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31,609,677 | 31,610,037 | 1 | 2 | 31,606,334 | train | <story><title>DALL-E 2 generates images of Kermit The Frog in various films</title><url>https://twitter.com/HvnsLstAngel/status/1531506455714492416</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tdehnel</author><text>Sorry to be this guy but that is not creativity. It’s using what already exists, not conjecturing something new.<p>Contrast with real creativity (what people can do but machines currently cannot) where you conjecture something completely new.<p>For example, Copernicus conjecturing the idea that the Earth revolves around the Sun. No machine learning model would have gotten there because it would have been trained on a bunch of data that said the Earth was the center of the universe.</text></item><item><author>tinalumfoil</author><text>The amount of creativity here is astounding. Just imagine all the decisions the AI made in incorporating Kermit into the movies: the clothing it&#x27;s chosen, how the character wears the clothing, the facial expressions, how to make Kermit himself look similar to the other movies characters. Should he be lanky? pudgy? Even simple decisions like obliviously Kermit in Wall-E is going to be a robot, it has to figure out what he looks like as a robot, what his mouth looks like, that his eyes should be enlarged.<p>It gets a lot of things wrong, like I&#x27;m not sure why kermit has a plastic texture in many of the pictures. If you showed me ten pictures of Kermit and ten frames of total recall, and for some reason 8 of your pictures had a plastic Kermit, and asked me to combine them in my head, I&#x27;d probably imagine something on-par or worse than what Dalle has managed to do. But I wouldn&#x27;t be able to show anyone what I&#x27;d made!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dougmwne</author><text>These are fun discussions because words like &quot;artistic creativity&quot; have a colloquial meaning that could only apply to humans since the dawn of humanity. Now you have an image of Kermit in Wall-E. I have never seen or conceived of an image of Kermit in Wall-E. Let&#x27;s assume that adorable robot Kermits do not exist in the training data to be spit out like a search algorithm.<p>The image is new, it did not previously exist. It is a creation, a very vague idea of a few words that was created in full realization.<p>So it sees like the only difference between the &quot;Not creativity&quot; that Dall-E is doing and &quot;Real Creativity&quot; that humans do is tht humans are the ones doing it?<p>I agree there&#x27;s this concept of expanding the frontiers of human aesthetic capability that has slow-marched from cave paintings till post-modernism. That there are a very few artists that invent completely new styles that the rest of us copy and remix. It&#x27;s questionable that Dall-E can do that, but I&#x27;m also not sure that it can&#x27;t do that.</text></comment> | <story><title>DALL-E 2 generates images of Kermit The Frog in various films</title><url>https://twitter.com/HvnsLstAngel/status/1531506455714492416</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tdehnel</author><text>Sorry to be this guy but that is not creativity. It’s using what already exists, not conjecturing something new.<p>Contrast with real creativity (what people can do but machines currently cannot) where you conjecture something completely new.<p>For example, Copernicus conjecturing the idea that the Earth revolves around the Sun. No machine learning model would have gotten there because it would have been trained on a bunch of data that said the Earth was the center of the universe.</text></item><item><author>tinalumfoil</author><text>The amount of creativity here is astounding. Just imagine all the decisions the AI made in incorporating Kermit into the movies: the clothing it&#x27;s chosen, how the character wears the clothing, the facial expressions, how to make Kermit himself look similar to the other movies characters. Should he be lanky? pudgy? Even simple decisions like obliviously Kermit in Wall-E is going to be a robot, it has to figure out what he looks like as a robot, what his mouth looks like, that his eyes should be enlarged.<p>It gets a lot of things wrong, like I&#x27;m not sure why kermit has a plastic texture in many of the pictures. If you showed me ten pictures of Kermit and ten frames of total recall, and for some reason 8 of your pictures had a plastic Kermit, and asked me to combine them in my head, I&#x27;d probably imagine something on-par or worse than what Dalle has managed to do. But I wouldn&#x27;t be able to show anyone what I&#x27;d made!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pphysch</author><text>Humans don&#x27;t generate new ideas from nothing. Your &quot;real creativity&quot; doesn&#x27;t exist. Everything is dependent on what came before, and therefore derivative to some extent.<p>Copernicus got his idea after gathering a lot of data, explicitly and implicitly, training his internal model of the world.</text></comment> |
24,804,964 | 24,804,971 | 1 | 2 | 24,803,740 | train | <story><title>Uninstall Nano Defender</title><url>https://resynth1943.net/articles/uninstall-nano-defender-immediately/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rightbyte</author><text>Auto-update is such a antifeuture. There is like no circumstances where it is beneficial since you can mever trust it wont break your stuff or add malicoius code. Since it is pushed instantly there is no chance anyone had the time to review it.<p>Eg. Steam ask if it should update a game. Windows just does it and adds Candy Crush and spyware. Two different takes on the same thing.</text></item><item><author>wnevets</author><text>&gt; Raymond inspected the modifications added by the new developers (which was not published to GitHub), revealing their dubious intentions.<p>and chrome will auto-update the extension for you transparently so you don&#x27;t miss out on these new amazing features!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wongarsu</author><text>Windows tried manual updates for years, and even after switching to automated updates still received lots of bad press for security holes that were fixed years earlier. Home Edition taking away the ability not to update is the logical conclusion.<p>Also Microsoft controls the code they push on your computer, they paid the people who wrote it and they take liability for it. Browsers are automatically pushing other people&#x27;s code to your computer</text></comment> | <story><title>Uninstall Nano Defender</title><url>https://resynth1943.net/articles/uninstall-nano-defender-immediately/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rightbyte</author><text>Auto-update is such a antifeuture. There is like no circumstances where it is beneficial since you can mever trust it wont break your stuff or add malicoius code. Since it is pushed instantly there is no chance anyone had the time to review it.<p>Eg. Steam ask if it should update a game. Windows just does it and adds Candy Crush and spyware. Two different takes on the same thing.</text></item><item><author>wnevets</author><text>&gt; Raymond inspected the modifications added by the new developers (which was not published to GitHub), revealing their dubious intentions.<p>and chrome will auto-update the extension for you transparently so you don&#x27;t miss out on these new amazing features!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fireattack</author><text>&gt; there is no circumstances where it is beneficial<p>Do we really need to be this hyperbolic? And Steam <i>can</i> auto update games just fine (I even remember it being the default, but not sure.)</text></comment> |
21,128,724 | 21,125,657 | 2 | 3 | 21,124,992 | train | <story><title>Breakthrough in Synthetic Vaccine Technology Requires No Refrigeration</title><url>https://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2019/september/synthetic-vaccine.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>fnord77</author><text>would this work for biologic drugs like remicade, humira and the like that require refrigeration?</text></comment> | <story><title>Breakthrough in Synthetic Vaccine Technology Requires No Refrigeration</title><url>https://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2019/september/synthetic-vaccine.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mabbo</author><text>This is a huge deal.<p>A big issue the anti-vaccine movement latched onto was &quot;they contain mercury!&quot;. Technically true- a compound used as a preservative has some mercury molecules in it. Never mind that it wasn&#x27;t elemental mercury and was perfectly safe to ingest, or that the quantity of mercury was less than is in most fish-based diets.<p>The end result was a lot of third world countries naively banning vaccines containing mercury- meaning that all these vaccines no longer had preservatives that let them survive longer outside of refrigeration. It&#x27;s hard to bring &quot;must stay refrigerated&quot; anything into rural areas in less developed parts of the world (or at least, it&#x27;s a lot more expensive to do it). End result: fewer people vaccinated, and more preventable deaths, higher costs per person saved.<p>This kind of breakthrough, if applicable more widely, could save millions (of both lives and dollars).</text></comment> |
11,009,211 | 11,009,195 | 1 | 3 | 11,008,685 | train | <story><title>How convolutional neural networks see the world</title><url>http://blog.keras.io/how-convolutional-neural-networks-see-the-world.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>fizixer</author><text>Question to deep learning practitioners:<p>Is there any research on comparing the 99.9% confidence about something wrong, to the human weakness of &#x27;optical illusion&#x27;?<p>If you watch a few minutes of this Dan Ariely TED Talk [1], we humans are fooled into near certainty that the table on the left has longer vertical distance that the horizontal distance of that on the right. Even after the speaker shows this is not the case, we still &quot;confidently see&quot; the wrong thing. (not to mention, we suffer from non-optical illusions as well, like cognitive biases, and fallacious reasoning, as shown later in the talk).<p>It seems to me you guys have discovered &#x27;machine optical illusion&#x27;. It&#x27;s just that the machine has illusions about something completely different. I believe exploring the space of architectures&#x2F;weights&#x2F;what-not might lead towards making a machine get into the same kind of optical illusions as the human visual system gets into. At the least, it looks like a very promising research direction to me.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;9X68dm92HVI?t=2m22s" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;9X68dm92HVI?t=2m22s</a></text></comment> | <story><title>How convolutional neural networks see the world</title><url>http://blog.keras.io/how-convolutional-neural-networks-see-the-world.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>cjenken</author><text>What I find interesting is that the auras that I get as a precursor to my migraines don&#x27;t look far off from those images.<p>If you were to take a C shaped slice and overlay it onto video and then animated the color you would pretty much have it.<p>It would be interesting to see if they were connected somehow...</text></comment> |
17,134,215 | 17,132,137 | 1 | 2 | 17,132,058 | train | <story><title>Adobe Photoshop 1.0.1 Source Code (2013)</title><url>http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/adobe-photoshop-source-code/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>todd8</author><text>While at Texas Instruments, around 1976, I was in the group trying to move the company to use a more modern programming language. I had learned Pascal while in grad school by studying Wirth’s compiler source so I was happy to be in this department. We had built a commercial, extended, Pascal that ran on the company’s own hardware, microprocessors though minicomputers.<p>The goal was to move the COBOL, Fortran, JOVIAL, and assembly language programmers in the company to Pascal. My department built the compiler and because I had taught programming in grad school I ended up being one of the evangelists that taught innumerable one week crash courses to the company’s engineers, business programmers, and software people. It was actually a really fun job and I met a large number of people that worked in the company’s various branches.<p>I discovered that there is no better way to learn every facet of something than to teach it, more than once, to grumpy students sceptical of the new fangled concepts.<p>A couple years later I was back in grad school again, still programming in Pascal. It was interesting to realize that most fellow PhD students that go straight through aren’t really good programmers and don’t understand software engineering. (This was a long time ago so it’s probably very different now. CS students own their own computers and are able to program much more than we could.)<p>I remember Pascal fondly like some friends remember their first car. Like cars though, the new languages are really much better (safer, faster, more reliable, etc).</text></comment> | <story><title>Adobe Photoshop 1.0.1 Source Code (2013)</title><url>http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/adobe-photoshop-source-code/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>sdrothrock</author><text>&gt; His brother John, working at the movie visual effects company Industrial Light &amp; Magic, found it useful for editing photos, but it wasn’t intended to be a product.<p>John Knoll is a name that may be familiar to people who stick around after the credits; he was ILM&#x27;s supervisor on Generations and First Contact, all the Star Wars prequels, some Harry Potter movies, as well as some of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. His name comes up a lot in behind-the-scenes interviews etc. with directors about effects.</text></comment> |
26,524,905 | 26,524,270 | 1 | 2 | 26,521,761 | train | <story><title>The Invention of a New Pasta Shape</title><url>https://kottke.org/21/03/the-invention-of-a-new-pasta-shape</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kibwen</author><text>Extrusion is soooo 2032. Here in 2045 we direct nanobots to assemble our 3D-fractal pasta to atomic precision. Look for it under the brand name FractalDente™.</text></item><item><author>MPSimmons</author><text>The year is 2045. 35 percent of humanity&#x27;s GDP is invested in improving pasta technology. The current record-setting pasta is being extruded through a bronze die which had been cast into a void produced by activated charcoal formed around transformer-derived non-euclidean topologies. A one-quarter-inch pasta has three square miles of surface area.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>powvans</author><text>Klein bottle shaped pastas can be constructed and blur the distinction between extruded noodles and filled pastas.<p>Getting hungry thinking about it.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Invention of a New Pasta Shape</title><url>https://kottke.org/21/03/the-invention-of-a-new-pasta-shape</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kibwen</author><text>Extrusion is soooo 2032. Here in 2045 we direct nanobots to assemble our 3D-fractal pasta to atomic precision. Look for it under the brand name FractalDente™.</text></item><item><author>MPSimmons</author><text>The year is 2045. 35 percent of humanity&#x27;s GDP is invested in improving pasta technology. The current record-setting pasta is being extruded through a bronze die which had been cast into a void produced by activated charcoal formed around transformer-derived non-euclidean topologies. A one-quarter-inch pasta has three square miles of surface area.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>afandian</author><text>Not much progress has been made on precise cooking instructions though. The more accurately the cooking time is measured, the longer it takes.</text></comment> |
20,356,395 | 20,354,277 | 1 | 3 | 20,353,824 | train | <story><title>Conflict at Walmart threatens its ecommerce battle with Amazon</title><url>https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/7/3/18716431/walmart-jet-marc-lore-modcloth-amazon-ecommerce-losses-online-sales</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>taneem</author><text>Stories like this are often instigated by someone inside the organization with an agenda. They reach out to a journalist, give some quotes anonymously, and put them in touch with others in the company that are allies and will also give supporting quotes.<p>This article feels like an article designed to pressure Marc Lore to leave.<p>Losing $1B on $22B in revenue, after just 3 years of really starting this bet is nothing!</text></comment> | <story><title>Conflict at Walmart threatens its ecommerce battle with Amazon</title><url>https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/7/3/18716431/walmart-jet-marc-lore-modcloth-amazon-ecommerce-losses-online-sales</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>fredsanford</author><text>Loading walmart.com on most of my machines reminds me of loading image heavy sites in the early &#x27;90s over a 9600bd modem...<p>I am unsure how they reach this &quot;achievement.&quot; I didn&#x27;t think any close to modern website could act like ESPN in loading 32453235 scripts per page...<p>And please... Fix it so I can search for in-store only items.</text></comment> |
20,384,835 | 20,383,851 | 1 | 3 | 20,383,145 | train | <story><title>AMD Zen 2 Microarchitecture Analysis: Ryzen 3000 and EPYC Rome</title><url>https://www.anandtech.com/show/14525/amd-zen-2-microarchitecture-analysis-ryzen-3000-and-epyc-rome</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nvahalik</author><text>After all of the fuss about Intel&#x27;s architecture issues, I&#x27;m really left wondering if AMD is just &quot;totally killing it&quot; and they simply have a superior product due to something like better processes, or if AMD will end up in the same bathwater with Intel at some point with a bunch of flaws exposed.<p>IOW: How is that AMD is now poised to eat Intel&#x27;s lunch? Is it too good to be true?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>psnosignaluk</author><text>Would it be rude to say that AMD didn&#x27;t have any other choice and that they needed to bake rapid iterations in their mainstream chips into their (R)DNA or die? (&lt;- that deserves a downvote!)<p>From my lofty perch in my armchair, I consider that from Intel&#x27;s perspective that Ryzen 1st gen was cute. Ryzen 2nd gen was getting a little closer to home, but still didn&#x27;t really pose a real issue. Ryzen 3rd gen? It just took a giant dump all over Intel in multithreaded workloads up and down the Z390 SKU&#x27;s and took a seriously devastating shot at X299...without AMD&#x27;s 3950X even being available yet. Even where Intel wins, it doesn&#x27;t win by far enough to crow much.<p>The strange new day that dawned on 7&#x2F;7 was a good one. As someone who built his first machine on a K6-2 333Mhz chip and his last on an FX 8350, long may it continue.<p>* The other pleasant surprise this weekend was Navi. Better than expected performance. Surprising reduction in power draw. Nicely priced (thanks Super!). Pity that they still haven&#x27;t gotten over the space heater blower design. Hint guys: it doesn&#x27;t work. Much cooling...little problem.</text></comment> | <story><title>AMD Zen 2 Microarchitecture Analysis: Ryzen 3000 and EPYC Rome</title><url>https://www.anandtech.com/show/14525/amd-zen-2-microarchitecture-analysis-ryzen-3000-and-epyc-rome</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nvahalik</author><text>After all of the fuss about Intel&#x27;s architecture issues, I&#x27;m really left wondering if AMD is just &quot;totally killing it&quot; and they simply have a superior product due to something like better processes, or if AMD will end up in the same bathwater with Intel at some point with a bunch of flaws exposed.<p>IOW: How is that AMD is now poised to eat Intel&#x27;s lunch? Is it too good to be true?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>aiCeivi9</author><text>&gt; Is it too good to be true?<p>It might just not last long enough. Athlon64&#x2F;X2 also totally destroyed Intel but Core architecture arrived before AMD was able to grab more market share.</text></comment> |
39,180,139 | 39,180,033 | 1 | 2 | 39,172,858 | train | <story><title>Why you've never been in a plane crash</title><url>https://asteriskmag.com/issues/05/why-you-ve-never-been-in-a-plane-crash</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>chmod600</author><text><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_...</a><p>TIL that car fatalities were declining until 2019, and then reversed and are getting worse.<p>What happened in the last five years? Safety features of the cars themselves are improving (emergency braking). Alcohol may be a factor, but why in the last five years? Cars have been big for a while. WFH probably reduced commuting time. Other countries appear to be on the decline.</text></item><item><author>nayuki</author><text>Great article. I agree a lot with the safety culture in commercial aviation and the commitment to investigate and fix root causes.<p>Now can we please apply the same standards to car crashes? The same human errors and bad infrastructure keep getting repeated over and over again. And the problems are getting worse, with SUVs and distracted driving on the rise.<p>See <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;fuckcars&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;fuckcars&#x2F;</a> for a community that is sounding the alarm on the insidiousness of car culture. Or see these reasonable urbanists if you think FuckCars is too extreme: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;@OhTheUrbanity&#x2F;videos" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;@OhTheUrbanity&#x2F;videos</a> , <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;@NotJustBikes&#x2F;videos" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;@NotJustBikes&#x2F;videos</a> , <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;@CityNerd&#x2F;videos" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;@CityNerd&#x2F;videos</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>scoofy</author><text>One current theory is speed (citation below).<p>Ironically, heavy traffic is one of the better &quot;safety features&quot; of our automobile transportation system. Since crowded roads are higher-conflict roads, there is a bit of luck in the fact that traffic slows down when it gets crowded. There may be more collisions, but they are less deadly.<p>Suddenly there is a pandemic, and there are orders of magnitude fewer people on the roads. The number of collisions goes down, but the number of deaths goes up, because all of the collisions are at higher, deadlier speeds.<p>---<p><i>Driving Went Down. Fatalities Went Up. Here&#x27;s Why.</i> by Charles Marohn<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.strongtowns.org&#x2F;journal&#x2F;2022&#x2F;1&#x2F;10&#x2F;driving-went-down-fatalities-went-up-heres-why" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.strongtowns.org&#x2F;journal&#x2F;2022&#x2F;1&#x2F;10&#x2F;driving-went-d...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Why you've never been in a plane crash</title><url>https://asteriskmag.com/issues/05/why-you-ve-never-been-in-a-plane-crash</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>chmod600</author><text><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_...</a><p>TIL that car fatalities were declining until 2019, and then reversed and are getting worse.<p>What happened in the last five years? Safety features of the cars themselves are improving (emergency braking). Alcohol may be a factor, but why in the last five years? Cars have been big for a while. WFH probably reduced commuting time. Other countries appear to be on the decline.</text></item><item><author>nayuki</author><text>Great article. I agree a lot with the safety culture in commercial aviation and the commitment to investigate and fix root causes.<p>Now can we please apply the same standards to car crashes? The same human errors and bad infrastructure keep getting repeated over and over again. And the problems are getting worse, with SUVs and distracted driving on the rise.<p>See <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;fuckcars&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;fuckcars&#x2F;</a> for a community that is sounding the alarm on the insidiousness of car culture. Or see these reasonable urbanists if you think FuckCars is too extreme: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;@OhTheUrbanity&#x2F;videos" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;@OhTheUrbanity&#x2F;videos</a> , <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;@NotJustBikes&#x2F;videos" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;@NotJustBikes&#x2F;videos</a> , <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;@CityNerd&#x2F;videos" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;@CityNerd&#x2F;videos</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bostonpete</author><text>&gt; TIL that car fatalities were declining until 2019, and then reversed and are getting worse.<p>Per your link, fatalities per mile drive bottomed out in 2014 and barely dropped after 2010. There&#x27;s been some speculation that this reversal in safety was tied to the rise of smartphones and a corresponding increase of distracted driving.</text></comment> |
24,093,514 | 24,093,160 | 1 | 3 | 24,091,707 | train | <story><title>Ask HN: What feature did you find after years of using macOS?</title><text>For me, it was finding that I can use &quot;Stacks&quot; in Finder to clear desktop. For years, I was irritated with screenshots lying all over my desktop screen but didn&#x27;t have the energy to sort them manually. When I found out Stacks, I was like ...</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>awinder</author><text>I’ve been using windows more recently since my personal Mac bit the dust and I’m trying to decide if there’s really that much reason to own a personal Mac.<p>So now I realize for years I’ve been using this silent feature of macs for years called “not totally jacked up font rendering”. I would never have imagined this was a feature, but apparently there is a collective insanity in windowsland where the quality of font rendering is not just a total and utter failure. So this is my new top Mac feature.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>com2kid</author><text>This is a holy war topic.<p>Some people, myself included, prefer how Windows render fonts. Others prefer MacOS.<p>From what I recall the last time this came up on HN, MacOS tries to render true to the font as if in a professional work flow that ends with a physical product. Windows aims for on screen legibility as it&#x27;s primary goal.<p>Also remember that most Windows machines have a much lower DPI screen that what comes with or is hooked up to a Mac, so what is being optimized for there is also different.<p>Honestly hooked up to my large 1440p screen, MacOS&#x27;s font rendering isn&#x27;t &#x2F;that&#x2F; nice, it becomes a wash vs Windows, and on a 1080p laptop I&#x27;ll take Windows don&#x27;t rendering.</text></comment> | <story><title>Ask HN: What feature did you find after years of using macOS?</title><text>For me, it was finding that I can use &quot;Stacks&quot; in Finder to clear desktop. For years, I was irritated with screenshots lying all over my desktop screen but didn&#x27;t have the energy to sort them manually. When I found out Stacks, I was like ...</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>awinder</author><text>I’ve been using windows more recently since my personal Mac bit the dust and I’m trying to decide if there’s really that much reason to own a personal Mac.<p>So now I realize for years I’ve been using this silent feature of macs for years called “not totally jacked up font rendering”. I would never have imagined this was a feature, but apparently there is a collective insanity in windowsland where the quality of font rendering is not just a total and utter failure. So this is my new top Mac feature.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>madhadron</author><text>My wife spent two years with a Surface Pro running Windows 10, and when it recently croaked we got her a new MacBook Pro. The degree of relief she had is remarkable.</text></comment> |
32,575,007 | 32,574,782 | 1 | 2 | 32,572,753 | train | <story><title>Effects of large vehicles on pedestrian and pedal-cyclist injury severity</title><url>https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0022437522000810</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mc32</author><text>There are three trends: bigger mass, larger sizes and taller vehicles.<p>Which one of the above is the most consequential?<p>I&#x27;m guessing height. at 2500 or 5000 lbs, neither is going to be pleasant when you bang in to it. size maybe there is more surface area to get hit by, but that&#x27;s unlikely to be significant.<p>mass does influence stopping distance though, so that could be, but at the same time we now have large disc brakes with anti-skid.</text></item><item><author>yboris</author><text><i>Exactly</i> on topic: a philosophy paper &quot;<i>Vehicles and Crashes: Why is this Moral Issue Overlooked?</i>&quot; by Douglas Husak. Author argues that because of the high <i>crash incompatibility</i> with other vehicles (and pedestrians), SUV driving is immoral - imposing an oversized amount of harm to others with no proportional safety for self.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jstor.org&#x2F;stable&#x2F;23562447" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jstor.org&#x2F;stable&#x2F;23562447</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>asdff</author><text>Also, shape. Go look at the front end of a car like a ford F150. The hood is flat and sits 4 feet high. Now go look at a more compact car like a prius. The hood is low, and is angled like a wedge smooth into the windshield. When a prius hits you, its liable that you will just roll up and off of it and not get much of the force from the impact as a result. When an F150 hits you with its 4 foot tall wall of a grill straight in your chest, I don&#x27;t think you will be rolling up and over. Maybe your head would just pop off from the kinetic force, sparing you from a slower death?</text></comment> | <story><title>Effects of large vehicles on pedestrian and pedal-cyclist injury severity</title><url>https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0022437522000810</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mc32</author><text>There are three trends: bigger mass, larger sizes and taller vehicles.<p>Which one of the above is the most consequential?<p>I&#x27;m guessing height. at 2500 or 5000 lbs, neither is going to be pleasant when you bang in to it. size maybe there is more surface area to get hit by, but that&#x27;s unlikely to be significant.<p>mass does influence stopping distance though, so that could be, but at the same time we now have large disc brakes with anti-skid.</text></item><item><author>yboris</author><text><i>Exactly</i> on topic: a philosophy paper &quot;<i>Vehicles and Crashes: Why is this Moral Issue Overlooked?</i>&quot; by Douglas Husak. Author argues that because of the high <i>crash incompatibility</i> with other vehicles (and pedestrians), SUV driving is immoral - imposing an oversized amount of harm to others with no proportional safety for self.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jstor.org&#x2F;stable&#x2F;23562447" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jstor.org&#x2F;stable&#x2F;23562447</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wefarrell</author><text>I got into a head on collision with an SUV that came off two wheels while rounding a curve and crossed the yellow divider right into my little car. In that case it was definitely the height that did us in.</text></comment> |
21,108,567 | 21,108,017 | 1 | 2 | 21,107,628 | train | <story><title>A.I. researchers are making more than $1M, even at a nonprofit</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/19/technology/artificial-intelligence-salaries-openai.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>currymj</author><text>Misleading article and headline; a few celebrity researchers in high-up positions make this much. You can probably find some chemists who make $1M too if they have made it to executive positions.<p>Most AI researchers in industry make a lot of money, $200k+, but that is not so outrageous in the context of big tech companies.<p>And in fact the vast majority of AI researchers are making $20k-$30k a year, because they are graduate students.</text></comment> | <story><title>A.I. researchers are making more than $1M, even at a nonprofit</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/19/technology/artificial-intelligence-salaries-openai.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>rm999</author><text>&gt; A third big name in the field, the roboticist Pieter Abbeel, made $425,000, though he did not join until June 2016, after taking a leave from his job as a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Those figures all include signing bonuses.<p>425k after signing bonus is probably closer to 300-350k base + annual bonus, which feels low for someone in such a distinguished position (close to a typical specialized physician or big tech software engineer with 5-10 years of experience). After finishing my masters degree in machine learning in the mid-2000s, I immediately got job offers higher than my much more talented professors. To me, the real story is that academia has set the compensation bar low for people adding so much value.<p>Edit: to be clear I know these salaries are high and people in my field are lucky to be making so much. But I also don’t think it’s accurate that people in the field are overpaid, which titles like OP may make it seem.</text></comment> |
30,701,561 | 30,701,326 | 1 | 3 | 30,700,700 | train | <story><title>Tell HN: Amazon's book search is gamed, keyword-stuffed, and inaccurate</title><text>In short: horrible.<p>I know this won&#x27;t be new to most of you, but I wanted to share an anecdote (and a rant!)<p>I have a friend who has brain cancer. I went to Amazon searching for books on the subject and I typed ‘brain cancer’ in the search (books) field. What did I find?<p><i>Amazon UK</i><p>As you scroll down page 1 of the search results, you find examples of “brain cancer notebook” or “brain cancer journal”. Empty notebooks with nothing to do with the subject.<p><i>Amazon US</i><p>Same search term. The search results were even worse. The “no content” ranked even higher on the first page of search page.<p>Here is a screenshot of the search results for Amazon UK and US: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.postimg.cc&#x2F;JRDkSGRK&#x2F;amazon-book-search.jpg<p>Try an Amazon book search for “Ukraine war” on Amazon UK and US and already the search results are populated with “Ukraine war” blank notebooks seizing the opportunity to profit from war (these blank notebooks are not donating to charities, they are simply seizing on keyword searches).<p>The reason so many of these &quot;no content&quot; notebooks pollute the books category is because of Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) service: a print-on-demand service. It has opened the flood gates to “low content” or “no content” journals and notebooks which allows &quot;creators&quot; publish hundreds of notebook titles. These are simply empty, lined or blank print-on-demand notebooks. Amazon includes these in book search results rather than confine these items to it’s own search category. You can find hundreds of YouTube videos on how to publish “no content” notebooks via KDP and how to game Amazon search results to rank higher.<p>I know Amazon simply doesn’t care, but I had to rant. I might be overreacting by the results I saw and I won’t be offended if you say so :-)</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>pg5</author><text>On a similar note, I&#x27;ve found so many items on Amazon are &quot;review hijacked&quot;. You&#x27;ll see 5 star reviews, but when you look at the actual reviews, they are all for a different product. They sold some simple product with good reviews, then swapped everything out for their new, more expensive product.<p>This was the case for the front page results for S22 screen protectors when I was looking a few weeks ago. It&#x27;s ridiculous that Amazon doesn&#x27;t catch this.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ziml77</author><text>Even legit companies abuse that. Dymo&#x27;s latest label printer models enforce DRM on the paper which is a shitty move on its own. But then what they did on Amazon was swap their model 450 printer to the new model 550 so they would keep all of the good reviews: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=hwggIw2HQuQ" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=hwggIw2HQuQ</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Tell HN: Amazon's book search is gamed, keyword-stuffed, and inaccurate</title><text>In short: horrible.<p>I know this won&#x27;t be new to most of you, but I wanted to share an anecdote (and a rant!)<p>I have a friend who has brain cancer. I went to Amazon searching for books on the subject and I typed ‘brain cancer’ in the search (books) field. What did I find?<p><i>Amazon UK</i><p>As you scroll down page 1 of the search results, you find examples of “brain cancer notebook” or “brain cancer journal”. Empty notebooks with nothing to do with the subject.<p><i>Amazon US</i><p>Same search term. The search results were even worse. The “no content” ranked even higher on the first page of search page.<p>Here is a screenshot of the search results for Amazon UK and US: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.postimg.cc&#x2F;JRDkSGRK&#x2F;amazon-book-search.jpg<p>Try an Amazon book search for “Ukraine war” on Amazon UK and US and already the search results are populated with “Ukraine war” blank notebooks seizing the opportunity to profit from war (these blank notebooks are not donating to charities, they are simply seizing on keyword searches).<p>The reason so many of these &quot;no content&quot; notebooks pollute the books category is because of Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) service: a print-on-demand service. It has opened the flood gates to “low content” or “no content” journals and notebooks which allows &quot;creators&quot; publish hundreds of notebook titles. These are simply empty, lined or blank print-on-demand notebooks. Amazon includes these in book search results rather than confine these items to it’s own search category. You can find hundreds of YouTube videos on how to publish “no content” notebooks via KDP and how to game Amazon search results to rank higher.<p>I know Amazon simply doesn’t care, but I had to rant. I might be overreacting by the results I saw and I won’t be offended if you say so :-)</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>pg5</author><text>On a similar note, I&#x27;ve found so many items on Amazon are &quot;review hijacked&quot;. You&#x27;ll see 5 star reviews, but when you look at the actual reviews, they are all for a different product. They sold some simple product with good reviews, then swapped everything out for their new, more expensive product.<p>This was the case for the front page results for S22 screen protectors when I was looking a few weeks ago. It&#x27;s ridiculous that Amazon doesn&#x27;t catch this.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>chucksta</author><text>I went out of my way once to contact support for this, there is no way to report it directly and got a very strong sense that they intentionally don&#x27;t care</text></comment> |
28,046,646 | 28,046,695 | 1 | 3 | 28,038,603 | train | <story><title>Life before smartphones (2020)</title><url>https://mattruby.substack.com/p/the-most-unbelievable-things-about</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>koolba</author><text>&gt; If someone comes up to me and talks to me, I may not even respond immediately.<p>Maybe I’m too old fashioned, but there’s world of difference between ignoring someone contacting you through an async communication channel like SMS and them literally standing next to you and speaking to your face.</text></item><item><author>hughrr</author><text>My ex wife was like that. One reason she&#x27;s an ex wife. I lost a job due to her once because she phoned the office after I didn&#x27;t respond to an SMS while I was in a very tough meeting with a client.<p>I now have my phone on do not disturb 24&#x2F;7. I will choose when I participate in messaging. I also disable iMessage on my Mac. If someone comes up to me and talks to me, I may not even respond immediately.<p>I took this to extremes and a couple of weekends back I actually went for a day long solo hike with zero technology with me at all past a torch, map, compass and alcohol stove. I didn&#x27;t even have any way of telling the time with me. It was invigorating with the obligation to communicate and steal my attention removed. What was most surprising was the removal of a camera and watch. Rather than being focused on recording my journey and keeping to a schedule I was focused on enjoying it. This has led to considerably more vivid memories and a much higher level of satisfaction. A trip I will always remember.</text></item><item><author>oceanghost</author><text>I wanted to say this. I hate how small the world has become and how we&#x27;re supposed to be &quot;reachable&quot; all the time.<p>Some of my friends will freak out if I don&#x27;t text back in as little as 5 minutes. A particular needy friend once tried to get me to &quot;promise&quot; that I would always return her texts within 10 minutes.<p>I said &quot;hard no&quot; explaining that it meant that it meant that I could never watch a movie uninterrupted, read a book, take a nap, etc. Also, Driving. I don&#x27;t answer texts while I&#x27;m driving because I <i>literally</i> got in an accident texting (it was a freak circumstance, but these things do happen).<p>I have purposefully started training my friends by being erratic with my texts&#x2F;messages&#x2F;e-mails.<p>I have another friend who always calls on his commute home and gets offended when I don&#x27;t answer. The idea alone that someone is obligated to answer the phone is insane. What if I don&#x27;t want to spend an hour shooting the shit with you because I&#x27;m doing something else?<p>I miss the days when I could just walk away from contact.</text></item><item><author>rapnie</author><text>And he doesn&#x27;t even mention that you could just be outside, and be unreachable and not able to reach other people too.<p>As a kid I used to play outside a lot, and my mother had no clue where I was, nor could she easily find out. I could be outside all day without her worrying that I&#x27;d be abducted or involved in an accident.<p>Now that all has <i>completely</i> changed, and my mother has too. Some years ago when I walked into the hallway of my house I coincidentally noticed a lot of people in front of my door. So I opened it, and it was the police that was about to bust the door with a battering ram. As it happened I hadn&#x27;t answered my phone in a couple of hours. After multiple calls unanswered, my mom had called 911 on me. And my doorbell was broken, police didn&#x27;t even knock.. they wanted the action, probably.<p>I was just freaking programming with the deep-work-destroying phone thingy on silence (where it should be most of the time, imho).</text></item><item><author>krylon</author><text>Now I feel old. I remember vividly running around with my first camera, looking for objects worthy of being photographed. The film cost money, so did developing it into pictures. I really had to weigh the pros and cons of taking a particular picture. And in a class of ~25 kids, I was one of three who owned a camera. Not that it was such a luxury item, but most people weren&#x27;t into that.<p>These days, (nearly) everyone carries a camera around all the time, and one that is quite probably much better than the one I had in 1992. They can take dozens, even hundreds of pictures without breaking a sweat, and it does not cost anything.<p>Nostalgia is a very warped mirror. Back then, I did not miss the ability to take dozens of pictures at no cost, because the option did not exist. Was it better? Worse? Neither, I think. But this is the first time I feel old and appreciate it for the history I have lived through. Getting old is weird, but it sure is interesting. (For reference, I&#x27;m 40. &quot;That&#x27;s not <i>old</i>&quot;, I hear someone say, but I have never been this old before, so for me it&#x27;s all new.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pharmakom</author><text>I agree.<p>However, I wish our culture considered it rude to just walk up to someone in the middle of deep work and ask them something - unless it’s really important and time critical. It could be a simple as sending a message first “free for a quick chat?”</text></comment> | <story><title>Life before smartphones (2020)</title><url>https://mattruby.substack.com/p/the-most-unbelievable-things-about</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>koolba</author><text>&gt; If someone comes up to me and talks to me, I may not even respond immediately.<p>Maybe I’m too old fashioned, but there’s world of difference between ignoring someone contacting you through an async communication channel like SMS and them literally standing next to you and speaking to your face.</text></item><item><author>hughrr</author><text>My ex wife was like that. One reason she&#x27;s an ex wife. I lost a job due to her once because she phoned the office after I didn&#x27;t respond to an SMS while I was in a very tough meeting with a client.<p>I now have my phone on do not disturb 24&#x2F;7. I will choose when I participate in messaging. I also disable iMessage on my Mac. If someone comes up to me and talks to me, I may not even respond immediately.<p>I took this to extremes and a couple of weekends back I actually went for a day long solo hike with zero technology with me at all past a torch, map, compass and alcohol stove. I didn&#x27;t even have any way of telling the time with me. It was invigorating with the obligation to communicate and steal my attention removed. What was most surprising was the removal of a camera and watch. Rather than being focused on recording my journey and keeping to a schedule I was focused on enjoying it. This has led to considerably more vivid memories and a much higher level of satisfaction. A trip I will always remember.</text></item><item><author>oceanghost</author><text>I wanted to say this. I hate how small the world has become and how we&#x27;re supposed to be &quot;reachable&quot; all the time.<p>Some of my friends will freak out if I don&#x27;t text back in as little as 5 minutes. A particular needy friend once tried to get me to &quot;promise&quot; that I would always return her texts within 10 minutes.<p>I said &quot;hard no&quot; explaining that it meant that it meant that I could never watch a movie uninterrupted, read a book, take a nap, etc. Also, Driving. I don&#x27;t answer texts while I&#x27;m driving because I <i>literally</i> got in an accident texting (it was a freak circumstance, but these things do happen).<p>I have purposefully started training my friends by being erratic with my texts&#x2F;messages&#x2F;e-mails.<p>I have another friend who always calls on his commute home and gets offended when I don&#x27;t answer. The idea alone that someone is obligated to answer the phone is insane. What if I don&#x27;t want to spend an hour shooting the shit with you because I&#x27;m doing something else?<p>I miss the days when I could just walk away from contact.</text></item><item><author>rapnie</author><text>And he doesn&#x27;t even mention that you could just be outside, and be unreachable and not able to reach other people too.<p>As a kid I used to play outside a lot, and my mother had no clue where I was, nor could she easily find out. I could be outside all day without her worrying that I&#x27;d be abducted or involved in an accident.<p>Now that all has <i>completely</i> changed, and my mother has too. Some years ago when I walked into the hallway of my house I coincidentally noticed a lot of people in front of my door. So I opened it, and it was the police that was about to bust the door with a battering ram. As it happened I hadn&#x27;t answered my phone in a couple of hours. After multiple calls unanswered, my mom had called 911 on me. And my doorbell was broken, police didn&#x27;t even knock.. they wanted the action, probably.<p>I was just freaking programming with the deep-work-destroying phone thingy on silence (where it should be most of the time, imho).</text></item><item><author>krylon</author><text>Now I feel old. I remember vividly running around with my first camera, looking for objects worthy of being photographed. The film cost money, so did developing it into pictures. I really had to weigh the pros and cons of taking a particular picture. And in a class of ~25 kids, I was one of three who owned a camera. Not that it was such a luxury item, but most people weren&#x27;t into that.<p>These days, (nearly) everyone carries a camera around all the time, and one that is quite probably much better than the one I had in 1992. They can take dozens, even hundreds of pictures without breaking a sweat, and it does not cost anything.<p>Nostalgia is a very warped mirror. Back then, I did not miss the ability to take dozens of pictures at no cost, because the option did not exist. Was it better? Worse? Neither, I think. But this is the first time I feel old and appreciate it for the history I have lived through. Getting old is weird, but it sure is interesting. (For reference, I&#x27;m 40. &quot;That&#x27;s not <i>old</i>&quot;, I hear someone say, but I have never been this old before, so for me it&#x27;s all new.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hughrr</author><text>I should have been more explicit but it does indeed depend on the context. If I’m in the middle of something I will acknowledge the person and defer the question until I’m done politely. But I won’t drop everything and context for ad-hoc stuff.</text></comment> |
40,665,558 | 40,665,450 | 1 | 2 | 40,664,339 | train | <story><title>How Meta trains large language models at scale</title><url>https://engineering.fb.com/2024/06/12/data-infrastructure/training-large-language-models-at-scale-meta/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dudus</author><text>&gt; Since we did not have time to change the cooling infrastructure, we had to remain in an air-cooled environment. The mechanical and thermal designs had to change to accommodate this, and that triggered a validation cycle to support a large-scale deployment.<p>&gt; All of these hardware-related changes were challenging because we had to find a solution that fit within the existing resource constraints, with a very small degree of freedom to change and meet a tight schedule.<p>Seems like the time constraints put into the team impacted the overall quality of the model.</text></comment> | <story><title>How Meta trains large language models at scale</title><url>https://engineering.fb.com/2024/06/12/data-infrastructure/training-large-language-models-at-scale-meta/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>xvector</author><text>&gt; So we decided to build both: two 24k clusters, one with RoCE and another with InfiniBand. Our intent was to build and learn from the operational experience.<p>I love how they built two completely insane clusters just to learn. That&#x27;s badass.</text></comment> |
24,855,798 | 24,855,769 | 1 | 3 | 24,855,453 | train | <story><title>GitHub Certifications (Beta)</title><url>https://github.com/certifications</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>breakingcups</author><text>Ugh, this has Microsoft&#x27;s playbook written all over it. Introduce a certification, thus increasing the gap between developers who (had their employee) pay Microsoft and developers that didn&#x27;t. Conflate a generic concept (Git in this case) with Microsoft&#x27;s specific implementation (Github), muddying the difference in managers&#x27; lexicons. Attempt to set Github as a standard to reach in everyone&#x27;s mind.<p>I mean there&#x27;s a certificaiton, so it has to be something we shouldn&#x27;t miss out on, right?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>DaiPlusPlus</author><text>&gt; Introduce a certification, thus increasing the gap between developers who (had their employee) pay Microsoft and developers that didn&#x27;t.<p>Did anyone ever take Microsoft&#x27;s &quot;Microsoft Certified Application Developer&quot; or &quot;Microsoft Certified Solutions Architect&quot; titles seriously?<p>I was still in high-school when I heard about it. I asked some SWE friends of mine who told me that they didn&#x27;t take it seriously due to the wide prevalence of _brain dumps_ all over the Internet. A few said having it on your resume may actually <i>hurt</i> their careers or job-seeking because potential employers who were on-the-ball took a dim view of them because they were so easy to obtain, so and automatically assumed anyone who advertised the fact they had one when they already had a degree in CS and&#x2F;or good industrial experience at the very least had misplaced priorities (so I guess if you have it as a single line-item on your resume in 9pt text buried at the bottom that&#x27;s okay, just don&#x27;t make it a heading).<p>What&#x27;s amusing to me is that after working at Microsoft in Redmond for a few years at the start of my career as an FTE SE in DevDiv - I didn&#x27;t know anyone who had such a certificate. If no-one needed one to work <i>at</i> Microsoft on the very tools these certificates are for, what&#x27;s the point?</text></comment> | <story><title>GitHub Certifications (Beta)</title><url>https://github.com/certifications</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>breakingcups</author><text>Ugh, this has Microsoft&#x27;s playbook written all over it. Introduce a certification, thus increasing the gap between developers who (had their employee) pay Microsoft and developers that didn&#x27;t. Conflate a generic concept (Git in this case) with Microsoft&#x27;s specific implementation (Github), muddying the difference in managers&#x27; lexicons. Attempt to set Github as a standard to reach in everyone&#x27;s mind.<p>I mean there&#x27;s a certificaiton, so it has to be something we shouldn&#x27;t miss out on, right?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>m12k</author><text>Thank god most of the non-corporate software industry regards certifications as a way to pad a non-impressive resume and not something actually valuable.</text></comment> |
23,740,657 | 23,740,477 | 1 | 3 | 23,739,596 | train | <story><title>The Wrong Abstraction (2016)</title><url>https://www.sandimetz.com/blog/2016/1/20/the-wrong-abstraction</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>captainmuon</author><text>So much this. I&#x27;ve encountered many codebases (in science and in tech) where the coder did not even use basic abstractions. In one case there was a lot of<p><pre><code> plot(&#x27;graph1&#x27;)
plot(&#x27;graph2&#x27;)
....
plot(&#x27;graph100&#x27;)
</code></pre>
because somebody didn&#x27;t know how to create strings at runtime in C++. Another codebase did complex vector calculations in components, I was able to reduce a 500 lines function to 50 lines (including comments, and with bugs fixed).<p>I can sympathize with this a bit, I started programming with BASIC - you could not return structs, you could not use indirect variables (no pointers&#x2F;references)... but at least you had the FOR loop :-P<p>People get often called out for over abstracting (rightly so), but I&#x27;ve rarely seen somebody critisized for copypasta or for overly stupid code. Probably because we&#x27;re too accidentially afraid to imply somebody can&#x27;t code.</text></item><item><author>Pxtl</author><text>Every Line Of Business codebase I&#x27;ve worked on has been the worst &quot;there I fixed it&quot; copypasta spaghetti, and has never made it to the point where &quot;maybe we shouldn&#x27;t add a parameter to this existing, cleanly abstracted method to handle this new similar-but-distinct use-case&quot; was anywhere near my radar for abstraction.<p>I would <i>love</i> to have developers where my problem was &quot;maybe you piggybacked on existing code <i>too much</i>, in this case you should&#x27;ve split out your own function&quot;.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>toastal</author><text>This comes up very often and is probably a big part of the distaste many people have for jQuery. You see so much copypasta $(selector) that queries the entire DOM over and over again instead of storing the intial query in a selector, querying children based on a ParentNode, etc.. This duplication is wasteful at best, and can hurt performance at worst.<p>But as others noted, this is usually the sign that the creator is either green, or puts little focus in furthering their programming because they normally do other things--not malice or carelessness.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Wrong Abstraction (2016)</title><url>https://www.sandimetz.com/blog/2016/1/20/the-wrong-abstraction</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>captainmuon</author><text>So much this. I&#x27;ve encountered many codebases (in science and in tech) where the coder did not even use basic abstractions. In one case there was a lot of<p><pre><code> plot(&#x27;graph1&#x27;)
plot(&#x27;graph2&#x27;)
....
plot(&#x27;graph100&#x27;)
</code></pre>
because somebody didn&#x27;t know how to create strings at runtime in C++. Another codebase did complex vector calculations in components, I was able to reduce a 500 lines function to 50 lines (including comments, and with bugs fixed).<p>I can sympathize with this a bit, I started programming with BASIC - you could not return structs, you could not use indirect variables (no pointers&#x2F;references)... but at least you had the FOR loop :-P<p>People get often called out for over abstracting (rightly so), but I&#x27;ve rarely seen somebody critisized for copypasta or for overly stupid code. Probably because we&#x27;re too accidentially afraid to imply somebody can&#x27;t code.</text></item><item><author>Pxtl</author><text>Every Line Of Business codebase I&#x27;ve worked on has been the worst &quot;there I fixed it&quot; copypasta spaghetti, and has never made it to the point where &quot;maybe we shouldn&#x27;t add a parameter to this existing, cleanly abstracted method to handle this new similar-but-distinct use-case&quot; was anywhere near my radar for abstraction.<p>I would <i>love</i> to have developers where my problem was &quot;maybe you piggybacked on existing code <i>too much</i>, in this case you should&#x27;ve split out your own function&quot;.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>alephnil</author><text>Code like you describe is of often the result when a program is written by someone that does not have programming as their main profession. I have seen code like you describe in code written by scientists (in other disciplines than computer science).<p>They may have very deep knowledge in their field, and have written a program so solve some problem they have, but are unfortunately not very good programmers. This often results in quite naive code that still try to solve an advanced problem.<p>In code written by professional programmers, I have seen the pattern described in the article far more often than the naive style you describe. After all, programmers are trained to avoid duplication and finding abstractions, and will often add one abstraction too much rather than one too little.</text></comment> |
5,084,330 | 5,084,283 | 1 | 2 | 5,083,891 | train | <story><title>We expect too much of geeks</title><url>http://threads2.scripting.com/2013/january/weExpectTooMuchOfGeeks</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>rodh</author><text>This article hits a nerve for me.<p>There's in particular a sentence right at the start. "If you're young and think you're hot shit, and there's some reason to believe you are, you can go far, very quickly."<p>When I think back at my time prior to going to University, I really did think this way. And I had reason to. Even during my time at University, that feeling never escaped me.<p>Once I entered full-time employment (almost by accident. I had started my own limited company at this point), my attitude changed completely. I was surrounded by so many people so unbelievably more clever than me, I was humbled. It wasn't just their abilities, but their "maturity".<p>Now I cringe to think of my attitude as little as 5 years ago. And I think I have reason to. Where I used to take pride in "fixing your 6-month problem in 4 days", I now realise I failed on a lot of aspects. I am now much more focused on doing things <i>right</i>. I focus on listening and understanding, on being tolerant and empathetic. I measure my work in quality, maintainability, measurable evidence. Every day I try my hardest to learn and to be a pioneer.<p>I do think this is a positive improvement. But when I come across an article like this one, and recall my youthful naivety and enthusiasm, I do worry if I haven't perhaps lost something more important.</text></comment> | <story><title>We expect too much of geeks</title><url>http://threads2.scripting.com/2013/january/weExpectTooMuchOfGeeks</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>swombat</author><text><i>When young people risk it all, it would be nice if there were people who understood what they're going through, who could offer some perspective. Even better, if there was an oldtimer around when the world is telling you you're a god and can do no wrong, to tell you that's bullshit, to kick you in the butt, in a friendly way, tell you you're a mortal human being, and you need to understand that life has its ups and downs, and you're going to be around for a long time, and this is just the beginning, part of the learning process, and while it looks like everything is great now, or falling apart, or whatever emotion is driving you at this moment, let's go for a walk, get a burger, see a movie and hang out for a bit, watch a game, and notice all the other stuff that's going on.</i><p>This seems appropriate: <a href="http://www.kipling.org.uk/poems_if.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.kipling.org.uk/poems_if.htm</a></text></comment> |
6,676,810 | 6,676,799 | 1 | 2 | 6,676,075 | train | <story><title>Nexus 5 Teardown</title><url>http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Nexus+5+Teardown/19016</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pearjuice</author><text>Can anyone shed light on why the battery cannot be replaced like back in the day with (smart)phones? This is a real deal breaker for me, especially with the very limited battery life you would at least expect that it would be easily replaceable. I don&#x27;t mind carrying an extra battery pack with me. At all.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ChikkaChiChi</author><text>It&#x27;s a thinness issue.<p>If you want a removable battery you have to build a clip or latch system to allow the battery to be removable as well as a component shielding so that grubby little fingers don&#x27;t go in there gumming up the works. Finally, a removable battery will have different receptors on it to allow it to be more easily swapped by laymen as opposed to a ribbon cable which takes a bit more finesse.<p>You CAN replace the battery in these units..you just have to be better at your job than your grandmother replacing her cordless phone battery.</text></comment> | <story><title>Nexus 5 Teardown</title><url>http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Nexus+5+Teardown/19016</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pearjuice</author><text>Can anyone shed light on why the battery cannot be replaced like back in the day with (smart)phones? This is a real deal breaker for me, especially with the very limited battery life you would at least expect that it would be easily replaceable. I don&#x27;t mind carrying an extra battery pack with me. At all.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>clarky07</author><text>I find these comments interesting. I see them all the time, yet I have never had any battery issues with my iPhone. (that being said, my wife does tend to run hers down sometimes)<p>Perhaps I just don&#x27;t look at facebook and instagram enough on my phone, but I never have issues under normal conditions. I&#x27;d say I usually have &gt; 50% left at the end of the day, and I very rarely get under 20%.</text></comment> |
14,122,275 | 14,122,210 | 1 | 2 | 14,121,815 | train | <story><title>Ex-Professor Says Dismissed Racketeering Case Is Still ‘Devastating’</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/09/business/joy-laskar-georgia-tech-racketeering-case.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>srtjstjsj</author><text>The original story explains how this was likely a jealous colleague at GT, who called in the state guns to get revenge. The prosecutor&#x27;s extreme delay and then &quot;accidentally&quot; losing the case on a &quot;miscalculation&quot; of statue of limitations was because they had no case and were too embarrassed to admit it.<p>If there were justice here, charges would be brought against whoever in the university demanded this malicious false prosecution.</text></comment> | <story><title>Ex-Professor Says Dismissed Racketeering Case Is Still ‘Devastating’</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/09/business/joy-laskar-georgia-tech-racketeering-case.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>rl3</author><text>&gt;<i>For one thing, a state grand jury didn’t indict him on racketeering charges until late December 2014, more than four and a half years after the raids on Dr. Laskar’s home and office in May 2010.</i><p>The delay in indictment aside, it appears they&#x27;ve been holding his personal devices hostage for nearly seven years now.<p>&gt;<i>He had previously remained silent to avoid antagonizing prosecutors, who still hold family items with sentimental value, like a laptop with the only copies of childhood photographs of Dr. Laskar’s three daughters and an unfinished novel by his wife.</i><p>Theoretically, not speaking up offers the prosecutors more incentive to retain possession, especially if they know that&#x27;s the reason for the silence.<p>Device seizure without prompt imaging and return of the hardware is bullshit in all but the most grievous cases (e.g. terrorism).<p>While many people who have been through extended litigation or criminal proceedings just want it to end, it seems like this guy was railroaded pretty hard.<p>Does he have cause to sue the state, university, or both?</text></comment> |
27,811,840 | 27,812,179 | 1 | 2 | 27,810,019 | train | <story><title>My business might have 32 days before it's shut down by NYC [video]</title><url>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oDjSoic9Zk</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>toomuchtodo</author><text>&gt; And people wonder why there is staunch support for less government involvement. At least when I get screwed over by a private company I can talk to someone...so long as it&#x27;s not Google.<p>I don&#x27;t bother wondering why people are ignorant anymore, some things just are. You get a vote simply by existing as a citizen and can put effort into changing government. Businesses can tell you to pound sand unless you&#x27;re a shareholder or management. Government can be held accountable (caveats such as Venezuela and Somalia aside), businesses less so.</text></item><item><author>MeinBlutIstBlau</author><text>And people wonder why there is staunch support for less government involvement. At least when I get screwed over by a private company I can talk to someone...so long as it&#x27;s not Google.</text></item><item><author>toomuchtodo</author><text>If you have a moment, please call the IRS&#x27; Customer Advocacy Department to file a complaint regarding this. Gotta be the squeaky wheel.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.irs.gov&#x2F;advocate&#x2F;the-taxpayer-advocate-service-is-your-voice-at-the-irs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.irs.gov&#x2F;advocate&#x2F;the-taxpayer-advocate-service-i...</a></text></item><item><author>ta1234567890</author><text>&gt; c) You can&#x27;t show up in person without an appointment.<p>&gt; d) Appointments are only granted by means of contact that don&#x27;t reply.<p>Similar thing happened to me recently with the IRS. Got a notice about them needing to verify my identity and gave me a number to call. Had been calling for months and would always get a message saying they were too busy and to try the following day. After trying a few other options to no avail, I decided to show up at my local IRS office without an appointment (which I couldn’t get anyway). They first turned me down, then told me that maybe if I waited for a few hours they might be able to see me at the end of the day, then after about 20min and them clearly not being busy, they talked to me and was able to resolve the issue within 15min.<p>So, even though I was told I couldn’t show up without an appointment, and they tried turning me down, just by being there they finally paid attention to me. Yes, it was uncomfortable and annoying to have to do that, but it worked.</text></item><item><author>dt3ft</author><text>Here is a summary from the Louis Rossmann YT comment:<p><i>To answer some common questions:<p>a) I have already emailed &amp; called, and I patiently await a reply...<p>b) You can&#x27;t re-renew with a 13 month old PIN if you already renewed.<p>c) You can&#x27;t show up in person without an appointment.<p>d) Appointments are only granted by means of contact that don&#x27;t reply.<p>e) Yes I have two other licenses that AREN&#x27;T expired, but those are useless, they are for selling laptops, not fixing laptops, which I don&#x27;t do anymore anyway after the city was unable to give me a straight answer on how to do so without being fined: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=yi8_9WGk3Ok" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=yi8_9WGk3Ok</a> - I need this license in the video to be able to actually do repairs.<p>f) Just listen to this. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=yi8_9WGk3Ok" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=yi8_9WGk3Ok</a> This is what I am dealing with. After 15+ minutes and being transferred to two people, they can&#x27;t answer a basic question about a rule they fined me for breaking that they can&#x27;t even explain. They never emailed or called me back, which has been the behavior I have come to expect over the past nine years.<p>I am serious, if you work for the city and have any way of applying my 13 month old payment to this license renewal, you have the gratitude of myself &amp; 14 of my employees who will get to continue paying their rents, mortgages, &amp; food bill for their kids.<p>In spite of what people think, I am not a millionaire. If I&#x27;m forced to close - I can&#x27;t afford to pay these people. I do not want that to happen.<p>I am not meming, I never get responses to DCA emails - not 3 months ago, not for NINE YEARS, and I don&#x27;t expect to be able to now. Since I cannot sort this out in person due to the COVID closures, this channel is my only hope of reaching someone who can help me sort this out.</i></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jvanderbot</author><text>Boiling this down to biz vs gov is a false dichotomy.<p>There&#x27;s some fundamental &quot;usability&quot; spectrum aligned with &quot;optional-ness&quot; vs &quot;mandatory-ness&quot;. Equifax, Experian, Trans Union, etc have some of the worst customer service of all time. They make egregious errors and are not held accountable. My experiences with the DMV (another semi-mandatory service) pale in comparison with those 3 companies.<p>Of all the bad experiences I&#x27;ve had, it almost always comes down to &quot;Do I have other options and how easy is it to opt-out?&quot;. The harder it is to opt-out, the worse my experience has been.</text></comment> | <story><title>My business might have 32 days before it's shut down by NYC [video]</title><url>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oDjSoic9Zk</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>toomuchtodo</author><text>&gt; And people wonder why there is staunch support for less government involvement. At least when I get screwed over by a private company I can talk to someone...so long as it&#x27;s not Google.<p>I don&#x27;t bother wondering why people are ignorant anymore, some things just are. You get a vote simply by existing as a citizen and can put effort into changing government. Businesses can tell you to pound sand unless you&#x27;re a shareholder or management. Government can be held accountable (caveats such as Venezuela and Somalia aside), businesses less so.</text></item><item><author>MeinBlutIstBlau</author><text>And people wonder why there is staunch support for less government involvement. At least when I get screwed over by a private company I can talk to someone...so long as it&#x27;s not Google.</text></item><item><author>toomuchtodo</author><text>If you have a moment, please call the IRS&#x27; Customer Advocacy Department to file a complaint regarding this. Gotta be the squeaky wheel.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.irs.gov&#x2F;advocate&#x2F;the-taxpayer-advocate-service-is-your-voice-at-the-irs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.irs.gov&#x2F;advocate&#x2F;the-taxpayer-advocate-service-i...</a></text></item><item><author>ta1234567890</author><text>&gt; c) You can&#x27;t show up in person without an appointment.<p>&gt; d) Appointments are only granted by means of contact that don&#x27;t reply.<p>Similar thing happened to me recently with the IRS. Got a notice about them needing to verify my identity and gave me a number to call. Had been calling for months and would always get a message saying they were too busy and to try the following day. After trying a few other options to no avail, I decided to show up at my local IRS office without an appointment (which I couldn’t get anyway). They first turned me down, then told me that maybe if I waited for a few hours they might be able to see me at the end of the day, then after about 20min and them clearly not being busy, they talked to me and was able to resolve the issue within 15min.<p>So, even though I was told I couldn’t show up without an appointment, and they tried turning me down, just by being there they finally paid attention to me. Yes, it was uncomfortable and annoying to have to do that, but it worked.</text></item><item><author>dt3ft</author><text>Here is a summary from the Louis Rossmann YT comment:<p><i>To answer some common questions:<p>a) I have already emailed &amp; called, and I patiently await a reply...<p>b) You can&#x27;t re-renew with a 13 month old PIN if you already renewed.<p>c) You can&#x27;t show up in person without an appointment.<p>d) Appointments are only granted by means of contact that don&#x27;t reply.<p>e) Yes I have two other licenses that AREN&#x27;T expired, but those are useless, they are for selling laptops, not fixing laptops, which I don&#x27;t do anymore anyway after the city was unable to give me a straight answer on how to do so without being fined: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=yi8_9WGk3Ok" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=yi8_9WGk3Ok</a> - I need this license in the video to be able to actually do repairs.<p>f) Just listen to this. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=yi8_9WGk3Ok" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=yi8_9WGk3Ok</a> This is what I am dealing with. After 15+ minutes and being transferred to two people, they can&#x27;t answer a basic question about a rule they fined me for breaking that they can&#x27;t even explain. They never emailed or called me back, which has been the behavior I have come to expect over the past nine years.<p>I am serious, if you work for the city and have any way of applying my 13 month old payment to this license renewal, you have the gratitude of myself &amp; 14 of my employees who will get to continue paying their rents, mortgages, &amp; food bill for their kids.<p>In spite of what people think, I am not a millionaire. If I&#x27;m forced to close - I can&#x27;t afford to pay these people. I do not want that to happen.<p>I am not meming, I never get responses to DCA emails - not 3 months ago, not for NINE YEARS, and I don&#x27;t expect to be able to now. Since I cannot sort this out in person due to the COVID closures, this channel is my only hope of reaching someone who can help me sort this out.</i></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>autokad</author><text>&gt; &quot;Government can be held accountable&quot;<p>LOL. I remember when the city of Philadelphia flooded my house because they were doing some work on a neighboring structure. COP&#x27;s response &quot;We have a law that says the City of Philadelphia cannot be held accountable or sued for their actions&quot;. As Mel Brooks once put it, &quot;its good to be the King&quot;.</text></comment> |
12,082,903 | 12,081,502 | 1 | 2 | 12,079,824 | train | <story><title>Intro to modern hardware prototyping</title><url>http://obogason.com/modern_hardware_prototyping/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>krapht</author><text>Eh, Eagle in this day in age? If you&#x27;re going cheap, I&#x27;d stick with KiCAD. It&#x27;s unintuitive, like GIMP vs Photoshop, but gets the job done with no restrictions on functionality. I&#x27;ve also heard decent things about CircuitMaker, but never used it.<p>If you have any academic links at all though, or don&#x27;t mind piracy, I&#x27;d grab a student edition of Altium Designer. Solidworks too if you can get it for mechanical modeling. If you ever make it big, these are the tools you want to learn and know how to use. You don&#x27;t mention anything about a good debugger - this is crucial! If you work with ARM the Segger JLink is the gold standard.<p>Also you should probably mention where to get cheap stencils, like Osh Stencils etc. With all the cheap parts going to extra small packages, stencils are a godsend. Or, just have your prototype made in China at any of the small board-houses - quite cheap as well compared to the time you might spend doing board assembly.<p>Just my quick 2c.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>akiselev</author><text>I&#x27;m very much against software piracy but if you&#x27;re starting out in electrical engineering, you are doing an absolute disservice by not using a pirated version of Altium. Not only is it basically the industry standard (Cadence, Orcad, etc are mostly propped up by legacy clients, especially in aerospace and defence) but its interface and features are leaps and bounds beyond anything else. Pretty much all ECAD software is a naive port of the pen and paper schematic design process to mouse and keyboard (it&#x27;s still called &quot;schematic capture&quot; in contrast to &quot;PCB design&quot;) but Altium has moved far beyond that, especially with the introduction of cloud features in the last five years (like an online repository for user and vendor created footprints). The field of electrical engineering has been extremely averse to the ideas of open source but for many reasons, Altium&#x27;s online resources among them, that is finally starting to change. Eagle does have a large community with companies like Sparkfun and Adafruit but those pale in comparison to the community forming around Altium, which is made up of a large number of vendors and professionals who are starting to grasp the benefits of sharing data.<p>Considering how much the package costs and how much Altium benefits from the growing community, I honestly don&#x27;t think they&#x27;d mind if you pirated the software a few years before you could afford it.</text></comment> | <story><title>Intro to modern hardware prototyping</title><url>http://obogason.com/modern_hardware_prototyping/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>krapht</author><text>Eh, Eagle in this day in age? If you&#x27;re going cheap, I&#x27;d stick with KiCAD. It&#x27;s unintuitive, like GIMP vs Photoshop, but gets the job done with no restrictions on functionality. I&#x27;ve also heard decent things about CircuitMaker, but never used it.<p>If you have any academic links at all though, or don&#x27;t mind piracy, I&#x27;d grab a student edition of Altium Designer. Solidworks too if you can get it for mechanical modeling. If you ever make it big, these are the tools you want to learn and know how to use. You don&#x27;t mention anything about a good debugger - this is crucial! If you work with ARM the Segger JLink is the gold standard.<p>Also you should probably mention where to get cheap stencils, like Osh Stencils etc. With all the cheap parts going to extra small packages, stencils are a godsend. Or, just have your prototype made in China at any of the small board-houses - quite cheap as well compared to the time you might spend doing board assembly.<p>Just my quick 2c.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wgj</author><text>The team at CERN has made big improvements to KiCad, including the push and shove router: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=CCG4daPvuVI" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=CCG4daPvuVI</a><p>Another good reason to think about KiCad is if you care about open formats (vs. Altium for example.) CERN&#x27;s own statement [1]: &quot;We think that KiCad can do to PCB design what the gcc compiler did to software: ensure there are no artificial barriers to sharing so that design and development knowledge can flow more freely.&quot;<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ohwr.org&#x2F;projects&#x2F;cern-kicad&#x2F;wiki" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ohwr.org&#x2F;projects&#x2F;cern-kicad&#x2F;wiki</a></text></comment> |
8,004,117 | 8,004,088 | 1 | 2 | 8,003,929 | train | <story><title>DuckDuckGo Regex Search</title><url>https://duckduckgo.com/?q=regex+%2F%28%3Fx%3A+%28%5Cw%2B%29+%5Cs+%28%5Cw%2B%29+%29%2F+hacker+news</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dedosk</author><text>Google does not implement regex search support because they said somewhere that the data storage needed for the index would be huge. And since regex search is used only by a small subset of users, it is not worth the effort.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mike-cardwell</author><text>This does not do what you think it does. It takes a regular expression and an input and applies that regular expression to that input. It doesn&#x27;t search the web using the regex.</text></comment> | <story><title>DuckDuckGo Regex Search</title><url>https://duckduckgo.com/?q=regex+%2F%28%3Fx%3A+%28%5Cw%2B%29+%5Cs+%28%5Cw%2B%29+%29%2F+hacker+news</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dedosk</author><text>Google does not implement regex search support because they said somewhere that the data storage needed for the index would be huge. And since regex search is used only by a small subset of users, it is not worth the effort.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>przemoc</author><text>IIRC &quot;security&quot; plays important role here too, because using regexps you can much easier find sensitive data, or to be precise: context (neighborhood) of sensitive data.</text></comment> |
25,744,418 | 25,744,456 | 1 | 3 | 25,743,726 | train | <story><title>Parler social network sues Amazon for pulling support</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-55615214</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>meerita</author><text>I refuse to believe they&#x27;ve got banned because of the lack of user management features. In fact, the existence of very crazy people on the platform shouldn&#x27;t be a platform problem, you can always let know authorities about any danger, report and ban users. If we apply the same rules for everyone, Amazon and Apple should be banning Twitter too, because you can see dozens of messages everyday of people death threatening others, in fact, you can still read old messages of politics inciting rioting, reporters doxxing other reporters, etc. and nothing happened since.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>namuol</author><text>The difference is that Twitter and Facebook make a real effort to police violent or otherwise dangerous communications on their platforms. Parler was literally created as a safe haven for stuff that gets you banned on other platforms.</text></comment> | <story><title>Parler social network sues Amazon for pulling support</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-55615214</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>meerita</author><text>I refuse to believe they&#x27;ve got banned because of the lack of user management features. In fact, the existence of very crazy people on the platform shouldn&#x27;t be a platform problem, you can always let know authorities about any danger, report and ban users. If we apply the same rules for everyone, Amazon and Apple should be banning Twitter too, because you can see dozens of messages everyday of people death threatening others, in fact, you can still read old messages of politics inciting rioting, reporters doxxing other reporters, etc. and nothing happened since.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dstick</author><text>&gt; I refuse to believe they&#x27;ve got banned because of the lack of user management features.<p>&gt; you can always let know authorities about any danger, report and ban users<p>One contradicts the other? They didn&#x27;t do #2, so #1 happened.</text></comment> |
40,367,943 | 40,368,199 | 1 | 3 | 40,366,962 | train | <story><title>The Worst Website in the Entire World</title><url>https://matduggan.com/the-worst-website-in-the-entire-world/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>airstrike</author><text>I would think management can&#x27;t be that adamant about not letting users copy-and-paste... I would also think front end folks should try saying &quot;no&quot; to at least some of those silly requests</text></item><item><author>fkyoureadthedoc</author><text>&gt; Hey front-end folks, just a quick note. Never ever ever ever ever mess with my browser. It&#x27;s not yours, it&#x27;s mine. I&#x27;m letting you use it for free to render your bloated sites.<p>As if any front end developer came up with this. Anyone who has ever had job in the industry knows this is straight from management.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kbolino</author><text>Large corporate&#x2F;government IT lives on another plane of existence. Rules are made in some far-flung office and enforced through edicts that can&#x27;t be challenged, partly because nobody knows exactly who created them, partly because nobody wants to stand out, and partly because yes-men surround the upper levels of management.<p>Anyway, somebody somewhere about a decade ago seems to have injected into the heads of such rule-makers that users who paste their password confirmations defeat the purpose of the confirmation mechanism, which was leading to excess support requests for forgotten passwords. So, therefore, pasting into the confirmation box (or even better, both boxes) should be disabled.<p>Never mind that password rules have gotten more complex, that allowing users to temporarily preview their passwords instead is now recommended, or that the use of password managers and online password resets means even if the original concern were valid, it&#x27;s now moot. The rule exists, and so it must be followed.<p>At some point these corporations do lurch forward (or die), so eventually this will get changed, but it&#x27;ll happen way slower than it should.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Worst Website in the Entire World</title><url>https://matduggan.com/the-worst-website-in-the-entire-world/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>airstrike</author><text>I would think management can&#x27;t be that adamant about not letting users copy-and-paste... I would also think front end folks should try saying &quot;no&quot; to at least some of those silly requests</text></item><item><author>fkyoureadthedoc</author><text>&gt; Hey front-end folks, just a quick note. Never ever ever ever ever mess with my browser. It&#x27;s not yours, it&#x27;s mine. I&#x27;m letting you use it for free to render your bloated sites.<p>As if any front end developer came up with this. Anyone who has ever had job in the industry knows this is straight from management.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>duxup</author><text>I do some front end work. I push back on things and win some battles re-directing them, but ultimately if the client pays to do a stupid thing, they get the stupid thing. It is their website, not mine.</text></comment> |
10,885,398 | 10,884,213 | 1 | 2 | 10,884,011 | train | <story><title>Introduction to Statistical Learning, with Applications in R</title><url>https://lagunita.stanford.edu/courses/HumanitiesSciences/StatLearning/Winter2016/about</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>cs702</author><text>The lecturers here, Hastie and Tibshirani, are also the authors of the classic text book, &quot;Introduction to Statistical Learning,&quot; probably the best introduction to machine&#x2F;statistical learning I have ever read.[1]<p>I highly recommend the book and this online course, both of which are FREE.<p>Hastie and Tibshirani&#x27;s other book, &quot;The Elements of Statistical Learning,&quot; is also excellent but far more theoretical, and best for experienced practicioners who want to use it as a reference guide.[2]<p>--<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www-bcf.usc.edu&#x2F;~gareth&#x2F;ISL&#x2F;ISLR%20Sixth%20Printing.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www-bcf.usc.edu&#x2F;~gareth&#x2F;ISL&#x2F;ISLR%20Sixth%20Printing.p...</a>
[2] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;statweb.stanford.edu&#x2F;~tibs&#x2F;ElemStatLearn&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;statweb.stanford.edu&#x2F;~tibs&#x2F;ElemStatLearn&#x2F;</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Introduction to Statistical Learning, with Applications in R</title><url>https://lagunita.stanford.edu/courses/HumanitiesSciences/StatLearning/Winter2016/about</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>washedup</author><text>Very helpful course, I highly recommend it. If nothing else, get a copy of the book:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www-bcf.usc.edu&#x2F;~gareth&#x2F;ISL&#x2F;ISLR%20Fourth%20Printing.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www-bcf.usc.edu&#x2F;~gareth&#x2F;ISL&#x2F;ISLR%20Fourth%20Printing....</a><p>Even though the book is introductory material, it explains everything with great clarity. I have yet to find a better resource for someone wanting to get into data science. The theoretical material side-by-side with coded examples is very powerful (although the labs could use some work). Even if you have been using data science for a while, this is a great refresher on theoretical concepts.</text></comment> |
21,634,797 | 21,634,439 | 1 | 2 | 21,630,459 | train | <story><title>React Table is a “headless” UI library</title><url>https://github.com/tannerlinsley/react-table/blob/master/docs/concepts.md</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>outsidetheparty</author><text>I&#x27;m very curious how do people feel about the &quot;headless component&quot; UI strategy? First came across the concept at a conference recently -- React Table was one of the key examples the speaker gave, in fact -- and I find the idea intriguing, but I&#x27;m not quite sure yet whether I want to subscribe to the newsletter.<p>Is it a useful way to separate look-and-feel concerns from functional concerns, or is it just another layer of indirection?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>johnsoft</author><text>I&#x27;m a fan. It&#x27;s so refreshing to have all the HTML and CSS in your own codebase, under your control, instead of reading through a list of 50 sparsely-documented props only to realize that none of them quite do what you need.<p>Another example of this pattern is `downshift`, which is a headless autocomplete library: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;downshift-js&#x2F;downshift" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;downshift-js&#x2F;downshift</a><p>I would love to see a datepicker component that used this design. I have some choice words for the various datepicker libs I&#x27;ve used over my career and none of them are friendly.</text></comment> | <story><title>React Table is a “headless” UI library</title><url>https://github.com/tannerlinsley/react-table/blob/master/docs/concepts.md</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>outsidetheparty</author><text>I&#x27;m very curious how do people feel about the &quot;headless component&quot; UI strategy? First came across the concept at a conference recently -- React Table was one of the key examples the speaker gave, in fact -- and I find the idea intriguing, but I&#x27;m not quite sure yet whether I want to subscribe to the newsletter.<p>Is it a useful way to separate look-and-feel concerns from functional concerns, or is it just another layer of indirection?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>BigJono</author><text>I&#x27;ve never used one, but it sounds like a great idea. 3rd party React components are a huge pain in the ass to work with. People do all sorts of bullshit like re-implement half of CSS in their component&#x27;s API and half the time it&#x27;s easier to just build the fucking thing yourself than learn all the arbitrary rules around customisation the author has conjured up.<p>The best reusable components are the ones that have exactly one look, which you&#x27;re fine with, and are just plug in and go.<p>None of that is a problem with the logic behind the component though, just the display. So for something complex that has a bunch of logic behind it, it&#x27;s a real nice idea to just be able to reuse that logic and whack some html and css over the top of it instead of having to read some 6 page doc every time you want to increase the width of a border or something.</text></comment> |
27,498,470 | 27,494,425 | 1 | 2 | 27,493,945 | train | <story><title>Forget going back to the office – people are just quitting instead</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/forget-going-back-to-the-officepeople-are-just-quitting-instead-11623576602</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>PragmaticPulp</author><text>By “quitting” they mostly mean getting new jobs or career changes. Not necessarily refusing to work in an office. The headline is misleading.<p>It’s also still a relatively small number in absolute terms:<p>&gt; In April, the share of U.S. workers leaving jobs was 2.7%, according to the Labor Department, a jump from 1.6% a year earlier to the highest level since at least 2000.<p>The higher turnover is expected in a booming economy like the one we’re in.<p>These articles with hyperbolic headlines and underwhelming actual data are very common right now. It feels like the journalists want us to believe some sort of revolution is happening, be it WFH or remote work or people quitting in droves. I’m beginning to think the reality is mostly a boring return to pre-pandemic normalcy, though, given how hard these articles are teaching for something noteworthy to share.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>durovo</author><text>What people miss in these discussions about going full remote is that the market for software developers is very good right now but this won&#x27;t last forever. Many companies are surely going to embrace full-remote once they have built up the right processes and infra.<p>When that happens, it is not going to matter whether you live in California or Mexico or Brazil. It is much easier to replace an employee who is working remotely, the burden of looking for employees in the locality of your office is gone. Wages will stop growing. While WFH is very convenient, the strong market is giving developers a false impression that they won&#x27;t become replaceable cogs in the future.</text></comment> | <story><title>Forget going back to the office – people are just quitting instead</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/forget-going-back-to-the-officepeople-are-just-quitting-instead-11623576602</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>PragmaticPulp</author><text>By “quitting” they mostly mean getting new jobs or career changes. Not necessarily refusing to work in an office. The headline is misleading.<p>It’s also still a relatively small number in absolute terms:<p>&gt; In April, the share of U.S. workers leaving jobs was 2.7%, according to the Labor Department, a jump from 1.6% a year earlier to the highest level since at least 2000.<p>The higher turnover is expected in a booming economy like the one we’re in.<p>These articles with hyperbolic headlines and underwhelming actual data are very common right now. It feels like the journalists want us to believe some sort of revolution is happening, be it WFH or remote work or people quitting in droves. I’m beginning to think the reality is mostly a boring return to pre-pandemic normalcy, though, given how hard these articles are teaching for something noteworthy to share.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>repsilat</author><text>&gt;&gt; <i>It’s also still a relatively small number in absolute terms:</i><p>&gt; <i>In April, the share of U.S. workers leaving jobs was 2.7%, according to the Labor Department, a jump from 1.6% a year earlier to the highest level since at least 2000.</i><p>If those are monthly figures they are roughly going from &quot;quit once every five years&quot; to once every three. It&#x27;s a pretty big change, I think. Positive, IMO -- mobility is healthy for the economy.</text></comment> |
15,921,618 | 15,921,395 | 1 | 3 | 15,920,618 | train | <story><title>How the US Pushed Sweden to Take Down the Pirate Bay</title><url>https://torrentfreak.com/how-the-us-pushed-sweden-to-take-down-the-pirate-bay-171212/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ckastner</author><text>It never ceases to amaze me how much influence the MPAA has.<p>Movies, while extremely popular, don&#x27;t generate <i>that</i> much money: in 2016, total box office results in the US were under $12bn [1]. That&#x27;s <i>the entire industry</i>.<p>Apple alone makes that much money in three weeks&#x27; time.<p>Amazing, that you can apply such pressure to politics, with so little.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.statista.com&#x2F;statistics&#x2F;187069&#x2F;north-american-box-office-gross-revenue-since-1980&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.statista.com&#x2F;statistics&#x2F;187069&#x2F;north-american-bo...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>astura</author><text>American box office results are far from the only source of revenue for movies. Their is foreign box office, DVD&#x2F;Blueray sales, digital sales, digital rentals, streaming fees, and broadcast fees.<p>In Blockbuster&#x27;s heyday their revenue <i>alone</i> surpassed American box office sales.</text></comment> | <story><title>How the US Pushed Sweden to Take Down the Pirate Bay</title><url>https://torrentfreak.com/how-the-us-pushed-sweden-to-take-down-the-pirate-bay-171212/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ckastner</author><text>It never ceases to amaze me how much influence the MPAA has.<p>Movies, while extremely popular, don&#x27;t generate <i>that</i> much money: in 2016, total box office results in the US were under $12bn [1]. That&#x27;s <i>the entire industry</i>.<p>Apple alone makes that much money in three weeks&#x27; time.<p>Amazing, that you can apply such pressure to politics, with so little.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.statista.com&#x2F;statistics&#x2F;187069&#x2F;north-american-box-office-gross-revenue-since-1980&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.statista.com&#x2F;statistics&#x2F;187069&#x2F;north-american-bo...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>digi_owl</author><text>It&#x27;s because so few care about copyright. It is seen as something dry and stodgy that only affect artists and their publishers&#x2F;labels.<p>This perhaps because once the cassette recorder, never mind the VCR, came to be, most nations on the western side of the wall decided to not go full police state and thus added a &quot;friends and family&quot; clause to their copyright laws.<p>This meant that a person could create a copy, if it was meant for a direct friend or a relative. This avoided having to park a copyright cop in every home in the nation.<p>Never mind that producing analog copies from tape to tape cause of a noticeable loss of content with each generation removed from the original.<p>But the computer, never mind the internet, changed all that. It made mass copying not something that required massive machinery in a warehouse, but something every kid could do in their own home. Especially as bandwidth and storage capacity kept improving at a massive rate.<p>And digital copies do not degrade like an analog one does.</text></comment> |
10,365,597 | 10,365,094 | 1 | 3 | 10,364,197 | train | <story><title>Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/10/technology/twitter-expected-to-begin-layoffs-and-stop-headquarters-expansion.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>petercooper</author><text>I mostly agree, but the scale of what Twitter is doing technically is <i>very</i> different.<p>Network size is not as important as how messages are distributed within it. Whereas most WhatsApp messages are one to one, on Twitter they&#x27;re almost always one-to-very-many.<p>If 10000 Twitter users with 1000 followers each send a tweet, that&#x27;s 10000000 messages hitting queues. 10000 WhatsApp users sending a single message each are likely to result in 10000-20000 messages (sometimes people have group conversations).</text></item><item><author>amix</author><text>I think the general market could learn a thing or two from WhatsApp: 55 people powering a platform used by 800 million _active_ users across many different platforms. And WhatsApp has innovated, e.g. the new video and calling system works very well.<p>I have often wondered what thousands of Twitter employees are doing all day long? Their platform and apps have been stale for a long time.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>paulsutter</author><text>Number of employees doesn&#x27;t scale up with the number of messages hitting queues.<p>No those acres of employees at Twitter are showing each other powerpoint presentations, ordering lunch for each other, and subdividing again and again tiny slivers of functionality into more and more product management teams, none of whom have sufficient authority to make any material improvement to the product.</text></comment> | <story><title>Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/10/technology/twitter-expected-to-begin-layoffs-and-stop-headquarters-expansion.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>petercooper</author><text>I mostly agree, but the scale of what Twitter is doing technically is <i>very</i> different.<p>Network size is not as important as how messages are distributed within it. Whereas most WhatsApp messages are one to one, on Twitter they&#x27;re almost always one-to-very-many.<p>If 10000 Twitter users with 1000 followers each send a tweet, that&#x27;s 10000000 messages hitting queues. 10000 WhatsApp users sending a single message each are likely to result in 10000-20000 messages (sometimes people have group conversations).</text></item><item><author>amix</author><text>I think the general market could learn a thing or two from WhatsApp: 55 people powering a platform used by 800 million _active_ users across many different platforms. And WhatsApp has innovated, e.g. the new video and calling system works very well.<p>I have often wondered what thousands of Twitter employees are doing all day long? Their platform and apps have been stale for a long time.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>x1024</author><text>Perhaps <i>that</i> is the lesson to be learned? That technology with limits... scales?<p>If you want to &quot;do social&quot;, do it for small groups. Nobody <i>really</i> has 40 000 friends, so why bother with the use-case that is literally only used by advertising companies?</text></comment> |
36,125,489 | 36,125,445 | 1 | 2 | 36,125,048 | train | <story><title>Nvidia is now a $1T company</title><url>https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/30/23742123/nvidia-stock-ai-gpu-1-trillion-market-cap-price-value</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>malpanim</author><text>Why TSMC is having such a low PE. Aren&#x27;t they are the one producing all these chips other than Intel?</text></item><item><author>alberth</author><text>Wow, 213x P&#x2F;E ratio.<p>To put this into context with other large tech companies:<p><pre><code> P&#x2F;E MARKET CAP
Salesforce 1,036x $0.2T
AMD 519x $0.2T
NVIDIA 213x $1.0T
Amazon 293x $1.25T
Microsoft 35x $2.4T
Meta&#x2F;FB 33x $0.7T
Apple 30x $2.7T
Google 27x $1.5T
TSMC 16x $0.4T
Samsung 10x $0.3T
</code></pre>
EDIT: &quot;P&#x2F;E&quot; ratio is the Market Cap &quot;Price&quot; &#x2F; Earnings the company generates. E.g. Samsung is generating $30B in earnings (not revenue, earnings), investors are valuing Samsung to be a $300B company. That means investors see Samsung is worth 10x P&#x2F;E</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dghlsakjg</author><text>The very real possibility of them being the prize in a war between superpowers has to figure into that price…</text></comment> | <story><title>Nvidia is now a $1T company</title><url>https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/30/23742123/nvidia-stock-ai-gpu-1-trillion-market-cap-price-value</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>malpanim</author><text>Why TSMC is having such a low PE. Aren&#x27;t they are the one producing all these chips other than Intel?</text></item><item><author>alberth</author><text>Wow, 213x P&#x2F;E ratio.<p>To put this into context with other large tech companies:<p><pre><code> P&#x2F;E MARKET CAP
Salesforce 1,036x $0.2T
AMD 519x $0.2T
NVIDIA 213x $1.0T
Amazon 293x $1.25T
Microsoft 35x $2.4T
Meta&#x2F;FB 33x $0.7T
Apple 30x $2.7T
Google 27x $1.5T
TSMC 16x $0.4T
Samsung 10x $0.3T
</code></pre>
EDIT: &quot;P&#x2F;E&quot; ratio is the Market Cap &quot;Price&quot; &#x2F; Earnings the company generates. E.g. Samsung is generating $30B in earnings (not revenue, earnings), investors are valuing Samsung to be a $300B company. That means investors see Samsung is worth 10x P&#x2F;E</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mgh2</author><text>Ppl are so easily manipulated by media and hype. TSMC has low margins and probably bc they are not involved in the application side</text></comment> |
23,042,972 | 23,039,734 | 1 | 3 | 23,039,348 | train | <story><title>Modern and Cross Platform Stack for WebRTC</title><url>https://github.com/pion</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>gfodor</author><text>Whenever these threads pop up I always ask: is there an erlang&#x2F;elixir implementation anyone knows about? I check every couple of months and come up empty (there is one closed source one.) Being able to speak WebRTC natively to a Elixir&#x2F;Phoenix cluster would be a pretty killer app, but the hurdle to get there is quite high.</text></comment> | <story><title>Modern and Cross Platform Stack for WebRTC</title><url>https://github.com/pion</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>valera_rozuvan</author><text>Some signaling strategies for WebRTC:<p>- WebSockets<p>- XHR and other Comet options<p>- SIP over WebSockets<p>- XMPP&#x2F;Jingle<p>- WebRTC&#x27;s Data Channel<p>Obviously, one would want the data channel (last option). There&#x27;s some work done in this area. However, it&#x27;s still not full featured.</text></comment> |
22,101,444 | 22,099,109 | 1 | 3 | 22,098,808 | train | <story><title>LastPass stores passwords so securely, not even its users can access them</title><url>https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/01/20/lastpass_outage/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>filipn</author><text>So glad I switched to 1Password, haven&#x27;t had an issue since. They provide an easy transfer of your passwords from LastPass, you can just follow their guide and be done in 5 minutes: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.1password.com&#x2F;import-lastpass&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.1password.com&#x2F;import-lastpass&#x2F;</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>deepspace</author><text>I was a longtime LastPass customer, but the service just kept getting worse and worse, to the point where a year ago I realized I was spending more time fighting the user interface than it was saving me. And their support was absolutely useless.<p>So I also switched over to 1Password, and never looked back. It is such a refreshing and trouble free experience compared to LP, and the few times I needed to ask a question, their support team got right back to me with the correct answer the first time.</text></comment> | <story><title>LastPass stores passwords so securely, not even its users can access them</title><url>https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/01/20/lastpass_outage/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>filipn</author><text>So glad I switched to 1Password, haven&#x27;t had an issue since. They provide an easy transfer of your passwords from LastPass, you can just follow their guide and be done in 5 minutes: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.1password.com&#x2F;import-lastpass&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.1password.com&#x2F;import-lastpass&#x2F;</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jwineinger</author><text>Same. I switched after their thanksgiving 2018 outage and haven&#x27;t looked back. Just about everything about 1Password is better than LastPass.</text></comment> |
41,085,043 | 41,084,430 | 1 | 3 | 41,081,021 | train | <story><title>Zen 5's 2-ahead branch predictor: how a 30 year old idea allows for new tricks</title><url>https://chipsandcheese.com/2024/07/26/zen-5s-2-ahead-branch-predictor-unit-how-30-year-old-idea-allows-for-new-tricks/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>IvanAchlaqullah</author><text>It&#x27;s always interesting to see decades old papers, sometimes published with little to no fanfares, suddenly becomes &quot;state of the art&quot; because hardware have become powerful enough.<p>For example Z-buffers[1]. It&#x27;s used by 3d video games. When it&#x27;s first published on paper, it&#x27;s not even the main topic of the paper, just some side notes because it requires expensive amount of memory to run.<p>Turn out megabytes is quite cheap few decades latter, and every realtime 3d renderer ended up using it.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Z-buffering" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Z-buffering</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>abainbridge</author><text>Another example is Low Density Parity Check Codes [1]. Discovered in 1962 by Robert Gallager but abandoned and forgotten about for decades due to being computationally impractical. It looks like there was a 38 year gap in the literature until rediscovered by David MacKay [2].<p>The first mainstream use was in 2003. It is now used in WiFi, Ethernet and 5G.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Low-density_parity-check_code" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Low-density_parity-check_code</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;scholar.google.com&#x2F;scholar?q=%22low+density+parity+check+codes%22&amp;hl=en&amp;as_sdt=0%2C5&amp;as_ylo=1960&amp;as_yhi=1999" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;scholar.google.com&#x2F;scholar?q=%22low+density+parity+c...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Zen 5's 2-ahead branch predictor: how a 30 year old idea allows for new tricks</title><url>https://chipsandcheese.com/2024/07/26/zen-5s-2-ahead-branch-predictor-unit-how-30-year-old-idea-allows-for-new-tricks/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>IvanAchlaqullah</author><text>It&#x27;s always interesting to see decades old papers, sometimes published with little to no fanfares, suddenly becomes &quot;state of the art&quot; because hardware have become powerful enough.<p>For example Z-buffers[1]. It&#x27;s used by 3d video games. When it&#x27;s first published on paper, it&#x27;s not even the main topic of the paper, just some side notes because it requires expensive amount of memory to run.<p>Turn out megabytes is quite cheap few decades latter, and every realtime 3d renderer ended up using it.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Z-buffering" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Z-buffering</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>The_Colonel</author><text>&gt; suddenly becomes &quot;state of the art&quot; because hardware have become powerful enough.<p>I&#x27;d rather say that we were capable of such a design for several decades, but only now the set of trade-offs currently in-place made this attractive. Single core performance was stifled in the last 2 decades by prioritizing horizontal scaling (more cores), thus the complexity &#x2F; die area of each individual core became a concern. I imagine if this trend did not take place for some reason, and the CPU designers primarily pursued single core performance, we&#x27;d see implementation much sooner.<p>Regarding the Z-buffer, I kind of get that this would appear as a side note, it&#x27;s a simple concept. Perhaps even better example is ray tracing - the concept is even quite obvious to people without 3D graphics background, but it was just impractical (for real-time rendering) in terms of performance until recently. What I find interesting is that we haven&#x27;t found a simpler approach to approximate true to life rendering and need to fallback on this old, sort of naive (and expensive) solution.</text></comment> |
31,251,080 | 31,250,977 | 1 | 3 | 31,250,666 | train | <story><title>IQ Test Made by Mensa Norway</title><url>https://test.mensa.no/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>spywaregorilla</author><text>Got bored by question 9. Hit finish.<p>&gt; Your IQ lies outside the area that the test is able to measure.<p>You&#x27;re god damn right. But aside... No, that&#x27;s definitely not the correct conclusion from an incomplete testing dataset.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jerf</author><text>I&#x27;ve seen Mensa put out &quot;tests&quot; that aren&#x27;t actually that difficult for marketing purposes. (I can&#x27;t speak to their actual tests.) I recall a Mensa book in my elementary school library proclaiming that if you could solve even one puzzle in the book, you were smart enough to join Mensa! I believe it was officially from Mensa, but it&#x27;s been a while and I may not remember correctly.<p>I passed. I could solve many of them.<p><i>Oh, jerf, bragging about how you could join Mensa is like the canonical example of boorishness.</i><p>Yes, well, just about everyone I handed the book to &quot;passed&quot; as well, so... let&#x27;s just say this isn&#x27;t the strutbrag it may initially sound like. I did not attend school at Lake Wobegon where all the children were above average. It was an average school of average children. Either by an amazing coincidence we were all smart enough to join Mensa even so, or Mensa was sandbagging just a wee bit. You do the math, as the saying goes.</text></comment> | <story><title>IQ Test Made by Mensa Norway</title><url>https://test.mensa.no/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>spywaregorilla</author><text>Got bored by question 9. Hit finish.<p>&gt; Your IQ lies outside the area that the test is able to measure.<p>You&#x27;re god damn right. But aside... No, that&#x27;s definitely not the correct conclusion from an incomplete testing dataset.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>opdahl</author><text>&gt; <i>For the results to be as valid as possible, make sure that the room you sit in is properly ventilated and free from distractions and that you can work uninterrupted for 25 minutes.</i><p>Sounds to me that you have issues understanding directions so I think your result might be very much valid!</text></comment> |
24,085,003 | 24,084,924 | 1 | 2 | 24,084,373 | train | <story><title>Apple says game streaming services violate App Store policies</title><url>https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-explains-why-xbox-game-pass-is-not-on-iphone-2020-8</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mimsee</author><text>&gt; Basically, Apple wants to be able to review every game that graces an iPhone’s screen, even if it’s streamed from a game server somewhere in the cloud.<p>Really wondering how Apple can think they need to have that much power. How can they let me, a simple-minded iPhone user use the web browser without checking every website so that the sites don&#x27;t violate Apple&#x27;s policies. How do they allow 3rd party web browsers. They display loads of questionable content, too.<p>And actually, I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;d be too far off. Like what Google has their Safe Browsing list containing links to malware sites, Apple could create their own Apple Internet List, and demand through App Store policies that all browsers implement it or else.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nostromo</author><text>How does YouTube and Netflix get approved since Apple can’t verify every video on their platform, including videos that have yet to be published?<p>This reasoning is beyond absurd.</text></comment> | <story><title>Apple says game streaming services violate App Store policies</title><url>https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-explains-why-xbox-game-pass-is-not-on-iphone-2020-8</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mimsee</author><text>&gt; Basically, Apple wants to be able to review every game that graces an iPhone’s screen, even if it’s streamed from a game server somewhere in the cloud.<p>Really wondering how Apple can think they need to have that much power. How can they let me, a simple-minded iPhone user use the web browser without checking every website so that the sites don&#x27;t violate Apple&#x27;s policies. How do they allow 3rd party web browsers. They display loads of questionable content, too.<p>And actually, I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;d be too far off. Like what Google has their Safe Browsing list containing links to malware sites, Apple could create their own Apple Internet List, and demand through App Store policies that all browsers implement it or else.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>blihp</author><text>Need has nothing to do with it. They&#x27;re identifying ways in which people are making money off of the platform and demanding a cut. This is what companies do unless there is competition and&#x2F;or regulation.</text></comment> |
8,499,975 | 8,497,480 | 1 | 3 | 8,497,303 | train | <story><title>Bitcoin over Tor isn't a good idea</title><url>http://arxiv.org/abs/1410.6079</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>chatmasta</author><text>I researched TorCoin. I feel like I know a fair amount
about Tor and BitCoin.<p>What worries me most about Tor is that people do not
realize how trivially an exit relay can MITM your traffic.
The value proposition of Tor is NOT keeping all your traffic
safe. It&#x27;s <i>anonymizing</i> your traffic from end to end, so
that nobody who sees your data knows both where it came from
and where it&#x27;s going. They can still see the data itself.<p>For all intents and purposes, traffic from Exit -&gt; Internet
is plaintext. The relay operator can MITM it. Tor is only
safer than a VPN or proxy because the exit relay does not
know your <i>identity</i>. It can still access the data you
transfer through it. [4]<p>Anyone can start a Tor exit relay, and setting up a MITM
proxy on it is trivial. Siphoning bitcoin transactions
is equally trivial. Just listen for the proper traffic patterns.<p>You should not be transferring any business-critical
data over Tor. It&#x27;s a great tool for protecting your
identity, but not your data.<p>With HTTPS, you&#x27;re relatively safer, since you&#x27;ll get
an alert if a relay is MITM&#x27;ing you and modifying the
certificate. But with plain HTTP, you won&#x27;t even
know when you&#x27;re getting MITM&#x27;d.<p>More Resources:<p>[1] <a href="http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/34804/how-safe-is-tor-from-mitm-snooping-attacks" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;security.stackexchange.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;34804&#x2F;how-safe-i...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://blog.torproject.org/category/tags/mitm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.torproject.org&#x2F;category&#x2F;tags&#x2F;mitm</a> (includes links to research papers)<p>[3] <a href="https://www.petsymposium.org/2014/papers/Winter.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.petsymposium.org&#x2F;2014&#x2F;papers&#x2F;Winter.pdf</a><p>[4] Emphasis on &quot;for all intents and purposes.&quot; Not a true
statement universally.</text></comment> | <story><title>Bitcoin over Tor isn't a good idea</title><url>http://arxiv.org/abs/1410.6079</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>s_q_b</author><text>Tor and Bitcoin hide fundamentally <i>different things</i> in their pseudonymity specs. It&#x27;s like people think Tor is magic anonymity peanut butter they can spread on whichever project they wish.</text></comment> |
22,088,260 | 22,087,810 | 1 | 3 | 22,087,093 | train | <story><title>Algorithm for Drawing Trees</title><url>https://rachel53461.wordpress.com/2014/04/20/algorithm-for-drawing-trees/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>slavik81</author><text>&gt; I recently wanted to take a hierarchy of items and draw them in a nice tree structure. For example, a Family Tree.<p>In general, a family tree is a directed acyclic graph. Branches of the tree will always join back together if you follow the history far enough.<p>The number of ancestors in a generation is 2^N, with N being the number of generations back you&#x27;re looking. There were only 100 billion people that ever lived, so by the time you get about a thousand years back, it becomes literally impossible for all your ancestors to appear only once.<p>Of course, that&#x27;s just an easy upper bound to make the point that becoming a graph is unavoidable. In practice, branches will come together a lot sooner than that.</text></comment> | <story><title>Algorithm for Drawing Trees</title><url>https://rachel53461.wordpress.com/2014/04/20/algorithm-for-drawing-trees/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tejtm</author><text>Was thinking was going to get some nice L-system eye candy
[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;L-system" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;L-system</a></text></comment> |
20,882,580 | 20,882,609 | 1 | 2 | 20,874,795 | train | <story><title>Drone Bubble Bursts, Wiping Out Startups and Hammering VC Firms</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-30/drone-bubble-bursts-wiping-out-startups-and-hammering-vc-firms</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tylerchilds</author><text>Anecdotally, I never got into drones because of the batteries. Everyone I met that had them absolutely loved them, but had like 4 batteries they needed to keep charged for about 15 minutes of flight time.<p>And quite a few tried pushing that a little too long an ended up with crashed drones. So my half cent is that batteries need to get better before people like me even consider them. Mentioned 0 times in that article.<p>Alternatively, drones need to get efficient enough to be solar powered, which is maybe the intent behind the acquisitions by PrecisionHawk Inc.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.precisionhawk.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;media&#x2F;topic&#x2F;precisionhawk-acquires-both-hazon-inc-and-inspectools-inc-becoming-the-leading-provider-of-drone-technology-and-analytics-for-the-energy-market" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.precisionhawk.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;media&#x2F;topic&#x2F;precisionhawk...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ghaff</author><text>Even more generally, when I&#x27;ve thought about getting a drone, I imagine flying it around my house a few times, take some video, and then what?<p>I don&#x27;t really want to take it out into nature environments. That seems obnoxious where it&#x27;s even allowed.<p>I suppose I could find clubs that fiddle with the things but I don&#x27;t really have the interest.<p>So, basically, I have trouble imagining how I&#x27;d use them for more than a couple days.</text></comment> | <story><title>Drone Bubble Bursts, Wiping Out Startups and Hammering VC Firms</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-30/drone-bubble-bursts-wiping-out-startups-and-hammering-vc-firms</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tylerchilds</author><text>Anecdotally, I never got into drones because of the batteries. Everyone I met that had them absolutely loved them, but had like 4 batteries they needed to keep charged for about 15 minutes of flight time.<p>And quite a few tried pushing that a little too long an ended up with crashed drones. So my half cent is that batteries need to get better before people like me even consider them. Mentioned 0 times in that article.<p>Alternatively, drones need to get efficient enough to be solar powered, which is maybe the intent behind the acquisitions by PrecisionHawk Inc.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.precisionhawk.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;media&#x2F;topic&#x2F;precisionhawk-acquires-both-hazon-inc-and-inspectools-inc-becoming-the-leading-provider-of-drone-technology-and-analytics-for-the-energy-market" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.precisionhawk.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;media&#x2F;topic&#x2F;precisionhawk...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>driverdan</author><text>It depends on how you use them. I travel full time so I primarily use mine for nature photography. 15 min is usually plenty of time and if not I have a 2nd battery that takes no time to swap. It would be nice to have longer battery life but it&#x27;s not a deal breaker.<p>The only cases where needing more time would be a big deal would be for filming something that lasts longer than the battery.</text></comment> |
5,653,582 | 5,653,610 | 1 | 2 | 5,653,429 | train | <story><title>Help Kiera with her legal bills</title><url>https://www.crowdtilt.com/campaigns/help-keira-with-her-legal-bills-she-was-expelled-and-charged-with-felony-after-a-harmless-science-mistake/description</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>greghinch</author><text>To all the people who are towing the "this was inappropriate/unsafe behavior and she deserves her punishment" line, fine, but at most a suspension from school would seem fitting. Expulsion and 2 felony counts is ridiculous. Ruining a young girls life because of a mistake in which no one was hurt, whether she should have known or not, is not the answer.</text></comment> | <story><title>Help Kiera with her legal bills</title><url>https://www.crowdtilt.com/campaigns/help-keira-with-her-legal-bills-she-was-expelled-and-charged-with-felony-after-a-harmless-science-mistake/description</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>btilly</author><text>I thought of this with the Aaron Schwartz case. This makes me think of it again.<p>I'd love it if there was a service named something like Karma. When something like this happens, I could register a name, a reason, and a frequency. With no more than that frequency I'll be sent information on stories involving that name, with my reason attached.<p>The idea is that in a case like this I could search, find that the prosecutor in the case is "Tammy Glotfelty", and until I lost interest in the case would get updated on what she's doing. That way if she ever, for instance, ran for election I could be reminded, and know that it is time to donate to her opponent in said race.</text></comment> |
24,502,083 | 24,499,138 | 1 | 2 | 24,495,046 | train | <story><title>433% Keyboard</title><url>https://relivesight.com/projects/433/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>EForEndeavour</author><text>That reminds me, I consider losing arrow keys a dealbreaker. I use them frequently enough to navigate both text and code in various contexts (except in Vim, which I don&#x27;t use exclusively). I already hold modifiers to jump to next&#x2F;prev word boundary, page, start&#x2F;end of continuous data ranges in Excel, etc. Admittedly, I&#x27;d probably adapt, but I&#x27;m held back by the belief that any ergonomic advantages of moving to wasd or hjkl would be wiped out by reduction in speed and muscle memory for me.</text></item><item><author>sascha_sl</author><text>You can keep the normal layout on a 40%, you just wouldn&#x27;t have number&#x2F;function&#x2F;nav keys without layers<p>40% is <i>not</i> just plank, and I personally find the ergonomics of a plank board to be rather bad compared to staggered, unless it&#x27;s split.</text></item><item><author>EForEndeavour</author><text>What sort of WPM did you have on normal keyboards, and whta have you been able to train up to on your current one? I plateaued at roughly 35 WPM on Dvorak as a teenager and have been hesitant to commit to major layout changes since then, despite the ergonomic promises that a lot of them make.</text></item><item><author>readingnews</author><text>I am not OP, but I moved to a 40% (44 key minivan) about a year ago, and I am using it as my daily driver at home and work. I find that the fact that I can reach every key on the board and barely move my hands has helped a lot. The other interesting notation is that I can put the mouse really, really close by. So the motion going from keyboard to mouse is greatly reduced. I find that my wrists are much better off with this.</text></item><item><author>codezero</author><text>Is it an Atreus? How do you like that size of keyboard? I&#x27;m not too bothered about adopting some chords, but more interested in the general ergonomics &#x2F; RSI risks.</text></item><item><author>autocorr</author><text>For some context, this project was basically made to one up someone else, so it&#x27;s not fully serious. Part of what makes the keyboard funny though is that (a niche of) the custom mechanical keyboard scene has been moving to many fewer keys and programming the firmware to compensate. So it&#x27;s pretty funny going from seeing several Planck ~49 key layouts to seeing this gargantuan <i>450</i> key absolute unit.<p>Sincerely typed by someone on a 44 key layout :)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Symbiote</author><text>I had similar misgivings, so I chose an ErgoDash, which has a few more keys than some of the minimalist offerings. I have the arrow keys in a horizontal row (which took some time to adapt to), but I can still use them with Alt&#x2F;Ctrl&#x2F;Shift modifiers fairly easily.<p>However, I&#x27;m planning on making something like this[1] &quot;trackball Dactyl Manuform&quot;, where the trackball under the thumb can be configured to use different modes -- e.g. a key toggles it between being a mouse and being arrow keys, and another locks it to vertical&#x2F;horizontal. It could be combined with holding Alt&#x2F;Ctrl&#x2F;Shift.<p>I made a gallery of split&#x2F;ergonomic mechanical keyboards if you&#x27;d like a quick overview of other options. [2]<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@kincade&#x2F;track-beast-build-log-a-trackball-dactyl-manuform-19eaa0880222" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@kincade&#x2F;track-beast-build-log-a-trackbal...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aposymbiont.github.io&#x2F;split-keyboards&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aposymbiont.github.io&#x2F;split-keyboards&#x2F;</a></text></comment> | <story><title>433% Keyboard</title><url>https://relivesight.com/projects/433/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>EForEndeavour</author><text>That reminds me, I consider losing arrow keys a dealbreaker. I use them frequently enough to navigate both text and code in various contexts (except in Vim, which I don&#x27;t use exclusively). I already hold modifiers to jump to next&#x2F;prev word boundary, page, start&#x2F;end of continuous data ranges in Excel, etc. Admittedly, I&#x27;d probably adapt, but I&#x27;m held back by the belief that any ergonomic advantages of moving to wasd or hjkl would be wiped out by reduction in speed and muscle memory for me.</text></item><item><author>sascha_sl</author><text>You can keep the normal layout on a 40%, you just wouldn&#x27;t have number&#x2F;function&#x2F;nav keys without layers<p>40% is <i>not</i> just plank, and I personally find the ergonomics of a plank board to be rather bad compared to staggered, unless it&#x27;s split.</text></item><item><author>EForEndeavour</author><text>What sort of WPM did you have on normal keyboards, and whta have you been able to train up to on your current one? I plateaued at roughly 35 WPM on Dvorak as a teenager and have been hesitant to commit to major layout changes since then, despite the ergonomic promises that a lot of them make.</text></item><item><author>readingnews</author><text>I am not OP, but I moved to a 40% (44 key minivan) about a year ago, and I am using it as my daily driver at home and work. I find that the fact that I can reach every key on the board and barely move my hands has helped a lot. The other interesting notation is that I can put the mouse really, really close by. So the motion going from keyboard to mouse is greatly reduced. I find that my wrists are much better off with this.</text></item><item><author>codezero</author><text>Is it an Atreus? How do you like that size of keyboard? I&#x27;m not too bothered about adopting some chords, but more interested in the general ergonomics &#x2F; RSI risks.</text></item><item><author>autocorr</author><text>For some context, this project was basically made to one up someone else, so it&#x27;s not fully serious. Part of what makes the keyboard funny though is that (a niche of) the custom mechanical keyboard scene has been moving to many fewer keys and programming the firmware to compensate. So it&#x27;s pretty funny going from seeing several Planck ~49 key layouts to seeing this gargantuan <i>450</i> key absolute unit.<p>Sincerely typed by someone on a 44 key layout :)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fossuser</author><text>HHKB has worked well for me, it moves the arrow keys closer to your right hand in a much better location than most 60% boards default.<p>You can easily use your right pinky to hit Fn and then use the arrow keys that are right under your fingers (I think it&#x27;s actually better than normal keyboard arrow key placement).<p>I don&#x27;t think I could go below a 60% board because having the number row is too useful and dealing with function layers for that (and memorizing symbol placement) seems like an unnecessary pain for style.</text></comment> |
33,239,198 | 33,239,210 | 1 | 2 | 33,237,521 | train | <story><title>Germany extends lifetime of all 3 remaining nuclear plants</title><url>https://www.dw.com/en/germany-extends-lifetime-of-all-3-remaining-nuclear-plants/a-63466196</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Cwizard</author><text>&gt; „If Japan can’t control the technology nobody can“.<p>I don&#x27;t understand this argument, isn&#x27;t Japan known for its earthquakes? Which are essentially non-existent in Germany?<p>In my opinion Fukushima should be an argument _for_ nuclear power. The death toll was really low, roughly 2000, and many of those death were caused by the evacuation rather than radiation. The death toll of the tsunami&#x2F;earthquake was 15000 according to wikipedia.<p>What should really put this into perspective is that air pollutions is estimated to kill millions every year.<p>And all of this is with reactors that are really old. If we would put the same amount of engineering resources into nuclear as we put into chips I am sure the number of deaths would go down a few order of magnitudes.</text></item><item><author>dependsontheq</author><text>While I agree that it would have been sensible to phase out coal and then nuclear, the german position is more complex. The fallout from Tschernobyl was measurable in Germany… measurable as in my science teacher measured it in his garden. Up to today boar and mushrooms have an elevated level of radiation in the forests around my home. So this is the emotional background, the risks are not far away. Fukushima gave the debate another spin „If Japan can’t control the technology nobody can“.<p>I still thank shutting them off is wrong but I think there’s a lot of history in that decision. And it’s much more history than one party deciding that.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>JohnBooty</author><text><p><pre><code> I don&#x27;t understand this argument, isn&#x27;t Japan known for its earthquakes?
</code></pre>
Chernobyl has often been characterized as the result of a corrupt and incompetent late-stage USSR, whereas post-WWII Japan is seen as a generally well-run country.<p>I&#x27;m not agreeing or disagreeing with that, just trying to describe public opinion.</text></comment> | <story><title>Germany extends lifetime of all 3 remaining nuclear plants</title><url>https://www.dw.com/en/germany-extends-lifetime-of-all-3-remaining-nuclear-plants/a-63466196</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Cwizard</author><text>&gt; „If Japan can’t control the technology nobody can“.<p>I don&#x27;t understand this argument, isn&#x27;t Japan known for its earthquakes? Which are essentially non-existent in Germany?<p>In my opinion Fukushima should be an argument _for_ nuclear power. The death toll was really low, roughly 2000, and many of those death were caused by the evacuation rather than radiation. The death toll of the tsunami&#x2F;earthquake was 15000 according to wikipedia.<p>What should really put this into perspective is that air pollutions is estimated to kill millions every year.<p>And all of this is with reactors that are really old. If we would put the same amount of engineering resources into nuclear as we put into chips I am sure the number of deaths would go down a few order of magnitudes.</text></item><item><author>dependsontheq</author><text>While I agree that it would have been sensible to phase out coal and then nuclear, the german position is more complex. The fallout from Tschernobyl was measurable in Germany… measurable as in my science teacher measured it in his garden. Up to today boar and mushrooms have an elevated level of radiation in the forests around my home. So this is the emotional background, the risks are not far away. Fukushima gave the debate another spin „If Japan can’t control the technology nobody can“.<p>I still thank shutting them off is wrong but I think there’s a lot of history in that decision. And it’s much more history than one party deciding that.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>epivosism</author><text>There was 1 disputed radiation&#x2F;nuclear related death from Fukushima.<p>And mention of 2200 related to the (post-tsunami) evacuation.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wikiwand.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_accidents_by_death_toll" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wikiwand.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_ac...</a></text></comment> |
22,329,228 | 22,328,650 | 1 | 3 | 22,326,931 | train | <story><title>Why do incompetent managers get promoted?</title><url>https://medium.com/@lancengym/why-do-incompetent-managers-get-promoted-815165a03bee</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>derekp7</author><text>This raises a question in my mind -- do any of these traits actually make the company more successful? Or more generally, are traits that are undesirable to subordinates, yet desirable to higher management, actually good for the company, and are traits that the subordinates value actually detrimental to the company?<p>The reason I ask is that it would seem that natural selection would take over, and if a management style that employees feel good about actually helps the company thrive, then those companies that promote &quot;bad&quot; managers would go out of business and be replaced by ones that promote &quot;good&quot; management style.</text></item><item><author>mdorazio</author><text>I don’t agree with anything in this article. Incompetent managers get promoted because the things they are competent at are not the things their employees want them to be competent at. There is a dichotomy between traits that get people promoted at large companies and traits that make a good manager from the perspective of subordinates. Those traits only sometimes overlap. Thus the whole argument is predicated on a false definition of “incompetent”.<p>edit: people might ask, so here&#x27;s a list of things that, in my experience, get people promoted at large companies:<p>politics, self-promotion, networking, choosing the right (high-visibility) things to work on, taking credit, delivering new revenue and&#x2F;or new marketable shiny products&#x2F;services, having the right senior leadership mentors&#x2F;wing-people.<p>Note how none of these really require that a person be good at actually managing a team of people effectively.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>michaelmrose</author><text>It&#x27;s common to believe that natural selection leads to an efficient effective result. This is a false and inapplicable. In the first place natural selection just means that the least defective, insofar as survival is concerned, changes that randomly occur pass on to the next generation. There is no guarantee of forward progress along any axis.<p>Secondly a human power structure a created thing needn&#x27;t follow any such law. Success in society often depends more on perception than any objective measure of success. While bad decision making can put one out of business eventually there is no guarantee that the ones that follow will be more rational.</text></comment> | <story><title>Why do incompetent managers get promoted?</title><url>https://medium.com/@lancengym/why-do-incompetent-managers-get-promoted-815165a03bee</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>derekp7</author><text>This raises a question in my mind -- do any of these traits actually make the company more successful? Or more generally, are traits that are undesirable to subordinates, yet desirable to higher management, actually good for the company, and are traits that the subordinates value actually detrimental to the company?<p>The reason I ask is that it would seem that natural selection would take over, and if a management style that employees feel good about actually helps the company thrive, then those companies that promote &quot;bad&quot; managers would go out of business and be replaced by ones that promote &quot;good&quot; management style.</text></item><item><author>mdorazio</author><text>I don’t agree with anything in this article. Incompetent managers get promoted because the things they are competent at are not the things their employees want them to be competent at. There is a dichotomy between traits that get people promoted at large companies and traits that make a good manager from the perspective of subordinates. Those traits only sometimes overlap. Thus the whole argument is predicated on a false definition of “incompetent”.<p>edit: people might ask, so here&#x27;s a list of things that, in my experience, get people promoted at large companies:<p>politics, self-promotion, networking, choosing the right (high-visibility) things to work on, taking credit, delivering new revenue and&#x2F;or new marketable shiny products&#x2F;services, having the right senior leadership mentors&#x2F;wing-people.<p>Note how none of these really require that a person be good at actually managing a team of people effectively.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pyrale</author><text>The McDonnell&#x2F;Boeing merger is a good example of why the natural selection logic is not a good model to think about human interactions.</text></comment> |
23,516,360 | 23,496,991 | 1 | 3 | 23,494,366 | train | <story><title>University of the People: Tuition-Free, Accredited Online Degree Programs</title><url>https://www.uopeople.edu/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pugio</author><text>(Disclaimer: Most of what I say here has caveats and qualifications – hard to capture full nuance in a comment&#x27;s space.)<p>One of the distinguishing features of computers is easy simulation. Humans learn well by direct, tight, interaction with a system – poking at a thing to see how it works. Tight feedback loops are how we quickly build intuitions.<p>Explorable Explanations [0] are a great extant example of what I mean, but we can do more... Imagine a &quot;textbook&quot; constructed around a well built-simulator (extant example, Earth Primer [1]). Sections of the textbook would present the simulator configured in a pre-set state, with various simplifications and initial conditions. Students can poke and prod these simulators, reset them, test out new states, and answer questions. Assignments could be on the order of &quot;Given Sim[Initial Conditions] figure out what gets you to Sim[Desired State]&quot;.<p>Current explorables are lovely, but (usually) incredibly bespoke. One concrete improvement would be to produce an OpenSim standard, which would allow other content creators to embed and customize these sims to construct new narratives.<p>Another powerful computer affordance is extreme specificity – a system should be able to build a representation of a learner&#x27;s current knowledge &#x2F; skill graph, and figure out a (or many) shortest path(s) from current knowledge to desired knowledge, scoped to that user&#x27;s interests. (Many LMS systems attempt this, but we&#x27;re still in the early, clunky days).<p>Next we have non-linearity. Most textbooks and courses impose a false idea of topic dependence. Yes, there are some intrinsic dependencies, but there are many MANY more ways (orderings) of moving through a learning space than your chapter textbook suggests.<p>I can go on like this forever. I myself am currently focused on constructing usable knowledge graphs (and localizing incoming students on them), and simulations students can easily play around with to build powerful intuition. For the latter, we&#x27;ve found the wealth of STEM tools available in Python to be a huge boon. We (I work for an ed-tech non-profit startup) usually teach students some programming, and then have them start building models (physics simulations) or interacting with existing toolkits (such as, recently, the Rosetta protein modeling suite). These tools act as a forcing function for real-world relevance, and allow for direct intuition building over rote memorization. More effective, and much more engaging.<p>To address your comment: VR (and IMHO, AR) look to have a lot of potential in the future, though they are still in their infancy. I think there&#x27;s a lot of potential for the humanities to provide more immersive experiences of places and time periods. (Re humanities, simulations also work quite well. Mock trials, political re-enactments, etc. There&#x27;s a reason simulation games are so popular...)<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;explorabl.es&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;explorabl.es&#x2F;</a>
[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.earthprimer.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.earthprimer.com&#x2F;</a>
[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rosettacommons.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rosettacommons.org&#x2F;</a></text></item><item><author>d0gbread</author><text>Are you willing to share more about what you&#x27;re working on? It sounds interesting.<p>One language app I tried for a few minutes was a VR app that put you, for example, on a train, and you had to have a relevant conversation. It was cool, not sure how effective because the GearVR I used at the time made me sick too quickly.</text></item><item><author>pugio</author><text>I took a semester of courses from UofP. It had a wonderful diversity of ages, genders, and nationalities. Interacting with those people through peer assignments was interesting, and I applaud what they&#x27;re trying to do.<p>Ultimately, however, I found the entire thing way too tedious - full of the classic &quot;make-work&quot; and silly hoops. The level of pedagogy was very basic.<p>I dream of (and am actively working towards) a day where the computer&#x27;s potential as a new educational medium is fully realized, rather than the current parade of attempts at transplanting a brick and mortar classroom into a remote asynchronous delivery system.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>LockAndLol</author><text>A knowledge map (or graph) is definitely something that should be used more intensively in course structure and instruction.<p>I remember very well reaching an understanding of a subject by different means than what the teacher expected(?) or was taught to expect. That path of learning was rejected (despite the result being the same) and accordingly graded as a failure. Such resistance to different learning paths, a &quot;status quo&quot; of how people should learn, and the tendency to try and fit everybody into well-defined boxed is frustrating and counter-productive.</text></comment> | <story><title>University of the People: Tuition-Free, Accredited Online Degree Programs</title><url>https://www.uopeople.edu/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pugio</author><text>(Disclaimer: Most of what I say here has caveats and qualifications – hard to capture full nuance in a comment&#x27;s space.)<p>One of the distinguishing features of computers is easy simulation. Humans learn well by direct, tight, interaction with a system – poking at a thing to see how it works. Tight feedback loops are how we quickly build intuitions.<p>Explorable Explanations [0] are a great extant example of what I mean, but we can do more... Imagine a &quot;textbook&quot; constructed around a well built-simulator (extant example, Earth Primer [1]). Sections of the textbook would present the simulator configured in a pre-set state, with various simplifications and initial conditions. Students can poke and prod these simulators, reset them, test out new states, and answer questions. Assignments could be on the order of &quot;Given Sim[Initial Conditions] figure out what gets you to Sim[Desired State]&quot;.<p>Current explorables are lovely, but (usually) incredibly bespoke. One concrete improvement would be to produce an OpenSim standard, which would allow other content creators to embed and customize these sims to construct new narratives.<p>Another powerful computer affordance is extreme specificity – a system should be able to build a representation of a learner&#x27;s current knowledge &#x2F; skill graph, and figure out a (or many) shortest path(s) from current knowledge to desired knowledge, scoped to that user&#x27;s interests. (Many LMS systems attempt this, but we&#x27;re still in the early, clunky days).<p>Next we have non-linearity. Most textbooks and courses impose a false idea of topic dependence. Yes, there are some intrinsic dependencies, but there are many MANY more ways (orderings) of moving through a learning space than your chapter textbook suggests.<p>I can go on like this forever. I myself am currently focused on constructing usable knowledge graphs (and localizing incoming students on them), and simulations students can easily play around with to build powerful intuition. For the latter, we&#x27;ve found the wealth of STEM tools available in Python to be a huge boon. We (I work for an ed-tech non-profit startup) usually teach students some programming, and then have them start building models (physics simulations) or interacting with existing toolkits (such as, recently, the Rosetta protein modeling suite). These tools act as a forcing function for real-world relevance, and allow for direct intuition building over rote memorization. More effective, and much more engaging.<p>To address your comment: VR (and IMHO, AR) look to have a lot of potential in the future, though they are still in their infancy. I think there&#x27;s a lot of potential for the humanities to provide more immersive experiences of places and time periods. (Re humanities, simulations also work quite well. Mock trials, political re-enactments, etc. There&#x27;s a reason simulation games are so popular...)<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;explorabl.es&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;explorabl.es&#x2F;</a>
[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.earthprimer.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.earthprimer.com&#x2F;</a>
[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rosettacommons.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rosettacommons.org&#x2F;</a></text></item><item><author>d0gbread</author><text>Are you willing to share more about what you&#x27;re working on? It sounds interesting.<p>One language app I tried for a few minutes was a VR app that put you, for example, on a train, and you had to have a relevant conversation. It was cool, not sure how effective because the GearVR I used at the time made me sick too quickly.</text></item><item><author>pugio</author><text>I took a semester of courses from UofP. It had a wonderful diversity of ages, genders, and nationalities. Interacting with those people through peer assignments was interesting, and I applaud what they&#x27;re trying to do.<p>Ultimately, however, I found the entire thing way too tedious - full of the classic &quot;make-work&quot; and silly hoops. The level of pedagogy was very basic.<p>I dream of (and am actively working towards) a day where the computer&#x27;s potential as a new educational medium is fully realized, rather than the current parade of attempts at transplanting a brick and mortar classroom into a remote asynchronous delivery system.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>idoby</author><text>Literally all of these ideas are ones I&#x27;ve had for years in the education space. I&#x27;m glad someone is actually doing them.</text></comment> |
36,528,754 | 36,528,768 | 1 | 3 | 36,519,030 | train | <story><title>Delta flight lands in Charlotte without front landing gear</title><url>https://www.wbtv.com/2023/06/28/plane-lands-charlotte-douglas-international-airport-after-dealing-with-mechanical-issues/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tialaramex</author><text>And when you say &quot;Aviation is safe&quot; you mean specifically Scheduled Aviation ie people buy tickets and go on a plane with some guys they&#x27;ve never met flying it. Scheduled Aviation is remarkably safe.<p>GA (General aviation, people who own a little plane and maybe just fly it for fun, or it&#x27;s a professional expense for say a plastic surgeon and allows them to fly 300 miles home on Thursday evening after working four days in the big city) is not safe. A few hundred of these people die, not just smash up their planes or get hurt, but die, sometimes with family or friends aboard, every year. It might make the local TV news, at most. Unless they were a celebrity it won&#x27;t make national news.<p>Commercial is more complicated because there are so many possibilities. Cargo is pretty safe, if your job is to move boxes of stuff from one big jet airport to another in a civilized country you&#x27;ll likely die in bed of old age. But if you fly a police helicopter, or medevac, or you&#x27;re a crop duster, or you fly custom pick up jobs, when the client wants and where they want - those jobs can go badly wrong much too easily, without you really understanding what you&#x27;ve got yourself into until it&#x27;s too late. These people are (or at least should be) better trained than in GA, but they&#x27;re also often flying more demanding missions. You may operate out of somewhere with not-so-great capabilities, on short notice, in poor weather and&#x2F;or at night, and you may be expected to go places that you ordinarily wouldn&#x27;t, close to buildings, close to other aircraft, even close to the ground - all of which narrows your options if things go wrong.<p>Military is also pretty bad as I understand it. It needn&#x27;t be, but there&#x27;s some sense that the job is &quot;supposed&quot; to be dangerous, which maybe makes sense for front line infantry, but really not for the vast majority of military pilots - way too many of them die far from any enemy, as a result of somebody screwing up, just like in GA or commercial.</text></item><item><author>kube-system</author><text>Aviation is not safe because of luck or because aerospace engineers build infallible machines. Aviation is safe because of a culture of safety that puts the right procedures in place to mitigate problems that will eventually happen.</text></item><item><author>bombcar</author><text><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;@REALATCchannel&#x2F;videos">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;@REALATCchannel&#x2F;videos</a> made me realize just how many incidents happen and are resolved without issue.</text></item><item><author>devoutsalsa</author><text>This isn&#x27;t common, but it&#x27;s pretty routine. Pilots are trained for this, and the aircraft are designed to handle the stress.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>eschneider</author><text>GA is as safe as you want to make it for yourself. Most accidents happen because people are in a hurry to get where they&#x27;re going, so they force an uncertain situation into a bad one. Police heli and medivac are motivated to fly where that would be &#x27;unwise&#x27; because people might get hurt otherwise. It runs up the numbers. :&#x2F;</text></comment> | <story><title>Delta flight lands in Charlotte without front landing gear</title><url>https://www.wbtv.com/2023/06/28/plane-lands-charlotte-douglas-international-airport-after-dealing-with-mechanical-issues/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tialaramex</author><text>And when you say &quot;Aviation is safe&quot; you mean specifically Scheduled Aviation ie people buy tickets and go on a plane with some guys they&#x27;ve never met flying it. Scheduled Aviation is remarkably safe.<p>GA (General aviation, people who own a little plane and maybe just fly it for fun, or it&#x27;s a professional expense for say a plastic surgeon and allows them to fly 300 miles home on Thursday evening after working four days in the big city) is not safe. A few hundred of these people die, not just smash up their planes or get hurt, but die, sometimes with family or friends aboard, every year. It might make the local TV news, at most. Unless they were a celebrity it won&#x27;t make national news.<p>Commercial is more complicated because there are so many possibilities. Cargo is pretty safe, if your job is to move boxes of stuff from one big jet airport to another in a civilized country you&#x27;ll likely die in bed of old age. But if you fly a police helicopter, or medevac, or you&#x27;re a crop duster, or you fly custom pick up jobs, when the client wants and where they want - those jobs can go badly wrong much too easily, without you really understanding what you&#x27;ve got yourself into until it&#x27;s too late. These people are (or at least should be) better trained than in GA, but they&#x27;re also often flying more demanding missions. You may operate out of somewhere with not-so-great capabilities, on short notice, in poor weather and&#x2F;or at night, and you may be expected to go places that you ordinarily wouldn&#x27;t, close to buildings, close to other aircraft, even close to the ground - all of which narrows your options if things go wrong.<p>Military is also pretty bad as I understand it. It needn&#x27;t be, but there&#x27;s some sense that the job is &quot;supposed&quot; to be dangerous, which maybe makes sense for front line infantry, but really not for the vast majority of military pilots - way too many of them die far from any enemy, as a result of somebody screwing up, just like in GA or commercial.</text></item><item><author>kube-system</author><text>Aviation is not safe because of luck or because aerospace engineers build infallible machines. Aviation is safe because of a culture of safety that puts the right procedures in place to mitigate problems that will eventually happen.</text></item><item><author>bombcar</author><text><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;@REALATCchannel&#x2F;videos">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;@REALATCchannel&#x2F;videos</a> made me realize just how many incidents happen and are resolved without issue.</text></item><item><author>devoutsalsa</author><text>This isn&#x27;t common, but it&#x27;s pretty routine. Pilots are trained for this, and the aircraft are designed to handle the stress.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>devoutsalsa</author><text>I used to sell life insurance. &quot;Minor&quot; health problems would result in a slightly higher rate: higher than average blood pressure, asthma, thyroid issues, etc. Serious health problems like diabetes, cancer, smoking, and so on meant much higher premiums, especially when combined. If you were a private pilot, they wouldn&#x27;t even give you insurance (most of the time) unless you agreed to be covered in all cases except flying. It&#x27;s called an aviation exclusion rider.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sec.gov&#x2F;Archives&#x2F;edgar&#x2F;data&#x2F;791683&#x2F;000079168303000003&#x2F;exd6.htm" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sec.gov&#x2F;Archives&#x2F;edgar&#x2F;data&#x2F;791683&#x2F;0000791683030...</a></text></comment> |
24,310,819 | 24,310,570 | 1 | 2 | 24,309,632 | train | <story><title>Apple Terminates Epic Games' Developer Account</title><url>https://www.macrumors.com/2020/08/28/apple-terminates-epic-games-developer-account/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gameswithgo</author><text>people familiar with Tim Sweeny’s life and ideology know that it is an actual important issues to him that platforms be open.<p>your cynical take is often very true but there are sometimes real human ideals behind things.</text></item><item><author>oneplane</author><text>Not sure why people are surprised or consider it giant news.<p>&gt; The court recommended that Epic follow the App Store’s guidelines and policies while the case is in progress – the rules they followed over the past ten years until they created the current situation themselves. Epic refused.<p>Well duh, this is a show match court fight of Epic Games not liking the rules and not getting the special treatment they want. No matter what opinion one holds on mobile store rules, they are their rules and so far you have the choice of following them (which is also somewhat iffy) or not being on the store.<p>The whole goal of two post-capitalism enterprises having a fit is for one or more of them to make more money. The whole &quot;it is good for consumers&quot; or &quot;good for developers&quot; is just sprinkles and marketing to appeal to the public. Separate the issues and angles and see it for what it is: just a bunch of legal departments having a fight.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>chipotle_coyote</author><text>Tim Sweeney may be a wonderful man who loves open platforms, apple pie, and kittens, but:<p>- Android is clearly more open than iOS, but Epic is also suing Google. So is this really about sideloading? From that suit, it sure doesn&#x27;t sound like it.<p>- When you <i>do</i> sideload Fortnite on your Android device, from what I understand, you can&#x27;t actually sideload Fortnite <i>directly.</i> Instead you have sideload... the Epic Games Store!<p>It seems awfully clear that Epic&#x27;s real goal here is to force <i>both</i> Apple and Google to let you install the Epic Games Store from the iOS App Store and the Google Play Store. And while I&#x27;m not much of a gamer, the stories I recall about Epic&#x27;s store in the press... well, we&#x27;ll just say they didn&#x27;t have a &quot;so ideals! much open!&quot; vibe to them.<p>I think there&#x27;s a lot of valid criticisms to be made about both the &quot;app console&quot; model that Apple is steadfastly pushing and the specific ways in which they&#x27;re running the App Store, but I am skeptical that Epic is the general this particular battle needs.</text></comment> | <story><title>Apple Terminates Epic Games' Developer Account</title><url>https://www.macrumors.com/2020/08/28/apple-terminates-epic-games-developer-account/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gameswithgo</author><text>people familiar with Tim Sweeny’s life and ideology know that it is an actual important issues to him that platforms be open.<p>your cynical take is often very true but there are sometimes real human ideals behind things.</text></item><item><author>oneplane</author><text>Not sure why people are surprised or consider it giant news.<p>&gt; The court recommended that Epic follow the App Store’s guidelines and policies while the case is in progress – the rules they followed over the past ten years until they created the current situation themselves. Epic refused.<p>Well duh, this is a show match court fight of Epic Games not liking the rules and not getting the special treatment they want. No matter what opinion one holds on mobile store rules, they are their rules and so far you have the choice of following them (which is also somewhat iffy) or not being on the store.<p>The whole goal of two post-capitalism enterprises having a fit is for one or more of them to make more money. The whole &quot;it is good for consumers&quot; or &quot;good for developers&quot; is just sprinkles and marketing to appeal to the public. Separate the issues and angles and see it for what it is: just a bunch of legal departments having a fight.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>m3kw9</author><text>Open and closed is relative, as nothing is completely open unless it’s open source. Epic game store isn’t completely open. He’s just defining his version open to suit his bottom line.</text></comment> |
26,567,259 | 26,567,280 | 1 | 3 | 26,566,373 | train | <story><title>PinePhone – Beta Edition Linux SmartPhone Preorder</title><url>https://pine64.com/product/pinephone-beta-edition-linux-smartphone/?v=0446c16e2e66</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>amelius</author><text>The point was: if it doesn&#x27;t change the duopoly then who will write apps for the open platform? Not banks. Not governments. They will keep on developing only for Android and iOS.<p>And people with a pinephone will have a great phone with a great OS, but with a shitty selection of apps.</text></item><item><author>linmob</author><text>IMHO, it does not have to change the duopoly, as long as it creates sustainable options for those who want to escape that duopoly. In that way it‘s already a success.</text></item><item><author>Freak_NL</author><text>Except that it won&#x27;t break the app-store duopoly. At what point will WhatsApp or even Signal consider providing a web-app, or even an open API for others to built clients against? Not doing this is a policy choice, not a technical one.<p>Will banks offer something that doesn&#x27;t require authentication via an app? Governments? App here meaning: Android or IOS.<p>One solution might be to provide a sandbox for Android apps, but you would still be locked into Google&#x27;s app-store and require accepting their terms of use. And while your OS might be open and not user-hostile, all the apps everyone uses will still be the same.<p>I want a phone like this, but I don&#x27;t see it changing the duopoly.</text></item><item><author>wwarner</author><text>I personally think that the effort to create open source phones is the single most important technology project going on out there. We have open source browsers, we have open source social apps, but we definitely do not have open source phones. Phones that can be truly owned and controlled by users will reshape the privacy discourse, from one of complaining and legal coercion, to one of choices and markets.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>danShumway</author><text>I already use Linux with my bank and when I&#x27;m interacting with my government. And unlike on Android, the barrier of entry for <i>me</i> to write apps and set up quick solutions to problems is much lower. I don&#x27;t need to run my code on a completely separate environment with no overlap. Emulation is going to be easier. I don&#x27;t need to install Eclipse or whatever the heck Android devs tolerate now.<p>That&#x27;s part of the point of using Linux -- not creating an ecosystem from scratch.<p>Virtually all of my computing outside of my phone is already done on Linux devices, and the setup works for day-to-day computing. Support is good enough for me. What makes you think Pinephone going to have worse support than my current Linux desktop?<p>My hope with Pinephone is that a decent influx of Linux phone users will improve the quality of desktop software on Linux as well, since it forces devs to stop ignoring touch screens and to start thinking about responsive design. Ideally, the desktop versions of many apps should scale on interfaces like this without needing to be rewritten. But regardless, I&#x27;m still not particularly worried that my bank website is going to stop working.</text></comment> | <story><title>PinePhone – Beta Edition Linux SmartPhone Preorder</title><url>https://pine64.com/product/pinephone-beta-edition-linux-smartphone/?v=0446c16e2e66</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>amelius</author><text>The point was: if it doesn&#x27;t change the duopoly then who will write apps for the open platform? Not banks. Not governments. They will keep on developing only for Android and iOS.<p>And people with a pinephone will have a great phone with a great OS, but with a shitty selection of apps.</text></item><item><author>linmob</author><text>IMHO, it does not have to change the duopoly, as long as it creates sustainable options for those who want to escape that duopoly. In that way it‘s already a success.</text></item><item><author>Freak_NL</author><text>Except that it won&#x27;t break the app-store duopoly. At what point will WhatsApp or even Signal consider providing a web-app, or even an open API for others to built clients against? Not doing this is a policy choice, not a technical one.<p>Will banks offer something that doesn&#x27;t require authentication via an app? Governments? App here meaning: Android or IOS.<p>One solution might be to provide a sandbox for Android apps, but you would still be locked into Google&#x27;s app-store and require accepting their terms of use. And while your OS might be open and not user-hostile, all the apps everyone uses will still be the same.<p>I want a phone like this, but I don&#x27;t see it changing the duopoly.</text></item><item><author>wwarner</author><text>I personally think that the effort to create open source phones is the single most important technology project going on out there. We have open source browsers, we have open source social apps, but we definitely do not have open source phones. Phones that can be truly owned and controlled by users will reshape the privacy discourse, from one of complaining and legal coercion, to one of choices and markets.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mindcrime</author><text>You can still get updated software for CP&#x2F;M, BeOS, DOS and OS&#x2F;2 for crying out loud. Maybe not a lot, but people write &#x2F; maintain that stuff. A relatively modern phone, running Linux? If it gains <i>any</i> adoption, I expect that the availability of apps won&#x27;t be a problem. Maybe the ecosystem won&#x27;t be quite as rich as Android or IOS, but it may well be &quot;pretty good&quot; which will be good enough for a lot of people.</text></comment> |
7,262,284 | 7,262,256 | 1 | 2 | 7,261,916 | train | <story><title>Show HN: My side project just reached #6 on App Store music charts</title><url>https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/noon-pacific/id803563983?mt=8</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>epaga</author><text>Congratulations! What did you do to market the app? Just stick it in the store? Or did you get blogs to do write-ups?<p>It seems like discovery has always been a huge problem for app developers.</text></comment> | <story><title>Show HN: My side project just reached #6 on App Store music charts</title><url>https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/noon-pacific/id803563983?mt=8</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>qzervaas</author><text>Good job! It&#x27;s on the App Store, so treat yourself to a full version number ;)<p>(I wonder if people would be less likely to buy it having &quot;0.0.2&quot;, thinking it may not yet be worth buying. In any case, why not just call it 1.0.2, etc?)</text></comment> |
21,857,805 | 21,856,914 | 1 | 3 | 21,855,879 | train | <story><title>Debugging a Live Saturn V</title><url>http://www.zamiang.com/post/debugging-a-live-saturn-v</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>nn3</author><text>If you like these kinds of stories, Boris Chertok&#x27;s memoirs have a lot more from the Russian early launches during the space race. He was in charge of electrical systems in many of the Russian rockets.<p>NASA history has an excellent four volume translation of his memoirs. In volume 2 he describes the development and testing of the R7 (Soyuz) rocket:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nasa.gov&#x2F;connect&#x2F;ebooks&#x2F;rockets_people_vol2_detail.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nasa.gov&#x2F;connect&#x2F;ebooks&#x2F;rockets_people_vol2_deta...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Debugging a Live Saturn V</title><url>http://www.zamiang.com/post/debugging-a-live-saturn-v</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>rwmj</author><text>Switching a relay in a flammable atmosphere is ... bold. Does anyone know what voltages were used?<p>Edit: Seems like 28 volts DC unregulated supply (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ntrs.nasa.gov&#x2F;archive&#x2F;nasa&#x2F;casi.ntrs.nasa.gov&#x2F;19740021163.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ntrs.nasa.gov&#x2F;archive&#x2F;nasa&#x2F;casi.ntrs.nasa.gov&#x2F;197400...</a>), which was regulated to 5V and 56V depending on where it was used (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Saturn_V_instrument_unit#Power" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Saturn_V_instrument_unit#Power</a>)</text></comment> |
12,129,147 | 12,128,166 | 1 | 2 | 12,127,766 | train | <story><title>Dollar Shave Club and the Disruption of Everything</title><url>https://stratechery.com/2016/dollar-shave-club-and-the-disruption-of-everything/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>AznHisoka</author><text>The article seems to imply Dollar Dhave Club succeeded with the help of AWS. I don&#x27;t get it. These guys aren&#x27;t Google. It&#x27;s a simple static site with a few dynamic forms. Anyone could&#x27;ve built that easily in 1998, let alone 2006.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ripberge</author><text>Agreed regarding AWS being a non-factor. If any tech service gets credit here it&#x27;s YouTube. They also leveraged ad-tech for precise targeting, re-targeting that was not possible in a pre-Internet era. Once they were doing very well online they were able to jump in with the big boys like P&amp;G doing traditional media buys in TV, radio, etc.<p>I think that is the key here, Internet media helped them disseminate their message very rapidly.<p>I would also argue, easy access to capital was very important. Once that original video went viral, they had to really pour on the online ad-spend to acquire customers. Seeing as how their customer acquisition costs are high, the more customers they got, the more money they lost every month! Capital is key!<p>They were wildly successful before they were on AWS. I believe they started off on magento, then drupal before writing their own software (once they were having a lot of success).<p>They don&#x27;t use Amazon for fulfillment. They used some other 3PL&#x27;s and are now leasing and running their own distribution centers. In the beginning, Dubin was packing those razors up in his living room!<p>Source: founder a close personal friend.</text></comment> | <story><title>Dollar Shave Club and the Disruption of Everything</title><url>https://stratechery.com/2016/dollar-shave-club-and-the-disruption-of-everything/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>AznHisoka</author><text>The article seems to imply Dollar Dhave Club succeeded with the help of AWS. I don&#x27;t get it. These guys aren&#x27;t Google. It&#x27;s a simple static site with a few dynamic forms. Anyone could&#x27;ve built that easily in 1998, let alone 2006.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>akie</author><text>It&#x27;s not a &quot;simple&quot; static site, and I&#x27;d be very surprised if it was &quot;static&quot; either, because there is guaranteed to be a database backend (how else would you track orders?). The frontend is written in EmberJS, probably with some fancy javascript backend.</text></comment> |
32,772,589 | 32,772,286 | 1 | 2 | 32,768,590 | train | <story><title>Show HN: I made a modern web UI for Hacker News</title><url>https://www.modernhn.com/</url><text>Hey HN,<p>I made this free browser extension that modernizes the Hacker News design.<p>I previously launched Modern for Wikipedia [1] here back in December, and it seemed like the obvious next choice to build one for HN too! So I&#x27;ve taken what I learned from building that, and have spent all my spare time this year building Modern for HN.<p>I realize this won&#x27;t be for everyone, but it was a fun project to work on, and I&#x27;m really happy with the result so far. Hope you like it too!<p>Lots more planned for future updates, and suggestions welcome :)<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=29461735" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=29461735</a></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>uo21tp5hoyg</author><text>I really like the current simple design of HN, my only issue with it is how ridiculously zoomed out it is by default. I&#x27;ve been viewing HN at 150% zoom for as long as I can remember.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>theonething</author><text>I apparently set HN to 150% so long ago and had gotten so used to it I didn&#x27;t even realize that I had until reading this comment.<p>Just tried 100% out of curiosity and you&#x27;re right, it&#x27;s ridiculous.</text></comment> | <story><title>Show HN: I made a modern web UI for Hacker News</title><url>https://www.modernhn.com/</url><text>Hey HN,<p>I made this free browser extension that modernizes the Hacker News design.<p>I previously launched Modern for Wikipedia [1] here back in December, and it seemed like the obvious next choice to build one for HN too! So I&#x27;ve taken what I learned from building that, and have spent all my spare time this year building Modern for HN.<p>I realize this won&#x27;t be for everyone, but it was a fun project to work on, and I&#x27;m really happy with the result so far. Hope you like it too!<p>Lots more planned for future updates, and suggestions welcome :)<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=29461735" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=29461735</a></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>uo21tp5hoyg</author><text>I really like the current simple design of HN, my only issue with it is how ridiculously zoomed out it is by default. I&#x27;ve been viewing HN at 150% zoom for as long as I can remember.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Akronymus</author><text>For me, I dislike that it is not in dark mode without some userscript</text></comment> |
14,533,590 | 14,533,633 | 1 | 2 | 14,532,751 | train | <story><title>It's Now Possible to Boot Android on I.MX6 Platforms Without Proprietary Blobs</title><url>http://news.softpedia.com/news/it-s-now-possible-to-boot-android-on-i-mx6-platforms-without-proprietary-blobs-516364.shtml</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>grizzles</author><text>What are the other of the &quot;very few&quot; embedded SOCs that need no proprietary blobs to run? Mediatek?<p>Also, how great a name is Robert Foss for someone who writes open source code for a living...</text></comment> | <story><title>It's Now Possible to Boot Android on I.MX6 Platforms Without Proprietary Blobs</title><url>http://news.softpedia.com/news/it-s-now-possible-to-boot-android-on-i-mx6-platforms-without-proprietary-blobs-516364.shtml</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>robert_foss</author><text>Author here, feel free to ask me things.</text></comment> |
27,689,944 | 27,689,293 | 1 | 3 | 27,687,297 | train | <story><title>Canada weather: Dozens dead as heatwave shatters records</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57654133</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>teekert</author><text>There is that and then there is the fact that measuring for increasingly longer time periods will give you more and more extremes.<p>With two dice you usually start by rolling some 7&#x27;s, a 10, etc. Then after many tries you will have rolled a 2 and a 12.<p>Edit: Note that this is not me saying I don&#x27;t believe in climate change people!</text></item><item><author>Gravityloss</author><text>Over 10 years ago, James Hansen called future extreme events &quot;Rolling a Thirteen&quot;. You were suspecting the two dice you were rolling were not regular anymore, because the average had crept upwards, but after rolling a thirteen, you know.<p>EDIT: It seems to actually have been Steven Sherwood in 2010. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;greenfyre.wordpress.com&#x2F;2010&#x2F;08&#x2F;21&#x2F;tumblin-dice&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;greenfyre.wordpress.com&#x2F;2010&#x2F;08&#x2F;21&#x2F;tumblin-dice&#x2F;</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>xadhominemx</author><text>The longer time goes on, the more rare records should become. But record highs are becoming more common</text></comment> | <story><title>Canada weather: Dozens dead as heatwave shatters records</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57654133</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>teekert</author><text>There is that and then there is the fact that measuring for increasingly longer time periods will give you more and more extremes.<p>With two dice you usually start by rolling some 7&#x27;s, a 10, etc. Then after many tries you will have rolled a 2 and a 12.<p>Edit: Note that this is not me saying I don&#x27;t believe in climate change people!</text></item><item><author>Gravityloss</author><text>Over 10 years ago, James Hansen called future extreme events &quot;Rolling a Thirteen&quot;. You were suspecting the two dice you were rolling were not regular anymore, because the average had crept upwards, but after rolling a thirteen, you know.<p>EDIT: It seems to actually have been Steven Sherwood in 2010. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;greenfyre.wordpress.com&#x2F;2010&#x2F;08&#x2F;21&#x2F;tumblin-dice&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;greenfyre.wordpress.com&#x2F;2010&#x2F;08&#x2F;21&#x2F;tumblin-dice&#x2F;</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>blackbrokkoli</author><text>Yes, but we have an awful lot of new high points in recent times.<p>The earth is quite a big place and we are recording temperatures quite detailed since the 1850ies, so if we are accepting the null hypotheses of there not being a rise in averages, stochastic is rearing it&#x27;s ugly head quite a bit since the early two-thousands...</text></comment> |
33,368,303 | 33,367,366 | 1 | 2 | 33,365,948 | train | <story><title>Elon Musk Owns Twitter; CEO and CFO have left</title><url>https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/27/elon-musk-now-in-charge-of-twitter-ceo-and-cfo-have-left-sources-say.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fzeroracer</author><text>The odds are that Twitter will probably be dead in a year. He&#x27;ll bring on a few yes-men executives that&#x27;ll applaud him when he guts development and then when everything grinds to a halt they&#x27;ll catch the blame. Especially since he&#x27;ll probably force something like integrated NFTs on a whim.<p>Unlike Facebook and how it&#x27;s captured an older audience that&#x27;s relative inelastic to moving to other platforms, I don&#x27;t see people sticking around on Twitter nor do I see employees staying around either.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>oxplot</author><text>&gt; The odds are that Twitter will probably be dead in a year.<p>And that&#x27;s based on what exactly?<p>&gt; He&#x27;ll bring on a few yes-men executives that&#x27;ll applaud him<p>Again, based on what?<p>Now here&#x27;s a prediction actually based on Musk&#x27;s past perf:<p>He&#x27;ll bring in people who get shit done, and get it done fast. Twitter will achieve things everyone says is stupid, ridiculous and impossible now as he&#x27;s done in the past 20 years with Tesla and SpaceX.<p>That will be followed by a large swath of copy-cats who will try to replicate it to no avail.</text></comment> | <story><title>Elon Musk Owns Twitter; CEO and CFO have left</title><url>https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/27/elon-musk-now-in-charge-of-twitter-ceo-and-cfo-have-left-sources-say.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fzeroracer</author><text>The odds are that Twitter will probably be dead in a year. He&#x27;ll bring on a few yes-men executives that&#x27;ll applaud him when he guts development and then when everything grinds to a halt they&#x27;ll catch the blame. Especially since he&#x27;ll probably force something like integrated NFTs on a whim.<p>Unlike Facebook and how it&#x27;s captured an older audience that&#x27;s relative inelastic to moving to other platforms, I don&#x27;t see people sticking around on Twitter nor do I see employees staying around either.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pram</author><text>Twitter already has integrated NFTs lol</text></comment> |
8,658,160 | 8,657,968 | 1 | 2 | 8,657,543 | train | <story><title>EU’s New VAT Rules Could Create a Mess for Startups</title><url>http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/25/eus-new-vatmoss-rules-could-create-a-vatmess-for-startups/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wbond</author><text>As someone who sells digital software licenses, this is quite an baffling situation to experience.<p>Currently, I live in Massachusetts, which does not require collecting sales tax on digital goods. According to these new laws, even though I live in the USA, and don&#x27;t collect any address information for my customers, I now need to:<p><pre><code> 1. Collect address and IP address information
2. Register with a MOSS somewhere in the EU
3. Determine what VAT rate applies to the customer
4. Integrate with a (slow, unreliable) API to allow business customers to not pay VAT
5. Add VAT to their purchase (in USD, my merchant currency)
6. Generate VAT invoices that follow the regulations of every EU country
7. Submit tax payments quarterly with customer info
8. Pay VAT taxes in GBP, possibly at a different USD exchange rate
</code></pre>
So, even though I don&#x27;t live in the EU, don&#x27;t host a server there, don&#x27;t ship things to the EU and do all of my business with US banks and so forth, I will now have more responsibilities for sales taxes in the EU than I do for income tax in the US.<p>I&#x27;m almost considering shutting down sales to EU customers.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>MistahKoala</author><text>Whilst I don&#x27;t know the ins and outs of your business or the implications of non-EU&#x2F;EEA businesses selling to member state consumers... I&#x27;m wondering how such a requirement would be enforceable, given that you are outside the EU? I&#x27;ve yet to see anything that declares a requirement that you must collect VAT - but I have seen HMRC guidance saying that member state businesses selling outside the EU are not affected and don&#x27;t have to charge&#x2F;collect VAT, so I&#x27;m inclined to believe that it&#x27;s reciprocal.<p>A question that occurs for me is how TTIP would affect this situation, though. If TTIP was established, would the EU then require US businesses to collect VAT in the same fashion? Because that would be really sucky for you.</text></comment> | <story><title>EU’s New VAT Rules Could Create a Mess for Startups</title><url>http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/25/eus-new-vatmoss-rules-could-create-a-vatmess-for-startups/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wbond</author><text>As someone who sells digital software licenses, this is quite an baffling situation to experience.<p>Currently, I live in Massachusetts, which does not require collecting sales tax on digital goods. According to these new laws, even though I live in the USA, and don&#x27;t collect any address information for my customers, I now need to:<p><pre><code> 1. Collect address and IP address information
2. Register with a MOSS somewhere in the EU
3. Determine what VAT rate applies to the customer
4. Integrate with a (slow, unreliable) API to allow business customers to not pay VAT
5. Add VAT to their purchase (in USD, my merchant currency)
6. Generate VAT invoices that follow the regulations of every EU country
7. Submit tax payments quarterly with customer info
8. Pay VAT taxes in GBP, possibly at a different USD exchange rate
</code></pre>
So, even though I don&#x27;t live in the EU, don&#x27;t host a server there, don&#x27;t ship things to the EU and do all of my business with US banks and so forth, I will now have more responsibilities for sales taxes in the EU than I do for income tax in the US.<p>I&#x27;m almost considering shutting down sales to EU customers.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pjc50</author><text>Someone will correct me if I&#x27;m wrong, but this only applies if you&#x27;re selling from <i>within</i> the EU.</text></comment> |
33,631,979 | 33,631,337 | 1 | 3 | 33,630,220 | train | <story><title>CPSC calls for full recall of all Onewheel self-balancing electric skateboards</title><url>https://www.cpsc.gov/Newsroom/News-Releases/2023/CPSC-Warns-Consumers-to-Stop-Using-Onewheel-Self-Balancing-Electric-Skateboards-Due-to-Ejection-Hazard-At-Least-Four-Deaths-and-Multiple-Injuries-Reported</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>0_____0</author><text>One issue I&#x27;ve noticed with these new forms of electric wheeled transport (longboard, transverse and longitudinal one-wheelers) is that the people riding them often don&#x27;t come from a sports background. They aren&#x27;t &quot;safe&quot; devices exactly - it takes skill to pilot them, and when things inevitably go awry, it takes good reflexes to avoid damage.<p>Novices to action sports often throw their arms out to catch themselves when they bail instead of rolling through the fall. They also don&#x27;t know how to navigate obstacles via strategic weighting and unweighting of their implement.<p>The energies involved are also substantial -- to put it bluntly, some of these things fuckin&#x27; rip, which is super fun, but also makes safety gear a good idea. You can take a lot of trauma and abrasion bailing at 25mph+, potentially life-changing or fatal in the worst cases. There&#x27;s a reason why downhill longboarders and an increasing number of electric wheel riders wear a fullface and leathers.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>conductr</author><text>I bailed at 8mph on an electric longboard and broke my elbow, severely sprained my shoulder and wrist. I even lost some rotation and dexterity in my hand. It&#x27;s one of those <i>my arm is never going to be the same</i> type injuries. I was 40 but skated and bmxed into my mid-20s and still felt pretty comfortable with my abilities on the ground (gave up on ramps long ago). I knew this was a risk given the speeds and even got an &quot;off road&quot; model (bigger wheels) to help make pebbles and such a non-issue. Even still, concrete is not flat, you&#x27;ll eventually come across a missing cobblestone, etc. IMO it&#x27;s a matter of when not if you&#x27;ll take a spill.<p>That said, I think the electric unicycles are much more dangerous. But at least they make it clear that it&#x27;s not a toy. I passed on the Onewheel because of the random ejection complains I&#x27;ve seen online (which is likely fueling this regulation as it&#x27;s been known for several years now). While wrecking was not fun, at least I did it to myself. I&#x27;d be really upset if I felt like the board did it to me.</text></comment> | <story><title>CPSC calls for full recall of all Onewheel self-balancing electric skateboards</title><url>https://www.cpsc.gov/Newsroom/News-Releases/2023/CPSC-Warns-Consumers-to-Stop-Using-Onewheel-Self-Balancing-Electric-Skateboards-Due-to-Ejection-Hazard-At-Least-Four-Deaths-and-Multiple-Injuries-Reported</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>0_____0</author><text>One issue I&#x27;ve noticed with these new forms of electric wheeled transport (longboard, transverse and longitudinal one-wheelers) is that the people riding them often don&#x27;t come from a sports background. They aren&#x27;t &quot;safe&quot; devices exactly - it takes skill to pilot them, and when things inevitably go awry, it takes good reflexes to avoid damage.<p>Novices to action sports often throw their arms out to catch themselves when they bail instead of rolling through the fall. They also don&#x27;t know how to navigate obstacles via strategic weighting and unweighting of their implement.<p>The energies involved are also substantial -- to put it bluntly, some of these things fuckin&#x27; rip, which is super fun, but also makes safety gear a good idea. You can take a lot of trauma and abrasion bailing at 25mph+, potentially life-changing or fatal in the worst cases. There&#x27;s a reason why downhill longboarders and an increasing number of electric wheel riders wear a fullface and leathers.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>deeblering4</author><text>Very true. If you&#x27;ve never been able to cruise on a skateboard, you might not realize how much damage an unexpected pebble or sidewalk crack will do.<p>Riding is a constant balance of scanning the pavement for inconsistencies and making corrections to mitigate them. I don&#x27;t know if that&#x27;s even possible at 20+ mph.</text></comment> |
30,932,873 | 30,933,108 | 1 | 2 | 30,932,011 | train | <story><title>IPCC’s starkest message yet: extreme steps needed to avert climate disaster</title><url>https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00951-5</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>trentnix</author><text>“Extreme steps”, whether they admit it or not, is a reduction in the standard of living of many and handicapping the efforts to improve the standard of living for most. That requires the power of the individual to be reduced to empower central authorities who will manage our new rationed, austere society.<p>That is, certainly, a recipe for catastrophic war.<p>If climate change is the existential crisis some insist it is, our only solution is technological. But those who wish to use climate change as a Trojan horse to enact their social whims will reject any discussion of the sort. Because solving climate change isn’t their goal, it’s the means to attain their goal.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>AlexandrB</author><text>&gt; That is, certainly, a recipe for catastrophic war.<p>Climate change itself is probably a recipe for catastrophic war <i>and</i> the resurgence of fascism. There are estimates as high as 1.2 billion for people that will be displaced by climate change[1]. Even a much smaller number of refugees from the middle east and South America has helped push politics in many western countries towards isolationism and increased xenophobia. What would 1.2 billion refugees do?<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.weforum.org&#x2F;agenda&#x2F;2021&#x2F;06&#x2F;climate-refugees-the-world-s-forgotten-victims&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.weforum.org&#x2F;agenda&#x2F;2021&#x2F;06&#x2F;climate-refugees-the-...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>IPCC’s starkest message yet: extreme steps needed to avert climate disaster</title><url>https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00951-5</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>trentnix</author><text>“Extreme steps”, whether they admit it or not, is a reduction in the standard of living of many and handicapping the efforts to improve the standard of living for most. That requires the power of the individual to be reduced to empower central authorities who will manage our new rationed, austere society.<p>That is, certainly, a recipe for catastrophic war.<p>If climate change is the existential crisis some insist it is, our only solution is technological. But those who wish to use climate change as a Trojan horse to enact their social whims will reject any discussion of the sort. Because solving climate change isn’t their goal, it’s the means to attain their goal.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>DoingIsLearning</author><text>American, Canada, Australia, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, are a short list of countries who emit a ridiculously disproportionate amount of carbon per capita. [0]<p>The assumption that reduction of carbon emissions is a reduction of standard of living is flawed. A long list of developed countries have a tiny footprint per capita. Standard of living and living wastefully are not the same thing.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ourworldindata.org&#x2F;grapher&#x2F;co-emissions-per-capita?tab=chart&amp;country=CAN~USA~GBR~JPN~NZL~CHE~SWE~FRA~DNK~ISR~AUS" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ourworldindata.org&#x2F;grapher&#x2F;co-emissions-per-capita?t...</a></text></comment> |
4,413,591 | 4,412,815 | 1 | 2 | 4,412,245 | train | <story><title>Fixing Hacker News: A mathematical approach</title><url>http://gkosev.blogspot.com/2012/08/fixing-hacker-news-mathematical-approach.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>acabal</author><text>Interesting, but with an important flaw the author acknowledges:<p>&#62; The important downside of these results is that the people using the system were not aware that points are calculated in a different way.<p>As I mentioned in that HN-meta-whining thread, you can't engineer away jerks, and social problems need social solutions. People will naturally adapt to any sort of engineered restrictions and find away around them regardless. Personally I think the only way to maintain a very high standard of quality in a community is strict hands-on moderation and swift ejection of members who don't match the community's goals and vibe.<p>(In either case I think the thread this post refers to was about the negativity in comments, not the quality of submissions. Though I might be remembering wrong.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>paulsutter</author><text>People don't divide cleanly into good actors vs bad actors. Feedback mechanisms such as karma and downvoting on HN allows people to learn how to behave within the community. The better the feedback mechanism, the better people will behave.<p>Properly weighting the votes from each user would allow more effective moderation to be crowdsourced from the whole community. Everyone should be a moderator, but only with the degree of authority that he has earned.<p>That weighting can be done with a technical approach as has been proven by search* companies. How does Google deal with the fact that there is no moderation on the web in general, and a multibillion dollar incentive to manipulate their results? Google results are really clean and usable despite the above limitations. Their approach is purely technical.<p>This proposal is an effort to enhance the ability of the crowd to moderate HN more effectively by improved weighting.<p>*Note that Google is almost solely a ranking problem, and the the term "search" is a bit of a misnomer. If you could see the bottom ranked matches for any query I'm sure you would see plenty of unsavory content, but the first results (the ones you actually see) are really clean.</text></comment> | <story><title>Fixing Hacker News: A mathematical approach</title><url>http://gkosev.blogspot.com/2012/08/fixing-hacker-news-mathematical-approach.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>acabal</author><text>Interesting, but with an important flaw the author acknowledges:<p>&#62; The important downside of these results is that the people using the system were not aware that points are calculated in a different way.<p>As I mentioned in that HN-meta-whining thread, you can't engineer away jerks, and social problems need social solutions. People will naturally adapt to any sort of engineered restrictions and find away around them regardless. Personally I think the only way to maintain a very high standard of quality in a community is strict hands-on moderation and swift ejection of members who don't match the community's goals and vibe.<p>(In either case I think the thread this post refers to was about the negativity in comments, not the quality of submissions. Though I might be remembering wrong.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jorleif</author><text>Why can't you engineer away jerks? I mean, we have democracy, free markets etc. and among their main contributions is to engineer away the effects of bad behavior. In a democracy, you won't get the best decision, but you will get an acceptable decision. In a free market competitors force business to serve the customer.<p>Similarly, a techical solution which gives jerks a smaller influence seems an excellent partial solution. Sure, you might still need policing, but it isn't either or.</text></comment> |
24,906,935 | 24,899,999 | 1 | 2 | 24,897,812 | train | <story><title>Show HN: Personal CRM: Note taking, the way it should be</title><url>https://nat.app/calendar</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>noprivacy</author><text>&quot;What are you looking for in a personal CRM?&quot;<p>Privacy and security. And your privacy assurances&#x2F;policies are woefully insufficient.<p>From <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nat.app&#x2F;privacy" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nat.app&#x2F;privacy</a><p>&gt; Your Gmail data is only used by machines. Our team won&#x27;t read or access any of your email data unless you explicitly ask for it (for support for ex.)<p>&quot;Won&#x27;t&quot; means nothing. The word you&#x27;re looking for is &quot;can&#x27;t&quot;<p>&gt; By default, we don&#x27;t share any data with third parties. The only exception to this rule is Mixpanel, our analytics apps, which receives information about how you use our app only.<p>Yeeaaaaah your privacy policy directly states that if you&#x27;re acquired or go out of business, user data will be transferred or sold.<p>&gt; As required by Google, the authentification tokens we use to retrieve your Gmail data are safely encrypted in our database.<p>&quot;We do what is required&quot; isn&#x27;t convincing me you take privacy seriously, and...encrypted how? A password in the database server&#x27;s config file?<p>&gt; Access to production environments is limited to authorized team members only.<p>And....who are authorized team members? &quot;Authorized team members&quot; could mean &quot;the entire engineering and QA teams, plus the marketing intern collecting demographic data reports.&quot;<p>Your statement doesn&#x27;t distinguish between user data and the production environment as a whole, it doesn&#x27;t commit to strictly keeping access to production AND user data to the bare minimum required.<p>&gt; We use the industry-standard 256-bit encryption with SSL.<p>...like everyone else? This does not inspire faith that your company has exemplary network security if you think this is worth mentioning.<p>&gt; Key passwords are updated on a quarterly basis to reduce risks.<p>You think quarterly password rotation is a noteworthy, or even effective, security practice? You&#x27;re using passwords as your sole authentication for employees? O_o<p>You make no mention of your policies with regards to law enforcement. Do you commit to only releasing data when served with a warrant or subpoena, or can Officer Bob call you up and explain how he&#x27;s investigating a Really Bad Person and you&#x27;ll hand over their data? Seems the answer is yes, you will:<p>&gt; &quot;Nat discloses potentially personally-identifying and personally-identifying information only in response to a subpoena, court order or other governmental request, <i></i>or when Nat believes in good faith that disclosure is reasonably necessary to protect the property or rights of Nat, third parties or the public at large.<i></i>&quot;<p>What country is your organization incorporated in? What country is user data kept in and thus what laws is it subject to? Is the data stored in the cloud? A server in your uncle&#x27;s basement?<p>You make no mention of systems to assure only a minimum number of designated employees have the access they need when they need it. IE a support team member cannot access a customer&#x27;s data unless there is an open case verified as initiated by the customer.<p>You make no mention of how data or whether data is encrypted; it seems only gmail auth tokens are?<p>You should be using hardware token 2FA for critical employee access and 2FA everywhere else...not rotating passwords quarterly. You should be using vaults for every password used in production. All access should be logged and audited by an outside party.</text></item><item><author>nathanganser</author><text>I&#x27;m finally in love with my product!<p>We&#x27;re a bootstrapped team of 4 four and we&#x27;ve been building our personal crm app for over a year. As the original founder and CEO, I&#x27;ve been waiting for this day for a loooong time!
I finally love my own app and use it on a daily basis (hopefully you will too).<p>We&#x27;ve already launched a long time ago but today we&#x27;re launching a new feature: Note taking, straight from your inbox.<p>We email you before every meeting with all the notes you&#x27;ve taken about the person you&#x27;re going to meet and you simply have to reply to the email to log a note! Making it the easiest way to build your database of notes about your contacts.<p>I know that there are tons of people who tried to build a personal CRM and that everyone has his opinion on how the &quot;right&quot; personal crm should work.<p>Personally, we&#x27;ve decided that:
- it should be fully automated (sync with calendar and email)
- super simple to use (no complex and clunky interface)
- it should be magic (our app tells you who you&#x27;re losing touch with based on your data)<p>And you? What are you looking for in a personal crm?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dang</author><text>It&#x27;s of course fine to make the case for privacy and security in a product like this, but please do it without snark and especially without being an internet asshole. Those things are destructive of the ecosystem here, and the ecosystem is more important than any particular thread or product.<p>I&#x27;m sure you wouldn&#x27;t litter in a city park or dump motor oil into a lake, so please don&#x27;t do the analogical things on HN.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Show HN: Personal CRM: Note taking, the way it should be</title><url>https://nat.app/calendar</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>noprivacy</author><text>&quot;What are you looking for in a personal CRM?&quot;<p>Privacy and security. And your privacy assurances&#x2F;policies are woefully insufficient.<p>From <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nat.app&#x2F;privacy" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nat.app&#x2F;privacy</a><p>&gt; Your Gmail data is only used by machines. Our team won&#x27;t read or access any of your email data unless you explicitly ask for it (for support for ex.)<p>&quot;Won&#x27;t&quot; means nothing. The word you&#x27;re looking for is &quot;can&#x27;t&quot;<p>&gt; By default, we don&#x27;t share any data with third parties. The only exception to this rule is Mixpanel, our analytics apps, which receives information about how you use our app only.<p>Yeeaaaaah your privacy policy directly states that if you&#x27;re acquired or go out of business, user data will be transferred or sold.<p>&gt; As required by Google, the authentification tokens we use to retrieve your Gmail data are safely encrypted in our database.<p>&quot;We do what is required&quot; isn&#x27;t convincing me you take privacy seriously, and...encrypted how? A password in the database server&#x27;s config file?<p>&gt; Access to production environments is limited to authorized team members only.<p>And....who are authorized team members? &quot;Authorized team members&quot; could mean &quot;the entire engineering and QA teams, plus the marketing intern collecting demographic data reports.&quot;<p>Your statement doesn&#x27;t distinguish between user data and the production environment as a whole, it doesn&#x27;t commit to strictly keeping access to production AND user data to the bare minimum required.<p>&gt; We use the industry-standard 256-bit encryption with SSL.<p>...like everyone else? This does not inspire faith that your company has exemplary network security if you think this is worth mentioning.<p>&gt; Key passwords are updated on a quarterly basis to reduce risks.<p>You think quarterly password rotation is a noteworthy, or even effective, security practice? You&#x27;re using passwords as your sole authentication for employees? O_o<p>You make no mention of your policies with regards to law enforcement. Do you commit to only releasing data when served with a warrant or subpoena, or can Officer Bob call you up and explain how he&#x27;s investigating a Really Bad Person and you&#x27;ll hand over their data? Seems the answer is yes, you will:<p>&gt; &quot;Nat discloses potentially personally-identifying and personally-identifying information only in response to a subpoena, court order or other governmental request, <i></i>or when Nat believes in good faith that disclosure is reasonably necessary to protect the property or rights of Nat, third parties or the public at large.<i></i>&quot;<p>What country is your organization incorporated in? What country is user data kept in and thus what laws is it subject to? Is the data stored in the cloud? A server in your uncle&#x27;s basement?<p>You make no mention of systems to assure only a minimum number of designated employees have the access they need when they need it. IE a support team member cannot access a customer&#x27;s data unless there is an open case verified as initiated by the customer.<p>You make no mention of how data or whether data is encrypted; it seems only gmail auth tokens are?<p>You should be using hardware token 2FA for critical employee access and 2FA everywhere else...not rotating passwords quarterly. You should be using vaults for every password used in production. All access should be logged and audited by an outside party.</text></item><item><author>nathanganser</author><text>I&#x27;m finally in love with my product!<p>We&#x27;re a bootstrapped team of 4 four and we&#x27;ve been building our personal crm app for over a year. As the original founder and CEO, I&#x27;ve been waiting for this day for a loooong time!
I finally love my own app and use it on a daily basis (hopefully you will too).<p>We&#x27;ve already launched a long time ago but today we&#x27;re launching a new feature: Note taking, straight from your inbox.<p>We email you before every meeting with all the notes you&#x27;ve taken about the person you&#x27;re going to meet and you simply have to reply to the email to log a note! Making it the easiest way to build your database of notes about your contacts.<p>I know that there are tons of people who tried to build a personal CRM and that everyone has his opinion on how the &quot;right&quot; personal crm should work.<p>Personally, we&#x27;ve decided that:
- it should be fully automated (sync with calendar and email)
- super simple to use (no complex and clunky interface)
- it should be magic (our app tells you who you&#x27;re losing touch with based on your data)<p>And you? What are you looking for in a personal crm?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>philsnow</author><text>I was already put off by the email-centric flow of this (I want to spend <i>less</i> time in my email inbox, not more), but it looks like from this comment that signing up requires me to auth nat.app to read my gmail?<p>Complete non-starter for me. So many reset flows go through email these days that your primary email is the keys to the kingdom.<p>I could set up a specific email account on my domain just for nat.app but the whole point of this CRM is that it&#x27;s in the same flow as the rest of my email, isn&#x27;t it?</text></comment> |
26,094,459 | 26,094,249 | 1 | 3 | 26,093,778 | train | <story><title>Golang generics proposal has been accepted</title><url>https://github.com/golang/go/issues/43651#issuecomment-776944155</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dcolkitt</author><text>IMO the biggest factors for the success of Go are 1) super-fast compile times, 2) easy to interpret compiler errors, and 3) dead simple shipment of high performance, native static binaries.<p>I think Go has succeeded, despite, not because of the language itself. One very big limitation being the lack of generics or any sort of ability to leverage higher-order types. Sometimes making a small modification to a large codebase can require a huge footprint of lines modified, just because so much code winds up duplicated in slightly different contexts.<p>That being said, I really hope that Go&#x27;s core team understands the drivers of its popularity and doesn&#x27;t compromise the operational side for the sake of language improvements. Although higher-typed languages have no trouble achieving good runtime performance, it seems like there&#x27;s a fundamental tradeoff at compile time. Scala, Haskell, even Typescript have painful compile times. I don&#x27;t know if there&#x27;s any theoretical reason for it to hold, but more typing complexity inevitably leads to slow compile times.<p>And as for the topic of clear error messages, the higher-typed languages are all atrocious at this. Even templates in C++ are notorious for puking near impossible to decipher errors. This is something I&#x27;m sure can be fixed with enough engineering effort, but it would probably take <i>a lot</i> of effort to get there.<p>In general, I bitch about the Go language all the time. But I think we should recognize that the simplicity of the language gives us developers a lot of peripheral really nice usability benefits.</text></comment> | <story><title>Golang generics proposal has been accepted</title><url>https://github.com/golang/go/issues/43651#issuecomment-776944155</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>smasher164</author><text>This is a significant milestone for Go, and I&#x27;m extremely happy for the community. I didn&#x27;t imagine getting here when I first started using the language, and yet here we are.<p>Special props to Ian Lance Taylor and Robert Griesemer for their continued revisions of drafts, and exemplary discussion with the community in implementing feedback.</text></comment> |
19,963,874 | 19,963,048 | 1 | 3 | 19,961,487 | train | <story><title>GDPR adtech complaints keep stacking up in Europe</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/20/gdpr-adtech-complaints-keep-stacking-up-in-europe/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Veen</author><text>The same way publications made money for two centuries without tracking and “personalization”, by displaying advertising relevant to the content and the publication’s target audience.</text></item><item><author>judge2020</author><text>What is a reliable way to make money from free articles (other than NY times - style limited articles)? As in, what ad networks can you set up that only use the content of the page to target ads? At this point, if you don&#x27;t use Google Ads (adsense), your advertiser pool drops significantly and you&#x27;ll likely be making less money overall.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>earthboundkid</author><text>Here is a thing I think about a lot:<p>People like ads.<p>You know &quot;brand Twitter&quot; and how people like talking about the cheeky thing that Burger King said? That&#x27;s an ad.<p>The Super Bowl? People watch for the ads.<p>Magazines: people collect pretty ad series, like the old Absolute Vodka ones.<p>Podcasts? We all loved saying &quot;mail kimp&quot; like idiots for a couple months because of a popular ad.<p>People like ads! …Except on the web.<p>No one has ever liked a banner ad. Search ads people sometimes like, but no one has ever liked a banner ad. So, they kept adding more banner ads to try to make it up in volume and then they added a shit ton of tracking because they could, but guess what, banner ads still suck and no one likes them.<p>So, maybe stop trying to make fetch happen? If banner ads haven&#x27;t been successful for 20 years, maybe they aren&#x27;t going to suddenly become successful and it&#x27;s time to stop trying.</text></comment> | <story><title>GDPR adtech complaints keep stacking up in Europe</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/20/gdpr-adtech-complaints-keep-stacking-up-in-europe/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Veen</author><text>The same way publications made money for two centuries without tracking and “personalization”, by displaying advertising relevant to the content and the publication’s target audience.</text></item><item><author>judge2020</author><text>What is a reliable way to make money from free articles (other than NY times - style limited articles)? As in, what ad networks can you set up that only use the content of the page to target ads? At this point, if you don&#x27;t use Google Ads (adsense), your advertiser pool drops significantly and you&#x27;ll likely be making less money overall.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>stingraycharles</author><text>I thought that was mainly paid subscriptions <i>and</i> advertising?<p>Ad-only publications were always very low quality.</text></comment> |
34,507,935 | 34,507,498 | 1 | 3 | 34,505,717 | train | <story><title>NYC jails want to ban physical mail, then privatize scanning of digital versions</title><url>https://theintercept.com/2023/01/23/nyc-jail-rikers-mail-surveillance-securus/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>_trampeltier</author><text>In Germany are about 1&#x2F;3 people in prison because they used a train or bus without ticket. If you can&#x27;t pay you will end up in prison. Imagine how much money this does cost.</text></item><item><author>TaylorAlexander</author><text>Going a step further, we can reduce costs by funding social services that help prevent people from ending up in prison in the first place. I agree with your assessment of our Calvinist thinking.</text></item><item><author>mabbo</author><text>I feel like the prison system is the victim of perverse incentives.<p>The goal given to them is &quot;house this person securely for a specific length of time <i>at the lowest cost possible</i>&quot;. They are rewarded for cutting costs.<p>But the total cost <i>we</i> pay is the cost to imprison this person the second and third time when they re-offend. It&#x27;s the policing costs when they&#x27;re homeless because they can&#x27;t find housing or get a job. It&#x27;s the health care costs they can never pay for when all of the above inevitably leads to further problems.<p>To reduce the lifetime cost of this person on society (financially and otherwise) we should be incentivising prisons to actually rehabilitate.<p>But we won&#x27;t, because our society is largely based on Calvinist nonsense that says there are &quot;bad people&quot; and we should celebrate those people having bad things happen to them.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>VMG</author><text>This seems like a made up number. This article here states that it is at most 10% of all people even in that category of crime in Bavaria <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;netzpolitik.org&#x2F;2022&#x2F;datenluecke-wie-viele-menschen-sitzen-wegen-fahren-ohne-ticket-im-gefaengnis&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;netzpolitik.org&#x2F;2022&#x2F;datenluecke-wie-viele-menschen-...</a><p>The category being &quot;Ersatzfreiheitsstrafe&quot; (imprisonment for failure to pay a fine)<p>Do you have a source for your claim?</text></comment> | <story><title>NYC jails want to ban physical mail, then privatize scanning of digital versions</title><url>https://theintercept.com/2023/01/23/nyc-jail-rikers-mail-surveillance-securus/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>_trampeltier</author><text>In Germany are about 1&#x2F;3 people in prison because they used a train or bus without ticket. If you can&#x27;t pay you will end up in prison. Imagine how much money this does cost.</text></item><item><author>TaylorAlexander</author><text>Going a step further, we can reduce costs by funding social services that help prevent people from ending up in prison in the first place. I agree with your assessment of our Calvinist thinking.</text></item><item><author>mabbo</author><text>I feel like the prison system is the victim of perverse incentives.<p>The goal given to them is &quot;house this person securely for a specific length of time <i>at the lowest cost possible</i>&quot;. They are rewarded for cutting costs.<p>But the total cost <i>we</i> pay is the cost to imprison this person the second and third time when they re-offend. It&#x27;s the policing costs when they&#x27;re homeless because they can&#x27;t find housing or get a job. It&#x27;s the health care costs they can never pay for when all of the above inevitably leads to further problems.<p>To reduce the lifetime cost of this person on society (financially and otherwise) we should be incentivising prisons to actually rehabilitate.<p>But we won&#x27;t, because our society is largely based on Calvinist nonsense that says there are &quot;bad people&quot; and we should celebrate those people having bad things happen to them.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rahimnathwani</author><text>Is this 1&#x2F;3 of the current prison population, or is it 1&#x2F;3 of prison sentences handout in a certain period?<p>I could believe the latter.<p>But I assume that sentences for fare evasion are shorter than for other types of theft, or more serious things like murder?</text></comment> |
38,613,652 | 38,613,762 | 1 | 2 | 38,613,280 | train | <story><title>Active turbulence cancellation makes bumpy flights smoother</title><url>https://newatlas.com/aircraft/active-turbulence-cancellation/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>londons_explore</author><text>&gt; on long pole masts that placed them some 2.65 m (8.69 ft) forward of the leading edges. At cruise speed, that&#x27;s enough to give the system a tenth of a second&#x27;s worth of advance warning before turbulence hits<p>2.65m *&#x2F; 0.1 seconds = 60 mph.<p>Airliners fly about 500 mph, so something about this math is far off...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sgc</author><text>&gt; The company says it&#x27;ll have a system commercially available for light aircraft in 2024. It&#x27;s looking into a version for eVTOL air taxis by 2026, and hoping to have a system relevant to commercial airliners by 2030. Godspeed, team, the world&#x27;s airline passengers – not to mention cleaning crews – need you to succeed.<p>They are not targeting airliners for the current generation.</text></comment> | <story><title>Active turbulence cancellation makes bumpy flights smoother</title><url>https://newatlas.com/aircraft/active-turbulence-cancellation/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>londons_explore</author><text>&gt; on long pole masts that placed them some 2.65 m (8.69 ft) forward of the leading edges. At cruise speed, that&#x27;s enough to give the system a tenth of a second&#x27;s worth of advance warning before turbulence hits<p>2.65m *&#x2F; 0.1 seconds = 60 mph.<p>Airliners fly about 500 mph, so something about this math is far off...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wongarsu</author><text>Maybe they meant the cruise speed of the test aircraft. Some quick googling reveals it as a Colomban MC-30 Luciole [1], which according to Wikipedia [2] has a cruise speed of 110 mph and a maximum speed of 120 mph. Mounting the long instrument arm to the tiny aircraft probably doesn&#x27;t do it any favors (seriously, the aircraft looks tiny next to a Cessna), so cruising at 60mph sounds reasonable.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wildbergair.com&#x2F;registrations&#x2F;C&#x2F;OE-CRG_1_01.htm" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wildbergair.com&#x2F;registrations&#x2F;C&#x2F;OE-CRG_1_01.htm</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Colomban_MC-30_Luciole" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Colomban_MC-30_Luciole</a></text></comment> |
25,274,346 | 25,274,303 | 1 | 2 | 25,273,907 | train | <story><title>QBE vs. LLVM</title><url>https://c9x.me/compile/doc/llvm.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>siraben</author><text>I wanted to write an LLVM backend for various instruction sets (e.g. Z80, R216[0]), since those would deal with the problems of optimization passes and register allocation for me, but the LLVM tutorial[1] makes it look so goddamn hard. Does anyone know of a tutorial or of a declarative way to write such backends for either QBE or LLVM? The QBE git repository[2] has a few backends but also looks similarly involved.<p>Comparatively, writing frontends is quite easy these days and many examples of compiling to IR exist.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;trigraph.net&#x2F;powdertoy&#x2F;R216&#x2F;manual.md" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;trigraph.net&#x2F;powdertoy&#x2F;R216&#x2F;manual.md</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;llvm.org&#x2F;docs&#x2F;WritingAnLLVMBackend.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;llvm.org&#x2F;docs&#x2F;WritingAnLLVMBackend.html</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;c9x.me&#x2F;git&#x2F;qbe.git&#x2F;tree&#x2F;amd64" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;c9x.me&#x2F;git&#x2F;qbe.git&#x2F;tree&#x2F;amd64</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pjmlp</author><text>Writing backends to integration into compiler stacks like LLVM is as challenge unless one is quite deep into compilers.<p>If the idea is just to learn how they work, it is easier to just dump an IR that is compatible with a macro assembler, then just call the assembler with your macro definitions on the generated IR.<p>It won&#x27;t win prices in performance, but one gets to learn how things work and will have a compiler with proper binaries at the end, and one can fine tune the macros to improve the quality of the code anyway.</text></comment> | <story><title>QBE vs. LLVM</title><url>https://c9x.me/compile/doc/llvm.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>siraben</author><text>I wanted to write an LLVM backend for various instruction sets (e.g. Z80, R216[0]), since those would deal with the problems of optimization passes and register allocation for me, but the LLVM tutorial[1] makes it look so goddamn hard. Does anyone know of a tutorial or of a declarative way to write such backends for either QBE or LLVM? The QBE git repository[2] has a few backends but also looks similarly involved.<p>Comparatively, writing frontends is quite easy these days and many examples of compiling to IR exist.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;trigraph.net&#x2F;powdertoy&#x2F;R216&#x2F;manual.md" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;trigraph.net&#x2F;powdertoy&#x2F;R216&#x2F;manual.md</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;llvm.org&#x2F;docs&#x2F;WritingAnLLVMBackend.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;llvm.org&#x2F;docs&#x2F;WritingAnLLVMBackend.html</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;c9x.me&#x2F;git&#x2F;qbe.git&#x2F;tree&#x2F;amd64" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;c9x.me&#x2F;git&#x2F;qbe.git&#x2F;tree&#x2F;amd64</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mhh__</author><text>Writing compiler backend in a declarative manner is something I&#x27;ve been toying with for a while now, and I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s realistically possible with current technology.<p>Backends <i>are</i> hard, unfortunately.<p>However, since you are targeting the Z80, you might be able to just take the IR and transform it yourself? I haven&#x27;t touched an LLVM backend for a while, so I don&#x27;t know what the process is atm, but if you imagine that a lot of a modern compiler is dealing with instruction scheduling and the like , which the Z80 doesn&#x27;t really have a need for.<p>LLVM is very good for the industry, but it is a little over-engineered(?). Maybe that&#x27;s a bit harsh, but the difficulty is definitely thrown at you earlier than hacking on most compilers.</text></comment> |
8,859,520 | 8,859,469 | 1 | 3 | 8,859,199 | train | <story><title>How my life was changed when I began caring about the people I did not hire</title><url>http://brookeallen.com/pages/archives/1234</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>JeremyMorgan</author><text>The first time I got a front page link to my site on HN, it did this exact same thing, which prompted me to move away from Wordpress. Static HTML ever since.<p>But to comment on the article, I think this is a fantastic idea. I do wonder though how he found so many enthusiastic people. Maybe it&#x27;s just a new era, but I have a hard time finding people who even want to do a 1 hour coding challenge. He got these folks who were willing to learn something, and build and spend DAYS on it? It&#x27;s awesome but it seems unlikely these days.<p>Taking that kind of time to choose the right person, then helping the other people network with other APL folks... that just spreads good vibes all around. I would like to see the &quot;care more&quot; trend spread in our industry. Even now with a programmer shortage companies are still unicorn hunting and making people jump through stupid hoops for jobs.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>NoMoreNicksLeft</author><text>About 5 years ago, I moved to another city across the country to work for a small startup. The city was small, candidates were few locally, and maybe fewer still wanting to move there (Lubbock, but my inlaws are nearby, and I liked the idea of my kids getting to see their grandparents).<p>It was the funnest job I ever had, moreso than I could describe. I was hired on as a web developer, but about 3 weeks in they started asking me to help work on firmware written in C for pic microcontrollers. Soon after that, they asked me if I thought I could produce comparable products with commodity hardware, and I found myself trying to write linux drivers for a packet radio (the usb development kit that the chip maker sells... but only provides Windows drivers for).<p>A few weeks in, I had that working. With a dozen other projects on the backburner too, all of them interesting and challenging. They were buying whatever hardware I said I needed, and if I ordered something that turned out to not be so useful, no one ever complained.<p>It was easy to be excited doing all of this. So of course the day after I managed to get a working prototype of the biggest challenge yet, I was shitcanned. Startups run out of money.<p>Now I write stupid web apps for a university. They pay me better ($20,000 more a year, not including benefits, probably more like $35,000 more with those). But it&#x27;s boring as hell. And it&#x27;s not the university&#x27;s fault. The world needs alot of boring stuff to keep running.<p>My point is, if you&#x27;ve found alot of enthusiastic people, it&#x27;s not your HR department&#x27;s competence that gets the credit. It&#x27;s not really those people&#x27;s credit either. You just have a rare job that&#x27;s actually fun.</text></comment> | <story><title>How my life was changed when I began caring about the people I did not hire</title><url>http://brookeallen.com/pages/archives/1234</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>JeremyMorgan</author><text>The first time I got a front page link to my site on HN, it did this exact same thing, which prompted me to move away from Wordpress. Static HTML ever since.<p>But to comment on the article, I think this is a fantastic idea. I do wonder though how he found so many enthusiastic people. Maybe it&#x27;s just a new era, but I have a hard time finding people who even want to do a 1 hour coding challenge. He got these folks who were willing to learn something, and build and spend DAYS on it? It&#x27;s awesome but it seems unlikely these days.<p>Taking that kind of time to choose the right person, then helping the other people network with other APL folks... that just spreads good vibes all around. I would like to see the &quot;care more&quot; trend spread in our industry. Even now with a programmer shortage companies are still unicorn hunting and making people jump through stupid hoops for jobs.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vonmoltke</author><text>&gt; Even now with a programmer shortage companies are still unicorn hunting and making people jump through stupid hoops for jobs.<p>What&#x27;s worse is the companies who try to defend their unicorn hunts when called on it.</text></comment> |
12,803,805 | 12,801,149 | 1 | 3 | 12,800,019 | train | <story><title>Isaac Asimov on How to Be Prolific</title><url>http://briangroat.com/2016/10/26/asimov-on-how-to-be-prolific/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>laacz</author><text>I must say &quot;Thank you&quot;. Thank you, Asimov, for my language skills.<p>I started reading Asimov in my native language (Latvian) until I run out of it. It was late 80s. Then I had to work on my Russian reading skills in order to read everything else USSR had to provide from Asimov. Then I read everything libraries in Riga had on sci-fi.<p>And when 90s arrived, I accidentally got a hold of few Asimov books in English. I remember vividly the nights I spent with his book on the left side and English dictionary on the right one. Underlining and writing words and page numbers of words I coulnd&#x27;t find just to return to them later when context would be much cleaner. Ever so funny struggle with idioms and cultural references I couldn&#x27;t possibly understand. There was no internet to look that stuff up.<p>So, yes. Thank you, sci-fi in general and Asimov in particular for motivation and opportunity to learn one of basic life skills - ability to read and understand foreign language better than school could teach.</text></comment> | <story><title>Isaac Asimov on How to Be Prolific</title><url>http://briangroat.com/2016/10/26/asimov-on-how-to-be-prolific/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>michaelpinto</author><text>Something to keep in mind is that Asimov was very much a product of the age of pulp magazines, so early on in his career he was paid by the word for his work.<p>A side geek note: If you were active in NYC fandom from say the 50s on chances were very good that you would actually get to see Isaac in person at many local science fiction conventions. For some reason he disliked air travel, and would show up at almost any local convention that he was invited to.<p>If you want to read a really good book on being a geek from the depression era to about the 50s I would highly recommend reading The Way the Future Was by rederik Pohl.</text></comment> |
1,983,471 | 1,983,386 | 1 | 3 | 1,983,194 | train | <story><title>This is experimental. However, it could start a revolution in information access</title><url>http://i.imgur.com/nkBnu.png</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>junkbit</author><text>August 1991: WWW goes live; Linux Kernel announced; USSR collapsed; SNES English release; Terminator 2 was in the cinemas and Smells Like Teen Spirit had its radio début. What a month</text></comment> | <story><title>This is experimental. However, it could start a revolution in information access</title><url>http://i.imgur.com/nkBnu.png</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mambodog</author><text>If anyone wants to take it for a spin: <a href="http://www.nextcomputers.org/NeXTfiles/Software/NEXTSTEP/Apps/Internet/WWW/Web%20Browsers/First_Web_Browser/" rel="nofollow">http://www.nextcomputers.org/NeXTfiles/Software/NEXTSTEP/App...</a><p>Note: NEXTSTEP required. Runs pretty well in VMWare.<p>EDIT:
If you're running a VM you'll want the "33fat" (fat binary) one.<p>Also here is the Obj-C source code: <a href="http://www.w3.org/History/1991-WWW-NeXT/Implementation/" rel="nofollow">http://www.w3.org/History/1991-WWW-NeXT/Implementation/</a></text></comment> |
19,737,382 | 19,737,335 | 1 | 2 | 19,734,565 | train | <story><title>Changes to Models S and X allow them to travel longer without larger batteries</title><url>https://www.tesla.com/blog/longest-range-electric-vehicle-now-goes-even-farther</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>quanticle</author><text>They break at much much lower rates, because they have many fewer parts. EVs don&#x27;t have the pistons, valves, belts, fans, compressors, alternators, spark plugs, etc that gasoline engines have. There&#x27;s probably order of magnitude fewer parts to break.<p>Having seen the interior of an automatic gearbox, the surprising thing to me is that conventional automobiles are as reliable as they are.</text></item><item><author>ajuc</author><text>&gt; EVs don&#x27;t need the large established dealership base and their included maintenance facilities<p>I never understood that. Why does power source matter in the context of dealership base and maintenance? EVs still break.</text></item><item><author>Shivetya</author><text>A few observations, before I derail<p>I do not want to dismiss the efforts of Audi or Jaguar but I think their initial focus was being good examples for their respective brands with regards to their packaging. Their interior quality of a different generation and caliber than Tesla. The EV part was an important concern but secondary. They can still rack up significant ZEV credits in California letting them off the hook of buying them from others.<p>Tesla needs to refresh the S and X to improve interior fit and finish but also concentrate on making them quieter, an issue I have with my 3. without the drone of a motor every sound stands out and EVs tend to ride on stiffer, noisier, tires.<p>As for difficulty, other than i3 and Tesla cars I do not believe any other EV was a clean sheet design. Even the Leaf appears based on traditional cars. the Bolt is simply a spark when a new motor cradle and battery back pushed under it. The Hyundai&#x2F;Kia models are all adaptions. Not 100% sure about the iPace but Jaguar even contracted out assembly.<p>--<p>The manufacturing difficulty is probably secondary to the seismic shift crossing the auto industry and associated industries. EVs don&#x27;t need the large established dealership base and their included maintenance facilities. Secondary market means little use for parts stores and their suppliers. Gas stations will be right out with most charging done at destination points. Manufacturing of the autos themselves will implode the number of employees and that will lead to union difficulty in some countries; where they sit on boards and can stymie the move to EVs and loss of production jobs.<p>The Kia Niro EV numbers you mention are not EPA which was 258. I mention this because your other numbers were EPA.</text></item><item><author>codeulike</author><text>Compare to the Audi e-Tron, which has a fairly massive 95kWH battery but only scores 204 miles of EPA range. They claim they&#x27;re only using 88% of the battery capacity so that charging is faster and battery longevity is preserved, but thats a really weird engineering decision that belies the fact they have made a terribly inefficient (and perhaps rapidly degrading?) battery pack&#x2F;drivetrain.<p>Meanwhile the base Model S, for $4k more, has 285 miles of EPA range, and charges faster when below 50%, although not as fast as the e-Tron when above 50%.<p>The smaller Kia Niro EV (if you can get one, they aren&#x27;t making many because they can&#x27;t source the batteries) squeezes 258 miles of range from a 65 kWH battery. Much better, but terribly production constrained. It won What Car of the Year in the UK but they can only deliver 900 to the UK for the whole of 2019. Not sure what the global Kia production rate is, but presumably far far less than Tesla which has sustained 4000+ Model 3&#x27;s per week since last October (although not yet delivering to the RHD countries like the UK, alas)<p>Turns out making EVs is harder than everyone thought. We were told the traditional automakers would just wade in and obliterate Tesla, who were just putting &#x27;wheels on batteries&#x27;. That hasn&#x27;t happened.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dsfyu404ed</author><text>I hate to break it to you but very few vehicles are going to the dealer for engine&#x2F;trans related work. Dealerships mostly only see vehicles that are new enough to be under warranty or recently out of it and major power-train stuff doesn&#x27;t often break in that time period. It&#x27;s stuff like steering and suspension wear items, the occasional window motor, trunk latches that won&#x27;t pop, HVAC and stuff like that they make most of their money doing. EVs would probably actually net more money for dealers more money because they wouldn&#x27;t take a loss on fixing random leaks under warranty (they get paid but book times are often unrealistic).</text></comment> | <story><title>Changes to Models S and X allow them to travel longer without larger batteries</title><url>https://www.tesla.com/blog/longest-range-electric-vehicle-now-goes-even-farther</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>quanticle</author><text>They break at much much lower rates, because they have many fewer parts. EVs don&#x27;t have the pistons, valves, belts, fans, compressors, alternators, spark plugs, etc that gasoline engines have. There&#x27;s probably order of magnitude fewer parts to break.<p>Having seen the interior of an automatic gearbox, the surprising thing to me is that conventional automobiles are as reliable as they are.</text></item><item><author>ajuc</author><text>&gt; EVs don&#x27;t need the large established dealership base and their included maintenance facilities<p>I never understood that. Why does power source matter in the context of dealership base and maintenance? EVs still break.</text></item><item><author>Shivetya</author><text>A few observations, before I derail<p>I do not want to dismiss the efforts of Audi or Jaguar but I think their initial focus was being good examples for their respective brands with regards to their packaging. Their interior quality of a different generation and caliber than Tesla. The EV part was an important concern but secondary. They can still rack up significant ZEV credits in California letting them off the hook of buying them from others.<p>Tesla needs to refresh the S and X to improve interior fit and finish but also concentrate on making them quieter, an issue I have with my 3. without the drone of a motor every sound stands out and EVs tend to ride on stiffer, noisier, tires.<p>As for difficulty, other than i3 and Tesla cars I do not believe any other EV was a clean sheet design. Even the Leaf appears based on traditional cars. the Bolt is simply a spark when a new motor cradle and battery back pushed under it. The Hyundai&#x2F;Kia models are all adaptions. Not 100% sure about the iPace but Jaguar even contracted out assembly.<p>--<p>The manufacturing difficulty is probably secondary to the seismic shift crossing the auto industry and associated industries. EVs don&#x27;t need the large established dealership base and their included maintenance facilities. Secondary market means little use for parts stores and their suppliers. Gas stations will be right out with most charging done at destination points. Manufacturing of the autos themselves will implode the number of employees and that will lead to union difficulty in some countries; where they sit on boards and can stymie the move to EVs and loss of production jobs.<p>The Kia Niro EV numbers you mention are not EPA which was 258. I mention this because your other numbers were EPA.</text></item><item><author>codeulike</author><text>Compare to the Audi e-Tron, which has a fairly massive 95kWH battery but only scores 204 miles of EPA range. They claim they&#x27;re only using 88% of the battery capacity so that charging is faster and battery longevity is preserved, but thats a really weird engineering decision that belies the fact they have made a terribly inefficient (and perhaps rapidly degrading?) battery pack&#x2F;drivetrain.<p>Meanwhile the base Model S, for $4k more, has 285 miles of EPA range, and charges faster when below 50%, although not as fast as the e-Tron when above 50%.<p>The smaller Kia Niro EV (if you can get one, they aren&#x27;t making many because they can&#x27;t source the batteries) squeezes 258 miles of range from a 65 kWH battery. Much better, but terribly production constrained. It won What Car of the Year in the UK but they can only deliver 900 to the UK for the whole of 2019. Not sure what the global Kia production rate is, but presumably far far less than Tesla which has sustained 4000+ Model 3&#x27;s per week since last October (although not yet delivering to the RHD countries like the UK, alas)<p>Turns out making EVs is harder than everyone thought. We were told the traditional automakers would just wade in and obliterate Tesla, who were just putting &#x27;wheels on batteries&#x27;. That hasn&#x27;t happened.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>windexh8er</author><text>&gt; There&#x27;s probably order of magnitude fewer parts to break.<p>According to Tesla a comparative ICE drivetrain will have around 200 moving parts, while one of their vehicles will have roughly 17.<p>The real upside is longevity. While it is a miraculous feat that machines, such as transmissions, last as long as they do today - they&#x27;re not needed in electric vehicles. I think it&#x27;s fair to assume we all expect 100k miles and more out of a car produced in the last decade. The two main components of a traditional ICE vehicle are the main contributors to longevity of a vehicle: engine and drivetrain. Those two items are of such high cost to replace many people will not consider the repair as replacement is more feasible.<p>As electric cars stand today longevity is significantly improved immediately. The major failure components will be batteries and electric motors. However the former can be considered a wear item and is, generally easy, to replace. The latter is also much cheaper and more simple to replace compared to the ICE equivalent. That being said the expectations of a BEV today are 300k+ miles with significantly less wear maintenance.<p>Finally as electric vehicles tend to be more modular it may very well be that we finally start to see platforms instead of model year differentials. If I have &#x27;platform 1&#x27; here are motor, battery, electronics, etc upgrade options. We haven&#x27;t seen this that bluntly yet, but I hope we get there. Cars today are built as non-upgradeable partially due to the built in life cycling &#x2F; planned obsolescence the manufacturers have created for improved sales. It would be great if we could truly move cars to a more repair &#x2F; upgrade centric platform. Not only could this spur new forms of labor and business but help waste reduction and overall manufacturing waste and pollution.</text></comment> |
31,752,968 | 31,752,632 | 1 | 2 | 31,751,017 | train | <story><title>OCaml 5.0 Alpha Release</title><url>https://discuss.ocaml.org/t/ocaml-5-0-zeroth-alpha-release/10026</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>StevePerkins</author><text>If this were really true though, then wouldn&#x27;t F# be bigger than it is?</text></item><item><author>sunflowerdeath</author><text>For almost as long as I&#x27;ve been programming, I find Ocaml a fantastic language, which just lacked some development tools and improved concurrency. I still believe that under the right circumstances it could become a mainstream language.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pjmlp</author><text>F# suffers from being a stepchild in what concerns .NET product management.<p>They accepted to place it on the box, but never gave it the same love as VB and C#, or even C++&#x2F;CLI, and now they could rename the Common Language Runtime into C# Language Runtime, given how little outside they give to anything not C# on newer workloads.<p>Had F# been given feature parity with C# and VB on Visual Studio tooling and core frameworks, the adoption scenario would be much different.</text></comment> | <story><title>OCaml 5.0 Alpha Release</title><url>https://discuss.ocaml.org/t/ocaml-5-0-zeroth-alpha-release/10026</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>StevePerkins</author><text>If this were really true though, then wouldn&#x27;t F# be bigger than it is?</text></item><item><author>sunflowerdeath</author><text>For almost as long as I&#x27;ve been programming, I find Ocaml a fantastic language, which just lacked some development tools and improved concurrency. I still believe that under the right circumstances it could become a mainstream language.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>resoluteteeth</author><text>F# is great and it benefits from the .net ecosystem but at the same time the language sometimes feels like it is being held back now by not wanting to add new features that c# doesn&#x27;t support, so its relation to .net is kind of both a blessing and a curse.<p>Previously it added a lot of stuff on its own like async, etc. which was cool but also resulted in compatibility issues when c# later added similar features.<p>Now the f# developers are very concerned with compatibility but it basically means that f# can&#x27;t get new features until c# already has them. It&#x27;s also limited by the runtime which is designed around c#.<p>For example, it doesn&#x27;t support type classes because (among other reasons) that might end up being incompatible with future c# type-class like features several years down the line.<p>It&#x27;s also hard to learn f# unless you already know some ocaml&#x2F;haskell.<p>ocaml has failed to catch on that much so far but I think it does have potential, and adding multicore support&#x2F;effects is pretty promising.<p>On the other hand the fragmentation with stuff like reason&#x2F;rescript is pretty dumb.</text></comment> |
9,995,665 | 9,995,608 | 1 | 2 | 9,994,966 | train | <story><title>Wind turbines in Denmark reached record level in 2014</title><url>http://energinet.dk/EN/El/Nyheder/Sider/Vindmoeller-slog-rekord-i-2014.aspx</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>teh_klev</author><text>Scotland does pretty well with regards to renewables with ~49.8% of energy consumption sourced from renewable sources (17.1k GWh wind&#x2F;hydro out of 19k GWh total renewables).<p>This puts wind and hydro at around 42%.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scottishrenewables.com&#x2F;sectors&#x2F;renewables-in-numbers&#x2F;#chart5" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scottishrenewables.com&#x2F;sectors&#x2F;renewables-in-num...</a><p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gov.scot&#x2F;Resource&#x2F;0048&#x2F;00480365.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gov.scot&#x2F;Resource&#x2F;0048&#x2F;00480365.pdf</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Wind turbines in Denmark reached record level in 2014</title><url>http://energinet.dk/EN/El/Nyheder/Sider/Vindmoeller-slog-rekord-i-2014.aspx</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>kaybe</author><text>Extensive plots for Germany for comparison:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ise.fraunhofer.de&#x2F;en&#x2F;downloads-englisch&#x2F;pdf-files-englisch&#x2F;data-nivc-&#x2F;electricity-production-from-solar-and-wind-in-germany-2014.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ise.fraunhofer.de&#x2F;en&#x2F;downloads-englisch&#x2F;pdf-files...</a></text></comment> |
12,668,742 | 12,668,575 | 1 | 2 | 12,665,659 | train | <story><title>Monks Who Spent Years Turning Themselves into Mummies While Alive</title><url>http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/sokushinbutsu</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>biot</author><text>This was discussed a few times earlier this year in an article that contains pictures of the monks:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10892556" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10892556</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10650278" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10650278</a><p>Actual article: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.damninteresting.com&#x2F;sokushinbutsu-the-ancient-buddhist-mummies-of-japan&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.damninteresting.com&#x2F;sokushinbutsu-the-ancient-bu...</a><p>Curiously similar wording too. Original article:<p>&quot;Some of the monks drank tea made from the bark of the urushi tree during their fast. Also known as the Japanese Varnish Tree, its sap is normally used to make a lacquer varnish, and it contains the same abrasive chemical that makes poison ivy so unpleasant. Urushi is so toxic that even its vapor can cause a rash, and it remains in the body after death. Drinking urushi tea served to hasten the monk towards death as well as make his body even less hospitable to insects.&quot;<p>This new article:<p>&quot;A kind of sumac, the Japanese lacquer tree is called such because it is used to make traditional Japanese lacquer, urushi. Its bark contains the same toxic compound that makes poison ivy so poisonous. If ingested by these monks, urushi tea would have both hastened death and made the body even less hospitable to the bacteria and parasites that aid in decomposition.&quot;</text></comment> | <story><title>Monks Who Spent Years Turning Themselves into Mummies While Alive</title><url>http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/sokushinbutsu</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jdironman</author><text><i>At the completion of a thousand-day cycle on this diet, practitioners were considered spiritually ready to enternyūjō. However, most monks completed two or even three cycles to fully prepare themselves.</i><p>Oh, come on. You know they just backed out like anyone would a couple times.</text></comment> |
37,717,599 | 37,717,277 | 1 | 2 | 37,716,167 | train | <story><title>Drinking diet sodas daily during pregnancy linked to autism in male offspring</title><url>https://news.uthscsa.edu/drinking-diet-sodas-and-aspartame-sweetened-beverages-daily-during-pregnancy-linked-to-autism-in-male-offspring/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>modeless</author><text>&gt; odds were tripled for autism (OR = 3.1; 95% CI: 1.02, 9.7)<p>This is scientific malpractice! The most ridiculous confidence interval I&#x27;ve ever seen! 1.02 to 9.7, reported as &quot;tripled&quot;, seriously? And of course the data is non-blinded, self-reported survey responses recalling events that occurred many years ago, and the analysis is not preregistered and splits the cohort in an arbitrary way to eke out so-called &quot;statistical significance&quot; (by the slimmest imaginable margin, 1.02 &gt; 1.00, just barely).<p>How can this dreck be published? Everyone involved should be sanctioned. And everyone who took this headline at face value should seriously reconsider their approach to consuming science news.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>danShumway</author><text>It&#x27;s honestly embarrassing to see this article somehow climb to the top of HN. It&#x27;s a mess of statistical bad practice, self-reported data, and potentially confounded or ignored variables.<p>Normally when I see a bad study there&#x27;s like one or two serious problems with methodology, but when I read this through it&#x27;s almost just every couple of paragraphs that the authors will say something or describe methodology that should be giving the reader pause. From literally the first paragraph in the intro:<p>&gt; Changes in diagnostic definitions and guidelines and increased testing availability and funding have made major contributions to this increase in diagnosed cases; under the added impacts of changes in dietary, environmental, and other exposures affecting the intrauterine environment, ASD prevalence has reached unprecedented proportions.<p>Those two sentences contradict each other! You can&#x27;t just tie them together with a semicolon like one thought implies the other. I&#x27;m not even saying that autism cases <i>aren&#x27;t</i> actually rising at all, but you can&#x27;t just go &quot;our diagnostic criteria have changed; therefore environmental and dietary exposures are the cause.&quot; You have to actually put in the bare-bottom minimal amount of work to describe <i>why</i> you think that diagnostic criteria and social awareness aren&#x27;t the primary causes, you can&#x27;t just claim that changing diagnostic criteria itself implies diets are to blame.<p>It&#x27;s unsurprising that somebody who would write this way would do bad statistical analysis.</text></comment> | <story><title>Drinking diet sodas daily during pregnancy linked to autism in male offspring</title><url>https://news.uthscsa.edu/drinking-diet-sodas-and-aspartame-sweetened-beverages-daily-during-pregnancy-linked-to-autism-in-male-offspring/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>modeless</author><text>&gt; odds were tripled for autism (OR = 3.1; 95% CI: 1.02, 9.7)<p>This is scientific malpractice! The most ridiculous confidence interval I&#x27;ve ever seen! 1.02 to 9.7, reported as &quot;tripled&quot;, seriously? And of course the data is non-blinded, self-reported survey responses recalling events that occurred many years ago, and the analysis is not preregistered and splits the cohort in an arbitrary way to eke out so-called &quot;statistical significance&quot; (by the slimmest imaginable margin, 1.02 &gt; 1.00, just barely).<p>How can this dreck be published? Everyone involved should be sanctioned. And everyone who took this headline at face value should seriously reconsider their approach to consuming science news.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tpmx</author><text>The r&#x2F;science discussion of this paper 3 days ago is interesting:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;science&#x2F;comments&#x2F;16t4eyg&#x2F;drinking_diet_sodas_and_aspartamesweetened&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;science&#x2F;comments&#x2F;16t4eyg&#x2F;drinking_d...</a></text></comment> |
34,913,099 | 34,913,330 | 1 | 3 | 34,911,889 | train | <story><title>95% of Bay Area Cities Lost Zoning Authority</title><url>https://darrellowens.substack.com/p/96-of-bay-area-cities-lost-zoning</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Nifty3929</author><text>One under-appreciated topic is the extent to which we dis-incent people to sell their homes as they age. Through prop 13 (in California), and a stepped-up cost basis at death (in the US) - we give people very strong financial incentives to continue ownership.<p>As a result you have (forgive me) old people who either remain in their homes or rent them out instead of selling them, long after they otherwise would.<p>I think this is still not as big a factor as the simple lack of building - but it sure doesn&#x27;t help.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rcpt</author><text>It&#x27;s the heart of the problem. Prop 13 means there&#x27;s zero financial downside to appreciating home values which leads to NIMBYs on steroids.</text></comment> | <story><title>95% of Bay Area Cities Lost Zoning Authority</title><url>https://darrellowens.substack.com/p/96-of-bay-area-cities-lost-zoning</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Nifty3929</author><text>One under-appreciated topic is the extent to which we dis-incent people to sell their homes as they age. Through prop 13 (in California), and a stepped-up cost basis at death (in the US) - we give people very strong financial incentives to continue ownership.<p>As a result you have (forgive me) old people who either remain in their homes or rent them out instead of selling them, long after they otherwise would.<p>I think this is still not as big a factor as the simple lack of building - but it sure doesn&#x27;t help.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>penneyd</author><text>A law was recently passed that allows you to sell and move and keep your property tax rate that was designed to alleviate this issue.</text></comment> |
3,850,794 | 3,850,413 | 1 | 2 | 3,848,583 | train | <story><title>CryEngine 3 gives us a glimpse at the future of gaming [video]</title><url>http://www.bgr.com/2012/04/16/cryengine-3-gives-us-a-glimpse-at-the-future-of-gaming-video/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gavanwoolery</author><text>As someone who has worked intensively both in the fields of rendering and AI, I can say there are easy and hard problems in both. There is much in the way of AI that we already know, it's just that your average developer actually knows very little about AI (not trying to be insulting, it's just been true in my experience) -- and much more so your average company or publisher does not care to fund AI beyond enemies that can throw themselves into your gun barrel. Propositional logic, expert systems, backwards chaining, and neural networks are very powerful tools that we know a lot about, but most games rarely implement (perhaps trivially at most). We still tend to hand-design/script quests, when these fields of AI could provide very powerful emergent gameplay. What it mostly boils down to (for the sake of interesting gameplay) is proper knowledge-representation (i.e. abstraction) and reasoning (a prolog-like reasoning system would be a good start). And of course, path-finding/locomotion is pretty much a given. Interestingly, it is less about implementing these and more about designing a game that can use them properly - almost without doubt you need to create a game world that functions on its own, where every NPC has its own set of motivations, which is a very different task from creating a game that is limited to what the player does.<p>Other than that, there are still plenty of hard problems left in rendering, especially with regards to effective procedural generation (which arguably falls more under modeling). Our ray tracing is still far from "realistic" - take a more complex scene than a table with a wine glass, and we can still usually discern the difference, especially with complex materials and subsurface scattering (human skin STILL does not look quite right). As it is, we are only able to calculate light travel by <i>points</i> (we use the term ray tracing, but typically every ray does a number of steps, unless every model is mathematically calculated). Light travel should be determined by complex <i>volumes</i> -- which is pretty much impossible to simulate on today's hardware ( O(n^6) magnitude at least - growing by volume, travel distance, number of objects, volume bounces (dear god), and number of pixels calculated ).</text></item><item><author>Cushman</author><text>Visual quality is an "easy" problem. We know exactly how it ought to work (ray tracing has been photorealistic for some time now), it's just a matter of tweaking it to run fast enough on the hardware we have. And we're <i>really close</i> to pulling it off.<p>AI is, by contrast, a hard problem. We don't have a very good idea at all of how to exactly simulate a personality, but it's likely to be orders of magnitude more complex than the most elaborate physical simulation ever designed. The most intelligent NPC ever developed was really, <i>really</i> stupid. The appearance of realistic characters in games at all is an elaborate stage show. You can spend artist time making the show seem convincing in more circumstances, but evolving it past that <i>at all</i> is one of the hardest problems in computer science. We're nowhere near realism.<p>Now, with that said, in the demo they showed off some of their pathfinding and destructible environment improvements. There are plenty of gamers who care just as much (or more) about that stuff.</text></item><item><author>nihilocrat</author><text>Crytek deserves all the praise they get for their hard work in rendering...<p>...but...<p>Why are we conditioned to think that "the future of gaming" is solely a function of a game's audiovisual quality? I would like to see a "future of gaming" video that shows off highly-interactive (rather than just very pretty) gameworlds and characters. NPCs that notice you are trying to put a bucket on their heads, for example.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Cushman</author><text>I hope I didn't seem to be implying there weren't hard problems in both fields-- but I do think there's a bigger gap in the current state of the art than you claim.<p>The path to realism in graphics is pretty clear because the real-world behavior of light is well-understood. There may be equations yet to be perfected, and challenges in efficiently simulating that behavior, but the direction is never in question; you can always tell if you've made it look more realistic or less.<p>By contrast, AI in games has reached a local maxima; the combination of pathfinding, scripted cues, an elaborate finite state machine, and a few basic heuristics is capable of simulating human behavior well enough, and with few enough glitches, that it presents a realistic universe to the player so long as they don't exceed the scripted bounds. However, if they do exceed those bounds, the whole thing appears paper-thin. You can extend the bounds with additional effort in scripting, but not infinitely, and with diminishing returns-- and doing so gets you no closer to having real AI which would be able to make those same decisions on its own.<p>Striking out and attempting to make an intelligent NPC-directed world from scratch... I'm not saying it's impossible, but I haven't seen anything, from AAA titles to indie games to tech demos, to imply it's coming soon.<p>But maybe that's just because I haven't seen the Minecraft of AI-driven gameplay yet.</text></comment> | <story><title>CryEngine 3 gives us a glimpse at the future of gaming [video]</title><url>http://www.bgr.com/2012/04/16/cryengine-3-gives-us-a-glimpse-at-the-future-of-gaming-video/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gavanwoolery</author><text>As someone who has worked intensively both in the fields of rendering and AI, I can say there are easy and hard problems in both. There is much in the way of AI that we already know, it's just that your average developer actually knows very little about AI (not trying to be insulting, it's just been true in my experience) -- and much more so your average company or publisher does not care to fund AI beyond enemies that can throw themselves into your gun barrel. Propositional logic, expert systems, backwards chaining, and neural networks are very powerful tools that we know a lot about, but most games rarely implement (perhaps trivially at most). We still tend to hand-design/script quests, when these fields of AI could provide very powerful emergent gameplay. What it mostly boils down to (for the sake of interesting gameplay) is proper knowledge-representation (i.e. abstraction) and reasoning (a prolog-like reasoning system would be a good start). And of course, path-finding/locomotion is pretty much a given. Interestingly, it is less about implementing these and more about designing a game that can use them properly - almost without doubt you need to create a game world that functions on its own, where every NPC has its own set of motivations, which is a very different task from creating a game that is limited to what the player does.<p>Other than that, there are still plenty of hard problems left in rendering, especially with regards to effective procedural generation (which arguably falls more under modeling). Our ray tracing is still far from "realistic" - take a more complex scene than a table with a wine glass, and we can still usually discern the difference, especially with complex materials and subsurface scattering (human skin STILL does not look quite right). As it is, we are only able to calculate light travel by <i>points</i> (we use the term ray tracing, but typically every ray does a number of steps, unless every model is mathematically calculated). Light travel should be determined by complex <i>volumes</i> -- which is pretty much impossible to simulate on today's hardware ( O(n^6) magnitude at least - growing by volume, travel distance, number of objects, volume bounces (dear god), and number of pixels calculated ).</text></item><item><author>Cushman</author><text>Visual quality is an "easy" problem. We know exactly how it ought to work (ray tracing has been photorealistic for some time now), it's just a matter of tweaking it to run fast enough on the hardware we have. And we're <i>really close</i> to pulling it off.<p>AI is, by contrast, a hard problem. We don't have a very good idea at all of how to exactly simulate a personality, but it's likely to be orders of magnitude more complex than the most elaborate physical simulation ever designed. The most intelligent NPC ever developed was really, <i>really</i> stupid. The appearance of realistic characters in games at all is an elaborate stage show. You can spend artist time making the show seem convincing in more circumstances, but evolving it past that <i>at all</i> is one of the hardest problems in computer science. We're nowhere near realism.<p>Now, with that said, in the demo they showed off some of their pathfinding and destructible environment improvements. There are plenty of gamers who care just as much (or more) about that stuff.</text></item><item><author>nihilocrat</author><text>Crytek deserves all the praise they get for their hard work in rendering...<p>...but...<p>Why are we conditioned to think that "the future of gaming" is solely a function of a game's audiovisual quality? I would like to see a "future of gaming" video that shows off highly-interactive (rather than just very pretty) gameworlds and characters. NPCs that notice you are trying to put a bucket on their heads, for example.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sbierwagen</author><text>With AI, there's also the problem of being more accurate than you want to be. A triple-A title like MW3 or Skyrim is essentially "a movie you walk through". NPCs have lines, they follow a script.<p>You could easily have NPCs that run a little life simulation, (like in the early versions of Oblivion) but then you have the problem of NPCs going off the script. If you accurately simulate mental states, and some villager rolls a 1 on the d2000 mental state die, then proceeds to kill all the plot-critical NPCs in their village? Now you've got a more realistic, yet completely broken, game.</text></comment> |
10,992,344 | 10,992,247 | 1 | 2 | 10,991,628 | train | <story><title>How to Discover a Galaxy with a Telephoto Lens</title><url>http://nautil.us/issue/32/space/how-to-discover-a-galaxy-with-a-telephoto-lens</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>antognini</author><text>Ultimately the reason these small telescopes are so useful for finding these faint, diffuse galaxies is because the surface brightness of an object is independent of the collecting area. Larger optical telescopes have much better resolution, so the amount of light detected from a diffuse galaxy is fairly similar per pixel to a little telescope like Dragonfly. But a little telescope costs probably about three orders of magnitude less than a big telescope and you can afford to hammer a particular target night after night, whereas you&#x27;d be lucky to have an hour of time on a large telescope.<p>There are a number of other great small-telescope projects in different areas of astronomy. The one closest to my heart is ASAS-SN (pronounced &quot;Assassin&quot;) since it was the idea of the professor across the hall from me when I was at Ohio State and an officemate of mine was the one who spent much of his graduate career building it. The idea was to get a little telescope (like Dragonfly it&#x27;s pretty much just a telephoto lens with a detector attached) and then have it look at ~1&#x2F;3 of the sky every night. That way if a supernova goes off in a nearby galaxy (or there is some other transient) it&#x27;s discovered within a few days. Just this month they published a paper on the discovery of the brightest supernova ever observed [1]. They currently discover more supernovae than all other groups combined (including amateur astronomers, who are a formidable force!).<p>There&#x27;s another small-telescope project built to search for exoplanets called KELT (the Kilodegree Extremely Little Telescope). Since transiting planets are generally detected around bright stars (at least in apparent magnitude), telescope size is not so important for their discovery. In fact, having too big a telescope can be an issue because the host star is so bright that it saturates the detector. So far they&#x27;ve discovered (I think) somewhere around a dozen planets, though my favorite is Kelt-4Ab because it&#x27;s in a triple star system (and also because I&#x27;m on the paper) [2].<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;ASASSN-15lh" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;ASASSN-15lh</a><p>[2]: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;1510.00015" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;1510.00015</a></text></comment> | <story><title>How to Discover a Galaxy with a Telephoto Lens</title><url>http://nautil.us/issue/32/space/how-to-discover-a-galaxy-with-a-telephoto-lens</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>acqq</author><text>The paper by Dragonfly designers:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;1401.5473" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;1401.5473</a><p>It&#x27;s not &quot;just&quot; the off-the shelf lenses and cameras, although the lenses are really the crucial part and they are very cleverly used, achieving up to then never achieved low light scattering. At the time it used only 8 lenses, the telescope had weight of more than 100 kg.<p>Here&#x27;s the robotic mount they used then:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bisque.com&#x2F;sc&#x2F;pages&#x2F;ParamountMEII.aspx" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bisque.com&#x2F;sc&#x2F;pages&#x2F;ParamountMEII.aspx</a><p>The paper with the first results from the Dragonfly:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;iopscience.iop.org&#x2F;article&#x2F;10.1088&#x2F;2041-8205&#x2F;782&#x2F;2&#x2F;L24&#x2F;meta" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;iopscience.iop.org&#x2F;article&#x2F;10.1088&#x2F;2041-8205&#x2F;782&#x2F;2&#x2F;L2...</a></text></comment> |
10,836,723 | 10,836,541 | 1 | 3 | 10,831,919 | train | <story><title>Flexible working can make you ill, experts say</title><url>http://www.theguardian.com/money/2016/jan/02/work-life-balance-flexible-working-can-make-you-ill-experts-say</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jedberg</author><text>I was just thinking to myself yesterday how sometimes it would be nice to have one of those jobs where when you are away from work, there is no work to be done. Like working in a factory or something, where there is literally nothing I can do during the off hours other than relax.<p>This through crossed my mind because I had just finished two weeks of vacation where I literally did nothing related to work, and it was really relaxing.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ChuckMcM</author><text>Exactly.<p>So the take away is that in order to avoid burnout you need to mindfully develop the skill of &#x27;stopping work&#x27;. While that is easy when you work on a factory line and you can&#x27;t bring the tools home, and its really really hard when your job consists mostly about thinking about how to solve a problem.<p>I found early on that since I really enjoy programming I couldn&#x27;t &quot;stop&quot; instead I had to shift to one of my projects so that it would be more enjoyable for me. That works a bit but not as much as sitting on the deck of a mountain cabin with no Internet connectivity does :-).<p>But the bottom line is figure out a way to &quot;not work&quot;, whether it is by reading, exercising, or doing some hobby, so that you don&#x27;t let the stress of work overwhelm you.</text></comment> | <story><title>Flexible working can make you ill, experts say</title><url>http://www.theguardian.com/money/2016/jan/02/work-life-balance-flexible-working-can-make-you-ill-experts-say</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jedberg</author><text>I was just thinking to myself yesterday how sometimes it would be nice to have one of those jobs where when you are away from work, there is no work to be done. Like working in a factory or something, where there is literally nothing I can do during the off hours other than relax.<p>This through crossed my mind because I had just finished two weeks of vacation where I literally did nothing related to work, and it was really relaxing.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>phyllostachys</author><text>I&#x27;ve also thought about that a lot. I had a friend at a previous employer who considered starting a food truck business instead of doing software development.</text></comment> |
8,178,061 | 8,177,942 | 1 | 3 | 8,177,259 | train | <story><title>I'm 25 years old and I am lost</title><text>I co-founded a startup couple of years back which got acquired recently. Even though it was termed an acquisition, it was really an acqui-hire. When people congratulate me on that, I know in my heart that it&#x27;s not true and it doesn&#x27;t really make me happy.<p>Now, I&#x27;ve quit my job at that company because I just couldn&#x27;t work there any longer. And am trying to figure out what to do next.<p>I know for a fact that I want to run my own business and attain financial freedom but I can&#x27;t risk another startup at this moment because: 1. Startups are tough and I am afraid 2. I have a few financial responsibilities towards my family which I have to take care of.<p>Thus, I have picked up another job which I&#x27;ll join in a few weeks. It is not in a very &#x27;sexy&#x27; or &#x27;trendy&#x27; industry and I have no idea where it is going to take me in two years.<p>What do you do when you believe that you can do great things but something that you have no control over is holding you back? You believe that you are good at what you do and are meant for great things but you have to do your job even though it doesn&#x27;t do justice to your capabilities. How do you cope with that? Seeing your future as an underachiever pains you. What do you do?<p>In the course of trying to figure it out, I spoke to my friends about this, I realised that most of them are going through the same thing. But they haven&#x27;t figured out how to deal with it. I don&#x27;t know if this is what they call a quarter-life crisis.<p>Thus, this is as much a distress call as it is a rant. And not having anyone else to turn to, I am posting it here at HN assuming that this is not just a problem for a handful of people but a general problem for people who believe in their ability to do great things (whether it is true or not is irrelevant to them).<p>The questions I posed here aren&#x27;t the only ones I have in my mind. But, I hope I have been able to convey the message. Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks!</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>webwright</author><text><i>Why</i> do you want to do great things? Seriously, dig into it. When I ask a lot of people in startups this question and dig long enough, it comes down to money-- they want to be rich, they want to be free.<p>Fact: I&#x27;ve met these rich&#x2F;free people and they are largely working their asses off to get more rich (and presumably more free?). The ones who make it (largely) LOVE THE GAME. The few who get rich somehow but don&#x27;t actually love the game of getting rich are listlessly complaining about being unhappy.<p>You don&#x27;t love the game, it seems. The way to be happy&#x2F;satisfied is to find the game that you love or learn to love the game you&#x27;re playing. The latter is often what to focus on-- there people with much less interesting jobs that are satisfied with them. Whatever job you have, figure out how to be freakin&#x27; awesome at it and opportunities fall into your lap- trust me. Or be the guy who gets by, can&#x27;t be happy, is always looking out the window.<p>All that said, don&#x27;t settle for a shitty job. Get one where you&#x27;re surrounded by people who impress you in an industry&#x2F;market that has potential. That&#x27;s where you&#x27;ll find your next co-founder.<p>If you&#x27;ve got great ideas, start side projects. They turn into businesses all the time.<p>Reduce your burn rate ruthlessly and save $. Seriously, your car&#x2F;house&#x2F;clothes are too nice, and you have them because society makes you feel less successful if you don&#x27;t. Happiness and stuff have virtually no correlation. Get to the point where you&#x27;re downright smug about your burn rate. Smirk at people who drive BMWs.<p>Remember that a million years of evolution has made humanity <i>naturally discontent</i>-- do you think happiness&#x2F;contentedness is a survival trait? Add to that the external pressure of peers who make it big, do &quot;great things&quot;, and the river of marketing telling you that you need fancier watches, shinier cars, the newest iPhone. Being happy&#x2F;content takes smarts and discipline that most people simply can&#x27;t manage. Be one of the ones who can.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>buckbova</author><text>&gt; Seriously, your car&#x2F;house&#x2F;clothes are too nice, and you have them because society makes you feel less successful if you don&#x27;t.<p>Stuff makes me happy. Moving from a tiny apartment with a small everything to a spacious house made me much happier. It&#x27;s comfortable. I now have a wonderful kitchen to cook, which I enjoy doing, that I just couldn&#x27;t do as well before. I have a view out my large bay windows. It&#x27;s great.<p>Driving a nice car is awesome, especially if you commute longer distances or like road trips. I enjoy a comfortable luxury sedan with power.<p>I&#x27;m much happier with nice things. Society isn&#x27;t telling me I like my large flat screen tv. I am because it looks stunning on my wall.<p>I agree with what others say here about debt though. Don&#x27;t go into debt to buy yourself a bunch of crap you don&#x27;t need.</text></comment> | <story><title>I'm 25 years old and I am lost</title><text>I co-founded a startup couple of years back which got acquired recently. Even though it was termed an acquisition, it was really an acqui-hire. When people congratulate me on that, I know in my heart that it&#x27;s not true and it doesn&#x27;t really make me happy.<p>Now, I&#x27;ve quit my job at that company because I just couldn&#x27;t work there any longer. And am trying to figure out what to do next.<p>I know for a fact that I want to run my own business and attain financial freedom but I can&#x27;t risk another startup at this moment because: 1. Startups are tough and I am afraid 2. I have a few financial responsibilities towards my family which I have to take care of.<p>Thus, I have picked up another job which I&#x27;ll join in a few weeks. It is not in a very &#x27;sexy&#x27; or &#x27;trendy&#x27; industry and I have no idea where it is going to take me in two years.<p>What do you do when you believe that you can do great things but something that you have no control over is holding you back? You believe that you are good at what you do and are meant for great things but you have to do your job even though it doesn&#x27;t do justice to your capabilities. How do you cope with that? Seeing your future as an underachiever pains you. What do you do?<p>In the course of trying to figure it out, I spoke to my friends about this, I realised that most of them are going through the same thing. But they haven&#x27;t figured out how to deal with it. I don&#x27;t know if this is what they call a quarter-life crisis.<p>Thus, this is as much a distress call as it is a rant. And not having anyone else to turn to, I am posting it here at HN assuming that this is not just a problem for a handful of people but a general problem for people who believe in their ability to do great things (whether it is true or not is irrelevant to them).<p>The questions I posed here aren&#x27;t the only ones I have in my mind. But, I hope I have been able to convey the message. Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks!</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>webwright</author><text><i>Why</i> do you want to do great things? Seriously, dig into it. When I ask a lot of people in startups this question and dig long enough, it comes down to money-- they want to be rich, they want to be free.<p>Fact: I&#x27;ve met these rich&#x2F;free people and they are largely working their asses off to get more rich (and presumably more free?). The ones who make it (largely) LOVE THE GAME. The few who get rich somehow but don&#x27;t actually love the game of getting rich are listlessly complaining about being unhappy.<p>You don&#x27;t love the game, it seems. The way to be happy&#x2F;satisfied is to find the game that you love or learn to love the game you&#x27;re playing. The latter is often what to focus on-- there people with much less interesting jobs that are satisfied with them. Whatever job you have, figure out how to be freakin&#x27; awesome at it and opportunities fall into your lap- trust me. Or be the guy who gets by, can&#x27;t be happy, is always looking out the window.<p>All that said, don&#x27;t settle for a shitty job. Get one where you&#x27;re surrounded by people who impress you in an industry&#x2F;market that has potential. That&#x27;s where you&#x27;ll find your next co-founder.<p>If you&#x27;ve got great ideas, start side projects. They turn into businesses all the time.<p>Reduce your burn rate ruthlessly and save $. Seriously, your car&#x2F;house&#x2F;clothes are too nice, and you have them because society makes you feel less successful if you don&#x27;t. Happiness and stuff have virtually no correlation. Get to the point where you&#x27;re downright smug about your burn rate. Smirk at people who drive BMWs.<p>Remember that a million years of evolution has made humanity <i>naturally discontent</i>-- do you think happiness&#x2F;contentedness is a survival trait? Add to that the external pressure of peers who make it big, do &quot;great things&quot;, and the river of marketing telling you that you need fancier watches, shinier cars, the newest iPhone. Being happy&#x2F;content takes smarts and discipline that most people simply can&#x27;t manage. Be one of the ones who can.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>awakened</author><text>$ is freedom, but so is lack of debt.<p>Zero debt + $ = great freedom.<p>The edge of modern Western society (those not part of the main rat race) is a place where you can truly be free and happy, but you&#x27;ll be seen as fringe.<p>Never go into debt. Eat beans and rice. Work summer jobs as a river boat guide. Write poems. Watch the stars. Help others find peace.<p>Just be true to yourself and don&#x27;t let modern society set expectations or guide your life.</text></comment> |
18,010,148 | 18,010,141 | 1 | 2 | 18,009,581 | train | <story><title>David Patterson Says It’s Time for New Computer Architectures and Languages</title><url>https://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/computing/hardware/david-patterson-says-its-time-for-new-computer-architectures-and-software-languages</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Animats</author><text>It&#x27;s really hard. Remember the Itanium and the Cell. You can build it, but they may not come.<p>GPUs, though. Those have turned out to be very successful, they can be parallelized as much as you&#x27;re willing to pay for, and they&#x27;re good for some non-graphics tasks.<p>Much of machine learning is a simple repetitive computation running at low precision. Special purpose hardware can do that very well.<p>So what&#x27;s the next useful thing in that area?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>snaky</author><text>&gt; Remember the Itanium<p>Well, why not.<p>&gt; Q: I feel like deja vu - at Hot Chips, Intel introduced VLIW-concept Itanium that pushed complexity onto the compiler. I see traces of that here. What are you doing to avoid the Itanium traps? How will you avoid IP from Intel?<p>&gt; A: Itanium was in-order VLIW, hope people will build compiler to get perf. We came from opposite direction - we use dynamic scheduling. We are not VLIW, every node defines sub-graphs and dependent instructions. We designed the compiler first. We build hardware around the compiler, Intel approach the opposite.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.anandtech.com&#x2F;show&#x2F;13255&#x2F;hot-chips-2018-tachyum-prodigy-cpu-live-blog" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.anandtech.com&#x2F;show&#x2F;13255&#x2F;hot-chips-2018-tachyum-...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>David Patterson Says It’s Time for New Computer Architectures and Languages</title><url>https://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/computing/hardware/david-patterson-says-its-time-for-new-computer-architectures-and-software-languages</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Animats</author><text>It&#x27;s really hard. Remember the Itanium and the Cell. You can build it, but they may not come.<p>GPUs, though. Those have turned out to be very successful, they can be parallelized as much as you&#x27;re willing to pay for, and they&#x27;re good for some non-graphics tasks.<p>Much of machine learning is a simple repetitive computation running at low precision. Special purpose hardware can do that very well.<p>So what&#x27;s the next useful thing in that area?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>marcosdumay</author><text>Well, past experiences are not that useful right now. I don&#x27;t think the Itanium or the Cell were great architectures, but it&#x27;s clear that their most obvious failure mode (mainstream architectures improving faster than them) isn&#x27;t a showstopper anymore.<p>For some guess on the next big thing, I would imagine that stuff that avoid the need of memory coherence have nice odds.</text></comment> |
9,952,101 | 9,951,935 | 1 | 2 | 9,951,850 | train | <story><title>From Burma to Nagasaki: the man who walked through hell</title><url>http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/26/nagasaki-man-who-walked-through-hell-jan-bras</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>nicholas73</author><text>&gt;“Well, chance is a funny thing,” he says. “Why should I be angry about the bad things that occur and still accept the good things? I really do not understand life. I do not know what it’s all about.”<p>Remarkable wisdom in this quote.</text></comment> | <story><title>From Burma to Nagasaki: the man who walked through hell</title><url>http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/26/nagasaki-man-who-walked-through-hell-jan-bras</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>rdl</author><text>What struck me is how much better the world is today; aside from the risk of global thermonuclear war, a WW2-scale war is essentially impossible, and even smaller conflicts are becoming less frequent and shorter duration.<p>And how he responded to all of this -- became a doctor, spent the rest of his life trying to minimize suffering in the world. And still believes dropping the bomb was right.</text></comment> |
36,835,462 | 36,835,766 | 1 | 2 | 36,831,946 | train | <story><title>Simple Sabotage Field Manual – How to Destroy Your Organizations</title><url>https://butwhatfor.beehiiv.com/p/simple-sabotage-field-manual-destroy-organizations</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gilbetron</author><text>I like the idea of this, but many of the list items come off as things the author doesn&#x27;t like.<p>Lets restate some:
&quot;Insist on doing everything through “channels.” Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.&quot; -&gt; &quot;Insist on doing everything through &#x27;short-cuts&#x27;. Never permit official channels to be taken in order to expedite decisions&quot;<p>&quot;Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.&quot; -&gt; &quot;Insist that things you don&#x27;t like are irrelevant as frequently as possible.&quot;<p>&quot;Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.&quot; -&gt; &quot;Argue that people are being caught up trying to be precise, leading to documents that are lacking precision&quot;<p>&quot;Insist on perfect work in relatively unimportant products&quot; -&gt; &quot;Insist that products are unimportant and so sloppy work is ok&quot;<p>&quot;Hold conferences when there is more critical work to be done.&quot; -&gt; &quot;Claim that doing work is the only important thing and that communication is wasteful&quot;<p>&quot;Do your work poorly and blame it on bad tools, machinery, or equipment. Complain that these things are preventing you from doing your job right.&quot; -&gt; &quot;When you have the right tools and equipment, use them well, but then claim you are just really talented and that a master can work with poor tools.&quot;<p>&quot;Never pass on your skill and experience to a new or less skilful worker.&quot; -&gt; &quot;Watch new workers like a hawk and never let them think for themselves.&quot;<p>The idea is interesting, the implementation in the article is tepid.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>yebyen</author><text>I bet a lot of people already know Technology Connections, but I like to bring up the first video of his that I ever watched at a time like this - that&#x27;s right, the one about heat pumps!<p>He goes on this rant towards the end about Midwestern Values and I had been living in Indiana for about 5 years at this point, and nobody ever explained it to me so concisely and bitingly accurate what that perspective was. The short version in a picture of the story is the old man going up two flights on a rickety old ladder to check the roof, because he&#x27;s been using that ladder for 30 years and it&#x27;s &quot;perfectly fine.&quot; You should get a new ladder, or you&#x27;ll probably kill yourself!<p>The ladder is not perfectly fine, and each year he goes on using it the risk gets bigger. But we don&#x27;t strive for perfection because we&#x27;re used to &quot;making do&quot; with &quot;good enough&quot; tools. I could never make these my core values. As a professional, I need the freedom to bring my own tools, and as a full-time employee I&#x27;m going to need the right tools provided on the job site (because it&#x27;s not in my contract to provide my own tools!)<p>As an app dev for non-profit corp whose primary business is not app development, I couldn&#x27;t hack it here. I still live here, but I work for a foreign company now, on the open source project that I wish we could have adopted to make my life as an app dev a bit easier, or at least a bit more livable.<p>Your perspective on this classic document (that gets reposted at least once every year) reminds me of this struggle of my own.</text></comment> | <story><title>Simple Sabotage Field Manual – How to Destroy Your Organizations</title><url>https://butwhatfor.beehiiv.com/p/simple-sabotage-field-manual-destroy-organizations</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gilbetron</author><text>I like the idea of this, but many of the list items come off as things the author doesn&#x27;t like.<p>Lets restate some:
&quot;Insist on doing everything through “channels.” Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.&quot; -&gt; &quot;Insist on doing everything through &#x27;short-cuts&#x27;. Never permit official channels to be taken in order to expedite decisions&quot;<p>&quot;Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.&quot; -&gt; &quot;Insist that things you don&#x27;t like are irrelevant as frequently as possible.&quot;<p>&quot;Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.&quot; -&gt; &quot;Argue that people are being caught up trying to be precise, leading to documents that are lacking precision&quot;<p>&quot;Insist on perfect work in relatively unimportant products&quot; -&gt; &quot;Insist that products are unimportant and so sloppy work is ok&quot;<p>&quot;Hold conferences when there is more critical work to be done.&quot; -&gt; &quot;Claim that doing work is the only important thing and that communication is wasteful&quot;<p>&quot;Do your work poorly and blame it on bad tools, machinery, or equipment. Complain that these things are preventing you from doing your job right.&quot; -&gt; &quot;When you have the right tools and equipment, use them well, but then claim you are just really talented and that a master can work with poor tools.&quot;<p>&quot;Never pass on your skill and experience to a new or less skilful worker.&quot; -&gt; &quot;Watch new workers like a hawk and never let them think for themselves.&quot;<p>The idea is interesting, the implementation in the article is tepid.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lcnPylGDnU4H9OF</author><text>I haven’t seen this before and I can’t verify with the link to the actual field manual because it’s a 404. Does anyone have a PDF of the actual manual handy? (Edit: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikisource.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Simple_Sabotage_Field_Manual&#x2F;Specific_Suggestions_for_Simple_Sabotage" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikisource.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Simple_Sabotage_Field_Manual&#x2F;...</a> Scroll to section (11a).)<p>The article seems to suggest that these things were lifted from the actual manual. Perhaps they cherry-picked these over things that are more relevant to commercial office work, but I would suspect instead that the statements which were excluded are less relevant.<p>If that’s the case, these are hardly things simply which the author dislikes. In the author’s own words: “If you are like me, many of these things sound surprisingly familiar.”<p>Perhaps the other methods as suggested by this comment’s parent are less effective (as an intentional means of sabotage) and so were excluded. It still seems worth it to be aware of these things and especially to look for them being perpetrated in bad faith.</text></comment> |
40,528,772 | 40,528,876 | 1 | 3 | 40,527,730 | train | <story><title>What We're Working on in Firefox</title><url>https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/heres-what-were-working-on-in-firefox/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>yjftsjthsd-h</author><text>&gt; We’ve been listening to your feedback, and we’re prioritizing the features you want most.<p>&gt; Tab Grouping, Vertical Tabs, and our handy Sidebar will help you stay organized no matter how many tabs you have open — whether it’s 7 or 7,500.<p>&gt; Plus, our new Profile Management system will help keep your school, work, and personal browsing separate but easily accessible.<p>Wow, that ... actually <i>is</i> what users have been asking for, for ages. Nice.<p>&gt; More streamlined menus that reduce visual clutter and prioritize top user actions so you can get to the important things quicker.<p>Oh, there&#x27;s the other foot dropping. I wonder how SeaMonkey is doing...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>thwarted</author><text>I&#x27;ve been using multiple profiles in Chrome for years for keeping things separate… right up until my company started using Google&#x27;s centralized browser&#x2F;device management which infects the entire browser not just the single profile that is tied to my corporate Google account. Specifically, they forced a homepage setting browser-wide that can not be changed on a per-profile basis.<p>So multiple profiles are seemingly difficult to get right&#x2F;fully isolated. I hope Firefox doesn&#x27;t have similar limitations.</text></comment> | <story><title>What We're Working on in Firefox</title><url>https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/heres-what-were-working-on-in-firefox/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>yjftsjthsd-h</author><text>&gt; We’ve been listening to your feedback, and we’re prioritizing the features you want most.<p>&gt; Tab Grouping, Vertical Tabs, and our handy Sidebar will help you stay organized no matter how many tabs you have open — whether it’s 7 or 7,500.<p>&gt; Plus, our new Profile Management system will help keep your school, work, and personal browsing separate but easily accessible.<p>Wow, that ... actually <i>is</i> what users have been asking for, for ages. Nice.<p>&gt; More streamlined menus that reduce visual clutter and prioritize top user actions so you can get to the important things quicker.<p>Oh, there&#x27;s the other foot dropping. I wonder how SeaMonkey is doing...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jackson1442</author><text>I really hope the profile management system keeps tab containers working the same. It&#x27;s incredibly useful to have different containers automatically generated for AWS console sessions.</text></comment> |
11,811,208 | 11,806,697 | 1 | 3 | 11,810,802 | train | <story><title>Krita 3.0: The Animation Release</title><url>https://krita.org/krita-3-0-release-notes/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>emilsedgh</author><text>Krita is having a Kickstarter campaign [0] to fund next year&#x27;s development.<p>There is also a blog post [1] describing how Krita is funded and as you can see, the Kickstarter campaign plays a huge role in its development.<p>So if you are a Krita user, consider funding the campaign.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kickstarter.com&#x2F;projects&#x2F;krita&#x2F;krita-2016-lets-make-text-and-vector-art-awesome" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kickstarter.com&#x2F;projects&#x2F;krita&#x2F;krita-2016-lets-m...</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;krita.org&#x2F;item&#x2F;funding-kritas-development&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;krita.org&#x2F;item&#x2F;funding-kritas-development&#x2F;</a><p>Edit: The campaign has already reached its goal, but there are stretch goals to achieve.</text></comment> | <story><title>Krita 3.0: The Animation Release</title><url>https://krita.org/krita-3-0-release-notes/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>nwah1</author><text>Love Krita. This upgrade to QT5 will provide an important base for future development. The brisk pace of development is encouraging.<p>Although I still find myself using GIMP and Inkscape for usability reasons. But, given that they are being developed at a snail&#x27;s pace, I tend to think I will be increasingly using Krita.</text></comment> |
24,246,860 | 24,246,663 | 1 | 3 | 24,243,336 | train | <story><title>Rogue planets could outnumber the stars</title><url>https://phys.org/news/2020-08-rogue-planets-outnumber-stars.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>grawprog</author><text>&gt;I think it&#x27;s kinda cool to consider that rogue planets &#x2F; brown dwarfs [0] could be candidates for extending human life beyond the solar system post-Sol. Assuming we have enough fissile material (or master cold fusion) to perpetuate the civilization&#x27;s energy requirements, we could explore the stars in darkness for eons.<p>Every time I read a comment like this I wonder if people have actually taken the time to consider what living off the Earth would actually be like.<p>The quality of life for anyone living off the Earth would be abysmal. Think of the most barren, hostile, nearly uninhabitable places on Earth, they&#x27;re still magnitudes higher in habitability than anywhere we&#x27;re likely to find outside Earth.<p>Then if somehow we actually manage to find a place with a climate similar to Earth, that may even have some life or organic material, there&#x27;s the issue of compatibility.<p>Look at the issues humans have just travelling from one side of the world to the other. Pathogens, the environment, even the food can cause problems, let alone a place with entirely alien life.<p>Take something as simple as the prion that causes mad cow disease, it&#x27;s a protein.<p>What kinds of bacteria, virii, amoebas, fungi, parasites etc. Will we encounter? Would we even know we&#x27;re infected until it&#x27;a too late?<p>Maybe some kind of strange prion or virus that systemically and harmfully alters humans in a way that&#x27;s undetectable until the whole population is infected?<p>I mean this happens still here, with life on our own world.<p>But, before all that is the endless darkness, entire generations living like nomads in the cold, black emptiness of space. Entire generations seeing nothing, living their lives only so their children&#x27;s children&#x27;s children can maybe someday see something.<p>Overall though, the idea that we can just escape the Earth someday so it&#x27;ll be fine just leads to shortsighted neglectful actions that destroy the planet.<p>That colonial, we can just expand and keep growing indefinitely and just move to a new place, mindset stopped being reasonable the moment we spread across the world. Moving to a new planet is not the same as just hopping in a ship and sailing across the ocean. It&#x27;s not a reasonable backup plan, it&#x27;s not a reasonable solution.<p>We have one home, Earth, we are all made from this place, someday we go back to it. No other place we ever may find will be our home the way the Earth is. The idea we should just use and abandon the Earth is just so incredibly backwards to the way we should be thinking.</text></item><item><author>keithwhor</author><text>I think it&#x27;s kinda cool to consider that rogue planets &#x2F; brown dwarfs [0] could be candidates for extending human life beyond the solar system post-Sol. Assuming we have enough fissile material (or master cold fusion) to perpetuate the civilization&#x27;s energy requirements, we could explore the stars in darkness for eons.<p>I&#x27;m not sure how likely they are as candidates for life to emerge spontaneously, it seems like there&#x27;s a very high energy input requirement over billions of years (Sol -&gt; Earth) to get anything close to human civilization... but it&#x27;s cool to think that, perhaps, some future humans could settle a planet eternally cloaked in darkness. Adapt to the reality of that planet over generations... and be unable to acclimate to life near stars at all.<p>Also, post-Andromeda collision, is this a <i>necessary</i> future for posthuman life? [1] Billions of cold worlds will be flung into the far reaches of the Universe.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Brown_dwarf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Brown_dwarf</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Andromeda%E2%80%93Milky_Way_collision" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Andromeda%E2%80%93Milky_Way_co...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>senko</author><text>&gt; Every time I read a comment like this I wonder if people have actually taken the time to consider what living off the Earth would actually be like.<p>Parent is explicitly refering to human life post-Sun:<p>&gt;&gt; extending human life beyond the solar system post-Sol.<p>It took us only a few million years to get off the trees and invent Bitcoin.<p>If, by some chance, civilization once called human will exist at that time (2000x longer than current span of human species), all the problems you described should be trivial for them.<p>And if by then, by some chance, due to countless generations of people sharing your view on the matter, they don&#x27;t set off for the stars - they deserve to burn.</text></comment> | <story><title>Rogue planets could outnumber the stars</title><url>https://phys.org/news/2020-08-rogue-planets-outnumber-stars.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>grawprog</author><text>&gt;I think it&#x27;s kinda cool to consider that rogue planets &#x2F; brown dwarfs [0] could be candidates for extending human life beyond the solar system post-Sol. Assuming we have enough fissile material (or master cold fusion) to perpetuate the civilization&#x27;s energy requirements, we could explore the stars in darkness for eons.<p>Every time I read a comment like this I wonder if people have actually taken the time to consider what living off the Earth would actually be like.<p>The quality of life for anyone living off the Earth would be abysmal. Think of the most barren, hostile, nearly uninhabitable places on Earth, they&#x27;re still magnitudes higher in habitability than anywhere we&#x27;re likely to find outside Earth.<p>Then if somehow we actually manage to find a place with a climate similar to Earth, that may even have some life or organic material, there&#x27;s the issue of compatibility.<p>Look at the issues humans have just travelling from one side of the world to the other. Pathogens, the environment, even the food can cause problems, let alone a place with entirely alien life.<p>Take something as simple as the prion that causes mad cow disease, it&#x27;s a protein.<p>What kinds of bacteria, virii, amoebas, fungi, parasites etc. Will we encounter? Would we even know we&#x27;re infected until it&#x27;a too late?<p>Maybe some kind of strange prion or virus that systemically and harmfully alters humans in a way that&#x27;s undetectable until the whole population is infected?<p>I mean this happens still here, with life on our own world.<p>But, before all that is the endless darkness, entire generations living like nomads in the cold, black emptiness of space. Entire generations seeing nothing, living their lives only so their children&#x27;s children&#x27;s children can maybe someday see something.<p>Overall though, the idea that we can just escape the Earth someday so it&#x27;ll be fine just leads to shortsighted neglectful actions that destroy the planet.<p>That colonial, we can just expand and keep growing indefinitely and just move to a new place, mindset stopped being reasonable the moment we spread across the world. Moving to a new planet is not the same as just hopping in a ship and sailing across the ocean. It&#x27;s not a reasonable backup plan, it&#x27;s not a reasonable solution.<p>We have one home, Earth, we are all made from this place, someday we go back to it. No other place we ever may find will be our home the way the Earth is. The idea we should just use and abandon the Earth is just so incredibly backwards to the way we should be thinking.</text></item><item><author>keithwhor</author><text>I think it&#x27;s kinda cool to consider that rogue planets &#x2F; brown dwarfs [0] could be candidates for extending human life beyond the solar system post-Sol. Assuming we have enough fissile material (or master cold fusion) to perpetuate the civilization&#x27;s energy requirements, we could explore the stars in darkness for eons.<p>I&#x27;m not sure how likely they are as candidates for life to emerge spontaneously, it seems like there&#x27;s a very high energy input requirement over billions of years (Sol -&gt; Earth) to get anything close to human civilization... but it&#x27;s cool to think that, perhaps, some future humans could settle a planet eternally cloaked in darkness. Adapt to the reality of that planet over generations... and be unable to acclimate to life near stars at all.<p>Also, post-Andromeda collision, is this a <i>necessary</i> future for posthuman life? [1] Billions of cold worlds will be flung into the far reaches of the Universe.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Brown_dwarf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Brown_dwarf</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Andromeda%E2%80%93Milky_Way_collision" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Andromeda%E2%80%93Milky_Way_co...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>booleandilemma</author><text>Maybe any expansion does require a few generations to toughen up and live a spartan frontier lifestyle. It wasn’t easy for the first colonists to come to the new world, it won’t be easy for the first colonists in space. But in the long run humanity will be better for it. We have to take the first step, otherwise we never would have left Africa.</text></comment> |
14,132,726 | 14,132,270 | 1 | 3 | 14,131,604 | train | <story><title>How the Airlines Became Cartels</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/17/opinion/how-the-airlines-became-abusive-cartels.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tvanantwerp</author><text>The trick here is defining &quot;smart&quot; versus &quot;needless&quot; regulations. It&#x27;s not always an obvious difference. For example: lots of excessive state-level occupational licensing which effectively just creates cartels was passed with sensible arguments about protecting consumers from harm and poor quality. It&#x27;s fairly easy to rationalize lots of regulations that don&#x27;t work very well in practice. So just saying &quot;it should be smart and not mindless&quot; isn&#x27;t really a solution to anything without a rigorous definition of what a &quot;smart&quot; regulation looks like.</text></item><item><author>epistasis</author><text>Markets are such an essential tool for our society, but they&#x27;re also easy to get wrong. Markets require regulation, whether it&#x27;s in the form of contract enforcement or setting standardized terms for communication in the market. Any time there&#x27;s a power differential, we need regulation.<p>That&#x27;s why I wish we could get past this mindless anti-regulation political trend into a &quot;smart regulation&quot; political trend. Whenever I see &quot;regulations are bad&quot; these days it&#x27;s always associated with mindless deregulation; deregulation is a difficult thing that must be done carefully, and it has to be adjusted later on to adjust for all the unforeseen consequences. Regulations are not bad, it&#x27;s needless regulations that are bad.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>zeteo</author><text>Right on. The legislators who consult with lobbyists behind closed doors and then produce thousand page bills would argue that they also make &quot;smart&quot; regulation. Didn&#x27;t they talk at length to the people who knew most about the issue? Doesn&#x27;t the bill address lots of cases that would never occur to the &quot;dumb&quot; person?<p>Yes, but the bill is totally ineffective for the average person and only helps the big players.<p>What we arguably need is more &quot;stupid&quot; (as in &quot;keep it simple, stupid&quot;) regulation. Constitutional Amendments are written in this style; also some antitrust legislation [1]. Complex regulations are vulnerable to<p>a) hidden flaws - that tiny exception in article 57 paragraph 30 might turn out large enough to overturn all 56 previous articles.<p>b) regulatory capture - lobbyists will, of course, introduce as many exceptions as possible if the text is long enough.<p>c) the revolving door - if only a small group of people know the intricate details, they will soon be hired by the affected companies at a multiple of their previous salary.<p>d) compliance cost - only large companies might be able to afford the compliance cost, which ends up concentrating the market further at the cost of the consumer (Dodd-Frank, anyone?).<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Sherman_Antitrust_Act#Original_text" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Sherman_Antitrust_Act#Original...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>How the Airlines Became Cartels</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/17/opinion/how-the-airlines-became-abusive-cartels.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tvanantwerp</author><text>The trick here is defining &quot;smart&quot; versus &quot;needless&quot; regulations. It&#x27;s not always an obvious difference. For example: lots of excessive state-level occupational licensing which effectively just creates cartels was passed with sensible arguments about protecting consumers from harm and poor quality. It&#x27;s fairly easy to rationalize lots of regulations that don&#x27;t work very well in practice. So just saying &quot;it should be smart and not mindless&quot; isn&#x27;t really a solution to anything without a rigorous definition of what a &quot;smart&quot; regulation looks like.</text></item><item><author>epistasis</author><text>Markets are such an essential tool for our society, but they&#x27;re also easy to get wrong. Markets require regulation, whether it&#x27;s in the form of contract enforcement or setting standardized terms for communication in the market. Any time there&#x27;s a power differential, we need regulation.<p>That&#x27;s why I wish we could get past this mindless anti-regulation political trend into a &quot;smart regulation&quot; political trend. Whenever I see &quot;regulations are bad&quot; these days it&#x27;s always associated with mindless deregulation; deregulation is a difficult thing that must be done carefully, and it has to be adjusted later on to adjust for all the unforeseen consequences. Regulations are not bad, it&#x27;s needless regulations that are bad.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>r00fus</author><text>How about stopping the revolving door between those who are regulated and those is the agencies doing the regulation?<p>Conflict of interest appointments result in probably the vast majority of anti-market, cartel-style behavior.</text></comment> |
13,977,794 | 13,975,926 | 1 | 2 | 13,973,391 | train | <story><title>A lawsuit over Costco golf balls</title><url>https://qz.com/942785/lawsuit-over-popular-lower-priced-costco-golf-balls-shows-why-americans-cant-have-nice-things-cheap/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>aluminussoma</author><text>Costco sued J&amp;J Vision Care a few years ago over anti-consumer behavior in the contact lenses industry (I characterize it as anti-consumer. The Vision Care industry characterizes it as pro-consumer). They dropped the lawsuit in 2016, probably because Johnson and Johnson discontinued the practice: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.law360.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;800034&#x2F;costco-drops-antitrust-suit-against-j-j-over-contact-lenses" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.law360.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;800034&#x2F;costco-drops-antitrus...</a><p>Costco did support a different lawsuit by state of Utah against Contact Lens Manufacturers. The Manufacturers lost their first appeal in December 2016: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sltrib.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;4731439-155&#x2F;contact-lens-makers-lose-one-in" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sltrib.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;4731439-155&#x2F;contact-lens-makers-l...</a><p>Hopefully this will begin reducing the prices of contact lenses. Kudos to Costco for sticking up for its customers.<p>Here is one manufacturer&#x27;s opinion on this matter: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.alcon.com&#x2F;content&#x2F;unilateral-pricing-policy" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.alcon.com&#x2F;content&#x2F;unilateral-pricing-policy</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>deadowl</author><text>Vermont gas distributors have the highest profit margins in the nation. The gasoline oligopoly here is committed to creating high barriers to entry. This includes buying their competitors just to remove the tanks on premise.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sevendaysvt.com&#x2F;OffMessage&#x2F;archives&#x2F;2015&#x2F;06&#x2F;22&#x2F;lawsuit-alleges-price-fixing-by-vermont-gasoline-companies" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sevendaysvt.com&#x2F;OffMessage&#x2F;archives&#x2F;2015&#x2F;06&#x2F;22&#x2F;la...</a><p>Costco decided they were going to distribute gasoline at its Colchester, VT location. They spent years in court battles with Skip Vallee, owner of R.L. Vallee, Inc., eventually went up to the Vermont Supreme Court, which handed out a decision last year that Costco is permitted to build a gas station.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sevendaysvt.com&#x2F;OffMessage&#x2F;archives&#x2F;2016&#x2F;08&#x2F;05&#x2F;vermont-supreme-court-approves-costco-gas-pumps-rejects-vallee-appeal" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sevendaysvt.com&#x2F;OffMessage&#x2F;archives&#x2F;2016&#x2F;08&#x2F;05&#x2F;ve...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>A lawsuit over Costco golf balls</title><url>https://qz.com/942785/lawsuit-over-popular-lower-priced-costco-golf-balls-shows-why-americans-cant-have-nice-things-cheap/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>aluminussoma</author><text>Costco sued J&amp;J Vision Care a few years ago over anti-consumer behavior in the contact lenses industry (I characterize it as anti-consumer. The Vision Care industry characterizes it as pro-consumer). They dropped the lawsuit in 2016, probably because Johnson and Johnson discontinued the practice: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.law360.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;800034&#x2F;costco-drops-antitrust-suit-against-j-j-over-contact-lenses" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.law360.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;800034&#x2F;costco-drops-antitrus...</a><p>Costco did support a different lawsuit by state of Utah against Contact Lens Manufacturers. The Manufacturers lost their first appeal in December 2016: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sltrib.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;4731439-155&#x2F;contact-lens-makers-lose-one-in" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sltrib.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;4731439-155&#x2F;contact-lens-makers-l...</a><p>Hopefully this will begin reducing the prices of contact lenses. Kudos to Costco for sticking up for its customers.<p>Here is one manufacturer&#x27;s opinion on this matter: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.alcon.com&#x2F;content&#x2F;unilateral-pricing-policy" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.alcon.com&#x2F;content&#x2F;unilateral-pricing-policy</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>eddieroger</author><text>I always hear stories about Costco being great to their employees, but now seeing that they&#x27;re so pro-consumer as well makes me feel even better about shopping there pretty regularly. I&#x27;m not even their target market, but it&#x27;s one of my favorite stores.</text></comment> |
21,082,649 | 21,081,877 | 1 | 2 | 21,079,844 | train | <story><title>SAT Scores Fall as More Students Take the Test</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/sat-scores-fall-as-more-students-take-the-test-11569297660?mod=rsswn</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>IMAYousaf</author><text>I missed 1 question when i took the SAT 6-7ish years ago, resulting in the second highest possible score. It made me a US Presidential Scholars Medal Program Candidate. Take what I say for what it’s worth, which probably isn’t a lot, but I’d like to share my experience and why I believe I scored well.<p>I never took any prep course. I always was of the mindset that the only value they provided was forced practice. I never bought that they taught secrets of test taking.<p>Instead I bought 2 books, and 2 books only. One was the official SAT Guide which was $20ish. Secondly I bought a Kaplan book which just had 12 tests in it for $20. Both of these books were also available in the reference section of the public library.<p>I worked through about a test a week the 4ish months prior to the SAT, and read articles online about the SAT if I came across them. I felt very in the know regarding the test and just flew through it when taking it.<p>I used that score to tutor others for pay, and my friends for free. I found out that just walking people through the test was about confidence, which really jumped people’s score up. Naturally most people I came across were between a 1500 and an 1800 out of 2400. For people below that, they tended to need remedial education to improve their scores. Between 1800 and 2150 usually was a result of understanding patterns in the test and what to look for. Those were learned through some rigor in prep using the two aforementioned books. Finally, for students who wanted to score above a 2150 to a 2400, the differences in those that did and didn’t were not educational content based, but rather big picture problem solving strategy in how to logic through problems and knowing what to look for.<p>The SAT, IMO, is a relatively good predictor of someone’s educational attainment the first time they try one prior to any prep. I scored exactly what I predicted and after $40 of self-study, which could’ve been done for free, I scored what I knew I could.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bsanr2</author><text>I did 2160 out of 2400 (1490 on the 1600 scale), which got me Merit Commended and an Achievement Scholars Candidacy. No test prep, save for basic instructions and having taken the PSAT twice. AFAIC I bombed the math portion and would have scored over 700 if I&#x27;d taken it a second time. I was a decent student, but nothing special. That was a decade ago. Currently working in a big chain retailer&#x27;s warehouse for $17&#x2F;hr.<p>Accordingly, I think the SAT is a bit of a farce. Like BMI, it&#x27;s essentially worthless without context that, assessed prudently, could advise stakeholders on its own, without the test score. Likewise, it obfuscates the true nature of the strengths and weaknesses of the tested. With a 9xth percentile score, are you like me, possessing a high natural aptitude but dealing with the fallout of a mental health issues, a dysfunctional home life, and the fundamental difficulties of being black in American society? Are you a intellectually-middling child of wealthy parents who can afford to shove test prep down your throat until you &quot;get it,&quot; and then provide for your professional needs post-college? Or are you a hard-worker who studied diligently, only to exit undergrad to find that your options are severely limited by your debt load?<p>This is all kind of beside the point, however. We get stuck in this quagmire of discussing how best to facilitate the sorting and tracking of our youth into will succeed&#x2F;won&#x27;t succeed boxes, when we should be working to assure success across the board. Why are some American colleges (entrance into which is the aim of taking the SAT in the first place) excellent, and others not? Why the acceptance of such disparities in educational quality?</text></comment> | <story><title>SAT Scores Fall as More Students Take the Test</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/sat-scores-fall-as-more-students-take-the-test-11569297660?mod=rsswn</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>IMAYousaf</author><text>I missed 1 question when i took the SAT 6-7ish years ago, resulting in the second highest possible score. It made me a US Presidential Scholars Medal Program Candidate. Take what I say for what it’s worth, which probably isn’t a lot, but I’d like to share my experience and why I believe I scored well.<p>I never took any prep course. I always was of the mindset that the only value they provided was forced practice. I never bought that they taught secrets of test taking.<p>Instead I bought 2 books, and 2 books only. One was the official SAT Guide which was $20ish. Secondly I bought a Kaplan book which just had 12 tests in it for $20. Both of these books were also available in the reference section of the public library.<p>I worked through about a test a week the 4ish months prior to the SAT, and read articles online about the SAT if I came across them. I felt very in the know regarding the test and just flew through it when taking it.<p>I used that score to tutor others for pay, and my friends for free. I found out that just walking people through the test was about confidence, which really jumped people’s score up. Naturally most people I came across were between a 1500 and an 1800 out of 2400. For people below that, they tended to need remedial education to improve their scores. Between 1800 and 2150 usually was a result of understanding patterns in the test and what to look for. Those were learned through some rigor in prep using the two aforementioned books. Finally, for students who wanted to score above a 2150 to a 2400, the differences in those that did and didn’t were not educational content based, but rather big picture problem solving strategy in how to logic through problems and knowing what to look for.<p>The SAT, IMO, is a relatively good predictor of someone’s educational attainment the first time they try one prior to any prep. I scored exactly what I predicted and after $40 of self-study, which could’ve been done for free, I scored what I knew I could.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dharmon</author><text>I only did alright on the SAT, but I smoked the GRE by doing something similar.<p>The Kaplan book had a CD with a few practice tests. I think I did 2. If for no other reason, they are super useful for figuring out how to pace yourself.<p>The math section was (is?) easy for most people on this site. This seems the norm because the score&#x2F;percentile relationship was incredibly high.<p>The English section kills people. My pro-tip is, in the same Kaplan book, they have a list of the most common words. I made flashcards for the top 100, and I&#x27;ll be damned if like 80 of them didn&#x27;t show up on the test. I imagine this is similar for the SATs.</text></comment> |
30,574,721 | 30,574,183 | 1 | 3 | 30,571,990 | train | <story><title>Finding an authorization bypass on my own website</title><url>https://maxwelldulin.com/BlogPost?post=9185867776</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>PeterisP</author><text>The key point is that an abstraction layer trying to implement an API that looks like parametrized queries is not equivalent to actual parametrized queries where the query and parameters are kept separately, and the SQL text is parsed and execution plan is formed by the DB engine <i>before</i> the parameters are even considered. If your DB library is inserting the parameters in a text query before sending it off to the server to be parsed as arbitrary SQL, that&#x27;s not a parametrized query, but just fake smoke and mirrors.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bgrainger</author><text>One major problem is that the MySQL &quot;text&quot; protocol doesn&#x27;t support true parameterised queries. There&#x27;s no way to pass parameters in the `COM_QUERY` packet: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dev.mysql.com&#x2F;doc&#x2F;internals&#x2F;en&#x2F;com-query.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dev.mysql.com&#x2F;doc&#x2F;internals&#x2F;en&#x2F;com-query.html</a><p>That&#x27;s probably why many of the libraries mentioned in this thread use &quot;smoke and mirrors&quot;. Of course, it is quite possible to correctly escape a value by rendering it to a string first, _then_ encoding the whole thing.<p>To have true parameterised queries, you need to use the &quot;binary&quot; protocol, which many MySQL libraries don&#x27;t offer support for. (MySQL also has some frustrating limitations with the binary protocol, such as not allowing a SQL string containing more than one statement to be prepared.)</text></comment> | <story><title>Finding an authorization bypass on my own website</title><url>https://maxwelldulin.com/BlogPost?post=9185867776</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>PeterisP</author><text>The key point is that an abstraction layer trying to implement an API that looks like parametrized queries is not equivalent to actual parametrized queries where the query and parameters are kept separately, and the SQL text is parsed and execution plan is formed by the DB engine <i>before</i> the parameters are even considered. If your DB library is inserting the parameters in a text query before sending it off to the server to be parsed as arbitrary SQL, that&#x27;s not a parametrized query, but just fake smoke and mirrors.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tedunangst</author><text>From the mysqljs readme: &quot;Caution This also differs from prepared statements in that all ? are replaced, even those contained in comments and strings.&quot;<p>Eek. &quot;select * from classes where teacher = &#x27;?&#x27;&quot; -&gt; boom.</text></comment> |
11,806,762 | 11,806,492 | 1 | 3 | 11,805,355 | train | <story><title>The Untold Story Behind Saudi Arabia’s U.S. Treasury Holdings</title><url>http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-05-30/the-untold-story-behind-saudi-arabia-s-41-year-u-s-debt-secret</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>s_q_b</author><text>You can see from their reported figures that their U.S. treasury holdings are far too low for a sensible national portfolio. It&#x27;s a pretty glaring hole, and you know that the money is going somewhere off the balance sheets.<p>The question has always been how much U.S. debt exactly the Saudi&#x27;s hold. This is an interesting historical anecdote, but it doesn&#x27;t provide any information about the size of the debt, other than &quot;much larger&quot; than official figures, which isn&#x27;t terribly informative.<p>At this point, Saudi Arabia needs the United States more than the United States needs Saudi Arabia. The OPEC cartel is broken, Saudi Arabia is running a massive deficit, both China and Europe have economies mired in the aftershocks of 2008 which cannot absorb the additional supply, and the United States is energy independent.<p>If the Saudis are even willing to suggest selling off their dollar-denominated debts, they must be either unfathomably arrogant or extremely desperate. My read is the latter.<p>They really must want to keep those documents secret. There is no way that a country gobbling up it&#x27;s meager monetary reserves could afford the hit to the value of those assets as they unwound them, even if they sold them off very slowly and predictably.<p>Something potentially very bad for world security is in those documents. Something that would force us into confrontation with the Saudis. Something that could cause a run on the dollar.<p>There must be some extremely senior officials involved in that report. Whoever they are, they&#x27;re senior enough that they can&#x27;t be made to disappear quietly into the night.<p>If those pages do contain information specifically identifying financiers of 9&#x2F;11, the United States might be war-weary, but you can bet that a massive majority of Americans would demand their heads on pikes. As much as I support the public&#x27;s right to know, that&#x27;s a very nightmarish scenario.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jonstokes</author><text>A few years ago I read a good book on the collapse of the USSR (can&#x27;t remember the title, too lazy to go back and find it right now). One of the major factors that the author identified was glasnost (&quot;transparency&quot;), which I&#x27;m old enough to remember being talked about on the news at the time.<p>Basically, his thesis was that it was the transparency, after a generation of buildup of really nasty official secrets, that ultimately brought down the communist regime. Once it was clear that everything people thought was probably happening was actually happening, and worse, the whole thing just disintegrated from the bottom up. The regime lost all legitimacy, and the death blow was basically self-inflicted since it was the regime itself that started to open up.<p>I often wonder about that in the US context. What if a lot of crazy stuff that many people suspect has gone on actually turns out to be true, or what if it&#x27;s even worse than some of the tinfoil hatters think, and we suddenly start finding out about it all.<p>I figured it would be some type of Wikileaks or Snowden-type reveal that would do us in, if it happened. But we may actually do ourselves in with an American glasnost that, just like the Russian one of the 80&#x27;s, is done by well-meaning people in our own government.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Untold Story Behind Saudi Arabia’s U.S. Treasury Holdings</title><url>http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-05-30/the-untold-story-behind-saudi-arabia-s-41-year-u-s-debt-secret</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>s_q_b</author><text>You can see from their reported figures that their U.S. treasury holdings are far too low for a sensible national portfolio. It&#x27;s a pretty glaring hole, and you know that the money is going somewhere off the balance sheets.<p>The question has always been how much U.S. debt exactly the Saudi&#x27;s hold. This is an interesting historical anecdote, but it doesn&#x27;t provide any information about the size of the debt, other than &quot;much larger&quot; than official figures, which isn&#x27;t terribly informative.<p>At this point, Saudi Arabia needs the United States more than the United States needs Saudi Arabia. The OPEC cartel is broken, Saudi Arabia is running a massive deficit, both China and Europe have economies mired in the aftershocks of 2008 which cannot absorb the additional supply, and the United States is energy independent.<p>If the Saudis are even willing to suggest selling off their dollar-denominated debts, they must be either unfathomably arrogant or extremely desperate. My read is the latter.<p>They really must want to keep those documents secret. There is no way that a country gobbling up it&#x27;s meager monetary reserves could afford the hit to the value of those assets as they unwound them, even if they sold them off very slowly and predictably.<p>Something potentially very bad for world security is in those documents. Something that would force us into confrontation with the Saudis. Something that could cause a run on the dollar.<p>There must be some extremely senior officials involved in that report. Whoever they are, they&#x27;re senior enough that they can&#x27;t be made to disappear quietly into the night.<p>If those pages do contain information specifically identifying financiers of 9&#x2F;11, the United States might be war-weary, but you can bet that a massive majority of Americans would demand their heads on pikes. As much as I support the public&#x27;s right to know, that&#x27;s a very nightmarish scenario.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Sophistifunk</author><text>I think it&#x27;s much more likely that the result will be an un-deniable public insistence on the right to sue the royal family. And if the Sauds can be sued for 9&#x2F;11, the US can be sued for all the drone strikes and the like.</text></comment> |
5,503,105 | 5,503,085 | 1 | 2 | 5,502,878 | train | <story><title>My Code made it to a Hollywood Movie</title><url>http://hackoftheday.securitytube.net/2013/04/my-code-made-it-to-hollywood-movie.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ErrantX</author><text>This is slightly meta, but it's nice to see the attitude of the OP here. It quite matches my own.<p>It's always disappointing to see my work appear somewhere else without credit, but usually it is not worth moaning about. At the end of the day, he put that material up to be helpful to someone - and even if it wasn't used in the way it was intended, or with appropriate credit, at least it was still helpful.<p>It's a good attitude to have, I feel.<p>Especially as it means he gets to feel "cool, my work is in a hollywood movie" rather than "they stole my work". A much more positive feeling :)</text></comment> | <story><title>My Code made it to a Hollywood Movie</title><url>http://hackoftheday.securitytube.net/2013/04/my-code-made-it-to-hollywood-movie.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>WA</author><text>The most interesting part is that they even bothered to take source code that is loosely related to security stuff and not just took any source code that came across their way.</text></comment> |
19,160,958 | 19,159,006 | 1 | 3 | 19,155,826 | train | <story><title>Nasa’s Mars Rover Opportunity Concludes a 15-Year Mission</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/13/science/mars-opportunity-rover-dead.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tzs</author><text>Those &quot;have N copies and compare them&quot; systems then have the issue that whatever does the comparison is a single point of failure. You could use multiple comparison units and have a second level comparison check them, but then that is your single point of failure, and so on.<p>I&#x27;ve been told, but never actually looked it up, that there is a theorem that proves you always have to have at least one single point of failure.<p>I don&#x27;t know if the following is actually true, or just a rumor, but I&#x27;ve heard that at least one aircraft whose mission called for very high reliability didn&#x27;t have a comparison unit: the redundancy extended all the way to having the 3 independent flight control computers each control a separate actuator on each flight control surface. If one of the systems went bad and tried to move the surface incorrectly, the other two would physically overpower it.<p>That still has a single point of failure, but now that point is the control surface itself. If your control surface itself has failed it no longer matters if the 3 computers controlling it agree.</text></item><item><author>luizfzs</author><text>I saw a video once saying that SpaceX uses general purpose computers on the rockets instead of specific purpose hardware. If I&#x27;m not mistaken, they amount to 6 and have a checking system to assure the output of them is the same.</text></item><item><author>wiremine</author><text>Was looking through Opportunity&#x27;s Wikipedia page, and found this cool comparison of the embedded systems used in Mars rovers:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Comparison_of_embedded_computer_systems_on_board_the_Mars_rovers" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Comparison_of_embedded_compute...</a><p>That lead me to the RAD6000 page, which was new to me:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;IBM_RAD6000" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;IBM_RAD6000</a><p>&quot;Reported to have a unit cost somewhere between US$200,000 and US$300,000, RAD6000 computers were released for sale in the general commercial market in 1996&quot;<p>Anybody know why the per unit cost is so high? Low yields or is it that much more expensive?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Strilanc</author><text>&gt; <i>I&#x27;ve been told, but never actually looked it up, that there is a theorem that proves you always have to have at least one single point of failure.</i><p>In what context? There&#x27;s a theorem that arbitrarily-reliable computation can be done with noisy components, as long as the noise is below some threshold (e.g. picture less than 1 error per 10 operations). [1]<p>1: von Neumann, J. (1956). &quot;Probabilistic Logics and Synthesis of Reliable Organisms from Unreliable Components&quot;, in Automata Studies, eds. C. Shannon and J. McCarthy, Princeton University Press, pp. 43–98 <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cyclify.com&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;images&#x2F;a&#x2F;af&#x2F;Von_Neumann_Probabilistic_Logics_and_the_Synthesis_of_Reliable_Organisms_from_Unreliable_Components.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cyclify.com&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;images&#x2F;a&#x2F;af&#x2F;Von_Neumann_Probabil...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Nasa’s Mars Rover Opportunity Concludes a 15-Year Mission</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/13/science/mars-opportunity-rover-dead.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tzs</author><text>Those &quot;have N copies and compare them&quot; systems then have the issue that whatever does the comparison is a single point of failure. You could use multiple comparison units and have a second level comparison check them, but then that is your single point of failure, and so on.<p>I&#x27;ve been told, but never actually looked it up, that there is a theorem that proves you always have to have at least one single point of failure.<p>I don&#x27;t know if the following is actually true, or just a rumor, but I&#x27;ve heard that at least one aircraft whose mission called for very high reliability didn&#x27;t have a comparison unit: the redundancy extended all the way to having the 3 independent flight control computers each control a separate actuator on each flight control surface. If one of the systems went bad and tried to move the surface incorrectly, the other two would physically overpower it.<p>That still has a single point of failure, but now that point is the control surface itself. If your control surface itself has failed it no longer matters if the 3 computers controlling it agree.</text></item><item><author>luizfzs</author><text>I saw a video once saying that SpaceX uses general purpose computers on the rockets instead of specific purpose hardware. If I&#x27;m not mistaken, they amount to 6 and have a checking system to assure the output of them is the same.</text></item><item><author>wiremine</author><text>Was looking through Opportunity&#x27;s Wikipedia page, and found this cool comparison of the embedded systems used in Mars rovers:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Comparison_of_embedded_computer_systems_on_board_the_Mars_rovers" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Comparison_of_embedded_compute...</a><p>That lead me to the RAD6000 page, which was new to me:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;IBM_RAD6000" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;IBM_RAD6000</a><p>&quot;Reported to have a unit cost somewhere between US$200,000 and US$300,000, RAD6000 computers were released for sale in the general commercial market in 1996&quot;<p>Anybody know why the per unit cost is so high? Low yields or is it that much more expensive?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mehrdadn</author><text>This is something I&#x27;d always wondered about and never gotten a straight answer to. You&#x27;re the first person I&#x27;ve seen who explicitly confirmed my suspicion that every system has a single point of failure. Would love to find a reference for this...</text></comment> |
9,924,735 | 9,924,979 | 1 | 3 | 9,923,718 | train | <story><title>Why I am pro-GPL</title><url>http://dustycloud.org/blog/why-i-am-pro-gpl/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>SomeCallMeTim</author><text>* As pointed out by another commenter, Apple switched away from GCC as the default to CLANG.<p>* Microsoft is supporting CLANG.<p>* Android switched from GCC default to CLANG default.<p>* The CLANG development community, combined with the LLVM development community, are both extremely robust.<p>* GCC used to have full time commercial developer contributors working for Google and Apple and other large companies; most such companies have migrated almost entirely to CLANG&#x2F;LLVM support.<p>* Because of better management and the army of full time commercial developers contributing to it, CLANG is better in practically every conceivable way at this point than GCC. If GCC weren&#x27;t GPL, CLANG would likely be (at most) a fork of GCC, and may have been merged back into trunk by now (this happened to GCC once before).<p>CLANG is also an excellent example of how a completely permissive license <i>can</i> be sufficient to encourage big companies to contribute their changes back to the commons. All of the GPL fearmongering would have you believe that CLANG couldn&#x27;t exist, and yet it thrives.<p>And printer drivers are still almost all proprietary [1]. So GPL didn&#x27;t even achieve the objective that inspired it.<p>GPL did prove that open source CAN work, and it jumpstarted the open source movement. But its time has past; enough people understand the benefits of contributing to open source that the coercion is no longer necessary, and in fact is harmful.<p>[1] Some printer drivers have been reverse-engineered for Linux, certainly. But modern printers frequently leave so much processing for the host that their drivers are nontrivial, and even when there exists &quot;free&quot; drivers for Linux, they pale in comparison feature-wise to the proprietary drivers. I&#x27;m sure there are exceptions.</text></item><item><author>dman</author><text>Could you provide some supporting arguments &#x2F; evidence for this statement - &quot;GCC used to be the king of the compiler heap; now it&#x27;s well on its way to becoming an historical footnote.&quot; ?</text></item><item><author>SomeCallMeTim</author><text>&gt;Well, the GPL mandates the right to use the application, and that a redistributor cannot restrict it (section 0, preambule and section 6, IIRC); that right is not guaranteed by MIT, BSD, MPL or Apache.<p>Yeah, and because of the additional restrictions of GPL, big companies are simply avoiding it or writing software to replace it.<p>See: CLANG&#x2F;LLVM. GCC used to be the king of the compiler heap; now it&#x27;s well on its way to becoming an historical footnote.<p>It&#x27;s <i>far</i> better to convince people to help you by being trusting and generous than by coercion. The GPL uses coercion.<p>Yes, some companies use BSD&#x2F;MIT software and lock it up, never to send improvements back upstream. But they ultimately are harming themselves, as they can&#x27;t trivially update to new versions of the the software, because they&#x27;re now maintaining a fork, and the longer their code diverges, the harder it will be to maintain. So they <i>are</i> motivated to send improvements upstream. And many (most?) big companies do.<p>When there&#x27;s another game in town, people will play the one where they&#x27;re more welcome. Open source software benefits by many eyes and many hands; the GPL (especially GPLv3) cuts off access to just about everyone in big companies, which means the size of the potential user base is a fraction of what it <i>can</i> be.<p>Linux is a notable exception, obviously. But with Linux there&#x27;s a clear way to use it that doesn&#x27;t risk your proprietary code. Most other software, not so much.</text></item><item><author>jbk</author><text>&gt; I&#x27;m not yet convinced that MIT-like, BSD-like, and Apache-like are any worse at perpetuating user freedom, and may in fact be far better at perpetuating user freedom due to their greater acceptance.<p>Well, the GPL mandates the right to use the application, and that a redistributor cannot restrict it (section 0, preambule and section 6, IIRC); that right is not guaranteed by MIT, BSD, MPL or Apache.</text></item><item><author>epistasis</author><text>And that&#x27;s a great thing to care about, and a great reason to create a license. The secondary question is: which license is best at perpetuating user freedom? This is a separate question than that of whether users <i>should</i> have freedom to mess with code. IMHO, the GPL is not the best license for perpetuating the most user freedom. Many people disagree with me on this, but their disagreement usually comes down to &quot;the GPL is best for user freedom because it was created for user freedom and RMS is talking about user freedom.&quot; I&#x27;m not yet convinced that MIT-like, BSD-like, and Apache-like are any worse at perpetuating user freedom, and may in fact be far better at perpetuating user freedom due to their greater acceptance.</text></item><item><author>TazeTSchnitzel</author><text>It&#x27;s worth remembering why the GPL was invented.<p>Stallman had a printer which had proprietary drivers, and he wanted to fix an issue with the driver. He couldn&#x27;t. He created the GPL so that, in future, people wouldn&#x27;t have this problem.<p>Stallman created the GPL because he cared about user freedom.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>timtadh</author><text>LLVM was not created as reaction against the licensing model of GCC. It was created as a research project exploring: &quot;transparent, lifelong program analysis and transformation for arbitrary programs.&quot;[1] GCC and other compilers were not setup to do this. They needed to build an intermediate representation of a kind that was highly unusual for the time. That is where it originated, as pure research. Trying to build a better mouse trap. Not to become a GCC competitor. It did become one because it turned out they had some rather good ideas!<p>The GPL is not harmful and I encourage you to utilize it when appropriate for it protects you (the original author) and your target users far more than BSD or other similar licenses.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;llvm.org&#x2F;pubs&#x2F;2004-01-30-CGO-LLVM.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;llvm.org&#x2F;pubs&#x2F;2004-01-30-CGO-LLVM.html</a> Read full paper not just the abstract to get the full picture.</text></comment> | <story><title>Why I am pro-GPL</title><url>http://dustycloud.org/blog/why-i-am-pro-gpl/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>SomeCallMeTim</author><text>* As pointed out by another commenter, Apple switched away from GCC as the default to CLANG.<p>* Microsoft is supporting CLANG.<p>* Android switched from GCC default to CLANG default.<p>* The CLANG development community, combined with the LLVM development community, are both extremely robust.<p>* GCC used to have full time commercial developer contributors working for Google and Apple and other large companies; most such companies have migrated almost entirely to CLANG&#x2F;LLVM support.<p>* Because of better management and the army of full time commercial developers contributing to it, CLANG is better in practically every conceivable way at this point than GCC. If GCC weren&#x27;t GPL, CLANG would likely be (at most) a fork of GCC, and may have been merged back into trunk by now (this happened to GCC once before).<p>CLANG is also an excellent example of how a completely permissive license <i>can</i> be sufficient to encourage big companies to contribute their changes back to the commons. All of the GPL fearmongering would have you believe that CLANG couldn&#x27;t exist, and yet it thrives.<p>And printer drivers are still almost all proprietary [1]. So GPL didn&#x27;t even achieve the objective that inspired it.<p>GPL did prove that open source CAN work, and it jumpstarted the open source movement. But its time has past; enough people understand the benefits of contributing to open source that the coercion is no longer necessary, and in fact is harmful.<p>[1] Some printer drivers have been reverse-engineered for Linux, certainly. But modern printers frequently leave so much processing for the host that their drivers are nontrivial, and even when there exists &quot;free&quot; drivers for Linux, they pale in comparison feature-wise to the proprietary drivers. I&#x27;m sure there are exceptions.</text></item><item><author>dman</author><text>Could you provide some supporting arguments &#x2F; evidence for this statement - &quot;GCC used to be the king of the compiler heap; now it&#x27;s well on its way to becoming an historical footnote.&quot; ?</text></item><item><author>SomeCallMeTim</author><text>&gt;Well, the GPL mandates the right to use the application, and that a redistributor cannot restrict it (section 0, preambule and section 6, IIRC); that right is not guaranteed by MIT, BSD, MPL or Apache.<p>Yeah, and because of the additional restrictions of GPL, big companies are simply avoiding it or writing software to replace it.<p>See: CLANG&#x2F;LLVM. GCC used to be the king of the compiler heap; now it&#x27;s well on its way to becoming an historical footnote.<p>It&#x27;s <i>far</i> better to convince people to help you by being trusting and generous than by coercion. The GPL uses coercion.<p>Yes, some companies use BSD&#x2F;MIT software and lock it up, never to send improvements back upstream. But they ultimately are harming themselves, as they can&#x27;t trivially update to new versions of the the software, because they&#x27;re now maintaining a fork, and the longer their code diverges, the harder it will be to maintain. So they <i>are</i> motivated to send improvements upstream. And many (most?) big companies do.<p>When there&#x27;s another game in town, people will play the one where they&#x27;re more welcome. Open source software benefits by many eyes and many hands; the GPL (especially GPLv3) cuts off access to just about everyone in big companies, which means the size of the potential user base is a fraction of what it <i>can</i> be.<p>Linux is a notable exception, obviously. But with Linux there&#x27;s a clear way to use it that doesn&#x27;t risk your proprietary code. Most other software, not so much.</text></item><item><author>jbk</author><text>&gt; I&#x27;m not yet convinced that MIT-like, BSD-like, and Apache-like are any worse at perpetuating user freedom, and may in fact be far better at perpetuating user freedom due to their greater acceptance.<p>Well, the GPL mandates the right to use the application, and that a redistributor cannot restrict it (section 0, preambule and section 6, IIRC); that right is not guaranteed by MIT, BSD, MPL or Apache.</text></item><item><author>epistasis</author><text>And that&#x27;s a great thing to care about, and a great reason to create a license. The secondary question is: which license is best at perpetuating user freedom? This is a separate question than that of whether users <i>should</i> have freedom to mess with code. IMHO, the GPL is not the best license for perpetuating the most user freedom. Many people disagree with me on this, but their disagreement usually comes down to &quot;the GPL is best for user freedom because it was created for user freedom and RMS is talking about user freedom.&quot; I&#x27;m not yet convinced that MIT-like, BSD-like, and Apache-like are any worse at perpetuating user freedom, and may in fact be far better at perpetuating user freedom due to their greater acceptance.</text></item><item><author>TazeTSchnitzel</author><text>It&#x27;s worth remembering why the GPL was invented.<p>Stallman had a printer which had proprietary drivers, and he wanted to fix an issue with the driver. He couldn&#x27;t. He created the GPL so that, in future, people wouldn&#x27;t have this problem.<p>Stallman created the GPL because he cared about user freedom.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nickpsecurity</author><text>Like other commenters, I think GPL had little to do with switch to Clang&#x2F;LLVM. I liked it for its better, versatile design with a community turning it into the program analysis&#x2F;transformation baseline to beat them all (minus Semantic Design stuff maybe). However, I think your overall point is supported by the fact that many virtualization solutions in embedded space are marketing GPL isolation as a benefit worth buying them. They probably wouldn&#x27;t be saying it unless they had lots of customers talking about that problem.</text></comment> |
27,073,227 | 27,070,470 | 1 | 3 | 27,068,535 | train | <story><title>Faster DISTINCT queries on PostgreSQL</title><url>https://blog.timescale.com/blog/how-we-made-distinct-queries-up-to-8000x-faster-on-postgresql/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jereze</author><text>I made first tests with Timescale 10 days ago with logs of a website.
First result, I was impressed by the compression: 13GB of compressed CSV files - 1 PostgreSQL table of 63GB - 1 Timescale hypertable of 4GB.
Then, I saw improvements on the performance of my queries, between 23% and 92% faster on the hypertable versus the table.
This is definitely interesting and I will look into it further. I&#x27;m getting from &quot;it&#x27;s not a good idea to put weblogs on Postgresql&quot; to &quot;why not, if it helps simplify our infra&quot;.</text></comment> | <story><title>Faster DISTINCT queries on PostgreSQL</title><url>https://blog.timescale.com/blog/how-we-made-distinct-queries-up-to-8000x-faster-on-postgresql/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>akra</author><text>In the past I found this tip to be helpful: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.postgresql.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Loose_indexscan" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.postgresql.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Loose_indexscan</a>. You can emulate it but it would be good for distinct to do this natively for default fast performance (distinct key queries) to avoid needing to know these tricks of the trade.</text></comment> |
13,438,593 | 13,435,542 | 1 | 2 | 13,433,729 | train | <story><title>Japanese toilet industry agrees to standardize complex bidet controls</title><url>http://www.theverge.com/2017/1/17/14306464/japanese-toilet-control-icons-meaning-standard</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>antihero</author><text>Aww the Jainism tenets looked great until they got to chastity. Why do so many religions and movements associate sex with sin? It is a beautiful, wonderful thing.</text></item><item><author>Alexqw85</author><text>I agree with you. One culture&#x27;s horrifying misuse of a symbol should not censor it for all and forever.<p>My roommate for the first two years of college was raised as a Jain[1], and a swastika with four dots is an important symbol for them. He liked to sketch, anything and everything, but also this swastika.<p>As his art was all over our walls, the expressions people had when they entered our dorm room for the first time were priceless. Sometimes it took some real explaining to convince them that I&#x27;m not a Nazi, and it was my Indian roommate who was drawing them and not me. ;-)<p>Beautiful artwork though.<p>---Alex<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Jainism" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Jainism</a></text></item><item><author>bjackman</author><text>&gt; The government has recommended removing the Buddhist manji symbol from maps aimed at foreigners, for example, for fear of unintended associations with the Nazi swastika.<p>Does anyone else think this is a shame? When I&#x27;ve been to Asia and seen &quot;swastikas&quot; everywhere I&#x27;ve found it in a way joyful. The hate symbol has no power here, I thought; it&#x27;s a positive thing. Why should one culture change their own iconography just because it was perverted in a different culture? It seems like a mild example of self-inflicted cultural imperialism.<p>Maybe I&#x27;m just being very philosophically naïve.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rictic</author><text>Before good birth control, extramarital sex meant single mothers. And if it&#x27;s hard to be a single mom today, imagine being a single mom in a world where there were a fraction of the job opportunities outside the home for a woman.</text></comment> | <story><title>Japanese toilet industry agrees to standardize complex bidet controls</title><url>http://www.theverge.com/2017/1/17/14306464/japanese-toilet-control-icons-meaning-standard</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>antihero</author><text>Aww the Jainism tenets looked great until they got to chastity. Why do so many religions and movements associate sex with sin? It is a beautiful, wonderful thing.</text></item><item><author>Alexqw85</author><text>I agree with you. One culture&#x27;s horrifying misuse of a symbol should not censor it for all and forever.<p>My roommate for the first two years of college was raised as a Jain[1], and a swastika with four dots is an important symbol for them. He liked to sketch, anything and everything, but also this swastika.<p>As his art was all over our walls, the expressions people had when they entered our dorm room for the first time were priceless. Sometimes it took some real explaining to convince them that I&#x27;m not a Nazi, and it was my Indian roommate who was drawing them and not me. ;-)<p>Beautiful artwork though.<p>---Alex<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Jainism" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Jainism</a></text></item><item><author>bjackman</author><text>&gt; The government has recommended removing the Buddhist manji symbol from maps aimed at foreigners, for example, for fear of unintended associations with the Nazi swastika.<p>Does anyone else think this is a shame? When I&#x27;ve been to Asia and seen &quot;swastikas&quot; everywhere I&#x27;ve found it in a way joyful. The hate symbol has no power here, I thought; it&#x27;s a positive thing. Why should one culture change their own iconography just because it was perverted in a different culture? It seems like a mild example of self-inflicted cultural imperialism.<p>Maybe I&#x27;m just being very philosophically naïve.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>stelonix</author><text>It&#x27;s not exactly with sin, but sexual activity is correlated with the power of creation. So &quot;misusing&quot; a &quot;big bang&quot; is often painted as something &quot;bad&quot;, be it a sin or simply considered an act of layman&#x27;s ignorance.</text></comment> |
14,145,454 | 14,145,416 | 1 | 3 | 14,144,932 | train | <story><title>Some 4.5M Japanese aged between 35 and 54 are living with their parents</title><url>http://in.reuters.com/article/japan-ageing-singles-idINKBN17K2OQ</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sandworm101</author><text>I don&#x27;t see the &quot;illusions&quot;. It isn&#x27;t as if these people are daily choosing their life. There aren&#x27;t huge numbers of well-paid jobs out there for them or anyone else. Just because someone isn&#x27;t successful doesn&#x27;t mean they are under some sort of illusion. The word &quot;parasite&quot; also implies that these people should somehow stop living, that they are such a drain that the parasite should just let got and die rather than continue the only life available to them.<p>They may have made some mistakes, but in previous generations a few mistakes now and again was not a life sentence. A few years off the books wasn&#x27;t a big deal in the 80s or 90s. Now any gap in your linkedin profile is interrogated. In Japan and elsewhere, anyone with a blot on their employment record is doomed. And heaven help those with any criminal convictions. Our societies today deliberately push away so many people. It is improper of us to then say that it is entirely their fault or that they suffer illusions. The illusion is ours, that by shunning and dispossessing people for slight imperfections we only amplify them.<p>Once upon a time there was a net of reasonable jobs that didn&#x27;t pay well but allowed people a life, low-level government jobs that took anyone willing to work hard. But has anyone here looked at how hard it is to become a postal worker or to join the army? Ability and willingness is no longer enough. (I have relatives in the Canadian Armed Forces. The application process takes at least one and sometimes many years.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>phs318u</author><text>Direct quote from the first subject:<p>&quot;I got used to living in an unstable situation and figured somehow it would work out&quot;<p>That last bit is illusory thinking.<p>Also, I&#x27;d beg to differ on your suggestion that these people aren&#x27;t choosing their life every single day. I&#x27;d suggest the opposite is true for most of us (leaving aside those who through incapacity have diminished options). Every single day you don&#x27;t make an effort to look for work, don&#x27;t volunteer for something, don&#x27;t organise an activity, don&#x27;t spend some time learning something, don&#x27;t go somewhere to meet people, don&#x27;t go on a date - you are making a choice. Living with your parents and (more importantly) living off your parents well into your fifties is not an accident. You can&#x27;t accidentally do that. That is directly the result of daily choices and illusory thinking.<p>And while we can agreee that the term &quot;parasite&quot; is pejorative, I find it is deserved- at least from the perspective of the parent (who in this case is probably as much to blame for this situation).<p>My daughters are 20 and 18 and the expectation has long been set in our family that they will be moving out once they&#x27;re in stable employment (and by that I mean any job that can pay their bills, not their dream job). When both kids are out of the house, we&#x27;ll downsize and share some of the cashed out equity to help them get started on the property ladder. Then they&#x27;re on their own. In our family we refer to this as &quot;The Plan&quot;. They&#x27;ve been hearing about the Plan (and been onboard) since their early teens.</text></comment> | <story><title>Some 4.5M Japanese aged between 35 and 54 are living with their parents</title><url>http://in.reuters.com/article/japan-ageing-singles-idINKBN17K2OQ</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sandworm101</author><text>I don&#x27;t see the &quot;illusions&quot;. It isn&#x27;t as if these people are daily choosing their life. There aren&#x27;t huge numbers of well-paid jobs out there for them or anyone else. Just because someone isn&#x27;t successful doesn&#x27;t mean they are under some sort of illusion. The word &quot;parasite&quot; also implies that these people should somehow stop living, that they are such a drain that the parasite should just let got and die rather than continue the only life available to them.<p>They may have made some mistakes, but in previous generations a few mistakes now and again was not a life sentence. A few years off the books wasn&#x27;t a big deal in the 80s or 90s. Now any gap in your linkedin profile is interrogated. In Japan and elsewhere, anyone with a blot on their employment record is doomed. And heaven help those with any criminal convictions. Our societies today deliberately push away so many people. It is improper of us to then say that it is entirely their fault or that they suffer illusions. The illusion is ours, that by shunning and dispossessing people for slight imperfections we only amplify them.<p>Once upon a time there was a net of reasonable jobs that didn&#x27;t pay well but allowed people a life, low-level government jobs that took anyone willing to work hard. But has anyone here looked at how hard it is to become a postal worker or to join the army? Ability and willingness is no longer enough. (I have relatives in the Canadian Armed Forces. The application process takes at least one and sometimes many years.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>devoply</author><text>&gt; Once upon a time there was a net of reasonable jobs that didn&#x27;t pay well but allowed people a life, low-level government jobs that took anyone willing to work hard. But has anyone here looked at how hard it is to become a postal worker or to join the army? Ability and willingness isn&#x27;t enough any more.<p>This is all about Neoliberalism then isn&#x27;t it. Privatize everything and then the privatized companies are highly competitive and only want the best and couldn&#x27;t care less about the middle or the bottom. It&#x27;s not about jobs, it&#x27;s really never been about the jobs that&#x27;s just rhetoric. It&#x27;s about profits. And profits are stuck in large consolidated corporations that pay as little as possible to the middle and the bottom, preferably on contract or the &quot;sharing&quot; economy of contractors. For full-time employees with benefits they just want the top which is often overworked. I mean the economy was engineered to be like this specifically for the benefit of those with money.</text></comment> |
15,238,988 | 15,238,906 | 1 | 2 | 15,235,504 | train | <story><title>If America Lost Its Electricity: An Electromagnetic Shock</title><url>http://worldif.economist.com/article/13526/electromagnetic-shock</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>legulere</author><text>Having weapons makes it more likely for violent acts to happen. Additionally there&#x27;s a high risk that you will hurt yourself. And then there&#x27;s the effect on the society: a society based on trust is more productive and safe than a society based on mistrust.</text></item><item><author>tryingagainbro</author><text>If all it takes is $4 billion to secure it and we don&#x27;t, we kinda deserve it to happen. The same country has and is spending trillions in Iraq and Afghanistan..<p>On the other side, someone mention Pascal&#x27;s Wager: storing a few basic needs and self defense weapons (were legal), costs practically nothing now but it could save your family&#x27;s life. It&#x27;s not a sure way but it&#x27;s much better to have them then not.<p>Even in cramped apartments you could store stuff for a week or two; in private homes, you&#x27;re talking months. IIRC, tap water in dark areas with a drop of bleach for liter will last for quite a while. Think 55gallon drums, replaced every so often.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>morganvachon</author><text>And not having weapons makes it more likely you will be attacked and killed for your provisions if the shit hits the fan. In other words, armed or not, violence is a given when it gets bad enough that people are scavenging for food. When it&#x27;s so bad the police and military aren&#x27;t there to protect you, you either roll over and die, or fight and possibly live another day.<p>I&#x27;m not saying you&#x27;re wrong, just that we don&#x27;t live in a perfect world with everyone following the rules even in the best of times. I would love it if your ideal world where we all trust each other existed; it would be true paradise. But, we&#x27;re only human and even the very best of us are flawed creatures.</text></comment> | <story><title>If America Lost Its Electricity: An Electromagnetic Shock</title><url>http://worldif.economist.com/article/13526/electromagnetic-shock</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>legulere</author><text>Having weapons makes it more likely for violent acts to happen. Additionally there&#x27;s a high risk that you will hurt yourself. And then there&#x27;s the effect on the society: a society based on trust is more productive and safe than a society based on mistrust.</text></item><item><author>tryingagainbro</author><text>If all it takes is $4 billion to secure it and we don&#x27;t, we kinda deserve it to happen. The same country has and is spending trillions in Iraq and Afghanistan..<p>On the other side, someone mention Pascal&#x27;s Wager: storing a few basic needs and self defense weapons (were legal), costs practically nothing now but it could save your family&#x27;s life. It&#x27;s not a sure way but it&#x27;s much better to have them then not.<p>Even in cramped apartments you could store stuff for a week or two; in private homes, you&#x27;re talking months. IIRC, tap water in dark areas with a drop of bleach for liter will last for quite a while. Think 55gallon drums, replaced every so often.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tryingagainbro</author><text>&gt;&gt; <i>Additionally there&#x27;s a high risk that you will hurt yourself.</i><p>Probably a lower one than starvation, rape or a violent death in the hands of another desperate person.<p>&gt;&gt; <i>And then there&#x27;s the effect on the society: a society based on trust is more productive and safe than a society based on mistrust.</i><p>Nice one. What would happen, today--with all the infrastructure in place--if cops &#x2F;soldiers stayed home for 36 hours? Now add starvation plus desperation and try again.</text></comment> |
35,044,012 | 35,044,504 | 1 | 2 | 35,043,246 | train | <story><title>Ultra-processed foods may contribute to cognitive decline</title><url>https://cam.mbi.ufl.edu/2023/01/31/6089/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>strict9</author><text>&gt;<i>Even packaged breads, including those high in nutritious whole grains, qualify as ultra-processed in many cases because of the additives and preservatives they contain.</i><p>However much I&#x27;d like to alter my diet to be more healthy, including flavored nuts or bread as ultraprocessed means I have nearly zero chance avoiding a sizable portion of what academic scientists label as ultraprocessed.<p>These studies and press releases seem counterproductive. If sliced bread or fancy nuts is in the same category as aerosol cheese or high calorie soda, a lot of people are going to struggle to understand what <i>isn&#x27;t</i> ultraprocessed and give up trying to select better items at the grocery store.</text></comment> | <story><title>Ultra-processed foods may contribute to cognitive decline</title><url>https://cam.mbi.ufl.edu/2023/01/31/6089/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>thrwaway98423</author><text>Even though this is a review, it still suffers from the fact that diet studies are not controlled, randomized, or blind.<p>My mother has early onset dementia. Her habits were very healthy for 30+ years (quit drinking, quit smoking, daily exercise, lifetime healthy BMI, moderate diet) and otherwise physically she is in extremely good shape for her age. But one of the early, subtle signs of her cognitive decline was a reluctance to cook real meals. She now has progressed to a state where she can still use a smartphone or laptop for basic tasks, but isn&#x27;t able to cook any sort of complex recipe from scratch, even one she previously did from memory. Seems pretty obvious to me that it&#x27;s just as likely that cognitive decline causes an inability in older adults to plan and cook healthy meals, not the other way around.</text></comment> |
32,760,208 | 32,760,249 | 1 | 2 | 32,754,917 | train | <story><title>Emergency SOS via satellite is included for free with iPhone 14 Pro for 2 years</title><url>https://www.apple.com/iphone-14-pro/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>megablast</author><text>Why would they need 85% capacity for emergeny only SMS. How many people are getting into trouble on their boats??</text></item><item><author>OvidStavrica</author><text>&quot;Globalstar said it is allocating 85% of its current and future network capacity to support the services and has agreed to prioritize the services on its network.&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.satellitetoday.com&#x2F;telecom&#x2F;2022&#x2F;09&#x2F;07&#x2F;apple-to-debut-iphone-with-emergency-messaging-enabled-by-globalstar-satellites&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.satellitetoday.com&#x2F;telecom&#x2F;2022&#x2F;09&#x2F;07&#x2F;apple-to-d...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mplewis</author><text>Lots of people get into trouble all the time and don&#x27;t have a PLB or satellite messenger on them. It&#x27;s not just on boats – hikers and climbers in the mountains get themselves into dangerous situations frequently.<p>Globalstar is probably preparing for an influx of new users to their service who would otherwise not own a satellite-capable device.</text></comment> | <story><title>Emergency SOS via satellite is included for free with iPhone 14 Pro for 2 years</title><url>https://www.apple.com/iphone-14-pro/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>megablast</author><text>Why would they need 85% capacity for emergeny only SMS. How many people are getting into trouble on their boats??</text></item><item><author>OvidStavrica</author><text>&quot;Globalstar said it is allocating 85% of its current and future network capacity to support the services and has agreed to prioritize the services on its network.&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.satellitetoday.com&#x2F;telecom&#x2F;2022&#x2F;09&#x2F;07&#x2F;apple-to-debut-iphone-with-emergency-messaging-enabled-by-globalstar-satellites&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.satellitetoday.com&#x2F;telecom&#x2F;2022&#x2F;09&#x2F;07&#x2F;apple-to-d...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dghlsakjg</author><text>Boats? Denver to California is basically only covered if you can see a paved road… and their aren’t a ton of paved roads. Let’s not get into Canada, even on the main highway there are plenty of dead spots.<p>Also, don’t overestimate their bandwidth. I rented a sat-phone once for weather updates mid Atlantic. Text only emails could take a minute to ul&#x2F;dl with full reception.</text></comment> |
18,226,471 | 18,226,231 | 1 | 2 | 18,224,911 | train | <story><title>Priority Queue on Ethereum with a 15 ETH Bug Bounty</title><url>https://github.com/zmitton/eth-heap</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>seibelj</author><text>Cryptocurrencies, and especially Ethereum, are truly novel innovations in computer science that cross many academic disciplines. The linked example is a great write-up. It’s sad that there is a vocal group, especially on HN, that knee-jerk hates everything blockchain related and wishes with their entire being for it to fail.<p>However, I think smart contracts are fascinating and wish more people would keep an open mind.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nosuchthing</author><text>The term “Smart contracts” (Ethereum&#x2F;EOS&#x2F;hyperledger) is often used with wild claims for supply chains and cross border business deals, but why would any real business want to use a public blockchain?<p>Smart contracts can’t even do anything interesting without a trusted source of data input. The threat model and legal questions of smart contracts are another huge deterrent for most businesses.<p>Latency, throughput, security threats, and cost are all fairly understood with normal databases, yet with blockchain software all of these are measurably worse.<p>Where are the completed successful smart contracts deployed?<p>Why would any person or business want&#x2F;need to use an existing blockchain when some bug or mining operator might cause a catastrophe of that system, who would they sue for damages?<p>A single user who spent less than $5000 crashed the entire market for Ethereum last summer. Most of the supply of ETH, XMR, BTC and other crypto tokens are owned by a very small population of crypto-oligarchs.<p>It all seems like a marketing scheme to sell cyber beanie babies to people who are unfamiliar with the engineering flaws in distributing computing and the marketing lies from “investors” who need to pump the price on their magic beans.</text></comment> | <story><title>Priority Queue on Ethereum with a 15 ETH Bug Bounty</title><url>https://github.com/zmitton/eth-heap</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>seibelj</author><text>Cryptocurrencies, and especially Ethereum, are truly novel innovations in computer science that cross many academic disciplines. The linked example is a great write-up. It’s sad that there is a vocal group, especially on HN, that knee-jerk hates everything blockchain related and wishes with their entire being for it to fail.<p>However, I think smart contracts are fascinating and wish more people would keep an open mind.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>LeoPanthera</author><text>I don&#x27;t <i>want</i> to be anti-blockchain, but I have yet to come across <i>any</i> problems that are solved better with a blockchain than with any other traditional technology - except for the original one, a distributed electronic currency.</text></comment> |
22,455,582 | 22,455,382 | 1 | 3 | 22,449,939 | train | <story><title>Two epigenetic regulators interfere with healthy aging</title><url>https://padiracinnovation.org/News/2020/02/two-epigenetic-regulators-interfere-with-healthy-aging</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>1e-9</author><text>The researchers discovered that two particular proteins appear to degrade health in worms and mice by harming mitochondria. Worms, mice, and humans all produce these proteins in increasing amounts as they age. The researchers improved the health of aging worms and mice by suppressing the proteins. They found reason to believe this might also be possible for humans.</text></comment> | <story><title>Two epigenetic regulators interfere with healthy aging</title><url>https://padiracinnovation.org/News/2020/02/two-epigenetic-regulators-interfere-with-healthy-aging</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>zeigotaro</author><text>Perhaps a more layman-focused explanation: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.alzforum.org&#x2F;news&#x2F;research-news&#x2F;aging-epigenetic-wet-blanket-douses-mitochondria" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.alzforum.org&#x2F;news&#x2F;research-news&#x2F;aging-epigenetic...</a></text></comment> |
11,230,110 | 11,230,145 | 1 | 3 | 11,229,700 | train | <story><title>Ask HN: Which successful startups were rejected by YC?</title><text>And if the founders or anyone in the YC jury read this: what was the reason?</text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ig1</author><text>Companies which have publicly disclosed that were rejected by YC and have since raised &gt;$20m:<p>* Chartboost<p>* Sendgrid<p>* LightSail<p>I&#x27;ve seen it claimed that Couchbase should be on this list, but I&#x27;ve never seen a primary source which verifies that they were rejected from YC.</text></comment> | <story><title>Ask HN: Which successful startups were rejected by YC?</title><text>And if the founders or anyone in the YC jury read this: what was the reason?</text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>rajacombinator</author><text>PG offered a good proxy for this a while back. He said if you look at the top companies from other accelerators, most of them probably applied to YC also.</text></comment> |
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