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Apple Delays Rollout of Child Safety Features | Wow, we made Apple blink. I did not see that coming. People like me who sold their iPhone and cancelled all services probably are a drop in the bucket, but it looks like the general public and the news picked up on this enough to get the ball rolling to make them step back. So now the question is in what 15.X update do they just sneak it in. |
Show HN: GPT-4-powered web searches for developers | I asked it this question[1], I traverse a maze using a basic A* implementation (using the Manhattan distance metric). However, after the traversal, I would like to find out what wall would give me the best alternative path. Apart from removing every block and re-running A* on the maze, what's a more clever and elegant solution?
a question I asked on SO over 10 years ago. The SO thread includes working code and very friendly explanations and discussion. The answer Phind gives is the following[2]. It tells me to use D＊-lite (complete overkill), Theta＊ (totally wrong), or "Adaptive-A＊" (not sure if that's an actual thing, all I can find is a random paper).I was working on this in the context of a game I was making at the time, and while this is certainly a hard (and maybe rare) question, it's still on the level of CS undergrad.[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2489672/removing-the-obs...[2] https://www.phind.com/search?cache=d08cd0e7-4aa8-4d75-b1cd-7... |
Organic Maps | This was the first time I’d heard of the app, but due to comments in this thread I downloaded it.* Website, ethos: straightforward. “Old internet” vibes, love it. They seem very active, have a presence on every platform, very impressive* The app seems very nice. Simple clear UI. Lots of features. I need to experiment for more than a few minutes but I get the impression it could replace Google Maps for me, especially because Google Maps has trouble doing things like showing road names or other key navigation tools* On design and UI: the offline approach is very visible. I zoomed in to where I live and it starts downloading it. First, a great way to get a download (go there on the map, it downloads) but also compare how many steps it is to download offline for Google Maps compared to this (go to a special section of the app, download something in your screen’s aspect ratio, limited in size, give it a manual name, prompted to manually curate downloads, they expire when they could still be perfectly valid…) — this is significantly better design. It’s the same difference angainst other map apps. I have a hiking trail app (AllTrails) that advertises offline, but getting the data and keeping it is a complex series of steps and it’s impossible to know if it’s there until you’re in the wilderness and unable to download if it’s not. This is so much simpler… good simple design.* It’s developed in Estonia! Estonia has a remarkable IT and software culture (I live there) and every so often you come across an absolute gem. This looks like one of them |
Google just deleted my nearly 10-year-old free and open-source Android app | The easiest way to identify a monopoly is to look at how badly a company can treat its customers and still get away with it. My company has a half dozen stories like this about Google in the last year alone.Know what Google is doing to its AdSense partners on a massive scale? They wait until your site has just under the earnings when they have to write you a check, then they terminate your AdSense account for “policy violations”.I’m taking about AdSense sites that have been running for years with very little traffic, accumulating a few pennies a day.They suspended a client of ours who was spending $40k a month on Google Ads with a two word explanation of “policy violations”, and steadfastly refused to explain any reason why. Our client was perfectly reputable, ran multi million dollar ad campaigns on television and radio, and was FDA approved.When what Google has been getting away with finally comes to light... well, let’s hope it does come to light and they pay the consequences. |
TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem | This is a brilliant piece of work. As someone who has thousands of tabs open, I've always wanted to "close all tabs with a single command", or view all the open tabs and mass select them and close, for years. Otherwise, going through them one by one and deleting takes forever. Now somebody make a vim pluggin so I can delete tabs by visual selecting a bunch of them and typing "d". |
AlphaFold: a solution to a 50-year-old grand challenge in biology | Not knowing a lot about biotechnology, I read the article and it sounds great, but how big is this as a gamechanger? Can someone comment on how big are the implications of this in, let’s say, 5 years from now, on day to day life? Does this mean that biotech is going to explode? Or just that drugs will come to market faster, perhaps cheaper for rare diseases, but from the same industry structure as always? |
I got pwned by my cloud costs | Can somebody explain to me why I wouldn't just rent a 40 EUR dedicated server from Hetzner with unlimited traffic and gigabit uplink? His 600GB/day is way less than what you get over a gigabit link within a day. Sure, sudden bursts would perhaps "throttle" at a gigabit, but according to his article that was only the cloudflare proxy anyhow, so no pain in having that take a few seconds longer.As far as I am concerned, I just don't understand why people use cloud services. |
The Floppotron 3.0 | I've often wished there was a way programming could produce art as a by product. That way we could see something more tangible for our efforts, have a landmark system for help recalling it all, and show progress to our non technical family members.This has made me think that making music as a by product would also be pretty neat.. being able to hear different sounds for different functions would be a much more intuitive way of inspecting the overall health and performance of your system than trudging through logs.If anyone knows of anything like this I would be happy to pay for it! |
Lily – Drone camera | This is really, really cool.That said, flying objects are inherently dangerous. I was at a bike race and a guy was following the pack with a DJI drone. One motor suddenly failed and the thing plummeted to the ground from 40ft and broke into a bunch of pieces. Luckily, it didn't hit anyone but it would have been a major incident if it had.There's a lot of excitement about the cool, flashy features of these drones (following, waterproof, nice camera) but no assurance that it won't suddenly break and kill someone.I want 99.9999% reliability and strong safety guarantees as a feature. |
Two Photographers Unknowingly Shot the Same Millisecond in Time | This is typical birthday paradox stuff right? The chance that these two photographers would ever snap the same thing at the same time is small, but the chance that any two photographers, anywhere, would do so is, I bet, pretty big (even if you factor in millisecond precision). With photographers being photographers and the internet being the internet, there's also a pretty decent change that they'd find out about it and write a blog post like this, no? :-) |
Twitter Is DDOSing Itself | Speaking from very painful, personal experience, few things are more agitating than being forced to execute on something you fully know is a horrible idea, especially when you tried and failed to communicate this fact to the individual pushing you to go against your best judgement.Even more so when that person later loudly proclaims that they never made such a request, even when provided with written proof.I can of course not say whether the people currently working at Twitter did warn that the recent measures could have such major side effects, but I would not be surprised in the slightest, considering their leadership's mode of operation.Even as someone who very much detests what Twitter has become over the last few months and in fact did not like Twitter before the acquisition, partly due to short format making nuance impossible, but mostly for the effect Tweets easy embeddability had on reporting (3 Tweets from random people should not serve as the main basis for an article in my opinion), I must say, I feel very sorry for the people forced to work at that company under that management. |
Lee Sedol Beats AlphaGo in Game 4 | Relevant tweets from Demis; Lee Sedol is playing brilliantly! #AlphaGo thought it
was doing well, but got confused on move 87. We
are in trouble now...
Mistake was on move 79, but #AlphaGo only came to
that realisation on around move 87
When I say 'thought' and 'realisation' I just mean the
output of #AlphaGo value net. It was around 70% at
move 79 and then dived on move 87
Lee Sedol wins game 4!!! Congratulations! He was
too good for us today and pressured #AlphaGo into
a mistake that it couldn’t recover from
From: https://twitter.com/demishassabis |
Google Cloud Is Down | Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud (but disclaimer, I'm on vacation and so not much use to you!).We're having what appears to be a serious networking outage. It's disrupting everything, including unfortunately the tooling we usually use to communicate across the company about outages.There are backup plans, of course, but I wanted to at least come here to say: you're not crazy, nothing is lost (to those concerns downthread), but there is serious packet loss at the least. You'll have to wait for someone actually involved in the incident to say more. |
Bomberman massively multiplayer in HTML5 | I upvoted this because it is awesome, and it is, well... Bomberman.But I'm genuinely curious: at what point will we stop being fascinated by what can be done in HTML5, and actually start focusing more on what is actually being done -- regardless of the technology used.Or to put it another way: when will HTML5 games stop feeling like HTML5 games?For example, if this were on a console, I think it would still be cool, but it's lacking a certain "game" feel to it. It still feels like playing an old school game on a PC keyboard, and there still seems to be a sort of keyboard-to-response latency that I find in most HTML5 games. Not to mention, no music/sound.Again, I'm not knocking it for the effort. I still think it's pretty dang fun, even for an HTML5 game. But it still feels like an HTML5 game. |
Verizon/Yahoo Blocking Attempts to Archive Yahoo Groups – Deletion: Dec. 14 | disclaimer: I'm a Member of Archive Team who's helping coordinate the joining of Yahoo Groups in preparation for archival.Yahoo's banning of a large amount of the accounts we were using is a huge setback for us. In total we lost over access to over 55,000 Yahoo Groups, many of these will now not be archived and will be lost when Yahoo deletes everything on December 14.Particularly disastrous was the loss of access to all of the 30,000 Fandom (fanfic / fanart / etc..) groups that were requested to be archived by members of the fandom community. We're back to square one now, and it is looking increasingly likely that we're only going to be able to re-join (and therefore archive) a small percentage of these groups before December 14.(And now for the inevitable, shameless plug...) We could really use some help! If you've got an hour or so, we could really use people to come and complete CAPTCHAs for us. (A CAPTCHA is needed to join every group). Instructions at: https://github.com/davidferguson/yahoogroups-joiner |
Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage | I cut this deal with my neighborhood Italian restaurant!I texted the owner about being miffed they hadn’t told me they were on DoorDash. He replied. They aren’t. We compared pricing, and found the prices advertised are way off from what the restaurant charges.So I placed a $5,000 order to the neighbourhood homeless shelter. DoorDash paid him over $20,000, and I get free pasta for the rest of the year. (My neighbours have also partaken.)Glad to know it’s scaling. SoftBank has assembled a unique concentration of stupidity for itself. |
Show HN: I built a Rotten Tomatoes-style platform for durable products | A few months ago, I began developing the Buy For Life platform. It started as a simple list where people could add brands that manufacture durable products. It now evolved into a full platform with aggregated product reviews from all over the web, discussions, and various metrics to calculate a score for each brand and product.I want to help people finding the most durable and sustainable products in the world. It should become the Rotten Tomatoes for products, almost like you check the trustworthy rating of a movie before you watch it, people could check a brand or product before they purchase it.A metric I am working on is the average cost per month of ownership. That feels like a great metric that shifts consumer mindset - the longer you own something, the more you save. I still don't have enough data, so please submit your favourite product.Let me know what you think!PS: this project is completely non-commercial and entirely community-driven. It is still a work in progress, but I want to get feedback as early as possible. |
Is this Duplo train track under too much tension? | My favorite part about this thread is not the first, very thorough, very mathematical and accurate answer, but the answer below it that has 0 upvotes but is by far the most practical:"I would first check for track flatness"This thread is a great example of how engineering is often NOT a solution to problems, classic "hammer and nail" territory here. And how engineers often ofterthink things unnecessarily ;) |
Forced Exposure | Lets not try to code our way out of this.We succumb to terror pushing away meaningless bits of code on Github as a crypto projects in response. Some projects flourish sure but the same forces that profit off the court-less killings of others are collating your data, your pet projects. Harvesting your stolen info out of botnets.Giving you a salary for technician work keeping infrastructure ticking.Enough enabling the beastly mess that is privatized 'national' security. The payments to infrastructure providing companies for data access. The kidnapping/torture/drone fire of others when technological routes don't work.If you have a career with Dell, AT&T, Booz Allen Hamilton, SAIC, and many others, start making demands or make resumes. Stop being complicit. |
What should I do about YouTube? | My first thought: She should form a subsidiary company that releases her stuff on YouTube. Then she can give the sub her music as she sees fit. That way she can still control her YouTube presence, but Google has the right to do what it needs to do with the stuff she releases to it.Would this work? |
I was once a Facebook fool | Wow, well, this got way more attention than I wanted.First, to be clear -- I have nothing against the guy who took Dave Morin's job (who wasn't supposed to be named -- Amazon CloudFront didn't bother to invalidate its cache when I uploaded the final edit of that paper). He played his cards right, came out hundreds of millions of dollars ahead, and then he got out. He's not in this to control your social life or anything, he just played the Silicon Valley game and got his.The issue is really about the people who are trying to control your social life, and who are trying to convince the sort of people who read Hacker News to use them as a stable, reliable piece of infrastructure for your projects and businesses. My story is just one datapoint of so many -- most of which are private, but easily discoverable by quietly asking around the Valley -- that should help you realize that Facebook is definitely not the company you want operating the world's social infrastructure. The code might work, the pages might render, but on a deep social and ethical level, Facebook and its platform are not web-scale.Also, the "sharecropper" and "beware of your platform" arguments don't apply here. Social infrastructure isn't like being a developer for the Playstation -- this is very basic and very global stuff, similar to water or power, and you shouldn't have to question its integrity. I shouldn't get dirty water, or my power shut off, because the CEO of the utility company allows his/her VPs to play God. There's a reason these guys don't call themselves a "social utility" anymore... But anyway, that's a whole 'nother subject, and I'd rather be coding (or socializing!) than writing.And to all of the people who question why I would even publish something like this -- chill out bro, I'm just obeying Zuckerberg's Law! /disconnect |
Elon Musk Deletes Own, SpaceX and Tesla Facebook Pages After #deletefacebook | Facebook can be an essential promotional tool for many. If you're rich or an already successful company, then you can handle the loss by not being on Facebook. But if you're poor or just starting up a new venture, then it is harder to afford not being on Facebook. |
Hash collision in Apple NeuralHash model | How can you use it for targeted attacks?This is what would need to happen:1. Attacker generates images that collide with known CSAM material in the database (the NeuralHashes of which, unless I'm mistaken, are not available)2. Attacker sends that to innocent person3. Innocent person accepts and stores the picture4. Actually, need to run step 1-3 at least 30 times5. Innocent person has iCloud syncing enabled6. Apple's CSAM detection then flags these, and they're manually reviewed7. Apple reviewer confuses a featureless blob of gray with CSAM material, several timesNote that other cloud providers have been scanning uploaded photos for years. What has changed wrt targeted attacks against innocent people? |
Hello Chrome, it’s Firefox calling | I'm giddy with excitement on what this could be used for.Please correct me if I'm wrong:Does this mean that when you chat with another person you are directly linked to them, making the communication more secure than say Skype (which passes the 'data' through Skype servers)? |
Questions to ask a company during a job interview | Problem: Interviewers lie.I once interviewed with a company that brought me into a new, shiny, well-appointed building on the corporate campus for an interview.I did well answering their questions. And they answered my usual questions correctly. Stuff like "Can developers here choose their own tools?" and "My title is going to be Lead Engineer, will I actually be a Lead Engineer?"After I was hired, I found out everybody uses Eclipse, no exceptions, and I was absolutely not going to be leading anything (I was basically going to be used like an overpaid junior engineer).The best part: "Oh, you won't be working in the new building..." and was taken to an old, windowless, leaky, mold-smelling building with peeling paint and flickering fluorescent lights (think the opening scene from "Joe vs the Volcano"). My office was a supply closet that was being converted into an office (by that I mean, "we just pulled most of the stuff out of here, but otherwise just rearrange the furniture however.") I was given an old 70s vintage desk that was too low, a sort-of broken chair, and a laptop and left to my own devices for three weeks while waiting for my new project to get started. Then I was suddenly moved to even worse accommodations - a cubicle, which belonged to an employee who had recently died (his stuff was still there, and it was a month before anyone came to take it away).I started looking for a new job about 2 days in. Took me a year to find something else (I eventually had to move to a new city). |
20% of requests for Wikimedia Commons are for one image of a flower | The "traditional" way of fixing this would be a goatse.cx redirect of the image.I'm sure there is a more enlightened fix. |
Coin | SUPER clever idea -- kudos for that. In theory, this is awesome. As a consumer, I love it.As a merchant, however (which I am), there is no chance I would accept this. None. Unless the issuers (that is, Visa, MC, Amex) drastically change their policies, which I don't see happening anytime soon.Why? Because the issuers are very clear about a few things: When push comes to shove and it REALLY gets down to it, unless the merchant takes a physical swipe of the actual card AND has backup to prove it (i.e. an imprint of the physical plastic), the issuers will side with a consumer in the event of a fraud dispute.So why, do you ask, do most merchants not bother taking imprints of the actual cards? Because a visual verification and physical swipe is usually enough (for 99% of cases). Instances of fraud via card duplication are rare, so it's usually not worth the hassle. But in some cases, it is.My business runs large-ticket purchases though CCs (average is $2000), and we take super extra precautions when our customers buy from us. We take magnetic swipes, visually verify, AND take physical imprints.We've lost several chargebacks because of lack of doing this. You'd be surprised how these little-known rules crop up when you least expect them. "Sorry, customer claims charge not authorized. Merchant doesn't have physical imprint. Chargeback approved." It's happened and we've been defrauded out of $thousands because of it.The ONLY way we've been able to successful combat chargeback fraud is through the multi-layered approach.Anyway, I know this is a fairly esoteric perspective and my business may be different from lots of others where this isn't an issue, but I have a feeling V/MC/Amex aren't going to get behind this. |
Africa declared free of wild polio | Now the world needs to go after malaria in Africa.Throughout the world a child dies every 2 minutes from malaria.https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/08/infectious-diseases-c...I’ve been to South Africa twice. Most other Subsaharan countries have large malaria problems.Looking forward to that not being a problem in my lifetime. |
Show HN: Meteor, a realtime JavaScript framework | Hey everyone! The four of us have been working very hard on this for the last six months, and we're excited to finally take the wraps off. Can't wait to hear what you think!We've got a lot more stuff coming over the next few months, and if there are particular things you'd like us to do/prioritize, I'd love to hear about them! |
Hello Firefox, this is Chrome calling | Yes, please, please, please kill Skype. Kill it mercilessly. Using it has been the worst experience I've ever had with an application.I've been in a long distance relationship for a few years now and Skype has sadly been our main mode of video communication. The app crashes when I search chat history, can take upwards of 90+% of my CPU, literally forcing me to shut down every other application I have running. The forums are full of complaints, all unanswered. We've tried gChat and the plugin either goes undetected or slows down my machine as well (although not as bad as Skype). I'm running a 2010 MBA, so I've got the resources.So death to Skype, and open arms to WebRTC. |
I just lost my wallet on the way home from work | I hate it when my cynicism alarm goes off, but this feel-good tweet about hacking payment transfers for good is written by a guy who's twitter bio says he's a PM at Transferwise ("We’re building the best way to move money around the world.")All the replies are people contrasting shitty experiences they've had with their own wallets and money transfer services.His top pinned tweet is:> Reasons to work at @TransferWise:> 1. Irreversibly change the world of finance to be fairer> 2. Excellent office dogs [video of cute dogs running around]I mean, I'd love this to be true, but the coincidences are uncanny. |
Log4j RCE Found | I don't get what the point of this feature even is. What is a legitimate reason for a logging library to make network requests based on the contents of what is being logged? And is this enabled out-of-the-box with log4j2? |
What Is Code? | It's 2015. The audience of this article shouldn't even exist. The reader, as described in the article, is a VP who has so little understanding about what it is his company does, that the only meaningful abstraction he can mentally picture is that of his employees "burning barrels of money".Imagine an auto company VP who says "I don't know anything about engines and drivetrains and all that technical stuff. All I know is that when you guys are in a meeting talking about your variable valve timing system, all I smell is money burning!"That would not be acceptable. Yet, here we are, over 30 years after the original IBM PC was released, and there's still a corner-office audience for "what is a computer?" |
Pixel prevented me from calling 911 | My feeling is that Google is not capable of fixing fundamental problems of Android. Every year they change some colors and rounded edges (it's starting to get hilarious seeing the design of their apps being revamped over and over again), and add features invented by their designers nobody asked for. But the keyboard lag, the storage footprint (why must an ever so slightly older phone with 16GiB internal memory be discarded because His Majesty Android demands almost all of its space for itself?), those will only get worse every release. I think they simply don't care. It's all about futuristic colorful stuff that sells. Android will never be a humble, efficient, reliable platform.As for this issue. All I can think of is the tragedies it may cause. It's a cliché: software developers are not responsible, except when their PR forces them to take action. |
James Webb is fully deployed | Since 90% of the cost is probably in R+D of the telescope, one could build and deploy another for another 10%. Why isn't this done? Why is every space telescope completely unique? |
Do svidaniya, Igor, and thank you for Nginx | It still surprises me that NGINX beat out Apache so quickly even though Apache had way more modules and was/is entirely free vs. NGINX which is more or less "open core" with some nice features requiring commercial licensing. |
Google Tag Manager, the new anti-adblock weapon (2020) | God damn... this is it, this is the end-game. There's no way to fight this unless you customize and maintain blocking scripts for each individual website.Yes, websites could always have done this, but the REST (CDN-bypassing) requests' cost and the manual maintenance for the telemetry endpoints and storage was an impediment that Google just gives them a drop-in solution for :(I think Google is happy to eat some of the cost for the "proxy" server given the abundance of data they'll be gobbling up (not just each request's query string and users' IP address but -being a subdomain- all the 1st party cookies as well). I don't have the time or energy to block JavaScript and/or manually inspect each domain's requests to figure out if they use server-side tracking or not.I honestly don't know if there's any solution to this at all. Maybe using an archive.is-like service that renders the static page (as an image at the extreme), or a Tor-like service and randomizes one's IP address and browser fingerprint. |
I thought I would have accomplished a lot more today and also before I was 35 | Funny piece. It can be so easy to waste time when we have the internet. I think the most dangerous distractions are the ones that feel productive but don’t actually work toward your goals. For example, browsing hacker news. Such an activity is useful every now and then, but at least for myself I often scroll around only to realize later that it was a massive waste of time I could’ve spent working on something I care about. I think the brain justifies it since hey, at least I’m “learning” something (not really).Even something like an addictive videogame is designed to make you feel productive by giving you levels to progress through etc—fundamentally I think we all have a desire to produce, it’s just easy to spend time putting that energy into the wrong forms of productive activity, since these are usually easier and less isolating than actually producing crafts or products. |
What I Wish I'd Known About Equity Before Joining a Unicorn | As always the main rule you need to live by is value the equity at zero and you'll be (maybe) happy. Short of being a founder (and thus not really being offered equity) I have never treated these things as anything beyond a minor on paper "bonus". Given you'd be lucky to get anything more than 1% even as a first employee I find them next to worthless as early stage motivators. Which is how everyone seems to play it - "we're all in this together" - mmm. As long as the salary is market rate I ignore equity altogether. |
Felt | What nonsense! Gave up after reading this."""
Where typical internet maps take 30+ seconds to load after each pan and zoom
"""What typical maps are the talking about? |
Show HN: Obsidian Canvas – An infinite space for your ideas | Obsidian Canvas uses a new JSON-based file format that we have open-sourced under MIT license. You can see the spec here:https://github.com/obsidianmd/obsidian-api/blob/master/canva...Just like all other files in Obsidian, canvas files are your own and local to your device. You're still linking to your own Markdown files which are just as future-proof as ever.We decided to create the .canvas format because there wasn't any pre-existing canvas-type format we could find that fit our priorities around longevity, readability, interoperability and extensibility.The .canvas format is designed to be as easy to parse as possible. We've already seen a few plugins take advantage of it, and we hope that more tools will become available that can use the .canvas format. |
The early days of Linux | This is a great read of a humble start of history. The A..B concurrency printing, helping Linus out implementing Sprintf, learning assembly. Building it all towards a coherent system.What was truly profound is how Linux and other open source systems and libraries completely cracked open systems software for the masses. Back in the early 90s, everything around Unix, operating systems, compilers, tools, everything was crazy expensive to buy. And all of a sudden here came this thundering herd of code that was all completely free. Of course Gnu stuff had been around for awhile, but Linux is what propelled it into warp speed adoption. In thr 90s I was privileged to work at Bear Stearns and had a Sparc Station on my desk and regular interactions with SunOS, Solaris, and HPUX for the guys downstairs. Outside of University and business, it was hard for individuals to break into it.By the late 90s any old anybody could get a CD ROM with Red Hat or whatever. |
Google Memory Loss | I've noticed this many times too, particularly recently, and I call it "Google Alzheimer's" --- what was once a very powerful search engine that could give you thousands (yes, I've tried exhausting its result pages many times, and used to have much success finding the perfect site many dozens of pages deep in the results) of pages containing nothing but the exact words and phrase you search for has seemingly degraded into an approximation of a search engine that has knowledge of only very superficial information, will try to rewrite your queries and omit words (including the very word that makes all the difference --- I didn't put it in the search query for nothing!), and in general is becoming increasingly useless for finding the sort of detailed, specific information that search engines were once ideal for.To add insult to injury, if you do try to make complex and slightly varying queries and exhaust its result pages in an effort to find something you know exists, very often it will think you're a robot and present you with a CAPTCHA, or just ban you completely (solving the CAPTCHA just gives you another, and no matter how many you solve it keeps refusing to search; but they probably benefit from all the AI help you just gave them, what bastards...) for a few hours.Google had the biggest most comprehensive index for many years, which is why it was my sole search engine. Now I'm often finding better results with Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, and even Yandex, but part of me is very worried that large and extremely valuable parts of the Web are, despite still being accessible, simply "falling off the radar". |
Google is already pushing WEI into Chromium | I feel like I have to repeat this, since so much is at stake here, where it is about the preservation of the web as we know it today, at the peril of having it turned into yet another walled garden:The only way around the dystopia this will lead to is to constantly and relentlessly shame and even harass all those involved in helping create it. The scolding in the issue tracker of that wretched "project" shall flow like a river, until the spirit of those pursuing it breaks, and the effort is disbanded.And once the corporate hydra has regrown its head, repeat. Hopefully, enough practise makes those fighting the dystopia effective enough to one day topple over sponsoring and enabling organisations as a whole, instead of only their little initiatives leading down that path.Not a pretty thing, but necessary. |
Procrastination is about managing emotions, not time | As the society advances and problems are solved for us, we are left with the most central core problem, ourselves.Related to concepts like 'agency', 'impulse control', 'willpower', 'restraint', 'free will', 'delayed gratification' are connected to our status and self image.
If you think humans as AI systems, we are facing issues with our reward function. Short term reward seems to overrule long term planning and goals if the outside pressure is not there and we have a choice.Is this something without technical solution or can we learn to reprogram our reward function with biofeedback, brain implants, meds or application in Apple watch?I think the subject deserves a Black Mirror episode and few startups. |
Google no longer providing original URL in AMP for image search results | How does anyone think this is a good idea? It should be clear which news site I am reading when I'm reading an article. Otherwise, how do I know which bias to apply? On iOS, the title bar says "google.com" whether I'm reading an article from CNN.com or WashingtonExaminer.com.Of all the anti-competitive actions google has taken around search results, AMP is by far the worst. I hope they get smacked down for it in the upcoming anti-trust lawsuit. And kudos to Apple for refusing to change the URL bar like Google does on Android. |
Microsoft Open Sources C# Compiler | They also announced as part of this that they are putting a large swatch of their .NET Source code under Apache 2 and accepting pull requests.Folks, this is a very big deal for Microsoft. Who would have imagined this 10 years ago?Here is an image that shows what they are putting into the community
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BkT9oBcCQAAHIAV.jpg:large |
Ask HN: What do you want to see in Ubuntu 17.10? | - FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop- HEADLINE: Please, please, please fix space issues with /boot.- DESCRIPTION:I'm constantly running out of space in /boot, due to kernel updates. It drives me so incredibly batty. If I had to guess, this is due to poor defaults in the installer for folks that opt to encrypt their whole disk. Even still, this system was setup back on 14.04 (don't think it started on 12.04), and I have no intention of reinstalling from scratch just to fix it.Publish something official on how to fix this problem! Make it easy and stress free! Yell at the people who didn't catch this bug before it went out! Sorry, but this is just a really bad problem: it leads to folks like me wasting time, and probably a whole bunch of other folks just not being able to install updates, and no idea why.- ROLE/AFFILIATION: software developer in the federal government |
Panama Papers: Mossack Fonseca leak reveals elite's tax havens | Hilarious that BBC, a broadcaster paid for by British tax payers, has a subheading in that article titled "Russian connection" describing various dealings of Russian characters who are "close associates" of Putin and an equally sordid "Iceland connection" but not even a mention of David Cameron's father's tax evading schemes listed in the documents which the people of Great Britain should be vastly more interested in. Not to mention direct implications of various other western puppets (Saudi King, Ukrainian PM, Iraqi former PM) and other dubious "connections". |
maps.google.com now redirects to google.com/maps | This is a fantastic example of motivated reasoning. This "change" (which apparently isn't even new) can have so many different reasons, some of which are less harmful and some of which are probably worse (privacy-wise) than the one mentioned here. There is no indication that re/mis-using permissions is specifically what they wanted to do here, there is also no example of them doing it right now. Don't get me wrong, there is also no evidence that this isn't the real reason and that they wouldn't do that in the future. But the blog post basically list a single symptom and jumps right to the one conclusion that fits what the author expects. |
Explain Shell | Very well done. Now I just wish this was a shell program! user@server:~$ explain iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -s ip-to-block -j DROP |
"Lighten up" | You see, I have problem with posts like this.First I'm like - "Woah, I can't imagine someone would be so insensitive to make joke like this!" and get all fed up and upset.But then... then I freeze, because next example is something that I can imagine myself saying. "Oop, Katie's got the low cut dress on today! I know where I'm sitting!"
I... I'm at loss of words. I was trained during my teenage years, that it's cool to say things like that. As I'm getting older, I see how sexist and demeaning this is. But it's really hard to break this habit, and this "Hey, it's just meaningless joke, right?!" line of thought. I try, I really try, but sometimes I forget myself.On a similar note - I have exact same problem with how I perceive woman and man having multiple sexual partners.
"Good key opens many locks, but good lock is opened by only one key" and all that bullshit - I know that it's ridiculous to hold woman and men to different standard in this regard, and I mostly learned to don't do that, but my... instinct that was ingrained in me by society tells me otherwise.I find myself struggling to suppress my subconscious mind in this regard, and frankly, I don't know how I can help it.Edit for clarity: I don't have problem with such posts being written and upvoted, quite opposite actually, I'm glad they are written and read. I have problem with how posts like this make me feel. |
Key Reinstallation Attacks – Breaking WPA2 by Forcing Nonce Reuse | As an Android user is there any mitigation for this other than ditching my handset and switching to an iPhone or waiting (hopelessly) for a patch from my vendor.This really does highlight the absolute disaster zone that the Android handset market has become as far as updates are concerned. I'm sure the Pixels will get a fix relatively quickly but almost every other Android user is going to be left in security limbo. |
Thank you HN | >...and started working outI can't emphasize enough how much this helps. If anyone is suffering from depressions, anxiety and overthinking -- consider starting working out. It will make wonders to your mood. I'm not saying that it will fix your suffering entirely, because it typically requires a mental effort as well. But it will make your life noticeably more enjoyable. |
Playdate – A New Handheld Gaming System | I personally love weird single-purpose hardware. Unfortunately it tends not to do very well commercially.Anybody remember this guy? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiReader |
VLC contributor living in Aleppo writing about the Paris attacks | I work with a Muslim and I'm a Christian. Since we are both very conservative, I actually have more in common with him than with my secular coworkers and friends. Unfortunately we both work remotely and live several hundred miles from each other. I think we could be good friends if we lived closer.One thing I have learned talking with my Muslim coworker is that, just like in Christianity, there are many divisions and sects within the religion. I am Atlantean and go to an Atlantean church. I would not want to be called a Phoenician or Liliputian christian (made up names cause I don't want to offend anyone this early in the morning).Just as with anything else, the closer and more involved you are with something the more you see distinctions between different categories of that thing. As a total outsider your categories tend to be large, all encompassing and dominated by the loudest, most visible or most discussed sub category. For most westerners I think that sub category is, unfortunately radicalised Muslims.I'm fortunate that my coworker has given me a different perspective. I never believed all Muslims were radicalised but the true revelation for me was that my Muslim coworker was more like me than most non-muslims. It saddens me to see states in my country rejecting refugees from Syria. They are depriving their residents of potential friends and coworkers, potential spouses, neighbors or playmates that can give them a new perspective and help make their world a little larger and more interesting.Edit: I'd love to have a discussion with anyone who disagrees with me. (Not really making an argument but whatever) if you're down voting at least make a comment please. |
Google Workers Urge C.E.O. To Pull Out of Pentagon A.I. Project | This may be an uncomfortable fact but people have surprisingly short memories: the military funded the majority of the early advances in systems, networking, and cryptography (and especially as a large part of the latter subject area, invested heavily in fundamental, theoretical research). Not saying that I disagree with the employees' opinion, just that DoD/Pentagon involvement in artificial intelligence research shouldn't be viewed as a necessarily bad thing. Many other major powers have heavily invested in AI across all fronts (including military applications), and it would be stupid for the US to not have one of its' largest strategic assets to not be part of the process. |
NordVPN confirms it was hacked | Someone is probably going to ask what other HN users recommend as an alternative. Personally, I use Private Internet Access because they're the only provider I've found with a track record of demonstrably not being able to turn your records over to someone asking for them [1].[1] https://torrentfreak.com/private-internet-access-no-logging-... |
Stable Diffusion 2.0 | I am a solo dev working on a creative content creation app to leverage the latest developments in AI.Demoing even the v1 of stable diffusion to the non-technical general users blows them away completely.Now that v2 is here, it’s clear we’re not able to keep pace in developing products to take advantage of it.The general public still is blown away by autosuggest in mobile OS keyboards. Very few really know how far AI tech has evolved.Huge market opportunity for folks wanting to ride the wave here.This is exciting for me personally, since I can keep plugging in newer and better versions of these models into my app and it becomes better.Even some of the tech folks I demo my app to, are simply amazed how I can manage to do this solo. |
EU to stop changing the clocks in 2019 | I know this is against the bandwagon but still: it was just fine the way it was. Changing the clocks (that is, society's timetable) to match the suntime is a good idea. And countries should absolutely have the freedom to choose what suits them best.Now we're going to have to pick either summer time or winter time, to be on all year. Pick the latter? Bye-bye awesome summer afternoons with the sun setting down at 8:30. Pick the former? Say hello to waking up in darkness with the sun rising at 9 during winter. |
Report: 90% of nurses considering leaving the profession in the next year | I've spent a fair amount of time talking with nurses about the problems. I'm related to a bunch of people who are nurses across disciplines (ER, ICU, med/surg, etc). It's been enlightening hearing them talk about the problems...1. Many new nurses make the same or more and long time nurses. It's frustrating when the nurse in charge with the most experience is making less than new nurses. Some hospitals are even trying to stop nurses from talking about pay.2. Patients in COVID have become downright mean. Add this to the problems nurses have management and doctors (who are often rude and arrogant) and it's a poor culture. The quality of the environment, from a mental health standpoint, is on the decline.3. IT systems that they have to use were designed by people who have not talked with the workers who use them. They may have been designed with laws and compliance in mind. Nurses aren't the people who choose or pay for these systems. But, they use them a lot (maybe the most) and it's obvious they weren't taken into account when designing the UX. It's maddening for them.This one is big for product designers. Often we listen to the people who pay for it and miss out on the people who actually have to use it.4. Nurses are the catch all for jobs. Not enough aides? Nurses do the work. Food service workers don't want to take food into a patients room... nurses will do it. Not only do they have higher ratios of patients but they fill in the work when other areas have shortages, too. So, the work per patient goes up. Pay doesn't go up, though. |
“About one-third of Basecamp employees accepted buyouts today” | Interestingly the employees who left have the best career prospects. Entire iOS team, head of marketing and head of product team.The 6 months free money is hard for anyone entering a strong job market to pass up.A lot of comments seem to think 1/3 left because of the no politics policy. 1 / 3 left because it would increase their wealth or give them the summer covid took away last year.How many people would leave your job now for 6 months salary? How many could get a job tomorrow if they did?A few probably left because they want to change social policy. Many are probably staying but still want to change social policy. The head of marketing, products and the iOS team are not leaving because of social policy. |
Richard Stallman reveals he has cancer in the GNU 40 Hacker Meeting talk [video] | Asking out of curiosity, not to be cruel: I wonder if he's willing to use medical equipment that uses non-Free software? To my knowledge, his stated position against using non-Free software is pretty much absolute; but given that medical equipment's software is almost universally non-Free, taking that stance here would seriously endanger his ability to receive necessary medical care. |
Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers | Max 16GB of RAM on these new machines is really not that great to be honest. The mini supported up to 64GB before. |
Thanks HN: You helped save a company that now helps thousands make a living | I have mixed feelings about this story. I applaud your resolve, and you have certainly had a tremendous amount of success that should be celebrated!But I can't help but think about the 9 founders of other companies that had the same resolve in the same situation, but things did not work out so well.All you other people thinking about going for broke need to be ready to hit bottom and build yourself back up afterwards, because 9 times out of 10 that's what will happen. Or, even better, first put yourself into a situation where you don't need to go for broke to give yourself an excellent chance at success.I think this is why a lot of crazy big startups come from younger people, they can afford to go for broke before they have a family and other obligations, because the worst that can happen is they are left with nothing, then they settle for a high-paying job at a big tech company and 2 months later they can afford a new car. |
Announcing Rust 1.0 | I would like to take this opportunity to formally apologize to the HN community for that time back in early 2012 when I predicted that Rust 1.0 would be released "in about six months or so", and later proceeded to proudly proclaim that 0.4 would be the last release with major breaking changes to the syntax. I hope you all can find it in your hearts to forgive me. :) But at long last, we did it, and it's almost too good to believe.But as much work as it's been just to get to this point, the real struggle begins today. Months and years of brutal campaigning, compiler engineering, and careful language design lie ahead. If you've yet to take a look at Rust, please do, and report your findings so that we can better prioritize our efforts for the near future. If you like what you see, there's plenty of work to go around and a welcoming community should you decide to dig in and join us. And if you don't like what you see, that's fine too; Rust is not the language to end all languages! We're just here to make the world a little safer, however we can. Hopefully today is but the first page in that story. :) |
Mozilla VPN | Come on Mozilla, hurry up! I want to give you money for goods and services (I also donate monthly [1]), but I'm not that interested in a VPN (I can and do also pay Mullvad).Give me that real internet stuff - email, calendar, file sync, chat(?) - give me Firefox Premium. Bundle in the Lockwise password manager. I'd pay good money to see a company fill the void of paid, privacy first essential internet services and I think Mozilla is one of the foremost existing players to pull it off. They've started talking about Firefox Premium a while ago now [2] and it's obviously not easy to build all of this in a lean way, but I'll happily pitch in. If only to help make Firefox development less dependant on Google or Yahoo.[1]: https://donate.mozilla.org/[2]: https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/10/18660344/firefox-subscrip... |
The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever | While this bill is strongly opposed by the Internet Society, ACLU, CDT, and EFF, the critiques I've read don't get much into the real "why" behind this legislation continuing to be pushed so forcefully. The pretext is, of course, "protect the children" and more generally law-and-order with a bonus side-helping of "stop those awful social media giants." While these justifications are (hopefully) obvious misdirection to most, I'd like to see more mainstream discussion about who this bill benefits and why. The legislation 'coincidentally' achieves exactly the agenda proposed by the "surveillance state" (ie CIA, NSA, FBI, DHS, law enforcement lobby, state prosecutors, etc). While it doesn't specifically prohibit public access to encryption, it seeks to create nearly the same effect by making it legally risky for large social media and platform companies to offer end-to-end encryption as a default to law-abiding citizens. It's no accident that almost every version of the bill creates this exposure to essentially bottomless legal liability for platforms offering secure communications.Frankly, this scares the crap out of me. These people seem incapable of understanding the existential threat to free society and democracy posed by limiting everyone's ability to communicate private thoughts. While not explicitly outlawing untappable communications, it's much easier to identify who is choosing to use end-to-end encryption when it's not the typical default. This will ultimately put all of us who care about secure communications under default suspicion, whether our interest in private comms is a moral ideal, political principle or simply proper technical architecture and data hygiene. In today's multi-national environment of nation-state, criminal and privateer (NSO etc) threat actors, insecure communications over Internet infrastructure should only be seen as an ill-advised risky behavior or a technical bug. |
Open Guide to Amazon Web Services | The "use IAM roles for EC2" recommendation is a bit sketchy. The current security zeitgeist, not just after Colin's post but also after DerbyCon and Black Hat, is that EC2 roles are dangerous and, when under attack, not very predictable. |
YouTube videos that have almost zero previous views | Quoting astrocat from the previous thread:PSA: Watch in an private/incognito tab/window. If you are currently logged into your google account, this WILL pollute your watched history: https://www.youtube.com/feed/history |
FTC fines Twitter $150M for using 2FA phone numbers for ad targeting | This is an interesting part to me: "[T]he new order[0] adds more provisions to protect consumers in the future: ... Twitter must provide multi-factor authentication options that don’t require people to provide a phone number."I would like to see this be a more broad-based rule. No, I am not moved by "SMS is easy" or "getting a number that can receive SMS is harder for scammers to do in bulk." If you must, give users the choice but not the obligation to hand over a mobile number.0 - https://www.ftc.gov/legal-library/browse/cases-proceedings/2... |
Semaphore: A Full-Body Keyboard | Author here! Pleasant surprise to find my project at the top of HN this morning with such positive feedback :) I'm happy to answer any questions or hear suggestions for future tweaks. Planning to make this into a customizable full-body game controller as well. |
I'm choosing euthanasia etd 1pm. I have no last words. | This keeps me up at night. I hope the collective advancement in science makes it possible to defeat cancer some day. I believe/hope that my contribution as a insignificant CS-student helps somebody develop tools that help somebody researching etc.I am really convinced that every advancement is connected somehow and the collective improvement in efficiency and livings standards makes it possible to commit more resources and train even more students to work on hard problems.Even the work on something unrelated like React might somehow help if you observe humanity as a whole.Also f*ck cancer (i read the guidelines and i found no statue against insulting cancer, if there is a user named cancer its a misunderstanding and you should really consider changing your username) |
Reddit just passed Facebook as #3 most popular website in US | Reddit works because it’s anonymous, information-dense and relatively ad-free. Change any one of those three and the user base will abandon you.It’s been Reddit’s dilemma since the beginning: you can’t monetize a toxic user base that has total freedom. Sure you can try to drive away the toxic users, but it turns out that those toxic users are also pretty influential in non-toxic aspects.I’m still skeptical of Reddit’s ability to turn a profit. But as a community platform it’s the best out there IMO. |
Mozilla Files Suit Against FCC to Protect Net Neutrality | Am I the only person who thinks this whole approach to Net Neutrality is wrongly pursued through the FCC? Hear me out: if the networks don't access a physically limited resource like the RF spectrum and there isn't any censorship issue at stake, if the issue is truly differential access and usage due to oligopolistic limitation, isn't it for the FTC to intervene and bust up throttling and content blocks under restraint of trade doctrine? |
Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony | It's a depressing situation, particularly knowing that Firefox is pretty much kept alive at Google's whim. It makes one seriously wonder whether it is feasible at all to maintain an independent open-source web browser in 2021. People tend to blame Mozilla's management and I'm sure there have been management failures but I'm not sure what they could do to make Firefox a thriving, independent, sustainable browser. It seems that the market niche of tech-capable people who value privacy and customisation over a simplified UX is not capable of sustaining Firefox on its own. So Mozilla tries to move in Chrome's direction, removing configuration options and "dumbing down" the UI, which frustrates its existing user base (including me) while apparently also failing to eat into Chrome's market share.So what to do? Go back to being the quirky, heavily configurable browser we all know and love? That would be great for me, but even assuming Mozilla can afford to do that now (greater configurability leads to greater code complexity and therefore greater maintenance costs), experience seems to suggest it won't be enough to allow Mozilla grow its market share to a sustainable level.Finally, and this is a bit of a tangent, but I've never quite understood why Mozilla got such a hard time from users about telemetry. I understand that telemetry is in general something to be suspicious of, but we're not talking about handing your data over to Google so they can target you with ads; we're talking about sharing technical data with a non-profit organisation to help them maintain and improve the browser you rely on. Mozilla are removing a feature you use daily? Okay, did you enable the telemetry that lets them know you use it? Receiving and analysing user data is increasingly important to delivering a good user experience. If open-source projects can't access the same data as proprietary ones do, we can't expect them to be able to react to user demands in the same way, and so we can't expect them to be able to compete in today's market. |
Memory Allocation | Excellent, excellent article! I have a question though.> Couldn't we rearrange the memory to get a block of 6 contiguous bytes? Some sort of defragmentation process?> Sadly not. Remember earlier we talked about how the return value of malloc is the address of a byte in memory? Moving allocations won't change the pointers we have already returned from malloc. We would change the value those pointers are pointed at, effectively breaking them. This is one of the downsides of the malloc/free API.But why not? Couldn't we store information about old pointers somewhere and match them with new addresses when defragmenting? Some kind of virtual memory driver that would map old pointers to new adresses transparently for the programs? Or would it be too much overhead for too little benefit? |
They Used To Last 50 Years | I've worked on hundreds of domestic appliances.Newer ones from any manufacturer are indeed failing more often, and are designed worse.The only explanation is that this is on purpose - just like cars or laptops or smartphones, they are designed to fail faster so you buy new ones. Planned obsolescence, plain and simple.The best appliances today, by the way, are made by Bosch/Siemens and Miele. None of the other manufacturers come close, period.Interestingly, the high-end machines from Bosch/Siemens made in Germany are higher quality than the ones made in Poland, China, Spain or Turkey.Same design, but it seems they use lower quality electronics and metals, as the most common failures are with the motors, control boards and bearings. |
Facebook Is Giving Advertisers Access To Your Shadow Contact Information | What's facebook's boiling point? My guess is they'll respond, they'll no longer use 2FA #'s for ads, the damage will have been done, and 99% of the population won't know any of it occurred. We'll repeat this cycle when a fresh revelation occurs months from now, as facebook continues to test how much they can leverage for more ad revenue.But none of it is actually slowing FB down. Its biggest dip in value came from decelerating growth and spending to make FB more user-friendly, so there's a clear disconnect between shareholder incentives and those of the general populace.On top of that, most people remain unaware that FB owns both WhatsApp and IG, and while the departures of their top brass have made waves in these circles, it's not a concern for most.I don't see FB's dominance relenting any time soon, though I wish it would. |
Show HN: 40k HN comments mentioning books, extracted using deep learning | Interesting idea but not completely accurate. My own comment about how I hated Thinking, Fast and Slow seems to be counted as a recommendation. |
Dear Google, Apple, Mozilla, and MS: Please End Auto-Playing Media in Browsers | Things that make me just close tabs straight away:1) Autoplaying videos, especially ads.2) Pop-ups / overlays.3) Loading lots of extra elements causing text to jump around.Especially true if I'm just browsing around and click on something that looks interesting, the above will take that thing from "this might be worth 30 seconds" to "not worth it".Why kill that little dopamine boost someone just got from clicking on a link to your site? If you're wondering why your bounce rate is so high... though maybe these dark patterns bring in enough ad revenue that it's worth it. I don't see how 3 helps that, though, just lazy coding. Or maybe other people are more tolerant and it doesn't really affect the bounce rate. |
Apple has pushed a silent Mac update to remove hidden Zoom web server | It's been rather disturbing to see this whole thing play out --- I'm not taking sides here, but Apple "flexing its arms" in this manner shows that it is willing and has the power to go beyond policing its App Store and such (which while I do not like, I feel it does have the right to) and involve itself in the affairs of third-party software which it did not originally install. (This is subtly different from updating things like OS files, for example. Some other comments here suggest that the installation of this update is controlled by a setting described as being for system related updates, which a user would expect to leave his/her third-party software alone.)You may agree with its decision this time, but will you always agree? Apple's wielding of power in this way is likely to attract the attention of groups such as copyright/IP lobbyists, which have an immense desire to have all "non-authorised" files/software erased from all user's machines.As the saying goes, "two wrongs don't make a right".In any case, the idea of the OS/platform vendor meddling with third-party software that it doesn't like just feels wrong. I know Apple has historically held tight control over its mobile platforms, but the Mac is meant to be different.I am not an Apple customer, and I now feel even more reluctant to become one. |
Choose Boring Technology | There's a longer term issue that appears to be missing here.
At what point do you change? There must be a point otherwise we'd all be here writing COBOL/CICS with some whizzy Javascript interface library.Over time it becomes harder and harder and more and more expensive to maintain old technology. Because frankly maintaining old technology is pretty boring and career destroying so you need to be paid more and more to do it.The marginal benefit of the new shiny is indeed an overhead you should try and avoid, but also you have to dodge the trap of being stuck in a technology when everybody else has moved on.Anyway back to the Adabas support... |
Dsxyliea | Ugh, as someone with dyslexia, it's nothing visual, so trying to visualize being dyslexic is an exercise in futility.You know those "drunk" googles that distort your view? They certainly make it harder to walk, but they in no way make you feel drunk...Try explaining someone what it feels like being on LSD... you can't.Telling people that letters jump around is an easy way to dismiss people whit out having to do a lengthy and tiring explanation that likely wont be understood anyway.I do appreciate the effort that went into this, and that people try to understand, but I don't think this particular experiment is helpful, because people will get the wrong idea about what dyslexia is.Edit: Arzh is right in that I'm being a bit harsh/dramatic here, so I made some small changes. |
I'm “still afraid to use spaces in file names” years old | I work on a complex desktop application, and it's been astounding the number of bugs that have appeared over the years triggered by spaces and other unusual characters in file names. If you do anything with subprocesses or path processing, it's absurdly easy to hit in a thousand different ways, over and over again.Pro tip: rename your development directory (or even better: the workspace path in CI) to put a space and/or special characters in it.Forces you to deal with this properly, and immediately ensures that every automated test checks this case without you having to remember every time. Hasn't been particularly inconvenient, since I'm autocompleting it 99% of the time anyway, and I haven't shipped a single path parsing bug since. |
YouTube bans content “showing users how to bypass secure computer systems” | Emperor G built a beautiful walled city, inviting everyone in, encouraging them to paint their houses whatever color they like. A year later, Big G banned blue houses. If you didn't like the rules, you were more than welcome to build your house outside the city and paint it whatever color you like.Only most people don't leave - blue is just one color and they weren't very interested in it anyway. Besides, the city is so beautiful and provides for their every need. In the coming years, people who want to paint their house blue badly enough to leave paradise are heavily scrutinized and eventually considered outcasts.Over the years, more and more colors are slowly banned, one by one. People start to notice and complain once their favorite color is outlawed. But decades have passed since Emperor G's generous invitation. Entire generations have lived, died, and raised children inside the city. No one knows how to navigate the wilderness anymore. And even if they could, why would they want to? Thorns and weeds have overgrown the wasteland; it's much safer to stay inside the city walls. Besides, it's cozy and we have everything we need in here.In theory you are correct. In practice, if 97% of society exclusvely uses said aggregator/community to find videos - 97% of your potential audience will never know the video exists - is that not still censorship? |
This is a web page | "At it's heart, web design should be about words."No.The web is not just a place for text / words, that is not its heart and soul, and therefore neither is that the case for web design. It really never has been. I see no great argument in favor of words being the core over any other form of expression. Today's bandwidth more than allows for beautiful video, animation, high quality graphics and photos, etc. Or low key graphics, subtle interactivity, and so on. It's absurd to argue that such a rich medium should always be focused on words.Text does not have to be the focus. It depends on what the purpose to be achieved is. |
Broken | Things are so broken here at Apple. I joined about 4 years ago.I am awed by the fact that we manage to release any software at all, let alone functional software.The biggest problem is communication. No one fucking communicates.- No communication between orgs. Tons of bureaucratic tape to cut through just to get a hand on someone working on a different product- Barely any communication between teams. Literally every group of 4 people is in a little silo with no incentive to go outside it- Broken management structure. I have had many managers (a red flag in itself) but even worse none of the managers take suggestions from engineers. Everything is purely top down. If an engineer realizes there is a problem on a macro scale they cannot fix it. It is literally impossible to unite more than 1.5 teams to get anything done.- So what happens is that you’re working on a product that’s part of another product but you never talked to any other teams or orgs on how to make your product fit in- 10 different teams working on the same products and services. Zero unification means you are literally wasting developers and internally fragmenting every tool. Even worse, these teams compete for internal market domination- Culture of secrecy means nothing gets fucking done. You file a bug report and you can’t even see it any more for some orgsThis is only the tip of the iceberg. There are fundamental and serious problems at Apple that no one in management gives a shit about solving. Any time engineers try to congregate or work on anything constructive with another team, they are shot down.The only time I have seen cross-team developers working together has been to deal with critical bugs.Because of the lack of communication, none of management’s goals align. They are all out of sync and poorly thought out. So year after year your manager has something they want you to implement but the feature for the year is bullshit because it makes no sense and is just there to pad the manager’s resume.And you can’t speak out about this. Apple doesn’t take well to employees complaining. Even then, because of the lack of organization there is no one you could raise these issues with. |
Apple and Google must allow other in-app payment systems, Korean law declares | I have a question about monopolies and market abuses.Apple released their phone in 2007, the App Store in 2008, and in-app payments in 2009. During that time their marketshare was fairly small, and it didn't start to really grow until they expanded availability to the Verizon network in 2011.Right at launch of the App Store, Apple announced its sales commission would be 30%. Then they extended that same fee to in-app purchases a year later. At the same time they set the rules that third-party app stores were not allowed, and that third-party payment processors could not be used.I'm mentioning all of this history to make this point: Apple made these rules when they were not a monopoly by any definition. They released these products, with these rules, into a free market and let the market (both users and developers) decide which products to use and which products to develop for.Now, obviously, between 2007 and 2021 the iPhone has been a wild success. Its platform has grown in users and developers every year.So in terms of the framing of "market abuse", at what point between the launch of these rules and now did Apple cross that threshold between free-market competitor who can legally control their own platform to monopolist abusing its power?I'm asking this question not just to make a point, but because I think it will be instructive for future companies to understand where in the growth curve the rules they started with can potentially cross over into being "abusive". |
I'm all-in on server-side SQLite | > SQLite isn't just on the same machine as your application, but actually built into your application process. When you put your data right next to your application, you can see per-query latency drop to 10-20 microseconds. That's micro, with a μ. A 50-100x improvement over an intra-region Postgres query.This is the #1 reason my exuberant technical mind likes that we use SQLite for all the things. Latency is the exact reason you would have a problem scaling any large system in the first place. Forcing it all into one cache-coherent domain is a really good way to begin eliminating entire universes of bugs.Do we all appreciate just how much more throughput you can get in the case described above? A 100x latency improvement doesn't translate directly into the same # of transactions per second, but its pretty damn close if your I/O subsystem is up to the task. |
Rarbg Is No More | RARBG was originally Bulgarian, like many other trackers and warez stuff. Eastern Europe - inside EU or outside of the EU - has always been major player in this scene. RIP.I'm still curious how it's possible to run such global illegal operations without being exposed or caught.How is it still possible to remain anonymous on the Internet, considering in this age the thing is very mature and well commercialised? |
Every time you click this link, it will send you to a random Web 1.0 website | What exactly marks the difference between Web 1.0, Web 2.0 and Web 3.0? I read these terms all the time, is there a good explanation? |
Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competing products | The solution isn't hoping the free market would solve this with a competing platform. The solution is to create regulations & laws that prevent this behavior.You're either a platform/retailer or you're a manufacturer. You don't get to be both because we see the perverse incentive that happens when it's allowed. |
Blocklist Facebook domains | I highly recommend using uMatrix[1][2] if you're very privacy-conscious. It's the full-blown everything-at-your-fingertips console.By default, it blocks third-party scripts/cookies/XHRs/frames (with an additional explicit blacklist). You then manually whitelist on a matrix which types of requests from which domains you want to allow. Your preferences are saved.It is a bit annoying the first time you visit any new domain, because you need to go through a bootstrapping whitelist process to make it work. After a while I find I do it almost automatically though.I use it in conjunction with uBlock Origin and Disconnect, and it still catches the vast majority of things. As a nice side-effect, I find I keep pretty up-to-date with new SAAS companies coming out!---[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/umatrix/ogfcmafjal...[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/umatrix/ |
Architecture.md | Any word on supporting diagrams inside GitHub flavored markdown? |
Bongo Cat | It uses jQuery extensively. The frontend developer in me wants to make a fork written in typescript using react and redux toolkit to manage keystrokes. Then I realize it is just a fun toy. |
Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots | My startup is essentially an advertising aggregator (pooling traffic from a variety of publishers and routing it to advertisers) and dealing with things like bot detection is a HUGE chunk of what we work on, technology-wise. Let me try and give you an idea of how deep the rabbit hole can go.- Okay, you want to detect bots. Well, "good" bots usually have a user agent string like, "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)." So, let's just block those.- Wait, what are "those?" There is no normalized way of a user agent saying, "if this flag is set, I'm a bot." You literally would have to substring match on user agent.- Okay, let's just substring match on the word "bot." Wait, then you miss user agents like, "FeedBurner/1.0 (http://www.FeedBurner.com)." Obviously some sort of FeedBurner bot, but it doesn't have "bot" or "crawler" or "spider" or any other term in there.- How about we just make a "blacklist" of these known bots, look up every user agent, and compare against the blacklist? So now every single request to your site has to do a substring match against every single term in this list. Depending on your site's implementation, this is probably not trivial to do without taking some sort of performance hit.- Also, you haven't even addressed the fact that user agents are specified by the clients, so its trivial to make a bot that identifies itself as "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:14.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/14.0.1." No blacklist is going to catch that guy.- Okay, let's use something else to flag bot vs. non-bot. Say, let's see if the client can execute Javascript. If so, let's log information about those that can't execute Javascript, and then built some sort of system that analyzes those clients and finds trends (for example, if they originate from a certain IP range).- This is smarter than just matching substrings, but this means you may not catch bots until after the fact. So if you have any sort of business where people pay you per click, and they expect those clicks not to be bots, then you need some way to say, "okay, I think I sent you 100 clicks, but let me check if they were all legit, so don't take this number as holy until 24 hours have passed." This is one of the reasons why products like Google AdWords don't have real-time reporting.- And then when you get successful enough, someone is going to target your site with a a very advanced bot that CAN seem like a legit user in most cases (ie. it can run Javascript, answer CAPTCHAs), and spam-click the shit out of your site, and you're going to have a customer that's on the hook to you for thousands of dollars even though you didn't send them a single legit user. This will cause them to TOTALLY FREAK THE FUCK OUT about this and if you aren't used to handling customers FREAKING THE FUCK OUT, you are going to have a business and technical mess on your hands. You will have a business mess because it will be very easy to conclude you did this maliciously, and you're now one Hacker News post away from having a customer run your name through the mud and for the next several months, 7 out of the top 10 results on any Google search for your company's name will be that post and related ones. And you'll have a technical mess because your system is probably based on, you know, people actually paying you what you think they should, and if you have no concept of "issuing a credit" or "reverting what happened," then get ready for some late nights.I'm seriously only scratching the surface here. That being said, I'm not saying, "this is a hard problem, cut Facebook some slack." If they're indeed letting in this volume of non-legit traffic, for a company with their resources, there is pretty much no excuse.Even if you don't have the talent to preemptively flag and invalidate bot traffic, you can still invest in the resources to have a good customer experience and someone that can pick up a phone and say, "yeah, please don't worry about those 50,000 clicks it looks like we sent you, it's going to take us awhile but we'll make sure you don't have to pay that and we'll do everything we can to prevent this from happening again." In my opinion this is Facebook's critical mistake. You can have infallible technology, or you can have a decent customer service experience. Not having either, unfortunately, leads to experiences exactly like what the OP had. |
Defending Our Brand | Well done Comodo, this motivated me to donate to Let's Encrypt.https://letsencrypt.org/donate/ |
Yahoo scanned customer emails for US intelligence | I think the attitude here that most tech companies are rolling over and just complying without a single ethical consideration is misplaced.The government has been doing an excellent job of basically extorting these companies into compliance. They threaten the full weight of the US government's wraith and then tie every order up with classifications and gag orders.You aren't legally allowed to talk to other companies in the same position. Most your legal team probably doesn't get to know what's going on. You can't take your case to the public without being held in contempt.I'm not giving these companies a complete pass for being complicit in the erosion of individual's civil liberties but treating this as if the decision is easy is vastly unfair. |
Larry Tesler Has Died | He gave us so much more than cut, copy, paste. It's clear from all the design history books that I've read that he's a legend.[1]NO MODES!https://itsthedatastupid.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/nomodes...[1] One of the more rare sources for Larry Tesler's contributions is his interview for Bill Moggridge's Designing Interactions (http://www.designinginteractions.com/interviews/LarryTesler) |
Subsets and Splits