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Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B | Many years ago, when Adobe bought Macromedia, they acquired a tool called Fireworks[1]. This was a combined bitmap and vector editor that was incredibly well-optimised for user-interface and web design, at a time when most designers were paying exorbitant license fees to do such work painfully and slowly in Photoshop and Illustrator. Fireworks was cheap, powerful, and hugely ahead of its time. Many of the features and flows people love in Figma and Sketch were pioneered years earlier in Fireworks.After the acquisition, Adobe starved Fireworks of resources and marketing. They broke things, left major bugs and performance regressions unfixed, and eventually discontinued it altogether. I'd argue this wasn't simply negligence, but a calculated decision to kill an innovative product because it threatened the profits of their cash cows.As much as I hope otherwise, I believe the acquisition of Figma will go the same way. Once it's under the Adobe umbrella, the simple mathematics of profits from Photoshop and Illustrator vs. those from Figma will result in the latter being starved, stripped of functionality, and eventually left broken.[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Fireworks |
An Unbelievable Demo | > a heavy American accentAny non-Americans want to chime in on what is a heavy American accent? I’m imagining heavy southern accent, but maybe this is something that can only be heard by non-Americans? |
Reading privileged memory with a side-channel | Papers describing each attack:https://meltdownattack.com/meltdown.pdfhttps://spectreattack.com/spectre.pdfFrom the spectre paper:>As a proof-of-concept, JavaScript code was written
that, when run in the Google Chrome browser, allows
JavaScript to read private memory from the process
in which it runs (cf. Listing 2).Scary stuff. |
Internal Combustion Engine | I just built an engine for my car. One thing I gained an appreciation for was how CHEAP cars and engines are. There's probably nothing else with as precise machining that is as inexpensive.Engine cylinders are honed to accuracies that are less than 1 thousandth of an inch. Crank journals as well and rod journals. This is all precise machine work with metal. I use inches here because in machine work thousandths of inches is the language du jour. Transmissions are similar works of very precise and clean machine work.The distance between a crank bearing or rod bearing is less than 2 thousandths on modern engines. A small amount of oil in that tiny space is all that keeps your engine from having metal on metal seizure.So one would think that when EVs reach the same scale they will be significantly cheaper than ICE vehicles. |
Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B | I always thought Microsoft would be a natural buyer given the tech stack and Microsoft's support for developers.Unrelated story, I have a day one Stack Overflow account. I don't remember how I found it but I'm sure it was posted on digg or slashdot or something at the time. I had a lot of posts in the first few years about some generally broad concepts, and completely inactive since.In spite of this, I am in the top 7% of accounts on the site, which is a nice reminder on the power of compound interest! |
When you browse Instagram and find Tony Abbott's passport number | Nice. Here's a similar personal story with a PSA that sometimes blurring is NOT sufficient.A friend of mine posted on Instagram a picture of a U.S. visa (or something similar; it was probably five years ago) to announce her trip to the U.S., and she took care to blur out sensitive information such as her passport number. But a Gaussian blur is easy to reverse and I successfully unblurred it and told her my discovery. I didn't use any specialized software; it was just Mathematica with its built-in ImageDeconvolve function with guessed parameters for the Gaussian kernel.I personally recommend blacking out (add a black rectangle) instead of blurring, and if it is a PDF, convert to an image afterwards because too many PDF editors use non-destructive operations to add a new object instead of changing what's underneath. |
Google outage – resolved | Just checked https://www.google.com/appsstatusall green, which does not reflect reality for me (e.g. Gmail is down)edit: shows how incredibly difficult introspection is |
John Conway has died | People here might know him best for the "Game of Life"[0], but he did so much more. The book about Conway by Siobhan Roberts is an interesting read about the man and his work. There's a review here.[1]Some will know Conway via is work on the Classification of Finite Simple Groups (with many others), some via his "Look and Say" sequence, while still others will know his book "Winning Ways"[2], written with Richard Guy[3] and Elwyn Berlekamp[4]. My copy signed by all three is something I treasure.I was privileged to know all three of them, and I mourn their passing.[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life[1] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jul/23/john-horton-...[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winning_Ways_for_your_Mathemat...[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_K._Guy[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elwyn_BerlekampAdded in Edit:From his wikipedia page:Known for: Surreal numbers, Conway groups, Monstrous moonshine, Doomsday algorithm, Look-and-say sequence, Icosians, Mathieu groupoid, Free will theorem, Conway chained arrow notation, Conway criterion, Conway notation (knot theory), Conway polyhedron notation, ATLAS of Finite Groups, Conway's Game of Life |
Save .org | I think I give up on the Internet that we know today. I'm too tired to fight anymore. Monopoly ISPs with data caps, DNS rent seeking, the walled gardens, the internet of shit where I cannot walk down my street without getting recorded by every house with a "ring".I'm done with it. I don't want to partake anymore, I don't want to fight it anymore, I don't want to care anymore.Let the Google's and Facebook's have the old Internet. I'm done with it.The dream is over. The magic is gone for me. The old Internet is gone. Let them have the rest.Maybe then, and only then we will rise up like a Phoenix, with a solution that cannot be stolen out from under us. |
Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product | That is pretty egregious, and its also par for the course.And that is why startup companies go through all the hoops of being "stealth" and having NDAs and what not. There was a German VC firm that was, as I recall, very upfront about this. Clone a successful US company before it got to the European market.On the one hand it is great to have validation of the idea, on the other its a pain to have someone with more money in the bank able to spend it on marketing and spinning the narrative in their favor.Since the ability to get a foreign company (in this case Israeli) to do anything is limited, your best bet is to out execute them. Also, love them or hate them, having patents helps in situations like these.The reality is that if an idea is really good, the people who came up with it know it better than anyone and that gives them a tremendous advantage in terms of knowing what is important and what isn't. Companies have been known to talk about expensive and complicated features or options in order to get people trying to copy their success to waste time and money on something for which there is no actual demand. It is no doubt worth investing in understanding how one's enemies are getting their information and shutting that off if possible. |
Google tracks individual users per Chrome installation ID | I don't understand why Google and some other tech companies use their users as involuntary, unpaid guinea pigs. No consent. No opt-out.What's the motivation? Is it simple laziness because they don't want to deal with wetware? Is it afraid that if people knew what was happening they wouldn't be happy? Google has eighty brazillion employees it can test new features on. |
The End of the Redis Adventure | Ok, so many thank you here, thanks! It's very nice to read the comments here. But I hope to interact more on HN, since basically the idea is to write more blog posts, write more OSS software too. Just totally random :D I'll just do whatever every morning I want to do for a long time. Then maybe I'll find a new long term interest. |
Relicensing React, Jest, Flow, and Immutable.js | So which FB project still have a BSD+patents license.I count:* ReasonML - https://github.com/facebook/reason/blob/master/PATENTS.txt* GraphQL - https://github.com/graphql/graphql-js/blob/master/PATENTS* react-native - https://github.com/facebook/react-native/blob/master/PATENTS* PlanOut - https://github.com/facebook/planout/blob/master/PATENTS* Flow - https://github.com/facebook/flow/blob/master/PATENTS* Haxl - https://github.com/facebook/Haxl/blob/master/PATENTS* Flux - https://github.com/facebook/flux/blob/master/PATENTSJust a few that I found.. Please reply if you know more project that are still BSD+PATENTS licensed. |
Russian forces invade Ukraine after Putin orders attack | What is the endgame here?Russia is outclassed by NATO both economically and militarily.If NATO intervenes economically, Russia will lose much.If NATO intervenes militarily, Russia will lose much (but at great cost to NATO).The risk of NATO intervention is high, right? Russia understood this before invading, right? So it seems Russia is accepting a high risk of loss.But it doesn't make sense that a nation as sophisticated as Russia would accept such a high risk of loss. Which means that they might actually believe the risk of NATO intervention is low.How could the risk be low without some kind of collusion or hidden knowledge (hidden from us common folk)? Are "they" ("the global elite", "the military industrial complex") all "in it" (profiting) together? Is Russia just suicidal? If (when?) Russia loses out, how do they react? |
Apple dropped plan for encrypting backups after FBI complained | Wonder if this will help to kill a meme, about how much Apple cares about users and what great values they have, how they're going to stand for the user, fight with governments, etc.While iPhone itself is pretty secure as a device phone (and Apple makes sure to remind you about that in each ad, public speaking, attacks on competitors, etc), as an ecosystem it's not secure. And it's like that on purpose - there's no good and easy option to backup your phone other than iCloud.You have to be a tech person to know how to keep an iPhone secure. Average Joe buys iPhone and pays for iCloud. They Apple first $1k to get (on top of other things) a secure device, and then they Apple monthly fee to give Apple all their data and make insecure. Pretty genius business strategy. |
Llama 2 | Key detail from release:> If, on the Llama 2 version release date, the monthly active users of the products or services made available by or for Licensee, or Licensee’s affiliates, is greater than 700 million monthly active users in the preceding calendar month, you must request a license from Meta, which Meta may grant to you in its sole discretion, and you are not authorized to exercise any of the rights under this Agreement unless or until Meta otherwise expressly grants you such rights.Looks like they are trying to block out competitors, it's the perfect commoditize your complement but don't let your actual competitors try to eke out any benefit from it. |
Apple's plan to “think different” about encryption opens a backdoor to your life | I've been maintaining a spare phone running lineage os exactly in case something like this happened - I love the apple watch and apple ecosystem, but this is such a flagrant abuse of their position as Maintainers Of The Device that I have no choice but to switch.Fortunately, my email is on a paid provider (fastmail), and my photos are on a NAS, I've worked hard to get all of my friends on Signal. While I still use google maps, I've been trialing out OSM alternatives for a minute.The things they've described are in general, reasonable and probably good in the moral sense. However, I'm not sure that I support what they are implementing for child accounts (as a queer kid, I was terrified of my parents finding out). On the surface, it seems good - but I am concerned about other snooping features that this portents.However, with icloud photos csam, it is also a horrifying precedent that the device I put my life into is scanning my photos and reporting on bad behavior (even if the initial dataset is the most reprehensible behavior).I'm saddened by Apple's decision, and I hope they recant, because it's the only way I will continue to use their platform. |
Seven earth-sized planets discovered circling a star 39 light years from Earth | My favourite part of the press release:> The planets also are very close to each other. If a person was standing on one of the planet’s surface, they could gaze up and potentially see geological features or clouds of neighboring worlds, which would sometimes appear larger than the moon in Earth's sky.> In contrast to our sun, the TRAPPIST-1 star – classified as an ultra-cool dwarf – is so cool that liquid water could survive on planets orbiting very close to it, closer than is possible on planets in our solar system. All seven of the TRAPPIST-1 planetary orbits are closer to their host star than Mercury is to our sun.https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-telescope-reveals-la... |
WhatsApp gives users an ultimatum: Share data with Facebook or stop using app | I'd love to give up WhatsApp, but network effects are key here. I tried moving my extended family off WhatsApp onto Signal a couple of years ago and it failed miserably because the app wasn't nearly as easy to use, and they had all their friends on Whatsapp. Has anyone here had any success moving a large group of people onto something like Signal or Telegram? If so, do you have any tips? |
Stealth bomber in flight on Google Maps | Interesting how the three separate R/G/B images are taken independently a few ~seconds~ milliseconds apart, with a different color filter placed over the image sensor.I assume this is to maximize resolution, since no Bayer interpolation [0] is needed to demosaic the output of a traditional image sensor that integrates the color filters onto the sensor pixels themselves. As these satellites are not intended to photograph things in motion, the color channel alignment artifacts seen here are a rare, small price to pay for vastly improved resolution and absence of demosaicing artifacts.[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayer_filter |
Someone is pretending to be me | Andrew here. Connor, thanks for releasing this on the orange site.This story is also more fun from my position. I've been applying to internships and interviewing every week. They're mostly rejections. They're the same questions over and over with minor variation (sorry to top comment for "impersonating" your comment style). My days are deteriorating from a colorful sphere down to two points. In fact, down to two pointers, left and right, iterating over a list of heights to find how much rain water it can trap.I'm about to repeat the experience for the 10th time and I'm 100% on autopilot. But suddenly, a man reaches out to me on email and offers me up to $80/hr to be his senior engineer. This feels sketchy, my girlfriend tells me, "you're good but let's be honest here...". Anyways, I proceed, it might just be the start of a beautiful thing. I'm asked to interview as one of our developers because English is not their best language. I'm a little bothered, but I was fine with it. But then I see the developer name: Connor Tumbleson. My laughter bursts and so does my suspicion: With a name like that, no way the guy doesn't speak good English. I look up Connor Tumbleson on linkedin, and my suspicions were proved correct. I detail everything to Connor, and now this is on the top of HN. I lost a opprotunity but gained a story of the lifetime. |
Oppose the Earn IT Act | If you want to convince your friends they should support encryption, here's how I like to get past the "nothing to hide" argument.Imagine we're sitting at a bar, chatting. None of us have anything to hide. Then the government passes a law that all conversations must be streamed on Youtube Live, so an agent comes in, sets up a camera at our table, and starts streaming.We still don't "have anything to hide". We're just having a conversation. But the conversation used to be private--that's normal. Now it's not private, which is not normal.Whether or not you feel like you have to "hide" anything during a bar conversation is not the point. It's whether you think we should make changes to our society where having a private conversation is never allowed.This kind of analogy, in my experience, helps people understand that the "nothing to hide" argument assumes that privacy is only for evil people, when in reality it's the very normal default of daily life. The parable posted in another top-level comment is also great. |
G is for Google | Wow, they are doing letters? Really? Letters? Hey is Eric Schmidt still in the building somewhere? Ask him how well Planets worked out for Sun Microsystems.Interesting strategy, hard to second guess from the outside of course. Sun's motivation was to figure out whether the other parts of the company could stand on their own[1], it also makes it less fiscally complicated to discharge an entire group into the void. Think HP selling off the Agilent half of itself.Generally though this sort of move is a way of containing and then "fixing" cost problems. Divestiture is so much easier once you've created the framework of a whole organization around each chunk. It can also be weirdly inefficient, at Sun each of the "planets" paid in a sum of money to IT (Bill Raduchel's organization) for "Corporate IT support" except that Corporate IT didn't work for them, they were just the only vendor you could use to get your IT services, so what you ended up with was really crappy IT work that you couldn't shop around for. It was maddening. But the 'collection of companies' design pattern requires either that you have your "service providers" that everyone uses (HR, IT, Legal) which gives little incentive for quality service, or everyone gets their own version which means a lot of excess overhead and duplicated work.I could think of at least two other ways Google could have re-organized without bringing that pain upon them, and as Eric lived through it at Sun as well I'm sure he has an opinion.Oh, and having one of the sub-companies get the world's #3 brand? I wonder how that works out.[1] Answer "No" for SunSoft, "Yes" for Sun Hardware, "No" for Sun Labs. |
Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles | Praise to Mazda for making this decision.As a User Experience Professional, I was never able to grasp the true user's need for touch screens in cars. For years I have been working on product interfaces (not just apps). Many studies I conducted actually told me that people favored analog controls over digital touch screens controls. It gives you tactile feedback, making it accessible for anyone with sense of touch.> Audi, for instance has said that part of the reason it’s discontinuing its rotary controller is that a touchscreen better supports Apple CarPlay and Android Auto.This to me is insane reasoning. That is no way user centric. This decision is 100% business driven and has nothing to do with the end user. It basically means they have given up on developing a good branded interface between the driver and the car.> phones and tablets are familiar, so too should in-vehicle touchscreens.This too is so weird to me. I get that you want users to recognize an interface. And that it should mimic how you use other things. But at least put them in context.I hope other brands start following Mazda again for this choice. |
A Conspiracy to Kill IE6 | Oh my, this is amazing.I'm not sure the engineers realized despite their secrecy, it would be noticed by the press immediately after deploy.But the best part is how Google engineers immediately on seeing it figured "oh yeah, we should do that too" (although they apparently got the necessary approvals however that was done at Google, it was easier to do because they figured "well, youtube must have done due dillegence before doing it.")Amazing!I don't know how they didn't all get fired. Like, ALL of em, including everyone who set up the special "OldTuber" priv long before.But... it worked! This is a hacker story for the history books, it sounds like the kind of thing programmers did 20+ years ago for nothing except the reward of doing it right (against their own career interests), that I feel like doesn't happen so much in a more professionalized industry. |
US Senate votes unanimously to make daylight savings time permanent | Such a terrible idea compared to permanent standard time.There is plenty of light during the summer, so there's no need to optimize for that. The winter is when daylight is scarce, so that's what should be optimized for. |
How Firefox Got Fast Again | I switched back to Firefox 54 from Chrome when multiprocess browsing ("Electrolysis") came out of beta. It's been absolutely great. It's fast and I trust and like the nonprofit behind it. And all the extensions I care about are available.My main issue with Chrome was the endless nags to sign in to a Google account, and just generally wanting less dependence on Google. I also like that Firefox has a built in tracking protection (not just Do Not Track toggle but actual blocking of trackers). That's something that's just not in Google's interest to put in Chrome.Browsers are becoming more and more aggressive in protecting the interests of users. Becoming true "User Agents," in other words. See also Safari iOS allowing content blockers and now in iOS 11 blocking some popular tracking behaviors by default. It's absolutely great. And it's not surprising to me that Chrome is not a leader here. It's owned by the biggest advertising company on the internet. I predict Chrome will continue to lag on pro-privacy, anti-nag features. |
I am an Uber survivor | I'm not in the business of defending Uber - quite the contrary - but reading through the comments it seems that most people are assuming that this post by an anonymous person is 100% true.These types of posts are worrying to me. Why could this post not have been crafted by someone at Lyft? Or one of Uber's many other detractors? Given the PR nightmare that Uber is in why not pile on while the public seems primed for that type of information and stretch out the negative news cycle?Just thought I'd throw out a word of caution: we know literally nothing about the credibility of this person. |
Unveiling the first-ever image of a black hole [video] | Good video that correctly predicted the image and describes why it looks the way it does [1].TL; DR The dark area is the entire surface of the event horizon, including the side facing away from us, plus some more due to photons missing the event horizon "directly" being drawn in. One side is brighter due to its being Doppler boosted.[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUyH3XhpLTo |
LK-99 isn’t a superconductor | It’s disappointing news but the excitement and amount of replication on this paper was pretty fun to witness and experience.To me the most interesting part was everyone talking about potential consequences, uses, the order of magnitude improvements we’d see in certain costs or areas. Pumps, MRIs, power grids, chips, etc. Great reminder what materials science can do to some underlying economics. |
Apple open-sources FoundationDB | This is INCREDIBLE news! FoundationDB is the greatest piece of software I’ve ever worked on or used, and an amazing primitive for anybody who’s building distributed systems.The short version is that FDB is a massively scalable and fast transactional distributed database with some of the best testing and fault-tolerance on earth[1]. It’s in widespread production use at Apple and several other major companies.But the really interesting part is that it provides an extremely efficient and low-level interface for any other system that needs to scalably store consistent state. At FoundationDB (the company) our initial push was to use this to write multiple different database frontends with different data models and query languages (a SQL database, a document database, etc.) which all stored their data in the same underlying system. A customer could then pick whichever one they wanted, or even pick a bunch of them and only have to worry about operating one distributed stateful thing.But if anything, that’s too modest a vision! It’s trivial to implement the Zookeeper API on top of FoundationDB, so there’s another thing you don’t have to run. How about metadata storage for a distributed filesystem? Perfect use case. How about distributed task queues? Bring it on. How about replacing your Lucene/ElasticSearch index with something that actually scales and works? Great idea!And this is why this move is actually genius for Apple too. There are a hundred such layers that could be written, SHOULD be written. But Apple is a focused company, and there’s no reason they should write them all themselves. Each one that the community produces, however, will help Apple to further leverage their investment in FoundationDB. It’s really smart.I could talk about this system for ages, and am happy to answer questions in this thread. But for now, HUGE congratulations to the FDB team at Apple and HUGE thanks to the executives and other stakeholders who made this happen.Now I’m going to go think about what layers I want to build…[1] Yes, yes, we ran Jepsen on it ourselves and found no problems. In fact, our everyday testing was way more brutal than Jepsen, I gave a talk about it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fFDFbi3toc |
Cameras and Lenses | I have a question for the more knowledgeable:Color filters on the sensor split the light into three wavelength ranges - red, green, blue. Then photosites measure intensity of light, which means that sensor only knows that the incoming photon is "roughly green", but doesn't actually recognize its precise wavelength.So e.g. when the light is pure orange, it falls down into red wavelength range and is counted as red.Based on this I would expect that cameras would often produce pretty incorrect colors, but they are usually pretty good (after correcting for stuff like white balance). |
Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species [video] | Some of the comments here make me think of crabs in a pot pulling down the ones who try to climb out.Nobody's making you participate in this venture. If you don't like it, then you're free to go do whatever it is you do like.You might think Musk could better direct his efforts and resources elsewhere, but most other billionaires don't do anything all that interesting, they just invest their money in mundane stuff, outsource jobs, build hotels, run for President, etc. So why are you upset with this one and not all those others? |
Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B | When will Europe realise that there is no second place when it comes to a market - the larger player will always eventually end up owning everything.I can not put into words how furious I am at the UK's Conservative party for not protecting our last great tech company.Europe has been fooled into the USA's ultra free market system (which works brilliantly for the US but is terrible for everybody else). As such American tech companies have brought EVERYTHING and eventually moth balled them.Take Renderware it was the leading game engine of the PS2 era consoles, brought by EA and mothballed. Nokia is another great example brought by Microsoft and mothballed.
Imagination Technologies was slightly different in that it wasn't bought but Apple essentially mothballed them. Now ARM will undoubtedly be the next via an intermediate buyout.You look across Europe and there is nothing. Deepmind could have been a great European tech company - it just needed the right investment. |
Uber Founder Travis Kalanick Resigns as C.E.O. | This may kill Uber. Kalanick is a jerk, but he created that insane valuation. Uber has less than a year of runway left at their current burn rate. Unless they can find a bigger sucker than the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia,[1] they're going broke in 2018. (That "undisclosed amount" in 2017 isn't a significant investment on Uber's scale.)IPO? No way. They'd have to publish audited numbers. What's leaked out is bad enough. The real numbers have to be worse. Notice that leveraged loan in 2016.[2] All the details of that have to be disclosed in the prospectus for an IPO.[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/uber/funding-rounds
[2] https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/07/new-reports-confirm-1-15b-... |
Get started making music | I always wondered why musicians keep up with the conventional musical notation system, and haven't come up with something better (maybe a job for a HNer?).I mean the conventional music notation represents tones in five lines, each capable of holding a "note" (is that the right word?) on a line, as well as in between lines, possibly pitched down and up, resp., by B's and sharps (depending on the tune etc.).Since western music has 12 half-tone steps per octave (octave = an interval wherein the frequency is doubled, which is a logarithmic scale so compromises have to made when tuning individual notes across octaves) this gives a basic mismatch between the notation and eg. the conventional use of chords. A consequence is that, for example, with treble clef, you find C' in the top but one position between lines, and thus at a very different place than C (one octave below) visually, which is on, rather than between, an additional line below the bottom-most regular line.I for one know that my dyslexia when it comes to musical notation (eg. not recognizing notes fast enough to play by the sheet) has kept me from becoming proficient on the piano (well, that, and my lazyness). |
There are no results for tank man | @dang, I think we need an explanation for why Tank Man-related content on Hacker News has been disappearing all day. I usually trust HN to be a bastion of free speech, and if there isn't some kind of proportionate response here, I don't believe myself or many others here will be able to see it that way going forward.EDIT: Thank you for your response, dang. Hacker News is a special place, which is why we have responded so strongly to today's events - I apologize if the tone above came off as less-than-civil. I (and it seems, many others) look forward to hearing more about the 'dupe' article others have linked to below. It was only upon seeing the article marked as a dupe after seeing the previous flagged out of existence that it began to feel like more than just a user-initiated action, so I am sure further information on the mod-initiated actions will put these fears to rest. |
Aaron Swartz commits suicide | Thank you all for your kind words and thoughts. Aaron has been depressed about his case/upcoming trial, but we had no idea what he was going through was this painful.Aaron was a terrific young man. He contributed a lot to the world in his short life and I regret the loss of all the things he had yet to accomplish. As you can imagine, we all miss him dearly. The grief is unfathomable.Aaron's mother |
Reflecting on My Failure to Build a Billion-Dollar Company | Hey, #1 on Hacker News! I don't think that's happened since...I launched Gumroad back in 2011:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2406614Thanks HN for being a part of my journey! |
Ken Thompson's Unix Password | I remember cracking the password from a Windows system in high school. There was a centralized login mechanism using Novell but everything was cached locally. So you could boot a Linux CD and copy the password file to a memory stick, and crack at home. I think I used lophtcrack? The head admin account for the entire school district (basically root) had the password “north”. It took like a fraction of a second to crack. It was so simple that for weeks I didn’t even believe it to be true, and didn’t realize the name of the account was an admin.I was expelled a few months later for all the fun I had after discovering this. Good times. |
Google to restrict modern ad blocking Chrome extensions to enterprise users | Slightly off topic, I'm finding it very disingenuous that people in this thread(and any other threads that come up about Firefox) have actually had significant performance issues with Firefox. No bugs that are noteworthy, sans that fiasco with the expired certificate that disabled addons briefly.I've been using Firefox since "quantum" on both my MacBooks(one of which is old AF) and on Linux. I've yet to have problems playing video, streaming, or anything of the sort. I keep tons of tabs open. I just can't really say anything wrong about Firefox at this point.It was once the case that Firefox had significant disadvantages in contrast to Chrome, but now the only reason I have to still keep Chrome installed is when work forces me to use some Google-proprietary page that doesn't work in other browsers.If you had problems with Firefox 2 years ago, try it again before bringing up performance when people are considering it as an alternative to deleting Chrome. The more people who uninstall Chrome, the better. |
John McAfee found dead in Spanish jail after court approves extradition to US | From McAffee in 2019, "Getting subtle messages from U.S. officials saying, in effect: "We're coming for you McAfee! We're going to kill yourself". I got a tattoo today just in case. If I suicide myself, I didn't. I was whackd. Check my right arm.
"https://twitter.com/officialmcafee/status/120086428376625152... |
Google is shutting down Stadia | Just a couple of months ago."Stadia is not shutting down. Rest assured we're always working on bringing more great games to the platform and Stadia Pro."https://twitter.com/GoogleStadia/status/1552989433590214656 |
Remembering Bob Lee | So sad. I met Bob once at an interview at Square in 2012 for the final interview. I believe he was the inventor of Google’s guice dependency injection library and the dagger library. I bombed the interview. I liked him anyway. RIP. |
Email Encryption Software Relies on One Guy, Who Is Going Broke | Calling GnuPG "email encryption software" really understates its importance. It's also used in countless applications to encrypt data at rest, and GPG signatures are used to secure the distribution of software. For instance, GPG is an essential part of the package managers of Debian, Ubuntu, and RedHat.Here is a link to the donation page: https://gnupg.org/donate/index.html |
GitHub Sponsors | Not so fast. People have said this about gittip (now Gratipay), Patreon, Twitch, and now YouTube and Facebook. All of these have been mixed blessings. Here's an article about how Patreon doesn't work out even when everything goes smoothly: https://theoutline.com/post/2571/no-one-makes-a-living-on-pa..."After launching my Patreon, I struggled for months to find work. Patreon filled my downtime, and became a full time job itself. I’d spend hours combing through photos, looking back on notes I’d taken on the road, researching where I’d been. I’d post on Twitter and Instagram with teasers, free stories, anything to attract my followers to my Patreon page. I made friends on the site, I shared their projects on my own social media, and kept up with all my subscribers’ projects. It was a lot of work for little pay, but I was determined. A year later my monthly earnings on Patreon have grown from $120 to $163."$163 a month in extra income? Cool, right? Not when you spend 5+ hours a week thinking about it.If GitHub gets a lot of participation it will be unsustainable to only take a little on top of a credit card processing fee, and the fee it will be increased to be more like Facebook's 30% cut. There are plenty of articles on here about the costs and difficulties of running a payment platform. |
Deno 1.0 | Does anyone else see the import directly from URL as a larger security/reliability issue than the currently imperfect modules?I'm sure I'm missing something obvious in that example, but that capability terrifies me. |
The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday | I've written two books over the past decade as well as learning some other skills and hobbies and this is absolutely the most vital lesson I've learned. There is an incredible power in simply pouring a little time into something every day over a long period of time. It feels like a superpower when you see it start compounding.The Grand Canyon was created by little drops of water bouncing off rocks for millenia. Consistent effort over time is one of the greatest forces in the world. Persistence beats focus, inspiration, and genius 90% of the time. |
Conversations with a six-year-old on functional programming | What is truly astounding about this is the patience to even attempt to explain free theorems to a 6 year old. Most parents would likely answer "math" and that would be the end of it. I don't (yet) have kids, but when I do I hope I have the wherewithal to recognize and take advantage of moments like these. |
Court: Suspicionless Searches of Travelers’ Phones and Laptops Unconstitutional | Best thing is to just not have anything to do with the US of A. Death penalty, loaded guns everywhere, a general attitude of being the masters of the world which leads to things like suspicionless searches. No, thanks. I think the best would be if more people would actually stop dealing with the USA. Its becoming a trend. I once turned down an invitation to a conference in Hawai, and guess what, I was not alone. |
Today is The Day We Fight Back | All of the people who built the site and the banner are volunteers who met on HN across various threads, and not members of any of the advocacy orgs or companies listed on the site. We're really interested in getting feedback on how future campaigns can be better, and happy to discuss some of the decisions we made. The non-profits involved did all the legal and organization lifting, and this is a great opportunity to donate to the EFF and Demand Progress if you haven't recently.Likely the most impactful thing you can do right now is to add the banner to your own site and ask the companies you work for to do the same. We've tried to make it as easy as possible to add the banner; you can find all the options (including a Cloudflare app and Wordpress plugins) here: https://github.com/tfrce/thedaywefightback.jsPushing for technical solutions to the surveillance is also really important. Friends at Fight for the Future are launching a campaign along those lines as soon as this one wraps up, and there are a lot of open source projects (e.g. the great work done by [Whisper Systems](https://whispersystems.org)) that deserve attention.But legislation and technology need to work hand in hand for things to change in the long run. Even if we have decent technical solutions, legal measures can easily limit the scope of their success (see Lavabit). |
Request for Startups: Kill Hollywood. | Here is what Francis Ford Coppola has to say on the matter:http://the99percent.com/articles/6973/Francis-Ford-Coppola-O..."We have to be very clever about those things. You have to remember that it’s only a few hundred years, if that much, that artists are working with money. Artists never got money. Artists had a patron, either the leader of the state or the duke of Weimar or somewhere, or the church, the pope. Or they had another job. I have another job. I make films. No one tells me what to do. But I make the money in the wine industry. You work another job and get up at five in the morning and write your script.This idea of Metallica or some rock n’ roll singer being rich, that’s not necessarily going to happen anymore. Because, as we enter into a new age, maybe art will be free. Maybe the students are right. They should be able to download music and movies. I’m going to be shot for saying this. But who said art has to cost money? And therefore, who says artists have to make money?In the old days, 200 years ago, if you were a composer, the only way you could make money was to travel with the orchestra and be the conductor, because then you’d be paid as a musician. There was no recording. There were no record royalties. So I would say, “Try to disconnect the idea of cinema with the idea of making a living and money.” Because there are ways around it." |
Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard | The most important question I have is: will they replace Bobby Kotick?EDIT: "Bobby Kotick will continue to serve as CEO of Activision Blizzard. [...] he and his team will maintain their focus on driving efforts to further strengthen the company’s culture."Shame on you, Microsoft. |
Ask HN: What are some cool but obscure data structures you know about? | Not a very deep CS-y one, but still one of my favourite data structures: Promise Maps.It only works in languages where promises/futures/tasks are a first-class citizen. Eg JavaScript.When caching the result of an expensive computation or a network call, don't actually cache the result, but cache the promise that awaits the result. Ie don't make a Map
but a Map>
This way, if a new, uncached key gets requested twice in rapid succession, ie faster than the computation takes, you avoid computing/fetching the same value twice. This trick works because:- promises hold on to their result value indefinitely (until they're GC'ed)- you can await (or .then()) an existing promise as many times as you want- awaiting an already-resolved promise is a very low-overhead operation.In other words, the promise acts as a mutex around the computation, and the resulting code is understandable even by people unfamiliar with mutexes, locks and so on. |
Ubuntu on Windows | Surprised I don't see anyone else mentioning this.This looks to me like typical Microsoft strategy that they utilized a lot 25 years ago.1. when not leader in given market, make your product fully compatible with competitor2. start gaining momentum (e.g. why should I use Linux, when on Windows I can run both Linux and Windows applications)3. once becoming leader break up compatibility4. rinse and repeatHappened with MS-DOS, Word, Excel, Internet Explorer, and others. |
Microsoft to acquire LinkedIn for $26B | Oh, I can just imagine how the process went at MS:* Exec A: Social things are Good (coming to the conclusion about 10 years too late)* Exec B: Shall we create our own Google+?* Exec C: No, that didn't turn out that well for Google. Let's buy something existing.* Exec B: Ok, I've Googled a list of top 10 social networking sites for sale, and ordered them by list price, but really we'll need to come up with a strategy first to make a good choice...* Exec A: Booooring. Let's just buy the cheapest one and be done with it. What's the worst which could happen? Gimme a bonus.To be honest, they're probably buying the users, not the product. |
Disclosure of three 0-day iOS vulnerabilities | The problem is that cybersecurity is ridiculous hard problem. The junior to senior developers are just using existing frameworks with poor documentation. Any consumer technology will be beaten to submission.It's the same never-ending war as anti-cheat vs cheat. |
Meta lays off 11,000 people | > I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that.As always with these things, I wonder what taking responsibility actually means in practice.Businesses usually try to find ways to correct for major failures in decision making. In the case of Zuck, given his ownership, does anything actually happen or change? I'm sure his net worth has been reduced by changes to Meta's share price, but he was a multi-billionaire before and he still is now. Is that it? |
macOS command-line tools you might not know about | `pbcopy` and `pbpaste` are one of my most-loved in the list.Dealing with some minified json, switching to iTerm, doing `pbpaste | json_pp | pbcopy` and having a clean output is _so_ nice. |
Firefox Send: Free encrypted file transfer service | I can't believe that there isn't a simple service to transfer data between my cellphone and my computer without going through the internet. iTunes is terribly bloated, MTP is a mess, and Bluetooth is slow and frustrating.Back in my hacker day I used to have an SSH server open on my cellphone and use it to transfer files back and forth with my computer. Why isn't there a mainstream service like that? |
MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design? | I am using Ubuntu 20.04 on a Thinkpad X1 Extreme Gen2 and you would be surprised how "normal" it feels as a development machine. Sure there some little annoyances, the touchpad behaves a little worse than on windows, sound is a little worse. But the most important things, Keyboard and Screen are excellent. The system in general does not feel like the horror stories that people keep telling about linux on desktop(notebook). Now that WSL2 is getting Cuda even windows looks workable. Their new terminal app is amazing.
After a decade of Mac notebooks it was quite liberating and I would not switch back even if the flaws in macOS would be fixed. It is for sure the nicest of the big 3 operating systems but for development work Ubuntu is hard to beat for me. YMMV but it won't hurt to look around you what else is there. |
Building a Virtual Machine Inside ChatGPT | I've spent a couple of hours playing with ChatGPT since it was released and I am convinced people are not freaking out about it enough.It is well beyond merely retrieving compressed knowledge; I see a lot of capability for synthesis and what I can only call 'understanding'.I think a lot of people are getting tripped up by the fact it's trained to be very conservative in terms of what topics it will discuss. It's easy to think it's avoiding questions because it can't answer them. But often if you reframe the question you realize it is able to answer.I also think there's an art to formulating your query. It's easy to get a bad response because your question is interpreted too literally, or didn't really say what you meant. Reframing can often get much better results.It also appears bad at numbers/counting.I think these are causing many people to underestimate it.It's also easy to overestimate it sometimes - it often generates plausible but not quite right answers. You've got to read quite closely to make sure it's actually right.But it's very good at a lot of things. Code synthesis. Summarization, Reformulation, explanation, information retrieval.I think it's going to change whole industries.It's also getting really hard to definitively say "well, AI definitely can't do X". X is getting small.I think this is a watershed moment and people should be thinking hard about the implications.This sample shocked me:
https://mobile.twitter.com/fergal_reid/status/15981025960653...I got it to write a poem, altered it step by step so that's clearly not something it will have seen before, and then asked it questions.The bit where it explains why chocolate frogs mightn't make Ron from Harry Potter sick because of some wierd fact in that world, shocked me, because it's a really good retrieval of a very deep fact, relevant to a clearly out of sample input, and a good synthesis of that fact with reality.It's amazing. |
“I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL” | I don't know if it's just me, but if you read the forums and bug reports related to open source projects, it feels like programmers today are a really entitled lot.The tone that people take when filing bug reports for what is basically free software is reprehensible. People are doing work for FREE to benefit you, and you take a tone with them like you are a prince and they are your royal goblet holders? Who taught these human beings their manners?I totally understand the frustration when you write a large system in Python and then the Python committee makes a breaking change that makes your life very difficult. However, you didn't pay for Python! These sorts of changes should be expected, and if you didn't expect it, you are the fool. And in any case, you aren't paying these people a cent, so speak politely to them. You are basically a charity case from their perspective. |
Firefox is on a slippery slope | Watching the whole thing unfold has been heartbreaking. Most mozillians do not support this. This Twitter thread is one insight into it: https://twitter.com/steveklabnik/status/941709048529014784Firefox 57 gained a ton of good will from a lot of users, and they pull this crap right after. They absolutely should know better. They should have known better with Pocket; they should have learned from Pocket."Fork it" is not an acceptable answer. The problem is not with Firefox, it's with Mozilla. Mozilla is a good company at heart and they're an important pillar of the web. Losing them to stupid stuff like this sucks, we should fight for them. There's tons of Firefox forks, none of them get the point though, you might as well use Chromium. If Firefox disappears and the fork remains, the fork dies because maintaining a web browser is work that needs a corporation's backing behind it (or a government's).Mozilla's role goes beyond the web browser as well. Its mission was to "keep the web open", "keep the web free". This goal was reflected in projects such as Firefox OS, Hello and Persona (and to some extent, Thunderbird)... but atrocious management made those projects a waste of time and money.It's not Firefox you need to fork, it's Mozilla. |
Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked | This happens again and again. I have had that happen to my twitter account. I see this regulary on HN.My suspicion is that this is mostly happening because platforms that big like google or twitter rely very heavily on machine learning and other AI related technology to ban people. Because honestly, the amount of spam and abuse that are likely happening on these platforms has to be mind boggling high.So I get why they would try to automate bans.But after years and years of regular high profile news of false positives, one would think they eventually would change something.I mean the guy had direct business with Google going on....Why would they continue like that. Isn't there one single PR person at Google? |
Ask HN: What tech job would let me get away with the least real work possible? | I have no interest in telling you what to do as an individual but this thread and all of the people that seem on board with this is what drives me crazy about most of the places I've worked.I have the hardest time getting anything done because of the sea of people trying to find ways not to do any work. Is this not abuse of privilege? Do you all not hear the stories of people working multiple jobs and still not being able to pay their bills. Is this entitlement?There are actual problems in the world, sure most of them you are able to effect might be small but what a complete waist of time to be stuck in a job for 8 hours a day and be actively choosing not to contribute solutions to the problems you are faced with. Sure not everything along the way is going to be interesting but if these problems don't excite you there are other jobs that should and if all of that fails go start a company because you are only on this planet for so long and waisting these hours making it look like you are doing work pails in comparison to actually making any impact on the people and things around you. You will be missing out on shared relationships of successes and failures as you resign yourself to this void.It doesn't feel good to deceive people, it doesn't feel good to take money from people for work you haven't done.There are people in this world that would literally give anything to have the jobs you have all listed but they can't even apply because they were not born in the right country or their parents didn't have the money to send them to the right school or their accent or skin color made that same interview that you passed impossible to even get.This whole thread feels so wrong to me and I'm really amazed this community is okay with propagating it. It goes completely against the idea of progress and works against any form of entrepreneurial spirit. Companies fail because of this mentality and world as a whole is worse off because of it. Sure everyone has moments of these feelings but to encourage this as an ok path through of life, I just don't understand. |
Launching in 2015: A Certificate Authority to Encrypt the Entire Web | This certificate industry has been such a racket. It's not even tacit that there are two completely separate issues that certificates and encryption solve. They get conflated and non technical users rightly get confused about which thing is trying to solve a problem they aren't sure why they have.The certificate authorities are quite in love that the self-signed certificate errors are turning redder, bolder, and bigger. A self signed certificate warning means "Warning! The admin on the site you're connecting to wants this conversation to be private but it hasn't been proven that he has 200 bucks for us to say he's cool".But so what if he's cool? Yeah I like my banking website to be "cool" but for 200 bucks I can be just as "cool". A few years back the browsers started putting extra bling on the URL bar if the coolness factor was high enough - if a bank pays 10,000 bucks for a really cool verification, they get a giant green pulsating URL badge. And they should, that means someone had to fax over vials of blood with the governor's seal that it's a legitimate institute in that state or province. But my little 200 dollar, not pulsating but still green certificate means "yeah digitalsushi definitely had 200 bucks and a fax machine, or at least was hostmaster@digitalsushi.com for damned sure".And that is good enough for users. No errors? It's legit.What's the difference between me coughing up 200 bucks to make that URL bar green, and then bright red with klaxons cause I didn't cough up the 200 bucks to be sure I am the owner of a personal domain? Like I said, a racket. The certificate authorities love causing a panic. But don't tell me users are any safer just 'cause I had 200 bucks. They're not.The cert is just for warm and fuzzies. The encryption is to keep snoops out. If I made a browser, I would have 200 dollar "hostmaster" verification be some orange, cautious URL bar - "this person has a site that we have verified to the laziest extent possible without getting sued for not even doing anything at all". But then I probably wouldn't be getting any tips in my jar from the CAs at the end of the day. |
Select a muscle and it provides the exercises to workout the selected muscle | Thanks OP for sharing my website!Please be gentle with me. This is a project website that I built out of frustration a few years ago. I know there are things that need improving and a lot of things that could be adjusted. I work full time at Brave Software (brave.com) and simply don't have time to put a ton of effort into MuslceWiki.I do however have a big backlog of videos to add and I've slowly been working on an app. We have also re-drawn the homepage images and my long term plan is to move away from gifs to webm or MP4.FWIW, for some reason I was unable to log into my HN account. I made a new one, but the posts seem to be limited. So looks like I'll be replying in the morning. |
My Youtube earnings | So they make around $150K/year but likely pay more tax, higher overheads, and have to fund their own benefits out of that. Depending on where they live this could either be a very good income or only marginally higher than tech wages with much higher risk/stress. That's on 2M-6M viewers too.Makes me wonder how YouTube channels like Linus Tech Tips are able to seemingly hire around one-hundred full time staff? I have to imagine revenue from their other sources (e.g. their merchandise, sponsors, other?) is the majority of their income if this is what we can expect from YouTube.Regardless thanks for sharing. |
Physicists Detect Gravitational Waves, Proving Einstein Right | > And then the ringing stopped as the two holes coalesced into a single black hole, a trapdoor in space with the equivalent mass of 62 suns. All in a fifth of a second, Earth time.Am I reading this correctly, that shortly after the detector came online we just happened to observe the exact moment a billion years ago that two black holes collided?Was that extremely coincidental? Or do these events happen all the time, and so if it wasn't those two black holes it would be two others? |
I regret my website redesign | Author here. Happy to take any feedback or answer any questions about this post. |
The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018) | I ran a small company like this quite successfully earlier in my career. If you think this is awesome what goes unmentioned is how lonely it can get. Also, any issues you have (business or technology) you bear the brunt of alone. A coworking space doesn't really help either imo, if you like working with others you will miss having coworkers. Just something I think worth mentioning if you think this is something you might want to pursue. |
Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything? | One book that changed me was reading Master and Margarita in Russian for the first time.It was the first book I started reading I could not put down until the end. Gained a lot of appreciation for literature at that time.The other book that I enjoyed and changed me was ‘The Wisdom of Insecurity’ by Alan Watts. I was a fan of Alan Watts works through his lectures already and it was wonderful to hear his ideas in writing for the first time.The book is available to read for free online (https://antilogicalism.files.wordpress.com/2017/07/wisdom-of...).I wish everyone read or watched Alan Watts lectures and books. The world would be a much nicer place if that was the case.My favorite quote is by him:‘We thought of life by analogy with a journey, a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end, and the thing was to get to that end, success or whatever it is, maybe heaven after you’re dead. But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played.’ |
Element (Matrix chat app) suspended from the Google Play Store | So we got notified by the developer console at 21:45 UTC that the app had been suspended, but still haven’t had an email to explain why - it’s 02:24 now.Our assumption that this is due to someone reporting abusive content in Matrix to Google, and Element catching the blame — although this is currently speculation.To be clear: Element is a Matrix client just as Chrome is a Web browser, and just as it’s possible to view abusive material via Chrome, the same is true of Element.However, we abhor abuse, and on the default matrix.org server (and other Matrix servers the core team maintains) we have a fairly strict terms of use at https://matrix.org/legal/terms-and-conditions#6-play-nice-cl... which we proactively enforce. Meanwhile we have a comprehensive toolset at https://matrix.org/docs/guides/moderation to help folks moderate, and are making good process with decentralised reputation to empower users and admins to filter out stuff they don’t want to see, as per https://matrix.org/blog/2020/10/19/combating-abuse-in-matrix....So, it’s very unfortunate and frustrating that we’re in this position - hopefully Google will explain what’s going on shortly. |
Zoom closes account of U.S.-based Chinese activist after Tiananmen event | I feel like the good faith presumption for this company has to have shifted by now. Is there any reason not to assume that the Chinese government is surveilling Zoom calls en masse? Documenting participants (face, voice, language, location, etc.), recording content, etc. We're talking about the data of 200M+ users.I see people on HN defending Zoom all the time.>The company has acknowledged that much of its product development has been based in China, and that some Zoom calls were accidentally routed through Chinese servers.>The University of Toronto's Citizen Lab said it found serious concerns over Zoom's security protocols, and said the company's large workforce in China left it "responsive to pressure from Chinese authorities.">The government of Taiwan banned official use of Zoom due to security concerns, as have New York State schools, the U.S. Senate, and the German ministry of foreign affairs.>Zoom CEO Eric Yuan said in early June that the company has chosen not to encrypt free calls in order to cooperate with law enforcement. |
All Our Patent Are Belong To You | If you want to track the death of the cultural vision of Silicon Valley -- the belief that some people, at least, can rise above petty human squabbling and competition and are legitimately working to better humanity -- look no further than this thread. Every top comment is a skeptical one. "This is clearly a great PR move, but has no teeth." "How do you enforce this guarantee?" Etc.These are reasonable questions, but as Shaw said, all progress comes from unreasonable men. I cannot help but be fundamentally depressed as I read these comments. In my view, Elon Musk has, moreso than any other human except maybe Bill Gates, given every absolute inch of human effort and genius to fight to solve the world's biggest problems. And all we have for him, after benefiting freely from the fruit of his labor, is skepticism. We want more. It's not enough. It's never enough.Yes, Tesla Motors is a company operating in a media-hyped 2014 America. I know some of you are butthurt that he engages in the same "dishonest" PR tactics that other companies do. GET THE FUCK OVER IT. The end product he's producing will save humanity. That all of America has not rallied behind Musk and Tesla as the most important movement and achievement in the last 100 years of human history absolutely blows my mind.Not only do we not recognize his goals or his achievements, we actively try and bring him down and shit on his accomplishments. "Well, they invented a pretty cool electric motor, sure, but they were kind of dishonest in that one press release that one time."Go fuck yourself.I want to say "I'm done with Hacker News", but we know that's not true. I'm supremely disappointed in all of you. Godspeed, Musk. I thought this was a great announcement, and I'm behind you 100%. I just hope you can finish your work before our shitty, myopic, destructive society tears you down. Here's to faith. |
Show HN: Redbean – Single-file distributable web server | I just spent 30 minutes reading about this. I'm so shocked that I'm logging in to comment after 5 years of lurking.Justine has built a c library that allows you compile a binary once and have it run it on any os or baremetal. The SAME binary. Quite frankly, that sentence doesn't even make sense to me.Check out https://storage.googleapis.com/justine/cosmopolitan/index.ht...As far as I'm concerned, this is literal magic. Look at the magic numbers:
https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/blob/37a4c70c3634862d8d...I could go on, but there's no binary portability comparison with any other language. And she has made some pretty neat optimizations.Back in the day, I saw some pretty neat stuff with the ELF format, but this takes the cake.Wow.Edit:
I'm editing because this is just so bloody absurd.https://storage.googleapis.com/justine/printimage.html$ ./printimage.com someimage.jpgLike wow. And also video.https://storage.googleapis.com/justine/printvideo.htmlI'm struggling to put my shock into words. I've been around.There's engineering. There's academia.But this falls into straight-up wizardry. |
Reddit Strike Has Started | Great! There's a picket line I won't be crossing. Not just for those subs, of course, but for all of Reddit.The reason Reddit is valuable is not the few execs making these (IMHO terrible) decisions. It's the thousands of mods and the millions of people creating and organizing the content that I go there to read. Until those people are happy with things, I'm not going back. |
Having Kids | Hey guys. Anyone else have the experience of having kids, getting a burst of energy, but of course all that energy goes directly back into the kids and house, and you have absolutely no life for 3-5 years or more? Because my kids are 2 and 4 and so far it's been 4 years of no life, no freelance clients, almost no learning/hobbies, just 35-40 hours a week of working as much as I can at the office and then everything is about the kids. Until everyone goes to bed, then maybe I can think about something interesting to work on for a couple hours before sleeping well less than 7 hours of healthy sleep. Or do you even give that up, and as soon as the kids are in bed it's time for the bedtime routine for yourself?Just looking for some dads who can relate and maybe give some wisdom on the subject of having young kids and losing your ability to work on something interesting--which to be fair I never did before having kids because I was unmotivated, having not had that burst of energy yet... |
Drop Dropbox | Think about what it means to the HN culture to have a subject that normally would have been flagged out of existence as overtly political suddenly be featured front and center in the apparent belief that ideological purity is now a litmus test for who can serve on a board of directors in the startup world.In a free society, people can unite in their business ventures even though they might be far apart in how they view the world generally. Startup culture thirty years ago had a decidedly American flavor. Today, it does not because the world is big and diverse and because entrepreneurs today who do startups come from all sorts of cultures and backgrounds. Surely, those who come from such divergent backgrounds hold differing political and religious views. Some are conservative, others liberal, still others apolitical. Some are theists, others atheists. The variations are many but one thing is certain: not all people think alike on political, religious, or social topics. These are issues that inherently will divide.What happens, then, when people attempt to set political, social, or religious tests as criteria for who can hold important positions in a business organization? Well, it gets about as ugly as it can get, just as such tests proved ugly when used historically by, say, Christians to exclude Jews from holding important positions in society or to punish atheists for not holding to some prescribed creed.One might say, "this is different" because we are not holding to an arbitrary creed but rather to fundamental principles that ought to govern all humanity. Well, that is precisely how those who sought to impose thought control in other eras rationalized their conduct. "Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party" is a question that destroyed many careers as the blacklists proliferated back in the 1950s. That was indeed a repulsive set of events by which many innocent persons were hurt and today our national conscience wishes it could take back the damage done to them.So why is this any different? It is easy enough to whip oneself up into a lather over Ms. Rice’s policies if one disagrees with them but what about the half of America (or whatever significant percentage) that does not. And why should this be relevant to board service?Politics, religion, and social worldviews divide people and have no place as limiting tests in a business environment. Scolding and finger-wagging was bad enough coming from a first-grade teacher trying to promote sanctimonious values back in the 1950s. Do we really want a counterpart agenda now setting rules for who can be a founder, who can be an investor, who can be a director, who can be a CEO, or who can otherwise take a prominent role in the startup world? The answer should be an emphatic no.Principle is more important here than a particular outcome. What happens with Ms. Rice is not the issue here. What matters is upholding the abiding principle (precious in a free society) that people can hold divergent views on such topics as politics, religion, and society without being punished for their views in a business context. People can and ought to be able to unite to form great companies without having to compare notes on how they voted in the last election or some similar matter having nothing whatever to do with whether someone can add value to the venture. This is central to startup culture. Let us not lose sight of something so basic. |
U.S. Capitol Locked Down Amid Escalating Protests | How did we arrive to this point where a huge chunk of the population is in one reality and another huge chunk of the population is in another reality? Segregation of information sources? Politicization of media outlets? Self-reinforcing social bubbles? A combination of all of them and more? |
Bubbles | It's a wonderful thing: a toy, not a game.A game has a goal. Here you are free to experiment without being led or nudged. In the world of computer-based entertainment, it is refreshing. |
Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing | I have a story to tell, about the demise of one of the largest internet forums in my language.About ten years ago, when smartphones just started appearing, the forum did not have a mobile version, and there are various 3rd party clients on the App Store or Android Market.Later on, one of the largest 3rd party client was blocked, because of they hammering the forum's servers too hard,. Or something about caching and stealing ad revenue.Then a couple years later, in 2017, the 3rd party client's devs launched its own forum reusing the client's name. It exploded in popularity and quickly took over as the most popular message board among the youth.The old forum now has a sort of boomer or mentally ill stigma to it.I hope to see Apollo go down this route.Oh, and I think both forums in the story did not monetize as hard as reddit going to paid awards and memberships.One more thought: Keep the Apollo UI or whatever thing the users are most familiar with. Most of them do not care if it is fediverse or open source or backed by web-scale k8s, they only want it to just work (tm) good enough to post things on it. Eat the lunch you prepared yourself. |
Accidentally Stopping a Global Cyber Attack | Lessons learnt by ransomware developers - rather than using a single pretty arbitrary test, always rely on a more robust statistical model to detect whether your code is running inside a sandbox.Lessons learnt by NSA - never over estimate the skill level of your network admins.Lessons learnt by Microsoft - never under estimate the loyalty of your Chinese Windows XP users, both XP and Win10 have 18% of the Chinese market [1].Lessons learnt by the Chinese central government - NSA is a partner not a threat, they build tools which can make the coming annual China-US cyber security talk smooth.[1] http://gs.statcounter.com/os-version-market-share/windows/de... |
Visual design rules you can safely follow | These are good rules of thumb. As a professional designer for coming up on 2 decades, I'd say they are indeed safe to follow in most situations.He gives the good advice that you should only follow the rules when they make sense, and not otherwise. With that in mind, the two rules I disagree with the most are:> Measurements should be mathematically related> Elements should go in order of visual weightBecause, whereas most of the other rules are probably good to follow 90% of the time, these feel sort of arbitrary and opinionated.I think making measurements mathematically related is a convenience and is often helpful, but for the same reason that optically centering things is better than mathematically centering them, I think you can easily ignore a mathematical relationship between values if it doesn't look as good. There is nothing inherent about humans that makes us prefer magic numbers, it's just that using them gives us an easy way to achieve visual consistency. If it stops doing that, ignore the ratio. If a grid or your font sizes look better nudged by a pixel or two in one direction or the other, do that instead.With respect to ordering elements by visual weight, my only complaint is that he specifically says "heavier first", rather than "heavier first, or heavier last, both are fine as long as you're consistent". So, it's a nitpick, but it bothered me because it's an easy distinction to make. |
Google Reader shutting down | This has been a long time coming. Four years ago I began work on my own feed reader, NewsBlur, and it's now a full-fledged Google Reader competitor. It's also a paid app and has been paying for itself nearly since the beginning.http://www.newsblur.comI hope HN finds NewsBlur useful, especially since it's got native mobile apps on iOS (iPhone+iPad), Android, Windows Phone, and Nokia MeeGo. Native story sharing was launched last Summer and I expect NewsBlur to be around for quite a while.It's also fully open-source, in case you decide to build your own private community: http://github.com/samuelclay.I also have a full-scale re-design in the works, but if you can't get to the main site you can try using the beta site: http://dev.newsblur.com |
Grant Imahara Has Died | https://mobile.twitter.com/grantimahara/status/1243234010215...This was his workbench. In many ways, it doesn't look much different than mine. Grant was an electrical engineer, like me. Gone suddenly before 50 from an aneurysm. I can't help but wonder if it looks like that now, filled with unfinished projects. Projects that only he understood the complexity of, and few would have the hope of picking up where he finished. Projects that will never be completed, now that their creator has died.Grant, and Myth Busters were an inspiration to me as a young engineer. He was barely my age on the show, but influenced an entire generation of future engineers.I checked his Twitter feed. Barely a bitter or angry tweet. None of the toxic outrage so prevalent in society today. The world lost a decent person, and a brilliant engineer.Nobody knows their time. That what I leave unfinished would only be personal trivialities, and not angry tweets. That I would be able to have that impact on the next generation. |
Permanent suspension of @realDonaldTrump | This ban seems to heavily take advantage of the current moment, as it's obvious that he has tweeted worse things in the past.It's strange that they picked such a poor way to justify the ban when they could have made a significantly stronger case, and in doing so could have convinced millions more people that they are trying their best to apply policies evenly. For example, I have a hard time imagining why they chose to specifically quote "American Patriots", as if that somehow contributes to the straw that broke the camel's back. Perhaps they have a strategic reason for going about this how they did, but I think it will have some negative 2nd/3rd order effects. that they haven't yet realized.I imagine we are still only in the early days of the conflicts that are to come in this sphere (and I'd include just about every company and political faction in them, unfortunately).(Also because apparently I have to state this explicitly in every comment related to Trump: I do not support Trump, his supporters, the recent events that occurred at the capitol, etc etc) |
Google Maps' Moat | Many people don't realize why Google maps are so much better than anything out there. I would actually give lot of credit to Marissa Mayer who suddenly became in charge of maps from otherwise more higher position. Thanks to her influence in Google SLT and ability to make impressive arguments, she was able to make a case for maps as core pillar in Google's offering and consequently obtain huge investment and large talent pool to work on it. Creating these level of details world wide requires dazzling amount of investment that even some small governments can't afford. In most companies, you will not get green lighted for this because there is no real revenue coming in and its basically social charity in form of a free app. Now the reality is that you can't do self-driving cars without great maps and the day Google pulls its map app from iOS you can bet Apple is going to have a giant hole in their balance sheet. |
Rob Pike: Dennis Ritchie has died | There are several billion people using many billions of devices every day.From the code in your microwave to massive computing clusters, virtually all of our software can trace its ancestry back to this man's intellectual output.I'm eternally grateful for his life and contributions to humanity. |
14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School | If anyone is actually surprised by the administrations intelligence - I should remind you of 3 events:- A teacher confiscates Linux CDs claiming that the student was essentially distributing illegal copyrighted software - because no software is free [1]- A system administrator was fired for installing/running seti@home on school computers. There is a lot of controversy about this case - but I read one news article (that I can't find right now) where the administration said they would have been ok with cancer research folding@home rather than searching for aliens with seti@home. This combined with the backpedaling of "oh actually he was a bad employee, stole things, and cost the school millions in extra in electricity costs!" makes me believe that they just wanted to use it as an excuse to fire him and make the position open for a friend/relative. [2].- Or an honor roll student suspended for buying candy from another student [3]. His statuses were only restored after it caught media attention.I would go into my rant about the education system but you should just watch this video [4][1] http://linuxlock.blogspot.com/2008/12/linux-stop-holding-our...[2] https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/forum_thread.php?id=5169[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20080313141623/http://edition.cn...[4] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U |
California bans private prisons | I think private prisons could work if:- Convicts could choose whether to be sent to a public or private prison.- Private prisons had financial incentives for post-incarceration behavior. Eg: If their prisoner recidivism rate after 3 years was 10% lower than the average public prison, they would get a 20% bonus.Those changes would create enough competition and align incentives such that we could see some real innovation in the criminal justice system. Sadly, I don't think these sorts of experiments will ever be tried. If someone ever proposes such a system, they'll be branded a supporter of "private prisons". |
Whistleblower: Ubiquiti Breach “Catastrophic” | > “The breach was massive, customer data was at risk, access to customers’ devices deployed in corporations and homes around the world was at risk.”> “They were able to get cryptographic secrets for single sign-on cookies and remote access, full source code control contents, and signing keys exfiltration,”Maybe putting your network control plane in 'the cloud' isn't such a good idea after all...Edit: Just re-read the article, this part stood out:> the attacker(s) had access to privileged credentials that were previously stored in the LastPass account of a Ubiquiti IT employee, and gained root administrator access to all Ubiquiti AWS accounts, including all S3 data buckets, all application logs, all databases, all user database credentials, and secrets required to forge single sign-on (SSO) cookies.> Adam says Ubiquiti’s security team picked up signals in late December 2020 that someone with administrative access had set up several Linux virtual machines that weren’t accounted for.If this is true, and whoever breached them had full access to their AWS account, can we really trust them to clean up all their tokens and fully eradicate all forms of persistence the hackers may have gotten? |
Show HN: Non.io, a Reddit-like platform Ive been working on for the last 4 years | Congrats on the hard work, and the idea is fine, but the problem is that tech like this is a cheap commodity in a massively oversaturated space, and without a hook that makes the platform exceptional (innovative/clever/beautiful design, unique aggregation features, inherently interesting content, reimagined user/content/moderation dynamics etc etc), this kind of thing is dead in the water because it lacks a network effect. Add in the upfront subscription model and failure to launch is basically assured.When I visit the root domain I shouldn't be greeted with a marketing splash page, you need interesting content in the user's face right away, entice their curiosity and drive the user to explore the site... even as a fellow developer, my first instinct is to abandon the page as soon as I'm greeted with the cliche startup marketing page. Consider the user experience when I visit reddit.com or news.ycombinator.com or any other link aggregation competitor. What you have now is a tech demo, not a platform. Sorry if that's a little harsh, but I mean well! Good luck! |
Chandrayaan-3 Soft-landing [video] | Not asking rhetorically but why is this a big deal? Is it because it's going to the south pole? What are some other benefits to be gained from this? |
Email from Jeff Bezos to employees | > This journey began some 27 years ago. Amazon was only an idea, and it had no name.It had a name, and that name was "Cadabra".It didn't become Amazon until Jeff watched a documentary about the Amazon River. His lawyer had already turned up his nose at "Cadabra", and Jeff was looking for something else.It's also worth noting that the idea didn't grow over time - Jeff always intended to build something like "Sears for the 21st century". The bookstore was just the way in, not the long term plan.ps. amazon employee #2 |
Vulnerability in the Mac Zoom client allows malicious websites to enable camera | > This vulnerability leverages the amazingly simple Zoom feature where you can just send anyone a meeting link (for example https://zoom.us/j/492468757) and when they open that link in their browser their Zoom client is magically opened on their local machine. I was curious about how this amazing bit of functionality was implemented and how it had been implemented securely. Come to find out, it really hadn’t been implemented securely. Nor can I figure out a good way to do this that doesn’t require an additional bit of user interaction to be secure.Does anybody understand (and have a moment to explain) why the author says this is difficult to do securely? macOS has a simple facility for handling custom URL schemes, so my impulse would be to have `https://zoom.us/j/492468757` do a server-side redirect to a URL like, say, `zoomus://492468757`, which would launch Zoom locally using the OS's built-in services. This wouldn't require a third-party daemon of any sort, and would just be a regular application that the user could trivially uninstall.Is there a security hole there that I'm missing? Or have I misunderstood the author's point? |
Google Is Eating Our Mail | Google has no incentive to fix these kinds of problems.It's big enough that when someone complains that a message sent wasn't received, the intended recipient will say, "I never have problems with my Gmail account. It must be you." And the sender has to switch to Gmail to reliably communicate with the outside world.I wish this was just paranoia, but we've seen multiple discussions on HN about Google programs and policies that alter the internet in ways that only benefit Big G. It's like we're heading back to the days when people didn't know the difference between AOL and "the internet." |
The Day AppGet Died | Author here,
Because it's sure to come up here is a comment I wrote on Reddit that clarifies somethings, I haven't updated the original article since I'm not sure what the etiquette for updating a highly shared article is.------Code being copied isn't an issue. I knew full well what it meant to release something opensource and I don't regret it one bit. What was copied with no credit is the foundation of the project. How it actually works. If I were the patenting type, this would be the thing you would patent. ps. I don't regret not patenting anything.
And I don't mean the general concept of package/app managers, they have been done a hundred times. If you look at similar projects across OSes, Homebrew, Chocolaty, Scoop, ninite etc; you'll see they all do it in their own way. However, WinGet works pretty much identical to the way AppGet works.
Do you want to know how Microsoft WinGet works? go read the article (https://keivan.io/appget-what-chocolatey-wasnt/) I wrote 2 years ago about how AppGet works.I'm not even upset they copied me. To me, that's a validation of how sound my idea was. What upsets me is how no credit was given. |
Joe Armstrong has died | Just re-watched his Strangeloop talk: “The mess we’re in”. Still so spot on. He will be dearly missed.https://youtube.com/watch?v=lKXe3HUG2l4 |