rococode

He said in a fairly recent AMA:

> My code no longer goes into shipping products so I am rusty. I do like to try the new tools to understand how they help. I just did a review of the low-code tools where there is a lot of great innovation.

https://old.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/m8n4vt/im_bill_gates_...

Keep in mind there are thousands of lawyers out there whose job is to write software patents or litigate for big tech companies. I'm sure there are plenty of lawyers not working in tech who know about tech stuff just out of curiosity, but the ones who are in tech definitely know much more than surface-level things.

Tokyo!

Pros:

- Safe almost everywhere even at night and generally very clean

- Infinite amount of things to do, you'll never finish exploring new restaurants (with delicious food) and stores

- International events happen there: conferences, concerts, etc.

- Very walkable (including the metro), especially around city center

- Reasonable housing prices - high, but comparable to cities in the US

- Politeness is baked into society and unpleasant interactions with strangers are very rare

- Rest of the country is fairly accessible by train for a weekend trip, and there's plenty of beautiful nature if you get out of the city

Cons:

- Difficult language and few people speak any English

- Fairly closed society/culture, you'll always be an outsider (but there are plenty of expats)

- Toilets in restaurants often suck and public trash cans are rare

- Bureaucracy is quite bad and inaccessible if you aren't fluent in Japanese

- Work culture is bad, though being remote could make that a non-issue

Some runner ups:

- Lisbon (excellent weather, low prices)

- Copenhagen (super safe, great quality of life)

For me though, the top 3 criteria by far are 1) a lot to do, 2) very safe, and 3) don't need a car, and Tokyo is pretty much the only major city that meets those.

I learned today that Eric (ConcernedApe) does the music for his games too... Music, art and graphics, storytelling, and game development all in one dude, what a talent.

These recommendations are pretty arbitrary and don't even attempt to scratch the surface of what is actually materially different between the JDKs. Don't use Corretto outside of Amazon... why? Don't use Dragonwell because... China bad? Use Red Hat OpenJDK if you're running on Red Hat servers, Microsoft OpenJDK if you're on Azure, SapMachine if you're on SAP, because... the name matches so that's nice? At least they're consistent on that point. There are (generally pretty niche) reasons to pick specific distros, but those reasons certainly aren't discussed here.

I feel like the actual decision process is fairly straightforward in nearly all cases:

- Use whatever vendor happens to be most convenient to install. If nearly everyone using your OS is installing Java one way, and you're installing it some other unusual way, you should be crystal clear about why exactly you need to do that.

- Generally go with JDK 11, if you may have to deal with older software then maybe go with 8, if you want the shiny new stuff and don't mind some extra hassle then go with JDK 17 (it's not well-supported by everything yet).

That's pretty much it. There are exceedingly few cases where it actually matters whether you installed Corretto or Oracle OpenJDK, and in those cases you'll likely end up either testing all the JDKs anyway to make your decision or writing your own patches for whatever you need.

Absolutely love my Dygma Raise. Link for anyone interested: https://dygma.com/

My only gripe with it is that I wish the wrist pads were detachable - not because of the quality (which is good), but because I use a keyboard tray and they're a little bit too big for the amount of space I have. Also agree that an F-row would be nice, though I've gotten used to layer shifting for extra keys. I even have a layer that puts the letters on the right side of the keyboard onto the left side, so when I need to click around a lot while typing I can type using my left hand only and leave my right hand on my mouse.

The thumb cluster is perfect and the software does everything I need it to do. Customer support is great. And with their silent linear switch option (Kailh Silent Pinks), typing is very quiet and suitable for even an open office. No problems typing at full speed on it either since it's not an ortholinear layout, I was hitting my usual WPM (~135) the day I got it.

When I started running I found this guide to be helpful and realistic for my starting point as a beginner: https://i.imgur.com/iWVU9vc.jpeg

Basically working your way up from "I can't run for longer than a minute" to "I can run 30 minutes nonstop".

I feel people said the same thing about him for SpaceX and Tesla back when he was just the wacky PayPal guy. Remember SpaceX's first launch was in 2006 (before the iPhone existed!) and it's only started getting really serious traction in the past 5 years. Elon's no stranger to things that don't have any "useful form" for well over a decade. I'm quite certain he's aware of the realistic timelines, and he sells a different story in the press for the sake of fundraising and PR.

I think he's really got figured it out tbh - as long as he expects the technology to exist at some point, the fact that he's parked a big chunk of cash in the idea gives him an advantage. It's like he's reserved a spot for his company to exist when the tech exists. His team doesn't necessarily have to be the one actually making breakthrough innovations in order to be in a good position to reap the advantages of said innovations.

Surely no more complicated than it is for hourly workers to keep track of their shifts, or for college students to keep track of 5 different full-day schedules that change every few months. "Come in Monday, stay at home Tuesday" is not exactly the peak of complicated scheduling.

I predict the balance we're heading towards for many office jobs is going to be something like 2 mandatory office days a week, 1 optional day, and 2 mandatory WFH days, with "mandatory" really meaning "highly encouraged". Like Monday and Wednesday are in-office, Tuesday and Thursday are WFH, Friday is optional.

Preference for WFH depends on so many individual factors, not just personality but also your commute length, home size, children, neighborhood, friends, etc. Although a lot of discussions on HN seem to be dominated by "I prefer WFH", I reckon in reality the divide is probably pretty close to 50/50, just like with introverts and extroverts. Companies will find strong candidates in both types of people and find out they can't fully satisfy them all, and the end result will be everyone compromises.

Encourage some days to be WFH so that WFHers won't feel career pressure from missing out on office politics. Encourage some days to be in-office so that office-lovers won't go to the office to socialize and find it half empty. Have a flexible day or two where people can do whatever they want. Maybe throw in some flexibility on start and end hours so that people can avoid peak traffic.

No, the dev writes on GitHub that "this issue was fixed in 5.17 (which hit 100% production on 7/21)". Releases show 5.17.0 was released on July 15. They've also linked the commits that fix the bug - the fixes were committed 10 days ago.

They've just posted an update saying that the issue was fixed on July 21. It's certainly good that it's fixed...

But that's still over 7 months before it was fixed, including a 2 month period where people were still bumping the issue asking for help with no response from maintainers (afterwards, the issue went quiet until ~2 weeks ago). And there was at least one other issue on the same problem a few months later that received no response [1].

I understand the team is probably understaffed given the vast number of open issues (1300+) they have, many with no response, and I can sympathize with the challenges of being a small team developing an app used by millions, but they probably need to figure out a better way to triage...

[1] https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/11137

A lot of universities' computer science departments do something like this. They'll have a cluster of machines in a room somewhere for undergrads and grads to SSH into and use as they please. Those are usually run by IT, but grad students in ML fields will often have another set of machines with specific GPUs in their own offices that are completely student-run.

I'd like to see something like this combined with daylight hours. When daylight savings ends in November and twilight starts being as early as 5pm the lack of sunlight makes me feel pretty gloomy. I find myself much happier when it's still a bit bright outside at 7pm. Good weather is nice but I think daylight affects my wellbeing a lot more!

I dream of someday being able to spend those couple months of "it's pitch black outside at 6pm" somewhere else in the world with more sun.

China's restrictions are pretty new (implemented in 2019) so their long-term impact is yet to be seen.

And Korea's law is much less restrictive since kids can play as much as they like before midnight.

For context, these are China's current restrictions on gaming for minors (under age 18):

- Maximum 1.5 hours of gaming on weekdays

- Maximum 3 hours of gaming on weekends

- No games between 10pm and 8am (note that school typically starts between 7 and 8am)

South Korea has similar types of restrictions, by the way. No gaming for minors (under 16) between midnight and 6am. I think Vietnam may have something similar as well.

Sounds like the judge had some very sharp questions, big props to her. It seemed to me like Tim Cook and Apple were not as prepared as they should've been. They didn't have any particularly unexpected/novel arguments, it was basically just constantly repeating the same bland things they've been saying all along about IP and fraud and convenience.

To me, VSCode competes with IDEs, Sublime competes with text editors. Startup speed accounts for a solid 95% of that distinction. If I need to make a quick edit to a file or write down a temporary (but reasonably persistent) note, the only tools I've tried that let me do that in less than 3 seconds are Sublime, Notepad, and Notepad++. Among those choices, Sublime is the clear winner in overall usefulness and functionality.

Clicked into a couple random videos, looks like all of their video IDs are 11 characters, alphanumeric with cases. So 26+26+10 = 62 choices for each char, 62^11 = 5.2e+19 = 52 quintillion unique IDs (52 million trillions).

So, yeah, sampling would be a mostly futile effort since you're looking to estimate about 8 to 10 decimal digits of precision. Though it's technically still possible since you'd expect about 1 in every 50 million - 5 billion IDs to work (assuming somewhere between a trillion and 10 billion videos).

My statistics knowledge is rusty, but I guess if you could sample, say, 50 billion urls you could actually make a very coarse estimate with a reasonable confidence level. That's a lot but, ignoring rate limits, well within the range of usual web-scale stuff.

That's often the only thing that actually substantially changes between editions. Shuffle the exercise numbers and change the font and spacing and voila, brand new edition completely incompatible with older versions!

That was my thinking too, surely their school's IRB would have a field day with this. The question is whether they ran this by their IRB at all. If they did it, there would be implications on the ethics of everything coming out of UMN. If they didn't, then the same for their lab. I know at my school things were quite clear - if your work requires any interaction with any human not in your lab, you need IRB approval. This is literally just a social engineering experiment, so of course IRB should have reviewed it.

https://research.umn.edu/units/irb

Sounds like a good exploratory step towards reaching the tech capabilities we need to build Dyson spheres (or similar megastructures harvesting energy in space) someday in the far future. I doubt the tech we have now is enough to make anything particularly useful or efficient, but we've gotta start learning somewhere!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere

Did the mouse make a big difference for you? I came across it recently and was considering getting it as my wrist has been getting pretty creaky. I tried putting my hand in that position on my desk and it certainly feels quite relaxing, but I have no idea whether it'll actually feel more comfortable in regular long-term use.

Video walks on Youtube. If you haven't heard of them before, they're simple first-person videos where the filmer walks around some area with a stabilized video camera - no talking, just walking. I've really missed traveling and watching video walks while exercising has been a great way to satisfy that travel craving a bit and also trick my brain into experiencing some semblance of normalcy (not sure I could remember what a crowded street feels like otherwise haha).

I'm partial to Japan so my favorite channel has been Rambalac [1], and I recently also started watching another channel with the very creative name JAPAN 4K [2]. There are tons of other channels and places too, for example I recently watched a few in Lisbon [3] and Seoul [4] and Copenhagen [5]. They're very relaxing and fun to watch and going from place to place with no cuts captures the usual tourist experience quite well. If you like traveling you can probably find some that are interesting to you!

[1] https://www.youtube.com/c/Rambalac/videos

[2] https://www.youtube.com/user/keikaikeikaikeikai/videos

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXlFDpaQ1ec

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqj7l0Xk0Ho

[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nl69sN5PtgM

The video is worth a watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=antLneVlxcs

I think it's fair to say that there are definitely some sketchy moments in there. The one that surprised me the most was marked "Near Collision (2)" in the video (12:25). A car really close to the Tesla doesn't seem to be picked up at all until it's too late: https://i.imgur.com/BG0gN2R.jpeg

You can see in the first frame there that on the screen there's nothing in front of the Tesla, it's just the usual white background. But right out the windshield we can see the car is already very close. At the bottom frame which is a split second later, the car is finally detected and we can see the screen now shows the car. But at that point the driver manually intervened with a sharp swerve right as they were about to hit the car. Going frame by frame on Youtube the green box indicating the car was only there for 4 frames before the driver disengaged.

I was aware that self driving is far from ready but I didn't know that even basic detection stuff like this is buggy. Double parked cars, people walking in the street, etc, I would expect to be problematic. But this is not really an edge case, it's just a regular car at close range with no obstructions in between...

Also very lightweight and pleasant to use are Javalin and SparkJava. I've used them for all kinds of projects with great results. Basically a Java version of Python's Flask - small and concise but stable and performant enough for many (or even most) web projects.

https://javalin.io/

http://sparkjava.com/

Technically yes, but they've been in touch with Duolingo's CTO and it seems like Duolingo is OK with it for now.

https://duome.eu/copyright

https://duome.eu/blog/16.04.2018

> Durung the past few weeks I have been talking to Severin Hacker, the co-founder and CTO of Duolingo. To make a long story short: they do like the idea, but they need to own the domain [context for HN: original domain was duolingo.eu] and they're going to redirect it to duolingo.com so the old forum links will stop working in a couple of weeks from now.

Most IP cameras should be fine, I use Amcrest cameras in my home. They even have a guide on how to stop all outgoing connections [1]. And if you don't entirely trust that, you can always throw them onto a VLAN with no internet access, though it can be tricky to set that up if you don't have much experience with router configs (I found it quite hard the first time).

To record the streams, I run Xeoma [2] on an old laptop 24/7. I use ethernet where I can and wifi otherwise. I have a 10TB hard drive hooked up to the laptop - overall with some motion detection settings this lets me save around 90 days worth of activity at 720p-1080p for each of 12 cameras, though of course this will vary drastically with your own storage space and save settings. It's also quite customizable which is nice - you can get it to send email alerts to you on motion detection, only record at certain times of day, send HTTP requests on certain triggers, etc. They also have an Android app which is convenient if you choose to enable password-protected remote access, or if you're on the same local network and just want to check with your phone.

There are also bundles you can buy that come with a handful of cameras and an NVR (network video recorder = the local server that records the camera streams). Costco has some for example [3]. They may be a little easier to set up, and as above you can also put them on a VLAN to make sure they have no internet access.

Some alternatives I'm aware of for the sake of completeness (can't vouch for any of these as I haven't used them before):

Alternative camera brands:

- Lorex

- Hikvision

- AXIS (if budget isn't an issue)

Alternative software:

- Zoneminder

- Shinobi

- Blue Iris

Personally, I'm satisified with my Amcrest + Xeoma setup and will use it again if I need to do the same setup elsewhere.

/r/HomeSecurity may also be helpful

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-dsZlSggdU

[2] https://felenasoft.com/xeoma/en/

[3] https://www.costco.com/lorex-8-channel%2c-4-smart-4k-dome-ca...

An interesting thing about paid reviews - you can prove that the reviews are fake, but you usually can't prove that the business itself actually paid for those reviews. In a hypothetical world where companies with fake reviews are regularly discovered and lambasted in public, it's easy to imagine a sinister metagame where unscrupulous small businesses can buy bad good reviews (i.e. 5-star reviews that are obviously fake) for their competitors to make them seem sketchy. The folks selling the fake reviews certainly don't care who's paying. There's no obvious solution to me for that potential problem aside from stopping fake reviews before they're posted (which feels like the kind of thing that's much harder than it sounds); thankfully it doesn't appear to be a very common thing yet.

Is it realistic to expect the US to have the capability to block its northern borders? I can't imagine Russia siding with the US in the event of a serious conflict, and even ignoring Kazakhstan and Mongolia (which the US will likely find hard to influence), China and Russia have many miles of shared borders. Russia's oil production is in the same order of magnitude as Saudi Arabia and the US and to my understanding is artificially limited to play nice with OPEC.

I think the more interesting scenario is tech embargoes taking away the "building blocks" (e.g. chips) and stalling their tech production. But China is well aware of their deficiency in this area and they've been pushing hard towards what they call "self-reliance" [1].

As for food, I can't imagine the conflict escalating to such a level of hostility and disregard for human life that the world allows the US to blockade China into starvation.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2020-10-31/bloomb...

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3012888/ch...