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sokrateson Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2021)

Daedalus (YC W20) | Senior Software Engineer | San Francisco, CA & Karlsruhe, Germany | Full-Time

Daedalus is reinventing precision manufacturing. We are a team started by two OpenAI tech leads (we did the Rubik's cube robot hand project). We're building a distributed system for software-defined autonomous production of precision parts for spacecraft, medical devices, robots, and many others.

Tons of interesting challenging problems in the areas of distributed systems, reinforcement learning, computational geometry algorithms, robot perception & control, scheduling & optimization, FEM simulation, and many more.

No robotics experience required— we're looking for experienced software engineers (e.g. working on SaaS/infra) who are looking for a challenge. You'll join a multi-disciplinary team of folks hailing from SpaceX, Cruise, Stripe, Ripcord and others.

Our stack is built from scratch to power the next generation of robotics: Python, Rust, Bazel, gRPC, runC

Job posting:

San Francisco, CA — https://bit.ly/3udjQdC

Karlsruhe, Germany — https://bit.ly/39A4ojX

Or email me directly: jonas@daedalus.de

sokrateson CRS-7 Launch Update

As a non-native English speaker, I find the omissions of "the" very prominent and interesting in SpaceX speech. "shortly before first stage shutdown", "resulting in loss of mission", "139 seconds into flight", "some period of time following separation", "data to determine root cause" -- is this a general theme in engineering or journalism? I wonder what linguists have to say about this.

sokrateson HTML5 Fluid Simulation in WebGL

As a complete physics noob, can I mod this to work in 3D? I.e. model a concave rigid body shape, and have the fluid flow around it?

sokrateson Show HN: Wavepot – Digital audio workstation of the web

https://gist.githubusercontent.com/jonasschneider/bfa93fbb35...

Extended the melody & progression a bit. I'm so proud, this is awesome!

sokrateson Skype TX

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyA6NZ9C9pM

sokrateson Skype TX

They probably started development after the Skype fiasco at 30C3.

sokrateson The Fallacy of Android-First

SMS/MMS are shit and a relic of the past. I don't think it's a good idea to try and build a product based on them, ever. Use the Internet.

sokrateson Why Bother With Cucumber Testing?

Most points raised by the auther are criticism with specific Cucumber step implementations. I understand that this is not criticism of Cucumber-the-tool but Cucumber-the-process, but of course, if you're using your tools wrong, nobody's going to just fix your process.

The awkward step naming, and the routing issue, are all with the default steps of an integration of something like Webrat or Capybara. In recent projects (and I think this is the default for newer versions of Capybara), no steps are automatically generated for you. You have to choose the level of detail you want to operate at yourself. Comparing character count of a method call and a Gherkin step is also a rather useless metric.

The "doesn't share code with my test env" issue is a trivial fix: move your test-but-also-cucumber-env code from test_helper.rb into another file, then require it from both cucumber's env.rb and test_helper.rb.

Personally, I write Cucumber features exactly because they mean I don't have to think about routing, or paths, or syntax. I try to put myself in the role of the user and write down what I want to accomplish, and how. A key indicator for reasonably abstracted feature files might be the equivalence "I changed something in a .feature file" IFF "I have to communicate a change to my users."

But if you want to shoot yourself in the foot, you really have to do it yourself.

sokrateson Could keybase.io do for crypto what GitHub did for Git?

The entire idea is that, while keybase stores the pubkey, you don't have to trust them to deliver the right key. They have basically rolled their own type of digital certificate that's stored within a variety of social services, i.e. Twitter -- you tweet something like "I'm <fingerprint of your key> on keybase.io!". The keybase server says this to the keybase CLI: "Bob's pubkey is <key>, and I'm right because https://twitter.com/bob/tweets/1234 says so". The CLI then verifies that the tweet URL really contains the right fingerprint. This extends the trust root to the twitter user (and your local HTTPS CA store). Repeat for a variety of services similar to Twitter. This extends the trust root to the union of all the social site accounts of the keybase user. Whether you choose to trust those is (as always with trust roots) entirely up to you.

Not the worst idea ever, in my opinion.

sokrateson Update on Metro

> In the months since, as the team built and tested and refined the product, we’ve been watching Metro’s adoption. From what we can see, it’s pretty flat.

Cue rimshot.

sokrateson Apple Explains How Secure iMessage Is

Well, classic key distribution problem is classic. You have to anchor your trust somewhere. And whatever you choose, somebody will complain.

Cue web of trust PSA.

sokrateson Wealth does not make you smarter

Related: Being smart doesn't automatically make you wealthy.

sokrateson Stripe adds multiple account support

\o/

sokrateson How 'One Weird Trick' Conquered The Internet

> You've seen them.

No. AdBlock.

sokrateson How to Go Bankrupt

Oh, I thought this was a wittily-titled article about Golang.

sokrateson An adaptive prompt for Bash and Zsh

Love it, thanks for sharing!

sokrateson Catan-Style Board Game with Indiana Jones Feel

The description sounds exactly like Tikal (1999), although Tikal seems to be more focused on strategy, rather than short-term tactical decisions.

More info: http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/54/tikal

sokrateson BitCon: Don't

Literally the entire first half of the post can be read as "but it uses fancy techno stuff that can be constructed to violate some law." No real arguments against the currency there, just FUD about the wallet splitting (so I can't take 20$ out of the 40$ in my purse, right?)

Concering the entropy argument, which makes logical sense to me, it remains to be seen how much of an impact coin loss makes. As long as the amount remains small enough, that makes the coins rarer and just makes them rise in value a bit. Of course, as soon as everyone loses their coins, we're screwed. Who knew?

Sadly, I think the conclusion is pretty accurate: once Bitcoin rises above the grass, states will try to crush it with everything they've got. And they will probably succeed.

sokrateson An HTTP reverse proxy for realtime

Personal peeve: There is still a name collision beetween the popular use of "real-time" to describe "live" updates (usually as the defining aspect being "without polling") versus the definition of "real-time", implying that events are delivered to the customer in a guaranteed period of time. Which is obviously not true.

sokrateson How to share your data effectively

The "D" in PDF does not stand for data, but for documents.

sokrateson The Pirate Bay – North Korean hosting? No, it’s fake

> Do not play with BGP.

Well, okay. Don't touch it. It ain't broken. I don't think there's anything wrong with showing people who are not network experts how easy it is to (believably) route things into nirvana. I guess the effects of fake routes being propagated could have been a lot worse than this. Why not promote some discussion and thought around BGP and friends? Maybe we can come up with something more resistant.

sokrateson The City of Chicago is on Github

Github is ridiculously unsuited for one-time publication of blobs. Seriously.

sokrateson How AT&T Is Planning to Rob Americans of an Open Public Telco Network

Well, then go fix that legal loophole. "Moving services to IP" is modernization to me, not an attempt at deregulation.

sokrateson Why Use Make

If Make is a local optimum and close to a global optimum, it by definition is the global optimum.

sokrateson New Anti-Piracy System to Hit U.S. Internet Users on Monday

This is the perfect example of a result that arises when people disconnected from the internet think "OK, what can we do against piracy? Wait, piracy is a crime, and the best thing we can do to reduce crime is education. So why not educate users?" Why ISPs are complying with this bullshit is beyond me.

The video perfectly demonstrates the sheer ridiculousness of this system. It reminded me of the Portal 2 trailers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qcED35LL8I

sokrateson The comeback of static typing

I very much like Go's approach to static typing. Go allowed me to retain the flexibility and ease of development that Ruby and friends provide, even though the output is fully statically typed. It's great!

sokrateson Firefox Will Soon Block Third-Party Cookies

This is awesome. I have had third-party cookies disabled in Chrome for a long time now, and I rarely experienced any issues with embeds (Disqus being the noteworthy exception). While Idespise third-party tracking embeds in general, they have gained significant traction on the web (the worst offender is of course Facebook). Since many people think site owners cannot be blamed for that (I think they can), blocking third-party cookies to me is the next best thing for the end user. Also, it's just intuitive to me; when I visit a shop, and I identify myself to the clerk, why should I automatically identify to all bystanders in the shop?

sokrateson [dead]

> get 16GB of ram for it and be happy for the rest of your life

Seconded. This is the most awesome thing ever. If you like your workstation getting out of the way, this is like deactivating the light filters in Sunshine (2007).

sokrateson Ruby inline assembler

What's different (from a quick look at ronin) is that this actually runs the assembled code within the currently running ruby interpreter. That's a lot more than a DSL for creating assembly.

sokrateson Faster Rails partial rendering and caching. 78% improvement of test application

This reminds me of a talk about Evolution of Code at Facebook [1]. One of the first architectural restructurings (and still the major driving factor behind later changes) was the switch from sequential memcache_get to parallel memcache_multiget.

[1]: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Evolution-of-Code-Design-...