Hacker News Reader

mleonhardon Autodesk criticised by 35 named architects (2020)

Big companies usually don't innovate. And when they lose customer focus, they create opportunity for new companies to bring new & better products to market. For example, https://www.modumate.com is from a startup in SF, founded by a young architect.

mleonhardon GM makes $1,500 subscription mandatory on GMC, Buick, Cadillac Models

https://www.onstar.com/us/en/user_terms

> 26. Data Collection / Privacy. GM collects, uses, and shares information from and about You and your Vehicle. The GM Privacy Statement describes what GM does with that information. You consent to the collection, use, and sharing of information described in the Privacy Statement and in any revisions to the Privacy Statement, which may be modified as described in that document.

https://www.gm.com/privacy-statement

> We may collect information about you and your vehicle, such as name, address, email address, phone number, vehicle identification number (VIN) and vehicle performance data ...

> We may share your information ... with our business partners.

With OnStar, they now to track where you drive, how fast you drive, how you accelerate & brake, where you shop & eat, which friends you visit, what apps you use (over wifi), whether you text while driving, and what you listen to (over bluetooth). The value of this data is probably at least $20/mo per vehicle. GM probably sells this data directly to LiveRamp (formerly Acxiom) and other tracking companies.

mleonhardon Launch HN: Wolfia (YC S22) – A mobile app emulator you can share with a link

Nice. I think you should do your own Show HN post. Your website needs your name and company info.

mleonhardon Google Launches Carbon, an Experimental Replacement for C++

In Rust, types implement the Copy trait and the Drop (destructor) trait independently. Vec could easily implement Copy. It doesn't because copying a Vec requires an expensive heap allocation, which can surprise users when it happens implicitly.

mleonhardon Take more screenshots

I'm writing Swift code that calls Apple's UIKit. I'm constantly wasting time trying to figure out how to use the API properly, since it's buggy and poorly documented. Each solution brings relief, not euphoria.

mleonhardon Detroit’s new personalized flight information board is straight out of sci-fi

This company will bring personalized ads to the highway, bus stops, malls, and restaurants. They will make a lot of money and use most of it to record what we look at and how long, and store it forever.

I predict that these ads will eventually be like Tiktok. Every moment that your eyes pause on an ad will be recorded. They will use the data to pick videos that are better at holding your attention. The videos will be super interesting or shocking, with ads interspersed.

Eventually, the system will use deepfake tech to insert ad content into your tailored videos. As you walk past a shoe store, your eyes linger for a second on a particular shoe style. Half a block later, the bus stop ad shows the latest Tiktok fad video but the people are wearing the shoe style you looked at.

Eventually, the video ads will cause a lot of vehicle accidents and will get banned on roads. Then the billboards will show static ads, but still personalized and still recording your gaze as you drive by.

Some people will die from exposure after standing in front of ads for too long. There will be lawsuits. School districts will sue to have the adboards removed from near schools. Vending machines will let you pay by watching ads.

The ad companies will categorize people as desirable and undesirable. When an undesirable is standing in front of a billboard, the system will show a blank screen or a disgusting video to make them leave.

With so much face & eyeball data, the billboards can pick audio or a video+audio tracks to maximize their income. A group of teenagers are watching a music video on the board. The audio suddenly switches to an ad for expensive men's clothing, just as a wealthy man walks around the corner in earshot of the board.

Directional audio tech will add personalized audio to the adboards. Adboards will increase volume to reach people across the street. Cities will get much louder. Vandals will use spray glue to damage directional audio systems.

Personally, I don't want my physical movements and eye gaze recorded. Only regulation can prevent it. We need regulation now, before the companies get too powerful.

mleonhardon When rustc explodes

You can use Servlin to make an HTTP server with sync Rust. I made it.

https://crates.io/crates/servlin

mleonhardon FBI Child ID App

California destroys the newborn's blood sample when the parents ask [0], but their privacy policy says that sometimes they don't do it [1]:

> You have a right to ask the Newborn Screening Program not to use or share your or your newborn’s information and/or specimen in the ways listed in this notice. However, we may not be able to comply with your request.

[0] https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/CFH/DGDS/Pages/nbs/MyBabysB...

[1] https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/CFH/DGDS/Pages/nbs/nbsnpp.a...

mleonhardon MIT engineers fly first-ever plane with no moving parts (2018)

Ozone burns everything it touches. It smells nice while it destroys cells in your nose, throat, and lungs.

Ozone-producing consumer devices are banned in California. They are legal to sell in other places because of the negligence of regulators.

mleonhardon I analyzed more than 7M developer jobs

Where did the scanner find 4,000 Rust jobs? During my recent job search, I found only five: zed.dev code editor, systeminit.com devops tooling, fly.io, Microsoft security tooling, and Tesla car simulation. I excluded cryptocurrency, embedded, and some really cool jobs in Europe.

mleonhardon Electric fan car shatters the Goodwood hill climb record

Why do you think a car could not create a vacuum quickly? Airbags deploy quickly. Seatbelts tighten quickly. An emergency vacuum could use three parts: a deployable skirt, a device to create the initial low-pressure, and a fan to maintain it. The speed limitation is the speed of sound (340m/s), which takes only 1 millisecond to propagate through 1m of distance from the car to the ground.

mleonhardon Ask HN: What tone to use in code review suggestions?

Even when you express it clearly, many juniors won't understand and will feel frustrated. Some things can't be taught and must be experienced. Every junior developer must work on a crufty legacy codebase to develop understanding and habits for writing maintainable code.

Large companies pick experienced internal transfers for shiny new projects and hire externally for unglamorous legacy systems. Since all new grads are external hires, they end up starting out on legacy systems.

I recommend that junior devs start out at Amazon. They will learn a lot of important things in a year or two: the pain of technical debt, the value of automated tests, the pain of production issues when you're on call, that working overtime is not rewarded and does not solve job insecurity, and that switching companies is a great way to get more experience and earn more money.

mleonhardon Electric fan car shatters the Goodwood hill climb record

Could fans become a standard safety feature of all cars? It could activate only when needed, when the driver needs to swerve suddenly or when the tires begin to lose traction due to ice/oil/hydroplaning. Hazard detection systems could activate the fan early.

mleonhardon Detecting unauthorized physical access with beans, lentils and colored rice (2021)

These topics are interesting. Do you have links to more info on them?

mleonhardon Meta-analysis finds children with myopia experience higher levels of depression

I don't have access to the article's text. The abstract and summary do not say anything about inaccurate prescriptions for glasses. Would you please explain how their results and analyses support your bold claim?

mleonhardon Meta-analysis finds children with myopia experience higher levels of depression

You claim that using a slightly wrong prescription will harm your eyes and make eye problems worse. This is a bold claim. Your first link contradicts you, stating "The underlying biological cause of myopia is unknown, and there is no widely accepted means of prevention or cure." Please provide some analysis that backs up your claim. Please refrain from posting bold claims as fact without references. Such posts are boring to read.

mleonhardon Launch HN: Astro (YC W21) – Build your own dev teams in Latin America

Congratulations on launching. I'm considering hiring a DevOps engineer to share oncall for my solo startup. I need to know salary bands. Do you plan on providing this info?

LatAm is a big place and I don't read Spanish or Portuguese so I expect finding the info will be challenging. Levels.fyi has only Brazil, lists salaries in local currency, and has no info for DevOps engineers. Glassdoor lists large bands. For example, the bands for DevOps Engineer are USD 18k-75k in Rio de Janeiro and USD 14k-25k in Belo Horizonte. Glassdoor's salary bands don't account for English skills.

mleonhardon Ask HN: Are there senior devs who liked switching from static to dynamic typing?

Most of the cost of systems comes from maintenance. Most maintenance effort is spent reading code and trying to understand it. Types are documentation that speed up reading and comprehending. They're documentation that cannot get out of date because they compiler checks them. Don't think of type signatures as boilerplate or extra verbosity. Think of them as electromagnets waiting to accelerate future you.

Professionally, over about 12 years, I have used Java, C++, Golang, Rust, Dart, Python, Perl, and Swift. Since learning Rust, every other type system seems slightly broken. Fixing a red-underline takes a few seconds. Debugging runtime errors takes 10-times as long. And debugging runtime errors in a long CI run can take 100-times as long. Because static types let us catch errors earlier, they speed up writing and changing code.

mleonhardon A Trail Tale

Wikipedia has a little info on the pollution from the zinc factory [0]. There's a PDF describing the government's remediation work [1], which finished in 1995.

The pollution killed all microbial life, so the trees and dead vegetation could not decay and just lay on the ground for decades. There's a creepy photo in the PDF.

EPA developed a soil treatment and tested two ratios of ingredients. One ratio was good for grass and the other worked for trees. Finally, they used the average of the two ratios. They hoped that it would allow grasses to grow quickly and prevent rain from washing away the treatment and still allow trees to grow later. I'm curious if trees were finally able to grow. I think the answer is no, since there were few trees after fifteen years, when you visited in 2010.

Perhaps the ratio was good, but some areas (like the ridge) lost too much of the treatment material by erosion before grasses could grow and stabilize the soil? EPA could follow up and order a re-application of the treatment in the affected areas.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lehigh_Gap#Lehigh_Gap_Nature_C...

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20070929101630/http://www.biosol...

mleonhardon Bluetooth signals can be used to identify and track smartphones

Does this mean that a listener can know whether the phone is indoors, outdoors, in a warm pocket, or held in the hand?

mleonhardon Researchers discover way to 3D print directly inside the body without surgery

Ultrasound is already used to treat kidney stone disease [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidney_stone_disease#Lithotrip...

mleonhardon Show HN: Seal – Verifiable timestamp for your private ideas

I'm working on a text-based protocol for making and verifying timestamps of documents and live-streams. It uses SHA3-512 only. https://github.com/mleonhard/tokimark

mleonhardon Show HN: Can you lose at Wordle if you tried?

SPOILER WARNING. There seems to be a bug. I guessed 'rhyme', 'build', 'tonal', and 'local'. Then it said that I must use an UNDO. It doesn't let me enter 'vocal' and 'focal' to win.

mleonhardon Why the Cantillon Effect Creates Communism

> COVID stimulus showed how the lubricant for a globalized socialism was the monetary printing press.

Economic stimulus comes from taxes and bonds, not from printing money. This is a grave error that casts a pall over the entire article. I stopped reading.

mleonhardon Why, oh why was this added?

Code reviews often provide missing context. Unfortunately, git does not store code review comments. We need a FOSS source code manager that integrates code review data.

mleonhardon Investing in lighting did great things for my mental and physical health

Be careful of UV exposure from aquarium coral lamps.

mleonhardon Jasonette – Native App over HTTP

Which licenses will DocUI have? Is your code published anywhere?

mleonhardon Jasonette – Native App over HTTP

What are the major disadvantages?

mleonhardon Bugs are evolving to eat plastic, study finds

> The first bug that eats plastic was discovered in a Japanese waste dump in 2016.

In 2009, a Taiwanese high-school student (Tseng I-ching) discovered a bacterium that decomposes polystyrene [0]. I think she deserves credit for starting this field of research.

[0] https://taiwantoday.tw/news.php?unit=10,23,45,10&post=15307

mleonhardon A deep dive into .forever domain registrations

These .forever domains don't work for email or websites. To use them, you must configure your router with special DNS config. The FAQ [0] has a technical explanation that most people won't understand. I think this is dishonest, false advertising.

> Do .forever domains work in a browser like a website?

> .forever is a top-level domain in the Handshake root zone, so you will need a Handshake resolver in order to view .forever domains. We created Fingertip, an easy to use menubar app to simplify this. It uses HIP-5 to delegate subdomain management to our fork of ENS.

[0] https://foreverdomains.io/