New top story on Hacker News: Tell HN: Cloudflare verification is breaking the internet

Tell HN: Cloudflare verification is breaking the internet
157 by statquontrarian | 104 comments on Hacker News.
Across many different pages including science journals, ChatGPT, and many others, CloudFlare verification goes into an infinite loop of: 1. "Verify you are a human" 2. Check the box or perform some other type of rain dance 3. "Please stand by, while we are checking your browser..." 4. Repeat step 1 I'm on Fedora Linux 37 using Firefox 110. The workaround is to use Chrome. After experiencing this dozens of times and getting annoyed of needing to use Chrome, I finally went and deleted all my cookies and cache which I had been dreading to do. It did not help. I don't have a CloudFlare account so I wrote up a detailed post on their community forums. I offered a HAR file and was willing to do diagnostics. It received no responses and it was auto-closed. It's unacceptable that CloudFlare is breaking the internet while offering no community support. Edit: I'm in Texas. I'm not using a VPN or Tor, just AT&T Fiber. I don't have ad-blockers. No weird extensions. Nothing special (besides being on Linux). Edit2: Since this got traction, I opened a new community post: https://ift.tt/f5sclEJ To be clear, I'm not against CloudFlare doing DDoS protection, etc., but it can't be breaking the internet while ignoring community posts on it . Edit3: The CloudFlare team has engaged. Thank you HN!

Wiener Zeitung, One of the World's Oldest Newspapers, to Move Primarily Online

Founded in 1703 under the name Wiennerisches Diarium, and later renamed Wiener Zeitung in 1780

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Buddha Statue Discovery Sheds Light on Ancient India-Egypt Trade Ties

A Polish-US mission discovered the statue "dating back to the Roman era while digging at the ancient temple in Berenice

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Thursday, April 20, 2023

How Twitter Users Reacted to Removal of Legacy Blue

Many of Twitter’s high-profile users are losing the blue checks that helped verify their identity and distinguish them from impostors

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Flushed with Embarrassment: Austrian Airlines Flight Forced to Return to Vienna Due to Toilet Troubles

Some 300 people were on board Monday's Boeing 777 flight, which was to set to last eight hours

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Monday, April 17, 2023

New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: Quorbo – a quick and quirky quest for the quote

Show HN: Quorbo – a quick and quirky quest for the quote
4 by projectsforlife | 2 comments on Hacker News.
Hey HN, Today I'm launching Quorbo (www.quorbo.com): a simple letter-revealing game (think Wheel of Fortune with some twists) where you get 6 turns to guess the day's quote! It's my first post-parenthood side project and first web game. Being a working dad has caused me (for the first time, believe it or not) to focus on simplicity. Up until about a year ago, endless free time secretly plagued me... because I love _building_, and more free time meant: more room to add complexity. Not anymore! Quorbo is the first of my initial batch of three simple word games, and I can't wait to make more. Let me know what you think! (improvements, bugs / quirky behavior / stumbling blocks, any and all feedback welcome!) Enjoy!

'Hadn’t Finished My book': Spanish Athlete Emerges into Daylight After 500 Days in Cave

Elite mountaineer Beatriz Flamini told reporters that time had flown by and she did not want to come out

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Thursday, April 13, 2023

Japan: Haruki Murakami Fans Line Up for Midnight Release of First Novel in Six Years

Copies of "The City and Its Uncertain Walls" were piled up on tables at the entrance to Kinokuniya store in central Shinjuku district

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Meet New York City’s First 'Rat Czar' Kathleen Corradi

The appointment of Kathleen Corradi comes four months after the city posted a tongue-in-cheek advert seeking "somewhat bloodthirsty" candidates for the role

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'Quintessential Grilled Cheese': How Expensive is World's Most Expensive Sandwich at New York Eatery. Too Expensive

This sandwich holds the Guinness World Record for being the most expensive sandwich in the world, priced at a whopping $214

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'Only White Candidates' Job Advertisement Sparks Outrage on Internet

The job was apparently posted by Virginia-based Arthur Grand Technologies this week for a business analyst in its salesforce and insurance claims team in Texas

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New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: Sym, define just-in-time access workflows in code

Show HN: Sym, define just-in-time access workflows in code
30 by abuggia | 3 comments on Hacker News.
Hello HN, My cofounder (jon918) and I started Sym three years ago because we were frustrated with how hard it was to manage access to cloud infrastructure. We wanted to build a tool for JIT access that was actually designed for developers. We were wary of tools that tried to accommodate both devs and IT but ended up with usability compromises for both. First, we figured no one wants another web app to log into so we let administrators define access workflows in Terraform and let developers request and gain access via Slack. That seemed to pay off: being code-based was a big plus for our early customers since it let them manage the logic in version control and test in CI/CD. Second, we knew that updating permissions/roles/access was a major source of toil and risk in the world of cloud infrastructure. Have you ever tried to avoid annoying, persistent access requests by setting policies that are a bit more permissive than you’d like? We felt that fully automated just-in-time access + approvals could really help here. But we also knew that a simple approval tool could end up leading to request fatigue - kind of defeating the purpose. So we built an SDK to let you define checks in code (e.g. pagerduty.on_call, okta.is_user_in_group, github.get_repo_collaborators) in order to dynamically route requests or fast-track access when appropriate. This seems to be paying off: users are creating Slack-based approvals in front of different types of risky actions like production access, sensitive queries and triggering Lambdas. We’d love your feedback on our approach so far. Does this make sense to you? Is this a tool you'd use? What would you want to see out of it? To learn more, check out the video that Nick (nmeans (Sym VPEng)) made [1]. You can also check out our docs [2] or set up your own flow [3]. thanks! -adam [1] https://ift.tt/91opKCR [2] https://docs.symops.com [3] https://ift.tt/vc8Dzmw

New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: Quadratic – Open-Source Spreadsheet with Python, AI (WASM and WebGL)

Show HN: Quadratic – Open-Source Spreadsheet with Python, AI (WASM and WebGL)
31 by davidkircos | 10 comments on Hacker News.
Hi, I am David Kircos. The Founder of Quadratic ( https://QuadraticHQ.com ), an open-source spreadsheet application that supports Python, SQL (coming soon), AI Prompts, and classic Formulas. Unlike other spreadsheets, Quadratic has an infinite canvas (like Figma). As a result, you can pinch and zoom to navigate large data sets, and everything renders smoothly at 60fps. Our vision is to build a place where your team can collaborate on data analysis. You can write Python, AI Prompts, and Formulas in one spreadsheet feeding each other data and updating automatically. Quadratic is built using WebGL and Rust WASM. To render a large grid of cells smoothly, we tile the spreadsheet similar to google maps. If you are interested in the technical details, check us out on GitHub ( https://ift.tt/O3DQnaJ ) You can use AI to help you write Python and then run the code directly in Quadratic. Then, we feed the result back to the AI model so it can follow along, help you debug, and modify your existing code. AI can also be used to directly generate data onto the sheet with prompts. It knows the context of what's on the sheet and how the data it's inserting fits in. Try it out. SQL is coming soon... stay tuned!

New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: Want something better than k-means? Try BanditPAM

Show HN: Want something better than k-means? Try BanditPAM
10 by motiwari | 0 comments on Hacker News.
Want something better than k-means? I'm happy to announce our SOTA k-medoids algorithm from NeurIPS 2020, BanditPAM, is now publicly available! `pip install banditpam` or `install.packages("banditpam")` and you're good to go! k-means is one of the most widely-used algorithms to cluster data. However, it has several limitations: a) it requires the use of L2 distance for efficient clustering, which also b) restricts the data you're clustering to be vectors, and c) doesn't require the means to be datapoints in the dataset. Unlike in k-means, the k-medoids problem requires cluster centers to be actual datapoints, which permits greater interpretability of your cluster centers. k-medoids also works better with arbitrary distance metrics, so your clustering can be more robust to outliers if you're using metrics like L1. Despite these advantages, most people don't use k-medoids because prior algorithms were too slow. In our NeurIPS 2020 paper, BanditPAM, we sped up the best known algorithm from O(n^2) to O(nlogn) by using techniques from multi-armed bandits. We were inspired by prior research that demonstrated many algorithms can be sped up by sampling the data intelligently, instead of performing exhaustive computations. We've released our implementation, which is pip- and CRAN-installable. It's written in C++ for speed, but callable from Python and R. It also supports parallelization and intelligent caching at no extra complexity to end users. Its interface also matches the sklearn.cluster.KMeans interface, so minimal changes are necessary to existing code. PyPI: https://ift.tt/NrOBHhs CRAN: https://ift.tt/jrJLdp6 Repo: https://ift.tt/bRF625U Paper: https://ift.tt/CYfeOo1 If you find our work valuable, please consider starring the repo or citing our work. These help us continue development on this project. I'm Mo Tiwari (motiwari.com), a PhD student in Computer Science at Stanford University. A special thanks to my collaborators on this project, Martin Jinye Zhang, James Mayclin, Sebastian Thrun, Chris Piech, and Ilan Shomorony, as well as the author of the R package, Balasubramanian Narasimhan. (This is my first time posting on HN; I've read the FAQ before posting, but please let me know if I broke any rules)