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Are you a baby? A litmus test
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Just an observation, n=1; when I moved to Los Angeles to go to school, I was shocked to find that people cancelled plans on me all the time. At first I took it personally, because that didn't happen in the more rural town I'm from. But then I realized: its part of the culture, and maybe its just an attribute of very dynamic urban social networks, where an exciting new opportunity might pop up any moment. So I learned to not get my hopes up, and learned to cancel on others too without worrying about it over much.When I moved back to rural California, people thought I'd become a jerk. Took me a while to shift back.
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Japanese have been producing wood for 700 years without cutting down trees
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Does the Japanese government pay for or in some way support articles like this?
Do people in Japan get articles about how amazing coppicing is in the UK?Articles like this about Japan make me feel a bit weird but I kind of wish we were better at fetishising our own produce and practices like we do with the Japanese.
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Building GitHub with Ruby on Rails
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I absolutely love Rails. I'll always remember back in 2010 catching the train to Waterloo station in London and seeing a huge sign overlooking the train tracks that read something like "We Need Rails Developers".Rails was such a huge part of my professional career.Now, 13 years later and I'm deep in the JavaScript ecosystem and have been for 8 years.The most exciting thing to come out of this ecosystem recently is RedwoodJS, because it takes a lot of inspiration from Rails.
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A non-mathematical introduction to Kalman filters for programmers
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Do I understand it correctly that Kalman filters are supposed to give a better estimate of a value from noisy observations than just averaging the observations?Say I measured something 3 times and observed 7,8 and 9. My guess would be that the actual value is 8. Would a Kalman filter come up with a different estimate?
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Tracking Austrian grocery prices by scraping store sites
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I lived in Austria and in Germany and it's 100% true, prices in supermarkets are significantly higher in Austria even for products produced in Austria.The reasons IMO are:
* less price sensitivity: German people are extremely price sensitive, they discuss and compare prices all the time. In Austria people care way less about this on average. Supermarkets take advantage
* higher logistics costs: population density in Austria is less than in Germany. Furthermore, many supermarkets are located in areas hard to reach like mountain areas. Higher logistic costs translate to higher prices
* VAT is slightly higher in Austria
* unqualified labor that works in supermarkets and logistics makes slightly more money in Austria than in Germany
* there indeed is a higher supermarket tensity in Austria than in Germany. Supermarkets of the same company appear more appealing in Austria than in Germany: nicer presentation of food, cleaner, way less people in the line waiting. All this makes them more expensiveFor all these reasons mentioned above prices are higher. I argue it's mostly related to consumer choices. If they would care so much about prices and so little about esthetics as in Germany then prices would come down. If people would start to walk the extra mile for the cheaper supermarket prices would come down.
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Notch trying jsFiddle
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setInterval(clock, 1000 / 100);
Is there any reason for writing 1000/100 instead of 10?edit: Thanks guys!
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We Need a Better PC
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Not disagreeing with the premise, but just want to plug a machine I am very happy with.I was a lifetime mac owner (since OS 9) and my 2010 Macbook Pro finally broke down this year. It made it that long because I doubled the RAM, replaced the battery, and replaced the HDD with a hybrid drive. Finally the battery puffed up and exploded. I brought it to the Apple Store and they were beyond useless. The new MBPs are not modifiable in any way, and Apple's customer service is not what it used to be. So I decided to get a non-Mac for the first time in my life.I ended up with an Asus Zenbook UX305LA. It's a 13" 1080p screen, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD, Core i5 processor. Cost me $749 and I dual-boot WIndows 10 and Ubuntu (spending 95% of my time in Ubuntu). It costs about 50% what a similar specced Macbook would cost and is similar size/weight to the Macbook air. Build quality is fantastic (open with one hand, good keyboard, glass trackpad, etc). The battery life is not quite as good as a 13" MBA but better than a Macbook Pro. Overall I am extremely happy with it.Considering that my last MBP cost me $2200 up front plus ~$300 in repairs over time and lasted me ~4.5 years. That's about $500 a year. This machine cost $750. If it lasts over a year and a half, the experiment is a success. So far it's been nothing but great.
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Warren Buffett’s Best Investment
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I wish Bill or Warren would have run for presidency as an "outsider" instead of Trump. I guess our only hope will be their successor Mark (Zuckerberg)
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Mental health is still an issue in the workplace
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Great article. A few years ago (at a previous job) I took a sick day for "sanity", but told them I wasn't feeling well. I felt guilty about doing it. I think part of it is the association of sick leave with externally visible medical issues, and the corresponding "straightforward" medical verification.In other words, if you have a temperature or are vomiting, that's obvious. Many infections or physical injury can be trivially verified by a doctor. But a "sanity day", as truthful and necessary as it might be, is neither of those.Out of curiosity, I checked my current employment contract. It says sick leave is for "A personal illness, injury or medical disability that prevents the employee from performing his or her job, or personal medical or dental appointments." or "Exposure of the employee to contagious disease when attendance at work would jeopardize the health of others." There's a dozen or so other cases listed in the contract, mostly about allowing sick leave to care for sick family members/children. Our contract also allows for verification, "If the Employer suspects abuse, the Employer may require a written medical certificate for any sick leave absence."I've never heard of anyone here being asked for a verification, but it would tend to discourage people doing the "sanity day" sort of thing.
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Let's Encrypt now holds 35% of the market
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I doubt the web will ever be fully encrypted. There will always be tons of people who don't care enough. I've come across dozens of high information static websites that were set up like 10+ years ago where the author will probably never be back to configure tls.It's so strange that you have to ask someone's permission to use encryption[0]. Certificate authorities should've been (should be?) optional. SSH came out around the same time and its Trust-on-First-Use is a much better system.[0] https://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/moving-to-httpshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust_on_first_use
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Taiwan ban single-use plastic straws, plastic bags, disposable utensils by 2030
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The UK dropped to 500 million bags annually used from 7 billion after introduction of a 5 pence per bag charge. That's just one country albeit one of the world's largest. Still I think we're over due for much more agressive action.https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jul/30/england-...
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The latest trend for tech interviews: Days of unpaid homework
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Our industry's hiring practices are absolutely obnoxious. In an ideal world, you could trust someone's resume. e.g. "I've written large production programs in C." Ok, great, so then clearly this person knows C so there should be no need to dissect code or run them thru some linked list algorithm and see if they know how to use pointers correctly.Yet, we do. Ok, then what about open source contributions (if they have them)? Well, sure, but we don't really know, for sure, if that code is their own or if they indeed truly wrote it, can we? So we can't count on it. It helps but it can't be an automatic "this person passes the technical" signaler.So maybe the person shares actual code and walks us through it that they wrote, even if not open source? Again, we can't know for certain it is their own code and not some friend who wrote it for them 2 years ago that they claim is their own. Or was a teammate's, or what-have-you. So we can't count on that either.Apart from getting a candidate to actually pump out some code, even trivially, we don't really have a way to de-facto verify that the person says they can do what they say they can do, short of a personal reference from someone, say, in the company already that knows and has worked with the person in the past.I absolutely hate this practice of having to constantly "re-prove" to the next employer that someone knows how to write software. It's extremely redundant and yet we keep on doing it, with no real hope of actually making it better.
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Zotero: An open-source tool to help collect, organize, cite, and share research
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I use a little script [1] and a passive approach to quickly find a PDF I am looking for among a few thousands of academic PDF. The workflow (illustrated in the GIF [2]):- as I read new PDFs in the browser, the PDFs are passively downloaded typically in a Downloads/ folder.- This results in thousands in papers lying in Downloads/ or elsewhere.- The command p from the script [1] let me instantaneously fuzzy-search over the first page of each pdf (The first page of each pdf is extracted using pdftotext, but cached so it's fast). The first page of academic PDFs usually contains title, abstract, author names, institutions, keywords of the paper; so typing any combination of those will quickly find the pdf.What is particularly convenient is that no time is spent trying to organize the papers into folders, or importing them into software such as zotero. The papers are passively downloaded, and if I remember ever downloading a paper, it's one fuzzy-search away. Of course it does not solve the problem of generating clean bibtex files.[1]: the script: https://github.com/bellecp/fast-p[2]: an illustration in GIF: https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/1019692/34446795-1...edit: The script has been moved from the gist to the public repository https://github.com/bellecp/fast-p
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99% of the Git commands you'll need at work, demonstrated in a single script
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Maybe my workflow is a lot easier than others, but I work on a team of 10+ engineers and my Git usage is dead simple. I do everything from a GUI (Fork for macOS) and very rarely have to deal with any complicated issues that require a terminal.- Always pull w/ rebase for the current branch.- Always merge other branches into your current branch, eg master -> feature.- Always stage individual chunks of code one at a time to make sure I'm committing the right stuff.- Always squash feature branches into a single commit when merging back.- Stash changes if needed when switching branches.- Cherry-pick one-off commits if needed.- Append a previous commit that I haven't pushed yet if I happened to forget something.- For complicated merge conflicts I switch to Visual Studio Code which also has a great GUI.I think this covers 99% of the stuff I encounter in my day-to-day.
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We ‘may’ have discovered a potential remedy for tinnitus
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Is it possible that tinnitus is actually just a person's inability to ignore natural noise in the hearing systems? More of a physchological issue like chewing fingernails or having OCD, but which can be amplified by legitimate physical hearing damage?I ask this because for all the life I can remember, I've always been able to perceive a high-pitched tone, even in completely quiet environments. If I actually focus on it, it's quite loud and annoying.It's just that my "default state" is to not think or notice this tone, and instead focus on "actual" sounds.I have been tested to not have hearing damage.
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Boeing CEO ousted as 737 Max crisis deepens
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Why isn't it enough to retrofit all past and future models with enough hardware redundancy and create a properly written MCAS software?Wasn't the design sound, except for the lack of hardware sensor redundancy and naively written software?Why do they need to stop production and so on?
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Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month
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I worked on the design of Dropbox's exabyte-scale storage system, and from that experience I can say that these numbers are all extremely optimistic, even with their "you can do it cheaper if you only target 95% uptime" caveat. Networking is much more expensive, labor is much more expensive, space is much more expensive, depreciation is faster than they say, etc etc. I don't think the authors have ever done any actual hardware provisioning before.I didn't read all their math but I expect their final result to be off by a factor of 2-5x. Hard drives are a surprisingly low percentage of the cost of a storage system.
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Redditor finds unsecured surveillance cameras seemingly placed by US government
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Anybody else afraid to click some of the links in that post until you hear about legality of accessing (and controlling!) a DEA camera that's likely part of an active investigation?
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Milky Way, 12 years, 1250 hours of exposures and 125 x 22 degrees of sky
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It looks a little grainy / too much sharpening to my eye. Natural images tend have more blended features instead of looking like sand.
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Chrome’s address bar will use https:// by default
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I wish there was a solution for those of us who develop web interfaces for embedded products designed to live on LAN, often without any internet access and no well defined domain name.I'm all for HTTPS everywhere but right now for my products it's either: https with self-signed certificate, which basically makes any modern browser tell its user that they're in a very imminent danger of violent death should they decide to proceed, or just go with good old HTTP but then you hit all sorts of limitations, and obviously zero security.I wish there was a way to opt into a "TOFU" https mode for these use cases (which is how browser dealt with invalid HTTPS certificates for a long time), although I realize that doing that without compromising the security of the internet at large might be tricky.If somebody has a solution, I'm all ears. As far as I can tell the "solution" employed by many IoT vendors is simply to mandate an internet connection and have you access your own LAN devices through the cloud, which is obviously a privacy nightmare. But it's HTTPS so your browser will display a very reassuring padlock telling you all is fine!
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Experian’s credit freeze security is still a joke
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I really, really wish I could opt out of having accounts with the big 3 credit bureaus. Freezes don’t appear to work - they usually say that I don’t have an active freeze whenever I go to lift one. Or their website is down entirely. Or they won’t let me get to the freeze section without clicking no on their paid monitoring services 8 times. For Transunion all I needed to lift a freeze was the last 4 of my SSN, so how does that help?I don’t want to have my information with these companies. Please let me not participate. It’s like every American was given a Chase Bank account at birth that we can’t close, it’s weird.
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Right or left, you should be worried about big tech censorship
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>First of all, the internet’s “marketplace of ideas” is severely lopsided at the platform levelThe marketplace of ideas itself has been show to be a bust in recent years, IMHO.Better ideas, better models of truth and reality don't win out. People have not shown themselves interested in intellectual debate or argument. We do not see the 'best' ideas rise to the top. And before anyone asks who I am to judge the best ideas, I'll answer - nobody, but I can see that factually incorrect, scientifically illiterate, conspiratorial, harmful crank ideas gain legs in the online world we've created. Often at the root of these is a profit motive.Is censorship the best way to deal with it? Probably not. But we do need to recognise this as a problem as well as getting het up about giant internet platforms deplatforming people.
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Minus
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I love this as an idea, but I suspect as a user, I would use either zero or one posts.I do like the idea that the platform can actively disrupt the "addictive" patterns that develop elsewhere. Other things I've wanted:- Instagram with an ML layer that auto-rejects pics with faces or text. Landscapes, vistas, animals, architecture etc all would be welcome.- high latency Twitter, where no post is viewable until at least 2 weeks after it's published. Bickering threads become impractical. People learn to post stuff that will be worth caring about later.- Clearly just for entertainment and not information Facebook alternative, in which GPT bots produce a significant fraction of posts, impersonating users and making stuff up. Everyone quickly learns you can't trust it, but it can still be cute/fun/humorous.
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Show HN: Test your shape rotation skills
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10 shapes
12 sec/shape
(2nd try, no brute-force, mobile)16 shapes (3rd try)18 shapes (4th try)24 shapes (5th try, no brute-force)P.S. I had 7 years of art school in addition to engineering
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U+237C ⍼ Right Angle with Downwards Zigzag Arrow
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Might we run out of Unicode code points, like we (seem to) be running out of IPv4 addresses?As another comment mentions, once you add all these snowmen, with/without snow, male female and gender-neutral, in a few skin colour options (plus neutral)... it adds up. Plus, exponential growth once you consider family of snowmen (different number/genders/races of "parents", different number/gender/races of "children" and so on...).
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Declining quality of consumer-grade products – 2009 fridge compressor autopsy
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From the notes: "These marginal design choices are not the only way to get an efficient unit, since the fridge compressors from the 1940's and 1950's era were very efficient, while having consistently longer lives. This failed unit is purely an example of doing just enough to get by until it is someone else's problem."I've been seeing this as a common issue throughout most of the household appliances we've tried to buy in the last ten years. They just don't last.
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Brickit scans your pile of bricks and gives you ideas, with instructions
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Very cool.Now what I want is something that will scan a pile of rocks and tell me how to put them together to build a wall with minimal space between them.https://media.istockphoto.com/photos/stone-wall-texture-pict...Or better yet, tell my robot how to do it.
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Ask HN: If I get locked out of everything, please try to help me
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This is my nightmare. This is why I refuse to use 2FA. (Except on services that require it, and I wish they didn't require it.)Am I worried about getting hacked? Absolutely! But when I weigh the likelihood of (1) someone else getting into my account without 2FA and (2) locking myself out of my own account with 2FA, the latter seems much more likely!I understand how backup codes work. I promise you I will loose them.
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Microsoft to lay off 11k employees
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11,000 people - let's say an average loaded cost of $250k/yr. That's... ~$3b/yr these folks cost MSFT. Granted, it's per year, but ... keeping these people on for another 3 years would cost ~$10b.MSFT currently have $100b cash on hand. It's gotta be a little... frustrating to get be part of a 5% cut when there's so much free cash sitting around. I know, it's a narrow view of corporate finance, and I don't have the 'big picture', but... still doesn't sit right with me.That said, I don't know what severance packages people are being offered. That might help soften the blow for some folks.EDIT: re one reply about people earning $250k. I indicated 'loaded cost' - health insurance, likely some cost of options/stock, retirement matching, FICA and more. I possibly could have removed 'average'. I suspect many of the folks being cut have on paper salaries (well?) below $200k. Is the 11k number global or US only? Round the number down to $200k. It's closed to $2.2b/year then.
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Why do ships use “port” and “starboard” instead of “left” and “right?”
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It's interesting to compare how different professions handle the ambiguity in left/right. In the maritime world they went with an approach at one extreme, where they just use two completely separate words, "port" and "starboard." (Though that's far from the only case where there's a special word for something on a boat.)At the other extreme you have the medical profession where the first thing you learn in medical school is that left/right always refer to the patient's perspective. You could imagine that the maritime world could have gone with a similar convention. But the downside is that on very rare occasions someone along the way gets confused and the doctor operates on the wrong side of the body.The theatrical world takes an intermediate approach, where they use the terms "stage left / stage right", which always refer to the perspective of an actor onstage facing the audience. Then the word "stage" tells you the perspective, but you still keep the words left/right so you don't have to memorize two completely separate words.
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OpenLLM
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Hi all, I'm the main maintainer from the OpenLLM team here. I'm actively developing the fine-tuning feature and will release a PR soon enough. Stay tuned. In the meanwhile, the best way to track the development workflow is at our discord, so feel free to join!!
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Don't Take VC Funding – It Will Destroy Your Company
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You’re so right! It was an absolute disaster for us. Never do it!!!!!Kidding aside, it is true that raising money from VCs puts you on a very defined path with really only three potential outcomes: 1) failure, 2) sell to acquirer, or 3) go public. There are a small handful of exceptions, mostly for companies that throw off massive amounts of cash, but, realistically, those are the outcomes.If you don’t like any of those end states and what it realistically will take to get to them, don’t raise money from VCs.But, having done so and been successful and taken a company public, I can say: it’s pretty great and I have zero regrets about anyone we raised money from. And I’m proud that everyone who invested in us prior to going public made at least a 10x return.While there are plenty of VC horror stories, there are fairytales as well.
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Everything's broken and nobody's upset
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My sentiments exactly. I got so tired of being upset with the horrendous human design in modern technology that I took action. What I've done: - Buy 2 $350 laptops every year. Move all data. Give away old ones.
- All contacts in one .txt document.
- Memorize most frequently used contacts.
- No smart phone.
- No tablet.
- No Kindle.
- No palm pilot.
- No Facebook.
- New car ('12 Hyandai) with minimal technology.
- Wash dishes by hand. (Fuck the 48 buttons on the dishwasher.)
- Use Firefox.
- Use dedicated Casio camera with USB interface.
I love modern technology that adds real value.I don't use any modern technology that replaces perfectly good methods with something unnecessary just because everyone else is doing it.
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Sent $35,104.11 USD to CoinBase. Never received Bitcoins
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Brian from Coinbase here. Sorry for the delay on that - definitely not the customer experience we are striving for.We should have things squared away for you by end of day.Edit: your bitcoin credit has now been processed. It looks like as we were performing server upgrades last week a handful of jobs didn't run as normal. We should have certainly caught it and responded sooner so that was our fault. My deepest apologies for the delay and trouble on that. We've credited $50 worth of bitcoin to your account for the trouble, as a small way of saying thank you for bearing with us.Edit2: we'll push through the bitcoin credit at today's price instead of the original buy price (which should be in your favor) since the mistake was on our part. Sorry again for the trouble!
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Introducing Pebble Time
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It's a bland gadget. I'm really not sure about that approach. It's so cheap and uninspired. Whatever you think about the overall shape of the Apple Watch, at least it's not a bland gadget. It seems to pay meticulous attention to all the micro details that make jewelry jewlery and not a bland tech toy. (Seems to because obviously no one has looked at it in detail. But first indications are good.) This one does not.I'm really not sure why more smart watches don't try to be actual worthy jewlery. Pebble has this really cool and really functional tech, why not pack it into something worthy of being called a watch?
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If you've nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear
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"When you say I don't care about the right to privacy because I have nothing to hide, that is no different than saying I don't care about freedom of speech because I have nothing to say or freedom of the press because I have nothing to write."- Edward Snowden
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Cops are asking Ancestry.com and 23andMe for their customers’ DNA
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This is why I didn't use 23andMe's service. Because it's in their database, forever.I want a genetic sequencing service where they sequence everything, put it on multiple encrypted USB sticks and send it to you. Once you confirm you received your copy, they destroy the backup USB sticks.They never will store it on some centralized server. It will never end up on some tape backup. They will never have a copy after you get yours.Then you need DNA analysis software that runs offline.Most of them won't want to do that although, because it makes them a commodity service.
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Akamai takes Brian Krebs’ site off its servers after ‘record’ cyberattack
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Still not a good move for Akamai, though.I get him speaking out for them about the hosting having been free, but Akamai is now the CDN that got bullied into kicking someone of their service against their own will.Terrible PR, and that mud will stick in tech circles. Akamai folds under pressure.I know it's a crude comparison, but we don't negotiate with terrorists for a reason.
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Facebook Ordered to Stop Collecting Data on WhatsApp Users in Germany
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A former colleague of mine who was a distinguished academic and successful tech executive grew up in East Germany. After the Berlin wall fell, he was able to enter the building where they kept the dossiers. He found his own file and was astounded by the information they had on him. His friends, his work, his habits. Photos of himself going about his business. His social circles. His friends were equally shocked by the collection of the most trivial details. They weren't fomenting revolution or doing anything remotely disruptive. They thought nobody would pay much attention to a bunch of harmless random students. They were wrong.Memories like this still have force in Europe. I have to believe that their history makes many Europeans queasy about the collection of mass information. It is also easy to see how these laws could be exploited by large companies in Europe for their own commercial interest. Still, these laws have a moral force and US companies are stupid to try to circumvent, belittle, or ignore them. The desire for privacy has deep roots; it is not a nuisance to be swatted away on the path towards maximal profits.
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Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?
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Data management.1) Cleaning the data as it comes in rather than in batches so we can use it sooner, invalid data is discarded, outlier detection, normalizing inputs etc....2) Warehousing of the data with proper indexes so you can perform some advanced queries on unstructured data3) Some data is sent in bulk at the end of day, some of the data is streamed in fire hose style. How can we preprocess the fire hose data so that we don't have to wait until the end of the day to parse it all.4) Oh and all of this data is unstructured and comes from 75 different sources.Soon the average hedge fund will have more people just cleaning and managing data than they do in quantitative research, dev ops, software development and trading.Oh and lots of the data is considered proprietary so while AWS/Azure, etc is fine, sending it to a third party to process is not.TL/DR
Help me, I'm drowning in data. How do I get the time from when I acquire data to when I trade based on it down to a reasonable time frame, where reasonable is closer to hours rather than days/weeks.
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Reverse-engineering the Starbucks ordering API
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Solid writeup. From someone who does/did a lot of this professionally:1. Android typically is easier for this kind of work (you don't even need a rooted/jailbroken device, and it's all Java/smali),2. That said, instead of installing an entire framework like Xposed that hooks the process to bypass certificate pinning, you can usually just decompile the APK and nop out all the function calls in the smali related to checking if the certificate is correct, then recompile/resign it for your device (again, easier on Android than iOS),3. Request signing is increasingly implemented on APIs with any sort of business value, but you can almost always bypass it within an hour by searching through the application for functions related to things like "HMAC", figuring out exactly which request inputs are put into the algorithm in which order, and seeing where/how the secret key is stored (or loaded, as it were),4. There is no true way to protect an API on a mobile app. You can only make it more or less difficult to secure. The best you can do is a frequently rotated secret key stored in shared libraries with weird parameters attached to the signing algorithm. To make up for this savvy companies typically reduce the cover time required (i.e. change the secret key very frequently by updating the app weekly or biweekly) or by using using a secret key with several parts generated from components in .so files, which are significantly more tedious to reverse.
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Google removes ‘view image’ button from search results
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Quotes from @searchliaison:"Today we're launching some changes on Google Images to help connect users and useful websites.""Ultimately, Google Images is a way for people to discover information in cases where browsing images is a better experience than text."Do you believe any of these statements? I am still surprised how easily corporations will hide their true motives, resolve any cognitive dissonance internally, and how easily others will forgive them.I wonder how people within Google are feeling when this happens. And I don't mean "when a feature gets removed", there may be valid reasons to do that. But when the official communication about them contains manipulative statements such as above, how do employees who aren't allowed to speak up feel?
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TextQL: Execute SQL Against CSV or TSV
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In SQLite you can just do sqlite> .import myfile.csv mytable
sqlite> select ...
What does this tool give you that SQLite doesn't do out of the box?
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New Zealand travellers refusing digital search now face $5k Customs fine
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This happened to me driving from the US into Canada with my significant other on a short vacation. After some routine questioning, the agent asked for our phones and passwords. Naturally, I hesitated and wanted to know why he needed to go through our phones. He didn't give a reason, but said if I refuse they'd hold us until their forensics team cracks the phone password anyway. I wanted to make a bigger deal about it but didn't want to ruin our vacation so I complied. They took the phones in the back for about 45 min, who knows what information they downloaded or uploaded during that time, then gave it back to me while interrogating me like I was a drug lord because there was a text message from a year earlier about a friend's girlfriend doing cocaine.It was extremely unnerving, they went through all our private pictures, messages, dropbox files, email, notes, dating apps, etc. It ruined the vacation for me, and I've stopped visiting Canada because of how disgusted I felt afterwards. I know Canada is not the only country doing that, so from now on when I cross an international border I wipe my phone (after backing up) and just have a few pictures and messages on there. Incidentally though, that's the only time it's happened to me.
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Latest Firefox Brings Privacy Protections Front and Center
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The downside of all of this is that I feel like sites are now intentionally being designed to break if this kind of stuff is blocked. I used to be able to use Firefox Focus (which has tracking protection built-in) to pay most of my bills. This was convenient because I would just open up the one site in FFF, pay the bill, and then close it, with all browsing history automatically deleted.In the past month about 3 of my credit card sites stopped working on FFF, as well as my ISP's site. Some would flat out reject the agent ("Your browser is no longer supported"), others would let me log in but then immediately tell me I had been logged out or redirect back to the home page. So now I'm forced to open them back up in regular Firefox, history and tracking included.It's one thing to say "Don't use sites that exploit your data", but it's not like the average person really has a choice when it comes to paying utility bills.
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Amazon’s quest for more, cheaper products has resulted in a flea market of fakes
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My favorite Amazon scam is the Amazon Ship of Theseus[0]. You sell a product, normally a cheap electronic, and build up a decent corpus of positive reviews. A good example is a USB-C cable or something. Then you decide you want to sell a new product in a more competitive subcategory, like Bluetooth Headphones. You then take the _existing_ listing and change it piece by piece. First the pictures, then the title, then the price, etc. Until you have a listing for your headphones that comes with 5,000 pre-made positive reviews! Sure they're for a totally different product, but that doesn't affect the rankings.I see this all the time. If I go back in my order history and click on old products often the same "id" now maps to a totally different thing.For this reason I have basically stopped ordering from Amazon. I find that Walmart has like 99% of the inventory but none of it is fake (some is junk, but it's the junk I asked for). Same prices, same ship speed, no fake shit.0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus
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Satellite imagery shows Northern California kelp forests have collapsed
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I mean you can't have 8 billion needy, constantly consuming humans for 60/70 years and somehow have a sustainable, vibrant and healthy ecosystem.You can't have all the modern day luxuries (cars, airplanes, electricity 24/7) and somehow expect everything to just "hum" along.I think news reports like these will become more common, more frequent and a natural byproduct of how things are now, regardless as to whether human activity/climate change is the cause.I am uncertain about this whole "2030" neutrality thing, why not 2025? Why not next year? We're not very good at setting ambitious targets nor making people suffer for the benefit of nature (I'm sure somewhere there is a "link" between this event and the devastating impact humans are having on the natural world as we know it)Even a pandemic didn't have much effect whereas in previous times tens of millions would've been expected to die.Cue another attenborough documentary telling us how everything is basically screwed...Somehow he would convince us about how fossil fuels is directly responsible for this activity taking place...
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Microsoft buys Nuance for nearly $20B
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Is it just me or have speech recognition platforms like Siri actually gone backwards in the last few years (roughly coinciding with the AI/ML craze)?It feels (anecdata) that Siri is doing a bit better on voice to tex when sending messages but much worse on simple commands like “turn off living room lights”.
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SpaceX wins contract to develop spacecraft to land astronauts on the moon
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This is really huge news. Starship has in about 18 months gone from a Elon standing next to a steel grain silo duct-taped into the shape of a rocket, to all the eggs in NASA's moon basket. The thing I kept thinking - and I have to believe was considered within NASA - is given the rapid progress SpaceX has been making along with the delays in Congressional funding, SLS, BlueOrigin's other projects etc ... if NASA hadn't selected SpaceX there was at least some chance they'd go ahead and do their own private Moon landing mission before NASA's, a massive egg-on-face moment.There are still major risks with the Starship program so I don't think anyone should be 100% confident they can pull this off, but the massive side benefit is if they do NASA will have proven out a generic system, fully reusable and with orbital refueling, that can with minimal modification cost-effectively send humans to Mars and much of the rest of the solar system as well. A Model T or 737 in space. The original Artemis plan never made much sense as a Mars "proof-of-concept", but it actually does now.If at some point say 2025, NASA says to the President "we can get the first human on Mars in 4 years for $15 billion" I have to imagine any American president being eager to sign their name on that accomplishment and give the JFK speech, "We choose to go to Mars in this decade, not because it is easy, but because it is hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win"To me that's the real takeaway here: this is implicitly a huge NASA bet not just on the Moon, but Mars and the rest of the solar system. Finally.
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The story of the Tank Man photo by its photographer
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It's remarkable to imagine how different the world might have been if the Tiananmen uprising had succeeded. Democracy with Chinese characteristics, or whatever. A true ideological and moral competitor to the West.
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Magit, the magical Git interface (2017)
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I've never seen the upside. I use Emacs as my primary editor, and I regret it every time I say "today is the day I start using Magit". It is exceedingly invasive, triggering itself even when you don't ask for it (like running "git rebase -i" on the command line). The invasive stuff changes how the text editing itself works, but doesn't add deep features. In the interactive rebase case, I lose the ability to treat the interactive rebase text as text, but I also don't gain anything. I can't just navigate around, kill a line, and put it somewhere else. Well, I can do that, but the usual keybindings don't work, they just made their own for no reason. And, for example, if I do use their UI and pick "reword" as the operation for a certain commit, I should be prompted for the desired rewording then and there, right? But that's not what happens, I press C-c C-c to commit my changes (why isn't it C-x # which is how I'd normally close an emacsclient session?), then Emacs goes away, then it comes back up, then I can type my rewording. If you pick it more than a few times, you just get a seizure from all the flashing lights. This isn't a good user interface. It's a bad user interface.Obviously, my experience must be unique, because everyone loves Magit. It might be the most-loved piece of software ever. Every other week, there is an article on Hacker News about how it's the best piece of software ever to exist, and I've never seen anyone say anything bad about it. So I wonder what marketing techniques they use to make people feel this way; the emotions are strong, and widely shared.Maybe there is some fundamental insecurity about Git, and Magit makes people comfortable? I've never felt that way, but I did start using Git the weekend it came out, and my Github user ID is in the low 2000s, so I might have had time to get Stockholm Syndrome with the Git UI. I suppose it's possible that the people writing these articles may not have even been born when Git came out, which is interesting to think about actually!
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Convert SimCity 2000 cities into Minecraft worlds
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This reminds me a lot of SimCopter (1996) where you could also import your SC2k city and fly around and do missions. Mostly about helping people in various forms of distress by picking them up and flying to various destinations. Great flashback from 90's gaming, I remember tossing people out at random when flying which was always hilarious when you're a young kid. You could then pick them up and fly them to the hospital to get fixed up.But I must say I think the original SimCopter looks slightly better graphically than this Minecraft version.You can play SimCity 2000 online here, by the way:https://playclassic.games/games/city-building-dos-games-onli...
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Show HN: Filmbox, physically accurate film emulation, now on Linux and Windows
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As a photographer, emulation like this is of great interest to me. Like in cinematography, film is often held in high regard in photography with the caveat that it isn't even remotely as flexible as digital options.Have you considered creating a parallel product as an Adobe Lightroom plugin and/or a standalone app for still images?
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Intel OEM Private Key Leak: A Blow to UEFI Secure Boot Security
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There's an upside to this. It can be used politically as an argument against backdoors for "lawful access"[1] to encrypted data.[1] https://www.fbi.gov/about/mission/lawful-access
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AWS us-east-1 down
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For those wondering: Currently PDT is 7 hours behind UTC.AWS can do so many things, reporting critical outage updates in UTC is not one of those things.
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Why is desalination so difficult?
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Is it just me, or did this article dance around the question?I am not a physicist but let me give it a stab: except for a few specialized steps like UV or oxidizing heavy metals, most filtration is mechanical. A series of filters with smaller and smaller pores capture more and more of the mess in the water like bacteria and particulates while UV breaks down viruses, the oxidizer precipitates out metals, and so on.None of those methods work with salt. Salts in general disassociate through ion-dipole interactions - the water dipoles essentially rip the ionic compound apart and surround each ion in what is called a hydration shell. They're bigger than bare water molecules but not much bigger - much too small to target with pore size. This shell also puts them in a thermodynamically stable state and it takes energy to "jostle" the water molecules away from the ions either through evaporation, distillation, or through another chemical reaction that precipitates out the ions.As it turns out, doing that takes a lot of energy, so we use reverse osmosis as a cheaper alternative: we exploit the hydration shell of the ions by putting them behind a semi-permeable membrane with very small pores, "nanopores" if you will. The pores are too small for water to cross normally, but under high pressures bare water molecules can be forced through the pores while the ions trapped in their shells remain and concentrate into a brine. It takes less energy but produces a concentrated liquid waste stream that must be disposed of.Someone please correct any mistakes I've made
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Tron Legacy (2010)
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The text on this site hurts my eyes.
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Obama Promises Disappear from Web
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I see this as largely coincidental, and nothing nefarious. If you follow the link from the page to the archived version [1], look among the dozens of subjects, click on Ethics, scroll down to near the bottom of the page, you'll see the single paragraph he's referring to. It makes up for about 0.1% of the total content. It's unlikely the administration took down an entire website just to hide Obama's whistleblower promises.What's more likely is that that, since Hope/Change was the old slogan and "Forward" has replaced it as the new slogan, it's time to take down the old site because it's simply outdated.C'mon guys let's show a little critical thought and stop looking for conspiracies where they don't exist. It's bad for our credibility. Things are bad enough as it is with the stuff the NSA is actually doing.[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20130515024407/http://change.gov/...
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Reform Government Surveillance
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Among other things, this is the tipping point for how Snowden will be viewed.If all these powerful companies agree, in an unprecedented show of unanimity, that this is an important problem, then Snowden is ipso facto a hero for bringing it to our attention.The curious thing is, I feel the linkage works in the other direction too. If Snowden had been caught and was now having his brains scrambled by solitary confinement in some secret prison, these companies would have been at least slightly more reluctant to issue such a statement, because it would have seemed to be espousing the cause of someone people were hearing described on the news as a criminal.Snowden made his disclosures much more effective by escaping.
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MathBox 2
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> Please view in Chrome or Firefox. Chrome is glitchy, Firefox is stuttery.I really want to get behind WebGL, but when is it going to have decent performance/compatibility? I tried this out in both FF and Chrome on a powerful desktop computer (i5-4670K, GTX760, 16GB RAM) and it was glitchy/stuttery as described. Firefox rendered some scenes at what seemed like 2-3 FPS. Chrome was much smoother, but I couldn't tell what parts were glitches. For example, the "classic demoscene water effect" looked completely different in Chrome. But neither FF nor Chrome produced an effect remotely resembling water.Although this looks like a great library, personally I prefer to stick with OpenGL programming until WebGL's quircks are sorted out.
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Adam
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Much of what makes this appealing has nothing to do with the render engine. What I saw was some really excellent character animation / motion capture. The rendering itself wasn't particularly jaw dropping. And that's not a critique of unity. Rather it's a critique of their chosen subject. Metal, walls, and artificial objects in general are all very easy to render convincingly. Show me some trees, grass, translucency, or volumetrics and then I'll be impressed.
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Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?
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The leading cause of death is cardiovascular disease. >90% of these cases can be attributed to an overweight population. It's not an easy problem to solve, but there has to be a way to fix it. Lots of calorie counting apps, activity trackers, motivational reminder apps, etc. Obesity is very complicated, but there are three basic facts:1. Calories in, calories out is the golden rule.2. The vast majority of calories come from carbohydrates.3. Carbohydrates activate addictive dopaminergic pathways (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2235907/pdf/nih...)People overeat because food is easy to access, and it provides a short-term, immediate chemical reward. External rewards often need to be introduced to break this vicious cycle. Hobbies, relationships, career achievements, etc. can function as alternative rewards. Perhaps there is a way for technology to provide short-term rewards in lieu of eating?
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How I Ruined Office Productivity with a Face-Replacing Slack Bot
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I have to use Slack at work, and it is fun.But when I'm trying to focus on programming, it is like being in an all day long meeting without an agenda.
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Snowden: NSA just lost control of its Top Secret arsenal of digital weapons
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It's pretty fascinating to read the Shadow Broker's posts. They have to write something, since they can't just say "I work for Russia and we're reminding America that they're not invulnerable." So they have to come up with all sorts of contrived reasons about why they're doing this, complete with broken english to fool stylometry detection that walks the fine line between being believable and preposterous. Someone spent a lot of work getting it to look so terrible.
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Getting Started with Headless Chrome
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Off-topic, but I'm just going to start bringing this up in every thread like this ...We need a recipe / toolchain for running a browser instance in a chroot jail. With a head. GUI. On the desktop.I want to fire up a "banking browser" (or "danger browser" or "social media browser") that runs on its own IP, in its own chroot, and I can revert to virgin snapshot state anytime I want ... and I don't want to fire up a full-blown VM for eac of these ...What is standing in the way of making this happen ?Who is working on things related to this that I can donate funds to or establish a bounty ?
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It appears my Google account is slated for deletion
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Well, she is easier to defend than Nazis. So, here I go...Freedom of expression, not just free speech the legal concept, should be a societal goal. Google has every right, legally, to delete this stuff. However, in an ideal world, they'd do no such thing and would let people judge based on the merits of the message.I don't know about the rest of you, but I'd like to work towards that ideal world.Maybe the solution is enabling people to realistically host content themselves, on their own property, and just ensuring the ISP is nothing but a dumb pipe? Maybe the solution is distributed content and P2P networks?Either way, the continued aggressive censorship by Google, while their legal right, leaves a bad taste in my mouth. They can do it, but I don't have to like it.That said, if anyone can think of something that I can do to help, I'm all ears.
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Gas Pump Skimmers
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Chips aren't anymore secure, I can read the data off my card with a standard chip reader, and I have. The same data on the chip is on the mag strip.Just because you are using the chip doesn't mean you are doing an EMV transaction. The unique transaction codes only happen with and EMV transaction, almost every time you dip your card it's a regular old card transaction, just as if you swiped the card. Why?Getting EMV certified requires every part of the transaction chain to go through unified system testing, for each combination of hardware, software, card type, processor, issuing bank.I've been eyeballs deep in this nonsense for the last year or so. We just can't justify the expense of getting EMV certified, so we just accept the chip and do a regular transaction.As a consumer you have no way of knowing if your transaction is and EMV transaction or just a chip enabled regular transaction.
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Boardgame.io: State management and more for turn-based games
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This is awesome. It's great to see a lot of projects coming out in this area.I've been working on a similar project for over a year now. It's essentially this exact concept turned into an entire platform for designing/creating board games and then publishing the game so others can play it directly on the platform. Think of heroku or squarespace for board games.I have a very rough, working prototype of the editor and game engine. There is a ton left to do (I could write pages about what I'd like to implement/improve). But, I'm at least finally getting somewhere with it.At the risk of utterly destroying my server... for anyone who is interested, I have a demo site for the game editor prototype. A game can be test played from the editor by clicking "game play tester" in the upper-left menu. There are no docs or anything. But there are several games already implemented on the demo server. url: http://strat-city-demo.herokuapp.com
username: demo
password: password
Please be kind to the demo server. I just threw it up to show a few people -- it's not robust at all.I would love feedback! My e-mail is [email protected]: the interface for editing the "Game UI" is going to be completely redone so that it uses the same type of visual programming code-blocks as found in the "Core Logic" editing interface. Right now the game UI code format is simply javascript that becomes a react.js render function.
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AMD Ryzen 3000 announced
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I'm really looking forward to this. But one issue with current AMD cpu is that you have to buy a desktop GPU even when you are not doing any kind of gaming and such. I know intel iGPU haven't been terribly good but for work they are good enough and is one less part and cheaper to boot. For same performance a Ryzen 3rd gen + gpu might still be cheaper but the price advantage gets reduced.I haven't really seen that mentioned much I wonder why is that. I do love the potential for Zen2 + 7nm. The 65w of 3700x and the high frequency of the 3900X both suggest interesting potential for the future. One could end up seeing that the Ryzen 5, six cores might have higher overclocking headroom.Then there's of course Navi, the first new GPU core in a long long time.
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WARP is here
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I was openly critical of Cloudflare when they announced Warp the first time. My accusations were over-reaching, and I ultimately retracted them. But I'm still skeptical, and I still won't use Warp.Here's what still bothers me: Cloudflare is a single company with points of presence all over the world, handling traffic for websites all over the world (including some big ones), and now trying to attract consumers worldwide to proxy their traffic through its network. That's a lot of power, and we all know the saying about power and corruption. It doesn't matter how conscientious the leadership are. I'd prefer that the temptation to abuse that power was just not there at all.My idea of a better Internet is a return to the way the Internet was -- a large number of small providers, communicating with each other over open standard protocols. So, yes, I should switch to something other than Comcast here in my apartment. So far, I've been afraid that doing that would leave me with a truly abysmal quality of service. (I'm in Bellevue, Washington.) But at least I can avoid adding Cloudflare, with its terrifying power, to the mix.Granted, I mostly use the Internet on a stationary computer with a cable connection at home. About the only thing I do on my phone away from a WiFi connection is request an Uber ride. And I do need that to work reliably. But it is working just fine without Warp. So, maybe Warp is just not for me. Still, for the people that would benefit, I'm afraid of how much more power they're going to be giving Cloudflare when they tap that "on" button.
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Django 3
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I have been using FastAPI for the last two months (which also is an ASGI server and makes full use of annotations and type hints with mypy) and the experience has been incredible. (https://fastapi.tiangolo.com/)If Django can now also support annotations and async code I dream of an scenario where apis can be built using this two elements.Does anybody know a good resource to learn/catch up with this release?
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Who is Facebook's mysterious “Lan Tim 2”?
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As anyone who is, or has, worked in ad-tech would tell you, this is pretty _tame_ in terms of the "offline conversion problem."When there are $billions$ of dollars at stake for this type of information, you can guarantee there will be many companies attacking this problem.Therefore, not to be a pessimist, but if you think that 1) using a fake cell number on Facebook is going to help or that 2) there aren't services like Google doing this already, potentially with just as good match rates as Facebook, or 3) that using Firefox + adblock is all you need, then you're going to be constantly plugging holes in a leaking boat.
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George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter
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The fact that is even possible is insane. Imagine there being over 700 videos of pilots messing up in one month, 700 crane operator mishaps in a month, 700+ food poising by a chain in a month. The also imagine you believe there's no problem.This is Ba Sing Se levels of delusion for some people.
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Ask HN: My GitHub account got suspended without any notice
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It is ridiculous that GitHub has not even responded to your support ticket.To anyone reading from GitHub, this is making me rethink my choice of GitHub as a platform, and I'm sure the same is true for other people reading this post. Your reputation is very much at stake.To anyone reading this from Gitlab, how easy is it to migrate CI/CD off of GitHub Actions to Gitlab?
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Deno 1.6 supports compiling TypeScript to a single executable
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Hey, Bartek from deno.land here.I'll be more than happy to answer your questions about Deno and its development.
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Facebook to move UK users to California terms, avoiding EU privacy rules
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This is the balkanization of the internet. We've lived through a brief period of free exchange among peoples, but it's soon over. I predict only one viable future for all technology companies, big and small: Pick a single national jurisdiction, keep your employees and servers inside it.
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Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support
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I'm struggling to try to understand what this means for the risks of running a business in the cloud going forward. It was not just AWS dropping them, but many of their other vendors dropped them too, essentially killing their business overnight.Granted, for this first case the bar was extremely high. You needed literal storming of the Capitol and a platform seemingly specifically targeted at those people for this to happen. However, now that the precedent is set, I would expect the bar to be lowered going forward. That creates risks that need to somehow be mitigated (and reflected in valuations).Even for businesses that are not in such politically charged areas, I can easily imagine getting inadvertently tangled up in some popular issue and having vendors become targets of online activist (whether it's your own vendors, or whether you are a vendor to a target).What are the best mitigations here, both technical and social? Vocally side with the popular issues, or try to stay completely out of them, to try to avoid becoming a target (e.g., social media presence)? Try to reduce dependence on cloud providers and vendors by building more in-house? How far would you have to go, since a colo or an ISP can drop you just as AWS can?
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Initial M1 support merged into Linux SoC tree
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This is very anecdotal but every single laptop I have bought in the last 10 years (4) worked perfectly out-of-the box with either Linux Mint or Ubuntu (which are the same on the inside). I only vaguely remember once I had to change some conf file for my trackpad to work after a dist update but that was it.Not sure why everyone in this thread is so hesitant about Linux on a laptop? It literally just works (tm) for me and I haven’t used windows for 10 years and will never have a personal Mac.
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Why I Work on Ads
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The author jefftk is getting unfairly downvoted maybe because cynics just see it as a version of, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."I will offer a contrarian opinion as a user whose salary does not depend on advertising: the advertising model for using Google search and watching Youtube videos works better for me as a consumer.The alternative of paying $9.99/month for Youtube... or micropayments for each search query or a "Google Search Engine yearly subscription" ... or Patreon donations for video content ... are all more user hostile for my use cases. I don't like ads but they are the most friction-free way to consume a wide variety of content.I've been using Google Search for over 20 years for free which is pretty amazing. Would I rather replay history and pay ~$120 every year (~$2400 ?) to search for web articles? No.That said, there are also many corrosive aspects of advertising. Advertising should be open and transparent. If the business of ads are truthful, I will sometimes pay to see ads. E.g. I pay $10 ticket for a home & garden convention show so the manufacturers in booths can advertise their wares to me. The opposite and immoral idea of hidden ad tracking is Facebook trying to convince Apple not to show confirmation dialogs about ad IDFA tracking.
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Helix: a post-modern modal text editor
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I never really felt faster eliminating mouse from my coding workflow. Point and click to navigate things is pretty powerful. Why some devs try to avoid the mouse?
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Django for Startup Founders: A better software architecture for SaaS startups
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Does anyone else find django-rest really confusing?
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The fastest GIF does not exist
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I like the ”Internet Explorer 5 is closed source, but could hypothetically look something like this” bit.Is this source code available through MS partnership programs or an old leak?
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Take more screenshots
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I've gotten mixed reactions whenever I share this, but when I program I like to record my screen with OBS.* It's a mental hack to keep me accountable, especially now working from home. If I'm in an office anyone can look over and see whether or not I'm working. It started as an attempt to mimic this feeling at home, even though I'll be the only one to ever see the recordings.* It allows me to go back and see how I worked in the past. I have a few videos of myself working from 2015 which I think is pretty neat just because of how different my workflow was back then compared to now. I'm not using the same tools or even on the same operating system.* I'm working on video games which is what makes this very useful for me. If something visually interesting happens, or if there's graphical bug of some kind, I can go back and breakdown exactly what happened. I've stepped through videos frame by frame in the past to debug, it's been surprisingly helpful.* It allows me to go back and see my progress. I can know what I was working on a given day, see how far I've progressed, it's just generally a good motivator. You can of course do this with git, but if you're working on something visual it can be nice to see it in motion rather than a textual diff.
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Tell HN: It is impossible to disable Google 2FA using backup codes
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Whenever one of these threads about Google (or Apple) come up, I am shocked at the lack of response from people working at those companies. It seems reasonable that this site would be where you'd find someone from a team that interacted with logic that OP is having trouble with.I'd expect to see something like a "hey, yeah, I know a guy on our team that might be able to get in touch with the team who maintains this. I've sent them this thread"...I'm hoping OP got a private message.
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The “Build Your Own Database” book is finished
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1. Memory map a file2. Manage access to it through a serverThere you go, you know have a database.
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This Man Thinks He Never Has to Eat Again
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> a 24-year-old software engineer
> ...
> Soylent contains all of the nutritive components of a balanced dietWhat utter bollocks. We're (as in, scientists studying nutrition and how utterly wrong food industry has gotten that in the 20th and early 21st century) finally starting to get our collective heads around the benefits of whole foods vs. highly processed foods, and just how badly our bodies deal with the latter. It may be theoretically possible to create some processed food that's on par with the nutrition of whole foods, but I doubt that anyone alive today knows how to do it. He may see "good" results on some metrics due to a lack of any desire to go hypercaloric -- i.e. there's probably no artificially boosted food reward[1] mechanisms in his glop. But that won't make up for the glop's likely deficiencies.So an impatient _software engineer_ comes along and claims to have whipped up a drink that eliminates all that. A task that specialists have so far failed at.> "I read a textbook on physiological chemistry and took to the internet to see if I could find every known essential nutrient."I've seen this enough to be sick of it; it seems to be form of the software "everything is just an [easy] problem" mindset gone badly wrong. The supplement and meal replacement powder/drink industry is a multi-billion dollar market. First sanity check: _no_ staff scientists for any of these companies thought to go look at a textbook and the intertubes and do the same thing? DOH! Egg's on them!Another example of this failure: when software/CS types wander off to do experimental science (e.g. human subjects) without _any_ training in how to do experiment design, data collection, or analysis. "Just ask 'em some questions!" The general form of the problem seems to be a blindness to the depths of domain knowledge required to be effective in other disciplines.
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What happens when you wring out a washcloth in space [video]
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There were so many wires and electronics in the background and the water was floating everywhere! Nothing to worry?
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Windows NT Kernel Contributor Explains Why Performance is Behind Other OS
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It's nice to see that internal developers feel the same way about XNA that external developers (who used to build XNA games, or still build XNA games) do.From the outside I always assumed the constant flood of new, half-baked features instead of fixes and improvements to old ones was caused by interns and junior devs looking for glory - sad to hear that's actually partly true. I always considered frameworks like WPF (or Flex, for that matter) 'intern code' - not that interns necessarily wrote them, but they reek of not-experienced-enough engineers trying to solve problems by writing a bunch of new code, instead of fixing existing code.It really is too bad, though. There are parts of the NT kernel (and even the Win32 API) that I consider a joy to use - I love IOCP, despite its warts, and APIs like MsgWaitForMultipleObjects are great tools for building higher-level primitives.Plus, say what you want about GDI (there's a lot wrong with it at this point), but it's still a surprisingly efficient and flexible way to do 2D rendering, despite the fact that parts of it date back to before Windows 3.1. Some really smart people did some really good API design over time over at Microsoft...
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New NSA Leak Shows MITM Attacks Against Major Internet Services
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Trevor Perrin and I have been working on a dynamic certificate pinning proposal called TACK to help mitigate these types of attacks: http://tack.ioIn the current state of the world, we're all dependent on CA signatures for each connection we make to a website. TACK is a layer of indirection away from CA certificates, such that we'd only be dependent on CA signatures the very first time we contacted a website. It doesn't introduce any new authorities or change the default UX at all.After the Comodo breaches a few years ago, I put together a talk about these types of attacks, where the fundamental problems lie, and why approaches like DANE are similarly ineffective:http://youtu.be/8N4sb-SEpcg?t=4m47s
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A living death: Sentenced to die behind bars for what?
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My thoughts on the best and the worst:> Anthony Jackson has a sixth-grade education and worked as a cook. He was convicted of burglary for stealing a wallet from a Myrtle Beach hotel room when he was 44 years old. According to prosecutors, he woke two vacationing golfers as he entered the room and stole a wallet, then pretended to be a security guard and ran away. Police arrested him when he tried to use the stolen credit card at a pancake house. [...] Because of two prior convictions for burglary, Jackson was sentenced to mandatory life without parole under South Carolina's three-strikes law.Emphasis mine. I can't get too worked up about a system that sentences this guy to life in prison. What would be the point of letting him out? He knew he wasn't supposed to walk into other people's hotel rooms and take their wallets. At what point does society get to tell people "you know what, knock it off"?> After serving two years in prison during his mid-twenties for inadvertently killing someone during a bar fight, Aaron Jones turned his life around. He earned an electrical technician degree, married, became an ordained reverend, and founded the Perfect Love Outreach Ministry. Years later, Aaron was hired to renovate a motel in Florida, and was living in an employee-sponsored apartment with two other workers, one of whom had a truck that was used as a company vehicle by all the co-workers. Jones decided to drive this truck home to Louisiana to visit his wife and four children. When Aaron's co-worker woke up to find his truck missing, he reported it stolen. Aaron was pulled over by police while driving the truck.I don't understand this one at all. Shouldn't the truck owner have testified on his behalf? Declined to press charges?I made a cursory effort to look up the case itself, but I have no idea how to do that.
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Good News You May Have Missed in 2014
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What the Gates Foundation is wonderful, laudable, noble, and good. I am disappointed to not see mention of any environmental accomplishments in the list, though. Long term, the threats posed by climate change are far more of a threat than any disease.
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AngelList acquires Product Hunt
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This smells fishy to me.ProductHunt had no hope of ever becoming an actual business with realized monetization, it was a glorified marketing tool built by SV insiders to sell the ventures of their friends, colleagues, and investors. Slimy, but I guess not illegal.I start to draw the line though, when PH raises millions of dollars on XX million valuations (that anyone could easily see they had no chance of ever meeting), seemingly funnels most of that money into things that simply make promoting other startups more effective, but don't create value or revenue, and then gets bought by another startup who shares multiple investors for (supposedly) something around their ridiculous valuation.I guess it's probably not outright fraud, but somehow we ended up in a scenario where we have investors shelling out (in some cases paying themselves!!) a (rumored) total of ~28 million dollars for a community website with no real revenue, no actual product, not even any technology that they could theoretically pivot on... it's just a glorified phpBB theme with a relatively small community of fans who just happen to all be in on the take as well. And I'm sure all investors involved get to mark it as a "win" on the books and pad their stats.Next time Silicon Valley tries to portray itself as a meritocracy I guess we can just point to this...
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Little Things I Like to Do with Git
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I like how he creates an alias to blame called praise. He's right, blame is a loaded word. The command I really use to "blame" people is bisect... though sometimes I use that to find something good too
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Ideal OS: Rebooting the Desktop Operating System
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I'm the original author. I hadn't planned to publicize this yet. There are still some incomplete parts, broken links, and missing screenshots. But the Internet wants what it wants.Just to clarify a few things.I just joined Mozilla Devrel. None of this article has anything to do with Mozilla.I know that none of the ideas in this article are new. I am a UX expert and have 25 years experience writing professional software. I personally used BeOS, Oberon, Plan 9, Amiga, and many others. I read research papers for fun. My whole point is that all of this has been done before, but not integrated into a nice coherent whole.I know that a modern Linux can do most of these things with Wayland, custom window managers, DBus, search indexes, hard links, etc. My point is that the technology isn't that hard. What we need is to put all of these things into a nice coherent whole.I know that creating a new mainstream desktop operating system is hopeless. I don't seriously propose doing this. However, I do think creating a working prototype on a single set of hardware (RPi3?) would be very useful. It would give us fertile playground to experiment with ideas that could be ported to mainstream OSes.And thank you to the nearly 50 people who have signed up to the discussion list. What I most wanted out of this article was to find like minded people to discuss ideas with.Thanks,
Josh
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Diablo devolved – magic behind the 1996 computer game
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I remember going on vacation with my parents and all I had was the Diablo game manual, because I got the game 1 hour before we left. I read the manual about 100 times in the car... good memories
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Why OO Sucks by Joe Armstrong (2000)
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Everything sucks, they just all suck differently.I still think OO provides a pretty easy mental framework for programming. You can get good results. Bit of discipline without going crazy and it works really effectively. Despite its shortcomings.
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Show HN: A searchable list of self-hosted software with screenshots
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I know many non-technical small-scale entrepreneurs who would love to use OSS self-hosted tools to run the basics of their businesses and get away from BigTech. I'm talking little shops, yoga studios, restaurants, recording studios, etc. All they need is basics - email, calendars, maybe some shift management, inventory management, and obviously documents. These people are completely non-technical and I don't know of any tooling that would let them set these things up quickly and reliably.I fantasize about running a little consultancy that would set up and maintain a tailored package of self-hosted OSS software for such small businesses. But I haven't actually studied whether there's a workable business model to be had, or whether there's enough quality self-hosted software out there to adequately cover the needs of most small businesses. I'm curious if HN thinks this could be a viable business...
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Reverse engineering course
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Hmm, I've been itching to dive into some security thing again (I'm getting into the habit to dedicate 1 to 2 months per year for it, this would be year 4). This person's effort seems so awesome and genuine that I'm up for helping out.Though, I don't want to study it completely by myself, it gets a bit lonely and there's no accountability. Does anyone want to set up a study group with me?My background: I know how to reverse Linux binaries, albeit I'm a bit rusty. I followed a course called binary and malware analysis at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and two other related security courses (shout out to Herbert Bos and his team for giving such an awesome course).My email is in my profile.
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Epic Games steps up Apple fight with EU antitrust complaint
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I can hardly wait to use Amazon App Store to install Amazon and then open up the Epic Game Store to install random game and then open up EA Game Store to install random game and then open up Facebook App Store to install Facebook and then open up the Apple App Store to install the Blizzard App Store to install Hearthstone and then go back to the Apple App Store and update the Blizzard App Store so I can get the latest Hearthstone updates.Going to be super fun!My gaming computer is already filled with like 8 different app stores each completely different then the other and a variety of privacy/security issues on each. All of them need their App Store running in order to play their games, so half the time my computer has 4-5 App Stores running in the background so I can play a single game. And they are all electron/qt webkit apps cause nobody builds apps anymore so each one consumes about 500mb of ram.And each App Store also has their own chat system along with the others like discord.I don't agree that Apple should have a complete monopoly, but the alternative is not better. And while Android does have the main Google Play Store, and there isn't to many "alternative" App Stores at the moment. Just give it time, the same thing that is happening to TV Streaming/Game App Stores will happen on Android.
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The Norway Problem
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The world desperately needs a replacement for YAML.TOML is fine for configuration, but not an adequate solution for representing arbitrary data.JSON is a fine data exchange format, but is not particularly human-friendly, and is especially poor for editable content: Lacks comments, multi-line strings, is far too strict about unimportant syntax, etc.Jsonnet (a derivative of Google's internal configuration language) is very good, but has failed to reach widespread adoption.Cue is a newer Jsonnet-inspired language that ticks a lot of boxes for me (strict, schema support, human-readable, compact), but has not seen wide adoption.Protobuf has a JSON-like text format that's friendlier, but I don't think it's widely adopted, and as I recall, it inherits a lot of Protobufisms.Dhall is interesting, but a bit too complex to replace YAML.Starlark is a neat language, but has the same problem as Dhall. It's essentially a stripped-down Python.Amazon Ion [1] is neat, but I've not seen any adoption outside of AWS.NestedText [2] looks promising, but it's just a Python library.StrictYAML [3] is a nice attempt at cleaning up YAML. But we need a new language with wide adoption across many popular languages, and this is Python only.Any others?[1] https://amzn.github.io/ion-docs/[2] https://nestedtext.org/[3] https://github.com/crdoconnor/strictyaml/
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