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Where can I fly for how much?
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OMG, I've been waiting for someone to build something like this forever.I've always hated the fact that all major travel sites work based on the assumption that you already know exactly when and where you're going, rather than at least giving you the option to explore your options.
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Reddit CEO admits to altering user comments that were critical of him
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And without an "edited" mark, which means that any comment of any user can be covertly modified by an admin. Very concerning since Reddit comments have provoked even Congress hearings: http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/296680-house-pan...
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Uber Is Ripping Off Frequent Riders and Here’s How to Avoid It
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That's one thing I have noticed in general. I used to think that as a long time customer you are valued and get better deals. But this seems to have changed to the opposite. Long time customers are viewed as something a company doesn't have to compete for anymore and instead more money can be extracted from them. See cell phones, TV cable, car insurance and others. Almost like employment where now the only way to get a raise is often to change jobs and not to stay.It's a weird development and I wonder what the long term effects of this attitude will be.
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GDPR will pop the adtech bubble
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Oddly, I think the article underestimates the size of the change coming. I think one side affect of the surge of IT into advertising, is that it has become easier to measure exactly how well advertising works. By and large, it doesn't, very well.I am reminded of this, from Paul Graham, about his time at Yahoo: http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html"...The reason Yahoo didn't care about a technique that extracted the full value of traffic was that advertisers were already overpaying for it. If Yahoo merely extracted the actual value, they'd have made less."I'm pretty sure that, the more we learn about how well advertising works, the less money people will be willing to pay for it. What's happening to billboards and newspapers right now is probably coming to several other industries soon.
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Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL
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Ugggggh. As if graphics support on macOS weren't middling enough already. It's like they're trying to become as irrelevant as possible in that area.I could understand if they were deprecating it in favor of Vulkan. That would be in-line with Apple's history of aggressively pushing forward new standards. But by no means do they have the clout to coerce developers into their own bespoke graphics API that doesn't work anywhere else. All they'll accomplish is further killing off the already-small presence they have in the gaming space.
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What Happened to the 100000 Hour LED Bulbs?
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Lifetime isn't even my #1 concern with LED bulbs. It's strobing/flickering.I film all the LED bulbs I buy in slow motion at 240 fps with an Android phone, and play the movie back on a PC with mplayer using the dot(".") key to move frame by frame. Here is a shot I made comparing 2 brands of LED bulbs: https://youtu.be/QbenId_F2RQ (Edit: yeah you don't have to transfer to a PC, just playing back in slow motion on the phone will still show the effect quite well.)It's amazing how I find this way that most (but not all!) of LED bulbs flicker with a strobe effect at 120 Hz (frames alternate between bright and dim) because they have crappy power supply designs that fail to smooth the A/C voltage. As a result they flash one time during the positive phase and one time during the negative phase of the 60 Hz A/C mains frequency.I find this unacceptable. Although not too noticeable in normal conditions, a 120 Hz strobing light is definitely noticeable when your eyes move or track an object illuminated by the bulb.In my experience, Philips lightbulbs are one of the few brands that don't have this flaw because they take care of converting AC to a stable DC voltage internally. In fact they are advertised as such: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07CFRCGKC "COMFORTABLE LIGHT: Our products meet strict test criteria including flicker, strobe, glare and color rendition to ensure they meet EyeComfort requirements"
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5G Is Likely to Put Weather Forecasting at Risk
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I was wondering, what exactly 5G will bring us. For the most part, all the tasks I need to do on a phone (pocket computer / communicator) can be done even with 3G (video, streaming music, and any website's loading time is more than acceptable at 3G speeds).The only thing I can think of is 5G will allow for more overall network bandwidth, so the data caps on "unlimited" plans wouldn't be needed. But compared to how we use our phones today, what new items will be be able to do with 5G that we can't do with current 4G/LTE?
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Consume less, create more
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These are not the only two options. There's a third activity most of us seem to have forgotten - to simply be.For me, the very act of everyday living has become very enjoyable and fulfilling in recent years. Doing the dishes, cooking, gardening, sweeping the floor, putting out the trash. Those are not "chores", that's what life's made of. Some of it creative, some not, but the difference is you're simply present in the moment and in the world.
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Samsung: Anyone's thumbprint can unlock Galaxy S10 phone
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I've never used fingerprint scanners for paranoid reasons as this, so this gives me both some undeserved smugness and renewed paranoia.Are long pins and passwords still the most secure way to control access to your phone? Is there U2F for phones as a 2nd factor?
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City Roads – Draw all roads in a city at once
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Hey there, I'm the author of the tool!Just wanted to thank you for the comments, feedback and shares! I 'm very happy!PS: If you liked that project you may find my other stuff interesting: https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Aanvaka%20min_retweets%3A... - it's just a hobby but I love it :D
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De-Escalation Keeps Protesters and Police Safer
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We should expect police to us less use violence and improve their crowd management and deescalation skills. The increasing militarization of police is a trend that must be reversed. However, we should not neglect the other side of the equation either. This article is, in large part, about just that.The article points out that many protests in the U.S. went smoothly through the practice of police and protest organizers meeting and jointly managing protests, but that this practice fell into disuse after the 1999 Seattle WTO meeting in which protesters violated the negotiated terms and police responded with violence.While some recent (and ongoing) protests have turned violent, many didn't. In the coming months we'll have time to do a postmortem. I strongly suspect spontaneous protests without organization will be found to have the most potential for violence, while those with organizers committed to self-policing and, ideally, cooperating with police will be found to have fared much better.Individual people may be intelligent and responsible, but crowds have their own rules of behaviour and need to be managed. Protests are more dangerous when unplanned or when their organizers give no thought to self-policing.There will always be organizers who want violence because it reliably brings press coverage and attention to their protests, but social media is also creating new problems. Coordinating a large number of people to show up at the same time and place used to take considerable planning and effort. When you have to work hard just to get the even to happen, why wouldn't you plan how it will unfold as well? Now a couple of tweets or posts on the right reddit subs will suffice. How can police meet with the organizer of a protest when it's really just some dude who had a lot of social media followers and might not even bother showing up himself?
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Ask HN: A way to adblock “we're using cookies” popups?
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If you are already using ublock origin go to settings > filters list > annoyances, turn on easylist-cookies.
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Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison
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It's not much better if you end up being a GCP customer.My company has gone through 4 reps in 3 years. Every time we get a new GCP rep they just want to talk to us about "expanding our use of GCP offerings". The only thing they want to talk about is starting to use BigQuery - not my business at all.I signed up for a Google Cloud Security summit, and afterwards a sales rep reached out me. It was obvious from the start they had no idea I was a gsuite or GCP customer. They then directed me to a NEW account manager (#4) even though I had been working with a different one. I had worked with the prior account rep going over our architecture to make sure everything was kosher (sustained use discounts etc). I even made them a schematic of our architecture on GCP at their request. Once I provided that to them I was met with radio silence.It's really insulting, and to me obvious they don't care about my company at all. We're looking at other options.I wouldn't be surprised if somehow this post leads to me getting an email from another rep "Wanting to start over and doing things right", which will inevitably devolve into the discussion of how can I use BigQuery.
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Initial preview of GUI app support for the Windows Subsystem for Linux
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If you thought electron apps used a lot of memory, this thing will surprise you [0]:With WSL2, apps will now use either 50% or 8GB of your available memory.Happy coding![0]: https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/4166
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Console Do Not Track – Proposal for a standard environment variable
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Sure. But I have a question: why? Why should we opt out of the telemetry? To me, this idea seems to not just be admitting defeat, it's ensuring defeat right from the start.Telemetry should always be opt-in. Yes, that means vendors will get much less data. It's on them to deal with it.On a related note, I wonder how long it takes until one of the vendors of popular CLI tools or desktop apps get fined for GDPR violation. I wonder how much of existing telemetry already crosses the "informed consent" requirement threshold. I'll definitely be filing a complaint if I find a tool that doesn't ask for it when, by law, it should.
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Starbucks and TrustArc add fake cookie processing delay if you don't click agree
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The worst thing about this is that someone was asked to implement this, and instead of saying ‘fuck no’. They went ahead and did it anyway.There’s a few hills worth dying on and I feel this is one of them. It is just unambiguously evil.
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Hoppscotch: Open-source alternative to Postman
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Is there a command line tool or editor plugin where I don't have to specify parameters, learn all the options. Instead I would just point it to an "http file" with http syntax and it "runs" it. Meaning the file contents are the http request that I want to send, eg GET / HTTP/1.1
Cookie:
Accept: text/html,...
Host: news.ycombinator.com
Accept-Language: en-GB,en;q=0.9
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, br
Connection: keep-alive
And the I can just run it like so `http myRequest.http`
There are some decade old sublime text plugins that claim to do this, but none of them seem to work anymore, from what I'm seeing.
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Apple says they're removing my game because it's more than 2 years old
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I am having trouble summoning the outrage I see in the other comment threads here. The App Store is stuffed full of abandonware. Apple should be more aggressive with this, not less. If you can't recompile your app and patch up support for recent OSes and recent devices on an ongoing basis, then your business model is not sustainable. I know, I used to sell iOS apps.The market right now is absolutely flooded with indie games, some light pruning is probably for the best.
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Kagi Small Web
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Vlad from Kagi here, thanks for posting. The RSS feed unexpectedly broke (edit: the feed is back up! [3]) just as we published the blog post, in the true spirt of "small web" :) Should be up in 30 minutes which will enable the site to function too (it uses the same feed).This has been a personal pet project of mine and I spent considerable time getting my hands dirty with the code, as the team was busy with other initiatives. When I said the "feed broke" for the launch I meant I broke it. Software is messy especially for an old school dev. I learned in the process I am not a very good coder anymore (if I ever was one?), constantly going back and fixing stuff I previously thought was solid. Check it out in the linked repo [1].Most importantly - I found the site replace the need for discovery for me, and getting to know various different humans and their writing felt good! A lot of unexpected stuff surfaced and the web felt close again. I think there is a glimpse of hope in the concept and I hope you see it too. And the improvements to search quality and diversity this brings are real.You can check the list of included websites here [2]. And all the recent posts already surface in Kagi results (for relevant queries).[1] https://github.com/kagisearch/smallweb[2] https://github.com/kagisearch/smallweb/blob/main/smallyt.txt[3] https://kagi.com/smallweb
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Creator of "Dirty Jobs" Mike Rowe testifies to Congress
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I thought Mike was just some "TV guy" they hired to do that show. This puts a whole new perspective on things. Good for Mike, hopefully someone will listen and act.
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Nate Silver correctly called 50 out of 50 states
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Nate Silver's calculations are certainly more sophisticated that a simple time-weighted average of legitimate polling numbers, but are they more accurate?His baseball projection system, PECOTA, was extremely complex, but barely, barely outperformed a simple 3-year weighted average with an age component (Marcel), and some years was worse. Other projection systems that didn't take player comps into account were better overall than PECOTA (CHONE being the best, before the creator was hired away by a team).
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You know, Google, the web already had this feature
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Google has overstayed the web's welcome.What started out as a quirky, innovative company that bucked all of the suit-and-tie trends (see Microsoft, HP, even Apple in some regards) of Silicon Valley, has now turned into a monstrous calamity with no regard for its users. Up until 2009, it was breezy and beautiful, but right now, at this moment, it's a different story altogether.Don't be evil? Pfeh. The only thing left of Google that they haven't managed to screw up or cause outrage over is search. The only thing they can't afford to change, for fear people will stop using it.This harkens back far before Google, far before any company dared invest in the Internet. This type of corporate mentality is one we see often, but tend to forget quickly. Apple did it in the 1990s. Microsoft is doing it now; look at Windows 8.Any corporation that strays too far from its roots with fail. Not in a fiscal sense, but in an ethical sense, and that's the worst type of failure there is. Do I hope they get their shit together and start being Google again? Of course. They could start by fixing YouTube, exhuming Google Reader, and rethinking the decision to end iGoogle.And please, PLEASE, reinvent that horrid thing called Google+. Even the name sucks.
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The Lowdown on Lidar
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Speed radars are good for speed traps, but not so great to prevent speed related incidents. They share the same fatal flaw with all other single-point speed meters: You can just slow down for a minute, while you pass by the speed trap, and then speed up for the rest of your trip. Instead, a 2-point speed meter (i.e. license plate readers every few miles, measuring time between matching reads) system is superior because a) their margin of error is negligible and b) they measure sustained speed over a long distance rather than at a single hot spot, thus making roads safer. I can't believe it's not implanted at least in all interstate freeways.
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The Final Leaked TPP Text Is All That We Feared
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To me, code is much more of a long term threat to the power structure than intellectual property theft is. I'm wondering how long before we have government-sanctioned libraries, languages, and chipsets that we may develop for. I see this TPP as power consolidating ahead of any looming citizen revolt in order to chop it off at the knees. It's very weird and awesome to watch.I do chuckle about all this though because these moves are so clumsy and obvious. And recently the spokesmouths of the powerful have been SO ineffective. The Jade Helm scare-o-tron rollout was completely botched and scrapped as far as I can tell. Selling a war with Syria was also completely botched. Kerry has been a fool as sec. of state and never met a war he didn't like, talks about going to war all the time to the press with no context. CIA and arms deals in Benghazi and the sloppy coverup around that, we FUBAR'ed Libya for no good reason. Obama openly threatening whistleblowers like a douche. Republican establishment is losing its grip on the reins and losing containment of the growing number of dissenting voices. If I were the archons in power behind the scenes, I'd be concerned.As a developer, if I wanted to - REALLY wanted to - I feel like I could upend all of their power and diminish their relevance. I wouldn't do it with anarchy or hacktivism or whatnot because that destruction is desperate and ultimately self-defeating. Instead, I'd take the constructive route and build an alternate system to the internet that resists regulation and rewards the decentralization of server computing power and storage.I have a day job that pays just fine and I live a peaceful life with my family where I get to enjoy a lot of personal freedom. I don't take a lot of action today other than to avoid the social networks like the plague. I think the trigger for me to act will be when my ox gets gored somehow by these new regulations. Or, perhaps if we go to war with some rogue state who dares violate the intellectual property rights of Disney, etc.
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My Livecoding.tv account deletion saga
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It looks like Livecoding have now updated my profile for me, to claim I am "spamming them":https://www.livecoding.tv/lazer/
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Who Y Combinator Companies Want
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> "We’ve seen that most engineers only have the stomach for a limited number of interviews. Investing time in the wrong companies carries a high opportunity cost."I suspect in addition to not having the "stomach" for an unlimited number of interviews, they don't have the vacation days to burn for them. Let's say you are working already and have 10 days a year vacation (pretty standard). With these ridiculous all-day interviews, you have the ability to waste that vacation on a maximum of 10 companies, and that's if you choose not to take any "real" vacation at all during the year.In an environment like today, where every company is ostensibly hiring yet overly picky, a job candidate potentially will waste their entire PTO balance on interviewing with companies serious about interviewing but not serious about hiring.
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Brave: Brendan Eich's clean-ads browser startup
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I will repeat this one more time, because Eich seems to be missing the point.[1]I don't adblock for privacy, security, or speed. Those are just nice-side effects. I adblock because I do not want to be manipulated into buying things I do not need.I wonder what would happen if, as a society, we said, "enough, no more ads". Would it really be the capitalist apocalypse that the ad industry is trying to make us believe it would be?--[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10244964
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What Google Learned from Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team
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Something I always wish existed was a recruiting platform that hired a team as a whole. Today it's pretty much just a recruiter coming to me, and saying "Hey wanna change the future at xyz?" where the only criteria that I might work is based on my skill set on my resume. Instead i'd rather fill out a survey, and get matched with some people I would probably work really well with. Maybe you hack together for a weekend. Once your team has a set of strengths and weakness, and a price, companies can bid, and the team as a whole judges where to go.I think how well a team works together is sometimes more important then how much knowledge you may have of some arcane framework.
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Bloody Plant Burger Smells, Tastes and Sizzles Like Meat
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I've been a vegetarian for the last decade and change, and I simultaneously think that finding a cheaper, appealing alternative to meat is both a fantastic opportunity for the world and a really difficult thing.I used to love meat when I was a meat-eater, and I'm a fairly picky eater that dislikes many vegetable options. (Green peppers are nasty and food-destroying in my opinion, which immediately removes over half the vegetarian options out there, just as an example), so I consider myself a decent bellweather for people who like the tastes of meat but want to actually eat less of it for various reasons.The options that already exist today are quite varied. Boca, Morningstar, Beyond Meat, and Quorn are all big names that offer meat alternatives that taste VERY different from each other. Most of my meat eating friends won't even try any of these, sight unseen. (When they see them, they tend to have even more reluctance). So, while I think it's absolutely worthwhile to make alternatives that seem more "real", there is still a stigma to overcome just by virtue of being fake. And in america, at least, where meat-eating is tied to masculinity and bacon is worshipped, that's a tough stigma to shake.Decent imitations of highly processed meat exist already - I've had chicken nuggets that meat eaters had no idea were fake, and I fed my in-laws a "turkey loaf" dinner for Thanksgiving for years without them realizing - but matching the taste of "quality" meats hasn't yet happened.
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White House urges ban on non-compete agreements for many workers
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I don't understand why there's so many people in the comments defending non-competes. They have literally no value to society, or to individual employees. They are a tool of restrictive coercion to stifle an employees freedom of movement in the job market.Trade secrets, IP, secret sauce: covered by NDA and IP assignment agreementsClient lists, contract terms, sales strategies, reported metrics, financials: covered by NDA and in some cases SEC regulations about insider trading.Etc.The only thing a non-compete does is say that Employee A cannot work in their chosen field for some period of time after they are fired or quit. In doing so it offers no consideration or compensation typically in the contract.So your employer underpays you by 40% and treats you badly? You want to leave for greener pastures at that hip new startup that offered you a Senior Engineer gig? Well, sorry to say you have a mortgage, a wife, and 2 kids and that non-compete says you are only legally allowed to be a burger flipper for two years after quitting, that software engineering is verboten.Totally fair right?If you don't sit on the board of a Fortune 500 company, you have literally no incentive to support non-competes. There is no rational basis to argue in their favor. Please learn the difference between NDAs, IP assignment agreements, and non-competes before lending non-competes some mystical powers they don't have.
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The closest I've ever come to falling for a Gmail phishing attack
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The only two things that I think could have prevented me from falling for this is: I don't have images loaded by default for unknown senders, and LastPass wouldn't match the domain and therefore wouldn't show the button to autocomplete on the password box.Depending on how observant I'd be at the moment, I might check the URL bar and see something fishy. But I could fall for this, which is worrying.
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Man jailed 16 months, and counting, for refusing to decrypt hard drives
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I have a question...Suppose the suspect Alice only has a portion of the key. Someone else (Bob...) has the remaining key bits.Alice is busted, and 'compelled to give the key', and DOES provide her portion of the key.Bob is never found.Then Alice would be indefinitely imprisoned, even if she would have actually complied with the court order.It seems unethical, to me.Bonus question: Alice pretends that Bob exists, but actually he does not, but police cannot prove that. What then?A possible answer to the first question: Alice is not compelled to provide the key. She is compelled to decrypt the drive. Obviously she can't do that without Bob. Alice is screwed and will spend the rest of her life in prison.Seems harsh.
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Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation using Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks
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I've only recently started reading about deep neural networks, and the thing that strikes me the most about the literature is the lack of mathematics.Open a NIPS paper from 2010 or so, and you'll see extremely dense mathematics: nonparametrics, variational approximation, sampling theory, riemannian geometry. But from my (admittedly small) sampling of the convnet / RNN literature there really doesn't seem to be much maths there. The typical paper seems to run along the lines of "We tried this, and it worked".I'm not sure whether there's anything to learn from this observation, but I think it's striking all the same.
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GitLab Ultimate and Gold now free for education and open source
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While this is totally an awesome move in terms of marketing...Why doesn't the Open Source community actually band up and make a Github alternative that is actually good and free for Open Source?Considering that public Git services are kind of the single source of failure for all of the projects providing what the Internet needs to run, shouldn't we instead band together and make something like the Linux Foundation for Git, providing Git infrastructure for all those projects?It kind of feels like a really stupid move to hand over central infrastructure into the hands of any commercial entity.
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Software reuse is more like an organ transplant than snapping Lego blocks (2011)
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This makes me realize: the one example I can think of where software has been "Lego-like" is Unix piping. I'm not a Unix purist or anything, but they really hit on something special when it came to "code talking to other code".Speculating about what made it stand apart: it seems like the (enforced) simplicity of the interfaces between pieces of code. Just text streams; one in, one out, nothing more nothing less. No coming up with a host of parallel, named streams that all have their own behaviors that need to be documented. And good luck coming up with a complicated data protocol built atop your text stream; it won't work with anything else and so nobody will use your program.Interface complexity was harshly discouraged just by the facts-on-the-ground of the ecosystem.Compare that with the average library interface, or framework, or domain-specific language, or REST API, etc. etc. and it becomes obvious why integrating any of those things is more like performing surgery.
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Show HN: Learn how WebRTC actually works. A book on the protocols, not just APIs
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Hey HN! This is a book I am working on to help de-mystify WebRTC. It is wonderful technology, but many find it hard to understand. Especially if you don't have a telephony background. Before this I worked on https://github.com/pion/webrtc and https://github.com/awslabs/amazon-kinesis-video-streams-webr...I wanted to share all my knowledge from working on these.------Come learn about the WebRTC specification and how all the protocols work in depth, not just a tour of the APIs. The book is completely Open Source and available at https://github.com/webrtc-for-the-curious/webrtc-for-the-cur...Learn the full details of ICE, SCTP, DTLS, SRTP, and how they work together to make up the WebRTC stack.Hear how WebRTC implementers debug issues with the tools of the trade.Listen to interviews with the authors of foundational WebRTC tech! Hear the motivations and design details that pre-dated WebRTC by 20 years.Explore the cutting edge of what people are building with WebRTC. Learn about interesting use cases and how real-world applications get designed, tested and implemented in production.Written by developers who have written all of this from scratch. We learned it the hard way, now we want to share it with you!This book is vendor agnostic and multiple Open Source projects and companies are involved. We would love to have you involved!reply
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Show HN: I built an online interactive course that helps you learn Vim faster
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Can someone please explain to me why I should learn vim? I've made several attempts in my lifetime because I thought there would be some magical "ah-ha" moment, but it never came.Separate modes for command & insert just feels inherently clumsy and slow to me. Is there some other killer feature that can't or hasn't been reproduced by modern editors?
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Facebook does not plan to notify half-billion users affected by data leak
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I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, unless and until, companies like Facebook are fined appropriate amounts they’ll never stop.Quite literally, every business school on the fucking planet will tell you do something if it’s cheaper. It is cheaper for them to not give a fuck, than to give one. Unless they are fined upwards of $20-50bn it’ll never stop because it’s always going to benefit their bottom line. Full stop.If you don’t take 10-15% from a company they won’t ever be incentivized to stop. This 5% or less bullshit has to stop if folks want change.Edit: small grammar fix.
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Cloudflare R2 storage: Rapid and reliable object storage, minus the egress fees
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For those who don't want to wait, there's DigitalOcean Spaces (https://www.digitalocean.com/products/spaces/).Disclaimer: I haven't used it, but planning to, since I already use their VPS.
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Security issue related to the NPM registry
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For those thinking "what can we possibly do?"The best answer I can provide is to nuke your entire software supply chain from orbit and start over with something new that doesn't require you to depend on potentially hundreds of arbitrary 3rd parties. Factor into this all of your tooling and infrastructure vendors as well.You might not like our particular brand of medicine, but we are finding massive success in these supply chain matters with a pure Microsoft stack: .NET core/5/6, GitHub, Azure, VS2022, Server 2019, et. al. We also technically use SQLite, but no one has ever attempted to probe us on that vendor, and it is incorporated well enough into the Microsoft death star (Microsoft.Data.Sqlite) to pass as yet another defensive armament at this point. We avoided shitty javascript web stacks by using technologies like Blazor, or just hand-rolling a little vanilla javascript when required (the horror, i know).The reason we like this path is that we now require virtually zero additional third party dependencies for building our B2B products. .NET6 covers nearly 100% of the functions we require. On top of this we have 1-2 convenience nugets like Dapper (StackOverflow, et. al.), but everything else is System.* or Microsoft.*. The only other 3rd party items we consume into the codebase come from vendors of our customers as part of our integration stack - typically in the form of WCF contracts or other codegen items. Now, we do hedge for the inevitable Microsoft framework churn by not getting too deep into certain pools like AspNetCore. For example, we have rolled all of our own authentication, logging & tracing middleware, since this is the area they seem most hellbent on changing over time.Certainly, Microsoft has, can, and will drop the ball, but they also have a very long track record available to build [dis]trust upon. For us, we went with the trust path. If our customers run us through the due diligence gauntlet (and they will - we're in the banking industry), we can produce a snarky ~1 item list of vendors that makes life much easier for everyone involved. No one has ever given us a hard time for doing business with Microsoft. Typically, everyone we work with is also to some degree. Is this bad? Maybe. I am ambivalent about the whole thing because of how much energy they have apparently put into the open source side of things. I have actually been able to contribute to their process on GitHub and watch it come out the other side into a final release I could use to correct a problem we were having.
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We will be retiring Alexa.com
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Wow, that is a bummer!Alexa is my go-to place to get a first impression on how much traffic a website gets.I have never looked into how they get their data, I always assumed they get it from internet providers?Is there an alternative? SimilarWeb publishes their data with a huge delay, so it is not of much use for me. From my experience, it is also less reliable.It is crazy how valuable internet properties get closed down when they are owned by giant companies. According to Alexa, Alexa is still a top-5000 site:https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/alexa.comIt seems insane to just close it down.
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Neon – Serverless Postgres
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This is the missing piece on cloud for masses * we already have compute scale-to-zero (cloudrun, lambda, fly.io).
* Network is default pay for use. Storage (S3) is default pay for use.
* The only piece in the stack that was always-on was the database (only serverless db thus far was firestore, or something like sqlite+litestream)
With something like this we get a solid RDBMS engineered to be scale-to-zero, and with good developer experience.This opens up a world of try-out mini applications that cost cents to host. serverless db (postgres) + serverless compute (cloud-run) + use as you go storage+network. This is a paradigm-shift stack. Exciting days ahead.
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Tell HN: Banned from LinkedIn for Reporting Wickr Drug Spam
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Of all the social networks, I never would've guessed that LinkedIn is the one people turn to when they want to sell drugs.
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SQLite Internals: Pages and B-trees
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> Simplicity leads to reliability and I don't know of a more reliable database than SQLite.JSON file on disk might be a reasonable competitor here. This scales poorly, but sometimes you don't need to scale up to something as crazy as full-blown SQLite.
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Ask HN: How do you not take criticism of your work personally?
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What you have encountered is actually one of the necessary steps to really become "a senior developer". And congratulations, you have already passed the biggest part of that hurdle: becoming aware of the issue.There are things that are fragile, things that break when they encounter a shock. Such as porcelain, when transported. There are things that are non-fragile, things that do not break when they encounter a similar shock. Like a teddy bear, when transported. And there are things that are anti-fragile, things that improve when they are exposed to a shock, like the immune system. If you are not exposed to series of smaller shocks as a child, your immune system does not develop properly.So you need to develop an anti-fragile attitude towards criticism, in order to become a better developer from the criticism. If you do not learn that, you will be stuck at the level you are at the moment. You can do this at the meta-level as well at the same time: become anti-fragile towards handling criticism in general, and becoming a better human being from it.The key to hacking yourself is to increase your awareness of your emotional state. When you become aware that you are angry, the anger is losing the grip it has over you. When you are angry, you are sometimes doing things you would not have done if you were not angry. (Sometimes anger is healthy, it may also be a signal to us that our boundaries have been violated.)
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Evidence that the shingles vaccine prevents a good chunk of dementia cases
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This would not explain the precipitous rise in Alzhemier's rates seen in developed countries and mostly in the last few decades.
I maintain that alzheimer's is type 3 diabetes.
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Reddit CEO doubles down on attack on Apollo developer in drama-filled AMA
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Why did Reddit even have an AMA for this? Everyone knew it would turn out exactly like it did. The most difficult questions went unanswered. The answers they did give were either just bland corporate speak or actively detrimental, giving their critics more ammunition including opening Reddit up to accusations of libel. The whole ordeal seems to leave them in a worse position than if they just never did the AMA.
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Newpipe.net removed from Google search results due to DMCA take down request
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NewPipe is excellent. I was disappointed that it was not available for desktop until I discovered tartube which will download video files from almost any website easily
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Embeddings: What they are and why they matter
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Since publishing this I've found a few additional resources that are really useful for understanding embeddings at a lower level (my article is deliberately very high level and focuses mainly on their applications).Cohere's Text Embeddings Visually Explained: https://txt.cohere.com/text-embeddings/The Tensorflow Embedding Projector tool: https://projector.tensorflow.org/What are embeddings? by Vicki Boykis is worth checking out as well: https://vickiboykis.com/what_are_embeddings/Actually I'll add those as "further reading" at the bottom of the page.
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The One-Person Product
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I know very little about David Karp. But after reading this, I'm a bit surprised that he decided to sell Tumblr.The way Marco talks about David's disinterest in money, and his singular obsession with Tumblr, made me think he wouldn't even consider selling it to someone else.I'd be curious to hear his reasons for selling, as oppose to doing a strategic investment like Facebook did with Microsoft at one point.
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Show HN: Twenty
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I was wondering how a quick random player might fare so I made a simple one. Paste this into your inspector console (or in chrome type "javascript:" into the URL bar and paste it): function countPieces(){it=b.pieces();for(var e=0;it.current();)e++,it.next();return e}function getRandPiece(){for(var e=b.pieces(),t=Math.floor(Math.random()*countPieces()),n=0;t>n;n++)e.next();return e.current()}function stackRandPiece(){if(!b.isBusy()){if(b.isGameOver())return void clearInterval(randInterval);var e=getRandPiece();b.setTarget({x:e.pos.x+100,y:1500}),b.grab(e),window.setTimeout(function(){b.setTarget({x:200*Math.floor(7*Math.random())+100,y:1500}),window.setTimeout(function(){b.release()},15)},15)}}randInterval=window.setInterval(stackRandPiece,40);
Original code here: https://gist.github.com/CodyWalker/842149b82ed363659678The highest I've seen it manage is 17.
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BetterExplained: Math Lessons That Explain Concepts
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This site is a hidden gem on the internet. This guy deserves a lot more credit. I think he's doing something at the level of Khan Academy, but for seemingly simple concepts we all take for-granted.An article I really enjoyed was his explanation of Quake's inverse square root method: https://web.archive.org/web/20150530232103/http://betterexpl...What I also appreciate is that he admits when he doesn't understand something and doesn't pretend to give an incomplete, vague explanation and just straight up says he does't fully get it (like why the specific 'magic' number in the Quake algorithm). Thankfully he linked the original paper and I read up on it myself. But his initial explanation provided a solid background for the paper.
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Microsoft Solitaire was developed by a summer intern
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I don't know what it is, but I love implementing Solitaire to learn new languages and frameworks. It's always a fun exercise, and the engine gets better with every iteration. My latest attempt is https://solitaire.gg - it's a Scala/Scala.js WebGL/websocket Phaser web/native app with hundreds of games.
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Can I Email: ‘Can I Use’ for email
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It would be really nice to have a small and simple markup language, say some markdown standard, to be the layouting language for E-Mails. No (external) images, just links, lists, headings, basic formatting.HTML E-Mails are a security nightmare, even if "only" CSS is "allowed" and JS/iframes/external images are not loaded.
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What do executives do, anyway?
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This doesn't seem useless, but it hardly seems worth 1000x the wage of a regular worker either.
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My Letter to the Editor of New York Times Magazine
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Blaming the user is a pernicious problem in UX engineering, especially when a feature is introduced not for the actual users, but the executives making the purchasing decisions.MCAS was an economics driven decision by Boeing to be able to sell it as a "no cost" upgrade to existing 737 fleets. "You get all this and you don't need to retrain your people"The entire concept of the 737 MAX was flawed, marketing an inherently unstable aircraft with a patched undocumented system to control that instability. Then, incredibly, making the safety indicators an optional extra was criminal.The FAA is also liable for regulatory capture and handing over its responsibilities the actual organization it is supposed to be supervising.Ultimately, it's an example of what happens when MBA execs, convinced that they can run "any business" take over from a rigourous engineering culture. The Harvard (and other) Business Schools have a lot to be blamed for.
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Building all of our new mobile apps using React Native
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Honestly I think the future of mobile will just be... mobile websites.What's missing until regular websites have parity with mobile apps in functionality?- Accelerometer and all sensor support (some of these are already supported on various browsers on various OSes)- Background support- Bluetooth- WiFi- Better notifications- etc.Sure there will always be a need for native, but 99% of apps don't need any of that stuff, really. Though I suppose both Apple and Google have an inherent interest to gatekeep.Looking at my own most used apps:- Messenger- Mail- White Noise- Teams- Google MapsLiterally all of them could be implemented as responsive pages with acceptable performance. There are a small number of companies that don't bother with mobile apps, Craigslist being the most notable of them until a few months ago. Part of the issue though is that the app stores give you a lot of visibility and to get that visibility you need to be in the app store. Sure you can use a web view, but in some ways that's even worse than just a responsive website because now you have to deal with the abstraction of your site that is a WebView. Not to mention the temptation to try for "best of both worlds".
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Ask HN: How do you manage self-study?
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I'm hoping my reply is more helpful than it sounds at first glance... This is one of those questions where I read and then exclaim (rhetorically), "what's wrong with people?!"Don't take this the wrong way, I often exclaim this. You are quite possibly in the majority and I'm the odd one.To me it has always seemed inherently clear that the way to approach life is to do something if you enjoy it. If you stop enjoying it then do something else. I will naturally need a break from doing something after a while (hours, days, weeks), and so I'll put it down and pickup something else.As a recent article on HN mentioned, "enthusiasm is worth 25 IQ points."When it comes to self-guided activities such as this, there has never been a "should" or "best" for me. I just follow what I enjoy, perhaps guided secondarily by what may be useful. (Actually, I enjoy things that are useful, so perhaps that intertwines these concepts for me). I suspect I didn't thrive at university for this reason, while in the real world I know a number of people who would call me an overachiever.PS. I have a few friends with some degree of ADHD. These friends may often feel overwhelmed by a large number of choices or tasks, to the point of inaction. I'm not saying this applies to you, but I just thought it was worth mentioning.
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Advice to new managers: don't joke about firing people
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I am really surprised one has to write a blog post about this.I am not a manager, but here is a question for managers, have you or anyone you know, joked about firing someone?In my opinion, that would be incredibly cruel and stupid.
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The Unix Magic Poster
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Things I can identify in the poster:- A wizard (which is a reference to a highly knowledgeable UNIX expert)- the cauldron the wizard is using is in the shape of a seashell, and there are shells on the wizard's hat (on UNIX the shell is a textual interface between the user and the operating system)- the wizard's hat has the word "su" on it ("su" is the "superuser" command used to "become" a "superuser", ie. the most powerful user on a UNIX system, where one can perform administrative tasks that ordinary users are not capable of doing)- the wizard's robe contains: ">" and "- there are containers at the bottom of the picture with the words: "diff" - a utility used to show difference between various texts, "tar" - a utility for creating, listing, and extracting archives, "null" - a reference to /dev/null, a "device" file that outputs the end of file when read and which discards any output sent to it, "troff" is a text formatting utility sometimes used for formatting documentation, "awk" is a language used for text manipulation, "C" is the main programming language used on UNIX, and "B" is a language that "C" descended from, "UUCP" - a once common but now obsolete file transfer utility- there is a scroll with the words "shell script" on it, which refers to a program containing shell commands- in the background there are pouches with the words: "spawn", which refers to creating a new process, what looks like "JFO" (not sure what this is), and "nroff" - another text formatting utility, "root" (the default name of the "superuser" account)- there's a shelf with books bearing these titles: "Daemons" (which are background processes, usually used as "servers" on a unix system, which perform some function indefinitely, contrasting with regular applications which are more one-off processes that usually perform one function and exit), "Who am I" - a reference to the "whoami" utility that will tell you your user id, "traps" - the "trap" utility can be used to respond to signals, which are one way to perform inter-process communication on UNIX, usually used to indicate exceptional events, "Spells" - a word in keeping with the wizard theme, but I don't know if there's anything specific in UNIX that would be considerd a "spell" per se, "Curses" - a graphics library- there is a container on the shelf with the word "pwd", which is a shell command used to tell you what the current directory is- there is a box on the shelf with the word "mbox", which is a type of mail file on UNIX, and this box with the word "mbox" contains scrolls, which could be mail messages- there is a black cat, which is also in keeping with the wizard theme, but I'm not sure whether it corresponds to anything specific in UNIX either (update: of course it's a reference to one of the most common and well-known commands on UNIX: "cat", which is used to output the contents of a file... don't know how I missed one of the most obvious symbols in the whole picture!)- there is a black boot leaning against the wall. To "boot" a user off a UNIX system is to terminate or end their connection, "kicking" them off the system. "booting" a UNIX system is a term used for starting the system. "rebooting" refers to restarting the system.- in the window a person with a scythe is reaping (or chopping down) some crops... to "reap" processes on UNIX is to kill them (or terminate/end them)- under the ceiling are many pipes. pipes are used on UNIX for interprocess communication- there is a bucket under a leaking pipe. The bucket may be there just for aesthetic reasons, though there is an informal "bit bucket" term which could refer to an abstraction for discarding information. The leaking pipe might be a reference to a "leaking abstraction", which is an abstraction (a high-level representation of something) which is supposed to "abstract away" or not reveal anything about how it's implemented, but when it "leaks" it inadvertently reveals something about how it's implemented anyway, causing all sorts of problems, like difficulties in switching to a different implementation.- other probably purely aesthetic elements in the picture are a castle on a hill, mountains, and a sky seen through the window, a fireplace and a table. the "oregano" container on the table is probably also purely aethetic, as is the mortar (in the pestle with the word "tar")- on the table lies a fork, which refers to "forking" a process (which creates a copy from an existing process and is a way UNIX has of creating new "child" processes from existing "parent" processes)- on the "awk" container on the table is a spool of thread. "threads" on UNIX are lightweight processes. the spool of thread has the letters "usr" on it, which refers to the /usr partition on a UNIX system, which usually contains all sorts of UNIX utilities and libraries. To "spool" messages is to collect them for processing.- the wizard is pouring glowing liquid from test tubes, with what look like circuit traces coming out of the cauldron. In the cauldron there is a ladle with an iron hook at the end. I'm not sure what any of these elements are supposed to represent.- there is a spigot in the bottom of the cauldron, and it's emptying out in to the container labeled "null", which (as mentioned above) is a reference to the /dev/null device on UNIX, which will discard everything sent to it, so can be thought of as having infinite capacity, so even though it's a lot smaller in size than the cauldron all the liquid from the cauldron and more could be poured in to it without overflowing- there is a log with the word "login", next to the fireplace. "login" is a process used to respond to what the user types at the "login:" prompt when first connecting to a UNIX machine. A "log" is a text file containing (usually timestamped) information about what a process is doing or to record series of events- on the wizard's hat is a scroll which reads: "DMR", "KT", and "BWK". "KT" is probably Ken Thompson, one of the creators of UNIX. I don't recognize the others.That's all I can spot.Here is a direct link to the high resolution 32 MB PNG image of the poster: [1][1] - https://archive.org/download/unix-magic-poster-gary-overcare... Magic Poster - Gary Overcare (1).png
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Send: A Fork of Mozilla's Firefox Send
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Some other WebRTC file transfer options:* https://wormhole.app/ (my recent fave, by creator of WebTorrent, holds for 24h, https://instant.io by same)* https://file.pizza/ (p2p, nothing stored)* https://webwormhole.io/ (same, but has a cli)* https://www.sharedrop.io/ (same, does qr codes)* https://justbeamit.com/ (same, expires in 10 minutes)* https://send.vis.ee (hosted version of this code)* https://send.tresorit.com/ (not p2p, 5 GB limit, encrypted)I track these tools here: https://href.cool/Web/Participate/
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Note that I wouldn’t pass the listed minimum requirements
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General SE hiring comment: One thing I realized, for most IT/SE jobs, the more accurately you describe your current stack in the requirements (or maybe the person you are replacing), the smaller your candidate pool is. You might even find that your candidate pool is exactly the people you are already working with.Which makes it problematic when we make HR people do the initial screening. They would filter out a lot of good candidates just because they used Python instead of Java, or had been working on a C++ project one year less than the person leaving the team.Could it be then that this is a communication problem between the Engineering team and the HRD? After all, the Eng'g team writes the requirements for the job post, HRD just checks it and makes it look attractive.(Though honestly, I don't think this general comment applies to the job post in Carmack's tweet. Honestly I can't fault the job post for the way it was worded. I say the higher you are in an SE-org chain, the less this is a problem.)
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Economic costs of war
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To those here riffing on the theme of “this misrepresents the volume and beneficiaries of the transactions involved” - you’re not wrong. Accurate representation of public info like this is a top organisational problem for our species at the moment.But I do think you miss the point, so aptly put by Mr Eisenhower:“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”In a strictly limited sense, I’d rather get my cross of iron at 66% off than for the full $6.4T. Better yet would be universal healthcare, enough homes to go round, clean, sustainable energy production systems, and bridges that keep on bridging.
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Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
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Print it out on acid-free paper with a stable, acid-free ink. Have it bound as a hardback, and seal it into a waterproof container. Entrust it to one of your children, tell them to keep it in a safe-deposit box and take it out once a year to share with their children, and to pass it on to their children with the same instructions.If you have it electronically, the absolute best case in 500 years is that it will be a relatively easy job for software archaeologists or historians to decode, assuming it's been periodically backed up to new media for all those years. The most likely case, though, is that in 150 years, the servers it was stored on, which have not been running for 80 years, will be picked over and/or melted down for precious metal contents by a tinker who wanders between mud-hut villages repairing their ancient metal pots in exchange for dried fish.
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A YouTuber purposely crashed his plane in California, FAA says
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Under U.S. law, are there circumstances in which it could be acceptable to deliberately crash a plane?In this case, it clearly wasn't (crashing on public lands with risk of starting a wildfire and polluting them), but if you wanted to crash a plane for a scene in a movie, could you do so? Maybe crashing on private property in a predetermined location with appropriate fire department support and prior notification to air traffic control about your intentions?Can manufacturers perform genuine crashes (from controlled flight) on private property for safety tests, the way car manufacturers perform tests with crash test dummies?
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Nobody wants to teach anymore
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A few random thoughts:1. For as much as we spend on education, teachers seem to be grossly underpaid - to be getting robbed of their share of the budget. Where does that money go?2. It seems that education degrees are seen as easier to achieve than others.3. Teachers frequently complain about how they are unappreciated, yet children spend _12 years_ in their care. Why do people come up to them and say they hated school rather than “thank you”?4. Many school problems are caused by disruptive children.Disruptive children are caused by parents who frankly just don’t give a shit. Throwing more money into schools won’t ever fix this problem.5. Schools are just too darn big. Thousands of kids in a big prison-shaped building and we wonder why everyone is alienated, miserable and dehumanized?
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Crypto exchange AAX suspends withdrawals
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So, having been around since the early bitcoin days, core to the salespitch back then was the fact you would have control. You'd have your coins in your wallet, and no need for banks etc. Apparently nobody does this anymore, and gives their wallets to these exchanges (i.e. banks) and balks when the obvious happens in pyramid schemes. People just don't get distributed currency if they promptly undistribute it.Or is it I who's doing the not getting things?
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Tailscale Funnel
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Maybe I have a fundamental misunderstanding of how Tailscale works, but I always feel like there is a disconnect in how it is received on HN.Usually people are pretty critical/cynical of sending sensitive data to a closed source third party server, no matter how strong their claims of 'being the good guys' are (eg see Telegram).But somehow we're all meant to be happy giving full control of our entire network to a commercial company running a closed source command and control server?
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Show HN: I'm a doctor and made a responsive breathing app for stress and anxiety
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I find the "medical disclaimer" odd: https://www.lungy.app/medical-disclaimer> By using this App, you confirm that : (i) you are medically fit and in sound health. (ii) you have consulted your relevant health practitioner, medical advisor, or doctor before using Lungy (iii) Lungy and Pi-A Creative Systems have made the health and medical consequences of using Lungy clear (iv) you fully agree that you are using Lungy at your sole discretion and at your own risk.> There have been rare reports that people with certain mental health conditions such as anxiety and depression have experienced worsening symptoms after engaging in intensive breathing exercises and/or mindfulness practices. As such, you are requested to consult your doctor or medical provider before using Lungy if you are unsure or have a mental health condition.
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YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers
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YouTube premium perfectly showcases why ads dominate the internet, because even when there is a paid option for a service much cheaper than any alternative, people do not want to pay (And I am not talking about too broke to pay cases). Serving an infinite video catalog is very expensive in terms of all resources (And yes Netflix is not comparable, unlike YouTube, Netflix can highly leverage cache boxes at ISPs). Vimeo is one alternative for video hosting, and HN is surely not gonna like that model (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28547578).So what is the alternative? (Peer to Peer for streaming doesn't seem a reasonable alternative at any scale, since most people own phones and then laptops, and much fewer desktops).
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Why I Hate Frameworks (2005)
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I don't get it. I assume the author is trying to make it sound absurd that you would need all these layers of factories to build a simple spice rack and, by analogy, that frameworks are also absurd.But if you were building spice racks at scale, of course you would build them in a factory! And you'd use machinery made in other factories. And those factories would have tools and machines made in yet other factories.That's why you can go to Amazon or Wayfair or the Container Store and find 100 different spice racks for less than $30, and why nobody builds a spice rack by hand, except for fun.
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Unity's oldest community announces dissolution
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"More importantly, we've seen how easily and flippantly an executive-led business decision can risk bankrupting the studios we've worked so hard to build, threaten our livelihoods as professionals, and challenge the longevity of our industry. The Unity of today isn't the same company that it was when the group was founded, and the trust we used to have in the company has been completely eroded."Profoundly sad, and completely avoidable. Have never seen a company so quickly and completely just throw away all of their public good will.
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A simple guide for getting started with git
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I don't get this. Sure, the tutorial looks very pretty, but it does not explain any concepts."Create a new repository." What is a repository? What do I do with it?The HEAD is a tree "which points to the last commit you've made". Huh? A tree can point? The one in my garden can't. Also, what's a commit? I thought "commit" was a verb, not a noun.And so on.It's nice that people want to make something as complex as git accessible, so I applaud the effort. Nevertheless, this just makes me feel like a moron for not finding it simple. After all, the layout and the pictures make me feel like I should find it simple. But I don't, so it must be me, right? I think it's tutorials like these that keep people on TortoiseSVN.
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Don't copy paste from a website to a terminal
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So, ok. Don't copy and paste from a website to a terminal, I get it and I got it the last time that this kind of thing was posted. But if I look around I put so incredibly much trust in total strangers all the time that compared to say ordering a pizza (where the cook could put anything in the food they wanted), driving on the highway (where anybody could swerve any moment if they wanted) and simply walking down the street (where that old lady on the left of me could pull a knife and stab me any time they wanted) that you have to wonder if the downsides weigh up against the upsides of simply trusting the website you get the information from and getting on with your life (besides the fact that it is the browser acting in an un-expected way here, the bit selected does not mirror the visual feedback given to the user, this might even simply qualify as a bug).What is the actual risk here, how many people have been bitten by this sort of thing and what was the resulting damage? I'm not saying there isn't any risk, clearly there is a possibility for exploitation here so chances are this is an actual risk. But I find it hard to make the case that we should all now start re-typing all the text in how-to's and scripts. It's one thing to run wget | curl, quite another to distrust each and every snippet of code on the web. I don't see much difference compared to say installing Ubuntu from a website whose contents I haven't inspected and that may have been built with a bunch of malicious stuff in it, I did not actually inspect all the source code this machine was built up with and I would be busy for half a lifetime if I did, so I outsourced the trust and verify that trust by looking at some checksum but that's about the extent of it.Is there anybody that can quantify this risk somehow?Has anybody been personally burned by this?
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TiltBrush by Google
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Not exactly the same thing but I've actually been sitting on an idea for a mobile app that was inspired by Google: Essentially, you'd be able to look through your phone camera and draw on the world on the screen. Then other people could see your geolocated creations and maybe modify them. (I also considered autodecay for dense areas) I never did figure out the physics of how the projection would work or if the accuracy of GPS made it feasible, but I thought it'd be a good way to blend our real world and allow a sort of "virtual graffiti", a form of augmented virtual reality. As with all interesting ideas though, if you wait too long, someone comes and does it and I saw something similar on HN except with stickers also. As for how Google inspired it, their photo app lets you physically rotate your phone to pan around photospheres.TiltBrush seems more of a pure creative endeavor meant for artists or anyone just looking to mess around a virtual world. I really much like how you can walk around the creation/space. The fact that it's three dimensional actually makes it more like sculpture than painting, though I"m sure there isn't anything other than parallax errors preventing 2D drawing. The granularity of the brushes seems to be good, so it will all come down to how well the hand controllers will work together with the headset. (hopefully not requiring surgery-like stillness just to get small details right, maybe by allowing adjustable head movement sensitivity)
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I decided to disable AMP on my site
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There's a lot of backlash against AMP on principle, which I agree with and support. However, as a non-principled web consumer, I think AMP pages are 10x better than the ad-filled, slow as molasses, jump-around-as-JavaSript-loads, video autoplaying, 'stories you might like' suggested bullshit, auto-loading 20MB heaps of steaming garbage that current news sites are. I think that AMP is a stepping stone that shows the user experience that people want but lights a fire under web developers to give them that experience without relying on Google's walled garden. How many stories of "Company X made a great product Y, but Company X is anti-consumer/evil/eats puppies, so the OSS made their own and it has grown into something great" have you heard? I think AMP is another one.The web has become bloated, where people use heavy JS frameworks like React to make their blog and then load 5MB of ad JS to load 10MB autoplaying videos. I dream of a day when static site generators like Hugo and Jekyll are the norm. Let's flex our muscles and make that happen and show the world that AMP is good but openness is better.
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Nissan Admits Internal Emissions-Test Results were Falsified
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As software engineers/computer people, we have to have ethical standards. If you participate in writing code like the one in the VW case then you are not only complacent but active in fraud.Engineers have a code of ethics. If you were to knowingly build an unsafe bridge then you would be liable for the damage and injuries it caused if/when it failed. This is true even if your boss told you to do it. You not only have a moral/ethical obligation to not build that bridge, but also a legal one.As we write software we need to keep these things also in mind. We are writing things that affect peoples lives. That could kill people. That affect the environment. We need to hold ourselves to the same moral obligations as other engineers. We have a duty to prevent harming people when we write our software.If you have no stand to refuse to do the work then it is your duty to report such actions. First up the chain, and if that is rejected, then to the media. It is also your duty to report it if you have refused and you see it still happening. There are whistleblower rights in place to protect you.
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Colorizing and restoring old images with deep learning
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The most interesting exhibit for me is "People watching a television set for the first time", where everything is colorized except the TV image, which correctly remains B&W. I wonder what kind of a training set provided the neural network with this notion.
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Android now forces apps to include proprietary code for push notifications
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So to summarize, to save battery all notifications on Android (since two versions ago) have to go through a single notification service (rather than each app having the option of continuously running in the background and maintaining a connection with its own notification service). Recently Google killed their GCM notifications service in favor of Firebase Cloud Messaging, which (unlike GCM) unfortunately doesn't have an open source library available for it at the moment.Does that sound right so far?Anyway, the Telegram-FOSS team claims that this doesn't _actually_ save battery:> Despite Google's misleading warnings, there is no difference in battery usage between v4.6 in "true background" and v4.9+ with notification.But this seems rather unlikely to me. Are they saying that an application running continuously in the background uses the same amount of battery as an application that's not running at all? Or am I just misreading that statement?
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EU brings in 'right to repair' rules for appliances
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I don’t share the scepticism shared by other commenters. No matter how you look at this it’s a step in the right direction. We have needed this legislation for at least ten years now. Hopefully it will be iterated on and improved if manufacturers try to find ways around it. The EU has shown it’s willing to legislate in many areas for the better (and worse).
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Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (1996) [pdf]
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I took a one-week SICP course with 5 or 6 other professional programmers last year. It was amazing. I wrote about my personal motivation for doing so here:https://amontalenti.com/2018/08/26/sicp-expandingAs for an update: SICP was as good as I expected and definitely makes a professional programmer regain some love for the art and magic of computer science. (However, the book is a hard read without a guide. But it's really fun if you alternate between coding and reading, by using a local Racket & DrRacket install.)One can find recorded courses from MIT with the SICP authors on YouTube, so that may be one way to do this from home.Hal Abelson was recently interviewed about the lasting influence of the book in this podcast. It's a good conversation:https://pca.st/wmrdiyvq
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Google are removing URLs entirely from search results?
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It's still regular for me but if true this will probably be the last straw for me. It's already absolutely impossible to send someone a link to a pdf you've found through google, this would make it impossible to send any link. That bloody wrapper is also a fine piece of shit. Search engines should link to content, not appropriate that content, hide who supplies it or mess with the links.
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Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm
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The solution is not regulate it. The solution is to stop pretending like social media have anything to do with reality.
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The Google Squeeze
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It's not just Google, I've noticed this across all the major ad platforms: Instagram, Twitter, FB, etc, have all cranked up the number of ads to prop up revenues.I stopped using IG & Twitter largely because it went from having relatively few ads to where I started seeing an ad nearly every other post. The value of the platform proportionally declined significantly and I no longer bother using them.Google is slowly becoming useless (even with an ad blocker) because you have to hack search terms in order to get useful results. For example, I append words like "wiki" or "reddit" to get results that aren't SEO'd. Search for something generic like "computer" and you can see an example of how hard it is to get information instead of ads.It feels like ads are definitely a bubble, and I suspect the next big tech companies will not be ad based.
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Google Kubernetes Engine is introducing a cluster management fee on June 6
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This is awful - I don’t think GCP is fully aware of their position in the market as the second, inferior choice. I took a bet on the underdog by using GCP and they bit me back in return. Especially considering their ‘default’ kubernetes config automatically sets you up with three(!) control planes in replication, that’s, as far as I understand, $~300 added to our monthly bill, for nothing.Oh, and per their docs, three-control-planes decision is not reversible - I cannot in fact shut two of those down without shutting down my production cluster and starting a new one. https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/concepts/typ...Awful. Just so awful.Edit: To answer some questions below - we have a single-tenant model where we run an instance of our async discussion tool (https://aether.app) per customer for better isolation, that’s why we had bought into Kubernetes / GCP. Since we have our own hypervisor inside the clusters, it makes me wonder whether we can just deploy multiple hypervisors into the same cluster, or remove the Kubernetes dependency and run this on a Docker runtime in a more classical environment.
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Is Alexandra Elbakyan in real trouble this time?
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This is extremely infuriating. Alexandra Elbakyan has done a huge positive contribution to human civilization, even knowing that it was putting herself at personal risk. She's just 32 years old. How can we help her? Does she need money, public support, vpns in every country? Whatever she needs, mankind is indebted to her and we should help if we can.Anybody who has ever supported their research using Sci-Hub (or Library Genesis) should consider helping back. I certainly do, but I don't know how to best support her. Any suggestions?She's not very communicative lately: https://twitter.com/ringo_ring
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My Stripe Tax Story
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My dad owns a successful chain of bicycle stores in Texas. He’s been in business for almost 51 years and he’s one of the largest bike dealers by volume in the country. He has nearly a hundred employees and a bookkeeper. Despite having a proverbial dozen balls in the air at any time and despite having people on the payroll to do bookkeeping, he sits down at his computer every night at home, logs into the ERP system, and reviews sales and receipts. He catches all kinds of crazy things. Credit card fraud (before the chargeback even comes), internal theft, mis-priced items, mistakes, you name it. He has great employees but even the best make mistakes and he’s learned this habit over the decades the hard way. I remember sitting next to him as a kid, watching him pour over cash register journal tapes that were yards long, looking for problems.My point: if you let this kind of fuck-up go undetected for over three months, you have to at least assume some of the blame and acknowledge that you probably could have caught it if you scrutinized transactions. Every good business owner does it.
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Ask HN: Share your personal site
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https://dustinbrett.com/I've spent the last 16 months working on this app/site. It's my passion side project to build a functional desktop environment in the browser.Here is the source code: https://github.com/DustinBrett/daedalOS
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Amazon sales of Deep Learning with Python are counterfeit
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I don't understand why people willingly use Amazon for most buying or selling at this point.That said, in response to this, I would probably format the book's PDF edition so that an aspiring republisher would have to do a lot of work to get it print-ready.
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Codespaces but open-source, client-only, and unopinionated
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What are some of the competitors in this space?- Gitpod, a SaaS competitor to Codespaces. http://gitpod.io- Coder, which I guess is the more enterprisey self-hosted Codespaces alternative? https://coder.com- This project, Devpod, seems to be a polished experience but not centralized like Coder.- I recently stumbled upon Recode, which looks like a more indie take on the problem. https://github.com/recode-sh/cli
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Pixar, Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, and Nvidia form alliance for OpenUSD
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Stub for arguing about what "USD" means. These comments were originally at the top level but the offtopicness was choking the thread so I'm moving them here.I left https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36962294 out because it has actual interesting information about the project.
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Everest is littered with dead, exposed bodies
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I recently got back (almost exactly a month ago) from a month long climbing trip in Nepal with some friends.We had three guides, all three of whom have climbed Everest multiple times. One of our guides, who has summited 5 times, described Everest as his "bad habit".As a relative newbie to high altitude mountaineering (the highest I got was ~19,850 feet), climbing in Nepal was really, really hard. You are never warm, the food sucks, camping for long periods at high altitude sucks rather a lot, you are never clean, altitude sickness sucks, pooping in an 8" hole in the ground sucks, not eating much protein sucks, but… the views are spectacular, the people you meet are amazing, the place itself is awe-inspiring, the wildlife is interesting and diverse, the peace of the place is fantastic, and the mountains… well, the mountains are something special.I can see why some people spend their lives chasing summits, and I can also see why some people, having seen their first summit, turn away from the mountains forever and never come back. While we were in Nepal, within two days of our summit push, our head guide had two friends die. One died on Cho Oyu in an avalanche while traversing a glacier. The other died on a relatively unknown mountain in Tibet. Both were world-class mountaineers. These were people who no mountaineer in the world would accuse of being irresponsible, inexperienced, unprofessional, or, even, unsafe. They were serious mountaineers with long resumes and respected records.That said, exploration is always a serious business, and when you're out at the sharp end, sometimes you get cut. Without these people, however, and the part of humanity which they represent, we would never expand our experience of what it is to be human and our knowledge of the space around us.Even with Mount Everest, where the experience has been honed to the point where there are professionals whose entire job it is to make sure clients make it to the top… it's friggin' hard. Having been to nearly 20k feet, I have nothing but respect for people who can make it to 29,029 feet. Climbing that far is hard, no matter how you do it. I can only imagine the feeling of being on top of the world, and quite frankly I'm not sure I'm up to the challenge, personally, of tackling Mt. Everest. I will certainly never make fun of anyone who has climbed that mountain.Given the difference in oxygen between where I got to and the top of Everest, I don't think I can comment on the impairment of cognitive facilities climbing Mount Everest imparts. However: there's a good reason most responsible climbs leave a controller in radio contact from base camp or Camp 1 in charge of final decisions. Oxygen deprivation is a serious impediment to rational decision making.So, yeah, go ahead and don't climb where you don't feel comfortable. Just don't go judging those who do without having done a high climb yourself.
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I'm the guy who bought 259684 Bitcoins for under $3000 yesterday
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The problems here with Bitcoin come across as the same problems with piracy:Bitcoin are just bits on a computer.Just like piracy, when we copy bits from one place to another, is it really "stealing"?Anyone that says "yes", better double-check their stance on software piracy as well.
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This is what happens when one guy practices art every day for nine years
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How is this relevant to HN?
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Mac Pro
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I love watching people moan about this yet unreleased product.I think the new Mac Pro episode will resemble the iPad one - lots of "ohemgee it's like just a bigger ipod, lol, how stupid do they think we are, kthx?" reactions, when in fact this product will probably push a new paradigm shift in the way workstations are built i.e. moving away from the plastic pieces of shit ubiquitously sold now. Seriously, I dare you to look around a regular "PC customization" website e.g. [1]. Apart from Razer and maybe Alienware nobody has even tried to really innovate the workstation landscape. I remember when I was building one of my first desktops with my dad - 20 years ago.A final thought: Apple has a million flaws (mostly software and systems, grr), but they didn't get where they are for being stupid or for not understanding the market, so at least give them some fucking credit.[1] http://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/view/Vortex-500-gaming-pc/
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HTML5 Genetic Cars
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Maybe someone more versed in the state-of-the-art can help me: has the concept of "speciation" ever been applied to genetic algorithms?In my instance, there are two predominant "types" of cars that are doing approximately equally well--the "rhinoboat" and the "assdragger". But when these two solutions are combined in the crossover, I think they make an offspring that is terrible.If the algorithm would mate only the rhinoboats with rhinoboats and assdraggers with assdraggers, I'm convinced we'd end up with some superrhinoboats and superassdraggers, but instead I just get an unhappy compromise.Maybe make "similarity to self" one of the genotype parameters. A high rating here would mean the phenotype would have a bias against being combined with dissimilar creatures. This allows the propensity towards speciation to develop evolutionarily, too.
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VMWare Taken to Court Over GPL Violation
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As a VMWare customer, this makes me consider their ethics. If they're unethical, shouldn't we look into switching away from their product?I'm not aware of many competitors in their market space - Hyper-V certainly, but that's less of an option for some. Short of rearchitecting our service as a series of containers, what action can conscientious corporate leaders take?
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Turkish Citizenship Database Leaked
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TR citizen here, for the last 10 years only those who are really close to AKP got the government contracts including software like this etc. for stupid amounts of money with no know-how. Therefore this is absolutely normal -at least for us-, only thing that surprised me about this leak is this got into front page of HN.Those software "companies" take millions of liras, usually for stupid CRUD stuff, develop it in like years and result is goddamn vulnerable, unaesthetic pieces of garbage.I'm on that list as well. With that info, a terrorist can buy a SIM card for my name, use it to proxy-blow up a goddamn bomb aaaaand I'm in jail.
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Rails 5.0: Action Cable, API mode, and more
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Concurrency aside, why is Elixir preferred over Ruby when it doesn't even have a native array implementation? No, lists and tuples are no substitute nor are maps with numeric keys as Jose has suggested. If you want an array in Elixir your only option is Erlang's implementation which ain't pretty - http://erlang.org/doc/man/array.html. When I raised this issue in the mailing list and on IRC the response was invariably a definsive "I've never needed arrays", "We use tuples for most things in Elixir" or "Array performance characteristics are difficult to optimise in a functional language such as Elixir". I just find this disappointing.
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Visual Studio for Mac
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So Microsoft is treating the Mac more seriously as a professional platform while Apple is treating it less seriously? I'm not saying this in a snarky way; I mean it literally as a change of corporate strategies in both companies. Microsoft seems to be saying, If you are a pro mainly using the Mac for professional work, we want to do a better job of empowering you, and Apple seems to be saying, If you are a pro mainly using the Mac for professional work, you need to get used to the idea that we are deemphasizing your market--no hard feelings.
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