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Grocy: web-based, self-hosted grocery and household management
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This is exactly what I needed and was thinking about building a similar app. But to be really useful and automated, there's a bit long way I'm afraid. The biggest deal breaker is the time spend for the data entry and updates, leaving a pen-and-paper / notes solution still the most easy to use and just visiting local groceries and shops. I was collecting receipts and playing a bit with scanning of these, but the amount of noise in the data and inconsistencies between shops were a bit pushing away (unless you want to dedicate time cleaning the data and training own tailored information extraction models).One of the options to solve the data entry could be:
- good quality automatic scanning of receipts (not only individual barcodes) from shops using OCR possibly supported with image recognition for double-checking (can happen that products will be mis-labelled or without quantities, etc)
- when ordering on-line, the receipt should be available, so should be also much easier
Yet, not always one will have a meaningful receipt available...Solved the data entry and being able to predict own's supply needs would be also great to have a up-to date management of the inventory. Here are even more challenges on the tracking of the available goods at home, where these are and how many items (and in what state, expiration date, etc) would require most probably implementing different solutions from IoT (connected cameras, sensors, etc.).Then, having a connected home with own groceries supplies under control, one can then automate further the shopping process with feeding-back the information about own's demand to on-line groceries one is subscribed to. This can enable customer subscription plans, and for retailer keeping a possible continuous flow of goods. This could be really really useful especially for upcoming months, when it seems like we are expected to spend a bit more time at home rather than usual, hopefully not fighting in the local shops for the last rolls of the new white paper gold.
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A man owns the most advanced private air force after buying 46 F/A-18s
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I used to have a single shut-down in 2nd amendment arguments. When my opponent would claim that the 2nd amendment gives civilians the power to overthrow a government, my favorite response was to compare poorly armed and trained americans to essentially the Taliban, and follow that up with: and then the US would drone/bomb you to oblivion with their air force superiority, like how Israel dominated the no-air-force Middle East in The Six Day WarLooks like the joke is on me, now: People now actually have an option of building their own Air Force. Greaaaaaat,
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Amazon VP Resigns, Calls Company ‘Chickenshit’ for Firing Protesting Workers
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Why does big always become evil?
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Instagram Has Become SkyMall
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Is there anyone else out there who refuses to buy something if they first learned about it from an ad?
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Another free CA as an alternative to Let's Encrypt
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Can this one provide wildcard certificates without having to update DNS entries every three months?That is the one pain point I have with Let's Encrypt.PS: Yes, you can automate the DNS updates. That is the paintpoint I am talking about. It is one more moving part. One more dependency on a third party. One more thing to set up. One more thing that can break. One more thing that will rot (APIs always change at some point in time).Many people seem to solve the "automate DNS" by putting their DNS credentials on the server which serves their website. This is the worst thing from a security perspective. Now someone who breaks into your application can take over your DNS, point your domain to wherever they like and get any certificate for it they like. This probably enables them to also overtake your email and then escalate further from there.
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A bike parts company ditched Amazon to support indie shops instead
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If I recall correctly, Specialized Bikes pulled all their products from Amazon a while ago, pointing to the failing local bike shops eventually hurting the bike business for everyone.Bicycles are not toys. They are vehicles that need maintenance. You can do much of that maintenance yourself if you're a nerd, but the vast majority of cyclists are dependent on local bike shops to sustain the cycling community.The bicycle/parts manufacturers need a large cycling community to sell products to. The large cycling community will have novice and intermediate cyclists that will abandon cycling if their bikes break down. The novice and intermediate cyclist need local bike shops to do maintenance on their bikes at affordable rates. The local bike shops need a revenue stream beyond labor for maintenance to be affordable. Thus, the major bicycle manufacturers need to give a oligopoly status to the local bike shops in order to keep their user base large.As a life long cyclist, I've seen the industry grow and wane, and throughout it all, I've seen the vast majority of people think bicycles are some type of sports-equipment. Decisions like this are one of only a few business models that I can see sustaining the community. I'm actually surprised and optimistic to see the major manufacturer Trek start building their own brick and mortar shops in certain major cities, though I'd prefer to see this happen through a major cooperative between the various brands. If you care about making cycling a serious, sustainable transit alternative, we need to maintain the entire ecosystem of ridership, which means the race to the bottom on amazon must be stopped.
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Darling – Run Mac apps on Linux
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stupid question because I have not touched a Mac since 1999. What kind of apps are you using on Mac that if you were forced to switch to Linux you feel that you can't live without?the appeal back then (and from I hear people say until today) was always how everything is neatly integrated. a coherent system from the hardware all the way up the stack. not sure if that is overselling it but at least that's how I understand is what people are happy to pay for.
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The United States of America vs. Samuel Bankman-Fried Indictment [pdf]
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How anyone could look at this man's behavior over the last few weeks and not think he was on a fast track to a federal penitentiary is beyond me.A word to the unwise: If you have done something, anything, that you have a credible reason to believe the United States government thinks is illegal, shut up. Do not do any of the following:* Go on a podcast and talk about it* Go on a Twitter livestream and talk about it* Tweet about it* Answer questions from those you committed the crime against about it* Speak to journalists about itInstead, shut up. Shut up shut up shut up shut up. Your defense attorneys and your ankle will thank you.It does not matter whether it was an honest mistake or not. It does not matter whether you agree, philosophically, that it ought to be illegal. It does not matter whether Congress wants to talk to you about it first. It doesn't matter whether you've lived a life so sheltered and privileged that you cannot conceive of the idea that anyone from the government might be out to get you.Imagine the US Justice Department as an extremely patient, extremely hungry predator, and yourself as a delicious, plump prey animal with two broken legs hiding behind a rock. Anything you do or say to anybody except your lawyer will be used against you. So shut up.
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Half of Americans now believe that news organizations deliberately mislead them
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There are literal mountains of sociological studies on how (state and corporate) media have been in service of the powers that be, for decades, and how exactly this works. With a mountain of examples. So, for sociologists, this feels like "wow, it only took half a century to trickle through."Though of course this is the wrong reaction; it has always trickled through. Only that, in the past, it took a few years or decades to be come publicized knowledge that the media lied about every war, about every economic policy, created panics to serve its profit motive and aided the authorities, legitimizing their power; now, we know this in an instant. Thank decentralized distribution protocols.Every piece of information is produced with interests for audiences; objectivity is a pink unicorn Santa Claus, something you really shouldn't believe exists after you're, like, 8. But many of the structural pressures that sociologists have long identified shape commercial and state sourced news stories just don't apply to independent journalists, who don't have to rely on continued access state contacts, commercial paychecks, don't have to serve ad revenue and corporate PR aims, and who are not organizations whose literal existence depends on state licensing as a corporation. Not to say that there is no structural pressure in the independent realm; ideology still exists, years of socialization in the country of origin with their (often folly) "self-evidence" myths exist, the need to eat and make money somehow still exists. But the pressures are much, MUCH fewer than in the case of corporate and state news.
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Python 3.12
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Ooh, seems there is a new syntax for declaring the types of kwargs [1]: from typing import TypedDict, Unpack
class Movie(TypedDict):
name: str
year: int
def foo(*kwargs: Unpack[Movie]): ...
Maybe now I'll be able to actually figure out what data to send libraries without actually reading their source code.1. https://docs.python.org/3.12/whatsnew/3.12.html#pep-692-usin...
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Bullshit
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With Apple, I'm the customer, not a marketer. This makes me comfortable with our relationship. I don't really care about Ping or app store approval policies, so, meh...With Google, I can see their ability to become a shady company pretty easily, but it is just too damn easy to switch search engines. Bing isn't so bad you know.But Facebook knows so much about me, and the network effects are so strong -- this is the company I feel most unpleasantly stuck to. Not "Comcast stuck" mind you, but still, more "stuck" than I'd like. It's like my friends keep having parties at a bar I'm not super fond of... and I keep going.
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If I get hit by a truck...
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After reading a few of his blog posts from previous years, it almost seemed like he saw it coming years ago. Depression is a terrible thing. Most experience it in mild states. Only unlucky few contemplate suicide on daily basis. Some succumb to it within weeks. Others suffer years. Regardless, it's very sad to see someone so bright take their own life. Before you pull the trigger, tighten that rope around your neck or take those pills think of your loved once. Think of your parents. How miserable their life is going to be without the only being they cared for their entire lives. Then think twice about your life. When you kill yourself you kill others around you. This had stopped me once before and i hope it will help others. We all have a purpose here.Rest in peace, Aaron.
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Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance
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I have been very impressed by Firefox lately. Kudos to the whole team at Mozilla.Just about 5 years ago, it was looking to me like it was the end of Firefox. It was Chrome all the way. New features were coming out one after another. Faster rendering. Safe process isolation for each tab. Looked better.But I just switched back last month. It happened kind of randomly. Saw an announcement of a new release ( 33, I think ), downloaded, re-imported my bookmarks from Chrome and just kind of kept using it instead of Chrome since then.I like how the tabs look also I think it feels lighter and snappier on my (now old-ish) laptop.
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I decided to make a graphics card for my Amiga 2000
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How does one learn how to do this stuff? Low level programming interests me immensely but I can never find a good resource for how to learn. I know C, C++, Java, Javascript, Python, Objective-C, Swift, but the only reason I have been able to learn these languages and their technologies is because of the resources available. Can anyone point me in the right direction to become acquainted with low-level technologies/understanding?
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Artem vs. Predator
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This is a great story, but the original title of "Artem vs. Predator" is much better than the submitted one.
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Tricks to Monetize Your Side Projects
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Author here. I'm happy to answer any questions or comments. A little about this post:I was recently commenting on an excellent Show HN for a product called Duet and it was the most karma I have ever received on HN (17 votes in 4 hours), and another respondent said I should write it up as a blog post. So here it is.
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Not OK, Google
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What I think is interesting is that many of us nerds have probably innocuously fantasized about having a Star Trek-like AI assistant with us, but now that they're taking the first steps towards that, we're starting to realize that in order for it to do everything for us, it has to know everything about us, too.
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Buttery Smooth Emacs
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Emacs flickers? I've never noticed this, but I've only ever used it on Linux. Maybe it flickers in OSX?
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Britain passed the “most extreme surveillance law ever passed in a democracy”
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What is the easiest way to explain to the average citizen that the "Nothing to hide, nothing to fear" argument is not a good reason to let the Government keep tabs on your online activities? Most people don't give any thought to online privacy that it truly scares me.
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Linus Torvalds: Successful projects are 99% perspiration and 1% innovation
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Someone who should be a multi billionaire says to ignore marketing and sales and just work.Edit: I'm not saying that he WANTS to be a multi billionaire, but the fact is that he has attained disproportionately less value than he's created. By rights he should be one of the wealthiest people in tech. He might have 150m but that's peanuts given what he's done. The wealth of the guy who made Instagram dwarfs that. The guy who made Whatsapp has a net worth of 8b.Creation might be 90% perspiration as he says, but perspiration doesn't equal success, and success doesn't equal a career. Obviously everything isn't about money, and Torvald's legacy will be timeless. But if you want to ensure earnings, at some point it's a good idea to sell.
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Modern JavaScript for Ancient Web Developers
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The trick to being successful with JavaScript is to relax and allow yourself to slightly sink into your office chair as a gelatinous blob of developer.When you feel yourself getting all rigid and tense in the muscles, say, because you read an article about how you're doing it wrong or that your favourite libraries are dead-ends, just take a deep breath and patiently allow yourself to return to your gelatinous form.Now I know what you're thinking, "that's good and all, but I'll just slowly become an obsolete blob of goo in an over-priced, surprisingly uncomfortable, but good looking office chair. I like money, but at my company they don't pay the non-performing goo-balls." Which is an understandable concern, but before we address it, notice how your butt no-longer feels half sore, half numb when in goo form, and how nice that kind of is. Ever wonder what that third lever under your chair does? Now's a perfect time to find out!As long as you accept that you're always going to be doing it wrong, that there's always a newer library, and that your code will never scale infinitely on the first try, you'll find that you can succeed and remain gelatinous. Pick a stack then put on the blinders until its time to refactor/rebuild for the next order of magnitude of scaling, or the next project.
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Sorting Visualizations
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Good stuff, except for the rainbow color scales [1]. I'd much prefer to see the same in viridis [2] or something similar. The color boundaries on the rainbow scale are not perceived uniformly by human eyes (there might even be a cultural bias at play, i.e. we may distinguish blue from green more readily than different shades of blue, even if they may be objectively at the same distance)[1] https://visual.ly/blog/rainbow-color-scales/[2] https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/viridis/vignettes/in...Edit:Here's my demo, in Viridis: http://gph.is/2xZnKxl(Generated in ipython + numpy + matplotlib + seaborn)
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My new favorite book of all time
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"War is illegal. This idea seems obvious. But before the creation of the United Nations in 1945, no institution had the power to stop countries from going to war with each other. Although there have been some exceptions, the threat of international sanctions and intervention has proven to be an effective deterrent to wars between nations."I would argue that something else that happened in 1945 has been a much bigger deterrent of war - at least among the developed countries of the world: the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Once the world saw the atom bomb's capability for destruction, the motivation to avoid war increased significantly (to put it lightly).Surely the Cold War would have been a real war if not for nukes, no? I don't think the US and Russia were avoiding conflict because "the UN made it illegal."
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The poetry and brief life of a Foxconn worker
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I hope this makes people reconsider if they really need a new laptop, iphone, etc. I think a lot of people would pay twice as much for their devices if they could guarantee the workers weren't being exploited.
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Computer Graphics from Scratch (2017)
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Author here. What a surprise to open HN and see this on the front page :) Happy to answer any questions.
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Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation
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Just throwing out there but has Slack genuinely improved the work lives of anybody? I've used it for my past two jobs and have yet to find a way of using it that doesn't destroy my productivity or make me genuinely afraid of receiving a message and being thrown off what I was doing.
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At what time of day do famous programmers work?
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Personally, I’d be very cautious about assuming that commit time has anything to do with work time.For at least 15 years I’ve had a policy - and so have the people on my teams - to avoid merging or committing to public branches at night or just before & during weekends so that you don’t accidentally hose other people on the team, who rely on automated builds & testing. We write code at all hours, but wait to commit/push/merge to master until the morning when everyone’s there.I realize that not everyone has policies like that, but these are high profile programmers who are likely to have their own complicating factors. Linus, for example, commits a lot of merges that other people depend on; his code reviews and code writing might be on separate schedules.
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Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer
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I've also turned down countless Amazon interview offers. In fact, I don't get how I'm still on their recruitment lists after asking several times to be removed.Amazon has arguably the worst culture out of any large tech company, and generally treats its workers like dirt. Given all my friends that worked for them, almost all have quit within 5 years. Given their abysmal warehouse management, it's no surprise they have the second highest employee turnover out of all Fortune 500 companies[1]. This scummy way of enforcing a "never enforced" NDA is just Amazon doing Amazon things. I mean, just think about the stress and money that must go into fighting a multi-billion dollar corporation in court. Keep away.[1] https://www.ibtimes.com/amazoncom-has-second-highest-employe...
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Trading halted as U.S. stocks plummet
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Genuine question: They can just do that ? Issue a trading halt because they don't like the direction it's going ?> “There’s a reason why they have those circuit breakers -- it’s to give people time to come back from panicked feelings,”Seems strange that the market is kinda able to be manipulated like that. I'm not saying this is a bad move, just surprised that someone can do it.
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Only 9% of visitors give GDPR consent to be tracked
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The author's consent form is very simple and isn't using any shady UX tricks to get the user to consent. One action will opt you in, one action will opt you out.I wonder what results you would see for something like yahoo, the daily mail, reddit, or other sites that heavily rely on ad revenue, which attempt to force the user to accept the cookies through non-obvious no buttons, or long processes to opt out of cookies.
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Chrome Is Bad
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This should not be the #1 story on HN right now. :(It's a single anecdote that deleting Chrome on two computers sped them up. It provides zero evidence (even anecdotal) that it has anything to do with "Keystone" specifically. It provides zero evidence for the idea that "Keystone" is able to "nefariously hide itself from Activity Monitor". And it also completely contradicts the normal user experience of Chrome, which is that most people's computers don't slow down after a Chrome install. (WindowServer on my MBP usually uses Why is this nonsense being upvoted? I get people dislike Google and Chrome, but wouldn't it be better to stick to things backed by real evidence?
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New York Senate passes Right to Repair bill
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4. Excludes motor vehicle manufacturers, manufacturer of motor vehicle
equipment, or motor vehicle dealers and medical devices or a digital
electronic product or embedded software found in medical settings.For all the bravado about standing up to powerful interests, this shows you who the most powerful interests are in that space.
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A backlash against gender ideology is starting in universities
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Can someone please tell me how important this topic based on the amount of news time and eyeballs it attracts relative to the number of people that it affects?The numbers I can find for US citizens is: 0.6% or 1,988,696 out 331,449,281 of people total for the entirety of the US in 2021.>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_demographics_of_the_Unite...In the UK where the featured article took place the latest poll I could find comes counts the number of people who selected "other" when choosing a sex at 0.4% or 224,632 people out of 64,596,800.>https://practicalandrogyny.com/2014/12/16/how-many-people-in...Personally I don't think this is very important compared to other topics. There are more blind people than trans people. There are more people with Alzheimer's than trans people. There are more people in the US who have lost a limb than trans people.I don't mean to downplay what is happening because it is happening but do you not think the amount of outrage this topic generates surpasses the level of impact we can have assuming we fix it? It just feels like we're being distracted.
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Most Canadians believe Facebook harms their mental health
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As a side note, I'm a little saddened when I see friends apologize for their posts. There's such a reaction to "influencer culture" that people feel like foodgrams and humblebrags are a terrible thing, and in excess they certainly can be, but I think from most people it's a billion times better than strawman political arguments and manipulative media that is far worse for our mental health than just comparing ourselves to someone's good day.I had a friend post a picture of food made from ingredients they had made in their own garden, and it made them feel so good to eat it because they had had a rough year and it was a good personal win, so they apologetically posted a photo of it.Forget the rest of the trash on Facebook - seeing a friend I haven't seen in a while experience something good and being able to share that with them is something we need more of in the world. I'd trade away all the "only geniuses can remember the order of operations for this future scam page" or "you won't believe how this person misrepresents their opponents views and tears that misrepresentation apart!" and keep stuff like this.
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You can change your number
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Why would supposedly secure communicator use actual phone number as identifier is beyond me.And everybody does that, either phone number or email.The only software I could find for anonymous communication was old Polish communicator http://gg.pl which uses arbitrary numbers as identifiersI understand that startups are scared that they won't be able to build up userbase from scratch but come on! Discord and Slack did it.
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Due to failure in the IT system, it is not possible to run any trains today
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My curiosity is killing me as to what exactly went wrong. And as someone living in The Netherlands I'm also kind of mad at the apparent fragility of this huge chunk of our infrastructure. If this had happened on a work day, it would have been a real national emergency, rather than just a huge national inconvenience.I would appreciate one of those post-outage "what happened" reports like with the AWS and Facebook outages last year. But outside of IT I don't think anyone really expects those over here. And there might be national security considerations preventing such disclosure until any chance of a repeat has been engineered away, at which point everyone will have forgotten.
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Human brain compresses working memories into low-res ‘summaries’
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I think this is why it's hard sometimes to argue in support of something you believe, even if you're right.At one point, all of the relevant facts and figures were loaded into your working memory, and with that information you arrived at a conclusion. Your brain, however, no longer needs those facts and figures; you've gotten what you needed from them, and they can be kicked out of working memory. What you store there is the conclusion. If it comes up again, you've got your decision, but not all of the information about how you arrived there.So when your decision is challenged, you are not well equipped to defend it, because you no longer retain why you arrived at that decision, just the conclusion itself.It's immensely easier to trust that you arrived at the right conclusion and the person who is in disagreement is missing something, than it is to reload all of the facts and figures back into your brain and re-determine your conclusion all over again. Instead, you can dig in, and resort to shortcuts and logical tricks (that you can pull out without needing to study) to defend what you've previously concluded (possibly correctly, but without the relevant information).If this finding ends up being generally an approximation of how our brains work, it could explain a lot about what's happening to global conversations, particularly around the Internet and on social media specifically. It also suggests a possible solution; make the data quickly available. Make it as seamless as possible to re-load those facts and figures into your working memory, and make it as unpleasant as possible to rely on shortcuts and logical tricks when arguing a point.
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Ask HN: Azure has run out of compute – anyone else affected?
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> We never thought our startup would be threatened by the unreliability of a company like MicrosoftYou're new to Azure I guess.I'm glad the outage I had yesterday was only the third major one this year, though the one in august made me lose days of traffic, months of back and forth with their support, and a good chunk of my sanity and patience in face of blatant documented lies and general incompetence.One consumer-grade fiber link is enough to serve my company's traffic and with two months of what we pay MS for their barely working cloud I could buy enough hardware to host our product for a year of two of sustained growth.
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US Government demands direct police access to European biometric data [pdf]
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Reading through the slides, it appears that what has been discussed is sharing signature and fingerprints for travel into the USA. There is a lot of weasel words, but it's probably worth nothing that the USA currently collects this information for foreign nationals coming into the USA (as the EU does for Americans traveling into the EU). This is being done in the context of a DB query as part of the e VISA application.It's worth noting that almost all of this is still the output of the 9/11, where US and Saudi systems did not communicate and resulted in known terrorists in Saudi Arabia being able to travel at will into the USA.I don't like biometrics, but the hyperbole needs to be tuned down a bit here.
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The Top Idea in Your Mind
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A very closely related idea is that most people have a "ground state": an activity that they naturally gravitate toward when nothing else intervenes.For many people, their ground state is shopping, or talking with friends, or watching tv. Nothing wrong with any of these.For some people, their ground state is aimless coding, or writing, or drifting around some community (e.g., the community of actors, or musicians, etc). Again, nothing wrong with any of these, and they may be a useful way of learning, or having ideas.But for a very small number of people their ground state is much more focused. I've known people whose ground state is writing papers about physics or mathematics. And it's simply unbelievable what such people can get done in a year. (Note, mind you, that very few professional physicists or mathematicians fall into this category.)I haven't founded or worked at a startup. My observation-from-the-outside is that founders often have to take on many different tasks. And I wonder how difficult that must make it for any of them to become a ground state task.
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Solar-panel "trees" really are inferior
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I didn’t find it that harsh. He was direct and took pains not to ridicule a thirteen year-old for making an entirely age-appropriate mistake in measuring the results. Instead, he asked the perfectly valid question of how this becomes news without critical thought.In that, the critique seemed hopelessly ignorant of how the news works. Why should science fair projects be treated any differently than crime, the personal lives of celebrities, politics, or economics? News outlets publish first and ask questions later or not at all. They have gone to court to defend their right to publish things they know to be false.How did a confused science project become international news? Why, the same way that almost any overnight sensation becomes international news, by being digestible, by being something people want to be true, by appealing to their preconceived biases.A commenter pointed out that this is the value of a peer-review process. And indeed, this result was published without peer review. So who is the fool here? The journalist for publishing without review? Or the reader who knowingly accepts the result despite it being published without peer review and/or corroboration?
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How I helped destroy Star Wars Galaxies
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I work at a company that makes MMOs. If this guy's statements are true, then he was making significantly more money exploiting an MMO than I do by programming one.The irony is staggering.
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US and Israel created Stuxnet, lost control of it
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"[Obama] repeatedly expressed concerns that any American acknowledgment that it was using cyberweapons—even under the most careful and limited circumstances—could enable other countries, terrorists or hackers to justify their own attacks. “We discussed the irony, more than once,” one of his aides said.""Irony" is the wrong word. It's "hypocrisy".
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Why I Quit Being So Accommodating (1922)
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What a wonderful article for the Chrismas season. Helping people is so overrated. May we all strive to live in a world like the 1920's; when a 12 year old child could work in a coal mine for 16 hours a day and receive 1-2 dollars, when minimum wage laws were non-existent; and the income disparity between the top and the bottom was at it's highest point in all of US history. What a wonderful time to have lived, and this article is exactly the type of attitude we need to cultivate in todays society.I hope you detect the sarcasm.
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Secret Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement
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I really, really hope the culture of leaking information becomes so strong that governments will become incapable of keeping anything a secret. That would give me some hope for the future.Anyone that leaks information is a fucking hero.Edit: Stop attacking me personally. I'm talking about the government's privacy here, not mine (nor anyone else's). I actually think my privacy will improve if this becomes a reality.
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#define CTO
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>But universally, “sparse micromanagement” (the best term I’ve heard for jumping in to some random issue, overturning all the decisions, and then disappearing) is the worst.Great essay. My favorite term for this is "drive-by micromanagement.":)I think it's hard to make "chief architect" work out in the long term--if the role is too weak, it often becomes nothing more than an evangelist; if too strong, it often disempowers the people who are closest to the work.For figuring out what CTO means in an organization with a VP engineering, you might take some inspiration from Google's organizational history. Google never had a CTO, but they took care to establish ways for highly technical people to have huge impact without being forced onto the management track.The first was Google Fellow, a level of individual contributor equivalent in to a VP engineering. Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat are good examples; they didn't manage people, but they did work on very hard technologies like GFS, MapReduce, and BigTable that were used by the whole company, and later inspired projects like Hadoop. (In general, I think having a dual career ladder—one for ICs, and one for managers—is a good idea, and the "Fellow" model really just recognizes the fact that the best engineers are worth as much or more than the best managers.)The second model is essentially skunkworks: leading projects which are high-risk and important to Stripe's future, but far enough outside the main product that you want to treat it almost as a small startup. The first attempt at this were Googlettes, led by Georges Harik, which included projects like GMail, Google Talk, Orkut, and Google Mobile. At the time, those were very distant from search, but as they grew the successful projects became core to the company. The second version is Google X, where they're now expanding into very distant areas that involve hardware, biosensors, self-driving cars, etc. For Stripe, maybe the equivalent is something like cryptocurrencies, or physical payments, or something you've imagined by I haven't. :)Anyway, thanks for writing. I have a lot of admiration for Stripe's culture and so I hope you all keep blogging about it.
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Announcing Ubuntu Core, with snappy transactional updates
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This looks great.It's often overlooked, but Android devices are really low system administration high availability Linux systems. That they work as well as they do is kind of crazy, and a lot of it is down to the application packaging and isolation mechanism. This Canonical stuff is going to generate a lot of noise, but it is the way forward.Ultimately between this, containerization and virtualization, we're witnessing the death of the whole dll concept long after dll-hell became a thing.
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Talking About Money
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>> Most important takeaway about salary negotiation, by the way: disclosing a previous salary is almost always against your interests because it pegs your new salary to that plus 5% rather than your value to the new firm minus a discount, which is a brutal mistakeI had a phone screen with an HR drone once (Cerner Inc. to be exact \waves) part way thru she asked me my current salary. I declined to provide that information. She replied "we can't continue without that information". I replied, I'm sorry, but I won't discuss salary at this point. She said, "good bye" and that was all. I had a job so was not desperate at the time. I was still shocked at how abrupt it was.
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“MP3 is dead” missed the real, much better story
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Honestly I'm looking forward to Spotify running out of money and shutting down so this generation will wake up that they need to start duplicating and archiving their media before they lose it.Have a strong feeling there is going to be a cultural black hole where large segments of music etc lost in the post-naptster/post-piratebay world because it only existed on the artists machine, Spotify's servers and YouTube's servers.(I understand pirate bay is still kicking but its all certainly way more niche that it was 5-10 years ago)
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Hackers Are Hijacking Phone Numbers and Breaking into Email, Bank Accounts
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What settings exactly do I have to change to get GMail to never unlock my account by SMS alone?I have enabled proper 2FA on my Google account with U2F, but I haven't disabled everything else yet because I only have one token, and I still need something like TOTP for stuff that uses Google accounts, but doesn't support U2F.As a closely related remark, I wish U2F would just get popular enough, it's pretty convenient, isn't vulnerable against the kind of attack SMS-based 2FA is, and protects against phishing. But almost nobody outside Google supports it, and OS/Application support is rather incomplete or requires additional setup.
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Three Equifax Managers Sold Stock Before Cyber Hack Was Revealed
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So, does this count as insider trading? My intuition says 'yes'. But my intuition about a thing and what the law says don't always match.
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German court rules Facebook use of personal data illegal
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I think if I was creating a new social media website today I'd probably not set up any presence in the EU. The sheer quantity of fines for vaguely specified "crimes" being handed out makes it a deeply unattractive business environment and it seems to be getting worse. I remember when Facebook was new, one of its big competitive advantages was its easy and comprehensive privacy controls. I didn't see other social networks go significantly further in the years since. Now Germany - having failed to clone Facebook domestically (StudiVZ) - sits around extracting money on the grounds that users somehow did not consent to their data being used when they directly uploaded it to the site.I don't see the Valley's hold on social networking loosening any time soon. For all its faults the USA doesn't constantly fine its firms for not doing "enough", whatever that means.
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Show HN: Wired-elements – UI web components with a hand drawn, sketchy look
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i started working on a react clone of wired from a few months ago - kinda dont have time to continue on it but if anyone wants to take over please do: https://github.com/sw-yx/react-wiredalso preet's designer tool is very very very usable: https://wiredjs.github.io/designer/ basically a free balsamiq!
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1/0 = 0
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My problem with "1/0 = 0" is that it's essentially masking what's almost always a bug in your program. If you have a program that's performing divide-by-zeroes, that's almost surely something you did not intend for. It's a corner case that you failed to anticipate and plan for. And because you didn't plan for it, whatever result you get for 1/0 is almost surely a result that you wouldn't want to have returned to the user.When encountering such unanticipated corner cases, it's almost always better to throw an error. That prevents any further data/state corruption from happening. It prevents your user from getting back a bad result which she thinks she can trust and rely on. It highlights the problem very clearly, so that you know you have a problem, and that you have to fix it. Simply returning a 0 does the exact opposite.If you're one of the 0.1% who did anticipate all this, and correctly intended for your program to treat 1/0 as 0, then just check for this case explicitly and make it behave the way you wanted. The authors of pony are welcome to design their language any way they want. But in this case, they are hurting their users far more than they are helping.
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Tesla Model Y
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It is hard to describe exactly the niches they are trying to fill with the designs. I don't see the Y suddenly appealing to someone who didn't already want an X or Y or 3. The differences between models borders on what other companies would consider trim levels.They are only cannibalizing the same market, as opposed to producing a pickup or a hatchback or a van on the same chassis. Are they limited by tech or capital? Or are they really attached to an idea of what a perfect car is and have trouble extending the vision?
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Inflammation might be the root of preventable disease
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My prediction:
1) reducing chronic inflammation by, for example, exercise or eating better food, is proven to have good health effects
2) pharmaceutical companies try to make that into a pill
3) dang, the benefits of the pill are not nearly as big as if you exercise and eat better food, and not nearly as big as our early trials of the drug indicated they would be
4) we must need a different kind of pill
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Netflix Saves Kids from Up to 400 Hours of Commercials a Year
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Worth. Every. Penny.I went to my parents house with my son. He was 4. They turned on cartoons. Then he said, "Dad why'd you change the show? I don't want to watch this." It was a commercial. I had to explain commercials to my son. It was at that moment I realized how much of my tv watching as a kid was commercials.
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Facebook has been granted patent on shadow banning
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This is ridiculous. We had shadow banning on reddit in 2007, four years before this was ever filed. In fact, we met with Facebook and told them about it before 2011, and they hadn't considered it before that. I'm pretty sure reddit is where they got the idea...To be fair, there was no public record of it until 2012 or so.
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Terry Jones has died
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Years of living in a shoebox in the middle of the road will do that to you.Rest in peace.
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Scaling to 100k Users
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This is relevant only for multimedia apps.I have fintech systems in production with 100k+ users with complex Gov app for entire country that runs on commodity hardware (majority of work done by 1 backend server , 1 database server and all reporting by 1 reporting backend server using the same db). Based on our grafana metrics it can survive x10 number of users without upgrade of any kind. It runs on linux and dot net core and Sql Server.Most of the software is not multimedia in nature and those numbers are off the charts for such systems.
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It’s OK for your open source library to be a bit shitty (2015)
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I had a GitHub project that got a few hundred stars. The amount of mean, crazy, and entitled people is crazy. I have no idea how the bigger projects can deal with it.
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Experimental blood test detects cancer up to four years before symptoms appear
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This makes me think of an article I read about prostate cancer detection. Apparently, it is possible to detect the possibility of prostate cancer many, many years before it is going to develop with a more sensitive, modern test. Once the detection is made both patient and doctor are not in a position to ignore it. At the same time treatment may well be premature or not recommended. But the doctor is left with a dilemma because it may appear they did not take action on something they knew.That at least was the general topic of the article. The question it raises is interesting: is it sometimes too early to know.
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Matt Levine makes sense of Wall Street like none other
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Thoughts:-I love reading Matt's stuff. The praise of his writing is totally deserving.-In my daily life there's rarely a topic I come across that I'm unable to understand. In an otherwise boring day full of mundane work tasks, his column gives me intellectual challenges that I really appreciate.-Matt's ability to understand and synthesize topics reflects incredibly highly on his intellect. I don't know anyone on Wall Street... is his level of intellect common among investment bankers and such there?-He was valedictorian at Harvard and became a public high school teacher after!?-Apparently MoneyStuff has 150,000 subscribers, the total income+power of which is gigantic (multiple billionaire readers along with presumably many thousands of high 6-7 figure readers). But yet they don't seem to do much at all of monetizing it (there's an easily bypassed Bloomberg paywall and a tiny ad in the text of the email newsletter).-I would really love a weekly Matt Levine podcast. But sadly I don't think we'll ever get that.
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The new warrant: how US police mine Google for your location and search history
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Is there a self hosted app to track your location? I use Google maps to keep granular history so I can use it later for whatever. But if I could self host that’d be better.
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Rancher Desktop, a Docker Desktop Replacement
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Podman also has a docker desktop alternative in the works (Already works on Mac IIRC)[0]. Will be interesting to see how these two solutions play out.0: https://github.com/containers/podman/issues/11494
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Microsoft no longer signs Windows drivers for Process Hacker
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In related news - ever wondered why Windows 11 can't be installed on "older computers"?You know, the ones that don't have a TPM chip?Now you know. Windows 11 completes the lock-up of the OS.That's why Windows 11 exists in the first place. All other changes are secondary. Microsoft knows they would've not been able to pull shit like this as a Windows 10 update, so they were effectively forced to do a version increase. Against older promises of W10 being the last Windows version ever.Welcome to the future that Microsoft always wanted, but couldn't have - a platform with airtight control. Just like what Apple has with its AppStore and its wonderful, wonderful 30% commission. Almost there and the lemmings didn't even notice it, distracted by the new and friendly Microsoft front, free upgrades to Windows 10 and centered Start menu in Windows 11.Mark my words - Windows 12 will severely impede direct installation even of an user-space software, funnelling everyone to go through the store. That's the end goal and we will all be there in a couple of years, whether we want it or not.
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Supersonic Trebuchet
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Cute. It is around 8 feet long and per the comments, it throws tennis balls. Throwing a tennis ball at supersonic speed is nothing to sneeze at, but the really impressive thing about historical and modern trebuchets is how big some of them got. They could throw things like pianos, as in a famous Northern Exposure episode. Doing that supersonically would have really been something ;).
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PRQL – A proposal for a better SQL
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Do people still write SQL?
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Be anonymous
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As careful as some of the things he suggests are...if you're truly wanted by a state-level actor or sufficiently motivated attacker, you won't be able to hide by simply using VPN and Tor. Especially if you're running something with many transactions like AlphaBay. You would need to obfuscate quite a bit more:- if you're using VPN traffic but most people "around" you aren't, you're a suspicious node; your ISP could easily flag you to your government. If you use wifi at a common point you're likely to be flagged and there isn't an easy way other than keeping on the move. But moving often is another anomalous event, and it's very difficult to do even for Drug Lords ( El Chapo ) or Terrorists that it behooves to do. This puts you in a sort of Zugzwang, to borrow a chess term.- there's always leakage, for instance, in the way you talk with people in the real world. At some point you send enough communication for sophisticated frequency analysis.- and there are other patterns of usage that could be used to identify you, like searches or even keyboard frequency on anonymized accounts can be de-anonymized by very specific markers ( ML works! ).- off ramps for crypto aren't very good. If you're in e.g. Brazil, haha, yeah, good luck spending bitcoin or any other crypto and going unnoticed. Mixers and tumblers will eventually leak and you'll be caught.- you're very vulnerable to social engineering by people you do business with. one slip where you stop communicating in a transactional mode of communication and that's a weak link in your armor.In the end, the FBI only has to be right once, and you have to be right every time.
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Twitter Deal Temporarily on Hold
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I used to like Elon circa 2018 up until he started acting up (pedo guy, et al), but the main thing that soured my opinion of him lies in being -- don't know if this is the right word -- unhinged.I just can never trust anything he says because he has a significant history of being indecisive and disorderly. This deal is a perfect demonstration of how I feel. What I can't really tell is if he was always like that or grew into it at one point.Also, the guy is always going to extreme lengths to seek attention, just like one certain US politician...Something turns me off from these types of people.
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Ask HN: What are some of the best documentaries you've seen?
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“The Century of the Self” by Adam Curtis.https://youtu.be/eJ3RzGoQC4sIt goes through each decade of the 1900s and explains how Freud’s psychology and the new field of marketing completely reshaped society. For the first time in my life I feel like I understood the “why” of how things work in American society. This film is probably best if you’re age 40+ and actually remember some of the events.
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I’m a productive programmer with a memory of a fruit fly
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I have the same problem (i.e. terrible short-term memory, though my long-term memory is fine), and I've picked up a number of compensating behaviors over the years. By far, documentation is my #1 go-to strategy. I document code extensively, even if I'm the only person who is ever going to read it again. People have mocked me for this, but I believe it's a superpower.Most programmers believe a number of blatant falsehoods about documentation, with the most prevalent being "comments go out of date quickly, so there's no point in investing in them". Maybe I'm just hyper-aware of it because my short-term memory sucks, but code comments have saved me on so many occasions that they're simply not optional.You can document your code. You can keep it up to date. It isn't that hard. You just don't want to.
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I accidentally started a movement – Policing the Police by scraping court data
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I wonder if it is legal / possible to record police radio traffic and associate it with the records?
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Why is Rosetta 2 fast?
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I remember years ago when Java adjacent research was all the rage, HP had a problem that was “Rosetta lite” if you will. They had a need to run old binaries on new hardware that wasn’t exactly backward compatible. They made a transpiler that worked on binaries. It might have even been a JIT but that part of the memory is fuzzy.What made it interesting here was that as a sanity check they made an A->A mode where they took in one architecture and spit out machine code for the same architecture. The output was faster than the input. Meaning that even native code has some room for improvement with JIT technology.I have been wishing for years that we were in a better place with regard to compilers and NP complete problems where the compilers had a fast mode for code-build-test cycles and a very slow incremental mode for official builds. I recall someone telling me the only thing they liked about the Rational IDE (C and C++?) was that it cached precompiled headers, one of the Amdahl’s Law areas for compilers. If you changed a header, you paid the recompilation cost and everyone else got a copy. I love whenever the person that cares about something gets to pay the consequence instead of externalizing it on others.And having some CI machines or CPUs that just sit around chewing on Hard Problems all day for that last 10% seems to be to be a really good use case in a world that’s seeing 16 core consumer hardware. Also caching hints from previous runs is a good thing.
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Breaking up with JavaScript front ends
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The biggest problem facing the front-end space today isn't so much of complexity of a particular library, rendering technique, or view/model architecture, but rather lots of bad ideas glued together, creating nightmare scenarios for companies trying to maintain products.A micro dependency system with never ending breaking changes to glue different tools and libraries together - bad idea.Using un-opinionated "libraries" that don't scale well, but at scale - bad idea.Technology organizations trying to stay relevant by simply adopting every next hyped fad out there, rather than stepping back to get a bigger picture of what the front-end space actually needs - bad idea.The list goes on, for quite a long time.And all of these issues are further exacerbated by an army of junior developers entering the front-end development space, along with recruiters subscribing to buzzwords to hire them.
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Advice From An Old Programmer
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People who can code in the world of technology companies are a dime a dozen and get no respect. People who can code in biology, medicine, government, sociology, physics, history, and mathematics are respected and can do amazing things to advance those disciplines.This is a nice sentiment but as someone who has been a programmer for biology and medical research, it's not true. It's just like any other mediocre programming job, but your office is a folding table under a decommissioned fume hood. Physicists and mathematicians who program are so underpaid they dream about the glamour and glitz of working in a cube on Wall Street. There are bad jobs with technology firms, but by far the programming jobs with the most "respect", most fun and usually highest pay are with tech firms and well funded startups.
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13-Year-Old Makes Solar Power Breakthrough by Harnessing the Fibonacci Sequence
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The comparison is against a flat row of cells that do not track the sun. I suspect that it will not do better compared to an array of cells that do track the sun.Basically the tree of cells are arranged in different angles so that as the sun moves some of them will always be receiving optimal sunlight when their normal is parallel with that of the incident light.Very nice insight, especially for a kid his age. I certainly would not have thought of it.
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A Single Div
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I am unmoved by the many "... in pure CSS" posts, but I guess they are the equivalent of "HTTP server in x86 assembly" for CSS designers.
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Welcome Peter
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Thiel joining makes YC look like the 1992 Olympics "Dream Team" compared to all of the other accelerators.
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Vim 8.0 is coming
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I have vim, neovim and emacs (and spacemacs) installed. Right now I'm trying to get into emacs a bit more.What's interesting to me, and the reason I try to keep up to date with the latest changes for all four editors, is that it's been now, what, 25 years (?) since emacs and vim started "competing" and they still are. I guess we could be saying the same in 10 years about firefox and chrome, but it still is amazing in my opinion. It's amazing that so much work has been done to vim and emacs, and so many changes, so many users using them for different things. And there is still no clear winner. I'm not trying to start a discussion about the strenghts and weaknesses of each. Just expressing my appreciation.Thank you for your great work, to everyone involved with vim and emacs, and more recently neovim and spacemacs. You are awesome.
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Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail
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I'm a FastMail customer. Here's some things I like and why I switched from Gmail and Google Apps: - better shortcuts in the web interface
- the mobile web interface is actually good
- can import email by IMAP
- POP links actually work, Gmail's POP links are broken
- IMAP is better implemented
- Gmail limits IMAP to 15 max connections and
each folder ends up being a connection
- CardDAV works and has good picture resolution,
when I was on Google Apps they were limited to 80px
- FastMail's Sieve filters are very flexible
- on folders vs tags, I like folders more, because then
I can import my huge work email as a backup without
polluting my searches and my archive
- Google Apps email aliases limited to 30 per user, which is
pretty dumb and insufficient if you have a couple of domains
- FastMail does sub-domain email aliasing, which is awesome,
as now each user account I have has its own email; Gmail
only does "plus" aliasing, but that's obvious and problematic
Part of this decision was also a switch from Google Drive to Dropbox: Dropbox supports Linux, Google Drive does not.On the matter of privacy, Google is simply too big and has access to too much info.
They have your searches, often representing your secret desires, your video/music preferences, your favorite locations and habits, your travel itinerary, your voice, your chats, your G+ likes, your email, your purchases, etc.And don't get me wrong, personally I've never seen many big companies as competent and as non-evil as Google. I also worked with their AdX and I can tell you that from the advertiser's perspective, Google discloses much less information than others in the business. But they don't have to be evil right now, they simply have to store that info and analyze it later, sell it, etc. And consider that the info in question is enough to determine with accuracy if somebody is pregnant, male or female, black or gay, as in things that in the right context can get one injured or killed.In other words you can use Google's stuff, but reducing their area of knowledge and not placing all your eggs in the same basket is always wise.
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You might not need JavaScript
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Does anyone else feel that a site called "You Might Not Need Javascript", probably shouldn't use Javascript?
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Cloudflare data still in Bing caches
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From the parent thread: The caches other than Google were quick to clear and we've not been able to find active data on them any longer.
...
I agree it's troubling that Google is taking so long.
That's really the core issue here - the Cloudflare CEO singled out Google as almost being complicit in making their problem worse whilst that exact issue is prevalent amongst other indexes too.The leaked information is hard to pinpoint in general, let alone amongst indexes containing billions of pages.I can understand the frustration - this is a major issue for Cloudflare and it's in everyone's best interests for the cached data to disappear - but it's not easy, and they shouldn't say as such (or incorrectly claim that "The leaked memory has been purged with the help of the search engines" on their blog post).This is a burden that Cloudflare has placed on the internet community.
Each of those indexes - Google, Microsoft Bing, Yahoo, DDG, Baidu, Yandex, ... - have to fix a complicated problem not of their creation.
They don't really have a choice either given that the leak contains personally identifiable information - it really is a special sort of hell they've unleashed.Having previously been part of Common Crawl and knowing many people at Internet Archive, I'm personally slighted. I'm sure it's hellish for the commercial indexes above to properly handle this let alone for non-profits with limited resources.Flushing everything from a domain isn't a solution - that'd mean deleting history. For Common Crawl or Internet Archive, that's directly against their fundamental purpose.
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How to Sleep
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My biggest struggle with sleep is that I'm always excited to do stuff, and always feel like I'm not done with my day. Exceptions are when something happens and I end up feeling very depressed during the day, and simply want to shut down and do nothing.Usually, I get so infatuated with a script I'm writing, a new program I discovered, a bug that I need to resolve, a book that I'm reading, some concept that I'm thinking of, that my mind just keeps on being active, and wants to keep working. It's the worst when I'm working on my computer, due to the blue light (I've started wearing yellow sunglasses to minimize the effect), while it's a bit better when I'm reading or listening to music or thinking.In any case, this is a great article. I feel like small amounts of sleep has been the greatest inhibitor of my performance in... anything really. Being dumb and young I felt like I could still function correctly, but I really started noticing that I had better tournament results when actually sleeping 8 hours, while my results on all other days were lackluster. I read up on a lot of things and convinced myself that sleeping enough is essential. I still slip up and don't even go on my bed at the right times, my sleep schedule goes all over the place for a lot of different reasons, but I'm really trying. I feel like I might need to seek some professional help on this, but I'll still take it as far as possible before that.
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I'm Scott Aaronson, quantum computing/computational complexity researcher. AMA
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Do you think that quantum physics can tell us anything about 'the hard problem' in philosophy? Is it possible that the mind could somehow control how quantum states collapse in situations where randomness would be the typical explanation?
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How Discord Handles Two and Half Million Concurrent Voice Users Using WebRTC
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I made several websocket-based apps that I want to turn into Electron desktop apps where people can use them only with their friends, but WebRTC has been really confusing and hard to know how to get started with. Especially considering ideally I don't want to have to host a server, but all the P2P JavaScript libraries that I found seem to assume you'll at least have a server for hosting the lobby to look for peers.
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Experts cracked laptop of crypto CEO who died with $137M, but the money was gone
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For some reason this sounds like the plot of a movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio.CEO of Crypto Company...1) Takes time off to build orphanage in region noted for fake deaths.2) Subsequently dies unexpectedly.3) Is immediately cremated.4) Wife waits a month before saying "oh by the way he is dead"5) Wife claims all keys on encrypted laptop6) World watches as wallets mysteriously empty7) Experts crack laptop8) All wallets turn up in fact empty9) $140 million disappears into the etherhttps://pbs.twimg.com/media/DOjLuy7VoAATprU.jpg
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DARPA Is Building a $10M, Open-Source, Secure Voting System
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Why does this keep coming up? What is the compelling argument against paper ballots? There is no need for results to be known immediately, so how does making voting an exercise done by computers make anything better, particularly when computers are much more vulnerable to remote interference?
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A database of Facebook users’ phone numbers found online
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Facebook: "This dataset is old and appears to have information obtained before we made changes last year to remove people’s ability to find others using their phone numbers."Not that "old." Some of those "update" dates are just a few days ago.
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Equifax doesn't want consumers to get their $125
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If anyone is getting a mortgage or refinancing soon, ask your lender to 'drop' equifax without running your score with them - just take the score from the other two. Equifax is an unnecessary security and privacy risk.They are a horrible company that needs to go out of business. Make their customers feel embarrassed to be doing business with them.
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Off-Grid Cyberdeck: Raspberry Pi Recovery Kit
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As I've been playing with Raspi's and Beaglebones and stuff lately, it's been driving me nuts that EVERYTHING I do needs to be apt-gotten off the internet, the base image doesn't even include basics like screen/tmux.If those repos are inaccessable for any reason, I have a bunch of hardware that's very hard to do anything useful with.I know there are such things as apt-caches and squid caches and stuff, but I could really use thing that goes through every apt-get I've ever done and the top 50,000 packages on github and stuffs 'em all onto an SD card and shows me how to use them from my commandline.OP mentions this as a future direction for the project, but I think it's one of the most important.
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Float Toy
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With the 32-bit one, if I set the highest bit of the exponent from 1 to 0, the exponent goes to -126 (ok), but if I then toggle the lowest bit of the exponent (rightmost green bit), it modifies the mantissa, not the exponent.Is that a bug or do I not understand how IEEE754 works (very likely :p)?
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I think my BBQ just offered to be my default browser?
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Android is such a drag sometimes. Between mystery quirks like this, where I'm sure someone who has been making Android apps for 6 years will be able to explain it, and things like the absolute inability to override the order of items in the sharing panel[1], such that Android will routinely topline sharing to a contact you got one text message from three years ago."F.U., that's why" is the simplest conclusion I can draw. "Unpaid concept testing" is the next simplest.1. https://cdn57.androidauthority.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/0...
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The Beauty of Unix Pipelines
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Pipes are wonderful! In my opinion you can’t extol them by themselves. One has to bask in a fuller set of features that are so much greater than the sum of their parts, to feel the warmth of Unix:(1) everything is text(2) everything (ish) is a file(3) including pipes and fds(4) every piece of software is accessible as a file, invoked at the command line(5) ...with local arguments(6) ...and persistent globals in the environmentA lot of understanding comes once you know what execve does, though such knowledge is of course not necessary. It just helps.Unix is seriously uncool with young people at the moment. I intend to turn that around and articles like this offer good material.
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Wikipedia is getting a new look
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If someone asked me to critique the UX of Wikipedia, the first two things I’d point out would be that I almost never use the left hand side bar (and I have a feel almost no one does) and that when paragraphs are that wide they become harder to read (especially when they snake around floated images).Not changing for 10 years, watching as some trends fade and others become law-of-the-land, and then making two changes that are backed by a fair amount of data strikes me as a great way for Wikipedia to operate.I’ll also note that they definitely have changed some UX stuff over the past 10 years. The fullscreen expandable thing for images is pretty good, clean and JS-light (although this is HN so I have to note it would be better if it didn’t break the back button).
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Sperm counts worldwide are plummeting faster than we thought
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I did my Master Degree in Organic Chemistry where we tried to develop a male contraceptive pill. I spend a lot of time studying sperm so here is a short list of thing to avoid regarding sperm quality (not ranked):1. Eating and drinking from plastics (This includes aluminum cans which are plastic lined) [a]2. Heating food in ANY type of plastic [a]3. Caffein intake [b]4. Sugar intake [c]5. NOT exercising regularly [d]6. Alcohol [e]7. Age [f]8. Stress [g]9. Soy products or other natural products containing phytoestrogens [h]I edited the comment to add point 8 and 9.Funnily enough these goes for both genders regarding fertility. If you are considering having a child, it takes approximately 7 months for sperm to fully develop so better to change lifestyle sooner rather than later.a. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3222987
b. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5482951/
c. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35606632/
d. https://rep.bioscientifica.com/view/journals/rep/153/2/157.x...
e. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28029592/
f. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3253726/
g. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6260894/
h. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18650557/
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Open-source hospital price transparency
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I wrote Hacking Healthcare for O'Reilly and I've spent the bulk of my career as a CEO and senior executive operating large health systems. It is a meaningful step forward to have most of this data in the public sphere but I think it is still early and that a lot of work has to continue to shape and analyze this information in a way that is more meaningful and practical for patients.Appreciate the complexity of billing codes, these are not created by hospitals but by by the American Medical Association, Center for Medicaid/Medicare and a soup of other organizations. There are tens of thousands of procedure and drug codes (things that are done or given) and tens of thousands of diagnostic codes (reasons justifying the procedure), creating a space well into the quadrillions of possible routine combinations. That's a large restaurant menu.There are a number of other comments comparing hospital pricing to retail type interactions. It is also important to consider that hospital interactions involve unexpected and unknown things that aren't easily captured in a pricing context before you get there.From an instution standpoint there are some bad apples but a lot of organizations that are not complying are not complying because they are facing technology and operational issues that are stopping them from complying. From the trenches in my consulting practice one example is an institution whose has a core element of their billing system, that is largely a black box even to them, using technologies that are decades old. Why would someone continue to rely on that? Because it has direct integration with critical partners and counterparties that was set up decades ago and that continues to work.Replacing it is underway but is costing 8 figures and taking years. The potential fines are small relative to that and there isn't much they can do to comply in the immediate term anyway.For context understand that Medicare billing routinely involved actual physical dial-up modems somewhere in the chain (even if it was invisible to you) until late 2018.
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AntiSec leaks 1,000,001 Apple UDIDs, Device Names/Types
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Money quote for the people that don't want to wade through ten pages of rant: During the second week of March 2012, a Dell Vostro notebook, used by
Supervisor Special Agent Christopher K. Stangl from FBI Regional Cyber Action
Team and New York FBI Office Evidence Response Team was breached using the
AtomicReferenceArray vulnerability on Java, during the shell session some files
were downloaded from his Desktop folder one of them with the name of
"NCFTA_iOS_devices_intel.csv" turned to be a list of 12,367,232 Apple iOS
devices including Unique Device Identifiers (UDID), user names, name of device,
type of device, Apple Push Notification Service tokens, zipcodes, cellphone
numbers, addresses, etc.
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Why we don't hire programmers based on puzzles and tricks
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Sigh. This is the issue that will just never die.Let's just summarize the points:- Not everyone can produce real-world code. Most of what we do for a living belongs to our employer. Side projects, particularly in the US, can be an issue for IP reasons (California is somewhat of an exception here);- Side projects, even open source projects, can be of questionable "real world" value;- I've personally encountered many "programmers" who can talk a good game but can't code a for loop;- tests like the FizzBuzz test [1] are, in my experience, remarkably effective as an early negative filter. This is an important point. If someone blows you away at FizzBuzz, it doesn't mean they're an awesome engineer. But if they can't do it, it almost certainly means they aren't. The idea here is to spend the most time with candidates who might potentially work out and wasting as little time as possible on those that probably won't;- the problem with these kinds of whiteboard coding problems is that the tendency is for interviewers to think the problem needs to be "hard". It doesn't. In making it too hard (IMHO) you risk destroying the value of your filter;- pop-quizzes of obscure language features, the kind that might appear in certification exams, are a waste of time. I have no argument with that;- whiteboarding code by itself is not a great filter. It should be used in conjunction with a multi-faceted interviewing approach that involves testing fundamentals, the ability to construct a relatively simple algorithm, the issues of working on a team and on a production code base and systems design.- the problem with simply talking about "real world" code, as the author suggests, is you're no longer finding a good engineer, you're finding someone you like, someone who thinks like you. This falls under the umbrella of cultural fit, which is of course important, but don't mistake that for engineering skill.- I think we can all agree that "logic" puzzles like "how would you move Mount Fuji?" or "if you shrunk to 1cm in size and dropped in a blender, what would you do?" are stupid.- testing "back of the envelope" estimation however can be useful. I mean things like "how much storage is required to store satellite images for Google Maps?" The idea isn't to get an accurate answer. It's to see what assumptions the candidate states and, based ont hose assumptions, to come up with a reasonable ballpark number.The problem here is that there are many engineers who can't comprehend the possibility that there is someone being paid to be a programmer who can't code. But I assure you this is the case. It's shocking but true. Simple coding tests largely filter these people out so if you're offended by such simple tests, just do it and move on. I assure you there's a reason why they exist.One final prediction: There's some guy here on HN who always posts the exact same huge comment on any hiring thread. I'm sure it'll pop up any moment now.EDIT: let me add a point about trial periods and take home assignments.Both of these are guaranteed recipes for mediocrity. Truly outstanding candidates need to justify the time investment for either option and very few companies have the kind of gravitas that would justify it.Anything written without supervision will be of questionable provenance at best.As for whether or not someone will work out in your organization, bringing them in for a day is (IMHO) of questionable value. Many engineers are introverts. I include myself in this. It's incredibly awkward as is to be in a new company or even a new team in the same company. I question the value of any such assessment over what you learn in 1-4 hours of interviewing.[1]: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/02/why-cant-programmer...
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iOS 7
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Man, iOS 7 feedback is incredibly frustrating for no reason that actually matters.I feel like I spent the past few years falling in love with flat design, on mobile and on the web -- and I read article after article from historically pro-Apple bloggers/authors explaining that no, flat design was fundamentally a bad move: the strongest metaphor is that of the phone as a tool -- that we needed skeumorphism, we need hints for interactivity, we needed polish.And now iOS 7 is out! And I'm excited, because the flat (okay, 'mature') design philosophy that I've been told is a bad idea is finally here -- and now it's suddenly a great leap forward because Apple decided to do it? When Microsoft decided that the average consumer understood what a smartphone was for and no longer needed the physical cues, they were wrong and fools -- but when Ive decides it, its because its time to move to mature and modern?Here's the thing, though: I think iOS 7, on the whole, looks worse than iOS 6. The stock icons look outright ugly; interfaces like the call-answer screen and the calculator look poorly designed, and everything has the sense that it just needs another run or two through the review process. Not that it's irreversibly bad, but I don't think it's executing as well as WP or MIUI are. (With exceptions, of course: I think the translucency paradigm looks great, as well as the changes to the UI Kit.)(People arguing 'its just a beta, it'll obviously change over time': what happened to Apple's relentless pursuit of quality before introducing something to the public? What's the point of secrecy if you're showing off v0.8 and not v1.0?)I imagine actually using the new iOS won't be bad at all. It's just reading about it that frustrates me, which is definitely a sign I should be doing less of it.(I own an iPad, iPhone, and MBA.)
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