By BY CARLOTTA GALL AND ERIKA SOLOMON from NYT World https://ift.tt/wMSlBzt
via IFTTT
Sunday, 31 July 2022
Saturday, 30 July 2022
Friday, 29 July 2022
New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: Chunk – Code sandbox for back-end devs
Show HN: Chunk – Code sandbox for back-end devs
17 by theochampion | 3 comments on Hacker News.
Chunk co-founder here. We spent the last 2 weeks building this to scratch our own itch: As developers, we often have problems that could be solved just by running a few lines of code. Sometimes, running this code on your local machine is fine. But other time, the code need to run automatically reacting to external events or to run continuously, which means, it needs to run on a server somewhere. So now, you have to find a cloud provider, to package or build the code and finally to deploy it. All of that for what could be literally be 4 lines of code. We couldn’t find an easier way to do this, so we built it. Chunk is an all in one web editor (think of the codesandbox experience) that allows you to write, deploy and run a piece of code in the cloud from a variety of triggers: HTTP, WebHook, manual or scheduled (cron). No setup, no build, no deploy. Chunk makes you go from idea to code running in the cloud in seconds. Let me know what you guys think!
17 by theochampion | 3 comments on Hacker News.
Chunk co-founder here. We spent the last 2 weeks building this to scratch our own itch: As developers, we often have problems that could be solved just by running a few lines of code. Sometimes, running this code on your local machine is fine. But other time, the code need to run automatically reacting to external events or to run continuously, which means, it needs to run on a server somewhere. So now, you have to find a cloud provider, to package or build the code and finally to deploy it. All of that for what could be literally be 4 lines of code. We couldn’t find an easier way to do this, so we built it. Chunk is an all in one web editor (think of the codesandbox experience) that allows you to write, deploy and run a piece of code in the cloud from a variety of triggers: HTTP, WebHook, manual or scheduled (cron). No setup, no build, no deploy. Chunk makes you go from idea to code running in the cloud in seconds. Let me know what you guys think!
Thursday, 28 July 2022
Wednesday, 27 July 2022
New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: Peerdiem — Discover and discuss one painting a day
Show HN: Peerdiem — Discover and discuss one painting a day
24 by afkqs | 9 comments on Hacker News.
Hi everyone, I made Peerdiem (a portmanteau word between Peer and Per Diem, which means Per Day in latin). The idea is very simple, a new painting or artwork to discover and discuss with your peers every day. Content is currently only fetched from Chicago Art Institute Free API [1] but I'm planning to add more sources in the short future. It was built with a couple of technologies I wanted to try for some time. Frontend is made with Preact and styled with Tailwindcss. Backend consists of an FastAPI app deployed in a Docker container. [1] https://ift.tt/tQDvYUW
24 by afkqs | 9 comments on Hacker News.
Hi everyone, I made Peerdiem (a portmanteau word between Peer and Per Diem, which means Per Day in latin). The idea is very simple, a new painting or artwork to discover and discuss with your peers every day. Content is currently only fetched from Chicago Art Institute Free API [1] but I'm planning to add more sources in the short future. It was built with a couple of technologies I wanted to try for some time. Frontend is made with Preact and styled with Tailwindcss. Backend consists of an FastAPI app deployed in a Docker container. [1] https://ift.tt/tQDvYUW
Tuesday, 26 July 2022
Monday, 25 July 2022
New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: Pipes puzzle (a.k.a. Net) on a hexagonal grid
Show HN: Pipes puzzle (a.k.a. Net) on a hexagonal grid
5 by gereleth | 0 comments on Hacker News.
Hello, HN - I wanted to share this puzzle game I made during my vacation. I'm rather fond of the pipes puzzle where your goal is to restore a scrambled network of connections by rotating tiles. It's usually played on a grid of squares and this all started when I decided to make a programmatic solver for that kind of puzzle. Then I realized that with some minor changes the solver could generate new puzzle instances. I thought about what kind of puzzle to make and someone suggested a hexagonal grid. Adapting the generator wasn't too hard but then I had to create a way to play this variant. So I did just that =). I find hexagonal pipes a bit more difficult than the square variant because there's a larger variety of possible tile shapes. For an extra challenge I implemented wrap mode where the board can connect to itself (right to left and top to bottom), so there are no convenient outer walls to start from. The site is made with Svelte Kit, its code is available on github at < https://github.com/gereleth/hexapipes >. Hope you enjoy playing =).
5 by gereleth | 0 comments on Hacker News.
Hello, HN - I wanted to share this puzzle game I made during my vacation. I'm rather fond of the pipes puzzle where your goal is to restore a scrambled network of connections by rotating tiles. It's usually played on a grid of squares and this all started when I decided to make a programmatic solver for that kind of puzzle. Then I realized that with some minor changes the solver could generate new puzzle instances. I thought about what kind of puzzle to make and someone suggested a hexagonal grid. Adapting the generator wasn't too hard but then I had to create a way to play this variant. So I did just that =). I find hexagonal pipes a bit more difficult than the square variant because there's a larger variety of possible tile shapes. For an extra challenge I implemented wrap mode where the board can connect to itself (right to left and top to bottom), so there are no convenient outer walls to start from. The site is made with Svelte Kit, its code is available on github at < https://github.com/gereleth/hexapipes >. Hope you enjoy playing =).
Sunday, 24 July 2022
Russia Tells Famine-Fearing Africa It’s Not to Blame for Food Shortage
By BY VIVIAN YEE, ANTON TROIANOVSKI AND ABDI LATIF DAHIR from NYT World https://ift.tt/zWpDeGT
via IFTTT
Saturday, 23 July 2022
Friday, 22 July 2022
Thursday, 21 July 2022
New top story on Hacker News: Tell HN: It looks like even air gapped Bitcoin hardware wallets can phone home
Tell HN: It looks like even air gapped Bitcoin hardware wallets can phone home
20 by JonathanBeuys | 7 comments on Hacker News.
We had a great discussion here on HN a few days ago about the question whether it is possible to use Bitcoin in a trustless way. So that you control your Bitcoin yourself and don't have to trust any privileged party to not take it from you: https://ift.tt/MsJCh1Y Interestingly, there was a lot of speculation and misinformation. So even on Hacker News, this topic is still only vaguely understood. But also some very good information came to light. The biggest bomb that was dropped in the thread received little attention: The fact that signing a transaction is not deterministic. This means when a hardware wallet is asked to sign a transaction, it can internally do that multiple times and then chose from multiple valid signatures. This means that it can encode data into the signature. For example, it could choose between two signatures with certain properties (say one results in an even checksum of the bits of the signature and one results in an odd checksum) and thereby signalling one bit to the creator of the wallet. Everytime it signals a bit of your seed phrase home, the security of your coins is cut in half. Here is an article about the fact that elliptic curve signatures are not deterministic: https://ift.tt/sWzb1PH The way I understand it, the wallet can chose from a large number of possible signatures and thereby signal many bits to its creator. In every transaction. I think a dicsussion about this should be started. The way I understand it, it makes it completely impossible to use Bitcoin in a trustless way. Even with an air gapped hardware wallet, you are always at the mercy of the wallet manufacturer and the delivery chain that gets the wallet to you. If it gets swapped out on the way to you, you are at the mercy of whoever swapped it out.
20 by JonathanBeuys | 7 comments on Hacker News.
We had a great discussion here on HN a few days ago about the question whether it is possible to use Bitcoin in a trustless way. So that you control your Bitcoin yourself and don't have to trust any privileged party to not take it from you: https://ift.tt/MsJCh1Y Interestingly, there was a lot of speculation and misinformation. So even on Hacker News, this topic is still only vaguely understood. But also some very good information came to light. The biggest bomb that was dropped in the thread received little attention: The fact that signing a transaction is not deterministic. This means when a hardware wallet is asked to sign a transaction, it can internally do that multiple times and then chose from multiple valid signatures. This means that it can encode data into the signature. For example, it could choose between two signatures with certain properties (say one results in an even checksum of the bits of the signature and one results in an odd checksum) and thereby signalling one bit to the creator of the wallet. Everytime it signals a bit of your seed phrase home, the security of your coins is cut in half. Here is an article about the fact that elliptic curve signatures are not deterministic: https://ift.tt/sWzb1PH The way I understand it, the wallet can chose from a large number of possible signatures and thereby signal many bits to its creator. In every transaction. I think a dicsussion about this should be started. The way I understand it, it makes it completely impossible to use Bitcoin in a trustless way. Even with an air gapped hardware wallet, you are always at the mercy of the wallet manufacturer and the delivery chain that gets the wallet to you. If it gets swapped out on the way to you, you are at the mercy of whoever swapped it out.
Wednesday, 20 July 2022
Tuesday, 19 July 2022
Monday, 18 July 2022
New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: Babble – Communicate privately on state-sponsored social media
Show HN: Babble – Communicate privately on state-sponsored social media
20 by yvbbrjdr | 3 comments on Hacker News.
Thanks for checking out Babble! You might wonder why this app is even useful and why not just use Signal/PGP. This app's target audience is actually ordinary people in China or similar countries who are under severe government surveillance and censorship, where access to Signal and similar E2EE messaging software is blocked by nationwide firewalls, such as the Great Firewall of China (GFW). Chinese people have been deprived of freedom of speech even before the COVID-19 pandemic. Li Wenliang, who was among the first to notice the spread of the virus and warned his colleagues about it in a private WeChat group, was admonished by the police for "spreading rumors"; his punishment was then aired on the national TV channel. After Wenliang passed away due to getting COVID-19 himself, discussions about it on China's public Internet were highly restricted; most discussions will be deleted upon being posted, which was done by some automatic keyword detection mechanism. Things got even worse over the years and especially during the Shanghai lockdown in early 2022. Everything related to questioning the public health policy is banned. Many people posted articles about how bad Shanghai's economic and social situation is on their WeChat public accounts. None of these articles, not even their accounts, can survive for longer than a few hours. Even articles crying for help, because people were starving, got deleted. A video called Voice from Shanghai Lockdown ( https://youtu.be/38_thLXNHY8 ), which contains audio recordings of desperate Shanghai people during the lockdown, went viral on Chinese social media at the end of this April. Unsurprisingly, this video was immediately censored. People got angry and tried to spread this video as much as possible by re-posting it again and again, racing against the detection algorithm. But it was futile. It's just like 1984, where the number of words available to say "legally" is decreasing. There are no tools available for people to speak out. Public social media and private messaging apps are all monitored by the government. Foreign tools such as Telegram, Signal, or anything similar are blocked by the GFW. PGP is too technical for normal people. The goal of Babble is to provide those people with a cryptographic and steganographic tool that's easy enough to use but secure enough against a censorship system. It's not perfect as of now, but we are making an effort to make it better. Yes, Babble might get removed from the App Store in China if the Chinese government asks, but it's fundamentally different from Signal being blocked - there are a considerable number of people in China who has an overseas Apple ID so that they can download apps not on Chinese App Store, but to use Signal, you have to bypass GFW, which fewer people know how to. One of the real challenges for this project though, is how to get people aware of the situation, because our education is brainwashing and people are starting to take surveillance and censorship for granted. And it's very hard for the app to reach its intended audience because the surveillance system is designed to prevent them from accessing this kind of tool.
20 by yvbbrjdr | 3 comments on Hacker News.
Thanks for checking out Babble! You might wonder why this app is even useful and why not just use Signal/PGP. This app's target audience is actually ordinary people in China or similar countries who are under severe government surveillance and censorship, where access to Signal and similar E2EE messaging software is blocked by nationwide firewalls, such as the Great Firewall of China (GFW). Chinese people have been deprived of freedom of speech even before the COVID-19 pandemic. Li Wenliang, who was among the first to notice the spread of the virus and warned his colleagues about it in a private WeChat group, was admonished by the police for "spreading rumors"; his punishment was then aired on the national TV channel. After Wenliang passed away due to getting COVID-19 himself, discussions about it on China's public Internet were highly restricted; most discussions will be deleted upon being posted, which was done by some automatic keyword detection mechanism. Things got even worse over the years and especially during the Shanghai lockdown in early 2022. Everything related to questioning the public health policy is banned. Many people posted articles about how bad Shanghai's economic and social situation is on their WeChat public accounts. None of these articles, not even their accounts, can survive for longer than a few hours. Even articles crying for help, because people were starving, got deleted. A video called Voice from Shanghai Lockdown ( https://youtu.be/38_thLXNHY8 ), which contains audio recordings of desperate Shanghai people during the lockdown, went viral on Chinese social media at the end of this April. Unsurprisingly, this video was immediately censored. People got angry and tried to spread this video as much as possible by re-posting it again and again, racing against the detection algorithm. But it was futile. It's just like 1984, where the number of words available to say "legally" is decreasing. There are no tools available for people to speak out. Public social media and private messaging apps are all monitored by the government. Foreign tools such as Telegram, Signal, or anything similar are blocked by the GFW. PGP is too technical for normal people. The goal of Babble is to provide those people with a cryptographic and steganographic tool that's easy enough to use but secure enough against a censorship system. It's not perfect as of now, but we are making an effort to make it better. Yes, Babble might get removed from the App Store in China if the Chinese government asks, but it's fundamentally different from Signal being blocked - there are a considerable number of people in China who has an overseas Apple ID so that they can download apps not on Chinese App Store, but to use Signal, you have to bypass GFW, which fewer people know how to. One of the real challenges for this project though, is how to get people aware of the situation, because our education is brainwashing and people are starting to take surveillance and censorship for granted. And it's very hard for the app to reach its intended audience because the surveillance system is designed to prevent them from accessing this kind of tool.
Sunday, 17 July 2022
Saturday, 16 July 2022
New top story on Hacker News: Bun gets “bun:FFI” – call native libraries from JavaScript
Bun gets “bun:FFI” – call native libraries from JavaScript
30 by tambourine_man | 1 comments on Hacker News.
30 by tambourine_man | 1 comments on Hacker News.
Friday, 15 July 2022
Thursday, 14 July 2022
Sri Lanka’s President Resigns After Months of Protest
By BY SKANDHA GUNASEKARA, EMILY SCHMALL AND MUJIB MASHAL from NYT World https://ift.tt/HyoGkwf
via IFTTT
Wednesday, 13 July 2022
Tuesday, 12 July 2022
Monday, 11 July 2022
New top story on Hacker News: The euro has tumbled near parity to the US dollar
The euro has tumbled near parity to the US dollar
173 by systemvoltage | 174 comments on Hacker News.
173 by systemvoltage | 174 comments on Hacker News.
New top story on Hacker News: Ask HN: Moving from Corporate to Solo Dev?
Ask HN: Moving from Corporate to Solo Dev?
48 by disenchanted_ds | 28 comments on Hacker News.
I'm pretty disillusioned with the corporate rat race...I naively took on some additional managerial/strategic responsibilities assuming I'd get a promotion, but I'm finding that even if I did get the promotion, I'm not enjoying my current work as much, as I'm far less hands-on. I know I can provide value--I've got industry-specific domain expertise and I can write high-quality software. One of the projects I've recently been managing is the outsourcing of some programming work--work outsourced to a team of "professional programmers" but with no domain expertise. I think I could have done better myself in terms of code quality, but even if I had, I know I wouldn't have gotten paid as much since I'm an employee. I'd like to capture that value myself instead of dealing with an OK bonus and sub-inflationary raise. I've been considering trying my hand going solo, offering my skills on a contract basis. But I've never done this, and it's a big change for me. Ideally, I could start with my current employer as a client. How often is this done? What steps should I take and what should I consider? Any resources that you'd recommend?
48 by disenchanted_ds | 28 comments on Hacker News.
I'm pretty disillusioned with the corporate rat race...I naively took on some additional managerial/strategic responsibilities assuming I'd get a promotion, but I'm finding that even if I did get the promotion, I'm not enjoying my current work as much, as I'm far less hands-on. I know I can provide value--I've got industry-specific domain expertise and I can write high-quality software. One of the projects I've recently been managing is the outsourcing of some programming work--work outsourced to a team of "professional programmers" but with no domain expertise. I think I could have done better myself in terms of code quality, but even if I had, I know I wouldn't have gotten paid as much since I'm an employee. I'd like to capture that value myself instead of dealing with an OK bonus and sub-inflationary raise. I've been considering trying my hand going solo, offering my skills on a contract basis. But I've never done this, and it's a big change for me. Ideally, I could start with my current employer as a client. How often is this done? What steps should I take and what should I consider? Any resources that you'd recommend?
