Hacker News Reader

Trisellon Tech’s Next Revolution Might Be Open Source Semiconductors

I think the bigger thing for Open Source Chips is going to be the expiration of a ton of the x86 patents next year. That is going to free up a whole host of people to take a look at trying to build A better open x86 processor. Maybe then we can finally get to having a truly open source server from chip through software.

Trisellon How to undo almost anything with Git (2015)

You should be able to run a command that cleans the git tree of the file in all commits. I’ve had to do it because of committed passwords in files.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/35115585/remove-file-fro...

Trisellon Show HN: Hacking on a VR desktop inside of a VR desktop [video]

This excites me. I’ve wanted to build a renderer like this for a while. The current display model is outdated. We no longer have a reason to be limited to a monitor. Either VR or AR is the visual path forward to provide us with a better work environment as we continue to become more and more of a digital workforce.

Trisellon Ask HN: Do you write tests before the implementation?

We ran screenshots and looked for a percentage same. Because 100% is almost impossible. Where it saved us over snapshots was we were using MUI and they introduced a breaking UI change that our snapshots didn’t catch the change. And the screenshot did because the menu was no longer hidden. But the code hadn’t changed.

Trisellon A turf war and a botched contract landed two pentesters in Iowa jail

TBH. It’s more the governments fault. These local jurisdictions are constantly undergoing terrorism training from the state and federal governments. When I was a firefighter we constantly trained for NBC and other types of terrorist attacks and were required to have a mandatory amount training regarding other types of incidents that could all be caused by terrorism. It’s been a basically constant drumbeat by the state and federal governments since September 11.

And honestly the pentest company should have thought twice before conducting this type of test on September 11th. Any anniversary date of a major terrorist attack is a potential day of a second copycat attack.

Trisellon Ask HN: Do you write tests before the implementation?

I’ve had really good luck with react UI testing using Jest and React Testing Library and throwing in UI screenshot testing.

At my previous job we eliminated selenium from our testing suite. We found that good UI unit and integration testing caught 99% of the bugs and the bugs that did make it through most likely wouldn’t have been caught by selenium so the added time wasn’t worth it.

Trisellon SpaceX launches another 60 Starlink satellites while setting two reuse records

I’m not sure that Starlink is supposed to make money. I think it’s another part of the get Musk to Mars plan. If you are going to a planet with unknown resources what is the easiest way to bootstrap communications. Is it bury 100k of km of wire? Or just plug a bunch of “cheap” satellites into a low Mars orbit? Makes total sense in that light to try it here. I’m not convinced these plans and products are designed to make money as much as bootstrap humans living on another planet.

Trisellon Private firefighters go to work for California's wealthy

I see a lot of people talking about the privatization of firefighting and the future. In this case there is a big difference between the two types of firefighting that is being talked about.

1. The first type of firefighting is your traditional city structure firefighting departments. These are the ones we see most of the time in the movies(Backdraft, Ladder 49). These are government funded by local and municipal taxes. They traditionally provided structure and medical services to a city. While the firefighting portion of these departments has stayed public the medical(ambulance) services have been heavily privatized for years. Due to the large migration we have seen of people wanting to live closer to nature, wildland Urban Interface firefighting has become a service that these traditional structure departments have stepped up to provide as they have expanded their boundaries to provide services to the ever increasing number of homes that have been built outside of the traditional city landscape.

2. Wildland firefighting has traditionally been paid for and managed by the Federal Government. Last I saw around 40% of wildland firefighting resources are privately owned. This includes fire engines, water tankers, showers, food caterers, hand crews(20 man crews that dig fire line in an attempt to contain the fire), tree fallers(loggers who are brought in to fall dangerous trees), air tankers, and helicopters. This particular part of firefighting has been privatized for 20+ years and the Federal government shows no signs of changing this trend anytime soon.

There is also a lot of talk of people leaving the structural "public" fire departments to go private. In my experience the trend is actually the opposite. Private firefighters are generally significantly underpaid compared to their government counterparts. When I was working for the Federal government 15 years ago, I was making a base wage of $15-$20 an hour, if I went out on a fire I got $2 an hour hazard pay for the entire day. If I went over 40 hours in a week I then was paid time and a half and anything over 80 was double time and a half. If I got sent out on a fire for a 14-21 day tour I would work 16 hour days for 14-21 days straight and just be raking in the money. My private crew counterparts were making somewhere between $7-$12 dollars an hour and were only getting time and a half over 40 hours.

Source: Spent 10 years as a volunteer structure and wildland firefighter.

Trisellon Mozilla’s 18-month effort to market without Facebook

I’m in my mid thirties. I work with a teen program. To get in touch with them I have to use Instagram or Snapchat. All of my friends that are my current age or older. They are all still on Facebook posting memes and political rants. I think it still makes sense to target Facebook. They have the larger share of the 30+ crowd that most businesses see as their target audience.

Trisellon Big ISPs aren’t happy about Google’s plans for encrypted DNS

I’m working at a company and they want to do a massive amount of logging from our companies IOS app. Basically log everything in the name of security. I made the statement today what does legal think about the data we would be now storing? It has user locations, gps coordinates, all the other fun stuff you can get from a users phone. They all looked at me like I was crazy for even asking that question. And I don’t think a single person in the room the devs included had even though about the personal data we were going to be able to collect. And if we SHOULD be collecting it.

Trisellon What ORMs have taught me: just learn SQL (2014)

That’s how I’ve done it on my last two projects. We used TypeORM for the standard repeated simple queries, and then wrote custom SQL for our complicated queries that the ORM failed at and then just executed them with the ORM. It was really nice and made for easier table refactors because we didn’t have to go through and audit every query that was calling that table.

Trisellon Troubles with the AWS web console

I’ve been working at a company where I have had to fight with the infrastructure team because they see no reason why I would need programmatic cress to do anything on the cli or with the sdk. The reason why. They don’t use it so why would I?

Trisellon Flight risk: can we take the carbon out of air travel?

I wish we had these. Crossing Europe on one was magnificent. The issue is with states being what they are it would take something like the Eurotrain system and that won’t happen in our country any time soon. There just isn’t the desire to do this in this country. :(

Trisellon Should Failing Phish Tests Be a Fireable Offense?

Rohyt Belani, CEO of Leesburg, Va.-based security firm Cofense (formerly PhishMe), said anti-phishing education campaigns that employ strongly negative consequences for employees who repeatedly fall for phishing tests usually create tension and distrust between employees and the company’s security team.

This is the key. If you think security teams aren’t hated enough for having to change your password every 90 days. Just wait until their “games” are the reason for people getting fired. This is a guaranteed way to get your users to not only not want to help you. But actively work against you. And if enough people scream the C ring will eventually listen. And I don’t think the security team will win.

Trisellon As Suicides Rise, Insurers Find Ways to Deny Mental Health Coverage

Mental health problems are seen as a weakness in this country. It's very anti the American way to:

1. Have a mental health problem

2. Seek help for a mental health problem

This leads to insures being able to deny this, and it not seen as a negative, because it's denying something that's weak. And weakness in the USA is the ultimate sin. Homelessness/Joblessness also fall under this same belief system.

Trisellon U.S. Farmers Are Being Bled by the Tractor Monopoly

Outside of the large corporate farms I think you are going to see an increase in farmers continuing to refurbish older tractors that are pre computers and then begin to retrofit those tractors with third party systems that won’t give them complete vendor lock in. A good example is Welker Farms. They run Big Bud tractors from the 70s refurbish them every decade or so. And have added in gps guidance and other things as 3rd party mods. Also they have a great YouTube channel[1].

1 https://www.youtube.com/WelkerFarmsInc?uid=tKUW8LJK2Ev8hUy9Z...

Trisellon We Don't Have a Talent Shortage. We Have a Sucker Shortage

I agree. But these tests do nothing to validate that I can be a useful programmer on a team. Nothing about those types of questions prove that I’m unable to build a viable web app. I’m not applying to be a embedded programmer just continuing to do what I’ve done for years.

Trisellon We Don't Have a Talent Shortage. We Have a Sucker Shortage

I agree every interview I’ve had has just been a variation of a coder wars puzzle with no help and asking for help renders you an inferior programmer not worth their time.

Trisellon We Don't Have a Talent Shortage. We Have a Sucker Shortage

I've been looking for jobs recently. Have a background building pretty robust Node/React apps. At the 4 places that have given me an interview. I've been told that I don't meet their needs. The reason for this. I'm unable to solve their pet coder wars function challenge. Being a self taught programmer, not having a 'learned' background has proven to be a hindrance. Because I don't have the traditional algorithmic chops. In the time I've been working as a programmer I've had the need to use recursion one maybe two times. 3 of the 4 interviews have required me to over use recursion because iteration is to 'easy'.

Apparently my ability to answer some random function that in no way shows my ability to do day to day engineering work disqualifies me from employment. Yet these same companies are posting month in and month out looking for engineers and complaining that they are unable to find viable employees.

Trisellon Amazon ‘flooded by fake five-star reviews’ – report

My wife uses it for our family as well. If you watch you can catch really good sales as well.

Trisellon You Are Not Google (2017)

I would love to know as well.

Trisellon Apple announces Apple Card credit card

Most people miss the point that for a rewards card to pay you. You have to pay off the balance every month. And missing that by even a single month at 10%-21% interest that you get charged. You are more then likely to loose money even with the rewards.

Trisellon A guide to threads in Node.js

Honest question. Are we going to be able to pass functions with data to threads? Or are these only designed to use files? Which makes this feel like a better wrapper on the child process api that already exists.

Trisellon Cockpit voice recorder of Lion Air jet depicts pilots' frantic search for fix

Again we are seeing a more systematic issue that commercial pilots don’t have stick and rudder skills. Automation has taken over 95% of the job. They push the throttles up to take off power, pull back on the stick, and then punch the auto-pilot and sit back and enjoy the ride. Then they don’t fly or input anything into flying until landing where they again fly the plane for the last 3-5 minutes of the flight. I would be interested to see the experience level/age of the pilots. As I think the retiring generation of pilot was much more equipped to deal with this type of issue. Then the new generation of pilot. I included an article lamenting this decreased skill we are seeing. It’s refering to the Miracle on the Hudson. But I think it applies here as well. [1]

[1]https://nymag.com/news/features/53788/index1.html

Trisellon Kickstarter’s staff is unionizing

Due to a supreme court case you can opt out of having your union dues used to support the political machinations of your union.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2015/08/26/not-just-in...

Trisellon Azure Data Studio: An Open-Source GUI Editor for Postgres

It seems that you can opt out by adding, '"telemetry.enableTelemetry": false' to your setting files[1].

[1]https://github.com/Microsoft/azuredatastudio/wiki/How-to-Dis...

Trisellon U.S. to ground Boeing 737 Max 8

I find it scary that Trump had to issue an Executive Order to get this to happen. It tells me that the FAA no longer cares about safety, but is more interested in corporate interests over the lives of 180+ people at any given time.

Trisellon U.S. to ground Boeing 737 Max 8

It sounds like he had to go to an Executive Order to get the FAA to comply.

Trisellon Uber’s self-driving car unit was burning $20M a month

I feel like we are going to look back at Uber in like 10 years as the 'golden age' of startups. Where money was no object and it only mattered how much you 'produced' on your way to an IPO.

In 20 years we will have the Wolf of SV movie about Uber.

Trisellon Researchers find trapdoor in SwissVote election system

Here is a thread[1] from one of the researchers. She spells out what they have found. I think the most damning quote is.

“Do not let people minimize this issue. This isn't "some random hacker can steal an election" this is "SwissPost can prove they didn't steal an election, even if they did"

[1]https://twitter.com/sarahjamielewis/status/11053782573171916...