Hacker News Reader

brutuscaton Amazon's Lumberyard game engine is now open source

Amazon’s move here is a boon for anyone interested in developing open-source tools for 3D game engines (that can then be used by game developers), but a bust for anyone financially invested in Lumberyard becoming a competitor to Unity or Unreal Engine

brutuscaton Data portability, the forgotten right of GDPR

ZKP all the way https://www.aepd.es/en/prensa-y-comunicacion/blog/encryption...

brutuscaton Java Is Underhyped

Not sure how things are now, but I would rather use Ruby via JRuby and still benefit from most of the Java ecosystem but using the much more higher level abstractions of the Ruby lang.

Many years ago I discovered that I could use all the Java components just like that: https://speakerdeck.com/brutuscat/jruby-experiences

brutuscaton Why machine learning algorithms are hard to tune and how to fix it

> Nothing of this article is novel. You might already be aware of everything we wanted to say. However, we have the impression that most machine learning curricula do not discuss optimisation methods very well (I know mine did not), and consequently, gradient descent is being treated as the one method to solve all problems. And the general message is that if an algorithm does not work for your problem, you need to spend more time tuning the hyper-parameters to your problem.

brutuscaton Bitcoin consumes more electricity than Argentina

> It’s pretty clear by now that, looking just at costs (without getting into the detail of the actual type of pollution), mining gold is ~50 times more expensive than mining bitcoins AND running the bitcoin network. Bitcoin pollutes far, far less than gold.

> mining gold is ~50 times more expensive than mining bitcoins

> It’s even harder to compare the type of pollution created by mining gold versus mining bitcoin. What’s easy to do is to simply state that mining gold is MUCH WORSE than mining bitcoins. Mining gold is an environmental disaster. Poisoned waters, solid waste, endangered communities, and so on. Producing gold for one wedding ring alone generates 20 tons of waste.

https://simon.medium.com/bitcoin-and-pollution-the-definitiv...

brutuscaton LauncherOne liquid fuel light-class and air-dropped rocket reaches space

> On its second launch attempt after a propulsion problem prevented its light-class air-dropped rocket from reaching space last year, Virgin Orbit will try to deliver 10 experimental CubeSats into orbit as soon as Sunday on a mission booked by NASA five years ago for $4.7 million.

FYI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LauncherOne

I wonder how this affects the price to put cargo on space? How much cheaper than SpaceX offering this is?

brutuscaton Show HN: I built an intercom for my 6 yo to keep us connected during quarantine

I’m also very happy. I was reflecting about the speedy nature of tech changes. Now no one “remembers” land lines AF of these were from there 50s or before (I guess they are?). What’s next? Currencies? Over the air tv? Gasoline? What things that we take for granted will disappear, obsolete 20 years from now?

brutuscaton Show HN: I built an intercom for my 6 yo to keep us connected during quarantine

At least in Argentina it was not because of the infrastructures, it was because of the telefonica monopoly. Once deregulated, private companies came and in few years most middle class families could have a land line, cable tv and Internet.

brutuscaton Show HN: I built an intercom for my 6 yo to keep us connected during quarantine

How old are we all now that we talk about this as if it where ancient stuff? I remember my grandfather tell me about how they used to gather around the radio to listen to the radio shows (or whatever these were called...). Incredible how something like a land line phone is now a thing of the past (not so distant!). In Argentina it was not until the lates nineties that most people have access to a phone at home. Now everyone has a mobile phone. The power of technology evolving at exponential rate I guess!

brutuscaton Europe's night trains are on track for a resurgence

You should look at how the new low-cost high speed trains is looking now in Spain. The high speed rails are now open to the market and a Madrid-Barcelona ticket would be around 10 EUR (12ish USD) and a 2:30h trip. https://www.ouigo.com/es/en/barcelona-madrid-train

I really look forward to this deregulation (it was about time for Renfe to have real rivals) and I think it will be a huge added value for the people, that Spain has the second longest high speed train network in the world. I guess we'll see how it evolves in around 5/10 years...

brutuscaton Adobe has released the last Flash update ever

For everyone fond and nostalgic of any flash content, the Internet Archive is now emulating Flash animations (using Ruffle https://ruffle.rs), games and toys in their software collection.

https://blog.archive.org/2020/11/19/flash-animations-live-fo...

brutuscaton EU countries team up for semiconductor push

I do agree with you (at least I used to), but lately I've been very reluctant to anything "made in USA" (e.g. the American dream). The sheer amount of injustice that happens there is just way to much. I am not sure I would be able to sleep comfortably living in a country where I would be making 7x or 8x what other families are making at the expense of leaving them with no safety net whatsoever.

Freedom at times kinda looks a lot more like selfishness.

The EU has a lot of other problems, but at least people here does not have to think twice before doing "normal things" like going to the doctor. I mean it is primarily important to think about one self, I get that, but what happens to others is really important and will affect us eventually!

PS: I left Buenos Aires in 2009, now I live in Spain, even though here it is not perfect at least I can sleep without regrets.

brutuscaton Why do printers still suck?

I would not want to endorse any company, but we've been using HP Instant Ink quite successfully since we knew the existed and we are really happy with how that resulted. It is actually pretty cheap for us, 3 EUR per month and we get 50 prints per month and these accumulate if you don't use them. They even send you the ink before you run out of it and they take the empty ones for you to recycle. Great value for the customer if u ask me!

brutuscaton VSCode on Google Colab

I wonder how this is different from Eclipse Che? http://www.eclipse.org/che/

brutuscaton I just lost 1,400 BTC

Until you can't https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corralito

brutuscaton Robust T cell immunity in convalescent individuals with asymptomatic Covid-19

> SARS-CoV-2-specific memory T cells will likely prove critical for long-term immune protection against COVID-19. We here systematically mapped the functional and phenotypic landscape of SARS-CoV-2-specific T cell responses in unexposed individuals, exposed family members, and individuals with acute or convalescent COVID-19. Acute phase SARS-CoV-2-specific T cells displayed a highly activated cytotoxic phenotype that correlated with various clinical markers of disease severity, whereas convalescent phase SARS-CoV-2-specific T cells were polyfunctional and displayed a stem-like memory phenotype. Importantly, SARS-CoV-2-specific T cells were detectable in antibody-seronegative exposed family members and convalescent individuals with a history of asymptomatic and mild COVID-19. Our collective dataset shows that SARS-CoV-2 elicits robust, broad and highly functional memory T cell responses, suggesting that natural exposure or infection may prevent recurrent episodes of severe COVID-19.

brutuscaton Lost Generation: The Relay Computers

Even though I only scanned the article, many of those computers appear in Turing's cathedral G.Dyson[1], book which I enjoyed, given that there is not a lot of history lessons at the universities (at least the one I went to in Buenos Aires... UBA).

[1] https://openlibrary.org/search?isbn=0375422773

brutuscaton BBR, the new kid on the TCP block

First saw it at the morning paper: https://blog.acolyer.org/2017/03/31/bbr-congestion-based-con...

This is the story of how members of Google’s make-tcp-fast project developed and deployed a new congestion control algorithm for TCP called BBR (for Bandwidth Bottleneck and Round-trip propagation time), leading to 2-25x throughput improvement over the previous loss-based congestion control CUBIC algorithm.

brutuscaton Mass Extinction and the Structure of the Milky Way (2013)

Originally, astronomers had the idea that the arms of a spiral galaxy were material. However, if this were the case, then the arms would become more and more tightly wound, since the matter nearer to the center of the galaxy rotates faster than the matter at the edge of the galaxy. The arms would become indistinguishable from the rest of the galaxy after only a few orbits. This is called the winding problem.

Lin and Shu proposed in 1964 that the arms were not material in nature, but instead made up of areas of greater density, similar to a traffic jam on a highway.[3] The cars move through the traffic jam: the density of cars increases in the middle of it. The traffic jam itself, however, does not move (or not a great deal, in comparison to the cars). In the galaxy, stars, gas, dust, and other components move through the density waves, are compressed, and then move out of them.

brutuscaton Fathom: a framework for understanding web pages

Older submission https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12060787

brutuscaton CERN experiment discovers five new particles

Yes, you are right, I miss read those paragraphs...

brutuscaton CERN experiment discovers five new particles

Professor Tim Gershon, Professor of Physics at University of Warwick and UK spokesperson for the LHCb experiment: “After the LHCb experiment is upgraded in the next long shutdown of the LHC (during 2019-20), it will be able to move to the next stage in the search for new particles: namely, doubly heavy baryons. These states – which contain two charm quarks or two beauty quarks or one of each – have long been predicted, but never yet observed. Their discovery will help to address important unsolved questions about how hadrons are bound together by the strong interaction.”

So I would assume that yes they have been predicted and is opening the doors for further confirmations?

brutuscaton JSON Web Tokens should be avoided

Should we use Hawk + Oz[1]?

[1] https://hueniverse.com/2015/09/19/auth-to-see-the-wizard-or-...

brutuscaton Introducing Cloud Functions for Firebase

BTW AWS Lambda do have concurrent execution[1] limits which by default seems to be set to 100 per region[2]

[1]https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/concurrent-exec...

[2]https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/limits.html#lim...

brutuscaton SQLITE: JSON1 Extension

Not quite a lot apparently.... https://www.scribd.com/document/225906827/Software-Defect-Or...

https://theholyjava.wordpress.com/2015/01/26/challenging-mys...

brutuscaton Ask HN: What languages and technologies/tools are you using right now?

- PHP 5.6.x

* Composer https://getcomposer.org/ * Zend :( * Codeception testing framework http://codeception.com/

- AngularJs 1.4.x

* composer asset plugin (to avoid bower) https://github.com/fxpio/composer-asset-plugin * Shrinkpack https://github.com/JamieMason/shrinkpack (to avoid npm issues) * AngularUI https://github.com/angular-ui (Router, Bootstrap) * Bootstrap 2 & 3 * Ckeditor 4.4 * Lodash https://lodash.com * Moment.js http://momentjs.com/ * Numeral.js http://numeraljs.com/

- Swagger http://swagger.io/ - Git LFS https://github.com/github/git-lfs - Algolia - Gulp :( - Ruby 2.3 * Rake https://ruby.github.io/rake/ * Guard https://github.com/guard/guard * Data Anonymization https://sunitparekh.github.io/data-anonymization/

- MySQL 5.7 (AWS RDS) - Chef 11 - AWS Opsworks - AWS CloudWatch (Logs, Metrics and Alarms) - Ubuntu 14.04

Look forward to : - Upgrade to PHP 7.1 - Upgrade to Chef 12 - Upgrade to Ubuntu 16.04

brutuscaton Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

Thank you! I started to think on those lines too thanks to the Carl Sagan's Contact novel. That was the first thing that came to mind.

Now the question is, what if there are "objects" more advanced than others and what if advanced-object sends a message concealing an trojan horse? I think this question was also brought up in the novel/movie too...

I think this is a real life and practical show stopper to develop this concept...

brutuscaton Alan Kay on the misunderstanding of OOP (1998)

Yes, I agree.

And it also reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_contract and one can see how different block-chains need different interpreters to understand what computation are needed in order to "execute" the message.

About intential programming, see DCI http://www.fulloo.info/

>The essence of object orientation is that networks of collaborating objects work together to achieve a common goal. > The common sense of object oriented programming should reflect this essence with code that specifies how the objects collaborate. Our industry has, unfortunately, chosen differently and code is commonly written in terms of classes. > A class tells us everything about the properties of the individual objects that are its instances. It does not tell us anything about how these instances work together to achieve the system behavior.

brutuscaton Shutting down persona.org in November 2016

https://www.indolering.com/dnschain-is-harmful

From the article:

Update I’ve written a more-up-to-date technical overview of okTurtles, DNSChain, and Unblock.us. While the security model for DNSChain has improved, they are still misrepresenting the security parameters of their software.

I’m going to leave this up since it debunks what DNSChain was selling. I also think their resistance to outside security concerns is very troubling.

TL;DR

DNSChain erroneous claims to have passed a “peer review” process. However, its most important peers, Namecoin developers, have rejected it. This has been the reaction of every Namecoin developer who has evaluated the project (over four at this point). The project misrepresents its security model, its design is unfixable, it should not be used in any nonlocal capacity.

brutuscaton The Web We Have to Save

What about http://ipfs.io/

> IPFS is a new hypermedia distribution protocol, addressed by content and identities. IPFS enables the creation of completely distributed applications. It aims to make the web faster, safer, and more open.

> The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is a peer-to-peer distributed file system that seeks to connect all computing devices with the same system of files. In some ways, IPFS is similar to the Web, but IPFS could be seen as a single BitTorrent swarm, exchanging objects within one Git repository. In other words, IPFS provides a high throughput content-addressed block storage model, with content-addressed hyperlinks. This forms a generalized Merkle DAG, a data structure upon which one can build versioned file systems, blockchains, and even a Permanent Web. IPFS combines a distributed hashtable, an incentivized block exchange, and a self-certifying namespace. IPFS has no single point of failure, and nodes do not need to trust each other.