If you have to debug at that level, and you're not designing hardware, things are really bad.
Some years back, Wes Irish at Xerox PARC tracked down one of the great mysteries of early coax Ethernet - why was throughput so much lower than theory predicted? For this, he got both ends of a building-length coax with many machines on it connected to one office, so he could plug both ends into a storage scope. If the waveforms disagreed, somebody was transmitting when they shouldn't. Storage scopes with large storage were rare then. It was an expensive LeCroy unit.
After the end of each Ethernet packet on coax, there is a brief "quiet time", and then the next packet can be sent, beginning with a sync pattern. The hardware detects if what it is sending does not match what it is receiving, which indicates a collision. Both senders stop, wait a random time so they don't collide again, and retry. This is how "carrier sense multiple access - collision detection", or CSMA-CD, works at the hardware level.
This setup revealed that something on the cable was transmitting a single spike after the end of each packet, during the "quiet time". That reset the "quiet time" timer in the network interface, which inhibited the transition to "look for sync" mode. So the next packet would be ignored.
The quiet time timer was at a very low level - software did not see this event.
What came out of looking at the waveforms was the surprising result that the spike during the quiet time was not coming from either the data source or the destination, but from something elsewhere on the cable. The spike was not synchronized to the packet just sent.
With the waveforms for both ends of the cable visible, speed of light lag revealed both that this was happening and where it was coming from, as distance along the cable.
It turned out that several brands of network interface used a part which contained the quiet time timer, the sync recognizer, and the transmitter power controller. When the timer ran out, the device did a state machine transition, and during that transition, for a nanosecond or so, the transmitter turned on. It wasn't supposed to do that. This generated a spike on the cable, resetting every quiet time timer and causing the next packet to be silently ignored by all stations.
The network interface didn't need to be active to do this. Being powered on was sufficient. One device with that part could halve the data rate on a coax Ethernet. Thousands of network interfaces had to be scrapped to fix this.
It is worth learning considering a few things. The ruleset is freakishly simple and the docs are good. The speed at which you can prototype a gui is somewhat unparalleled. The ability to glue or automate different bits of software is often better than bash. It is called the tool command language after all, though they'll never get me to stop saying tickle.
If you are looking for more open challenges, both the 11b-x-1371 series and Cicada 3301 have unsolved stages. I have a copy of the last Cicada code book in a box somewhere, as it looked like a forked fake path, but it's a kitschy bit of internet apocrypha. Also, just do cryptopals (which I haven't actually done and still really should at some point). The John McAfee deadman switch puzzle looked like a hoax, but judging by the number of transactions on the $whackd blockchain and the stakes involved if even a fraction of what he was on about were true, it's plausible NSA or GCHQ got to it first. Those are just ones I can think of off the top of my head.
If nothing else has come out of the stream of scandals afflicting that agency, it's that they need better people. If you are eligible, do it, as you could be the change, and it appears the opportunity for improvement there is truly unlimited.
Decades back there was a UI sketch for a phone answering machine. It dropped a marble in a tray for each message received. "New messages? How many?" was a simple glance "New marbles? How many?". To play a marble/message, place it on the play-back dimple. Replay by nudging it. Save the marble, save the message. No "to save this message yet again, press N". Delete by dropping it in the recycling hopper. Running out of length-limited n-slot message storage is running out of marbles in the hopper. Very tactile, tangible affordances. The marbles were merely ID, not storage. But (reliably archival?) storage might be fun too - eg, finding a bag of marbles from when you were a kid? EDIT: Durrell Bishop
Same story. At about 40 I shaved my epic beard, took graduation dates off my resume and limited it to about the last 10 years of work. Fresh shave and haircut for any f2f interview. So far so good.
Now I'm 51 and lucky enough to be able to seriously consider not taking another job after the current one runs its course (which may be a long time, I don't know). But if I do go out after another job I may invest in a few months of facials and spa treatments to get that maximally youthful look :)
For others who might be coming across it, let me provide my story, which pans out very differently.
I was recently diagnosed with CPTSD (but it took a long time for doctors to reach that conclusion), although the anxiety was known for a long time.
Here's how it began: I was close to the end of a prestigious university program (3 years done out of 4) when I "snapped". I suddenly ran out of energy. I could no longer bring myself to care to go to class, and I found great comfort in running away from things. This was the beginning of what would eventually become deeply ingrained avoidant behaviour.
My ambition no longer matched up with the energy I had in my body. It no longer matched up with my ability to tolerate things. I could no longer live up to my ambitions, my dreams, my desires, my goals.
I broke, and I was suicidal for a long time (on and off for 10 years).
I am slowly working my way out of my issues now. I am learning how to deal with deep seated anxiety as a way to give me more energy so that I can achieve my goals. One of my doctors mentioned something crucial: anxiety saps energy. Having an overactive amygdala is harmful, because when you are having a panic attack, your body floods with energy (in order to execute "fight or flight"), but very briefly. The cost of this flood of energy is a massive drop in energy that lasts longer than the flood did. This is a possible explantion (amongst others) behind my perpetual low energy.
For me, part of the process of dealing with anxiety (amongst others, like mindfulness and self-kindness) is learning how to achieve my ambitions by making realistic goals, and learning how to feel pleasure in "small", consistent achievements (the depressed brain is excellent at making every achievement seem worthless). Feeling pleasure in these small achievements is important in order to fuel the necessary consistency of said achievements.
tl;dr: in my experience, anxiety is unlikely to be a driver of achievement, and therefore unlikely to be a cause of productive ambition.
Mathematicians use very terse notation in formulas, but accompanied by a lot of natural language text. The equivalent in programming would be terse code with long comments and documentation.
Many programmers instead see self-documenting code as the ideal outcome: maybe not very compact, but virtually free of comments (and with documentation at least partially autogenerated).
In reality, successful open-source projects tend to have many comments in the source code. Often not one-liners, but detailed descriptions of functions, their arguments and algorithms, motivation for the choice of the implementation and so on.
As a Linux laptop user, I used Thinkpads for years. The pinnacle was the T460s/T490s models from around 2016, because they:
- Ran Linux without much tinkering or major compromises
- small (14")
- affordable (around $1300 for my config)
- lightweight and thin
- powerful (I had a Core i5)
- upgrade-able (I had 48gb of RAM)
They started going downhill after that, primarily in that I could no longer find a Thinkpad model that was at the intersection of upgrade-able and Linux compatibility.
Around 2021 I started looking for an alternative. Looked at made-for-Linux laptops like System76 and the various Linux-certified Dells. Couldn't find anything that checked all my boxes and the Dells were particularly crippled: 8GB of soldered on RAM? Only certified to work if you use their custom hacked Ubuntu image? No thanks.
The Framework (gen11, DIY edition) was exactly what I was looking for. My configuration at the time was $1032 and I've been running Manjaro Linux on it continuously for the past year on it with zero problems. It's just good solid generic hardware at a fair price. It's cheap enough that I don't worry about it getting lost or stolen. It's repairable so I don't worry about something physically breaking.
I have since bought another one for an employee and over the next few years I plan on deploying them to my whole team.
Basically I should be a testimonial on their website.
“Entrepreneurs are not at all like ordinary businessmen. An entrepreneur who is not in trouble closes no avenues, keeps a lot of balls in the air, and will never tell you the whole truth when a half-truth will do. An entrepreneur who is in trouble will lie, cheat, and steal. He will smuggle cocaine or ship bricks. We should never measure an entrepreneur by the standards of a rock-solid businessman.” — attributed to Kenneth Rind[1]
Thanks for the valiant attempts to keep this discussion from devolving into a full-fledged dumpster fire.
1. The US, by the most generally accepted definition, has had continuous governance as a democracy since 1788. Just one more election, and not the most contentious or momentous by a long shot.
2. Current reported spread in votes between D and R are pretty slim, 75.0M v. 70.7M Wikipedia 11PM EST 11/7.
3. Whatever your partisan opinion, at least 70M American adults, 48.5% of those voting, disagree with you and think you’re an idiot. Try not to confirm the fact with your comments.
4. Challenging the validity of the voting process is a time-honored tradition during tight races. Stop sounding like newbies. This is the only time that the validity of the electoral process gets enough visibility to figure out if anything’s broke. Seriously broke? See 1.
5. A paper trail is a beautiful thing.
6. And what a wonderfully fertile field these comments are for use as examples of propaganda, inflammatory rhetoric and logical fallacies. Wish I was teaching a course right about now. Timely for the application of manure on fields too...
7. It would be nice if the mods kept the discussion away from an r/politics-ization of HN. The sides are pretty obvious and enforcing an arbitrary quota of half blue hurrah/half red hurrah would lead to a better flow and balance. Heavy-handed, but appropriate in these few cases IMHO.
The brilliant, stupid, wise, foolish, angry, mellow, old, young, rich, poor, naive, cynical, kind, nasty, sophisticated, brutish American people have spoken. Whether you agree with the results or not, it’s a beautiful thing.
Actually the RK3399-based Chromebooks are the "most-rootable" device you can buy today, by a long shot. Far more rootable than any desktop machine still in production.
No Intel ME, no PSP, and with the Samsung Kevin laptop you can build coreboot to boot the device with absolutely zero blobs -- even the Cortex-M0 power management unit firmware source is in there. It's really one of a kind.
Phones, consoles, Chromebooks and other unrootable hardware, restrictive hardware licensing, arm's business model, abstraction over abstraction, SAAS, corporate cloud infrastructure, web apps over local, streaming over storing, walled gardens, signed binaries, nearly everything about 'modern safe computing' is all about taking control and responsibility away from users and handing it over to somebody else to be paid for and properly managed by them for the users own safety.
This is bullshit. It's for profit and control.
The general purpose computer is hands down the most amazing, equalizing piece of technology humanity has ever created.
It's one of the few things that gives the average person the same abilities as the wealthy or elite. Whoever you are, where ever you are, if you have a general purpose computer and some knowledge, you can do just about anything.
Rather than teach people about this amazing, near magical piece of technology enabling anyone to do amazing things, the whole attitude, at least since i've been around using computers going back fairly far is, 'users can't be trusted with this power and need to be protected from themselves at their own expense by some other benevolent entity'.
Instead of being taught as something that's now just a part of life, the way something like driving is, despite being nearly as, if not more important than, driving is in society these days, general computing is still pushed as this mysterious arcane art the average person needs to be protected from through the use of everything mentioned in my first paragraph by someone who can lock everything up and provide security for them.
How else could they convince people to own three, four, five a dozen of what is essentially the same thing? Just locked down in functionality in different ways.
I lay responsibility on the early generation of tech people that got rich quick in the late 90's early 2000's. They seen the potential computers had to bring, they took advantage early and made money, they got greedy and have done nothing since but try and keep the average person out through whatever means necessary.
Those people are the ones running the tech giants today, pushing locked down hardware, and trying to crush general computing as a thing.
ETA: I changed my original wording from blame to lay responsibility on. My intention wasn't to blame anyone in particular but to bring awareness to the let down by those original people that benefited from the openness of general computing only to be at the forefront of trying to lock it down now.
In my experience, the vast majority of employees don’t want their workplace to become a political battleground. Even those who occasionally discuss politics at work and are mature enough to behave like adults about it.
It’s tempting to think of this in terms of Democrats vs Republicans or right vs left, but that’s not really the domain of the most problematic employees. The most problematic employees are the ones who have given up on the notion of reasonable debate or disagreement and instead have become convinced that the other side is committing acts so terrible that fighting them at every juncture is the only acceptable thing to do. Strangely enough, the “other side” isn’t just far-right or fad-left people, it becomes centrists, or people who don’t vote, or people who don’t want to engage in politics at work.
When you’ve reached the point where a small handful of employees are fomenting outrage at their company for not putting a BLM statement on the company Twitter account, for example, the situation has arrived at a “with us or against us” false dichotomy.
Generally, the only way to win with politics at the office is to not play. However, when one side decides that not playing is equivalent to being evil, everyone is forced to play. When everyone is forced to play by a handful of disgruntled employees, everyone loses.
Paying to remove these people from a company makes a lot of sense. If you don’t do something to remove them, the people who are sick of being dragged into political debates at work will slowly diffuse out of the company. The hyper-political employees are a loud minority, but the people who just want to do their jobs and remain professional are very much more common. Don’t let the tail wag the dog.
* https://overthewire.org Similar to HTS, but you don't need an account. The subject matter covered is also slightly different.
* https://0x00sec.org/ A forum dedicated to security. There's a lot of script kiddies, but also some gold.
* https://www.hackerone.com/ What better way to learn then practice on live targets? That being said, I would do some of the others first.
...
I do a lot of learning through reading, so books:
* Network Security Assessment by Chris McNab. I have second edition, which is a good and instructive read, but quite outdated.
* Real-World Bug Hunting by Peter Yaworski. Web security 101. Good read, and fairly useful.
* Advanced Penetration Testing by Wil Allsop. Outdated, but interesting. You will never use flash again after reading this.
* Social Engineering, The Science of Human Hacking by Christopher Hadnagy. This is a very interesting read. Also, one of the few that can't go out of date.
...
This should be enough to get you started. There's a couple more books I can think of, but they tend to be more specialized into certain fields of security and less approachable/generally applicable. If you want these recommendations as well, feel free to email me, my email's in my bio.
This is why I always gravitate towards software projects that are centered around making money (within ethical bounds, of course). The closer to the bottom line my code is, the larger the sales and support team is around my code, and the more customers there are (real paying customers, not internal employees who like to be called customers) using my code, the better.
It may sound overly hard-nosed and cynical to some people, but I find it's just the opposite. The drive to make more money is the only thing that trumps every other petty motivation people follow at work. It trumps favoritism, empire building, and intra-office rivalries. It trumps good ol' boys networks and tech bro networks. Money brings people into the same room who would never normally be in a room together, and they do it willingly. It forces people in power to listen to small fries. While money corrupts on an individual level, it purifies on an institutional level. Its universally accepted value allows a variety of individual motives to flourish.
This seems to change once a company goes public and hits a certain size, as the flow of money becomes less and less tied to actual sales and consumer behavior and more and more based on financial engineering and stock price.
Physics doesn't need another Einstein. Einstein explained Brownian motion, the Photoelectric effect, created special relativity and general relativity, the cosmological constant, helped found quantum mechanics, served as an invaluable critic of quantum mechanics. Then he foundered. Einstein never accepted particle physics, refused to follow new developments and became a dinosaur. This sadly is what most "physicists" are doing today, the followed in Einstein's footsteps, mostly the dinosaur part.
What does physics need? The world doesn't know. Nobody knows but someone will do it, someday in a manner no one else thought possible or could really anticipate. In fact, that's not entirely true but new developments will happen and only a handful of people will be in the loop. Lorenz, Poincare etc. e.g. laid some vital groundwork for relativity.
My own two cents on the matter is that we really don't understand our theories well enough and are badly in need of a firmer foundation. The situation is analogous to calculus before Weierstrass, Cauchy, Dedekind and Cantor.
Of course, mathematics wasn't completely stuck just because calculus wasn't fully developed. Probability and non-Euclidean geometry were stunning developments which predated a truer understanding of real numbers.
So it is with physics right now. Unification, strings, etc. isn't working out so well right now. Quantum computing is now a thing and Quantum mechanics is enjoying a second revolution not unlike the General Relativity Renaissance led by Penrose, et. al.
We can't predict the future. We don't know the sequence things we need to take the next step in AI or even if there is one. Will some form of deep learning be all we need? Probably not but possibly yes.
Physics is right where it should be. Frustration is part of the process. We're feeling some pain because our approach isn't working. Instead of having answers to everything maybe we should focus on better questions.
" At least I felt it hard to admit that the costly procedure had failed and saying it to my surgeon didn't feel easy."
That's one thing I have noticed. A few years ago my girlfriend had a failed surgery. She complained constantly during the weeks before the followup meeting. In the followup meeting the surgeon talked about how well the surgery had gone. My girlfriend basically agreed and they bantered around for almost half an hour. Ten minutes before the appointment ended I lost patience and said "Hold on, guys. This thing hasn't worked at all. The pain is worse than before and she talks at home about killing herself. How do we get out of this?". The surgeon gave me the evil eye, my girlfriend said nothing and we basically got kicked out soon.
It was a really weird dynamic. I wonder how many surgeries are scored as success because patients are afraid of telling the surgeon that it wasn't. I think it may be a substantial percentage where the hospital/surgeon never hears about problems and there is no independent follow up either.
A friend of mine was once arrested and it made national news - multiple times (arrest, randomly later on, then trial, etc). What I observed:
1. They often got a lot of details wrong - details very relevant to how the public would perceive him. Easily verifiable details, BTW. A lot of it was just someone on the law enforcement/justice side making statements that they did not bother to verify.
1a. Some of these false facts are now part of his Wikipedia page, with several references to these news outlets. Be wary of facts on Wikipedia if the source is journalism.
2. The national news have a hive mind mentality. Between the arrest and the trial, he would suddenly become headline news, and often with no event triggering it. As if they all suddenly decided (on the same day) to just write a story about him. The reality is more likely laziness - one outlet decided to make it big news and others didn't want to be left behind.
2a. As an aside, another well known freelance journalist said this is common. He once had the scoop on a big story and was trying to sell it to the top news outlets. The most common question was "Is anyone else running this?" followed by "We don't want to be the only ones to run this." The concern was about being wrong in the end, but the facts were easily verifiable and the news outlet didn't want to go through the trouble.
2b. The random big news about my friend with no trigger? A number of times the same news outlet had reported the very same thing at the time of arrest months prior. It was basically recycled news, but presented as if it was breaking news.
3. The local newspapers were the best. They didn't report false facts - they verified them. They had the most detail (continual coverage over months rather than random sensational headlines).
That was 20 years ago. Something similar happened to another friend of mine recently. Half of the latest news reports about him have ridiculously wrong facts (year of arrest, time spent in prison, etc). Stuff that is trivially verifiable. His case was not as high profile. Lesson learned: News stories that are not as big are a lot more likely to have wrong information.
This experience (particularly the false facts) is why I'm adamant about suspending judgment prior to the trial. My sources (news) are unreliable.
(BTW, that first person was easily acquitted - the defense called only one witness, because the prosecution's case was so flawed).
Apologies for all the typos by the way. Trying to get these written during breaks/downtime, and Autocorrect is making life interesting.
>You never answered my question, "How would you define the ability to vote, as only going to select white men?"
I actually did, but the typos may have minced it. You say they created a System where the vote only went to "certain white men". You're not really appreciating how wide that swath was. I offered the example of the House of Lords (peopled by actual aristocrats) as a contrast point.
The Peerage and Nobility is intrinsically woven into the concept and definition of English social and civic life. There is no 1:1 mapping of that same characteristic in the United States. There is no Aristocracy.
You look at "only landed white men" could vote, and don't realize how drastically that diverged from the European cultural baseline.
These landed white men didn't even have recognized and venerated and chronicled names. That was a revolutionary disbursement of power at the time. Johnny sets up a homestead, he gets to vote. Lack of suffrage for everyone else wasn't even mainly an issue of "Everyone without it is inferior;". It was chosen for it's uncontroversial nature amongst the founders and their contemporaries. They were building a Nation, remember, and the seed of Unity had to start somewhere. It's an example of incremental value delivery.
They needed some edifice capable of doing the things Governments was expected to do, which means they needed to start building that kernel of "get things done" that people could buy into and go with. So that's what they did. Amongst themselves they built the most revolutionary, egalitarian government they could at the time. They also built in the measures whereby all the assumptions and policies they enacted to create unity at that time could be modified by popular consensus as times progressed. Just as a plant starts with a Seed, so too did the Nation in that group of upper class white men, who wasted no remarkably little time on the Nation State scale of time expanding suffrage. voluntarily, I might add.
As to Senators being appointed by State legislatures, that was due to fundamental changes in what the role of the Senate is. The Senate was not intended to be reflective of "the People" at all. It was meant to represent the interest of The State's themselves where "The State" here is defined as the respective government apparat put in place by the People of each State.
Each State determined how voting for State Senators was done, and to my knowledge, at the State level, it is still direct election by the voting population at large. So you had that level of people expressing their confidence in someone to take on the mantle of overseer of the fundamental architecture of government. However, when it came to the Federal level, it was delegated to the State apparatus to choose the ones among their number most well-versed and capable of not only representing their State's interests, but balancing them against the competing interests of other States.
Without mass media, this arrangement made sense. You wouldn't know a Senatorial candidate from the other side of the State from Adam, but other State Senators would.
If you look at the patterns the Founders favored, it was always balances. Everyone gets to weigh in on overall direction, but the nagging details get handled by a smaller more deeply versed group with longer tenures/more experience because the devil is in the details. Start with the widest workable suffrage everyone could agree on, landed men who could show up and weren't deemed impossible to accommodate by the culture of the time, and have faith that men's good nature would see that spread wide in short-order; with a hedge against men's worse vices through deemphasis and deglorification of public service.
It was a different world back then. Just as kids growing up today will seemingly never know a U.S. before 9/11 screwed everything up, so too was the Overton window different back then.
Human beings are as much victims of the constraints imposed by the physical, economic, and social environments of the Times they Live In. The accomplishment, and great Humanitarian Gift of the Founders, was the Founding of a Nation whereby with Unity would come prosperity, safety, good fortune and freedom for all if only men endeavored to keep it so, and drive it in that direction.
History is full of the stories of how things didn't go to plan, but it is also full of examples of a Great Nation giving rise to Great People to do Great things, even from humble origins.
The Electoral College arose out of the Founders dedication to bicamerality. They trusted the population with Candidate selection, but once again, the work of figuring out who amongst the candidates was best was reserved for a small group of directly elected Electors. To them, under assumption of good nature, was entrusted the final responsibility of Conscience and wisdom into which candidate was most trustworthy to hold office. A decision best confined to smaller groups, away from the crowds. If it's a good fit, the extra step of the Electors wouldn't make a lick of difference. If it was a bad fit, but they could work a crowd, the Electors should weed out the unfit candidate. Check the Federalist papers on that one.
That went sideways when national political parties came about, but that's life.
The lifetime SCOTUS appointment was a concession toward attempting to keep the judiciary independent from the political arena and at least constrain the politics to appointment time. Even then, most nominations are encouraged to be of a fundamentally balanced nature, with track records that also encompass going across the aisle, and not taking undue liberty with interpretation of the law. Again, not perfect, but it mostly worked. It got us to the point where you and I are having a reasonable discussion over whether or not there was foul play at the heart of architecting things such that one or another group is kept at a severe disadvantage; which in all my research I haven't found clear evidence of. The emphasis has always been maintaining a governmental edifice that works, and changes with the mores of the time.
There have been undeniable bad calls by the government in history to be sure, but those weren't "all according to plan". They were emergent reflections of society at the time, just as the chaos we're experiencing now almost assuredly is. I never in my life dreamed the American System and way-of-life could end up in the painful straits we're in, but neither did any of my forefathers when they had their civic faith tested.
I shed a tear everyday, because at a minimum, the change we're experiencing is the system working as intended. Assumptions long unquestioned getting their due attention. This is it. This is the Legacy of the Founders, the marvelous machine they built, for the good or ill of their descendants. The winds o
You can credibly say that it sure smells like an aristocracy nowadays, and I won't argue. Back then though? Absolutely not, and never with a clear premeditation to create an underclass, a characteristic of Greek civics they despised as I recall.
>The Oklahoma City bombing was the biggest terrorist attack next to 9/11 and yet never discussed in any history class I’ve taken
No government sponsored curriculum is going to open the door to the very tough questions that the first two parts of that trilogy naturally raise. It's the same reason people are never taught about the Indian wars or Jim Crow south except that "they existed". If people learned about how many times the government straight up violated treaties it signed and how many times state governments intentionally used the forces at their disposal to disenfranchise blacks then people wouldn't trust the government. The career arcs of the kind of people who think these things should be learned don't tend to put them on the committees that set state curriculum.
The OP says "The most favorited articles by the top 10k most active Hacker News members." How was "most active" defined? (Edit: oh I see - the users who post the most comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24352688). It's an interesting list, and it never occurred to me that by counting the top favorites of different subsets of users you might get quite different interesting lists.
I got curious about what the global most-favorited would be. Here are the top 50. The first column is the fave count. It's interesting how many are Ask HNs, i.e. text posts with no external URL. Sorry that the item ids aren't clickable:
836 19087418 Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?
783 16745042 Ask HN: What are the best MOOCs you've taken?
685 16775744 Ask HN: How to self-learn electronics?
581 21332072 Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
554 21581361 Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?
510 18588727 Ask HN: What are your “brain hacks” that help you manage everyday situations?
510 20264911 Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?
506 22786853 Ask HN: What are your favorite low-coding apps / tools as a developer?
472 15919115 Machine Learning 101 slidedeck: 2 years of headbanging, so you don't have to
470 23151144 Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
463 20916749 Questions to ask a company during a job interview
461 22299180 Ask HN: What are some books where the reader learns by building projects?
454 23092657 Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life
448 23904000 Systems Design for Advanced Beginners
447 22400375 Mathematics for the Adventurous Self-Learner
444 23588896 Teach Yourself Computer Science
441 21585235 Basic Social Skills Guide (2012)
439 17238135 How to be a Manager – A step-by-step guide to leading a team
439 22105229 Tricks to start working despite not feeling like it
432 16493489 Machine Learning Crash Course
425 24351073 Most favorited Hacker News posts of all time
422 22310813 Gears
421 20985875 The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)
416 19490573 A guide to difficult conversations
409 24120275 How to stop procrastinating by using the Fogg Behavior Model
409 21324768 Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
406 23229241 Linux Productivity Tools (2019) [pdf]
398 21712194 Ask HN: Best book / resources on leadership, especially for tech teams?
396 12702651 Ask HN: What is your favorite YouTube channel for developers?
381 18805624 Algorithms, by Jeff Erickson
374 21536789 Build Your Own React
372 18104814 Ask HN: What are the best textbooks in your field of expertise?
369 23170881 Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?
366 22226380 The missing semester of CS education
365 23053981 Medium-hard SQL interview questions
364 17163251 The Importance of Deep Work and the 30-Hour Method for Learning a New Skill
363 22276184 My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file
360 22235279 Ask HN: What Skills to Acquire in 2020?
360 13660086 Ask HN: What are some books where the reader learns by building one project?
358 14486657 Ask HN: What language-agnostic programming books should I read?
358 15602538 Ask HN: Where can I find high-end stock images for a website?
356 19900955 Ask HN: What overlooked class of tools should a self-taught programmer look into
356 20044876 Advanced Data Structures (2017)
355 19264048 Immersive Linear Algebra (2016)
355 12713056 Ask HN: How to get started with machine learning?
353 23339830 Tools for Better Thinking
353 21900498 Ask HN: Best books you read in the past decade?
352 20254057 Startup idea checklist
347 17999659 Ask HN: Favorite teachers on YouTube?
347 23276456 Ask HN: What startup/technology is on your 'to watch' list?
This is about (common) swifts. I know some things about them.
Because a very long time ago I raised one, which was very difficult, but also enjoyable.
On the way home from last day of school before summer holidays I saw some bird chick on the ground, next to a closed wall of bricks, on the walkway, between one-way street with heavy traffic and a steep hill on the other side. I didn't know what to do, except not to blindly grab it and take it home, because sometimes the parents come and feed them. So I stood back about a dozen meters and waited for half an hour. No bird parents came, traffic on the street roared on and on. Couldn't make sense of where it would have fallen off, couldn't put it back where it came from beacause blank wall of bricks 4 to 5 meters high to some backyard was closed to the street. No doors/gates or something like that. Walked around the block to find entry, unsuccessfully. Walked back to where the chick still was, sitting miserably on the ground, almost no feathers, just some dark gray fluff, pink skin shining through.
Stood there and thought: Should I, shouldn't I?
What will Mommy say?
Knelt down to see if it had anything icky on it, which it hadn't and put it into the left cheat pocket of my shirt.
Didn't even struggle. Just looked around with its tiny dark eyes.
Some twenty minutes later, at home, unexpectedly no storm of rage because bringing back strange animals. Instead phoning around for some veterinary who does birds.
I somehow had the feeling that timing was essential here, so I grabbed my street bicycle without having lunch and speeded to the veterinarian. Again with the chick in my left shirt pocket, was afraid it would try to get out, but it seemed content to just look out from there.
The veterinarian examined it under a light and looking glass and found a hand full of tiny mites. Eeek! I haven't seen them! Strangely there were none in my shirt pocket.
Anyways, vet couldn't make out what it was exactly, because too young, settled for mostly some sort of swift and told me what to expect, and that it was a stupid thing to do, because if swift this would never be my bird, because they are wild things, almost always in the air, and nobody ever successfully raised one so far.
I answered that I know it's no Budgie or Canary, that I waited for the parents to show up, which they didn't, couldn't locate where it came from to put it back there, so certain death by car, cat, starvation was imminent.
So I got some tubes with different gels in it, which I had to give the chick with the food. Which was a mix of living mealworms to be obtained from fishing ponds where people use them as bait, deep frozen crickets from pet food stores, raw minced meat with egg white and yolk mixed in, and any living insects I managed to shoot down with the rubber rings from preserving jars :-)
Every two hours, at least! 24/7! For two months! Ugh!
Anyways, I did it, went to a museum of natural history to speak with an ornithologist there. Drove there by subway with it in my shirtpocket again :-)
Ornithologist confirmed bias of vet towards common swift, and lend me some books, plus a list of more titles from the library for learning the swarming patterns, to which I should release it when they appear in the sky.
So my summer holidays were effectively gone by having to care for it around the clock, without pauses longer than two hours. I didn't really mind, and chick neither. It grew into
something very streamlined, very dark brown and shiny feathers. It was primed to me and not afraid. I could put it onto my shoulder and it stayed there.
I worried a little about it being so lazy, so I trained it by putting it into my hands while standing, and then going down fast with my hands, to let its instincts kick in. Which they did, by spreading its wings.
Later, when it made strange rattling sounds by rhythmically spreading its wings to get the feathers out of their growing
sheets and I found it on top of the curtains when coming back into the room, I knew it was time to get it to fly.
Which I did by having it sit on my shoulder while bicycling around at 40 to 60 km/h in the forest on excellently paved ways.
At first it didn't let go of my shirt, just spread its wings
and lifting it a little, or beating its wings and tickling the side of my head that way. But it wouldn't let go!
I had to go to about 40km/h with the bird in one hand and only one hand on the handlebar, then throwing it UP!
Screech! Screech! Back to my shoulders. Hrrmpf.
I repeated that I don't know how often anymore until I had it flying after me for some minutes without immediately going back to my shoulders.
I extended these "lessons" to places where I knew there were
many insects in the air, like standing ponds, fields with cows on them, and it worked, it just got its flies from the air!
Seeing it doing that really took a burden from my mind.
Took it ontop the tower of some castle ruin, over bridges over rivers, onto watch towers in the forest, tried to show it all it could be confronted with in its life within my means, which meant from my shoulder while racing my bicycle.
It really liked me going downhill from the forest back home at anywhere between 65km/h to 85km/h tops for maybe 20 seconds.
It also liked sitting squat on my chest while I laid on my back, wings half spread, eyes closed, me very lightly stroking its head with one finger... cheelp, cheelp
If it were a cat it would have purred.
Also it never shat on me. Neither into the nest which I've built for it into the corner of the room, onto a halfheight cabinet out of some towels. Always nicely outside, onto the old newspapers which I put under and around it. Clean bird!
Then the time came to throw it up into the swarms, like I intended from the beginning. Took me about ten times until I could see it fly towards the swarm without coming back.
Instincts kicking in, Mission Accomplished! Proud and sad at the same time.
Called the vet which wouldn't believe at first, and then told her what I did, how, in which sequence and so on.
Moved away from there shortly after, so I don't know if it came back some time, hope it didn't get caught in the nets which some people in the south raise to catch them for food.
Anyways, about 30 years later I came back home to see a bird on the ground of the long hallway. It was a common swift, somehow got caught in there, with no way out. I tried to slowly grab it, but it panicked, tried to fly away, bumped into the glass, against the wall, so I stopped trying to grab it.
Thought a little, went for a towel to throw that over it, came back, havn't even spread the towl yet, it fluttered again, spread my arms wide to stop it, then it bumped into my belly and clawed into my windjacket there.
I slowly lowered my arms and stood very still for a minute, then tiptoed the long floor, down the stairs, away from the house, stood very still again, looked at it. It looked back.
After a minute or so I asked "don't you want to be back with your swarm?"
And it let itself fall down backwards over one wing, and going up to the swarm which was there at the time.
A few days later, me on the balcony, seeing and hearing the swarm again I thought to myself: why not putting back on the very yellow wind jacket I wore when I rescued that swift?
I did so, and one little fellow came down to do some aerobatics a few meters from my face, loudly cheeping
and chirrping.
They do remember and recognize you. I'm sure of that!
The really strange thing is it looked exactly like pictures of common swifts, except of the white. What is white on them was something like bronze/copper on mine, depending on the light.
For anyone interested in this type of stuff, I can recommend reading Drive.
Briefly, human behaviour can be motivated for extrinsic and intrinsic reasons. The rewards in this article are extrinsic motivators. Exploring is rewarding in an intrinsic way; it is a strive towards autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
In adults (and in older children) applying extrinsic motivators kills intrinsic motivation. Once the extrinsic motivators stop coming in, there is no desire left to do the task. Intrinsic motivation is practically infinite, as long as the environment is set up right to enable it.
Extrinsic motivation also tends to produce behaviour that does the bare minimum to get the reward (or avoid the negative consequences) whereas intrinsic motivation is what makes us want to excel.
Of course, I've skipped many important points and not countered any counterargument here, but I recommend reading Drive first if you think you disagree.
But the worst part of it all?
The schooling system, with its grades, signed slips, and whatnot, is set up through extrinsic motivation to teach obedience, conformity, and smothering the intrinsic drive so necessary for the creative work we will expect from the children later in life.
I'm Michelangelo - but that by definition makes me a loner.
I love staring at my code and contemplate on it's beauty just like the result of the code working.
I'm perfect at one-man projects.
I hate processes, standups, scrums and all that team playing bullshit.
I love customers and bosses who are trusting and freedom giving.
I love beers, steaks, good food and team gatherings - and i love people whom i am "working" with - but everyone knows i am working on something that is NOT "let get this shit done quickly and push this out of the door by next friday". That's not me.
Although I'm the one my boss comes to with "i don't know how but can you do something about it tomorrow"?
I'm good and super sharp focusing and delivering on my own.
If i need help - I'll ask.
I'm all for skunkworks.
I debug my code myself, using techniques i polished myself over the years and I'll end up with lightbulb that will last 100 yrs. Not the one that cost $3 and requires full replacement after 3.5 weeks of light usage.
I try not to buy stuff made in China. I love stuff made in Europe or Japan.
So, don't push guys like me into your "processes" and "change managements" wasting pipeline bullshit.
I won't fit.
I speak at conferences. I do evil harmless things. I violate countless stupid compliance rules. I take risks no one knows about.
I don't follow rules, and pretty much skip reading them when i can.
I do my best to deliver masterpieces. One piece at a time.
The truest saying in software is that the highest value output of a project is an engineering team that understands your business. Past a certain point of size/complexity you can't buy one of those for any price, you have to make it.
Outsourcing turns an investment opportunity into an expense.
This is normally why we have limits on behavior like using violence to push viewpoints. You can't reason someone out of something they didn't reason themselves into, but we also know that if you try to suppress them then they'll double down on their viewpoint. The best way to push a cause is to have a martyr.
There is no person fit to play the censor. Power corrupts. What starts as an intent to stop climate change denialism ends with being false about warrantless surveillance. What starts with trying to limit hate speech frequently ends with picking favorites.
Indeed, there were many true conspiracies in the nation's history, some of them which sound absolutely false and ridiculous until you read the declassified documents. The CIA's experiments with LSD, the FBI's threats to MLK, COINTELPRO as you mentioned, the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, these are all sordid (and true) episodes in US history that perfectly fit the "conspiracy theory" mold. If one of these events happened today and people uncovered it, they would be relentlessly mocked as "Russian trolls" by blue checks on Twitter, ignored by the mainstream media, and blocked by centralized social media gatekeepers like YouTube and Facebook.
(Needless to say, the US is not the only country with skeletons in its closet. Many others are worse.)
Some so-called "conspiracies" -- not all, not even most, but some -- ARE true. They are usually pretty horrible, and they deserve to be exposed. Do we really want to suppress conversations that could uncover these kind of institutional crimes? It's not like the bought-and-paid-for media is going to do it.
My opinion: violent people are going to find something to lash out no matter what. It might be an obsession with a celebrity, an ideology, a conspiracy theory, a religion, a politician, a neighbor or coworker, or something else. Rather than playing whack-a-mole with possible "triggers" for violence, realize that potential triggers are everywhere and adjust strategy accordingly.
Programming as a profession is strange because we each do such different things but all tools are available to us all the time. Imagine if this were true in the physical world; you would read arcticles written by accountants like "Dynamite Considered Harmful" with rebuttals titled "Why Dynamite Matters" by construction engineers...
Some years back, Wes Irish at Xerox PARC tracked down one of the great mysteries of early coax Ethernet - why was throughput so much lower than theory predicted? For this, he got both ends of a building-length coax with many machines on it connected to one office, so he could plug both ends into a storage scope. If the waveforms disagreed, somebody was transmitting when they shouldn't. Storage scopes with large storage were rare then. It was an expensive LeCroy unit.
After the end of each Ethernet packet on coax, there is a brief "quiet time", and then the next packet can be sent, beginning with a sync pattern. The hardware detects if what it is sending does not match what it is receiving, which indicates a collision. Both senders stop, wait a random time so they don't collide again, and retry. This is how "carrier sense multiple access - collision detection", or CSMA-CD, works at the hardware level.
This setup revealed that something on the cable was transmitting a single spike after the end of each packet, during the "quiet time". That reset the "quiet time" timer in the network interface, which inhibited the transition to "look for sync" mode. So the next packet would be ignored. The quiet time timer was at a very low level - software did not see this event.
What came out of looking at the waveforms was the surprising result that the spike during the quiet time was not coming from either the data source or the destination, but from something elsewhere on the cable. The spike was not synchronized to the packet just sent. With the waveforms for both ends of the cable visible, speed of light lag revealed both that this was happening and where it was coming from, as distance along the cable.
It turned out that several brands of network interface used a part which contained the quiet time timer, the sync recognizer, and the transmitter power controller. When the timer ran out, the device did a state machine transition, and during that transition, for a nanosecond or so, the transmitter turned on. It wasn't supposed to do that. This generated a spike on the cable, resetting every quiet time timer and causing the next packet to be silently ignored by all stations.
The network interface didn't need to be active to do this. Being powered on was sufficient. One device with that part could halve the data rate on a coax Ethernet. Thousands of network interfaces had to be scrapped to fix this.