January 2023
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January 30, 2023
Ask HN: Why Is Everything Declining?
445 by maerF0x0 | 769 comments on Hacker News.
Is anyone else noticing that for several 5 year blocks (pentad) the world just seems to get markedly worse? It's like no body seems to give a shit about anyone except themselves anymore. Whats the cause of this? What's the solution? A bunch of things I've noticed: * Landlords seem extremely greedy and do terrible rent seeking tactics like fees upon fees (250 admin fee to rent here, $75 to apply, $300 non refundable pet deposit, $25 a month pet rent, $12.50 community fee, $15 trash valet, $5 online payment fee, $100 a month community internet (for the $50 a month package), going Month to month after a lease ends is 2x the annual price. And then they use RealPage to collude to make prices higher[1] * People are noisy as fuck and dont seem to give a shit. Seems like every night there's someone with loud as exhaust on "sportish" car ripping around the neihborhood. For months this guy would start up his loud car at 7am and no one care when I complained. * General worker apathy is endemic everywhere I go people seem aggravated I would dare to check my order and point out they didn't put in the ketchup i asked for, or the napkins, or whatever. Or when I dine in the tables are dirty. Or the gym is filthy, the cleaner just drags the mop around looking busy but accomplishing nothing. But in many instances they keep asking for more tips. * Software seems to be overrun by a mentality that any future cost is worth it to save even 1 minute of development time today. And this one I think I've observed the root, it seems that people get promoted away from their problems so they're not the ones to solve them. And those who do write good software (albeit slightly slower) are not promotable beacuse they're "under performing" their peers. Why does it seem management (and many thusly incentivized engineers) have abandoned decades of experience showing how to create reliable, robust, reusable code that is both great the customer, fast to iterate on, and only a tiny tiny bit slower to write. * Seems like everything is subscription model and you have to pay N times to access something thats only worth 1-3x . Eg: I Netflix for a couple hours a month. At the price for 4k access I can almost go out to a theatre. Video games are all trending to subscription models. I just learned the other day that the PS4 games I got with my subcription to PSN all are locked because I stopped subscribing (nearly 50 games) . So I paid them like $125 for access to these games for 24 months, and now I cannot play any of them? At least I still own NES/SNES/N64 Game cartridges that will never lock me out. * Police seem to not give a shit anymore. I've noticed what seems to be total lawlessness going on in my world. Folks stealing shit. People driving absurdly dangerously in cars that are not designed to travel like that. (tailgating, lane switch, accelerating at the fastest I've ever seen a beat up Sentra do...) . I never see cops hit lights and sirens at them. And every year our taxes (their paycheck) and our insurance goes up (a consequence of poor driving habits). And at the same time, we get these cases where a dude like Tyre, at least as I see the body cam, seems to be basically complying and the police freak out on him, he basically complies, and they taze and pepper spay him, no wonder he ran away -- what is someone supposed to think when they say "on the ground" and you get on the ground and then just keep getting more and more aggressive. Like are you gonna just lay on your face while they potentially pull their gun and just shoot you in the back of the head? How do you know what's going on unless you can face and see them? How can you trust they wont, cause even if it's 99.999999% they wont, you only get 1 one chance and if you get it wrong you're dead without any coming back. * Over and over again we keep hearing stories of fake people becoming the top paid, respected, or otherwise status people in society. Elizabeth Holmes, Frank/JP Morgan scam for $175M[2], fraudulent crypto schemes * And there's a ton of little things too like the water is poison, the air is poison, the food system is poison or crashing etc. I'm aware of pinker's general argument that many numbers are getting better. But it seems like people just treat eachother like shit these days. Anyone else have other examples? I am I way off base here? [1]: https://ift.tt/vcBt7FX [2]: https://ift.tt/PBdnjkQ

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January 26, 2023
Show HN: I'm a doctor and made a responsive breathing app for stress and anxiety
505 by lukko | 175 comments on Hacker News.
Hey HN! Some more info: I’m an NHS doctor and the founder of Pi-A ( https://www.pi-a.io ) which developed Lungy ( https://www.lungy.app ). Lungy is an app (iOS only for now) that responds to breathing in real-time and was designed to make breathing exercises more engaging and beneficial to do. It hopefully has many aspects of interest to the HN community – real-time fluid, cloth and soft body sims running on the phone’s GPU. My background is as a junior surgical trainee and I started building Lungy in 2020 during the first COVID lockdown in London. During COVID, there were huge numbers of patients coming off ventilators and they are often given breathing exercises on a worksheet and disposable plastic devices called incentive spirometers to encourage deep breathing. This is intended to prevent chest infections and strengthen breathing muscles that have weakened. I noticed often the incentive spirometer would sit by the bedside, whilst the patient would be on their phone – this was the spark that lead to Lungy! The visuals are mostly built using Metal, with one or two using SpriteKit. There are 20 to choose from, including boids, cloth sims, fluid sims, a hacky DLA implementation, rigid body + soft body sims. The audio uses AudioKit with a polyphonic synth and a sequencer plays generated notes from a chosen scale (you can mess around with the sequencer and synth in Settings/Create Music). There are obviously lots of breathing and meditation apps out there, I wanted Lungy to be different - it's about tuning into your surroundings and noticing the world around you, so all the visuals are nature-inspired or have some reference to the physical world. I didn’t like other apps required large downloads and/or a wifi connection, so Lungy’s download size is very small (<50MB), with no geometry, video or audio files. Lungy is initially a wellness app, but I’d like to develop a medical device version for patients with breathing problems such as asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) & long COVID. Thanks for reading - would love to hear feedback!

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January 26, 2023
Tell HN: Whole Yandex Git repository leaked
562 by coolspot | 318 comments on Hacker News.
Someone just published 40Gb+ of leaked Yandex GIT repository. Won’t provide magnet here, but it is top google result for “yandex leak” when filtered by last 24h. Affected services: aapi.tar.bz2 admins.tar.bz2 ads.tar.bz2 alice.tar.bz2 analytics.tar.bz2 antiadblock.tar.bz2 antirobot.tar.bz2 autocheck.tar.bz2 balancer.tar.bz2 billing.tar.bz2 bindings.tar.bz2 captcha.tar.bz2 cdn.tar.bz2 certs.tar.bz2 ci.tar.bz2 classifieds.tar.bz2 client_analytics.tar.bz2 client_method.tar.bz2 cloud.tar.bz2 commerce.tar.bz2 connect.tar.bz2 crm.tar.bz2 crypta.tar.bz2 customer_service.tar.bz2 datacloud.tar.bz2 delivery.tar.bz2 direct.tar.bz2 disk.tar.bz2 docs.tar.bz2 drive.tar.bz2 extsearch.tar.bz2 fuzzing.tar.bz2 gencfg.tar.bz2 groups.tar.bz2 helpdesk.tar.bz2 infra.tar.bz2 intranet.tar.bz2 investors.tar.bz2 it-office.tar.bz2 jupytercloud.tar.bz2 kernel.tar.bz2 library.tar.bz2 load.tar.bz2 mail.tar.bz2 maps.tar.bz2 maps_2.tar.bz2 maps_adv.tar.bz2 market.tar.bz2 metrika.tar.bz2 mobile-WARNING-notfull.tar.bz2 nginx.tar.bz2 noc.tar.bz2 partner.tar.bz2 passport.tar.bz2 pay.tar.bz2 payplatform.tar.bz2 paysys.tar.bz2 portal.tar.bz2 robot.tar.bz2 rt-research.tar.bz2 saas.tar.bz2 sandbox.tar.bz2 search.tar.bz2 security.tar.bz2 skynet.tar.bz2 smart_devices.tar.bz2 smarttv.tar.bz2 solomon.tar.bz2 stocks.tar.bz2 tasklet.tar.bz2 taxi.tar.bz2 tools.tar.bz2 travel.tar.bz2 wmconsole.tar.bz2 yandex_io.tar.bz2 yandex360.tar.bz2 yaphone.tar.bz2 yawe.tar.bz2 frontend.tar.bz2

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January 22, 2023
Show HN: New AI edits images based on text instructions
737 by bryced | 166 comments on Hacker News.
This works suprisingly well. Just give it instructions like "make it winter" or "remove the cars" and the photo is altered. Here are some examples of transformations it can make: Golden gate bridge: https://ift.tt/VWuR8TP... Girl with a pearl earring: https://ift.tt/VWuR8TP... I integrated this new InstructPix2Pix model into imaginAIry (python library) so it's easy to use for python developers.

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January 21, 2023
Tell HN: Sometimes you don't realise how bad something is until you leave
685 by Goleniewski | 200 comments on Hacker News.
I was in two minds about writing this but in the end the thought of preventing someone going through what I went through is enough to tip the scales. As per title, sometimes in life you don't realise how toxic something can be until you leave it behind, no matter that be a bad habit, a relationship or even work. Sometimes it can be so toxic that you'd consider ending it all (as i did) because there is no visible way out and keeping the money flowing in at the same time when people depend on you. I am here to say thats not the case. Good stuff can happen. Under another name on here I wrote about my previous job and I felt stuck because if I left I walked away on a large chunk of stock options. That and my age made me feel really depressed and unwanted. I was driven to actively contemplate suicide due to my boss and his shitty attitudes and issues but no one actually seemed to care. Even then I convinced myself with "aww, it's not so bad" when in reality it was absolutely horrific. Getting out of bed became a real battle. People bitch about people being too lazy to get out of bed but some of those people will not be able to get out of bed because they are so depressed they see no point in it because "it's still gonna suck". I was so sidelined that I could literally disappear for an entire day/days and no-one would notice. I had a "top 10 dick of the year" award boss who didn't like me at all and proactively sidelined me so much it left me nothing to do on a daily basis. That said, in a large company you can cruise for years and that's what I did. The previous boss was a good guy but he left to pursue better options. Things where quite good back then actually. Just doing nothing sounds awesome. It's not. It's crap. Imagine having to sit at a workstation for months and years, having to be "present" with nothing to actually do but make some some BS stuff to appear busy. Even doing training courses and such becomes boring after a while. It was a kind of mental prison and my boss truly didn't give a flying you-know-what. Imagine having nothing in your week to justify the normal desire to do something useful. I even wrote scripts to make life better but my boss wouldn't consider them because I wrote them. Anyhow, it all came to a head and I ended up moving on... (cant go into that too much) and my new job pays much better money and is 500% more interesting and I get to play with cool new technologies. It makes you realise what crap you will really put up with and how from an impartial viewpoint you should have just "nope'd" out of it years ago but the status-quo is just easier to maintain. Looking back at it I knew my time was up a long time ago but I didn't have the courage to jump. It caused me so much misery and anguish. Looking back on the experience, I wasted several years of my life working for someone who didn't nurture or appreciate talent with his sociopathic tendencies. It's only after all these things have happened that you realise the effects it had. As an example, my faith in myself is utterly crushed. My new boss has recognised a lot of the mental snot has been virtually beat out of me and is understanding and I am grateful for that and is very helpful. Recovery will take time but at least I know I wont get verbally berated every time something isn't perfect. For those that this resonates with, I am not saying jump out right now but plan to just get out, even if a new job pays less or means going into a less demanding job. You can always make more money later but you can't get your time back. I suspect it will take years to get my confidence back but I am so glad to be out of a terrible situation. It's only when you leave you realise how truly terrible it was. I am however still resentful over the lost years.

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January 19, 2023
Tell HN: It is impossible to disable Google 2FA using backup codes
595 by gravitronic | 307 comments on Hacker News.
I would like to inform the HN community, if your plan to recover your Google account in the event of losing your phone is to use a 2FA backup code, or SMS recovery, to remove the old 2FA setup and set up a new 2FA code, that that may not be possible. My situation: I had 2FA set up with my Google Account through Google Authenticator. I lost my Google Authenticator settings when I broke my phone. I have 2FA backup codes. These successfully log me into my Google Account. In order to disable 2FA, or generate new 2FA backup codes, I need to access the 2FA settings page under the Security tab. When I try to load the Two-factor authentication page, I am forced to re-authenticate with Google. When re-authenticating to access the 2FA page, there is no option to enter a 2FA backup code or SMS verification to pass the 2FA challenge. The only option under "Choose a way to verify" is to enter a 2FA code. Entering a backup code instead of a 2FA code returns an error. What am I supposed to do in this situation? Yes this is a classic "maybe I can get support through public shaming" attempt. Thanks in advance.

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January 14, 2023
Ask HN: Strategies for working with engineers that are too smart?
482 by throwitawaaay | 460 comments on Hacker News.
There are a couple of engineers on my current team that I can only describe as being a little too smart for their own good, and I'm struggling a bit with how to work with them. I've worked with this sort of engineer on previous teams as well, and they all share a few traits: - They're brilliant, I mean very smart people (in an almost academic way?) - They have a big appetite for adding complexity to systems - They also have a big appetite for adding work to their own plates - Their code has no consistent style I work in embedded systems, so I'm generally writing C for resource-constrained systems. This sort of environment is rife with footguns, and I spend most of my time just trying to avoid those. A big part of that is keeping the things that my team controls as simple as possible, and while we are resource constrained, it's a balance. The tension comes when someone's more than happy to, for example, implement a complex caching scheme from scratch to save a few hundred bytes here, a handful of microwatts there. To me, adding that type of complexity for those sorts of performance improvements is missing the forest for the trees. When an engineer like this proposes something that adds unnecessary complexity, it's usually hard to argue with. The proposed change typically does indeed make the system objectively better, and they're the one taking responsibility for doing the work and ensuring its correctness. But the overall system becomes a little more brittle, and a little harder to reason about, two things that are much more difficult to measure than memory and power. Here's an example: an engineer on my current team recently proposed adding a significant feature to a module I wrote to make something dynamic that's currently statically defined at compile time. I pointed out that we could just change a couple entries in a static table to accomplish his goals, and we were able to avoid the extra work. What was notable, though, was his immediate willingness to write that feature. Maybe I'm lazy, but I'd sit there and think of half a dozen other ways to do it before settling on changing the module itself. But because he's smart enough to easily reason about a complicated solution, and he's willing to take on the extra work, he stopped there without weighing it against the larger system. Have you worked with engineers like this? Do you have any thoughts on how to work with them in a productive and friendly way? -- One more example if you feel like reading more: In a past role, I got into a debate about code style with the smartest person I've ever worked with. It boiled down to me advocating for more whitespace in his code and him arguing that adding whitespace made the code harder to read. It took a bit, but eventually I came to understand that he is so good at reading code that he just wants it all laid out in front of him as densely as possible. He can effectively run it in his head, as long as he can see it. That was baffling to me, I walked away thinking that I must be pretty bad at reading code. I use a very consistent style with long variable and function names, I keep my solutions as simple as I can, and I use whitespace generously to provide visual cues about the code's structure. All of this is to minimize the amount of brainpower I needed to understand my code, so I can put that energy toward thinking about the problem itself.

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January 13, 2023
Ask HN: Do you hate software engineering but love programming?
532 by throwwwwaway | 493 comments on Hacker News.
I have come to a realization that I don't really enjoy Software Engineering(& the processes that it comes with) but I do love programming & solving problems. Finding and fixing bugs is a lot of fun. Incidence response is a lot of fun. Hacking on new projects is a lot of fun. Writing unit tests is fun too. Refactoring, rewriting, sprint, agile, rearchitecting things etc aren't that fun. I like a few languages and I am not too keen on learning new paradigms or languages unless I have to. I'd rather get to value now by making something that just works(and is adequately tested) than engineer something thats future proof but takes longer to get out. What are some good jobs for a person like this?

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January 02, 2023
Airbnb removed my negative review
557 by luminaobscura | 326 comments on Hacker News.
I recently had a bad airbnb experience. During check in the host requested a cash deposit. this wasn't explained in the listing or prior to arrival. i couldn't check in and went elsewhere. Then i posted a review* giving these details. Airbnb removed my below review because "The review didn’t have enough relevant information to help the Airbnb community make informed booking or hosting decisions." The rating of the place went back up after removal. The host still have "superhost" status. Needless to say, i no longer trust airbnb reviews. *my full review was: I wasn't able to check in because [Host] requested 300 USD security deposit during check in. I told her - I don't have that much cash on me. - That is against AirBnB rules. - This should have been explained in airbnb listing. She can't just surprise guests with this at the last minute. She didn't listen. She said: "my house my rules", "you can't tell me how to run my business", "if you don't like it, you can cancel". I told her if i cancel, i don't get full refund so she should cancel. she said she won't cancel and me not getting refund is not her problem. I think she counts on the fact that guests typically wouldn't want to cancel in the last minute. you can see in some other reviews people had to agree to paying her this deposit. But i didn't want to cave in and called AirBnB. Thankfully, airbnb fully refunded the payment and i was able to find another accomodation in the last minute. I don't recommend this host unless you want a stressful start for your vacation.

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January 02, 2023
Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?
465 by luuuzeta | 681 comments on Hacker News.
I'm reading Petzold's Code [1], and it dawned on me that I didn't understand logic gates intuitively until now. I took a Computer Architecture course back in college, and I understood what logic gates meant in boolean algebra but not empirically. Petzold clarified this for me by going from the empirical to the theoretical using a lightbulb, a battery, wires, and relays (which he introduces when he talks about the telegraph as a way to amplify a signal). Another concept is the relationship between current, voltage, and resistance. For example, I always failed to understand why longer wires mean more resistance while thicker wires mean less resistance. [1]: https://ift.tt/hfzqJSy

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