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I think the scariest thing about this is if this was a PR stunt, the release of an unknown vuln could be completely controlled by whoever knew about it. Best case scenario is a relationships between Microsoft and the five eyes. It could have just as easily been China, a independent group or whatever. It's even possible that the top of Microsoft and/or NSA might not even know. But if it wasn't planned, no one would admit it anyway.

cliqueiqon Patch Critical Cryptographic Vulnerability in Microsoft Windows [pdf]

Thinking with my tin-foil hat: Same date as windows 7 last patch right? Not sure if this was a risk decision or an intentional message.

cliqueiqon Visa Buys Plaid

https://fin.plaid.com/articles/inside-ach-payments-with-stri...

"""To get started with ACH payments, you need a system that can connect you (the originator of the ACH transaction) with an Originating Depository Financial Institution (ODFI). Additionally, that system should be able to give updates on the status of the payment and give the developer an interface to authenticate, verify, and charge the user on demand.

That’s where Stripe comes in. In January, the payments infrastructure giant debuted support for ACH payments through its platform alongside a partnership with us here at Plaid. Now, Stripe users can authenticate their customers through Plaid (or, if they must, micro-deposits) and then charge them through ACH."""

Am I misunderstanding something?

EDIT:

Okay so maybe they weren't doing the transfers, but they were certainly facilitating them and adding to the adoption of more ACH based payments (which means less credit-card payments). Same conflict of interest applies. What does Visa care about bank account verifications?

cliqueiqon Visa Buys Plaid

I see a lot of hate for Plaid here. I was my understanding that the only reason you would really ever use Plaid is because they were able give programmatic access to flat-rate fee ACH payments of basically any size. Obviously they were never something you could compare to Stripe. I wonder what's gonna happen with in the near future, especially considering Plaid was obviously stepping on the toes of the interchange-rates of the likes of Visa.

cliqueiqon Ask HN: How do you guys stay motivated if you don’t feel like working?

Adderall. I said it.

cliqueiqon An idea from physics helps AI see in higher dimensions

I thought quantamagazine was above publishing click-bait, but I guess not.

Neural networks already see in "higher dimensions" (whatever that means). Anyone who's ever used neural networks already knows each neuron's branch (i.e. dendrite) of an N-sized vector can already be though of as a "dimension" of a data set. CNN (convolutions) flatten that data (reduce it or seeing the same pattern over less "dendrites", much like PCA, etc.).

CNNs only make sense when working with image data anyways.

cliqueiqon Broot – A new way to see and navigate directory trees

you can just vim into a dir and get a collapsible tree. i don't see any reason to invent yet another tool for something tree -f | grep foo can do. More supply chain hell, more useless tooling, more bloat IMO, prob for some junior dev's "portfolio"/"resume".

cliqueiqon Ask HN: Making a mobile app as a back-end developer?

And also nothing a competent software person should waste their time on.

cliqueiqon Ask HN: Making a mobile app as a back-end developer?

I was a back-end & full-stack guy for some time, doing things from ETL stuff to pipe-lining more colorful things interfacing with things from search, other analysis, etc... I started doing more "real" software development midway into college and was lucky (or maybe unlucky) enough to be able to develop my skills with a pretty full-stack spectrum (now doing things with Dart, React, to Python, Java, Docker, ES, Reddis, Helm, Jenkins, K8, AWS/GCP, etc, etc...).

I love Java (literally the best). Django is easy. Go is alright. jQuery & Bootstrap are great. Moving into heavy UI i.e, React/Redux, the entire JS ecosystem, mobile fragmentation, absurd, pointless policy changes in the UI world are absolutely 10x more annoying, difficult, arbitrary, meaningless, buggy, and horrible than anything back-end. TensorFlow, Unstructured-Data, NoSQL, CI/CD? No problem. You have an API, documentation that works, Linux systems that are consistent, predictable, repeatable. UI/UX? Changes every day. Docs from 2 years ago often don't work. Lower barrier to entry, lower quality ecosystem. Security & supply-chain nightmare. Fragmentation for no reason other than large corporations focusing on bottom lines and leaking core-rot. It's a insult to time investment.

I can build a full-stack, horizontally scalable, complex, awesome system with whatever tools you want I can guarantee you that no matter what you throw at me, I'll spend prob 75% screwing around with JS bugs, mobile garbage, awful ecosystems, and pointless garbage that at the end of the day comes down to nitpicking about pixel performance and arbitrary platforms.

I know I'm not the only who's wasted countless hours of my own time, clients money, companies time, and real-end-user money and value on things that were shiny and interesting to a PM or UX team and ended up sinking over half the cost of project on effectively nothing. The people that make the decisions don't understand it, because UI/UX is literally all they can "see". It's insanity. If I ever start a company, I'd love to model it off a concept like Stripe; such a beautiful concept of a beautiful idea run by some of the smartest guys out there, all based entirely off an API. No play-store policies, shifting trends, corporate politics, useless garbage, pure JS developers maintaining random repo's for tools that don't need to be built.

If you're smart, be like Amazon, Google, Facebook and every other huge idea: Make an unresponsive, useful front-end and just say no to fancy UI. Amazons website is an glorious defiance to the quite frankly disgusting culture of what robs real engineers time and resources away from something like curing disease, balancing equality, providing security, and focusing on things that could actually make the world a better place. Look at this site right here. Look what happened to Reddit.

If it's more than Bootstrap and you're not funded, just say no to UI/UX. JUST SAY NO.

EDIT: There's probably some good takeaways from the book "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Do yourself and the world a favor by not feeding this economy of engineered over-complexity and willful-ignorance, especially in this day in age. Our species might be about to go extinct. There's more important things to do. Seriously.