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9,064,201 | 9,063,700 | 1 | 2 | 9,063,216 | train | <story><title>Debian developer prompted to revisit FreeBSD after 20 years</title><url>http://changelog.complete.org/archives/9317-has-linux-lost-its-way-comments-prompt-a-debian-developer-to-revisit-freebsd-after-20-years</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>penland</author><text>That&#x27;s a good overall article - I&#x27;ve been switching back and forth between FreeBSD and Debian for several years now, and I never spend more than a couple of month without using one of them.<p>The one thing that surprised me was his take on FreeBSD&#x27;s package management system, pkg. PKG is relatively new, having been released in late summer 2012. Prior to that, FreeBSD relied on the ports collection, which was (is) a vast tree of Makefile&#x27;s allowing you to create custom builds of virtually any software imaginable.<p>While pkg is still raw on the edges, I VASTLY prefer it to Debian&#x27;s hodgepodge of package management tools that all do 90% of the other, though none of them do it cleanly and none of them have straightforward interfaces. Am I using dpkg here? What about aptitude? Or should I just roll w&#x2F; apt-get? All of these tools combine the ease of use of git with the flexibility of a Maven build. If you know how to use to descend deep into the depths of git or Maven, this isn&#x27;t an issue ( and for the author, it certainly is not ). Yet there are numerous simple tasks ( like say, searching for a package remotely when you aren&#x27;t sure the exact name ) which still require hitting up google and settling in for a Click-Your-Way-To-Adventure session.<p>PKG, in contrast, is both simplistic and flexible ( it reminds me of a industrial grade version of Brew in some sense ). It&#x27;s a tool that I find myself integrating into my workflow beyond simple installs &#x2F; updates, particularly it&#x27;s seamless integration with jails. Configuration of remote repositories is vastly simplified as well.<p>PKG is not perfect by an means - it definitely has worts that need to be taken care of. I&#x27;m also sure that PKG probably feels a tad inadequte to some hard core sys admins - pkg has the look and feel of a tool designed by a programmer looking to handle normal cases than a tool designed to provide a sys admin with an atom bomb if necessary. Yet the system is still relatively new and as the bugs continue to get ironed out it&#x27;s a reminder to me of why I love FreeBSD in a lot of ways - the abstraction point is flawless and it gets out of my way.</text></comment> | <story><title>Debian developer prompted to revisit FreeBSD after 20 years</title><url>http://changelog.complete.org/archives/9317-has-linux-lost-its-way-comments-prompt-a-debian-developer-to-revisit-freebsd-after-20-years</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Alupis</author><text>The article makes some good points, and I&#x27;m glad it didn&#x27;t just rail on one single part&#x2F;component since linux distrobutions have so much variety. ZFS is really a killer FS, and unfortunately Linux just doesn&#x27;t have a native answer just yet (although BtrFS does have some promising parts).<p>There&#x27;s a lot of people either threatening to switch or are switching to one of the BSD&#x27;s as a result of being dissatisfied with the systemd debate outcome -- apparently not realizing FreeBSD (and others) are in the early stages of working on their own systemd&#x2F;launchd-like init system. Everyone seems to realize the need for a more modern init system...</text></comment> |
18,355,497 | 18,354,706 | 1 | 2 | 18,353,425 | train | <story><title>Tim Berners-Lee says tech giants may have to be split up</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/article/us-technology-www/father-of-web-says-tech-giants-may-have-to-be-split-up-idUSKCN1N63MV</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>alexandercrohde</author><text>Suppose tech companies were no longer legally allowed to use the network effect (i.e. they had to provide open-access to their public data via API).<p>Then this would enable alternative front-ends on twitter.<p>This would then enable me to filter messages by positivity, or whichever criteria I choose (e.g. non-Russian-bots, non-shills).<p>This is turn would then change the whole ecosystem. It would remove the perverse incentives of outrage-attention machine.</text></item><item><author>asaph</author><text>&gt; “If you put a drop of love into Twitter it seems to decay but if you put in a drop of hatred you feel it actually propagates much more strongly. And you wonder: ‘Well is that because of the way that Twitter as a medium has been built?’”<p>How exactly is breaking up the tech giants going to solve this problem?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nine_k</author><text>I think that people have an (almost) unalienable power, very strong, and pretty underused.<p>It&#x27;s the power of walking away.<p>If you find an environment toxic, leave it, and ask your friends to leave it, too. Yes, you have to research alternatives first, and make compromises, at least temporarily.<p>Lately this somehow worked for Facebook. I bet they are going to see that on their bottom line.<p>So, if you dislike the outrage machine, <i>leave it</i>. Consciously ignore it. Do not retweet, do not link to tweets (instead, quote worthy tweets, they are short).<p>If enough people did that, and migrated elsewhere, that would be noted. Speak to companies in the language they understand, that is, the language of money. Their money comes from your attention spent on their property. Vote with your dollar — the dollar not spent by online advertisers for your eyeballs that are not there.</text></comment> | <story><title>Tim Berners-Lee says tech giants may have to be split up</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/article/us-technology-www/father-of-web-says-tech-giants-may-have-to-be-split-up-idUSKCN1N63MV</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>alexandercrohde</author><text>Suppose tech companies were no longer legally allowed to use the network effect (i.e. they had to provide open-access to their public data via API).<p>Then this would enable alternative front-ends on twitter.<p>This would then enable me to filter messages by positivity, or whichever criteria I choose (e.g. non-Russian-bots, non-shills).<p>This is turn would then change the whole ecosystem. It would remove the perverse incentives of outrage-attention machine.</text></item><item><author>asaph</author><text>&gt; “If you put a drop of love into Twitter it seems to decay but if you put in a drop of hatred you feel it actually propagates much more strongly. And you wonder: ‘Well is that because of the way that Twitter as a medium has been built?’”<p>How exactly is breaking up the tech giants going to solve this problem?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>RickS</author><text>There&#x27;s so much right with your take here, IMO.<p>It flies in the face of so much opposition from reality – much of it credible – like how the hell do you make money when you eschew walled gardens, engagement boosters, and adtech friendly practices? Do people even <i>want</i> to make the tradeoffs they&#x27;d have to? Is regulation too heavyhanded?<p>Will it be that for as long as these systems can be turned into money machines, old money will use them to print new money? Perhaps.<p>But the mentality of &quot;open at all costs, profits be damned&quot; feels like one we in the tech industry have gradually let slip from our ethos, and it&#x27;s so core to the old web. I miss it.</text></comment> |
6,038,394 | 6,038,465 | 1 | 2 | 6,038,315 | train | <story><title>Intel In Bed with NSA?</title><url>http://cryptome.org/2013/07/intel-bed-nsa.htm</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>comex</author><text>It is really, really hard for me to see this as anything other than utter paranoia. As one of the messages in the thread stated:<p>&gt; Right. How exactly would you backdoor an RNG so (a) it could be effectively used by the NSA when they needed it (e.g. to recover Tor keys), (b) not affect the security of massive amounts of infrastructure, and (c) be so totally undetectable that there&#x27;d be no risk of it causing a s<i></i>tstorm that makes the $0.5B FDIV bug seem like small change (not to mention the legal issues, since this one would have been inserted deliberately, so we&#x27;re probably talking bet-the-company amounts of liability there).</text></comment> | <story><title>Intel In Bed with NSA?</title><url>http://cryptome.org/2013/07/intel-bed-nsa.htm</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>__alexs</author><text>The comments about RdRand being impossible to verify because it&#x27;s on-chip seem quite reasonable. (Although Intel have tried to be quite open about how it works. <a href="https://sites.google.com/site/intelrdrand/references" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sites.google.com&#x2F;site&#x2F;intelrdrand&#x2F;references</a>)<p>I have no idea if RdRand is the <i>only</i> source of entropy for &#x2F;dev&#x2F;urandom in the kernel these days but that does seem quite silly. Especially as RdRand is documented as having two error conditions, not enough entropy, and that the hardware appears to be broken.<p>In any case, here&#x27;s the LKML thread where it was merged too <a href="http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/1173350" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;thread.gmane.org&#x2F;gmane.linux.kernel&#x2F;1173350</a></text></comment> |
38,411,510 | 38,411,595 | 1 | 2 | 38,411,415 | train | <story><title>ArchiveTeam is downloading and saving content from Blogger</title><url>https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Blogger</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>11011001</author><text>This is probably a better link than their project-tracker: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.archiveteam.org&#x2F;index.php&#x2F;Blogger" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.archiveteam.org&#x2F;index.php&#x2F;Blogger</a><p>&gt; No updates to Blogger have been documented since September 2020. Google has also moved away from Blogger for their own company blogs. For these reasons, Blogger may be at risk of shutting down.<p>&gt; Archive Team did a discovery between February and May 2015, but did not begin downloading actual content until November 2023.</text></comment> | <story><title>ArchiveTeam is downloading and saving content from Blogger</title><url>https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Blogger</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>pabs3</author><text>Here is the post about Google deleting inactive accounts soon:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reuters.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;google-delete-inactive-accounts-starting-december-2023-05-16&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reuters.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;google-delete-inactive-ac...</a></text></comment> |
10,662,620 | 10,662,748 | 1 | 2 | 10,661,997 | train | <story><title>PHP 7 Released</title><url>https://github.com/php/php-src/releases/tag/php-7.0.0</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>trm42</author><text>PHP 7 makes life a lot better for PHP devs in many ways but one awesome thing is it obsoletes bunch of out-of-date tutorials by finally removing the old Mysql extension \o&#x2F;<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;php.net&#x2F;manual&#x2F;en&#x2F;migration70.removed-exts-sapis.php" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;php.net&#x2F;manual&#x2F;en&#x2F;migration70.removed-exts-sapis.php</a><p>I actually met a young aspiring web developer who still learned DB-access with mysql_* functions. I urged him to switch to a sane framework like Laravel. Oh boy he was happy in a month and learned bunch of best practices quickly.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nnq</author><text>&gt; I urged him to switch to a sane framework like Laravel<p>...why didn&#x27;t you taught him about PDO, so he can start with something more universal, not tied to one particular framework that happens to be popular nowadays?!<p>Then he can learn whichever OR&#x2F;DM or DAL he might like need (Eloquent, Doctrine, Redbean, IdiORM&#x2F;Paris etc.), and also be able to pop the hood and debug it when needed.<p>I never get it why so many otherwise-good PHP devs have their heads full of framework-specific knowledge and have a propensity to fall in love with heavy frameworks like Laravel, or worse, with leviathans like Symphony or Zend ...instead of playing to the language&#x27;s advantages and using light-weight tools and libraries that would allow them to move faster.</text></comment> | <story><title>PHP 7 Released</title><url>https://github.com/php/php-src/releases/tag/php-7.0.0</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>trm42</author><text>PHP 7 makes life a lot better for PHP devs in many ways but one awesome thing is it obsoletes bunch of out-of-date tutorials by finally removing the old Mysql extension \o&#x2F;<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;php.net&#x2F;manual&#x2F;en&#x2F;migration70.removed-exts-sapis.php" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;php.net&#x2F;manual&#x2F;en&#x2F;migration70.removed-exts-sapis.php</a><p>I actually met a young aspiring web developer who still learned DB-access with mysql_* functions. I urged him to switch to a sane framework like Laravel. Oh boy he was happy in a month and learned bunch of best practices quickly.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>superskierpat</author><text>My final project in my php class last year was way better than it would of been due to one simple website : <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.phptherightway.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.phptherightway.com&#x2F;</a><p>Edit: Posted this before seeing the other comments suggesting it already, dope</text></comment> |
22,727,744 | 22,726,895 | 1 | 3 | 22,724,447 | train | <story><title>Heineken WOBO: A Beer Bottle That Doubles as a Brick</title><url>https://inhabitat.com/heineken-wobo-the-brick-that-holds-beer/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>teruakohatu</author><text>Anyone know why it isn&#x27;t more popular outside of Europe? seems like a perfect use for recycled glass that is not suitable for glass bottles.</text></item><item><author>markvdb</author><text>A large fraction of the one time use glass at least in Europe is recycled into foam glass [0]. A wonderfully versatile and ecological insulation material with slowly but surely increasing popularity.<p>There&#x27;s factories in at least Belgium, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Lithuania, Switzerland, Russia, Slovakia and Ukraine.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Foam_glass" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Foam_glass</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>feb</author><text>One of the biggest companies manufacturing foam glass is actually based in the USA and has many production sites in Europe.<p>The insulation properties depend on the chemical composition of the glass. With recycled glass, the chemical composition is not fully under control and therefore they limit the amount of recycled glass.<p>Production of cellular glass (also called foam glass) requires, even with recycled glass, a lot of energy. That makes it one of the most expensive inorganic insulation materials.</text></comment> | <story><title>Heineken WOBO: A Beer Bottle That Doubles as a Brick</title><url>https://inhabitat.com/heineken-wobo-the-brick-that-holds-beer/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>teruakohatu</author><text>Anyone know why it isn&#x27;t more popular outside of Europe? seems like a perfect use for recycled glass that is not suitable for glass bottles.</text></item><item><author>markvdb</author><text>A large fraction of the one time use glass at least in Europe is recycled into foam glass [0]. A wonderfully versatile and ecological insulation material with slowly but surely increasing popularity.<p>There&#x27;s factories in at least Belgium, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Lithuania, Switzerland, Russia, Slovakia and Ukraine.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Foam_glass" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Foam_glass</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dmos62</author><text>Good question. I&#x27;d hazard guesses that there was a political dimension (the wikipedia article cites Soviet scientists developing the tech in 1930s) and that insulation wasn&#x27;t taken seriously enough (heaters are cheaper to install and energy was cheap).</text></comment> |
39,724,997 | 39,725,042 | 1 | 2 | 39,724,161 | train | <story><title>Telefunken Datenspeicher</title><url>https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/29676/what-is-this-large-device-labelled-telefunken-datenspeicher-and-how-does-it-wo</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>FirmwareBurner</author><text>It&#x27;s still mostly the same in Germany today.<p>My cousin in Germany is doing a 1-year long IT schooling course (going from how a PC works, how Win and Linux work, Shell&#x2F;PS scripting to python and AWS) and the course material has all the technical terms in German: &quot;Rechner&quot;, &quot;Speicher&quot;, Ordner&quot;, &quot;Betriebssystem&quot;, instead of Computer, Memory, Folder, Operating system.<p>Almost nothing from the course material is in English, which was shocking to me as if you&#x27;re searching online for solutions to issues or learning new concepts, you can&#x27;t expect in your career to only Google things in German and find answers in German, but you&#x27;ll have to know to use everything in English to broader your search and knowledge base, so forcing all the candidates and materials in German feels like an unnecessary crippling.<p>So despite the new clothing, Germany is still a conservative digital dinosaur underneath, pretending to be cool and modern. <i>&quot;How do you do fellow Kinder?&quot;</i>[1]<p>My 0.02 Eurocents<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;fiOMbqPHFwo?si=CIbdpdTXnkQ6MyJs&amp;t=28" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;fiOMbqPHFwo?si=CIbdpdTXnkQ6MyJs&amp;t=28</a></text></item><item><author>LAC-Tech</author><text>It&#x27;s so cool to see machines from an age when Germans still referred to technical things using their native language.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Tainnor</author><text>&quot;Rechner&quot; and &quot;Computer&quot; are interchangeable and probably used equally frequently, as are &quot;Hauptspeicher&quot; and &quot;RAM&quot;, etc. Some words do seem to be mainly referred to by their German names (&quot;Betriebssystem&quot;, &quot;Datenbank&quot;), while for many others, I&#x27;m not aware of any German equivalent in common usage (&quot;event sourcing&quot;, &quot;operations&quot;, &quot;pull&#x2F;merge request&quot;, &quot;branch&quot;, ...).<p>Sometimes, in university courses I&#x27;ve seen German names for things I had only ever heard the English term of. I suspect almost nobody in the industry actually uses these German terms.<p>So, not everything is in German. I guess it&#x27;s probably mostly the stuff that&#x27;s been around a long time that has acquired a German name, but newer tech is typically referred to by English terminology.<p>I also agree with my sibling commentor that dismissing a culture because they don&#x27;t exclusively use English terminology is silly. The German language certainly didn&#x27;t stop Niklaus Wirth (who was from Switzerland and spoke German) from winning the Turing Award.</text></comment> | <story><title>Telefunken Datenspeicher</title><url>https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/29676/what-is-this-large-device-labelled-telefunken-datenspeicher-and-how-does-it-wo</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>FirmwareBurner</author><text>It&#x27;s still mostly the same in Germany today.<p>My cousin in Germany is doing a 1-year long IT schooling course (going from how a PC works, how Win and Linux work, Shell&#x2F;PS scripting to python and AWS) and the course material has all the technical terms in German: &quot;Rechner&quot;, &quot;Speicher&quot;, Ordner&quot;, &quot;Betriebssystem&quot;, instead of Computer, Memory, Folder, Operating system.<p>Almost nothing from the course material is in English, which was shocking to me as if you&#x27;re searching online for solutions to issues or learning new concepts, you can&#x27;t expect in your career to only Google things in German and find answers in German, but you&#x27;ll have to know to use everything in English to broader your search and knowledge base, so forcing all the candidates and materials in German feels like an unnecessary crippling.<p>So despite the new clothing, Germany is still a conservative digital dinosaur underneath, pretending to be cool and modern. <i>&quot;How do you do fellow Kinder?&quot;</i>[1]<p>My 0.02 Eurocents<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;fiOMbqPHFwo?si=CIbdpdTXnkQ6MyJs&amp;t=28" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;fiOMbqPHFwo?si=CIbdpdTXnkQ6MyJs&amp;t=28</a></text></item><item><author>LAC-Tech</author><text>It&#x27;s so cool to see machines from an age when Germans still referred to technical things using their native language.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Kwpolska</author><text>I have a degree in CS, from a Polish university, and virtually all the course material was in Polish. That&#x27;s a legal requirement, since I signed up for a degree taught in Polish, and I can&#x27;t be expected to speak English, even though I would be useless in real life if I didn&#x27;t. An English version would be available, but it would probably be painful, considering how bad some of the teachers are at short phrases, let alone a semester&#x27;s worth of lectures.<p>Similarly, all my direct coworkers speak Polish, and that&#x27;s the language we use to talk about technical matters. We do use English words randomly, and our code (comments and variables) and docs are in English, but nobody is complaining about people using their native language.</text></comment> |
3,461,320 | 3,460,873 | 1 | 2 | 3,460,703 | train | <story><title>What the Bagel Man Saw - An Accidental Glimpse at Human Nature</title><url>http://www.stephenjdubner.com/journalism/bagelman.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ajays</author><text>"Paul F. has noted a strong correlation between high payment rates and an office where people seem to like their boss and their work."<p>I wonder if this could be a way for companies to figure out (surreptitiously) how managers are doing: provide such a bagel service to each department, and see where the theft rate is the highest. Of course, it has to be done completely incognito, otherwise the managers would make sure that the cash box is stuff full of cash....</text></comment> | <story><title>What the Bagel Man Saw - An Accidental Glimpse at Human Nature</title><url>http://www.stephenjdubner.com/journalism/bagelman.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>kghose</author><text>This was a very interesting article. I always find experiments involving honor systems very fascinating. The bus system in Germany and some parts of the Boston T (the trolleys when they are overground) are basically honor systems. In Bonn, Germany people are very particular about paying the fare. In Boston, not so much.</text></comment> |
18,613,646 | 18,613,361 | 1 | 2 | 18,612,590 | train | <story><title>Pipenv: promises a lot, delivers very little</title><url>https://chriswarrick.com/blog/2018/07/17/pipenv-promises-a-lot-delivers-very-little/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>greysteil</author><text>Sometimes, improvements don&#x27;t happen in a straight line.<p>There&#x27;s been a lot of work on Pipenv over the the last 6 months, predominantly by Dan Ryan and Tzu-Ping Chung, and it&#x27;s getting stronger and stronger with each release.<p>If you&#x27;ve gone back to using pip I&#x27;d encourage you to give Pipenv another try. Introducing a lockfile is a big step forward for Python dependency management, and the team working on Pipenv are committed and doing a great job.</text></item><item><author>legostormtroopr</author><text>Pipenv is a really interesting development for Python, and I&#x27;m glad that someone was working to improve dependency locking for Python.<p>However, Kenneth abused his position with PyPA (and quickly bumped a what is a beta product to version 18) to imply Pipenv was more stable, more supported and more official than it really was.<p>And worse still, for anyone saying &quot;but ts open source, you get what you pay for&quot;, Kenneth as former Python Overlord at Heroku, encouraged Heroku to place Pipenv above Pip as the default Python package manager in the Python buildpack. This decision impacted paying customers and the Python buildpack used a broken version of Pipenv for a long time. So long, most people I know just went back to Pip.<p>Then, lastly, when people complained he had a tizzy at reddit and twitter and got PyPA to help backtrack and say &quot;no we didn&#x27;t support it, nope, its just a thing that happened&quot;, all while the main Pipenv Github repository was held under the PyPA GitHub Org.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>legostormtroopr</author><text>&gt; Sometimes, improvements don&#x27;t happen in a straight line.<p>I don&#x27;t deny that, what I am (and the article is) saying is that we were sold on Pipenv being &quot;the officially recommended Python packaging tool from Python.org&quot;.<p>And PyPA didn&#x27;t refute it, and Heroku didn&#x27;t refute it, so the community bought it.<p>Yes, introducing a Lockfile is huge, and it was massively needed, and thats why when we were told &quot;heres the official way to do it&quot;, we got excited. Then we got daily breaking updates, rude issue close messages, and a giant backtrack of &quot;its free and still under development, why do you expect so much from us?&quot;</text></comment> | <story><title>Pipenv: promises a lot, delivers very little</title><url>https://chriswarrick.com/blog/2018/07/17/pipenv-promises-a-lot-delivers-very-little/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>greysteil</author><text>Sometimes, improvements don&#x27;t happen in a straight line.<p>There&#x27;s been a lot of work on Pipenv over the the last 6 months, predominantly by Dan Ryan and Tzu-Ping Chung, and it&#x27;s getting stronger and stronger with each release.<p>If you&#x27;ve gone back to using pip I&#x27;d encourage you to give Pipenv another try. Introducing a lockfile is a big step forward for Python dependency management, and the team working on Pipenv are committed and doing a great job.</text></item><item><author>legostormtroopr</author><text>Pipenv is a really interesting development for Python, and I&#x27;m glad that someone was working to improve dependency locking for Python.<p>However, Kenneth abused his position with PyPA (and quickly bumped a what is a beta product to version 18) to imply Pipenv was more stable, more supported and more official than it really was.<p>And worse still, for anyone saying &quot;but ts open source, you get what you pay for&quot;, Kenneth as former Python Overlord at Heroku, encouraged Heroku to place Pipenv above Pip as the default Python package manager in the Python buildpack. This decision impacted paying customers and the Python buildpack used a broken version of Pipenv for a long time. So long, most people I know just went back to Pip.<p>Then, lastly, when people complained he had a tizzy at reddit and twitter and got PyPA to help backtrack and say &quot;no we didn&#x27;t support it, nope, its just a thing that happened&quot;, all while the main Pipenv Github repository was held under the PyPA GitHub Org.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rendaw</author><text>Pipenv tries to upgrade all the versions of everything in your lockfile whenever you add a new package (not just dependencies of the package), and there&#x27;s no way to disable this behavior. Right now. That&#x27;s the tip of the iceberg.</text></comment> |
16,821,825 | 16,821,816 | 1 | 2 | 16,821,334 | train | <story><title>Mark Zuckerberg Refuses to Admit How Facebook Works</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/gadfly/articles/2018-04-12/mark-zuckerberg-refuses-to-admit-how-facebook-works</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mfoy_</author><text>I think the biggest thing is the HUGE disconnect with what people <i>think</i> Facebook is doing, and what Facebook is <i>actually</i> doing.<p>I think the whole point of this is to raise awareness about of the scope of Facebook&#x27;s data collection-- It&#x27;s unfathomably enormous.<p>If more average people had a better understanding of what Facebook was tracking, they&#x27;d be outraged. Zuckerberg&#x27;s goal in this was to keep the wool pulled over their eyes. That&#x27;s why he kept conflating post-visibility settings with privacy &#x2F; tracking settings.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>inlined</author><text>And what&#x27;s worse is that privacy controls explicitly don&#x27;t control ad targeting. Years ago I had a long term relationship end. We hid our relationship status and only ended the status a year later. Immediately after changing a status marked &quot;only me&quot; in privacy settings I got bombarded with dating ads.
I complained that this was a huge privacy violation and they said &quot;we didn&#x27;t share your relationship status with them. We matched you to them because of the relationship status&quot;</text></comment> | <story><title>Mark Zuckerberg Refuses to Admit How Facebook Works</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/gadfly/articles/2018-04-12/mark-zuckerberg-refuses-to-admit-how-facebook-works</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mfoy_</author><text>I think the biggest thing is the HUGE disconnect with what people <i>think</i> Facebook is doing, and what Facebook is <i>actually</i> doing.<p>I think the whole point of this is to raise awareness about of the scope of Facebook&#x27;s data collection-- It&#x27;s unfathomably enormous.<p>If more average people had a better understanding of what Facebook was tracking, they&#x27;d be outraged. Zuckerberg&#x27;s goal in this was to keep the wool pulled over their eyes. That&#x27;s why he kept conflating post-visibility settings with privacy &#x2F; tracking settings.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fwdpropaganda</author><text>&gt; That&#x27;s why he kept conflating post-visibility settings with privacy &#x2F; tracking settings.<p>Interesting. That&#x27;s pretty clever, which gives me confidence that&#x27;s exactly what he was doing.</text></comment> |
19,730,857 | 19,729,617 | 1 | 2 | 19,728,132 | train | <story><title>I Sell Onions on the Internet</title><url>https://www.deepsouthventures.com/i-sell-onions-on-the-internet/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Panino</author><text>&gt; I backordered the domain as a spectator, but for kicks &amp; giggles, I dropped in a bid around $2,200 ’cause I was confident I’d be outbid.<p>It&#x27;s funny and beautiful how a moment of whimsy ends up being a fulcrum point in his life.<p>It seems there&#x27;s a lot of interest in gardening &#x2F; food production among tech people. For me, one of the reasons I love gardening is because in many ways it&#x27;s totally different from working inside with machines, but there are important and unexpected overlaps. For example if you have a solid understanding of the OSI model which informs your method of system design, you can easily move into gardening where knowledge of the layers of a forest plays a similar role. Having this experience in tech makes it easy to zero in on similar structural principles in gardening, learn about them, and <i>apply</i> that knowledge whereas many others clearly don&#x27;t.<p>Just like a person who doesn&#x27;t understand the value of a proper foundation in tech (hardware, lower protocols like DNS, etc.), a similar gardener won&#x27;t first seek to build strong healthy soil, and they will constantly fight against nature rather than work with it, doing more work while getting fewer results.<p>As an aside, regarding onions: last year I cut off some green onion bottoms from the store and put them in the ground (including the little roots). They grew back and gave several more green onion harvests before winter set in, and now they&#x27;re back on their own! Permanent green onion. You can do this with a number of plants, btw. Try it!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jedberg</author><text>&gt; It&#x27;s funny and beautiful how a moment of whimsy ends up being a fulcrum point in his life.<p>My life pivoted on a similar moment of whimsy. When I saw the post about the first startup school way back in the day, I just randomly decided &quot;you know what, it&#x27;s on the other side of the country but I&#x27;ll just sign up and figure it out&quot;. Ended up flying to Boston on a super cheap flight, crashing on my friends couch who was in grad school at MIT, and meeting Steve and Alexis (of reddit), and that&#x27;s how I ended up working for reddit 18 months later.</text></comment> | <story><title>I Sell Onions on the Internet</title><url>https://www.deepsouthventures.com/i-sell-onions-on-the-internet/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Panino</author><text>&gt; I backordered the domain as a spectator, but for kicks &amp; giggles, I dropped in a bid around $2,200 ’cause I was confident I’d be outbid.<p>It&#x27;s funny and beautiful how a moment of whimsy ends up being a fulcrum point in his life.<p>It seems there&#x27;s a lot of interest in gardening &#x2F; food production among tech people. For me, one of the reasons I love gardening is because in many ways it&#x27;s totally different from working inside with machines, but there are important and unexpected overlaps. For example if you have a solid understanding of the OSI model which informs your method of system design, you can easily move into gardening where knowledge of the layers of a forest plays a similar role. Having this experience in tech makes it easy to zero in on similar structural principles in gardening, learn about them, and <i>apply</i> that knowledge whereas many others clearly don&#x27;t.<p>Just like a person who doesn&#x27;t understand the value of a proper foundation in tech (hardware, lower protocols like DNS, etc.), a similar gardener won&#x27;t first seek to build strong healthy soil, and they will constantly fight against nature rather than work with it, doing more work while getting fewer results.<p>As an aside, regarding onions: last year I cut off some green onion bottoms from the store and put them in the ground (including the little roots). They grew back and gave several more green onion harvests before winter set in, and now they&#x27;re back on their own! Permanent green onion. You can do this with a number of plants, btw. Try it!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tvanantwerp</author><text>Moments of whimsy are some of the most important. It was a moment of whimsy that led to me studying abroad in college, and another moment of whimsy that led me to meet my wife while I was there. Couldn&#x27;t have been more than 5 total minutes of thoughts no more complicated than &quot;yeah, I guess I&#x27;ll give it a go&quot; that shaped my entire life.<p>And yet, I can spend another 5 minutes in the grocery store agonizing over which of two near-identical bags of chips to buy. Funny how that goes.</text></comment> |
20,229,695 | 20,229,742 | 1 | 2 | 20,229,432 | train | <story><title>Apple explores moving 15-30% of production capacity from China</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-china-restructuring/apple-explores-moving-15-30-of-production-capacity-from-china-nikkei-idUSKCN1TK0XN</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>semicolon_storm</author><text>The absolute dependence on China is something I&#x27;m surprised more companies haven&#x27;t tried to combat. There&#x27;s so many efforts to try and diversify to reduce risk, yet almost every hardware company remains at the whims of the Chinese government due to their dependency on Chinese manufacturers.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>culturestate</author><text>The idea that the Chinese government could present a material <i>international</i> threat to your business is really a relatively new one[1]. Immediately after PNTR in 2000 and before the installation of the current regime, it was a a more-or-less stable environment.<p>Today&#x27;s uncertainty really only started to creep in around 2014[2], and in those 14 years the global supply chain concentrated so heavily in and around China that you need to overcome a lot of inertia to move elsewhere. Most attempts to do so until now have been either for low-value mfg - t-shirts or bicycles - or focused on relatively less complicated finishing and assembly stages.<p>1. What I mean here is that in earlier days, you were more likely to be concerned about access to the PRC market and making sure you had strong internal IP protections in place with your contract partners.<p>2. In addition to the politics, this is also around the time it became clear that the Chinese economy in general needed to change, because they were starting to lose out on low-margin products to lower-wage countries.</text></comment> | <story><title>Apple explores moving 15-30% of production capacity from China</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-china-restructuring/apple-explores-moving-15-30-of-production-capacity-from-china-nikkei-idUSKCN1TK0XN</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>semicolon_storm</author><text>The absolute dependence on China is something I&#x27;m surprised more companies haven&#x27;t tried to combat. There&#x27;s so many efforts to try and diversify to reduce risk, yet almost every hardware company remains at the whims of the Chinese government due to their dependency on Chinese manufacturers.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>reaperducer</author><text>I think China underestimated the readiness of Western companies to move out. The notion has been that these big companies are locked into these big Chinese factories and can&#x27;t leave.<p>But the reality is that these factories, often as the insistence of the Chinese government, are merely contract manufacturers. If another factory can be located somewhere else at a competitive price, moving production isn&#x27;t as big a deal as if the company actually owned the factory.</text></comment> |
24,375,255 | 24,374,741 | 1 | 2 | 24,372,584 | train | <story><title>Reddit app got 50M downloads by making mobile web experience miserable</title><url>https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/09/02/reddit-gets-its-app-to-50-million-play-store-downloads-mostly-by-making-the-mobile-web-experience-miserable/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ragnese</author><text>I genuinely wonder if the people in charge of Reddit ever come around to places like this to read these sentiments. Hell, they actually only need to read actual Reddit posts to understand that many people are utterly disgusted by their tactics to try and force you onto their mobile app, they&#x27;re upset at how slow the (default) site is, etc.<p>Maybe it doesn&#x27;t matter. Maybe people will keep using it forever. But I doubt it. They&#x27;ve turned Reddit from something that had potential to exist for a long time into something closer to TikTok (which, even without the current drama, was never going to be more than a fad IMO). There are more efficient ways to get low-effort shitposts and memes than Reddit. Those who want that will move on, and the people who were interested in more than that are leaving now.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>screye</author><text>I have come to the conclusion that reddit is 2 apps&#x2F;websites.<p>The first is a tiktok-esque waste of time, instant gratification meme machine. Everyone on this app uses the reddit native app and doesn&#x27;t care about dark patterns. They would never know that reddit&#x27;s app is shit, because they literally don&#x27;t care enough.<p>The 2nd is a Hackernews-esque collection of hobbyist sub-forums. These people are invested in their hobbies and sub-reddits. They use reddit to interact and discuss, but also a source of niche-news for their hobby. Every one here has a 3rd party reddit app or uses RES. (if you don&#x27;t, please do). Unlike twitter, reddit lets 3rd parties offer feature complete wrappers for reddit. This group has ad-block, but will occasionally give someone gold. This group hates reddit, but also has no where to go.<p>If a person tries to make reddit both, then it is an annoying experience. I use reddit entirely as the latter. The front-page and r&#x2F;all are garbage to me. Every super popular (barring sports) subreddit is trash. But, my niche subreddits are literally the best places on the internet to gain niche information.<p>Examples where the subreddit is the best source of open discussion on the internet for that niche: dota2, manga, soccer, metal, prog, civilized discourse, history, male fashion (kinda), calisthenics, small cities, fantasy fiction, niche YT channels, super authentic cooking....and that&#x27;s just for me.<p>PSA : Use a 3rd party reddit app (SYNC is my preferred. Pay up the 2$ dollars. It is worth it). Use RES, and enforce filters strongly. Use RedditProTools to detect trolls, bias and top contributors. Use Imagus (hoverzoom has malware) for pop-image&#x2F;video viewer. These will greatly enhance your reddit experience.</text></comment> | <story><title>Reddit app got 50M downloads by making mobile web experience miserable</title><url>https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/09/02/reddit-gets-its-app-to-50-million-play-store-downloads-mostly-by-making-the-mobile-web-experience-miserable/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ragnese</author><text>I genuinely wonder if the people in charge of Reddit ever come around to places like this to read these sentiments. Hell, they actually only need to read actual Reddit posts to understand that many people are utterly disgusted by their tactics to try and force you onto their mobile app, they&#x27;re upset at how slow the (default) site is, etc.<p>Maybe it doesn&#x27;t matter. Maybe people will keep using it forever. But I doubt it. They&#x27;ve turned Reddit from something that had potential to exist for a long time into something closer to TikTok (which, even without the current drama, was never going to be more than a fad IMO). There are more efficient ways to get low-effort shitposts and memes than Reddit. Those who want that will move on, and the people who were interested in more than that are leaving now.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hoorayimhelping</author><text>My time at Etsy (2012-2015) taught me that people will rationalize <i>anything</i> to avoid dealing with the fact that they made a fundamentally bad decision.<p>A big reason Etsy has lost a lot of trust with consumers is their inconsistently applied policies and their allowance of cheap knock off crap. When I was there a few years ago, there were all sorts of forum posts, reddit posts and tweets about the problem all the time. The leadership (and more importantly) the people in the company, absolutely refused to believe it was a problem. We came up with any excuse and rationalization we could for not addressing it. The most common one was, &quot;they (the people complaining) don&#x27;t have access to our data, they don&#x27;t know what we know, therefore their points are irrelevant.&quot; Another was, &quot;they&#x27;re just mad, let them vent, it&#x27;s no big deal.&quot; Pure denial, the simplest reaction to bad news.<p>By continuously shoving their heads in the sand and not addressing the perception (whether it was real or not) the company allowed the perception to become reality. I&#x27;d be pretty surprised if reddit leadership doesn&#x27;t do the same thing when they see messages on HN talking about how shit reddit is. They&#x27;ll rationalize how we&#x27;re a bunch of pedantic, angry nerds who don&#x27;t represent the average user. They&#x27;ll ignore the growing negative trends in favor of looking at the positive ones. They&#x27;ll do anything they can to not change the strategy they&#x27;ve committed to. It smacks of a company that doesn&#x27;t plan, doesn&#x27;t think about the consequences of their decisions, and goes with the first idea that pops into their head.</text></comment> |
26,946,432 | 26,945,434 | 1 | 2 | 26,942,110 | train | <story><title>Phoebus Cartel</title><url>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>klondike_</author><text>The planned obsolescence of incandescent light bulbs is largely a myth. While there are plenty of real examples of planned obsolescence, with incandescent light bulbs there are engineering tradeoffs between longevity and efficiency. Basically, the longer lasting a bulb is, the dimmer and less efficient it is. If you&#x27;ve ever seen any of the supposed 100 year old bulbs, you&#x27;ll notice that they&#x27;re extremely dim. Before, during, and after the Phoebus cartel incandescent light bulbs were (and still are!) standardized to 1000 hours. Why? Because that happens to be a good trade off between longevity and efficiency. It just doesn&#x27;t make sense to waste an extra $5 on electricity to make a $1 light bulb last longer.<p>You have always been able to buy long life incandescent light bulbs, and still can to this day. They&#x27;re called rough service bulbs, made for ovens and closets and areas used infrequently. People just never used them for general purpose lighting because they&#x27;re dim and power hungry.<p>If you read the report by the British monopolies commission quoted in this article, you&#x27;ll notice that they came to the same conclusion [1]. Pop science articles and Reddit love to bring out the Phoebus cartel over and over as an example of planned obsolescence, but always completely ignore the factors that go into making a good incandescent light bulb.<p>[1]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;assets.publishing.service.gov.uk&#x2F;government&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;system&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;attachment_data&#x2F;file&#x2F;235313&#x2F;0287.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;assets.publishing.service.gov.uk&#x2F;government&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Phoebus Cartel</title><url>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>syncsynchalt</author><text>In a bit of synchronicity, Dubai has sponsored development of more efficient and longer lived (via underdriving) LED lamps, and exclusivity enforcement means that you are prevented from being able to buy these longer-lived lamps: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hackaday.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;01&#x2F;17&#x2F;leds-from-dubai-the-royal-lights-you-cant-buy&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hackaday.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;01&#x2F;17&#x2F;leds-from-dubai-the-royal-li...</a></text></comment> |
31,735,267 | 31,734,837 | 1 | 3 | 31,734,110 | train | <story><title>Why I Don't Like Golang (2016)</title><url>https://www.teamten.com/lawrence/writings/why-i-dont-like-go.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>voidfunc</author><text>When developers who usually make 6 figures of money complain about $90&#x2F;yr IDE price I just cannot help laugh. Actually it&#x27;s even better... the price elevators down from $90 -&gt; year2 90 - 20% -&gt; year3 90 - 40%.<p>Over three years that&#x27;s like $150-$200 total and it will save you so many headaches. But that&#x27;s a steep price? Are you kidding? Why do developers hate tools that cost money when they save them time and allow them to do more?</text></item><item><author>implying</author><text>They&#x27;ve fixed the import &#x2F; modules situation to a point where it&#x27;s usable and much improved, and generics have been added.<p>However, the issue this brings up about structs &#x2F; types not explicitly declaring which interfaces they implement is a real and unaddressed problem, especially in large codebases. The only tool that I&#x27;m aware of that finds implementations is GoLand, at steep JetBrains prices.<p>Figuring out what type an API is asking for should not require reading every line of code in the package, and slows down every developer of large Go projects</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kstenerud</author><text>Sorry, no. I have JetBrains and have since stopped using it for go development. It&#x27;s too slow, too buggy, and lacks the ecosystem that VS code has. I still use it for Java because the rest are even worse<p>A language that depends too much on IDE integration for usability is a real problem, because now you have tool fragmentation as everyone goes different routes with varying levels of success to fix the deficiencies in your language. In the end you end up rolling your own tools as I have done, which is the absolute WORST of all worlds.<p>Go was supposed to be <i>simple</i>, but all it succeeded in doing is shifting the complexity elsewhere and calling mission accomplished. When you&#x27;re designing a language, it&#x27;s VERY important to understand the difference between the emergent complexity of the domain, and the inherent complexity of your design. The latter can be fixed, the former can only be managed - in ways that are already well researched (or just swept under the rug, as go has done).<p>Too much magic and too much &quot;clever&quot; re-purposing of existing paradigms (file names, capitalization, implicit contracts, etc) makes for an infuriatingly bad design.</text></comment> | <story><title>Why I Don't Like Golang (2016)</title><url>https://www.teamten.com/lawrence/writings/why-i-dont-like-go.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>voidfunc</author><text>When developers who usually make 6 figures of money complain about $90&#x2F;yr IDE price I just cannot help laugh. Actually it&#x27;s even better... the price elevators down from $90 -&gt; year2 90 - 20% -&gt; year3 90 - 40%.<p>Over three years that&#x27;s like $150-$200 total and it will save you so many headaches. But that&#x27;s a steep price? Are you kidding? Why do developers hate tools that cost money when they save them time and allow them to do more?</text></item><item><author>implying</author><text>They&#x27;ve fixed the import &#x2F; modules situation to a point where it&#x27;s usable and much improved, and generics have been added.<p>However, the issue this brings up about structs &#x2F; types not explicitly declaring which interfaces they implement is a real and unaddressed problem, especially in large codebases. The only tool that I&#x27;m aware of that finds implementations is GoLand, at steep JetBrains prices.<p>Figuring out what type an API is asking for should not require reading every line of code in the package, and slows down every developer of large Go projects</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>faitswulff</author><text>I would be more supportive of this message if it was a $90 LSP server that you could support by buying (a la intelephense), but software developers are very opinionated about their editors and not everyone wants to use IntelliJ products.</text></comment> |
11,188,561 | 11,188,485 | 1 | 3 | 11,187,388 | train | <story><title>Mysterious Martian “Cauliflower” May Be the Latest Hint of Alien Life</title><url>http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/mysterious-martian-cauliflower-may-be-latest-hint-alien-life-180957981?no-ist</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>static_noise</author><text>You might want to use a dot for those non-Germans over here.</text></item><item><author>nsajko</author><text>For those without intuition on Fahrenheit degrees; (-13,113)°F = (-25,45)°C.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vmarsy</author><text>I think dash would be more intuitive to represent a range here.<p>Your comment about Germans intrigued me so I googled it. If you were referring to a comma as a digit separator, there&#x27;s about 70 countries that use the comma as a decimal point: most of Europe, Africa, and South America, many more than just Germans :)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Decimal_mark#Countries_using_Arabic_numerals_with_decimal_comma" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Decimal_mark#Countries_using...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Mysterious Martian “Cauliflower” May Be the Latest Hint of Alien Life</title><url>http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/mysterious-martian-cauliflower-may-be-latest-hint-alien-life-180957981?no-ist</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>static_noise</author><text>You might want to use a dot for those non-Germans over here.</text></item><item><author>nsajko</author><text>For those without intuition on Fahrenheit degrees; (-13,113)°F = (-25,45)°C.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vectorjohn</author><text>It&#x27;s a temperature range. You see there four integers.</text></comment> |
22,786,425 | 22,784,522 | 1 | 3 | 22,783,363 | train | <story><title>We Made One Gram Of Remdesivir</title><url>https://www.acsh.org/news/2020/03/26/problem-remdesivir-making-it-14665</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kccqzy</author><text>Remdesivir is an analog of adenosine, one of the four building blocks of RNA. Just look at the main structure and you&#x27;ll agree they look similar. It turns out the mechanism of action of this drug is that it&#x27;s supposed to be confused with adenosine, so that the viral RNA replication process uses remdesivir instead of adenosine, which later breaks the RNA†.<p>Our body, or really, all biological processes can synthesize incredibly complicated molecules that can take human chemists a huge amount of effort to synthesize. It really is amazing how awesome our body is.<p>†: My description here is a dumbed down description. For a more precise description see section 2 of <i>Arguments in favour of remdesivir for treating SARS-CoV-2 infections</i>, Wen-Chien Ko et al, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sciencedirect.com&#x2F;science&#x2F;article&#x2F;pii&#x2F;S0924857920300832" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sciencedirect.com&#x2F;science&#x2F;article&#x2F;pii&#x2F;S092485792...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>koboll</author><text>This is such a great description. Compare how Wikipedia describes the same process [<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Adenosine#Research" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Adenosine#Research</a>]:<p>&gt; The adenosine analog NITD008 has been reported to directly inhibit the recombinant RNA-dependent RNA polymerase of the dengue virus by terminating its RNA chain synthesis. This interaction suppresses peak viremia and rise in cytokines and prevents lethality in infected animals, raising the possibility of a new treatment for this flavivirus.<p>Absolute gibberish to someone with limited knowledge of biology.</text></comment> | <story><title>We Made One Gram Of Remdesivir</title><url>https://www.acsh.org/news/2020/03/26/problem-remdesivir-making-it-14665</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kccqzy</author><text>Remdesivir is an analog of adenosine, one of the four building blocks of RNA. Just look at the main structure and you&#x27;ll agree they look similar. It turns out the mechanism of action of this drug is that it&#x27;s supposed to be confused with adenosine, so that the viral RNA replication process uses remdesivir instead of adenosine, which later breaks the RNA†.<p>Our body, or really, all biological processes can synthesize incredibly complicated molecules that can take human chemists a huge amount of effort to synthesize. It really is amazing how awesome our body is.<p>†: My description here is a dumbed down description. For a more precise description see section 2 of <i>Arguments in favour of remdesivir for treating SARS-CoV-2 infections</i>, Wen-Chien Ko et al, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sciencedirect.com&#x2F;science&#x2F;article&#x2F;pii&#x2F;S0924857920300832" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sciencedirect.com&#x2F;science&#x2F;article&#x2F;pii&#x2F;S092485792...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ashildr</author><text>This mode of action is fascinating, some HIV medications work in a similar way.<p>What I’m curious about is why this huge group attached to the adenosine-like group is needed. It seems to be rather complex for being a shoe to be thrown into cellular gear.
Do you have an idea or pointer into the mode of action of this group?</text></comment> |
9,227,449 | 9,227,412 | 1 | 3 | 9,226,268 | train | <story><title>Analysis of DNA uncovers a rough dating scene after the advent of agriculture</title><url>http://www.psmag.com/nature-and-technology/17-to-1-reproductive-success</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>swagasaurus-rex</author><text>I&#x27;ve suspected as much would happen during the agricultural revolution, but I did not expect such a huge disparity.<p>If the 51% male&#x2F;female ratio did not change, then 16 out of 17 males must have either been killed, enslaved, or been left frustrated. This would imply a highly patriarchal society where the local king and his cronies are the only ones fed, and to whom you would sell your daughters to. The only other explanation would be mass infanticide of males, but to see this in multiple regions is suspect.<p>&quot;It wasn&#x27;t like there was a mass death of males. They were there, so what were they doing?&quot; The article raises a very good question. In all places studied, agriculture must have favored a highly stratified society.</text></comment> | <story><title>Analysis of DNA uncovers a rough dating scene after the advent of agriculture</title><url>http://www.psmag.com/nature-and-technology/17-to-1-reproductive-success</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>seokranik</author><text>Since a lot of early civilizations seemed to be very slave heavy I wonder if that had anything to do with it. Agriculture requires more labour which leads to more slaving. Male slaves would work the fields with less of a chance for reproduction, and the landowners&#x2F;slaveowners would have their pick of the female slaves.</text></comment> |
21,200,748 | 21,198,916 | 1 | 2 | 21,195,913 | train | <story><title>Dark mode in a website with CSS</title><url>https://tombrow.com/dark-mode-website-css</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fastball</author><text>Is there anything which allows user choice (i.e. state) that doesn&#x27;t involve JS?</text></item><item><author>JDiculous</author><text>The problem is that this doesn&#x27;t let the user toggle dark mode on&#x2F;off.<p>If you want the user to be able to toggle dark mode on your site without changing their Operating System preferences, then you&#x27;ll need to implement your dark theme as a class (eg. body.theme-dark) since there&#x27;s no way to dynamically set the media query.<p><pre><code> const darkMode = window.matchMedia(&#x27;(prefers-color-scheme: dark)&#x27;)
if (darkMode) {
document.body.classList.add(&#x27;theme-dark&#x27;)
}
</code></pre>
If you have to write your dark theme CSS as a separate class, then there&#x27;s no sense in duplicating that logic inside the media query and having to override it when the user toggles it. So I ended up using that Javascript instead of putting the styles in the media query.<p>It&#x27;s a shame, I would&#x27;ve preferred a pure HTML&#x2F;CSS solution.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>RobertKerans</author><text>Checkbox + CSS custom properties for the colours&#x2F;font weights etc . Checkbox checked, adjust the variable values.<p>There&#x27;s normally a little more to it than that, but there shouldn&#x27;t ever be _much_ more, custom properties are fully dynamic</text></comment> | <story><title>Dark mode in a website with CSS</title><url>https://tombrow.com/dark-mode-website-css</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fastball</author><text>Is there anything which allows user choice (i.e. state) that doesn&#x27;t involve JS?</text></item><item><author>JDiculous</author><text>The problem is that this doesn&#x27;t let the user toggle dark mode on&#x2F;off.<p>If you want the user to be able to toggle dark mode on your site without changing their Operating System preferences, then you&#x27;ll need to implement your dark theme as a class (eg. body.theme-dark) since there&#x27;s no way to dynamically set the media query.<p><pre><code> const darkMode = window.matchMedia(&#x27;(prefers-color-scheme: dark)&#x27;)
if (darkMode) {
document.body.classList.add(&#x27;theme-dark&#x27;)
}
</code></pre>
If you have to write your dark theme CSS as a separate class, then there&#x27;s no sense in duplicating that logic inside the media query and having to override it when the user toggles it. So I ended up using that Javascript instead of putting the styles in the media query.<p>It&#x27;s a shame, I would&#x27;ve preferred a pure HTML&#x2F;CSS solution.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>agret</author><text>Yes, although doing things without JS is old school web. I think you&#x27;d be hard pressed to find any clients that don&#x27;t support JS in this era.<p>Anyway, to accomplish this you would split your styles into seperate CSS files and then have a drop-down that does an HTTP POST&#x2F;GET to a server side script that will then set a cookie on your browser with your preferred choice.<p>Each time a request comes in from the client you just check that cookie for which style they want and then change the HTML that&#x27;s sent to include a different stylesheet.</text></comment> |
16,314,399 | 16,314,104 | 1 | 3 | 16,283,016 | train | <story><title>US startups don’t want to go public anymore</title><url>https://qz.com/1192972/us-startups-are-shunning-ipos-thats-bad-news-for-americans/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tabtab</author><text>Most such rules are in place because slimebags abused the system, and in some cases taking the world economy with it. I&#x27;m all for making more efficient auditing rules, but one has to be careful not the throw the baby out with the bathwater.<p>Perhaps have compliance tiers such that smaller co&#x27;s can optionally be in a riskier and less audited stock system or level. However, we probably don&#x27;t want too much of the economy in that pool.<p>As it is, private investors may be willing to take on riskier and even dodgier companies who don&#x27;t want auditors snooping around. That&#x27;s fine: if the rich want to gamble with dodgy companies via private investment, go for it.</text></item><item><author>privateSFacct</author><text>Posting anonymously. Some quick factors not discussed.<p>1) Massive compliance overhead. Going public and maintaining public status can be a real nightmare.<p>For example staff generally &quot;get&quot; what a financial statement audit is about - are the numbers correct. And when they aren&#x27;t everyone gets that a system should be improved. And the auditor makes some notes about areas to improve based on their work, and the difficulty and errors noted in checking the actual numbers. This is the audit most private companies go through - and it actually works pretty well.<p>A public company under SOX - now you have an audit of the numbers (great) and you have a kind of meta audit of the system (internal control) that got to those numbers (ugh). The cost &#x2F; benefit of this second part is not clear to most staff. It&#x27;s huge checklists, everyone get&#x27;s checklist fatigue, and no one dares change a system after the auditors have been through etc. You literally can ask, why in the world do we do crazy procedures X&#x2F;Y&#x2F;Z? Because the auditors accepted it and we are too scared to change it. All critical thinking goes out the window. And folks start driving workarounds to the systems to get stuff done (double ugh and big actual risks).<p>Read some PCAOB reports for &quot;audit failures&quot;. These aren&#x27;t actual &quot;audit failures&quot; - no numbers were wrong. But it&#x27;ll be things like - the auditor read over the calculations, checked underlying documents, recalculated numbers sat in on some meetings, but STILL didn&#x27;t do enough to assess internal control over some calculation.<p>OK - I&#x27;ll save the rest for later, but the idea that the private markets are the new public markets rings true to me. These are folks who can weigh actual cost &#x2F; benefit of compliance cost vs losing money on an investment. Most are going to stick to something like a regular audit. Multiply by 100x in every dimension?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>privateSFacct</author><text>SOX was 2003 - and after it was implemented a bunch of folks nearly took down the world economy all while saying they complied with both SOX and the &quot;highest ethical standards&quot;.<p>The folks who wanted to take down the country faced almost NO consequence and SOX did little to prevent it. Seriously - thousands of companies jump through regulatory hoops - and the aggressive players get off with nothing.<p>There are lots of people (most people) working to do the RIGHT thing. It&#x27;s SUPER annoying to have people put in huge efforts to get a bunch of small things right, and then to have goverment totally fail to enforce truly 101 big things.<p>I would trade out some of the stuff that 4,000 companies and 100,000&#x27;s of individual have to jump through for even 100 companies getting some actual enforcement action. Everything from IRS audit to anything else you can think of, just at least make there be some consequence for the 101 style abuse of the systems.<p>Even auditing another 10,000 individuals, 200 additional executives - the number of folks putting money offshore - with full disclosure now available through leaked documents and information sharing, there should be 1000&#x27;s of cases to chase this stuff down, not just voluntary disclosure programs.</text></comment> | <story><title>US startups don’t want to go public anymore</title><url>https://qz.com/1192972/us-startups-are-shunning-ipos-thats-bad-news-for-americans/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tabtab</author><text>Most such rules are in place because slimebags abused the system, and in some cases taking the world economy with it. I&#x27;m all for making more efficient auditing rules, but one has to be careful not the throw the baby out with the bathwater.<p>Perhaps have compliance tiers such that smaller co&#x27;s can optionally be in a riskier and less audited stock system or level. However, we probably don&#x27;t want too much of the economy in that pool.<p>As it is, private investors may be willing to take on riskier and even dodgier companies who don&#x27;t want auditors snooping around. That&#x27;s fine: if the rich want to gamble with dodgy companies via private investment, go for it.</text></item><item><author>privateSFacct</author><text>Posting anonymously. Some quick factors not discussed.<p>1) Massive compliance overhead. Going public and maintaining public status can be a real nightmare.<p>For example staff generally &quot;get&quot; what a financial statement audit is about - are the numbers correct. And when they aren&#x27;t everyone gets that a system should be improved. And the auditor makes some notes about areas to improve based on their work, and the difficulty and errors noted in checking the actual numbers. This is the audit most private companies go through - and it actually works pretty well.<p>A public company under SOX - now you have an audit of the numbers (great) and you have a kind of meta audit of the system (internal control) that got to those numbers (ugh). The cost &#x2F; benefit of this second part is not clear to most staff. It&#x27;s huge checklists, everyone get&#x27;s checklist fatigue, and no one dares change a system after the auditors have been through etc. You literally can ask, why in the world do we do crazy procedures X&#x2F;Y&#x2F;Z? Because the auditors accepted it and we are too scared to change it. All critical thinking goes out the window. And folks start driving workarounds to the systems to get stuff done (double ugh and big actual risks).<p>Read some PCAOB reports for &quot;audit failures&quot;. These aren&#x27;t actual &quot;audit failures&quot; - no numbers were wrong. But it&#x27;ll be things like - the auditor read over the calculations, checked underlying documents, recalculated numbers sat in on some meetings, but STILL didn&#x27;t do enough to assess internal control over some calculation.<p>OK - I&#x27;ll save the rest for later, but the idea that the private markets are the new public markets rings true to me. These are folks who can weigh actual cost &#x2F; benefit of compliance cost vs losing money on an investment. Most are going to stick to something like a regular audit. Multiply by 100x in every dimension?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jeffbax</author><text>Rules being in place don&#x27;t mean they&#x27;re effective, having the desired outcome, or not causing other adverse effects.<p>&gt; The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.<p>Tends to ring true more often than not.</text></comment> |
18,074,974 | 18,073,228 | 1 | 3 | 18,071,909 | train | <story><title>Ask HN: What was the best decision you made in your career?</title></story><parent_chain><item><author>yutyut</author><text>I was a mid-level developer at a large software company making a very competitive salary and quit to join the U.S. Marine Corps and train to become a Naval Aviator.<p>I&#x27;m now a &#x27;mid-level&#x27; AH-1Z pilot.<p>I work longer hours and have generally a lower quality of life but there&#x27;s something to be said for the immensely unique things I&#x27;ve gotten to do and how profoundly well-rounded the entire experience has made me.<p>I will be re-entering the software industry in a few years unless another passion pulls me in some new direction.<p>The military is obviously not for everyone but picking up the phone, ducking into a side conference room across from my cube, and giving a verbal commit to my &#x27;recruiter&#x27; that day (after a years-long selection process) has been the best decision I&#x27;ve ever made.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sanbor</author><text>With respect I&#x27;d like to ask if you don&#x27;t have ethical issues. The military forces of USA has been doing pretty bad stuff in the last 50 years, so I have the feeling that you&#x27;re not saving lifes but rather ruining them. War became such a common thing and nonsense in the US that at this point thatnpeople is not sure if they&#x27;re at war or not.</text></comment> | <story><title>Ask HN: What was the best decision you made in your career?</title></story><parent_chain><item><author>yutyut</author><text>I was a mid-level developer at a large software company making a very competitive salary and quit to join the U.S. Marine Corps and train to become a Naval Aviator.<p>I&#x27;m now a &#x27;mid-level&#x27; AH-1Z pilot.<p>I work longer hours and have generally a lower quality of life but there&#x27;s something to be said for the immensely unique things I&#x27;ve gotten to do and how profoundly well-rounded the entire experience has made me.<p>I will be re-entering the software industry in a few years unless another passion pulls me in some new direction.<p>The military is obviously not for everyone but picking up the phone, ducking into a side conference room across from my cube, and giving a verbal commit to my &#x27;recruiter&#x27; that day (after a years-long selection process) has been the best decision I&#x27;ve ever made.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hef19898</author><text>May I ask how old you have been when you made the transition? And whether you had family or not? Because I learned that this significant change in lifestyle is a lot easier the younger you are and the less other commitments you have. Respect so for becomong an aviator, that definitely isn&#x27;t the easiest career path.<p>And I could imagine that a former naval aviator who is also a programmer has a bright future in the defense and aerospace industry if you want.</text></comment> |
10,756,154 | 10,756,206 | 1 | 3 | 10,753,574 | train | <story><title>Compiling to WebAssembly: It’s Happening</title><url>https://hacks.mozilla.org/2015/12/compiling-to-webassembly-its-happening/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gnuvince</author><text>And I don&#x27;t understand why. Take the two most popular mobile platforms, iOS and Android: people there routinely download and install new applications and typically never interact with Facebook, Twitter, Gmail or Instagram via their browsers. Why should the situation be different on the desktop? I feel that the efforts should not be going into making the browser into an OS that can run general-purpose software, but rather getting a packaging system that is cross-platform and easy for users to use. My own preference would be something based off of Nix so that you can avoid many problems related to library versions and whatnot, but anything where a user could be pretty much guaranteed that if he clicks &quot;install&quot;, he&#x27;ll be able to use his application in the next couple of minutes.</text></item><item><author>andrewchambers</author><text>Web browsers are turning into giant, poorly designed operating systems. My current operating system can already run binaries, this is reinventing the wheel in a massively over engineered way.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pcwalton</author><text>&gt; Why should the situation be different on the desktop? I feel that the efforts should not be going into making the browser into an OS that can run general-purpose software, but rather getting a packaging system that is cross-platform and easy for users to use.<p>Cross platform is a red herring. The iOS and Android app stores are not cross platform. Ease of use is also increasingly a red herring. The Windows and Mac app stores have been around for a long time and are quite easy to use. Yet they have not ushered in a shift away from Web apps on the desktop.<p>I think we should be looking at why Web apps have been successful on the desktop rather than pretending they have no advantages.</text></comment> | <story><title>Compiling to WebAssembly: It’s Happening</title><url>https://hacks.mozilla.org/2015/12/compiling-to-webassembly-its-happening/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gnuvince</author><text>And I don&#x27;t understand why. Take the two most popular mobile platforms, iOS and Android: people there routinely download and install new applications and typically never interact with Facebook, Twitter, Gmail or Instagram via their browsers. Why should the situation be different on the desktop? I feel that the efforts should not be going into making the browser into an OS that can run general-purpose software, but rather getting a packaging system that is cross-platform and easy for users to use. My own preference would be something based off of Nix so that you can avoid many problems related to library versions and whatnot, but anything where a user could be pretty much guaranteed that if he clicks &quot;install&quot;, he&#x27;ll be able to use his application in the next couple of minutes.</text></item><item><author>andrewchambers</author><text>Web browsers are turning into giant, poorly designed operating systems. My current operating system can already run binaries, this is reinventing the wheel in a massively over engineered way.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>TraderDuck</author><text>&gt; people there routinely download and install new applications and typically never interact with Facebook, Twitter, Gmail or Instagram via their browsers. Why should the situation be different on the desktop?<p>Er, because that would be really silly.<p>I like reading HN from time to time. I would never install an app, because I don&#x27;t use it frequently enough. I definitely would never go through the pain of installing a HN app every time I wanted to read HN. I really doubt I&#x27;m alone or even abnormal in that regard.<p>That&#x27;s the beauty of a browser: I can be reading HN in under a second when I want to, with no cluttering of my desktop just so I can read HN from time to time.</text></comment> |
9,738,307 | 9,738,267 | 1 | 2 | 9,738,019 | train | <story><title>“Fashion Is Hard. PostgreSQL Is Easy” [video]</title><url>https://tech.zalando.com/blog/watch-fashion-is-hard-postgresql-is-easy/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lmm</author><text>As someone who&#x27;s used to MySQL, I keep trying to use PostgreSQL (better standards compliance, better behaviour in the face of bad data) - and I keep going back. The psql interface is awkward (too many magic backslash commands to memorize instead of SHOW CREATE TABLE) and always feels slightly laggy somehow.</text></item><item><author>tempodox</author><text>That title is really great, and also rings true. And of all open-source SQL DBs, PostgreSQL is superbly executed and a breeze to work with. I can only recommend it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ibotty</author><text>You are the first person I read saying they like the mysql cli. Ctrl-c kills the whole shell. great, but not what I expect. Want to fix a small typo in your big query? In psql you can just edit your last command in your $EDITOR. Useful (but not perfect) autocomplete is also not in mysql.</text></comment> | <story><title>“Fashion Is Hard. PostgreSQL Is Easy” [video]</title><url>https://tech.zalando.com/blog/watch-fashion-is-hard-postgresql-is-easy/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lmm</author><text>As someone who&#x27;s used to MySQL, I keep trying to use PostgreSQL (better standards compliance, better behaviour in the face of bad data) - and I keep going back. The psql interface is awkward (too many magic backslash commands to memorize instead of SHOW CREATE TABLE) and always feels slightly laggy somehow.</text></item><item><author>tempodox</author><text>That title is really great, and also rings true. And of all open-source SQL DBs, PostgreSQL is superbly executed and a breeze to work with. I can only recommend it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>keithy</author><text>The backslash commands are way better than having to type out SHOW TABLES; or SHOW DATABASES;, or CONNECT DATABASE X. All I have to do is \dt or \c x. It&#x27;s so much better. Can&#x27;t remember them? Just do \?.</text></comment> |
24,124,160 | 24,123,658 | 1 | 2 | 24,120,311 | train | <story><title>Single Page Applications using Rust</title><url>http://www.sheshbabu.com/posts/rust-wasm-yew-single-page-application/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nickbauman</author><text>Clojure has been there as a fullstack language for a lot longer. It also fulfills the story that Elm was trying to do for much longer. And Reagent is a much needed improvement on React.<p>The borrow-checker in Rust is kind of silly tool to use in the context of a managed language (that does GC) like Javascript. I don&#x27;t get it. It&#x27;s like using a backhoe to plant a few geraniums. Am I just not getting this?</text></item><item><author>nilkn</author><text>I am hopeful that Rust can achieve what Elm did not.<p>I really fell in love with Elm early on, back when it was an experimental language for functional reactive programming that just happened to compile to JavaScript. It was an outgrowth of failed experiments in FRP from the Haskell world. I thought it got so many things right -- and it totally did. But then, just as soon as it started gaining real traction, development on Elm went silent and became siloed, staggeringly slow, locked-down, and unresponsive to users. I understand why this happened and I don&#x27;t even hold it against the Elm team, but it certainly stunted the language&#x27;s growth and adoption.<p>Rust has a much more expressive type system than Elm. The Rust world is much more open, responsive, and caring about user concerns. Rust isn&#x27;t afraid to offer unsafe escape hatches even if they&#x27;re not pretty or elegant. With Rust you have the added advantage of being able to use the language for the entire stack, both front- and back-end. That&#x27;s especially compelling because Rust is on its way to being one of the strongest languages for back-end development due to its combination of type safety, expressiveness, and performance.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>steveklabnik</author><text>This is a complicated question, and ends up different for each individual. For me, I don&#x27;t see the borrow checker as being more silly than GC, just an alternative, and one that speeds up my development process, not slows it down. I am also, of course, incredibly biased.<p>Rust also has many, many features that are not the borrow checker. Some people prefer Rust because of those features, in spite of the borrow checker.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;without.boats&#x2F;blog&#x2F;notes-on-a-smaller-rust&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;without.boats&#x2F;blog&#x2F;notes-on-a-smaller-rust&#x2F;</a> is also one of my favorite bits of writing on this topic.</text></comment> | <story><title>Single Page Applications using Rust</title><url>http://www.sheshbabu.com/posts/rust-wasm-yew-single-page-application/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nickbauman</author><text>Clojure has been there as a fullstack language for a lot longer. It also fulfills the story that Elm was trying to do for much longer. And Reagent is a much needed improvement on React.<p>The borrow-checker in Rust is kind of silly tool to use in the context of a managed language (that does GC) like Javascript. I don&#x27;t get it. It&#x27;s like using a backhoe to plant a few geraniums. Am I just not getting this?</text></item><item><author>nilkn</author><text>I am hopeful that Rust can achieve what Elm did not.<p>I really fell in love with Elm early on, back when it was an experimental language for functional reactive programming that just happened to compile to JavaScript. It was an outgrowth of failed experiments in FRP from the Haskell world. I thought it got so many things right -- and it totally did. But then, just as soon as it started gaining real traction, development on Elm went silent and became siloed, staggeringly slow, locked-down, and unresponsive to users. I understand why this happened and I don&#x27;t even hold it against the Elm team, but it certainly stunted the language&#x27;s growth and adoption.<p>Rust has a much more expressive type system than Elm. The Rust world is much more open, responsive, and caring about user concerns. Rust isn&#x27;t afraid to offer unsafe escape hatches even if they&#x27;re not pretty or elegant. With Rust you have the added advantage of being able to use the language for the entire stack, both front- and back-end. That&#x27;s especially compelling because Rust is on its way to being one of the strongest languages for back-end development due to its combination of type safety, expressiveness, and performance.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>keithasaurus</author><text>I don&#x27;t see clojure in the same realm here. Both rust and elm are geared more toward enforcing correctness through their type systems to tame complexity in large projects. In my experience, clojure, being dynamic, fits more as a comparison to vanilla JavaScript. In a langauge-to-language comparison, I think clojure is somewhat more appealing than JavaScript due to immutability by default and general functional niceties. However, the fullstack comparison is not quite apples-to-apples as clojure (backend) is JVM and clojurescript (frontend) is node. While it works for some people, clojure feels awkward to me as a fullstack language.</text></comment> |
15,129,102 | 15,127,646 | 1 | 2 | 15,126,938 | train | <story><title>The Lost Pleasure of Reading Aloud</title><url>https://www.spectator.co.uk/2017/08/the-lost-pleasure-of-reading-aloud/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mikepurvis</author><text>My wife and I had a long-distance courtship. We used to read novels to each other over Skype. It was a nice change from chatting when we&#x27;d run out of things to say, and a fun way to share favourite stories. We didn&#x27;t ever try to read anything really ambitious, but that was part of what made it enjoyable— even just kids&#x27; chapter books, stuff like Gordon Korman, Louis Sachar, Sid Fleischman.<p>We don&#x27;t read to each other as much these days (though sometimes in the car), but we definitely do read to the kids.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wyclif</author><text>I&#x27;ve begun reading Kenneth Grahame&#x27;s &quot;The Wind in the Willows&quot; to my 6 year-old boy, and it&#x27;s been a wonderful experience for both of us— I&#x27;ve enjoyed it more than I thought I would, and just as much as our boy does. I hadn&#x27;t read it since childhood, and I&#x27;d forgotten just how richly whimsical it is and how formative it was for me and how much it informs my imagination today.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Lost Pleasure of Reading Aloud</title><url>https://www.spectator.co.uk/2017/08/the-lost-pleasure-of-reading-aloud/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mikepurvis</author><text>My wife and I had a long-distance courtship. We used to read novels to each other over Skype. It was a nice change from chatting when we&#x27;d run out of things to say, and a fun way to share favourite stories. We didn&#x27;t ever try to read anything really ambitious, but that was part of what made it enjoyable— even just kids&#x27; chapter books, stuff like Gordon Korman, Louis Sachar, Sid Fleischman.<p>We don&#x27;t read to each other as much these days (though sometimes in the car), but we definitely do read to the kids.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sova</author><text>That&#x27;s very beautiful. A friend of mine was kind enough to &quot;make me an audio book&quot; by recording chapters and sending them to me via e-mail.</text></comment> |
7,195,728 | 7,194,580 | 1 | 2 | 7,193,937 | train | <story><title>NBC Story about Hacking at Sochi is 100% Fraudulent</title><url>http://blog.erratasec.com/2014/02/that-nbc-story-100-fraudulent.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>osipov</author><text>A bit offtopic but the recent &quot;Russian anti-gay law&quot; media coverage is as credible as this hacking story: <a href="http://www.blacklistednews.com/The_Olympics_of_Hate_in_a_Nation_of_Anti-Gay_Laws%3F_/32494/0/38/38/Y/M.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.blacklistednews.com&#x2F;The_Olympics_of_Hate_in_a_Nat...</a></text></item><item><author>NathanKP</author><text>The longer version of the report shows more details:<p><a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/watch/nbc-news-web-extra/honeypot-tests-likelihood-of-hackings-in-russia-137595971642" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nbcnews.com&#x2F;watch&#x2F;nbc-news-web-extra&#x2F;honeypot-tes...</a><p>On the phone they went to a website and ignored warnings in order to download and execute a malicious APK. On the PC they followed a link in a scammy looking phishing email to download and open a malicious Office document. On the Mac they visited a website that had an ad suggesting that they needed an &quot;antivirus program&quot; so they downloaded and installed it.<p>So the devices were hacked not because Sochi is especially dangerous, but because of pure stupidity. Nothing can help you if you deliberately ignore warnings, and deliberately install Trojan horse malware. The exact same thing would have happened in the US.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fiddlediddle</author><text>Hey man I actually went and read that paper you posted the other day: bullshit-alarm went off louder at every page. It&#x27;s all ad-hominems, &quot;look, America is also bad,&quot; unverifiable facts and hearsay.<p>If it is actually true (the anti-&quot;Russian anti-gay laws&quot; movement is overblown in Western media), and if you believe that it is true, then you would do better to stop posting this. You are only doing that cause a disservice by looking untrustworthy.<p>Everything about your posts and the thing you linked to smells of astroturf.<p>Been lurking on HN for half a year now, I guess this is what finally gets me to sign up.</text></comment> | <story><title>NBC Story about Hacking at Sochi is 100% Fraudulent</title><url>http://blog.erratasec.com/2014/02/that-nbc-story-100-fraudulent.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>osipov</author><text>A bit offtopic but the recent &quot;Russian anti-gay law&quot; media coverage is as credible as this hacking story: <a href="http://www.blacklistednews.com/The_Olympics_of_Hate_in_a_Nation_of_Anti-Gay_Laws%3F_/32494/0/38/38/Y/M.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.blacklistednews.com&#x2F;The_Olympics_of_Hate_in_a_Nat...</a></text></item><item><author>NathanKP</author><text>The longer version of the report shows more details:<p><a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/watch/nbc-news-web-extra/honeypot-tests-likelihood-of-hackings-in-russia-137595971642" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nbcnews.com&#x2F;watch&#x2F;nbc-news-web-extra&#x2F;honeypot-tes...</a><p>On the phone they went to a website and ignored warnings in order to download and execute a malicious APK. On the PC they followed a link in a scammy looking phishing email to download and open a malicious Office document. On the Mac they visited a website that had an ad suggesting that they needed an &quot;antivirus program&quot; so they downloaded and installed it.<p>So the devices were hacked not because Sochi is especially dangerous, but because of pure stupidity. Nothing can help you if you deliberately ignore warnings, and deliberately install Trojan horse malware. The exact same thing would have happened in the US.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>chimeracoder</author><text>That analysis isn&#x27;t entirely accurate either. For example:<p>&gt; Since 1993 gay sex was made legal in Russia, in 12 US States gay sex is a crime.<p>The law is still on the books, but ever since <i>Lawrence v. Texas</i>[0], gay sex is legal in all 50 states (and all US territories). They&#x27;re on the books simply because of inertia - there&#x27;s no impetus to pass a new law repealing a law that&#x27;s already been invalidated.<p>Others include:<p>&gt; In Russia you cannot be fired from your job for being an LGBT individual, in the United States you can<p>This depends highly on the state. Some states even protect transgender individuals.<p>Also, comparing Russia&#x27;s laws to the US&#x27;s laws is inherently flawed. For example, I could mention that Iran conducts more sex reassignment operations than any other country in the entire world, except Thailand![1]<p>But before we go ahead and praise Iran for being progressive with regard to transgender rights, let&#x27;s understand that they do this because they assume that homosexuality and being trans are the same thing, and the government pays for forced gender reassignment of gay people[2].<p>So it&#x27;s very easy to make the US look bad in comparison to other countries, especially since the US is more federated than many other countries (ie, states have more leeway), <i>and</i> the US is larger (so it&#x27;s easier to cherry-pick examples). But that doesn&#x27;t mean the US is actually worse.<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_v_texas" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Lawrence_v_texas</a><p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transsexuality_in_Iran" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Transsexuality_in_Iran</a><p>[2] There&#x27;s some subtlety to this (we could debate the exact nature of the word &quot;forced&quot;), but that&#x27;s basically how it works.</text></comment> |
7,402,428 | 7,402,547 | 1 | 3 | 7,401,833 | train | <story><title>Update on Metro</title><url>https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2014/03/14/metro/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>polshaw</author><text>If you don&#x27;t care about touch, then frankly you won&#x27;t care about this announcement. I think this is the perspective of most posters here. But as someone that wanted a better touch-optimised full-fat browser, I am very disappointed.<p>Metro is all about touch, and the problem with Firefox in that context is that its touch performance sucks-- zoom is irresponsive and stepped, and scrolling performance is sub-par too; IE on the other hand excels at both of these-- which is why I use IE-metro in touch scenarios despite having a strong preference for Firefox normally.<p>If Mozilla fixed these core issues (which I should note are &#x27;solved&#x27; on their android browser, and I believe are important anyway for their desktop mode), then I think they would have had a lot more interest in using Firefox in metro mode.. which is essentially what I have always wanted when using tablet-style, but have been waiting it out until they had something usable. I think their &#x27;marketing&#x27; has been really poor too.. I can&#x27;t say I really had any idea there <i>was</i> a metro mode to the existing Firefox.. why didn&#x27;t they try giving some kind of notification to windows8 users who had touch screens? And, personally (perhaps naively?), I just don&#x27;t see that Mozilla don&#x27;t have enough resources to handle this alongside existing projects, dumping it seems very short-sighted to me. Regardless, a big set back for those looking for a great full-fat browser experience with a touch-focused UI.</text></comment> | <story><title>Update on Metro</title><url>https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2014/03/14/metro/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>orky56</author><text>This type of news really breaks my heart. I&#x27;m part of a team developing a Windows 8 app for Metro. On the one hand, we have faced lots of challenges (8.1 isn&#x27;t compatible with 8!) and understand the issues regarding adoption. However, we still continue to believe that the Metro experience is a great concept and apps like ours have a chance to significantly turn the tide on its reputation. It&#x27;s really a free-for-all where whoever creates the strongest end-user experience can really own that category on Windows 8. That brand&#x2F;product recognition can follow to a user&#x27;s other devices whether it phone&#x2F;tablet&#x2F;laptop.</text></comment> |
33,211,477 | 33,211,546 | 1 | 2 | 33,210,775 | train | <story><title>Ask HN: Is anyone else trying to opt out of Equifax WorkNumber?</title><text>On the heels of yesterday&#x27;s bombshell:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33198708" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33198708</a><p>First thing this morning I emailed [email protected] to request a data freeze as outline at:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;employees.theworknumber.com&#x2F;employee-data-freeze&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;employees.theworknumber.com&#x2F;employee-data-freeze&#x2F;</a><p>But I&#x27;ve not yet heard anything back.<p>This is only the initial first step in a process with unknown hoops to jump through, but first I must get the form to reply and submit the freeze request.<p>If I don&#x27;t hear back by tomorrow morning I&#x27;ll mail in the form, but my god this is frustrating to have to opt out of something I never consented to in the first place.<p>Parasites.</text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Nextgrid</author><text>I’m not sure opting out is a good solution. Not only will Equifax still receive the data and will most likely still log it, but it doesn’t do anything to actually discourage this practice.<p>The only way to kill this, apart from government intervention (which has no chance of happening in the US) is to let the “free market” do it by rejecting jobs that leak your information to Equifax (and letting them know why). Ideally, do this all the way at the end of the interviewing pipeline so that they would’ve incurred significant costs as a result. You want companies to <i>lose</i> money by using the service, as to remove the business case for it.<p>The objective here is to put pressure on employers not to leak employee data to scummy companies. If they start losing qualified candidates because of it they will reconsider the practice.<p>If you are in a good financial position and can afford to do so, resigning is also an option. Again make sure they know <i>why</i> you are doing so.</text></comment> | <story><title>Ask HN: Is anyone else trying to opt out of Equifax WorkNumber?</title><text>On the heels of yesterday&#x27;s bombshell:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33198708" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33198708</a><p>First thing this morning I emailed [email protected] to request a data freeze as outline at:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;employees.theworknumber.com&#x2F;employee-data-freeze&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;employees.theworknumber.com&#x2F;employee-data-freeze&#x2F;</a><p>But I&#x27;ve not yet heard anything back.<p>This is only the initial first step in a process with unknown hoops to jump through, but first I must get the form to reply and submit the freeze request.<p>If I don&#x27;t hear back by tomorrow morning I&#x27;ll mail in the form, but my god this is frustrating to have to opt out of something I never consented to in the first place.<p>Parasites.</text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>_huayra_</author><text>Just for clarity and equanimity about this stuff:<p>- If you sign up to see your TWN data (which is just the usual KYC-type sign-up), you can generate a report and will likely see that no employer has pulled your data in the past 24 months (the most they give). Most people who work in tech don&#x27;t seem to have any inquiries registered for TWN when they check their report after hiring (from the handful of anecdata I have at hand).<p>- You don&#x27;t have to mail anything in. They have some hokey secure email thing that is basically a link to a webform upload. Is it a weird process? Yeah, but it&#x27;ll work just give it time.<p>- Opting out won&#x27;t prevent partners that &quot;subscribe&quot; to TWN from sharing your data with them; it will only prevent partners from having access to your data until you unfreeze it. My current employer has been dutifully reporting my comp every month despite it having been frozen.</text></comment> |
11,587,775 | 11,587,776 | 1 | 2 | 11,587,260 | train | <story><title>How Cheap Can Electric Vehicles Get?</title><url>http://rameznaam.com/2016/04/12/how-cheap-can-electric-vehicles-get/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dsfyu404ed</author><text>A cheap used economy car will still have the lowest cost per mile for a very long time....<p>When you factor purchase price into the equation gas vehicles win by a long ways since you need X years of EV economy cars on the market before you can get an X year old used EV. EV&#x27;s will need to fill the same market segment as today&#x27;s Chevy Aveos and Toyota Yarii (plural of Yaris?) for a decade or more before they&#x27;re competitive in price at the bottom chunk of the used car market. E.g. if a 2030 Civic EV is price competitive with a 2030 Civic gasoline then it&#x27;ll be 2045 or later before they&#x27;re both competing for the &quot;cheapest cost per mile.&quot; Theoretically, the EV wins that hands down because when purchase price is so small the operating cost dominates the cost per mile (less maintenance, cheaper gas). The problem with that is that with current tech you won&#x27;t be able to find a 15yo EV without trashed batteries, so the hypothetical $2k 2030 gas civic vs $2k 2030 EV civic comparison goes out the window because the EV needs batteries replaced or will need them replaced soon and you can&#x27;t exactly buy used batteries at the junkyard (they wear out) so you&#x27;ll need to shell out big bucks for that new replacement battery, and I&#x27;d bet that whatever a new battery costs in 2045 will still buy a heck of a lot of gas and maintenince...<p>&quot;But storage tech will improve and batteries will be able to withstand a bajillion cycles without replacement&quot; Sure, but why would the OEMs put a big battery that&#x27;s good to 1,000,000mi in a car when they can get away with one that&#x27;s good to half that, reduce cost, weight, etc<p>TD;DR, EVs will be cheaper soon the same way cars will all be driving themselves next year.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>madaxe_again</author><text>You assume a constant price for gasoline, which is a bold assumption, given that the oil markets are currently gyrating wildly, and have been for some time - we&#x27;re likely to see prices at the pump go up by orders of magnitude over a relatively short timescale, which will provide a big push towards EV adoption, and will drive people away from older vehicles which guzzle gas.<p>No, it isn&#x27;t going to be overnight, but like most transitions, it&#x27;s going to happen far more quickly than you think. In 1905 people thought that most people would still be using horses in a century, that cars were just too expensive and niche, that horses were good enough. Horses were obsolete within 15 years of private automobiles being a thing - by 1920 more freight was hauled and more passenger-miles were travelled by internal combustion than horse, in the US.<p>EVs have been around for seven years, in a &quot;real&quot; form, give or take, their adoption rate is similar to that of the original gasoline automobiles when compared to horses.<p>I give it seven more years before they&#x27;re dominant.<p>I&#x27;m also putting my money where my mouth is, and I&#x27;ve been buying up nice dirt cheap houses on busy, noisy, polluted roads. They&#x27;ll be nice, not so cheap houses on less busy, quiet, clean roads in fifteen years.</text></comment> | <story><title>How Cheap Can Electric Vehicles Get?</title><url>http://rameznaam.com/2016/04/12/how-cheap-can-electric-vehicles-get/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dsfyu404ed</author><text>A cheap used economy car will still have the lowest cost per mile for a very long time....<p>When you factor purchase price into the equation gas vehicles win by a long ways since you need X years of EV economy cars on the market before you can get an X year old used EV. EV&#x27;s will need to fill the same market segment as today&#x27;s Chevy Aveos and Toyota Yarii (plural of Yaris?) for a decade or more before they&#x27;re competitive in price at the bottom chunk of the used car market. E.g. if a 2030 Civic EV is price competitive with a 2030 Civic gasoline then it&#x27;ll be 2045 or later before they&#x27;re both competing for the &quot;cheapest cost per mile.&quot; Theoretically, the EV wins that hands down because when purchase price is so small the operating cost dominates the cost per mile (less maintenance, cheaper gas). The problem with that is that with current tech you won&#x27;t be able to find a 15yo EV without trashed batteries, so the hypothetical $2k 2030 gas civic vs $2k 2030 EV civic comparison goes out the window because the EV needs batteries replaced or will need them replaced soon and you can&#x27;t exactly buy used batteries at the junkyard (they wear out) so you&#x27;ll need to shell out big bucks for that new replacement battery, and I&#x27;d bet that whatever a new battery costs in 2045 will still buy a heck of a lot of gas and maintenince...<p>&quot;But storage tech will improve and batteries will be able to withstand a bajillion cycles without replacement&quot; Sure, but why would the OEMs put a big battery that&#x27;s good to 1,000,000mi in a car when they can get away with one that&#x27;s good to half that, reduce cost, weight, etc<p>TD;DR, EVs will be cheaper soon the same way cars will all be driving themselves next year.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pkorzeniewski</author><text>The main goal of the car industry (actually almost every industry, but car is one of the most expensive things people buy in their life, with the biggest impact on environment) is to make people buy new car every few years, even if the old one is perfectly fine - they want you to feel like you&#x27;re missing something in life by driving the &quot;old model&quot;. I&#x27;m probably biased, because I drive a 1998 Mercedes, but I could easily afford a brand new one, yet I can&#x27;t find a reason good enough to justify this - sure, it would be nice to have the interior in perfect condition, made from better materials, but everything else is just a gimmick. My car has 200kkm on the clock and is absolutely reliable, cheap to maintain, comfortable, safe and a blast to drive. If people would choose quality cars and drive them until they fall apart, there would be 10x less cars produced each year.</text></comment> |
10,667,988 | 10,667,941 | 1 | 2 | 10,662,461 | train | <story><title>Rob Pike: Simplicity Is Complicated [video]</title><url>http://www.thedotpost.com/2015/11/rob-pike-simplicity-is-complicated</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>knucklesandwich</author><text>I strongly disagree with this notion of &quot;simplicity&quot; as being attributable to scarcity of language features. Some of the languages that I felt were the easiest to use had quite a number of language features, but had simple <i>semantics</i>. I think Rich Hickey nailed this in his &quot;Simple Made Easy&quot;[1] talk. Complexity is <i>not</i> about additivity, it&#x27;s about entanglement.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.infoq.com&#x2F;presentations&#x2F;Simple-Made-Easy" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.infoq.com&#x2F;presentations&#x2F;Simple-Made-Easy</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Rob Pike: Simplicity Is Complicated [video]</title><url>http://www.thedotpost.com/2015/11/rob-pike-simplicity-is-complicated</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>chubot</author><text>From reading the abstract, it sounds like this addresses precisely the topic of &quot;Worse is Better&quot; [1].<p>There are frequent misunderstandings of this essay -- the argument isn&#x27;t as coarse as &quot;crappy software wins&quot;, or &quot;release early and often&quot;.<p>The tradeoff is: do you want a simple interface (MIT style) or a simple implementation (NJ style)? If you want a simple interface, you have to hide a bunch of complexity underneath. If you want a simple implementation, you punt on some hard things and expose it to the user.<p>Despite its authorship, and marketing as a better C (which is the epitome of NJ style), Go is MIT style! The concurrency model hides a lot of stuff under the covers: sync vs async syscalls, segmented stacks, etc. And GC is probably the ultimate MIT-style feature, in that the interface is very simple (just pretend you have infinite memory), but implementations are tremendously complex -- basically each GC is unique and its own research project.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jwz.org&#x2F;doc&#x2F;worse-is-better.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jwz.org&#x2F;doc&#x2F;worse-is-better.html</a><p>EDIT: From paging through the slides, this seems to be basically the gist of the last half, but I don&#x27;t see that he mentioned &quot;Worse is Better&quot; or MIT vs NJ style...</text></comment> |
14,096,030 | 14,093,985 | 1 | 2 | 14,093,254 | train | <story><title>Uber's head of communications is leaving the company</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/11/uber-head-of-comms-rachel-whetstone-is-leaving-the-company/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>yummyfajitas</author><text>No, they didn&#x27;t play us. They did exactly what they promised. Thanks to Uber, <i>I don&#x27;t get racially discriminated against on a daily basis.</i> Before Uber I did.<p>Some folks may hate them because of Susan Fowler, but that doesn&#x27;t change the fact that they&#x27;ve drastically improved the world for consumers.</text></item><item><author>paulcole</author><text>&gt;Uber was an asshole, but they were OUR asshole.<p>In other words, they played us like fiddles.</text></item><item><author>stale2002</author><text>I think the big change happened now is because for years Uber has been doing legally dubious things, that were morally defensible from certain perspectives.<p>IE, They mostly screwed over corrupt taxi monopolies.<p>Similar to a sort of Tony Stark character, Uber was an asshole, but they were OUR asshole. Fighting for insanely low customer prices and fighting against a bigger enemy, which is the terrible existing taxi industry.<p>The stuff that has happened recently is about having an awful company&#x2F;engineering culture, and isn&#x27;t in any way morally defensible.</text></item><item><author>ejlangev</author><text>People definitely want to watch Uber burn as some have forever, but something seems to have shifted. I&#x27;ve been seeing facebook ads for Uber engineering for the last 1-2 years but recently looking at the comments on them they&#x27;re 100% negative. A sampling:<p>&quot;This is one of those times when steering into the skid might have been the wrong move.&quot;<p>&quot;I think Uber needs to post an ad for a new President more than a Senior Software Engineer...&quot;<p>&quot;How about UberEatsDicks? Can we work on that product together? It sounds pretty good for you guys. Right up your alley.&quot;<p>&quot;Facebook must hate me to suggest this post. LOL&quot;<p>&quot;Haha, no thanks. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;...&#x2F;14664474&#x2F;uber-sexism-allegations" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;...&#x2F;14664474&#x2F;uber-sexism-allegations</a> .&quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>TeMPOraL</author><text>They&#x27;re still giving us exactly what they promised - promised not by just words, but actions.<p>Initially, Uber set itself out as the hero of the day, riding on a shining horse to fight the Evil Taxi Mafia. Anyone who looked closely at how they did that could easily predict that what they want to become is the new, but worse, Taxi Mafia. They&#x27;ve been assholes almost from the start, they continue to be assholes now. That so many people only got angry after <i>sexism accusations</i>, of all the things, only makes me sad about the state of humanity.</text></comment> | <story><title>Uber's head of communications is leaving the company</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/11/uber-head-of-comms-rachel-whetstone-is-leaving-the-company/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>yummyfajitas</author><text>No, they didn&#x27;t play us. They did exactly what they promised. Thanks to Uber, <i>I don&#x27;t get racially discriminated against on a daily basis.</i> Before Uber I did.<p>Some folks may hate them because of Susan Fowler, but that doesn&#x27;t change the fact that they&#x27;ve drastically improved the world for consumers.</text></item><item><author>paulcole</author><text>&gt;Uber was an asshole, but they were OUR asshole.<p>In other words, they played us like fiddles.</text></item><item><author>stale2002</author><text>I think the big change happened now is because for years Uber has been doing legally dubious things, that were morally defensible from certain perspectives.<p>IE, They mostly screwed over corrupt taxi monopolies.<p>Similar to a sort of Tony Stark character, Uber was an asshole, but they were OUR asshole. Fighting for insanely low customer prices and fighting against a bigger enemy, which is the terrible existing taxi industry.<p>The stuff that has happened recently is about having an awful company&#x2F;engineering culture, and isn&#x27;t in any way morally defensible.</text></item><item><author>ejlangev</author><text>People definitely want to watch Uber burn as some have forever, but something seems to have shifted. I&#x27;ve been seeing facebook ads for Uber engineering for the last 1-2 years but recently looking at the comments on them they&#x27;re 100% negative. A sampling:<p>&quot;This is one of those times when steering into the skid might have been the wrong move.&quot;<p>&quot;I think Uber needs to post an ad for a new President more than a Senior Software Engineer...&quot;<p>&quot;How about UberEatsDicks? Can we work on that product together? It sounds pretty good for you guys. Right up your alley.&quot;<p>&quot;Facebook must hate me to suggest this post. LOL&quot;<p>&quot;Haha, no thanks. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;...&#x2F;14664474&#x2F;uber-sexism-allegations" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;...&#x2F;14664474&#x2F;uber-sexism-allegations</a> .&quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gotothedoctor</author><text>I found that to be true at the beginning. But now, Uber drivers are Lyft drivers are taxi drivers. They all use apps now. And evidence suggests drivers adapted and found new ways to discriminate. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theatlantic.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2016&#x2F;10&#x2F;uber-lyft-and-the-false-promise-of-fair-rides&#x2F;506000&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theatlantic.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2016&#x2F;10&#x2F;uber-ly...</a> The only difference now is who is taking how much out of the driver&#x27;s paycheck--and whether or not that company is paying taxes or just extracting wealth from any given city.</text></comment> |
2,467,909 | 2,467,706 | 1 | 3 | 2,467,443 | train | <story><title>Joel Spolsky is doing an IAmA on reddit</title><url>http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/gulpx/iama_cofounder_of_stack_exchange_and_fog_creek/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>euroclydon</author><text>I really want to learn C, like he says. I get plenty done without knowing it, and I have few doubts I can continue to find decent work without knowing it, but I haven't been able to gain any traction when I try to learn it.<p>I've got the books sitting front of me, and I've written some trivial visualizations of sorting algorithms using terminal output, but damn if I can find a way to use C as a web developer. If there were just some use case where C would help me get something done, I'd be all over it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>follower</author><text>For years as I developed with Python and Javascript I thought "I really should write something in C again and maybe I should learn some C++". But nothing I was doing was performance critical or low level enough that I needed C or C++.<p>Then, a funny thing happened and I started playing with the Arduino.<p>And, while they go to great pains to hide it from non-technical people, the whole Arduino stack (ignoring the IDE) is based on C/C++. So then I began writing C again and learning C++. (I always find it slightly odd that I'm using C++ on a microcontroller--admittedly it's very small subset of C++, mostly just used for the object encapsulation/abstraction. (Insert handwavy, "yes, yes, I know it's not strictly C above library level" here.))<p>So, you might like to take a look at playing with the Arduino if you want to get into C. And if nothing else it's fun playing with tangible things that interact with the "real world".</text></comment> | <story><title>Joel Spolsky is doing an IAmA on reddit</title><url>http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/gulpx/iama_cofounder_of_stack_exchange_and_fog_creek/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>euroclydon</author><text>I really want to learn C, like he says. I get plenty done without knowing it, and I have few doubts I can continue to find decent work without knowing it, but I haven't been able to gain any traction when I try to learn it.<p>I've got the books sitting front of me, and I've written some trivial visualizations of sorting algorithms using terminal output, but damn if I can find a way to use C as a web developer. If there were just some use case where C would help me get something done, I'd be all over it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>SkyMarshal</author><text>Raphters might interest you:<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2407334" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2407334</a><p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2436885" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2436885</a><p><a href="http://thechangelog.com/post/4608227295/raphters-a-web-framework-for-c" rel="nofollow">http://thechangelog.com/post/4608227295/raphters-a-web-frame...</a></text></comment> |
21,324,798 | 21,324,528 | 1 | 2 | 21,324,273 | train | <story><title>Dramatically reduced power usage in Firefox 70 on macOS with Core Animation</title><url>https://mozillagfx.wordpress.com/2019/10/22/dramatically-reduced-power-usage-in-firefox-70-on-macos-with-core-animation/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kvark</author><text>Amazing work by my colleagues! I hope we&#x27;ll not regress this with WebRender ;)<p>Celebration aside, one particular note (that was known, but still) makes me sad:<p>&gt; It’s worth noting that the ability to assign an IOSurface to the CALayer contents property is not properly documented. Nevertheless, all major browsers on macOS now make use of this API.<p>So we end up in a situation where using the most efficient way to display contents now relies on undocumented&#x2F;private APIs. At any point Apple can break them, or punish us for using them.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pcwalton</author><text>It&#x27;s &quot;documented&quot; as in &quot;tweeted out by an Apple engineer&quot;: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;bciechanowski&#x2F;status&#x2F;874345241666437120?lang=en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;bciechanowski&#x2F;status&#x2F;874345241666437120?...</a><p>One thing that is <i>not</i> documented is that the IOSurface must have been created with the &#x27;BGRA&#x27; pixel format, or it will silently render as black instead.</text></comment> | <story><title>Dramatically reduced power usage in Firefox 70 on macOS with Core Animation</title><url>https://mozillagfx.wordpress.com/2019/10/22/dramatically-reduced-power-usage-in-firefox-70-on-macos-with-core-animation/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kvark</author><text>Amazing work by my colleagues! I hope we&#x27;ll not regress this with WebRender ;)<p>Celebration aside, one particular note (that was known, but still) makes me sad:<p>&gt; It’s worth noting that the ability to assign an IOSurface to the CALayer contents property is not properly documented. Nevertheless, all major browsers on macOS now make use of this API.<p>So we end up in a situation where using the most efficient way to display contents now relies on undocumented&#x2F;private APIs. At any point Apple can break them, or punish us for using them.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>xenadu02</author><text>Do you have an FB number for improving the documentation here?<p>CALayer accepts a number of different data types for its contents property, IOSurface being one of them.<p>Another tip: CAShapeLayer draws on the GPU so simple shapes&#x2F;strokes can be insanely faster drawn that way vs CoreGraphics.</text></comment> |
16,865,507 | 16,862,329 | 1 | 3 | 16,859,981 | train | <story><title>Mode Studio – Python, R and SQL Editor</title><url>https://blog.modeanalytics.com/announcing-mode-studio-and-r/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tlrobinson</author><text>If you&#x27;re looking for something free, open source, selfhosted, or doesn&#x27;t require programming knowledge (but allows SQL if needed), there&#x27;s Metabase: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;metabase.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;metabase.com&#x2F;</a><p>Disclaimer: I work on Metabase</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>avenius</author><text>Thank you for your work! Metabase has been a tremendous help in getting my coworkers interested in data and analytics, and is probably the sole reason why our call center is finally registering data in a structured and organized way.</text></comment> | <story><title>Mode Studio – Python, R and SQL Editor</title><url>https://blog.modeanalytics.com/announcing-mode-studio-and-r/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tlrobinson</author><text>If you&#x27;re looking for something free, open source, selfhosted, or doesn&#x27;t require programming knowledge (but allows SQL if needed), there&#x27;s Metabase: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;metabase.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;metabase.com&#x2F;</a><p>Disclaimer: I work on Metabase</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>luminousbit</author><text>We use metabase too! Far superior to Mode with no cost!</text></comment> |
37,263,218 | 37,262,135 | 1 | 2 | 37,259,225 | train | <story><title>Unpacking Elixir: Concurrency</title><url>https://underjord.io/unpacking-elixir-concurrency.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fndex</author><text>This is coming from someone who likes Elixir. Not much for its distributed systems features, but mostly because of the language design. I keep hearing everyone talk about how Erlang&#x2F;Elixir gives everything out of the box and you don&#x27;t need to worry about Queues, RPC or whatever... But in reality, people don&#x27;t really recommend using Distributed Erlang that much, on most Elixir gigs I worked, they didn&#x27;t use Distributed Elixir at all, just plain old Kubernetes, Kafka, Redis and GRPC.</text></item><item><author>tombert</author><text>Disckaimer: I have never used Elixir in any serious capacity, but I have done a good chunk of Erlang.<p>Concurrency in Erlang sort of frustrates me...not because it&#x27;s bad, but because when I use it I start getting pissed at how annoying concurrency is in nearly every other language. So much of distributed systems tooling in 2023 is basically just there to port over Erlang constructs to more mainstream languages.<p>Obviously you can get a working distributed system by gluing together caches and queues and busses and RPC, but Erlang gives you all that out of the box, and it all works.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>josevalim</author><text>&gt; I keep hearing everyone talk about how Erlang&#x2F;Elixir gives everything out of the box and you don&#x27;t need to worry about Queues, RPC or whatever...<p>Many companies are using Distributed Erlang but not the way you described: they are using it to exchange messages between nodes running the same version of the software. Imagine that you are building a web application, you can directly exchange live messages between nodes without Redis&#x2F;RabbitMQ [1]. If you are deploying a machine learning model, you can route requests through multiple nodes and GPUs without additional deps [2]. If you want to see which users are connected to your app, you can exchange this information directly between nodes [3].<p>In other words, there is a subset of distributed problems that Distributed Erlang solves very well out of the box: homogeneous systems working on ephemeral data. And some of the scenarios above are very common.<p>If you need to communicate between different systems or you need to persist data, then I 100% agree with you, I would not use Distributed Erlang (at best it would be one part of the solution). I think this distinction gets lost in many conversations and sometimes it leads to false dichotomies: &quot;why Erlang when I have k8s&#x2F;grpc&#x2F;redis?&quot; while in practice there is not a lot of overlap. I have written about Erlang&#x2F;Elixir vs Redis [4] and vs k8s [5] for those interested.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hexdocs.pm&#x2F;phoenix_pubsub&#x2F;Phoenix.PubSub.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hexdocs.pm&#x2F;phoenix_pubsub&#x2F;Phoenix.PubSub.html</a>
[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.livebook.dev&#x2F;distributed2-machine-learning-notebooks-with-elixir-and-livebook---launch-week-1---day-2-1aIlaw" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.livebook.dev&#x2F;distributed2-machine-learning-note...</a>
[3]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hexdocs.pm&#x2F;phoenix&#x2F;Phoenix.Presence.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hexdocs.pm&#x2F;phoenix&#x2F;Phoenix.Presence.html</a><p>[4]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dashbit.co&#x2F;blog&#x2F;you-may-not-need-redis-with-elixir" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dashbit.co&#x2F;blog&#x2F;you-may-not-need-redis-with-elixir</a>
[5]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dashbit.co&#x2F;blog&#x2F;kubernetes-and-the-erlang-vm-orchestration-on-the-large-and-the-small" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dashbit.co&#x2F;blog&#x2F;kubernetes-and-the-erlang-vm-orchest...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Unpacking Elixir: Concurrency</title><url>https://underjord.io/unpacking-elixir-concurrency.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fndex</author><text>This is coming from someone who likes Elixir. Not much for its distributed systems features, but mostly because of the language design. I keep hearing everyone talk about how Erlang&#x2F;Elixir gives everything out of the box and you don&#x27;t need to worry about Queues, RPC or whatever... But in reality, people don&#x27;t really recommend using Distributed Erlang that much, on most Elixir gigs I worked, they didn&#x27;t use Distributed Elixir at all, just plain old Kubernetes, Kafka, Redis and GRPC.</text></item><item><author>tombert</author><text>Disckaimer: I have never used Elixir in any serious capacity, but I have done a good chunk of Erlang.<p>Concurrency in Erlang sort of frustrates me...not because it&#x27;s bad, but because when I use it I start getting pissed at how annoying concurrency is in nearly every other language. So much of distributed systems tooling in 2023 is basically just there to port over Erlang constructs to more mainstream languages.<p>Obviously you can get a working distributed system by gluing together caches and queues and busses and RPC, but Erlang gives you all that out of the box, and it all works.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>weatherlight</author><text>Well, in big orgs, that adopt Elixir&#x2F;Erlang, along with other technologies with poor concurrency stories, those other ecosystems still need Kubernetes, Kafka, Redis and GRPC, to get by. elixir isn&#x27;t going to make ruby or python apps magically concurrent. So that make sense.<p>However, in orgs that are primarily Elixir shops, I don&#x27;t see a lot of Kafka or gRPC. (Redis is just useful, its more than just a queue and K8s and Elixir&#x2F;Erlang compliment each other, btw.)</text></comment> |
13,749,453 | 13,749,216 | 1 | 3 | 13,747,414 | train | <story><title>I am an Uber survivor</title><url>https://medium.com/@amyvertino/my-name-is-not-amy-i-am-an-uber-survivor-c6d6541e632f</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jastingo</author><text>I&#x27;m not in the business of defending Uber - quite the contrary - but reading through the comments it seems that most people are assuming that this post by an anonymous person is 100% true.<p>These types of posts are worrying to me. Why could this post not have been crafted by someone at Lyft? Or one of Uber&#x27;s many other detractors? Given the PR nightmare that Uber is in why not pile on while the public seems primed for that type of information and stretch out the negative news cycle?<p>Just thought I&#x27;d throw out a word of caution: we know literally nothing about the credibility of this person.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>enraged_camel</author><text>She posted anonymously, BUT also went out of her way to provide an awful lot of information about herself. Information that her ex-coworkers could presumably verify and figure out her real identity (especially since Uber seems to have very few women in engineering positions).<p>Based on the article, she is:<p><pre><code> 1) A woman in her late 20s
2) who used to work at Uber in Engineering working on database and networking scalability
3) went to a top private college
4) has a Masters in Information Systems
5) previous to Uber worked as a Data Analyst in a tech company in the Midwest and left when it was acquired by a Chinese firm
6) is 5 foot 7 Caucasian with dark hair
7) never wears high heels
</code></pre>
So yeah, the target demographic of the article is almost certainly her ex-coworkers. It seems to be a call to action of sorts.</text></comment> | <story><title>I am an Uber survivor</title><url>https://medium.com/@amyvertino/my-name-is-not-amy-i-am-an-uber-survivor-c6d6541e632f</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jastingo</author><text>I&#x27;m not in the business of defending Uber - quite the contrary - but reading through the comments it seems that most people are assuming that this post by an anonymous person is 100% true.<p>These types of posts are worrying to me. Why could this post not have been crafted by someone at Lyft? Or one of Uber&#x27;s many other detractors? Given the PR nightmare that Uber is in why not pile on while the public seems primed for that type of information and stretch out the negative news cycle?<p>Just thought I&#x27;d throw out a word of caution: we know literally nothing about the credibility of this person.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>eropple</author><text>To be frank? Uber gets the benefit of the doubt when they demonstrate that they&#x27;ve earned it. Every bit of smoke I have seen, both online and in my social circles, has had fire behind it. <i>Every one</i>, without exception.<p>So I&#x27;m going to believe this until I have a compelling reason not to, and &quot;but it could be fake&quot; isn&#x27;t one.</text></comment> |
28,083,812 | 28,083,779 | 1 | 3 | 28,082,566 | train | <story><title>Beware of 'shrinkflation,' inflation's devious cousin</title><url>https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2021/07/06/1012409112/beware-of-shrinkflation-inflations-devious-cousin</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>alister</author><text>&gt; <i>make products look bigger than they really are, especially in online photos</i><p>I&#x27;ve noticed that tiny condos and apartments in real estate photos look enormous. I&#x27;m undecided on whether this is a deliberate attempt to mislead or an artifact of having to use a wide angle lens to capture the whole room (but an artifact that the seller and real estate agent like).</text></item><item><author>HellsMaddy</author><text>I&#x27;ve been shopping on Instacart a lot during the pandemic and I&#x27;ve noticed a related phenomenon: packaging designed to make products look bigger than they really are, especially in online photos. It&#x27;s not necessarily a new thing, but the online photo aspect is somewhat novel because you don&#x27;t get to see the product in context.<p>For example, a jar of Jalapenos, product photo: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;mprWr6R.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;mprWr6R.jpg</a><p>In reality, the jar&#x27;s cross-section isn&#x27;t circular as it appears, it&#x27;s an ellipse&#x2F;oval: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;dXDUOR9.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;dXDUOR9.png</a><p>Only the first photo was included in the item listing. When the groceries were delivered and I pulled out the jar, I was so surprised by the odd football-like shape that I couldn’t stop laughing for a few minutes at how well they’d fooled me.<p>Another common thing to see is familiar product packaging that is just “scaled down”. Everything about the packaging looks the same or very similar, but smaller - especially fonts. This deceives the eye into believing the product is much larger. I recently fell for this when shopping for some conditioner. The packaging is not exactly the same but close enough to fool me at a glance:<p>What I bought: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;MdAuhS0.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;MdAuhS0.png</a><p>What I expected: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;MGxdD0d.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;MGxdD0d.png</a><p>I&#x27;m inclined the believe this is on purpose because in real life, the fonts are way too small to read comfortably. If not trying to mislead, I would expect the packaging to be designed to be legible, right?<p>It&#x27;s especially frustrating because I usually would&#x27;ve just paid more for the larger size.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>function_seven</author><text>Real estate photos are so bad. When I sold my last house, I almost regretted it when I got the listing photos back. I never knew I lived in such a clean and enormous house!<p>Three things:<p>1. I get that interior shots need a wide angle to capture the boundaries of a room in a single photo. But there&#x27;s a limit. Most pictures I see dial it up to those crazy levels where obviously square or circular items become rectangles and ovals. Here are 2 images I just now randomly picked:<p>This kitchen is long! <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;YxrRMSy.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;YxrRMSy.jpg</a><p>Nope, just small: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;rPCSMUT.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;rPCSMUT.jpg</a><p>(But, the rise of 3D walkthroughs is a good antidote for this, so credit where it&#x27;s due on that front.)<p>2. Saturation! Please, stop maxing out that slider. Sometimes it&#x27;s just vivid blue sky and greenest green grass, but other times they go so far that the highlights are all blown out and everything just looks weird.<p>3. Fake fireplace fires, sunny weather, etc. A lot of photos have a fake sunny sky inserted into window openings, or a &quot;fire&quot; in the fireplace that&#x27;s obviously been pasted in. Different random listing shows 2 photos with incredible luck—the flames are identical.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;jhnwvAv.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;jhnwvAv.jpg</a> and <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;Ut1aTdl.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;Ut1aTdl.jpg</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Beware of 'shrinkflation,' inflation's devious cousin</title><url>https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2021/07/06/1012409112/beware-of-shrinkflation-inflations-devious-cousin</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>alister</author><text>&gt; <i>make products look bigger than they really are, especially in online photos</i><p>I&#x27;ve noticed that tiny condos and apartments in real estate photos look enormous. I&#x27;m undecided on whether this is a deliberate attempt to mislead or an artifact of having to use a wide angle lens to capture the whole room (but an artifact that the seller and real estate agent like).</text></item><item><author>HellsMaddy</author><text>I&#x27;ve been shopping on Instacart a lot during the pandemic and I&#x27;ve noticed a related phenomenon: packaging designed to make products look bigger than they really are, especially in online photos. It&#x27;s not necessarily a new thing, but the online photo aspect is somewhat novel because you don&#x27;t get to see the product in context.<p>For example, a jar of Jalapenos, product photo: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;mprWr6R.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;mprWr6R.jpg</a><p>In reality, the jar&#x27;s cross-section isn&#x27;t circular as it appears, it&#x27;s an ellipse&#x2F;oval: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;dXDUOR9.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;dXDUOR9.png</a><p>Only the first photo was included in the item listing. When the groceries were delivered and I pulled out the jar, I was so surprised by the odd football-like shape that I couldn’t stop laughing for a few minutes at how well they’d fooled me.<p>Another common thing to see is familiar product packaging that is just “scaled down”. Everything about the packaging looks the same or very similar, but smaller - especially fonts. This deceives the eye into believing the product is much larger. I recently fell for this when shopping for some conditioner. The packaging is not exactly the same but close enough to fool me at a glance:<p>What I bought: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;MdAuhS0.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;MdAuhS0.png</a><p>What I expected: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;MGxdD0d.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;MGxdD0d.png</a><p>I&#x27;m inclined the believe this is on purpose because in real life, the fonts are way too small to read comfortably. If not trying to mislead, I would expect the packaging to be designed to be legible, right?<p>It&#x27;s especially frustrating because I usually would&#x27;ve just paid more for the larger size.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>alchemism</author><text>They are deliberate in that they know how to take a photograph which maximizes the attractiveness of a space.<p>The same tradition occurs in filling the written description of a place with no amenities. “Walking distance to schools &amp; churches” is a popular filler. Τhe facility could be 50 feet away or it could be a 5 mile walk; anything short of walking alongside the freeway is fair game to describe in this fashion.</text></comment> |
38,397,414 | 38,395,912 | 1 | 3 | 38,392,277 | train | <story><title>Polio is on the brink of eradication</title><url>https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03602-5</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>naravara</author><text>Someday soon we’ll just be able to sequence its genome and reconstruct it without needing to keep samples alive (and no longer have the risk with all the maintenance and security protocols that will entail).<p>Of course however we store that genomic code had better be on physical media in a sealed vault that isn’t even within spitting distance of anything with an internet connection.</text></item><item><author>ls612</author><text>Ostensibly this serves a purpose beyond the MAD incentive, having stocks of the virus on hand makes manufacturing the old style smallpox vaccine easier should the need ever arise in the future. As we saw with monkeypox last year there is much more limited capacity for more modern pox vaccines due to the more advanced manufacturing process and limited demand.</text></item><item><author>nolok</author><text>Don&#x27;t need to wonder, the US and Russian (Soviet at the time) have made it public that they keep samples of smallpox.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Smallpox_virus_retention_debate" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Smallpox_virus_retention_debat...</a></text></item><item><author>ChrisMarshallNY</author><text><i>&gt; Only one human disease has so far been declared eradicated: smallpox</i><p>I was reading a post by someone, a few years ago, lamenting that we had “killed” a virus.<p>I am not 100% sure they were being serious, but they gave every indication that they were.<p>In any case, I’m sure that some bioweapons lab, somewhere (like, maybe, in Frederick, MD) has samples of the virus, “just in case it comes back.”</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vgel</author><text>Oh, we already sequenced it awhile back. As for physical media, that&#x27;s not exactly what happened... <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;nuccore&#x2F;NC_001611.1?report=fasta" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;nuccore&#x2F;NC_001611.1?report=fast...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Polio is on the brink of eradication</title><url>https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03602-5</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>naravara</author><text>Someday soon we’ll just be able to sequence its genome and reconstruct it without needing to keep samples alive (and no longer have the risk with all the maintenance and security protocols that will entail).<p>Of course however we store that genomic code had better be on physical media in a sealed vault that isn’t even within spitting distance of anything with an internet connection.</text></item><item><author>ls612</author><text>Ostensibly this serves a purpose beyond the MAD incentive, having stocks of the virus on hand makes manufacturing the old style smallpox vaccine easier should the need ever arise in the future. As we saw with monkeypox last year there is much more limited capacity for more modern pox vaccines due to the more advanced manufacturing process and limited demand.</text></item><item><author>nolok</author><text>Don&#x27;t need to wonder, the US and Russian (Soviet at the time) have made it public that they keep samples of smallpox.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Smallpox_virus_retention_debate" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Smallpox_virus_retention_debat...</a></text></item><item><author>ChrisMarshallNY</author><text><i>&gt; Only one human disease has so far been declared eradicated: smallpox</i><p>I was reading a post by someone, a few years ago, lamenting that we had “killed” a virus.<p>I am not 100% sure they were being serious, but they gave every indication that they were.<p>In any case, I’m sure that some bioweapons lab, somewhere (like, maybe, in Frederick, MD) has samples of the virus, “just in case it comes back.”</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Gare</author><text><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thebulletin.org&#x2F;2020&#x2F;02&#x2F;a-biotech-firm-made-a-smallpox-like-virus-on-purpose-nobody-seems-to-care&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thebulletin.org&#x2F;2020&#x2F;02&#x2F;a-biotech-firm-made-a-smallp...</a></text></comment> |
7,195,823 | 7,195,788 | 1 | 2 | 7,195,695 | train | <story><title>Apple approves Dogecoin iOS app</title><url>http://www.mydoge.co</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Tarang</author><text>From the page:<p>&gt;MYĐOGE is read-only. It can be used to monitor your Dogecoin at a glance, watch the markets or read about Dogecoin.<p>So it can&#x27;t be used for transfers. It still doesn&#x27;t look like Apple is approving apps that send *coins</text></comment> | <story><title>Apple approves Dogecoin iOS app</title><url>http://www.mydoge.co</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mrtksn</author><text>Dogecoin is an example how your story about your product could make it or break it. Dogecoin is not yet another digital currency and this has nothing to do with it&#x27;s technology.</text></comment> |
41,750,739 | 41,750,710 | 1 | 2 | 41,750,253 | train | <story><title>The profit-obsessed monster destroying American emergency rooms</title><url>https://www.vox.com/health-care/374820/emergency-rooms-private-equity-hospitals-profits-no-surprises</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ryandrake</author><text>&gt; The thing that doesn&#x27;t get mentioned much<p>This gets mentioned every time. The regulation boogeyman always shows up. If only there were fewer rules... everyone could make more money, the little guy would be able to enter and play fast and loose, and nobody would do the wrongdoing those rules were meant to correct&#x2F;prevent. Yes, there are regulations in health care. There are regulations in almost every industry, and yes, they can be a pain to deal with. Yet people still start businesses, make money, grumble endlessly about those regulations, and society marches on. As part of the general public, who are often the victims of business&#x27;s negative externalities, I&#x27;m grateful that our government still manages to regulate businesses.</text></item><item><author>giantg2</author><text>The thing that doesn&#x27;t get mentioned much in these conversations that I&#x27;ve personally seen play a big role is the regulation. When you have highly complex regulations, you end up consolidating practices. As regulations increase, the number of distinct providers&#x2F;owners decrease. Many individuals don&#x27;t want to run their own practice due to the complexities (insurance, etc) that exist beyond the work (treating people). It doesn&#x27;t make a lot of sense to deal with the insurance, billing, recordkeepeing, etc for a single physician or two. They wouldn&#x27;t be able to compete with the larger and more effiecent practices that have more bargaining power with insurance companies anyways.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bluecalm</author><text>Or maybe regulation is in fact a problem. In my country there is less regulation in healthcare services. I can walk into multiple private facilities in my town, get full blood panel with almost everything you can think of included (hormones, vitamins&#x2F;mineral levels, liver markers etc) for around 100$. The results are going to be available online the same day (with the exception of those that require more lab time). This is fully private enterprise which has nothing to do with &quot;universal healthcare&quot; my country has.<p>I don&#x27;t need prescription or doctor recommendation to get it done. I can also take my own urine&#x2F;hair&#x2F;swabs, walk into a lab, pay and have the requests results online in a few days.<p>If I need MRI I can usually schedule it for the next day in multiple private points and again the results are going to be there the same day. The price is around 200 bucks for say cervical spine.<p>How is it in your country? Do you know how much is required to get those basic services in other countries?</text></comment> | <story><title>The profit-obsessed monster destroying American emergency rooms</title><url>https://www.vox.com/health-care/374820/emergency-rooms-private-equity-hospitals-profits-no-surprises</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ryandrake</author><text>&gt; The thing that doesn&#x27;t get mentioned much<p>This gets mentioned every time. The regulation boogeyman always shows up. If only there were fewer rules... everyone could make more money, the little guy would be able to enter and play fast and loose, and nobody would do the wrongdoing those rules were meant to correct&#x2F;prevent. Yes, there are regulations in health care. There are regulations in almost every industry, and yes, they can be a pain to deal with. Yet people still start businesses, make money, grumble endlessly about those regulations, and society marches on. As part of the general public, who are often the victims of business&#x27;s negative externalities, I&#x27;m grateful that our government still manages to regulate businesses.</text></item><item><author>giantg2</author><text>The thing that doesn&#x27;t get mentioned much in these conversations that I&#x27;ve personally seen play a big role is the regulation. When you have highly complex regulations, you end up consolidating practices. As regulations increase, the number of distinct providers&#x2F;owners decrease. Many individuals don&#x27;t want to run their own practice due to the complexities (insurance, etc) that exist beyond the work (treating people). It doesn&#x27;t make a lot of sense to deal with the insurance, billing, recordkeepeing, etc for a single physician or two. They wouldn&#x27;t be able to compete with the larger and more effiecent practices that have more bargaining power with insurance companies anyways.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>charleslmunger</author><text>&gt;Yet people still start businesses, make money, grumble endlessly about those regulations, and society marches on.<p>One such regulation is &quot;certificate of need&quot; laws, where you effectively need to ask the incumbent for permission to open your would-be competitor.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;spn.org&#x2F;articles&#x2F;certificate-of-need-laws&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;spn.org&#x2F;articles&#x2F;certificate-of-need-laws&#x2F;</a></text></comment> |
12,788,648 | 12,788,533 | 1 | 2 | 12,787,766 | train | <story><title>Xiaomi unveils concept phone with near bezel-less display</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/25/xiaomi-unveils-concept-phone-with-near-bezel-less-display/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>LeifCarrotson</author><text>Things I don&#x27;t particularly care about in a phone:<p>- Bezel size<p>- Weight<p>- Thickness<p>- Manufacturer-specific apps and skins<p>- Screen resolution beyond that of my eyes<p>- Fastest possible processor<p>Things I care about in a phone:<p>- Ability to make calls<p>- Battery life<p>- Replaceable battery<p>- Fits in my pocket<p>- Expandable storage<p>- Durable<p>- Decent camera<p>- Inexpensive<p>- Gets security updates<p>And what do the latest phones feature? Super-thin, super-light phones with consequently small batteries that are overburdened by enormous screens and processors that could run a laptop, and screens that would also fit a laptop. They cost $600 and more, when nearly-equivalent technology can bring the cost down to less than half that.<p>At least we&#x27;re getting better cameras (though this would be easier with thicker phones) and waterproofing for durability. Wireless charging also seems to help with the longevity of the ports.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>justinhj</author><text>Sounds like you&#x27;d be fine with a flip phone from 10 years ago and a small high quality camera. You don&#x27;t seem to be the target audience for the latest smartphones.</text></comment> | <story><title>Xiaomi unveils concept phone with near bezel-less display</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/25/xiaomi-unveils-concept-phone-with-near-bezel-less-display/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>LeifCarrotson</author><text>Things I don&#x27;t particularly care about in a phone:<p>- Bezel size<p>- Weight<p>- Thickness<p>- Manufacturer-specific apps and skins<p>- Screen resolution beyond that of my eyes<p>- Fastest possible processor<p>Things I care about in a phone:<p>- Ability to make calls<p>- Battery life<p>- Replaceable battery<p>- Fits in my pocket<p>- Expandable storage<p>- Durable<p>- Decent camera<p>- Inexpensive<p>- Gets security updates<p>And what do the latest phones feature? Super-thin, super-light phones with consequently small batteries that are overburdened by enormous screens and processors that could run a laptop, and screens that would also fit a laptop. They cost $600 and more, when nearly-equivalent technology can bring the cost down to less than half that.<p>At least we&#x27;re getting better cameras (though this would be easier with thicker phones) and waterproofing for durability. Wireless charging also seems to help with the longevity of the ports.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>aembleton</author><text>With Android there is such a huge choice of different phones that you can find one close to the one you&#x27;d like. Many people would like a thin high resolution display and don&#x27;t care about many of the things you care about. They can buy different phones to you.<p>Personally, I agree with your requirements and as a result have settled for the 2GB version of the Moto G (3rd gen) <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gsmarena.com&#x2F;motorola_moto_g_(3rd_gen)-7247.php" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gsmarena.com&#x2F;motorola_moto_g_(3rd_gen)-7247.php</a><p>Sadly, the 4th generation isn&#x27;t waterproof. So far I&#x27;m happy with it and as is it is close to stock should get updates sooner.</text></comment> |
26,058,991 | 26,058,998 | 1 | 2 | 26,058,457 | train | <story><title>Talent Is Largely a Myth</title><url>https://blog.nukemberg.com/post/talent-is-largely-a-myth/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Swizec</author><text>Talent isn’t a myth, it’s a prerequisite. Same for hard work.<p>I could put in all the hours of practice and guided training into boxing as Mike Tyson and I wouldn’t get nearly the same results. And I [like to] imagine Tyson could spend as much time programming as I have and not be nearly as good.<p>Talent is a multiplier. When you’re learning something you have a talent for, you’ll know.<p>For example: in high school I was very into art and into programming. I could spend 30 hours on a digital painting and it looked <i>okay</i>. But when I spent 30 hours on python, I was fluent in a weekend.<p>Some folks I knew could take those 30 hours of drawing and produce a painting that would take me 3 months. Even after adjusting for baseline skill.<p>Their rate of improvement was simply beyond anything I could achieve. Same as my rate of improvement in programming was beyond what they could pull off.<p>Crucially: Talent isn’t a measure of how good you are <i>now</i>. It’s a measure of <i>how fast you improve with practice</i>.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hinkley</author><text>Talent <i>is</i> a multiplier, but the needle can go negative.<p>It can be a trap. I knew a guy in college, “Kevin” who was not naturally good at anything except perseverance. He worked his ass off all the time. He was doing much better than people like me who could pick things up and be an expert beginner in hours or days, because most of us never worked anywhere near that hard for anything in our lives. I had worked that hard for exactly one thing at this point, which put me at a vantage point of being able to see both groups. None of my other peers really understood Kevin. I confess I didn’t always either.<p>If you can fill your days with things that you are “talented” at, you never get around to the things that are hard but make you a better person or for a richer life. You can justify quitting before you ever start, and only later figure out that “compensating qualities” simply don’t. Not all the time. Especially in a crisis.<p><pre><code> She lives with a broken man
A cracked polystyrene man
Who just crumbles and burns
</code></pre>
Today a couple of the things that people think I’m talented at, I simply believe are possible when everyone else has given up. The Talent, if there is one, is a better sense of possibility, and a belief that at least a few people could figure things out if they could be arsed to do so. If there’s a second Talent, it’s in figuring out that not only are people fundamentally the same, century after century, but in many cases so are the problems they struggle with. Much like there is some underlying quality of NP-complete problems that makes them interchangeable. Solving problems is itself a thing you can study, and it can make you “talented” in whatever you care to be arsed to try.</text></comment> | <story><title>Talent Is Largely a Myth</title><url>https://blog.nukemberg.com/post/talent-is-largely-a-myth/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Swizec</author><text>Talent isn’t a myth, it’s a prerequisite. Same for hard work.<p>I could put in all the hours of practice and guided training into boxing as Mike Tyson and I wouldn’t get nearly the same results. And I [like to] imagine Tyson could spend as much time programming as I have and not be nearly as good.<p>Talent is a multiplier. When you’re learning something you have a talent for, you’ll know.<p>For example: in high school I was very into art and into programming. I could spend 30 hours on a digital painting and it looked <i>okay</i>. But when I spent 30 hours on python, I was fluent in a weekend.<p>Some folks I knew could take those 30 hours of drawing and produce a painting that would take me 3 months. Even after adjusting for baseline skill.<p>Their rate of improvement was simply beyond anything I could achieve. Same as my rate of improvement in programming was beyond what they could pull off.<p>Crucially: Talent isn’t a measure of how good you are <i>now</i>. It’s a measure of <i>how fast you improve with practice</i>.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>throwaway2245</author><text>&gt; I could put in all the hours of practice and guided training into boxing as Mike Tyson and I wouldn’t get nearly the same results.<p>I think this fails to recognise the talents that Mike Tyson has leveraged: the soft skills and gumption to identify the best trainers, the best team, the best opportunities, and to seize those, being motivated to gain fame and plaudits. Plus consistent, world-class training and experience on top - working outside of the 30 hours of class.<p>These skills are very transferable to other fields. Look, for example, at the George Foreman Grill.<p>Could you have done the same? Yes, I think it&#x27;s possible. But, viewing it as only practice and guided training seems like a fundamental error.</text></comment> |
20,754,229 | 20,754,216 | 1 | 2 | 20,753,985 | train | <story><title>The Art of PostgreSQL</title><url>https://theartofpostgresql.com/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jfbaro</author><text>I am going to buy the book for two reasons.One for its content and Two to somehow thank Dimitri Fontain for all his work on Postgres. He is one of the main Postgresql contributors.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Art of PostgreSQL</title><url>https://theartofpostgresql.com/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>war1025</author><text>Looked at the website and didn&#x27;t really get much of a feel for what was actually in the book.<p>I will say though, having a good knowledge of SQL (we use Postgres where I work) can help you do some really neat things.<p>There are probably three or four large new features I&#x27;ve added to our system in the past couple years that have boiled down to &quot;Pre-process the input and then ask Postgres for the answer&quot;<p>Databases are very powerful. They are even more powerful when you know how to use them right.</text></comment> |
36,378,227 | 36,376,733 | 1 | 3 | 36,376,111 | train | <story><title>Falcon LLM – A 40B Model</title><url>https://falconllm.tii.ae/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>LeoPanthera</author><text>&gt; to remove machine generated text and <i>adult content</i><p>Why are tech companies so puritanical? Adult content is not immoral.</text></comment> | <story><title>Falcon LLM – A 40B Model</title><url>https://falconllm.tii.ae/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>sbierwagen</author><text>Doesn&#x27;t do so great on the leaderboards: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tatsu-lab.github.io&#x2F;alpaca_eval&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tatsu-lab.github.io&#x2F;alpaca_eval&#x2F;</a></text></comment> |
18,983,680 | 18,983,622 | 1 | 3 | 18,983,036 | train | <story><title>Customer Service Agents Can See What You're Typing in Real Time</title><url>https://gizmodo.com/be-warned-customer-service-agents-can-see-what-youre-t-1830688119</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Jerry2</author><text>Another thing people don&#x27;t realize is that if your browser&#x2F;extension prefills&#x2F;autofills certain fields (say, name, email, address, etc), those things can be easily sent to the website even if you don&#x27;t press the submit button.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;2017&#x2F;jan&#x2F;10&#x2F;browser-autofill-used-to-steal-personal-details-in-new-phising-attack-chrome-safari" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;2017&#x2F;jan&#x2F;10&#x2F;browser-a...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>WestCoastJustin</author><text>Had this happen about 2 weeks ago when I was booking a hotel. This was <i>not</i> a chat window, like the article, but a hotel booking form. I had a few tabs open and filled in the booking information but found something a little more convenient. So, I did not submit the form and closed the tab. About 2-3 minutes later my phone started to ring. It was a customer service agent from that incomplete booking website asking if I needed a better deal!? This was extremely creepy! I guess they are grabbing the form data via xhr requests or something (pre-submit). Not only that they do this, but the speed at which they can action it, makes me think we&#x27;re in a whole new ball game.</text></comment> | <story><title>Customer Service Agents Can See What You're Typing in Real Time</title><url>https://gizmodo.com/be-warned-customer-service-agents-can-see-what-youre-t-1830688119</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Jerry2</author><text>Another thing people don&#x27;t realize is that if your browser&#x2F;extension prefills&#x2F;autofills certain fields (say, name, email, address, etc), those things can be easily sent to the website even if you don&#x27;t press the submit button.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;2017&#x2F;jan&#x2F;10&#x2F;browser-autofill-used-to-steal-personal-details-in-new-phising-attack-chrome-safari" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;2017&#x2F;jan&#x2F;10&#x2F;browser-a...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Veen</author><text>Yeah, that’s why Safari no longer autofills until you tell it to.</text></comment> |
6,032,599 | 6,032,737 | 1 | 2 | 6,031,360 | train | <story><title>Don't be evil: Moving everything off of Google</title><url>https://blog.samwhited.com/2013/07/dont-be-evil/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>alan_cx</author><text>Depressing thread this....<p>I think this thread demonstrates why the privacy issues with the likes of google, facebook, etc are pretty much vapor complaints. Essentially, people are happy in the end to sacrifice privacy for convenience. With that mind set, we can easily see why no one really cares about NSA slurping. As far as they are concerned, all the NSA has is what facebook, gmail etc, have. So, what is the problem exactly? And you know what, I can understand the point. I disagree, but equally, I understand.<p>Having read about how people won&#x27;t move form FB because it easy to stay there, since their &quot;friends&quot; are there, I now realize most people really are not committed to privacy while it means some sort of inconvenience. There is even a reply here where a friend who wont use facebook is referred to as an &quot;outcast&quot;... Understandable, but also says it all.<p>Depressing.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>VikingCoder</author><text>You&#x27;re presenting a false choice: It&#x27;s entirely possible to care about privacy, and still use Facebook and GMail.<p>Simply pretend that everything you post on Facebook and GMail is in the public domain, posted in the public square.<p>If I never share anything I don&#x27;t want public, then my privacy is guaranteed. I&#x27;d advise others with privacy concerns to do the same.<p>Given that you <i>NEVER KNOW, EVER</i> that you can <i>100% trust</i> the people you&#x27;re sharing with (no matter which media you use), I think people are kind of crazy to act any other way.</text></comment> | <story><title>Don't be evil: Moving everything off of Google</title><url>https://blog.samwhited.com/2013/07/dont-be-evil/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>alan_cx</author><text>Depressing thread this....<p>I think this thread demonstrates why the privacy issues with the likes of google, facebook, etc are pretty much vapor complaints. Essentially, people are happy in the end to sacrifice privacy for convenience. With that mind set, we can easily see why no one really cares about NSA slurping. As far as they are concerned, all the NSA has is what facebook, gmail etc, have. So, what is the problem exactly? And you know what, I can understand the point. I disagree, but equally, I understand.<p>Having read about how people won&#x27;t move form FB because it easy to stay there, since their &quot;friends&quot; are there, I now realize most people really are not committed to privacy while it means some sort of inconvenience. There is even a reply here where a friend who wont use facebook is referred to as an &quot;outcast&quot;... Understandable, but also says it all.<p>Depressing.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nahname</author><text>There is a really good talk (short too) from Moxie Marlinspike on privacy. His talk is very much along the same lines. Definitely worth watching.<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qzldtKV1PY" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=5qzldtKV1PY</a></text></comment> |
3,431,578 | 3,431,456 | 1 | 3 | 3,431,132 | train | <story><title>App Engine charges $6,500 to update a ListProperty on 14.1 million entities</title><url>http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine/browse_thread/thread/f85aa58e54ebb8ae#</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ajross</author><text>Reading the thread (I'm curious about GAE, not an expert), it seems like the details aren't clear at all. Neither the original poster nor the Google rep seem to have a clear idea of what I/O operations are being generated.<p>But this bit stood out: $0.10 per 100k writes. That price seems to be far too high. The poster is doing (something like) a reindex of 10M entries (that kind of data is pretty small really: it's the kind of database you might use as a test set on your laptop interactively). Figure each modification is atomic, and that the b-tree height of the storage is ~4. So that's 40M writes to create an index, or $400!<p>Seriously? Again, this is the kind of task you'd expect to do quickly and interactively on your development box, and it costs a price of the same order as your day's salary (!) to execute in the cloud?<p>Looking at this from the perspective of the underlying I/O device: this index consumes just a tiny, tiny fraction of a hard disk drive's capacity. Yet creating it costs enough to <i>buy the device</i> several times over?<p>Something is wrong. Is that a misquote or have I misunderstood?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Strom</author><text>$0.10 per 100k writes is just a way of them billing you. Sure it's a lot compared to your avarage HDD price, but the data is hosted on at least 3 datacenters at all times, running google's software stack &#38; everything is being constantly monitored by Google's SRE team.<p>App Engine pricing might seem expensive if you try to do a simple table comparsion with alternatives, but when you get more deeply into it you'll find that a lot of stuff that is included in the service with GAE will cost you extra when you use the alternatives.</text></comment> | <story><title>App Engine charges $6,500 to update a ListProperty on 14.1 million entities</title><url>http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine/browse_thread/thread/f85aa58e54ebb8ae#</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ajross</author><text>Reading the thread (I'm curious about GAE, not an expert), it seems like the details aren't clear at all. Neither the original poster nor the Google rep seem to have a clear idea of what I/O operations are being generated.<p>But this bit stood out: $0.10 per 100k writes. That price seems to be far too high. The poster is doing (something like) a reindex of 10M entries (that kind of data is pretty small really: it's the kind of database you might use as a test set on your laptop interactively). Figure each modification is atomic, and that the b-tree height of the storage is ~4. So that's 40M writes to create an index, or $400!<p>Seriously? Again, this is the kind of task you'd expect to do quickly and interactively on your development box, and it costs a price of the same order as your day's salary (!) to execute in the cloud?<p>Looking at this from the perspective of the underlying I/O device: this index consumes just a tiny, tiny fraction of a hard disk drive's capacity. Yet creating it costs enough to <i>buy the device</i> several times over?<p>Something is wrong. Is that a misquote or have I misunderstood?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>magicalhobo</author><text>&#62; So that's 40M writes to create an index, or $400!<p>At $0.10 per 100k writes, 40M would be $40.</text></comment> |
19,630,108 | 19,629,757 | 1 | 3 | 19,629,513 | train | <story><title>Is Anyone Listening to You on Alexa? A Global Team Reviews Audio</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-10/is-anyone-listening-to-you-on-alexa-a-global-team-reviews-audio</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bduerst</author><text>By that logic, any device with a microphone and potential to record should not exist.<p>Smart speakers are not telephone calls, and even if they were, federal law only requires consent of one party to record (11 states require all-party consent).<p>In public spaces, you generally lose any right to consent to recording. If you&#x27;re in someone else&#x27;s home and they record you with their smart speaker device, then your beef is with that person whose private property you&#x27;re being recorded on. Same as if they were recording you with their phone&#x27;s camera in their private residence, vs recording you in a public space.</text></item><item><author>subway</author><text>&gt; which makes smart speakers basically impossible to exist.<p>Then perhaps in their current form, they shouldn&#x27;t exist. It&#x27;s already illegal to record people without their consent in many states. We shouldn&#x27;t give up this right to privacy for a bit of convenience.</text></item><item><author>ipsum2</author><text>I don&#x27;t work for Amazon or Google, but I agree with them in this case.<p>I read through the full text of the bill (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ilga.gov&#x2F;legislation&#x2F;fulltext.asp?DocName=&amp;SessionId=108&amp;GA=101&amp;DocTypeId=SB&amp;DocNum=1719&amp;GAID=15&amp;LegID=&amp;SpecSess=&amp;Session=" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ilga.gov&#x2F;legislation&#x2F;fulltext.asp?DocName=&amp;Sessio...</a>) and it seems like it sounds like the companies can be sued if one user agrees to a written policy, but then is used by another user (e.g. a spouse or sibling or friend), which makes smart speakers basically impossible to exist. (User identification isn&#x27;t good enough, and even if it were, mistakes can happen)<p>&gt; No private
entity may turn on or enable, cause to be turned on or enabled,
or otherwise use a digital device&#x27;s microphone to listen for or
collect information, including spoken words or other audible or
inaudible sounds, unless a user first agrees to a written
policy informing the user[..]</text></item><item><author>Despegar</author><text>Well what a coincidence<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;matthewstoller&#x2F;status&#x2F;1115991653662195713" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;matthewstoller&#x2F;status&#x2F;111599165366219571...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ridgeguy</author><text>I don’t agree. In your example, being in someone else’s home doesn’t put you in a public space for purposes of recording consent.<p>A dumb recording device can’t do something illegal without its owner’s&#x2F;user’s affirmative action. If the homeowner uses the recording thing illegally they’re liable for that use.<p>In contrast, Alexa and similar devices operate on rules built-in by their builders. They do what their builders intend, not what applicable law or their owners require. Liability should rest with the builders.</text></comment> | <story><title>Is Anyone Listening to You on Alexa? A Global Team Reviews Audio</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-10/is-anyone-listening-to-you-on-alexa-a-global-team-reviews-audio</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bduerst</author><text>By that logic, any device with a microphone and potential to record should not exist.<p>Smart speakers are not telephone calls, and even if they were, federal law only requires consent of one party to record (11 states require all-party consent).<p>In public spaces, you generally lose any right to consent to recording. If you&#x27;re in someone else&#x27;s home and they record you with their smart speaker device, then your beef is with that person whose private property you&#x27;re being recorded on. Same as if they were recording you with their phone&#x27;s camera in their private residence, vs recording you in a public space.</text></item><item><author>subway</author><text>&gt; which makes smart speakers basically impossible to exist.<p>Then perhaps in their current form, they shouldn&#x27;t exist. It&#x27;s already illegal to record people without their consent in many states. We shouldn&#x27;t give up this right to privacy for a bit of convenience.</text></item><item><author>ipsum2</author><text>I don&#x27;t work for Amazon or Google, but I agree with them in this case.<p>I read through the full text of the bill (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ilga.gov&#x2F;legislation&#x2F;fulltext.asp?DocName=&amp;SessionId=108&amp;GA=101&amp;DocTypeId=SB&amp;DocNum=1719&amp;GAID=15&amp;LegID=&amp;SpecSess=&amp;Session=" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ilga.gov&#x2F;legislation&#x2F;fulltext.asp?DocName=&amp;Sessio...</a>) and it seems like it sounds like the companies can be sued if one user agrees to a written policy, but then is used by another user (e.g. a spouse or sibling or friend), which makes smart speakers basically impossible to exist. (User identification isn&#x27;t good enough, and even if it were, mistakes can happen)<p>&gt; No private
entity may turn on or enable, cause to be turned on or enabled,
or otherwise use a digital device&#x27;s microphone to listen for or
collect information, including spoken words or other audible or
inaudible sounds, unless a user first agrees to a written
policy informing the user[..]</text></item><item><author>Despegar</author><text>Well what a coincidence<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;matthewstoller&#x2F;status&#x2F;1115991653662195713" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;matthewstoller&#x2F;status&#x2F;111599165366219571...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>subway</author><text>The telephone is only relevant in some jurisdictions. For instance in Illlinois (an all-party state), you cannot record a private <i>conversation</i>. There&#x27;s no mention of a phone or telecoms, and you should expect to get sued if you&#x27;re in a conference room recording folks without their consent.</text></comment> |
31,733,462 | 31,733,435 | 1 | 2 | 31,732,048 | train | <story><title>Thank HN: Five months ago, I was feeling like a loser, now I am opposite</title><text>I posted this a few months ago: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=29709273" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=29709273</a><p>I thought I hated programming and was ready to quit or even divorce my wife. I was not able to have a normal conversation with anyone. I was burned out but I thought I was having midlife crisis.<p>My wife wanted to buy a big house and I kept blaming her for the stress.<p>My job was easy and I had a lot of control over my time, work location, etc. I didn&#x27;t think it could be the job that was causing me feel depressed.<p>What I didn&#x27;t realize while my work gave me freedom on work schedule, it didn&#x27;t give me any real freedom to make important decisions. We were checkmark driven company. I was forced to do a lot of compliance and security related tasks which added zero benefit to our service.<p>After my post, I decided that I either move into management at my last company or get a new job. I worked longer hours and spent all my free time doing LeetCode.<p>LeetCode was hard and pointless. But I was motivated and was able to solve most easy and medium question in 30 mins. However, that was not good enough for FAANGs.<p>I applied to some smaller companies and got a few offers. I picked one really great Series D startup. I believe in their mission and I have freedom to make real decisions here. I got a decent bump in my salary but not really FAANG TC.<p>However, more importantly, work is 1000 times more exciting. I feel alive again. Wife and I are not fighting anymore. I work longer hours but have more energy at the end of day.<p>I just want to thank everyone that responded to my post and tell everyone that if you find your work or life unfulfilling, change your job now!</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>_carbyau_</author><text>Lines you won&#x27;t see on a gravestone:<p>&quot;I wish I had worked more.&quot;<p>&quot;I wish I had a less meaningful relationship with my wife.&quot;</text></item><item><author>sacrosancty</author><text>Just a suggestion, but if your relationship with your wife depends on your personal circumstances and mood, then it sounds not very strong. Might be worth taking advantage of this good period to do some relationship strengthening exercises while you can so that when the next downturn happens, you can both understand each other&#x27;s and your own feelings better. I&#x27;m not talking about random activities like going to the beach but finding a good self-help book or therapist and sitting down together working through it regularly. It&#x27;s easy for problems to grow silently until they&#x27;re too big to fix. Relationships are far more important than jobs, money or houses.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>theGeatZhopa</author><text>… I wish I was little bit taller<p>I wish I was a baller<p>I wish I had a girl who looked good, I would call her<p>I wish I had a rabbit in a hat with a bat,
And a six four Impala</text></comment> | <story><title>Thank HN: Five months ago, I was feeling like a loser, now I am opposite</title><text>I posted this a few months ago: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=29709273" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=29709273</a><p>I thought I hated programming and was ready to quit or even divorce my wife. I was not able to have a normal conversation with anyone. I was burned out but I thought I was having midlife crisis.<p>My wife wanted to buy a big house and I kept blaming her for the stress.<p>My job was easy and I had a lot of control over my time, work location, etc. I didn&#x27;t think it could be the job that was causing me feel depressed.<p>What I didn&#x27;t realize while my work gave me freedom on work schedule, it didn&#x27;t give me any real freedom to make important decisions. We were checkmark driven company. I was forced to do a lot of compliance and security related tasks which added zero benefit to our service.<p>After my post, I decided that I either move into management at my last company or get a new job. I worked longer hours and spent all my free time doing LeetCode.<p>LeetCode was hard and pointless. But I was motivated and was able to solve most easy and medium question in 30 mins. However, that was not good enough for FAANGs.<p>I applied to some smaller companies and got a few offers. I picked one really great Series D startup. I believe in their mission and I have freedom to make real decisions here. I got a decent bump in my salary but not really FAANG TC.<p>However, more importantly, work is 1000 times more exciting. I feel alive again. Wife and I are not fighting anymore. I work longer hours but have more energy at the end of day.<p>I just want to thank everyone that responded to my post and tell everyone that if you find your work or life unfulfilling, change your job now!</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>_carbyau_</author><text>Lines you won&#x27;t see on a gravestone:<p>&quot;I wish I had worked more.&quot;<p>&quot;I wish I had a less meaningful relationship with my wife.&quot;</text></item><item><author>sacrosancty</author><text>Just a suggestion, but if your relationship with your wife depends on your personal circumstances and mood, then it sounds not very strong. Might be worth taking advantage of this good period to do some relationship strengthening exercises while you can so that when the next downturn happens, you can both understand each other&#x27;s and your own feelings better. I&#x27;m not talking about random activities like going to the beach but finding a good self-help book or therapist and sitting down together working through it regularly. It&#x27;s easy for problems to grow silently until they&#x27;re too big to fix. Relationships are far more important than jobs, money or houses.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ungamedplayer</author><text>Along with &quot;npm install ...&quot;</text></comment> |
8,330,363 | 8,330,250 | 1 | 2 | 8,328,760 | train | <story><title>JavaScript for OS X Automation</title><url>https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/mac/releasenotes/InterapplicationCommunication/RN-JavaScriptForAutomation/index.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>andyfleming</author><text>I found this nice simple, contrasting comparison of syntax from the last discussion about this (thought it would be worth sharing).<p>Here is some of the new JavaScript syntax:<p><pre><code> Mail.outgoingMessages.whose({subject:&#x27;JavaScript&#x27;})
</code></pre>
Here is what it looks like in AppleScript<p><pre><code> tell application &quot;Mail&quot;
set msgs to every outgoing message whose subject is &#x27;JavsScript&#x27;
end tell
</code></pre>
While the AppleScript sounds logical, the JavaScript syntax just feels so comfortable and familiar (obviously).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Tloewald</author><text>The problem isn&#x27;t the AppleScript&#x27;s wordiness, it&#x27;s that knowing the exact way to phrase a command correctly is horrible (and it doesn&#x27;t help AppleScript is implicitly strongly typed).<p>In HyperTalk you could write something like put 4 + 4, get it; or set fred to 4 + 4; or put 4 + 4 into fred. You could leave quotes off a string, or put quotes on a number, and it would usually &quot;just work&quot;. This made HyperTalk easy for non-programmers to write, yet still easy for programmers to write well (and debug). AppleScript allows even more syntactic constructs than HyperTalk, but they all turn out to be semantically different in incompatible ways. (It&#x27;s very much like they map directly onto C++&#x27;s . -&gt; * and &amp; directly.) So if you can set fred to 4 + 4, you probably can&#x27;t put 4 + 4 into fred. (I&#x27;m pulling these examples out of my ass without looking up actual syntax because I can&#x27;t be bothered.)<p>I went from being a competent HyperTalk programmer to &quot;godlike&quot; thanks to a book by Danny Goodman (The HyperTalk Bible, I think). When AppleScript came out, Apple commissioned Goodman to write the definitive book on AppleScript -- I read it and still couldn&#x27;t get anywhere. AppleScript is kind of like Blender. I can eventually figure out how to do anything, but knowledge of how I did it evaporates almost instantly. It&#x27;s perhaps the worst programming language I have ever actually tried to master.<p>Danny Goodman later wrote books on JavaScript and DHTML which, for their time, were just as great as his HyperTalk stuff, but no-one has ever been able to make AppleScript not suck (for me, anyway).</text></comment> | <story><title>JavaScript for OS X Automation</title><url>https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/mac/releasenotes/InterapplicationCommunication/RN-JavaScriptForAutomation/index.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>andyfleming</author><text>I found this nice simple, contrasting comparison of syntax from the last discussion about this (thought it would be worth sharing).<p>Here is some of the new JavaScript syntax:<p><pre><code> Mail.outgoingMessages.whose({subject:&#x27;JavaScript&#x27;})
</code></pre>
Here is what it looks like in AppleScript<p><pre><code> tell application &quot;Mail&quot;
set msgs to every outgoing message whose subject is &#x27;JavsScript&#x27;
end tell
</code></pre>
While the AppleScript sounds logical, the JavaScript syntax just feels so comfortable and familiar (obviously).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>js2</author><text>For a while, there was a wonderful third-party alternative to Applescript known as &quot;appscript&quot;[0]. Your example above in Python would&#x27;ve been:<p><pre><code> app(&#x27;Mail&#x27;).outgoingMessages[its.subject==&#x27;JavaScript&#x27;]
</code></pre>
Appscript also had bindings for Ruby and ObjC.<p>Unfortunately, Apple deprecated the underlying API in 10.6 that made appscript possible and never provided a suitable replacement[1].<p>As always though, the problem wasn&#x27;t Applescript, but rather limited support for Apple Events by applications. Unless that problem is fixed, adding Javascript support to the OSA isn&#x27;t going to help much.<p>[0] <a href="http://appscript.sourceforge.net/index.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;appscript.sourceforge.net&#x2F;index.html</a><p>[1] <a href="http://appscript.sourceforge.net/status.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;appscript.sourceforge.net&#x2F;status.html</a><p>Edited to add: I see the author of appscript has additional criticism linked to elsewhere from this thread - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8329408" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8329408</a></text></comment> |
31,068,420 | 31,066,613 | 1 | 2 | 31,034,543 | train | <story><title>Ancient tombs and statues unearthed beneath Notre Dame Cathedral</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/apr/14/ancient-tombs-statues-notre-dame-cathedral-archaeological-dig</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>giantg2</author><text>&quot;We uncovered all these riches just 10-15cm under the floor slabs. It was completely unexpected.&quot;<p>They never did any scans? I remember being a kid and learning about how some old churches would entomb people directly under the floor (not catacombs).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>asdff</author><text>It doesn&#x27;t seem like the notre dame was the best curated cathedral based on my readings since the fire. The alarm system failed and was far from modern, actually very crude with the guard physically walking to where the fire was reported (which wasn&#x27;t even where it was), vs it automatically calling the fire department and a specialized team directly and not some half asleep security guard on the night shift. The restoration team working on the roof at the time were all smoking cigarettes and investigators still haven&#x27;t been able to rule out a mere cigarette causing the blaze. No sprinklers to speak of despite similar fires affecting similar buildings and causing similar billions in damage. No other preventative measures as far as i&#x27;m aware; other cathedrals have been covering their beams with fire retardant material. The state owns all the cathedrals but doesn&#x27;t insure them, so restoration currently has been reliant on donors, and to me its still an open question if it will ever be completely restored as planned (since some donors have even backed out). The fact the building survived seems to be because firefighters guarded the towers and allowed the roof to burn itself out on top of the stone vault which contained it.</text></comment> | <story><title>Ancient tombs and statues unearthed beneath Notre Dame Cathedral</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/apr/14/ancient-tombs-statues-notre-dame-cathedral-archaeological-dig</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>giantg2</author><text>&quot;We uncovered all these riches just 10-15cm under the floor slabs. It was completely unexpected.&quot;<p>They never did any scans? I remember being a kid and learning about how some old churches would entomb people directly under the floor (not catacombs).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Swizec</author><text>&gt; some old churches would entomb people<p>I remember visiting the Westminster Abbey. It’s full of famous dead people. Marked floor tiles and all.<p>Chaucer, Darwin, Newton, Dickens, lots of kings and queens all right under your feet.</text></comment> |
9,614,067 | 9,614,115 | 1 | 3 | 9,611,219 | train | <story><title>Ask HN: What are your recommended reads that are available for free?</title><text>I recently stumbled across a link in another thread to &quot;Economics in One Lesson&quot; and thought it was incredibly interesting.
https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mises.org&#x2F;sites&#x2F;default&#x2F;files&#x2F;Economics%20in%20One%20Lesson_2.pdf<p>What are some other interesting reads—whether PDF, website, doc, etc—that are freely available?<p>One of my favorites that I find thought-provoking is the &quot;Procedural Content Generation in Games&quot; book (http:&#x2F;&#x2F;pcgbook.com&#x2F;).</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>anthony_romeo</author><text>Just a bit of caution. The Ludwig von Mises Institute is a group devoted to specifically advocating one branch of economics, Austrian Economics. Part of this branch is staunch Libertarianism, but they don&#x27;t believe in several aspects which are typical in mainstream economic branches, such as using statistical modeling and mathematics to draw conclusions about economic status or action.<p>I&#x27;m not here to debate the merits of the Austrian branch compared to other branches. I just think that it&#x27;s important to have a general and unbiased understanding of the other branches of economics before reading a text which is effectively a criticism of those branches and an advocacy for one specific branch.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mindcrime</author><text><i>but they don&#x27;t believe in several aspects which are typical in mainstream economic branches, such as using statistical modeling and mathematics to draw conclusions about economic status or action</i><p>To be fair, that doesn&#x27;t mean they are wrong. Certainly we&#x27;ve seen plenty of cases where people built incredibly complex, elegant and expressive models of economic systems, which turned out to be completely broken.<p>That said, I know of at least some Austrian economists who think the Austrian school should make some effort to better ground their ideas with mathematical formulations, but I haven&#x27;t followed things closely enough to know if much, or any, work has actually been done in that regard.</text></comment> | <story><title>Ask HN: What are your recommended reads that are available for free?</title><text>I recently stumbled across a link in another thread to &quot;Economics in One Lesson&quot; and thought it was incredibly interesting.
https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mises.org&#x2F;sites&#x2F;default&#x2F;files&#x2F;Economics%20in%20One%20Lesson_2.pdf<p>What are some other interesting reads—whether PDF, website, doc, etc—that are freely available?<p>One of my favorites that I find thought-provoking is the &quot;Procedural Content Generation in Games&quot; book (http:&#x2F;&#x2F;pcgbook.com&#x2F;).</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>anthony_romeo</author><text>Just a bit of caution. The Ludwig von Mises Institute is a group devoted to specifically advocating one branch of economics, Austrian Economics. Part of this branch is staunch Libertarianism, but they don&#x27;t believe in several aspects which are typical in mainstream economic branches, such as using statistical modeling and mathematics to draw conclusions about economic status or action.<p>I&#x27;m not here to debate the merits of the Austrian branch compared to other branches. I just think that it&#x27;s important to have a general and unbiased understanding of the other branches of economics before reading a text which is effectively a criticism of those branches and an advocacy for one specific branch.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hodwik</author><text>In a chaotic system, arriving at abstractions of the forces at play often gives a more illuminating picture than trying to model those systems from weakly-linked data points.<p>It&#x27;s not that Austrian economists can&#x27;t find their own data models to defend their positions, with an area like economics finding data to support your opinions is the easy part.<p>Rather, we&#x27;ve found that obsessing over the data provides very little understanding of the underlying cause-and-effect of economics.<p>It&#x27;s like neurology. Yes, it&#x27;s a terribly interesting field, but you&#x27;ll learn more about the human mind from reading Proust.</text></comment> |
2,500,573 | 2,500,411 | 1 | 2 | 2,500,082 | train | <story><title>Workers Leaving the Googleplex</title><url>http://www.andrewnormanwilson.com/portfolios/70411-workers-leaving-the-googleplex</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>systems</author><text>Hey, first I am from Egypt.<p>Second, I have to admit, I am kind of struct by most of the comments here. Most of the comment are pro google and think andrew here got it for himself.<p>I believe this have to do a lot with cultural differences here. Most people in Egypt, would stand with the employee against the corporation. Most egyptians would definitely be pro andrew. I believe the reason here is that most Egyptians are either employees or owners of very small businesses, and would not perceive themselves as even potentially large business owners. Egypt being a poorer country and all. This is why most Egyptian would never try to put themselves in google's foot and try to see things from their perspective.<p>I guess the opposite is true from most of the ppl commenting here, they must think if I was google, I would have done the same, and it's probably because they don't see it as too far fetched. Either that or the western population is becomming alarmingly submissive to authority and unwilling to question their action.<p>Google are clearly being unfair, this should not be acceptable.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>trotsky</author><text>You have to understand that in the US there has been a significant anti-labor campaign, both in the media and in politics for at least the last 40 or 50 years. It's been reasonably effective, and took serious hold in the 1980's - many of the posters here have grown up in a world where labor issues are mostly only discussed in a context of how worker demands are holding back corporations. It's difficult to not have your attitudes effectively co-opted if you're only exposed to one side of the argument for most of your life.</text></comment> | <story><title>Workers Leaving the Googleplex</title><url>http://www.andrewnormanwilson.com/portfolios/70411-workers-leaving-the-googleplex</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>systems</author><text>Hey, first I am from Egypt.<p>Second, I have to admit, I am kind of struct by most of the comments here. Most of the comment are pro google and think andrew here got it for himself.<p>I believe this have to do a lot with cultural differences here. Most people in Egypt, would stand with the employee against the corporation. Most egyptians would definitely be pro andrew. I believe the reason here is that most Egyptians are either employees or owners of very small businesses, and would not perceive themselves as even potentially large business owners. Egypt being a poorer country and all. This is why most Egyptian would never try to put themselves in google's foot and try to see things from their perspective.<p>I guess the opposite is true from most of the ppl commenting here, they must think if I was google, I would have done the same, and it's probably because they don't see it as too far fetched. Either that or the western population is becomming alarmingly submissive to authority and unwilling to question their action.<p>Google are clearly being unfair, this should not be acceptable.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nkassis</author><text>It's not that we think Google did it because they were hiding something but imaging those insinuations he was making end up in the press, and snowball, they decided they didn't want to deal with it and let him go, which is completely legal in most of the US with no reason needed.<p>Employment in the US is at-will or whatever it's called. You can leave your employment when you want and your employer can fire you when they want. This can obviously be overridden by a contract. I don't know what his said but it probably put some severance package in there. (1 month pay or whatever).<p>Not that might sound crazy why would that be OK but I prefer to work for someone who wants me to work for them then have some laws telling them they can't fire me without some crazy reason and have to go through a large process to do so.<p>As for the 4 classes of employees, I dunno about that but I mean those perks aren't rights they are used to entice people to work for a company and stay there. If they can get employees without them then why not. It's a for profit thing is it not?<p>And all this is why you can just go out and start your own company and never have to deal with that stuff ;p</text></comment> |
39,804,247 | 39,801,903 | 1 | 2 | 39,801,088 | train | <story><title>A Return to Blu-ray as Streaming Value Evaporates</title><url>https://www.audioholics.com/news/a-return-to-blu-ray-as-streaming-value-evaporates</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tombert</author><text>I have a pretty extensive blu-ray collection (almost 500 movies now, about 40 complete series). I almost never <i>watch</i> blu-rays directly, because I don&#x27;t want to muck with physical discs. Immediately after buying a movie, I remove the DRM with MakeMKV, and put it onto a Jellyfin server.<p>I know it&#x27;s (probably) not strictly legal for me to break the DRM of my movies, but I think I&#x27;m ethically in the clear; I&#x27;m not distributing the movies on ThePirateBay or anything, I just watch them within my home network...I think it would be pretty hard for anyone to demonstrate any <i>damages</i> from my habits.<p>Streaming is absolutely more convenient than physical discs, but it&#x27;s also objectively horrible for a company to be able to arbitrarily remove my media. With my discs, I always have a physical copy, so it&#x27;s more failure-proof.<p>That said, maintaining a server is a huge pain in the ass, and it&#x27;s something that really is limited to geeky people. Sure, as a software engineer I know enough to install NixOS and Jellyfin and I even get some kind of masochistic enjoyment from fixing things when they inevitably break, but I cannot imagine my mom going through anything like this, so for her the media landscape has gotten <i>only worse</i>.<p>Blu-rays really aren&#x27;t being produced anymore, so I suspect that the only sustainable preservation effort will end up being piracy, and this has been an issue long enough that the large media companies cannot pretend to not understand that.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rakoo</author><text>&gt; I cannot imagine my mom going through anything like this,<p>That&#x27;s why we have to post individualistically and learn that everything is social, that solutions are societal. Your mom might never be able to self-host, and you might never be able to make the wine that you drink. That&#x27;s fine, and that&#x27;s why we share responsibilities as a group. Be the one that &quot;knows how to do that king of things&quot; for your group, host services for you, your mom, your friends... It&#x27;s fun to do and a very good way to collectively re-appropriate our digital lives. You&#x27;ll be the technical person, but all governance, directions, values can be decided collectively: that&#x27;s what democratic societies are, after all. If you can&#x27;t&#x2F;don&#x27;t want to be there 24&#x2F;7, let the group know that it might break but maybe the group will decide that it&#x27;s fine enough.</text></comment> | <story><title>A Return to Blu-ray as Streaming Value Evaporates</title><url>https://www.audioholics.com/news/a-return-to-blu-ray-as-streaming-value-evaporates</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tombert</author><text>I have a pretty extensive blu-ray collection (almost 500 movies now, about 40 complete series). I almost never <i>watch</i> blu-rays directly, because I don&#x27;t want to muck with physical discs. Immediately after buying a movie, I remove the DRM with MakeMKV, and put it onto a Jellyfin server.<p>I know it&#x27;s (probably) not strictly legal for me to break the DRM of my movies, but I think I&#x27;m ethically in the clear; I&#x27;m not distributing the movies on ThePirateBay or anything, I just watch them within my home network...I think it would be pretty hard for anyone to demonstrate any <i>damages</i> from my habits.<p>Streaming is absolutely more convenient than physical discs, but it&#x27;s also objectively horrible for a company to be able to arbitrarily remove my media. With my discs, I always have a physical copy, so it&#x27;s more failure-proof.<p>That said, maintaining a server is a huge pain in the ass, and it&#x27;s something that really is limited to geeky people. Sure, as a software engineer I know enough to install NixOS and Jellyfin and I even get some kind of masochistic enjoyment from fixing things when they inevitably break, but I cannot imagine my mom going through anything like this, so for her the media landscape has gotten <i>only worse</i>.<p>Blu-rays really aren&#x27;t being produced anymore, so I suspect that the only sustainable preservation effort will end up being piracy, and this has been an issue long enough that the large media companies cannot pretend to not understand that.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>screamingninja</author><text>Do you watch those movies &#x2F; series more than once? I have always thought of Blu-ray disks like books. You consume it and then lend it to a friend. I get that this is not what the media companies would want, but purchasing media&#x2F;books and not using them more than once just feels wrong.</text></comment> |
29,322,423 | 29,322,611 | 1 | 2 | 29,318,648 | train | <story><title>Tech investors can’t get enough of Europe’s fizzing startup scene</title><url>https://www.economist.com/business/tech-investors-cant-get-enough-of-europes-fizzing-startup-scene/21806435</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>yoran</author><text>It&#x27;s paradoxical that entrepreneurship is less of a thing in the EU than in the US. After all, Europeans can afford a lot more risk than Americans. There&#x27;s a strong safety net in the form of social security. Health insurance is not tied to your employer. European university graduates don&#x27;t start with lives with several $100k in debt, while having gotten an education of similar quality. Maybe the culture is shifting?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>zemvpferreira</author><text>There is no paradox, only innocence. Did you know here in Portugal company directors used to be personally liable for social security payments for a business&#x27;s employees in case of bankruptcy, until the end of their former contract? That meant for every engineer you hire, you might easily be on the hook for 10K with the government in case you go under. Try failing fast with that.<p>America was built in part by swindlers and robber-barons in a system who let them get away with it by design. In many of Europe&#x27;s different legislations, failure in the bankruptcy way has&#x2F;had serious consequences for the business person responsible. Play fast and loose with your responsibilities like you might in the US, confident that the corporate veil will bail you as long as you don&#x27;t do anything criminal, and you might find yourself staring down the barrel of a loaded fiscal gun.</text></comment> | <story><title>Tech investors can’t get enough of Europe’s fizzing startup scene</title><url>https://www.economist.com/business/tech-investors-cant-get-enough-of-europes-fizzing-startup-scene/21806435</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>yoran</author><text>It&#x27;s paradoxical that entrepreneurship is less of a thing in the EU than in the US. After all, Europeans can afford a lot more risk than Americans. There&#x27;s a strong safety net in the form of social security. Health insurance is not tied to your employer. European university graduates don&#x27;t start with lives with several $100k in debt, while having gotten an education of similar quality. Maybe the culture is shifting?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>TTPrograms</author><text>1) Less upside for entrepreneurs&#x2F;investors&#x2F;early employees due to tax policy,<p>2) greater hiring&#x2F;firing friction due to stronger employee protections,<p>3) greater fixed operating costs&#x2F;overhead all around due to increased incorporation costs&#x2F;bureaucratic requirements.<p>I don&#x27;t think these things are necessarily negative, but in a world with competition between markets with high incorporation friction and low incorporation friction you&#x27;d expect entrepreneurship to concentrate in lower friction markets.</text></comment> |
31,412,064 | 31,412,322 | 1 | 2 | 31,411,191 | train | <story><title>I want an iPhone Mini-sized Android phone</title><url>https://smallandroidphone.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>izacus</author><text>These &quot;slow iPhone 13 mini&quot; sales are more than all Google Pixel phones sold in a year. Think about that.<p>I don&#x27;t understand when did the ability to choose a product fitting your preferences become a bad thing on HackerNews and modern American perception. Why is being able to buy niche products somehow not a worthy thing to be desired?</text></item><item><author>perardi</author><text><i>“matching size and design of iPhone 13 Mini”</i><p>So, by all accounts, the iPhone mini has been an extremely slow seller.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.macrumors.com&#x2F;2022&#x2F;04&#x2F;21&#x2F;iphone-13-mini-unpopular-march-quarter&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.macrumors.com&#x2F;2022&#x2F;04&#x2F;21&#x2F;iphone-13-mini-unpopula...</a><p>Why would that form factor succeed in the Android space?<p>---<p>I see these meme on tech sites all the time: “oh phones are too big I just want something simple”. That is a valid sentiment that I think is shared by basically no average consumer. For a <i>lot</i> of people, phones are their primary computing devices, so a big screen is nice there. Bigger phones allow for more battery capacity. Aging populations like them because you can use screen zoom features to really blow up that text size without making the effective viewport too small.<p>And…people just like big stuff. I know that’s simplistic and a little condescending, but then look at SUV and truck sales.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>reaperducer</author><text><i>I don&#x27;t understand when did the ability to choose a product fitting your preferences become a bad thing on HackerNews</i><p>Because so many on HN have been indoctrinated into the &quot;scale at all costs&quot; mentality.<p>It demonstrates the difference between HN and the real world.<p>On HN, if you can&#x27;t serve a billion people, your product is niche. In the real world, billions of people earn a very nice living making niche products.<p>It&#x27;s why so many people on HN don&#x27;t understand Panic, or its PlayDate. They don&#x27;t understand artisan anything. They&#x27;ve forgotten the whole hipster movement, which still exists in pockets of the world. They can&#x27;t grok that there are companies that have been in business for hundreds of years making products one at a time — by hand.<p>&quot;X doesn&#x27;t scale&quot; is HN for &quot;I know nothing about how the world works.&quot;</text></comment> | <story><title>I want an iPhone Mini-sized Android phone</title><url>https://smallandroidphone.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>izacus</author><text>These &quot;slow iPhone 13 mini&quot; sales are more than all Google Pixel phones sold in a year. Think about that.<p>I don&#x27;t understand when did the ability to choose a product fitting your preferences become a bad thing on HackerNews and modern American perception. Why is being able to buy niche products somehow not a worthy thing to be desired?</text></item><item><author>perardi</author><text><i>“matching size and design of iPhone 13 Mini”</i><p>So, by all accounts, the iPhone mini has been an extremely slow seller.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.macrumors.com&#x2F;2022&#x2F;04&#x2F;21&#x2F;iphone-13-mini-unpopular-march-quarter&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.macrumors.com&#x2F;2022&#x2F;04&#x2F;21&#x2F;iphone-13-mini-unpopula...</a><p>Why would that form factor succeed in the Android space?<p>---<p>I see these meme on tech sites all the time: “oh phones are too big I just want something simple”. That is a valid sentiment that I think is shared by basically no average consumer. For a <i>lot</i> of people, phones are their primary computing devices, so a big screen is nice there. Bigger phones allow for more battery capacity. Aging populations like them because you can use screen zoom features to really blow up that text size without making the effective viewport too small.<p>And…people just like big stuff. I know that’s simplistic and a little condescending, but then look at SUV and truck sales.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>d3nj4l</author><text>Much of that can be chalked down to the fact that Apple doesn&#x27;t have that many models they actively sell, so the models that they do tend to have way more than any individual Android model, and that the mini is the cheapest iPhone in the 13 line. I know a few people who went for the mini because it was marginally cheaper.</text></comment> |
18,060,548 | 18,060,583 | 1 | 2 | 18,060,201 | train | <story><title>Linux developers threaten to pull “kill switch”</title><url>https://lulz.com/linux-devs-threaten-killswitch-coc-controversy-1252/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Covzire</author><text>The alt-right, seriously?</text></item><item><author>chx</author><text>Sigh.<p>1. Most of Linux is written by paid contributors. They won&#x27;t leave.<p>2. Most of those who kindle this flamewar are not Linux contributors but the alt-right. They also got involved in the Larry Garfield-Drupal affair (which was extremely poorly communicated).<p>3. If I may offer an explanation on why Code of Conducts are important: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@chx&#x2F;a-note-from-an-open-source-lead-developer-who-got-banned-from-his-community-due-to-code-of-conduct-22d8f066ab9e" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@chx&#x2F;a-note-from-an-open-source-lead-deve...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>codemac</author><text>FTA:<p>&gt; unconditionedwitness@redchan<p>I&#x27;m not sure what I define redchan as, but alt-right isn&#x27;t a crazy description to me.</text></comment> | <story><title>Linux developers threaten to pull “kill switch”</title><url>https://lulz.com/linux-devs-threaten-killswitch-coc-controversy-1252/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Covzire</author><text>The alt-right, seriously?</text></item><item><author>chx</author><text>Sigh.<p>1. Most of Linux is written by paid contributors. They won&#x27;t leave.<p>2. Most of those who kindle this flamewar are not Linux contributors but the alt-right. They also got involved in the Larry Garfield-Drupal affair (which was extremely poorly communicated).<p>3. If I may offer an explanation on why Code of Conducts are important: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@chx&#x2F;a-note-from-an-open-source-lead-developer-who-got-banned-from-his-community-due-to-code-of-conduct-22d8f066ab9e" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@chx&#x2F;a-note-from-an-open-source-lead-deve...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>AdmiralAsshat</author><text>The email in question appears to originate from someone whose domain is &quot;@redchan...&quot;<p>So, I&#x27;d say it&#x27;s not inconceivable that the guy is alt-right.</text></comment> |
16,486,256 | 16,485,896 | 1 | 2 | 16,483,889 | train | <story><title>The Makefile I use with JavaScript projects</title><url>http://www.olioapps.com/blog/the-lost-art-of-the-makefile/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lisper</author><text>&gt; everything is—symbolically—a file<p>How are you going to make the result of a join in a relational database into a file, symbolically or otherwise?</text></item><item><author>derefr</author><text>&gt; Make has deeply woven into it the assumption that the product of workflows are files, and that the way you can tell the state of a file is by its last modification date.<p>I&#x27;ve always wondered whether Make would be seen as less of a grudging necessity, and more of an elegant panacea, if operating systems had gone the route of Plan 9, where everything is—<i>symbolically</i>—a file, even if it&#x27;s not a file in the sense of &quot;a byte-stream persisted on disk.&quot;<p>Or, to put that another way: have you ever considered writing a FUSE filesystem to expose workflow inputs as readable files, and expect outputs as file creation&#x2F;write calls—and then just throw Make at that?</text></item><item><author>lisper</author><text>&gt; It&#x27;s really a workflow automation tool,<p>That&#x27;s true.<p>&gt; and the UX for that is actually pretty close to what you would want.<p>That is so not true. Make has deeply woven into it the assumption that the product of workflows are files, and that the way you can tell the state of a file is by its last modification date. That&#x27;s often true for builds (which is why make works reasonably well for builds), but often not true for other kinds of workflows.<p>But regardless of that, a tool that makes a semantic distinction between tabs and spaces is NEVER the UX you want unless you&#x27;re a masochist.</text></item><item><author>rschloming</author><text>I think the reason make is both so controversial and also long-lived is that despite how everyone thinks of it, it isn&#x27;t really a build tool. It actually doesn&#x27;t know anything at all about how to build C, C++, or any other kind of code. (I know this is obvious to those of us that know make, but I often get the impression that a lot of people think of make as gradle or maven for C, which it really isn&#x27;t.) It&#x27;s really a workflow automation tool, and the UX for that is actually pretty close to what you would want. You can pretty trivially just copy tiresome sequences of shell commands that you started out typing manually into a Makefile and automate your workflow really easily without thinking too much. Of course that&#x27;s what shell scripts are for too, but make has an understanding of file based dependencies that lets you much more naturally express the automated steps in a way that&#x27;s a lot more efficient to run. A lot of more modern build tools mix up the workflow element with the build element (and in some cases with packaging and distribution as well), and so they are &quot;better than make&quot;, but only for a specific language and a specific workflow.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ori_b</author><text>On plan 9, you&#x27;d do something like:<p><pre><code> ctlfd = open(&quot;&#x2F;mnt&#x2F;sql&#x2F;ctl&quot;, OREAD|OWRITE);
write(fd, &quot;your query&quot;);
read(fd, resultpath);
resultfd = open(resultpath, OREAD);
read(fd, result);
close(resultfd);
</code></pre>
This is similar to the patterns used to open network connections or create new windows.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Makefile I use with JavaScript projects</title><url>http://www.olioapps.com/blog/the-lost-art-of-the-makefile/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lisper</author><text>&gt; everything is—symbolically—a file<p>How are you going to make the result of a join in a relational database into a file, symbolically or otherwise?</text></item><item><author>derefr</author><text>&gt; Make has deeply woven into it the assumption that the product of workflows are files, and that the way you can tell the state of a file is by its last modification date.<p>I&#x27;ve always wondered whether Make would be seen as less of a grudging necessity, and more of an elegant panacea, if operating systems had gone the route of Plan 9, where everything is—<i>symbolically</i>—a file, even if it&#x27;s not a file in the sense of &quot;a byte-stream persisted on disk.&quot;<p>Or, to put that another way: have you ever considered writing a FUSE filesystem to expose workflow inputs as readable files, and expect outputs as file creation&#x2F;write calls—and then just throw Make at that?</text></item><item><author>lisper</author><text>&gt; It&#x27;s really a workflow automation tool,<p>That&#x27;s true.<p>&gt; and the UX for that is actually pretty close to what you would want.<p>That is so not true. Make has deeply woven into it the assumption that the product of workflows are files, and that the way you can tell the state of a file is by its last modification date. That&#x27;s often true for builds (which is why make works reasonably well for builds), but often not true for other kinds of workflows.<p>But regardless of that, a tool that makes a semantic distinction between tabs and spaces is NEVER the UX you want unless you&#x27;re a masochist.</text></item><item><author>rschloming</author><text>I think the reason make is both so controversial and also long-lived is that despite how everyone thinks of it, it isn&#x27;t really a build tool. It actually doesn&#x27;t know anything at all about how to build C, C++, or any other kind of code. (I know this is obvious to those of us that know make, but I often get the impression that a lot of people think of make as gradle or maven for C, which it really isn&#x27;t.) It&#x27;s really a workflow automation tool, and the UX for that is actually pretty close to what you would want. You can pretty trivially just copy tiresome sequences of shell commands that you started out typing manually into a Makefile and automate your workflow really easily without thinking too much. Of course that&#x27;s what shell scripts are for too, but make has an understanding of file based dependencies that lets you much more naturally express the automated steps in a way that&#x27;s a lot more efficient to run. A lot of more modern build tools mix up the workflow element with the build element (and in some cases with packaging and distribution as well), and so they are &quot;better than make&quot;, but only for a specific language and a specific workflow.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>com2kid</author><text>&gt; How are you going to make the result of a join in a relational database into a file, symbolically or otherwise?<p>A file that represents the temporary table that has been created. Naming it is harder, unless the SQL query writer was feeling nice and verbose.</text></comment> |
7,735,797 | 7,734,665 | 1 | 2 | 7,734,363 | train | <story><title>OAuth Security Cheatsheet</title><url>http://www.oauthsecurity.com/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>stormbrew</author><text>The place I work for deals with about 20 different site&#x27;s oauth processes and it&#x27;s amazing how widely varied they are. Some of them let you restrict the redirect_uri while others don&#x27;t, some of them still need you to send a login&#x2F;password pair for the first request rather than do an oauth flow, but then still use oauth-style tokens all over the place. A couple of them <i>require</i> that the token be passed as a query string parameter instead of as a header for all requests. Being responsibly secure with all of them is quite difficult. It doesn&#x27;t help that it&#x27;s very difficult to have a development environment work properly with them, so doing active work against them is often painful.<p>OAuth is basically a complete mess, implementation-wise, and that&#x27;s really sad since it&#x27;s such a promising and useful premise.</text></comment> | <story><title>OAuth Security Cheatsheet</title><url>http://www.oauthsecurity.com/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>homakov</author><text>It&#x27;s using free plan on heroku, so if it will be down repo is available at <a href="https://github.com/homakov/oauthsecurity" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;homakov&#x2F;oauthsecurity</a></text></comment> |
15,299,164 | 15,299,207 | 1 | 2 | 15,298,862 | train | <story><title>French chef asks to be stripped of three Michelin stars</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/20/sebastien-bras-french-chef-three-michelin-stars-le-suquet-laguiole</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>rjzzleep</author><text>He&#x27;s not the only one. [1][3]<p>In fact some places like Kyo Aji from Kenichiro Nishi - who is apparently a very good and famous chef - go as far as ban michelin tourists. Or at least try to.<p>Just look at this discussion on chowhound [2]. Interesting comment:<p>&gt; Kyoaji is probably sick of rich foreigners trying to book via 5 star hotel concierges. Maybe change your strategy, and stay at a budget salaryman hotel and use their concierge?<p>[1]: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2008&#x2F;02&#x2F;24&#x2F;business&#x2F;worldbusiness&#x2F;24guide.html?mcubz=1" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2008&#x2F;02&#x2F;24&#x2F;business&#x2F;worldbusiness&#x2F;24g...</a><p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.chowhound.com&#x2F;post&#x2F;secure-kyoaji-reservation-930916" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.chowhound.com&#x2F;post&#x2F;secure-kyoaji-reservation-930...</a><p>[3]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vanityfair.com&#x2F;culture&#x2F;2015&#x2F;09&#x2F;top-chefs-michelin-stars" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vanityfair.com&#x2F;culture&#x2F;2015&#x2F;09&#x2F;top-chefs-micheli...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>French chef asks to be stripped of three Michelin stars</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/20/sebastien-bras-french-chef-three-michelin-stars-le-suquet-laguiole</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>nwhatt</author><text>Part of me wonders if he wants to be removed in protest, or if he wants to sort of exit with three stars, and not have to deal with being perceived as lower quality by losing a star.<p>I don’t speak French, but here’s the video announcing it: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.facebook.com&#x2F;BrasOfficiel&#x2F;videos&#x2F;vb.1903236566598979&#x2F;1946897092232926" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.facebook.com&#x2F;BrasOfficiel&#x2F;videos&#x2F;vb.190323656659...</a></text></comment> |
26,754,535 | 26,754,457 | 1 | 3 | 26,752,721 | train | <story><title>SEC Charges 1inMM Capital, LLC with Operating a $690M Ponzi Scheme</title><url>https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2021-58</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>anm89</author><text>It&#x27;s a shame that the word Ponzi scheme is so abused that when I see something labled a Ponzi scheme my expectation is that it is not actually a Ponzi scheme.<p>Where as this is a real Ponzi scheme. The business was totally made up, and it was a front to get investor money to cycle to other investors:<p>&gt;in fact, neither Horwitz nor 1inMM had ever sold any movie rights to, or done any business with, HBO or Netflix.<p>Crazy that people think they can get away with this stuff. Ponzi schemes seem guaranteed to blow up over a long enough time horizon.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mherdeg</author><text>Ponzi schemes can operate in the open for a pretty long time.<p>As of late 2007 it was pretty clear that Agape World Inc. was a classic Ponzi scheme (see FatWallet forum thread full of promoters and onlookers patiently explaining the scam at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20080503040727&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fatwallet.com&#x2F;forums&#x2F;finance&#x2F;780511&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20080503040727&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fatwal...</a> ). They claimed to offer &quot;commercial bridge loans&quot;, which to a limited extent they actually did, though they were mostly paying investors other investors&#x27; money.<p>They operated apparently with impunity throughout 2008 and the arrest wasn&#x27;t until Jan 2009, with years of further criminal charges helping unravel the scam ( e.g. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archives.fbi.gov&#x2F;archives&#x2F;newyork&#x2F;press-releases&#x2F;2011&#x2F;former-agape-world-inc.-owner-and-president-sentenced-to-25-years-imprisonment-for-multi-million-dollar-ponzi-scheme" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archives.fbi.gov&#x2F;archives&#x2F;newyork&#x2F;press-releases&#x2F;201...</a> , <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.justice.gov&#x2F;usao-edny&#x2F;pr&#x2F;largest-grossing-broker-agape-ponzi-scheme-sentenced-108-months-imprisonment" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.justice.gov&#x2F;usao-edny&#x2F;pr&#x2F;largest-grossing-broker...</a> ).<p>It was just fascinating to spend all of 2008 reading that forum thread being vividly suspicious that folks were being scammed in broad daylight for a year.</text></comment> | <story><title>SEC Charges 1inMM Capital, LLC with Operating a $690M Ponzi Scheme</title><url>https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2021-58</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>anm89</author><text>It&#x27;s a shame that the word Ponzi scheme is so abused that when I see something labled a Ponzi scheme my expectation is that it is not actually a Ponzi scheme.<p>Where as this is a real Ponzi scheme. The business was totally made up, and it was a front to get investor money to cycle to other investors:<p>&gt;in fact, neither Horwitz nor 1inMM had ever sold any movie rights to, or done any business with, HBO or Netflix.<p>Crazy that people think they can get away with this stuff. Ponzi schemes seem guaranteed to blow up over a long enough time horizon.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Bukhmanizer</author><text>&gt; Crazy that people think they can get away with this stuff. Ponzi schemes seem guaranteed to blow up over a long enough time horizon.<p>I just finished a podcast on Madoff, and I found myself wondering if he just assumed he would eventually get caught. The man lived like a literal king for like 40 years, and only got caught in his 70’s. It’s not a tradeoff that I would take, but I wonder if for some people, prison is the assumed endgame, and the goal is to keep the plates spinning for as long as possible.</text></comment> |
34,804,872 | 34,804,513 | 1 | 3 | 34,802,160 | train | <story><title>Shoichiro Toyoda, who turned Toyota into global automaker, has died</title><url>https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20230214/p2g/00m/0bu/043000c</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ChrisMarshallNY</author><text><i>&gt; establishing a culture of quality control that helped Toyota evolve into a world-leading automaker.</i><p>A lot of the JIT stuff that is so common, these days, was revolutionary, when he introduced it.<p>I&#x27;m told that many agile techniques also had their genesis in his work.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ughitsaaron</author><text>&gt; I&#x27;m told that many agile techniques also had their genesis in his work<p>The “kanban” interfaces definitely originate from Toyota. Scrum was influenced by Toyota’s management techniques, among others. I believe other familiar concepts, e.g. “kaizen” or continuous improvement, also originate from Toyota.</text></comment> | <story><title>Shoichiro Toyoda, who turned Toyota into global automaker, has died</title><url>https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20230214/p2g/00m/0bu/043000c</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ChrisMarshallNY</author><text><i>&gt; establishing a culture of quality control that helped Toyota evolve into a world-leading automaker.</i><p>A lot of the JIT stuff that is so common, these days, was revolutionary, when he introduced it.<p>I&#x27;m told that many agile techniques also had their genesis in his work.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>oblio</author><text>I wonder if Deming (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;W._Edwards_Deming#Japan" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;W._Edwards_Deming#Japan</a>) contributed to the Toyota Way? A lot of the Toyota Way seems inspired by his teachings.</text></comment> |
26,610,816 | 26,610,160 | 1 | 3 | 26,609,482 | train | <story><title>Piano Practice Software Progress</title><url>https://jacquesmattheij.com/piano-practice-software-progress/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>yboris</author><text>Must share my favorite piece of piano + software conjunction: <i>Pianoteq</i> [0] see the video and hear how amazing it is [1]<p><i>Pianoteq</i> makes digital pianos sound like a real piano without using pre-recorded samples, but by instead generating sound via an advanced model.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.modartt.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.modartt.com&#x2F;</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=wvGTsIkdsBU" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=wvGTsIkdsBU</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Piano Practice Software Progress</title><url>https://jacquesmattheij.com/piano-practice-software-progress/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>gus_massa</author><text>I tried the webpage, and I got<p>&gt; <i>WebMIDI is supported in this browser</i><p>Do I need a MIDI wire to connect the piano or the page can heard the sound? (Sound recognitions looks very difficult.)<p>It would be nice to add some example with a graphic in the paragraph about labeling the scores for non musicians. (My wife plays the piano and guitar, but not professionally. I understand the that D♭ is somewhat equivalent to C♯ in a piano, but using the wrong one in a score is as bad as an unmatched parenthesis. But don&#x27;t ask me the details.<p>I was going to ask if you support DoReMiFaSolLaSi, but it looks like another rabbit hole <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Musical_note#12-tone_chromatic_scale" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Musical_note#12-tone_chromatic...</a></text></comment> |
32,821,362 | 32,813,117 | 1 | 2 | 32,811,182 | train | <story><title>Apple’s next big thing: A business model change</title><url>https://mondaynote.com/apples-next-big-thing-a-business-model-change-e9b0145500c9?gi=176846fdbc6d</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>superdug</author><text>Am I a realist on Apple Apologist?<p>My primary credit card is an apple card, primary dev machine is a mbp, primary work machine iPad, phone iPhone, watch Apple, and I have air tags attached to my dogs and wallet.<p>In this ecosystem, I can reference _ANY_ of my screens for necessary and current relevant information whether it be curated or automated without breaking a glance to whatever primary device the content came from.<p>I can air drop to my screens and other people in my family whenever I want to share anything from any of my devices.<p>It&#x27;s a walled garden sure, but the toys in here are fantastic.<p>I also have Apple One service because of the iCloud storage alone between devices and Apple Music&#x2F;News is actually a nice service.<p>So I guess I understand the &quot;Oh no big company taking over more of my stuff that I think I should diversify because it seems like the right thing to do&quot;, but I guess I&#x27;m just too used to things just functioning well that I get over how &quot;limited&quot; I am.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>thefz</author><text>Yeah, if all you have in your home are Apple devices, sure. You can have a nice experience.<p>I dropped all my sympathy towards Apple and gave my MBP13 to my girlfriend the day they willingly implemented an outdated version of SMB in OSX that broke compatibility with almost all of my other machines.<p>I had a leftover Cinema 24inch display too. I sold it because to regulate its brightness I had to install a custom driver under Windows, and to tinker a lot under Linux, because the damn thing had no physical buttons. It is a primary function of a display device.<p>No more Apple devices for me, thanks. These are just overpriced toys.</text></comment> | <story><title>Apple’s next big thing: A business model change</title><url>https://mondaynote.com/apples-next-big-thing-a-business-model-change-e9b0145500c9?gi=176846fdbc6d</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>superdug</author><text>Am I a realist on Apple Apologist?<p>My primary credit card is an apple card, primary dev machine is a mbp, primary work machine iPad, phone iPhone, watch Apple, and I have air tags attached to my dogs and wallet.<p>In this ecosystem, I can reference _ANY_ of my screens for necessary and current relevant information whether it be curated or automated without breaking a glance to whatever primary device the content came from.<p>I can air drop to my screens and other people in my family whenever I want to share anything from any of my devices.<p>It&#x27;s a walled garden sure, but the toys in here are fantastic.<p>I also have Apple One service because of the iCloud storage alone between devices and Apple Music&#x2F;News is actually a nice service.<p>So I guess I understand the &quot;Oh no big company taking over more of my stuff that I think I should diversify because it seems like the right thing to do&quot;, but I guess I&#x27;m just too used to things just functioning well that I get over how &quot;limited&quot; I am.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>oezi</author><text>As a Android user who is lured by the appeal of the Apple Watch and the long update availability, I have recently found that the wall of the garden has gotten so high that it is harder to get in than thought:<p>- there is no way to migrate messages from Signal messenger from Android to iOS<p>- there is no way to synchronize Opera bookmarks from Android to iOS<p>- SwiftKey keyboard can&#x27;t sync my Android settings to iOS<p>I might have to buy another Pixel I guess...</text></comment> |
40,486,267 | 40,485,962 | 1 | 3 | 40,483,878 | train | <story><title>Self-hosted offline transcription and diarization service with LLM summary</title><url>https://github.com/transcriptionstream/transcriptionstream</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>__jonas</author><text>I&#x27;ve been using this:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;bugbakery&#x2F;transcribee">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;bugbakery&#x2F;transcribee</a><p>It&#x27;s noticeably work-in-progress but it does the job and has a nice UI to edit transcriptions and speakers etc.<p>It&#x27;s running on the CPU for me, would be nice to have something that can make use of a 4GB Nvidia GPU, which faster-whisper is actually able to [1]<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;SYSTRAN&#x2F;faster-whisper?tab=readme-ov-file#large-v2-model-on-gpu">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;SYSTRAN&#x2F;faster-whisper?tab=readme-ov-file...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Self-hosted offline transcription and diarization service with LLM summary</title><url>https://github.com/transcriptionstream/transcriptionstream</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>siruva07</author><text>Built something similar for podcasts<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.podsnacks.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.podsnacks.org&#x2F;</a></text></comment> |
32,455,855 | 32,454,508 | 1 | 3 | 32,423,913 | train | <story><title>Programming and Writing</title><url>http://antirez.com/news/135</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>rytill</author><text>&gt; I believe programming, in this regard, can learn something from writing: when writing the first core of a new system, when the original creator is still alone, isolated, able to do anything, she should pretend that this first core is her only bullet. During the genesis of the system she should rewrite this primitive kernel again and again, in order to find the best possible design. My hypothesis is that this initial design will greatly inform what will happen later: growing organically something that has a good initial structure will result in a better system, even after years of distance from the original creation, and even if the original core was just a tiny faction of the future mass the system would eventually assume.<p>I thought this paragraph had an interesting point. Does anyone have experience with testing this hypothesis?</text></comment> | <story><title>Programming and Writing</title><url>http://antirez.com/news/135</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>keyle</author><text>Note, that post is over a year old and it looks like the book is available here<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;antirez.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;136" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;antirez.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;136</a><p>I also just realised the name was familiar, it&#x27;s the redis guy that moved on.</text></comment> |
25,840,669 | 25,839,491 | 1 | 2 | 25,836,886 | train | <story><title>IPFS Support in Brave</title><url>https://brave.com/ipfs-support/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mikece</author><text>Does Brave have an implementation of Multi-Account Containers? This is the ONE killer feature in Firefox that makes it impossible for me to leave for Brave completely:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;multi-account-containers&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;multi-account...</a></text></item><item><author>agilob</author><text>Mozilla promised us Tor integration, IPFS integration and more private browsing by default. Brave delivered it all.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rmm</author><text>For me, somewhat embarrassingly, the one killer feature is the &quot;Send to Device&quot; feature from firefox on iOS. Being able to send links to browser for later reviewing is super useful. Not sure why Edge or other browsers don&#x27;t implement</text></comment> | <story><title>IPFS Support in Brave</title><url>https://brave.com/ipfs-support/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mikece</author><text>Does Brave have an implementation of Multi-Account Containers? This is the ONE killer feature in Firefox that makes it impossible for me to leave for Brave completely:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;multi-account-containers&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;multi-account...</a></text></item><item><author>agilob</author><text>Mozilla promised us Tor integration, IPFS integration and more private browsing by default. Brave delivered it all.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jonathansampson</author><text>Not a 1-to-1 parity at this time, but Brave offers parallel profiles. You can have one running personal interests, while the other has professional interests. Each profile is able to host a unique session for Facebook, etc. Brave already prohibits cookie and data bleed-over from one domain to another.</text></comment> |
6,991,481 | 6,991,261 | 1 | 2 | 6,990,570 | train | <story><title>Why I no longer contribute to Stack Overflow</title><url>http://michael.richter.name/blogs/why-i-no-longer-contribute-to-stackoverflow/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nathan_long</author><text>StackOverflow is a machine designed to do one thing: make it so that, for any given programming question, you will get a search engine hit on their site and find a good answer quickly. And see some ads.<p>That&#x27;s really it. Everything it does is geared toward that, and it does it quite well.<p>I have lots of SO points. A lot of them have come from answering common, basic questions. If you think points exist to prove merit, that&#x27;s bad. But if you think points exist to show &quot;this person makes the kind of content that brings programmers to our site and makes them happy&quot;, it&#x27;s good. The latter is their intent.<p>Does having easy answers available on SO make us dumber? I doubt it. People have made the same argument about search engines, and you probably could have said the same about encyclopedias.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tgflynn</author><text><i>StackOverflow is a machine designed to do one thing: make it so that, for any given programming question, you will get a search engine hit on their site and find a good answer quickly.</i><p>Yes, and that is an incredibly valuable service.<p>I haven&#x27;t participated in StackOverflow actively, neither asking nor answering questions, for various reasons, some perhaps related to some of the OP&#x27;s complaints, but it has saved me many hours of searching through documentation and mailing lists just by being there.<p>I suspect the contribution to global programmer productivity is enormous. It&#x27;s true that it may tend to reduce the amount of very detailed knowledge about very narrow topics that people need to memorize but I think that externalizing this type of knowledge is the way to go. As long as your mental models about the basic workings of the software you&#x27;re using are essentially correct I don&#x27;t think there&#x27;s much harm in depending on external resources for specific details.</text></comment> | <story><title>Why I no longer contribute to Stack Overflow</title><url>http://michael.richter.name/blogs/why-i-no-longer-contribute-to-stackoverflow/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nathan_long</author><text>StackOverflow is a machine designed to do one thing: make it so that, for any given programming question, you will get a search engine hit on their site and find a good answer quickly. And see some ads.<p>That&#x27;s really it. Everything it does is geared toward that, and it does it quite well.<p>I have lots of SO points. A lot of them have come from answering common, basic questions. If you think points exist to prove merit, that&#x27;s bad. But if you think points exist to show &quot;this person makes the kind of content that brings programmers to our site and makes them happy&quot;, it&#x27;s good. The latter is their intent.<p>Does having easy answers available on SO make us dumber? I doubt it. People have made the same argument about search engines, and you probably could have said the same about encyclopedias.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>agon</author><text>I have to agree with your statement. I&#x27;ve also used SO to ask esoteric questions about niches in technologies I work with every day. Most of the time those questions don&#x27;t get answers quickly. However, after a period of time I can see they&#x27;ve helped others by the views and awards that come in sometimes a year or more after posting. I view SO more as a way to display example use cases of strange behavior or puzzling functionality that I discover as I&#x27;m working through issues. Especially for things that official documentation explains poorly or not at all.</text></comment> |
18,852,038 | 18,850,703 | 1 | 3 | 18,848,335 | train | <story><title>Marc Andreessen: VR will be 1,000 times bigger than AR</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/05/marc-andreessen-audio-will-be-titanically-important-and-vr-will-be-1000-times-bigger-than-ar/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zapzupnz</author><text>Another article on technology in search of a problem to solve. Once again, Silicon Valley just can&#x27;t quite see the human factor in why VR won&#x27;t be this universal technology that everybody uses. Yes, it will have its place, but that place won&#x27;t be in <i>every</i> home.<p>Prolonged stretches of being unable to see the real world, invoking feels of fear, anxiety, and uncertainty are completely alien to those who work in huge, warehouse-sized, empty rooms in secure facilities, trying out what they assume everybody will want to put in their ornately decorated front rooms.<p>There&#x27;s a disconnect between the tech industry and the &quot;real world&quot;, so to speak, and it really makes you appreciate companies who can see the limits of certain technologies in certain domains. Take Apple, working to make AR easy and friendly on iOS; if, one day, VR takes off, then Apple is already prepared with plenty of machine learning and physics frameworks.<p>Until then, they present AR as the next best thing to VR in a safe, controlled, and non-threatening way; we can see the real world very clearly both through our devices and around them, we don&#x27;t need to pay for prescription headsets or eyewear, and we are all free to put our iPhones and iPads away at any time.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wildermuthn</author><text>Most technological breakthroughs are first perceived as toys and hobbies of the rich: personal computers, cellphones, mechanical carriages, Facebook. In this context, sour-grape reactionism is unfortunate but not surprising.<p>VR is where computation becomes human. No keyboards, no monitors, no mice or joysticks, but instead hands, gaze, movement, and voice. VR presents itself as a new way to receive information, but its essential innovation is data input in its most natural form.<p>Enabling humanity to engage with itself and its machines with a fully embodied interface is a 10x improvement over touch-screens. Small example: whiteboards. The simple act of a talented group viewing and marking a large flat surface can change the world. Today, this is not possible without co-location. Once a VR headset with positional and hand tracking hits the market (Oculus promises this spring), the rate of world-changing collaboration will no longer be restricted to geography. Once these virtual whiteboard trend toward Jupyter notebooks, VR will not only have triumphed over location-restricted bodies, but also location-restricted computers.<p>The future is bright and VR will be at the heart of it, regardless of how many people currently mistake it for a toy.</text></comment> | <story><title>Marc Andreessen: VR will be 1,000 times bigger than AR</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/05/marc-andreessen-audio-will-be-titanically-important-and-vr-will-be-1000-times-bigger-than-ar/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zapzupnz</author><text>Another article on technology in search of a problem to solve. Once again, Silicon Valley just can&#x27;t quite see the human factor in why VR won&#x27;t be this universal technology that everybody uses. Yes, it will have its place, but that place won&#x27;t be in <i>every</i> home.<p>Prolonged stretches of being unable to see the real world, invoking feels of fear, anxiety, and uncertainty are completely alien to those who work in huge, warehouse-sized, empty rooms in secure facilities, trying out what they assume everybody will want to put in their ornately decorated front rooms.<p>There&#x27;s a disconnect between the tech industry and the &quot;real world&quot;, so to speak, and it really makes you appreciate companies who can see the limits of certain technologies in certain domains. Take Apple, working to make AR easy and friendly on iOS; if, one day, VR takes off, then Apple is already prepared with plenty of machine learning and physics frameworks.<p>Until then, they present AR as the next best thing to VR in a safe, controlled, and non-threatening way; we can see the real world very clearly both through our devices and around them, we don&#x27;t need to pay for prescription headsets or eyewear, and we are all free to put our iPhones and iPads away at any time.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mattnewport</author><text>Our customers for VR training are not particularly tech savvy and not part of the Silicon Valley bubble but we don&#x27;t find any of the issues you raise to be concerns with our customers.<p>VR probably won&#x27;t have a place in every home, just as TV or Alexa type devices don&#x27;t have a place in my home. I think the market can ultimately be as big as those technologies however.</text></comment> |
22,582,902 | 22,582,394 | 1 | 3 | 22,582,096 | train | <story><title>British Society for Immunology open letter to Government on SARS-CoV-2 response</title><url>https://www.immunology.org/news/bsi-open-letter-government-sars-cov-2-outbreak-response</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>alexmingoia</author><text>It’s fascinating (and depressing) to watch the difference in response between Asia and the West.<p>I’m an American living in Myanmar. Here’s what’s being done in my city all before there are any confirmed cases:<p>- Cancellation of large events.<p>- Free testing.<p>- TV notices encouraging social distancing and hand washing.<p>- Temperature checks and hand sanitizer dispensed at entrances of indoor crowded places like malls, grocery stores, large retail stores (not doing this really baffles me, since it’s so straightforward and practical).<p>- School closures.<p>- Travel and border restrictions.<p>These are simple tactics that every country should be utilizing. Yet when I talk to my friends in US and Europe, they report no temperature checks or hand sanitizer. My family member just flew through SFO and said there were no temperature checks or hand sanitizer being dispensed.<p>It’s sad and perplexing to me that common sense practical approaches to testing and spread control are not being utilized by many countries, and that closures have been reactive instead of proactive. It’s unfortunate that the UK is focused on actively ignoring practical efforts to control spread.</text></comment> | <story><title>British Society for Immunology open letter to Government on SARS-CoV-2 response</title><url>https://www.immunology.org/news/bsi-open-letter-government-sars-cov-2-outbreak-response</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>coding123</author><text>The common hepatitis virus stays in the body forever and may be responsible for countless things we have typically classified as auto immune disorders.<p>So to say the solution is to get most least at risk people infected without even knowing if those 60000 recovered Chinese are all going to die in 6 months, that&#x27;s just stupid.</text></comment> |
3,502,589 | 3,502,258 | 1 | 2 | 3,502,216 | train | <story><title>Welcome Garry and Aaron</title><url>http://ycombinator.posterous.com/welcome-garry-and-aaron</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mhartl</author><text>Garry has always been one of my favorite YC founders, and not only because he bought me a large quantity of gin shortly after Posterous got funded. Aaron made a huge impact on my life through his gutsy blog post on RSI [1]. Congratulations, guys, and thanks for being awesome.<p>[1] <a href="http://aaroniba.net/articles/tmp/how-i-cured-my-rsi-pain.html" rel="nofollow">http://aaroniba.net/articles/tmp/how-i-cured-my-rsi-pain.htm...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Welcome Garry and Aaron</title><url>http://ycombinator.posterous.com/welcome-garry-and-aaron</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>benatkin</author><text>What software does YC write for itself again? I've heard a bit about the software for collecting and analyzing applications to YC but I'd like to hear more. Is the HN software mostly written by pg and volunteers or do other hackers at YC do a significant amount of it? Is there anything else?</text></comment> |
10,930,346 | 10,930,271 | 1 | 3 | 10,927,312 | train | <story><title>All Hollowed Out: The lonely poverty of America’s white working class</title><url>http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/01/white-working-class-poverty/424341/?utm_source=SFFB&amp;single_page=true</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>746F7475</author><text>Completely off-topic, but whenever I see these amounts I feel like either I don&#x27;t understand how U.S. economy works or I&#x27;ve been living in poverty my whole life. I&#x27;m recently graduated B.Sc in compsci and I&#x27;m doing software testing and to me 30k&#x2F;year is plenty. Like I have money to buy all kind of unnecessary stuff for my hobbies. Is 30k&#x2F;year really low salary in U.S.? Or am I just being under paid? I always though my family was above middle class, but I guess we&#x27;ve been under it or something...</text></item><item><author>randycupertino</author><text>I feel you. My brother is a restaurant manager in the middle of Kansas making 30k a year. And he is a smart guy who was a MATH MAJOR at a state school! He could come out here and get a job at a startup and make 80k easily. But he won&#x27;t leave his inlaws family, so he&#x27;s stuck in Kansas.<p>There is some strain and resentment in our relationship over our income differential, sure... especially when I want to complain that I&#x27;ll never be able to afford a 1.4 million dollar house on the Peninsula because I only make 150k. It&#x27;s just pointless to even bring that up to him because I know I will come off as an ass. However in some ways, he has it better than me. He and his wife bought a nice 4 bedroom rancher on a half-acre lot with an inground pool for 120k- which I will never ever be able to afford around here in my lifetime barring some unicorn ipo.</text></item><item><author>jurassic</author><text>This level of inequality makes me sad. Really sad. I know I can&#x27;t be the only working stiff in the valley whose poor siblings and family think they are rich for earning in the $100-150k range. Nevermind that I can&#x27;t afford to buy a house here. I can&#x27;t enjoy my success because of the near-desperate financial situations I see my relatives enduring.<p>My sister gave me a $50 gift for christmas, and it brought tears to my eyes because she&#x27;s a single mother making the federal minimum wage of $7.15&#x2F;hr. That comes out to $290&#x2F;wk, before taxes, if she&#x27;s lucky and gets a full week&#x27;s worth of hours. To earn that pittance, she is physically laboring and might have to work 7 days a week to get enough hours in the schedule.<p>It makes me feel like a douche every time I think about it. Me sitting there in my Aeron chair, eating free snacks while reading code. And making ~10x what she does. When I really think about it, from similar beginnings, only a relatively small number of key decisions separate our two economic outcomes.<p>I try to give generously to assuage my guilt. But I&#x27;ve found that there are limits to what can be given without stirring resentment, or provoking attempts at reciprocity. That&#x27;s how this $50 gift came about... I bought some nice stuff for her kid, and she wanted to show her gratitude.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bane</author><text>The U.S. economy is geographically spread out and <i>enormous</i>. However, due to various historic reasons, the population is mostly focused at the coasts, and for other historic reasons, the north-west and north-eastern coastal areas are the wealthiest and densest. More people and more money means more demand and higher prices.<p>In the rest of the country, which is fairly sparse, you can find high standards of living, minus some of the extras you&#x27;ll find in the rich, dense, coastal areas (extras usually in the form of various culture and activities). However, due to the lack of local demand, the prices are lower.<p>This creates hugely variable economic conditions on the order of the differences between London&#x2F;Paris and Budapest.<p>Housing, like anywhere, dominates living expenses after taxes $30k&#x2F;yr income looks more like $22k&#x2F;yr. There are single bedroom apartments, not fantastic, but pretty nice, around where I live that are $2k+&#x2F;mo. Now you have no money for food, transport, clothing, hobbies, etc. You can find cheaper places for around $1.5k+&#x2F;mo (there are no housing options here under $1200) but that still leaves you pretty thin with $4k left to spread across the entire <i>year</i> for other necessities.<p>On the other hand, in Omaha, Nebraska, I found some comparable apartments at $500&#x2F;mo. Which gives you a little more than $1k&#x2F;mo for the rest of the year. You&#x27;ll probably blow through half of that on food and half of that on car expenses (cheap housing in the U.S. implies almost no public transport options) and now you still have no money for savings or hobbies.<p>The median income in the U.S. is ~$54k&#x2F;year (about the same as Europe but a hair higher). But that also means children, a couple income earners and so on.</text></comment> | <story><title>All Hollowed Out: The lonely poverty of America’s white working class</title><url>http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/01/white-working-class-poverty/424341/?utm_source=SFFB&amp;single_page=true</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>746F7475</author><text>Completely off-topic, but whenever I see these amounts I feel like either I don&#x27;t understand how U.S. economy works or I&#x27;ve been living in poverty my whole life. I&#x27;m recently graduated B.Sc in compsci and I&#x27;m doing software testing and to me 30k&#x2F;year is plenty. Like I have money to buy all kind of unnecessary stuff for my hobbies. Is 30k&#x2F;year really low salary in U.S.? Or am I just being under paid? I always though my family was above middle class, but I guess we&#x27;ve been under it or something...</text></item><item><author>randycupertino</author><text>I feel you. My brother is a restaurant manager in the middle of Kansas making 30k a year. And he is a smart guy who was a MATH MAJOR at a state school! He could come out here and get a job at a startup and make 80k easily. But he won&#x27;t leave his inlaws family, so he&#x27;s stuck in Kansas.<p>There is some strain and resentment in our relationship over our income differential, sure... especially when I want to complain that I&#x27;ll never be able to afford a 1.4 million dollar house on the Peninsula because I only make 150k. It&#x27;s just pointless to even bring that up to him because I know I will come off as an ass. However in some ways, he has it better than me. He and his wife bought a nice 4 bedroom rancher on a half-acre lot with an inground pool for 120k- which I will never ever be able to afford around here in my lifetime barring some unicorn ipo.</text></item><item><author>jurassic</author><text>This level of inequality makes me sad. Really sad. I know I can&#x27;t be the only working stiff in the valley whose poor siblings and family think they are rich for earning in the $100-150k range. Nevermind that I can&#x27;t afford to buy a house here. I can&#x27;t enjoy my success because of the near-desperate financial situations I see my relatives enduring.<p>My sister gave me a $50 gift for christmas, and it brought tears to my eyes because she&#x27;s a single mother making the federal minimum wage of $7.15&#x2F;hr. That comes out to $290&#x2F;wk, before taxes, if she&#x27;s lucky and gets a full week&#x27;s worth of hours. To earn that pittance, she is physically laboring and might have to work 7 days a week to get enough hours in the schedule.<p>It makes me feel like a douche every time I think about it. Me sitting there in my Aeron chair, eating free snacks while reading code. And making ~10x what she does. When I really think about it, from similar beginnings, only a relatively small number of key decisions separate our two economic outcomes.<p>I try to give generously to assuage my guilt. But I&#x27;ve found that there are limits to what can be given without stirring resentment, or provoking attempts at reciprocity. That&#x27;s how this $50 gift came about... I bought some nice stuff for her kid, and she wanted to show her gratitude.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pjc50</author><text>Comparing salaries across countries and regions is hard if you compare at exchange rates. It&#x27;s better to use &quot;purchasing power parity&quot;.<p>To a first approximation, how much house does your $30k income buy&#x2F;rent you where you live?<p>(Even within the UK, I went from &quot;choice of buying 2 bed flat or renting a 3 bed one&quot; to &quot;4 bed detached house&quot; at the same salary by moving further away from London).</text></comment> |
18,668,660 | 18,667,695 | 1 | 3 | 18,667,281 | train | <story><title>Train TensorFlow models faster and at lower cost on Cloud TPU Pods</title><url>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/now-you-can-train-ml-models-faster-and-lower-cost-cloud-tpu-pods</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>etaioinshrdlu</author><text>Does this require distributed training?<p>My understanding and experience is that it is not always trivial to get linear training speedups with additional machines.<p>It can be sometimes hard to get any speedup at all.<p>The difference with gradient descent can be described simply as:<p>* Single-machine training: take more steps<p>* Distributed training: take fewer but more confident and accurate steps. This could allow you to take bigger steps (learning rate) as well, but there is a limit to this as well.<p>They are not equivalent processes and it is an area of active research how to get an equivalent result with distributed training.</text></comment> | <story><title>Train TensorFlow models faster and at lower cost on Cloud TPU Pods</title><url>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/now-you-can-train-ml-models-faster-and-lower-cost-cloud-tpu-pods</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>KenoFischer</author><text>Julia runs on these ;). Well, it will once multicore access for non-TF frameworks is public.</text></comment> |
12,919,986 | 12,919,014 | 1 | 2 | 12,918,704 | train | <story><title>Lumo – A fast, standalone ClojureScript REPL that runs on Node.js and V8</title><url>https://anmonteiro.com/2016/11/the-fastest-clojure-repl-in-the-world/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>iagooar</author><text>Sometimes I think Clojure should have been developed on top of the ErlangVM instead of the JVM. I think that the ErlangVM solves a lot better the problems that Clojure is trying to solve. Also, seems like targeting the ErlangVM is an achievable feat, since Elixir in its version 1.3 has proven to be extremely solid.<p>Crazy idea: if I wanted to implement Clojure on top of the ErlangVM, where should I start?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mac01021</author><text>I think shared memory is foundational to Clojure&#x27;s approach to concurrency, and that is something the Erlang VM cannot provide. So some main fixtures of Clojure&#x27;s standard library, like atoms, STM, agents, become either useless or nonsensical.<p>It&#x27;s also not clear to me wether the Erlang VM provides what Clojure needs to efficiently implement its user-defined types, protocols, etc<p>That said, a Clojure-like dialect of lisp built on Erlang is a fine idea and, as others have said, I would probably start by seeing how the Lisp-Flavoured-Erlang (LFE) guys built <i>their</i> lisp.</text></comment> | <story><title>Lumo – A fast, standalone ClojureScript REPL that runs on Node.js and V8</title><url>https://anmonteiro.com/2016/11/the-fastest-clojure-repl-in-the-world/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>iagooar</author><text>Sometimes I think Clojure should have been developed on top of the ErlangVM instead of the JVM. I think that the ErlangVM solves a lot better the problems that Clojure is trying to solve. Also, seems like targeting the ErlangVM is an achievable feat, since Elixir in its version 1.3 has proven to be extremely solid.<p>Crazy idea: if I wanted to implement Clojure on top of the ErlangVM, where should I start?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sz4kerto</author><text>One of the main objectives of Clojure was interoperability with Java because of the ecosystem. Java and Erlang ecosystems are not comparable.<p>Also, JVM is great. :)</text></comment> |
14,224,460 | 14,223,296 | 1 | 3 | 14,221,501 | train | <story><title>OfflineIMAP: sync and backup tool for IMAP</title><url>https://github.com/OfflineIMAP/offlineimap</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>akie</author><text>I&#x27;ve successfully used imapsync (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;imapsync&#x2F;imapsync" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;imapsync&#x2F;imapsync</a> and <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imapsync.lamiral.info&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imapsync.lamiral.info&#x2F;</a>) in the past. It&#x27;s been around for years, has tons of options, and has proven very stable, and is still maintained.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wfunction</author><text>Does imapsync set INTERNALDATE correctly? I ask because naive IMAP uploading doesn&#x27;t do this. (It&#x27;s the date Gmail shows in the mailbox.)</text></comment> | <story><title>OfflineIMAP: sync and backup tool for IMAP</title><url>https://github.com/OfflineIMAP/offlineimap</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>akie</author><text>I&#x27;ve successfully used imapsync (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;imapsync&#x2F;imapsync" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;imapsync&#x2F;imapsync</a> and <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imapsync.lamiral.info&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imapsync.lamiral.info&#x2F;</a>) in the past. It&#x27;s been around for years, has tons of options, and has proven very stable, and is still maintained.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>itsfatz</author><text>This saved me at least 2 hours of awful fetchmail&#x2F;getmail related work last month; Highly recommended.</text></comment> |
21,620,862 | 21,620,688 | 1 | 3 | 21,618,654 | train | <story><title>Historians Find Another Spy in the U.S. Atomic Bomb Project</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/23/science/manhattan-project-atomic-spy.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>stuff4ben</author><text>As fascinating as I find &quot;how&quot; the spies did it, I&#x27;m more interested in &quot;why&quot; they did it? Was it dissatisfaction with something in their lives? For the money (boring)? Because they didn&#x27;t want to see the US so far ahead of the USSR?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mannykannot</author><text>The linked article on Ted Hall has him explaining why he did it. All such justifications must be taken with a grain of salt, of course, but he claims to have feared that if a post-war depression ensued, the USA could turn totalitarian and fascist, in which case it would be better if the USA did not have a monopoly in nuclear weapons.<p>He also recounts the extent that his views were shaped by his slightly older roommates at Harvard, whom he was obviously in awe of.<p>Rather more self-servingly, he claims that he probably would not have spied if he had known how despotic the Soviet Union was.<p>Money was apparently not involved.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;1997&#x2F;09&#x2F;14&#x2F;magazine&#x2F;the-boy-who-gave-away-the-bomb.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;1997&#x2F;09&#x2F;14&#x2F;magazine&#x2F;the-boy-who-gave...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Historians Find Another Spy in the U.S. Atomic Bomb Project</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/23/science/manhattan-project-atomic-spy.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>stuff4ben</author><text>As fascinating as I find &quot;how&quot; the spies did it, I&#x27;m more interested in &quot;why&quot; they did it? Was it dissatisfaction with something in their lives? For the money (boring)? Because they didn&#x27;t want to see the US so far ahead of the USSR?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>everybodyknows</author><text>Money, Ideology, Compromise+Extortion, Ego.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Motives_for_spying" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Motives_for_spying</a><p>In the case of the early Los Alamos scientists: Ideology</text></comment> |
37,637,521 | 37,637,613 | 1 | 2 | 37,637,165 | train | <story><title>LARPing and Violent Extremism</title><url>https://leb.fbi.gov/articles/featured-articles/larping-and-violent-extremism</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>crazygringo</author><text>I was definitely confused by this article at first, thinking it was some silly guide for law enforcement which can&#x27;t tell the difference between criminals and LARPers...??<p>But no -- it&#x27;s actually about terrorists and criminals trying to claim in court that their criminal planning wasn&#x27;t that at all, but just LARPing:<p>&gt; <i>For example, after Kaleb Franks was arrested in October 2020 for plotting to abduct Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, he told the FBI he and his compatriots were only LARPing. Franks later pled guilty and testified that this was a lie.</i><p>So this document is for investigators to ensure they have a specific framework for being able to collect the appropriate evidence to use in court that prevents a defendent from using a LARPing defense.<p>Which actually makes a tremendous amount of sense. When armed militia members claim all of their organizing&#x2F;preparation is just recreational, and totally unlinked to violence that members <i>do</i> eventually commit, it&#x27;s important to have delineated standards to be able to refute that.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Jensson</author><text>It isn&#x27;t just courts, these are for police officers in general, they say it near the top &quot;which may be helpful to both law enforcement and prosecutors if suspects of targeted violence claim they were playacting&quot;.<p>These standards will likely make officers go after more genuine LARPers than before. These tips are very problematic if police officers start to follow them, for example:<p>&gt; Role players will not discuss law enforcement concerns on social media or provide guidance to each other if confronted by an officer. Also, they will have no demonstrated interest in criminal cases involving claims of LARP.<p>If police officers are going after LARPers then LARPers will start to talk about what to do in those cases.<p>&gt; The foremost distinction between LARPers and violent extremists is that genuine role players will not care whether others are watching. They may even embrace third-party observation, such as nonplayer characters or a general audience. After all, LARP is a performance.<p>Lots of people are embarrassed to do things in public, a police officer coming across some people LARPing in private shouldn&#x27;t be cause for investigation.</text></comment> | <story><title>LARPing and Violent Extremism</title><url>https://leb.fbi.gov/articles/featured-articles/larping-and-violent-extremism</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>crazygringo</author><text>I was definitely confused by this article at first, thinking it was some silly guide for law enforcement which can&#x27;t tell the difference between criminals and LARPers...??<p>But no -- it&#x27;s actually about terrorists and criminals trying to claim in court that their criminal planning wasn&#x27;t that at all, but just LARPing:<p>&gt; <i>For example, after Kaleb Franks was arrested in October 2020 for plotting to abduct Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, he told the FBI he and his compatriots were only LARPing. Franks later pled guilty and testified that this was a lie.</i><p>So this document is for investigators to ensure they have a specific framework for being able to collect the appropriate evidence to use in court that prevents a defendent from using a LARPing defense.<p>Which actually makes a tremendous amount of sense. When armed militia members claim all of their organizing&#x2F;preparation is just recreational, and totally unlinked to violence that members <i>do</i> eventually commit, it&#x27;s important to have delineated standards to be able to refute that.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>TheJoeMan</author><text>To add a counterpoint, that specific example is really a poor choice to get the point across. It’s been established (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.insider.com&#x2F;kidnapping-conspiracy-whitmer-fbi-informants-report-2021-7" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.insider.com&#x2F;kidnapping-conspiracy-whitmer-fbi-in...</a>) that the Whitmer plot was run by the FBI itself, in a way having agents LARPing as terrorists.<p>Also, I would hope the real LARPing community can feel safe enough to share tips on what to do if they run into police while running around the woods with foam swords.</text></comment> |
25,145,448 | 25,143,800 | 1 | 2 | 25,143,334 | train | <story><title>Affirm Public S-1 Filing</title><url>https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1820953/000110465920126927/tm2026663-4_s1.htm</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>112012123</author><text>Interesting. Overall, I agree with everyone else - Affirm looks like a healthy company.<p>Major takeaways:<p>1.5% write-off rate for their jan 2020 vintage is very healthy - comparable to the long-term trend for unsecured superprime consumer debt. Given the (I suspect) lower average creditworthiness of Affirm customers, this is a great number. I&#x27;d be curious to see their long-term trend for same-age vintages, however. In consumer credit it&#x27;s well known that all the stimulus support in 2020 has significantly depressed defaults. It would be interesting to see if this is a fluke, or if this is actually what their charge-off rate actually looks like in a normal environment&#x2F;part of a bigger trend.<p>I&#x27;m a little skeptical of their claim to use ML &amp; build a data moat for significantly better underwriting decisions. Consumer credit laws in the US so severely restrict what you can use for credit scoring purposes that better underwriting through data is basically a lost cause, absent some specific customer segment that has special credit situations.<p>Finally, as others have noted, 30% of revenue just from Peloton is an enormous number.</text></comment> | <story><title>Affirm Public S-1 Filing</title><url>https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1820953/000110465920126927/tm2026663-4_s1.htm</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>granzymes</author><text>FY Ended June 30, in millions<p><pre><code> | 2019 | 2020
------------|--------|--------
net revenue | $264 | $509
op ex | $391 | $617
net loss | $(120) | $(113)
loss ex SBC | $(79) | $(83)
volume | $2,620 | $4,637
customers | 2.05 | 3.62</code></pre></text></comment> |
26,658,325 | 26,658,393 | 1 | 2 | 26,656,206 | train | <story><title>Latest EmDrive tests at Dresden University shows it does not develop any thrust</title><url>https://www.grenzwissenschaft-aktuell.de/latest-emdrive-tests-at-dresden-university-shows-impossible-engine-does-not-develop-any-thrust20210321/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>RyEgswuCsn</author><text>There is a difference here: cars are built by car mechanics; they know cars inside out --- cars are never designed to drive in reverse. Physicists, on the other hand, didn&#x27;t invent physics, so they know their current understanding of physics could be wrong.</text></item><item><author>prof-dr-ir</author><text>There were days on the internet when a car analogy was appreciated -- let me try here.<p>Suppose there was a rally driver who would claim that rally cars could go much faster if they were always driven in reverse. He did some rudimentary experiments and might have found a significant improvement. The general public and other racing drivers, who in my analogy can all be wonderful people but happen to know little about the mechanics of cars, are naturally enthusiastic: a potential breakthrough in driving! But clearly we need more experiments. So other rally drivers get to work: they set up an elaborate system with ropes and pulleys so they can reverse the driver&#x27;s position in the car and run a car as fast as they can, but in reverse, on a test track. What do they find? Sadly, their answer is somewhat inconclusive, probably negative, but perhaps the test track had many bends. So they would like to repeat the experiment on a track with a few more straight segments: they write grant proposals, build a track, and plan other test runs... and all the time their progress is eagerly followed by the general public.<p>Now suppose you are a car mechanic in all this. What are you to do? This cannot work! It flies completely in the face of the way cars are set up, not to speak of the disadvantages in air flow. So you can loudly dismiss the claim as preposterous early on, but then you will be called a pessimist and the public point out that at least the rally drivers are trying something new - what the bleep have you been doing all this time? So you just wait the whole thing out, see it come... and go.<p>I guess I should at least be happy that I did not buy any shares in EnDrive Inc?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>plutonorm</author><text>This idea that we are so sure of everything is pervasive. The kind of people who like science are often the kind of people who crave certainty. And so for them science becomes like a religion, it provides them with a sense of certainty. Consistency. So when they rally against stories like this what they are really doing is reaffirming their own faith in an orderly universe, reaffirming their own faith in their scientific religion. It serves an emotional need. Which is why, paradoxically, their arguments are not alterable through logic.<p>If you go read what the real experts in a field have to say about the state of knowledge, they are often incredibly humble. They state that there is so much that they do not know. That are so many things that could be wrong. That there are even bigger pictures just beyond their grasp.<p>Now these reactionless thruster concepts don&#x27;t look to be doing too well. But I for one am not particularly convinced that mach &#x27;s principle is so stupid.</text></comment> | <story><title>Latest EmDrive tests at Dresden University shows it does not develop any thrust</title><url>https://www.grenzwissenschaft-aktuell.de/latest-emdrive-tests-at-dresden-university-shows-impossible-engine-does-not-develop-any-thrust20210321/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>RyEgswuCsn</author><text>There is a difference here: cars are built by car mechanics; they know cars inside out --- cars are never designed to drive in reverse. Physicists, on the other hand, didn&#x27;t invent physics, so they know their current understanding of physics could be wrong.</text></item><item><author>prof-dr-ir</author><text>There were days on the internet when a car analogy was appreciated -- let me try here.<p>Suppose there was a rally driver who would claim that rally cars could go much faster if they were always driven in reverse. He did some rudimentary experiments and might have found a significant improvement. The general public and other racing drivers, who in my analogy can all be wonderful people but happen to know little about the mechanics of cars, are naturally enthusiastic: a potential breakthrough in driving! But clearly we need more experiments. So other rally drivers get to work: they set up an elaborate system with ropes and pulleys so they can reverse the driver&#x27;s position in the car and run a car as fast as they can, but in reverse, on a test track. What do they find? Sadly, their answer is somewhat inconclusive, probably negative, but perhaps the test track had many bends. So they would like to repeat the experiment on a track with a few more straight segments: they write grant proposals, build a track, and plan other test runs... and all the time their progress is eagerly followed by the general public.<p>Now suppose you are a car mechanic in all this. What are you to do? This cannot work! It flies completely in the face of the way cars are set up, not to speak of the disadvantages in air flow. So you can loudly dismiss the claim as preposterous early on, but then you will be called a pessimist and the public point out that at least the rally drivers are trying something new - what the bleep have you been doing all this time? So you just wait the whole thing out, see it come... and go.<p>I guess I should at least be happy that I did not buy any shares in EnDrive Inc?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pif</author><text>&gt; they know their current understanding of physics could be wrong.<p>Sure, we do know!<p>And we know how to recognise when someone masters current literature (a.k.a. factual knowledge) and proposes a breaktrough in a yet uncovered field, and when someone is speaking out of his ... nothing!<p>If you prefer a non-car analogy: we all do <i>know</i> that a hundred consecutive heads is possible, still you are not going to bet your week pay on it, even if you were promised 2^100 weeks of pay in return.</text></comment> |
19,054,251 | 19,053,815 | 1 | 3 | 19,052,688 | train | <story><title>A small notebook for a system administrator</title><url>https://habr.com/en/post/437912/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>anilakar</author><text>Mostly reminds me of <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;simpsons.fandom.com&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;The_Homer" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;simpsons.fandom.com&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;The_Homer</a><p>On a serious note, I mostly disagree about the small size. The author mentioned his preferred size being A5, which is about half a letter. Having to type commands on machine that just fits under your palms is painful. I&#x27;d rather have a large keyboard, large screen and a large battery.<p>My current EDC setup is an X250 with a huge bag of adapter dongles, carried in a Falcon II.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Arnt</author><text>Some of us (I assume OP is one of them) think that since your screen won&#x27;t be <i>large</i> anyway, there is little point to having a screen bigger than your preferred keyboard size.<p>And since your battery won&#x27;t be large enough to support compiling LLVM in reasonable time anyway, it&#x27;s better to just get used to do CPU-heavy stuff by ssh-ing to a rackmount somewhere use the laptop for terminal-ish tasks.</text></comment> | <story><title>A small notebook for a system administrator</title><url>https://habr.com/en/post/437912/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>anilakar</author><text>Mostly reminds me of <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;simpsons.fandom.com&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;The_Homer" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;simpsons.fandom.com&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;The_Homer</a><p>On a serious note, I mostly disagree about the small size. The author mentioned his preferred size being A5, which is about half a letter. Having to type commands on machine that just fits under your palms is painful. I&#x27;d rather have a large keyboard, large screen and a large battery.<p>My current EDC setup is an X250 with a huge bag of adapter dongles, carried in a Falcon II.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dkdbejwi383</author><text>&gt; which is about half a letter<p>What oddly specific unit of measurement is this?</text></comment> |
6,851,228 | 6,851,266 | 1 | 3 | 6,850,474 | train | <story><title>Has StackOverflow saved billions of dollars in programmer productivity?</title><url>http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/18539/has-stackoverflow-saved-billions-of-dollars-in-programmer-productivity</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>forgotAgain</author><text>A lot of time has been spent by developers trying to get points. There is a cost to that.<p>The site has enabled software vendors to slack off on their documentation. If there was no StackOverflow the vendors would have to do better. I&#x27;m thinking of msdn as an example since a lot of the Stack questions are MS technology based. MS is far from alone though. Much of the money saved has gone to vendors.<p>Even given those points it has still saved a lot of money. But billions? I don&#x27;t know if it would be that much. It would be interesting to know what the global number for reputation points is. There may be a correlation to money saved.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>taspeotis</author><text><p><pre><code> The site has enabled software vendors to slack off on their documentation ... I&#x27;m thinking of msdn as an example
</code></pre>
The number of questions on SO that can be answered by RTFM is quite remarkable. I think that points to a lot of the documentation being just fine. The last bug of my own I spent any significant of time on was answerable by RTFM [1].<p>There are plenty of PHP+MySQL questions that appear where the OP is clearly learning about PHP+MySQL and the code looks something like...<p><pre><code> $result = mysql_query(&quot;select username, password from user where username = &quot; . $username)
</code></pre>
...shows that they haven&#x27;t bothered to RTFM [2].<p>[1] I had made a new thread and was calling ShellExecute on it. It didn&#x27;t work on some computers because I hadn&#x27;t initialised COM (presumably they had some shell extensions installed). See the first sentence of &quot;Remarks&quot; <a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/bb762153(v=vs.85).aspx" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;msdn.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;library&#x2F;windows&#x2F;desktop&#x2F;bb76...</a><p>[2] Big red box: <a href="http://www.php.net/mysql_query" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.php.net&#x2F;mysql_query</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Has StackOverflow saved billions of dollars in programmer productivity?</title><url>http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/18539/has-stackoverflow-saved-billions-of-dollars-in-programmer-productivity</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>forgotAgain</author><text>A lot of time has been spent by developers trying to get points. There is a cost to that.<p>The site has enabled software vendors to slack off on their documentation. If there was no StackOverflow the vendors would have to do better. I&#x27;m thinking of msdn as an example since a lot of the Stack questions are MS technology based. MS is far from alone though. Much of the money saved has gone to vendors.<p>Even given those points it has still saved a lot of money. But billions? I don&#x27;t know if it would be that much. It would be interesting to know what the global number for reputation points is. There may be a correlation to money saved.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dragonwriter</author><text>&gt; If there was no StackOverflow the vendors would have to do better.<p>Documentation quality had been declining for many years before SO -- I think its more accurate to say that if vendors were doing better, there would be no (or less interest in) StackOverflow than the other way around.</text></comment> |
17,912,712 | 17,911,214 | 1 | 3 | 17,908,691 | train | <story><title>Conservative web development</title><url>https://drewdevault.com/2018/09/04/Conservative-web-development.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zelon88</author><text>Your math sounds wrong, so I did it on paper and proved that it&#x27;s wrong.<p>The average bandwidth for a mobile device in the USA is about 3.25 mb&#x2F;s (26mbps). So to load your &quot;2-4mb&quot; Javascript library you&#x27;re looking at 400ms to connect + 1000ms to download resources. That&#x27;s 1400ms.<p>Now for the rest of the math I benchmarked my own website. My homepage is ~300kb and loaded in 461ms. The fastest you&#x27;re going to get ANYTHING back from my server is about ~170ms.<p>Lets start with your App. 1,400ms and the app is loaded. Load another page and it takes 200ms to load another 5kb of content. Load one more page and it&#x27;s another 200ms for 5kb of content. I&#x27;ve been waiting on your website for a total 1,800ms and viewed three &quot;pages&quot; of content.<p>Lets move on to my website. ~450ms and the site is loaded. Load another page and it takes another ~450ms to load another 300kb. Load another page and that&#x27;s another ~450ms to load another 300kb. I&#x27;ve been waiting on my website for a total of 1,350ms and viewed three actual pages of content, but the user only had to download 900kb instead of 4mb.<p>So I think you proved the OP&#x27;s point.</text></item><item><author>coding123</author><text>There are two different kinds of web development:<p>a) Apps where the user is expected to stay a while<p>b) Sites where the user is there, maybe once ever (most likely also scared off by the ads)<p>For Apps, I would always prefer a pre-load of JS that was built with React and downloads about 2-4 MB. If there is an update I will be forced to download it again.<p>On the UPSHOT, almost everything I do in that app is now a 3-8KB request. This means transitioning pages, changing states of things, all happen in about 50ms including whatever visual changes are required on the screen.<p>Compare that to full-screen refresh apps and I am usually waiting 200-400ms. It just feels too damn slow.<p>Why am I even typing this? This is the freaking whole point of an SPA. Are we not all caught up on this yet?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>chipotle_coyote</author><text>But the person you&#x27;re replying to specifically cited SPAs, single page applications, as the use case for &quot;download a big JS library first and then minimize future loads.&quot; If the SPA presents more than five 5kb chunks of what you define as &quot;actual pages of content&quot; to the user in a single session -- which doesn&#x27;t sound at all unreasonable -- then using your own numbers, the SPA is now slightly beating your web site (2600ms to 2700ms). By ten &quot;pages,&quot; the SPA has substantially pulled ahead (3400ms to 4500ms), and has still only sent 50kb of data past the initial huge hit. If the JS library is closer to the 2mb side than the 4mb side, it may well have already sent less data.<p>At any rate, the NYT page that Drew DeVault is complaining about isn&#x27;t an SPA, and its problems don&#x27;t stem from loading a JS library whose point is to make future requests faster. Its excessive JavaScript use is driven almost entirely by including advertising&#x2F;marketing-driven code, and I would argue that JS is being a bit scapegoated here: it&#x27;s a symptom, not the problem. I bet we could deliver a lean, mean, highly-optimized version of that web site that duplicated the exact same ads, down to the same obtrusive banner behavior. Would we like the site more then? Would any of us really respond, &quot;Wow, it&#x27;s <i>so much better</i> now that I can be frustrated by this terrible design in a tenth the load time!&quot;?</text></comment> | <story><title>Conservative web development</title><url>https://drewdevault.com/2018/09/04/Conservative-web-development.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zelon88</author><text>Your math sounds wrong, so I did it on paper and proved that it&#x27;s wrong.<p>The average bandwidth for a mobile device in the USA is about 3.25 mb&#x2F;s (26mbps). So to load your &quot;2-4mb&quot; Javascript library you&#x27;re looking at 400ms to connect + 1000ms to download resources. That&#x27;s 1400ms.<p>Now for the rest of the math I benchmarked my own website. My homepage is ~300kb and loaded in 461ms. The fastest you&#x27;re going to get ANYTHING back from my server is about ~170ms.<p>Lets start with your App. 1,400ms and the app is loaded. Load another page and it takes 200ms to load another 5kb of content. Load one more page and it&#x27;s another 200ms for 5kb of content. I&#x27;ve been waiting on your website for a total 1,800ms and viewed three &quot;pages&quot; of content.<p>Lets move on to my website. ~450ms and the site is loaded. Load another page and it takes another ~450ms to load another 300kb. Load another page and that&#x27;s another ~450ms to load another 300kb. I&#x27;ve been waiting on my website for a total of 1,350ms and viewed three actual pages of content, but the user only had to download 900kb instead of 4mb.<p>So I think you proved the OP&#x27;s point.</text></item><item><author>coding123</author><text>There are two different kinds of web development:<p>a) Apps where the user is expected to stay a while<p>b) Sites where the user is there, maybe once ever (most likely also scared off by the ads)<p>For Apps, I would always prefer a pre-load of JS that was built with React and downloads about 2-4 MB. If there is an update I will be forced to download it again.<p>On the UPSHOT, almost everything I do in that app is now a 3-8KB request. This means transitioning pages, changing states of things, all happen in about 50ms including whatever visual changes are required on the screen.<p>Compare that to full-screen refresh apps and I am usually waiting 200-400ms. It just feels too damn slow.<p>Why am I even typing this? This is the freaking whole point of an SPA. Are we not all caught up on this yet?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Izkata</author><text>Shouldn&#x27;t your static assets be cached in the browser for pages 2 and 3, making your subsequent pages load a bit faster than the first?</text></comment> |
19,513,953 | 19,513,864 | 1 | 2 | 19,512,332 | train | <story><title>Looking for a new CEO</title><url>https://stackoverflow.blog/2019/03/28/the-next-ceo-of-stack-overflow/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>soneca</author><text>As a junior developer for two years now, what frustrates me is <i>not</i> the responses to the questions I ask. I almost never had the urge to ask any questions, most of them are already asked and answered in a similar enough form so I can learn from them.<p>What do frustrates me is how I, as a newbie, am incapable of contributing to the site.<p>I can&#x27;t upvote an answer that was particularly good to my case. Dozens (literally dozens) of times I clicked to upvote an answer that was just the right one for my case and it wasn&#x27;t the accepted or most upvoted answer. Only to get this as a reply:<p>- <i>&quot;Thanks for the feedback! Votes cast by those with less than 15 reputation are recorded, but do not change the publicly displayed post score.&quot;</i><p>What?? As a junior learning through an answer, I want to contribute it right away and acknowledge the person who helped it. As well as signalizing to other people that that answer is a good one. Why my upvote do not count? I don&#x27;t understand the reason behind this design decision.<p>Then I try to comment on the answer to make it explicit how it helped me and I get:<p>- <i>&quot;You must have 50 reputation to comment&quot;</i><p>This rule at least I kind of understand the logic (avoid spamming, flamewars maybe?), but it does not make it any less frustrating.<p>I cannot contribute to the site and to the people that helped me so much at the beginning of my learning path.<p>I can Ask, Answer and Edit without any reputation threshold. But those are precisely what a junior developer will most likely <i>not</i> want to do while learning the basic stuff through SO.<p>These design choices made me totally give up of any urge to <i>participate</i> in SO and I only consult the answers without engaging or recognizing any of the humans that helped me.</text></item><item><author>peeters</author><text>&gt; <i>One thing I’m very concerned about, as we try to educate the next generation of developers, and, importantly, get more diversity and inclusiveness in that new generation, is what obstacles we’re putting up for people as they try to learn programming. In many ways Stack Overflow’s specific rules for what is permitted and what is not are obstacles, but an even bigger problem is rudeness, snark, or condescension that newcomers often see.</i><p>&gt;<p>&gt; <i>I care a lot about this. Being a developer gives you an unparalleled opportunity to write the script for the future. All the flak that Stack Overflow throws in the face of newbies trying to become developers is actively harmful to people, to society, and to Stack Overflow itself, by driving away potential future contributors. And programming is hard enough; we should see our mission as making it easier.</i><p>It&#x27;s good to see that acknowledgement coming from Joel. I wasn&#x27;t one of those newbies facing that snark, but as an earlier contributor it was really depressing to see the general attitude shift from &quot;yeah OK this question&#x27;s not the best but it was asked in good faith so I&#x27;ll answer&quot; to &quot;you&#x27;re a worthless human being for wasting our time with imperfection&quot;.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>everfree</author><text>I understand that can be frustrating, but as you mentioned part of that is by design. Stack Overflow gets its success by being laser-focused on questions and answers, to the extreme that comments like &quot;thanks&quot; are seen as noise for developers to wade through to find the answers they are looking for. That&#x27;s why they have such a high bar to comment - the number of &quot;thanks&quot; and &quot;this solved my problem&quot; comments would be a staggering moderation issue. Either that or the site would turn into a long-winded discussion forum.<p>In short, only questions and answers add any real value to the site for the most part. If you really want to contribute to the community, consider diving in and writing questions and answers.<p>As for upvoting, I understand that it&#x27;s frustrating not to be able to vote in a community that you spend so much time in. But on the flip side, realize that 90% of the value of Stack Overflow comes from its questions and answers. If you want to contribute to the site, it only takes 3 upvotes across all your questions (or 2 across all your answers) to gain the upvote privilege permanently.</text></comment> | <story><title>Looking for a new CEO</title><url>https://stackoverflow.blog/2019/03/28/the-next-ceo-of-stack-overflow/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>soneca</author><text>As a junior developer for two years now, what frustrates me is <i>not</i> the responses to the questions I ask. I almost never had the urge to ask any questions, most of them are already asked and answered in a similar enough form so I can learn from them.<p>What do frustrates me is how I, as a newbie, am incapable of contributing to the site.<p>I can&#x27;t upvote an answer that was particularly good to my case. Dozens (literally dozens) of times I clicked to upvote an answer that was just the right one for my case and it wasn&#x27;t the accepted or most upvoted answer. Only to get this as a reply:<p>- <i>&quot;Thanks for the feedback! Votes cast by those with less than 15 reputation are recorded, but do not change the publicly displayed post score.&quot;</i><p>What?? As a junior learning through an answer, I want to contribute it right away and acknowledge the person who helped it. As well as signalizing to other people that that answer is a good one. Why my upvote do not count? I don&#x27;t understand the reason behind this design decision.<p>Then I try to comment on the answer to make it explicit how it helped me and I get:<p>- <i>&quot;You must have 50 reputation to comment&quot;</i><p>This rule at least I kind of understand the logic (avoid spamming, flamewars maybe?), but it does not make it any less frustrating.<p>I cannot contribute to the site and to the people that helped me so much at the beginning of my learning path.<p>I can Ask, Answer and Edit without any reputation threshold. But those are precisely what a junior developer will most likely <i>not</i> want to do while learning the basic stuff through SO.<p>These design choices made me totally give up of any urge to <i>participate</i> in SO and I only consult the answers without engaging or recognizing any of the humans that helped me.</text></item><item><author>peeters</author><text>&gt; <i>One thing I’m very concerned about, as we try to educate the next generation of developers, and, importantly, get more diversity and inclusiveness in that new generation, is what obstacles we’re putting up for people as they try to learn programming. In many ways Stack Overflow’s specific rules for what is permitted and what is not are obstacles, but an even bigger problem is rudeness, snark, or condescension that newcomers often see.</i><p>&gt;<p>&gt; <i>I care a lot about this. Being a developer gives you an unparalleled opportunity to write the script for the future. All the flak that Stack Overflow throws in the face of newbies trying to become developers is actively harmful to people, to society, and to Stack Overflow itself, by driving away potential future contributors. And programming is hard enough; we should see our mission as making it easier.</i><p>It&#x27;s good to see that acknowledgement coming from Joel. I wasn&#x27;t one of those newbies facing that snark, but as an earlier contributor it was really depressing to see the general attitude shift from &quot;yeah OK this question&#x27;s not the best but it was asked in good faith so I&#x27;ll answer&quot; to &quot;you&#x27;re a worthless human being for wasting our time with imperfection&quot;.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fabian2k</author><text>The restriction on upvoting is necessary to have any chance of handling vote fraud like users upvoting themselves with socks. If any new account could vote it would be far easier to cheat the system.<p>15 rep is also a very small barrier. Asking good questions or editing are probably the best ways to start. Editing is certainly something a new user can do, simply fixing the formatting, grammar and typos in new questions will give you 15 rep in no time.</text></comment> |
26,859,310 | 26,859,414 | 1 | 3 | 26,858,659 | train | <story><title>Unsettling capital letters</title><url>https://art-by-kaine-shields.tumblr.com/post/643105913844154368/fun-fact-about-me-is-that-when-i-was-a-kid-id</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>steve_adams_86</author><text>I find it incredibly fascinating how readable the end results are. They’re so wrong, so fun and attention-grabbing, and somehow it makes sense.<p>I’d really like to understand better how it is that we can decipher language so well. At least, it seems like we’re good at it. Why can I read that font or that calligraphy? It’s almost an abomination, haha. Yet my brain troops on, parsing and processing, turning those squiggles back into what it knows.<p>Truly fascinating stuff. I also enjoy the back story here. Exploring written language as a kid was a lot of fun. I settled on a strange way of writing, not much unlike the runes on the inside of the ring in the LOTR movies, and it was entirely arbitrary and almost an artistic decision. Totally impractical. I still write like that to this day.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>oconnor663</author><text>Reminds me of this classic:<p>&gt; Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.<p>I think that paragraph oversimplifies. (For example, splitting up the gh in &quot;rghit&quot; or the tt in &quot;ltteers&quot; would make them much harder to scan.) But clearly what it&#x27;s getting at is true, that there are certain details of words and letters that we tend to focus on, and we can ignore quite a lot of noise as long as those details are in place.</text></comment> | <story><title>Unsettling capital letters</title><url>https://art-by-kaine-shields.tumblr.com/post/643105913844154368/fun-fact-about-me-is-that-when-i-was-a-kid-id</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>steve_adams_86</author><text>I find it incredibly fascinating how readable the end results are. They’re so wrong, so fun and attention-grabbing, and somehow it makes sense.<p>I’d really like to understand better how it is that we can decipher language so well. At least, it seems like we’re good at it. Why can I read that font or that calligraphy? It’s almost an abomination, haha. Yet my brain troops on, parsing and processing, turning those squiggles back into what it knows.<p>Truly fascinating stuff. I also enjoy the back story here. Exploring written language as a kid was a lot of fun. I settled on a strange way of writing, not much unlike the runes on the inside of the ring in the LOTR movies, and it was entirely arbitrary and almost an artistic decision. Totally impractical. I still write like that to this day.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>deaddodo</author><text>Part of the reason is, we don&#x27;t actually parse letters individually, but the patterns of words&#x2F;letter-groups, sentences and general grammar.<p>Another responder mentioned the infamous Cambridge study. My Layman&#x27;s take would be that the patterns are recognizable enough that the pattern-matching portion of verbal cognition can still associate them properly without conscious thought. And any &quot;misses&quot; are filled in or trained by contextual clues.</text></comment> |
34,456,131 | 34,455,281 | 1 | 2 | 34,453,971 | train | <story><title>Mercedes-Benz workforce to receive record profit-sharing bonus</title><url>https://group-media.mercedes-benz.com/marsMediaSite/en/instance/ko/Mercedes-Benz-strategy-pays-off-workforce-to-receive-record-profit-sharing-bonus.xhtml?oid=55064985</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>NickC25</author><text>&gt;<i>On top of that, Mercedes Benz has a corporate Supervisory Board with 1&#x2F;2 of the members representing the employees.</i><p>Absolutely love that, and stuff like that would never be allowed to form here in the US. Labor having an equal seat at the table should be seen as a good thing for the purposes of long-term sustainability, not a bad thing. Can it have drawbacks? Sure. However, the flipside is that currently in most places, such as the US, Capital has <i>all</i> the seats at the table, or sometimes Labor will given a symbolic place at the proverbial kid&#x27;s table, with no real ability to enact change or make their voices heard. I applaud what Mercedes-Benz is doing here.</text></item><item><author>digdugdirk</author><text>&quot;The company&#x27;s management and General Works Council have jointly agreed to pay all eligible employees a special lump sum bonus of up to 7,300 euros, a figure that is even higher than the current maximum payment cap of 6,465 euros.&quot;<p>This General Works Council seems to be something like a separate &quot;union within the company&quot;, in addition to whatever union represents various workers within the organization. On top of that, Mercedes Benz has a corporate Supervisory Board with 1&#x2F;2 of the members representing the employees.<p>Interesting how this structure has a headline like this one, vs the &quot;&gt;10k workers laid off from giant corporation with record profits for the past two years&quot; headlines that seem to be popping up here daily.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Aunche</author><text>For well developed industries, I agree that employee representation is a good thing.<p>On the other hand, America&#x27;s friendliness to capital has lead to funding companies that end up competing for software engineers. This is part of the reason why developer jobs in the US tend to pay twice as well as those in Europe.</text></comment> | <story><title>Mercedes-Benz workforce to receive record profit-sharing bonus</title><url>https://group-media.mercedes-benz.com/marsMediaSite/en/instance/ko/Mercedes-Benz-strategy-pays-off-workforce-to-receive-record-profit-sharing-bonus.xhtml?oid=55064985</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>NickC25</author><text>&gt;<i>On top of that, Mercedes Benz has a corporate Supervisory Board with 1&#x2F;2 of the members representing the employees.</i><p>Absolutely love that, and stuff like that would never be allowed to form here in the US. Labor having an equal seat at the table should be seen as a good thing for the purposes of long-term sustainability, not a bad thing. Can it have drawbacks? Sure. However, the flipside is that currently in most places, such as the US, Capital has <i>all</i> the seats at the table, or sometimes Labor will given a symbolic place at the proverbial kid&#x27;s table, with no real ability to enact change or make their voices heard. I applaud what Mercedes-Benz is doing here.</text></item><item><author>digdugdirk</author><text>&quot;The company&#x27;s management and General Works Council have jointly agreed to pay all eligible employees a special lump sum bonus of up to 7,300 euros, a figure that is even higher than the current maximum payment cap of 6,465 euros.&quot;<p>This General Works Council seems to be something like a separate &quot;union within the company&quot;, in addition to whatever union represents various workers within the organization. On top of that, Mercedes Benz has a corporate Supervisory Board with 1&#x2F;2 of the members representing the employees.<p>Interesting how this structure has a headline like this one, vs the &quot;&gt;10k workers laid off from giant corporation with record profits for the past two years&quot; headlines that seem to be popping up here daily.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>zackmorris</author><text>Allowed? We can choose not to work for companies that ban workers from their boards. Which is pretty much all of the big companies in the US.<p>It&#x27;s funny that we have a dozen different open source software licenses that are all some version of &quot;how can we give this to you even freer&quot; but we have no notion of what an equitable work contract looks like. Until that changes, things will never, ever, get better for workers.</text></comment> |
9,399,660 | 9,396,826 | 1 | 3 | 9,395,217 | train | <story><title>RethinkDB 2.0 is amazing</title><url>http://rob.conery.io/2015/04/17/rethinkdb-2-0-is-amazing/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>TylerE</author><text>Let me give you an arbitrary, unknown sql string in a variable `s`, and I&#x27;ll do the same with a ReQL query.<p>The challenge is to make sure the column&#x2F;field `age` is more than 20.<p>My code is:<p><pre><code> query.filter(r.row[&#x27;age&#x27;] &gt; 20)
</code></pre>
What&#x27;s yours? (Hint: start by writing a compliant SQL parser)</text></item><item><author>army</author><text>&#x27;When you query with ReQL you tack on functions and “compose” your data, with SQL you tell the query engine the steps necessary (aka prescribe) to return your data:&#x27;<p>... what? ReQL and SQL are both declarative query languages: I don&#x27;t really see the author is getting at. Is there an implication that SQL isn&#x27;t declarative?<p>The only real difference is that the API is based around chaining function calls rather than expressing what is needed as a string - there are many SQL query builder APIs that will let you build SQL queries by chaining together function calls.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ghc</author><text>Let us compare this newfangled &quot;auto-mobile&quot; invention to my favorite form of transportation, the horse: Where would you mount your favorite riding saddle on an auto-mobile?<p>(Hint: start by learning metalworking)</text></comment> | <story><title>RethinkDB 2.0 is amazing</title><url>http://rob.conery.io/2015/04/17/rethinkdb-2-0-is-amazing/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>TylerE</author><text>Let me give you an arbitrary, unknown sql string in a variable `s`, and I&#x27;ll do the same with a ReQL query.<p>The challenge is to make sure the column&#x2F;field `age` is more than 20.<p>My code is:<p><pre><code> query.filter(r.row[&#x27;age&#x27;] &gt; 20)
</code></pre>
What&#x27;s yours? (Hint: start by writing a compliant SQL parser)</text></item><item><author>army</author><text>&#x27;When you query with ReQL you tack on functions and “compose” your data, with SQL you tell the query engine the steps necessary (aka prescribe) to return your data:&#x27;<p>... what? ReQL and SQL are both declarative query languages: I don&#x27;t really see the author is getting at. Is there an implication that SQL isn&#x27;t declarative?<p>The only real difference is that the API is based around chaining function calls rather than expressing what is needed as a string - there are many SQL query builder APIs that will let you build SQL queries by chaining together function calls.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>joevandyk</author><text>using ActiveRecord:<p><pre><code> query.where(&#x27;age &gt; ?&#x27;, 20)
</code></pre>
If I&#x27;m understanding you correctly.</text></comment> |
13,515,664 | 13,515,526 | 1 | 3 | 13,514,568 | train | <story><title>ClojureScript 1.9.456, Externs Inference and Comprehensive JavaScript Modules</title><url>https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/clojurescript/wGJeG36GPTk/e9XCo3a2BgAJ</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>gw</author><text>I&#x27;ve been using the externs inference feature for a little while, and it works great. Writing externs was the last truly ugly and error-prone part of ClojureScript development. For my game library [1], I can finally use advanced compilation because of this feature. The resulting games are much smaller and get better frame rates now.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;oakes&#x2F;play-cljs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;oakes&#x2F;play-cljs</a></text></comment> | <story><title>ClojureScript 1.9.456, Externs Inference and Comprehensive JavaScript Modules</title><url>https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/clojurescript/wGJeG36GPTk/e9XCo3a2BgAJ</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>moomin</author><text>This is huge. ClojureScript&#x27;s biggest weakness has always been its inability to just use standard JS stuff the way Clojure could use standard Java stuff. Sounds like they&#x27;ve finally solved it (yes, alpha-quality, but still).</text></comment> |
4,734,367 | 4,733,952 | 1 | 3 | 4,733,212 | train | <story><title>NoSQL databases benchmark: Cassandra, HBase, MongoDB, Riak</title><url>http://www.networkworld.com/cgi-bin/mailto/x.cgi?pagetosend=/news/tech/2012/102212-nosql-263595.html</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>karterk</author><text>I was part of a large migration that moved a significant amount of data from MongoDB to HBase recently. Along the way, I also spent significant time digging into Cassandra and Riak.<p>I appreciate the effort and intention behind this article, but for all practical purposes, such numbers are really not helpful. From experience, if you really want performance from HBase, you need to spend significant amount of time coming up with the right way to structure your data in HBase. To name a few:<p>* choosing the right row key that optimizes bulk scans<p>* setting optimum client and server caching based on the size of each row<p>* pre-splitting regions, and setting custom region sizes<p>You will also run into various cluster-related issues. Things don't really scale linearly as you add more nodes. You need to also consider maintenance, upgrades, backups, replication and so on.<p>If you want to choose a NoSQL (or for that matter any database), spend some time thinking about whether it fits your data model and your own understanding of the technology. Performance is rarely gained by simply switching a few knobs.</text></comment> | <story><title>NoSQL databases benchmark: Cassandra, HBase, MongoDB, Riak</title><url>http://www.networkworld.com/cgi-bin/mailto/x.cgi?pagetosend=/news/tech/2012/102212-nosql-263595.html</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jegoodwin3</author><text>Not sure I buy the paper's analysis. They don't seem to know much about load testing -- they speak as though throughput is 'load' (rather than the multiprogramming level) and don't computer Bandwidth - Delay products.<p>Also, rather than using M/M/1 or some reasonable analytic model, they deliberately trottled their request rates to hold throughput constant (thereby guaranteeing different loadings for different 'benchmarks')<p>Just reading the first graph, for example, and applying Little's Law, it's pretty evident that Cassandra was loaded more heavily than than the two MySQL systems, with HBASE and Riak trailing.<p>Looks like HBASE and Cassandra lead the pack to me, with different characterists for different purposes.<p>Advice to authors: buy a book by Neil Gunther.</text></comment> |
33,520,617 | 33,520,174 | 1 | 2 | 33,518,961 | train | <story><title>FTX Appears to Have Stopped Processing Withdrawals, On-Chain Data Show</title><url>https://www.theblock.co/post/184176/ftx-appears-to-have-stopped-processing-withdrawals-on-chain-data-show</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bigdaddyrabbit2</author><text>Unlike traditional finance, all this is on-chain, so you can trivially look it up.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;etherscan.io&#x2F;address&#x2F;0x7abe0ce388281d2acf297cb089caef3819b13448" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;etherscan.io&#x2F;address&#x2F;0x7abe0ce388281d2acf297cb089cae...</a><p>FTX seems to be processing withdrawals normally. For the life of me, I can&#x27;t understand why journalists love to speculate instead of doing a 5-second search on EtherScan.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>janmo</author><text>SBF and CZ tweeted.
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;cz_binance&#x2F;status&#x2F;1590013613586411520" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;cz_binance&#x2F;status&#x2F;1590013613586411520</a>
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;SBF_FTX&#x2F;status&#x2F;1590012124864348160" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;SBF_FTX&#x2F;status&#x2F;1590012124864348160</a><p>Reading through the lines:
FTX is in trouble and faces a &quot;liquidity crunch&quot;, Binance might acquire them (But will do Due Dilligence first).<p>FTX US is not affected (SBF says funds are SAFU for FTX US, probably withdrawals are working for US but not FTX global)</text></comment> | <story><title>FTX Appears to Have Stopped Processing Withdrawals, On-Chain Data Show</title><url>https://www.theblock.co/post/184176/ftx-appears-to-have-stopped-processing-withdrawals-on-chain-data-show</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bigdaddyrabbit2</author><text>Unlike traditional finance, all this is on-chain, so you can trivially look it up.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;etherscan.io&#x2F;address&#x2F;0x7abe0ce388281d2acf297cb089caef3819b13448" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;etherscan.io&#x2F;address&#x2F;0x7abe0ce388281d2acf297cb089cae...</a><p>FTX seems to be processing withdrawals normally. For the life of me, I can&#x27;t understand why journalists love to speculate instead of doing a 5-second search on EtherScan.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jefftk</author><text>The article seems to be based on <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;etherscan.io&#x2F;tokentxns?a=0x2faf487a4414fe77e2327f0bf4ae2a264a776ad2" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;etherscan.io&#x2F;tokentxns?a=0x2faf487a4414fe77e2327f0bf...</a>, which does seem to have only incoming transitions unlike the &quot;FTX Exchange 3&quot; account you linked.<p>Is this FTX changing their patterns for which accounts they use for withdrawals, and then this being interpreted as withdrawals being halted?</text></comment> |
39,730,993 | 39,726,316 | 1 | 3 | 39,722,498 | train | <story><title>MM1: Methods, Analysis and Insights from Multimodal LLM Pre-training</title><url>https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.09611</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>nl</author><text>This is an awesome paper, and the somewhat negative sentiment in the discussion here is surprising.<p>The ablation studies are well done, comprehensive and expensive to do. People will be using the conclusions from this for years, and that is much more impactful than if an upcoming Siri product ourperforms the GPT model at that same point in time.<p>A few really interesting points:<p>Synthetic datasets substantially (1%+) increase performance for Image Encoder Pre-training<p>Architecture of the Visual&lt;-&gt;Language model connector doesn&#x27;t seem to matter.<p>Interleaving text and image data improves few shot performance, but image captioning data improves zero-shot numbers.<p>The ideal mix of data types is 5:5:1 for Interleaved:Captions:Plain Text (!)<p>Synthetic captioning data helps substantially at this point too (up to 4% gain)<p>The appendices are amazing: lots of details about learning rates tried, batch sizes.<p>The &quot;explain these figures&quot; are really really good. See page 37.</text></comment> | <story><title>MM1: Methods, Analysis and Insights from Multimodal LLM Pre-training</title><url>https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.09611</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>reaperman</author><text>This looks competitive against CLIP, and surprisingly great at VQA style prompts, but it doesn&#x27;t seem like the paper supports comparing it to GPT-4. We don&#x27;t see any tests for coding performance, math homework, legal document review, or any of the myriad other things that people use GPT-4 for on a daily basis.</text></comment> |
14,415,362 | 14,413,828 | 1 | 2 | 14,411,703 | train | <story><title>What I've learned from 100s of interviews with candidates at top tech companies</title><url>http://observer.com/2017/05/apple-facebook-google-amazon-secrets-dream-job/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ThePawnBreak</author><text>&gt; I would rather make more money in a stupid corporate job than working on more aggressive ways of making people to click on ads.<p>Could you name a few &quot;stupid corporate jobs&quot; that pay better than Google or Facebook (200k - 300k for a senior engineer) ?</text></item><item><author>holydude</author><text>The biggest problem I have with these companies is that they feel like a cult.
And the people working there are doing a lot to keep that cult spirit alive.
All of these companies want you too feel and act like they are the single best entity in the entire universe and you should be honored that they even acknowledged you. This works great for young graduates that are full of dreams and hopes but it discourages experienced people from even attempting to go through the interview process.<p>Oh and the always responsive HR or whoever is in charge.
Getting back to you after 6 months.
Thanks but no thanks. I would rather make more money in a stupid corporate job than working on more aggressive ways of making people to click on ads.</text></item><item><author>gaylemcd</author><text>I&#x27;ll try to stay active on this thread if anyone has any more specific questions. (Context: I&#x27;m the author of Cracking the Coding Interview)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rdiddly</author><text>All you&#x27;re doing is repeating the cult&#x27;s mantra there. They&#x27;d <i>better</i> pay that much if they&#x27;re going to depend so heavily on dehumanizing you.<p>It does take a lot of preparation for big-company clueless interviewing processes though. Next we&#x27;ll see guides for how to ace your kid&#x27;s application to the top-tier coding preschool.<p>All this sucking up to big companies with questionable morals and procedures, for the money, is so... 80s. So yuppie, so Reagan-era. Reachin&#x27; for the top! Go for it! Eye of the tiger! Pressure, pushing down on you, pushing down on me, no man ask for.</text></comment> | <story><title>What I've learned from 100s of interviews with candidates at top tech companies</title><url>http://observer.com/2017/05/apple-facebook-google-amazon-secrets-dream-job/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ThePawnBreak</author><text>&gt; I would rather make more money in a stupid corporate job than working on more aggressive ways of making people to click on ads.<p>Could you name a few &quot;stupid corporate jobs&quot; that pay better than Google or Facebook (200k - 300k for a senior engineer) ?</text></item><item><author>holydude</author><text>The biggest problem I have with these companies is that they feel like a cult.
And the people working there are doing a lot to keep that cult spirit alive.
All of these companies want you too feel and act like they are the single best entity in the entire universe and you should be honored that they even acknowledged you. This works great for young graduates that are full of dreams and hopes but it discourages experienced people from even attempting to go through the interview process.<p>Oh and the always responsive HR or whoever is in charge.
Getting back to you after 6 months.
Thanks but no thanks. I would rather make more money in a stupid corporate job than working on more aggressive ways of making people to click on ads.</text></item><item><author>gaylemcd</author><text>I&#x27;ll try to stay active on this thread if anyone has any more specific questions. (Context: I&#x27;m the author of Cracking the Coding Interview)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>deong</author><text>I make roughly 85% of that 200k figure (give-or-take, depending on stock option values), and my house cost $90 per square foot. If you&#x27;re a good senior level engineer, you can make good money in far more than five or six companies in the world.</text></comment> |
13,023,124 | 13,021,822 | 1 | 3 | 13,020,240 | train | <story><title>Tesla runs an entire island on solar power</title><url>https://www.engadget.com/2016/11/22/tesla-runs-island-on-solar-power/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jamiesonbecker</author><text>Battery tech in general is really the limiting factor for environmental improvements of solar and wind over other common forms of energy. We need more advances here, and they shouldn&#x27;t all come from Elon Musk.<p>One of the toughest things to overcome is that lithium ion batteries have a limited lifespan (although it&#x27;s improving) and the cost for that life span compared to alternatives is pretty high, so the economics aren&#x27;t great. Yet.<p>The environmental hazards, both in manufacturing and disposal, are not insignificant either[1].<p>With all that said, li-ion represents <i>our best bet for future tech advances</i> that have minimal environmental impact, especially for space travel.<p>Eventually. (But if I was a VC, I&#x27;d be investing in cleaner and more efficient ways to utilize petrochemicals in the near&#x2F;mid term.. maybe looking at non-burning tech; whatever happened to fuel cells?)<p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Lithium-ion_battery#Environmental_concerns_and_recycling" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Lithium-ion_battery#Environmen...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Tesla runs an entire island on solar power</title><url>https://www.engadget.com/2016/11/22/tesla-runs-island-on-solar-power/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>masklinn</author><text>The part I don&#x27;t get is: why use batteries for large infrastructural power storage? Why not flywheels?<p>edit: looks like Oʻahu is getting flywheels: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;amberkinetics.com&#x2F;amber-kinetics-and-hawaiian-electric-sign-agreement-for-flywheel-energy-storage-pilot-project&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;amberkinetics.com&#x2F;amber-kinetics-and-hawaiian-electri...</a><p>It&#x27;s too bad Tesla seems all-in on batteries even for large-scale storage projects.</text></comment> |
22,581,966 | 22,581,178 | 1 | 3 | 22,580,223 | train | <story><title>InboxSDK – Build apps inside Gmail</title><url>https://www.inboxsdk.com/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>walty8</author><text>I am the author of Simple Gmail Notes (a free extension for Chrome and FF). When I started to develop the extension years ago, I did some research of InboxSDK and Gmail.js. I am not sure if it&#x27;s still true now, but at that time when I use the SDK I need to load a remote and minified JS file hosted at the Streak server, which seems not a good idea for security concerns. I don&#x27;t think Streak will try to steal the data in purpose, but still... Also, I wonder if that might cause problems with extension verification nowadays. Both FF and Chrome has more strict safety policies now.<p>I then tried to use Gmail.js for a while, but it seems not that stable, the extension got a lot of complaints of not working from time to time (Gmail.js cannot load email data correctly, but not every time).<p>After a few months, I finally decided to parse the DOM data myself, it&#x27;s actually not THAT difficult, if you are not trying to build an extremely powerful extension.Gmail.com did change the UI from time to time, but it&#x27;s not that huge actually. For the latest big UI change on Gmail, I remember it took me about 1MD to finish all the required code changes.</text></comment> | <story><title>InboxSDK – Build apps inside Gmail</title><url>https://www.inboxsdk.com/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>rubyn00bie</author><text>Yeah... this is gonna be a big &quot;no&quot; from me, dawg.<p>There&#x27;s probably a segment of small mid-sized businesses to prey upon making apps with this; but outside of that this has got to be the most terrifying platform to ever build upon.<p>1. It&#x27;s based on a specific email provider.<p>2. That provider is google.<p>3. Google has zero incentive to give a shit about about anyone or anything using its platform.<p>4. Average SDK releases per week: 12 (screw the fact GMail hasn&#x27;t been responsible for breaking changes)<p>Focusing on a tool that does this shit, on any platform, or one that integrates into any email provider... that&#x27;d be neat. This I am afraid of...</text></comment> |
37,890,964 | 37,891,149 | 1 | 2 | 37,890,685 | train | <story><title>Causal inference as a blind spot of data scientists</title><url>https://dzidas.com/ml/2023/10/15/blind-spot-ds/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>bertil</author><text>The main reason for not using causal inference is not because data scientists don’t know about the different approaches or can’t imagine something equivalent (a lot of reinvention); forecasting is one of the most common tasks, after all.<p>The main reason is that they generally work for software companies where it’s easier and less susceptible to analyst influence to implement the suggested change and test it with a Random Control Trial. I remember running an analysis that found that gender was a significant explaining factor for behavior on our site; my boss asked (dismissively): What can we do with that information? If there is an assumption of how things work that doesn’t translate to a product change, that insight isn’t useful; if there is a product intuition, testing the product change itself is key, and there’s no reason to delay that.<p>There are cases where RCTs are hard to organize (for example, multi-sided platform businesses) of changes that can’t be tested in isolation (major brand changes). Those tend to benefit from the techniques described there——and they have dedicated teams. But this is a classic case of a complicated tool that doesn’t fit most use cases.</text></comment> | <story><title>Causal inference as a blind spot of data scientists</title><url>https://dzidas.com/ml/2023/10/15/blind-spot-ds/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Anon84</author><text>For a hands on introduction to Causality, I would recommend
“Causal Inference in Python” by M. Facure <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;amzn.to&#x2F;46byWnl" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;amzn.to&#x2F;46byWnl</a>
Well written and to the point.<p>&lt;ShamelessSelfPromotion&gt;
I also have a series of blog posts on the topic: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;DataForScience&#x2F;Causality">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;DataForScience&#x2F;Causality</a> where I work through Pearls Primer: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;amzn.to&#x2F;3gsFlkO" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;amzn.to&#x2F;3gsFlkO</a>
&lt;&#x2F;ShamelessSelfPromotion&gt;</text></comment> |
17,340,762 | 17,340,472 | 1 | 3 | 17,339,866 | train | <story><title>X86 assembly doesn’t have to be scary</title><url>https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/interactive-x86-bootloader-tutorial</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tvmalsv</author><text>When I was about 14 I was enthralled with programming my new Commodore 64, first in BASIC, then 6510 assembly. I had the opportunity to accompany my mother to a one-day class on programming. Being just an intro on the subject, I was well ahead of what they would be discussing, but thought it would interesting to talk to some adults that were also into programming.<p>I was talking to a couple of guys about what I had been doing on my C=64, and when I mentioned the assembly stuff I was writing, one of them said, &quot;How can you possibly write anything with only three registers?!&quot; (just the accumulator and x&#x2F;y registers). I was wondering what the big deal was since that was the only architecture I had known at that point. Every game and utility I had were only using three registers, so it was already proven to me that three were &quot;enough&quot;.<p>It&#x27;s funny how you can just adapt and work with whatever is available, and that becomes your norm. Especially when you don&#x27;t even realize there are other options out there.<p>Those were the days!</text></comment> | <story><title>X86 assembly doesn’t have to be scary</title><url>https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/interactive-x86-bootloader-tutorial</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ChrisSD</author><text>I wonder if the history of x86 is holding us back in a big way. It started out being close to the metal but now it&#x27;s an abstraction that can mislead you if you think processors are literally working the way x86 assembly describes.<p>And surely the whole spectre issue could be lessened if we could be less reliant on CPUs having to guess what to keep in cache, which code paths are most likely, etc?</text></comment> |
33,162,276 | 33,161,897 | 1 | 2 | 33,160,274 | train | <story><title>Private Prisons Are Behind the Push for Homeless Criminalization</title><url>https://invisiblepeople.tv/private-prisons-for-homeless-criminalization/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>isodev</author><text>The penal system in the US is perplexing. It&#x27;s built on the premise that people should not only lose their freedom but also get subjected to the worst possible conditions and exploited as free labor. I honestly can&#x27;t comprehend how a modern nation can get to this point.</text></item><item><author>dgan</author><text>I loved to throw around &quot;What&#x27;s next? Private prisons??&quot; when speaking about some crazy privatization ideas. That, until I learned it&#x27;s an actual thing in US. Who would have guessed. I think I was 32 at that time</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>acdha</author><text>We didn’t get here as a modern nation. We got there because the fight to end slavery resulted in a lot of white people giving up during the Reconstruction era and allowing the South to rebuild many of the same power structures through a campaign of terrorism and political disenfranchisement during the Jim Crow era, which was only partially halted during the civil rights era and even some of those wins were later reversed under Regan and later.<p>The major loophole here is in the 13th amendment:<p>&gt; Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.<p>That doesn’t work if the judicial system is unfair. There are many, many examples showing that it too often isn’t with uncomfortably close relationships between the police, prosecutors, judges, and the prison industry. This is one of the more egregious cases in recent memory because it involved children but the cases involving adults tend to get far less media coverage:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.inquirer.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;pennsylvania&#x2F;pa-kids-for-cash-scandal-judges-mark-ciavarella-michael-conahan-20220818.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.inquirer.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;pennsylvania&#x2F;pa-kids-for-cash-...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Private Prisons Are Behind the Push for Homeless Criminalization</title><url>https://invisiblepeople.tv/private-prisons-for-homeless-criminalization/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>isodev</author><text>The penal system in the US is perplexing. It&#x27;s built on the premise that people should not only lose their freedom but also get subjected to the worst possible conditions and exploited as free labor. I honestly can&#x27;t comprehend how a modern nation can get to this point.</text></item><item><author>dgan</author><text>I loved to throw around &quot;What&#x27;s next? Private prisons??&quot; when speaking about some crazy privatization ideas. That, until I learned it&#x27;s an actual thing in US. Who would have guessed. I think I was 32 at that time</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bdg</author><text>I think this had something to do with the base ethos of North American style crime &amp; punishment.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;History_of_the_Puritans_in_North_America" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;History_of_the_Puritans_in_Nor...</a></text></comment> |
31,739,026 | 31,739,001 | 1 | 2 | 31,738,029 | train | <story><title>Coinbase Announces 18% Layoffs</title><url>https://blog.coinbase.com/a-message-from-coinbase-ceo-and-cofounder-brian-armstrong-578d76eedb12</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>NikolaNovak</author><text>We may be mixing things up.<p>You can definitely be paid laid off employee for a period of time, <i>while</i> having your access revoked. They&#x27;re completely orthogonal. Depends on role, company, situation. It&#x27;s an assessment and tradeoff - is it worth &#x2F; do I need the next two weeks of work and KT from this person, vs the risk of having access.<p>The notion of revoking security access to limit risk is <i>definitely</i> not a US thing.</text></item><item><author>a_chris</author><text>This is absolutely untrue. In Europe we work several days&#x2F;weeks after the layoff notice. You can fire people from the night to the morning only in US</text></item><item><author>nemo44x</author><text>Pretty standard to not let terminated employees hang around. It feels cold but it’s just the way it has to be. Sone places will even do this when an employee submits a resignation on good terms. Just a way for the company to cover themselves.</text></item><item><author>Barrera</author><text>&gt; If you are affected, you will receive this notification in your personal email, because we made the decision to cut access to Coinbase systems for affected employees. I realize that removal of access will feel sudden and unexpected, and this is not the experience I wanted for you. Given the number of employees who have access to sensitive customer information, it was unfortunately the only practical choice, to ensure not even a single person made a rash decision that harmed the business or themselves.<p>How typical is this? Is he really talking about the hot wallet and&#x2F;or cold storage?<p>Those claiming that this is a &quot;crypto&quot; sentiment thing should consider the possibility that the front page of HN will be filled with stories like this from all over the economy within one month.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Closi</author><text>In the UK you have to provide employees with a consultation period, which is typically done while the employee is still carrying out their day-to-day jobs (dependent on the reason for the redundancy). I believe it is similar in other EU companies.<p>See here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gov.uk&#x2F;redundancy-your-rights&#x2F;consultation" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gov.uk&#x2F;redundancy-your-rights&#x2F;consultation</a><p>Revoking access and not allowing users to complete their jobs would often be seen as a failure to consult (see, for instance, the recent P&amp;O ferries dismissals where they immediately removed ship access from the crew, replaced them with oversees workers, and <i>then</i> began consultation. This was a failure to consult and was found to be illegal).<p>People tend not to do rash things anyway during this period, as gross misconduct during that time would mean the employee is instantly fired regardless with zero redundancy pay. Treat people fairly and as adults and they tend to behave fairly and respond as adults. Treat people as untrustworthy and rash, and they tend to respond with the same.</text></comment> | <story><title>Coinbase Announces 18% Layoffs</title><url>https://blog.coinbase.com/a-message-from-coinbase-ceo-and-cofounder-brian-armstrong-578d76eedb12</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>NikolaNovak</author><text>We may be mixing things up.<p>You can definitely be paid laid off employee for a period of time, <i>while</i> having your access revoked. They&#x27;re completely orthogonal. Depends on role, company, situation. It&#x27;s an assessment and tradeoff - is it worth &#x2F; do I need the next two weeks of work and KT from this person, vs the risk of having access.<p>The notion of revoking security access to limit risk is <i>definitely</i> not a US thing.</text></item><item><author>a_chris</author><text>This is absolutely untrue. In Europe we work several days&#x2F;weeks after the layoff notice. You can fire people from the night to the morning only in US</text></item><item><author>nemo44x</author><text>Pretty standard to not let terminated employees hang around. It feels cold but it’s just the way it has to be. Sone places will even do this when an employee submits a resignation on good terms. Just a way for the company to cover themselves.</text></item><item><author>Barrera</author><text>&gt; If you are affected, you will receive this notification in your personal email, because we made the decision to cut access to Coinbase systems for affected employees. I realize that removal of access will feel sudden and unexpected, and this is not the experience I wanted for you. Given the number of employees who have access to sensitive customer information, it was unfortunately the only practical choice, to ensure not even a single person made a rash decision that harmed the business or themselves.<p>How typical is this? Is he really talking about the hot wallet and&#x2F;or cold storage?<p>Those claiming that this is a &quot;crypto&quot; sentiment thing should consider the possibility that the front page of HN will be filled with stories like this from all over the economy within one month.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ewindal</author><text>Have had colleagues who were required to not work for their resignation period (3 months). &quot;Professional quarantine,&quot; since they were going to competitors.</text></comment> |
32,124,389 | 32,123,813 | 1 | 2 | 32,122,818 | train | <story><title>We could have universal Covid vaccines soon</title><url>https://www.slowboring.com/p/we-could-have-universal-covid-vaccines</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>lamontcg</author><text>We can&#x27;t vaccinate our way out of this virus. Even without the issues of compliance, eradication is likely impossible with a respiratory virus like this.<p>Even if you have a pan coronavirus nasal vaccine the NAbs will wane and people will get infected again.<p>It doesn&#x27;t matter if we use more mRNAs than just spike for more targets or anything else. It&#x27;ll mutate, NAbs will wane, people won&#x27;t get vaccinated and the virus will persist.<p>People are looking for a silver bullet which will confer the naive ideal of &quot;perfect immunity&quot; against this virus which just doesn&#x27;t exist. The vaccines we have though are great, particularly against severe disease and death. But it won&#x27;t get much better than this.<p>The disease burden is currently high compared to common colds because the virus is still novel and our immune system responses aren&#x27;t 100% fully formed and tested. Once everyone has been exposed to the antigen a half dozen times and the virus is forced to mutate off of its naive optimum then the disease burden will drop even further. Then we just have another human common cold coronavirus.<p>Nobody is freaking out over HCoV-NL63, HCoV-229E or HCoV-OC43.</text></comment> | <story><title>We could have universal Covid vaccines soon</title><url>https://www.slowboring.com/p/we-could-have-universal-covid-vaccines</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>robhunter</author><text>I&#x27;m not sure the public - at least in North America - has much of an appetite for any more Covid vaccines. In the US:<p>- Only about 2% of kids under 5 have had a 1st dose since they were introduced nearly a month ago<p>- Only 30% of the 5-11 year old population has had 2 doses<p>- &lt; 50% of people w&#x2F;2 doses went on to get a booster<p>So much damage has been done to public trust - &quot;You will not get Covid if you get the vaccine; the vaccine eliminates the spread of the disease; the vaccine is more effective than natural immunity; healthy 18 year old males need a booster to go to school&quot; - that I think it will be a real uphill climb to get more buy-in, even if the actual underlying product is more effective.</text></comment> |
5,851,240 | 5,851,247 | 1 | 2 | 5,850,698 | train | <story><title>Microsoft admits Patriot Act can access EU-based cloud data (2011)</title><url>http://www.zdnet.com/blog/igeneration/microsoft-admits-patriot-act-can-access-eu-based-cloud-data/11225</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mosqutip</author><text>&quot;Microsoft cannot provide those guarantees. Neither can any other company.&quot;<p>The most telling and most important line in the article. Recent days have made it abundantly clear that anyone under US jurisdiction is susceptible to scrutiny and surveillance.</text></comment> | <story><title>Microsoft admits Patriot Act can access EU-based cloud data (2011)</title><url>http://www.zdnet.com/blog/igeneration/microsoft-admits-patriot-act-can-access-eu-based-cloud-data/11225</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>toyg</author><text>Most large European corporations have known this for ages, and it&#x27;s still a big obstacle for cloud offerings here in Europe when dealing with sensitive (or just very bureaucratic) engagements.<p>I know of at least one (massive) US company that had to create a special data centre in the UK to host sensitive financial data for a (massive) bank, because US-based servers were a huge no-no due to Patriot Act. In that case, it was promised that the provider might have to comply with US requests anyway, but would have been entitled to at least notify the client in advance... and I bet there was a huge discount to sweeten the deal.</text></comment> |
17,750,984 | 17,751,043 | 1 | 3 | 17,750,664 | train | <story><title>US elections remain 'dangerously vulnerable' to cyber-attacks</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/aug/13/us-election-cybersecurity-hacking-voting</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>umanwizard</author><text>Friendly reminder: electronic voting is totally unnecessary. Many highly developed democracies (e.g. France) have totally paper voting where the ballots never leave the public eye.<p>If the past is any indication, there will almost certainly be a lot of comments on this article proposing complicated schemes for making electronic voting secure and verifiable. Consider when evaluating these schemes whether there is any benefit or upside at all over good old fashioned unhackable paper.</text></comment> | <story><title>US elections remain 'dangerously vulnerable' to cyber-attacks</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/aug/13/us-election-cybersecurity-hacking-voting</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>MichaelApproved</author><text>It&#x27;s insane that we have systems using 100% electric vote counting.<p>Any system, even 100% paper ballots, are hackable. They key is making the hack difficult to scale.<p>Computer systems are easy to hack from a distance and in large numbers. Theoretically, one person could hack many devices from another country.<p>Paper ballots require someone to change&#x2F;stuff in person. One person can do limited damage and would have to be in the country. You&#x27;d need to recruit large numbers for an effective operation.<p>Electric assistance is fine but ultimately you need a paper result that a human can read.<p>A computer can help you make selections and fill out the ballot but the voter must be able to read the printed result and confirm their vote was properly printed.<p>I&#x27;d be against any computer counting for the initial count. Manual is slower and expensive but it&#x27;s worth the added cost to have a more secure voting system.</text></comment> |
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