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7,658,691 | 7,658,529 | 1 | 3 | 7,658,459 | train | <story><title>SSH Kung Fu </title><url>http://blog.tjll.net/ssh-kung-fu/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>patio11</author><text>A trick I learned recently: create .ssh&#x2F;config<p>File format: as many of the following blocks as you like<p><pre><code> Host $ALIAS &lt;-- whatever you want here
Hostname www.example.com
User someuser
Port 1234
</code></pre>
You can now ssh to that server as that user by doing &quot;ssh $ALIAS&quot; on the command line, without needing to specify the port or user with the usual command line arguments, or necessarily spell out the entire host name.</text></comment> | <story><title>SSH Kung Fu </title><url>http://blog.tjll.net/ssh-kung-fu/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>peteretep</author><text>From the article:<p><pre><code> &gt; No more password prompts
</code></pre>
Is that - you ask - because he&#x27;s using ssh-agent? No, it&#x27;s because he doesn&#x27;t tell you you should be using a password-protected key. Some kung fu.</text></comment> |
11,389,599 | 11,388,482 | 1 | 3 | 11,387,214 | train | <story><title>The Loophole in the Hedonic Treadmill</title><url>http://nautil.us/blog/the-loophole-in-the-hedonic-treadmill</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>J-dawg</author><text>The one I always find a little unsettling is the idea that relative wealth has a greater impact on happiness than absolute wealth. The inference that happiness is a zero-sum game doesn&#x27;t sit well with me.<p>In South American countries for example, it certainly seems to be true that middle class professionals have a pretty nice lifestyle partially <i>as a result of</i> inequality in society. (For example, it&#x27;s pretty normal to have a live-in housekeeper to clean and cook for you)</text></item><item><author>lqdc13</author><text>Lots of contradictory stadies on this subject:<p>Money buys happiness until you have $75,000 (the one they are citing):<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.princeton.edu&#x2F;~deaton&#x2F;downloads&#x2F;deaton_kahneman_high_income_improves_evaluation_August2010.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.princeton.edu&#x2F;~deaton&#x2F;downloads&#x2F;deaton_kahneman_...</a><p>Money always buys happiness - no limit:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.brookings.edu&#x2F;~&#x2F;media&#x2F;research&#x2F;files&#x2F;papers&#x2F;2013&#x2F;04&#x2F;subjective%20well%20being%20income&#x2F;subjective%20well%20being%20income.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.brookings.edu&#x2F;~&#x2F;media&#x2F;research&#x2F;files&#x2F;papers&#x2F;2013&#x2F;...</a><p>However, it seems to not matter that much as money only explains 1.8% of the variance in subjective well being:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;link.springer.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;10.1023&#x2F;A:1010079728426" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;link.springer.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;10.1023&#x2F;A:1010079728426</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Retric</author><text>Many things <i>are</i> zero sum. Land does not increase just because world GDP grows. Further, increasing wealth does not mean every resource becomes more abundant.<p>Gold supply for example is fairly fixed because we have already mined the stuff for thousands of years and most of that old gold is still around. Granted, there is a lot of gold out there something like 2 pounds per person, but that it. Want more than that, take it from someone else.<p>Housekeeping is an edge case where everyone wants it, but nobody wants to do it. So, it only shows up due to wealth disparity.<p>PS: The abundance of food <i>is</i> also great wealth, but you only need so many calories a day.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Loophole in the Hedonic Treadmill</title><url>http://nautil.us/blog/the-loophole-in-the-hedonic-treadmill</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>J-dawg</author><text>The one I always find a little unsettling is the idea that relative wealth has a greater impact on happiness than absolute wealth. The inference that happiness is a zero-sum game doesn&#x27;t sit well with me.<p>In South American countries for example, it certainly seems to be true that middle class professionals have a pretty nice lifestyle partially <i>as a result of</i> inequality in society. (For example, it&#x27;s pretty normal to have a live-in housekeeper to clean and cook for you)</text></item><item><author>lqdc13</author><text>Lots of contradictory stadies on this subject:<p>Money buys happiness until you have $75,000 (the one they are citing):<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.princeton.edu&#x2F;~deaton&#x2F;downloads&#x2F;deaton_kahneman_high_income_improves_evaluation_August2010.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.princeton.edu&#x2F;~deaton&#x2F;downloads&#x2F;deaton_kahneman_...</a><p>Money always buys happiness - no limit:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.brookings.edu&#x2F;~&#x2F;media&#x2F;research&#x2F;files&#x2F;papers&#x2F;2013&#x2F;04&#x2F;subjective%20well%20being%20income&#x2F;subjective%20well%20being%20income.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.brookings.edu&#x2F;~&#x2F;media&#x2F;research&#x2F;files&#x2F;papers&#x2F;2013&#x2F;...</a><p>However, it seems to not matter that much as money only explains 1.8% of the variance in subjective well being:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;link.springer.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;10.1023&#x2F;A:1010079728426" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;link.springer.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;10.1023&#x2F;A:1010079728426</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>spacehome</author><text>I think the fact that happiness is (mostly) zero sum comes from the fact that in early humanity&#x27;s evolutionary environment, the ecosystem had a mostly constant (meaning over human reproductive cycle timelines) carrying capacity for humans. Innovative advances in technology or techniques or knowledge that would allow for more humans to thrive with better qualities of life were so rare that evolution did not have much opportunity to select for them. In that kind of environment, one&#x27;s genes can only propagate at the expense of others&#x27;. So we&#x27;re now all the decedents of the early humans who preferred being the top dog of squalor as opposed to an equal in a prosperous society.</text></comment> |
14,528,662 | 14,528,681 | 1 | 2 | 14,527,710 | train | <story><title>Are Google, Amazon and others getting too big?</title><url>http://www.bbc.com/news/business-39875417</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>friedman23</author><text>&gt; Even if we assume that allowing Google to exist as a monopoly does bring better services<p>How is google even a monopoly? Bing exists, yahoo still exists. In Asia Google isn&#x27;t even the most popular search engine.<p>Want me to show you how google is not a monopoly? A company with monopoly power would be able to raise the price of its service to the price the market can <i>bear</i>. If google put search behind a pay wall, Bing would destroy it in market share.<p>&gt; that&#x27;s a small price to pay for not having to be subjugated by a conglomerate.<p>So now you are not using economic arguments but appealing to emotion.<p>I just need to point this out<p>First you felt the need to off hand mention your (clearly undergraduate) degree in economics which had absolutely zero relevance to the discussion.<p>Secondly, you are using appeals to emotion without any basis in fact. &quot;Google is an extremely successful company and we use them in so many things! They must be evil!&quot;<p>Try using evidence. I&#x27;m not going to argue against your fear mongering only point out that like almost all fear mongering, it is not based on fact.<p>&gt; Countries can already barely withstand pressure from big companies<p>There is absolutely zero evidence of this. None of your arguments are based on evidence. The US just fined Volkswagen billions of dollars. The EU is ready to fine Google billions of dollars. Apple paid japan hundreds millions of dollars in fines. All the banks responsible for the financial crisis in America and the EU paid <i>hundreds of billions</i><p>&gt; In many cases even better services because the prime objective is to make a program that would help the user, not make money for the company.<p>Again you have no evidence of this. If smaller businesses were able to provide better services people would be using dedicated email providers, not gmail. They would be using flickr instead of google and apple photos.</text></item><item><author>0x737368</author><text>Even if we assume that allowing Google to exist as a monopoly does bring better services, that&#x27;s a small price to pay for not having to be subjugated by a conglomerate.<p>Countries can already barely withstand pressure from big companies, by allowing them grow even further everything would just turn in a way that would allow such companies to make even more money, whilst increasing the gap between the rich and the poor.<p>And with regards to better services, I think the open source community has shown us that it&#x27;s possible to make great services without having to work for a company. In many cases even better services because the prime objective is to make a program that would help the user, not make money for the company.</text></item><item><author>friedman23</author><text>Congrats on your degree in econ. You would think that someone with a degree in econ would believe it wise to first establish what the negative externalities are and what externalities regulating away the existence of large business would produce before defending the idea of doing so.<p>We already know that with the existence of Google we get free products like search, mail, video, etc. Do you have evidence that when we destroy google that we will still retain all of these benefits?</text></item><item><author>weirdstuff</author><text>&gt; Divorce the ad-making money machine, and say goodbye to all the services consumers like that are nowhere near as profitable: gmail, maps, photos, chrome, android, translate, youtube, drive, waze, where do you think the money for this stuff all comes from?<p>This needs a citation, as well.<p>This is assuming Google hasn&#x27;t starved out potential competitors who would have provided the same service, or better service, had the playing field been more level.<p>My unsubstantiated opinion is that many talented folks are&#x2F;have been dissuaded from trying their hand at anything that may go up against Google, et. al., unless their looking for an aquihire. (And we know how Google treats those after a few years.)<p>And there&#x27;s another argument to be made: that Google&#x27;s habit of purchasing competition stifles the innovation since it&#x27;s nipping it in the bud.<p>(I majored in Econ in uni.)</text></item><item><author>TulliusCicero</author><text>Disclaimer: I work at Google<p>&gt; The world is a better place with lots of smaller companies.<p>[citation needed]<p>A lot of things Google does -- a lot of the things people actually like about Google -- are possible only because it&#x27;s a huge monolith. Divorce the ad-making money machine, and say goodbye to all the services consumers like that are nowhere near as profitable: gmail, maps, photos, chrome, android, translate, youtube, drive, waze, where do you think the money for this stuff all comes from?<p>Of course, if you&#x27;re one of the uber technerds that thinks that Google is unabashedly evil and Linux is going to take over the desktop any day now, that probably sounds great to you. I just think the average consumer would have a different take on it.</text></item><item><author>jondubois</author><text>I agree they should be regulated. The world is a better place with lots of smaller companies.<p>These big companies turn regular people into corporate livestock to serve the wealthy.<p>If you were to analyze Facebook as if it were a country, the wealth gap among employees would be atrocious - The top 1% would own maybe 99% of the wealth of the country and everyone else would earn a minuscule fraction of the total value that they produced.<p>If we let monopolies take over, then the economy of the world will start to mirror the economies within these large corporations.<p>What&#x27;s worse is that the social aspects will also be mirrored. We will gradually lose freedom of speech, in the same way that employees of large corporations don&#x27;t have the freedom to say what they really think to their bosses.<p>Many who have worked for a big corporation will know how suppressing the environment can be. I&#x27;m really glad that I live in a time when there are still alternatives.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>0x737368</author><text>&gt; First you felt the need to off hand mention your (clearly undergraduate) degree in economics which had absolutely zero relevance to the discussion.<p>That was a different person.<p>&gt;There is absolutely zero evidence of this. None of your arguments are based on evidence. The US just fined Volkswagen billions of dollars. The EU is ready to fine Google billions of dollars. Apple paid japan hundreds millions of dollars in fines. All the banks responsible for the financial crisis in America and the EU paid hundreds of billions<p>Precisely, EU, USA and China(ones that I know, there might be more) are the ones who can actually fight back from the pressure. Once they&#x27;re able to pay enough politicians even more to coax them into bringing laws that help them further, we won&#x27;t even have that(like that hasn&#x27;t happened before).<p>Additionally, you need to consider if the fines are actually painful enough. Sure, sometimes it&#x27;s enough to make them stop doing offences, but sometimes the companies are left with a net profit from illegal actions.<p>&gt; Again you have no evidence of this. If smaller businesses were able to provide better services people would be using dedicated email providers, not gmail. They would be using flickr instead of google and apple photos.<p>Look up Linux. Whilst big companies did have a hand in making it, it&#x27;s still driven a lot by the community. Compare how Linux performs against Windows(fast, no intentional backdoors, free, almost limitless customisability) and MacOS(no upgrades that make your completely fine hardware useless in 3-4 years after purchase).<p>I neither use flickr not google&#x2F;apple photos so can&#x27;t judge the discrepancy in quality. But I do a lot of messengers, text editors, email clients and so on, and they&#x27;re completely fine. You need to consider that perhaps people are using them because they didn&#x27;t bother to look up alternatives and just went with what the company offered them because &quot;hey! it&#x27;s &#x27;free&#x27;! and it&#x27;s right here.&quot;<p>You seem to be giving off some belligerent vibes, so I&#x27;m not going to argue much further, all I&#x27;m asking is that you consider that companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft and so on are not in the business of making people happy, but in the business of making money. And if that means the best path to that is to manipulate governments and try to control every aspect of people&#x27;s lives for their own profit - they&#x27;ll do it. If you break them apart you give them much less power to do that.</text></comment> | <story><title>Are Google, Amazon and others getting too big?</title><url>http://www.bbc.com/news/business-39875417</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>friedman23</author><text>&gt; Even if we assume that allowing Google to exist as a monopoly does bring better services<p>How is google even a monopoly? Bing exists, yahoo still exists. In Asia Google isn&#x27;t even the most popular search engine.<p>Want me to show you how google is not a monopoly? A company with monopoly power would be able to raise the price of its service to the price the market can <i>bear</i>. If google put search behind a pay wall, Bing would destroy it in market share.<p>&gt; that&#x27;s a small price to pay for not having to be subjugated by a conglomerate.<p>So now you are not using economic arguments but appealing to emotion.<p>I just need to point this out<p>First you felt the need to off hand mention your (clearly undergraduate) degree in economics which had absolutely zero relevance to the discussion.<p>Secondly, you are using appeals to emotion without any basis in fact. &quot;Google is an extremely successful company and we use them in so many things! They must be evil!&quot;<p>Try using evidence. I&#x27;m not going to argue against your fear mongering only point out that like almost all fear mongering, it is not based on fact.<p>&gt; Countries can already barely withstand pressure from big companies<p>There is absolutely zero evidence of this. None of your arguments are based on evidence. The US just fined Volkswagen billions of dollars. The EU is ready to fine Google billions of dollars. Apple paid japan hundreds millions of dollars in fines. All the banks responsible for the financial crisis in America and the EU paid <i>hundreds of billions</i><p>&gt; In many cases even better services because the prime objective is to make a program that would help the user, not make money for the company.<p>Again you have no evidence of this. If smaller businesses were able to provide better services people would be using dedicated email providers, not gmail. They would be using flickr instead of google and apple photos.</text></item><item><author>0x737368</author><text>Even if we assume that allowing Google to exist as a monopoly does bring better services, that&#x27;s a small price to pay for not having to be subjugated by a conglomerate.<p>Countries can already barely withstand pressure from big companies, by allowing them grow even further everything would just turn in a way that would allow such companies to make even more money, whilst increasing the gap between the rich and the poor.<p>And with regards to better services, I think the open source community has shown us that it&#x27;s possible to make great services without having to work for a company. In many cases even better services because the prime objective is to make a program that would help the user, not make money for the company.</text></item><item><author>friedman23</author><text>Congrats on your degree in econ. You would think that someone with a degree in econ would believe it wise to first establish what the negative externalities are and what externalities regulating away the existence of large business would produce before defending the idea of doing so.<p>We already know that with the existence of Google we get free products like search, mail, video, etc. Do you have evidence that when we destroy google that we will still retain all of these benefits?</text></item><item><author>weirdstuff</author><text>&gt; Divorce the ad-making money machine, and say goodbye to all the services consumers like that are nowhere near as profitable: gmail, maps, photos, chrome, android, translate, youtube, drive, waze, where do you think the money for this stuff all comes from?<p>This needs a citation, as well.<p>This is assuming Google hasn&#x27;t starved out potential competitors who would have provided the same service, or better service, had the playing field been more level.<p>My unsubstantiated opinion is that many talented folks are&#x2F;have been dissuaded from trying their hand at anything that may go up against Google, et. al., unless their looking for an aquihire. (And we know how Google treats those after a few years.)<p>And there&#x27;s another argument to be made: that Google&#x27;s habit of purchasing competition stifles the innovation since it&#x27;s nipping it in the bud.<p>(I majored in Econ in uni.)</text></item><item><author>TulliusCicero</author><text>Disclaimer: I work at Google<p>&gt; The world is a better place with lots of smaller companies.<p>[citation needed]<p>A lot of things Google does -- a lot of the things people actually like about Google -- are possible only because it&#x27;s a huge monolith. Divorce the ad-making money machine, and say goodbye to all the services consumers like that are nowhere near as profitable: gmail, maps, photos, chrome, android, translate, youtube, drive, waze, where do you think the money for this stuff all comes from?<p>Of course, if you&#x27;re one of the uber technerds that thinks that Google is unabashedly evil and Linux is going to take over the desktop any day now, that probably sounds great to you. I just think the average consumer would have a different take on it.</text></item><item><author>jondubois</author><text>I agree they should be regulated. The world is a better place with lots of smaller companies.<p>These big companies turn regular people into corporate livestock to serve the wealthy.<p>If you were to analyze Facebook as if it were a country, the wealth gap among employees would be atrocious - The top 1% would own maybe 99% of the wealth of the country and everyone else would earn a minuscule fraction of the total value that they produced.<p>If we let monopolies take over, then the economy of the world will start to mirror the economies within these large corporations.<p>What&#x27;s worse is that the social aspects will also be mirrored. We will gradually lose freedom of speech, in the same way that employees of large corporations don&#x27;t have the freedom to say what they really think to their bosses.<p>Many who have worked for a big corporation will know how suppressing the environment can be. I&#x27;m really glad that I live in a time when there are still alternatives.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>thesagan</author><text>A pattern I notice on this site, and reddit: that it&#x27;s far easier to ask left-and-right for evidence than it is producing your own or going on a limb to make a point in your own words. Is open discussion discouraged on HN?<p>Now, I don&#x27;t provide a lot of hard evidence on HN, if only because this probably isn&#x27;t the right type of forum for a courtroom. I like to keep it a bit more casual.</text></comment> |
14,066,528 | 14,065,096 | 1 | 2 | 14,064,698 | train | <story><title>Common Algo Problem Solutions</title><url>https://github.com/sherxon/AlgoDS/blob/master/README.md</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>elbigbad</author><text>So are these just copied from leetcode? For example, leetcode&#x27;s hamming distance versus yours:<p>LeetCode:<p>The Hamming distance between two integers is the number of positions at which the corresponding bits are different.<p>Given two integers x and y, calculate the Hamming distance.<p>Yours:<p>1)<i></i>Hamming Distance<i></i>
The Hamming distance between two integers is the number of positions at which the corresponding bits are different.
Given two integers x and y, calculate the Hamming distance.<p>Another one, LeetCode:<p>Given an array of integers, every element appears twice except for one. Find that single one.<p>Note:
Your algorithm should have a linear runtime complexity. Could you implement it without using extra memory?<p>Yours:<p>2)<i></i>Single Number<i></i>
Given an array of integers, every element appears twice except for one. Find that single one.
Note:Your algorithm should have a linear runtime complexity. Could you implement it without using extra memory?</text></comment> | <story><title>Common Algo Problem Solutions</title><url>https://github.com/sherxon/AlgoDS/blob/master/README.md</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>lsiebert</author><text>First this doesn&#x27;t include any statements of the specifics of the algorithm problems, which can be extremely relevant. Second there are errors, for example the code the return all duplicates in array is just broken, and even if you fix the obvious errors like indexing and modifying the array you are examining, it will still not handle values of 0 or less.</text></comment> |
3,648,894 | 3,648,840 | 1 | 3 | 3,648,775 | train | <story><title>Justin Kan Launches Exec (YC W12) For Real-Time Mobile Jobs</title><url>http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2012/02/29/justin-kan-launches-exec-for-real-time-mobile-jobs/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mikeryan</author><text>Strangely enough my biggest concern is how well this will scale.<p>EDIT: I'm not sure why I'm getting down boated. I'm pretty serious. I have no idea the average task duration but assume its an hour then every "exec" can only do about 7-8 a day (assume some non billable time). If they get 10,000 customers and say each need one task every 2 weeks. Thats 5000 tasks and would require a staff of 125 execs. With 125 execs now you need managers and quality control and customer support. I'm assume execs are only getting paid about $15 an hour. That means A. Quality of Execs would be an issue. B. You only have about $10 of every hour left towards margin. Margin in straight services is nasty and this one is thin and in this case unless you have an extremely efficient staff your margin tends to go down as you grow - not up.</text></comment> | <story><title>Justin Kan Launches Exec (YC W12) For Real-Time Mobile Jobs</title><url>http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2012/02/29/justin-kan-launches-exec-for-real-time-mobile-jobs/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>pg</author><text>The beta users for Exec were YC alumni living in SF, and they have great things to say about it.</text></comment> |
34,345,676 | 34,345,863 | 1 | 3 | 34,342,901 | train | <story><title>Why Use Make (2013)</title><url>https://bost.ocks.org/mike/make/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hedora</author><text>People always claim ninja is fast, but I can&#x27;t figure out what they mean by that. A typical C++ project build uses 10-10,000 CPU core minutes, and make takes (maybe, in some pessimal situation) 100 milliseconds to schedule and coordinate the build invocations.<p>Even if ninja is 100x faster, it really, really doesn&#x27;t matter, at all.</text></item><item><author>ddulaney</author><text>Does ninja fit your needs? It’s available on just about all of the Linux distros and it’s extremely fast with very few bells and whistles. The language is (for better or worse) designed to be generated by a higher-level tool, so it strips out most of the complexity of GNU make, but it might go too far if you’re looking to do list&#x2F;map processing in it.</text></item><item><author>nine_k</author><text>It&#x27;s true, but the compatibility is limited.<p>I had to resort to tricks to make Makefiles which work both on Linux and macOS. I had to mandate the use of GNU make on Macs in other cases.<p>This is on top of having BSD vs GNU coreutils for things like grep, awk, etc, and the ancient bash on macOS.<p>I really wish there was a self-contained tool that could work like make (building a dependency graph and only doing the needed things), with reasonable string &#x2F; list &#x2F; map processing built in. (In a limited way, GNU make is such a tool.)</text></item><item><author>jitl</author><text>The best thing about make is that it’s available <i>everywhere</i> on POSIX systems. macOS comes with it pre-installed, and every Linux distro or *BSD does too, or offers a package for it that’s often depended on by everything else devtools-wise. This means make skills are super transferable; possibly more so than bash&#x2F;shell skills.<p>Sure there are more user-friendly tools written in the programming language du jour, but those will always need some special snowflake setup process for all of your developers. If you’re cross-platform, now you need encode that in a setup script before your project can build… Maybe you can offer a Makefile just to install `better-make`?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>drothlis</author><text>They probably mean incremental builds, where the actual compilation doesn&#x27;t overshadow the &quot;coordination&quot; work.<p>In my (artificial) benchmark, make scaled poorly, taking 70 seconds to process 100k C files worth of dependencies, vs. ninja&#x27;s 1.5 seconds: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;david.rothlis.net&#x2F;ninja-benchmark&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;david.rothlis.net&#x2F;ninja-benchmark&#x2F;</a><p>Most of make&#x27;s time was spent processing the &quot;.d&quot; files containing header dependencies (Ninja has a special optimisation for these files, where it reads them the first time they&#x27;re created, inserts the dependency information into a binary database, then deletes them so it doesn&#x27;t have to parse them in future invocations).<p>In real world projects, you often end up &quot;abusing&quot; make to add behaviour such as detecting if the compilation flags have changed, and this can make your makefiles slower; whereas ninja has those features built in. Apparently this made a big difference in build times for Chromium (where ninja was born). See this comment by the ninja&#x27;s author: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23182469" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23182469</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Why Use Make (2013)</title><url>https://bost.ocks.org/mike/make/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hedora</author><text>People always claim ninja is fast, but I can&#x27;t figure out what they mean by that. A typical C++ project build uses 10-10,000 CPU core minutes, and make takes (maybe, in some pessimal situation) 100 milliseconds to schedule and coordinate the build invocations.<p>Even if ninja is 100x faster, it really, really doesn&#x27;t matter, at all.</text></item><item><author>ddulaney</author><text>Does ninja fit your needs? It’s available on just about all of the Linux distros and it’s extremely fast with very few bells and whistles. The language is (for better or worse) designed to be generated by a higher-level tool, so it strips out most of the complexity of GNU make, but it might go too far if you’re looking to do list&#x2F;map processing in it.</text></item><item><author>nine_k</author><text>It&#x27;s true, but the compatibility is limited.<p>I had to resort to tricks to make Makefiles which work both on Linux and macOS. I had to mandate the use of GNU make on Macs in other cases.<p>This is on top of having BSD vs GNU coreutils for things like grep, awk, etc, and the ancient bash on macOS.<p>I really wish there was a self-contained tool that could work like make (building a dependency graph and only doing the needed things), with reasonable string &#x2F; list &#x2F; map processing built in. (In a limited way, GNU make is such a tool.)</text></item><item><author>jitl</author><text>The best thing about make is that it’s available <i>everywhere</i> on POSIX systems. macOS comes with it pre-installed, and every Linux distro or *BSD does too, or offers a package for it that’s often depended on by everything else devtools-wise. This means make skills are super transferable; possibly more so than bash&#x2F;shell skills.<p>Sure there are more user-friendly tools written in the programming language du jour, but those will always need some special snowflake setup process for all of your developers. If you’re cross-platform, now you need encode that in a setup script before your project can build… Maybe you can offer a Makefile just to install `better-make`?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>stabbles</author><text>If you have a slow filesystem and you’re compiling C, make has a “lot” of overhead due to implicit rules. There are many more rules than you write, unless you set stuff like<p><pre><code> .SUFFIXES:
</code></pre>
to nothing</text></comment> |
38,131,857 | 38,131,214 | 1 | 2 | 38,126,210 | train | <story><title>Why You Should Write Your Own Static Site Generator</title><url>https://arne.me/articles/write-your-own-ssg</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>icyfox</author><text>I&#x27;m not sure I&#x27;d advocate for writing a static site generator, although I&#x27;m certainly guilty of writing a few myself.<p>Instead I always encourage people who are trying to start blogging to do the writing first. Figure out a workflow that works for you - what time of day you prefer writing, what editor, do diagrams naturally come up in your thought stream, etc. It&#x27;s way easier to get this workflow dialed in when you&#x27;re doing things locally since the switching cost between solutions is that much lower.<p>Only when you know that you A) enjoy writing and B) have something worth sharing should you invest the time in translating your workflow to something that can deployed. That might mean writing your own SSG - that might mean just spinning up a wordpress blog.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>miroljub</author><text>But if you write a static site generator, you can blog about it. And that can be the first and the last post of your blog.<p>If you don&#x27;t write one, the chance is good, your blog would stay empty.</text></comment> | <story><title>Why You Should Write Your Own Static Site Generator</title><url>https://arne.me/articles/write-your-own-ssg</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>icyfox</author><text>I&#x27;m not sure I&#x27;d advocate for writing a static site generator, although I&#x27;m certainly guilty of writing a few myself.<p>Instead I always encourage people who are trying to start blogging to do the writing first. Figure out a workflow that works for you - what time of day you prefer writing, what editor, do diagrams naturally come up in your thought stream, etc. It&#x27;s way easier to get this workflow dialed in when you&#x27;re doing things locally since the switching cost between solutions is that much lower.<p>Only when you know that you A) enjoy writing and B) have something worth sharing should you invest the time in translating your workflow to something that can deployed. That might mean writing your own SSG - that might mean just spinning up a wordpress blog.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>deepspace</author><text>&gt; I&#x27;m certainly guilty of writing a few myself.<p>So am I. My first one was written in C in 1995, and the resultant site run under NCSA Httpd. DIY-ing becomes tedious after several cycles, though.<p>On the other hand, my experience with generally available SSGs has been miserable. They keep breaking my site after a few upgrades. At this point, I am very close to just spinning up wordpress for a new site.</text></comment> |
30,260,771 | 30,260,825 | 1 | 2 | 30,257,487 | train | <story><title>HN ran on a single box in 2018 has anything changed?</title><url>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16076041</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>axegon_</author><text>There is something comical about this: HN receives an absurd amount of traffic. More than startups and corporations with millions of customers and millions if not billions of dollars behind them, and yet it runs on effectively an arduino nano compared to what they are using. HN serves all the contents significantly faster than any of them at the fraction of the time and cost. Let&#x27;s take my old job for instance: the company website had almost nothing on it: a list of products, a jobs page and that&#x27;s it. That website ran on 12(yes, twelve) dell servers, each having a 4 socket motherboard, each occupied by a 12 core xeon, and each of those servers had 384 gigs of ram. Sure, it tracked every click and whatnot but the data that was tracked was never actually used and the all-beloved bundle.min.js was 15 megabytes. So much for low carbon footprint and all that...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bin_bash</author><text>&gt; absurd amount of traffic<p>Not sure what platforms you&#x27;ve worked on but &quot;6M requests&#x2F;day&quot; is peanuts in my neighborhood. (No offense to dang and team which do a fantastic job, but that&#x27;s not high throughput compared to almost any platform I&#x27;ve worked on over the past decade.)</text></comment> | <story><title>HN ran on a single box in 2018 has anything changed?</title><url>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16076041</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>axegon_</author><text>There is something comical about this: HN receives an absurd amount of traffic. More than startups and corporations with millions of customers and millions if not billions of dollars behind them, and yet it runs on effectively an arduino nano compared to what they are using. HN serves all the contents significantly faster than any of them at the fraction of the time and cost. Let&#x27;s take my old job for instance: the company website had almost nothing on it: a list of products, a jobs page and that&#x27;s it. That website ran on 12(yes, twelve) dell servers, each having a 4 socket motherboard, each occupied by a 12 core xeon, and each of those servers had 384 gigs of ram. Sure, it tracked every click and whatnot but the data that was tracked was never actually used and the all-beloved bundle.min.js was 15 megabytes. So much for low carbon footprint and all that...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mschuster91</author><text>On the other side, it is not much content to begin with.<p>Traffic is a bit of text, <i>extremely</i> basic CSS, no images, no tracking, no bullshit means that load times are probably instantaneous even on a 56k modem.<p>Content is a bit of plain text =&gt; easy rendering, the entire database probably would fit into memory, so not much in terms of i&#x2F;o going on.</text></comment> |
38,487,872 | 38,487,664 | 1 | 3 | 38,486,907 | train | <story><title>Return to office is 'dead,' Stanford economist says</title><url>https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/30/return-to-office-is-dead-stanford-economist-says-heres-why.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>btbuildem</author><text>It&#x27;s good to see the broad but anecdotal sentiment backed up by data.<p>The RTO&#x2F;WFH struggle is clearly about money (what else could it be about in a corporate world?), and it&#x27;s fascinating to watch some companies chew their own limbs off (metaphorically speaking) to appease investors-at-large.<p>Here I speculate, but the pattern seems to be that board members are involved with multiple organizations, and are stakeholders in even more - and those with ties to commercial real estate (and all the funds heavily invested into it) will do whatever it takes to push for higher office occupancy. At the same time, they&#x27;re doing this (arguably) to a disadvantage to the companies they&#x27;re supposed to steward - forcing best talent out, paying a premium for half-empty office space, and generally eroding morale by this display of duplicity.<p>At the same time, I love seeing the quiet resistance by the rank-and-file and even some middle management. The new reality is here, and there&#x27;s no going back. The % of days WFH has flatlined, and I imagine over time it will begin to slowly but steadily trend back up.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>DrBazza</author><text>In broad strokes, it&#x27;s just old vs new, and an age thing. I&#x27;ll pick &#x27;40&#x27; as the mid-point:<p>Old = over 40s (myself included) who are senior, their careers have been in offices and commuting, and still believe that &#x27;managing people&#x27; means real-life first person interaction, and are completely invested in offices, and the cost of paying for them, rather than downsizing.<p>Young = under 40s - have grown up with the internet, github, working&#x2F;studying remotely and so on.<p>I&#x27;ve worked in companies where the CEO and senior management are all 50 something, and in a couple of companies where they&#x27;re all approaching 40. Can you guess which company used PCs and which one used Macbooks?<p>Going back further, I can remember working on Sun boxes, because management was reluctant to use that &#x27;new fangled NT3.51 or even NT4.0&#x27;.<p>The point being, as the workforce demographic changes, so will the opinions and approaches. And the cycle will repeat.</text></comment> | <story><title>Return to office is 'dead,' Stanford economist says</title><url>https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/30/return-to-office-is-dead-stanford-economist-says-heres-why.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>btbuildem</author><text>It&#x27;s good to see the broad but anecdotal sentiment backed up by data.<p>The RTO&#x2F;WFH struggle is clearly about money (what else could it be about in a corporate world?), and it&#x27;s fascinating to watch some companies chew their own limbs off (metaphorically speaking) to appease investors-at-large.<p>Here I speculate, but the pattern seems to be that board members are involved with multiple organizations, and are stakeholders in even more - and those with ties to commercial real estate (and all the funds heavily invested into it) will do whatever it takes to push for higher office occupancy. At the same time, they&#x27;re doing this (arguably) to a disadvantage to the companies they&#x27;re supposed to steward - forcing best talent out, paying a premium for half-empty office space, and generally eroding morale by this display of duplicity.<p>At the same time, I love seeing the quiet resistance by the rank-and-file and even some middle management. The new reality is here, and there&#x27;s no going back. The % of days WFH has flatlined, and I imagine over time it will begin to slowly but steadily trend back up.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>matthewmcg</author><text>Great point on potentially overlapping board membership. More broadly, there&#x27;s also a theory that growing common ownership by index funds and others with significant commercial real estate exposure is driving this pressure.</text></comment> |
11,927,821 | 11,927,532 | 1 | 3 | 11,927,356 | train | <story><title>Google’s stock slid after report on search ad decline</title><url>http://www.recode.net/2016/6/17/11966982/google-alphabet-stock-search-ad</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>msoad</author><text>As much as people like to consider Google revenu sources very diverse or dream about future of other Google bets, Google is mostly an advertisement company heavily relying on their search business.<p>It&#x27;s obvious that Facebook has a better position for growth and adding new channels for their ads business. I can see Facebook share of online advertising grow in the next couple of years.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>emilsedgh</author><text>In the Google vs. Facebook discussion, I think people seem to forget a tiny detail:<p>Google has some products that are market leaders with heavy usage, eg:<p>* Search<p>* GMail<p>* Youtube<p>* Android<p>* Chrome<p>* Maps<p>* Docs<p>Its just that Google is unable to monetize many of them.<p>However, Facebook has only Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp.<p>1) Instagram _is_ what Facebook was 10 years ago. Its not a new product.
They just bought it because Instagram was becoming _The Social Network_.<p>2) Instagram and Whatsapp were bought acquired.<p>What I&#x27;m trying to say is that Google is unable to monetize many of its products.
And if online advertisement gets doomed, it would have to look for other business models.<p>But it _does_ have a very diverse set of products that people love.<p>What does Facebook have? and when was the last time they created something people loved?</text></comment> | <story><title>Google’s stock slid after report on search ad decline</title><url>http://www.recode.net/2016/6/17/11966982/google-alphabet-stock-search-ad</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>msoad</author><text>As much as people like to consider Google revenu sources very diverse or dream about future of other Google bets, Google is mostly an advertisement company heavily relying on their search business.<p>It&#x27;s obvious that Facebook has a better position for growth and adding new channels for their ads business. I can see Facebook share of online advertising grow in the next couple of years.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>elorant</author><text>How exactly is Facebook better positioned? CTR for Facebook ads is abysmal compared to that on Google search.</text></comment> |
3,273,388 | 3,273,308 | 1 | 3 | 3,272,986 | train | <story><title>I feel like I’m living the first line of my obituary.</title><url>https://wikimediafoundation.org/w/index.php?title=L11_1123_combo10B_PFP/en/US</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>aresant</author><text>Brilliant headline.<p>But man, I would love to help Wikipedia optimize their campaign.<p>I know they work on CRO internally but on this page, for instance, I see 30%+ sitting on the table with:<p>a) Fix the headline - Wikimedia's headline is "From Wikipedia programmer Brandon Harris". The OP in this thread fixed by taking the very compelling first line "I feel like I’m living the first line of my obituary." Still needs an action for scanners (80% of your readers).<p>b) Call to Action Needs to be More Obvious - The call to action doesn't appear as a link in the copy, users will miss the box on top right. Eye @ end of article flows to the "give monthly" link. The box at the top right falls into the deadzone of visual attention. An arrow would be cheesy, but effective, as would hyperlinks in the text w/strong call to action text.<p>c) Edit the Copy &#38; Formatting - The copy concept is outstanding. The formatting and paragraph structure needs to be edited down. The old "If I'd had more time i would have written you a shorter letter" - eg word economy. Could be as powerful or more-so with moderate editing. Needs sub-headlines, just something like "How can you help?" lets scanners quickly read the headline, first paragraph and jump right into donate mode.<p>d) Humanize Brandon - Get a picture of Brandon on there for goodness sakes. Humanizing the page with an actual image almost always works.<p>e) Fix Your CC Page - The click through to the donate page is bizarrely formatted with the form on the far right. Why introduce more ad-copy when somebody has indicated they want to donate? Reduce friction, don't introduce more. Better yet partner w/Amazon or somebody to process donations that's trusted and makes payments absurdly easy (PayPal doesn't count)<p>f) Leverage the Exit Action - I get that Wikipedia is a foundation but hit some of the basic fun commerce drivers like a little javascript exit pop like "Want to help but don't have the cash? Donate 60 seconds instead." and drive to a simple FB / Twitter screen to have people push to social on the drive.<p>g) Tweak your Buttons - These buttons feel like government issue desks. You might argue that this helps give them credibility as a charity to look a little off-the-shelf, but that is one of the most basic things to tweak. Build a button people can't resist rolling over, and they'll click it more and take more actions. Period.<p>I love Wikipedia, I want to help. Who do I go bother?<p>If anybody from Wikipedia is out there I am raising my hand, I want to donate time and expertise. Contact me via profile.</text></comment> | <story><title>I feel like I’m living the first line of my obituary.</title><url>https://wikimediafoundation.org/w/index.php?title=L11_1123_combo10B_PFP/en/US</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>RockyMcNuts</author><text>Not sure which would be less annoying - a few Adsense links clearly marked and off on the side, or the ginormous banner and somewhat overwrought copy.</text></comment> |
4,993,656 | 4,993,444 | 1 | 3 | 4,992,401 | train | <story><title>How I Fell in Love with a Schizophrenic</title><url>http://asserttrue.blogspot.com/2013/01/how-i-fell-in-love-with-schizophrenic.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>steveklabnik</author><text>There is a person with schizophrenia who posts to HN, who is shadowbanned due to the comments they leave, which are nonsensical due to their illness. Turn 'showdead' on in your profile, then hit <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=losethos" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=losethos</a> and now <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=SparrowOS" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=SparrowOS</a> .<p>They've been writing their own operating system in assembly for the last few years: <a href="http://www.losethos.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.losethos.com/</a> and now <a href="http://sparrowos.com/" rel="nofollow">http://sparrowos.com/</a><p>For more: <a href="http://qaa.ath.cx/LoseThos.html" rel="nofollow">http://qaa.ath.cx/LoseThos.html</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Xcelerate</author><text>Hmmph. I noticed the (dead) comments by SparrowOS a few days ago and was very curious about them. They didn't look like any sort of spam or advertising, because there were bouts of normal conversation amidst them.<p>I posted a "Ask HN" question inquiring about this user and his comments, and my post was marked "dead" within a minute. Only thing I've ever had marked dead on here (that I'm aware of at least).<p>Thank you for your explanation; I would have never guessed it was something like schizophrenia.</text></comment> | <story><title>How I Fell in Love with a Schizophrenic</title><url>http://asserttrue.blogspot.com/2013/01/how-i-fell-in-love-with-schizophrenic.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>steveklabnik</author><text>There is a person with schizophrenia who posts to HN, who is shadowbanned due to the comments they leave, which are nonsensical due to their illness. Turn 'showdead' on in your profile, then hit <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=losethos" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=losethos</a> and now <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=SparrowOS" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=SparrowOS</a> .<p>They've been writing their own operating system in assembly for the last few years: <a href="http://www.losethos.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.losethos.com/</a> and now <a href="http://sparrowos.com/" rel="nofollow">http://sparrowos.com/</a><p>For more: <a href="http://qaa.ath.cx/LoseThos.html" rel="nofollow">http://qaa.ath.cx/LoseThos.html</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>krakensden</author><text>I kind of wish that he'd be unbanned. No one owes him their attention, but it seems awful to hide him in the closet.</text></comment> |
28,721,773 | 28,721,381 | 1 | 3 | 28,719,928 | train | <story><title>Antiviral Molnupiravir Reduces Risk of Hospitalization/Death by ~50 Percent</title><url>https://www.merck.com/news/merck-and-ridgebacks-investigational-oral-antiviral-molnupiravir-reduced-the-risk-of-hospitalization-or-death-by-approximately-50-percent-compared-to-placebo-for-patients-with-mild-or-moderat/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>carbocation</author><text>I think it&#x27;s disappointing that this thread has devolved into a political discussion that is hardly related to the topic. The scientific&#x2F;medical achievement here seems significant.<p>As an MD, the difference between calling in a script for a pill and arranging for outpatient infusion therapies is vast.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>andybak</author><text>Be wary of commenting on the tone of a thread. Skimming it 39 minutes later and it seems a very reasonable, varied thread. Wait for voting to do it&#x27;s thing.</text></comment> | <story><title>Antiviral Molnupiravir Reduces Risk of Hospitalization/Death by ~50 Percent</title><url>https://www.merck.com/news/merck-and-ridgebacks-investigational-oral-antiviral-molnupiravir-reduced-the-risk-of-hospitalization-or-death-by-approximately-50-percent-compared-to-placebo-for-patients-with-mild-or-moderat/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>carbocation</author><text>I think it&#x27;s disappointing that this thread has devolved into a political discussion that is hardly related to the topic. The scientific&#x2F;medical achievement here seems significant.<p>As an MD, the difference between calling in a script for a pill and arranging for outpatient infusion therapies is vast.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sudosysgen</author><text>Indeed. The opportunity for prophylaxis with an oral antiviral is also amazing.</text></comment> |
5,477,885 | 5,477,825 | 1 | 3 | 5,477,405 | train | <story><title>Powerful Thoughts From Paul Graham</title><url>http://www.rosshudgens.com/thoughts-from-paul-graham/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>karamazov</author><text>&#62; I believe it too, that one person could be 100 times as productive as one other. But what the salaries are saying is that one CEO is more productive than all those 100 people below him put together.<p>We're not interested in the case where one person is 100x more productive than another because the second person is watching youtube. If the CEO is 100x more productive than the average person working for her, then she is, in fact, more productive than 100 of the people working under her put together. That's exactly what that statement means.<p>And, anyway, whether or not the CEO is 100x more productive, her output is worth 100x more. How do we know? Because that's what she's being paid.<p>Is she being paid for her contacts? It doesn't matter, so long as she's steering the company in the right direction. You're implying that "having contacts in the right places" is corruption, but it's not; knowing what to build and who to sell it to is a big part of running a company. CEO's don't spend their time conniving in smoke-filled rooms, they spend it trying to push their company forward.<p>Rich people don't get that way without providing something people want. Wal-Mart may or may not be lowering the quality of products nationwide, but what they're demonstrably doing is providing goods to people at great prices that let them generate a lot of profit. That's something people want, whether or not you agree with them. The RIAA, on the other hand, is a symptom of the power of the music industry - and the way the music industry got to have so much power, and so much money, is by providing music that people wanted to listen to enough that they paid for it.</text></item><item><author>krichman</author><text>&#62; But I have no trouble imagining that one person could be 100 times as productive as another.<p>This is a smokescreen. I believe it too, that one person could be 100 times as productive as one other. But what the salaries are saying is that one CEO is more productive than all those 100 people below him put together. I think 100x productivity is more standard deviations than that seems to represent.<p>Everyone, just admit that the CEO's are paid for having contacts in the right places. They aren't outperforming 100 engineers all day every day or even most days. The notion that salaries are some measurement of productivity is complete hokum.<p>Nor do I buy 54, the idea that rich people create more wealth for society from by-products, like Henry Ford gifting us with the automobile. I don't think it's correlated.<p>Yes we have some by-products that improve our lives, but we also have Wal-Marts lowering the quality of products nationwide and RIAA lowering the quality of free speech nationwide. So it's not as if rich people lead directly to benefits for society and they could just as easily push the other way.<p>Being wealthy isn't like being some video game paladin, it's just another form of concentrated power.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jleader</author><text>"Rich people don't get that way without providing something people want."<p>Well, to be precise, some ancestor of the rich person at one time provided something (some) people wanted. Not all rich people are "self made", even if you accept that silly phrase at face value.<p>For that matter, what about successful criminals? There have definitely been people who got rich through fraud, or extortion.</text></comment> | <story><title>Powerful Thoughts From Paul Graham</title><url>http://www.rosshudgens.com/thoughts-from-paul-graham/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>karamazov</author><text>&#62; I believe it too, that one person could be 100 times as productive as one other. But what the salaries are saying is that one CEO is more productive than all those 100 people below him put together.<p>We're not interested in the case where one person is 100x more productive than another because the second person is watching youtube. If the CEO is 100x more productive than the average person working for her, then she is, in fact, more productive than 100 of the people working under her put together. That's exactly what that statement means.<p>And, anyway, whether or not the CEO is 100x more productive, her output is worth 100x more. How do we know? Because that's what she's being paid.<p>Is she being paid for her contacts? It doesn't matter, so long as she's steering the company in the right direction. You're implying that "having contacts in the right places" is corruption, but it's not; knowing what to build and who to sell it to is a big part of running a company. CEO's don't spend their time conniving in smoke-filled rooms, they spend it trying to push their company forward.<p>Rich people don't get that way without providing something people want. Wal-Mart may or may not be lowering the quality of products nationwide, but what they're demonstrably doing is providing goods to people at great prices that let them generate a lot of profit. That's something people want, whether or not you agree with them. The RIAA, on the other hand, is a symptom of the power of the music industry - and the way the music industry got to have so much power, and so much money, is by providing music that people wanted to listen to enough that they paid for it.</text></item><item><author>krichman</author><text>&#62; But I have no trouble imagining that one person could be 100 times as productive as another.<p>This is a smokescreen. I believe it too, that one person could be 100 times as productive as one other. But what the salaries are saying is that one CEO is more productive than all those 100 people below him put together. I think 100x productivity is more standard deviations than that seems to represent.<p>Everyone, just admit that the CEO's are paid for having contacts in the right places. They aren't outperforming 100 engineers all day every day or even most days. The notion that salaries are some measurement of productivity is complete hokum.<p>Nor do I buy 54, the idea that rich people create more wealth for society from by-products, like Henry Ford gifting us with the automobile. I don't think it's correlated.<p>Yes we have some by-products that improve our lives, but we also have Wal-Marts lowering the quality of products nationwide and RIAA lowering the quality of free speech nationwide. So it's not as if rich people lead directly to benefits for society and they could just as easily push the other way.<p>Being wealthy isn't like being some video game paladin, it's just another form of concentrated power.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>krichman</author><text>&#62; And, anyway, whether or not the CEO is 100x more productive, her output is worth 100x more. How do we know? Because that's what she's being paid.<p>He's only 100x more if you measure productivity entirely in money.<p>I'm not implying corruption, I'm saying it's separate from productivity.</text></comment> |
30,576,984 | 30,576,888 | 1 | 2 | 30,576,443 | train | <story><title>Just say no to :latest</title><url>https://platformers.dev/log/2022-03-02-latest-literally-kills-puppies/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>oxfordmale</author><text>This is always a balance. The moment you pin to a specific version you need to have a process in place to ensure you regularly upgrade to avoid introducing vulnerabilities in your production system. Throughout my career I have seen many cases where certain software still runs on ancient versions as the team originally maintaining it is no longer around (e.g. reorganisations or lay-offs). It is always hard to convince senior management to invest any resources to upgrade (If it works don&#x27;t fix it)<p>If I have project that has good unit test coverage, I prefer to use :latest, as this results in a gradual update over time. If something breaks due to a version discrepancy, it is a lot easier to convince management to fix this, as the breakage would only be noticed as part of a feature request, and often would only require a small amount of work.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>peakaboo</author><text>I&#x27;ve also seen the same. As soon as people start locking versions, that code is no longer updated and nobody will change it, because it&#x27;s extra work to do so.<p>I personally think running latest is the best thing to do. And if something fails, you downgrade it temporarily until the latest work again. It&#x27;s pretty much opposite to what is recommended, and it&#x27;s just the best solution in my opinion.</text></comment> | <story><title>Just say no to :latest</title><url>https://platformers.dev/log/2022-03-02-latest-literally-kills-puppies/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>oxfordmale</author><text>This is always a balance. The moment you pin to a specific version you need to have a process in place to ensure you regularly upgrade to avoid introducing vulnerabilities in your production system. Throughout my career I have seen many cases where certain software still runs on ancient versions as the team originally maintaining it is no longer around (e.g. reorganisations or lay-offs). It is always hard to convince senior management to invest any resources to upgrade (If it works don&#x27;t fix it)<p>If I have project that has good unit test coverage, I prefer to use :latest, as this results in a gradual update over time. If something breaks due to a version discrepancy, it is a lot easier to convince management to fix this, as the breakage would only be noticed as part of a feature request, and often would only require a small amount of work.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bheadmaster</author><text>In that case, it&#x27;s better to just pin the major version of the container:<p><pre><code> FROM python:3
</code></pre>
will work as long as Python3 doesn&#x27;t make any backwards incompatible changes (note: Python3 occasionally deprecates then removes a feature that was part of the official API[0], so Python3 is not technically semver-correct).<p>If, however, one wants automatic updates WITH reproducible builds, then a CI&#x2F;CD pipeline that automatically updates the FROM line in a Dockerfile on every upstream release is an only solution.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.python.org&#x2F;3.10&#x2F;whatsnew&#x2F;3.10.html#removed" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.python.org&#x2F;3.10&#x2F;whatsnew&#x2F;3.10.html#removed</a></text></comment> |
5,715,308 | 5,714,409 | 1 | 3 | 5,713,981 | train | <story><title>The New Google Maps</title><url>https://maps.google.com/help/maps/helloworld/desktop/preview/?resubmit=true</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>onemorepassword</author><text>"Request an invite".<p>Dear god, Google still thinking it's a cute little startup. It really is the Microsoft story all over again.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dasil003</author><text>This is echo chamber mentality. Why does request-an-invite imply little startup? It just happens to be a strategy startups regularly employee, but why is it only legitimate for startups? Your criticism is hard to parse any other way than that you don't like Google, so whatever they do you find an interpretation of how their behavior is disingenuous and annoying. How the wider consumer world will view this is an open question, but I very much doubt anyone but the tech 1% will even have this thought cross their mind.</text></comment> | <story><title>The New Google Maps</title><url>https://maps.google.com/help/maps/helloworld/desktop/preview/?resubmit=true</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>onemorepassword</author><text>"Request an invite".<p>Dear god, Google still thinking it's a cute little startup. It really is the Microsoft story all over again.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>manacit</author><text>Facebook has consistently done the same thing with all of their new features (Graph Search, Timeline, etc). I fail to see why this is so egregious?</text></comment> |
21,135,893 | 21,135,935 | 1 | 2 | 21,135,259 | train | <story><title>Ocean plastic waste probably comes from ships, report says</title><url>https://www.afp.com/en/news/826/ocean-plastic-waste-probably-comes-ships-report-says-doc-1kv8e91</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>MichaelApproved</author><text>And here you are creating a <i>straw</i> man argument.<p>Reducing straws won’t “save the planet” on its own. We will improve the planet by doing multiple things.<p>Reducing plastic use (less packaging, fewer straws, reusable shopping bags) all play a <i>role</i> in a much bigger effort.</text></item><item><author>rantwasp</author><text>This is known. The number I have heard floated around is 45%. So, commercial fishing nets are a big problem when it comes to plastic in the oceans.<p>And here we are &quot;saving the planet&quot;, by reducing the plastic straw consumption:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.usatoday.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;news&#x2F;2018&#x2F;07&#x2F;18&#x2F;anti-straw-movement-based-unverified-statistic-500-million-day&#x2F;750563002&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.usatoday.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;news&#x2F;2018&#x2F;07&#x2F;18&#x2F;anti-straw-mo...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;opinion&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2018-06-07&#x2F;plastic-straws-aren-t-the-problem" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;opinion&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2018-06-07&#x2F;plasti...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;07&#x2F;19&#x2F;business&#x2F;plastic-straws-ban-fact-check-nyt.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;07&#x2F;19&#x2F;business&#x2F;plastic-straws-b...</a><p>Mental gymnastics at its best:<p>&gt; “Whether it’s 500 million or 500 a day, we shouldn’t lose sight of the real issue: Straws should be disposed of properly and should never, ever be littered on land or in waterways,” she said.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ibeckermayer</author><text>Except that’s not improving the planet even a bit — chances are, every one of those straws being used in an American city would end up in a well run landfill and have minimal impact on the environment. It’s yet another example of knuckle dragging elites using state force to virtue signal. Meanwhile the real sources of the problem get ignored.</text></comment> | <story><title>Ocean plastic waste probably comes from ships, report says</title><url>https://www.afp.com/en/news/826/ocean-plastic-waste-probably-comes-ships-report-says-doc-1kv8e91</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>MichaelApproved</author><text>And here you are creating a <i>straw</i> man argument.<p>Reducing straws won’t “save the planet” on its own. We will improve the planet by doing multiple things.<p>Reducing plastic use (less packaging, fewer straws, reusable shopping bags) all play a <i>role</i> in a much bigger effort.</text></item><item><author>rantwasp</author><text>This is known. The number I have heard floated around is 45%. So, commercial fishing nets are a big problem when it comes to plastic in the oceans.<p>And here we are &quot;saving the planet&quot;, by reducing the plastic straw consumption:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.usatoday.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;news&#x2F;2018&#x2F;07&#x2F;18&#x2F;anti-straw-movement-based-unverified-statistic-500-million-day&#x2F;750563002&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.usatoday.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;news&#x2F;2018&#x2F;07&#x2F;18&#x2F;anti-straw-mo...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;opinion&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2018-06-07&#x2F;plastic-straws-aren-t-the-problem" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;opinion&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2018-06-07&#x2F;plasti...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;07&#x2F;19&#x2F;business&#x2F;plastic-straws-ban-fact-check-nyt.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;07&#x2F;19&#x2F;business&#x2F;plastic-straws-b...</a><p>Mental gymnastics at its best:<p>&gt; “Whether it’s 500 million or 500 a day, we shouldn’t lose sight of the real issue: Straws should be disposed of properly and should never, ever be littered on land or in waterways,” she said.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rantwasp</author><text>is it a straw man though? i&#x27;m not proposing anything, I was just providing some links and maybe hinting at the fact that if we want to reduce plastic in the oceans we should focus on the biggest sources of plastics.<p>if everyone stops using plastic straws tomorrow it will not matter and will not make an impact on how much plastic keeps accumulating.<p>here are a few more ideas for helping the planet: have fewer kids - this weird trick works, learn to love GMOs - this is the future, there is no way we can sustain the population growth we are experience with everyone eating organic, drive your car into the ground or until it&#x27;s too expensive to repair it.</text></comment> |
28,269,334 | 28,242,313 | 1 | 2 | 28,238,163 | train | <story><title>We built a system like Apple’s to flag CSAM and concluded the tech was dangerous</title><url>https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/08/19/apple-csam-abuse-encryption-security-privacy-dangerous/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>knaik94</author><text>One additional issue that I haven&#x27;t really seen discussed is how to handle a situation when a false accusation is made.<p>If a person knows the right people who work at these companies, things get sorted out, but I imagine sometimes a person is forced to just handle the consequences.<p>Stepping away from CSAM and going back to something like developer account and apps getting banned on platforms for violating vague &quot;guidelines&quot;. It&#x27;s someone&#x27;s livelihood that&#x27;s sometimes destroyed. Demonetization, apps getting banned, payment processors freezing accounts are mostly black box events and most situations aren&#x27;t even related to crimes dealing with CSAM.<p>If it was something the government made a mistake with, there&#x27;s legal ways to fight for your rights. There&#x27;s generally a level of transparency that is afforded to you.<p>It is concerning that people flagged for handling CSAM will not know if they have been manually reviewed. The need to keep the forwarding to authorities a secret is understandable, but a human review before forwarding is only necessary if you expect false positives to begin with. Keeping that flag secret seems like another black box you can&#x27;t fight as a user.<p>I don&#x27;t deny the value of catching these criminals, but it throws the idea of due process out the window when the only assurance so far has been &quot;trust us to do the right thing&quot;.<p>It&#x27;s also weird how Apple has chosen to intentionally insert itself into the investigation pipeline rather than just let NCMEC handle it like all other cloud providers.<p>I am glad this hasn&#x27;t flown under the radar just because it is Apple who is making these promises. I have heard non-tech people talk about this but there&#x27;s a lot of misunderstanding.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>skinkestek</author><text>&gt; It&#x27;s also weird how Apple has chosen to intentionally insert itself into the investigation pipeline rather than just let NCMEC handle it like all other cloud providers.<p>Not so weird actually in my opinion:<p>Apple wants to make sure their customers doesn&#x27;t get into trouble for no good reason, that would be bad for business.<p>Personally for me, a European living in Norway I do have great respect for the local police (mostly). Great people, mostly going out of their way to serve the public (again, mostly).<p>Norwegian child protection however is someone I&#x27;d rather stay clear of. They are well known to simultaneously ignore kids who need help and also harass innocent parents.<p>Again, not all of them are like this, many of them try to do good, but they seem to a large extent to be working outside of control of the courts so if they mess up you have to go to a EU court to fix it. (Two or three cases just last 18 months from a small country like Norway.)<p>So something similar might also be at play, but I don&#x27;t know what reputation NCMEC has, only that it is well known that a number of people have gotten serious trouble because of overeager employees at photo labs reporting innocent images.</text></comment> | <story><title>We built a system like Apple’s to flag CSAM and concluded the tech was dangerous</title><url>https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/08/19/apple-csam-abuse-encryption-security-privacy-dangerous/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>knaik94</author><text>One additional issue that I haven&#x27;t really seen discussed is how to handle a situation when a false accusation is made.<p>If a person knows the right people who work at these companies, things get sorted out, but I imagine sometimes a person is forced to just handle the consequences.<p>Stepping away from CSAM and going back to something like developer account and apps getting banned on platforms for violating vague &quot;guidelines&quot;. It&#x27;s someone&#x27;s livelihood that&#x27;s sometimes destroyed. Demonetization, apps getting banned, payment processors freezing accounts are mostly black box events and most situations aren&#x27;t even related to crimes dealing with CSAM.<p>If it was something the government made a mistake with, there&#x27;s legal ways to fight for your rights. There&#x27;s generally a level of transparency that is afforded to you.<p>It is concerning that people flagged for handling CSAM will not know if they have been manually reviewed. The need to keep the forwarding to authorities a secret is understandable, but a human review before forwarding is only necessary if you expect false positives to begin with. Keeping that flag secret seems like another black box you can&#x27;t fight as a user.<p>I don&#x27;t deny the value of catching these criminals, but it throws the idea of due process out the window when the only assurance so far has been &quot;trust us to do the right thing&quot;.<p>It&#x27;s also weird how Apple has chosen to intentionally insert itself into the investigation pipeline rather than just let NCMEC handle it like all other cloud providers.<p>I am glad this hasn&#x27;t flown under the radar just because it is Apple who is making these promises. I have heard non-tech people talk about this but there&#x27;s a lot of misunderstanding.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hirvi74</author><text>&gt; It&#x27;s also weird how Apple has chosen to intentionally insert itself into the investigation pipeline rather than just let NCMEC handle it like all other cloud providers.<p>So, I am not much of conspiracy theorist, but I do like to sometimes fantasize about alternative realities in which they were true.<p>I am not saying the US government had any involvement in Apple&#x27;s decision, but what if they did? I do agree with your point about how this topic more or less came out of Left-field. It&#x27;s clear that Apple did not just recently acquire the technological ability to produce this feature in 2021. This feature could have been implemented years ago (like many other companies with a consumer-available cloud storage model already did to some degree). I am just curious if Apple did not really have a &quot;choice&quot; in this matter. Perhaps my monkey brain just want this to be the case.</text></comment> |
6,711,666 | 6,711,726 | 1 | 3 | 6,711,551 | train | <story><title>Apple maps: how Google lost when everyone thought it had won</title><url>http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/nov/11/apple-maps-google-iphone-users</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>archgrove</author><text>Apple maps has reached &quot;good enough&quot; for a large number of use cases. It&#x27;s now &quot;good enough&quot; to use as a satellite navigation system for a car, &quot;good enough&quot; to give me walking directions to nearby major sites&#x2F;roads, and &quot;good enough&quot; as a &quot;I&#x27;m sure I&#x27;m nearly at X, where the heck is it?&quot; recovery tool.<p>It still has a pretty useless database of locations. The listings for many shops&#x2F;venues in my area are literally years (sometimes decades) out of date, even after I reported them back when iOS 6 was a beta. This is slowly improving, seemingly starting with locations that are commonly visited, but it&#x27;s still not there. However, given that most of my use cases are &quot;Enter post (ZIP) code, go there&quot;, this doesn&#x27;t really matter. 90% of the time, Apple maps works fine, and there&#x27;s no reason to use something else, especially when it&#x27;s ad-laden.<p>Given that maps are not a core concern for Apple, I&#x27;ve always been surprised they&#x27;ve not just thrown money at improving open street maps. A few hundred million to setup an &quot;OSM foundation&quot; (or fund an existing one) could seriously help them (decent free mapping database to use), and hurt Google (major commercial advantage limited&#x2F;eliminated). They could probably get MS onboard as well.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ZeroGravitas</author><text>MS does help OSM quite a bit, primarily by providing access to Bing satellite images which can be used to trace over to create OSM data. They also hired the guy who started OSM for a while (though he left recently to go to Telenav)<p>And the OSM foundation does already exist:<p><a href="http://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Main_Page" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.osmfoundation.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Main_Page</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Apple maps: how Google lost when everyone thought it had won</title><url>http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/nov/11/apple-maps-google-iphone-users</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>archgrove</author><text>Apple maps has reached &quot;good enough&quot; for a large number of use cases. It&#x27;s now &quot;good enough&quot; to use as a satellite navigation system for a car, &quot;good enough&quot; to give me walking directions to nearby major sites&#x2F;roads, and &quot;good enough&quot; as a &quot;I&#x27;m sure I&#x27;m nearly at X, where the heck is it?&quot; recovery tool.<p>It still has a pretty useless database of locations. The listings for many shops&#x2F;venues in my area are literally years (sometimes decades) out of date, even after I reported them back when iOS 6 was a beta. This is slowly improving, seemingly starting with locations that are commonly visited, but it&#x27;s still not there. However, given that most of my use cases are &quot;Enter post (ZIP) code, go there&quot;, this doesn&#x27;t really matter. 90% of the time, Apple maps works fine, and there&#x27;s no reason to use something else, especially when it&#x27;s ad-laden.<p>Given that maps are not a core concern for Apple, I&#x27;ve always been surprised they&#x27;ve not just thrown money at improving open street maps. A few hundred million to setup an &quot;OSM foundation&quot; (or fund an existing one) could seriously help them (decent free mapping database to use), and hurt Google (major commercial advantage limited&#x2F;eliminated). They could probably get MS onboard as well.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dingaling</author><text>Just in general, whilst helping OSM is a topic, they do have Amazon affiliate links that earn them about 5% on purchases but for some reason they don&#x27;t make this obvious on their website<p><a href="http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Merchandise#Amazon" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.openstreetmap.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Merchandise#Amazon</a><p>Hopefully I&#x27;ve thrown them about £50 over the past couple of years by bookmarking them as my link to Amazon.</text></comment> |
30,294,301 | 30,287,350 | 1 | 3 | 30,285,085 | train | <story><title>How the modern world arose from imaginary numbers</title><url>https://nautil.us/imaginary-numbers-are-reality-13999/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dboreham</author><text>This is only mentioned in passing in the article, but the penny dropped for me when I read somewhere else that you should first think about negative numbers. They seem pretty real, but they&#x27;re not. There&#x27;s no negative quantity in nature. You can&#x27;t have -5 rocks. Negative numbers are just the solution to equations of the form x + n = 0. Now after you let that sink in, imaginary numbers don&#x27;t seem so weird after all. Just another kind of number defined as the solution to some equation.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ska</author><text>Lots of replies to you are missing the point I think.<p>You are right, negative numbers are a useful <i>concept</i> which can be mapped to a number of real world operations, but that in some fundamental way not the same thing as positive integers. The same can be said of zero, of course.<p>This is probably why it took humans ages to come up with such concepts, the jump is bigger than it seems after you think of this as &quot;normal&quot;.<p>On a related note, real numbers are far weirder than most people think....</text></comment> | <story><title>How the modern world arose from imaginary numbers</title><url>https://nautil.us/imaginary-numbers-are-reality-13999/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dboreham</author><text>This is only mentioned in passing in the article, but the penny dropped for me when I read somewhere else that you should first think about negative numbers. They seem pretty real, but they&#x27;re not. There&#x27;s no negative quantity in nature. You can&#x27;t have -5 rocks. Negative numbers are just the solution to equations of the form x + n = 0. Now after you let that sink in, imaginary numbers don&#x27;t seem so weird after all. Just another kind of number defined as the solution to some equation.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mettamage</author><text>I disagree.<p>&gt; You can&#x27;t have -5 rocks<p>You can have 5 rocks destroyed in the future. That to me, is what -5 physically means: a guarantee that the object associated with the number will be eliminated out of existence in the future and decrement the negative number by 1.<p>Some people call it debt, but to me, emotionally that word feels too financial. So I prefer “a guarantee to be eliminated out of existence in the future “, or something like that.<p>Conversely, 5 cows means: 5 cows currently in existence.<p>5 cows - 5 cows means: I see 5 cows and now they don’t exist any more and there is nothing.<p>I wish my math skills were better, I am optimistic that I’d find a similar thing for imaginary numbers and maybe even complex numbers.<p>With that said, I do get where you’re coming from and I find it a compelling perspective as well. It’s simply that I feel the perspective I described as well.</text></comment> |
30,236,685 | 30,235,962 | 1 | 2 | 30,233,199 | train | <story><title>Union Pacific to buy 20 battery-electric locomotives for yard service</title><url>https://railfan.com/union-pacific-to-buy-20-battery-electric-locomotives/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bobthepanda</author><text>The lede is a bit buried here:<p>&gt; Union Pacific plans to purchase 20 battery-electric locomotives for <i>yard service</i><p>If all they&#x27;re doing is moving around a yard, they&#x27;re not ever very far from a charging station and they&#x27;re moving at very low speeds.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>donarb</author><text>Yard service is a perfect application for these types of locomotives. Diesel fired locomotives tend to sit around idling and burning fuel many more hours than they are being used every day. Diesel locos also tend to not be very fuel efficient when constantly stopping&#x2F;starting around the yard.</text></comment> | <story><title>Union Pacific to buy 20 battery-electric locomotives for yard service</title><url>https://railfan.com/union-pacific-to-buy-20-battery-electric-locomotives/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bobthepanda</author><text>The lede is a bit buried here:<p>&gt; Union Pacific plans to purchase 20 battery-electric locomotives for <i>yard service</i><p>If all they&#x27;re doing is moving around a yard, they&#x27;re not ever very far from a charging station and they&#x27;re moving at very low speeds.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>seanp2k2</author><text>Yep, battery energy density is still far off from fossil fuels.<p>This is from 2012 but still relevant and why we don’t have electric commercial passenger planes, and probably never will until we make 10x gains in energy density:<p>“””
Stored energy in fuel is considerable: gasoline is the champion at 47.5 MJ&#x2F;kg and 34.6 MJ&#x2F;liter; the gasoline in a fully fueled car has the same energy content as a thousand sticks of dynamite. A lithium-ion battery pack has about 0.3 MJ&#x2F;kg and about 0.4 MJ&#x2F;liter (Chevy VOLT). Gasoline thus has about 100 times the energy density of a lithium-ion battery. This difference in energy density is partially mitigated by the very high efficiency of an electric motor in converting energy stored in the battery to making the car move: it is typically 60-80 percent efficient. The efficiency of an internal combustion engine in converting the energy stored in gasoline to making the car move is typically 15 percent (EPA 2012). With the ratio about 5, a battery with an energy storage density 1&#x2F;5 of that of gasoline would have the same range as a gasoline-powered car. We are not even close to this at present.
“””<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aps.org&#x2F;publications&#x2F;apsnews&#x2F;201208&#x2F;backpage.cfm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aps.org&#x2F;publications&#x2F;apsnews&#x2F;201208&#x2F;backpage.cfm</a></text></comment> |
32,173,378 | 32,172,867 | 1 | 3 | 32,166,175 | train | <story><title>General Motors Streetcar Conspiracy</title><url>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rmason</author><text>My father frequently told me the story of mass transit in Detroit. He was a fan of the interurbans which were street cars that travelled between cities, some of them fifty miles from Detroit. Cars and later freeways totally killed off the interurbans. In fact freeways killed off passenger trains as well.<p>But streetcars still thrived in Detroit. You could get anywhere with them and even in the car capital of the world people went without them. But then in a flash they were gone. My father was a life long believer in the so called conspiracy.<p>He was regarded as a conspiracy theorist. As a kid I wished he&#x27;d just stop talking about it. But then as a young adult the proof started coming out that maybe he was right all along. But now with a big media push it&#x27;s going the other way. I know one thing in Michigan the politicians go along with whatever GM wants, always.<p>Michigan has some of the worst roads in America while at the same time having the largest gas taxes. Yet when billions of dollars became available as a result of COVID what did the governor do who ran on the slogan, &#x27;fix the damn roads&#x27;? She gave the money to GM for battery plants! This Wikipedia page just looks like more spin to me.</text></item><item><author>m0llusk</author><text>This is false, revisionist history. During the war maintenance was deferred and many operators either went bankrupt or dramatically reduced operations. By the time the war ended the tracks and rolling stock were all in need of replacement.<p>The public did not love streetcars for many reasons. The ride was rough, they were boiling in the summer and freezing in the winter. They forced all manner of people into close quarters with one another. Insufficient capacity meant it was not unusual for riders to cling to the sides of cars where that was possible.<p>When freeways and buses were presented as an alternative the public embraced building new infrastructure over rebuilding the old. Part of that is because the downsides had not yet become clear.<p>Blaming some corporate bogeyman is always tempting but does not change the facts. The streetcars were replaced because they fell out of favor with the public who wanted to try the new and shiny thing.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jimkleiber</author><text>I dunno, I&#x27;m starting to see the world as more and more complex (aka many inputs contribute to many outputs) and yet maybe too complex for us as humans so we latch onto one input causing one output.<p>I see lots of side road construction in the northern Detroit suburbs, the interstates have been under major construction for at least 2-3 years, and overall, it seems as if there&#x27;s lots of construction. Is it from Whitmer? From the feds? From local cities? I don&#x27;t know, probably a combination of all three and more.<p>Same with why the street cars disappeared. I think our anger&#x2F;fear can make us think it was one and only one group or person who made such things happen, I just think that&#x27;s probably a subjective perspective more than an objective reality.<p>Edit: also I hadn&#x27;t heard of Whitmer giving money to GM, could you share a link about that? All I can find is that she helped GM make their own $7B investment in Michigan.</text></comment> | <story><title>General Motors Streetcar Conspiracy</title><url>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rmason</author><text>My father frequently told me the story of mass transit in Detroit. He was a fan of the interurbans which were street cars that travelled between cities, some of them fifty miles from Detroit. Cars and later freeways totally killed off the interurbans. In fact freeways killed off passenger trains as well.<p>But streetcars still thrived in Detroit. You could get anywhere with them and even in the car capital of the world people went without them. But then in a flash they were gone. My father was a life long believer in the so called conspiracy.<p>He was regarded as a conspiracy theorist. As a kid I wished he&#x27;d just stop talking about it. But then as a young adult the proof started coming out that maybe he was right all along. But now with a big media push it&#x27;s going the other way. I know one thing in Michigan the politicians go along with whatever GM wants, always.<p>Michigan has some of the worst roads in America while at the same time having the largest gas taxes. Yet when billions of dollars became available as a result of COVID what did the governor do who ran on the slogan, &#x27;fix the damn roads&#x27;? She gave the money to GM for battery plants! This Wikipedia page just looks like more spin to me.</text></item><item><author>m0llusk</author><text>This is false, revisionist history. During the war maintenance was deferred and many operators either went bankrupt or dramatically reduced operations. By the time the war ended the tracks and rolling stock were all in need of replacement.<p>The public did not love streetcars for many reasons. The ride was rough, they were boiling in the summer and freezing in the winter. They forced all manner of people into close quarters with one another. Insufficient capacity meant it was not unusual for riders to cling to the sides of cars where that was possible.<p>When freeways and buses were presented as an alternative the public embraced building new infrastructure over rebuilding the old. Part of that is because the downsides had not yet become clear.<p>Blaming some corporate bogeyman is always tempting but does not change the facts. The streetcars were replaced because they fell out of favor with the public who wanted to try the new and shiny thing.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>7speter</author><text>&gt;Yet when billions of dollars became available as a result of COVID what did the governor do who ran on the slogan, &#x27;fix the damn roads&#x27;? She gave the money to GM for battery plants!<p>I understand the discontent, but the logic seems to follow. Assuming you have Michiganders working in the battery plants, they get paid producing batteries, and then taxed by the state. The taxes pay for the roads, and workers can buy homes and other things while remaining in Michigan (flight seems to be a bit of a crisis in Detroit, last I read). And the cycle, ideally, repeats year after year.</text></comment> |
4,815,191 | 4,814,817 | 1 | 2 | 4,814,322 | train | <story><title>Extremist Programming</title><url>http://blog.ezyang.com/2012/11/extremist-programming?</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tikhonj</author><text>I agree with the blog's premise: "extremist" languages are great for language and for research. So this whole rant is not directly related to the post's central thesis. Instead, it's about the assumptions most people have whenever this topic comes up.<p>What I'm a little annoyed with can be summed up with a single banal and overused phrase: "the right tool for the right job".<p>For one, this phrase really doesn't say all that much--it's basically a tautology. Yes, using the right tool would be good, but with programming languages, it's rarely obvious what the right tool <i>is</i>! It's just a specialized version of the advice to "make the right choices", which is not much advice at all.<p>Another problem is that people inevitably ignore how much programming languages overlap. Virtually any languages worth comparing are going to be <i>general-purpose</i> languages. Choosing between a functional language and an OO language is not like choosing between a hammer and a screwdriver to pound in a nail, it's more like choosing between different types of hammer. In a world where hammers can do anything. (I don't know enough about carpentry to extend the analogy properly.) There are very few applications where one language clearly fits and another is clearly unsuited--and if you're in a vertical like that, the question just won't come up in the first place!<p>Another thing that comes up is people assuming that a multi-paradigm language has the benefits of <i>all</i> the paradigms it supports. I've found this is never the case. Even very multi-paradigm languages tend to favor one paradigm or the other more. And even if they didn't, there are benefits to being consistent. You can do much more by being functional <i>everywhere</i> than you can by merely supporting functional programming in some places. Any mix of paradigms is necessarily going to be a compromise, and the advantages of prioritizing one main paradigm can outweigh the flexibility of supporting more than one to any large extent. Doing one thing, and doing it well, is a powerful idea that doesn't stop applying in designing programming languages.<p>Now, I'm not leaning one way or the other here in any comparison of languages (I'm sure my biases are pretty evident and show through, they're just not germane to this comment); I just think that summarily dismissing a language for being too focused or too "extremist" or not multi-paradigm is rather short-sighted. Also, often, unless you've tried doing something in a language yourself, don't assume it's more difficult than what you already know. There is much "common wisdom" about (like "functional programming is bad for GUIs") which is often more "common" than "wisdom".</text></comment> | <story><title>Extremist Programming</title><url>http://blog.ezyang.com/2012/11/extremist-programming?</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jonsen</author><text>Another extreme direction to try out is the direction toward the machine. The value of trying out assembler programming may not have similarly direct benefits. But I personally find it a great general advantage to have detailed knowledge of under which practical conditions your program must run. To know that whatever fancy high level constructs you are making use of, you are always building a giant state machine where space is traded for time.</text></comment> |
40,981,976 | 40,981,953 | 1 | 2 | 40,977,834 | train | <story><title>Deconstructing the Role-Playing Video Game</title><url>https://olano.dev/blog/deconstructing-the-role-playing-videogame/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bityard</author><text>You are not wrong. Legend of Zelda is categorized as an adventure game. Or sometimes, action-adventure to emphasize the sword-swinging aspect.<p>This is the kind of thing that people will argue about, but to me, a role-playing video game is characterized by a controlling party (usually) of characters with stats that can change based on the player&#x27;s actions and&#x2F;or progress, and turn-based combat.</text></item><item><author>nox101</author><text>I always find these categories frustrating.<p>A Link to the Past and Chrono Trigger do not belong in the same category. In the first, you have action fights that require quick hand-eye coordination and skilled reflexes. In the 2nd you just choose actions from menus, no hand-eye coordination nor reflexes required.<p>To me, an RPG, has always meant the latter (choose [attack, magic, item] from a menu). Wizardry, Bard&#x27;s Tale (Apple II), FF7 are RPGs. A Link to the Past, Link&#x27;s Adventure, Breath of the Wild, are not.<p>I know the letters RPG stand for &quot;Role Playing Game&quot; but if we&#x27;re going to go down that route, Flight Sim is an RPG. You play the role of an airplane pilot. Mario Tennis, would also be an RPG. you play the role of a cartoon tennis players. GTA5 is an RPG. You play the role of a member of a street gang.<p>Since we know that&#x27;s not what people mean when they say RPG, we&#x27;re still left making sure were discussing comparable games. IMO, Zelda games (nearly all action games) are not comparable to Final Fantasy or other J-RPG games (nearly all select from a menu games). Their similarity is at most, they are set in a middle-earth tolken-esk setting where you fight monsters with swords. But that&#x27;s clearly not a useful distinction as it would leave out Earthbound or any other RPG not set in a wizards &amp; dragons type of setting.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bigger_cheese</author><text>I think everyone will have a different definition. In my opinion the &quot;Role Playing&quot; element is the ability for the game player to make deliberate choices which alter the character progression.<p>It can seem somewhat arbitrary. But to me a game like Diablo, Cyberpunk or Deus Ex where you are given a choice (to allocate skill points or similar) which changes the performance&#x2F;abilities of the character makes its &quot;roleplaying&quot;.<p>On the other hand something like Zelda or Metal Gear Solid the game play tended to change more based around obtaining certain items or reaching a certain stage of game rather than any decision based character progression<p>Something like Bioshock blurs the line as you make choices about which skills to obtain which alters the gameplay.</text></comment> | <story><title>Deconstructing the Role-Playing Video Game</title><url>https://olano.dev/blog/deconstructing-the-role-playing-videogame/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bityard</author><text>You are not wrong. Legend of Zelda is categorized as an adventure game. Or sometimes, action-adventure to emphasize the sword-swinging aspect.<p>This is the kind of thing that people will argue about, but to me, a role-playing video game is characterized by a controlling party (usually) of characters with stats that can change based on the player&#x27;s actions and&#x2F;or progress, and turn-based combat.</text></item><item><author>nox101</author><text>I always find these categories frustrating.<p>A Link to the Past and Chrono Trigger do not belong in the same category. In the first, you have action fights that require quick hand-eye coordination and skilled reflexes. In the 2nd you just choose actions from menus, no hand-eye coordination nor reflexes required.<p>To me, an RPG, has always meant the latter (choose [attack, magic, item] from a menu). Wizardry, Bard&#x27;s Tale (Apple II), FF7 are RPGs. A Link to the Past, Link&#x27;s Adventure, Breath of the Wild, are not.<p>I know the letters RPG stand for &quot;Role Playing Game&quot; but if we&#x27;re going to go down that route, Flight Sim is an RPG. You play the role of an airplane pilot. Mario Tennis, would also be an RPG. you play the role of a cartoon tennis players. GTA5 is an RPG. You play the role of a member of a street gang.<p>Since we know that&#x27;s not what people mean when they say RPG, we&#x27;re still left making sure were discussing comparable games. IMO, Zelda games (nearly all action games) are not comparable to Final Fantasy or other J-RPG games (nearly all select from a menu games). Their similarity is at most, they are set in a middle-earth tolken-esk setting where you fight monsters with swords. But that&#x27;s clearly not a useful distinction as it would leave out Earthbound or any other RPG not set in a wizards &amp; dragons type of setting.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lolinder</author><text>The party seems to be pretty optional, because I don&#x27;t know many (except maybe OP) who would seriously try to argue that Morrowind doesn&#x27;t count.</text></comment> |
30,015,450 | 30,015,406 | 1 | 3 | 30,012,544 | train | <story><title>Police in tiny Alabama town suck drivers into legal ‘black hole’</title><url>https://www.al.com/news/2022/01/police-in-this-tiny-alabama-town-suck-drivers-into-legal-black-hole.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Bhilai</author><text>In the town I live in, the police has decided to not to respond to nonemergency calls. They put the blame on their budget being cut and #defundthepolice movement. As it turns out some smart reporters looked up numbers and the budget was reduced in 2020 but it was increased back significantly in 2021.<p>Anecdotally, I see a constable car hiding near a stop sign close to my home almost everyday and ticketing people who do a rolling stop. How they prioritize pulling people over actually responding to incidents is beyond me.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ASalazarMX</author><text>&gt; How they prioritize pulling people over actually responding to incidents is beyond me.<p>To be honest, we all know it&#x27;s because traffic fines are risk-free income, while chasing actual criminals is an expense. The invisible hand of the Free Market(tm) optimizes for income instead of effectiveness, because police departments don&#x27;t have competition.</text></comment> | <story><title>Police in tiny Alabama town suck drivers into legal ‘black hole’</title><url>https://www.al.com/news/2022/01/police-in-this-tiny-alabama-town-suck-drivers-into-legal-black-hole.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Bhilai</author><text>In the town I live in, the police has decided to not to respond to nonemergency calls. They put the blame on their budget being cut and #defundthepolice movement. As it turns out some smart reporters looked up numbers and the budget was reduced in 2020 but it was increased back significantly in 2021.<p>Anecdotally, I see a constable car hiding near a stop sign close to my home almost everyday and ticketing people who do a rolling stop. How they prioritize pulling people over actually responding to incidents is beyond me.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>manuelabeledo</author><text>Sounds like Austin.<p>City council approved an increase in taxes, and used part of it to raise the APD budget [1]. This didn&#x27;t translate into a more effective force, and the perception among citizens is that police has given up on misdemeanors or infractions.<p>Incidentally, one of my neighbours is an officer, and his major complaints are the lack of new recruits, which is odd since that is ultimately the department responsibility, and the inability to charge people with possession of weed, since the city has effectively decriminalise it.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kut.org&#x2F;austin&#x2F;2021-08-12&#x2F;austin-passes-4-5-billion-budget-increases-police-budget-per-state-law" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kut.org&#x2F;austin&#x2F;2021-08-12&#x2F;austin-passes-4-5-bill...</a></text></comment> |
4,512,056 | 4,511,923 | 1 | 2 | 4,511,756 | train | <story><title>Apple Officially Reveals The iPhone 5</title><url>http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/12/apple-iphone-5-official/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ubershmekel</author><text>Screen resolution of 1136x640<p>Why on earth would they go 144x80 pixels shy of 720p, 1280x720?<p>Hasn't the world suffered enough from transcoding? So the eye sees your perfect DPI, but the pixels are going to be imperfect because it's a random down-sample size that doesn't divide anything standard.<p>I don't get it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>awolf</author><text>1136 means adding 88 screen pixels, which is 44 x 2.<p>44 is a magic number in iOS development. All navigation bars are 44px tall. All tap targets are recommended to be at least this size. It's very easy for developers to conceptualize 88 more vertical pixels and what to do with them; much easier to work with.<p>And let's face it, iOS is about the apps over watching videos. I'm sure 16:9 videos will look great.</text></comment> | <story><title>Apple Officially Reveals The iPhone 5</title><url>http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/12/apple-iphone-5-official/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ubershmekel</author><text>Screen resolution of 1136x640<p>Why on earth would they go 144x80 pixels shy of 720p, 1280x720?<p>Hasn't the world suffered enough from transcoding? So the eye sees your perfect DPI, but the pixels are going to be imperfect because it's a random down-sample size that doesn't divide anything standard.<p>I don't get it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>andrewmunsell</author><text>Devs would have a <i>completely</i> new resolution. This maintains compatibility without having a ton of black bars around the screen. And yes, I realize it letterboxes with older apps. But I don't want vertical black bars too.</text></comment> |
34,326,841 | 34,326,822 | 1 | 2 | 34,325,695 | train | <story><title>Taking over a Dead IoT Company</title><url>https://blog.kchung.co/taking-over-a-dead-iot-company/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ColdHeat</author><text>Hello, author here. Happy to answer any questions!<p>My apologies for the downtime, I wasn&#x27;t expecting much traffic today since I submitted the post to HN yesterday but I&#x27;ve started scaling my server now!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hahla</author><text>Love this story. I did something similar with a website. Previous owner took it down, bought the domain from him and it organically grew to over 1m users per month with the same exact functionality.<p>I wouldn&#x27;t discount your ability to bring this back to market. Would consult a lawyer to see what implications taking over the branding and APIs have. But clearly this has a big market.</text></comment> | <story><title>Taking over a Dead IoT Company</title><url>https://blog.kchung.co/taking-over-a-dead-iot-company/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ColdHeat</author><text>Hello, author here. Happy to answer any questions!<p>My apologies for the downtime, I wasn&#x27;t expecting much traffic today since I submitted the post to HN yesterday but I&#x27;ve started scaling my server now!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ivraatiems</author><text>I just want to say that I love that you did this. You have great skills and you used them for good. I&#x27;ve never seen such a clearly white-hat hack :)<p>People&#x27;s stuff will work again thanks to you and you should feel great about it!</text></comment> |
27,846,523 | 27,846,599 | 1 | 3 | 27,844,363 | train | <story><title>Josh: Get the advantages of a monorepo with multirepo setups</title><url>https://github.com/esrlabs/josh</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>derefr</author><text>IANAMU (I Am Not A Monorepo User), but as far as I understand monorepos and their advantages, I&#x27;m not sure what the use-case for this tooling is.<p>Most of the time, when an org chooses to move to having a monorepo (rather than just being left with one by accident of history), the key advantage they&#x27;re striving to attain, is the ability to make changes to cross-cutting concerns across many distinct applications&#x2F;libraries, with single commits&#x2F;PRs. To change an API, and <i>all</i> of its internal callers, atomically, without having to worry about symbolically binding the two together with dependency version constraint resolution.<p>Which is to say, the key advantage of a monorepo comes from having the whole monorepo checked out locally.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>majormajor</author><text>When I&#x27;ve used a monorepo, that was one of the explicit goals.<p>Avoiding &quot;here&#x27;s my new library version, go see if it breaks your shit&quot; was the goal - you make a change, you run the tests, you see if the whole company&#x27;s code can still build or not. Having fully-separate projects in directories in the monorepo using published dependencies was considered an antipattern (though it was very hard to keep some teams from doing that).<p>The disadvantages of the resulting monorepo weren&#x27;t &quot;this directories are so big to keep checked out when I&#x27;m just working on one specific project&quot; it was &quot;our old build times and build tools are dying under the strain and even trying to move to a &#x27;monorepo friendly&#x27; build tool might be an intractable problem because our dependency graph has become such a mess of spaghetti.&quot;<p>A monorepo that was done well from the start so you <i>don&#x27;t</i> have the slow-spaghetti-build problem from months or years of &quot;oh it&#x27;s easy to depend directly on this full other module, let&#x27;s just do that&quot; sounds very appealing. We just didn&#x27;t pull it off in practice, and this project would ... maybe... help in the early stages by letting people have more restricted checkouts? But only if you already know what you&#x27;re doing anyway.</text></comment> | <story><title>Josh: Get the advantages of a monorepo with multirepo setups</title><url>https://github.com/esrlabs/josh</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>derefr</author><text>IANAMU (I Am Not A Monorepo User), but as far as I understand monorepos and their advantages, I&#x27;m not sure what the use-case for this tooling is.<p>Most of the time, when an org chooses to move to having a monorepo (rather than just being left with one by accident of history), the key advantage they&#x27;re striving to attain, is the ability to make changes to cross-cutting concerns across many distinct applications&#x2F;libraries, with single commits&#x2F;PRs. To change an API, and <i>all</i> of its internal callers, atomically, without having to worry about symbolically binding the two together with dependency version constraint resolution.<p>Which is to say, the key advantage of a monorepo comes from having the whole monorepo checked out locally.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wildmanxx</author><text>The ability to do <i>some</i> changes like that is not the same as doing it <i>always</i>. Most commits are quite localized, and those should not be penalized by the ability to have a few cross-cutting ones.</text></comment> |
14,443,490 | 14,443,466 | 1 | 2 | 14,442,971 | train | <story><title>Someone forged my resignation letter</title><url>https://workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/91643/someone-forged-my-resignation-letter</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>skrebbel</author><text>Hardly related, but does anyone know why resignation letters are so popular in the first place? When I quit the only job I ever had, I went to my boss and told him I wanted to quit. We had a constructive conversation.<p>Now, this company has a very strong &quot;talk about it&quot; culture, with super supportive management, etc. No bureaucracy or paperwork anywhere. Nevertheless, my boss was totally surprised that I wanted to <i>talk</i> about resigning. Pleasantly surprised I might add, but still: In his entire career, every employee who had left had written a letter and left it at that.<p>Why do it that way? Of course I understand if there&#x27;s fundamental disagreements or deep unhappiness, it&#x27;s a good way to keep emotions out of the way. But that wasn&#x27;t the case here, and everybody I know who left that company left it on good terms.<p>I ask because I&#x27;m an employer now. I try to be a good and open-minded boss, and I&#x27;d much rather have someone tell me what&#x27;s going on than receive a letter out of the blue. Is this wishful thinking?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pm215</author><text>I (and the people I know) write resignation letters because it makes the intention clear (I really am resigning, not just sounding off because I&#x27;m annoyed or discussing possibilities). It also gets the facts down in writing in case of later possible confusion or dispute: in particular it ought to say &quot;my notice period is X and I have Y days of leave outstanding, so my final day of work will be Z&quot;.<p>Basically leaving work is a formal change in status that deserves to be memorialized in writing, just as the initial contract should be in writing and any subsequent changes would. That doesn&#x27;t mean I wouldn&#x27;t also talk to my manager, but the letter is important too I think.</text></comment> | <story><title>Someone forged my resignation letter</title><url>https://workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/91643/someone-forged-my-resignation-letter</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>skrebbel</author><text>Hardly related, but does anyone know why resignation letters are so popular in the first place? When I quit the only job I ever had, I went to my boss and told him I wanted to quit. We had a constructive conversation.<p>Now, this company has a very strong &quot;talk about it&quot; culture, with super supportive management, etc. No bureaucracy or paperwork anywhere. Nevertheless, my boss was totally surprised that I wanted to <i>talk</i> about resigning. Pleasantly surprised I might add, but still: In his entire career, every employee who had left had written a letter and left it at that.<p>Why do it that way? Of course I understand if there&#x27;s fundamental disagreements or deep unhappiness, it&#x27;s a good way to keep emotions out of the way. But that wasn&#x27;t the case here, and everybody I know who left that company left it on good terms.<p>I ask because I&#x27;m an employer now. I try to be a good and open-minded boss, and I&#x27;d much rather have someone tell me what&#x27;s going on than receive a letter out of the blue. Is this wishful thinking?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>michaelt</author><text><p><pre><code> does anyone know why resignation letters are
so popular in the first place?
</code></pre>
My employment contract literally says &quot;Your employment may be terminated either by you or by us by providing X weeks written notice&quot; and while I could work to get that language changed, I don&#x27;t imagine such a change would deliver measurable business benefits.<p>I suspect many employment contracts are the same, lawyers having seen that clause in some 25-year-old textbook.</text></comment> |
27,353,783 | 27,353,991 | 1 | 2 | 27,351,970 | train | <story><title>Swiss Covid Certificate – Technical documentation of the swiss Covid certificate</title><url>https://github.com/admin-ch/CovidCertificate-Documents</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>swiley</author><text>Doesn&#x27;t that creep you out at least a little bit?</text></item><item><author>CaptainZapp</author><text>You actually get heavily fined when you move to Switzerland and use your foreign license for more than a year.<p>Exchanging it is a small formality in most cases, but you need to do it.</text></item><item><author>zhdc1</author><text>Americans are far more distrustful.<p>The idea of registering with your local municipality is downright alien in the United States. At best, you&#x27;re required to eventually update your drivers license when you switch states, which (depending on the state) is the equivalent of &quot;maybe&quot; updating your license and vehicle registration whenever you eventually get around to it.<p>Compare that against moving between, say, Switzerland and Poland (or any other combination of Schengen member countries).</text></item><item><author>m_st</author><text>We Swiss people are also quite suspicious with this kind of documentation (Google Fichenaffäre &#x2F; secret files scandal for reasons). To my understanding you will get this Covid certificate either through vaccination, after having had Covid-19 or after a negative test.
So it&#x27;s not like a central vaccine database or so.<p>(Note that we had such a database called &quot;Elektronischer Impfausweis&quot; but it had to be taken down after it was found to be a mess in security)</text></item><item><author>mensetmanusman</author><text>From the G7 agenda reporting:<p>“ Last Friday morning, during an interview on Good Morning America, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said the Biden administration was taking “a very close look” at the possibility of vaccine passports for travel into and out of the United States.<p>However by Friday afternoon the Department of Homeland Security was clarifying Mayorkas’ statement. The DHS says there won’t be any federal vaccination database nor any mandate that requires people to get a single vaccination credential. It also said there are no plans for anything like a U.S. passport.”<p>The U.S. is suspicious of many types of documentation. E.g. none needed for voting in many areas, etc. The culture tends towards erring on less bureaucracy.<p>If more states ban covid-passports, I wonder if the EU would rather not have tourists than allow visitations.<p>Once there is a vaccine surplus, the vast amount of risk is on those who decide out of their own volition to not get vaccinated, at which point society can’t hold their hands anymore.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dvdkon</author><text>Not really. I think some people associate driving a car with freedom of movement. I get it, when it&#x27;s your primary mode of transport, it feels dystopian to have it taken away. Interestingly, I get a similar feeling in places with no&#x2F;unreliable public transport or in countries where I can&#x27;t walk through forests, meadows and fields. Not that walking through fields is my primary way of traveling, but it feels reassuring to know I can leave by just walking away (and then catching a bus to get home).</text></comment> | <story><title>Swiss Covid Certificate – Technical documentation of the swiss Covid certificate</title><url>https://github.com/admin-ch/CovidCertificate-Documents</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>swiley</author><text>Doesn&#x27;t that creep you out at least a little bit?</text></item><item><author>CaptainZapp</author><text>You actually get heavily fined when you move to Switzerland and use your foreign license for more than a year.<p>Exchanging it is a small formality in most cases, but you need to do it.</text></item><item><author>zhdc1</author><text>Americans are far more distrustful.<p>The idea of registering with your local municipality is downright alien in the United States. At best, you&#x27;re required to eventually update your drivers license when you switch states, which (depending on the state) is the equivalent of &quot;maybe&quot; updating your license and vehicle registration whenever you eventually get around to it.<p>Compare that against moving between, say, Switzerland and Poland (or any other combination of Schengen member countries).</text></item><item><author>m_st</author><text>We Swiss people are also quite suspicious with this kind of documentation (Google Fichenaffäre &#x2F; secret files scandal for reasons). To my understanding you will get this Covid certificate either through vaccination, after having had Covid-19 or after a negative test.
So it&#x27;s not like a central vaccine database or so.<p>(Note that we had such a database called &quot;Elektronischer Impfausweis&quot; but it had to be taken down after it was found to be a mess in security)</text></item><item><author>mensetmanusman</author><text>From the G7 agenda reporting:<p>“ Last Friday morning, during an interview on Good Morning America, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said the Biden administration was taking “a very close look” at the possibility of vaccine passports for travel into and out of the United States.<p>However by Friday afternoon the Department of Homeland Security was clarifying Mayorkas’ statement. The DHS says there won’t be any federal vaccination database nor any mandate that requires people to get a single vaccination credential. It also said there are no plans for anything like a U.S. passport.”<p>The U.S. is suspicious of many types of documentation. E.g. none needed for voting in many areas, etc. The culture tends towards erring on less bureaucracy.<p>If more states ban covid-passports, I wonder if the EU would rather not have tourists than allow visitations.<p>Once there is a vaccine surplus, the vast amount of risk is on those who decide out of their own volition to not get vaccinated, at which point society can’t hold their hands anymore.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>snovv_crash</author><text>No. Why? Because there is civilian oversight.<p>Compare this with the US, where if I want to give a proof of address for a phone contract, or a car lease, or anything else. In the US, I need to go to a private, for profit organisation who will send me some mail, and then by receiving this mail I &#x27;prove&#x27; that I live at this address. No civilian oversight, in fact they can sell that data to whoever they want<p>With the Swiss (or German) system, you get a proof of address when you register at your local center. They&#x27;re also the ones who handle things like marriage certificates, death certificates, etc. And then if they do something with the data that you&#x27;re unhappy with, you vote in new laws saying what is and isn&#x27;t acceptable.</text></comment> |
29,708,768 | 29,708,815 | 1 | 3 | 29,707,808 | train | <story><title>I made my first web0 website today. It's so cool it just works</title><url>https://elliott.computer/pages/web0.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tehjoker</author><text>It&#x27;s funny that web3 is being sold as the decentralized web when that&#x27;s what the internet architecture was literally designed for -- to survive an apocalyptic nuclear war. However, big players used their ability to purchase infrastructure and unforeseen flaws in the protocols to centralize much of the activity on the web. Lol if you think money can&#x27;t do that to any decentralized architecture.<p>One thing that would at least help. We got the web fractured from a p2p two-way street into a broadcast medium because ISP&#x27;s were able to use the exhaustion of the IPv4 address space to limit stable IPs to business class connections. I can&#x27;t claim we can bring that back, but wide deployment of IPv6 would at least demolish the argument against consumer static IPs and open up the network as a fair flat graph again.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>arnaudsm</author><text>I 100% agree. Imagine if self-hosting was taught in schools. Would Facebook and GMail be this big?<p>I&#x27;m dreaming of an alternate universe where you read your friends microblogs through RSS, with the client and timeline algorithm of your choice. Everyone has his own mail server, with proper open-source spam filters. Open-source is a public service, receiving donations from governments. We were so close to this.</text></comment> | <story><title>I made my first web0 website today. It's so cool it just works</title><url>https://elliott.computer/pages/web0.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tehjoker</author><text>It&#x27;s funny that web3 is being sold as the decentralized web when that&#x27;s what the internet architecture was literally designed for -- to survive an apocalyptic nuclear war. However, big players used their ability to purchase infrastructure and unforeseen flaws in the protocols to centralize much of the activity on the web. Lol if you think money can&#x27;t do that to any decentralized architecture.<p>One thing that would at least help. We got the web fractured from a p2p two-way street into a broadcast medium because ISP&#x27;s were able to use the exhaustion of the IPv4 address space to limit stable IPs to business class connections. I can&#x27;t claim we can bring that back, but wide deployment of IPv6 would at least demolish the argument against consumer static IPs and open up the network as a fair flat graph again.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>foobarbecue</author><text>So true. IP address should have been like phone numbers. The public should have known what they were and how to use them for 2-way communications. I tell non-technical people about this all the time and get blank stares. It didn&#x27;t occur to me that IPv6 could fix it. I sure hope you&#x27;re right about that -- what a glorious day it would be if everyone gained control of their computers&#x27; networking abilities.</text></comment> |
28,767,951 | 28,767,187 | 1 | 2 | 28,765,183 | train | <story><title>Show HN: ChessCoach – A neural chess engine that comments on each player's moves</title><url>https://chrisbutner.github.io/ChessCoach/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cbutner</author><text>This took about a year and a half – a little over a year coding in between experiments and training.<p>It&#x27;s a chess engine with a primary neural network just like AlphaZero or Leela Chess Zero&#x27;s, but it adds on a secondary &quot;commentary decoder&quot; network based on Transformer architecture to comment on positions and moves. All of the code and data for training and search is from scratch, although it does use Stockfish code to generate legal moves and manage chess positions.<p>You can watch it play on Lichess here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lichess.org&#x2F;@&#x2F;PlayChessCoach&#x2F;tv" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lichess.org&#x2F;@&#x2F;PlayChessCoach&#x2F;tv</a> or challenge it here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lichess.org&#x2F;?user=PlayChessCoach#friend" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lichess.org&#x2F;?user=PlayChessCoach#friend</a>, and see its commentary in spectator chat. It only plays one game at a time, so you may need to wait a little bit. It&#x27;s fairly strong (~3450 rating, roughly on par with Stockfish 12 or SlowChess Blitz 2.7), but you can set up a position when challenging it so that it&#x27;s missing a couple pawns or a piece (Variant: From Position).<p>I ended up writing much more about it than I expected. If you&#x27;re into the technical side of chess or machine learning, beyond the linked overview, there&#x27;s:<p>High-level explanation: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrisbutner.github.io&#x2F;ChessCoach&#x2F;high-level-explanation.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrisbutner.github.io&#x2F;ChessCoach&#x2F;high-level-explanat...</a><p>Technical explanation: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrisbutner.github.io&#x2F;ChessCoach&#x2F;technical-explanation.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrisbutner.github.io&#x2F;ChessCoach&#x2F;technical-explanati...</a> (including code pointers)<p>Development process: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrisbutner.github.io&#x2F;ChessCoach&#x2F;development-process.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrisbutner.github.io&#x2F;ChessCoach&#x2F;development-process...</a> (including timelines, bugs and failures)<p>Data: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrisbutner.github.io&#x2F;ChessCoach&#x2F;data.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrisbutner.github.io&#x2F;ChessCoach&#x2F;data.html</a> (including raw measurements and tournament PGN files)<p>And the code is here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;chrisbutner&#x2F;ChessCoach" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;chrisbutner&#x2F;ChessCoach</a> (C++ and Python, GPLv3 or later)<p>Happy to answer any questions!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mcyc</author><text>This is a fantastic project. Thanks for sharing!<p>I had a nice long conversation with two of the authors of [0] at ACL.<p>One thing we discussed was the reverse problem. That is, as a player, could I give commands to the model and have the engine figure the moves that would best satisfy them.<p>This ranges from concrete like &quot;take the black square bishop&quot; (there is still variability like which piece should take it or if it&#x27;s even possible) to more complex positional stuff like &quot;set up to attack the kingside.&quot;<p>Any thoughts on this line of research?<p>[0] Automated Chess Commentator Powered by Neural Chess Engine (Zang, Yu &amp; Wan, 2019) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;1909.10413.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;1909.10413.pdf</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Show HN: ChessCoach – A neural chess engine that comments on each player's moves</title><url>https://chrisbutner.github.io/ChessCoach/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cbutner</author><text>This took about a year and a half – a little over a year coding in between experiments and training.<p>It&#x27;s a chess engine with a primary neural network just like AlphaZero or Leela Chess Zero&#x27;s, but it adds on a secondary &quot;commentary decoder&quot; network based on Transformer architecture to comment on positions and moves. All of the code and data for training and search is from scratch, although it does use Stockfish code to generate legal moves and manage chess positions.<p>You can watch it play on Lichess here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lichess.org&#x2F;@&#x2F;PlayChessCoach&#x2F;tv" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lichess.org&#x2F;@&#x2F;PlayChessCoach&#x2F;tv</a> or challenge it here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lichess.org&#x2F;?user=PlayChessCoach#friend" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lichess.org&#x2F;?user=PlayChessCoach#friend</a>, and see its commentary in spectator chat. It only plays one game at a time, so you may need to wait a little bit. It&#x27;s fairly strong (~3450 rating, roughly on par with Stockfish 12 or SlowChess Blitz 2.7), but you can set up a position when challenging it so that it&#x27;s missing a couple pawns or a piece (Variant: From Position).<p>I ended up writing much more about it than I expected. If you&#x27;re into the technical side of chess or machine learning, beyond the linked overview, there&#x27;s:<p>High-level explanation: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrisbutner.github.io&#x2F;ChessCoach&#x2F;high-level-explanation.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrisbutner.github.io&#x2F;ChessCoach&#x2F;high-level-explanat...</a><p>Technical explanation: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrisbutner.github.io&#x2F;ChessCoach&#x2F;technical-explanation.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrisbutner.github.io&#x2F;ChessCoach&#x2F;technical-explanati...</a> (including code pointers)<p>Development process: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrisbutner.github.io&#x2F;ChessCoach&#x2F;development-process.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrisbutner.github.io&#x2F;ChessCoach&#x2F;development-process...</a> (including timelines, bugs and failures)<p>Data: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrisbutner.github.io&#x2F;ChessCoach&#x2F;data.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrisbutner.github.io&#x2F;ChessCoach&#x2F;data.html</a> (including raw measurements and tournament PGN files)<p>And the code is here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;chrisbutner&#x2F;ChessCoach" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;chrisbutner&#x2F;ChessCoach</a> (C++ and Python, GPLv3 or later)<p>Happy to answer any questions!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>modeless</author><text>Where did you source the commentary dataset?</text></comment> |
9,432,291 | 9,432,217 | 1 | 2 | 9,431,944 | train | <story><title>Becoming Productive in Haskell</title><url>http://mechanical-elephant.com/thoughts/2015-04-20-becoming-productive-in-haskell/index.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>QuantumRoar</author><text>Scripting languages try to seduce you to just fiddle around until the output looks like something you want. While that quickly gives you some results, I think it&#x27;s a huge roadblock in the mid- to longterm. Especially when programmers are only familiar with &quot;easy&quot; scripting languages, there are rarely insights about the general approach to the problem until the project already grew to become an abomination.<p>While fiddling around is still somewhat possible in Haskell, the language itself makes it quite difficult. Haskell kind of forces you right at the beginning to pause and think &quot;Well, what is it that I&#x27;m actually trying to do here?&quot; It let&#x27;s you recognize and apply common patterns and implement them in abstract ways without having to think about what kind of values you actually have at runtime. In that way Haskell is the most powerful language I know.<p>Have a tree&#x2F;list&#x2F;whatever? Need to apply a function to each of the elements? Make your tree&#x2F;list&#x2F;whatever an instance of the Functor type class and you&#x27;re done. Need to accumulate a result from all the elements? Make it foldable.<p>Something depends on some state? Make it a Monad.<p>You either get a result or you don&#x27;t (in which case any further computations shouldn&#x27;t apply)? Use the Maybe Monad.<p>You need to compute different possible results? Use the List Monad.<p>Need to distinguish three different possible values that are different compositions of elementary types? Make yourself your own type and pattern match the behavior of applying functions.<p>Need to output in a certain way? Make it an instance of the Show class.<p>Most concepts that are used every day have some kind of idea behind them that is abstract and implementation independent. Haskell kind of forces you to reference those ideas directly. The downside is that you actually have to know about those concepts. However, knowing about the such concepts makes you also a better programmer in other languages, so it&#x27;s not like it&#x27;s a bad thing.</text></comment> | <story><title>Becoming Productive in Haskell</title><url>http://mechanical-elephant.com/thoughts/2015-04-20-becoming-productive-in-haskell/index.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>david-given</author><text>The author&#x27;s comments on noise chime true with me: every time I give Haskell a try I end up struggling with frustrating and opaque vocabulary, sometimes completely at odds with the way other languages use them: e.g. C++ also has functors, and they&#x27;re completely unrelated to Haskell functors.<p>I really like the author&#x27;s suggestion of mentally translating Functor to Mappable. Are there any other synonyms for other Haskell terms of art?<p>What I&#x27;d really like, I suppose, is a complete overhaul of Haskell syntax to modernise and clarify everything: make it use actual <i>words</i> to describe things (foldl vs foldl&#x27;? BIG NO). Put in syntax redundancy and visual space to avoid the word soup effect: typing is cheap, understanding is expensive. Normalise and simplify terminology. Fix the semantic warts which make hacks like seq necessary --- if I need to worry about strictness and order of evaluation, then the language is doing lazy wrong. etc.<p>Basically I want language X such that X:Haskell like Java:K&amp;R C.<p>This will never happen, of course; the people who have the knowledge to do such a thing won&#x27;t do it because they are fully indoctrinated into the Haskell Way Of Life...</text></comment> |
30,888,037 | 30,888,052 | 1 | 3 | 30,864,616 | train | <story><title>A history of Hup, the jump sound of shooting games</title><url>https://www.wired.com/story/hup-history-jump-sound-video-games/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>icecap12</author><text>The &#x27;hup&#x27; for me will always be associated with Quake, as I played that for a long time.<p>When I was a youngster in the early 90s, a grade school classmate of mine had a huge computer network at home. His dad worked for the (local) Washington, DC NBC affiliate as one of their system engineers. Their house was fully networked mecca of multiple Unix, Windows, and Apple machines on different floors.<p>Back then most homes didn&#x27;t have a computer, and if they did, it was just one. Internet connections were achieved with dial-up modems to the local BBS or service provider. Almost nobody my age was playing computer games, only people working in industry. Even fewer had a network, since online play didn&#x27;t exist for most games (tho there were exceptions, like Netrek...miss that game too)<p>I originally learned the command line by using it to start computer games. This guy had basically ALL of the major gaming titles through about 1997, at which point I bought my own computer. Many of the other shooters back then were horror-themed knockoffs of Doom and Quake (like Hexen, Heretic, etc.), though all had their nuances. What I think of as the golden age of FPS games happened shortly after, in 98, with the release of Half-Life and Unreal.<p>That early experience was how I got into computing at a time when most kids had no real exposure to computers. Still miss those times.</text></comment> | <story><title>A history of Hup, the jump sound of shooting games</title><url>https://www.wired.com/story/hup-history-jump-sound-video-games/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jfroma</author><text>I remember we played Price of Persia without soundcard and one day my father came to tell me he saw the game in someone’s else computer and he could listen the steps and the junp.. we got a Sound Blaster 16 for that Christmas which came in a huge box. Bigger than a laptop today<p>Edit: maybe it wasn’t prince of persia, I am confused now.</text></comment> |
37,139,660 | 37,139,619 | 1 | 3 | 37,138,691 | train | <story><title>Requiring ink to scan a document–yet another insult from the printer industry</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/08/the-printers-that-require-ink-to-scan-and-fax/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nraynaud</author><text>Doesn&#x27;t one of the SV rich kids want to make the world a better place by building non-crappy printers? The only innovation would be to forbid anyone with a MBA from making any decision or suggestion at any level of the company. Normal basic printers, the tech is here, we want not even faster horses, thanks (actually that might be the impetus for someone to define what a faster horse would be).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>m463</author><text>It is hard to find people fixing race-to-the-bottom markets.<p>I do like craigslist.org</text></comment> | <story><title>Requiring ink to scan a document–yet another insult from the printer industry</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/08/the-printers-that-require-ink-to-scan-and-fax/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nraynaud</author><text>Doesn&#x27;t one of the SV rich kids want to make the world a better place by building non-crappy printers? The only innovation would be to forbid anyone with a MBA from making any decision or suggestion at any level of the company. Normal basic printers, the tech is here, we want not even faster horses, thanks (actually that might be the impetus for someone to define what a faster horse would be).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Waterluvian</author><text>I’ve always wondered this. How is there not even one single billionaire who wants to just stick it to an entire industry?</text></comment> |
35,318,191 | 35,318,302 | 1 | 3 | 35,316,822 | train | <story><title>SVB collapse could mean a $500B venture capital ‘haircut’</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-24/svb-debacle-could-mean-a-500-billion-venture-capital-haircut</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kurthr</author><text>Play bank run games, win bank run prizes.<p>Really, I don&#x27;t love the regulatory arbitrage played by SVB and unhedged duration risk, nor the moral hazard created by the bailout, nor the somewhat bizarre attitude of companies holding huge $100Ms of uninsured deposits earning minimal interest (why have more than 1 months cash flow?), but really this was a bank run pure and simple. When you have to plan to lose &gt;20% of your deposits in a single day you&#x27;re not a bank anymore. That is a money market account or some other product, which doesn&#x27;t lend long. It&#x27;s a bit apropos that those who started the run will pay part of the price, although there&#x27;s a LOT of collateral damage, and I don&#x27;t doubt those who started it will ultimately turn that to their advantage since they have the deepest pockets.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnn.com&#x2F;2023&#x2F;03&#x2F;14&#x2F;tech&#x2F;viral-bank-run&#x2F;index.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnn.com&#x2F;2023&#x2F;03&#x2F;14&#x2F;tech&#x2F;viral-bank-run&#x2F;index.htm...</a><p>BTW you can blame the Fed for low interest rates, but it&#x27;s the yield curve inversion and long rates which caused the liquidity&#x2F;solvency problem not the short term rate hikes (not raising short rates would increase inflation expectations and push 10y rates even higher!). And there is no hard line between solvency and liquidity, because it all has to do with time scale. If I say you have to give me $1000 in the next 3 seconds or I take your car, you can&#x27;t do it because you can&#x27;t reach your wallet fast enough.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>akira2501</author><text>&gt; you can blame the Fed for low interest rates, but it&#x27;s the yield curve inversion and long rates which caused the liquidity&#x2F;solvency problem not the short term rate hikes<p>I blame the bank management. They left the risk management position open and spent way too much time, money and effort on marketing during that period of time rather than shoring up their shaky position.</text></comment> | <story><title>SVB collapse could mean a $500B venture capital ‘haircut’</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-24/svb-debacle-could-mean-a-500-billion-venture-capital-haircut</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kurthr</author><text>Play bank run games, win bank run prizes.<p>Really, I don&#x27;t love the regulatory arbitrage played by SVB and unhedged duration risk, nor the moral hazard created by the bailout, nor the somewhat bizarre attitude of companies holding huge $100Ms of uninsured deposits earning minimal interest (why have more than 1 months cash flow?), but really this was a bank run pure and simple. When you have to plan to lose &gt;20% of your deposits in a single day you&#x27;re not a bank anymore. That is a money market account or some other product, which doesn&#x27;t lend long. It&#x27;s a bit apropos that those who started the run will pay part of the price, although there&#x27;s a LOT of collateral damage, and I don&#x27;t doubt those who started it will ultimately turn that to their advantage since they have the deepest pockets.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnn.com&#x2F;2023&#x2F;03&#x2F;14&#x2F;tech&#x2F;viral-bank-run&#x2F;index.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnn.com&#x2F;2023&#x2F;03&#x2F;14&#x2F;tech&#x2F;viral-bank-run&#x2F;index.htm...</a><p>BTW you can blame the Fed for low interest rates, but it&#x27;s the yield curve inversion and long rates which caused the liquidity&#x2F;solvency problem not the short term rate hikes (not raising short rates would increase inflation expectations and push 10y rates even higher!). And there is no hard line between solvency and liquidity, because it all has to do with time scale. If I say you have to give me $1000 in the next 3 seconds or I take your car, you can&#x27;t do it because you can&#x27;t reach your wallet fast enough.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>arcticbull</author><text>&gt; nor the moral hazard created by the bailout<p>There was no moral hazard created because bank shareholder equity got zeroed out.<p>Bank management and shareholders were not protected against the &#x27;find out&#x27; phase.</text></comment> |
40,860,289 | 40,860,241 | 1 | 2 | 40,859,993 | train | <story><title>Google's carbon emissions surge nearly 50% due to AI energy demand</title><url>https://www.cnbc.com/2024/07/02/googles-carbon-emissions-surge-nearly-50percent-due-to-ai-energy-demand.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>kens</author><text>The headline is bogus and most of the comments are responding to the headline. Google&#x27;s emissions increased 13% since last year, &quot;primarily due to increases in data center energy consumption and supply chain emissions.&quot; It&#x27;s unclear how much is due to AI. The supposed surge is a 48% increase compared to *2019*, consisting of moderate increases every year since 2020, not a nearly 50% surge due to AI.<p>Google&#x27;s document is at: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gstatic.com&#x2F;gumdrop&#x2F;sustainability&#x2F;google-2024-environmental-report.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gstatic.com&#x2F;gumdrop&#x2F;sustainability&#x2F;google-2024-e...</a>
See pdf page 8 &#x2F; document page 7 for details, as well as the graph on page 32&#x2F;31.</text></comment> | <story><title>Google's carbon emissions surge nearly 50% due to AI energy demand</title><url>https://www.cnbc.com/2024/07/02/googles-carbon-emissions-surge-nearly-50percent-due-to-ai-energy-demand.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Frieren</author><text>I see the current gold rush of AI the same way I saw crypto-currencies. Even if originally there were people that believed in the concept it became just a snake-oil sellers business.<p>The parallelism is made even more relevant by its hungry use of electricity.<p>There is a future for AI but it is not what we see companies developing right now. Chat-bots are more dystopian and problematic than useful. AI future (and present) is on analyzing big chunks of data about chemical bounds, traffic-flow, astronomical observations, etc.<p>But all that really useful AI is not attracting the kind of investment that flashy consumer-oriented chat-bots are getting.</text></comment> |
22,414,555 | 22,414,720 | 1 | 2 | 22,413,805 | train | <story><title>Implement with types, not your brain (2019)</title><url>https://reasonablypolymorphic.com/blog/typeholes/index.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>_bxg1</author><text>Rich Hickey once said something (with regards to TDD) like, &quot;We have guard rails on highways, but that doesn&#x27;t mean we just take our hands off the wheel because the rails will keep us on the road. Guard rails don&#x27;t know where we actually want to go. We drive the car where we&#x27;re trying to go, and the rails are only there for when things go wrong.&quot;<p>I think a version of this applies to static types as well. Even under normal circumstances, I&#x27;ve noticed at times my own thoughts getting lazy when refactoring statically-typed code. I don&#x27;t &quot;load&quot; as much of the program into my brain as I would otherwise; I just change the part I want to change and then fairly thoughtlessly fix all the type errors. I don&#x27;t think this is a good thing. The OP takes this to an absolute extreme.<p>Static types are there to document and to catch bugs early; they cannot be used as a complete verification that your code is correct, much less a <i>generative</i> tool for writing logic where &quot;you&#x27;re not entirely sure how&quot; it works.</text></item><item><author>q3k</author><text>This way of writing Haskell, from my experience, results in write-only code. While it&#x27;s nice that the compiler helped you figure out which obscure operators to use for your code to actually compile, it sucks for the next person trying to find the bug in your code. And just because the types check out doesn&#x27;t mean it&#x27;s free from bugs.<p>Code is also meant to be read and reasoned about by humans, not just by the compiler.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jerf</author><text>&quot;I don&#x27;t think this is a good thing.&quot;<p>How good a thing it is depends on how right you are when you do it. If your language is statically typed, but not very well, then it&#x27;s a bad thing. But it&#x27;s not just abstractly a bad thing because you are a lazy person who didn&#x27;t choose to do useless cognitive work, it&#x27;s a bad thing because you may be wrong. To give a specific example, if your type system forcibly adjoins NULL to all pointer types, you can&#x27;t afford to take your hands off the wheel when dealing with pointer types and neglect that case. You <i>must</i> think about it when using pointer types.<p>On the other hand, if you take your hands off the wheel for a moment, but you perform only type system manipulations that you have good and correct reasons to believe won&#x27;t affect the behavior of the underlying code... then what&#x27;s wrong with that?<p>I&#x27;m guessing you&#x27;ve used the former type of language more than the latter? Me too. I think you&#x27;ve turned the justifiable fear you feel in that sort of language into a heuristic, which makes it easy to then forget the underlying problems. But there&#x27;s no <i>particular</i> virtue to <i>having</i> to understand more of the program to do a manipulation than having to understand less. Proof: If that was <i>always</i> true, then that recurses on itself until you shouldn&#x27;t ever make a change until you understand the whole program completely in your head at once (if not the whole system it is running on). Even if that&#x27;s true, it doesn&#x27;t matter; we humans don&#x27;t have the cognitive capacity for that, we <i>must</i> window our understandings.<p>It isn&#x27;t just the micro task of refactoring one particular function; it&#x27;s completely common for me to undertake a type-driven refactoring of code where <i>just</i> the type-driven aspects are plenty to fill my cognitive window. Especially since I&#x27;m usually in a looser language and I really have to watch those darned forcibly-adjoined NULLs. If I&#x27;m somehow &quot;obligated&quot; to understand more, the result isn&#x27;t that I&#x27;m going to have that understanding, the result is that my hand will be tied and I won&#x27;t be able to do that refactoring because it&#x27;ll blow out my cognitive budget.</text></comment> | <story><title>Implement with types, not your brain (2019)</title><url>https://reasonablypolymorphic.com/blog/typeholes/index.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>_bxg1</author><text>Rich Hickey once said something (with regards to TDD) like, &quot;We have guard rails on highways, but that doesn&#x27;t mean we just take our hands off the wheel because the rails will keep us on the road. Guard rails don&#x27;t know where we actually want to go. We drive the car where we&#x27;re trying to go, and the rails are only there for when things go wrong.&quot;<p>I think a version of this applies to static types as well. Even under normal circumstances, I&#x27;ve noticed at times my own thoughts getting lazy when refactoring statically-typed code. I don&#x27;t &quot;load&quot; as much of the program into my brain as I would otherwise; I just change the part I want to change and then fairly thoughtlessly fix all the type errors. I don&#x27;t think this is a good thing. The OP takes this to an absolute extreme.<p>Static types are there to document and to catch bugs early; they cannot be used as a complete verification that your code is correct, much less a <i>generative</i> tool for writing logic where &quot;you&#x27;re not entirely sure how&quot; it works.</text></item><item><author>q3k</author><text>This way of writing Haskell, from my experience, results in write-only code. While it&#x27;s nice that the compiler helped you figure out which obscure operators to use for your code to actually compile, it sucks for the next person trying to find the bug in your code. And just because the types check out doesn&#x27;t mean it&#x27;s free from bugs.<p>Code is also meant to be read and reasoned about by humans, not just by the compiler.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>agentultra</author><text>&gt; Static types are there to document and to catch bugs early; they cannot be used as a complete verification that your code is correct, much less a generative tool for writing logic where &quot;you&#x27;re not entirely sure how&quot; it works.<p>You might be surprised to learn that this is not only possible but something research is definitely working towards.<p>In a language like Agda, for example, when there is enough type information available the compiler can fill in the holes for you with the obviously correct implementation.<p>The idea behind program synthesis drives this even further. Using type level specifications we can automatically derive the programs that meet those specifications. This is useful because the language of types is much more concise than the language of terms. For sufficiently difficult problems it&#x27;s much easier for humans to reason about complexity in higher-level specifications. Let the computer generate the code!<p>It&#x27;s still early on for this kind of technology but projects like Synquid[0] are making good headway.<p>Dependent-type theory also forms the basis of interactive theorem proving in Coq and Lean[1]. We use something like holes as the basis of proofs. Haskell&#x27;s typed holes are quite a bit more loose but to me it feels very similar to working with such a system. I propose to Haskell there there exists an expression that satisfies a particular type and then I use the typed holes to fill in my obligations to provide a proof. The hole is my goal and the available objects in scope are my terms. It is a very effective tool for solving hard problems.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.csail.mit.edu&#x2F;research&#x2F;synquid-synthesis-liquid-types" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.csail.mit.edu&#x2F;research&#x2F;synquid-synthesis-liquid-...</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;leanprover.github.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;leanprover.github.io&#x2F;</a><p><i>update</i>: Links</text></comment> |
11,943,562 | 11,943,388 | 1 | 2 | 11,943,149 | train | <story><title>A Third of Valve Is Now Working on VR</title><url>http://uploadvr.com/valve-third-vr/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jn1234</author><text>The by far most interesting comment from the thread is this one (It&#x27;s by Alan Yates who works on Vive&#x2F;SteamVR) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;Vive&#x2F;comments&#x2F;4osav8&#x2F;lighthouse_tracked_osvr&#x2F;d4geko7" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;Vive&#x2F;comments&#x2F;4osav8&#x2F;lighthouse_tra...</a>.<p>&gt;Of course. We want AR&#x2F;VR&#x2F;MR to be ubiquitous.
Over the past four years or so I&#x27;ve seen many companies big and small bring their demos to show and tell. They all have bits and pieces of the larger puzzle. Good eye tracking, interesting haptic techniques, next generation display technologies. But most of them are narrowly focused on their thing, and struggle alone to make a successful product. Partially this was just because the market didn&#x27;t exist but also many of them were&#x2F;are just trying to boil the ocean. The minimum viable product is now a pretty high bar and that can stifle innovation. We can offer a running start, the traditionally &quot;hard&quot; parts of HMD technology, the things other than GPUs that kept VR niche for so long.
In return we ask that your device leveraging our technology works with our platform. And mostly that is it. We won&#x27;t ask that it only works on our platform, we won&#x27;t stop you from targeting other industries. This gives both you and your users freedom of choice and security that isn&#x27;t dependant on either party&#x27;s future decisions. It is a pretty good deal really. Our platform has a rapidly growing collection of great content for your end-users so your product won&#x27;t be an orphan and you don&#x27;t need to convince anyone to author for it. Day one people can fire up Tilt Brush and have their minds blown by your awesome new hardware.<p>If Valve games are &quot;locked&quot; to SteamVR and won&#x27;t play on Oculus, then nobody is going to buy an Oculus. Does Facebook really think that people are going to choose Lucky&#x27;s Tale over Portal 3 or Half-Life 3? Facebook is going to have to capitulate and focus on their hardware advantage.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nilkn</author><text>It&#x27;s the opposite. I think you might have misunderstood the quote. SteamVR fully supports the Rift. It even supports the unreleased Touch controllers which likely won&#x27;t be out until the end of the year. And Valve has made no indication that they&#x27;re going to change this. In fact, they&#x27;ve suggested that they&#x27;re very serious about always supporting all HMDs.</text></comment> | <story><title>A Third of Valve Is Now Working on VR</title><url>http://uploadvr.com/valve-third-vr/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jn1234</author><text>The by far most interesting comment from the thread is this one (It&#x27;s by Alan Yates who works on Vive&#x2F;SteamVR) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;Vive&#x2F;comments&#x2F;4osav8&#x2F;lighthouse_tracked_osvr&#x2F;d4geko7" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;Vive&#x2F;comments&#x2F;4osav8&#x2F;lighthouse_tra...</a>.<p>&gt;Of course. We want AR&#x2F;VR&#x2F;MR to be ubiquitous.
Over the past four years or so I&#x27;ve seen many companies big and small bring their demos to show and tell. They all have bits and pieces of the larger puzzle. Good eye tracking, interesting haptic techniques, next generation display technologies. But most of them are narrowly focused on their thing, and struggle alone to make a successful product. Partially this was just because the market didn&#x27;t exist but also many of them were&#x2F;are just trying to boil the ocean. The minimum viable product is now a pretty high bar and that can stifle innovation. We can offer a running start, the traditionally &quot;hard&quot; parts of HMD technology, the things other than GPUs that kept VR niche for so long.
In return we ask that your device leveraging our technology works with our platform. And mostly that is it. We won&#x27;t ask that it only works on our platform, we won&#x27;t stop you from targeting other industries. This gives both you and your users freedom of choice and security that isn&#x27;t dependant on either party&#x27;s future decisions. It is a pretty good deal really. Our platform has a rapidly growing collection of great content for your end-users so your product won&#x27;t be an orphan and you don&#x27;t need to convince anyone to author for it. Day one people can fire up Tilt Brush and have their minds blown by your awesome new hardware.<p>If Valve games are &quot;locked&quot; to SteamVR and won&#x27;t play on Oculus, then nobody is going to buy an Oculus. Does Facebook really think that people are going to choose Lucky&#x27;s Tale over Portal 3 or Half-Life 3? Facebook is going to have to capitulate and focus on their hardware advantage.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>alcari</author><text>But Valve hasn&#x27;t locked out the Oculus. Plug one into a computer with Steam and it&#x27;ll pop up a prompt to setup SteamVR just the same as plugging in a Vive. It even includes a link to Oculus-specific instructions: you need to set it up with the Oculus app and change a setting there to enable the Oculus device for use outside the Oculus store.<p>(Source: anecdotal experience from plugging a Rift into a computer that didn&#x27;t have a real GPU; no idea if there are any other issues.)</text></comment> |
41,148,685 | 41,148,270 | 1 | 3 | 41,147,545 | train | <story><title>Boeing's Starliner proves better at torching cash than reaching orbit</title><url>https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/02/boeing_starliner_losses/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>shrubble</author><text>Former Boeing CEO McNerny hated the &quot;phenomenally talented **holes&quot; in engineering roles and sought to minimize their power or get rid of them .<p>Dreamliner was delayed and cost 3x the amount to develop as a result.<p>This may be more follow-on from engineering-hostile management.</text></comment> | <story><title>Boeing's Starliner proves better at torching cash than reaching orbit</title><url>https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/02/boeing_starliner_losses/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Tuna-Fish</author><text>Even if it&#x27;s deemed sufficiently safe, there&#x27;s no way the Starliner is coming down before 6th of November.<p>Harris is the chair of the Space Council. Even if it&#x27;s in no way her fault, two torched astronauts with her in some way attached is just too easy to write headlines about. Similarly, if they publicly decide that it&#x27;s unsafe, that&#x27;s declaring failure.</text></comment> |
40,000,878 | 40,000,471 | 1 | 3 | 39,998,849 | train | <story><title>AI-generated sad girl with piano performs the text of the MIT License</title><url>https://suno.com/song/da6d4a83-1001-4694-8c28-648a6e8bad0a/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Max-q</author><text>When recorded music was invented, musicians protested. Recorded music was devoid of any vitality or soul. Recorded music still became a hit. Then we got the synthesizer. Again we got the same complaints, lifeless and without soul. The synthesizer still became a hit. Now the next step is happening, and we see the same complaints all over.<p>Only time will show if the next step will happen anyway. My gut feeling tells me that AI art will gain acceptance over time, and we will just think of it as &quot;art&quot; or &quot;music&quot;, just as we did with recorded mysic and synthetic sounds.</text></item><item><author>chilmers</author><text>To me the feeling of AI generated content is less &quot;slop&quot; and more &quot;in-flight magazine&quot;. It can have a surface sheen of quality that you can lure you in, but you realise it&#x27;s devoid of any vitality or soul.</text></item><item><author>cedws</author><text>I don&#x27;t think I can endure much more AI slop seeping its way into my life.</text></item><item><author>epaga</author><text>I have to say, I completely lost it at the whisper &#x27;(The &quot;Software&quot;)&#x27; (0:18)... give this tech another year or two and it will be better quality than your average radio song.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tumult</author><text>Humanity lost some things when it gained recorded music. It made the profession of performer less valuable, and diminished the number of performers who could make a living. But humanity got something very valuable in return — the ability to record and play back music. The same goes with the tradeoffs made for photography and motion pictures.<p>I see little value to humanity in tools that are able to generate an endless amount of music derived from existing music, specifically designed to neatly slot into the place of human artists. We gain little in return from that.<p>Some people will make an argument like, this lets people generate lots of low-quality music for use in elevators or grocery stores. Well, there is already a massive oversupply of completely free music which can do that. Do people pretend to not know this?<p>The other weak argument is that it lets people express themselves who haven&#x27;t studied or practiced music. But, it doesn&#x27;t, because the interfaces (text prompts or &quot;upload an existing file&quot;) are designed to take the place of a human being given instructions for criteria to fill, as if they were a worker, not an expression of the person giving the instructions. If the person giving the instructions were expressing themselves, most of the AI tool would not be redundant. It&#x27;s as expressive as telling another person to write a song for you with some instructions. Hardly expressive at all.</text></comment> | <story><title>AI-generated sad girl with piano performs the text of the MIT License</title><url>https://suno.com/song/da6d4a83-1001-4694-8c28-648a6e8bad0a/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Max-q</author><text>When recorded music was invented, musicians protested. Recorded music was devoid of any vitality or soul. Recorded music still became a hit. Then we got the synthesizer. Again we got the same complaints, lifeless and without soul. The synthesizer still became a hit. Now the next step is happening, and we see the same complaints all over.<p>Only time will show if the next step will happen anyway. My gut feeling tells me that AI art will gain acceptance over time, and we will just think of it as &quot;art&quot; or &quot;music&quot;, just as we did with recorded mysic and synthetic sounds.</text></item><item><author>chilmers</author><text>To me the feeling of AI generated content is less &quot;slop&quot; and more &quot;in-flight magazine&quot;. It can have a surface sheen of quality that you can lure you in, but you realise it&#x27;s devoid of any vitality or soul.</text></item><item><author>cedws</author><text>I don&#x27;t think I can endure much more AI slop seeping its way into my life.</text></item><item><author>epaga</author><text>I have to say, I completely lost it at the whisper &#x27;(The &quot;Software&quot;)&#x27; (0:18)... give this tech another year or two and it will be better quality than your average radio song.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>TheCapeGreek</author><text>Agreed.<p>Another side of it is that it will enable the creation of more music around <i>more topics</i> than before, by non-musicians. The accessibility bar is lower.<p>For a lot of people, music is a way to express their emotions, and not just by creating&#x2F;playing it, but by listening to it. Now, you&#x27;ll be make your own hyper-specific music with lyrics around topics specific to you, without learning any of the underlying skills yourself.<p>I&#x27;ve certainly wanted some kinds of music&#x2F;representation in music of some of my experiences to exist, but not enough to go out and learn to make it myself. Now&#x2F;soon I should be able to do that with AI tools, and I think that&#x27;s actually neat!</text></comment> |
19,078,919 | 19,078,995 | 1 | 2 | 19,076,528 | train | <story><title>Google Has Quietly Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking (2016)</title><url>https://www.propublica.org/article/google-has-quietly-dropped-ban-on-personally-identifiable-web-tracking</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>petilon</author><text>If you want to see an example of the devious means now employed by Google, open Chrome settings and turn off &quot;Allow Chrome sign-in&quot;. Then go to Gmail and sign in. You are now signed into Chrome, regardless of the setting. By signing into Gmail you are sharing your identity with the browser itself.<p>Microsoft&#x27;s Chromium-based Edge can&#x27;t arrive soon enough.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mulmen</author><text>It still blows my mind that any technologically literate person would use Chrome as their primary browser in 2019. Or 2018, or really ever.<p>The incentives for Google are perverse, this is really simple reasoning.<p>Google will continue their MS-esque Embrace-Extend-Extinguish march until only Chrome is left. That people who should know better willingly enable this disaster terrifies me.</text></comment> | <story><title>Google Has Quietly Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking (2016)</title><url>https://www.propublica.org/article/google-has-quietly-dropped-ban-on-personally-identifiable-web-tracking</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>petilon</author><text>If you want to see an example of the devious means now employed by Google, open Chrome settings and turn off &quot;Allow Chrome sign-in&quot;. Then go to Gmail and sign in. You are now signed into Chrome, regardless of the setting. By signing into Gmail you are sharing your identity with the browser itself.<p>Microsoft&#x27;s Chromium-based Edge can&#x27;t arrive soon enough.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>swebs</author><text>&gt;Microsoft&#x27;s Chromium-based Edge can&#x27;t arrive soon enough.<p>Eww, so you can have your data harvested by an even more evil and scummy company? Why not just use Ungoogled-Chromium or Firefox today? Hell, even Safari would be better.</text></comment> |
15,628,215 | 15,627,936 | 1 | 2 | 15,627,340 | train | <story><title>Alpha Go Zero: How and Why It Works</title><url>http://tim.hibal.org/blog/alpha-zero-how-and-why-it-works/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>shghs</author><text>The main reason AlphaGo Zero learns so much faster than its predecessors is because it uses temporal-difference learning.[1] This effectively removes a <i>huge</i> amount of the value network&#x27;s state space for the learning algorithm to search through, since it bakes in the assumption that a move&#x27;s value ought to equal that of the best available move in the following board position, which is exactly what you&#x27;d expect for a game like Go.<p>A secondary reason for AlphaGo Zero&#x27;s performance is that it combines both value and policy networks into a single network, since it&#x27;s redundant to have two networks for move selection.<p>These are the two biggest distinguishing characteristics of AlphaGo Zero compared to previous AlphaGos, and the OP doesn&#x27;t discuss either of them.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Temporal_difference_learning" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Temporal_difference_learning</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>smallnamespace</author><text>Interestingly, the idea behind temporal difference learning is more or less the intuition behind how people price derivatives in finance.<p>The expected value of a contract at time T, estimated at some time t &lt; T, is assumed to be equal (up to discounting) for all t -- e.g. if today we think the contract will be worth $100 a year later, then we also think that the <i>expected estimate, made n months from now, of the value [12-n] months later, will also be $100</i>. This allows you to shrink the state space considerably.<p>You can usually work out the payoff of a derivatives in different scenarios given rational exercise decisions by all contract participants. The calculation assumes that every market participant makes the best possible decision given the information they had available at the time by either explicitly or implicitly building a tree and working backwards, back-propagating the &#x27;future&#x27; value back to the root.<p>This closely resembles the modeling of a discrete adversarial game, except the payoffs need to make reference to random market variables like the stock price, so the tree nodes are not just indexed by participant action, but also by variables.<p>There&#x27;s actually a nice resemblance between the Longstaff-Schwarz method of pricing American options and MCTS + Alphago, except that the former is using kernel regressions instead of deep neural nets and we sample from a continuous space with an assumed probability distribution instead of a discrete space guided by a policy network [1].<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;people.math.ethz.ch&#x2F;~hjfurrer&#x2F;teaching&#x2F;LongstaffSchwartzAmericanOptionsLeastSquareMonteCarlo.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;people.math.ethz.ch&#x2F;~hjfurrer&#x2F;teaching&#x2F;LongstaffSchw...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Alpha Go Zero: How and Why It Works</title><url>http://tim.hibal.org/blog/alpha-zero-how-and-why-it-works/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>shghs</author><text>The main reason AlphaGo Zero learns so much faster than its predecessors is because it uses temporal-difference learning.[1] This effectively removes a <i>huge</i> amount of the value network&#x27;s state space for the learning algorithm to search through, since it bakes in the assumption that a move&#x27;s value ought to equal that of the best available move in the following board position, which is exactly what you&#x27;d expect for a game like Go.<p>A secondary reason for AlphaGo Zero&#x27;s performance is that it combines both value and policy networks into a single network, since it&#x27;s redundant to have two networks for move selection.<p>These are the two biggest distinguishing characteristics of AlphaGo Zero compared to previous AlphaGos, and the OP doesn&#x27;t discuss either of them.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Temporal_difference_learning" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Temporal_difference_learning</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gwern</author><text>&gt; These are the two biggest distinguishing characteristics of AlphaGo Zero compared to previous AlphaGos, and the OP doesn&#x27;t discuss either of them.<p>David Silver disagrees. The most critical distinguishing characteristic is the expert&#x2F;tree iteration which makes stable self-play possible at all.</text></comment> |
19,351,998 | 19,352,000 | 1 | 3 | 19,351,835 | train | <story><title>Ethiopian Airlines plane crash: No survivors among 157 on board</title><url>https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/03/ethiopian-airlines-flight-nairobi-crashes-deaths-reported-190310082515738.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>stackola</author><text>Second 737 Max to go down within the span of a few months.<p>I hope it&#x27;s a coincidence, but that can&#x27;t look good on Boeing.<p>E: Removed the word &#x27;sure&#x27;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>huffmsa</author><text>Giving the infrequency of airplane crashes, it probably isn&#x27;t coincidence.<p>Very unlikely for a brand new plane to suffer issues with altitude shortly after take off.<p>Even less likely for it to happen twice in a span of a few months.<p>However, aviation history has more than a handful of samples where a new design suffered multiple crashes shortly after introduction and the cause was ultimately a design flaw.</text></comment> | <story><title>Ethiopian Airlines plane crash: No survivors among 157 on board</title><url>https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/03/ethiopian-airlines-flight-nairobi-crashes-deaths-reported-190310082515738.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>stackola</author><text>Second 737 Max to go down within the span of a few months.<p>I hope it&#x27;s a coincidence, but that can&#x27;t look good on Boeing.<p>E: Removed the word &#x27;sure&#x27;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kilroy123</author><text>The frighting thing is, I was just looking at tickets for that exact flight leg (but the opposite direction), for an upcoming trip this summer.<p>I am not flying any leg on the 737 Max now.</text></comment> |
3,701,560 | 3,701,269 | 1 | 3 | 3,700,982 | train | <story><title>Double Fine Adventure Kickstarter finishes at $3,335,250</title><url>http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/66710809/double-fine-adventure/?</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jerf</author><text>A periodic topic that has come up on HN in the past few weeks is how people can make money in a non-copyright world. A common example brought up is the commission model, where payment is made in advance, but I think people subconsciously discard it as a real possibility because they can't imagine how it could actually happen.<p>Here it is.<p>Yes, Double Fine (and Brian Fargo with the Wasteland 2) come in with a pre-existing reputation worth millions, but while you're there, poke around on Kickstarter's other projects. I never had before, and I am astonished what is on there and has been successfully funded with no apparent name-brand power that I'm aware of. Just look at this stuff: <a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/discover/categories/games/most-funded#p1" rel="nofollow">http://www.kickstarter.com/discover/categories/games/most-fu...</a><p>There are things that targeted $10,000 and handily blew past them.<p>Relevant to HN's interests as I browse through: <a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/meetpoint/startup-fever-the-board-game-0?ref=category" rel="nofollow">http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/meetpoint/startup-fever-...</a><p>Anyway, back to my point. I think it's time to stop theorizing about how maybe the commission model might work someday in the future maybe sorta, because it's happening <i>now</i>. (The fact that I never even considered browsing around on Kickstarter is itself a testament to my own subconscious bias against the idea.)</text></comment> | <story><title>Double Fine Adventure Kickstarter finishes at $3,335,250</title><url>http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/66710809/double-fine-adventure/?</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Aloisius</author><text>This was an amazing success especially given no equity traded hands. Game publishers shouldn't be the only ones worried.<p>While I don't see it being easy to do initial angel funding on Kickstarter, it clearly is possible to raise significant amounts of money if you either have a good product and/or a name.</text></comment> |
23,636,700 | 23,630,235 | 1 | 3 | 23,629,151 | train | <story><title>The Inheritance Tax Is Far Too Low</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/opinion/inheritance-tax-inequality.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>reese_john</author><text>It is said that 70% of families lose their wealth by the 2nd generation and 90% by the 3rd[1]<p>Inequality is not static, it is rather dynamic.<p>Nassim Taleb makes some good points about that here[2], for instance, ~ 70% of Americans will spend a year in the top 20% and only ten percent of the wealthiest five hundred American people or dynasties were so thirty years ago.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nasdaq.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;generational-wealth%3A-why-do-70-of-families-lose-their-wealth-in-the-2nd-generation-2018-10" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nasdaq.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;generational-wealth%3A-why-d...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;incerto&#x2F;inequality-and-skin-in-the-game-d8f00bc0cb46" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;incerto&#x2F;inequality-and-skin-in-the-game-d...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>_uy6i</author><text>In furtherance of this point let’s take the article’s author at face value $50m inheritance @21% is $39.5m...not bad! But let’s now be a little more realistic, the family has two kids and not 1 so $19.25m per child - now let’s say that parents died at 85 and had their kids at the age of 30 so the kids are 55 which means they can invest their money for 30 years, and let’s say they invest it in a nice vanguard balanced fund, their after tax annualized return would be 5-7% [1] If we use the past 10-20 years as a guide (this also assumes you live in a place with no state tax like TX or FL). Now inflation is 2-3% so we’re making 3-5% real which means that over our 30 year investment horizon we could expect to increase our wealth between 2.5 - 4.3x if we don’t spend a dime... let’s be real someone with that money is going to want to enjoy at least some of it! So let’s say they spend 2% (or ~$400k&#x2F;year real) now that 3-5% real is 1% - 3% real or 1.4x - 2.5x the original corpus - now they pass it on to their 2 kids, they’d be lucky to pass along the same amount they inherited - spend a little more along the way, have some bad investments, get a divorce, have more than two kids and your heirs are almost guaranteed to get significantly less than their parents ... Sure they’re still rich, most rich families are in decline once the money’s been made...it may take several generations, but eventually their progeny is back working...<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;investor.vanguard.com&#x2F;mutual-funds&#x2F;profile&#x2F;performance&#x2F;vbiax" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;investor.vanguard.com&#x2F;mutual-funds&#x2F;profile&#x2F;performan...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>The Inheritance Tax Is Far Too Low</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/opinion/inheritance-tax-inequality.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>reese_john</author><text>It is said that 70% of families lose their wealth by the 2nd generation and 90% by the 3rd[1]<p>Inequality is not static, it is rather dynamic.<p>Nassim Taleb makes some good points about that here[2], for instance, ~ 70% of Americans will spend a year in the top 20% and only ten percent of the wealthiest five hundred American people or dynasties were so thirty years ago.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nasdaq.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;generational-wealth%3A-why-do-70-of-families-lose-their-wealth-in-the-2nd-generation-2018-10" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nasdaq.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;generational-wealth%3A-why-d...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;incerto&#x2F;inequality-and-skin-in-the-game-d8f00bc0cb46" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;incerto&#x2F;inequality-and-skin-in-the-game-d...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>JMTQp8lwXL</author><text>Maintaining wealth 100 years ago was different from today. Today, you can passively own index funds, and property rights are respected in the US. I would expect the 70% and 90% figures to decrease for future generations.</text></comment> |
5,847,714 | 5,846,570 | 1 | 3 | 5,846,391 | train | <story><title>Bradley Manning leaked Granai Airstrike "~86-147, mostly women and children"</title><url>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granai_airstrike#Video_of_the_airstrike</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>gridmaths</author><text>I posted the link. I wanted to describe my reasons :<p>I know that even the most justified war is ugly : there are accidents and mistakes and innocent people die at times, despite the best precautions.<p>Im aware that the freedoms I have every day, are a result of a coalition of democratic countries winning WWII and other conflicts. Many of my freedoms were won by American strength : military, economic and technological. I&#x27;m not an American, but I hold up the Constitution, the rule of Law and Democracy as high ideals - the best way humans have come up with so far of coexisting on this planet.<p>But a Democracy cannot exist where there is no free speech nor the right to question the government and the law. Citizens need information on whats happening : we need freedom to speak and anonymity to discuss in private, if we are to have a functioning Democracy.<p>I think Bradley Manning had a moral obligation as a soldier and as a citizen, to release the information he did. From what I read it seems that he was careful not to share information that would get other soldiers and spies killed, nor give the enemy any material advantage in the war.<p>What I think should happen is that this should be a civil trial by jury to decide whether he acted legally and morally. He leaked news of military &#x27;mistakes&#x27;, so he should not be tried by that same organization. A civil jury should decide whether the obligation to uphold the Constitution, by leaking, outweighed his obligation as a soldier to keep the information secret.<p>Even more worrying here is that the Obama administration is pushing for this to be tried as &#x27;giving information directly to the enemy&#x27; ie. treason, when clearly the motivation was not that.<p>If there were no Wikileaks, no Press, no privacy.. how would we keep our secret organisations in check, and have any confidence they are following their mandate ?</text></comment> | <story><title>Bradley Manning leaked Granai Airstrike "~86-147, mostly women and children"</title><url>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granai_airstrike#Video_of_the_airstrike</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jlgreco</author><text>I wonder if this is an example of one of the freedoms that they hate us for.</text></comment> |
7,418,064 | 7,414,536 | 1 | 2 | 7,414,030 | train | <story><title>MH370: A different point of view</title><url>https://plus.google.com/106271056358366282907/posts/GoeVjHJaGBz</url><text>This seems like a simpler explanation.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>wikiburner</author><text>This doesn&#x27;t explain the zigzagging trajectory of the plane after its disappearance:<p><i>Indeed, soon after MH370 disappeared, reports emerged that recordings of Malaysian military radar returns showed an unidentified track that could correspond to the flight turning left onto a westward course and descending. At the time it was difficult to assess the validity of that claim. It’s been bolstered, however, by a Reuters report earlier Friday stating that Malaysian military radar showed the flight following a course westward over the Malay peninsula and then heading out over the Indian Ocean, passing specific navigational waypoints as it went.<p>According to the report, this latter portion of the flight followed an unusual zigzag trajectory as it worked its way toward the north and west. This is a very inefficient way to get from one place to another, but it had some consequences that may have been useful for whoever was in control of the airplane. For one thing, by navigating between well-traveled waypoints, the plane would have seemed to military radar operators to look just like all the other well-behaved commercial traffic traveling over that stretch of ocean. “That’s going to seem like unsuspicious traffic,” says Maarten Uijt de Haag, a professor of electrical engineering at Ohio University. Had the plane left the well-traveled routes and struck out on its own, it would have been far more conspicuous.<p>Another consequence of the zigzagging trajectory is that, like a fox crossing back and forth over a stream to eluding a pack of hounds, it obscured where exactly it might be heading.</i><p><a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/03/14/mh370_disappearance_if_the_malaysia_airlines_plane_isn_t_in_the_indian_ocean.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.slate.com&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;future_tense&#x2F;2014&#x2F;03&#x2F;14&#x2F;mh370_dis...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>3327</author><text>&quot;By signing off from Malaysian airspace at 1.19 a.m. on March 8 with a casual &quot;all right, good night,&quot; rather than the crisp radio drill advocated in pilot training, a person now believed to be the co-pilot gave no hint of anything unusual.<p>Two minutes later, at 1.21 a.m. local time, the transponder - a device identifying jets to ground controllers - was turned off in a move that experts say could reveal a careful sequence.&quot;<p>-Reuters<p>Turning off the transponder two minutes after communication and turning IMO rules out fire. It would have had to take place in a 2 minute window.</text></comment> | <story><title>MH370: A different point of view</title><url>https://plus.google.com/106271056358366282907/posts/GoeVjHJaGBz</url><text>This seems like a simpler explanation.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>wikiburner</author><text>This doesn&#x27;t explain the zigzagging trajectory of the plane after its disappearance:<p><i>Indeed, soon after MH370 disappeared, reports emerged that recordings of Malaysian military radar returns showed an unidentified track that could correspond to the flight turning left onto a westward course and descending. At the time it was difficult to assess the validity of that claim. It’s been bolstered, however, by a Reuters report earlier Friday stating that Malaysian military radar showed the flight following a course westward over the Malay peninsula and then heading out over the Indian Ocean, passing specific navigational waypoints as it went.<p>According to the report, this latter portion of the flight followed an unusual zigzag trajectory as it worked its way toward the north and west. This is a very inefficient way to get from one place to another, but it had some consequences that may have been useful for whoever was in control of the airplane. For one thing, by navigating between well-traveled waypoints, the plane would have seemed to military radar operators to look just like all the other well-behaved commercial traffic traveling over that stretch of ocean. “That’s going to seem like unsuspicious traffic,” says Maarten Uijt de Haag, a professor of electrical engineering at Ohio University. Had the plane left the well-traveled routes and struck out on its own, it would have been far more conspicuous.<p>Another consequence of the zigzagging trajectory is that, like a fox crossing back and forth over a stream to eluding a pack of hounds, it obscured where exactly it might be heading.</i><p><a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/03/14/mh370_disappearance_if_the_malaysia_airlines_plane_isn_t_in_the_indian_ocean.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.slate.com&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;future_tense&#x2F;2014&#x2F;03&#x2F;14&#x2F;mh370_dis...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>graeham</author><text>Also doesn&#x27;t address telemetry being turned off dozens of minutes before last radio comm.</text></comment> |
35,781,415 | 35,781,589 | 1 | 2 | 35,781,051 | train | <story><title>Chemists tackle the tough challenge of recycling mixed plastics</title><url>https://phys.org/news/2023-04-chemists-tackle-tough-recycling-plastics.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>culi</author><text>In some cities garbage workers are intstructed to take a look at a recycling bin beforehand. If they see a single plastic bag they dump the whole thing with the landfill pile. Same for &quot;compostable plastic bags&quot;. Bags break really expensive machinery regularly and are probably one of the single worst things you could throw away<p>There are so many gaps like these in the public&#x27;s understanding of how recycling works (and doesn&#x27;t!) and the reality. Mixed plastics are useless; you need to wash your dirty plastics; the triangle doesn&#x27;t mean it&#x27;s recyclable it&#x27;s there to tell you what type of plastic it is (usually only 1, PET, and 2, HDPE, are recyclable). These are the very basics of recycling that, from my experience, the majority of people don&#x27;t understand. It would take literally 10 minutes to explain most of this to people<p>We keep bending over backwards trying to innovate our way towards making recycling really behave like the magic green plastic&#x2F;paper eating box people imagine it to be but I feel like we&#x27;d get so much more return on investment if we spent a fraction of our investments on simple public education. At least at this point where that latter investment is basically nil in most places</text></comment> | <story><title>Chemists tackle the tough challenge of recycling mixed plastics</title><url>https://phys.org/news/2023-04-chemists-tackle-tough-recycling-plastics.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>IvyMike</author><text>I think all packaging material should be taxed by weight, but with a multiplier that corresponds to the amount of that type of material which is actually recycled. Glass is heavy, but the data shows that 90% of it is recycled? The tax is 90% off.<p>This would do three things:<p>1) Encourage manufacturers to use materials which are actually recycled.
2) Encourage manufacturers to reduce total material.
3) Encourage manufacturers to invest in new methods of recycling to move the multiplier in their favor.</text></comment> |
34,073,223 | 34,067,508 | 1 | 2 | 34,049,896 | train | <story><title>MelonJS – a fresh and lightweight JavaScript game engine</title><url>https://github.com/melonjs/melonJS</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>onion2k</author><text>An example of what can be done with it - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;melongaming.com&#x2F;games&#x2F;melonjump&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;melongaming.com&#x2F;games&#x2F;melonjump&#x2F;</a> (hold the left mouse button down and move your mouse to play).<p>More here <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.melongaming.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;Games" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.melongaming.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;Games</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jlokier</author><text>Just a bit of friendly feedback. On my Android phone, the game didn&#x27;t work in Firefox or Firefox Focus for me (the browsers I use normally). Music sounded good and initial screen looked good, but touching the screen had no effect. On Samsung Internet it worked fine. If MelonJS is handling the mouse&#x2F;touch events, maybe all games are affected.</text></comment> | <story><title>MelonJS – a fresh and lightweight JavaScript game engine</title><url>https://github.com/melonjs/melonJS</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>onion2k</author><text>An example of what can be done with it - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;melongaming.com&#x2F;games&#x2F;melonjump&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;melongaming.com&#x2F;games&#x2F;melonjump&#x2F;</a> (hold the left mouse button down and move your mouse to play).<p>More here <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.melongaming.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;Games" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.melongaming.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;Games</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nassimsoftware</author><text>The thing I noticed with most JS game libraries is their inability to display text without being slightly blurry. Is there a fix to the issue?<p>I noticed this in the game you linked as well.</text></comment> |
39,894,588 | 39,894,496 | 1 | 3 | 39,892,583 | train | <story><title>Your database skills are not 'good to have' (2023)</title><url>https://renegadeotter.com/2023/11/12/your-database-skills-are-not-good-to-have.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ergonaught</author><text>Every time I read someone&#x27;s &quot;horror story&quot; of &quot;queries that used a lot of joins, like even 3 or 4 tables&quot;, I...well, sigh, at this point, I guess. It&#x27;s been a very long time since I needed advanced SQL to do things that probably shouldn&#x27;t be happening in the database anyway, but the fundamentals seem largely foreign concepts today (speaking generally), and they are definitely still relevant and enormously helpful.</text></comment> | <story><title>Your database skills are not 'good to have' (2023)</title><url>https://renegadeotter.com/2023/11/12/your-database-skills-are-not-good-to-have.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>eatonphil</author><text>Good call linking to Use The Index Luke. A great resource.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;use-the-index-luke.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;use-the-index-luke.com&#x2F;</a></text></comment> |
11,787,885 | 11,788,030 | 1 | 2 | 11,787,093 | train | <story><title>Dr Heimlich saves choking woman with manoeuvre he invented</title><url>http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-36400365</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>drumdance</author><text>I like to think the greatest moment of my life was when I performed the heimlich on a colleague on an airplane. It took three tries but it worked. In retrospect I was surprised how calm I was. I remember thinking on the third try, &quot;if this doesn&#x27;t work, I&#x27;m yelling for a flight attendant.&quot;<p>What&#x27;s even crazier is I was sitting in the window seat, she in the middle seat. I&#x27;m surprised it worked in such cramped circumstances.<p>And something amusing: the guy in the aisle seat slept through the whole thing.</text></comment> | <story><title>Dr Heimlich saves choking woman with manoeuvre he invented</title><url>http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-36400365</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>alejohausner</author><text>Heimlich means well, but the popularity of his maneuver is due more to his relentless promotional skills, and not to sound research. If someone is choking, it&#x27;s best to slap them hard on the back a few times.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.metroactive.com&#x2F;papers&#x2F;metro&#x2F;01.05.05&#x2F;heimlich-0501.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.metroactive.com&#x2F;papers&#x2F;metro&#x2F;01.05.05&#x2F;heimlich-05...</a></text></comment> |
15,466,822 | 15,466,781 | 1 | 3 | 15,466,560 | train | <story><title>Google is building an anti-Amazon alliance, and Target is the latest to join</title><url>https://www.recode.net/2017/10/12/16464132/google-target-retailers-amazon-walmart-assistant-alexa-home-echo-augmented-reality</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hbosch</author><text>If I order toilet paper via my Google Home, where does it come from? Wal Mart or Target? How long for shipping? If they send me dog food instead, how do I get in touch with customer service? Is it Google&#x27;s customer service or Target&#x27;s?<p>I don&#x27;t see how this is a threat to Amazon. People don&#x27;t shop there because they have voice -- they shop there because I can Prime myself anything in 2 days or less and if it&#x27;s messed up I can talk to a human being and find out why. I&#x27;d hate to try and get the same kind of service via Google and Target.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>viperscape</author><text>With that said, I’m really irked that amazon is using “private” shipping companies, I’m tired of seeing joe schmoes ring my bell in their Honda Civic or uhaul rental van, with my goods, my address, and seeing my house and family. They even take pictures with cell phone of package at door, wtf. Is there any background check, nope. Stick to a professional shipping company and not fly by night, random folks please</text></comment> | <story><title>Google is building an anti-Amazon alliance, and Target is the latest to join</title><url>https://www.recode.net/2017/10/12/16464132/google-target-retailers-amazon-walmart-assistant-alexa-home-echo-augmented-reality</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hbosch</author><text>If I order toilet paper via my Google Home, where does it come from? Wal Mart or Target? How long for shipping? If they send me dog food instead, how do I get in touch with customer service? Is it Google&#x27;s customer service or Target&#x27;s?<p>I don&#x27;t see how this is a threat to Amazon. People don&#x27;t shop there because they have voice -- they shop there because I can Prime myself anything in 2 days or less and if it&#x27;s messed up I can talk to a human being and find out why. I&#x27;d hate to try and get the same kind of service via Google and Target.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dawnerd</author><text>I order by price, so that means not ordering things like paper towels from amazon. Their grocery and household goods are often more expensive than just going down the street.<p>Also target has amazing returns. You can return online orders to the store - not like you can do that with amazon. I believe Walmart is the same.</text></comment> |
27,742,771 | 27,742,730 | 1 | 2 | 27,737,887 | train | <story><title>Music for Programming</title><url>https://www.musicforprogramming.net/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Darmody</author><text>World of Warcraft ambient music is just awesome.(Unless you&#x27;re a WoW junkie because it&#x27;ll make you want to play)<p><pre><code> - https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=xTPn_Nk_KrM
- https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Oeo2VCCtUZQ
- https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=wjTe0R2bREY
</code></pre>
Skyrim<p><pre><code> - https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=hBkcwy-iWt8
- https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=vgUaZz04bkw
</code></pre>
Blade Runner<p><pre><code> - https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=k3fz6CC45ok
</code></pre>
LOTR - Nazgul Ambience<p><pre><code> - https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=y1Wum6hQclU
</code></pre>
I don&#x27;t usually listen to rain because it makes me want to sleep, not work, but some ambience videos with rain are pretty nice<p><pre><code> - https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=UzEfSjTYvDc
</code></pre>
And my go-to music for when I&#x27;m tired and I need a boost.<p><pre><code> - https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=_RlJig87Px0</code></pre></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wyclif</author><text>Here&#x27;s a good Ambient playlist that I found and it&#x27;s great for listening while programming: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;open.spotify.com&#x2F;playlist&#x2F;1ugMRn7db1Cy0VD7a6VvUc?si=60f11932ce294c91" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;open.spotify.com&#x2F;playlist&#x2F;1ugMRn7db1Cy0VD7a6VvUc?si=...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Music for Programming</title><url>https://www.musicforprogramming.net/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Darmody</author><text>World of Warcraft ambient music is just awesome.(Unless you&#x27;re a WoW junkie because it&#x27;ll make you want to play)<p><pre><code> - https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=xTPn_Nk_KrM
- https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Oeo2VCCtUZQ
- https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=wjTe0R2bREY
</code></pre>
Skyrim<p><pre><code> - https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=hBkcwy-iWt8
- https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=vgUaZz04bkw
</code></pre>
Blade Runner<p><pre><code> - https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=k3fz6CC45ok
</code></pre>
LOTR - Nazgul Ambience<p><pre><code> - https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=y1Wum6hQclU
</code></pre>
I don&#x27;t usually listen to rain because it makes me want to sleep, not work, but some ambience videos with rain are pretty nice<p><pre><code> - https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=UzEfSjTYvDc
</code></pre>
And my go-to music for when I&#x27;m tired and I need a boost.<p><pre><code> - https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=_RlJig87Px0</code></pre></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jackbravo</author><text>I love this one for programming: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=n_OHjeugEv4" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=n_OHjeugEv4</a></text></comment> |
12,261,694 | 12,261,877 | 1 | 2 | 12,260,898 | train | <story><title>Apple Said to Plan First Pro Laptop Overhaul in Years</title><url>http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-10/apple-said-to-plan-first-pro-laptop-overhaul-in-four-years</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>NegatioN</author><text>Why the touch screen?<p>That seems like an odd addition to the list.</text></item><item><author>falcolas</author><text>I&#x27;m a software developer who focuses on operational automation, and this brings almost nothing to the table which I could want. Especially replacing the function keys with a touchpad; why would I want to replace dedicated keys with muscle memory attached to them with soft keys that can change on whim?<p>Better graphics may be nice, if it&#x27;s enough to allow me to drive a pair of high-resolution displays in addition to the laptop&#x27;s screen itself. I&#x27;m not hopeful, though, due to the power and heat requirements.<p>As for thinner, at what cost? Battery life? Active cooling? A nasty keyboard like those in the new macbook? Losing even more ports?<p>Here&#x27;s what I want in a MBP refresh: More power. Enough battery life to allow me on a hangout all day long; or at least enough battery life that I can have Chrome running and still be able to code all day long. A strong enough graphics card to smoothly drive a pair of 4k monitors in addition to the internal monitor. No loss of existing ports. More CPU power for compiling code. A touch screen.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dillera</author><text>I agree, a touch-screen on a &#x27;pro&#x27; laptop (unless it&#x27;s a 2-in-1) is useless.<p>Also: Please don&#x27;t ever, ever touch my laptop&#x27;s screen.</text></comment> | <story><title>Apple Said to Plan First Pro Laptop Overhaul in Years</title><url>http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-10/apple-said-to-plan-first-pro-laptop-overhaul-in-four-years</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>NegatioN</author><text>Why the touch screen?<p>That seems like an odd addition to the list.</text></item><item><author>falcolas</author><text>I&#x27;m a software developer who focuses on operational automation, and this brings almost nothing to the table which I could want. Especially replacing the function keys with a touchpad; why would I want to replace dedicated keys with muscle memory attached to them with soft keys that can change on whim?<p>Better graphics may be nice, if it&#x27;s enough to allow me to drive a pair of high-resolution displays in addition to the laptop&#x27;s screen itself. I&#x27;m not hopeful, though, due to the power and heat requirements.<p>As for thinner, at what cost? Battery life? Active cooling? A nasty keyboard like those in the new macbook? Losing even more ports?<p>Here&#x27;s what I want in a MBP refresh: More power. Enough battery life to allow me on a hangout all day long; or at least enough battery life that I can have Chrome running and still be able to code all day long. A strong enough graphics card to smoothly drive a pair of 4k monitors in addition to the internal monitor. No loss of existing ports. More CPU power for compiling code. A touch screen.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>falcolas</author><text>Since I use an iPad on a relatively regular basis, I find myself reaching for the screen on my MacBook when it&#x27;s on my lap and I&#x27;m reading the web. Scrolling through webpages with a touch on the screen is a natural gesture now; having to pull my hands back to the touchpad feels clunky in comparison.<p>It&#x27;s a minor wish, but a worthwhile addition, IMO.</text></comment> |
5,845,294 | 5,845,284 | 1 | 2 | 5,845,027 | train | <story><title>Oracle Discontinues Free Java Time Zone Updates</title><url>http://developers.slashdot.org/story/13/06/08/051235/oracle-discontinues-free-java-time-zone-updates</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>zorlem</author><text>Oracle changed the distribution terms of TZUpdater from free (as in beer) to available only to paying customers at least half a year ago.<p>It should be noted, though, that this largely affects only users that for some reason can&#x27;t update their JRE and are lagging behind the latest version. Oracle still provides up-to-date versions of the TZ data with the latest JRE.<p>It&#x27;s not a big issue since one could use IBM&#x27;s TZ updater tool or compile the TZ data from the raw Olson TZ database using javazic.jar available from OpenJDK.</text></comment> | <story><title>Oracle Discontinues Free Java Time Zone Updates</title><url>http://developers.slashdot.org/story/13/06/08/051235/oracle-discontinues-free-java-time-zone-updates</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>thwarted</author><text>I never understood why the system-wide timezone database, at least on UNIX-like systems, wasn&#x27;t used by Java. Why does Java need its own timezone database&#x2F;database format? Why do I need to install new timezone databases on my Linux system that runs Java? Why can&#x27;t the Olsen tzinfo files be installed on systems where the OS provider doesn&#x27;t provide them?</text></comment> |
8,504,968 | 8,504,753 | 1 | 3 | 8,504,136 | train | <story><title>Hey Paypal, why do you need access to my microphone, camera and photos?</title><url>http://thepcspy.com/read/paypal-permissions-microphone-camera-photos/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jessaustin</author><text>This is great stuff. I kind of wish they would hire you to run this. Another idea I&#x27;ve had would be for the user to be able to install an app without giving it the perms it &quot;requires&quot; (perhaps by unchecking some boxes in the dialog). Then apps would be responsible for handling a &quot;no you can&#x27;t see the contact DB&quot; API response. Or they could crash I guess. The point is that users could effectively renegotiate with apps, e.g. &quot;yes I&#x27;d like to use NFC to pay, no I don&#x27;t want you to be able to record everything that&#x27;s going on around my phone&quot;.</text></item><item><author>Someone1234</author><text>As a long term Android user and a mostly happy one at that, let me just say that Android&#x27;s permissions are terrible and basically not fit for purpose.<p>I&#x27;m going to ignore third party solutions that require root, because those aren&#x27;t part of the equation for 95%+ of Android users.<p>Android should have three levels of permissions: Implied (i.e. all apps get these), explicit (at installation), and prompted (user is asked at runtime).<p>- Implied (&quot;freebies&quot;): internet connectivity, store data, get a unique device ID (per app?), store the app&#x27;s own accounts within the accounts API.<p>- Explicit (installation): Run in background, use GPS, use the camera, use the microphone, etc.<p>- Prompted (&quot;personal information&quot;&#x2F;&quot;cost you money&quot;): Access your cellphone number, access your contact list, access your calendar, access your email, read&#x2F;send texts, make calls, etc.<p>Users in the current Android ecosystem learn to ignore permissions pretty quick as most are for trivial stuff (e.g. internet access, store data on the SD card, store an account, etc).<p>Worse still a lot of users will skip apps that ask for too many permissions which is bad for both the app developer AND users. Most developers want to offer functionality (e.g. share to contacts) but don&#x27;t want to do so at the cost of losing users (&quot;Why is this asking to see my contact list?&quot;).<p>Android needs to drop a bunch of &quot;silly&quot; permissions that have no inherent cost to the user. They&#x27;re clearly created by an engineer who just wanted to slap permissions on every kind of API for no good reason. It benefits nobody.<p>They then need to take permissions which have a cost (either literally or to user privacy) and set them up rationally so they&#x27;re either something you get when installing OR something you&#x27;ll be prompted for.<p>Lastly Android needs to add a description field to the permissions manifest where the developer can put in a short explanation for why they need permission XYZ. Limit it to 128 characters if you wish. The app store can display these.<p>I install less apps on Android largely because many ask for too many permissions. If Google makes it really easy for me to protect my personal information (e.g. prompts) I&#x27;ll literally spend more money on their store because I&#x27;ll feel more safe to do so. As a developer I&#x27;ll also offer more functionality to my apps as there is no permission &quot;cost.&quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>TheLoneWolfling</author><text>Actually, you&#x27;d want three settings:<p>Yes, No, and spoof. Otherwise far too many apps would just go &quot;I won&#x27;t work until you enable the settings I ask for&quot; - and then we&#x27;re right back at the current situation.</text></comment> | <story><title>Hey Paypal, why do you need access to my microphone, camera and photos?</title><url>http://thepcspy.com/read/paypal-permissions-microphone-camera-photos/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jessaustin</author><text>This is great stuff. I kind of wish they would hire you to run this. Another idea I&#x27;ve had would be for the user to be able to install an app without giving it the perms it &quot;requires&quot; (perhaps by unchecking some boxes in the dialog). Then apps would be responsible for handling a &quot;no you can&#x27;t see the contact DB&quot; API response. Or they could crash I guess. The point is that users could effectively renegotiate with apps, e.g. &quot;yes I&#x27;d like to use NFC to pay, no I don&#x27;t want you to be able to record everything that&#x27;s going on around my phone&quot;.</text></item><item><author>Someone1234</author><text>As a long term Android user and a mostly happy one at that, let me just say that Android&#x27;s permissions are terrible and basically not fit for purpose.<p>I&#x27;m going to ignore third party solutions that require root, because those aren&#x27;t part of the equation for 95%+ of Android users.<p>Android should have three levels of permissions: Implied (i.e. all apps get these), explicit (at installation), and prompted (user is asked at runtime).<p>- Implied (&quot;freebies&quot;): internet connectivity, store data, get a unique device ID (per app?), store the app&#x27;s own accounts within the accounts API.<p>- Explicit (installation): Run in background, use GPS, use the camera, use the microphone, etc.<p>- Prompted (&quot;personal information&quot;&#x2F;&quot;cost you money&quot;): Access your cellphone number, access your contact list, access your calendar, access your email, read&#x2F;send texts, make calls, etc.<p>Users in the current Android ecosystem learn to ignore permissions pretty quick as most are for trivial stuff (e.g. internet access, store data on the SD card, store an account, etc).<p>Worse still a lot of users will skip apps that ask for too many permissions which is bad for both the app developer AND users. Most developers want to offer functionality (e.g. share to contacts) but don&#x27;t want to do so at the cost of losing users (&quot;Why is this asking to see my contact list?&quot;).<p>Android needs to drop a bunch of &quot;silly&quot; permissions that have no inherent cost to the user. They&#x27;re clearly created by an engineer who just wanted to slap permissions on every kind of API for no good reason. It benefits nobody.<p>They then need to take permissions which have a cost (either literally or to user privacy) and set them up rationally so they&#x27;re either something you get when installing OR something you&#x27;ll be prompted for.<p>Lastly Android needs to add a description field to the permissions manifest where the developer can put in a short explanation for why they need permission XYZ. Limit it to 128 characters if you wish. The app store can display these.<p>I install less apps on Android largely because many ask for too many permissions. If Google makes it really easy for me to protect my personal information (e.g. prompts) I&#x27;ll literally spend more money on their store because I&#x27;ll feel more safe to do so. As a developer I&#x27;ll also offer more functionality to my apps as there is no permission &quot;cost.&quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ptaffs</author><text>i completely agree. to avoid crashes the OS could return innocuous zeros, for example, the contacts has no entries, silence on the mic, zero for location, no connection on a network interface. To level the playing field, the vendor should be able to know i declined the request and not provide me the software, that&#x27;s if their business model is based on advertising or data collection defeated by my choice.</text></comment> |
36,913,319 | 36,909,222 | 1 | 2 | 36,907,674 | train | <story><title>Rain Panels: Harvesting the energy of falling raindrops</title><url>https://thedebrief.org/forget-solar-panels-here-come-rain-panels/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>angry_moose</author><text>So 25mm&#x2F;hour (1&quot;) is a fairly heavy sustained rain. Terminal velocity of rain drops is on the order of 10 m&#x2F;s. Volume of a rain drop is on the order of .5ml.<p>Total rainfall volume per m^2 is .025 m^3&#x2F;hour. This is approximately 500,000 randrops&#x2F;hour or about 14 drops&#x2F;second. Each drop has 1&#x2F;2 * m * V^2 = 25 mJ of energy.<p>So putting it all together, this is generating 25 mJ&#x2F;drop * 14 drops&#x2F;second = .35 W&#x2F;m^2, and that&#x27;s only when its raining. (Edit: and this is assuming 100% conversion efficiency, which....no. Don&#x27;t know anything about this technology, but probably cut that number in half again).<p>Sounds a lot like Solar Freakin Roadways.<p>Edit: Just a sidenote; back in college the best course I took was billed as a &quot;Renewable Energy&quot; but was really just a weekly set of unit conversion problems like this that proved how absolutely stupid most energy proposals are.<p>We did focus a fair amount on real technologies like Wind and Solar (and analyzing the shortcomings like storage, which haven gotten better since ~2009). The professor took a lot of joy in shooting down ideas like this though.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dojomouse</author><text>Love you for this! I had exactly the same “solar freaking roadways” thought, although at least that idea qualified by basic theoretical analysis of available energy and area for harvesting and conversion efficiency. It was an obviously terrible idea for other reasons :-) yet it still got a prototype…<p>I wasn’t sure about the droplet analysis so took your same numbers (25mm&#x2F;h, 10m&#x2F;s) and just worked out aggregate mass: 25mm over 1m^2 = 0.025m^3 = 25kg<p>0.5mv^2 =&gt; 1250J&#x2F;h… so looks like we agree.<p>And to add a simple economic analysis of why this is such a dead-end idea:<p>Mawsynram, in India, is apparently the rainiest city in the world with roughly 10,000mm of annual rainfall - 10x the global average.<p>A given rain energy harvesting panel, deployed there, would generate 500,000J&#x2F;yr… or 0.138kWh. That’s significantly less than what a typical rooftop 1m2 solar panel would generate in an <i>hour</i> on a sunny day. 0.138kwh is worth around 1.3cents at 10c&#x2F;kWh.<p>A big roof might get you $1-$2&#x2F;year. You couldn’t pay to clean your roof for that. You couldn’t even pay someone to answer an email enquiry about the install costs for your system for that. This solution would have to be VASTLY cheaper than <i>paint</i> to stand a chance of being viable.<p>There is a reason our existing systems to collect power from rainfall rely on vast existing landscapes and aggregation mechanisms (rivers) to concentrate the rainfall for us.<p>It is - in my view - a dead idea.</text></comment> | <story><title>Rain Panels: Harvesting the energy of falling raindrops</title><url>https://thedebrief.org/forget-solar-panels-here-come-rain-panels/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>angry_moose</author><text>So 25mm&#x2F;hour (1&quot;) is a fairly heavy sustained rain. Terminal velocity of rain drops is on the order of 10 m&#x2F;s. Volume of a rain drop is on the order of .5ml.<p>Total rainfall volume per m^2 is .025 m^3&#x2F;hour. This is approximately 500,000 randrops&#x2F;hour or about 14 drops&#x2F;second. Each drop has 1&#x2F;2 * m * V^2 = 25 mJ of energy.<p>So putting it all together, this is generating 25 mJ&#x2F;drop * 14 drops&#x2F;second = .35 W&#x2F;m^2, and that&#x27;s only when its raining. (Edit: and this is assuming 100% conversion efficiency, which....no. Don&#x27;t know anything about this technology, but probably cut that number in half again).<p>Sounds a lot like Solar Freakin Roadways.<p>Edit: Just a sidenote; back in college the best course I took was billed as a &quot;Renewable Energy&quot; but was really just a weekly set of unit conversion problems like this that proved how absolutely stupid most energy proposals are.<p>We did focus a fair amount on real technologies like Wind and Solar (and analyzing the shortcomings like storage, which haven gotten better since ~2009). The professor took a lot of joy in shooting down ideas like this though.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>geph2021</author><text>I&#x27;m wondering if the charge generated by a rain drop could be from its static charge, rather than kinetic energy conversion?<p>Clearly storm systems can accumulate a large charge differential with the ground (i.e. lightning), but I don&#x27;t know if that&#x27;s the principle behind rain drop charge harvesting. Cursory googling[1] tells me electrostatic charge may be the source?<p>1 - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;onlinelibrary.wiley.com&#x2F;doi&#x2F;abs&#x2F;10.1002&#x2F;smll.202301568" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;onlinelibrary.wiley.com&#x2F;doi&#x2F;abs&#x2F;10.1002&#x2F;smll.2023015...</a></text></comment> |
14,712,727 | 14,712,817 | 1 | 3 | 14,712,269 | train | <story><title>Two Commits and the User Experience of Git</title><url>https://redfin.engineering/two-commits-that-wrecked-the-user-experience-of-git-f0075b77eab1</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>CJefferson</author><text>I really agree with this, it&#x27;s too late for git now, but I consider the overloading of &#x27;checkout&#x27; to be one of the worst pieces of UI I&#x27;ve ever come across, and the source of confusion for many people when I try to teach them git.<p>I didn&#x27;t know that &#x27;git reset&#x27; has a similar problem.<p>If git gained the &#x27;checkout-tree&#x27; and &#x27;checkout-file&#x27; (and other) commands mentioned, I&#x27;d personally use them instead of checkout.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ajarmst</author><text>It&#x27;s not really too late for git, if there is sufficient energy around rolling back the change. The relatively standard process for API changes of (1) adding a new command that does the same thing for a major version, (2) adding a deprecation warning and description of the new way to do it (say &#x27;Please use checkout-tree instead&#x27;) for another major version or two before (3) it stops working in major version 3. That allows people to get used to a syntax change without breaking scripts for a while. The git project has already used that process for other API changes. In fact, it&#x27;s pretty common practice to do that sort of thing when a given CLI option starts getting too baroque and complex.</text></comment> | <story><title>Two Commits and the User Experience of Git</title><url>https://redfin.engineering/two-commits-that-wrecked-the-user-experience-of-git-f0075b77eab1</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>CJefferson</author><text>I really agree with this, it&#x27;s too late for git now, but I consider the overloading of &#x27;checkout&#x27; to be one of the worst pieces of UI I&#x27;ve ever come across, and the source of confusion for many people when I try to teach them git.<p>I didn&#x27;t know that &#x27;git reset&#x27; has a similar problem.<p>If git gained the &#x27;checkout-tree&#x27; and &#x27;checkout-file&#x27; (and other) commands mentioned, I&#x27;d personally use them instead of checkout.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>stephengillie</author><text>Git is really 2 tools in 1: a manual Distributed File System, and a Version Control System built on hashing. And much new vocabulary. Instead of helping to make the system simpler and easier to understand, the vocabulary actually makes the system more complex and increases the slope of the learning curve.<p>It shouldn&#x27;t be so complex to indicate you&#x27;ve copied files from Github, made a personal copy to work on, and have switched to that copy. But this involves finding where your Head is, having an Origin, a Master, and somewhere Remote, finding the right branch in the tree to hit with a fork, and going to a checkout counter.</text></comment> |
26,068,502 | 26,065,426 | 1 | 3 | 26,060,839 | train | <story><title>Barcode scanner app on Google Play infects 10M users with one update</title><url>https://blog.malwarebytes.com/android/2021/02/barcode-scanner-app-on-google-play-infects-10-million-users-with-one-update/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wooptoo</author><text>This is possibly tied to the recent assault on the ZXing Barcode scanner app[1].<p>This is a legit open source app that&#x27;s been recently flooded by 1-star reviews claiming that the app contains malware, probably in order to get users to switch to the other apps.
The funny thing is this app has not been updated since 2019 on the Play Store, so those reviews are clearly bogus.<p>It takes a special kind of scum to slander an open source project in order to push malware.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;play.google.com&#x2F;store&#x2F;apps&#x2F;details?id=com.google.zxing.client.android" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;play.google.com&#x2F;store&#x2F;apps&#x2F;details?id=com.google.zxi...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bityard</author><text>The ZXing Barcode Scanner (which is the &quot;official barcode&#x2F;QR code scanner for Android, as far as _I_ am concerned) is also available on f-droid.org. There&#x27;s no absolute guarantee that F-Droid apps are malware-free but they have at least been looked at by a competent team of humans, something that is not true of the Play Store.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;f-droid.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;packages&#x2F;com.google.zxing.client.android&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;f-droid.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;packages&#x2F;com.google.zxing.client.andr...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Barcode scanner app on Google Play infects 10M users with one update</title><url>https://blog.malwarebytes.com/android/2021/02/barcode-scanner-app-on-google-play-infects-10-million-users-with-one-update/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wooptoo</author><text>This is possibly tied to the recent assault on the ZXing Barcode scanner app[1].<p>This is a legit open source app that&#x27;s been recently flooded by 1-star reviews claiming that the app contains malware, probably in order to get users to switch to the other apps.
The funny thing is this app has not been updated since 2019 on the Play Store, so those reviews are clearly bogus.<p>It takes a special kind of scum to slander an open source project in order to push malware.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;play.google.com&#x2F;store&#x2F;apps&#x2F;details?id=com.google.zxing.client.android" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;play.google.com&#x2F;store&#x2F;apps&#x2F;details?id=com.google.zxi...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>curtis3389</author><text>I knew nothing of ZXing Barcode Scanner other than it was super simple and &quot;just works.&quot; Nice to know that it&#x27;s open source! I&#x27;ve been happily using on all my android phones since I started with the HTC Dream so many years ago.</text></comment> |
6,190,508 | 6,189,945 | 1 | 2 | 6,189,324 | train | <story><title>Meta (YC S13), The Crazy AR Glasses That Aim To Do What Google Glass Can’t</title><url>http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/09/meta-the-ar-glasses-that-aim-to-be-what-google-glass-is-not-go-up-for-pre-order/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>m_ke</author><text>Did anyone see actual demos of this thing in action? Meron came to my computer vision class this spring at CU and didn&#x27;t have anything to show other than the CGI demo that has been up for over a year. The newer videos are also mostly just renderings and the only working examples that were posted are around 10 seconds long.<p>I wish them the best of luck but it seems to me like they&#x27;re really overselling themselves.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cf</author><text>These guys had a booth at the Epson stage at SIGGRAPH this year. I tried it out from one the engineers. The unit could stand to be a bit lighter, and less dorky but it definitely works. They are very accessible and probably game to demo it if you visit their offices.</text></comment> | <story><title>Meta (YC S13), The Crazy AR Glasses That Aim To Do What Google Glass Can’t</title><url>http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/09/meta-the-ar-glasses-that-aim-to-be-what-google-glass-is-not-go-up-for-pre-order/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>m_ke</author><text>Did anyone see actual demos of this thing in action? Meron came to my computer vision class this spring at CU and didn&#x27;t have anything to show other than the CGI demo that has been up for over a year. The newer videos are also mostly just renderings and the only working examples that were posted are around 10 seconds long.<p>I wish them the best of luck but it seems to me like they&#x27;re really overselling themselves.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mikemoka</author><text>looks like they invited the reddit co-founder to test them actually:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cv7nSng0yD8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Cv7nSng0yD8</a></text></comment> |
27,235,911 | 27,236,151 | 1 | 2 | 27,235,531 | train | <story><title>France's 18-year-olds given €300 culture pass</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-57198737</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>boomboomsubban</author><text>&quot;19 year olds on twitter unhappy&quot; is a ridiculous and unnecessary angle to add to this story.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lancebeet</author><text>Why&#x27;s that? 18 year olds are graduating secondary education this summer and now they have more money to spend in a society that&#x27;s rapidly opening up. 19 year olds graduated last year, possibly the worst time to do so (especially given the strict lockdown in France), and they get nothing. Life obviously isn&#x27;t fair but I can&#x27;t help but feel for the 19 year olds.</text></comment> | <story><title>France's 18-year-olds given €300 culture pass</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-57198737</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>boomboomsubban</author><text>&quot;19 year olds on twitter unhappy&quot; is a ridiculous and unnecessary angle to add to this story.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>duxup</author><text>I really wish the go to for everything hoi polloi wasn&#x27;t Twitter. Twitter encourages trite, mean, and outrageous content, it&#x27;s not going to have much of a variety of views that get any attention.<p>It infects anything.<p>I was listening to a podcast about my local sports team and they couldn&#x27;t help but reference what they&#x27;re &#x27;not saying&#x27; relative to Twitter outrage ... repeatedly. And even address &#x27;fan sentiment&#x27; purely through the looking glass of Twitter.<p>They talk about players who &#x27;fans don&#x27;t like&#x27; and yet you go to the game and you&#x27;d think that was the most popular player based on fan reaction...<p>Then I switch to my coding related podcast ... same thing, they address Twitter drama like it represents most coders.</text></comment> |
17,817,538 | 17,817,086 | 1 | 2 | 17,815,892 | train | <story><title>Valve Rolls Out Wine-Based “Proton” for Running Windows Games on Linux</title><url>https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Valve-Steam-Play-Proton-Linux</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>acd</author><text>This is good for gaming on Linux!<p>Future prediction:
Hackers reverse engineer Microsoft SQL server for Linux compatibility DLLs and adds better Wine support. Microsoft will eventually start selling a commercial Windows 10 compatibility layer for Linux. Reason Microsoft does not found main revenue through operating sales but of online cloud adoption and subscriptions. Microsoft of today is much more open source friendly than before.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Xenix" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Xenix</a>
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Windows_Services_for_UNIX" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Windows_Services_for_UNIX</a>
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Windows_Subsystem_for_Linux" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Windows_Subsystem_for_Linux</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>BuildTheRobots</author><text>&gt; Hackers reverse engineer Microsoft SQL server for Linux compatibility DLLs and adds better Wine support. Microsoft will eventually start selling a commercial Windows 10 compatibility layer for Linux<p>I like the optimism but I honestly believe it&#x27;s going to go the other way round.<p>Based on Microsoft s EEE strategy from the past, combined with the way they&#x27;ve pushed for SecureBoot on x86 and Arm and the (re-)rise of the WSL, I honestly expect it to get even more difficult in the future to boot a linux kernel on your own hardware.<p>Once all the usual suspects work properly under WSL I think more hardware lockdowns are going to come into place combined with phrases like &quot;what do you need a kernel for? just boot windows kernel and use your linux userland and stop complaining!&quot;. The rise of GNU&#x2F;Windows might well be coming...</text></comment> | <story><title>Valve Rolls Out Wine-Based “Proton” for Running Windows Games on Linux</title><url>https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Valve-Steam-Play-Proton-Linux</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>acd</author><text>This is good for gaming on Linux!<p>Future prediction:
Hackers reverse engineer Microsoft SQL server for Linux compatibility DLLs and adds better Wine support. Microsoft will eventually start selling a commercial Windows 10 compatibility layer for Linux. Reason Microsoft does not found main revenue through operating sales but of online cloud adoption and subscriptions. Microsoft of today is much more open source friendly than before.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Xenix" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Xenix</a>
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Windows_Services_for_UNIX" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Windows_Services_for_UNIX</a>
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Windows_Subsystem_for_Linux" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Windows_Subsystem_for_Linux</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tonyedgecombe</author><text><i>Microsoft of today is much more open source friendly than before.</i><p>When it&#x27;s in their interest to be so, don&#x27;t expect them to start giving away their bread and butter.</text></comment> |
12,875,258 | 12,874,245 | 1 | 3 | 12,873,156 | train | <story><title>The Mega Rich Have Found an Unlikely New Refuge</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-02/the-rich-have-found-a-place-to-escape-the-horrors-of-the-world</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>te_chris</author><text>Fantastic. As a NZ expat currently resident in London it&#x27;s depressing the way global market conditions have sent house prices skyrocketing in the places I&#x27;d like to live. My partner and I are doing well here, and we plan to go back to NZ one day, but in just 6 years since my partner&#x27;s brother was here what we&#x27;d go back to has changed immeasurably.<p>He and his partner managed to come over here when the pound was worth $3 NZD, rent was cheaper, save well and move back to Auckland when houses were depressed (2009-2010). Since then they rode the wave and now have a beautiful home with a view straight down the Waitemata harbour.<p>My partner and I? We came here when the pound was at $2.10ish, not so bad I thought, not as good, but y&#x27;know, we make good money, we can deal with it. Then BREXIT. BOOM. Now the pound is $1.70, our salaries are, of course, still the same. Also a shithole house in Auckland in a bad suburb now costs at least $700k NZD - the first house that my partner&#x27;s brother bought cost $650k NZD, in a nice suburb on transport links.<p>The world is mad.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>robotresearcher</author><text>So you&#x27;re pissed with people who made money elsewhere then went to NZ to buy property. And you&#x27;re pissed because it messes with your plan of earning money in London and then using it to buy property in NZ.<p>The same international market that employs you in London priced that house in Aukland.<p>Also, do you imagine your presence in London increases or decreases property prices there?</text></comment> | <story><title>The Mega Rich Have Found an Unlikely New Refuge</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-02/the-rich-have-found-a-place-to-escape-the-horrors-of-the-world</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>te_chris</author><text>Fantastic. As a NZ expat currently resident in London it&#x27;s depressing the way global market conditions have sent house prices skyrocketing in the places I&#x27;d like to live. My partner and I are doing well here, and we plan to go back to NZ one day, but in just 6 years since my partner&#x27;s brother was here what we&#x27;d go back to has changed immeasurably.<p>He and his partner managed to come over here when the pound was worth $3 NZD, rent was cheaper, save well and move back to Auckland when houses were depressed (2009-2010). Since then they rode the wave and now have a beautiful home with a view straight down the Waitemata harbour.<p>My partner and I? We came here when the pound was at $2.10ish, not so bad I thought, not as good, but y&#x27;know, we make good money, we can deal with it. Then BREXIT. BOOM. Now the pound is $1.70, our salaries are, of course, still the same. Also a shithole house in Auckland in a bad suburb now costs at least $700k NZD - the first house that my partner&#x27;s brother bought cost $650k NZD, in a nice suburb on transport links.<p>The world is mad.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>flog</author><text>To give more context for non-Kiwi&#x27;s: New Zealanders have traditionally valued houses above all else, treating them as their retirement plans.
We don&#x27;t have capital gains tax or stamp duty, so house flipping has been a valuable side-business for many.</text></comment> |
15,679,163 | 15,677,989 | 1 | 3 | 15,676,785 | train | <story><title>Snap’s Rise and Fall: How a Big, Splashy IPO Prompted the Doubters to Keep Mum</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/snaps-rise-and-fall-how-a-big-splashy-ipo-prompted-the-doubters-to-keep-mum-1510249164</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cft</author><text>That means that FB was probably the last &quot;web&quot; or &quot;app&quot; big IPO. Now it&#x27;s Amazon, Google or Facebook. Even Yelp is withering. Just like it has been impossible to start a new car or airliner manufacturer since the 1920s (except for Tesla), the opportunity for creating new large web companies has been shut by the entrenched trio.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>TylerE</author><text>&gt; start a new car or airliner manufacturer since the 1920s (except for Tesla<p><pre><code> Porsche (1931)
Nissan (1933)
Volkswagen (1937)
Toyota (1937)
Kia (1944)
Hyundai (1947)
Honda (1948)
Land Rover (1948)
SEAT (1950)
Lotus (1952)
Subaru (1953)
Lamborghini (1963)
Dozens of Chinese companies in recent years...
</code></pre>
On the aero side:<p><pre><code> Antonov (1946)
Embraer (1969)
Airbus (1970)
Diamond (1981)
ATR (1981)
Cirrus (1984)
Bombardier (1989)
</code></pre>
These lists are very far from inclusive.</text></comment> | <story><title>Snap’s Rise and Fall: How a Big, Splashy IPO Prompted the Doubters to Keep Mum</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/snaps-rise-and-fall-how-a-big-splashy-ipo-prompted-the-doubters-to-keep-mum-1510249164</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cft</author><text>That means that FB was probably the last &quot;web&quot; or &quot;app&quot; big IPO. Now it&#x27;s Amazon, Google or Facebook. Even Yelp is withering. Just like it has been impossible to start a new car or airliner manufacturer since the 1920s (except for Tesla), the opportunity for creating new large web companies has been shut by the entrenched trio.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ptero</author><text>I do not think it is shut, but new entrants must offer something significantly better (or new and useful) than what is available from big 3. I am not sure what exactly Snaps value was beyond some funny face transforms. If nothing, it is not surprising if it fails once the novelty wears off.</text></comment> |
9,582,915 | 9,582,917 | 1 | 3 | 9,582,512 | train | <story><title>First images of collisions at 13 TeV</title><url>http://home.web.cern.ch/about/updates/2015/05/first-images-collisions-13-tev</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>iamthepieman</author><text>I followed the links to the CMS, Atlas and other detectors that the images appear to be from but couldn&#x27;t find any information on what these images actually mean. By reading the layman&#x27;s descriptions (which I most certainly am) I assume that the images show where along the &quot;surface&quot;, if there is such a thing, of the detector various particles were detected and the length of the bars show either how much energy the particle(s) have or the density of particles at that point.<p>Is there anywhere I can go to get a more detailed description of these without delving into academic papers that I have no hope of understanding?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>elwin</author><text>A detector is typically a series of concentric cylinders, with the beam pipe, where the collisions occur, running through the center. The inner layers are tracking chambers, which detect the paths of charged particles. This is what produces all the curved lines radiating from the center.<p>The outer layers are calorimeters, which catch particles and measure their kinetic energy. As you correctly assumed, these produce the bar plots. Often there will be one layer of calorimeters for photons and electrons, and a second for hadrons (protons, mesons, etc.)<p>This Wikipedia article is a good starting point: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Hermetic_detector" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Hermetic_detector</a></text></comment> | <story><title>First images of collisions at 13 TeV</title><url>http://home.web.cern.ch/about/updates/2015/05/first-images-collisions-13-tev</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>iamthepieman</author><text>I followed the links to the CMS, Atlas and other detectors that the images appear to be from but couldn&#x27;t find any information on what these images actually mean. By reading the layman&#x27;s descriptions (which I most certainly am) I assume that the images show where along the &quot;surface&quot;, if there is such a thing, of the detector various particles were detected and the length of the bars show either how much energy the particle(s) have or the density of particles at that point.<p>Is there anywhere I can go to get a more detailed description of these without delving into academic papers that I have no hope of understanding?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kordless</author><text>The amount of data that comes out of the different detectors on the LHC is staggering. It takes a fair amount of post processing to get meaningful results from collisions, and there can be millions of collisions in a run. There&#x27;s some more information about how they process these results on the LHC computing grid page: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;wlcg-public.web.cern.ch&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;wlcg-public.web.cern.ch&#x2F;</a>.</text></comment> |
7,357,357 | 7,356,557 | 1 | 2 | 7,356,280 | train | <story><title>The Europa mission is real and could very well happen</title><url>http://blog.chron.com/sciguy/2014/03/heres-why-the-europa-mission-is-real-and-could-very-well-happen/#21279101=0</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>bfe</author><text>I talked with a NASA engineer in 1998 who was working on the planned Europa probe, and hoping it would be funded enough to include a lander and not just a Europa orbiter. Sad to see how little progress we&#x27;ve made since then, and how arbitrarily the cause advances.<p>Even more, it&#x27;s continuously sad to see how arbitrarily NASA&#x27;s space missions, and overarching goals and strategies, in both robotic exploration and human spaceflight, fluctuate almost randomly with the whims of incoming and outgoing congresspeople and presidents. Space exploration missions by their nature have a longer timeline than the terms and attention spans of elected officials. NASA has no real chief executive but a board of directors with 536 people on it, all of whom have dozens of more important priorities, none of whom has expertise in its operations, and almost all of whom don&#x27;t have the qualifications to be a substitute science teacher in middle school.<p>Our space program would be light-years ahead (maybe even literally) if it were just given its annual funding in a single block grant with a simple mandate to further the exploration and settlement of space, period, full stop, overseen by a real board of unelected technocratic experts, and with any specific direction from Congress forbidden.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Europa mission is real and could very well happen</title><url>http://blog.chron.com/sciguy/2014/03/heres-why-the-europa-mission-is-real-and-could-very-well-happen/#21279101=0</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>pshin45</author><text>I feel compelled to plug the 2013 sci-fi film &quot;Europa Report&quot;[1], a great movie that no one watched.<p>Space.com called it &quot;awesome&quot; and &quot;stunningly realistic&quot;[2].<p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europa_Report" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Europa_Report</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.space.com/21247-europa-report-scifi-film-trailer.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.space.com&#x2F;21247-europa-report-scifi-film-trailer....</a></text></comment> |
20,788,397 | 20,788,344 | 1 | 2 | 20,787,237 | train | <story><title>Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, and FCC Bullying</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/cities-are-saying-no-to-5g-citing-health-aestheticsand-fcc-bullying-11566619391?mod=rsswn</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>chvid</author><text>Funny how people even on a tech website seems to be stuck at &quot;640 KB is enough for everyone&quot;.<p>When technology gets a lot cheaper, a lot more powerful, a lot less power consuming, the magic of the market creates completely new categories of use that unlock new demand at consumers.<p>Right now your phone has a sim-card. There might be one in your tablet or your car too. But there is not one in your TV or the lights in your bathroom. But at some point telecommunications technology is going to be so cheap that drawing a wire to connect a button to a light is going to be the expensive option.<p>5G is a step on the way.</text></item><item><author>JumpCrisscross</author><text>&gt; <i>at best it&#x27;s just... faster internet</i><p>Counterpoint: streaming audio and video were singularly enabled by faster internet. That is restructuring multibillion-dollar industries. The iPhone, one could argue, and through it real-time social media, are products of mobile internet.<p>There are legitimate new capabilities that will likely erupt from cheaper, faster mobile internet. If the playground is in Shenzhen versus Silicon Valley, that’s where resources should be allocated to explore that potential.<p>I’m not arguing for 5G. (I don’t know enough about it.) But “it’s just faster internet” is a facile counterargument.</text></item><item><author>_bxg1</author><text>There&#x27;s such weird marketing zealotry behind 5G. They&#x27;re acting like it&#x27;s going to completely reshape society, but at best it&#x27;s just... faster internet. In places where the internet is already pretty fast.<p>I can only assume it&#x27;s a mixture of political and economic stakeholders that have their own reasons for really wanting it to succeed (looking competitive against China, selling new phones, etc.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>delecti</author><text>Obviously sentiments like &quot;640 KB is enough for everyone&quot; hilariously failed to predict the value of faster and more powerful computers. At the same time, most people&#x27;s personal use of computers hasn&#x27;t kept up with the capabilities of the high-end of consumer grade products. Lots of people only really use a web browser, and even an ad-infested website will run fine on most 10-20 year old computers.<p>You can say &quot;we don&#x27;t need to frantically rush to deploy 5G&quot; without also saying &quot;nobody will ever benefit from 5G&quot;.</text></comment> | <story><title>Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, and FCC Bullying</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/cities-are-saying-no-to-5g-citing-health-aestheticsand-fcc-bullying-11566619391?mod=rsswn</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>chvid</author><text>Funny how people even on a tech website seems to be stuck at &quot;640 KB is enough for everyone&quot;.<p>When technology gets a lot cheaper, a lot more powerful, a lot less power consuming, the magic of the market creates completely new categories of use that unlock new demand at consumers.<p>Right now your phone has a sim-card. There might be one in your tablet or your car too. But there is not one in your TV or the lights in your bathroom. But at some point telecommunications technology is going to be so cheap that drawing a wire to connect a button to a light is going to be the expensive option.<p>5G is a step on the way.</text></item><item><author>JumpCrisscross</author><text>&gt; <i>at best it&#x27;s just... faster internet</i><p>Counterpoint: streaming audio and video were singularly enabled by faster internet. That is restructuring multibillion-dollar industries. The iPhone, one could argue, and through it real-time social media, are products of mobile internet.<p>There are legitimate new capabilities that will likely erupt from cheaper, faster mobile internet. If the playground is in Shenzhen versus Silicon Valley, that’s where resources should be allocated to explore that potential.<p>I’m not arguing for 5G. (I don’t know enough about it.) But “it’s just faster internet” is a facile counterargument.</text></item><item><author>_bxg1</author><text>There&#x27;s such weird marketing zealotry behind 5G. They&#x27;re acting like it&#x27;s going to completely reshape society, but at best it&#x27;s just... faster internet. In places where the internet is already pretty fast.<p>I can only assume it&#x27;s a mixture of political and economic stakeholders that have their own reasons for really wanting it to succeed (looking competitive against China, selling new phones, etc.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wongarsu</author><text>&gt; But there is not one in your TV or the lights in your bathroom. But at some point telecommunications technology is going to be so cheap that drawing a wire to connect a button to a light is going to be the expensive option.<p>For stationary objects like TVs and lights we already have wifi, and a range of simpler low-power options used by IoT basestations. What does 5G bring to the table here?</text></comment> |
4,098,737 | 4,098,602 | 1 | 2 | 4,097,613 | train | <story><title>Amazon Digital Markup: 129,000%</title><url>http://andrewhy.de/amazons-markup-of-digital-delivery-to-indie-authors-is-129000/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>dandelany</author><text>It's ridiculous to include the cost of the entire "Kindle ecosystem" with a fee called "delivery fee" - as other posts have mentioned, this is what commission is for. WhisperNet is another story - this is legitimately a part of the delivery - however, it's just 3G service that they leased from AT&#38;T, and to assume it costs them even close to $2.58 per delivery is just ignorant. If I downloaded an 18MB e-mail attachment over 3g on my phone, essentially the same thing, I would be absolutely livid if I was charged $2.58.<p>Amazon's "delivery fee" is 15 cents/megabyte. By comparison, AT&#38;T's <i>most expensive pay-as-you-go</i> data plan is $15 for 250MB, or 6 c/MB, less than half the price. Their cheapest plan is 1 cent/MB.<p>Amazon is known for having very reasonable data storage/transfer fees in their other services, so it's very clear to me that they're just taking a huge margin here.</text></item><item><author>res0nat0r</author><text>Hosting a static file in S3 you have to point people to manually find and download themselves is much cheaper because you don't have the built in captive audience, WhisperNet and everything else which comes with the Kindle ecosystem, so comparing the two only via a flat dollar cost is naive.</text></item><item><author>mycroftiv</author><text>Did you read the blog post? The author specifically was comparing the cost of delivery via the Kindle service to using Amazon S3/EC2 to deliver the content. His specific comparison was that the price that he would pay to host and deliver the content using Amazon's own services, would be orders of magnitude smaller! In other words, the comparison you are making is the exact basis for his entirely justified claim that Amazon's delivery fee is complete ripoff.</text></item><item><author>res0nat0r</author><text>&#62; charging several dollars for a "delivery fee" of a digital book is OBVIOUS BS!<p>Do you think that the largest file sharing service (S3) and the largest public cloud computing infrastructure (EC2) in the world just operate for free? Digital delivery fees help pay for the millions in hardware, software, infrastructure and maintenance costs for these services, which Kindle uses extensively.</text></item><item><author>mycroftiv</author><text>He is making an entirely justified complaint that Amazon charges unreasonable fees. The idea that any and all corporate behavior is fine simply because "it says so in the contract" is ridiculous.<p>You aren't actually paying attention to what the author wrote - he even specifically talked about how Amazon's Kindle platform provides a good experience for readers and has accounted for the majority of his sales. His post doesn't display any ignorance of the points you are making - instead, he acknowledges them but makes the entirely valid point that charging several dollars for a "delivery fee" of a digital book is OBVIOUS BS!<p>There is a huge disconnect between the attitude of "any price that people will pay is a fair price" and the fact that economic systems require that parties engage in transactions in good faith. To me, it seems blatantly obvious that Amazon is engaging in the bad-faith practice of trying to conceal the true costs of their service by loading a lot of the price into a "delivery charge" that is absurd.<p>This kind of thing is a very old game in business, but that doesn't make it ok. Just because something is common and legal doesn't make it appropriate. A large amount of standard business practices are deliberate, but legal, rip-offs - and calling a rip-off a rip-off is a good thing.</text></item><item><author>ChuckMcM</author><text>This is confusing. Here is someone with a <i>FANTASTIC</i> first outing of a book and he's whinging about it?<p>The author raises $8K on Kickstarter, sells his book for $10, and is complaining that the 'gorilla' is taking a bigger percentage of the take?<p>Using his numbers: of 73%/11%/12%/1% his money was $1117/$231/$333/$20 respectively. So he made three times as much money selling through Amazon as he did on the next closest service (PDF).<p>So what is his complaint? That he didn't read the contract completely? Would he have forgone selling his book on Amazon if he had? Assuming he was trying to get $7/book out of them would he have raised his book price to $15 to pump that price up? And what would that have done to his volume?<p>Its all well and good to posit that you could store your book on an FTP server at Hurricane electric but how would people find it? How would they read it?<p>And then why all this angst over the first few months? The kickerstarter [1] only funded in April, here it is June he has his book out, most travel magazines have like a 3 month lead time on their content, plus folks need to review it etc. What was he expecting? And more importantly since this reads like he is hugely disillusioned by the experience exactly why was he expecting what he was expecting? Didn't he 'get' that he could not have published this book at this level of success <i>at all</i> prior to Amazon?<p>[1] <a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/andrewhyde/this-book-is-about-travel?ref=live" rel="nofollow">http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/andrewhyde/this-book-is-...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>waterlesscloud</author><text>What they're doing is charging one fee based on price and an additional fee based on file size. This separates the incentives for the publisher, which makes sense.<p>It's also worth noting that his book is large compared to your average novel. He clocks in around 17.6 megabytes, whereas even a giant novel like Game Of Thrones is only 3.3 megabytes. Hunger Games is a paltry 0.5 megabytes.</text></comment> | <story><title>Amazon Digital Markup: 129,000%</title><url>http://andrewhy.de/amazons-markup-of-digital-delivery-to-indie-authors-is-129000/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>dandelany</author><text>It's ridiculous to include the cost of the entire "Kindle ecosystem" with a fee called "delivery fee" - as other posts have mentioned, this is what commission is for. WhisperNet is another story - this is legitimately a part of the delivery - however, it's just 3G service that they leased from AT&#38;T, and to assume it costs them even close to $2.58 per delivery is just ignorant. If I downloaded an 18MB e-mail attachment over 3g on my phone, essentially the same thing, I would be absolutely livid if I was charged $2.58.<p>Amazon's "delivery fee" is 15 cents/megabyte. By comparison, AT&#38;T's <i>most expensive pay-as-you-go</i> data plan is $15 for 250MB, or 6 c/MB, less than half the price. Their cheapest plan is 1 cent/MB.<p>Amazon is known for having very reasonable data storage/transfer fees in their other services, so it's very clear to me that they're just taking a huge margin here.</text></item><item><author>res0nat0r</author><text>Hosting a static file in S3 you have to point people to manually find and download themselves is much cheaper because you don't have the built in captive audience, WhisperNet and everything else which comes with the Kindle ecosystem, so comparing the two only via a flat dollar cost is naive.</text></item><item><author>mycroftiv</author><text>Did you read the blog post? The author specifically was comparing the cost of delivery via the Kindle service to using Amazon S3/EC2 to deliver the content. His specific comparison was that the price that he would pay to host and deliver the content using Amazon's own services, would be orders of magnitude smaller! In other words, the comparison you are making is the exact basis for his entirely justified claim that Amazon's delivery fee is complete ripoff.</text></item><item><author>res0nat0r</author><text>&#62; charging several dollars for a "delivery fee" of a digital book is OBVIOUS BS!<p>Do you think that the largest file sharing service (S3) and the largest public cloud computing infrastructure (EC2) in the world just operate for free? Digital delivery fees help pay for the millions in hardware, software, infrastructure and maintenance costs for these services, which Kindle uses extensively.</text></item><item><author>mycroftiv</author><text>He is making an entirely justified complaint that Amazon charges unreasonable fees. The idea that any and all corporate behavior is fine simply because "it says so in the contract" is ridiculous.<p>You aren't actually paying attention to what the author wrote - he even specifically talked about how Amazon's Kindle platform provides a good experience for readers and has accounted for the majority of his sales. His post doesn't display any ignorance of the points you are making - instead, he acknowledges them but makes the entirely valid point that charging several dollars for a "delivery fee" of a digital book is OBVIOUS BS!<p>There is a huge disconnect between the attitude of "any price that people will pay is a fair price" and the fact that economic systems require that parties engage in transactions in good faith. To me, it seems blatantly obvious that Amazon is engaging in the bad-faith practice of trying to conceal the true costs of their service by loading a lot of the price into a "delivery charge" that is absurd.<p>This kind of thing is a very old game in business, but that doesn't make it ok. Just because something is common and legal doesn't make it appropriate. A large amount of standard business practices are deliberate, but legal, rip-offs - and calling a rip-off a rip-off is a good thing.</text></item><item><author>ChuckMcM</author><text>This is confusing. Here is someone with a <i>FANTASTIC</i> first outing of a book and he's whinging about it?<p>The author raises $8K on Kickstarter, sells his book for $10, and is complaining that the 'gorilla' is taking a bigger percentage of the take?<p>Using his numbers: of 73%/11%/12%/1% his money was $1117/$231/$333/$20 respectively. So he made three times as much money selling through Amazon as he did on the next closest service (PDF).<p>So what is his complaint? That he didn't read the contract completely? Would he have forgone selling his book on Amazon if he had? Assuming he was trying to get $7/book out of them would he have raised his book price to $15 to pump that price up? And what would that have done to his volume?<p>Its all well and good to posit that you could store your book on an FTP server at Hurricane electric but how would people find it? How would they read it?<p>And then why all this angst over the first few months? The kickerstarter [1] only funded in April, here it is June he has his book out, most travel magazines have like a 3 month lead time on their content, plus folks need to review it etc. What was he expecting? And more importantly since this reads like he is hugely disillusioned by the experience exactly why was he expecting what he was expecting? Didn't he 'get' that he could not have published this book at this level of success <i>at all</i> prior to Amazon?<p>[1] <a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/andrewhyde/this-book-is-about-travel?ref=live" rel="nofollow">http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/andrewhyde/this-book-is-...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>reedlaw</author><text>Probably Amazon is charging more to offset the cost of their unlimited free 3G usage. Before I had a 3G phone, I purchased a 3G Kindle partially to take advantage of this incredible offer. With a 3G Kindle in the US I could freely browse the web anywhere with no limit.</text></comment> |
35,321,203 | 35,321,040 | 1 | 3 | 35,317,590 | train | <story><title>The layoffs will continue until (investor) morale improves</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/26/tech-company-layoffs-2023-morale/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>gumby</author><text>The case of Amazon amazes me. This is the company that famously refused to worry about what investors thought 20+ years ago and just kept on being unprofitable (and instead, investing heavily in growth) to the considerable benefit of investors who stuck with them.<p>Google is crazy too: they will spend more on stock buybacks than they will save through the layoffs, yet are investing nothing in fixing their actual, deep structural problems.</text></comment> | <story><title>The layoffs will continue until (investor) morale improves</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/26/tech-company-layoffs-2023-morale/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>eftychis</author><text>I am curious at what point this violent recurring &quot;dawn&quot; to software engineers (in Silicon Valley specifically) is going to lead to the creation of a Guild.<p>Consider that remote work is more prevalent, the healthcare situation is not getting any better in the U.S. and in this space it has become more common for employees to have to move between companies regardless.<p>Then the certainty of having a comfortable job at Google or Meta evaporates violently. To the point, where mothers while giving birth learn they are fired. And then we have things like ...Twitter.<p>Say you were laid off by FAANG or a notable startup and the same or adjacent company reaches out to you a year from now to rehire you, as the &quot;bull market is here.&quot; What will you do? The instability is here to stay for a while. This can happen in 2025 again pretty easily.<p>What is that critical mass of engineers that would demand a startup gets guild approved to join? I can see that happening if one of FAANG becomes a guild company but they will fight tooth and nail to avoid that.<p>As an investor that is a nightmare, if a minority of startups are in this situation. On the other hand if that is the status quo to getting great people, I can accept that overhead.</text></comment> |
19,571,557 | 19,571,660 | 1 | 2 | 19,571,150 | train | <story><title>Why Don't Americans Understand How Poor Their Lives Are?</title><url>http://www.danielsjourney.com/2017/12/21/america.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>seibelj</author><text>&gt; <i>In London, Paris, Berlin, I hop on the train, head to the cafe — it’s the afternoon, and nobody’s gotten to work until 9am, and even then, maybe not until 10 — order a carefully made coffee and a newly baked croissant, do some writing, pick up some fresh groceries, maybe a meal or two, head home — now it’s 6 or 7, and everyone else has already gone home around 5 — and watch something interesting, maybe a documentary by an academic, the BBC’s Blue Planet, or a Swedish crime-noir. I think back on my day and remember the people smiling and laughing at the pubs and cafes.</i>[0]<p>No, not everyone in Europe gets to live white-collar worker dream of writing poetry at the coffee shop and coming in late. See the people working at the coffee shop, the construction workers, garbage men, etc.<p>One thing I love about America is that people still get shit done here. One reason that Europe has very few innovative new companies created in the last 25 years is that everyone is at the coffee shop writing poetry.<p>An old joke - <i>&quot;Every MBA in America dreams of starting a billion dollar business. Every MBA in Europe dreams of starting a satellite office of the American business.&quot;</i><p>[0] From the actual blog the author quoted from <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;eand.co&#x2F;what-do-you-call-a-world-that-cant-learn-from-itself-58ae28cefd23" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;eand.co&#x2F;what-do-you-call-a-world-that-cant-learn-fro...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cribbles</author><text>&gt; One reason that Europe has very few innovative new companies created in the last 25 years is that everyone is at the coffee shop writing poetry.<p>This does not dispute the central point of the quoted piece, which is that the quality of life of most Americans is very poor contrast to that of the average person in some subset of European countries. I would wager that most coffee shop employees are more concerned with labor protections, healthcare, social welfare, the ability to afford housing and take vacations than whether their country’s economy is producing “innovative companies” (read: tech startups?). This was certainly true of myself when I worked in food service.<p>Even so, this point does not stand well on its own. It may be that Europeans are deincentivized from creating enormously overvalued startups because their quality of life is much better (although I question whether this is worth bragging about, from a US standpoint). Nevertheless, I’d consider things like lack of a single market, fragmented languages and cultures, completely different VC environment, and so on to be much more impactful in that regard.</text></comment> | <story><title>Why Don't Americans Understand How Poor Their Lives Are?</title><url>http://www.danielsjourney.com/2017/12/21/america.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>seibelj</author><text>&gt; <i>In London, Paris, Berlin, I hop on the train, head to the cafe — it’s the afternoon, and nobody’s gotten to work until 9am, and even then, maybe not until 10 — order a carefully made coffee and a newly baked croissant, do some writing, pick up some fresh groceries, maybe a meal or two, head home — now it’s 6 or 7, and everyone else has already gone home around 5 — and watch something interesting, maybe a documentary by an academic, the BBC’s Blue Planet, or a Swedish crime-noir. I think back on my day and remember the people smiling and laughing at the pubs and cafes.</i>[0]<p>No, not everyone in Europe gets to live white-collar worker dream of writing poetry at the coffee shop and coming in late. See the people working at the coffee shop, the construction workers, garbage men, etc.<p>One thing I love about America is that people still get shit done here. One reason that Europe has very few innovative new companies created in the last 25 years is that everyone is at the coffee shop writing poetry.<p>An old joke - <i>&quot;Every MBA in America dreams of starting a billion dollar business. Every MBA in Europe dreams of starting a satellite office of the American business.&quot;</i><p>[0] From the actual blog the author quoted from <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;eand.co&#x2F;what-do-you-call-a-world-that-cant-learn-from-itself-58ae28cefd23" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;eand.co&#x2F;what-do-you-call-a-world-that-cant-learn-fro...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mikejb</author><text>I agree with the white-collar BS story. People work hard in Europe, and especially in cities, some need to work multiple jobs to afford a very basic life. But there&#x27;s one part I disagree with:<p>&gt; One thing I love about America is that people still get shit done here. One reason that Europe has very few innovative new companies created in the last 25 years is that everyone is at the coffee shop writing poetry.<p>I mean, you&#x27;re disagreeing with yourself here: first you say that many don&#x27;t sit in a coffee shop writing poetry, only to then try to make a point basing it on everyone sitting at the coffee shop writing poetry.<p>There&#x27;s plenty of innovation in Europe - but there&#x27;s also limitations that go beyond the personal limitations of people, e.g. lots of regulation and market fragmentation. And often enough, that innovation finds its way into foreign companies, where it then seems as they got shit done.</text></comment> |
38,615,369 | 38,615,800 | 1 | 2 | 38,604,265 | train | <story><title>A rare occultation of Betelgeuse</title><url>https://spaceweatherarchive.com/2023/12/10/an-extremely-rare-occultation-of-betelgeuse/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>1970-01-01</author><text>This was the result:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;spaceweathergallery2.com&#x2F;indiv_upload.php?upload_id=202389" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;spaceweathergallery2.com&#x2F;indiv_upload.php?upload_id=...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>A rare occultation of Betelgeuse</title><url>https://spaceweatherarchive.com/2023/12/10/an-extremely-rare-occultation-of-betelgeuse/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>crooked-v</author><text>Just be careful about saying the name too much during such occult conditions.</text></comment> |
5,047,394 | 5,047,376 | 1 | 2 | 5,046,845 | train | <story><title>Aaron Swartz commits suicide</title><url>http://tech.mit.edu/V132/N61/swartz.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jacquesm</author><text>Man this so sucks.<p>If you hit someone with enough felony counts sooner or later something can snap. This in response to those that claim the DOJ didn't have anything to do with Aaron killing himself.<p>For some people the mere fact of being suspected of a crime they didn't commit is enough to push them over the edge. When you're placed in a holding cell the police will remove your laces from your boots so you don't hang yourself, that's how heavy being imprisoned can weigh on some.<p>Aaron did something that he thought was right, that he truly believed in and that upset a large number of applecarts and that had far reaching implications, had the proverbial book thrown at him and then some. The prospect of significant amounts of jail time (35 years for downloading scientific papers, it shouldn't even <i>be</i> a crime) and/or a felony record must have weighed very heavy on him.<p>For a person that is of a very stable mental make-up that would already be extreme pressure.<p>For someone with a mental issue it may very well be all it takes.<p>Aaron was inspiring to me, I think that no copyrighted piece of paper is worth a human life and that the DOJ, even if they are not directly responsible at least indirectly carry some of the responsibility here for beating down someone who was fighting for an extremely good cause in a somewhat haphazard way. The letter of the law <i>and</i> the spirit of the law should both be taken into account.<p>I hope those that had a hand in Aarons' continued prosecution will sleep miserably for a long time to come. Likely it won't weigh on their consciousness at all.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>konstruktor</author><text>Aaron Swartz did something he knew was morally right but very probably illegal in some way, and, him being a prodigy, I'm very confident he was aware of this. It is called activism, and is a very brave and noble thing to do, something most people don't have the guts for. Governments often try to break activists who threaten their agenda (or in this case, that of a dying industry), and it seems they have succeeded with him, which I find very sad and which makes me so angry.<p>Maybe being indicted while free may even be a bigger psychological pressure on somebody than being in prison. When you are in prison, you can focus all your energy on your case, and the situation can only get better than your current one, not worse. You have certain legal protections, and your basic needs are taken care of.<p>Imagine having to work a job to earn an income (your assets probably being seized) and function in society with a constant feeling of danger looming ahead. They can fuck up your life one little piece at a time. Imagine working on your defence when the computer you are using to do so can be seized at any time (some DA having convinced a judge that you may be hacking right now). Imagine restrictions on travel that make making a living even more difficult. Imagine randomly being delivered a letter with one more bogus charge.<p>While being free seems to be better than in prison from an objective point of view, given the workings of the threat detection system in our mind, made for tigers in the savannah, not constant worry and fear, it may be much worse. It is well known that the functioning of our "higher" abilities like creativity and critical thinking are impaired under constant stress. It's easy to conceive what this means for the feeling of self worth of somebody who lives for doing cool, meaningful, big things (one of my favourite essays ever, btw):
<a href="http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/productivity" rel="nofollow">http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/productivity</a><p>Also, it neatly avoids the aura of illegitimacy that imprisoning peaceful activists would have for a government.<p>One lesson that could be learned from this is to try and consciously provide people in his situation with an environment that feels safe. Nut just a fund for legal and living expenses and therapy to cope with the stress, but much more importantly, reliable relationships with people who are supporting, compassionate and willing to listen.</text></comment> | <story><title>Aaron Swartz commits suicide</title><url>http://tech.mit.edu/V132/N61/swartz.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jacquesm</author><text>Man this so sucks.<p>If you hit someone with enough felony counts sooner or later something can snap. This in response to those that claim the DOJ didn't have anything to do with Aaron killing himself.<p>For some people the mere fact of being suspected of a crime they didn't commit is enough to push them over the edge. When you're placed in a holding cell the police will remove your laces from your boots so you don't hang yourself, that's how heavy being imprisoned can weigh on some.<p>Aaron did something that he thought was right, that he truly believed in and that upset a large number of applecarts and that had far reaching implications, had the proverbial book thrown at him and then some. The prospect of significant amounts of jail time (35 years for downloading scientific papers, it shouldn't even <i>be</i> a crime) and/or a felony record must have weighed very heavy on him.<p>For a person that is of a very stable mental make-up that would already be extreme pressure.<p>For someone with a mental issue it may very well be all it takes.<p>Aaron was inspiring to me, I think that no copyrighted piece of paper is worth a human life and that the DOJ, even if they are not directly responsible at least indirectly carry some of the responsibility here for beating down someone who was fighting for an extremely good cause in a somewhat haphazard way. The letter of the law <i>and</i> the spirit of the law should both be taken into account.<p>I hope those that had a hand in Aarons' continued prosecution will sleep miserably for a long time to come. Likely it won't weigh on their consciousness at all.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wheels</author><text>It really rubs me the wrong way when something like this happens and folks jump to conclusions as you have here. You didn't know this person. For all we know he could have not given two shits about the whole legal process and this is linked to family or relationship problems or long term general depression.</text></comment> |
2,440,939 | 2,440,845 | 1 | 3 | 2,440,432 | train | <story><title>Another Way to View the "Decline" of HN</title><url>http://www.georgesaines.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pg</author><text>Unfortunately, I think the biggest problem is that there are a huge number of mediocre comments. The increase in meanness is just one of the more visible aspects of that. (Meanness is moral mediocrity.)<p>Although maybe I shouldn't say "unfortunately," because that problem may be easy to cure. E.g. it might work simply to add a karma cost of for commenting, an idea I'm seriously considering trying out.</text></item><item><author>javert</author><text>If comments "seem worse," then in what way are they worse? That may help find an answer.<p>My general hypothesis is that you can improve comment quality by giving users more metrics than just an upvote or downvote.<p>For example, consider the following:<p>Some people are saying there's a lot more negativity around here. I think that's true. Also, I've found that if someone is negative towards me in a way that seems personal, I get defensive and have to work hard to not respond in kind (and sometimes I respond in a mean way anyways). Sometimes these kinds of arguments get a lot of upvotes, because lots of people take one side or the other, and new people get drawn in.<p>One way to deal with this particular problem would be to treat comments that are "mean" differently from comments that just aren't interesting or insightful or correct.<p>For example, you could just cut off, or gray out, any comment thread that becomes "mean," thus diverting attention from it; people already involved would be able to continue if they want, knowing nobody else will probably look at it, and new people won't get drawn in. How you detect when a thread becomes "mean" is not easy, but maybe you could have a "mean" button/flag. A person clicks the "mean" flag to vote the thread as mean, but their vote's power is weighted against their karma, and then there is a threshhold that, if reached, actually designates the thread as "mean" and greys it out or whatnot.<p>Now, the point of this comment is not actually the specific "meanness" example, but the hypothesis I laid out at the beginning of the comment.<p>I mean, hell, you could try a bunch of different metrics. Just create a little "metrics bar" that allows users to vote on various things (like "meanness," etc.) and rotate a few different options through over time just to see which ones help or give interesting data. Keep the normal voting much more prominent, though, and make this metrics bar less prominent, so that it can be ignored and doesn't impact the UX much for those not interested.</text></item><item><author>pg</author><text>I wish this were the whole reason. It may be why people are bored with the stories on the frontpage; there doesn't seem much if any change in those. But comments do actually seem worse. Though I still have hopes of reversing that trend.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>zedshaw</author><text>&#62; Meanness is moral mediocrity.<p>Shiiit Paul, hacker news has been screwed up since the beginning. Remember this video?<p><a href="http://www.viddler.com/explore/rentzsch/videos/31/" rel="nofollow">http://www.viddler.com/explore/rentzsch/videos/31/</a><p>That video would show up on the front page about once a year, and is by one of your most popular members and commenters. The video is <i>full</i> of slander and straight up factual errors and even gets almost all of cryptography and network protocols wrong. It's probably one of <i>the</i> worst videos on security out there, yet, what did HN do?<p>Eat. It. Up. Nobody flagged that video, told tptacek it was bullshit, or bothered saying one damn thing about it other than cheering it on and laughing. You definitely didn't boot him off the site, and in fact gave him a top spot in your system. This is not how you tell people you don't like 'meanness'.<p>Over the years here and before I started commenting people called me a cocksucker, cock, asshole, douchebag, and every mean ass thing you can imagine. They do it to other people too, and I sure as hell don't see anyone getting flagged or kicked off. If you pick someone unpopular to insult you're totally allowed to be a dick here.<p>Paul, HN is in decline because you don't actually enforce your own rules. If you don't want people to be "mean" or talk like idiots then don't let mean and idiotic crap on the front page. Half the time, when one of my many clever ruthless jokes shows up on the front page I giggle. My jokes demonstrate what you've been allowing for years but only seem to care about now that it's insulting your own ethos of the "uber hacker scientist ruling the world":<p>You guys love cruelty and insult, I'm proof.</text></comment> | <story><title>Another Way to View the "Decline" of HN</title><url>http://www.georgesaines.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pg</author><text>Unfortunately, I think the biggest problem is that there are a huge number of mediocre comments. The increase in meanness is just one of the more visible aspects of that. (Meanness is moral mediocrity.)<p>Although maybe I shouldn't say "unfortunately," because that problem may be easy to cure. E.g. it might work simply to add a karma cost of for commenting, an idea I'm seriously considering trying out.</text></item><item><author>javert</author><text>If comments "seem worse," then in what way are they worse? That may help find an answer.<p>My general hypothesis is that you can improve comment quality by giving users more metrics than just an upvote or downvote.<p>For example, consider the following:<p>Some people are saying there's a lot more negativity around here. I think that's true. Also, I've found that if someone is negative towards me in a way that seems personal, I get defensive and have to work hard to not respond in kind (and sometimes I respond in a mean way anyways). Sometimes these kinds of arguments get a lot of upvotes, because lots of people take one side or the other, and new people get drawn in.<p>One way to deal with this particular problem would be to treat comments that are "mean" differently from comments that just aren't interesting or insightful or correct.<p>For example, you could just cut off, or gray out, any comment thread that becomes "mean," thus diverting attention from it; people already involved would be able to continue if they want, knowing nobody else will probably look at it, and new people won't get drawn in. How you detect when a thread becomes "mean" is not easy, but maybe you could have a "mean" button/flag. A person clicks the "mean" flag to vote the thread as mean, but their vote's power is weighted against their karma, and then there is a threshhold that, if reached, actually designates the thread as "mean" and greys it out or whatnot.<p>Now, the point of this comment is not actually the specific "meanness" example, but the hypothesis I laid out at the beginning of the comment.<p>I mean, hell, you could try a bunch of different metrics. Just create a little "metrics bar" that allows users to vote on various things (like "meanness," etc.) and rotate a few different options through over time just to see which ones help or give interesting data. Keep the normal voting much more prominent, though, and make this metrics bar less prominent, so that it can be ignored and doesn't impact the UX much for those not interested.</text></item><item><author>pg</author><text>I wish this were the whole reason. It may be why people are bored with the stories on the frontpage; there doesn't seem much if any change in those. But comments do actually seem worse. Though I still have hopes of reversing that trend.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tansey</author><text>PG, if you really want to get hard data on whether comments have gotten "meaner", I'd be happy to help with that.<p>It seems the chief complaint is that comments are no longer increasing the happiness and confidence of the community, but rather raising anxiety and hostility. My startup is based on an algorithm for measuring the emotional impact of text and does in fact measure these four emotions.<p>I'd be pleased to help measure how comments' effects on readers have changed over time. I would do it myself, but I know you don't want me anonymously scraping every comment for the last 3+ years, and it'd be much faster to just get a data dump from the server.<p>Drop me a line if interested. :)</text></comment> |
12,561,410 | 12,561,440 | 1 | 3 | 12,559,753 | train | <story><title>How to Get a Job in Deep Learning</title><url>http://blog.deepgram.com/how-to-get-a-job-in-deep-learning/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>csantini</author><text>TL;DR: Deep Learning will become a commodity. Software will eat Deep Learning too.<p>I&#x27;d like to clean up a bit the air from the hype fog:<p>DL is giving amazing results only when you have big sets of labelled data. Hence it will be much cheaper for companies to buy Google&#x2F;Microsoft Vision&#x2F;Audio REST APIs rather than paying the costs of: cloud + find data + deep learning experts. So, I don&#x27;t think we will see a massive growth of DL gigs.<p>e.g. Google Vision API: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cloud.google.com&#x2F;vision&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cloud.google.com&#x2F;vision&#x2F;</a><p>Except those areas where your own CNN implementation is needed (automotive, industrial automation), Deep Learning will be another &quot;library&quot; in the ever increasing Software Engineering mess of gluing many open source libraries and REST apis to get something useful done. You need 1 guy training a Neural Network for every 100 software monkeys maintaining the infrastructure complexity.
There are now many Software Engineering jobs because it&#x27;s hard to glue and maintain publicly-available code to solve some specific business problem.<p>I think the the same applies for many Data Scientist jobs, which are these days more about fetching&#x2F;cleaning&#x2F;visualizing data than making machine learning on it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>csantini</author><text>This is also one reason why Tensor Flow is open. Yes, Google wants it to become the standard, but it&#x27;s also not a competitive advantage.<p>The advantage is not the Deep Learning algorithm.<p>Some theoretical progress has been made on Neural Networks lately, but largely it&#x27;s the same stuff from the 90s, with much more GPUs and data.<p>The competitive advantage is the cloud, and the software mess that keeps it alive.<p>I think Deep Learning experts will be like Linux Kernel experts. You need 1000 kernel experts in the world, but you need 10 million javascript monkeys that code what dialog message appears when the user does something stupid in some app.</text></comment> | <story><title>How to Get a Job in Deep Learning</title><url>http://blog.deepgram.com/how-to-get-a-job-in-deep-learning/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>csantini</author><text>TL;DR: Deep Learning will become a commodity. Software will eat Deep Learning too.<p>I&#x27;d like to clean up a bit the air from the hype fog:<p>DL is giving amazing results only when you have big sets of labelled data. Hence it will be much cheaper for companies to buy Google&#x2F;Microsoft Vision&#x2F;Audio REST APIs rather than paying the costs of: cloud + find data + deep learning experts. So, I don&#x27;t think we will see a massive growth of DL gigs.<p>e.g. Google Vision API: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cloud.google.com&#x2F;vision&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cloud.google.com&#x2F;vision&#x2F;</a><p>Except those areas where your own CNN implementation is needed (automotive, industrial automation), Deep Learning will be another &quot;library&quot; in the ever increasing Software Engineering mess of gluing many open source libraries and REST apis to get something useful done. You need 1 guy training a Neural Network for every 100 software monkeys maintaining the infrastructure complexity.
There are now many Software Engineering jobs because it&#x27;s hard to glue and maintain publicly-available code to solve some specific business problem.<p>I think the the same applies for many Data Scientist jobs, which are these days more about fetching&#x2F;cleaning&#x2F;visualizing data than making machine learning on it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>stephensonsco</author><text>For the people who want a job in deep learning, they are definitely around and they will be for a while.<p>It&#x27;s true that DL will probably become just-another-library, but that will happen only once computing becomes extremely cheap on the petaflop scale (it isn&#x27;t cheap yet). Even after that happens, the people that spend time doing DL now will be trained in a way of thinking that will be in demand for a long time.</text></comment> |
25,667,558 | 25,667,554 | 1 | 2 | 25,667,251 | train | <story><title>Infosec implications of the US Capitol physical breach</title><url>https://twitter.com/neurovagrant/status/1346964347684179970</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ReaganFJones</author><text>I&#x27;m not sure if it could be largely characterized as security theater. The videos from the Capitol demonstrate just how outmatched the police were: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;KySportsRadio&#x2F;status&#x2F;1347031398176223233" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;KySportsRadio&#x2F;status&#x2F;1347031398176223233</a><p>There were clear examples of failures like the police letting them in or taking selfies with them. We&#x27;ll see what oversight gets applied to the Capitol police... <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.politico.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;2021&#x2F;01&#x2F;06&#x2F;capitol-riots-police-firings-455698" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.politico.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;2021&#x2F;01&#x2F;06&#x2F;capitol-riots-polic...</a></text></item><item><author>btmiller</author><text>In terms of physical intrusion, a tremendous amount of security theater was exposed today. Quite astonishing how easily people were able to gain access.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>quasse</author><text>&gt;outmatched<p>I wouldn&#x27;t say that&#x27;s even a fair characterization. Per the capitol police website they have 2,600 officers and a budget of $460 million. It honestly just ... didn&#x27;t look like they were trying very hard. They managed to arrest what, 14 people? Compare that to the BLM protests on the west coast where unmarked vans of feds were literally rolling up and black bagging people off the street.<p>USCP is charged with protecting Congress, and I think members of congress should be thinking hard about whether the police were complicit in what happened today.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.uscp.gov&#x2F;media-center&#x2F;uscp-fast-facts" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.uscp.gov&#x2F;media-center&#x2F;uscp-fast-facts</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Infosec implications of the US Capitol physical breach</title><url>https://twitter.com/neurovagrant/status/1346964347684179970</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ReaganFJones</author><text>I&#x27;m not sure if it could be largely characterized as security theater. The videos from the Capitol demonstrate just how outmatched the police were: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;KySportsRadio&#x2F;status&#x2F;1347031398176223233" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;KySportsRadio&#x2F;status&#x2F;1347031398176223233</a><p>There were clear examples of failures like the police letting them in or taking selfies with them. We&#x27;ll see what oversight gets applied to the Capitol police... <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.politico.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;2021&#x2F;01&#x2F;06&#x2F;capitol-riots-police-firings-455698" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.politico.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;2021&#x2F;01&#x2F;06&#x2F;capitol-riots-polic...</a></text></item><item><author>btmiller</author><text>In terms of physical intrusion, a tremendous amount of security theater was exposed today. Quite astonishing how easily people were able to gain access.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>preommr</author><text>&gt; The videos from the Capitol demonstrate just how outmatched the police were<p>Not sure if I understand the point you&#x27;re trying to make.<p>They shouldn&#x27;t have been outmatched in the first place. The protest was planned and the information was extremely overt. Something went horribly wrong for this to happen.</text></comment> |
3,081,224 | 3,080,738 | 1 | 3 | 3,080,172 | train | <story><title>Wozniak remembers Steve Jobs</title><url>http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/wozniak-remembers-steve-jobs/2011/10/06/gIQAAINvPL_video.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ajross</author><text>Not sure that would have been as enlightening as you think. They worked together on the Apple II, not the Mac. And the 6502 boxes were all Woz on the inside. His design, his software. Jobs added the box, the polish and the marketing. But all the look and feel wizardry and attention to detail was still in his future. Apple bootstrapped by selling a machine that was fundamentally the work of a single hacker.<p><i>Edit: I should explain more of my perspective here. Woz doesn't get remotely as much recognition as he deserves for Apple's success. Jobs was the executive, his leadership style, "force of taste" and personality were able to scale to Apple as it exists today. But by itself that would have gotten him zilch in 1976. Apple exists at all because One Guy was able to put together a single box at a production price point that wouldn't be matched for 7 years. The Apple II video hardware and especially the disk controller (both implemented with just a handful of off-the-shelf logic chips, no ASICs involved) were works of true, absolute, genius. Circuit design like that probably won't ever happen again.</i></text></item><item><author>JunkDNA</author><text>Reminds me what an incredible guy Woz is as well. Makes me wish I could have been there as the two of them debated the future of the personal computer in their garage.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ellyagg</author><text>You don't think hearing Jobs and Wozniak discussing the future of personal computers would have been all that enlightening? Did you watch the linked video? Wozniak explicitly refutes you. He says they discussed personal computers extensively and Jobs always pushed him to engineer ideas that other people weren't envisioning. He says that Jobs needed him at the beginning and that Wozniak owes much more after that to Jobs.<p>It's pointless to try to determine who was more important to Apple's initial success anyway. It's like trying to figure out whether the calves or the thighs contribute more to a vertical jump. Try keeping your legs perfectly straight at the knees and jumping with just the feet: You'll only get a couple inches off the floor. Now try keeping the ankle locked and jump off the heels with your thighs: You'll get a little higher. But if you take a full natural jump with your upper and lower leg, you'll jump far higher than the addition of both before. The point is, sometimes synergies just can't be broken down into obvious component forces.</text></comment> | <story><title>Wozniak remembers Steve Jobs</title><url>http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/wozniak-remembers-steve-jobs/2011/10/06/gIQAAINvPL_video.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ajross</author><text>Not sure that would have been as enlightening as you think. They worked together on the Apple II, not the Mac. And the 6502 boxes were all Woz on the inside. His design, his software. Jobs added the box, the polish and the marketing. But all the look and feel wizardry and attention to detail was still in his future. Apple bootstrapped by selling a machine that was fundamentally the work of a single hacker.<p><i>Edit: I should explain more of my perspective here. Woz doesn't get remotely as much recognition as he deserves for Apple's success. Jobs was the executive, his leadership style, "force of taste" and personality were able to scale to Apple as it exists today. But by itself that would have gotten him zilch in 1976. Apple exists at all because One Guy was able to put together a single box at a production price point that wouldn't be matched for 7 years. The Apple II video hardware and especially the disk controller (both implemented with just a handful of off-the-shelf logic chips, no ASICs involved) were works of true, absolute, genius. Circuit design like that probably won't ever happen again.</i></text></item><item><author>JunkDNA</author><text>Reminds me what an incredible guy Woz is as well. Makes me wish I could have been there as the two of them debated the future of the personal computer in their garage.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vecter</author><text>I remember a video of Steve in 1997(?) where he said "people want big beautiful color displays, maps, intuitive interfaces, etc." (horribly misquoted I'm sure). It was clear back then that he had the vision for the iPhone and iPad, in some way.<p>Just because Steve wasn't technically proficient doesn't mean that he didn't have any good input into the design and features of the machines that Woz was building. I'm sure Steve said a lot of things, about the software especially, that helped determine the direction of the product they were building.</text></comment> |
25,488,199 | 25,487,361 | 1 | 2 | 25,486,446 | train | <story><title>The Acorn Archimedes and the first ARM processor</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/features/2020/12/how-an-obscure-british-pc-maker-invented-arm-and-changed-the-world/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>klelatti</author><text>If you really want to understand why Arm was so successful as a company I&#x27;d suggesting spending time listening to their their first CEO - Robin Saxby - in this engaging interview by Charbax from 2017.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=FO5PsAY5aaI" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=FO5PsAY5aaI</a><p>And they are unlikely winners not because they came from the UK (seriously?) but because of the weakness of their commercial position when they started. It&#x27;s a really interesting story.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Acorn Archimedes and the first ARM processor</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/features/2020/12/how-an-obscure-british-pc-maker-invented-arm-and-changed-the-world/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>codeulike</author><text>I had an Archimedes, the first Arm machine, in 1988 or so. It was marketed as the fastest microcomputer in the world at the time so I think Acorn knew they&#x27;d hit on something special. I was 14 and used to write games on the BBC Micro Model B and so upgrading to the Archimedes with it&#x27;s speed, Sprite system and millions of colours was like suddenly being let loose in a huge unbounded creative arena. Good times.</text></comment> |
28,647,081 | 28,647,025 | 1 | 2 | 28,639,952 | train | <story><title>Do not leave XPS laptop in any sleep/hibernate/standby mode when placed in a bag</title><url>https://www.dell.com/community/XPS/FAQ-Modern-Standby/td-p/7514448</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>davrosthedalek</author><text>Be careful. My Macbook Pro cooked it&#x27;s display twice. Some program made it not go to sleep when I closed the lid, I put it in my backpack, and it overheated the display so much that I had yellow-brownish spots (which followed gravity over time).
No way to check if it&#x27;s sleeping when the lid is closed, because reasons...</text></item><item><author>radicalbyte</author><text>This is the literal reason I switched to OSX. I dislike the impractical design of Macbooks - horrible connectivity and no way to swap batteries.<p>However the combination of 15 hrs battery life + closing the lid and it not melting a hole in my bag trumps any negatives.</text></item><item><author>fxtentacle</author><text>I stopped using my Microsoft Surface Pro because it had the same issues. It&#x27;s a clusterfuck of bad design decisions at Microsoft, the most offensive one being that they prioritize the execution of their scheduled spyware upload (telemetry) over honoring the agreement with the user that a sleeping PC will remain asleep unless the user takes action. It&#x27;ll even install updates at night and then make reboot sounds to wake you up. And the next day, your unsaved open documents are all gone. Plus as described here, many Windows 10 laptops will either burn themselves, or the battery will be empty whenever you need em.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dubya</author><text>I really miss the &quot;snoring&quot; light that Macbooks used to have, though more to tell if the computer is actually waking up.</text></comment> | <story><title>Do not leave XPS laptop in any sleep/hibernate/standby mode when placed in a bag</title><url>https://www.dell.com/community/XPS/FAQ-Modern-Standby/td-p/7514448</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>davrosthedalek</author><text>Be careful. My Macbook Pro cooked it&#x27;s display twice. Some program made it not go to sleep when I closed the lid, I put it in my backpack, and it overheated the display so much that I had yellow-brownish spots (which followed gravity over time).
No way to check if it&#x27;s sleeping when the lid is closed, because reasons...</text></item><item><author>radicalbyte</author><text>This is the literal reason I switched to OSX. I dislike the impractical design of Macbooks - horrible connectivity and no way to swap batteries.<p>However the combination of 15 hrs battery life + closing the lid and it not melting a hole in my bag trumps any negatives.</text></item><item><author>fxtentacle</author><text>I stopped using my Microsoft Surface Pro because it had the same issues. It&#x27;s a clusterfuck of bad design decisions at Microsoft, the most offensive one being that they prioritize the execution of their scheduled spyware upload (telemetry) over honoring the agreement with the user that a sleeping PC will remain asleep unless the user takes action. It&#x27;ll even install updates at night and then make reboot sounds to wake you up. And the next day, your unsaved open documents are all gone. Plus as described here, many Windows 10 laptops will either burn themselves, or the battery will be empty whenever you need em.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jmarcher</author><text>I always assumed those were the result of my cycling backpack putting too much pressure on the screen. It&#x27;s basically bow-like structure to keep the bag off my back.<p>I do have my MacBooks cooking themselves in my backpack every so often too.<p>Basically, every MacBook&#x27;s I had in the past &gt; 10 years ended with that issue.<p>Mystery solved!</text></comment> |
35,832,133 | 35,830,550 | 1 | 3 | 35,825,688 | train | <story><title>Arianespace CEO: Europe won't have reusable rockets for another decade</title><url>https://www.space.com/europe-no-reusable-rocket-until-2030s</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bluescrn</author><text>The US won&#x27;t have the tech in 10 years either if current levels of political tribalism continue.<p>Seems that a lot of people want to see Elon destroyed over Twitter&#x2F;politics. See the incredibly negative reaction to the Starship launch attempt compared to the much more positive reaction to previous test flights that ended with a boom.<p>And if they destroy our current best hope for the future of space exploration in the process of going after Elon, they don&#x27;t care, it&#x27;s &#x27;a win for the environment&#x27;, or acceptable collateral damage to take down an &#x27;evil multibillionaire&#x27;<p>(Maybe Elon should even consider stepping away from SpaceX? - but then projects as ambitious&#x2F;risky as Starship would likely be dropped)</text></item><item><author>samwillis</author><text>And likely neither will Russia, China, India, Japan or anyone other than the US - with maybe the exception of New Zealand.<p>The writing has been on the wall for where rockets were going for ten years, policy makers absolutely have failed, but let&#x27;s not pretend it&#x27;s only Europe who have got it wrong.<p>Also, the negativity these sort of headlines bring to &quot;tech&quot; in Europe as a whole are also unhelpful. Europe is absolutely at the cutting edge of technology.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>panick21_</author><text>&gt; See the incredibly negative reaction to the Starship launch attempt compared to the much more positive reaction to previous test flights that ended with a boom.<p>You are rewriting history. The same fucking thing happens everytime a rocket explodes. The same reaction happened with the earlier test flights again.<p>Some dumb idiots in the media and twitter right bullshit. A few dumb politicans try to cash in and do a bunch of saber rattling in congress.<p>Same game over and over, it doesn&#x27;t matter and doesn&#x27;t change anything.<p>SpaceX or Musk will not be destroyed by this nonsense.</text></comment> | <story><title>Arianespace CEO: Europe won't have reusable rockets for another decade</title><url>https://www.space.com/europe-no-reusable-rocket-until-2030s</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bluescrn</author><text>The US won&#x27;t have the tech in 10 years either if current levels of political tribalism continue.<p>Seems that a lot of people want to see Elon destroyed over Twitter&#x2F;politics. See the incredibly negative reaction to the Starship launch attempt compared to the much more positive reaction to previous test flights that ended with a boom.<p>And if they destroy our current best hope for the future of space exploration in the process of going after Elon, they don&#x27;t care, it&#x27;s &#x27;a win for the environment&#x27;, or acceptable collateral damage to take down an &#x27;evil multibillionaire&#x27;<p>(Maybe Elon should even consider stepping away from SpaceX? - but then projects as ambitious&#x2F;risky as Starship would likely be dropped)</text></item><item><author>samwillis</author><text>And likely neither will Russia, China, India, Japan or anyone other than the US - with maybe the exception of New Zealand.<p>The writing has been on the wall for where rockets were going for ten years, policy makers absolutely have failed, but let&#x27;s not pretend it&#x27;s only Europe who have got it wrong.<p>Also, the negativity these sort of headlines bring to &quot;tech&quot; in Europe as a whole are also unhelpful. Europe is absolutely at the cutting edge of technology.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>usefulcat</author><text>Elon is a great salesman, but I think SpaceX is far enough along that it would be fine without him. Maybe better than fine, given how reckless he can be.</text></comment> |
38,218,755 | 38,218,853 | 1 | 2 | 38,218,346 | train | <story><title>Swedish painters trade union to stop all work with Tesla brand cars</title><url>https://www.malarna.nu/om-oss/nyheter/20232/pressmeddelande-malarna-stoppar-lackering-av-tesla-bilar/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>anon23432343</author><text>Welcome to Sweden :)<p>Unions are strong here which in general is a good thing!<p>You can&#x27;t also fire people just for willing to join or create a union!<p>This is not the U S of A. Were you can get fired for stuff which you have the right to do.<p>I hope the unions will win soon!<p>I my self joined the <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sverigesingenjorer.se&#x2F;in-english&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sverigesingenjorer.se&#x2F;in-english&#x2F;</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rob74</author><text>Good for Sweden! But OTOH, it&#x27;s sad to see the international race to the bottom: Tesla will of course not build a factory in Sweden, where the union representation rate is 88%, but in Germany, which theoretically has a very similar collective bargaining model, but where the rate has fallen to 54% (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Collective_agreement_coverage#By_country" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Collective_agreement_coverage#...</a>).</text></comment> | <story><title>Swedish painters trade union to stop all work with Tesla brand cars</title><url>https://www.malarna.nu/om-oss/nyheter/20232/pressmeddelande-malarna-stoppar-lackering-av-tesla-bilar/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>anon23432343</author><text>Welcome to Sweden :)<p>Unions are strong here which in general is a good thing!<p>You can&#x27;t also fire people just for willing to join or create a union!<p>This is not the U S of A. Were you can get fired for stuff which you have the right to do.<p>I hope the unions will win soon!<p>I my self joined the <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sverigesingenjorer.se&#x2F;in-english&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sverigesingenjorer.se&#x2F;in-english&#x2F;</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>waihtis</author><text>The Nordic countries must adapt away from this pre-globalization mentality or have all of their assets slowly withered away by more flexible economies. The same exact problem applies to Finland where I&#x27;m from.<p>Euro-area economies are stagnant or shrinking whilst US economy is churning onwards like a madman. They will buy all of our assets away over time unless we start seriously competing.<p>Sad, but this is the only choice now that we&#x27;ve chosen to participate in the global economy.</text></comment> |
13,878,381 | 13,878,548 | 1 | 2 | 13,874,026 | train | <story><title>Hiring without whiteboards</title><url>https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>alexeiz</author><text>When you get stuck, start talking. You should not be silent at the whiteboard trying to flash out a complete solution all at once. Talk. Even if interviewers are not saying anything or ask you any more questions. There are multiple advantages of talking while writing code at the whiteboard. Firstly, you show the interviewers the way you think and approach the problem. It is as important as actually solving the problem. Secondly, if you get stuck or start making unreasonable assumptions about the problem, the interviewers will have a chance to quickly correct you or give you a hint. Thirdly, it shows that you can communicate. Nobody wants to hire a person who can&#x27;t communicate with other people.</text></item><item><author>kelvin0</author><text>Imagine this. You are interviewing for a job, you walk in a room with 2 people who hand you over a sheet with a few problems. They ask you to write the solutions on the whiteboard, while they wait for you to complete.<p>Not a word is said, they are clicking at their laptops, and staring at the whiteboard, as waiting for the genie to pop out of a bottle. All the while your mind is frozen and stuck in a bad loop.<p>This lasts an hour, you are barely able to complete parts of the problems and are frozen. Of course this affects your usually creative and sharp mind.<p>The torture lasts an hour, time&#x27;s up! You shake their hands, as a kiss of death, and head out. As you are walking back, all the answers to all the problems they wanted you to whiteboard, come rushing like a torrent in your mind. Too bad, another &#x27;botched&#x27; technical interview.<p>This is my experience as a battle tested developer who is shipped many products and has been programming for the love of computers since the age of 12 (professionally for more than 15 years). I am not going to be working at Google any time soon (not that a Google job really matters to me).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>meowlicious</author><text>I don&#x27;t find talking and thinking at the same time natural. &#x27;Just think out loud&#x27; seems so unnatural to me, I never do it in daily life. I am used to thinking to deep house music not to interviewers staring at me like hungry wolves. Its hard to communicate with someone who already knows the solution to question because you are thinking together and feeding off of each others thoughts like in a normal work situation.<p>I think the idea of modern open office is built on the same idea that people would be thinking, communicating and collaborating at the same time, but I hate open offices for this precise reason.</text></comment> | <story><title>Hiring without whiteboards</title><url>https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>alexeiz</author><text>When you get stuck, start talking. You should not be silent at the whiteboard trying to flash out a complete solution all at once. Talk. Even if interviewers are not saying anything or ask you any more questions. There are multiple advantages of talking while writing code at the whiteboard. Firstly, you show the interviewers the way you think and approach the problem. It is as important as actually solving the problem. Secondly, if you get stuck or start making unreasonable assumptions about the problem, the interviewers will have a chance to quickly correct you or give you a hint. Thirdly, it shows that you can communicate. Nobody wants to hire a person who can&#x27;t communicate with other people.</text></item><item><author>kelvin0</author><text>Imagine this. You are interviewing for a job, you walk in a room with 2 people who hand you over a sheet with a few problems. They ask you to write the solutions on the whiteboard, while they wait for you to complete.<p>Not a word is said, they are clicking at their laptops, and staring at the whiteboard, as waiting for the genie to pop out of a bottle. All the while your mind is frozen and stuck in a bad loop.<p>This lasts an hour, you are barely able to complete parts of the problems and are frozen. Of course this affects your usually creative and sharp mind.<p>The torture lasts an hour, time&#x27;s up! You shake their hands, as a kiss of death, and head out. As you are walking back, all the answers to all the problems they wanted you to whiteboard, come rushing like a torrent in your mind. Too bad, another &#x27;botched&#x27; technical interview.<p>This is my experience as a battle tested developer who is shipped many products and has been programming for the love of computers since the age of 12 (professionally for more than 15 years). I am not going to be working at Google any time soon (not that a Google job really matters to me).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>andersonmvd</author><text>It&#x27;s a band-aid for an unfixed root cause. Solving problems by talking doesn&#x27;t work for all people. It astonishes me how broken interview processes are. They just need to see if the candidate will be able to do the daily job of a current employee in that position. It&#x27;s that simple. It doesn&#x27;t require whiteboards, puzzles, 10 interviews. Put the candidate to work on a project that you currently facing and see his performance. Doing something other than that is bullshit.</text></comment> |
18,055,376 | 18,055,440 | 1 | 2 | 18,054,865 | train | <story><title>Mr. Rogers vs. the Superheroes</title><url>https://longreads.com/2018/09/19/mr-rogers-vs-the-superheroes/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>caro_douglos</author><text>I&#x27;ve always been fascinated by how some children&#x27;s book authors are able to bring up story lines which tap into feelings that arise at various ages (i.e death, divorce, etc). I watched Mr Roger&#x27;s growing up but really had no idea everything seen was a smartly curated way to make children more empathetic and analytical.</text></comment> | <story><title>Mr. Rogers vs. the Superheroes</title><url>https://longreads.com/2018/09/19/mr-rogers-vs-the-superheroes/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>lifeisstillgood</author><text>This is especially true today. I have seen a critique of Marvels infinity war where (spoilers) Thanos needs to &quot;sacrifice that he loves the most&quot; to gain a special stone.<p>So he throws his daughter off a cliff, and cries as he does. He &quot;loved&quot; her.<p>People have pointed out that for an abused child sitting watching with her abuser, this reinforces the idea that the person who is harming her actually loves her ... a repulsive idea and perhaps as damaging as jumping off a roof with a towel.<p>I guess &quot;with great power comes great responsibility&quot;<p>PS
not being American Mr Rogers is a mystery to me - can anyone recommend a documentary &#x2F; example ?</text></comment> |
4,373,639 | 4,373,348 | 1 | 2 | 4,372,378 | train | <story><title>Erlang programmer’s view on Curiosity Rover software</title><url>http://jlouisramblings.blogspot.com/2012/08/getting-25-megalines-of-code-to-behave.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>pron</author><text>I absolutely love Erlang and think that, along with Clojure, it provides a complete ideology for developing modern software.<p>But the article implies (and more than once) that the rover's architecture borrows from Erlang, while the opposite is true. Erlang adopted common best practices from fault-tolerant, mission-critical software, and packaged them in a language and runtime that make deviating from those principles difficult.<p>The rover's software shows Erlang's roots, not its legacy.</text></comment> | <story><title>Erlang programmer’s view on Curiosity Rover software</title><url>http://jlouisramblings.blogspot.com/2012/08/getting-25-megalines-of-code-to-behave.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Tloewald</author><text>Back in the 90s there was a software engineering fad (unfair term but it was faddish at the time) called the process maturity index, and JPL was one of two software development sites that qualified for the highest rank (5) which involves continuous improvement, measuring everything, and going from rigorous spec to code via mathematical proof.<p>This process (which Ed Jourdan neatly eviscerated when applied to business software) produces software that is as reliable as the specification and underlying hardware.</text></comment> |
3,328,408 | 3,328,364 | 1 | 2 | 3,326,969 | train | <story><title>Simple ways to improve the security of a web app</title><url>http://blog.fiesta.cc/post/13896457582/three-simple-ways-to-improve-the-security-of-your-web</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mike-cardwell</author><text>Your Strict-Transport-Security definition is missing the "includeSubDomains" flag. STS is a lot more effective if you use that flag.<p>You should discuss how X-Frame-Options prevents sites legitimately loading your pages inside frames too. I believe Reddit does this amongst others in order to displays a small control panel at the top of the page. X-Frame-Options is appropriate for many sites, but perhaps not for blogs.<p>You should talk about how CSP prevents most bookmarklets from working. For example readability and instapaper. I really like CSP, but people should be made aware of this.</text></comment> | <story><title>Simple ways to improve the security of a web app</title><url>http://blog.fiesta.cc/post/13896457582/three-simple-ways-to-improve-the-security-of-your-web</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>alexchamberlain</author><text>I wasn't expecting much from yet another "How to secure your website..." article, but those headers are completely new to me.</text></comment> |
3,818,259 | 3,818,145 | 1 | 3 | 3,817,840 | train | <story><title>Facebook acquires Instagram</title><url>https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10100318398827991</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>homosaur</author><text>YouTube is a content paradise though. There's tons of value there and you can sell ads against it or even charge for premium services.<p>Where's the money in Instagram? The content is practically worthless and their only real value is in their userbase. Even though I use the Instagram client, most of the time I see photos, they come through Twitter. So that also reinforces for me that any value is in the users and not the actual content, which is mostly crap.<p>I'm more convinced that we're in a 2nd bubble now more than ever.</text></item><item><author>inmygarage</author><text>This is very reminiscent of Google/YouTube circa 2006. When Google bought YT it was a small team of people and a pretty nascent product that people really loved, and the usage numbers were out of control. They left the product mostly untouched and let it grow on its own. Though there was major criticism at the time, it is one of the best tech acquisitions of the past decade.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>acgourley</author><text>I doubt you, or anyone else, was saying that then youtube was purchased. It merely looked popular.<p>It turns out what Google was buying was a chance to maintain their lead in how people were going to use their computers.<p>Facebook is now buying a chance to maintain their lead with how people are going to use their phones.</text></comment> | <story><title>Facebook acquires Instagram</title><url>https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10100318398827991</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>homosaur</author><text>YouTube is a content paradise though. There's tons of value there and you can sell ads against it or even charge for premium services.<p>Where's the money in Instagram? The content is practically worthless and their only real value is in their userbase. Even though I use the Instagram client, most of the time I see photos, they come through Twitter. So that also reinforces for me that any value is in the users and not the actual content, which is mostly crap.<p>I'm more convinced that we're in a 2nd bubble now more than ever.</text></item><item><author>inmygarage</author><text>This is very reminiscent of Google/YouTube circa 2006. When Google bought YT it was a small team of people and a pretty nascent product that people really loved, and the usage numbers were out of control. They left the product mostly untouched and let it grow on its own. Though there was major criticism at the time, it is one of the best tech acquisitions of the past decade.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>xutopia</author><text>Social sites like Facebook are mostly about photo sharing. This acquisition is all about controlling the main reason people use a social site like FB (or one that competes for it).</text></comment> |
31,390,031 | 31,390,125 | 1 | 2 | 31,389,797 | train | <story><title>Total Eclipse of the Moon: 2022 May 16</title><url>https://astro.ukho.gov.uk/eclipse/1212022/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>thombat</author><text>An easier to interpret description: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.timeanddate.com&#x2F;eclipse&#x2F;lunar&#x2F;2022-may-16" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.timeanddate.com&#x2F;eclipse&#x2F;lunar&#x2F;2022-may-16</a><p>which given your location tells you what to expect. For me the news is bleak: full eclipse begins at 05:23 local time, and sunrise is just 4 minutes later, so the darkening of the moon&#x27;s face probably won&#x27;t register against the rapidly brightening sky. But the site overall is a go-to for easily digested information on all things daylight.</text></comment> | <story><title>Total Eclipse of the Moon: 2022 May 16</title><url>https://astro.ukho.gov.uk/eclipse/1212022/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>DoreenMichele</author><text>A lot of years ago, I watched a total eclipse of the moon from the parking lot of my husband&#x27;s place of employment. My husband, our kids and some of his coworkers attended as well.<p>The moon turned red at some point. It was a pretty eerie experience.<p>If you can do so at least once in your life, I recommend it.<p>Total eclipses aren&#x27;t all that common. Eclipses occur every six months, usually in pairs (one solar, one lunar, two weeks apart), but most are partial eclipses.</text></comment> |
33,378,348 | 33,378,260 | 1 | 2 | 33,375,250 | train | <story><title>“Twitter will be forming a content moderation council with diverse viewpoints”</title><url>https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1586059953311137792</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Waterluvian</author><text>I got a 7 day ban for a tweet that included “political suicide pact” as an idiom.<p>I then got permanently banned for including the line, “sending their children to die in Ukraine” in a tweet.<p>The “appeal” button causes me to get a denied email within one minute. This tells me no humans are in the loop on any of this.<p>I don’t think these tweets were controversial or require any diversity of viewpoints. They just require appreciation that you cannot automatically moderate anything accurately unless you are prepared to be very very VERY relaxed about the rules.<p>I’m not sure Elon is even interested in fixing this kind of problem. He seems focused on the politics and “cancel culture” type issues (whether they’re real or imagined).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>smcl</author><text>On the other hand, I’ve reported posts for using racial slurs (you know the one) and for calling for genocide … and been cheerfully told they didn’t break any rules but that I can block the user if my feelings were hurt. These sites aren’t moderated ideologically, they’re moderated randomly</text></comment> | <story><title>“Twitter will be forming a content moderation council with diverse viewpoints”</title><url>https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1586059953311137792</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Waterluvian</author><text>I got a 7 day ban for a tweet that included “political suicide pact” as an idiom.<p>I then got permanently banned for including the line, “sending their children to die in Ukraine” in a tweet.<p>The “appeal” button causes me to get a denied email within one minute. This tells me no humans are in the loop on any of this.<p>I don’t think these tweets were controversial or require any diversity of viewpoints. They just require appreciation that you cannot automatically moderate anything accurately unless you are prepared to be very very VERY relaxed about the rules.<p>I’m not sure Elon is even interested in fixing this kind of problem. He seems focused on the politics and “cancel culture” type issues (whether they’re real or imagined).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>matsemann</author><text>I got a 48 hour ban recently for sharing a quote from an article we were discussing. The quote was nothing special, just a statement from a spokesperson for a company. The &quot;problem&quot; was that I included the name+title of the person I quoted, and that somehow got flagged as me &quot;doxxing&quot; that person and their place of work. Whose job it was was to be a public spokesperson for this company..<p>It wasn&#x27;t any political or contentious topic, so no idea what set it off. Basically along the lines of &quot;as X working at Y said in the article, they want to do Z soon&quot;.</text></comment> |
38,618,150 | 38,617,978 | 1 | 2 | 38,616,550 | train | <story><title>'Like we were lesser humans': Gaza boys, men recall Israeli arrest, torture</title><url>https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2023/12/12/like-we-were-lesser-humans-gaza-boys-men-recall-israeli-arrests-torture</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>stoorafa</author><text>You’ve been in touch with Palestinians use HN? Not to seem one-sided, I didn’t realize Gazans had sufficient internet access, let alone food or water, to browse HN.</text></item><item><author>dang</author><text>I&#x27;ve been in touch with several Israeli HNers who are in much the same position as you describe, and I admire their, and your, capacity to stay open despite being under orders of magnitude more pressure than most of us here. This is the spirit I&#x27;m asking for commenters to find in themselves before posting.<p>(Edit: Lest this seem like an expression of bias: I&#x27;ve been in touch with HNers on the other side of the conflict as well and can say similar things about them.)</text></item><item><author>ido</author><text>Thank you, Dang.<p>As someone on the Israeli left I feel like I&#x27;m between a rock and a hard place- I do not condone Netanyahu and his government and am indeed very critical of Israeli governments of the past decades. But on the other side, my 78 year old mother is fleeing to shelter every couple hours as my hometown (not anywhere near the west bank or the Gaza strip) gets hit by rockets, as do my young nieces and nephews, some of which developed psychological issues from the stress. And the stories from what people experienced on the October 7th attacks wrench my gut.<p>At the same time I&#x27;m also sorry for the Palestinians suffering during this war, the vast majority of them civilians. I wish instead of people treating it like a football match where you to support &quot;your side&quot;, they could process the nuance of opposing any violence towards civilians and support peace (with the goal of a two state solution with Israel and Palestine co-existing according to the 1967 borders and UN resolution 242).<p>IMO this would require that both Netanyahu and Hamas do not stay in power.</text></item><item><author>dang</author><text>All: if you&#x27;re going to comment in this thread, please do not do so in the spirit of battle. The latter is off topic here, and the last thread HN had about this did not do well enough at keeping to the site guidelines: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html</a>.<p>Instead, ask first whether you can find a place of compassion in yourself before commenting. If you can&#x27;t, that&#x27;s understandable, but then please don&#x27;t post. By compassion I mean something more spacious than angry identification.<p>I&#x27;m not saying that this is the purpose of HN (we&#x27;re not aiming quite that high) but I do think it&#x27;s the only way to touch a topic like this without destroying that purpose, which is thoughtful, curious conversation. It may be nearly impossible to relate to such a topic from such a place, but nearly != entirely, and it&#x27;s part of HN&#x27;s mandate to try. Consider this an experiment, or perhaps an advanced exercise, in community.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dang</author><text>When I said &quot;HNers on the other side of the conflict&quot; I had in mind users who aren&#x27;t necessarily Palestinians but have strong identification with their plight. However, it&#x27;s worth saying that HN has some valued members in Gaza (as well as in the West Bank, of course, and Palestinians in other places). Here&#x27;s one memorable example:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;posts?id=daliaawad">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;posts?id=daliaawad</a>, <i>My experience as a Gazan girl getting into Silicon Valley companies</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=26251143">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=26251143</a> - Feb 2021 (460 comments).<p>Someone who knows Dalia has been in touch with us, but at least at that time, they unfortunately had lost contact with her and don&#x27;t know if she&#x27;s still alive.<p>Also this YC startup:<p><i>Launch HN: Manara (YC W21) – Connect Middle East engineers with global companies</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25849054">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25849054</a> - Jan 2021 (104 comments)<p>---<p>Some other threads over the years (I just looked up Gaza, of course there are also many Palestinians on HN from the West Bank and other places):<p><i>Lifehacker: Tarek Loubani on 3D-Printing in Gaza</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20623545">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20623545</a> - Aug 2019 (68 comments)<p><i>Gaza: Coding in a conflict zone</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=18128432">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=18128432</a> - Oct 2018 (88 comments)<p><i>Marc Benioff joins Valley notables backing Gaza’s first coding academy</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=13374027">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=13374027</a> - Jan 2017 (137 comments)<p><i>How to Get More Women in Tech: Lessons from a Hackathon in Gaza</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=13240777">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=13240777</a> - Dec 2016 (12 comments)<p><i>Mentoring in Gaza&#x27;s first hackathon</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11858963">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11858963</a> - June 2016 (152 comments)<p><i>Mentor startups in Gaza</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9267716">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9267716</a> - March 2015 (63 comments)<p><i>Wireless in Gaza: the young entrepreneurs beating the blockades</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8715085">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8715085</a> - Dec 2014 (54 comments)<p><i>What It&#x27;s Like to Build a Startup in Gaza</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8404414">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8404414</a> - Oct 2014 (80 comments)</text></comment> | <story><title>'Like we were lesser humans': Gaza boys, men recall Israeli arrest, torture</title><url>https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2023/12/12/like-we-were-lesser-humans-gaza-boys-men-recall-israeli-arrests-torture</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>stoorafa</author><text>You’ve been in touch with Palestinians use HN? Not to seem one-sided, I didn’t realize Gazans had sufficient internet access, let alone food or water, to browse HN.</text></item><item><author>dang</author><text>I&#x27;ve been in touch with several Israeli HNers who are in much the same position as you describe, and I admire their, and your, capacity to stay open despite being under orders of magnitude more pressure than most of us here. This is the spirit I&#x27;m asking for commenters to find in themselves before posting.<p>(Edit: Lest this seem like an expression of bias: I&#x27;ve been in touch with HNers on the other side of the conflict as well and can say similar things about them.)</text></item><item><author>ido</author><text>Thank you, Dang.<p>As someone on the Israeli left I feel like I&#x27;m between a rock and a hard place- I do not condone Netanyahu and his government and am indeed very critical of Israeli governments of the past decades. But on the other side, my 78 year old mother is fleeing to shelter every couple hours as my hometown (not anywhere near the west bank or the Gaza strip) gets hit by rockets, as do my young nieces and nephews, some of which developed psychological issues from the stress. And the stories from what people experienced on the October 7th attacks wrench my gut.<p>At the same time I&#x27;m also sorry for the Palestinians suffering during this war, the vast majority of them civilians. I wish instead of people treating it like a football match where you to support &quot;your side&quot;, they could process the nuance of opposing any violence towards civilians and support peace (with the goal of a two state solution with Israel and Palestine co-existing according to the 1967 borders and UN resolution 242).<p>IMO this would require that both Netanyahu and Hamas do not stay in power.</text></item><item><author>dang</author><text>All: if you&#x27;re going to comment in this thread, please do not do so in the spirit of battle. The latter is off topic here, and the last thread HN had about this did not do well enough at keeping to the site guidelines: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html</a>.<p>Instead, ask first whether you can find a place of compassion in yourself before commenting. If you can&#x27;t, that&#x27;s understandable, but then please don&#x27;t post. By compassion I mean something more spacious than angry identification.<p>I&#x27;m not saying that this is the purpose of HN (we&#x27;re not aiming quite that high) but I do think it&#x27;s the only way to touch a topic like this without destroying that purpose, which is thoughtful, curious conversation. It may be nearly impossible to relate to such a topic from such a place, but nearly != entirely, and it&#x27;s part of HN&#x27;s mandate to try. Consider this an experiment, or perhaps an advanced exercise, in community.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ido</author><text>I&#x27;ve been in contact with Palestinians, you may be aware of millions of them living abroad (same as Israelis, like myself) and millions more living in the west bank (the total Palestinian population world-wide numbers 14.3 million, Gaza only houses 2.3M). You don&#x27;t have to be on ground zero in Gaza to be a Palestinian.</text></comment> |
34,176,012 | 34,175,048 | 1 | 3 | 34,161,081 | train | <story><title>The Linux Command Line</title><url>https://www.linuxcommand.org/tlcl.php</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>channel_t</author><text>I consider this book pretty much required reading for junior devs and others in engineering who don&#x27;t have a decent handle on basic Unix skills for whatever reason--which seems to be a more common occurrence these days than earlier in my career.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>chasil</author><text>It is a very kind gesture to make this book freely-available.<p>It does have a small problem in the number of &quot;bashisms&quot; that it quietly promotes.<p>The entire Debian&#x2F;Ubuntu family has chosen the Almquist shell because of speed and standards compliance, and many things in this book will not work there.<p>It would be helpful to have a book that is clear that the POSIX.2 shell is not Bash.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Linux Command Line</title><url>https://www.linuxcommand.org/tlcl.php</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>channel_t</author><text>I consider this book pretty much required reading for junior devs and others in engineering who don&#x27;t have a decent handle on basic Unix skills for whatever reason--which seems to be a more common occurrence these days than earlier in my career.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>velavar</author><text>Do you think that this is because they don&#x27;t really need to anymore with all the nice GUI&#x2F;tools around? Is there an advantage to bring able to do something on a command line vs other ways?<p>Asking because I&#x27;m at a bit of a crossroads - I have a good handle on about 5% of the command line knowledge which gets me through 80% of the stuff I need to do. I&#x27;m wondering if learning to use more commands is worth the effort when I can already get the task done without using the command line?</text></comment> |
6,122,258 | 6,121,986 | 1 | 2 | 6,121,132 | train | <story><title>Bitcoin ruled illegal in Thailand</title><url>https://bitcoin.co.th/trading-suspended-due-to-bank-of-thailand-advisement/?bettertitle</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cs702</author><text>Thailand&#x27;s &quot;Foreign Exchange Administration and Policy Department&quot; has advised that, quoting from the OP: <i>&quot;the following Bitcoin activities are illegal in Thailand: buying Bitcoins; selling Bitcoins; buying any goods or services in exchange for Bitcoins; selling any goods or services for Bitcoins; sending Bitcoins to anyone located outside of Thailand; receiving Bitcoins from anyone located outside of Thailand.&quot;</i><p>We can get a sense of how successful and lasting this edict will be with a simple mental experiment: replace &quot;Bitcoin&quot; with &quot;US Dollar.&quot; The edict thus becomes: <i>&quot;the following US Dollar activities are illegal in Thailand: buying US Dollars; selling US Dollars; buying any goods or services in exchange for US Dollars; selling any goods or services for US Dollars; sending US Dollars to anyone located outside of Thailand; receiving US Dollars from anyone located outside of Thailand.&quot;</i> How successful could <i>that edict</i> be, and how long could it last, realistically?<p>Foreign exchange controls are normally difficult to implement and enforce. Control of Bitcoin -- a decentralized, optionally anonymous, virtual commodity -- should be even more difficult.<p>I suspect a lot of Bitcoin trading volume in Thailand will simply go underground.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wmil</author><text>To put things in perspective, from 1933 - 1964 it was illegal for US citizens to own non-jewelry gold.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Executive_Order_6102</a><p>There are already many limitations on currency, this can last as long as the others.<p>This is actually arguably good news for Bitcoin. The government of Thailand sees it as a feasible way to bypass currency controls.</text></comment> | <story><title>Bitcoin ruled illegal in Thailand</title><url>https://bitcoin.co.th/trading-suspended-due-to-bank-of-thailand-advisement/?bettertitle</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cs702</author><text>Thailand&#x27;s &quot;Foreign Exchange Administration and Policy Department&quot; has advised that, quoting from the OP: <i>&quot;the following Bitcoin activities are illegal in Thailand: buying Bitcoins; selling Bitcoins; buying any goods or services in exchange for Bitcoins; selling any goods or services for Bitcoins; sending Bitcoins to anyone located outside of Thailand; receiving Bitcoins from anyone located outside of Thailand.&quot;</i><p>We can get a sense of how successful and lasting this edict will be with a simple mental experiment: replace &quot;Bitcoin&quot; with &quot;US Dollar.&quot; The edict thus becomes: <i>&quot;the following US Dollar activities are illegal in Thailand: buying US Dollars; selling US Dollars; buying any goods or services in exchange for US Dollars; selling any goods or services for US Dollars; sending US Dollars to anyone located outside of Thailand; receiving US Dollars from anyone located outside of Thailand.&quot;</i> How successful could <i>that edict</i> be, and how long could it last, realistically?<p>Foreign exchange controls are normally difficult to implement and enforce. Control of Bitcoin -- a decentralized, optionally anonymous, virtual commodity -- should be even more difficult.<p>I suspect a lot of Bitcoin trading volume in Thailand will simply go underground.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gamblor956</author><text>No need to control Bitcoin itself--they can control the <i>users</i>. That is ultimately more effective, because as with historical foreign exchange prohibitions in other countries have demonstrated, the prohibiting country generally has no control over the prohibited currency.<p>EDIT: Also, it seems that this is not an actual prohibition. Rather, it is merely a legal advisory memo from the national Bank of Thailand to a Bitcoin company regarding the current legal status of Bitcoin transactions in Thailand. According to the BoT, Bitcoin transactions <i>may</i> not be legal under the current law, so the BoT will not provide banking services to individuals or companies that will use the services for Bitcoin-based transactions or services.</text></comment> |
20,880,018 | 20,879,802 | 1 | 2 | 20,877,700 | train | <story><title>Why Index Funds Are Like Subprime CDOs</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-04/michael-burry-explains-why-index-funds-are-like-subprime-cdos</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>markbnj</author><text>Not knowledgeable on these matters, so my money is in index funds. Obviously a lot of other people are in the same category as myself. The article seems to be saying we&#x27;d all be better financial citizens if we put our money into actively managed funds, or did our own investing. The latter is out of reach for most people, and with respect to the former it&#x27;s somewhat puzzling that managed funds can&#x27;t consistently outperform index funds (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;03&#x2F;15&#x2F;active-fund-managers-trail-the-sp-500-for-the-ninth-year-in-a-row-in-triumph-for-indexing.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;03&#x2F;15&#x2F;active-fund-managers-trail-t...</a>), and so the managers of those funds in a strict sense don&#x27;t earn their fees. So what is the average person with a couple bucks to invest supposed to take from this? The market is in peril because not enough money is flowing to people who do a poor job of managing it?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ptero</author><text>I will try to interpret, but obviously it is just my interpretation (and personally I mostly agree with many theses Burry gave). First, he does not really talk about being a &quot;good citizen&quot; or not. His points are for &quot;greedy citizens&quot; who, in his view, should be worried (about his pocketbook) if he is heavily invested in passive index funds.<p>This is due to his &quot;bigger and bigger crowds, same exits&quot; analogy: individuals easily move through doors at will; but if a crowd rushes out through the same door, injuries happen.<p>His premise is that many stocks that index funds invest in have low liquidity (small door): half of stocks in SP500 trades less than $150M a day. This is tiny (he quotes total market cap of indices of $150 trillion). What happens if there is a small, but synchronized outflow for any reason? If customers ask for 1% of index funds to be sold, index funds <i>have</i> to sell 1% of their holdings in the exact ratios defined by the index, including stocks with low trading volumes. Which is a problem, as there may be no one to sell them to, so prices of those stocks may crash and create a big panic causing additional sales of index funds bringing down bigger chunks of the market.<p>That is the gist of it I think.</text></comment> | <story><title>Why Index Funds Are Like Subprime CDOs</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-04/michael-burry-explains-why-index-funds-are-like-subprime-cdos</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>markbnj</author><text>Not knowledgeable on these matters, so my money is in index funds. Obviously a lot of other people are in the same category as myself. The article seems to be saying we&#x27;d all be better financial citizens if we put our money into actively managed funds, or did our own investing. The latter is out of reach for most people, and with respect to the former it&#x27;s somewhat puzzling that managed funds can&#x27;t consistently outperform index funds (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;03&#x2F;15&#x2F;active-fund-managers-trail-the-sp-500-for-the-ninth-year-in-a-row-in-triumph-for-indexing.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;03&#x2F;15&#x2F;active-fund-managers-trail-t...</a>), and so the managers of those funds in a strict sense don&#x27;t earn their fees. So what is the average person with a couple bucks to invest supposed to take from this? The market is in peril because not enough money is flowing to people who do a poor job of managing it?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>drelihan</author><text>Imagine there was a cookie market made up of two types of cookies, tasty and meh. An active investor in cookies would spend time determining which cookies are likely tasty and which are meh. They would pay more for the tastier cookies so they can savor the flavor and less for the meh ones they can binge eat in the shower when no one is home.... A passive investor comes along and says, I don&#x27;t want to do all this research, I&#x27;ll just assume the market was able to price these accordingly and buy any cookie at the market price. At the beginning, it is great. They just sit back and buy baskets of cookies, some tasty, some meh... but they always pay the higher price for tasty and lower price for meh, so it is fair. Over time, more people start buying baskets of cookies rather than spending time&#x2F;money figuring out what to pay for them. At some point, no one is left to figure out which cookies are tasty vs meh, so the price of all cookies converge to a single price. Cookie manufactures notice this and figure might as well just make meh cookies as no one can tell the difference until after they buy them... and then we are stuck in a world with meh cookies. With some critical mass of active cookie investors, prices could be set fairly for all cookies. Too many active investors, and there is a drain on the system as there is likely a lot of duplicated work among the investors ( each one has to have a research team, back office cookie trading systems, etc, etc ). Too little and prices become less accurate.</text></comment> |
22,632,198 | 22,632,121 | 1 | 3 | 22,630,665 | train | <story><title>Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days</title><url>https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-51968302</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rococode</author><text>I&#x27;ve been having major internet issues lately (Seattle area), have had 4 techs come try to figure it out. Yesterday&#x27;s tech finally correctly diagnosed the problem as happening before the connection reaches our home but was unsure of the cause. He called his supervisor to investigate, and they found that the capacity for our neighborhood&#x27;s node was nearly at 100%, while ideally it should always be under 80%. Fortunately they said they&#x27;ll be able to fix it within a few weeks by doing a node split. The tech mentioned he&#x27;d never heard of capacity issues before in his ~20 years as a tech and that some smaller ISPs have been having issues keeping their internet up and running at all.<p>I&#x27;ve been tracking the performance with PingPlotter, if you&#x27;re curious how bad it is right now here&#x27;s the last 10 minutes: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;AnUqv3j.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;AnUqv3j.png</a> (red lines are packet loss) Pretty interesting how current circumstances are pushing even tried and tested infrastructure to their limits.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>texthompson</author><text>If you didn&#x27;t know, that 80% number is probably the result of Little&#x27;s Law. That&#x27;s the result where if your demand is generated by a Poisson process, and your service has a queue, 80% utilization of the service is where the probability of an infinite queue starts to get really high. People<p>Here&#x27;s a nice blog post about the subject:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.johndcook.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2009&#x2F;01&#x2F;30&#x2F;server-utilization-joel-on-queuing&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.johndcook.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2009&#x2F;01&#x2F;30&#x2F;server-utilization...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days</title><url>https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-51968302</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rococode</author><text>I&#x27;ve been having major internet issues lately (Seattle area), have had 4 techs come try to figure it out. Yesterday&#x27;s tech finally correctly diagnosed the problem as happening before the connection reaches our home but was unsure of the cause. He called his supervisor to investigate, and they found that the capacity for our neighborhood&#x27;s node was nearly at 100%, while ideally it should always be under 80%. Fortunately they said they&#x27;ll be able to fix it within a few weeks by doing a node split. The tech mentioned he&#x27;d never heard of capacity issues before in his ~20 years as a tech and that some smaller ISPs have been having issues keeping their internet up and running at all.<p>I&#x27;ve been tracking the performance with PingPlotter, if you&#x27;re curious how bad it is right now here&#x27;s the last 10 minutes: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;AnUqv3j.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;AnUqv3j.png</a> (red lines are packet loss) Pretty interesting how current circumstances are pushing even tried and tested infrastructure to their limits.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>martin_bech</author><text>I’ve worked at a major ISP, for a decade, and spotting something like this should be so easy to spot. There are tools on monitoring of load all the time, and areas are routibely getting split etc. to improve bandwith, so I think your ISP are basicly amateurs..</text></comment> |
21,395,865 | 21,394,387 | 1 | 3 | 21,394,290 | train | <story><title>Close Encounter with a Gigantic Jet</title><url>https://spaceweatherarchive.com/2019/10/25/close-encounter-with-a-gigantic-jet/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>new_here</author><text>Two weeks ago I was on a flight into London. While we were coming down through some clouds I was looking out of the window for a clearing when I saw an almost blinding purple flash which was followed by a loud crack. I looked forward with pure panic in my eyes at the airhost who was smiling, he calmly informed me that we had just been struck by lighting. Apparently, it&#x27;s not uncommon and planes are designed to withstand it. I learnt something new that day.</text></comment> | <story><title>Close Encounter with a Gigantic Jet</title><url>https://spaceweatherarchive.com/2019/10/25/close-encounter-with-a-gigantic-jet/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>hos234</author><text>I hope someday we learn to make controllable mini-storms. All kinds of interesting things to study thanks to the energy levels.<p>From wikipedia -
&quot;Scientists estimate that a tropical cyclone releases heat energy at the rate of 50 to 200 exajoules (10^18 J) per day, equivalent to about 1 PW (10^15 watt). This rate of energy release is equivalent to 70 times the world energy consumption of humans and 200 times the worldwide electrical generating capacity, or to exploding a 10-megaton nuclear bomb every 20 minutes&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Tropical_cyclone" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Tropical_cyclone</a></text></comment> |
3,297,075 | 3,296,918 | 1 | 2 | 3,296,761 | train | <story><title>Researcher shows how to "friend" anyone on Facebook within 24 hours</title><url>http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/11/researcher-shows-how-to-friend-anyone-on-facebook-within-24-hours.ars</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>anorwell</author><text>There seems to a lot of confusion, both in the article and in the comments, about the "3 trusted friends" password recovery. You have to manually select your trusted friends [1]. A fake account mimicking one of your friends will not be a "trusted friend" unless you make him or her one.<p>Furthermore, this is an opt-in feature.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=119897751441086" rel="nofollow">https://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=119897751441086</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Researcher shows how to "friend" anyone on Facebook within 24 hours</title><url>http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/11/researcher-shows-how-to-friend-anyone-on-facebook-within-24-hours.ars</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tryke</author><text>I was surprised to learn that Facebook has a "3 trusted friends" method for recovering your account without the original email or security question response.<p>EDIT: tried to find a better source for that, came up with <a href="https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-security/national-cybersecurity-awareness-month-updates/10150335022240766" rel="nofollow">https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-security/national-cy...</a><p>Looks like the feature is still being rolled out, and the attacker doesn't get to choose which friends he trusts.</text></comment> |
29,430,467 | 29,429,500 | 1 | 3 | 29,413,754 | train | <story><title>How to rest well</title><url>https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-rest-well-and-enjoy-a-more-creative-sustainable-life</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sdevonoes</author><text>&gt; A 20-minute nap provides an energy boost comparable with a cup of strong coffee (without the later crash).<p>This is not true for me. If I get a 20-minute nap in the middle of the day, I wake up wasted. It takes around another 20 minutes for me to get really awaken.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>khariel</author><text>Something to factor in here is if you&#x27;re sleep deprived. I can normally nap for 20 minutes and get said boost, but not when I&#x27;m sleep deprived. In that case, it feels way harder to wake up at the 20-minute mark, I also wake up groggy and I feel like napping longer (and that&#x27;s what normally ends up happening).</text></comment> | <story><title>How to rest well</title><url>https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-rest-well-and-enjoy-a-more-creative-sustainable-life</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sdevonoes</author><text>&gt; A 20-minute nap provides an energy boost comparable with a cup of strong coffee (without the later crash).<p>This is not true for me. If I get a 20-minute nap in the middle of the day, I wake up wasted. It takes around another 20 minutes for me to get really awaken.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hvgk</author><text>Same trouble here. I find it’s better to get up and go for a 20 minute walk instead. That pulls all the right strings in my brain.</text></comment> |
17,152,438 | 17,151,717 | 1 | 3 | 17,147,404 | train | <story><title>In Twitter’s early days, only one celebrity could tweet at a time</title><url>https://theoutline.com/post/4147/in-twitters-early-days-only-one-celebrity-could-tweet-at-a-time</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>liquidgecka</author><text>If anybody is interested in random Twitter internal stuff I might bang up a medium post one day. I was neck deep in the infra side of things for years and have all sorts of funny stories.<p>Our managed hosting provider wouldn&#x27;t let us use VPNs or anything that allowed direct access to the managed network they provided, but we wanted to make internal only services that were not on the internet so I setup a simple little system that used DNS to point to private space in the office and a SSH tunnel to forward the ports to the right places. Worked great, but over time the internal stuff grew up, and our IT team refused to let me have a server in the office so it was all running of a pair of mac mini&#x27;s. We called them the &quot;load bearing mac minis&quot; since basically 90% of the production management traffic went over the SSH tunnels they hosted. =)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lagadu</author><text>Posting that here is like showing a big juicy steak to a pit full of hungry lions: of course we&#x27;re interested!</text></comment> | <story><title>In Twitter’s early days, only one celebrity could tweet at a time</title><url>https://theoutline.com/post/4147/in-twitters-early-days-only-one-celebrity-could-tweet-at-a-time</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>liquidgecka</author><text>If anybody is interested in random Twitter internal stuff I might bang up a medium post one day. I was neck deep in the infra side of things for years and have all sorts of funny stories.<p>Our managed hosting provider wouldn&#x27;t let us use VPNs or anything that allowed direct access to the managed network they provided, but we wanted to make internal only services that were not on the internet so I setup a simple little system that used DNS to point to private space in the office and a SSH tunnel to forward the ports to the right places. Worked great, but over time the internal stuff grew up, and our IT team refused to let me have a server in the office so it was all running of a pair of mac mini&#x27;s. We called them the &quot;load bearing mac minis&quot; since basically 90% of the production management traffic went over the SSH tunnels they hosted. =)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kornish</author><text>Extremely interested! Sounds like some great stories from the trenches.</text></comment> |
20,080,334 | 20,079,888 | 1 | 2 | 20,078,566 | train | <story><title>Shady Numbers and Bad Business: Inside the Esports Bubble</title><url>https://kotaku.com/as-esports-grows-experts-fear-its-a-bubble-ready-to-po-1834982843</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>toofy</author><text>I think esports will take off once a modern popular game allows local communities and neighborhoods to host what we used to do with lanparties.<p>Part of what helped propel traditional sports into ubiquity was the ability to have a ball and play anywhere with anyone you choose which allowed schools to build teams with practice fields and community leagues etc...<p>Modern games, at least as far as I can tell require you to connect to the IP holders company’s servers and often don’t allow you to pick and choose specifically who you play against which in turn makes it nearly impossible to build leagues and do team scrimmages, team practices, local community leagues, etc...<p>And the other major issue I see is the lack of quality spectator features in games.<p>My friends had a LAN party a few months ago and we played some older game, quake3osp(?) Its definitely old, but it seemed to have the kind of setup I imagine it would take for a modern game to really become as prolific as traditional sports. It had amazing spectator functions where you could jump from player to player at will, it had the ability to host the server yourself, you could trade players from the sideline onto your team at anytime, you could pause the match, you could practice on any map you wanted, you could pick a map and run around for an unlimited amount of time practicing, etc.. etc...<p>Modern games require too much interaction directly with the companies who control the IP for them to ever really take off.<p>Could you imagine if neighborhood kids playing football didn’t have the freedom to just run around the same field for hours and play against the same other team for hours? And were required to only play when everything is controlled by the Professional league who controls the nfl or mls branding? It never would have flourished.</text></comment> | <story><title>Shady Numbers and Bad Business: Inside the Esports Bubble</title><url>https://kotaku.com/as-esports-grows-experts-fear-its-a-bubble-ready-to-po-1834982843</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>kibwen</author><text>The article ends up burying several important ledes: that whole companies are built around inflating livestream viewership numbers, and that popular streamers are threatening to slowly gut the competitive esports scene. For the latter, note the perverse incentives: Twitch streamers famously lose so many subscribers to even a day away from their stream (or, heaven forbid, a whole weekend) that the amount of money needed to entice them to spend days at a time traveling to attend tournaments leads to either ludicrous and unsustainable prize pots or a competitive scene where, ironically, all the best players decide not to compete because they would lose money by doing so (especially ironic considering that they likely became popular by competing in the first place).</text></comment> |
8,837,376 | 8,837,398 | 1 | 2 | 8,836,085 | train | <story><title>When a Cartoonist Landed in L.A. County Jail, She Drew What She Saw</title><url>http://www.laweekly.com/publicspectacle/2014/12/31/when-a-cartoonist-landed-in-la-county-jail-she-drew-what-she-saw-using-only-a-golf-pencil?showFullText=true</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Jtsummers</author><text>&gt; After that, beyond basic bar soap, you’re on your own. You have to order supplies through the commissary system, a sort of monopoly drugstore run by the Keefe Group out of Missouri. This is where you purchase everything from hygiene supplies and chips to a Styrofoam cup. You place orders once a week, and the following week a delivery guy shows up with a cart piled high with plastic bags of stuff. If nobody on the outside puts money on your “books” (inmate account), you can order a second indigent kit. But as soon as someone sends you money, Keefe deducts that cost. And with a 20-cent pack of ramen costing $1.18, just like most monopolies throughout history, goods are sold at an inflated rate.<p>This is one of the parts of prisons I find particularly distressing. I&#x27;m trying to find (but can&#x27;t recall the name of the company) an article, perhaps posted here a few months ago, about a company that handles inmate &quot;bank accounts&quot;. The percentage they took was absurd. Between what the financial company took and the prisons, $100 sent to a prisoner might end up only being $50 by the time they could spend it. Paired with the high prices in the commissary they can barely afford &quot;essentials&quot;.<p>EDIT:
JPay. Here&#x27;s an article, but not the one I was looking for:<p><a href="http://www.publicintegrity.org/2014/09/30/15761/prison-bankers-cash-captive-customers" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.publicintegrity.org&#x2F;2014&#x2F;09&#x2F;30&#x2F;15761&#x2F;prison-banke...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rhgraysonii</author><text>I can speak to this personally.<p>My father is currently in a federal prison. I do not want to reveal sentencing, names, etc. but I deal with Jpay on a daily basis.<p>Their core currency is &#x27;stamps&#x27; if you are technologically literate.<p>It is $4.50 to be able to buy 12 &#x27;stamps&#x27;<p>It takes one stamp to send an email, plus one stamp per attachment.<p>Beyond this, there are music &#x27;credits&#x27;, video call &#x27;credits&#x27;, etc.<p>It is a fucking racketeering ring. I literally keep a Windows laptop so that I can have video calls with my father because its incompatible with OSX and Linux (Ubuntu 14.04 in my case)<p>Would love to hear a way to make a difference here...I&#x27;ve thought of nothing.</text></comment> | <story><title>When a Cartoonist Landed in L.A. County Jail, She Drew What She Saw</title><url>http://www.laweekly.com/publicspectacle/2014/12/31/when-a-cartoonist-landed-in-la-county-jail-she-drew-what-she-saw-using-only-a-golf-pencil?showFullText=true</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Jtsummers</author><text>&gt; After that, beyond basic bar soap, you’re on your own. You have to order supplies through the commissary system, a sort of monopoly drugstore run by the Keefe Group out of Missouri. This is where you purchase everything from hygiene supplies and chips to a Styrofoam cup. You place orders once a week, and the following week a delivery guy shows up with a cart piled high with plastic bags of stuff. If nobody on the outside puts money on your “books” (inmate account), you can order a second indigent kit. But as soon as someone sends you money, Keefe deducts that cost. And with a 20-cent pack of ramen costing $1.18, just like most monopolies throughout history, goods are sold at an inflated rate.<p>This is one of the parts of prisons I find particularly distressing. I&#x27;m trying to find (but can&#x27;t recall the name of the company) an article, perhaps posted here a few months ago, about a company that handles inmate &quot;bank accounts&quot;. The percentage they took was absurd. Between what the financial company took and the prisons, $100 sent to a prisoner might end up only being $50 by the time they could spend it. Paired with the high prices in the commissary they can barely afford &quot;essentials&quot;.<p>EDIT:
JPay. Here&#x27;s an article, but not the one I was looking for:<p><a href="http://www.publicintegrity.org/2014/09/30/15761/prison-bankers-cash-captive-customers" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.publicintegrity.org&#x2F;2014&#x2F;09&#x2F;30&#x2F;15761&#x2F;prison-banke...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sremani</author><text>JPay et al. are the worst scum. One of the justifications though is that our dear leaders expand definition of &quot;crime&quot; and &quot;criminality&quot; but do not expand budgets for incarceration so it falls on the Jailor and&#x2F;related staff to get finances. They typically bring in these JPay kind of shady dealers who promise a cut per person in jail. So JPay takes a cut but shares it with the Jail or department. To give the kind of commission promised to the Jails they rob the inmates - its that simple. So we not only hold an inmate for crime but his family for ransom. This is sad because people do not have empathy for in-mates. One of the many &quot;criminal&quot; faces of the Criminal Justice System.</text></comment> |
27,500,131 | 27,499,332 | 1 | 3 | 27,498,602 | train | <story><title>Up for Grabs</title><url>https://up-for-grabs.net/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Liquidor</author><text>The idea is great but...<p>I checked out about 15+ smaller repositories with the &quot;help wanted&quot; labels and only one had active development.<p>Most projects had several unanswered pull-requests since 2018&#x2F;2019 contributed by strangers wanting to help or issues with comments from people asking to help with no response.<p>I actually looked for one project that i could potentially help out a tiny bit, but the experience so far has been discouraging.</text></comment> | <story><title>Up for Grabs</title><url>https://up-for-grabs.net/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>deviation</author><text>This has been posted 6 times before, see this HN thread below if you want to read their discussion about it:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10830618" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10830618</a></text></comment> |
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