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29,997,770 | 29,997,715 | 1 | 3 | 29,996,614 | train | <story><title>IRS Will Soon Require Selfies for Online Access</title><url>https://krebsonsecurity.com/2022/01/irs-will-soon-require-selfies-for-online-access/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>exhilaration</author><text>You should let them know to contact their state legislator. From what I read on various state subreddits that&#x27;s the only way to get a response from your overwhelmed state unemployment office. This is the equivalent to escalating your issue to a manager.</text></item><item><author>lotsofpulp</author><text>&gt; because their internal systems were designed to delay, deny and deprive, I say.<p>Definitely. I know someone in NJ who has not received unemployed benefits for 14 months. They call every month, and are told to keep waiting. No one returns their calls, snail mail, or emails.<p>There is zero justification the government cannot respond via email, or give you a call back, other than they would like you to waste so much of your time and effort on hold that you give up.</text></item><item><author>mistrial9</author><text>American here<p>&quot;perhaps better known as the online identity verification service that many states now use to help staunch the loss of billions of dollars in unemployment insurance and pandemic assistance stolen each year by identity thieves&quot;<p>In the great State of California, <i>billions</i> in unemployment benefits were sent to the wrong people.. because their internal systems were designed to delay, deny and deprive, I say. Actual people with real jobs were repeatedly refused, while insiders who knew how to fill out paperwork, and apparently knew where the blind spots were, filed hundreds of claims in the early pandemic days. A newly appointed Director (young, tech savvy woman) soon stopped making public statements, and the situation nearly two years later, is not resolved. This is at a time when California has record income to the State.<p>Now, some people may jump on this and say &quot;well, you see how photo ID would have helped that&quot; and, with incomplete knowledge and personal opinion, I say no, it would not solve it. You see, people with real jobs, with every real paper filed, were <i>denied</i> benefits, while insiders were pulling checks with both hands, using certain kinds of identities that would slip through. How would ever more restriction, requirement and verification, have helped here?<p>I am deeply against the collective government making ever more demands on citizens for &quot;papers, please&quot; enrollment to massive money social services (<i>edit e.g. govt unemployment benefits</i>). It is not going to have the desired effect, despite superficial evidence otherwise. Additionally this represents a slippery slope where the ability to interact as an individual will be eroded, and opportunity for insider graft will increase.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Loughla</author><text>Due to COVID, my representatives no longer take visitors, and no longer take phone calls to their office, nor do they provide a contact e-mail. They have a form you can fill out on their websites.<p>That way you get a response (thank you for completing the form) and then zero way to track the communication. In my case, I have never received anything after that from any of my representatives.<p>You can&#x27;t call to check on it, because, again, they&#x27;re no longer taking phone calls. And even if they did, you have no reference number.<p>They took advantage of the pandemic to just completely cut ties with their constituents outside of THEIR approved avenues.<p>Super cool. Very representative.</text></comment> | <story><title>IRS Will Soon Require Selfies for Online Access</title><url>https://krebsonsecurity.com/2022/01/irs-will-soon-require-selfies-for-online-access/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>exhilaration</author><text>You should let them know to contact their state legislator. From what I read on various state subreddits that&#x27;s the only way to get a response from your overwhelmed state unemployment office. This is the equivalent to escalating your issue to a manager.</text></item><item><author>lotsofpulp</author><text>&gt; because their internal systems were designed to delay, deny and deprive, I say.<p>Definitely. I know someone in NJ who has not received unemployed benefits for 14 months. They call every month, and are told to keep waiting. No one returns their calls, snail mail, or emails.<p>There is zero justification the government cannot respond via email, or give you a call back, other than they would like you to waste so much of your time and effort on hold that you give up.</text></item><item><author>mistrial9</author><text>American here<p>&quot;perhaps better known as the online identity verification service that many states now use to help staunch the loss of billions of dollars in unemployment insurance and pandemic assistance stolen each year by identity thieves&quot;<p>In the great State of California, <i>billions</i> in unemployment benefits were sent to the wrong people.. because their internal systems were designed to delay, deny and deprive, I say. Actual people with real jobs were repeatedly refused, while insiders who knew how to fill out paperwork, and apparently knew where the blind spots were, filed hundreds of claims in the early pandemic days. A newly appointed Director (young, tech savvy woman) soon stopped making public statements, and the situation nearly two years later, is not resolved. This is at a time when California has record income to the State.<p>Now, some people may jump on this and say &quot;well, you see how photo ID would have helped that&quot; and, with incomplete knowledge and personal opinion, I say no, it would not solve it. You see, people with real jobs, with every real paper filed, were <i>denied</i> benefits, while insiders were pulling checks with both hands, using certain kinds of identities that would slip through. How would ever more restriction, requirement and verification, have helped here?<p>I am deeply against the collective government making ever more demands on citizens for &quot;papers, please&quot; enrollment to massive money social services (<i>edit e.g. govt unemployment benefits</i>). It is not going to have the desired effect, despite superficial evidence otherwise. Additionally this represents a slippery slope where the ability to interact as an individual will be eroded, and opportunity for insider graft will increase.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ryanianian</author><text>100% this. I had an issue with the NJ DMV, and the senator&#x27;s office was able to get my issue resolved like same-day and told the DMV to eat glass. I even got a formal apology letter from the DMV.<p>Not all congresscritters will have the same effectiveness, but that is the first place to start if the trail to getting results turns to a dead-end.</text></comment> |
15,878,459 | 15,878,461 | 1 | 3 | 15,878,156 | train | <story><title>Bitcoin mining and energy consumption</title><url>https://blog.bitcoin.org.hk/bitcoin-mining-and-energy-consumption-4526d4b56186</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>seanwilson</author><text>One of the big selling points of Bitcoin is that it&#x27;s meant to be decentralised but it doesn&#x27;t look like this plays out. Proof of work seems to inevitably lead to all the power going to parties that can afford specialised hardware who are in countries with low electricity costs.<p>Running a Bitcoin miner on commodity hardware now is pointless which seems to go against the spirit of Bitcoin when it started. Was this predicted at the inception of Bitcoin? It&#x27;s interesting how economics impacts the security of the protocol like this.<p>Proof of stake is meant to consume less resources but then the power is then handed to people with the most money? Coming up with a way to have a decentralised currency where everyone involved gets a fair say without consuming too many resources is a super interesting problem.</text></comment> | <story><title>Bitcoin mining and energy consumption</title><url>https://blog.bitcoin.org.hk/bitcoin-mining-and-energy-consumption-4526d4b56186</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>albertgoeswoof</author><text>Bitcoin&#x27;s electricity consumption is unfortunate, it&#x27;s difficult to assess whether it is a waste or not. The current position blockchain tech can be compared to the state of networked computers in the 70s and early 80s. Not a huge amount of value delivered at the time, yet very few could have foreseen the impact of the internet and personal computing on the world.<p>If blockchains and distributed computing does present a new leap forward in how we communicate, this electricity will not be wasted.</text></comment> |
10,797,691 | 10,797,744 | 1 | 2 | 10,797,043 | train | <story><title>32C3 – Chaos Communication Congress – Streams Online</title><url>http://streaming.media.ccc.de/32c3/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wslh</author><text>Someone in HN who can share some information about how to setup WiFi for high-demand? In any place I go (e.g. airports, restaurants) the WiFi is terrible.</text></item><item><author>palcu</author><text>I&#x27;m always mindblowned by the sheer number of networking equipment deployed and maintained during the conference. They now have[0] 5000 WiFi clients connected, downloading with 2.70 Gbps and uploading with 8.93 Gbps. It&#x27;s like, once a year, a big part of the internet traffic is routed through Hamburg.<p>[0]: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;dashboard.congress.ccc.de&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;dashboard.congress.ccc.de&#x2F;</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ethbro</author><text>The PyCon people have historically done a number of detailed blogs on running high capacity&#x2F;utilization wireless networks.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tummy.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;pycon2010-network&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tummy.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;pycon2010-network&#x2F;</a><p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;serverfault.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;72767&#x2F;why-is-internet-access-and-wi-fi-always-so-terrible-at-large-tech-conferences" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;serverfault.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;72767&#x2F;why-is-internet-acces...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>32C3 – Chaos Communication Congress – Streams Online</title><url>http://streaming.media.ccc.de/32c3/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wslh</author><text>Someone in HN who can share some information about how to setup WiFi for high-demand? In any place I go (e.g. airports, restaurants) the WiFi is terrible.</text></item><item><author>palcu</author><text>I&#x27;m always mindblowned by the sheer number of networking equipment deployed and maintained during the conference. They now have[0] 5000 WiFi clients connected, downloading with 2.70 Gbps and uploading with 8.93 Gbps. It&#x27;s like, once a year, a big part of the internet traffic is routed through Hamburg.<p>[0]: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;dashboard.congress.ccc.de&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;dashboard.congress.ccc.de&#x2F;</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sathackr</author><text>I work for an ISP and have done wifi for events with over 10,000 attendants. We have done this exclusively with Ubiquiti equipment. I have not used any of the high-end gear that claims to be designed for this (Aerohive&#x2F;Ruckus&#x2F;etc...). The bottom line is, ultimately, the wifi standard is not designed for this type of deployment -- the standards do not support the features that would be needed to get the best performance in this environment. That being said, like with most things, it can often be made to work with a reasonable level of service.<p>There are two bands that are available for use -- 2.4ghz and 5.8ghz. Most newer devices support 5.8ghz -- there is more overall bandwidth available on the 5.8ghz band, but we have had good success deploying only 2.4ghz for public events. Deploying 802.11ac in the 5ghz band with beam steering is something that we may investigate as more clients begin to support this band.<p>Two of the main issues is contention for air time (bandwidth) and channel usage. Wifi is half duplex, and only one device within a cell can talk at the same time on the same channel. If the access point(AP) is talking, clients(cell phone&#x2F;laptop&#x2F;etc...) must listen. If a client is talking, the AP and all other clients must listen. A protocol is implemented for this, CSMA&#x2F;CA [1]. Think about this for a second -- when someone is transmitting data, nobody else can receive data. This is important (will explain later).<p>While(in the US) there are 11 available channels in the 2.4ghz band, there are only 3 usable channels. The others overlap and will cause interference if used in the same area. 1&#x2F;6&#x2F;11 are the non-overlapping channels. There is a limited amount of bandwidth available in any given area on any given channel. 2.4ghz tops out at about 130mb&#x2F;s over-the-air (figure about 60% usable bandwidth as a best-case scenario) so about 80mb&#x2F;s. That&#x27;s with a single client, clean spectrum, and a single access point. If the signal is weak or if there is interference, this number will be reduced.<p>Antennas and access points need to be placed and configured (transmit power) in such a manner that you control the number of devices that are within range of them such that their client densities don&#x27;t get too high (you don&#x27;t want 1000 people connecting to one access point, wifi&#x27;s implentation of CSMA&#x2F;CA breaks down with these densities) but also the targeted clients have a good signal. One thing you must consider that many people don&#x27;t is, that while you can control the area and transmit power of your access point, you cannot control the client device talking to it. You must take this into consideration also. That client 150ft away on the fringe of this cell is transmitting with full power, likely interfering with another access point 250ft away that can&#x27;t even hear this AP&#x27;s signal.<p>A single low signal client can turn your 80mb&#x2F;s access point into a 2mb&#x2F;s access point. An access point talking to a client with a weak signal will &#x27;downshift&#x27; and talk at a slower speed -- say 12mb&#x2F;s instead of 54mb&#x2F;s -- this makes it easier for the client to receive the data being transmitted without errors. But, this slower speed means more time must be spent transmitting the data, and this is time that the AP can&#x27;t talk to other clients, and other clients can&#x27;t talk to the AP. In this manner, a single weak signal device streaming Youtube at 2mb&#x2F;s can reduce your overall bandwidth on an access point to 10mb&#x2F;s or even worse. I aim for about 30 devices per access point, with a maximum distance of about 100ft in outdoor environments and 50ft indoors. In practice, this maintains a generally usable speed of about 5mb&#x2F;s (you&#x27;ll want to deploy bandwidth management systems to enforce this). Your overall usage will depend heavily on the type of event, but generally we see about 10% of attendants using wifi -- so based on the rule above, about one access point per 300 people.<p>If the layout of your event is such that this is difficult or impossible (such as a large auditorium&#x2F;stadium) you can co-locate multiple access points on non-overlapping channels and handle about 1000 clients in a general area. But care must be taken to control the signal propagation if you want to support more clients in other areas as you will be using all 3 available channels thus any other nearby access points(within range) will be cutting into your available bandwidth.<p>This is complicated by the reluctance of most wifi devices (phones are the worst because you generally can&#x27;t configure this setting on the client) to let go of a weak signal and grab a stronger one. A wifi device will generally hold on to a signal long after it has become unusable. Many of the bigger manufacturers have ways to mitigate it. With Ubiquiti, you MUST configure the &quot;minrssi&quot; [2] feature and it is buried in a config file on the access point controller. Most consumer grade access points do not support this feature at all.<p>As I get more into trying to explain this I&#x27;m realizing all of the nuances and gotchas that can really make this difficult for someone without experience to engineer and implement. I&#x27;m not sure I can effectively convey them in an HN reply but hopefully I&#x27;ve helped steer you in at least the right direction. Sadly, most tech companies that would be contracted to do this type of work are just as ill equipped to design and implement this.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Carrier_sense_multiple_access_with_collision_avoidance" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Carrier_sense_multiple_access_...</a><p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;help.ubnt.com&#x2F;hc&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;articles&#x2F;205146050-OD-UniFi-How-does-minimum-RSSI-work-" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;help.ubnt.com&#x2F;hc&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;articles&#x2F;205146050-OD-UniFi-H...</a></text></comment> |
29,553,274 | 29,553,369 | 1 | 3 | 29,551,686 | train | <story><title>Ask HN: News site that provides world updates only when relevant?</title><url>https://legiblenews.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gpm</author><text>I&#x27;m working on something that you might like - though it&#x27;s not released yet.<p>It&#x27;s a news site that doesn&#x27;t write articles. It just organizes links to other peoples articles, and links to original sources, into sagas that unfolded over time.<p>For stories of sufficient note I&#x27;d like to offer the ability to subscribe to them and get email notifications when something major changes. Unfortunately I suspect that for the long tail of other stories I will need to rely on a wiki-style model for gathering links, and probably can&#x27;t send notifications without it becoming a source of spam.<p>The brief version of the motivation for this is basically three fold:<p>- Most stories of any interest really unfold over a period of weeks to years, but the current news cycle really only favors reporting on them as a single one time event. I&#x27;d like that to change.<p>- Most news sites seem to have a severe allergy to linking to original sources, but often the original sources have a lot of value.<p>- I&#x27;d often like to be able to compare new articles to what I&#x27;ve already read on the topic.<p>Edit: Send me an email (my email is on my profile), and I&#x27;ll send you one back once I have a MVP released. That&#x27;s just my personal email, and I promise not to add you to a mailing list or anything.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>0xCMP</author><text>You&#x27;re actually sort-of describing the original idea for Vox. They wanted to basically have like a website of <i>things happening</i> with explainers for everything they could easily link-to and keep updated so they could write a story explaining an event and provide context for experts and normal consumers.<p>e.g. Explainers on the budget process and what happened before with regulations of some kind. etc. And that only becomes relevant to readers when it becomes important and if they&#x27;re interested in it.<p>Unfortunately because of social media, AMP, and etc. they <i>had to fit in the article format</i> even though they had big plans for doing richer UIs on the website itself. They basically were forced to pivot into a blog which I think they still do a good job at today cause the mission is still similar, but the mechanics of getting people to read things which aren&#x27;t articles is difficult.<p>[This is all from memory of an episode of Erza Klein&#x27;s Vox Podcast where the founders talk about the original ideas of Vox and why they ended up where they were]</text></comment> | <story><title>Ask HN: News site that provides world updates only when relevant?</title><url>https://legiblenews.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gpm</author><text>I&#x27;m working on something that you might like - though it&#x27;s not released yet.<p>It&#x27;s a news site that doesn&#x27;t write articles. It just organizes links to other peoples articles, and links to original sources, into sagas that unfolded over time.<p>For stories of sufficient note I&#x27;d like to offer the ability to subscribe to them and get email notifications when something major changes. Unfortunately I suspect that for the long tail of other stories I will need to rely on a wiki-style model for gathering links, and probably can&#x27;t send notifications without it becoming a source of spam.<p>The brief version of the motivation for this is basically three fold:<p>- Most stories of any interest really unfold over a period of weeks to years, but the current news cycle really only favors reporting on them as a single one time event. I&#x27;d like that to change.<p>- Most news sites seem to have a severe allergy to linking to original sources, but often the original sources have a lot of value.<p>- I&#x27;d often like to be able to compare new articles to what I&#x27;ve already read on the topic.<p>Edit: Send me an email (my email is on my profile), and I&#x27;ll send you one back once I have a MVP released. That&#x27;s just my personal email, and I promise not to add you to a mailing list or anything.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>indogooner</author><text>This sounds very useful. The quality of sagas would matter a lot. This is from my personal experience of trying to build a news site in my past life which cuts the clutter and focuses on facts. The problem I faced was in how do I decide which link to choose without biases. This turned off a lot of people who did not conform to that view. Even on clear topics. For instance most people agree racism is bad but there would be diverse opinion on where to draw the line and what actions constitute racism.<p>However there are quite a few topics where you could be objective - sports scores, election results, new releases etc.<p>Good luck. Hope to see it on Show HN one day.</text></comment> |
13,976,496 | 13,976,161 | 1 | 3 | 13,975,550 | train | <story><title>Uber is ending its services in Denmark</title><url>http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-ending-services-in-denmark-2017-3</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>chopin</author><text>Afaik a taxi-meter is an approved device, at least somewhat tamper-resistant. Smartphone + app + backend is none of these.</text></item><item><author>ovi256</author><text>Mandating the use of an obsolete technology (taxi meter, when a smartphone + app + backend has the same capability) seems like sensible regulation to you ? That regulation was tailor-made to shut down Uber operations, as a favour to the taxi lobby.</text></item><item><author>legulere</author><text>Uber&#x27;s business model simply cannot survive in sensibly regulated markets when they have to follow the regulations.<p>Uber is probably better than taxi services in markets that lack basic safeguarding regulations or have questionable regulations like restricted tradable taxi medallions leading to high prices. But this is not the case in many places around the world.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tyingq</author><text>The most popular taxi cheat is to the take the long way around. Meters don&#x27;t help you there. Also, meters don&#x27;t show you the full trip price before you commit.<p>Uber could perhaps fiddle around with map data, but the history would have to show the correct origin and destination, or it would be noticed. It&#x27;s trivially easy, and free, to audit against Google maps.<p>I don&#x27;t trust Uber to be ethical, but cheating in this space would just be corporate suicide...they would easily be caught.</text></comment> | <story><title>Uber is ending its services in Denmark</title><url>http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-ending-services-in-denmark-2017-3</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>chopin</author><text>Afaik a taxi-meter is an approved device, at least somewhat tamper-resistant. Smartphone + app + backend is none of these.</text></item><item><author>ovi256</author><text>Mandating the use of an obsolete technology (taxi meter, when a smartphone + app + backend has the same capability) seems like sensible regulation to you ? That regulation was tailor-made to shut down Uber operations, as a favour to the taxi lobby.</text></item><item><author>legulere</author><text>Uber&#x27;s business model simply cannot survive in sensibly regulated markets when they have to follow the regulations.<p>Uber is probably better than taxi services in markets that lack basic safeguarding regulations or have questionable regulations like restricted tradable taxi medallions leading to high prices. But this is not the case in many places around the world.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Cthulhu_</author><text>Those are at least verifiable by 3rd parties - in Uber&#x27;s case, both the driver&#x27;s and passengers&#x27; smartphones should match up in terms of what route they took. I guess a sophisticated enough malicious driver could set up a GPS spoof in their car, but honestly if they can do that they&#x27;re working in the wrong industry.</text></comment> |
6,266,425 | 6,266,292 | 1 | 3 | 6,265,856 | train | <story><title>Docker 0.6: Events API, registry improvements, expert mode, security updates.</title><url>http://blog.docker.io/2013/08/websockets-dockerfile-upgrade-better-registry-support-expert-mode-and-more/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>codexon</author><text>When is the AUFS requirement going to be removed?<p>Ubuntu is going to drop it in the near future. So the idea of rebooting all servers to install a custom kernel with AUFS makes me not even want to try it.</text></comment> | <story><title>Docker 0.6: Events API, registry improvements, expert mode, security updates.</title><url>http://blog.docker.io/2013/08/websockets-dockerfile-upgrade-better-registry-support-expert-mode-and-more/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>timClicks</author><text>Can anyone point to an evaluation of the various orchestration&#x2F;wiring tools mentioned in the post, e.g. &quot;Orchestra, Shipper, Deis, Pipeworks, etc&quot;?</text></comment> |
11,023,815 | 11,023,905 | 1 | 2 | 11,023,236 | train | <story><title>LSD: My Life-Saving Drug</title><url>http://www.gq.com/story/lsd-life-saving-drug</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kurage</author><text>LSD helped me significantly; it alleviated my ADHD symptoms, and helped me get over my substance dependency issues over few low dose trips.<p>Psilocybin helped bring clarity, motivation in my life, love for nature, and helped purge out some negative emotions by crying.<p>Ayahuasca has been the most therapeutic; it allowed me to revisit very early childhood memories I&#x27;ve completely forgotten about, which later helped my interactions with my family and friends. It also showed me why I was born, which helped give me a sense of direction, purpose in life.<p>Forever grateful for psychedelics and the guides that help facilitate a safe space.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>selestify</author><text>&gt; It also showed me why I was born, which helped give me a sense of direction, purpose in life.<p>Out of curiosity, can I ask why you were born?</text></comment> | <story><title>LSD: My Life-Saving Drug</title><url>http://www.gq.com/story/lsd-life-saving-drug</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kurage</author><text>LSD helped me significantly; it alleviated my ADHD symptoms, and helped me get over my substance dependency issues over few low dose trips.<p>Psilocybin helped bring clarity, motivation in my life, love for nature, and helped purge out some negative emotions by crying.<p>Ayahuasca has been the most therapeutic; it allowed me to revisit very early childhood memories I&#x27;ve completely forgotten about, which later helped my interactions with my family and friends. It also showed me why I was born, which helped give me a sense of direction, purpose in life.<p>Forever grateful for psychedelics and the guides that help facilitate a safe space.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>astral303</author><text>In your other comments I noticed you referenced meditation. Can you talk about the effect that a 20 minute meditation session has on you?</text></comment> |
9,258,419 | 9,258,291 | 1 | 3 | 9,257,130 | train | <story><title>Triton: Docker and the “best of all worlds”</title><url>https://www.joyent.com/blog/triton-docker-and-the-best-of-all-worlds</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>themgt</author><text>I find these to be pretty weasel words:
<i>Is Triton open source?<p>Yes. Triton Elastic Container Infrastructure is the commercial offering built on the top of the open-source SmartDataCenter cloud infrastructure management platform. In addition to the open source components, Triton includes support, a DevOps portal, and intellectual property indemnification only available to commercial customers.</i><p>In more plain English, &quot;Yes. Triton is open source just like Mac OS X&quot;<p><a href="https://www.joyent.com/developers/triton-faq#os" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.joyent.com&#x2F;developers&#x2F;triton-faq#os</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Triton: Docker and the “best of all worlds”</title><url>https://www.joyent.com/blog/triton-docker-and-the-best-of-all-worlds</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>DannoHung</author><text>Uh, so I&#x27;ve never really heard of SmartOS or Joyent&#x27;s SDC before now...<p>This stuff looks pretty fucking unreal. What&#x27;s the catch? It looks like it solves so many problems with clustered container deployment. Exposing a whole datacenter as a single Docker host seems like the end-game to me.<p>Am I missing something? I&#x27;m a little low on sleep today.<p>edit: To answer my own question a little: I guess the docker-sdc isn&#x27;t quite fully baked yet. That&#x27;s not really a huge issue since it&#x27;s still a preview, I think?</text></comment> |
37,911,068 | 37,908,586 | 1 | 2 | 37,908,268 | train | <story><title>Detroit wants to be the first big American city to tax land value</title><url>https://www.economist.com/united-states/2023/10/05/detroit-wants-to-be-the-first-big-american-city-to-tax-land-value</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>TulliusCicero</author><text>Land value taxes don&#x27;t factor in improvements. Improving the land results in no property tax change, so they incentivize doing more useful things with the land.</text></item><item><author>ejstronge</author><text>Perhaps someone who has thought about this more can explain how a &#x27;land value tax&#x27; differs from existing property tax regimes that explicitly examine the value of improvements and the value of land...<p>This Detroit case is interesting because there are different rates of taxation on the land, but the difference in rate could also be obtained by increasing the land component of a parcel&#x27;s value.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lend000</author><text>I&#x27;ve gone back and forth on LVT, but don&#x27;t currently support it.<p>The problem is determining what the land is worth. If you use a periodic market-based auction system (the only known way that could possibly yield accurate prices), then you give the government and the wealthy extraordinary power to kick people out of their residences, even ones in which the tenants built the house. Good for the collective perhaps, but terrible for individual autonomy. This could be mitigated by auctioning off longer length (~say 30 year) leases, but you can end up with huge value mismatches after 30 years of change, just like today, and I suspect there would be other unintended consequences. For example, things wouldn&#x27;t be built to last, they&#x27;d be built to generate as much value as possible before the lease is auctioned off again.<p>And even then, you haven&#x27;t really determined what the land is worth, since any rational auction participant is considering how much money can be made with the existing improvements on the property.<p>That being said, I hope they do try it in Detroit, since I have no stake in the city and it seems like it has more to gain than to lose from such an experiment.</text></comment> | <story><title>Detroit wants to be the first big American city to tax land value</title><url>https://www.economist.com/united-states/2023/10/05/detroit-wants-to-be-the-first-big-american-city-to-tax-land-value</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>TulliusCicero</author><text>Land value taxes don&#x27;t factor in improvements. Improving the land results in no property tax change, so they incentivize doing more useful things with the land.</text></item><item><author>ejstronge</author><text>Perhaps someone who has thought about this more can explain how a &#x27;land value tax&#x27; differs from existing property tax regimes that explicitly examine the value of improvements and the value of land...<p>This Detroit case is interesting because there are different rates of taxation on the land, but the difference in rate could also be obtained by increasing the land component of a parcel&#x27;s value.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ses1984</author><text>Don’t improvements in nearby plots change the value of a plot of land?</text></comment> |
28,088,457 | 28,083,883 | 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>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></item><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>neutronicus</author><text>My in-laws put their house on the market, and the Real Estate agent produced a walk-through video.<p>My wife and I couldn&#x27;t stop laughing because the agent photoshopped a view into the kitchen window, but even in the context of the video it&#x27;s clearly a plane with a texture on it just outside the window. It looks like a low-res poster of the Himalayas hung outside their kitchen window; it&#x27;s not a convincing fake view in the slightest.<p>Don&#x27;t know what the agent was thinking, the actual view out the window is better than that.</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>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></item><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>nprateem</author><text>The easiest trick is to blast a flash off white ceilings which then makes any other white walls look bright and clean</text></comment> |
9,121,658 | 9,121,158 | 1 | 2 | 9,120,364 | train | <story><title>Rethinking office space</title><url>http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2015/02/rethinking-office-space.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hga</author><text>I think I should point out that this is traditionally a sign of a peak of a company, sometimes called the Edifice Complex.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ChuckMcM</author><text>It does seem not unusual that, at their peak, technology companies embark on a project that will eventually be their tomb. However, closer inspection reveals that this is really just survivor bias, as many companies continue on post tomb building. Apple built the Infinite Loop campus, Sun built its Menlo Park campus but really didn&#x27;t &quot;die&quot; until after the Agnews complex was being built.<p>Interestingly for me, they are getting bigger and bigger. The space ship complex for Apple (and this proposed Google setup) are both quite large. So harder to lease out as a unit to the next company that comes along.<p>Still, if you have the extra cash laying about companies like IBM have proven that investing in real estate is a good hedge against the future. They have several really beautiful campuses.</text></comment> | <story><title>Rethinking office space</title><url>http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2015/02/rethinking-office-space.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hga</author><text>I think I should point out that this is traditionally a sign of a peak of a company, sometimes called the Edifice Complex.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mbrzusto</author><text>it&#x27;s almost like when SGI built that big hq in mountain view
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googleplex" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Googleplex</a></text></comment> |
22,285,222 | 22,285,250 | 1 | 2 | 22,283,992 | train | <story><title>Storm Ciara helps plane beat transatlantic flight record</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-51433720</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>RcouF1uZ4gsC</author><text>&gt;The fastest transatlantic crossing belongs to BA Concorde, which flew from New York to London in two hours 52 minutes and 59 seconds in 1996 - hitting a top speed of 1,350 mph.<p>That was the fastest commercial flight. The fastest transatlantic crossing by an aircraft was the SR-71 in 1974:<p>1 hour 55 minutes
Average speed over 1800 mph<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tacairnet.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;09&#x2F;02&#x2F;the-sr-71s-record-breaking-transatlantic-crossing&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tacairnet.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;09&#x2F;02&#x2F;the-sr-71s-record-breaking-...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>themodelplumber</author><text>&gt; 1 hour 55 minutes Average speed over 1800 mph<p>It felt weird that my first reaction was to wonder what took so long. For some reason I was thinking that surely the Blackbird could make the crossing about 60 minutes faster than listed.<p>Looking at a map, I saw that the air line distance from Fortaleza to Dakar is just over 1,900 miles though. So I&#x27;m thinking &quot;transatlantic&quot; must mean more than my own basic definition. (Plus I don&#x27;t know if these locations would have enough runway for the SR-71, or if the reason we haven&#x27;t heard of faster is because US taxpayers aren&#x27;t footing the gas bill to arrange a shorter route)</text></comment> | <story><title>Storm Ciara helps plane beat transatlantic flight record</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-51433720</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>RcouF1uZ4gsC</author><text>&gt;The fastest transatlantic crossing belongs to BA Concorde, which flew from New York to London in two hours 52 minutes and 59 seconds in 1996 - hitting a top speed of 1,350 mph.<p>That was the fastest commercial flight. The fastest transatlantic crossing by an aircraft was the SR-71 in 1974:<p>1 hour 55 minutes
Average speed over 1800 mph<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tacairnet.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;09&#x2F;02&#x2F;the-sr-71s-record-breaking-transatlantic-crossing&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tacairnet.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;09&#x2F;02&#x2F;the-sr-71s-record-breaking-...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>aeleos</author><text>It looks like this is not the fastest commercial flight but the fastest subsonic flight. The Blackbird and Concord records you are talking about are a different category.</text></comment> |
31,415,684 | 31,412,449 | 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>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></item><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>tablespoon</author><text>&gt;&gt; I don&#x27;t understand when did the ability to choose a product fitting your preferences become a bad thing on HackerNews<p>&gt; Because so many on HN have been indoctrinated into the &quot;scale at all costs&quot; mentality.<p>HN also has many fanboys that slavishly celebrate the decisions of certain prestigious companies as the best possible ones, because that prestigious company made it. Other decisions can be assumed to be inferior because, if they had merit, the company would have picked that instead.<p>IMHO, a lot of technology has plateaued, to the point where the hip new thing is objectively a regression that just looks different.</text></comment> | <story><title>I want an iPhone Mini-sized Android phone</title><url>https://smallandroidphone.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><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></item><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>cortesoft</author><text>&gt; In the real world, billions of people earn a very nice living making niche products.<p>But rarely something as expensive to create as a smart phone.</text></comment> |
5,987,488 | 5,987,328 | 1 | 3 | 5,987,097 | train | <story><title>Uncovering Android Master Key That Makes 99% of Devices Vulnerable</title><url>http://bluebox.com/corporate-blog/bluebox-uncovers-android-master-key</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mdaniel</author><text>Is it my imagination or is 5 months a very short disclosure window for a vulnerability that affects Androids since Donut?<p>I think about how manufacturers drag their feet on normal updates and can&#x27;t imagine what heaven and earth movement would be required to patch this industry wide.<p>Then again, maybe the attack surface for this is small enough that it&#x27;s manageable.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>adamely</author><text>Google set the time frame and gave the go ahead for public disclosure based on their work with the manufactures.</text></comment> | <story><title>Uncovering Android Master Key That Makes 99% of Devices Vulnerable</title><url>http://bluebox.com/corporate-blog/bluebox-uncovers-android-master-key</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mdaniel</author><text>Is it my imagination or is 5 months a very short disclosure window for a vulnerability that affects Androids since Donut?<p>I think about how manufacturers drag their feet on normal updates and can&#x27;t imagine what heaven and earth movement would be required to patch this industry wide.<p>Then again, maybe the attack surface for this is small enough that it&#x27;s manageable.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>greenlakejake</author><text>Not really. Three months is common.</text></comment> |
29,252,430 | 29,252,235 | 1 | 3 | 29,250,582 | train | <story><title>Amazon to stop accepting UK Visa credit cards</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-11-17/amazon-will-stop-accepting-visa-credit-cards-issued-in-the-u-k</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>input_sh</author><text>Here&#x27;s why: two debit cards, one for receiving money, one for spending money. Automated payment from the 1st one to the 2nd one once a month with a fixed amount you expect to spend in a month.<p>Nothing to pay off, you&#x27;re spending your own money, can&#x27;t be overcharged, can&#x27;t go below zero, if someone leaks your spending card they can&#x27;t touch the majority of your money, no scummy business practices.<p>Never owned a credit card, don&#x27;t have the slightest wish to do so.</text></item><item><author>mrec</author><text>&gt; most people buying stuff on Amazon would be using a debit card, folks only really use credit cards for large purchases<p>Huh? I&#x27;m in the UK, have been an Amazon customer for over 20 years and have always used a credit card for everything. I didn&#x27;t even know you <i>could</i> use a debit card, and can&#x27;t see any reason you&#x27;d want to. Paid off in full every month, better consumer protection, what&#x27;s not to like?</text></item><item><author>em10fan</author><text>Quite the opposite in the UK, at least over the last 10 years or so.<p>99% of debit cards are Visa, and most people buying stuff on Amazon would be using a debit card, folks only really use credit cards for large purchases and things like travel, here.<p>Even when it comes to credit cards, I would say Mastercard has like a large chunk - like 80% in terms of institutions (but who knows in terms of actual customers), I would say.<p>Barclays and HSBC are the only majors that do Visa as far as I know. And Vanquis which is a junky one for people with bad credit.<p>The other majors like Lloyds, TSB, Bank Of Scotland, Halifax, Natwest, RBS, are all Mastercard. Same with most smaller banks like Virgin and CapitalOne, and store branded ones like Sainsburys&#x2F;M&amp;S&#x2F;Tesco, too, as well as the remainder of the popular bad-credit cards like Ocean, and Aqua. Mastercard.</text></item><item><author>barrkel</author><text>I cannot believe that Visa transaction overhead would be higher than Amex - there&#x27;s something going on behind the scenes here.<p>I don&#x27;t think this is the end of it either, it smells like a negotiation threat. Visa have a larger market share overall (80%, including debit cards [1]) but Mastercard leads in credit cards. Amex has always been fairly niche because it&#x27;s not accepted everywhere.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.statista.com&#x2F;statistics&#x2F;1116580&#x2F;payment-card-scheme-market-share-in-europe-by-country&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.statista.com&#x2F;statistics&#x2F;1116580&#x2F;payment-card-sch...</a><p>&gt; Visa was the largest card issuer in Ireland and the United Kingdom, with market shares of over 80 percent in both countries. (from 2019)<p>Reading further it does look like most Visa cards are debit cards and Mastercard has the lead in credit cards.<p>PS: Comment updated after some research.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rlpb</author><text>&gt; can&#x27;t be overcharged, can&#x27;t go below zero<p>In the UK, it&#x27;s really hard to get a bank account where they&#x27;ll do that. Instead they&#x27;ll pay it, call it an &quot;unauthorised overdraft&quot; and then charge you for that. This is their business model - it&#x27;s how they make sufficient income to operate.<p>There are &quot;basic bank accounts&quot; which don&#x27;t provide a credit facility, but these only exist because people with poor credit histories can&#x27;t get bank accounts otherwise, and the regulator has threatened to enforce their availability otherwise. However since this means that there currently isn&#x27;t any rule, the banks make it very difficult for an ordinary person (with good credit) to open a &quot;basic bank account&quot;.</text></comment> | <story><title>Amazon to stop accepting UK Visa credit cards</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-11-17/amazon-will-stop-accepting-visa-credit-cards-issued-in-the-u-k</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>input_sh</author><text>Here&#x27;s why: two debit cards, one for receiving money, one for spending money. Automated payment from the 1st one to the 2nd one once a month with a fixed amount you expect to spend in a month.<p>Nothing to pay off, you&#x27;re spending your own money, can&#x27;t be overcharged, can&#x27;t go below zero, if someone leaks your spending card they can&#x27;t touch the majority of your money, no scummy business practices.<p>Never owned a credit card, don&#x27;t have the slightest wish to do so.</text></item><item><author>mrec</author><text>&gt; most people buying stuff on Amazon would be using a debit card, folks only really use credit cards for large purchases<p>Huh? I&#x27;m in the UK, have been an Amazon customer for over 20 years and have always used a credit card for everything. I didn&#x27;t even know you <i>could</i> use a debit card, and can&#x27;t see any reason you&#x27;d want to. Paid off in full every month, better consumer protection, what&#x27;s not to like?</text></item><item><author>em10fan</author><text>Quite the opposite in the UK, at least over the last 10 years or so.<p>99% of debit cards are Visa, and most people buying stuff on Amazon would be using a debit card, folks only really use credit cards for large purchases and things like travel, here.<p>Even when it comes to credit cards, I would say Mastercard has like a large chunk - like 80% in terms of institutions (but who knows in terms of actual customers), I would say.<p>Barclays and HSBC are the only majors that do Visa as far as I know. And Vanquis which is a junky one for people with bad credit.<p>The other majors like Lloyds, TSB, Bank Of Scotland, Halifax, Natwest, RBS, are all Mastercard. Same with most smaller banks like Virgin and CapitalOne, and store branded ones like Sainsburys&#x2F;M&amp;S&#x2F;Tesco, too, as well as the remainder of the popular bad-credit cards like Ocean, and Aqua. Mastercard.</text></item><item><author>barrkel</author><text>I cannot believe that Visa transaction overhead would be higher than Amex - there&#x27;s something going on behind the scenes here.<p>I don&#x27;t think this is the end of it either, it smells like a negotiation threat. Visa have a larger market share overall (80%, including debit cards [1]) but Mastercard leads in credit cards. Amex has always been fairly niche because it&#x27;s not accepted everywhere.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.statista.com&#x2F;statistics&#x2F;1116580&#x2F;payment-card-scheme-market-share-in-europe-by-country&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.statista.com&#x2F;statistics&#x2F;1116580&#x2F;payment-card-sch...</a><p>&gt; Visa was the largest card issuer in Ireland and the United Kingdom, with market shares of over 80 percent in both countries. (from 2019)<p>Reading further it does look like most Visa cards are debit cards and Mastercard has the lead in credit cards.<p>PS: Comment updated after some research.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>aysfrm11</author><text>In Europe just using debit cards is perfectly viable in 99% of the cases, however when it comes to car rentals you are still in some locations forced to provide a &#x27;real&#x27; credit card.<p>I write &#x27;real&#x27; since most of the FinTechs like Revolut, N26 etc often issue debit cards that may fail in exactly that situation. It doesn&#x27;t help if your account is flush with 10k USD and a car rental could easily block 2k for claims on your debit card, some will just not accept Revolut &amp; co. Thus I am always forced to carry an emergency backup credit card from a major bank just to be on the safe side...<p>Very much looking forward to the day some other means of international payment (crypto?) will be generally accepted.</text></comment> |
21,178,103 | 21,177,998 | 1 | 3 | 21,153,478 | train | <story><title>Open Letter from Governments to Facebook Is an All-Out Attack on Encryption</title><url>https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/open-letter-governments-us-uk-and-australia-facebook-all-out-attack-encryption</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>darawk</author><text>It&#x27;s interesting how governments come to feel entitled to forms of surveillance. For thousands of years financial transactions were completely illegible to government. They took place hand to hand, either in cash or barter. But now that transactions are digitized, it is actually illegal to conduct certain types of transactions anonymously (KYC&#x2F;AML laws). This came about because governments got used to being able to peer into the financial lives of their citizens, and once they got used to it, they didn&#x27;t like it when people circumvented that, so they made it a crime.<p>The same is true here of private messaging. Governments got used to being able to read our messages. They have come to rely on it. And so now they want to make it illegal for us to keep them out.<p>I guess what i&#x27;m saying is: We ought to be extremely careful what we allow our governments to get used to doing. There is an argument to be made that the original sin here was allowing wiretaps <i>at all</i>, even when the medium was un-encrypted.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Animats</author><text>Yes.<p>After WWII, the US imposed a constitution on Japan. Here&#x27;s Article 21: &quot;Freedom of assembly and association as well as speech, press and all other forms of expression are guaranteed.
No censorship shall be maintained, nor shall the secrecy of any means of communication be violated.&quot;<p>All wiretapping was illegal in Japan until 1999.[1] Even today, it&#x27;s very rare. 40 wiretaps in 2017.[2]<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.iol.co.za&#x2F;mercury&#x2F;world&#x2F;japan-passes-controversial-wiretap-law-8417" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.iol.co.za&#x2F;mercury&#x2F;world&#x2F;japan-passes-controversi...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mainichi.jp&#x2F;english&#x2F;articles&#x2F;20170217&#x2F;p2a&#x2F;00m&#x2F;0na&#x2F;013000c" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mainichi.jp&#x2F;english&#x2F;articles&#x2F;20170217&#x2F;p2a&#x2F;00m&#x2F;0na&#x2F;01...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Open Letter from Governments to Facebook Is an All-Out Attack on Encryption</title><url>https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/open-letter-governments-us-uk-and-australia-facebook-all-out-attack-encryption</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>darawk</author><text>It&#x27;s interesting how governments come to feel entitled to forms of surveillance. For thousands of years financial transactions were completely illegible to government. They took place hand to hand, either in cash or barter. But now that transactions are digitized, it is actually illegal to conduct certain types of transactions anonymously (KYC&#x2F;AML laws). This came about because governments got used to being able to peer into the financial lives of their citizens, and once they got used to it, they didn&#x27;t like it when people circumvented that, so they made it a crime.<p>The same is true here of private messaging. Governments got used to being able to read our messages. They have come to rely on it. And so now they want to make it illegal for us to keep them out.<p>I guess what i&#x27;m saying is: We ought to be extremely careful what we allow our governments to get used to doing. There is an argument to be made that the original sin here was allowing wiretaps <i>at all</i>, even when the medium was un-encrypted.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>throwaway3392</author><text>AML laws are nuts. They operate on the presumption of guilt. That is, the burden of proof is on you to prove the money&#x27;s provenance is not illegal. It&#x27;s pretty scary. I have some BTC I mined back when they weren&#x27;t worth much and those AML laws make me worried to cash out.</text></comment> |
6,460,679 | 6,460,731 | 1 | 2 | 6,460,425 | train | <story><title>Taking PHP Seriously [pdf]</title><url>https://raw.github.com/strangeloop/StrangeLoop2013/master/slides/sessions/Adams-TakingPHPSeriously.pdf</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>leokun</author><text>In what ways is PHP less hassle than Python? I don&#x27;t understand this argument.</text></item><item><author>asnyder</author><text>I code in Python, BASH, C, and PHP on a regular basis and still strongly prefer PHP for everyday coding and hobby tasks. I even prefer to create command-line scripts in PHP (though will switch to Python if it&#x27;s large to begin with). For me getting Flask to work properly under NGINX + uwsgi was such a hassle. Having to tell it what module, and hooking things up to touch versus just passing to PHP under fast cgi.<p>To be honest, PHP is really just simpler, less hassle, and if you know what you&#x27;re doing things come out structured well. Just stick to classes (Including statics! There shouldn&#x27;t be a define() anywhere.), use namespaces, use composer (I&#x27;ve come to really like it), and use a coding standard.</text></item><item><author>Almaviva</author><text>Are the complaints about PHP even controversial? The built in library functions are a mess, and mostly terrible. The syntax and basic language are overly verbose and have layers upon layers of cruft. The type and object systems are grafted on, and have so many gotchas and inconsistencies that it takes many months to understand enough of them to be very productive in the language. The aspects of PHP that were intended to make it simple (like pretending types don&#x27;t exist) actually make it more difficult to reason about precisely. I don&#x27;t think anyone who knows anything else would ever choose PHP for a fun personal project.<p>Despite this, there is nothing in PHP that prevents you from doing the thing you want to do, however you want to do it. As projects become larger and involve more time and people, the fine grain of line syntax fades out of view, and all that is left is the large scale design decisions, which are similar in any language. And this is what ultimately determines the technical success or failure of software.</text></item><item><author>DigitalSea</author><text>Adams actually makes some very valid arguments in this PDF. People like to argue the superiority of languages, but at the end of the day if the result in PHP is the same as it is in Ruby &amp; Rails, Java, .NET or whatever, does it really make what the language is? Another good point is the efficiency of a developer working in PHP. The language is easy, it&#x27;s so easy to be a PHP master after a few years working in the language. It&#x27;s easy to find super-talented PHP developers compared to any other language.<p>I like the idea of opt-in typing for PHP via Hack which you can enter by beginning your PHP code with &lt;?hh — Facebook have essentially taken everything that is wrong with PHP, every complaint that someone has ever published in a blog post or bug report, forum or IRC channel and built it into an improvement of the language.<p>PHP isn&#x27;t going anywhere. It might be one of the oldest web languages, but I think the PHP space is starting to get better with Facebook&#x27;s contributions to the language, Laravel 4 being a solid PHP framework and we can&#x27;t forget that most Yahoo! products are built using PHP as well (even the recently acquired Tumblr is coded in PHP). Flickr! is probably one of their biggest PHP applications.<p>Event hough Facebook appear to have resolved the many complaints and problems of PHP, I am sure people will still find a way to complain about the language that powers most of the web...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>LeafStorm</author><text>Deployment, for one. sudo apt-get install Apache and PHP, then edit the Apache config to say, &quot;use this directory.&quot; I love Django and Flask to pieces, but deploying a Python app is like building a hovercraft compared to PHP.</text></comment> | <story><title>Taking PHP Seriously [pdf]</title><url>https://raw.github.com/strangeloop/StrangeLoop2013/master/slides/sessions/Adams-TakingPHPSeriously.pdf</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>leokun</author><text>In what ways is PHP less hassle than Python? I don&#x27;t understand this argument.</text></item><item><author>asnyder</author><text>I code in Python, BASH, C, and PHP on a regular basis and still strongly prefer PHP for everyday coding and hobby tasks. I even prefer to create command-line scripts in PHP (though will switch to Python if it&#x27;s large to begin with). For me getting Flask to work properly under NGINX + uwsgi was such a hassle. Having to tell it what module, and hooking things up to touch versus just passing to PHP under fast cgi.<p>To be honest, PHP is really just simpler, less hassle, and if you know what you&#x27;re doing things come out structured well. Just stick to classes (Including statics! There shouldn&#x27;t be a define() anywhere.), use namespaces, use composer (I&#x27;ve come to really like it), and use a coding standard.</text></item><item><author>Almaviva</author><text>Are the complaints about PHP even controversial? The built in library functions are a mess, and mostly terrible. The syntax and basic language are overly verbose and have layers upon layers of cruft. The type and object systems are grafted on, and have so many gotchas and inconsistencies that it takes many months to understand enough of them to be very productive in the language. The aspects of PHP that were intended to make it simple (like pretending types don&#x27;t exist) actually make it more difficult to reason about precisely. I don&#x27;t think anyone who knows anything else would ever choose PHP for a fun personal project.<p>Despite this, there is nothing in PHP that prevents you from doing the thing you want to do, however you want to do it. As projects become larger and involve more time and people, the fine grain of line syntax fades out of view, and all that is left is the large scale design decisions, which are similar in any language. And this is what ultimately determines the technical success or failure of software.</text></item><item><author>DigitalSea</author><text>Adams actually makes some very valid arguments in this PDF. People like to argue the superiority of languages, but at the end of the day if the result in PHP is the same as it is in Ruby &amp; Rails, Java, .NET or whatever, does it really make what the language is? Another good point is the efficiency of a developer working in PHP. The language is easy, it&#x27;s so easy to be a PHP master after a few years working in the language. It&#x27;s easy to find super-talented PHP developers compared to any other language.<p>I like the idea of opt-in typing for PHP via Hack which you can enter by beginning your PHP code with &lt;?hh — Facebook have essentially taken everything that is wrong with PHP, every complaint that someone has ever published in a blog post or bug report, forum or IRC channel and built it into an improvement of the language.<p>PHP isn&#x27;t going anywhere. It might be one of the oldest web languages, but I think the PHP space is starting to get better with Facebook&#x27;s contributions to the language, Laravel 4 being a solid PHP framework and we can&#x27;t forget that most Yahoo! products are built using PHP as well (even the recently acquired Tumblr is coded in PHP). Flickr! is probably one of their biggest PHP applications.<p>Event hough Facebook appear to have resolved the many complaints and problems of PHP, I am sure people will still find a way to complain about the language that powers most of the web...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>asnyder</author><text>I&#x27;m going to say it, better documentation. I don&#x27;t know, maybe it&#x27;s just me, but I find it takes me significantly less time do find out how to do something in PHP, or a PHP library than in the corresponding Python. Though, there are obviously exceptions to this.</text></comment> |
13,617,670 | 13,617,725 | 1 | 2 | 13,617,100 | train | <story><title>Wall Street Is Giving Up On Twitter</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/gadfly/articles/2017-02-10/wall-street-is-giving-up-on-revenue-challenged-twitter</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mtw</author><text>It&#x27;s interesting to see how the power and reach of every word on Twitter by politicians or journalists, yet Twitter is unable to profit from it. On the other hand, nobody cares about the power of a Facebook posting or an instagram, yet Facebook makes so much money of the frivolity.</text></item><item><author>the_economist</author><text>Twitter is so powerful. When Paul Graham wants to say something, he takes to Twitter to do it. Not Facebook. Not Hacker News. Not reddit.<p>The same goes for many of the most influential people in the world.<p>Twitter has incredible utility for powerful people but very limited utility for average people. Maybe the exact opposite of facebook. On Facebook, my friends interact with me. On twitter, I speak into the void.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>danjoc</author><text>&gt;yet Twitter is unable to profit from it.<p>Twitter could front run wall street on Donald Trump tweets.</text></comment> | <story><title>Wall Street Is Giving Up On Twitter</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/gadfly/articles/2017-02-10/wall-street-is-giving-up-on-revenue-challenged-twitter</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mtw</author><text>It&#x27;s interesting to see how the power and reach of every word on Twitter by politicians or journalists, yet Twitter is unable to profit from it. On the other hand, nobody cares about the power of a Facebook posting or an instagram, yet Facebook makes so much money of the frivolity.</text></item><item><author>the_economist</author><text>Twitter is so powerful. When Paul Graham wants to say something, he takes to Twitter to do it. Not Facebook. Not Hacker News. Not reddit.<p>The same goes for many of the most influential people in the world.<p>Twitter has incredible utility for powerful people but very limited utility for average people. Maybe the exact opposite of facebook. On Facebook, my friends interact with me. On twitter, I speak into the void.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gdubs</author><text>It&#x27;s reminiscent of the way that broadcast news was transformed as profit became a motive (basically the themes that are explored in the movie &#x27;Network&#x27;).<p>News orgs were never in themselves meant to be profitable, yet they were at the heart of the big three network&#x27;s identities (and had enormous reach).</text></comment> |
33,007,861 | 33,000,218 | 1 | 3 | 32,996,953 | train | <story><title>Someone is pretending to be me</title><url>https://connortumbleson.com/2022/09/19/someone-is-pretending-to-be-me/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>blastwind</author><text>Andrew here. Connor, thanks for releasing this on the orange site.<p>This story is also more fun from my position. I&#x27;ve been applying to internships and interviewing every week. They&#x27;re mostly rejections. They&#x27;re the same questions over and over with minor variation (sorry to top comment for &quot;impersonating&quot; your comment style). My days are deteriorating from a colorful sphere down to two points. In fact, down to two pointers, left and right, iterating over a list of heights to find how much rain water it can trap.<p>I&#x27;m about to repeat the experience for the 10th time and I&#x27;m 100% on autopilot. But suddenly, a man reaches out to me on email and offers me up to $80&#x2F;hr to be his senior engineer. This feels sketchy, my girlfriend tells me, &quot;you&#x27;re good but let&#x27;s be honest here...&quot;. Anyways, I proceed, it might just be the start of a beautiful thing. I&#x27;m asked to interview as one of our developers because English is not their best language. I&#x27;m a little bothered, but I was fine with it. But then I see the developer name: Connor Tumbleson. My laughter bursts and so does my suspicion: With a name like that, no way the guy doesn&#x27;t speak good English. I look up Connor Tumbleson on linkedin, and my suspicions were proved correct. I detail everything to Connor, and now this is on the top of HN. I lost a opprotunity but gained a story of the lifetime.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>blastwind</author><text>Messages are only editable within 2 hrs so I write another message expressing my additional thoughts and thanks:<p>As important as having integrity is a community that prioritizes and fosters integrity. The HN community skipped the fostering part and went straight to giving me referrals and interviews. I&#x27;m grateful, and I&#x27;ll carry on the spirit when I&#x27;m in the position to do so. The opportunities I&#x27;ve derived are nothing but amazing, but the most important thing I&#x27;ve learned is to internalize integrity as one of my greatest strengths: In the face of adversity and unfairness, I&#x27;ll stand up for myself and others.<p>Also, thanks for those telling me internship finding is going to get better. I am not pessimistic about it at all, but I was trying to be funny by &quot;impersonating&quot; the previous top comment, it fits the theme. I find myself maniacally focused when practice algorithms, and I enjoy focusing.<p>This whole time of writing this I have that one scene from Scent of A Woman repeating in my head: &quot;And I have seen boys like these, younger than these, their arms torn out, their legs ripped off. But there isn&#x27;t nothin&#x27; like the sight of an amputated spirit; there is no prosthetic for that.&quot;</text></comment> | <story><title>Someone is pretending to be me</title><url>https://connortumbleson.com/2022/09/19/someone-is-pretending-to-be-me/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>blastwind</author><text>Andrew here. Connor, thanks for releasing this on the orange site.<p>This story is also more fun from my position. I&#x27;ve been applying to internships and interviewing every week. They&#x27;re mostly rejections. They&#x27;re the same questions over and over with minor variation (sorry to top comment for &quot;impersonating&quot; your comment style). My days are deteriorating from a colorful sphere down to two points. In fact, down to two pointers, left and right, iterating over a list of heights to find how much rain water it can trap.<p>I&#x27;m about to repeat the experience for the 10th time and I&#x27;m 100% on autopilot. But suddenly, a man reaches out to me on email and offers me up to $80&#x2F;hr to be his senior engineer. This feels sketchy, my girlfriend tells me, &quot;you&#x27;re good but let&#x27;s be honest here...&quot;. Anyways, I proceed, it might just be the start of a beautiful thing. I&#x27;m asked to interview as one of our developers because English is not their best language. I&#x27;m a little bothered, but I was fine with it. But then I see the developer name: Connor Tumbleson. My laughter bursts and so does my suspicion: With a name like that, no way the guy doesn&#x27;t speak good English. I look up Connor Tumbleson on linkedin, and my suspicions were proved correct. I detail everything to Connor, and now this is on the top of HN. I lost a opprotunity but gained a story of the lifetime.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kodah</author><text>Shout out to you for wading through the literal torrent of bullshit without the foresight of a blog post to expose context and with little professional experience to help inform you. You&#x27;ll be a great asset to the industry but it can take a minute to find your footing. Be persistent and definitely keep this story around for beer Friday.</text></comment> |
14,829,247 | 14,828,442 | 1 | 2 | 14,827,668 | train | <story><title>Bitcoin Cash Starts Trading</title><url>http://www.trustnodes.com/2017/07/22/bitcoin-cash-starts-trading-reaches-high-nearly-900</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>hudon</author><text>A fork like Bitcoin Cash will be a boon for the blockchain community.<p>There is a pretty big subset of the community that believe Bitcoin is a panacea that will replace currencies, payment networks and so on, regardless of how technically inferior the blockchain is to other more mature distributed databases and networks. They believe one day, the blockchain will be just as efficient or even more so. This subset is vocal about the urgency of increasing Bitcoin&#x27;s block size limit so that we can increase transaction throughput as much as possible and as soon as possible.<p>On the other hand, most developers who have worked on Bitcoin proper (either protocol development or Core node development) believe that Bitcoin is more about financial sovereignty and censorship resistance, not as an in-place replacement of PayPal or VISA. This group wants to find as many ways to scale the blockchain without increasing the block size limit because increasing the size of blocks puts at risk users&#x27; ability to validate the chain. This is because larger blocks means more resources required to transmit, validate and store blocks and if you cannot validate blocks, then you are trusting transaction validators (miners) just like you trust PayPal. Risking the ability to validate the chain is risking the financial sovereignty or censorship resistance they value so much.<p>Regardless of how well some claim SegWit2x is doing, truth is once SegWit is activated, we still have to face the 2x hard fork which many people in the second camp will simply refuse to support.<p>Having said all this, Bitcoin Cash represents an earnest understanding that there are two camps in Bitcoin and because of the differing economic visions, they will have different technical visions, so why not have two chains and evolve them independently? Rather than playing tug-of-war and both parties being dissatisfied?</text></comment> | <story><title>Bitcoin Cash Starts Trading</title><url>http://www.trustnodes.com/2017/07/22/bitcoin-cash-starts-trading-reaches-high-nearly-900</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>TD-Linux</author><text>For those unaware, &quot;Bitcoin Cash&quot; is a proposed future fork of Bitcoin. The primary miner supporting it also runs an exchange, so what they are effectively trading is &quot;future promised coins&quot; once they start actually mining the fork.<p>Because so few of % of the total coins are tradeable, I think this results in a similarly volatile &quot;market cap&quot; as many ICOs.</text></comment> |
20,780,198 | 20,780,114 | 1 | 2 | 20,776,815 | train | <story><title>Cooling a house without air conditioning</title><url>http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20190822-are-there-alternatives-to-air-conditioning</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>simonsarris</author><text>A lot of the need for AC (and having lights on) is just really, really bad modern house design. I recently finished building a house (my first one) and everyone acted like I was crazy for not building in central air conditioning. (This is in New Hampshire)<p>I built in an older style, with windows on every side, with a mind towards ventilation and light. Inexplicably most houses in the area, even $500k+ houses do not have these two things. My mom&#x27;s condo has central air but the system is so feeble and the venting upstairs so poor that two bedrooms in the house remain stuffy anyways. It seems like light and natural ventilation are not even afterthoughts, but non-thoughts, and the designs all rely on electric light and forced air. Its amazing being in an expensive home where you need a light on in the kitchen at 8am. How do they decide what to build?<p>I built 9 foot ceilings on the first floor and 8.5 on the second. Then I placed the attic (3rd story) door centrally in the upstairs hallway. The result of the design is that airflow moves on the first floor in all directions, and upward, and on the second floor can move <i>at least</i> east-west (bathroom and hallway windows), and also north-south if bedroom doors are open. Finally, air flows upwards to the attic, which has windows north-south. So winds should suck air higher, and out.<p>If I close windows in the morning and open around 7pm, the result is that the house stays very cool, about(? only tested with temp gun a few times) 74 downstairs and 76 upstairs during these 90 degree days, and then gets cooler at night as I open windows again. So far, I&#x27;ve only bought one fan, though things might work better with more. Note I&#x27;m not an expert or an architect, I just included some design features that should be obvious to anyone who&#x27;s lived in an old house for a summer.<p>This takes some manual control, but there are far fewer parts to maintain (this was a general design goal beyond AC), and summer electric bills are $50-60&#x2F;month. With this design, there have been 3 icky-hot days so far this year, when there was no wind and the night did not get very cool.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>shados</author><text>My house has windows on every side for similar reasons, but it&#x27;s back firing big time. I have to keep them closed at all time because of noise, and they let the sun in, requiring even more A&#x2F;C. We have blackout&#x2F;insulating shades, but it&#x27;s still not as good as straight up walls.<p>So millage will vary.<p>Similarly with light, in winter by the time I get home its pitch black either way, so it wouldn&#x27;t change a whole lot. And in summer the light from the windows doesn&#x27;t play well with TV&#x2F;monitors&#x2F;etc.<p>Cats like the windows a lot though.</text></comment> | <story><title>Cooling a house without air conditioning</title><url>http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20190822-are-there-alternatives-to-air-conditioning</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>simonsarris</author><text>A lot of the need for AC (and having lights on) is just really, really bad modern house design. I recently finished building a house (my first one) and everyone acted like I was crazy for not building in central air conditioning. (This is in New Hampshire)<p>I built in an older style, with windows on every side, with a mind towards ventilation and light. Inexplicably most houses in the area, even $500k+ houses do not have these two things. My mom&#x27;s condo has central air but the system is so feeble and the venting upstairs so poor that two bedrooms in the house remain stuffy anyways. It seems like light and natural ventilation are not even afterthoughts, but non-thoughts, and the designs all rely on electric light and forced air. Its amazing being in an expensive home where you need a light on in the kitchen at 8am. How do they decide what to build?<p>I built 9 foot ceilings on the first floor and 8.5 on the second. Then I placed the attic (3rd story) door centrally in the upstairs hallway. The result of the design is that airflow moves on the first floor in all directions, and upward, and on the second floor can move <i>at least</i> east-west (bathroom and hallway windows), and also north-south if bedroom doors are open. Finally, air flows upwards to the attic, which has windows north-south. So winds should suck air higher, and out.<p>If I close windows in the morning and open around 7pm, the result is that the house stays very cool, about(? only tested with temp gun a few times) 74 downstairs and 76 upstairs during these 90 degree days, and then gets cooler at night as I open windows again. So far, I&#x27;ve only bought one fan, though things might work better with more. Note I&#x27;m not an expert or an architect, I just included some design features that should be obvious to anyone who&#x27;s lived in an old house for a summer.<p>This takes some manual control, but there are far fewer parts to maintain (this was a general design goal beyond AC), and summer electric bills are $50-60&#x2F;month. With this design, there have been 3 icky-hot days so far this year, when there was no wind and the night did not get very cool.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>davexunit</author><text>&gt;A lot of the need for AC (and having lights on) is just really, really bad modern house design.<p>Agreed, but people also seem uninterested in simple techniques to work with what they&#x27;ve got. I live in MA, in an old house that doesn&#x27;t have much in the way of modern energy efficiency but we get by without AC on all but the hottest days of the year by doing really simple things. Open windows at night. Close them in the morning. Pull the blinds down on windows that have sun exposure. You get the idea. The only serious retrofit we&#x27;ve done so far is have a contractor add cellulose insulation to the attic. On 90+ degree days the second floor will reach 80+ by the evening so then we turn on the AC if a window fan is unable to bring the temperature back down to something comfortable. In our climate AC should be the backup plan, not the primary cooling system.</text></comment> |
28,226,351 | 28,226,237 | 1 | 3 | 28,224,792 | train | <story><title>Launch HN: Govly (YC S21) – Making it easier to sell to the U.S. government</title><text>Hi, we&#x27;re Mike, Jon and Nick, founders of Govly (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.govly.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.govly.com</a>). We’re building a place for companies, resellers, and distributors to work together to bid on government contracts.<p>The U.S. government buys lots of things. In 2021, over $218B will be spent purchasing technology products alone. The problem is, it&#x27;s super confusing to participate in the market.
You have to understand the rules, have the right connections to government contractors, have a record of strong performance selling to the government, and usually a sales force focused specifically on government sales. This friction leads to fewer companies (especially smaller companies) participating, less competition, and ultimately the government buying the loudest or most insider-connected products instead of the best or most innovative.<p>Jon and I have been experiencing this problem for the last 15 years at various technology manufacturers, technology resellers and government contractors. As we saw little improvement in the process throughout this time, we ultimately decided to try to improve it ourselves with Govly.<p>Currently, Govly serves as a platform where all the stakeholders in government procurement (manufacturers, distributors, value added resellers, prime contractors and government agencies) can securely share information about things the government wants to buy and then collaborate on fulfilling those purchases (talk through specs, iterate on quotes, etc.). Most people don’t realize, but the vast majority of government opportunities are only released to a subset of organizations called “prime contractors”. We have built a network of these prime contractors who are uploading their “private” opportunities into our application. These opportunities can then be shared to other stakeholders in the network via &quot;Govly partnerships&quot;, which are like friend requests between the different organizations, e.g. prime contractor → manufacturer.<p>We&#x27;ve also built automation tools that help prime contractors stay compliant in their work and with the agencies they work with. Many government opportunities are required to go through a specific channel called a &quot;contract vehicle&quot; which are typically managed by specific agencies. For example, one of the largest and oldest contract vehicles is managed by NASA and is called NASA SEWP (Scientific and Engineering Workstation Procurement). This is actually how you become a &quot;prime contractor&quot; in the first place: if you apply for access to a contract vehicle, and you&#x27;re selected, you&#x27;re a prime contractor. Once you are a prime contractor, you&#x27;re required to do various reporting tasks in order to stay compliant on your contracts. As you can imagine, there is a <i>lot</i> of bureaucratic detail with that. We&#x27;ve built automations to make it easier.<p>This space is exceedingly complicated and confusing but it also has a ton of room for tech-enabled efficiency, transparency, and growth. We plan to chip away at the problems we find until we can change the system into the simpler, fairer, more efficient system we know it can be...or at least bite off some pieces that can.<p>On the technical side, we’ve had fun solving some low hanging fruit that has made a huge difference in the lives of our customers. For example, the way that opportunities on contract vehicles are distributed is mostly via email. Companies were managing this by receiving thousands of emails per day and creating email filters to try to filter down to opportunities of interest. The first iteration of our product allowed them to redirect emails to our system so they could be parsed and indexed in Elasticsearch. We then helped them build specific queries as saved searches so they could get instant notifications when a new match hit, or a digest of match activity for the day. It was cool to create such a simple solution that immediately provided substantial value for end users.<p>Anyways, thanks for taking the time to read our story. There is a free version of Govly that you can poke around if you&#x27;d like. It essentially scrapes public opportunities from <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sam.gov" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sam.gov</a> and provides our search and saved search interface on top of the data. To be honest, it probably is not of much interest to the readers here <i>and</i> the public version has not been a priority (so it&#x27;s not that good...) Regardless, if you want to check us out at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.govly.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.govly.com</a>, any and all feedback is appreciated!</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>sidlls</author><text>I think you&#x27;ve left out the most important problems in this space: the graft, turf building&#x2F;protectionism, and corruption. Tech isn&#x27;t going to solve those. That aside, this seems like a pretty decent idea for a company.<p>Also, this is a gem: &quot; Most people don’t realize, but the vast majority of government opportunities are only released to a subset of organizations called “prime contractors”. We have built a network of these prime contractors who are uploading their “private” opportunities into our application. &quot;<p>A lot of people truly aren&#x27;t aware of it! Nor are they aware of the fact that often the Primes&#x27; contract vehicles have requirements&#x2F;constraints on the subs the primes select to farm work out to (e.g. some minimal fraction of the subs must be minority or women owned, subs cannot be foreign entities, etc.). What your feature here looks like to me is something that may be prone to abuse: primes post a set of (sub)contracts and cherry-pick the subs that they can shoe-horn into their checkboxes at minimal cost. Alternatively, this just seems to relabel links in the chain: instead of a would-be contractor bidding on a government vendor portal, they&#x27;re bidding on your portal, and the bids are submitted to Primes instead of the government. I&#x27;m not sure this solves a problem so much as adds a middle-man. Maybe I&#x27;m misunderstanding it. Any thoughts about that?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>1vuio0pswjnm7</author><text>&quot;I&#x27;m not sure this solves a problem so much as adds a middleman.&quot;<p>The default &quot;business plan&quot; of any so-called &quot;tech&quot; company.<p>At some point the novelty of the internet and ever-smaller computers (&quot;tech&quot;) may wear off and these companies will just be seen for what they are: &quot;middlemen&quot; (with silly, infantile company names).<p>The problem to solve in this space is arguably one of transparency (&quot;Most people don&#x27;t realise...&quot;) Allowing citizens, i.e., taxpayers, to see what kind of deals their government is making could add accountability.<p>To the parent&#x27;s point about malfeasance in government contracting, perhaps more transparency would better allow the exising laws to be enforced:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;False_Claims_Act" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;False_Claims_Act</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Launch HN: Govly (YC S21) – Making it easier to sell to the U.S. government</title><text>Hi, we&#x27;re Mike, Jon and Nick, founders of Govly (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.govly.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.govly.com</a>). We’re building a place for companies, resellers, and distributors to work together to bid on government contracts.<p>The U.S. government buys lots of things. In 2021, over $218B will be spent purchasing technology products alone. The problem is, it&#x27;s super confusing to participate in the market.
You have to understand the rules, have the right connections to government contractors, have a record of strong performance selling to the government, and usually a sales force focused specifically on government sales. This friction leads to fewer companies (especially smaller companies) participating, less competition, and ultimately the government buying the loudest or most insider-connected products instead of the best or most innovative.<p>Jon and I have been experiencing this problem for the last 15 years at various technology manufacturers, technology resellers and government contractors. As we saw little improvement in the process throughout this time, we ultimately decided to try to improve it ourselves with Govly.<p>Currently, Govly serves as a platform where all the stakeholders in government procurement (manufacturers, distributors, value added resellers, prime contractors and government agencies) can securely share information about things the government wants to buy and then collaborate on fulfilling those purchases (talk through specs, iterate on quotes, etc.). Most people don’t realize, but the vast majority of government opportunities are only released to a subset of organizations called “prime contractors”. We have built a network of these prime contractors who are uploading their “private” opportunities into our application. These opportunities can then be shared to other stakeholders in the network via &quot;Govly partnerships&quot;, which are like friend requests between the different organizations, e.g. prime contractor → manufacturer.<p>We&#x27;ve also built automation tools that help prime contractors stay compliant in their work and with the agencies they work with. Many government opportunities are required to go through a specific channel called a &quot;contract vehicle&quot; which are typically managed by specific agencies. For example, one of the largest and oldest contract vehicles is managed by NASA and is called NASA SEWP (Scientific and Engineering Workstation Procurement). This is actually how you become a &quot;prime contractor&quot; in the first place: if you apply for access to a contract vehicle, and you&#x27;re selected, you&#x27;re a prime contractor. Once you are a prime contractor, you&#x27;re required to do various reporting tasks in order to stay compliant on your contracts. As you can imagine, there is a <i>lot</i> of bureaucratic detail with that. We&#x27;ve built automations to make it easier.<p>This space is exceedingly complicated and confusing but it also has a ton of room for tech-enabled efficiency, transparency, and growth. We plan to chip away at the problems we find until we can change the system into the simpler, fairer, more efficient system we know it can be...or at least bite off some pieces that can.<p>On the technical side, we’ve had fun solving some low hanging fruit that has made a huge difference in the lives of our customers. For example, the way that opportunities on contract vehicles are distributed is mostly via email. Companies were managing this by receiving thousands of emails per day and creating email filters to try to filter down to opportunities of interest. The first iteration of our product allowed them to redirect emails to our system so they could be parsed and indexed in Elasticsearch. We then helped them build specific queries as saved searches so they could get instant notifications when a new match hit, or a digest of match activity for the day. It was cool to create such a simple solution that immediately provided substantial value for end users.<p>Anyways, thanks for taking the time to read our story. There is a free version of Govly that you can poke around if you&#x27;d like. It essentially scrapes public opportunities from <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sam.gov" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sam.gov</a> and provides our search and saved search interface on top of the data. To be honest, it probably is not of much interest to the readers here <i>and</i> the public version has not been a priority (so it&#x27;s not that good...) Regardless, if you want to check us out at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.govly.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.govly.com</a>, any and all feedback is appreciated!</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>sidlls</author><text>I think you&#x27;ve left out the most important problems in this space: the graft, turf building&#x2F;protectionism, and corruption. Tech isn&#x27;t going to solve those. That aside, this seems like a pretty decent idea for a company.<p>Also, this is a gem: &quot; Most people don’t realize, but the vast majority of government opportunities are only released to a subset of organizations called “prime contractors”. We have built a network of these prime contractors who are uploading their “private” opportunities into our application. &quot;<p>A lot of people truly aren&#x27;t aware of it! Nor are they aware of the fact that often the Primes&#x27; contract vehicles have requirements&#x2F;constraints on the subs the primes select to farm work out to (e.g. some minimal fraction of the subs must be minority or women owned, subs cannot be foreign entities, etc.). What your feature here looks like to me is something that may be prone to abuse: primes post a set of (sub)contracts and cherry-pick the subs that they can shoe-horn into their checkboxes at minimal cost. Alternatively, this just seems to relabel links in the chain: instead of a would-be contractor bidding on a government vendor portal, they&#x27;re bidding on your portal, and the bids are submitted to Primes instead of the government. I&#x27;m not sure this solves a problem so much as adds a middle-man. Maybe I&#x27;m misunderstanding it. Any thoughts about that?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>clairity</author><text>&gt; &quot;...the most important problems in this space: the graft, turf building&#x2F;protectionism, and corruption. Tech isn&#x27;t going to solve those.&quot;<p>rather than the byzantine prescriptive requirements we have now, the simple, straightforward solution to all of these is to disallow consolidation in procurement, making the contract sizes much smaller in most cases. it&#x27;s much easier to hide significant graft in a billion dollar contract vs. a multi-thousand dollar one. the federal government tries to use size as its leverage over price, but we should be using competition instead. make contractors compete each time for smaller bites of the apple, rather than giving them the whole orchard in a single go, which often leads to complacency and corruption.</text></comment> |
29,905,276 | 29,895,993 | 1 | 2 | 29,892,505 | train | <story><title>Djokovic's PCR test was manipulated?</title><url>https://twitter.com/zerforschung/status/1480924205352996870</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>grujicd</author><text>I have 2 more datapoints. My wife went with me to the testing on the same date. If you&#x27;re negative on rapid test, they usually take PCR as well. Since she was negative on the first one, there was a PCR too. These are her QR urls:<p>Rapid test:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pcr.euprava.gov.rs&#x2F;validate.php?cqcode=16415703349MJi4QNr3Ohxz3cgzFrtDBM4CSNHfigF$tg4AiN4YoVJSPtDUO" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pcr.euprava.gov.rs&#x2F;validate.php?cqcode=16415703349MJ...</a><p>Timestamp: 1641570334, time: GMT: Friday, 7. January 2022. 15:45:34<p>PCR:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pcr.euprava.gov.rs&#x2F;validate.php?cqcode=1641924832NyL5YS!wsSf!8sEKBcvi!hpbktN2TKm8BJv11xGmKwndWBeXvj" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pcr.euprava.gov.rs&#x2F;validate.php?cqcode=1641924832NyL...</a><p>Timestamp: 1641924832, time: GMT: Tuesday, 11. January 2022. 18:13:52<p>I downloaded PCR from portal today, that&#x27;s why it has today&#x27;s timestamp.<p>What&#x27;s interesting is that her test IDs are 7601574 and 7631146 while they were taken within 15 minutes from each other. There&#x27;s some 30k difference, and I think Serbia runs around 40k tests a day. PCR samples are sent to central lab and processed later, that would explain why PCR&#x27;s ID is much higher.<p>However I don&#x27;t think we have definite proof of how these test IDs are generated. Different labs could be assigned batches of IDs, PCR tests itself could have preassigned IDs (you can see they have same ID when you&#x27;re tested, but I&#x27;m not sure it&#x27;s the same ID as presented in results). If test ID is generated when results are inserted into database, then they should always be incremental and Novak&#x27;s test IDs point to forgery. But there could be other explanations.<p>My conclusions:<p>- timestamps are not proof of forgery<p>- test IDs are suspicious, but we can&#x27;t be sure.</text></item><item><author>grujicd</author><text>Ok, this is getting strange. There are two ways to get test results:<p>- it&#x27;s automatically sent to email (if they have it)<p>- you can download it from ezdravlje.rs portal<p>The test I shared above is the one I got on email. However, I went to portal, downloaded pdf, and now I have two copies. They&#x27;re different! IDs and all the data are the same, but QR codes are different.<p>This is the new one:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pcr.euprava.gov.rs&#x2F;validate.php?cqcode=1641923234g3DWOTqw9NocsR3M9sx2AnAAwbPVByAjUD$uXqiuc1q0gJjGwI" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pcr.euprava.gov.rs&#x2F;validate.php?cqcode=1641923234g3D...</a><p>Timestamp on new pdf is: 1641923234, which is GMT: Tuesday, 11. January 2022. 17:47:14<p>So it appears that timestamp is related to when pdf is generated, and when you download it from the portal it&#x27;s generated at that point of time, i.e. there are no pdf documents sitting on government server!<p>So this timestamp is definitely no proof of forgery. But test ID might be - that one is still suspicious.<p>And one more thing, when I switch tabs with my two QR codes - page content is the same but shifted a bit. I didn&#x27;t look into html&#x2F;css to see what&#x27;s different.</text></item><item><author>grujicd</author><text>This is very sad development for me, Djokovic&#x27;s countryman who really bought his story. Nut facts are facts.<p>I can share my own (positive) test, which confirms timestamp and id theory. My test was taken on the 7th January, it was a rapid test, not a PCR. But it&#x27;s in the same government database:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pcr.euprava.gov.rs&#x2F;validate.php?cqcode=1641591150Q!A!EMiAKyIGblU0kEC2nKRD2DNBb23KZ4J5dn8ruBpwqKP1PR" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pcr.euprava.gov.rs&#x2F;validate.php?cqcode=1641591150Q!A...</a><p>Timestamp: 1641591150, which translates to GMT: Friday, 7. January 2022. 21:32:30. That seems to be right, it was taken earlier on the 7th and probably entered later to the central database.<p>Also, ID of my test is: 7601263. Djokovic IDs are 7371999 (16&#x2F;12 test) and 7320919 (22&#x2F;12 test).<p>It really looks like IDs are incremental, and that his test that was supposedly taken on the 16th was taken on the later date.<p>One consolation fact is that he wasn&#x27;t positive when he took photos with kids on 17th.<p>EDIT:
I messed up and copied Novak&#x27;s QR url! fixed now!</text></item><item><author>TomAnthony</author><text>The negative test result:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pcr.euprava.gov.rs&#x2F;validate.php?cqcode=1640187792DOH1rb5UHzHutVMKM8TZoXqZZfWoED2JaOoX5mfaeeZODIjRBn" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pcr.euprava.gov.rs&#x2F;validate.php?cqcode=1640187792DOH...</a><p>The positive test result:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pcr.euprava.gov.rs&#x2F;validate.php?cqcode=1640524880jk8GTmMJnQCO03nyzch9GPlevVO4rkO3Y!Ognqrxnz34PYV$Rm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pcr.euprava.gov.rs&#x2F;validate.php?cqcode=1640524880jk8...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>djoko_research</author><text>Intro:
Looking at covid19.rs&#x2F;homepage-english&#x2F; I can see that there was a total of 1.444.532 people tested and the data is marked for 10.01.2022 at 15:00.<p>This is exactly the same as here:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ourworldindata.org&#x2F;coronavirus&#x2F;country&#x2F;serbia" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ourworldindata.org&#x2F;coronavirus&#x2F;country&#x2F;serbia</a><p>So I&#x27;m assuming that this dataset can be trusted.<p>The point:<p>From the dataset:
Date: 2021-12-16, new tests: 13690.0, total tests: 7032035.0
Date: 2021-12-22, new tests: 14808.0, total tests: 7107851.0
Date: 2021-12-26, new tests: 9265.0, total tests: 7158932.0<p>As We can see Djoko&#x27;s &quot;ID&quot; (7371999) is much larger than total number of tests for 26th of December 2021 (by 213067) and for me this furthers your point that We don&#x27;t know how this number is generated.
(It seems to be sequential, but is it?)</text></comment> | <story><title>Djokovic's PCR test was manipulated?</title><url>https://twitter.com/zerforschung/status/1480924205352996870</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>grujicd</author><text>I have 2 more datapoints. My wife went with me to the testing on the same date. If you&#x27;re negative on rapid test, they usually take PCR as well. Since she was negative on the first one, there was a PCR too. These are her QR urls:<p>Rapid test:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pcr.euprava.gov.rs&#x2F;validate.php?cqcode=16415703349MJi4QNr3Ohxz3cgzFrtDBM4CSNHfigF$tg4AiN4YoVJSPtDUO" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pcr.euprava.gov.rs&#x2F;validate.php?cqcode=16415703349MJ...</a><p>Timestamp: 1641570334, time: GMT: Friday, 7. January 2022. 15:45:34<p>PCR:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pcr.euprava.gov.rs&#x2F;validate.php?cqcode=1641924832NyL5YS!wsSf!8sEKBcvi!hpbktN2TKm8BJv11xGmKwndWBeXvj" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pcr.euprava.gov.rs&#x2F;validate.php?cqcode=1641924832NyL...</a><p>Timestamp: 1641924832, time: GMT: Tuesday, 11. January 2022. 18:13:52<p>I downloaded PCR from portal today, that&#x27;s why it has today&#x27;s timestamp.<p>What&#x27;s interesting is that her test IDs are 7601574 and 7631146 while they were taken within 15 minutes from each other. There&#x27;s some 30k difference, and I think Serbia runs around 40k tests a day. PCR samples are sent to central lab and processed later, that would explain why PCR&#x27;s ID is much higher.<p>However I don&#x27;t think we have definite proof of how these test IDs are generated. Different labs could be assigned batches of IDs, PCR tests itself could have preassigned IDs (you can see they have same ID when you&#x27;re tested, but I&#x27;m not sure it&#x27;s the same ID as presented in results). If test ID is generated when results are inserted into database, then they should always be incremental and Novak&#x27;s test IDs point to forgery. But there could be other explanations.<p>My conclusions:<p>- timestamps are not proof of forgery<p>- test IDs are suspicious, but we can&#x27;t be sure.</text></item><item><author>grujicd</author><text>Ok, this is getting strange. There are two ways to get test results:<p>- it&#x27;s automatically sent to email (if they have it)<p>- you can download it from ezdravlje.rs portal<p>The test I shared above is the one I got on email. However, I went to portal, downloaded pdf, and now I have two copies. They&#x27;re different! IDs and all the data are the same, but QR codes are different.<p>This is the new one:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pcr.euprava.gov.rs&#x2F;validate.php?cqcode=1641923234g3DWOTqw9NocsR3M9sx2AnAAwbPVByAjUD$uXqiuc1q0gJjGwI" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pcr.euprava.gov.rs&#x2F;validate.php?cqcode=1641923234g3D...</a><p>Timestamp on new pdf is: 1641923234, which is GMT: Tuesday, 11. January 2022. 17:47:14<p>So it appears that timestamp is related to when pdf is generated, and when you download it from the portal it&#x27;s generated at that point of time, i.e. there are no pdf documents sitting on government server!<p>So this timestamp is definitely no proof of forgery. But test ID might be - that one is still suspicious.<p>And one more thing, when I switch tabs with my two QR codes - page content is the same but shifted a bit. I didn&#x27;t look into html&#x2F;css to see what&#x27;s different.</text></item><item><author>grujicd</author><text>This is very sad development for me, Djokovic&#x27;s countryman who really bought his story. Nut facts are facts.<p>I can share my own (positive) test, which confirms timestamp and id theory. My test was taken on the 7th January, it was a rapid test, not a PCR. But it&#x27;s in the same government database:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pcr.euprava.gov.rs&#x2F;validate.php?cqcode=1641591150Q!A!EMiAKyIGblU0kEC2nKRD2DNBb23KZ4J5dn8ruBpwqKP1PR" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pcr.euprava.gov.rs&#x2F;validate.php?cqcode=1641591150Q!A...</a><p>Timestamp: 1641591150, which translates to GMT: Friday, 7. January 2022. 21:32:30. That seems to be right, it was taken earlier on the 7th and probably entered later to the central database.<p>Also, ID of my test is: 7601263. Djokovic IDs are 7371999 (16&#x2F;12 test) and 7320919 (22&#x2F;12 test).<p>It really looks like IDs are incremental, and that his test that was supposedly taken on the 16th was taken on the later date.<p>One consolation fact is that he wasn&#x27;t positive when he took photos with kids on 17th.<p>EDIT:
I messed up and copied Novak&#x27;s QR url! fixed now!</text></item><item><author>TomAnthony</author><text>The negative test result:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pcr.euprava.gov.rs&#x2F;validate.php?cqcode=1640187792DOH1rb5UHzHutVMKM8TZoXqZZfWoED2JaOoX5mfaeeZODIjRBn" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pcr.euprava.gov.rs&#x2F;validate.php?cqcode=1640187792DOH...</a><p>The positive test result:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pcr.euprava.gov.rs&#x2F;validate.php?cqcode=1640524880jk8GTmMJnQCO03nyzch9GPlevVO4rkO3Y!Ognqrxnz34PYV$Rm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pcr.euprava.gov.rs&#x2F;validate.php?cqcode=1640524880jk8...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pajowu</author><text>Hey, it&#x27;d be great if you&#x27;d reach out to zerforschung at [email protected] :)</text></comment> |
22,706,287 | 22,704,193 | 1 | 2 | 22,691,603 | train | <story><title>A Light Box in Heavy Times</title><url>https://blog.afandian.com/2020/02/light-box-heavy-times/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>munificent</author><text>What a perfectly delightful post in all respects.<p><i>&gt; I am starting to think of interesting software for the Light Box that does respond exclusively to human input.</i><p>When I think of responsive software that gives me with delight without wresting any control from me, I think of programs that <i>magnify</i> my input in some way.<p>One simple idea that would well for this is a kaleidoscope. Press a button and not only does it change, but so do corresponding mirrored or rotated buttons around the box from it. A hex grid is great for this because then you can do 3-fold or 6-fold symmetry around the center button in addition to simple reflection symmetry.</text></comment> | <story><title>A Light Box in Heavy Times</title><url>https://blog.afandian.com/2020/02/light-box-heavy-times/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>strags</author><text>That is awesome! The retro box is fantastic.<p>I discovered that my son (17 months old at the time) loves to mess with stereo controls. So I bought a few rotary encoders and neo-pixel rings - build a wooden enclosure with a plastic faceplate, and wrote some code to generate fancy light and audio effects when he turns&#x2F;clicks the knobs. He loved it. We call it the &quot;Max Distractor&quot;.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=xtE8oE9GOsM" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=xtE8oE9GOsM</a><p>Inside it&#x27;s just a RPi. One of these days I really need to make it do something more fancy.</text></comment> |
34,215,178 | 34,215,176 | 1 | 2 | 34,213,549 | train | <story><title>Why Not Mars</title><url>https://idlewords.com/2023/1/why_not_mars.htm</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gary_0</author><text>The article gets the numbers right but the human part absolutely wrong. I&#x27;d love it if humans were the kind of creatures that could make big advances by taking them one small boring step at a time with no unachievably ambitious end goal driving them forward, but that&#x27;s absolutely not how it works.<p>The first advances in science were made by people trying to get rich turning worthless metals into gold. A lot of computer science grunt-work in decades past was done by or funded by people who thought they could build C-3PO.<p>Reasonable people who avoid likely financial ruin, who don&#x27;t dream of building impossible machines or visiting other planets, simply don&#x27;t take the risks needed to make actual technological leaps. Reasonable scientific goals that can&#x27;t make headlines don&#x27;t get billions from Congress.<p>We&#x27;re not capable of building Mars colonies any time soon, that&#x27;s true, but who knows what we&#x27;ll invent as we blunder our way in that direction nonetheless?</text></item><item><author>skissane</author><text>Part of article’s argument, can be summarised as “US Congress spends over $10 billion a year on grandiose and unachievable Martian vision-imagine what we could achieve if they gave that to JPL for robotic missions instead”. But that isn’t how Congress works. If they cancelled all expenditure on human space flight, they’d be unlikely to redirect any more than a fraction of that to robotic science missions. Instead, it will probably go to a new weapons system, or Medicare, or farm subsidies, or whatever. Spending it on human spaceflight likely even has indirect benefits for the robotic program-some NASA resources are shared by both programs, and taking away the human spaceflight component of their funding may threaten their overall viability, and hence their ability to serve the robotic programs</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cphajduk</author><text>Actually - It doesn&#x27;t get the numbers right either. If you look at the first reference, &quot;[1]&quot;, the author says:<p>&quot;I’ll justify this figure in detail later on. For now, consider that each SLS launch costs $4.2B, and that developing just the Orion space capsule has cost $20B. The ISS, which is functionally close to a Mars transfer vehicle, has so far cost $250 billion.&quot;<p>With absolutely no regard for the massive cost per kg to orbit improvement being achieved by new space companies (SpaceX, RocketLab, etc.)<p>The author has cherry-picked his facts to fit his opinion.</text></comment> | <story><title>Why Not Mars</title><url>https://idlewords.com/2023/1/why_not_mars.htm</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gary_0</author><text>The article gets the numbers right but the human part absolutely wrong. I&#x27;d love it if humans were the kind of creatures that could make big advances by taking them one small boring step at a time with no unachievably ambitious end goal driving them forward, but that&#x27;s absolutely not how it works.<p>The first advances in science were made by people trying to get rich turning worthless metals into gold. A lot of computer science grunt-work in decades past was done by or funded by people who thought they could build C-3PO.<p>Reasonable people who avoid likely financial ruin, who don&#x27;t dream of building impossible machines or visiting other planets, simply don&#x27;t take the risks needed to make actual technological leaps. Reasonable scientific goals that can&#x27;t make headlines don&#x27;t get billions from Congress.<p>We&#x27;re not capable of building Mars colonies any time soon, that&#x27;s true, but who knows what we&#x27;ll invent as we blunder our way in that direction nonetheless?</text></item><item><author>skissane</author><text>Part of article’s argument, can be summarised as “US Congress spends over $10 billion a year on grandiose and unachievable Martian vision-imagine what we could achieve if they gave that to JPL for robotic missions instead”. But that isn’t how Congress works. If they cancelled all expenditure on human space flight, they’d be unlikely to redirect any more than a fraction of that to robotic science missions. Instead, it will probably go to a new weapons system, or Medicare, or farm subsidies, or whatever. Spending it on human spaceflight likely even has indirect benefits for the robotic program-some NASA resources are shared by both programs, and taking away the human spaceflight component of their funding may threaten their overall viability, and hence their ability to serve the robotic programs</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>runarberg</author><text>&gt; The first advances in science were made by people trying to get rich turning worthless metals into gold.<p>And the planetary motions were discovered by somebody trying to prove that the 5 planets all fit inside a babushka doll of the 5 platonic solids. This says nothing of what would happen if these scientists had different creeds or different goals. Most scientific discoveries are indeed very boring. Vera Rubin discovered dark matter while trying study the rotation curves of spiral galaxies, a very simple and very down to earth goal that lead to a remarkable discovery. At the same time Jane Goodall’s big creed was that maybe it is OK to empathize with the individual animals you are studying.<p>Grand goals are neither necessary nor sufficient for making scientific advancements. And while some goals might be useful, others are just as likely to be a major distraction. There is reason to believe that a human mars landing falls in the latter category.</text></comment> |
6,979,719 | 6,979,735 | 1 | 3 | 6,978,274 | train | <story><title>Xplain: Explaining X11 for the rest of us</title><url>http://magcius.github.io/xplain/article/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>SimHacker</author><text>In his &#x27;90 Usenix presentation, Dennis Ritchie reminded the audience that
Steve Jobs stood at the same podium a few years back and announced that
X-windows was brain-dead and would soon die. &quot;He was half-right.
Sometimes when you fill a vacuum, it still sucks.&quot;<p>-- Dennis Ritchie, coinventor of UNIX, from an article in UNIX Today<p><a href="http://www.anvari.org/fortune/Miscellaneous_Collections/133229_in-his-90-usenix-presentation-dennis-ritchie-reminded-the-audience-that-steve-jobs-stood-at-the-same-podium-a-few-years-back-and-announced-that-x-windows-was-brain-dead-and-would-soon-die.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.anvari.org&#x2F;fortune&#x2F;Miscellaneous_Collections&#x2F;1332...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Xplain: Explaining X11 for the rest of us</title><url>http://magcius.github.io/xplain/article/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>SimHacker</author><text>The more important question of whether or not systems like C++ and X-Windows cause actual permanent brain damage in humans, will have to wait for the autopsies of human brain doners. That won&#x27;t be soon, since they&#x27;re still only in the animal experimentation stages. But I think it&#x27;s reprehensible how they&#x27;re exposing all those poor innocent bunnies to shoddy static class libraries without garbage collection, and high doses of raw Motif.<p><a href="http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~chak/quotations.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cse.unsw.edu.au&#x2F;~chak&#x2F;quotations.html</a></text></comment> |
40,708,575 | 40,708,521 | 1 | 2 | 40,708,046 | train | <story><title>Proton is taking its privacy-first apps to a nonprofit foundation model</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/06/proton-is-taking-its-privacy-first-apps-to-a-nonprofit-foundation-model/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>vzaliva</author><text>The new emerging hybrid model of non-profit foundations paired with for-profit businesses is certainly interesting, as it combines some &quot;greater good&quot; principles with the ability to build products and run businesses in a modern competitive market. I feel it may take some time to work out the details of these models. The biggest example we&#x27;ve seen is OpenAI, which, in my opinion, still hasn&#x27;t solved this model and is torn between lucrative multibillion business opportunities and adherence to its founding principles.</text></comment> | <story><title>Proton is taking its privacy-first apps to a nonprofit foundation model</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/06/proton-is-taking-its-privacy-first-apps-to-a-nonprofit-foundation-model/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>emaro</author><text>Proton&#x27;s announcement was posted here (10 comments so far):<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=40704191">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=40704191</a></text></comment> |
30,412,723 | 30,412,482 | 1 | 3 | 30,411,160 | train | <story><title>95%-ile isn't that good (2020)</title><url>https://danluu.com/p95-skill/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>xigency</author><text>Admittedly, I only skimmed this. But within the space of video games, I’m not sure Overwatch is a stunning example since it’s generally a casual game.<p>I’ve been playing various iterations of Counter-Strike and StarCraft for decades. Sometimes with deliberate practice, including reading strategies, playing custom maps to practice certain skills, and watching series aimed at improving level of play. And despite the hundreds of hours invested I don’t believe I’ve ever cracked the top 50% in any leaderboard rankings.<p>Anyone in the top 5% is definitely <i>that good</i>, executing complex strategies with extreme precision.<p>There are lots of areas in life that are highly competitive — where being the best takes raw talent, a huge time investment, and a bit of luck. I wouldn’t try to diminish that.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>xboxnolifes</author><text>In every competitive game I&#x27;ve ever played (Overwatch, CSGO, LoL, TFT, Rocket League), the top 5% definitely wasn&#x27;t &quot;that good&quot;.<p>In my mind, the top 20% are people who actually play. If you are stuck anywhere below that, you aren&#x27;t even trying to improve. If a leaderboard says you haven&#x27;t even cracked top 50%, then that leaderboard is definitely cutting players that don&#x27;t play much from the bottom of that list. In most competitive games, the bottom 80% is just casuals who play a few times and stop, or people who only play the game while high.<p>Then the top 5% is when you <i>start</i> understanding the game at a competitive level. The very start.<p>Then the top 1% is where you can consider yourself good at the game, but, still, there are a ton of fairly bad players that play enough to get here but don&#x27;t understand what they&#x27;re doing. It&#x27;s a combination of grinders and skilled players.<p>Then the 0.1% is where you have good players. Not pros, but definitely, unarguably, <i>good</i>.<p>Then you have pros.</text></comment> | <story><title>95%-ile isn't that good (2020)</title><url>https://danluu.com/p95-skill/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>xigency</author><text>Admittedly, I only skimmed this. But within the space of video games, I’m not sure Overwatch is a stunning example since it’s generally a casual game.<p>I’ve been playing various iterations of Counter-Strike and StarCraft for decades. Sometimes with deliberate practice, including reading strategies, playing custom maps to practice certain skills, and watching series aimed at improving level of play. And despite the hundreds of hours invested I don’t believe I’ve ever cracked the top 50% in any leaderboard rankings.<p>Anyone in the top 5% is definitely <i>that good</i>, executing complex strategies with extreme precision.<p>There are lots of areas in life that are highly competitive — where being the best takes raw talent, a huge time investment, and a bit of luck. I wouldn’t try to diminish that.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ZephyrBlu</author><text>I played StarCraft 2 (SC2). I reached Master 3, and my MMR at the time was top 3% globally.<p>I wouldn&#x27;t say I was that good. My foundational skills were decent, but not amazing and I did poorly against cheese or in extreme late-game situations. My micro in large scale battles also sucked.<p>A lot of people in the community would say that Master is where the game starts, and in some ways that&#x27;s very true.<p>This:<p>&gt; <i>Anyone in the top 5% is definitely that good, executing complex strategies with extreme precision</i><p>Is more like GM in SC2. In Master players can usually execute 90-95% perfectly if left alone, but that quickly falls apart if you have to multitask. Probably closer to 70-80% at best in real games, if that.<p>Also, almost everyone is copying strategies not doing anything particularly complicated. It&#x27;s hard enough to just play the damn game with a simple strategy, no point in making it harder.</text></comment> |
24,701,231 | 24,701,277 | 1 | 2 | 24,700,537 | train | <story><title>Q3 Linux touchpad update: Multitouch gesture test packages now ready</title><url>https://bill.harding.blog/2020/10/06/q3-linux-touchpad-like-macbook-update-multitouch-gesture-test-packages-are-ready/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>juancampa</author><text>For my last couple of laptops I&#x27;ve used libinput first because everyone says it&#x27;s the best option, but it always feels incredibly hard to perform small, precise movements. For example: try moving the mouse in a small circle (perhaps the size of the &quot;Y&quot; logo above). So both times I ended up switching to the old synaptics driver which seems to work better. I hope this project helps fix that so I&#x27;m sponsoring it</text></comment> | <story><title>Q3 Linux touchpad update: Multitouch gesture test packages now ready</title><url>https://bill.harding.blog/2020/10/06/q3-linux-touchpad-like-macbook-update-multitouch-gesture-test-packages-are-ready/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>yepthatsreality</author><text>It’s too bad we can’t condense all the rhetoric “i use Apple &lt;x&gt; because it just works” into actual useful energy. Something like this may have been solved a long time ago.<p>Glad to see movement about this. Was just considering converting my XPS 9560 into a full Linux machine next week (I will miss fingerprint sensor support, which brings up another point about just upgrading to a model that supports it). Going to use it as a testing ground for switching over my main rig to Linux and seeing progress like this is really encouraging that I’m making the right decision.<p>I will gladly install these test packages and help out.</text></comment> |
7,354,815 | 7,178,214 | 1 | 2 | 7,178,004 | train | <story><title>Ask HN: Should I sue drchrono (YC W11) for violating their contract w/ me?</title><text>[1 of 2]: My name is Dr. Dal Bedi. I&#x27;m owner of a medical practice in Va. I took a chance on a start-up drchrono as my EHR &amp; billing service provider; both services being a vital part of my business. It&#x27;s a decision I wish I never made. In the past 5 mo, I&#x27;ve had massive issues w&#x2F; the drchrono service. The setup of their billing &amp; collections services has taken 4 months due to repeated, inept errors by outsourced-to-India drchrono billing staff. Other drchrono users have been complaining about similar issues &amp; have asked for refunds: http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bit.ly&#x2F;1doMER9 &amp; http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bit.ly&#x2F;1fL8dzH. I&#x27;ve forwarded pages of errors to the drchrono staff http:&#x2F;&#x2F;cl.ly&#x2F;image&#x2F;200i2D2y1s2R , http:&#x2F;&#x2F;cl.ly&#x2F;image&#x2F;1z0g230x0N1I , http:&#x2F;&#x2F;cl.ly&#x2F;image&#x2F;3H072F0f3k43 , http:&#x2F;&#x2F;cl.ly&#x2F;image&#x2F;0k3G1t2h3h3w , http:&#x2F;&#x2F;cl.ly&#x2F;image&#x2F;0V1x2h3E2m43 , escalated w&#x2F; their support team for months, and finally escalated to the CEO, Michael Nusimow. When that proved ineffective, I asked for a refund for the months when the service wasn&#x27;t functional, all while being a committed customer w&#x2F;o a single outstanding balance. This past Xmas Eve, drchrono sent me an email raising my monthly fee 3x from $1.5k&#x2F;mo to $4.5k&#x2F;mo starting Jan 1st, 2014 w&#x2F;o any reason given -- even tho. we have a signed contract which sets the price for their services and can&#x27;t be changed.</text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Skeletor</author><text>drchrono cofounder here.<p>I spoke with Dr. Dal on the phone and we worked out his issues. We try to make all of our users happy, but from time to time things don&#x27;t work out. The drchrono team and I are working to change healthcare doctor by doctor and healthcare is a hard space to fix.<p>Dr. Dal was using our RCM (Revenue Cycle Management) service where we do all of the staff work for billing for the Doctor in exchange for a percentage of all of the insurance collections done in a month. There is a monthly minimum fee for the first few months the service ramps up, but for all of these contracts the percentage of billing fees is designed to exceed the monthly minimum in a steady state. In all the months Dr. Dal was using our RCM service he was paid on all of his medical claims in our system, but his account still never exceeded the minimum fee.<p>We raised rates for all of our RCM customers whose contracts weren&#x27;t exceeding the minimums across the board. We gave customers several months notice about these rate changes and helped any customer that wanted to do their own billing or port to another service do so.<p>All of our users have access to download all of their data at any time. Users can also synch all of their data on an ongoing basis to Box&#x27;s Enterprise HIPAA compliant storage. We put up a blog post to highlight these features and give instructions for users with links to our knowledge base: <a href="https://drchrono.com/blog/backup-records-outside-drchrono/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;drchrono.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;backup-records-outside-drchrono&#x2F;</a><p>I think it&#x27;s important that users always have access to their own data to use with other services at their convenience and to have for their own safety and peace of mind.</text></comment> | <story><title>Ask HN: Should I sue drchrono (YC W11) for violating their contract w/ me?</title><text>[1 of 2]: My name is Dr. Dal Bedi. I&#x27;m owner of a medical practice in Va. I took a chance on a start-up drchrono as my EHR &amp; billing service provider; both services being a vital part of my business. It&#x27;s a decision I wish I never made. In the past 5 mo, I&#x27;ve had massive issues w&#x2F; the drchrono service. The setup of their billing &amp; collections services has taken 4 months due to repeated, inept errors by outsourced-to-India drchrono billing staff. Other drchrono users have been complaining about similar issues &amp; have asked for refunds: http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bit.ly&#x2F;1doMER9 &amp; http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bit.ly&#x2F;1fL8dzH. I&#x27;ve forwarded pages of errors to the drchrono staff http:&#x2F;&#x2F;cl.ly&#x2F;image&#x2F;200i2D2y1s2R , http:&#x2F;&#x2F;cl.ly&#x2F;image&#x2F;1z0g230x0N1I , http:&#x2F;&#x2F;cl.ly&#x2F;image&#x2F;3H072F0f3k43 , http:&#x2F;&#x2F;cl.ly&#x2F;image&#x2F;0k3G1t2h3h3w , http:&#x2F;&#x2F;cl.ly&#x2F;image&#x2F;0V1x2h3E2m43 , escalated w&#x2F; their support team for months, and finally escalated to the CEO, Michael Nusimow. When that proved ineffective, I asked for a refund for the months when the service wasn&#x27;t functional, all while being a committed customer w&#x2F;o a single outstanding balance. This past Xmas Eve, drchrono sent me an email raising my monthly fee 3x from $1.5k&#x2F;mo to $4.5k&#x2F;mo starting Jan 1st, 2014 w&#x2F;o any reason given -- even tho. we have a signed contract which sets the price for their services and can&#x27;t be changed.</text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>codingdave</author><text>Yes, file the suit.<p>Lawsuits serve more purposes than just taking an issue to trial - they are also a mechanism to force the resolution of an issue when more reasonable conflict resolution methods have failed.<p>Nobody really wants to go to trial over stuff like this - but it will force them to stop ignoring the situation. (Or, if their story differs from yours, it will force their side to come forward as well.)<p>It is almost always less painful to settle outside of court once a suit is filed, and odds are that is exactly what they will do if you file the suit.</text></comment> |
1,263,718 | 1,263,485 | 1 | 2 | 1,263,083 | train | <story><title>Stack Exchange 2.0</title><url>http://blog.stackexchange.com/post/518474918/stack-exchange-2-0</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bonaldi</author><text>They realised that StackExchange was failing, but because they don't realise the reasons <i>why</i> their attempted correction is only making it worse.<p>Their software is a hideously complicated and over-engineered attempt to twist human relationships into math. It only works on StackOverflow because:
a) The tech community was <i>desperate</i> for an alternative to hidebound mailing lists on one hand and expertsexchange on the other
b) How to put this? A whole lot of nerds really would like to be able to reduce the complexity of human relationships to math, too, and willingly participated.<p>But without a userbase that's dying for a solution, any solution, and especially a userbase prepared to put up with convoluted ranking-rating-have-I-got-enough-points-to-change-my-profile-picture-yet point-scoring games the software is actually a millstone. You're not going to get a liberal arts Q&#38;A site that takes off with those restrictions. This is why StackExchange was such a dud.<p>By not realising this, their solution is more of the same! "Sure, you can start a site, you just need pi+4 users to seed your initial contract bounding, then that will need to be ranked to 6 by a quorum of level 3 users, and after an initial 26-day period of zzzzzzzzzz &#60;click&#62;".<p>You want to create a good Q&#38;A site, you need to have a community, and it needs to be well-tended by empathic people who know how and where to prune. The software is pretty much irrelevant. Look at <a href="http://ask.metafilter.com/" rel="nofollow">http://ask.metafilter.com/</a> for a success story: totally flat, forum-esque, but answers are obvious, there's no chatter or bullshit, and it works on the most amorphous and wide-ranging types of questions.<p>There is no shortcut solution to this problem. There is no way to mathematically manage human connections like this that works in this space. The route to success is careful relationship management, not yet more programming.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>spolsky</author><text>Sounds like you have a great business plan. In the meantime, I think that the Stack Overflow model has proven itself among nerds, and I think that your assertion that nerds are weird in some way and need completely different software than the rest of the world is not backed up by any evidence.<p>I disagree that the software is irrelevant. Discussion groups that don't allow voting have no way to distinguish answers that the community thinks are good from answers that the community thinks are bad. Discussion groups that don't allow editing have no way to change answers as the world changes, so wrong answers stick around. Discussion groups without tags are forced to splinter communities into smaller and smaller fragments because they have no way of dealing with overlapping communities. Discussion groups without reputation systems are overrun with spam.<p>I can't think of anything I disagree with MORE than the concept that "the software is irrelevant." The software DEFINES how the community works with each other and is absolutely critical.</text></comment> | <story><title>Stack Exchange 2.0</title><url>http://blog.stackexchange.com/post/518474918/stack-exchange-2-0</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bonaldi</author><text>They realised that StackExchange was failing, but because they don't realise the reasons <i>why</i> their attempted correction is only making it worse.<p>Their software is a hideously complicated and over-engineered attempt to twist human relationships into math. It only works on StackOverflow because:
a) The tech community was <i>desperate</i> for an alternative to hidebound mailing lists on one hand and expertsexchange on the other
b) How to put this? A whole lot of nerds really would like to be able to reduce the complexity of human relationships to math, too, and willingly participated.<p>But without a userbase that's dying for a solution, any solution, and especially a userbase prepared to put up with convoluted ranking-rating-have-I-got-enough-points-to-change-my-profile-picture-yet point-scoring games the software is actually a millstone. You're not going to get a liberal arts Q&#38;A site that takes off with those restrictions. This is why StackExchange was such a dud.<p>By not realising this, their solution is more of the same! "Sure, you can start a site, you just need pi+4 users to seed your initial contract bounding, then that will need to be ranked to 6 by a quorum of level 3 users, and after an initial 26-day period of zzzzzzzzzz &#60;click&#62;".<p>You want to create a good Q&#38;A site, you need to have a community, and it needs to be well-tended by empathic people who know how and where to prune. The software is pretty much irrelevant. Look at <a href="http://ask.metafilter.com/" rel="nofollow">http://ask.metafilter.com/</a> for a success story: totally flat, forum-esque, but answers are obvious, there's no chatter or bullshit, and it works on the most amorphous and wide-ranging types of questions.<p>There is no shortcut solution to this problem. There is no way to mathematically manage human connections like this that works in this space. The route to success is careful relationship management, not yet more programming.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>billybob</author><text>1) I don't think they're trying to model 'the complexity of human relationships.' That's what Facebook tries to do. The trust metrics are crude, but the real goal seems to be to get credible upvotes for answers.<p>I use SO all the time, have great success, and haven't made any friends there. Because that's not what it's for.<p>2) Maybe this model won't work for EnthusiasticCatBreeders.com, but it will probably work for a lot of sites. Maybe it will self-select for topics where the people interested are a bit nerdy.<p>That's OK. There is still a lot of room for nerdy growth. I can imagine sites about cell phones, economics, geomapping, and lots of other topics where the audience is a bit nerdy, there are right and wrong answers, and this will probably work.</text></comment> |
7,534,870 | 7,534,841 | 1 | 2 | 7,534,468 | train | <story><title>Amazon Dash</title><url>https://fresh.amazon.com/dash</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dotBen</author><text>HN&#x27;ers asking why this isn&#x27;t a cell phone app take note - this exemplifies why we <i>(geeks)</i> don&#x27;t make good use cases for consumer tech and we should always be careful looking to our own habits and values when in a Product Development role.<p>We&#x27;re rarely the target customer and rarely behave like &quot;average Joe&quot;. We&#x27;re naturally resistant to superfluous redundancy <i>(&quot;My phone can already snap a barcode, I don&#x27;t need a separate device&quot;)</i> when consumers don&#x27;t even see the duplication let alone the issue. They don&#x27;t separate devices (or even apps) has having layers of similarity and just see things for their end functionality.<p>My mother would see a phone and apps as completely separate functionality to a physical device like this. She probably would have the Amazon Fresh scanner, the <i>(theoretical)</i> Google Shopping Express scanner and the <i>(also theoretical)</i> Whole Foods scanner and wouldn&#x27;t even consider the duplication, let alone be frustrated by it. She doesn&#x27;t care about the potential for an &quot;open standard&quot;&#x2F;&quot;common standard&quot;.<p>She also has an AppleTV and a ChromeCast connected to the same smart-TV that also has native apps within it <i>(she mostly uses the native apps)</i>. Again, she sees no issue with that and might even buy an Amazon FireTV if she felt it was more compelling for one use.<p>Ultimately we shouldn&#x27;t assume consumers value convergence, especially when it creates ever increasing complexity in user experience <i>(eg opening an app to snap a barcode vs pressing a single button on an Amazon Fresh scanner)</i><p>ADDED: If you don&#x27;t have parents that also work in tech, go visit them and just watch them use technology without prompting. Ask them about their experiences, their frustrations, their decisions behind purchasing specific equipment and downloading particular apps. It&#x27;s very insightful.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mrxd</author><text>Agreed. Other advantages:<p>A dedicated device means everyone in the household can use it without the friction of having to help everyone find the app and register with the same account.<p>People without phones (like kids) can use it.<p>It&#x27;s designed to sit on the kitchen counter or hooked on to something. That physical presence reminds you to use it when you&#x27;re in the kitchen, where an app buried on the last page of the home screen is easy to forget.<p>The camera-based barcode scanners like the one built into the Amazon mobile app are significantly more difficult to use than laser scanners. In a grocery shopping context, shoppers will purchase dozens of different products and every bit of additional frustration and delay matters.<p>One issue with the website: the hero image is really bad. The background is blurred out so there&#x27;s no context and there are no other objects in the frame so I have no sense of scale. If there was like an apple next to it or something, and you could see it was in a kitchen, that would be so much better.</text></comment> | <story><title>Amazon Dash</title><url>https://fresh.amazon.com/dash</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dotBen</author><text>HN&#x27;ers asking why this isn&#x27;t a cell phone app take note - this exemplifies why we <i>(geeks)</i> don&#x27;t make good use cases for consumer tech and we should always be careful looking to our own habits and values when in a Product Development role.<p>We&#x27;re rarely the target customer and rarely behave like &quot;average Joe&quot;. We&#x27;re naturally resistant to superfluous redundancy <i>(&quot;My phone can already snap a barcode, I don&#x27;t need a separate device&quot;)</i> when consumers don&#x27;t even see the duplication let alone the issue. They don&#x27;t separate devices (or even apps) has having layers of similarity and just see things for their end functionality.<p>My mother would see a phone and apps as completely separate functionality to a physical device like this. She probably would have the Amazon Fresh scanner, the <i>(theoretical)</i> Google Shopping Express scanner and the <i>(also theoretical)</i> Whole Foods scanner and wouldn&#x27;t even consider the duplication, let alone be frustrated by it. She doesn&#x27;t care about the potential for an &quot;open standard&quot;&#x2F;&quot;common standard&quot;.<p>She also has an AppleTV and a ChromeCast connected to the same smart-TV that also has native apps within it <i>(she mostly uses the native apps)</i>. Again, she sees no issue with that and might even buy an Amazon FireTV if she felt it was more compelling for one use.<p>Ultimately we shouldn&#x27;t assume consumers value convergence, especially when it creates ever increasing complexity in user experience <i>(eg opening an app to snap a barcode vs pressing a single button on an Amazon Fresh scanner)</i><p>ADDED: If you don&#x27;t have parents that also work in tech, go visit them and just watch them use technology without prompting. Ask them about their experiences, their frustrations, their decisions behind purchasing specific equipment and downloading particular apps. It&#x27;s very insightful.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Rusky</author><text>&gt; Ultimately we shouldn&#x27;t assume consumers value convergence, especially when it creates ever increasing complexity in user experience<p>Reminds me of this excellent article by Bret Victor: <a href="http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesign/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;worrydream.com&#x2F;ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesi...</a><p>Making everything an app narrows the bandwidth between the user and the tool. Now everyone needs a phone, and you can&#x27;t leave the scanner where it gets used, and you have to go through the generalized touch interface to get to the functionality instead of (and this is a valid UI) just picking up the scanner.</text></comment> |
27,901,889 | 27,901,741 | 1 | 3 | 27,894,640 | train | <story><title>Restaurant workers quit at record rate</title><url>https://www.npr.org/2021/07/20/1016081936/low-pay-no-benefits-rude-customers-restaurant-workers-quit-at-record-rate</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Aloha</author><text>It&#x27;s not just wages - like alot of what we can do is making shitty jobs less miserable, ensuring everyone gets some amount of vacation and sick time, insuring everyone has cheap or free healthcare access, ensuring everyone has relatively fixed schedule - eliminate punitive workplace policies, on stuff like attendance and other shit that makes being there miserable. Like, you can do a hell of alot to reduce peoples day to day misery.<p>There used to be some sort of a tradeoff, there used to be a ton of jobs that didnt pay well, but they were not miserable places to work at, that was kinda the tradeoff, you know - you like, didnt get a ton of money, but the workplace wasnt awful. Those jobs still exist but they&#x27;re rarer.</text></item><item><author>browningstreet</author><text>I think some businesses are going out of businesses because they stubbornly refuse to raise their wages.<p>In the vacation community where I live, there are two grocery&#x2F;delis about a mile apart from each other. One is at a marina, the other is at a beach. They have almost the same business offering. Traditionally, both are fully mobbed during the sunny seasons.<p>Two weeks ago, I visited the one I usually go to -- at the marina. They had a sign at the front door, &quot;Due to the labor shortage...&quot; and they weren&#x27;t operating their deli counter. No sandwiches. When I sent inside, it was empty. No customers. The one employee at the register was on their phone. Nothing going on. A couple of people pulled up in their cars, read the sign, pulled out and left immediately.<p>Drove up the road a mile to the other one. No sign -- it was busy like it usually was. Full house, busy counters and registers.<p>My son asked me why the other place wouldn&#x27;t just raise their wages.. I couldn&#x27;t answer, but I guessed it was more on a matter of principle than calculated reality. There&#x27;s no way they were surviving or thriving. I joked that maybe the owner was an old cahoot who remembered when a soda was $0.05 and there was no way they were going to raise their hourly wages to $15 or more.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>acituan</author><text>All of those reasons are valid, but not unique to hospitality industry.<p>I think we might be backgrounding one particular reason too much: customers are a headache. One of the subheadings of the article is &quot;They&#x27;re just yelling the entire time&quot;.<p>I find it interesting that this hasn&#x27;t been discussed as much, maybe because we are culpable? Maybe at one point of time we were <i>that</i> high maintenance customer? Maybe there is a general culture problem <i>we all have</i> regarding how we treat strangers, especially those who are bound to serve us to an extent. And looking at that need for transformation might be hard on our ego than the transformation of structural non-industry-specific inequities.</text></comment> | <story><title>Restaurant workers quit at record rate</title><url>https://www.npr.org/2021/07/20/1016081936/low-pay-no-benefits-rude-customers-restaurant-workers-quit-at-record-rate</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Aloha</author><text>It&#x27;s not just wages - like alot of what we can do is making shitty jobs less miserable, ensuring everyone gets some amount of vacation and sick time, insuring everyone has cheap or free healthcare access, ensuring everyone has relatively fixed schedule - eliminate punitive workplace policies, on stuff like attendance and other shit that makes being there miserable. Like, you can do a hell of alot to reduce peoples day to day misery.<p>There used to be some sort of a tradeoff, there used to be a ton of jobs that didnt pay well, but they were not miserable places to work at, that was kinda the tradeoff, you know - you like, didnt get a ton of money, but the workplace wasnt awful. Those jobs still exist but they&#x27;re rarer.</text></item><item><author>browningstreet</author><text>I think some businesses are going out of businesses because they stubbornly refuse to raise their wages.<p>In the vacation community where I live, there are two grocery&#x2F;delis about a mile apart from each other. One is at a marina, the other is at a beach. They have almost the same business offering. Traditionally, both are fully mobbed during the sunny seasons.<p>Two weeks ago, I visited the one I usually go to -- at the marina. They had a sign at the front door, &quot;Due to the labor shortage...&quot; and they weren&#x27;t operating their deli counter. No sandwiches. When I sent inside, it was empty. No customers. The one employee at the register was on their phone. Nothing going on. A couple of people pulled up in their cars, read the sign, pulled out and left immediately.<p>Drove up the road a mile to the other one. No sign -- it was busy like it usually was. Full house, busy counters and registers.<p>My son asked me why the other place wouldn&#x27;t just raise their wages.. I couldn&#x27;t answer, but I guessed it was more on a matter of principle than calculated reality. There&#x27;s no way they were surviving or thriving. I joked that maybe the owner was an old cahoot who remembered when a soda was $0.05 and there was no way they were going to raise their hourly wages to $15 or more.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>14</author><text>I think I get 15 paid sick days a year, 15 vacation days with an extra day added each year, and 12 lieu days that I get off but no pay. This was the first year having it. What a difference it makes to my mental well being. I spread my days off out so I get lots of 3 day weekends and I feel a lot less burnt out. The sick days are a big one. If my kid is sick or I hurt myself or I have a bad tooth or just feeling down or something just call in at least half hour before my shift and it’s all good.</text></comment> |
13,682,871 | 13,682,257 | 1 | 3 | 13,682,022 | train | <story><title>Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber</title><url>https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-one-very-strange-year-at-uber</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jacquesm</author><text>What&#x27;s with all the &#x27;this is unbelievable&#x27; comments here?<p>This is absolutely believable, Uber has pretty much made it their standard to break the laws where-ever they can, why should work place conduct be any different? In for a penny, in for a pound.<p>You&#x27;d never hear something even close to this from Stripe or some other company run by upstanding folks.<p>Fish rots from the head.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tptacek</author><text>I fully expected this thread to be a shitshow, but comments here are overwhelmingly supportive of Fowler, and except perhaps for the very bottom of the thread, I don&#x27;t see much much &quot;this is unbelievable&quot; at all. I&#x27;m pleasantly surprised.</text></comment> | <story><title>Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber</title><url>https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-one-very-strange-year-at-uber</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jacquesm</author><text>What&#x27;s with all the &#x27;this is unbelievable&#x27; comments here?<p>This is absolutely believable, Uber has pretty much made it their standard to break the laws where-ever they can, why should work place conduct be any different? In for a penny, in for a pound.<p>You&#x27;d never hear something even close to this from Stripe or some other company run by upstanding folks.<p>Fish rots from the head.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>minimaxir</author><text>If anything, OP&#x27;s subsequent employment by Stripe is a very strong endorsement for the workplace culture of the company.</text></comment> |
35,922,692 | 35,915,832 | 1 | 3 | 35,914,447 | train | <story><title>Pigz: Parallel gzip for modern multi-processor, multi-core machines</title><url>https://zlib.net/pigz/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>adamgordonbell</author><text>One wild thing is how much performance wins were available compared to ZLib. Pigz is parrellel, but what if you just had a better way to compress and decompress than DEFLATE?<p>When zstd came out – and Brotli before it to a certain extent – they were 3x faster than ZLib with a slightly higher compression ratio. You&#x27;d think that such performance jumps in something as well explored as data compression would be hard to come by. We weren&#x27;t that close to the efficiency frontier.</text></item><item><author>adamgordonbell</author><text>I heard of pigz in the discussions following my interview of Yann Collet, creator of LZ4 and zstd.<p>If you&#x27;ll excuse the plug, here is the LZ4 story:<p>Yann was bored and working as a project manager. So he started working on a game for his old HP 48 graphing calculator.<p>Eventually, this hobby led him to revolutionize the field of data compression, releasing LZ4, ZStandard, and Finite State Entropy coders.<p>His code ended up everywhere: in games, databases, file systems, and the Linux Kernel because Yann built the world&#x27;s fastest compression algorithms. And he got started just making a fun game for a graphing calculator he&#x27;d had since high school.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;corecursive.com&#x2F;data-compression-yann-collet&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;corecursive.com&#x2F;data-compression-yann-collet&#x2F;</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>twotwotwo</author><text>A part of this was that zstd and Brotli were able to use compression history windows of MBs not KBs, while DEFLATE maxes out at 32KB. RAM was thousands of times more expensive in the early 90s, so a smaller history window made sense.<p>There are also optimizations that only work on today&#x27;s larger cores, and you have to actively update old code to get the advantages (happily some work is going into that): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=32533061" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=32533061</a> &#x2F; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=32537545" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=32537545</a><p>That&#x27;s not to minimize the clever ideas and amazing implementation work in new stuff. It&#x27;s more that people were making smart decisions both then and now, more so than you might guess just from comparisons on today&#x27;s hardware.</text></comment> | <story><title>Pigz: Parallel gzip for modern multi-processor, multi-core machines</title><url>https://zlib.net/pigz/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>adamgordonbell</author><text>One wild thing is how much performance wins were available compared to ZLib. Pigz is parrellel, but what if you just had a better way to compress and decompress than DEFLATE?<p>When zstd came out – and Brotli before it to a certain extent – they were 3x faster than ZLib with a slightly higher compression ratio. You&#x27;d think that such performance jumps in something as well explored as data compression would be hard to come by. We weren&#x27;t that close to the efficiency frontier.</text></item><item><author>adamgordonbell</author><text>I heard of pigz in the discussions following my interview of Yann Collet, creator of LZ4 and zstd.<p>If you&#x27;ll excuse the plug, here is the LZ4 story:<p>Yann was bored and working as a project manager. So he started working on a game for his old HP 48 graphing calculator.<p>Eventually, this hobby led him to revolutionize the field of data compression, releasing LZ4, ZStandard, and Finite State Entropy coders.<p>His code ended up everywhere: in games, databases, file systems, and the Linux Kernel because Yann built the world&#x27;s fastest compression algorithms. And he got started just making a fun game for a graphing calculator he&#x27;d had since high school.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;corecursive.com&#x2F;data-compression-yann-collet&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;corecursive.com&#x2F;data-compression-yann-collet&#x2F;</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dist-epoch</author><text>&gt; as well explored as data compression<p>What&#x27;s well explored is compression rate, where indeed it&#x27;s difficult to improve, and true innovations, like arithmetic coding, are rare.<p>Compressing speed on the other hand it&#x27;s not very interesting to academics, it&#x27;s more of an engineering problem. And there is plenty of work to do here, starting with stuff as simple as multi-threading and SIMD.<p>ZLib and ZStandard are probably in the same complexity class, but with different constant factors, which academics don&#x27;t care about but which have massive practical consequences.</text></comment> |
25,133,678 | 25,132,167 | 1 | 2 | 25,131,408 | train | <story><title>Firefox beta supports Apple silicon natively</title><url>https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1648496#c2</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>beached_whale</author><text>Firefox doesn&#x27;t stutter on infinite scroll sites like Twitter. Safari noticeably does, even in Big Sur.<p>So I am torn between the two.</text></item><item><author>CamJN</author><text>As a diehard Firefox user, it has never been competitive with safari when it comes to performance. JavaScriptCore and WebKit are kind of ridiculously fast. If only they were put in a browser that was at all usable.</text></item><item><author>amanzi</author><text>This is great news. Based on the early reviews coming in, native Apple apps perform amazingly well on the M1 chips. So it&#x27;s going to be really important for third-party apps to support M1 natively to remain competitive.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>alwillis</author><text>I&#x27;ve not seen Safari stutter as you describe, especially with version 14 which got a big speed boost in general and especially on Big Sur.<p>Here&#x27;s a link to a tweet showing Safari with 400 tabs on a M1 MacBook Air… the performance is incredible.<p>Turns out Chrome choked and became unresponsive when trying to do the same thing: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;panzer&#x2F;status&#x2F;1328790134548905985?s=20" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;panzer&#x2F;status&#x2F;1328790134548905985?s=20</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Firefox beta supports Apple silicon natively</title><url>https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1648496#c2</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>beached_whale</author><text>Firefox doesn&#x27;t stutter on infinite scroll sites like Twitter. Safari noticeably does, even in Big Sur.<p>So I am torn between the two.</text></item><item><author>CamJN</author><text>As a diehard Firefox user, it has never been competitive with safari when it comes to performance. JavaScriptCore and WebKit are kind of ridiculously fast. If only they were put in a browser that was at all usable.</text></item><item><author>amanzi</author><text>This is great news. Based on the early reviews coming in, native Apple apps perform amazingly well on the M1 chips. So it&#x27;s going to be really important for third-party apps to support M1 natively to remain competitive.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Klonoar</author><text>I have the exact opposite experience, FWIW.</text></comment> |
21,978,166 | 21,977,974 | 1 | 2 | 21,974,942 | train | <story><title>Is Git Irreplaceable? (2019)</title><url>https://fossil-scm.org/forum/forumpost/b251b6e48e</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Ace17</author><text>I work for a 40-people game studio.<p>A major limitation of git is how it deals with many &quot;big&quot; (~10Mb) binary files (3D models, textures, sounds, etc.).<p>We ended up developing our own layer over git, and we&#x27;re very happy ; even git-lfs can&#x27;t provide similar benefits. This technique seems to be commonplace for game studios (e.g Naughty Dog, Bungee), so certainly git has room for improvement here.</text></item><item><author>kemitche</author><text>I disagree that Git&#x27;s biggest flaw is its lack of scalability. Cases where git needs to scale tend to be isolated to companies that have the manpower to build a finely-tuned replacement (see: MS, Google).<p>Git&#x27;s flaws are primarily in usability&#x2F;UX. But I think for its purpose, functionality is far more important than a perfect UX. I&#x27;m perfectly happy knowing I might have to Google how to do something in Git as long as I can feel confident that Git will have the power to do whatever it is I&#x27;m trying to do. A competitor would need to do what git does as well as git does it, with a UX that is not just marginally better but categorically better, to unseat git. (Marginally better isn&#x27;t strong enough to overcome incumbent use cases)<p>And for the record: I think git-lfs issues are primarily usability issues, and tech improvements. The tech enhancements will be solved if there&#x27;s enough desire, and as I mentioned the usability problems are more annoyances than actual problems.</text></item><item><author>comex</author><text>Git&#x27;s biggest flaw is that it doesn&#x27;t scale. If a new system can fix that without sacrificing any of Git&#x27;s benefits, I think it can topple Git.<p>It&#x27;s ironic that Git was popularized in the same era as monorepos, yet Git is a poor fit for monorepos. There have been some attempts to work around this. Google&#x27;s `repo` command is a wrapper around Git that treats a set of smaller repos like one big one, but it&#x27;s a (very) leaky abstraction. Microsoft&#x27;s GVFS is a promising attempt to truly scale Git to giant repos, but it&#x27;s developed as an addon rather than a core part of Git, and so far it only works on Windows (with macOS support in development). GVFS arguably has the potential to become an ubiquitous part of the Git experience, someday... but it probably won&#x27;t.<p>Git also has trouble with large files. The situation is better these days, as most people have seemingly standardized on git-lfs (over its older competitor git-annex), and it works pretty well. Nevertheless, it feels like a hack that &quot;large&quot; files have to be managed using a completely different system from normal files, one which (again) is not a core part of Git.<p>There exist version control systems that do scale well to large repos and large files, but all the ones I&#x27;ve heard of have other disadvantages compared to Git. For example, they&#x27;re not decentralized, or they&#x27;re not as lightning-fast as Git is in smaller repos, or they&#x27;re harder to use. That&#x27;s why I think there&#x27;s room for a future competitor!<p>(Fossil is not that competitor. From what I&#x27;ve heard, it neither scales well nor matches Git in performance for small repos, unfortunately.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mathw</author><text>This does not surprise me. Git&#x27;s original purpose of managing versions of a tree of text files (i.e. the source code of the Linux kernel) pervasively influences it, and I wouldn&#x27;t expect it to be any good for working with binary files or large files.<p>If somebody comes up with something that matches Git&#x27;s strengths and also handles binaries and biggies much, much better then they could definitely topple Git with it. It&#x27;d take time for the word to spread, the tools to mature and the hosting to appear, but I can definitely see it happening.<p>I think most people know that Git isn&#x27;t perfect, but it&#x27;s also the case that coming up with anything better is an extremely difficult task. If it wasn&#x27;t, someone would have already done it. It&#x27;s not like people haven&#x27;t been trying.</text></comment> | <story><title>Is Git Irreplaceable? (2019)</title><url>https://fossil-scm.org/forum/forumpost/b251b6e48e</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Ace17</author><text>I work for a 40-people game studio.<p>A major limitation of git is how it deals with many &quot;big&quot; (~10Mb) binary files (3D models, textures, sounds, etc.).<p>We ended up developing our own layer over git, and we&#x27;re very happy ; even git-lfs can&#x27;t provide similar benefits. This technique seems to be commonplace for game studios (e.g Naughty Dog, Bungee), so certainly git has room for improvement here.</text></item><item><author>kemitche</author><text>I disagree that Git&#x27;s biggest flaw is its lack of scalability. Cases where git needs to scale tend to be isolated to companies that have the manpower to build a finely-tuned replacement (see: MS, Google).<p>Git&#x27;s flaws are primarily in usability&#x2F;UX. But I think for its purpose, functionality is far more important than a perfect UX. I&#x27;m perfectly happy knowing I might have to Google how to do something in Git as long as I can feel confident that Git will have the power to do whatever it is I&#x27;m trying to do. A competitor would need to do what git does as well as git does it, with a UX that is not just marginally better but categorically better, to unseat git. (Marginally better isn&#x27;t strong enough to overcome incumbent use cases)<p>And for the record: I think git-lfs issues are primarily usability issues, and tech improvements. The tech enhancements will be solved if there&#x27;s enough desire, and as I mentioned the usability problems are more annoyances than actual problems.</text></item><item><author>comex</author><text>Git&#x27;s biggest flaw is that it doesn&#x27;t scale. If a new system can fix that without sacrificing any of Git&#x27;s benefits, I think it can topple Git.<p>It&#x27;s ironic that Git was popularized in the same era as monorepos, yet Git is a poor fit for monorepos. There have been some attempts to work around this. Google&#x27;s `repo` command is a wrapper around Git that treats a set of smaller repos like one big one, but it&#x27;s a (very) leaky abstraction. Microsoft&#x27;s GVFS is a promising attempt to truly scale Git to giant repos, but it&#x27;s developed as an addon rather than a core part of Git, and so far it only works on Windows (with macOS support in development). GVFS arguably has the potential to become an ubiquitous part of the Git experience, someday... but it probably won&#x27;t.<p>Git also has trouble with large files. The situation is better these days, as most people have seemingly standardized on git-lfs (over its older competitor git-annex), and it works pretty well. Nevertheless, it feels like a hack that &quot;large&quot; files have to be managed using a completely different system from normal files, one which (again) is not a core part of Git.<p>There exist version control systems that do scale well to large repos and large files, but all the ones I&#x27;ve heard of have other disadvantages compared to Git. For example, they&#x27;re not decentralized, or they&#x27;re not as lightning-fast as Git is in smaller repos, or they&#x27;re harder to use. That&#x27;s why I think there&#x27;s room for a future competitor!<p>(Fossil is not that competitor. From what I&#x27;ve heard, it neither scales well nor matches Git in performance for small repos, unfortunately.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>taftster</author><text>Do you have tools that you can utilize diffs from your binary file changes? Or does a change simply just replace all the bytes.<p>I&#x27;d argue if it&#x27;s the later, that git was never the right choice to begin with. You don&#x27;t really want to record a full 10MB of data every time you change one pixel in your texture or one blip in your sound, right?<p>So I don&#x27;t know if this is a &quot;major limitation&quot; of git per se. Not saying there&#x27;s a better solution off-the-shelf (you&#x27;re obviously happy with your home grown). But this was probably never a realistic use for git in the first place.</text></comment> |
5,125,197 | 5,125,220 | 1 | 3 | 5,124,993 | train | <story><title>The 50 million dollar lie</title><url>http://garyrubinstein.teachforus.org/2013/01/09/the-50-million-dollar-lie/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kenjackson</author><text>This is a surprising blog post in that I draw the complete opposite conclusion the author does. The author seems to think that the averaging hides volatility (which it does), which leads to incorrect conclusions drawn. Whereas to me it looks like it removes visual noise to show an actual trend.<p>In his original scatter plot, because of the big ball in the middle it's easy to handwave and say, "look a random blob" -- but even a slightly longer look seems to indicate there is a positive correlation in the data. His averaging that he does at the end, IMO, makes it clear.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pdonis</author><text>You're missing the point. The author agreed that there is a slight positive correlation in the data. But the averaging makes it look like there is a <i>strong</i> positive correlation in the data, which there isn't.<p>In other words: without the averaging, you are seeing the full implications of the data: slight positive correlation, but a lot of scatter--i.e., not much meat there. With the averaging, you are seeing <i>only</i> the positive correlation, with all other information filtered out--i.e., you are seeing only part of the picture, and it's the part that, surprise, surprise, makes the person who ordered the data collected look good.</text></comment> | <story><title>The 50 million dollar lie</title><url>http://garyrubinstein.teachforus.org/2013/01/09/the-50-million-dollar-lie/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kenjackson</author><text>This is a surprising blog post in that I draw the complete opposite conclusion the author does. The author seems to think that the averaging hides volatility (which it does), which leads to incorrect conclusions drawn. Whereas to me it looks like it removes visual noise to show an actual trend.<p>In his original scatter plot, because of the big ball in the middle it's easy to handwave and say, "look a random blob" -- but even a slightly longer look seems to indicate there is a positive correlation in the data. His averaging that he does at the end, IMO, makes it clear.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Alex3917</author><text>"Whereas to me it looks like it removes visual noise to show an actual trend."<p>Except for that in this case the noise is more important than the trend. Think about it, if you're firing or sanctioning perhaps 30%+ of teachers each year for no reason, then only complete morons would go into teaching.<p>It's the same as airport security, where a .1% false positive rate is unacceptable, whereas a 75% false negative rate is just fine.</text></comment> |
40,636,116 | 40,636,136 | 1 | 3 | 40,635,749 | train | <story><title>Apple Debuts VisionOS 2</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2024/06/10/apple-debuts-visionos-2/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>guerrilla</author><text>I wonder how many comments there were like this about the iPod and iPhone.</text></item><item><author>behnamoh</author><text>Vision Pro must be the worst failed product Apple has ever made, and they made Newton.<p>I remember all the hype about it on Twitter, and then it all went away when people started to realize just how pointless this device is, with all the Apple restrictions that limit its applications.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>furyofantares</author><text>Probably none, they were both massive hits immediately, nobody was calling them failed products months after release.<p>edit: That said I&#x27;m reading now that the early reports that Apple downgraded their expectations for year 1 from 800k units to 400k units after launch were wrong, and instead they were always projecting 400k units.</text></comment> | <story><title>Apple Debuts VisionOS 2</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2024/06/10/apple-debuts-visionos-2/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>guerrilla</author><text>I wonder how many comments there were like this about the iPod and iPhone.</text></item><item><author>behnamoh</author><text>Vision Pro must be the worst failed product Apple has ever made, and they made Newton.<p>I remember all the hype about it on Twitter, and then it all went away when people started to realize just how pointless this device is, with all the Apple restrictions that limit its applications.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>scarface_74</author><text><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.slashdot.org&#x2F;story&#x2F;21026" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.slashdot.org&#x2F;story&#x2F;21026</a><p>“No wireless. Less space than the Nomad. Lame”<p>Palm CEO on the iPhone<p>“ We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone, PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”<p>People seem to forget that it took two years to sell the first 1 million iPods and Apple only sold 10 million iPhones the first year - 1% of the total market.</text></comment> |
19,234,541 | 19,234,688 | 1 | 3 | 19,233,208 | train | <story><title>The SDK “Power Mac G5” for the Xbox 360</title><url>https://www.journaldulapin.com/2019/01/21/power-mac-g5-sdk/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>maximilianburke</author><text>When the Xbox 360 finally shipped, Microsoft didn’t want these alpha kits returned. I waa working for EA at the time and our studio arranged a raffle for these; you could enter a draw and if your name was chosen you could buy one of these G5s freshly loaded with OS X for $500 with the provision that you couldn’t flip it for a year.<p>All the money went to charity so it was a pretty good deal.</text></comment> | <story><title>The SDK “Power Mac G5” for the Xbox 360</title><url>https://www.journaldulapin.com/2019/01/21/power-mac-g5-sdk/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>zorpner</author><text>Very cool. Reminds me also of the N64 dev kit made for the SGI Indy (the video it generated couldn&#x27;t be handled internally, but because the Indy was designed for video input you could simply loop it back in, and the machine could DMA it directly onto the screen): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;assemblergames.com&#x2F;threads&#x2F;my-complete-sgi-ultra64-dev-set-manual-scans-dev-software.45165&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;assemblergames.com&#x2F;threads&#x2F;my-complete-sgi-ultra64-d...</a></text></comment> |
37,915,907 | 37,915,694 | 1 | 2 | 37,914,146 | train | <story><title>Mypy 1.6</title><url>https://mypy-lang.blogspot.com/2023/10/mypy-16-released.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>_fdsfs12123</author><text>Has anyone had to choose between Mypy and Pyright? Which is &quot;better&quot;?<p>A couple years ago I was in charge of choosing between the two, and I somewhat flippantly chose Pyright because it felt a lot faster (&lt;5 second to do 30k lines) and had an easy integration with the editors people use at work (Pylance, coc-pyright).<p>Later, I realized that some popular libraries we use (django, numpy) have dedicated plugins for Mypy that you can&#x27;t use with Pyright. So you have to look for Pyright-friendly type stubs or roll your own.<p>I&#x27;ve generally liked Pyright (as a side note, they have super responsive maintainers - ask a question on their GH, and they usually answer within a few hours), but I&#x27;ve been wondering if I am missing out with Mypy.</text></comment> | <story><title>Mypy 1.6</title><url>https://mypy-lang.blogspot.com/2023/10/mypy-16-released.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>KolmogorovComp</author><text>Is anyone still using mypy, and if so why? I have replaced it by pyright [0] for a while now, and not looking back. It’s been a faster, more powerful replacement with (in my case), zero downside.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;microsoft&#x2F;pyright">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;microsoft&#x2F;pyright</a></text></comment> |
19,703,120 | 19,702,638 | 1 | 2 | 19,701,767 | train | <story><title>Applied Category Theory</title><url>https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-s097-applied-category-theory-january-iap-2019/index.htm</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>eindiran</author><text>If anyone is looking to get into Category Theory as a programmer, I would recommend giving Bartosz Milewski&#x27;s Category Theory for Programmers a shot[0]. Quite good, and you can read it as a blog post on that site or get the ebook&#x2F;physical book to leaf through.<p>For a more theoretical&#x2F;less applied approach that&#x27;s still relevant to computer science&#x2F;programming, check out Benjamin Pierce&#x27;s Basic Category Theory for Computer Scientists[1]. It&#x27;s a very good introduction to the parts of Category Theory that are useful for [theoretical] CS, and delves into semantics of programming languages, types, and concurrency a fair amount.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bartoszmilewski.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;10&#x2F;28&#x2F;category-theory-for-programmers-the-preface&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bartoszmilewski.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;10&#x2F;28&#x2F;category-theory-for-p...</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mitpress.mit.edu&#x2F;books&#x2F;basic-category-theory-computer-scientists" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mitpress.mit.edu&#x2F;books&#x2F;basic-category-theory-compute...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Applied Category Theory</title><url>https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-s097-applied-category-theory-january-iap-2019/index.htm</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>outlace</author><text>The course is based on this free book <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;math.mit.edu&#x2F;~dspivak&#x2F;teaching&#x2F;sp18&#x2F;7Sketches.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;math.mit.edu&#x2F;~dspivak&#x2F;teaching&#x2F;sp18&#x2F;7Sketches.pdf</a></text></comment> |
39,754,107 | 39,753,393 | 1 | 2 | 39,750,061 | train | <story><title>Inversion: Fast, Reliable Structured LLMs</title><url>https://rysana.com/inversion</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>AmazingTurtle</author><text>Most likely a small retrieval optimized model with focus on JSON tokens and a combination of the technique involved in grammar&#x2F;guidance<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;guidance-ai&#x2F;guidance">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;guidance-ai&#x2F;guidance</a><p>Same principle</text></comment> | <story><title>Inversion: Fast, Reliable Structured LLMs</title><url>https://rysana.com/inversion</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>fzysingularity</author><text>I was initially impressed with the landing page, but it does look a bit suspect when things are claimed to be 100x faster without much info on the HW acceleration or the model sizes.<p>My best guess is that they&#x27;re using two approaches to get this running faster:<p>- structured generation techniques from sglang (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;sgl-project&#x2F;sglang">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;sgl-project&#x2F;sglang</a>) that allow them to generate faster JSON (with look-ahead &#x2F; pre-fill) with strong guarantees on the output (i.e. 100% reliable, without requiring any retries).<p>- distilling a gpt-3.5 turbo-esque model from GPT-4 JSON outputs, and using it in conjuction with above to give the additional performance boosts on inference.<p>It doesn&#x27;t seem like they&#x27;re deploying on any custom silicon, nor have they optimized GPU kernels to suggest that the speed ups came there.</text></comment> |
21,526,623 | 21,524,476 | 1 | 3 | 21,520,129 | train | <story><title>One Google Staffer Fired, Two Others Put on Leave Amid Tensions</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-11-12/one-google-staffer-fired-two-others-put-on-leave-amid-tensions</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>leftyted</author><text>My empoyer doesn&#x27;t have a lot of power over me. I&#x27;m a programmer not a coal miner.<p>I don&#x27;t want to be in a union. I don&#x27;t want to join some club. I don&#x27;t want to pay dues. I don&#x27;t want to read newsletters or listen to speeches or be involved at all in the grubby, underhanded manuevering for power that would come with a union. And I&#x27;m tired of people condescendingly telling me that I&#x27;m wrong for feeling this way. I&#x27;m not wrong. Power corrupts and labor is no more pure than mangement. If labor gets the upper hand it will abuse its position.<p>The solution is a balance of power between labor and management. In my case, I feel I have plenty of power. In the case of Google employees, I feel they have plenty of power. Broadly speaking, programmers (in the US) have plenty of power.<p>If you want to do good, volunteer at a soup kitchen. Of course that would be <i>hard</i> and would involve looking at things you&#x27;d rather not see.</text></item><item><author>DagAgren</author><text>&gt; Your colleagues are not an authentic social network who you can organise with and pursue activism.<p>This is absolutely, 100% false. This is exactly what you SHOULD do, and this is what unions are for.<p>Always organise with coworkers. Otherwise you are giving employers more power over you than you should.</text></item><item><author>say_it_as_it_is</author><text>What we are seeing are the consequences of &quot;Employee Capture&quot;. Google captured the hearts and minds of its employees for workplace productivity. Its side effects are varied. The real world only sees highlights.<p>Googled created a bubble from which its employees can socialize without ever needing to do so with the outside world. Why talk politics with the outside world? Stay with us, where it is safe, people are intelligent, and share your values (we swear).<p>This is a root problem at the company. It is coming at a great cost.<p>James Damore shared his views with his social group. These other activists do the same. This is what people do among their own.<p>Being fired from Google amounts to not just losing a job but &quot;friends&quot; and the only people who the company encouraged socializing with.<p>Google has a major lawsuit on its hands, regardless of whatever arbitration agreement it makes new-hires sign. Google is causing harm by capturing employees hearts and minds.<p>Your colleagues are not an authentic social network who you can organise with and pursue activism. You aren&#x27;t hired to do that. While you are naive for thinking you could, it&#x27;s not entirely your fault. Google brainwashed you.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sangnoir</author><text>&gt; My empoyer doesn&#x27;t have a lot of power over me. I&#x27;m a programmer not a coal miner.<p>Respectfully - were you a programmer during the last recession? I only ask because this power dynamic you imply is inherent in being a programmer can change (and has changed) in a matter of <i>weeks</i> and you&#x27;ll find the entire industry is not hiring, not seeking consultants, and not looking to buy your *aaS product.<p>There were a lot of desperate programmers during the great recession (and before that, the dotcom bust)<p>edit: removed age from what should have been a more general question.</text></comment> | <story><title>One Google Staffer Fired, Two Others Put on Leave Amid Tensions</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-11-12/one-google-staffer-fired-two-others-put-on-leave-amid-tensions</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>leftyted</author><text>My empoyer doesn&#x27;t have a lot of power over me. I&#x27;m a programmer not a coal miner.<p>I don&#x27;t want to be in a union. I don&#x27;t want to join some club. I don&#x27;t want to pay dues. I don&#x27;t want to read newsletters or listen to speeches or be involved at all in the grubby, underhanded manuevering for power that would come with a union. And I&#x27;m tired of people condescendingly telling me that I&#x27;m wrong for feeling this way. I&#x27;m not wrong. Power corrupts and labor is no more pure than mangement. If labor gets the upper hand it will abuse its position.<p>The solution is a balance of power between labor and management. In my case, I feel I have plenty of power. In the case of Google employees, I feel they have plenty of power. Broadly speaking, programmers (in the US) have plenty of power.<p>If you want to do good, volunteer at a soup kitchen. Of course that would be <i>hard</i> and would involve looking at things you&#x27;d rather not see.</text></item><item><author>DagAgren</author><text>&gt; Your colleagues are not an authentic social network who you can organise with and pursue activism.<p>This is absolutely, 100% false. This is exactly what you SHOULD do, and this is what unions are for.<p>Always organise with coworkers. Otherwise you are giving employers more power over you than you should.</text></item><item><author>say_it_as_it_is</author><text>What we are seeing are the consequences of &quot;Employee Capture&quot;. Google captured the hearts and minds of its employees for workplace productivity. Its side effects are varied. The real world only sees highlights.<p>Googled created a bubble from which its employees can socialize without ever needing to do so with the outside world. Why talk politics with the outside world? Stay with us, where it is safe, people are intelligent, and share your values (we swear).<p>This is a root problem at the company. It is coming at a great cost.<p>James Damore shared his views with his social group. These other activists do the same. This is what people do among their own.<p>Being fired from Google amounts to not just losing a job but &quot;friends&quot; and the only people who the company encouraged socializing with.<p>Google has a major lawsuit on its hands, regardless of whatever arbitration agreement it makes new-hires sign. Google is causing harm by capturing employees hearts and minds.<p>Your colleagues are not an authentic social network who you can organise with and pursue activism. You aren&#x27;t hired to do that. While you are naive for thinking you could, it&#x27;s not entirely your fault. Google brainwashed you.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ddevault</author><text>What if your punch in, put on the blinders, work 8 hours, punch out, go home; emotionally-deatched approach has you building tools to enable censorship in China? Or what if you end up working on [insert your personal morally objectionable issue of choice]?<p>Your employer doesn&#x27;t have power over you, but you have power over them. Organization is about choosing not to exercise that power by leaving for greener pastures and letting the company rinse and repeat with the next cycle of college graduates, but by <i>staying</i> and choosing to influence the direction of the company in a positive way. You can choose to do your 8 hours every day and devote a full one-third of your life - the only life you get - to someone else&#x27;s work that you don&#x27;t have a stake in. But that just seems like the stupid, easy way out.</text></comment> |
4,914,063 | 4,913,013 | 1 | 3 | 4,911,881 | train | <story><title>CDNJS: The Fastest Javascript Repo on the Web</title><url>http://blog.cloudflare.com/cdnjs-the-fastest-javascript-repo-on-the-web</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jread</author><text>Low latency with a handful of pingdom monitoring nodes sitting in data centers does not necessarily translate to the "fastest repo on the web". We've tested CloudFlare since their launch using thousands of real users, and based on that testing performance tends to be on the low end compared to traditional static content CDNs. CloudFlare is more of a website proxy than CDN. By assuming full control of your website DNS, it stands out more with add-on features like security. Here is a link to some real user performance analysis I've compiled for various CDNs including CloudFlare:
<a href="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/20765204/feb12-cdn-report/index.html" rel="nofollow">http://dl.dropbox.com/u/20765204/feb12-cdn-report/index.html</a></text></comment> | <story><title>CDNJS: The Fastest Javascript Repo on the Web</title><url>http://blog.cloudflare.com/cdnjs-the-fastest-javascript-repo-on-the-web</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>eric_bullington</author><text>For analytics and tag generation of libraries hosted by CDNJS, take a look at: <a href="http://www.scriptselect.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.scriptselect.com</a> It's a weekend project I did a couple of weeks ago using d3 and backbone. You can select libraries, view selected library size, and copy the generated script tags for the libraries you've selected. Just a little tool to make using CDNJS a little more convenient. If there's enough demand, I'll add other CDNs.<p>Thanks to Ryan, Thomas, and CloudFlare for a very cool service!</text></comment> |
21,371,391 | 21,362,795 | 1 | 2 | 21,352,278 | train | <story><title>Panopticlick</title><url>https://panopticlick.eff.org/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>danShumway</author><text>Interesting counterpoint to people who claim that turning off Javascript is just another data point. I use Firefox with a decent amount of tracking protection turned on. With Javascript, I leak about 16 bits of identifying information. Without, I leak about 7.<p>You want to take that with a grain of salt, because I don&#x27;t think Panopticlick is a perfect tool to measure this stuff. For one thing, I suspect that Panopticlick is highly influenced by the people who visit it -- being posted on HN probably means there are more data points for me to hide in than usual.<p>For the other thing, there are measurements that Panopticlick doesn&#x27;t include, and there&#x27;s no way for Panopticlick to track disinformation and false data. For example, you could still get my screen size without Javascript via just CSS. Are most tracking sites doing that? No, it would be a massive pain to do, and it would force you to ship giant CSS blobs everywhere. But it&#x27;s still possible.<p>But, this does still strengthen my conviction that turning off Javascript by default _probably_ helps avoid tracking on most sites, and it&#x27;s surprisingly feasible to do. A lot of content-sites work without Javascript.<p>I recommend UMatrix if you want to go down that route, since it lets you create very precise exceptions relatively easily when you need them.</text></comment> | <story><title>Panopticlick</title><url>https://panopticlick.eff.org/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>glandium</author><text>&quot;Does your browser unblock 3rd parties that promise to honor Do Not Track?&quot;<p>&quot;No&quot; comes with a red X like if it&#x27;s a bad thing, but... Is it?</text></comment> |
40,543,023 | 40,540,300 | 1 | 2 | 40,539,172 | train | <story><title>Heroku Postgres is now based on AWS Aurora</title><url>https://blog.heroku.com/heroku-postgres-essential-launch</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>olau</author><text>A warning about Aurora: It&#x27;s opaque tech. I&#x27;ve been on a project that switched to it by recommendation by the hosting provider, and had to switch away because it turns out that it does not support queries requiring temporary storage, i.e. queries exceeding the memory of the instances.<p>It manifested the way that the Aurora instances would use up their available (meagre) memory, then start thrashing, taking everything down. Apparently the instances did not have access to any temporary local storage. There was no way to fix that, and it took some time to understand. After having read all the little material I could find on Aurora, my personal conclusion is that Aurora is perhaps best thought of as a big hack. I think it&#x27;s likely there are more gotchas like that.<p>We moved the database back to a simple VM on SSD, and Postgres handled everything just fine.</text></comment> | <story><title>Heroku Postgres is now based on AWS Aurora</title><url>https://blog.heroku.com/heroku-postgres-essential-launch</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>iancarroll</author><text>Having previously been on several managed PostgreSQL providers and now on AWS Aurora -- Aurora has been pretty great in terms of reliability and performance with large row counts and upsert performance.<p>However, Aurora isn&#x27;t cheap and is at least ~80% of our monthly AWS bill. I wonder how it is cheaper than Heroku&#x27;s previous offerings? Is it Aurora Serverless v2 or something like that to reduce cost? Aurora billing is largely around IOPS, and Heroku&#x27;s pricing doesn&#x27;t seem to reflect that.</text></comment> |
11,690,662 | 11,690,624 | 1 | 3 | 11,688,772 | train | <story><title>Beautiful sci-fi GIFs</title><url>http://carlburton.tumblr.com/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>hnal943</author><text>Reminds me of Mark Ferrari&#x27;s 8-bit palette shifting animations:
<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.effectgames.com&#x2F;demos&#x2F;canvascycle&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.effectgames.com&#x2F;demos&#x2F;canvascycle&#x2F;</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Beautiful sci-fi GIFs</title><url>http://carlburton.tumblr.com/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>WickyNilliams</author><text>Beautiful! GIFs really are a medium of their own.<p>Can anyone recommend other artists working with GIFs like this? I can recommend Davidope [0] and Bees &amp; Bombs [1] for their work. Trippy and geometric :)<p>[0] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;dvdp.tumblr.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;dvdp.tumblr.com&#x2F;</a><p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;beesandbombs.tumblr.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;beesandbombs.tumblr.com&#x2F;</a></text></comment> |
13,529,493 | 13,526,906 | 1 | 2 | 13,522,626 | train | <story><title>Parse is shutting down today</title><url>https://status.parse.com/incidents/6mpkbscqw6p9</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cperciva</author><text>I&#x27;m also confused. &quot;API as a service&quot; sounds to me like &quot;service as a service&quot;... ok, it&#x27;s a service, but what does it <i>do</i>?</text></item><item><author>flukus</author><text>&gt; Parse was an API as a service. The idea being that you don&#x27;t need your own servers and parse would provide API, database, push messaging and so on.<p>I&#x27;m still unclear. It&#x27;s some sort of hosted database+services?</text></item><item><author>jasonm23</author><text>Parse was an API as a service. The idea being that you don&#x27;t need your own servers and parse would provide API, database, push messaging and so on.<p>That said, I never used it, I saw it appear, had a look, decided what it offered was too rudimentary to be scalable, and moved on.<p>That said, as an open source offering, it&#x27;s quite interesting.<p>This post answers the basic question, what is parse:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.parse.com&#x2F;announcements&#x2F;what-is-parse-server&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.parse.com&#x2F;announcements&#x2F;what-is-parse-server&#x2F;</a></text></item><item><author>trumbitta2</author><text>And nowhere in there I was able to find what&#x27;s Parse and what does the open-source Parse Server do.</text></item><item><author>gfosco</author><text>During this year-long shutdown&#x2F;migration process, the open-source and community maintained Parse Server is what most people switched to. Parse is yours now. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ParsePlatform&#x2F;parse-server" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ParsePlatform&#x2F;parse-server</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>webmaven</author><text>I would call Parse a &quot;Backend as a Service&quot;[0], akin to Firebase[1]. &quot;API as a Service&quot; is more like Apiary (bought by Oracle) or Apigee (bought by Google).<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Backend_as_a_service" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Backend_as_a_service</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;firebase.google.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;firebase.google.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Parse is shutting down today</title><url>https://status.parse.com/incidents/6mpkbscqw6p9</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cperciva</author><text>I&#x27;m also confused. &quot;API as a service&quot; sounds to me like &quot;service as a service&quot;... ok, it&#x27;s a service, but what does it <i>do</i>?</text></item><item><author>flukus</author><text>&gt; Parse was an API as a service. The idea being that you don&#x27;t need your own servers and parse would provide API, database, push messaging and so on.<p>I&#x27;m still unclear. It&#x27;s some sort of hosted database+services?</text></item><item><author>jasonm23</author><text>Parse was an API as a service. The idea being that you don&#x27;t need your own servers and parse would provide API, database, push messaging and so on.<p>That said, I never used it, I saw it appear, had a look, decided what it offered was too rudimentary to be scalable, and moved on.<p>That said, as an open source offering, it&#x27;s quite interesting.<p>This post answers the basic question, what is parse:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.parse.com&#x2F;announcements&#x2F;what-is-parse-server&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.parse.com&#x2F;announcements&#x2F;what-is-parse-server&#x2F;</a></text></item><item><author>trumbitta2</author><text>And nowhere in there I was able to find what&#x27;s Parse and what does the open-source Parse Server do.</text></item><item><author>gfosco</author><text>During this year-long shutdown&#x2F;migration process, the open-source and community maintained Parse Server is what most people switched to. Parse is yours now. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ParsePlatform&#x2F;parse-server" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ParsePlatform&#x2F;parse-server</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jrlocke</author><text>The first iOS app I built used parse for the entire backend. We basically used it as a database in the cloud accessible by multiple clients (it can accommodate fancier uses as well). We didn&#x27;t really run any custom code on the server side, Parse basically provided access to a shared db across our client instances. It allowed us to build a simple location sharing app in a few hours.</text></comment> |
28,768,007 | 28,768,017 | 1 | 2 | 28,767,700 | train | <story><title>Statement from Mark Zuckerberg</title><url>https://www.facebook.com/login/web/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>skissane</author><text>&gt; And if social media were as responsible for polarizing society as some people claim, then why are we seeing polarization increase in the US while it stays flat or declines in many countries with just as heavy use of social media around the world?<p>That&#x27;s a point I&#x27;ve made myself before, and I think there is some truth to it. Social media can&#x27;t explain the high and increasing degree of US political polarisation, because other countries (including other English-speaking countries) consume social media about as much and yet have less polarisation, and don&#x27;t show the same degree of increase in it either. The real explanation must lie in other aspects of US culture, or the US political system</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kumarvvr</author><text>That is because most other countries have multi party systems.<p>The polarization is still there, but spread thin amongst various factions.<p>In the US, people are shoehorned into R or D.<p>Edit : I would also like to point out that the OP is a bit confused between cause and effect. In the US, the effect is deep polarization. However, the <i>cause</i> is the power of mass communication, especially misinformation and blatant lies, that FB enables and does not bother to control. The cause is common to all the countries in the world, the effect varies due to various other factors, one of them being the presence of a multi-party system.<p>Take the example of India. FB has a large and active user base. However, India being a chaos of various identities, cultures, regions, languages, etc, divisions in society are less pronounced as there are a large number of players (politically, regionally, locally, etc)<p>Other than that, the <i>effect</i> of FB in Europe is also less visible due to the same reason. Every EU country has mostly multi party systems, leading to spreading thin of the hate and focus.</text></comment> | <story><title>Statement from Mark Zuckerberg</title><url>https://www.facebook.com/login/web/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>skissane</author><text>&gt; And if social media were as responsible for polarizing society as some people claim, then why are we seeing polarization increase in the US while it stays flat or declines in many countries with just as heavy use of social media around the world?<p>That&#x27;s a point I&#x27;ve made myself before, and I think there is some truth to it. Social media can&#x27;t explain the high and increasing degree of US political polarisation, because other countries (including other English-speaking countries) consume social media about as much and yet have less polarisation, and don&#x27;t show the same degree of increase in it either. The real explanation must lie in other aspects of US culture, or the US political system</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fighterpilot</author><text>Not sure if I fully agree with that argument. With the US being a superpower, the stakes are high and this invites unique foreign influence via social media. That foreign influence could be state coordinated or just come from regular people who have an emotional stake in US politics. I&#x27;ve seen it myself, outside of the US people are more concerned about US politics than their own and engage with it on social media which only adds to the pile of insanity. Also, because of limited bandwidth, only a small handful of topics tend to monopolize, and as such they are usually US topics.</text></comment> |
16,154,572 | 16,154,445 | 1 | 2 | 16,154,010 | train | <story><title>California does not have the highest poverty rate in the USA</title><url>http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/01/california-is-doing-fine-thank-you-very-much/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>bmmayer1</author><text>This article boils down to one point: that the basis of the LA Times article&#x27;s claim is California&#x27;s sky-high real estate prices. If it wasn&#x27;t including house prices, poor Californians would be doing &#x27;just fine.&#x27; That&#x27;s like saying a laptop works perfectly fine if you ignore the fact the screen is busted.<p>Why shouldn&#x27;t housing prices be looked at when determining how poor a population is? Obviously it&#x27;s a significant component of cost of living, which directly impacts how much purchasing power individuals and families have.</text></comment> | <story><title>California does not have the highest poverty rate in the USA</title><url>http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/01/california-is-doing-fine-thank-you-very-much/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tomc1985</author><text>As a Californian I don&#x27;t agree with the sentiment of this analysis. Sure, certain segments of the population here are doing well -- particularly, the well-off and those from out-of-state -- but if you were born and raised an average life here any time in the past 35 years, particularly on the coast, then your life is particularly tough in some areas: $1500 rents for a 1BR apartment, super-low wages, apathetic middle class, increasing traffic, now we have a homeless problem....<p>More succinctly I disagree with the authors&#x27; assertion that CA is doing fine &quot;if you take out housing prices&quot;</text></comment> |
17,858,171 | 17,857,742 | 1 | 3 | 17,856,734 | train | <story><title>WideNES – Peeking Past the Edge of NES Games</title><url>http://prilik.com/blog/wideNES</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ArtWomb</author><text>This would make a cool art installation. If you can get access to one of those giant screens that you see demo&#x27;d at E3. You can visualize the entire Land of Hyrule from Lengend of Zelda. With a tiny Link navigating his way through the world ;)</text></comment> | <story><title>WideNES – Peeking Past the Edge of NES Games</title><url>http://prilik.com/blog/wideNES</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>glaberficken</author><text>Which brings to my mind an interesting question: Could a ml agent be used to auto-explore with the intention of visiting all parts of the game world?<p>There has been recent focus on ML research trying to win or beat games. What if the goal was merely to have an agent that would manage to explore the largest game &quot;area&quot; possible? Has that been done before?</text></comment> |
16,443,735 | 16,442,569 | 1 | 3 | 16,441,515 | train | <story><title>Self-owning corporations are legally possible</title><url>https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2954173</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>will_brown</author><text>The article seems confused...the title references <i>ownership</i> and the abstract is not about ownership at all but about control of LLC’s and in a legal context ownership is distinct from control.<p>Otherwise the article is based on a false premises:<p>&gt;Third, governments — particularly in the United States — lack the ability to determine who controls entities they charter<p>Take Florida. Florida’s Limited Liability Company Act regulates who can be a manager (i.e. who controls the LLC). In fact the act creates 2 types of LLCs as most states do, member managed and manager managed. In one non-members can not be managers (control) the LLC.<p>Outside of the LLC, almost every statute regulates who can <i>control</i> and who can <i>own</i> a business entity. For example, a non-profit corporation has no <i>owners</i>. Although states do differ, generally by statute, a non licensed person cannot be the owner of a professional service corporation, professional association, or professional limited liability company. Though generally those professional entities can have non-licensed directors, officers, or managers. State laws also generally include restriction on minors being directors, officers or managers, but they can usually be owners, although it gets tricky where they are the sole owner because legally they can’t even sign contracts&#x2F;formation documentation (though still legally possible).<p>Point is Governments are well equipped to regulate who can own or who can control any type of business entity.<p>What is possible, and I have written legal articles about, is to have autonomous trusts, or what I call the <i>trusteeless trust</i> but my examples and use cases are limited to the trust being funded solely with cryptocurrencies&#x2F;tokens.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>will_brown</author><text>I can no longer edit my comment, but I have now read all 75 Pages, and the Article does in fact mention some of these issues, such as member-managed vs manager-managed LLCs and then in the &quot;detection problem&quot; section they discuss incorporators, directors, officers of corporations.<p>Still the premises of the Article is flawed, and found in Section 1(b), <i>Initiating Algorithmic Entities</i>, on page 13, in part:<p>&gt;Bayern specifies this chain of events as capable of establishing the link:
(1) [A]n individual member creates a member-managed LLC,
filing the appropriate paperwork with the state; (2) the individual(along, possibly, with the LLC, which is controlled by the sole member) enters into an operating agreement governing the conduct of the LLC; (3) the operating agreement specifies that the LLC will take actions as determined by an autonomous system, specifying terms or conditions as appropriate to achieve the autonomous system’s legal goals; (4) the sole member
withdraws from the LLC, leaving the LLC without any members. The result is potentially a perpetual LLC—a new legal person—that requires no ongoing intervention from any preexisting legal person in order to maintain its status.<p>The premises is the last member (owner) withdrawing from the LLC leaving an AI to run the perpetual LLC, which is a legal impossibility. Every State has a law requiring an LLC have at least one member, and upon the withdraw of the last member of an LLC the LLC immediately becomes administratively dissolved (no longer in good standing with the State) under the State&#x27;s law. Its not novel, similar laws govern situations when the sole member of an LLC dies, either the LLC automatically dissolves or ownership gets distributed to the member&#x27;s heirs, pursuant to the specific State&#x27;s laws, but the managers and&#x2F;or employees don&#x27;t go on running the member-less LLC whether they are human or an AI.</text></comment> | <story><title>Self-owning corporations are legally possible</title><url>https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2954173</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>will_brown</author><text>The article seems confused...the title references <i>ownership</i> and the abstract is not about ownership at all but about control of LLC’s and in a legal context ownership is distinct from control.<p>Otherwise the article is based on a false premises:<p>&gt;Third, governments — particularly in the United States — lack the ability to determine who controls entities they charter<p>Take Florida. Florida’s Limited Liability Company Act regulates who can be a manager (i.e. who controls the LLC). In fact the act creates 2 types of LLCs as most states do, member managed and manager managed. In one non-members can not be managers (control) the LLC.<p>Outside of the LLC, almost every statute regulates who can <i>control</i> and who can <i>own</i> a business entity. For example, a non-profit corporation has no <i>owners</i>. Although states do differ, generally by statute, a non licensed person cannot be the owner of a professional service corporation, professional association, or professional limited liability company. Though generally those professional entities can have non-licensed directors, officers, or managers. State laws also generally include restriction on minors being directors, officers or managers, but they can usually be owners, although it gets tricky where they are the sole owner because legally they can’t even sign contracts&#x2F;formation documentation (though still legally possible).<p>Point is Governments are well equipped to regulate who can own or who can control any type of business entity.<p>What is possible, and I have written legal articles about, is to have autonomous trusts, or what I call the <i>trusteeless trust</i> but my examples and use cases are limited to the trust being funded solely with cryptocurrencies&#x2F;tokens.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>slimsag</author><text>I would also like to read your articles. Would you be able to link me to them or edit your post and include links to them?</text></comment> |
3,639,020 | 3,638,906 | 1 | 3 | 3,638,585 | train | <story><title>Bash Shell Scripting in 10 seconds</title><url>http://www.aboutlinux.info/2005/10/10-seconds-guide-to-bash-shell.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>nescafe</author><text>Linked article is actually a really horrible intro to bash -- at best, it is an OK intro to pre-POSIX bourne shell scripting.<p>Specifically:<p>* test and [ ] are fraught with parameter expansion peril. Use [[ ]] instead.<p>* The author uses single quotes around strings that are demonstrating parameter expansion. Single quotes inhibit parameter expansion, so every one of those examples is wrong.<p>* select is a better tool than read; case for most of his case-relasted demos.<p>* Backticks ( ` ` ) are the devil.<p>At least he points people greg's wiki at the end.</text></comment> | <story><title>Bash Shell Scripting in 10 seconds</title><url>http://www.aboutlinux.info/2005/10/10-seconds-guide-to-bash-shell.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>babarock</author><text>Small nitpick:<p>for file in <i>.java; do javac $file; done<p>This will break if the filename contains funky characters like newline or whitespaces. You should prefer using find instead:<p>find . -name '</i>.java' -exec javac {} \+<p>Also, I would suggest adding a pragaraph about proper quoting, I usually find it to be an issue beginners struggle with the most.</text></comment> |
41,494,693 | 41,494,531 | 1 | 2 | 41,491,896 | train | <story><title>iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max</title><url>https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2024/09/apple-debuts-iphone-16-pro-and-iphone-16-pro-max/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>user3939382</author><text>Assuming those prices are correct and the procedure is that convenient, it doesn&#x27;t practically exist if most people aren&#x27;t aware of it. From my casual observations most people suffer with bad batteries until buying a new model.</text></item><item><author>arcticbull</author><text>&gt; If the iPhone would have true user-swappable batteries, their business would collapse.<p>Battery replacement costs at Apple are $69-99 and offered all the way back to the iPhone SE 1st Generation. That&#x27;s the all-in cost where you bring it in, they open it up, swap it out, and give your phone back to you.<p>An OEM battery for an Android phone is like $50.<p>Budgeting $69-99 once every 3-4 years hardly seems like it&#x27;s going to nuke their business from orbit.</text></item><item><author>iteratethis</author><text>I&#x27;m conflicted.<p>It&#x27;s absolutely stunning what smartphones can do these days and Apple makes an excellent product. It feels ungrateful and cynical to keep calling new models &quot;boring&quot;.<p>The reality though is that normie needs were accomplished several generations ago. I&#x27;ll use my girlfriend as a sample of such user.<p>She can&#x27;t tell the difference between LCD and OLED nor would she notice Pro-motion.<p>You can add a million features to the camera app but she opens it and presses the shutter. Her only awareness of features is when she accidentally enables one and doesn&#x27;t know how to get back.<p>You could set her back 8 iOS versions and she probably wouldn&#x27;t notice. Because she uses none of the hundreds of features released since. Not because she dislikes them, she doesn&#x27;t know they even exist.<p>All the spectacular advances in computing power are lost on her as this makes zero difference for the Facebook cat video group and Pinterest.<p>You might assume my girlfriend is perhaps lowly educated or just not tech savvy. Wrong, she&#x27;s highly educated, even works in IT, although not in an engineering role. It&#x27;s not that she&#x27;s unable to understand the advances, she simply doesn&#x27;t care.<p>It&#x27;s becoming ever harder to justify new models for normies. Pretty much they buy the new one when the battery of their current one runs bad, typically every 3-4 years.<p>I think this is also why Apple put many Pro features into the regular model. Most people don&#x27;t buy the pro and they&#x27;re desperate for selling points in the regular model.<p>If the iPhone would have true user-swappable batteries, their business would collapse.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tpmoney</author><text>At what point are people responsible for their own actions or ignorance? Apple hardly makes the battery replacement option a secret, and there are plenty of 3rd party retailers that advertise them too. Anyone who bought a new iPhone because they didn&#x27;t realize they could get the battery replaced has failed to do even the most cursory research into what options are out there for solving their problem. It would be one thing if we were talking the 1st generation iPhone days, when the &quot;battery replacement&quot; option was the usually &quot;out of warranty&quot; device replacement that was effectively Apple&#x27;s entire repair process for the phone at the time. Then your &quot;battery replacement&quot; costs were ~50% of the cost of a new phone, and that definitely gets into the &quot;buy a new phone instead of replacing the battery&quot; territory. But the ~$100 battery replacement option has been around since at least 2010[1], now 14 years later there&#x27;s no excuse for not being aware, or becoming aware when you need it.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.nytimes.com&#x2F;gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com&#x2F;2010&#x2F;03&#x2F;12&#x2F;iphone-battery-replacement-diy-or-not&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.nytimes.com&#x2F;gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com&#x2F;201...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max</title><url>https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2024/09/apple-debuts-iphone-16-pro-and-iphone-16-pro-max/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>user3939382</author><text>Assuming those prices are correct and the procedure is that convenient, it doesn&#x27;t practically exist if most people aren&#x27;t aware of it. From my casual observations most people suffer with bad batteries until buying a new model.</text></item><item><author>arcticbull</author><text>&gt; If the iPhone would have true user-swappable batteries, their business would collapse.<p>Battery replacement costs at Apple are $69-99 and offered all the way back to the iPhone SE 1st Generation. That&#x27;s the all-in cost where you bring it in, they open it up, swap it out, and give your phone back to you.<p>An OEM battery for an Android phone is like $50.<p>Budgeting $69-99 once every 3-4 years hardly seems like it&#x27;s going to nuke their business from orbit.</text></item><item><author>iteratethis</author><text>I&#x27;m conflicted.<p>It&#x27;s absolutely stunning what smartphones can do these days and Apple makes an excellent product. It feels ungrateful and cynical to keep calling new models &quot;boring&quot;.<p>The reality though is that normie needs were accomplished several generations ago. I&#x27;ll use my girlfriend as a sample of such user.<p>She can&#x27;t tell the difference between LCD and OLED nor would she notice Pro-motion.<p>You can add a million features to the camera app but she opens it and presses the shutter. Her only awareness of features is when she accidentally enables one and doesn&#x27;t know how to get back.<p>You could set her back 8 iOS versions and she probably wouldn&#x27;t notice. Because she uses none of the hundreds of features released since. Not because she dislikes them, she doesn&#x27;t know they even exist.<p>All the spectacular advances in computing power are lost on her as this makes zero difference for the Facebook cat video group and Pinterest.<p>You might assume my girlfriend is perhaps lowly educated or just not tech savvy. Wrong, she&#x27;s highly educated, even works in IT, although not in an engineering role. It&#x27;s not that she&#x27;s unable to understand the advances, she simply doesn&#x27;t care.<p>It&#x27;s becoming ever harder to justify new models for normies. Pretty much they buy the new one when the battery of their current one runs bad, typically every 3-4 years.<p>I think this is also why Apple put many Pro features into the regular model. Most people don&#x27;t buy the pro and they&#x27;re desperate for selling points in the regular model.<p>If the iPhone would have true user-swappable batteries, their business would collapse.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dghlsakjg</author><text>What more can they do to let people know?<p>You can google it, go to the website, go to any of their stores or authorized dealers, or click the link the phone gives you in the battery health view.<p>Short of apple beating down your door, what more do you expect</text></comment> |
17,045,316 | 17,045,371 | 1 | 3 | 17,043,541 | train | <story><title>FizzBuzz Enterprise Edition</title><url>http://www.fizzbuzz.enterprises/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>lotkowskim</author><text>I am surprised that the Enterprise edition is missing the option to export as an Excel file, eagerly waiting for future releases.</text></comment> | <story><title>FizzBuzz Enterprise Edition</title><url>http://www.fizzbuzz.enterprises/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>_pmf_</author><text>The documentation is not Enterprise Ready™; it still contains a description of what the product actually does in an accessible location. For proper compliance, this description should be in a PDF whitepaper that will only be mailed to you after providing your e-mail address and phone number.</text></comment> |
22,408,526 | 22,408,130 | 1 | 3 | 22,406,667 | train | <story><title>Math is an insurance policy</title><url>https://bartoszmilewski.com/2020/02/24/math-is-your-insurance-policy/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dcolkitt</author><text>To paraphrase what&#x27;s said about fusion energy: Haskell is the language of the future and always will be.<p>I love Haskell, but there&#x27;s really not a single shred of evidence that programming&#x27;s moving towards high-level abstractions like category theory. The reality is that 99% of working developers are not implementing complex algorithms or pushing the frontier of computational possibility. The vast majority are delivering wet. messy business logic under tight constraints, ambiguously defined criteria, and rapidly changing organizational requirements.<p>By far more important than writing the purest or most elegant code, are &quot;soft skills&quot; or the ability to efficiently and effectively work within the broader organization. Can you effectively communicate to non-technical people, do you write good documentation, can you work with a team, can you accurately estimate and deliver on schedules, do you prioritize effectively, are you rigorously focused on delivering business value, do you understand the broader corporate strategy.<p>At the end of the day, senior management doesn&#x27;t care whether the codebase is written in the purest, most abstracted Haskell or EnterpriseAbstractFactoryJava. They care about meeting the organizational objectives on time, on budget and with minimal risk. The way to achieve that is to hire pragmatic, goal-oriented people. (Or at the very least put them in charge.) And that group rarely intersects with the type of people fascinated by the mathematical properties of the type system.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mumblemumble</author><text>&gt; The vast majority are delivering wet. messy business logic under tight constraints, ambiguously defined criteria, and rapidly changing organizational requirements.<p>And herein lies the fundamental reason why most large aggregations of business software that I&#x27;ve seen in the wild are only strongly typed at about the same scale as the one on which the universe actually agrees with Deepak Chopra. Beyond that, it&#x27;s all text.<p>It doesn&#x27;t have to be full-blown Unix style the-howling-madness-of-Zalgo-is-held-back-by-sed-but-only-barely; it can be CSV or JSON or XML or whatever. And a lot of it&#x27;s really just random magic strings. But it&#x27;s still all stringly typed at human scales.</text></comment> | <story><title>Math is an insurance policy</title><url>https://bartoszmilewski.com/2020/02/24/math-is-your-insurance-policy/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dcolkitt</author><text>To paraphrase what&#x27;s said about fusion energy: Haskell is the language of the future and always will be.<p>I love Haskell, but there&#x27;s really not a single shred of evidence that programming&#x27;s moving towards high-level abstractions like category theory. The reality is that 99% of working developers are not implementing complex algorithms or pushing the frontier of computational possibility. The vast majority are delivering wet. messy business logic under tight constraints, ambiguously defined criteria, and rapidly changing organizational requirements.<p>By far more important than writing the purest or most elegant code, are &quot;soft skills&quot; or the ability to efficiently and effectively work within the broader organization. Can you effectively communicate to non-technical people, do you write good documentation, can you work with a team, can you accurately estimate and deliver on schedules, do you prioritize effectively, are you rigorously focused on delivering business value, do you understand the broader corporate strategy.<p>At the end of the day, senior management doesn&#x27;t care whether the codebase is written in the purest, most abstracted Haskell or EnterpriseAbstractFactoryJava. They care about meeting the organizational objectives on time, on budget and with minimal risk. The way to achieve that is to hire pragmatic, goal-oriented people. (Or at the very least put them in charge.) And that group rarely intersects with the type of people fascinated by the mathematical properties of the type system.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>whateveracct</author><text>&gt; The way to achieve that is to hire pragmatic, goal-oriented people. (Or at the very least put them in charge.) And that group rarely intersects with the type of people fascinated by the mathematical properties of the type system.<p>I wouldn&#x27;t say it rarely intersects - I&#x27;m one and I&#x27;ve worked with plenty. And I&#x27;ve seen plenty with strength in one join a production Haskell shop and pick up the other (in both directions!)<p>Haskell definitely gives you a lot to help manage the messiness you mention. You have to have know-how and awareness to do it, but it can help like none other.<p>But overall, stuff like this is why I wish to eventually become as independent as I can manage in my career. The intersection of Haskell and management thinking is frequently a bad faith shitshow in my experience, so the sooner I can start creating on my own terms, the better. The best part about Haskell is how little effort I exert solving problems compared to my comparable experience in Go, Python, Java. A perfect match for personal creation.</text></comment> |
13,535,725 | 13,535,796 | 1 | 3 | 13,534,778 | train | <story><title>AI Beats Four Top Poker Players</title><url>http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-38812530</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>brilliantcode</author><text>Sure it is. Much like most developers don&#x27;t spend their time reading on computing science papers to do their job, I question why such academic rigour is to be demanded from somebody trying to capitalize on the arbitrage opportunity.<p>Math is good but my time won&#x27;t be best used if I have to learn calculus all over again just to begin understanding the linguo. Rather have a generic model of what to use and when, hire those that have that capacity to dive deep when needed and implement the expected business outcome.</text></item><item><author>deepnotderp</author><text>&gt; &quot;So the question is, how does an average joe hacker like me exploit and leverage this wonderful thing called deep learning? I&#x27;m not interested in reading PHD papers with advanced calculus.&quot;<p>FFS, if you&#x27;re not willing to read a paper with BASIC CALCULUS (it&#x27;s HS&#x2F;college, not advanced like fractional), then I&#x27;m not sure machine learning is the right place for you.</text></item><item><author>brilliantcode</author><text>it won&#x27;t be long before we hearing more headlines like:<p>&quot;AI beats top 10 hedge fund managers&quot;<p>to<p>&quot;AI run hedge fund blows up due to black swan event&quot;<p>regardless it&#x27;s an incredible feat. It really casts questions into what our edge as humans are which is slowly disappearing and we didn&#x27;t even need to put a brain in a jar and hook it up to a computer....it&#x27;s deep learning reinforced algorithms that is appearing to outlearn, outthink the best of humans.<p>I just can&#x27;t emphasize what a monumental period in history we are at. Humans are producing specialized algorithms that learn and hold information about the deep web of relationships between myriads of parameters to produce superior performance than humans.<p>It&#x27;s almost like we&#x27;ve uncovered ways to automate our intelligence very much like we&#x27;ve been automating human and animal labor in the past couple centuries.<p>So the question is, how does an average joe hacker like me exploit and leverage this wonderful thing called deep learning? I&#x27;m not interested in reading PHD papers with advanced calculus.<p>I want to have a map of what AI, ML, DL, NN methodologies to use and when and who to hire based on that. This is no time to be a luddite and don&#x27;t count on basic income from appeasing the masses anytime soon. Much like people took the most hit in the early rise of industrial revolution, our generation and immediate generation will be hit the hardest.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ori_b</author><text>Because this is the language of the domain. Much like code is the language of programming. This isn&#x27;t academic rigor or lingo. This is how things work.<p>To me, your comment reads similarly to &quot;Much like most business people don&#x27;t spend their time reading code to do the job, I question why such academic rigor is to be demanded by someone who is translating business requirements into database operations&quot;.</text></comment> | <story><title>AI Beats Four Top Poker Players</title><url>http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-38812530</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>brilliantcode</author><text>Sure it is. Much like most developers don&#x27;t spend their time reading on computing science papers to do their job, I question why such academic rigour is to be demanded from somebody trying to capitalize on the arbitrage opportunity.<p>Math is good but my time won&#x27;t be best used if I have to learn calculus all over again just to begin understanding the linguo. Rather have a generic model of what to use and when, hire those that have that capacity to dive deep when needed and implement the expected business outcome.</text></item><item><author>deepnotderp</author><text>&gt; &quot;So the question is, how does an average joe hacker like me exploit and leverage this wonderful thing called deep learning? I&#x27;m not interested in reading PHD papers with advanced calculus.&quot;<p>FFS, if you&#x27;re not willing to read a paper with BASIC CALCULUS (it&#x27;s HS&#x2F;college, not advanced like fractional), then I&#x27;m not sure machine learning is the right place for you.</text></item><item><author>brilliantcode</author><text>it won&#x27;t be long before we hearing more headlines like:<p>&quot;AI beats top 10 hedge fund managers&quot;<p>to<p>&quot;AI run hedge fund blows up due to black swan event&quot;<p>regardless it&#x27;s an incredible feat. It really casts questions into what our edge as humans are which is slowly disappearing and we didn&#x27;t even need to put a brain in a jar and hook it up to a computer....it&#x27;s deep learning reinforced algorithms that is appearing to outlearn, outthink the best of humans.<p>I just can&#x27;t emphasize what a monumental period in history we are at. Humans are producing specialized algorithms that learn and hold information about the deep web of relationships between myriads of parameters to produce superior performance than humans.<p>It&#x27;s almost like we&#x27;ve uncovered ways to automate our intelligence very much like we&#x27;ve been automating human and animal labor in the past couple centuries.<p>So the question is, how does an average joe hacker like me exploit and leverage this wonderful thing called deep learning? I&#x27;m not interested in reading PHD papers with advanced calculus.<p>I want to have a map of what AI, ML, DL, NN methodologies to use and when and who to hire based on that. This is no time to be a luddite and don&#x27;t count on basic income from appeasing the masses anytime soon. Much like people took the most hit in the early rise of industrial revolution, our generation and immediate generation will be hit the hardest.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>davidivadavid</author><text>How do you suggest you take advantage of an arbitrage opportunity if you have 0 informational insight?</text></comment> |
41,209,538 | 41,209,214 | 1 | 2 | 41,208,988 | train | <story><title>A wonderful coincidence or an expected connection: why π² ≈ g</title><url>https://roitman.io/blog/91</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fouronnes3</author><text>As a computer scientist this is not surprising either. After all there are only three numbers: 0 1 and n.</text></item><item><author>BrandoElFollito</author><text>As a physicist, this makes sense. Pi = 3, pi^2 = 10, which is g<p>Not sure why everyone is surprised.<p>Ah, and a year is pi*10e9 seconds (IIRC)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jeffwass</author><text>One of my old physics professors said something similar - there are only three numbers in the world - 0, 1, and infinity. No wait, zero is just one divided by infinity, so there are only two numbers, zero and one. So if the answer is not zero, it must be one. (ie, how to justify dimensional analysis and ignore any dimensionaless constant).<p>Hysterical, especially for the fact that he quotes &#x27;two&#x27; and &#x27;three&#x27; in the sentence itself.</text></comment> | <story><title>A wonderful coincidence or an expected connection: why π² ≈ g</title><url>https://roitman.io/blog/91</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fouronnes3</author><text>As a computer scientist this is not surprising either. After all there are only three numbers: 0 1 and n.</text></item><item><author>BrandoElFollito</author><text>As a physicist, this makes sense. Pi = 3, pi^2 = 10, which is g<p>Not sure why everyone is surprised.<p>Ah, and a year is pi*10e9 seconds (IIRC)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pansa2</author><text>Remember that `i` is also a number. As in `for i = 0 to n`.<p>Don’t believe those mathematicians when they tell you that `i` is “imaginary”.</text></comment> |
26,959,568 | 26,958,753 | 1 | 2 | 26,953,352 | train | <story><title>Nbterm: Jupyter Notebooks in the Terminal</title><url>https://blog.jupyter.org/nbterm-jupyter-notebooks-in-the-terminal-6a2b55d08b70</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kenward</author><text>Slightly tangent, but has anyone figured out a good solution for version controlling jupyter notebooks?<p>The closest thing that we&#x27;ve found has been to use the notebook percent format in a simple .py file [0][1]. It plays with git much nicer than an .ipynb and it is still interactive enough for rapid prototyping. However, it would be nice to have some first-class support from Jupyter on this.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jupytext.readthedocs.io&#x2F;en&#x2F;latest&#x2F;formats.html?highlight=cell%20syntax#the-percent-format" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jupytext.readthedocs.io&#x2F;en&#x2F;latest&#x2F;formats.html?highl...</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;code.visualstudio.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;python&#x2F;jupyter-support-py" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;code.visualstudio.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;python&#x2F;jupyter-support-py</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>goodside</author><text>Until recently, I also thought this was a major problem. My old solution was to always pair .ipynb files with proper .py modules of the same name, so the .ipynb always starts with `%run foo.py` and just calls functions.<p>However, I recently started using VSCode Insiders the preview release of VSCode, which has amazing support for Jupyter notebooks in the editor. You can use your normally configured linters, auto-formatters, vi-mode keyboard shortcuts (major selling point for me). You even get legible, cell-aware diffs when comparing in git. Now, the edit&#x2F;git workflow for .ipynb files is so close to parity I&#x27;ve stopped caring whether code is in a proper Python module or not, and I almost never run Jupyter Notebook or Jupyter Lab in the browser.<p>In some ways this is a loss, because it&#x27;s nice to have project-wide linting and other tooling that only work with .py files, but using `%run` was always an imperfect abstraction. By default, `%run` executes modules in a new module namespace which is then copied over, so it&#x27;s not exactly &quot;paste into Jupyter&quot; unless you do `%run -i`. Even then, it&#x27;s limited by running all at once. Every cell in a typical Notebook is effectively a button that runs an `exec()` statement, and you can&#x27;t achieve those semantics by calling Python functions.</text></comment> | <story><title>Nbterm: Jupyter Notebooks in the Terminal</title><url>https://blog.jupyter.org/nbterm-jupyter-notebooks-in-the-terminal-6a2b55d08b70</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kenward</author><text>Slightly tangent, but has anyone figured out a good solution for version controlling jupyter notebooks?<p>The closest thing that we&#x27;ve found has been to use the notebook percent format in a simple .py file [0][1]. It plays with git much nicer than an .ipynb and it is still interactive enough for rapid prototyping. However, it would be nice to have some first-class support from Jupyter on this.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jupytext.readthedocs.io&#x2F;en&#x2F;latest&#x2F;formats.html?highlight=cell%20syntax#the-percent-format" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jupytext.readthedocs.io&#x2F;en&#x2F;latest&#x2F;formats.html?highl...</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;code.visualstudio.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;python&#x2F;jupyter-support-py" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;code.visualstudio.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;python&#x2F;jupyter-support-py</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>e3bc54b2</author><text>Forgive the snark because my suggestion is obviously not an improvement or even a match for target audience, but org-mode files with inline org-babel code-blocks is what I consider to be perfect version controlled notebook.<p>Pity Emacs is not the best on-boarding experience.</text></comment> |
11,262,735 | 11,262,930 | 1 | 2 | 11,261,910 | train | <story><title>What the IBM Layoffs Look Like</title><url>http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/tech-careers/is-this-months-ibm-layoff-for-rebalancing-or-is-it-really-for-offshoring#.VuHU1fevtY4.hackernews</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cortesoft</author><text>The difference is that as skilled tech workers, when we are laid off we can find new work as fast as we want to.<p>I have worked for a few companies that have gone out of business. Looking for work afterwards is mostly a screening job, picking the work I want to do out of the various offers. Every time, I have been hired for more money than I was making before (it is common knowledge that changing jobs is the best way to get raises)<p>It isn&#x27;t like I am some hotshot developer, either. I am not a networking type person, so all of my contacts are just people I have worked with at previous shops. The reason it is so easy to find work is because there are simply more jobs available than qualified workers.<p>I know this because I have been on the other side, too (trying to hire people). It is really hard to find quality developers, because they always have multiple offers.<p>Why would workers in this situation want or need to collectively bargain? Every place I have worked needs me more than I need them.</text></item><item><author>thenewwazoo</author><text>IBM has literally no disincentive to do this, either de jure or de facto. The threat of H1-B applications being denied is either laughable or [there aren&#x27;t enough of them anyway] depending on who you ask. And IBM employees, like most tech workers, don&#x27;t think they need to act (read: bargain) collectively and thus have no recourse. Until the tech industry wakes up to the reality that they _are_ labor, companies will continue to treat their employees as fungible, on an increasingly global scale.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ryandrake</author><text>&gt; The difference is that as skilled tech workers, when we are laid off we can find new work as fast as we want to.<p>Having been through two tech downturns, and unemployed at points in both of them, I can guarantee you the job environment you describe is temporary.</text></comment> | <story><title>What the IBM Layoffs Look Like</title><url>http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/tech-careers/is-this-months-ibm-layoff-for-rebalancing-or-is-it-really-for-offshoring#.VuHU1fevtY4.hackernews</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cortesoft</author><text>The difference is that as skilled tech workers, when we are laid off we can find new work as fast as we want to.<p>I have worked for a few companies that have gone out of business. Looking for work afterwards is mostly a screening job, picking the work I want to do out of the various offers. Every time, I have been hired for more money than I was making before (it is common knowledge that changing jobs is the best way to get raises)<p>It isn&#x27;t like I am some hotshot developer, either. I am not a networking type person, so all of my contacts are just people I have worked with at previous shops. The reason it is so easy to find work is because there are simply more jobs available than qualified workers.<p>I know this because I have been on the other side, too (trying to hire people). It is really hard to find quality developers, because they always have multiple offers.<p>Why would workers in this situation want or need to collectively bargain? Every place I have worked needs me more than I need them.</text></item><item><author>thenewwazoo</author><text>IBM has literally no disincentive to do this, either de jure or de facto. The threat of H1-B applications being denied is either laughable or [there aren&#x27;t enough of them anyway] depending on who you ask. And IBM employees, like most tech workers, don&#x27;t think they need to act (read: bargain) collectively and thus have no recourse. Until the tech industry wakes up to the reality that they _are_ labor, companies will continue to treat their employees as fungible, on an increasingly global scale.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Apocryphon</author><text><i>Why would workers in this situation want or need to collectively bargain? Every place I have worked needs me more than I need them.</i><p>Every skilled craftsman in every generation in the history of civilization has made this claim. Why do you think your position of privilege is any more lasting than that of weavers or threshers?</text></comment> |
2,787,936 | 2,787,869 | 1 | 2 | 2,787,227 | train | <story><title>Donut math - How donut.c works</title><url>http://a1k0n.net/2011/07/20/donut-math.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>a1k0n</author><text>In a highly technical post like this I'm never sure how well I'm explaining it. I tried to keep things at the high school trig/algebra II level for this one. I've proofread it a billion times now but is there anything I can clarify?</text></comment> | <story><title>Donut math - How donut.c works</title><url>http://a1k0n.net/2011/07/20/donut-math.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mrpollo</author><text>I'm starting to grow even more jealous, this guy has some serious knowledge of his craft</text></comment> |
284,014 | 283,985 | 1 | 2 | 283,908 | train | <story><title>Aaron Swartz: How To Launch Software</title><url>http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/howtolaunch</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tptacek</author><text>37Signals has launched four (4) commercial products, and takes in (by my guess, from headcount and subscription numbers) mid-high 7 figures from them.<p>Aaron Swartz has launched, by my count, <i>no</i> successful products (unless I'm wrong and Reddit wasn't already a success story when he got there).<p>From Aaron's own web page, here's what I get when I click on his "my day job" link:<p><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/29804691@N02/2786744327/" rel="nofollow">http://www.flickr.com/photos/29804691@N02/2786744327/</a><p>Why am I being such a dick about this? Because the argument he's making is disingenuous. Aaron advocates for an extended friends-and-family beta before launch. Aaron has no idea what 37signals does to beta and dogfood their product before the "Hollywood Launch". From what I can tell, everything 37signals does happens just before "step 5" in his master plan.<p>The difference between 37signals and Aaron Swartz isn't methodology. Methodology is a band-aid. The difference between Aaron Swartz and 37signals is <i>ability to execute</i>.<p>Here's a much better writeup from a much more credible source on the same topic:<p><a href="http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/PickingShipDate.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/PickingShipDate.html</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gojomo</author><text>The 'Hollywood Launch' can work if you already have notoriety to leverage, and already have the experience/userbase to do iterative improvement/testing internally. Steve Jobs is master of the Hollywood Launch.<p>If you're a small, young team making your first product, the dream of a 'Hollywood Launch' is destructive. It causes you to delay getting bulk feedback from disinterested strangers. It slows the organic learning/testing loop. It delays launch as you try to ensure you'll make a good first impression. And as Aaron notes, there's always something that goes wrong on a contrived 'big day'.<p>Steve Jobs and Apple on their umpteenth launch can usually keep those glitches to a minimum. (But not always: see MobileMe.) 37signals on their Nth launch of another webapp in the same mold as their other N-1 apps can pull this off, too.<p>But a young team launching a brand-new product will gain more from a measured ramp-up than an engineered hype-storm. They should listen to Aaron.</text></comment> | <story><title>Aaron Swartz: How To Launch Software</title><url>http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/howtolaunch</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tptacek</author><text>37Signals has launched four (4) commercial products, and takes in (by my guess, from headcount and subscription numbers) mid-high 7 figures from them.<p>Aaron Swartz has launched, by my count, <i>no</i> successful products (unless I'm wrong and Reddit wasn't already a success story when he got there).<p>From Aaron's own web page, here's what I get when I click on his "my day job" link:<p><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/29804691@N02/2786744327/" rel="nofollow">http://www.flickr.com/photos/29804691@N02/2786744327/</a><p>Why am I being such a dick about this? Because the argument he's making is disingenuous. Aaron advocates for an extended friends-and-family beta before launch. Aaron has no idea what 37signals does to beta and dogfood their product before the "Hollywood Launch". From what I can tell, everything 37signals does happens just before "step 5" in his master plan.<p>The difference between 37signals and Aaron Swartz isn't methodology. Methodology is a band-aid. The difference between Aaron Swartz and 37signals is <i>ability to execute</i>.<p>Here's a much better writeup from a much more credible source on the same topic:<p><a href="http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/PickingShipDate.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/PickingShipDate.html</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>spolsky</author><text>When you're finished with the ad hominem part of your attack, I'd just like to weigh in and say that Aaron got this exactly right.</text></comment> |
7,048,612 | 7,047,945 | 1 | 2 | 7,047,252 | train | <story><title>More functional C#</title><text>I added this code as a comment to a thread that was almost all the way off the front page by the time I got to it. It was a response to some &#x27;functional folks&#x27; criticizing the verbosity of c#. While you can certainly do c# the java way, you can also do it in a <i>near</i> functional way.<p>I decided to post the code as a full submission because I think c# often gets dismissed as Java copy-cat, which hasn&#x27;t been true in a decade.<p>The code (non-destructive, no side effects) calculates square roots :<p><pre><code> public static void Main()
{
const int n = 21;
Observable.Generate&lt;double,double&gt;(1, x=&gt;true, x=&gt; 0.5 * (x + (n&#x2F;x)), x=&gt;x )
.Scan(new {prv = 0d, cur = 0d}, (prev, curr) =&gt; new {prv = prev.cur, cur = curr})
.FirstAsync(_ =&gt; Math.Abs(_.cur - _.prv) &lt; 1E-10)
.Select(_ =&gt; _.cur)
.Subscribe(Console.WriteLine);
&#x2F;&#x2F; this is just to compare values, so is not part of the solution
Console.WriteLine(Math.Sqrt(n));
Console.ReadLine();
}
</code></pre>
Read the more OO c# implementation that inspired me here:
https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=7044497<p>Read the Haskell code that inspired both here:
https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=7043943</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>Touche</author><text>But why do things &quot;near functional&quot; when you have F# which is fully functional?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Sanddancer</author><text>This argument of purity of ideology reminds me more than a bit of the Salon system of French art. Unless your style was absolutely to their liking, your work was deemed refusé. Sometimes doing things in an imperative style, even with state and all the baggage that comes with it, results in easier to read and debug code.</text></comment> | <story><title>More functional C#</title><text>I added this code as a comment to a thread that was almost all the way off the front page by the time I got to it. It was a response to some &#x27;functional folks&#x27; criticizing the verbosity of c#. While you can certainly do c# the java way, you can also do it in a <i>near</i> functional way.<p>I decided to post the code as a full submission because I think c# often gets dismissed as Java copy-cat, which hasn&#x27;t been true in a decade.<p>The code (non-destructive, no side effects) calculates square roots :<p><pre><code> public static void Main()
{
const int n = 21;
Observable.Generate&lt;double,double&gt;(1, x=&gt;true, x=&gt; 0.5 * (x + (n&#x2F;x)), x=&gt;x )
.Scan(new {prv = 0d, cur = 0d}, (prev, curr) =&gt; new {prv = prev.cur, cur = curr})
.FirstAsync(_ =&gt; Math.Abs(_.cur - _.prv) &lt; 1E-10)
.Select(_ =&gt; _.cur)
.Subscribe(Console.WriteLine);
&#x2F;&#x2F; this is just to compare values, so is not part of the solution
Console.WriteLine(Math.Sqrt(n));
Console.ReadLine();
}
</code></pre>
Read the more OO c# implementation that inspired me here:
https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=7044497<p>Read the Haskell code that inspired both here:
https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=7043943</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>Touche</author><text>But why do things &quot;near functional&quot; when you have F# which is fully functional?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>V-2</author><text>Because &quot;near functional&quot; is sufficient most of the time and if there is no compelling reason to split your codebase among two different languages, you shouldn&#x27;t do it. Not to mention that there&#x27;s probably 1000 C# developers for every F# developer<p>Have a look at <a href="http://www.indeed.com/jobanalytics/jobtrends?q=c%23%2C+f%23&amp;l=" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.indeed.com&#x2F;jobanalytics&#x2F;jobtrends?q=c%23%2C+f%23&amp;...</a><p>And someone has to maintain your near functional or functional code</text></comment> |
28,008,885 | 28,007,606 | 1 | 2 | 28,006,989 | train | <story><title>Amazon Gets Record $888M EU Fine over Data Violations</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-30/amazon-given-record-888-million-eu-fine-for-data-privacy-breach</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pjc50</author><text>Well, that&#x27;s not chicken feed, even for Amazon. Still a bit light on detail?<p>The original complaint is linked from <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.laquadrature.net&#x2F;en&#x2F;personnal-data&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.laquadrature.net&#x2F;en&#x2F;personnal-data&#x2F;</a> - it&#x27;s in French <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gafam.laquadrature.net&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;sites&#x2F;9&#x2F;2018&#x2F;05&#x2F;amazon.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gafam.laquadrature.net&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;sites&#x2F;9&#x2F;20...</a><p>The lack of publicity or even publicly available copy of the ruling is odd. I guess the choice of Amazon to reside in one of the secretive tax haven jurisdictions of Europe has the side effect that it also has a really secretive information commissioner.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ElKrist</author><text>Summarized conclusions of the original complaint [1]:<p>2.2.3.1 claims that Amazon does not disclose anything proving they intend to get consent from their users to process their behavoural data for ad targeting purposes<p>2.2.3.2 is a rebuttal against one potential line of defense from Amazon. This defense is &quot;We have to collect&#x2F;use data because this is precised in our contract with our users and so we need to respect this contract&quot;. The rebuttal is that the main goal of the contract is a marketplace to buy&#x2F;sell goods. Ad targeting is not essential to fulfill this goal and it is not something that can be considered as reasonable user expectations<p>2.2.3.3 It says that Amazon does not explicitly states that it&#x27;s in its legitimate interest to process data and do ad targeting. It then refers to section 2.1.3 which shows that Amazon could not claim legitimate interest anyway. Section 2.1.3 is too complicated for me as it quotes a lot of precedent rulings in European law to prove it can&#x27;t be legitimate interest<p>Please keep in mind that it is the complaint, I don&#x27;t have details on the ruling of today<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gafam.laquadrature.net&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;sites&#x2F;9&#x2F;2018&#x2F;05&#x2F;amazon.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gafam.laquadrature.net&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;sites&#x2F;9&#x2F;20...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Amazon Gets Record $888M EU Fine over Data Violations</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-30/amazon-given-record-888-million-eu-fine-for-data-privacy-breach</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pjc50</author><text>Well, that&#x27;s not chicken feed, even for Amazon. Still a bit light on detail?<p>The original complaint is linked from <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.laquadrature.net&#x2F;en&#x2F;personnal-data&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.laquadrature.net&#x2F;en&#x2F;personnal-data&#x2F;</a> - it&#x27;s in French <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gafam.laquadrature.net&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;sites&#x2F;9&#x2F;2018&#x2F;05&#x2F;amazon.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gafam.laquadrature.net&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;sites&#x2F;9&#x2F;20...</a><p>The lack of publicity or even publicly available copy of the ruling is odd. I guess the choice of Amazon to reside in one of the secretive tax haven jurisdictions of Europe has the side effect that it also has a really secretive information commissioner.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fmajid</author><text>At least the Luxembourg DPA is doing its job, unlike the Irish DPA that seems to think it is a division of the Irish Industrial Development Agency charged with shielding multinationals from accountability.</text></comment> |
40,490,249 | 40,486,716 | 1 | 2 | 40,484,602 | train | <story><title>What happens in the brain to cause depression?</title><url>https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-happens-in-the-brain-to-cause-depression-20240523/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>_rm</author><text>The culture of medicalizing depression perplexes me. There seems to be a staunch commitment to studying it as if it were like a disease of the brain tissue, like Alzheimer&#x27;s, and staying well clear of simple explanations like &quot;maybe the subject&#x27;s life is shit?&quot;.<p>Because it turns out, and trust me on this one, that having a shit life causes depression. In particular: a shit life that the subject feels <i>no hope</i> of getting out of.<p>I suffered really severe, debilitating depression for years. I tried all the usual crap that know-nothings recommend, doing exercise and the like, and working hard to try and do better at life, but none of it budged the needle. Beyond that I was told I of course need to drug myself to feel better (SSRIs).<p>The depression was permanently solved, not by any of that, but just ditching my old life in full, and doing something else. Once your life stops being shit, you stop feeling depressed.<p>All the &quot;chemical imbalance&quot; talk is to avoid having to think about this, and instead reduces the problem in the same way a heroin addict does.<p>The main complexity in fixing it is that the subject often doesn&#x27;t know their life is shit and just keeps trying to do that life better, or that they fear leaving that life will make things worse.<p>My non-psychologist tip for anyone suffering from severe depression like I was is simple: you have to make a very big, easy change to your life.<p>Big means not tweaking this or that, but completely changing everything. What&#x27;s the most extreme change you could make, in your mind? Is it go and be a monk in Nepal for a couple of years? Then do that.<p>Easy means it can&#x27;t be a struggle - if you&#x27;re depressed you don&#x27;t have the energy to do that.</text></comment> | <story><title>What happens in the brain to cause depression?</title><url>https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-happens-in-the-brain-to-cause-depression-20240523/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>g3e0</author><text>I’m not an expert in the field, but I am someone who has recovered from depression. The “lack of serotonin” theory always made me laugh. It’s like if your computer was running abnormally and you said it “doesn’t have enough electricity”.<p>Neurotransmitters send signals. The amount of neurotransmitter tells you nothing about what information is actually encoded in those signals. You can transmit happy and sad music using electricity, for example. It seems to me that you can transmit happy and sad thoughts using neurotransmitters. (And of course the brain is much more complicated than a computer, because a computer “just” uses electricity, whereas in the brain some processing happens at each neuron, and signals coming in on one neurotransmitter can cause signals to leave in others.)<p>I see the term antidepressant as a bit of a misnomer. A drug that inhibits re-uptake of neurotransmitters will amplify the “loudness” of the signals. If you only have negative thoughts, and you take such a drug, your depression could realistically get worse (and this does happen to some people).<p>If you can get in to a positive feedback loop (e.g. an activity that leads to positive thoughts that lead to more of that activity) and _then_ start amplifying those signals, then these drugs can do wonders.</text></comment> |
21,389,908 | 21,389,183 | 1 | 3 | 21,388,951 | train | <story><title>Remove default "terraform" partner_id</title><url>https://github.com/terraform-providers/terraform-provider-azurerm/issues/4747</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mitchellh</author><text>Hi everyone,<p>I&#x27;m the founder of HashiCorp.<p>I want to make something clear up front that this does NOT allow us to see resource usage by Terraform user and does NOT result in credits or revenue sharing at all. HashiCorp has no direct access to this information in any form.<p>Before explaining &quot;why&quot; we do this, I do want to apologize and say that adding this without proper explanation was a mistake. It isn&#x27;t clear why it&#x27;s there and I think enough companies have hurt users with features like this that defaulting to a negative reaction makes sense. I&#x27;m sorry. I promise (and will explain) that our usage is not nefarious, and even further this ID does not give us access to anything directly.<p>The &quot;why&quot;: the partner ID lets Microsoft better track Terraform usage internally (with data they already have access to, just lets them filter it by Terraform). Microsoft does share aggregate information with us (&quot;x% of all Azure workloads&quot;) but does not go any more granular than that.<p>This information is used by Microsoft to gauge how much investment to make into Terraform as well as what resources are a priority to fix any issues or make improvements to. Microsoft is a big partner of ours[1] and as part of that partnership they employ full-time people to improve the Terraform provider. Part of making that partnership successful is measuring the output of it and this is one mechanism that allows them to do that. I can say that the usage information given by this partner code has directly resulted in more headcount being assigned to the &quot;azurerm&quot; Terraform provider that may not have been otherwise assigned.<p>Note that all this partner ID does is let Microsoft filter by &quot;Terraform.&quot; They already have and use all information around what resources are being spun up by accounts (as you would expect any IaaS or even SaaS to do). This doesn&#x27;t introduce anything else other than that easier filter for them.<p>The partner ID used by Terraform was provided directly by Microsoft and generated by them. It is not associated with our Azure accounts at all. This is an extra assurance that we don&#x27;t have access to any partner information using this ID.<p>Some have pointed out that the docs specifically state that this is used for credit&#x2F;revenue sharing. That is a feature of the partner ID but not one that we use. Azure is a large, complex platform and features are overloaded for different use cases. In our case, the partner ID does NOT provide us with any information, credits, or revenue. Zero.<p>Going forward, we will be building an option to opt out of using this partner ID. It was already noted in other comments that we made it configurable since there are other use cases for it that a Terraform user might want to set. We haven&#x27;t made a direct option to opt-out and we will do that in the next release. As a workaround today, you can set any partner ID you want (an invalid value) and we will send that and that will function similarly.<p>Note that for years all our providers have also sent a custom user agent that notes Terraform and the version of Terraform being used. We haven&#x27;t been secret about this (I&#x27;ve publicly tweeted about it many times), but it feels important to call out in this comment as well. This information could also be used by providers to determine Terraform usage. Similarly, HashiCorp has no direct access to this information.<p>I&#x27;m happy to answer any questions, and once again I&#x27;m sorry about how this wasn&#x27;t communicated up front.<p>EDIT (2 hours after posting): We&#x27;ve opened a PR for adding the opt-out behavior which also includes an environment variable you can set. We plan to include this as part of the next patch release. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;terraform-providers&#x2F;terraform-provider-azurerm&#x2F;pull&#x2F;4751" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;terraform-providers&#x2F;terraform-provider-az...</a><p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hashicorp.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;hashicorp-and-microsoft-extend-multi-year-collaboration-agreement&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hashicorp.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;hashicorp-and-microsoft-exten...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Remove default "terraform" partner_id</title><url>https://github.com/terraform-providers/terraform-provider-azurerm/issues/4747</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>davidu</author><text>Isn&#x27;t this what Partner ID is designed for?<p>&quot;Injects&quot; is a strong word.<p>Maybe &quot;Hashicorp provides an Azure Partner ID in Terraform deployments for deployment stats, and some users may not want that&quot; would be a better title.</text></comment> |
21,800,281 | 21,800,292 | 1 | 3 | 21,799,845 | train | <story><title>Boeing Weighs Cutting or Halting 737 Max Production</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/boeing-weighs-cutting-or-halting-737-max-production-11576448990</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pcurve</author><text>There have been plenty of design flaws in commercial jetliners and in most cases, reputation is recovered. But there hasn&#x27;t been design flaw quite like this one.<p>but none quite like this one.</text></item><item><author>freehunter</author><text>Just an anecdote, but I&#x27;m a traveling consultant for a pretty big tech company, and the manager of the consulting group told us when the 737 Max issue started (but before it was grounded) that we did not have to fly on that plane and if we were put on that plane we could change flights and bill the change fee back to the company without any complaints.<p>There&#x27;s been no further guidance so far on what we&#x27;ll do when the 737 Max is back in service, but the message was clear: the safety and comfort of the employee is worth a $200 change fee, compared to being forced onto a plane that the employee feels is unsafe. I&#x27;ve never heard that mentioned for any other plane. As much as air travel has sucked this summer with cancelations and delays caused by the grounding of this plane, I don&#x27;t foresee that model having much luck if&#x2F;when it&#x27;s put into full service.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>chx</author><text>Especially one that the FAA tried to pooh pooh as long as it could. It was amazing to watch the goodwill and trust accumulated over decades crumble to nothing in a few hours as the European countries one by one banned the airline from their airspace but did not ground them. It was the EASA telling the FAA to do the right thing. They didn&#x27;t and then finally the EASA did ground the plane. I really can&#x27;t remember any other time when the EASA and the FAA disagreed especially this big.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thejournal.ie&#x2F;us-ireland-boeing-4538567-Mar2019&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thejournal.ie&#x2F;us-ireland-boeing-4538567-Mar2019&#x2F;</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Boeing Weighs Cutting or Halting 737 Max Production</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/boeing-weighs-cutting-or-halting-737-max-production-11576448990</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pcurve</author><text>There have been plenty of design flaws in commercial jetliners and in most cases, reputation is recovered. But there hasn&#x27;t been design flaw quite like this one.<p>but none quite like this one.</text></item><item><author>freehunter</author><text>Just an anecdote, but I&#x27;m a traveling consultant for a pretty big tech company, and the manager of the consulting group told us when the 737 Max issue started (but before it was grounded) that we did not have to fly on that plane and if we were put on that plane we could change flights and bill the change fee back to the company without any complaints.<p>There&#x27;s been no further guidance so far on what we&#x27;ll do when the 737 Max is back in service, but the message was clear: the safety and comfort of the employee is worth a $200 change fee, compared to being forced onto a plane that the employee feels is unsafe. I&#x27;ve never heard that mentioned for any other plane. As much as air travel has sucked this summer with cancelations and delays caused by the grounding of this plane, I don&#x27;t foresee that model having much luck if&#x2F;when it&#x27;s put into full service.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nexuist</author><text>Like a lot of tragedies, it&#x27;s really hard to tell how much the side effects of something like this are attributed to the mistake itself and how much can be explained through modern communication networks (social media) amplifying everything.<p>Is the Boeing mistake <i>really</i> that bad, or is it because this is the first such aviation design mistake to happen in our post-2010 everyone-is-online world? Remember that the tails on 737s used to just...fall off back in the &#x27;90s.<p>For the record, I don&#x27;t think the 737 MAX should have ever been cleared to fly with the current version of MCAS. But I can&#x27;t help but believe that there had to be some boneheaded designs in the past that cost hundreds of lives that we just don&#x27;t think about today.<p>In any case, I hope Boeing has learned from this and revised its engineering processes to go back to its previous prestigious roots. I also hope against hope that we will finally see some executives go to prison for approving this.</text></comment> |
31,810,314 | 31,809,859 | 1 | 3 | 31,807,104 | train | <story><title>No-one knows what they are doing</title><url>https://successfulsoftware.net/2022/06/19/no-one-knows-what-they-are-doing/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>PragmaticPulp</author><text>This is a very comforting fiction to tell yourself when you’re faced with new and unfamiliar challenges. However, it’s not really true. Plenty of people within an industry or field know enough of what they’re doing because they’ve gone through it before and&#x2F;or done all of the heavy research to prepare for these situations.<p>I see the “nobody knows what they’re doing” fiction brought out as an easy antidote for impostor syndrome or as comforting words to people struggling to learn. While intentions might be good, it had an unintended side effect of creating an illusion that expertise doesn’t exist or that everyone’s knowledge is equal regardless of their level of experience.<p>The dark side of this mentality is that it creates the same situations whereby people believe their own intuitions are equal to professional scientific research. If you believe no one knows what they’re doing and all adults are just making it up as they go, why would you listen to experts instead of inserting your own opinions based on your Facebook research or some quip you saw online?<p>The real key is to identify who really knows what they’re doing and to what degree, then leverage those people for advice as much as possible. Going through life assuming everybody is equally incompetent will leave you blind to these huge opportunities to learn from other people’s expertise and experience.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>louthy</author><text>I think a better phrase is &quot;everybody is winging it&quot;, because once you get good at something, then you tend to end up working on something that&#x27;s at the edge of your current understanding, either through promotion or some sense of seniority in the industry.<p>This isn&#x27;t necessarily true for all jobs, but I think it&#x27;s especially true in the software industry. I&#x27;ve been a CTO for 17 years, but I still feel like I&#x27;m winging it. It doesn&#x27;t mean I don&#x27;t know what I&#x27;m doing, I have enough experience to make good judgements; but to be the best at something you often have to be on the edge of your understanding at any one point in time.<p>I don&#x27;t remember exactly when I realised that everybody is winging it (to one extent or another), but it made it easier to trust my own judgement, it made it easier to push for something I believed in, but it also gave me a sense of how little I still know - which helps me to not get too arrogant about my current abilities.</text></comment> | <story><title>No-one knows what they are doing</title><url>https://successfulsoftware.net/2022/06/19/no-one-knows-what-they-are-doing/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>PragmaticPulp</author><text>This is a very comforting fiction to tell yourself when you’re faced with new and unfamiliar challenges. However, it’s not really true. Plenty of people within an industry or field know enough of what they’re doing because they’ve gone through it before and&#x2F;or done all of the heavy research to prepare for these situations.<p>I see the “nobody knows what they’re doing” fiction brought out as an easy antidote for impostor syndrome or as comforting words to people struggling to learn. While intentions might be good, it had an unintended side effect of creating an illusion that expertise doesn’t exist or that everyone’s knowledge is equal regardless of their level of experience.<p>The dark side of this mentality is that it creates the same situations whereby people believe their own intuitions are equal to professional scientific research. If you believe no one knows what they’re doing and all adults are just making it up as they go, why would you listen to experts instead of inserting your own opinions based on your Facebook research or some quip you saw online?<p>The real key is to identify who really knows what they’re doing and to what degree, then leverage those people for advice as much as possible. Going through life assuming everybody is equally incompetent will leave you blind to these huge opportunities to learn from other people’s expertise and experience.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ZephyrBlu</author><text>I&#x27;m pretty junior in terms of YOE, but I hate when I see people say things like &quot;don&#x27;t worry, I have no idea what I&#x27;m doing and I have x YOE. You&#x27;re fine!&quot; to people on the internet.<p>I have a decent understanding of what I&#x27;m doing, but I worked for it by doing exactly what you described in your last paragraph and then synthesizing that knowledge into an explicit process.<p>If you don&#x27;t know what you&#x27;re doing you&#x27;re either bad or don&#x27;t have a conscious understanding of your process. Both are not good.</text></comment> |
27,637,881 | 27,637,297 | 1 | 3 | 27,636,082 | train | <story><title>Final Fantasy remasters reignite controversies over pixel art</title><url>https://www.vice.com/en/article/qj83yp/final-fantasy-remasters-reignite-controversies-over-pixel-art</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>derefr</author><text>Always wondered why they haven’t remade the 2D games to just match the look of Yoshitaka Amano’s concept art. The monsters in the games were nearly always straight Amano digitizations, and looked out-of-place next to a world of semi-chibi reinterpretations of the PCs and NPCs (which always read to me more as compromises in the name of animatability, rather than a truly desired visual style. See e.g. the character menu portraits in the original FF6, which were also Amano art.)<p>Why not make the rest of the world look like the monsters? Amano’s original art is still right there in their archives, cleaned up and digitized for their own art books and everything. Just take those, draw a few variations each, and use them directly as visual-novel-style taking heads in dialogue and battles; and then make much-closer-matched 3D models &#x2F; hi-res spritework of them for overworld navigation.</text></comment> | <story><title>Final Fantasy remasters reignite controversies over pixel art</title><url>https://www.vice.com/en/article/qj83yp/final-fantasy-remasters-reignite-controversies-over-pixel-art</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>leshokunin</author><text>Some people not familiar with games might think the issue is overblown and the result of a vocal minority of zealots.<p>How would you feel about a 4K colorized version Citizen Kane?<p>The issue here is that these games are supposed to be a reissuing of the original games, with some small tweaks. People are often fine with that. The case of the Dragon Quest III remake and the 2D+3D simultaneous versions of DQ XI show that the exact same audience is fine with fully upgraded (or even downgraded) games.<p>However, this in-between situation is frustrating. Is doesn’t help that Square Enid keeps on trying over and over with every version being the definitive one.</text></comment> |
38,134,392 | 38,134,251 | 1 | 2 | 38,132,016 | train | <story><title>As I retire, my goal now is to release 40+ years of source code</title><url>https://dunfield.themindfactory.com/dnldsrc.htm</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jart</author><text>I&#x27;m taking a look through DOSUTIL.ZIP and I love all these simple elegant C programs. A lot of these programs somehow only manage to have 1-2 standard c #include lines. How often do you see that? I also love how, out of 20,000 lines of C code, there only exists 24 #if statements. This is how C programming was meant to be. Reading codebases like this is one of the things I drew inspiration from when I started working on Cosmopolitan Libc.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cdchn</author><text>If your build targets are 1 then that saves you a lot of #if macros.</text></comment> | <story><title>As I retire, my goal now is to release 40+ years of source code</title><url>https://dunfield.themindfactory.com/dnldsrc.htm</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jart</author><text>I&#x27;m taking a look through DOSUTIL.ZIP and I love all these simple elegant C programs. A lot of these programs somehow only manage to have 1-2 standard c #include lines. How often do you see that? I also love how, out of 20,000 lines of C code, there only exists 24 #if statements. This is how C programming was meant to be. Reading codebases like this is one of the things I drew inspiration from when I started working on Cosmopolitan Libc.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>duskwuff</author><text>&gt; A lot of these programs somehow only manage to have 1-2 standard c #include lines<p>Older C compilers will let you get away with a lot of sins which a modern C compiler will (correctly) call you out for.</text></comment> |
2,741,912 | 2,741,763 | 1 | 2 | 2,741,425 | train | <story><title>XKCD's Randall Munroe on Google+ requiring your gender to be public</title><url>https://plus.google.com/111588569124648292310/posts/SeBqgN9Zoiu</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>demallien</author><text>"but VERY few"
I'm not sure what you're suggesting here. You know, if it's only 1% of men that act in a sexually predatory manner (workplace sexual harrassement, groping on public transport, all the way through to rape), how am I as a woman supposed to react? Online it's even worse, I can expect sexually explicit comments to be made to me with a probability approaching 1.0 if I reveal my gender (HN is a pleasant exception to the rule, and here's hoping it stays that way!)<p>Online there are many forums where I choose to hide my gender, and in the real world I am always conscious that I am being objectified sexually (an experience you probably can't appreciate until you've been in a bar and had a fat, bald guy 20 years older than you grinding his crotch up against your leg even when you've physically tried to push him away).<p>So yeah, take all the offense you like, it is an offense that is rooted in a deep ignorance of what it's like to be a woman in our culture.</text></item><item><author>_3u10</author><text>I take great offense to my culture being defined as "relentless treatment of women as objects teaches them that they are defined by the one thing that men around them want from them"<p>Yes some people do that, but VERY few. It's as silly as thinking that all gay men speak with lisps, yes some do and those that do are very identifiable as likely gay. Yes there is always that guy in the bar that is inappropriate with women, and he will get noticed, but did anyone bother to look at the VAST majority of men who do not engage in that behavior. These are also the same idiots who are getting into bar fights with other men. This doesn't make it acceptable but it's hardly a hallmark of my "culture". There are people who just don't respect other people in every culture.<p>As to being bigger and stronger, perhaps we should look to the nation of Japan and the feats its military was able to achieve with men roughly the size of north american women. Women are perfectly capable of defending themselves, not that they should have to, just like smaller men are perfectly capable of defending themselves, not that they should have to. These are again averages and if you look at the deviances you'll see that there are a lot of women who are larger than a lot of men.<p>Also, keep in mind that a man is twice as likely to be assaulted as a woman so from a statistical perspective it is men who should be fearing for their safety
as they post their gender online.<p>I personally think it's a good idea for Google to make the settings private but it doesn't need the invocation of chivalric myths and the slander of an entire culture for it to happen. Frankly, the idea that women can't defend themselves and we need to add privacy settings to protect them seems more to perpetuate the ideals of chivalry than feminism.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fleitz</author><text>I'm in support of Google changing the policy, I just think that slandering a culture is unnecessary to get a simple oversight fixed. I'm suggesting that the vast majority of men (and women) are respectful of people and that there are a few who are not that we tend to notice. (selection bias).<p>Sorry shitty things happen to you because of your gender, shitty things have happend to me because of my gender. Most women are phenomenal people but just like men some are really shitty people.<p>We don't need to figure out who the biggest victim group is, it's irrelevant.<p>We need figure out ways to stop it from happening. If it was a man who caused you undue grief and pain then let me be the first to empathize on behalf of the gender I share with people who have treated you with disrespect. No I'm probably not going to understand what it is like to be you in our society, just like you're not going to understand what it's like to be me in our society. If we can get a little closer to understanding than that's a step in the right direction. If we can work together to solve each others problems then that's even better.<p>If Google+ having privacy with regard to gender will help you to have a better life then I support that. I don't need to understand what it's like to be a woman in our society to know that if you say a trivial change will help you that doesn't affect me in the least then I support getting that feature changed. I'm very much in favor of achieving a more polite and respectful society, regardless of the reasonable steps we need to take to achieve that.</text></comment> | <story><title>XKCD's Randall Munroe on Google+ requiring your gender to be public</title><url>https://plus.google.com/111588569124648292310/posts/SeBqgN9Zoiu</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>demallien</author><text>"but VERY few"
I'm not sure what you're suggesting here. You know, if it's only 1% of men that act in a sexually predatory manner (workplace sexual harrassement, groping on public transport, all the way through to rape), how am I as a woman supposed to react? Online it's even worse, I can expect sexually explicit comments to be made to me with a probability approaching 1.0 if I reveal my gender (HN is a pleasant exception to the rule, and here's hoping it stays that way!)<p>Online there are many forums where I choose to hide my gender, and in the real world I am always conscious that I am being objectified sexually (an experience you probably can't appreciate until you've been in a bar and had a fat, bald guy 20 years older than you grinding his crotch up against your leg even when you've physically tried to push him away).<p>So yeah, take all the offense you like, it is an offense that is rooted in a deep ignorance of what it's like to be a woman in our culture.</text></item><item><author>_3u10</author><text>I take great offense to my culture being defined as "relentless treatment of women as objects teaches them that they are defined by the one thing that men around them want from them"<p>Yes some people do that, but VERY few. It's as silly as thinking that all gay men speak with lisps, yes some do and those that do are very identifiable as likely gay. Yes there is always that guy in the bar that is inappropriate with women, and he will get noticed, but did anyone bother to look at the VAST majority of men who do not engage in that behavior. These are also the same idiots who are getting into bar fights with other men. This doesn't make it acceptable but it's hardly a hallmark of my "culture". There are people who just don't respect other people in every culture.<p>As to being bigger and stronger, perhaps we should look to the nation of Japan and the feats its military was able to achieve with men roughly the size of north american women. Women are perfectly capable of defending themselves, not that they should have to, just like smaller men are perfectly capable of defending themselves, not that they should have to. These are again averages and if you look at the deviances you'll see that there are a lot of women who are larger than a lot of men.<p>Also, keep in mind that a man is twice as likely to be assaulted as a woman so from a statistical perspective it is men who should be fearing for their safety
as they post their gender online.<p>I personally think it's a good idea for Google to make the settings private but it doesn't need the invocation of chivalric myths and the slander of an entire culture for it to happen. Frankly, the idea that women can't defend themselves and we need to add privacy settings to protect them seems more to perpetuate the ideals of chivalry than feminism.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>muuh-gnu</author><text>&#62; until you've been in a bar and had a fat, bald guy<p>Since when is being bald become a derogatory term? How do you expect to get sympathy for your position if you at the same time totally deadheartedly debase a group of people purely on their looks?</text></comment> |
33,869,622 | 33,866,677 | 1 | 2 | 33,862,768 | train | <story><title>How to estimate an SSD’s working life</title><url>https://eclecticlight.co/2022/12/05/how-to-estimate-an-ssds-working-life/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>drooopy</author><text>According to the guy behind Asahi Linux, there was no misreporting. It was an actual bug and those excessive write operations happened. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;marcan42&#x2F;status&#x2F;1396374313591140357?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;marcan42&#x2F;status&#x2F;1396374313591140357?ref_...</a><p>While I don&#x27;t like it being that way, I can definitely see the benefits of non-upgradeable RAM. The performance of the SOC on my &quot;lowly&quot;, entry-level M1 Air is out of this world.<p>But an SSD that&#x27;s glued on to the motherboard has 0 benefits that I can think of and basically only serves to give any computer a hard coded expiration date. And thinness is not an excuse. There are computers as thin as the Air that have removable storage drives.</text></item><item><author>tokamak-teapot</author><text>Did the question about Apple’s new laptops and their apparently high writes in general usage get resolved? And was it incorrect&#x2F;misleading reporting, or somehow not a problem (life of SSD still likely to be ‘long enough’) or is it still potentially the case that the machines will be ‘bricked’ due to the non-replaceable SSD dying early?<p>I don’t mind having to have the SSD replaced by Apple if the cost is reasonable, just as I do with batteries, but would be good to know what to expect.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>AceJohnny2</author><text>&gt; <i>But an SSD that&#x27;s glued on to the motherboard has 0 benefits</i><p>It&#x27;s because, since the T2 chip and going on with Apple Silicon, they&#x27;re not SSDs in the NVMe sense. They&#x27;re an Apple-specific technology derived from their Anobit acquisition, that only look like an NVMe device to the upper layers.</text></comment> | <story><title>How to estimate an SSD’s working life</title><url>https://eclecticlight.co/2022/12/05/how-to-estimate-an-ssds-working-life/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>drooopy</author><text>According to the guy behind Asahi Linux, there was no misreporting. It was an actual bug and those excessive write operations happened. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;marcan42&#x2F;status&#x2F;1396374313591140357?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;marcan42&#x2F;status&#x2F;1396374313591140357?ref_...</a><p>While I don&#x27;t like it being that way, I can definitely see the benefits of non-upgradeable RAM. The performance of the SOC on my &quot;lowly&quot;, entry-level M1 Air is out of this world.<p>But an SSD that&#x27;s glued on to the motherboard has 0 benefits that I can think of and basically only serves to give any computer a hard coded expiration date. And thinness is not an excuse. There are computers as thin as the Air that have removable storage drives.</text></item><item><author>tokamak-teapot</author><text>Did the question about Apple’s new laptops and their apparently high writes in general usage get resolved? And was it incorrect&#x2F;misleading reporting, or somehow not a problem (life of SSD still likely to be ‘long enough’) or is it still potentially the case that the machines will be ‘bricked’ due to the non-replaceable SSD dying early?<p>I don’t mind having to have the SSD replaced by Apple if the cost is reasonable, just as I do with batteries, but would be good to know what to expect.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>JohnBooty</author><text>Yeah, that&#x27;s what kills me.<p>And the only viable mitigation strategies involve giving Apple more money.<p>Spec&#x27;ing a larger onboard SSD to spread out the writes for hopefully longer endurance should be effective.<p>And, perhaps, opting for more RAM to reduce VM writes to disk? I&#x27;m not sure if that&#x27;s effective. Perhaps the resulting sleep file will be larger as well, resulting on more writes overall. I&#x27;m sure somebody can chime in on that?<p>At least the newer models have SD card slots; can use SD cards for semidurable storage. They are obviously unsuitable for some things, but fine for others.</text></comment> |
15,273,534 | 15,272,776 | 1 | 3 | 15,272,394 | train | <story><title>Devs unknowingly use “malicious” modules snuck into official Python repository</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/09/devs-unknowingly-use-malicious-modules-put-into-official-python-repository/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>zizek23</author><text>The casual culture of pulling in hundred of dependencies, and mushrooming language specific package managers is ridiculously insecure and has to go.<p>There is no way for anyone to know what all this code is doing, there is little way to verify updates and its simply untenable.<p>If some developers like this sort of unsafe practice it should be strictly limited to their machines and in no way make it across in any form as a deployment artifact.<p>There are already secure distribution package managers with the necessary infrastructure, you are not special, use those. Ruby is already paying a price for imposing dependency hell of users and wasting millions of man hours. Many have suffered and do not even bother with Ruby apps anymore. Node and others who think this is a good model will be next. Users should simply boycott such user hostile developers and languages that encourage this kind of insecurity.</text></comment> | <story><title>Devs unknowingly use “malicious” modules snuck into official Python repository</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/09/devs-unknowingly-use-malicious-modules-put-into-official-python-repository/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>swiley</author><text>One nice thing about languages like C is that a lot of programmers just avoid dependencies because dealing with them kind of sucks. That&#x27;s one solution to this problem.</text></comment> |
22,384,036 | 22,383,305 | 1 | 3 | 22,382,946 | train | <story><title>AMD Threadripper 3970X under heavy AVX2 load: Defective by design?</title><url>https://forum.level1techs.com/t/amd-threadripper-3970x-under-heavy-avx2-load-defective-by-design/153883</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>bdd</author><text>“Unable to perform AVX2 instructions correctly under heavy load” is also a common “WTF Intel!?”–inducing phenomenon. I’m certain SREs who work at companies with more than 1 million servers have a bunch of hair pulling stories.<p>Most (all?) Intel server CPUs in fact decrease clock speed when executing AVX2 (and some other) instructions to keep things a bit more sane. Vlad from Cloudflare wrote about this, more specific to AVX-512 back in 2017: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.cloudflare.com&#x2F;on-the-dangers-of-intels-frequency-scaling&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.cloudflare.com&#x2F;on-the-dangers-of-intels-frequen...</a><p>Then there is PROCHOT signal. Which is supposed to protect the CPU from getting too hot but keeps getting raised in lopsided AVX2 loads not because CPU is too hot but voltage regulation gets whacked.<p>You may wonder: what is an example of AVX2 heavy load. RSA multiplication is a good candidate. AES constructions or modes (CBC with SHA, GCM) are implemented in AVX2-BMI2 as well.</text></comment> | <story><title>AMD Threadripper 3970X under heavy AVX2 load: Defective by design?</title><url>https://forum.level1techs.com/t/amd-threadripper-3970x-under-heavy-avx2-load-defective-by-design/153883</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ntauthority</author><text>My 3970X on the ASRock Taichi (with default settings, generally) does not seem to reproduce this issue at this time - the system remains operational despite the FMA3 path being used (I&#x27;m assuming this is behind the AVX2 flag? disabling FMA3 leads to a plain AVX path) while running an all-core test with 16K FFTs in Prime95.<p>Either a slight background workload (Windows seems to be trying to use half a core for an OS update) resolves this, or this board does not have a broken power design?</text></comment> |
12,182,165 | 12,181,685 | 1 | 2 | 12,180,443 | train | <story><title>Oracle Buys NetSuite for $9.3B</title><url>http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-07-28/oracle-buys-netsuite-in-deal-valued-at-about-9-3-billion</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>morgo</author><text>MySQL has done well also.<p>Disclosure: I work on this team. Take a look at new features in 5.7 for example:
<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thecompletelistoffeatures.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thecompletelistoffeatures.com&#x2F;</a></text></item><item><author>cowmix</author><text>VirtualBox has done quite well under Oracle.</text></item><item><author>DoubleMalt</author><text>At least it is not a software I use an like, that is devoured by Oracle this time.<p>(Of course Oracle makes great stuff. In a company as big as Oracle, there are always niches that create great things. But most offerings are dreadful. And most open source acquisitions did not fare especially well under Oracle)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>aphextron</author><text>Really great to see native JSON support in MYSQL finally.<p>Also, &quot;Random password generated by default on installation&quot;<p>This has been a long time coming. I can&#x27;t tell you how many mysql servers I&#x27;ve cracked into with &quot;root&quot;</text></comment> | <story><title>Oracle Buys NetSuite for $9.3B</title><url>http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-07-28/oracle-buys-netsuite-in-deal-valued-at-about-9-3-billion</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>morgo</author><text>MySQL has done well also.<p>Disclosure: I work on this team. Take a look at new features in 5.7 for example:
<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thecompletelistoffeatures.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thecompletelistoffeatures.com&#x2F;</a></text></item><item><author>cowmix</author><text>VirtualBox has done quite well under Oracle.</text></item><item><author>DoubleMalt</author><text>At least it is not a software I use an like, that is devoured by Oracle this time.<p>(Of course Oracle makes great stuff. In a company as big as Oracle, there are always niches that create great things. But most offerings are dreadful. And most open source acquisitions did not fare especially well under Oracle)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>0xmohit</author><text>This is fantastic. It&#x27;d be good see more products list new features (and changes) so nicely, especially those links to the manual. Thanks for the list.<p>Couldn&#x27;t help posting it: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12181637" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12181637</a></text></comment> |
25,269,266 | 25,267,874 | 1 | 3 | 25,266,473 | train | <story><title>Precursor’s Custom PCBs</title><url>https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=6011</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>generalizations</author><text>Took me a while to figure out the context for what exactly the Precursor is [1], and where to get one [2].<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bunniestudios.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;?p=5921" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bunniestudios.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;?p=5921</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.crowdsupply.com&#x2F;sutajio-kosagi&#x2F;precursor" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.crowdsupply.com&#x2F;sutajio-kosagi&#x2F;precursor</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Precursor’s Custom PCBs</title><url>https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=6011</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>frowin</author><text>It fascinates me, that volume and automation can make this profitable. Very nice article and I would love to see a cost breakdown of a PCB manufacturer. There is still labour involved in manual handling and even communication with customers.</text></comment> |
39,867,423 | 39,867,358 | 1 | 3 | 39,867,160 | train | <story><title>When new hires get paid more, top performers resign first</title><url>https://hbr.org/2024/03/when-new-hires-get-paid-more-top-performers-resign-first</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jedberg</author><text>This is one of the reasons I loved Netflix. Each year they would say &quot;to get new people in the door with your level experience, we had to offer them $XXX. Therefore we are raising you to $XXX.&quot;<p>Some years I got 25%+ raises. Netflix understood this like no one else.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>theshrike79</author><text>Companies should understand when their business hangs on people, you need to keep the people happy.<p>Hiring people off the street for more money than people with 20+ years of experience isn&#x27;t a good way to keep experienced workers employed.</text></comment> | <story><title>When new hires get paid more, top performers resign first</title><url>https://hbr.org/2024/03/when-new-hires-get-paid-more-top-performers-resign-first</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jedberg</author><text>This is one of the reasons I loved Netflix. Each year they would say &quot;to get new people in the door with your level experience, we had to offer them $XXX. Therefore we are raising you to $XXX.&quot;<p>Some years I got 25%+ raises. Netflix understood this like no one else.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bluSCALE4</author><text>Makes me happy that at least someone out there is experiencing pay fairness.</text></comment> |
7,468,598 | 7,467,695 | 1 | 3 | 7,466,524 | train | <story><title>Projects that power GitHub</title><url>https://github.com/showcases/projects-that-power-github</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>neya</author><text>Is there a reason why Github runs on it&#x27;s own fork of Rails (I believe it&#x27;s 2.3 or something), when they could just upgrade to Rails 4, from the official Master (which is faster and probably more stable AND most importantly with most security bugs fixed)??<p>Pardon me if I sound stupid, I&#x27;m just trying to understand why.</text></comment> | <story><title>Projects that power GitHub</title><url>https://github.com/showcases/projects-that-power-github</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jweir</author><text>No mention of Resque. Is Github still using it, or moved on?<p><a href="https://github.com/resque/resque/tree/1-x-stable" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;resque&#x2F;resque&#x2F;tree&#x2F;1-x-stable</a><p>[edit -- thanks, I see that it is on the list now.]</text></comment> |
26,461,711 | 26,461,596 | 1 | 2 | 26,458,296 | train | <story><title>Tweeting “Memphis” autolocks your Twitter account</title><url>https://twitter.com/SwiftOnSecurity/status/1371183849712009219</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nine_k</author><text>There is a well-known recipe against trolls: do not feed them. Block and ignore them. If you visit a bathroom, you normally don&#x27;t bloviate about the kind of crap you had just to flush, you rather avoid the topic; the same applies to trolls. Bring <i>zero</i> attention to them.<p>Trolls&#x27; game is all about drawing attention, in the form of ire, offense, and and panic. Deprive them this, and they&#x27;ll cease to bother you much.<p>This is, of course, easier to do if you are a statue of buddha made of reinforced concrete, but even us living beings can learn and engage in some best practices of communication online.</text></item><item><author>tom_mellior</author><text>&gt; They can exist because both of them are going to HAVE to learn how to engage with one another<p>You&#x27;re assuming good faith from both parties. Harassers and trolls don&#x27;t act in good faith.</text></item><item><author>cbozeman</author><text>There <i>is</i> no way to moderate the entire world. The sooner everyone alive accepts this, the better off we will be.<p>The values of a Black lesbian female software developer who grew up in San Francisco and went to Stanford will <i>never</i> be compatible with the values of a Hispanic straight male Marine officer who grew up in San Antonio and went to Texas Christian University and has been deployed to 17 different countries.<p>However, they can and do exist on the same platforms. They can exist because both of them are going to <i>HAVE</i> to learn how to engage with one another, even though their existences are completely incompatible and utterly different.<p>There&#x27;s no technology <i>on</i> <i>Earth</i> powerful enough to solve for the human condition. We have to evolve our ways of thinking and interacting.</text></item><item><author>ve55</author><text>In general it seems like moderating platforms with millions&#x2F;billions of users is a fool&#x27;s errand, but is required to be attempted due to the level of centralization we&#x27;ve ended up with.<p>Regardless of how much of it is automated away via blackbox ML algorithms lacking transparency or via outsourcing to cheap labor that spends their days looking at terribly offensive and shocking content, the end result is going to have countless false positives, a difficult (if even possible) path for users to appeal, and a largely discontent userbase that constantly feels wronged from multiple angles.<p>Having millions of people with thousands of cultures, hundreds of languages, and countless niche styles of communication all be moderated by the same group of people (or the same algorithms) just isn&#x27;t a good idea, and I hope that in the long-term we can find ways for communities to self-moderate in more decentralized manners to help improve this.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>acdha</author><text>This approach only works if they don’t care about you. There’s a couple of decades of history by now showing how this approach fails, ranging from mass harassment (want to spend weeks blocking randos and sock puppets?) to attempts to contact your family and coworkers up to in-person harassment, placing Craigslist ads with your address saying you have violent rape fantasies, and SWATing.<p>This is, of course, unevenly distributed. If you’re a white guy you have to work at it to get the same level of resentment in certain circles that other people start with by being female, brown, gay, etc.<p>GamerGate is well worth learning about as an extreme example of how far it can get beyond the level where blocking works: it started with one person (Eron Gjoni) trying to clinch the “worst ex ever” title by rallying a hate mob against his ex girlfriend with some fake claims, which produced hate spasms for over a year, multiple police investigations, and fed into the 2016 US Presidential election.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Gamergate_controversy" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Gamergate_controversy</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Tweeting “Memphis” autolocks your Twitter account</title><url>https://twitter.com/SwiftOnSecurity/status/1371183849712009219</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nine_k</author><text>There is a well-known recipe against trolls: do not feed them. Block and ignore them. If you visit a bathroom, you normally don&#x27;t bloviate about the kind of crap you had just to flush, you rather avoid the topic; the same applies to trolls. Bring <i>zero</i> attention to them.<p>Trolls&#x27; game is all about drawing attention, in the form of ire, offense, and and panic. Deprive them this, and they&#x27;ll cease to bother you much.<p>This is, of course, easier to do if you are a statue of buddha made of reinforced concrete, but even us living beings can learn and engage in some best practices of communication online.</text></item><item><author>tom_mellior</author><text>&gt; They can exist because both of them are going to HAVE to learn how to engage with one another<p>You&#x27;re assuming good faith from both parties. Harassers and trolls don&#x27;t act in good faith.</text></item><item><author>cbozeman</author><text>There <i>is</i> no way to moderate the entire world. The sooner everyone alive accepts this, the better off we will be.<p>The values of a Black lesbian female software developer who grew up in San Francisco and went to Stanford will <i>never</i> be compatible with the values of a Hispanic straight male Marine officer who grew up in San Antonio and went to Texas Christian University and has been deployed to 17 different countries.<p>However, they can and do exist on the same platforms. They can exist because both of them are going to <i>HAVE</i> to learn how to engage with one another, even though their existences are completely incompatible and utterly different.<p>There&#x27;s no technology <i>on</i> <i>Earth</i> powerful enough to solve for the human condition. We have to evolve our ways of thinking and interacting.</text></item><item><author>ve55</author><text>In general it seems like moderating platforms with millions&#x2F;billions of users is a fool&#x27;s errand, but is required to be attempted due to the level of centralization we&#x27;ve ended up with.<p>Regardless of how much of it is automated away via blackbox ML algorithms lacking transparency or via outsourcing to cheap labor that spends their days looking at terribly offensive and shocking content, the end result is going to have countless false positives, a difficult (if even possible) path for users to appeal, and a largely discontent userbase that constantly feels wronged from multiple angles.<p>Having millions of people with thousands of cultures, hundreds of languages, and countless niche styles of communication all be moderated by the same group of people (or the same algorithms) just isn&#x27;t a good idea, and I hope that in the long-term we can find ways for communities to self-moderate in more decentralized manners to help improve this.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>paulv</author><text>Blocking, muting, or ignoring a handful of people may work. But when you have hundreds or thousands or more people harassing you, blocking them all isn&#x27;t practical or sufficient. Get enough people mad at you and you&#x27;ll end up being SWATted or doxxed (or turned in to deepfake porn). At some point the trolls start feeding each other. Next thing you know we end up with another gamergate (which started because some dude was mad at his ex).</text></comment> |
15,553,807 | 15,553,945 | 1 | 2 | 15,553,205 | train | <story><title>I have no side code projects to show you</title><url>https://www.codementor.io/ezekielbuchheit/no-i-have-no-side-code-projects-to-show-you-cz1tyhgdz</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>TAForObvReasons</author><text>Side projects are for software what a portfolio is for other creative industries. You don&#x27;t hire a designer sight unseen -- usually you ask for a sample. It makes perfect sense to expect the same of technology.</text></item><item><author>shortsightedsid</author><text>It&#x27;s funny that the tech industry is so insistent on side projects. I mean - would you hire a marketing person based on their &#x27;side projects&#x27; or a corporate lawyer purely based on their pro-bono work? Likewise, who on earth asks a building contractor if they have any side projects? You would ask for references or find a contractor via someone you know. What about recruiters themselves? How does one judge if a person is going to be good recruiter or not? What about sales guys? Does anyone ask them - do you sell stuff on the side - Y&#x27;know maybe you just do door-to-door selling as a hobby. Or what about other engineering disciplines? Does one really ask a Mechanical Engineer or a Civil Engineer about their side projects?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sidlls</author><text>Only if you believe software development is neither engineering nor science, and is purely creative.<p>It isn&#x27;t, though, and demanding a portfolio is almost as terrible a practice as <i>Cracking the Coding Interview</i> style interviews.</text></comment> | <story><title>I have no side code projects to show you</title><url>https://www.codementor.io/ezekielbuchheit/no-i-have-no-side-code-projects-to-show-you-cz1tyhgdz</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>TAForObvReasons</author><text>Side projects are for software what a portfolio is for other creative industries. You don&#x27;t hire a designer sight unseen -- usually you ask for a sample. It makes perfect sense to expect the same of technology.</text></item><item><author>shortsightedsid</author><text>It&#x27;s funny that the tech industry is so insistent on side projects. I mean - would you hire a marketing person based on their &#x27;side projects&#x27; or a corporate lawyer purely based on their pro-bono work? Likewise, who on earth asks a building contractor if they have any side projects? You would ask for references or find a contractor via someone you know. What about recruiters themselves? How does one judge if a person is going to be good recruiter or not? What about sales guys? Does anyone ask them - do you sell stuff on the side - Y&#x27;know maybe you just do door-to-door selling as a hobby. Or what about other engineering disciplines? Does one really ask a Mechanical Engineer or a Civil Engineer about their side projects?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ng12</author><text>I can take a 10 minute look at a designer&#x27;s portfolio and get reasonably accurate insight into their style and abilities.<p>Do you think a 10 minute scan of an arbitrary GitHub account is the same? I say decidedly not.</text></comment> |
35,393,459 | 35,392,949 | 1 | 3 | 35,389,566 | train | <story><title>Police relied on Clearview AI and put the wrong person in jail</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/31/technology/facial-recognition-false-arrests.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>danesparza</author><text>Oh, this is simple. Clearview AI needs to get sued for defamation or slander.<p>In the United States, falsely accusing someone can be considered defamation or slander, depending on the circumstances.<p>Defamation is a legal term that refers to the act of making false statements about someone that damage their reputation. If the false statements are made in writing, such as in a blog post or social media post, it is called libel. If the false statements are made verbally, it is called slander.<p>To prove defamation or slander, the person who was falsely accused must demonstrate that the statements were false (he can), that they were published or spoken to a third party (they were -- to the police department), that they caused harm to the person&#x27;s reputation (he lost a week from work and was put in jail -- not to mention countless articles that mention this fact), and that the person making the false statements acted with actual malice or negligence (they provided a service for money and didn&#x27;t check their facts). Actual malice means that the person making the false statements knew they were false or acted with reckless disregard for the truth. I&#x27;m pretty sure &#x27;reckless disregard for the truth&#x27; would be pretty easy to prove in this case -- considering Clearview probably can&#x27;t say specifically why this person selected for arrest.<p>If a person is found guilty of defamation or slander, they may be required to pay damages to the person who was falsely accused to compensate for the harm caused to their reputation. The amount of damages can vary depending on the extent of the harm and the specific circumstances of the case.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tantalor</author><text>It&#x27;s going to be really easy for them to weasel out by claiming the match was like &quot;99% confidence&quot; or something, so not actually false per se. This is supported by the facts: &quot;one of the alleged fraudsters looked like Mr. Reid&quot;<p>They can also claim their technology does not make an accusation, it provides a similarity score that LEO can use in their investigations. This is also supported by the facts: sheriff’s officer insisted it was a &quot;positive match&quot;.<p>The sheriff&#x27;s officer actually gives up the game here, revealing they improperly relied on the similarity score to deduce a suspects guilt, but an actually competent prosecutor would know better. The fault lies with the LEO in this case. Good luck suing them.</text></comment> | <story><title>Police relied on Clearview AI and put the wrong person in jail</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/31/technology/facial-recognition-false-arrests.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>danesparza</author><text>Oh, this is simple. Clearview AI needs to get sued for defamation or slander.<p>In the United States, falsely accusing someone can be considered defamation or slander, depending on the circumstances.<p>Defamation is a legal term that refers to the act of making false statements about someone that damage their reputation. If the false statements are made in writing, such as in a blog post or social media post, it is called libel. If the false statements are made verbally, it is called slander.<p>To prove defamation or slander, the person who was falsely accused must demonstrate that the statements were false (he can), that they were published or spoken to a third party (they were -- to the police department), that they caused harm to the person&#x27;s reputation (he lost a week from work and was put in jail -- not to mention countless articles that mention this fact), and that the person making the false statements acted with actual malice or negligence (they provided a service for money and didn&#x27;t check their facts). Actual malice means that the person making the false statements knew they were false or acted with reckless disregard for the truth. I&#x27;m pretty sure &#x27;reckless disregard for the truth&#x27; would be pretty easy to prove in this case -- considering Clearview probably can&#x27;t say specifically why this person selected for arrest.<p>If a person is found guilty of defamation or slander, they may be required to pay damages to the person who was falsely accused to compensate for the harm caused to their reputation. The amount of damages can vary depending on the extent of the harm and the specific circumstances of the case.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hypersoar</author><text>My guess is that some other law or tort would be a better fit, but I&#x27;ll note that the &quot;actual malice&quot; and &quot;negligence&quot; are different standards with the latter being a lower bar. The former only applies to public figures.</text></comment> |
7,301,078 | 7,300,654 | 1 | 3 | 7,300,291 | train | <story><title>Real money, invested with algorithms</title><url>http://blog.quantopian.com/real-money/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>gbasin</author><text>Some other commenters have hinted at this but... I feel sad whenever people build this kind of stuff. It&#x27;s probably a very well built product (or will be) and is better than the alternatives out there, but the unfortunate fact is that anything that enables and encourages active trading in modern financial markets is setting 99% of their customers up for failure. And the 1% that are actually on to something will quickly move off the platform onto their own, or will end up losing whatever they make when their strategy loses whatever alpha it has and they can&#x27;t admit it (I&#x27;ve seen this happen, but never the former, actually).<p>Trading is hard. I run a proprietary trading firm with modern technology infrastructure and we have a lot of trading experience. You really have very little chance of success unless you&#x27;re doing this full time, and even then it will take years before you have enough experience to build a sustainable income.</text></comment> | <story><title>Real money, invested with algorithms</title><url>http://blog.quantopian.com/real-money/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ForHackernews</author><text>Sweet. This is perfect for those of us who still have some money we didn&#x27;t put into MtGox left to lose!</text></comment> |
11,305,106 | 11,305,327 | 1 | 2 | 11,304,752 | train | <story><title>Unmasking Startup L. Jackson</title><url>http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-03-17/unmasking-startup-l-jackson-silicon-valley-s-favorite-twitter-persona</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>raphman_</author><text>Previous unmasking (without naming him) based on screenshots from his account:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;syrah.co&#x2F;joshdickson40&#x2F;5604e5e10fc1786b0152a51a" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;syrah.co&#x2F;joshdickson40&#x2F;5604e5e10fc1786b0152a51a</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Unmasking Startup L. Jackson</title><url>http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-03-17/unmasking-startup-l-jackson-silicon-valley-s-favorite-twitter-persona</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>cm3</author><text>Why? I mean why is it important to identify who&#x27;s behind something that doesn&#x27;t hurt anybody? Can&#x27;t we just enjoy the art?</text></comment> |
6,650,870 | 6,650,543 | 1 | 3 | 6,650,271 | train | <story><title>How I Got My First 1000 Users in 1 Day</title><url>http://popcornryan.tumblr.com/post/65640245447/how-i-got-my-first-1000-users-in-1-day</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>james33</author><text>I think you need a 5th takeaway: write a follow-up blog post about how your HN post got you 1000 users, subsequently getting you another 1000 users that missed the post the day before.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jpittman</author><text>how about a 6th takeaway in a follow up, in which he discusses retention of these initial 1000 users? I think it&#x27;s great he was able to obtain those numbers early but I think those users are a bit ephemeral.</text></comment> | <story><title>How I Got My First 1000 Users in 1 Day</title><url>http://popcornryan.tumblr.com/post/65640245447/how-i-got-my-first-1000-users-in-1-day</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>james33</author><text>I think you need a 5th takeaway: write a follow-up blog post about how your HN post got you 1000 users, subsequently getting you another 1000 users that missed the post the day before.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>drum</author><text>hah! the post was meant to be mutually beneficial</text></comment> |
21,974,914 | 21,974,817 | 1 | 2 | 21,974,609 | train | <story><title>Better protecting kids’ privacy on YouTube</title><url>https://youtube.googleblog.com/2020/01/better-protecting-kids-privacy-on-YouTube.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vageli</author><text>I don&#x27;t understand the prevention of adding to a playlist. Now I can&#x27;t make a custom playlist of children&#x27;s content for my kid?</text></item><item><author>Rebelgecko</author><text>Some of the features that get disabled for &quot;children&#x27;s content&quot; are a bit surprising:<p>Playback in the Miniplayer<p>Save to playlist and Save to watch later<p>Likes and dislikes on YouTube Music<p>Donate buttons<p>I guess it&#x27;s hard to do these in a way that is compliant with the privacy rules, or they&#x27;re worried that kids will donate $1000 to their favorite Youtuber with Mom and Dad&#x27;s credit card? It will be interesting to see how good their machine learning is at identifying &quot;kid&#x27;s content&quot;. From reading the FTC page, the delineation seems a bit arbitrary. I suppose we&#x27;ll see if there&#x27;s a financial impact on Youtubers that are borderline (is someone playing a video game considered children&#x27;s content? What if the videogame is rated M? Will the tiebreaker be statistics about their actual viewers?)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Slartie</author><text>Maybe this is intended to prevent &quot;YouTube babysitting&quot; aka &quot;make a long playlist, park kid in front of youtube, go and do something else&quot;? Without the ability to schedule up hours of content, one is forced to look after the child regularly, even if it&#x27;s just to start the next dull bit of entertainment.<p>Though if that was the motivation I&#x27;d expect them to also disable auto-play of next video for content targeted at kids.</text></comment> | <story><title>Better protecting kids’ privacy on YouTube</title><url>https://youtube.googleblog.com/2020/01/better-protecting-kids-privacy-on-YouTube.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vageli</author><text>I don&#x27;t understand the prevention of adding to a playlist. Now I can&#x27;t make a custom playlist of children&#x27;s content for my kid?</text></item><item><author>Rebelgecko</author><text>Some of the features that get disabled for &quot;children&#x27;s content&quot; are a bit surprising:<p>Playback in the Miniplayer<p>Save to playlist and Save to watch later<p>Likes and dislikes on YouTube Music<p>Donate buttons<p>I guess it&#x27;s hard to do these in a way that is compliant with the privacy rules, or they&#x27;re worried that kids will donate $1000 to their favorite Youtuber with Mom and Dad&#x27;s credit card? It will be interesting to see how good their machine learning is at identifying &quot;kid&#x27;s content&quot;. From reading the FTC page, the delineation seems a bit arbitrary. I suppose we&#x27;ll see if there&#x27;s a financial impact on Youtubers that are borderline (is someone playing a video game considered children&#x27;s content? What if the videogame is rated M? Will the tiebreaker be statistics about their actual viewers?)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jaimex2</author><text>I guess Youtube is covering itself from someone alleging custom playlists is a form of tracking.</text></comment> |
15,281,105 | 15,280,998 | 1 | 3 | 15,278,344 | train | <story><title>AWS announces per-second billing for EC2 instances</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/18/aws-announces-per-second-billing-for-ec2-instances/?ncid=rss</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>user5994461</author><text>It&#x27;s really really difficult to be able to turn on and off instances as needed, like turn a test instance on in the morning when developers come in and turn it off in the evening when they leave.</text></item><item><author>mbesto</author><text>They would legitimately lose a lot of money if they did this now (and I would argue, wouldn&#x27;t make up for it in market share). Most companies I work with who switch to AWS think it&#x27;s a 1:1 conversion in terms of cost from a data center and pretty much just &quot;leave AWS on&quot; not realizing that they are not only paying for computing cost but the hidden cost of being able to scale up more instances quickly.</text></item><item><author>zedpm</author><text>That&#x27;s sure nice, but I&#x27;m waiting for AWS to switch to automatic sustained use discounts [0] like GCP offers.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cloud.google.com&#x2F;compute&#x2F;docs&#x2F;sustained-use-discounts" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cloud.google.com&#x2F;compute&#x2F;docs&#x2F;sustained-use-discount...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>skywhopper</author><text>I don&#x27;t understand. If autoscaling groups are too complicated, just create the instance and stop and start it when you want. You can control permissions via IAM groups and instance tags if you need to be careful. Or you can indirect through a lambda if you need to be super careful.<p>Good morning!
`aws ec2 start-instances --instance-ids i-12345678900`<p>Good night!
`aws ec2 stop-instances --instance-ids i-12345678900`</text></comment> | <story><title>AWS announces per-second billing for EC2 instances</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/18/aws-announces-per-second-billing-for-ec2-instances/?ncid=rss</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>user5994461</author><text>It&#x27;s really really difficult to be able to turn on and off instances as needed, like turn a test instance on in the morning when developers come in and turn it off in the evening when they leave.</text></item><item><author>mbesto</author><text>They would legitimately lose a lot of money if they did this now (and I would argue, wouldn&#x27;t make up for it in market share). Most companies I work with who switch to AWS think it&#x27;s a 1:1 conversion in terms of cost from a data center and pretty much just &quot;leave AWS on&quot; not realizing that they are not only paying for computing cost but the hidden cost of being able to scale up more instances quickly.</text></item><item><author>zedpm</author><text>That&#x27;s sure nice, but I&#x27;m waiting for AWS to switch to automatic sustained use discounts [0] like GCP offers.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cloud.google.com&#x2F;compute&#x2F;docs&#x2F;sustained-use-discounts" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cloud.google.com&#x2F;compute&#x2F;docs&#x2F;sustained-use-discount...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bdcravens</author><text><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.aws.amazon.com&#x2F;autoscaling&#x2F;latest&#x2F;userguide&#x2F;schedule_time.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.aws.amazon.com&#x2F;autoscaling&#x2F;latest&#x2F;userguide&#x2F;sche...</a></text></comment> |
32,177,696 | 32,175,307 | 1 | 2 | 32,158,598 | train | <story><title>A Soviet scientist dreamed of melting the Arctic with a 55 mile dam (2013)</title><url>https://www.vice.com/en/article/xyy97w/the-soviet-scientist-who-dreamed-of-melting-the-arctic-with-a-55-mile-dam-5886b6e3b70b0245b1239331</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>pmoriarty</author><text>Meanwhile, American scientists as part of Project Plowshare[1] were proposing to use nukes to blast a harbor in Alaska, <i>&quot;in the shape of a polar bear, if desired&quot;</i>.[2]<p>They also wanted to use nukes to blast a canal through Central America, as an alternative to the Panama Canal.[2]<p>[1] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Project_Plowshare#cite_note-11" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Project_Plowshare#cite_note-...</a><p>[2] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.historynet.com&#x2F;an-explosive-plan-to-use-atoms-for-peace&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.historynet.com&#x2F;an-explosive-plan-to-use-atoms-fo...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>A Soviet scientist dreamed of melting the Arctic with a 55 mile dam (2013)</title><url>https://www.vice.com/en/article/xyy97w/the-soviet-scientist-who-dreamed-of-melting-the-arctic-with-a-55-mile-dam-5886b6e3b70b0245b1239331</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>woodruffw</author><text>See also: the 1920s proposal to dam the Mediterranean[1] and various plans to expand lower Manhattan[2], some of which were executed.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Atlantropa" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Atlantropa</a><p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Lower_Manhattan_expansion" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Lower_Manhattan_expansion</a></text></comment> |
20,390,344 | 20,390,113 | 1 | 3 | 20,387,136 | train | <story><title>Libra, 2 Weeks In</title><url>https://www.facebook.com/notes/david-marcus/libra-2-weeks-in/10158616513819148/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Lucadg</author><text>This is the part where they reveal how they plan to negotiate with regulators:<p>&quot;At the core, we believe that a network that helps move more cash transactions — where a lot of illicit activities happen — to a digital network that features regulated on and off ramps with proper know-your-customer (KYC) practices, combined with the ability for law enforcement and regulators to conduct their own analysis of on-chain activity, will be a big opportunity to increase the efficacy of financial crimes monitoring and enforcement&quot;<p>In other words: let us do Libra and we&#x27;ll help you win the war on cash.<p>The biggest blow on privacy in the world&#x27;s history, brought to you buy Facebook.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sametmax</author><text>Not just privacy. Democracy in general.<p>No cash mean you can&#x27;t do anything that has not been validated by the state first.<p>It means kids will have less options to foul around without the parents checking it.<p>It means you won&#x27;t be able to pay in a gay bar anonymously.<p>It means any new (and hence controversial) political concept will have no way to financially grow to acceptance.<p>It means no living off the grid.<p>It means hobo will be even more excluded.<p>It means in case of crisis, the financial system is paralyzed.<p>It means if powerful people wants something bad for you, you can&#x27;t be on the run.<p>It means easy censorship against unpopular activists or artists.<p>It means no way to test a weird idea off the record to see if it&#x27;s worth it.<p>It means no escape if the gov raises taxes in an unjust way.<p>It means no workaround for paralyzing bureaucracy.<p>It means no grandpa selling his home grown vegetable at the farmer market on the side.<p>It means everything you do, where you do, at what time and with whom is tracked, permanently recorded, then passed to algo or AI for analysis.<p>No grey area. No margin of error.<p>Just the immovable, inflexible structure of current society imposing itself to everybody.</text></comment> | <story><title>Libra, 2 Weeks In</title><url>https://www.facebook.com/notes/david-marcus/libra-2-weeks-in/10158616513819148/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Lucadg</author><text>This is the part where they reveal how they plan to negotiate with regulators:<p>&quot;At the core, we believe that a network that helps move more cash transactions — where a lot of illicit activities happen — to a digital network that features regulated on and off ramps with proper know-your-customer (KYC) practices, combined with the ability for law enforcement and regulators to conduct their own analysis of on-chain activity, will be a big opportunity to increase the efficacy of financial crimes monitoring and enforcement&quot;<p>In other words: let us do Libra and we&#x27;ll help you win the war on cash.<p>The biggest blow on privacy in the world&#x27;s history, brought to you buy Facebook.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gridlockd</author><text>This is exactly how all cryptocurrencies already are allowed to operate. Any domestic crypto exchange has to do KYC, but also cooperate with the IRS. With most cryptocurrencies, transactions are public and traceable.</text></comment> |
10,332,191 | 10,332,012 | 1 | 2 | 10,331,237 | train | <story><title>Mecca Then and Now – 128 Years of Growth</title><url>http://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2015/09/mecca-then-and-now-128-years-of-growth/408013/?single_page=true</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tboyd47</author><text>One thing I like to reflect on when seeing this pictures is the vast difference in the number of people present at the hajj. It&#x27;s truly orders of magnitude more.<p>This huge increase in pilgrims over the last century is because of new technology like air travel, and the peace the world has experienced over the past few decades that allows people to move freely across the world. But it is due to the efforts of the Saudis to expand the masjid, build camps at Mina, allow hotels to be constructed, modernize the facilities, etc. that every person is able to actually perform the rites of hajj at the proper times. Hajj consists of a number of rites that have to be performed in certain places at certain times on certain days. Think about what it takes to organize millions of people trying to do this. It&#x27;s very different than organizing thousands, or tens of thousands. You have to accommodate all their sleeping arrangements. You have to provide enough space for marketplaces so they can get something to eat. You have to widen the roads, air condition the facilities, make sure each group leaves at their own time, etc.<p>It&#x27;s true that the Saudis aren&#x27;t perfect, and they make mistakes, but my point is that it&#x27;s easy to get the impression from the massive construction projects that they are just trying to make another Dubai or Olympics. But really, there is a spiritual purpose behind it, not connected to money, and there is also a lot going on behind the scenes that you can&#x27;t see in the pictures. It would be easier for the Saudis to just restrict the visas to a tiny fraction and not go through with all of the construction and organizing, but they are making the effort as you can see. I know this is not going to be a popular comment here but I&#x27;m just trying to offset all the negative comments with some positive.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>yawz</author><text>&gt; &quot;not connected to money...&quot;<p>Kaaba has always been about trade&#x2F;commerce&#x2F;money, since well before Muhammad and Islam.<p>It is not a coincidence that Muhammad&#x27;s tribe had the control of Kaaba where pagan pilgrims came before Islam to revere their many gods (whose representations (statues, icons, figures, etc.) were placed around Kaaba). And, very conveniently, it remained to be a holy place in Islam where each and every Muslim who can afford it must visit at least once during their lifetime.</text></comment> | <story><title>Mecca Then and Now – 128 Years of Growth</title><url>http://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2015/09/mecca-then-and-now-128-years-of-growth/408013/?single_page=true</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tboyd47</author><text>One thing I like to reflect on when seeing this pictures is the vast difference in the number of people present at the hajj. It&#x27;s truly orders of magnitude more.<p>This huge increase in pilgrims over the last century is because of new technology like air travel, and the peace the world has experienced over the past few decades that allows people to move freely across the world. But it is due to the efforts of the Saudis to expand the masjid, build camps at Mina, allow hotels to be constructed, modernize the facilities, etc. that every person is able to actually perform the rites of hajj at the proper times. Hajj consists of a number of rites that have to be performed in certain places at certain times on certain days. Think about what it takes to organize millions of people trying to do this. It&#x27;s very different than organizing thousands, or tens of thousands. You have to accommodate all their sleeping arrangements. You have to provide enough space for marketplaces so they can get something to eat. You have to widen the roads, air condition the facilities, make sure each group leaves at their own time, etc.<p>It&#x27;s true that the Saudis aren&#x27;t perfect, and they make mistakes, but my point is that it&#x27;s easy to get the impression from the massive construction projects that they are just trying to make another Dubai or Olympics. But really, there is a spiritual purpose behind it, not connected to money, and there is also a lot going on behind the scenes that you can&#x27;t see in the pictures. It would be easier for the Saudis to just restrict the visas to a tiny fraction and not go through with all of the construction and organizing, but they are making the effort as you can see. I know this is not going to be a popular comment here but I&#x27;m just trying to offset all the negative comments with some positive.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>JoeAltmaier</author><text>Wait ... &quot;Not connected to money&quot;?! How is this different from building a movie theatre complex, or Disneyland? Why would we imagine its not all about profit at root? I&#x27;m not that generous.</text></comment> |
17,272,805 | 17,272,512 | 1 | 2 | 17,272,328 | train | <story><title>Predicting Price Changes in Ethereum (2017) [pdf]</title><url>http://cs229.stanford.edu/proj2017/final-reports/5244039.pdf</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>adjkant</author><text>I&#x27;ve actually run a trading algorithm off a very similar approach for the past 8-10 months, which yielded about 87% return in that time. Using regression I can still to this day hit about 55-60% accuracy. What&#x27;s not mentioned in the paper is that accuracy is only a small part of the story. If you&#x27;re accurate 60% of the time but in the 40% accuracy range you&#x27;re very wrong, acting on the information is useless.<p>As a result, it&#x27;s important to develop a trading approach that can actually capitalize on the information. For that, I have found three things to work best:<p>1. Only trading on the highest signals of increase within a model that is a spectrum rather than binary classification. This usually doesn&#x27;t increase accuracy much ironically but does increase the &quot;average value&quot; of buying on the increase signals. I usually set this through historical testing for prediction values and taking a top percentage of the prediction values to set the &quot;threshold&quot;.<p>2. More features and feature selection tuning. Right now I&#x27;m using genetic algorithms to constantly try and test new sets of features, thresholds, &quot;hold times&quot; after buying, etc.<p>3. Work on minutes, not hours. The volatility is so high that you can actually capitalize well on the micro level in my experience.<p>While accuracy is important, the average trade value and trades per day are far more important to returns.<p>Interestingly enough, the algorithm was steadily making money until April or so, when it stagnated. Mind you, it was making money from January-March due to sheer volatility even while the price was dropping most days. I&#x27;ve actually shut mine down for two reasons - the plateau plus the fact that the market was too thin on GDAX to quickly trade on buy signals for the amount I was running with (ending at about $3.5K). If the market thickens, I&#x27;ll likely start running it again.<p>Takeaway: this paper&#x27;s approach may seem simple but honestly the reality is that with something so volatile it&#x27;s surprisingly easy to capitalize on with algorithmic trading that learns even a few small features and trades frequently.</text></comment> | <story><title>Predicting Price Changes in Ethereum (2017) [pdf]</title><url>http://cs229.stanford.edu/proj2017/final-reports/5244039.pdf</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>maxpert</author><text>I can vouch for the DNN results. I took data from Kaggle and tried training networks with different approaches. Was not able to get prediction any better than 54% (which I am pretty sure would be biased as well). Later on while inspecting data and looking at dips and rises turns out external events (govts banning crypto or a price crash due to other reasons) was causing price drops or surge, my conclusion was if you need to predict anything you need to be aware of these external factors.</text></comment> |
8,449,011 | 8,448,983 | 1 | 2 | 8,448,617 | train | <story><title>The Emails Snowden Sent to First Introduce His NSA Leaks</title><url>http://www.wired.com/2014/10/snowdens-first-emails-to-poitras/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>noir_lord</author><text>&gt; Assume your adversary is capable of one trillion guesses per second<p>Jesus, one trillion passphrase checks a second.<p>Well I know what I&#x27;m changing this afternoon.<p>&gt; My personal desire is that you paint the target directly on my back. No one, not even my most trusted confidant, is aware of my intentions and it would not be fair for them to fall under suspicion for my actions.<p>Snowden has always had my respect but the more I read the more he has my admiration as a person.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nickscoronado</author><text>I think it&#x27;s entirely fascinating how they&#x27;ve been unable to successfully assault Snowden&#x27;s character. It&#x27;s like the second go-to move after denying everything, and they still haven&#x27;t been able to paint him a villain. He&#x27;s just so damn heroic.<p><a href="http://www.newsweek.com/most-americans-think-snowden-did-right-thing-poll-says-253163" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newsweek.com&#x2F;most-americans-think-snowden-did-rig...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>The Emails Snowden Sent to First Introduce His NSA Leaks</title><url>http://www.wired.com/2014/10/snowdens-first-emails-to-poitras/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>noir_lord</author><text>&gt; Assume your adversary is capable of one trillion guesses per second<p>Jesus, one trillion passphrase checks a second.<p>Well I know what I&#x27;m changing this afternoon.<p>&gt; My personal desire is that you paint the target directly on my back. No one, not even my most trusted confidant, is aware of my intentions and it would not be fair for them to fall under suspicion for my actions.<p>Snowden has always had my respect but the more I read the more he has my admiration as a person.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jercos</author><text>Considering john the ripper has a plugin that can churn out 50k c&#x2F;s on a gpg key with a mid-tier GPU without specific optimizations, I&#x27;d guess a dedicated team of NSA researchers could get the cost for off-the-shelf hardware down to 5000 c&#x2F;s&#x2F;$ (based on a $100 GPU running 50k c&#x2F;s + 10x speedup from engineering effort and specific optimizations), which makes the cost of the raw GPU hardware for a 1 trillion passphrase GPU cluster a smooth $200 million for a civilian assembling in his basement.<p>Wanna bet the NSA gets volume discounts from nVidia&#x2F;AMD?</text></comment> |
7,319,495 | 7,319,482 | 1 | 2 | 7,318,947 | train | <story><title>Ask HN: Where are the 750k Bitcoins lost by Mt. Gox?</title></story><parent_chain><item><author>chevreuil</author><text>I&#x27;m a bit new to bitcoins, but is it technically possible for the bitcoins community as a whole to make a blacklist of bitcoins addresses and &quot;ban&quot; the stolen bitcoins ?
Such blacklist would daunt robbers and enforce public trust in bitcoins.</text></item><item><author>deweller</author><text>In November of 2011 Mt. Gox demonstrated control of 500k BTC.<p>I followed the 500,000 BTC for a bit beginning at <a href="https://blockchain.info/tx/b269bf1b82dae8a61f7f91dbf7a9d807e30963c1ae00ddd95a8faebea6d0a007" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blockchain.info&#x2F;tx&#x2F;b269bf1b82dae8a61f7f91dbf7a9d807e...</a>.<p>The coins move around and small amounts are sent away, but the majority ends up back in Mt. Gox&#x27;s main (hot) wallet. This repeats a few times until the majority is paid back to the main Mt.Gox address.<p>Here is the transaction where it starts to get interesting:<p><a href="https://blockchain.info/tx/478ea915aa3a2e54503c43e1c5659722b42a784412423a05394c83a44affb805" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blockchain.info&#x2F;tx&#x2F;478ea915aa3a2e54503c43e1c5659722b...</a><p>What&#x27;s left of the 500,000 (429.9k) is split into roughly half and sent to 2 new address. And then each of those address splits the coins in half and sends to two new address.<p>The end result is that the 429k was split again and again until the funds are split into many addresses, each of which now contain less than 1,000 BTC each. I stopped following the transactions there.<p>Why take 429k and split it into many addresses each containing less than 1,000 BTC each?<p>I&#x27;d like to see someone trace all of these coins and see if they end up coming together somewhere or show a pattern.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>patio11</author><text>This is not technically speaking impossible, but the Bitcoin community has a visceral hatred for the idea, because it allows off-blockchain-entities to effectively deprive them of the use of their coins. It also undermines trust in the currency generally, since why accept Bitcoins if there is the possibility that you&#x27;d be paid with black Bitcoins instead of white Bitcoins, when you&#x27;re practically speaking guaranteed that all dollars are green.<p>Also &quot;Take all the coins that went through Silk Road. Now, floodfill forward.&quot; (probably) colors most of the network black.</text></comment> | <story><title>Ask HN: Where are the 750k Bitcoins lost by Mt. Gox?</title></story><parent_chain><item><author>chevreuil</author><text>I&#x27;m a bit new to bitcoins, but is it technically possible for the bitcoins community as a whole to make a blacklist of bitcoins addresses and &quot;ban&quot; the stolen bitcoins ?
Such blacklist would daunt robbers and enforce public trust in bitcoins.</text></item><item><author>deweller</author><text>In November of 2011 Mt. Gox demonstrated control of 500k BTC.<p>I followed the 500,000 BTC for a bit beginning at <a href="https://blockchain.info/tx/b269bf1b82dae8a61f7f91dbf7a9d807e30963c1ae00ddd95a8faebea6d0a007" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blockchain.info&#x2F;tx&#x2F;b269bf1b82dae8a61f7f91dbf7a9d807e...</a>.<p>The coins move around and small amounts are sent away, but the majority ends up back in Mt. Gox&#x27;s main (hot) wallet. This repeats a few times until the majority is paid back to the main Mt.Gox address.<p>Here is the transaction where it starts to get interesting:<p><a href="https://blockchain.info/tx/478ea915aa3a2e54503c43e1c5659722b42a784412423a05394c83a44affb805" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blockchain.info&#x2F;tx&#x2F;478ea915aa3a2e54503c43e1c5659722b...</a><p>What&#x27;s left of the 500,000 (429.9k) is split into roughly half and sent to 2 new address. And then each of those address splits the coins in half and sends to two new address.<p>The end result is that the 429k was split again and again until the funds are split into many addresses, each of which now contain less than 1,000 BTC each. I stopped following the transactions there.<p>Why take 429k and split it into many addresses each containing less than 1,000 BTC each?<p>I&#x27;d like to see someone trace all of these coins and see if they end up coming together somewhere or show a pattern.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>the_watcher</author><text>Well, the supply of BTC is finite, so simply excluding stolen BTC&#x27;s has some additional problems. May be better than not addressing it, but while BTC provides a mechanism for following them through the transaction chain, it&#x27;s not that simple to ID what addresses contain &quot;stolen&quot; BTC. What if the thieves are able to launder them through unwitting proxies? For example, steal a bunch of BTC, sell them on another exchange immediately, and now, how do you blacklist those &quot;stolen&quot; bitcoins without screwing over an innocent bystander?</text></comment> |
2,449,974 | 2,449,167 | 1 | 2 | 2,448,455 | train | <story><title>YC: The new grad school</title><url>http://www.mattbrezina.com/blog/2011/04/yc-the-new-grad-school/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>edw519</author><text>If YC is grad school, then Hacker News is on-line university.<p>The links to good articles are the curriculum.<p>The links to good references are the text books.<p>The debates and discussions are the study groups.<p>The "Ask HN" posts are the mentorships.<p>The projects we push each other to do are independent studies.<p>The community is my adult fraternity.<p>I've been here 4 years - I oughta try to get my diploma.<p>[Aside: Kinda ironic that your blog banner has a picture of my graduate school. The University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Business was in the 42 story Cathedral of Learning (the tall building on the right) where we took higher education quite literally.]</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>amix</author><text>If YC is a grad school, then doing a startup is a way to learn and graduate. Hanging around on HN should be viewed as entertainment. That's at least my experience (I have been on HN for the past 3.5+ years).</text></comment> | <story><title>YC: The new grad school</title><url>http://www.mattbrezina.com/blog/2011/04/yc-the-new-grad-school/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>edw519</author><text>If YC is grad school, then Hacker News is on-line university.<p>The links to good articles are the curriculum.<p>The links to good references are the text books.<p>The debates and discussions are the study groups.<p>The "Ask HN" posts are the mentorships.<p>The projects we push each other to do are independent studies.<p>The community is my adult fraternity.<p>I've been here 4 years - I oughta try to get my diploma.<p>[Aside: Kinda ironic that your blog banner has a picture of my graduate school. The University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Business was in the 42 story Cathedral of Learning (the tall building on the right) where we took higher education quite literally.]</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jswinghammer</author><text>Have you started a company? I think that's your diploma.</text></comment> |
37,735,346 | 37,734,922 | 1 | 3 | 37,728,990 | train | <story><title>Teens inundated with phone prompts day and night, research finds</title><url>https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/teens-inundated-phone-prompts-day-night-research-finds-rcna108044</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>FridgeSeal</author><text>I have an iOS device, so can’t speak for Google, but I suspect that’s what Apple has been _trying_ to do.<p>The problem is that these apps are essentially adversarial in their notifications. If you have a mechanism for “only the most essential notifications”, then they simply mark all their notifications as “essential” (looking at you Uber). Try to limit their notifications using “only is summary” or disabling them and the app will gleefully deny you all notifications, rendering it basically useless. Uber is particular is guilty for this - the app is conspicuously free of meaningful notification controls.</text></item><item><author>donmcronald</author><text>That&#x27;s exactly what I do!<p>Google and Apple could instantly fix the problem (of co-mingling essential and marketing notifications) <i>if they wanted to</i>. The current situation is like getting opted in to &quot;street signs <i>and</i> flashing billboards&quot;. It&#x27;s stupid.</text></item><item><author>alexanderchr</author><text>It is a breach of trust. I give apps access to my immediate attention so they can notify me of things that need my attention. Not for telling me about their new features or some crappy partner deal.<p>For this reason I have a one strike policy for apps. One marketing notification and permissions are revoked. Missing out on surprisingly little although it has made me stop using some services entirely.</text></item><item><author>soultrees</author><text>I run my phone on DND all day, everyday and block notifications from almost all apps. The amount of garbage we have vying for our attention on an hourly basis is overwhelming sometimes.<p>The worst is the apps where you do want notifications on, like your food delivery apps so you know when your food is at the door, but those companies take that as an invite to send you daily marketing notifications and it all feels like a breach of trust.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Keirmot</author><text>Well, Apple is trying a &#x27;do as I say, not as I do&#x27; approach, which isn&#x27;t exactly working.<p>For example I got an Apple Music notification the other day telling me how awesome the new Classic Music App is, or how the new season of whatever show is available in Apple TV+ is just fresh out of the oven.<p>I like their products, and even their services, but in this particular case, they&#x27;re as bad as Uber, just at a different degree (I used to get an Uber Eats notification everyday until I uninstalled the app)</text></comment> | <story><title>Teens inundated with phone prompts day and night, research finds</title><url>https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/teens-inundated-phone-prompts-day-night-research-finds-rcna108044</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>FridgeSeal</author><text>I have an iOS device, so can’t speak for Google, but I suspect that’s what Apple has been _trying_ to do.<p>The problem is that these apps are essentially adversarial in their notifications. If you have a mechanism for “only the most essential notifications”, then they simply mark all their notifications as “essential” (looking at you Uber). Try to limit their notifications using “only is summary” or disabling them and the app will gleefully deny you all notifications, rendering it basically useless. Uber is particular is guilty for this - the app is conspicuously free of meaningful notification controls.</text></item><item><author>donmcronald</author><text>That&#x27;s exactly what I do!<p>Google and Apple could instantly fix the problem (of co-mingling essential and marketing notifications) <i>if they wanted to</i>. The current situation is like getting opted in to &quot;street signs <i>and</i> flashing billboards&quot;. It&#x27;s stupid.</text></item><item><author>alexanderchr</author><text>It is a breach of trust. I give apps access to my immediate attention so they can notify me of things that need my attention. Not for telling me about their new features or some crappy partner deal.<p>For this reason I have a one strike policy for apps. One marketing notification and permissions are revoked. Missing out on surprisingly little although it has made me stop using some services entirely.</text></item><item><author>soultrees</author><text>I run my phone on DND all day, everyday and block notifications from almost all apps. The amount of garbage we have vying for our attention on an hourly basis is overwhelming sometimes.<p>The worst is the apps where you do want notifications on, like your food delivery apps so you know when your food is at the door, but those companies take that as an invite to send you daily marketing notifications and it all feels like a breach of trust.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ClumsyPilot</author><text>&gt; then they simply mark all their notifications as “essential&quot;<p>That&#x27;s like getting spam mail from your bank. In the physical world this would be illegal</text></comment> |
21,443,162 | 21,443,229 | 1 | 2 | 21,442,807 | train | <story><title>U of Chicago projected to be the first U.S. university to cost $100k per year</title><url>https://hechingerreport.org/university-of-chicago-projected-to-be-the-first-u-s-university-to-charge-100000-a-year/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sorenn111</author><text>One thing I find crazy is the very same institutions that are generally very left leaning, decry income inequality, and espouse generally liberal views then turn around and having tuition costs that having been rising at rates so far above inflation.<p>Student debt is a major issue in the US and the ever increasing costs of tuition are a MAJOR culprit in pushing this crisis. Where are these costs coming from? How can you politically espouse free college while ratcheting up tuition costs?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Finnucane</author><text>I work at one local university, and my wife works at another. One thing we&#x27;ve definitely noticed (and this is a widespread problem) is that the administration is becoming more top-heavy. There are cutbacks in faculty, support, and teaching staff, more reliance on adjuncts (academic temps, basically), and so on, while central administration grows. Expensive new buildings contribute, but less than people suppose. But that is a tangential problem, in that wealthy donors want to give big gifts for vanity projects rather than to, say, scholarship funds.</text></comment> | <story><title>U of Chicago projected to be the first U.S. university to cost $100k per year</title><url>https://hechingerreport.org/university-of-chicago-projected-to-be-the-first-u-s-university-to-charge-100000-a-year/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sorenn111</author><text>One thing I find crazy is the very same institutions that are generally very left leaning, decry income inequality, and espouse generally liberal views then turn around and having tuition costs that having been rising at rates so far above inflation.<p>Student debt is a major issue in the US and the ever increasing costs of tuition are a MAJOR culprit in pushing this crisis. Where are these costs coming from? How can you politically espouse free college while ratcheting up tuition costs?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>slg</author><text>The tuition price being talked about is the top sticker price. If you care about inequality, that isn&#x27;t the metric to care about. You should instead focus on something like median tuition paid since financial aid can mean that any individual student is paying anything from zero up to the full tuition costs. The concept of the richest students paying a six figure sticker price in order to help compensate for the students on the other end of the socioeconomic spectrum who can&#x27;t afford it is the exact type of thing you would expect from a &quot;left leaning&quot; institution.</text></comment> |
19,414,621 | 19,414,047 | 1 | 3 | 19,413,569 | train | <story><title>How to build a distributed throttling system with Nginx, Lua, and Redis</title><url>https://leandromoreira.com.br/2019/01/25/how-to-build-a-distributed-throttling-system-with-nginx-lua-redis/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>cobbzilla</author><text>For those working in a Java JAX-RS environment and looking for an additional rate filter on the app server itself, here is a similar Redis+Lua rate limiter implemented as a Jersey&#x2F;JAX-RS filter [1].<p>It supports multiple limits, for example max 100 requests&#x2F;minute and 10000&#x2F;day, etc. The lua magic is here [2].<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;cobbzilla&#x2F;cobbzilla-wizard&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;wizard-server&#x2F;src&#x2F;main&#x2F;java&#x2F;org&#x2F;cobbzilla&#x2F;wizard&#x2F;filters&#x2F;RateLimitFilter.java" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;cobbzilla&#x2F;cobbzilla-wizard&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;wi...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;cobbzilla&#x2F;cobbzilla-wizard&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;wizard-server&#x2F;src&#x2F;main&#x2F;resources&#x2F;org&#x2F;cobbzilla&#x2F;wizard&#x2F;filters&#x2F;api_limiter_redis.lua" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;cobbzilla&#x2F;cobbzilla-wizard&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;wi...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>How to build a distributed throttling system with Nginx, Lua, and Redis</title><url>https://leandromoreira.com.br/2019/01/25/how-to-build-a-distributed-throttling-system-with-nginx-lua-redis/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>bratao</author><text>Awesome post, from a fellow Brazilian!<p>We did a very similar implementation (although not distributed) for a similar problem, using Redis and Laravel.<p>We had MANY people crawling our website, and we would prefer that they use our API for that. Using Redis we block IPs who accessed our website more than X times not logged-in (200 URLs right now).<p>We also had the requirement that all good bots(Bing, Baidu, Google) should pass-thru without blocks or any slowdown.
Another requirement, was that those good bots should be verified(Reverse &amp; Forward DNS Lookup) before entering out good bot list.<p>It is working great for our high-traffic website ( 2 Mi hits&#x2F;day). You can check our work here:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Potelo&#x2F;laravel-block-bots" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Potelo&#x2F;laravel-block-bots</a></text></comment> |
21,257,299 | 21,257,326 | 1 | 2 | 21,250,577 | train | <story><title>NASA engineer's 'helical engine' may violate the laws of physics</title><url>https://www.newscientist.com/article/2218685-nasa-engineers-helical-engine-may-violate-the-laws-of-physics/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>elcomet</author><text>How could NASA allow research on such a topic if it is obvious for physicists that this is impossible ?</text></item><item><author>knzhou</author><text>The description in the article is oversimplified.<p>Relativistic dynamics is different from Newtonian dynamics in a lot of ways. Force isn&#x27;t parallel to acceleration anymore. Acceleration gets harder the faster an object moves. You can mimic <i>some</i> of these changes by just pretending that you still have Newtonian dynamics but the mass can change with velocity, but we don&#x27;t use this language in physics because it&#x27;s misleading -- there are many effects this idea <i>can&#x27;t</i> capture. (For example, the fact that force is not parallel to acceleration.) It is a very fragile analogy that causes a lot of conceptual mistakes.<p>It&#x27;s easy to prove that Newtonian mechanics conserves momentum. It&#x27;s also easy to prove that relativistic mechanics conserves momentum. A weird hybrid of Newtonian mechanics plus a magically changing &quot;relativistic mass&quot; does <i>not</i> conserve momentum, but nobody has ever thought this was a correct description of nature. It&#x27;s the result of taking a helpful simplifying analogy too far. Any reactionless drive formulated using this Frankenstein theory doesn&#x27;t work.<p>If you just bounce an object back and forth, in either Newtonian mechanics or relativistic mechanics, you won&#x27;t get anywhere. If you change the <i>rest mass</i> of the object to be different going right than left, you will go somewhere, but it will cost momentum to do this, as explained in gus_massa&#x27;s comments. So we haven&#x27;t gotten thrust for free.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sgift</author><text>Even things we think we know very well may be wrong, so having a certain budget for &quot;fringe&quot; subjects which may yield unexpected results is not a bad idea. At the same time it&#x27;s probably a good idea to assume everything they report is a measurement&#x2F;test setup error until further proof.</text></comment> | <story><title>NASA engineer's 'helical engine' may violate the laws of physics</title><url>https://www.newscientist.com/article/2218685-nasa-engineers-helical-engine-may-violate-the-laws-of-physics/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>elcomet</author><text>How could NASA allow research on such a topic if it is obvious for physicists that this is impossible ?</text></item><item><author>knzhou</author><text>The description in the article is oversimplified.<p>Relativistic dynamics is different from Newtonian dynamics in a lot of ways. Force isn&#x27;t parallel to acceleration anymore. Acceleration gets harder the faster an object moves. You can mimic <i>some</i> of these changes by just pretending that you still have Newtonian dynamics but the mass can change with velocity, but we don&#x27;t use this language in physics because it&#x27;s misleading -- there are many effects this idea <i>can&#x27;t</i> capture. (For example, the fact that force is not parallel to acceleration.) It is a very fragile analogy that causes a lot of conceptual mistakes.<p>It&#x27;s easy to prove that Newtonian mechanics conserves momentum. It&#x27;s also easy to prove that relativistic mechanics conserves momentum. A weird hybrid of Newtonian mechanics plus a magically changing &quot;relativistic mass&quot; does <i>not</i> conserve momentum, but nobody has ever thought this was a correct description of nature. It&#x27;s the result of taking a helpful simplifying analogy too far. Any reactionless drive formulated using this Frankenstein theory doesn&#x27;t work.<p>If you just bounce an object back and forth, in either Newtonian mechanics or relativistic mechanics, you won&#x27;t get anywhere. If you change the <i>rest mass</i> of the object to be different going right than left, you will go somewhere, but it will cost momentum to do this, as explained in gus_massa&#x27;s comments. So we haven&#x27;t gotten thrust for free.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>IanCal</author><text>I don&#x27;t think they have in this case.<p>&gt; Burns has worked on his design in private, without any sponsorship from NASA</text></comment> |
28,093,033 | 28,092,285 | 1 | 2 | 28,090,830 | train | <story><title>Clubhouse Is a Cargo Cult</title><url>https://ianvanagas.com/2021/08/06/clubhouse-is-a-cargo-cult/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Traster</author><text>The only criticism I would have of this article is that it misses the underlying issue. There was never a reason for high status individuals to be on clubhouse, the reason they were there has nothing to do with the pandemic - it was because of the pump and dump style of Andreesen Horrowitz and the silicon valley obsession with being an early adopter.<p>A16Z seemingly thought simply by telling everyone how excited they were about Clubhouse they could turn Clubhouse into being something to be excited about. The problem being that the reality undermined them though - just as they were telling people to be excited about the innovative conversations on Clubhouse, the number one story was some CEO getting arsey about a journalist reporting the news- a fundamentally petty and narcissistic look for an App that needed to be seen as cool and new. So Elon and co did their &quot;Oh look at us we&#x27;re early adopters dance&quot; but never invested in the platform - because there was <i>never</i> a reason to, and that failure to give a value proposition to the people they wanted to harvest value from was their core issue.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>potatolicious</author><text>I think you hit on a good point re: status, and in that way Clubhouse is very reminiscent of TED (remember when that was an obsession?) - people gathering to hear pre-eminent experts and learn.<p>Which of course is an admirable thing to do! Listening to well-crafted presentations by learned experts and expanding your knowledge is fantastic!<p>But of course we know how that went - participation in TED quickly became a status marker (not helped by the exorbitant cost of tickets), and the organization capitalized by spinning off TEDx talks all over the world that ended up being filled with more charlatans and hucksters than genuine experts... which seems to have been the direction Clubhouse has also gone.<p>It&#x27;s a bit sad - I think Clubhouse could have been something great - though arguably the &quot;listen to experts talk&quot; thing is better fulfilled by podcasts than a live format. Maybe what the world needs isn&#x27;t a live streaming platform but an authoring tool that makes it <i>really</i> easy to get people together to talk, record a podcast, and distribute it. The bar to podcasting has been lowered a lot in recent years, but it&#x27;s still substantial to produce a quality product.<p>I think there&#x27;s also something to be said here for FOMO and what I&#x27;ve taken to calling &quot;the unknowability of ideas&quot; - I think genuinely investors have <i>no idea</i> why some ideas succeed (see: Facebook), but are terrified of missing out on the next big thing. The combination of this is that many SV VCs seem to regard the quality of ideas as unknowable - you can <i>never</i> pooh-pooh anything, because the last thing you thought was shite turned out to be a multi-billion dollar company, and therefore ideas are literally unjudgeable. The FOMO seems to induce a lot of hype over some companies&#x2F;products even though the people doing the hyping themselves don&#x27;t seem to understand why.</text></comment> | <story><title>Clubhouse Is a Cargo Cult</title><url>https://ianvanagas.com/2021/08/06/clubhouse-is-a-cargo-cult/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Traster</author><text>The only criticism I would have of this article is that it misses the underlying issue. There was never a reason for high status individuals to be on clubhouse, the reason they were there has nothing to do with the pandemic - it was because of the pump and dump style of Andreesen Horrowitz and the silicon valley obsession with being an early adopter.<p>A16Z seemingly thought simply by telling everyone how excited they were about Clubhouse they could turn Clubhouse into being something to be excited about. The problem being that the reality undermined them though - just as they were telling people to be excited about the innovative conversations on Clubhouse, the number one story was some CEO getting arsey about a journalist reporting the news- a fundamentally petty and narcissistic look for an App that needed to be seen as cool and new. So Elon and co did their &quot;Oh look at us we&#x27;re early adopters dance&quot; but never invested in the platform - because there was <i>never</i> a reason to, and that failure to give a value proposition to the people they wanted to harvest value from was their core issue.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>CPLX</author><text>The problem with Clubhouse is the product sucks.<p>The idea of listening to party-line style conversations isn&#x27;t totally insane. Hypothetically good content <i>could</i> be created this way, and it seems that happened at least a few times. But the product was and is just awful.<p>The discovery function sucks, it&#x27;s just a crappy stream of mostly low-value hustle culture nonsense that feels like mid-2000&#x27;s junk mail subject lines. There&#x27;s no way (that actually works) to change that to something that guides you to decent content.<p>There&#x27;s an alternate version of this story where they had a really great technical founding team that reacted to the influx of users and hype by really rapidly iterating on the product and making everyone have a great experience.<p>Instead everyone signed up via exclusive invite and spent a few rounds trying to figure out why they fuck they should care and eventually gave up because they shouldn&#x27;t.</text></comment> |
40,405,581 | 40,403,943 | 1 | 2 | 40,403,524 | train | <story><title>Microsoft's Emissions Spike 29% as AI Gobbles Up Resources</title><url>https://www.pcmag.com/news/microsofts-emissions-spike-29-as-ai-gobbles-up-resources</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>delish</author><text>It is praiseworthy Microsoft straightforwardly reported the increase.<p>I haven&#x27;t paid attention to these kinds of optional disclosures. Never thought about it but were I asked I would have said these are advertisements. I don&#x27;t dislike sustainability, but I thought those function as advertisements because you can expect to get more sustainability &quot;for free&quot; over time, because of many things (Moore&#x27;s Law, ephemeralization, societal investment). So of course savvy corporations publish sustainability reports that say, &quot;We&#x27;re doin&#x27; great : ).&quot;<p>Therefore I&#x27;d argue their commitment to sustainability is shown by their disclosure of the increase.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>1vuio0pswjnm7</author><text>&quot;Therefore I&#x27;d argue their commitment to sustainability is shown by their disclsoure of the increase.&quot;<p>Alternatively, one could argue the increase shows their commitment to profit at the expense of the environment and the voluntary disclosure shows a commitment to greenwashing.</text></comment> | <story><title>Microsoft's Emissions Spike 29% as AI Gobbles Up Resources</title><url>https://www.pcmag.com/news/microsofts-emissions-spike-29-as-ai-gobbles-up-resources</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>delish</author><text>It is praiseworthy Microsoft straightforwardly reported the increase.<p>I haven&#x27;t paid attention to these kinds of optional disclosures. Never thought about it but were I asked I would have said these are advertisements. I don&#x27;t dislike sustainability, but I thought those function as advertisements because you can expect to get more sustainability &quot;for free&quot; over time, because of many things (Moore&#x27;s Law, ephemeralization, societal investment). So of course savvy corporations publish sustainability reports that say, &quot;We&#x27;re doin&#x27; great : ).&quot;<p>Therefore I&#x27;d argue their commitment to sustainability is shown by their disclosure of the increase.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Nition</author><text>It&#x27;s funny how that happens sometimes. Reminds me of the United Nations&#x27; &quot;Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples&quot;. The only four countries that didn&#x27;t sign it initially were the ones that actually looked at it and thought about whether they could really achieve it.</text></comment> |
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