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Fraudulent trading activity at Mt. Gox
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The reason I'm inclined to believe this report's implications about Karpeles is because I spent a long time in Mt. Gox's IRC support channel talking with support reps, and they were paid to lie. They didn't know they were being paid to lie, but they were instructed by management to say "don't worry, all user coins are safe" right up until the day the Mt. Gox crisis report was leaked. They could have said "we are investigating the extent of the problem," but no, Karpeles was paying them to say "nothing is wrong," even while Karpeles was crafting his crisis report to investors about how all the coins were gone.Karpeles seems to have a history of lying. He was caught in a lie by his employer in 2004: http://newslines.org/mt-gox/joins-linux-cyberjoueurs/From a game theory point of view, it's interesting that the price at every major exchange depends on every other major exchange. For example, when Mt. Gox was active, if its price went up, BTC-e, Bitstamp, etc would simultaneously go up. It's a natural phenomenon which has rather grim implications: if an exchange is conducting fraudulent activity, then the entire bitcoin trading ecosystem is affected. And since bitcoin is completely unregulated, there's nothing really stopping anyone from manipulating the market. For example, no one knows who's behind BTC-e, but it has a lot of trade volume. What if they're engaging in fraudulent trading as well? There's every incentive to.The inevitable conclusion seems to be: you can try to come up with a bunch of logical reasons about why the price of bitcoin is going up or down, but you can't ever rule out "the price is due to large-scale fraudulent behavior," i.e. it's a bubble. Bad behavior from one exchange will always affect all the others.As Karpeles has probably shown, you can become a millionaire by manipulating the market and then escape all consequences by letting your company go bankrupt.
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Plastc Card
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They say this supports chip-and-PIN, but I don't believe them until they explain how. If I have a chip-and-PIN card from my bank, the chip has an unreadable secret used to generate one-time cryptograms to verify the authenticity of the card. There's no way to get that secret onto my Plastc card. You'd need partnerships with banks to get a new secret the way Apple Pay does. Without those, this sounds like it'll be useless once the chip-and-PIN switch happens in a year or so.
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Why I turned down $500K and shut down my startup
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Hi. Tim here.I'm delighted that this article struck such a chord. I'll try to answer the most common questions here. I wish I could answer everyone directly.1) I called it off before anyone sent money or quit their jobs. The only one who lost money or a job because of ContractBeast was me. If the money was in the bank and the team on board we would have gone ahead. That's why I had to make that decision when I did.2) I'm not saying there was no solution. There might have been, but the team and I could not find one. Think of it this way. You and a team decide to summit a mountain. It's a high-risk endeavor. After weeks of going over your maps and equipment you just can't see a plausible way up. Do you call it off or set out hoping you'll be able to figure it out. It doesn't mean no one can do it. I means I could not do it with that team and that equipment.3) Why didn't we leverage the contract approval features that customers loved? We tried. The problem was that those kinds of approvals were not core workflow for SMBs. It was useful when importing contract templates, but was not used much after that. Nice feature but not important enough to get companies to sigh up for multiple seats, which is what we needed.4) Whats going to happen to the code and to Tim? No decisions yet. I'm open to suggestions on both counts.
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Ask HN: Is it possible to run your own mail server for personal use?
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It's absolutely possible to run an email server in 2016 and I encourage anyone capable to do so!Email is one of the bastions of the decentralised Internet and we should hang on to it.Every day more and more people are moving to Gmail/Hotmail/Outlook and while I do understand the reasons, it also puts more and more power into the hands of these providers and the little guy (us) gets more screwed (like marked as junk by default by them :Having said that, here's my check list for successfully delivering email:- make sure your IP (IPv6) is clean and not listed in any RBL, use e.g. http://multirbl.valli.org/ to check- make sure you have a correct reverse dns (ptr) entry for said IP and that ptr/hostname's A record is also valid- make sure your MTA does not append to the message headers your client's IP (ie x-originating-ip), messages can be blocked based only on "dodgy" x-originating-ip (see eg https://major.io/2013/04/14/remove-sensitive-information-fro... )- set up SSL properly in your MTA, there are so many providers giving away free certs nowadays- SPF, DKIM, DMARC - set them up, properly, this site can come in handy for checking yourself https://www.mail-tester.com/- do not share the IP of your email server with a web server running any sort of scripting engine - if it gets exploited in any way usually sending spam is what the abusers will do- last but not least - and while I loved qmail and vpopmail - use Postfix or Exim, they are both more fit for 2016, more configurable and with much, much larger user bases and as such bigger community and documentation.HTH
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Show HN: Make an app by adding JSON to this app
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Guys, the author here. This is my first open source project and I worked really hard on it for 5 months.I think it's really cool, and I hope you guys like it. I would appreciate any kind of feedback!
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An Open Letter to the Uber Board and Investors
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I would be exceedingly reluctant to work with an investor who writes an "open letter" to a company in a situation like this, and particularly when that letter calls out the CEO in a pretty gratuitous way ("and we have both been contacted by senior leaders at Uber (though notably not by Travis, the CEO)"). You're supposed to be able to be open with investors and other advisors, so this is a deep breech of trust in a non-public company. I can't see taking advice from and sharing confidential or sensitive information with someone who has done that to you in the past.(The sad part is I agree Uber has a problem and needs to change; Susan Fowler's blog post was remarkable.)
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Building a Kickass Portfolio
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I'm always looking for personal sites that are still out there. I love some of the ones she listed. Here are some random ones I found yesterday.http://merkoba.com/http://angusnicneven.com/http://danieltemkin.com/http://joelcalifa.com/https://jacky.wtf/https://www.jacobyyoung.com/abouthttp://nik.works/http://web.archive.org/web/20180501202224/https://shiba.comp...Here are two I found several days ago, but that I am still finding amusing today.http://coolguy.website/http://leonbambrick.com/Please share your personal page links, too.Even if this list becomes long, that's okay. I will look at it.
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Camera and microphone require HTTPS in Firefox 68
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Dear Apple: for Christmas I'd like physical, no-bullshit power shutoff switches for your camera and microphone on the Macbook Pro. Other devices too—if you can manage it, that'd be great. Sincerely, the people who put tape over their cameras, the people who don't because it's ugly and messes with closing the lid but wish they could, and the people who would be in one of those two camps if they understood the risk (so, altogether, 100% of your users).
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Mozilla’s DNS over HTTPs
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I'm so sad to see Mozilla move forward with this massive attack on user privacy.Firefox DoH is snake oil, plain and simple. It sends all the users DNS queries to Cloudflare, adding a new party which can surveil the user's traffic (and can be legally compelled to do so and not disclose this fact)-- providing a convenient choke point to save spies and hackers the trouble and exposure of extracting the data from tens of thousands of individual ISPs.Simultaneously, it does not protect the user from monitoring by their ISP or parties situated there because the user's destination IPs remain unencrypted, as well as the hostnames via SNI (for cases of shared hosting, e.g. on cloudflare, where the IP alone wouldn't be enough).At the moment you can disable this across your whole lan by blocking traffic to 104.16.248.249, 104.16.249.249, 2606:4700::6810:f8f9, and 2606:4700::6810:f9f9 and by DNS blackholing use-application-dns.net and cloudflare-dns.com.iptables -t raw -A PREROUTING -d 104.16.248.249 -j DROPiptables -t raw -A PREROUTING -d 104.16.249.249 -j DROPip6tables -t raw -A PREROUTING -d 2606:4700::6810:f8f9 -j DROPip6tables -t raw -A PREROUTING -d 2606:4700::6810:f9f9 -j DROPAnd if you're using bind:zone "use-application-dns.net" {
type master;
file "/etc/bind/db.empty";
};zone "cloudflare-dns.com" {
type master;
file "/etc/bind/db.empty";
};Or unbound:local-zone: "use-application-dns.net" staticlocal-zone: "cloudflare-dns.com" staticBut there is no guarantee that these mitigations will continue to work.[Edit: Aside, this comment and many/most(?) comments on this thread were moved from a more recent thread with a headline "Firefox turns on DoH as default for US users". The new title which omits the on-as-default, is kinda burying the lead.]
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Supporting Linux kernel development in Rust
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I won't get tired of repeating the same comment in every topic that suggests Rust to be a great replacement of C in existing projects, that it isn't.The safety guarantees that Rust provides are neither unique nor complete, and if we discuss the amount of effort necessary for bringing new interfaces like the one this article mentions ("one can define a kmalloc_for_rust() symbol containing an un-inlined version"), we should compare it to other existing solutions, like ATS [1], that are designed to be seamlessly interoperable with C codebases without giving up on the safety side of the argument.Just a week ago there was a link in ATS reddit channel that advertised ATS Linux [2][3] initiative, that may be of great interest for the same people who are interested in bringing more memory sefety to Kernel development, without giving up on existing C interfaces and the toolchain[4].[1] http://www.ats-lang.org/Documents.html#INT2PROGINATS[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/ATS/comments/ibyczp/ats_linux/[3] http://git.bejocama.org[4] http://ats-lang.sourceforge.net/DOCUMENT/INT2PROGINATS/HTML/...
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Firefox replaces Google Analytics with fake no-op in strict tracking protection
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I don't mind blocking ads, but analytics? That seems like the taking the desire for privacy too far.Why shouldn't site owner know you've visited their site? How will they do their job if they don't know where people come from, what content they enjoy, what devices they should optimized for, general demographic of their audience, etc.These are all the things a restourant owner would know about their customers, for example. But no one seems to have a problem with that.
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Upheaval at freenode
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Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27286628.
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How to permanently delete your Facebook account
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I got rid of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp about 4 years ago. Facebook and Instagram was easy, but people who have WhatsApp really think you’re weird for not having it.Deleting WhatsApp, while annoying for me personally, has resulted in many people I know joining Signal or Telegram — the network effect can be broken by being belligerent.If you don’t want to have a conversation about why you deleted WhatsApp, simply say it’s a moral issue, nobody wants to know.
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EU Commission is planning automatic CSAM scanning of private communications
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It's scary, because CSAM (child sexual abuse material) is very, very broad, and quite vague in its definition¹. My three year old son stayed with my parents for a week, and he was being taught to swim in their swimming pool. Of course, I get sent pictures and clips of his progress by a proud grandma, and of course, him being a toddler, he felt swimming trunks to be completely optional (and of course, they are at his age in a private pool).That's not CSAM right? But who knows how the AI will mark those happy pics? Some quirk in its programming and training leading to them being pushed way up whatever ranking is used? It's a nude child after all, and that is most likely one of the few things such an algorithm can detect quite reliably.The automated filter won't care about the context though, and if any of the recent failures of algorithms ruining peoples lives are anything to go by (the Dutch Toeslagenaffaire comes to mind), being flagged by the CSAM filter is a high risk event — even if you can clear your name later by human intervention — because now you are on a list.1: People tend to conjure up horrific images of underage children getting raped by adults when they hear 'CSAM' or 'child pornography', but when you read up on the legal definitions used it becomes very vague, quite fast. A seventeen year old boy sending a dick pic to his 18 year old lover is producing child pornography and can in many jurisdictions be sentenced as such, and nudism of any minor can be seen as CSAM if the pose they strike can be construed as 'erotic' — yet there is no clear definition of what this means, falling squarely into “I'll know it when I see it” territory.
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Accounting For Developers, Part I
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Any time the idea of double entry bookkeeping comes up there is nothing but unanimous advocacy for it. This thread echoes the same sentiment where there's several comments about the importance of double entry. And yet like all previous endorsements I've heard, I've not been able to take away why it is so important. The reasons are always around error tracking, tracing source of funds, standing the test of time etc. and yet in my head I'm not able to envision the specific problem double entry can solve that single entry cannot.Somewhere in my head I feel a double entry system makes sense if you have two different parties making respective entry. But if it's all with a single party, single entry system should be equivalent to a double entry system. My accounting concepts are weak so I'm unable to justify. Hoping someone with more expertise can shed some light here.
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LiteFS
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> Developing against a relational database requires devs to watch out for "N+1" query patterns, where a query leads to a loop that leads to more queries. N+1 queries against Postgres and MySQL can be lethal to performance. Not so much for SQLite.This is misleading AFAICT. The article(s) is actually comparing remote RDBMS to local RDBMS, not Postgres to SQLite.Postgres can also be served over a UNIX socket, removing the individual query overhead due to TCP roundtrip.SQLite is a great technology, but keep in mind that you can also deploy Postgres right next to your app as well. If your app is something like a company backend that could evolve a lot and benefit from Postgres's advanced features, this may be the right choice.
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Nyxt: The Hacker's Browser
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Looks like Nyxt, a browser "inspired by Vim", inherits Vim's showstopper bug: Being unusable on many non-US keyboards, at least with the default bindings. The 'switch-buffer-previous' command is bound to C-[, which cannot be pressed e.g. on QWERTZ layouts because the [ character requires AltGr. This is like sending around text files encoded in Windows-1252 and expecting things to just work.Sorry folks, but it turns out that the creators of Vi(m) didn't actually invent the ultimate UI paradigm half a century ago. It's bad enough that a text editor that ignores the past few decades of UX research is still in widespread use, but please, for the love of God, stop incorporating that broken paradigm into new products.What a pity, because Nyxt looks like a well-designed piece of software otherwise.
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Ted Kaczynski has died
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Anyone who disagrees with Kaczynski's ideas because they came from a convicted terrorist should read the works of Jacques Ellul instead, of which Kaczynski's was largely a popular reduction. The Technological Society is the clearest influence on Kaczynski's manifesto, but Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes is possibly more pertinent in this day and age.Ellul was a professor, a pacifist, and a Christian anarchist. Attacks the ideas, not the man.
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To Paul Graham
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This seems like as good a place as any to ask this: Can only some people down vote? B/c I have seen posts with negative scores and as I am only allowed to up vote, I have wondered how someone gets a negative score next to a comment?
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How to nap
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For those wondering how to nap at the office and not get hauled into the managers office for sleeping on the job, I paraphrase a tip from Scott Adams (Dilbert):"Grab a handful of paperclips and find an office/meeting room. Shut the door and lie down on the ground with your feet against the door. Sprinkle the paperclips in front of you. Now have a nap.If someone tries to enter the room, the door will hit your feet. This will naturally cause them to pause (and stops them entering), it wakes you up and lets you reach for the paperclips which gives you a ready excuse ("Oh sorry, I was just picking up the paperclips")":)
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Producer vs. Consumer
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I'm curious: why exactly is being a "consumer" such a bad thing? I'm not necessarily saying I disagree, but I'm having trouble coming up with an explanation, and it seems like everyone is simply assuming that consumption is a bad thing.
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I Have 50 Dollars
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Commenters seem to be missing the point of this. Go visit the signup page, and right at the bottom you'll see this tagline:If you can spare $50 for a social network I'm guessing you can spare $50 to help put an end to slavery. Yeah, it's 2012 and it's still a pretty big problem. That shit is unacceptable. Really. Personally, I'm not the fan of the "don't spend money on anything until the world's problems have been cured" style of thinking, but it's certainly a novel idea.Now all they have to do is fix the title of the signup page. Right now it says Signup For App.net.EDIT: Interestingly, the domain name of freetheslaves.net belongs to "Superhuman Ventures, LLC." I don't know enough about how people taking donations work, but I find it pretty strange that Free The Slaves have a long list of directors and staff (https://www.freetheslaves.net/SSLPage.aspx?pid=285) but no mention of what their corporate structure is. Is this unusual? Should they explicitly be a charitable organisation?
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“Citizenfour” Awarded Oscar for Best Documentary in 2014
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Seeing Greenwald on stage was fantastic. I wonder how much hassle he and Poitras had getting into the US.
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B. B. King, Defining Bluesman for Generations, Dies at 89
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I'm reminded of a picture that tells his significance to music far better than words.https://wavemakermagazine.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/s_a060...Then there's this one as well:http://www.pastblues.com/images/files/April/Jimi%20Hendrix%2...
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Write like you talk
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If you've ever read a verbatim transcript of an interview or conversation, you'll know that actual speech is anything but clear. When talking off the cuff, even the most clear minded people tend to ramble, um and ahh, double back, talk across each other, and jump between points and subjects.When listening to someone in person, our brains seem to edit what they say on the fly to make it comprehendible, focusing on the important bits and forgetting the rest. When it's presented in written form, such as in a newspaper or magazine article, a skilled journalist has usually done the editing for us.This means that what we consider a “conversational” tone in written language is not a representation of natural communication so much as an idealised version of it. That doesn't mean it isn't useful to strive for it, particularly in business and academic writing that otherwise tends towards the turgid, but it isn't as simple as telling people to “write how you talk”. Writing conversational prose that achieves clarity whilst not being oversimplified, patronising or banal requires practice and skill.I also think, conversely, that while a conversational tone can improve formal writing about complex topics, the reverse can be true. It's possible to enliven mundane topics by being less direct and more playful with language.
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Encryption, Privacy Are Larger Issues Than Fighting Terrorism
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>PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: If, technologically, it is possible to make an impenetrable device or system where the encryption is so strong that there's no key - there's no door at all - then how do we apprehend the child pornographer? How do we solve or disrupt a terrorist plot?It's so disappointing to me to hear a quote like that from the President.
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TensorFlow 1.0 Released
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How do I get started with machine learning?I have a couple of applications in mind, mostly time series predictions. But the machine learning field seems to be vast and I don't know where to start.
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24/192 Music Downloads Are Very Silly Indeed (2012)
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I've said it before, this video demo is one of the very best I've ever seen.https://xiph.org/video/vid2.shtmlSo well prepared, so well presented, so little that could be removed without ruining it.I aspire to do such good demos but always fall so short.
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Yahoo Triples Estimate of Breached Accounts to 3B
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I think the issue right now is that private user information is viewed as an asset, not a liability. If we could find a way to make it more of a liability, companies would be less likely to collect it just for the sake of having it, and they would be more proactive in securing it.
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Paradise Papers: New leak from offshore finance firm
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It's the wrong angle. One should not look at corporations as the moral saviours. As Supreme Court Judge Learned Hand once said:"Over and over again courts have said that there is nothing 851*851 sinister in so arranging one's affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible. Everybody does so, rich or poor; and all do right, for nobody owes any public duty to pay more than the law demands: taxes are enforced exactions, not voluntary contributions. To demand more in the name of morals is mere cant."[1]Rather, it is the governments of the world we should be going at if we want this behaviour to change. But then again, it is always easier to find a fat scapegoat with a shiny appearance.[1]https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=628482160657957... (last paragraph)
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E Pur Si Muove
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I think this is a radical simplification of what is a complex problem. Genetic engineering as a whole is known to be an area strewn with moral hazards, and not least harks back to some of the darkest days of 20th century science.Having an ethical outlook isn't a form of heresy, it's a form of societal safety. We need to accept that some of these ideas (probably not all - it's always difficult to get on the right side of the line) are inherently dangerous.Particularly when we start involving healthcare, a "move fast/break things" type approach can be extremely detrimental, for example.
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My account is sending spam emails
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Exact same thing for me.Noticed I was getting emails being sent from myself. More worringly was the emails appeared in my SENT folder. For 5mins I was freaking out thinking I was hacked, because I didnt think spoofing emails would show up in MY "sent" folder.But I run 2FA, long complex unique password etc. I treat OpSec really highly. I checked all Google security settings, no unauthorised access, no apps using my account etc. Still did a password reset "just in case".However one interesting part is after about 4 hours the emails automatically became marked as "spam" - and they disappeared from my "sent" folder simulatenously.So it would seem the likely issue is someone worked out a way around the "Spam" setting for Gmail - and a by-product of not flagging spoofed emails as spam is Gmail marks them as "Sent" by you in the labels.Seems this was flagged as a security risk over a year ago - and Google declined to fix? https://www.zdnet.com/article/spammers-delight-gmail-weirdly...
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How to get rich without getting lucky
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The highest probability for success for the 'everyday person':- Earn as much as you can from your own work. Take a 2nd job, change to a higher paying job, ask for more responsibility and a raise at your current job, go back to school for a more lucrative degree, ...- Spend much less than you earn. Economize, share an apartment, buy an inexpensive car, shop at Trader Joe's and Costco, ....- Learn how to invest. This is really important. The most deliberate and highest probability of ultimate success is likely mutual funds. Individual stocks can goose it, but should only a small portion of your wealth, as they start to bring a luck factor into the mix ...- Protect your investments. Health insurance is really a must in the US, might be a must elsewhere. Work for a company that offers health insurance. Car insurance is a must. Other insurance is probably wise.- Be patient. The compounding effect of investing takes a long time, but once it gets rolling, it's pretty much unstoppable.
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Um – Create your own man pages so you can remember how to do stuff
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One thing I hate about man pages is that there are not enough examples. Sometimes feature is explained on five pages while simple one line example would explained it instantly. And at the end there should be 2-3 pages of examples at least, maybe even more.
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How I Built a $5K a Month Side Project
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I created a successful side project back in 2014. It is still running and making 20 times more than I would get with a normal job.
But i was lucky. Lucky to be born in a rich country. Lucky because I was given a computer at the age of 5. Lucky because I had unlimited education opportunities. Lucky because I had a friend who gave me access to something I needed for my business. And many other lucks. I will never deny that fact.
But reading these stories makes me a bit angry, because it is just not that simple. It's always easy to translate a successful story into a guideline. But that guideline isn't worth anything when all those luck properties are different.
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The Linux kernel's inability to gracefully handle low memory pressure
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Glad to see this issue raised! My system hangs for minutes sometimes and is very frustrating compared to Windows and OSX which seem to handle out of memory in a much more user-friendly way. Which seems to be: suspending the offending program and letting the user decide what to do from there. I'm sure there's a reason the Linux kernel doesn't do something similar, but can anyone enlighten me? :)
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Why I Write Games in C (yes, C)
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> The stop-the-world garbage collection is a big pain for games, stopping the world is something you can't really afford to do.I love this opinion from games programmers because they never qualify it and talk about what their latency budgets are and what they do in lieu of a garbage collector. They just hand wave and say "GC can't work". The reality is you still have to free resources, so it's not like the garbage collector is doing work that doesn't need to be done. What latency budgets are you working with? How often do you do work to free resources? What are the latency requirements there? Even at 144 fps, that's 7ms per frame. If you have a garbage collector that runs in 200us, you could run a GC on every single frame and use less than 3% of your frame budget on the GC pause. I'm -not- suggesting that running a GC on every frame is a good idea or that it should be done, but what I find so deeply frustrating is that the argument that GC can't work in a game engine is never qualified.edit: wow for once the replies are actually good, very pleased with this discussion.
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Face ID and Touch ID for the Web
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So roughly speaking this is WebAuthn for a web site, with the iphone acting as the dongle.It's a really good idea. I can see there being a big demand for just simplifying signin - I can easily see a time where it is worth not having the hassle of managing multiple signin processes and just choosing webauth or nothing.Edit: to be clear this won't affect B2C sites whose monetisation is based on getting as many people as possible. But imagine a saas business charging upwards of 100 bucks a month - they have something valuable to protect, and the security story just got a lot easier
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The Era of Visual Studio Code
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I find this post along with the comments in "A Picture of Java in 2020" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24551390 to be incongruous with my experience as a professional developer.My first couple of years writing software I used Vim, then VSCode, then worked in a Java shop and was forced to use IntelliJ. I didn't like it at first, but now after a couple of years I cannot see how I lived without it.The idea that VSCode is the future doesn't seem right to me. JetBrains products allow you to do so much out of the box, without installing a million plugins that may or may not work. In IntelliJ I can write a half baked statement like `new Foo()`, and then Alt + Enter my way to it being `foo = new Foo();` as a private member variable of the class in no time. If you take time to set up configuration it becomes even more powerful. Even these basics are more difficult in VSCode.To me the future is IntelliJ for Java and all other languages should seek to have such a nicely integrated experience with an IDE.I am not even sure I could write Java from scratch in Vim - its really that I'm using IntelliJ, not writing Java. Is this bad? In some pure sense, sure, you are further from the language. But I don't care because I can write and edit code some multiple faster than if I was in VSCode.
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Studio Ghibli releases 400 free-to-use images
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You can bulk download these with wget like so; wget http://www.ghibli.jp/gallery/{ged,chihiro,karigurashi,ponyo,kokurikozaka,marnie,kaguyahime,kazetachinu}{001..050}.jpg
However they're low quality 1080p jpegs, so you're better off splitting out the frames of a blu-ray rip of the movie using ffmpeg or something.
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An iOS zero-click radio proximity exploit odyssey
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The scary thing is that even though this sounds like a monstrous effort to pull off this hack, its not out of reach for large governments. Its basically known as a fact they have loads of these exploits sitting in their toolbox ready to use when they have a enticing enough target.Short of rewriting the whole of iOS in a memory safe language I'm not sure how they could even solve this problem. Assigning a researcher to search for 6 months only to find one bug is financially prohibitive.
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AT&T Fiber in the SF Bay Area is flipping bits
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If you have AT&T fiber, run the script in the linked gist:https://twitter.com/bmastenbrook/status/1335400747794530304It loads http://example.com and https://example.com and compares the result (should be equal) in a loop, and then reports if it finds a difference. I'm seeing multiple bit flips in the unencrypted version, and having a lot of issues loading web pages, presumably because a corrupted packet in a TLS handshake is an error and the connection dies.Tech support, even when Twitter accounts with a lot of followers message them, is completely useless, they just say that they don't show any outages at your location. They need to be flooded with complaints for someone to look at this, or maybe someone from AT&T is on here that can get it looked at...
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Show HN: After 2.5 years on my side project, it has hit £500/month revenue
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Very nice. Congrats. Keep on going.
I remember that I started with my side project back in 2011. A small app. It made like 1 dollar a month. I spend like 8 hours on it every day and night next to my normal day job.
People were thinking I was insane. After 1 year, it made like 1 dollar per day. Then few months later I got 20 dollars in one single day. Another few months later it made for the first time 100 dollars a day. Still worked on it for many many hours.
App is still running today and generating 2k per day. It gave me freedom to quit my day job and the opportunity to start a business as around it a few years ago. And just recently I started an entire new (more serious) fintech business.
Although I know it's not easy to start something like I did. But on the other hand. Most people are not even trying it. I always tell people to really start making something you feel passionate about. (I am talking from a developers perspective) Don't look at others and don't do something other want you to do. If money is the motive, then you will fail for sure.
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Ubiquiti Networks Breach
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Argh, why do I learn about this from HN when they pretty much force me through the cloud login with UDM-Pro. Nothing in the dashboard. Also I think http://unifi/ is crap from a security standpoint. Their threat management also seems to be just some kind of a bad joke.They could for example do a nice hardware based honeypot that you have to untrigger with physical access. They could offer so much more for prosumers providing sane defaults for a common case of having multitude of devices at your home which can be categorized as intruder but expect to be on the same network as your phone.Is there a better alternative? When I tested multiple routers mostly regarding low latency, network stability and reliability a few years ago nothing came close, especially when having multiple access points.
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Dominance of Apple and Google’s app stores impacting competition and consumers
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You can have third-party Android app stores. Can you say the same about Apple? While I agree that Google has market-dominance, they are not anti-competition or anti-consumer in the same sense as Apple. Android is open source, Chrome OS is open source, etc. Google is actually providing and contributing something back to the community. Apple intentionally locks people to specific hardware and to their app store.
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Implement DNS in a Weekend
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I love all the series about writing your own X in 100 lines of code.
It gives you the understanding of technology and removes a lot of unnecessary details.The great examples of this are
'A from-scratch tour of Bitcoin in Python'
https://karpathy.github.io/2021/06/21/blockchain/
and 'Let's build GPT: from scratch, in code, spelled out'
https://youtu.be/kCc8FmEb1nY
from Andrej KarpathyI wonder if anybody tried to collect all such projects together and built his own 'Internet in just 100 lines of code'
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Xcode, GCC, and Homebrew
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Unfortunately Apple's new Command Line Tools for Xcode doesn't include regular gcc, but Apple's gcc-compatible wrapper around LLVM (i.e. /usr/bin/gcc is a symlink that points to llvm-gcc).llvm-gcc doesn't compile many projects correctly, including gcc itself (as of Xcode 4.2 there were reports that it's not possible to compile a gcc cross-compiler using llvm-gcc). Hopefully there have been improvements in this regard.Still, anyone who needs the real gcc will have to install it through some other means.
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Higgs Boson Explained by Cartoon
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From the video around :30 seconds in, "...this is when surprises might happen. Any day could be the day that changed the world."I am still looking for an answer as to how the world could be changed by the discovery of the Higgs Boson particle. What are some possible outcomes for society? I do not doubt that it will change, and I agree fully with it's value, however, I can't find any specifics in what ways it might change or what new technologies might be created with or without the Higgs Boson.Also, at a 9 Billion USD price tag, how were our governments convinced? There must be something beyond scientific intellectual curiosity. Those of us with this curiosity may be happy to pay for it, but how were politicians convinced? What value will this provide to the governments of the world who made the decision to purchase this answer.I'm sure it's not this...Scientists: "We need 9 Billion to find out if the Higgs Boson particle exists."Governments: "OK, here is your 9 Billion."... 15 years laterScientists: "The answer is yes. The Higgs Boson does exist."Governments: "Oh, that's really great."Update: I understand and agree fully with the value of this research. I am asking if there are any specific technologies that are expected to be advanced or if it is just added knowledge that could lead anywhere. I am also wondering how it was explained to politicians who don't have specific interest in science.
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Andrew Mason's statement about being fired as Groupon CEO
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Full text of his statement:(This is for Groupon employees, but I’m posting it publicly since it will leak anyway)People of Groupon,After four and a half intense and wonderful years as CEO of Groupon, I’ve decided that I’d like to spend more time with my family. Just kidding – I was fired today. If you’re wondering why… you haven’t been paying attention. From controversial metrics in our S1 to our material weakness to two quarters of missing our own expectations and a stock price that’s hovering around one quarter of our listing price, the events of the last year and a half speak for themselves. As CEO, I am accountable.You are doing amazing things at Groupon, and you deserve the outside world to give you a second chance. I’m getting in the way of that. A fresh CEO earns you that chance. The board is aligned behind the strategy we’ve shared over the last few months, and I’ve never seen you working together more effectively as a global company – it’s time to give Groupon a relief valve from the public noise.For those who are concerned about me, please don’t be – I love Groupon, and I’m terribly proud of what we’ve created. I’m OK with having failed at this part of the journey. If Groupon was Battletoads, it would be like I made it all the way to the Terra Tubes without dying on my first ever play through. I am so lucky to have had the opportunity to take the company this far with all of you. I’ll now take some time to decompress (FYI I’m looking for a good fat camp to lose my Groupon 40, if anyone has a suggestion), and then maybe I’ll figure out how to channel this experience into something productive.If there’s one piece of wisdom that this simple pilgrim would like to impart upon you: have the courage to start with the customer. My biggest regrets are the moments that I let a lack of data override my intuition on what’s best for our customers. This leadership change gives you some breathing room to break bad habits and deliver sustainable customer happiness – don’t waste the opportunity!I will miss you terribly.Love,Andrew
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Federal Judge Finds National Security Letters Unconstitutional, Bans Them
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If this was stayed to allow it to go to the circuit appeals court, does it only apply in the Ninth Circuit?
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Mistakes You Should Never Make
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> In the early days I would often let potential customers think we already had a feature they wantedWhat. How is this even remotely acceptable? If discovered it destroys your credibility. Among your employees it destroys your credibility. If I was an employee and found out that this was happening, I'd be extremely upset. I wouldn't trust a thing you say. If you'll lie to customers, you'll lie to me.
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Mozilla Webrender: rendering any webpage at several hundred FPS
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I watched this the other day, and I've been mulling over the observation that onboard graphics are getting more and more die-space.On mobile, where discrete graphics are a rarity and power is a scarce resource, it makes sense to offload as much work onto the GPU as possible.
Light it up, do the work as quickly as possible, then go back to sleep.However I started wondering about what can be done for high-end desktops. I just bought an i7-6700K, and of course it's paired with a very powerful discrete GPU.So as I understand it, effectively this means about 1/3 of that 6700K is just dark all the time. If there's any GPU work to be done it will all be offloaded to the PCIe bus, not the onboard graphics.How can we make use of that silicon in scenarios like that? Is there any advantages an onboard GPU has that can be leveraged over a discrete GPU? (Apart from power efficiency; which in my opinion is a non-issue when thinking about PCs with 800W+ power supplies.)---P.S: Of course all this would be moot if I had just bought the 5820K. Live and learn.
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OpenAI Five
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Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud (and vaguely helped with this).For me, one of the most amazing things about this work is that a small group of people (admittedly well funded) can show up and do what used to be the purview of only giant corporations.The 256 P100 optimizers are less than $400/hr. You can rent 128000 preemptible vcpus for another $1280/hr. Toss in some more support GPUs and we're at maybe $2500/hr all in. That sounds like a lot, until you realize that some of these results ran for just a weekend.In days past, researchers would never have had access to this kind of computing unless they worked for a national lab. Now it's just a budgetary decision. We're getting closer to a (more) level playing field, and this is a wonderful example.
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Prime Down: Amazon’s sale day turns into fail day
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Something no one has mentioned yet, could it be that the engineering force at Amazon is no longer what it used to be?I can personally point to two friends who I consider top notch engineers and designers that have left Amazon because of its toxic culture. I'm sure I'm not the only with these anecdotal examples, we've all heard the stories. At the end of the day years of unbalanced work/life balance, overly aggressive management and frugal approach to everything makes for a weak argument for A players to stick around.Could this be an example of crumbling engineering standard at Amazon?
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The Unstoppable Rise of Sci-Hub (2019)
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I am part of a well-funded university, so I have access to all the papers without using Sci-Hub.Nevertheless, I prefer this platform because I disagree with the publishing model of most publishers. Let's not get into the details here, but there is all kinds of shoddy editorship happening all over the place---I have seen at least one blatant case of plagiarism in an Elsevier journal: no one cares. I have experienced very strange 'reformatting' queries; my highlight being a journal that forces you to convert your lovingly-crafted vector graphs into JPG just 'because'.On top of all that, add the fact that the interface of many publishers is egregiously bad to use. It takes a lot of clicks to download a single PDF, often opening multiple windows for that purpose or redirecting you a few times. Sci-Hub streamlined this process: you put in a DOI, and you get a PDF. Not an ePDF that is super laggy (looking at you, Wiley!), but a normal PDF that I can download, annotate, print, decorate my wall with.Thus, I disagree with the article: the single minimalist interface is definitely something that contributes to Sci-Hub's popularity.
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Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay
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America has a weird sense of superiority about its lower unemployment numbers vs Canada. The difference is the US, you basically need a job, or else you're one broken ankle, complex childbirth, or infected hangnail away from complete financial ruin. People being able to take extra time to find the right job is a good thing for the economy. Better than being driven by an abject fear of not having a job.
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Create diagrams with code using Graphviz
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We're reluctant to be exposed to too much anger about misfeatures in 20 year old code that was basically a prototype that escaped from the lab, but go ahead, ask us anything.We've gotten a lot of help lately from Magnus Jacobsson, Matthew Fernandez and Mark Hansen on cleaning up the website and the code base, even some persistent bugs we could never find ourselves.Improvements that would benefit the community the most?- better default styles that don't look like troff from 1985- better default layout parameters in neato than statistical multidimensional scaling based on shortest path- more expressive graph language with classes or templates- more robust handling of error conditions like out of memory- better documentation to help people find useful tools or just know what they should be looking for- find someone to donate a generic orthogonal routing algorithm based on a modern algorithm since people want this- it would be a big effort, but move the core algorithms to a framework that supports interaction with layout generationHope this makes sense.
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GitHub isn't fun anymore
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I’ve never considered GitHub to be “fun.” It’s a great tool, though.Most of my GH interaction is through my desktop system, not a browser (pushing and pulling checkouts).I’ve been using some form of source control for nearly 30 years (since Projector, in the 1990s). It’s a tool. A very, very important tool.I appreciate many of the “glossy” features of GH, like hero images and GH Pages, but this shows how “out of touch” I must be, because I have never considered it to be a social venue or competitive arena.It’s just a place I keep my code. I’m quite grateful for it.
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Canon's cloud platform has lost users' files and can't restore them
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Lesson for those designing cold-storage solutions--design your system, as much as reasonable, to not support deletion operations. The reason why files get lost is usually due to software bugs, bad configurations, and operator errors. Design your system to protect against these things.
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DigitalOcean App Platform
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I am so glad to see this. I was looking to deploy an app and the choice is either Heroku or manage your own server which I don't want to do.Heroku gives instant deployment for the most common types of apps (python/java/ruby). It's PaaS done right, it's fantastic. You should really have a look if you're not aware of it, it's only $7 for a starter app.Problem is, scaling up is about $50 per gigabyte of memory which makes it a dead end for anything non trivial. You're forced to go to digital ocean / Linode / OVH instead to have something affordable.That leaves Digital Ocean as the only alternative (don't trust Linode) and it sucks because it only gives me a server to manage. I don't want to manage a server I want to run a (python) application. It's 2020 this sort of things should auto deploy from GitHub without bothering me to manage an operating system.
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Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech (2019)
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>a workable plan that enables more free speech, [...] That approach: build protocols, not platforms. To be clear, this is an approach that would bring us back to the way the internet used to be. The early internet involved many different protocols—instructions and standards that anyone could then use to build a compatible interface. As I've commented before[1][2], discussing protocols and advocating for them is a popular topic but it does not make progress.The real issue is funding and trying to make humans do what they don't want to do.If HN is overrepresented by vanguards of decentralization and free speech, why are a lot of us here on HN instead of running USENET nodes and posting to a newsgroup such as "comp.programming.hackernews" to avoid being moderated by dang?If most of HN knows how to set up git and stand up a web server, why do most of use Github instead of running Gitlab on a home pc/laptop/RaspberryPi or rent a Digital Ocean vps?It's because "free & open protocols" weren't really the issue!A lot of us don't want to run a USENET node or manage our own git server to share code.[1] the so-called "open" internet of free protocols:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20231960[2] free & royalty free protocol like Signal still doesn't solve the "who pays for running the server" problem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20232499
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-2000 Lines of Code
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Just the other day I was in my logistics class and the professor started deviating into something that I believe was pure nonsense.He started the lecture by analyzing how many pieces a machine could manufacture per day. Fair enough. He extended the model to measure different ratios of capacity. Makes sense.Then he tried to extend the model to all machines, including humans. His example was: "How do you measure the capacity of a legal team?". I thought it was a trick question, so I answered (paraphrasing) "You can't answer that question the same way you answer for the machine. You can't give a single metric." He told me I was wrong and that the _right_ measure would be (total number of working hours/day).I was tempted to try to convince him otherwise. The analogy was deeply flawed. He certainly measured the machines in (number of pieces / day) but measured the legal team in (hours/day). So, in analyzing a machine, you take into account its efficiency, but you don't do the same thing for humans.I believe that is exactly the same thing that is going on in the post. Managers/Logistics/Economists are very susceptible to this kind of generalization pitfalls.Edit: Given that this answer has generated some discussion I feel the need to expand on it. The legal team was not expected to sell their services "by the hour". In fact, any discussion about how their services were sold was shut down by the professor. From his point of view, the lawyers were machines and he was asking the question "how much can this machine produce?"Yes, other students also suggested taking the number of billable hours/revenue into account, but that's not the answer the professor was looking for.I don't criticize whether his answer is not technically right, but I feel it holds no real-world meaning. It was a purely academic question that leads nowhere instead of having a debate about how you measure the productivity of a group of human beings. And on top of that, his final answer was definitive and (from his point of view) was irrefutable.
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Brickit – scans your Lego bricks and helps you build new creations
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Peripheral question. The app appears to be iPhone only.I'm honestly curious why people do this, and I've never gotten a satisfactory answer. iPhone market share is 15% at best while Android is 75%. It seems like releasing an iPhone-only first iteration kneecaps the enterprise out of the gate. What am I not understanding?
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1 out of every 153 American workers is an Amazon employee
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I’m torn badly with Amazon. After read The Everything Store, and what has been written all over the place, Jeff Bezos is a massive turd. Employees are horribly treated, wages suppressed, and all sorts of terrible and abusive practices.Then it comes time for me to buy something. I needed a new pair of size 14 sneakers. I drove to Adidas, Footlocker, dicks, and a few other stores but I just couldn’t justify $100 sneakers that didn’t look like prison issued.Opened my Amazon app in my car after leaving the crowded mall, and find what appear to be a decent pair of shoes. FakeSpot agreed with the reviews, and I bought then for $35. They will arrive tomorrow.That kind of convenience is terribly addicting. I haven’t figured out the solution, but I remember what it was like when Walmart came to town, put others out of business, mistreated employees, etc. We were unable to stop it then, how the heck are we going to stop it now?So aside from “just stop buying from Amazon” what can we do ?
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I automated my job over a year ago and haven't told anyone
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Many subreddits are simply themed containers of creative writing. With all the media attention the AntiWork subreddit has gotten lately that brings more karma farmers and therefore more fiction. It's an entertaining read, but not likely true.
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Zas Editor
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Hi everyone! I'm the lead developer of Zas Editor. I wanted to share some details about the editor you might be interested in.The text-storage data structure, syntax highlighting and search features are written in Rust, and the UI is written in Swift since we wanted to create a native macOS experience. The Swift and Rust code talk to each other using C FFI, and no, that doesn’t take away the safety features of both languages.We’re using the Rope data structure for text representation, and the tree-sitter parser for syntax highlighting and some smart features like file outline, local renaming and symbol search. All other language features are powered by LSP servers (rust-analzyer and gopls).I’d be happy to answer any questions under this comment or anywhere else in this thread.
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Python 3.11.0 final
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> Python 3.11 is up to 10-60% faster than Python 3.10.Horrayy!!Does anyone has any experience with working with python in a very large scale?Most of the big tech companies I worked with use Java, I remember when working with large scale JS projects it was nightmare to debug, TS came along and really saved the working experience and scale of JS/TS projects. I've seen TS adopted almost everywhere in big tech companies, some even create microservices with node.When choosing tech stack for a very small projects I tend to use Django, but when I want to create my own large scale business one day I'm quite afraid to use it because of the typing problems, I might choose node/nestJS, but just wonder how does it work in large scale businesses that use python mainly? Is it a nightmare to debug?
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Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon
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Doesn't this prove the value to users of a centralized platform over a federated platform?The centralized platform made it very easy to find people. Now people who are moving to a federated platform miss the value of centralization, so they are writing a tool that will leverage that value and import it into the federated platform.Maybe if Mastodon was a centralized Twitter-style platform it would be more usable, and more popular.
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Companies must stop using Google Analytics
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My sister-in-law (girlfriends brothers girlfriend, not that it matters) recently studied for a data analytics certification. Actually several.The entire course (located on here: https://medieinstitutet.se) is based on Google Analytics.Now her entire value is tied to the use of Google Analytics, she will almost certainly fight very hard to ensure that these skills remain relevant, nobody would want to retrain for 6-12mo on new analytics systems (or, god forbid, not be an analyst at all!).I think we don't really assess the amount of lock-in we allow when we learn something that supposedly makes our lives simpler. Google Analytics was sold as a solution to you making your own analytics, because that's hard! and the cost is that google gets your information too- which most webmasters don't care about individually.However now we're in a situation where at least a few thousand people depend on this precise tool existing, and will be economically useless if it is banned.Personally I find this astonishingly foolish of the people who train exclusively on these tools instead of first principles and primitives.That said; we also have "Cloud Engineer" as a job title, so I'm not sure we will learn this lesson.
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Have attention spans been declining?
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There is far more content than there used to be but no more hours in the day. Our filters must reject more.Yes, there are costs -- deep work & study both suffer -- but there are benefits too: informational content that can be compressed does get compressed. An introduction to a concrete skill that would at one time have been padded out to fit into an hour long movie or lecture might become a 30 minute youtube video and then a 30 second tiktok, by which point it has become a snap cut between the critical actions and finger-wag followed by pitfalls. You can look it up, watch it multiple times until it's committed to memory, and you don't have to spend hours torturing yourself with irrelevant tangents and nonsense. This is an astonishingly compact form of communication and it's beautiful to see.
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Go Daddy No Longer Supports SOPA
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The only thing this means is that community action actually made a difference. That's immensely reassuring.Can we keep doing this, but for SOPA itself?
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Paul Graham's Letter to YC Companies
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Note incidentally that I'm talking about the performance of the IPO, not the performance of Facebook itself. I think Facebook as a company is in a strong position. The problem is simply that Mr. Market (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Intelligent_Investor) doesn't think so at the moment.
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“It’s done, there is no way back. We tried, we failed”
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I wanted to believe that a team of 6 to 10 people could make a game that looked and felt AAA. Boy was I wrong!When we made Crash Bandicoot (with a team of 7), it was already virtually impossible to make a AAA game with 6-10 people, and that was 20 years ago.I tell inexperienced entrepreneurs to take their honest best estimate and multiply by 10. Or, as Mark Cerny (our producer on Crash) used to tell us, "add one and increase the unit: 1 week = 2 months; 2 months = 3 years; 3 years = you're doomed".For a less anecdotal version, read The Mythical Man Month. (The factor he arrives at is 9.)
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Comcast injects JavaScript into webpages to show copyright notices to customers
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The root of this problem is that there is no "control channel" (or whatever you want to call it) from an ISP to its customers. Email doesn't work because ISPs don't always have the customer's address and email can get spam filtered. Paper mail is expensive and may not be read. Until someone defines and implements a protocol for this, ISPs are going to keep inventing weird kludges. I wonder if Hotspot 2.0 can be adapted for wired networks.
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Choose GitLab for your next open source project
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GitLab CEO here. Awesome to see this article! Ask me anything.
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SVG can do that?
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SVG works so fantastically well with React -- it's just part of the DOM, after all. Unless there are performance concerns, that reason alone would make me choose it over Canvas every time.Shameless plug, one of my first experiments with SVG+react (+cljs): https://polymeris.github.io/carlos/ Done in one day, without knowing the tech.
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Spain Fines Facebook Over Tracking Users Without Consent
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I don't have anything against regulations and fines to keep monopolistic companies in check, but that being said, as an European, I can't help but feel a little appalled that there's so much focus on this and so little on actually creating European Googles and Facebooks.
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Dangers of CSV Injection
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The thing that puzzles me the most is, that people use _C_SV at all. Separation by comma, or any other member of the printable subset of ASCII in the first place. What this essentially boils down to is ambiguous in-band-signalling and a contextual grammar.ASCII had addressed the problem of separating entries ever since its creation: Separator control codes. There are:x01 SOH "Start of Heading"x02 STX "Start of Text"x03 ETX "End of Text"x04 EOT "End of Transmission"x1C FS "File Separator"x1D GS "Group Separator"x1E RS "Record Separator"x1F US "Unit Separator"You can use those just fine for exchanging data as you would using CSV, but without the ambiguities of separation characters and the need to quote strings. Heck if payload data is limited to the subset ASCII/UTF-8 without control codes you can just dump anything without the need for escaping or quoting.So my suggestion is simple. Don't use CSV or "P"SV (printable separated values). Use ASV (ASCII separated values).
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What is backpropagation and what is it doing? [video]
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There needs to be some sort of organized push for visualization tools. I know, I might be bringing the proverbial owls to the proverbial Athens with saying that here, but I really do feel that if done right this could impact the course of the world like nothing else. This could be as important as idk, invention of book press or smth. Make computer "the visualization machine".I think that one of the fundamental problems is that to be a visualization machine, you need to have easy access of the GPU and OpenGL is provides anything but. I think that shadertoy (shadertoy.com) is the thing that comes the closest but the learning curve is kinda steep.I know that people like Alan Kay, Bret Victor or Michael Nielsen (his post was on the fp the other day
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15616637) share these sentiments but this is a task bigger than a single people.Idk what I really mean by "organized push". I'm not sure if the problem is well defined too
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What we've learned from building Ghost after 5 years and $3M
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Good morning HN! John from Ghost here - Thanks for all your support over the last 5 years. We wouldn't be here if it wasn't for that very first blog post hitting the #1 spot of HN and getting so much attention back in 2012. That was the very first time anyone ever heard about Ghost, and everything we've built since then has been thanks to that.
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50 Years Ago, the Sugar Industry Paid Scientists to Blame Fat (2016)
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This undue exaggeration about sugar lobby influence has been thoroughly debunked - http://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6377/747Aside, it is really a shame how reductionist the popular view of nutrition is that we come to scapegoating "fat" or "sugar". T. Colin Campbell says it well:This is reductionist experimentation that encourages the development of out-of-context remedies targeted to one risk factor or one causal event at a time, a recipe for failure. Reductionist experimentation is valuable for understanding nutrient structure and function, but it too often encourages endless speculation and confusion caused by highly subjective, personal preferences as to which factor to favor in research and to offer to the market.https://nutritionstudies.org/fallacious-faulty-foolish-discu...
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Do-nothing scripting: the key to gradual automation
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I know this isn’t the point of the article but the code shown there is the archetypal case where writing classes is an anti-pattern, as argued in “Stop Writing Classes” [1]. All the classes in that code can — should! — be functions. There’s no downside, and it’s less code (and otherwise identical).[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3717715
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Explanation of the state of uBlock Origin and other blockers for Safari
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There is a lot of confusion around this issue. Some people are taking this to mean that Safari has completely banned ad blockers, which isn't the case. Instead they've switched to a model that matches what they've been doing on iOS which is content blocking[1]. Content blockers give Safari a list of triggers and actions to take when something matches a trigger.For example; you can have a trigger which contains a regex that matches all images and stylesheets for a given domain. The action can be one of several options, one of which is to block that item.One advantage this technique provides over ad blocking is that there's no data to be phoned back home. It is, in essence, a mask that is applied to a web page before rendering. Also, it's very lightweight. It's literally just a JSON document which means Safari can perform better.Now, I'll admit it's not foolproof. Apple and the content blockers have some work to do on it. I'm noticing some issues with it myself after having upgraded to Safari 13. But from a privacy perspective, I personally much prefer this technique.1: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safariservices/cre...
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WeWork says will file to withdraw IPO
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What I don't understand is how do things get this far down the road before a good old fashioned sanity check happens? I have got to think that Soft Bank knew/knows the valuation was off. The fact that they pushed on means they either intended to try and get away with it/take the money and run as I cant believe incompetence is the reason here. How did this get so far along???As for Adam N, I have to think some part of him knew that it was a bullshit valuation and all the hand-wavy "we are a tech company that also happens to do real estate" doesn't pass the smell test to me. He has personally enriched himself quite a bit so even if the whole thing falls apart he will be ok. I don't know if there is a bubble in SV or not, but it seems that the last couple of really huge unicorn companies have all been based on BS(We Work), Fraud(Theranos), and untenable business models (Uber). I'm far removed from that whole scene so maybe I'm showing my ignorance by stating this. I am, however, very curious to hear about any startup unicorns that are profitable or at least have a clear roadmap to profitability and not based on a business model that will be outlawed in a few years.
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Big ISPs aren’t happy about Google’s plans for encrypted DNS
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While I don't particularly trust Google all that much anymore, the fact that ISPs even have an opinion on this is a smoking gun that they're doing sketchy things with DNS data. There is no actual technical reason why they should care if you use their DNS servers or something else, even a private, encrypted DNS service.
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Learning to See in the Dark (2018)
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As a photographer, the comparison to "raw" results without color balance or noise removal seems somewhat deceptive. The effects visible in the video seem easy to quickly replicate with existing techniques, such as the "surface blur" filter that averages out pixel values in areas with similar color.This happens at the expense of detail in low-contrast areas, producing a plastic-like appearance of human skin and hair, and making low-contrast text unintelligible, which is why it's generally not done by default.
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Modeling a Wealth Tax
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Perhaps notable: Switzerland has a wealth tax (of up to 0.3%), and there is zero evidence that this has any deterrent effect on wealthy people settling in Switzerland or startups being created in Switzerland.Other features of the tax system more than offset the 0.3% wealth tax.Personally, I am a bit disappointed by the lack of depth of the discourse: Wealth taxes and their effect have been studied quite a bit in economics literature, and there are various peer-reviewed papers that attempt to measure the effects, but the Silicon Valley crowd is strangely avoidant of examining evidence or explaining their opposition with real-world data. It's all 101ism and polemics.See also https://twitter.com/halvarflake/status/1295283922117566464?s... - I tried to ask @rabois for the source of a claim, and got crickets in return.I'd like to see a more nuanced and thorough discussion, to be honest. Perhaps that's a bit much to ask.
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IBM is splitting itself into two public companies
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We divested networking back in the ‘90s, we divested PCs back in the 2000s, we divested semiconductors about five years agoIs it just me or does anyone else feel over the decades they've been divesting some of the best (long term) building blocks? A company with vertically integrated silicon, compute, networking, cloud, AI, Enterprise etc. seems like it could have such an edge if only they had focused those engineering capabilities on consolidated, high-margin end products.I see the other big players going the opposite direction. e.g. Google and Amazon are building their own silicon for an edge in Cloud and AI.So-called SexyIBM is just another cloud company without a distinguishing barrier to entry. Sure, their growth will look good on paper for a few years, but when Cloud becomes commoditized (which I think is already happening), the capabilities which could have created the kind of real innovation that opens up whole new industries will have all been cleaved away.
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No, Cellebrite Cannot “Break Signal Encryption”
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It’s shameful that one of the worlds best journalistic sources didn’t even bother to reach out to Signal to get comment on a story they ran about themI feel like a lot of today’s mistrust of news stems from publications not verifying sources, or checking evidence, or at least scrutinizing what others are saying.Wish we could fix that
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Facebook buying ads for Messenger to be top result when you search for 'Signal'
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Whatsapp displays 404 not found when I send a link to Signal
https://www.dropbox.com/s/0t5venwty2oe2re/Screenshot%202021-...
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WebRTC is now a W3C and IETF standard
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This is so exciting. WebRTC is our best hope to have video interop between platforms. I love that it works outside web browsers, compeitors like WebTransport assume a 100% browser world. Or you have protocols like RTMP/SRT... that will never make it into the browser.WebRTC might be our best bet to establish P2P connectivity between all languages/platforms. Would love to get rid of the single point of falure in Pub/Sub systems. WebRTC also feels like a great path towards easy cloud-agnostic code. You can use lots of different languages, and not dependent on SDKs/Servers.* https://github.com/aiortc/aiortc (Python)* GStreamer’s webrtcbin (C)* https://github.com/shinyoshiaki/werift-webrtc (Typescript)* https://github.com/pion/webrtc (Golang)* https://github.com/webrtc-rs/webrtc (Rust)* https://github.com/awslabs/amazon-kinesis-video-streams-webr... (C/Embedded)* https://webrtc.googlesource.com/src/ (C++)* https://github.com/rawrtc/rawrtc (C++)----Then you have a couple that aren't Open Source. But proves it is possible for these platforms also.* Shiguredo (Erlang)* |pipe| (Java)----If you are new to WebRTC I have been working on making it more accessible https://webrtcforthecurious.com. I am currently pretty tied up with Pion so haven't been able to make much progress lately.
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UMN CS&E Statement on Linux Kernel Research
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This is a great statement, they confirm they're aware of the issue, they acknowledge the concerns and they set out their intention to gather the full facts whilst suspending the operation of the research in the meantime. They also acknowledge the systematic way the need to deal with this.I hope their follow up is as thorough but I want to applaud this, it's a good approach.
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Cinder: Instagram's performance-oriented fork of CPython
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I love how Facebook and Instagram never went the route of "full rewrite" for their apps as they scaled.I my experience "Language X is slow and we could save Y switching to Z" is always a false promise. You can pick parts of the system that are costing a lot and port them to other language/frameworks to capture the bulk of savings while keeping your developers happy working on familiar code. Or if you'e big enough like Facebook, you can go see why X is slow and if it is possible to improve at the compiler level. Never disrupt the developers flow (Twitter did this with their Scala craze back in the day)
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Why modern software is slow
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Oh, this is nothing.Windows force-updated my Notepad.exe to the new modern UI version.It is very visibly laggy for basic actions such as opening menus or scrolling through text.You have to be spectacularly bad at programming to make something so basic so slow in 2022 on a very high-end gaming computer.Not just bad, but utterly oblivious. Casey Muratori excoriated the Windows Terminal dev team for failing to achieve a consistent 60 fps when displaying fixed-width text, which is such a trivial exercise that Casey whipped up a demo in like two weekends. [1]Now the Notepad team insisted on following in the Windows Terminal team's footprints and slowing down the other fixed-width text app that needs to be lightweight fast for all sorts of reasons. Nobody needs Notepad to be pretty. Everyone needs it to work.[2]Just amazing to see something like this happen. It's like a slow motion train wreck, ruining one Windows app at a time.[1] These videos are especially "shocking" because the code he wrote is terse, straightforward, lightning fast, and more correct than whatever madness Microsoft was doing.First weekend: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxM8QmyZXtgSecond weekend: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99dKzubvpKE[2] For example, opening a 300 MB log file takes a solid minute of time, which is absurdly slow. It also bloats this to 800 MB of memory usage. For comparison, TextPad opens it in 5 seconds and uses 30 MB of memory. VS Code, an electron application(!) opens in under 2 seconds.
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Tell HN: MailChimp blacklists your IP if you open the browser's dev tools
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This is worrying since I have accidently opened dev tools hundreds of times by clicking both mouse buttons when my cursor is near the bottom of the screen.I have a tic disorder (not Tourette's, because my tics are all nonverbal). One of my tics is that I mash both mouse buttons over empty space pretty frequently. I even go out of my way to keep my cursor positioned over empty space so I can mash the mouse buttons when I need to, and it's not uncommon for me to move the cursor while mashing the buttons. If the cursor is towards the bottom of the screen, that's pretty much guaranteed to open dev tools, since all it takes is a small motion of the cursor with the right-click menu open to hit the 'Inspect' option.
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The Sugru story
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Imagine if patents had been eliminated. They would have died once a big company like 3M got a sample back to their lab.This company exists because they were able to patent their invention.People say that patents are bad because everything relies on previous efforts. Well, they didn't invent silicon rubber. They didn't invent the volatile compound that allows their rubber to cure overnight. But they did invent a new thing.Pretty analogous to software patents and combinations software-hardware patents like the iPhone's multi-touch.
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A Note from one of Cloudflare's upstream providers
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What if this had been Akamai and not Cloudflare? Would we even hear about it? Why is Cloudflare in the news regularly and never Akamai? Do they just like drama? Is that good or bad for their business?
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Show HN: I open-sourced my web app alternative to Illustrator
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Artur, the linked page is almost unreadable here (Chrome OSX):http://cl.ly/image/0F212f3X2h07The Maven Pro font appears to be infinitely thin at weight 300, it only starts being readable at 120px+. It doesn't have a version for that weight, so the browser is [failing at] simulating that.
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Lens Blur in the new Google Camera app
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We had an interesting discussion about this a few nights ago at a Photojournalism talk.In that field, digital edits are seriously banned, to the point multiple very well known photo journalists have been fired for one little use of the clone tool [1] and other minor edits.It's interesting to think I can throw an f/1.8 lens on my DSLR and take a very shallow depth of field photo, which is OK, even though it's not very representative of what my eyes saw. If I take the photo at f/18 then use an app like the one linked, producing extremely similar results, that's banned. Fascinating what's allowed and what's not.I find even more interesting is the allowance of changing color photos to B/W, or that almost anything that "came straight off the camera" no matter how far it strays from what your eyes saw.[1] http://www.toledoblade.com/frontpage/2007/04/15/A-basic-rule...
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Should All Research Papers Be Free?
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Full disclosure: I'm a founder of a company called Scholastica that provides software that helps journals peer-review and publish open-access content online. One of our journal clients, Discrete Analysis, is linked to in the NYT article.It is incredibly obvious that journal content shouldn't cost as much as it does.- Scholars write the content for free- Scholars do the peer-review for free- All the legacy publishers do is take the content and paywall PDF filesCan you believe it? Paywalling. PDFs. For billions.Of course the publishers say they create immense value by typesetting said PDFs, but as technologists, we can clearly see that this is bunk.There's a comment in this thread that mentions the manual work involved in taking Word files and getting them into PDFs, XML, etc. While that is an issue, which you could consider a technology problem, it definitely doesn't justify the incredible cost of journal content that has been created and peer-reviewed at no cost. Keep in mind that journal prices have risen much faster than the consumer price index since the 80s (1).The future is very clear, academics do the work as they've always done and share the content with the public at a very low cost via the internet.PS. If you want a peek into how the publishers see the whole Sci-Hub kerfuffle, check out this post from one of their industry blogs - the comment section is a doozy: http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2016/03/02/sci-hub-and-th...1. https://cdn1.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/jtj2dzMfklULQipRZt_3xaLoFxU...
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