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Has UML died without anyone noticing?
UML's promise was that that with detailed enough diagrams, writing code would be trivial or even could be automatically generated (there are UML tools that can generate code). It was developed during a time when there was a push to make Software Engineering a licensed profession. UML was going to be the "blueprints" of code, and software architects would develop UML diagrams similar to how building architects create blueprints for houses. But as it turned out, that was a false premise. The real blueprints for software ended up being the code itself. And the legacy of UML lives on in simpler boxes and arrow diagrams.
I read the federal government’s Zero-Trust Memo so you don’t have to
This is pretty incredible. These aren't just good practices, they're the fairly bleeding edge best practices.1. No more SMS and TOTP. FIDO2 tokens only.2. No more unencrypted network traffic - including DNS, which is such a recent development and they're mandating it. Incredible.3. Context aware authorization. So not just "can this user access this?" but attestation about device state! That's extremely cutting edge - almost no one does that today.My hope is that this makes things more accessible. We do all of this today at my company, except where we can't - for example, a lot of our vendors don't offer FIDO2 2FA or webauthn, so we're stuck with TOTP.
Apple's custom NVMes are amazingly fast – if you don't care about data integrity
This F_FULLFSYNC behaviour has been like this on OSX for as long as I can remember. It is a hint to ensures that the data in the write buffer has been flushed to stable storage - this is historically a limitation of fsync that is being accounted for - are you 1000% sure it does as you expect on other OSes?POSIX spec says no: https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/functions/f...Maybe unrealistic expectation for all OSes to behave like linux.Maybe linux fsync is more like F_BARRIERFSYNC than F_FULLFSYNC. You can retry with those for your benchmarks.Also note that 3rd party drives are known to ignore F_FULLFSYNC, which is why there is an approved list of drives for mac pros. This could explain why you are seeing different figures if you are supplying F_FULLFSYNC in your benchmarks using those 3rd party drives.
My bad habit of hoarding information
I do something similar, and in my case it is apparently a result of ADHD/ASD, but that's not why I'm here. I installed the OneTab browser plugin fairly recently because I tended to keep open "too many" tabs across multiple devices for various reasons. And I'd use it, and all my tabs are "closed and bookmarked and filed away", and then a short while later I've got dozens of tabs open again. In most cases, I've actually read these and I'm expecting to continue using the content in some manner.So, anyway, counting what's open right now and what I've filed away, I'm at nearly 700 tabs. Some of them will be reused but the vast majority of essentially junk food for the brain.That doesn't include the untracked but presumably insane number of things I actually did read but didn't keep open in a tab or file for later (just as it ignores the several hundred unread books on my Kindle while not counting the vast number of digital and physical books I do read).I could handwave and spout unfounded theories about dopamine or "conditions" or anything you like, but ultimately, after decades of this, in my case it's what happens when my focus is on consuming rather than producing (ex: when I'm not engaged in something like a zettelkasten process), while allowing my insatiable curiosity and love of learning to remain undirected.In short, you've got to manage that stuff. Or, at least, I do,
Show HN: Open-source resume builder and parser
A general question: What do you all think about this Skill representation as points out of 5 (or 7 or 10 for that matter)? These arbitrary scales always hit me as kind of...useless? There is no frame of reference what a specific amount of points mean. Of course, with this kind of skill-self-description there will always be difficulties, i.e., one does not always know what one does not know etc. But it seems to me that e.g., a duration of full-time or equivalent experience with a technology would provide a better way of measuring experience than these arbitrary scales?
If PEP 703 is accepted, Meta can commit three engineer-years to no-GIL CPython
So generous!The FAANG etc failed me for anything open source sponsorship related.Their business depends on it, they made a fortune out of it, yet they donate little or nothing to it, or worse, they forked it and was reluctant to upstream anything.pick Amazon randomly, it went from exploiting to rip-off in my opinion, thanks to its boss , who sails on a luxury yacht and asks all his employees to be frugal. they all look similar to me as far as supporting OSS goes.
Fuck passwords
There is a (mildly) compelling reason for every bank to have a stupid password rule which is mutually incompatible with every site in existence: it means that compromising that other site's identity:password dictionary and then running it against your bank results in zero successes. Regular users reuse passwords given the opportunity to do so, and most of them will happily cough up their bank password to, quite literally, any site on the Internet.There's got to be some weird game-theory solution for "Maximize for security while simultaneously minimizing the sum of all accounts on the Internet which have a password that could possibly collide with a valid password on this site."
Hacked: commit to rails master on GitHub
If this is a GitHub exploit, and I were GitHub, I would be talking to law enforcement. This is not how adults disclose software vulnerabilities.
The Recruiter Honeypot
"Though I averaged two interviews a day, we had only grown the team by three-four engineers each year."Wait a second, he was interviewing 100X more people than he was hiring??? Does that seem a little extreme to anyone, or is it just me?
Bootstrap 4 alpha
Also launching official bootstrap themes: http://themes.getbootstrap.com/collections/allEdit: unfortunately though, the 'dashboard' theme is not fully responsive (tables (order history) in mobile view)
Profits are too high. America needs a giant dose of competition
...and those profits are not being reinvested in new projects, new ventures, and new markets.Instead, large corporations have been accumulating historically high amounts of cash, which is just sitting on their balance sheets, idle.[1]It's definitely not due to lack of greed. Corporations in the US are very much driven by profit motives: whenever they identify an opportunity to make a profit from customers, they take advantage of it.Therefore, it must be that they aren't identifying enough attractive opportunities in which to invest that growing mountain of cash.Meanwhile, the US middle class appears to be struggling with stagnant wages and limited opportunity.[2]We have engine trouble, and no agreement on how to fix it.--[1] https://www.stlouisfed.org/Publications/Regional-Economist/J...[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/happy-days-no-more-midd...
Almost Nothing About the ‘Apple Harvests Gold from iPhones’ Story Is True
What does it say about the world we live in where blogs do more basic journalism than CNN? All that one would have had to do is read the report actually provided.I don't think I'm being too extreme when I say that, apart from maybe PBS, there is no reputable source of news in America. If you don't believe me, pick a random story, watch it as it gets rewritten a million times through Reuters, then check back on the facts of the story one year later. A news story gets twisted to promote some narrative that will sell papers, and when the facts of the story are finally verified (usually not by the news themselves, but lawyers or courts or whoever), the story is dropped and never reported on again.Again, if the only thing a reporter had to do was read the report to find the facts of the case to verify what is and isn't true, what the fuck is even the point of a news agency?
Amazon Web Services in Plain English (2015)
Hey, Author here. This is old and I haven't added some of the new services that AWS has released since I first wrote it.Whenever this list comes up there's generally a group of people that dislike it for trying to be at least mildly humorous (The whole concept for it started with my developer friends and I joking about some of the names and how opaque they were, so not sure what I'm supposed to do).There were a couple substantial edits I made to it where a few funny lines were cut in favor of better explaining what/how something worked.I also started fleshing out some of the services with slightly more in-depth articles about them (such as this discussion of AWS Buckets where I compare Amazon's CTO to a character from 28 Days Later - https://www.expeditedssl.com/aws-s3-buckets-of-objectsI've sometimes thought that I should try and make it into an ebook or something, but there's always been something more interesting to work on. Thanks to everyone who has enjoyed it, shared it with their friends and hopefully took their first steps to messing around with AWS.
Txt.fyi
Hi! Creator here. It's getting a good kicking right now so I took down the "new post" page. Everyone's fyis are still live and well.I wanted to make a publishing widget so minimal it would operate without fuss on a $5 digitalocean plan, and I think I almost succeeded!
Robert M. Pirsig has died
"Normally screws are so cheap and small and simple you think of them as unimportant. But now, as your Quality awareness becomes stronger, you realize that this one, individual, particular screw is neither cheap nor small nor unimportant. Right now this screw is worth exactly the selling price of the whole motorcycle, because the motorcycle is actually valueless until you get the screw out. With this reevaluation of the screw comes a willingness to expand your knowledge of it."
Goodbye PNaCl, Hello WebAssembly
This one I'm fine with since WebAssembly is a worthy replacement, but I'm still annoyed at Google discontinuing Chrome Apps.Some examples of specialized apps I use all the time that would require a native app otherwise:- Signal Desktop- TeamViewer- Postman- SSH client- Cleanflight drone configuration toolIt was one of the best things that happened to Linux desktops in a long time and removing it hurts users and makes them less secure.Now everyone is moving to Electron and instead of one Chrome instance, I'm now running five which use more than one GB of RAM each. Much less secure, too, since each has its own auto-updater or repository and instead of being sandboxed by Chrome's sandbox, they're all running with full permissions.It also means I cannot longer use Signal Desktop on my work device since installing native apps is forbidden for good reasons, while Chrome Apps are okay.It also hurts Chrome OS users since Chrome Apps are being abandoned in favor of Electron. It also makes it less useful for developers to create Chrome Apps since the market is much smaller.Since Chrome Apps continue to be available on Chrome OS, I'm considering separating that functionality into a stand-alone runtime or making a custom build for Linux. Anyone wants to help with that?
Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest
I believe the politicization of nuclear energy (the resulting lack of investment & innovation) will go down as one of the major blunders in human history.We'd be in a far, far better situation with greenhouse gasses if we (as a human race) had continued to invest in nuclear energy. There would have been mishaps along the way, but at a much smaller scale than we're experiencing now with deaths from air pollution and looming risk of a warming planet.We'd have much, much safer systems with modern reactor designs.
Pricing low-touch SaaS
The single best advice Patio11 has given is "charge more". Seriously. It's been one of the scariest thing to do in the beginning, but I've now 4X'd my pricing (from 3 figures to 4 figures a month!) and the customers got 10X better, complain less, I work less and earn more. Please! If you read this, double your prices today. See what happens in the next 3-4 weeks.
How to write idempotent Bash scripts
I got hung up on the claim "Touch is by default idempotent. ... A second call won’t have any effects". The whole point of touch is to have an effect every single time you run it. It updates the file atime and mtime. That may seem harmless in your application, but it's definitely not no effect. Also promiscuous touching is the source of a bunch of bogus last modified dates in source code bundles.
MacBook Pro Keyboard Drives Me Crazy
The monotony of this complaint is driving me crazy.It's really simple.1. If you don't care about MacOS, and want a different keyboard, please buy a Lenovo Carbon X1 and leave us happy Macbook Pro users in peace.2. If your keyboard breaks, Apple will replace it free. The newer gen keyboards generally don't break.3. If you really can't type on this keyboard and you really love MacOS, there are lots of decent thin Bluetooth keyboards. Microsoft has a great one. It's a small monetary sacrifice you'll need to make for sticking with MacOS. i.e. something we already do when we buy Macbook Pros ;)I am getting tired of being sneered at for "clearly not understanding my own interests" because I like my Macbook Pro, have never had a keyboard issue, I LIKE TYPING on the keyboard, and would buy another one.I do hope they change the keyboard radically in the next release so that the laptop posse finds another issue to rage at.
Rebuilding our tech stack for the new facebook.com
Quite sincerely, it's a total failure. I got the chance to try the new interface, and it's so slow that it's barely usable. It's even slower than the old website, that was already painfully slow.Loading a random profile takes 8 seconds. Opening a messenger discussion takes 6 seconds. It reminds me of the new Reddit website. Facebook was more enjoyable to use 12 years ago.It's really sad that in 2020, 10k+ engineers can't make a photo, video, post and message sharing website that is not a pain to use. We collectively failed as a profession. If one needs 2MB of CSS for such a website, there is clearly a problem.
I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next
This might not be a popular opinion, but I feel like YouTube is doing their best with a really hard problem.I see a lot of people complaining about things like this, but I also see a lot of people complaining that YouTube/Twitter/etc aren't doing enough to take down false/immoral/illegal content quick enough. [1]It really sucks when a legitimate video is taken down by mistake. But it also really sucks when revenge porn is left up. YouTube is doing it's best to blend automation (fast but inaccurate) with human curation (more thoughtful but slower), and sometimes it gets it wrong.I feel like most of the time I see posts like this, the situation is resolved favorably and relatively quickly. YouTube is dealing with two opposing issues, and is constantly doing its best to find a fair middle ground.[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23316660
Docker fails to launch on Apple Silicon
This link is a little confusing because the top comment and much of the conversation is talking about the DTK which was based on the much older A12X CPU and not the M1.As far as I can tell, the M1 does have virtualization support, Docker just isn't ported yet.Update: Also, from Apple docs it seems like you won't be able to run emulation and virtualization in the same process. So you can run x86 Mac apps, but it's likely x86 Docker images will be out-of-reach.
To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills
I've been working on remote teams for almost 20 years. The key to success is overcommunicating.In other words--don't assume people have full context or share assumptions. Write emails that lay out assumptions explicitly and detail problems completely. As a manager I sometimes feel like a Habsburg bureaucrat buried in the Chancery offices sending painstaking messages to a far flung empire. Come to think of it, remote work is not that different.
Google Stadia shuts down internal studios, changing business focus
I'm dumbfounded at Google's lack of planning on this. I tried Stadia, and they had (have?) so few games that they seem to have neither search nor pagination on the list that you can play. None of the games are ones that I care about.It feels like they could have—at the cost of short-term profit and pride—partnered with Valve and shipped something mind-blowing. But instead we're left with a bunch of AAA games that feel half-baked (Hitman crashes on first boot and complains about a lack of a controller) and a bunch of indie games that feel like a sad attempt to squeeze a few extra bucks out of a middling title (the Hello Neighbor hide and seek game) and titles released half a decade ago (superhot).Minecraft is on every console imaginable—except Stadia. What about Roblox? Fortnite? Factorio? Among Us? Any Sid Meier's game? Any Paradox game? Every genre of game that I actually put time into is completely absent on their platform. Every game from the top 10 (perhaps 20 or more?) on Twitch right now is absent on Stadia. I don't know what they're doing, but whatever it is, it's wrong.
Dear Google: Public domain compositions exist
I recommend the excellent video by Youtuber Tom Scott "YouTube's Copyright System Isn't Broken. The World's Is." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Jwo5qc78QUWhile I agree with the OP in broad strokes (they clearly have the right to post and profit off their performance), I find that the vast majority of comments on Youtube's copyright claim system fail to even acknowledge major aspects of the problem. Perhaps Youtube's practical monopoly does it a disservice here, and it's hard to separate "big self publishing video platform" problems with Youtube specific problems.Without a system like YT currently has, it would get absolutely sued into oblivion by rightful copyright complaints. This is in many ways is a problem of copyright law not being designed with modern technology in mind. I think a good first step would be a way for copyright owners to be punished for broadly overreaching with their claims.
Evidence for European presence in the Americas in AD 1021
An interesting counter-factual that comes to mind - if the Norse Greenlanders had brought smallpox or other diseases with them, then Native Americans would have had 500 years to recover (and keep immunity?) - The conquistadors would have faced millions of not-dying-natives. A much different world would have resulted.
UST Stablecoin Loses Dollar Peg
The video interview at the bottom of the article discusses the source of capital for this enterprise to "keep" the peg. The interviewee claims that the source of the capital was basically a crowdfund. The team issued a lot of the tokens, kept a lot of it (about 1/2), and sold the rest. Perpetual motion is possible in finance, but you need fancy licenses and government appointments to do it. These guys are going to prison.This thing isn't just one token, but apparently at least three. One of them (Anchor) claims a 20% yield on savings. This alone should be a red flag because that's about 1900 basis points above what you can expect to get from a good savings account or short-term treasury.I don't have time to dive into the Rube Goldberg machine that this thing appears to be, but when it ends, it will end very badly.Every Bitcoin era seems to have its Ponzi scheme. In 2017 it was BitConnect. They offered something very similar to what Anchor appears to be offering.
Git ignores .gitignore with .gitignore in .gitignore
This is my favourite feature of gitignores. Everytime I need "drafts", sample code, etc, in a repo, I create a folder in that repo, but then I have to remember to not add it to commits, and I don't want to add it to the .gitignore that is versioned, so I do "mkdir drafts && echo '*' > ./drafts/.gitignore", and it ignores my drafts without having to add a new ignored dir in the versioned .gitignores.And obviously, it also "ignores" the .gitignore itself because it matches "*", while still taking it into account, which is what I need.
Rogers network outage across Canada hits banks, businesses and consumers
The utterly inefficient and overpriced Canadian telecoms exist only because we allow one specific behavior:1. A new local player comes to town, builds their own infrastructure (e.g. connects one building to fiber) and starts offering competitive service.2. Rogers/Shaw/Bell/Telus immediately offer better terms for the residents of that building.3. The competitor runs out of money and leaves.4. The telecoms revert to their usual pricing.This hurts competition, this hurts customers, this hurts long-term infrastructure resilience, but not a single politician ever comes close to even admitting the problem. I understand you cannot do it on the federal level where both major parties are on the telecoms' payroll, but it could be a very low-hanging fruit for someone running for a municipal position to address. But nope, identity politics, words, feelings and fighting climate change with paper straws seem to be what the electorate wants instead. Sad.
PostgreSQL 15
I hate to ask a stupid question, but I'm new to administering a Postgres database.Do admins usually upgrade their DBs with each major release? I'm guessing it's highly contextual and depends on how easy it is to do so, but I've heard about places that never upgrade until it's a huge problem for them to do so (in order to avoid an even worse problem.)
Htmx in a Nutshell
howdy, I'm the creator of htmx, happy to talk about it
Poor sleep drove me insane, and my long path to recovery
This is quite raw and I'm actually somewhat afraid to share this. But I think sleep apnea is criminally under-discussed and underdiagnosed. It can f your life up sideways and can take years to diagnose. So sharing my story and hope I can advocate for it.If you have sleep apnea, no amount of sleep gadgets, good habits, exercise, will help you. You must fix the root cause
How AirBnB Became a Billion Dollar Company
I love this. Being scrappy is one of the best qualities among entrepreneurs. The attitude of "do anything" to succeed usually results in success not to mention it is one of the characteristics that PG looks for in founders.
Please Learn to Code
I'm actually kind of tired of hearing, "there's no other field that lets you create something from nothing" vis a vis programming. Look: I LOVE coding. I LOVE programming. I think it's fun and challenging, etc. etc. But it's not the only creative outlet that has ever existed.Have you considered a pencil and a paper? Crayons? Markers? Paints and a canvas? A hammer, some wood and some nails?"Ah, but that requires something to create something!" Yeah? So does programming. It requires a computer (or access to one). It requires programs to run your code - free or otherwise. In fact, I'd argue the barrier for entry into programming is SIGNIFICANTLY HIGHER than MANY other creative outlets.
Attacking Tor: How the NSA targets users' online anonymity
Metacommentary:I've taken a jaundiced view of "liberation tech" efforts in the past and this is as good an illustration as any of why. Among "amateur" libtech projects, Tor is about as good as you get --- an active community, extremely widespread use, technical people with their heads screwed on right and as much humility as you can reasonably expect of people whose projects are (candidly) intended to thwart world governments.If Tor can't provide meaningful assurances (here, there's a subtext that Tor actually made NSA's job easier), you'd need an awfully convincing reason for how you're going to do better than they are before "liberating" the Chinese internet, especially given that it your users who assume the real risks.
Kofi Annan on Why It's Time to Legalize Drugs
The drug problem was studied years ago by the RAND corporation and the US Military - a pure cost-benefit analysis. They found that treatment and education are the most cost effective way to deal with the drug problem, and that prohibition was the most costly and ineffective means of dealing with it.Therefore the government understands that the war on drugs is likely to be unsuccessful, and we have to ask ourselves, why do they persist with it? A few reasons present themselves: Ideological motivations, they just don't like the drugs. The fact that if you terrify the population you can use that as means for greater political control and discipline. And the fact that Tobacco and Alcohol companies would likely suffer as a result of drug legalisation, like cannabis.Lastly the CIA has been found to be involved in the drug trade on a vast scale. This is not a conspiracy, there are many well-documented books on this. They need large sums of untraceable money for clandestine operations, and drugs are an ideal source of this.http://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR331.htmlNoam Chomsky on the War on Drugs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-JX0yXDlh8
Telegram founder: US intelligence tried to bribe us to weaken encryption
>"It would be naive to think you can run an independent/secure cryptoapp based in the US."This seems to be a shot at WhatsApp and Signal, implying that they have loopholes that allow the FBI to snoop in. I'm not sure how true that is. This might be an attempt to deflect from the fact that Telegram uses a home-baked encryption protocol which might be insecure, while WhatsApp uses the OWS protocol.
Show HN: Observable Notebooks
Just in case people were wondering, the site seems to have been overwhelmed for the past 10-15 minutes. But there's a YouTube demo of the tech https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16275040I guess an oversimplified description would be that this is like a Jupyter Notebook specifically for JavaScript. Libraries like D3 are pre-loaded and immediately accessible. Am definitely interested in hearing the details about what it is built with and medium to long-term plans for the service.Note that the Jupyter Notebook service generally requires you to be installing and running Python etc. on your own computer. Jumping into an Observable notebook is as easy as opening your browser and signing in via GIthub
Larry Roberts has died
I highly recommend reading the book “Where Wizards Stay Up Late”, which covers much of the history that this article touches upon. Great book.https://www.amazon.com/Where-Wizards-Stay-Up-Late/dp/0684832...
Ask HN: How to self-study mathematics from the undergrad through graduate level?
Here's my personal opinion about how you should approach this.It's all well and good to want to cover undergraduate math courses. When you are actually enrolled in a university, you will have enough inertia and motivation to complete the courses.However, when you are self-studying you are doing it all on your own. It's hard to be as thorough and cover everything.And so I ask, what really is your goal here? You don't have to learn everything about mathematics, because that is in fact impossible.My advice is to FIRST construct a bunch of projects, tasks or goals that require knowledge.It could be something like (a) implement a machine learning algorithm to do X from scratch (b) implement a simple physics engine (c) try to verify a number theory conjecture (d) be able to solve all the exercises in a book (e) be able to write up a compelling description/theorem/problem in math (d) numerically solve the quantum mechanics equations of a certain systemSpend some time on material that will inspire you first to help get these goals. Numberphile on YouTube, or any of Brady Haran's videos, is a good place to start. But make the goals your own and make them personal.Math is not a spectator's sport. Make sure to DO mathematics, not just LEARN mathematics.
Flutter: a Portable UI Framework for Mobile, Web, Embedded, and Desktop
Can someone from the Google team comment on what's going on - https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/07/kotlin-is-now-googles-pref...>Android development will become increasingly Kotlin-first,” Google writes in today’s announcementhttps://techcrunch.com/2019/05/07/google-launches-jetpack-co...>Google today announced the first preview of Jetpack Compose, a new open-source UI toolkit for Kotlin developers who want to use a reactive programming model similar to React Native and Vue.js.This is massively confusing. Do we invest in Kotlin ...or do we invest in Dart ? Remember I'm talking about developing nations like India - where startups like ours invest in training college graduates . These guys can't afford 10$ courses on udacity and Coursera.But even if it was not India, having this parallel signalling for Android based startups is very confusing. Atleast Apple was very clear about Swift .Where will Android be in 2 years : Dart or Kotlin ?
Computer Architecture – ETH Zürich – Fall 2019
Too bad they host their course videos on Youtube. It has become painful to use. I don't understand why they cannot host them on their own server.
The Wrong Abstraction (2016)
I feel some people here are misunderstanding the blog post.Sandi Metz IMHO doesn't claim that the problem occurs at step 2 or 3. She doesn't claim that it's wrong to introduce abstraction when there is duplication.What she is saying instead is that the problem occurs from step 6 onwards: when you find yourself wanting to reuse an abstraction that, regardless of whether it made sense in the first place or not, has outlived its usefulness.I think this is in agreement with other points that she often makes, about being bold, but methodical about refactorings.The whole discussion about "you should never abstract away code before you see the third duplication" has little to do with the article, and I'm also really not sure it's good advice.
Resignation Letter
There's several layers of irony here, chief of which Bari Weiss headed a very vocal campaign to fire anyone at Colombia who didn't exist on the far-right on Israel/Palestine - and of course, falsely painted several professors as racist and anti-Semitic:https://theintercept.com/2018/03/08/the-nyts-bari-weiss-fals...
First Ever Image of a Multi-Planet System Around a Sun-Like Star Captured by ESO
This is nice work. I am amazed at the advances in planet discovery from "other stars 'might' have planets" to post Kepler "more than half the stars have planets."The other "unknown" is under what conditions can intelligent life evolve? Once you know that window, the Drake equation gets even more interesting.The notion that we are the only intelligent species in the galaxy seems more and more unlikely.
Over 80% of Covid-19 patients in a hospital study have Vitamin D deficiency
Nobody seems to be asking a related question: in a sunny country like Israel vitamin D deficiency should be less common, does that translate into fewer Covid-19 cases?Well, there seem to be differences between different ethnic & religious groups, but on average vitamin D deficiency seems to be less prevalent in Israel: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28647929/However Covid-19 cases don't seem to have been lacking in Israel https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/israel/
macOS Big Sur
Just want to put here that if you're using a Mac and haven't tried Safari recently, you're missing out. A few things:- Battery life is fantastic compared to Chrome/FF- Privacy seems to be top-notch- The tab ordering situation is now chrome-like (my biggest gripe in older versions of safari)- Experimental features are 1 click away, easily enable/disable WebGL2- Support for the WebExtensions standard means addons are trickling back into the ecosystem - I'm happy with my AdBlocker and Nightmode extensions- Actually decent dev tools (used to be terrible)- Native support for keychain + fingerprintI've been using it for the past year after being on Chrome, and it's really impressive how much work they've put into not only catching up, but in many regards, jumping ahead.
Asahi Linux: Linux on Apple Silicon project
Very interesting overall.> Apple allows booting unsigned/custom kernels on Apple Silicon macs without a jailbreak! This isn’t a hack or an omission, but an actual feature that Apple built into these devices.Indefinitely? How do we know it's a feature vs a temporarily convenient oversight?> Our goal is not just to make Linux run on these machines, but to polish it to the point where it can be used as a daily OS. Doing this requires a huge amount of work to be done, as Apple Silicon is a completely undocumented platform. In particular, we will be reverse engineering the Apple GPU architecture and developing an open source driver for it.This looks like the major bullet point. The wiki is currently empty, but while it's WIP, it would be nice to see some of the major milestones or breakdown of the goal mentioned above.Best of luck to Hector and the contributors!
My 2 Year Journey to $10K MRR
> In my case, I found that the more documentation I wrote the more conversions I got.I think this is key and great documentation is one of the most underrated parts of business. Stripe nailed this. Digital Ocean nailed this. Most places don't or can't.[note - personal bias as I have a startup in this space, but it seems very clear to me and I think there's a win-win in businesses focusing more on their docs in terms of improving global efficiency and improving sales and trust in that business - it's just really low hanging fruit in a majority of cases I've seen]
Pattern matching accepted for Python
A lot of early Python's appeal was in its simplicity. I miss that era. Soon Python is going to resemble C++'s bloated feature set where you're not supposed to use parts of the language because "that's the old way of doing things".Edit: Actually that's already true with string formatting.
Interview with CEO of rsync.net: “no firewalls and no routers”
I wonder if they have any sales to large enterprises or similar institutions.In my experience, the larger organizations will have a "security" questionnaire required of their vendors, and the person administering it is a droid, incapable of evaluating whether the questions, originally written in the mid-00s and only updated for buzzword compliance since, are applicable to modern security practice today, or to the particular product/service/vendor in question. And no firewalls or routers would be massive, disqualifying red flags on such a questionnaire.Never mind that a KISS setup tends to bring security because of its minimized attack surface. In the minds that write and administer those questionnaires, security only comes from sufficient amounts of the right kinds of complexity.I'm sure it can be done. IIRC, Cloudflare doesn't use any firewalls, and they do some big business. It just isn't easy to get past the droids programmed to ensure that all pegs shall be properly square, IME.
Signal on Android: Images sent to wrong contacts
Signal has been adding lots of silly social media like features lately, not surprising that they are messing up the core value prop. I’m shopping for a new encrypted messenger. They used to say every program expands in scope until it can read email, now every app expands until you can add Snapchat filters to your selfies.
Report on Stablecoins [pdf]
This is good. The backing of stablecoins is a very real issue. As the Treasury points out, there's a very real possibility of a run. Two stablecoins have crashed so far, SafeDollar SDO, and $TITAN. They went all the way to zero.Can Tether survive a net outflow? Probably not. They don't have the collateral.Dai is really a derivative of Etherium. Dai is backed by Etherium at 150%. So value in Dai is at risk if the price of Etherium drops more than 1/3. Etherium dropped by half back in May 2021, but recovered. DAI could have crashed at that time if it faced a net outflow. It didn't, though.The real question is what happens in the next recession.
We saved millions in SSD costs by upgrading our filesystem
It's wild to me that sites managing storage clusters at petabyte scale are doing it on AWS. I would think that by then you could save millions more by migrating to your own colocated hardware.
Show HN: A game that tests how well you know your local area
Hi HN, I made Back Of Your Hand, a map-based game where you're given random street names and you have to locate them on the map. You can play solo or compete with friends on other devices.I made it for my dad as a Christmas present. It also gave me an opportunity to learn about geocoding, etc.Tech: serverless, Leaflet, Turf, Svelte, TypeScript, Cloudflare pages. I tried to use as many open / free tools as I could. I originally used map tiles from OpenStreetMap but they were discontinued so it uses Mapbox and Maptiler now.Questions / feedback welcome. I also wrote a blog post with more information: https://adamlynch.com/back-of-your-hand. The code: https://github.com/adam-lynch/back-of-your-handWarning: it’s pretty difficult, unless your streets are numbered :)
Soft deletion probably isn't worth it
I've been a software dev since the 90s and at this point, I've learned to basically do things like audit trails and soft deletion by default, unless there's some reason not to.Somebody always wants to undelete something, or examine it to see why it was deleted, or see who changed something, or blah blah blah. It helps the business, it helps you as developer by giving you debug information as well as helping you to cover your ass when you are blamed for some data loss bug that was really user error.Soft deletion has obvious drawbacks but is usually far less work than implementing equivalent functionality out-of-stream, with verbose logging or some such.Retrofitting your app and adding soft deletion and audit trails after the fact is usually an order of magnitude more work. Can always add it pre-launch and leave it turned off.If performance is a concern, this is usually something that can be mitigated. You can e.g. have a reaper job that runs daily and hard-deletes everything that was soft-deleted more than n days ago, or whatever.
Japan to invest on nuclear energy in major policy shift
Contrary to the cynical takes so far here, this is both good news and logical.Nuclear fission does come with risks. Japan already paid the price of one costly lesson with the Fukushima Daiichi incident. Whatever your thoughts are on the incident, one thing is clear; it was absolutely preventable, and they had the means to do so. There's ample evidence of that, it's not very controversial. Like most incidents, it was a combination of factors, including some preconditions (the inadequate sea wall, old reactor design), some operational mistakes, and a massive and still unlikely to repeat soon event. Humans are, of course, likely to continue to make mistakes, so the best way forward is of course to try to prevent similar scenarios from happening and invest in safer designs. Things that can be done.Of course, many would argue now is the right time to instead invest in solar and wind power. I mean, sure. But Japan has multiple nuclear fission power plants currently not in operation mainly just because of fear after Fukushima Daiichi. I'm not a civil engineer of any sort, so I have no idea how plausible it is to implement comparable solar and wind capabilities along with battery storage to make it reliable, in Japan. I know Japan is larger than map projections would have you believe, but it still seems like there could be practical problems. Even if that really were the future, though, today the present is this: they already have fission plants that could be generating cleaner energy, and with rising gas prices, it doesn't seem all that illogical to me.
Dwarf Fortress has sold half a million copies
I love Dwarf Fortress and it's the inspiration for many modern simulators (and I put my $30 for Tarn with this release), but I do think that Oxygen Not Included, Rimworld, Factorio, et.al. have surpassed it.My main issue with DF is that the main challenge of the game, combat, is pretty boring and rife with issues. For example, let's say I'm new to the game and want to put some XBow dwarfs behind a few fortifications in my base. Will the dwarfs intelligently do this when a siege happens? Is there a specific way to tell the AI that specific spots are where the Dwarfs should stand to defend? No and No.Instead I will either have to painstakingly set up individual zones / burrows for each individual defender or the dwarfs will just ignore the fortifications, even if they are in a burrow! And they'll just sit there and ignore invaders breaking through your kill zone unless you specifically micromanage them into 1-wide spaces with fortifications facing the kill zone, and even then they might just run outside your fortress on the other side of the fortifications so they're close to where you ordered them to.Rimworld on the other hand, (for all of its flaws around random and explosive damage), will at least let you draft a pawn, order it to stand behind a wall, and the pawn will get a significant cover bonus even without fortifications. They're smart enough to lean out and attack on their own too.I say all this not to criticize DF but to say that the genre has come a long way, and I hope that with this success they're looking at weaknesses like this in the gameplay loop so that folks don't just take 20+ years of goodwill as a replacement for the possibilities ahead.PS: Fuck cancer
The Future of Thunderbird
> “Why does Thunderbird look so old, and why does it take so long to change?” ~ A notable percentage of Thunderbird usersHonestly this doesn't seem like the main issue with Thunderbird; the main issue is that the UI is very slow, it tends to use a lot of CPU and memory just sitting there and a lot of operations block the UI. This got a lot worse with 102. 102 unfortunately is so low in responsiveness that it's literally quicker for me to open a new tab, load Google Mail (the slowest webmail I'm using) find and(!) read the mail there than switching to the already running Thunderbird and waiting for it to load the new message. It also tends to take pretty long to "boot", so most days I just avoid using it entirely now, as leaving it running in the background substantially decreases battery life.
Largest island in a lake on an island in a lake on an island (2007)
The article states that Greenland is the largest island. This may conflict with a common belief that Australia is an island; as an Australian, allow me to explain (it’s actually quite interesting!)Australia is a continent, so it cannot be an island by definition, as islands are defined as 1. completely surrounded by water, and 2. smaller than continents. It may seem like a silly technical objection at first, but it’s actually necessary to stipulate that continents cannot be islands, as otherwise the largest island would be the Americas, or perhaps mainland Asia + Africa + Europe.Perhaps the other reason Australia seems like an island (while eg the Americas does not) is that it looks mostly convex on a global map. Unfortunately, we can’t make use of this intuition in a formal way because of the coastline paradox.
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Release
I was listening to a gaming podcast last week and they were talking about how this release was pirated and available for the last week or so on torrents. That in itself wasn't surprising, but the interesting point they talked about is that the game is much more enjoyable when played on PC with an emulated copy because modern gaming PC hardware is much smoother and higher resolution than the stock Switch.It really makes me think Nintendo has an untapped market here to sell a little box you plug into your PC that plays switch games, interfaces with their controllers, etc. They've done oddball stuff like the SNES Gameboy player and GameCube GBA player add-ons in the past. It feels like there would be people willing to pay to properly play Switch games on their gaming PCs.
The Sad Bastard Cookbook
My food for when I can't be bothered is pasta with canned pesto sauce (+optional parmesan). Can eat it every day. Another a bit more involved option is pasta with checkpeas: https://www.seriouseats.com/pasta-e-ceci-pasta-with-chickpea... What's yours go-to recipes?
Some Dark Patterns Now Illegal in UK
A good example of beneficial government regulation, for people who refuse to believe such a thing exists. (Another good example is the Internet itself, but it's best to start small)
Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day
I'm probably going to do one step wrongly and get laughed at, but here goes:7 000 000 000 humans * 0.67 hashes per day = 4 690 000 000 hashes per day (or 54282.4074074 per second)54282H/s would give us a daily profit of: 0.00078760 BTC ($0.30)So when the evil space aliens conquers the human race, they can put us to good use to generate 30 cents worth of Bitcoins for them every day (not counting human electricity cost aka food).
U.S. NSA domestic phone spying program illegal: appeals court
Can somebody explain how a constitutional challenge could be dismissed under the pretext of "it was authorized by Congress"? Isn't the whole point of a constitutional challenge to address things illegal things authorized by the government?
An 18 Year Old Buys a Mainframe [video]
This is so cool. Especially given that this thing can run Linux.I had a sorta-kinda similar experience in college years ago. My college (a small community college in the middle of nowhere) had received an IBM AS/400 machine as a donation. I signed up for some "Survey of Operating Systems" class, and when I showed up the first day, the instructor (who already knew me) goes "Phil, your job is to take the AS/400, install an OS and get it on the Internet". Needless to say, at that point in time, I'd never seen or touched an AS/400 before.Anyway, the instructor pointed me to a room with an AS/400, a huge stack of tapes (for the OS), a huge stack of manuals, and basically said "just do it." It was an interesting experience, but in the end, I got the thing on the 'net so you could telnet to it and work on it. And that indirectly led to the beginnings of my career in IT, as my first real IT job was as an AS/400 operator / Netware admin, and it was a job this instructor connected me with after this class.So here's to taking vintage IBM equipment and dorking around with it and putting it on the Internet!
Tell HN: Apply HN apology and revision
This is a cryptic post, what, in direct terms, happened?
Raspberry Pi Zero W, with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, priced at $10
Sadly its extremely hard to buy any Pi Zero at the sticker price. Its always out or not available - and even if you can get em you only can order a limited amount (in the case were I got lucky it was 1).The Pi Zero W seems to continue the trend as far as my local distributor is concerned. I get the overpriced USB hubs its where the profit is at but MAN stop frigging teasing its annoying if you can't buy it at that price.I don't want the adapters - I solder to the board directly and while the sandisk sd card is not terrible its far from the fastest you can get for a similar price.sorry about that I am calm now.
How to Improve a Legacy Codebase
How does one get better if they only ever work in code bases that are steaming piles of manure? So far I've worked at two places and the code bases have been in this state to an extreme. I feel like I've been in this mode since the very beginning of my career and am worried that my skill growth has been negatively impacted by this.I work on my own side projects, read lots of other people's code on github and am always looking to improve myself in my craft outside of work, but I worry it's not enough.
The screen that set off the ballistic missile alert on Saturday
It's easy to see how this is bad, and I bet dozens of designers are now creating alternatives for their dribble and Twitter appreciation, but the problem is probably what led to this, not this specifically. I can see it: a contractor started with a link that triggers a push notification, then someone requested another link, then another, then it grew from there, never having the ability to stop and rethink this from a design standpoint since it would require more work, more training, more money.The problem is not knowing (or having someone who knows) how to design something better, it's treating good design as a priority. It rarely happens.
Explaining copyright broke the YouTube copyright system
I think a lots of people end up having a reaction like "well they're trying their best! what else are they going to do!? it's basically an impossible problem!" to things like this and other recent youtube headlines.That reaction betrays an assumption that YouTube must exist at its current scale in its current form, just because... it does already. And I think that assumption is dead wrong: we're bumping up on all kinds of emergent phenomenon (conspiracies, runaway recommendations) and issues (copyright, borderline child porn) that cannot be solved, and we shouldn't let Google give us their best-effort compromise. If you can't address these kinds of problems in your product, don't fucking build it.
textfiles.com
Has the community of people who wrote documents like this just dried up and vanished? Or have they all moved somewhere underground I can't find?
Editorial board of Index and more than 70 staff members resign
To put this in context: for imagine the largest, and one of the last remaining independent news site in a country where most of the media is centrally controlled. Criticism of the government in that media is unknown. This site is read by close to half of the online population. The government is clearly irritated by this.This site was Index, in Hungary. The editorial board resigning is a response of the takeover attempt from government sources.Going forward, the largest, independent news outlet accessible to Hungarians will like be the Guardian and the New York Times.If this was happening in an autocratic country, we’d just shrug. But this happening in an EU country, in a democracy.The question begs itself: can a democracy with no independent, local press be considered a democracy still?
Math Overflow users resolve PhD thesis crisis
This reminds me of my Ph.D. crisis. (which I'm sure many former grad students can relate to)I was in my 6th year. All my friends had graduated, and my stipend had run out. I was 2 weeks away from submission and discovered that one of my assumptions was wrong, which potentially distorted/invalidated all my studies -- to fix these studies would have potentially delayed submission for months. It was a very subtle assumption violation (and it wasn't even that wrong) and my committee probably wouldn't even have noticed. I was tempted to sweep it under the carpet and not let it keep me from graduating.But I knew it was wrong. I felt that if I sacrificed my integrity then, the moral failure would mark me for life. No one would know -- but I would know. So I decided to fix the issue, re-do the studies and live with the reality that I would have to delay my defense.Turns out when you're desperate -- and many grad students can attest to this -- a resourcefulness that you never thought you had kicks in ("where were you during all my years of grad school?"). I don't remember how, but I somehow managed to wrangle new studies out in 3 days (which would have previously taken me months). I made the deadline in the end.The lesson I learned was that committing to doing the right thing has its costs, but in some cases it also forces one to explore attacks never previously considered. Asking on MathOverflow is one such attack.
Google’s Search Preference Menu Eliminates DuckDuckGo
In other words, people are not willing to pay enough money for the service DuckDuckGo provides to afford a spot on the list, and also DuckDuckGo's service is unable to attract as many users as they would like without the aid of the list.I'm generally very sympathetic to anti-trust measures, but this strikes me as a situation where DuckDuckGo needs to stand on its own two feet. If your position is that privacy is more valuable to consumers, then you should compete in the auction. If your position is that it's not about the money, and privacy is an inherent good even if it can't compete monetarily, then you should be able to attract and retain your users without free advertising. But if your position is that your product cannot compete monetarily and also cannot compete without the advertising that money buys, then it might just be that you don't have as desirable a product as you think you do.
Solomon Islands set to ban Facebook in the name of 'national unity'
For island nations, it's not as bad an idea as it might sound. For all the bullshit about connectedness, the basic physical human urge social media stimulates is for conflict. All the other things like sentimentality, status signalling, attention seeking, are parts of the underlying addiction to conflict because in a lot of hind-brains, that sensation represents opportunity. It's a vice.Outright bans are clumsy, but imposing a cost or bar to entry, like most societies do with alcohol and drugs, might be constructive.I'm tired of meeting friends and family in person and listening to them spend 20mins one-way unloading all the shit they read on the internet. They're so indexed on things that aren't physically present in the moment it's like talking someone through a psychosis or reasoning with someone with schizophrenia. It's a mass hysteria machine. When I talk to some people, it's like I'm not even talking to people anymore, I'm talking to some node of the internet. We've basically invented language cancer, nice one guys.
A Tunguska size burst destroyed Tall el-Hammam, Bronze Age city in Jordan Valley
So, two early cities were destroyed by meteorites in the Bronze age, when there were very few cities world wide.And that's it, as cities kept poping out everywhere, this never happened again.
Google had a plan called “Project NERA” to turn the web into a walled garden
I've never understood the criticism of Firefox on HN. I've been a happy user since 2004.I viewed chrome the same as IE. Owned by a big US tech company that only cares about one thing, and that one thing isn't you or me, only what your and my data/views are worth.As far as I'm concerned all criticism leveled at Firefox is neatly mitigated by the reality of what chrome is, spyware.
Apple Mac Studio
I would like to highlight just how much Apple is focusing on their customers and use cases right now. It seems that they're targeting products to what their professional customers actually want. And in this case, it's a 3.7" little thing that can process 18 streams of 8k video (fully specced out). That's kinda crazy, and they're doing it at a price point that's competitive compared to all of the companies out there.Bravo Apple. I'd love to see what they have in store for designers and programmers next.
YC W22 Stablegains is being sued for losing $42M in funds from 4878 customers
The last few weeks (months, really) has highlighted an incredible lack of discernment in the VC-verse wrt the thing we call web3. Now. I have no experience doing what YC does and don’t claim to, but the jig here was so transparent that the smallest drop of “street smart” should’ve been enough to set off some alarms.We’re approaching a point where being passed over for “culture fit” is a compliment. Hopefully the embarrassment is enough to expand the founder vetting checkboxes.
Bob Cassette Rewinder: Hacking Detergent DRM
I am, more and more, deliberately choosing boring technology. Knobs in the car and on appliances. No screen interfaces. Low-tech where possible.We just replaced our "high tech" Maytag dryer and its "advanced" feature set for a low tech SpeedQueen, the same dryers you find in most Laundromats. Why? Repairability. While we could _technically_ replace the burnt out fuse in the Maytag, it would take at least two hours for a skilled technician (translated to several days for me and my spouse spread across a few weeks) and frankly we want to repair and get back to life. After a few days of looking into the issue and considering the option, we bit the bullet and bought a new one. The old one just had too many fault modes to consider even if we did successfully repair it.I take the same neo-Luddite view on a lot of recent "technology" improvements. The BoringTechnology.club website has the right idea.
Password protect a static HTML page
If you have to run javascript it is not a static page anymore. I've seen a lot of this particularly weird overloading of "static HTML" lately. Static HTML, or static webpage, is meant to describe the experience from the person who is trying to look at the page. It does not describe the experience of the dev.Using a dynamic script or application to generate a static html page that requires no JS execution is a static page.Using a static HTML page and then hiding it behind javascript execution is explicitly not a static HTML page.Use .htaccess. And if you can't, reconsider the choices you made that restrict your abilities so significantly.
Sinead O’Connor has died
She never deserved to be shunned.
Watch TV from the 90s and earlier
To make the 80's TV more authentic, is there an option to change channels via a pair of vice-grips that are permanently attached to the stub where the missing/broken channel knob should be? Because that's how I experienced it.The static effect is nice for creating a low-fi vibe, but some kind of CRT effect (like many arcade & console emulators have) would be even better.
Amit Gupta hasn't found a marrow transplant match; today's your last chance.
I am a south asian male living in the US.I tried to sign up as a donor.Here is my experience.>Your password needs to be between 8 and 15 characters long, must contain at least 1 number and 1 letter and cannot contain spaces.Seriously WTF....I am sure half of the people who wanted to sign up did not just for this bs!Okay chill...password abcd......> In the past 5 years have you taken money or drugs in exchange for sex?.. (Men only) In the past 5 years have you had sex, even once with another male?Half of the people who passed stage 1 probably said "fuck it" at this stage.I am close but am willing to go through this for amit.> SSN? Driver License Number ? HomePhone ? Current Mailing Address? Permanent Address ? Employer Information ?Should I also give you my bank account username/passwords?At this point I am really mad!..Luckily the SSN and DL fields are not mandatory> First Contact Information ? Spouse Information ? Second Contact InformationGrrr....what the fuck!> Race Information? Not Hispanic or Latino ? Black ? Asian ?Wtf...take my DNA and figure it out!After a cpl other irritating forms I am finally able to get a kit sent to my address.-My advice to Amit's friends would be to please do something to improve the signup workflow.-Also I have my genome phenotyped with 23andMe.I am totally willing to share it with Amit's Friends or Amit.I am sure a lot of other south asians on 23andMe would be willing too but there is no way to do this!
Handwriting to LaTeX maths
Hi folks,A small note on what we don't support yet:no cube roots, no nth roots eithersquare root's top line must be a single line (make it wide enough up front)no matricesno system of equationsno corrections, no scratch out (use top left undo/redo arrows)leave enough space between integral/summation symbols and main expression for better accuracyLaTeX output pleases MathJax as much as possible (thank you guys for your lovely rendering library)Hope that helps, Thank you for trying it out.PS: MathML seems to get little attention, why is it so?--- LIST OF SUPPORTED SYMBOLS (encoded in UTF-8) ---Letters a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z Digits 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Maths symbols € $ £ ¥ ₩ ¢ ( ) [ ] { } ! # % & ? @ / \ | ∥ © ∂∅ ∇ ∞ ℂ ℕ ℚ ℝ ℤ + - ± × ÷ * ∘ · = ' , . : ; _ ← ↑ → ↓ ↔ ↕ ↖ ↗ ↘ ↙ ⇐ ⇑ ⇒ ⇓ ⇔ ⇕ ∀ ∃ ∄ ∈ ∉ ∋ ∌ ∩ ∪ ⊂ ⊃ ⊄ ⊅ ∼ ≃ ≠ ≡ ≢ ≤ ≥ ≪ ≫ ∝ ∠ ∏ ∑ ∫∮∧ √ Greek symbols Γ Δ Ω α β γ δ ε η θ λ ν π ρ σ τ φ χ ψ ω ϕ µ International convention units (with cursive support) km hm dam dm cm mm µm ha hl dal dl cl ml µl kg hg dag dg cg mg µg ms µs GHz MHz kHz Hz Other mathematical terms (with cursive support) sin cos tan sinh cosh tanh arcsin arccos arctan cot coth min max arg argmin argmax inf sup lim liminf limsup ln log dx dy dz dt
Dear Spike Lee
Where are the internet hippies saying everything should be free?
GitHub under ongoing DDoS attack
As a paying customer of Github I want them to know they have my undivided support in staying strong against "the bullies".
How are zlib, gzip and Zip related? (2013)
In other compression news, Apple open sourced their implementation of lzfse yesterday: https://github.com/lzfse/lzfse. It's based on a relatively new type of coding - asymmetric numeral systems. Huffman coding is only optimal if you consider one bit as the smallest unit of information. ANS (and more broadly, arithmetic coding) allows for fractional bits and gets closer to the Shannon limit. It's also simpler to implement than (real world) Huffman.Unfortunately, most open source implementations of ANS are not highly optimized and quite division heavy, so they lag on speed benchmarks. Apple's implementation looks pretty good (they're using it in OS X, err, macOS, and iOS) and there's some promising academic work being done on better implementations (optimizing Huffman for x86, ARM, and FPGA is a pretty well studied problem). The compression story is still being written.
Apollo 11 Guidance Computer source code
people could've really used a higher-level language compiling to optimized AGC(apollo computer) assembly. Is there any reason why they didn't develop one? It seems it would've helped tremendously with the productivity and verification (and a lot of the explanations and equations would be readable as code, not as an non-executed comment)
Maru OS – A complete desktop experience on a smartphone
I'm wondering how secure it is.. According to https://github.com/maruos/maruos/wiki/Tips, they start sshd up by default, listening on the local network, with the default user maru and password maru. That seems like a bit of a red flag and makes me wonder if it is the tip of the iceberg.
Build Impossible Programs
Anyone know what Julia is using for those handwritten slides?I absolutely love everything Julia writes. She writes in a way that makes absolutely zero assumptions about your level of technical competence. You could be a junior, mid, senior and still get something from most of her articles.Anecdotally; Almost every female engineer I work with writes and communicates in this fashion and I really bloody wish more of my male counterparts would speak with less jargon/acronyms for the sake of new starts/non-engineers.
Kubernetes Is a Surprisingly Affordable Platform for Personal Projects
The list of things mentioned in the article to do and learn for a simple, personal project with k8s is absolutely staggering, in my opinion.Having used it, there's a sizeable amount of further work needed which the article doesn't mention (e.g. learning how to use the pretty confusing google interface, finding the right logs and using their tools). So the overhead is really huge.Furthermore, the whole system is slow. Want to run a SQL query against your postgres? You need to use a google cloud command that changes the firewall and ssh's you in on the machine... and this takes a couple of minutes, just enough to make me desist unless I _really_ need to run that query. Abysmal.Finally, and this is a pet peeve against many advocacy blog posts, they just show you the happy path! Sure, _in the best of cases_ you just edit a file. In a more realistic case, you'll be stuck with a remote management system which is incredibly rich but also a really steep learning curve. Your setup is not performant? Good luck. Need to tweak or fine tune? Again, best of luck.We've tried to adopt k8s 3-4 times at work and every single time productivity dropped significantly without having significant benefits over normal provisioning of machines. {Edit: this does not mean k8s is bad, but rather that we are probably not the right use case for it!}...which in turn is usually significantly slower than building your own home server (but that's another story!)
What it’s like to pursue a dream for 30 years and fail
I read the article with fascination, and googled his name to get a website with some media upon which I found a link to a page with a non-clickable link to this video (likely the same as has been featured earlier):https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aD7ClbhLNOcAs a fellow passionate creator, it pains me to see a video production like this. Having never seen this product before, I'd argue what interests most people first and foremost is seeing the product in action, and what's possible with them (which wouldn't be possible without).It takes 18 seconds until the video actually shows them being used while worn. 25, if you want to see them running in real-time. The first time you actually get a sense of how they compare to anything else (bikes / cars) isn't until one minute and 16 seconds into the video. It boggles my mind. I understand that not everyone can be a video da vinci, but this video could be 1000 times better in so many ways.It's literally the ideal product for a click-baity - WE OUTRUN A CAR/BIKE/OLYMPIC MEDAL WINNER - type video. Sure, have a little bit of a lead in, but then show him squaring off against 3 other commonly known modes of transportation etc. etc.And don't even get me started on that constant heart-beat and increasingly present jet 'woosh' noise O_O.
Google Ends Forced Arbitration for Employees
Why isn't forced arbitration illegal?You're effectively agreeing to renounce to your rights to sue a company. Seems odd that US laws allows that.Or, is the clause only that arbitration has to be attempted but not binding to the fact that an agreement may be reached?This case would seem far less evil.
Amazon S3 will no longer support path-style API requests
One important implication is that collateral freedom techniques [1] using Amazon S3 will no longer work.To put it simply, right now I could put some stuff not liked by Russian or Chinese government (maybe entire website) and give a direct s3 link to https:// s3 .amazonaws.com/mywebsite/index.html. Because it's https — there is no way man in the middle knows what people read on s3.amazonaws.com. With this change — dictators see my domain name and block requests to it right away.I don't know if they did it on purpose or just forgot about those who are less fortunate in regards to access to information, but this is a sad development.This censorship circumvention technique is actively used in the wild and loosing Amazon is no good.1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collateral_freedom
I can see your local web servers
If you use uMatrix, you can easily block the localhost and local network "sniffing" with the following rule[0]: * 127 * block ### block access to IPv4 localhost 127.x.x.x * localhost * block * [::1] * block ### block access to IPv6 localhost * 192.168 * block ### block access to LAN 192.168.x.x In principle, you can use this without any other blocking, i.e. with the rule: * * * allow and hence without disabling javascript on any sites.[0] https://github.com/ghacksuserjs/ghacks-user.js/wiki/4.2.3-uM...Edit: as pointed out by DarkWiiPlayer below, if you want to be able to access the localhost websites from the same browser, you need: localhost localhost * allow and similarly for the LAN. In full: 127 127 * allow localhost localhost * allow [::1] [::1] * allow 192.168 192.168 * allow
iMessage: Malformed Message Bricks iPhone
Since a restore works it cannot be called a brick though?
Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil fuels off the grid
I’ve always wondered about something, yet have never found anyone discussing it online. So maybe some smart people can help me out:a lot of people install solar on their rooftops. Much of the time this is done with the assumption that it will pay off financially because energy prices are currently at a certain rate and will continue to rise.But here’s my question: If its financially advantageous to install solar on your roof, wouldn’t it be greatly more financially advantageous (given the main cost for solar installation is the labor) for energy companies to install solar at scale? And if that’s the case, wouldn’t the energy companies eventually do this, which, given macro market laws of supply and demand, would eventually cause the price of electricity to go dramatically down for their end consumer, thus eliminating the financial benefit of privately installed roof top solar for homeowners?I live in the southwest, and based on online calculators it “makes sense” from a 10 year outlook to pay the money now and install solar on my home, but that’s only if the energy prices don’t fall. But nobody seems to even think that’s a possibility.