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Stop the Earn IT Bill Before It Breaks Encryption | I strongly believe we have lost the war for privacy and security (against state level actors) already. Once the net adopted the platform model, we were screwed. Platforms are as easy to regulate, as for example the telephone companies were back in the days.They were easily forced to comply with wiretapping demands of the government.The moment a central platform controlled (most of) our communication and was able to provide security to the users by using encryption, legislators realized the danger and also the solution. They would just need to force these central hubs with laws as they did back in the day. Legislation was/is needed to break users' encryption and give government the access to all communication that was lost with modern forms of communication and encryption.So on one hand, it is "just" a return to a previous state of affairs. On the other hand, given for example today's methods of automatically listening in and transcribing voice to text, this would be a way more massive intrusion and control mechanism. |
Michael Collins, Apollo 11 astronaut, has died | Collins' role in Apollo 11 is often minimized in the public conciseness, but I find it particularly fascinating from a human perspective. In certain ways it seems even scarier than Armstrong's and Aldrin's jobs. They at least had more direct control over their success in landing on the moon. Collins was largely powerless to help if something went wrong. If that did happen, he would have been faced with the choice of abandoning his crewmates to die on the moon and fly back to Earth himself. Meanwhile no one had ever been as far from other life as he was on that flight. When he was on the far side of the moon he was truly alone in a way that no other person had ever been in human history. |
Kathleen Booth, the inventor of assembly language, has died | She invented Assembler language! This one really deserves a HN "black header" imho. |
Startup idea checklist | Is the only reason to create a startup to experience exponential growth and get really rich and have your own stock symbol?Or, could someone create a lifestyle business and call that a startup? Where the goals might be simply to make a living doing what you love without working for some big company somewhere?Or maybe could someone create a startup that makes the world a better place without concern for getting oneself crazy rich?I am not a fan of the idea that the only driving motivation for establishing a small tech company is to make the VC's happy. |
Apple's New Map | This is really neat but I don't really care about greenery when I'm using Apple Maps. Can they take a break from figuring out how to convert satellite images into green blobs and devise an algorithm to put street names on the screen?Apple and Google maps are both worthless as maps without typing in an actual address and using navigation because they can't just show the main cross street names on the screen. It absolutely blows my mind that map products ship without street names clearly visible at all times.The before/after map of downtown SF actually shows less useful data about the city. It no longer shows the names of Mission or Market streets. The fancy 3D representations of buildings don't help me negotiate on the ground. |
Launch HN: Prometheus (YC W19) – Remove CO2 from Air and Turn It into Gasoline | How could the math possibly work out on this? If a gallon of gas holds 33.70 kWh of energy, and you can get cheap electricity for $0.1/kWh, you're looking at $3.37/gallon if you have a magical process that converts with 100% efficiency. Even if you hit your efficiency goal, which would be impressive, who is paying $7/gallon for gas? Just buy an electric car. This can only possibly be useful when all of the oil is gone and there is no other alternative, right? |
Stripe: instant payment processing for developers | Stripe pretty much takes payment processing kicking and screaming into 2011. Merchant accounts are a serious drag. I've opened a few and they've been nothing but headaches (especially if you're young—nobody trusts you.) Couple that with getting a gateway account, dealing with credit checks, monthly fees, monthly minimums, slow people in the payments industry, PCI compliance...Stripe takes payments and put them behind a simple API. No crappiness and 1099 rules of PayPal. No more reconsidering the meaning of life like back when I had a merchant account. The only downside I see is the 7-day rolling batch (deposit to bank), versus the nightly batch from the merchant account, though I assume that is for fraud protection.Maybe if you're charging millions of dollars, you should use a regular merchant account. If you aren't, I'm telling you now: don't even bother with a merchant account. Just use Stripe. |
How I Ended Up In Solitary After Calling 911 For Help | Back in November, I was arrested in Brooklyn for running a red light on my bike while on my way to work in Manhattan.Normally you're given a ticket and let go, but in this instance, the officers took issue with the fact that I was not carrying ID. Both officers told me that I "could be arrested for not having ID." For clarification, I asked if it was a city, state, or national law, and the officers adamantly maintained that it was a state law. I, stupidly, thought to educate them on this misconception, and one officer in particular decided to bring me in because she "knows the laws and doesn't need to be told how to do [her] job."I was brought into the local precinct (Brooklyn's 88th). When I arrived, both officers denied saying I was required to carry ID when I asked the captain about the law. Of course the captain confirmed that I was not required to carry ID, but at that point it didn't really matter anyway. The charge was failure to obey a traffic signal.I was held in solitary confinement for 10 hours. During that time, the female arresting officer would periodically come by to taunt me, and tell me that I shouldn't have questioned her, and then threw a huge tantrum when I requested not to be touched by her for fingerprinting. They sent another officer in to do it, but for a moment, I honestly thought was going to beat the shit out of me.The other arresting officer, a guy of Filipino descent, noticed my Filipino flag belt buckle when they were taking my belt (so I couldn't hang myself, apparently). We talked about the country a bit (I was a volunteer there for 2 years) and to his credit he apologized to me, admitted that he was wrong about the law, but said that there wasn't anything he could do now that I was in there because the other officer wanted to make an example of me. I was, curiously, allowed to keep my shoelaces.The other officers that would walk by my urine soaked cell and ask why I was there did not believe at first that I had been arrested for running a red light. When I mentioned who the arresting officer was though, they all gave a knowing sigh. One told me that she was not at all respected there, that she had a huge temper, and that I should not have crossed her. One officer went across the street and bought me a slice of pizza, which was nice.Around 8pm, I was personally escorted by two other officers to a courthouse in downtown Brooklyn, where I was retina scanned and placed in a holding cell with around 10 other criminals. Charges ranged from domestic abuse to armed robbery. One man was on the floor going through drug withdrawals. Everyone scoffed at the idea that I was there because of a traffic violation, and likely assumed I was making that up. I talked to my escorting officers a bit and they also confirmed that my arresting officer was a bit of a joke at the precinct, and that I had been unlucky.While at the courthouse jail cell, the officer that was watching everyone at one point began banging on the cell bars with his hands and yelling at the inmates, calling them niggers and going on about how they're all in there because they never had any fathers growing up. Some of the inmates laughed, but others were visibly scared. When that calmed down and another officer came by to drop off someone else, I told him what had happened and his only response was "so?"I was offered the chance to make a phone call, but the only number I even have memorized anymore is my mother's, and despite knowing that my friends were probably scared to death looking for me, I wasn't at the point of calling her. She still does not know that any of this ever happened.I was then given a chance to speak to my public defender through plated glass. That took about 20 seconds. She basically told me this whole thing was ridiculous, that I had likely pissed off an officer (I hadn't told her anything) and that we were going to ask the judge to dismiss the charge and that the judge would do so.At 11pm I went before the judge for about 5 seconds and the charges were dismissed and I was allowed to go home. Unfortunately, I first had to walk back to the precinct to get my bike, keys, phone, etc. Luckily it wasn't too cold.I had thought that I was handling things fairly well, but when I arrived at the precinct and was faced with the notion of going back in there, even as a free person, I began vomiting in the garbage can beside the steps leading in. Dehydration and stress were probably the causes, and for a moment I feared being seen, in case they would arrest me again right there for something or other.My phone was dead, so I couldn't get ahold of anyone until I got home, but I was too tired and afraid to get back on my bike, so I walked back to my apartment. When I finally did get back on the grid, I had found that my brother, girlfriend, and work colleagues had all been desperately looking for me when I hadn't shown up to work, and had been calling hospitals and police stations. They eventually did get a confirmation from the 88th precinct that I was there, which of course no one relayed to me. My work was prepared to send their lawyer down, but my brother talked them out of it, thinking that it would likely make things worse for me inside (he was probably right, but go work). I felt even worse for putting them through such an experience.All told, I was in custody from around 10am to 11pm and I've learned a few things on the inside. Knowing your rights doesn't matter. There are no repercussions to any officer for anything they say or do. If they want to make your life hell, they can and will. Carrying ID may not be required by law, but it will save you a lot of hassle and explaining if you ever do have a run in with the law. You can either exercise your right not to carry ID, but you put yourself in danger of the wrath of an ignorant police force (I still don't carry it). Also, don't run red lights on your bike. |
Entering Public Beta | FYI, if you don't want to install anything to try it out, you can use https://gethttpsforfree.com which is a browser-based ACME client. It doesn't ask for private keys, so you don't need to trust it. |
New Hacker News Guideline: Avoid Gratuitous Negativity | One of the most negative habits is in my opinion the failure to read a comment charitably (to make an effort to interpret it in the best possible light). Instead, people often tend to misread or miserunderstand what's being said, only to use the opportunity to write a "correction" based on that false impression. A worse flavor of the same problem is a misunderstanding that is then used to justify outrage or personal annoyance.That's what I find worthy of being changed, and I will certainly make an effort to read comments more charitably as well.Overall though, and I realize this is quite anecdotal, rampant negativity - especially about things other members of the community have created - seems to have gotten less common recently. |
Node v4.0.0 | The io.js fork and subsequent merge back into Node.js, including the birth of the Node Foundation, has been one of the best examples of the power of open source I have ever seen in action.The situation went from bad, to worse, to the best possible outcome, and that's remarkable to say the least.Congratulations to everyone involved and thank you for the hard work. |
Cyberattacks in 12 Nations Said to Use Leaked N.S.A. Hacking Tool | I think this is an excellent example that we can all reference the next time someone says that governments should be allowed to have backdoors to encryption etc.This shows that no agency is immune from leaks and when these tools fall into the wrong hands the results are truly catastrophic. |
Email is your electronic memory | I've ranted here before about the complexity of email and the difficulty of even existing as a startup in the email space (see my bio). The single team that has navigated the insanity of the email space well as a small company is Fastmail. They are brilliant, ethical, and pragmatic. I sincerely hope the folks at Google who are behind this AMP-for-email idea will take the time to chat with the Fastmail team about it before pulling the trigger.Having lived through the last DOJ/Google 10-month battle royale (the sale of ITA Software, now called Google Flights), I think this is an absolutely terrible idea for Google from an antitrust standpoint. The upside for them, while obvious, pales in comparison to the downside they face by leveraging their email and search dominance to create a new walled garden. I'm amazed this got past legal. |
Zoom rolled their own encryption scheme, transmit keys through servers in China | The serverside key handling stuff is bad, but generally known (Zoom has features whose natural implementation require them to keep keys serverside).People are dunking on Zoom for rolling their own crypto and coming up with AES-128-ECB. This is also bad, but people should be aware that it's a lot more complicated than "you can see penguins through it".You can see penguins through an ECB-encrypted bitmap because discrete blocks of the bitmap image repeat, and thus have the same ciphertext, and these correspondences carry obvious meaning in a bitmap. The same is not automatically true of video or audio data with normal codecs. Aaron Toponce points out that sensor noise will likely scramble ECB ciphertexts, for instance.Colm MacCárthaigh makes an even more important point, which is that it's already very trick to reliably encrypt voice tracks, because common encoding and transmission techniques make them susceptible to traffic analysis. So, for instance, you can quickly find papers about exploiting silence suppression to make predictions about speech in an encrypted audio channel. The point here being, cryptanalytic attacks on ECB are unlikely to be anyone's first recourse.Obviously, the 128 bit AES key thing doesn't really have any practical impact.Designers should religiously avoid ECB mode, but the real danger of ECB is in interactive settings, where we as attackers get to induce plaintext patterns, and use chosen boundaries to isolate targeted ciphertext. Bulk video and audio transmission isn't that kind of interactive setting. You still don't want to read people saying that ECB is OK; it's bad.Essentially: it seems like Zoom's cryptography is bad, but not in a way that really matters compared to brochure-level badness of non-end-to-end-encryption. |
Moderna mRNA sequence released to GitHub [pdf] | I'm sure it's more complex than I grasp as a layperson, but I'm utterly amazed at how simple this _appears_. I get the feeling that this is something I have a better chance of understanding than the average SaaS Terms and Conditions.I expected to have to scroll through pages upon pages of indecipherable text. Instead it's no bigger than a large paragraph of text, and I can easily fit it on my screen. |
Amazon Go | Look, I know this might not be a popular view here on HN, but I think this is useless. And bad.I'm not talking about the technology behind it (I think it's an amazing achievement)..I live in Barcelona and I have at least 5 medium-sized supermarkets within 5 minutes walking distance from my home. Plus there are several smaller shops that sell fruits and vegetables.I know all the people who work in these supermarkets. The cashier in the supermarket downstairs always sings a quiet song while she scans my products, she knows my daughter and she's always nice and friendly.The cashier in the other store talks to the customers. She stops scanning and starts talking while the line waits. Some customers might join the conversation. I know she has an old cat that eats an unlimited amount of food if allowed to do so...There are similar stories about other shops in the neighbourhood - they come to work, they serve the people in the neighbourhood, they go home. They do this until they retire.These people like their jobs because we respect them for what they do, so they feel useful and they work hard.I don't mind waiting in line for 3 minutes. Or 5. It's never longer than that, even if the cashier discusses the latest news with the old lady.The humanity of it has value for us here and that value is greater than the time we'd save by removing the people from the shops. |
Summary of the Amazon S3 Service Disruption | > At 9:37AM PST, an authorized S3 team member using an established playbook executed a command which was intended to remove a small number of servers for one of the S3 subsystems that is used by the S3 billing process. Unfortunately, one of the inputs to the command was entered incorrectly and a larger set of servers was removed than intended.It remains amazing to me that even with all the layers of automation, the root cause of most serious deployment problems remain some variant of a fat fingered user. |
Samsung TVs May Upload Screenshots for Automatic Content Recognition | I'm getting ready to go full Battlestar Galactica in all of my appliances. It's now difficult to find high end washers and ovens without these features.At least right now we can choose not to connect the devices, but what happens if iot LTE connections get cheap enough that the choice is removed altogether, like with Tesla and other high end modern cars?I don't think I'm just being a Luddite. This really seems like a bad idea. We need some way to assure security and limit data collection. |
Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help | I canceled all my personal jetbrains products a few years ago after meeting some of their team at GopherCon.I vote with my money and I was a 5+ year subscriber up until that point. I visited their booth with same enthusiasm as other posters here and lavished praise on their tooling and talked about how excited I was for their Go IDE and they just stared at me and said “Ok, thanks”.Something so empty and almost a pretentious kind of tone when it was said was a massive turnoff. Why even come to a conference if you don’t want to engage with your users?I don’t expect my story to change any hearts or minds and I still use their tools when a company provides them for Java work but I’ve replaced my usage of their other tools with VS Code and plug-ins for my personal projects. |
Stealing Your Private YouTube Videos, One Frame at a Time | Classic "confused deputy" problem. What is the current recommendation in the modern microservices world to solve it?When user agent (UA) makes authenticated call to service A, which in turn makes call to service B:UA -[user auth]-> A -[????]-> Bhow to pass authentication information from A, when making a call to B? Options I can think of:- pass UA token as is. This has a problem that token becomes too powerful and can be made to call any service.- pass own token and pass user auth info as an additional field. This doesn't solve confused deputy problem, since own token can be used with any user auth and service B can be tricked to make request for data in B not belonging to user- Mint new unique token derived from tuple (A own token, UA token, B service name). B then extracts user information from the token presented by A and authorizes request. This seems to solve confused deputy problem, because A has no access to other UA tokens, so it can't mint a new token for a wrong user. Downside is that token minting should probably be done in another service and it requires making a call to it for almost every request between two microservices, making it a bottleneck pretty quickly.I've never seen last one in real life, maybe it has some critical flaws I am failing to see? |
Thanks for the Bonus, I Quit | When I worked at eBay, we had a bonus program based on company revenue. It was around 6% of your salary max and managers got around 25% max based on the same formula. For the first few years, you could count on getting a max bonus every quarter. To the point where most everyone who worked there had always gotten one.And the one quarter, we didn't get the max bonus. In fact, I don't think we got it all. People screamed and yelled and were pissed. At the company all hands they spent a lot of time explaining that bonuses weren't guaranteed. Some of the lower paid folks were actually crying about not making critical payments because they counted on the bonus. Morale went way down. People left because of it.Stories like this are one of the stated reasons Netflix doesn't do things like bonuses or any sort of variable comp. Because once you get one once, you feel entitled to it in the future, and it feels like a loss when you don't get it. |
Just Wanted to Say Thanks | Some people are pointing out how rare it is for GitHubbers to express gratitude, but GitHub doesn't exactly encourage it. Doesn't it feel inappropriate to express gratitude as an "issue"? Maybe if there was a natural place for these messages they'd be sent more often. To the extent that there are affordances for it (stars, emojis) it is actually quite popular to praise good work on GitHub. |
Fireflies | Nature has the best algorithms, don't it folks?I have a question about a detail.The rule is:1. When you see a nearby neighbour flash, nudge your own clock forward.2. That's it.My question is -- when the fireflies are firing at the same time, they see each other flash, so they all nudge their clocks forward, correct?Assuming they don't nudge their clocks forward at the same amount, they would fall out of sync, correct? But they stay in sync, so they must nudge forward at the same amount...is this right?So my question is -- if everyone keeps nudging their clocks forward, why don't they keep speeding up? They do appear instead to continue flashing at the same steady rate.Does this mean that there ought to be another detail in the rule, such as,If you see a neighbour nearby flash, when you are not flashing, nudge your clock forward by a bit.? Or is the perspective I just said missing something? |
A Sad Day for Rust | A lot of this thread has it wrong, and this wrongness contributes to the problem which led to this.I have two simple mantras which establish my philosophy here:1. YOU are responsible for your dependencies.2. Open source participants are volunteers and owe you nothing.It was never Nikolay's job to vet actix-web for you, nor did it become his job when the library became popular, nor does invoking "security" change anything in the slightest. Your dependencies are your responsibility. Responding with vitrol, anger, or hate when failing to uphold this responsibility bites you in the ass is just being a jerk.User entitlement is totally unjustified and will burn out maintainers faster than almost anything else. I don't stand for it. If any other maintainers out there are struggling with this, please send me an email: [email protected]. I'm sympathetic to your cause and I can likely lend some pertinent advice. |
Covid-19 is now officially a pandemic, WHO says | By delaying the "pandemic" designation, the WHO has inadvertently cost more lives. They will strongly need to reevaluate their role and policies going forward, because this was a monumental process and leadership failure.The messaging from the media (who are laypersons) and the politicians (who are economically motivated laypersons) has been that this is "just the flu". Weak messaging from both the WHO and the CDC has only reinforced this in the public's perception.The WHO should have taken the decisive move to encourage greater caution by employing the "pandemic" label. That label comes with real power. While there is danger in crying wolf, it was evident months ago from the growth rate of the virus and the lack of quarantine procedures being put in place that this virus would reach the pandemic stage.If the role of the WHO is to stave off pandemics and not just to monitor them, then elevating the risk profile of the virus should have been a top priority. Since people look to the WHO for guidance, their actions have direct impact to sequestration and bringing the outbreak under control.Both the WHO and the CDC were too afraid to take early action. Their wait and see approach will ultimately result in more human deaths and suffering. |
When a customer refunds your paid app, Apple refunds its 30% cut [edited] | App stores need heavy regulations. It's not only Apple but Google and even steam to a small extent. Apple is of course the biggest offender as they heavily guard their monopoly with code signing enforcement. This shouldn't have been legal. They are the very definitions of predatory competition squashing monopolies. |
I am an Uighur who faced China’s concentration camps | CCP must not go unpunished. The world needs to stand up to their lone wolf style. If we do not stand up against CCP now it will only embolden the evil. Vote with your wallets. Avoid buying China made products. Pressure/ Make laws for retailers to enforce Country of Origin information for each and every product especially Amazon. Amazon is flooded with cheap Chinese products almost certainly made in inhumane conditions. CCP and Xi Jinping must not be emboldened any further. |
iOS 15 Humane | Even though this article is sarcastic(?) I can't help but get genuinely angry at these trillion dollar companies thinking they know what is better for us and trying to control and police everything. This is even worse than govt censoring porn and cuss-words back in the day thinking they know what is moral for the society.I was just talking to a friend the other day on how badly Apple and Google are trying their best to kill curiosity and creativity. I mean when I first got my 286 the machine was just full of possibilities. I think learning the ins and outs of it was more fun than doing anything productive.I used to hack away at it all day and night. Learning about interrupts, tinkering with the BIOS settings, hacking the serial port, irq, etc. Now everything is just locked down. In my latest phone I can't even run `fastboot` as that too has been locked down permanently because "security".Thank god we have Linux created before all this Bullshit started happening. If Apple, Google and Microsoft was in charge of things as they are now, we wouldn't even have any hardware to run anything else than Windows and iOS. |
Show HN: Looptap – A minimal game to waste your time | One of my favorite things to do with these neat little games is to build something that plays them for me by just pasting stuff into the browser JS console.https://pastebin.com/aTYuaNVSAt a score of 1,619 the ball is moving so fast it no longer works! I switched to a new tab (hoping that the event loop would be sent to the background/context switch/whatever) and ta-da - it misclicked. High score of 1,637. |
Show HN: SHA-256 explained step-by-step visually | So, how do people come up with these things? I assume every aspect of the design is carefully considered to defend it against various attacks. For example, why "right rotate 7 XOR right rotate 18 XOR right shift 3" and not "right rotate 2 XOR right rotate 3 XOR right shift 4"? |
Life in the Spanish city that banned cars | This may be shocking to people with an American upbringing, but cars (especially privately owned ones) just do not make sense going forward.Cities get bigger and denser, and wasting a big % of land on parking spaces, roads, intersections and accepting a horrible air quality (that reduces citizen life spans and health quality) and noise pollution just does not make any sense anymore. Carse are effective in less dense regions, but in modern cities other solutions have to be found. Mass transit, biking lanes, electro-scooters, (elevated)-footpaths are the way to go. Maybe even electric ridesharing.But privately owned gasoline-guzzlers are an archaic solution to the transportation problem, and they are not effective in today's society.I know european cities are much more pedestrian friendly & that US cities in general are more oriented towards the car lifestyle, but as said previously, this needs to change. It is a big cultural and infrastructure change over a longer timespan, but it is achievable.Of course change always requires some sacrifice, and I imagine the car-drivers in above mentioned article must have been plenty pissed at the beginning. But they paved over the streets, made the inner city pedestrian only, and now they are better for it. Of course this is a very small town and these changes do not scale up as easily as one would like, and much more complex projects will have to be designed for bigger cities. But it is doable (see initiatives in e.g. Madrid, Munich & most of the netherlands) and "only" requires some long-term commitment. But we all know how good politicians are at that (what's global warming??).I want to finish this comment with a call to engage in democracy. Make your opinion heard, loudly, go to the voting polls, participate in your local council, actually engage in politics. Because if you do not, no significant change will be made any time soon. |
Psilocybin for major depression granted Breakthrough Therapy by FDA | I've been reading a book called "How to Change Your Mind"[1] which contains a collection of history, anecdotes, trip reports, and some of the science behind these types of drugs. The book mostly discusses psilocybin and LSD, but it also touches on some of the other related drugs. If you're curious and want to learn more, it's worth a read.The one thing I'll say is that it seems like these drugs affect the brain in a way that's more akin to a super-placebo, rather than being therapeutic on their own. In other words, you would need to use the drugs in combination with therapy to obtain good results.[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Change_Your_Mind |
DevDocs API Documentation | Reminds me of Dash[1] which is especially useful when configured in your editor: press a key to open documentation for the word under the cursor.1: https://kapeli.com/dash |
Linux Productivity Tools (2019) [pdf] | I do my development work and run most of my agency (with multiple employees) with Linux. For some of the business things that most people don't assume Linux can do, I use:1. Xournal to annotate PDFs (aka sign contracts without printing them and scanning them back).2. LibreOffice of course for most document related work3. OBS Studio for recording webcam videos along with screen sharing4. Audacity for audio editing (heck, I used this even when I was on Mac OS X)5. Technically I've tried video editing with OpenShot, but do find myself back at Final Cut Pro X on my now 6 year old Macbook Pro for that for now6. pdfsandwich and Tesseract OCR for OCR/turning PDFs into searchable files7. Chrome/Firefox are both first class and run all the modern day web application stuff8. Tons and tons and tons of command line stuff that Linux is well known for9. QEMU/KVM for hosting arbitrary virtual machines with almost native performance10. GnuCash for double entry accounting for personal and volunteer society finances. I used GnuCash for a while to run the S Corp accounting when we were on Freshbooks and Harvest, but we've since graduated to QuickBooks Online for better invoicing and CPA office professional services support.11. GIMP for photo editing12. Inkscape for messing around with vector graphicsOnce you get past locating the tools to do your job. Linux has everything. |
Superconductor news: What’s claimed, and how strong the evidence seems to be | If this material does just what they say it does, what would it revolutionise?Or as the article talks about, is this just a pointer at other possibilities that would be the real game changers? |
Philae Found | Off-topic, but why do they usually shoot black and white? Is it something to do with the file size? |
How to fight back against Google AMP as a web user and a web developer | Here's one great takeaway:> Treat the cause: Third-party requests slow down the web> ...> - Google owns 7 of the top 10 most popular third-party calls> ...> So you can see why there must be some kind of internal struggle at Google. They understand the value of a faster web but they also cannot go after the main cause of the slow web. And this is how technology such as AMP gets invented and makes things worse.It blows my mind how many devs around here are devoted to their browser and search.Stop using chrome. Honestly, wtf?! Firefox is awesome. FF dev tools are awesome. FF, like Wu Tang, is for the kids.STOP USING google SEARCH! USE DUCKDUCKGO! Use the `!gm` google maps bang when you need it. Use the `!g` google bang in a pinch, but for all of our sake, please wean yourself off of google search.These two steps are immensely easy to do, and yet a MAJOR investment in all of our future. |
Freeman Dyson Has Died | About 4 years ago, I was a grad student in astrophysics at Princeton. Dyson worked at the Institute for Advanced Study which, while not officially part of the university was essentially an extension of the various departments (shared colloquiums, any researcher there was a valid thesis adviser, etc.).The grad students have a tradition (or used to) called “Thunch” (Thursday Lunch) where they invite someone to come have lunch and hang out every week. It was by far one of the highlights of my life — maybe 10 people in the room max, eating pizza, shooting shit with some of the most impressive and accomplished people you could hope to meet — Nobel prize laureates, Neil deGrasse Tyson, famous authors, whoever would respond to our invitation (people tended to say yes). Dyson was one of them. At the time he was already like 92 years old, dressed in a suit, occasionally using a handkerchief, and this guy had just published a result in Nature. The guy was SHARP at 92. Nicest, most interesting person I have ever met. Knew Einstein from his early days at IAS. Worked on an early version of the space program that looked into launching people into space with large spring loaded contraptions that were to be propelled with nuclear weapons. Those were the days I guess...So sorry to see he’s gone, the guy was a living legend. |
I started a one-man biz that's beating VC-backed startups | @Pud can undeniably build products that are laser focused and useful.And his minimalist approach to company building is epic and I am a fan.But it's sort of disingenuous to play David Vs. Goliath here like his line about launching:"I figured only a small number of smart people would somehow find us among the masses."He's just like the rest of us - just build a great product and be lean guys!But oh wait he launched DistroKid on the back of the HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of registered musicians already using his other site - Fandalism - founded years before.(1)EDIT - why I am a fan of pud is in the children to this comment he brings a data-gun to a knife fight and sorts out my impression w some facts.(1) https://techcrunch.com/2012/04/06/philip-kaplan-fandalism/ |
New York Times phasing out all 3rd-party advertising data | Here's a really naive question. The article talks about collecting data for some audience segments. Are they talking about letting users check checkboxes for the segments they might be interested in, or are they going to try to do what the third-party advertising companies do, which is try to guess what segments their users fall into by hoovering up what data they can find about them?It's crazy to me that there is a multi-billion dollar industry focused on trying to guess what ads I might be interested in, using lots of privacy-invading techniques that I do my best to counter. Did they ever think to just ask me? I might not care much about ads if it was as simple as declaring the categories I might be interested in, at least if I could be convinced that that's all I would see and that the crazy privacy violations would stop. |
I am done. I give up | A big fact of the entrepreneur world is that it is hugely based on luck. Luck of finding the right idea, the right market, the right timing, the right connections, the right customers, the right employees, the right financing. The basic fact is that most startups and most entrepreneurial dreams fail or get consumed by another for their talent/clients. And as an entrepreneur you fight against all odds. Most will fail and you have to be ok with that for yourself. Even how many times you try. It is ok, it does not make you a failure because you tried. It makes you a brave and daring person you tried.It does not help that the media only celebrates the few lucky ones, and because they were lucky they will propagate all their steps of wonderful execution, but overlooking the fact that they were just with the right timing, market & people. That it was pure luck.There are more journeys in life to be happy than being an entrepreneur. There are more paths towards personal fulfilment. |
My Heroic and Lazy Stand Against IFTTT | I am the CEO over at IFTTT. I apologize for any misunderstanding our communications today have caused. I built the Pinboard Channel on IFTTT and have maintained it for years. I am also a paying customer of Pinboard! I’ve built for hundreds of platforms and any changes to those platforms by default suck. At IFTTT, we've been on the receiving end of platform changes too many times to count. I want to make sure we do it better. Pinboard is a beloved service. Every service is, on IFTTT or not. We care about the people who use them and build them. The changes we are asking for are indeed more work, but we know they will lead to a better Pinboard Channel on IFTTT in the long term. I'd love to see Pinboard stay on IFTTT and am willing to give them the time they need and even come over to help myself! |
Sonos's “recycle mode” intentionally bricks devices so they can't be reused | It seems like a lot of commenters here (as well as the tweets) are totally missing the purpose of the recycle mode.If you want to sell, give away, or otherwise let someone else reuse your Sonos, then DON'T PUT IT IN RECYCLE MODE. Easy peasy.Recycle mode exists for when you intentionally want to get a Sonos trade-in credit for recycling your speakers for materials. But because you don't send the speakers directly to Sonos (instead to a local recycler), they have to trust you're actually recycling it instead of keeping it or selling it. So the recycle lock is a clever mechanism to ensure that. Otherwise you could "cheat" by getting the credit AND still using/selling your speakers.So if you want your speakers to be reused... don't take the credit!! Donate or sell them instead! It's your choice.It seems to me like overall it's a good set of incentives. The credit helps encourage people to recycle them at all instead of just throwing them in the trash, right? But doesn't prevent people from otherwise selling or donating them. Since it gives the consumer all the choice, this seems like a win for all sides, no? |
Delays aren’t good enough – Apple must abandon its surveillance plans | The problem here is similar to what happens with the War on Terror.1) It is noted that governments could, in theory, be spying on everything. Widely dismissed as silly.2) There is a trigger event (eg, 9/11). Inside government, a standard slips. They start spying on everything.3) Years later it becomes public knowledge. It is too hard to monitor what is going on now though, so it is difficult to tell who specifically should be outraged about what.4) The situation persists because it is convenient to the people in charge.5) (TBD) It gets turned on political dissidents. I'm expecting everyone will agree on this point in 5 or so years, at the moment that is probably maybe more a partisan observation.Apple's partnering up will follow the same pattern. There just isn't enough transparency about what closed source software does. |
Room-Temperature Superconductivity Achieved for the First Time | This is interesting for a couple reasons.1) While I agree with the article's assessment that superconduction along huge distances is a likely no-go given pressures involved, it's not out of the realm of possibility that we could find a way to apply massive static pressure loads to small high-performance circuits.2) If the pressures are 75% the Earth's core, that raises interesting geologic questions about what's going on in the Earth's core. Perhaps the model for Earth's magnetic field (or the material that causes it) will need to be adjusted to account for the possibility of naturally-occurring superconductors. |
Instagram ads Facebook won't show you | See, the trick here is to put all the personal data onto an oddly specific t-shirt that's for sale.Available now, size "Large" t-shirt for sale!"I'm a proud dad living in Seattle who attended the University of Washington and once went on a trip to Central America for a while. I have a dog and like to read and occasionally complain about politics."I'd buy this if I saw it, if just for the lulz and nihilistic outlook when it comes to privacy.In fact... if I were a privacy-focused company, I'd 100% do this as a marketing stunt. |
Why we lost Uber as a user | Does anyone else think the scenario in the explanation is an unreasonable request to make of a relational database? I think that if you've created a design that requires you to update a 50K row table 500 times a second that itself is heavily indexed and used heavily in joins, you have a software design problem more than a database problem. I wouldn't expect any database to handle that and am surprised that mysql does. One has to ask: for how long will it work? Surely the clock is running out on such a design. |
Farewell Stack Exchange | I deeply respect Jeff's decision to put his family first. I have a general question though. I am an ordinary programmer at an ordinary job working ordinary hours. From those of you who have started their own project full time, is it impossible to run a start up and work ordinary hours? Or is it really necessary to sacrifice all other aspects of your life to be successful? |
Microsoft intercepting Firefox, Chrome installation on Windows 10 Insider build | In threads about github etc, many were claiming Microsoft are a completely different, and better company, with a fine open approach to business these days.Seems nothing much has changed in their approach in 30 years. |
Ebola Is Now Curable | It's great news, but they're observing a 30% mortality rate for the "cure". Absent medical intervention there is still a nontrivial survival rate (mortality rate of 75-90%). With supporting medical treatment before this new treatment - fluid support, etc - I think it's up to 50%? It sounds like the monoclonal antibody treatment has improved odds of survival from 1:10-1:2 to 2:3.edit: The 6% figure is population restricted to early interventions. I am uncomfortably out of my limited knowledge here, but I think that early intervention numbers are better across the board. I'd want to compare the 6% number to the control. And I don't want to see a control! It is such a good result no matter how you look at it that they wisely halted the trial. |
Perfectly Cropped | "But I see them impact my aging parents all the time."I've realized lately that I'm actually entering this zone. For the last 20 years I've been talking about how stuff like this is a nightmare for the "aging" community.20 years is a long time, and now I'm falling into it.The big one for me in this new version of iOS was that:1) I couldn't figure out how to move my cursor around. It used to be perfect. I held my finger down, it let me move the cursor around in a word. Now you have to swipe the cursor to "grab" it and move it around under your finger. It feels like change for the sake of change when it worked perfectly before.2) And I can't do a "select all" anymore. I don't even know where that option is and I used it all the time. Something tells me I have to swipe somewhere now.We all become the "aging" population no matter how much we think we know tech, design, etc.I think my biggest problem with all of this is that things worked. I liked that things worked, and I liked that I knew how to use things. I cannot figure out why things have to change. Or at least, put an option in settings to change back/forth from previous functionality. When I wake up one morning with nothing to worry about except work, and find out I now have to relearn how to use the same phone that has been in my pocket for 2 years.... this is irritating. |
Mathematics for the Adventurous Self-Learner | I know this is going to be the case for likely nobody, but I have browsed most of the self-study math threads that pop up here as a forever-on-my-todo-list thing and I have a remark to make:I have yet to find a guide that does not start with the assumption that you graduated highschool.That is a very reasonable assumption to make. We are in a community of technology and engineering, it would be a bit ridiculous to assume the people you are surrounded by did not have a fundamental base of mathematics.But the times I have tried to go through these teach-yourself materials, it went from zero to draw-the-rest-of-the-fucking-owl real quick. [0]I have been programming for 14 years, but stopped doing schoolwork around age 12, and never did any math beyond pre-algebra.Does anyone know of materials for adults that cover pre-algebra -> algebra -> geometry -> trigonometry -> linear algebra -> statistics -> calculus? At a reasonably quick pace that someone with a family + overtime startup hours could still benefit from?[0] https://i.imgur.com/RadSf.jpg(Also, curse the Greeks for not using more idiomatic variables. ∑ would never pass code review, what an entirely unreadable identifier) |
Judge: Citibank isn't entitled to $500M it sent to various creditors last August | > Raj thought that checking the "principal" checkbox and entering the number of a Citibank wash account would ensure that the principal payment would stay at Citibank. He was wrong. To prevent payment of the principal, Raj actually needed to set the "front" and "fund" fields to the wash account as well as "principal." Raj didn't do that.I don't even have anything to add. The paragraph speaks for itself... You can't make this up |
Inside the longest Atlassian outage | Engineering mistakes happen.The most inexcusable thing is not communicating with the paying customers who have been affected for over a week.Atlassian's Global Head of Customer Success probably should have been fired but here she is promoting Atlassian Cloud on LinkedIn three days ago: https://www.linkedin.com/mwlite/in/gertie-rizzo-5b70061Actually reading a bit more, it seems like their customer team was partying in Las Vegas instead of taking care of business: https://www.linkedin.com/mwlite/feed/hashtag/atlassianteam22Priorities. |
Clock | Wow. That makes me anxious. It really makes me feel like the seconds come and go. |
Water | Looks nice but not like water. It keeps moving forever. A bucket of water would stand still after a few minutes.Edit: Seems to lack simulation of friction between water particles? |
Plagiarism | Update: see this comment on HN. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3972875Zee from TNW here.Someone has to explain to me exactly what we should have done differently here.I honestly have absolutely no idea what we should have done differently here to illustrate an interesting fact with our readers and reference the original source (we did that twice in the article...even with his full name (a screenshot of which he conveniently didn't include in his post))...and still he comes out guns blazing like he wrote a full-on opinion piece and we decided to just copy/paste.We work immensely had to product original content as well as link to original sources when deserved...this case was absolutely no different.I'm honestly amazed that this is crawling up Hacker News quite frankly. |
WhatsApp Co-Founder Donates $1M to FreeBSD Foundation | From the announcement:>>"This marks the largest single donation to the Foundation since its inception almost 15 years ago"First, I'm extremely excited to see this announcement. FreeBSD is fantastic and extremely underrated.Secondly though, isn't it sad to hear that in FreeBSD existence - this is the largest donation ever ... given that Yahoo use to run it's entire company on it, OS X is based on it, Juniper is based on it, Netflix deploys on it, NetApp, EMC, etc.Edit: typo |
All the best engineering advice I stole from non-technical people | they have innate understanding that being observed working is more valuable than the results of their work.I've seen coders who knew this by heart forget this less than 5 years after entering management and become champions of forcing everybody into the office for 8:30 stand-ups and time tracking systems that enforce minute by minute "project accountability".I don't know exactly how this happens, all I know is its like a damn force of nature. The only thing I've ever seen kill morale and tank projects faster is random periodic layoffs. |
Zoom meetings aren’t end-to-end encrypted, despite marketing | Are people just looking for things to be mad at Zoom for at this point? When Zoom says E2E encryption they're using older notion when it was common for services to not use encryption at all for these kinds of things and it was somewhat of a technical accomplishment that every client-server-server-client leg was all encrypted.Like it's fine to point out that the bar has been raised in the security community and that the term E2E now requires that only the participants be able to decrypt the content and they should change their copy but it ignores the fact that E2E in healthcare means exactly what Zoom is doing. In the HIPPA world providers are trusted entities. |
Medium-hard SQL interview questions | SQL interview questions are an interesting counterpoint to stereotypical programming interviews: while typical algo questions in SWE interviews tend to test what's taught in academic contexts but have little real-world application; the questions in SQL interviews are more practical outside the whiteboard.A weakness of these types of SQL questions however is that it's near impossible for the interviewer to provide help/guidance; the questions are often know-it-or-don't questions (especially involving window functions w/ uncommon syntax). A data science interviewer years ago mocked me during a whiteboard test for not knowing the BETWEEN ROW syntax for a window function.That said, as an IRL data scientist, the amount of times I've had to do a SQL self-join in the past few years can be counted on one hand. And the BETWEEN ROW syntax for a window function. |
Don't start with microservices – monoliths are your friend | I wonder why no one ever talks about architectures in the middle between those two - modular monoliths.The point in time where you're splitting your codebase up in modules (or maybe are a proponent of hexagonal architecture and have designed it that way from the beginning), leading to being able to put functionality behind feature flags. That way, you can still run it either as a single instance monolith, or a set of horizontally scaled instances with a few particular feature flags enabled (e.g. multiple web API instances) and maybe some others as vertically scaled monoliths (e.g. scheduled report instance).I wrote more about that approach on my blog, as one of the first articles, "Moduliths: because we need to scale, but we also cannot afford microservices": https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/modulith-because-we-need-to...In my eyes, the good part is that you can work with one codebase and do refactoring easily across all of it, have better scalability than just a monolith without all of the ops complexity from the outset, while also not having to worry as much about shared code, or perhaps approach the issue gently, by being able to extract code packages at first.The only serious negatives is that this approach is still more limited than microservices, for example, compilation times in static languages would suffer and depending on how big your project is, there will just be a bit of overhead everywhere, and not every framework supports that approach easily. |
H.264 is Magic | Absolutely love this:'Suppose you have some strange coin - you've tossed it 10 times, and every time it lands on heads. How would you describe this information to someone? You wouldn't say HHHHHHHHH. You would just say "10 tosses, all heads" - bam! You've just compressed some data! Easy. I saved you hours of mindfuck lectures.'This is a really great, simple way to explain what is otherwise a fairly complex concept to the average bear. Great work. |
Confirmed: The NSA is Spying on Millions of Americans | I hate to use this tone but, so be it. Maybe now you morons who continue to vote in the pieces of shit into our government who are bent on taking more and more power for themselves will wake up and figure it out? How much more proof do you need? Does this make you angry yet or is Obama still your diety? Oh, and Republicans don't get a pass either.The point is that all of you morons voting like robots along party lines are destroying my country, from the inside, one fucking vote at a time. And it is sad. And it is painful. And it is almost unbearable to watch. You are destroying what this country is supposed to be about and turning it into something our children will have to suffer with.Terrorists won. You morons saw to it. Our way of life is, in many ways, unrecognizable from what it was before 9/11.When are you going to understand that a conservative Libertarian (as opposed to extreme and nearly anarchist) approach is the only path to recovery? Ultra limited government. They are OUR servants, we are not their property. They need to get the fuck out of our lives, homes, businesses, bedrooms, schools and more.Time to take it back. Peacefully. Vote with intelligence. Email. Write letters. Make calls. Let them know who they work for. Reboot the system. |
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to retire within 12 months | He'll be remembered as a terrible CEO. Ballmer took over as CEO in 2000. In the 13 years since then, Apple has experienced an unprecedented resurgence. Google and Facebook have gone from being obscure startups to giants. The tech industry went through the bubble, recovered, and today is stronger than ever.What happened to Microsoft? While the rest of the tech sector exploded and prospered, it stayed still. A MSFT share was worth about $35 dollars when Ballmer took over; it's worth about $35 now. The world moved on, and Microsoft didn't move with it. |
Hi, It’s Google Corporate Development | For a period I was heavily recruited by google. Their recruiters tried a great many variations of attempts to trick me into interviewing for a job. It seems weird that they would do this, because pretty soon, it would become obvious that it was a job interview and nothing more. Maybe there are a lot of talented engineers out there who are doing startups but aren't really committed to them and google manages via the fame of its name and wearing them down to convince them to give up and become employees.I agree with this article's characterization of it as a scam, as they are pretending to be something they are not. This is manipulative and dishonest. What I experienced was less heinous but had the same elements- misrepresentation, name dropping, attempts at emotional manipulation with tone and timing (the first call being so dead, then enthusiastic in the second- very "HR recruiter", not corp dev.)Worse, once I'd eventually figure out what was going on, and put one of them off of me, a few weeks later another would show up, with another variation. |
Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive | You know what the internet needs? User agents.We've got this idea stuck in our heads that only the website itself is allowed to curate content. Only Facebook gets to decide which Facebook posts to show us.What if, instead, you had a personal AI that read every Facebook post and then decided what to show you. Trained on your own preferences, under your control, with whatever settings you like.Instead of being tuned to line the pockets of Facebook, the AI is an agent of your own choosing. Maybe you want it to actually _reduce_ engagement after an hour of mindless browsing.And not just for Facebook, but every website. Twitter, Instagram, etc. Even websites like Reddit, which are "user moderated", are still ultimately run by Reddit's algorithm and could instead be curated by _your_ agent.I don't know. Maybe that will just make the echo chambers worse. But can it possibly make them worse than they already are? Are we really saying that an agent built by us, for us, will be worse than an agent built by Facebook for Facebook?And isn't that how the internet used to be? Back when the scale of the internet wasn't so vast, people just ... skimmed everything themselves and decided what to engage with. So what I'm really driving at is some way to scale that up to what the internet has since become. Some way to build a tiny AI version of yourself that goes out and crawls the internet in ways that you personally can't, and return to you the things you would have wanted to engage with had it been possible for you to read all 1 trillion internet comments per minute. |
BitTorrent v2 | I make P2P tools too. [0] Let me tell you this: Bittorrent is one of the few things in the space that actually ... works.It works not in the sense that there is a white paper that should work. Not in the sense that there are a few company-made swarms hosted on industrial servers that keep everyone up and alive, so that the thing gives the impression the 'P2P' network does work. Not in the sense that there is a very-well oiled marketing machinery talking about Web 3.0 that allows its founder to go on TechCrunch and talk about the upcoming distributed paradise.Bittorrent works in the way you install it into your computer and it does something for you. And for that alone, it has my immense respect and attention.It's a tool that doesn't pitch that it's a P2P tool - it doesn't try to convince you with sob stories about how using P2P helps fight against the big bad evil web. Instead, you use it because it's genuinely the best at what it does: it being P2P is not a selling point, it's just how it happens to work, and that is exactly what it should be.That is something all P2P developers should aspire towards.[0] Aether P2P: https://getaether.net |
Show HN: Wave function collapse algorithm | This is pretty awesome, but there is no LICENSE file so I'm assuming no one is allowed to use it in their own projects. |
Understanding how Facebook disappeared from the internet | Is anyone else kinda put off by how Cloudflare keeps interjecting themselves into this situation? First with the Twitter posts and now this blogpost. They're a passive observer, not involved in this event, and yet they keep putting themselves in the middle of it.Cloudflare staff are not Facebook staff, they do not know how things actually went down to trigger the events that transpired. They are essentially doing glorified bikeshedding, and providing an explainer of how BGP works that can be gleaned by reading virtually any introductory text on it, and using it as a marketing opportunity. |
Reliability: It’s not great | Fundamentally I think some of the problems come down to the difference between what Fly set out to build and what the market currently want.Fly (to my understanding) at its core is about edge compute. That is where they started and what the team are most excited about developing. It's a brilliant idea, they have the skills and expertise. They are going to be successful at it.However, at the same time the market is looking for a successor to Heroku. A zero dev ops PAAS with instant deployment, dirt simple managed Postgres, generous free level of service, lower cost as you scale, and a few regions around the world. That isn't what Fly set out to do... exactly, but is sort of the market they find themselves in when Heroku then basically told its low value customers to go away.It's that slight miss alignment of strategy and market fit that results in maybe decisions being made that benefit the original vision, but not necessarily the immediate influx of customers.I don't envy the stress the Fly team are under, but what an exciting set of problems they are trying to solve, I do envy that! |
Not everyone has an internal monologue | Unfathomable to me. My mind is constantly racing, playing out different conversations, interviewing myself in a variety of roles to navigate my thoughts on things (one day I'm the president of the US talking about foreign policy, another day I'm a big tech CEO navigating the diversity questions). I constantly have something in my ears to tune myself out, podcasts or music. After being diagnosed w/ ADHD I realize I'm probably on the extreme end of those with internal dialogue but to see a complete lack of it in others is very surprising. |
This website has 81% battery power remaining | I think this also shows how inefficient modern website hosting is. The fact that this person was able to get a raspberry pi to host the #1 website on HN powered by a small 50 watt solar panel is very cool (meaning maybe 10w average power budget), but also shouldn't be as uncommon as it is today. To put this in perspective, a modern server uses 50-100 watts idle doing nothing, and many more under load. To handle the top of HN, the developer probably would use load balancing and other tech, multiplying the power usage accordingly.
Edit: fixing typos. |
Uber's playbook for sabotaging Lyft | I know this may sound hyperbolic, but I hope that others join me in finally getting around to installing the Lyft app today.Before now I'd considered them too small to be worth bothering with, but hey, if Uber is worried then maybe I should give it a try. After this, and Uber's attempts at doing the same with GoTaxi a few months ago, I'll be very happy to take my business elsewhere.I'd also be interested to know if the VCs that invested in Uber were aware of these tactics. It's especially sad to think of good startup investment money being used to defraud a competing company rather than invest in good customer service. |
Montana becomes first state to implement net neutrality after FCC repeal | Montana. Now that's an unexpected source for business regulation. |
Amazon threatens to suspend Signal's AWS account over censorship circumvention | They're spoofing identity of non-consenting parties. The cause is noble, but it isn't what the headline would imply. Amazon isn't saying "You can't host encrypted services on our platform", they are saying "You can't use TLS and load balancing hacks to pretend to be us in oppresive countries".And>The idea behind domain fronting was that to block a single site, you’d have to block the rest of the internet as well. In the end, the rest of the internet didn’t like that plan.That they interpret AWS and Google as "the rest of the Internet" is pretty sad, too. |
We at $Famous_company switched to $Hyped_technology | What are some examples of $HYPED_TECHNOLOGY and $FLASHY_LANGUAGE these days? All I can remember is Ruby on Rails. |
Path texts my entire phonebook at 6 AM | How about another detail -- the fact that the message said the user had photos to share, when he didn't?There's annoying spam, and then there's straight-out-lying spam -- the "x has sent you a message, you need to create an account to view it" type.Just curious, is there a way to sue/fine a company like this for false advertising, essentially? |
How to Work Hard | When I was an undergrad at CMU, I learned how to work hard. Really hard. After having coasted through too-easy high school, I spent all day every day at CMU either programming, doing mathematics, or thinking about one of those things (to great effect: often the trick to prove a theorem would pop into my head while showering or while taking a walk). I would fall asleep while programming in the middle of the night, dream about programming, then wake up and continue programming just where I left off.One thing from this essay really stuck out to me:> The most basic level of which is simply to feel you should be working without anyone telling you to. Now, when I'm not working hard, alarm bells go off.One thing that always happened at the end of a semester is we'd have a few days after exams but before flights back home. On these days I'd typically try playing a video game (my hobby before college) and every time I would stop playing after just an hour with deep feeling of unease at the pit of my stomach. "Alarm bells" is exactly how I would describe it - a feeling at the core of my psyche that I have been wasting time and there must be something productive I should be doing or thinking about.Years later, having tackled anxiety problems that had plagued me most of my life, I came to recognize that my relationship with hard work during my college years was not healthy and that this deep seated desire to do more work is not a positive thing, at least not for me.I've since reformed my ambitions, instead of looking to start a company or get a PhD in mathematics, I've decided that hard work is not the love of my life and instead I should focus on my hobbies while looking for a career path that can be simultaneously fulfilling but laid back. |
“Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs | In the late 2000s, as a teenager, I was gifted a Runescape account. This account had level 80+ woodcutting, allowing one to chop magic trees - which would produce the most expensive lumber in the game. It took a staggering number of real hours to achieve this skill level, we're talking several hundred hours minimum.At some point I had realized that there were different sketchy websites that would buy and sell the in-game currency, gold pieces or GP. It was something like $10 to 1M GP. I could chop enough magic logs in about 4-6 hours to make $10.I had a breakthrough. What if I wrote a macro to record my cursor and clicks during my route from the 'bank' (where you can deposit any amount of any material) to the nearby respawning magic tree forest?Weeks went by and I had passive income. Runescape eventually introduced the Grand Exchange, a literal in-game stock market that allowed power users like me to sell much larger quantities of certain items instantly, across all Runescape servers (referred to as Worlds) simultaneously. This required a standardized pricing mechanism, like an order book, where prices of any item would fluctuate based on buy and sell orders.Suddenly, I now could see a +-10% change on the value of my digital assets, on which my passive income was built.I could go on; Runescape in fact taught me much about economics. What's extraordinary is selling Runescape gold led me to Bitcoin, and I've watched cryptocurrency for nearly a decade, seeing trends from a MMO propagate throughout the world. It seems human nature to innovate and stagnate, and the more immediate our collective feedback loops, the quicker these cycles are. |
DuckDuckGo is blowing up | Thank you all! (I'm the founder.)In response to a lot of the comments here, please know that two major things we're working on are better programming queries (https://duckduckgo.com/tech.html -- one of my new favorites https://duckduckgo.com/?q=alternative+to+picasa) and speed.For speed, just this week we upgraded our whole caching system, which should significantly speed up a lot of queries. I'd be interested to know if anyone has noticed any difference over the past day or so. This change should equalize a lot of the location differences, which is the main issue. In some parts of the world we were way slower.Also, for anyone wanting to get involved we've been open sourcing more and more (https://github.com/duckduckgo). We're working on better entry points, but one could start here now: https://github.com/duckduckgo/duckduckgo/wiki. For programming documentation in particular, this is the repo: https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-fathead. That will answer queries like https://duckduckgo.com/?q=perl+splitOn the back-end we could also use some sysadmin help :). Here's our hiring info: http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216387Of course, we're also always looking for feedback, the more detailed/specific the better: https://duckduckgo.com/feedback.html |
What's SAP? | I teach enterprise systems at a university, with emphasis on SAP.It's hideous. Hideous. My students complain it is unusable (agree), doesn't make sense (agree), that they can't see the point (agree).When you look at the underlying database 'schema' (inverted commas deliberate) you'll find it's a massive, denormalised mess.Much of what SAP can do can be done at the local level using intuitive software. Reports, for example, against a well-designed schema or data warehouse are easy. Power BI, Tableau, whatever your poison. You can even aggregate and present data in raw SQL if you like. Each technique is far easier than trying to achieve the same in SAP.What SAP does do well is multinational, enterprise-wide integration. Are you a company comprised of many mergers and acquisitions? You can do HR one way, universally, across your organisation. Credit control? Replace your spreadsheets and custom apps you have deployed across your many siloed finance departments with the FI/CO modules.I (am actually told to) teach that changing the business to fit SAP is preferable to changing SAP to fit the business. And it's accurate advice. It shouldn't be, but it is. SAP is SAP. It doesn't care about your USP. Or your custom approach to business. As far as SAP is concerned all businesses are the same, they do the same things, and all must conform. Resistance is futile. |
Time to Upgrade Your Monitor | The technical details are all right (or seem right to me, anyway), but this is too opinionated for my liking. No, you do not need a 4K monitor for software development. Some people might like them, some won't. [edit/clarification: someone rightfully pointed out that nobody will actively dislike a 4K monitor. I was unclear here: I meant "some people won't need them" more than "dislike them"]This sounds like when Jeff Atwood started that fad that if you didn't have three external monitors (yes, three) then your setup was suboptimal and you should be ashamed of yourself.No. Just no. The best developers I've known wrote code with tiny laptops with poor 1366x768 displays. They didn't think it was an impediment. Now I'm typing this on one of these displays, and it's terrible and I hate it (I usually use an external 1080p monitor), but it's also no big deal.A 1080p monitor is enough for me. I don't need a 4K monitor. I like how it renders the font. We can argue all day about clear font rendering techniques and whatnot, but if it looks good enough for me and many others, why bother? |
President Obama Calls for a Free and Open Internet | I am not American (feel free to ignore my opinion) but this is just a bad joke from someone who seems to be an utmost failure.Especially in light of last week FBI/NSA/DHS undermining TOR and killing its utility for any dissidents and free speech in authoritarian states. Under his watch the surveillance state has expanded and has become downright creepy25 years after the fall of the Berlin wall we should be saying "Ich bin ein Ost-Berliner" :(
The Stasi would be proud of the surveillance state that western countries have created with Obama at the helm.edit: Oh i see the cult of personality is still strong in this one, downvoted in under a minute. |
Do You Love Me? [video] | So what's the main barrier to using these industrially?Is it reliability? Did this video a zillion takes?Is it manufacturing? Maybe it's hard to scale them up?Is it battery life? Maybe it can power itself for just a few minutes?Is it object manipulation or sensing/world understanding? Maybe it can't apply the right forces to a soft thing or a flexible thing or know what it can step on vs over or what will move or stay still?Is it just that anything worth automating is worth specializing, and there are better robots for different specific tasks?We've seen industrial robots for a while now, and these more general robots have gotten really good, so where are they? |
Google Security Team Member on NSA: "Fuck These Guys" | I think it's pretty clear that we need both technical and legislative fixes to NSA surveillance. Just one of the two isn't enough: to get be even vaguely confident that surveillance ends, we need both. The technical fixes I can't speak to, but the legislative ones I've been thinking about for a while. In the last week, there have been two prominent bills announced to deal with surveillance:- Bill 1: The FISA Improvements Act, from Feinstein and the Senate Intelligence Committee. In short it legalizes most of what the NSA has been done.- Bill 2: The USA FREEDOM ACT, from Sensenbrenner and Leahy, currently being considered by the House/Senate Judiciary committees. It amends §215 of FISA to end bulk phone metadata collection and fixes some of the problems with §702 of the FISA Amendments Act (under which PRISM is run). But it doesn't fix §702 fully, does nothing to end BULLRUN (undermining encryption) nor the surveillance that happens outside FISA (MUSCULAR, for example, and god knows what else).Obviously the Feinstein bill can't be allowed to pass. But some really big names (ACLU, CDT) have thrown strong support behind the Freedom Act. I'm wondering what we as the Taskforce(.is) should do. It's clear to me that it doesn't go nearly far enough. And there's some chance that if it passes, Congress will view this whole thing as "dealt with" and not revisit the issue for years to come. But unfortunately the Freedom Act barely has the votes to get out of the judiciary committee, and getting it to pass through both houses requires a lot of momentum.We've been working on a campaign asking folks to call and oppose Feinstein, and potentially to support the Freedom Act. But I'm not sure if that's a right move. Unfortunately, the public doesn't understand why privacy is important, and Americans aren't nearly angry enough for Congress to do anything more substantial than the Freedom Act. We might be able to push for amendments, but it's a long shot.tl;dr - We've got two bills in Congress. One is terrible, one is mediocre. But we don't have the political momentum to do anything better than the mediocre bill. What do we do? Tech advocate conundrum. |
PowerShell is open sourced and is available on Linux | PowerShell is my guilty pleasure of the computing world. Once you've piped strongly-typed objects around between your shell commands, text scraping seems barbaric by comparison. The problem, of course, is that you can't use all that power for much, since the pool of PS-compatible tools and utilities is much shallower than it is for Unix shells. I'm really hoping this will help spur a new wave of PowerShell-compatible tools.Come to the dark side, we have (strongly-typed) cookies. |
Google Noto Fonts | We had to stop using this font as it didn't support back tick(`). Try typing ` multiple times in the search box.We had reported this to Google some months back but got no response. |
Introducing Swift | Oh God, they just compared the speed of Objective C, Swift and... Python! It's nice to see Swift being faster than Objective C, etc., but what has Python got to do with coding native iOS/OS X apps? Of course it's going to fail at speed when compared to a static compiled language.What a weird and pointless comparison, imo (I mean the inclusion of Python, seems so random to me). |
SETI@home shuts down after 21 years | Not to sound like a broken record (I and others have said this or similar on these kinds of threads) but... I, personally, have become convinced that looking for signals this way is actually pointless.The argument is basically this:1. Within 1000 years (and maybe a lot less) we will have the engineering capability to build space habitats, powered by solar power. This last part is important because this thought experiment isn't gated on commercial viability of nuclear fusion power, which I'm not yet convinced is possible.2. These space habitats are far more efficient at creating living area than planets. I forget the exact numbers but something like 1% of the mass of Mercury is enough to create enough living area for something like 10^16 to 10^18 people.3. Space habitats are more convenient and cheaper to move between than leaving or even entering a gravity well like Earth's.4. Roughly one billionth of the Sun's energy hits the Earth.5. Once you have the ability to create one of these things, each becomes progressively easier.This, of course, is the classic Dyson Swarm. Originally this was called a Dyson Sphere but this has led some to think it's a solid shell around a star. That was never the intent. Even if it was, no known or currently theorized material could support this.Dyson Swarms are not subtle. Even a partial Dyson Swarm should be detectable as a large IR source compared to how much visible light is produced. This is because the only way for something in space to cool down is to radiate that heat away and physics determines the wavelength of that based on the temperature of the object.Standard objection: what if you can recycle that heat? Well, you can't do that perfectly (as this would violate Thermodynamics) and even if you reduce IR emissions by 90%, you've simply reduced the IR emissions by one order of magnitude. For comparison, the Sun produces roughly 4x10^26 Watts of power.So if you accept the above premises the gap between stabbing each other with swords and having this technology, at least for us, is 1000-2000 years, a cosmic blink of an eye to produce signals without the above IR signature. Those are long odds.Personally I subscribe to the view that technological life is, at least within a billion light years of us, is likely quite rare.The above is a very superficial summary of a topic that Isaac Arthur's channel goes into great depth about. I guarantee you any objection you have has at least one video that goes into that in great depth. |
Show HN: Imba – I have spent 7 years creating a programming language for the web | Looks cool. I'm honestly curious as to why a lot of new web languages/frameworks are mixing logic and content in the same file again though. The distinction between HTML, JS and CSS always made perfect sense to me. Anyone care to enlighten me? |
I Quit: What really goes on at Apple | One of my friends used to work at Apple. After one particular grueling stint of 14+ hour days, management decided to give them a thank-you. In the form of vouchers. For frozen dinners. Meanwhile, all of his friends worked for Google, we got gourmet food every meal of the week as a standard perk, and we were usually home by 8 or 9 PM rather than midnight. It's sorta like "Your 'thank you' is really more like a giant 'fuck you'".He works for Google now.My cousin also works for Apple, and after complaining about crunch time and how he had to check the bug queue when I was visiting him on a Saturday, I asked him "So, how long has crunch time lasted?" He replied, "Oh, about 18 months. Makes it really hard to date when I don't get any weekends." (He's in his 40s now, still no girlfriend.) |
Show HN: Spot the Drowning Child | I would like to point out that any flotation device in a pool besides a life jacket is just asking for problems.I life-guarded for almost 10 years, the only way I would ever let anything that supported a human floating __besides__ an approved life jacket was if the pool was almost empty (such that the one person got my undivided attention) and if I knew the child to already be a strong swimmer.I highly encourage everyone reading this to not swim at pools that allow floats of any kind besides a life jacket, even something as simple as water wings. [0] It encourages kids to go deeper than they should, and if they fall off they're in big trouble. It creates the possibility for a child to get trapped under someone else, and a life guard has almost no chance in that scenario.95% of guarding is preventive.Neat site though.[0] Water wings can create the situation where a child has their head underwater and their arms up above water, but they can't pull themselves up. |
Beirut Port Explosion | In the past this kind of material would be collected and analyzed by state intelligence services.Combined by allies and used to gain leverage for individual or combined strategic priorities.Something like, “Here is how negligent you were. Install this person in power or we leak this and your people revolt and you won’t be able to walk away.”More recently, it seems, some news organizations have begun assembling reports using modeling and expert analysis.A good example is The NY Times report on Philadelphia Police use of tear gas against a group of trapped protestors. [1]Having this information about the Beirut warehouse explosion open-sourced so-to-speak, seems to signal a further shift away from reliance on state intelligence and the advertising-funded third state.This reminds me some of the collected content created and posted to social media by the public in the aftermath of the downing of Ukrainian International Airlines Flight 752. That loose set of content eventually forced the Iranian government to admit responsibility.I’d presume that the quality and speed of independent research and analysis of public data will increase to where a scene of non-media, ngo research groups grows, beating out the resources of any given media or government.Sort of like warez, but with information analysis.[1] https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000007174941/philadelphi... |
Are Xiaomi browsers spyware? Yes, they are (2020) | I truly don't understand, from a security and privacy perspective, why would anyone outside of China would voluntarily choose to run closed-source software from a company that's subject to domestic laws and regulations in China. The MSS is no joke.https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=china+mss...This is the same reason that Zoom is banned at my workplace and many other partner companies.You've actually got two problems here. One is the commercial advertising/for-profit related data sharing problem described in the article. The second is that Xiaomi, as a company with that collected data resident in China on its servers, is obliged to provide a pipeline for a copy of their database to the MSS upon request. |
A room-temperature superconductor? New developments | I'm astounded that the MSM seems to be ignoring this ATM. I did a Google news search on LK-99 and saw nothing from major publications. A search on the NYTimes returned an article from 1974. |
Google Buys Motorola For $12.5 Billion | Interestingly, this means the only manufacturer-neutral smartphone OS is now Windows Phone 7. iOS is on Apple, Android is on Motorola/Google, Blackberry on RIM, and webOS on HP/Palm. I wonder if this means we'll see an increase in WP7-based phones from HTC, Samsung, and LG... |
A Method I’ve Used to Eliminate Bad Tech Hires | This system is interesting but has a crucial flaw: I legally can't take part. I have a job now, which claims ownership over any tech-related IP I create. There are processes for getting exceptions, but a) you won't get them for actual job-related things b) I'm not asking Google for an exception so I can interview somewhere else.This is true for nearly anyone with a standard SV job. So if you're willing to restrict your pool to the currently unemployed, this can work, but I think you'd rather not do that. |
Norway votes to decriminalise drugs and offer treatment instead of jail time | Bottom line, deaths from overdose:Drugs criminalized, USA:185 deaths/million people/yearNot criminalized, treatment focused Portugal:6 deaths/million people/yearhttp://www.aei.org/publication/chart-of-the-day-5/ |
Show HN: Make your site’s pages instant in one minute | Many people browse the web from an employer who has rules about what
types of pages may be accessed. For example, a person applying for a
job with my team may include a link to a web page about their
job-related background -- portfolio.html or whatever. HR tells us to
be sure we don't follow links to any other page that may be
more personal in nature, such as a page that reveals the applicant's
marital status (which can't legally be considered in hiring decisions
here). HR doesn't want to deal with complications from cases where we
reject an applicant but there's a log entry showing a visit to, say,
family.html from our company's IP address block. We'd prefer that
prefetching isn't a default.There's also log analysis to identify the set of web pages visited by
each employee during work hours, and an attempt to programmatically
estimate the amount of non-work-related web browsing. This feeds into
decisions about promotions/termination/etc. Prefetching won't get
anyone automatically fired, but we'd still prefer it isn't a default. |
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