HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

pipingdog

188 karma · joined December 25, 2017

submissionscomments
pipingdog··on Amazon's killing a feature that let you download and backup Kindle books
The changes to their whatsits are likely certificate expiration related.

For the longest time the rumor was that backward compatibility was mandated (through certificate gymnastics) by Jeff because Mackenzie had a 1st gen Kindle that she adored. I reckon nobody any longer gives a shit about that.

pipingdog··on Two months of feed reader behavior analysis
It's important to consider that an online service's poor behavior is amortized over it's user base (or all of the users who subscribe via the service's local copy of a given feed), so it _could_ be worse, if all those users were fetching the feed themselves.

It's also the case that a service wants to ensure they have the freshest copy or impatient users could bail somewhere else, or just do it themselves.

But, there's certainly an opportunity for a service to perform analysis on feeds to see the rate at which they're likely to have more content, as well as take cues from metadata.

At the end of the day, RSS isn't a protocol, and feed providers are just as wild west as consumers.

pipingdog··on Nanos – A Unikernel
Tangent: I have an earnest interest in learning about methods for installing software obtained from the internet which would be any more secure than this.
pipingdog··on Open source supply chain security at Google [video]
The lack of consensus is on what an SBOM is for. Even the NIST recommendation which came out of Executive Order 14028 had little guidance on how to apply SBOM .

At any sort of scale, it isn't clear how an SBOM shipped with each package can be consumed to any great effect.

A central database of all dependencies, on which queries and analysis can be performed, however, can be very useful, and in a large software shop, I've seen it used to rapidly get a very real sense of the company's exposure to events like the Log4j debacle.

pipingdog··on UK opposition leader targeted by AI-generated fake audio smear
It would be hilarious if the fear of being faked turned out to be the final blow to demands for privacy.
pipingdog··on Associated Press clarifies standards around generative AI
A replacement for artists, on the other hand... (the graphic for the article was quite obviously AI generated.)
pipingdog··on The Amazon Prime Day 2023 AWS Bill
Logging, metrics, distributed action trace.
pipingdog··on Not Using Zoom
I'll go out on a limb and propose that end-to-end encryption and many-to-many real-time multimedia communication are two things that aren't often combined in a single product.
pipingdog··on We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google. Here’s what it says
You can read the paper too: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922
pipingdog··on Help make mass surveillance of entire populations uneconomical
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33444223
pipingdog··on How Will the Universe End?
The universe ends when entropy reaches maximum and all information takes the form of popular science articles.
pipingdog··on Screenshots as the Universal API
Found it: https://fosstodon.org/@ross/109671294741113929
pipingdog··on Screenshots as the Universal API
I recently saw a post on Mastodon where someone figured out they could build a simple Automation[1] on their iPhone to assist them in avoiding foods that contain allergies. They take a picture of the label, then the automation OCRs the text and searches for $ALLERGEN.

It seems the technology for making "screenshot APIs" a less zany proposition is emerging.

[1]: https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/create-an-automation-...

pipingdog··on Screenshots as the Universal API
I use this technique to build a personal dashboard. Rather than try to scrape data, then come up with a nice presentation for it, I just find a nice representation on the web for the data I want on the dashboard, then use Puppeteer[1] to automatically screenshot the specific DOM element that contains the thing I want. Works like a champ.

[1]: https://github.com/puppeteer/puppeteer

pipingdog··on A Curious Integral
If you want to get a flavor of the article without being too much of a math person, you can watch the 3Blue1Brown video linked in the article, which captures a similar surprise that for certain values a formula maps exactly to a "round" quantity, then starts to diverge after a while.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=851U557j6HE

pipingdog··on Ask HN: Contingency plans for a lead dev no longer avail?
Don't be indispensable, that's irresponsible.
pipingdog··on Freeform: a new app designed for creative collaboration
> This limits collaboration to those in the Apple ecosystem.

Not only that, it limits collaboration to those running only the newest version of iOS/MacOS.

pipingdog··on Ask HN: How is your company training you to become a better developer/engineer?
I wish people would stop using the "10x" term, as it is meaningless. Nobody can articulate what x is or even what units x should be in. I won't even start--and nor should I need to--on "engineer."

The value of a person engaged in software development is highly context dependent. In the last year as an "engineer" in my previous role, I made a single code commit. A one line configuration change as part of an ops rotation. When I announced I was leaving, my supervisor (and his supervisor) was sad. They threw me a party with a customized cake. How was my contribution being measured? I wasn't managing people. I wasn't coding. But I had "built" multiple products.

Someone once asked me "how do you explain to your parents what it is you do at work?" I replied "I can't even explain it to my boss."

People regarded as 10x in one situation will enter another situation and appear to fail miserably.

pipingdog··on U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why
Without understanding precisely what is being measured, it is useless to try to understand why the metric is moving in whatever direction it is moving. This is hand-wringing and trying to blame the workforce for a collapsing bubble.
pipingdog··on What If the Team Hates My Functional Code?
That there's nothing to stop another developer from coming along and putting another for loop inside it.
pipingdog··on A Bit of Z80 History (2021)
From the point of view of the user, I wish this was more true than it is. Cloud users have a specific thing they want to get done, and ideally, the cloud should do that and get out of the way. And yet, there's still room for specialists to "get close" to the cloud and have an expertise in glueing cloud services together to make a product.

From the point of view of cloud providers, standing up a cloud service is enormously complex, filled with interesting distributed computing problems, especially under scale, diverse tenancy (and the predators that attracts), diverse workloads, and creative consumers finding ways to use it that you hadn't considered.

pipingdog··on Employers’ Use of AI Tools Can Violate the Americans with Disabilities Act
ML is a technique for discovering and amplifying bias.

Applying ML to hiring shows a profound lack of awareness of both ML and HR. Especially using previous hiring decisions as a training set. Like using a chainsaw to fasten trees to the ground.

pipingdog··on My favorite things about working at companies with a culture of writing
This sentiment is why software developers should not be called engineers.
pipingdog··on Rockstar: a language for programs that are also hair metal power ballads
This is why I wanted to create a project called Tenex or 10x.
pipingdog··on Using Rust with Elixir for code reuse and performance
It’s also important to note that a NIF can bring down your whole BEAM.
pipingdog··on I hate almost all software (2011)
People are amazing at predicting the future, and in some ways we are better at it than remembering the past. That's because we use the same machinery to do both. We partly remember the future, and predict the past. This ability breaks down with complexity and abstractness, as well as with novelty, all of which are involved in software (I can tell you that the sun will come up tomorrow, and where I should move my hand to catch a ball, but I can't predict all of the defects my software will have--though if it involves X.509 certificates, I can tell you exactly when a particular sort of outage will occur)
pipingdog··on The Azolla Event
So, Azolla sequesters enough carbon to turn the greenhouse earth into icehouse earth, creating conditions favorable for humanity to evolve and dig it all up again.
pipingdog··on A Victoria man has gone two decades without money
A man with sufficient free cash flow but no capital.
pipingdog··on The Impedance Mismatch Test: Is Your Data Layer a Complex Mess?
If you scroll to the end you need not merely hope.
pipingdog··on Salesforce completes acquisition of Slack
Perhaps Stewart, Cal, and co will start work on a game next.
Page 1 of 3Next →