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Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2016)
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Magic Leap | multiple positions | Dania Beach, FL; Mountain View, CA | Onsite | Full-Time; Intern | Visa (full time) | Computer Vision; Embedded; Machine Learninghttp://magicleap.com/Magic Leap is an eclectic group of visionaries, rocket scientists, wizards, and gurus from the fields of film, robotics, visualization, software, computing, and user experience. We are growing quickly, and this is the time to get on board and play a role in shaping the way people will be interacting with the world tomorrow.In the press: http://www.wired.com/2016/04/magic-leap-vr/We are hiring in the following areas: computer vision
machine learning
embedded systems
software engineering
hardware and pcb design
android systems
embedded algorithm optimization
game dev tools (Unity, Unreal Engine)
cloud computing/apis
For more information or to apply: http://www.magicleap.com/#/wizards-wanted
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The Fathers of the Internet Urge Today’s Software Engineers to Reinvent the Web
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> “That utopian leveling of society, the reinvention of the systems of debate and government—what happened to that?”Only speaking personally, what happened for me was that I noticed that these utopian online communities that we reinvented are not really particularly wonderful because a lot of the loudest people in such communities are really nasty people with really nasty things to say. On the other hand, the internet has proven incredibly useful for enabling people to keep up their deep high-trust relationships (usually forged offline) across longer distances and more life changes. It makes me a bit sad too, but it doesn't appear that being open and distributed is an important ingredient in building these types of communities, as Facebook, WhatsApp, and others have shown.It's always amazing to me how much more down on technology we technologists seem to be than the majority of people I know, who just think it's amazing that they can stay so connected with their friends and family all the time. If I told them that Tim Berners-Lee is bummed that they're sharing pictures and liking posts instead of creating their own web pages, they wouldn't understand why, and I don't think I could really explain it to them (or myself).
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The most mentioned books on Stack Overflow
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Although not directly development related. The most impressive book I've had the pleasure of reading is "Gödel Escher Bach: An eternal golden braid" (also known as GEB) from Douglas Hofstadter.It's hard to explain what it is about exactly, but it contains ideas and concepts from mathematics, computer science, philosophy and conscience. All of it is explained in very clear and interesting way. I can recommend it to anyone interested in these topics.The book won a Pulitzer and to take a quote from the Scientific American about it: "Every few decades, an unknown author brings out a book of such depth, clarity, range, wit, beauty and originality that it is recognized at once as a major literary event."
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Let's Remove the Global Interpreter Lock
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Could someone who really wants to get rid of the GIL explain the appeal? As far as I understand, the only time it would be useful is when you have an application that is 1. Big enough to need concurrency
2. Not big enough to require multiple boxes.
3. Running in a situation that can not spare the resources for multiprocessing.
4. You want to share memory instead of designing your workflow to handle messages or working off a queue.
#4 does sound appealing, but is it really worth the effort?
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Rejecting a candidate for over-qualification results in age bias
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The "traditional understanding" of getting an applicant to your job that is over qualified is that they are just trying to get a paycheck while they look for something better.I put that in quotes because yes, I've seen it also result in an age bias and as I went from one side of the equation to the other, I spent some time evaluating what was and was not important to me as an employee.About 15 years ago I came to the conclusion that "over qualified" was never a legitimate disqualifying disposition of a candidate. Simply put, if you are applying for a job that needs less skills than you bring and are willing to take the salary that is offered, how far 'beyond' the requirements you go is irrelevant. I asked a hiring manager at Google once if they would tell a sales guy "No I don't want the Ferrari at the same price as this Mazda Miata, its more sports car than I need to get around." Even if you never expect to challenge the top end of the sports car you probably won't turn it down. Similarly with employees, if you are up front with them about what the job entails and they are ok with it, who are you to say they will be "bored" or "twiddling their thumbs all day" ?Answer is, you aren't. Hire them and get get a discount on skilz they are offering you. Your company will be better for it.
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Show HN: Self-generated custom art for your home or Airbnb
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It would be nice to have an option to remove the House Rules / Contact section. I just want one for my home.
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AI at Google: our principles
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So, I'm all for giving someone the benefit of the doubt if they have a change of heart upon reconsidering an issue, but this coming after the fact rings a bit hollow to me. I think the only principle at play here is that it became a PR issue. That's fine, but let's be honest about it.Early emails between Google execs framed this project only in terms of revenue and potential PR backlash. As far as we're aware, there was no discussion about the morality of the matter (I'm not taking any moral stance here just to be clear.) Once this became an internal and external PR issue, Google held a series of all hands meetings and claimed that this was a "small project" and that the AI would not be used to kill people. While technically true, those same internal emails show that Google expected this to become a much larger project over time, eventually bringing in about $250M / year[1]. So even then they were being a bit disingenuous by focusing only on the current scope of the deal.And here we are now with a release from the CEO talking about morality and "principles" well after the fact. I doubt many people do anyway, but I'm not buying the "these are our morals" bit.https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2018/06/01/report-g...
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Inventor says Google is patenting work he put in the public domain
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What is the relative advantage of putting something into the public domain versus releasing under an Apache 2 or MIT license? The latter doesn’t restrict anyone’s use AND establishes a public record to refute what Google is trying to do. Additionally, communications by email could be via GitHub issues and open to all to see.
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Chrome extension manifest v3 proposal: comment from uBlock Origin author
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To see how Google feels about ad blockers, all you need to do is look at Chrome on Android & the fact that it does not allow extensions at all. I have personally used Firefox on Android for years because of this.I predict Firefox will see a large uptake in market share if ad and content blockers become ineffective on desktop Chrome. I've finally switched to Firefox on the desktop now that U2F support is here, and it looks like it was just in time.
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My company sold for $100M and I got zilch – how can that be?
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I feel like legal manipulation is very bad for the startup ecosystem. Even here, at the YC forums, people assume their startup equity is worth $0 and advise you to go with a FAANG (or day that they broke even with friends at faangs after their exits). How is a legitimate startup supposed to recruit the best people under these conditions?
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Suspicious Discontinuities
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The perverse incentives around these discontinuities is one of the worst misfeatures of programs intended to help people.Here is a real example. My niece wound up with 3 kids, divorced, with inconsistent child support payments. So she went on food stamps. She was looking for a better job. She found one, interviewed, and they wanted to hire her. But the salary that they offered was $0.50/hour too much for her to stay on food stamps, and was less than her current job. Thanks to union regulations, the person who wanted to hire her couldn't pay her less than the standard salary. The result is that she did not take the job.A common result when Congress takes note of perverse incentives like this is that they introduce a more complex program with specific terms that address specific problems that emerged. The problem is that by creating more brackets and more complex rules you usually create MORE cliffs with perverse incentives (though the perverse incentive at each cliff tends to be less).Another solution is to introduce rules that attempt to identify people who are "abusing the system" and punish them. So, for example, you can only be on welfare for a limited time because people got outraged that single mothers wound up on welfare for a long time. However those single mothers were acting that was in part because they were better off on welfare looking after their own kids than they were in a low end job and paying for daycare.Stereotypically the first type of solution is characteristic of Democrats and the second of Republicans. But the truth is that both parties do a lot of both solutions.
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The unexpected Google wide domain check bypass
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Windows again. "Let's use a backslash instead of a slash in paths" has to be up there with "NUL-terminated strings" in terms of tiny bad ideas from long ago that are still haunting us.Of course it's not as though Google had a choice at the outset, I'm sure some non-trivial number of web sites magically didn't work (and maybe still don't work) if you insist that https://www.example.com\works\fine\on\my\pc doesn't do what the person writing it expects... I think we can blame some early Internet Explorer build for first having this work (I can't see Netscape allowing it) and then it becomes a choice whether to be a purist or sigh and move on once IE gets popular and real people do it.
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The EARN IT Act Violates the US Constitution
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Dear Thomas:Thank you for writing to me to share your concerns about law enforcement access to encrypted communications. I appreciate the time you took to write, and I welcome the opportunity to respond.I understand you are opposed to the “Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies (EARN IT) Act of 2020” (S. 3398), which I introduced with Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), and Josh Hawley (R-MO) on March 5, 2020. You may be interested to know that the Senate Judiciary Committee—of which I am Ranking Member—held a hearing on the “EARN IT Act” on March 11, 2020. If you would like to watch the full hearing or read the testimonies given by the hearing witnesses, I encourage you to visit the following website: https://sen.gov/53RV.The “EARN IT Act” would establish a National Commission on Online Sexual Exploitation Prevention to recommend best practices for companies to identify and report child sexual abuse material. Companies that implement these, or substantially similar, best practices would not be liable for any child sexual abuse materials that may still be found on their platforms. Companies that fail to meet these requirements, or fail to take other reasonable measures, would lose their liability protection.Child abuse is one of the most heinous crimes, which is why I was deeply disturbed by recent reporting by The New York Times about the nearly 70 million online photos and videos of child sexual abuse that were reported by technology companies last year. It is a federal crime to possesses, distribute, or produce pictures of sexually explicit conduct with minors, and technology companies are required to report and remove these images on their platforms. Media reports, however, make it clear that current federal enforcement measures are insufficient and that we must do more to protect children from sexual exploitation.Please know that I believe we must strike an appropriate balance between personal privacy and public safety. It is helpful for me to hear your perspective on this issue, and I will be mindful of your opposition to the “EARN IT Act” as the Senate continues to debate proposals to address child sexual exploitation.Once again, thank you for writing. Should you have any other questions or comments, please call my Washington, D.C. office at (202) 224-3841 or visit my website at feinstein.senate.gov. You can also follow me online at YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, and you can sign up for my email newsletter at feinstein.senate.gov/newsletter.Best regards.Sincerely yours, Dianne Feinstein
United States Senator
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Attention Is My Most Valuable Asset for Productivity as a Software Developer
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Ex-professional weightlifter of about 10 years here, checking in to add a note.
The whole section on physical health and deadlifting is borderline redundant.Don't get me wrong... It's an alpha exercise and you feel amazing doing it. But the only physical reward you get from deadlifting is the ability to deadlift more and alongside it have a severely higher risk of injury.If you want a correlation between sitting at a desk and building strength to offset that, look at squats in all it's forms, and hamstring and quad dominant exercises. Your lower body is in much more trouble than your lower back from sitting at a computer.Hipflexer stretches with resistance bands will also do you wonders.Trust me folks. Doing deadlifts because you see the gym-bros on youtube doing them is a big mistake. Take a book out of Eddie Hall's playbook who says the exact same thing... And he's literally the strongest man in the world.
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Gmail having issues
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People will suggest running your own mail server, and if you have the time and energy then definitely do that.But the next best thing you can do is simply just use your own domain. That way, you can at least decide to migrate your email elsewhere. Don't use the free domains you get from things like gmail or other providers, because then you have to _change_ your email address, and not just your MX records.
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Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon
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We talk often on this forum of how innaccessible giants like Google and Amazon are for the little guy. I thus found this point particularly interesting:>"Attempts to contact the vendor through regular support channels were unsuccessful so we ended up searching LinkedIn and managed to find an engineer working on the core antivirus detection. They immediately understood the seriousness of the problem and took prompt action to get a fix shipped, thus preventing quite the disaster for the users of this product. It’s notable that without this last-ditch effort we would have been effectively blocked from releasing a native Apple Silicon version for an indefinite period."
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Actually Portable Executable
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Using completely wrong greek letters in the title is making me very uneasy for no good reason
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Alexa suggests lethal challenge to child
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Why do people buy and use these things?
And why have they taught their kids to use them? (And what looks like for fun...).I feel like we're on the verge of an age where every single person is used to, and just has an Alexa/google home voice assist in their house.
Not only is it unnecessary, but as you can see from thia tweet, they're never going to be perfect.
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Yep, I created the new Avatar font
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I really got excited and thought this was about the other (IMHO better) Avatarhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avatar:_The_Last_AirbenderBut this font looks cool too.
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It wasn't for nothing
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I'd love to know how the authors financials work. It sounds like a dream to work on something just because it's fun and fulfilling. I have mouths to feed and that dominates much of my career choices. I'm in a small town in a small country so earning a FAANG salary is not an option. I can't save up and go work on a dream project.
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Transformers from Scratch (2021)
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An early explainer of transformers, which is a quicker read, that I found very useful when they were still new to me, is The Illustrated Transformer[1], by Jay Alammar.A more recent academic but high-level explanation of transformers, very good for detail on the different flow flavors (e.g. encoder-decoder vs decoder only), is Formal Algorithms for Transformers[2], from DeepMind.[1] https://jalammar.github.io/illustrated-transformer/
[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.09238
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Ask HN: Can someone ELI5 transformers and the “Attention is all we need” paper?
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The Yannic kilcher review is quite good.https://youtu.be/iDulhoQ2proI can't ELI5 but I can ELI-junior-dev. Tl;dw:Transformers work by basically being a differentiable lookup/hash table. First your input is tokenized and (N) tokens (this constitutes the attention frame) are encoded both based on token identity and position in the attention frame.Then there is an NxN matrix that is applied to your attention frame "performing the lookup query" over all other tokens in the attention frame, so every token gets a "contextual semantic understanding" that takes in both all the other stuff in the attention frame and it's relative position.Gpt is impressive because the N is really huge and it has many layers. A big N means you can potentially access information farther away. Each layer gives more opportunities to summarize and integrate long range information in a fractal process.Two key takeaways:- differentiable hash tables- encoding relative position using periodic functionsNB: the attention frame tokens are actually K-vectors (so the frame is a KxN matrix) and the query matrix is an NxNxK tensor IIRC but it's easier to describe it this way
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Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles and Unreal Engine
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For years I've been dreaming of a driving/pedestrian sandbox game that used Google Maps data to let me drive recklessly around my home town with accurate models of the buildings and roads.This demo reminds me of that dream.
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Show HN: Unity like game editor running in pure WASM
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Do you know anything about any WASM developments that will enable pure WASM interaction with the browser's Web-APIs at no or at a low cost without the JS layer? Sometimes I look at https://github.com/WebAssembly/proposals and it's very confusing. There are the type imports proposal(years away), the almost complete GC proposal(which is apparently only for GCd languages, but not for anything browserwasm), the component model(which looks and sounds as something not for the browser use case), JS String Builtins (which will provide faster JS strings, but not DOM) and ECMAScript module integration (which will turn WASM modules into ES modules, but Web-APIs aren't ES modules so no luck). Sometimes I read contributor interactions and it looks as if providing such functionality isn't their priority or even in their plans, and for the majority the WASI + component model for the cloud, crypto and similar use cases are more important.
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Letter To A Young Programmer Considering A Startup
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"Yet, there is no enduring formula for creativity and rebellion."This is a fine sounding statement, but it's false. We've been accumulating and refining techniques for having new ideas for centuries, at least. Leonardo da Vinci mentioned several in his writings.
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Seriously.js
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"Sadly, we are unable to get Seriously.js to work on your computer. Sometimes WebGL gets a bit weird with certain graphics hardware and drivers. Please have a look here for more information."
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The Strange Case of Barrett Brown
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There may be an argument for life in prison, or even execution, for people that are so dangerous that they should never be allowed in the society again. But either give life, or put a cap on prison sentences at say 25 years, total, like it's in many other countries.This idea of "adding" sentences is ridiculous, and my guess is it's only (ab)used as a way to force people into agreeing to declare themselves guilty, and the prosecutors going "easy on them" and only asking for 30 years in prison, instead of 100, if they win.That's not justice and people should be opposing this. I think it was on The Daily Show where a guest talked about a documentary called Gideon's Army where they're talking exactly about this issue, and how prosecutors are forcing 90% of the people arrested to admit guilt this way, before they even get a trial. So 90% go to prison without a trial!It also must be very convenient that the US law is so complex now, and has gotten to the point where everyone can be incriminated with something, so basically the prosecutors can threaten just about anyone with at least a charge or two, if they want to. They must be BS charges, but lucky for them they manage to convince those people to agree with a "lesser punishment" before there even is a trial. I'm sure the private prison system and their lobbying plays a big role in this, too. It's self sustaining corrupt system.
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I understood gender discrimination once I added “Mr.” to my resume
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That's really, really sad.And the worst part is, it's surely conscious on nobody's part. There have even been studies showing this effect.What's even sadder is that there's no obvious or easy way to fix it.
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2015 Chromebook Pixel
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Jesus, designing a usable ultrabook must be very difficult.We have one contender from California, but their ideology has them offer just a single USB-C port. Now we get the competitor from Mountain View, who have rightly recognized the need for more than one fucking port when that's how you charge the damn thing, and what do they decide?Oh yeah, we'll top out storage at 64GiB.
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Times Pulls Article Blaming Encryption in Paris Terror Attack
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Increasingly we're seeing 'encryption' discussed in mainstream media as a tool that can only be used for nefarious ends. Kind of like how they talked about "cookies" in the late 90s and early 00s.It's unfortunate that there's no way [without a lot of money] to launch a campaign that highlights the fact that most sensitive online transactions rely on encryption - banking, purchasing, etc - to protect you from The Bad People who want to steal your critical financial information.That would also highlight that it's not just about keeping secrets from the government - in fact, that's the smallest fraction of it.
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Snowden: FBI obscuring crucial details in Apple case
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No tinfoil intended here, but it strikes me as very unfortunate that the Supreme Court Justice most likely to be opposed to this recently passed away last weekend.In my not-a-lawyer opinion, I think that Apple will absolutely take this as far as it can. With only an 8-member court, Anthony Kennedy becomes even more important than ever.We should be lobbying SCOTUS harder now than ever before. We need them to rule against this far more than we need to be calling congress people.We need the Supreme Court to act with the effect of precedent. But I'm not optimistic. We would need Roberts and Thomas to back off their national security platforms, and we need RBG and Kagan to understand the problem better.Kennedy is a wildcard, but if we can explain the issue in plain English to those key people and get them to agree, this is doable. Alito and Sotomayor will fall in line.If we do our jobs as members of the body politic, write amicus briefs, and hound the members of the court, this is doable.Thomas and Roberts can be swayed. So can RBG and Kagan. It would be an easier 5-4 decision with Scalia still around, but this is possible without him, and we need to focus our efforts.I'll be putting my money where my mouth is over the weekend and creating a website that submits comments to the individual justices. I'll also be asking for help/edits on the boilerplate I'm offering as a starting point.
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Hello from Orkut
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I'm echoing what others are saying: no web version means I won't bother at all.My phone has access to multiple great browsers. Building a good lightweight web app means I can access the content from anywhere without having to deal with annoyances of push notifications or (as much) creepy tracking.My favorite example of a mobile web app is currently Twitter Mobile [0]. I even like using it from my desktop. It's very lightweight, fast, and easy to read.[0] https://mobile.twitter.com/
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Developer Preview – EC2 Instances with Programmable Hardware
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If you don't click through to read about this: you can write an FPGA image in verilog/VHDL and upload it... and then run it. To me that seems like magic.HDK here: https://github.com/aws/aws-fpga(I work for AWS)
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Introducing Lottie: Airbnb's tool for adding animations to native apps
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Author of the iOS side of things here. Feel Free to ask any questions!
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ICANN races towards regulatory capture: the great .org heist
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Seize the means of registration. Seriously, why on earth are the domain registries of the world not in the hands of the people? This stuff is far to important to be under the control of cooperations.
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Ask HN: Best Talks of 2019?
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For me, personally, it was David Beazley's Keynote (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUT386_GKI8) at PyCon India this year.
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How to brainstorm great business ideas
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There is an interesting bias going on here. I'm wondering how many people upvoting this text has actually built a business, or just want to believe that what was written here is true?Building a business is messy. Most ideas suck initially. Companies who got the problem right the first time are extremely rare. Just as rare as companies who succeeded with a crappy idea having great execution.The hero ingredient is luck. Using all the tricks of the non scientific entrepreneurship self-help literature may grant you better odds at getting lucky, or may not.You know if the problem/idea/execution was good/real after you have customers paying you. And even after that you don't really know was it execution or idea that won the game, only that they were enough good to succeed.
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How to sell a B2B product
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A rule I gave myself after running a company for several years is that I never reply to incoming offers or sales pitches. In my opinion it’s very rare that someone really offers something that my company needs at that exact moment, so most interactions resulting from such offers will be a waste of my time. In the past I reacted to such incoming offers, but I always regretted it and usually burned some money and time as well. Now they only way I pick suppliers is by sourcing them myself exactly when I need something.I think many executives / entrepreneurs have developed a similar adversity towards incoming offers, and my own experience with cold outbound selling seems to confirm this. I’ve contacted hundreds of companies myself trying to sell our service, but the only deals we closed so far were either with companies we already knew via our network or ones that did actively seek out our services themselves. It’s of course possible that an experienced sales person would be able to generate outbound interest, but as a founder without much sales experience it is very tough.
I therefore think inbound sales is the future, at least in B2B.
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Create Diagrams in VS Code with Draw.io
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There are also plugins for graphviz, which is a more structured language. I use it for documenting states in my code, e.g. https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=tintinwe... and https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=joaompin.... Since graphviz is old, there are also command line tools to render the output.For more information about graphviz: https://graphviz.org/
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Laying the foundation for Rust’s future
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What other programming languages have established foundations like this? The other one I know of is the Python Software Foundation.
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Six Figures in 6 days
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As an Android user, I am completely blown away by two things: #1 iPhones got this only in 2020, when Android had this since the first version, #2 iPhone owners are willing to spend $28 for a icon pack, a very nice one, but still an icon pack.
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Google’s Supreme Court faceoff with Oracle was a disaster for Google
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I'm not sure why so many people here seem to be surprised by this, I got the exact same impression from the hearing.The problem for Google on the copyrightability front is that "compilations" of non-copyrightable items can be copyrightable even if the underlying items themselves are not, if the "selection, coordination, or arrangement" of those items involves sufficient creativity to be considered an "original work of authorship".For example, individual recipes are generally not copyrightable, but if you compile a set of recipes and publish them in a cookbook, the cookbook itself becomes copyrightable.As applied to Java, individual method signatures like min and max might not be copyrightable, but someone had to go in and organize those individual methods into classes, and organize those classes into packages. That act of organization likely implies that the Java API (taken as a whole) constitutes a copyrightable work, even if the individual method signatures are not.What's worse for Google is that code has always been considered copyrightable so arguing that APIs are non-copyrightable is essentially carving out an exception for a specific type of code.As is common when HN discusses legal matters I see a lot of people blaming the judges for not understanding tech, but the problem here isn't really the judges so much as the law itself. We should not be surprised if Oracle ends up winning here, at least on the question of copyrightability. Google may have an out related to fair use, but that seems like a long shot as well.
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Comic Mono
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Comic Sans and its descendants are... indestructible. No matter how much some font designers complain about it, and how often they criticize it, Comic Sans keeps coming back, like the Terminator: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comic_Sans#Reception_and_use_i...Among the most incongruous uses of Comic Sans I've seen, a few stand out:* A plaque on a large statue of a historical figure in a public space: https://www.biobiochile.cl/noticias/nacional/region-metropol...* A letter announcing the creation of new political party in Greece, breaking off with the then-current Prime Minister: https://web.archive.org/web/20151004131442/http://www.volosn...* A letter to the US Congress from the legal team defending the President against impeachment proceedings: https://www.fastcompany.com/90414127/trumps-old-lawyers-real...Thankfully, in these examples the authors chose not to use a different color for each letter!
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Lithium battery costs have fallen by 98% in three decades
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This is important to keep in mind when you read articles and/or studies about how electric cars or wind or solar power is impractical. A lot of the data these studies use is just obsolete.Say you have an opinion piece in a news paper that says that electric cars will always be expensive toys for the rich. It relies on a scientific paper published in a technical journal 2 years ago. The scientific paper does not perform original research but relies on a study published 2 years ago, which study relies on official data reported by companies six months before publication.Perhaps nobody in this propagation chain meant to mislead. But in the end they are using old data that assumes that battery costs are five times what they are in reality and twenty times what they will be in the near future (for example) and draws all the wrong conclusions.Similar things are happening with articles and public comments about renewable energy. There are numerous arguments about how we will always need coal power or nuclear power, or natural gas and they all base it on old studies with obsolete high costs of batteries. These articles commit a further error by also neglecting the every decreasing costs of solar and wind power. These articles are even more egregious because while a car lasts only 10-15 years a power plant is supposed to last at least 30 (for coal or gas) and up to 60 (for nuclear). Furthermore, nuclear plants take 5 to 10 years to even build. In those years the costs of batteries and renewables will only go down further.In the financial press there were many articles about how Tesla will never be profitable, how it is an extravagant way for shareholders to subsidize luxury car buyers, how it will always rely on government subsidies and will need more of them, etc. Well, guess what the federal tax credit expired and lo and behold tesla is profitable.They weren't necessarily lying. But they were using automotive industry assumptions, and the auto industry with their internal combustion engines is a mature industry with few opportunities for cost reductions. But as far as batteries and electric motors and power semiconductors go ... well we are just getting started on them and hopefully we will have many opportunities for cost reductions.
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Private Israeli spyware used to hack cellphones of journalists, activists
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Aren't these private hacking companies breaking the law though? Does anyone know why no one has sued them or arrested them or something? From what I understand in most cases, any attempts to reverse engineer or exploit any system is against terms of service with the offender held liable. Some teenager who comes up with a game hack can be slapped with a massive fine, but these hacking companies aren't even breaking the law? How does that work?Cause I think I'm in the wrong game
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Messaging and chat control
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The scary thing about this is that many people have images that look like child porn at home: Family photos of naked grandchildren playing at the sea or in the mud, as well as sexting between consenting teenagers. There is no way automatic classification can distinguish these from real child porn, because they look almost identical and thus many private pictures will be shared with the government. This not only infringes the privacy of those people in the most drastic way possible, but might also lead to lawsuits that can tear families apart (think your father being accused of having CP only for it to turn out months later it was an old picture of yourself). The article mentions that 40% of CP investigations in Germany are started against minors (implied: through sexting), which shows that this concern is not purely theoretical at all.This was not an issue with the old approach of comparing checksums against public CP images, but it will increasingly be if we use more AI algorithms for this.EDIT: Probably Apples neural hashes that are currently in the news won't be vulnerable to this since they trained specifically to only detect changes in color/cropping/rotation. But we can't know for sure since the white paper is not that detailed and "naked kid on beach" photos all look really similar usually.
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Google's Secret Initiative – “Project Hug”
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Thread links no longer work on mobile web Twitter without an account.
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In MySQL, use “utf8mb4” instead of “utf8” (2016)
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Has anyone ever successfully converted a large legacy Apache/PHP/MySQL site to UTF-8? If so you deserve an award. utf8mb4 is just one issue and not the worst.
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Web color is still broken
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The worst part about web colour is that it's not even consistent. If you draw a PNG containing a rectangle with a given colour on to a page with background colour of the exact same RGB values, then it can look different.Here's an example: https://incoherency.co.uk/interest/colour.htmlAnd here's a screenshot of how it looks on my browser (Firefox 99.0, Ubuntu 20.04 LTS): https://img.incoherency.co.uk/3812The square is a different colour to the page background colour despite having the same RGB value (#0cf4c7) but they look different. No amount of changing the colour mode selection in GIMP can fix this.I opened the screenshot in GIMP and used the colour picker tool to see what colour my #0cf4c7 has turned into, and in the screenshot image it is #67f1c7.Strangely, when I draw the screenshot in the browser, its colours stay the same, so obviously there is something you can do to the PNG that will make it render the colours you chose.
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Apple’s Self Service Repair now available
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I find it… curious that the Self Service [0] website of famously brand-conscious Apple is dog-ugly, generic, and has no Apple branding whatsoever.[0]: https://www.selfservicerepair.com/home
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Facebook tracking is illegal in Europe
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This is a crazy way of making laws, IMO.To recap: a law was put in place 5 years ago that said if you get consent you can basically use data in any way, with some very vague and general language about how consent can be gathered and what it means.Meanwhile, Facebook has invested billions of dollars in building and developing a platform according to their fair reading of that law.Then, some random guy says he doesn't think Facebook's interpretation is right, a court agrees, and all of those billions of dollars have gone to waste.So absurdly inefficient. No regulator has had the idea of just going to Facebook, having a real conversation about what they're doing, then talked about it with ethics professionals and researchers and tried to draft a forward-looking law that will make the whole system better? No; we prefer to thrive by ignoring problems for a long time then smashing them with a hammer.
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Krita: A professional free and open source painting program
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As a long-time user and supporter of Krita, I'm thrilled to see it mentioned here. However, I must express my concern about the choice of emphasizing "FREE" in all caps in this headline. While I understand that the cost-free nature of open-source software is certainly appealing, I feel that this particular framing could cheapen the overall value proposition of Krita.Krita has much more to offer than just being free. It's a powerful and versatile painting program, developed by a dedicated team of professionals and volunteers who have worked tirelessly to make it an excellent tool for digital artists. The software offers a wide range of features, including an intuitive user interface, advanced brush engines, and robust layering capabilities. These strengths are what truly set Krita apart and should be the primary focus when promoting it.By emphasizing the "FREE" aspect in all caps, the headline may inadvertently detract from these strengths and create the perception that Krita's most significant selling point is its price tag, rather than its outstanding functionality and features. I would suggest presenting Krita as a "professional open-source painting program" without the all-caps emphasis on "FREE," so that the conversation around it can focus more on its capabilities and the value it brings to the creative community.Again, I wholeheartedly support Krita and am grateful for the fantastic work that has been put into it. I hope this critique is received in the caring and thoughtful spirit in which it was intended, as my goal is to ensure that Krita receives the recognition and appreciation it truly deserves.
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Mojo – a new programming language for AI developers
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There are a bunch of questions about Julia, so I'll do my best to give a short answer to a very long and complicated topic. Up front, Julia is a wonderful language and a wonderful community, I am a super fan.That said, Mojo is a completely different thing. It is aligned with the Python community to solve specific problems outlined here:
https://docs.modular.com/mojo/why-mojo.htmlMojo also has a bunch of technical advancements compared to Julia by virtue of it being a much newer development and being able to learn from it (and Swift and Rust, and C++ and many many other languages). Including things like ownership and no GC. We also think there is room for a new language that is easier to deploy, scales down to small envelopes, works directly with the full Python ecosystem, is designed for ML and for MLIR from first principles, etc.Julia is far more mature and advanced in many ways. Many folks have and will continue to push Julia forward and we wish them the best, it is a lovely ecosystem and language. There is room for more than one thing! :)EDIT: Just in case there is any confusion, I work for Modular, built LLVM, Swift, Clang, MLIR and a variety of other things. I wasn't trying to misrepresent as being unaffiliated.
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We raised a bunch of money
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Will you be publishing a follow up blog post about how you’re increasing API user fees once you’ve monopolized your particular market? Or how about how you’ll be increasing margins for investors in 5 years as you prepare for your IPO?Why won’t you suffer the fate of every single other tech company that raises a shit load of money which is completely and irrevocably selling out any pretense of being beneficial for customers and employees (primarily) in the extreme long term?My new heuristic is that I avoid every single company that raises venture funding. Hopefully others adopt this heuristic because by raising tons of money, so you are explicitly creating an adversarial relationship between the customers/users and your investors so everyone but your founding team and investors in the long term is worse off.Edit: I’ve been a HN power user since 2012 - don’t ask me why I’m here.
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Great HN parody
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It's missing the "Why I'm leaving HN (This time for good)"and "A front page HN story about how being on the front page of HN changed my business"and "A rambling article about how voting is broken on HN"and "How I lived out of a shoebox and traveled the world on a bicycle while creating my startup"Anybody interested in more, I refer you to my javascript parody of two years ago, "Roll Your Own Linkbait Tech Headline": http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2011/01/roll-your-own...
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German Girl Turned Away at Border Due to Private Facebook Messages
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It's unclear to me who provided the print-out of Jana's private messages. Obviously it seems much more likely that Jana provided the messages, not Homeland Security.I hired a Canadian once under a TN NAFTA "visa" and he had to bring some correspondence from me to the border. We had to be very careful to word things correctly and not to use specific words that could prevent him from coming to the US. It seems that this is similar to what this young woman experienced.
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New NIST password guidelines: don't require character types or rotation
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I never understood thecidea of having to change my password periodically. The password was good last month, why isn't it good now?
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Scala Native v0.1
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I would love for there to be a similarly thorough project with Clojure. It really bothers me there's no good native compiler. Apart from anything else, it means that Clojure lives and dies by the languages it compiles to, and while Java is used everywhere still, it probably isn't the thing the kids are learning these days. Besides, without going into any further rational arguments for why using the JVM (or another VM) isn't always great, something about it feels a bit icky to me. On an aesthetic level.
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Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day (2014)
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Next: Mining bitcoin with pool of monkeys with typewriters.
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Economics of Minecraft
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This was one of the most entertaining things I've read lately.I tried playing on minecraft servers with economy plugins, but never really saw the point. I just liked mining for the sake of mining so an economy didn't do much for me.But this... it's like a gigantic meta-game on top of the game you're already enjoying. Something tells me I'll be playing some minecraft tonight...
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Google loses ‘right to be forgotten’ case
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We're rapidly moving to a point where an official (government) criminal record is not important to folks you want to interact with -- landlords, employers etc. They will instead turn to Google. As such, Google might as well be the official record for many people.And if one put themsleves in the shoes of a victim, or even a criminal who has served their time, Google's pagerank is doing them a disservice.I don't know if expunging records is the right thing to do, but it's worth discussing. There's no guarantee that searching a criminal's name will bring up the recent history where they've done their time, shown contrition, and is contributing to society. Instead it'll be the most highly cited -- likely news about their crime.As a society, we approve of jail being the mechanism to "forgive" a person's crime. As such, isn't it horrible that Google's pagerank will only turn up what they've done wrong in the past? Again, I don't know if expunging the records is the right thing to do (in fact I believe it's wrong), but I do think it's worth debating.
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GitHub launches Actions, its workflow automation tool
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This UI is beautiful. I hope GitLab looks into implementing something similar. Their CI is already so powerful, it would be great to be able to have a UI to build pipelines.
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A Raspberry Pi-powered live train station sign
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That is super cool.But admittedly when I saw the title i was hoping for a mini version of those massive flipboard signs. Those things are amazing.
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Amazon Changed Search Algorithm in Ways That Boost Its Own Products
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Considering how shopping at Amazon now feels like shopping at an electronics bazaar in Singapore with giant bins of random knock-off products of suspicious quality, tweaking the algo to push name-brand options (even if it's their own name-brand) would be a welcome move to me as a buyer.Obviously it's grossly unfair to their vendors, but from a strictly user-centric view it's an improvement.Otherwise, Amazon feels like AliExpress with faster shipping and better English.
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Ask HN: How was life for a regular dev during the dot com burst?
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I had a summer internship at HP while I was in college. (I graduated in 1992.) When I graduated, the assumption/expectation was that they would offer me a job. They hesitated, and a manager who was unusually nice to me explained that HP hires people who will stick around for many years -- and thus, they weighed every hire carefully.He went further and said that several years before that, when there had been a recession, everyone at HP -- all the way up and down the ladder -- worked 9 days out of 10, and took a 10% salary cut, in order to ensure that there wouldn't be any layoffs.People spoke about the company, and how it treated employees, with great pride, and the way that they treated workers during hard times was one major reason for that.If nothing else, I learned from these stories that the boss/owner should be paid last, after all of the employees receive their salaries. I've done that whenever I've had employees, and I credit that lesson not just to general business ethics, but to a sense that business is about much more than just profit.It's hard to imagine a modern company taking such steps to avoid layoffs, but the story continues to inspire me nearly 30 years later.
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Parse, Don’t Validate
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This is describing what I've known as "Typed Hungarian notation", and have seen a few times before, though I can't seem to find now.The original intent of Hungarian notation was to encode metadata into the variable name - for example, "validData = validate(rawData); showValidData(validData)". The idea was that the prefixes would make it just look wrong to the programmer if someone accidentally used mismatched names, such as "showValidData(rawData)", indicating a likely bug.This notation mutated into the far more simplistic and arguably less useful "prefix with the datatype", such as iFoo indicating Foo is an integer. This mutation became known as Systems Hungarian, while the original became Apps Hungarian.The suggestion in this post is taking Apps Hungarian, and instead of relying on variable names, encoding it into the type system itself.The first time I recall seeing something like this suggested was actually in Java, with examples in that blog post involving class attributes: public String Name;
public String Address;
And creating classes to represent these values, preventing them from being used the wrong way: public NameType Name;
public AddressType Address;
...which is why I remember this as "Typed Hungarian" - making the language's type system handle the work that a person would normally have to think about in Apps Hungarian.
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The FBI is secretly using Sabre as a global travel surveillance tool
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https://search.edwardsnowden.com/docs/FullSpectrumCyberEffec...see page 8.GCHQ has a program called ROYALCONCIERGE, where they hack the reservation systems of hotels to watch for targets renting rooms. then GCHQ sends teams ahead of time to intercept the targets, preaumably to spy on them, or assassinate them or rendition them to a black site.from another Snowden doc which i can no longer find, it was revealed that ROYAL CONCIERGE hacked hotels owned by Starwood, one of the biggest umbrella corps owning multiple global hotel chains.you think NSA only went after Starwood hotels? remember NSA said their "Full Spectrum Domination" posture means "Collect It All."you think if NSA/GCHQ are hacking into hotel reservation databases to exfiltrate the whole shebang, that Airline reservation systems are NOT a higher priority?a commenter said it is ridiculous hypocracy how we blast China for forcing its tech companies to become appendages of their military/intelligence complex, while ignoring FBI/CIA/NSA do the very exact same thing under the rubric of NSLs and Bulk FISA Warrants and Business Records "All Tangible Things" and EO12333 get-out-of-jail-free cards to target anything loosely related to "understanding foreign intelligence."there is zero difference between what China does and what the FVEYs do, except that our Overlords tell us they are not spying on us, while every peasant in China knows they are being spied on by their govt because the Chinese govt openly admits to it.
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Writing a book: is it worth it?
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I have spent probably thousands of hours writing random responses helping people on forums, just because its the thing that I do to procrastinate. For example, this year I wrote more than 4000 posts on https://users.rust-lang.org/ and 19000 messages on the help channels in a few Discord servers. I'm probably the world expert at spotting the mistake in small snippets of Rust code at this point.I honestly wish I was able to channel this incredible amount of writing into blog posts or a book, but I don't know how. My blog has had one post in the last three years. Writing a blog post just takes energy in a way that writing on forums simply does not.It's always been this way too. For example, in high school, I spent the time on https://math.stackexchange.com/.
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Introducing the next generation of Mac
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I don't understand the pricing of the MacBook Air vs the 13" Pro.The Air ($1249) vs 13" Pro ($1299), you get:- same CPU- same GPU- same Neural chip- same RAM (8gb)- More storage for the Air (512gb vs 256gb with 13" Pro)- You get Touch Bar with 13" ProSo if you don't care about the Touch Bar, you actually get with the Air:- better specs- smaller device footprint- and $50 cheaper.Am I missing something?
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Dev Fonts
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My favourite monospaced font is Triplicate https://practicaltypography.com/triplicate.html>: the only true serif monospace that I know of (though I have a vague feeling I found one other at some point). Every other serif monospace I know of is a slab serif. Triplicate’s variable stroke thickness is also exceedingly rare in monospaced fonts; almost everyone goes for uniform stroke thickness, as is customary with sans-serif fonts but anathema for true serif fonts (though slab serifs could be either). Variable stroke thickness can be a bit iffy on low-resolution displays, but so long as you keep the size up or use a high-resolution display, I find it very pleasant. I’ve been using Triplicate everywhere for the last few years, including on my website.(Also note on that page, since people are talking about ligatures a lot in this thread: “No, there are no programming ligatures in Triplicate, and there never will be.” with a link to https://practicaltypography.com/ligatures-in-programming-fon..., which can be distilled to the quote “ligatures in programming fonts are a terrible idea”. I agree.)Pragmata Pro and Operator are two other well-regarded and popular commercial monospaced fonts that are missing from this list.
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Who Americans spend their time with, by age
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The thing that seems crazy to me is how much time alone increases with age. There are many many reasons for it, but one thing I think is especially sad is how much this is a consequence of our built environment. If you live in a village with multiple generations of a family around, it’s much easier for grandparents to be involved day too day in helping with little things in the village, especially keeping an eye on the kids roaming around. This is also true in the more traditional urban neighborhoods with walking-oriented life (safety from cars) and a wide mix of housing types etc.But (to varying degrees) most of the new construction around the world since WW2 has been oriented around driving and separation of land uses, and as a result when you age you end up living in a nice little garden home far removed from any day to day life going on. And once it gets hard for you to drive... then you really end up spending a ton of time alone.I don’t think there’s an easy fix for this, and that makes me sad.
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Interview advice that got me offers
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The hardest part about interviewing is that there is no feedback loop; I once interviewed at 10 companies within 2 weeks and got rejected from all of them, but to this day I still don't know what part I need to improve upon.
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Revolt: Open-source alternative to Discord
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Not sure "written in Rust" is a headline thing that's worth mentioning anymore. Particularly amusing in this case when parts of Discord are written in Rust too.
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StarBook 14-inch
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Looks interesting, starts at $930 which is not too steep vs other products in the same space, price of upgrades is not stated which is a bit scary. Several Linux distros tested including Ubuntu, but Debian is not in the list. Appears to have a non-removable battery with nothing said about replacing it. And of course the CPU (whether you pick Intel or AMD) is full of blobs, management engine, etc. I didn't notice a mention of a built in microphone but it is a standard thing to find on laptops, so what I was hoping to see was a way to hard disconnect it.Edit: aha, I see replacement parts including batteries are available if you select "parts" from the menu.Ordering screen alert says "Production for the StarLite's has now finished, and are in the final stages of testing. Orders placed now are estimated to ship out in 2-3 weeks."There are some unstated "if"s in that, so I would say until people actually receive units, it doesn't quite exist.Anyway I will keep an eye out for this. I'm going to need another laptop at some point and this seems like a possibility, as does the Framework, etc.
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Detecting unauthorized physical access with beans, lentils and colored rice (2021)
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Am I the only one who's totally unable to spot the apparently-obvious difference in the comparison photo GIF at the end?
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Mozilla reaffirms that Firefox will continue to support current content blockers
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Is Mozilla really trying to juxtapose themselves here against another browser that removes support for power user customization like they don't do it? That's wild. Is there no one left at Moz that remembers them throwing away the entire ecosystem of XUL based extensions that allowed for many things that current Firefox builds don't re: blocking and UI customization.Mozilla literally did this back in the version 37 and only Firefox forks remain to support the full set of extension features. I guess we're all amnesiacs or the pot is just being boiled slowly enough to not notice.
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Experian is a pile of dark pattern garbage
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Those upsell marketing emails without unsubscribe links because they are "account related emails" are the worst. I quickly solved the problem by marking everything from Experian as spam, but I can't think of another service where I've gone searching for an unsubscribe link and haven't found one. Their messaging at the bottom of these emails for anyone who is curious:"This is not a marketing email — you’re receiving this message to notify you of a recent change to your account. If you’ve unsubscribed from Experian CreditWorks℠ Basic emails in the past, don’t worry — you no longer receive newsletters or special offers."Checking my spam folder, it looks like I've already received two of them this calendar month.
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Neural Networks: Zero to Hero
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A little offtopic, but is this something that someone with only webdev experience can get started with?
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Why is OAuth still hard in 2023?
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It'd be interesting to hear about people who have had a good time implementing OAuth, as my experience is similar to that in the article. I've played with adding it to a few side projects and the process usually goes:1. Read loads of docs, end up pretty confused2. Find a library that seems to do what I want3. Install this huge library full of opaque code
doing...things4. Have an impossible time troubleshooting issues5. Get scared ("I'm almost certainly doing something wrong here") and give upI find it hard to have much faith in security standards like this. I want them small, well defined and understandable and OAuth does not meet any of these criteria in my experience.
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Hacker Monthly #1 is here
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I will have to admit, I was skeptical about the idea when it was discussed here first and now I can see real value in it. Its true that discussion on these topics adds value to the contents and that is what makes a community unique. The discussions.But sometimes I just want to read the content, not get distracted by anything else.Two suggestions for future releases.1) Can you reprint at least the top 3-5 comments on those topics on hackers News? (not sure how you are going to do that without making a lot of people mad). Also on the PDF version, can you have a clickable link to the discussion on the hacker news?2) One of the biggest reasons I am turned off from reading magazines is the annoying ads all over the place including in-between the content. Since you are going to rely on ad, may I suggest that you try to avoid ads on the same page, where there is content? I stopped reading Wired Magazine, just because of this reason.Good luck. Looks good.
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Steve Jobs Resigns as Apple CEO (Official Letter)
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Fuck all those WSJ assholes with their "SELL SELL SELL" comments.
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The Marco.org Review of John Siracusa’s Review of OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion
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Marco has perfected the followup blog entry HN spam. Even if it is hilarious and witty.He jumps on a hot topic and gets the page views.
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First Mechanical Gear Found in a Living Creature
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This gives us four possibilities:1. This geared creature must be considered part mechanical. A cyborg, if you will.2. A "gear" is no longer (and was never) a "mechanical" device, but instead an organic one. Using gears is no longer (and was maybe never) doing mechanics.3. Whether something is mechanical or organic depends on the process which created it. This is the "colored bits" or "patent" view. (If I build something using intuition instead of reason, am I no longer doing mechanics?)4. A gear is no longer (and was never) either mechanic or organic, and is simply a physical process. The whole "mechanical" and "organic" division is a false dichotomy.
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Learn C and build your own Lisp
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How good is this book for a complete beginner? I am starting to learn C in my free time and I have no objective way to judge this book.
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Researchers Could Have Uncovered Volkswagen’s Emissions Cheat If Not for DMCA
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To be honest, that is pure populism by the EFF. I am a supporter of EFF and against the DMCA. But that saying is BS.There are many different ECUs within a car (about 40 in a current Volkswagen Golf). Does EFF really thinks that someone would have found that issue, when everything is OpenSource?Nobody would have examined such things, because nobody would have been interested in examining it, if it would be OpenSource. We have seen such things in lots of OpenSource software, just reminding of the now legendary Debian bug in the random number generator or Heartbleed and such things. How long where those bugs present?To find this wrongdoing by VW you don't need access to the car. Put a measuring device to the pipe and drive around.The question: why did the engineers implemented a detection of the test environment? Because you need to. You just have to apply a little bit of thinking your self. Such a car is equipped with lots of assistants like traction control, like crash detection, and so on. In a test environment you have your car running on a dynamometer or alike. That means the car detects, that 2 wheels run at 30 mph while 2 wheels are standing still and there is no acceleration. The car now has to classify that situation. The car has to decide if the front wheels are just spinning in the mud and traction control must be applied, or is it a valid situation. So there are lots of those things you have to consider during development and which are valid use cases. Of course this should not be misused.
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Apple fans are coming to hate Apple software
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It's not just software. While I'm still a fan of Macbooks, I'm getting close to abandoning ship thanks to the increasingly un-repairability of these things. I have a Macbook from ~2008 that's still functional as a media PC thanks to memory/SSD upgrades and battery replacements over the years.My current Macbook Pro has memory soldered on to the motherboard and a battery glued to the case. The SSD is technically replaceable, but the specs that this laptop shipped with are going to be the specs that it dies with.When the battery goes, I'll have to either risk destroying the machine or pay way too much to Apple to do the job for me. At that point I'll probably just switch to a brand with a more reasonable user-servicing model, assuming those still exist.
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A Basic Income Should Be the Next Big Thing
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I'm still wondering about one thing: if everybody has a basic income, then who will be doing the dirty jobs like collecting our waste? Will the price for waste collecting go up? And will there then be a kind of economic "inversion", where the intellectual people prefer to work on interesting stuff at the expense of money, while the "non-intellectual" (need a better word here) people will make all the money doing the dirty jobs?
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The Intel ME subsystem can take over your machine, can't be audited
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Does this apply to Macs?
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The Problem with AMP
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One thing I love about AMP, that seems to never be mentioned when people discuss it, is viewing AMP-HTML pages on my laptop.I wrote a small chrome extension that always forwards my page to the equivalent AMP page (if one exists) and the experience of reading the news is so much better.AMP pages off mobile are really really amazing. Compare Non-AMP[0] vs AMP[1][0] http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Trump-on-the-minds-of-...[1] http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/amp/Trump-on-the-minds-of-MLK-...
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Get your loved ones off Facebook
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It won't be a popular opinion here but here it goes:Well if it all goes to hell we will all be in the same handbasket. I'm simply not willing to cut people out of my life and miss out on things that are important to me because my data is mined and might be used against me. All these distributed platforms are a joke, no really they are technically cool but no one I care about is on them. Maybe if your entire social circle is technically sophisticated you can leave FB for something like diaspora (I don't know if this is the "new hotness" or if there is something better but I really don't care). My social graph is so far from able or willing to switch to something else it's not even funny. Like it or not there is a social stigma around NOT having a FB account. In fact I've thought on multiple occasions that someone is hiding something if they don't have one. You might hate me for that or hate the fact people think like that but good luck changing that mindset.Look I've been on the other side of this, I paid for App.net (I think that's what that twitter clone was called) and tried multiple distributed platforms but they all fall short or require too many compromises. I tried to get friends to use Signal but no one really cares. iMessage/FB Messenger are just easier and everyone is on them. You want people to leave the "evil facebook" then make something better and easier to use. The best doesn't win, the easiest does.
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Four Earth-sized planets detected orbiting the nearest sun-like star
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I am flabbergasted that as a society we aren't rushing to build a 100 metre wide telescope mirror large enough for us to directly image the spectra of the potentially habitable exoplanets around us.A telescope this large could tell us whether any of these potentially habitable planets contain oxygen, and thus, biological processes.Yet thanks to funding cuts in science the biggest telescope we have in the pipeline right now is one with a 30 metre mirror.
This telescope won't be big enough, and as a result, our failure to push now for bigger sizes is almost certainly going to push back for decades humanity's ability to answer one of the most important questions we face:Why are we here, and are we alone.
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The Hand Licking Incident
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Eh, this article was a bit "Reader's Digest". Parent tries to solve problem, gives up and lets fate have its way, problem goes away when parent wasn't looking, parent-child have a moment of trust which reveals that the problem was something simple all along. Life lesson learned.How about when it's not a simple underlying problem ("hands get dry in cold climate")? A speech impediment which is cute in a small kid but weird in middle school and socially+career-limiting in an adult. Or an aggression issue. Or one of the many spectrum issues, which won't go away by moving to a warmer climate.I agree with the article on not getting angry, but I'm not going to get a new life lesson from "if your kid trusts you they will open up."
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We are leaving the Apple App Store and all its problems
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Actually; now that I think about it, from a user perspective I also really dislike the App Store.I used to _love_ it, I would check weekly for new things, maybe there was some new shiny (often beautiful) program to do something really well. The experience was on the 'better than passable' side, nobodies favourite interface maybe, but certainly not terrible.But I actually avoid the App Store these days, both on MacOS and my iPhone. I never really noticed but I just slowly stopped installing new applications from there (unless sent there by a company website in the case of iOS); this was around the time that Apple Music was being foisted down my throat. I'm not sure if there's a correlation there.I always suspected there were dark patterns at play in the App Store though. Although every program is reviewed, probably only 2% or less of them become popular, and if you are popular, boy, are you popular. the design paradigm is self-fulfilling. ("most popular"/"highest grossing").
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Becoming a high performing software developer working from your bedroom
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> Buy a whiteboard and write the goals for the day on it, for instanceAs a solo dev the biggest productivity booster for me, from a physical and mental aspect, was purchasing a whiteboard. It honestly feels like some sort of hack. Prior to having one I would use pen and paper but that didn't quite scratch my itch - if I made a mistake I would have to scribble it out and that space was now wasted. I can't quite explain why but on a whiteboard my brain juices just flow. Made a mistake? Wipe it off. Need more space? Wipe it off (or purchase additional whiteboards).My high school maths teacher once said something that has stuck with me since - "When you're stuck on a problem, start fresh on a blank piece of paper." - he must've meant a whiteboard ;)
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Employee Scheduling
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I’m a bit uncertain about what Google OR-Tools is…it seems to be some sort of framework for solving optimization problems, but based on the example here I am curious how general such a tool can be, as normally I find that a “drop in” algorithms framework is generally quite difficult to make or use. Is anyone using this for something useful? Does it perform faster than a hand-rolled implementation tailored to the problem? Is it easier to use?
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ReMarkable’s redesigned e-paper tablet is more powerful and more papery
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Terrible link, the actual reMarkable website is much better.It's a very niche device but I've owned mine for nearly two years and am a big advocate. In some ways, the first model was proof of concept. Excellent hardware and writing experience, but the early versions of the software were horrible, and the device itself is very ugly. The software has improved dramatically in the time I've owned it, going from horrible to bad, then to almost acceptable, and now it's decent.I'm happy to see the company is doing well enough to make a second generation reality. Looks like it will be an overall improved experience, with a magnetic marker, a slick-looking device and overall incremental improvements. I'd like to see some kind of trade up program though, it's expensive (and 50$ more for a marker with one extra sensor is ridiculous) and I can't justify paying that much for an incremental upgrade.My only concern about the new specs would be the thickness, or rather the sturdiness. The first generation is thick by modern standards, but it's very sturdy. I've dropped the device, I've dropped the bag with it, I've bumped into things with it - not a scratch. Very refreshing in the age of fragile devices. Hopefully the rM2 doesn't sacrifice much sturdiness to be thinner.
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WeWork sells Meetup
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I don't get how sites like Meetup can be "struggling". Shouldn't a company that runs a site like Meetup be pretty lean, only needing a handful of people to work on it? Seems like it would cost very little to maintain, but what do I know.
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Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage Now Has S3 Compatible APIs
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I have a decent sized music collection consisting a lot of lossless vinyl rips that I've made from my record collection. It totals around 200gigs at the moment but is growing weekly. I've been looking for somewhere to back this all up in the cloud and backblaze is looking most promising at the moment. Anyone here have any thoughts on where I should go with this?
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Bootstrap 5 alpha
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Here is a question for people who are more knowledgeable than me.I remember reading somewhere that a library is a bunch of functions you call in your software whereas a framework is a software that calls your functions. I'm obviously paraphrasing but you get the idea.Bootstrap is called a CSS "framework" but as far as I can tell, the user calls the predefined classes if putting them in an html element's attribute can be considered a "call". Or maybe CSS with its selectors is the one calling the HTML by, dunno, crawling it.Can you help me? I'm confused. :)
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Material Shell – A modern desktop interface for GNOME
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I find the app-based window navigation in vanilla GNOME 3 rather frustrating, and try as I might, I just can't get comfortable navigating between what I think of as applications.This is because I have a few applications (Firefox, Terminal) that are really not applications in and of themselves; the applications are really Outlook, JIRA, Confluence, Slack, OpenShift (logged in as cluster admin), OpenShift (logged in as my regular user), that quick terminal session I opened to work on a script, the SSH connection to an OpenStack director, the 'oc rsh' command that I'm using to administrate a PostgreSQL database running in OpenShift, and so on.This becomes far worse when using multiple monitors. Say I have teams hanging around on my secondary monitor to keep an eye on stuff. I literally just now alt-tabbed into a terminal and then alt-tabbed back to continue writing this comment. As a result, I'm back in Firefox on my primary monitor (as expected) but now I have an unwanted random Firefox window that I forgot was even open on top of Teams on my secondary monitor!The only window manager I've ever been at home with while using multiple applications, workspaces and monitors has been i3. Specifically I love how it manages multiple monitors in that each has a current workspace, but workspaces are not bound to a particular monitor. So I was able to have my secondary monitor always showing my 'Slack and email' workspace, and switch between my multiple task-based workspaces on my primary monitor and never get confused like I with GNOME where I want to switch to my email tab but to get there I have to remember ahead of time that I have to switch to my first workspace, then switch applications to Firefox, then switch windows to the one with Outlook in it, and finally switch to the Outlook tab...Anyway. This project looks awesome and I will try it out!
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