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Scunthorpe Sans – a self-censoring font
As a way to show off the capability of ligatures, more power to them. As an effort to censor, why in the ever loving fuck nuggets would you ever actually do that?I have young kids and a large family. We all curse periodically. Instead of telling the kids that these are bad words, we told them they are adult words. As in, when you are old enough you can curse all you want, but as a kid you can’t. We felt that this was a more correct way to put it, and instead of making a huge deal out of them we instead taught them what is and what isn’t appropriate. You’d think this would result in them using those potty words all the time. Nope. I mean mostly no. Currently one of them asked one of the family members to stop using the word fuck because it makes her uncomfortable. The other one and I were playing Minecraft and I tried to explain the Nether to her as hell and she was like “wait is that a word I can say?” which led to us discussing when it’s ok and not ok to use that word. My girlfriend explained what “boss bitch” means to the kids recently in terms of dog mushing.Some amusing stories: my oldest when she was in daycare made a pact with her classmates to go into the bathroom and say curse words because the teachers wouldn’t hear them in there. They even had someone on lookout when they did this. Words used were “poop” and “doodoo”.That same kid when she was 4-5 came up to mom and asked “I really want to say a curse word”. Mom sent her to her room to say it no more than five times and come back. She did and that was that.The other kid accidentally busted out with a periodic “what is this bullshit?” when she was much younger. She does not curse currently.Words are words and censoring “bad” words is silly. You can’t censor meaning. “Fk you” is just as powerful a statement as “fuck you”. Especially if it censors words like “associating” or “Cummings” or “arsenal”. This is just fodder for the unnecessary censorship memes.
A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors (2018)
To me HNs biggest feature is the lack of features and the lack of 'innovation', or rather redesigns for the sake of redesigning.Keep up the fantastic moderation and the wonderful lack of innovation, HN people!
The Next Step for Generics
I like generics for collections but that is about it. I've seen "gifted" programmers turn everything into generic classes and functions which then makes it very difficult for anyone else to figure out what is going on.One reason I like go is it doesn't have all the bells and whistles that give too many choices.
Stripe bans Trump campaign
The people cheering this on will not be protected when the mob comes for you.We live in a digital age. If having the wrong opinion means you can get your bank accounts and all Internet presence removed from you, it's not any different than living under a fascist government.
The “Granny Knot”
A few years ago I switched from the "Granny Knot" to the "Ian Knot" [0] in order to (1) eliminate the need for "double knotting" and (2) straighten the bow. Despite the few embarrassing times early in the process where friends observed me struggling to tie my shoes, I can confidently say the switch has been worth it.[0] https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/ianknot.htm
Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?
See what creator of Babel has to say>Babel used by millions, so why are we running out of money? Bluntly: Because funds were misallocated for years, and the project has been too slow to improve.>The reason there's no money is because someone took a $130k annual salary and didn't actually work on the project. https://twitter.com/sebmck/status/1392019586833387522- So donating money because of this post may not be a good idea
What's Inside the EU Green Pass QR Code?
So after all this talk of how we're better than China and how invasive the wechat Green qr code is we decided to copy it?What exactly is the moral high ground we stand on?
Words known better by males than females, and vice versa
I'm a woman software engineer, and I recognize every one of those as a word, which I think was the criterion being measured. (There are a few on each side I can't define but have definitely seen.) I'm mostly floored by how many of the textile words people here don't recognize, to the point of thinking they're "fake words." Have you never shopped for textiles for your house or apartment? I mean, espadrille, sure, that's a woman's shoe guys might not ever see the word for. But damask? Jacquard? Chenille? Do you not have curtains or a couch?
The Unreasonable Math of Type 1 Diabetes
I'm a type 1 diabetic, and this was a helpful post at showing non diabetics why it is so. hard. Non diabetics typically think the difficult thing must be the shots and the finger pricks, right?Not really. The majority of diabetics get used to those things quickly (of course there are some of course that deal with a major major needle phobia that can make it even harder). The hard part is that it never ends. Almost every moment of every day, your brain has a background process running that's evaluating every decision in context of your diabetes. There are no breaks. Your prefrontal cortex now has to take the place of a previously complex and automatic bodily process. It's the last thing you think about when you go to bed and it's the first thing you think about when you wake up. It's what you think about when you want to go on a walk, are about to enter a meeting, go into an interview, get on a plane, take a shower.It's usually little things: "okay, where am I at now? which direction is it going? when did I last eat? do I have snacks ready? do I have enough insulin for the day? what if I start to go low during this meeting? should I pop some carbs and run high for this interview, so I don't risk a hypo partway through? why am I going low right now when I took the same dose I took yesterday for the same meal? why am I now skyrocketing for no discernible reason, I didn't even eat anything? shoot, I'm starting to hypo out of nowhere in the middle of this great conversation, which I now have to interrupt to eat a snack and recover for 15 minutes. I fell asleep with a perfect BG, but now I'm awake at 2AM half delirious because my BG fell all the way down to 50, and I'm in the kitchen shoving cookies down my throat because hypoglycemia activates a survival instinct to EAT EVERYTHING that's extremely hard to control, and I know that I'm gonna shoot all the way up to 250 shortly, which I'll have to treat with insulin, and I'm basically not going to get any sleep tonight".And then the math often doesn't make any sense. There are so many factors that effect it. One day the same number of carbs + insulin may make you go high, and the next low, because of other environmental factors. (See the "42 factors that effect blood glucose" chart in the post.) You're constantly having to adjust.I'm literally crying while writing this post, because it's so exhausting and it never ends.
Germany opposes EU plans for client-side scanning
Anything that includes client side scanning is a slippery slope to fully controlling your device. Will it be illegal to somehow disable the client side scanning? If so then how long until you are breaking the law when you turn off the government scanner — or are caught “installing a new hard drive” in your computer.. etc..Is the problem that people can send encrypted things back and forth to each other? Requiring that companies put snooping software on their device is basically the thought police. Not hyperbole but the actual thought police. Today it’s saving the children, tomorrow it’s basically any problem the governments of many nations want to try to solve.
Show HN: Alpaca.cpp – Run an Instruction-Tuned Chat-Style LLM on a MacBook
Is there a post somewhere where I can get all the jargon for this AI/ML stuff? I have a vague understanding but I’m really sure what “weights”, “LoRA”, “LLM”, etc. are to really understand where each tool and concept fit in.
Check if your IKEA chair is compatible with your screen
I once had the problem that running make with too many parallel jobs (-j) would change my keyboard layout.The machine was some laptop mainboard glued to the backside of my monitor, and the USB socket came out at the top of the mainboard. On its way down, the USB cable for the keyboard passed across the whole mainboard. On high load, the mainboard created enough interference to cause the connection to reset, re-hotplugging my keyboard, so the previous setxkbmap call was not effective anymore and i was back to the standard US qwerty layout.
Jujutsu: A Git-compatible DVCS that is both simple and powerful
I haven't really used git on the command line for years now, except for some special cases. In my daily usage, I rely on the built-in IDE integration (IntelliJ, FWIW), and I don't understand why anyone would put up with doing it manually. I can do partial commits by selecting individual lines right in my editor. I can view all branches, merge them, cherry-pick from them, commit stuff or amend it, pull updates, edit tags - everything at once, with keyboard shortcuts.Apparently, I'm in the minority here (also considering all the talk about git being such an essential skill that real programmers can issue commands blindfold). Why is that?
Code Llama, a state-of-the-art large language model for coding
Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37248494, which was posted a bit earlier.
Mint.com turns 404 ad page into date ad for developer
I love it when companies add a little personal touch to their 404 pages (though they're taking 'personal' to a whole new level here!)I saw an incredibly great collection of creative 404 pages a few months back. I can't find the one I saw, though Fab404 (http://fab404.com/) has a bunch.
Autocomplete from Stack Overflow
It still astounds me that we haven't solved reusable modules in 2016.Sure, we have libraries, apis, package managers etc. but every time I read a code base, there is always a utility function reinventing the wheel.Someone wrote it because it is still difficult to discover modular code and reuse it easily.It's pretty nuts when you think about it. Imagine mechanical engineers having to recreate the same CAD file because they can't find a component with the same functionality (which does happen but for other reasons e.g intellectual property).But we don't have the same intellectual property challenges and yet the best tools we have to discover and reuse code are 90s search engines that treat code as raw text with zero contextual understanding and often outdated code snippets.PS: I love your project btw.
Crying
I am a big burly guy with a beard - and I get overwhelmed and cry regularly. Not even from sadness, just from general emotion.For example last night I watched the trailer for Overwatch[1] and got so excited I started tearing up. I don't know why, anything that triggers ANY sort of strong emotion in me brings it on. Always has.My wife makes fun of me for it. I don't see anything wrong with it.[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqnKB22pOC0
Uber London loses licence to operate
If they can't or won't reform then excellent, let's be rid of them.I don't want to give any business to a company that are seeking to become a worldwide cab monopoly, and squirrel away any profits to the US. We have a perfectly healthy cab ecosystem in my city, app-driven and with fare competition and city regulation. Which I suppose is why Uber, though present, hasn't really taken off here.That said, talk of profits may be a little early and AFAICT they're losing money by the fistful. Which kinda says that they're engaging in some dodgy market distortion to me...
Assembly Language for Beginners [pdf]
I actually got paid a salary for learning & programming in IBM mainframe assembler (BAL or Basic Assembly Language) in 1970, for an insurance company. The CPU memory was so small (32K, yes 32,768 bytes) that the only way we could squeeze enough functionality was to write in assembler, with overlays (no virtual memory). Debugging consisted of manually toggling hex data and instructions at the control panel. What a blast!It was a lot of fun, but terribly inefficient programmer productivity. I would not want to go back :o) Dereferencing registers prepared me for C pointers later.
‘I’m Broke and Mostly Friendless, and I’ve Wasted My Whole Life’
This probably won't be popular, but what the hell.I feel like, if you strip away the outward trappings and dogma, this is what religion is good for. Not in a "believe in Jesus" or "trust in God" kind of way, but in a "how to orient your life" kind of way. Which is to say, the actually useful portion of religion generally teaches that your best life is probably not focused on you. It isn't about finding yourself, or being true to yourself, or really thinking about yourself at all. It's in being of benefit to the human beings around you. And in serving those around you, you become something that is worth being.It doesn't matter who you are or where you live, there are poor people around you. There are parentless children, drug addicts, parks that need cleaning, animal shelters that need dog walkers. You can always do something meaningful with your life. Try that, and see what kind of relationships you make. Look at and actually see a homeless person. See how that makes you feel. See if your worrying about your own future maybe drops away, or gets morphed into something you can do something with. See what kinds of other people you run into that way. Focus on, if not bringing joy to other people, then at least making their lives better. See if that doesn't - as a pure byproduct - change your own self-worth. Or maybe just make you less focused on it.
BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X
Ah, memories. Used to use BeOS as my primary OS for a year or two. I think it's the only OS I ever found to be truly intuitive and pleasant to work with.That said, I don't think the world would be in a better place had Apple chosen Be over NeXT. The elephant in the room is security: NeXTSTEP, being Unix-based, has some amount of security baked in from the ground up. BeOS didn't; it was more akin to Windows 95 or classic Mac OS on that front. Consequently, I doubt it could have made it far into the 21st century. It would have died unceremoniously in a steaming pile of AYBABTU. Taking Apple with it, presumably.
Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent
The weird thing about this is that the only company I've seen doing problematic user-agent handling in recent years is Google themselves. They have released several products as Chrome-only, which then turned out to work fine in every other browser if they just pretended to be Chrome through the user agent. Same with their search pages, which on mobile were very bad in every non-Chrome browser purely based on user agent sniffing.
How Developers Stop Learning: Rise of the Expert Beginner (2012)
Maybe developers stop learning because they realize that that to learn how to do the same thing with 167 technologies is not a real development. Maybe they realize (they should) that self-development should be we well balanced, so after programming workday they should invest their time into sports and work with their emotions and take care of interpersonal aspect of their lives.The older I am the more I'm convinced that development is not individual thing - it's a team sport.Hey, company: divide your workday into 4h work for external projects and 4h work for team development.Smart, mature developer, will realize that the most inhibiting phenomenon for him is usually the job itself.
Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB
Not a fan of Raspberry Pi. It hides behind proprietary Broadcom chip, no DSI/MIPI support and you're at the mercy of Raspberry PI for any sort of commercial implementation (RPi Zero and independent module). They do guarantee upto 2026 availability for their DIMM modules which is nice. We wanted to build commercial device using RPi but its a no go due to its blackbox nature.What they should do is to leverage their position in the market and convince Broadcom to open source the bootloader and drivers. There are a bunch of binary blobs from Broadcom that are a mystery as to what they do. No docs, no anything. HAL layer is completely at the mercy of Raspbery Pi.Raspberry Pi is an ecosystem which is based on proprietary technologies and masquerading as an open source friendly thing.If you want to support proper open source development (I understand, at some point things get proprietary the closer you get to the hardware, but with RPi, there isn't even a datasheet for the processor that you can get your hands on), buy Beagle board and other alternatives.
Apple’s head of security indicted in Santa Clara County CCW case
Can't believe all the Apple apologists here. Bribing public officials is a crime, period. It isn't an "unfortunate situation" or anything else that people are calling it. It also doesn't matter who initiated the bribe. The employee, and potentially the company itself, absolutely need to be charged and prosecuted for it.
Robinhood lays off 23% of staff
> As CEO, I approved and took responsibility for our ambitious staffing trajectory—this is on meReminder that Vlad Tenev received $800M in compensation in 2021. In the same year the company made terrible bets on crypto and banking, took an irreversible reputation hit among its core user base because of the GME fiasco, had multiple user data breaches, was subject to several investigations and was fined hundreds of millions by the SEC and other regulatory bodies, and saw its share price drop by 90%.At this point "taking responsibility" would mean resigning and letting someone more competent fix his messes.
Twilio incident: What Signal users need to know
This is a weird thread. There's a product that does secure messaging with usernames and only requires user/pass. It's called Keybase. If this is the product you want, then go use it. I don't understand why everyone wants Signal to be something it's not. I quite like Signal as they are and this "incident" demonstrates exactly what happens if a carrier gets compromised: nothing. Nothing happens. Signal decides not to trust any phone verifications from the period of compromise and requires affected numbers to reregister. All the important crypto has nothing to do with phone numbers in Signal's domain. And this is exactly why I use Signal. It lets me send secure messages to people using a tried and true UX: text messaging, but with its own secure application layer. It's really difficult to build a useable security product, and Signal has done it successfully.
Lego violates GPL by keep Blender-based BrickLink Studio source closed (2021)
It's worth noting that there have been some high-profile cases of legal action being taken against GPL violators, such as the BusyBox lawsuit in 2007, which resulted in a settlement requiring the defendant to comply with the GPL and pay damages. However, many GPL violations are resolved through non-legal means, such as negotiating a license agreement or reaching a settlement outside of court.But likely this will just cause minor reputational damage among HN-types and have no real consequences.
I want to talk about WebGPU
I suspect this article may even be underestimating the impact of WebGPU. I'll make two observations.First, for AI and machine learning type workloads, the infrastructure situation is a big mess right now unless you buy into the Nvidia / CUDA ecosystem. If you're a research, you pretty much have to, but increasingly people will just want to run models that have already been trained. Fairly soon, WebGPU will be an alternative that more or less Just Works, although I do expect things to be rough in the early days. There's also a performance gap, but I can see it closing.Second, for compute shaders in general (potentially accelerating a large variety of tasks), the barrier to entry falls dramatically. That's especially true on web deployments, where running your own compute shader costs somewhere around 100 lines of code. But it becomes practical on native too, especially Rust where you can just pull in a wgpu dependency.As for text being one of the missing pieces, I'm hoping Vello and supporting infrastructure will become one of the things people routinely reach for. That'll get you not just text but nice 2D vector graphics with fills, strokes, gradients, blend modes, and so on. It's not production-ready yet, but I'm excited about the roadmap.[Note: very lightly adapted from a comment at cohost; one interesting response was by Tom Forsyth, suggesting I look into SYCL]
UK Parliament undermined the privacy, security, freedom of all internet users
I've said it before and I'll repeat it here - as someone who lives in the UK the thing that bothers me the most about it is a complete apathy from everyone I know, and I work in IT. People just go "meh what are you going to do", or recently very common "I don't have strength to be angry at this government all the time over everything, I just carry on forward and hope things improve". And of course the fact that this is getting 0 coverage from mainstream media doesn't help.
Tell HN: Let's Be Civil
The root cause is not incivility, it's inanity. Why do we have threads about these not-exactly-revolutionary things sitting all over the front page? Who votes for this stuff?The Surface one up there is just some guy's blog review. It's not poorly written, but why are we reading randomly selected Surface reviews? There's an entire post right now that is basically a Samsung press release via CNET, describing some (totally unquantified, of course) minor uptick in sales for the latest Android phone. There is literally nothing to talk about there except to proffer essentially baseless flames, praise, or speculation.I would have no qualms asking the moderators to fix this. I can't understand any metric by which these are useful posts to have on the front page. There is lots of much better stuff sitting on the New page which is being crowded out by noise that I could go read in two hundred other places. "Intellectual curiousity" is not referring to what you have every time a phone comes out which is 20% lighter and 10% longer.
Goodbye, Malcolm
Wow, what a tragic shock. Does anyone know the details?
FBI Admits It Controlled Tor Servers Behind Mass Malware Attack
I don't even know anymore. We're gonna have to raise the bar on what it means to be a "tinfoil hatter"; the original definition has become reality."Trust no one! Suspect EVERYTHING!", I can say today without sounding crazy.Also, remember this? http://www.linuxfoundation.org/news-media/blogs/browse/2011/... ....hmm, I wonder if....
Choose hotels by the quality of their WiFi
One thing that I noticed, is that the more expensive the hotel, the worst is the WiFI. Same applies when I have to pay for WiFI - the more I pay, the worst it is.I've found that 3 star hotels that offer free WiFI usually have the best speeds/service. Whereas 5 star hotels that usually charge $14.95 daily have the worst.
Solved by Flexbox
Solved by flexbox is nice.Regarding flexbox itself: the syntax is confusing. After working on html/css, leaving, using auto-layout (obj-c, ios) and coming back to trying flexbox, I am scratching my head, who came up with this?row/column - use horizontal/vertical or hor/ver for short. justify-content and align-items mean different things depending on whether you're using row or column - what?why not just have hor-align, ver-align?Suppose you want a box with 3 paragraphs left-aligned, centered on the screen and a footer with 1 paragraph, aligned with the 3 paragraphs above it, how do you do this?Here's my pseudo-code:body ver nowrap, hor-align center.add 2 flex boxes ver nowrap.box 1 height stretch, hor-align left, ver-align center.box 2 height fit-content, hor-align left, ver-align center.add 3 paragraphs to box 1.add 1 paragraph to box 2.In reality, it is: body flex: column nowrap, justify-content: center, or is it align-items? I don't know, let's guess.How do I do box 1 height stretch? Hm... I don't intuitively know because nothing intuitively makes sense with flexbox. The answer turns out to be flex: 1 on box 1 and flex: 0 on box 2. Great syntax.And the pain continues. Btw, if you set the paragraph margin to 1em 1em 1em 1em;, it breaks the horizontal alignment of the paragraphs, making them center-aligned, why? Only God knows. If you set margin: 1px 1px 1px 1px, it works as expected. What?!Flexbox is light years ahead of the retardation that is floats and clears and the rest of it but it is a FAR cry from auto-layout.Let me set the height of an element... in relation to another element... ANY element... Why am I doing flex: 2, flex: 1 but that only works for sibling elements? What if I want box 1 width to be 20% of the height of box 2 that's elsewhere on the page? How do I do that in flexbox?Even if there is a way, the fact that I don't know and I've spent 2 days figuring it out says it all.
Dropbox’s Exodus from the Amazon Cloud
Hi HN! A couple of us from the Magic Pocket software team are around to answer questions if anyone has some.
India has banned disposable plastic in Delhi
Not a huge fan of outright bans, and think this is probably the wrong priority for India to focus on. (I understand this is just Delhi)Air pollution is huge right now. And sad to say, people pooping in streets and rivers is still a major problem.To me, plastic remnants are a very minor issue in comparison.
Human speech may have a universal transmission rate: 39 bits per second
But, he says, instead of being limited by how quickly we can process information by listening, we’re likely limited by how quickly we can gather our thoughts. That’s because, he says, the average person can listen to audio recordings sped up to about 120%—and still have no problems with comprehension.Some years ago I worked on an accessibility project for an app and website designed for people with disabilities. One of the team members had low vision, and used a screen reader that must have been set to 3x or even higher. I usually listen to YouTube and podcasts at 1.5-2x and I could barely understand the audio. He seemed surprised, which indicated to me that 3x+ was the norm for people in his circle.I wonder if his ability was trained through years of using fast screen readers, vs. a lower visual processing load leads to better audio processing, or some other explanation.
αcτµαlly pδrταblε εxεcµταblε
People... Please stop using foreign alphabets like that! It's a nightmare for those of us who know the alphabets. It took me a good 20 seconds to read the title. And it's magnitudes worse when someone uses cyrillic for instance and it's native to me.
Moderna's Covid vaccine shows nearly 95% protection
Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25110665
Facebook's Hypocrisy on Apple's New iOS 14 Privacy Feature
Facebook and Google have completely smashed the online advertising industry. The whole reason online advertising is so difficult to profit on is because Facebook and Google have sucked all the profit out of the room. The Open Web is a total shambles because of nonsense from Google and Facebook so many companies don't even have an alternative to fall back on... Now Facebook is claiming they are defending small business. What a joke.Anything which causes Facebook to make this much noise must be good.
If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund
Here's why investors buy up houses: they know your neighbors will do the dirty work of artificially constraining the housing supply, which makes it a good investment.Here's one who comes right out and explains this:> Meanwhile, local opposition to building is so commonplace and the approval process so cumbersome, time consuming, and expensive, even when a proposed project complies entirely with requirements, approvals are not forthcoming, at least in an expeditious manner and needed supply is simply not provided. Recently I heard of a new acronym to add to my vocabulary: CAVE, Citizens Against Virtually Everything, to be added to NIMBYISM and BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone).https://www.clearcapllc.com/2021/04/27/q1-2021-clear-capital...Support groups like https://yimbyaction.org/ if you want to 'stick it to the investors'. If there's a credible threat to build plenty of housing, they'll move on.
How big was the Tonga eruption?
Heard it go bang, 2600km away, echoing through the hills around our place at the top of the South Island of New Zealand. That's pretty staggering to think about it. Then to see other peoples Home Assistants around the world pick up the change in pressure on opposite sides of the planet. Mental, just mental...
How I regained concentration and focus
"Trivial inconveniences" are a big hurdle when trying to build a habit, but are a great tool for breaking bad ones. Anything you can do to break the dopamine loop helps, however small it may be. I've had success with:- setting long passwords to social media that aren't autofilled (saved in bitwarden) and logging out after each session- nerfing addicting parts of webapps (plugins which block the facebook news feed but allow messaging/groups helped a TON)- forbidding dedicated social media apps and only using "worse" internet sites- router DNS blockers, even if I can get around them, the act of having to bypass it raises my awareness I'm doing something subpar for myself
Understanding Jane Street
Regarding the last point in working at Jane Street versus research on fusion/cancer:You could maximise more good by first working at Jane Street in your 20s, retire by 30, and then set up your own smal fusion/cancer research lab where you can do research without being tied to government funding and politics. By 30, many cancer researchers have barely finished their PhDs, so you won’t actually be that far behind scientifically, but you’ll be far ahead financially.
There’s no speed limit (2009)
When I went to college, having already done full-time software work and countless hours of programming in my spare time, I went to a departmental advisor confidently requesting to test out of the introductory CS classes aimed at first-time programmers. I nearly got laughed out of the room. I pushed the department on this, but it was clear: they simply did not do this. Everyone takes intro to CS. Everyone.It sucks, but there are people out there no smarter than you yet more powerful, and sometimes they impose a speed limit.If you get the opportunity though, I'd still suggest doing what the author did. No harm in learning something twice, particularly from two different perspectives.
‘Breakthrough’ obesity drugs that have stunned researchers
I’m currently taking one of these drugs and it has been no less than a miracle in my life. I became obese when I was around 5, topping out around a 34 BMI. When I was 20 I lost a substantial amount of weight the old fashioned way (diet and exercise), and within 8 months I was BMI 23. Losing weight was extremely challenging and socially isolating.7 years later, I had a bad ankle injury and regained weight to about 29 BMI. This time I lost weight by doing an “eat every other day” diet. This was also extremely challenging, but easier than just counting calories and working out. After Covid and a lack of exercise I was back to BMI 30. I started taking tirzeparide this summer and have gone from BMI 31 to BMI 26 and still dropping. This is by far the easiest way to lose weight. The side effects for the first 3 months are quite bad, and include off and on strong nausea, extreme fatigue, brain fog, and constipation. I was eating <1k calories per day for a long time and feeling full. I expect to be on this drug long term. My blood work shows extreme improvements in cholesterol, BP, and other key health indicators. I believe that everyone, even the skinny folks, should be on GLP1 drugs for the longevity effects. They changed they induce in diet reduce the oxidative stress on the human body, even if the person is already thin.
Honestly, It's Probably the Phones
>rise of smartphones was also the rise of “phubbing”, i.e. when people go on their phones instead of paying attention to the people around themGot a few tips for this, first obviously if you’re meeting with people never do it yourself, one person doing it always causes chain reactions.If you’re meeting with one person and they start doing it never use it as an excuse to check your own phone just sit there in silence waiting for them if they’re distracted by it. This works surprisingly well and it’s funny how often people apologize, when if you check your own phone it’s always considered fine you don’t get the apology.If you’re in a group and talking about something factual like when a movie came out or a directors name and someone reaches for their phone to google because of the compulsion and just desire to stare into their phone is getting too much, just say “it’s not important” and move on or actually I’m going to start just lying I mean it doesn’t really matter we gain nothing from having the exact answer and actually sometimes the conversation is better and the answer comes to you if you don’t check. This one bugs me a lot because like all you get is someone messing around on their phone and then announcing “it was blah blah” then everyone going “oh ok” like the act of checking the phone added nothing to the conversation, we can talk around ideas without knowing exactly who or when what happened. It just made that person addicted to their phone get their fix.
3dfx: So powerful it’s kind of ridiculous
My first video accelerator was the Nvidia NV-1 because a friend of mine was on the design team and he assured me that NURBs were going to be the dominant rendering model since you could do a sphere with just 6 of them, whereas triangles needed like 50 and it still looked like crap. But Nvidia was so tight fisted with development details and all their "secret sauce" none of my programs ever worked on it.Then I bought a 3DFx Voodoo card and started using Glide and it was night and day. I had something up the first day and every day thereafter it seemed to get more and more capable. That was a lot of fun.In my opinion, Direct X was what killed it most. OpenGL was well supported on the Voodoo cards and Microsoft was determined to kill anyone using OpenGL (which they didn't control) to program games if they could. After about 5 years (Direct X 7 or 8) it had reached feature parity but long before that the "co marketing" dollars Microsoft used to enforce their monopoly had done most of the work.Sigh.
Why does a plastic-wrapped turkey sandwich cost $15 at the NYC airport?
This is a perfect example of an airport trying to have their cake and eat it too, and it's kind of diabolically clever.On the one hand, airports need to make money, and with people buying cheap airline tickets, airports have found a solution by turning themselves halfway into malls, and charging businesses extremely high levels of rent, which the airport justifies because it's a captive audience that can't go anywhere else. Most of the $15 sandwich is ultimately going to the airport as rent, not to the CIBO food vendor as profit.But at the same time, there's public outcry over the absurd pricing, so the airport has to mollify lawmakers by insisting it'll come up with a policy where they won't charge more than 10% for what would be comparable in Midtown. The airport is trying to blame those greedy vendors! But this is a trick. Who could ever define that? Sure you can compare Starbucks with Starbucks... but you can't compare a CIBO sandwich because it doesn't exist outside of airports, which is by design. That's the whole point, that easy comparables don't exist, and when a journalist tries to use a FOIA request to get at the comparables, they're stonewalled.The airport is trying to insist it's preventing jacked-up prices, when in reality it's the airport charging rent that generates those jacked-up prices in the first place, and it tries to pretend like it plays no part. Evil, but clever.
Making a Linux home server sleep on idle and wake on demand – the simple way
This looks like one of those home server infrastructure setup rabbit holes I would've bailed out of within the first 10 minutes of Googling to research the problem.I commend the author for their perseverance and the writeup - rabbit hole writeups are their own form of entertainment. That alone was worth it. I could never run anything that looks like such a conceptual pain the butt. A pain to maintain and troubleshoot to boot.Especially since the setup requires a Raspberry Pi to run permanently. A Raspberry Pi that itself would work just as fine as the Time Machine server the author seems to need on demand?
Docuseal: Open-source DocuSign alternative
Hi everyone, my name is Alex and I'm the creator of DocuSeal.I was not happy with the existing mainstream document signing solutions so I decided to create an open-source alternative.I've been working on this project since the middle of May and here is what the tool can do so far:- PDF form fields builder- 10 field types available (Signature/Date/File/Checkbox etc)- Multiple submitters per document- Automated emails via SMTP- File storage on AWS S3, Google Storage, or Azure- Automatic PDF eSignature- PDF signature verification- User management- Mobile-optimizedDocuSeal can be self-hosted on-premises or used in the Cloud for free. DocuSeal was built with Ruby on Rails with a bit of Vue3 for complex UI parts like the form builder.Looking for some feedback and would be happy to answer any questions
Firefox 4 is here
Lets say I'm a chrome user (and loving it), is Firefox4 worth a try? What are the main differences from the last version?
Please Don't Become Anything, Especially Not A Programmer
I really don't know why people worry so much about this. I don't think dissuading people from entering any field is surprising. Generally, experts in a field want passionate, talented people, because that's how the field will likely advance, which is what any good expert hopes for. If we scare off the dispassionate before they have a chance to burden the field, great. This is exactly the purpose of "weeder" courses in college.Edit: Well, pardon me for having an unpopular opinion. I have no intention of apologizing. Perhaps your opinions will change when you see the damage that incompetence can cause.
Tesla Repays Department of Energy Loan Nine Years Early
The reason why Tesla is able to pay the Dept of Energy loan early is because of a secondary stock and bonds offering worth about >850+ million. In another words, Tesla is raising funds by generating more debt (from bondholders) and diluting share value (from shareholders), roughly about 3.5 mil out of 40 mil float, and using that money to pay the US govt.TSLA rose on the news despite diluting shareholders is because coupled with the announcement, Elon Musk mentions that he will personally put an additional 100mil into the secondary offer; and general exuberance that TSLA will use the cash for more infrastructure build-out, a la Google, Yahoo during their heyday's. Make no mistake, this is as much a PR ploy by Tesla to pump up their offering.It's incredibly smart for Musk and company to raise money in a very favorable environment as TSLA climbed from 45 to 90 after earnings. However, it remains to be seen if they can be still profitable. Note that they are still selling each car at a material loss; and only managed to show a profitable quarter by trading green credits they gained from their manufacturing. To truly scale, they need to either drive down the production cost of their cars down and broaden their market as there are only so much supply of carbon-emission credits on the market.Disclosure: I trade TSLA options on volatility, without any directional bias.
Reasons not to use (i.e., be used by) Facebook
If someone can't state their point without warping the very language they use to support their point, it makes it very hard to feel like anything they're saying is credible.Example 1: someone is trying to convince me to vote Republican. They go through the Republican platform issue by issue, and compare/contrast it to the Democrats' stand. However, every time they use the word "Democrat" they instead say "Democrap" or "Dumbocrat" or "Dumbocrap". That does not make me think they are clever wordsmiths; rather, that makes me think that they think I'm an idiot and that they think they can actually manipulate me with such silliness. It also makes me think they arrived at their own philosophy not by trying to understand opposing views, but by inventing their own strawmen for whatever tribe they imagine they are opposed to. It makes me think they are driven by tribalism rather than ideas.Example 2: well, here, RMS' insistence on using the word "useds" rather than "users" when referring to people who are on Facebook. Yeah, I get it. Ha ha ha. It doesn't make me think you're clever, it makes me think you literally do not possess the capacity to reason about anything without invoking strawmen. It calls into question every single observation you are making. It makes it sound like you don't respect the people you are supposedly trying to convince, and are instead just enjoying preaching to your choir.It's not like an isolated incident, it is literally his primary rhetorical device in nearly everything he's written over the last 3 decades. Even the appropriation of generic terms like "free" to mean very, very, very specific and non-intuitive things reeks of intellectual dishonesty. It's so frustrating because he does have some (some) very insightful and constructive ideas about a lot of things, and could be such a positive contributor to the world, but it's like he wants to alienate his non-choir audience right out of the gate. It's like he's terrified of actually engaging with people that are not already 100% (not 99.9%, he demands 100%) on his side. He is right about some (some) things, but so many, many people will never know it because he wants to shoot himself in the foot as soon as possible.
Ask HN: What's the best computer science book you've read recently?
The Algorithm Design Manual by Skiena.Each section contains a story of some situation he was in where he faced a problem which he solved by applying one of various algo techniques (DP, divide and conquer, etc.). After reading CLRS for a class, it was nice to see how some of the most common textbook algorithms have been applied by a notable computer scientist.
Fifth Circuit holds that First Amendment protects the right to record the police [pdf]
...it's hard to imagine a more obvious and plain application of "freedom of the press" in the information age than the right to record what one's eyes and ears can see and hear and then publish the same, even if (especially if!) it contains evidence of state misconduct.I mean come on.
Google Chrome to stop autoplaying content with sound
Auto-playing crap bugs the hell out of me. Some news sites do it as well even when you go and Pause the player, it will go on and play ahead after a few seconds.Started using "Disable HTML5 Autoplay"[1] extension in Chrome and works great. I wish every browser would stop sound and video by default until i hit Play or have a setting for that.[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/disable-html5-auto...
Microsoft Has Stopped Manufacturing The Kinect
This is a shame. I mean, yeah, it was a pretty awkward gaming accessory, but outside the context of gaming people were doing some pretty fun things with it. A powerful sensor at a ridiculously cheap cost that you could use to create amazing things, provided of course your imagination wasn't weighed down by the latest dumb tech trend. That last statement is just as true now as it was when the Kinect originally came out.Gives me some strange feels about the current state of the tech economy. The Kinect is being retired at the same time Amazon and Google are caught up in a dumb contest to see who can produce the best hockey-puck-sized speaker that can add items to your shopping list. As overwhelmingly large as tech giants like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Apple are, they seem mostly resigned to following trends, as opposed to creating new ones.Don't forget, smartwatches originated from a highly successful Kickstarter campaign. Same can be said for VR. Bitcoin, and blockchain by extension, originated from a white paper published by someone who's still to this day a complete mystery.Tech giants are very much capable of generating cash, but are damned by their inability to create gold.
How to get kids to pay attention
What's really interesting to me is this same thing can be applied to adults too.The article writes:> For starters, he says, ask your kid this question: 'What would you do if you didn't have to do anything else?'I often wonder what civilization would be like if adults asked the same question to themselves and then lead a life where they focused on that instead of being pressured into "making a living".
The Amazing $1 Microcontroller (2017)
My favorite is the ATTINY 85. It's so cheap and yet, it can do almost most of the things you can do an Arduino. And yes, you can program it using the Arduino IDE as well.Last year, I started out to digitalize my entire house with these tiny ATTINY 85 chips and with some nrF wireless chips. It has worked really well for me and I'm able to control and monitor any power port in my house as well as my mains.The overall setup still costed less than a Nest, yet, vastly more powerful. Of course, the downside is you need to write code, have a running server to control it on the cloud. But, no problem for me as I'm a (Google Cloud) consultant and this is what I do for a living.I use Google Cloud's IAP with AppEngine (I may switch to cloud run now, since it's cheaper tho) and I have a private REST server running that I can access from my own Android app.The whole thing took me a year to finish, but that's because I worked on it maybe once or twice a week in the weekends and didn't focus on it much.But, my effort has paid off and it's amazing to me that what is possible with just a dollar investment.
California Approves Statewide Rent Control
I am a landlord in Oregon, but not California. The curious, although ultimately predictable, outcome of the new rent control measure in Oregon is that while I have historically had an arrangement with my property management to be restrained in annual rent increases, they are now advising a default annual increase of the maximum allowed (7 percent before inflation). This is because larger adjustments cannot be made if and when necessary due to market conditions, so it's smart to just steadily increase rent at the maximum rate permitted. If I agree, I believe the result will be more profitable for landlords, and hurtful to tenants.The real solution to a housing problem is to incentivize and facilitate the building of more housing. ADUs, relaxed zoning, reduced building regulations, reduced fees for permitting, etc. I fear rent control is actually going to do more damage to the housing market than good.
Ask HN: Quitting Big Tech, what is it like?
I quit full-time work in 2001, after being burned out in the dot com boom. I did well for myself financially after the startup I was in got bought. The phrase "well" is of course subjective, considering that no colleague of mine quit. I left a whole lot of money on the table, but never once have I regretted it.I decided that the name of the game is to optimise quality of life. That means, infrequent brutal deadlines, minimal (pref. zero) commute, opportunity to learn, and spend time with family and friends and be of use to society at large.This meant (1) I'd only do short-term assignments (less than a year) (2) I'll keep my technical chops as current as possible, so no shortage of interesting gigs to work on (3) Not hurry into the next gig when one ended.I have never learnt the art of work-life balance, but now I'm able to amortise it over the course of a year! Work my ass off when I have a contract, then take off and putter around with different technologies and hobbies. There's lots of time for family and friends. The money is of course considerably less than what I could make, but more money comes at the cost of very high expectations and brutal deadlines. I charge less, and I get more time to do a quality job. Clients remember you for the quality, not for the time taken. Of course, as I get older, I _need_ the extra time too; I just don't have the stamina.I love it. I am 55 and I code every single day, just for fun.
Senate leadership pushing a surveillance bill as Americans focused on Covid-19
The article neglects to mention that the bill already passed the democratic house without much debate.The President of the United States wants the Senate bill to remove powers given to the executive branch, because he's convinced they were used against him. Yes, that's right, the president of the United States wants the Senate to amend the bill to reduce the power of the executive branch.In other words, by characterizing this bill as something Senate republicans are trying to do to increase the power of the federal government, the article neglects to mention that (a) the bill has already passed the Democrat-led house (sponsored by Adam Schiff, BTW) and (b) that the head of the Republican party, the POTUS, wants more restrictions on the powers they're giving to him. That would certainly change the headline, but wouldn't satisfy people's republican bashing appetite.https://www.usnews.com/news/technology/articles/2020-03-16/u...
Google to stop selling ads based on your specific web browsing
I remember a small story, decades ago, about a company/univeristy which was left holding the bag when the government cancelled their contract. They were constructing a lens system to go into a satellite which could purportedly read the issue date on a dime lying on the sidewalk. It was something like $15M. The implication was that the government had found something even better, and gone with that instead. If Google is publicly giving up on a particular, unpopular technology to buy some PR, I strongly suspect that they've already figured out something which will work "better" behind the scenes.There's a lot of confusion over what this story is actually saying, and, given the obscurity with which Google deals with it's tech, I don't think this is going to get cleared up, leaving room for a lot of speculation. But one thing is absolutely certain: There's no possible way that Google is going to make a change to their biggest money maker that would make them LESS money. Maybe that just means that they consider their duopoly enough of a barrier that advertisers will be forced to accept less-targeted marketing, but I doubt it...
Deno 1.9
I feel like I have hit a point in my life where I don't want another framework to learn, and due to this I am not giving Deno a fair shake...Does anyone have a short anecdote why I might bother to invest in yet another JS framework?
DOOM Captcha
While this is too simple (even the website admits that a bot could be written in virtually no time to break it), it does make me wonder if you could have a WarioWare CAPCHA. A minigame with extremely vague description that you have to react to quickly to pass.Thinking about it some more it fails the primary criteria for a CAPCHA: it needs to be harder to write the bot that cracks it than each test case, by at least a couple orders of magnitude. Otherwise bot makers will just create custom bots for each contingency. They have more time and funding than you do.
Microsoft will include pay ranges in all U.S. job postings
Just to play Devil's Advocate: being explicit about salaries is the kind of practice that sounds amazingly good on the surface, but might have some unintended real-world consequences.For instance, whereas before when salaries weren't explicit, a weaker candidate with some good qualities who was on the bubble for consideration might be able to get a job if the salary was more favorable than the company was initially planning. With explicit salary ranges, if the candidate isn't deemed good enough to warrant hitting that predefined range, they might be unemployable in that field and not gain the experience needed to progress. In the past, a weaker candidate might have been able to go for a lesser salary range, get the job and gain more experience, and maybe make it up down the line. Maybe that's no longer a path forward for a lot of people on the bubble.And stronger candidates who are perfect fits and world-class performers might be lost for a lot of companies because the company has the excuse of a pre-defined salary range. So maybe firms miss out on some genius, perfect fits, because the bean counters can't be bothered to assess everybody's merits individually.
NYC Slice
Native New Yorker here. Out of towners are obsessed with the BEST slice, but the true measure of NYC's 45 degree greatness is the decent quality following a Poisson distribution. My tip: just travel to any random spot in the five boroughs. First; you will be impressed how close you are to a pizza spot wherever you are. Second: you will be impressed with the slice, and with the variety of people who are good at making it.
Grayscale on 1-bit LCDs (2022)
My father Bryce Bayer studied this question fifty years ago at Eastman Kodak; his approach is known as ordered dithering:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordered_ditheringOne is effectively posterizing a grayscale image, and his primary goal was to reduce artifacts drawing unwanted attention to the borders between poster levels.With improvements in hardware other approaches to dithering took over. The last time I saw my father's pattern was on a DEC box logo. He moved to the color group at Kodak, and designed the "Bayer filter" used in digital cameras.
Show HN: I've built a C# IDE, Runtime, and AppStore inside Excel
I work on Excel at Microsoft and this is really cool. I’ll check it out and share it with the rest of the R&D.
Fq: Jq for Binary Formats
fqing finally. It always seemed strange that there wasn’t any central database of binary parsers that everyone could contribute to. Nearly every file format is fully documented, but none of the docs are programmatic.I was trying to rip some sounds from a wii game called Rhythm Heaven, and it’s ridiculous how primitive the tech is. By that I mean the programming community’s tech. If you want to extract some assets, you’d better be running Windows, and you’ll need to download some random exe from mediafire made by Jared, a 13yo that coded the extractor in C in his spare time. This is only a very slight exaggeration; Windows being a requirement isn’t.Hopefully projects like this will standardize all binary formats once and for all.Actually, this is a good opportunity to ask: how would one contribute a binary parser to fq? If I wrote one for wii sound files, can I just submit a PR or is there some other process?EDIT: https://github.com/wader/fq/blob/master/doc/dev.md documents the development side of things. I’m more interested in the project itself — if someone puts in the work to make a decoder for an obscure binary format, will it get merged (assuming it’s high quality) or is this only for popular formats?
In Memoriam: Christopher Hitchens, 1949–2011
Hitchens was essentially a Marxist (by his own admission) who was also in favor of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the foreign policy it represented. So there was very little I agreed with him on.But I'm terribly upset about this and I'll tell you why.Because of his willingness to debate. I'd literally scan right wing talk radio schedules for his name because you just knew it would be a great show. In a world where so many people in our modern society hide in their little cliques I think a smart person who is willing to have their ideas challenged is the most valuable person of all.Losing a voice like that is a true tragedy.So, with all due respect, I hope he is wrong in his beliefs about the after life because if there is a heaven he's surely earned his place in it.Edit: On that note this is awesome: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4JJqXISBiI (though skip the first 4 minutes of the host self aggrandizement)
The Gift
I would have loved to see this beautifully written, touching story without mentioning any form or idea of God.
Moto 360
Am I the only one who doesn't wear a watch (even if I wanted to) because I don't like the way it scratches against my MacBook Pro?
What happens when a culture is driven by the need for money to make more money
I've recently come to the conclusion that any society where it is easier for the rich become richer than it is for the poor to become richer, regardless of its starting state, will tend toward feudalism over time. While modern day America is starting to look more and more like a data point that supports this conclusion, I'd like to think that there's a certain amount of mathematical certainty involved too: money => more money ------- (1) money power ----------- (2) (1) and (2) over time will result in the bifurcation of society into two groups: the rich and powerful, and the rest. This probably doesn't apply to corporations though.
Software Engineering Internship Amazon Interview Experience
The following information will be collected during the duration of the exam: Your microphone Your webcam Your physical location Your head movements Your eye movements Your mouth movements Creepy as all get-out. By all means, lets have more leaks like this.
Amazon's Tepid Response to Counterfeiters Frustrates Sellers
I purchased Quickbooks Pro 2017 (PC) on Amazon last week, said it was "sold by Intuit" so wasn't even supposed to be an FBA (fulfilled by Amazon). Figured if it costs no more I might as well get the physical disk.What showed up was a DVD case with a very clearly photocopied cover for a Mac version with a Verbatim CDR inside and a hacked version of the software.Amazon processed the refund just fine but didn't seem particularly interested or concerned that they had just sold me pirated software. Not a big deal for Quickbooks, I can just buy the download version. I also want to buy a new Ipod Touch and, for the first time ever, don't feel like I can buy it on Amazon.Long term Amazon customer since 1999, Prime since the first year, this counterfeit issue is a real problem that's going to cost them seriously if they don't get a handle on it.
Samsung used my DSLR photo to fake their phone’s “portrait mode”
Ah man, I immediately thought of another recent case of a smartphone manufacturer faking their phone's camera shots[0] (turns out TFA links to it as well). Just a single instance of this kind of fraud is enough for me to write off a brand forever, frankly. If you're lying to my face before I even bought your product, who knows how much else you're lying about. Zero trust for companies like this.[0] https://www.diyphotography.net/huawei-passes-off-dslr-photos...
Manim – 3Blue1Brown's animation engine for explanatory math videos
Why did he give away his secret sauce?Edit: yes I know this tool isn’t his secret sauce, I was being facetious. His excellent explanations are his secret sauce. I just wanted to know why he open sourced this after so long of saying it was made for his personal use and wasn’t designed for widespread use.
Brave Improves Its Ad-Blocker Performance with New Engine in Rust
I'm impressed with Brave. I've started using it as my primary browser (after a couple false starts a year or so ago) and it has all the best of Chrome without the worst.There is controversy about how Brave does stuff, and I agree there is some sketchy stuff they are doing (replacing ads with their own). I'm glad they are giving us a choice, though, and exploring different options for sites being able to makes some money.
Counterfeit books “shipped and sold by Amazon”?
As an aside, why does nearly every Twitter link take you to a page not found thus requiring a reload? This is a terrible user experience that should be easy to fix.
Tesla's self driving algorithm's overlay [video]
It still strikes me why so many people are still against a future with self driving cars. Sure, people throughout history are scared of change & new tech. But if you look at this video and compare the amount of stuff the camera catches AND processes, with the things you are seeing & processing, it's really hard for me to see me being better at it than a computer.The reality of driving (as a human) is that most of it happens on autopilot anyway. It's rare to deal with an anomaly. So realistically, it makes total sense to keep refining these algorithms and make driving safer and more pleasant for everybody.I just find it very hard to understand the perspective of those that are opposed to self driving cars.
GitHub CLI is now in beta
Were the GitHub devs doing anything before Microsoft bought them? All that comes to mind is Atom. MS seems to have really been a shot in the arm for feature development at GH.
Renaming files with mv without typing the name two times
Something like this isn't really necessary. I do something like this (bash) all the time when I want to change a part of a filename (renames "foo-bar-baz.txt" to "foo-bar-quux.txt"): mv foo-bar-{baz,quux}.txt You can have an 'empty' bit to add or remove something from the name (renames "foo-bar.txt" to "foo-bar-baz.txt"): mv foo-bar{,-baz}.txt That will work with pathname parts as well (as in the linked demo video) if you include them in the command.I guess the linked script is useful if you need to do some complex edits to the filename, since you can't usefully have more than one curly-brace-group for this use case. But in that case honestly I'm fine just double-clicking the first argument to select, and then middle-clicking to paste, and then using the arrow keys to edit.
For Donald Knuth, good coding is synonymous with beautiful expression
> I write an average of five new programs every week. Poets have to write poems. I have to write computer programs.It seems more obvious now that I read it. A lot of programmers out there, including myself, are looking for ways to improve their skills and I never thought to myself to write more programs. And not just programs for the sake of programs, but programs that force you to explain to the computer that you understand certain concepts. This man is and will continue to be a huge inspiration.
Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images
This is the latest in a string of incidents where critical software systems, facing new pressure due to the pandemic, are catastrophically failing their users. I think what's happened in the past is that most public-facing software systems either a) were not really critical (because people had the alternative of doing things in-person), or b) (as in the case of all the ancient COBOL systems underpinning the US gov) had been made reliable over the years through sheer brute force as opposed to principled engineering. But in the latter case, as we saw with New Jersey's unemployment system, that "reliability" was fragile and contingent on the current state of affairs, and had no hope of withstanding a sudden shift in usage patterns.Now we have various organizations - governmental and otherwise - hastily setting up online versions of essential services and it seems like every single one of them breaks on arrival.We need some sort of standard for software engineering quality. I don't think this is an academic question anymore. Real people's lives are being impacted every day now by shoddy software, and with the current crisis they often have no alternative. Software that you or I could probably have executed better, but that the people who were hired to do it either a) couldn't, or b) didn't bother. It's nearly impossible for non-technical decision makers in these orgs to evaluate the quality of the systems they've hired people to build. We need quality assurance at an institutional level.If not governmental, maybe an organization around this could be made by developers themselves. Not the "certified for $technology" certifications we have now, but a certification of fundamental software engineering skills and principles. A certification you can lose if you do something colossally irresponsible. At the end of the day, this dilution of quality is having a negative impact on our job field, so it concerns all of us. It leads to technical debt, micro-management, excessively rigid deadlines and requirements, which we all have to deal with. All of these are either symptoms of or coping mechanisms for management's inability to evaluate engineering quality.
ITER: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly
I am going to need some help on this one as my knowledge on physics is limited: What makes scientists believe that the solution to nuclear fusion power is only a matter of scale? I desperately want nuclear fusion to work because nuclear power is the only realistic way to solve the looming energy crisis of the 21st century while still maintaining the same standard of living for everyone. It's also 500% more important that nuclear fusion works because most people around the world think that nuclear fission is scary (weaponization concerns even though fission power is different from bomb-making, radioactive waste, reactor meltdowns, etc.), even though it's the only realistic method we have today of going carbon-neutral.However, I looked up the article on "fusion power" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power) and it says "but to date, no design has produced more fusion power output than the electrical power input, defeating the purpose."Can anyone help explain what I am missing, or what is not explained well? My common-person impression is if a laboratory experiment cannot even produce desired outcomes, what makes people think that an engineered, faulty-prone system will? The way I see it is that researchers produce the proof-of-concept, and engineering will attempt to reproduce that at scale. Isn't this preemptive? Or, from the article, it seems that it is necessary to build this thing in order to get any conclusive research results.
I Hacked into Facebook's Legal Department Admin Panel
You brilliant guys need to find a way to extract more than $7500 for solutions to problems that less than what, 2%?, of the worlds population can solve.If I were your tech agent I'd demand Facebook pay out $75,000 minimum for this specific problem.
Highly Evasive Attacker Leverages SolarWinds Supply Chain
I don’t see how to word this politely.What is SolarWinds, and why are all these organizations using it?Clearly, it’s a giant single point of failure, but other than that, I’ve never heard of them.Their marketing says they do network monitoring, etc. Do they have a legitimate product, or is this just another case of enterprise checkbox security theater gone awry?
The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed
The saddest thing about all of this IMO is they have been working on this for 14 years, and how much money was spent/wasted? Now, read about Skunkworks - they were able to build the SR71 (without supercomputers) in less than half that time and for a fraction of the cost.This isn't just planes, this seems to be everything nowadays. Fission was discovered in 1938/1939 and we dropped two bombs on Japan in 1945. No chance we could do something like that in this toxic environment of today.I know Peter Thiel is not popular here, but his conversations about technological progress seem to be spot on: we just cant build cool shit anymore. I really did want a flying car, and all I have is 140 characters and promises of AI that never come true.Maybe, you could say there are some exceptions like CRISPR, but that is TBD.
Facebook is now claiming official CDC.gov links are “False Information”
Facebook seems to be censoring so much because Facebook believes that most people will actually believe whatever bits of misinformation are floating around out there.But is everyone that easily manipulated? More importantly, does everyone actually believe that they can be easily manipulated, or do they just think that everyone else is so easily manipulated, but somehow they're above the fray?And at what point does the censorship to protect me from manipulation become manipulation itself?Facebook is fighting a losing battle if they think they will survive a battle with their own users. This is way past censoring Alex Jones. You can't possibly censor every crackpot conspiracy theorist. Actually, we're probably all crackpot conspiracy theorists in some way. We probably all believe some conspiracy about 9/11 or the NSA or elections or vaccines or masks or aliens or royal families or whatever.The rate of censoring is almost certainly accelerating faster than facebook's growth, and once you've been censored once, you're likely to radically curb your use of that platform. I can't imagine that FB doesn't have stats on how many people keep using FB after they've been censored just once.FB only works when you and 99% of your social group are on there.And the network effect works in reverse, too.
Life before smartphones (2020)
Now I feel old. I remember vividly running around with my first camera, looking for objects worthy of being photographed. The film cost money, so did developing it into pictures. I really had to weigh the pros and cons of taking a particular picture. And in a class of ~25 kids, I was one of three who owned a camera. Not that it was such a luxury item, but most people weren't into that.These days, (nearly) everyone carries a camera around all the time, and one that is quite probably much better than the one I had in 1992. They can take dozens, even hundreds of pictures without breaking a sweat, and it does not cost anything.Nostalgia is a very warped mirror. Back then, I did not miss the ability to take dozens of pictures at no cost, because the option did not exist. Was it better? Worse? Neither, I think. But this is the first time I feel old and appreciate it for the history I have lived through. Getting old is weird, but it sure is interesting. (For reference, I'm 40. "That's not old", I hear someone say, but I have never been this old before, so for me it's all new.)
Apple explicitly asks employees to merge their personal and work accounts
Create a firewall between your personal and professional time. Another name for this is “setting healthy boundaries”.Always create new accounts for anything work related -- GitHub, Apple ID, whatever.Don’t install work apps on your personal phone. Don’t enrol your personal phone in corporate MDM. If they want you to use a device for work, ask them to give you one.Don’t do personal stuff on your work devices. Don’t do side project work on your work devices. Only do work for your employer on your work devices. Turn it off when you’re done work and leave it off until you start work the next day.Be very clear on all your contractual obligations related to this before you start a new job. Ask to see ahead of time all the paperwork they will ask you to sign, so there are no last-minute surprises (“oh, you want to own anything I create outside of working hours?”).Firewall yourself to protect yourself.Edit: One more: don’t use corporate WiFi with your personal devices
Regulators Shut Down Lending Platform (YC Alum) LendUp
As an immigrant I can tell you that the USA is basically Jurassic Park. The monsters are mostly predatory companies. It can be a lot of fun but it’s very easy to do worse than die - to end up a slave for the rest of your life to one of the predators. Along with bullshit like making options trading available to kids, debt is probably one of the velociraptors.It is a trap sprung at the very start of your adult life when you’re most vulnerable, as a student loan.It’s sprung when you’ve lost your job, are vulnerable and are about to become homeless.It’s sprung when you’re already in debt and vulnerable, by other lenders.Anyone see a pattern here? Debt preys on the vulnerable, turns them into something that delivers returns for decades to the holders, and wraps all that up into tidy looking financial products.The business of debt is the financial equivalent of the US pork industry: Everyone treats it as part of American life, but the details would make most people throw up.Anyone remember microfinance? That was the same play: usury with a fresh coat of paint.I’m seeing posts here making it sound like 36% APR is acceptable. Look up usury folks. This is it. Debt that is intentionally structured so that it can never be repaid and keeps the borrower harnessed to the cart.It’s incredible how folks, particularly in the US, have become this morally uncalibrated.
Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company
I don’t understand how any board can implement a “poison pill”, not just Twitter but Netflix and others, and not be found working against the interest of shareholders. Can anyone help me understand?You’re categorically changing the profile of the stock. This has a chilling effect on large investors, including but not limited just to Musk, right?Vanguard, for example, has just had its range of further investment limited arbitrarily. Isn’t that bad for all stockholders, to know that large stakeholders will not drive the price up if they somehow gain substantial belief in the company?The risk portfolio of Vanguard just went up considerably because in the case that they fully lose faith in the board, they no longer have the option of installing a friendly board, they must simply liquidate their holdings. This, in turn, makes them more skeptical of further smaller (non-takeover) investment because it’s more to liquidate and more risk.Who does this benefit besides the board? I guess I understand that the board is not beholden to the interests of all shareholders equally, and I’m not suggesting that this doesn’t benefit some shareholders, but where does the line start?
OBS – Open Broadcaster Software
When I was half my age, OBS was unfathomable. I was shooting video on digital 8, editing in Final Cut Pro 4 which was the new hotness, and trying but failing to use DSS on my college network. Actual streaming at scale required a massive server and a massive license from RealNetworks. If I wanted to do anything with animation, it was all $$$$$ software. This all took place in a shared lab at my college with stuff I could never afford on my own.Today, people at that age are making lucrative careers out of streaming then doing the things they love out of their bedrooms using OBS. Blender has enabled all kinds of amazing creators, from animation to video editing to 3D printing and even (basic) architecture. Kicad makes EDA! approachable. My teen son has been able to dabble in all of the above in his spare time without spending a dime.I’m in awe of the power of free software and the amazing engineering work that has enabled these projects to be good enough for real professionals to choose first. I hope we see Godot achieve world domination in gaming, GIMP in graphics, and Libra Office + Collabra in productivity. The people who have given us these tools deserve the highest accolades.
Amazon to lay off 9,000 more workers after earlier cuts
I don't know how many of you relate, but a personal level this last few years has left me quite shaken.In 2021 I remember thinking how tech really proved its worth by so quickly assisting our economies through the pandemic with e-commerce, video conferencing and work from home.Sure, things felt a bit crazy, but I remember thinking how lucky I was to land in tech as a career and that it was hard to see a future any time soon where the world wouldn't value tech workers highly.Skip to today and I'm honestly wondering how long I have.We've had a massive influx of new tech talent over the last few years and now we see this dramatic turnaround in hiring which will likely make it significantly harder to get a good tech job in the near future.And in addition to this we have tools like GPT potentially disrupting our careers on a timescale best viewed on the scale of months.It doesn't help that I'm going through a lot in my personal life at the moment too, but I've never felt so vulnerable about what the future holds.I guess I should just be grateful that we had a good run while it lasted, but it's hard to think like that when people depend on you to have things figured out.Anyway, I hope everyone involved in these layoffs lands on their feet.
Valve Restricts Accounts of 2500 Users Who Marked a Negative Game Review Useful
I wish steam didn't have an effective monopoly on PC video game distribution. It was basically forced on us when CS 1.6 required it. But people will choose the option even slightly more convenient for them against ethical costs.I frequently see people here justifying chrome over Firefox due to a really small feature relative to maintaining a healthier web.