeing 2016-2017 MacBook Pros in our shop regularly for this issue.Since Apple built the flex cable into the display, the only solution (even from third parties like us) is a new display. At $600-$700 each, this is unacceptable.And, like the keyboards, this is a part that's pretty much guaranteed to fail (unless you basically never open your laptop.)Apple hasn't announced a fix yet, even with a petition with over 11,000 signatures, and more screens failing by the day.From the time the keyboard issues happened, I made a strong recommendation to avoid buying these. If you can do your work on a PC, do so. (Personally, I now use a Dell XPS 15 as a "desktop replacement", and kept my old 2013 MacBook Pro around too.) If you need a Mac, consider a desktop version (with a SSD!), or stick with the 2015 or older MacBooks.Even if you think the keyboard issues are fixed, consider too that this is the 4th generation of these keyboards--and Apple promised that the 2nd and 3rd generation would fix these as well. This plus the screen issues means switching to PC if you need speed should be a serious consideration.iFixit article on "stage light" display issues/"flexgate": https://ifixit.org/blog/12903/flexgate/
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Blender 2.80
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Their integrated renderers don't work on newer macOS versions with AMD cards unfortunately, no metal support. macOS id really a bad place right now if you're into 3D and want GPU rendering, not only because of Blender, but others like Cinema 4D aren't there yet either.It's a big fail of the Apple management to not support the metal development for apps like Blender, they gonna lose a generation of creatives.
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YouTube accidentally permanently terminated my account
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I keep hearing stories about similar issues. Suddenly someone is terminated from a Google service for unknown reasons, without any possibility of reversing such decisions.This appears to be true of Twitter and others as well.From my vantage point, it appears to be quite arbitrary. And quite concerning in a number of cases, given the centralization of email, docs, etc.I do make backups of google content every so often.I guess the irony of making a copy of a cloud set of services data locally, as you may not be able to trust that these services will be there over longer intervals, is either ironic ... or problematic.It speaks directly to the concept of risk of extended supply chains ... is the risk to your data, and ability to interact with services worth maintaining a presence on the systems?This behavior on their and related tech giants generally makes me question how much we should rely on them for important things (like permanent email addresses) over time. This has been making me uneasy for a while, and seeing more stories like this is not quelling my discomfort.
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Epic Games has filed legal papers in response to Apple [pdf]
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Apple is about to get bitten hard for being a monopoly.I hope the government considers the harshest punishment of all: splitting up Apple into hardware and software+services entities.This is absurd that Apple has built a fiefdom on America's most popular generic computer device. It's a threat to freedom! We can only compute what the overlords allow and can tax? What a crock!The fact that Apple thinks they can extort more protection money from developers than the government does in taxes is an affront. But the freedom aspect should have everyone out with their pitchforks.This after Apple created an environment where its users, many of whom have lots of disposable income for buying goods and services, expect apps to be $0.99 and come with free updates for life. Meanwhile Apple's own products are luxury priced. And they still take 30%.US Government, please force Apple to open up iPhone to any software we want to install. It's a generic computer. It's how we communicate, do banking, do basic shopping, dating, business ... everything. Apple can't be the gatekeepers of 21st century life. It's incredibly damaging to our ability to innovate and succeed as small business owners and entrepreneurs.Apple, you are the tyrant king. Long have we suffered under your rule. We won't stand for it any longer and we demand our freedom.
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Attention is your scarcest resource
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I think the most salient point of this blog is pretty much buried as the closing thought. It’s pretty hard to be a good engineering manager when you also have programming responsibilities (IC work). Sure, you can debate about what the different hacks are to try and work around this and do a good job in spite of the difficulty, but it’s a lot easier to just go full-time managing.In my experience it takes six or more people to fully occupy a manager. Ten seems to be about perfect. You can go higher than that (and many do) but at a certain point you’re not evenly investing in all your people anymore, you’re mostly focusing on a few at a time.Obviously the hardest part of this is if you don’t have 6+ people to manage. My answer to very small teams is not to have a manager at all, just have a technical lead and trust that a group of 1-5 people can work out their own crap.
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Calibre 5.0
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It's a big shame that whenever anything related to Calibre is posted, top comments will often be how arrogant is author is. I used to think the same. But when I read his comments history in GitHub, he doesn't seem a dick to me at all. So I googled his name, and end up in a forum. It completely changed my mind.Contrary to what people believe, Dovid Goyal is the most friendly programmer to his users. He spent lots of time answering questions in the forum https://www.mobileread.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=166. His answers include where is a menu located, how to convert a book from one format to another, helping the user to debug the exact the problem with Calibre. He has been doing this daily and is very responsive. You can expect an answer to your question in the same day. (The forum used to allow you to read user's comments history anonymously, but now you need a account to do so)
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What is the best dumb TV?
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I don't have a TV, only a few monitors (it's very liberating, actually). So instead I'll talk about my microwave. Yes, unironically! :D It has two dials. OMG how do I survive with only two dials? How do I program it? Well, the answer is, unsurprisingly, that I don't program it. Instead I crank it to watever wattage I need (usually the top one), and the time I think it'll take until the food I becomes hot. Aaaand that's it. No programming. No fiddling or mindlessly pushing buttons in the hopes of finding the right one. Only two dials. One for wattage (power output), and the other for time. I think it's really great. There's even some indicators on the Watt-dial for thawing and stuff like that, but I seldom need it, so I usually just keep it rested on 800W. It's the required wattage for most TV dinners anyway. And hot pockets. Don't forget hot pockets guys. How would I survive without...... If you didn't get it, this is actually a post about UIs, and how much I love the book The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman.[1][1]: https://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Revised-Expand...
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Danish military intelligence uses XKEYSCORE to tap cables in co-op with the NSA
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All these comments about metadata not being useful are missing the point. Metadata is incredible valuable and sometimes just as valuable as the decrypted data itself. Knowing what sites a target visits, access patterns, changes in behavior: all this can be fed into ML algorithms to come up with fingerprints.You don't need to be able decrypt the data in transit if you know the endpoints and can somehow compromise the endpoints at a later date. And that is way easier. Breaking encryption is hard and time consuming. Identifying a site a user regularly visits and exploiting that is more straightforward.
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The man who produced Steve Jobs’ keynotes for 20 years (2018)
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It’s always interesting to watch other companies give presentations in their attempt at Apple style. Google comes to mind as being the worst.It’s like everyone has analyzed or identified certain little nuggets of a good presentation and then sprinkled them in... versus truly and innately understanding how to deliver a cohesive performance to an audience. The most famous example of this is the way everyone started to use “we did x y and z and you’re going to love it!” which was thrown around like peanuts on a domestic flight.Richard Feynman’s quote on cargo culting comes to mind.
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Hatetris – Tetris which always gives you the worst piece
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For about 15 years I've been trying to figure out how to articulate a `Tetris is life` essay. "Things are going good, you're given an S piece that doesnt fit anywhere. You have to decide where you'll put that blocking piece so that you can hopefully clear it later. This might be an unexpected car repair bill or a death that you aren't emotionally capable of addressing ... You're in control, you have a good job, a great partner, and yall are saving to buy a house -- basically waiting for an l piece to complete your `Tetris`..."Anyway, this game of (ha)Tetris is a lot like a lot of people's lives, just roadblock after roadblock. While the normal version where you start from zero on level one is probably an upper middle class life. And Id say that the majority of people in the world start on level 6 with the board halfway filled with a bunch of gaps and the pieces move at a speed that is barely controllable (im thinking of the classic gameboy version when I imagine these boards)Hatetris is cool. I couldn't get one line and I consider myself a damn good tetris player. It kept giving me S pieces and threw a Z in there and then an l
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Anna Kiesenhofer: Mathematician, amateur cyclist, Olympic champion
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Some additional context for those who don't follow professional cycling: the Dutch women's team was incredibly strong coming into this road race. All 4 riders on their team are stars in their own right, and the only reason there wasn't a clear favorite for the race overall is that people weren't sure which Dutch rider would win.So you have a complicated group dynamic, where the majority of the peloton has no interest in pulling the group to catch the break, since they would just get beat by one or more of the Dutch riders, and the Dutch riders didn't seem to have a clear plan on how to control the race and who would sacrifice their chances and work on the front for the rest of the team.As others have said, there were no radios allowed for riders in the race, so all information about the breakaway came from the race director's car trailing the peloton. This was a well known fact about the race coming in, and it's the same way that the annual World Championship race is run. It's normal for riders to drop back to the team car to get information about the break, and the lead moto for a group of cyclists will occasionally show time gaps on a whiteboard.At least one of the Dutch riders claimed to have known about the lone rider off the front [1], but somehow that information didn't make it to the rest of the team. It seems that most of the peloton didn't know (or didn't care) how many riders were up the road, and the Dutch team failed to communicate amongst themselves and establish a plan.All that leads to Kiesenhofer's solo move working out. All credit to her for an extremely strong ride.[1]https://netherlandsnewslive.com/miscommunication-and-underes...
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Show HN: I built a fake VS Code to browse live cricket score in office
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Just goes to show the difference in work cultures. Here in the UK I could quite happily have the match up on another monitor, nobody would bat (pun unintended) and eyelash. I'm not sure I could do that with a game that requires more oversight though, test cricket, especially, is slow to watch. Fun though!
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After 20 years the Dwarf Fortress devs have to get used to being millionaires
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So this happened to a guy that worked for me. Loved video games, super talented front end dev. Made a horror game in Unity at evenings and weekends with his best friend. Launched it on Steam. Very low sales. But he learnt a huge amount about marketing and game design based on player feedback.Designed a second game, put all the marketing learnings into it, 48 hours after launch the biggest streamer on twitch was streaming it.4 days later he quit working for me. Couldnt be happier for him.The biggest thing I saw was that 2 guys, Unity, unity asset store and some upwork artists made a really pretty decent game. I love how this has come full circle. I'm 47 and back in the 8 bit days games were made by 1 or 2 people. 15 years ago this just wasnt possible, but now with unity, unity assets, remote for hire work, steam and twitch for marketing you can legit make it as a 2 person studio. I love it.The distribution of Steam and viral marketing of Twitch have revolutionised indie development for the better. In addition to this, as an asset he now has a Discord server with 10ksss+ subscribers. I doubt he will ever pay for a $ of traditional above or below the line marketing.
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I lost everything that made me love my job through Midjourney
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When DALL-E 2 was released, I remember reading lots of people here in HN saying it would never take the jobs of artists. Well, seems like this argument is aging badly. This is exactly the type of conversation we need to have as a society. Instead of deluding ourselves that our skills are impossible to be reproduced by a machine, we should strive to build a system with values in which we can find a way to build a good live knowing that everything we do will eventually be better reproduced by AI.
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Pixpaint
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I also have a buggy version that preserves angle:https://warms2.maxbittker.repl.co/(it only works if you draw slowly right now, not sure why)This whole tool was directly inspired by "grubs" here https://whichlight.github.io/draw-play/
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Why is my dryer radioactive?
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I think the core of the explanation given is correct but some of the adjacent details need adjustment. The important part is:"Clothes dryers are very effective at making statically charged surfaces. (Dryer sheets help.) So when radon and its temporary decay products are blown through the dryer, electrically-polarized molecules tend to be attracted to the charged surfaces"What that commenter misses is that nearly all hobbyist grade detectors (Geiger tubes) are not sensitive to alpha but they are highly sensitive to beta and a little sensitivity to gamma. However, any thin solid will block beta, so they would need the Geiger tube to be very near the radiation emitting material to pick up the beta. In other words, if they're just waving the detector around they're probably just catching the gamma.The radon in the air decays into various progeny, and by the time it reaches the dryer that will be to some extent in equilibrium, so several isotopes, including gamma emitters, will be present in the mix. Therefore I'm not surprised the detector reads a tiny bit of that.Why it dissipates is probably not a decay thing but rather the accumulated material gradually diffusing away from the filter or whatever after the dryer is turned off and no longer actively accumulating radon.This could be tested by putting a detector right next to the filter to see how much beta it picks up. I've basically done that with a home air filter:https://twitter.com/BetterGeiger/status/1605639346865901570?...That's with the detector I make and sell which is primarily sensitive to gamma, which is why I could register a reading through the plastic container, even a couple days after preparing the test. When I used a pancake style detector sensitive to alpha and beta, directly against the exposed filter, the detector reacted much more strongly... But the Better Geiger S-1 gives an accurate dose reading, the Geiger tube or pancake probe will dramatically overestimate dose in that scenario, which can cause undue concern... In reality it's pretty harmless levels of radiation. :)
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Patio11's perspective on the Japan Earthquake
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There is a bit of overlap here with my comments on HN the last couple of days. I've had to explain it to 100+ friends, family, customers, clients, etc, so I figured I might as well polish it and put it somewhere public.At the risk of stating the obvious: I am not "HN's Japan Guy." There are many, many HNers in Japan. A few dozen of them make it out to the Tokyo meetups. There are many, many perspectives on this disaster -- this is just my wee little contribution from a place well removed from most of the worst scenes.
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If this then that
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Anyone interested in this may care to read the discussion from 3 months ago:http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2604921To be honest, I still have a hard time figuring out how, where or why I would ever use this. Maybe I'm just too old, too disconnected, or too stupid to understand what it's all about, but in short, I just don't.I'd love a single, simple, concrete example of a relevant problem this solves.Don't get me wrong, I have no doubt it's very cool and very clever. I just really don't get it.
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Meeting A Troll
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compelling story, but I'd like to know how he translated an ip address in to a street address.
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NSA shares raw intelligence including Americans' data with Israel
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The shoe I'm still waiting for is whether the FBI is willing to use the sworn affidavit of foreign intelligence people with access to American intelligence as grounds for warrants issued under the 4th amendment.In plain English, if another country tells us which Americans to go after, do we issue warrants and actually go after them? I'd be willing to bet money that we do, but nobody will want to admit to it.
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A town of about 200 people, almost all of whom live in the same building
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W00h! I grew up in Whittier, AK. Ask me Anything! Haha, seriously, I moved to Whittier at the age of 2 in 1974 and lived there until 1986.The big change there since I left has been the tunnel. When I was there you had to drive your car up onto a railroad flatcar (and pay a steep ticket price) to get out. Anchorage is only 55 miles away, but really it's two mountains away. The railroad sold passenger service only as a requirement of the state and prioritized it behind freight. Between that, avalanches and assorted weather problems, you could wait hours and hours for a train. Winter service wasn't even daily, back then. We didn't even have cable. Just PBS and one channel that mixed shows from the three big networks. It was strange.Yes, most residents live in one big 14 story high-rise in rural Alaska.I most definitely do not miss it. I recommend this book if you want more info:http://www.amazon.com/dp/1578331919/
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Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2015)
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NCC Group (formerly Matasano Security, iSEC Partners, and Intrepidus Group) - Austin, Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, and Sunnyvale, CAIt's July, and I can assure you that all of our offices have better A/C than anyone else on this thread.Many of you will be familiar with NCC Group's legacy US names - Matasano Security, iSEC Partners, and Intrepidus Group. We're now all officially integrated under the NCC Group name and one happy family.The bottom line: if you love security and research, NCC Group just may be a perfect fit for you.What do we do exactly? Penetration testing, security analysis, and cutting-edge research into current technologies and attacks (breaking things). You spend most of your day thinking about security systems and how they can break. You get to be creative and have a lot of freedom to be clever while learning new technologies at a very fast pace. Engagements are usually 2-4 weeks long and in a year you will be exposed to 15-20 products and technology stacks. Your work will typically initiate person-months of security improvements in products millions of people use. You will have access to senior engineers/architects and your findings/ideas will be heard by senior decision makers. You will have enormous impact in making the software people use safer. All of our consultants are also security researchers, with dedicated research time. Not too shabby!If you want to learn more about us check out our:
Blog - https://www.nccgroup.trust/us/blog/
Cryptopals - http://cryptopals.com/
Microcorruption - http://microcorruption.com/
Research - https://isecpartners.github.io/If you're ready to apply, contact us at: https://www.nccgroup.trust/us/careers/. We'd love to hear from you!
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Who Will Command the Robot Armies?
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What I am worried about is that in future AI swarm military robots will enable something that wasn't seen yet in history. Now to make dictatorship state you need support of military/rebels/people behind it, you can't make it on your own. Without humans in equation who will stop some oligarch with enough money to take over some nation in for example Africa or Middle East? You wouldn't need hundreds of thousands/millions people supporting you anymore.
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Show HN: Dply – Free temporary Linux servers
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This is a project I've been working on for a while. Dply allows you to quickly create a temporary cloud server (1CPU/512MB RAM/20GB SSD) for free. You can have one free server running at any time. Log in with your Github account and it will allow you to create your server using your Github ssh-key. Servers are free for 2 hours and expire after that time (unless you choose to add more time via credit card or bitcoin). It's a quick and easy way to demo some code on a live server or just play around with a few popular Linux distros.We also provide the ability to create a button for your project allowing you to let people create a server with your service/project running on it for free to try it out. Create a yaml or bash user-data script and others can launch servers with it.For the last 11 years on and off I've run a small Linux distribution. I work for a well known cloud host by day but in talking with users learned that it's a hassle sometimes to create an account, billing profile and all that when you just need to quickly test or share something so I built this in my free time.Do you expect to make money on this?Honestly, no idea. I have a decent credit grant that will cover free 2 hour servers for a while so it was worth trying out.How do I log into my server?All servers are created with ssh-key authentication only. You are provided the option to select from the ssh keys on your Github account when you create a server. Your key will be applied to the "root" account.I am happy to answer any questions about dply.co and would love any feedback.
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Standard Notes – A notes app with a focus on longevity, portability, and privacy
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> What I write is important to me. I want to be able to read it fifty years from now. A hundred years from now. So where do I go? Apple Notes? Google? Other private, short-lived, growth-oriented companies? No. What we need is something that focuses on durability and not growth.I know HN is for the tech crowd, but can I suggest something so simple it sounds stupid? If you want to read your notes 50 years from now use a pen and paper. Go ahead, downvote away. Yes, you won't be able to index them and search them and yadda yadda yadda but you're writing _notes_, not full-fledged documents.What is a note? "A brief record of facts, topics, or thoughts, written down as an aid to memory." according to Google.I keep a small Moleskine notebook and a pen with me to write down notes and ideas. James Altucher uses a waiter's pad. It works just fine. I know it's a radical thing to say but technology isn't always the solution to our problems.
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Show HN: Metaballs
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Could this extend to 3D?
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Two Koreas Agree to End War This Year, Pursue Denuclearization
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What changed that North Korea would be serious this time? I can't think of much. On the contrary, they seem stronger. Maybe they feel they have enough to negotiate more favorable terms than ever before. Maybe the borders have become so porous to outside information coming in that they feel change is inevitable so they'd do better to be in front of it.I can't get past that on a personal level, the decision-makers, in particular Kim Jong Un's family, are responsible for many people's suffering and deaths, which I would think would make them fear too much freedom among the survivors. People hunted Nazis for generations. Wouldn't the North Korean decision-makers fear being hunted?Meanwhile, China has been invaded more than once from the Korean peninsula. How willing will they be to lose a buffer between themselves and U.S. military bases?
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YAML: probably not so great after all (2017)
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We've spent like 10 years trying to fill in gaps left when we all decided to hate XML. JSON is great as a lightweight DIF between trusted partners. If you care about maintenance and safety, XML with XSD is rock solid.
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How Facebook tracks you on Android [video]
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We're spoiled in the desktop browser by being able to clear history, cookies, local storage etc, or use a private browser session. There's also the importance of the "same origin policy".The Android platform API should simply never allow apps to obtain global system identifiers (serial numbers, "advertising IDs", MACs, Wifi network info, EMEIs etc) in the first place. Perhaps even going as far as not providing a shared filesystem.Mobile apps, despite platform API permission, and having some ability to protect their own data, are a lot closer to desktop programs than web apps in many regards.
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Let's Encrypt makes certs for 30% of web domains
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can someone please share how they deploy/distribute Let's encrypt certificates with auto renewal on load balanced multiple EC2 servers for the same dns name. I had tried this a while but had to give up and just bought SSL certs which I then include in my EC2 image.
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Ask HN: How Can I Learn Music Theory?
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Here's how I approach it: forget about all the historic naming like "perfect fifths" and just think in terms of the modern 12-note equal temperament. Every note is a number, e.g. 440 Herz = 69, the standard guitar tuning has strings from 40 to 64, etc. Every interval is an integer, up an octave is +12, major chord is a triple of {x, x+4, x+7}, minor seventh chord is {x, x+3, x+7, x+10} etc.Then, as a the second game-changer, learn the circle of fifths. Start with a note like C, and keep adding +7 to it. You'll get FCGDAEBF#C#G#D#A# - note how the sharped notes repeat the pattern of the nonsharped ones, easy to remember. The "keys" and "modes" stuff is just intervals of seven consecutive notes on the circle. Say you choose FCGDAEB, that's one key, then every mode is to be found by choosing one note out of those seven, and hopping over one note until you play all seven once: e.g. FGABCDE is one mode (Lydian afair), EFGABCD is another one etc. The "major" and "minor" keys are just different names for two of those seven modes. Pentatonic scales are those same modes with some notes omitted. Blues and harmonic minor scales are those same modes with some notes inserted. Overall modes, not keys or chords are the key to actually composing music intelligently, so learn them and learn to play them.This should give you a good start in practical music theory.
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Tell HN: Cisco WebEx on OS X uses the same pre-installer tricks as Zoom
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Everyone who's spent 3 hours talking a parent through downloading and installing a Zoom client understands exactly why they're doing this. Mine are unable to (1) reliably download a zip file; (2) navigate to that file using Finder; (3) run something inside it.By the time we were done -- I use copilot (basically VNC with NAT punching built in) -- and I got control of the laptop to just do it myself, there were 7 downloads and 4 unzip attempts.My MIL and I have literally had facetime pointed at her laptop while I directed her where to to get copilot running for the quarterly cleansing-of-the-spyware.
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A Third Solution
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Not only is it completely unrealistic at scale, the specific approach in the blog post is wildly impossible at all.It requires screeners to directly manipulate saliva samples; this is dangerous in a pandemic. The assays referred to (lazily) in a Google Scholar search are almost overwhelmingly antibody assays; this does not allow the screener to differentiate between "has COVID-19" and "had COVID-19". Also, there is no evidence that the described test actually exists.Finally, maybe irrelevantly, there is no way in hell you're going to get people at large to stand around for two hours a week waiting for test results. Ten minutes for a screening whenever you try to enter a public building; that's ten minutes to get into work, and we'll say ten minutes to get into another place each day. "But wait," I hear you say, "you only need to be screened once per day, and the first place can share that data with the next place." This plan was constructed by someone who is unfamiliar with medical records laws.This is no "third solution." It's an engaging thought experiment, but it's just too far away from reality to get here from there.
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