Archive for April 2022

Saturday 30 April 2022

Friday 29 April 2022

New top story on Hacker News: Ask HN: Is the EULA on my new $30k RED cinema camera legal?

New top story on Hacker News: Ask HN: Is the EULA on my new $30k RED cinema camera legal?

Ask HN: Is the EULA on my new $30k RED cinema camera legal?
92 by red_throwaway | 98 comments on Hacker News.
TLDR: I bought a $30K professional cinema camera that doesn't work unless I sign away my rights to privacy and possibly the video content I make with it ( at least it seems ) Over the past few years my photography business has seen a surge in demand for ultra high quality video production work. In an effort to meet this demand, I picked up one of RED Digital Cinema's newest pro camera bodies, the RED V-RAPTOR. Considering this camera is used by professional filmmakers to create films destined for cinemas, it's not surprising that it came with a $30k price tag. After unboxing and assembling it, I power the camera on and the first thing I see is a wall of legal text on the embedded LCD. Turns out it's a "Software License Agreement" that I'm required to consent to using the on-camera menu buttons before any of the camera's functionality becomes available. I can give consent or power the camera off. The full text can be found on the manufacturer's website at https://ift.tt/9ciyuMO . Here are a few highlights > 4. CONSENT TO USE OF DATA. You agree that RED and its affiliates may collect, maintain, process, transmit, and use technical, diagnostic, usage and related information, including but not limited to information about your RED Camera, Camera Module, computer, system and application software, usage, content, and peripherals. RED may use the information to provide and improve RED’s products and services, including providing the information to RED’s licensors. RED may also provide the information to third party advertisers for the purpose of providing advertising statistics without identifying you personally ... > 5. UPDATES. RED and its licensors have no obligation to provide updates, bug fixes or error correction. If RED provides updates, such updates may be automatic and may delete or change the nature or features of the Software, including functions you may rely upon and you may lose data. You consent to updates by RED ... I snapped a few photos of the camera and the on-screen license agreement for those interested https://ibb.co/ZzBMPWm https://ibb.co/wy5Qjq7 I'm annoyed that I must consent to accepting all software updates which they admit could result in the loss of my data but the part that really has me stuck is section 4. I'm interpreting it to mean that RED and whoever they see fit may access not only data on and about my personal computer but also the actual video content that I create with my camera. Furthermore, they are permitted to share all that with advertisers. It seems like I must be misunderstanding this because I can't imagine professional videographers being willing to consent to such blatant violations of their own customer's expectations of privacy and discretion. Many of the jobs I get are product shoots for prototypes and things yet to be released. Some of them even require an NDA from me. There's no way my clients would work with me if they knew that my camera might be capturing frames from their commissioned videos and transmitting them behind the scenes to advertisers. This camera has been assembled but collecting dust for over a week now. I'm on the verge of returning it and eating the 2k I spent on compatible peripherals. I would love some input from anyone who can offer clarity. My questions are as follows: 1. Is my assessment of the implications of this license agreement correct or am I misunderstanding the legalese? 2. Is this type of EULA, where the most basic functionality of a hardware device is held hostage pending the user consents to some arbitrary agreement legal in the USA and/or Europe? Is there actually a legal precedent allowing for it? 3. For film pros, do the top of the line Arris and Panavisions take these same liberties?

April 29, 2022 0

Thursday 28 April 2022

New top story on Hacker News: Ask HN: Do you find it challenging to talk to your users?

New top story on Hacker News: Ask HN: Do you find it challenging to talk to your users?

Ask HN: Do you find it challenging to talk to your users?
31 by atomiomi | 20 comments on Hacker News.
One of the problems I faced when I had my first users on [just-diary.com]( http://just-diary.com ) is that I didn’t have any way to talk to them. Like getting feedback on using the product, asking them questions about what they want from it, and sharing some tips on how to use some features. Does anyone have the same problem? If yes, how did you solve it?

April 28, 2022 0

Wednesday 27 April 2022

New top story on Hacker News: Ask HN: What Happened to Pinboard (April '22 edition)?

New top story on Hacker News: Ask HN: What Happened to Pinboard (April '22 edition)?

Ask HN: What Happened to Pinboard (April '22 edition)?
34 by ihodes | 9 comments on Hacker News.
There have been threads like this before (last one in 1.5 months ago: https://ift.tt/YxOTrbK), but I'm not really sure what to do. I've emailed Maciej on 4/13/21, 12/11/21, and 4 times in the past month (a more urgent issue) with no response. Full-text search is regularly broken, archiving doesn't work sometimes, and most recently my >5yr archiving account was disabled on 4/1 with no warning or ability to re-up, so as far as I know I've lost archived bookmarks from up to a decade ago (don't remember when I turned on the service). It doesn't look like When I tried to re-up my archiving account, I selected 10 years, but was charged for 1 year (without the 10 yr discount, of course) instead. I really have enjoyed using Pinboard, and have been since at least 2011 (when the entry was created in 1pw), but this is a bummer and I'm not sure what to do. I really respect Maciej and wish him the best, and would love to keep using Pinboard.

April 27, 2022 0

Tuesday 26 April 2022

New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: Sqwok – A social chat alternative to Twitter and Reddit

New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: Sqwok – A social chat alternative to Twitter and Reddit

Show HN: Sqwok – A social chat alternative to Twitter and Reddit
44 by holler | 12 comments on Hacker News.
I previously did a Show HN late Dec 2020: https://ift.tt/tDFujce That was a great experience and in the past year I continued to develop the site to bring it to a level of stability and maturity that I felt necessary for it to have a chance to succeed. Sqwok is all about answering the question: Can we have better open conversations on the internet? I wasn’t satisfied with the existing means of discussing topics such as culture, history, politics, and technology through threaded comments, and was simultaneously impressed with Slack bringing the IRC experience to the browser for a more general but enterprise focused audience. I wondered why not create an open Slack-like chat app for general discussion? Not gamers or enterprise but rather for people to have open, kitchen-table discussion on the matters of the day (or just for fun!). I set out to build this because I wanted to use it myself and felt that existing chat apps weren't designed for open public discourse in the way Reddit/Twitter are but for threaded comments & mostly unidirectional communication. This past year I’ve been very grateful to have a group of people continuously show up, offer support of the site and the idea, encouraging me to continue. Without those people I would have probably gave up! But alas I want to see this through and I believe now is the moment to make it happen. Since the last Show HN I’ve added: - markdown support in chat messages, post text, and user bio in profile (soon coming to full text post). - User profiles including bio, location, photo avatar, and chronological post listings. - New “who’s online” list that shows the top 10 ppl online and helps steer people to active conversations. - @mentions now work in posts, user bios, as well as chat messages. - Email notifications to be alerted when someone @mentions you. - Settings pages with ability to change password, delete account, and manage notification settings. - Upgraded image handling to support higher res photos with upcoming features allowing enhanced viewing. - Major refactor of the chat handling to stabilize it and fix many bugs with presence, locations, etc. - Many improvements to the codebase, frontend, backend, UI, tests, etc - Updated mobile web UI that drops you straight into the chat in a single view. - Ability to toggle full width chat view on desktop. - Live message counts displayed on the post list items that are updated in realtime. - Updated location handling for realtime location display. - Backend stability & aggregate analytics. Through Sqwok and particularly through the last Show HN I've met & got to know numerous people living across the entire Earth from Laos to Europe to Africa, all through a silly piece of software that for some reason seemed like the thing to work on. Truth be told there is much, much more I want to do with this. I believe now is the perfect time with the state of existing social networks and I’m hoping to find more people to support the site and help drive it to the next level. Let me know if you have any questions, Thanks!

April 26, 2022 0

Monday 25 April 2022

New top story on Hacker News: Ask HN: What happened to Twitter poison pill?

New top story on Hacker News: Ask HN: What happened to Twitter poison pill?

Ask HN: What happened to Twitter poison pill?
36 by rukshn | 28 comments on Hacker News.
Last week it was said that Twitter's directors will take a poison pill instead of selling Twitter to Elon Musk. What caused the board to change the direction 180 and now closing the deal with Musk? Can anyone shed a light on that, I didn't see anyone talking about this.

April 25, 2022 0

Sunday 24 April 2022

Saturday 23 April 2022

Friday 22 April 2022

Thursday 21 April 2022

Wednesday 20 April 2022

Tuesday 19 April 2022

Monday 18 April 2022

Sunday 17 April 2022

New top story on Hacker News: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?

New top story on Hacker News: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?

Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?
104 by halgir | 96 comments on Hacker News.
I want to start by saying this is anecdotal, and I feel paranoid for even thinking it. But often my internet will feel very slow, so I'll open speedtest to check if something's wrong. When I do, all of my stalled tabs suddenly spring into action and finish loading. The tinfoil hat wearer inside of me speculates that my internet provider is overloaded and throttling my bandwidth, but immediately prioritizes me when it senses that I'm trying to check if I'm getting what I pay for. Has anyone else noticed this pattern? Is there a way I can test this more scientifically?

April 17, 2022 0

Saturday 16 April 2022

New top story on Hacker News: Ask HN: What should I bring up during salary negotiation as a junior developer?

New top story on Hacker News: Ask HN: What should I bring up during salary negotiation as a junior developer?

Ask HN: What should I bring up during salary negotiation as a junior developer?
13 by _lgj5 | 18 comments on Hacker News.
So i am a junior software developer in a large consultant company and have my first salary negotitations soon and need some help. I was told all juniors would increase the same in a sort of collective way since some did not get the same chances when it came to projects and performance, however my boss said there was a small change they would consider giving a larger raise based on performance. I have been lucky and got a very good project, as in I could show my strengths and it's a high value customer. During the project i took a lot of initiative and responsibility, we were 3 developers working on it (2 seniors and me) and luckily one of them is my boss. The project is now being used by the customer and I am the only one maintaining the project and feeling I have taken even more responsibility than was expected. The project was fairly large consisting of 2 frontends and one backend, where I made ~80% of both the frontends and did all the database work on the backend. To be honest being told that my performance wont impact my salary is kind of a bummer considering i have to wait another year for the next possible raise. I can see myself working here for some time, but i feel like saying that would make them feel like they can pay me less as im not going to leave in the foreseeable future. The project is now also being used as a reference to sell consultants to other customers and it has also garnered attention in nationwide news. So my question to you is how should approach the salary negotiation and how should i present my case to my boss? Sorry if this is incoherent, english is not my first language. Thanks.

April 16, 2022 0

Friday 15 April 2022

Thursday 14 April 2022

Wednesday 13 April 2022

Tuesday 12 April 2022

Monday 11 April 2022

New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: Multiplayer Demo Built with Elixir

New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: Multiplayer Demo Built with Elixir

Show HN: Multiplayer Demo Built with Elixir
37 by wenbo | 2 comments on Hacker News.
Hey HN, I’m an engineer at Supabase [0] and one of the creators of this demo. My team and I have been working hard to bring developers the next version of Supabase Realtime. The current version of Realtime [1] is a Change Data Capture (CDC) server for a PostgreSQL database that broadcasts changes via WebSockets to authorized subscribers. It’s written in Elixir/Phoenix. The server utilizes PostgreSQL’s logical replication functionality, which writes database changes to Write-Ahead Logging (WAL) segment files, and a replication slot, responsible for managing and retaining WAL files. Database changes are polled from WAL by the server using PostgreSQL’s replication function pg_logical_slot_get_changes and changes converted to JSON objects using the wal2json [2] extension by setting it as the output plugin. Security is enforced through two checks - each check ensures only authorized client subscribers are sent database changes. The first check validates a JWT that is sent by clients subscribing to database changes. This JWT must contain an existing database role and optional claims, both of which can be referenced in Row Level Security (RLS) policies. Every valid client subscription is then inserted into the realtime.subscription table with an assigned UUID, database role, and claims. The second check calls the realtime.apply_rls SQL function from Write Ahead Log Realtime Unified Security (WALRUS) utility lib [3]. This function takes the database changes, executes a prepared statement to verify if the database role and claims have SELECT permissions on the changes, and outputs an array of authorized UUIDs. Then, the server finds all the subscribers whose UUIDs are in that array and broadcasts the changes to them. The next version of Supabase Realtime will offer three features: Broadcast, Presence, and Extensions. Broadcast, our Pub/Sub offering, can be used to pass ephemeral data from client to client such as cursor movements. This runs on a distributed cluster of nodes built on top of Phoenix PubSub + Channels. Presence, can be used for tracking online/offline users and their state. This is built into Phoenix, and uses replicated state across a cluster using an Observe-Remove-Set-Without-Tombstones (ORSWOT) CRDT [4] which prefers adds over removes when resolving conflicts. Extensions, are a way for the community to add additional functionality to take advantage of the WebSocket infrastructure. We have converted the existing Change Data Capture system to an extension that supports connecting to multiple customer databases (multi-tenancy). Other possible extensions include listening to other databases like MySQL and getting stock market events server-side [5], then broadcasting them to connected clients. This demo is built using a Supabase project, Supabase Realtime, and Next.js and deployed on 20 Fly [6] nodes located around the world. You can find an introduction and walkthrough of the demo here [5]. Supabase Realtime is entirely open source and you can find the demo code here [7]. Once we have stabilized the release we will add it to the self-hosted offering [8]. This demo is a way to highlight the upcoming features and gather feedback/ideas. Feel free to ask me anything and let me know what you think! [0] https://supabase.com [1] https://ift.tt/AZF5HfN [2] https://ift.tt/nXetGsa [3] https://ift.tt/uSMWDyF [4] https://ift.tt/608qPmw... [5] https://ift.tt/4stGIyb... [6] https://fly.io [7] https://ift.tt/kgjpYSb [8] https://ift.tt/XhfViQN

April 11, 2022 0

Sunday 10 April 2022

Saturday 9 April 2022

Friday 8 April 2022

Thursday 7 April 2022

Wednesday 6 April 2022

Tuesday 5 April 2022

Monday 4 April 2022

Sunday 3 April 2022

Saturday 2 April 2022

Friday 1 April 2022