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2,483,593 | 2,483,432 | 1 | 3 | 2,483,341 | train | <story><title>7% of Americans Subscribe to Netflix, Now Larger than any Cable Company</title><url>http://money.cnn.com/2011/04/25/technology/netflix_earnings/index.htm?source=cnn_bin&hpt=Sbin</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ShabbyDoo</author><text>The cable companies' competitive response to Netflix has been laughable although no worse than any other established industry's response to disruption. The service Netflix provided from the beginning is a wide selection of content with little applied time on the customer's part. Going to the video store, picking out titles, and remembering to return them was a huge timesink. Netflix fixed that albeit at the expense of elapsed time. Then, Netflix drastically cut the elapsed time with streaming content. That the cable companies did next to nothing to combat this disruption is astounding given that they already owned and controlled a pipe into the customer's house!<p>Imagine if, in 2002, the cable companies had come offered a little, Roku-esque box which could hold two almost DVD-quality movies. A consumer would have attached a Y-splitter in front of his existing cable box and then added this new box in parallel. The box then would have connected to the TV's analog inputs. One would have loaded up his box by going to the cable company's website and picking movies from a large catalog -- one movie for slot "A" and another for slot "B". Each slot would have taken 8 hours to download over the cable line and then could have been watched using a minimalist remote to pause, rewind, etc. -- just like a VCR. Consumers could have gone to their local cable company office and picked up this box along with unlimited movie service for, say, $20/month.<p>I've purposefully suggested the crappiest, most minimalist implementation I could imagine as a thought experiment. Would this have been sufficient to combat Netflix? Presuming identical catalogs, why would I fiddle with snail mail, scratched-up DVDs, etc.? Such an offering certainly would have created an uphill battle for Netflix.<p>It is not as if video-on-demand services had not been discussed since at least the early 90s. What I have proposed is worse than what was suggested even back then, right? So, why didn't the cable operators do anything? I'm bet it had to do with fear of cannibalizing existing revenue streams. Why pay for HBO (sans original content of course) if you could pick ANY movie? How many industries have hurt themselves by not cannibalizing their existing revenue streams with sufficient aggressiveness?</text></comment> | <story><title>7% of Americans Subscribe to Netflix, Now Larger than any Cable Company</title><url>http://money.cnn.com/2011/04/25/technology/netflix_earnings/index.htm?source=cnn_bin&hpt=Sbin</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ronnier</author><text>Even a strong reason for cable companies such as Comcast to enforce their 250 Gb monthly transfer limit.</text></comment> |
7,470,710 | 7,470,357 | 1 | 3 | 7,469,507 | train | <story><title> Gay Firefox developers boycott Mozilla to protest CEO hire</title><url>http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/03/gay-firefox-developers-boycott-mozilla-to-protest-ceo-hire/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ender7</author><text>If this were any other company I don&#x27;t think this would turn any heads. However, much of Mozilla&#x27;s ethos and community support is built on ethical rather than capitalistic foundations. It&#x27;s hard to reconcile thoughts on a company that seems to so value freedom in some areas but not in others [1].<p>[1] Inferring what Mozilla values based on the opinions of its CEO is not particularly <i>fair</i>, but then again I&#x27;m not sure it&#x27;s unfair either.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gojomo</author><text>Judge Mozilla on the actions of the organization, and the staff while performing their official roles.<p>What the staff does in other spheres of life, with their own time and money, is their own concern. It&#x27;s a freer society, and a more pro-freedom organization, that grants individuals the widest range of actions and opinions when away from their official responsibilities.<p>The CEO position isn&#x27;t &quot;mascot&quot; or &quot;most popular&quot; or &quot;dear leader&quot;. (Those are cult-of-personality failure modes for a professional organization.) It&#x27;s lead administrator, with specific on-the-job duties which involve essentially no electoral politicking nor meddling in employees&#x27; lives.</text></comment> | <story><title> Gay Firefox developers boycott Mozilla to protest CEO hire</title><url>http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/03/gay-firefox-developers-boycott-mozilla-to-protest-ceo-hire/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ender7</author><text>If this were any other company I don&#x27;t think this would turn any heads. However, much of Mozilla&#x27;s ethos and community support is built on ethical rather than capitalistic foundations. It&#x27;s hard to reconcile thoughts on a company that seems to so value freedom in some areas but not in others [1].<p>[1] Inferring what Mozilla values based on the opinions of its CEO is not particularly <i>fair</i>, but then again I&#x27;m not sure it&#x27;s unfair either.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>anaphor</author><text>Even if Mozilla started actively discriminating against people and campaigning against minority rights I would have no problem taking the code and starting a forked version. IMO that&#x27;s what&#x27;s so great about FLOSS, if you disagree with how something is managed you can ignore the people who created it and start your own version along with other people who agree.<p>So I wouldn&#x27;t really be worried about the current state of affairs. If people want to boycott then they can do that, but I doubt it will have much effect unless Eich starts going insane, in which case Google will probably cut their funding. In that case we can all start hacking on Iceweasel and forget about it. Yay for free libre open source software!</text></comment> |
20,468,523 | 20,468,488 | 1 | 2 | 20,467,963 | train | <story><title>Pornography sites found to be riddled with trackers from major tech companies</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/17/opinion/google-facebook-sex-websites.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>aviraldg</author><text>No, the equivalent is you walking into a store to buy DVDs, and the store manager keeping a record of what sells well, and what you show interest in, etc. to drive decisions about what to stock next.</text></item><item><author>letstrynvm</author><text>&gt; prompting outrage when there isn&#x27;t a good reason for it.<p>Can you expand on why there&#x27;s &#x27;no good reason for it&#x27;?<p>The equivalent is my peering in your window to see and note down what you rub one out to... every time. And you don&#x27;t know what I do with that information or where it will leak to.<p>That sounds perfectly fine to you, does it?</text></item><item><author>aviraldg</author><text>I feel like all these articles follow a pattern: they take a common, well known aspect of technology (in this case, analytics trackers), search for any cases where a major tech company is involved, and come up with the most clickbaity headline possible (&quot;Google and Facebook Are Quietly Tracking You on Sex Websites&quot;, when it&#x27;s actually the website owners adding this tracking code in the first place, explicitly for the purpose of understanding user behaviour.) These headlines are then shared and reshared by nontechnical users, prompting outrage when there isn&#x27;t a good reason for it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pjc50</author><text>Interestingly this example led to one of America&#x27;s few, narrowly-focused privacy laws: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Video_Privacy_Protection_Act" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Video_Privacy_Protection_Act</a><p>&gt; It makes any &quot;video tape service provider&quot; that discloses rental [or sale] information outside the ordinary course of business liable for up to $2500 in actual damages.</text></comment> | <story><title>Pornography sites found to be riddled with trackers from major tech companies</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/17/opinion/google-facebook-sex-websites.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>aviraldg</author><text>No, the equivalent is you walking into a store to buy DVDs, and the store manager keeping a record of what sells well, and what you show interest in, etc. to drive decisions about what to stock next.</text></item><item><author>letstrynvm</author><text>&gt; prompting outrage when there isn&#x27;t a good reason for it.<p>Can you expand on why there&#x27;s &#x27;no good reason for it&#x27;?<p>The equivalent is my peering in your window to see and note down what you rub one out to... every time. And you don&#x27;t know what I do with that information or where it will leak to.<p>That sounds perfectly fine to you, does it?</text></item><item><author>aviraldg</author><text>I feel like all these articles follow a pattern: they take a common, well known aspect of technology (in this case, analytics trackers), search for any cases where a major tech company is involved, and come up with the most clickbaity headline possible (&quot;Google and Facebook Are Quietly Tracking You on Sex Websites&quot;, when it&#x27;s actually the website owners adding this tracking code in the first place, explicitly for the purpose of understanding user behaviour.) These headlines are then shared and reshared by nontechnical users, prompting outrage when there isn&#x27;t a good reason for it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>martingoodson</author><text>... and then cross-referencing your purchase with everything else you ever purchased. And also every article you ever read. And then selling that information to others.</text></comment> |
30,822,810 | 30,822,976 | 1 | 2 | 30,822,584 | train | <story><title>Killed by Microsoft</title><url>https://killedbymicrosoft.info</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ryan-duve</author><text>I like seeing the list of services, but I wish it was called &quot;Microsoft Graveyard&quot; instead of &quot;Killed by Microsoft&quot;. Some of those wouldn&#x27;t be around today regardless of the controlling organization, such as Silverlight and Encarta. To me, &quot;Killed by Microsoft&quot; makes it sound like Microsoft chose to discontinue a product that otherwise would still be &quot;alive&quot; today.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Mindless2112</author><text>It isn&#x27;t even fair to say that some of these products are dead. For example, you can still use Microsoft Streets &amp; Trips today, as it&#x27;s from an era when you bought (rather than rented) software. It&#x27;s just not getting any more updates, so its usefulness diminishes as the road network changes.</text></comment> | <story><title>Killed by Microsoft</title><url>https://killedbymicrosoft.info</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ryan-duve</author><text>I like seeing the list of services, but I wish it was called &quot;Microsoft Graveyard&quot; instead of &quot;Killed by Microsoft&quot;. Some of those wouldn&#x27;t be around today regardless of the controlling organization, such as Silverlight and Encarta. To me, &quot;Killed by Microsoft&quot; makes it sound like Microsoft chose to discontinue a product that otherwise would still be &quot;alive&quot; today.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>detritus</author><text>This does feel like a somewhat bilious [anti-?]fanboy counter to the Google Graveyard website.</text></comment> |
31,668,846 | 31,668,486 | 1 | 2 | 31,664,203 | train | <story><title>I quit the tech industry (2015)</title><url>https://eev.ee/blog/2015/06/09/i-quit-the-tech-industry/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>robotburrito</author><text>Seems like a huge # of techies I meet out here are trying to reach a million dollars in savings in a job they hate so that they can &quot;go live in a cabin in the woods.&quot; I try to tell them that my Cousin has been doing that for 40 years, and he dropped out of high school and worked at a gas station.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>PragmaticPulp</author><text>One of the weirder side effects of the early retirement (FIRE) movement is that it selects for people who value freedom and time away from work and then convince them that they need to work the highest paid job they can find no matter how miserable it makes them right now. A lot of tech companies capitalize on this by offering 20% raises to recruit people and then demand 50-100% more work until they burn out. They can always recruit more people to backfill because 20% (or more) raises are hard to turn down.<p>Not everyone, of course, but this theme plays out far too frequently in FIRE communities.</text></comment> | <story><title>I quit the tech industry (2015)</title><url>https://eev.ee/blog/2015/06/09/i-quit-the-tech-industry/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>robotburrito</author><text>Seems like a huge # of techies I meet out here are trying to reach a million dollars in savings in a job they hate so that they can &quot;go live in a cabin in the woods.&quot; I try to tell them that my Cousin has been doing that for 40 years, and he dropped out of high school and worked at a gas station.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hotpotamus</author><text>&quot;You don&#x27;t need a million dollars to do nothin. Take a look at my cousin, he&#x27;s broke, don&#x27;t do shit.&quot;<p>- Lawrence from Office Space</text></comment> |
38,399,703 | 38,397,017 | 1 | 2 | 38,394,364 | train | <story><title>Developer account removed by Apple</title><url>https://seraleev.notion.site/Our-developer-account-was-removed-by-Apple-and-they-haven-t-paid-out-108-878-b61192711c74487480373badc70d42c0</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>madeofpalk</author><text>I&#x27;ve never seen these apps before. I have no idea who this company is. But these icons, names, and type of apps I typically associate with trash behaviour I wish was removed from the app store. Like a Video Joiner Pro that lets you concat two videos, has a 1 week free trial and then $20&#x2F;month subscription.<p>Edit: Ahh yup, that&#x27;s exactly what this is<p>&gt; <i>A simple and convenient collage maker will help you make cool videos for TikTok and Instagram, Facebook.</i><p>&gt; <i>Subscription price $ 3.99 &#x2F; week, $ 19.99 &#x2F; year and $ 39.99 &#x2F; forever</i><p>$3.99&#x2F;week subscription is deliberately predatory. It tries to bait people in thinking &quot;oh it&#x27;s just $3.99&quot;, and then forgetting and now paying $17&#x2F;month for a photo collage app.<p>I&#x27;m not sad this developer&#x27;s had their account cancelled.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;webcache.googleusercontent.com&#x2F;search?q=cache:xJlbYZOPH7IJ:https:&#x2F;&#x2F;apps.apple.com&#x2F;ye&#x2F;app&#x2F;oddy-side-by-side-photo-video&#x2F;id1599528807&amp;hl=en&amp;gl=uk&amp;client=firefox-b-d" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;webcache.googleusercontent.com&#x2F;search?q=cache:xJlbYZ...</a></text></item><item><author>mortallywounded</author><text>Something feels off... those apps don&#x27;t seem like 33K&#x2F;MRR worthy. I suspect some kind of manipulation was being done to... help?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Aeolun</author><text>&gt; $3.99&#x2F;week subscription is deliberately predatory. It tries to bait people in thinking &quot;oh it&#x27;s just $3.99&quot;, and then forgetting and now paying $17&#x2F;month for a photo collage app.<p>How is that predatory? It makes perfect sense to me and I’d probably do it myself if I ever were to sell an app this way. If someone just installs my app once, to make a single video, then immediately cancels, I still want to make some money off that.<p>That’s probably how 90% of these apps are used.</text></comment> | <story><title>Developer account removed by Apple</title><url>https://seraleev.notion.site/Our-developer-account-was-removed-by-Apple-and-they-haven-t-paid-out-108-878-b61192711c74487480373badc70d42c0</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>madeofpalk</author><text>I&#x27;ve never seen these apps before. I have no idea who this company is. But these icons, names, and type of apps I typically associate with trash behaviour I wish was removed from the app store. Like a Video Joiner Pro that lets you concat two videos, has a 1 week free trial and then $20&#x2F;month subscription.<p>Edit: Ahh yup, that&#x27;s exactly what this is<p>&gt; <i>A simple and convenient collage maker will help you make cool videos for TikTok and Instagram, Facebook.</i><p>&gt; <i>Subscription price $ 3.99 &#x2F; week, $ 19.99 &#x2F; year and $ 39.99 &#x2F; forever</i><p>$3.99&#x2F;week subscription is deliberately predatory. It tries to bait people in thinking &quot;oh it&#x27;s just $3.99&quot;, and then forgetting and now paying $17&#x2F;month for a photo collage app.<p>I&#x27;m not sad this developer&#x27;s had their account cancelled.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;webcache.googleusercontent.com&#x2F;search?q=cache:xJlbYZOPH7IJ:https:&#x2F;&#x2F;apps.apple.com&#x2F;ye&#x2F;app&#x2F;oddy-side-by-side-photo-video&#x2F;id1599528807&amp;hl=en&amp;gl=uk&amp;client=firefox-b-d" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;webcache.googleusercontent.com&#x2F;search?q=cache:xJlbYZ...</a></text></item><item><author>mortallywounded</author><text>Something feels off... those apps don&#x27;t seem like 33K&#x2F;MRR worthy. I suspect some kind of manipulation was being done to... help?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cfpg</author><text>I agree, even the author aludes to this when refering to trials and how to cancel them. (text in parenthesis added by me)<p>&gt; One day before removal, we had 1209 active trials. (money in our pockets)<p>&gt; [...] established a help center with articles on canceling trials (cause we have a UI team dedicated on making it complicated)</text></comment> |
3,394,853 | 3,394,735 | 1 | 3 | 3,394,383 | train | <story><title>Launching the Kindle Fire was a mistake</title><url>https://plus.google.com/100838276097451809262/posts/EvstFnKynKf</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tghw</author><text>Many of his main points are vacuous at best. "Adding insult to injury, it’s an extremely simple and ugly unlock-gesture, just the sweep of a mono-color bar from right to left." Since when is a function being simple a problem? And he's comparing it to a Windows phone, where the entire interface is based on "mono-color" tiles.<p>The Fire is a $200 tablet, and aside from a misplaced On/Off button (not sure how that got passed QA), the hardware you get for $200 is incredible. The software could use some work, there's no doubt about that. But here's the thing:<p><i>They can improve the software.</i><p>I don't love my Fire, but you can hardly say it is "downright terrible", especially when you consider the price tag.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>phillco</author><text>&#62; <i>They can improve the software.</i><p>But not their first impressions.<p>I've heard this argument before (hell, even <i>The Lean Startup</i> advocates shipping a broken, backwards v1.0), but it's usually paired with meekness: grow slowly, so that by the time you reach a wide audience your quality is awesome and nobody's the wiser. Instead, Amazon's pushing the Fire 1.0 with everything they've got.<p>Shame, because Amazon probably could have pulled off the meekness strategy really well, too -- launch the Fire in December 2011 to a small number of hand-picked (Prime?) beta users, iterate, and launch the real thing in 2012.</text></comment> | <story><title>Launching the Kindle Fire was a mistake</title><url>https://plus.google.com/100838276097451809262/posts/EvstFnKynKf</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tghw</author><text>Many of his main points are vacuous at best. "Adding insult to injury, it’s an extremely simple and ugly unlock-gesture, just the sweep of a mono-color bar from right to left." Since when is a function being simple a problem? And he's comparing it to a Windows phone, where the entire interface is based on "mono-color" tiles.<p>The Fire is a $200 tablet, and aside from a misplaced On/Off button (not sure how that got passed QA), the hardware you get for $200 is incredible. The software could use some work, there's no doubt about that. But here's the thing:<p><i>They can improve the software.</i><p>I don't love my Fire, but you can hardly say it is "downright terrible", especially when you consider the price tag.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>zmanji</author><text>I'm not going to purchase a device because the software <i>might</i> improve in the future. I'm going to purchase a device that has functional software from day 1. Otherwise every day that I have to use the terrible software until it is improved is another cost that I have to pay.</text></comment> |
9,887,862 | 9,885,881 | 1 | 2 | 9,883,246 | train | <story><title>Firefox makes click-to-activate Flash the default</title><url>https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-ons-cause-issues-are-on-blocklist</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>marksc</author><text>Mark from Mozilla here.<p>To be clear, by &quot;blocked&quot; Flash we really mean enforced click-to-activate. User choice is always a #1 priority at Mozilla.<p>We regularly block vulnerable plugins. What made this block different was that we did it before Adobe made an update available. Now that Adobe has released an update, it is no longer true that every version of Flash Player is blocked in Firefox.<p>However, we&#x27;re glad to see the conversation this has sparked. Personally I align with Alex Stamos regarding Flash, in the thinking that a formal EOL would be great.<p>I&#x27;d also like to use this space to make a shameless plug for Shumway, a project set on building a faithful an efficient renderer for the SWF file format without native code assistance. Ending Flash doesn&#x27;t need to mean an end for Flash media. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.areweflashyet.com&#x2F;shumway&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.areweflashyet.com&#x2F;shumway&#x2F;</a><p>Edit: typo</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>koonsolo</author><text>Hi Mark,<p>Technology should be replaced by better technology. To give you some background: I&#x27;ve written games for all kinds of platforms: PocketPC, Windows Mobile, (Desktop) Windows, Linux, OS X, Flash (AS3), HipTop, J2ME devices and some smaller proprietary devices.<p>Some of those platforms offer write once, run everywhere. On other platforms every device has it&#x27;s own quirks and you have to test on every device and implement workarounds.<p>You might not like Flash, but it is great at running on every platform&#x2F;browser with the same code base. If you test it on one platform, it runs on all others. (Adobe is also very good at keeping it backwards compatible)<p>Now, I ask you, what&#x27;s the alternative for Flash? Does HTML5 offer write once, runs the same on every platform&#x2F;browser(version!)? No it doesn&#x27;t, and it never will. Even simple HTML pages are full of browser checking hacks.<p>Now, if you can offer a programming platform where the games I develop on, run exactly the same on every browser, on every platform, I have no problem killing Flash. But let&#x27;s be honest here, only plugins can guarantee such a thing.<p>As to Alex Stamos, the top games on Facebook are all Flash. You know why? Because developers don&#x27;t have to worry whether or not those games will run inside the users browser. Because once Flash is installed, they will run without issues. HTML5? No such guarantee.<p>So before you declare EOL, please have a proper alternative, where I don&#x27;t have to pull my hair and cry all night because browser X on platform Y version Z seems to break the end boss of level 5 in my game because its implementation slightly differs from all the rest.</text></comment> | <story><title>Firefox makes click-to-activate Flash the default</title><url>https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-ons-cause-issues-are-on-blocklist</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>marksc</author><text>Mark from Mozilla here.<p>To be clear, by &quot;blocked&quot; Flash we really mean enforced click-to-activate. User choice is always a #1 priority at Mozilla.<p>We regularly block vulnerable plugins. What made this block different was that we did it before Adobe made an update available. Now that Adobe has released an update, it is no longer true that every version of Flash Player is blocked in Firefox.<p>However, we&#x27;re glad to see the conversation this has sparked. Personally I align with Alex Stamos regarding Flash, in the thinking that a formal EOL would be great.<p>I&#x27;d also like to use this space to make a shameless plug for Shumway, a project set on building a faithful an efficient renderer for the SWF file format without native code assistance. Ending Flash doesn&#x27;t need to mean an end for Flash media. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.areweflashyet.com&#x2F;shumway&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.areweflashyet.com&#x2F;shumway&#x2F;</a><p>Edit: typo</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mangeletti</author><text>Hi Mark,<p>Do you have any interest an organizing an effort, along with Facebook&#x27;s Alex Stamos and other folks, to plan a formal EOL for Flash? Of course, the steps Mozilla and others have taken help, but perhaps a more organized movement could get other thought and market leaders on board, trigger higher rates of HTML5 adoption and foster the bits of remaining innovation that are needed to fully replace Flash on the web.<p>Also, does Firefox plan to address the concerns brought up about Hello, and, more importantly, Pocket?</text></comment> |
18,757,195 | 18,756,358 | 1 | 3 | 18,755,782 | train | <story><title>Show HN: Wiv.js – A library for a more wiggly div</title><url>https://jjkaufman.github.io/wiv.js/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>PavlovsCat</author><text>move these things into initWiv() and cache them:<p><pre><code> var speed = parseFloat(wivCurve.parentNode.dataset.wivSpeed)
var height = parseFloat(wivCurve.parentNode.dataset.wivHeight)
var tightness = parseFloat(wivCurve.parentNode.dataset.wivTightness)
var thickness = parseFloat(wivCurve.parentNode.dataset.wivThickness)
var ctx = wivCurve.getContext(&quot;2d&quot;);
</code></pre>
do this once on init, the canvas context remembers it anyway:<p><pre><code> ctx.strokeStyle = wivCurve.parentNode.dataset.wivColor != undefined ? wivCurve.parentNode.dataset.wivColor : &quot;#FF0000&quot;
</code></pre>
don&#x27;t convert numbers and strings all the time, use numbers and init them to 0<p><pre><code> &#x2F;&#x2F;current frame is tracked on per wiv basis. This is to help with speed calculations
if (parseFloat(wivCurve.dataset.count) &gt; 100000) {
wivCurve.dataset.count = &quot;0&quot;;
}
wivCurve.dataset.count = (wivCurve.dataset.count ? parseFloat(wivCurve.dataset.count) : 0) + speed;
</code></pre>
parseFloat(wivCurve.dataset.count) also is used a lot in that loop.<p>And don&#x27;t set unneccessary canvas state, this should happen only once per draw loop iteration: [edit, actually, as I said above, the canvas contexts remember it individually, so do this once in initWiv(), and not in the draw loop at all, yay!]<p><pre><code> ctx.lineWidth = thickness;
</code></pre>
That&#x27;s all just at first glance, but I bet you, this would help with slow laptops and whatnot :) Such &quot;small&quot; things really add up when you do them 60 times per second * number of borders. I don&#x27;t know if setting the canvas width or height to the value it has anyway to clear it (instead of clearing&#x2F;drawing a rectangle explicitly) is still a useful thing to do, but you might try that as well.</text></comment> | <story><title>Show HN: Wiv.js – A library for a more wiggly div</title><url>https://jjkaufman.github.io/wiv.js/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ryanchoi</author><text>This is guilt-trippingly sweet, there&#x27;s a certain charm I get from this, kind of like that of tacky Christmas sweaters or unironically used comic sans :)</text></comment> |
38,195,973 | 38,195,100 | 1 | 2 | 38,194,359 | train | <story><title>Oil and gas production in Texas produces twice as much methane as in New Mexico</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/nov/08/texas-methane-oil-and-gas-study-climate</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tigerstyle</author><text>My hunch would be that abandoned wells are more responsible for this issue than better regulated new wells. Old wells are more likely to leak, as shown in the link below, are often never checked on, and were often drilled and shut-in when there was a lot less regulation. They can be venting directly to atmosphere, and since natural gas is naturally odorless and wells are often in remote locations, the potential for them to leak a lot of gas for a long time is high.<p>Texas has a lot more historical production of oil and gas, which should result in a lot more old and abandoned wells. That doesn&#x27;t give them a pass, but if this hypothesis is true, this flaring regulation would not have a major impact.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reuters.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;us-usa-drilling-abandoned-specialreport&#x2F;special-report-millions-of-abandoned-oil-wells-are-leaking-methane-a-climate-menace-idUSKBN23N1NL" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reuters.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;us-usa-drilling-abandoned-sp...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Oil and gas production in Texas produces twice as much methane as in New Mexico</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/nov/08/texas-methane-oil-and-gas-study-climate</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>auspiv</author><text>Natural gas (which is of course composed primarily of methane) free takeaway capacity from West Texas is super low. Pipelines are booked solid and and 1-2 new ones are being commissioned yearly (google search for &#x27;Permian natural gas pipeline projects&#x27;).<p>Oil&#x2F;gas companies generally never want to straight up vent (i.e. release directly into the atmosphere) natural gas. It gives no economic value. However, natural gas production is an inevitable byproduct of oil production, especially in the Permian basin shale plays, which can lead to either having to shut-in your oil well, or flare, or vent.<p>I work for an oil&#x2F;gas company that operates in the Permian. Our wells range from ~3000 standard cubic feet per barrel of oil to 10000. Some of our bigger wells produce &gt;1000 barrels of oil per day, which corresponds to 3-10 million cubic feet of natural gas per day. We do not vent unless an emergency situation arises. Even for pigging and other procedures (blow downs, etc.), we capture the natural gas. We do flare if needed, but that is limited. Small amounts of gas gather at the top of oil tanks and rather than risk an explosion (due to lightning and other unpredictable things like that), the small amount of gas is flared. The state of TX has flare limits per day and per month on both a pad and well level.<p>We have also electrified a very large portion of our operations, reducing the amount of natural gas burned to generate electricity (this happens all over the basin). All of our large gathering facilities but one are electric powered. This can be a challenge with gas compressors, which have traditionally been gas powered. Gas compressors are commonly in the 1500-3000 horsepower range each, and there are 4-12 per facility. That&#x27;s a lot of electricity. One facility does have a gas generator powered component, which can be used to kick-start other facilities to get things going again in case of a major, multi-facility shutdown.<p>Long story short - gas doesn&#x27;t have a ton of value in the Permian basin. In decreasing order of preference, operators will want to 1) sell gas, 2) use it to run gas compressors or generators, 3) flare it, or 4) vent it.<p>Some enterprising people have constructed trailers with natural gas generators powering bitcoin miners. This option can be appealing to operators who would otherwise be flaring&#x2F;venting the natural gas. Not sure of the contract commercial terms but presumably it benefits both parties. Straight up burning methane is the same whether it is via flare or generator. Both are better than venting due to the increased greenhouse gas potential of methane vs CO2.</text></comment> |
23,398,824 | 23,398,634 | 1 | 2 | 23,398,115 | train | <story><title>Police Riot</title><url>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_riot</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dang</author><text>Ok, between this one and <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23395852" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23395852</a>, wikipedia submissions to HN have jumped the shark and we need to go back to penalizing them on HN. Generic repetition of the hottest topics is the opposite of what makes a good HN submission.<p>Other recent posts about Wikipedia on HN:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23249978" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23249978</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23117614" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23117614</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23239405" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23239405</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=22990237" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=22990237</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23089041" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23089041</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23274898" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23274898</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Police Riot</title><url>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_riot</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>rz2k</author><text>The 1992 police riot in New York associated with resistance to community review boards and Giuliani&#x27;s mayoral ambitions[1] should probably be on that list.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cato.org&#x2F;publications&#x2F;commentary&#x2F;rudys-racist-rants-nypd-history-lesson" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cato.org&#x2F;publications&#x2F;commentary&#x2F;rudys-racist-ra...</a></text></comment> |
35,115,999 | 35,116,052 | 1 | 2 | 35,113,094 | train | <story><title>OldLinux: Ancient Linux Resources</title><url>http://www.oldlinux.org/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>msla</author><text>Little note: The Minix hard disk clone contains the text string &quot;Copyright Autumnal Water Corp. 1991&quot; which is consistent with a boot sector virus called &quot;Autumnal.3072&quot; so... I don&#x27;t know, don&#x27;t run it in a virtual machine hooked up to any other disk images you care about? This is the first time I&#x27;ve ever found malware on retrocomputing media, and goddamn if I don&#x27;t love the verisimilitude. Don&#x27;t Copy That Floppy and such.<p>I found that with binwalk. Using strings, I found the string &quot;Dis is one half.&quot; which is on Wikipedia:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;OneHalf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;OneHalf</a><p>&gt; OneHalf is a DOS-based polymorphic computer virus (hybrid boot and file infector) discovered in October 1994.[1] It is also known as Slovak Bomber, Freelove or Explosion-II.[2] It infects the master boot record (MBR) of the hard disk, and any files with extensions .COM, .SCR and .EXE.[3] However, it will not infect files that have SCAN, CLEAN, FINDVIRU, GUARD, NOD, VSAFE, MSAV or CHKDSK in the name.[4]<p>[snip]<p>&gt; OneHalf is known for its peculiar payload: at every boot, it encrypts two unencrypted cylinders of the user&#x27;s hard disk, but then temporarily decrypts them when they are accessed. This makes sure the user does not notice that their hard disk is being encrypted like this, and lets the encryption continue further. It also hides the real MBR from programs on the computer, to make detection harder. The encryption is done by bitwise XORing by a randomly generated key, which can be decrypted simply by XORing with the same bit stream again. Once the virus has encrypted half of the disk, and&#x2F;or on the 4th, 8th, 10th, 14th, 18th, 20th, 24th, 28th and 30th of any month and under some other conditions, the virus will display the message:[4]<p><pre><code> Dis is one half.
Press any key to continue ...
</code></pre>
<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;virus.wikidot.com&#x2F;onehalf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;virus.wikidot.com&#x2F;onehalf</a><p>So that&#x27;s at least two different viruses. This thing is more infected than a streetwalker after Fleet Week.</text></comment> | <story><title>OldLinux: Ancient Linux Resources</title><url>http://www.oldlinux.org/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>donio</author><text>Here is the famous Tanenbaum thread:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.oldlinux.org&#x2F;Linux.old&#x2F;docs&#x2F;linux_is_obsolete.txt" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.oldlinux.org&#x2F;Linux.old&#x2F;docs&#x2F;linux_is_obsolete.txt</a><p>It&#x27;s in RMAIL&#x2F;BABYL format, open it with C-u M-x rmail and then h for the summary view. Or just read it as text.</text></comment> |
15,767,584 | 15,766,566 | 1 | 2 | 15,765,990 | train | <story><title>Windows 10 switchover will cost Linux champion Munich €50m</title><url>https://www.techrepublic.com/article/windows-10-switchover-will-cost-linux-champion-munich-50m/?ftag=COS-05-10aaa0g&utm_campaign=trueAnthem%3A%20Trending%20Content&utm_content=5a14ac6f00bd470007dd3c20&utm_medium=trueAnthem&utm_source=twitter</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tw04</author><text>That&#x27;s not at all what it says. The cost of moving to Windows and office is ~€5 million:<p>&gt;€ 4.8 million and licenses (for Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office, software distribution,<p>The €50 is for hardware replacements that were going to happen anyway.<p>Nothing in the article addresses the harder to track costs of user efficiency and expert support staff. I&#x27;m not claiming it&#x27;s cheaper in either direction, but staffing costs are a very, very real cost.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>merb</author><text>Costs are as follow:<p><pre><code> - 14 Mio € for personal costs
- 24 Mio € for consulting (not sure why that is that high?!)
- 13,4 Mio € for it@M services (support, hardware installation, etc it@M is the it company that manages the project)
- 4,8 Mio € for HARDWARE
- 29,9 Mio € for Licenses (Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office, software delivery, License-, Print-, and Profile Management, identity management and extension of the virtualisation environment)
</code></pre>
(to be fair the pdf quotes that a big cost will be the investment into additional virtualisation, probably licenses)<p>Source: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ris-muenchen.de&#x2F;RII&#x2F;RII&#x2F;DOK&#x2F;SITZUNGSVORLAGE&#x2F;4740966.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ris-muenchen.de&#x2F;RII&#x2F;RII&#x2F;DOK&#x2F;SITZUNGSVORLAGE&#x2F;4740...</a><p>Somebody read over the &#x27;and&#x27; (edit:) and to be fair it&#x27;s a wierd way of expressing something that is so important in german. probably an intention.</text></comment> | <story><title>Windows 10 switchover will cost Linux champion Munich €50m</title><url>https://www.techrepublic.com/article/windows-10-switchover-will-cost-linux-champion-munich-50m/?ftag=COS-05-10aaa0g&utm_campaign=trueAnthem%3A%20Trending%20Content&utm_content=5a14ac6f00bd470007dd3c20&utm_medium=trueAnthem&utm_source=twitter</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tw04</author><text>That&#x27;s not at all what it says. The cost of moving to Windows and office is ~€5 million:<p>&gt;€ 4.8 million and licenses (for Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office, software distribution,<p>The €50 is for hardware replacements that were going to happen anyway.<p>Nothing in the article addresses the harder to track costs of user efficiency and expert support staff. I&#x27;m not claiming it&#x27;s cheaper in either direction, but staffing costs are a very, very real cost.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mijoharas</author><text>From the text:<p>&gt; the former open-source champion would pay €49.3 million to create a new Windows 10 client OS<p>I don&#x27;t know what you mean by calling a &quot;new client OS&quot; &quot;hardware replacements that were going to happen anyway&quot;.<p>I find the sentence confusing itself, as the OS would be microsoft, maybe they mean a distribution with preinstalled software? Either way, I don&#x27;t read it to mean hardware replacemens</text></comment> |
36,345,717 | 36,345,615 | 1 | 2 | 36,345,288 | train | <story><title>Ask HN: What are some of the best Reddit alternatives?</title><text>Ask HN: What are some of the best Reddit alternatives?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>pc86</author><text>Going outside is a really good one.<p>Honestly, I was late to the Reddit train, didn&#x27;t join until 2015 or 2016 or so. I noticed a marked decline in my overall mental well-being but I really did feel addicted to it. For several reasons I stopped using it a few years ago and I can&#x27;t think of a single thing that&#x27;s worse off than before.<p>Unless you&#x27;re running ads and using traffic from Reddit to fuel your business, you&#x27;re not getting any value out of it. I&#x27;d see something on HN and it would be <i>weeks</i> at best before it would pop up on any of the technical&#x2F;programming subs, and the conversation was always 1&#x2F;10 the quality of here.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Niksko</author><text>This is not a good take for the things that Reddit really excelled at: niche hobbies. Mechanical keyboards, mushroom cultivation, home brewing, just to name a few of my interests. None of that gets much traction on HN, nor outside unless your friends happen to have the same interests. Discord has a bit of that content, but I find Discord harder to engage with because it feels a bit more synchronous and time sensitive.</text></comment> | <story><title>Ask HN: What are some of the best Reddit alternatives?</title><text>Ask HN: What are some of the best Reddit alternatives?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>pc86</author><text>Going outside is a really good one.<p>Honestly, I was late to the Reddit train, didn&#x27;t join until 2015 or 2016 or so. I noticed a marked decline in my overall mental well-being but I really did feel addicted to it. For several reasons I stopped using it a few years ago and I can&#x27;t think of a single thing that&#x27;s worse off than before.<p>Unless you&#x27;re running ads and using traffic from Reddit to fuel your business, you&#x27;re not getting any value out of it. I&#x27;d see something on HN and it would be <i>weeks</i> at best before it would pop up on any of the technical&#x2F;programming subs, and the conversation was always 1&#x2F;10 the quality of here.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>_oce_</author><text>Disagree, while it&#x27;s obviously bad to spend all of your free time on a screen, there are some good middle sized subreddits that provided me value for my job or my hobbies.</text></comment> |
16,464,110 | 16,460,137 | 2 | 3 | 16,459,236 | train | <story><title>Differential Privacy for Dummies (2016)</title><url>https://robertovitillo.com/2016/07/29/differential-privacy-for-dummies/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lalaland1125</author><text>One very interesting thing about differential privacy is its connection to generalizability in machine learning. In particular, a model can only provide differential privacy if that model is completely generalizable. Generalizability is the ability of a model to do well on data outside its training set. Non generalized models violate differential privacy because you can find out if someone is in the training set by simply measuring the error rate on that person. A low error rate provides evidence that that particular person was in the training set.<p>This connection is interesting because it implies that differential privacy techniques applied to machine learning must in turn result in more generalizable models, which is very useful in general. This can also provide a simple &quot;upper bound&quot; on how differentialy private your model is. Simply compare the performance on the training and test set and see how much it differs.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jaster</author><text>Fun coincidence (or maybe not?), I just stumbled upon the following paper on arvix titled &quot;Differentially Private Generative Adversarial Network&quot; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;1802.06739v1.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;1802.06739v1.pdf</a><p>Its Related Work section also references some works on &quot;differentially private learning in neural network&quot;.<p>While the paper does not discuss directly OP remark about how differential privacy could help generality in machine learning, it shows that at least some connections exist between the domains.</text></comment> | <story><title>Differential Privacy for Dummies (2016)</title><url>https://robertovitillo.com/2016/07/29/differential-privacy-for-dummies/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lalaland1125</author><text>One very interesting thing about differential privacy is its connection to generalizability in machine learning. In particular, a model can only provide differential privacy if that model is completely generalizable. Generalizability is the ability of a model to do well on data outside its training set. Non generalized models violate differential privacy because you can find out if someone is in the training set by simply measuring the error rate on that person. A low error rate provides evidence that that particular person was in the training set.<p>This connection is interesting because it implies that differential privacy techniques applied to machine learning must in turn result in more generalizable models, which is very useful in general. This can also provide a simple &quot;upper bound&quot; on how differentialy private your model is. Simply compare the performance on the training and test set and see how much it differs.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>maksimum</author><text>&gt; This can also provide a simple &quot;upper bound&quot; on how differentialy private your model is.<p>This is a very interesting idea. Are you aware of any resources that go through the mechanics?</text></comment> |
12,165,666 | 12,165,022 | 1 | 2 | 12,161,693 | train | <story><title>Ask HN: Why don't companies hire programmers for fewer hours per day?</title><text>Hello<p>Maybe this question doesn&#x27;t properly apply to USA programmers since labor laws are a little different there, but let me try.<p>Rationale: we always discuss how programming makes us tired and stressed, how often we spend hours and hours per day just procrastinating or being completely unproductive while still trying to be. Also, we often discuss how programmers get paid nice salaries in comparison with most other professions. This leads me to the conclusion: I&#x27;d probably be very happy to take a 25% (or more) salary cut if I had to work 25% (or more) less. I mean, 8 hours per day is a lot and it&#x27;s very rare for me to have a fully productive day. If I moved to 6 hours per day, I&#x27;m not even sure if I&#x27;d become less productive, I&#x27;d probably just spend less time chatting at the coffee room, and have a smaller chance to get burnout. Maybe a little less productive, but the company would be saving some money with me, and if they did this to other 3 people they would be able to hire another 6h&#x2F;day programmer to balance things, maybe making the result even positive for them.<p>But, considering that no company does this, it looks like this isn&#x27;t a good idea for employers. Why? Why do companies try to squeeze all the possible juice from employees instead of the alternative where they pay a little less, require a little less, and the employee becomes much more happy?<p>And the question to the workers: wouldn&#x27;t you accept a proportional salary reduction for a proportional time-spent-inside-the-office-doing-whatever reduction?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>Piskvorrr</author><text>Quoting TMMM as a justification for product death march? Wow.<p>A programmer who works 55 hours a week will produce twice as much code - but for how long? Once fatigue settles in (a few weeks in), you&#x27;re back at the 40-hour productivity levels, just paying it at 55-hour rates (and organizational overhead for overtime, oooh boy!), plus burning out the developers (and organizational overhead for employee churn).<p>Your assumption is that 55 hour weeks are sustainable: just change this number in the spreadsheet from 40 to 55, and voila! And while we&#x27;re at it, why not 80? Why not 200? Very PHB-ish, in my unhumble opinion.</text></item><item><author>dustingetz</author><text>Mythical man month says that even if longer hours have diminishing returns, the organizational overhead from adding people to the team is worse - fewer people with longer hours is the better alternative.<p>Here I will quote a HN post which quotes a secondary source which analyses mythical man month<p><i>&quot;From a business point of view, long hours by programmers are a key to profitability. Suppose that a programmer needs to spend 25 hours per week keeping current with new technology, getting coordinated with other programmers, contributing to documentation and thought leadership pieces, and comprehending the structures of the systems being extended. Under this assumption, a programmer who works 55 hours per week will produce twice as much code as one who works 40 hours per week. In The Mythical Man-Month, the only great book ever written on software engineering, Fred Brooks concludes that no software product should be designed by more than two people. He argues that a program designed by more than two people might be more complete but it will never be easy to understand because it will not be as consistent as something designed by fewer people. This means that if you want to follow the best practices of the industry in terms of design and architecture, the only way to improve speed to market is to have the same people working longer hours. Finally there is the common sense notion that the smaller the team the less management overhead. A product is going to get out the door much faster if it is built by 4 people working 70-hour weeks (180 productive programmer-hours per week, after subtracting for 25 hours of coordination and structure comprehension time) than if by 12 people working 40-hour weeks (the same net of 180 hours per week). The 12-person team will inevitably require additional managers and all-day meetings to stay coordinated.</i>&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=3547965" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=3547965</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>skywhopper</author><text>One of the points of TMMM is that communication and coordination overhead is a cost and a risk and that it grows exponentially in relation to the number of programmers you have. So, you won&#x27;t get double the productivity out of twice as many programmers (unless they&#x27;re on unrelated projects--but more projects == more overhead as well).<p>200 hour weeks would be quite unsustainable, indeed. Forget not sleeping, where do you get the other 32 hours?</text></comment> | <story><title>Ask HN: Why don't companies hire programmers for fewer hours per day?</title><text>Hello<p>Maybe this question doesn&#x27;t properly apply to USA programmers since labor laws are a little different there, but let me try.<p>Rationale: we always discuss how programming makes us tired and stressed, how often we spend hours and hours per day just procrastinating or being completely unproductive while still trying to be. Also, we often discuss how programmers get paid nice salaries in comparison with most other professions. This leads me to the conclusion: I&#x27;d probably be very happy to take a 25% (or more) salary cut if I had to work 25% (or more) less. I mean, 8 hours per day is a lot and it&#x27;s very rare for me to have a fully productive day. If I moved to 6 hours per day, I&#x27;m not even sure if I&#x27;d become less productive, I&#x27;d probably just spend less time chatting at the coffee room, and have a smaller chance to get burnout. Maybe a little less productive, but the company would be saving some money with me, and if they did this to other 3 people they would be able to hire another 6h&#x2F;day programmer to balance things, maybe making the result even positive for them.<p>But, considering that no company does this, it looks like this isn&#x27;t a good idea for employers. Why? Why do companies try to squeeze all the possible juice from employees instead of the alternative where they pay a little less, require a little less, and the employee becomes much more happy?<p>And the question to the workers: wouldn&#x27;t you accept a proportional salary reduction for a proportional time-spent-inside-the-office-doing-whatever reduction?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>Piskvorrr</author><text>Quoting TMMM as a justification for product death march? Wow.<p>A programmer who works 55 hours a week will produce twice as much code - but for how long? Once fatigue settles in (a few weeks in), you&#x27;re back at the 40-hour productivity levels, just paying it at 55-hour rates (and organizational overhead for overtime, oooh boy!), plus burning out the developers (and organizational overhead for employee churn).<p>Your assumption is that 55 hour weeks are sustainable: just change this number in the spreadsheet from 40 to 55, and voila! And while we&#x27;re at it, why not 80? Why not 200? Very PHB-ish, in my unhumble opinion.</text></item><item><author>dustingetz</author><text>Mythical man month says that even if longer hours have diminishing returns, the organizational overhead from adding people to the team is worse - fewer people with longer hours is the better alternative.<p>Here I will quote a HN post which quotes a secondary source which analyses mythical man month<p><i>&quot;From a business point of view, long hours by programmers are a key to profitability. Suppose that a programmer needs to spend 25 hours per week keeping current with new technology, getting coordinated with other programmers, contributing to documentation and thought leadership pieces, and comprehending the structures of the systems being extended. Under this assumption, a programmer who works 55 hours per week will produce twice as much code as one who works 40 hours per week. In The Mythical Man-Month, the only great book ever written on software engineering, Fred Brooks concludes that no software product should be designed by more than two people. He argues that a program designed by more than two people might be more complete but it will never be easy to understand because it will not be as consistent as something designed by fewer people. This means that if you want to follow the best practices of the industry in terms of design and architecture, the only way to improve speed to market is to have the same people working longer hours. Finally there is the common sense notion that the smaller the team the less management overhead. A product is going to get out the door much faster if it is built by 4 people working 70-hour weeks (180 productive programmer-hours per week, after subtracting for 25 hours of coordination and structure comprehension time) than if by 12 people working 40-hour weeks (the same net of 180 hours per week). The 12-person team will inevitably require additional managers and all-day meetings to stay coordinated.</i>&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=3547965" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=3547965</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mannykannot</author><text>MMM is actually an important part of the answer, and it is unfortunate that it was presented this way (death marches are deprecated for their own reasons.) The right way to think of this is to consider four people each working two hours a day on the same problem. Sustained effort and focus matter.<p>This is most true for tasks that are more intellectually demanding, like the development of large-scale software (which is what Brooks was writing about.) The more routine a task is, the easier it is to divide it up (though that is rarely to the benefit of the worker.)</text></comment> |
7,655,046 | 7,654,893 | 1 | 3 | 7,654,601 | train | <story><title>“Mostly functional” programming does not work</title><url>http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?ref=rss&id=2611829</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>yason</author><text>I think that &quot;Mostly functional&quot; is actually the sweet spot.<p>Going to any extreme makes some things horribly difficult and going to another does the same for other things. So, optimally, multiple paradigms coexist in the single codebase, applied where they&#x27;re most useful.<p>Functional programming with as many immutable bits as possible is definitely a good start. I generally do that for whatever problem I&#x27;m solving: I have a model for the data and then I write (if at all possible) pure functions to transform the inputs into meaningful outputs. But then you need know where to drop the ball and move over to some other paradigm that does something else right and merely drives the functional parts from the top level.<p>For example, such a data analysis library can be written with minimal state and using only pure functions but if -- and when -- you need some sort of an user interface so that the program can actually be used, an imperative&#x2F;procedural approach is generally the most native approach because UIs are basically I&#x2F;O. If you&#x27;re adding a graphical user interface, you might use object oriented approach to build the UI tree which is probably the world&#x27;s most idiomatic, canonical use for OO anyway. But even those are generally driven with an innately imperative event loop.<p>Also, note that the different approaches or paradigms aren&#x27;t language specific either.<p>In the first stage, languages are tools that shape your thinking into accepting new programming paradigms but at some point you have a number of different ways of thinking in your head, and you can just forget about the languages they came from.<p>But in the second stage, you can just think directly in paradigms: you can consider different ways to build different parts of your program but you might actually use only one language to implement everything. You can write functional, imperative, object-oriented, and whatever code in C. Or you can use several languages with strengths in each paradigm, depending on what trade-offs produce the best engineering in each case.</text></comment> | <story><title>“Mostly functional” programming does not work</title><url>http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?ref=rss&id=2611829</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Kutta</author><text>I disagree with some of the sentiment expressed in the article; mostly functional programming works much better than profoundly non-functional code, and more functional programming usually delivers marginal benefits.<p>The fact that effects can be used to simulate other effects does not imply that programmers would typically try doing that. In fact, programming style is more often shaped by trivial inconveniences (often syntactic, or the availability of certain libraries) than most of us care to admit. A programming language that merely <i>discourages</i> people from writing spaghetti code should still cause less spaghetti code being written. Freak bugs will pop up from time to time, but not as often.<p>Shifting an existing language to a more functional style should be a net negative thing only if the resulting extra complexity and bloat gets excessive. Starting from an OOP&#x2F;imperative position, it gets harder and harder to support an additional (marginal) piece of FP functionality, and after a while it&#x27;s just better to start over and switch to pure FP, but current OOP languages flirting with FP are not particularly close to that point. They haven&#x27;t started in earnest to introduce purity to an impure core language (which would be rather awkward, as the article points out). In this situation it is somewhat early to talk about mostly functional programming not working.<p>Scala might be closest to the point of excessive bloat, but I&#x27;m not really familiar with it, and I think that the FP support there is a good thing, especially in contrast to the Java code that it might displace.<p>(Disclaimer: I program chiefly in Haskell and I love it).</text></comment> |
10,546,840 | 10,546,414 | 1 | 3 | 10,537,801 | train | <story><title>Why Obama did not stop NSA domestic surveillance</title><url>http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/11/barack-obama-lawyer-in-chief-213342</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>duncan_bayne</author><text>Don&#x27;t knock that approach - it&#x27;s known as Sortition ( <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Sortition" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Sortition</a> ) and I&#x27;m personally convinced that it&#x27;s a much better way of achieving democracy than any other.</text></item><item><author>mjevans</author><text>A more reasonable explanation is that irrespective of what he might &#x2F;want&#x2F; to do, he doesn&#x27;t actually have sufficient power to do anything about the actions, assuming he&#x27;s actually being accurately briefed on the matter.<p>It&#x27;s probably more a symptom of how absolutely useless and ineffective at doing anything than consuming money to be elected for corporate interests the US congress has become.<p>I think at this point I might actually be better served by having representatives and senators selected at &#x2F;random&#x2F; from the entire populace.</text></item><item><author>steve19</author><text>The charitable explanation, which this article seems to imply, is that he suddenly discovers how important these programs are and how much is at stake.<p>The less charitable explanation, since it&#x27;s hard to believe he fundamentally agrees deep down with these programs, is that he is just another politicians and the guaranteed political fallout from surveillance and drones was far less than the catastrophic career-ending political fallout from a major terrorist attack (after dismantling surveillance programs). He chose the option that he thought would give him a second term (and then a gold plated public speaking career after the White House).<p>I would say his gambit paid off. The right would never love him, the left had no one else and in any case they had fallen so deeply in love with the Idea of him.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>huherto</author><text>I would like an approach where we randomly select &quot;electors&quot;. They are sequestered, listen to the arguments of the candidates, hold several election rounds and finally come out with he elected officials. Like a jury. They would be dismissed after that.</text></comment> | <story><title>Why Obama did not stop NSA domestic surveillance</title><url>http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/11/barack-obama-lawyer-in-chief-213342</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>duncan_bayne</author><text>Don&#x27;t knock that approach - it&#x27;s known as Sortition ( <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Sortition" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Sortition</a> ) and I&#x27;m personally convinced that it&#x27;s a much better way of achieving democracy than any other.</text></item><item><author>mjevans</author><text>A more reasonable explanation is that irrespective of what he might &#x2F;want&#x2F; to do, he doesn&#x27;t actually have sufficient power to do anything about the actions, assuming he&#x27;s actually being accurately briefed on the matter.<p>It&#x27;s probably more a symptom of how absolutely useless and ineffective at doing anything than consuming money to be elected for corporate interests the US congress has become.<p>I think at this point I might actually be better served by having representatives and senators selected at &#x2F;random&#x2F; from the entire populace.</text></item><item><author>steve19</author><text>The charitable explanation, which this article seems to imply, is that he suddenly discovers how important these programs are and how much is at stake.<p>The less charitable explanation, since it&#x27;s hard to believe he fundamentally agrees deep down with these programs, is that he is just another politicians and the guaranteed political fallout from surveillance and drones was far less than the catastrophic career-ending political fallout from a major terrorist attack (after dismantling surveillance programs). He chose the option that he thought would give him a second term (and then a gold plated public speaking career after the White House).<p>I would say his gambit paid off. The right would never love him, the left had no one else and in any case they had fallen so deeply in love with the Idea of him.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>irixusr</author><text>I&#x27;ve argued for it for a few years but most people are aghast at the suggestion...</text></comment> |
33,442,351 | 33,441,449 | 1 | 2 | 33,436,918 | train | <story><title>SpaceX is now building a Raptor engine a day, NASA says</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/11/spacex-is-now-building-a-raptor-engine-a-day-nasa-says/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Moissanite</author><text>This is what baffles me about the current space-travel fetish. We know what&#x27;s up there - <i>basically nothing at all</i>. Even if you go to another planet and mine for raw materials, bringing material back isn&#x27;t even remotely economically feasible and is unlikely to become so in any of our lifetimes.<p>Going to space in the 1960s made sense from the perspective of scientific advancement, and let&#x27;s be honest, showing off. Now, we realize that the world has serious problems - but the people with influence are decidedly un-serious and so would rather continue to show off instead of fixing the mess they helped to create.</text></item><item><author>tsimionescu</author><text>That plan will not work, as there is nothing that could possibly be gained by flying thousands of rockets to Mars: there is nothing worth having on Mars.</text></item><item><author>cryptoz</author><text>The Mars plans <i>are</i> medium-term, though, and they need many thousands of Starships+Boosters for that plan to work. In the short-term, SpaceX is &#x27;behind&#x27; on launching Starlink, especially v2 which is needed to fulfill the promises of the network and be profitable (and v2 can only launch on Starship).<p>In the short term, they need hundreds of full stage rockets, and in the medium term, thousands. That&#x27;s <i>tens of thousands</i> of engines needed in the next ~10 years. I don&#x27;t think 1&#x2F;day is fast enough and I&#x27;m sure they will increase that rate as soon as possible.<p>Also for testing, SpaceX doesn&#x27;t want to be afraid of blowing up rockets and losing engines, so the first few hundred engines will likely not be reused.</text></item><item><author>GuB-42</author><text>This is great but... what are they goig to do with so many Raptors?<p>SpaceX is following a &quot;fully reusable&quot; strategy, I am not even sure if the BFR booster has an expendable option, Starship may be expendable but it is clearly not the configuration they are pushing for. And yet, SpaceX is producing these engines as if they were consumables.<p>We only need so many launches, especially super heavy rocket launches before we run out of payload. And if they build as many rockets as they have engines for, where are they going to store them? What about the launch pads? Etc...<p>I am not criticizing SpaceX strategy, I know that Musk is a fan of assembly lines, for a lot of good reasons, so maybe they are just making so many engines just because they can, or so that they can blow them up later during testing (another SpaceX hallmark), but I am curious about their medium term strategy (i.e. after Starship is operational but before crazy projects like Mars settlements).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>signatoremo</author><text>Huh? We do not know what is up there. That’s the whole point of exploration. We don’t even fully know what our planet has.<p>The world is and will always be a mess. That’s the nature of human being, we have different ideas, priorities, mindset. We can’t stop progress in an area just to fix some other areas. Besides, it is baffling that space is always singled out when it comes to fixing earth’s issues. Why not says, divert all resources of the video gaming industry to fixing climate; stopping all sporting competition, especially professional ones, for the same goal? That’s of course straw man and unrealistic argument, but space skeptics repeat the same argument on every single space discussion.</text></comment> | <story><title>SpaceX is now building a Raptor engine a day, NASA says</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/11/spacex-is-now-building-a-raptor-engine-a-day-nasa-says/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Moissanite</author><text>This is what baffles me about the current space-travel fetish. We know what&#x27;s up there - <i>basically nothing at all</i>. Even if you go to another planet and mine for raw materials, bringing material back isn&#x27;t even remotely economically feasible and is unlikely to become so in any of our lifetimes.<p>Going to space in the 1960s made sense from the perspective of scientific advancement, and let&#x27;s be honest, showing off. Now, we realize that the world has serious problems - but the people with influence are decidedly un-serious and so would rather continue to show off instead of fixing the mess they helped to create.</text></item><item><author>tsimionescu</author><text>That plan will not work, as there is nothing that could possibly be gained by flying thousands of rockets to Mars: there is nothing worth having on Mars.</text></item><item><author>cryptoz</author><text>The Mars plans <i>are</i> medium-term, though, and they need many thousands of Starships+Boosters for that plan to work. In the short-term, SpaceX is &#x27;behind&#x27; on launching Starlink, especially v2 which is needed to fulfill the promises of the network and be profitable (and v2 can only launch on Starship).<p>In the short term, they need hundreds of full stage rockets, and in the medium term, thousands. That&#x27;s <i>tens of thousands</i> of engines needed in the next ~10 years. I don&#x27;t think 1&#x2F;day is fast enough and I&#x27;m sure they will increase that rate as soon as possible.<p>Also for testing, SpaceX doesn&#x27;t want to be afraid of blowing up rockets and losing engines, so the first few hundred engines will likely not be reused.</text></item><item><author>GuB-42</author><text>This is great but... what are they goig to do with so many Raptors?<p>SpaceX is following a &quot;fully reusable&quot; strategy, I am not even sure if the BFR booster has an expendable option, Starship may be expendable but it is clearly not the configuration they are pushing for. And yet, SpaceX is producing these engines as if they were consumables.<p>We only need so many launches, especially super heavy rocket launches before we run out of payload. And if they build as many rockets as they have engines for, where are they going to store them? What about the launch pads? Etc...<p>I am not criticizing SpaceX strategy, I know that Musk is a fan of assembly lines, for a lot of good reasons, so maybe they are just making so many engines just because they can, or so that they can blow them up later during testing (another SpaceX hallmark), but I am curious about their medium term strategy (i.e. after Starship is operational but before crazy projects like Mars settlements).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Me1000</author><text>People were talking about &quot;the world&#x27;s problems&quot; in the 60s too. Fortunately we still went to the moon and inspired generations of people to quite literally reach for the stars. The idea that we could simply reallocate the relatively small number of resources currently used for spaceflight, and that would make some meaningful impact in the world&#x27;s problems is silly. There will always be new problems on Earth to solve.</text></comment> |
14,215,457 | 14,215,581 | 1 | 2 | 14,213,540 | train | <story><title>Write Fast Apps Using Async Python 3.6 and Redis</title><url>https://eng.paxos.com/write-fast-apps-using-async-python-3.6-and-redis</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Waterluvian</author><text>I get that everyone&#x27;s responses are thinking some big public thing. I&#x27;m thinking small toy implementation for my home network.<p>The toy experiment is how to do what&#x27;s trivial in Node with Python. Mainly because I like working with python. I think the answer might be: Python is the wrong tool for the job.</text></item><item><author>bobbyi_settv</author><text>You normally use something like redis to store the state.<p>If you were going to share state in memory between threads, how would you handle the case where the second request goes to a different server or that the process has restarted? You&#x27;d need redis anyway, so you might as well just use it in all cases.</text></item><item><author>Waterluvian</author><text>I have never found a good example of a Python web server that provides some mechanism for statefulness. Is it just fundamentally not possible to have shared state among requests handled by the threads of a process? Sanic&#x27;s examples seem to be the same as Flask&#x27;s: self-contained function calls attached to endpoints.<p>I keep hitting a wall with Python when I want to do something like:<p>1. subscribe to a websocket connection and keep the last received message in state
2. expose an http endpoint to let a client GET that last message.</text></item><item><author>erikcw</author><text>We&#x27;ve just recently started using Sanic[0] paired with Redis to great effect for a very high throughput web service. It also uses Python 3 asyncio&#x2F;uvloop at its core. So far very happy with it.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;channelcat&#x2F;sanic" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;channelcat&#x2F;sanic</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rcarmo</author><text>Erm, no. You can do shared thread storage, in Python, it&#x27;s just that it doesn&#x27;t really scale. I&#x27;ve done it for small daemons without significant hassle, and even wrote my own Go-like CSP helper: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;rcarmo&#x2F;python-utils&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;taskkit.py" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;rcarmo&#x2F;python-utils&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;taskkit.p...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Write Fast Apps Using Async Python 3.6 and Redis</title><url>https://eng.paxos.com/write-fast-apps-using-async-python-3.6-and-redis</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Waterluvian</author><text>I get that everyone&#x27;s responses are thinking some big public thing. I&#x27;m thinking small toy implementation for my home network.<p>The toy experiment is how to do what&#x27;s trivial in Node with Python. Mainly because I like working with python. I think the answer might be: Python is the wrong tool for the job.</text></item><item><author>bobbyi_settv</author><text>You normally use something like redis to store the state.<p>If you were going to share state in memory between threads, how would you handle the case where the second request goes to a different server or that the process has restarted? You&#x27;d need redis anyway, so you might as well just use it in all cases.</text></item><item><author>Waterluvian</author><text>I have never found a good example of a Python web server that provides some mechanism for statefulness. Is it just fundamentally not possible to have shared state among requests handled by the threads of a process? Sanic&#x27;s examples seem to be the same as Flask&#x27;s: self-contained function calls attached to endpoints.<p>I keep hitting a wall with Python when I want to do something like:<p>1. subscribe to a websocket connection and keep the last received message in state
2. expose an http endpoint to let a client GET that last message.</text></item><item><author>erikcw</author><text>We&#x27;ve just recently started using Sanic[0] paired with Redis to great effect for a very high throughput web service. It also uses Python 3 asyncio&#x2F;uvloop at its core. So far very happy with it.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;channelcat&#x2F;sanic" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;channelcat&#x2F;sanic</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>zeptomu</author><text>The problem is that accessing shared state concurrently in a multi-process context is a non-trivial problem, so specific software emerged that handles these problems for you.<p>The simplest solution is to use a small DB system like sqlite. It is built into Python (import sqlite3) performs reasonably well and you do not have to run an additional service.<p>Now if a small DB like sqlite already feels overblown to you (and it really <i>is</i> simple and small) you might not need concurrent access either, so the simplest solution is to just use a file where you store your state.</text></comment> |
32,024,803 | 32,024,666 | 1 | 3 | 32,022,773 | train | <story><title>Apple, Google, Facebook's AV1 standards group under EU antitrust investigation</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-eu-antitrust-regulators-probing-tech-group-aoms-video-licensing-policy-2022-07-07/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nightpool</author><text>If the EU finds royalty-free patent ceasefire clauses to be anti-competitive, then the entire foundation of standards-based interoperability for the web is at stake. These schemes underlie everything—even something as simple as addEventListener(&#x27;touchstart&#x27;). And the entire realm of software encoding schemes has been poisoned by patent royalty schemes for far too long. I cannot think of anything worse for the state of media encoding on the web than regulator intervention to maintain that status quo.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>IfOnlyYouKnew</author><text>This is the nutgraph:<p>“ The Commission has information that AOM and its members may be imposing licensing terms (mandatory royalty-free cross licensing) on innovators that were not a part of AOM at the time of the creation of the AV1 technical, but whose patents are deemed essential to (its) technical specifications,&quot; the paper said.<p>This concern is certainly valid, i. e. it is logically consistent. I would tend to agree with the sentiment that standardization is net-positive, but I know next to nothing about the commercial aspects happening behind the scenes of these processes.</text></comment> | <story><title>Apple, Google, Facebook's AV1 standards group under EU antitrust investigation</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-eu-antitrust-regulators-probing-tech-group-aoms-video-licensing-policy-2022-07-07/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nightpool</author><text>If the EU finds royalty-free patent ceasefire clauses to be anti-competitive, then the entire foundation of standards-based interoperability for the web is at stake. These schemes underlie everything—even something as simple as addEventListener(&#x27;touchstart&#x27;). And the entire realm of software encoding schemes has been poisoned by patent royalty schemes for far too long. I cannot think of anything worse for the state of media encoding on the web than regulator intervention to maintain that status quo.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>yalogin</author><text>I was confused reading the article, seeing your comment makes me at ease that I read the article correctly. I too don’t get why the EU needs to intervene when they are making things better.</text></comment> |
26,207,167 | 26,207,164 | 1 | 2 | 26,206,132 | train | <story><title>Teardown of a quartz crystal oscillator and the tiny IC inside</title><url>https://www.righto.com/2021/02/teardown-of-quartz-crystal-oscillator.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tlb</author><text>I just spent some time understanding the shape of the quartz crystal (don&#x27;t be fooled by the broken disk in the picture -- it was originally a circular disk.)<p>I expected a tuning fork shape. Which indeed are used for low-frequency crystals like 32 kHz.<p>This one is a disk that vibrates in shear mode. The crystal is cut on an angle (about 35 degrees) to the crystal grain structure. When voltage is applied across the thickness of the disk, it creates a force parallel to the crystal axis. The crystal is extremely stiff in compression, so it can&#x27;t get thinner, but it can shear so the top moves one way and the bottom moves the other.<p>The reason behind this complicated setup is that it&#x27;s the most stable over temperature. The stiffness of any material changes with temperature, but when you get the angles exactly right the changes cancel out.<p>Further reading:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Crystal_oscillator#Crystal_structures_and_materials" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Crystal_oscillator#Crystal_str...</a>
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jauch.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;en&#x2F;its-all-about-the-angle-the-at-cut-for-quartz-crystals&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jauch.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;en&#x2F;its-all-about-the-angle-the-at...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Teardown of a quartz crystal oscillator and the tiny IC inside</title><url>https://www.righto.com/2021/02/teardown-of-quartz-crystal-oscillator.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tedd4u</author><text>If you&#x27;re interested in this, watch this [1] very in-depth 1943 movie called &quot;Crystals go to War&quot; which documents crystal oscillator manufacturing step by step. Honestly, I was amazed by this. I tend to think of technology as pretty primitive in the 40s but this is a great reminder of how sophisticated technology could be even back then.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=fKprsCNLUlE" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=fKprsCNLUlE</a></text></comment> |
16,748,596 | 16,748,794 | 1 | 2 | 16,747,928 | train | <story><title>Intel won’t release Spectre patches for some older chips after all</title><url>https://liliputing.com/2018/04/intel-wont-release-spectre-patches-for-some-older-chips-after-all.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>DCKing</author><text>The support list [1] is weird. Gulftown (Core i7) and Westmere-EP (Xeon) are essentially the same chips yet only the latter is patched. The distinction between Gulftown and Westmere-EP actually was barely ever made until now. And Intel&#x27;s confusing product line has lasted until today - the Xeon W3690 is apparently Gulftown (the only Xeon) and is not patched [2], yet the Xeon W3670 and W3680 are Westmere-EP and will receive their microcode updates [3].<p>According to this document, make sure to read your CPU&#x27;s model numbers carefully. It doesn&#x27;t reflect well on Intel that the line does <i>not</i> appear to be drawn based on technical capability, but apparently on contractual obligations.<p>Many CPUs in the unsupported list still make very serviceable hardware in 2018. It&#x27;s a shame a security issue will only add to their obsoletion, or make people using this hardware more vulnerable. Spectre variant 2 is difficult to exploit in practice, but that sounds like some famous last words.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;newsroom.intel.com&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;sites&#x2F;11&#x2F;2018&#x2F;04&#x2F;microcode-update-guidance.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;newsroom.intel.com&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;sites&#x2F;11&#x2F;2018&#x2F;...</a><p>[2]: On page 8<p>[3]: On page 16</text></comment> | <story><title>Intel won’t release Spectre patches for some older chips after all</title><url>https://liliputing.com/2018/04/intel-wont-release-spectre-patches-for-some-older-chips-after-all.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ken</author><text>This list includes the base model CPU in the 2009, 2010, and 2012 Mac Pros, as well as some of the BTO upgrades. I&#x27;m disappointed, but not surprised.<p>The 2012 Mac Pros, in particular, were still being sold less than 5 years ago, so this means it&#x27;s still officially supported by Apple. I wonder if there&#x27;s some awkward conversations happening between the two companies about that.<p>Fortunately, it&#x27;s possible to upgrade the CPU in a Mac Pro to a newer part which is still supported by Intel.</text></comment> |
5,892,744 | 5,892,774 | 1 | 2 | 5,892,341 | train | <story><title>Priced out of Paris</title><url>http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/a096d1d0-d2ec-11e2-aac2-00144feab7de.html#axzz2WSyQOXWl</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>andyking</author><text>Even if my pay was doubled, I wouldn&#x27;t be able to afford to live in or near London. However, I can afford a comfortable lifestyle in rural Yorkshire (house, car, holidays, internet access, good food, days out etc etc) on a modest pay packet. The rent for my 17th century cottage with garden in a Yorkshire village wouldn&#x27;t get me a room in a shared house in an undesirable part of London.<p>I don&#x27;t understand the pull of the capital. It&#x27;s overcrowded, noisy and dirty, even in its &#x27;desirable&#x27; areas. The oil sheikhs and Russian oligarchs can keep it. I&#x27;d much rather live up here even if I had enough money to live in London!</text></item><item><author>stevoski</author><text>The article talks a lot about cities now being the domain only of &quot;one-percenters&quot; and &quot;global elite&quot;. This is demonstrably false. Consider the UK.<p>UK&#x27;s population: 62 million<p>London population: 8 million<p>13% of the UK&#x27;s population, therefore, resides in London. To say that only the &quot;1%&quot; can afford London is clearly not the case.<p>In France&#x27;s case, 15% of the population live in Paris.<p>Perhaps we can&#x27;t all live in London&#x27;s Chelsea and whatever the most desirable part of Paris is. But both cities have excellent public transport...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>simonbarker87</author><text>Couldn&#x27;t agree more, I live in Newcastle (Upon Tyne) and wonder why all my friends headed down south after uni - for &quot;the salary&quot; was their reasoning but none of them have savings and their salary goes into rent, commuting and maintain an expensive social life. I&#x27;d much rather be here in Newcastle and be able to afford to live and save - just wish the weather were a little better</text></comment> | <story><title>Priced out of Paris</title><url>http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/a096d1d0-d2ec-11e2-aac2-00144feab7de.html#axzz2WSyQOXWl</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>andyking</author><text>Even if my pay was doubled, I wouldn&#x27;t be able to afford to live in or near London. However, I can afford a comfortable lifestyle in rural Yorkshire (house, car, holidays, internet access, good food, days out etc etc) on a modest pay packet. The rent for my 17th century cottage with garden in a Yorkshire village wouldn&#x27;t get me a room in a shared house in an undesirable part of London.<p>I don&#x27;t understand the pull of the capital. It&#x27;s overcrowded, noisy and dirty, even in its &#x27;desirable&#x27; areas. The oil sheikhs and Russian oligarchs can keep it. I&#x27;d much rather live up here even if I had enough money to live in London!</text></item><item><author>stevoski</author><text>The article talks a lot about cities now being the domain only of &quot;one-percenters&quot; and &quot;global elite&quot;. This is demonstrably false. Consider the UK.<p>UK&#x27;s population: 62 million<p>London population: 8 million<p>13% of the UK&#x27;s population, therefore, resides in London. To say that only the &quot;1%&quot; can afford London is clearly not the case.<p>In France&#x27;s case, 15% of the population live in Paris.<p>Perhaps we can&#x27;t all live in London&#x27;s Chelsea and whatever the most desirable part of Paris is. But both cities have excellent public transport...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>njs12345</author><text>If you don&#x27;t mind me asking, how much do you earn? If you&#x27;re on the median UK national income and you double it you&#x27;d very easily be able to live in a nice place in London. Your lifestyle would of course be very different, but not necessarily worse (I&#x27;d rather take good public transport than drive, for instance). Housing is the only thing that&#x27;s objectively worse, unless you have kids, that is..</text></comment> |
8,178,061 | 8,178,000 | 1 | 2 | 8,177,259 | train | <story><title>I'm 25 years old and I am lost</title><text>I co-founded a startup couple of years back which got acquired recently. Even though it was termed an acquisition, it was really an acqui-hire. When people congratulate me on that, I know in my heart that it&#x27;s not true and it doesn&#x27;t really make me happy.<p>Now, I&#x27;ve quit my job at that company because I just couldn&#x27;t work there any longer. And am trying to figure out what to do next.<p>I know for a fact that I want to run my own business and attain financial freedom but I can&#x27;t risk another startup at this moment because: 1. Startups are tough and I am afraid 2. I have a few financial responsibilities towards my family which I have to take care of.<p>Thus, I have picked up another job which I&#x27;ll join in a few weeks. It is not in a very &#x27;sexy&#x27; or &#x27;trendy&#x27; industry and I have no idea where it is going to take me in two years.<p>What do you do when you believe that you can do great things but something that you have no control over is holding you back? You believe that you are good at what you do and are meant for great things but you have to do your job even though it doesn&#x27;t do justice to your capabilities. How do you cope with that? Seeing your future as an underachiever pains you. What do you do?<p>In the course of trying to figure it out, I spoke to my friends about this, I realised that most of them are going through the same thing. But they haven&#x27;t figured out how to deal with it. I don&#x27;t know if this is what they call a quarter-life crisis.<p>Thus, this is as much a distress call as it is a rant. And not having anyone else to turn to, I am posting it here at HN assuming that this is not just a problem for a handful of people but a general problem for people who believe in their ability to do great things (whether it is true or not is irrelevant to them).<p>The questions I posed here aren&#x27;t the only ones I have in my mind. But, I hope I have been able to convey the message. Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks!</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>webwright</author><text><i>Why</i> do you want to do great things? Seriously, dig into it. When I ask a lot of people in startups this question and dig long enough, it comes down to money-- they want to be rich, they want to be free.<p>Fact: I&#x27;ve met these rich&#x2F;free people and they are largely working their asses off to get more rich (and presumably more free?). The ones who make it (largely) LOVE THE GAME. The few who get rich somehow but don&#x27;t actually love the game of getting rich are listlessly complaining about being unhappy.<p>You don&#x27;t love the game, it seems. The way to be happy&#x2F;satisfied is to find the game that you love or learn to love the game you&#x27;re playing. The latter is often what to focus on-- there people with much less interesting jobs that are satisfied with them. Whatever job you have, figure out how to be freakin&#x27; awesome at it and opportunities fall into your lap- trust me. Or be the guy who gets by, can&#x27;t be happy, is always looking out the window.<p>All that said, don&#x27;t settle for a shitty job. Get one where you&#x27;re surrounded by people who impress you in an industry&#x2F;market that has potential. That&#x27;s where you&#x27;ll find your next co-founder.<p>If you&#x27;ve got great ideas, start side projects. They turn into businesses all the time.<p>Reduce your burn rate ruthlessly and save $. Seriously, your car&#x2F;house&#x2F;clothes are too nice, and you have them because society makes you feel less successful if you don&#x27;t. Happiness and stuff have virtually no correlation. Get to the point where you&#x27;re downright smug about your burn rate. Smirk at people who drive BMWs.<p>Remember that a million years of evolution has made humanity <i>naturally discontent</i>-- do you think happiness&#x2F;contentedness is a survival trait? Add to that the external pressure of peers who make it big, do &quot;great things&quot;, and the river of marketing telling you that you need fancier watches, shinier cars, the newest iPhone. Being happy&#x2F;content takes smarts and discipline that most people simply can&#x27;t manage. Be one of the ones who can.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>buckbova</author><text>&gt; Seriously, your car&#x2F;house&#x2F;clothes are too nice, and you have them because society makes you feel less successful if you don&#x27;t.<p>Stuff makes me happy. Moving from a tiny apartment with a small everything to a spacious house made me much happier. It&#x27;s comfortable. I now have a wonderful kitchen to cook, which I enjoy doing, that I just couldn&#x27;t do as well before. I have a view out my large bay windows. It&#x27;s great.<p>Driving a nice car is awesome, especially if you commute longer distances or like road trips. I enjoy a comfortable luxury sedan with power.<p>I&#x27;m much happier with nice things. Society isn&#x27;t telling me I like my large flat screen tv. I am because it looks stunning on my wall.<p>I agree with what others say here about debt though. Don&#x27;t go into debt to buy yourself a bunch of crap you don&#x27;t need.</text></comment> | <story><title>I'm 25 years old and I am lost</title><text>I co-founded a startup couple of years back which got acquired recently. Even though it was termed an acquisition, it was really an acqui-hire. When people congratulate me on that, I know in my heart that it&#x27;s not true and it doesn&#x27;t really make me happy.<p>Now, I&#x27;ve quit my job at that company because I just couldn&#x27;t work there any longer. And am trying to figure out what to do next.<p>I know for a fact that I want to run my own business and attain financial freedom but I can&#x27;t risk another startup at this moment because: 1. Startups are tough and I am afraid 2. I have a few financial responsibilities towards my family which I have to take care of.<p>Thus, I have picked up another job which I&#x27;ll join in a few weeks. It is not in a very &#x27;sexy&#x27; or &#x27;trendy&#x27; industry and I have no idea where it is going to take me in two years.<p>What do you do when you believe that you can do great things but something that you have no control over is holding you back? You believe that you are good at what you do and are meant for great things but you have to do your job even though it doesn&#x27;t do justice to your capabilities. How do you cope with that? Seeing your future as an underachiever pains you. What do you do?<p>In the course of trying to figure it out, I spoke to my friends about this, I realised that most of them are going through the same thing. But they haven&#x27;t figured out how to deal with it. I don&#x27;t know if this is what they call a quarter-life crisis.<p>Thus, this is as much a distress call as it is a rant. And not having anyone else to turn to, I am posting it here at HN assuming that this is not just a problem for a handful of people but a general problem for people who believe in their ability to do great things (whether it is true or not is irrelevant to them).<p>The questions I posed here aren&#x27;t the only ones I have in my mind. But, I hope I have been able to convey the message. Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks!</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>webwright</author><text><i>Why</i> do you want to do great things? Seriously, dig into it. When I ask a lot of people in startups this question and dig long enough, it comes down to money-- they want to be rich, they want to be free.<p>Fact: I&#x27;ve met these rich&#x2F;free people and they are largely working their asses off to get more rich (and presumably more free?). The ones who make it (largely) LOVE THE GAME. The few who get rich somehow but don&#x27;t actually love the game of getting rich are listlessly complaining about being unhappy.<p>You don&#x27;t love the game, it seems. The way to be happy&#x2F;satisfied is to find the game that you love or learn to love the game you&#x27;re playing. The latter is often what to focus on-- there people with much less interesting jobs that are satisfied with them. Whatever job you have, figure out how to be freakin&#x27; awesome at it and opportunities fall into your lap- trust me. Or be the guy who gets by, can&#x27;t be happy, is always looking out the window.<p>All that said, don&#x27;t settle for a shitty job. Get one where you&#x27;re surrounded by people who impress you in an industry&#x2F;market that has potential. That&#x27;s where you&#x27;ll find your next co-founder.<p>If you&#x27;ve got great ideas, start side projects. They turn into businesses all the time.<p>Reduce your burn rate ruthlessly and save $. Seriously, your car&#x2F;house&#x2F;clothes are too nice, and you have them because society makes you feel less successful if you don&#x27;t. Happiness and stuff have virtually no correlation. Get to the point where you&#x27;re downright smug about your burn rate. Smirk at people who drive BMWs.<p>Remember that a million years of evolution has made humanity <i>naturally discontent</i>-- do you think happiness&#x2F;contentedness is a survival trait? Add to that the external pressure of peers who make it big, do &quot;great things&quot;, and the river of marketing telling you that you need fancier watches, shinier cars, the newest iPhone. Being happy&#x2F;content takes smarts and discipline that most people simply can&#x27;t manage. Be one of the ones who can.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>refurb</author><text><i>Remember that a million years of evolution has made humanity naturally discontent</i><p>That about sums it up. The drive to always want more is just how humans are. If it wasn&#x27;t, the human condition would never improve. However, you need to recognize it for what it is and don&#x27;t let it control your own happiness.<p>The older I get the more I realize that doing what I want to do <i>now</i> is much more rewarding that doing what I <i>think</i> will make me happy years from now.</text></comment> |
22,961,110 | 22,961,463 | 1 | 2 | 22,960,199 | train | <story><title>Instacart announces new Covid-19 policies and plans to hire 250k more shoppers</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/23/instacart-announces-new-covid-19-policies-and-plans-to-hire-250000-more-shoppers/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>toomuchtodo</author><text>Anyone know if they&#x27;ve fixed the bug where someone could set the tip to $50 and then remove it entirely at or after delivery (&quot;tip baiting&quot;)?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nypost.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;04&#x2F;10&#x2F;people-are-baiting-grocery-delivery-workers-with-big-tips-then-reneging&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nypost.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;04&#x2F;10&#x2F;people-are-baiting-grocery-del...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cactus2093</author><text>Bug or feature? If the shopper does a terrible job and brings the complete wrong things, you should be able to reduce the tip.<p>Presumably the argument against this is that it should not be allowed because then the shoppers don&#x27;t make a reasonable living wage. Then why not solve the actual problem? Raise the delivery fee to where the wage is reasonable, don&#x27;t make them rely as heavily on tips.</text></comment> | <story><title>Instacart announces new Covid-19 policies and plans to hire 250k more shoppers</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/23/instacart-announces-new-covid-19-policies-and-plans-to-hire-250000-more-shoppers/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>toomuchtodo</author><text>Anyone know if they&#x27;ve fixed the bug where someone could set the tip to $50 and then remove it entirely at or after delivery (&quot;tip baiting&quot;)?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nypost.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;04&#x2F;10&#x2F;people-are-baiting-grocery-delivery-workers-with-big-tips-then-reneging&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nypost.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;04&#x2F;10&#x2F;people-are-baiting-grocery-del...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ineedasername</author><text>I think the best way to solve it is simply not show shoppers the tip ahead of time so that it isn&#x27;t a factor in choosing the job. That way people can&#x27;t game the system.<p>Alternatively, they could give the buyer the option of &quot;locking&quot; the tip so it can&#x27;t be changed, or of keeping it variable, or a % of it variable so that shoppers can make an informed judgment about the likelihood of getting a certain tip level.</text></comment> |
32,380,577 | 32,380,584 | 1 | 3 | 32,379,764 | train | <story><title>Carbon offsetting is just another form of greenwashing</title><url>https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2022/08/04/offsetting-greenwashing-carbon-emissions</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>RosanaAnaDana</author><text>I&#x27;ve been very careful to not wade into one of these threads too readily, as when I read them, I almost always find a huge range of variability around what people understand or don&#x27;t understand about forests, soils, or ecosystem scale biogeochemical cycling. There also seem to be some very assertive, and often very uninformed claims around voluntary versus compliance marketplaces, and what role nature based mitigation efforts play currently or might play in the future.<p>However, it&#x27;s becoming increasingly clear that most authors in the pop science journalism space have a limited capacity for understanding the nuance or uncertainties associated with remote sensing models and principles of biogeochemistry. As well, the armchair analysts make many wrong assumptions about forests, forestry, or how carbon cycling works.<p>Number one, is that forests work as long term carbon storage and sinks. There are often claims made around what forests can or cant do with regards to carbon cycling, and almost always they tend to fundementally misunderstand how carbon cycling, and nutrient cycling work in relationship to long term carbon stability. Not used taking advantage of forests and their ability to represent both (relatively, 10&#x27;s-100&#x27;s yr) short term stores of carbon, as well as less labile longer term storage pools (100&#x27;s-1000&#x27;s yr). We&#x27;ve been basically mining the world&#x27;s forests and haven&#x27;t even remotely attempted using natural ecosystems ability to not only sequester carbon, but to provide significant opportunities for climate resilience.<p>Granted, we have an extraordinary limited understanding of the upper and lower bounds of many of these systems, but that&#x27;s hardly any argument that we can&#x27;t engage with and begin learning about the potential of these systems.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dspoka</author><text>And yet research on this topic suggest the opposite.
&quot;These days everyone seems to thinks that &quot;planting trees&quot; is an important solution to the climate crisis. They&#x27;re mostly wrong, and in this paper we explain why. Instead of planting trees, we need to talk about people managing landscapes.&quot; [1]<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;ForrestFleisch1&#x2F;status&#x2F;1306221445933129728" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;ForrestFleisch1&#x2F;status&#x2F;13062214459331297...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Carbon offsetting is just another form of greenwashing</title><url>https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2022/08/04/offsetting-greenwashing-carbon-emissions</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>RosanaAnaDana</author><text>I&#x27;ve been very careful to not wade into one of these threads too readily, as when I read them, I almost always find a huge range of variability around what people understand or don&#x27;t understand about forests, soils, or ecosystem scale biogeochemical cycling. There also seem to be some very assertive, and often very uninformed claims around voluntary versus compliance marketplaces, and what role nature based mitigation efforts play currently or might play in the future.<p>However, it&#x27;s becoming increasingly clear that most authors in the pop science journalism space have a limited capacity for understanding the nuance or uncertainties associated with remote sensing models and principles of biogeochemistry. As well, the armchair analysts make many wrong assumptions about forests, forestry, or how carbon cycling works.<p>Number one, is that forests work as long term carbon storage and sinks. There are often claims made around what forests can or cant do with regards to carbon cycling, and almost always they tend to fundementally misunderstand how carbon cycling, and nutrient cycling work in relationship to long term carbon stability. Not used taking advantage of forests and their ability to represent both (relatively, 10&#x27;s-100&#x27;s yr) short term stores of carbon, as well as less labile longer term storage pools (100&#x27;s-1000&#x27;s yr). We&#x27;ve been basically mining the world&#x27;s forests and haven&#x27;t even remotely attempted using natural ecosystems ability to not only sequester carbon, but to provide significant opportunities for climate resilience.<p>Granted, we have an extraordinary limited understanding of the upper and lower bounds of many of these systems, but that&#x27;s hardly any argument that we can&#x27;t engage with and begin learning about the potential of these systems.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bradleyjg</author><text>Now take this Gell-Mann type observation and apply it broadly. The internet is full of highly confident people that, if you are lucky, skimmed a Wikipedia article.<p>Sorting the gold from the dross is THE contemporary skill.</text></comment> |
25,777,590 | 25,777,795 | 1 | 2 | 25,776,124 | train | <story><title>Decentralised content moderation</title><url>https://martin.kleppmann.com/2021/01/13/decentralised-content-moderation.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>colllectorof</author><text>It&#x27;s pretty obvious that the tech crowd right now is so intoxicated by its own groupthink that these attempts to come up with &quot;solutions&quot; are going to have awful results. You don&#x27;t even know what the problem really is.<p><i>&quot;I fear that many decentralised web projects are designed for censorship resistance not so much because they deliberately want to become hubs for neo-nazis, but rather out of a kind of naive utopian belief that more speech is always better. But I think we have learnt in the last decade that this is not the case.&quot;</i><p>What you should have learned in the last decade is that social networks designed around virality, engagement and &quot;influencing&quot; are awful for the society in the long run. But somehow now the conversation has turned away from that and towards &quot;better moderation&quot;.<p>Engage your brain. Read Marshall McLuhan. The design of a medium is far more important than how it is moderated.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>crmrc114</author><text>&quot;What you should have learned in the last decade is that social networks designed around virality, engagement and &quot;influencing&quot; are awful for the society in the long run.&quot;<p>Yes, and don&#x27;t forget the 24 hour news cycle with its focus on getting outrage and attention through fear. I did not know who Marshall McLuhan was until now- thanks for the tip!</text></comment> | <story><title>Decentralised content moderation</title><url>https://martin.kleppmann.com/2021/01/13/decentralised-content-moderation.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>colllectorof</author><text>It&#x27;s pretty obvious that the tech crowd right now is so intoxicated by its own groupthink that these attempts to come up with &quot;solutions&quot; are going to have awful results. You don&#x27;t even know what the problem really is.<p><i>&quot;I fear that many decentralised web projects are designed for censorship resistance not so much because they deliberately want to become hubs for neo-nazis, but rather out of a kind of naive utopian belief that more speech is always better. But I think we have learnt in the last decade that this is not the case.&quot;</i><p>What you should have learned in the last decade is that social networks designed around virality, engagement and &quot;influencing&quot; are awful for the society in the long run. But somehow now the conversation has turned away from that and towards &quot;better moderation&quot;.<p>Engage your brain. Read Marshall McLuhan. The design of a medium is far more important than how it is moderated.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>timdaub</author><text>&gt; The design of a medium is far more important than how it is moderated<p>IMO this is a great point. Social medias as they exist today are broken because they have been engineered on the assumption to make money on ads. Making money on ads works by engineering around virality, engagement and influencing.<p>Another thing that McLuhan teaches though is that actually the (social) media is the message. And ultimately this lead to a Viking dude standing in the US capitol.<p>Now, that whole situation was awful. But it was also hilarious.
In social media, this was barely a meme that lived on for a few hours. Whereas within the ancient system of democracy, an intrusion into the parlament is breaking some sacret rules. And there, surely the incident will cast long winding consequences.<p>To cut to the chase: Social media outcomes have to be viewed wearing a social media hat. Same for real-life. In this case, gladly. Another great case were this was true was Kony 2012, where essentially all the Slacktivism lead to nothing.</text></comment> |
36,464,790 | 36,464,277 | 1 | 2 | 36,464,183 | train | <story><title>Netflix Canada just got rid of its cheapest ad-free plan without even a heads up</title><url>https://www.narcity.com/netflix-canada-got-rid-of-cheapest-ad-free-subscription</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>medellin</author><text>Netflix also no longer works when i travel. Went on a short trip to see some relatives in another country and my netflix account is blocked. Contacted support and they said i need to pay for a new account in that country.<p>Netflix is really starting to lose its value for me. But I’m working on setting up a VPN at my house to tunnel all Netflix traffic through and then configure some rpis to send to family members so we can all steal from Netflix again.<p>At this point they have pissed me off enough that im working on making it as easy as possible for anyone to setup and sharing it when im done.</text></comment> | <story><title>Netflix Canada just got rid of its cheapest ad-free plan without even a heads up</title><url>https://www.narcity.com/netflix-canada-got-rid-of-cheapest-ad-free-subscription</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Waterluvian</author><text>Tangent: As much as it feels like we just have “bundles” like the bad old cable days, I really enjoy getting to change streaming providers every 2-3 months. My wife and I just Hoover up whatever we’re interested in then move on. And in a year we’ve got that service back and we Hoover up the last year’s added content that looks good.<p>Lots of ways to measure it but when I think about how much I pay and what my experience is like, I’m doing far better than in the cable days. I’m much happier.</text></comment> |
3,204,614 | 3,204,110 | 1 | 2 | 3,203,931 | train | <story><title>What being hopelessly single taught me about pitching tech celebs</title><url>http://www.geekwire.com/2011/hopelessly-single-taught-pitching-tech-celebs</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>pg</author><text>Maybe my case is unusual because YC takes applications online, but I don't like it when people walk up to me and "pitch" me by reciting some preformulated speech about their startup. I can almost never understand what they're talking about. And it makes me feel like a target, in much the same way it probably does to women when guys walk up to them and recite preformulated pickup lines.<p>The unit of conversation with a "tech celeb" need not be a pitch. I'd suggest trying an ordinary conversation instead. I don't know about other people, but it would definitely work better with me.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>zach</author><text>This is a tough thing for founders. I was in this situation earlier this year after I won a ticket to Google I/O. One of the events was a Google Ventures mixer, which turned out to be a "speed-dating" event. I was excited to meet Joe Kraus, who gave my favorite Startup School speech ever, but what to do in this format? Launch into a cooked-up pitch? But I wanted to talk to Joe, not use him for target practice based on his job. But wasn't that kind of what I was expected to do? Still, what a borderline-presumptuous missionary tack to take with someone I respect. But wouldn't I get over that knowing teammates were counting on me to get us funding any way we could?<p>At last, I decided to skip the pitch, chatted very pleasantly with Joe, got some great advice and his card. In retrospect, that was really about as much as I should expect in a five-minute sit-down. He seems twice as much of a great guy as I thought he was. The pitch can wait until the next time we cross paths or it's been a lot better tested. But I better recognize now how awkward these situations can get.</text></comment> | <story><title>What being hopelessly single taught me about pitching tech celebs</title><url>http://www.geekwire.com/2011/hopelessly-single-taught-pitching-tech-celebs</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>pg</author><text>Maybe my case is unusual because YC takes applications online, but I don't like it when people walk up to me and "pitch" me by reciting some preformulated speech about their startup. I can almost never understand what they're talking about. And it makes me feel like a target, in much the same way it probably does to women when guys walk up to them and recite preformulated pickup lines.<p>The unit of conversation with a "tech celeb" need not be a pitch. I'd suggest trying an ordinary conversation instead. I don't know about other people, but it would definitely work better with me.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>donalddesantis</author><text>Thanks for the comment, Paul. Blog posts are funny, b/c you have to boil down a bunch of complex ideas into something people can grok while skimming. I actually don't like the word "pitch" or think of myself as someone who really pitches things very well at all. But it does describe sharing your ideas with other people, capturing it in a single word. A more accurate description would be "sharing your vision" or something similar.<p>If there's one thing I've learned over the years (whether meeting new startup people or trying to get a date) it's been the "don't be a douchebag" rule. Treat people like people. The best "pitch" is actually not a pitch. It's authentic, where you're talking to someone who you <i>honestly</i> believe will be interested in what you're doing, and you're sharing something you're sincerely excited about.<p>The last person you want to be is one of the "Jersey shore meatheads" trying to dry hump some poor woman out on the dance floor (to harken back to my earlier analogy). :)</text></comment> |
37,412,902 | 37,412,909 | 1 | 2 | 37,410,812 | train | <story><title>Flexport CEO resigns a year after joining logistics company</title><url>https://www.geekwire.com/2023/former-amazon-exec-dave-clark-resigns-as-flexport-ceo-a-year-after-joining-logistics-company/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>TX81Z</author><text>So many people in leadership at top companies just won the start-up lottery as a junior employee and had the internal drive to get promo at all costs to gradually get to the top. As soon as they leave the bubble it’s clear how few real skills they possess.<p>Likewise, the degree to which Director+ jobs just hire based on current title at a competitor alone is bonkers. I’ve worked under people who are utterly clueless but managed to make VP at the place up the street. So they just get to be a VP at the next place.</text></item><item><author>throwaway5959</author><text>“The only place I&#x27;ve really worked in my life is Amazon. And so I didn&#x27;t get out much.”<p>Hard pass.</text></item><item><author>scrum-treats</author><text>Additional information on Dave Clark&#x27;s impact:<p>&quot;Some Flexport insiders say layoffs and an influx of former Amazon leaders are wrecking morale.&quot;[1]<p>&#x27;&quot;These people do not have conversations — they make demands,&quot; one laid-off employee said. Unsatisfactory answers could be met with harsh feedback, sources said.<p>One laid-off Flexporter said an Amazon veteran told them, &quot;I don&#x27;t believe a word you&#x27;re saying,&quot; during a presentation they said took months to prepare.<p>Clark was asked at Tuesday&#x27;s conference whether his Amazon hires meant he wanted to change Flexport&#x27;s culture.<p>&quot;The only place I&#x27;ve really worked in my life is Amazon. And so I didn&#x27;t get out much. And I worked in supply chain so most of the people I know are Amazon people,&quot; he said. &quot;Turns out Amazon&#x27;s pretty good at moving stuff around.&quot;&#x27;<p>See also, the Dave Clark effect at Amazon:
&quot;Amazon generally delivers later than competitors. That can be terrifying for some of its drivers&quot;[2].<p>[1]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;flexport-layoffs-amazon-leaders-change-culture-dave-clark-2023-3?op=1" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;flexport-layoffs-amazon-lead...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnn.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;12&#x2F;21&#x2F;tech&#x2F;amazon-delivery-night&#x2F;index.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnn.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;12&#x2F;21&#x2F;tech&#x2F;amazon-delivery-night&#x2F;in...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tyingq</author><text>The key milestones for VP often are<p>- Luck landed them in a leadership spot on a project that was already successful
or headed that way<p>- They didn&#x27;t do anything to abruptly change that course<p>- They are skilled at managing up with the right words, phrases, actions<p>Then, they move up in the chain they are already in, where everything is very familiar. Goes well enough until they move outside that bubble.</text></comment> | <story><title>Flexport CEO resigns a year after joining logistics company</title><url>https://www.geekwire.com/2023/former-amazon-exec-dave-clark-resigns-as-flexport-ceo-a-year-after-joining-logistics-company/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>TX81Z</author><text>So many people in leadership at top companies just won the start-up lottery as a junior employee and had the internal drive to get promo at all costs to gradually get to the top. As soon as they leave the bubble it’s clear how few real skills they possess.<p>Likewise, the degree to which Director+ jobs just hire based on current title at a competitor alone is bonkers. I’ve worked under people who are utterly clueless but managed to make VP at the place up the street. So they just get to be a VP at the next place.</text></item><item><author>throwaway5959</author><text>“The only place I&#x27;ve really worked in my life is Amazon. And so I didn&#x27;t get out much.”<p>Hard pass.</text></item><item><author>scrum-treats</author><text>Additional information on Dave Clark&#x27;s impact:<p>&quot;Some Flexport insiders say layoffs and an influx of former Amazon leaders are wrecking morale.&quot;[1]<p>&#x27;&quot;These people do not have conversations — they make demands,&quot; one laid-off employee said. Unsatisfactory answers could be met with harsh feedback, sources said.<p>One laid-off Flexporter said an Amazon veteran told them, &quot;I don&#x27;t believe a word you&#x27;re saying,&quot; during a presentation they said took months to prepare.<p>Clark was asked at Tuesday&#x27;s conference whether his Amazon hires meant he wanted to change Flexport&#x27;s culture.<p>&quot;The only place I&#x27;ve really worked in my life is Amazon. And so I didn&#x27;t get out much. And I worked in supply chain so most of the people I know are Amazon people,&quot; he said. &quot;Turns out Amazon&#x27;s pretty good at moving stuff around.&quot;&#x27;<p>See also, the Dave Clark effect at Amazon:
&quot;Amazon generally delivers later than competitors. That can be terrifying for some of its drivers&quot;[2].<p>[1]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;flexport-layoffs-amazon-leaders-change-culture-dave-clark-2023-3?op=1" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;flexport-layoffs-amazon-lead...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnn.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;12&#x2F;21&#x2F;tech&#x2F;amazon-delivery-night&#x2F;index.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnn.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;12&#x2F;21&#x2F;tech&#x2F;amazon-delivery-night&#x2F;in...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>throwboatyface</author><text>Yup. If you got your foot in the door at the right place and people in leadership liked you, you&#x27;re on the track to be a director in 6-8 years. Usually the people who promoted you were themselves early employees with no experience being executives, who just peter-principled into senior director&#x2F;VP roles.<p>I&#x27;ve watched these failsons get promoted to senior director&#x2F;VP, leave before they were ever accountable for their bad decisions, and then bring all their cronies over to the new place at the same levels.</text></comment> |
34,020,383 | 34,013,282 | 1 | 3 | 34,010,970 | train | <story><title>Use a laptop as a 2nd display on Linux using FreeRDP</title><url>https://blog.jacobstoner.com/use-a-laptop-or-tablet-as-a-2nd-display-on-linux-with-a-dummy-monitor-and-rdp/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>el_snark</author><text>There&#x27;s a slightly different approach with a similar outcome: sharing the keyboard and mouse between two machines.<p>Software used to be called Synergy, but that went commercial, so there&#x27;s a fork called barrier.
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;debauchee&#x2F;barrier">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;debauchee&#x2F;barrier</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ashirviskas</author><text>Barrier has been abandoned, the currently supported fork is now called input-leap: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;input-leap&#x2F;input-leap">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;input-leap&#x2F;input-leap</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Use a laptop as a 2nd display on Linux using FreeRDP</title><url>https://blog.jacobstoner.com/use-a-laptop-or-tablet-as-a-2nd-display-on-linux-with-a-dummy-monitor-and-rdp/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>el_snark</author><text>There&#x27;s a slightly different approach with a similar outcome: sharing the keyboard and mouse between two machines.<p>Software used to be called Synergy, but that went commercial, so there&#x27;s a fork called barrier.
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;debauchee&#x2F;barrier">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;debauchee&#x2F;barrier</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nanna</author><text>&gt; Compatibility. We use more than one operating system and you probably do, too. Windows, OSX, Linux, FreeBSD... Barrier should &quot;just work&quot;. We will also have our eye on Wayland when the time comes.<p>Wow that sounds handy indeed.</text></comment> |
17,852,606 | 17,852,458 | 1 | 2 | 17,852,254 | train | <story><title>Cigarette butts are the single greatest source of ocean trash</title><url>https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/plastic-straw-ban-cigarette-butts-are-single-greatest-source-ocean-n903661</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>simonebrunozzi</author><text>Simple solution, but thought to implement: do to cigarette butts what it has been done for empty glass bottles: each one has a deposit cost of, say, $0.20, and when you return them you get the money back.<p>Cigarette packs should be modified to allow for easy storage of used butts, so you can return it to the cigarette seller when you buy a new pack.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>throwanem</author><text>What does the seller do with it, then? There has to be some sort of sequestration program, possibly involving landfills - but a mass of cigarette butts is likely to produce runoff that&#x27;s toxic to plants and insects, at the very least, if not to everything in its path. So, if you have a multiple-stream recycling program, you probably need to add a stream to that specifically for butts; if you have a single-stream program, I hope your sorters are getting hazard pay already, and if they aren&#x27;t then they sure should be now. And you still have the sequestration problem from here - all you&#x27;ve accomplished is to make it minimally possible to implement that. And all of this costs, and everything downstream of it will cost, too.<p>Cheaper and simpler just to ban cigarettes entirely. And I realize that&#x27;s neither simple nor cheap! But it&#x27;s not the worst idea I&#x27;ve ever heard, either. Even back when I smoked every day, I wasn&#x27;t entirely against it; now that I smoke only when drunk, I favor it considerably more. Yeah, it sucks to go cold turkey, but nicotine isn&#x27;t like ethanol; quitting cold turkey makes you miserable for a while, but it&#x27;s not going to kill anyone.</text></comment> | <story><title>Cigarette butts are the single greatest source of ocean trash</title><url>https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/plastic-straw-ban-cigarette-butts-are-single-greatest-source-ocean-n903661</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>simonebrunozzi</author><text>Simple solution, but thought to implement: do to cigarette butts what it has been done for empty glass bottles: each one has a deposit cost of, say, $0.20, and when you return them you get the money back.<p>Cigarette packs should be modified to allow for easy storage of used butts, so you can return it to the cigarette seller when you buy a new pack.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>zaptheimpaler</author><text>I like the idea.. it is tricky to get right though. Cigarette butts smell a lot, so if smokers started carrying around 20 butts in their pack at work&#x2F;home, non-smokers would not like it. Its hard to imagine modifying a pack cheaply enough to contain the smell.</text></comment> |
30,895,533 | 30,894,753 | 1 | 3 | 30,892,811 | train | <story><title>Horrible edge cases when dealing with music</title><url>https://dustri.org/b/horrible-edge-cases-to-consider-when-dealing-with-music.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>maxbendick</author><text>My time to shine! I work in music distribution.<p>The Apple Music style guide is a great and accessible place to look if you&#x27;re interested in music metadata: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;help.apple.com&#x2F;itc&#x2F;musicstyleguide&#x2F;en.lproj&#x2F;static.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;help.apple.com&#x2F;itc&#x2F;musicstyleguide&#x2F;en.lproj&#x2F;static.h...</a><p>DDEX is the set of metadata standards used across the music industry: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ddex.net&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ddex.net&#x2F;</a><p>Also worth knowing that not all content on streaming services is music! Some of it is spoken word, ASMR, non-music field recordings, etc. The difference between sound and music is subjective of course though.<p>On an artistic note, music can of course be presented in an infinite amount of ways. Not all these can be represented (i.e., re-presented) on streaming platforms. Installations and generative music for example. That&#x27;s ok! To be able to represent all this music (and non-music) requires restrictions, otherwise we wouldn&#x27;t be able to create programs for it in the first place.<p>Sometimes restrictions on sound content are to make the streaming services friendlier to use, like the formatting of featured artists in titles. Royalty laws put restrictions on the handling of different roles, like songwriters and composers.<p>BUT nothing is stopping you from building your own way of representing music digitally, so long as you follow relevant laws.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>slaymaker1907</author><text>I still think it&#x27;s pretty bad for classical music. An important question for various pieces is who plays a particular instrument, but there really isn&#x27;t a nice way to encode this in the metadata (encoding the relation of both person and role where role could be anything).<p>I also usually want to know who the conductor was and what was the orchestra</text></comment> | <story><title>Horrible edge cases when dealing with music</title><url>https://dustri.org/b/horrible-edge-cases-to-consider-when-dealing-with-music.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>maxbendick</author><text>My time to shine! I work in music distribution.<p>The Apple Music style guide is a great and accessible place to look if you&#x27;re interested in music metadata: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;help.apple.com&#x2F;itc&#x2F;musicstyleguide&#x2F;en.lproj&#x2F;static.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;help.apple.com&#x2F;itc&#x2F;musicstyleguide&#x2F;en.lproj&#x2F;static.h...</a><p>DDEX is the set of metadata standards used across the music industry: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ddex.net&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ddex.net&#x2F;</a><p>Also worth knowing that not all content on streaming services is music! Some of it is spoken word, ASMR, non-music field recordings, etc. The difference between sound and music is subjective of course though.<p>On an artistic note, music can of course be presented in an infinite amount of ways. Not all these can be represented (i.e., re-presented) on streaming platforms. Installations and generative music for example. That&#x27;s ok! To be able to represent all this music (and non-music) requires restrictions, otherwise we wouldn&#x27;t be able to create programs for it in the first place.<p>Sometimes restrictions on sound content are to make the streaming services friendlier to use, like the formatting of featured artists in titles. Royalty laws put restrictions on the handling of different roles, like songwriters and composers.<p>BUT nothing is stopping you from building your own way of representing music digitally, so long as you follow relevant laws.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Thorrez</author><text>&gt;Sometimes restrictions on sound content<p>Is there some sort of rule against sirens?<p>The song &quot;Car Alarm&quot; prominently features a car alarm on Youtube, but not on Spotify. This could just be a choice by the artists though, rather than a platform restriction.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=xV7nHX2RLjQ" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=xV7nHX2RLjQ</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;open.spotify.com&#x2F;album&#x2F;2u4HDb57v96iiJZUC7PqOx?highlight=spotify:track:0OvzUMsUDTUp9v8c8CxR1q" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;open.spotify.com&#x2F;album&#x2F;2u4HDb57v96iiJZUC7PqOx?highli...</a></text></comment> |
14,182,117 | 14,181,376 | 1 | 3 | 14,180,761 | train | <story><title>Apple releases a bit of code to let you put Live Photos on your sites</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/20/apple-releases-a-bit-of-code-to-let-you-put-live-photos-on-your-sites</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ggrochow</author><text>Could just be my browser, but it doesn&#x27;t seem to play very nicely for me ( Firefox on debian jessie ).<p>First time I tried to hover, it didn&#x27;t do anything at all, I think it might have still been loading ( or waiting to load the &#x27;live&#x27; version until I hover over ).<p>When I got it to actually go &#x27;live&#x27; they didn&#x27;t seem smooth at all, stuff was jumping all over the place. Though, after watching them both fully, repeat playbacks seemed fine.<p>didn&#x27;t get either of these issues in chrome on the same machine.</text></item><item><author>tedmiston</author><text>Direct link to Apple demo - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.apple.com&#x2F;live-photos&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.apple.com&#x2F;live-photos&#x2F;</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fredsted</author><text>You have to hover on the &#x27;Live&#x27; icon in the top right.<p>Works fine in Safari :)<p>Edit: Can confirm it&#x27;s very twitchy and jumpy in Firefox on macOS. The photo and video switches place every few hundred milliseconds.</text></comment> | <story><title>Apple releases a bit of code to let you put Live Photos on your sites</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/20/apple-releases-a-bit-of-code-to-let-you-put-live-photos-on-your-sites</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ggrochow</author><text>Could just be my browser, but it doesn&#x27;t seem to play very nicely for me ( Firefox on debian jessie ).<p>First time I tried to hover, it didn&#x27;t do anything at all, I think it might have still been loading ( or waiting to load the &#x27;live&#x27; version until I hover over ).<p>When I got it to actually go &#x27;live&#x27; they didn&#x27;t seem smooth at all, stuff was jumping all over the place. Though, after watching them both fully, repeat playbacks seemed fine.<p>didn&#x27;t get either of these issues in chrome on the same machine.</text></item><item><author>tedmiston</author><text>Direct link to Apple demo - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.apple.com&#x2F;live-photos&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.apple.com&#x2F;live-photos&#x2F;</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hyperpape</author><text>Similar in mobile safari, most recent iOS version (10.3.1). They seemed very jumpy, not like my own live photos on my phone.</text></comment> |
29,922,247 | 29,922,355 | 1 | 2 | 29,921,265 | train | <story><title>Ask HN: Is Bay Area in a tipping point for tech talent?</title><text>Some younger companies like Coinbase[2] and Stripe[1] are sharing numbers that they are not hiring much in the Bay Area anymore.<p>I am assuming that many positions that require the candidate to (eventually) relocate to the Bay Area are not getting a lot of traction. A fried of mine refused to interview for position like that despite being very junior! She decided the cost of living is not worth it.<p>What all of this means for the Bay Area talent pool and job market? Talent in the Bay Area are fetching astonishing pay ($600k for L6)[3] which I believe contributed to the out of the ordinary housing market in the Bay Area when you compare it to other cities in CA like San Diego and Los Angeles. I know many older talent have grown roots in the area. They have kids and friends which means they can&#x27;t easily move. What if with this new wave of remote work acceptance, Bay Area pay won&#x27;t match the expenses? Companies can hire everywhere in the U.S. for arguably the same talent quality. Some companies are even expanding to Mexico City[4] and other countries which might put even more pressure on Bay Area salaries.<p>Are we at an end of decades of continues growth and competition in the Bay Area? Will there be big pay adjustments?<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;brian_armstrong&#x2F;status&#x2F;1481129589761998857" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;brian_armstrong&#x2F;status&#x2F;14811295897619988...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;patrickc&#x2F;status&#x2F;1480647701221896195" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;patrickc&#x2F;status&#x2F;1480647701221896195</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;levels.fyi" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;levels.fyi</a><p>[4] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lyft.com&#x2F;careers#openings?location=mexico%2520city%252C%2520mexico" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lyft.com&#x2F;careers#openings?location=mexico%2520ci...</a></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>xyzzy_plugh</author><text>It&#x27;s funny that no one wants to admit that Covid-19 was the forcing function for shifting to remote wholesale. I have many peers who have been fighting for internal accessibility of working remotely, most of whom gave up and jumped ship. I even know a few people who left Stripe in 2019 due to their inflexible remote work policies.<p>So to now come out and say &quot;look at all the remote hiring we&#x27;re doing&quot; sure leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Yeah, because you have no choice!<p>The talent has realized they have all the cards and bargaining power in terms of remote work right now. Anyone who is fighting to return to the office is missing the point. We should all be striving to unlock permanent mobility within our professions.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>_fat_santa</author><text>&gt; permanent mobility within our professions.<p>This is one of the most understated things about remote work. I hate when the arguments for the benefits of remote work all seem to end with &quot;well you don&#x27;t have to sit in traffic&quot;. It&#x27;s way way more than that.<p>* I just moved across the country. I didn&#x27;t hate where I lived but it was meh, moved to Colorado where I&#x27;m now going skiing every weekend and a general 180 for my lifestyle.<p>* I&#x27;m planning far more trips. If my office is now my laptop so who says I can&#x27;t do it from anywhere. I just came back from a few weeks in Hawaii and planning another trip to the Keys in a month or so. I work my regular hours in all of these places.<p>How I look at work has completely and diametrically shifted in the last 2 years, and it&#x27;s made me a much more active and healthier person. It&#x27;s honestly hard to believe how one change in my career (going remote) has been in service of all of this.</text></comment> | <story><title>Ask HN: Is Bay Area in a tipping point for tech talent?</title><text>Some younger companies like Coinbase[2] and Stripe[1] are sharing numbers that they are not hiring much in the Bay Area anymore.<p>I am assuming that many positions that require the candidate to (eventually) relocate to the Bay Area are not getting a lot of traction. A fried of mine refused to interview for position like that despite being very junior! She decided the cost of living is not worth it.<p>What all of this means for the Bay Area talent pool and job market? Talent in the Bay Area are fetching astonishing pay ($600k for L6)[3] which I believe contributed to the out of the ordinary housing market in the Bay Area when you compare it to other cities in CA like San Diego and Los Angeles. I know many older talent have grown roots in the area. They have kids and friends which means they can&#x27;t easily move. What if with this new wave of remote work acceptance, Bay Area pay won&#x27;t match the expenses? Companies can hire everywhere in the U.S. for arguably the same talent quality. Some companies are even expanding to Mexico City[4] and other countries which might put even more pressure on Bay Area salaries.<p>Are we at an end of decades of continues growth and competition in the Bay Area? Will there be big pay adjustments?<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;brian_armstrong&#x2F;status&#x2F;1481129589761998857" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;brian_armstrong&#x2F;status&#x2F;14811295897619988...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;patrickc&#x2F;status&#x2F;1480647701221896195" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;patrickc&#x2F;status&#x2F;1480647701221896195</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;levels.fyi" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;levels.fyi</a><p>[4] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lyft.com&#x2F;careers#openings?location=mexico%2520city%252C%2520mexico" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lyft.com&#x2F;careers#openings?location=mexico%2520ci...</a></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>xyzzy_plugh</author><text>It&#x27;s funny that no one wants to admit that Covid-19 was the forcing function for shifting to remote wholesale. I have many peers who have been fighting for internal accessibility of working remotely, most of whom gave up and jumped ship. I even know a few people who left Stripe in 2019 due to their inflexible remote work policies.<p>So to now come out and say &quot;look at all the remote hiring we&#x27;re doing&quot; sure leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Yeah, because you have no choice!<p>The talent has realized they have all the cards and bargaining power in terms of remote work right now. Anyone who is fighting to return to the office is missing the point. We should all be striving to unlock permanent mobility within our professions.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>no_butterscotch</author><text>On the other hand, the company I work for that IPO&#x27;d the year before COVID is now hiring a ton of remote...in Mexico City, the Philippines, and in Poland.<p>So I&#x27;d correct your phrasing: &quot;The talent <i>in the US</i> have all the cards and bargaining power&quot;. So the &quot;smart&quot; thing companies are doing is find talent outside the US.<p>And also before anyone mentions lower quality devs (for which I have an eye roll and a &quot;get over yourself&quot;), I&#x27;ve worked with enough of these devs by now to tell you there&#x27;s next to no difference in quality.</text></comment> |
38,145,864 | 38,145,204 | 1 | 2 | 38,144,584 | train | <story><title>Lapham's Quarterly Is on Hiatus</title><url>https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/hiatus</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>disposition2</author><text>I subscribed a few years ago on a whim after seeing it advertised in Harpers (which I still subscribe to and is one of the best publications around IMHO). It honestly went over my head and I didn’t continue my subscription.<p>Sad to hear this though, the quality (both in the editorials and the actual paper &#x2F; product) is head and shoulders above just about any other publication I can recall. The paper quality reminded me a lot of Next Generation [1] that I used to save my pennies for back in the day.<p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Next_Generation_(magazine)" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Next_Generation_(magazine)</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Lapham's Quarterly Is on Hiatus</title><url>https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/hiatus</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>reidacdc</author><text>These are interesting and fun. Each issue follows a particular theme (youth, risk, energy, time, etc.) and I occasionally wondered if they would run out, but they seemed to keep going. Articles were an interesting mix of deep dives and short bits that make you go &quot;huh&quot;.<p>Lewis Lapham also has a podcast, where he interviews authors of books he&#x27;s liked.</text></comment> |
33,561,561 | 33,560,247 | 1 | 2 | 33,551,036 | train | <story><title>What it’s like to dissect a cadaver</title><url>https://alok.github.io/2022/11/09/dissection/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>danielheath</author><text>&gt; most discussions involving cadavers are quite respectful of the fact that they are working on the mortal remains of a person<p>Not that I know first-hand, but that&#x27;s not the impression I got from the med students when I was at uni.<p>People find all sorts of odd ways to cope with their own mortality, and getting reminded of it tends to bring those to the fore.</text></item><item><author>zac_hudson</author><text>Firstly, its surprising that this school allows what would apparently be the lay public gain access to human anatomical gifts. In Canada, this is restricted to persons with a legitimate interest, ie med students and grad students in bioengineering&#x2F;bio-adjacent fields.<p>I think that the author is not an individual with such an interest was quite clear from the tone taken on this piece - most discussions involving cadavers are quite respectful of the fact that they are working on the mortal remains of a person; for some reason the way this piece was written felt almost disrespectful.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kendallpark</author><text>Speaking from first-hand, I can&#x27;t remember any disrespectful behavior. Acting disrespectful toward the donor (what we called the cadavers) would get you kicked out of anatomy lab. There is even a &quot;gift of body&quot; ceremony commemorating the donations every year that family members can attend. Med students will speak about how the donors impacted their medical education and how much they appreciate them.<p>I would hope that tales of inappropriate jokes of posing with body parts are relegated to a bygone era.<p>Fwiw I would have no issue donating my body to my institution for dissection. I certainly benefited from the donation. Some notable memories:<p>- The brittleness and <i>crunchiness</i> of an atherosclerotic artery compared to the pliable rubber hose of a healthy artery<p>- How incredibly soft lungs are -- like a tempur-pedic pillow. Unless the donor had been a smoker. Then the lungs were hard and black-spotted like a pumice stone.<p>- The muscular atrophy of old age. There were some donors whose abdominal muscles were as thin as paper.<p>- Holding a donors brain in one&#x27;s hand (it&#x27;s smaller than one would expect). In the words of a lab partner, &quot;I can&#x27;t believe we are holding everything that made this person a <i>person</i>, all their personality, everything.&quot;</text></comment> | <story><title>What it’s like to dissect a cadaver</title><url>https://alok.github.io/2022/11/09/dissection/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>danielheath</author><text>&gt; most discussions involving cadavers are quite respectful of the fact that they are working on the mortal remains of a person<p>Not that I know first-hand, but that&#x27;s not the impression I got from the med students when I was at uni.<p>People find all sorts of odd ways to cope with their own mortality, and getting reminded of it tends to bring those to the fore.</text></item><item><author>zac_hudson</author><text>Firstly, its surprising that this school allows what would apparently be the lay public gain access to human anatomical gifts. In Canada, this is restricted to persons with a legitimate interest, ie med students and grad students in bioengineering&#x2F;bio-adjacent fields.<p>I think that the author is not an individual with such an interest was quite clear from the tone taken on this piece - most discussions involving cadavers are quite respectful of the fact that they are working on the mortal remains of a person; for some reason the way this piece was written felt almost disrespectful.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rubatuga</author><text>First-hand, every session that involved cadavers during medical school was very respectful. We were told not to take photos as well. Worst part was the smell of formalin. Humour is fine, assuming the person&#x2F;cadaver would have been okay with it (and quite a few of the older patients I&#x27;ve met joke about their mortality). But I would rather be respectful and play it safe.</text></comment> |
10,991,476 | 10,991,532 | 1 | 3 | 10,988,746 | train | <story><title>Preact, a fast 3k React alternative</title><url>http://developit.github.io/preact/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>terrortrain</author><text>Nope. People should always create and attempt improve upon whats out there.<p>Don&#x27;t try to stifle innovation for the sake of making decisions simpler.<p>If you don&#x27;t want to make decisions, don&#x27;t use libraries, or use an opinionated framework.</text></item><item><author>Cartwright2</author><text>I&#x27;m not sure that we should be doing this.<p>Yes, it stands to reason that if you take framework X, cut out a lot of functionality, remove some of the &quot;ugly&quot; code that addresses edge cases, then you end up with a similar, reduced framework which is smaller in file size.<p>But this is done at the cost of polluting the Javascript framework environment. The biggest problem right now is pollution, we&#x27;re all drinking from the fire hose of frameworks and someone needs to cut the supply so we can double-down on the good stuff and stop jumping from one framework to the next like a plastic bag caught in a strong breeze.<p>Preact is now a decision point for any developer who Googles &quot;react alternative&quot; and scans far enough through the search results. This isn&#x27;t right. This contributes to decision fatigue. It&#x27;s time to stop churning out new frameworks that are only marginally different from what&#x27;s already available.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Cartwright2</author><text>&gt; People should always create and attempt improve upon whats out there. Don&#x27;t try to stifle innovation...<p>I agree completely and my argument is that a lot of the Javascript libraries being pushed around over the past three to four years are neither creative nor improvements over what already exists. React is innovative. Redux is (arguably) innovative. jQuery was innovative. Many other libraries have been innovative. I&#x27;m arguing against the hundreds upon hundreds of &quot;me too&quot; libraries that make it so much harder to find the truly innovative stuff. These libraries do nothing but add to decision fatigue. Developers have to make decisions, sure, but we need to have limits too.</text></comment> | <story><title>Preact, a fast 3k React alternative</title><url>http://developit.github.io/preact/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>terrortrain</author><text>Nope. People should always create and attempt improve upon whats out there.<p>Don&#x27;t try to stifle innovation for the sake of making decisions simpler.<p>If you don&#x27;t want to make decisions, don&#x27;t use libraries, or use an opinionated framework.</text></item><item><author>Cartwright2</author><text>I&#x27;m not sure that we should be doing this.<p>Yes, it stands to reason that if you take framework X, cut out a lot of functionality, remove some of the &quot;ugly&quot; code that addresses edge cases, then you end up with a similar, reduced framework which is smaller in file size.<p>But this is done at the cost of polluting the Javascript framework environment. The biggest problem right now is pollution, we&#x27;re all drinking from the fire hose of frameworks and someone needs to cut the supply so we can double-down on the good stuff and stop jumping from one framework to the next like a plastic bag caught in a strong breeze.<p>Preact is now a decision point for any developer who Googles &quot;react alternative&quot; and scans far enough through the search results. This isn&#x27;t right. This contributes to decision fatigue. It&#x27;s time to stop churning out new frameworks that are only marginally different from what&#x27;s already available.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pacomerh</author><text>I&#x27;m supporting this mentality. You should always be looking for ways to make existing things better. This is exactly how React was born damn it.</text></comment> |
30,964,656 | 30,963,835 | 1 | 3 | 30,963,723 | train | <story><title>Mozilla Thunderbird Beta now supports Matrix chat</title><url>https://matrix.org/blog/2022/04/08/this-week-in-matrix-2022-04-08#thunderbird</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hardwaresofton</author><text>The crossover I never knew I wanted but am glad to see<p>Does anyone know of any services that offer all the backing services for add-ons for thunderbird: WebDAV for filelink, CalDAV, CardDAV, (and now) Matrix?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rglullis</author><text>How much would you be willing to pay for it?<p>I provide Matrix hosting (as well as XMPP and ActivityPub Mastodon) on Communick [0].<p>At the moment I&#x27;m more focused on taking these services to offer custom domain hosting, and personally I&#x27;ve been staying away from servers and using DecSync [1] + syncthing to get my calendars and contacts on my devices [2], so I haven&#x27;t thought about adding a DAV server to the mix on Communick. But if you tell me there is any actual demand, I would definitely consider it.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;communick.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;communick.com</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;39aldo39&#x2F;DecSync" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;39aldo39&#x2F;DecSync</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;raphael.lullis.net&#x2F;thinking-heads-are-not-in-the-clouds&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;raphael.lullis.net&#x2F;thinking-heads-are-not-in-the-clo...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Mozilla Thunderbird Beta now supports Matrix chat</title><url>https://matrix.org/blog/2022/04/08/this-week-in-matrix-2022-04-08#thunderbird</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hardwaresofton</author><text>The crossover I never knew I wanted but am glad to see<p>Does anyone know of any services that offer all the backing services for add-ons for thunderbird: WebDAV for filelink, CalDAV, CardDAV, (and now) Matrix?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jakecopp</author><text>I haven&#x27;t heard of anyone that hosts both Matrix &amp; Mail&#x2F;Calendar&#x2F;Contacts.<p>That would be a really interesting enterprise solution though - effectively replacing Slack&#x2F;Teams for internal comms!</text></comment> |
21,862,499 | 21,862,333 | 1 | 2 | 21,861,764 | train | <story><title>France to Raise Pollution Tax on SUVs and Trucks to €22k</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-20/france-sharpens-offensive-against-suvs-by-raising-penalties</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>twblalock</author><text>If you want to tax pollution, tax fuel consumption or actual tailpipe emissions, not a broad class of vehicles.<p>Which emits more -- a small family SUV or a BMW M3?<p>Governments have taxed vehicles based on weight, width, engine displacement, etc. -- and the automakers adapt. It&#x27;s very easy to game the system. Just tax vehicles on a model-by-model basis on the fuel they actually use, and on what they actually emit.</text></comment> | <story><title>France to Raise Pollution Tax on SUVs and Trucks to €22k</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-20/france-sharpens-offensive-against-suvs-by-raising-penalties</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>rcMgD2BwE72F</author><text>And yet, the most popular French SUV won&#x27;t be a taxed a single € as part of this super malus (Peugeot 3008 and 5008).<p>Thus tax increase will impact far less than 1% if the sales. It&#x27;s all PR, nothing concrete.</text></comment> |
7,455,156 | 7,454,891 | 1 | 2 | 7,454,670 | train | <story><title>California police use of body cameras cuts violence and complaints (2013)</title><url>http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/04/california-police-body-cameras-cuts-violence-complaints-rialto</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ggreer</author><text>I&#x27;m very much in favor of these cameras, but there&#x27;s one extrapolation that few have proposed: Why not encourage private citizens to record their public lives? Most of the arguments for recording police apply to everyone: Allegations are quickly discovered to be true or false. Everyone involved is less likely to be violent. People are more cordial. Determining guilt or innocence is much easier. Was a shooting self-defense or manslaughter? Did the eyewitness really recognize the defendant on the night of the crime? Etc.<p>There are other perks to life-logging. Conversations could be transcribed and searched, eliminating many disputes as to who said what. We already do this with IRC and some types of video chat. You could even save footage that becomes important only much later. For example, you could prove you sold pencils to Vincent van Gogh before he was famous. Or you could record the first time you met your now-spouse. Finally, there&#x27;s the entertainment value of life-logging. Think Russian dash cams on steroids.<p>This technology has the potential to drastically reduce crime and improve quality of life. Yet I think most people would have an aversion to constantly recording their own lives, let alone being constantly recorded by others. I&#x27;m curious how people resolve this inconsistency.</text></comment> | <story><title>California police use of body cameras cuts violence and complaints (2013)</title><url>http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/04/california-police-body-cameras-cuts-violence-complaints-rialto</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jrlocke</author><text>I&#x27;m 23. People younger than me (generally) do not have faith in the police. My parents believe cops do no wrong. Neither belief leads to useful change.
This kind of program would moderate these thoughts into actionable ones while bringing accountability into these asymmetric encounters. This seems like a place where more surveilance is actually a good thing.</text></comment> |
35,999,222 | 35,999,261 | 1 | 3 | 35,997,351 | train | <story><title>Visa and Mastercard agree to lower average credit card interchange fee below 1%</title><url>https://ca.news.yahoo.com/visa-mastercard-agree-lower-average-193615680.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ivan_gammel</author><text>You won’t sell this idea in Europe. Here the price tag for anything is the full amount you pay - including all commissions and taxes. People use debit cards, the paid amount is immediately deducted from bank account. If customers are forced to calculate how much they actually will spend on each transaction, they will instantly switch back to cash.</text></item><item><author>mdasen</author><text>&gt; I&#x27;m weary of government intervention in capping prices, but I&#x27;m not sure what&#x27;s the alternative here<p>Instead of capping prices, you could simply require any fees to be paid by the cardholder. Combine that with a standard for payment processing so that lots of companies could compete for payment processing and fees would drop really fast.<p>If someone is using a POS terminal like Toast or Square, it should be trivial for them to support lots of new payment companies if they&#x27;re all adhering to a standard. If consumers have to pay the fee, they&#x27;re going to shop around for the lowest-fee card (just as many shop around for the highest-reward card now). You wouldn&#x27;t need government caps.<p>You could tell stores &quot;once you accept payments with the new system, the consumer is responsible for the fees.&quot; This would drop fees really fast - even for stores that didn&#x27;t upgrade their credit card machines. If Walmart, Target, CVS, etc. all update their machines quickly, I&#x27;m going to find a card with a low fee. Then when I use that card at a non-upgraded shop, they have to pay the fee, but it&#x27;s a much lower fee since I had shopped around for a low fee.<p>The issue right now is that the person choosing the card doesn&#x27;t feel any of the pain. As the article notes, Visa (Canada) charges 1.25% for a regular consumer card or 2.08% for a premium card. I will pay with a premium card since it will give me nice rewards and I don&#x27;t feel the additional 0.83% that the store has to pay. If I did have to feel it, I would make different decisions.<p>If you&#x27;re looking to change behavior, align people&#x27;s incentives. Another commenter said that they&#x27;re capped at 0.3% in Europe. Consumers might hate the idea of paying 0.3% additional, but I think credit card companies would drop below that cap if consumers had to pay it. I think they&#x27;d look to make it up on interest or other things. As you note, credit cards can come with 2% rewards so they&#x27;re essentially giving you the whole interchange fee back already. Make consumers shop around for the lowest fee cards.<p>The problem is that stores need to take the cards that consumers have with little option to forgo the fees. If Bank of America had a no-fee card while Chase charged 1.5%, consumers would move to BofA if they felt the fee.</text></item><item><author>e63f67dd-065b</author><text>These numbers are not public, but the grapevine is that visa&#x2F;mastercard keeps about a third of all interchange.<p>Credit card rewards are a regressive tax on the poor -- literally, only those like us here on HN with good credit can get 2% cashback on everything, the rest who pay with debit&#x2F;cash effectively subsidise our 2% discount. I enjoy my 2% cashback, but really would rather see a world where, like the EU, interchange got slashed to 30bps and it all went away.<p>Take a look around the rest of the world -- Alipay in China is 55bps, TNG is Malaysia is 50, Pix in Brazil (I can&#x27;t find concrete numbers, but seems to be around 22bps), etc. 2-300 bps is outrageous, we should demand better.<p>I don&#x27;t know what&#x27;s the solution here. I&#x27;m weary of government intervention in capping prices, but I&#x27;m not sure what&#x27;s the alternative here -- force each card to be available over multiple networks and for them to bid the interchange per transaction? Durbin amendment style caps? I don&#x27;t know. But I do know that the status quo cannot stand.<p>Edit: see the classic Boston Fed paper <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bostonfed.org&#x2F;publications&#x2F;public-policy-discussion-paper&#x2F;2010&#x2F;who-gains-and-who-loses-from-credit-card-payments-theory-and-calibrations.aspx" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bostonfed.org&#x2F;publications&#x2F;public-policy-discuss...</a> for a more through explanation of my point</text></item><item><author>arcticbull</author><text>Visa and Mastercard don&#x27;t keep much of interchange at all and never have.<p>The vast majority is paid to issuing banks to pay for loan origination, fraud and, most significantly, to return in the form of cash back or points.<p>These networks charge 0.2% for debit and 0.3% for credit in Europe as per regulation, you just don&#x27;t get rewards there.<p>Kinda sounds like they&#x27;re just going to squeeze issuing banks. Cash back and points cards in Canada (already pretty weak offerings compared to the US) are going to get further watered down. I&#x27;ve no real opinion on this, tbh.<p>Some napkin math that may not be right: Visa processed 11.6T in payment volume last year. Net revenue was $29B. Opex was $9.3B. Net income was $16B. That means their net revenue is about 0.25% and their net income is like 0.137% of transaction volume. This passes the smell test given their EU-mandated numbers. [1]<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;annualreport.visa.com&#x2F;financials&#x2F;default.aspx" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;annualreport.visa.com&#x2F;financials&#x2F;default.aspx</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jkaplowitz</author><text>The price tag in Europe already has at least one exception in some countries like Germany: bottles and cans subject to the deposit system usually have the deposit added on top of the listed price. Of course, one can recover the deposit by returning the bottle or can to a suitable store, but at the point of sale it is usually added on top of the listed. (The price listing often acknowledges this addition explicitly, with text like &quot;zzgl. 0,25€ Pfand&quot;.)<p>But yeah, I guess that doesn&#x27;t differ by payment method, so it wouldn&#x27;t affect the choice of payment method. And it&#x27;s not a percentage, so it&#x27;s easier mental math.</text></comment> | <story><title>Visa and Mastercard agree to lower average credit card interchange fee below 1%</title><url>https://ca.news.yahoo.com/visa-mastercard-agree-lower-average-193615680.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ivan_gammel</author><text>You won’t sell this idea in Europe. Here the price tag for anything is the full amount you pay - including all commissions and taxes. People use debit cards, the paid amount is immediately deducted from bank account. If customers are forced to calculate how much they actually will spend on each transaction, they will instantly switch back to cash.</text></item><item><author>mdasen</author><text>&gt; I&#x27;m weary of government intervention in capping prices, but I&#x27;m not sure what&#x27;s the alternative here<p>Instead of capping prices, you could simply require any fees to be paid by the cardholder. Combine that with a standard for payment processing so that lots of companies could compete for payment processing and fees would drop really fast.<p>If someone is using a POS terminal like Toast or Square, it should be trivial for them to support lots of new payment companies if they&#x27;re all adhering to a standard. If consumers have to pay the fee, they&#x27;re going to shop around for the lowest-fee card (just as many shop around for the highest-reward card now). You wouldn&#x27;t need government caps.<p>You could tell stores &quot;once you accept payments with the new system, the consumer is responsible for the fees.&quot; This would drop fees really fast - even for stores that didn&#x27;t upgrade their credit card machines. If Walmart, Target, CVS, etc. all update their machines quickly, I&#x27;m going to find a card with a low fee. Then when I use that card at a non-upgraded shop, they have to pay the fee, but it&#x27;s a much lower fee since I had shopped around for a low fee.<p>The issue right now is that the person choosing the card doesn&#x27;t feel any of the pain. As the article notes, Visa (Canada) charges 1.25% for a regular consumer card or 2.08% for a premium card. I will pay with a premium card since it will give me nice rewards and I don&#x27;t feel the additional 0.83% that the store has to pay. If I did have to feel it, I would make different decisions.<p>If you&#x27;re looking to change behavior, align people&#x27;s incentives. Another commenter said that they&#x27;re capped at 0.3% in Europe. Consumers might hate the idea of paying 0.3% additional, but I think credit card companies would drop below that cap if consumers had to pay it. I think they&#x27;d look to make it up on interest or other things. As you note, credit cards can come with 2% rewards so they&#x27;re essentially giving you the whole interchange fee back already. Make consumers shop around for the lowest fee cards.<p>The problem is that stores need to take the cards that consumers have with little option to forgo the fees. If Bank of America had a no-fee card while Chase charged 1.5%, consumers would move to BofA if they felt the fee.</text></item><item><author>e63f67dd-065b</author><text>These numbers are not public, but the grapevine is that visa&#x2F;mastercard keeps about a third of all interchange.<p>Credit card rewards are a regressive tax on the poor -- literally, only those like us here on HN with good credit can get 2% cashback on everything, the rest who pay with debit&#x2F;cash effectively subsidise our 2% discount. I enjoy my 2% cashback, but really would rather see a world where, like the EU, interchange got slashed to 30bps and it all went away.<p>Take a look around the rest of the world -- Alipay in China is 55bps, TNG is Malaysia is 50, Pix in Brazil (I can&#x27;t find concrete numbers, but seems to be around 22bps), etc. 2-300 bps is outrageous, we should demand better.<p>I don&#x27;t know what&#x27;s the solution here. I&#x27;m weary of government intervention in capping prices, but I&#x27;m not sure what&#x27;s the alternative here -- force each card to be available over multiple networks and for them to bid the interchange per transaction? Durbin amendment style caps? I don&#x27;t know. But I do know that the status quo cannot stand.<p>Edit: see the classic Boston Fed paper <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bostonfed.org&#x2F;publications&#x2F;public-policy-discussion-paper&#x2F;2010&#x2F;who-gains-and-who-loses-from-credit-card-payments-theory-and-calibrations.aspx" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bostonfed.org&#x2F;publications&#x2F;public-policy-discuss...</a> for a more through explanation of my point</text></item><item><author>arcticbull</author><text>Visa and Mastercard don&#x27;t keep much of interchange at all and never have.<p>The vast majority is paid to issuing banks to pay for loan origination, fraud and, most significantly, to return in the form of cash back or points.<p>These networks charge 0.2% for debit and 0.3% for credit in Europe as per regulation, you just don&#x27;t get rewards there.<p>Kinda sounds like they&#x27;re just going to squeeze issuing banks. Cash back and points cards in Canada (already pretty weak offerings compared to the US) are going to get further watered down. I&#x27;ve no real opinion on this, tbh.<p>Some napkin math that may not be right: Visa processed 11.6T in payment volume last year. Net revenue was $29B. Opex was $9.3B. Net income was $16B. That means their net revenue is about 0.25% and their net income is like 0.137% of transaction volume. This passes the smell test given their EU-mandated numbers. [1]<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;annualreport.visa.com&#x2F;financials&#x2F;default.aspx" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;annualreport.visa.com&#x2F;financials&#x2F;default.aspx</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Osiris</author><text>That’s not the case on the US (tax is added after the fact) and there hasn’t been a massive switch to cash. Convenience is a powerful thing.</text></comment> |
14,325,975 | 14,325,870 | 1 | 3 | 14,325,338 | train | <story><title>Elon Musk's Boring Company Begins First Tunnel</title><url>https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/12/15629754/elon-musk-boring-company-tunnels-watch-first-route-la</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>arcticbull</author><text>I definitely think this is cool tech, and it&#x27;s going to be amazing to see this whole setup work once completed.<p>I do have to wonder, this seems like it a largely over-engineered solution to the problem of moving people -- wouldn&#x27;t it be more practical to put a train down there? This still requires individuals own cars, so it does nothing to reduce costs, promote equality and seems to just move the traffic problem from the downtown core to the outlets of the tunnel. Am I missing something?<p>It feels like LA really needs public transit.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>backpropaganda</author><text>If you&#x27;d ask the people in 1900s, they&#x27;d say the &quot;right solution&quot; is faster horses.<p>Public transit SUCKS. And I don&#x27;t understand why people are pretending that it doesn&#x27;t. Space efficiency and throughput are not the only important variables here. How about freedom? Once I take that train and reach my work, what if I have to go somewhere nearby work?<p>There&#x27;s a reason cars exist. In your imaginary world, trains might be better than cars, but in the real world, cars are way better, even in those higher culture societies with planned cities like Scandinavia. Cars exist there too. Why? Because they do solve <i>some</i> problem, which I&#x27;d imagine could be comfort, freedom, privacy, hygiene, and many others I&#x27;m sure.</text></comment> | <story><title>Elon Musk's Boring Company Begins First Tunnel</title><url>https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/12/15629754/elon-musk-boring-company-tunnels-watch-first-route-la</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>arcticbull</author><text>I definitely think this is cool tech, and it&#x27;s going to be amazing to see this whole setup work once completed.<p>I do have to wonder, this seems like it a largely over-engineered solution to the problem of moving people -- wouldn&#x27;t it be more practical to put a train down there? This still requires individuals own cars, so it does nothing to reduce costs, promote equality and seems to just move the traffic problem from the downtown core to the outlets of the tunnel. Am I missing something?<p>It feels like LA really needs public transit.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Tiktaalik</author><text>You&#x27;re not missing anything. This is an example of implementing the wrong solution better instead of implementing the right solution.<p>The right solution is as you state public transit, which is more space efficient at moving people than cars.</text></comment> |
35,507,844 | 35,505,704 | 1 | 2 | 35,500,966 | train | <story><title>Sunset at the South Pole</title><url>https://brr.fyi/posts/sunset</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Jun8</author><text>Great set of posts! This one brought to mind: I think there&#x27;s an unexplored niche of vampire movies where our protagonist lives 6 months in each hemisphere per year to minimize downtime in a coffin. With careful planning and a private jet, you can probably reduce sun time to a few <i>hours</i> per year. This would be an interesting calculation to do.<p>Bonus Sunday thought: It&#x27;s always said that ants are found on all continents except Antarctica, e.g. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Ant" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Ant</a> (surely there must be <i>some</i> ants in the buildings). I&#x27;ve always thought it would be interesting to try to introduce them there, sort of like a modern-day Herostratos.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tialaramex</author><text>Modern humans are much better at successful bio-insulation. New Zealand&#x27;s first colonists couldn&#x27;t help but bring rats, there were rats everywhere there were humans, they snuck about large boats, the colonists were humans, they brought rats and, (with some small but growing exceptions) there are still rats everywhere humans live on New Zealand today.<p>However, by the time Amundsen Scott was built in 1956 we&#x27;d got much more conscious of why this is a bad idea and of how to prevent it. So the only reason there would be ants at Amundsen Scott would be if we intentionally wanted ants there, and I can&#x27;t think of any reason why we would. If they &quot;escaped&quot; they can&#x27;t live on Antarctica, the penguins make it look easy but it&#x27;s <i>really hard to live there</i>, an ant colony would need human intervention to basically feed and protect the ants.</text></comment> | <story><title>Sunset at the South Pole</title><url>https://brr.fyi/posts/sunset</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Jun8</author><text>Great set of posts! This one brought to mind: I think there&#x27;s an unexplored niche of vampire movies where our protagonist lives 6 months in each hemisphere per year to minimize downtime in a coffin. With careful planning and a private jet, you can probably reduce sun time to a few <i>hours</i> per year. This would be an interesting calculation to do.<p>Bonus Sunday thought: It&#x27;s always said that ants are found on all continents except Antarctica, e.g. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Ant" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Ant</a> (surely there must be <i>some</i> ants in the buildings). I&#x27;ve always thought it would be interesting to try to introduce them there, sort of like a modern-day Herostratos.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>SoftTalker</author><text>The vampire may be hungry though. Not too many people living in polar night regions, compared to more central lattitudes.<p>As for the ants idea, introducing a species where it doesn&#x27;t exist is usually a Bad Thing (TM).</text></comment> |
31,039,609 | 31,039,823 | 1 | 3 | 31,037,729 | train | <story><title>It’s Still Stupidly, Difficult to Buy a ‘Dumb’ TV</title><url>https://www.techdirt.com/2022/04/14/its-still-stupidly-ridiculously-difficult-to-buy-a-dumb-tv/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>andix</author><text>TVs without a tuner are quite popular in Austria. You save around 30€ per month on payments to public TV stations, if your TV is just a monitor and has no tuner.<p>You can get for example one of those (german, but you probably can read the specs anyway):<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nogis.at" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nogis.at</a> or <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gisbefreit.at&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gisbefreit.at&#x2F;</a><p>Most devices are not high end though.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>404mm</author><text>Vizio makes (or used to make) those as well. I have one of their 4k 70” without tuner (in the US). It does not suck any less.
Disclaimer: I received it as a “equal replacement” by squaretrade for broken Sharp 70”</text></comment> | <story><title>It’s Still Stupidly, Difficult to Buy a ‘Dumb’ TV</title><url>https://www.techdirt.com/2022/04/14/its-still-stupidly-ridiculously-difficult-to-buy-a-dumb-tv/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>andix</author><text>TVs without a tuner are quite popular in Austria. You save around 30€ per month on payments to public TV stations, if your TV is just a monitor and has no tuner.<p>You can get for example one of those (german, but you probably can read the specs anyway):<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nogis.at" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nogis.at</a> or <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gisbefreit.at&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gisbefreit.at&#x2F;</a><p>Most devices are not high end though.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>woldenron</author><text>Do you perhaps know how does it work in Germany? I heard you have to pay the TV tax regardless if you have a TV or not.</text></comment> |
31,398,942 | 31,396,146 | 1 | 2 | 31,395,765 | train | <story><title>McDonald’s to Exit from Russia</title><url>https://corporate.mcdonalds.com/corpmcd/en-us/our-stories/article/ourstories.mcd-exit-russia.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mupuff1234</author><text>Can you sell the Russian business without violating the sanctions?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lotusmars</author><text>Russian social media are full of winking posts hinting that McDonald&#x27;s will sell operations to a Russian company which it will still profit from &quot;behind the scenes&quot; (via offshore proxy or some other indirect way). They also hint that this will pave the way for other Western companies currently in limbo: split ownership between controllable proxy and Russian owner. And at the same time shout in Bloomberg how much you condemn Russian invasion to pacify Western public.<p>Can anyone confirm if it&#x27;s possible? I hope it&#x27;s Russian desinformation again, but I fear it&#x27;s possible looking at how &quot;well&quot; Western &quot;sanctions&quot; work (Moscow feels great, ruble is much stronger than even pre-war).</text></comment> | <story><title>McDonald’s to Exit from Russia</title><url>https://corporate.mcdonalds.com/corpmcd/en-us/our-stories/article/ourstories.mcd-exit-russia.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mupuff1234</author><text>Can you sell the Russian business without violating the sanctions?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jnorthrop</author><text>I&#x27;m not sure who downvoted you. It is a good question. McDonald&#x27;s and other consumer goods type companies are not sanctioned, so the company can sell its assets. For that matter they could continue to operate as normal in Russia if they choose.</text></comment> |
29,794,681 | 29,793,606 | 1 | 2 | 29,790,063 | train | <story><title>ASML reports fire at its Berlin factory</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/technology/asml-reports-fire-its-berlin-factory-2022-01-03/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>CookiesNCream23</author><text>I work in the industry and have worked in a fab. Here is some insight.<p>We are taught that fabs are not treated as factories but as hazardous chemical storage plants. On top of that, we work with high pressure and high power systems.<p>Fires have accounted for the most damage to fabs over the years; however, this situation is different.<p>The site is not a fab, it is a ASML manufacturing plant. This plant does not produce chips. It produces parts for the ASML machines. It makes the tables the wafer moves on and the frame the mask moves on.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=jH6Urfqt_d4" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=jH6Urfqt_d4</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikichip.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;mask" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikichip.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;mask</a><p>Downstream effects of this fire will reduce the uptime of the machines and the delivery of promised machines to our customers.<p>To plug ASML. Speaking as a new grad. If you are in hardware, physics, nanoscience, simulations. ASML is the best company to work at if you want to learn. I get exposure to maybe the most complex engineering system is the world. The scale, complexity, details, and just hardcore technology is mind-blowing. I am plugging ASML because it is not widely know and I would love if fellow engineers had the opportunity to work here. I absolutely love the work I do.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>collegeburner</author><text>This definitely doesn&#x27;t match how I heard some software is done there: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=18463181" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=18463181</a></text></comment> | <story><title>ASML reports fire at its Berlin factory</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/technology/asml-reports-fire-its-berlin-factory-2022-01-03/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>CookiesNCream23</author><text>I work in the industry and have worked in a fab. Here is some insight.<p>We are taught that fabs are not treated as factories but as hazardous chemical storage plants. On top of that, we work with high pressure and high power systems.<p>Fires have accounted for the most damage to fabs over the years; however, this situation is different.<p>The site is not a fab, it is a ASML manufacturing plant. This plant does not produce chips. It produces parts for the ASML machines. It makes the tables the wafer moves on and the frame the mask moves on.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=jH6Urfqt_d4" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=jH6Urfqt_d4</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikichip.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;mask" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikichip.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;mask</a><p>Downstream effects of this fire will reduce the uptime of the machines and the delivery of promised machines to our customers.<p>To plug ASML. Speaking as a new grad. If you are in hardware, physics, nanoscience, simulations. ASML is the best company to work at if you want to learn. I get exposure to maybe the most complex engineering system is the world. The scale, complexity, details, and just hardcore technology is mind-blowing. I am plugging ASML because it is not widely know and I would love if fellow engineers had the opportunity to work here. I absolutely love the work I do.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jokteur</author><text>I am currently beginning a PhD in physics (mathematical modeling, simulation on HPC) in Switzerland, and I am afraid that after my PhD, I won&#x27;t find a job that really pleases me. These last years, I came under the impression that you currently can only find ML driven software engineering jobs (I am exagerating of course), and having done quite a bit of ML and software engineering, I now know that I don&#x27;t want my future job be like this.<p>A company like ASML gives me hope. Do you know by chance if there are similar companies (complex engineering, with physics, maths, chemistry, computer science, ...) that are located in Switzerland ?</text></comment> |
24,709,531 | 24,708,687 | 1 | 3 | 24,707,994 | train | <story><title>Lessons learned from onboarding emails with no HTML styling</title><url>https://blog.palabra.io/great-onboarding-plain-text</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>bonoboTP</author><text>I really hate these cheesy lines that are &quot;excellent&quot; according to the article, like:<p>- &quot;You had enough fluff marketing content and so did we. So the absofreakinlutely BEST thing you could do right now...&quot;<p>- &quot;Writing this from my couch at home, hoping to find you safe and well at yours. It&#x27;s been a busy summer! I wanted to share more about out 2.9 release...&quot;<p>No, just no. Leave me alone, we aren&#x27;t friends, you did not write this to me personally. When I read such text I am mentally bracing myself and putting up my defenses because we are at war. You are fighting in the arms race in the attention economy at my expense. This kind of email is like mimicry in the animal kingdom. You are faking the appearance of a mail from a friend when it&#x27;s a business. It&#x27;s nasty, parasitic and off-putting.<p>But maybe it&#x27;s a cultural difference. Perhaps American culture is more receptive to this. But in most European cultures politeness requires a certain distance and being overly enthusiastically friendly makes us immediately think you are a scammer (in real life too). So pay attention to local cultural customs because these kinds of fake-cheerful-friendly-informal mails don&#x27;t work everywhere.</text></comment> | <story><title>Lessons learned from onboarding emails with no HTML styling</title><url>https://blog.palabra.io/great-onboarding-plain-text</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>hjanssen</author><text>To add to the points others have made: If I see an email with a name in the title I don&#x27;t recognize, I instantly think it is spam.<p>Please do not do this, it neither helps with your credibility nor does it help to build a &quot;connection&quot;. I want to know where this email is coming from, and if I have signed up at Spotify, I expect to recieve my emails from Spotify, not Tom whoever at Spotify.</text></comment> |
30,522,132 | 30,522,383 | 1 | 2 | 30,521,545 | train | <story><title>Write plain text files</title><url>https://sive.rs/plaintext</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>elteto</author><text>This is one of the main strengths of Obsidian, which I have been using lately and I’m extremely happy with: everything is just Markdown files in some folder on disk. Zero danger of lock in.<p>You can have a disk hierarchy if you desire, or trust that search will find you what you are looking for. For me search works fairly well and if I need something extra I can just grep&#x2F;sed&#x2F;awk.<p>Plus it has the features that a simple text editor will not have: displaying images, live preview, relationships between topics, etc. It even has a Vim mode!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nextos</author><text>I use org-mode the same way. I have a flat directory with many small files, inspired by Zettelkasten and by simple wikis. No server, no dependencies.<p>This also works well for small organizations. Both GitHub and GitLab are able to render org files, with some minor limitations. Hence, a simple repository full of org files is already a wiki. Even local links just work, with zero dependencies.<p>It&#x27;s possible to transform org files into HTML with some CI task to get support for all org features. But I have found this a bit of an overkill. I don&#x27;t need most org features. The basics are already great: outlines, timestamps, hyperlinks, tables and footnotes.<p>You can achieve more or less the same things with Markdown as well.</text></comment> | <story><title>Write plain text files</title><url>https://sive.rs/plaintext</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>elteto</author><text>This is one of the main strengths of Obsidian, which I have been using lately and I’m extremely happy with: everything is just Markdown files in some folder on disk. Zero danger of lock in.<p>You can have a disk hierarchy if you desire, or trust that search will find you what you are looking for. For me search works fairly well and if I need something extra I can just grep&#x2F;sed&#x2F;awk.<p>Plus it has the features that a simple text editor will not have: displaying images, live preview, relationships between topics, etc. It even has a Vim mode!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sylens</author><text>This is exactly why I switched to Obsidian after trying a few others like Bear, Notion, and Craft. Let me see the files on disk! Don&#x27;t abstract it away or hide it from me.</text></comment> |
13,368,688 | 13,368,617 | 1 | 3 | 13,366,498 | train | <story><title>Mac’s share falls to five-year low</title><url>http://www.computerworld.com/article/3155088/apple-mac/macs-share-falls-to-five-year-low.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fritzw</author><text>The second you compile one package to get any of those boxes to work, for me, the pro-linux box argument is negated. Particularly for work machines, I don&#x27;t have time to compile and install just to get my box up and running. Mac worked for me for this reason, I presume the reasons are the same for many. You like the freedom and power your boxes allot you, I like the simple operation of the mac. My problem is Macs are quickly becoming more work with all of there services and issues. When I start having to search for drivers online I might consider switching to Linux, but this won&#x27;t be a cure all, because I deal too much in graphics.</text></item><item><author>gshulegaard</author><text>&gt; the Mac ecosystem is now ingrained into open source development.<p>Interesting...<p>&gt; Anyone who suggests doing this either hasn&#x27;t done it before or has way too much time on their hands.<p>Oh...<p>Quick question, when was the last time you did it?<p>Currently I have three full time Linux boxes:<p>* Custom PC build I did myself<p>* System76 Galago UltraPro<p>* Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition<p>Oddly enough, the one that gave me the most issues was the Dell supported XPS 13 DE but I didn&#x27;t have to do a thing, just waited for driver updates from Dell which I could install via:<p>&gt; sudo apt-get update<p>&gt; sudo apt-get upgrade<p>But at the end of it I have a Linux laptop with premium build quality, 8 hour battery life (with 4K screen), and an external battery pack that easily extends my battery to a full day of work before needing an outlet.<p>My company gave me a Mac, but literally <i>every</i> other computer I personally own, right down to the Dell T710 server I have is running Linux (Ubuntu 14.04.3 specifically) without issue.<p>I don&#x27;t expect Linux to take over the Desktop market. But for Developers I see the current MBP as just another reason to seriously consider just getting a Linux laptop from an OEM like Dell or a niche player like System76.<p>Let&#x27;s face it, this MBP just highlights the fact that its target market is not developers or power users. Which is fine, and it probably can be a successful product with or without us...</text></item><item><author>jameslk</author><text>I keeping hearing the narrative from this crowd that the MBP is on its way out of being in vogue for developers, but I don&#x27;t buy it at all.<p>First of all, this is market share up to the release of the new MBP. It&#x27;s not surprising that their market share has been slipping given that up to this point they haven&#x27;t released a significant update to the MBP since 2013.<p>But getting to the point, the Mac ecosystem is now ingrained into open source development. Believe me I used to use a PC not too long ago and nothing would work because OS software is designed to run on top of a NIX environment. I recently had to go through this exercise with a colleague who was in denial. But over time, it ends up the same: software built to run on Linux servers runs best under an environment that is designed more like Linux. He now owns a MBP.<p>So Windows is out (for non .NET devs). That leaves us with what, Linux itself as the OS? Anyone who suggests doing this either hasn&#x27;t done it before or has way too much time on their hands. I use macOS because I don&#x27;t have time to hunt for drivers, trying to understand an obscure error discussed in a long forum thread or having all my software no longer work just because I updated a package. I&#x27;ve already tried that twice once with Gentoo and then with Ubuntu years later hoping it would be different. I know plenty of others who have as well. Ultimately we have jobs and we need to debug our own software.<p>Which brings us back to the Mac. I fully expect this release to be their Windows 8 moment, a beta event from which they will recover from given time for hardware to catch up. Not every release can be a stellar event. Give it time.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gshulegaard</author><text>I guess I implied it in my comment, but I&#x27;ll explicitly say it here:<p>&gt; I did not search for, manually install, or otherwise fiddle with drivers for any of my current 3 personal machines.<p>I have done so many times in the past, but not for these three[1].<p>This is particularly true for the System76 which not only had drivers pre-installed and the repository configured, but also had <i>no</i> issues out of the box...or ever in my case.<p>Dell had the drivers installed and the repo pre-configured...but out of the box there were some bugs in various drivers at release...but again for me it was a matter of waiting for a fix and just doing a regular `apt-get` update process...none of the typical online support forum crawling I typically am used to.<p>Don&#x27;t get me wrong, there are many other things that might dissuade you from going the Linux route, but driver headaches of old are largely gone, especially if you get a laptop&#x2F;desktop with OEM support.<p>[1] Aside for the aforementioned `update` and `upgrade` combination using the `apt-get` packaging system...but the relevant repositories were already configured (or configured automatically as is the case for custom build).</text></comment> | <story><title>Mac’s share falls to five-year low</title><url>http://www.computerworld.com/article/3155088/apple-mac/macs-share-falls-to-five-year-low.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fritzw</author><text>The second you compile one package to get any of those boxes to work, for me, the pro-linux box argument is negated. Particularly for work machines, I don&#x27;t have time to compile and install just to get my box up and running. Mac worked for me for this reason, I presume the reasons are the same for many. You like the freedom and power your boxes allot you, I like the simple operation of the mac. My problem is Macs are quickly becoming more work with all of there services and issues. When I start having to search for drivers online I might consider switching to Linux, but this won&#x27;t be a cure all, because I deal too much in graphics.</text></item><item><author>gshulegaard</author><text>&gt; the Mac ecosystem is now ingrained into open source development.<p>Interesting...<p>&gt; Anyone who suggests doing this either hasn&#x27;t done it before or has way too much time on their hands.<p>Oh...<p>Quick question, when was the last time you did it?<p>Currently I have three full time Linux boxes:<p>* Custom PC build I did myself<p>* System76 Galago UltraPro<p>* Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition<p>Oddly enough, the one that gave me the most issues was the Dell supported XPS 13 DE but I didn&#x27;t have to do a thing, just waited for driver updates from Dell which I could install via:<p>&gt; sudo apt-get update<p>&gt; sudo apt-get upgrade<p>But at the end of it I have a Linux laptop with premium build quality, 8 hour battery life (with 4K screen), and an external battery pack that easily extends my battery to a full day of work before needing an outlet.<p>My company gave me a Mac, but literally <i>every</i> other computer I personally own, right down to the Dell T710 server I have is running Linux (Ubuntu 14.04.3 specifically) without issue.<p>I don&#x27;t expect Linux to take over the Desktop market. But for Developers I see the current MBP as just another reason to seriously consider just getting a Linux laptop from an OEM like Dell or a niche player like System76.<p>Let&#x27;s face it, this MBP just highlights the fact that its target market is not developers or power users. Which is fine, and it probably can be a successful product with or without us...</text></item><item><author>jameslk</author><text>I keeping hearing the narrative from this crowd that the MBP is on its way out of being in vogue for developers, but I don&#x27;t buy it at all.<p>First of all, this is market share up to the release of the new MBP. It&#x27;s not surprising that their market share has been slipping given that up to this point they haven&#x27;t released a significant update to the MBP since 2013.<p>But getting to the point, the Mac ecosystem is now ingrained into open source development. Believe me I used to use a PC not too long ago and nothing would work because OS software is designed to run on top of a NIX environment. I recently had to go through this exercise with a colleague who was in denial. But over time, it ends up the same: software built to run on Linux servers runs best under an environment that is designed more like Linux. He now owns a MBP.<p>So Windows is out (for non .NET devs). That leaves us with what, Linux itself as the OS? Anyone who suggests doing this either hasn&#x27;t done it before or has way too much time on their hands. I use macOS because I don&#x27;t have time to hunt for drivers, trying to understand an obscure error discussed in a long forum thread or having all my software no longer work just because I updated a package. I&#x27;ve already tried that twice once with Gentoo and then with Ubuntu years later hoping it would be different. I know plenty of others who have as well. Ultimately we have jobs and we need to debug our own software.<p>Which brings us back to the Mac. I fully expect this release to be their Windows 8 moment, a beta event from which they will recover from given time for hardware to catch up. Not every release can be a stellar event. Give it time.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>eikenberry</author><text>&gt; The second you compile one package to get any of those boxes to work, for me, the pro-linux box argument is negated.<p>This seems a strange things to say considering everyone I know who uses a Mac for dev uses homebrew, which compiles as part of the install.</text></comment> |
21,542,587 | 21,542,683 | 1 | 2 | 21,541,865 | train | <story><title>It's Not Sabotage, They're Drowning</title><url>https://shermanonsoftware.com/2019/11/15/its-not-sabotage-theyre-drowning/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>stickfigure</author><text>I can perhaps understand where this one is coming from:<p><i>I refactored the code from untested and untestable, to testable with 40% test coverage. The senior architect is refusing to merge because the test coverage is to low.</i><p>You have a piece of software running in production; even if it&#x27;s poorly written and bereft of tests, your customers are satisfied. Customers (unwittingly) have already vetted this version! A rewrite, even with brilliant design and fantastic test coverage, is still more of a risk than fixing what isn&#x27;t broken.<p>This isn&#x27;t to say that you shouldn&#x27;t rewrite code, especially if it makes other improvements possible. But don&#x27;t discount how high a bar new code has to reach to measure up with &quot;it already works&quot;. Maybe 40% is still too risky.</text></comment> | <story><title>It's Not Sabotage, They're Drowning</title><url>https://shermanonsoftware.com/2019/11/15/its-not-sabotage-theyre-drowning/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>CoolGuySteve</author><text>Nobody’s better at letting better be the enemy of good than software engineers. For some reason our culture likes to argue and nitpick over the most mundane stuff, usually missing the forest for the trees.<p>I’ve had jobs where the manpower spent just arguing outweighed the cost of the change significantly. One dickhead manager I had spent weeks arguing over the acquisition of a $500 SSD. It made me want to slap $500 down on the table just so he’d shut the fuck up already.<p>The only way I know to counteract it is by saying “don’t let better be the enemy of good”.</text></comment> |
13,180,207 | 13,179,688 | 1 | 3 | 13,178,305 | train | <story><title>Does It Make Sense for Programmers to Move to the Bay Area?</title><url>http://blog.triplebyte.com/does-it-make-sense-for-programmers-to-move-to-the-bay-area</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>qntty</author><text>This is really insightful. Does this fallacy have an well known name?</text></item><item><author>harterrt</author><text>This could also be an artifact of the metric. I call this the &quot;Geico&quot; fallacy.<p>Geico advertises that &quot;People who switch to Geico save 15% or more&quot;. Notice that people who would lose money by switching to Geico should rarely switch. Accordingly, this metric will usually be positive.<p>Consider that people moving to a new city for a job may need more incentive to move.</text></item><item><author>tom_b</author><text>Interesting that Bay Area hackers make more than local hackers when they relocate outside the Bay Area.<p>FTA:<p><pre><code> A 2015 report by Hired found that when engineers from
the Bay Area relocate to other areas, they out-earn
engineers on the local market. Experience in the Bay
Area seems to advance careers. Engineers moving from
San Francisco to Seattle make an average of $9,000
more than others who get offers in Seattle. This Bay
Area premium is even higher in other cities: $16,000
in Boston, $17,000 in Chicago, and $19,000 in San Diego.
</code></pre>
[found slide at <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;get.hired.com&#x2F;rs&#x2F;348-IPO-044&#x2F;images&#x2F;Hired-State-of-Salaries.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;get.hired.com&#x2F;rs&#x2F;348-IPO-044&#x2F;images&#x2F;Hired-State-of-Sa...</a>]<p>Bay Area hackers are more valued in different markets than local hackers. I would love to see the raw data for the &quot;relocating&quot; hackers and local hackers. Is it a question of applied experience opportunities in the Bay Area hackers? Is just startup afterglow? Are relocating hackers better than average pre-Bay Area experience to begin with and this shows up when they migrate away from the Bay Area?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sjbp</author><text>Self-selection bias : <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Self-selection_bias" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Self-selection_bias</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Does It Make Sense for Programmers to Move to the Bay Area?</title><url>http://blog.triplebyte.com/does-it-make-sense-for-programmers-to-move-to-the-bay-area</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>qntty</author><text>This is really insightful. Does this fallacy have an well known name?</text></item><item><author>harterrt</author><text>This could also be an artifact of the metric. I call this the &quot;Geico&quot; fallacy.<p>Geico advertises that &quot;People who switch to Geico save 15% or more&quot;. Notice that people who would lose money by switching to Geico should rarely switch. Accordingly, this metric will usually be positive.<p>Consider that people moving to a new city for a job may need more incentive to move.</text></item><item><author>tom_b</author><text>Interesting that Bay Area hackers make more than local hackers when they relocate outside the Bay Area.<p>FTA:<p><pre><code> A 2015 report by Hired found that when engineers from
the Bay Area relocate to other areas, they out-earn
engineers on the local market. Experience in the Bay
Area seems to advance careers. Engineers moving from
San Francisco to Seattle make an average of $9,000
more than others who get offers in Seattle. This Bay
Area premium is even higher in other cities: $16,000
in Boston, $17,000 in Chicago, and $19,000 in San Diego.
</code></pre>
[found slide at <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;get.hired.com&#x2F;rs&#x2F;348-IPO-044&#x2F;images&#x2F;Hired-State-of-Salaries.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;get.hired.com&#x2F;rs&#x2F;348-IPO-044&#x2F;images&#x2F;Hired-State-of-Sa...</a>]<p>Bay Area hackers are more valued in different markets than local hackers. I would love to see the raw data for the &quot;relocating&quot; hackers and local hackers. Is it a question of applied experience opportunities in the Bay Area hackers? Is just startup afterglow? Are relocating hackers better than average pre-Bay Area experience to begin with and this shows up when they migrate away from the Bay Area?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sbuttgereit</author><text>Not that I know of... the closest might be the Broken Window Fallacy (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.investopedia.com&#x2F;ask&#x2F;answers&#x2F;08&#x2F;broken-window-fallacy.asp" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.investopedia.com&#x2F;ask&#x2F;answers&#x2F;08&#x2F;broken-window-fal...</a>), where only the effect of &quot;seen&quot; outcomes are front of mind and considered, but &quot;unseen&quot; outcomes are ignored even if they are more impactful to reality.</text></comment> |
30,487,512 | 30,487,476 | 1 | 3 | 30,487,351 | train | <story><title>Germany commits €100B to defense spending</title><url>https://www.dw.com/en/germany-commits-100-billion-to-defense-spending/a-60933724</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jnsaff2</author><text>How about invest 100 billion on renewables to get independence from russian gas.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bakuninsbart</author><text>The same speech actually mentions energy security [0], and the new government is planning to invest a huge amount into renewable energy and a deeper integration of the european energy market.<p>One thing that is often left out of the international discussion of Germany&#x27;s domestic policies is that we actually put a law into our constitution to limit governments from making new debt... So if the current government wants to take on new debt for Defense and Energy Transition, it will have to either do some tricks (the 100B for the military is supposed to come from a different, special pot), or change the constitution again, for which they would need the votes of the opposition.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=4_F1xCKi5vY" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=4_F1xCKi5vY</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Germany commits €100B to defense spending</title><url>https://www.dw.com/en/germany-commits-100-billion-to-defense-spending/a-60933724</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jnsaff2</author><text>How about invest 100 billion on renewables to get independence from russian gas.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>belter</author><text>Or revert the decision to phase out nuclear power.</text></comment> |
28,762,592 | 28,763,001 | 1 | 2 | 28,760,305 | train | <story><title>Facebook whistleblower hearing: Frances Haugen testifies in Washington – live</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/technology/live/2021/oct/05/facebook-hearing-whistleblower-frances-haugen-testifies-us-senate-latest-news</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tw600040</author><text>I don&#x27;t understand which of these accusations are actually breaking the law. They all imply that Facebook isn&#x27;t being a Good Samaritan, but that isn&#x27;t actually illegal.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>alfalfasprout</author><text>Whether or not anything here is illegal is for the courts to decide. But the hearing is for policymakers. If there&#x27;s grossly disagreeable and unethical conduct then it&#x27;s up to policymakers to create new laws or modify existing laws to prevent these things in the future.<p>This is why hearings like this are important.</text></comment> | <story><title>Facebook whistleblower hearing: Frances Haugen testifies in Washington – live</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/technology/live/2021/oct/05/facebook-hearing-whistleblower-frances-haugen-testifies-us-senate-latest-news</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tw600040</author><text>I don&#x27;t understand which of these accusations are actually breaking the law. They all imply that Facebook isn&#x27;t being a Good Samaritan, but that isn&#x27;t actually illegal.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tablespoon</author><text>&gt; I don&#x27;t understand which of these accusations are actually breaking the law.<p>You misunderstand: this isn&#x27;t so much about enforcing existing laws, rather it&#x27;s about advocating for <i>new</i> ones.</text></comment> |
16,074,010 | 16,073,945 | 1 | 3 | 16,073,254 | train | <story><title>How a researcher hacked his own computer and found 'worst' chip flaw</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cyber-intel-researcher/how-a-researcher-hacked-his-own-computer-and-found-worst-chip-flaw-idUSKBN1ET1ZR</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Pxtl</author><text>Okay, one thing I don&#x27;t get: Fundamentally, the Meltdown problem comes from a process getting to inspect the wreckage after the the CPU <i>tried</i> to clean up access of protected memory, but failed to properly account for a fun trick of caching.<p>That is, the process tried to read some data from protected memory A and did some fancy stuff with it such that left enough breadcrumbs that after the CPU responds to the illegal read, the process still has enough info to piece together what was in A, at least from timing of reads, right?<p>Why not kill the process instantly on a prohibited read, then? Do these prohibited reads happen too often to switch from &quot;oh, that&#x27;s okay, you can try again and do other stuff&quot; to &quot;the punishment is death&quot;?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>apendleton</author><text>My understanding:<p>Because it may not be known whether or not the read will have ended up being prohibited at the time it&#x27;s speculatively executed. Think of a simple for loop over the contents of an array: usually at the end of each loop iteration you jump back to the beginning of the loop, until the last time you don&#x27;t, when i &gt; array.length or whatever. The branch predictor will likely predict that the last time you&#x27;ll jump back again (you always have before, and it doesn&#x27;t know the actual value of array.length yet since that takes hundreds of cycles to come back from memory) and try to speculatively execute the contents of the loop body on what turns out to be out-of-bounds data. That&#x27;s not typically malicious; it&#x27;s at the end of pretty much every iteration over an array ever.<p>So then, if we can reliably get our loop to operate on a bit of data that might turn out to be out of bounds, the trick is then to have a loop body like this:<p>if (potentially_illegal_bit == 1) {
load_legal_location_1()
} else {
load_legal_location_2()
}<p>After the branch misprediction occurs, the state of the program gets rolled back so we don&#x27;t know what potentially_illegal_bit itself was anymore, but we don&#x27;t have to, we can surmise it from the cache contents. The program isn&#x27;t going to do an illegal read, it&#x27;s going to do a legal one, to either legal location 1 or legal location 2, and see which is faster (as only one of them should be cached). Both reads are legal and will succeed, so the only difference is the speed. We&#x27;ve now exfiltrated one bit of data from outside of your array bounds, but the only actually illegal read was speculative, which, as far as the CPU is concerned, is par for the course (predictions are wrong all the time), so no harm, no foul.</text></comment> | <story><title>How a researcher hacked his own computer and found 'worst' chip flaw</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cyber-intel-researcher/how-a-researcher-hacked-his-own-computer-and-found-worst-chip-flaw-idUSKBN1ET1ZR</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Pxtl</author><text>Okay, one thing I don&#x27;t get: Fundamentally, the Meltdown problem comes from a process getting to inspect the wreckage after the the CPU <i>tried</i> to clean up access of protected memory, but failed to properly account for a fun trick of caching.<p>That is, the process tried to read some data from protected memory A and did some fancy stuff with it such that left enough breadcrumbs that after the CPU responds to the illegal read, the process still has enough info to piece together what was in A, at least from timing of reads, right?<p>Why not kill the process instantly on a prohibited read, then? Do these prohibited reads happen too often to switch from &quot;oh, that&#x27;s okay, you can try again and do other stuff&quot; to &quot;the punishment is death&quot;?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>conradev</author><text>Speculative execution executes code that might not actually run. The following example could access protected memory even if `has_privileges` is false (i.e. the processor predicts it might be true):<p><pre><code> if (has_privileges) {
&#x2F;&#x2F; Access protected memory
} else {
&#x2F;&#x2F; Do something else
}</code></pre></text></comment> |
9,924,172 | 9,924,357 | 1 | 3 | 9,923,718 | train | <story><title>Why I am pro-GPL</title><url>http://dustycloud.org/blog/why-i-am-pro-gpl/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>epistasis</author><text>And that&#x27;s a great thing to care about, and a great reason to create a license. The secondary question is: which license is best at perpetuating user freedom? This is a separate question than that of whether users <i>should</i> have freedom to mess with code. IMHO, the GPL is not the best license for perpetuating the most user freedom. Many people disagree with me on this, but their disagreement usually comes down to &quot;the GPL is best for user freedom because it was created for user freedom and RMS is talking about user freedom.&quot; I&#x27;m not yet convinced that MIT-like, BSD-like, and Apache-like are any worse at perpetuating user freedom, and may in fact be far better at perpetuating user freedom due to their greater acceptance.</text></item><item><author>TazeTSchnitzel</author><text>It&#x27;s worth remembering why the GPL was invented.<p>Stallman had a printer which had proprietary drivers, and he wanted to fix an issue with the driver. He couldn&#x27;t. He created the GPL so that, in future, people wouldn&#x27;t have this problem.<p>Stallman created the GPL because he cared about user freedom.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jbk</author><text>&gt; I&#x27;m not yet convinced that MIT-like, BSD-like, and Apache-like are any worse at perpetuating user freedom, and may in fact be far better at perpetuating user freedom due to their greater acceptance.<p>Well, the GPL mandates the right to use the application, and that a redistributor cannot restrict it (section 0, preambule and section 6, IIRC); that right is not guaranteed by MIT, BSD, MPL or Apache.</text></comment> | <story><title>Why I am pro-GPL</title><url>http://dustycloud.org/blog/why-i-am-pro-gpl/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>epistasis</author><text>And that&#x27;s a great thing to care about, and a great reason to create a license. The secondary question is: which license is best at perpetuating user freedom? This is a separate question than that of whether users <i>should</i> have freedom to mess with code. IMHO, the GPL is not the best license for perpetuating the most user freedom. Many people disagree with me on this, but their disagreement usually comes down to &quot;the GPL is best for user freedom because it was created for user freedom and RMS is talking about user freedom.&quot; I&#x27;m not yet convinced that MIT-like, BSD-like, and Apache-like are any worse at perpetuating user freedom, and may in fact be far better at perpetuating user freedom due to their greater acceptance.</text></item><item><author>TazeTSchnitzel</author><text>It&#x27;s worth remembering why the GPL was invented.<p>Stallman had a printer which had proprietary drivers, and he wanted to fix an issue with the driver. He couldn&#x27;t. He created the GPL so that, in future, people wouldn&#x27;t have this problem.<p>Stallman created the GPL because he cared about user freedom.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>phkahler</author><text>&gt;&gt; I&#x27;m not yet convinced that MIT-like, BSD-like, and Apache-like are any worse at perpetuating user freedom, and may in fact be far better at perpetuating user freedom due to their greater acceptance.<p>Just try to get source code to any of the Apple or Microsoft OS parts that were BSD licensed so you can tweak them. Then come back and tell me how free you feel. I know you probably don&#x27;t have a desire to change most of that, but my point is that you can&#x27;t - for the parts that were changed from their BSD origins with no source released.</text></comment> |
10,438,106 | 10,437,411 | 1 | 2 | 10,437,109 | train | <story><title>Decline in the labor share of income in the U.S.</title><url>http://www.vox.com/2015/1/8/7511281/labor-share-income</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>netcan</author><text>One of the key concepts for thinking like an economist is noticing where and how things are economically equivalent, or literally fungible.<p>Trade (like outsourcing) and technology is economically indistinguishable from technology from the perspective of a single country. The classic example is that if you export potatoes and import cars, this is economically equivalent to finding a way to grow cars in a field.<p>In practice trade and technology have always been closely related. When China could make silk and Italy could make glass, trade was very obviously a substitute for the technology.<p>So basically, it makes a lot of sense to treat advancements in trade and technologies similarly in our thinking. Luddite ideas and economic isolationist ideas are in this sense different flavors of the same reaction by those made redundant.<p>Personally, I don&#x27;t buy &quot;robots wil take all jobs&quot; wholesale. There&#x27;s a lot of guesses in there we don&#x27;t have a rational way of making. We need to remember the many incarnations of Ned Ludd though time, including eminent figures like Ghandi. I think they&#x27;ve all been wrong regarding the big picture. While this time might indeed be different, we need to give some respect to the fact that this is an idea we have a long history with, and we&#x27;ve been wrong about it in most cases.<p>That said, I think the pace of change is a new part of the mix. The work in a 1850 factory and an 1875 factory was not different to the same extent as 1990-2015. People with 1990 skills now are not employable today in many&#x2F;most fields. If that condenses further as I think it will, many people will fail to stay employable from 18-65, which means more unemployment.<p>I think we also need to consider some points Marx was fairly right about, the inevitability of political instability as a result of certain economic realities. Too much inequality can lead to revolution.</text></comment> | <story><title>Decline in the labor share of income in the U.S.</title><url>http://www.vox.com/2015/1/8/7511281/labor-share-income</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ptaipale</author><text>There are more issues here that could be discussed - particularly what is pointed out already in point 5, statistical quirks - but I&#x27;ll stick to this one in point 6 for now:<p>&quot;Another possibility is that the decline is more recent than we assume, and the result of slack in the labor market is due in large part to the recession.&quot;<p>I haven&#x27;t studied US data, but in my country (Finland), which is a small country dependent on trade, the impact of recession is exactly the opposite. Recession means that the labor share of income goes <i>up</i>, not down. Labor share of income has been in historically local highs at a time when life was very very bad (1992-1993): high unemployment, falling income, foreclosures.<p>The labor share of income has gone down here, as well. But it&#x27;s not because of more money going to capitalists. Their share has been essentially the same since 1970&#x27;s (23-25%). In my country, the falling share of labor is almost entirely explained by the rising share of state: the proportion of taxes on production and imports has gone up by about 5 percentage points, from 10 % to 15% of national income. So the share of labor has gone down from ~67 % to ~60 %.<p>I wrote this blog post three years ago but it&#x27;s still quite valid:
<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;ptaipale.blogspot.fi&#x2F;2012_08_01_archive.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;ptaipale.blogspot.fi&#x2F;2012_08_01_archive.html</a></text></comment> |
28,759,455 | 28,758,016 | 1 | 3 | 28,756,454 | train | <story><title>A new public beta of GitHub Releases</title><url>https://github.blog/2021-10-04-beta-github-releases-improving-release-experience/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Vinnl</author><text>Ugh. One of my pet peeves is the generation of release notes from commit messages. Commit messages and PR descriptions have a different audience (i.e. contributors) from release notes (i.e. users).<p>For example, take a look at ESLint&#x27;s autogenerated changelog [1]:<p><pre><code> 67c0074 Update: Suggest missing rule in flat config (fixes #14027) (#15074) (Nicholas C. Zakas)
cf34e5c Update: space-before-blocks ignore after switch colons (fixes #15082) (#15093) (Milos Djermanovic)
c9efb5f Fix: preserve formatting when rules are removed from disable directives (#15081) (Milos Djermanovic)
14a4739 Update: no-new-func rule catching eval case of MemberExpression (#14860) (Mojtaba Samimi)
7f2346b Docs: Update release blog post template (#15094) (Nicholas C. Zakas)
fabdf8a Chore: Remove target.all from Makefile.js (#15088) (Hirotaka Tagawa &#x2F; wafuwafu13)
e3cd141 Sponsors: Sync README with website (ESLint Jenkins)
05d7140 Chore: document target global in Makefile.js (#15084) (Hirotaka Tagawa &#x2F; wafuwafu13)
0a1a850 Update: include ruleId in error logs (fixes #15037) (#15053) (Ari Perkkiö)
47be800 Chore: test Property &gt; .key with { a = 1 } pattern (fixes #14799) (#15072) (Milos Djermanovic)
a744dfa Docs: Update CLA info (#15058) (Brian Warner)
9fb0f70 Chore: fix bug report template (#15061) (Milos Djermanovic)
f87e199 Chore: Cleanup issue templates (#15039) (Nicholas C. Zakas)
</code></pre>
I&#x27;m reading release notes to get a feel for how the new release might impact me. This takes so much time to scan, because there&#x27;s so much useless cruft (to me, as a user) I have to ignore.<p>What&#x27;s worked very well for me is to simply have an &quot;I updated the changelog, if applicable&quot; entry in my PR template checklist. Then when I cut a new release, I simply add the release date above the release notes currently listed under &quot;Unreleased&quot;, and they&#x27;ll list all relevant changes, reviewed during the pull request to verify that it is relevant to users.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;eslint&#x2F;eslint&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;CHANGELOG.md" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;eslint&#x2F;eslint&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;CHANGELOG.md</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mylesborins</author><text>I guess it is a good thing we made automated release notes on GitHub use PRs instead of commits then ; )</text></comment> | <story><title>A new public beta of GitHub Releases</title><url>https://github.blog/2021-10-04-beta-github-releases-improving-release-experience/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Vinnl</author><text>Ugh. One of my pet peeves is the generation of release notes from commit messages. Commit messages and PR descriptions have a different audience (i.e. contributors) from release notes (i.e. users).<p>For example, take a look at ESLint&#x27;s autogenerated changelog [1]:<p><pre><code> 67c0074 Update: Suggest missing rule in flat config (fixes #14027) (#15074) (Nicholas C. Zakas)
cf34e5c Update: space-before-blocks ignore after switch colons (fixes #15082) (#15093) (Milos Djermanovic)
c9efb5f Fix: preserve formatting when rules are removed from disable directives (#15081) (Milos Djermanovic)
14a4739 Update: no-new-func rule catching eval case of MemberExpression (#14860) (Mojtaba Samimi)
7f2346b Docs: Update release blog post template (#15094) (Nicholas C. Zakas)
fabdf8a Chore: Remove target.all from Makefile.js (#15088) (Hirotaka Tagawa &#x2F; wafuwafu13)
e3cd141 Sponsors: Sync README with website (ESLint Jenkins)
05d7140 Chore: document target global in Makefile.js (#15084) (Hirotaka Tagawa &#x2F; wafuwafu13)
0a1a850 Update: include ruleId in error logs (fixes #15037) (#15053) (Ari Perkkiö)
47be800 Chore: test Property &gt; .key with { a = 1 } pattern (fixes #14799) (#15072) (Milos Djermanovic)
a744dfa Docs: Update CLA info (#15058) (Brian Warner)
9fb0f70 Chore: fix bug report template (#15061) (Milos Djermanovic)
f87e199 Chore: Cleanup issue templates (#15039) (Nicholas C. Zakas)
</code></pre>
I&#x27;m reading release notes to get a feel for how the new release might impact me. This takes so much time to scan, because there&#x27;s so much useless cruft (to me, as a user) I have to ignore.<p>What&#x27;s worked very well for me is to simply have an &quot;I updated the changelog, if applicable&quot; entry in my PR template checklist. Then when I cut a new release, I simply add the release date above the release notes currently listed under &quot;Unreleased&quot;, and they&#x27;ll list all relevant changes, reviewed during the pull request to verify that it is relevant to users.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;eslint&#x2F;eslint&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;CHANGELOG.md" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;eslint&#x2F;eslint&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;CHANGELOG.md</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>e3bc54b2</author><text>This is why I believe Nate Graham does a fantastic job with weekly KDE updates[0]. He actually goes through the pain to condense every bugfix&#x2F;feature addition to readable and grokkable single line, and it makes for great changelog read.<p>Of course, not every project can manage to write such a thoughtful post for every release, but if Mr. Graham can do it for something as sprawling as KDE, then can sure at least try.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pointieststick.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pointieststick.com&#x2F;</a></text></comment> |
17,162,391 | 17,162,350 | 1 | 2 | 17,162,000 | train | <story><title>GDPR Version of USA Today Is 500KB Instead of 5.2MB</title><url>https://twitter.com/fr3ino/status/1000166112615714816?s=19</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dominotw</author><text>Is anyone concerned that we are starting to replicate real world boundaries on the internet.<p>Internet was supposed to free us from the limitations of the real world. World of internet was supposed to be the one where you can fluidly switch between your preceptions of self, become a new person whenever you felt like, leave your past behind. This was supposed to be a new world where people see themselves differently.<p>Now we have created countries on internet. Transferred our real world identity onto internet. Masses were rushed into the internet before they were ready, before they got the concept of what internet means psychologically. Now we vast bureaucracies ruling the internet, so depressing. Depressing to see ppl on HN saying &quot;Good&quot; to every GDPR news. Sad to see internet age squashed by beurocracies right when it was getting started.</text></item><item><author>ocdtrekkie</author><text>I&#x27;m honestly starting to reach the opinion we should all be VPNing our web traffic through Europe so we can pick up more of the benefits.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>anvandare</author><text>The story of mankind, I&#x27;m afraid. A few people find a neat little spot where they can hang out, and for a while things are great, everything is pretty cool. Then, sooner or later, the group gets Too Big. Not so cool stuff starts happening, and where formerly you had a small anarchic group that worked with mutual understanding and (unspoken) agreements, now you have a need for Laws and Enforcement and Bureaucracy.<p>Every beautiful place on Earth will sooner or later be exploited for mass tourism and marketing. If you ever find such a place, keep it a secret, to keep it intact.</text></comment> | <story><title>GDPR Version of USA Today Is 500KB Instead of 5.2MB</title><url>https://twitter.com/fr3ino/status/1000166112615714816?s=19</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dominotw</author><text>Is anyone concerned that we are starting to replicate real world boundaries on the internet.<p>Internet was supposed to free us from the limitations of the real world. World of internet was supposed to be the one where you can fluidly switch between your preceptions of self, become a new person whenever you felt like, leave your past behind. This was supposed to be a new world where people see themselves differently.<p>Now we have created countries on internet. Transferred our real world identity onto internet. Masses were rushed into the internet before they were ready, before they got the concept of what internet means psychologically. Now we vast bureaucracies ruling the internet, so depressing. Depressing to see ppl on HN saying &quot;Good&quot; to every GDPR news. Sad to see internet age squashed by beurocracies right when it was getting started.</text></item><item><author>ocdtrekkie</author><text>I&#x27;m honestly starting to reach the opinion we should all be VPNing our web traffic through Europe so we can pick up more of the benefits.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ocdtrekkie</author><text>We haven&#x27;t &quot;created countries on the Internet&quot;. The Internet exists <i>in</i> the real world, and it exists in countries. Those countries have laws, and they always applied. Governments can take time to adopt to new technologies, but this was always going to happen.<p>And GDPR is an awesome thing, it&#x27;s an example of governments doing the right thing.</text></comment> |
37,356,766 | 37,356,772 | 1 | 3 | 37,347,657 | train | <story><title>Ask HN: What is your policy regarding smartphones for your children?</title><text>Recently, there are more and more studies that smartphones harm learning and not a single study with the opposite results. However, very few parents have the guts not to buy a smartphone for their child. At what age do children in the HN crowd begin to have censored access to proprietary software (personal supervision) and uncensored (smartphone with or without parental controls)? Are there families where children have access to computers with only FOSS before they have access to proprietary software?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>yumraj</author><text>Smartphone in high school, not before.<p>No social media <i>apps</i> on the phone. Parental control (iOS) so need Parent permission before installing apps<p>At home most&#x2F;almost every non-professional social media is blocked via pi-hole<p>I’m not on FB, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok etc. I think this is very very important for the above since kids see that parents are also not on social media. Most people, IMHO, run into trouble when they use it but want to restrict kids.<p>This mostly worked for a kid who just went to college. Will see if it works for the other.<p>Edit: have Switch and PS5, but multiplayer internet games are not allowed. Offline games only.<p>Edit2: I occasionally remote login into computers to tell the kids that I can do that. I think&#x2F;hope it reduces temptation.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gizmo385</author><text>As a person who grew up and found very valuable social connections in online spaces, connections that helped me figure out who I am as a person, these feel very controlling and overbearing to be a bit blunt. For kids who don’t fit society’s typical mold, whether they be queer or whatever, being able to meet people who have lived their experience is invaluable.</text></comment> | <story><title>Ask HN: What is your policy regarding smartphones for your children?</title><text>Recently, there are more and more studies that smartphones harm learning and not a single study with the opposite results. However, very few parents have the guts not to buy a smartphone for their child. At what age do children in the HN crowd begin to have censored access to proprietary software (personal supervision) and uncensored (smartphone with or without parental controls)? Are there families where children have access to computers with only FOSS before they have access to proprietary software?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>yumraj</author><text>Smartphone in high school, not before.<p>No social media <i>apps</i> on the phone. Parental control (iOS) so need Parent permission before installing apps<p>At home most&#x2F;almost every non-professional social media is blocked via pi-hole<p>I’m not on FB, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok etc. I think this is very very important for the above since kids see that parents are also not on social media. Most people, IMHO, run into trouble when they use it but want to restrict kids.<p>This mostly worked for a kid who just went to college. Will see if it works for the other.<p>Edit: have Switch and PS5, but multiplayer internet games are not allowed. Offline games only.<p>Edit2: I occasionally remote login into computers to tell the kids that I can do that. I think&#x2F;hope it reduces temptation.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>shmde</author><text>Sounds draconian af. This would just... make a kid hack into the iPhone and find out ways to remove restrictions.</text></comment> |
9,708,424 | 9,708,440 | 1 | 2 | 9,708,211 | train | <story><title>California Announces Restrictions on Water Use by Farmers</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/13/us/california-announces-restrictions-on-water-use-by-farmers.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jkyle</author><text>About time.<p>Agriculture is using 80% of the water, but accounts for a mere 2% of the GDP (4% of employment)[1].<p>There&#x27;s no reason we should be squeezing our rural and suburban centers that fuel the overwhelming majority of our economy while giving farmer&#x27;s a free pass to suck the state dry of usable water which is mainly used for exported profits and not sustaining local industries.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;govbeat&#x2F;wp&#x2F;2015&#x2F;04&#x2F;03&#x2F;agriculture-is-80-percent-of-water-use-in-california-why-arent-farmers-being-forced-to-cut-back&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;govbeat&#x2F;wp&#x2F;2015&#x2F;04&#x2F;03&#x2F;ag...</a><p><i>edit</i><p>For clarification, mentioning the GDP is meant to show that cutting back on agricultural usage will not affect our economy catastrophically even if the industry sinks a bit. Will food prices go up? Perhaps.<p>Further, if the point is food <i>production</i> and not food <i>profit</i> for the nation then the focus should be on producing the most water efficient foods (per calorie) not the most profitable foods produced under an assumption of free or near free water. So yeah, that might mean less prime rib and more black eyed peas for Americans (figuratively speaking).<p>The cost of the product should reflect the cost of the resources required to produce. This is not the current case.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>monochromatic</author><text>Why is that a comparison that makes sense? If we doubled the water available to tech companies, that wouldn&#x27;t make them any more productive.</text></comment> | <story><title>California Announces Restrictions on Water Use by Farmers</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/13/us/california-announces-restrictions-on-water-use-by-farmers.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jkyle</author><text>About time.<p>Agriculture is using 80% of the water, but accounts for a mere 2% of the GDP (4% of employment)[1].<p>There&#x27;s no reason we should be squeezing our rural and suburban centers that fuel the overwhelming majority of our economy while giving farmer&#x27;s a free pass to suck the state dry of usable water which is mainly used for exported profits and not sustaining local industries.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;govbeat&#x2F;wp&#x2F;2015&#x2F;04&#x2F;03&#x2F;agriculture-is-80-percent-of-water-use-in-california-why-arent-farmers-being-forced-to-cut-back&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;govbeat&#x2F;wp&#x2F;2015&#x2F;04&#x2F;03&#x2F;ag...</a><p><i>edit</i><p>For clarification, mentioning the GDP is meant to show that cutting back on agricultural usage will not affect our economy catastrophically even if the industry sinks a bit. Will food prices go up? Perhaps.<p>Further, if the point is food <i>production</i> and not food <i>profit</i> for the nation then the focus should be on producing the most water efficient foods (per calorie) not the most profitable foods produced under an assumption of free or near free water. So yeah, that might mean less prime rib and more black eyed peas for Americans (figuratively speaking).<p>The cost of the product should reflect the cost of the resources required to produce. This is not the current case.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>WillPostForFood</author><text>The primary contribution of agriculture is feeding people, not GDP. What does watering one&#x27;s lawn contribute to?</text></comment> |
28,494,146 | 28,493,393 | 1 | 3 | 28,489,567 | train | <story><title>Why did the web take over desktop and not mobile?</title><url>https://subconscious.substack.com/p/why-did-the-web-take-over-desktop</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>amw-zero</author><text>People say this a lot, but really, what can a native app track that a web app can&#x27;t? To track location, you need to give the app permission, just like the web. To receive push notifications, you need to give the app permission, just like the web.<p>I think this claim is unfounded.</text></item><item><author>feanaro</author><text>Native phone apps are more invasive and can therefore be used for more extensive tracking and spying, which is good for ad revenue.<p>Remember how all the largest spying products like Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit, Twitter, etc aggressively push you to install their phone apps even though they are (or were) perfectly usable through their mobile websites.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>manigandham</author><text>Native apps have much more access to lower level APIs and had fixed identity that could be shared with all other apps.<p>The web was always limited by JS access, processing power, network connectivity, and a very fragile identity graph that was routinely reset. That&#x27;s why Safari&#x27;s battle on privacy is routinely seen as a misguided effort by most of the adtech industry that knows that SDKs in mobile apps reveal a magnitude more data.</text></comment> | <story><title>Why did the web take over desktop and not mobile?</title><url>https://subconscious.substack.com/p/why-did-the-web-take-over-desktop</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>amw-zero</author><text>People say this a lot, but really, what can a native app track that a web app can&#x27;t? To track location, you need to give the app permission, just like the web. To receive push notifications, you need to give the app permission, just like the web.<p>I think this claim is unfounded.</text></item><item><author>feanaro</author><text>Native phone apps are more invasive and can therefore be used for more extensive tracking and spying, which is good for ad revenue.<p>Remember how all the largest spying products like Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit, Twitter, etc aggressively push you to install their phone apps even though they are (or were) perfectly usable through their mobile websites.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kevin_thibedeau</author><text>Computers are kept in a fixed or limited number of locations. Phones are tracking devices that follow you throughout the day. The data they generate is far more valuable for building a consumer profile.</text></comment> |
14,122,534 | 14,122,603 | 1 | 2 | 14,121,609 | train | <story><title>Apple's cash hoard swells to $246B</title><url>https://www.cnbc.com/2017/01/31/apples-cash-hoard-swells-to-record-24609-billion.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>toomuchtodo</author><text>We don&#x27;t have to lower taxes. We just change the tax law to tax that money whether they bring it back to the US or not.</text></item><item><author>drawkbox</author><text>You are right, really if we want companies to bring money back we just need lower taxes. The games companies play to eek out an additional 5% and overcome taxes is massive. Better to have lower taxes here in the US while our dollar is still valued so high to offset and maybe they will have a reason to repatriate and continue investment here. We need more money moving in our country immediately, the velocity of money[1] and gdp to compensation [2] are horrid right now, worst in history.<p>Our dollar being too high in value is an advantage to wealthy and buying more abroad but harms workers here competitively no matter what they do. It also makes companies with money in other areas able to do more outside of the US, good but also bad.<p>Another thing that would help immensely is companies no longer being allowed to provide benefits, a legacy bug, just salary, enough to get their own services as those are private and companies should not be involved in that. Healthcare would need to be either single payer or private but solely individual and not tied to your employer which is a single point of failure, it may also fix medical pricing one day if more consumer focused.<p>Both lower taxes and companies not having to worry about providing benefits&#x2F;healthcare would be immense competitive moves. Companies in Canada, UK, Mexico etc etc don&#x27;t have to worry about providing healthcare benefits and it makes it easier to start a business, change jobs and in general allows more focus on business and products.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fred.stlouisfed.org&#x2F;series&#x2F;M2V" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fred.stlouisfed.org&#x2F;series&#x2F;M2V</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fred.stlouisfed.org&#x2F;graph&#x2F;?g=2Xa" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fred.stlouisfed.org&#x2F;graph&#x2F;?g=2Xa</a></text></item><item><author>breatheoften</author><text>What possible reason could Apple have to repatriate their cash hoard (even with a tax holiday?)<p>They don&#x27;t manufacture anything in the us -- do they need those kinds of billions to hire more software developers in Cupertino -- that seems pretty unlikely to me. Do they need it to build more US apple stores (nope they&#x27;ve got that covered).<p>They are already paying a dividend with free cash flow from their US business ...<p>I can&#x27;t imagine why they would ever want to &quot;increase investment&quot; in the us vs the many far more productive things they could conceivably do by spending that money outside the us ...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>drawkbox</author><text>You could do that but it would create more games with headquarters being outside the US and even small businesses&#x2F;medium businesses would start doing that. There would be a million loopholes around it.<p>I say corporations won the war, they have the legal teams to keep winning. As a response let small&#x2F;medium sized businesses compete better by just lowing business taxes to really low levels, or progressive taxing as you grow. Right now the high tax rate only really affects our engine small&#x2F;medium businesses who provide 50% of GDP, 65+% of jobs and 33% of exports.<p>The only companies paying taxes are small&#x2F;medium businesses, the tax system here almost is a competitive advantage to large companies over small&#x2F;medium. If larger companies aren&#x27;t going to invest here, get competitive help to the small&#x2F;medium companies and entrepreneurs that are to challenge them.</text></comment> | <story><title>Apple's cash hoard swells to $246B</title><url>https://www.cnbc.com/2017/01/31/apples-cash-hoard-swells-to-record-24609-billion.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>toomuchtodo</author><text>We don&#x27;t have to lower taxes. We just change the tax law to tax that money whether they bring it back to the US or not.</text></item><item><author>drawkbox</author><text>You are right, really if we want companies to bring money back we just need lower taxes. The games companies play to eek out an additional 5% and overcome taxes is massive. Better to have lower taxes here in the US while our dollar is still valued so high to offset and maybe they will have a reason to repatriate and continue investment here. We need more money moving in our country immediately, the velocity of money[1] and gdp to compensation [2] are horrid right now, worst in history.<p>Our dollar being too high in value is an advantage to wealthy and buying more abroad but harms workers here competitively no matter what they do. It also makes companies with money in other areas able to do more outside of the US, good but also bad.<p>Another thing that would help immensely is companies no longer being allowed to provide benefits, a legacy bug, just salary, enough to get their own services as those are private and companies should not be involved in that. Healthcare would need to be either single payer or private but solely individual and not tied to your employer which is a single point of failure, it may also fix medical pricing one day if more consumer focused.<p>Both lower taxes and companies not having to worry about providing benefits&#x2F;healthcare would be immense competitive moves. Companies in Canada, UK, Mexico etc etc don&#x27;t have to worry about providing healthcare benefits and it makes it easier to start a business, change jobs and in general allows more focus on business and products.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fred.stlouisfed.org&#x2F;series&#x2F;M2V" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fred.stlouisfed.org&#x2F;series&#x2F;M2V</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fred.stlouisfed.org&#x2F;graph&#x2F;?g=2Xa" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fred.stlouisfed.org&#x2F;graph&#x2F;?g=2Xa</a></text></item><item><author>breatheoften</author><text>What possible reason could Apple have to repatriate their cash hoard (even with a tax holiday?)<p>They don&#x27;t manufacture anything in the us -- do they need those kinds of billions to hire more software developers in Cupertino -- that seems pretty unlikely to me. Do they need it to build more US apple stores (nope they&#x27;ve got that covered).<p>They are already paying a dividend with free cash flow from their US business ...<p>I can&#x27;t imagine why they would ever want to &quot;increase investment&quot; in the us vs the many far more productive things they could conceivably do by spending that money outside the us ...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>valuearb</author><text>So you are saying that you want Samsung to be able to build phones tax free in China, but Apple should pay 40%+ income taxes (CA+US) for doing so?<p>Please let me move all my retirement savings into foreign stocks before you pass this law, please.</text></comment> |
20,071,779 | 20,071,595 | 1 | 2 | 20,070,558 | train | <story><title>Tips for Writing a Technical Book</title><url>https://performancejs.com/post/31b361c/13-Tips-for-Writing-a-Technical-Book</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>nbaksalyar</author><text>Thank you, this is very timely: recently I got a cold email from an acquisition editor too and been researching this fascinating topic of writing tech books. :)<p>Some more helpful resources I found:<p>- Advice to Prospective Book Authors from Scott Meyers (of Effective C++ fame): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aristeia.com&#x2F;authorAdvice.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aristeia.com&#x2F;authorAdvice.html</a><p>- &quot;I wrote a book&quot; by Tryggvi Björgvinsson: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dev.to&#x2F;trickvi&#x2F;i-wrote-a-book-lfg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dev.to&#x2F;trickvi&#x2F;i-wrote-a-book-lfg</a><p>- &quot;Writing a technical book&quot; by Ian Miell: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;zwischenzugs.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;05&#x2F;15&#x2F;writing-a-technical-book&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;zwischenzugs.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;05&#x2F;15&#x2F;writing-a-technical-book...</a><p>- Then there are some good discussion about this topic on HN. You can try searching by keywords like &quot;ask hn + writing a book&quot;, e.g.: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=14300932" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=14300932</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Tips for Writing a Technical Book</title><url>https://performancejs.com/post/31b361c/13-Tips-for-Writing-a-Technical-Book</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>rmason</author><text>I&#x27;ve been a technical editor on a few programming titles. I don&#x27;t think the average developer realizes that for the authors writing a book is a passion project.<p>Not only won&#x27;t you get rich, you will be extremely lucky to make minimum wage. Most if not all the marketing is on your shoulders. Even though it&#x27;s a hits driven business the publishers do all right though.</text></comment> |
1,815,896 | 1,815,756 | 1 | 2 | 1,815,195 | train | <story><title>The Tax Haven That's Saving Google Billions</title><url>http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_44/b4201043146825.htm</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lionhearted</author><text>&#62; That seems absurd by free enterprise standards and I am genuinely curious to know why refusing to do this would be called "evil."<p>When taxes come up, it tends not to be a well-thought, cohesive, pros-and-cons thing. It tends to be an emotional/identity thing. Some people think and almost always argue it'd be a good thing if companies gave more money over to governments.<p>Me, I think it's very good for the world on every level for Google to pay less taxes. They're hiring the best people, acquiring companies and giving liquidity to founders, run amazing free services (search, Gmail, Google Earth, Google Maps, Google Finance, Google News, Google Voice, Google Reader, Feedburner, many many others). Also, they're internally investing in energy and robotics like the auto-driven cars thing, and their high level personnel seem to invest really well too (like in genetics research). Anyone who thinks that England would do a better job with the money than Google hasn't been to England, or hasn't thought this through very much.</text></item><item><author>grellas</author><text><i>Google is "flying a banner of doing no evil, and then they're perpetrating evil under our noses," says Abraham J. Briloff, a professor emeritus of accounting at Baruch College who has examined Google's tax disclosures.</i><p>Maybe it is the lawyer in me, but why wouldn't any international business do whatever it could legally do to minimize its taxes? I understand that governments might want to consider these as loopholes and seek to end the right of U.S. taxpayers to avail themselves of these tax-minimization strategies. But, as long as it <i>is</i> legal, why should a company voluntarily seek to expose itself to higher tax rates when it has the choice not to?<p>I guess when you as a company claim the high ground ("do no evil"), you will have people making their own judgments about what ethical standard ought to govern your conduct and this would explain this professor's remark. By that measure, though, one could argue that companies such as Google should seek to attribute all their revenues to California because that is where their main intellectual property development efforts have occurred and hence pay corporate tax rates at one of the highest rates around simply because they "owe" it to California.<p>I get this question all the time from web-based startups: why run our revenues through a high-tax state when we have the option of running them through all sorts of lower-tax venues and saving on taxes? The universal answer for smaller companies is "set your company up in a way that let's you pay the least tax you can legally."<p>Why should Google be held to a different standard on penalty of having its perfectly legal actions castigated as "evil"? Is it the view of some or many in the HN community, for example, that a private enterprise has a form of "social responsibility" to voluntarily subject itself to the tax rates of whatever domicile it happens to have its major operations in (in this case, California) when it legally has the option not to do so? That seems unwise by free enterprise standards and I am genuinely curious to know why refusing to do this would be called "evil."</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>notahacker</author><text>The NHS employs a lot more people than Google and carries out research and development into saving people's lives. Sure, what Google does is great, but I'm really not convinced that thinking up ever more creative outlets to display targeted advertising is necessarily a better outcome for society than spending the money on the UK public sector, which has many worthwhile projects of its own. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that sometimes multimillion sums are better spent on schools and hospitals than buying startups to wind up (big companies, like governments, have a tendency to overpay and make some blunders). The original article pointed out that Google owed its very existence to that paragon of state-sponsored inefficiency: the research university.<p>Calling it "evil" to carry out their fiduciary duty by legally shifting tax burden to the less well-off might be a stretch, but it's equally a stretch to suggest that we're better off because Google pays less tax. It's not as if they'd be dirt poor if they paid a tax rate comparable to that of profitable startups...</text></comment> | <story><title>The Tax Haven That's Saving Google Billions</title><url>http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_44/b4201043146825.htm</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lionhearted</author><text>&#62; That seems absurd by free enterprise standards and I am genuinely curious to know why refusing to do this would be called "evil."<p>When taxes come up, it tends not to be a well-thought, cohesive, pros-and-cons thing. It tends to be an emotional/identity thing. Some people think and almost always argue it'd be a good thing if companies gave more money over to governments.<p>Me, I think it's very good for the world on every level for Google to pay less taxes. They're hiring the best people, acquiring companies and giving liquidity to founders, run amazing free services (search, Gmail, Google Earth, Google Maps, Google Finance, Google News, Google Voice, Google Reader, Feedburner, many many others). Also, they're internally investing in energy and robotics like the auto-driven cars thing, and their high level personnel seem to invest really well too (like in genetics research). Anyone who thinks that England would do a better job with the money than Google hasn't been to England, or hasn't thought this through very much.</text></item><item><author>grellas</author><text><i>Google is "flying a banner of doing no evil, and then they're perpetrating evil under our noses," says Abraham J. Briloff, a professor emeritus of accounting at Baruch College who has examined Google's tax disclosures.</i><p>Maybe it is the lawyer in me, but why wouldn't any international business do whatever it could legally do to minimize its taxes? I understand that governments might want to consider these as loopholes and seek to end the right of U.S. taxpayers to avail themselves of these tax-minimization strategies. But, as long as it <i>is</i> legal, why should a company voluntarily seek to expose itself to higher tax rates when it has the choice not to?<p>I guess when you as a company claim the high ground ("do no evil"), you will have people making their own judgments about what ethical standard ought to govern your conduct and this would explain this professor's remark. By that measure, though, one could argue that companies such as Google should seek to attribute all their revenues to California because that is where their main intellectual property development efforts have occurred and hence pay corporate tax rates at one of the highest rates around simply because they "owe" it to California.<p>I get this question all the time from web-based startups: why run our revenues through a high-tax state when we have the option of running them through all sorts of lower-tax venues and saving on taxes? The universal answer for smaller companies is "set your company up in a way that let's you pay the least tax you can legally."<p>Why should Google be held to a different standard on penalty of having its perfectly legal actions castigated as "evil"? Is it the view of some or many in the HN community, for example, that a private enterprise has a form of "social responsibility" to voluntarily subject itself to the tax rates of whatever domicile it happens to have its major operations in (in this case, California) when it legally has the option not to do so? That seems unwise by free enterprise standards and I am genuinely curious to know why refusing to do this would be called "evil."</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Anechoic</author><text><i>run amazing free services (search, Gmail, Google Earth, Google Maps, Google Finance, Google News, Google Voice, Google Reader, Feedburner, many many others). Also, they're internally investing in energy and robotics like the auto-driven cars thing</i><p>None of those products/services would be possible but for the government spending taxpayer money to develop the infrastructure behind those services (the internet, roads, GPS, etc).</text></comment> |
10,717,386 | 10,717,544 | 1 | 3 | 10,715,149 | train | <story><title>Capital Is No Longer Scarce</title><url>http://continuations.com/post/134920840275/capital-is-no-longer-scarce</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jondubois</author><text>Misallocation is a massive problem. I think a significant amount of money is going into advertising, pointless startups, entertainment and social media.<p>Basically, we are spending huge amounts of money getting numbed out of our minds instead of solving real fundamental problems.<p>In general, I think it reveals a deeper problem about capitalism; none of us understand value anymore (we have more junk in our lives than we could possibly need)... So we struggle to allocate capital properly. We just blindly follow trends. The people who are getting rich now are not those who want to make the world a better place; the winners are those who just want to make quick cash (short-term thinkers who take insane risks).<p>Does society prefer Snapchat or a cure for cancer? In the current economic environment, investors prefer Snapchat because Snapchat is pretty likely to get a ROI within the next 5 years.<p>The return on investment for a cancer cure is probably small (especially given the large amount of recurring revenue that big pharmaceuticals are currently making by selling cancer drugs). Also, it&#x27;s much riskier than Snapchat... Could take 5 years, 10 years or 20 years.<p>Ultimately, we are satisfying people&#x27;s short-term &#x27;wants&#x27; at the expense of their long-term needs. We&#x27;re a society of addicts who just want to get a quick buzz.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>merpnderp</author><text>Capitalism has never been about making the world a better place. All systems deal with humans and humans inevitably prefer helping out themselves and people close to them over others, which leads to corruption regardless of the system. And capitalism seems the best method for controlling innate human corruption (see China&#x27;s incredible economic growth once socialism was all but abandoned for capitalism in the 80&#x27;s pulling a billion people out of abject poverty).<p>As for investors preferring Snapchat to curing cancer? The amount of money invested in cancer dwarfs Snapchat&#x27;s investments by magnitudes. You don&#x27;t just cure &quot;cancer&quot; you find cures for the hundreds of different diseases that fall under the umbrella of cancer. There&#x27;s so much money invested in cancer there are often not enough candidates for a new clinical trials.<p>If we have a shortage of anything, it is medical research scientists. And the way to get more of those is to change the regulations so there is more room for profit medical research.</text></comment> | <story><title>Capital Is No Longer Scarce</title><url>http://continuations.com/post/134920840275/capital-is-no-longer-scarce</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jondubois</author><text>Misallocation is a massive problem. I think a significant amount of money is going into advertising, pointless startups, entertainment and social media.<p>Basically, we are spending huge amounts of money getting numbed out of our minds instead of solving real fundamental problems.<p>In general, I think it reveals a deeper problem about capitalism; none of us understand value anymore (we have more junk in our lives than we could possibly need)... So we struggle to allocate capital properly. We just blindly follow trends. The people who are getting rich now are not those who want to make the world a better place; the winners are those who just want to make quick cash (short-term thinkers who take insane risks).<p>Does society prefer Snapchat or a cure for cancer? In the current economic environment, investors prefer Snapchat because Snapchat is pretty likely to get a ROI within the next 5 years.<p>The return on investment for a cancer cure is probably small (especially given the large amount of recurring revenue that big pharmaceuticals are currently making by selling cancer drugs). Also, it&#x27;s much riskier than Snapchat... Could take 5 years, 10 years or 20 years.<p>Ultimately, we are satisfying people&#x27;s short-term &#x27;wants&#x27; at the expense of their long-term needs. We&#x27;re a society of addicts who just want to get a quick buzz.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bko</author><text>Why would a cure for cancer be a small return on investment? You&#x27;re assuming that the only people who could enter the market and find a cure would be the current players who are profiting from the current treatment or some global conspiracy to keep the cure hidden. If someone were to discover a very effective treatment, they would surely profit nicely. Hepatitis C was recently cured, a brutal disease that affected some of the most marginal people in society [0]. And it was done thanks to a profit motive. Barring extreme price controls on drugs by politicians, this type of progress can be greatly encouraged by the profit motive.<p>[0] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scientificamerican.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;we-now-have-the-cure-for-hepatitis-c-but-can-we-afford-it&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scientificamerican.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;we-now-have-the-cu...</a><p>[edit] I would also like to add, the non-profit approach [IMO] has failed to produce anything but the abundance of the color pink and self congratulatory galas for wealthy donors. Perhaps the profit motive and choice that has served society so well in practically all aspects of our lives can be equally leveraged on solving hard problems like disease.</text></comment> |
20,498,631 | 20,495,816 | 1 | 2 | 20,494,129 | train | <story><title>Tesla Enters “Whistleblower Hell”</title><url>https://www.thedrive.com/tech/29089/tesla-enters-whistleblower-hell</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kreetx</author><text>Elon gets a lot of hate unfortunately due to his position in the industry, and also I guess the age we&#x27;re in.<p>See this tweet from Paul Graham for example
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;paulg&#x2F;status&#x2F;1122987659079618563" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;paulg&#x2F;status&#x2F;1122987659079618563</a><p>People notice the hate, and although there most probably are issues in the factories, then the reporting of them is way bent to the negative.</text></item><item><author>wnorris</author><text>There appears to be an active group working to create these stories in order to create a &#x27;whistleblower hell&#x27;.<p>Elon occasionally does not help this, but authorities should look into the allegations that a group is actively manipulating Tesla employees for these types of stories.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cleantechnica.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;07&#x2F;21&#x2F;were-cnbc-sources-tesla-employees-funded-by-tslaq&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cleantechnica.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;07&#x2F;21&#x2F;were-cnbc-sources-tesla...</a></text></item><item><author>vikramkr</author><text>Tesla (or at least Elon) has a terrible habit of engaging with critics in deeply unproductive ways, such as all the anti short seller stuff they pulled. It makes them look very defensive and seem like they feel vulnerable&#x2F;cant face the criticism, and maybe it&#x27;s because they actually are vulnerable and doing things that merit short selling and whistleblowing.<p>At least from a PR perspective you dont want to engage like this if you have nothing to hide, so either they&#x27;re doing something wrong or they have terrible terrible PR sense. Both seem equally likely right now.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>P_I_Staker</author><text>I don&#x27;t know what you&#x27;re talking about, Elon Musk gets flack for being a jerk, and all the questionable stuff he&#x27;s done. This narrative that big business is out to get him (eg. that tweet) needs to die.</text></comment> | <story><title>Tesla Enters “Whistleblower Hell”</title><url>https://www.thedrive.com/tech/29089/tesla-enters-whistleblower-hell</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kreetx</author><text>Elon gets a lot of hate unfortunately due to his position in the industry, and also I guess the age we&#x27;re in.<p>See this tweet from Paul Graham for example
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;paulg&#x2F;status&#x2F;1122987659079618563" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;paulg&#x2F;status&#x2F;1122987659079618563</a><p>People notice the hate, and although there most probably are issues in the factories, then the reporting of them is way bent to the negative.</text></item><item><author>wnorris</author><text>There appears to be an active group working to create these stories in order to create a &#x27;whistleblower hell&#x27;.<p>Elon occasionally does not help this, but authorities should look into the allegations that a group is actively manipulating Tesla employees for these types of stories.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cleantechnica.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;07&#x2F;21&#x2F;were-cnbc-sources-tesla-employees-funded-by-tslaq&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cleantechnica.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;07&#x2F;21&#x2F;were-cnbc-sources-tesla...</a></text></item><item><author>vikramkr</author><text>Tesla (or at least Elon) has a terrible habit of engaging with critics in deeply unproductive ways, such as all the anti short seller stuff they pulled. It makes them look very defensive and seem like they feel vulnerable&#x2F;cant face the criticism, and maybe it&#x27;s because they actually are vulnerable and doing things that merit short selling and whistleblowing.<p>At least from a PR perspective you dont want to engage like this if you have nothing to hide, so either they&#x27;re doing something wrong or they have terrible terrible PR sense. Both seem equally likely right now.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>AndrewBissell</author><text>Actually the criticism that Musk gets is a result of things like:<p>- Calling someone&#x27;s boss and threatening a lawsuit to make him take down critical writings on Twitter and Seeking Alpha (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ftalphaville.ft.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;07&#x2F;27&#x2F;1532692760000&#x2F;Je-suis-Montana-Skeptic&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ftalphaville.ft.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;07&#x2F;27&#x2F;1532692760000&#x2F;Je-suis...</a>)<p>- Threatening to &quot;nuke&quot; a departing employee who had returned to Tesla HQ to collect some personal belongings (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2019-04-05&#x2F;tesla-board-probed-allegation-that-elon-musk-pushed-employee" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2019-04-05&#x2F;tesla-boa...</a>)<p>- Trumpian attacks on the press, including by riling up his fans on Twitter (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;lopezlinette&#x2F;status&#x2F;1014983757252780033" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;lopezlinette&#x2F;status&#x2F;1014983757252780033</a>)<p>- Lying with statistics, e.g. &quot;traffic incidents are xx% less likely with Autopilot engaged&quot; or &quot;Tesla cars are xx% safer than the overall U.S. fleet&quot; without mentioning the huge selection bias at play<p>- Running factories with <i>tons</i> of environmental, health, labor, and QA-related problems, then attempting to just gaslight his way through the criticism (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;07&#x2F;15&#x2F;tesla-workers-in-ga4-tent-describe-pressure-to-make-model-3-goals.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;07&#x2F;15&#x2F;tesla-workers-in-ga4-tent-de...</a>)<p>- Brazenly lying about his company on Twitter in an attempt to manipulate the stock price (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sec.gov&#x2F;litigation&#x2F;complaints&#x2F;2018&#x2F;comp-pr2018-219.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sec.gov&#x2F;litigation&#x2F;complaints&#x2F;2018&#x2F;comp-pr2018-2...</a>)</text></comment> |
12,944,963 | 12,945,131 | 1 | 2 | 12,944,655 | train | <story><title>A guide to using the Facebook Pixel</title><url>https://github.com/adam-s/facebook-pixel-guide/blob/master/README.md</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>kuschku</author><text>This, btw, is where the EU cookie law applies, and what it was intended to prevent.<p>You can not embed that tracking pixel without first having approval from the user.<p>(This – third party cookies for tracking – is the entire reason the damn law was written in the first place, and yet we still haven’t gotten rid of them).</text></comment> | <story><title>A guide to using the Facebook Pixel</title><url>https://github.com/adam-s/facebook-pixel-guide/blob/master/README.md</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>warpech</author><text>This is what sometimes is called a &quot;third party cookie&quot;</text></comment> |
11,528,329 | 11,527,948 | 1 | 3 | 11,526,316 | train | <story><title>Ascension Island, where nothing makes sense</title><url>http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-36076411</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>PaulRobinson</author><text>I have been at the airport briefly, twice. Once on the way into the Falklands, once on the way out. Both in the early 2000s, both times on an RAF Tristar. I was a contractor going down there for a months worth of work, surrounded by civilians and military on my flights.<p>I remember being there on the way down middle of the day and all the army guys were grabbing beers. It was 35C and I was necking water. I thought they were crazy. I am told there are parts of the island that get hotter.<p>On the way back, middle of the night, 4am I think we landed. I remember thinking the plane was too warm, and I couldn&#x27;t wait to get some fresh air. I stood by the door as it opened waiting for the cool breeze to come in. Nope: wall of hot air. It was in the 30s.<p>There&#x27;s nothing there, really. It&#x27;s obvious who runs the comms stuff, and it&#x27;s obvious why it&#x27;s kept the way it is, but nobody will talk about it.<p>A few people I spoke to have ventured further afield.<p>The lady I stayed with in the Falklands who ran a B&amp;B told me she had holidayed there. It was beautiful, apparently.<p>A friend of mine was stationed there during the Falklands War helping refuel planes. It was hell, apparently.</text></comment> | <story><title>Ascension Island, where nothing makes sense</title><url>http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-36076411</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>madaxe_again</author><text>I&#x27;m heading there in a month or so, then onwards to St Helena - I have a penchant for wanting to visit weird and remote places. Taking a drone, I might post footage here.<p>Getting permission to visit is a laugh, I had to write to the governor and explain why I want to come (last sailing of last mail ship).</text></comment> |
34,589,436 | 34,587,718 | 1 | 2 | 34,577,788 | train | <story><title>TUI calculator for programmers working close to the bits</title><url>https://github.com/alt-romes/programmer-calculator</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>gavinhoward</author><text>Shameless plug: my `bc` [1] can also display bits like this, as well as do bit operations.<p>It automatically detects how many bits your number must have and uses the minimum, or you can tell it the standard bit sizes or even use a custom bit size. It will handle 2&#x27;s complement signed integers.<p>See the manual ([2]), especially the extended math library section ([3]).<p>It&#x27;s also a normal `bc`, with every feature of all other implementations.<p>I should add floating point support, though.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;git.yzena.com&#x2F;gavin&#x2F;bc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;git.yzena.com&#x2F;gavin&#x2F;bc</a><p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;git.yzena.com&#x2F;gavin&#x2F;bc&#x2F;src&#x2F;branch&#x2F;master&#x2F;manuals&#x2F;bc&#x2F;A.1.md" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;git.yzena.com&#x2F;gavin&#x2F;bc&#x2F;src&#x2F;branch&#x2F;master&#x2F;manuals&#x2F;bc&#x2F;...</a><p>[3]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;git.yzena.com&#x2F;gavin&#x2F;bc&#x2F;src&#x2F;branch&#x2F;master&#x2F;manuals&#x2F;bc&#x2F;A.1.md#extended-library" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;git.yzena.com&#x2F;gavin&#x2F;bc&#x2F;src&#x2F;branch&#x2F;master&#x2F;manuals&#x2F;bc&#x2F;...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>TUI calculator for programmers working close to the bits</title><url>https://github.com/alt-romes/programmer-calculator</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ghewgill</author><text>For old school fans, the HP-16C [1] calculator provided these kinds of functions in a handheld calculator, in 1982. This was the only &quot;programmer&quot; calculator that HP has ever made.<p>There is a simulator (for Windows) available [2]. (No affiliation; but I made a simulator for the cousin calculator HP-15C [3]).<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hpmuseum.org&#x2F;hp16.htm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hpmuseum.org&#x2F;hp16.htm</a>
[2]: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;hp16c.org" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;hp16c.org</a>
[3]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hp15c.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hp15c.com</a></text></comment> |
39,312,984 | 39,308,229 | 1 | 2 | 39,302,744 | train | <story><title>Mozilla names new CEO as it pivots to data privacy</title><url>https://fortune.com/2024/02/08/mozilla-firefox-ceo-laura-chambers-mitchell-baker-leadership-transition/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wkat4242</author><text>For a company that has a declining marketshare like Mozilla it&#x27;s really way too high IMO.<p>Her salary kept going up as the marketshare was going down...</text></item><item><author>gkoberger</author><text>Yes, that&#x27;s a lot of money.<p>But if you&#x27;re a CEO good enough to turn Mozilla around given the constraints... you could make a lot more elsewhere. If nothing else, you&#x27;d get stock, which would correlate with your performance.</text></item><item><author>animal_spirits</author><text>Mitchell baker was making 6.2 million dollars a year at Mozilla in 2023.<p>Source: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theregister.com&#x2F;AMP&#x2F;2024&#x2F;01&#x2F;02&#x2F;mozilla_in_2024_ai_privacy&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theregister.com&#x2F;AMP&#x2F;2024&#x2F;01&#x2F;02&#x2F;mozilla_in_2024_a...</a></text></item><item><author>gkoberger</author><text>I agree with everything you said. All I can say in response is that being a great community leader and open web advocate doesn&#x27;t always square with someone who has to make a profit for hundreds or thousands of employees.<p>I have no inside information, but here&#x27;s my guess at what happened. John Lilly was a great CEO. When he left, there was a gigantic void. They hired Gary Kovacs, who started the &quot;squirrel!&quot;-ing. He wasn&#x27;t well-liked, and used Mozilla as a stepping stone. So going forward they only hired from the Mozilla community, which is a small pool – both of people who could do it and people who wanted to do it. I&#x27;m not sure if Mitchell wanted it or not, but I don&#x27;t think there was a lot of competition.<p>Being the CEO of Mozilla is not a good job, and I imagine it&#x27;s really hard to fill. There&#x27;s a ton of pressure, relatively low salary, no equity, no exit.</text></item><item><author>lolinder</author><text>It&#x27;s interesting to hear this, because from the outside Mitchell&#x27;s tenure has seemed to be a disaster, with a complete inability to stay focused on one thing for long enough to make a difference.<p>Mozilla in recent memory has reminded me more than anything of the dogs in Pixar&#x27;s Up (&quot;squirrel!&quot;), constantly chasing after the latest shiny tech fad while neglecting the fundamentals. They&#x27;ve been a follower on <i>everything</i> and have failed to lead on <i>anything</i>. Mitchell&#x27;s justification for stepping down as CEO seems to me to follow this same pattern: she&#x27;s stepping down in order to focus on AI and internet safety.<p>It&#x27;s good to know that she&#x27;s a decent person and was good to Mozilla employees, but it&#x27;s hard to square the picture you paint with the complete lack of direction I&#x27;ve seen during her tenure. Maybe Mozilla was in a much worse situation than I thought at the time she took the position?</text></item><item><author>gkoberger</author><text>I worked at Mozilla back in 2012, as we were pivoting to FirefoxOS (a mobile OS). I was very low in the company, but for some reason sent Mitchell an email detailing why I thought it was a bad idea.<p>She not only responded in a very gracious way, but also followed up months later to check if my feelings had changed. While they had not, she didn&#x27;t owe me anything and I really appreciated her attentiveness. Mitchell really cares about Mozilla and its community.<p>Mitchell was a great community leader. That doesn&#x27;t always translate to being a good CEO or leader of a business, however Mitchell is a huge reason (if not THE reason) why we have Firefox today – and, even if you don&#x27;t currently use Firefox, a huge reason why we have the web we have today.<p>So, while I haven&#x27;t been the biggest fan of Mozilla&#x27;s decisions the past few years, I do want to give credit to Mitchell for everything she did for the open web and open source. She was a supporter before anyone really cared, and played a huge part in getting is to where we are now over the past 20+ years.<p>(I am glad this is the direction they have chosen! Here&#x27;s a 2015 post where I write about how I think Mozilla should focus on data privacy: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10698997">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10698997</a>)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Certhas</author><text>This line is trotted out all the time... but her salary also was going up as revenues and earnings kept going up. From 2005 to 2022 revenues grew more than 10 fold, from 52M$ to 593M$.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Mozilla_Corporation" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Mozilla_Corporation</a>
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;frankhecker.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;08&#x2F;13&#x2F;mozillas-uncertain-future&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;frankhecker.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;08&#x2F;13&#x2F;mozillas-uncertain-future...</a><p>In recent years, the proportion coming from Google has also been coming down (even if slowly, from 90+% to just above 80%), and considerable cash reserves have been built up.<p>Her compensation is ahead of the median for companies in the 0.1-1 billion revenue range, but in line with the median CEO compensation for a company with 1-5 billion in revenues:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;corpgov.law.harvard.edu&#x2F;2021&#x2F;10&#x2F;07&#x2F;ceo-and-executive-compensation-practices-in-the-russell-3000-and-sp-500&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;corpgov.law.harvard.edu&#x2F;2021&#x2F;10&#x2F;07&#x2F;ceo-and-executive...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;corpgov.law.harvard.edu&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2021&#x2F;09&#x2F;Figure-11.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;corpgov.law.harvard.edu&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2021&#x2F;09&#x2F;F...</a><p>So if you accept that this is an unusually complex CEO role, then it does not seems disproportionate (when judged relative to the absurd disproportionate growth of CEO compensation overall).</text></comment> | <story><title>Mozilla names new CEO as it pivots to data privacy</title><url>https://fortune.com/2024/02/08/mozilla-firefox-ceo-laura-chambers-mitchell-baker-leadership-transition/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wkat4242</author><text>For a company that has a declining marketshare like Mozilla it&#x27;s really way too high IMO.<p>Her salary kept going up as the marketshare was going down...</text></item><item><author>gkoberger</author><text>Yes, that&#x27;s a lot of money.<p>But if you&#x27;re a CEO good enough to turn Mozilla around given the constraints... you could make a lot more elsewhere. If nothing else, you&#x27;d get stock, which would correlate with your performance.</text></item><item><author>animal_spirits</author><text>Mitchell baker was making 6.2 million dollars a year at Mozilla in 2023.<p>Source: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theregister.com&#x2F;AMP&#x2F;2024&#x2F;01&#x2F;02&#x2F;mozilla_in_2024_ai_privacy&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theregister.com&#x2F;AMP&#x2F;2024&#x2F;01&#x2F;02&#x2F;mozilla_in_2024_a...</a></text></item><item><author>gkoberger</author><text>I agree with everything you said. All I can say in response is that being a great community leader and open web advocate doesn&#x27;t always square with someone who has to make a profit for hundreds or thousands of employees.<p>I have no inside information, but here&#x27;s my guess at what happened. John Lilly was a great CEO. When he left, there was a gigantic void. They hired Gary Kovacs, who started the &quot;squirrel!&quot;-ing. He wasn&#x27;t well-liked, and used Mozilla as a stepping stone. So going forward they only hired from the Mozilla community, which is a small pool – both of people who could do it and people who wanted to do it. I&#x27;m not sure if Mitchell wanted it or not, but I don&#x27;t think there was a lot of competition.<p>Being the CEO of Mozilla is not a good job, and I imagine it&#x27;s really hard to fill. There&#x27;s a ton of pressure, relatively low salary, no equity, no exit.</text></item><item><author>lolinder</author><text>It&#x27;s interesting to hear this, because from the outside Mitchell&#x27;s tenure has seemed to be a disaster, with a complete inability to stay focused on one thing for long enough to make a difference.<p>Mozilla in recent memory has reminded me more than anything of the dogs in Pixar&#x27;s Up (&quot;squirrel!&quot;), constantly chasing after the latest shiny tech fad while neglecting the fundamentals. They&#x27;ve been a follower on <i>everything</i> and have failed to lead on <i>anything</i>. Mitchell&#x27;s justification for stepping down as CEO seems to me to follow this same pattern: she&#x27;s stepping down in order to focus on AI and internet safety.<p>It&#x27;s good to know that she&#x27;s a decent person and was good to Mozilla employees, but it&#x27;s hard to square the picture you paint with the complete lack of direction I&#x27;ve seen during her tenure. Maybe Mozilla was in a much worse situation than I thought at the time she took the position?</text></item><item><author>gkoberger</author><text>I worked at Mozilla back in 2012, as we were pivoting to FirefoxOS (a mobile OS). I was very low in the company, but for some reason sent Mitchell an email detailing why I thought it was a bad idea.<p>She not only responded in a very gracious way, but also followed up months later to check if my feelings had changed. While they had not, she didn&#x27;t owe me anything and I really appreciated her attentiveness. Mitchell really cares about Mozilla and its community.<p>Mitchell was a great community leader. That doesn&#x27;t always translate to being a good CEO or leader of a business, however Mitchell is a huge reason (if not THE reason) why we have Firefox today – and, even if you don&#x27;t currently use Firefox, a huge reason why we have the web we have today.<p>So, while I haven&#x27;t been the biggest fan of Mozilla&#x27;s decisions the past few years, I do want to give credit to Mitchell for everything she did for the open web and open source. She was a supporter before anyone really cared, and played a huge part in getting is to where we are now over the past 20+ years.<p>(I am glad this is the direction they have chosen! Here&#x27;s a 2015 post where I write about how I think Mozilla should focus on data privacy: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10698997">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10698997</a>)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bradly</author><text>&gt; Her salary kept going up as the marketshare was going down...<p>You&#x27;d really need to decide if you thought their marketshare would go down faster or not with someone else.</text></comment> |
36,528,055 | 36,527,703 | 1 | 3 | 36,527,423 | train | <story><title>English as the new programming language for Apache spark</title><url>https://www.databricks.com/blog/introducing-english-new-programming-language-apache-spark</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>pixelmonkey</author><text>One thing I find somewhat amusing about this is that all of the generated code is against the PySpark API. And the PySpark API is itself an interop layer to the native Scala APIs for Spark.<p>So you have LLM-based English prompts as an interop layer to Python + PySpark, which is itself an interop layer onto the Spark core. Also, the generated Spark SQL strings inside the DataFrame API have their own little compiler into Spark operations.<p>When Databricks wrote PySpark, it was because many programmers knew Python but weren&#x27;t willing to learn Scala just to use Spark. Now, they are offering a way for programmers to not bother learning the PySpark APIs, and leverage the interop layers all the way down, starting from English prompts.<p>This makes perfect sense when you zoom out and think about what their goal is -- to get your data workflows running on their cluster runtime. But it does make a programmer like me -- who developed a lot of systems while Spark was growing up -- wonder just how many layers future programmers will be forced to debug through when things go wrong. Debugging PySpark code is hard enough, even when you know Python, the PySpark APIs, and the underlying Spark core architecture well. But if all the PySpark code I had ever written had started from English prompts, it might make debugging those inevitable job crashes even more bewildering.<p>I haven&#x27;t, in this description, mentioned the &quot;usual&quot; programming layers we have to contend with, like Python&#x27;s interpreter, the JVM, underlying operating system, cloud APIs, and so on.<p>If I were to take a guess, programmers of the future are going to need more help debugging across programming language abstractions, system abstraction layers, and various code-data boundaries than they currently make do with.</text></comment> | <story><title>English as the new programming language for Apache spark</title><url>https://www.databricks.com/blog/introducing-english-new-programming-language-apache-spark</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>greggyb</author><text>&quot;Moving four week average using only calendar weeks with complete data&quot;<p>&quot;Moving four week average to today inclusive&quot;<p>&quot;Moving four week average to today exclusive (or to yesterday)&quot;<p>&quot;Moving four week daily average&quot;<p>&quot;Moving four week weekly average&quot;<p>&quot;Moving four week daily average, but the denominator should only count days with data&quot;<p>&quot;Moving four week average, but I actually mean week-to-date total as of today&quot;<p>And these are just a few of the variations I have had to implement recently. I have no reason to expect things to end up one way or the other, but it would sure suck if the English SDK only correctly implements a subset of these.</text></comment> |
15,843,498 | 15,843,628 | 1 | 3 | 15,830,782 | train | <story><title>My 20-Year Experience of Software Development Methodologies</title><url>https://zwischenzugs.com/2017/10/15/my-20-year-experience-of-software-development-methodologies/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tw1010</author><text>I find it somewhat amusing that this article doesn&#x27;t pick up on the fact that it is furthering the root cause of this very issue in the act of basing it on the book Sapiens. A core problem with these mythological trends is that they reduce world views down to easy-to-communicate little stories. This is useful for propagating ideas from person to person, but it necessarily has to be pithy and avoid too much detail. What we aught to do is to notice this historical pattern, and to take a stand against it. We should try to not be too persuaded by the book, or methodology, of the month (Sapiens right now) but to try to go back to the hard, tough, classics. We should try to build a foundation based on actual psycological and sociological research, instead of being steered too much by the, understandably attractive, mimetic pulls of water cooler philosophy.</text></comment> | <story><title>My 20-Year Experience of Software Development Methodologies</title><url>https://zwischenzugs.com/2017/10/15/my-20-year-experience-of-software-development-methodologies/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mannykannot</author><text>I am ambivalent about &quot;the difficulty lies not in defining [useful software methodologies], but in convincing others to follow [them].&quot;<p>Currently, I see too much faith being put in methods of dubious utility. I see techniques, that may be effective when applied judiciously in some circumstances, being promoted to universal principles. In particular, I see the failure of waterfall being taken to mean that any attempt to think ahead is counterproductive.<p>On the other hand, ten years before the scope of this article, Barry Boehm took on the waterfall model with an iterative one that emphasized frequent reevaluation of where you are, where you are going, and what impediments you face [1]. The fact that this article begins with waterfall supports the notion that adoption is the problem. Perhaps Boehm&#x27;s model was largely overlooked precisely because it was not dogmatic enough to promote zealotry?<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Spiral_model" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Spiral_model</a></text></comment> |
25,859,006 | 25,853,295 | 1 | 3 | 25,848,278 | train | <story><title>Show HN: Beeper – All Your Chats in One App</title><url>https://www.beeperhq.com/?hn</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jakelazaroff</author><text>Doesn&#x27;t using this with Discord run a risk of your account getting banned for using a third-party client? That&#x27;s why the Cordless developer shut down the project: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Bios-Marcel&#x2F;cordless" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Bios-Marcel&#x2F;cordless</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>doublerabbit</author><text>If I can login to your service with the API given, there should be no reason for a ban. And this is what annoys me with today&#x27;s communication protocols; your forced to enjoy their service only with their provided application.<p>It never used to be like this. MSN messenger,AIM even YIM; they all had FOSS applications.</text></comment> | <story><title>Show HN: Beeper – All Your Chats in One App</title><url>https://www.beeperhq.com/?hn</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jakelazaroff</author><text>Doesn&#x27;t using this with Discord run a risk of your account getting banned for using a third-party client? That&#x27;s why the Cordless developer shut down the project: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Bios-Marcel&#x2F;cordless" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Bios-Marcel&#x2F;cordless</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>saagarjha</author><text>I have yet to see any verbiage in the Discord ToS that mentions this…do they really not read their own legalese?</text></comment> |
29,054,071 | 29,052,035 | 1 | 3 | 29,048,945 | train | <story><title>How to help a programming student get unstuck</title><url>https://offbyone.us/posts/how-to-help-a-student-get-unstuck/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hdctambien</author><text>This is pretty much how I taught my High School Computer Science classes.<p>The biggest step for me was to never touch the student keyboards. And then I basically only answered their questions with more questions.<p>Sometimes I would hear students grumble &quot;He never answers my questions...&quot;, But in the long run, they would start asking themselves the same questions they knew I would ask (what did you expect it to do?, what did it do?, Why did it do that?)... Then they would usually solve their problem without me!<p>Or, when they called me over they would start with &quot;I tried a, b, and c&quot; and got results x, y, and z&quot; which is a way better start to a learning experience for everyone than the old &quot;it doesn&#x27;t work, fix it, please&quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>keb_</author><text>I personally think this is bad advice. I&#x27;ve experienced this kind of method through a friend of mine; it was always more frustrating than it was worth. I knew he has good intentions, but the truth is, <i>different people learn </i>differently*. When I ask questions, its often to try to build context or a mental map before I tackle a problem. I think that, while being cryptic and only answering questions with more questions can help nudge certain students in the right direction, it will just frustrate and confuse others. My guess is that for every student you&#x27;ve found this method successful with, there were 3 students who just gave up on asking you for advice because they&#x27;d just assume you&#x27;d elude them again -- and these are invisible failures.<p>Personally, I stopped asking that certain friend for advice after one too many frustrating sessions.</text></comment> | <story><title>How to help a programming student get unstuck</title><url>https://offbyone.us/posts/how-to-help-a-student-get-unstuck/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hdctambien</author><text>This is pretty much how I taught my High School Computer Science classes.<p>The biggest step for me was to never touch the student keyboards. And then I basically only answered their questions with more questions.<p>Sometimes I would hear students grumble &quot;He never answers my questions...&quot;, But in the long run, they would start asking themselves the same questions they knew I would ask (what did you expect it to do?, what did it do?, Why did it do that?)... Then they would usually solve their problem without me!<p>Or, when they called me over they would start with &quot;I tried a, b, and c&quot; and got results x, y, and z&quot; which is a way better start to a learning experience for everyone than the old &quot;it doesn&#x27;t work, fix it, please&quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Buttons840</author><text>&gt; Sometimes I would hear students grumble &quot;He never answers my questions...&quot;<p>Did you ever explain why you are doing this? After walking a student through their problem I would praise them and point out they solved the problem themselves. Some people may perceive your style as you being annoyed or unwilling to fully help, so explaining explicitly why you&#x27;re helping that way would be good.</text></comment> |
23,209,946 | 23,210,028 | 1 | 2 | 23,208,704 | train | <story><title>Modern universities are an exercise in insanity (2018)</title><url>http://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2018/01/modern-universities-are-exercise-in.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zamalek</author><text>The reason college is a requirement is because everyone who is in charge went to one, and believes it is necessary.<p>That&#x27;s a double-edged statement. On one hand, college is correlated with success (but that may be because college peddles networking). On the other hand, they are senselessly perpetuating a perceived important of college - which may not exist (at least for disciplines outside of medicine and so forth). There is no justification for the cost, it&#x27;s a very expensive printing press.<p>While I can understand both points of view, after my complete and utter cash grab &quot;degree&quot; where I learned nothing beyond what I already knew, I perceive it as a scam.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>KingOfCoders</author><text>I have studied computer science as master in Germany (Diplom) with the best possible final exam score (1,0) in databases, distributed systems, etc. That didn&#x27;t help me very much with my career. I&#x27;ve worked on the side in startups. That experience helped me found my first VC funded startup and helped my career later on as CTO in several companies. I&#x27;m now working as a CTO coach and looking back, my university days didn&#x27;t have much impact, if any at all.<p>Have I&#x27;ve learned anything useful? Yes. Was the outcome worth 6 years? No. I would have learned the same things watching excellent Youtube (Standford, MIT, ...) videos for one year.<p>EY [1] has shown several years ago that university had no impact on the career of their employees and dropped that requirement.<p>As someone who hired and managed many people I never looked at university degrees. And I never saw a difference.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;books&#x2F;2016&#x2F;jan&#x2F;18&#x2F;penguin-ditches-the-need-for-job-seekers-to-have-university-degrees" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;books&#x2F;2016&#x2F;jan&#x2F;18&#x2F;penguin-ditche...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Modern universities are an exercise in insanity (2018)</title><url>http://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2018/01/modern-universities-are-exercise-in.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zamalek</author><text>The reason college is a requirement is because everyone who is in charge went to one, and believes it is necessary.<p>That&#x27;s a double-edged statement. On one hand, college is correlated with success (but that may be because college peddles networking). On the other hand, they are senselessly perpetuating a perceived important of college - which may not exist (at least for disciplines outside of medicine and so forth). There is no justification for the cost, it&#x27;s a very expensive printing press.<p>While I can understand both points of view, after my complete and utter cash grab &quot;degree&quot; where I learned nothing beyond what I already knew, I perceive it as a scam.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sandworm101</author><text>&gt;&gt; after my complete and utter cash grab &quot;degree&quot; where I learned nothing beyond what I already knew, I perceive it as a scam.<p>Then you either didn&#x27;t go to a proper school, or you didn&#x27;t properly take advantage of the time. I went to an oldschool university (in canada) followed by a US law school. I could have slacked off an not learned much, just enough to pass, but I leveraged the resources and learned a huge amount. I used this knowledge every day, and in fields totally unrelated to my degrees. I had to recently read up on some radio frequency stuff for work. I was channeling my astronomy 202 lectures. That class was an outside elective taught by a PHD in a huge classroom, what some people would call a waste of my time. But 20+ years later I still have the knowledge and it makes me a better employee today.</text></comment> |
30,173,164 | 30,173,328 | 1 | 3 | 30,171,986 | train | <story><title>Starlink Premium</title><url>https://www.starlink.com/premium</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mdasen</author><text>Why does this seem aimed at the enterprise market (besides the price tag)? From what I&#x27;ve seen, Starlink uses CGNAT (carrier grade network address translation) so it&#x27;s hard to handle incoming connections (given the lack of a public IP address). CGNAT seems like it would be a problem for enterprise customers. Would this be enterprises in cities where they&#x27;d be looking for a backup for a wired connection? I know that a lot of companies have wireless back-ups for their wired connection so I&#x27;m not sure that Starlink would be a better enterprise option for them.<p>The question in my head is whether Starlink is going to slow down their $100-tier signups if they start seeing enough $500-tier signups. People have been waiting for years to get Starlink. If they start getting lots of $500-tier interest, it seems like they&#x27;d prioritize those users for new signups.</text></item><item><author>fossuser</author><text>$500 deposit, $2500 total cost for the dish, $500&#x2F;mo for the service.<p>Looks like it&#x27;s targeting the enterprise market.<p>The dish cost is probably closer to the actual value of the dish. The original dish we bought for $500 I think I read actually cost closer to $3k for them to manufacture (I&#x27;m not an expert on this)?<p>Regular service is $500 for a dish and $99 a month which is a great deal for 50-200mbps at pretty low latency. Particularly if you&#x27;re in an area where your only other option is geostationary (which sucks and costs a lot).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>toomuchtodo</author><text>From the page:<p>&gt; Unlimited Service Locations:
Starlink is ideal for rural and remote locations. Order as many Starlinks as needed and manage all of your service locations, no matter how remote, from a single account.<p>This screams corp fleet management of the equipment, similar to SSO price segmentation.</text></comment> | <story><title>Starlink Premium</title><url>https://www.starlink.com/premium</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mdasen</author><text>Why does this seem aimed at the enterprise market (besides the price tag)? From what I&#x27;ve seen, Starlink uses CGNAT (carrier grade network address translation) so it&#x27;s hard to handle incoming connections (given the lack of a public IP address). CGNAT seems like it would be a problem for enterprise customers. Would this be enterprises in cities where they&#x27;d be looking for a backup for a wired connection? I know that a lot of companies have wireless back-ups for their wired connection so I&#x27;m not sure that Starlink would be a better enterprise option for them.<p>The question in my head is whether Starlink is going to slow down their $100-tier signups if they start seeing enough $500-tier signups. People have been waiting for years to get Starlink. If they start getting lots of $500-tier interest, it seems like they&#x27;d prioritize those users for new signups.</text></item><item><author>fossuser</author><text>$500 deposit, $2500 total cost for the dish, $500&#x2F;mo for the service.<p>Looks like it&#x27;s targeting the enterprise market.<p>The dish cost is probably closer to the actual value of the dish. The original dish we bought for $500 I think I read actually cost closer to $3k for them to manufacture (I&#x27;m not an expert on this)?<p>Regular service is $500 for a dish and $99 a month which is a great deal for 50-200mbps at pretty low latency. Particularly if you&#x27;re in an area where your only other option is geostationary (which sucks and costs a lot).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bubblethink</author><text>Why is CGNAT an issue ? Enterprise here doesn&#x27;t mean on-prem public facing hosting. It just means rich entity that can afford $500&#x2F;month per account. It could be anything ranging from a government office to a small business. You just need the ability to connect to your actual servers in AWS or wherever and transfer at acceptable rates and latency.</text></comment> |
32,947,926 | 32,947,232 | 1 | 2 | 32,946,736 | train | <story><title>Super-Earths are ideal targets in the search for life</title><url>https://singularityhub.com/2022/09/22/super-earths-are-bigger-and-more-habitable-than-earth-and-astronomers-are-discovering-more-of-the-billions-they-think-are-out-there/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ramraj07</author><text>I suppose one cannot expect anything better from a site called singularity hub, but this post is disingenuous (or written by an actual hack) for multiple reasons. Aren’t the majority of planets we are discovering all orbiting red dwarfs, which can exhibit massive swings in luminosity and be very violent? Even the example quoted by the author which such a short radius seems one of them. Also what do you do in a tidally locked planet? Half if not 90 % of it is likely to be unsustainable.<p>Also a rogue planet without a star might be able to sustain simple life but without human sources of nuclear power the only source of energy would be geothermal, so not exactly exciting candidates for living. Also who wants to live in a planet in perpetual darkness?<p>Either the “astronomer” author wasn’t a real astronomer at all or this is just clickbait.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sbuttgereit</author><text>&quot;Chris Impey is a University Distinguished Professor of Astronomy at the University of Arizona. He has over 210 refereed publications on observational cosmology, galaxies, and quasars, and his research has been supported by $20 million in NASA and NSF grants. He has won eleven teaching awards and has taught two online classes with over 300,000 enrolled and 4 million minutes of video lectures watched. Chris Impey is a past Vice President of the American Astronomical Society, and he has won its Education Prize. He’s also been an NSF Distinguished Teaching Scholar, Carnegie Council’s Arizona Professor of the Year, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor. He has written 70 popular articles on cosmology, astrobiology and education, two textbooks, a novel called Shadow World, and eight popular science books: The Living Cosmos, How It Ends, Talking About Life, How It Began, Dreams of Other Worlds, Humble Before the Void, Beyond: The Future of Space Travel, and Einstein’s Monsters: The Life and Times of Black Holes.&quot;<p>-- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.as.arizona.edu&#x2F;people&#x2F;faculty&#x2F;chris-impey" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.as.arizona.edu&#x2F;people&#x2F;faculty&#x2F;chris-impey</a><p>Naturally, none of this makes him right... I have no judgement on that point. But does clear some of the ad hominem.</text></comment> | <story><title>Super-Earths are ideal targets in the search for life</title><url>https://singularityhub.com/2022/09/22/super-earths-are-bigger-and-more-habitable-than-earth-and-astronomers-are-discovering-more-of-the-billions-they-think-are-out-there/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ramraj07</author><text>I suppose one cannot expect anything better from a site called singularity hub, but this post is disingenuous (or written by an actual hack) for multiple reasons. Aren’t the majority of planets we are discovering all orbiting red dwarfs, which can exhibit massive swings in luminosity and be very violent? Even the example quoted by the author which such a short radius seems one of them. Also what do you do in a tidally locked planet? Half if not 90 % of it is likely to be unsustainable.<p>Also a rogue planet without a star might be able to sustain simple life but without human sources of nuclear power the only source of energy would be geothermal, so not exactly exciting candidates for living. Also who wants to live in a planet in perpetual darkness?<p>Either the “astronomer” author wasn’t a real astronomer at all or this is just clickbait.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dhruval</author><text>Sorry for in advance for the dumb question...<p>Are red dwarf planets over represented due to detection methods?<p>Or is there some sort of astrophysics related reason red dwarfs would be more likely to have super earth class planets in orbit?<p>Basically should we hold out hope that with better detection techniques we will be able to detect more planets that are similar to our own.</text></comment> |
35,450,201 | 35,449,700 | 1 | 2 | 35,449,054 | train | <story><title>PWAs in App Stores</title><url>https://web.dev/pwas-in-app-stores/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>samwillis</author><text>I find the negativity in this thread depressing.<p>The web stack (html&#x2F;css&#x2F;js&#x2F;http) is one of the most impressive feats of invention by humanity. We have this one stack and toolkit that run on everything from a desktop computer down to a cheap (as little as 100$) mobile phone. It&#x27;s free with no payments for access or deployment, and at the bottom end basic enough that a child can pick it up. But capable of building incredible professional experiences (see Figma or onShape, seriously they are incredible).<p>As a sole developer I can build something with a single code base for mobile (both web and installable), and desktop (again both web and installable). The breadth of tooling available is incredible.<p>The OP is about PWAbuilder, there are alternatives. I like the combination of Capacitor (from the Ionic Framework team) and Native Script. It lets you extent your installable version of the app with additional native capability, all while staying mostly in a JS environment.<p>The complaints about PWA being poor are, in my view, two fold. One, the support for them on iOS has be atrocious until recently, but also there are a lot of poorly written webapps. That is actually a testament to the accessibility of the platform. Look past that and you see what it is truly capable of.<p>We need to stop this silly gate keeping, it&#x27;s frankly ridiculous.<p>Edit: since I started writing the negative posts have them voted down the page. Looking more positive now.<p>Edit 2: While I have your attention, if you care about PWAs and consumer choice of web engines on mobile, go support the OWA (Open Web Advocacy - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;open-web-advocacy.org&#x2F;donate&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;open-web-advocacy.org&#x2F;donate&#x2F;</a>). They are there to represent us and push for move choice and support. They are turning up and presenting the evidence needed to ensure the large players open up their platforms.</text></comment> | <story><title>PWAs in App Stores</title><url>https://web.dev/pwas-in-app-stores/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>yanis_t</author><text>While this is nice, to me the whole promise of PWA is that developers can escape confusing App Store rules, long approval process, and the absurd 30% commissions.<p>So no, thank you. I don’t want back into the App Store.</text></comment> |
7,580,673 | 7,580,374 | 1 | 2 | 7,580,161 | train | <story><title>Linux 3.15 Can Resume From Suspend Faster</title><url>https://01.org/suspendresume/blogs/tebrandt/2013/hard-disk-resume-optimization-simpler-approach</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>AndrewDucker</author><text>This seems to be a similar approach to the one taken by Windows[0]<p><i>There were a causes for the poor resume time, but a large contributor was device resume time. Since the OS serialized S0 IRPs to all devices in the PnP tree, the time for each device to resume added sequentially to the system&#x27;s resume time.<p>The OS serialization of the S0 IRPs could not change for Windows XP, so the problem was attacked at the other end...each driver would complete the S0 IRP as fast as it could so the OS could resume quickly and then asynchronously power up the device.<p>This way each device could power up in parallel and the total time to power up was not sequential (nor was it only the longest of any device to power up since there is still ordering between parent and child devices) and resume time could be dramatically slower.</i><p>[0]<a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/b/doronh/archive/2007/10/15/fast-resume-and-how-if-affects-your-driver.aspx" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blogs.msdn.com&#x2F;b&#x2F;doronh&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2007&#x2F;10&#x2F;15&#x2F;fast-resum...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Linux 3.15 Can Resume From Suspend Faster</title><url>https://01.org/suspendresume/blogs/tebrandt/2013/hard-disk-resume-optimization-simpler-approach</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Watabou</author><text>Interestingly, OS X has the fastest resume from suspend I&#x27;ve ever seen. I&#x27;ll see if this beats it.</text></comment> |
18,991,188 | 18,989,581 | 1 | 2 | 18,973,008 | train | <story><title>Why We Dominate the Earth</title><url>https://fs.blog/2019/01/yuval-noah-harari-dominate-earth/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lordnacho</author><text>&gt; Surprisingly, it’s not our shared language or even our ability to dominate other species that defines us but rather, our shared fictions.<p>I read his book where he talks about this. It makes some sense: you can operate at varied scales if you have shared fictions.<p>When you meet a complete stranger, you&#x27;re both members of the human race, sharing a desire for a better future. Meet a fellow countryman, and there are songs and stories that bind you together. Work for the same company and there&#x27;s internal culture as well as the glorious leader you both work for. Support the same football team and you both remember that night in Istanbul. You were sitting at home in Liverpool, he was in Malaysia.<p>Hard to tell as with anything historical whether this is the most convincing explanation though. I&#x27;m sure there&#x27;s other things that separate us from the animals? But a compelling enough story and he tells it well.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>keeper7777</author><text>Netflix is hosting Joseph Campbell and &#x27;The Power of Myth&#x27; with Bill Moyers which wonderfully details how this idea of shared fiction works. [0] It&#x27;s amazing how deep it permeates our culture including how Disney adopted Campbell&#x27;s ideas as not only a vehicle for story telling but also as a matter of social responsibility creating a unified view among all the billions of Earth&#x27;s human inhabitants.[1] You and I have a shared fiction that is also the same as a person buying a bootleg copy of Star Wars or Frozen on the street corner in Moscow, Beijing, Mexico City, or New Delhi.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.netflix.com&#x2F;title&#x2F;70281117" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.netflix.com&#x2F;title&#x2F;70281117</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;livingspirit.typepad.com&#x2F;files&#x2F;chris-vogler-memo-1.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;livingspirit.typepad.com&#x2F;files&#x2F;chris-vogler-memo-1.p...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Why We Dominate the Earth</title><url>https://fs.blog/2019/01/yuval-noah-harari-dominate-earth/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lordnacho</author><text>&gt; Surprisingly, it’s not our shared language or even our ability to dominate other species that defines us but rather, our shared fictions.<p>I read his book where he talks about this. It makes some sense: you can operate at varied scales if you have shared fictions.<p>When you meet a complete stranger, you&#x27;re both members of the human race, sharing a desire for a better future. Meet a fellow countryman, and there are songs and stories that bind you together. Work for the same company and there&#x27;s internal culture as well as the glorious leader you both work for. Support the same football team and you both remember that night in Istanbul. You were sitting at home in Liverpool, he was in Malaysia.<p>Hard to tell as with anything historical whether this is the most convincing explanation though. I&#x27;m sure there&#x27;s other things that separate us from the animals? But a compelling enough story and he tells it well.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>learc83</author><text>There was an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation that explored a similar concept.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Darmok" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Darmok</a></text></comment> |
32,418,817 | 32,419,027 | 1 | 2 | 32,416,815 | train | <story><title>The Case for Degrowth</title><url>https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n16/geoff-mann/reversing-the-freight-train</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>impossiblefork</author><text>The problem with ideas like this is that it takes the ladder away from middle class and the poor.<p>Both need growth in order to improve their conditions, and their place in society exists only because they can produce growth.<p>Without it the power of the wealthy over them would become a weight pressing down with such force that it would intolerable.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pessimizer</author><text>The conditions of the middle-class are actually too luxurious. Everybody in the world can&#x27;t have a suburban lawn.<p>What the middle-class (and the poor) don&#x27;t have is <i>security</i>. They live in a state of fear that the entire bottom will drop out of their lives if they get fired, or have a heart attack, or any of a million things. Supplying security to people is actually cheaper that what we do now, just as socialized health care is far cheaper than an ad hoc privatized patchwork.<p>We don&#x27;t need more growth, we need more humanity.<p>edit: I&#x27;d trade most (though maybe not all) of the great meals I&#x27;ve ever had for the guarantee I&#x27;d never go hungry.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Case for Degrowth</title><url>https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n16/geoff-mann/reversing-the-freight-train</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>impossiblefork</author><text>The problem with ideas like this is that it takes the ladder away from middle class and the poor.<p>Both need growth in order to improve their conditions, and their place in society exists only because they can produce growth.<p>Without it the power of the wealthy over them would become a weight pressing down with such force that it would intolerable.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dredmorbius</author><text>This observation begs the questions:<p>Is this the <i>only</i> such ladder?<p>And <i>why</i> is it that economic growth seems to be the <i>only</i> ladder recognised in the economic mainstream for poverty alleviation?<p>The latter question is one that&#x27;s addressed often in the writing and talks of Herman Daly, one example I&#x27;ve recently come across being a 2020 Thanksgiving edition of the CASSE podcast, which discusses Daly&#x27;s work and academic heritage:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.iheart.com&#x2F;podcast&#x2F;269-the-steady-stater-72324277&#x2F;episode&#x2F;giving-thanks-a-conversation-with-herman-74282469&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.iheart.com&#x2F;podcast&#x2F;269-the-steady-stater-7232427...</a><p>A more useful framing of the question might be to <i>assume</i> that degrowth is a given, <i>whether you believe this or not</i>, and proceed from there with a discussion of concerns.<p>The obvious advantage of growth over degrowth, or even steady-state economics, is that a larger pie allows portion sizes to increase (at least in theory --- actual history shows that both growth <i>and</i> absolute shrinkage have occurred, see particularly the introduction to Gregory Clark&#x27;s <i>A Farewell to Alms</i> which notes that the richest <i>and poorest</i> people who&#x27;ve ever lived are alive now), without reallocation.<p>But wealth and livelihood allocation <i>are</i> social functions and constructs. A philosophy of commmon weal rather than personal gain might address this. It can be found in unexpected places, including Adam Smith&#x27;s <i>Wealth of Nations</i>, several times.</text></comment> |
28,262,318 | 28,262,178 | 1 | 2 | 28,260,313 | train | <story><title>Cyber Attack, Possible Serious Breach, at U.S. State Department</title><url>https://twitter.com/JacquiHeinrich/status/1429173367643516936</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>xvector</author><text>The state department, hell, a big portion of the entire government is a joke when it comes to cybersecurity.<p>This comes with the turf of refusing to pay competitive compensation. I&#x27;d personally love to help secure the government, but I&#x27;m not going to take a massive hit in QoL just for a sense of patriotism.<p>During the Black Hat 2021 closing keynote, the Secretary of Homeland Security was begging for more cybersecurity engineers to join the government, but there was no acknowledgement of the compensation problem, which is one of their biggest roadblocks. It makes zero sense to whine about getting hacked while paying a fifth of the compensation of private industry. The government ought to put up or shut up.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>OminousWeapons</author><text>You see the same issues across government. I remember listening to Francis Collins, the head of the NIH, talk about the major problems in academic life sciences at my University. He opened by saying he wasn&#x27;t there to talk about comp or funding which was amusing considering that every problem in the space ultimately tracks back to hilariously inadequate funding and comp.</text></comment> | <story><title>Cyber Attack, Possible Serious Breach, at U.S. State Department</title><url>https://twitter.com/JacquiHeinrich/status/1429173367643516936</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>xvector</author><text>The state department, hell, a big portion of the entire government is a joke when it comes to cybersecurity.<p>This comes with the turf of refusing to pay competitive compensation. I&#x27;d personally love to help secure the government, but I&#x27;m not going to take a massive hit in QoL just for a sense of patriotism.<p>During the Black Hat 2021 closing keynote, the Secretary of Homeland Security was begging for more cybersecurity engineers to join the government, but there was no acknowledgement of the compensation problem, which is one of their biggest roadblocks. It makes zero sense to whine about getting hacked while paying a fifth of the compensation of private industry. The government ought to put up or shut up.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Seattle3503</author><text>For me the issue is that I&#x27;d probably need to move to the East coast and work in a government office environment. I&#x27;d rather stay on the West coast.</text></comment> |
30,585,417 | 30,585,424 | 1 | 3 | 30,583,720 | train | <story><title>Zero rupee note (2015)</title><url>https://karthika2006.wordpress.com/2015/05/13/zero-rupee-note/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>_nalply</author><text>I experienced corruption and had to bribe an officer. This was more than 20 years ago. I hope you find my tale interesting as an example how bribery is executed exactly, even if you are clueless like me.<p>I was in Romania to watch the solar eclipse of there. Then we started our itinary back home. About one kilometer before the border to Hungary we were stopped by the police. It was very flat and the road very straight. We already could see the border post in the distance. The officer seemed friendly and beckoned me to get out of the car. I got off and he wanted to look at the trunk. I opened it and I showed him our gear, two tents, sleeping bags, clothes, some food and it took the time. He was very friendly, like an older uncle of you. He wanted to look at our papers again and when I passed him my passport he made a gesture, he put the flat hand between two pages.<p>After some time I suddenly realized that he wanted to be bribed. Duh!<p>Then I said, sorry no more Romanian Lei, but we have Hungarian Forint, and he nodded eagerly. So I said, just a moment please and took back my passport then I did some calculation in my head. I decided to give him $20 worth in Forint and put the notes in the passport and gave him the passport back. He was happy and gestured that we can continue.<p>Just to know, this was only two years after the fall of Ceausescu.<p>We drove away. Slowly just to give him the feeling that he has the situation in control.<p>We expected to wait about 15 minutes at the border post, as it already happened when we entered Romania. But when we slowly cruised to the post, another officer appeared and beckoned us through. We overtook about four cars.<p>I didn&#x27;t plan to but we got VIP treatment.<p>Today I think I shouldn&#x27;t have bribed the officer. However I was completely clueless and I had a good rapport with the officer and I just wanted to help him and us. I still don&#x27;t know what I should have done.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>inglor</author><text>You (unfortunately) did the right thing and this is (unfortunately) still common in several Eastern European countries (and elsewhere for example certain areas in India and LATAM) especially outside the central areas. I actively avoid trips&#x2F;routes that take me through areas where bribing is necessary.<p>As for &quot;what happens if I refuse&quot; - in anecdotal experience:<p>- I&#x27;ve seen friends arrested&#x2F;detained until they paid up (happened 3-4 times).<p>- I&#x27;ve seen officials attempting to take a bribe &quot;give up&quot; when we acted confused (1-2 times).<p>- I&#x27;ve seen officials invent very creative excuses about a &quot;EU tax&quot; or &quot;foreigner tax&quot; or &quot;special foreigner tickets&quot;.<p>I want to say this is amusing but honestly the situation is always terrifying and unclear and I actively avoid places with corruption when picking my tourist destinations.</text></comment> | <story><title>Zero rupee note (2015)</title><url>https://karthika2006.wordpress.com/2015/05/13/zero-rupee-note/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>_nalply</author><text>I experienced corruption and had to bribe an officer. This was more than 20 years ago. I hope you find my tale interesting as an example how bribery is executed exactly, even if you are clueless like me.<p>I was in Romania to watch the solar eclipse of there. Then we started our itinary back home. About one kilometer before the border to Hungary we were stopped by the police. It was very flat and the road very straight. We already could see the border post in the distance. The officer seemed friendly and beckoned me to get out of the car. I got off and he wanted to look at the trunk. I opened it and I showed him our gear, two tents, sleeping bags, clothes, some food and it took the time. He was very friendly, like an older uncle of you. He wanted to look at our papers again and when I passed him my passport he made a gesture, he put the flat hand between two pages.<p>After some time I suddenly realized that he wanted to be bribed. Duh!<p>Then I said, sorry no more Romanian Lei, but we have Hungarian Forint, and he nodded eagerly. So I said, just a moment please and took back my passport then I did some calculation in my head. I decided to give him $20 worth in Forint and put the notes in the passport and gave him the passport back. He was happy and gestured that we can continue.<p>Just to know, this was only two years after the fall of Ceausescu.<p>We drove away. Slowly just to give him the feeling that he has the situation in control.<p>We expected to wait about 15 minutes at the border post, as it already happened when we entered Romania. But when we slowly cruised to the post, another officer appeared and beckoned us through. We overtook about four cars.<p>I didn&#x27;t plan to but we got VIP treatment.<p>Today I think I shouldn&#x27;t have bribed the officer. However I was completely clueless and I had a good rapport with the officer and I just wanted to help him and us. I still don&#x27;t know what I should have done.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>okl</author><text>Thanks for your story.<p>McAfee has written an extensive guide on how it works in central America: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.whoismcafee.com&#x2F;the-travel-guide&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.whoismcafee.com&#x2F;the-travel-guide&#x2F;</a></text></comment> |
30,644,477 | 30,643,804 | 1 | 3 | 30,640,741 | train | <story><title>Russia opens criminal investigation of Meta over death calls on Facebook</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/world/kremlin-says-meta-would-have-cease-work-russia-if-reuters-report-is-true-2022-03-11/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>monklu</author><text>On the contrary, I think this says less about FB, but more so reflects a hypocrisy in &quot;western principles&quot; that many are probably not self-aware of.<p>Let&#x27;s assume for a second, that FB do not relax their rules for this conflict. Then they would have to ban a whole sleuth of Ukrainian accounts, including many government accounts such as Ministry of Defense, and probably even Zelensky. You don&#x27;t have to stretch your imagination to see what the headlines would look like in that case -- &quot;Facebook bans Ukrainian resistance against Russian aggression&quot; etc. In a sense, FB was a facing a catch-22 situation, where it&#x27;s just lose-lose for them, and they had to make a call to swallow the &quot;less poisonous&quot; pill.<p>Contrast this situation with American war efforts in the middle east and Afghanistan over the past 20 years, where they faced no such conundrum.</text></item><item><author>gambler</author><text>If you need to change your platform&#x27;s rules for literally every major event (elections, Covid, this war) there is something profoundly wrong both with your rules and your platform.<p>There is tremendous value in having actual principles. So many people either forgotten it or never understood that to begin with.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>aerovistae</author><text>Reminds me of my favorite internet essay of all time, no longer available except on wayback machine[1]<p>&gt; ...the US criminal justice system is overwhelmingly preoccupied with procedure and process, often at the expense of justice. This myopia is the product of a technocratic bureaucracy.<p>&gt; The contemporary incarnation of the peculiar mindset of Anglo-American jurisprudence leads to the question, “Were the rights of all parties, as enumerated by the law, protected?”, eclipsing the much larger issue: “Is this outcome compatible with justice?”<p>While these comments are in reference to the legal system, I think they are equally applicable to the mindset pervading the oversight of today&#x27;s tech world.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20210308014253&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;likewise.am&#x2F;2014&#x2F;12&#x2F;26&#x2F;what-armenians-should-know-about-life-in-america&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20210308014253&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;likewise.a...</a><p>Note - the author is an intermittent HN user, abalashov.</text></comment> | <story><title>Russia opens criminal investigation of Meta over death calls on Facebook</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/world/kremlin-says-meta-would-have-cease-work-russia-if-reuters-report-is-true-2022-03-11/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>monklu</author><text>On the contrary, I think this says less about FB, but more so reflects a hypocrisy in &quot;western principles&quot; that many are probably not self-aware of.<p>Let&#x27;s assume for a second, that FB do not relax their rules for this conflict. Then they would have to ban a whole sleuth of Ukrainian accounts, including many government accounts such as Ministry of Defense, and probably even Zelensky. You don&#x27;t have to stretch your imagination to see what the headlines would look like in that case -- &quot;Facebook bans Ukrainian resistance against Russian aggression&quot; etc. In a sense, FB was a facing a catch-22 situation, where it&#x27;s just lose-lose for them, and they had to make a call to swallow the &quot;less poisonous&quot; pill.<p>Contrast this situation with American war efforts in the middle east and Afghanistan over the past 20 years, where they faced no such conundrum.</text></item><item><author>gambler</author><text>If you need to change your platform&#x27;s rules for literally every major event (elections, Covid, this war) there is something profoundly wrong both with your rules and your platform.<p>There is tremendous value in having actual principles. So many people either forgotten it or never understood that to begin with.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rajin444</author><text>Private companies should not get in the business of policing content. Follow the laws of the land and that’s it.<p>It’s not really a foreign concept. We don’t deny somebody sunlight or air because they do something we don’t like (we as in non government entities - governments do deny people “air”). The world would be a better place if businesses operated as close to a natural resource as possible and left politics to politicians.<p>It’s dumb luck that sunlight isn’t provided by some corporation. Systems like that are what we should strive for.</text></comment> |
5,862,160 | 5,861,553 | 1 | 3 | 5,861,459 | train | <story><title>Yandex Mail</title><url>http://mail.yandex.com/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>api</author><text>Actually you laugh, but being spied on by someone with no jurisdiction over you is better than being spied on by someone who can name you an enemy combatant because they misunderstand your e-mails that contain a plot synopsis for a book you&#x27;re working on or that can label you a child pornographer because you have naked photos of your grandkids playing in your yard.</text></comment> | <story><title>Yandex Mail</title><url>http://mail.yandex.com/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>kpierre</author><text>KGB is much better than NSA: they simply don&#x27;t have money for data processing on that scale.<p>Yandex Mail is a great competitor to gmail, some things even work better -- you&#x27;ve got a separate list of thread&#x27;s attachments, ability to unsubscribe from whole spam categories in one click, SMS (maybe only in russia) and so on</text></comment> |
36,116,692 | 36,115,850 | 1 | 3 | 36,114,147 | train | <story><title>C++17’s useful features for embedded systems</title><url>https://interrupt.memfault.com/blog/cpp-17-for-embedded</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>WalterBright</author><text>I added 0b binary literals to C++ back in the 1980s.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.digitalmars.com&#x2F;ctg&#x2F;ctgLanguageImplementation.html#binary_constants" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.digitalmars.com&#x2F;ctg&#x2F;ctgLanguageImplementation.ht...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>C++17’s useful features for embedded systems</title><url>https://interrupt.memfault.com/blog/cpp-17-for-embedded</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>kramerger</author><text>Why<p><pre><code> uint8_t b = 0b1111&#x27;1111;
</code></pre>
I would rather have<p><pre><code> uint8_t b = 0b1111_1111;
</code></pre>
This &#x27; thing is hard to get right on some non-us keyboards. And yes, I&#x27;ve the same problem with Rust.</text></comment> |
32,767,860 | 32,766,786 | 1 | 2 | 32,761,429 | train | <story><title>What to read to understand central banking</title><url>https://www.economist.com/the-economist-reads/2022/09/07/what-to-read-to-understand-central-banking</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>uticus</author><text>Understanding central banking, like so many other things, also means understanding philosophies, worldviews, perceptions, and outlooks. And goals. Especially goals.<p>So yes, read. But my advice: read widely, not naively, because economic theory looks like math from the shoreline but it tastes and feels like philosophy when you dive in.<p>Fun starting point: learning about the different &quot;schools&quot; of economic thought: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Schools_of_economic_thought" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Schools_of_economic_thought</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>halotrope</author><text>This begs to mention the beloved ft.com 404 page: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ft.com&#x2F;errors&#x2F;page&#x2F;404" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ft.com&#x2F;errors&#x2F;page&#x2F;404</a></text></comment> | <story><title>What to read to understand central banking</title><url>https://www.economist.com/the-economist-reads/2022/09/07/what-to-read-to-understand-central-banking</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>uticus</author><text>Understanding central banking, like so many other things, also means understanding philosophies, worldviews, perceptions, and outlooks. And goals. Especially goals.<p>So yes, read. But my advice: read widely, not naively, because economic theory looks like math from the shoreline but it tastes and feels like philosophy when you dive in.<p>Fun starting point: learning about the different &quot;schools&quot; of economic thought: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Schools_of_economic_thought" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Schools_of_economic_thought</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>davidw</author><text>Something else to be mindful of when reading about economics is that the more centrist, middle of the road, technocrat type of stuff that underpins modern economies tends to not be all that loud on the internet, whereas you get people endorsing more fringe, absolutist theories who make a lot of noise.</text></comment> |
30,149,841 | 30,150,043 | 1 | 2 | 30,148,272 | train | <story><title>Citrix to be acquired for $16.5B, will be merged with Tibco</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2022/01/31/citrix-to-be-acquired-by-vista-and-evergreen-elliott-in-a-16-5b-all-cash-deal-will-be-merged-with-tibco-to-create-saas-powerhouse/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>nikanj</author><text>My developer experience with Citrix last year:<p>1) Contact Citrix support about some missing details in their SDK (Dynamic Virtual Channels were not loading properly on XenDesktop, and the SDK docs just said &quot;Use the Microsoft APIs for registration&quot;)<p>2) Citrix ponders about the issue for a few months. I write a full DVC plugin for them to test things with, because they don&#x27;t seem to have anyone in-house who knows their own tech stack<p>3) Citrix finally declares that dynamic virtual channels are currently broken. They might get fixed in a future release, but they&#x27;re not on the active roadmap.<p>4) Citrix is still releasing frequent updates to the SDK, advertising DVC support. NB this is not just a small typo in the docs, they have a long chapter dedicated to the topic ( Citrix Dynamic Virtual Channel Protocol at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;citrix&#x2F;receiver-for-windows-virtual-channel-sdk&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;docs&#x2F;architecture.md" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;citrix&#x2F;receiver-for-windows-virtual-chann...</a> ). The feature is very thoroughly documented, it&#x27;s just...not actually implemented.<p>I can&#x27;t imagine how many developer hours get wasted yearly with people trying to get virtual channels to work, when in reality they&#x27;re just flat-out not supported.</text></comment> | <story><title>Citrix to be acquired for $16.5B, will be merged with Tibco</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2022/01/31/citrix-to-be-acquired-by-vista-and-evergreen-elliott-in-a-16-5b-all-cash-deal-will-be-merged-with-tibco-to-create-saas-powerhouse/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>duck</author><text>I interviewed at Citrix 20+ years ago for my first SWE job out of college. The first phone interview went well, but on the second one I was surprised to find the interviewer was asking the exact same questions, word for word. After a couple of them I mentioned it, thinking maybe this was a mistake and the interviewer said that wasn&#x27;t the case, and then proceeded to ask me the rest of the same questions. After I told them the answer to the next question before they asked it there was a real long pause on their side and then they asked the remaining questions in a different order. Needless to say I wasn&#x27;t as excited about working there after that, but they never called me back either.</text></comment> |
38,105,687 | 38,105,592 | 1 | 2 | 38,103,733 | train | <story><title>FCC launches inquiry to increase minimum broadband speed [pdf]</title><url>https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-398168A1.pdf</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>isilofi</author><text>Non-techie notices &quot;internet is slow&quot; because their youtube video is blocky or pages load slowly. Non-techie goes to ISP to complain. ISP upsells to a more expensive plan.<p>The actual reason in almost all cases: non-techies are clueless about their slow and shitty WIFI. Picking empty or less busy channels, using 5GHz, using <i>gasp</i> cables, all black magic and never done.<p>Sometimes the upselling actually helps because the better plan comes with a maybe-better AP...</text></item><item><author>Workaccount2</author><text>In an extreme ironic twist, me, the techie nerd guy, has the slowest internet of the regular-folk friend group of mine. Everyone has got 1Gbps and here I am with 300Mbps.</text></item><item><author>gnicholas</author><text>I started with Comcast with 12Mbps service. Over time, they increased the base speed they offer to 20, 25, 50, and now 75. They have done this because they want to have x% of their customers on &quot;broadband&quot;, per the federal definition.<p>This is all well and good, but they keep increasing the price, and refuse to offer lower-tier service. I probably wouldn&#x27;t want 12Mbps anymore, but 20 or 25 would suffice. I wish I could pay a fraction of what I&#x27;m paying for 75Mbps and get a lower tier of service. It should suffice that x% of customers are offered &quot;broadband&quot; for a reasonable price, even if some choose a lower speed.<p>Ultimately, this comes down to competition. There are no other wired options where I live (in the heart of Silicon Valley). I have considered using a cellular hotspot, but it&#x27;s not competitive in terms of pricing.<p>I&#x27;m all for prodding companies to move to faster speeds, but there should still be room for consumer choice.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lifeisstillgood</author><text>I live with the shitty wifi because the yak-shaving that comes with &quot;ok, I will set their router to be pass through, now I need to install openwrt on that 100$ recommended router, and run a cable behind my drywall upto the second floor, and install anothe openwrt and bang goes a weekend and really I am only do that once I order a second line because taking out my family&#x27;s internet for the whole weekend because I will fuck it up at least once ..<p>ok.<p>Next month honest</text></comment> | <story><title>FCC launches inquiry to increase minimum broadband speed [pdf]</title><url>https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-398168A1.pdf</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>isilofi</author><text>Non-techie notices &quot;internet is slow&quot; because their youtube video is blocky or pages load slowly. Non-techie goes to ISP to complain. ISP upsells to a more expensive plan.<p>The actual reason in almost all cases: non-techies are clueless about their slow and shitty WIFI. Picking empty or less busy channels, using 5GHz, using <i>gasp</i> cables, all black magic and never done.<p>Sometimes the upselling actually helps because the better plan comes with a maybe-better AP...</text></item><item><author>Workaccount2</author><text>In an extreme ironic twist, me, the techie nerd guy, has the slowest internet of the regular-folk friend group of mine. Everyone has got 1Gbps and here I am with 300Mbps.</text></item><item><author>gnicholas</author><text>I started with Comcast with 12Mbps service. Over time, they increased the base speed they offer to 20, 25, 50, and now 75. They have done this because they want to have x% of their customers on &quot;broadband&quot;, per the federal definition.<p>This is all well and good, but they keep increasing the price, and refuse to offer lower-tier service. I probably wouldn&#x27;t want 12Mbps anymore, but 20 or 25 would suffice. I wish I could pay a fraction of what I&#x27;m paying for 75Mbps and get a lower tier of service. It should suffice that x% of customers are offered &quot;broadband&quot; for a reasonable price, even if some choose a lower speed.<p>Ultimately, this comes down to competition. There are no other wired options where I live (in the heart of Silicon Valley). I have considered using a cellular hotspot, but it&#x27;s not competitive in terms of pricing.<p>I&#x27;m all for prodding companies to move to faster speeds, but there should still be room for consumer choice.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gosub100</author><text>&gt; their slow and shitty WIFI<p>I&#x27;m still embarrassed about the time I called my ISP and complained that the new Xmbs package they just installed is capped at only Ymbps only to realize I had run the speed test over wifi (back in the wireless-g,maybe n days)...</text></comment> |
5,731,160 | 5,730,448 | 1 | 3 | 5,730,142 | train | <story><title>Poll: HN Linux users, what desktop environmemt do you use?</title><text>For those of you that use linux, what is your main desktop environment?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>D9u</author><text>I don't use Linux, I use FreeBSD.
I don't use a "Desktop Environment," I use DWM.<p>I've run the gamut, from GNOME, to Xfce4, to LXDE, etc...<p>They all have too much extraneous software.<p>I'd much rather build a system up, rather than tear it down, in my quest to squeeze as much performance out of my netbook as I can.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>apotheon</author><text>&#62; I don't use Linux, I use FreeBSD.<p>Ditto. For me, however, the performance benefits of going fairly minimal are kinda secondary to the productivity benefits of choosing tools that stay the hell out of my way.<p>While there's a lot to like about dwm (I rather like its tag concept as a replacement for workspaces, for instance), I find it a bit limiting for my purposes. Spectrwm is another good one, and it gets too little attention. Xmonad is pretty good. For floating rather than tiling window managers, I think AHWM is pretty awesome, though it has been abandoned for years; it could stand to be picked up by a new maintainer.<p>I ended up with i3, though; it's tiling with decent functionality, including its native support for tabbing windows. It used to be better, actually, in that it was easier to mix and match different window arrangement styles within a single workspace, but even after making that marginally less usable it still does more in that regard than other WMs I've tried out.</text></comment> | <story><title>Poll: HN Linux users, what desktop environmemt do you use?</title><text>For those of you that use linux, what is your main desktop environment?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>D9u</author><text>I don't use Linux, I use FreeBSD.
I don't use a "Desktop Environment," I use DWM.<p>I've run the gamut, from GNOME, to Xfce4, to LXDE, etc...<p>They all have too much extraneous software.<p>I'd much rather build a system up, rather than tear it down, in my quest to squeeze as much performance out of my netbook as I can.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>keithpeter</author><text>For those who wish to try before they buy (into) a tiling window manager, the repository dwm/suckless-tools work fine on Ubuntu 12.04 so you can log into a DWM session, and log out again using Shift-Alt-q. If you like the experience, you will need to uninstall the stock repository dwm binary and compile a replacement from source as the configuration is in a c header file.</text></comment> |
18,419,683 | 18,419,581 | 1 | 2 | 18,418,667 | train | <story><title>Making floating point math highly efficient for AI hardware</title><url>https://code.fb.com/ai-research/floating-point-math/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>grandmczeb</author><text>Here&#x27;s the bottom line for anyone who doesn&#x27;t want to read the whole article.<p>&gt; Using a commercially available 28-nanometer ASIC process technology, we have profiled (8, 1, 5, 5, 7) log ELMA as 0.96x the power of int8&#x2F;32 multiply-add for a standalone processing element (PE).<p>&gt; Extended to 16 bits this method uses 0.59x the power and 0.68x the area of IEEE 754 half-precision FMA<p>In other words, interesting but not earth shattering. Great to see people working in this area though!</text></comment> | <story><title>Making floating point math highly efficient for AI hardware</title><url>https://code.fb.com/ai-research/floating-point-math/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>moflome</author><text>Not sure why this isn&#x27;t getting more votes, but it&#x27;s a good avenue of research and the authors should be commended. That said, this approach to optimizing floating point implementations has a lot of history at Imagination Technologies, ARM and similar low-power inferencing chipsets providers. I especially like the Synopsys ASIP Design [0] tool which leverages the open-source (although not yet IEEE ratified) LISA 2.0 Architecture Design Language [1] to iterate on these design issues.<p>Interesting times...<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.synopsys.com&#x2F;dw&#x2F;ipdir.php?ds=asip-designer" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.synopsys.com&#x2F;dw&#x2F;ipdir.php?ds=asip-designer</a>
[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;LISA_(Language_for_Instruction_Set_Architecture)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;LISA_(Language_for_Instruction...</a></text></comment> |
3,679,331 | 3,679,080 | 1 | 2 | 3,678,380 | train | <story><title>A Better Javascript Date Picker/Calendar</title><url>https://github.com/ChiperSoft/Kalendae</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>duncans</author><text>As unfashionable as it may seem, ASP.NET's ill-fated AJAX Toolkit library (before MS realised that jQuery was the way forward) still has the best date picker control: <a href="http://www.asp.net/ajaxLibrary/AjaxControlToolkitSampleSite/Calendar/Calendar.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://www.asp.net/ajaxLibrary/AjaxControlToolkitSampleSite/...</a><p>The key thing is the ability to click the month/year headings to zoom out.</text></comment> | <story><title>A Better Javascript Date Picker/Calendar</title><url>https://github.com/ChiperSoft/Kalendae</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>troels</author><text>Very nice. I've been using this one for a project recently: <a href="http://www.eyecon.ro/datepicker/" rel="nofollow">http://www.eyecon.ro/datepicker/</a> and I noticed the other day that the author has begun work on an updated version: <a href="http://www.eyecon.ro/colorpicker-and-datepicker-for-twitter-bootstrap.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.eyecon.ro/colorpicker-and-datepicker-for-twitter-...</a></text></comment> |
10,922,663 | 10,921,899 | 1 | 3 | 10,917,328 | train | <story><title>The Real Problem with Lunch</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/16/opinion/the-real-problem-with-lunch.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>adekok</author><text>I spent years living in France, and my daughter went to kindergarten and grade one there.<p>The lunches were <i>insane</i>. A 3 year-old can expect a five course meal every day. Prepared fresh on-site. Different every day of the month.<p>The school district would mail a calendar of lunches to the parents every month. I still have some.<p>The parents <i>care</i> about the food their children eat. They&#x27;re willing to pay a little more for good food at school. As a computer programmer, I earned an above average salary, and paid small amounts every semester for better food. IIRC, it was about $200. And definitely way below $1K.<p>My daughter loved her lunches, and I was happy to not have to make something with the French parents would then laugh at. ;)<p>The French attitude is &quot;we live to eat&quot;. They say every other country &quot;eats to live&quot;. That definitely shows in the different attitude towards the school lunches.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>crdb</author><text>I would caution against extrapolating from your experience. You must have been living in a good district with a decent school (and if you&#x27;ve been in France for any period of time you&#x27;ll know that fighting for the right school is almost the most important thing in parents&#x27; lives and can even decide elections). Crucially, as there are much fewer private schools in France than say the UK or the US, the elite will instead make public superschools and then use connections and districts to put their kids in them (and get the taxpayer to foot the bill), the most famous being Henri IV and Louis le Grand in Paris, but this system applies to all regions (AFAIK).<p>Anecdotal evidence: my &quot;college&quot; or middle school equivalent (which I won&#x27;t name and shame) in Grenoble had a much less interesting canteen. For example, the fries (served with every meal) were undercooked, sometimes still frozen inside, and we occasionally found worms. The queue for food could be as long as 45 minutes, forcing everybody to gulp down their food as fast as they could so as not to be late to the next class. The food was always deep fried meat or equivalents. A decent part of the student population was quite fat, although not to US or UK levels of obesity.<p>France is like the US. You have areas like Manhattan or Santa Monica, and you have areas like North Virginia or Ohio, all with their own history, local funding, civil servants providing wildly differing levels of service. Paris is almost another country (and its residents definitely see &quot;provinciaux&quot; as foreigners), maybe even more so than with London and the UK.<p>For a deep dive down the other end, I recommend the movie &quot;Journee de la Jupe&quot; which gives you a taste of the ZEP schools (arguably the worst in France), it&#x27;s a bit more realistic than &quot;Banlieue 13&quot;.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Real Problem with Lunch</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/16/opinion/the-real-problem-with-lunch.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>adekok</author><text>I spent years living in France, and my daughter went to kindergarten and grade one there.<p>The lunches were <i>insane</i>. A 3 year-old can expect a five course meal every day. Prepared fresh on-site. Different every day of the month.<p>The school district would mail a calendar of lunches to the parents every month. I still have some.<p>The parents <i>care</i> about the food their children eat. They&#x27;re willing to pay a little more for good food at school. As a computer programmer, I earned an above average salary, and paid small amounts every semester for better food. IIRC, it was about $200. And definitely way below $1K.<p>My daughter loved her lunches, and I was happy to not have to make something with the French parents would then laugh at. ;)<p>The French attitude is &quot;we live to eat&quot;. They say every other country &quot;eats to live&quot;. That definitely shows in the different attitude towards the school lunches.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>alain94040</author><text>Looking at random &quot;menu cantine&quot; on Google, getting hungry already. For instance: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;dumezil-lyc.spip.ac-rouen.fr&#x2F;IMG&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;menu_du_14_au_18_decembre_2015.pdf.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;dumezil-lyc.spip.ac-rouen.fr&#x2F;IMG&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;menu_du_14_au_18...</a><p>On Tuesday, chicken curry (with white wine sauce). Wednesday, salmon with potato gratin. And lots of vegetables.<p>I can tell you some US cafeterias are not quite up to speed yet.</text></comment> |
35,231,407 | 35,230,485 | 1 | 2 | 35,224,356 | train | <story><title>Mastodon hit 10M users</title><url>https://mastodon.social/@mastodonusercount/110051957865629817</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>brabel</author><text>&gt; Toxic and hateful people simply get banned<p>I don&#x27;t know if that&#x27;s supposed to sound like a good thing, but to me this sounds like a distopian place where anyone that does not align with the &quot;correct worldview&quot; is made to disappear and never be heard of again.<p>If you think &quot;only bad people are toxic&quot;, you probably haven&#x27;t been to many debates where your viewpoint happens to be the minority viewpoint.</text></item><item><author>devjab</author><text>&gt; So long as you lean to progressive worldviews and see insult slinging at those that don&#x27;t see your way not as being toxic, but rather just expressions of righteous indignation.<p>I&#x27;m not sure which mastodon server you are on, or which ones you&#x27;re linked with, but I&#x27;m on Universeodon and I&#x27;ve frankly seen nothing of the sort.<p>You do have a point of course, but I haven&#x27;t seen any sort of toxic behaviour. Toxic and hateful people simply get banned, and the servers that house them get blacklisted. Which isn&#x27;t too dissimilar to how the world used to function before centralized social media made it harder to moderate which people you want to spend your time on.<p>I&#x27;m progressive of course, so it&#x27;s easy for me. But the thing is, if you came up to me in the real world and started to talk about how wrong it is for people to be gay, then I&#x27;d frankly walk away from you. This is what becomes possible with decentralized social media, but I&#x27;m not sure I&#x27;d call it a bubble or safespace, it&#x27;s simply going back to the world before Facebook and Twitter, to when it was much easier to ignore people.</text></item><item><author>sbuttgereit</author><text>&quot;<i>Zero toxicity and probably several magnitudes more meaningful conversations with people from all around the world. This apparently comes from the kinds of people I could find and connect with.</i>&quot;<p>So long as you lean to progressive worldviews and see insult slinging at those that don&#x27;t see your way not as being toxic, but rather just expressions of righteous indignation... sure, I could buy that line. A quick perusal on the front page of mastodon.social had only of either relatively neutral topics or various progressive tropes on the news of the day. No contrary views were there at all. Perhaps this is what you mean: it&#x27;s your bubble, so it&#x27;s cozy and non-toxic. A safe-space of sorts for all right minded people.<p>I do agree with you: Twitter is a digital hellscape. Of course, I deleted my account half a decade or so ago for this reason and to be fair, it&#x27;s not changed. It might now have a different flavor with Musk, but still as toxic a place as it was before him. I can&#x27;t see Mastodon as being much different and with that I&#x27;ll do us both a favor a stay away from there as well.</text></item><item><author>nforgerit</author><text>After about 6 months hosting my own little private Mastodon instance, I can say the following things:<p>(1) Whoever cares about that but the atmosphere is nice, cozy, exciting and creative. Zero toxicity and probably several magnitudes more meaningful conversations with people from all around the world. This apparently comes from the kinds of people I could find and connect with.<p>(2) Hosting is relatively easy. I think all kinds of organizations (e.g. sports clubs, media companies, private companies, schools, political parties, gov&#x27;t agencies, etc.) should give it a shot hosting their own instances to take control of their social media identity.
They don&#x27;t necessarily need to open registrations for everyone and start moderating &quot;the masses&quot;. I only let few hand-picked people on my instance that I happen to know IRL and still have a happy life.<p>(3) I once saw a post from a German IT mag (heise, I think from November 2022) that claimed that they have more traffic through Mastodon than through any other Social Media thingy. Surely, their audience was a good fit but I think it&#x27;s a matter of critical mass when more less-nerdy people would join the Fediverse.<p>In summary, I deleted my Twitter account ~2 months ago and don&#x27;t regret it. Some things are a bit annoying (mostly bugs, finding and connecting with other people, not much interaction with my posts [maybe it&#x27;s because my posts are sh*t]) but all in all it&#x27;s a great resource for inspiration and digital interaction with other people.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>xorcist</author><text>&gt; distopian place where anyone that does not align with the &quot;correct worldview&quot;<p>People said exactly the same thing about open relays and spam filters some twenty years ago. A very famous Internet personality kept an open relay around for many years until there was literally no one left to federate with. I worked at a place who thought themselves obligated to keep around copies of all incoming messages for some period of time.<p>Who are you to decide between signal and noise, and so on, the discussion went. Turns out that&#x27;s useless discourse. Because similar logic goes the other way around, who are you to decide what I keep?<p>I am not obliged to read email from all senders, and above all, I do not have to explain myself and I don&#x27;t have to keep them stored as to not infringe their right of expression.<p>Every decentralized protocol with any real world traction allows every actor to filter traffic in a permissionless manner. You can call it righteousness or as amoral as you&#x27;d like, but until you can present an alternative system that&#x27;s how it&#x27;s going to work.</text></comment> | <story><title>Mastodon hit 10M users</title><url>https://mastodon.social/@mastodonusercount/110051957865629817</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>brabel</author><text>&gt; Toxic and hateful people simply get banned<p>I don&#x27;t know if that&#x27;s supposed to sound like a good thing, but to me this sounds like a distopian place where anyone that does not align with the &quot;correct worldview&quot; is made to disappear and never be heard of again.<p>If you think &quot;only bad people are toxic&quot;, you probably haven&#x27;t been to many debates where your viewpoint happens to be the minority viewpoint.</text></item><item><author>devjab</author><text>&gt; So long as you lean to progressive worldviews and see insult slinging at those that don&#x27;t see your way not as being toxic, but rather just expressions of righteous indignation.<p>I&#x27;m not sure which mastodon server you are on, or which ones you&#x27;re linked with, but I&#x27;m on Universeodon and I&#x27;ve frankly seen nothing of the sort.<p>You do have a point of course, but I haven&#x27;t seen any sort of toxic behaviour. Toxic and hateful people simply get banned, and the servers that house them get blacklisted. Which isn&#x27;t too dissimilar to how the world used to function before centralized social media made it harder to moderate which people you want to spend your time on.<p>I&#x27;m progressive of course, so it&#x27;s easy for me. But the thing is, if you came up to me in the real world and started to talk about how wrong it is for people to be gay, then I&#x27;d frankly walk away from you. This is what becomes possible with decentralized social media, but I&#x27;m not sure I&#x27;d call it a bubble or safespace, it&#x27;s simply going back to the world before Facebook and Twitter, to when it was much easier to ignore people.</text></item><item><author>sbuttgereit</author><text>&quot;<i>Zero toxicity and probably several magnitudes more meaningful conversations with people from all around the world. This apparently comes from the kinds of people I could find and connect with.</i>&quot;<p>So long as you lean to progressive worldviews and see insult slinging at those that don&#x27;t see your way not as being toxic, but rather just expressions of righteous indignation... sure, I could buy that line. A quick perusal on the front page of mastodon.social had only of either relatively neutral topics or various progressive tropes on the news of the day. No contrary views were there at all. Perhaps this is what you mean: it&#x27;s your bubble, so it&#x27;s cozy and non-toxic. A safe-space of sorts for all right minded people.<p>I do agree with you: Twitter is a digital hellscape. Of course, I deleted my account half a decade or so ago for this reason and to be fair, it&#x27;s not changed. It might now have a different flavor with Musk, but still as toxic a place as it was before him. I can&#x27;t see Mastodon as being much different and with that I&#x27;ll do us both a favor a stay away from there as well.</text></item><item><author>nforgerit</author><text>After about 6 months hosting my own little private Mastodon instance, I can say the following things:<p>(1) Whoever cares about that but the atmosphere is nice, cozy, exciting and creative. Zero toxicity and probably several magnitudes more meaningful conversations with people from all around the world. This apparently comes from the kinds of people I could find and connect with.<p>(2) Hosting is relatively easy. I think all kinds of organizations (e.g. sports clubs, media companies, private companies, schools, political parties, gov&#x27;t agencies, etc.) should give it a shot hosting their own instances to take control of their social media identity.
They don&#x27;t necessarily need to open registrations for everyone and start moderating &quot;the masses&quot;. I only let few hand-picked people on my instance that I happen to know IRL and still have a happy life.<p>(3) I once saw a post from a German IT mag (heise, I think from November 2022) that claimed that they have more traffic through Mastodon than through any other Social Media thingy. Surely, their audience was a good fit but I think it&#x27;s a matter of critical mass when more less-nerdy people would join the Fediverse.<p>In summary, I deleted my Twitter account ~2 months ago and don&#x27;t regret it. Some things are a bit annoying (mostly bugs, finding and connecting with other people, not much interaction with my posts [maybe it&#x27;s because my posts are sh*t]) but all in all it&#x27;s a great resource for inspiration and digital interaction with other people.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>graypegg</author><text>This is an odd minority viewpoint for HN actually. I find most people feel rather empowered by the decentralized nature of mastodon… or email for that matter.<p>Your right to freedom of speech is between you and the government. People aren’t required to publish your work just because you complain.<p>The difference here is you can just hook into the same decentralized system the publisher is using, and subvert them by finding another instance to use or even making your own! With no difference in reach or power.<p>Why is that bad? The seems to be MUCH better for you.</text></comment> |
31,246,220 | 31,246,079 | 1 | 3 | 31,245,005 | train | <story><title>Using QGIS to apply a 1777 style to today's OpenStreetMap data</title><url>https://manuelclaeysbouuaert.be/projects/ferrargis.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ssl232</author><text>I dabbled in web-based mapping a couple years ago and found the tech stack to be really quite polished. Starting from a database of features from e.g. OpenStreetMap hosted in a Postgres-based PostGIS map server, and geographical boundaries via special shape files, you can write XML files representing the features you wish to see on each layer of the map (using SQL queries intended for PostGIS), and CSS-like style files representing how the features should look. You then set up a tile server (Apache or nginx or whatever) that generates tiles on demand and performs caching. Finally you use a JavaScript library to provide the &quot;slippy map&quot; that users can drag around.<p>All of these layers of the tech stack have FOSS implementations; indeed most of the most widely used ones are FOSS. And then there&#x27;s QGIS (also FOSS) to do most of this in a similar fashion, but offline.<p>As merely a dabbler having a bit of fun, it&#x27;s rather excellent I must say. It would be interesting to hear from anyone working in this field professionally as to how the FOSS tools measure up.</text></comment> | <story><title>Using QGIS to apply a 1777 style to today's OpenStreetMap data</title><url>https://manuelclaeysbouuaert.be/projects/ferrargis.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>qwertox</author><text>It&#x27;s interesting to see how segmented Antwerpen was back in 1777, what the author describes as hedges.<p>These were usually the result of inheritance, when the land of one owner got split into pieces and each child then got one piece. They got smaller and smaller.<p>I didn&#x27;t think that this was already so extreme in 1777, but comparing it to the other maps, only Antwerpen and Brugge seem to be affected.</text></comment> |
24,327,673 | 24,324,930 | 1 | 3 | 24,312,083 | train | <story><title>Physicists found a new quantum paradox that casts doubt on a pillar of reality</title><url>https://www.sciencealert.com/a-new-quantum-paradox-throws-the-foundations-of-observed-reality-into-question</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Zenbit_UX</author><text>Whenever I hear about weird shit from the realm of quantum physics (this theory, double-slit, etc..) I can&#x27;t help but think:<p>Why would I hardcode values for imperceptible objects, that would take an enormous about of ram and cpu time to constantly update values in the off chance it&#x27;s needed.<p>Much more efficient to optimize for what the _player_ can see at their perspective. Oh and I should probably code in some error handling in the fluke event one of these particles is detected, I&#x27;ll just calculate their position retroactively, the user will never be able to tell and we can host way more players due to the reduced memory.<p>It would seem to me that god is a junior dev and no one reviewed his pull requests.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jlokier</author><text>That model of efficiency (RAM and CPU time) is based on classical computation.<p>When your underlying model of computation is full quantum computation, it&#x27;s simpler to just run everything at once. It takes no energy if you run everything without picking out a scenario (but in a kind of &quot;tree falling in a forest&quot; way), and more energy if you select out specific scenarios to look what happened (I&#x2F;O is expensive). Counter-intuitively, the computation part of quantum systems is free in ways that we consider classical computers expensive to run. It&#x27;s reversible and doesn&#x27;t consume any energy.<p>That may seem like it&#x27;s avoiding the point, after all what does it take to run the &quot;underlying model of computation&quot;.<p>But what I&#x27;m trying to say is that &quot;quantum all the way down&quot; (see also turtles) is as much a valid model as &quot;mechanical computation all the way down&quot;, which your picture relies on. Neither of them is more fundamental.<p>It may seem like quantum-all-the-way-down is a bit artificial, because we can in principle run quantum simulations on classical computers, which seem simpler. But it turns out we can&#x27;t. There is a fundamental intractability barrier for simulations above an arbitrary tiny size, which means we can only simulate interesting quantum systems using other quantum systems. It really is quantum-all-the-way-down.<p>If god came up with the quantum-all-the-way-down version, I&#x27;d say that&#x27;s pretty clever, because it&#x27;s way more efficient than anything you would implement, with your old-school classical RAM and classical CPU.</text></comment> | <story><title>Physicists found a new quantum paradox that casts doubt on a pillar of reality</title><url>https://www.sciencealert.com/a-new-quantum-paradox-throws-the-foundations-of-observed-reality-into-question</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Zenbit_UX</author><text>Whenever I hear about weird shit from the realm of quantum physics (this theory, double-slit, etc..) I can&#x27;t help but think:<p>Why would I hardcode values for imperceptible objects, that would take an enormous about of ram and cpu time to constantly update values in the off chance it&#x27;s needed.<p>Much more efficient to optimize for what the _player_ can see at their perspective. Oh and I should probably code in some error handling in the fluke event one of these particles is detected, I&#x27;ll just calculate their position retroactively, the user will never be able to tell and we can host way more players due to the reduced memory.<p>It would seem to me that god is a junior dev and no one reviewed his pull requests.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rantwasp</author><text>disagree on the junior dev part and on the god part.<p>what you’re describing is called “simulation theory” and it has been proposed and discussed at length<p>i think lazy evaluation makes sense in that context. i also think that having a few basic rules and after that applying them consistently across your simulation space make sense. if your basic space unit of reality is way smaller than the sims in it can perceive and measure they’re gonna start making stuff up</text></comment> |
37,399,051 | 37,399,283 | 1 | 2 | 37,398,921 | train | <story><title>Engineer’s guide to career growth: Advice from my time at Stripe and Facebook</title><url>https://review.firstround.com/the-engineers-guide-to-career-growth-advice-from-my-time-at-stripe-and-facebook</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mertd</author><text>The article does mention this but worth noting that riding two rocket ships back to back is not going to be a typical career experience for majority of people. So this doesn&#x27;t strike me as a typical career growth story.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Racing0461</author><text>Agreed. Make sure you get on apollo 11 and not the challenger.</text></comment> | <story><title>Engineer’s guide to career growth: Advice from my time at Stripe and Facebook</title><url>https://review.firstround.com/the-engineers-guide-to-career-growth-advice-from-my-time-at-stripe-and-facebook</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mertd</author><text>The article does mention this but worth noting that riding two rocket ships back to back is not going to be a typical career experience for majority of people. So this doesn&#x27;t strike me as a typical career growth story.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>choppaface</author><text>One rocketship bias of this article appears to be lack of &quot;focus on the customer&quot; versus &quot;strive to be the most valuable, but least critical.&quot; The latter can be good core advice anywhere (&quot;pager duty&quot; stuff at any company causes burnout for ICs and EMs) but customer traction is only really given to you on a plate at a rocketship (e.g. after Series A&#x2F;B). Most of the piece is about scaling rather than understanding the user &#x2F; customer and evolving the product ... a more balanced advice essay is going to talk more about gaining, keeping, losing, and re-gaining traction versus just scaling a sprawling org.</text></comment> |
20,128,219 | 20,128,295 | 1 | 2 | 20,121,876 | train | <story><title>Book subtitles are getting longer because of SEO</title><url>https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/book-subtitles-are-getting-ridiculously-long-what-is-going-on/2019/06/04/3150bcc8-86c3-11e9-98c1-e945ae5db8fb_story.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fastball</author><text>You want the world to be more straightforward and less creative?<p>Huh.</text></item><item><author>chrisseaton</author><text>Seems like a good thing, doesn&#x27;t it? More straightforward, plain speaking language.</text></item><item><author>aeharding</author><text>SEO is making all titles&#x2F;descriptions be less creative and use more targeted keywords.<p>For example, Skydiving dropzones. Some in Wisconsin:<p><pre><code> 1. Skyknights -&gt; Skydive Milwaukee
2. AtmosphAIR -&gt; Wisconsin Skydiving Center
3. Green Bay Skydivers -&gt; Skydive Freefall Adventure</code></pre></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dvtrn</author><text>These things don&#x27;t have to be mutually exclusive?</text></comment> | <story><title>Book subtitles are getting longer because of SEO</title><url>https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/book-subtitles-are-getting-ridiculously-long-what-is-going-on/2019/06/04/3150bcc8-86c3-11e9-98c1-e945ae5db8fb_story.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fastball</author><text>You want the world to be more straightforward and less creative?<p>Huh.</text></item><item><author>chrisseaton</author><text>Seems like a good thing, doesn&#x27;t it? More straightforward, plain speaking language.</text></item><item><author>aeharding</author><text>SEO is making all titles&#x2F;descriptions be less creative and use more targeted keywords.<p>For example, Skydiving dropzones. Some in Wisconsin:<p><pre><code> 1. Skyknights -&gt; Skydive Milwaukee
2. AtmosphAIR -&gt; Wisconsin Skydiving Center
3. Green Bay Skydivers -&gt; Skydive Freefall Adventure</code></pre></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>chrisseaton</author><text>In things like business names? Yeah.</text></comment> |
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