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Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?

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Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?

#861

Post by elproxy »

1337biz wrote: post #827
SeaSeaRider wrote: post #727

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Without massive progress in the next decade, civilization will probably collapse by 2035.” This is deathcult type rhetoric which has no scientific basis whatsoever.

I just wish there would be a way to hold these doomsday preachers responsible. In the end they will all shrugg it of with that smirk of 'oh back then we didn't know better'.

Considering we can't hold big oil accountable for burrying the lede on climate change, and electing to spread lies and cause confusion instead, I guess that's fair.

Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?

#862

Post by eitland »

krageon wrote: post #815
teknologist wrote: post #786

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two words: Signal Protocol

It's an american development by a company that refuses to release actually open software. Perhaps it's good in theory! As far as I am aware there is no open implementation of it and it is also inside a problematic regime and therefore just as suspect.

Signal clients are released aa open source as far as I am aware and mathematics doesn't care about what regime it is developed under.

You guys will normally find me defending Telegram here but the more important point is that we should stick to the facts even if they go in favor of "the other side".

Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?

#863

Post by ryanlol »

eitland wrote: post #859
ryanlol wrote: post #816

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the Kremlin backed startup that was already caught shipping blatant backdoors is so much better https://habr.com/en/post/206900/

1. The man behind Telegram cannot even safely visit Russia after people with friends in high places stole his previous startup there or so the story goes. 2. As have been pointed out before, while this is really bad if true, but you are pointing to something that happened extremely early in the development of Telegram and later fixed (and as I've mentioned before you keep throwing a link to an old Russian post in a f…

>1. The man behind Telegram cannot even safely visit Russia after people with friends in high places stole his previous startup there or so the story goes.

Yeah, exactly. That's how the official story goes. However in reality he seems to often visit the country he is supposed to be in exile from https://tjournal.ru/tech/52954-durov-back-in-ussr https://lenta.ru/news/2017/03/20/durov/

It's also very well documented that Telegram was developed in offices shared with the same startup that was supposedly stolen from him, https://theoutline.com/post/2348/what-isn-t-telegram-saying-... https://twitter.com/bershidsky/status/910169626989953024 https://twitter.com/ChristopherJM/status/910186197598838784

Unfortunately the western press doesn't really care about Telegram or the Durovs so we don't really have heaps of high quality journalism to count on.

>but you are pointing to something that happened extremely early in the development of Telegram and later fixed

I'm not convinced that this is something that can be fixed. Sure, they removed the backdoor they added but does that really fix the organization?

I think it's utterly irrelevant that this backdoor was added and removed a while ago, the Telegram team hasn't significantly changed since then.

>I've mentioned before you keep throwing a link to an old Russian post in a forun where most people have never read a word Russian

I don't read Russian either, but I have no problem reading this post with google translate (or yandex translate if you'd like) and I assume that you too have access to this amazing technology.

Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?

#864

Post by ryanlol »

eitland wrote: post #857
ryanlol wrote: post #777

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>1. They are vey different. Those who arent aware of the large differences shouldn't comment as if they are they are subject experts. Telegram might be full of holes but it is a very different thing to Slack. (I use both for different things.) This is just bullshit. Slack does TLS, Telegram does their own weird TLS replacement. In both cases essentially zero conversations are E2EE. As far as privacy and security goes…

This is getting tiresome and I don't think I'll move ryanlol, but for everyone else: One big difference between slack and Telegram is that Slack can and will give my data to the administrator at work if they ask for it. ryanlol seems to be thinking only about the last hop from their data center to the device. In practice security is about a whole lot more than just checking of the coolest boxes: WhatsApp for example…

>The big difference between slack and Telegram is that Slack can easily give my data to the administrator at work if they ask for it.

Sure, that's perfectly fair. With Slack you have to trust Slack and the admins of your workspace (which could very well be you!), with Telegram you have to trust Telegram but don't get workspaces.

>Re the rest of your post: as I've mentioned begore most people here don't understand Russian, yet you keep posting old Russian posts.

It's hardly unreasonable to assume that people in 2019 have access to translation software, I also think it'd be presumptuous to directly link to a machine translated version.

Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?

#865

Post by themadsens »

ncmncm wrote: post #542
johnmorrison wrote: post #171

In the online world, it seems like there are two big things happening right now: - Neural networks / ML (eg GPT-2) Definitely nowhere near its potential for being applied to a wide variety of areas. Find a niche you like and apply there. - Security / Privacy (eg Telegram) Rapidly growing demand pretty much everywhere. Bonus points if you can make your product great for standard users and at the same time hackable/cus…

The most pressing problem for humanity is global climate disruption. Arguably, working on anything that doesn't help there is not just wasted effort, but actively harmful. Wind, solar power, energy storage still have huge room for improvement. Direct solar or wind -> liquid fuel will be essential to adapting fast. Windmills can drive production of liquid ammonia on farms (needing only air and water inputs), for use d…

At least we will not have to worry about Y2038 then..

Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?

#866

Post by hinkley »

JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #485
dilippkumar wrote: post #470

I listened to Robert Green's talk at Google recently [0] He proposes the following idea: - Everybody born within 22 years of each other belong to a "generation" - Generations follow a cycle: - There is a rebellious generation - The next generation is trying to keep the ideals of the rebellious generation alive - The third generation is very conservative - The fourth generation is a "crisis" generation that will event…

This looks like it could just be cherry picking. If you look hard enough, you can find someone rebellious, then 20 years later, someone trying to maintain those ideals, and so forth. There's so many people, so many stories out there, you could form any narrative you wanted about theories of generational cycles.

I'll bet it says more about the overlap between fashion and the media than it says about people.

Something comes back 'into style' at intervals and the narrative is hyped up to accentuate that fact. But it probably has more to do with burnout and collective amnesia. We've forgotten how awful "bell bottoms" can be and so here's some "bell bottoms", 20-30 years later.

Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?

#867

Post by eitland »

ryanlol wrote: post #864
eitland wrote: post #857

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is getting tiresome and I don't think I'll move ryanlol, but for everyone else: One big difference between slack and Telegram is that Slack can and will give my data to the administrator at work if they ask for it. ryanlol seems to be thinking only about the last hop from their data center to the device. In practice security is about a whole lot more than just checking of the coolest boxes: WhatsApp for example…

>The big difference between slack and Telegram is that Slack can easily give my data to the administrator at work if they ask for it. Sure, that's perfectly fair. With Slack you have to trust Slack and the admins of your workspace (which could very well be you!), with Telegram you have to trust Telegram but don't get workspaces. >Re the rest of your post: as I've mentioned begore most people here don't understand Rus…

> With Slack you have to trust Slack and the admins of your workspace (which could very well be you!), with Telegram you have to trust Telegram but don't get workspaces.

Small modification:

With Slack you have to trust the admins (which is most often not you) as well as Slack.

With Telegram you have to trust Telegram.

I trust none of them much but there's still a difference. Also as far as I am aware Slack has never ever pointed out if they encrypt their data at rest which leads me to guess that they don't do it.

But hey, we almost agreed here.

Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?

#868

Post by mamcx »

chadcmulligan wrote: post #578
mamcx wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think in the same lines (I'm building a relational lang http://tablam.org ) and think a modern RDBMS could be made alike: command "city.define miami" |> event pre-process (ie: validations and transformations!) |> write-ahead log |> fire-observers: [post log for later OR block writes] The idea is to put some of the stored procedures in the "event pre-process" before commit to write-ahead. In the "fire-observers" ste…

Not sure if this is what you mean but these exist - Oracle Queues, MQSeries, RabbitMQ (open source MQSeries copy), all part of a generic thing called Enterprise Service Bus

If the queue is outside the RDBMS, not.

What I say is that RDBMS are too much of a blackbox. I want a way to use them alike legos (but without gettin INTO their source code!).

Imagine you wanna do a bloom index, but the RDBMS not have it. How you do it normally?

Put a handler/listener/event etc that intercept the calls and route if need:

    search ... | if_bloom index_bloom OR continue

Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?

#869

Post by ncmncm »

pjc50 wrote: post #820
johnmorrison wrote: post #803

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> drought and desertification This is an issue, but increased atmospheric carbon and the latitude land distribution of the Earth probably means desertification will be net-negative for at least a while. (I don't have a source for this, but I recall reading that we have more trees today than ever in history?) Keep in mind, carbon is what plants eat. > When every summer, heatwaves take a few of your neighbours you star…

Desertification is currently increasing: https://www.un.org/en/events/desertification_decade/whynow.s... > more trees today than ever in history? Depending on how big you count history this sounds really implausible. > carbon is what plants eat. A slogan commonly repeated by global warming denialists, because it's true but highly misleading. Plants also primarily require water, and the temperature rise dries out a lo…

Best current evidence is that the plants whose growth rate is limited by carbon dioxide availability, and so grow faster with higher CO2 concentration, are parasitic vines. Others are limited by other factors.

Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?

#870

Post by ncmncm »

baq wrote: post #749
SeaSeaRider wrote: post #727

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Without massive progress in the next decade, civilization will probably collapse by 2035.” This is deathcult type rhetoric which has no scientific basis whatsoever.

With the way things are going ww3 will be about water. It’s easy to imagine half of Africa, Latin America and parts of Asia to pack and move as a whole.

When the large fraction of the world population that depends on seafood for their protein loses that input as ocean acidification crashes fish nurseries, do not expect them to adapt peacefully.

So, will WW3 be about access to living space, fresh water or protein? Or all three at once?

Not a great choice.

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