anyfactor · HackerTrans

anyfactor

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Submissions

Close but no Nobel: the scientists who never won [2016]

nature.com

1 pointsby anyfactoril y a 3 ans1 comments

Identifying thousands of organizations using Internet-facing and exposed webcams

bitsight.com

2 pointsby anyfactoril y a 3 ans0 comments

Framework 16 – Performance vs. Price [video]

youtube.com

1 pointsby anyfactoril y a 3 ans0 comments

My Dumb Steam Game Got 90k Downloads [video]

youtube.com

1 pointsby anyfactoril y a 3 ans0 comments

Don't use AI detectors for anything important

aiweirdness.com

3 pointsby anyfactoril y a 3 ans0 comments

TweetSneak – Evade Twitter Login Overhead

tweetsneak.pages.dev

2 pointsby anyfactoril y a 3 ans0 comments

I sent robot forgeries to a handwriting expert – Stuff Made here [video]

youtube.com

3 pointsby anyfactoril y a 3 ans0 comments

Tips and tricks with implicit return in Nim

peterme.net

3 pointsby anyfactoril y a 3 ans0 comments

[untitled]

1 pointsby anyfactoril y a 3 ans0 comments

[untitled]

1 pointsby anyfactoril y a 4 ans0 comments

You can't make this shit up

old.reddit.com

40 pointsby anyfactoril y a 4 ans44 comments

Semantic Line Breaks

sembr.org

1 pointsby anyfactoril y a 4 ans0 comments

Vision Fund Portfolio

visionfund.com

1 pointsby anyfactoril y a 4 ans0 comments

Ask HN: Is there any text editor faster than Notepad on Windows?

2 pointsby anyfactoril y a 4 ans0 comments

R Bookdown

bookdown.org

4 pointsby anyfactoril y a 4 ans0 comments

Ask HN: Rewriting any popular Python project in C/Rust/Haskell is better?

4 pointsby anyfactoril y a 4 ans5 comments

Ask HN: Evaluate my weekend idea project, “non-prejudicial audio interview”

1 pointsby anyfactoril y a 4 ans1 comments

Brussels' ban on diesel vehicle and suspicious bot activity on Reddit

twitter.com

3 pointsby anyfactoril y a 5 ans1 comments

Pulse Tube Refrigerator

en.wikipedia.org

1 pointsby anyfactoril y a 5 ans0 comments

Eric Clapton successfully sues woman for selling a bootleg live CD for $11

consequence.net

4 pointsby anyfactoril y a 5 ans1 comments

comments

il y a 3 moisdiscuss

In another comment, I mentioned that I was “the guy who knew about computers but was more approachable than the IT guy.” Even the rudest people tended to soften their tone when talking to me. I think when it comes to IT, most people’s default reaction is frustration. Trying to turn that frustration into a lesson can be frustrating at any age.

My approach was always: let me fix it first, then hand over the solution. It’s entirely up to you whether you want to follow up with “how did you fix it?” In my experience, 9 out of 10 people didn’t ask. The 1 out of 10 who did were often just making small talk.

The conversation was usually about how they ended up in that situation and what they wanted to achieve. I fixed they talked mostly to vent. That is part of the process.

In software engineering and professional culture, we often ask, “What have you tried so far?” That can be frustrating. The person you’re helping isn’t someone you have authority over—you either help them or you don’t. This cuts both ways, as they do not have authority on you to have you help them.

My thesis always has been people are generally polite. It’s not about manipulation or being overly conscious of achieving a goal. Impolite people usually are struggling with something internally, so you should pity them.

il y a 3 moisdiscuss

I have worked with people in their mid 30s who had an utter disgust for computers. I was “the guy who knew about computers but was more approachable than the IT guy” at a large office. Even though some people hate doing this kind of work, I always enjoyed it. Sometimes, people would hang around my desk first thing in the morning to get help with IT issues.

I made contacts with the executive team when I had to sign them up for their ChatGPT accounts and set up their VPNs (which often just involved pressing a button). They saw a YouTube ad about how a VPN kept them safe, and they paid for a year in advance...

People of all ages can have a hard time dealing with technology. And to be honest, the IT ecosystem has become adversarial. About a decade ago, installing antivirus software would eliminate many risk factors. But these days, with sponsored content and advertisements, there are so many ways people can mess up their systems.

il y a 3 moisdiscuss

I am really interested in the concept of elder/senior citizen technology. The basic design concept for them is answering "what am I looking at?"

I created this tool (https://anftr.com/) for some of my ex-colleagues in their early 50s who were trying to navigate the world of office software. They were struggling with Microsoft Word and Excel, and I have seen them yell at ChatGPT and bash their mouses constantly, hoping the computer will load files faster.

Essentially, you focus on text and video demos. The foundational design concept for elder tech is providing clear instructions and minimizing interactions.

If you want them to sign in, you should not require them to press a button more than two times.

To address things they tend to forget, consider a human custodian or "IT concierge" model, please. The reality is that after a certain age, people really struggle to learn new things and prefer talking to a person for help. Technology has its limitations.

If you are working with users aged 50 to 80, provide them with a phone number and charge a subscription for the service or a one-time payment. It might be borderline exploitative, but I have noticed that elderly individuals want a "solution" rather than a lesson.

You explain how to do something, and if they are eager to learn, they will. You offer them a solution either way. Please do not create a monetization model for this custodian service and keep the charge as low as possible.

The money you receive from this serves purposes: it is designed to help them second guess and try to help themselves. If you do not charge for something, they will just keep asking you questions. When you charge for something, they perceive it to have more value compared to it being free.

Do not prioritize ease of operation that compromises their security.

il y a 5 moisdiscuss

I am sorry for the late reply. Everyone says "you need backup" but that is the thing, I need just scripts. But I will look into your recommendation for sure. Thank you!

il y a 6 moisdiscuss

My VPS was purged due to a platform hack. I did not keep a backup, and I am trying to figure out what to do. There is no plug and play solution for backup. From what I understand, I have to set up rsync and dump files via cron to a Raspberry Pi. But there is no snapshot-like feature.

I am using KVM from Cloudcone (their virtualization software was hacked about a week ago) and I am using RPI4.

Then I need to set up my old website again, which is a pain in the butt. I hard-coded cron and a git-based auto-deployment feature (I think).

il y a 6 moisdiscuss

This is surprising to me. I actively used Heroku during the early to mid 2010s. I do not remember ever seeing the Salesforce logo there much later.

il y a 6 moisdiscuss

I think the "Heroku story" was less about technical limitations, but everything except technical limitations. More than a decade ago, I started learning and building on Heroku and hosted all my side projects and client projects on Heroku. Then when they got acquired, I was naive; then they removed their free tier and that broke my trust.

I primarily worked on PoC/MVP development where I worked to bring ideas to something barely tangible. And Heroku's free tier decisions meant it was a barrier for developers to develop on their platform. Pay first, develop later. It was like the rest of the industry.

After that, I just exited containerized platform-based application development entirely because convenience and having that weird developer philosophy "I must not pay because I can find a way" was less of a reason than sustainability. For me, containerized application platforms was about POC and MVP. If there was growth then me or the client can pay for the convenience. But if there was nothing, pretty easy to delete the project.

Then I committed to replicating the Heroku experience with a small VPS, backing up via rsync, and moving from PostgreSQL to SQLite. I can even charge clients for hosting (+ maintenance) on my VPS.

I do not know, to me containerized application platforms are limited by commercial challenges rather than technical ones. I see tons of containerised application platforms, but the trust has eroded because of a single company.

I have changed my development facility and laid the groundwork to not commit to these platforms. Sustainability over convenience.

Sure, I understand and respect folks at fly.io, render, railway, and even the open source variants of these companies (Caddy etc.). But there is no sustainability guarantee for these platforms. It was not just about the "free tier", to me it transcends to a philosophical point about building applications in general. Sure, there could be a new era with AI making MVP/PoC development easy through hosting in containerised applications, but that is a tangent point.

If Heroku were doing everything right, there would not be a dozen application platforms out there, but they made mistakes and, in my opinion, made the entire containerised application platform model untrustworthy.

il y a 7 moisdiscuss

How does the govdirectory project work? Does it use web scrapers to collect the contact details? I checked the bot repository, and it was empty. https://github.com/govdirectory/bots I would like to know about their methodology and to be honest how it helps me.

There are only 46 countries listed there. I am not intending to be critical of the idea, but having contact information of government institutions is not an effective way to get things done, in my opinion. And most government websites and contact details are quite accessible because they are centrally built through national IT system and a unified software service (usually). In third and second world country the contact details is usually quite useless. You have to find the right person and sit in front of their office.

The issue with the government contact repository is that it does not connect 'I have this problem' and 'who do I reach out to'. From my experience, you have to invest time in doing research and finding out who to reach out to.

l’année dernièrediscuss

https://support.google.com/notebooklm/answer/15731776

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il y a 2 ansdiscuss

Thorium powerplants, nuclear fusion powerplants, solid-state batteries, quantum computing, and TSMC producing chips in the US are news that should be considered speculative until they go into production. There has been plenty of coverage, but little real-world utility or impact from these technologies so far.

il y a 2 ansdiscuss

The projects I worked on always had a mechanism to dump data into a proper database. For example, I built a daily scraper to collect some of the inventory. I didn’t keep all the data in a single sheet. Instead, all the data was stored in a cloud-based managed SQLite or PostgreSQL database, or sometimes a local SQLite database. Only the day's data was stored in Google Sheets because the client wanted to see the spreadsheet themselves and have the UI be accessible for their users.

il y a 2 ansdiscuss

In a separate comment, I mentioned how Mozilla should have been more like Proton with their cloud storage, VPN, password manager, and cloud office suite.

In fact, they should have done that a decade a ago.

Mozilla has been around since the late '90s and should have evolved beyond just being a browser company. They launched a VPN service when VPNs were already everywhere, and they did the same with a bookmark manager when others were already offering similar solutions. Mozilla is always catching up, never leading, and that's a common issue with many big open-source and free software companies. They often pretend to be a business that isn't heavily propped up by big tech donations.

If I were leading a browser company, my focus would have been aggressively directed towards small business software. I’d create an internet and privacy-focused affordable minimal business software suite that lives within the browser — a combination of Proton and Zoho. And I’d strongly avoid building things that should be browser extensions.

il y a 2 ansdiscuss

I've built quite a few dashboards while working on proof-of-concept feature/product engineering. Even though people often think I'm joking, almost always the backend database was a Google Sheet. Google Sheets has great API support, easy to write functionality, convenient read and file dumps, works well with Pandas/SQL, and has a universally appreciated UX. Data validation can be annoying if the "admin" directly enters data, but for building a proof of concept, nothing beats Google Sheets. The data from Google Sheets would be passed through an API to a web UI/dashboard. The dashboard I built for end users was a simple Bootstrap (Vue-Bootstrap) table from the API, with enough easy-to-use filters and views to work out of the box. If the data was too large, I would use a templated snippet to convert the JSON into a card view. Ignoring long-term maintainability, this was one of the most foolproof ways to build dashboards. After that, I'd slap Firebase Auth on top, and that was it.

I haven't worked on these types of projects for nearly two years now. Folks I know use Retool or Softr with an API connectivity platform like Portable, Pipedream, or Zapier. If you're staring at a spreadsheet on a daily basis, the next step should be looking into an app builder combined with an API connection platform.

il y a 2 ansdiscuss

The only useful (or even paid) browser-integrated AI service I can imagine using would be a browsing history-aware AI chatbot. Essentially, it would just spit out a link from my history based on the context or prompt I give. Since privacy will be a crucial factor, I can imagine building an extension that reads page contents, stores them in a database, and connects to a self-hosted LLM.

il y a 2 ansdiscuss

Mozilla should have been doing what Proton is doing. But considering how far Proton has gone I wouldn't be surprised if Proton spun up their own browser at this point.

il y a 2 ansdiscuss

I was an excel enthusiast and studied accounting mainly for Excel. Although I have moved to programming unlike most I still do think Excel is awesome.

I sincerely commend the enthusiasm, but working in the industry as the "excel expert", I think most outsider does not understand the "cult" aspect of Excel.

Excel works. That is it.

Trying to replace excel with anything will be percieved as replacing a calculator with some alien substance that does math. Excel is like Pencil and Pen. You can not replace it.

Excel is not software it is a tool.

I have had my fair share backlash when trying to introduce replacement and complimentary tools. To replace excel, you not only need to advocate for it's usefulness and you need to be also be liable to the complaints from excel users. If anything goes wrong no how minor with the new tool, you are the one who introduced all these mess.

So, in practice what usually happens is that, when people hit UX challenges they go to a consulting firm and commission a backoffice software to address the Excel limitations. Some business may pay for nocode but that is very rare. They go to backoffice software firm and they build a CRUD software that is now not replacing Excel but compliments it.

il y a 2 ansdiscuss

I could not find the docs. Does it offer a static storage URI for people to download stuff via a link? Can I update the contents of the storage URI without generating a new URI everytime?

il y a 2 ansdiscuss

I think my phrasing of "solo founder" was not very good. I should have used another word.

Zuck is not a solo founder at all but what happened to the rest of the guys. Some says Google is what it is today was largely due to Eric Schimdt's involvement who is not a founder. The idea that all co-founders hold large influence in the long run of the company is not true. However, there individuals who essentially established the culture, the vision and the framework of the company.

The idea is that within the original or pivotal executive board there are people who even though left the company still holds significant influence in terms of grand strategy or vision. And those people does not include all cofounders.

il y a 2 ansdiscuss

I don't think Larry and Sergey is on the same level as Bill Gates. Solo founders who have raised to and led a big tech company is a different breed. I would pick Jeff Bezos, Zuck and Larry Ellison on the same level of Bill Gates. They don't manage day 2 day but big strategies don't go through without their blessing. Even though you can say Bill does not manage, the top level executives will always think "what would Bill do" or "what would Bill think about this".

il y a 2 ansdiscuss

I am interested in the business logic of paying to hosts. Say someone had netted sub 10 dollars for hosting their GPU on the platform. How do you make that payment? Business have to pay fixed plus variable transaction fees. So the small payments to a large pool of users should be quite involved specially with international payments.

Since the dawn of torrenting (and to some extent the the Silicon Valley TV show) many folks tried to launch a P2P resource pool platform. The challenge is that small amount of money being distributed to a large pool is challenging. Then there is the issue of stability. Do you penalize hoster who fail to provide a stable service?

Hosters must have "trust" in the system and platform can only afford to pay out only when the payable amount to hosters reach a certain threshold. Like you can't withdraw unless you have about $100 charged invoices.

And that is where I see the concept of crypto tokens appear because trust as a short term mechanism can be consoled via crypto tokens.

Engineering an service to take advantage of idle resources is a non-trivial task specially if the service is hooked up to doing something dedicated. For the hosters energy is not cheap, maintenance is a hassle and guranteeing stability is a pain.

I would love to learn how you would address these issues.