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Announcing Pipenv
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This is great, but sometimes I think that python needs a new package manager from scratch instead of more tools trying to mix and mash a bunch of flawed tools together in a way that's palatable by most of us. Python packaging sucks, the whole lot of it. Maybe I'm just spoiled by rust and elixir, but setuptools, distutils, pip, ez_install, all of it is really subpar. But of course everything uses pypi and pip now, so it's not like any of it can actually be replaced. The state of package management in python makes me sad. I wish there was a good solution, but I just don't see it.Edit: I don't mean to disparage projects like this and pipfile. Both are great efforts to bring the packaging interface in line with what's available in other languages, and might be the only way up and out of the current state of affairs.
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Federal judge stays deportations of travelers in Trump immigration order
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No one seems to be talking about that fact that Trump can do these things because the Congress has specifically authorized the president to do so. It seems as though a massive amount of power in one person's hands is OK is some situations but not in others, depending on one's political persuasion.And the list of countries is from Homeland Security's list of "countries of concern" compiled during the Obama administration. And signed into law by Obama himself.https://sethfrantzman.com/2017/01/28/obamas-administration-m...Of course some will blast me as supporting Trump or supporting this ban. Not true.
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Arrest of WannaCry researcher sends chill through security community
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I've read a few articles but I feel like I'm missing something. What's with the sensational quotes like "I had folks afraid that their own involvement in investigating WannaCry would get them arrested."?Everything I've read points that he created banking Malware "Kronos" which was sold on various "underground forums" (whatever that means). What's with the WannaCry conspiracies? He wasn't arrested for being a security research, he was arrested for being a malware creator selling malware. Why is this "sending a chill through the security community"?
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Text Editor: Data Structures
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I'm always amazed that people are still working on new text editors. When I have an idea for an app and I see there's even only one alternative I usually loose all motivation for coding this app (until I realize the alternative doesn't fulfill my need).
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Guide to scaling engineering organizations
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I think this post missed one extremely important point. I almost never see it in blog posts, and yet the successful heads of 100+ engineer organizations all know this.Find good managers! Or groom them. Whichever. Just make sure you have good managers.I see endless posts about recruiting, and I see tons of posts about engineering culture, but I almost never see posts from these same sources about the nitty gritty of how to evaluate and grow leadership and people management skills. Ironically, I see a lot of that from MBA programs.Actually getting good management in place is extremely hard to do and does more for talent retention than almost everything else. For every company blog post I've read that talks about scaling the organization, including Stripe, I also hear corresponding horror stories from friends and acquaintances who are leaving because they hate their manager and because their company isn't doing anything about it.Sure, it's relative, on the grand scale of managerial quality I'd wager that Stripe is on the right side of average, but I'd really like to see more focus on scaling leadership.
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Inter UI, a typeface designed for user interfaces
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If you're looking for a UI font that's non-specific to your design (ie. you're not designing a poster) then I recommend the following:font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif, "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol";Everything else is less user friendly. This loads instantly, looks perfect on the user's screen, and is guaranteed to look exactly as it's supposed to.
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I Miss Rails
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> if the modern equivalent of Rails already exists, please let me know!You're in luck. Rails 5.2.3 was released 20 hours ago.More seriously, I feel rails is still excellent and I'm happy to work with it every day. I'd be interested to hear more about what makes rails not modern? I find it a very productive framework.EDIT: If you're talking about missing a JS equivalent of rails, do you know about Loopback? https://loopback.io/
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Alan Turing to feature on new £50 note
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It is funny how the article doesnt mention him committing suicide as a result of being chemically castrated by the UK authorities for being gay.
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Living Near Trees, Not Just Green Space, Improves Wellbeing
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Unsurprising result.I was so sad (figuratively speaking) when we moved from an older office - but one which had trees all around and even running water - to a very modern, but boring open floor glass paned antfarm-like building.After some time I got literally depressed. Walking around the concreted block did nothing for me anymore. No trees, no water, no birds, no squirrels. Just cars and a lot of heat in the summer - and a lot of wind during the winter.
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No More Google
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These anti-Google discussions come and go on the front page of Hacker News, but I'd be curious to know how many people actually degoogle their lives drastically after reading such discussions and articles.
I believe it's more of a case of "Oh my god, Google is so disgusting! Shame on Google!", and then people open up a new tab in Chrome to search on Google about their next restaurant destination as if nothing happened.Or maybe I'm too pessimistic.
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Google Photos will end its free unlimited storage in June 2021
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Has anyone found a good family friendly alternative? In particular I would really like to:- Pay for the service (sustainable/trustworthy business model)- Be able to very tightly control access to albums as I really don't want kid photos ending up on facebook or similar due to crazy aunt kathy (in google photos anyone with access can add anyone else and until recently there was no way to remove people)- Ability to require a full/proper login for guests (no hard-to-guess urls as security)- Confirmed and well-tested backup as a feature (sha1 of the backup matches my local, original copy, no stripping of the geo data!)- Decent ios and android clients that can auto backup all photos on the device
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Atomic resolution video of salt crystals forming in real time
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Every time I see these kinds of video, whether that is of protein translation, kinesin walking on microtubule, or birth and death of a galaxy, I get this feeling that Panpsychism is closer to truth that it gets credit for. Any constraints we put in the defining consciousness and life seems to be just some arbitrary constraint put there for our own convenience.
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New HIV vaccine with a 97% antibody response rate in phase I human trials
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Dumb question: Isn't HIV a solved problem? With current anti-virals they can't even detect HIV in blood tests.
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How to draw S-curved arrows between boxes
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It's cute and definitely a great way to "draw S-curved arrow between boxes", but, under the assumption of being built to be used within a real project with dozens or hundreds of overlapping connections, this, like many other node systems, fails to be usable unless you push the complexity somewhere else.
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Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one
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I would really say that "running your own email" is a set of things that can be done independently:- Getting your own domain and using a provider such as fastmail or proton is a first step that gives you lots of security fom arbitrary. Because you own the doorstep, you can change provider without having to inform all your contacts of the move. You're also more secure from unilateral moves from your provider.-Hosting your own mail server means that you are responsible for the persistence of your mail. It's a nice artisanal thing to do, and you may be satisfied to know that no one is reading your mail.-Sending your mail yourself is the real hard part, because you need a stable IP that is accepted as a legitimate mail sender. Moreover, you need to monitor this property in the long term. Every mail server has their own way to choose who is a legitimate mail sender, and it's an ongoing pain to check that.You're not forced to go all the way, you can simply pick a domain to secure the frontdoor, or you can host your mail server without sending mail by yourself, etc. You can also self-host, and change your mind later without much impact.I personally would incite everyone to do at least #1 for safety reasons, #2 if you want to fiddle with the system to know how it works, and to avoid #3.
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How I learned French in 12 months (2020)
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I learned Spanish, too, in about 12 months to dogfood my new app for learning vocabulary (which I just recently launched) [0]Even though I made an app that helped me along the way to learn words, I don't believe in a single app/book/approach for learning a language. You need to expose yourself to A LOT of different language materials.I was learning for about 2h a day, 6 times a week. I would read articles, books, websites in Spanish. I would watch YouTube videos [1]. I would read news, initially for beginners [2] and later regular [3]. And most importantly, I would have 4-5h a week itakly conversations.After 6 months I understood quite a lot, but couldn't speak almost at all. Then magic happens and 6 months later, I was having a normal conversation (though still with some errors) about any range of topics: politics, global warming, travel, engineering etc.I believe the key for me was to read a lot of books which were interesting to me. For example I read Bill Gate's book "How To Avoid A Climate Disaster" in Spanish, as well as about ~8 others in the first 12 months.[0] https://www.obstino.com[1] https://www.youtube.com/c/DreamingSpanish[2] www.newsinslowspanish.com[3] https://elpais.com
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Apple is discontinuing the iPod
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There is a part of me that wants to abandon streaming services and just buy a couple of albums per month based on what I think might be cool. I find myself enjoying music significantly less now I have unlimited access to everything I could ever want. It’s become disposable; just background noise rather than something I’m actively experiencing.There is also a part of me that wants to take those albums and keep them on an old click-wheel iPod. I always thought the early iPod nanos were among the best consumer hardware devices ever made. Just the right mix of boxy and round; small enough to be novel (at least at the time), but large enough to still be perfectly usable. Unfortunately, finding one that both holds a charge and isn’t battered to all hell is quite difficult these days, and even so, it’s much harder to justify a single use device for music when I literally always have my phone with me.As someone who was a teen when the iPod really started taking off, it was a constant presence during the time music was starting to become an important part of my life. Sad to see it go, even though really it’s been gone since the iPhone launched.
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IRS will look into setting up a free e-filing system
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There's no reason the government couldn't just tell me how much money they took each year and give me a chance to contest it if I thought it was wrong.One of my best friends lives in Tokyo and every time I have to think about taxes I get this little pang of jealousy at how sane and un-infested with rent seeking trashcans (intuit etc.) the Japanese system seems.If you need the government to behave against the best interest of the people in order for your industry to exist maybe your industry shouldn't exist.
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Meta fined $1.3B over data transfers to U.S.
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These numbers should be written as "hours of revenue".Then people would notice how laughably small those fines are.> Meta was fined 12 hours of revenue for violating your fundamental human rights for years of profit.
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Speed Test
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Tried on several devices - it consistently under-reads.I'm on 500Mbps broadband. Ookla and fast.com show 350Mbps via WiFi. Cloudflare only 274Mbps.Similar results on Ethernet. Over 400Mbps on a proper speed test. Can't hit 300 on this.I assume their downstream is capped?
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How Doctors Die
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Tonight I will tell the mother of our child that if I reason in any way that resembles this article she should slap me in face and tell me to fight for my life. For my daughter and my own sake.In Sweden medical care is free. I can fight as long as I want without them getting in trouble. I also suspect I should fight so hard as if the illnes is truly terminal I will end sooner in flames, not later.I want all the tubing. I want the cracked ribs and surgeons transform me to a piece of blubber and then anlyze the hell out of it so anyone else don't have to go through the same thing.Telling people to give up because of money or some sort of gentleness to yourself or your family is alien to me. Maybe it's our harsh climate uphere. Swedes seems very in tune with our suffering.
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What if Hollywood had to use tech like we have to watch movies?
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This is just sad, I get the impression from the comments and
up votes that tech does not get Hollywood. Hollywood business only work
because only Hollywood is willing to give Christopher Nolan 200+ million
dollars to make Dark Knight, ditto with James Cameron's Avatar. When Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook or Yahoo decides to give a Christopher Nolan or James Cameron $200million+ to make a movie, things will be different. Then these multinationals can distribute to everyone who wants to buy the movie without DRM, without regional restriction and at a competitive price. Until then everything is just
posturing, indie budgets will not change Hollywood.
Tech world has competition, but only Hollywood is making these big budget productions.edit: not sure why this is getting down voted, it would be interesting to see a counterpoint.
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ASCII interactive fluid animation
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Switching the background-color to black and the text color to green results in a really cool looking display.
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Introducing Google Drive... yes, really
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Here's the most important paragraph in the blog post that most people will gloss over (because Google glossed over it):"Drive is built to work seamlessly with your overall Google experience. You can attach photos from Drive to posts in Google+, and soon you’ll be able to attach stuff from Drive directly to emails in Gmail. Drive is also an open platform, so we’re working with many third-party developers so you can do things like send faxes, edit videos and create website mockups directly from Drive. To install these apps, visit the Chrome Web Store—and look out for even more useful apps in the future."Specifically the app integration ecosystem they're creating with the Chrome Web Store is extremely interesting. There's documentation for developers here:https://developers.google.com/drive/Basically, you register your app against certain mime types, and then when users install your app into Chrome, they can now open those file types directly from Drive using your app, seamlessly.It's Windows' "open with" dialogue, except on the Web. That's a big deal, because while everyone expected Drive to offer features that compete with Dropbox, this feature competes with operating systems. I think it's a brilliant move that shows Google thinking ahead and beyond what Dropbox is doing.
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Grasshopper 100m Lateral Divert Test
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Few questions. Is Grasshopper intended to be a vehicle that ships a payload into a low earth orbit and return itself back to the launch pad?With that, a question of descent, once it's reached orbit and released its payload, would it re-enter with a short burn towards its earthly destination, decelerate with, say, parachutes, and then do its final descent onto the pad with the rocket? I can't see it doing its entire descent with a rocket, that would use so much fuel, and require so much extra weight.
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Fucking Sue Me (2011)
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There's a simple reason why this works for small businesses: nobody sues a guy with no money.So if you're a sole proprietor scraping by and you piss off a giant company with lawyers enough that they want to file a lawsuit against you, well, what's the upside for them if they win? Tens of thousands of dollars in expenses on their side, and roughly zero dollars in recovered costs from the business they destroyed or the guy they sent in to bankruptcy.Unless their goal is simply revenge, there's really no reason for them to follow through with such a course of action.
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Are Your Programmers Working Hard, Or Are They Lazy?
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> When people are doing a physical task, it’s easy to assess how hard they are working. You can see the physical movement, the sweat. You also see the result of their work: the brick wall rising, the hole in the ground getting bigger. Recognising and rewarding hard work is a pretty fundamental human instinct, it is one of the reasons we find endurance sports so fascinating.We've all heard about the stereotypical manager-perception of "effort invested will be proportional to results delivered!", like the article laments. But this analogy breaks down really quickly.Let's use an example that's not from software to illustrate the point -- in fact, let's use the author's own example, laying bricks. Who would you rather hire?-- Bricklayer A: Takes 2 weeks to finish a wall, stays late every day to finish the job, finally builds a brick wall of passable quality.-- Bricklayer B: Finishes your wall in two hours because he realizes there's a better way to lay your bricks, and builds a wall of excellent quality.I feel like most people, even managers of non-software folks, would rather hire B. At least, I certainly would.So I think the premise of the article is wrong. There's something deeper going on, and dismissing it with "managers want to reward hard work, and creatives don't look like they're working hard" is an explanation that is "neat, simple, and wrong" [0].[0]: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/H._L._Mencken
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Why not just a simple spreadsheet of salaries?
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It's strange to me that these salary discussions are so narrowly focused on just pay/bonus and don't seem to care about benefits and work/life balance. Here's stuff I track in my own career spreadsheet and compare new jobs against these metrics when considering a new one: * Vacation, sick, and holiday time off
* Distance to work and traffic considerations
* Relative cost of living
* Health insurance cost and coverage amount
* Retirement benefits (401k, pension, etc)
* Expected work hours per week
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What the CIA WikiLeaks Dump Tells Us: Encryption Works
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I don't see any mention of quantum computers in here so I thought I'd mention:the NSA themselves are concerned that quantum computing will be a great threat to encryption in the near future.Keep in mind that the NSA and god knows who else are storing encrypted communications to break them later.Quantum computing will defeat RSA, DH, ECC, asymmetric crypto, but it will only weaken symmetric crypto (eg. AES) by a factor of two.So according to my Internet research: if your symmetric crypto is twice as secure (key size) as needs be, it is future proof.Also (and please correct me if I'm wrong) I believe the triple encryption Serpent(Twofish(AES)) available in VeraCrypt (TrueCrypt fork) even protects against weaknesses which may be discovered in any of these cryptosystems: they would have to defeat all three.
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YC AI
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If you're the kind of person that's interested in taking up this challenge, but you currently have the coding skills without the deep learning skills, we built something that can equip you with most of the current best practices in deep learning in http://course.fast.ai/ . It doesn't assume anything beyond high school math, but it doesn't dumb anything down (key mathematical tools are introduced when required, using a "code first" approach).We don't charge anything for the course and there are no ads - it's a key part of our mission so we give it to everyone for no charge: http://www.fast.ai/about/And yes, it does work. We have graduates who are now in the last round of applications for the Google Brain Residency, who are moving into deep learning PhDs, who have got jobs as deep learning practitioners in the bay area, etc: http://course.fast.ai/testimonials.html . Any time you get stuck, there's an extremely active community forum with lots of folks who will do their best to help you out: http://forums.fast.ai/ .(Sorry for the blatantly self-promotional post, but if you're reading this thread you're probably exactly the kind of person we're trying to help.)
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Earth on AWS – Open geospatial data
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On a somewhat related topic - can anyone recommend a geocoder available through AWS?There are several AWS marketplace solutions available on the link at the bottom of the original article.[1] Only Geolytica and Forward Geocoder seem to be available to new customers, and both have [1] https://aws.amazon.com/mp/gis/#geocoding
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How to Read Mathematics
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Feynman’s method to understand complex problems is so simple and elegant! Surely you’re joking, mr Feynman:”I can’t understand anything in general unless I’m carrying along in my mind a specific example and watching it go. Some people think in the beginning that I’m kind of slow and I don’t understand the problem, because I ask a lot of these “dumb” questions: “Is a cathode plus or minus? Is an an-ion this way, or that way?” But later, when the guy’s in the middle of a bunch of equations, he’ll say something and I’ll say, “Wait a minute! There’s an error! That can’t be right!” The guy looks at his equations, and sure enough, after a while, he finds the mistake and wonders, “How the hell did this guy, who hardly understood at the beginning, find that mistake in the mess of all these equations?” He thinks I’m following the steps mathematically, but that’s not what I’m doing. I have the specific, physical example of what he’s trying to analyze, and I know from instinct and experience the properties of the thing. So when the equation says it should behave so-and-so, and I know that’s the wrong way around, I jump up and say, “Wait! There’s a mistake!”
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Cloud Computing Without Containers
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Hi, I'm the tech lead of Workers.Note that the core point here is multi-tenancy. With Isolates, we can host 10,000+ tenants on one machine -- something that's totally unrealistic with containers or VMs.Why does this matter? Two things:1) It means we can run your code in many more places, because the cost of each additional location is so low. So, your code can run close to the end user rather than in a central location.2) If your Worker makes requests to a third-party API that is also implemented as a Cloudflare Worker, this request doesn't even leave the machine. The other worker runs locally. The idea that you can have a stack of cloud services that depend on each other without incurring any latency or bandwidth costs will, I think, be game-changing.
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NES.css: 8-bit style CSS framework
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I'm currently evaluating a lot of CSS frameworks on how accessible they are (for an upcoming blog post), so I'd like to give it a go:1. "Focus ring" (focus indicator) is completely missing for buttons. I cannot navigate the site with my keyboard if I don't see the currently focused element. Never remove the outline for focusable elements without providing a sufficient alternative.2. The focus ring for the form elements is insufficient, especially for input fields.3. The green, blue and red buttons have insufficient contrast ratio. Use something like [0] to find accessible color combinations.4. Only native components are used (button, input) - that's great! This way, almost no ARIA is needed. Adding role="alert" [1] to the balloons is the only one I'm missing.5. The mobile layout is broken for inputs.Unfortunately, many CSS frameworks either partially or fully ignore the accessibility aspect. It takes a lot of experience and time to make a website fully WCAG-compliant, but it's quite easy to follow some basic guidelines, like in this cheatsheet [2].[0] https://contrast-ratio.com/[1] https://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria-practices-1.1/#alert[2] https://moritzgiessmann.de/accessibility-cheatsheet/
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World of Goo Update, 10 Years Later
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World of Goo was a great example from the early Android days of what people thought the future of mobile gaming would be. High quality games that could be controlled with tapping and swiping.Unfortunately it turned out to be mostly games preying on the impatience of the player to make microtransactions.
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GitHub CLI 1.0
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I don't understand the appeal of using a cli to manage commits, branches, remotes, merges with conflicts, and so on. To me all these things are so much better internalized and understood when presented visually. Git GUIs are aplenty (Sublime Merge being my latest discovery, SourceTree before that) and generally really good. Combined with the already amazing GitHub web GUI, it's a wonder what use case is better served by sticking to the cli, other than this misplaced notion that it's what the cool kids are doing.
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Modern action films fetishize the body even as they desexualize it
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Is this a side effect of normalizing porn, that sexuality is more effectively partitioned?I once had a debate in an online forum about legalizing prostitution, and most participants were supportive of it. Then I asked the same group, what about legalizing partial prostitution, like a receptionist that also has sex with the boss as part of the job description. The participants all immediately switched to revulsion at the idea and none would support it.So why is 100% sex work less exploitative than 50% sex work? I don't think it is. But for some reason our culture finds specialist sex workers more tolerable. The same pressure seems to be bifurcating entertainment.
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Lego has designed a set that can't be taken apart
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I saw a term in the comments: AFOL. I had to look it up: Adult Fan Of Legos.I loved legos as a kid and would spend hours building stuff. Now the kits seem more like models to be assembled and put on display and not touched rather than “a paint brush of blocks” where I can use my imagination. It lost my interest. My attention is now on software where I feel I can build anything. I liken it to my lego experience as a child.I don’t necessarily think there’s a right or wrong thing here. It’s interesting to note how our mind changes as we age and grow older. The ”do anything” mentality get displaced with something else. This would make for an interesting PhD topic. :)I found another quote from a related article that captured this feeling. “It’s like a blast to the past, straight to our childhoods,” said Deason, 40, who lives in Connellsville, Pa. “It took me by surprise, but it makes sense: Life is so structured. But with Lego, you can do anything.”
Deason has a few million Lego pieces, which she organizes by type and color. The Star Wars and Architecture sets, she says, are the most popular among adults, who almost always look for the instruction manuals.
“The younger kids come in and it’s all about their imaginations — playing pretend, building zombie towns,” she said. “But at some point that gets lost. The adults seem to value the final finished project. That’s where they get their satisfaction.”
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Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years
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Having worked in ML at two different companies now, I think that people interpreting model output as intelligence or understanding says much more about the people than about the model output.We want it to be true, so we squint and connect dots and it's true.But it isn't. It's math and tricks, and if human intelligence is truly nothing more than math and tricks, then what we have today is a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of the amount of math and tricks in the average human brain, because what we have today isn't anywhere close.
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Show HN: I stripped DALL·E Mini to its bare essentials and converted it to Torch
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This stuff is so cool and it makes me happy that we're democratizing artistic ability. But I can't help but think RIP to all of the freelance artists out there. As these models become more mainstream and more advanced, that industry is going to be decimated.
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Show HN: America – Road Trip Simulator
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Tangentially related, but I'm reminded a little bit of Desert Bus, which was an unreleased bideo game from the mid-90s which was designed to be the most annoying video game to play.The idea is that you're driving a bus from Tucson to Las Vegas in real time. The maximum speed of the bus is 45 mph so it takes about eight hours. The bus constantly tilts right so you have to constantly correct it's course, otherwise you'll drive off the road and have to be towed back (also in real time).The only break in the monotony is a bug that splats on the windshield at around hour 5.
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Ask HN: How do you test SQL?
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We spin up a docker container running the DB technology we use, run our DB migration scripts on it, and then run integration tests against it. You get coverage of your migration scripts this way too.
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Juice
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I make a boring Windows software that uses this sort of juicing in its UI.Had some doubts if it would go well with, you know, your good old sysadmin types, but it did! A bit of embellishment that doesn't deviate too far from the native look and feel goes a long way. As per some guy here on HN - "delight your users" and all that.Examples of what I'm referring to - https://bvckup2.com/wip/r82-preferences.gif, https://bvckup2.com/wip/r82-backup-settings.gif, https://bvckup2.com/wip/r82-rabbit-hole.gif, https://bvckup2.com/wip/r82-backup-verification-dialog-r2.gi...
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I used Stable Diffusion and Dreambooth to create an art portrait of my dog
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I love how much work went into this.There's a great deal of pushback against AI art from the wider online art community at the moment, a lot of which is motivated by a sense of unfairness: if you're not going to put in the time and effort, why do you deserve to create such high equality imagery?(I do not share this opinion myself, but it's something I've seen a lot)This is another great counter-example showing how much work it takes to get the best, deliberate results out of these tools.
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Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks
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Here's a thought and I am writing this as I don my kevlar flame retardant jacket.For most things in life where we could impact the lives of other people materially - driving is a good example - we ensure some minimal amount of training before letting people perform that activity.However with parenting we have nothing and the result it seems is we pay with a ton more resources downstream in the way of therapy, detention centers, jails etc.How about some minimal coaching so that all parents are aware of the state of the art in child psychology and techniques to do better as parents. Potentially break the cycles of bad parenting that have been running in families for a long time (I write this as one such person).I expect it will be hard (nay impossible) to institute a parenting license (like a driving license) in a democratic society. So instead have a strong incentive in the way of a financial grant for every parent who clears a parenting curriculum sometime before their child turns 1 (or some appropriate marker). Keep the freebees /incentives piling on during the kids childhood so parents are motivated to undertake "continuing education"Parenting is truly important stuff - for many parents it is the most important responsibility we'll ever have in our lives- but we seem to leave it to chance to get the right outcomes.
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Building an open source Nest
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I like the use of short 2-5 second videos instead of pictures. They did it tastefully and made it useful.I never thought I'd see a good use case for auto playing videos.
(It kind of reminds me of Harry Potter too)
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Ask HN: 16-hour work week jobs?
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Four hours per day of work where you are in high focus is about normal. You will see that professionals across many creative fields only work 4 hours per day.There are a lot of posts here from developers talking about how they are more productive than their peers working less hours. Really, they probably have the same capacity for hours, but the less productive developers are carrying a lot of baggage in attempting to manage themselves (trying to push themselves when they shouldn't be.)I think you could actually put in more. The trick is to observe your own natural rhythm. For example, energy and your ability to focus is like a wave through the day. For most, I think the time of the most energy is early in the morning and then it declines from there. You aren't burning hours so much as you're burning that fuel in your brain. But if you put in your 4 hours early, then you could probably take a good break and get another good 90 minute session. You could also find other tasks that are much less cognitive demanding to fill your day. If you put in your 4 hours that you believe are more productive than what your peers put in, then fill out the rest of the day with things that are lighter and less "forced."If you are running a business, then after your creative work you still might have email, quotes, meetings, marketing, billing and a long list of other things to do. It could be pretty easy for a business manager to knock out 4 hours of creative work per day and then still fill out the rest of a normal working day with other tasks.If you didn't have these other sorts of tasks, then maybe you could work out a side project with your employer. After you do the "forced" work, then maybe there is something that you could work on which is more a "scratch an itch" type of project. This could be something that you see as a glaring problem for the business which also happens to be something that you are highly interested in. Maybe it's something that's a different area of expertise that you might want to move into in the future.Or maybe your 4 hours is all you can do without burning out.
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Show HN: Bocker – Docker implemented in 100 lines of bash
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Using btrfs subvolumes as the image format, that's a nice touch. On the same road as the hypothetical systemd packaging system (not that I'm very enthusiastic about that).The network, PID and mount namespaces are the ones unshared, plus a private /proc.I like tools like this because they're reality checks on how the basics of Linux containers are just a few essential system calls, and particularly that they're limited.
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This AI Boom Will Also Bust
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> Good CS expert says: Most firms that think they want advanced AI/ML really just need linear regression on cleaned-up data.Cleaning up data is very expensive. And without that, the analysis is good for nothing. AI helps provide good analysis without having to cleaning up data manually. I don't see how that is going away.
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Noncompete Clauses: Signing Away the Right to Get a New Job
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Worth remembering, especially for those just entering the software field: by the time a potential employer gives you an employment agreement to sign, they've already decided they want you. At that point, it's on them to give you a palatable offer. They may include a noncompete clause for one of two reasons: 1) to prevent you from working somewhere else at the same time, which can create all sorts of conflicts of interest, or 2) because it'll keep you from looking for a new job, and they think you're too naive to argue.Here's my suggestion. When you receive the document, read it and see if there's a noncompete clause. If so, you're going to want to send a redlined version back to them, changing the noncompete duration from "during and for 2 years following employment at the company" (or whatever they gave you) to "for the duration of employment at the company." By doing so, you show your willingness not to do any kind of work for a competitor while employed, while very clearly pointing out that you do have the right to get a new job. It may be important not to offend the person who wrote up the agreement and included something so ridiculous, so the minor nature of your modification will allow them to save face.In the end, most employers won't bother to argue the second point, and the ones that do are probably shadily taking advantage of you in other ways.Additional note: in California and several other states, these clauses are not legally enforceable anyway, and you should mention that when you give them the "fixed" agreement.
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A Solution of the P versus NP Problem?
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Scott Aaronson on "suppose someone sends you a complicated solution to a famous decades-old math problem, like P vs. NP. How can you decide, in ten minutes or less, whether the solution is worth reading?": http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=304
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Numpy: Plan for dropping Python 2.7 support
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Good. The glacial migration from Python 2 to 3 is one of the worst things about an otherwise fantastic ecosystem. The tide is turning though, with Django having already dropped support for 2, and now with Numpy too hopefully Python 2 can be properly consigned to the history books.For people wondering why it's been like this for almost a decade(!) since Python 3.0 was released: Python 3.0 was actually terrible. It lacked many critical things, and was riddled with bugs and security flaws until 3.3, which was released 4 years after 3.0. This cemented in many people's minds the idea that Python 3 was a bad thing. Python 2 was and is a fantastic programming language, so it was a very high bar to move up from. Python 3 has come a long way since then, Python 3.6 is now a decent step up from 2.7.
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Walkable Streets Are More Economically Productive
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This is something that certain cities have understood for many years. Chicago, for example, mandates that all new development from a simple three-story building to a 100-story skyscraper has retail at its base to improve the walkability of its streets and make its business corridors vibrant. This also helps push down retail rents even in the CBD, allowing local upstart businesses a shot at reaching the masses.Chicago has also come around to the notion that streets aren't "for cars." Streets are public property and belong to all of the city's citizens, including the hundreds of thousands who don't own a car. CDOT evaluates streets and sometimes decides that private property storage (parking cars) isn't the best use for some of that land. So it turns parking spaces into miniature parks or seating areas, or public art.
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Python startup time: milliseconds matter
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I've always been disappointed by how large software projects, both FOSS and commercial, lose their "can do" spirit with age. Long-time contributors become very quick with a "no". They dismiss longstanding problems as illegitimate use cases and reject patches with vague and impervious arguments about "maintainability" or "complexity". Maybe in some specific cases these concerns might be justified, but when everything garners this reaction, the overall effect is that progress stalls, crystallized at the moment the last bit of technical boldness flowed away.You can see this attitude of "no" on this very HN thread. Read the comments! Instead of talking about ways we can make Python startup faster, we're seeing arguments that Python shouldn't be fast, we shouldn't try to make it faster, and that programs (and, by implication, programmers) who want Python startup to be fast are somehow illegitimate. It's a dismal perspective. We should be exercising our creativity as a way to solve problems, not finding creative ways to convince ourselves to accept mediocrity.
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Silent and Simple Ion Engine Powers a Plane with No Moving Parts
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As planes use most of their energy to not crash into the ground, I could see the most practical use of this technology for propulsion where crashing isn't a major concern.Airships (dirigibles/blimps), and to a lesser extent, sea and land vehicles.
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Foundations of Databases (1995)
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I see that this is now #3 on the homepage with 112 points but no comments yet. Are people already very familiar with this work? Can some expound on its merits?
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Show HN: A Senior Engineer's CheckList
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> "Understand the business aspect of your work, and what makes money. Eventually, only that matters."How about ethics? company reputation? legal compliance? corporate responsibility?
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Access to Wikipedia restored in Turkey after more than two and a half years
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"... a 26 December 2019 ruling by the Constitutional Court of Turkey that the more than two and a half year block imposed by the Turkish government was unconstitutional."Your takeaways:1) Turkey has a Constitutional Court.2) Turkey has a constitution.3) The court makes rulings and they are carried out.4) Erdogan did something and it was "checked" and "balanced."Sounds an awful lot like a nation of laws, ruled by principles and such. Courts always take a while to catch up, just like e.g. investigations and pretty much every process governed by facts. But yeah, cause for some optimism. Lot of yelling here today about the block - guys it was lifted. After a ruling by a court.
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Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You
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The answer to why this is, I’m beginning to realize after talking to dozens of Googlers working at Google as acquaintances, friends, former coworkers, HN comments and twitter personalities is - Google has an active disrespect if you’re not part of their in group. If you haven’t passed their tests, you’re basically an object of derision - a mark, an object just used for incrementing a CPM metric, or an incompetent, low-class buffoon who doesn’t deserve to have their jet setting luxury lifestyles. And unfortunately, everything trickles down from that.
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Blacksmith – Rowhammer bit flips on all DRAM devices today despite mitigations
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Eventually, it will be obvious that running shared workloads on a single piece of physical hardware has fundamentally unremediatable security implications. This slow recognition is deeply perpendicular with how the current landscape of x86 chips are both manufactured and priced, as well as how cloud providers have structured billions of dollars in DC investment; in other words, they'll down-play it. This will be a massive opportunity for ARM & SoC manufacturers in the coming years, as its far better positioned to offer, for example, a single rack appliance with 64 individual 2-core mini-computers at a price-point competitive with a 128 core x86 rack, as one computer.Computing moves in cycles:- 2000s: gigahertz race on each core- 2010s: increase core counts, multicore everything- 2020s: back to core-efficiency and increasing per-core performance. M1 is already leading this charge, but is obviously a mismatch for a DC environment.AMD and Intel need to adjust, or face extinction. Its not just about pushing ultra-high per-core performance (they're both good at this); its about pushing for more efficiency, so per-blade density in a DC can be pushed higher in the face of more, smaller individual computers. If they don't evolve, AWS will for them [1].[1] https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/graviton/
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The Quest for Netflix on Asahi Linux
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The mere existence of Widevine is a mystery for me. How sensible for Netflix is to invest into DRM at all?It's not a gamedev situation, where DRM lasts long enough to make impact on initial sales. Pirated Netflix shows appear on the torrents same day, and unless they have full-stack protection from the decoder to the screen, not much can be done.They seem to make user experience worse for nothing.
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Load 'em up and throw 'em under the bus
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One mismatch I often see between engineers and management. Engineers: "I must not be doing the best I can, because I'm not keeping up with work. Gotta work faster, gotta do better." Managers: "engineers are professionals with strong opinions who will always tell me when/if they need anything to help them get their work done. Right? If they aren't saying anything, it's their own fault, right? They're adults, right?"Unfortunately many engineers (and humans generally) can't easily recognize and articulate what they need. One theory of mine is that we assign senior-sounding roles in this industry too readily. "Senior engineer" sounds like they would know how to handle this, but while they might be great at programming, they often have little experience recognizing their own limitations, asking for help/resources, and understanding that this level of self-awareness and focus on outcomes would make them look better, not worse.If I was to give one piece of advice to an engineer in a similar position: you will always look more mature and professional if you evaluate your situation and explain what sort of help you need, than if you silently keep burning yourself out while the quality keeps slipping.If you're management and you actually reprimand them for asking for help, you will have trouble retaining engineers. It would be justifiable for them to look for work elsewhere on these grounds.
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Advanced Compilers: Self-Guided Online Course
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Are there any courses on creating a new language, interpreter, and compiler from scratch? Like not using LLVM or similar to generate intermediate representation but to literally pick an ISA and, well, compile for it.
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HP disables customers’ printers if they use ink cartridges from cheaper rivals
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The CEO and the board must serve prison time for things like this. No measure less than prison for the CEO and all board members is enough to curtail this because it just becomes the cost of doing business.No, you can’t say it wasn’t your decision. If you want to not be held accountable for the work your employees, contractors, and agents do on your behalf, you should have to prove they acted against your express written orders.
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Redditor creates working anime QR codes using Stable Diffusion
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Imagine if some construction company created a whole neighborhood that from the right vantage point would be a valid QR code.
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A video game where you are an operating system
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You know what would be cool? A defragmentation game. It's basically Tetris but in a circular layout, and you get more points the better optimized it is - with frequently used data blocks towards the outer tracks and old/archive file types towards the inner tracks.I always enjoyed watching graphical defragmenters do their magic back in the day and would unironically love to play a defragging game.
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Show HN: Paisa – Open-Source Personal Finance Manager
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Slightly off topic but how do people use these? Depending on where/what I pay, I pay with an assortment of credit cards, bank account, debit cards, paypal, etc.Do people who use this kind of software manually enter every transaction they do every day, or something?
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Time.is
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I like Time.gov, personally; it was the first site I ever found around this concept and so it has a soft spot.I keep finding all my physical atomic clock synced clocks (yes, I have more than one, they are cheap these days) disagreeing, sometimes by 2 seconds or more, which makes me laugh (great ideas ruined by poor implementation). I find many of the web sites (listed in comments or the original post) to also differ, perhaps for similar reasons of implementation choices.I would presume all the sites work off various implementations of NTP, http://www.ntp.org/ plus some trusted source.I guess my question is: has anyone found a site which is really, really accurate by reducing all the latency and lag, so what you see on the screen really is, to whatever precision, accurate? And would said person have access to a really good source for the comparison point? I don't seem to have one. Yes, I should have stopped at 3 so that I could pick the 2 closest ones (like the old saying: 1 clock is unsure, 2 clocks are worse, but 3 at least lets you make a decision)I wonder, would you need to have NTP on the client side synced to a trusted source (say, in java, flash, or javascript) to get a good reading? Any server serving over HTTP induces lag, I would think, and NTP is supposed to account for transmission delays, or so I recall.Thanks for sharing, another interesting time site to add to the collection.
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We have an employee whose last name is Null. He kills our employee lookup (2012)
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Reminds me of a story a police reservist told me. Guy got a license plate caled "none," and instantly had thousands of outstanding warrants. (The cop thought "none" was trying a fast one, and so deserved it.)
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Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments
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This is ridiculous. It's bad enough that people are downvoted for contrarian opinions, but now our comments need to be vetted by the elite HN users before they can be shown to the rest.I don't get it. This site looks like something made in 1996 (with absolutely no regard for readability), but the big new upgrade we're getting is a draconian (and wholly unnecessary) comment moderation feature/policy?A lot of HN users bitch about Reddit, but they would never implement something this ridiculous since it would kill their community. But I guess that's the whole point of this exercise...to cull the userbase.Ironically, this comment is precisely the kind of thing that may never receive an "endorsement."
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Privacy – Forget Your Credit Card
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Hey HN - Privacy.com co-founder here. I'm really excited to share what we've been working on for the past year and a half or so.We've been neck-deep in payments stuff on the card issuing side (getting a BIN sponsor, ACH origination, etc), so happy to answer any questions on that front as well.P.S. For new users, your first $5 donation to watsi.org is on us :)
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Vim 8.0 released
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I moved to http://wikemacs.org/wiki/Evil and I am happy with the transition. Spacemacs seems to be a good choice nowadays.Magit and org-mode are worth it.
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How to Study Mathematics (2017)
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Memorization is so underrated. Memorizing the fundamentals and having them available for instant recall is hugely valuable, especially when trying to grok a new concept.I generally buck the standard advice and memorize first, before trying to understand. Understanding is much easier for me if I can easily hold everything in my working memory.
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Twitter urges users to change passwords after computer 'glitch'
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Actual twitter post: https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/topics/company/2018/..."Due to a bug, passwords were written to an internal log before completing the hashing process. We found this error ourselves, removed the passwords, and are implementing plans to prevent this bug from happening again."Exact same thing that github did just recently.
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Kerbal Space Program 2
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Is KSP1 any fun for casual gamers with only an hour or two and a joystick? Will I have to read up on lots of math and orbital mechanics to get anywhere in it?
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China's New Cybersecurity Program: No Place to Hide
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I don't see how any sizable foreign company could operate in China under rules like this. All sufficiently large companies are privy to certain trade secrets of partners, vendors, clients through agreements, technology, information sharing, etc, and will have legal arrangements in place for it. If the government gets carte blanche access to their data, no company could operate without violating those agreements.
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Building personal search infrastructure for your knowledge and code
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Sourcegraph CEO here. I see the doc mentions Sourcegraph for code search (cool!). Something like ripgrep is indeed better for your case, a single person who just needs to search code in local directories on their own machine. I made a PR for our docs at https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph/pull/8075 that should clarify this.Sourcegraph is a web-based code search tool that automatically syncs and indexes many repositories from your organization's code host(s). It's intended for every developer at an organization to use for searching across all of the organization's code (and for navigating/cross-referencing with code intelligence). It's self hosted and usually there is 1 Sourcegraph instance per organization. If you love local+personal code search, I bet you and your teammates would love organization-wide code search, so give Sourcegraph a try (https://docs.sourcegraph.com/#quickstart). :)
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Facial Recognition Leads To False Arrest Of Black Man In Detroit
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This story is really alarming because as described, the police ran a face recognition tool based on a frame of grainy security footage and got a positive hit. Does this tool give any indication of a confidence value? Does it return a list (sorted by confidence) of possible suspects, or any other kind of feedback that would indicate even to a layperson how much uncertainty there is?The issue of face recognition algorithms performing worse on dark faces is a major problem. But the other side of it is: would police be more hesitant to act on such fuzzy evidence if the top match appeared to be a middle-class Caucasian (i.e. someone who is more likely to take legal recourse)?
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Technical debt as a lack of understanding
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I've had to explain this to non-technical stakeholders many, many times over the years, and I always use the restaurant metaphor:If you run a commercial kitchen and you only ever cook food, because selling cooked food is your business -- if you never clean the dishes, never scrape the grill, never organize the freezer -- the health inspector will shut your shit down pretty quickly.Software, on the other hand, doesn't have health inspectors. It has kitchen staff who become more alarmed over time at the state of the kitchen they're working in every day, and if nothing is done about it, there will come a point where the kitchen starts failing to produce edible meals.Generally, you can either convince decision makers that cleaning the kitchen is more profitable in the long run or you can dust off your resume and get out before it burns down.
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Pfizer vaccine appears effective against mutation in new coronavirus variants
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Sadly, note that the study talked about here [1] is investigating the effect of the N501Y mutation, not the more worrying E484K mutation found in the South African 501.v2 strain that likely does escape antibody drugs and reduces neutralization by convalescent sera from past infections. [2][1]: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.07.425740v1[2]: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.12.31.425021v1
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Open-source, not open-contribution
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Github really needs to allow people to disable the "Pull Request" tab on repos, to reduce the stigma around not accepting pull requests.https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/1191 3 years and counting.Some people are resorting to adding bots which auto-close PRs with a message like "Sorry, I'm not accepting PRs at this time", but that only triggers once the person has put in the effort to patch your project, at which poi t they may get annoyed to be suddenly told that PRs aren't welcome.Best solution is to keep code somewhere other than github. Is sourceforge still around?
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Moths in slow motion [video]
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This made me feel so much better about moths. With the video so close up they looked super cute and snuggly. Something I have never associated with a moth before.Secondly, I found it pretty cool to see how their flight wasn't as controlled as I had thought of. It looked like a bit of a mess on take off. Again, just disarmed me from the moths I've grown to despise flying around the house.Very cool to see them from a different perspective.
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EasyList is in trouble and so are many ad blockers
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A great opportunity right now for CloudFlare to win some goodwill and PR by helping out EasyList for free right now.But what about simply enable a firewall and show captcha or similar if the origin IP is from India and requesting that URL until the situation is under control? I did that with the free plan recently in CloudFlare in a similar situation and it worked perfectly (of course on a much smaller scale).
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Show HN: Unknown Pleasures, a tiny web experiment with WebGL
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Extremely impressive. Meanwhile, I'm struggling to get the text aligned inside this blasted tag...
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GPT-4 details leaked?
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"Open" AI, a charity to benefit us all by pushing and publishing the frontier of scientific knowledge.Nevermind, fuckers, actually it's just to take your jobs and make a few VCs richer. We'll keep the science a secret and try to pressure the government into making it illegal for you to compete with us.https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpphttps://github.com/openlm-research/open_llamahttps://huggingface.co/TheBloke/open-llama-7b-open-instruct-...https://huggingface.co/TheBloke/open-llama-13b-open-instruct...You can use the above without paying OpenAI. You don't even need a GPU. There are no license issues like with the facebook llama.
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Why was a scam company able to raise $76 Million Series B?
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So I went through their checkout process, and up until the credit card stage there is zero indication that it's a membership site (I read everything on every page).I've uploaded the credit card section here:http://i.imgur.com/3di93.pngIt says you'll be billed month per month on the right hand side under the VIP membership program, but I think it's pretty clear that the page is engineered to be misleading. It looks like a standard upsell, not a mandatory part of the purchase.They're relying on people clicking the accept terms and conditions check box without realizing that it's signing them up for the membership, i.e. it's the terms and conditions of the program, not the site in general.Terms and conditions boxes are common in the checkout process and nobody gives them a second thought. I'm not sure I would have caught this one if I went in naively.Clearly unethical, IMO.
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PostgreSQL 9.5: UPSERT, Row Level Security, and Big Data
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Unless I'm mistaken MySQL has had this for almost a decade with "ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE". I'm seeing a lot more about PSQL here and in the news. I've always found it to be unfriendly and slow. Why the new attention? Is there really something about PSQL that makes it better than MySQL these days? It used to be transactions, but InnoDB made that moot years ago.We do over 20,000 queries per second on one of our production mysql DB's and I'm not sure I'd trust anything else with that: http://i.imgur.com/sLZzXhS.pngJust curious if I'm missing out on some new awesomeness that PostgreSQL has or if it's just marketing.
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“Dear Mark. I am writing this to inform you that I shall not comply”
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Sometimes I wonder that when we shower criticism on Facebook about privacy concerns, we're missing the forest for the trees. The bigger issue I see is the sheer amount of eyeballs trained exclusively to Facebook's content.What does it mean for society when Facebook can demote a challenging but important article (say, of war reporting) in your newsfeed so it can promote your friend's Wedding photos, because an algorithm says that challenging articles cause people to leave FB, reducing page views and ad revenue?
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White House Bars NYT, CNN, and Politico from Briefing
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For anyone who has actually watched these press briefings in their entirety: Does anyone else think these are pretty much the worst way to get to the bottom of issues? Here's how it seems to work:* The press secretary (or President, or whoever) makes a statement* He or she chooses a journalist to ask a question* Journalist asks question* Press secretary answers question in as much or as little detail as he/she wants* Press secretary calls another journalist* This goes on for maybe 20-30 minutes, and it's over.How does this even help at all? It's not like the press secretary is going to answer a question that he/she doesn't want to answer anyway.
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“I was just asked to balance a Binary Search Tree by JFK's airport immigration”
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In a away this actually makes sense. Instead of relying on automatic systems and algorithms, you rely on people, namely the agent performing the interview. A short chat about selected topics might be actually quite revealing. Point not being if you know the exact right answer for the BST question but more how you react and if there are inconsistencies in your story (most people are pretty bad at lying).All of this could be backed by the personal data has been collected before hand.The old (and often linked?) article about airport security in Israel[1] describes how the actually rely a lot on people being able to spot strange behavior.[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/daniel-wagner/what-israeli-air...
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Inside a fast CSS engine
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I always wonder, who puts together nifty little blog posts on this kind of thing complete with graphics just for the article? By that I mean, literally what title do they have?Myself and my colleagues would/could write up a technical breakdown of something neat or innovative we might have done to solve some problem at work, but we sure as shit can't make cool little graphics interspersed between opportune paragraphs, nor could we figure out how to make the thing entertaining to read.Is this kind of thing done in coordination with like a PR/graphics department?
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Please take care of my plant
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I made a self-watering flower pot with an arduino, a moisture sensor and a small pump once. Worked like a charm. Well, until I forgot to put water in the reservoir, that is. I suppose I could hook it up to water mains, but I couldn't be bothered.The plants we have at home are 'trained' properly so they can survive with an intermittent splash of water every now and then. At the office we have hydroculture and a gardener that takes care of them.
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DRM’s Dead Canary: How We Lost the Web, What We Learned, and What to Do Next
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I think it's amazing how a lot of comments on EFF's resignation from W3C (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15278883) seemed to focus on how they were being unreasonable about EME, and that allowing companies to have DRM is necessary. Yet, both then and now, the EFF keeps making the point that none of the DRM even works! It was never ABOUT the DRM. The companies don't give a shit about "copyright laws" or people "stealing movies". As this article very clearly demonstrates, the companies are using this to crush competition. That's it. There's no other use for this.The DRM is a legal excuse to sue competitors out of existence. The existing EME-compliant DRM implementations don't even work. This whole thing is a farce.
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Larry Ellison allegedly tried to have a professor fired for benchmarking Oracle
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> If we look at major commercial databases today, two out of the three big names in commericial databases forbid publishing benchmarks.I see many people bashing Oracle/Ellison, but they are not alone in this. MS does the same thing as well. The really worrying thing is that such practices are deemed to be legal. The entire principle of Free Markets is underpinned by consumers having accurate information about the goods they are purchasing. Having licensing agreements that are expressly designed to prevent the dissemination of product-information, goes against everything that Capitalism and Free-Markets stand for.The fact that there are no government regulations against such behavior, is precisely what leads people to think that we are living in a Corporatocracy, and not a Free Market.
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Show HN: Lunar lander-type game with computational fluid dynamics
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Author here.
It started as a technical demonstration for fluid dynamics in the web browser. Then I saw the js13kgames competition and the decision was made to make a game out of it. A game in which the fluid mechanic counts. The decision for the Lunar Lander genre then was quiet easy.Does someone know more games then the two I mentioned in the README (Plasma Pong and Pixeljunk Shooter) with more or less realistic fluid dynamics?
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COI – Chat Over IMAP
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> With XMPP and Matrix.org -based services you would still need to convince everyone to join your new network. Easy in theory, very complex in practice!I think they missed the the bit where Matrix is called Matrix because it bridges (matrixes) the existing networks (Slack, IRC, Telegram, Discord, XMPP, etc) in, rather than needing to convince everyone to join. But no matter, we'll just provide a COI bridge if this takes off :)
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The China Cultural Clash
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I see lots of Anti-China sentiment. I would be very careful here into not falling into their deliberate trap of making "The West" China's "Enemy".China in its current totalitarian form needs an "Enemy" to survive, without it, it has to deal with difficult internal questions which will force it to adapt and change - and this what scares them.Totalitarian governments rely on distraction and misdirection of the populace in order to survive. Without it to use as ammunition to unify the people against a commonly perceived "enemy", the very nature of its limiting rule forces the populace to start questions to try and improve their own condition. Questions like "freedom" and "censorship". Totalitarian governments are not equipped to satisfy difficult questions like this and will either adapt or crumble.Thus the best way "oppose a government that is the sworn enemy of values you regard as precious" is to allow it to face its internal discord without giving it the "enemy" it so desperately needs as ammunition to use against you.EDIT: There are many comments that I think are misguided attacking this concept, here is rebuttal to them:Proposition: If China wants to make the west an enemy, it will do so with or without us by the total control it has over its populace.Rebuttal: So the best counter plan is to help them in doing so?Proposition: So the solution is don't speak out about real issues because you don't want to piss off Chinese citizens and make them think you are the enemy?Rebuttal: Obviously not, but rhetoric implying war or xenophobia is hardly the answer either.Proposition:Most totalitarian governments fail on the battlefield. Think of Genghis Khan, Napoleon, the empires that fell during WW1, or the Axis powers in WW2.Rebuttal: Just because totalitarian regimes have fallen on the battlefield before, does not mean they will do so in the future. Not only is this proposition utterly foolish and dangerous but its not even remotely true in the nuclear age.Proposition: Even if you watch or read the heavily controlled Chinese media, it's never about fighting anyone or pointing the finger at anyone.Rebuttal: This is almost categorically untrue and uninformed. In fact, in times of political tension anti-west and anti-Japanese sentiment in the government controlled media is used almost without fail. No protests are allowed, but anti-west and anti-japanese protests are manufactured by the state.Proposition:Should we allow economic coercion and suppression of political speech in the US by a state power? Can we not speak out in favor of those protesting in Hong Kong that were promised 50 years of "one country, two systems"?Rebuttal: Of course NOT! But we should act on the defensive, and prudently, with our own best interests in mind.Proposition:This theory has proved wrong. China has been welcomed into the WTO over the last 20-30 years and it has not reformed. It is now extending it's economic superpower into political and cultural power. It's not about making an enemy, it's about limiting this unwanted influence.Rebuttal: To say the theory has proved wrong is premature, China took advantage of one sided trade agreements that created a competitive advantage for itself, subsidized by us. Limitations of its political and cultural power should be in the form of leveling out this competitive economic playing field, and not escalation into xenophobia or coercion.
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Over 100 PBS local stations start streaming on YouTube TV
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Can anyone explain why PBS television stations are local rather than nationwide? I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a local program on one, but they seem to have a huge extra layer of bureaucracy in order to broadcast the same programs in a hundred different locations.
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Coinbase S-1
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Many have forgotten why we used cryptocurrencies in the first place. The original promise of cryptocurrency was to become independent from banks.In the end CoinBase (like every exchange) is a great product, but just a bank. It's centralized, hackable, has economies of scale, etc.
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Google requiring all ‘G Suite legacy free edition’ users to start paying
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I'm definitely getting screwed over by this. I've hosted close friend's and family's email for a decade now on an old G Apps instance. We only ever used it for email on a custom domain. It was most useful because I could reset passwords for them if they forgot it. Now I'm going to have to figure out what to do.Microsoft's Family offering is way better (not saying much considering Google doesn't have one). Right now I'm really considering moving over to them. But I have no idea what the migration of a decade of email across 5 inboxes will look like; not to mention Calendar and contacts. I used this as my primary email on at least 7 android phones (the original Pixel up through the Pixel 6 I preordered). The loss of Youtube purchases; android play purchases, etc. is going to hurt. I'm sad it isn't illegal to turn a free account into a paid one when it means losing purchased content like this.I'm not 100% sure what to do, I don't have dozens of hours to walk everyone through a migration; and Google provides absolutely no migration tools to help with this. This is the last time I'll be burned by Google though. I used to be a huge fan; but at this point I'm done. I'm really looking forward to cutting them out completely. As an added bonus; I no longer have to worry about them deciding to ban my account one day and lose everything.
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