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Machine Learning Crash Course

Looking through the topics covered, the standard AI-course caveats (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16247629) apply.Yes, AI/ML MOOCs teach the corresponding tools well, and the creation of new tools like Keras make the field much more accessible. The obsolete gatekeeping by the AI/ML elites who say "you can't use AI/ML unless you have a PhD/5 years research experience" is one of the things I really hate about the industry.However, contrary to the thought pieces that tend to pop up, taking and passing a crash course doesn't mean you'll be an expert in the field (and this applies for most MOOCs, honestly). They're very good for learning an overview of the technology, but nothing beats applying the tools on a real-world, noisy dataset, and solving the inevitable little problems that crop up during the process.Reviewing the Keras documentation (https://keras.io) and examples (https://github.com/keras-team/keras/tree/master/examples) are honestly much better teachers of AI/ML than any MOOC, in my opinion.(Of course, Keras is now a part of TensorFlow, so there's a neat Google vertical intergration with this crash course!)

Pockit: A tiny, powerful, modular computer [video]

As far as I can tell, this is a single individual that has done all of this work. I am floored at the design and intricacy of this project.Really, truly blown away. I'm sure there are plenty of edge cases to correct for but I haven't gotten so excited by a demo in a long time. I've obviously signed up to learn more.

Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

Look at the cockpit of any modern airliner and you will see screens, but they are never interactive. There are hardware buttons, dials and lights all over the place. A tactile interface is both more obvious, sturdy and more stable, and therefore safer. The problem that touch interfaces solve, ever since the advent of the first smart phone, is that the interface is now dynamic. You can change it without having to replace the hardware. Here's the catch: for safety critical interfaces, YOU DO NOT want the interface to change. The point is moot.Touch screens will hopefully never make it into any critical pilot systems, because safety and stability matters to airline manufacturers, current ongoing scandals notwithstanding. I only wish automobile manufacturers took their job equally seriously.

I tried creating a web browser, and Google blocked me

The blame for this sits squarely on the w3c for their efforts in trying to replace flash by letting the content companies dictate standards for encrypted playback.If they had held fast, we could have forced the companies to do their key management in something like WebAssembly and avoided this gatekeeping mess.

Let's guess what Google requires in 14 days or they kill our extension

Uh, yikes:> As I looked at the permissions and what our extension actually needs to operate, I noticed a great opportunity to reduce our permissions requests. We do not need to request access to data on https://*/* and http://*/*. Instead, we can simply request data access for https://*.pushbullet.com/*, http://*.pushbullet.com/*, and http://localhost/*. This is a huge reduction in the private data our extension could theoretically access. A big win!While I agree with the larger part about the lack of transparency of what they want you to fix, this is an amazingly huge oversight, and the fact that the extension review process got an established, popular extension to go "Wait, we don't actually need to request access to every website ever" is a point in favor of the review process - and, unfortunately, a (weak) argument in favor of the review process taking the attitude that they get lots of crap and don't have the time to explain to all the authors of crap what they're doing wrong. How did the extension ever ask for this in the first place?Also why do you need http://localhost/? Is the extension running a web server on localhost with native code? If so, can you use the specific mechanism/permission for communicating with native code via a subprocess (because it turns out communicating with a web server on localhost is very hard to do securely)? If not, what's it for?I'm sympathetic to the broader argument here, but given the provided information, all of this is consistent with an extension that should be kicked off the app store within 14 days.(Among other things, if you have an approved extension with https://*/* permissions and active users, malware authors will offer to buy your extension for a very high price. So it's definitely in the public interest to make sure there are as few of those as possible and that they're only in the hands of people who have the ability to understand why the friendly person offering them way too much money for their extension isn't just being nice.)

IoT hacking and rickrolling my high school district

Someone I know did something similar, was arrested in their college dorm, and at the sentencing hearing in federal court was fined and sentenced to 5 years probation, and now has a criminal record.This kid is very very lucky. Obviously they violated the CFAA which carries severe criminal penalties. They engaged in actual hacking without any permission or defined scope. And they exploited the system without any responsible disclosure process.Anyone in the field will tell you that this is an absolute disaster of a post because it sends the signal to other young aspiring cybersecurity professionals that this is OK, and the school will laugh it off, and you'll be seen as an adorable Matthew Broderick type Wargames character. I can't overemphasize how far this is from the truth in 2021.Absolutely do not access systems you are not allowed to. If you do want to do penetration testing, you need permission from the systems owner and a clearly defined scope. And when you do find issues, you don't exploit them, you responsibly disclose them within a clearly defined framework.If you want to end up with a criminal record that will profoundly effect the rest of your life, including your career prospects and ability to travel internationally, then by all means, do what this guy did.I wish it wasn't so. It never used to be. But this is how it is now. Overzealous prosecutors have been given a huge amount of power, and all you need is one embarrassed systems administrator, school board or management team to trigger a disastrous outcome in stories like this.

Same-Sex Marriage Is a Right, Supreme Court Rules

Well, I know I'm probably a minority in saying this, but I'm disappointed - not because I don't think everyone should have access to the government rights attached to marriage, but because it seems our country doesn't actually want to fix problems at the root.What is the root problem? People on both sides of the debate agree (if given the option) that the government probably never should have messed with marriage, at least not as the cultural/religious thing that it is.In a nation where we care so much about the separation of church (broadly defined to include ideologies that may not be formal religions) and state, I don't understand why we're seeking to only expand that connection.What should happen is the government should stop defining marriage of any form (leave that to religion or personal tradition), and simply define all these rights under civil union (or a similar phrase with no significant religious/cultural attachment).

Spotify to Apple: Time to Play Fair

Can someone help me stop playing the world's smallest violin here?Spotify knowingly built a low margin business living in the pocket of the labels (who force Spotify towards razor thin margins) and Apple/Google (who have, since before Spotify launched, operated app stores for their platforms which are to some extent curated and which are not free market economies).Spotify feels aggrieved that Apple does not allow it to develop software for certain of their hardware lines, such as Homepod or Apple Watch. Why do I have to allow you to develop software for my proprietary hardware, just because it's technically possible?The crucial line in their argument is this:> giving up 30% was too much for us to keep our prices low for our fans. Unfortunately, the end result is that you can no longer upgrade to Premium through the app.How is this Apple's fault and not your fault? Every market place takes a cut from the vendor. Your business not being able to sustain the cost of doing business is nobody's fault except your own.Apple should not be allowed to send push notifications about products or services they prohibit other apps from sending. They shouldn't arbitrarily restrict Spotify from updating the app (virtually no information is provided about what infractions Apple saw, and history suggests that companies are great at presenting one side of the argument and then we find that Apple has a legitimate grievance). They should not be able to charge Spotify more because of their competition.But to suggest that Apple should be forced to allow Siri integration with Spotify? Homepod? Apple Watch? Ridiculous.Monopolies where prices rise are bad news. But look at UK football coverage. On top of my free-to-air channels (£150 p.a. TV licence) I need a Sky Sports subscription (minimum £25 per month) and a BT Sport subscription (which necessitates one of BT Broadband - gross - or Sky) which I think is around £5-£10 per year. The top flight football is fragmented across all three providers. Is that better for me?

Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?

I have a rail line right under my apartment, so I built a small computer vision app running on a Rasperry Pi which records each train passing, and tries to stitch an image of it.It has a frontend at https://trains.jo-m.ch/.Edit: it's currently raining and the rain drops are disturbing the images a bit.

Exploiting vulnerabilities in Cellebrite UFED and Physical Analyzer

So I wonder, why disclose this?This will just prompt Cellebrite to improve its security process and sandbox the entire tool.If they wanted to destroy the credibility of the tool, using the vulnerabilities to silently tamper with the collected data or even leaking it online would be a much better option and hit them without any warning, not only jeopardizing those cases but forever casting doubt on not just Cellebrite but their competitor tools.

1.1.1.1: Fast, privacy-first consumer DNS service

$ ping 1.1.1.1PING 1.1.1.1 (1.1.1.1): 56 data bytes64 bytes from 1.1.1.1: icmp_seq=0 ttl=47 time=214.866 ms64 bytes from 1.1.1.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=47 time=173.416 ms64 bytes from 1.1.1.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=45 time=256.007 ms64 bytes from 1.1.1.1: icmp_seq=3 ttl=45 time=196.638 ms64 bytes from 1.1.1.1: icmp_seq=4 ttl=45 time=294.694 ms64 bytes from 1.1.1.1: icmp_seq=5 ttl=45 time=314.883 ms64 bytes from 1.1.1.1: icmp_seq=6 ttl=47 time=335.099 ms(From Singapore)Google's 8.8.8.8 has about <4ms

Covid vaccine: First ‘milestone’ vaccine offers 90% protection

Good:+ ~90% of individuals achieve immunity.+ no significant side-effects.Not so good:- two doses needed, 3 weeks apart, immunity after one month from first dose. Slow rollout.- -80C storage and transport needed. Challenging, but doable in developed countries, but still may slow down mass rollout. Not feasible in many developing countries.I still wonder about long-term immunity. Anyone can share any insight?

After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel

The sweet spot for having control over your email while simultaneously minimizing unforseen headaches is to simply own your domain name and point the MX record to whatever hosting provider you want instead of self-hosting a server at home.Same philosophy for exposing a your personal blog of html files or content like mp4 videos. The sweet spot is to focus on buying a domain name you control. Then let Amazon S3, or Cloudflare, Hezner etc, host your html or mp4 files.I quit self-hosting email at home over 15 years ago. It's just not something I want to babysit anymore because I have other things to focus on. As long as I control the MX record on my own domain, that's really all that's necessary.

Linux bans University of Minnesota for sending buggy patches in name of research

Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26887670.

We lost 54k GitHub stars

I really like this post.While the author clearly feels bad about the fact that they've lost his community and that GitHub didn't restore it (which is honestly what any of us would've felt under similar circumstances), they're also focusing towards the future and using their personal experience as a parable all of us can learn from.Lesson 1 on UI design I think is really important. I often think scary popup boxes are enough to get people to think about what they're doing, but this example clearly demonstrates that what's important is to use design not to scare (alone?), but to convey the information which makes a dangerous action dangerous as well. I also really like the fact that when the action isn't dangerous, the distractions ("Type this repo's name", etc) just go away. It's super intuitive, and (for a newbie designer like me) really helps build an intuition for various design principles put in action.Lesson 2, which was to use soft deletes, is something I have more thoughts about. I assume that the cascading done on GitHub would be done on a FK constraint, but I'm not really sure how you'd do a "cascading soft delete" without making some kind of manual cascading logic? If anyone's aware of a standard way to accomplish this, please do let me know. Of course, the best way may just be to simplify the model so they aren't needed at all haha.As designers and developers we've been given a chance to sharpen our toolkit. Thanks, HTTPie! You've gained a new star :)Edit: Changed GitHub couldn't restore to GitHub didn't restore, as pointed out by @ncmncm (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31033758#31034195)

Launch HN: 70MillionJobs (YC S17) – Job board for people with criminal records

Former career criminal here. Spent 19 years of my adult life in a combination of jail and prison. Longest stint was for 14 consecutive years. Been working in IT for the last 17 years, mostly as a developer. Had a very hard time getting my foot in the door; was denied employment more than once because of my record. Not sure that my current employer is even aware that I have a record, and to be honest I have no plans to reveal that part of my life. Also, knowing that my criminal activities would have life-long consequences was never a deterrent. One thing I know for sure: I’m not what I used to be. Today I live a peaceful and productive life with my wife, enjoy the company of family and friends, and try to stay up-to-date with technology.I think that what you are doing is a good thing an applaud you for it.

Zoom Acquires Keybase

For years people have been begging Keybase to allow them to pay them for the service and Chris Coyne always refused.Now they've lost their independence and they're owned by a communication company that has [edit: the majority of] its dev team in China.I use Keybase to talk to my friend in China since it's one of the few services they don't block.This is a pretty disappointing outcome.

Factorio 1.0

It's the game to teach people what technical debt and refactoring is.When you start building your factory, you think about how to get first steps just done (ship it!). Over time complexity and scope of your factory increases, but old code, I mean old machines, are still there, getting in the way.You can choose to ignore it and work around it using underground belts and similar solutions, or you can take on a proper refactoring, limiting your progress in the short term.

Request For Research: Basic Income

Things that would help everyone, regardless of income, without depending on a radical restructuring of entitlement spending, that seem like things startups could actually do:* Equally credible alternatives to university education for professions that don't involve students shouldering $100k-$200k in debt based on decisions they have to make when they're 18 years old.* Empirical, blinded, skills-assessment based turnkey hiring solutions that outperform interviews for non-technology roles like marketing, purchasing, &c, so that people who avail themselves of alternatives to universities can get good jobs regardless of social signals.* Tools that make it possible for companies that today exploit the 1099 labor classification to cost-effectively offer benefits and handle taxes, to make on-demand employment legal and fair while remaining competitive.* Alternatives to patient-present doctor-mediated health care to cover the 80% case in which doctors are expensive overkill; some combination of telemedicine and nurse-practitioners.* Technology-mediated services that drastically improve outcomes in K12 education.* Modern logistics-driven solutions for inexpensive high-quality child care.* Products that offer serious competition for incumbents in the financial sector to bid down the 7-10% of the economy taken by financial services.* Tools to improve engagement with local elections and make it easier for people to take flyers on standing for election.* Modernized fee and fine collection for things like traffic and parking tickets, which currently default out to "charging minimum wage workers $2,000 to get the boot off the car on which they happen to owe 3 parking tickets".* Similarly: a way to do things like enroll a credit card with your local government to automatically pay fines and fees at their reduced early-payment rate --- which is something you might be able to do without getting permission from local governments.Later: I added some things

Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone

The people losing their marbles over this being some kind of Turing Test passing distopian stuff are missing the point at how limited this domain is.People who answer phones to take bookings perform an extremely limited set of questions and responses, that’s why they can even be replaced by dumb voice response systems in many cases.In these cases, the human being answering the phone is themselves acting like a bot following a repetitive script.Duplex seems trained against this corpus. The end game would be for the business to run something like duplex on the other side, and you’d have duplex talking to duplex.Most people working in hair salons or restaurants are very busy with customers and don’t want to handle these calls, so I think the reverse of this duplex system, a more natural voice booking system for small businesses would help the immensely free up their workers to focus on customers.

Just Be Rich

A lot of people who are just as smart and motived as Elon Musk or Steve Jobs will never be able to start their own companies and get rich.Because they have family obligations that take priority.Because they live outside high-income countries.Because they have no access to support network, so when they fail, they fall all the way to bottom.Because they may have made a crippling mistake in their pasts that now prevents them from reaching their full potential.And so on and on. While I would still recommend everyone to pursue the dreams over never trying to do so - being poor is the single most powerful force that prevents people from doing that.

John Carmack Leaves Meta

”It has been a struggle for me. I have a voice at the highest levels here, so it feels like I should be able to move things, but I'm evidently not persuasive enough. A good fraction of the things I complain about eventually turn my way after a year or two passes and evidence piles up, but I have never been able to kill stupid things before they cause damage, or set a direction and have a team actually stick to it. I think my influence at the margins has been positive, but it has never been a prime mover.”It is simply stunning that the seasoned direction and counsel that someone of John Carmack’s caliber is capable of delivering was not being followed.

ChatGPT Plugins

I have some odd feelings about this. It took less than a year to go from "of course it isn't hooked up to the internet in any way, silly!" to "ok.... so we hooked up up to the internet..."First is your API calls, then your chatgpt-jailbreak-turns-into-a-bank-DDOS-attack, then your "today it somehow executed several hundred thousand threads of a python script that made perfectly timed trades at 8:31AM on the NYSE which resulted in the largest single day drop since 1987..."You can go on about individual responsibility and all... users are still the users, right. But this is starting to feel like giving a loaded handgun to a group of chimpanzees.And OpenAI talks on and on about 'Safety' but all that 'Safety' means is "well, we didn't let anyone allow it to make jokes about fat or disabled people so we're good, right?!"

Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs

Commenters here seem dubious. I’ll take the contra-position. This feels to me like it’s going to be great; a big win for consumers and developers.Current A12z chips are highly performant; Apple is roughly one chip cycle ahead on perfomance/watt from any other manufacturer. I presume their consumer hardware will launch with an A13Z, or maybe an A14 type chip.Apple has consistently shipped new chip designs on time; Intel’s thrashing has cost them at least two significant update cycles on the macbook line in the last six years. Search this fine site for complaints about how new mac laptops don’t have real performance benefits over old ones —- those complaints are 100% down to being saddled with Intel.Apple has a functional corporate culture that ships; adding complete control of the hardware stack in is going to make for better products, full stop.Apple has to pay Intel and AMD profit margins for their mac systems. They are going to be able to put this margin back into a combination of profit and tech budget as they choose. Early days they are likely to plow all this back into performance, a win for consumers.So, I’m predicting an MBP 13 - 16 range with an extra three hours of battery life+, and 20-30% faster. Alternately a Macbook Air type with 16 hours plus strong 4k performance. You’re not going to want an Intel mac even as of January of 2021, unless you have a very unusual set of requirements.I think they may also start making a real push on the ML side in the next year, which will be very interesting; it’s exciting to imagine what Apple’s fully vertically integrated company could do controlling hardware, OS and ML stack.One interesting question I think is outstanding - from parsing the video carefully, it seems to me that devs are going to want ARM linux virtualized, vs AMD64. I’m not highly conversant with ARM linux, but in my mind I imagine it’s still largely a second class citizen — I wonder if systems developers will get on board, deal with slower / higher battery draw intel virtualization, or move on from Apple.Languages like Go with supremely simple cross architecture support might get a boost here. Rust seems behind on ARM, for instance; I bet that will change in the next year or two. I don’t imagine that developing Intel server binaries on an ARM laptop with Rust will be pleasant.

Google’s GDPR Workaround

It's really funny to see that yesterday, I was branded as a 'privacy nut' after the release of Android 10 as I was concerned about the privacy issues that are in Android. Then the Go modules proxy issue around the Go Programming language that raised suspicions about tracking usage statistics around downloading modules turned on by default without any consent and now this.I think there are some folks at Google who have just read too deep into both 1984 and The Google Book to go on to think that privacy violations like this is a normal thing. But what do I know? I'm just another 'privacy lunatic' on the net that wears a metal helmet (tinfoil hats are just not good enough) trying to protect my privacy.

A Most Peculiar Test Drive

Wow. I was as skeptical of the wisdom of Tesla attacking NYT's journalist for their Model S review as all the other HNers - but this is incredible.First: I realize the fact that what the hardware logs show and what the user was shown may not be one and the same (i.e. hardware sensors may indicate charge at 28% but due to a bug (it's possible!) it may be shown to be full). But their travel logs shred, I repeat, shred Broder's credibility and claims alike.It really does look like he was hell-bent on ripping Tesla a new one in his review. Taking Tesla's rebuttal at face value: purposely embarking on journeys over twice the indicated available range, driving around in circles in an empty parking lot to kill batteries, turning up the heat and claiming to have turned it down ("shaking, shivering, and with white knuckles" no less).They post images, graphs, logs, maps, and more. I'm incredibly surprised at how well they're defending themselves against dishonest reviews - for example, I'd never have thought to log the changes to the cabin temperature, but apparently they've done so and more!This post makes me want to reconsider a Model S as my next car. As far as I'm concerned, this is exactly the kind of attention to detail I want going into the engineering, design, and manufacture of my vehicle.I'd be interested in hearing NYT's response to this - they previously stated unconditionally that they stand by Broder's review and believe it to be honest, truthful, and factual.If indeed at the end of the day this was Broder pushing his own agenda, not only ignoring but outright faking facts, then I think his journalistic career should be over.

Willingness to look stupid

This has happened to me frequently at my current company. I get pulled into a meeting about something that I have no context on because it touches my area of expertise, and the discussions have apparently been stalling out.I brace myself to be the idiot. I'm going to waste everyone's time asking questions that everyone knows the answer to, and I just got looped in, so everyone's going to feel like they need to walk through all the super-obvious stuff to satisfy the one guy who didn't do his homework.So I start asking questions, and slowly begin to realize that nobody in the room has any idea what they are talking about. That there are fundamental misunderstandings and misconceptions about existing systems. And, naturally, it turns out that the questions I have are questions that other people have.This has happened to me so often now that you would think the sinking feeling I get before I brace myself to look stupid would go away, but it never does.

Show HN: I may have created a new type of puzzle

(author here)Great feedback! Yes, I am the "Land of Lisp" guySorry about the potential epilepsy trigger- that was the fastest way I could think of to code a quick "reward effect", I will do something different in the next version. I didn't really expect anyone to care enough to solve the puzzle lol.Now that I know people like the puzzle, I will build out the website and post regular puzzles, follow my Twitter @lisperati for updates.

Facebook account now required to login to Oculus devices

Palmer Luckey, the original creator had this to say over on /r/oculus: I am already getting heat from users and media outlets who say this policy change proves I was lying when I consistently said this wouldn't happen, or at least that it was a guarantee I wasn't in a position to make. I want to make clear that those promises were approved by Facebook in that moment and on an ongoing basis, and I really believed it would continue to be the case for a variety of reasons. In hindsight, the downvotes from people with more real-world experience than me were definitely justified. A few examples below so people won't make up their own version of what I actually said: - I guarantee that you won't need to log into your Facebook account every time you wanna use the Oculus Rift. - You will not need a Facebook account to use or develop for the Rift - Nope. That would be lame. - I promise. Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/ic4ye1/new_oculus_u...

Atlassian acquires Trello for $425M

This is depressing. Trello is a beloved software for a lot of people. It's sad that Trello decided to sell off to Atlassian. I can't believe the same company that makes Jira is going to run Trello. SourceTree is the only software that they make that doesn't suck.

Why I’m Suing the US Government

I studied section 1201 thoroughly during law school and I think this post doesn't give a fair characterization of it. The reason this statute exists is because companies were unable to devise protection for copyrighted works that hackers were not able to immediately circumvent. As a result, the government stepped in and created 1201 to make it illegal for someone to circumvent some form of access control that a company used to protect their copyrighted works. The purpose of the statute isn't to destroy but is to make it much less expensive for a company to protect its products. I don't see anything wrong with that.

Linus Torvalds: “Somebody is pushing complete garbage for unclear reasons.”

A lot of people trying to defend being a jerk as necessary in these circumstances. I think Google culture proves the opposite: Googley code and peer reviews, blameless postmortems, and a host of other mechanisms that de-escalate and de-personalize things.The Meltdown work at Google probably didn't begin with a rant about morons.It's possible to construct a culture where people can air grievances and criticize others without inducing flame wars. It only works for Linus because people won't go nuclear in the response, but for rank and file engineers, especially of equal stature, if you call someone a moron in a thread, it's likely to kill productivity and create a negative testosterone ladden atmosphere of people trying to avoid being wrong, and counter attacking others.I've worked at a lot of places where engineer got into heated shouting matches. It's is not a way to increase the probability of zeroing in on a problem, or reaching agreement faster.

Master Plan, Part Deux

> "When used correctly, [partially autonomous driving] is already significantly safer than a person driving by themselves"If you're an American, you're twice as likely to die with a steering wheel in your hands as you are to die at the hands of a murderer. Human-driven vehicle deaths cause grave second-order suffering for families and friends - and hurt the economy.A shift to technologies safer than human-driven cars would dramatically reduce human suffering and should be welcomed.I do wonder, though, how this would reshape our cities - if we're not careful. Besides direct costs for the car, fuel, and maintenance, the main disincentive to driving is how damn boring it is. What happens when we turn fully-autonomous vehicles into luxury entertainment centers? I suspect that, if we're not smart about this shift, we could see wild sprawl on a scale that would dwarf the mid-20th century sprawl we saw in Los Angeles and elsewhere.On the whole, though, it's a beautiful thing.

EU copyright law proposal rejected

It is extremely important not to lose focus on the problem because they're going to try again and again to pass it, one way or another. They'll never stop: it's about profit both for the corporations bribing for those laws and the politicians being bribed to push for them, so they'll just keep pushing until they find the right weapon of mass distraction to keep the public attention away.Also it is important to keep in mind the old tricks used to pass bad laws: they push initially for worse laws then after public protest they slowly step back to the initial goal to pretend people were listened to, so that not only they get what they wanted, but the public is also being fooled into believing their protest were successful and they have politicians who actually listen to them. How lucky!

iOS14 reveals that TikTok may snoop clipboard contents every few keystrokes

It seems like a ton of apps are abusing this feature: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRSWdtoUAjoI categorize this as another reason why "just trust us," just isn't acceptable enough when it comes to data privacy and ownership. Companies just cannot be trusted to treat their users' data with respect given the option of: profit or privacy.(sourced from reddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/hejb9i/ios14_catches...)

GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

What do people think the future looks like where publicly available resources on the Internet (art, code, etc) aren't fair use for training ML models? Where you have to opt into models or can opt out (and many wind up doing so)?OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, et al will STILL train such models that can do all the same things, but it will be much harder for non-industry-backed individuals to navigate the legal minefield where you must ensure you properly attribute your model outputs, only train on opt-in data, etc, etc. Surely no one really thinks that a court case against Microsoft/OpenAI (even if they lose) would stop CoPilot?Most of these complaints seem to be extremely emotional and cherry-picked. "People's legal rights are being violated!" (you definitely don't know that, no one knows that, the article is 100% right about that), "look I prompted CoPilot for this piece of code that I already knew about and it spit it right out" (that's not how it's going to be used in practice).It seems to me that the longer-term implications of the outcome of a lawsuit like this are far more interesting, yet almost all the comments I see are nitpicking and whining about how the world isn't the way they want it to be. I wish the conversations around generative AI could be...just better.

The Cloud Computer

I am CTO of a large global data center provider posting with throwaway account.As a technologist, I really appreciate what they have done. Impressive work, high quality, however I don't understand who this is for.The meaningful market for Data Center hardware is pretty well defined in two clusters. People that build/make custom gear (such as Hyperscalers) and people that buys HP/Cisco/IBM/Dell... (blades or hyper-converged). To scale, you obviously want your DCs as standardized as possible.Until this company has a certain/size and scale, no one serious will trust their black boxes at any type of scale.Beyond the tech, how would support services really work? We can have a technician from any of the large vendors on-site in less than 2 hours. In some of our DC clusters we actually have vendor support personnel 24x7 on-site with vendor paid spare parts inventory. How would they provide that level of service?Maybe I am not the target audience for this offering.

The Cloud Computer

I am CTO of a large global data center provider posting with throwaway account.As a technologist, I really appreciate what they have done. Impressive work, high quality, however I don't understand who this is for.The meaningful market for Data Center hardware is pretty well defined in two clusters. People that build/make custom gear (such as Hyperscalers) and people that buys HP/Cisco/IBM/Dell... (blades or hyper-converged). To scale, you obviously want your DCs as standardized as possible.Until this company has a certain/size and scale, no one serious will trust their black boxes at any type of scale.Beyond the tech, how would support services really work? We can have a technician from any of the large vendors on-site in less than 2 hours. In some of our DC clusters we actually have vendor support personnel 24x7 on-site with vendor paid spare parts inventory. How would they provide that level of service?Maybe I am not the target audience for this offering.

GitHub lets staff own IP developed for personal projects using company resources

Once upon a time, I was looking for a job, in straightened circumstances. I found a so-so match, and since I was in danger of missing a mortgage payment, I decided to accept their offer. Pragmatism and all that.Well, I went in and picked up the documents, and told them I needed to read them before signing and returning them to the company. I looked at the IP clause, and it said the company owned anything and everything I created or invented while an employee, in any field of endeavor.I called the founder to renegotiate."What if," I posited, "I write a blog post. The way I read this, the company owns the copyright on my blog post." > Yes. "Or if I take a video of a climbing trip, the company owns that video." > We'd never exercise that right. But we reserve the right. "Well, I'm not sure I want to agree that anything I create, even on my own time and property and with my own equipment, belongs to you." > Now that you mention it, I'm not sure I want to employ > someone who uses their creative energy for anything except > the company's business. "Thanks for the clarification!"My next call was to a realtor, I put my house up for sale. There was no way I wanted to be in a position where I would feel like I had no choice but to accept an offer like this.I went through some hard times, but as it turned out, that blog that I did end up writing on-and-off over the years turned out to be valuable. Not directly in money, but in satisfaction. It lead to some work, but even more importantly, it led to communities like Hacker News and meeting programmers around the world.If I'd agreed to that contract, there might not be a "raganwald" today.

16-inch MacBook Pro

I'm astonished and pleased to see they walked back the two worst things about the original Touch Bar MBPs - the lack of a physical Escape key, and the full-size left and right arrow keys.The lack of physical function keys remains regrettable, and the Touch Bar is still no worthy substitute, but perhaps this is a sign that Apple is finally interested in listening to feedback from its long-term customer base, even if that feedback conflicts with the design team's desires.

My students cheated... a lot

Threads like these are always frustrating, because as usual people (programmers in this case) freely air their opinions on how schools are broken with phrases like “we need to fix the system”.As someone who studied pedagogy for years and quit due to an immense frustration with exactly this — how broken the system is — I would encourage you to entertain the thought that maybe, you as a person who is almost in all cases not a teacher, nor someone with any experience apart from once having been a student, do not have a good understanding of how exactly this system should be fixed, and that it’s not broken for fun but because there are some very difficult unresolved issues.People love to rant about how bad tests are. “We just study for the tests” and so on. And yet this complaint seems to be international. Curious, isn’t it, how all these systems seem to fail in the same way?In the case of testing it’s because you choose to focus on the obviously bad thing (current state of testing) rather than the very complex and difficult question behind it: HOW do you measure knowledge? And when you decide how, how do you scale it?These are very hard questions, and it’s frustrating to read the phrase “we need to fix the system” because yes, obviously we do, but agreeing that things are bad isn’t the hard part, and probably input from people who have never worked in the field is of pretty limited value in how to resolve the hard part, and will not do much more than annoy teachers even more.So what’s the solution then? Well, maybe we should start by rolling back this common conception that when it comes to schools, everyone’s opinion matters an equal amount, and then listen to the teachers and academics.Cynically, this will never happen because reforms to battle educational issues in any democratic society usually takes more than 5 election cycles to show obvious results (and when the bad results start stacking up current leaders will take the flak regardless).

Jury in Oracle v. Google finds in Google's favour

These are the statutory fair use factors the jury was required to consider (17 U.S.C. 107):(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.It's a somewhat surprising result, because two of the factors weigh heavily against Google (it's a commercial work, and was important to Android gaining developer market-share). Oracle's strategy going forward, both in post-trial motions and in any subsequent appeal, will be based on arguing that no rational jury could have applied these factors to the undisputed facts of the case and concluded that the fair use test was met.It's also not a particularly satisfying result for anybody. If API's are copyrightable, then I can't think of a better case for protecting them than in this one, where Google created a commercial product for profit and there was no research or scientific motivation. It wasn't even really a case (like say, Samba) where copying was necessary to interoperate with a closed, proprietary system. Davlik isn't drop-in compatible with the JVM anyway.That makes Oracle's win on the subject matter issue basically a pyrrhic victory for anyone looking to protect their APIs. They're protectable, but can't be protected in any realistic scenario.And if you're in the camp that believes APIs should not be protected, this precedent--if it stands--means that you'll have to shoulder the expense of going to trial on the fair use issue before winning on the merits.

Lavabit abruptly shuts down

For the unfamiliar: Lavabit was a webmail service, that (claimed to) encrypt emails in such a way that they literally did not have access to the content stored on their own servers. The linked email would lend some credence to those claims. It was originally designed in contrast to gmail scanning your email for targeted advertising, but my imperfect memory says that their system should also have been resilient to "we have a warrant, hand over the data."

Tell HN: Thank you for not redesigning Hacker News

HN is lightweight in some ways, but also quite bad in others. For example, every single time you vote on anything, the site sends back a 302 redirect and then a copy of the entire page's HTML in response. This means that every vote results in a response that's usually around 10KB gzipped.As of right now, for me, voting on any comment in this thread currently causes a 14KB response and takes about 1.3 seconds to finish.

A guide to difficult conversations

I’m generally a good conversation participant, but this week has made me second guess myself.My father-in-law is currently hospitalized after his heart stopped this weekend. He’s currently in an induced coma. Brain damage is a foregone conclusion at this point and they’re unsure if he will ever regain consciousness.My wife and I happened to be on vacation in Costa Rica when this happened. We hopped on the next available flight and were at the hospital 21 hours later.Because we were unavailable, my younger brother-in-law was given Power of Attorney. This “power” went to his head within minutes. He’s now decided that he is the sole arbiter of information. Nobody but him is allowed to talk to the doctors or ask questions.I spent over 2 hours with him trying to talk it through. I never insulted or condescended him. My goal of the conversation was to allow his sister (both are the patients children) to participate in conversations with the medical staff.At the end of the 2 hours, he attempted to assault me so I left. I felt like a failure. I’ve never not been able to talk someone down from an irrational position before.I think I subconsciously used some of these NVC tactics, but failed miserably.Is there an online course one can take on having these difficult conversations? I need to up my skills.

NPM Is Joining GitHub

Microsoftie here — throwaway for obvious reasons.Microsoft doesn’t do everything right but the GitHub acquisition has honestly gone better than I ever expected. Rather than forcing GitHub to adopt Microsoft centric policies, Microsoft has adopted more GitHub stuff, especially from a product POV. GitHub still runs as a separate company (different logins and health care and hiring systems) with its own policies and point of view.The reality is npm was in a bad place and in a land of not good options, this strikes me as the best possibility. I’d rather have GitHub control this and be able to give the resources to npm than a company like Oracle or Amazon or even Google or Facebook to own it. In a perfect world, some independent entity could fund npm out of gratitude but at the same time, consider how poorly npm as a company was run for YEARS and the general lack of direction.So yeah, I’m cautiously optimistic this won’t be fucked up by GitHub — but I understand the concern.As for those worried about Microsoft embracing, extending, and extinguishing. Lol. Even if that was the goal (and I truly don’t think that’s the ethos at all any more), Microsoft is laughably incompetent at achieving that sort of strategy. Google and Amazon have the EEE under lock right now (Facebook too — let’s be glad Zuck didn’t buy this after we saw what happened to yarn), but Microsoft can’t even put coherent dev strategy outside of .NET on Azure.

Swift is Open Source

Github repo is live now. https://github.com/apple/swiftFirst ever commit found here https://github.com/apple/swift/commit/afc81c1855bf711315b8e5...

Boot a linux kernel right inside your browser.

This is demonstrative of the advantages of the new low-level APIs being added to JavaScript to work efficiently with binary data.Fabrice uses this to implement an x86 interpreter -- it could not be done efficiently without typed arrays. However, it is still slow -- imagine what kind of advances could be made if a common bytecode was established that would be JIT'd by the JavaScript VM, and could be output directly by the emulator.This is why so many people want to see the browser execution environment offer more complete, low-level APIs instead of high-level APIs locked to HTML/CSS and legacy browser technology. Efficiently supporting high-performance, high-complexity systems such as an x86 emulator (or a video game, or custom font rendering, or even an application framework) absolutely require efficient low-level APIs.

It’s Time to Build

I'm in the process of reading _Why Nation Fails_. The central thesis is that the rich and poor countries are separated by inclusive vs extractive institutions. The extractive institutions are characterised by elites that attempt to defend their own wealth and status by maintaining the status quo and resisting the creative destruction that may threaten that position.It seems to resonate a bit here, when Marc speaks of things like regulatory capture. I heard a few years back that a US health insurance startup had to provide on the order of 6000 pages of documentation to be approved. No wonder that there hadn't been another provider for twenty years or so. It seems like some things are hard to build mostly because some people want it that way.I can't help but think that there's a fundamental flaw in the American regulatory approach. From the European perspective, the US is sometimes viewed as some time of free market haven, but in practice it often turns out that the regulatory burden is much higher. The framework imposed on financial markets by the SEC and related authorities is on a whole different level in the US, and with higher complexity you a also get a larger surface area for special interests to make their mark.Point being, why not write simpler laws and regulations and leave it to the courts to interpret what adheres to the spirit of it? With the barriers of entry gone, I think we'd see a renewed vitality to many ossified sectors.

Dall-E 2

Preventing Harmful Generations We’ve limited the ability for DALL·E 2 to generate violent, hate, or adult images. By removing the most explicit content from the training data, we minimized DALL·E 2’s exposure to these concepts. We also used advanced techniques to prevent photorealistic generations of real individuals’ faces, including those of public figures. "And we've also closed off a huge range of potentially interesting work as a result"I can't help but feel a lot of the safeguarding is more about preventing bad PR than anything. I wish I could have a version with the training wheels taken off. And there's enough other models out there without restriction that the stories about "misuse of AI" will still circulate.(side note - I've been on HN for years and I still can't figure out how to format text as a quote.)

Donald Trump is the president-elect of the U.S.

It is possible to view this as an isolated event or a trend. Coming on the heels of BREXIT this is a trend.The attempts at building an interconnected globalised world are beginning to fail. A bunch of elites decided to create their own trans-national utopia unchecked by borders and dismissed all criticism as racist or bigoted. The globalisation project has been rejected by a majority of the population. Whether it is for economic reasons or just plain bigotry is something for the sociologists to study and not something I can pontificate on.Also people seem to care a LOT about immigration and preserving their culture. Instead of patronising these people it's time we tried to understand their concerns and try to assuage them.There is no genuine leftist alternative. It's a choice between center-right "left" that's sold out to the establishment and the far right.Economists need to stop acting like priests in the medieval ages who justified the existing order . The rural voter who lost his job doesn't care about the theory of comparitive advantage.If this trend holds this will soon take hold in France and other European nations. This is a return to the world of the 1920s. Not gloom and doom but a much more unstable global order with every country for itself. Not what we need when we face planet scale threats like global warming. Get out of your bubble.Hang out more on subreddits you don't agree with.The divide is bridged one person at a time.PS - Reposted my comment from another thread as it got flagged. Hope its OK with the mods.EDIT: His concession speech seems to indicate that he's beginning to appreciate what he's been entrusted with.

Hosting SQLite databases on GitHub Pages or any static file hoster

Over high latency links this would be virtually unusable. Why not just download the entire database into memory over XHR on page load? SQLite databases of pure data usually aren’t over 10MB in size.

Before buying a NYT subscription, here's what it'll take to cancel it

Imagine having a business model so fragile that your only line of defense is to obscure the cancellation process through these tactics. Do they really think that they can curve their churn this way?I mean best you’re doing is getting maybe another month or so of revenue from a customer who is just pushing the pain of cancelling because they are busy or lazy.And at the end instead of getting what could be a dormant customer who can sign up later again, what you get is someone who hates your company.What an incredibly stupid way to erode the brand of a publication, whose major asset to survive is precisely its brand.

Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview

I met/had a similar experience with Google ATAP in 2013 (was Motorala ATAP then; Google recently bought them) though not for a job interview but to discuss working together to build our tech SpeakerBlast into the Moto X.They asked if we ever thought about selling our technology to them before the meeting and at the meeting they baited us for how our tech worked saying we'd like to work with you tell us how it works. Once we did they left the room (Dugan's 2nd right hand man at the time and another) & 3 minutes later showed us the door saying the "race is on."They have since been awarded patents for audio syncing across phones.Many here will say that's just how Silicon Valley works.... takes advantage and stomps on the little guy innovators & their dreams. That's not professional and I met with many other companies like Samsung who acted with the utmost respect & professionalism towards us. Yet, Google whose motto is "Don't Be Evil," can't act in the same fashion?

I wrote a children's book / illustrated guide to Apache Kafka

Wow this is such a beautiful read. Has anything like this been done before for some other topic?P.S. This sentence is hard to grasp for me "This Unawareness helps Decouple systems that produce events from otters that read events." https://www.gentlydownthe.stream/#/20

Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option when installing Windows

This is incredibly bad.In general I have a positive opinion about what MS is doing lately, but Windows is a glaring exception, it’s getting worse and worse at an alarming rate.In the last two months we had two consecutive updates that broke basic functionality for users who disabled web results in Windows Search (which is a very common setting among those who care about privacy) https://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-10-1903-microsoft-deta...Now, MS is trying to force upon customers this cloud login garbage, which is obviously not acceptable if you are privacy conscious.I build my own PCs and have spent hundreds of dollars in Windows 10 retail licenses, I pay for the service so I don’t want to be the product.I’ve always assumed that I’m locked into using Windows but after all this crap I’m starting to look into alternatives even though they’v got shortcomings on their own.(Edit: replaced Amp link with real link, sorry I didn’t realise it was Amp)

Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend

There was a freakonomics podcast recently about advertising (online and traditional).No one can actually prove it has any ROI at all. No one is willing to run the experiments necessary. In the few cases of natural experiments, where ads got turned off for some people by accident, there was no change in buying behavior.https://freakonomics.com/podcast/advertising-part-1/https://freakonomics.com/podcast/advertising-part-2/

Nokia launches DIY repairable budget Android phone

Does anyone notice the irony of it being partly repairable, while offering just three years of security updates, after which you basically have to throw the thing away? The repairability sounds nice, but it is very irrelevant compared to the limited software updates. Imagine buying a Windows laptop and only receiving three years of security updates. (I know, most other phones aren't better.)It would have been better if they offered slightly longer security updates in exchange of only letting you change the battery. Other things probably won't break anyway before the security updates stop coming in.

Twitter suspends pg's account [fixed]

Wow. PG did not even post any links, he pretty much just said "I have a Mastodon account." And just like that, banned.Looks like now you're not allowed to so much as mention that you use other websites on the internet besides Twitter.

If we lose the Internet Archive, we’re screwed

I'm so sick of modern businesses and their vampire approach on creativity and intelligent property.I see a lot of comments in this thread with what about-isms or "I don't care, we wouldn't miss anything", but these people are short-sighted. And to be honest the hacker news community is frequently the community I loathe to engage in these topics with. Because they are always looking forward with very little respect for the past as well as very little respect for domains outside of technology.The internet archive is a huge boon in intangible value for communities and the world. It represents a huge cultural fountain that is accessible for anyone so long as they have the ability to access a computer.A great example of this is that the Internet Archive was the ONLY place where I could enjoy a completely random piece of lost media from a children's television show called Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. There was a lost episode where OJ Simpson was in it and it never aired because of obvious issues. BUT there was a book published from the production called "White Rabbits Can't Jump"https://archive.org/details/whiterabbitscant00varlI can't imagine being able to go to any publisher or paid streaming service or god forbid Amazon to find this book, and I sure as shit don't believe in this community to help create ecosystems to support finding things like this.I am so sick and tired of the copyright laws that play counter to productive creation and stymying efforts to preserve anything. The fact that I have to wait until people die until copyright is up is god awful. And the fact that I have to read people in this community who sound like boot-lickers for corporate oligarchs and their shitty value adds to the world drives me so fucking insane.I'm only commenting here because I feel it's important to articulate that there are people out there who care, and that the vocal a-holes on this site really miss the point and the intangible value of what the internet archive provides.

Serverless: slower and more expensive

PSA: porting an existing application one-to-one to serverless almost never goes as expected. Couple of points that stand out from the article:1. Don’t use .NET, it has terrible startup time. Lambda is all about zero-cost horizontal scaling, but that doesn’t work if your runtime takes 100 ms+ to initialize. The only valid options for performance sensitive functions are JS, Python and Go.2. Use managed services whenever possible. You should never handle a login event in Lambda, there is Cognito for that.3. Think in events instead of REST actions. Think about which events have to hit your API, what can be directly processed by managed services or handled by you at the edge. Eg. never upload an image through a Lamdba function, instead upload it directly to S3 via a signed URL and then have S3 emit a change event to trigger downstream processing.4. Use GraphQL to pool API requests from the front end.5. Websockets are cheaper for high throughput APIs.6. Make extensive use of caching. A request that can be served from cache should never hit Lambda.7. Always factor in labor savings, especially devops.

Google deletes “communist bandits” from comments on Youtube

I think a more fundamental problem is a single private company having a near-monopoly on various public communication channels, and having financial interests in various global dictatorships.The Founding Fathers could not have predicted this.Google's "We're a private company" get-out-jail-free card cannot continue to apply.

Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study

I conducted a couple hundred interviews for my first FAANG employer, and I was constantly amazed at the percentage of candidates with years of Microsoft or Facebook experience on the resumes who apparently did not know how to program. I always thought, 'huh, guess I know why they quit after 3 years, amazing that they all lasted this long."Then I interviewed for another company and utterly bombed. It became suddenly clear to me that I had been an idiot. Of course nearly all of those candidates were perfectly good programmers. They had had shit interviewing days, probably mostly due to nerves, but they probably would have mostly been perfectly good employees. How frickin' arrogant I had been for concluding that people who couldn't solve incredibly high stakes algorithm riddles on a whiteboard in 45 minutes with enough speed and flair were somehow not qualified to be my coworkers.

Apple's child protection features spark concern within its own ranks: sources

In their attempt to make this extra private by scanning 'on device', I think they've managed to make it feel worse.If they scan my iCloud photos in iCloud, well lots of companies scan stuff when you upload it. It's on their servers, they're responsible for it. They don't want to be hosting CSAM.It feels much worse them turning your own, trusty iPhone against you.I know that isn't how you should look at it, but that's still how it feels.

YC Research

> I’m going to personally donate $10 millionStatements like this always turn me off. I guess it's because it breaks the illusion that Sam and everyone else at YC are normal people like most of us. They're not. They're INSANELY wealthy by any reasonable standard.

Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private

Smelled this one coming miles away.Next, they'll hand over fan-built communities to the entities that own the IPs they're dedicated to. Eg. r/starwars to Disney, r/startrek to Viacom/Paramount, etc.Then, old.reddit.com will stop working spontaneously, just like how they toyed with killing mobile browser access to force users to download the app, which they probably will eventually. That's going to be the final push for a lot more users. The academics, for certain.Give it a few months, it'll be like FaceBook, Twitter, Tumblr. Ad and bot ridden ghost town, devoid of all creativity - nay, devoid of actual information at all. Just a sinking ship with people still getting off.Aaron Swartz is rolling in his grave.

GitHub Codespaces

Must be fun for @sytse to watch these GitHub announcements every year, where they consistently release the same thing GitLab rolled out two years prior.Codespaces -> https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/web_ide/Insights -> https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/insights/GH Actions -> https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/etc

The Heartbleed Bug

There was a discussion here a few years ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2686580) about memory vulnerabilities in C. Some people tried to argue back then that various protections offered by modern OSs and runtimes, such as address space randomization, and the availability of tools like Valgrind for finding memory access bugs, mitigates this. I really recommend re-reading that discussion.My opinion, then and now, is that C and other languages without memory checks are unsuitable for writing secure code. Plainly unsuitable. They need to be restricted to writing a small core system, preferably small enough that it can be checked using formal (proof-based) methods, and all the rest, including all application logic, should be written using managed code (such as C#, Java, or whatever - I have no preference).This vulnerability is the result of yet another missing bound check. It wasn't discovered by Valgrind or some such tool, since it is not normally triggered - it needs to be triggered maliciously or by a testing protocol which is smart enough to look for it (a very difficult thing to do, as I explained on the original thread).The fact is that no programmer is good enough to write code which is free from such vulnerabilities. Programmers are, after all, trained and skilled in following the logic of their program. But in languages without bounds checks, that logic can fall away as the computer starts reading or executing raw memory, which is no longer connected to specific variables or lines of code in your program. All non-bounds-checked languages expose multiple levels of the computer to the program, and you are kidding yourself if you think you can handle this better than the OpenSSL team.We can't end all bugs in software, but we can plug this seemingly endless source of bugs which has been affecting the Internet since the Morris worm. It has now cost us a two-year window in which 70% of our internet traffic was potentially exposed. It will cost us more before we manage to end it.

Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

> I drastically reduced the time developers spent repairing those failures, but there were no metrics that tracked developer time.For several jobs in a row, I've felt that helping others on a team is undervalued and under-recorded. I've been planning to implement the "assist" metric, similar to basketball, on my own team for a while.The idea would be something along the lines of everyone gets a set of assist points they must distribute to people who help them the most.While I don't love the idea of gamifying it, all the places I've ever worked have had too strong of a reverse incentive towards individual achievement, especially when it comes to promotion, and not nearly enough support for teamwork in specific and measurable ways.Anybody have experience with teamwork metrics like this, or others that worked or didn't work?

Tesla Cybertruck

I feel like I am taking crazy pills with the amount of good sentiment to this design. This thing is absolutely fugly. The guys over at Rivian must be having a party right now.

Supreme Court Overturns Roe vs. Wade

I'll be the begrudging devils advocate for a decision that is sure to have devastating consequences for poor women in red states.It is good for unelected bodies like the Supreme Court to allow such dividing issues be figured out democratically. The US house has bled power to the other 3 institutions and of them, the judiciary is the least democratic. Ofc, my support for this change assumes that this Supreme Court will show restraint towards political activism (in either direction) in general. Call it naive, but I'll wait and see.States rights has always been a double edged sword. You can't have your cake and eat it too. The same state rights that allow gun control and homosexuality to be locally legalized before national concensus; also now lead to abortion legislation being a state issue.The sad part of democracy is that it aims to represent the views of the voting majority. If the voting majority truly cares about access to abortion then we will hopefully see enough democratic traction to give them the mandate needed. Now, the rural republican votes counting for more in the senate is a huge issue and threat to democracy that the US needs to figure out if it ever wants to represent the views of the people. But, the Supreme Court should not be responsible for managing dysfunction in other branches of govt.My personal opinion is that polarization has pushed both sides to be completely antagonistic towards each other. 'Own the libs, fuck the deplorables', no compromise. The jaded side of me says: vote in more moderates that are willing to strike compromises. Crazed jesus Republicans and hyperprogressive activists are terrible people to put into national office. They gain power by antagonizing and being unhelpful roadblocks for change, all while asking for the most stubbornly impossible outcomes.In the long run, history will have a dim view of this era of global polarization with all political sides to blame.

Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test

I'm amazed he knew things in such detail. I mean who would know just how long a MAC address is? Or what the actual SYN/ACK etc tcp flags are? You just need to know what they're used for, and if you need the specifics, you'll find out with a single search. He seemed to know that as well though. Kernighan for bit twiddling algos, that kind of thing.It's a bit strange to have someone non-technical interviewing a techie. You end up with stupid discussions like the one about Quicksort. If you point out qs is one of several things with the same big-O, you'll probably also get it "wrong". But the real problem is that a guy who is just reading off a sheet can't give any form of nuanced feedback. Was the guy blagging the sort algo question? Did he know if in detail? Does he know what the current state of research on that area is? There's no way to know that if your guy is just a recruiter, but I'm sure even a relatively junior coder would be able to tell if someone was just doing technical word salad.I wonder what would happen if ordinary people recruited for medical doctor jobs? Would you be comfortable rejecting a guy who'd been in medical school for 10 years based on his not knowing what the "funny bone" is? Wouldn't you tell your boss that you felt a bit out of that league? It's amazing you can get someone to do this without them going red in the face.

Heroku's Ugly Secret: The story of how the cloud-king turned its back on Rails

This is Oren Teich, I run Heroku.I've read through the OP, and all of the comments here. Our job at Heroku is to make you successful and we want every single customer to feel that Heroku is transparent and responsive. Getting to the bottom of this situation and giving you a clear understanding of what we’re going to do to make it right is our top priority. I am committing to the community to provide more information as soon as possible, including a blog post on http://blog.heroku.com.

A uBlock Origin update was rejected from the Chrome Web Store

It's time to switch to Firefox as my main web browser. It's faster and generally more efficient than Chrome plus it has the most important extensions.The most surprising thing is that the Android version of Firefox is excellent. So good that I switched from Chrome a few months ago when this expected news first dropped. No ads on mobile is awesome.

WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

I'm an Alaska (relatively) frequent flyer. That airline offers a free "messaging" plan, that lets you send and receive messages on apps like iMessage, Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp. Though, it somehow prevents images/attachments from coming through on those platforms.I've always wondered how this is implemented technically, and if it might be possible to setup some kind of protocol/wrapper to send data that looks like it's being sent over those protocols, but offers access to other parts of the internet.

Paper Airplane Designs

Imagine my surprise when I'm reading down the HN list like I do every day and I stumble upon my own website. Thats a pretty cool feeling! Im happy to answer any questions people may have. This was my Angular learning project back when Angular just came out. I think Angular ended up being the wrong choice for this project, but it works and I learned Angular, so its all good.

FTC Sues Facebook for Illegal Monopolization

I feel like instead of pushing for the companies to separate, congress should pass laws mandating [adversarial interoperability](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interopera...). Then the data (including the social graph) really would belong to the users, and facebook would have to compete with multiple other “social network clients” that would rapidly emerge. Facebook would lose some monopoly profits, but in the long-run they might even make more money - they have a lot of very smart practical engineers (at least based on seeing their approach to writing libraries e.g. react vs angular, pytorch vs tensorflow etc.) So if forced to compete, I think they would do just fine, particularly because I believe that the ecosystem would develop faster in the presence of real, and actually grow the market beyond what it would otherwise be.

Show HN: I 3D scanned the interior of the Great Pyramid at Giza

Semi-related, the Great Pyramid was also scanned using muon radiography, by which a "big void" was discovered [0]. Muons can penetrate through a lot of material, so they can see through very large, thick things like the pyramids.Muon tomography was also used to scan the Fukushima reactors [1] and see where the fuel ended up.[0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1711.01576.pdf [1] https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/RS-Muons-suggest-location...

Facebook loses users for the first time

This is how the narrative of Facebook looks to me:Zuckerberg got lucky and then executed brilliantly, transitioned from nerd hacker to CEO amazingly well. He deserves a lot of credit for that.Since then, Facebook have innovated very little. Zuckerberg recognised this, and bought Instagram and Whatsapp in lieu of building an innovative company. The latter is clearly really difficult to do.Without a stream of new ideas and products (unlike, say, Apple) Facebook double-downed on maximising revenue growth from their core advertising business. This led to all the scandals and disasters they have brought us, including destabilising societies.Inevitably, this led to the core product becoming less attractive, and people were also turned off by the negative press. Zuckerberg's rigid control of the company has led to him being a lightening rod for the backlash against big tech and especially adtech. His media skills are awful, so insisting on control and making himself a figurehead has further damaged the business.Zuckerberg knows the only way out is another home run. He's a super smart and prescient thinker, so he can see VR is a good play. It looks like the timeline for VR won't be short enough to save FB, but even if it were arriving soon enough he must know that FB probably isn't capable of delivering a truly new thing.This then marks the beginning of the end for the company, as it continues to bring in revenue from Instagram and monetises Whatsapp. Its sheer size means decline is going to take decades.I wouldn't be surprised if Zuckerberg leaves in the next few years, before the failure of Meta strategy becomes apparent.What they _should_ have done is debatable, but developing some sense of ethics might have helped. I think they could have focused on building Whatsapp into a payments (etc) app, which would have created an enduring product, and then used the time that bought them to rebuild the company.Microsoft are showing that it can be done, but I wonder if Facebook has the capacity to do great things. Perhaps the lesson from MS is that only a new leader can rescue such a mired company.

Unlimited Kagi searches for $10 per month

Three years ago, I migrated from Gmail to FastMail because I was afraid of losing access to my digital life on Google's whim.Two years ago, I found out that my favorite Youtube creators were all on Nebula.One year ago, I switched my phone to LineageOS to get security updates a little longer.A month ago, I installed OpenStreetMaps because Google Maps got really bad at showing points-of-interest.And today, Kagi removed the only obstacle that kept me on Google Search. I'm looking forward to building my filter list.After accidentally de-googlifying myself, I might ditch Windows next. It feels really nice using products that respect me, as opposed to services that are actively hostile because of advertisers.

SpaceX to Send Privately Crewed Dragon Spacecraft Beyond the Moon Next Year

Wow. This sends so many thoughts cascading through my head that I'm dizzy.Some things to consider, China has been working up to getting a space capability to send people to the Moon with the full backing of the government funding, by 2035[1]. They started in 2003. SpaceX was founded in 2002 and they are saying they will fly someone around the moon next year? Dragon has the deltaV to land on the moon (not sure if it has enough to get off again though) and SpaceX certainly has the expertise in building spacecraft that land.The next person to take a picture of the Earth from moon may not be on a government funded mission. That one really blows my mind. For so long it was only countries that could do something like that, now it is nearly within reach of individuals.The UN has treaties about claiming (or not) the moon by a nation state, but there isn't anything about a privately funded and established outpost that wants to declare independence. All this time I imagined that some country would establish a base there, and grudgingly offer up some space for non-state use, and now there is this possibility of a private facility that states have to ask permission to visit? That is priceless.[1] http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2016/04/29/man-on-the-moo...

Farewell, Google Maps

"Sudden change of policy by Google, which is directed specifically at startups (as smaller web sites should largely remain below even the new lower thresholds), is surely an unpleasant surprise for us and does not create much trust in Google as a vendor. In the future we would therefore keep our distance from Google Cloud and avoid deep integration with any Google services on which it can pull a similar trick. For example we would be wary on taking free Google Analytics for granted."I think this is one of the most important points in the article - the way they handle these pricing changes destroys trust in Google's other business offerings. How can people use Google products and services as a core piece of their infrastructure when they're willing to bump their prices >10x with only a few months of notice? That could literally be a business-ending event, depending on how core that service is to the business.In the case of maps, there weren't many great alternatives for a long time, due to Google sucking all the oxygen/profit potential out of the field with their excellent free offerings. Fortunately, their last (sudden) price bump seems to have allowed the creation of some good alternatives.

Richard M. Stallman resigns

RMS was defending his friend who, at the age of 74, is accused of having sex with a 17 year old girl on a billionaire's private island.There is not a defense for what RMS was writing or how he was trying to defend Minsky.The prevalence of comments trying to turn this against "SJW"s or whatever "other" they can because they're a fan of RMS is disturbing.This isn't us vs. them.This is a man who said something wildly inappropriate in an MIT forum and got fired. He deserved it. Defending him by pointing towards people who overreact to things is a bit terrible.The firing was appropriate and reasonable, not a response to extremists, zealots, or some other kind of witch.I welcome anyone to provide a counter-argument.

Sir Clive Sinclair has died

RIP Sir.I was gifted the 48K when I was 6 yrs old - it changed my life. I am here because Sir Sinclair built a machine whose setup instructions said:Now that you have set up the computer, you will want to use it. The rest of this booklet tells you how to do that; but in your impatience you will probably already have started pressing the keys on the keyboard, and discovered that this removes the copyright message. This is good; _you cannot harm the computer in this way._ Be bold. Experiment. If you get stuck, remember that you can always reset the computer to the original picture with the copyright message by taking out the '9V DC IN' plug and putting it back again. This should be the last resort because you lose all the information in the computer."You cannot harm the computer in this way."That single sentence started a life long journey. I doubt I would have been bold enough at that age to mess around with one of our most valuable possessions.

Everything that uses configuration files should report where they're located

This is the central problem with all programming today.You can think of everything as configuration. Parameters of a function are just configuration for that function.What we need is traceability of every value in a system, not just configuration. You click on any value and you see a graph/chain of all the transformations this data goes through right back to the source of truth. This is how we should code. Think about how difficult this is to do today with your current IDE/editor.Every task in software is wanting to change what is displayed in a user interface of some sort. Usually you have to make your way through a labyrinth to figure out what to change where, and also what side-effects will occur.If this is not smack bang in front of your face when you are coding, then you are just adding more and more tangled data flows and complexity to your system.

UC terminates subscriptions with Elsevier in push for open access

One of the reasons you are probably seeing this happen are budget cuts. Major university systems have seen their funding be cut by state governments. Elsevier charges an obscene amount of money to access information that is often publicly funded.If money were no object, you'd probably see less university systems rejecting Elsevier. But money is becoming a bigger issue.Ultimately, this is starting to put major university systems in line with individual users, and we should see an explosion of open-access information in the next decade.Remember when Harvard University said it can't afford journal publishers' price: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/apr/24/harvard-univ...

The top-ranking HTML editor on Google is an SEO scam

Same story for various Wordpress plugins and widgety things that live in site footers.Google has turned into a cesspool. Half the time I find myself having to do ridiculous search contortions to get somewhat useful results - appending site: .edu or .gov to search strings, searching by time periods to eliminate new "articles" that have been SEOed to the hilt, or taking out yelp and other chronic abusers that hijack local business results.

Paul Graham: SOPA Supporting Companies No Longer Allowed At YC Demo Day

Am I the only one thinking that this is censorship too?edit: censorship

Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?

There's a bus station across from my studio / coworking space. I can see people waiting for the bus and doing either: 1) staring into the void 2) looking at their watches 3) desperately glancing in the direction where the bus is coming from.I figured that it'd be nice to let people know when the bus is supposed to be there. So, I installed a 28" display on a monitor stand, installed the stand on my window frame, turned the monitor to face the bus station, and show the up-to-date arrival time in a very big font (the buses have GPS; the Pi gets the real time info from the local transit authority).This is in Montreal. Some info here [0]. And a little video [1].[0] https://greg.technology/#bus [1] https://youtu.be/pc16oPb5zW0

Jessica Livingston

So, what's her secret?Is it something you can learn, is it experience, x-ray vision you either have or have not? Are women better suited for this job?What clues are you looking for while talking to founders?Is there something like a 'perfect' character or does she make a list of positive and negative traits?Are some traits more important than others?

Ruth Bader Ginsburg has died

I think reading about Ruth and Antonin Scalia's friendship was the most wholesome political reading I've ever done. Hearing people divided in opinion, but not bitterly so, working together to figure out the best framework to construct American society from was inspirational. I hope the two halves of the political world can become friends in the way they were.Rest in peace Ruth. I hope if there's an after you and Antonin are living it up.

EU approves internet copyright law, including ‘link tax’ and ‘upload filter’

>However, those backing these provisions say the arguments above are the result of scaremongering by big US tech companies, eager to keep control of the web’s biggest platforms.This is the most hilarious quote in the article. The only thing this will do is entrench massive players like Google and Facebook who already have these systems in place. I honestly cannot comprehend how anyone could support this law while having any understanding of how the internet works. Do these politicians really not understand the awful implications of these filtering systems for free speech and fair use? Just look at the abuses that already happen with the existing systems and now we have to spread this across the entire web, absolutely insane.A truly sad day for the future of a free internet in Europe.

A Sister’s Eulogy for Steve Jobs

OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW.One can only wonder what he was referring to. Such a well written piece.

GitLab sees huge spike in project imports

For people wondering what makes GitLab any different, the answer is that GitLab is an open source product at its core. This means that anybody can run their own instance. If the company ends up moving in a direction that the community isn’t comfortable with, then it’s always possible to fork it.There’s also a proposal https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/4517 to support federation between GitLab instances. With this approach there wouldn’t even be a need for a single central hub. One of the main advantages of Git is that it’s a decentralized system, and it’s somewhat ironic that GitHub constitutes a single point of failure.In theory this could work similarly to the way Mastodon works currently. Individuals and organizations could setup GitLab servers that would federate between each other. This could allow searching for repos across the federation, tagging issues across projects on different instances, and potentially fail over if instances mirror content. With this approach you wouldn’t be relying on a single provider to host everybody’s projects in one place.

Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

This goes to show how hard winning Turing award is. One would have expected someone who invented the most useful invention of the 20th century to have won this award long time ago. Maybe I am just overvaluing www because of the impact it had on people's lives.EDITED: 20th century, not 19th.

Namecheap: Russia Service Termination

We haven't blocked the domains, we are asking people to move. There are plenty of other choices out there when it comes to infrastructure services so this isn't "deplatforming". I sympathize with people that are not pro regime but ultimately even those tax dollars they may generate go to the regime. We have people on the ground in Ukraine being bombarded now non stop. I cannot with good conscience continue to support the Russian regime in any way, shape or form. People that are getting angry need to point that at the cause, their own government. If more grace time is necessary for some to move, we will provide it. Free speech is one thing but this decision is more about a government that is committing war crimes against innocent people that we want nothing to do with.

Breaking down Amazon's mega dropdown

Hey all,I'm on the team that built this. We also built the redesign that launched last year. In fact, this was part of that. The article pretty much nails our implementation.Point of fact: Our team is recruiting. If you dig UX projects like this, shoot our manager Chad an email: chaddes at amazon dot com

A first look at Unreal Engine 5

In the past, I have always looked at Demos from Games and thought this is very good and getting close to movie quality. But that "close to" remained "close to" for quite some time. Even though It is improving every year but you can still tell it is gaming graphics. Even if some of the shots are not real time and pre rendered, they are still gaming like.That Unreal 5 Demo was the first time ever I thought this is Hollywood Movie quality GFX ..... ( Apart from the Character ). IT IS STUNNING! And this is done Real time on PS5!Edit: I am sorry for the tone and block capitals.... I am seriously geeking out.

GitHub is fully available in Iran

Github situation aside, as an Iranian (living in the US) I would like to use the opportunity to raise some awareness regarding Iranian sanctions by the US government.The US sanctions are part of a "maximum pressure" campaign on the Iranian government. The US government has banned the rest of the world from dealing with Iran. Therefore, Iran has no exports anymore.As a result, Iran's currency lost it's value ~10 times in the past decade (When the original sanctions where started by the Obama administration).The goal of the sanctions are to make people of Iran so miserable that they would go in streets and start a revolution. Now, Iranian people hate the Islamic Republic and would get rid of them if they could. But the Islamic Republic has no limits. They would shoot and kill and many as it takes.Another challenge for Iranian people and a revolution, except for Islamic regime's cruelty is an unknown future. Iran shares a lot of border with Afghanistan and Pakistan. Iran also has many terrorist groups activated inside it already. That means there are real fears of Isis/Taliban/Other groups rushing to Iran if the central government is weakened.So people are scared of Islamic Republic, and also scare of what can come next.Therefore, basically, Maximum Pressure campaign's goal is to make people so miserable, they'd rather face bullets/wars.This has lead to some really devastating results. Middle class doesn't exist anymore. Some rural cities are reporting that people cannot pay for bread anymore. Most people cannot pay for chicken/meat anymore. Add Covid 19 to this, and a very incompetent and cruel government which has been rendered completely useless by the sanctions, and you get a complete disaster on your hand.The government is also quite scared, and to make sure there wont be uprisings, is spreading fear. They execute people and hand cruel sentences to everyone. Last weeks they gave a 10 years sentence to an 18 years makeup artist who had a famous Instagram account. Journalists are executed, etc. People's morale are completely shattered.So the bottom line is, the maximum pressure campaign has rendered Iranian people completely miserable. Even if it were to succeed wit topping Islamic Republic, there is no guarantee that it wont make Iran another Syria situation. Please, as a U.S. voter, I urge you to consider your support for stopping the sanctions.

NPM and Left-Pad: Have We Forgotten How to Program?

Holy moly-- is-positive-integer/index.js: var passAll = require('101/pass-all') var isPositive = require('is-positive') var isInteger = require('is-integer') module.exports = passAll(isPositive, isInteger) I retract my previous statements that Javascript programmers are going down the same enterprise-y mess that Java programmers went down a decade ago.They've already taken it to an entirely different level of insanity.