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Internet-connected cars fail privacy and security tests conducted by Mozilla
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Of all the horrible things go on with privacy these days, this is the one I hate the most. I’m a “car guy”, but not the sort that obsesses over old cars (although I do love 60s and 80s cars). I like new tech, I like the advances in engineering we’ve made in new vehicles, I like EVs even.Nonetheless I’ve been in the market for a new car for months and haven’t bought because it’s hard to find any cars that meet my requirements (after all most companies primarily make trucks and shitty crossovers, not even cars). The two things that consistently hold me back are either things like this (crazy telemetry / touchscreens everywhere / half-ass safety tech) or insane dealer markups. I’ve pretty much figured out the new Toyota GR Corolla is the perfect car for my needs, but you can’t find them anywhere without a $25K+ dealer markup and many dealers won’t sell them to out of state residents.It’s truly a crazy time in the new car markets and the used market isn’t really any better.
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Depixelizing Pixel Art
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I wish they would use this in Windows 8. As far as I can tell, their scaling algorithm for 4k displays is: scale up 2x using nearest neighbor, then randomly drop pixels to get back to 125% or 150%. The result is horrifyingly bad. Not just kind of bad, but unusably bad. (Adding insult to injury, they ClearType the text before scaling.)
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FingerIO: Using Active Sonar for Fine-Grained Finger Tracking
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I work with sonar and the physical positioning of the sensors is important in trying to get useful results. Why is it these academic types don't release the apks or software? Just publications and maybe a video.
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React Native for OS X
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I sympathize with cross-platform development woes (we have this problem too) but I can't say I've ever been impressed with a cross-platform app developed using React Native (or anything else cross-platform).A React Native app isn't horrible or bad (nothing like Java Swing) but it also isn't delightful to use. Technically you have animations and things like the cross-platform navigator. In reality, you have a lot of performance issues and strange incompatibilities due to attempting to execute animation keyframes on the JS thread (or replace the system-provided navigation bar in the case of Navigator). It isn't terribly easy on battery life either.I'd rather write my sync and offline storage system in JS and share that across platforms while leaving the entire view layer as native code. That stuff is far harder to get right for non-trivial apps, it just isn't sexy and most web devs ignore it completely because hey - the web browser is always online!I'm biased though. Our customers download 5-10 GB projects with millions of objects in them because when you're building a hospital the MRI room is a literal faraday cage. No such thing as internet access in there and telling the user they can't pull up plans or engineering specs because they're offline is a non-starter.
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Intel to Cut 12,000 Jobs, Forecast Misses Amid PC Blight
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So Intel is cutting 11% of its workforce, Goldman Sachs just reported a 56% drop in profits, Morgan Stanley had a 50% drop in profits, Netflix missed subscriber growth estimates etc... yet, the Dow just hit a 9-Month high, and the S&P500 is now above 2100.The whole market is overvalued, not just the tech unicorns.
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Why we chose Vue.js
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I do very little web these days, mostly working on backend data processing, network I/O and distributed comms.A bit over a year ago, I wanted a real-time web UI to visualize some of the data I had on server-side, which I was trying to do using SignalR. I went back through some of the popular frameworks, with a pretty simple mindset of "Can I read the 'getting started', and get something basic working in about 15 minutes?".I ended up choosing Vue, mainly because it used simple objects for models and I could literally just pass stuff I got from SignalR directly into it and have it show up. Almost everything else I tried had some type of wrapper/proxy around the data, which meant you had to run through some mapping exercise to get models working. I was close to deciding on Mithril, but when I found vue it just clicked with me way more. I actually really wanted to do React, but Vue was just so much more approachable that I couldn't justify spending the extra time learning React.The real test however came months later, when I went to modify and add more functionality to my simple debug UI. I was able to pick it up nearly instantly, and even made some fairly substantial changes.Contrast to my experience with say, Ember. We have a big app written in Ember, and every time I try to do even what I think should be a simple change (after not touching it for months), it takes me 5 times longer than I thought, and I end up spending most of the time fighting with it before realizing I forgot one of the 5 places you have to modify to reference an additional dependency, or some other equally trivial but infuriating detail.You can learn the basics of Vue in minutes, and be quite adept within hours of it. That's something not a lot of frameworks can claim, and it's a seriously underrated benefit.
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Exposing high-end poker cheating devices
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This is pretty silly. No casinos or card rooms let you have a phone/device at the table.That aside, you need to have a special marked deck. People have tried something similar with flourescent ink and special glasses. I think professional shuffling devices have some kind of built in blacklight check now for this. IR is a bit better since its harder to detect without a camera. You would still need to have a tub of ink and manually mark the cards though.You'd basically need to have the dealer in on it, and if that is the case you don't really need the device at all.A more interesting method from a few decades ago that actually worked was "edge sorting". Because of printing/cutting one could determine certain cards. http://deadspin.com/how-phil-ivey-beat-or-maybe-cheated-a-ca...
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I'm Testifying to Congress about Data Breaches – What Should I Say?
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To me, the main issue is accountability.A citizen's data can be collected, badly secured, stolen, and used by criminals without the user ever being aware of step 1. Just like a citizen can get ill from swimming in a river without ever being aware of the factories upstream.The solution is not to force citizens to constantly be on the lookout. It's to severely punish polluters and leakers.When a CTO says "let's collect geolocations", the CEO should should have legal and business reasons to say "no way, it's not worth the financial risk of losing them; it could destroy our company."---Update: I do not think the government should mandate specific practices; it's too complicated, too fast-changing, and too hard to police.It should be entirely results-based. You lose people's data, you pay big bucks. Figuring out how not to lose it is your problem. The government sets the rules, and the market plays the game.
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How DOOM fire was done
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I am kind of surprised, at the attention and fond rememberance Doom is still getting, compared to Descent, which though released around 2 years later, appears to me much more accomplished: levels of tunnels with complex spatial arrangements, the 6dof motion, even had a sterographic 3d mode.
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Apple Cancels AirPower Product
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It is a slimy move to wait a week after the wireless charging Airpods were released before announcing this. You can't tell me that Apple didn't know this was coming. What percentage of people who have bought new Airpods in the last week wouldn't have made that purchase if they knew AirPower was never going to be released?EDIT: Several people are responding that other manufactures make wireless chargers, so what is the big deal? Sure, you are right other options exist. There are also a wide variety of USB-C laptop chargers available that could charge your Macbook. There would still be plenty of complaints if Apple stopped selling their USB-C power brick. Two of the primary reasons people buy Apple products are because of the ecosystem and their standard of quality. Now people are forced out of the Apple ecosystem and must buy a product from 3rd parties that don't have the same quality requirements. What happens when that $5 Qi charge from some noname brand fries your devices battery?
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Photorealistic Path Tracer
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Well I hoped to be on HN today for my high-effort blog post on generics and metaprogramming (http://thume.ca/2019/07/14/a-tour-of-metaprogramming-models-...) but at least I'm on HN for something :PEdit: And at least right before I go to bed my post technically made it on the front page in the very last slot :)I'm also glad people like my ray tracer, it was super satisfying to build, and nice to have a project that I know I put substantial effort into and can really be proud of.
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Tools we used to create a hit HTML5 game on Steam
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HTML/JS is criminally underrated as a game development platform. You get so much from it, like instant deployment, delivery, multiplayer features, and so much more. You can just send a link to your friends and they can join your game with a single click.The reason why business apps went all to the web still holds for games as well. Games like agar.io use these features, such as no downloads and instant start, and their success speaks for itself.
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Planet Ceres is an 'ocean world' with sea water beneath surface, mission finds
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Ceres is one of the more interesting candidates for life in our solar system. Ceres is in the habitable zone for our solar system (although just barely), it's surface temperature is -30 F (eq. to winter in Greenland), and it's detected that the water on the surface is 20% carbon by mass (though that can mean a lot of things).
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“Before cancelling your subscription, you must agree to the following”
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The wording on that notice is atrocious, but it seems like the actual behavior isn’t horrible. In reality, they seem to be trying to convey:If you cancel your subscription, any content which you still have in your account will revert to the privacy options of the free plan. If you don’t want some content to be public, delete it before making this change.Whoever at Prezi manages this UI should definitely clean it up to actually say that, but the behavior itself doesn’t seem crazy to me.
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A Framework for Writing Better Documentation
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> It doesn’t matter how good your product is, because if its documentation is not good enough, people will not use it.Eh docs aren't that important; we've all used badly documented libraries before. Would better docs help? Sure, but let's not overstate their value.The framework looks like a useful writing aid though.
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White House eyes subsidies for nuclear plants to help meet climate targets
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I support nuclear power and oppose subsidies for it. A better approach is to remove subsidies from their dirtier competitors.
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Sign arbitrary data with your SSH keys
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I get that they're "public" keys, but I was surprised to learn (and from somebody other than github themselves) that ssh public keys are just available at that github.com/username.keys URL (without there being an option to disable it, it seems?). Did most people already know that? Probably fine but just surprised. Just tried searching their authentication docs [0] and I don't get any results for "public key url" eitherhttps://docs.github.com/en/authentication?query=public+key+u...
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New German government calls for European ban on biometric mass surveillance
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Yet scanning a QR code which uniquely identifies an individual to get into any venue is totally fine because we didn't update the source code yet and so it's not phoning home this week.Well, if the source (of the scanner) is even legit, since the app stores provide no way to verify that anyway.
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SMS phishing is way too easy
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I wish we would just stop using phone numbers as the primary user identifier and SMS as the primary communication channel, period.The amount of cruft involved in SMS delivery is unbelievable, and phone numbers are neither particularly stable, nor particularly well protected against takeovers.
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Twitter has banned Mastodon links in name and bio for being “malware”
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There are two ways this could have happened:1) Twitter/Elon has made the conscious decision to censor all references to Mastodon in an attempt to retain market share.2) Somebody shared something bad with a mastodon.social link, and Twitter's always-creaky moderation systems, now nerfed and defunded by Elon, completely failed to realize the implications and added mastodon.social to the same global domain ban list as viruses4u.ru and freeviagra.xxx etc.My money is actually on #2, because the ban only appears to impact mastodon.social and not any other Mastodon instance, but I guess we'll find out once this hits mainstream news and Twitter has to make a public decision on this.
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Messages that can only be understood under the influence of psychedelics
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All the people in this thread who decoded it used long exposure or faster playback. Using the latter, for me, it starts to become readable at 2.5x and is essentially a clear static image at 4x. (I had to download the video and play it back using VLC.)Which for me, makes this claim a bit absurd:> At a theoretical level, this confirmation is significant because it is the first clear demonstration of a real perceptual computational advantage of psychedelic states of consciousness.LSD fans might hate this conclusion, but there's no "computational advantage" to having a 2.5x to 4x slower processing speed, which his the only thing actually being shown here.
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The Last Egg
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Weird they don't stock UHT milk. I buy milk for 6 months and keep it in my pantry. I honestly can't tell the difference between modern UHT milk and mass-produced "fresh" milk (at 2% anyway). They could in theory ship in UHT milk instead of fresh, and stock enough extra to last a few more months in winter. It would be fun to make your own cheese down there as a hobby!Eating by the seasons is also pretty interesting, I think. It forces you to expand your gastronomic horizons, explore the cuisine of different regional cultures. Some cultures don't use milk (and thus cheese or butter), some don't use much oil, some are vegetarian while some are nearly all meat. There's preservation by fermentation, by drying, by salting, by burying, by sealing in hardened butter. Some just eat a lot of soup. There's really an infinite number of dishes that express flavor, aroma and texture. If you ever get bored of your food, you can fix that.
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The Web We Lost
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I agree with Anil 110% that the Web he's talking about was, in many, many ways, a Better Web than the one we have today.The problem is that it's worse than the one we have today in the only way that most people care about: it's harder. To participate, it expected you to know how to do a bunch of things that seem trivial to tech folks but frighteningly complicated to everybody else. You had to buy a domain. You had to choose a Web host. You had to know how to connect the domain to the Web host. You had to choose the right software to do what you wanted to do. You had to install that software, and configure it properly.The reason hosted services became popular is because they let you skip all that stuff. You fill out a form and you're up and running. Someone else worries about all that other stuff for you. This makes those services accessible in a way that the Web of 2000 was not.Of course, to get that accessibility, the hosted services make you give up a lot of things. You lose access to your raw data. You lose your privacy. You lose the ability to change vendors if the one you're on turns evil.But to non-technical people, those losses aren't obvious. They don't understand what they've lost until losing those things turns around and bites them. It's like DRM: people don't understand why DRM-encumbered music downloads are bad until their iPod dies and they want to move their iTunes-bought music to an Android phone. "What do you mean I can't do that?" is what you hear the moment the penny drops. But before then, they don't understand the risk.This is what will need to be overcome to make tomorrow's Web like yesterday's was: it'll need to be as easy for people to use as today's is, or you'll need to educate the entire world about why they should put up with it not being that easy. Otherwise people will keep on blindly stumbling into the heavily-advertised walled gardens, not realizing that's what they're doing until the day they decide they want to leave, and can't.
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F.C.C. Is Expected to Propose Regulating the Internet as a Utility
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I get what they're trying to accomplish, we all want faster more reliable service, but as comparison is anyone 100% happy with their utility (power, water, etc)?That's where this is headed.
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DuckDuckGo on CNBC: We’ve grown 600% since NSA surveillance news broke
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What is HN's opinion on the quality of the search results?
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Justice Department Wants Apple to Unlock Nine More iPhones
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The article describes the Justice Dept. doing exactly what has been so widely predicted on HN and elsewhere. Doesn't seem like good timing on the government's part to publicly announce the intention to seek numerous iPhone "unlockings". Rather it plays into Apple's argument about unleashing a torrent of court-ordered demands which will have adverse consequences for security.Legal minds should weigh in, but I'm thinking the only effective remedy is going to be congressional action, to pass law that defines the limits of court discretion re: forcing firms' assistance breaching their carefully constructed security/privacy systems.This news prompts me to write my representative and senators and strongly urge them to support enacting this form of protective legislation. If there's enough of an outcry from the electorate there's a far greater chance of putting sensible policies in place. The fact it's an election year can only make voicing our concerns all the more effective.
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Medical error is third biggest cause of death in the US, experts say
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Just an anecdote: Our friend in New Orleans had his wife's second baby delivery. They went to the same hospital and doctor as the first normal delivery.She was given the wrong medicine in the epidural. She went into a coma, the hospital flew her to a specialty hospital in Denver to recover. Almost a year later she is still paralyzed from the waist down. Her life is ruined, her husband has two babies to take care of and an infirm wife.The amazing thing is that the state of Louisiana has a $500k limit on malpractice! (Set in the 1970's) Plus he will not get the full $500k. In spite of their clear error the hospital will not just settle out of court. Instead if they pay out through the court system they only have to pay $100k, the rest comes from the state patient compensation fund which has $900 million dollars stored up. So my friend will get $350k and medical care for his wife.This is called keeping costs down in the state of Louisiana. And this was affirmed in 2012 by their supreme court.
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Home Computers Connected to the Internet Aren't Private, Court Rules
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Bad judging all around here.Just because a home computer might be hacked does not mean that an average user doesn't expect his experience on that computer to be private. Every area of life might be breached by determined intruders and, if that were the test of having a expectation of privacy, then every area of life would flunk it. Your home, your car, your bathroom, your bedroom, you name it. In reality, of course, break-ins, hacks, and other intrusions are the exception and not the rule in the areas we commonly regard as private. If the legal test on protecting privacy were to turn on whether break-ins or hacks were a regular element of the environment (however infrequent), then the exception swallows the rule and privacy is no more. This judge's ruling essentially embraces such logic and is thus wildly out of line with existing law regarding protection against unreasonable searches and seizures.Also bad judging in reaching the issue gratuitously: the main issue here was whether a particular warrant was misused; it was unnecessary to decide what would have happened without a warrant of any kind. Yet the judge reached to inject his obiter dictum into the analysis as a sort of by-the-by, "here is what I would rule if other issues were before me."Why such an outcome? As the lawyers say, "hard facts make for bad law." You have a despicable perp doing vile things and the natural instinct is to want to nail him. Just as, conversely, when you have a sympathetic person who has being seriously wronged, the natural instinct is to do what you can to help him get justice. In either case, judges and juries will be more prone than otherwise to engage in results-oriented jurisprudence and will thus try to bend and shape the law to that purpose even if the law objectively says otherwise. This factor may help explain why the judge did what he did. It does not make it right.Finally, bad judging means, in this case, bad precedent and this decision will surely have pernicious effects until the day comes when its run is ended by a higher court. For this case, that day will surely come. It is a bad decision all around.
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Anki: Memorization with Spaced Learning
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I'm always a little confused when I see articles on the internet extolling the virtues of spaced repetition learning. I don't doubt that it's a good way to memorize things; it's just that I have never really found that memorization was ever an obstacle to my ability to learn something. I've always found that retention proceeds from understanding.Time spent flicking through flashcards for vocabulary or formulae or chemical paths or whatever seems like a poor substitute for time spent reading material that uses the vocabulary, explains the derivation of the formulae, or describes the chemical process, or whatever...Is this just about passing tests, or is this genuinely how other people approach learning?
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What Happens to the Body on No Sleep
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In case you feel sleep is a waste of time, it could actually be surprisingly productive to sleep. Once thing I noticed in grad school is that your sub-conscious is passively working on the problems you encountered even if you are not actively thinking about them. And often I would "dream" up a clever solution to a homework problem during my sleep.J.P. Serre, one of the most brilliant mathematician still living today, purportedly "does all his best work in his sleep": https://tinyurl.com/y25q45utFrom what I learned in the wonderful Coursera course: "Learning How to Learn", these are manifestations of the unfocused or diffused mode of the mind, and play a critical role in learning and problem solving.https://medium.com/learn-love-code/learnings-from-learning-h...
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An Illustrated Guide to Useful Command Line Tools
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Can someone explain the misuse of cat, which bat solves?
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The Unparalleled Genius of John von Neumann
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von Neumann, Oppenheimer, Bohr, Einstein, Rutherford, Turing, Teller, Szilard, Wigner, Meitner... the list goes on... -- how did that time produce so many people of colossal intellect?
War certainly can't be the primary factor, given that many of them were brilliant/productive even before WWI
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Landmark computer science proof cascades through physics and math
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In high school our math teacher introduced a problem that could not be solved, which involved a TV-show game where the contender would choose one of 3 doors, and if there was something behind it, the contender would win it. But the show host would remove one of the doors without something behind it, and ask the contender if he/she would like to switch door.I simply simulated the game on a computer one million times which revealed that changing the door after the host removed a empty one had a 66% probability of winning. (rather then 50%) but the teacher wouldn't believe me...
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WebWormHole: Send files quickly using WebRTC
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file.pizza is another similar project
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Chuck Yeager has died
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44 years after the Wright Brothers first flew 120 feet, Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier. 22 years after that, man landed on moon.51 years later ... still waiting for the future to arrive.
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GPT-J-6B – A 6 billion parameter, autoregressive text generation model
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I’m simultaneously surprised and unsurprised that announcements about Copilot get so much copyright discussion, while the GPT-like models don’t get nearly the same. Meanwhile, GPT-J is literally trained on pirated books (the books3 corpus is part of the Pile, which is the corpus this was trained on).Charitably, it’s because licenses are already such a core discussion when github comes up.Uncharitably, it’s because Copilot uses “our” community’s labor, while the GPTs use others’.
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WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers
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My experience is, # of engineers is directly related to # of product people, which is in turn related to quantity (not quality) of ideas that the founders/leaders are desperate to try out.Higher quantity of ideas == More engineers. Higher quality of ideas == Fewer engineers.WhatsApp success is not about what WhatsApp did, it's about everything they didn't do. No desktop, no browser (until after reaaaaaaallly long), no account creation (your phone number is enough, thanks), no hidden ad engine, no hundreds of stupid features that product people stuff down in the name of experimentation.There are some leaders who want anything and everything: Throw 100 darts in the wall. Leave what sticks (don't touch or nurture it). Go back to throwing 100 more. The other guy does that? We want that too. Mobile? Yes. Desktop? Yes. Browser? Yes. Different affiliate channels? Yes. Custom features for B2B partners? Yes. Merchandizing? Yes. Build a mini Ad engine? Yes. Multi user profile management systems? Yes. Yes, yes, yes, every requirement is a go.The crucial difference is: What happens when you have a restricted pool of people, but insist on doing 100s of things? Some leaders simply treat this as an "org structure" problem, not a problem of focus. They slice and dice the org until the 30 people become split into teams of 2-3 with a manager for each, running into coordination hell on each step – just so that more quantity of features can be seen on paper. This is how most startups are, except for those rare few which don't "talk" about focusing, but actually focus.
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We need to reclaim our attention
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> Some scientists say these worries about attention are a moral panic, comparable to the anxieties in the past about comic books or rap music, and that the evidence is shaky.I agree with them.It's hard to pay attention to something for long unless it's entertaining. Reading a book, reading a paper, etc -- these activities take discipline that most people don't develop or don't often apply. This isn't new. The mistake is thinking that the ability to concentrate on something non-entertaining is the baseline. One reason so many people think they have ADHD is because they make that mistake.We had the same anxieties about radio and TV. Those anxieties were right and wrong. Technologies do change how people behave but it's always the same story. There will be entertainment freely available and you'll have to choose to concentrate on things that aren't entertaining that you consider worthwhile.
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EU Passes Law to Switch iPhone to USB-C by End of 2024
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Why do people think it is a good thing to have this enforced by law is beyond me.I don't see any win besides a minor convenience. A lightning cable weighs almost nothing and it's not a big deal to have one around.As to lightning port limitations, I question whether usb-c will give average iPhone users any other advantage other than charging their phone. What are people gonna do with it other than charge their phones or transfer files?Feels like there's nothing to celebrate here. Just the EU using its influence to exert control over things that don't matter at all.
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What does the ??!??! operator do in C?
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I learnt C, more than 20 years ago, from the book The C Programming Language written by Brian W. Kernighan and Dennis M. Ritchie, also known as K&R. I read the book almost cover to cover all the way from the preface at the beginning to its three appendices at the end while solving all the exercises that each chapter presented. As someone who knew very little about programming languages back then, this book was formative in my journey of becoming a programmer.Appendix A (Reference Manual) of the book broadened my outlook on programming languages by providing me a glimpse of what goes into formally specifying a programming language. Section A.12 (Preprocessing) of this appendix specifies trigraph sequences. Quoting from the section:> Preprocessing itself takes place in several logically successive phases that may, in a particular implementation, be condensed.> 1. First, trigraph sequences as described in Par.A.12.1 are replaced by their equivalents. Should the operating system environment require it, newline characters are introduced between the lines of the source file.Then section A.12.1 (Trigraph Sequences) further elaborates trigraph sequences in more detail. Quoting this section below:> The character set of C source programs is contained within seven-bit ASCII, but is a superset of the ISO 646-1983 Invariant Code Set. In order to enable programs to be represented in the reduced set, all occurrences of the following trigraph sequences are replaced by the corresponding single character. This replacement occurs before any other processing. ??= #
??/ \
??' ^
??( [
??) ]
??! |
??< {
??> }
??- ~
> No other such replacements occur.> Trigraph sequences are new with the ANSI standard.
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Zoom lays off 15% of employees
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> As the CEO and founder of Zoom, I am accountable for these mistakes and the actions we take today– and I want to show accountability not just in words but in my own actions. To that end, I am reducing my salary for the coming fiscal year by 98% and foregoing my FY23 corporate bonus. Members of my executive leadership team will reduce their base salaries by 20% for the coming fiscal year while also forfeiting their FY23 corporate bonuses.It’s nice to see the phrase “I am accountable” followed by a description of what that accountability entails.Whether or not the steps taken seem fair is a separate conversation, but it seems like a step in the right direction.When you’re making CEO salary, no amount of salary reduction will have a day to day impact, but this seems strongly symbolic at least.
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Apple just lost its lawsuit trying to ban iOS virtual machines
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Can someone remind me why Apple is so anti-VM in seemingly every instance?It just seems so arbitrary and unhelpful, and I have a hard time imagining that the amount of hardware purchased it forces outweigh the benefits from making macOS/iOS better platforms for development and computation.It just seems like such an odd stance to take.
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Apple previews Live Speech, Personal Voice, and more new accessibility features
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Firstly compliments to Apple for all these incredible accessibility features.I think there is an important little nod to the future in this announcement. "Personal Voice" is training (likely fine tuning) and then running a local AI model to generate the user's voice. This is a sneak peak of the future of Apple.They are in the unique position to enable local AI tools, such as assistance or text generation, without the difficulties and privacy concerns with the cloud. Apple silicone is primed for local AI models with its GPU, Neural Cores and the unified memory architecture.I suspect that Apple is about to surprise everyone with what they do next. I'm very excited to see where they go with the M3, and what they release for both users and developers looking to harness the progress made in AI but locally.
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Mastercard Should Stop Selling Our Data
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We should have a payment system that isn't held hostage by two providers anyway.At least here in Europe MasterCard and visa are the only options. Amex and Discovery are really unusable here.Besides selling our data this also means we get American morals pushed on us, eg they won't provide payments for some websites they don't like.But how do you break up such a duopoly?
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TV is broken
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There are many other things that are broken too.My fancy expensive name-brand digital TV takes a full minute to boot up from a cold start, longer than it took my tube based TV from the 1950s to warm up.Once on, it takes almost a full second to change channels while it rebuffers the stream of the channel being changed to. This prevents quickly flipping through channels to see what is on.As a result I just don't bother most of the time. Which is fine, I watch much less TV.We won't even get into how 720 screens don't really have 720 display pixels so even perfect size matches are resampled and interpolated, or how often I find I have to manually change the aspect ratio because it wasn't able to figure it out on its own.
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An Advanced Guide to HTML and CSS
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Does anyone know of any guides or books for really advanced HTML/CSS? I find a lot of these guides target regular websites, which I have experience with, whereas I'd love to know how to create much more advanced layouts (e.g. Gmail, Grooveshark). Does anyone know where I can find information on that kind of stuff?
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Aaron Swartz, Asking For Help, 119 Days Ago
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Here is the HN thread from back then. Some of it makes for pretty uncomfortable reading right now.http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4529484
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The Birth and Death of JavaScript [video]
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> xs = ['10', '10', '10']> xs.map(parseInt)[10, NaN, 2]Javascript is beautiful.
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Using the wrong dictionary
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Stephen King seems to disagree: "Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule."
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Tilde.Club: I had a couple drinks and woke up with 1,000 nerds
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I'm going to use this opportunity to shamelessly plug my tildeclub page: http://tilde.club/~richedit: Please also go to my girlfriend's page! She's jealous of my hit counter: http://tilde.club/~arch
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Get Your Shit Together
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This is great advice all around, but get a local lawyer involved to prepare your will. Even in US, there is not a single set of laws that apply to wills and power of attorney. It varies state by state. With a generic template pulled from the internet, you could just be doing a whole lot of work and ultimately be ending up with a document that has little legal basis.Do your loved ones a favor - hire a lawyer to do it. It's not free, but they'll do the actual paperwork, and you'll get the comfort of knowing it's done right.
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New human-like species discovered
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for a minute there I thought we discovered hominids alive today. Phrasing!
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Aaron Swartz died three years ago today
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I'm still disgusted by the behavior of the MIT officials in all of this. Whenever I see or hear 'MIT' the first thing that comes to mind is: "that's the school that was responsible for the death of Aaron".
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Police ask for whole city's Google searches, and a judge says yes
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I'm trying to see what the big deal is here (relax, I'll explain).Police are not asking for the entire search history of everyone in the town, then combing through it to see what they've searched for. Rather, police are asking Google who, in a narrow amount of time, searched for the name of a relatively unknown person who had $28K stolen from him.Is this really that different from police asking for security camera footage from a convenience store after a robbery? In either case, obviously innocent bystanders will be quickly eliminated from the list of possible suspects. Any remaining suspect(s) will still need to be (1) charged, (2) have a judge allow the evidence in court, and (3) convicted on the basis of evidence beyond reasonable doubt by a jury of their peers.Unfortunately, I think obvious invasions of privacy (e.g., PRISM) have made folks very jumpy about any electronic evidence collection, which I don't think is warranted.EDIT: Thanks to guelo for pointing out that this was an unsuccessful attempt at wire fraud, so the victim (fortunately) retained the $28K. I missed that previously.
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Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2017)
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Doist | Windows Developer | C#, XAML | World | Full-time | Remote: https://doist.com/jobs/#windows-developerDoist | Back-end Engineer | Python | World | Full-time | Remote: https://doist.com/jobs/#back-end-engineer-pythonDoist | Front-end Engineer | JavaScript | World | Full-time | Remote: https://doist.com/jobs/#front-end-engineerDoist | Front-end Developer | CSS, HTML | World | Full-time | Remote: https://doist.com/jobs/#front-end-developerAt Doist, we’re always striving to build not only amazing products but also amazing teams: Teams that innovate and change how productivity tools are made. Our flagship product is Todoist, a to do app with over 10 million users worldwide. Recently we launched our second app Twist which is a mindful team communication and collaboration app.These are all remote positions, you'll be free to work from wherever you please. You can also choose to work from our office in Porto, Portugal, or we'll get you a co-working space in the city where you live. :)
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The impossible dream of USB-C
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I'll go further than this. USB-C isn't misguided, problematic or questionable. It's insanity.Take a given cable and there's a number of dimensions you need to considered:- Supported power standards (none, USB, various other wattages and standards)- Supported bandwidth. I think some don't even support data transfer (which might include the USB-C cable that comes with the Apple Macbook charger)- Supported modes (USB, Thunderbolt, DisplayPort?)There's no colour scheme that can adequately handle all the possible variations.But there are other problems: it makes no sense to have all 4 ports on a 15" Macbook Pro (for example) support power. You only need one port to charge with. I think I read that not all the ports on the 13" Macbook Pro are the same (in terms of capabilities).This is just strikes me as a (hollow) victory for principle ("one port/cable to rule them all") over pragmatism. This always reminds me of the quote: a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.This whole thing is expensive, unnecessary, user-unfriendly and confusing (to the average user).
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Django 2.0 released
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This is probably your best bet if you're just going to build a nice CRUD frontend for a business app, possibly with an API (via DRF). I am doing this right now on a project as it's the shortest path to a win. The API however is written in Java 8 / vertx.
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Guide to Slack import and export tools
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As head of IT for a company using Slack: FINALLY.Don't get me wrong--it's not like I want to read your messages and very likely won't. But there are times when I have no choice. A few years back, a group of interns started privately harassing other interns via Slack. Only way to see it was to boot an offending intern from his work station and go into his Slack to see what was happening. We had to make all intern accounts into multi-channel guests after that. Compare that to our email, where I can go into anyone's messages immediately if need-be. This is all very standard corporate IT stuff that you need for HR and legal reasons.Edit: I'll say this is still not an ideal solution. I don't go into private communications unless I have to, and I'd rather have the option to review specific DMs / private channels than dump everything. I really don't want everything; that's more than I care to see. Also, to clarify, I'm in the US and our employees are well aware that communications on company-operated platforms should not be considered private. I want them to be careful how they communicate in writing, not because they should be worried about me, but because they should be worried about Slack getting hacked/leaked. With the recent Facebook news, I should have thought that sort of concern was obvious.
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Network protocols for anyone who knows a programming language
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I took a networking course in college and I didn't learn much, if anything. We used textbooks like Kurose and Ross that went deep into details like the header format of each packet of each layer. Ultimately, these were useless details that had no place in a textbook. It made me hate the subject.I eventually learned the subject properly through High Performance Browser Networking. This is the one book I would recommend to any software developer. Available for free here - https://hpbn.co
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Four-day week trial: study finds lower stress but no cut in output
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At Mobile Jazz (7 years old now) and Bugfender (4-5 years old now) we always had the rule, that people could choose to work as much as they want and when they went. As long as the output and quality was there. Obviously to achieve high quality output you need to be there at certain times (overlap with other team members) and you need to do a certain amount of hours. The problems we had because of this are almost no-existent (specific people that then ended up not staying very long in the company) and the advantages by far outweigh the "loss of control". In the end myself as a business owner and managers have far less stress by trusting people and empowering them to do great work.With this framework, people will take breaks whenever they feel like. They go doing sports, play with their kids, run errands. They even take whole days off to go surfing or skiing. And I really don't mind. Because I do the same.But then, if a server goes down late at night, people all the sudden show up by themselves and fix problems. Also on a rainy Saturday or Sunday, people will all the sudden be online and working.Give people the opportunity to be in charge of their own work schedule, give them the responsibility, make them feel that they're actually responsible and they will shine.We also just released our company handbook which goes in a lot of detail on how we run a 20+ people remote business:* https://mobilejazz.com/company-handbook (landing page, if you want to get email updates)* https://mobilejazz.com/docs/company-handbook/mobile-jazz-com... (direct link to the PDF)EDIT: Added some more details
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Start Your Own ISP
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Would be cool to see community-run non-profit ISPs.
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Game Programming Patterns (2014)
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This is the book that finally helped me grok software design patterns. Gang of four reads like a dictionary while the examples of Game Programming patterns have stayed with me.If I'm rendering a forest of course I don't want to copy the data for trees a 1000 times so of course I need to use the flyweight patternThe decoupling patterns chapter is particularly good and will help you understand how to turn each entity in a game into a server which sends events to other entities. That way you end up with many small pieces of a code as opposed to a single giant game loop. The entity component system (ECS) is one of the main reasons why programming games in Unity is so pleasant.If it wasn't obvious by now, this is not a book about game programming patterns it's the best book on software design patterns that I've ever read. Most software design books seems to think I'm only interested in designing accounting or banking software, why not a game?
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Y Combinator Startup Library 2.0
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Hi HN -- Kat here. Catheryn Li and I worked on launching this version of the library. This is Phase 1 -- we'll be adding more content from YC's archives, and new content as more is made. Seeing this thread and what you're searching for will give us a better sense of what we're missing. If you have feedback or ideas - let us know: [email protected] and [email protected].
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There’s no such thing as “a startup within a big company”
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When I was at PowerBI in Microsoft, all the execs hailed it as Startup within Microsoft. Come work here instead of Uber. I worked like a dog, sometimes till 2am in morning. My manager would routinely ask us to come on weekends. I was naive, I thought we are growing customer base, this is what a startup looks like.The ultimate realization was in a startup you have equity, a decent amount in a good startup. At Microsoft it was a base salary and set amount of stock. What we did moved very little of the top revenue metric. It made little difference if I worked like a dog, or slacked. The promos were very much “buddy buddy” system.In the end I realized you can’t have startups in big companies (esp as an engineer you don’t have the huge upside if the startup is successful, your upside is capped)Startups work because you have skin in the game, when you build something people want, you get to reap rewards proportional to it. That correlation and feedback loop is very important.At big companies you don’t have the the same correlation. Some big shot exec they hired reaps far far more on the work you did.Equity is what builds wealth.
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Write libraries instead of services, where possible
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> A service has constant administration costs which are paid by the service provider. A properly designed library instead moves these costs to the users of the library.I agree with the articles point, but this introduction, right there, is why it's not happening. SaaS turns your startup into a unicorn and yourself into a rich person. Or at least that's what you are hoping/aiming for. A library is not going to make you a billionaire. Sad but reality.
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Android's new Bluetooth stack rewrite (Gabeldorsh) is written with Rust
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This is great news. Hopefully it fixes a lot of the jank that I've always experienced with Android Bluetooth. I don't think I've ever had a smooth experience - even with a supposedly flagship device (Pixel 4a!) I've encountered all of the following problems:* Devices getting stuck at max volume (thankfully not headphones)* Devices getting stuck at really low volumes* Devices randomly switching between absolute volume and relative volume (not really sure how to describe this, but sometimes changing the volume on the phone changes the volume on the receiver, and sometimes it changes the mix volume on the phone only (like an aux output would behave) and keeps the volume on the receiver)* Needing to enable Developer Settings to change the Bluetooth protocol version and other wacky stuff that I just shouldn't have to do [0]* Headphones cutting in and out when exercising, like the phone can't figure out it needs to stay in the higher of two radio power profiles that it's switching between, as the receiving antenna on my workout band moves 2-3 inches away from the phone and back again[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/GooglePixel/comments/8hbcuu/the_100...Bluetooth has been awful on Android for a long time. I've never not had to futz with it to get it to work. I hope this is a move toward making it as seamless as it should be. I couldn't imagine trying to figure all this out as a non-technical user.
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El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender
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> The El Salvador President has previously said the move will open up financial services to the 70% of Salvadoreans who do not have bank accounts.Right. People who can't even afford a bank account would now all be using financial services by paying 10 dollars per transaction.
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NSA Kubernetes Hardening Guidance [pdf]
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What yields the lowest risk - spending a ton of time hardening one cluster, or building multiple clusters to reduce the blast radius of bugs and misconfigurations?
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Study: Recycled Lithium Batteries as Good as Newly Mined
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Just as important as recycling these batteries is making it possible for older EVs to have their batteries replaced years down the road with 3rd party batteries.In 2031, it should be possible to by a long-past-warranty 2021 EV, replace the battery pack (with one made from recycled EV batteries!), and have it just-work. Just like you can replace the engine of a classic car today if you are so inclined.It should be possible because the electrical connection of the batteries to EV drivetrains are relatively simple - although I'm sure that will take a lawsuit (like was launched against Nespresso to allow 3rd party coffee pods) for EV manufacturers to release the specs required for this to happen.It would be unfortunate if EV batteries were non-serviceable except by the manufacturer after they were out of warranty, like phones are today. Instead, battery replacement would potentially allow the tertiary used EV market to flourish, and make them more accessible to people of modest means.
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Multiple Sclerosis Causality
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Terrifying - I was EBV positive 4 years ago. It does not mention an association between EBV severity and MS, but I was very symptomatic and had post viral fatigue for around a year. I had no idea about the MS association!
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Be careful with that thing, it's a confidential coffee maker
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This is HN, so I feel free to nerd-pick: IBM was right about the coffee maker!Really, consumer-grade coffee makers aren't intended to stay on for days at a time. You need commercial machines for that, all metal and glass, that won't be a fire hazard or have melting plastic. Some facilities have strict rules about that.
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Productivity Blocker
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Something like this might actually be useful for the all-too-common productive procrastination breaks. Stuck on a hard problem? Better clean my desk. Waiting for a build? Better clean my files. Lacking momentum? Better check LinkedIn (it’s professional so it’s okay). I wonder which type of “break” kills more productivity, “fun” distraction or “productive” distraction. Anyone else?
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Help! Is This Arabic?
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This website is well-meaning, but will be difficult to parse if you don't have elementary Arabic and can't tell apart ال from ل ا.What it really needs is a simple reference input string, examples of how it gets broken, and what to do to fix them. The middle case, where the sentence is correctly rendered RTL but the individual words are LTR (breaking the ligatures), is particularly common and insidious because it looks plausible to non-Arabic speakers.
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More than 75% of Steam games tested are playable or verified on the Steam Deck
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For people that own a Steam Deck, how do you like it? And how do you use it? I would like to talk myself into buying one, but I can’t think of a decent use case.
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I swapped my MacBook for an iPad+Linode
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This has to be the most ergonomically inefficient set-up ever!I also cannot fathom how to work with 21" at least). And a tiling window manager. And a decent mechanical keyboard... ok ok..Interesting setup. I'd be interested in knowing how it works out in the long term.
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Announcing Online MS in Computer Science in Collaboration with Georgia Tech
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http://www.omscs.gatech.edu/faq/> How much does the degree program cost?
We’re not yet ready to announce a specific program cost, but the plan is to offer the Georgia Tech OMS CS for a total cost of under $7,000—a fraction of the cost of Georgia Tech’s on-campus program and even less than that of comparable private universities.> The total workload is the same as the residential program; the weekly or hourly workload depends on how quickly students wish to complete the program.This is revolutionary.Not only is it much cheaper, the incentives are now back in alignment. I know plenty of people that could graduate much faster and get on with their lives - The schools on the other hand, want them to stay longer (and thus pay more).This removes the nickel and dime element and all kinds of backwards tedium.
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Creator of xkcd Reveals Secret Backstory of His Epic 3,990-Panel Comic
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As someone who is just hearing about this now, isn't this just an animation?
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Please remove mitsuhiko/*
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These kinds of episodes are making me increasingly depressed.On one hand, I'm incredibly disappointed in the ethics and morality of some of the people who have latched on to Bitcoin. And sadly, I'd have to include tip4commit in that group, particularly since they are "opt-out" and yet have been spamming people after each commit [ubernostrum points out below that they aren't even "opt-out", since they're not honoring opt out requests]. At best, it's poorly thought out. They may have good intentions, but they've implemented their intentions in a very sketchy manner. Completely unacceptable, and I understand people's anger. Bitcoin has attracted more than it's fair share of assholes, and I understand the frustration people have toward such people and companies.On the other hand, I'm even more saddened by the irrational hatred so many developers have for Bitcoin, who refuse to acknowledge that not everyone who is interested in Bitcoin is a scammer or lunatic. I have met some incredibly honest, generous, and kind individuals in the Bitcoin community. And the Bitcoin project holds such promise for the financial world, if it's not first destroyed by scammers, regulators, and close-minded developers.As just one example of what drew me to Bitcoin, Bitcoin holds (or used to hold) such tremendous promise for the developing world, and to people who are shut out of traditional banking. It's bitterly disappointing to me that so many people are intent on destroying Bitcoin because its implications are perceived to threaten their political beliefs, or because of some kind of jealousy toward the imagined wealth of earlier adopters. The contempt around here is palpable, and it's directed toward anyone associated with Bitcoin.The emotions here are so intense that we have HNers pulling out the DMCA, which is so hypocritical coming from certain people that I am left speechless.Can we please bear in mind that Bitcoin has many, many ethical, kind, honest developers and users, and that not everyone should be painted with this brush of contempt that some of you wield so recklessly. Bitcoin has the misfortune to have experienced an huge gain in price last winter, which drew in an inordinate number of scammers, opportunists, and speculators. We, the developers and users of Bitcoin, are not to blame for these types of dishonest people. Very often, we are their victims.If Bitcoin does fail, a large part of the blame will be one the shoulders of so many software and IT people who make a flash decision that Bitcoin was "tulips" or a "ponzi scheme", and who refused to change their minds in the face of evidence otherwise (like scores of established corporations choosing to accept Bitcoin).I actually worry now that some of my Bitcoin open source contributions in my real name will be held against me now. All my hard work building a great Github repo is going to be discounted because people see contributions to one or two Bitcoin projects in my "contributed to" Github section.The whole situation makes me sad beyond belief.
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Io.js 1.0.0
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...Okay, normally I roll my eyes at people asking "What does this do" but Christ this is ridiculous.From the FAQ:> What is io.js?> io.js is a JavaScript platform that is compatable with Node.js & npm.What does that even mean?Edit: Thanks for those answering. I started figuring out what it was, but sometimes folks really need to learn that "A correct definition" is not the same as "a useful definition". However, if it's as cool as described, definitely might give it a shot.Edit2: Is this expected to be as stable as Node.js consistently? And how solid is the upgrade path- is it going to be a pain upgrading between versions the way Node used to be, or is there a smoother upgrade process? I guess what I'm wondering is, do I get any benefit from using this right now, or would it be smart to still wait for whatever version they consider release quality?
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I Am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator. AMA
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Question re solo founders:
"A startup is too much work for one person" and if you can't convince even one friend to join you, that doesn't speak well for your idea! On the other hand, a bad hire/partnership can ruin the company. YC gives signal it really prefers to look at teams than individual applications.
Q: Do you have have advice or rules of thumb re how much time a solo founder should put into finding partner(s)? Or thoughts re how much to prioritise this, vs. just writing code and talking to users to finish initial version yourself?
I don't mean this to be just focused on "getting into YC" but more in general: what's the right way to think about fixing this problem (being a solo founder) vs tackling other things like actually building something initial users can be using? For software ideas surely it is occasionally sensible to make at least a prototype and actually get some users before ever buddying up? Or if I've got this far but am basically still going it alone, am I doing something wrong?
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Privilege and Inequality in Silicon Valley
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There's a strong thread of meritocracy in the tech community, but there is no such thing. When you choose the clearly better developer over the other, you're often choosing the one who had better resources growing up, not just natural ability. The poorer developer may have had a natural advantage over the other one, but didn't have the money to develop it as much. So you're really just selecting for wealth all over again.This is what's behind the achievement gap anxiety: Wise rich people don't want to perpetuate a world where only money selects success. It's wasteful and ultimately unsustainable.
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Google’s not-so-secret new OS
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It bothers me that Google does not seem particularly interested in doing the one thing that would make their Android platform absolutely dominant: Allow Chrome to run Android apps on Mac and Windows.Google has already done 90% of the necessary work by adding Android apps to ChromeOS. Two and a half years ago it created "App Runtime for Chrome" which demonstrated that Android apps could run on Windows and Mac in a limited, buggy way [1]. If Google had put meaningful effort into developing such a strategy we would by now have a relatively simple way to develop software which runs on 99% of laptops and 85% of smartphones and tablets. Developers would now be targeting 'Android first' instead of 'web app first then iOS then maybe Android'.Sundar, if you're reading this - do it![1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/09/hack-runs-android-ap...
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To Change Habits, Try Replacement Instead
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Disclaimer: I am not a doctor and if you are suffering emotionally/mentally please seek professional help.----My anecdote:I used to frequently suffer from (undiagnosed) anxiety and depression.For about a year, I would respond to sudden anxiety by seeking comfort in various forms of isolation/depressed behavior (watch TV as a distraction, try to take a "nap", etc.). The most insidious thing about this was how it seemed to happen so quickly that it was practically subconscious. Days would disappear.It took me about a year to recognize this pattern, but eventually I learned to catch myself whenever I was seeking this form of comfort, and instead chose to do one session of push-ups, instead (when possible).This worked really well for me for two reasons:1. It caused me to stop myself short of falling into any kind of depressive spiral -- physical exertion is a great distraction!2. Needless to say, I did a LOT of push ups, which are a great form of full-body exercise. The benefits are well known.These days, I don't need the push-ups as a distraction; most of the "bad habits" I used to have don't appear nearly as much (although I still need to exercise regularly to avoid depression).
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ISPs Say They Don’t Make Enough Money
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They aren't only lying about not making enough money. They are "lobbying" to keep up this charade.Many European nations have much cheaper and faster access to the internet with many more ISPs. I don't see a logical reason why US can't have the same.
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Terry Davis has died
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I don't know if this is the correct post for this or not, but I've been thinking about it for some time.We hackers and founders obviously suffer from mental illness and poverty, yet some of us do really well -- rich beyond most folks' understanding.I don't want to get into a discussion of "what's wrong with society". I just want to know: why aren't we taking care of our own? We obviously have the resources. If we can do a basic income experiment, we can take care of the Terry Davis's in the world. Why aren't we?
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Firefox removes core product support for RSS/Atom feeds
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I think I've come full circle on this...(I was one of the creators of RSS).My current company, Datastreamer:http://www.datastreamer.io/Provides social media data streams for companies and search engines wanting full torrents of web content.We deprecated RSS a LONG time ago, which was for me, like abandoning your baby.I think RSS is dead in many ways but it's also still around in a sense.Mostly because of Twitter and Facebook metadata. You can accomplish 90% of what you want with RSS just by parsing the metadata on an HTML page.Because we've added NLP and content extraction algorithms on top of the content we're able to re-construct feeds that are better than the original RSS.With another app I'm working on:https://getpolarized.io/I might actually use something similar to build in data feeds similar to a feed reader.But man.. I can't believe I'm thinking about building in a feed reader again :-P
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Ask HN: Best Command-Line Applications?
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Just about every Rust cli app written by sharkdp: https://github.com/sharkdp/fd
https://github.com/sharkdp/bat
https://github.com/sharkdp/diskus
https://github.com/sharkdp/hyperfine
For viewing csv's as tabular, paged data from the terminal, check out VisiData (python) https://github.com/saulpw/visidata
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Facebook has struggled to hire talent since the Cambridge Analytica scandal
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I just spent three months hiring in NYC, and now that I think about it, I haven't seen a single person mention they were considering counteroffers from Facebook. For context, Facebook and Google are the two largest tech companies with a significant NYC presence. It's telling that a substantial portion of our candidates admitted to considering competing offers from Google, but literally no one was considering Facebook.> Usually half of the close is done for recruiters with the brand Facebook hasI'm also finding that company brand plays a huge role in closing candidates. Our company's brand is generally pretty strong, and I've found one of the things candidates respond to most is the story we tell about our company's past, present, and future. Facebook's story has become "we were founded by a jerk who didn't care about privacy, our not caring about privacy has had massive consequences for American and global society, and our promises to improve our approach to privacy in the future have proven to be disingenuous smokescreens."It's no wonder the substantial portion of people who care about their employer's ethics are turned off.
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Every productivity thought I've ever had, as concisely as possible
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I would definitely recommend against having an hour’s commute to work. It is a really strong predictor for life dissatisfaction. Fifteen minutes is the number I heard to be a good balance.
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The 2002 mandate for internal communication systems at Amazon
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> 6) Anyone who doesn’t do this will be fired.So I've never worked at a company over 150 people. Is this... a normal thing for an email? Maybe I'm just one of those softies but an email with that line would throw me off my day and cause a serious hit to my morale and confidence of working there.
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Git: Malicious repositories can execute remote code while cloning
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> This vulnerability affects platforms with case-insensitive filesystems...What kind of platforms use case-insensitive filesystems?
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Ubiquiti starts serving ads in their management interface
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I think it's a common sentiment here,
but I'm turning into a more extreme anti-advertising zealot every day.Even the large ad networks show paid content that violates what I would consider widespread ethical norms - presenting everything from hyperbolic claims to straight fraud to people with little repercussion. I'm reminded of a poignant example in television, where episodes of Jeopardy! are intertwined with their shilling quackery like Prevagen to an audience using the fear of aging. Perhaps I'm growing increasingly blind to any positive impacts of the discipline, but ethically I find it hard to separate the fraudsters from the engineers that enable them.I guess advertising is saving me a lot of money in the end by cultivating this hatred, and though I can't change the world this screed was therapeutic.
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If Looks Could Kill
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I may be misinterpreting the story, but did Gates basically sabotage the computer (temporarily) of a trade show attendee?
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The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-oriented cultures
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Former Googler here. This person has correctly identified that a key reason why google sucks is that people very often...> choose between doing what’s best for users or what’s best for their careerBut the root cause isn't that people want to get promoted. It's that Google promotes people for the wrong reasons. Put very simply, the problem is that Google promotes people for "solving hard problems" not for solving USEFUL problems.Imagine if people did get promoted for fixing bugs instead of building a new product (to be abandoned)! Or if maintaining an existing system was somehow on par with building a new system (which is just a bigger more complicated version of something perfectly good). The googler would say "well those useful problems are too easy to merit a promotion. Anybody can solve easy problems - we're google, and we're too smart to work on those easy problems." Grow up.Y'all value the wrong things. That's why your culture is broken.
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Donald Knuth on work habits, problem solving, and happiness (2020)
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> My mother is amazing to watch because she doesn't do anything efficiently, really: She puts about three times as much energy as necessary into everything she does. But she never spends any time wondering what to do next or how to optimize anything; she just keeps working. Her strategy, slightly simplified, is, "See something that needs to be done and do it." All day long. And at the end of the day, she's accomplished a huge amount.This strategy is remarkably powerful and I've used it to great effect in my career. Committing yourself to pushing forward every single day, even if just a little bit, and always just peeling off one single thing you can do next (even if it's tiny yet takes you all day) has a dizzying compounding effect.
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A little exercise each day improves muscles more than one big weekly workout
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Probably relevant for the HN crowd: there's a bunch of very geeky next gen fitness guys that keep up with the cutting edge of fitness research, and occasionally expand it themselves. If you're reading them, this kind of thing is being discussed for years, with new studies just moving the odds a bit in favor of the current hypothesis. Yes, they're very Bayesian, explicitly so.A few names/links, pick and mix as you will - they're all good:https://mennohenselmans.com/high-resistance-training-frequen...http://www.lookgreatnaked.com/fitness_articles_by_brad_schoe...https://macrofactorapp.com/articles/https://rpstrength.com/team-member/mike-israetel-phdProbably not the best links for each, but it's morning and I got work to do. Should be enough to get you started tho.
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Ken Thompson really did launch his "trusting trust" trojan attack in real life
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Off-topic but, I'm noticing a lot of anime waifu and furry-type illustrations on tech blogs lately on HN.Can someone cooler/younger tell me: Is this the hand-off to the new generation, or is there a meta-meme I missed?
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Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
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Potentially inflammatory story, but I think about it occasionally, and this is a good context.I was out having a meal with old college buddies; most of us are developers, but some have become team leaders and managers. I will call it a statistical anomaly, but the worst engineers are now in 'people management' positions.The discussion ended with a guy boasting about how his team has X people, and he's looking to grow it to Y this year. Naturally, we asked if he needed that much headcount. Turns out, no. It's their way of assessing value and getting promoted. He gave almost 0 fucks about the quality of the people employed and how adding them to the team would impact quality. The only thing on his mind was getting that number up to pump up his CV for the following position of managing people.I'm gladly reporting that he managed to do that and has indeed been promoted, and I still can't say what he does for a living apart from 'enable engineers to grow their careers.'I've also been in positions where my 'people managers' advised me against my interests. Unfortunately, I am my own people manager, so I took my own advice, which worked out wonderfully. I wake up from time to time thankful that I didn't follow the advice of my managers and was able to see some of them in the audience from the stage.
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How Browsers Work
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They refer to Tali Garsiel as "she". Sure it isn't a "he" ?
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A day in the life of a startup founder
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I wonder what is the different between a CEO and founder in the small startups? Or its a matter of company structure?
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