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It’s day one of President Biden's administration, prompting the question: what can we expect when it comes to technology over the next four years? As expected, the Trump White House website has been archived and replaced with a new, and largely empty, Biden version. But it does contain details of what Biden’s top priorities are going to be and, well... there’s not a tech topic in sight. To be fair, you can hardly blame Biden for this. We are, after all, still smack in the middle of a global pandemic in which a staggering 400,000 Americans have died and millions infected. It’s fair to assume that dealing with that – particularly getting vaccines into people – is going to be the main focus for the next year. Next on the list: climate. Also fair enough given the fact that, yet again, 2020 was one of the hottest years on record and the impact – from Californian wildfires to Florida's hurricanes – is only going to get worse. So what about the fallback position of many of those who believe in climate change but don’t want to actually change the way existing markets work: the magic-new-technology-will-save-us position? There’s no information save a statement that “the Biden administration will ensure we meet the demands of science, while empowering American workers and businesses to lead a clean energy revolution.” Which sounds to us like tax credits etc. Next priorities: racial equity, then economy, then healthcare, then – aha! – immigration. What is Biden going to do about the many barriers that the Trump administration put in the way of immigrant workers, particular as they impact the tech industry and the work visa programs? Screw-up Well, in some respects he may not need to do anything. Because, with typical Trump admin efficiency, the latest H-1B rules pushed just last week by the White House are likely moot. How come? Because they failed to publish them in the Federal Register. There is no chance that the Biden administration will move forward with those proposals. In fact, even if they had been published in the Federal Register, they would have been halted. The White House put out a statement today that explained anything put forward in the past 60 days will be automatically put under review – which in all likelihood means terminated. And that includes the other anti-immigrant policies the Trump admin pushed at the last minute. The president is also expected to remove or lift all the immigration restrictions that Trump put in place – in fact, there is a slew of 17 directives Biden will sign on his first day. Since Trump never passed actual immigration legislation, the restrictions were all built on presidential directives, and as such they can be by and large overridden or discarded by the next president. Among those directives is the lifting of the travel restrictions on seven Muslim-majority countries. Biden also insisted during his campaign that he w
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What attracts a lot of people to amateur radio is that it gives you the ability to make your own gear. Scratch-building hams usually start by making their own antennas, but eventually, the itch to build one’s own radio must be scratched. And building this one-transistor transmitter is just about the simplest way to dive into the world of DIY radio. Of course, limiting yourself to eight components in total entails making some sacrifices, and [Kostas (SV3ORA)]’s transmitter is clearly a study in compromise. For starters, it’s only a transmitter, so you’ll need to make
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This is a partial draft (July 28, 2005 of part 9 of The Emotion Machine by Marvin Minsky. Do not distribute this because it will change. All comments welcome: send them to [email protected] Chapter §9. The Self............................................................................ 1 We need Multiple Models of Ourselves........................................... 4 Multiple Sub-Personalities............................................................... 5 The Sense of Personal Identity......................................................... 6 §9-2. Personality Traits....................................................................... 7 Self-Control...................................................................................... 8 Dumbbell Ideas and Dispositions..................................................... 9 §9-3. Why do we like the idea of a Self?........................................... 12 §9-4. What is Pleasure, and why do we like it?................................. 14 The Pleasure of Exploration........................................................... 16 §9-5. What controls the mind as a whole?.......................................... 17 Mental Bugs and Parasites............................................................. 21 Why don’t we have more bugs than we do?................................... 21 §9-6. Why makes feelings so hard to describe?................................. 22 §9-7. How do you know when you’re feeling a pain?...................... 24 Feelings are hard to describe because they are complex!................ 25 §9-8. The Dignity Of Complexity..................................................... 27 §9-9. Some Sources of Human Resourcefulness.............................. 27 Could be I only sang because the lonely road was long; and now the road and I are gone but not the song. I only spoke the verse to pay for borrowed time: and now the clock and I are broken but not the rhyme. Possibly, the self not being fundamental, eternity breathes only on the incidental.             —Ernesto Galarza, 1905-1984 What makes each human being unique? No other species of animal has such diverse individuals; each person presents a different set of appearances and abilities. Some of those traits are inherited, and
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The maker of a disallowed iOS app called Coronavirus Reporter has sued Apple claiming the iPhone overlord's refusal to approve the software violates America's antitrust law. In a complaint [PDF] filed in the District of New Hampshire on Tuesday, Keith Mathews, a lawyer with Associated Attorneys of New England, states that the plaintiff, identified as a Wyoming-based app maker operating under the name Coronavirus Reporter, submitted an app of the same name on March 3, 2020, seeking distribution approval. According to the court paperwork, the application was designed to allow people to declare they had symptoms of the COVID-19 virus, with the results aggregated on a map to illustrate the bio-nasty's spread. It was built before reliable Bluetooth-based contact-tracing had been devised, tested, and released. The filing claimed: Below a screenshot of this seemingly crowd-sourced pandemic-tracking iOS app, taken from the filing: Click to enlarge Three days after the software was submitted for approval, Apple is said to have rejected the app based on a rule revision declaring that the iGiant will only accept coronavirus apps from "recognized institutions such as government, hospital, insurance company, NGO, or a university." Apple published a notice of the rule change on March 14, 2020, citing the need to present credible health and safety information. Coronavirus Reporter appealed but Apple is said to have denied the appeal on March 26, 2020. "Apple alleged that Coronavirus Reporter was not a recognized healthcare company," the complaint says. "Additionally, Apple stated that the 'user-generated data has not been vetted for accuracy by a reputable source.' In other words, Apple told Plaintiff a self-reported symptoms model was not acceptable for the pandemic." COVID-19 tracing without an app? There's an iOS and Android update for that READ MORE On Apple's developer forums, other iOS devs have griped about the mega-corp's refusal to accept coronavirus-related apps from developers not affiliated with approved organizations. The court filing stated that Apple subsequently allowed several employees at a teaching hospital in London, England, to distribute a coronavirus app that functioned in a way nearly identical to Coronavirus Reporter. "That competing app obtained the so-called first player advantage, and is used by five million individuals daily," the legal filing laments, and goes on to disparage the performance of Apple's own contact-tracing software, released later that summer. It also takes a shot at Apple's June 2020 announcement that it would allow developers to challenge App Store rules. That policy change, widely seen as an attempt to mollify antitrust regulators, was "a sham," the complaint argues. In 2019, the US Supreme Court ruled in Apple v. Pepper that consumers have the right to sue Apple for monopolizing the sale of apps
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Welcome to LWN.net The following subscription-only content has been made available to you by an LWN subscriber. Thousands of subscribers depend on LWN for the best news from the Linux and free software communities. If you enjoy this article, please consider accepting the trial offer on the right. Thank you for visiting LWN.net! Free trial subscription Try LWN for free for 1 month: no payment or credit card required. Activate your trial subscription now and see why thousands of readers subscribe to LWN.net. It is an unfortunate fact of life that non-free firmware blobs are required to use some hardware, such as network devices (WiFi in particular), audio peripherals, and video cards. Beyond that, those blobs may even be required in order to install a Linux distribution, so an installation over the network may need to get non-free firmware directly from the installation media. That, as might be guessed, is a bit of a problem for distributions that are not willing to officially ship said firmware because of its non-free status, as a recent discussion in the Debian community shows. Surely Dan Pal did not expect the torrent of responses he received to his short note to the debian-devel mailing list about problems he encountered trying to install Debian. He wanted to install the distribution on a laptop that was running Windows 10, but could not use the normal network installation mechanism because the WiFi device required non-free firmware. He tracked down the DVD version of the distribution and installed that, but worried that Debian is shooting itself in the foot by not prominently offering more installation options: "The current policy of hiding other versions of Debian is limiting the adoption of your OS by people like me who are interested in moving from Windows 10." The front page at debian.org currently has a prominent "Download" button that starts to retrieve a network install ("netinst") CD image when clicked. But that image will not be terribly useful for systems that need non-free firmware to make the network adapter work. Worse yet, it is "impossible to find" a working netinst image with non-free firmware, Sven Joachim said, though he was overstating things a bit. Alexis Murzeau suggested adding a link under the big download button that would lead users to alternate images containing non-free firmware. He also pointed out that there are two open bugs (one from 2010 and another from 2016) that are related, so the problem is hardly a new one. While they are hard to find, there are unofficial images with non-free firmware for Debian, as Holger Levsen noted; he also pointed to his 2017 blog post that he uses to rediscover those images when he needs them. It is a rather strange situation; Emanuele Rocca put it this way: So the current situation is that we make an active effort to produce two different types of installation media: one that works for all users, and one broken for most laptops. Some sort of FOSS version of an anti-feature. Then we publish the broken version on the front page, and hide very carefully the version tha
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In the movie “Falling Down,” the character played by Michael Douglas is stranded in a Los Angeles traffic jam. He abandons his car, starts walking with briefcase in hand and ultimately has a mental breakdown. Cargo shippers trying to get their containers through the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach can relate. The pileup of ships offshore in San Pedro Bay and congestion onshore at the terminals have reached epic proportions. And the situation could become even more maddening in the weeks ahead. 32 container ships at anchor American Shipper interviewed Kip Louttit, executive director of the Marine Exchange of Southern California, to get the latest on ships in San
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Crime 2020 Saw Unprecedented Murder Spike In Major U.S. Cities In late December the Associated Press reported that 2020 was on track to become the deadliest year in U.S. history with the total number of deaths forecast to rise 15 percent compared to 2019, primarily due to the coronavirus pandemic. There were also several other smaller contributory factors, however, including higher death tolls from heart & circulatory diseases as well as from the country's opioid crisis. The U.S. also experienced its most violent year in decades with an unprecedented rise in homicides. The Gun Violence Archive r
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This is a pure 6510 assembly program for the Commodore 64 made by Bright Pixel in 2019, because why not. The C64 was a famous 8-bit machine in the 80s and the highest-selling single computer model ever. Its hardware and architecture set it appart from other 8-bit personal computers at the time. Unlike most of the others, the C64 had dedicated advanced MOS chips for graphics and sprites (the VIC-II), sound (the SID), I/O (the CIA), and many others. These chips were not only powerful for the time, but they could perform their tasks autonomously, independently of what the main CPU, a MOS technology 6510 microprocessor, was doing. For instance, the VIC-II could generate interrupts on a
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We’re a small (~25) but quickly growing team that’s passionate about our mission of reimagining healthcare access for those in need.We come from organizations like McKinsey, the Clinton Foundation, and Stanford Biology. We like to work hard, solve tough problems, and are determined to improve healthcare access for families who have trouble affording the medications they need to stay healthy.We are currently hiring for both our Palo Alto and Atlanta Offices as well as some fully remote roles. We have opportunities for senior software developers, sales, customer success, operations managers, and communication managers.If you want to work in health-care, love mission-driven work, and thriv
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Throughout much of 2019, Internet tech giant Google has attempted to portray itself as a public champion of web privacy. Yet, behind the scenes, a very different view of Google is emerging. In August 2019, at approximately the same time that Google was rolling out its much-hyped “Privacy Sandbox” privacy framework, it was also working to block efforts of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards body to bolster the web privacy features of new technical specifications. Google’s efforts to limit the web privacy powers of PING Most notably, Google was the only member of the W3C to vote “No” to a proposed charter change for the Priva
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Nostalgia aside, there are a few things an analog scope can still do better than a digital, with oscilloscope art being a prime example. The blue-green glow of phosphors in a real CRT just add something special to such builds, and as a practitioner of this craft, [Aaron Stokes], aka [Oscilloboy], decided to paint a New Year’s affirmation on his oscilloscope screen, in Japanese calligraphy of all things. When used in X-Y mode, analog oscilloscopes lend themselves nicely to vector-based graphics, which is the approach [Aaron] has taken with previous “Oscilloclock” builds, like the Metropolis Clock. The current work, however, doesn’t use vector graphics, opting inste
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Analysis Ajit Pai has left his position as head of the FCC – America's communications regulator – marking the end of an extraordinary four years where telecoms policy was dragged into the era of alternate facts. With sad inevitability, Pai has a list of his accomplishments in a similar fashion. Just as he had done during his tenure, however, Pai has mirrored the 45th president’s approach and, rather than give an overview of actions to show a coherent drive and philosophy, has created the longest list possible. Bigger is better. And so we have a 19-page document with 134 bullet points, many with sub-points. The end result is a mixture of tedium and propaganda with seemingly every program the FCC runs religiously inscribed, and the most controversial decisions whitewashed with tangential facts or ideological zeal. As just one example, Pai’s unforgivably weak response to a devastating hurricane in Puerto Rico – something that mirrored President Trump’s own bizarre response that many have attributed to racism – is ignored. Instead the list heralds how the FCC awarded the island $127m “to expand, improve, and harden broadband networks,” and notes how Pai visited the island not once, but twice. Pai fails to note the extensive, and justified, criticism leveled at him by his own commissioners, the Government Accountability Office, the press, and Puerto Ricans for doing too little, too late. He also refused a review into the FCC’s response: something that is a standard approach used to help the organization learn from mistakes. Had it been run, the review might have queried why normal protocols weren’t followed. The fact he prevented such a probe reveals a darker truth: that Pai’s actions, or lack of them, were not the result of incompetence. Net neutrality Pai will, of course, be most closely associated with the reversal of net neutrality rules. Not only did he undercut the FCC’s own rulings made just two years earlier but he pushed through a predetermined outcome, o
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Crypto crackdown? — Yellen argues many cryptocurrencies are used "mainly for illicit financing." Enlarge / Janet Yellen, Joe Biden's nominee to be Secretary of the Treasury, at a December press conference.Cryptocurrencies could come under renewed regulatory attack over the next four years if Janet Yellen, Joe Biden's pick to lead the Treasury Department, gets her way. During Yellen's Tuesday confirmation hearing before the Senate Finance Committee, Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.) asked Yellen about the use of cryptocurrency by terrorists and other criminals. "Cryptocurrencies are a particular concern," Yellen responded. "I think many are used—at least in a transactions sense—mainly for illicit financing." She said she wanted to "examine ways in which we can curtail their use and make sure that [money laundering] doesn't occur through those channels." Blockchain-based financial networks are attractive to criminals because they do not require users to identify themselves—as the law requires most conventional financial networks to do. Because no individual or organization controls these networks, there's no easy way for governments to force them to
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It’s been a busy holiday and New Year’s season at Purism as we continue to ship out Librem 5s to backers each week. We know for those who haven’t received their Librem 5 yet, what they most want to know is when their Librem 5 will arrive. In summary, we will be providing shipping estimates within the next week to the backers within the original crowdfunding campaign (orders through October 2017), but not all backers yet, based on our confidence in the estimates. The rest of this post will explain what is going into our shipping estimates, and why we can’t yet provide shipping estimates to every backer.When we published the shipping FAQ we explained some of the factors in the shipping calculation:That calculation depends not only on their place in line, but also on our knowing our average and maximum weekly phone throughput in advance, which we don’t expect to know until we are at least a few weeks into the process. We expect to have a good idea on these projections by the end of the year, however.Now we are happy to say that we not only have a good idea on our shipping throughput, we actually exceeded our expectations for how many we could ship! So hopefully by the end of this week, or possibly the beginning of next week, we will be contacting a large group of backers who we feel we can provide a reliable shipping estimate. Note that this will be a separate email from the emails we already send out each week to confirm shipping information to the next group of backers who are ready to receive their Librem 5.Back when we published the shipping FAQ, we expected that by this point we would be able to provide every backer with an accurate shipping estimate and be able to predict when we would hit shipping parity–the moment when all of the backlog has cleared and a new order would be fulfilled in our standard 10-business-day window. Once you know how many Librem 5s you can ship in a week, it seems like it would be a relatively straightforward calculation to apply that to a person’s place in line and estimate a shipping date.Making Librem 5 Just In TimeIn our case the calculation is a little more complicated due to the fact that we employ a “Just In Ti
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Meta-bits — A mix of actuator and bit-level memory. For applications like robotics, there's usually a clear division of labor between the processors that control the robot's body and the actuators that actually control the physical changes of that body. But a new paper being released today blurs the lines between the two, using a magnetic switch in a way that both stores a bit representing the hardware's state and alters the physical conformation of the hardware. In essence, it merges memory and physical changes. This particular implementation doesn't seem to be especially useful—it's much too big to be a practical form of memory, and the physical changes are fairly limited. But the concept is intriguing, and it's possible that someone more adept at creative thinking can find ways of modifying the concept to create a useful device. A magnetic metamaterial? A metamaterial is generally defined as a material that is structured so that it has properties that aren't found in bulk mixes of its raw materials. A broad reading of that definition, however, would mean that a car is a metamaterial, which makes the definition near-meaningless. The researchers behind the new device, based at Switzerland's École Polytechnique Fedeŕale de Lausanne, claim their creation is a metamaterial, but it's fairly large (roughly a cube three centimeters on a side) and has a number of distinct parts. I'd tend to call that a device, rather than a material, and will use that terminology here. So what is the device? The part that changes its configuration is a platform supported by a set of four legs that are bent inwards (v and iii in the image below). The two different states of the system are read out by registering the amount of force needed to push the platform down. The force needed is raised by pushing a wedge (iv) between the bend of the legs, forcing them outward and dropped again by sliding the wedge back out. The wedge is indirectly attached to a flexible base that pops between two stable states (i), a bit like the tops of twist-off jar lids that
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Productivity tool to launch everything (e.g. switch the next song, connect bluetooth device, set a timer, etc.) so you can stay focused on your current task. ❤️   Open source 🤖   Native 🔌   Plugin system ⌨️   Custom hotkeys ⬆️   Sort options by frequency of use 📦   Small size (less than 20mb) Installation Installation instructions and alternatives are available on https://spotter-application.github.io/getspotterapp Hotkeys Default hotkey to run the app double shift Plugins Bluetooth b Google g (will get data from clipboard) g "your query" System commands sleep shutdown restart logout Kill applications k Applications dimensions save application positions restore application positions Timer 15m Spoti
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Virtual tactile sensations projected onto your handsRead moreAttach and amazeSTRATOS InspireEffortless to install, Ultraleap’s plug-and-play haptic module is the smart way to integrate virtual touch – and take your products to the next level. Designed for quick deployment and safety tested for public use.Discover endless possibilitiesSTRATOS ExploreIt’s time to explore what’s possible. STRATOS Explore is a flexible, scalable high-end haptics development kit, built for innovation.Multiple ultrasound speakers3. AlgorithmsEach individual speaker is triggered at a different time.Using our patented algorithms, the ultrasound speakers are triggered with very specific time differences. These time differences mean the ultrasound waves arrive at the same point in space, at the same time.4.
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On Tuesday, during his last full day as US President, Donald Trump issued an executive order seeking to curtail cyber attacks by directing the government to come up with rules requiring cloud service providers to better identify foreign customers. It now falls to the incoming Biden administration to implement the order, which may end up simply being ignored, given the recent flood of executive orders. The "executive order on Taking Additional Steps to Address the National Emergency with Respect to Significant Malicious Cyber-Enabled Activities" calls for the US Secretary of Commerce to propose rules to "require United States IaaS providers to verify the identity of a foreign person that obtains an Account." In a letter to Congressional leaders, Trump explains that foreign actors use US cloud service providers to carry out malicious cyber activities and that America must be able to obtain more extensive information from service providers about foreign individuals using their computing infrastructure. "Foreign actors use United States IaaS products for a variety of tas
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lots of f's in the chat today — Video-streaming account launched in 2019, faced first suspension in 2020. Enlarge / Photo illustration of the Twitch logo on a smartphone.On Wednesday, an automated alert about Twitch account bans included a somewhat surprising account name: "@DonaldTrump." The surprise came because Twitch had already "indefinitely suspended" the former president's official Twitch channel on January 7 in the wake of his January 6 speech inciting a seditious riot at the US Capitol. Following this Wednesday alert, Twitch confirmed to Ars Technica that this was no accident: Trump's account is indeed outright banned. Twitch continues to call the ban an "indefinite suspension," but it has not offered any timeline for its return or steps that its account holders (either Trump himself or any representatives) may take to reverse the decision. Wednesday's news lines up with a Tuesday claim by DW News reporter Dana Regev, who had hinted at Twitch waiting until after President Joe Biden's inauguration to make a firmer ruling on the previous ban. The service took the rare step of outlining the exact reason for the ban, a courtesy generally not reserved to those affected. This lack of clarity emerged in particular when Twitch offered no explanation for banning Guy "DrDisrespect" Beahm in the wake of spreading COVID-19 misinformation. In Trump's case, Twitch cited "the ongoing risk of further incitement of violence" as a primary reason for the ban. The statement, as issued to Ars Technica by a Twitch representative, continued: The Presid
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LG Electronics is reportedly considering leaving the smartphone business this year, according to a leaked internal memo issued by CEO Kwon Bong-seok. Writing to staffers, Kwon said the future of LG's mobile business remained uncertain, but promised any decision would not result in any redundancies. "Regardless of any change in the direction of the smartphone business operation, the employment will be maintained, so there is no need to worry," he said. An LG representative subsequently told The Korea Herald it was examining all possible opportunities, including selling, downsizing, or dismantling its mobile business. "Since the competition in the global market for mobile devices is getting fiercer, it is about time for LG to make a cold judgment and the best choice," they said. This is a reversal for Kwon, who had previously reiterated his commitment to LG's mobile business and promised a return to profitability in 2021 following 14 consecutive loss-making quarters. At 2020's CES event, the company chief said LG's revival would be driven by phones with "wow factors to woo consumers". Fate had different plans. Two months after Kwon promised LG's revival, the world was under lockdown to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. Mobile sales cratered. Supply chains experienced unprecedented disruption. The entire phone industry suffered. LG m
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logistics — A huge number of Amazon's own 800,000 employees are considered essential workers. Enlarge / An Amazon warehouse on a sunny day in Germany on April 2, 2020. Amazon is one of the country's largest businesses—and despite its faults and flaws, the company overall excels at logistics and distribution at scale. Therefore, Amazon suggests, the brand-new Biden administration should give the company a call to help ramp up COVID-19 distribution nationwide. "A
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At first glance, they might be identical. Two orange lozenges leaning out of shards of blue. Two paintings purportedly by the same artist. But look a little closer, and you’ll start to notice differences. The one on the left seems clunkier, its gradations in colour less subtle. The palette seems reduced, the brushwork less varied and interesting. The one on the right is Painterly Architectonic (1917) by Liubov Popova, a cubist and suprematist painter who lived a brief and active life in early 20th-century Moscow. The one on the left is a fake. The paintings have been on show in ‘
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Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power by Pekka Hämäläinen. Yale University Press, 2019. Hardcover, 544 pages, $35. Revivewed by Santi Ruiz On this year’s Indigenous People’s Day I encountered a curious phenomenon. My social circles are largely college-educated, left-leaning Gen Zers and Millennials, whom I assumed would be most likely to celebrate indigenous people as an underrepresented and integral part of the American fabric. Opening Twitter and Instagram, however, the zone was flooded with variations on the pastel infographic aesthetic that showcases one’s ex
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One of the best things about NixOS is the fact that it's so easy to do configuration management using it. The Nix store (where all your packages live) has a huge flaw for secret management though: everything in the Nix store is globally readable. This means that anyone logged into or running code on the system could read any secret in the Nix store without any limits. This is sub-optimal if your goal is to keep secret values secret. There have been a few approaches to this over the years, but I want to describe how I'm doing it. Here are my goals and implementation for this setup and how a few other secret management strategies don't quite pan out. At a high level I have these goals: It should be trivial to declare new secrets Secrets should never be globally
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Etymologies of names are interesting. 'Brandon' has no single etymology; the name and close variants arise independently in multiple languages, sounding almost exactly the same and eventually in time being treated as equivalent but having no common meaning: Prince, Raven or Crow, Broom Hill, Sword. They also get appropriated -- the Irish forms of the name are not originally Irish, for instance; it was a foreign name that became popular. I tend to think of my name as broadly Welsh, but strictly speaking, in my case the name is derived from a surname, which means that in lineage it's probably Anglo-Saxon (Broom Hill, and thus the same as many of the towns and cities called 'Brandon' in the English-speaking world), or French (in which case either Sword or Firebrand).I've always thought it in
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Rust has taken the programming language world by storm. Since its 1.0 release in 2015, it has been one of the most loved programming languages with a loyal following of developers and contributors.To learn why this language is favored so much between developers, we have started a new series on Rust in production. In it, we’ll interview people that have used Rust for significant projects: apps, services, startup MVPs, and others.For the first installment of the series, we interview Michael Fey, VP of Engineering at 1Password. Read further to find out why they chose Rust for their product, the benefits of Rust for security-centered applications, and what cool libraries you should look into if you’re developing something similar in Rust.Could you tell us a little about your company and yo
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We’re all familiar by now with Right-NIMBYs — conservatives who block transit and housing development in order to keep poor people and minorities out of their quiet white-flight suburban neighborhoods. These are still the most common kind, given that Republicans tend to value low-density communities while Democrats tend to value denser, more walkable places. But liberals can be NIMBYs as well, as any resident of a deep-blue state or city well knows. But leftists can be NIMBYs as well (and remember, leftists and liberals are generally different people). In various cities, concerns over gentrification, environmental preservation, and profits for private developers have hardened into a sort of Left-NIMBY Canon — a standardized, off-the-shelf package of beliefs, attitudes, and arguments
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January 17, 2021 | 30 min. read Urwhat? Given the events of the first few weeks of 2021 and the ensuing discourse regarding online communities, decentralized platforms have become something of a hot topic. None of these are mainstream in any sense outside of the privacy/FOSS/developer community, but some of the more popular ones include Mastodon, Pleroma, and PeerTube. All of these have in common the fact that they are part of the "fediverse", a community of self-hosted platforms that can interact with each other via the ActivityPub protocol. Via ActivityPub, you can see PeerTube videos from Mastodon, people on different Pleroma servers can follow each other, your self-hosted blog can allow comments via Mas
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Translations 🇨🇳 Chinese version 🇧🇷 Portuguese version 🇯🇵 Japanesese version 🇷🇺 Russian version Table of Contents Introduction Learning Lua Existing tutorials for writing Lua in Neovim Companion plugins Where to put Lua files init.lua Other Lua files Caveats Tips A note about packages Using Lua from Vimscript :lua :luado :luafile luafile vs require(): luaeval() v:lua Caveats Tips The vim namespace Tips Using Vimscript from Lua vim.api.nvim_eval() Caveats vim.api.nvim_exec() vim.api.nvim_command() Tips vim.api.nvim_replace_termcodes() Managing vim options Using api functions Using meta-accessors Caveats Managing vim internal variables Using api functions Using meta-accessors Caveats Calling Vimscript f
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A little over a a year ago, we covered an impressive battery monitor that [Timo Birnschein] was designing for his boat. With dedicated batteries for starting the engines, cranking over the generator, and providing power to lights and other amenities, the device had to keep tabs on several banks of cells to make sure no onboard systems were dipping into the danger zone. While it was still a work in progress, it seemed things were progressing along quickly. But we know how it is. Sometimes a project unexpectedly goes from having your full attention to winning an all-expense-paid trip to the back burner. In this case, [Timo] only recently put the necessary finishing touches on his monitor and got it installed on the boat. Recent log entries on the project’s Hackaday.io page detail
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Skip to content Today is the day I discovered Sturgeon’s law: Ninety percent of everything is crap.Sturgeon’s law I like this for a lot of reasons. But most of all, I like it as a nudge to try harder to enjoy things. Think you hate poetry? Roller coasters? Banjo music? Thai food? Maybe you haven’t discovered the good 10% yet. Keep looking. How about work? Think QA engineers are useless? Code review is a waste of time? Managers hurt more than they help? Maybe you’ve been stuck with the crap 90% of them. Keep looking. Then there’s relationships. Think there’s no one out there who can make you happy? Maybe you haven’t climbed out of your 90% of crappy relationships yet. Keep looking. It reminds me of a quote I read recently: Keep
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CareRev (YC S16) Is Hiring Product Managers – Remote USA 59 minutes ago | hide We are looking for Product Managers! CareRev is a SaaS platform and Marketplace for Healthcare Businesses to post extra available/emergency shifts for Nurses, CNAs, MAs, and Techs. With each team you will be part of a team of engineers and designers that can execute on the products you spearhead the definition of.We are looking for Product Managers with 3+ years experience to dig in specifically on: Facility side users needs. For this role you'll communicate daily with Facility users of our platform, not the executive buyers. You will gain a deep understanding for the problems these users face and build amazing solutions with the CareRev platform for them
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Red Hat, which is killing CentOS Linux in favour of CentOS Stream, will extend its developer subscription to allow free production use of RHEL for up to 16 systems. CentOS Linux is a community build of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and therefore suitable for production use. CentOS Stream, which will remain available, is a preview build of what is likely to be in RHEL – great for testing but not ideal for production use. The popularity of CentOS, which drives 17.7 per cent of Linux-based web sites, according to W3Techs, has meant a strong response to Red Hat's decision, including alternative free builds such as Rocky Linux and Project Lenix, which is now known as Alma Linux. Red Hat said in December t
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take it all in — This is quite literally Sonic like you've never seen him before. The intertwining paths of Chemical Plant Zone are a thing of beauty at this scale. Casino Night Zone looks a bit repetitive when you zoom out. Sega
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MORE FALLOUT — Group backed by a nation-state rifles through company's email servers. Security firm Malwarebytes said it was breached by the same nation-state-sponsored hackers who compromised a dozen or more US government agencies and private companies. The attackers are best known for first hacking into Austin, Texas-based SolarWinds, compromising its software-distribution system and using it to infect the networks of customers who used SolarWinds’ network management software. In an online notice, however, Malwarebytes said the attackers used a different vector. “While Malwarebytes does not use SolarWinds, we, like many other companies were recently tar
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Pebble smartwatch was introduced in 2012 on Kickstarter. The Bluetooth smartwatch came with an E-Paper display, would connect to your Android smartphone or iPhone to receive notifications or other info, and the company also released an SDK for further customization. It was quite popular at the time having sold over one million units, the Pebble Time followed in 2015 with a color display, as well as other models. But despite selling millions of watches, the company folded in 2016, and the Pebble was discontinued after the intellectual property was purchased by Fitbit.Watchy is a new smartwatch that reminds me of the original pebble. It is based on ESP32 WiFi & Bluetooth SoC, equipped with a 1.54-inch E-Paper display with 200×200 resolution, and the usual accelerometer for activity tracking and gesture detection.Watchy key features and specifications:SIP – Espressif Systems ESP32-PICO-D4 system-in-package with ESP32 dual-core processor with Bluetooth LE 4.2/5.x and WiFi 4 connectivity, 4MB SPI flashDisplay – 1.54-inch E-Paper display with 200×200 resolution and wide viewing angleUSB – 1x Micro USB port for power and programmingSensor – BMA423 3-Axis accelerometer for gesture detection, activity trackingMisc – DS3231 Real-Time Clock, vibration motor, 4x tactile buttonsBattery – 200 mAh battery good for 5-7 days for timekeeping (no WiFi), or 2 to 3 days with a WiFi connection.OSHW certification – US000936Watchy sells as a kit with a fully assembled Watchy PCB, the E-Paper display, a 200mAh Battery, two adhesive tapes, and a watch strap.The smartwatch is open-source hardware & software with documentation, KiCad hardware design files, 3D Case Designs (STLs), and
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Last month we reported that a huge vertical farming operation near Copenhagen in Denmark recently completed its first harvest. That setup uses hydroponics, but the veggies grown in Vertical Field urban farming pods take root in real soil.Traditional agricultural farming involves the use of a lot of land and resources to grow crops, and then even more resources to harvest and transport the goods – sometimes thousands of miles – to where consumers can get to them.Controlled-environment agriculture systems such as hydroponics operations can be much more efficient, are no longer bound by season or location, the growing to harvest cycle is reduced and crops could be produced all year, and as with the Copenhagen operation, they can be set up close to where the food is purchased or consumed.The Vertical Field setup retains many of the advantages of hydroponic vertical farms, but instead of the plants growing in a nutrient-packed liquid medium, the container-based pods treat their crops to real soil, supplemented by a proprietary mix of minerals and nutrients. The company says that it opted for geoponic production "because we found that it has far richer flavor, color, and quality." Vertical Field's
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I've been contemplating ways to build more resilient web applications. One consistent issue that seems to crop up in my explorations is that we have no way to execute JavaScript at a given priority. We can write asynchronous code, but this doesn't provide a general-purpose resiliency primitive. Un-yield-y It is possible to write code that "yields" to allow other code to execute. Writing everything as async functions can accomplish this in specific cases, though only promise chains can be interrupted and it lacks any form of scheduling. This technique relies entirely on authors writing code to be interruptible, explicitly indicating where interruption may occur. In addition to being opt-in, code that uses async/await, Promises or callbacks is still largely synchronous. The code between each point of asynchrony (await, Promise, callback) can't be interrupted. The following example function can only yield in a single location, the remaining code executes synchronously: async function amazing() { let items = []; let seen = new Set(); for (let i=0; i<1000; i++) { let item = await db.get(i); // ^ yielding can only occur here if (!seen.has(item.name)) { seen.add(item.name); items.push(item); } } return items; } Combined with the fact that most JavaScript doesn't use async/await or even Promises, makes it insufficient as a general-purpose resiliency primitive. Most of the JavaScript executed by browsers is synchronous. Why yield? There is no language or platform feature that allows for interrupting arbitrary synchronous work in order to prioritize other work. There are a few reasons why we might want such a feature, but the one I find most compelling is to apply resiliency paradigms to existing web code. Effectively, we want the ability to interrupt code wasn't written to be interrupted in order to allocate more time to executing high-priority code. function veryGoodCode() { const start = Date.now(); while (Date.now() - start < 1000) {} // 🧐 generateRevenue(); // 💸 } The code we run from npm modules, third-party embeds and ads is all given access to the same p
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Goodbye to Pai — Pai's last report keeps 6-year-old broadband standard and gives ISPs high marks. Enlarge / FCC Chairman Ajit Pai says goodbye to members of a Senate Appropriations Subcommittee afters testifying during a hearing on June 16, 2020, in Washington, DC.In one of his last acts as Federal Communications Commission chairman, Ajit Pai decided to stick with the FCC's 6-year-old broadband standard of 25Mbps download and 3Mbps upload speeds. The decision was announced yesterday in the FCC's annual broadband-deployment report, released one day before Pai's departure from the FCC. As in all previous years of Pai's chairmanship, the report concludes that the telecom industry is doing enough to extend broadband access to all Americans—despite FCC Democrats saying the facts don't support that conclusion. Pai's report said: We find that the current speed benchmark of 25/3Mbps remains an appropriate measure by which to assess whether a fixed service is providing advanced telecommunications capability. We conclude that fixed services with speeds of 25/3Mbps continue to meet the statutory definition of advanced telecommunications capability; that is,
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Jai is a high-level programming language developed by Jonathan Blow, creator of indie games Braid and, most recently, The Witness. It is an imperative static/strongly typed C-style language, but with a variety of modern language features that C lacks. Blow began work on Jai in late September 2014. It is still in development and as of yet is unavailable to the general public. Blow developed it with an eye towards video games, but in fact it’s a general purpose programming language that could be used for any task. Disclaimer: I have no association with Jon Blow. As of this writing there are no public compilers for Jai, so all information in this text is collated from his YouTube videos. Therefore nothing in this post is official. There may be information more up to date than what is available on this page. That said, I believe everything in this post to be up to date as of this writing. (If you are Jon Blow and want me to correct anything in this post, I would be happy to). Everything in this document, unless otherwise noted, is implemented and currently working in the (currently private) prototype. As it is not yet released, everything in this document is subject to change. Brief Description In short, Jai could be described as a modern replacement for C. Some of the coolest features: Arbitrary compile-time code execution – Any function of the program can be made to run at compile time with #run Syntax-facilitated code refactoring – The language syntax facilitates code reuse by making it easy to move code from local block → local function → global function Integrated build process – The build process and parameters are specified by the source code itself, for consistency Data-oriented structures – Automatic conversion between Structure of Arrays and Array of Structures, avoids classes and inheritance Reflection and run-time type information – Static type information for every structure available at runtime A new approach to polymorphic procedures – Polymorphism at the function level, with programmer control by special procedures Low-level memory management tools – Better control over how libraries allocate memory, automatic ownership man
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No evidence that vitamin D is able to prevent or affect the severity of COVID-19 in individuals with European ancestry: a Mendelian randomisation study of open data http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3054-838XHasnat A Amin1 and http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2469-5516Fotios Drenos1,2 1 Department of Life Sciences, Brunel University London, Uxbridge, UK 2 Institute of Cardiovascular Sciences, UCL, London, UK Correspondence to Dr Fotios Drenos, Department of Life Sciences, Brunel University London, Uxbridge, UB8 3PH, UK; fotios.drenos{at}brunel.ac.uk AbstractBackground Upper respiratory tract infections are reportedly more frequent and more severe in individuals with lower vitamin D levels. Based on these findings, it has been suggested that vitamin D can prevent or reduce the severity of COVID-19.Methods We used two-sample Mendelian randomisation (MR) to assess the causal effect of vitamin D levels on SARS-CoV-2 infection risk and COVID-19 severity using publicly available data. We also carried out a genome-wide association analysis (GWA) of vitamin D deficiency in the UK Biobank (UKB) and used these results and two-sample MR to assess the causal effect of vitamin D deficiency on SARS-CoV-2 infection risk and COVID-19 severity.Results We found no evidence that vitamin D levels causally affect the risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection (ln(OR)=0.17 (95% CI −0.22 to 0.57, p=0.39)) nor did we find evidence that vitamin D levels causally affect COVID-19 severity (ln(OR)=0.36 (95% CI −0.89 to 1.61, p=0.57)). Based on our GWA analysis, we found that 17 independent variants are associated with vitamin D deficiency in the UKB. Using these variants as instruments for our two-sample MR analyses, we found no evidence that vitamin D deficiency causally affects the risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection (ln(OR)=−0.04 (95% CI −0.1 to 0.03, p=0.25)) nor did we find evidence that vitamin D deficienc
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[Udi] lives in an apartment with a pleasant balcony. He also has three kids who are home most of the time now, so he finds himself spending a little more time out on the balcony than he used to. To upgrade his experience, he installed a completely custom shade controller to automatically open and close his sunshade as the day progresses. Automatic motors for blinds and other shades are available for purchase, but [Udi]’s shade is too big for any of these small motors to work. Finding a large servo with a 2:1 gear ration was the first step, as well as creating a custom mou
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The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has rejected a petition seeking to block Ligado Networks from deploying its LightSquared nationwide 5G network. The petition – which was rejected by a three-to-two majority – was filed by the Department of Commerce's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) on behalf of the Defense and Transportation departments, and largely repeats previous concerns about Ligado's proposed use of L-band spectrum. The term "L-Band" refers to the spectrum between 1GHz an
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Ask HN: Anyone know any funny programming jokes? 101 points by arthurcolle 8 hours ago | hide | past | favorite | 117 comments Can be super esoteric or super generalized, I love it when I get them, or when I just learn something new. (Not my joke)At a recent real-time Java conference, the participants were given an awkward question to answer: "If you had just boarded an airliner and discovered that your team of programmers had been responsible for the flight control software, how many of you would disembark immediately?" Among the forest of raised hands only one man sat motionless. When asked what he would do, he replied that he would be quite content to stay aboard. With his team's software, he said, the plane was unlikely to even taxi as far as the runway, let alone take off. Three logisticians just finished dinner, and the waitress comes up and asks "do y'all want dessert?"The first logistician says "I don't know." The second also says "I don't know." The last says "yes, we would." These are both old, like me:There's a new object-oriented version of COBOL. It's called "Add 1 to COBOL".(Carbon dates back to the ancient time when C++ was basically object oriented C, so like, 1988 or so.)Here's one for the increasingly elderly people who prefer C over C++. "Whoever invented C++ doesn't know the difference between increment and excrement." (Best said in a cranky old man voice whilst battling a bug in some big C++ source base. Yeah, I know who Bjarne Stroustrup is. It's funnier with "whoever".) Apparently a true story:A guy was walking around in a Ruby conference with a shirt that said ":sex" (which is read "sex symbol" in Ruby). Until someone asked him: "I don't get it. Why colon sex?" What's the difference between an introverted programmer and an extroverted programmer?The extroverted programmer looks at your shoes when he's talking to you. A
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Janet Yellen on Tuesday expressed concern about cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, whose price has surged. Andrew Harnik/ASSOCIATED PRESS Janet Yellen on Tuesday suggested lawmakers "curtail" the use of Bitcoin amid terrorism concerns.Yellen said cryptocurrency transactions were used "mainly for illicit financing."It was the latest sign that lawmakers and regulators could get tough on Bitcoin and Ethereum.Sign up here for our daily newsletter, 10 Things Before the Opening Bell.Janet Yellen, President-elect Joe Biden's nominee for treasury secretary, suggested on Tuesday that lawmakers "curtail" the use of cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin over concerns that they are "mainly" used for illegal activities.There has been a surge in interest in bitcoin; its price has soared by about 300% in the past year. Bitcoin was down 7.59%, to $34,183.57, on Wednesday, while Ethereum was down 9.74%, to $1,259.97, after hitting an all-time high of more than $1,430 on Tuesday.Yellen's comments suggested the incoming Biden administration could be hostile to cryptocurrencies and ramp up regulation. Watchdogs around the world, from the European Central Bank to the UK's financial regulator, have recently expressed concerns about cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin.Sen. Maggie Hassan asked Yellen during her confirmation hearing on Tuesday about the dangers of terrorists using cryptocurrencies. Read more: Michael Saylor has invested over $1 billion of MicroStrategy's funds in Bitcoin. The software CEO turned Bitcoin whale explains why he is making such a massive bet on the digital asset."You're absolutely right that the technologies to accomplish this change over time, and we need to m
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Persistent Memory is a new memory technology that allows byte-addressability at DRAM-like access speed and provides disk-like persistence. Applications using persistent memory benefit in a number of ways such as seeing improved performance and faster restart times. More details on this technology can be found at pmem.io. This is a proposal to add native support for programming persistent memory in Go. A detailed design of our approach to add this support is described in our 2020 USENIX ATC paper go-pmem. An implementation of the above design based on Go 1.15 release is available here. In summary, adding support for natively programming persistent memory requires following capabilities to be added to Go : Manage a garbage-collected persistent memory heap Provide an interface for applications to allocate objects in persistent memory heap Enable applications to make crash-consistent updates to data in persistent memory Support applications to recover following a crash/restart There exists libraries such as Intel PMDK that provides C and C++ developers support for persistent memory programming. Other programming languages such as Java and Python are also exploring ways to enable efficient access to persistent memory. But no language provide a native persistent memory programming support. This proposal attempts to remedy this problem by making Go the first language to completely support persistent memory. Since adding this support involves significant changes to the
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On his last day in office, US president Donald Trump has issued 143 pardons – including one for Anthony Levandowski who admitted stealing trade secrets from Waymo while a self-driving car researcher. Breitbart founder and one-time Cambridge Analytica board member Steve Bannon was also among those receiving clemency over fraud charges regarding a fundraiser for Trump's infamous border wall, as were some rappers. In August last year, Levandowski, an engineer in Google's self-driving Waymo division from 2007 to 2016, pleaded guilty to stealing trade secrets and was sent down for 18 months. He was also ordered to pay Google $756,499.22 in compensation and a fine of $95,000. He had resigned from Google to co-found Otto, an autonomous truck firm sold to Uber in 2016. Levandowski was accused of leaving Waymo with more than 14,000 files detailing its proprietary Lidar technology and sharing them with Uber. Google sued Uber over the matter and the companies settled for $245m of Uber stock in 2018. The US Attorney's office took action against Levandowski, filing 33 charges alleging theft and attempted theft of trade secrets, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1832. Explaining Levandowski's pardon, the White House press secretary said he "has paid a significant price for his actions and plans to devote his talents to advance the public good". It was noted the sentencing judge described him as a "brilliant, groundbreaking engineer that our country needs". Raytheon techie who took home radar secrets gets 18 months in the clink in surprise time fraud probe twist READ MORE The individuals supporting the pardon include Peter Thiel, the prominent Trump financier and PayPal investor who founded AI firm Palantir, which largely carries out information analysis and processing work for the defence and intelligence communities, including the CIA and controversial US border agency ICE. The firm has also fingers in NHS data in the UK. Also campaigning for Levandowski's pardon was Palmer Luckey, VR firm Oculus's CEO when it was acquired by Facebook. Levandowski joins a long list of names to be pardoned hours before the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden. Among them is Bannon, the media entrepreneur and alt-right cheerleader who led Trump's 2016 election campaign and became senior counsel to the president following the election, leaving eight months later to rejoin the right-wing news site Breitbart, which he founded. The White House statement said: "Prosecutors pursued Mr Bannon with charges related to fraud stemming from his involvement in a political project. Mr Bannon has been an important leader in the conservative movement and is known for his political acumen." Bannon stood charged with fraud in connection with the "We Build the Wall" campaign. He is alleged to have received more than $1m of the donations, some of which he is accused of using to cover personal expenses. Bannon also helpe
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Distributed search engines using BitTorrent and SQLite Distributed sites have gained much attention lately with systems such as ZeroNet and IPFS, which seem to improve on older systems like Freenet. Building search engines on top of these distributed systems is not quite feasible yet as users need to download the entire site database (usually several hundreds of gigabytes large) before running queries against it. TorrentNet allows you to build distributed search engines by leveraging the BitTorrent network and the SQLite database. Users do not have to wait until the site is fully downloaded before they can query it. How? Site owners create an SQLite database (.db file) and create a torrent from this file. They then proceed to seed this torrent -- just like they would seed any other file. Site users then start downloading the site torrent, but, rather than downloading pieces of the torrent in "rarest first" order, they download pieces based on the search query they performed. In other words, given a search query such as "indiana jones", TorrentNet knows to download pieces of the torrent where data for "indiana jones" is likely to be stored at. Hence, results are given to users in a timely manner, without having to wait until the entire database is downloaded. Furthermore, since search queries are just regular torrent piece downloads, a search query can be satisfied by many different peers in a swarm, effectively allowing for distributed search engines. Distributed torrent sites, queryable on demand by prioritizing specific piece downloads. Create distributed torrent sites accessible via your public key (eg. 33cwte8iwWn7uhtj9MKCs4q5Ax7B) that are shared and kept alive using the BitTorrent network. Update your site using the Mutable Torrents extension (BEP46) and let your users know about site updates via the DHT network. Build interactive sites that are queryable on demand using the sqltorrent technique. Things like search engines, or complex browsable experiences are possible. Pros Hosting your site is as simple as seeding a torrent. No need to buy a domain name or a hosting server. You can easily host your torrent site on your home network and let users visiting your site help you with the hosting. Since you control your address (public key), which is broadcast via the DHT, it's much harder for governments and institution to block the content you're sharing. Via sqltorrent you drive your users experience by letting them only downloading pieces of the torrent that are relevant to the users' interaction. Essentially you could create a search engine, and program interactions so that submissions of a search form result in queries to the underlying SQLite database - which prioritizes pieces based on the query. Cons Read only sites for now. ZeroNet seems to have a solution to this problem but I'm not convinced yet. Your site doesn't have a pretty name. Sharing your public key can be much harder than sharing the name of a DNS site. No standards for doing distributed sites. Many different solutions (IPFS, ZeroNet, Freenet, etc..). TorrentPeek at least follows most of the BitTorrent specifications (us
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Most task managers make two assumptions. Do you make them too? A task manager needs to remember all of your tasks (Would you buy a task manager that lost data?) All tasks can use a similar creation workflow (You hit the ‘create issue’ button, and fill in some fields. Simple, obvious, how could it be better?) It’s not obvious that they’re wrong—they actually seem useful. But both at work, and at home, making these assumptions will reduce your effectiveness. And if you have trouble context-switching, procrastinate tasks, or have an ever-growing task backlog that looms over your head, these assumptions have likely caused you unnecessary pain. Here’s how they hurt us, and how to s
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After 4 months of waiting, that is the response I got from Widevine, Google’s DRM for web browsers, regarding a license agreement. For the last 2 years I’ve been working on a web browser that now cannot be completed because Google, the creators of the open source browser Chrome, won’t allow DRM in an open source project.The browser I’m building, called Metastream, is an Electron-based (Chromium derived), MIT-licensed browser hosted on GitHub. Its main feature is the ability to playback videos on the web, synchronized with other peers. Each client runs its own instance of the Metastream browser and transmits playback information to keep them in sync—no audio or video content is sent
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Since 2007, artist Walead Beshty has been cleverly using FedEx’s shipping infrastructure to create a series of artworks. He constructs glass objects that fit exactly into FedEx’s shipping boxes and then ships them to galleries and museums without any protection against damage. Any cracks or breaks in the glass became part of the work upon display at its destination. According this interview, part of what interested Beshty about doing this project related to the proprietary sizes of FedEx’s boxes: As for the corporate dimension, I was aware that standard FedEx boxes are SSCC coded (serial shipping container code), a code that is held by FedEx and excludes other shippers from
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I’m always fascinated that someone designed just about everything you use, no matter how trivial it is. The keyboard you type on, the light switch you turn on, even the faucet handle. They don’t just spontaneously grow on trees, so some human being had to build it and probably had at least a hazy design in mind when they started it. Some things are so ubiquitous that it is hard to remember that someone had to dream them up to begin with. A friend of mine asked me the other day why we use Control+X and Control+V to manipulate the clipboard almost universally. Control+C for copy makes sense, of course, but it is still odd that it is virtually universal in an industry where everyon
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I like to post new articles and solutions when I think they are ready. Production tested and stable. Well thought and tested … or at least trying to make things as good as possible in the available time window. Perfectionism definitely does not help making often articles on the blog. Today’s solution is not perfect but I will ‘ship it’ anyway because good and done is better then perfect. I wanted to rework it so many times that I stopped counting … and I really would like to continue the series – thus I have made a conscious decision to finally release it and hope that maybe someone else will have better ideas to make it better. I really wanted to provide pixel perfect soluti
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Who will make our banana phones now? — LG says it needs to make "a cold judgment" about its only money-losing division. The LG Velvet is LG's closest thing to a normal flagship right now. With only a non-flagship Snapdragon 765G SoC, the company has opted out of the flagship market. LG
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This purpose of this article is not to rate each web browser in a vacuum, like articles on this website that focus on one specific web browser, but rather to compare all of the web browsers that have been rated on this website against each other. This is a ranking that is based on how much Privacy a browser offers by default, as well as, how much privacy can be gained by configuring it. Top Tier — Best Privacy These are all browsers that require a minimal amount of configuration and can achieve the required level of privacy needed to browse the modern web- compatibility with a comprehensive suite of content-blocking extensions that can block spyware providers correctly and fully. Iridium and Pale Moon both are configured in a way that leaks user information and thus require additional configuration. Tor Browser GNU IceCat Ungoogled Chromium Iridium BrowserConfiguration Guide Pale MoonConfiguration Guide High Tier — Good Privacy These browsers do not have privacy issues, but they also do not have enough privacy features to make it to the highest tier. These browsers both have simple ad-blockers, and do not have any privacy issues, however, these tools are not as good as the comprehensive privacy tools that Top Tier browsers offer. Mid Tier — Ok Privacy These browsers do not have any big privacy flaws, but they also do not have sufficient privacy protections. Qutebrowser has a very basic adblocker in it. Both browsers don't have access to extensions either. So, it's just not enough to be able to browse the modern web privately, despite the developers not putting spyware into their browsers. Low Tier — Poor Privacy These browsers do not protect your privacy, but they are not in the lowest tier since they still have something to offer, although, they should not be used in general. Vivaldi does not let you disable all of the spyware features, Brave whitelists trackers and has forced updates, and Firefox and Waterfox are loaded with spyware, to the point where configuring them is so non-trivial that you might as well use a version of Firefox that respects your privacy by default, rather than diving into the uncertainty of digging out all of the spyware features (and repeating the process every time the browser is updated). It's always going to be better to pick a browser higher on this list. Waterfox Classic Brave
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SpaceX has landed an individual Falcon 9 booster for a record eighth time after pushing the envelope on winds above the waiting drone ship. The launch had been delayed from 18 January due to what the company called "unfavorable weather conditions in the recovery area". There was a further delay on 19 January "to allow additional time for pre-launch inspections" before Elon Musk's band of rocketeers lit the blue touchpaper and stood well back earlier today. The first Starlink mission of 2021 left Kennedy Space Center's LC39-A at
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Apple Right from Apple’s $3 billion purchase of Beats in 2014, the company, alongside increasingly less amused Beats executives, has had to put up with repeated questions on when it was going to release some proper, serious Apple headphones. Then the success of AirPods only fuelled speculation that an over-ear set of cans had to be coming. Finally, all guessing ended in September last year as Jon Prosser leaked images of the then unannounced AirPods Max headpho
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The release of Apple Silicon-based Macs at the end of last year generated a flurry of news coverage and some surprises at the machine’s performance. This post details some background information on the experience of porting Firefox to run natively on these CPUs. We’ll start with some background on the Mac transition and give an overview of Firefox internals that needed to know about the new architecture, before moving on to the concept of Universal Binaries. We’ll then explain how DRM/EME works on the new platform, talk about our experience with macOS Big Sur, and discuss various updater problems we had to deal with. We’ll conclude with the release and an overview of various other improvements that are in the pipeline. Apple Silicon Approaching Speculation that Apple would switch its Mac lineup to use ARM CPUs had been ongoing in the industry for several years. As early as 2013, Apple had referred to the custom ARM chips they were putting in the iPhone as “desktop-class” designs. While the claim initially met some scepticism, near the end of 2018 computer hardware magazine AnandTech published the results of running the industry-standard SPEC benchmark on the iPhone XS, showing that even workloads that reflect real-world desktop use cases reached desktop chip performance, and were doing so at significantly better power efficiency. This provided us with some warning that Apple might be ready to start the transition to the ARM architecture in the near future. From the perspective of Mozillla’s platform team, an area of particular interest for such an architecture change on macOS is Firefox’s use of macOS APIs. Firefox and Gecko’s roots go back to the Netscape codebase, which already supported the Mac as it was in 1994. Although continuously updated, Firefox still uses a wide range of macOS APIs that followed the Mac’s evolution over the years (Carbon, Cocoa, HIITheme, Quartz, …).  Apple has generally kept them — the code is there and working, after all — and has even added compatibility shims in some places where behavior has changed. But they’re not willing to keep compatibility forever, and in fact had removed 32-bit support in the previous macOS Catalina which had an impact on applications that were relying on this, among them many games.  As such, we were concerned that not all APIs would still be supported on the new architecture and we’d have to go in and rewrite some amount of widget, toolkit or theming code in short order. Based on the performance from the aforementioned benchmarks and Apple’s historical release schedule, the platform team estimated in March that “macOS 10.16” was likely to appear around September or October 2020 and that there was a significant risk it could involve API changes in order to add ARM support, which we took into account in our planning. The Announcement On the 22nd of June 2020, Apple confirmed it would begin moving its Mac hardware to their own ARM chips – referred to as Apple Silicon. They also confirmed that the machines would ship with an Intel x64 emulator (Rosetta 2) and would support iOS apps. The latter led to some guessing within Mozilla’s platfor
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Hey everyone! My name is Laila and with my co-founder Iliana I’m building Manara (https://www.manara.tech/). We support software engineers in the Arab region to get great jobs at tech companies worldwide. These companies appreciate being connected to skilled talent that is diverse and inclusive (50% of our engineers are women).I grew up in a refugee camp in Gaza. My dream was to become a Silicon Valley software engineer. Eventually I hacked my way there successfully, becoming a software engineer at Nvidia. I like to joke that the hardest part wasn’t escaping Gaza in the middle of the 2014 war, but rather, my first interviews... which I totally bombed. ;)Once I got to Silicon Valley, I was surprised at the lack of women. In Gaza, more women study computer science than men! I was also surprised to learn how hard it was for companies in Silicon Valley to attract the talent we needed. During interviews with candidates I’d often think, “I wish I could hire my friends in Gaza. They’d be great.”That’s when I re-connected with Iliana. She and I had met in Gaza when she was running Gaza Sky Geeks (GSG), the first startup accelerator in Gaza. Her work was widely covered and has a few threads on HN including https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11858963. Iliana asked me “How can we produce more success stories like yours?”I told her that engineers in the Arab region don't lack talent, but they lack other ingredients. They're mostly not aware of opportunities outside their region, and even if they are aware, they think you have to be a genius to work at a company like Google. Also, they have no idea what sorts of resumes recruiters want to see and don't have brand names to put on them. They don't have referral networks to get their foot in the door. And they're completely unprepared for the style of interviews that tech companies go for. As we talked further, it became clear that all of these problems would be fixable with the right kind of coaching and support, and that bringing this growing talent pool to the global job marketplace would benefit both sides (accelerating the success of global companies, while redistributing wealth to the region).We developed an approach to address those gaps - and it worked. Just last week, 67% of the people we referred to Google for internships made it past the hiring committee (they’re now waiting for their job offers, so if you work at Google and have internship headcount, let us know!) We’ve heard Google interviewers say several times, “This is the best junior engineering interview I’ve ever done.”I want to emphasize that we are not a zero-to-hero bootcamp. Manara is a career accelerator for skilled software engineers at all levels with a focus on junior engineers. Students learn the technical and soft skills they need to pass interviews and get introductions to companies with jobs that are either remote or on-site (in Europe or Canada). We charge an affordable fee to both candidates and companies, only if a successful match is made.We focus on Arabic-speaking countries in the Middle East and North Africa region (MENA) for a few reasons. On the business side, that's where we're from and w
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Star Trek and stuff — The service combines CBS, MTV, BET, Paramount, Nickelodeon, and more. Enlarge / Star Trek: Picard will be offered on the new/old streaming service.It's time for yet another streaming service—sort of. ViacomCBS has announced that Paramount+ will launch on March 4, but it's more of an evolution than a wholly new service, as it replaces and expands upon the company's previous service, CBS All Access. The move to replace CBS All Access was announced several months ago. It's in large part a result of the completion of the merger between CBS and Viacom, as CBS All Access launched before that merger, but the merger greatly increased the content library that could be put on a streaming service run by the company. In addition to shows associated with the CBS TV network, Paramount+ will include content from properties Viacom brought to the mix, including MTV, BET, Comedy Central, VH1, and Nickelodeon, as well as theatrically released films from Paramount Pictures. Beyond the myriad Star Trek shows that CBS All Access has already offered, planned original series for Paramount+ include a series based on The Godfather as well as a revival of VH1's Behind the Music. The sizzle trailer for Paramount+.March 4 is the planned launch day in the US and Latin America, and a launch is planned in Nordic countries on March 25, as well as Australia around the middle of the year. Canada will also receive the service sometime this year, but a date has not been named—however, CBS All Access will be rebranded to Paramount+ right away in that country even before new content is introduced. Before this point, CBS All Access was arguably best known for its various Star Trek programs; it included all the Star Trek TV series that aired on broadcast TV in the past, plus new Trek series like Discovery, Picard, and Lower Decks. It did not, however, have the Star Trek movies at first, as those were owned by Paramount. The merger brought all Star Trek TV and movie content under one corporate roof. CBS All Access also aired live TV, sports programming, and some additional shows like the critically acclaimed The Good Fight. Those will continue under Paramount+. The past year and a half has seen numerous new streaming networks launch, including Peacock (NBC Universal), Disney+, and HBO Max, among others. The onslaught has disappointed those who expected a service like Netflix or Hulu to offer virtually all content for a flat $10-per-month fee, but that was never going to be economically viable, especially as production costs for TV series have risen in recent years as viewers have responded to more lavishly produced shows—something the industry refers to as "prestige TV." The new normal for TV appears to be similar in some respects to cable, with each media company delivering a channel that primarily consists of the company's own content, plus small amounts of licensed content. Still, there are some significant difference
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Webcast What’s your tech infrastructure going to look like in the next few months or years? You know, once we get past the current situation and find time to start innovating again. All of which may come sooner than you think. Your devs are probably going to be experimenting with analytics, machine learning and AI. Data will be coming at you from all directions, from customers to edge devices. And much, if not all, of this is probably going to happening in the cloud. Sounds interesting, doesn’t it. And you’re not the only one interested. Bad actors are going to be interested too, and would like to exfiltrate as much of
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See a different side to your family and friends Mon - Sat Take time each day to reflect intentionally and slow down Mon
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In computer programming, Flow-Based Programming (FBP) is a programming paradigm, discovered/invented by J. Paul Rodker Morrison in the late '60s, that uses a "data processing factory" metaphor for designing and building applications. FBP defines applications as networks of "black box" processes, which communicate via data chunks (called Information Packets) travelling across predefined connections (think "conveyor belts"), where the connections are specified externally to the processes. These black box processes can be reconnected endlessly to form different applications without having to be changed internally. FBP is thus naturally component-oriented.
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mebm is a browser based video editor that supports animation of images and text overlays. The animation is done with key-frames (denoted in blue on the timeline) and linear interpolation. The design values simplicity and rudimentary functionality over a full feature set. Audio is not yet supported, but is planned. >>> link <<< timeline allow extending beyond current max time (medium) split at play head (medium) mouseover preview safari fix (hard) file management error on bad type (easy) animated .gif support editing undo (hard) audio (hard) face tracking (medium/easy) opacity (easy) rotation (medium) code refactor/simplify MoveableLayer
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Although it would be nice, we can’t all work from home. If you have to spend the day in close quarters with other people, you might want more protection than just a mask and sanitizer. Check out [jshanna]’s DIY HEPA filtering fan — it looks like a breeze to build and uses commonly-available parts plus a few 3D-printed pieces to put it all together. The basis of this attractive and useful office must-have is a muffin fan from Amazon that has an optional variable speed controller. A long threaded rod runs up the center of the HEPA filter, so it attaches kind of like a lampshade. The fan draws up air from underneath and blows it upward through the filter and out into t
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You’re a software engineering leader, and you’re great at your job. You know that the optimal path for software development lies in figuring out which components of your design to implement from scratch and which have already been implemented by specialists and can be reused. You also know that these aren’t decisions that you can only make once – you have to keep reevaluating based on environment changes and the needs of new products. Authentication is one of those components that you deal with all the time. Auth is a necessary part of any software product, but how you implement auth is not necessarily always the same. Careful consideration is needed,
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OVHcloud has introduced tape-storage-as-a-service, based on IBM technology, in response to European data sovereignty and localisation requirements. The company, which is among Europe's biggest hosting firms, has kicked off with four dedicated facilities, all located in France but, for disaster recovery purposes, sited several hundred kilometres apart. Sylvain Rouri, chief sales officer, said the "reliable and sovereign data preservation solution" will deliver a secure and trusted cloud for European customers. Mike Doran, worldwide sales director at IBM, said the deal with OVH was "another proof point of the enduring value that IBM Enterprise Tape provides to organisations as they look to cost effectively and securely store ever growing amounts of critical data". OVH's tape-as-a-service is S3-compatible, and that means it is roughly equivalent to AWS Glacier and Glacier Deep Archive. At time of writing, we don't have price details to enable us to compare rival offerings. The rationale for this service is to cut storage costs by moving old and stale data from enterprise customers' data centres to tape. And if you need to see the data again, restore times range from 10 minutes and 12 hours. Euro cloud slingers fight for niches on their own doorstep as AWS, Microsoft and Google inhale market share READ MORE The service uses IBM tape in tandem with Miria, an enterprise data backup, archive and migration suite from the French company Atempo. "Put simply," OVH said, "storing data on Tape costs mere pennies per terabyte and when not in use, requires zero energy consumption unlike hard disks and flash drives." Tale of the tape The tape in question is IBM's proprietary format 3592. The current Gen 6 TS1160 format (3592-60F) has a 20TB/tape cartridge raw capacity, 60TB compressed, and maximum uncompressed speed of 400MB/sec. These cartridges are used in IBM's TS3500 and TS4500 tape libraries. For comparison, the current open LTO-8 format offers 12TB raw, 3
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Since today marks one year since the release of Lenna’s Inception on Steam, it felt like a good time to look back over the game’s development and release. If you haven’t played Lenna’s Inception yet, feel free to read on without fear of spoilers. And if you don’t have Lenna’s Inception but like the sound of what you read here, you should know that both the game and the soundtrack are 50% off for today, and today only (edit: no longer)! It’s hard not to be quite critical of past mistakes, but I don’t really have many major regrets. Over the period of time covered here, I learned a ton, made new friends, formed connections, and built up a new career. Making and releasing this game was definitely worthwhile. In case you’ve come here from elsewhere and aren’t already acquainted with the game, Lenna’s Inception is a sort of metafictional, glitch-themed take on the Zelda series. After the hero dies in a glitch-related accident early in the game, the titular character Lenna, a schoolteacher who just wants to make sure her students are safe, is forced to take up the mantle. The game has multiple endings, procedurally generated maps, local co-op, tons of puns, and a set of challenge modes. We released the game on the 17th of January, 2020.
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First, an example title This is Dumbdown. The keyword for title is title. subtitle Dumbdown compiles to html. paragraph Dumbdown is an alternative to Markdown. paragraph Blank lines get turned into link https://treenotation.org/ It is built on Tree Notation code alert(`The keyword for code blocks is "code"`) list item Dumbdown supports lists item For now the keyword for an item is "item" item This is a very early version item Dumbdown is released to the public domain item If you want to make it better, please do! Try it Now The original prototype: https://jtree.treenotation.org/designer/#standard%20dumbdown An actual v1 spec is now in the discussion phase. Why Dumbdown? Do you want a markup language that doesn't require memorizing esoteric symbols but uses words instead? Do you want a markup langauge where you not only don't have to remember which order brackets go in— is it ()[] or —but that doesn't use brackets at all?! Do you want a markup language that is extensible, so you can store your own custom config data right alongside your content? Do you want a markup language where it is super easy to embed any kind of data or code without doing adding escape characters? Do you want a markup language that you could write your own parser for without having to learn complex parsing techniques? If you answered YES to the questions above, then Dumbdown is for you?! Features Keywords instead of key characters. ie "title" instead of "#". No brackets. Links are just "link", or type the full url for inline links. Stick your own custom config data in. Every file parses to a map. i.e. "published true". No need to escape characters for snippets. Just indent blocks. Very easy to write your own parsers for. It's just Tree Notation. Project Status Discussing spec for v1. Note: this Readme.md file is written in markdown, but if someone wants to work on Dumbdown syntax highlighting for GitHub, once we have a spec, that would be great! Issue is here: https://github.com/treenotation/dumbdown/issues/1 Release Notes Version 0.2 01/20/2021 -- Let's make this a real thing. Readme and GitHub project started. Version 0.1 09/01/2019 --
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Get out of jail free — Peter Thiel, Palmer Luckey, and others asked Trump to pardon Levandowski. Enlarge / Anthony Levandowski exits federal court in San Jose, California, on August 27, 2019.David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty ImagesOn his final full day in office, Donald Trump pardoned Anthony Levandowski, the engineer at the center of Waymo's epic 2017 trade secret battle with Uber. Last year, Levandowski pleaded guilty to stealing a single confidential Google document; prosecutors agreed to drop other pending charges against him. Levandowski was a key early member of Google's self-driving car project, but he quit Google in early 2016 to found his own self-driving startup. Within months, the startup was acquired by Uber for a nine-figure sum, and Levandowski was put in charge of Uber's self-driving efforts. But then, Google's self-driving unit—now known as Waymo—accused Levandowski of stealing trade secrets. According to Waymo, Levandowski had downloaded thousands of confidential documents from Google in his final days as a Google employee. Waymo says it was tipped off to the theft after Uber submitted a design for a lidar circuit board to a third-party vendor—a vendor also used by Waymo. Uber's design looked almost identical to Waymo's. Waymo sued Uber over the theft. When Levandowski invoked the Fifth Amendment rather than testify in the civil case, Uber fired him. Waymo and Uber settled their lawsuit in early 2018. Levandowski was ultimately ordered to pay Waymo $179 million, forcing him to declare bankruptcy. Federal prosecutors then charged Levandowski with 30 criminal counts related to the theft of trade secrets. After Levandowski's guilty plea, a judge sentenced him to 18 months in prison in August. Levandowski had argued that he had health conditions that put him in particular danger from COVID-19. So the judge allowed Levandowski to delay serving his sentence until the pandemic was over. Now Trump's pardon means
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How much does Beeper cost?Beeper is a subscription service with a $10 monthly fee.Can I self host?We decided to open source all our bridges to enable you to audit how Beeper connects to each chat network and verify the security of your data. The side effect is that you may self host if you prefer. There are two options for self hosting Beeper:On-premises, managed by Beeper: run our install script on your amd64 server or 4gb Raspberry Pi and run all bridges locally on your own hardware. This option requires a Beeper subscription.Self-host the full stack: The simplest and free way to self-host the full Matrix+bridges stack is with this Ansible scriptNB: the Beeper client app is not open source, but the stack will work with Element (open source Matrix client).How in the world did you get iMe
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Red Hat has announced a new set of options meant to attract current CentOS users who are unhappy with the shift to CentOS Stream. "While CentOS Linux provided a no-cost Linux distribution, no-cost RHEL also exists today through the Red Hat Developer program. The program’s terms formerly limited its use to single-machine developers. We recognized this was a challenging limitation. We’re addressing this by expanding the terms of the Red Hat Developer program so that the Individual Developer subscription for RHEL can be used in production for up to 16 systems. That’s exactly what it sounds like: for small production use cases, this is no-cost, self-supported RHEL." (Log in to post comments)
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We are a small group of friendly humans working on an open source project to make informal video calls more fun and dynamic. The idea emerged during the first SARS-CoV-2 shutdown when some of us started a virtual bar. We found informal group conversations restricting and hierarchical, as the majority of tools are created to enable (corporate) meeting culture. Where were the dynamics of a self-organizing crowd hanging out at one big table together? The big table, where so many jokes, comforting talks, discussions, and encounters happen. Where utopias and ideas would emerge?It’s our goal to find interaction patterns that enable informal, unmoderated video calls. It’s our hypothesis, that we can prototype these interactions based on spatialized sound.This proj
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For many years now, the so-called ‘Blue Pill’ STM32 MCU development board has been a staple in the hobbyist community. Finding its origins as an apparent Maple Mini clone, the diminutive board is easily to use in breadboard projects thanks to its dual rows of 0.1″ pin sockets. Best of all, it only costs a few bucks, even if you can only really buy it via sellers on AliExpress and EBay. Starting last year, boards with a black soldermask and an STM32F4 Access (entry-level) series MCUs including the F401 and F411 began to appear. These boards with the nickname ‘Black Pill’ or ‘Black Pill 2’. F103 boards also existed with black soldermask for a while, so it’s confusing. The F4xx Black Pills are available via the same sources as the F103-based Blue Pill ones, for a similar price, but feature an MCU that’s considerably newer and more powerful. This raises the question of whether it makes sense at this point to switch to these new boards. Our answer is yes, but it’s not entirely clearcut. The newer hardware is better for most purposes, really lacking only the F103’s dual ADCs. But hardware isn’t the only consideration; depending on one’s preferred framework, support may be lacking or incomplete. So let’s take a look at what it takes to switch. The Hardware The F4 MCUs have significantly better specs than the F103, with a higher clockspeed, more flash storage and more SRAM. In total we have three MCUs to compare on the old and new boards: F103:  72 MHz, 64/128 kB Flash,   20 kB SRAM. (STM32F103C8T6) F401:  84 MHz,     256 kB Flash,   64 kB SRAM. (STM32F401CCU6) F411: 100 MHz,       512 kB Flash, 128 kB SRAM. (STM32F411CEU6) T
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The second half of 2020 brought improved 5G availability in the UK with London seeing some of the biggest gains, according to research by RootMetrics. Predictably, the network with the highest 5G availability was EE, which had next-gen connectivity present during 39.9 per cent of RootMetrics' tests in the capital, compared to 28.8 per cent in the first half of the year. Although far from widely available, this growth was an improvement in a relatively short amount of time. Still, EE has an advantage as the first UK carrier to launch a commercial 5G service – it's easier to maintain a lead when you've had a head start. The other three main carriers, O2, Three, and Vodafone each flashed better figures over the first half of the year too, as one might expect. O2 ended H1 2020 as the worst carrier for 5G in the capital with just 0.3 per cent availability. By the end of last year, it remained firmly in last place but had upped its game to offer 5G access in 6.6 per cent of all tests. Three almost tripled its 5G penetration to 16.8 per cent and Vodafone's coverage nearly doubled, reaching 9.7 per cent of test sites. In terms of speed, each carrier outperformed their own 4G networks by a country mile, although 5G speeds varied between the bunch. Three was the slowest, reporting median download speeds of 114.7Mpbs. EE and O2 we
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HARRISBURG — A woman accused of entering the U.S. Capitol illegally during the Jan. 6 riot will likely be charged with stealing a computer from the office of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a federal prosecutor said in court Tuesday.U.S. Magistrate Judge Martin Carlson in Harrisburg said he will consider bail and that he plans to conduct a preliminary hearing on Thursday in the case of Riley June Williams.Williams is charged with trespassing as well as violent entry
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pink looks good — At almost $20,000 less than an entry-level 911, it seems like a bargain. As we expected, Porsche has introduced a single-motor, rear-wheel drive version of the Taycan electric vehicle to its lineup.
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The pandemic has been kind to Logitech, whose profits have almost quadrupled from what they were a year ago. Revenues for the peripheral maker's Q3 ended 31 December show a jump of 85 per cent year-on-year to $1.67bn and profit came in at $448m versus $129m. For the nine months of fiscal '21, sales were up 64 per cent $3.716bn and profit grew 205 per cent to $721.5m. On a conference call with financial analysts, Logitech CEO Bracken Darrell said: "Last quarter, we predicted that as the world opened up, few companies would opt f
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Not quite total recall — Studies are small so far, but they're pointing to decent long-term immune responses. Enlarge / The immune response involves a lot of moving parts.There's still a lot of uncertainty about how exactly the immune system responds to the SARS-CoV-2 virus. But what's become clear is that re-infections are still very rare, despite an ever-growing population of people who were exposed in the early days of the pandemic. This suggests that, at least for most people, there is a degree of long-term memory in the immune response to the virus. But immune memory is complicated and involves a number of distinct immune features. It w
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What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience …– From The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) by Hannah Arendt ‘Please write regularly, or otherwise I am going to die out here.’ Hannah Arendt didn’t usually begin letters to her husband this way, but in the spring of 1955 she found herself alone in a ‘wilderness’. After the publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism, she was invited to be a visiting lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley. She didn’t like the intellectual atmosphere. Her colleagues lacked a sense of humour, and the cloud of McCarthyism hung over social life
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Jan 11, 2021 by brian d foy Now I want to grab the entire list of O’Reilly cover animals, and Mojolicious is going to help me do that. O’Reilly Media, who publishes most of my books, is distinctively known by the animals it chooses for their covers. Edie Freedman explains how she came up with the well-known design in A short history of the O’Reilly animals. I think I first saw this design on the cover of sed & awk; those Slender Lorises (Lori?) are a bit creepy, but not creepy enough to keep me away from the command line. Not that a Perler should talk since Larry Wall choose a camel: it’s ugly but it gets th
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Rally — In wide-ranging interview, she also cautioned not to panic over coronavirus variants. Enlarge / Dr. Rochelle Walensky, President-elect Joe Biden’s pick to head the Centers for Disease Control.Midday today, January 20, Dr. Rochelle Walensky will take over as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—and one of her top priorities will be to try to undo all the harms done to the agency by the Trump administration. “How is it that I make sure that the people who are there—these incredible scientists, these incredible civil servants for their entire career—understand and feel the value that we should be giving them? They have bee
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Security company Malwarebytes suspects a breach of its Office 365 and Azure tenancies is by the same attacker behind the SolarWinds hack, but reckons flaws in Azure Active Directory security are also to blame. Malwarebytes, whose products include widely used anti-malware tools for consumers and businesses, said that it does not use SolarWinds but believes that the same attacker used "another intrusion vector that works by abusing applications with privileged access to Microsoft Office 365 and Azure environments". The attack was spotted because of suspicious activity reported by Microsoft's Security Response Center. The intruder "only gained access to a limited subset of internal company emails" said Malw
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This post highlights new, simplified and low-/no-cost options for deploying RHEL. These are the first of many new programs. To immediately go to the program that interests you: No-cost RHEL for small production workloads No-cost RHEL for customer development teams On December 8, 2020, Red Hat announced a major change to the enterprise Linux ecosystem: Red Hat will begin shifting our work from CentOS Linux to CentOS Stream on December 31, 2021. We and the CentOS Project governing board believe that CentOS Stream represents the best way to further drive Linux innovation. It will give everyone in the broader ecosystem community, including open source developers, hardware and software creators, individual contributors, and systems administrators, a closer connection to t
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I know a number of folks use The Great Suspender to automatically suspend inactive browser tabs in Chrome. Apparently recent versions of this extension have been taken over by a shady anonymous entity and is now flagged by Microsoft as malware. Notably the most recent version of the extension (v7.1.8) has added integrated analytics that can track all of your browsing activity across all sites. Yikes. Recommendations for users of The Great Suspender (7.1.8): Temporary easy fix Disable analytics tracking by opening the extension options for The Great Suspender and unchecking “Automatic deactivation of any kind of tracking”. Pray that the shady developer doesn’t issue a malicious update to The Great Suspender later. (There’s no sensible way to disable updates o
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A small group of wild, European bison will be introduced to a woodland reserve in England, and the group overseeing the project is looking for two rangers to manage the herd, no previous experience required.European bison, like this one, will be introduced to roam in the wild in the Blean woods near Canterbury, England, next spring. This bison is one of two males in captivity at the Wildwood Trust. (Tom Cawdron)As It Happens6:31Bison rangers wanted to oversee U.K. herd — no bison experience necessaryRead Story Transcript It's a job in the great outdoors that doesn't require applicants to have done it before, but the successful candidates will need to be comfortable with horns, hooves and fur. A conservation project in England is seeking to hire two rangers to oversee a small herd o
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India has asked WhatsApp to withdraw the planned change to its privacy policy, posing a new headache to the Facebook-owned service that identifies the South Asian nation as its biggest market by users. In an email to WhatsApp head Will Cathcart, the nation’s IT ministry said the upcoming update to the app’s data-sharing policy has raised “grave concerns regarding the implications for the choice and autonomy of Indian citizens… Therefore, you are called upon to withdraw the proposed changes.” The ministry is additionally seeking clarification from WhatsApp on its data-sharing agreement with Facebook and other commercial firms and has asked why users in the EU are exempt from the new privacy policy but their counterpoint in India have no choice but to comply.
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This post highlights new, simplified and low-/no-cost options for deploying RHEL. These are the first of many new programs. To immediately go to the program that interests you: No-cost RHEL for small production workloads No-cost RHEL for customer development teams On December 8, 2020, Red Hat announced a major change to the enterprise Linux ecosystem: Red Hat will begin shifting our work from CentOS Linux to CentOS Stream on December 31, 2021. We and the CentOS Project governing board believe that CentOS Stream represents the best way to further drive Linux innovation. It will give everyone in the broader ecosystem community, including open source developers, hardware and software creators, individual contributors, and systems administrators, a closer connection to t
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Illustration by Paweł Jońca In 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope team gave the world the first glimpse of what a black hole actually looks like. But the image of a glowing, ring-shaped object that the group unveiled wasn’t a conventional photograph. It was computed — a mathematical transformation of data captured by radio telescopes in the United States, Mexico, Chile, Spain and the South Pole1. The team released the programming code it used to accomplish that feat alongside the articles that documented its findings, so the scientific community could see — and build on — what it had done.It’s an increasingly common pattern. From astronomy to zoology, behind every great scientific finding of the modern age, there is
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Participation in open source requires you to surrender your monopoly over commercial exploitation. This is a profound point about free and open source software which seems to be causing a lot of companies to struggle with their understanding of the philosophy of FOSS, and it’s worth addressing on its own. It has been apparent for some years now that FOSS is eating the software world, and corporations are trying to figure out their relationship with it. One fact that you will have to confront in this position is that you cannot monopolize the commercial potential of free and open source software. The term “open source” is broadly accepted as being defined by the Open Source Definition, and its very first requirement is the following: [The distribution terms of open-source sof
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rhel is the new centos — RHEL is now free for dev teams, and it's even free in production for up to 16 systems. Enlarge / CentOS used to be the preferred way to get RHEL compatibility at no cost. CentOS is gone now—but Red Hat is extending no-cost options for RHEL further than ever before. Last month, Red Hat caused a lot of consternation in the enthusiast and small business Linux world when it announced the discontinuation of CentOS Linux. Long-standing tradition—and ambiguity in Red Hat's posted terms—led users to believe that CentOS 8 would be available until 2029, just like the RHEL 8 it was based on. Red Hat's early termination of CentOS 8 in 2021 cut eight of those 10 years away, leaving thousands of users stranded. CentOS Stream Red Hat's December announcement of CentOS Stream—which it initially billed as a "replacement" for CentOS Linux—left many users confused about its role in the updated Red Hat ecosystem. This week, Red Hat clarifies the broad strokes as follows: To summarize: we're making CentOS Stream the collaboration hub for RHEL, with the landscape looking like this: Fedora Linux is the place for major new operating system innovations, thoughts, and ideas—essentially, this is where the next major version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is born. CentOS Stream is the continuously delivered platform that becomes the next minor version of RHEL. RHEL is the intelligent operating system for production workloads, used in nearly every industry in the world, from cloud-scale deployment
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There’s a fallacy commonplace enough on the internet and causing sufficient confusion that it could use some clarifying: Teams decide to be “Haskell shops”, hire for maximal type-tetris capability and therefore expect to, by direct implication and default, produce outstanding software. Stated differently for additional clarity: Haskell, or any other particular language for that matter, does not automatically solve all problems related to architecture and macro-level decision-making in software production. Believing otherwise may actually produce worse outcomes than picking a mainstream language (e.g. JavaScript) and dealing with its warts.Here are some examples where simply “choosing Haskell” will not automatically solve the concern for you at all:Laying down, communicating and embodying the right hierarchy of values in software development, especially in a group settingChoosing the right internal/intermediate data representationsImagining the right MVP functionality your software should have in a way that aligns with continued enhancement from thereKnowing where making a huge deal out of every little issue prevents progress and where deep care needs to be taken even for the very MVPChoosing the right database — knowing when to use Postgres, Redis, DynamoDb, ElasticSearch, etc in concert as appropriateKnowing when a 300ms database call is just fine and when even 50ms isn’t acceptable.Knowing when no-redundancy is completely fine and when over-the-top redundancy is prudentKnowing when to use external async queues, their limitations, downsides, etc, and when to just get something done inlineFiguring out the right database schema (remembering there’s always a
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In October, the popular and famous archivist tool youtube-dl was taken down by GitHub due to a DMCA request by the Recording Industry Association of America. I posted a detailed analysis explaining the relation between international, US, EU and German law, and showing why this request was very different from what most people know as the “classic” DMCA takedown request. I felt this was necessary since there were a lot of rumor and wrong claims out on the Internet (not just in forums or on the (anti)social media, but also on media offerings), which did not help the discussion at all. The repository is back now, thanks to the EFF and its team. They filed a counter-notice on behalf of the youtube-dl maintainers, which allowed GitHub to reinstantiate the repository. EFF helps out by writing a counter notice The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-governmental organization based in the U.S. dedicated to defending civil liberties and especially digital rights, helped out the youtube-dl maintainers by filing a very informative counter notice with GitHub. This notice explained why the request itself is an abuse of the DMCA and the takedown was not justified at all. It allowed GitHub to reinstantiate the repository and, more importantly, all the metadata (for example, issues and pull requests) that was posted on the platform by users, developers and maintainers. Such information is invaluable to a project, and a takedown of the entire repository with all this data can hurt a project very badly. The takedown was widely regarded as abuse of the DMCA by the RIAA, given that the youtube-dl code repository did not contain any infringing material. The argumentation was made up by claiming that the primary purpose was to infringe copyright of some songs whose artists are apparently represented by the RIAA. They cited some automated unit tests for this, which do not download the entire songs, and would not be seen or executed by regular users. The EFF argues that these are likely a form of “fair use” and thus allowed legally. The request also cited an obscure German court decision which considered YouTube’s “rolling cipher” an “effective
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Ever wanted your own gesture-controlled robot arm? [EbenKouao]’s DIY Arduino Robot Arm project covers all the bases involved, but even if a robot arm isn’t your jam, his project has plenty to learn from. Every part is carefully explained, complete with source code and a list of required hardware. This approach to documenting a project is great because it not only makes it easy to replicate the results, but it makes it simple to remix, modify, and reuse separate pieces as a reference for other work. [EbenKouao] uses a 3D-printable robotic gripper, base, and arm design as the foundation of his build. Hobby servos and a single NEMA 17 stepper take care of the moving, and the wiring and motor driving is all carefully explained. Gesture control is done by wearing an articulated glove upon which is mounted flex sensors and MPU6050 accelerometers. These sensors detect the wearer’s movements and turn them into motion commands, which in turn get sent wirelessly from the glove to the robotic arm with HC-05 Bluetooth modules. We really dig [EbenKouao]’s idea of mounting the glove sensors to this slick 3D-printed articulated gauntlet frame, but using a regular glove would work, too. The latest version of the Arduino code can be found on the project’s GitHub repo
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In brief After an initial failure in 2020, the Virgin Galactic spinout reached orbit on its second try, with the LauncherOne rocket deploying its payloads to a 500km orbit. Virgin Orbit employs an air-launch system via the Cosmic Girl carrier aircraft, an adapted Boeing 747, which drops LauncherOne at the required altitude. The first attempt, in may last year, saw a brief firing of the rocket's engine before it abruptly cut out. Things went considerably better over the weekend as the NewtonThree engine burned for the full duration before stage separation and the NewtonFour-powered second stage took the payload to orbit. Virgin Orbit can now take its place alongside other small sat launchers, such as Rocket Lab. The differentiator is that air-launch capability removes the need for as much ground infrastructure. NASA bigwigs, the UK Space Agency and UK politicians lined up to congratulate the company. After all, there is a runway in Cornwall anxiously awaiting Virgin Orbit's arrival. Thank you, @spacegovuk, for all of your support. We look forward to bringing launch to Britain! https://t.co/tjY0sQ8eMC — Virgin Orbit (@Virgin_Orbit) January 18, 2021 Boeing's Calamity Capsule software checks out While the Space Launch System core stage, led by Boeing, may have faltered over the weekend, the company's troubled CST-100 Starliner spacecraft took another step closer to launch. Issues with the qualification processes the first time around resulted in a failure of the uncrewed capsule to reach the International Space Station (ISS) and a truncated mission. Boeing announced that the formal requalification of the flight software was now complete ahead of a re-run of that first mission in March. Testing has included full end-to-end mission scenarios and "additional assessments were made to verify the complete integration of software with all recommended flight hardware." It's a shame that such diligence did not feature quite so prominently before. Addition
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Element Matrix Services is adding a bridge between hipster chat platform Slack and the open-source world of Matrix messaging. With recent events focusing the minds of users on what might be happening to their data on centrally hosted platforms, Matrix, which emerged from beta in June 2019, represents a more open alternative. To ease the journey from the centralised world of Slack, Element Matrix Services (EMS) – a hosting platform for Matrix – is adding a managed bridge for connecting Slack to the Matrix ecosystem. The bridge will join others that connect services such as Telegram and Discord to the network. The functionality costs $20 for one workspace and a maximum of 20 rooms (unless one wishes to purchase multiple bridges) on top of the EMS subscription pricing. The Register spoke to Matthew Hodgson, technical co-founder of Matrix and CEO of Element, who explained how it worked. "The integration happens on the server side, so it's available on all of the clients both on the Matrix side and also on the Slack side," he said. The implementation works on a room-by-room or channel-by-channel basis and, assuming an administrator has enabled the necessary inbound and outbound webhooks, replicates the requisite bits of Slack in the Matrix. Matrix users appear as bots in Slack, and authorised Slack users appear in the Matrix. Things are text-based for the time being. Hodgson was, however, hopeful that the impending Digital Markets Act [PDF] would see more APIs opening up and the arrival of VoIP in the coming months. Managed bridges for other platforms, such as Microsoft Teams, are also on the cards. The Matrix project itself is all about secure, decentralised and real-time communication. Messaging is protected by end-to-end encryption, VoIP is present and correct and the reference implementations for the system are Apache licensed. The system can handle pretty much any real-time data, according to the foundation. "If you're familiar with how Git work
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Hi friends, I’m looking for a site that recommends books based on preferences. All the sites I found depend on matching up user profiles. That is to say, you like the books that these other people like and so here are some more books for you. The flaw I see here is that you don’t usually get to see unknown authors. I’m looking for a site/program that uses the actual text of books to match up your interests directly with books, rather than other peoples opinions of books. If there is no such site, are you, or anyone you know, building such an engine or site? Thanks!
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About OdekoOdeko builds mobile ordering and supply chain management software for independent coffee shops, cafes, and bakeries. About the roleWhy Odeko? Odeko builds mobile ordering and supply chain tools for coffee shops, cafés and bakeries. It’s our goal to help these small businesses increase their revenue, lower how much they spend on supplies, and to reduce their environmental footprint. We’re on a mission to build products that make the lives of our customers better. We genuinely care about people, and we rely on an ambitious team that operates within a collaborative environment to
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The product activation inflicted on Windows by Microsoft has few fans, but one of its creators stepped up over the weekend to explain and defend the maligned technology. The sight of Windows bleating about activation is a familiar one (certainly to those that follow our Bork feature). While also a mainstay of the Office productivity suite, it turned up in Windows XP as an extension to the serial numbers of the past, as Microsoft tried to address piracy worries. As with the serial number, the user was expected to enter a lengthy alphanumeric that was associated with a computed hash based on the system components. Microsoft's servers took care of the activation and, as long as that hardware hash didn't change too much, would allow repeated activations. Posting in his YouTube channel, retired Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer admitted his part in the technology back in the early days of Windows XP, as well as coughing to a tweak made to Windows to allow for a special bit of Registry shenanigans. Windows Protect Activation has come in for some stick over the years. Plummer explained the thinking behind the hardware identifier used, highlighting the need to allow users to call in with the value. "One of the requirements we set out for ourselves was that people didn't have to be online," he explained. "Maybe we would do it differently today, but at the turn of the millennium it wasn't a given that every computer could be connected to the net." "Phone activation," he said, "is always going to limit the amount of information that can go back and forth and so will always be an attack vector and likely the easiest one for hackers to target." Plummer noted the tiny amount of bandwidth afforded by "what a user was willing to enter using the telephone" meant they had to make a few compromises. For example, he suggested the engineer responsible might, say, elect to categorise memory sizes rather than shoehorn the entire figure into the limited space of the identifier. The retired engineer also highlighted some tweaks made to the registry: in this case, stashing the date of the first use of Windows to try to cut down on evaluation period shenanigans. Rather than
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A glimpse into a more civilized (yet challenging) tool in the JavaScript ecosystemArt for ReScript Blog, credit to Bettina SteinbrecherThis is not evangelism of ReScript or a one-to-one comparison with TypeScript. I love TypeScript. I decided to rewrite a small TypeScript+React+Jest side project into ReScript.ReScript is not new. In a way it’s as old as JavaScript itself. ReScript is a rebranding of ReasonML (Facebook) and BuckleScript (Bloomberg), which wrap OCaml on both ends. The former is an interface of the OCaml syntax, while the latter makes sure to compile the AST into JavaScript. ReasonML was created by Jordan Walke, the creator of React. ReasonML still exists as a parallel project to ReScript, with a slightly different syntax and mission.ReScript syntax compiling into OCaml Abstract-Syntax-Tree, and BuckleScript compiling into readable, optimized JavaScriptReScript is not just a rebranding: it’s a ReasonML which freed itself of the yoke of the OCaml ecosystem. By doing so, it forfeited compilation to native code and OCaml library interop, but gained a freer syntax which further resembles JavaScript to embrace its developers, eager for better tools.My first attempt was to just install ReScript on my project, start the watcher, rename an easy file into .res and be guided by the errors. I immediately learned that refactoring into ReScript is not “breadth-first” but “depth-first.” Simply renaming the file extension won’t work, as the compiler stops completely at type errors.In TypeScript one can gradually assign types and interfaces to dynamic types, while tagging some as unknown or any. Depth-first means that you start with one small function, or one
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[Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash, modified (cropped)] This article follows up on a discussion. Please share your experience there, I'd gladly hear about it! Introduction Some months ago I was surveying a little the state of GUI in Rust. Let me tell you, the quest has been horrible. Starting off some searches on internet, apart some questions on Reddit and other sites, you get some (very old) articles. Sep 19 '19 Author: AwlsomeAlex365 Rust has always seemed super interesting to me since learning of its existence a few months ago. However one thing that turned me off at the time was the lack of (structured) GUI bindings for cross platform devices. But fast forward a few months, is there a good GUI library to use that can make “complex” applications? Or maybe a… Old and stale. The only guide you get at the end of the day (referenced by all) is the site Are We GUI Yet which is not helpful at all. Want to find crates for GUI in Rust? Then you've come to the right place! Status This site is maintained as best as possible. The next steps likely involve replacing it with an automated system more like lib.rs. CI runs weekly to update crate information from crates.io, if it is not overriden by the crate's configuration in this repo. What is this? Companion website to arewegameyet arewewebyet, and arewelearningyet. Contributing To make i
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January 20, 2021 Yesterday, Elastic NV, the company behind Elasticsearch, announced they would release future versions of their Elasticsearch and Kibana software under the Server Side Public License (SSPL) to prevent Amazon from offering them as managed services on its proprietary cloud platform. Elastic joins MongoDB, originator of SSPL, in accusing AWS of unfair play and adopting defensive license terms. The same day, the Open Source Initiative released a short post pointedly entitled “The SSPL Is Not an Open Source License”, attempting to brand Elastic and SSPL “fauxpen source” and generally throwing as many short jabs their way as possible. To hear OSI tell it, Elastic has “abandoned their original dedication to the open source community” by falling prey to the current “license du jour”, announcing the move in a post “unironically titled ‘Doubling Down on Open’”, and hocking what is now a lamentably “proprietary product”. It’s a hit piece. Not that it matters so much. As usual with OSI these days, I don’t think either Elastic or Mongo will feel a thing. The folks at OSI will enjoy “taking a stand”. A few of their faithful will accept the line and shun the offender, mostly by saying mean things on social media somewhere. But Elastic has little to fear from being “called out” by an increasingly fractured and irrelevant institution. It’s one great, big, noisy, cliquish NOP. Or it would be. Alas, there is more in OSI’s post. More bad arguments. More self-serving misinformation. More fear, uncertainty, and doubt in response to anxiety about their self-bestowed “authority”. More seeds of confusion. It is not my responsibility to break the cycle of taunts and jibes between cloud companies, database companies, and their vassals. It’s not my responsibility to “fix” copyleft for the cloud, or to reconcile opposing interests to some kind of amicable, Kumbayah settlement. But as I’ve seen over the years, it will be my responsibility to clean up the mess of misconceptions opportunistically engendered for dubious tactical points along the way. I’d rather not. Retreat? OSI mentions: The [fauxpen source] license du jour is the Server Side Public License. This license was submitted to the Open Source Initiative for approval but later withdrawn by the license steward when it became clear that the license would not be approved. This is literally true. But it begs to leave exactly the wrong impression. Why did MongoDB walk away from the OSI process? Was it because they came to understand, at the foot of OSI’s wisdom, that their license wasn’t open source, but a regrettable heresy? Nope. From the Mongo e-mail OSI links to in quote above: We continue to believe that the SSPL complies with the Open Source Definition and the four essential software freedoms. In other words, they still think it’s open source and free software. Whether OSI, or the people who hang out on OSI mailing lists, say so or not. As I saw it, MongoDB’s exit had everything to do with aborting
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pup is a command line tool for processing HTML. It reads from stdin, prints to stdout, and allows the user to filter parts of the page using CSS selectors. Inspired by jq, pup aims to be a fast and flexible way of exploring HTML from the terminal. Install Direct downloads are available through the releases page. If you have Go installed on your computer just run go get. go get github.com/ericchiang/pup If you're on OS X, use Homebrew to install (no Go required). brew install https://raw.githubusercontent.com/EricChiang/pup/master/pup.rb Quick start $ curl -s https://news.ycombinator.com/ Ew, HTML. Let's run that through some pup selectors: $ curl -s https://news.ycombinator.com/ | pup 'table table tr:nth-last-of-type(n+2) td.title a' Okay, how about only the links? $ curl -s https://news.ycombinator.com/ | pup 'table table tr:nth-last-of-type(n+2) td.title a attr{href}' Even better, let's grab the titles too: $ curl -s https://news.ycombinator.com/ | pup 'table table tr:nth-last-of-type(n+2) td.title a json{}' Basic Usage $ cat index.html | pup [flags] '[selectors] [display function]' Examples Download a webpage with wget. $ wget http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_exclusion_standard -O robots.html Clean and indent By default pup will fill in missing tags and properly indent the page. $ cat robots.html # nasty looking HTML $ cat robots.html | pup --color # cleaned, indented, and colorful HTML Filter by tag $ cat robots.html | pup 'title' Robots exclusion standard - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Filter by id $ cat robots.html | pup 'span#See_also' See also Filter by attribute $ cat robots.html | pup 'th[scope="row"]' Exclusion standards Related marketing topics Search marketing related topics Search engine spam Linking People Other Pseudo Classes CSS selectors have a group of specifiers called "pseudo classes" which are pretty cool. pup implements a majority of the relevant ones them. Here are some examples. $ cat robots.html | pup 'a[rel]:empty' $ cat robots.html | pup ':contains("History")' History History $ cat robots.html | pup ':parent-of([action="edit"])' Edit links For a complete list, view the implemented selectors section. +, >, and , These are intermediate characters that declare special instructions. For instance, a comma , allows pup to specify multiple groups of selectors. $ cat robots.html | pup 'title, h1 span[dir="auto"]' Robots exclusion standard - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Robots exclusion standard Chain selectors together When combining selectors, the HTML nodes selected by the previous selector will be passed to the next ones. $ cat robots.html | pup 'h1#firstHeading' Robots exclusion standard $ cat robots.html | pup 'h1#firstHeading span' Robots exclusion standard Implemented Selectors For further examples of these selectors head over to MDN. pup '.class' pup '#id' pup 'element' pup 'selector + selector' pup 'selector > selector' pup '[attribute]' pup '[attribute="value"]' pup '[attribute*="value"]' pup '[attribute~="value"]' pup '[attribute^="value"]' pup '[attribute$="value"]' pup ':empty' pup ':first-child' pup ':fir
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An MQ-9 Reaper drone, used for surveillance by the US Air Force.Credit: Staff Sgt. John Bainter/U.S. Air Force Eyes in the Sky: The Secret Rise of Gorgon Stare and How It Will Watch Us All Arthur Holland Michel Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (2019)In the 1998 Hollywood thriller Enemy of the State, an innocent man (played by Will Smith) is pursued by a rogue spy agency that uses the advanced satellite “Big Daddy” to monitor his every move. The film — released 15 years before Edward Snowden blew the whistle on a global surveillance complex — has achieved a cult following.It was, however, much more than just prescient: it was al
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US sanctions on Huawei got the Chinese firm kicked out of Britain, the former head of the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has told Parliament – adding that he didn't feel under pressure to change the body's own verdict on keeping Huawei in UK mobile networks. Speaking to Parliament's National Security Strategy (NSS) Committee, Ciaran Martin told peers and MPs that US trade sanctions aimed at Huawei were the final nail in the coffin for the Chinese telecom equipment supplier in Britain. "While the Huawei issue for better or worse is resolved by, essentially, the change in US sanctions, more important is shaping the reg
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SOUL, a new language now in V1.0, makes audio coding vastly more accessible January 20, 2020 London — Today’s release of SOUL, the new universal language for audio applications, will dramatically lower barriers and expand access for developers creating any apps that depend on audio, as well as providing a more efficient architecture for audio processing. SOUL has reached version 1.0 status with its language, compiler, and “SOUL patch” format all stable, tested, and ready to use in a wide variety of audio-related projects.. The team, led by JUCE and Tracktion creator Julian Storer, is already at work on an array of other SOUL tools including a visual ed
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This dwm 6.2 (bb2e72, 2020-07-08) side project has a different take on dwm patching. It uses preprocessor directives to decide whether or not to include a patch during build time. Essentially this means that this build, for better or worse, contains both the patched and the original code. The aim being that you can select which patches to include and the build will contain that code and nothing more. Due to the complexity of some of the patches dwm-flexipatch has diverged from mainstream dwm by making some core patches non-optional for maintenance reasons. For the classic dwm-flexipatch build refer to branch dwm-flexipatch-1.0. For example to include the alpha patch then
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Market analyst Trendforce reports that foundry TSMC is to start making Intel's Core i3 process later in the year on a 5nm process. This follows Intel's well documented problems with its leading edge process technology at 10nm and 7nm. The Core i3 move to a 5nm process is set to be followed by mid-range and high-end CPUs being produced for Intel by TSMC on a 3nm process in 2H22. TrendForce did not give a source for the information, simply referencing "investigations."Intel has long outsourced production significant amounts of its non-CPU chips to TSMC and UMC – about 15 to 20 percent of its output, according to TrendForce. This is partly because it has often acquired fabless startups tha
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Distributed SQL database biz Cockroach Labs has analysed public cloud performance and concluded that Google Cloud Platform wins on throughput, although AWS is ahead on CPU performance and network latency. Cockroach Labs first reported on cloud performance in 2018, saying: "We are committed to building a cloud neutral product, and we run test clusters on all three leading US cloud providers." The researchers measured CPU, network, storage, and online transaction processing (OLTP) performance. At the time, the researchers reported that "AWS outperforms GCP on nearly every criteria we tested – including cost." Azure was not te
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