chosen
int64 353
41.8M
| rejected
int64 287
41.8M
| chosen_rank
int64 1
2
| rejected_rank
int64 2
3
| top_level_parent
int64 189
41.8M
| split
large_stringclasses 1
value | chosen_prompt
large_stringlengths 236
19.5k
| rejected_prompt
large_stringlengths 209
18k
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
23,780,261 | 23,779,647 | 1 | 2 | 23,777,128 | train | <story><title>Full Employment</title><url>https://locusmag.com/2020/07/cory-doctorow-full-employment/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>setgree</author><text>&gt; we&#x27;re trapped in a system that doesn&#x27;t provide workable means to solve our pressing problems<p>Generalization: most of those problems are political rather than technical, and unlike with technical problems, if you make a wrong guess about how to solve a political problem, the costs might be unboundedly catastrophic (e.g. world war).<p>I personally believe that the best response to global warming is open borders, because it would mean that all the people who:<p>* are living in the global south could relocate somewhere colder and further inland, if they wanted;<p>* are subsistence farming, but who would be great engineers, scientists, etc. given the right opportunities, would be more likely to get those opportunities.<p>Most people think that open borders would be bad, and I don&#x27;t think I will be able to persuade them otherwise in my lifetime.<p>In general, alternatives to persuasion in politics amount to seizing power and&#x2F;or changing the rules of the game. Even if I thought I <i>could</i> do that, which I don&#x27;t, I wouldn&#x27;t, because all too often in history, the cure is worse than the disease.<p>That&#x27;s why I think these problems are hard -- and why I&#x27;m scared of people who propose grand solutions to them.</text></item><item><author>andyjohnson0</author><text>Reading the economic and tech-fix discussion here, it strikes me again that we&#x27;re trapped in a system that doesn&#x27;t provide workable means to solve our pressing problems. Yet we continue to treat it (economics, the global financial system) as some kind of inevitable force of nature, rather than as something that we invented and (to some degree) chose. I wish I knew why that is.<p>I don&#x27;t know how we get from here to a place where these problems become solvable (or even what that place looks like) and from there to a world that is actually going to sustain us again. So its hard to have much confidence that we have much of a future beyond the later part of this century. My children will by my age then and I don&#x27;t envy them.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nine_k</author><text>The more obligations a state takes to its population (not limited to citizens), the harder it is to enact an open-borders policy while keeping these obligations.<p>The US used to accept basically anyone, but it did not have any Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, unemployment benefits, etc. In EU states, the problem is even more severe, as they provide more benefits, to those who pay taxes an to those who don&#x27;t alike.<p>So, high life standards, advanced social protections, open borders: pick any two.</text></comment> | <story><title>Full Employment</title><url>https://locusmag.com/2020/07/cory-doctorow-full-employment/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>setgree</author><text>&gt; we&#x27;re trapped in a system that doesn&#x27;t provide workable means to solve our pressing problems<p>Generalization: most of those problems are political rather than technical, and unlike with technical problems, if you make a wrong guess about how to solve a political problem, the costs might be unboundedly catastrophic (e.g. world war).<p>I personally believe that the best response to global warming is open borders, because it would mean that all the people who:<p>* are living in the global south could relocate somewhere colder and further inland, if they wanted;<p>* are subsistence farming, but who would be great engineers, scientists, etc. given the right opportunities, would be more likely to get those opportunities.<p>Most people think that open borders would be bad, and I don&#x27;t think I will be able to persuade them otherwise in my lifetime.<p>In general, alternatives to persuasion in politics amount to seizing power and&#x2F;or changing the rules of the game. Even if I thought I <i>could</i> do that, which I don&#x27;t, I wouldn&#x27;t, because all too often in history, the cure is worse than the disease.<p>That&#x27;s why I think these problems are hard -- and why I&#x27;m scared of people who propose grand solutions to them.</text></item><item><author>andyjohnson0</author><text>Reading the economic and tech-fix discussion here, it strikes me again that we&#x27;re trapped in a system that doesn&#x27;t provide workable means to solve our pressing problems. Yet we continue to treat it (economics, the global financial system) as some kind of inevitable force of nature, rather than as something that we invented and (to some degree) chose. I wish I knew why that is.<p>I don&#x27;t know how we get from here to a place where these problems become solvable (or even what that place looks like) and from there to a world that is actually going to sustain us again. So its hard to have much confidence that we have much of a future beyond the later part of this century. My children will by my age then and I don&#x27;t envy them.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>SAI_Peregrinus</author><text>If you haven&#x27;t seen it, you might like Open Borders by Bryan Caplan and Zach Weinersmith[1]. Comic-book form advocating for open borders, with pretty good reasoning.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;smile.amazon.com&#x2F;Open-Borders-Science-Ethics-Immigration&#x2F;dp&#x2F;1250316960" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;smile.amazon.com&#x2F;Open-Borders-Science-Ethics-Immigra...</a></text></comment> |
20,679,003 | 20,678,668 | 1 | 3 | 20,678,426 | train | <story><title>Colombia fines Uber more than $629k for obstructing regulatory visit</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/article/us-uber-colombia/colombia-fines-uber-more-than-629000-for-obstructing-regulatory-visit-idUSKCN1V21RO</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>danielpal</author><text>Although most people will read this and think, oh more shenanigans from UBER, the reality is (and as a Colombian I know), that the government has failed for years to regulate this industry, which is regarded by all consumers as incredibly positive, and continuously has fought against this platforms in an effort to keep the taxi mafia content.<p>Yet, taxis in Colombia are incredibly dangerous. As a passenger you are exposed to express kidnappings, drivers that are aggressive, adultered fares systems and drive unsafely in cars that don&#x27;t meet any security guidelines (a large number of passengers have died on rear-collisions given that the most common Bogota taxi has no rear-reinforcement). For decades the taxi mafia&#x27;s have provided an unsafe &amp; horrible service, when Uber &amp; other platforms arrived, users flocked, yet by means of aggressive protests where they pretty much block the city, the taxi&#x27;s have forced some parts of the government to try to curve Uber.<p>Uber however has fought to continue providing the service that the consumers demand, and has otherwise tried to complied with every law. This fine comes from the industry of commerce regulators, who have tried to convince the technology ministry to shut Uber down, with them refusing. I hope Uber continues to operate in Colombia and use their legal means to fight this regulators who are not operating from a consumer benefit standpoint, but rather a political fight to protect a mafia that needs to be dismantled.</text></comment> | <story><title>Colombia fines Uber more than $629k for obstructing regulatory visit</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/article/us-uber-colombia/colombia-fines-uber-more-than-629000-for-obstructing-regulatory-visit-idUSKCN1V21RO</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>romaaeterna</author><text>&gt; The country has not specifically regulated transport services like Uber, but has said it will suspend for 25 years the licenses of drivers caught working for the platform.<p>&gt; The fine from the Superintendency of Industry and Commerce says Uber urges employees not to give information to regulators and to block access to company computers.<p>Call me crazy, but I wonder if they were trying to get a list of drivers, for the purposes of pulling licenses.</text></comment> |
18,498,392 | 18,497,968 | 1 | 2 | 18,495,184 | train | <story><title>Casey Neistat’s Viral Marketing Strategy</title><url>https://medium.com/the-set-list/viral-marketing-77aa2fc94b95</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>notatoad</author><text>I think there&#x27;s another aspect here that the author is missing: break expectations, but do it in a way that confirms existing biases.<p>It&#x27;s not just &quot;this thing people believe is wrong&quot;, but &quot;this thing people believe is wrong, <i>but you were never one of those people, were you? you and me, we&#x27;re more clever than that</i>&quot;. breaking expectations in a way that makes people feel stupid for having those expectations in the first place isn&#x27;t going to win you an audience.<p>- snowboarding with the NYPD: haven&#x27;t you always wanted the roads to be shut down for everybody else, and you were the only one allowed on them?<p>- Bike Lanes: authority figure doing something stupid, gets called out for it. everybody&#x27;s got a bit of an anti-authority streak and can sympathise with this<p>- Make it Count. spend a big company&#x27;s money on your personal travel? who wouldn&#x27;t want to do that.<p>- Bike thief: it&#x27;s easy to see how viewers would like to feel they&#x27;d be better than all the people who ignored the &quot;bike theives&quot;<p>- iPod’s Dirty Secret: doesn&#x27;t everybody wish their electronics lasted longer, and harbor a suspicion that the big rich tech companies are ripping them off?</text></comment> | <story><title>Casey Neistat’s Viral Marketing Strategy</title><url>https://medium.com/the-set-list/viral-marketing-77aa2fc94b95</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ibudiallo</author><text>There is another thing Neistat likes to portray in his video that I think makes him even more popular: The illusion of amateur.<p>His videos seems like they can be shot by anyone. But try skateboarding in the middle of a busy New York street with cars going in both directions while holding a heavy tripod camera on one hand, a remote on the other, and talking to the camera and saying hi to fans on the street, and finishing that narrative you started two miles ago all at the same time.</text></comment> |
26,466,461 | 26,466,484 | 1 | 2 | 26,464,111 | train | <story><title>Our app was banned because the button says “Report User” and not just “Report”</title><url>https://twitter.com/hermaritz/status/1371383715381805061</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jonathanlydall</author><text>For those not from South Africa, this app is primarily for people to be able to get notifications or look up when their area will be affected by a &quot;planned power outage&quot;, or as Eskom (our state owned power utility) refers to it, &quot;load shedding&quot;. &quot;Load shedding&quot; is enacted whenever they have a power production capacity issue where different areas take turns without power so as to not let the power grid collapse.<p>This app aggregates information from various data sources and provides push notifications too. It is without a doubt the best source of this information and the app being unavailable significantly affects the day to day lives of a significant portion of the South African population who use it to plan around these power outages.<p>While the app also has a &quot;chat&quot; feature, it&#x27;s really tangental to the primary purpose of the app and I expect that most users of the app, like myself, don&#x27;t use that feature at all and only care about knowing when they will be without electricity.<p>In case you&#x27;re wondering why they hell we have load shedding, it&#x27;s because Eskom is grossly incompetent. Their incompetence is hugely exacerbated by nepitism and corruption where government has historically appointed people to Eskom management positions solely as &quot;favours&quot;, rather than on qualification for the job.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tremon</author><text>Load shedding is the correct technical term for it. It&#x27;s not just a South African thing either, industrial consumers in Europe have the same stipulation in their power contracts: in case of emergency, the power company (network operator) may choose to suspend power delivery to protect the grid.<p>However, in the EU this 1) isn&#x27;t a regular occurrence, and 2) the grid has a tiered system for load shedding. I can&#x27;t find a reference for the tier classifications right now, but if I remember correctly: tier 1 consumers (the ones who will be disconnected first) are heavy industries with huge power draw, tier 2 are other commercial uses, tier 3 is residential, and tier 4 is critical infrastructure (emergency services).<p>I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;ve ever experienced a load shedding event that affected residential areas. There have been local blackouts but I don&#x27;t recall any grid-wide emergency events.</text></comment> | <story><title>Our app was banned because the button says “Report User” and not just “Report”</title><url>https://twitter.com/hermaritz/status/1371383715381805061</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jonathanlydall</author><text>For those not from South Africa, this app is primarily for people to be able to get notifications or look up when their area will be affected by a &quot;planned power outage&quot;, or as Eskom (our state owned power utility) refers to it, &quot;load shedding&quot;. &quot;Load shedding&quot; is enacted whenever they have a power production capacity issue where different areas take turns without power so as to not let the power grid collapse.<p>This app aggregates information from various data sources and provides push notifications too. It is without a doubt the best source of this information and the app being unavailable significantly affects the day to day lives of a significant portion of the South African population who use it to plan around these power outages.<p>While the app also has a &quot;chat&quot; feature, it&#x27;s really tangental to the primary purpose of the app and I expect that most users of the app, like myself, don&#x27;t use that feature at all and only care about knowing when they will be without electricity.<p>In case you&#x27;re wondering why they hell we have load shedding, it&#x27;s because Eskom is grossly incompetent. Their incompetence is hugely exacerbated by nepitism and corruption where government has historically appointed people to Eskom management positions solely as &quot;favours&quot;, rather than on qualification for the job.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>igitur</author><text>This app is also known for its humorous take the quite serious subject matter. The WHAT’S NEW section in the Google Play Store is known for sarcastic titbits with the fictional Jeff working hard to keep us up to date with the imminent darkness. The app&#x27;s name itself, Eskom se Push, is wordplay on an extremely vulgar South African insult and feeds into the popular dislike of Eskom.</text></comment> |
39,040,146 | 39,040,084 | 1 | 3 | 39,039,209 | train | <story><title>EU NGI TALER will bring private and secure online payments to the Eurozone</title><url>https://taler.net/en/news/2024-02.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Animats</author><text><i>Where is the balance in my wallet stored?</i><p><i>Your wallet stores digital coins and thus ultimately your computer holds your balance. The exchange keeps funds matching all unspent coins in a settlement account.</i><p><i>What if my wallet is lost?</i><p><i>Since the digital coins of value in your wallet are anonymized, the exchange can not assist you in recovering a lost or stolen wallet. Just like with a physical wallet for cash, you are responsible for keeping it safe.</i><p><i>The risk of losing a wallet can be mitigated by making backups or keeping the balance reasonably low.</i>[1]<p>Ah. This is Chaum&#x27;s DigiCash, from 1990.[2] A good idea, too early.<p>It&#x27;s a system where coins are protected against double-spending by a database back-end.
Which is how some centrally issued cryptocurrencies actually work.<p>The half-anonymity is interesting. The recipient is not anonymous, but the sender is. That
may make it a politically acceptable substitute for cash.<p>It has the nice property that, unlike debit cards, etc., the recipient can&#x27;t take more of your money than you give them.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;taler.net&#x2F;en&#x2F;faq.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;taler.net&#x2F;en&#x2F;faq.html</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;DigiCash" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;DigiCash</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>joshuaissac</author><text>Also reminiscent of Mondex, from the same year.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Mondex" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Mondex</a></text></comment> | <story><title>EU NGI TALER will bring private and secure online payments to the Eurozone</title><url>https://taler.net/en/news/2024-02.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Animats</author><text><i>Where is the balance in my wallet stored?</i><p><i>Your wallet stores digital coins and thus ultimately your computer holds your balance. The exchange keeps funds matching all unspent coins in a settlement account.</i><p><i>What if my wallet is lost?</i><p><i>Since the digital coins of value in your wallet are anonymized, the exchange can not assist you in recovering a lost or stolen wallet. Just like with a physical wallet for cash, you are responsible for keeping it safe.</i><p><i>The risk of losing a wallet can be mitigated by making backups or keeping the balance reasonably low.</i>[1]<p>Ah. This is Chaum&#x27;s DigiCash, from 1990.[2] A good idea, too early.<p>It&#x27;s a system where coins are protected against double-spending by a database back-end.
Which is how some centrally issued cryptocurrencies actually work.<p>The half-anonymity is interesting. The recipient is not anonymous, but the sender is. That
may make it a politically acceptable substitute for cash.<p>It has the nice property that, unlike debit cards, etc., the recipient can&#x27;t take more of your money than you give them.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;taler.net&#x2F;en&#x2F;faq.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;taler.net&#x2F;en&#x2F;faq.html</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;DigiCash" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;DigiCash</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>asgeirn</author><text>Ah, DigiCash! I was really optimistic on this concept in my student days - one local bank even had a PoC with digital cash.</text></comment> |
17,042,778 | 17,042,734 | 1 | 2 | 17,040,275 | train | <story><title>ISPs Say They Don’t Make Enough Money</title><url>https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/05/big-lie-isps-are-spreading-state-legislatures-they-dont-make-enough-money</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Zarath</author><text>One thing I&#x27;ve never understood is how computers using one ISP connect with computers using another ISP. Is there some sort of law that requires that one ISP&#x27;s cable must be able to interact with another ISP&#x27;s cable? What incentive does someone, like say Comcast, have in allowing their users to interact with people using a smaller ISP like yours?</text></item><item><author>montasaurus</author><text>We have an ISP in San Francisco and it really is a great business. Lots of long lasting recurring revenue and very low recurring costs--bandwidth is actually one of our smallest expenses. The biggest hurdle is really tapping in to the tribal knowledge on how to set up and run an ISP. You&#x27;ve got networking, provisioning, how to buy bandwidth, even what type of power plugs you need to have in your rack (spoiler: there are multiple and they are not all compatible). Besides the cost of initial deployment and setting up new customers, there&#x27;s not a whole bunch you need to spend money on.<p>We really like the business, and more people really should start their own. The numbers make sense in a bunch of different markets and scales. If you deploy with fixed wireless, it brings the costs down to the 10&#x27;s of thousands of dollars range. Laying fiber is obviously a lot more expensive, but not really necessary in most circumstances.<p>We&#x27;re working on helping more people start ISPs-launching here on HN next week, but TechCrunch wrote about the project just now: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;05&#x2F;10&#x2F;necto-looks-to-help-individuals-get-their-own-local-isp-businesses-off-the-ground&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;05&#x2F;10&#x2F;necto-looks-to-help-indivi...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mcpherrinm</author><text>In general, every IP address is reachable from every other IP address on the internet. This is possible because there&#x27;s many BGP peering agreements between ISPs, and generally traffic is not filtered between them. There&#x27;s no law saying you can reach everybody else: that&#x27;s just how the Internet works, because it&#x27;s in everyone&#x27;s business interests to make it work. Very few websites are hosted using Comcast&#x27;s internet service, so if Comcast didn&#x27;t peer with anyone else, you couldn&#x27;t get to many websites at all.<p>Comcast mostly provides service to end-users. Comcast connects with larger backbone providers, like Level 3, NTT, Sprint and Cogent. Those providers sell access to other residential ISPs like Necto, but also to businesses, like website hosting companies, cloud providers, etc. Comcast might directly connect to some bigger businesses like Google, CDNs, etc, for performance and cost-saving reasons.<p>The large (&quot;Tier 1&quot;) providers all peer with each other, and you can pay one of those ISPs to be able to reach the customers of all the others (this is called &quot;Transit&quot;). So Comcast might connect to Level 3, and buy transit from them. My ISP might connect to NTT, and buy transit from them.<p>When my computer sends a packet, it goes to my ISP. They consult their routing table, and decide it&#x27;s reachable over NTT. NTT gets the packet, routes it through their network to a peering point with Level 3, who will then route that packet to Comcast, and finally to the end user.<p>Then some other random home ISP which pays for connectivity with NTT is reachable from my comcast connection. The business relationship is not between Comcast and my ISP, but it&#x27;s between Comcast and L3, L3 and NTT, and NTT and my ISP.<p>Thus Comcast would have to go out of their way to block connectivity. Comcast wants to reach everyone on Level 3&#x27;s network, because that&#x27;s where the websites users want to connect to are.<p>This is largely simplified. There&#x27;s a lot of billing, politics, and technology issues involved here, and I&#x27;m not sure I understand them all.</text></comment> | <story><title>ISPs Say They Don’t Make Enough Money</title><url>https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/05/big-lie-isps-are-spreading-state-legislatures-they-dont-make-enough-money</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Zarath</author><text>One thing I&#x27;ve never understood is how computers using one ISP connect with computers using another ISP. Is there some sort of law that requires that one ISP&#x27;s cable must be able to interact with another ISP&#x27;s cable? What incentive does someone, like say Comcast, have in allowing their users to interact with people using a smaller ISP like yours?</text></item><item><author>montasaurus</author><text>We have an ISP in San Francisco and it really is a great business. Lots of long lasting recurring revenue and very low recurring costs--bandwidth is actually one of our smallest expenses. The biggest hurdle is really tapping in to the tribal knowledge on how to set up and run an ISP. You&#x27;ve got networking, provisioning, how to buy bandwidth, even what type of power plugs you need to have in your rack (spoiler: there are multiple and they are not all compatible). Besides the cost of initial deployment and setting up new customers, there&#x27;s not a whole bunch you need to spend money on.<p>We really like the business, and more people really should start their own. The numbers make sense in a bunch of different markets and scales. If you deploy with fixed wireless, it brings the costs down to the 10&#x27;s of thousands of dollars range. Laying fiber is obviously a lot more expensive, but not really necessary in most circumstances.<p>We&#x27;re working on helping more people start ISPs-launching here on HN next week, but TechCrunch wrote about the project just now: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;05&#x2F;10&#x2F;necto-looks-to-help-individuals-get-their-own-local-isp-businesses-off-the-ground&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;05&#x2F;10&#x2F;necto-looks-to-help-indivi...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>montasaurus</author><text>That gets into a really interesting aspect of how the internet works. It&#x27;s not really one entity, the way people sometimes think about it. In reality, it&#x27;s a bunch of interconnected networks owned by different people like you mentioned. How it works is that you buy something called &quot;transit&quot;, which is the right to send traffic to a neighboring network, who is then responsible for trying to pass it along to the destination network or to another intermediary network. Depending on where the traffic is going, this handoff process can happen multiple times before it reaches the destination.<p>Sometimes, the connections between these networks can get congested...or network owners can allow them to become congested as a way to extract payments from other network owners. This is what happened to Netflix. The different networks are called Autonomous Systems, and each one has a number called an ASN. The path a packet takes between those systems is called an AS Path. When networks interconnect, it&#x27;s called Peering. Sometimes those peering agreements are settlement-free (no payments), and sometimes one network pays the other (like when you buy transit).</text></comment> |
5,087,110 | 5,087,021 | 1 | 3 | 5,086,793 | train | <story><title>So you think you can tell Arial from Helvetica?</title><url>http://www.ironicsans.com/helvarialquiz/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>visarga</author><text>I immediately got 17/20, missing only the ones where there were no lower case characters. How do you distinguish between in these 3 cases? <a href="http://imgur.com/a/NOLoI" rel="nofollow">http://imgur.com/a/NOLoI</a></text></item><item><author>jongold</author><text>Ruining the game for everyone; two things I love about Helvetica<p>— Terminals at right angles to the stroke. <a href="http://c.jon.gd/image/3Q0y2u323j3C" rel="nofollow">http://c.jon.gd/image/3Q0y2u323j3C</a> . Arial looks particularly sloppy with jaunty terminals. It is possible to have a similar grotesque sans-serif feel with offset terminals (see Univers &#38; Akzidenz Grotesk) but they're a crucial part of what give Helvetica its character.
- The uppercase R. Has a really strong leg compared to Arial's half-assed flaky leg.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>callum85</author><text>A thing that helps me distinguish them is that Helvetica is a bit more decorative with some of the capitals, like G and R. I think the Arial designers were probably trying to make it "even more Helvetica than Helvetica", by simplifying the flourishey/decorative bits, like the bottom thing on a G and the curvy bit at the top of the slanty line of the R. (These are the proper typographical terms, btw.)</text></comment> | <story><title>So you think you can tell Arial from Helvetica?</title><url>http://www.ironicsans.com/helvarialquiz/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>visarga</author><text>I immediately got 17/20, missing only the ones where there were no lower case characters. How do you distinguish between in these 3 cases? <a href="http://imgur.com/a/NOLoI" rel="nofollow">http://imgur.com/a/NOLoI</a></text></item><item><author>jongold</author><text>Ruining the game for everyone; two things I love about Helvetica<p>— Terminals at right angles to the stroke. <a href="http://c.jon.gd/image/3Q0y2u323j3C" rel="nofollow">http://c.jon.gd/image/3Q0y2u323j3C</a> . Arial looks particularly sloppy with jaunty terminals. It is possible to have a similar grotesque sans-serif feel with offset terminals (see Univers &#38; Akzidenz Grotesk) but they're a crucial part of what give Helvetica its character.
- The uppercase R. Has a really strong leg compared to Arial's half-assed flaky leg.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>stevanl</author><text>1) Completely round O = Helvetica
2) The C's. Helvetica = flat endings not slanted
3) Like a perfectly round O, the M's have more of a squarish spacing</text></comment> |
23,276,625 | 23,275,836 | 1 | 3 | 23,271,053 | train | <story><title>Using SQL to find my best photo of a pelican according to Apple Photos</title><url>https://simonwillison.net/2020/May/21/dogsheep-photos/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>simonw</author><text>My favourite demo is hidden pretty deep in the text - here&#x27;s a SQL query that shows the machine learning labels that were applied to each photo by Apple Photos:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dogsheep-photos.dogsheep.net&#x2F;public?sql=select%0D%0A++photo%2C%0D%0A++%28%0D%0A++++select%0D%0A++++++json_group_array%28%0D%0A++++++++normalized_string%0D%0A++++++%29%0D%0A++++from%0D%0A++++++labels%0D%0A++++where%0D%0A++++++labels.uuid+%3D+photos_with_apple_metadata.uuid%0D%0A++%29+as+labels%2C%0D%0A++date%2C%0D%0A++albums%2C%0D%0A++persons%2C%0D%0A++ZOVERALLAESTHETICSCORE%0D%0Afrom%0D%0A++photos_with_apple_metadata%0D%0Alimit+40" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dogsheep-photos.dogsheep.net&#x2F;public?sql=select%0D%0A...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Using SQL to find my best photo of a pelican according to Apple Photos</title><url>https://simonwillison.net/2020/May/21/dogsheep-photos/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>renewiltord</author><text>This is incredible! Thank you for sharing!<p>I sync my Google Photos and Apple Photos and I hope they both also run the model on things I&#x27;ve uploaded from a different device. Wish the Google stuff was also queriable like this.</text></comment> |
19,423,333 | 19,423,555 | 1 | 3 | 19,423,147 | train | <story><title>Italy bans unvaccinated children from school</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-47536981</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>CodeCube</author><text>Fantastic (note that the article mentions (or at least hints at) medical exemptions, which of course makes sense)! Now ... if only we could make this happen here in the US!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mac01021</author><text>If that&#x27;s what you want, don&#x27;t wait for the institution of a national policy. Talk to your local Board of Education.</text></comment> | <story><title>Italy bans unvaccinated children from school</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-47536981</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>CodeCube</author><text>Fantastic (note that the article mentions (or at least hints at) medical exemptions, which of course makes sense)! Now ... if only we could make this happen here in the US!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gatherhunterer</author><text>Some states that refused (i.e. failed) to set up their own health care exchanges because they did not want to comply with the ACA have Medicaid programs that do not cover low-income adults. If you were deprived of vaccines as a child then you should be allowed to visit the doctor and schedule a series of vaccinations to catch up without paying a copay. It seems wrong to federally ban something without a federal solution.<p>There may be ways to get vaccines without coverage that of which I am not aware. How would you even get someone to review your record without being in a network, though? OK, KS, MO, MS, TN, AL, GA, SC, NC, FL, VA, UT, ID, WY, ME, WI, NE and SD have no medicaid coverage for low-income adults [1]. That is probably not a complete list.<p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.medicaid.gov&#x2F;state-overviews&#x2F;index.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.medicaid.gov&#x2F;state-overviews&#x2F;index.html</a></text></comment> |
14,714,976 | 14,714,888 | 1 | 3 | 14,714,668 | train | <story><title>Jawbone is being liquidated as its CEO launches a related health startup</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/06/jawbone-is-being-liquidated-as-its-ceo-launches-a-related-health-startup</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>stingrae</author><text>The days of consumer hardware company&#x27;s access to startup capital is over. With so many high profile VC backed (Fitbit, GoPro, Hello, Juicero, Coin, Pearl, ect.) and kickstarted (Lily.ai, Pebble) failures, no one is willing to risk it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>replicatorblog</author><text>I&#x27;d ascribe the failure to the commodification of the fitness tracker and increasingly platform-driven smart speaker space. Here are some companies that have raised big rounds recently:<p>+ SimpliSafe raised $57M from Sequoia<p>+ Ring raised $100M+ from DFJ<p>+ Formlabs raised $50M from Foundry<p>+ Sphero raised $23M in April<p>+ Anki raised $52.5M in PE<p>I&#x27;m not sure what the future holds for Anki&#x2F;Sphero, but the first three examples have what GoPro&#x2F;FitBit didn&#x27;t — a clear recurring business model. This is a good blog post on the subject:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.bolt.io&#x2F;the-3-business-models-that-matter-for-connected-hardware-startups-32fbf59506e5" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.bolt.io&#x2F;the-3-business-models-that-matter-for-c...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Jawbone is being liquidated as its CEO launches a related health startup</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/06/jawbone-is-being-liquidated-as-its-ceo-launches-a-related-health-startup</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>stingrae</author><text>The days of consumer hardware company&#x27;s access to startup capital is over. With so many high profile VC backed (Fitbit, GoPro, Hello, Juicero, Coin, Pearl, ect.) and kickstarted (Lily.ai, Pebble) failures, no one is willing to risk it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>BinaryIdiot</author><text>&gt; The days of consumer hardware company&#x27;s access to startup capital is over.<p>So I haven&#x27;t worked at a hardware start-up but it seemed pretty difficult even before these companies to raise funding versus a pure software play. I&#x27;m not necessarily convinced this makes it easier or harder. Is there a specific reason you think it will be harder now?<p>Also, for what it&#x27;s worth, Fitbit and GoPro are still going. I&#x27;m convinced Fitbit can get back on the growth curve as long as they can get a new product out the door that consumers want. Tall order for sure but I don&#x27;t count them as a failure yet.<p>GoPro want to move to doing software more so than hardware. Considering their software has always considered to be lackluster to borderline terrible I&#x27;m less convinced they will turn it around but also not yet willing to say they&#x27;re a failure.</text></comment> |
28,178,900 | 28,178,325 | 1 | 2 | 28,177,164 | train | <story><title>Black Hat USA 2021 Review</title><url>https://l3ouu4n9.github.io/post/learningnotes/2021-08-13-black-hat-usa-2021-english/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>xuki</author><text>Warning: this site use ~250MB of your data for all the photos. Mobile users, beware!</text></comment> | <story><title>Black Hat USA 2021 Review</title><url>https://l3ouu4n9.github.io/post/learningnotes/2021-08-13-black-hat-usa-2021-english/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>qweqwweqwe-90i</author><text>Looking forward to the videos - I wish they wouldn&#x27;t hold them for 6 months. Actually, are there some &quot;blackhat&quot; sites that host the videos earlier? :)</text></comment> |
5,860,038 | 5,859,513 | 1 | 2 | 5,859,307 | train | <story><title>Rackspace Response to PRISM</title><url>https://community.rackspace.com/general/f/34/p/791/1347#1347</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>callmeed</author><text>I was thinking about Rackspace and PRISM today (I spend &gt; $10K&#x2F;month at Rackspace) ... and that thread about how all this could harm the startup ecosystem.<p>If the Govt&#x2F;NSA wanted access to certain metadata and a company refused (like some claim Twitter did), what&#x27;s to stop them from going to Amazon or Rackspace and throwing their weight around to get access that way? Or, if that didn&#x27;t work, they could just keep going up the OSI layers (or tier 1 providers) until they get the access they want OR can force it be threatening to disrupt service.<p>My point is, even awesome companies like Rackspace are dependent on less-than-awesome companies for some types of infrastructure.</text></comment> | <story><title>Rackspace Response to PRISM</title><url>https://community.rackspace.com/general/f/34/p/791/1347#1347</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>purephase</author><text>Probably one of the better responses that we&#x27;ve seen.<p>Regardless of my earlier posts, I&#x27;m actually inclined to believe these service providers.<p>I&#x27;m curious, has anyone seen&#x2F;heard anything from CA&#x27;s? I imagine it would be much easier to just create a split network route at the ISP layer and decrypt all traffic.<p>Wouldn&#x27;t be that crazy if you had all of the root keys.</text></comment> |
14,372,040 | 14,371,583 | 1 | 2 | 14,371,189 | train | <story><title>Ask HN: Is Hackernews still using the file system as database?</title><text>I&#x27;d love to learn a bit about what the current hosting&#x2F;tech stack setup looks like. IIRC the posts were stored in files on the file system and scaled quite well vertically. Is that still the case?</text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dchuk</author><text>While on the &quot;how HN works&quot; topic, I have a question:<p>I&#x27;m working on an HN app reader idea that I think is unique (more to come) that requires regularly getting the front page posts and comments. I wrote a script to do that through the Firebase API but holy shit it ended up needing thousands of requests to get all the data for the current state of the front page.<p>So instead, I wrote a scraper script to produce the same thing, just with 30 requests (1 per front page post). (Trying to turn these damn &lt;tr&gt;&#x27;s into a recursive comment tree was a quite the mindfuck btw)<p>...is it ok to scrape HN? I see nothing in the robots.txt to say it shouldn&#x27;t be allowed, and I actually feel better making 30 scraping requests rather than XXXX API requests.<p>EDIT: Also happy to receive suggestions. I&#x27;m coding in Ruby and don&#x27;t see an obvious way to access the Firebase DB directly (quite frankly I don&#x27;t even know if what I just said makes sense) so any help is appreciated.</text></comment> | <story><title>Ask HN: Is Hackernews still using the file system as database?</title><text>I&#x27;d love to learn a bit about what the current hosting&#x2F;tech stack setup looks like. IIRC the posts were stored in files on the file system and scaled quite well vertically. Is that still the case?</text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Kaizyn</author><text>The source code used to be open, and it isn&#x27;t clear what happened to it. Maybe ask over on the arclanguage.org forum as HN is written in arc.<p>The closest thing to a source repo is this from many years ago:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;wting&#x2F;hackernews" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;wting&#x2F;hackernews</a></text></comment> |
37,519,643 | 37,517,919 | 1 | 2 | 37,516,061 | train | <story><title>Analyzing Starfield’s Performance on Nvidia’s 4090 and AMD’s 7900 XTX</title><url>https://chipsandcheese.com/2023/09/14/analyzing-starfields-performance-on-nvidias-4090-and-amds-7900-xtx/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>brucethemoose2</author><text>Starfield is an interesting analysis choice because, for what you get, the performance is horrid.<p>Starfield looks worse, and runs slower at 4K, on my RTX 3090&#x2F;7800x3d than Cyberpunk 2077 does on my laptop 2060. Thats insane! And even setting the Nvidia bias aside, Cyberpunk 2077 is a busy game, and no pariah of optimization.<p>Also, speaking as a diehard BGS fan since Oblivion and a diehard sci fi lover who even enjoyed ME Andromeda... Starfield seems kinda dull? I don&#x27;t really get what all the fuss is about.</text></comment> | <story><title>Analyzing Starfield’s Performance on Nvidia’s 4090 and AMD’s 7900 XTX</title><url>https://chipsandcheese.com/2023/09/14/analyzing-starfields-performance-on-nvidias-4090-and-amds-7900-xtx/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Ameo</author><text>I&#x27;ve become such a huge fan of the writeups from chipsandcheese. I&#x27;ve not found anywhere else that regularly produces technical analysis on this level. Such a joy to read</text></comment> |
8,952,245 | 8,952,136 | 1 | 3 | 8,952,100 | train | <story><title>Vivaldi – A new browser for our friends</title><url>https://vivaldi.com</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>albertzeyer</author><text>I would like some more information. Like what engine is this based on? What JS engine? And I guess the source will not be open? (Why?)<p>Edit: Some more info here: <a href="http://thenextweb.com/apps/2015/01/27/meet-vivaldi-new-browser-former-ceo-opera/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;thenextweb.com&#x2F;apps&#x2F;2015&#x2F;01&#x2F;27&#x2F;meet-vivaldi-new-brows...</a><p>Seems as if it uses the Chrome engine.
I wonder about the differences to Opera then.<p>Edit: Found also this on the homepage (somewhat hidden under the &quot;Web technology&quot; tab):<p>We use JavaScript and React to create the user interface — with the help of Node.js, Browserify and a long list of NPM modules. Vivaldi is the web built with the web.<p>So it&#x27;s like <a href="http://breach.cc/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;breach.cc&#x2F;</a> (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8952152" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8952152</a>) then?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>matmann2001</author><text>Basically, it looks like it&#x27;s going to be Opera on the Chrome engine, but with the return all the cool unique features Opera ditched when they switched engines a little while back. And hopefully managed by a group that has the spirit from Opera&#x27;s good old days.</text></comment> | <story><title>Vivaldi – A new browser for our friends</title><url>https://vivaldi.com</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>albertzeyer</author><text>I would like some more information. Like what engine is this based on? What JS engine? And I guess the source will not be open? (Why?)<p>Edit: Some more info here: <a href="http://thenextweb.com/apps/2015/01/27/meet-vivaldi-new-browser-former-ceo-opera/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;thenextweb.com&#x2F;apps&#x2F;2015&#x2F;01&#x2F;27&#x2F;meet-vivaldi-new-brows...</a><p>Seems as if it uses the Chrome engine.
I wonder about the differences to Opera then.<p>Edit: Found also this on the homepage (somewhat hidden under the &quot;Web technology&quot; tab):<p>We use JavaScript and React to create the user interface — with the help of Node.js, Browserify and a long list of NPM modules. Vivaldi is the web built with the web.<p>So it&#x27;s like <a href="http://breach.cc/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;breach.cc&#x2F;</a> (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8952152" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8952152</a>) then?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>quarterto</author><text>Since it seems to use atom-shell for the UI[1], it&#x27;s likely Chromium.<p>[1]: <a href="https://vivaldi.com/#Features/4" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vivaldi.com&#x2F;#Features&#x2F;4</a></text></comment> |
17,615,980 | 17,615,955 | 1 | 2 | 17,612,540 | train | <story><title>Removing jQuery from GitHub.com frontend</title><url>https://twitter.com/mislav/status/1022058279000842240</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zackbloom</author><text>I was one of the developers who made <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;youmightnotneedjquery.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;youmightnotneedjquery.com</a>. To be fair, we made it in... 2014? There is a lot you can do now which you couldn&#x27;t do then, just with a browser. A lot of the challenging examples, like animation, you&#x27;re better off doing with straight CSS.<p>Ultimately, I haven&#x27;t actually used jQuery for anything serious in half a decade, and somehow I manage.</text></item><item><author>interlocutor</author><text>Removing jQuery is not always a good idea. The best advertisement for jQuery, ironically, is this site: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;youmightnotneedjquery.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;youmightnotneedjquery.com&#x2F;</a> Look at how simple things are in the left column, and how much more code is needed in the right column.<p>jQuery has many convenience features such as chaining, for example: item.addClass(&#x27;selected&#x27;).siblings().removeClass(&#x27;selected&#x27;);
and you don&#x27;t have to check for nulls after each selection.<p>Many functions such as closest() and remove() have no equivalents in IE11, and other things such as replaceWith() and before() are not available even in Edge.<p>For simple sites it is easy enough to remove jQuery, but for more complex javascript applications, especially apps that have a lot of interactivity, removing jQuery will result in more code, or you will end up writing a lot of utility functions thereby creating your own little clone of jQuery.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sgift</author><text>&gt; Ultimately, I haven&#x27;t actually used jQuery for anything serious in half a decade, and somehow I manage.<p>I don&#x27;t understand that sentiment ... Of course you can &quot;manage&quot; without JQuery. JQuery itself doesn&#x27;t use JQuery (D&#x27;oh) and somehow it can do all these things, so it is possible. The point of JQuery is that I don&#x27;t have to think about the various (slightly) incompatible implementations of &lt;whatever&gt; in each browser version, but can just use one lib call and be done with it.<p>JQuery to me is like using a car instead of running to another city. Yes, I could run, but why would I do that ..?</text></comment> | <story><title>Removing jQuery from GitHub.com frontend</title><url>https://twitter.com/mislav/status/1022058279000842240</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zackbloom</author><text>I was one of the developers who made <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;youmightnotneedjquery.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;youmightnotneedjquery.com</a>. To be fair, we made it in... 2014? There is a lot you can do now which you couldn&#x27;t do then, just with a browser. A lot of the challenging examples, like animation, you&#x27;re better off doing with straight CSS.<p>Ultimately, I haven&#x27;t actually used jQuery for anything serious in half a decade, and somehow I manage.</text></item><item><author>interlocutor</author><text>Removing jQuery is not always a good idea. The best advertisement for jQuery, ironically, is this site: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;youmightnotneedjquery.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;youmightnotneedjquery.com&#x2F;</a> Look at how simple things are in the left column, and how much more code is needed in the right column.<p>jQuery has many convenience features such as chaining, for example: item.addClass(&#x27;selected&#x27;).siblings().removeClass(&#x27;selected&#x27;);
and you don&#x27;t have to check for nulls after each selection.<p>Many functions such as closest() and remove() have no equivalents in IE11, and other things such as replaceWith() and before() are not available even in Edge.<p>For simple sites it is easy enough to remove jQuery, but for more complex javascript applications, especially apps that have a lot of interactivity, removing jQuery will result in more code, or you will end up writing a lot of utility functions thereby creating your own little clone of jQuery.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>EnderMB</author><text>Haha, I remember when that site was released, and a few of our developers jumped right on it without actually reading the text - namely the second paragraph.<p>&gt; If you&#x27;re developing a library on the other hand, please take a moment to consider if you actually need jQuery as a dependency. Maybe you can include a few lines of utility code, and forgo the requirement. If you&#x27;re only targeting more modern browsers, you might not need anything more than what the browser ships with.<p>Back then, you were 100% correct that if you were writing a library that you intend to use in other places, having jQuery as a hard requirement was a bad idea. However, one developer managed to convince their PM&#x27;s to completely strip out jQuery for an upcoming project, despite the fact that this website was for a major charity that had huge accessibility requirements AND required legacy browser support. The devs on that project learned a ton about vanilla JS, but that project was an absolute disaster.<p>We did get a solid library out of it, though, and at least that didn&#x27;t have jQuery as a dependency!</text></comment> |
36,748,568 | 36,745,622 | 1 | 3 | 36,744,395 | train | <story><title>Self hosted YouTube media server</title><url>https://www.tubearchivist.com/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>DCKing</author><text>Tube Archivist is quite heavyweight as it&#x27;s meant to do heavy full archiving of YouTube channels and search through positively huge libraries. I&#x27;m getting the sense that it&#x27;s a data hoarding tool, not a casual web video watching tool. I found that I just want to add a few channels to my media library, for which I use Jellyfin already.<p>For people looking for a more lightweight option of that kind, I run the following script hourly [1]. This script uses yt-dlp to go through a text file full of YouTube RSS urls (either a channel RSS or a playlist RSS works for channels where you&#x27;re only interested in a subset of videos) [2] and downloads the latest 5 videos organized in folders based on channel name. I watch these files by adding the output folder in a Jellyfin &quot;Movies&quot; type library sorted by most recent. The script contains a bunch of flags to make sure Jellyfin can display video metadata and thumbnails without any further plugins, and repackages videos in a format that is 1080p yet plays efficiently even in web browsers on devices released in at least the last 10 years.<p>It uses yt-dlp&#x27;s &quot;archive&quot; functionality to keep track of videos it&#x27;s already downloaded such that it only downloads a video once, and I use a separate script to clean out files older than two weeks once in a while. Running the script depends on ffmpeg (just used for repackaging videos, not transcoding!), xq (usually comes packaged with jq or yq) and yt-dlp being installed. You sometimes will need to update yt-dlp if a YouTube side change breaks it.<p>For my personal usage it&#x27;s been honed for a little while and now runs reliably for my purposes at least. Hope it&#x27;s useful to more people.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pastebin.com&#x2F;s6kSzXrL" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pastebin.com&#x2F;s6kSzXrL</a><p>[2]: E.g. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;danielmiessler.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;rss-feed-youtube-channel&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;danielmiessler.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;rss-feed-youtube-channel&#x2F;</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Self hosted YouTube media server</title><url>https://www.tubearchivist.com/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>codetrotter</author><text>Does it save the video thumbnail as well? Video description? Comments? Channel name? Channel avatar? etc<p>Currently I use yt-dlp to manually download individual videos that I want to keep. At the moment I only save the video itself. And most of the time I then also paste the URL of the video into archive.is save page and web.archive.org&#x2F;save so that there is a snapshot of what the video page itself looked like at the time. But this is still incomplete, and relies on those services continuing to exist. Locally saving a snapshot of the page like that, and then also saving the thumbnail and perhaps more of the comments would be nice.</text></comment> |
30,657,766 | 30,657,346 | 1 | 2 | 30,656,668 | train | <story><title>In Moscow, McDonald's packs up, radio falls silent and the brain drain begins</title><url>https://lite.cnn.com/en/article/h_032d5311e117bcfd9144ac4c4360ab33</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>quietthrow</author><text>I sympathize with the tragic situation in both these countries for the common person. My curiousness arising out of this situation is forced me to try to understand it and it’s roots. What I found definitely changed my perspective on what to expect out of this. I went in thinking this is a pivotal moment and unsure what the future looks like. I came out sad that this is not a one off thing for the people of this land. If you look at this in the context of the last 150 years - almost every prominent leader in this land was a) never phased by the (sheer) human cost to be incurred as reason to not chase the outcome they wanted and b) the people of this land have never successfully risen up to counter the oppression they faced. Many died trying but they never had the critical mass they needed to overcome the oppression. I dot not claim to know the reason why. I am sure it’s complex but it has occurred multiple times and there is something there to be said for that.<p>Utterly sad and tragic. But I am no longer expecting spectacular revolt and a feel good ending. History suggests this going to go down the same way it has for a long time.<p>I really hope and want to be wrong on this one.</text></comment> | <story><title>In Moscow, McDonald's packs up, radio falls silent and the brain drain begins</title><url>https://lite.cnn.com/en/article/h_032d5311e117bcfd9144ac4c4360ab33</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>AlexCoventry</author><text>Doesn&#x27;t he risk a 15-year prison sentence, by writing this? Pretty gutsy, to let it be published while he&#x27;s still in Moscow.</text></comment> |
15,697,164 | 15,696,895 | 1 | 2 | 15,696,109 | train | <story><title>Germany Is Burning Too Much Coal</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-11-14/germany-is-burning-too-much-coal</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>graeme</author><text>I have never understood why people fear nuclear <i>and</i> don’t seem to fear carbon as giscerally or more.<p>I can understand that nuclear has risks. But people seem to evaluate nuclear in a vacuum, rather than against the carbon sources which currently replace it.<p>“What do we do with the waste” is a better question when applied to coal.</text></item><item><author>pm90</author><text>The emergency move away from nuclear has been incredibly short sighted. I understand not wanting to build new reactors, but shutting down running reactors, with all the capital investment involved, just doesn&#x27;t make any sense. Especially when there is little risk of natural disasters in Germany.<p>If people are serious about maintaining the same quality of lifestyle that we have today without burning as much coal, the current solution is Nuclear Energy. Yes it does pose many risks but so does burning coal, and the latter seems to be destroying our environment.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pizzapill</author><text>The fear of nuclear power in Germany comes from the Tschernobyl disaster 1986. A life changing event for many Germans. Not beeing able to leave the house. Cutting a lot of foods from your diet because they are contaminated for decades (mushrooms, game meat, berries etc.).<p>East block countries trying to sell their contaminated food for consumption and it ending up in GDR school kitchens.<p>Additionally having two superpowers stationing a huge arsenal of nuclear bombs in your country. While at the same time beeing sure that you&#x27;d die first in a new world war that would almost surely start in your country and would probably devastate your whole continent beyond beeing suited for human surival.<p>Then the whole argument that its cleaner and cheaper energy. While you pay for transport, storage and security with your tax money and the company keeps the profits. By storage i mean temporar storage, because no one worldwide has figured out how to safely store the waste for hundreds of thousands of years (Pyramids are 4500 years old and we don&#x27;t even know how they are build). Thats why most of this waste from the 80s and 90s lies a few km off our coasts in the sea where the UK, Russia and Italian mafia dumped it.</text></comment> | <story><title>Germany Is Burning Too Much Coal</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-11-14/germany-is-burning-too-much-coal</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>graeme</author><text>I have never understood why people fear nuclear <i>and</i> don’t seem to fear carbon as giscerally or more.<p>I can understand that nuclear has risks. But people seem to evaluate nuclear in a vacuum, rather than against the carbon sources which currently replace it.<p>“What do we do with the waste” is a better question when applied to coal.</text></item><item><author>pm90</author><text>The emergency move away from nuclear has been incredibly short sighted. I understand not wanting to build new reactors, but shutting down running reactors, with all the capital investment involved, just doesn&#x27;t make any sense. Especially when there is little risk of natural disasters in Germany.<p>If people are serious about maintaining the same quality of lifestyle that we have today without burning as much coal, the current solution is Nuclear Energy. Yes it does pose many risks but so does burning coal, and the latter seems to be destroying our environment.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>foepys</author><text>Germany is traditionally very anti-nuclear because when the Chernobyl disaster happened, a lot of people in the south were told to not let their children play outside. Even today some mushrooms and boars that eat those mushrooms are contaminated.<p>On the French and Belgian side of its borders Germany got some very old reactors that had some serious security related incidents within the last few years. [1] In the city of Aachen the government even distributed iodine tablets if it gets worse.<p>Additionally Germany doesn&#x27;t have locations to store radioactive waste indefinitely. The current location for intermediate storage, called &quot;Asse&quot;, is known to be leaking contaminated water into all kinds of directions and nobody is really sure how to stop it. [2]<p>1: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Tihange_Nuclear_Power_Station#Incidents" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Tihange_Nuclear_Power_Station#...</a><p>2: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Asse_II_mine#Water_inflow" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Asse_II_mine#Water_inflow</a></text></comment> |
11,545,676 | 11,545,746 | 1 | 2 | 11,545,112 | train | <story><title>Alphabet slides 5% after missing earnings expectations on revenue of $20.3B</title><url>http://techcrunch.com/2016/04/21/alphabet-slides-6-after-missing-earnings-expectations/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tma-1</author><text>Long-term, I am not very bullish on Google&#x2F;Alphabet. More than 90% of their profits come online advertising, something that can be easily blocked for life with a simple browser extension&#x2F;plugin. Some worrying figures[1]:<p>* US ad blocking grew by 48% to reach 45 million active users in 12 months up to June 2015.<p>* Ad blocking grew by 41% globally in the last 12 months.<p>* US ad blocking grew by 48% to reach 45 million active users in 12 months up to June 2015.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.pagefair.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;ad-blocking-report&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.pagefair.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;ad-blocking-report&#x2F;</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Alphabet slides 5% after missing earnings expectations on revenue of $20.3B</title><url>http://techcrunch.com/2016/04/21/alphabet-slides-6-after-missing-earnings-expectations/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jhulla</author><text>Alphabet isn&#x27;t the only big corp down after hours today.<p>As of now:<p>Microsoft - down 5%. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.marketwatch.com&#x2F;investing&#x2F;stock&#x2F;msft" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.marketwatch.com&#x2F;investing&#x2F;stock&#x2F;msft</a><p>Visa - down 4% <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.marketwatch.com&#x2F;investing&#x2F;stock&#x2F;v" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.marketwatch.com&#x2F;investing&#x2F;stock&#x2F;v</a><p>Starbux - down 4% <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.marketwatch.com&#x2F;investing&#x2F;stock&#x2F;sbux" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.marketwatch.com&#x2F;investing&#x2F;stock&#x2F;sbux</a><p>In each case, the cause is different. But one thing is common, trailing PE ratios of all four are high compared to historical norms. High PE ratios are maintained with high growth in revenue, earnings and margins. Back off even a bit and the invisible hand smacks you in the face.</text></comment> |
14,850,595 | 14,850,309 | 1 | 3 | 14,848,836 | train | <story><title>Firefox’s speed with large numbers of tabs leaves Chrome in the dust</title><url>http://www.techradar.com/news/firefoxs-blazing-speed-with-huge-numbers-of-tabs-leaves-chrome-in-the-dust</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pavel_lishin</author><text>This is very neat from a technological point of view, but: who are these people who have hundreds and thousands of tabs open, and how can we get them the help they need?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>setr</author><text>I have the opposing opinion<p>Who are these people with a shockingly low number of tabs, and how do we get them the help they need?<p>Those I usually see with few tabs are either those who only browse the web for extremely simple things (ie facebook, netflix and google for very simple questions), or those who only just maintain like a single docs page at any given moment.<p>The hell kind of absurd usage pattern is that? Do you keep one book on your shelf too? Do you just not have any interests? Nothing but one thing at a time? I keep around ~300 tabs and a heavily organized bookmarks storage with some 400 links; tabs are ram and bookmarks are disk.<p>How else would you naturally organize your web-information? I can only imagine you have very little information to organize...</text></comment> | <story><title>Firefox’s speed with large numbers of tabs leaves Chrome in the dust</title><url>http://www.techradar.com/news/firefoxs-blazing-speed-with-huge-numbers-of-tabs-leaves-chrome-in-the-dust</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pavel_lishin</author><text>This is very neat from a technological point of view, but: who are these people who have hundreds and thousands of tabs open, and how can we get them the help they need?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Macha</author><text>Yo.<p>Reasons I have a lot of tabs open:<p>1. Google searching problem. The first result is rarely a complete solution to a problem if I&#x27;ve resorted to Google. Maybe it&#x27;s a partial solution, maybe it&#x27;s no good at all. Usually I&#x27;ll open anything looking relevant from the first page, skim through them, if they don&#x27;t have a quick answer I&#x27;ll check the next. Then I&#x27;ll eliminate any that are totally not relevant. If any have partial answers, I&#x27;ll keep them around while searching related search terms. See also searching our jira instance for related issues when I know this is very similar to something that&#x27;s came up before.<p>2. Programming docs have this annoying habit of sticking one class per page, meaning I usually have to have multiple pages open to understand some area of a library if I&#x27;m unfamiliar with it.<p>3. Reddit&#x2F;HN threads often send me on tangents down links while I keep the parent threads open.<p>4. Sometimes I&#x27;ll go on an aside and do something else while keeping my previous context open for when I return. Yes, I could bookmark them, but bookmarks are a lot more awkward to load back and also mentally feel like they&#x27;re for something a lot more permanent than &quot;I might need in 3-4 hours but won&#x27;t need it tomorrow&quot;. Plus when it&#x27;s not costing me much to not have to put up with the reload time...<p>5. Sometimes I open new windows to view multiple pieces of content at once. Sometimes I end up following links in these new windows.<p>6. Sometimes I open new windows to create a seperate context for a new piece of research when the previous one might be still relevant.<p>I have tried pinboard, pocket when it was readitlater, browser bookmarks, etc. None of them have really solved this use case and I tend to forget about using them after a while.<p>I tend to idle in the 5-20 range, go up to the 50s when researching. Hitting 100+ happens many days, and my record is closing out a browser with 354 open tabs.</text></comment> |
18,669,325 | 18,667,058 | 1 | 2 | 18,665,048 | train | <story><title>An open letter to FB, Twitter, Instagram regarding algorithms and my son's birth</title><url>https://twitter.com/gbrockell/status/1072589687489998848</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Wowfunhappy</author><text>In the case of the letter author, I suspect the problem isn&#x27;t just that stillbirths are rare, but that you can&#x27;t really monetize a stillbirth. Better to assume the baby was born successfully than miss out on the opportunity to advertise to a new mom.<p>I&#x27;m sure no one in the room of marketing execs has considered personal consequences like this one.<p>This type of thing is why I do my best to enable privacy settings and disable personalized ads. I don&#x27;t actually care whether Google knows what I ate for dinner last night, but I don&#x27;t want constantly see Google&#x27;s fuzzy judgements of my humanity as I browse the web.</text></item><item><author>srvo</author><text>This seems to happen a lot when one&#x27;s experience is statistically unlikely, or when it doesn&#x27;t neatly mesh with a commercial opportunity.<p>For instance, I am a transgender woman and I get THE WEIRDEST ads. Makes sense, since an algorithm meshing together my engagement histories from ten years of social platforms must see something quite strange.<p>The only appropriately targeted advertisements I get are from academics interested in studying me. Like: &quot;are you a trans woman? Take this study and win a gift card.&quot;<p>When platforms attempt to monetize me, they wind up pushing the brooks brothers dress shirt deals and so on that I used to gobble up in my prior life.<p>I&#x27;ve taken my business local as a result, but the algorithmic rejection of my reality on these platforms takes a pretty consistent toll. I don&#x27;t know what the solution is, but wanted to underscore that this is a broader problem.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tathougies</author><text>Given the amount of ads for fertility doctors I saw after we lost our son, and the ridiculous claims they were making, I think its safe to say that stillbirths are both lucrative and certainly advertised towards.<p>Honestly, I&#x27;m not sure theres anything to do about it. As awful as losing our son was, I&#x27;m not sure taking away others rights is really an appropriate response. While Facebook would be wise to take these things into account to build social trust, advertisers themselves are always going to want to advertise their products.</text></comment> | <story><title>An open letter to FB, Twitter, Instagram regarding algorithms and my son's birth</title><url>https://twitter.com/gbrockell/status/1072589687489998848</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Wowfunhappy</author><text>In the case of the letter author, I suspect the problem isn&#x27;t just that stillbirths are rare, but that you can&#x27;t really monetize a stillbirth. Better to assume the baby was born successfully than miss out on the opportunity to advertise to a new mom.<p>I&#x27;m sure no one in the room of marketing execs has considered personal consequences like this one.<p>This type of thing is why I do my best to enable privacy settings and disable personalized ads. I don&#x27;t actually care whether Google knows what I ate for dinner last night, but I don&#x27;t want constantly see Google&#x27;s fuzzy judgements of my humanity as I browse the web.</text></item><item><author>srvo</author><text>This seems to happen a lot when one&#x27;s experience is statistically unlikely, or when it doesn&#x27;t neatly mesh with a commercial opportunity.<p>For instance, I am a transgender woman and I get THE WEIRDEST ads. Makes sense, since an algorithm meshing together my engagement histories from ten years of social platforms must see something quite strange.<p>The only appropriately targeted advertisements I get are from academics interested in studying me. Like: &quot;are you a trans woman? Take this study and win a gift card.&quot;<p>When platforms attempt to monetize me, they wind up pushing the brooks brothers dress shirt deals and so on that I used to gobble up in my prior life.<p>I&#x27;ve taken my business local as a result, but the algorithmic rejection of my reality on these platforms takes a pretty consistent toll. I don&#x27;t know what the solution is, but wanted to underscore that this is a broader problem.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wiz21c</author><text>&gt;&gt;&gt; I&#x27;m sure no one in the room of marketing execs has considered personal consequences like this one.<p>Your first sentence was more correct (I suspect) : they thought about it and purposely forgot about it &#x27;cos there was no money to be made there.</text></comment> |
25,190,479 | 25,190,114 | 1 | 3 | 25,186,890 | train | <story><title>The Nintendo Switch uses my open source code</title><url>https://twitter.com/feross/status/1330582600813924352</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>randmeerkat</author><text>Imagine if Nintendo gave away their devices just so they could have the “feeling” of knowing people are using it, rather than selling it for money.<p>It’s weird to me that developers write code that other companies use to make profits, while they just get paid with a “feeling” of satisfaction.</text></item><item><author>javajosh</author><text>The company is giving him something, which is a huge vote of approval to his library. &quot;You ship it, you own it&quot; means Nintendo just said, &quot;This guys code is Nintendo-handheld quality code!&quot; Big endorsement. And literally no-one in the world knows more about that code than him.<p>Last but not least is just the feeling that your code is running in so many places! What a feeling of accomplishment. Over a career, you start to think more and more about what code you have running in the world. Where it used to run. Where you&#x27;d like it to run.<p>That&#x27;s a pretty satisfying feeling, and it also makes him one of the few bona fide people in the world at whom you can throw money to fix (or change) the library.</text></item><item><author>BerSerKer</author><text>I&#x27;m happy for the guy. That&#x27;s no mean feat.<p>I&#x27;m just kinda curious about some comments on Twitter and here. Ok, the guy made an open source library, with no strings attached, a big company used it for god knows what and acknowledged him. Why would the company give him anything more than acknowledgement? As far as we know they didn&#x27;t demand any updates or support from him, why are they expected to give him freebies, contribute to the code or anything else?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>javajosh</author><text>A bit too close to a troll, but there is a germ of a good point, which is whether its ethical for Nintendo to profit from this code. I think the answer is clearly yes, for the simple reason that the author chose to release his code for the world to use. Most projects will die in obscurity, unused (and unmourned).<p>There are a ton of project owners who would love nothing more than to be used by a big, popular platform. That&#x27;s a pretty big win with hardly any risk. It means their thing beat out something that could have been made in-house by the world&#x27;s best devs. Can you imagine discovering that your little thousand-star github library is present in, I don&#x27;t know, Gmail? Presumably, at the very least, it means an auto-hire if you apply to any of the biggies for a <i>very</i> high total comp.<p>(And if you refuse on principle to cash in on that endorsement? I say good for you and I would like to hire you to be on my &quot;wizard council&quot;. These are people I subscribe to to be diligent, principled, skeptical, and open about any software update I consume. This would include, BTW, a holistic definition of &quot;software&quot; to include firmware, FPGAs and so on. Please talk to me like an adult about InfoSec! Thank youuuu!)</text></comment> | <story><title>The Nintendo Switch uses my open source code</title><url>https://twitter.com/feross/status/1330582600813924352</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>randmeerkat</author><text>Imagine if Nintendo gave away their devices just so they could have the “feeling” of knowing people are using it, rather than selling it for money.<p>It’s weird to me that developers write code that other companies use to make profits, while they just get paid with a “feeling” of satisfaction.</text></item><item><author>javajosh</author><text>The company is giving him something, which is a huge vote of approval to his library. &quot;You ship it, you own it&quot; means Nintendo just said, &quot;This guys code is Nintendo-handheld quality code!&quot; Big endorsement. And literally no-one in the world knows more about that code than him.<p>Last but not least is just the feeling that your code is running in so many places! What a feeling of accomplishment. Over a career, you start to think more and more about what code you have running in the world. Where it used to run. Where you&#x27;d like it to run.<p>That&#x27;s a pretty satisfying feeling, and it also makes him one of the few bona fide people in the world at whom you can throw money to fix (or change) the library.</text></item><item><author>BerSerKer</author><text>I&#x27;m happy for the guy. That&#x27;s no mean feat.<p>I&#x27;m just kinda curious about some comments on Twitter and here. Ok, the guy made an open source library, with no strings attached, a big company used it for god knows what and acknowledged him. Why would the company give him anything more than acknowledgement? As far as we know they didn&#x27;t demand any updates or support from him, why are they expected to give him freebies, contribute to the code or anything else?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>throwaway09223</author><text>Creation isn&#x27;t zero sum. I make things all the time which create shared benefit.<p>I spent this Saturday morning working in my front yard. It looks nice for my benefit, but it also benefits my neighbors. It would be really strange for me to approach my neighbors and ask for financial remuneration because they&#x27;ve been enriched by my yardwork. Yardwork is enjoyable and I like making the world better in this fashion.<p>I wouldn&#x27;t join a yardwork company and work for free.<p>Software is similar. We can use OSS to share the benefit when we do something we want or need to do anyway.</text></comment> |
13,950,091 | 13,949,806 | 1 | 3 | 13,949,353 | train | <story><title>From Ruby to Crystal: A Quick Look</title><url>https://spin.atomicobject.com/2017/03/24/ruby-to-crystal-test/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>deedubaya</author><text>Crystal could be a really powerful tool for enhancing existing Ruby code.<p>Imagine a world where you write your code in Ruby, but farm out the expensive operations to a Ruby-like Crystal extension (similar to what is commonly done with C or Rust). I think this is possible already (just after a quick Google search[1]), just not friendly for the average Ruby dev to implement.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.slideshare.net&#x2F;AnnaKazakova&#x2F;how-to-write-ruby-extensions-with-crystal" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.slideshare.net&#x2F;AnnaKazakova&#x2F;how-to-write-ruby-ex...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>From Ruby to Crystal: A Quick Look</title><url>https://spin.atomicobject.com/2017/03/24/ruby-to-crystal-test/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>nurettin</author><text>Great writeup for the folks who are curious but lack the time to test Crystal.</text></comment> |
33,914,175 | 33,914,220 | 1 | 3 | 33,911,694 | train | <story><title>Nearly six in 10 US young adults live within 10 miles of where they grew up</title><url>https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2022/07/theres-no-place-like-home.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Yhippa</author><text>&gt; Many suburbs are not sustainable, and are degrading.<p>Genuinely curious: what is the basis for that claim? Even if you don&#x27;t cite a source.<p>Edit: these responses are very insightful. Thank you all for the responses.</text></item><item><author>parker_mountain</author><text>Part of it, as well, is that a lot of these regions that people moved out of are the suburbs. Many suburbs are not sustainable, and are degrading.</text></item><item><author>fullshark</author><text>A lot of upperwardly mobile, ambitious people don&#x27;t realize this, or they generally understand it only in terms of chastising their high school peers who stayed home. If you build a society based on the assumption everyone will simply move and re-skill to the regions with economic opportunity, you get a lot of regions of bitter people who stayed behind somewhere and watched their local economy get destroyed by trade deals and technological advances, and that&#x27;s how you get an anti-globalization populist political movement.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>akiselev</author><text>See the Strong Towns article &quot;The Growth Ponzi Scheme&quot; [1] and the ASCE Infrastructure Report Card for more concrete data [2].<p>The gist is that we&#x27;ve funded the construction of our infrastructure nationwide without accounting for the cost of maintenance. Now after decades of neglect, the cost of fixing all of our infrastructure is astronomical, far worse than if we had been doing it correctly from the beginning.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.strongtowns.org&#x2F;the-growth-ponzi-scheme" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.strongtowns.org&#x2F;the-growth-ponzi-scheme</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;infrastructurereportcard.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;infrastructurereportcard.org&#x2F;</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Nearly six in 10 US young adults live within 10 miles of where they grew up</title><url>https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2022/07/theres-no-place-like-home.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Yhippa</author><text>&gt; Many suburbs are not sustainable, and are degrading.<p>Genuinely curious: what is the basis for that claim? Even if you don&#x27;t cite a source.<p>Edit: these responses are very insightful. Thank you all for the responses.</text></item><item><author>parker_mountain</author><text>Part of it, as well, is that a lot of these regions that people moved out of are the suburbs. Many suburbs are not sustainable, and are degrading.</text></item><item><author>fullshark</author><text>A lot of upperwardly mobile, ambitious people don&#x27;t realize this, or they generally understand it only in terms of chastising their high school peers who stayed home. If you build a society based on the assumption everyone will simply move and re-skill to the regions with economic opportunity, you get a lot of regions of bitter people who stayed behind somewhere and watched their local economy get destroyed by trade deals and technological advances, and that&#x27;s how you get an anti-globalization populist political movement.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>duped</author><text>Not GP but locally there are a few exurbs that have serious budget problems because they overbuilt infrastructure and don&#x27;t have the tax base to fully maintain it which creates a feedback loop of poorly maintained roads, water systems, parks, etc.<p>Some of it had to do with the murder of brick and mortar retail in tightly packed downtowns in favor of the big box stores on the edge of town. That creates an enormous waste in municipal resources, doubly so if the store got property&#x2F;sales tax subsidies.<p>This is less of an issue in the denser near suburbs where populations and revenues have been consistently rising the last few years.</text></comment> |
3,469,176 | 3,469,132 | 1 | 3 | 3,468,974 | train | <story><title>Zappos.com customer database compromised</title><url>http://www.zappos.com/passwordchange</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>IgorPartola</author><text>LastPass FTW! The attacker will reverse my password just to find a bunch of unusable bits :). What would be even cooler is an API on top of LastPass that sites like Zappos could hook into to force a behind-the-scenes change of passwords, similar to revoking a compromised certificate. Essentially, since there is some lead time after the breach is discovered and before the attacker manages to crack the long, random passwords, their efforts would be futile by the time they are done since all LastPass passwords would have already been changed.<p>Or we could just stop using passwords everywhere and not have this problem again. Anybody? Anybody?<p>Disclosure: I have no affiliation with LastPass beyond being a satisfied user.</text></comment> | <story><title>Zappos.com customer database compromised</title><url>http://www.zappos.com/passwordchange</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>skrish</author><text>+1 for not storing clear text passwords.<p>I like the tone of the blog &#38; how forthright they have been with dealing with the issue.</text></comment> |
18,305,463 | 18,301,958 | 1 | 2 | 18,301,361 | train | <story><title>Ban organophosphate pesticides to protect children's health, experts say</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/24/entire-pesticide-class-should-be-banned-for-effect-on-childrens-health</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>chicob</author><text>And what about safety to farmers?<p>I&#x27;ve used phosmet, an organophosphate insecticide, and I don&#x27;t like to use it. You can know it&#x27;s around in the warehouse, still in the original sealed packages, just by smelling it. A feeling of dry mouth and eyes usually follows.<p>And it&#x27;s not because it&#x27;s a dangerous substance - most pesticides with very few exceptions are dangerous - but because it is very hard to handle.<p>Phosmet is usually sold as a fine powder, and as it is the case of most soluble powders, it disperses in air easily. I always ask for liquid insecticides, but these are not always available.<p>Masks are not particularly useful: cotton masks are of little to no use, filters are compromised by facial hair[1] and air supply masks are crazy expensive.<p>If farmers respect the required safety intervals, harm to consumers is considerably minimized.
The main hazard comes to people that come in contact with larger concentrations of pesticides: manufacturers, sellers and farmers.<p>Now I just open the package carefully underwater, if the sprayer is full enough and the package is to be completely emptied. This minimizes dispersion considerably.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;multimedia.3m.com&#x2F;mws&#x2F;media&#x2F;463742O&#x2F;facial-hair-and-respirators.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;multimedia.3m.com&#x2F;mws&#x2F;media&#x2F;463742O&#x2F;facial-hair-and-r...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Ban organophosphate pesticides to protect children's health, experts say</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/24/entire-pesticide-class-should-be-banned-for-effect-on-childrens-health</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dragontamer</author><text><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.epa.gov&#x2F;sites&#x2F;production&#x2F;files&#x2F;documents&#x2F;rmpp_6thed_ch5_organophosphates.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.epa.gov&#x2F;sites&#x2F;production&#x2F;files&#x2F;documents&#x2F;rmpp_6t...</a><p>EPA has this little chapter on organophosphates. Seems like this class of pesticides is well known to be toxic to humans.</text></comment> |
34,494,083 | 34,494,305 | 1 | 3 | 34,493,487 | train | <story><title>An incomplete guide to stealth addresses</title><url>https://vitalik.ca/general/2023/01/20/stealth.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>lysergia</author><text>&gt; Basic stealth addresses can be implemented fairly quickly today, and could be a significant boost to practical user privacy on Ethereum. They do require some work on the wallet side to support them<p>So how easy is it realistically? I hope it&#x27;s not going to un-ergonomic like PGP where novices are sometimes seeing to be pasting their private key into e-mails and sending things in plaintext which should have been ciphertext, or otherwise leaking info.<p>I imagine you have to be really careful not to mess things up here.</text></comment> | <story><title>An incomplete guide to stealth addresses</title><url>https://vitalik.ca/general/2023/01/20/stealth.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>alexbakers</author><text>Stealth addresses are beneficial for large amounts.<p>For example:<p>- 0x1... stealth address have 5USDC<p>- 0x2... stealth address have 5USDC<p>- 0x3... stealth address have 5USDC<p>Now I want to pay 9USDC to 0x4..., how do I do that?<p>0x1... -&gt; 0x4... = 3USDC (gas transfer ERC20 ~2USDC)<p>0x2... -&gt; 0x4... = 3USDC (gas transfer ERC20 ~2USDC)<p>0x3... -&gt; 0x4... = 3USDC (gas transfer ERC20 ~2USDC)<p>And since you spend from different addresses in one transaction, in theory you can reveal your identity.</text></comment> |
9,380,779 | 9,380,645 | 1 | 2 | 9,379,817 | train | <story><title>The Dark side of .io TLD</title><url>http://www.thedarksideof.io/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dogma1138</author><text>The archipelago was first settled in the 19th century, only about 1500 people were displaced, yes the British government mistreated these people by not properly compensating them because the US and NATO needed a military base in the region.<p>However there are urban restructuring projects every day in western countries that displace more people without proper compensation than this incident.<p>And while i understand that some people might feel they&#x27;ve been stripped of their homeland, but considering that the Islands were populated for the 1st time in modern history less than 200 years ago and remained populated for a period of only about a 100 years it&#x27;s not exactly the strongest backing for a claim to a nation.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Dark side of .io TLD</title><url>http://www.thedarksideof.io/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mahouse</author><text>&gt;They lost all rights to their homeland, now including the valuable .io TLD.<p>You don&#x27;t want to know what happened in the United States... Or everywhere, to that matter.</text></comment> |
35,200,843 | 35,200,820 | 1 | 3 | 35,200,267 | train | <story><title>ChatGPT's Chess Elo is 1400</title><url>https://dkb.blog/p/chatgpts-chess-elo-is-1400</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>latexr</author><text>&gt; These people used bad prompts and came to the conclusion that ChatGPT can’t play a legal chess game. (…)<p>&gt; With this prompt ChatGPT almost always plays fully legal games.<p>&gt; Occasionally it does make an illegal move, but I decided to interpret that as ChatGPT flipping the table (…)<p>&gt; (…) with GPT4 (…) in the two games I attempted, it made numerous illegal moves.<p>So you’ve ostensibly¹ found a way to reduce the error rate and then deliberately ignored the cases where it failed. In short: it may play valid chess <i>under certain conditions</i> but can’t be trusted to do so. That doesn’t contradict previous findings.<p>¹ 19 games is a small sample and the supposedly more advanced system failed in your tries.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vidarh</author><text>Fuller context from the article:<p>&gt; Occasionally it does make an illegal move, but I decided to interpret that as ChatGPT flipping the table and saying “this game is impossible, I literally cannot conceive of how to win without breaking the rules of chess.” <i>So whenever it wanted to make an illegal move, it resigned.</i><p>(my emphasis)<p>So the illegal moves are at least part of the reasons for the 6 losses, and factored into the rating. Quickly scanning the game, it seems 3 of the losses ended in checkmate, so that leaves 3 illegal moves in 19 games.<p>Could be better, but for a system not intentionally built to play chess, it&#x27;s pretty decent.</text></comment> | <story><title>ChatGPT's Chess Elo is 1400</title><url>https://dkb.blog/p/chatgpts-chess-elo-is-1400</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>latexr</author><text>&gt; These people used bad prompts and came to the conclusion that ChatGPT can’t play a legal chess game. (…)<p>&gt; With this prompt ChatGPT almost always plays fully legal games.<p>&gt; Occasionally it does make an illegal move, but I decided to interpret that as ChatGPT flipping the table (…)<p>&gt; (…) with GPT4 (…) in the two games I attempted, it made numerous illegal moves.<p>So you’ve ostensibly¹ found a way to reduce the error rate and then deliberately ignored the cases where it failed. In short: it may play valid chess <i>under certain conditions</i> but can’t be trusted to do so. That doesn’t contradict previous findings.<p>¹ 19 games is a small sample and the supposedly more advanced system failed in your tries.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ballenf</author><text>The illegal moves were counted as losses&#x2F;resignations, not ignored.</text></comment> |
6,976,548 | 6,976,230 | 1 | 2 | 6,976,095 | train | <story><title>Bitcoin and positive vs. normative economics</title><url>http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/28/bitcoin-is-evil/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>smtddr</author><text><i>&gt;&gt;BitCoin looks like it was designed as a weapon intended to damage central banking and money issuing banks, with a Libertarian political agenda in mind—to damage states ability to collect tax and monitor their citizens financial transactions.</i><p>So basically it brings an ability to the middle-class that normally only the top 1% have. We know wealthy people use tax loopholes(and a few of them, laundering) and... why do the states need to monitor financial transactions? Don&#x27;t tell me because terrorism. I&#x27;m sick of that being the reason for everything when we have this kind of nonsense[1] happening.<p>I translate this to: <i>&quot;Bitcoin is designed to free non-rich people from the restrictions, fees &amp; surveillance placed upon them by the wealthy elite&quot;</i><p>I don&#x27;t know if crypo-currency will succeed long-term, but seeing how hardcore scared&#x2F;doubtful some people are about it makes me think a nerve has been hit. I just hope that if btc fails, it fails naturally&#x2F;organically&#x2F;mathematically on its own... not because someone arbitrarily makes it illegal.<p>1. <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6954341" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=6954341</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>chipsy</author><text>What I think is important about cryptographic assets isn&#x27;t exactly in the economic properties they have now, but in the potential for reforming governance.<p>That is, if people are successfully using a crypto asset for their business, AND they are able to use a power and network infrastructure for this that is difficult enough(not perfect) that government authorities aren&#x27;t successfully applying their &quot;monopoly on force,&quot; then government is now pushed into competition with the crypto-anarchic principles and must find a way to become a &quot;better product,&quot; enough so that people will prefer government money over crypto.<p>How will government come up with a product that is better - in a positive way - than a crypto asset? Government has the authority to issue new centralized currencies. This means that if it truly embraced computing - which it never has to date, having never faced a challenge of that nature - it could program a form of currency that is &quot;smart&quot; and bakes in the policy decisions and taxation currently executed by bureaucracy. It would be made attractive to citizens by building in basic income, as well as the service provisions. The result would be more powerful and more efficient than anything we currently know as government. Cash would still exist as a backup, but the government could discourage its use except in emergency situations.</text></comment> | <story><title>Bitcoin and positive vs. normative economics</title><url>http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/28/bitcoin-is-evil/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>smtddr</author><text><i>&gt;&gt;BitCoin looks like it was designed as a weapon intended to damage central banking and money issuing banks, with a Libertarian political agenda in mind—to damage states ability to collect tax and monitor their citizens financial transactions.</i><p>So basically it brings an ability to the middle-class that normally only the top 1% have. We know wealthy people use tax loopholes(and a few of them, laundering) and... why do the states need to monitor financial transactions? Don&#x27;t tell me because terrorism. I&#x27;m sick of that being the reason for everything when we have this kind of nonsense[1] happening.<p>I translate this to: <i>&quot;Bitcoin is designed to free non-rich people from the restrictions, fees &amp; surveillance placed upon them by the wealthy elite&quot;</i><p>I don&#x27;t know if crypo-currency will succeed long-term, but seeing how hardcore scared&#x2F;doubtful some people are about it makes me think a nerve has been hit. I just hope that if btc fails, it fails naturally&#x2F;organically&#x2F;mathematically on its own... not because someone arbitrarily makes it illegal.<p>1. <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6954341" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=6954341</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>username223</author><text>&quot;why do the states need to monitor financial transactions?&quot;<p>I hate the &quot;terrorism&quot; BS as much as you, but money laundering and large-scale scamming ( <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6972139" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=6972139</a> ) are actual threats.</text></comment> |
3,001,594 | 3,001,550 | 1 | 2 | 3,001,153 | train | <story><title>Remembering a relationship, one chat at a time</title><url>http://www.good.is/post/chat-history/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>DanielBMarkham</author><text>When I go to write a letter, I use some software that allows me to put together words on a semblance of a page and then print it. The tool is called a "word processor"<p>When we live our lives, we leave all these digital footprints and clues all over the web. It seems to me that somebody should invent a "life processor" that would collect these traces of our former selves and allow us, after death, to somehow more actively participate than we've ever done before.<p>If nothing else, it would be a central repository of things that we left behind -- words, images, songs, memories, etc. Yes, I know GMail and Facebook do some of that, but a lot is in chat, on blogs, in comments (like this one), and spread all over the place. After all, they're <i>my</i> thoughts. Shouldn't my descendants be able to easily browse and use them? I would think that with a bit of computational magic, there could be all sorts of new things coming out of our thoughts after we pass on -- if only there was a central repository of data to start with.<p>I liked this article a lot. It reminded me how important the traces of our digital lives are. Or rather, how important those traces can be.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>corin_</author><text><i>Shouldn't my descendants be able to easily browse and use them?</i><p>I'm not so sure... there's a lot of things I've written that, looking back a year or two later, I wish I hadn't, yet alone other people reading them too.<p>And I'm not talking about the generic big examples that people talk about like "that picture of you on facebook throwing up" or anything, just small things, whether it's an MSN conversation where I over-reacted and acted like a complete dick, flirting with someone on MSN in what is later obviously a really embarassing way, or that time I told my friend that my mum/child/brother was boring/annoying/whatever me.<p>And of course secrets, whether they're ones I want to keep from certain people, or something private that I don't want anyone knowing, but for some reason wrote about in a not-for-public-eyes personal diary sort of way.<p>I don't know how much there is that I don't want other people seeing, but I know I've seen old stuff I've written/said/done/made that I cringe at now, and I'm sure there's plenty more that I just haven't noticed.</text></comment> | <story><title>Remembering a relationship, one chat at a time</title><url>http://www.good.is/post/chat-history/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>DanielBMarkham</author><text>When I go to write a letter, I use some software that allows me to put together words on a semblance of a page and then print it. The tool is called a "word processor"<p>When we live our lives, we leave all these digital footprints and clues all over the web. It seems to me that somebody should invent a "life processor" that would collect these traces of our former selves and allow us, after death, to somehow more actively participate than we've ever done before.<p>If nothing else, it would be a central repository of things that we left behind -- words, images, songs, memories, etc. Yes, I know GMail and Facebook do some of that, but a lot is in chat, on blogs, in comments (like this one), and spread all over the place. After all, they're <i>my</i> thoughts. Shouldn't my descendants be able to easily browse and use them? I would think that with a bit of computational magic, there could be all sorts of new things coming out of our thoughts after we pass on -- if only there was a central repository of data to start with.<p>I liked this article a lot. It reminded me how important the traces of our digital lives are. Or rather, how important those traces can be.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lylejohnson</author><text>&#62; It seems to me that somebody should invent a "life processor" that would collect these traces of our former selves and allow us, after death, to somehow more actively participate than we've ever done before.<p>All I could think after finishing the article was, "I sure hope she has those messages backed up somehow." Too many horror stories of Google locking up someone's account with no hope of getting it back. (And yes, that could happen with any service provider, she just happened to mention that she's using Gmail).</text></comment> |
19,839,584 | 19,839,637 | 1 | 3 | 19,835,615 | train | <story><title>The Impact of the Lambda Calculus (1997) [pdf]</title><url>http://www-users.mat.umk.pl/~adwid/materialy/doc/church.pdf</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>galaxyLogic</author><text>An interesting detail from the paper is why it is called &quot;LAMBDA&quot;. That is because in the original notation what current-day programmers would call formal argument of a function were denoted by putting an upward arrow-head on top of variable&#x2F;name but since that could not be type-set easily the arrow-head was moved in front of such variable which resembles the Greek letter &quot;lambda&quot;.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Impact of the Lambda Calculus (1997) [pdf]</title><url>http://www-users.mat.umk.pl/~adwid/materialy/doc/church.pdf</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>galaxyLogic</author><text>My question would be, why is Lambda-calculus not a good programming language in practice?</text></comment> |
22,452,745 | 22,451,111 | 1 | 2 | 22,442,513 | train | <story><title>A quick primer on type traits in modern C++</title><url>https://www.internalpointers.com/post/quick-primer-type-traits-modern-cpp</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rjeli</author><text>The amount of background knowledge you need to understand what’s happening here... I don’t envy people who have to catch up<p>becoming more and more convinced that when sfinae opened the Turing hatch it doomed c++</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>skrebbel</author><text>I&#x27;m not sure, I last coded C++ about 8 years ago and that was all C++03, yet I had no trouble to follow along.<p>I mean, even if you never saw a &quot;constexpr&quot; before, isn&#x27;t it pretty clear from the example and the name, well, &quot;constexpr&quot; want&#x27;s going on? Same for the other newish C++ features.<p>I thought it was a nice little primer.</text></comment> | <story><title>A quick primer on type traits in modern C++</title><url>https://www.internalpointers.com/post/quick-primer-type-traits-modern-cpp</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rjeli</author><text>The amount of background knowledge you need to understand what’s happening here... I don’t envy people who have to catch up<p>becoming more and more convinced that when sfinae opened the Turing hatch it doomed c++</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>saagarjha</author><text>&gt; The amount of background knowledge you need to understand what’s happening here...<p>Not a whole lot, actually. You can go from C to this in about a week if you’re focused. (I did this a few years ago when learning C++. Now if you want to talk about initialization, that’s a whole ‘nother story…)</text></comment> |
37,818,150 | 37,817,392 | 1 | 3 | 37,816,670 | train | <story><title>Lenovo exec promises 80% of its devices will be consumer-repairable by 2025</title><url>https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/6/23884108/lenovo-consumer-repair-pcs-serviceability-framework</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>SilverBirch</author><text>The title is a mischaracterization of what was said:<p>&gt;More than 80 percent of our devices will be able to be repaired at the customer,<p><i>At</i> the customer not <i>by</i> the customer. What they mean by this is that a skilled (and probably approved) technician would be able to carry out a repair on-site.<p>I think it&#x27;s actually a much more reasonable approach - devices should have a first-class vendor supported route for repair. Outside of that, obviously people should <i>also</i> be free to have a go and repair the device themselves, but there&#x27;s obvious reasons why that should be at arms-length from the vendor.<p>Personally I already have an X1, I bought it for work, I have the full 5 year support package and it&#x27;s great, I think it&#x27;s a totally reasonable compromise. I&#x27;m an engineer using this device for work, I don&#x27;t expect to be cracking it open and fixing it myself when something goes wrong, and I don&#x27;t expect my employer to tolerate my not working because I don&#x27;t have the correct tools.</text></comment> | <story><title>Lenovo exec promises 80% of its devices will be consumer-repairable by 2025</title><url>https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/6/23884108/lenovo-consumer-repair-pcs-serviceability-framework</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>sacnoradhq</author><text>Lenovo Thinkpads were already on the side of repairability, but that declined after the Apple cargo-culting that began around the time of the T470. The T480 had dual batteries, 1 removable and 1 internal. The T490 was even more enshitified with only 1 internal battery and a lower runtime.</text></comment> |
31,504,895 | 31,503,179 | 1 | 3 | 31,502,432 | train | <story><title>Credit Scores Can Run – and Ruin – Our Lives</title><url>https://thewalrus.ca/credit-score-canada/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>TrackerFF</author><text>Here in Norway, we don&#x27;t have any credit score in that sense. Rather, we have sort of a &quot;credit history&quot; system, which shows the following:<p>-When there&#x27;s been registered wage garnishment (by court) against you.<p>-When there&#x27;s been registered a lien against your property.<p>-When you&#x27;ve entered a court-ordered debt payment program.<p>-When you&#x27;ve been registered as bankrupt.<p>And by law, these things have to be deleted when you&#x27;ve settled your debt. In any case, it&#x27;s difficult to get those things by accident. Usually you&#x27;re at the end of the process, and have been through civil court.<p>With that said - it should be mentioned that Norway is a INCREDIBLY creditor friendly country, as far as the law goes. If a creditor really want their money back, they can &#x2F; will take you to court, and eventually get a garnishment on your wage or welfare money. Or property&#x2F;vehicles&#x2F;personal belongings lien if you don&#x27;t have any income.<p>I like the system as it is. I really don&#x27;t like the idea of constantly having to do things with respect to a credit score - and I&#x27;m not talking about gaming the system or being a deadbeat, but trying to maximize my credit score for the sake of keeping it high.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kube-system</author><text>We don&#x27;t have &quot;<i>a</i> credit score&quot; in the US either. We have a credit history, much like you describe. For the businesses that review someone&#x27;s credit history, the credit agencies provide some assortment of algorithms to help quantify it for them. This is colloquially called your &quot;credit score&quot;, but in reality, there isn&#x27;t a single credit score, there&#x27;s a bunch of different algorithms and everyone uses a different one. The equivalent to a US &quot;credit score&quot; in Norway would be, a creditor&#x27;s formula for determining creditworthiness from your credit history.<p>The alternative to algorithmic scoring is often <i>worse</i>: someone making a subjective judgement call. Which, historically, is fraught with discrimination.</text></comment> | <story><title>Credit Scores Can Run – and Ruin – Our Lives</title><url>https://thewalrus.ca/credit-score-canada/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>TrackerFF</author><text>Here in Norway, we don&#x27;t have any credit score in that sense. Rather, we have sort of a &quot;credit history&quot; system, which shows the following:<p>-When there&#x27;s been registered wage garnishment (by court) against you.<p>-When there&#x27;s been registered a lien against your property.<p>-When you&#x27;ve entered a court-ordered debt payment program.<p>-When you&#x27;ve been registered as bankrupt.<p>And by law, these things have to be deleted when you&#x27;ve settled your debt. In any case, it&#x27;s difficult to get those things by accident. Usually you&#x27;re at the end of the process, and have been through civil court.<p>With that said - it should be mentioned that Norway is a INCREDIBLY creditor friendly country, as far as the law goes. If a creditor really want their money back, they can &#x2F; will take you to court, and eventually get a garnishment on your wage or welfare money. Or property&#x2F;vehicles&#x2F;personal belongings lien if you don&#x27;t have any income.<p>I like the system as it is. I really don&#x27;t like the idea of constantly having to do things with respect to a credit score - and I&#x27;m not talking about gaming the system or being a deadbeat, but trying to maximize my credit score for the sake of keeping it high.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>2rsf</author><text>More or less like Sweden, and everything is digitally interconnected to the main population registry so things like that usually don&#x27;t happen:<p>&gt; TransUnion, one of Canada’s two main credit bureaus, had reported her as deceased.<p>We also moved out of the stone age and faxes practically don&#x27;t exist and all certificates are digital:<p>&gt; Two years of faxing in detailed documents—including Dave’s death certificate</text></comment> |
25,747,520 | 25,747,856 | 1 | 3 | 25,743,546 | train | <story><title>Lulu – Mac open-source firewall that aims to block unknown outgoing connections</title><url>https://objective-see.com/products/lulu.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>webmobdev</author><text>Threre are no indications that Apple is willing to compromise and allow application firewalls to block Apple softwares that Apple believes should be able to access the internet, even if the user doesn&#x27;t want it too.<p>It&#x27;s a gross invasion of privacy, and a security risk.<p>(By the way, even in Lulu, some Apple system software - apsd, automount, helpd, mDNSResponder, mount_nfs, mount_url, ocspd, sntp, trustd - are whitelisted and cannot be blocked by the user even if they want to, and that&#x27;s bit disappointing).</text></item><item><author>m463</author><text>I wonder how this works with respect to apple&#x27;s &quot;special exemptions&quot; for its own applications.<p>(bypass NEFilterDataProvider)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>miles</author><text>&gt; some Apple system software ... are whitelisted and cannot be blocked by the user even if they want to<p>There are currently 3 ways I know of to block them:<p>1. Exclusions Blaster <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vallumfirewall.com&#x2F;eblaster&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vallumfirewall.com&#x2F;eblaster&#x2F;</a><p>2. Enabling Little Snitch 4.6 kext under Big Sur <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.obdev.at&#x2F;support&#x2F;littlesnitch&#x2F;245913651253917" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.obdev.at&#x2F;support&#x2F;littlesnitch&#x2F;245913651253917</a><p>3. Convoluted hack: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tinyapps.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;202010210700_whose_computer_is_it.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tinyapps.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;202010210700_whose_computer_is_it....</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Lulu – Mac open-source firewall that aims to block unknown outgoing connections</title><url>https://objective-see.com/products/lulu.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>webmobdev</author><text>Threre are no indications that Apple is willing to compromise and allow application firewalls to block Apple softwares that Apple believes should be able to access the internet, even if the user doesn&#x27;t want it too.<p>It&#x27;s a gross invasion of privacy, and a security risk.<p>(By the way, even in Lulu, some Apple system software - apsd, automount, helpd, mDNSResponder, mount_nfs, mount_url, ocspd, sntp, trustd - are whitelisted and cannot be blocked by the user even if they want to, and that&#x27;s bit disappointing).</text></item><item><author>m463</author><text>I wonder how this works with respect to apple&#x27;s &quot;special exemptions&quot; for its own applications.<p>(bypass NEFilterDataProvider)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>FabHK</author><text>Could you enlighten me what the gross invasion of privacy and the security risk is for the majority of users that do not hack their machine in a way that prevents those connections?<p>I&#x27;m aware of Gatekeeper checking developer certificates upon opening apps over an unencrypted connection (so far; Apple is fixing that), but not sure where the gross privacy invasion or security risk is (in particular compared to existing alternatives, not some platonic ideal).<p>Here, FWIW, is what Apple says about Gatekeeper and Notarization. I&#x27;d be eager to hear any evidence that this is incorrect.<p>&gt; Gatekeeper performs online checks to verify if an app contains known malware and whether the developer’s signing certificate is revoked. We have never combined data from these checks with information about Apple users or their devices. We do not use data from these checks to learn what individual users are launching or running on their devices.
&gt; Notarization checks if the app contains known malware using an encrypted connection that is resilient to server failures.<p>&gt; These security checks have never included the user’s Apple ID or the identity of their device. To further protect privacy, we have stopped logging IP addresses associated with Developer ID certificate checks, and we will ensure that any collected IP addresses are removed from logs.<p>&gt; In addition, over the the next year we will introduce several changes to our security checks:<p>* A new encrypted protocol for Developer ID certificate revocation checks<p>* Strong protections against server failure<p>* A new preference for users to opt out of these security protections<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.apple.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;HT202491" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.apple.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;HT202491</a></text></comment> |
21,639,061 | 21,639,038 | 1 | 2 | 21,638,723 | train | <story><title>Y Combinator Abruptly Shutters YC China</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/21/y-combinator-abruptly-shutters-yc-china/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>saagarjha</author><text>Discussion from last week: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21597763" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21597763</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Y Combinator Abruptly Shutters YC China</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/21/y-combinator-abruptly-shutters-yc-china/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ixtli</author><text>I&#x27;d love to assume this had something to do with government abuses and overreach that YC couldn&#x27;t condone, but call me cynical, im not holding my breath.<p>Also, I wonder if when asian businesses consider starting up something in the US if local news write articles like this. E.g.:<p>&quot;That there is no mention of the uncertain international politics and U.S.-China relations right now, nor the explosive situation in Hong Kong, or ongoing human rights issues elsewhere in the country, seems a deliberate choice to make this move seem as ordinary as possible. But those things are major questions for anyone looking to do business in [the US], and it’s hard to believe none had any bearing on the decision to abruptly pack up and leave a major enterprise behind.&quot;</text></comment> |
29,235,397 | 29,235,267 | 1 | 2 | 29,233,852 | train | <story><title>Air cargo is suddenly affordable relative to ocean shipping</title><url>https://www.freightwaves.com/news/why-is-air-cargo-suddenly-more-affordable-compared-to-ocean-shipping</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>winslow</author><text>I&#x27;m having a hard time understanding this snippet:<p><i>The intermediary stop in Anchorage, as opposed to flying from Shanghai to Oakland, CA, actually increases total flight distance by around 144 miles but allows the aircraft to carry an additional 45,000kg of cargo (instead of extra fuel) increasing revenue for the trip by around $90,000.</i><p>Why would traveling an extra 144 miles allow the aircraft to carry 45,000kg of cargo instead of fuel? I feel like I&#x27;m misreading it.</text></item><item><author>jeromegv</author><text>Anchorage is because they found out that they can fill their planes with more inventory and less gas if they stop in Anchorage instead of doing the full pacific route.<p>Good article here:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zdnet.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;why-your-ipad-comes-via-anchorage&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zdnet.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;why-your-ipad-comes-via-anchor...</a></text></item><item><author>noduerme</author><text>I ordered an M1 Max the day after it was announced. It&#x27;s supposed to arrive today. The route it took to get to Portland, Oregon, was Shanghai to Zhenzhou (where it spent a week), on to South Korea, then Anchorage, then a weekend in Louisville, Kentucky. How this makes any sense in terms of efficiency is totally beyond me.<p>As a side note, I&#x27;m mildly paranoid about new Apple devices spending a week held up in Chinese customs. Is the CCP throttling exports, or installing backdoors?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nkurz</author><text>Shanghai to Oakland is about 10,000 km: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.greatcirclemap.com&#x2F;?routes=PVG-OAK" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.greatcirclemap.com&#x2F;?routes=PVG-OAK</a><p>Adding a stop in Anchorage adds about 200 km:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.greatcirclemap.com&#x2F;?routes=PVG-ANC-OAK" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.greatcirclemap.com&#x2F;?routes=PVG-ANC-OAK</a><p>The plane is probably limited by takeoff weight: body plus fuel plus cargo. By adding a stop in the middle, the plane can take off with less fuel from Shanghai. Since it has 45000 kg less fuel, it can instead carry 45000 kg more cargo. Total fuel consumption for the trip ends up slightly higher, but fuel per kg of useful cargo is much less.</text></comment> | <story><title>Air cargo is suddenly affordable relative to ocean shipping</title><url>https://www.freightwaves.com/news/why-is-air-cargo-suddenly-more-affordable-compared-to-ocean-shipping</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>winslow</author><text>I&#x27;m having a hard time understanding this snippet:<p><i>The intermediary stop in Anchorage, as opposed to flying from Shanghai to Oakland, CA, actually increases total flight distance by around 144 miles but allows the aircraft to carry an additional 45,000kg of cargo (instead of extra fuel) increasing revenue for the trip by around $90,000.</i><p>Why would traveling an extra 144 miles allow the aircraft to carry 45,000kg of cargo instead of fuel? I feel like I&#x27;m misreading it.</text></item><item><author>jeromegv</author><text>Anchorage is because they found out that they can fill their planes with more inventory and less gas if they stop in Anchorage instead of doing the full pacific route.<p>Good article here:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zdnet.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;why-your-ipad-comes-via-anchorage&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zdnet.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;why-your-ipad-comes-via-anchor...</a></text></item><item><author>noduerme</author><text>I ordered an M1 Max the day after it was announced. It&#x27;s supposed to arrive today. The route it took to get to Portland, Oregon, was Shanghai to Zhenzhou (where it spent a week), on to South Korea, then Anchorage, then a weekend in Louisville, Kentucky. How this makes any sense in terms of efficiency is totally beyond me.<p>As a side note, I&#x27;m mildly paranoid about new Apple devices spending a week held up in Chinese customs. Is the CCP throttling exports, or installing backdoors?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>koolba</author><text>The last mile of flight time is the most expensive because the jet fuel has to be carried all the way from the starting point. By breaking a trip into intermediate hops, you get to trade “expensive” last miles for cheaper ones.<p>For it to make economic sense it just needs to exceed the extra cost of time spent at the intermediate port. And even that can offset by adding cargo for that intermediate destination to replace the weight savings of not carrying that “last mile” jet fuel.</text></comment> |
28,413,376 | 28,413,229 | 1 | 2 | 28,401,445 | train | <story><title>Tmpfs inode corruption: introducing inode64</title><url>https://chrisdown.name/2021/07/02/tmpfs-inode-corruption-introducing-inode64.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>kzrdude</author><text>Is the mount option needed for backwards compat? Any system that creates that many files, should be large file aware, hopefully? Maybe it comes down to many files being created (and deleted) during the lifetime of the tmpfs mount, i.e usage time, not size, without any counter reset.<p>A system that uses &quot;our identifier space is approximately infinite&quot; can be fragile in a surprising way. A system that uses &quot;our identifier space is proportional to the physical size of the medium&quot; is more humanly predictable in its limitations.</text></comment> | <story><title>Tmpfs inode corruption: introducing inode64</title><url>https://chrisdown.name/2021/07/02/tmpfs-inode-corruption-introducing-inode64.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jabl</author><text>Similarly, XFS has the inode32&#x2F;64 mount options. Since kernel 3.7 inode64 is the default: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;man7.org&#x2F;linux&#x2F;man-pages&#x2F;&#x2F;man5&#x2F;xfs.5.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;man7.org&#x2F;linux&#x2F;man-pages&#x2F;&#x2F;man5&#x2F;xfs.5.html</a></text></comment> |
10,342,851 | 10,342,569 | 1 | 2 | 10,339,388 | train | <story><title>New Windows 10 Devices From Microsoft</title><url>http://blogs.windows.com/devices/2015/10/06/a-new-era-of-windows-10-devices-from-microsoft/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cm2187</author><text>But then you loose the USB port. But the main problem of USB adapters is that they don&#x27;t like being unplugged and plugged back which happens quite frequently with a laptop. With a real port connectivity is pretty much instantaneous. I used USB adapters for a while on a MacBook pro and came to the conclusion that I will never ever buy a laptop without ethernet ports.<p>What I wonder is why they don&#x27;t come up with a mini-ethernet port format? Ethernet ports aren&#x27;t exactly high tech.</text></item><item><author>soapdog</author><text>I use a surface and I have an ethernet to USB adapter, works pretty well.</text></item><item><author>cm2187</author><text>I still miss the z series... But the z series had ethernet ports. This surface thing is useless to me.</text></item><item><author>hkmurakami</author><text>This is what I was hopeful for when VAIO was spun off of SONY last year.<p>When I saw the &quot;machined magnesium body&quot; line in their video [1] I was immediately reminded of the VAIO laptops that had beautiful material way back in the 90&#x27;s.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=XVfOe5mFbAE&amp;feature=youtu.be" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=XVfOe5mFbAE&amp;feature=youtu.be</a></text></item><item><author>tmd83</author><text>This! At least from the initial look and spec it looks like they did a lot of the things right and put effort in making this nice. Yes there are things that maybe I can get by without but the basics looks fantastic.<p>You don&#x27;t chip $50 off a premium laptop and make it crappy. OEM just keeps making too many model at every price point .. at every 20 dollars it feels like. While I hate the almost singular choice for OsX .. both for Windows and Android I think there is just too many price points and when you try to reduce by 5-10-20 dollar you skip things that seems not so essentially but the degradation in experience is much more than the money saved.<p>What I really hope from this is that it shows the OEM that there are enough interest in quality product and also let them know what are some of the things that people really care about like the build quality, nice keyboard&#x2F;touchpad etc. Beyond this particular laptop my real wish is that it motivates and gives confidence to the windows OEM. We really do need some good windows laptop even if to just to run linux :).</text></item><item><author>MatthiasP</author><text>That&#x27;s what the OEMs get for not being able to put out a laptop that could compete with Apple in all those years, they always managed to introduce some fatal flaw in their premium laptops, from weird keyboard layouts to bad fan management software.<p>Let&#x27;s hope the Surface Book will be succesful and Apple finally gets serious competition in the premium laptop market.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mrbuttons454</author><text>Anker makes a USB 3 hub with gigabit ethernet. I&#x27;ve got one, it&#x27;s pretty great.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ianker.com&#x2F;product&#x2F;A7514041" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ianker.com&#x2F;product&#x2F;A7514041</a></text></comment> | <story><title>New Windows 10 Devices From Microsoft</title><url>http://blogs.windows.com/devices/2015/10/06/a-new-era-of-windows-10-devices-from-microsoft/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cm2187</author><text>But then you loose the USB port. But the main problem of USB adapters is that they don&#x27;t like being unplugged and plugged back which happens quite frequently with a laptop. With a real port connectivity is pretty much instantaneous. I used USB adapters for a while on a MacBook pro and came to the conclusion that I will never ever buy a laptop without ethernet ports.<p>What I wonder is why they don&#x27;t come up with a mini-ethernet port format? Ethernet ports aren&#x27;t exactly high tech.</text></item><item><author>soapdog</author><text>I use a surface and I have an ethernet to USB adapter, works pretty well.</text></item><item><author>cm2187</author><text>I still miss the z series... But the z series had ethernet ports. This surface thing is useless to me.</text></item><item><author>hkmurakami</author><text>This is what I was hopeful for when VAIO was spun off of SONY last year.<p>When I saw the &quot;machined magnesium body&quot; line in their video [1] I was immediately reminded of the VAIO laptops that had beautiful material way back in the 90&#x27;s.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=XVfOe5mFbAE&amp;feature=youtu.be" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=XVfOe5mFbAE&amp;feature=youtu.be</a></text></item><item><author>tmd83</author><text>This! At least from the initial look and spec it looks like they did a lot of the things right and put effort in making this nice. Yes there are things that maybe I can get by without but the basics looks fantastic.<p>You don&#x27;t chip $50 off a premium laptop and make it crappy. OEM just keeps making too many model at every price point .. at every 20 dollars it feels like. While I hate the almost singular choice for OsX .. both for Windows and Android I think there is just too many price points and when you try to reduce by 5-10-20 dollar you skip things that seems not so essentially but the degradation in experience is much more than the money saved.<p>What I really hope from this is that it shows the OEM that there are enough interest in quality product and also let them know what are some of the things that people really care about like the build quality, nice keyboard&#x2F;touchpad etc. Beyond this particular laptop my real wish is that it motivates and gives confidence to the windows OEM. We really do need some good windows laptop even if to just to run linux :).</text></item><item><author>MatthiasP</author><text>That&#x27;s what the OEMs get for not being able to put out a laptop that could compete with Apple in all those years, they always managed to introduce some fatal flaw in their premium laptops, from weird keyboard layouts to bad fan management software.<p>Let&#x27;s hope the Surface Book will be succesful and Apple finally gets serious competition in the premium laptop market.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>untog</author><text>&gt; What I wonder is why they don&#x27;t come up with a mini-ethernet port format?<p>I suspect that is part of the problem. The plug is just so big - though IMO Thunderbolt and USB adapters work OK. Realise not everyone thinks this way, though.<p>&gt; But the main problem of USB adapters is that they don&#x27;t like being unplugged and plugged back which happens quite frequently<p>? That&#x27;s basically what they&#x27;re designed for.</text></comment> |
8,622,636 | 8,622,601 | 1 | 3 | 8,622,331 | train | <story><title>China Just Blocked Thousands of Websites</title><url>https://zh.greatfire.org/blog/2014/nov/china-just-blocked-thousands-websites</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>eob</author><text>Speaking entirely divorced from my opinion on China politically (as someone with strong US and TW ties, FWIW), I think the Great Firewall has been a brilliant economic move in retrospect. While it may have been an accidental side-effect, blocking so many foreign sites has enabled a flourishing of domestic internet companies of the likes that nobody but the US has seen unless I&#x27;m mistaken.<p>And for a &quot;middle class&quot; of blocked sites, while not technically blocked, the packet delay is so great most people (except a dedicated few) will just shrug and figure that cross-continent internet connections must be too slow to be practical. Accessible, but only if you&#x27;re willing to wait a minute. A brilliant political play, because it&#x27;s hard to pin a charge oppression on anyone, since the information is technically there, but so slow nobody will access it.</text></comment> | <story><title>China Just Blocked Thousands of Websites</title><url>https://zh.greatfire.org/blog/2014/nov/china-just-blocked-thousands-websites</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tbenst</author><text>I&#x27;m currently in China. VPNs are very common and popular here. Many work very poorly unfortunately (Private Internet Access included). Astrill appears to be the most popular and best performing. A few high-end hotels that I&#x27;ve stayed at route all traffic through a VPN to cater to their Western audience.<p>Many, many people with little technical ability use a VPN, especially in businesses dealing with the West.</text></comment> |
10,240,658 | 10,240,693 | 1 | 2 | 10,240,001 | train | <story><title>Volkswagen Is Ordered to Recall Nearly 500k Vehicles Over Emissions Software</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/19/business/volkswagen-is-ordered-to-recall-nearly-500000-vehicles-over-emissions-software.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dayjah</author><text>When I last bought a VW (2008) I was concerned due to a clunking noise after first starting it up and driving a few miles; I called the VW service dept and they explained that there was a compressor which captured exhaust fumes and released them at a lower rate for the first few miles of each journey -- to help them meet EPA emissions standards. I was assured there was nothing to worry about.<p>While this is a different case, it struck me then that the emissions guidelines were being gamed by manufacturers. We&#x27;re regularly reminded that barriers will be circumvented; what is the correct approach here? Like performance enhancing drugs in sports, too stiff of a fine and manufacturers are encouraged to find more subtle ways to beat the system, unenforced you leave a polluting industry to destroy our environment..</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>spydum</author><text>Perhaps the noise was poorly explained. What they describe is likely the Exhaust Gas Recirculation (EGR - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Exhaust_gas_recirculation" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Exhaust_gas_recirculation</a> ). This isn&#x27;t a system to game emissions, it&#x27;s an active component in real emissions reduction.<p>Still I get your point: manufacturers are clearly going to optimize based on the measured metrics. How do we know those metrics are meaningful in the overall system.</text></comment> | <story><title>Volkswagen Is Ordered to Recall Nearly 500k Vehicles Over Emissions Software</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/19/business/volkswagen-is-ordered-to-recall-nearly-500000-vehicles-over-emissions-software.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dayjah</author><text>When I last bought a VW (2008) I was concerned due to a clunking noise after first starting it up and driving a few miles; I called the VW service dept and they explained that there was a compressor which captured exhaust fumes and released them at a lower rate for the first few miles of each journey -- to help them meet EPA emissions standards. I was assured there was nothing to worry about.<p>While this is a different case, it struck me then that the emissions guidelines were being gamed by manufacturers. We&#x27;re regularly reminded that barriers will be circumvented; what is the correct approach here? Like performance enhancing drugs in sports, too stiff of a fine and manufacturers are encouraged to find more subtle ways to beat the system, unenforced you leave a polluting industry to destroy our environment..</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>CurtHagenlocher</author><text>There is a more charitable interpretation.<p>When engines are colder, they burn less efficiently and produce &quot;worse&quot; emissions. A system that treats the warmup period differently than the steady-state of running a hot engine is potentially quite reasonable.</text></comment> |
30,942,643 | 30,942,680 | 1 | 2 | 30,939,200 | train | <story><title>Why the WHO took two years to say Covid is airborne</title><url>https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00925-7</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>titzer</author><text>Governments who &quot;didn&#x27;t want to create a panic&quot; just flat-out lied. They broke the public trust and did incalculable, permanent damage to societies&#x27; ability to react to crises in the future.<p>It was self-serving, short-sighted, and frankly, the worst possible outcome. They clearly <i>did not</i> avoid a panic, <i>did not</i> avoid massive consequences, but, in the long run, deliberately injected distrust, hatred, and fear, deepening political divisions and driving us to the brink.<p>And yet political leaders <i>will face no consequences</i>.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dgellow</author><text>Which governments specifically? Also, you say that they failed to avoid panic but where have you seen some?<p>From what I’ve seen some governments said a few incorrect or misleading things at a time where we had a lot of uncertainty and contradictory information. And then corrected once information became better. Overall western governments (I’m mostly familiar with Western Europe and the US) have been quite good at communicating in the middle of a global pandemics, even when the US had Trump as president, someone who contributed actively to misinformation regarding the virus.</text></comment> | <story><title>Why the WHO took two years to say Covid is airborne</title><url>https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00925-7</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>titzer</author><text>Governments who &quot;didn&#x27;t want to create a panic&quot; just flat-out lied. They broke the public trust and did incalculable, permanent damage to societies&#x27; ability to react to crises in the future.<p>It was self-serving, short-sighted, and frankly, the worst possible outcome. They clearly <i>did not</i> avoid a panic, <i>did not</i> avoid massive consequences, but, in the long run, deliberately injected distrust, hatred, and fear, deepening political divisions and driving us to the brink.<p>And yet political leaders <i>will face no consequences</i>.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>chimprich</author><text>&gt; Governments who &quot;didn&#x27;t want to create a panic&quot;<p>Is that supposed to be a quote? It doesn&#x27;t seem to be a quote from the article. Not creating a panic seems to be a sensible thing to do in most circumstances. You want people to react with appropriate concern to risks, but not behave irrationally.</text></comment> |
13,423,005 | 13,422,184 | 1 | 3 | 13,418,434 | train | <story><title>Being a Data Scientist: My Experience and Toolset</title><url>https://jeffersonheard.github.io/2017/01/being-a-data-scientist-my-experience-and-toolset/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>achompas</author><text>These types of posts validate my concern about the people entering my field right now.<p>Data science, as a line of work, is distinct from other technical roles in its focus on <i>creating business value using machine learning and statistics</i>. This quality is easily observed in the most successful data scientists I&#x27;ve worked with (whether at unicorn startups, big companies like my current employer, or &quot;mission-driven&quot; companies).<p>Implicit in this definition is <i>avoiding the destruction of business value by misapplying ML&#x2F;statistics</i>. In that sense, I am concerned about blog posts like these (which list 50 libraries and zero textbooks or papers) and those who comment arguing the relevance of &quot;real math&quot; in the era of computers.<p>Speaking bluntly: if you are a &quot;data scientist&quot; that can&#x27;t derive a posterior distribution or explain the architecture of a neural network in rigorous detail, you&#x27;re only going to solve easy problems amenable to black-box approaches. This is code for &quot;toss things into pandas and throw sklearn at it&quot;. I would look for a separate line of work.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>SatvikBeri</author><text>I think the &quot;Data Scientist&quot; job title is overloaded–I see several clusters of skills being useful, and in my ideal world they would have similar but slightly different job titles:<p>–Medium Stats&#x2F;ML, medium Engineering (&quot;Data Scientist&quot; or &quot;Data Engineer&quot;)<p>–High Engineering on very large datasets, low&#x2F;medium Stats&#x2F;ML (&quot;Data Engineer&quot; or &quot;Backend Engineer&quot;)<p>–High Analysis, medium Stats&#x2F;ML, low Engineering (&quot;Analyst&quot;)<p>–High traditional Stats, High Analysis, low ML&#x2F;Engineering (&quot;Statistician&quot;)<p>–High ML, medium Stats, medium Analysis (&quot;Data Scientist&quot;)<p>–High ML, medium Engineering (&quot;Machine Learning Engineer&quot;)</text></comment> | <story><title>Being a Data Scientist: My Experience and Toolset</title><url>https://jeffersonheard.github.io/2017/01/being-a-data-scientist-my-experience-and-toolset/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>achompas</author><text>These types of posts validate my concern about the people entering my field right now.<p>Data science, as a line of work, is distinct from other technical roles in its focus on <i>creating business value using machine learning and statistics</i>. This quality is easily observed in the most successful data scientists I&#x27;ve worked with (whether at unicorn startups, big companies like my current employer, or &quot;mission-driven&quot; companies).<p>Implicit in this definition is <i>avoiding the destruction of business value by misapplying ML&#x2F;statistics</i>. In that sense, I am concerned about blog posts like these (which list 50 libraries and zero textbooks or papers) and those who comment arguing the relevance of &quot;real math&quot; in the era of computers.<p>Speaking bluntly: if you are a &quot;data scientist&quot; that can&#x27;t derive a posterior distribution or explain the architecture of a neural network in rigorous detail, you&#x27;re only going to solve easy problems amenable to black-box approaches. This is code for &quot;toss things into pandas and throw sklearn at it&quot;. I would look for a separate line of work.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>teej</author><text>Or, just like software engineering or any other profession in the world, there&#x27;s going to be a need for people to solve hard problems and people to solve easy problems. Data science isn&#x27;t different.</text></comment> |
15,242,830 | 15,242,815 | 1 | 2 | 15,242,078 | train | <story><title>Chelsea Manning: The Dystopia We Signed Up For</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/13/opinion/chelsea-manning-big-data-dystopia.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ncr100</author><text>One point seems to be about trust. She&#x27;s noting how society depends upon digital, not analog, trust.<p>She thinks of that as dystopian because of the foreignness and inconvenience.<p>We, as technologists, can improve upon this by talking empathetically more with our users about how they interact with our technology, to help steer the product towards incorporating more human-focused designs. This could help avoid this Stranger in a Strange Land phenomenon becoming more prevalent, and avoid the negative psychological behaviors which disconnected individuals typically exhibit.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>drawkbox</author><text><i>We, as technologists, can improve upon this by...</i><p>We can do some of it but most of the &#x27;do no evil&#x27; goes away in favor of what <i>the money</i> wants to do. Even well intentioned designers, developers&#x2F;engineers, entrepreneurs, etc get pushed&#x2F;pulled in directions of <i>the money</i> and usually understandably. The money machine always gets what it wants.<p>A big problem with our society today is, the people with all the power (lever on the money) are the same ones selling us out to dystopian lack of control of privacy, rights etc. We are a system setup where the only good that can really come is if wealth, or someone wealthy, wants to see it happen. We are basing all our opportunities, hopes, rights on very few people that are actively getting paid to cut them down.<p>Inequality does us in more than we realize because it is easy to throw <i>the people</i> under the bus for <i>the money</i>, once you are in <i>the money</i> you aren&#x27;t in <i>the people</i> by design. We live in a &#x27;free&#x27; country, but combine that with the feudal&#x2F;sharecropper setup at our dictator-like controlled companies we work for where corporate rights overpower individual rights on the regular, and well you end up with a recipe for dystopia.</text></comment> | <story><title>Chelsea Manning: The Dystopia We Signed Up For</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/13/opinion/chelsea-manning-big-data-dystopia.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ncr100</author><text>One point seems to be about trust. She&#x27;s noting how society depends upon digital, not analog, trust.<p>She thinks of that as dystopian because of the foreignness and inconvenience.<p>We, as technologists, can improve upon this by talking empathetically more with our users about how they interact with our technology, to help steer the product towards incorporating more human-focused designs. This could help avoid this Stranger in a Strange Land phenomenon becoming more prevalent, and avoid the negative psychological behaviors which disconnected individuals typically exhibit.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dqpb</author><text><i>talking empathetically more with our users about how they interact with our technology</i><p>I&#x27;ve been hearing this a lot lately but I don&#x27;t really know what it means.<p>I think most (all?) developers&#x2F;designers try to imagine the experience of an average or &quot;canonical&quot; user while developing features. This is a natural way to try creating a product with decent usability. You can take this a step further with UX studies, focus groups, etc.<p>However, since &quot;UX design&quot; has existed in one form or another since before PC&#x27;s were a thing, I take it that&#x27;s not what&#x27;s meant by &quot;having more empathy for our users&quot;.<p>I suspect this means somehow tailoring&#x2F;adapting our products to the wide variety of cultural, geographic, socio-economic backgrounds of users, or even their states-of-mind&#x2F;existential experience. In that case, I think a UX designer would face a combinatorial explosion of constraints and&#x2F;or features requests, which is not practical.<p>However, we do have a free&#x27;ish market, which seems well positioned to address this wide variety of needs. Moreover, the long tail of users is getting fatter as our population scales, so it is increasingly rewarding to target niche groups.</text></comment> |
17,323,874 | 17,323,576 | 1 | 3 | 17,323,485 | train | <story><title>U.S. Files Criminal Charges Against Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes, Ramesh Balwani</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-files-criminal-charges-against-theranoss-elizabeth-holmes-ramesh-balwani-1529096005</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>maxxxxx</author><text>Does anybody know if Theranos got started with at least an idea how to accomplish what they wanted to do? From what I have heard in interviews they started with the thought &quot;Doing xxx would be super useful&quot; but didn&#x27;t have an approach for accomplishing this but instead took in money and tried to figure it out. It&#x27;s like me saying &quot;An antimatter drive would revolutionize space exploration&quot; and starting to collect money but without even the faintest idea how to produce one.<p>Does anyone know? Did Holmes have any insight that caused her and the investors to believe she could do the blood tests?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>atombender</author><text>This interview with John Carreyrou [1], the Wall Street Journal journalist who is largely responsible for exposing Theranos, goes into a lot of detail. It&#x27;s long, so if you want a shorter answer, jump to the question &quot;What technology did Theranos actually develop?&quot;:<p><i>Basically there were three iterations of the technology. The first one used microfluidics, which are basically the repurposing of the micro-fabrication techniques that the computer chip industry pioneered to move tiny volumes of liquid. Theranos tried to work on that for several years before Holmes lost patience in late fall 2007 and abandoned it. At that point she pivoted to what was essentially a converted glue-dispensing robot. One of the engineers ordered a glue-dispensing robot from a company called Fisnar in New Jersey, studied its components and rebuilt a smaller version of it. It was a robotic arm on a gantry with three degrees of motion and a pipette stuck to its end, and it replicated what the scientist does at the bench. That ended up being called the Edison and it could do only one class of test, known as immunoassays. It was also error-prone. The third iteration of the technology was the miniLab, which Holmes wanted to be able to do more than just immunoassays. The miniLab didn’t invent any new techniques to test blood with. It miniaturized existing laboratory instruments and packed them into one box. By the time Theranos went live with its tests, the miniLab was a malfunctioning prototype.</i><p>The interview also explains how Holmes was able to attract so many influential people on her board. The short answer is her Jobs-like &quot;reality distortion field&quot; -- she was exceedingly good at convincing non-scientists that their science worked.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.nautil.us&#x2F;issue&#x2F;60&#x2F;searches&#x2F;does-theranos-mark-the-peak-of-the-silicon-valley-bubble" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.nautil.us&#x2F;issue&#x2F;60&#x2F;searches&#x2F;does-theranos-mark-the-...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>U.S. Files Criminal Charges Against Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes, Ramesh Balwani</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-files-criminal-charges-against-theranoss-elizabeth-holmes-ramesh-balwani-1529096005</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>maxxxxx</author><text>Does anybody know if Theranos got started with at least an idea how to accomplish what they wanted to do? From what I have heard in interviews they started with the thought &quot;Doing xxx would be super useful&quot; but didn&#x27;t have an approach for accomplishing this but instead took in money and tried to figure it out. It&#x27;s like me saying &quot;An antimatter drive would revolutionize space exploration&quot; and starting to collect money but without even the faintest idea how to produce one.<p>Does anyone know? Did Holmes have any insight that caused her and the investors to believe she could do the blood tests?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gamblor956</author><text>They had a good idea of what they <i>wanted</i> to do (blood tests using very thin needles) but never successfully figured out how to accomplish that with the level of accuracy required.<p>Most Medical professionals believe that what they wanted to do was simply impossible from a biological perspective due to the natural variations of blood content. It would have been like trying to determine traffic on a freeway by taking a brief glance through a tiny slit in a piece of paper.(This is why they draw so much blood for testing, to try and get a fairly representative sample.)</text></comment> |
33,413,780 | 33,413,936 | 1 | 2 | 33,408,735 | train | <story><title>ISBNdb dump – how many books are preserved forever?</title><url>http://annas-blog.org/blog-isbndb-dump-how-many-books-are-preserved-forever.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bloak</author><text>Google has claimed that about 130 million books have been published (that factoid is all over the web). The number of 10-digit ISBNs is 1000 million (there&#x27;s a check digit) and people have only just started using 13-digit ISBNs that start with 979 instead of 978; but of course there must be lots of wasted ISBNs, for example when a publisher optimistically buys a big block and then goes bankrupt. Both those numbers suggest that the &quot;ISBNdb&quot; with less than 31 million ISBNs is far from complete.<p>The frequency of each top-level prefix (which tells you the geographical or language region) would be interesting. That would the first thing I&#x27;d calculate if I had the data on my disc.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ComputerGuru</author><text>I always loved how despite the massive domain differences, the ISBN situation is <i>extremely</i> similar to the IPv4&#x2F;IPv6 situation (except more aggressively rent-seeking), with prefixes leased out to the old dogs, concerns about eventual address&#x2F;isbn exhaustion, a scheme for mapping old ISB10 to new ISBN13 codes, etc etc.</text></comment> | <story><title>ISBNdb dump – how many books are preserved forever?</title><url>http://annas-blog.org/blog-isbndb-dump-how-many-books-are-preserved-forever.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bloak</author><text>Google has claimed that about 130 million books have been published (that factoid is all over the web). The number of 10-digit ISBNs is 1000 million (there&#x27;s a check digit) and people have only just started using 13-digit ISBNs that start with 979 instead of 978; but of course there must be lots of wasted ISBNs, for example when a publisher optimistically buys a big block and then goes bankrupt. Both those numbers suggest that the &quot;ISBNdb&quot; with less than 31 million ISBNs is far from complete.<p>The frequency of each top-level prefix (which tells you the geographical or language region) would be interesting. That would the first thing I&#x27;d calculate if I had the data on my disc.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>23skidoo</author><text>I&#x27;m a little perplexed by the ISBN system. The whole centralized affair, where you have to purchase ISBNs seems like a racket. ISBNs cost more in some countries (America) than they do in others (Canada). Not for any reason other than that they can get away with it.<p>Much better would be a UUID generated from unique values, like a hash of the timestamp and publisher of a book. If you limit the length and number of the fields you hash to generate the UUID, you could even prove there will be zero collisions and eliminate any need to collision checks and thus an organization that charges money.</text></comment> |
20,704,861 | 20,703,808 | 1 | 2 | 20,695,806 | train | <story><title>The not so hidden cost of sharing code between iOS and Android</title><url>https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2019/08/the-not-so-hidden-cost-of-sharing-code-between-ios-and-android/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mmastrac</author><text>We&#x27;ve had a mostly different (positive) experience doing a similar thing at FullStory for mobile instrumentation, though I think I know where some of the key differences are.<p>Our core &quot;business logic&quot; lives in Rust. This is a shared bit of code between Android &amp; iOS that mainly deals with orchestration, serialization, and server communication. We managed to extract ~1&#x2F;2 of each platform&#x27;s native code into this shared orchestration. What&#x27;s left on each platform is more like a platform driver.<p>I fully admit that things are different for us because we&#x27;re not dealing with a bunch of UI that we manage (instead we&#x27;re dealing with UI that our customers have written in Java&#x2F;Swift&#x2F;Objective-C&#x2F;etc), but I think that there&#x27;s a few places where we&#x27;ve made this work in a better way:<p>- We&#x27;ve chosen flatbuffers to serialize most (not all) of the data between the platform drivers and the shared library.<p>- We&#x27;re using a language that&#x27;s a little more hip. It&#x27;s still not very easy to hire Rust developers, but developers interested in Rust are _very_ interested.<p>- We built tooling early on to make this pretty seamless. Our Rust code builds in XCode and gradle, so there&#x27;s no real friction to a developer getting up and running.<p>Our team is about a year in on this transition to Rust and so far it&#x27;s helped us move far quicker, especially given the size of our team.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>charlesdm</author><text>As someone with plenty of C++ knowledge on mobile, I would expect there to be more C++ devs available with good mobile skills than there are rust devs?<p>Maybe my own viewpoint is twisting the amount of devs I think are available, but I don&#x27;t think the choice dropbox originally made was crazy. C++ is a great way to share complex code over multiple platforms (i.e. desktop + mobile) if you&#x27;re running a relatively small engineering team with limited resources.<p>Now, if you have semi unlimited resources, it makes sense to rebuild things natively for each platform in many cases. But Dropbox might not have been around, had they not maken the choice to share part of their codebase cross platforms.</text></comment> | <story><title>The not so hidden cost of sharing code between iOS and Android</title><url>https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2019/08/the-not-so-hidden-cost-of-sharing-code-between-ios-and-android/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mmastrac</author><text>We&#x27;ve had a mostly different (positive) experience doing a similar thing at FullStory for mobile instrumentation, though I think I know where some of the key differences are.<p>Our core &quot;business logic&quot; lives in Rust. This is a shared bit of code between Android &amp; iOS that mainly deals with orchestration, serialization, and server communication. We managed to extract ~1&#x2F;2 of each platform&#x27;s native code into this shared orchestration. What&#x27;s left on each platform is more like a platform driver.<p>I fully admit that things are different for us because we&#x27;re not dealing with a bunch of UI that we manage (instead we&#x27;re dealing with UI that our customers have written in Java&#x2F;Swift&#x2F;Objective-C&#x2F;etc), but I think that there&#x27;s a few places where we&#x27;ve made this work in a better way:<p>- We&#x27;ve chosen flatbuffers to serialize most (not all) of the data between the platform drivers and the shared library.<p>- We&#x27;re using a language that&#x27;s a little more hip. It&#x27;s still not very easy to hire Rust developers, but developers interested in Rust are _very_ interested.<p>- We built tooling early on to make this pretty seamless. Our Rust code builds in XCode and gradle, so there&#x27;s no real friction to a developer getting up and running.<p>Our team is about a year in on this transition to Rust and so far it&#x27;s helped us move far quicker, especially given the size of our team.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>manmal</author><text>Kotlin Native comes to mind - it generates binaries that can easily integrated with gradle and cocoapods, complete with headers&#x2F;interfaces.<p>Do you also keep ViewModels or things like an AuthManager (incl Keychain) or view coordinators in Rust?</text></comment> |
36,501,539 | 36,501,172 | 1 | 2 | 36,500,448 | train | <story><title>The damaging results of mandated return to office</title><url>https://www.entrepreneur.com/growing-a-business/the-damaging-results-of-the-mandated-return-to-office-is/454043</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>diego_moita</author><text>I wish we stopped with the &quot;companies should do this&#x2F;should do that&quot;. Existing big companies are too comfortable and lazy for the remote work revolution.<p>Remote work is a radical change in culture and work organization. It will take new companies with new workflows and organizational ideas to make it work well. We&#x27;re not there yet. Managers don&#x27;t understand yet how to do it, they need to read a lot of documentation (Gitlab&#x27;s is a good start) to start grasping it.<p>But it will happen and the companies&#x2F;startups that crack remote work will be at great advantage. Employee satisfaction is just a small part. There are other, bigger advantages: access to a bigger talent pool, talent retention, saving money, etc<p>And then, after that comes a revolution in cities. Walkable, safe and cheap places with good internet have a lot to gain (e.g. Portugal, Thailand). Unsafe or expensive cities have a lot to loose (e.g. San Francisco).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Uehreka</author><text>…what?<p>Sorry to harsh the vibe, but that second paragraph reads like something out of 2014 when people were first reading REMOTE. At this point remote work is nothing new, and while many large companies don’t like it, many large companies are going along with it (and developing the culture, documentation, etc.) because it works well as a way to attract talent. And some startup founders are trying to go “full Musk” and call workers’ bluffs and cement their control, so I don’t think there’s a clean dichotomy here.<p>As for walkable cities, I agree that they would be awesome, but they do not just naturally flow from a remote work culture. And having lived in Thailand for two years I hard disagree about it being a walkable place with good internet (it is cheap, which is nice, but you don’t get what you don’t pay for).</text></comment> | <story><title>The damaging results of mandated return to office</title><url>https://www.entrepreneur.com/growing-a-business/the-damaging-results-of-the-mandated-return-to-office-is/454043</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>diego_moita</author><text>I wish we stopped with the &quot;companies should do this&#x2F;should do that&quot;. Existing big companies are too comfortable and lazy for the remote work revolution.<p>Remote work is a radical change in culture and work organization. It will take new companies with new workflows and organizational ideas to make it work well. We&#x27;re not there yet. Managers don&#x27;t understand yet how to do it, they need to read a lot of documentation (Gitlab&#x27;s is a good start) to start grasping it.<p>But it will happen and the companies&#x2F;startups that crack remote work will be at great advantage. Employee satisfaction is just a small part. There are other, bigger advantages: access to a bigger talent pool, talent retention, saving money, etc<p>And then, after that comes a revolution in cities. Walkable, safe and cheap places with good internet have a lot to gain (e.g. Portugal, Thailand). Unsafe or expensive cities have a lot to loose (e.g. San Francisco).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>alistairSH</author><text>Except almost all white-collar offices (in the US at least) went remote during the first 2-3 years of COVID. Most did so successfully. Yet, many now want to return to traditional office work with little evidence that’s a better way to work.</text></comment> |
12,428,496 | 12,428,558 | 1 | 2 | 12,428,274 | train | <story><title>First new antibiotic in 30 years discovered in major breakthrough</title><url>http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/03/14/first-new-antibiotic-in-30-years-discovered-in-major-breakthroug</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kyriakos</author><text>Once this gets approved for human use it should be put on lock down and be used only in extreme cases of resistant infections. Like a last resort cure to avoid the mistakes of the past and prolong it&#x27;s usefulness.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>paulsutter</author><text>Notably, that&#x27;s one reason there so little investment in antibiotic r&amp;d. The concern is that sales of a new antibiotic could be very limited because of this very concern.</text></comment> | <story><title>First new antibiotic in 30 years discovered in major breakthrough</title><url>http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/03/14/first-new-antibiotic-in-30-years-discovered-in-major-breakthroug</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kyriakos</author><text>Once this gets approved for human use it should be put on lock down and be used only in extreme cases of resistant infections. Like a last resort cure to avoid the mistakes of the past and prolong it&#x27;s usefulness.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>zamalek</author><text>Most importantly, don&#x27;t feed it to livestock.</text></comment> |
16,418,590 | 16,418,647 | 1 | 2 | 16,418,288 | train | <story><title>Salon magazine mines crypto-cash with readers' PCs</title><url>http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43053783</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>MereInterest</author><text>Absolutely not. Wasting battery power to let somebody else buy into a pyramid scheme is not my idea of a solution.</text></item><item><author>TekMol</author><text>Isn&#x27;t that a good thing?<p>Imagine you have a little widget in your browser that displays something like &#x27;50%&#x27; which means you constantly use 50% of one core to mine a cryptocurrency for the page you are currently looking at.<p>And in return you get an ad free web. I think that would be way better then the web as we know it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sudhirj</author><text>It&#x27;s a perfectly reasonable solution for those who are okay with it. You need to pay with something - either with your privacy, your attention, your money, or your electricity&#x2F;idle CPU cycles.<p>Ad blockers eliminate paying with attention, and put a big squeeze on paying with privacy. Which makes the leftover choices of money or power quite reasonable.<p>What site uses the money or power for is nobody&#x27;s business. Would you not pay journalists if you found out they like losing money on pyramid schemes?</text></comment> | <story><title>Salon magazine mines crypto-cash with readers' PCs</title><url>http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43053783</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>MereInterest</author><text>Absolutely not. Wasting battery power to let somebody else buy into a pyramid scheme is not my idea of a solution.</text></item><item><author>TekMol</author><text>Isn&#x27;t that a good thing?<p>Imagine you have a little widget in your browser that displays something like &#x27;50%&#x27; which means you constantly use 50% of one core to mine a cryptocurrency for the page you are currently looking at.<p>And in return you get an ad free web. I think that would be way better then the web as we know it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>staticassertion</author><text>You&#x27;re reading an article that they provide... you&#x27;re paying for a service. Ads promote tracking, third parties, uncontrolled CPU usage.<p>A coin being mined is controlled, handled entirely by first party, provides no incentive for tracking, etc.<p>This seems like a huge win.</text></comment> |
22,149,424 | 22,149,533 | 1 | 3 | 22,147,841 | train | <story><title>Wuhan scientists: What it’s like to be on lockdown</title><url>https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00191-5</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>xgantan</author><text>As a Canadian, I&#x27;m currently visiting my family in Changsha, a city about 4 hours of a drive south of Wuhan. In the city, everyone is on edge. All public places such as restaurants, gyms and night clubs are closed. And everyone on the street wears a surgical or N95 mask. Not only Wuhan, but the entire country is also on lockdown.<p>It sucks but the people and the government have aligned themselves together to do whatever it takes to contain and control the coronavirus. Let&#x27;s be strong and have faith.</text></comment> | <story><title>Wuhan scientists: What it’s like to be on lockdown</title><url>https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00191-5</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Merrill</author><text>The restrictions on travel in China will be an interesting experiment in how much interurban travel is essential.<p>My take would be that with modern communications and IT infrastructure, there is actually very little need for interurban travel not associated with the movement of physical goods, i.e. not associated with truck drivers, rail crews, barge crews, air freight pilots, and so forth. Most other travel can be replaced by communications.</text></comment> |
21,799,900 | 21,798,275 | 1 | 2 | 21,796,793 | train | <story><title>JetBrains: $270M revenue, 405K paying users, $0 raised</title><url>https://twitter.com/chetanp/status/1205907182396395525</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lol768</author><text>&gt;But with a very customer-friendly clause of where if you pay for a subscription for 12 months you get a perpetual license for the latest version of the product when you initially subscribed. And then after paying for any particular version of a product for 12 months, you also get a perpetual license for that particular version and so on and so forth<p>This came about due to a decent amount of consumer backlash, if I recall correctly. They used to sell standalone perpetual licenses which included a period of updates.</text></item><item><author>kevindong</author><text>I&#x27;m a big fan of the way JetBrains sells their licenses. Like a lot of software companies nowadays, they only sell licenses on a subscription basis. But with a very customer-friendly clause of where if you pay for a subscription for 12 months you get a perpetual license for the latest version of the product when you initially subscribed. And then after paying for any particular version of a product for 12 months, you also get a perpetual license for that particular version and so on and so forth.<p>Their FAQ page explains it a lot better than I can: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sales.jetbrains.com&#x2F;hc&#x2F;en-gb&#x2F;articles&#x2F;207240845-What-is-perpetual-fallback-license-" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sales.jetbrains.com&#x2F;hc&#x2F;en-gb&#x2F;articles&#x2F;207240845-What...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Lazare</author><text>When you say it like that, it doesn&#x27;t sound amazing, but you can also phrase it as:<p>&quot;JetBrains listened to their customers, took feedback on board, and made meaningful changes that addressed the concerns.&quot;<p>In a perfect world, that would the minimum expected behaviour, but in the world we live in, it&#x27;s kind of surprising when it happens.</text></comment> | <story><title>JetBrains: $270M revenue, 405K paying users, $0 raised</title><url>https://twitter.com/chetanp/status/1205907182396395525</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lol768</author><text>&gt;But with a very customer-friendly clause of where if you pay for a subscription for 12 months you get a perpetual license for the latest version of the product when you initially subscribed. And then after paying for any particular version of a product for 12 months, you also get a perpetual license for that particular version and so on and so forth<p>This came about due to a decent amount of consumer backlash, if I recall correctly. They used to sell standalone perpetual licenses which included a period of updates.</text></item><item><author>kevindong</author><text>I&#x27;m a big fan of the way JetBrains sells their licenses. Like a lot of software companies nowadays, they only sell licenses on a subscription basis. But with a very customer-friendly clause of where if you pay for a subscription for 12 months you get a perpetual license for the latest version of the product when you initially subscribed. And then after paying for any particular version of a product for 12 months, you also get a perpetual license for that particular version and so on and so forth.<p>Their FAQ page explains it a lot better than I can: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sales.jetbrains.com&#x2F;hc&#x2F;en-gb&#x2F;articles&#x2F;207240845-What-is-perpetual-fallback-license-" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sales.jetbrains.com&#x2F;hc&#x2F;en-gb&#x2F;articles&#x2F;207240845-What...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>georgemcbay</author><text>Still commendable given how common it is these days for companies to get consumer backlash and just continue to do the same thing while comically trying to publicly convince the customer base that the new model is somehow better for them when any rational person can see it isn&#x27;t.<p>Also useful as a guide to show the customer they should go ahead and voice their displeasure when these situations arise, preferably before the product is so entrenched in the given market that they can &quot;pull an Adobe&quot; in this situation (&quot;Don&#x27;t like the new terms? Fuck you, pay us&quot;).</text></comment> |
35,593,826 | 35,591,396 | 1 | 2 | 35,590,734 | train | <story><title>De-Stressing Booking.com (2019)</title><url>https://www.alexcharlton.co/projects/booking-com-de-stresser</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jvans</author><text>This is why I sometimes hate a&#x2F;b testing. I&#x27;m sure someone at booking a&#x2F;b tested these things and saw an increase in revenue. The thing that these tests don&#x27;t measure are very long term effects where people either start to hate your product and look for alternatives, or become so numb to the changes that the initial novelty effect wears off. The person who ran the test gets a promotion for increasing revenue during the quarter but the net result is a massive negative for the longevity of the product.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>shswkna</author><text>I have a personal experience where booking.com’s nudging caused me to reconsider my trip. I was trying to find something suitable to stay in Paris. Maybe it was the exaggeration of booking.com or maybe there was some truth, but at some point I shut down and made a 180 on my plans. I had realised that I don’t want to go somewhere where I have to compete against this avalanche of other visitors who were or were not snapping my accommodation options away. I am now visiting friends in another European city.</text></comment> | <story><title>De-Stressing Booking.com (2019)</title><url>https://www.alexcharlton.co/projects/booking-com-de-stresser</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jvans</author><text>This is why I sometimes hate a&#x2F;b testing. I&#x27;m sure someone at booking a&#x2F;b tested these things and saw an increase in revenue. The thing that these tests don&#x27;t measure are very long term effects where people either start to hate your product and look for alternatives, or become so numb to the changes that the initial novelty effect wears off. The person who ran the test gets a promotion for increasing revenue during the quarter but the net result is a massive negative for the longevity of the product.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wpietri</author><text>That is not a problem with A&#x2F;B testing. It&#x27;s a problem with the values of the company. I&#x27;ve worked with people who will say, &quot;Oh, this tests well, but we don&#x27;t want to do it because of [long term concerns X and Y].&quot;<p>People who value revenue metrics over all else will still do shitty things for users even if they don&#x27;t A&#x2F;B test.</text></comment> |
35,108,660 | 35,108,619 | 1 | 2 | 35,105,528 | train | <story><title>“Clean Code, Horrible Performance” Discussion</title><url>https://github.com/unclebob/cmuratori-discussion/blob/main/cleancodeqa.md</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>robalni</author><text>I used to like to rewrite code that I thought was &quot;ugly&quot; because it was not written in the modern way or it was not very generic or whatever.
I thought that doing that was often pretty easy so I thought &quot;why has no one done this already?&quot;<p>Later I realized that the fact that it was easy to change was what made it good and the changes I wanted to make to it would probably just make it more complicated.<p>That&#x27;s the danger; good code is easy to change so it will easily get rewritten until it&#x27;s not easy to change anymore.</text></item><item><author>pkolaczk</author><text>It is debatable if Clean Code actually improves the programmer efficiency and programs readability. I find people applying it religiously often create over-complex designs like FizzBuzz Enterprise.<p>Even Uncle Bob&#x27;s examples are not the state of the art in readability:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;qntm.org&#x2F;clean" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;qntm.org&#x2F;clean</a><p>The main problem seems to be that Clean Code is mostly a premature optimisation in code flexibility. It makes code more complex and objectively worse in hope it would be easier to extend later. Unfortunately we often dont know how the code will change, and in practice the code has to be significantly changed&#x2F;rewritten anyway when a business requirement change appears.<p>IMHO optimizing for simplicity and readability has served me the best. Instead of avoiding the changes in code, it is better to write code so obvious that anyone can safely and easily change it when really needed.<p>And finally, performance of the program vs performance of the developer is a false dichotomy. So many times I&#x27;ve seen a more readable, simpler code turned out to be more efficient as well. You often can have both.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>edflsafoiewq</author><text>&gt; Software has a Peter Principle. If a piece of code is comprehensible, someone will extend it, so they can apply it to their own problem. If it’s incomprehensible, they’ll write their own code instead. Code tends to be extended to its level of incomprehensibility.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nigeltao.github.io&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2021&#x2F;json-with-commas-comments.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nigeltao.github.io&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2021&#x2F;json-with-commas-commen...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>“Clean Code, Horrible Performance” Discussion</title><url>https://github.com/unclebob/cmuratori-discussion/blob/main/cleancodeqa.md</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>robalni</author><text>I used to like to rewrite code that I thought was &quot;ugly&quot; because it was not written in the modern way or it was not very generic or whatever.
I thought that doing that was often pretty easy so I thought &quot;why has no one done this already?&quot;<p>Later I realized that the fact that it was easy to change was what made it good and the changes I wanted to make to it would probably just make it more complicated.<p>That&#x27;s the danger; good code is easy to change so it will easily get rewritten until it&#x27;s not easy to change anymore.</text></item><item><author>pkolaczk</author><text>It is debatable if Clean Code actually improves the programmer efficiency and programs readability. I find people applying it religiously often create over-complex designs like FizzBuzz Enterprise.<p>Even Uncle Bob&#x27;s examples are not the state of the art in readability:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;qntm.org&#x2F;clean" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;qntm.org&#x2F;clean</a><p>The main problem seems to be that Clean Code is mostly a premature optimisation in code flexibility. It makes code more complex and objectively worse in hope it would be easier to extend later. Unfortunately we often dont know how the code will change, and in practice the code has to be significantly changed&#x2F;rewritten anyway when a business requirement change appears.<p>IMHO optimizing for simplicity and readability has served me the best. Instead of avoiding the changes in code, it is better to write code so obvious that anyone can safely and easily change it when really needed.<p>And finally, performance of the program vs performance of the developer is a false dichotomy. So many times I&#x27;ve seen a more readable, simpler code turned out to be more efficient as well. You often can have both.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>simplotek</author><text>&gt; (...) because it was not written in the modern way or it was not very generic or whatever.<p>Premature generalization is a well known problem and a never-ending source of complexity. I lost count of the times I had to push back on PRs of clueless developers who felt the need to generalize one-liners that pop up twice in the whole project, and for that their proposal was to add a strategy pattern, ultimate replacing two expressions with three classes.</text></comment> |
38,997,329 | 38,996,051 | 1 | 3 | 38,973,404 | train | <story><title>Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare</title><url>https://kevinchen.co/blog/autonomous-trucking-harder-than-rideshare/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>capitainenemo</author><text>Hm. I did a quick search on freight percentages, EU vs US and google gave me this snippet off the top hit. &quot;46 percent of European freight goes by truck while only 11 percent goes by rail, while in the United States more than 40 percent goes by rail while just 30 percent goes on the highway.&quot;<p>Seems US is doing pretty well on prioritising freight rail transport, despite brainwashing, at least compared to europe.<p>Which is probably a good thing. Until that figure is a lot higher, passenger rail is just one more thing reducing the efficiencies of freight.</text></item><item><author>beedeebeedee</author><text>Build more railroads.<p>(I used to work for an autonomous truck company, and when you factor in the cost of roads in addition to the development of the trucks, it makes absolutely no sense to do autonomous trucking when you could do trains. As a culture, we&#x27;ve been brainwashed not to fund trains. We collectively spend billions and billions on roads but would not dare spend money to build more tracks. It is shocking and ludicrous, but that&#x27;s what happens when you suck up a century of propaganda from the fossil fuel and automotive industry).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>coalteddy</author><text>The reason is probably because, in the EU, passenger rail transport is prioritised over cargo. For example in Switzwerland rail cargo is mainly transported during the night because thats the only time the network isn&#x27;t working at it&#x27;s limit for the passenger trains.<p>In Canada, to my understanding, it&#x27;s the other way round where passenger trains have been reduced because of the need for more cargo train trips. The USA might be similar.</text></comment> | <story><title>Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare</title><url>https://kevinchen.co/blog/autonomous-trucking-harder-than-rideshare/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>capitainenemo</author><text>Hm. I did a quick search on freight percentages, EU vs US and google gave me this snippet off the top hit. &quot;46 percent of European freight goes by truck while only 11 percent goes by rail, while in the United States more than 40 percent goes by rail while just 30 percent goes on the highway.&quot;<p>Seems US is doing pretty well on prioritising freight rail transport, despite brainwashing, at least compared to europe.<p>Which is probably a good thing. Until that figure is a lot higher, passenger rail is just one more thing reducing the efficiencies of freight.</text></item><item><author>beedeebeedee</author><text>Build more railroads.<p>(I used to work for an autonomous truck company, and when you factor in the cost of roads in addition to the development of the trucks, it makes absolutely no sense to do autonomous trucking when you could do trains. As a culture, we&#x27;ve been brainwashed not to fund trains. We collectively spend billions and billions on roads but would not dare spend money to build more tracks. It is shocking and ludicrous, but that&#x27;s what happens when you suck up a century of propaganda from the fossil fuel and automotive industry).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ehnto</author><text>So perhaps a priority could be to build more medium&#x2F;high speed passenger rail, and get it off the freight lines?<p>Travelers and commuters win, cargo wins!<p>It is funny though, the US built it&#x27;s current freight network in a comparatively low tech era, yet I doubt it could do it again in the current era due to funding and beauracracy.</text></comment> |
3,263,651 | 3,263,543 | 1 | 2 | 3,263,460 | train | <story><title>Google Just Snuck Most of Chrome OS Onto the iPad</title><url>http://thenextweb.com/google/2011/11/22/google-just-used-its-search-app-to-sneak-most-of-chrome-os-onto-the-ipad/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>2arrs2ells</author><text>This article makes no sense.<p>Apple has already "snuck most of Chrome OS onto the iPad" - it's called mobile Safari, and it shares the same WebKit foundation as Chrome/Chrome OS.<p>Google's new search app can act as a portal into the various Google Apps, and that's somehow "sneaking in" their OS? All it's doing is taking features already present on the iPad and making them (slightly) more visible.</text></comment> | <story><title>Google Just Snuck Most of Chrome OS Onto the iPad</title><url>http://thenextweb.com/google/2011/11/22/google-just-used-its-search-app-to-sneak-most-of-chrome-os-onto-the-ipad/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>modeless</author><text><i>Honestly, if Google were to continue to update this app, replacing each of the web versions of these apps with native ones, it could easily end up with a fully iOS-native version of Google Chrome, running on the iPad.</i><p>Um, what? I think this guy is confused. iOS-native Google Apps would be great to have, but they wouldn't be Chrome. Chrome is a browser and app platform, which Apple will certainly not allow on the App Store, ever.</text></comment> |
13,386,527 | 13,386,734 | 1 | 3 | 13,385,873 | train | <story><title>Flickr – A Year Without a Byte</title><url>https://code.flickr.net/2017/01/05/a-year-without-a-byte/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Niksko</author><text>No, I think you&#x27;ve misunderstood.<p>What they&#x27;re saying is that you can take a JPEG compressed image, decompress to raw pixels, and then recompress with JPEG more efficiently (if you&#x27;re careful, no specifics on how this is done), and you save space.<p>That&#x27;s why they mention that they&#x27;re doing it very carefully, because you&#x27;ve got to make sure that when you decompress the new optimized image that it pixel for pixel matches the original decompressed image.</text></item><item><author>Nition</author><text>Really interesting that (if I&#x27;m reading the article right) you can take an already-compresed JPEG, recompress it losslessly using another technique to get <i>better</i> compression than the original compressed JPEG, and then decompress it to the original JPEG again.<p>The concept makes sense but I&#x27;d never thought of that before.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>camtarn</author><text>Nition is correct, I think.<p>As far as I can tell, &#x27;raw pixels&#x27; is not quite accurate. Both PackJPG and Lepton seem to decompress as far as frequency-domain coefficients, but no further. That means they don&#x27;t repeat the lossy stages in JPEG encoding - the transformation of pixel data to the frequency domain, and the discarding of high frequency infomation. It looks like PackJPG and Lepton do some interesting tricks with the coefficients to essentially make them more amenable to the following lossless compression. Both PackJPG and Lepton have their own file format, so they&#x27;re definitely not outputting standard JPEG images.<p>Here&#x27;s the Lepton page:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blogs.dropbox.com&#x2F;tech&#x2F;2016&#x2F;07&#x2F;lepton-image-compression-saving-22-losslessly-from-images-at-15mbs&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blogs.dropbox.com&#x2F;tech&#x2F;2016&#x2F;07&#x2F;lepton-image-compress...</a><p>And for more detail, here&#x27;s the paper that PackJPG is based on:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.elektronik.htw-aalen.de&#x2F;packjpg&#x2F;_notes&#x2F;PCS2007_PJPG_paper_final.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.elektronik.htw-aalen.de&#x2F;packjpg&#x2F;_notes&#x2F;PCS2007_PJ...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Flickr – A Year Without a Byte</title><url>https://code.flickr.net/2017/01/05/a-year-without-a-byte/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Niksko</author><text>No, I think you&#x27;ve misunderstood.<p>What they&#x27;re saying is that you can take a JPEG compressed image, decompress to raw pixels, and then recompress with JPEG more efficiently (if you&#x27;re careful, no specifics on how this is done), and you save space.<p>That&#x27;s why they mention that they&#x27;re doing it very carefully, because you&#x27;ve got to make sure that when you decompress the new optimized image that it pixel for pixel matches the original decompressed image.</text></item><item><author>Nition</author><text>Really interesting that (if I&#x27;m reading the article right) you can take an already-compresed JPEG, recompress it losslessly using another technique to get <i>better</i> compression than the original compressed JPEG, and then decompress it to the original JPEG again.<p>The concept makes sense but I&#x27;d never thought of that before.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Veratyr</author><text>This definitely isn&#x27;t what they&#x27;re saying.<p>Lepton (one of the examples they mentioned) losslessly compresses a JPEG to Lepton format, then losslessly decompresses it back to JPEG. The pixels are never decompressed and in fact a JPEG decompressed from Lepton is bit-exact the same as the original. I&#x27;ve tested and verified this on several million images.</text></comment> |
17,281,138 | 17,281,104 | 1 | 2 | 17,280,558 | train | <story><title>Alternatives to Google Products</title><url>https://restoreprivacy.com/google-alternatives/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cosmojg</author><text>It&#x27;s not that &quot;privacy-focused&quot; tends to be conflated with FLOSS. Rather, it&#x27;s nearly impossible to guarantee privacy in proprietary software. The transparency of FLOSS makes it trustless. Want to know what data of yours, if any, is being collected? Look at the code.<p>This is why, when it comes to privacy, Apple isn&#x27;t worth consideration. All we have is their word, and that simply isn&#x27;t enough.</text></item><item><author>nemothekid</author><text>I&#x27;m a little discouraged when I see articles like this that seem to be completely tuned for developers or look over completely decent pro-privacy alternatives like Apple.<p>For example, the &quot;best&quot; calendar alternative is Etar which looks to a Github repo. Really? At the very least you could mention Apple Calendar. Is Maps.Me (which uses AdSense) really better than Apple Maps? I&#x27;m not a fan of hooktube either - it just further cements YouTube&#x27;s monopoly.<p>I think what what bothers me is that &quot;privacy focused&quot; tends to be conflated with FOSS. I&#x27;m really thankful for organizations like Mozilla and Signal that are trying to deliver privacy focused applications to real people. However I also think we should recognize Apple-like companies who are also privacy focused without necessarily being FOSS. I think that will help move more non-technical people out of central databases.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bartread</author><text>&gt; Want to know what data of yours, if any, is being collected? Look at the code.<p>I find this to be an extremely un-compelling position. A relatively small proportion of the general population has the skills to meaningfully look at the code, never mind the time. Moreover, even for someone who is capable, such an exercise quickly becomes non-trivial on an unfamiliar codebase for an app of any complexity.<p>In many cases there&#x27;s also no guarantee that the code you&#x27;re reading is the code that&#x27;s running.</text></comment> | <story><title>Alternatives to Google Products</title><url>https://restoreprivacy.com/google-alternatives/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cosmojg</author><text>It&#x27;s not that &quot;privacy-focused&quot; tends to be conflated with FLOSS. Rather, it&#x27;s nearly impossible to guarantee privacy in proprietary software. The transparency of FLOSS makes it trustless. Want to know what data of yours, if any, is being collected? Look at the code.<p>This is why, when it comes to privacy, Apple isn&#x27;t worth consideration. All we have is their word, and that simply isn&#x27;t enough.</text></item><item><author>nemothekid</author><text>I&#x27;m a little discouraged when I see articles like this that seem to be completely tuned for developers or look over completely decent pro-privacy alternatives like Apple.<p>For example, the &quot;best&quot; calendar alternative is Etar which looks to a Github repo. Really? At the very least you could mention Apple Calendar. Is Maps.Me (which uses AdSense) really better than Apple Maps? I&#x27;m not a fan of hooktube either - it just further cements YouTube&#x27;s monopoly.<p>I think what what bothers me is that &quot;privacy focused&quot; tends to be conflated with FOSS. I&#x27;m really thankful for organizations like Mozilla and Signal that are trying to deliver privacy focused applications to real people. However I also think we should recognize Apple-like companies who are also privacy focused without necessarily being FOSS. I think that will help move more non-technical people out of central databases.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>auslander</author><text>Apple makes its money from expensive hardware. And respecting your privacy and security helps selling it a <i>lot</i>. And they earned trust by being serious about it for a long time.</text></comment> |
28,305,384 | 28,304,315 | 1 | 2 | 28,300,797 | train | <story><title>OnlyFans drops planned porn ban</title><url>https://variety.com/2021/digital/news/onlyfans-drops-porn-ban-sexually-explicit-policy-1235048705/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Sebb767</author><text>I&#x27;ve actually heard that quite often and it seems anecdotally true to me, but is there actually any study to prove this?</text></item><item><author>lawn</author><text>And also why piracy is increasing again as the movie&#x2F;TV series space is becoming so fragmented.</text></item><item><author>da_chicken</author><text>&gt; <i>People really do just want a one click solution for creating adult content, and consuming adult content.</i><p>Once they know it&#x27;s possible, people want a one click solution for anything. The subject being taboo has nothing to do with it.<p>This is one reason why Youtube, Spotify, Steam and Netflix did such a good job combatting piracy for music, video games, and movies, while ROM sites are still a ubiquitous problem for 20 year old consoles. Youtube, Spotify, Steam and Netflix made content easy to get. There&#x27;s no equivalent for most ROMs, so they&#x27;re still widely pirated.</text></item><item><author>rootsudo</author><text>My biggest shock was how much &quot;PR&quot; was generated on Reddit, and how many sexworkers really do use the platform.<p>I knew it was a thing, I knew of the memes, but to see both sides in arms over a company vs branding, creating their own website and content - and vanity domain as well.<p>People really do just want a one click solution for creating adult content, and consuming adult content.<p>And the memes, I think they&#x27;re pretty toxic, 4chan, incel, reddit, twitter memes - I never knew there was that much angst.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>e40</author><text>I had completely stopped downloading movies in 2018, and even for that year, I downloaded very few. I had been tapering off since 2015. These are real numbers from my NAS. I got a seedbox 2 months ago. This was my last straw: trying to rent some movie on Amazon and was told I had to subscribe to some service to watch it--there was no price to watch it once.<p>The other things I did recently:
1) paused Google YTTV because NBA season was over
2) canceled Netflix because I never watch it<p>I&#x27;ve been watching content (some of it very old, like <i>The Larry Sanders Show</i>) on HBO Max, but the app on Roku is *SO HORRIBLE* I&#x27;d rather pirate content and watch it on PLeX.<p>The Amazon app&#x2F;UI is *HORRIBLE*, too. Like multiple seasons are separate items? WTF. I&#x27;ll download series I have access to on Amazon just to avoid that app.</text></comment> | <story><title>OnlyFans drops planned porn ban</title><url>https://variety.com/2021/digital/news/onlyfans-drops-porn-ban-sexually-explicit-policy-1235048705/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Sebb767</author><text>I&#x27;ve actually heard that quite often and it seems anecdotally true to me, but is there actually any study to prove this?</text></item><item><author>lawn</author><text>And also why piracy is increasing again as the movie&#x2F;TV series space is becoming so fragmented.</text></item><item><author>da_chicken</author><text>&gt; <i>People really do just want a one click solution for creating adult content, and consuming adult content.</i><p>Once they know it&#x27;s possible, people want a one click solution for anything. The subject being taboo has nothing to do with it.<p>This is one reason why Youtube, Spotify, Steam and Netflix did such a good job combatting piracy for music, video games, and movies, while ROM sites are still a ubiquitous problem for 20 year old consoles. Youtube, Spotify, Steam and Netflix made content easy to get. There&#x27;s no equivalent for most ROMs, so they&#x27;re still widely pirated.</text></item><item><author>rootsudo</author><text>My biggest shock was how much &quot;PR&quot; was generated on Reddit, and how many sexworkers really do use the platform.<p>I knew it was a thing, I knew of the memes, but to see both sides in arms over a company vs branding, creating their own website and content - and vanity domain as well.<p>People really do just want a one click solution for creating adult content, and consuming adult content.<p>And the memes, I think they&#x27;re pretty toxic, 4chan, incel, reddit, twitter memes - I never knew there was that much angst.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>asdff</author><text><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;torrentfreak.com&#x2F;piracy-and-filesharing-traffic-surges-amidst-covid-19-crisis-200408&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;torrentfreak.com&#x2F;piracy-and-filesharing-traffic-surg...</a></text></comment> |
15,815,556 | 15,815,191 | 1 | 2 | 15,814,121 | train | <story><title>Why Did ProtonMail Vanish from Google Search Results? (2016)</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/27/why-did-protonmail-vanish-from-google-search-results-for-months/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fastball</author><text>So what exactly is your solution? What law do you put in place, precisely? Google has to provide consumers with whatever information they want, whenever they want it, free of charge? Because that seems to be what you&#x27;re gunning for.</text></item><item><author>coldtea</author><text>&gt;<i>It&#x27;s not like you have a right to appear in Google&#x27;s search results...</i><p>It should be, though.<p>It&#x27;s not 1776. A website like Google is more than a company, it&#x27;s a public service with immense power of manipulation and influence over countless industries.<p>The law shouldn&#x27;t be written like we live in the stone age.</text></item><item><author>fastball</author><text>It&#x27;s not like you have a right to appear in Google&#x27;s search results...<p>I&#x27;ll rag on Google&#x27;s poor support as much as the next guy, but only when it&#x27;s warranted. ProtonMail and anyone else that gets delisted &#x2F; what-have-you is not Google&#x27;s client and shouldn&#x27;t expect first-class support for things like this.</text></item><item><author>joosters</author><text>So Google&#x27;s recommended way of reporting a problem is to post on a forum that Google themselves don&#x27;t officially read (or promise any kind of response)? Do you understand why some people might not think that&#x27;s a satisfactory solution?</text></item><item><author>f_allwein</author><text>[2016].<p>Having worked at Google’s Search Quality Evaluation team, I can confirm that Google would only manually remove sites from its search results if they violate its webmaster guidelines: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.google.com&#x2F;webmasters&#x2F;answer&#x2F;35769?hl=en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.google.com&#x2F;webmasters&#x2F;answer&#x2F;35769?hl=en</a><p>Of course, there can be other issues preventing a site from showing up in the search results (e.g. site migration issues, accidentally locking out Googlebot in robots.txt, ...). In such cases, the best way to raise the issue would be to report it on the webmaster forum, which is frequented both by smart and helpful users and by Googlers working on search quality: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;productforums.google.com&#x2F;forum&#x2F;#!forum&#x2F;webmasters" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;productforums.google.com&#x2F;forum&#x2F;#!forum&#x2F;webmasters</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cjcole</author><text>When they, by virtue of their overwhelming market share, nuke a competitor&#x27;s product off the face of the internet, whether algorithmically or intentionally, it feels reasonable to me to compel them to provide more detail than &quot;we fixed the glitch&quot;.<p>Google does not have the right to avoid being regulated in the public interest.</text></comment> | <story><title>Why Did ProtonMail Vanish from Google Search Results? (2016)</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/27/why-did-protonmail-vanish-from-google-search-results-for-months/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fastball</author><text>So what exactly is your solution? What law do you put in place, precisely? Google has to provide consumers with whatever information they want, whenever they want it, free of charge? Because that seems to be what you&#x27;re gunning for.</text></item><item><author>coldtea</author><text>&gt;<i>It&#x27;s not like you have a right to appear in Google&#x27;s search results...</i><p>It should be, though.<p>It&#x27;s not 1776. A website like Google is more than a company, it&#x27;s a public service with immense power of manipulation and influence over countless industries.<p>The law shouldn&#x27;t be written like we live in the stone age.</text></item><item><author>fastball</author><text>It&#x27;s not like you have a right to appear in Google&#x27;s search results...<p>I&#x27;ll rag on Google&#x27;s poor support as much as the next guy, but only when it&#x27;s warranted. ProtonMail and anyone else that gets delisted &#x2F; what-have-you is not Google&#x27;s client and shouldn&#x27;t expect first-class support for things like this.</text></item><item><author>joosters</author><text>So Google&#x27;s recommended way of reporting a problem is to post on a forum that Google themselves don&#x27;t officially read (or promise any kind of response)? Do you understand why some people might not think that&#x27;s a satisfactory solution?</text></item><item><author>f_allwein</author><text>[2016].<p>Having worked at Google’s Search Quality Evaluation team, I can confirm that Google would only manually remove sites from its search results if they violate its webmaster guidelines: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.google.com&#x2F;webmasters&#x2F;answer&#x2F;35769?hl=en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.google.com&#x2F;webmasters&#x2F;answer&#x2F;35769?hl=en</a><p>Of course, there can be other issues preventing a site from showing up in the search results (e.g. site migration issues, accidentally locking out Googlebot in robots.txt, ...). In such cases, the best way to raise the issue would be to report it on the webmaster forum, which is frequented both by smart and helpful users and by Googlers working on search quality: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;productforums.google.com&#x2F;forum&#x2F;#!forum&#x2F;webmasters" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;productforums.google.com&#x2F;forum&#x2F;#!forum&#x2F;webmasters</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mattmanser</author><text>Identifying a problem caused by a monopoly is not the same as having to provide a solution for it. Some sort of regulation. No-one said they had to do it free.</text></comment> |
30,554,955 | 30,553,596 | 1 | 3 | 30,552,142 | train | <story><title>Google Docs New Feature: Pageless</title><url>https://support.google.com/docs/thread/150905607/google-docs-new-feature-pageless?hl=en</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dpkrjb</author><text>Have you ever tried to print a Notion document? It feels like they made the &quot;Export to PDF&quot; in a weekend. It&#x27;s hugely underpowered and under-featured.<p>It feels like Notion&#x27;s demographic just dont need to share documents as documents. Notion would likely have put more effort into that feature if they did.</text></item><item><author>lewisjoe</author><text>I&#x27;m in the business of building an online word processor - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zoho.com&#x2F;writer" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zoho.com&#x2F;writer</a><p>It&#x27;s interesting how the documents industry is moving from print oriented legacy softwares (Google Docs, Word) to block based, app-ish, smart canvases (Notion, Coda, etc).<p>Also both Microsoft &amp; Google have adopted completely different strategies to compete in this market. Microsoft launched Loop as an entirely new app while Google is incorporating these blocks as smart chips in Google Docs itself. Both strategies have their own pros and cons.<p>My bet is on Google Docs style, because this means a group that&#x27;s already invested in traditional document making skills (legal professionals, academic professionals, etc) will be able to incrementally step up their game without their workflow being completely destroyed. Sure, this will slow down the pace with which Google Docs can innovate and evolve - but overall it helps the older generation to smoothly transition over to the new age document editing, which is great.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jitl</author><text>&gt; It feels like they made the &quot;Export to PDF&quot; in a weekend<p>Ah well, I built it in my first week or so as part of a hiring trial process, back when the company was 16 people in a remodeled auto body shop. Before that, the “PDF Export” feature just opened the browser print dialog.<p>One fun thing about working at a startup is that you solve a problem for 90% of your users, but after a while of user growth and demographic shift, that remaining 10% ends up being bigger than the original 90% was in raw numbers.</text></comment> | <story><title>Google Docs New Feature: Pageless</title><url>https://support.google.com/docs/thread/150905607/google-docs-new-feature-pageless?hl=en</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dpkrjb</author><text>Have you ever tried to print a Notion document? It feels like they made the &quot;Export to PDF&quot; in a weekend. It&#x27;s hugely underpowered and under-featured.<p>It feels like Notion&#x27;s demographic just dont need to share documents as documents. Notion would likely have put more effort into that feature if they did.</text></item><item><author>lewisjoe</author><text>I&#x27;m in the business of building an online word processor - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zoho.com&#x2F;writer" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zoho.com&#x2F;writer</a><p>It&#x27;s interesting how the documents industry is moving from print oriented legacy softwares (Google Docs, Word) to block based, app-ish, smart canvases (Notion, Coda, etc).<p>Also both Microsoft &amp; Google have adopted completely different strategies to compete in this market. Microsoft launched Loop as an entirely new app while Google is incorporating these blocks as smart chips in Google Docs itself. Both strategies have their own pros and cons.<p>My bet is on Google Docs style, because this means a group that&#x27;s already invested in traditional document making skills (legal professionals, academic professionals, etc) will be able to incrementally step up their game without their workflow being completely destroyed. Sure, this will slow down the pace with which Google Docs can innovate and evolve - but overall it helps the older generation to smoothly transition over to the new age document editing, which is great.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lf-non</author><text>I am not a big fan of notion, but printing a document (even as a pdf) is an increasingly niche usecase in an increasingly digital-only world and I can totally understand if they don&#x27;t put in much effort into it.</text></comment> |
22,099,426 | 22,098,185 | 1 | 2 | 22,079,918 | train | <story><title>Why is quicksort better than other sorting algorithms in practice? (2013)</title><url>https://cs.stackexchange.com/questions/3/why-is-quicksort-better-than-other-sorting-algorithms-in-practice</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>amelius</author><text>There are annual contests for sorting large amounts of data, e.g.:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;sortbenchmark.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;sortbenchmark.org&#x2F;</a><p>(I could be wrong but I don&#x27;t think the winners ever used Quicksort.)</text></comment> | <story><title>Why is quicksort better than other sorting algorithms in practice? (2013)</title><url>https://cs.stackexchange.com/questions/3/why-is-quicksort-better-than-other-sorting-algorithms-in-practice</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Aardwolf</author><text>There are too many different tradeoffs and dimensions to the problem to say that one sorting algorithm is the &quot;best&quot;. E.g. quicksort without fallback has a denial of service attack against it.</text></comment> |
23,077,029 | 23,077,050 | 1 | 2 | 23,076,007 | train | <story><title>RailsConf 2020 Couch Edition</title><url>https://railsconf.com/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Pmop</author><text>I started learning Ruby and Ruby on Rails in February, as a requirement of what would be my first job in industry (then COVID came and everyone got fired). I&#x27;m loving both so far, had previous experiences with Java&#x2F;Spring and Python&#x2F;Flask&#x2F;Django, I like Ruby on Rails better. Convention over configuration. Mature and beautiful testing with RSpec. Beautiful Ruby syntax. Sane conventions. You can throw in Slim templating engine, which makes working with markup a delightful experience. Wonderful community, I could go on and on.<p>I hope that RoR stays strong amidst the current React&#x2F;SPA framework&#x2F;Node fad.</text></comment> | <story><title>RailsConf 2020 Couch Edition</title><url>https://railsconf.com/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>retrac98</author><text>Good to see. Rails is still a fantastic framework for building web apps in 2020.</text></comment> |
29,409,194 | 29,408,884 | 1 | 2 | 29,408,341 | train | <story><title>ImageMagick: CLI for Image Editing</title><url>https://imagemagick.org/script/index.php</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>coldpie</author><text>I always found it fascinating the grade-A executable names which imagemagick was able to claim in the global namespace:<p><pre><code> imagemagick &#x2F;usr&#x2F;bin&#x2F;animate
imagemagick &#x2F;usr&#x2F;bin&#x2F;compare
imagemagick &#x2F;usr&#x2F;bin&#x2F;composite
imagemagick &#x2F;usr&#x2F;bin&#x2F;conjure
imagemagick &#x2F;usr&#x2F;bin&#x2F;convert
imagemagick &#x2F;usr&#x2F;bin&#x2F;display
imagemagick &#x2F;usr&#x2F;bin&#x2F;identify
imagemagick &#x2F;usr&#x2F;bin&#x2F;import
imagemagick &#x2F;usr&#x2F;bin&#x2F;mogrify
imagemagick &#x2F;usr&#x2F;bin&#x2F;montage
imagemagick &#x2F;usr&#x2F;bin&#x2F;stream</code></pre></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nauticacom</author><text>Thankfully as of v7 these are all bundled under a single &quot;magick&quot; command (with symlinks for compatibility). Hopefully in the future these can be removed</text></comment> | <story><title>ImageMagick: CLI for Image Editing</title><url>https://imagemagick.org/script/index.php</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>coldpie</author><text>I always found it fascinating the grade-A executable names which imagemagick was able to claim in the global namespace:<p><pre><code> imagemagick &#x2F;usr&#x2F;bin&#x2F;animate
imagemagick &#x2F;usr&#x2F;bin&#x2F;compare
imagemagick &#x2F;usr&#x2F;bin&#x2F;composite
imagemagick &#x2F;usr&#x2F;bin&#x2F;conjure
imagemagick &#x2F;usr&#x2F;bin&#x2F;convert
imagemagick &#x2F;usr&#x2F;bin&#x2F;display
imagemagick &#x2F;usr&#x2F;bin&#x2F;identify
imagemagick &#x2F;usr&#x2F;bin&#x2F;import
imagemagick &#x2F;usr&#x2F;bin&#x2F;mogrify
imagemagick &#x2F;usr&#x2F;bin&#x2F;montage
imagemagick &#x2F;usr&#x2F;bin&#x2F;stream</code></pre></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>alerighi</author><text>import is the most fun, when you forgot the `#!&#x2F;usr&#x2F;bin&#x2F;env python` at the start of the script and of course the first instruction is import and you get an ImageMagik error</text></comment> |
6,361,426 | 6,361,551 | 1 | 3 | 6,361,037 | train | <story><title>Documents Shed Light on Border Laptop Searches</title><url>https://www.aclu.org/blog/technology-and-liberty-immigrants-rights-national-security/documents-shed-light-border-laptop</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>grey-area</author><text>Is the best strategy here to leave your devices at home and just bring a burner phone on holiday or other travels and no other devices?<p>It&#x27;s strange as an ordinary citizen who might choose to contribute to someone like Manning&#x27;s defence fund, or post statements supportive of Snowden online, to have to consider that GCHQ or the Homeland Security might put your name on a list for questioning and confiscation at the border, requiring drastic action like this.<p>Given the abuse of them in many countries including the US and UK (which was inevitable), I can&#x27;t see any case for these powers of arbitrary detainment and confiscation to be given to the police in any country.</text></comment> | <story><title>Documents Shed Light on Border Laptop Searches</title><url>https://www.aclu.org/blog/technology-and-liberty-immigrants-rights-national-security/documents-shed-light-border-laptop</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>revelation</author><text>Obviously the officials involved in this case were let go, right?
Because who would enter into an official database that they want to abuse border searches to search an <i>attorney</i> for a person in an ongoing case with the government, and for that <i>exact</i> reason?</text></comment> |
8,506,556 | 8,505,621 | 1 | 2 | 8,504,931 | train | <story><title>Alan Eustace Jumps from Stratosphere, Breaking Felix Baumgartner’s World Record</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/25/science/alan-eustace-jumps-from-stratosphere-breaking-felix-baumgartners-world-record.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>toomuchtodo</author><text>31 year old Operations&#x2F;DevOps at a startup. I still find time to build CNC mills from scratch, and my current&#x2F;long-term project is building a 40&#x27; sailing vessel for a circumnavigation.<p>I have no college education. I can weld (quite well), I&#x27;ve built 3d models for laser sintering, I&#x27;ve assembled carbon fiber body panels. If you want to do something, learn how to do it. Then go do it!</text></item><item><author>thrownawaya</author><text>Says the guy with the user name toomuchtodo...</text></item><item><author>toomuchtodo</author><text>Its never too late. Start now.</text></item><item><author>kyro</author><text>Lots of things make me regret not studying engineering, but this certainly takes the cake and the entire bakery.</text></item><item><author>aresant</author><text>So the guy straps himself to balloon, rides straight up for 2 hours, 25 miles high.<p>So 12.5 mph, a little faster than the average bicycle pace. Straight up.<p>Works with other engineers in secret for 3 years to knock out a badass space survival suit.<p>And then, just for us kids, &quot;cut himself loose from the balloon with the aid of a small explosive device . . .&quot; and achieves 800mph+, setting off a &quot;small sonic boom&quot;.<p>I !@%! love engineers.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gonzo</author><text>I can also weld, and never finished the degree. I&#x27;ve played some with CF, and rather than build one, I bought a CNC mill.<p>My son had an idea, so I learned injection molding (smallworks.com).<p>Companies I&#x27;ve helped start have both cratered (Vivato) and had successful exits (Wayport).<p>I&#x27;m 52.</text></comment> | <story><title>Alan Eustace Jumps from Stratosphere, Breaking Felix Baumgartner’s World Record</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/25/science/alan-eustace-jumps-from-stratosphere-breaking-felix-baumgartners-world-record.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>toomuchtodo</author><text>31 year old Operations&#x2F;DevOps at a startup. I still find time to build CNC mills from scratch, and my current&#x2F;long-term project is building a 40&#x27; sailing vessel for a circumnavigation.<p>I have no college education. I can weld (quite well), I&#x27;ve built 3d models for laser sintering, I&#x27;ve assembled carbon fiber body panels. If you want to do something, learn how to do it. Then go do it!</text></item><item><author>thrownawaya</author><text>Says the guy with the user name toomuchtodo...</text></item><item><author>toomuchtodo</author><text>Its never too late. Start now.</text></item><item><author>kyro</author><text>Lots of things make me regret not studying engineering, but this certainly takes the cake and the entire bakery.</text></item><item><author>aresant</author><text>So the guy straps himself to balloon, rides straight up for 2 hours, 25 miles high.<p>So 12.5 mph, a little faster than the average bicycle pace. Straight up.<p>Works with other engineers in secret for 3 years to knock out a badass space survival suit.<p>And then, just for us kids, &quot;cut himself loose from the balloon with the aid of a small explosive device . . .&quot; and achieves 800mph+, setting off a &quot;small sonic boom&quot;.<p>I !@%! love engineers.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sillysaurus3</author><text>Unfortunately, this only tends to work during periods of economic prosperity. When times get tough, those without credentials usually seem to be the first to be ousted.<p>But I&#x27;ve long wondered whether that&#x27;s true. How&#x27;d you fare during 2008? It&#x27;d be nice to collect some datapoints from someone else.<p>The phenomenon seemed most true just after The Bubble. I think tptacek mentioned he had some pretty substantial credentials yet finding a job was extraordinarily difficult.</text></comment> |
21,856,680 | 21,848,016 | 1 | 2 | 21,844,105 | train | <story><title>The sad state of personal data and infrastructure</title><url>https://beepb00p.xyz/sad-infra.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>simonw</author><text>I&#x27;ve been working on a project along these lines recently. I&#x27;ve called it Dogsheep - the basic idea is to have scripts that export all manner of my personal data (from Google, Apple HealthKit, Twitter, LinkedIn etc) into SQLite database files, then use my Datasette web app to browse them and run interesting queries.<p>More about that here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dogsheep.github.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dogsheep.github.io&#x2F;</a><p>The tools I&#x27;ve built so far are under <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dogsheep" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dogsheep</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gpchelkin</author><text>I think that Perkeep <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;perkeep.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;perkeep.org&#x2F;</a> is also worth mentioning here. One of their latest tools is the one for exporting Google Photos: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;perkeep&#x2F;gphotos-cdp" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;perkeep&#x2F;gphotos-cdp</a></text></comment> | <story><title>The sad state of personal data and infrastructure</title><url>https://beepb00p.xyz/sad-infra.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>simonw</author><text>I&#x27;ve been working on a project along these lines recently. I&#x27;ve called it Dogsheep - the basic idea is to have scripts that export all manner of my personal data (from Google, Apple HealthKit, Twitter, LinkedIn etc) into SQLite database files, then use my Datasette web app to browse them and run interesting queries.<p>More about that here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dogsheep.github.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dogsheep.github.io&#x2F;</a><p>The tools I&#x27;ve built so far are under <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dogsheep" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dogsheep</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ocdtrekkie</author><text>Whoa, this is super exciting to me. I&#x27;ve been looking for something that would get some of these types of data into a web-based interface that I could package for Sandstorm. This looks like it would potentially work for that fairly easily.</text></comment> |
8,644,277 | 8,644,291 | 1 | 2 | 8,644,080 | train | <story><title>Rides of Glory – Uber Blog (2012)</title><url>https://web.archive.org/web/20140827195715/http://blog.uber.com/ridesofglory</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mmcclure</author><text>I gotta say, I&#x27;m not really seeing the creepy &#x2F; cringey &#x2F; evil &#x2F; whatever-else here...<p>Anyone (especially the HN crowd) should know they have the data, and if you think they&#x27;re not carefully analyzing it behind the scenes (like every other tech company who has your data), I&#x27;ve got things to sell you. I personally think a tiny peek like this into the data, much like the usage posts that OKCupid, YouPorn, and others give, is neat.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>striking</author><text>The problem here (for me personally, at least) is that Uber is not in the business of selling dates&#x2F;&quot;encounters&quot; and that people don&#x27;t expect a ridesharing company to go right for the sexual data. Even OKCupid is straddling the line here with <a href="http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/we-experiment-on-human-beings/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.okcupid.com&#x2F;index.php&#x2F;we-experiment-on-human-bei...</a> noting that:<p><pre><code> To test this, we took pairs of bad matches (actual 30% match) and told them they were exceptionally good for each other (displaying a 90% match.)
</code></pre>
That&#x27;s really not something people like having done to them. And the &quot;HN crowd&quot; shouldn&#x27;t have an expectation of privacy and decency in data? Of course they&#x27;re analyzing data, but it&#x27;s really the viewpoint from which they do it that is unsettling. OKCupid says &quot;no, duh, we&#x27;re unethical. Deal with it.&quot; Uber says &quot;Check it out! We drew a line between social security checks and prostitution!&quot; (as waterlesscloud notes at <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8644138" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8644138</a> )<p>There are a million more beneficial ways that people could be using the data. Fighting hunger, poverty, illiteracy, etc., to me, is a &quot;good&quot; use of Big Data. Looking at sexual habits (when you&#x27;re not selling sex) or openly manipulating people to get data is, to me, a &quot;bad&quot; use.</text></comment> | <story><title>Rides of Glory – Uber Blog (2012)</title><url>https://web.archive.org/web/20140827195715/http://blog.uber.com/ridesofglory</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mmcclure</author><text>I gotta say, I&#x27;m not really seeing the creepy &#x2F; cringey &#x2F; evil &#x2F; whatever-else here...<p>Anyone (especially the HN crowd) should know they have the data, and if you think they&#x27;re not carefully analyzing it behind the scenes (like every other tech company who has your data), I&#x27;ve got things to sell you. I personally think a tiny peek like this into the data, much like the usage posts that OKCupid, YouPorn, and others give, is neat.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>physcab</author><text>There&#x27;s a difference between this type of post and a post by OkCupid. OkCupid is a dating platform and their blog posts are net-positives for their users. What should I say in my first opening message? What do I wear in a picture to attract a mate?<p>By contrast, it&#x27;s simply not professional and reeks of juvenile behavior for Uber to be writing a post like this. Just because you have data and have these thoughts, doesn&#x27;t mean you have to do the analysis and show the world. It doesn&#x27;t help their users, it&#x27;s not even that interesting, and it&#x27;s not relevant to their value proposition as a business.</text></comment> |
11,633,967 | 11,633,359 | 1 | 2 | 11,631,235 | train | <story><title>We asked 15,000 people how they're learning to program</title><url>https://medium.freecodecamp.com/we-asked-15-000-people-who-they-are-and-how-theyre-learning-to-code-4104e29b2781#.tesff0l03</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>santaclaus</author><text>I was surprised to see no mention of game development as what drew one into coding. Half the cats I&#x27;ve worked with got bit by the programming bug initially wanting to make games.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hkmurakami</author><text>The survey says that the median age of respondents was 27 and on average they started programming 11 months ago. They didn&#x27;t give a standard deviation, but presumably there are not many who are in their early teens.<p>I say this because the cohort you describe will have started playing games at a younger age, and would have self selected itself out of this survey by venturing into small time game development on their own at an age younger than the survey respondent demographic.</text></comment> | <story><title>We asked 15,000 people how they're learning to program</title><url>https://medium.freecodecamp.com/we-asked-15-000-people-who-they-are-and-how-theyre-learning-to-code-4104e29b2781#.tesff0l03</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>santaclaus</author><text>I was surprised to see no mention of game development as what drew one into coding. Half the cats I&#x27;ve worked with got bit by the programming bug initially wanting to make games.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lucb1e</author><text>Game Maker is what got me started after MSIE 5 let me down - only like ten years later I discovered MSIE did in fact have an error console to show you what you did wrong, making it not completely trial and error!<p>So did creating games pull me into programming? Hmm, kind of, after another avenue failed. But I certainly recognize what you mean, I also know many people who&#x27;d love to make games full time (and some do! Just not all, not enough demand).</text></comment> |
28,968,031 | 28,967,473 | 1 | 2 | 28,937,268 | train | <story><title>Notation as a Tool of Thought (1979) [pdf]</title><url>https://www.eecg.utoronto.ca/~jzhu/csc326/readings/iverson.pdf</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>abainbridge</author><text>I think this is a fascinating subject that touches on how human general purpose intelligence works. I&#x27;ve spent decades working with C like languages and by now I find them hugely helpful thinking tools.<p>I did some optimization work on a bilinear bitmap upscaler recently [1]. There were times in the middle of that work where I felt like I was sitting watching someone else do it for me. Not physically watching, but more like a part of my brain was doing it automatically. The amount of state in scope at once is too big to fit into my working memory (maybe I&#x27;m weak at this), so the work has to be symbolic manipulation. It feels like there are patterns in the symbol manipulation that my brain can do with minimal effort. Somehow the result is that I can write (hopefully) correct code that is beyond my ability to comprehend without the notation. The fact that I don&#x27;t understand how I understand it contributes to the feeling that someone else wrote it for me.<p>The problem I have looking at APL is that it doesn&#x27;t look like it would help with this kind of work. The examples in the paper are all mathematical and abstract. I&#x27;d like to see some real-world practical examples, where performance matters, IO is fiddly and memory layout is part of the API. And instead of the problem domain being &quot;differentiating a polynomial&quot;, I&#x27;d rather it was decoding the Huffman data out of a JPEG, or implementing a video game&#x27;s collision detection system. My feeling is that C like notations are better for that type of thing. Maybe that isn&#x27;t what APL is supposed to be good at. However, the paper starts by saying APL is needed because maths notation is not universal.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;69633678&#x2F;66088" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;69633678&#x2F;66088</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Notation as a Tool of Thought (1979) [pdf]</title><url>https://www.eecg.utoronto.ca/~jzhu/csc326/readings/iverson.pdf</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>narush</author><text>Cool paper - thanks for posting! I love the typesetting of the math in these old papers - I have no idea how it was done, but it&#x27;s ~good vibes~ for me.<p>If you&#x27;re interested in reading a more recent take on notation, check out this post [1] by Terence Tao on MathOverflow. It&#x27;s pretty cool, and a shorter read than this PDF - if you&#x27;re in a rush.<p>While I&#x27;m posting overflow questions I like, check out this gem [2] on parsing HTML with a regex.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mathoverflow.net&#x2F;questions&#x2F;366070&#x2F;what-are-the-benefits-of-writing-vector-inner-products-as-langle-u-v-rangle&#x2F;366118#366118" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mathoverflow.net&#x2F;questions&#x2F;366070&#x2F;what-are-the-benef...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;1732348&#x2F;regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags&#x2F;1732454" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;1732348&#x2F;regex-match-open...</a></text></comment> |
7,535,964 | 7,535,849 | 1 | 3 | 7,534,583 | train | <story><title>Linus will not be merging any code from systemd developer</title><url>http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/1677152</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>e12e</author><text>Oh, the actual bugzilla thread is (if possible) even more depressing:<p><a href="https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=76935" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugs.freedesktop.org&#x2F;show_bug.cgi?id=76935</a><p>I had actually started to warm to the idea of systemd, thinking that it couldn&#x27;t end up the same clusterf*ck of mismatched reinventions that didn&#x27;t really solve any problems that pulseaudio was. I guess it&#x27;s time to move to Debian&#x2F;kFreeBSD and ignore this crap.</text></comment> | <story><title>Linus will not be merging any code from systemd developer</title><url>http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/1677152</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>darkarmani</author><text>Wow. This comment captures it best:<p>&gt; &quot;Hmm, a user adds to the <i>kernel</i> command line &quot;debug&quot; and systemd starts spitting out so much crap that the system doesn&#x27;t boot anymore? That sounds like a major regression to me. Note this is a kernel command line, not a systemd command line. Userspace tools should not be using the same kernel parameters that are defined by the kernel. That&#x27;s just broken and wrong.<p>&gt; This bugzilla is the poster child of why people hate systemd and do not trust the developers that work on it.&quot;</text></comment> |
21,952,124 | 21,950,426 | 1 | 2 | 21,944,573 | train | <story><title>Terrain rendering algorithm in less than 20 lines of code</title><url>https://github.com/s-macke/VoxelSpace</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ben7799</author><text>Great article.<p>I wonder at the speed of this on a modern machine vs an assembly version running in dos on a 1992 machine. A benchmark of interpreted code on a modern OS + machine vs bare metal native code written in the 1992 style on an old machine would be interesting.<p>I remember when Comanche came out... the 1990s were like the Heyday of flight sim games and Comanche was mind-blowing at the time as a teen. They were my favorite by far type of game. At some point it feels like they really died out. There were a lot of games that had a happy medium of fun vs realistic&#x2F;complex back then.<p>At some point the # of flight sim type games plummeted and the ones that stuck around bifurcated into hyper-realistic to the point they are a time suck (cause you could be using an actual real flight sim for real flight training) or they are hopelessly unrealistic and no fun compared to the old stuff.<p>Not sure but I might disagree with the author about Comanche being 3 years ahead of it&#x27;s time. It might have been closer to 5 years ahead of it&#x27;s time. You didn&#x27;t get stuff that really blew it away till hardware acceleration became prevalent, but by that time 3D FPS games were demolishing the flight sim market.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>facorreia</author><text>In those days games came with hefty manuals. I particularly remember learning the rudiments of flying a helicopter from Gunship&#x27;s manual.<p>You can see for yourself on this PDF, starting on page 38:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.simwarrior.com&#x2F;gunship&#x2F;utilities&#x2F;GSManUK.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.simwarrior.com&#x2F;gunship&#x2F;utilities&#x2F;GSManUK.pdf</a><p>Edit: this is Comanche&#x27;s manual:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.starehry.eu&#x2F;download&#x2F;simulation&#x2F;docs&#x2F;Comanche-Manual.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.starehry.eu&#x2F;download&#x2F;simulation&#x2F;docs&#x2F;Comanche-Man...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Terrain rendering algorithm in less than 20 lines of code</title><url>https://github.com/s-macke/VoxelSpace</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ben7799</author><text>Great article.<p>I wonder at the speed of this on a modern machine vs an assembly version running in dos on a 1992 machine. A benchmark of interpreted code on a modern OS + machine vs bare metal native code written in the 1992 style on an old machine would be interesting.<p>I remember when Comanche came out... the 1990s were like the Heyday of flight sim games and Comanche was mind-blowing at the time as a teen. They were my favorite by far type of game. At some point it feels like they really died out. There were a lot of games that had a happy medium of fun vs realistic&#x2F;complex back then.<p>At some point the # of flight sim type games plummeted and the ones that stuck around bifurcated into hyper-realistic to the point they are a time suck (cause you could be using an actual real flight sim for real flight training) or they are hopelessly unrealistic and no fun compared to the old stuff.<p>Not sure but I might disagree with the author about Comanche being 3 years ahead of it&#x27;s time. It might have been closer to 5 years ahead of it&#x27;s time. You didn&#x27;t get stuff that really blew it away till hardware acceleration became prevalent, but by that time 3D FPS games were demolishing the flight sim market.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pjmlp</author><text>I imagine it would be very sad, when you then realise how many wasted cycles our CPUs are doing versus those days.</text></comment> |
2,251,911 | 2,251,655 | 1 | 3 | 2,251,560 | train | <story><title>Windows 7 SP1 is out</title><url>http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=c3202ce6-4056-4059-8a1b-3a9b77cdfdda</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>kenjackson</author><text>I think we may have some history in the making here. This is the first SP1 for an MS OS release that I have no interest in installing. I probably will at some point, but my system is running so well that w/o new features I fail to see what the upside can be.<p>Who would've thunk anyone would say about Windows... "No need for SP1. The original version is working like a charm."</text></comment> | <story><title>Windows 7 SP1 is out</title><url>http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=c3202ce6-4056-4059-8a1b-3a9b77cdfdda</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mrcharles</author><text>Does anyone have a link to actual release notes from SP1? I followed about 10 links, downloaded a *.doc that the microsoft site led me to believe had release notes, which actually only contained links back to the page I downloaded the doc from.<p>Helpful site design.</text></comment> |
25,419,364 | 25,418,939 | 1 | 2 | 25,417,788 | train | <story><title>Reddit is buying TikTok rival Dubsmash</title><url>https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/14/tech/reddit-dubsmash/index.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>notyourwork</author><text>&gt; forever<p>I suspect a Reddit PM is watching a usage of old.reddit.com metric and waiting for it to hit a certain threshold before canning it. Perhaps the migration has taken longer than they planned but I have no doubt in time old.reddit.com will be retired.</text></item><item><author>saurik</author><text>I mean, a sizable enough number of us continue to use old.reddit.com that it seems like they realize they can&#x27;t force us onto the new design and are relegated to maintaining the old one for essentially forever... which to me says something incredible about just how badly their design failed.</text></item><item><author>sorenjan</author><text>Reddit is searching for something, but I don&#x27;t think they&#x27;ve introduced a single feature that makes it better since they added subreddits. They&#x27;ve added and removed community chat rooms [0], they still have some other kind of chat that I don&#x27;t know if anyone uses, when I happen to visit new Reddit there&#x27;s some kind of streaming broadcasts that I don&#x27;t see anyone liking. And of course the redesign, but I suspect that their metrics show that a majority of users like it, so it&#x27;s just old users like med that are put off by it. Recently they introduced Topics [1], but it&#x27;s not supported by the API, so you need to use their apps.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;modnews&#x2F;comments&#x2F;jwme40&#x2F;deprecating_community_chat_rooms&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;modnews&#x2F;comments&#x2F;jwme40&#x2F;deprecating...</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;changelog&#x2F;comments&#x2F;kb99yk&#x2F;introducing_a_new_way_to_explore_reddit_using&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;changelog&#x2F;comments&#x2F;kb99yk&#x2F;introduci...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>somehnguy</author><text>The day reddit drops old.reddit.com is the last day I ever visit. The redesign is that horrible for anything but mindless scrolling watching clip videos.</text></comment> | <story><title>Reddit is buying TikTok rival Dubsmash</title><url>https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/14/tech/reddit-dubsmash/index.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>notyourwork</author><text>&gt; forever<p>I suspect a Reddit PM is watching a usage of old.reddit.com metric and waiting for it to hit a certain threshold before canning it. Perhaps the migration has taken longer than they planned but I have no doubt in time old.reddit.com will be retired.</text></item><item><author>saurik</author><text>I mean, a sizable enough number of us continue to use old.reddit.com that it seems like they realize they can&#x27;t force us onto the new design and are relegated to maintaining the old one for essentially forever... which to me says something incredible about just how badly their design failed.</text></item><item><author>sorenjan</author><text>Reddit is searching for something, but I don&#x27;t think they&#x27;ve introduced a single feature that makes it better since they added subreddits. They&#x27;ve added and removed community chat rooms [0], they still have some other kind of chat that I don&#x27;t know if anyone uses, when I happen to visit new Reddit there&#x27;s some kind of streaming broadcasts that I don&#x27;t see anyone liking. And of course the redesign, but I suspect that their metrics show that a majority of users like it, so it&#x27;s just old users like med that are put off by it. Recently they introduced Topics [1], but it&#x27;s not supported by the API, so you need to use their apps.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;modnews&#x2F;comments&#x2F;jwme40&#x2F;deprecating_community_chat_rooms&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;modnews&#x2F;comments&#x2F;jwme40&#x2F;deprecating...</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;changelog&#x2F;comments&#x2F;kb99yk&#x2F;introducing_a_new_way_to_explore_reddit_using&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;changelog&#x2F;comments&#x2F;kb99yk&#x2F;introduci...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pletsch</author><text>I expect features to just stop working on old.reddit as we get further away from the redesign, whether it be updates internally or full new features. This will continue until it gets unusable and then they&#x27;ll kill it because &#x27;nobody uses it!&#x27;</text></comment> |
8,395,446 | 8,395,103 | 1 | 2 | 8,394,331 | train | <story><title>Poll: Did you “drop Dropbox”?</title><text>A few months ago there was an intense discussion at https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=7566069 regarding the appointment of Condoleezza Rice on the Board of Dropbox.<p>The linked page was http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.drop-dropbox.com&#x2F;.<p>Looking at Crunchbase profile of Dropbox indicates that Rice continues as a Board member.<p>I am curious to know how many users decided to drop Dropbox as a consequence of the above.<p>Don&#x27;t forget to upvote the post itself to get more people to vote on this.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>lhnz</author><text>I continue to use Dropbox and I&#x27;m <i>pro</i> the appointment of Condoleezza Rice as for the sake of our industry it is wise for us to have better political links to the US government.<p>(Politics is irrelevant to me, but power is not. The government can already twist your arm; being on first name&#x27;s basis with somebody important will be invaluable.)<p>Edit: I thought we could openly state our opinions, but it seems I am getting punished with downvotes. Editing again because it&#x27;s now going the other direction, but my point still stands: don&#x27;t downvote or upvote just to normalise your own political beliefs.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cryoshon</author><text>&quot;Politics&quot; is discrete from ethics. Condi is a pariah, ethically speaking-- a war criminal walking free.<p>Political links to the US govt are also a bit of a hazard-- the more you willingly approach them and enable them, the more they will take from your pocket and the more they will push you around. The Snowden leaks have painted a bad picture of the US companies as a result of their compliance with ridiculous government policy, and these companies are being scrutinized fiercely as a result.</text></comment> | <story><title>Poll: Did you “drop Dropbox”?</title><text>A few months ago there was an intense discussion at https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=7566069 regarding the appointment of Condoleezza Rice on the Board of Dropbox.<p>The linked page was http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.drop-dropbox.com&#x2F;.<p>Looking at Crunchbase profile of Dropbox indicates that Rice continues as a Board member.<p>I am curious to know how many users decided to drop Dropbox as a consequence of the above.<p>Don&#x27;t forget to upvote the post itself to get more people to vote on this.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>lhnz</author><text>I continue to use Dropbox and I&#x27;m <i>pro</i> the appointment of Condoleezza Rice as for the sake of our industry it is wise for us to have better political links to the US government.<p>(Politics is irrelevant to me, but power is not. The government can already twist your arm; being on first name&#x27;s basis with somebody important will be invaluable.)<p>Edit: I thought we could openly state our opinions, but it seems I am getting punished with downvotes. Editing again because it&#x27;s now going the other direction, but my point still stands: don&#x27;t downvote or upvote just to normalise your own political beliefs.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>shapov</author><text>You make a claim that,<p><pre><code> it is wise for us to have more political links to the US government.
</code></pre>
but you fail to explain why. Perhaps that&#x27;s the source of some downvotes.<p>You also write,<p><pre><code> Politics is irrelevant to me
</code></pre>
which demostrates that your &#x27;opinion&#x27; comes from a place of indifference, perhaps another reason for downvotes.</text></comment> |
27,885,824 | 27,885,692 | 1 | 3 | 27,884,233 | train | <story><title>Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?</title><url>https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/07/05/time-to-assume-that-health-research-is-fraudulent-until-proved-otherwise/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ta988</author><text>When you want to do a proper work, your grants and papers get rejected because they are not innovatove enough or don&#x27;t go far enough. So it is not a surprise that people that lied in their applications about what they can realistically do also lie when it comes to reporting results. Unfortunately there is no way out. I stopped counting how many reviewers of my grants disagreed on what was proposed, one saying that it was not innovative, the other saying that is was too risky to use this approach. We have a big problem in science, peer-review is broken and everything relies on it. And many reviewers are way out of touch about what happens in their field, I see reviews that clearly show the reviewer was sleeping for the last 10 years.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nextos</author><text>You are absolutely right.<p>Furthermore, universities tend to require tons of publications to promote you. Things are spinning out of control. I know a few EU countries where the written norm is to need &gt; 100 publications to qualify for a full professorship, with equally ridiculous requirements for associate and assistant positions.<p>Obviously, this encourages and rewards completely broken practices. Many associate and full professors in my area only care about stamping their names into as many journal articles as humanly possible. Some of them are already beyond 500, with many of these in top tier journals (Nature, Science, Cell, NEJM). Obviously, they hardly ever contribute anything. Their serfs do all the work. Their job is basically to plot in order to stay on top of their neofeudal shire.<p>In addition to this, funding bodies do nothing after fraud has been proven. ERC only terminates grants on rare occasions. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;forbetterscience.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;forbetterscience.com&#x2F;</a> discusses many cases of serial fraudsters who keep getting funded despite having retracted 10 or 15 articles in major journals.</text></comment> | <story><title>Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?</title><url>https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/07/05/time-to-assume-that-health-research-is-fraudulent-until-proved-otherwise/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ta988</author><text>When you want to do a proper work, your grants and papers get rejected because they are not innovatove enough or don&#x27;t go far enough. So it is not a surprise that people that lied in their applications about what they can realistically do also lie when it comes to reporting results. Unfortunately there is no way out. I stopped counting how many reviewers of my grants disagreed on what was proposed, one saying that it was not innovative, the other saying that is was too risky to use this approach. We have a big problem in science, peer-review is broken and everything relies on it. And many reviewers are way out of touch about what happens in their field, I see reviews that clearly show the reviewer was sleeping for the last 10 years.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jerf</author><text>Worse yet, it compounds. The people approving grants, seeing all these amazing results promised, will then raise the bar for what kind of results you&#x27;re promising. Which means the next batch of promises will need to be that much more extreme to get approved. It&#x27;s a race to the top... or the bottom, depending on your point of view.</text></comment> |
36,169,959 | 36,169,641 | 1 | 3 | 36,168,468 | train | <story><title>Effect of repeated low-level red light on myopia prevention</title><url>https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2804215</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rngname22</author><text>You gotta dig into supplement 1 to find the treatment:<p>&quot;) Input power &lt;100VA, input voltage: AC10V-240V, 50Hz&#x2F;60Hz
版本号 8 : 2.0，20200120 版
2) Low-level single-wavelength red-light wavelength: 650nm±10nm
3) Diameter of low-level single-wavelength red-light cursor: 7mm±3mm, spot at the observation port: 10mm ± 2mm
4) Light source output power: 2.0mW±0.5mW; At a distance of 100mm: 1.07-1.42mw<p>...the intervention group are treated with the intervention instrument twice a day from Monday to Friday, three minutes each time, with an interval of at least 4 hours (morning break before school and afternoon break before school), under the supervision of the school teacher&#x2F;coordinator in addition to routine study and life. All children have a unique corresponding personal account and password. They need to swipe the card and log in the system for verification before starting the intervention device.... the optical energy will stop automatically after three minutes of use, leave the blue eye patch, close your eyes and rest for 3-5 minutes until the light spots before your eyes disappear.&quot;<p>^ So it sounds like the students might even have light spots (temporary blindness)? for a few minutes after the treatment.<p>No use of near-infrared (in the 850nm range), only red light (in the 650 range), so if attempting to recreate at home make sure the red light therapy device is in 650 not red + infrared combination as many are. Though if you Google you can find plenty of studies and resources suggesting NIR can be safe and effective for the eyes as well.<p>I use red and NIR for collagen boosting on the skin but had until now been too afraid to directly expose my closed eyelids w&#x2F;o protective goggles as I noticed light spots (I use a close-up helmet). Taking the leap of faith and using light therapy to the point that I have light spots for a few minutes after treatment as described in the study is a leap of faith that I&#x27;m afraid may be beyond me.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hollerith</author><text>&gt;if you Google you can find plenty of studies and resources suggesting NIR can be safe and effective for the eyes as well.<p>Infrared in the eye causes cataracts, a fact that is all over Google search results. Workers in steel mills for example are about 26 times more likely to need cataract surgery than others their age, but maybe it is not the near-infrared fraction doing that?<p>I&#x27;ve seen many studies of the effects of red light on the eye, but none of the effects of NIR on the eye, but in avoiding exposing the eyes of experimental human subjects to NIR, maybe researchers are using an overabundance of caution?</text></comment> | <story><title>Effect of repeated low-level red light on myopia prevention</title><url>https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2804215</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rngname22</author><text>You gotta dig into supplement 1 to find the treatment:<p>&quot;) Input power &lt;100VA, input voltage: AC10V-240V, 50Hz&#x2F;60Hz
版本号 8 : 2.0，20200120 版
2) Low-level single-wavelength red-light wavelength: 650nm±10nm
3) Diameter of low-level single-wavelength red-light cursor: 7mm±3mm, spot at the observation port: 10mm ± 2mm
4) Light source output power: 2.0mW±0.5mW; At a distance of 100mm: 1.07-1.42mw<p>...the intervention group are treated with the intervention instrument twice a day from Monday to Friday, three minutes each time, with an interval of at least 4 hours (morning break before school and afternoon break before school), under the supervision of the school teacher&#x2F;coordinator in addition to routine study and life. All children have a unique corresponding personal account and password. They need to swipe the card and log in the system for verification before starting the intervention device.... the optical energy will stop automatically after three minutes of use, leave the blue eye patch, close your eyes and rest for 3-5 minutes until the light spots before your eyes disappear.&quot;<p>^ So it sounds like the students might even have light spots (temporary blindness)? for a few minutes after the treatment.<p>No use of near-infrared (in the 850nm range), only red light (in the 650 range), so if attempting to recreate at home make sure the red light therapy device is in 650 not red + infrared combination as many are. Though if you Google you can find plenty of studies and resources suggesting NIR can be safe and effective for the eyes as well.<p>I use red and NIR for collagen boosting on the skin but had until now been too afraid to directly expose my closed eyelids w&#x2F;o protective goggles as I noticed light spots (I use a close-up helmet). Taking the leap of faith and using light therapy to the point that I have light spots for a few minutes after treatment as described in the study is a leap of faith that I&#x27;m afraid may be beyond me.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>RobotToaster</author><text>I wonder if just wearing glasses with a wratten 29 filter would work?<p>Maybe the hippies were onto something with those rose tinted glasses, lol.</text></comment> |
26,348,954 | 26,347,293 | 1 | 2 | 26,346,141 | train | <story><title>The Importance of Learning CSS</title><url>https://www.joshwcomeau.com/css/the-importance-of-learning-css/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Kagerjay</author><text>As someone who is usually the go-to CSS guy in every project, my take on CSS is you can&#x27;t really master it. There&#x27;s just so many tricks associated with it and our brains aren&#x27;t wired to remember all the little tips and tricks.<p>That being said, good skills in CSS are really in deficit imo. If your starting a career in webdev, just being good at CSS is already a big added benefit to a team, especially as a junior dev.<p>Also, one of the harder things to understand as a frontend developer is knowing the limitations of CSS. It doesn&#x27;t do everything, and sometimes you have to know when a Javascript-based CSS approach is better. This opens up another can of worms since now you also have to be familiar with alot of lesser known Javascript APIs.<p>Last note to make is getting good at CSS also requires a good chunk of math knowledge, especially for difficult design-based problems</text></comment> | <story><title>The Importance of Learning CSS</title><url>https://www.joshwcomeau.com/css/the-importance-of-learning-css/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>whytaka</author><text>As a designer that used to make pixel perfect websites turned developer, CSS lets me offload so much of what I need in building UIs and keeps my templates&#x2F;JSX as close to data representation as possible. With my components having tightly scoped CSS, the only CSS I share between my components is very universal branding settings. My class names make sense and my SCSS reads like the DOM, and the only non unique dom-selector class name is the &#x27;active&#x27; state.<p>I loathe having to deal with so much layout building classes in my dom, having to swap them for responsive layouts, etc. My css determines layouts. My html presents data. It keeps my javascript very focused on function.</text></comment> |
9,719,062 | 9,717,881 | 1 | 2 | 9,717,823 | train | <story><title>IBM Invests to Help Apache Spark</title><url>http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/06/15/ibm-invests-to-help-open-source-big-data-software-and-itself/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>rpalmaotero</author><text>For everyone that wants to start working with Spark and Big Data, I recommend them to enrole into this MOOC published by UC Berkeley at EDX: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.edx.org&#x2F;course&#x2F;introduction-big-data-apache-spark-uc-berkeleyx-cs100-1x" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.edx.org&#x2F;course&#x2F;introduction-big-data-apache-spar...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>IBM Invests to Help Apache Spark</title><url>http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/06/15/ibm-invests-to-help-open-source-big-data-software-and-itself/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>zaroth</author><text>I read about an interesting technique, an &quot;all-or-nothing tracker&quot; in a blog post from an Apache Spark engineer.<p>You dispatch n jobs, where n is quite large, and you want to know; have all n jobs have completed, or has less than n jobs have completed. How to do so with a small fixed number of bytes with very high probability?<p>Give each job a random 128-bit ID number. XOR each ID number together as you start each job, and XOR into the same value as each job completes. If all the jobs have completed, the result is 0. The chance of zero turning up randomly if all jobs are not complete is negligible.<p>The technique is mentioned here under &#x27;Lineage Tracking&#x27;: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;highlyscalable.wordpress.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;08&#x2F;20&#x2F;in-stream-big-data-processing&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;highlyscalable.wordpress.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;08&#x2F;20&#x2F;in-stream-bi...</a> but there&#x27;s a better blog post I remembered reading but can&#x27;t find at the moment...</text></comment> |
6,123,230 | 6,123,295 | 1 | 2 | 6,122,889 | train | <story><title>Desperate times call for desperate measures</title><url>http://blog.theoldreader.com/post/56798895350/desperate-times-call-for-desperate-measures</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>sitharus</author><text>I don&#x27;t understand why they don&#x27;t want to charge for it. It will slow down signups and give them funding to scale up. They could also use invite-style signups like LiveJournal did back in the day.<p>I didn&#x27;t sign up for the old reader because having to pay for it was at the top of my requirements, on the basis that people are more likely to keep things going if you&#x27;re paying for them. Not always true I know, but it does hold some weight.</text></comment> | <story><title>Desperate times call for desperate measures</title><url>http://blog.theoldreader.com/post/56798895350/desperate-times-call-for-desperate-measures</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>stevejohnson</author><text>I kicked the tires after the Google Reader announcement, but it was always apparent that the team wasn&#x27;t able to keep up with the rush of new users. I think the best outcome here would be a sale to a more dedicated party, but regardless of that, I can see why they would want to take this route.<p>They&#x27;re working on a free service for love. They deserve to do that on their own terms.</text></comment> |
8,022,437 | 8,022,309 | 1 | 2 | 8,022,177 | train | <story><title>This is a blog post that’s incredibly confusing and painful for me to write</title><url>http://blog.maxistentialism.com/post/91476212698/this-is-a-blog-post-thats-incredibly-confusing</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>eykanal</author><text>While it&#x27;s very chivalrous of him to not want to lawyer up, what he&#x27;s describing is libel, pure and simple. This &quot;friend&quot; of his did something completely inappropriate, and is liable to cause significant monetary damage, a possibly permanent stain on his reputation, and significant psychological distress.<p>Not pursuing this through the appropriate venues—the legal system—simply lets her &quot;get away with it&quot;. That&#x27;s not being nice to her, that&#x27;s being in an abusive relationship and not speaking up for yourself.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>untog</author><text>A lot of people in this thread seem to want Max to become a Men&#x27;s Rights activist and fight this case on behalf of wronged men everywhere.<p>What he seems to say in his post is that he is willing to let this slide because the alternative could well result in fewer women speaking out about sexual assaults they have suffered. He has decided that the negative (a false accusation against him) is worth an overall positive (women hopefully feeling free to speak out). That is his choice to make.</text></comment> | <story><title>This is a blog post that’s incredibly confusing and painful for me to write</title><url>http://blog.maxistentialism.com/post/91476212698/this-is-a-blog-post-thats-incredibly-confusing</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>eykanal</author><text>While it&#x27;s very chivalrous of him to not want to lawyer up, what he&#x27;s describing is libel, pure and simple. This &quot;friend&quot; of his did something completely inappropriate, and is liable to cause significant monetary damage, a possibly permanent stain on his reputation, and significant psychological distress.<p>Not pursuing this through the appropriate venues—the legal system—simply lets her &quot;get away with it&quot;. That&#x27;s not being nice to her, that&#x27;s being in an abusive relationship and not speaking up for yourself.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>NickWarner775</author><text>While this is definitely true, couldn&#x27;t that just bring more unwanted attention to him in this situation? We see it with celebrities all the time; they go on trial for something, and the trial often gets so much media publicity that people forget if the person in question was even innocent or guilty in the end. They only remember to associate them with whatever the crime was. He doesn&#x27;t want that, and maybe he doesn&#x27;t want to give the accuser the satisfaction of tainting his reputation like that.</text></comment> |
21,073,630 | 21,073,473 | 1 | 3 | 21,071,873 | train | <story><title>Neither, and New: Lessons from Uber and Vision Fund</title><url>https://stratechery.com/2019/neither-and-new-lessons-from-uber-and-vision-fund/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tempsy</author><text>I think Uber missed the opportunity to be a more full fledged wallet (which is what Grab started a few years ago). They have a &quot;cash&quot; product now where you can load money, but it&#x27;s too little too late IMO, and the incentive to load money vs use your cc is small (e.g. tiny discount).<p>Starbucks is the obvious model here...IIRC they have one of the most success mobile payment apps in the country, even competing with Apple Pay despite being relevant to them alone. They have something like $1.6 billion in balances, which they can monetize (free loan + interest).</text></comment> | <story><title>Neither, and New: Lessons from Uber and Vision Fund</title><url>https://stratechery.com/2019/neither-and-new-lessons-from-uber-and-vision-fund/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>zwieback</author><text>When I was in Singapore I used the &quot;grab&quot; app, which is super popular and has both regular taxis and uber-like drivers (and food and other stuff).<p>What&#x27;s different about Singapore and grab? Seems like a good model to me but it must involve heavy regulation to work.</text></comment> |
15,271,092 | 15,271,046 | 1 | 2 | 15,269,493 | train | <story><title>Our Approach to Privacy</title><url>https://www.apple.com/privacy/approach-to-privacy/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>greggman</author><text>I&#x27;m happy Apple is at least trying hard to deal with privacy but honestly I don&#x27;t think they are doing enough, at least for me.<p>For example, I don&#x27;t really want to give most apps constant access to my photos, my camera, or my mic but I really don&#x27;t have a whole lot of choice if I still want to use popular apps and services like Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, Hangouts, Line, WhatsApp etc..<p>I really wish that every time they wanted a photo they had to get it through some OS level UX and they only got to see the photos I selected. As it is they get to see all my photos the moment I want to give them a single photo. Similarly if I take a photo in one of them they require permission to read all my photos when all I want them to be able to do is save the photo.<p>As for the Camera I don&#x27;t give any of those apps access to the camera because I don&#x27;t trust them not to spy on me in some way (I assume camera = mic access so they could be doing the subsonic listening for ads things etc...). Instead I take the picture with the built in app then access that picture from the app I want to use the picture in. Of course that leads to the problem above.<p>Mic access is more problematic. I don&#x27;t want any of them to have mic access when I&#x27;m not using the mic function directly but I can&#x27;t talk to my friends who use all those services to call me if I don&#x27;t give the apps mic access.<p>I feel like if Apple was more serious about privacy they&#x27;d handle these issues in some way. The photo one seems mostly straight forward for most use cases. Don&#x27;t let the app access them at all, only the OS. The camera one is less straight forward. I get that there are innovative things apps can do with the cameras by using them directly. On the other hand most of the current use cases could be handled by letting the OS access the camera only, not the app, and then just giving the result to the app.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>chillaxtian</author><text>They actually are changing the Photos privacy defaults in iOS 11: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.apple.com&#x2F;videos&#x2F;play&#x2F;wwdc2017&#x2F;505&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.apple.com&#x2F;videos&#x2F;play&#x2F;wwdc2017&#x2F;505&#x2F;</a><p>Apps won’t need to ask for permission to your entire library - the Photo picker will just appear, and only user selected photos will be available to the app.<p>On the iOS 11 GM at the moment, Facebook still seems to need access to my entire library. So perhaps it is only for apps that link against iOS 11. Guess we’ll see soon.</text></comment> | <story><title>Our Approach to Privacy</title><url>https://www.apple.com/privacy/approach-to-privacy/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>greggman</author><text>I&#x27;m happy Apple is at least trying hard to deal with privacy but honestly I don&#x27;t think they are doing enough, at least for me.<p>For example, I don&#x27;t really want to give most apps constant access to my photos, my camera, or my mic but I really don&#x27;t have a whole lot of choice if I still want to use popular apps and services like Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, Hangouts, Line, WhatsApp etc..<p>I really wish that every time they wanted a photo they had to get it through some OS level UX and they only got to see the photos I selected. As it is they get to see all my photos the moment I want to give them a single photo. Similarly if I take a photo in one of them they require permission to read all my photos when all I want them to be able to do is save the photo.<p>As for the Camera I don&#x27;t give any of those apps access to the camera because I don&#x27;t trust them not to spy on me in some way (I assume camera = mic access so they could be doing the subsonic listening for ads things etc...). Instead I take the picture with the built in app then access that picture from the app I want to use the picture in. Of course that leads to the problem above.<p>Mic access is more problematic. I don&#x27;t want any of them to have mic access when I&#x27;m not using the mic function directly but I can&#x27;t talk to my friends who use all those services to call me if I don&#x27;t give the apps mic access.<p>I feel like if Apple was more serious about privacy they&#x27;d handle these issues in some way. The photo one seems mostly straight forward for most use cases. Don&#x27;t let the app access them at all, only the OS. The camera one is less straight forward. I get that there are innovative things apps can do with the cameras by using them directly. On the other hand most of the current use cases could be handled by letting the OS access the camera only, not the app, and then just giving the result to the app.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>spsful</author><text>I agree with this but just so you know mic and camera access are two different things and iOS users get two different prompts if an app wants camera AND mic access</text></comment> |
36,527,762 | 36,524,113 | 1 | 2 | 36,523,480 | train | <story><title>Building Boba AI: Lessons learnt in building an LLM-powered application</title><url>https://martinfowler.com/articles/building-boba.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mvdtnz</author><text>I am so despondent at the lack of creativity in most of the (many, many) LLM powered projects that are popping up. I have seen hardly a single thing that goes beyond &quot;it&#x27;s a chat bot, but with a special prompt&quot;. Like, is this the best we can expect from this supposedly ground-breaking technology?</text></comment> | <story><title>Building Boba AI: Lessons learnt in building an LLM-powered application</title><url>https://martinfowler.com/articles/building-boba.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>akiselev</author><text><i>&gt; Along the way, we’ve learned some useful lessons on how to build these kinds of applications, which we’ve formulated in terms of patterns.</i><p><pre><code> * Use a text template to enrich a prompt with context and structure
* Tell the LLM to respond in a structured data format
* Stream the response to the UI so users can monitor progress
* Capture and add relevant context information to subsequent action
* Allow direct conversation with the LLM within a context.
* Tell LLM to generate intermediate results while answering
* Provide affordances for the user to have a back-and-forth interaction with the co-pilot
* Combine LLM with other information sources to access data beyond the LLM&#x27;s training set</code></pre></text></comment> |
12,676,621 | 12,675,418 | 1 | 2 | 12,674,846 | train | <story><title>Decap of a Cell Phone SIM card [video]</title><url>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_BfjEF513k</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>kasbah</author><text>If you want to understand more about what the glitching protection is about Scanlime recently made a very good video where she grabs firmware from a drawing tablet using such an attack.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=TeCQatNcF20" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=TeCQatNcF20</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Decap of a Cell Phone SIM card [video]</title><url>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_BfjEF513k</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>gcb0</author><text>sim cards are as capable as 80s computers and run the JVM.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.extremetech.com&#x2F;computing&#x2F;161870-the-humble-sim-card-has-finally-been-hacked-billions-of-phones-at-risk-of-data-theft-premium-rate-scams" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.extremetech.com&#x2F;computing&#x2F;161870-the-humble-sim-c...</a></text></comment> |
40,138,995 | 40,138,119 | 1 | 3 | 40,133,976 | train | <story><title>The man who killed Google Search?</title><url>https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>potatolicious</author><text>It&#x27;s also a good lesson for the new AI cycle we&#x27;re in now. Often inserting ML subsystems into your broader system just makes it go from &quot;deterministically but fixably bad&quot; to &quot;mysteriously and unfixably bad&quot;.</text></item><item><author>JohnFen</author><text>&gt; where he argued against the other search leads that Google should use less machine-learning<p>This better echoes my personal experience with the decline of Google search than TFA: it seems to be connected to the increasing use of ML in that the more of it Google put in, the worse the results I got were.</text></item><item><author>gregw134</author><text>Ex-Google search engineer here (2019-2023). I know a lot of the veteran engineers were upset when Ben Gomes got shunted off. Probably the bigger change, from what I&#x27;ve heard, was losing Amit Singhal who led Search until 2016. Amit fought against creeping complexity. There is a semi-famous internal document he wrote where he argued against the other search leads that Google should use less machine-learning, or at least contain it as much as possible, so that ranking stays debuggable and understandable by human search engineers. My impression is that since he left complexity exploded, with every team launching as many deep learning projects as they can (just like every other large tech company has).<p>The problem though, is the older systems had obvious problems, while the newer systems have hidden bugs and conceptual issues which often don&#x27;t show up in the metrics, and which compound over time as more complexity is layered on. For example: I found an off by 1 error deep in a formula from an old launch that has been reordering top results for 15% of queries since 2015. I handed it off when I left but have no idea whether anyone actually fixed it or not.<p>I wrote up all of the search bugs I was aware of in an internal document called &quot;second page navboost&quot;, so if anyone working on search at Google reads this and needs a launch go check it out.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ytdytvhxgydvhh</author><text>I think that’ll define the industry for the coming decades. I used to work in machine translation and it was the same. The older rules-based engines that were carefully crafted by humans worked well on the test suite and if a new case was found, a human could fix it. When machine learning came on the scene, more “impressive” models that were built quicker came out - but when a translation was bad no one knew how to fix it other than retraining and crossing one’s fingers.</text></comment> | <story><title>The man who killed Google Search?</title><url>https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>potatolicious</author><text>It&#x27;s also a good lesson for the new AI cycle we&#x27;re in now. Often inserting ML subsystems into your broader system just makes it go from &quot;deterministically but fixably bad&quot; to &quot;mysteriously and unfixably bad&quot;.</text></item><item><author>JohnFen</author><text>&gt; where he argued against the other search leads that Google should use less machine-learning<p>This better echoes my personal experience with the decline of Google search than TFA: it seems to be connected to the increasing use of ML in that the more of it Google put in, the worse the results I got were.</text></item><item><author>gregw134</author><text>Ex-Google search engineer here (2019-2023). I know a lot of the veteran engineers were upset when Ben Gomes got shunted off. Probably the bigger change, from what I&#x27;ve heard, was losing Amit Singhal who led Search until 2016. Amit fought against creeping complexity. There is a semi-famous internal document he wrote where he argued against the other search leads that Google should use less machine-learning, or at least contain it as much as possible, so that ranking stays debuggable and understandable by human search engineers. My impression is that since he left complexity exploded, with every team launching as many deep learning projects as they can (just like every other large tech company has).<p>The problem though, is the older systems had obvious problems, while the newer systems have hidden bugs and conceptual issues which often don&#x27;t show up in the metrics, and which compound over time as more complexity is layered on. For example: I found an off by 1 error deep in a formula from an old launch that has been reordering top results for 15% of queries since 2015. I handed it off when I left but have no idea whether anyone actually fixed it or not.<p>I wrote up all of the search bugs I was aware of in an internal document called &quot;second page navboost&quot;, so if anyone working on search at Google reads this and needs a launch go check it out.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>munk-a</author><text>I think - I hope, rather - that technically minded people who are advocating for the use of ML understand the short comings and hallucinations... but we need to be frank about the fact that the business layer above us (with a few rare exceptions) absolutely does not understand the limitations of AI and views it as a magic box where they type in &quot;Write me a story about a bunny&quot; and get twelve paragraphs of text out. As someone working in a healthcare adjacent field I&#x27;ve seen the glint in executive&#x27;s eyes when talking about AI and it can provide real benefits in data summarization and annotation assistance... but there are limits to what you should trust it with and if it&#x27;s something big-i Important then you&#x27;ll always want to have a human vetting step.</text></comment> |
5,575,918 | 5,575,378 | 1 | 2 | 5,575,277 | train | <story><title>Pony ORM - Use Pure Python to Speak to Your Data</title><url>http://ponyorm.com/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>kozlovsky</author><text>Hi, I'm Alexander Kozlovsky, one of Pony ORM authors.
I'll try to answer some questions<p>&#62; why such an obsession with "pure" Python?<p>With this statement we are trying to say Pony is not just to offer some syntax sugar. The end goal of Pony ORM is to understand the semantic of each Python generator which can be translated to database query and then do translation accordingly.<p>The direct benefit of this is that generator query are more high-level then resulted SQL, and can be much easier to understand and refactor. The simplest example is an automatic converting of attribute path traversing such as grade.student.group.department.name to a minimal set of SQL joins. Pony also can use attribute path in reverse direction, from “one” to “many”, such as department.groups.students.gpa, which in this case resulted in a multiset of all ‘gpa’ values for this department. Also you can see examples of query optimization in the documentation, for example when the subquery is converted to LEFT JOIN with GROUP BY, where it can give performance benefit.<p>There are more distant benefits of the semantic translation. In future, we plan to add support of denormalized database schemas. Such denormalization will take place on a physical level (i.e. in the database) while on the logical level (in Python) all queries and logic will remain the same. But first of all we are going to add the migration support.<p>Another future plan is to add support of MongoDB. This is a distant plan, but I think Pony architecture will allow this. After that, migration of PonyORM-based project from relational databases to noSQL and vice versa will be possible.<p>&#62; An ORM like Django's offers a higher level of abstraction<p>I disagree with this. I think, any Django query can be written in PonyORM much more concisely, and there are easy-to-understand PonyORM queries which cannot be expressed in Django easily.<p>Also, Pony ORM completely eliminates N+1 select problem.</text></comment> | <story><title>Pony ORM - Use Pure Python to Speak to Your Data</title><url>http://ponyorm.com/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>benatkin</author><text>This has a split licensing model. <a href="http://ponyorm.com/license-and-pricing.html" rel="nofollow">http://ponyorm.com/license-and-pricing.html</a></text></comment> |
18,127,404 | 18,127,400 | 1 | 3 | 18,126,211 | train | <story><title>The Complicated Financial Lives of Freelancers</title><url>https://www.npr.org/2018/10/02/653627067/going-it-solo-the-complicated-financial-lives-of-freelancers</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sho</author><text>&gt; It&#x27;s better to demand cash upfront, period<p>In my experience the vast majority of businesses will not entertain the idea of cash up front, period. I bet that you wouldn&#x27;t either. If you were building a house, and the builder demanded cash up front, you&#x27;d laugh in his face.<p>Finding good clients is important, but if you demand to be paid in advance, get used to waiting those tables because you&#x27;re going to be doing it a long time. Note: you will not be paid in advance for waiting those tables, either.</text></item><item><author>anoncoward111</author><text>This is right. This is what many businesses do. It&#x27;s better to demand cash upfront, period.<p>If they don&#x27;t take those terms, then they don&#x27;t get your services.<p>If that means you have to wait tables until you find a few legit clients, then so be it.</text></item><item><author>gjs278</author><text>ok and then they ignore the freshbooks invoice</text></item><item><author>gk1</author><text>FreshBooks is $50&#x2F;month and you can automatically send invoices and schedule reminders. This is a solved problem.</text></item><item><author>prawn</author><text>That this is likely a submarine piece for one of the linked products or quoted entrepreneurs shouldn&#x27;t discount the value of discussion. There are only going to be more and more people working like this and it&#x27;s a huge price to pay for the &quot;freedom&quot;. I&#x27;ve effectively freelanced for 20 years and it&#x27;s brutal, crushingly so. Until you&#x27;re big enough to have someone handling admin&#x2F;etc, you are doing everything and things inevitably get missed or ignored. For me, it&#x27;s been invoicing and chasing up invoices - to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years missed completely. End result is all of the hassle and pressure but with less reward.<p>Building specific frameworks&#x2F;systems to work within is absolutely the solution IMO. So, like Xero but with a focus on an exact industry&#x2F;locale. One-button follow up of unpaid invoices, automatic setting aside of money for paying taxes, automatic advice on rates. Too often, people try to fit the tools to their way of working when I think they&#x27;d be better off fitting their work to the tools.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ryanwaggoner</author><text>This is 100% untrue. I’ve been a freelancer for 11 years and I’ve coached literally hundreds of others. I never, ever work with a new client without getting at least 25% upfront. Never. It’s 50% if the contract is smaller than $20k. And I also never really get any pushback. By the time we’re talking payment terms, they’re sold.<p>If you’re doing work for clients upfront without a deposit, you are taking a huge risk. Which is probably why out of more than $2 million billed, I’ve only had a single client not pay me, and that was a startup that went under completely.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Complicated Financial Lives of Freelancers</title><url>https://www.npr.org/2018/10/02/653627067/going-it-solo-the-complicated-financial-lives-of-freelancers</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sho</author><text>&gt; It&#x27;s better to demand cash upfront, period<p>In my experience the vast majority of businesses will not entertain the idea of cash up front, period. I bet that you wouldn&#x27;t either. If you were building a house, and the builder demanded cash up front, you&#x27;d laugh in his face.<p>Finding good clients is important, but if you demand to be paid in advance, get used to waiting those tables because you&#x27;re going to be doing it a long time. Note: you will not be paid in advance for waiting those tables, either.</text></item><item><author>anoncoward111</author><text>This is right. This is what many businesses do. It&#x27;s better to demand cash upfront, period.<p>If they don&#x27;t take those terms, then they don&#x27;t get your services.<p>If that means you have to wait tables until you find a few legit clients, then so be it.</text></item><item><author>gjs278</author><text>ok and then they ignore the freshbooks invoice</text></item><item><author>gk1</author><text>FreshBooks is $50&#x2F;month and you can automatically send invoices and schedule reminders. This is a solved problem.</text></item><item><author>prawn</author><text>That this is likely a submarine piece for one of the linked products or quoted entrepreneurs shouldn&#x27;t discount the value of discussion. There are only going to be more and more people working like this and it&#x27;s a huge price to pay for the &quot;freedom&quot;. I&#x27;ve effectively freelanced for 20 years and it&#x27;s brutal, crushingly so. Until you&#x27;re big enough to have someone handling admin&#x2F;etc, you are doing everything and things inevitably get missed or ignored. For me, it&#x27;s been invoicing and chasing up invoices - to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years missed completely. End result is all of the hassle and pressure but with less reward.<p>Building specific frameworks&#x2F;systems to work within is absolutely the solution IMO. So, like Xero but with a focus on an exact industry&#x2F;locale. One-button follow up of unpaid invoices, automatic setting aside of money for paying taxes, automatic advice on rates. Too often, people try to fit the tools to their way of working when I think they&#x27;d be better off fitting their work to the tools.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>GrumpiNerd</author><text>I typically require a deposit and set a payment schedule although I&#x27;m doing most of my work on UpWork now. UpWork is nice because they handle all the billing and payment hassles and I get a weekly transfer to the account of my choice. It&#x27;s worth the 5% cut.</text></comment> |
38,971,300 | 38,968,669 | 1 | 3 | 38,964,958 | train | <story><title>Keycloak open redirect: wildcard redirect URIs can be exploited to steal tokens</title><url>https://securityblog.omegapoint.se/en/writeup-keycloak-cve-2023-6027/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>never_inline</author><text>&gt; The vulnerability affects all OAuth 2.0 clients configured with a redirect URI ending with a * in Keycloak &lt; 23.0.4.<p>How common is a wildcard in a redirect URL?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>maxwellg</author><text>IME Wildcard redirect URLs have become more common in recent years due to the rise of preview environments. If you&#x27;re deploying a git branch to Vercel, and you now want to log in to &lt;project-name&gt;-git-&lt;branch-name&gt;-&lt;scope-slug&gt;.vercel.app, then you don&#x27;t want to bother with configuring a different redirect URL for every branch name. Enter the wildcard.<p>Ideally wildcards are only used in dev&#x2F;staging environments, but if the system allows for misconfiguration, the system will be misconfigured.</text></comment> | <story><title>Keycloak open redirect: wildcard redirect URIs can be exploited to steal tokens</title><url>https://securityblog.omegapoint.se/en/writeup-keycloak-cve-2023-6027/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>never_inline</author><text>&gt; The vulnerability affects all OAuth 2.0 clients configured with a redirect URI ending with a * in Keycloak &lt; 23.0.4.<p>How common is a wildcard in a redirect URL?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pwntus_se</author><text>I&#x27;ve seen it in multiple installs, and it&#x27;s used by keycloak&#x27;s default clients used for the admin app and for the account portals for realms.</text></comment> |
31,035,405 | 31,028,183 | 1 | 2 | 31,026,257 | train | <story><title>I'm tired of Google's business products</title><text>I&#x27;ve been trying to start a business lately, and as many people do, have chosen to rely on Google&#x27;s suite of products. Google Ads for marketing, Google workspace for email, Drive for spreadsheets... The works.<p>While working for other companies, I never really had a problem with their services. In fact, Google remains one of my favorite companies of all time for solving the search problem (their search engine is still the best, sorry haters).<p>However, over the past few months, I have STRUGGLED against the tide to use their other services. My Google ads account is currently suspended for reasons I cannot fathom. My Google Sheets spreadsheet is currently frozen (the reason I&#x27;m ranting right now). Their administrative setting pages feel like going to the DMV from the amount of options on screen. Last but not least, their support is almost nonexistent.<p>Am I alone in this? Is this a problem of my own making, by using Safari instead of Chrome, and not configuring my services properly? Or is this a feeling that others get?<p>Conclusion: I hope Google gets some real competition soon because it feels like they are falling off.<p>Edit: Shameless plug, my company peddles a data movement tool called SQLpipe. https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sqlpipe.com</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>jermaustin1</author><text>&gt; Now, 10 years later they are holding my online persona hostage in a shameless cash grab to try and make Workspaces more profitable.<p>I&#x27;m in the same boat, but since ~2006 when I started my first company (dont recall exactly when I set up my google apps account though). I have to chose whether to move my account (which thanks to sign in with google is attached to more places than I can even remember), or pony up $6&#x2F;mo&#x2F;user with 20 friends and family having email accounts under my domain.<p>I have not yet decided what to do. But if I leave Google. I will leave for life, and that includes multiple other Workplace accounts that I already DO pay for. I&#x27;m sure losing a few thousand a year doesn&#x27;t matter to them, but mail-in-a-box seems like a decent fit for my limited email I actually use on those older accounts.</text></item><item><author>Cordivae</author><text>I <i>hate</i> Google Workspace so much.<p>Not because of the product, which seems fine. But because 10 years ago I signed up for google apps. It was marketed as a way to have a vanity gmail domain. Free forever up to 10 users.<p>I thought it was cool, was a huge Google fan at the time, and created a custom domain for myself and another one for my grandparents. Now, 10 years later they are holding my online persona hostage in a shameless cash grab to try and make Workspaces more profitable.<p>All I ever wanted was my own Gmail domain. I have zero use for the business functionality. Fuck you google.<p>I&#x27;m a VP of Cloud Platform for a rather large enterprise and quite frankly this is why we won&#x27;t even consider Google Cloud. Broken trust. Broken promises.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tehwhale810</author><text>I know it’s not the same thing but Cloudflare just released a new product for email that’s free. It just forwards any email from your domain in cloudflare. I already use cloudflare and instead of paying google apps for it, I just forward * to my gmail account. Thought it may be of some use if you’re not actively responding from them.</text></comment> | <story><title>I'm tired of Google's business products</title><text>I&#x27;ve been trying to start a business lately, and as many people do, have chosen to rely on Google&#x27;s suite of products. Google Ads for marketing, Google workspace for email, Drive for spreadsheets... The works.<p>While working for other companies, I never really had a problem with their services. In fact, Google remains one of my favorite companies of all time for solving the search problem (their search engine is still the best, sorry haters).<p>However, over the past few months, I have STRUGGLED against the tide to use their other services. My Google ads account is currently suspended for reasons I cannot fathom. My Google Sheets spreadsheet is currently frozen (the reason I&#x27;m ranting right now). Their administrative setting pages feel like going to the DMV from the amount of options on screen. Last but not least, their support is almost nonexistent.<p>Am I alone in this? Is this a problem of my own making, by using Safari instead of Chrome, and not configuring my services properly? Or is this a feeling that others get?<p>Conclusion: I hope Google gets some real competition soon because it feels like they are falling off.<p>Edit: Shameless plug, my company peddles a data movement tool called SQLpipe. https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sqlpipe.com</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>jermaustin1</author><text>&gt; Now, 10 years later they are holding my online persona hostage in a shameless cash grab to try and make Workspaces more profitable.<p>I&#x27;m in the same boat, but since ~2006 when I started my first company (dont recall exactly when I set up my google apps account though). I have to chose whether to move my account (which thanks to sign in with google is attached to more places than I can even remember), or pony up $6&#x2F;mo&#x2F;user with 20 friends and family having email accounts under my domain.<p>I have not yet decided what to do. But if I leave Google. I will leave for life, and that includes multiple other Workplace accounts that I already DO pay for. I&#x27;m sure losing a few thousand a year doesn&#x27;t matter to them, but mail-in-a-box seems like a decent fit for my limited email I actually use on those older accounts.</text></item><item><author>Cordivae</author><text>I <i>hate</i> Google Workspace so much.<p>Not because of the product, which seems fine. But because 10 years ago I signed up for google apps. It was marketed as a way to have a vanity gmail domain. Free forever up to 10 users.<p>I thought it was cool, was a huge Google fan at the time, and created a custom domain for myself and another one for my grandparents. Now, 10 years later they are holding my online persona hostage in a shameless cash grab to try and make Workspaces more profitable.<p>All I ever wanted was my own Gmail domain. I have zero use for the business functionality. Fuck you google.<p>I&#x27;m a VP of Cloud Platform for a rather large enterprise and quite frankly this is why we won&#x27;t even consider Google Cloud. Broken trust. Broken promises.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Cordivae</author><text>Exactly. If I have to leave I will leave forever as well. To the point of buying a mac &#x2F; iphone, and completely leaving the google ecosystem. That&#x27;s how much this pisses me off.<p>Its now about the principle rather than how much it actually costs.</text></comment> |
40,822,677 | 40,821,777 | 1 | 2 | 40,820,311 | train | <story><title>Apple II graphics: More than you wanted to know</title><url>https://nicole.express/2024/phasing-in-and-out-of-existence.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>thought_alarm</author><text>&gt; <i>&quot;Randomly reading from various memory addresses might give the modern programmer some concern about security holes, maybe somehow reading leftover data on the bus an application shouldn&#x27;t be able to see. On the Apple II, there is no protected memory at all though, so don&#x27;t worry about it!&quot;</i><p>Funnily enough, protected memory (sort of) arrived with the Apple III a couple of years later in 1980 and it was met with complete disdain from the developer community (&quot;Stop trying to control my life, Apple!&quot;).<p>Apple III ROM, hardware, and kernel memory wasn&#x27;t meant to be directly accessible from the application&#x27;s address space. The purpose was to increase system stability and to provide a backward-compatible path for future hardware upgrades, but most users and developers didn&#x27;t see the point and found ways around the restrictions.<p>Later, more-successful systems used a kinder, gentler approach (please use the provided firmware&#x2F;bios interfaces please).</text></comment> | <story><title>Apple II graphics: More than you wanted to know</title><url>https://nicole.express/2024/phasing-in-and-out-of-existence.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>PaulHoule</author><text>The first generation of home computers used discrete components for the display controller which is crazy expensive because you need lots of counters, comparators, wide data paths, etc which adds up to a lot of parts.<p>Second generation machines line the VIC-20 and TRS-80 Color Computer used ASICs for the display controller. Apple though the ][ was on borrowed time and has no idea how long it would last so they were slow to come out with the ][e which was cost-reduced.</text></comment> |
18,288,097 | 18,288,069 | 1 | 3 | 18,287,187 | train | <story><title>Lack of progress exposed by the Canary MacGuffin</title><url>https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2018/10/23/idle/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>AndyNemmity</author><text>I&#x27;m likely in a Canary MacGuffin situation right now. What is the reason?<p>I&#x27;ve been given a task I don&#x27;t know how to do. So I&#x27;m working diligently on learning enough about it. But because I don&#x27;t know how to do it, there are an infinite number of concepts that may or may not be required to complete the task.<p>So, I am using the time productively in the sense of breaking apart each piece I don&#x27;t understand, building it myself, learning about it, and moving on to another one.<p>But I haven&#x27;t collected the key from the shop. Every day, I write down what I need to do again, and it changes and evolves as I learn things. I try again to complete the task, fail again, use it as an opportunity to learn about that piece.<p>If I had just got the key, maybe the task is complete, but I am no closer to being able to obtain a different key, or providing any value on that surface area.<p>So I&#x27;m optimizing for my ability to get keys in the future, not getting this particular key.<p>Is that good? Bad? Lots of arguments in both directions I think. Maybe my optimizations are 25% what they could be with direct help. But having experienced direct help, what it actually means is someone talks over my head no matter how much I say I don&#x27;t understand.<p>They don&#x27;t get just how far away I am. Given the constraints, all that can be done is to improve to the point where their help, is help.<p>Hopefully that made some level of sense.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bigiain</author><text>So communicate that back to the person who asked you to do the task.<p>I don&#x27;t mind discovering a task I&#x27;ve assigned someone is actually way more complicated and time consuming that I expected (although I&#x27;d appreciate an explanation so I can recalibrate my assumptions), and I don&#x27;t even mind finding out a team member I&#x27;ve assigned a task to is not yet skilled or experienced enough to understand the best way of doing it or to complete it in a reasonable timeframe.<p>What _does_ bug me (as RachelByTheBay alludes to) is the complete radio silence where I&#x27;ve been kinda expecting the job to pop out of the queue completed for the last few days&#x2F;weeks, only to finally after giving you the benefit of the doubt and not wanting to seem like I&#x27;m micromanaging you - discover it&#x27;s barely been started and doesn&#x27;t look like it&#x27;ll _ever_ get completed.<p>If it&#x27;s way more complex that I assumed? Tell me. If you&#x27;re way out of your depth? Tell me. If you think it&#x27;s a stupid task and you&#x27;re not going to do it and hope it goes away? Just fucking tell me!</text></comment> | <story><title>Lack of progress exposed by the Canary MacGuffin</title><url>https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2018/10/23/idle/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>AndyNemmity</author><text>I&#x27;m likely in a Canary MacGuffin situation right now. What is the reason?<p>I&#x27;ve been given a task I don&#x27;t know how to do. So I&#x27;m working diligently on learning enough about it. But because I don&#x27;t know how to do it, there are an infinite number of concepts that may or may not be required to complete the task.<p>So, I am using the time productively in the sense of breaking apart each piece I don&#x27;t understand, building it myself, learning about it, and moving on to another one.<p>But I haven&#x27;t collected the key from the shop. Every day, I write down what I need to do again, and it changes and evolves as I learn things. I try again to complete the task, fail again, use it as an opportunity to learn about that piece.<p>If I had just got the key, maybe the task is complete, but I am no closer to being able to obtain a different key, or providing any value on that surface area.<p>So I&#x27;m optimizing for my ability to get keys in the future, not getting this particular key.<p>Is that good? Bad? Lots of arguments in both directions I think. Maybe my optimizations are 25% what they could be with direct help. But having experienced direct help, what it actually means is someone talks over my head no matter how much I say I don&#x27;t understand.<p>They don&#x27;t get just how far away I am. Given the constraints, all that can be done is to improve to the point where their help, is help.<p>Hopefully that made some level of sense.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>beatgammit</author><text>I feel like I&#x27;m on the opposite end of that quite a bit. Quite often, colleagues come to me because they don&#x27;t understand the task they&#x27;re given, so I try to explain the pieces and how to learn about them. However, either I overwhelm them or they don&#x27;t want to put in the effort, but eventually it ends up being: &quot;do this, then that, and don&#x27;t worry about how I knew to do that&quot;.<p>Unfortunately, I don&#x27;t think there&#x27;s a good solution to either side of this. I mostly did what you did to get where I am, and I suppose I expect others to do the same.<p>Usually my advice is: study this, that and the other thing, and come back to me after 40 hours of study (without my guidance, it could easily be several times that). However, the other side wants something that will take &lt;1hr, and when I give them that, they complain that they didn&#x27;t learn anything.<p>It&#x27;s a hard balance to strike.</text></comment> |
28,784,304 | 28,783,728 | 1 | 3 | 28,783,381 | train | <story><title>Mozilla to put ads in Firefox address bar suggestions</title><url>https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/navigate-web-faster-firefox-suggest</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Certhas</author><text>A browser is expensive. Currently Firefox is funded (though not controlled) by Google&#x27;s Ad business. I am all for them reducing their reliance on Google&#x27;s Ad business. In this sense this is a step _towards_ what you want. I really really dislike them double speaking about this though.</text></item><item><author>AegirLeet</author><text>Yeah, it really sucks. I&#x27;ve been using Firefox for 15 years or so but this shit is just so discouraging. Can&#x27;t we have one piece of good software that doesn&#x27;t try to shove &quot;relevant&quot; &quot;suggestions&quot; from &quot;trusted&quot; &quot;partners&quot; down our throats?<p>I just want a browser that isn&#x27;t controlled by the ad mafia.</text></item><item><author>eCa</author><text>As someone who has used Firefox since v0.* I really, really, <i>really</i> dislike the language they have used lately.<p>&gt; relevant suggestions from our trusted partners<p>The suggestions are not relevant to, and the partners not trusted by, me.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>strken</author><text>Mozilla takes hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue a year. For decades it hired its engineers from the single most expensive place on earth to hire an engineer, the Bay Area. It boosted CEO pay into the millions shortly before laying off a big chunk of its engineering team. If they had taken the cash they spent on &quot;diversifying their revenue streams&quot; (i.e. getting distracted by side projects while their moneymaker Firefox got slower and lost all its users) over the last decade and a half and stuck it into a trust, they&#x27;d be sitting on a war chest of billions of dollars right now.<p>I also don&#x27;t understand what will stop all five of their remaining users from switching to IceCat, Chromium, or Brave.</text></comment> | <story><title>Mozilla to put ads in Firefox address bar suggestions</title><url>https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/navigate-web-faster-firefox-suggest</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Certhas</author><text>A browser is expensive. Currently Firefox is funded (though not controlled) by Google&#x27;s Ad business. I am all for them reducing their reliance on Google&#x27;s Ad business. In this sense this is a step _towards_ what you want. I really really dislike them double speaking about this though.</text></item><item><author>AegirLeet</author><text>Yeah, it really sucks. I&#x27;ve been using Firefox for 15 years or so but this shit is just so discouraging. Can&#x27;t we have one piece of good software that doesn&#x27;t try to shove &quot;relevant&quot; &quot;suggestions&quot; from &quot;trusted&quot; &quot;partners&quot; down our throats?<p>I just want a browser that isn&#x27;t controlled by the ad mafia.</text></item><item><author>eCa</author><text>As someone who has used Firefox since v0.* I really, really, <i>really</i> dislike the language they have used lately.<p>&gt; relevant suggestions from our trusted partners<p>The suggestions are not relevant to, and the partners not trusted by, me.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>skywal_l</author><text>Is there a way to know how the Mozilla Foundation spend its money? They&#x27;ve stopped updating this page[0] in 2019.<p>Maybe a way to rely less on Google and &quot;trusted partners&quot; money is just to spend less.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;foundation.mozilla.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;who-we-are&#x2F;public-records&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;foundation.mozilla.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;who-we-are&#x2F;public-records&#x2F;</a></text></comment> |
1,054,794 | 1,054,096 | 1 | 3 | 1,053,792 | train | <story><title>The end of Haiti? </title><url>http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2010/01/end_haiti_0</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mahmud</author><text>I am from Somalia, and I have witnessed its decay right to its downfall, including the three days during which the government dispersed and the central bank threw out its stash of local currency in large garbage bins.<p>Haiti will not die. For one, the suffering has been universally afflicted on all Haitians. This will strengthen their bond more than anything. Even if warlords and gangs form their own fiefdoms throughout the country, the humanitarian efforts, whenever they're ready a year or ten from now, can always tap into that shared Haitian identity, forged through an equally-endured hardship.<p>An earthquake has no one to blame. Probably as many Somalis died as in Haiti (though not in one day) but we only have ourselves to blame, and each victim left a blood debt on his killer, which "must" be avenged (or it has been avenged, and now the victim's family are awaiting reprisals)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>joubert</author><text>"An earthquake has no one to blame"<p>I agree. However, you can get spin doctors and loonies who manage to convince others that some group is to blame. Once they have done that they can manipulate the situation in a direction that pleases them. Witness for example demented Pat Robertson who makes the superstitious claim that the misery in Haiti is a direct result of a pact with the devil when Haiti's people (then slaves) overthrew their French masters two centuries ago.</text></comment> | <story><title>The end of Haiti? </title><url>http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2010/01/end_haiti_0</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mahmud</author><text>I am from Somalia, and I have witnessed its decay right to its downfall, including the three days during which the government dispersed and the central bank threw out its stash of local currency in large garbage bins.<p>Haiti will not die. For one, the suffering has been universally afflicted on all Haitians. This will strengthen their bond more than anything. Even if warlords and gangs form their own fiefdoms throughout the country, the humanitarian efforts, whenever they're ready a year or ten from now, can always tap into that shared Haitian identity, forged through an equally-endured hardship.<p>An earthquake has no one to blame. Probably as many Somalis died as in Haiti (though not in one day) but we only have ourselves to blame, and each victim left a blood debt on his killer, which "must" be avenged (or it has been avenged, and now the victim's family are awaiting reprisals)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sailormoon</author><text><i>An earthquake has no one to blame.</i><p>The event itself does not, it's true. But there certainly is someone to blame for the shoddy construction standards and grievous lack of preparation. The government is entirely accountable for these things.</text></comment> |
2,193,792 | 2,193,728 | 1 | 2 | 2,193,539 | train | <story><title>How To Get Your First 1,000 Users</title><url>http://viniciusvacanti.com/2011/02/08/how-to-get-your-first-1000-users/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>il</author><text>I like the list, but I wouldn't dismiss paid advertising so quickly. Set up a testing budget and keep testing until you make it work. Groupon, LivingSocial, etc are seeing tremendous growth from their AdWords campaigns.<p>Investors and potential acquirers are goig to be a lot more excited about a scalable user acquisition model like AdWords than fleeting success on social media.</text></comment> | <story><title>How To Get Your First 1,000 Users</title><url>http://viniciusvacanti.com/2011/02/08/how-to-get-your-first-1000-users/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>JoeAltmaier</author><text>I love how-to blog entries = its a tutorial, a cheat sheet, a process guide. Especially when, like this one, they give fairly detailed instructions on services, techniques, and sequencing.</text></comment> |
22,132,566 | 22,132,565 | 1 | 3 | 22,130,088 | train | <story><title>23andMe lays off 100 people as DNA test sales decline</title><url>https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/23/23andme-lays-off-100-people-ceo-anne-wojcicki-explains-why.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jsgo</author><text>&gt; Wojcicki has theories<p>Think the obvious one is that the results are shared and whether someone is a criminal or not (or will be one in the future), people are not particularly comfortable with sharing to parties they didn&#x27;t initially trust it to for the purposes they trusted it for.<p>Anecdotally, I bought a 23andme kit (just the genealogy one) but never submitted it because the labeling was to send it to the lab in the next town that manages the company I work for&#x27;s drug screenings. Well, I don&#x27;t think I have any pre-existing conditions and certainly don&#x27;t do drugs, but I don&#x27;t know about any unknowns on the health side that could impact my insurance if they were to share it to the company. Forget that.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bobthepanda</author><text>Honestly, I would also say that a partial reason why these would&#x27;ve dropped is that everyone who can do it has done it.<p>You only need these kinds of results once because your DNA doesn&#x27;t change. I knew people who were giving or had gotten these as gifts, but those are one-off purchases. And if you&#x27;ve heard of people doing it then you&#x27;ll do it too but that&#x27;s also a one-off.<p>I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;d personally benefit because my family came to the US relatively recently from a country that has very few records going back very far, that haven&#x27;t been destroyed. So what would be the point for me?</text></comment> | <story><title>23andMe lays off 100 people as DNA test sales decline</title><url>https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/23/23andme-lays-off-100-people-ceo-anne-wojcicki-explains-why.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jsgo</author><text>&gt; Wojcicki has theories<p>Think the obvious one is that the results are shared and whether someone is a criminal or not (or will be one in the future), people are not particularly comfortable with sharing to parties they didn&#x27;t initially trust it to for the purposes they trusted it for.<p>Anecdotally, I bought a 23andme kit (just the genealogy one) but never submitted it because the labeling was to send it to the lab in the next town that manages the company I work for&#x27;s drug screenings. Well, I don&#x27;t think I have any pre-existing conditions and certainly don&#x27;t do drugs, but I don&#x27;t know about any unknowns on the health side that could impact my insurance if they were to share it to the company. Forget that.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mc32</author><text>Exactly. Many people naively thought that it was going to be positive. Build your family tree, get better ancestry information.<p>Even finding family relations can be fraught with issues like illegitimate children, sperm donors who thought they’d remain anonymous, secret affairs now outed and then there is the other health data aspect...</text></comment> |
35,211,609 | 35,211,427 | 1 | 3 | 35,190,971 | train | <story><title>The early 90s tech scene that created L0pht, the legendary hackerspace</title><url>https://cyberscoop.com/boston-l0pht-hackers-tech-scene/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hereforphone</author><text>I&#x27;d like to post my perception since I was a 90s hacker.<p>Inclusivity is arbitrary here - no one in the scenes that I was familiar with were excluded because of race or sex - it&#x27;s just that certain demographics weren&#x27;t attracted to that &#x27;scene&#x27;. Those like me, ADHD, awkward, and not extremely socially capable at the time, were however sometimes excluded. There were still the cool nerds and the lame nerds. I was pretty involved in the scene, being a staff writer of 2600 (several articles published under various handles, my name listed in the cover for a couple of years), and spending some time talking to &quot;famous&quot; people.<p>Later I grew up, spent 4 years in the military, then used money I earned to finally go to college, graduating eventually with an engineering Master&#x27;s in my 30s. As I grew up I realized that the whole 90s &#x2F; early 2000s hacker scene was mostly just a social clique. I learned that many people who were revered had marginal skills. I learned that the paranoia and self-aggrandizement (&quot;The FBI totally monitors #2600 to learn our skills&quot;) was really just immaturity. The whole thing eventually seemed lame as I grew into an adult. I realized 2600 was really just a money machine and a manipulative scheme. Phrack went downhill quick, sadly (I also published there).<p>Still, this was a classic and wonderful time. Even <i>I</i> made friends - some that I talk to now, 20+ years later. I learned a lot. I got started on a tech path that took me very far and into regions of tech I&#x27;d never learn about otherwise like radio and telephone. I&#x27;m still a hacker, but legally. I don&#x27;t miss the &quot;scene&quot; at all, but I do wish I was more included in it at the time. As this article illustrates it must have been great.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bink</author><text>I generally agree, but some of those claims were true. It wasn&#x27;t entirely immaturity. I was part of the group at the 2600 meeting near the Pentagon that got raided by Secret Service dressed up like mall security. They conducted some busts a few weeks later based on things illegally confiscated from that raid.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.2600.com&#x2F;secret&#x2F;pc&#x2F;pc-pressrelease.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.2600.com&#x2F;secret&#x2F;pc&#x2F;pc-pressrelease.html</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;archive&#x2F;politics&#x2F;1992&#x2F;11&#x2F;12&#x2F;hackers-allege-harassment-at-mall&#x2F;5f5e756f-806e-485e-962b-0a5f71635c81&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;archive&#x2F;politics&#x2F;1992&#x2F;11&#x2F;12&#x2F;h...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>The early 90s tech scene that created L0pht, the legendary hackerspace</title><url>https://cyberscoop.com/boston-l0pht-hackers-tech-scene/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hereforphone</author><text>I&#x27;d like to post my perception since I was a 90s hacker.<p>Inclusivity is arbitrary here - no one in the scenes that I was familiar with were excluded because of race or sex - it&#x27;s just that certain demographics weren&#x27;t attracted to that &#x27;scene&#x27;. Those like me, ADHD, awkward, and not extremely socially capable at the time, were however sometimes excluded. There were still the cool nerds and the lame nerds. I was pretty involved in the scene, being a staff writer of 2600 (several articles published under various handles, my name listed in the cover for a couple of years), and spending some time talking to &quot;famous&quot; people.<p>Later I grew up, spent 4 years in the military, then used money I earned to finally go to college, graduating eventually with an engineering Master&#x27;s in my 30s. As I grew up I realized that the whole 90s &#x2F; early 2000s hacker scene was mostly just a social clique. I learned that many people who were revered had marginal skills. I learned that the paranoia and self-aggrandizement (&quot;The FBI totally monitors #2600 to learn our skills&quot;) was really just immaturity. The whole thing eventually seemed lame as I grew into an adult. I realized 2600 was really just a money machine and a manipulative scheme. Phrack went downhill quick, sadly (I also published there).<p>Still, this was a classic and wonderful time. Even <i>I</i> made friends - some that I talk to now, 20+ years later. I learned a lot. I got started on a tech path that took me very far and into regions of tech I&#x27;d never learn about otherwise like radio and telephone. I&#x27;m still a hacker, but legally. I don&#x27;t miss the &quot;scene&quot; at all, but I do wish I was more included in it at the time. As this article illustrates it must have been great.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>aestetix</author><text>It sounds to me like part of your growing up was realizing that the people you looked up to were human, and it shattered some illusions you had.<p>In truth, pretty much every social &quot;scene&quot; has a small core of dedicated people surrounded by a much larger social clique. This becomes more and more true as it grows in size. There will always be the &quot;talkers&quot; who are good at communicating but have &quot;marginal skills,&quot; but I&#x27;d argue everyone has different strengths. For example, there are some absolutely excellent hackers who are terrible writers, and other people who write quite well <i>about</i> hacking, but cannot hack themselves. We need both types.<p>While quite a lot of the worry about government monitoring might actually be paranoia, I&#x27;ll simply note that Snowden&#x27;s relevations showed that a lot of the fears were justified. Perhaps there are tradeoffs in privacy that you are willing to make, which others refuse to make.</text></comment> |
29,850,602 | 29,849,710 | 1 | 2 | 29,849,057 | train | <story><title>School closures led to more sleep and better quality of life for adolescents</title><url>https://www.media.uzh.ch/en/Press-Releases/2022/Adolescent-Sleep.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>shafyy</author><text>In the US, maybe. In Europe, it&#x27;s very unusual for a kid older than ~9 years to be driven to school.</text></item><item><author>etchalon</author><text>There are a lot of high schoolers who do not live within walking distance of their school, or who aren&#x27;t safe walking to their school. Buses are unreliable, easy to miss, and public transportation can be expensive.<p>It&#x27;s a whole thing.</text></item><item><author>throwawayboise</author><text>High schoolers do not need daycare; they also do not need parents to dress them and get them to school. They should be able to manage those things on their own, and take care of themselves for a few unsupervised hours a day.</text></item><item><author>silisili</author><text>And led to a huge retardation (in the literal sense) of learning. My kid was way more active and alert, but the schools weren&#x27;t prepared for this and they basically just read books together; she&#x27;s way behind in math still.<p>That all said, school hours were set mostly because public schools double as a daycare. I don&#x27;t know many people who drive in at 7am anymore, it&#x27;s definitely time to reset expectations here.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>onion2k</author><text><i>In Europe, it&#x27;s very unusual for a kid older than ~9 years to be driven to school.</i><p>Here in the UK there are parking restrictions around practically every school to stop parents clogging up the roads to drop off or collect their kids. I&#x27;d suggest that&#x27;s evidence that a lot of children still get taken to school by car.</text></comment> | <story><title>School closures led to more sleep and better quality of life for adolescents</title><url>https://www.media.uzh.ch/en/Press-Releases/2022/Adolescent-Sleep.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>shafyy</author><text>In the US, maybe. In Europe, it&#x27;s very unusual for a kid older than ~9 years to be driven to school.</text></item><item><author>etchalon</author><text>There are a lot of high schoolers who do not live within walking distance of their school, or who aren&#x27;t safe walking to their school. Buses are unreliable, easy to miss, and public transportation can be expensive.<p>It&#x27;s a whole thing.</text></item><item><author>throwawayboise</author><text>High schoolers do not need daycare; they also do not need parents to dress them and get them to school. They should be able to manage those things on their own, and take care of themselves for a few unsupervised hours a day.</text></item><item><author>silisili</author><text>And led to a huge retardation (in the literal sense) of learning. My kid was way more active and alert, but the schools weren&#x27;t prepared for this and they basically just read books together; she&#x27;s way behind in math still.<p>That all said, school hours were set mostly because public schools double as a daycare. I don&#x27;t know many people who drive in at 7am anymore, it&#x27;s definitely time to reset expectations here.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sdoering</author><text>I have to anecdotally disagree. I am living near to a big high school. Every morning parents, primarily mothers, drive their high school kids into school.<p>One has to know that every 10 minutes the train stops at the school as it has their own stop.<p>Busses also stop at school.<p>Nonetheless the amount of kids in their teens being driven to school by parents is staggering.</text></comment> |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.