News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

tpfour

Re:No-JavaScript Fingerprinting on Sunday February 06, 2022 @10:24PM (#30239947)
Thank you, interesting!
Re:No-JavaScript Fingerprinting on Sunday February 06, 2022 @08:59PM (#30239242)
Ok sure, but how does it work? I clicked around your website but there doesn't seem to be a description.
Minimum I've seen was 1.5g. Usually between 2 and 3.5.

The issue with psychedelics is not that their ingestion might kill you, but rather what you will do to yourself or others while on them. No amount of reading and Youtube videos can prepare you for a strong psychedelic experience. Once in it, you have to go through it, and accidents do happen.

I've found that people who do psychedelics in repetition usually _think_ they are some sort of key to their problems, they'll help them fix themselves, yada yada yada. One trip is enough for people for whom that is true. If you have to do them repeatedly, the issue is elsewhere. I am against full-on prohibition, but also skeptical about the "pro-psychedelic" sentiment in vogue.

Re:Goodbye, Clean Code (2020) on Tuesday November 16, 2021 @12:54PM (#29243838)
The typical SE path I'm familiar with looks like:

1. Write _anything_ that works. Dependencies, code quality don't matter. Code is idiosyncratic but can be understood by a reviewer.

2. Apply abstractions _everywhere_. Re-implement data structures and algorithms (maybe unknowingly). Code is now very hard to understand.

3. Figure out one is completely unable to update or even maintain code written 6 months ago. Rewritten code suddenly becomes clearer, one begins to think about programming as an craft and not just hacking things on a keyboard until you get the desired result. Dependencies, judicious comments, code quality and a sane terseness become important. The journey starts here.

Personally, step 1 was very short as I learned to program on the job. I was responsible for code, and so I needed to get it together quick. A language like Python makes 2 very easy, and 3 came very quickly too since, as I mentioned, I was responsible for the code (one man team).

I have met people who work at large institutions who are stuck at 1. Others with degrees in CS who are stuck at 2. Some just "get it" and go straight to 3. But typically, the real journey starts when you need to go on with work but your prior self is preventing you from being efficient. You need to get rid of that prior self's work to move on.

Re:Show HN: My proposal for a new keyboard layout on Monday November 15, 2021 @01:54PM (#29231085)
Try the Canadian Multilingual French layout on a standard QWERTY keyboard.

à is \

è is '

é is /

ç is ]

accent grave is right-alt+[+letter

and

"specials" are right-alt+num (±@£¢¤¬{}[]) but for any glyph used in programming, I usually switch back to US keyboard using alt+caps-lock. Ça fonctionne très bien pour moi!

Re:Racketscript: Racket to JavaScript Compiler on Sunday September 26, 2021 @02:38PM (#28663365)
I see this is a WIP without support for the Scheme numerical tower, tail calls, continuations, etc. If you're looking for such features, Gambit Scheme can compile to JS with those features working and comes at ~600kb gzipped (for the _whole_ system). You can see it in action at https://try.gambitscheme.org but I don't know if it's the latest version.
@dang the article link is broken, the above works for me.
There's also Codeboot: https://codeboot.org/py/ which offers a single stepper.
Re:Wayfinder – a relaxing 'art game' in the browser on Wednesday June 16, 2021 @09:04PM (#27535225)
I get an error:

    Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property 'canvas' of null
There is a vast amount of unpublished research, not because of malicious intentions, but because it's either still ongoing, or abandoned, or postponed, or waiting for other results, or for review, or qualified specialists to help, whatever.

The VF article specifically mentions that the closest known virus was 96% similar (vs 90% for SARS-CoV-1), and had actually been renamed by the scientists studying it and that fact hadn't been put forward to the community.

It can still be shown that this has a completely natural (i.e. no human error involved) origin, but the burden of proof gets higher every day. It's much more probable that human error is involved, which is something that happens every day.

Are you expecting a number? The joint probability of low-probability events is itself very low.

I'm not saying you should calculate it like P(10 000 tails coin flip) * P(1 000 000 tails coin flip). That can be done numerically. I'm saying that based on everything I've read, the highest probability hypothesis according to my own evaluation is the unintentional lab leak. To me, that's as uncontroversial as it gets. Human error happens _all the time_. Arguing against the lab leak, knowing what we know about China's refusal to allow an actual thorough scientific investigation into it, seems quite a bit more controversial to me.

Labs burn down, medical errors happen, bridges collapse, whatever. That's just reality.

We know enough to calculate a joint probability. Just update your estimate with new information. This should be pretty non-controversial. Everybody does this every day especially in the face of uncertainty.
Let me make this clear: I don't know for certain what happened. But after updating my priors, I believe it's highly probable that the outbreak came from human error.

Also, I never once mentioned engineering. There's a lab 280m away from the market that has one of the largest bat virus samples in the world.

I would have no problem revising my priors, but for the moment I still consider the lab leak human error hypothesis still the most reasonable explanation.

It's the joint probability of everything we know.

p(Epidemic started in Wuhan) * p(origin in market right next to lab) * p(lab is one of 3 in the world to conduct gain-of-function research on conronaviruses) * p(lab scientists were notably sick prior to outbreak) * p(no accident ever happening in a lab) * p(et cetera) = very small number.

That's not evidence per se, but it does show you how probable a human error is.

You're taking this the wrong way. You have to update your priors and calculate a joint probability knowing everything we know about the origins of this particular virus.
The calculation is simple and could have been made in early 2020. What's the joint probability of occurrence given everything you know about the origins of SARS-CoV-2?

There is _very_ high probability that this is just a human error.

Anybody who has ever worked in a wet lab, or a lab of any sort, knows that accidents happen. All the time. Things catch fire, things are dropped, labeling issues happen, anything you can think of.

I worked for many years in a lab, the accidental leak hypothesis was and still is what I consider the most probable. Calculate the joint probability of everything we know about the origin of SARS-CoV-2 happening and it should be obvious that the "lab leak" should be _thoroughly_ investigated before dismissing it.

Re:Ask HN: How would you set up a new B2B SaaS? on Sunday February 21, 2021 @03:04PM (#26216613)
Clients do not support wireguard, but I wish. I use it for my own uses but there's practically no chance it gets approved by clients!
Re:Ask HN: How would you set up a new B2B SaaS? on Sunday February 21, 2021 @02:39PM (#26216401)
Thank you for the references.

I don't think I can explain it more succinctly than this: I ship fully provisioned VMs which contain all of the application code (web frontend and backend) which accesses internal databases. My provisioning workflow is already automated.

It would be desirable for me to move from managing on-prem VMs to managing cloud instances with on-prem connectivity. I am just interested in reading about how others do it.

Re:Ask HN: How would you set up a new B2B SaaS? on Sunday February 21, 2021 @02:23PM (#26216291)
I could ask for a TLS connection to internal databases. I'm evaluating options. Depending on clients, either solution can be too complicated...
Re:Ask HN: How would you set up a new B2B SaaS? on Sunday February 21, 2021 @01:26PM (#26215767)
I "ship appliances" by sending fully provisioned virtual machines to clients. A connector (or gateway) is an on-premise piece of software that allows a machine on another network to access internal resources. The interesting data resides on-premises, most of the time. Not all application data is stored on-premise. I'm not sure what you find unclear about "site-to-site VPN".

Ask HN: How would you set up a new B2B SaaS?

Hi,I'm looking to transition from shipping appliances to a cloud offering with some sort of connector for on-prem data queries. An obvious method would be to use site-to-site VPNs and pass relevant queries through them.Does HN have suggestions on how to properly do this, starting from scratch, in 2021? In a way I'm not looking for the latest, shiniest piece of tech, rather the most easily...

( Read More... | 10 comments | 6 points | on HN )
Re:Medicine's Machine Learning Problem on Saturday January 09, 2021 @08:11PM (#25707176)
Thanks for the reply. A part of me believes it would be worth going through med school just to get to "save" one life. I just don't get that gratitude feeling as a developer. I mean sure, you can work on software that could be used by millions of people, software _does_ change and affect the world, but it does not really compare to medicine. A git commit can be immensely important but there's something about medicine that makes it very appealing. On the other hand, computers do as they're told and rarely complain, stink, whine ;)

I am strongly attracted but I feel maybe it's mostly illusory.

Re:Medicine's Machine Learning Problem on Friday January 08, 2021 @08:00PM (#25693939)
Tangential: I've always had an interest for medicine. A decade or so into software dev and I'm not convinced I want to stay. I've heard a lot of doctors say they wouldn't do it all over again. I'm wondering if med school makes any sense. Maybe my idea of medicine is too influenced by Hollywood, but it does look very interesting. Would you study medicine again given the chance to start over?
Re:Psiloscoby: Psilocybin Brewed by Kombucha on Thursday November 26, 2020 @09:28PM (#25225107)
I would like to add that even if you "feel generally secure with yourself and your life", psilocybin could teach you otherwise.
Re:Show HN: This Word Does Not Exist on Wednesday May 13, 2020 @03:53PM (#23171041)
Ha!

    neuterization
    neu·ter·i·za·tion
    the denial of a person's sexual identity and gender 
    identity to someone else
    "she had undergone neuterization of her facial hair"
Re:What we can learn from Camus’s “The Plague” on Sunday March 22, 2020 @07:32PM (#22659814)
I read it in French and these words will forever live in my soul:

    Aujourd’hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas.
I found his writing style exquisite. He got me "in the zone" after one sentence.
Re:A Starter Kit for Emergency Websites on Sunday March 22, 2020 @07:24PM (#22659772)
Because the CMS is decoupled from the content, and installing Netlify CMS is very fast. I was able to coach an SMB owner into using it for their website in about 1h tops (after setting everything up myself).

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