News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

oddeyed

I bought a second hand Meebook M6 on ebay. At least, it was listed as second hand but seemed to be fresh out of the box when it arrived. I completely love it.

For actually reading ebooks, I'm using Koreader instead of the built-in reader because I find the UI a bit easier to get my head around. I mostly use it for PDFs related to classroom learning, but have the odd epub knocking around from project gutenburg etc.

It has Google Play support, so I can use the Libby app to access my local library's ebook collection (including offline access to travel guides - so useful). I also use the Sefaria app to read Hebrew scripture (also supports offline). These apps tend to use the battery faster than Koreader and having scrolling controls instead of page-turning controls is a bit of a pain, but quite manageable.

I haven't tried the Kindle app, but I'm sure it would work fine.

I have been asking around but people in the know are keeping quiet. I'd love to know and will reply to this comment if I find anything out.
I can understand your concern. Thankfully we have no way of accessing any PII from within an embedded context - all the agent knows is its own MAC/IP addresses etc.
Likely it isn't within your firewall anyway. Our integrations are typically on the router supplied by your ISP.
That is only for people who volunteer to receive our custom hardware and we need the name and address to ship them the unit. For most units we have no name, address or any PII whatsoever.
Most likely deployment scenario is that the ISP has installed it in their home router, it's not running in their own device.
Block TCP connections on port 80 and 443 to dcs-global.samknows.com
SamKnows is not surveillance, we generate synthetic traffic for our tests from our test agents. We do monitor byte counters for the WAN interface to tell if someone else is using the connection before we run our tests, but otherwise we can't see any ongoing traffic.
I work at SamKnows, AMA (I know nothing)
I had no idea this was a new feature but used this today. It was extremely convenient!
Re:Ask HN: Anyone working 4 day week here, as an employee? on Sunday August 21, 2022 @06:20PM (#32545067)
I have negotiated a four day week twice. I would recommend a four day week to anyone who can afford it. Don't forget that because of tax bands the effective pay cut is less than 20%.

The first time I just straight up asked my boss in a conversation and with a request in writing. I said I was unhappy in my life in general and wanted more time to spend on other things than work. There is legislation in the UK that means that employers must consider these requests and reply with an answer and explanation in a fixed time frame. They accepted and I worked it for about 4 months before other circumstances meant I had to relocate and leave that company.

The job I moved to was a start-up. After a string of executive resignations and engineering team redundancies I was left as the most experienced team member. I had another job offer in hand that I didn't really want but took it to the only remaining senior lead and asked for 4 days (at full pay this time) or I'd leave. They accepted in an informal way rather than modify my contract in this case and just called it "taking a day off when you need it". I would not recommend accepting this in general as it puts you in a vulnerable position for being punished for doing what you thought was the agreed deal. In any case, working 4 days at this job was a disaster because the company was such a mess and I had so little support that I spent my day off and my weekends obsessing about work unhealthily. I ultimately went back to 5 days in a more senior role to try to help right the ship but couldn't take the stress then either so ended up leaving.

I'm now at 5 days again. If I stick my new job out I plan to request 4 days after my probation period ends.

The decision for an employer comes down to retention - do they want to keep you enough to accept 4 days instead of the risk of you leaving? So if you have a manager who can understand your value and represent that to internal decision makers then that's the main key.

Re:A 2000-year-old postcard on Thursday May 05, 2022 @04:34PM (#31278081)
Fascinating insight into the past! It makes me appreciate the convenience of emails and messaging today.
Re:A 2000-year-old postcard on Thursday May 05, 2022 @04:30PM (#31278050)
It certainly is poetic. I don't know how much of that comes from the translation which will have been done by someone who already "knows" that these letters are important classical texts. If I knew Ancient Greek then maybe I could read it and it would seem like reading people's Facebook messages today.

But if you like that kind of writing, then try writing like that! If you keep at it, your friends will at least to recognise that style of writing as part of you. :-)

Re:A 2000-year-old postcard on Thursday May 05, 2022 @06:29AM (#31271604)
I'm reminded of a quote from Seneca's letters to Lucilius, also circa 1st century CE:

> Thank you for writing so often. By doing so you give me a glimpse of yourself in the only way you can. I never get a letter from you without instantly feeling we’re together. If pictures of absent friends are a source of pleasure to us, refreshing the memory and relieving the sense of void with a solace however insubstantial and unreal, how much more so are letters, which carry marks and signs of an absent friend that are real. For the handwriting of a friend affords us what is so delightful about seeing him again, the sense of recognition.

In a small team, I have found that a simple spreadsheet of tests can go a long way. Give it a fancy name like "Subcomponent X Functional Test Specification" and have one row per requirement. Give them IDs (e.g. FNTEST0001).

What sort of tests you want depends a lot on your system. If you're working on some data processing system where you can easily generate many examples of test input then you'll probably get lots of ROI from setting up lots of regression tests that cover loads of behaviour. If it's a complex system involving hardware or lots of clicking in the UI then it can be very good to invest in that setup but it can be expensive in time and cost. In that case, focus on edge or corner cases.

Then in terms of how you use it, you have a few options depending of the types of test:

- you can run through the tests manually every time you do a release (i.e. manual QA) - just make a copy of the spreadsheet and record the results as you go and BAM you have a test report

- if you have some automated tests like pytest going on, then you could use the mark decorator and tag your tests with the functional test ID(s) that they correspond to, and even generate a HTML report at the end with a pass/fail/skip for your requirements

Re:All You Zombies on Friday February 25, 2022 @11:42AM (#30469169)
This sounds great, I will try and read it. I recently read a science-fiction novel with similarly strongly-consistent timelines which was very enjoyable (if a bit slow to start).

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

When I had Covid in December, I briefly lost my sense of smell and taste (only for a few days, thankfully). I decided I would see if the Switch cartridges tasted as bad as I remembered - purely in the interests of science, of course.

I couldn't taste it at first, but then the wave of toxic unpleasantness slowly built up, even after I had moved the cartridge away from my tongue. It was different than I remembered it being, but then again it had been a few years since I tried it (probably spurred by this same headline). Really horrible. Good to know that this bitterant it still is a deterrent if you have anosmia!

Not necessarily comparable for purposes of global heating effect (not sure if that's what you're doing or not).

The CO2 that a human exhales is from the carbon in the food they consume. That carbon ultimately comes (whether indirectly via animals or not) from plants, which drew that CO2 out of the air directly, typically at most a few years prior. The net change in CO2 concentration is zero.

Contrast this to burning fossil fuels which moves carbon from places where it is not enhancing the greenhouse effect (e.g. it's in coal, gas wells or crude oil) into the atmosphere where it will cause global heating - a net increase in CO2 concentration.

As a side note, methane produced by livestock or food waste does still have a global heating effect as CH4 is a more "potent" greenhouse gas than CO2, so there is a net increase in heating potential due to this conversion.

The article seems pretty clear that the story is about how productivity is worse _than it would have been_ without the global heating that industrialisation has incurred.
Re:Amazon's scorched-earth PR strategy on Wednesday March 31, 2021 @06:03AM (#26645374)
I'm desperate to know whether it is or not. Mind sharing how you reached that conclusion?
Re:Don’t blindly prefer emplace_back to push_back on Thursday March 04, 2021 @04:19AM (#26340335)
If you realise how it relates to "placement new" then it does kinda make sense. But yeah, not exactly beginner friendly!
Re:Cab Ride: Drive a train, forever, through a dreamlike land on Monday February 01, 2021 @05:58PM (#25995311)
A nice bit of fun. I kept missing the platforms and restarting as I felt bad for the passengers that I'd left behind...
Re:GNU Units on Wednesday January 06, 2021 @08:51AM (#25657688)
In certain contexts (such as linear algebra), linear refers to the fact that the mapping must cross the origin.

This follows from the constraint that for a linear map f, f(a + b) = f(a) + f(b), which is not true for the farenheit-celsius example.

EDIT: See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_function#As_a_linear_ma...

Re:McDonald's is adding plant-based burgers to the menu on Monday November 09, 2020 @06:37PM (#25041297)
There's actually a big scene of vegan cheese alternative making, it's just pretty localised right now. For example there are many companies in London making excellent vegan alternatives (e.g. I AM NUT OKAY, Honestly Tasty, Kinda Co, Mouse's Favourite), many of which offer something with pizza-melty mozzarella-like effect. Local pizza delivery places offer the vegan options too. There's even some with blue mould for that real funky cheesy flavour! It's expensive right now but the product is there.
Re:Stopping phishing campaigns with Bash on Thursday August 13, 2020 @05:42AM (#24141532)
The opposite. ; is the same as a newline. Prepending the newline with a backslash \ is like saying "pretend this newline isn't here". So all of the -H arguments get applied to the same command in the example, rather than being treated as commands in their own right.
Re:Open source 5G core network on Friday June 05, 2020 @11:53AM (#23429925)
Not quite, this is the "core network" which handles things like handset authz/authn, billing, base station attachement etc.

A 5G basestation is called a gNB, and a handset is called a UE. This project doesn't involve the radio interface of 5G, so neither of those are included. There's another comment on the post outlining how you might go about standing up an actual network using this.

I think they mean that they do use bash, but the reason that they use it is not ideological. Tricky sentence to work out.
Re:Chart: Brexit Costs Nearly Match UK's Total EU Contributions on Wednesday January 22, 2020 @06:41AM (#22116660)
Just because that's one thing that the campaign talked about, doesn't make it the reason that people chose to vote leave.
Re:Chart: Brexit Costs Nearly Match UK's Total EU Contributions on Wednesday January 22, 2020 @06:40AM (#22116652)
I realise that it can be tempting to try and wave this around as proof that leavers are silly and us remainers are so much cleverer than them.

However, if you haven't realised by now that people who want to leave the EU want it for reasons other than budget contributions then you are the silly one. Not every political decision is based only on economics.

Older »