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1,767,673 | 1,767,495 | 1 | 3 | 1,767,265 | train | <story><title>Ultimate CSS Gradient Generator</title><url>http://www.colorzilla.com/gradient-editor/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>pxlpshr</author><text>wow this is awesome!!! bookmarking to my tools.<p>here's another one I use frequently. <a href="http://css3generator.com" rel="nofollow">http://css3generator.com</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Ultimate CSS Gradient Generator</title><url>http://www.colorzilla.com/gradient-editor/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Imagenuity</author><text>It looks great on Chrome and IE8, however Firefox 3.6.10 has repeating bands all down the screen. Example at: <a href="http://www.imagenuity.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.imagenuity.com/</a></text></comment> |
7,520,730 | 7,520,645 | 1 | 2 | 7,516,872 | train | <story><title>Microsoft introduces Universal Windows apps</title><url>http://wmpoweruser.com/microsoft-introduces-universal-windows-apps/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dmix</author><text>I tried Keepass2 with mono on Linux and it&#x27;s pretty slow and unnatural UX experience. Much like running Wine. On OSX Keepass2 mono just froze constantly and looked weird. I&#x27;ve had similar experience with other cross-platform apps.<p>Total cross-platform is a pipe dream. Just like Java or more recently HTML5&#x2F;JS cross-platform mobile apps, they are almost always a half-baked solution compared to proper native OS apps. The UX and performance will never be consistent enough to make it better than just investing in native development (Note I&#x27;m talking about software, not simple content consumption apps where HTML5 in browser is fine).<p>Having primary operating system -&gt; tablet -&gt; phone is a good enough goal. They should focus 100% and make it as stable ass possible.</text></item><item><author>gum_ina_package</author><text>Mono! Lots of ASP.Net projects (like Nancyfx or SignalR) are actually built on Mono. I think there&#x27;s some hope that web dev on Windows isn&#x27;t dead.</text></item><item><author>Aardwolf</author><text>But what about Linux?</text></item><item><author>gum_ina_package</author><text>The amazing thing is that you can potentially write all your code in C# and have backend&#x2F;frontend logic for the web (ASP.NET), Windows, Windows Phone, and even iOS&#x2F;Android (via Xamarin). Wow.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>keeperofdakeys</author><text>Naturally mono probably has some quirks, which you need to keep in mind during development. However, you can make successful apps using it. The Unity3D engine uses mono on linux, and the games using it run fine (even on my laptop).</text></comment> | <story><title>Microsoft introduces Universal Windows apps</title><url>http://wmpoweruser.com/microsoft-introduces-universal-windows-apps/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dmix</author><text>I tried Keepass2 with mono on Linux and it&#x27;s pretty slow and unnatural UX experience. Much like running Wine. On OSX Keepass2 mono just froze constantly and looked weird. I&#x27;ve had similar experience with other cross-platform apps.<p>Total cross-platform is a pipe dream. Just like Java or more recently HTML5&#x2F;JS cross-platform mobile apps, they are almost always a half-baked solution compared to proper native OS apps. The UX and performance will never be consistent enough to make it better than just investing in native development (Note I&#x27;m talking about software, not simple content consumption apps where HTML5 in browser is fine).<p>Having primary operating system -&gt; tablet -&gt; phone is a good enough goal. They should focus 100% and make it as stable ass possible.</text></item><item><author>gum_ina_package</author><text>Mono! Lots of ASP.Net projects (like Nancyfx or SignalR) are actually built on Mono. I think there&#x27;s some hope that web dev on Windows isn&#x27;t dead.</text></item><item><author>Aardwolf</author><text>But what about Linux?</text></item><item><author>gum_ina_package</author><text>The amazing thing is that you can potentially write all your code in C# and have backend&#x2F;frontend logic for the web (ASP.NET), Windows, Windows Phone, and even iOS&#x2F;Android (via Xamarin). Wow.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Pxtl</author><text>Mono makes no pretext of offering cross-platform GUI live, and so any app that attempts to use the same GUI on multiple platforms using winforms on Linux or gtk on win32 is going to be ugly. They&#x27;re up front about this.</text></comment> |
2,540,867 | 2,540,879 | 1 | 2 | 2,540,703 | train | <story><title>New iMacs run fans at full on all drives other than Apple supplied... </title><url>http://blog.macsales.com/10146-apple-further-restricts-upgrade-options-on-new-imacs</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>ddlatham</author><text>Apple's trying to build the best integrated product, and they're willing to give up some standard parts and interfaces to get there. If you want to be able to swap out components, an iMac may not be the best choice for you.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fiblye</author><text>I can understand wanting to build a reliable system, but hard drives are the most unreliable part of any modern PC. A user should have the right to replace them in the event of failure or if it's simply not enough storage at a later point. Apple traditionally taught users how to service computers themselves: <a href="http://manuals.info.apple.com/en/imacG5_20inch_harddrive.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://manuals.info.apple.com/en/imacG5_20inch_harddrive.pdf</a><p>The hard drives and RAM are by far the most overpriced components in Macs, and I see this as nothing more than Apple trying to squeeze out some extra money.</text></comment> | <story><title>New iMacs run fans at full on all drives other than Apple supplied... </title><url>http://blog.macsales.com/10146-apple-further-restricts-upgrade-options-on-new-imacs</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>ddlatham</author><text>Apple's trying to build the best integrated product, and they're willing to give up some standard parts and interfaces to get there. If you want to be able to swap out components, an iMac may not be the best choice for you.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>michh</author><text>I don't expect to be able to upgrade the graphics card or the CPU but swapping out the harddrive or adding more memory used to be relatively easy for iMacs. Certainly not impossible.<p>What if in five years your harddrive crashes and they've already switched to yet another proprietary temperature monitoring standard and no longer sell drives equipped with the old system?<p>I've been using the same iMac for 5 years now (and upgraded the disk to an SSD about 6 months ago). Not being able to do that with a new one is a deal breaker.</text></comment> |
12,773,661 | 12,773,516 | 1 | 2 | 12,772,851 | train | <story><title>A Little-Known Company That Enables Mass Surveillance</title><url>https://theintercept.com/2016/10/23/endace-mass-surveillance-gchq-governments/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jgrahamc</author><text>These DPI companies always make me smile because 20 years ago I was the inventor on this patent: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;patents.google.com&#x2F;patent&#x2F;US6182146B1&#x2F;en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;patents.google.com&#x2F;patent&#x2F;US6182146B1&#x2F;en</a> It describes a way of doing DPI to identify protocols that are not running on standard ports. We used this for a protocol analysis product [0] that did network monitoring (for accounting purposes inside companies and led to companies discovering what people were mis-using their network connections for---hello PointCast[1]) and for prediction of network scaling needs. And all that was based on stuff I&#x27;d been doing from about 1984 [2].<p>Bottom line: scooping up packets is easy; encrypt your shit.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnet.com&#x2F;au&#x2F;news&#x2F;tool-gauges-web-apps&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnet.com&#x2F;au&#x2F;news&#x2F;tool-gauges-web-apps&#x2F;</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;PointCast_(dotcom)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;PointCast_(dotcom)</a><p>[2] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.jgc.org&#x2F;2011&#x2F;01&#x2F;network-protocol-analysis-prior-art.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.jgc.org&#x2F;2011&#x2F;01&#x2F;network-protocol-analysis-prior-...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>A Little-Known Company That Enables Mass Surveillance</title><url>https://theintercept.com/2016/10/23/endace-mass-surveillance-gchq-governments/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>brador</author><text>Ponder: Is your available ISP speed restricted, through backdoor channels and red letters, to not overcome the throughput bandwidth of these devices?<p>Or, another way, is the maximum throughput of these monitoring setups limiting ISP maximum offered speeds in the countries that use them?<p>US, UK, Aus, Canada, the eyes, all have unusually low maximum consumer speeds vs. non implicated countries such as Japan, korea, even China, given the technology available today.</text></comment> |
2,952,285 | 2,952,313 | 1 | 2 | 2,952,101 | train | <story><title>Netflix to lose Starz, its most valuable source of new movies</title><url>http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/entertainmentnewsbuzz/2011/09/netflix-to-lose-starz-its-most-valuable-source-of-new-movies.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bittermang</author><text>"However, executives at Starz apparently concluded that they would lose even more money by giving consumers a reason to subscribe to Netflix instead of the cable channel."<p>I don't think they get it. The landscape has changed and I'm not going back.<p>I don't have cable. I don't have satelite. I don't have an antenna for broadcast TV. I have the Internet serving content to my TV via my Xbox, and I use it to watch Netflix.<p>If your content isn't available on Netflix. I'm not consuming your content. Period.<p>I'm done bending over backwards. I'm done with schedules. I'm done with managing the space on my DVR. I'm done keeping up with new episodes and seasons. I'm done with movie theaters full of loud other people who aren't me, and the litany of other issues that have been discussed to death from overpriced tickets, to concessions, to 3D projector woes and content. I'm done with physical media getting scratched. Hell, I'm even done with sketchy torrent sites, and different scene groups fighting over who gets to release what, and a billion codecs and formats. I'm done with it. I'm done.<p>So frankly, good bye and good riddance to Starz. Go climb this hill and die upon it. I never liked the fact that their schizophrenic content releases would appear during a timed window, only to disappear from my list later before I actually got a chance to watch it. I grew to avoid movies labeled with the Starz logo, and my heart would sink when a feature would open with one, because I knew the experience was fleeting and I wouldn't be able to enjoy the content later. So I'm done with that too.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>MatthewB</author><text>I'm in the same boat as you. I cut the cord about 5 months ago and haven't looked back. I have Netflix and Hulu, Amazon Prime, and Apple TV. I know I am missing out on a lot of great content and it pisses me off...until I get my bill, which is a fraction of what I was paying before. Also, the convenience of my current setup is unmatchable.<p>The thing is, like you said, the technology has changed. I want shows on my current setup. I am willing to pay more for more content. One thing I thought was very interesting is Apple removing TV show rentals. I never purchase movies or TV shows. I like to rent them, watch them once and I usually don't want to watch them again. If I do, I will rent it again.<p>Why can't content providers understand this? Netflix and Hulu need to start creating their own content, which I know they are both working towards.<p>One semi-related note: AMC is ending Breaking Bad next season because of Madmen sucking up the budget - Netflix and Hulu: go buy that show! I would gladly pay for a show-specific season pass just to watch Breaking Bad.</text></comment> | <story><title>Netflix to lose Starz, its most valuable source of new movies</title><url>http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/entertainmentnewsbuzz/2011/09/netflix-to-lose-starz-its-most-valuable-source-of-new-movies.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bittermang</author><text>"However, executives at Starz apparently concluded that they would lose even more money by giving consumers a reason to subscribe to Netflix instead of the cable channel."<p>I don't think they get it. The landscape has changed and I'm not going back.<p>I don't have cable. I don't have satelite. I don't have an antenna for broadcast TV. I have the Internet serving content to my TV via my Xbox, and I use it to watch Netflix.<p>If your content isn't available on Netflix. I'm not consuming your content. Period.<p>I'm done bending over backwards. I'm done with schedules. I'm done with managing the space on my DVR. I'm done keeping up with new episodes and seasons. I'm done with movie theaters full of loud other people who aren't me, and the litany of other issues that have been discussed to death from overpriced tickets, to concessions, to 3D projector woes and content. I'm done with physical media getting scratched. Hell, I'm even done with sketchy torrent sites, and different scene groups fighting over who gets to release what, and a billion codecs and formats. I'm done with it. I'm done.<p>So frankly, good bye and good riddance to Starz. Go climb this hill and die upon it. I never liked the fact that their schizophrenic content releases would appear during a timed window, only to disappear from my list later before I actually got a chance to watch it. I grew to avoid movies labeled with the Starz logo, and my heart would sink when a feature would open with one, because I knew the experience was fleeting and I wouldn't be able to enjoy the content later. So I'm done with that too.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>w1ntermute</author><text>&#62; Hell, I'm even done with sketchy torrent sites, and different scene groups fighting over who gets to release what, and a billion codecs and formats.<p>I'm not sure what sites you're using, but if you use a scene-only torrent tracker, the only releases you'll see are XviD for SD and x264 for HD, which <i>never</i> give me any problems. And one of the fundamental purposes of the scene is to eliminate duplicates - one valid release per movie/TV show episode.<p>If you want to spend your time reading scene notices and follow along with the endless pissing contests between the different release groups, that's fine. But if you just want to consume the content, like I do, it's pretty hard to find a better all-encompassing, no-bullshit source than the scene. With my 20 mbit connection, I can have an HD TV show ready to go in &#60;10 mins and a movie in &#60;30.</text></comment> |
28,208,635 | 28,208,474 | 1 | 2 | 28,207,565 | train | <story><title>A shot to prevent Lyme disease could be on its way</title><url>https://www.outsideonline.com/health/wellness/lyme-disease-prevention-antibody-shot/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>spicybright</author><text>As a US new england-er, this is game changer for walking through woods.<p>For those un-informed, on a walk through any woods, you should always wear high socks, and do a full body check for ticks after.<p>Deer ticks can be as small as a few grains of sand, and near undetectable if they latch on unless you have sharp eyes.<p>Obviously they can transmit lymes.<p>I had a close encounter a few years ago, but very luckily giant rings appeared around the bite site, making it a very easy diagnosis.<p>That only happens in 30% of cases though. The rest likely have no idea, and over time the disease will work it&#x27;s way into your nervous system, causing permanent damage if not treated quickly enough.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>inter_netuser</author><text>Many report chronic symptoms, who have been laughed at for decades.<p>Chronic persistence (at least in some cases) has now been proven.<p>Took someone with chronic lyme to donate the brain for research: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.frontiersin.org&#x2F;articles&#x2F;10.3389&#x2F;fneur.2021.628045&#x2F;full" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.frontiersin.org&#x2F;articles&#x2F;10.3389&#x2F;fneur.2021.6280...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>A shot to prevent Lyme disease could be on its way</title><url>https://www.outsideonline.com/health/wellness/lyme-disease-prevention-antibody-shot/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>spicybright</author><text>As a US new england-er, this is game changer for walking through woods.<p>For those un-informed, on a walk through any woods, you should always wear high socks, and do a full body check for ticks after.<p>Deer ticks can be as small as a few grains of sand, and near undetectable if they latch on unless you have sharp eyes.<p>Obviously they can transmit lymes.<p>I had a close encounter a few years ago, but very luckily giant rings appeared around the bite site, making it a very easy diagnosis.<p>That only happens in 30% of cases though. The rest likely have no idea, and over time the disease will work it&#x27;s way into your nervous system, causing permanent damage if not treated quickly enough.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ChrisMarshallNY</author><text>I&#x27;ve pulled four of the little bastards off me, this summer (so far).<p>They have gotten much worse, in the last few years (Long Island, NY).<p>I also know a few (several) folks that have had <i>very</i> bad, life-changing debilitation, as a result of Lyme. I&#x27;m aware of one (that I never met), who died from complications of Lyme. I also have a family member, that got it pretty badly, recovered completely, and now seems to be immune.<p>I&#x27;m having myself checked at the doctor, next week.</text></comment> |
25,182,793 | 25,180,382 | 1 | 3 | 25,179,337 | train | <story><title>Guitar Center files for bankruptcy</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/article/BigStory12/idUSKBN282058</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>trentnix</author><text>MAP loopholes (like the thomanmusic.com example you mentioned) have killed brick and mortar retail. Some of those prices you&#x27;re paying from those European outlets are less than the local retailer can buy it wholesale. So you&#x27;re asking your local retailer to lose money to make the sale.<p>I owned a bike shop and sporting goods store in a past life (I&#x27;ve written about it here: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sciencerocketry.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;great-work-and-new-beginnings" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sciencerocketry.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;great-work-and-new-begin...</a>) and the effects of Shimano&#x27;s inability (or really, refusal) to control pricing from its European distribution was catastrophic to my business and my peers. And not only that, I found that many of those sellers would defraud customs on expensive items by declaring the value just under thresholds that would result in them paying import taxes and tariffs. It was a profit destroyer for us but Shimano moved units, and that&#x27;s all that mattered to them.<p>When some of those parts customers purchased from Chain Reaction or Wiggle or whatever didn&#x27;t work, the customers who bought those parts overseas would come into our shop asking us to handle the warranty process. We were a Shimano dealer, after all! If we politely refused or tried to collect a handling charge, we were the ones that would face the customer&#x27;s outrage.<p>The end result is that there is less sales tax in your community because of the absence of that brick and mortar retailer. There are fewer jobs. There are fewer local communities built around hobbies, crafts, trades, or whatever. But you can get products cheaper and your dollars have greater purchasing power. Maybe that&#x27;s a worthwhile trade-off - YMMV.</text></item><item><author>S_A_P</author><text>Guitar Center definitely shifted to &quot;mainstream&quot; and de-contented stores after bain got involved. Maybe that is the only real path forward, but I dont ever stop into Guitar Center anymore since they usually only have the prosumer-ish gear that Im not interested in. They also seem to have much less used gear in each store, despite the influx of &#x27;sell yer gear here for cash&#x27; emails I get from them.<p>Edit: Another thing- part of the problem for US based retailers in general is MAP. Its price fixing, and in many cases I can go to, say Thomanmusic.com and order something from Germany for ~85% of the best price I can get at major retailers here, including shipping, tarriffs and foreign transaction fees.
Personally I think MAP is ridiculous and leads to TREMENDOUS waste of resources. Im buying something that was shipped from China to Europe, then shipping it back to Texas all for less money than US retailers will allow. WHY IS THAT?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>titzer</author><text>This sounds like one of the oft-overlooked knock-on effects of globalization and long supply chains. Lots of tariff quackery and a whole lot of risk and uncertainty for sourcing. It all ends up funneling money away from local businesses and governments. Even if it helps consumers by making goods a smidgen cheaper, what good is it if money ultimately <i>leaves</i> the local economy?<p>Multiply your experience by a million and stretch it out over decades, and this is middle America getting sucked dry.</text></comment> | <story><title>Guitar Center files for bankruptcy</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/article/BigStory12/idUSKBN282058</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>trentnix</author><text>MAP loopholes (like the thomanmusic.com example you mentioned) have killed brick and mortar retail. Some of those prices you&#x27;re paying from those European outlets are less than the local retailer can buy it wholesale. So you&#x27;re asking your local retailer to lose money to make the sale.<p>I owned a bike shop and sporting goods store in a past life (I&#x27;ve written about it here: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sciencerocketry.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;great-work-and-new-beginnings" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sciencerocketry.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;great-work-and-new-begin...</a>) and the effects of Shimano&#x27;s inability (or really, refusal) to control pricing from its European distribution was catastrophic to my business and my peers. And not only that, I found that many of those sellers would defraud customs on expensive items by declaring the value just under thresholds that would result in them paying import taxes and tariffs. It was a profit destroyer for us but Shimano moved units, and that&#x27;s all that mattered to them.<p>When some of those parts customers purchased from Chain Reaction or Wiggle or whatever didn&#x27;t work, the customers who bought those parts overseas would come into our shop asking us to handle the warranty process. We were a Shimano dealer, after all! If we politely refused or tried to collect a handling charge, we were the ones that would face the customer&#x27;s outrage.<p>The end result is that there is less sales tax in your community because of the absence of that brick and mortar retailer. There are fewer jobs. There are fewer local communities built around hobbies, crafts, trades, or whatever. But you can get products cheaper and your dollars have greater purchasing power. Maybe that&#x27;s a worthwhile trade-off - YMMV.</text></item><item><author>S_A_P</author><text>Guitar Center definitely shifted to &quot;mainstream&quot; and de-contented stores after bain got involved. Maybe that is the only real path forward, but I dont ever stop into Guitar Center anymore since they usually only have the prosumer-ish gear that Im not interested in. They also seem to have much less used gear in each store, despite the influx of &#x27;sell yer gear here for cash&#x27; emails I get from them.<p>Edit: Another thing- part of the problem for US based retailers in general is MAP. Its price fixing, and in many cases I can go to, say Thomanmusic.com and order something from Germany for ~85% of the best price I can get at major retailers here, including shipping, tarriffs and foreign transaction fees.
Personally I think MAP is ridiculous and leads to TREMENDOUS waste of resources. Im buying something that was shipped from China to Europe, then shipping it back to Texas all for less money than US retailers will allow. WHY IS THAT?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>alistairSH</author><text>But what is causing the prices in US and EU to vary so much? Im a cyclist, and even with a race team discount, the EU prices are often 10% lower than through my LBS.<p>Are Shimano and others just gouging in the US market because they can (and damn the impact on local retailers)?</text></comment> |
6,104,347 | 6,104,200 | 1 | 2 | 6,103,883 | train | <story><title>Increasing the D Compiler Speed by Over 75%</title><url>http://www.drdobbs.com/cpp/increasing-compiler-speed-by-over-75/240158941</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kevingadd</author><text>The idea of never free()ing and then taking advantage of that with a dumb allocator to get better performance is pretty clever. I wish I could do that with my compiler; sadly I can&#x27;t let it leak since I invoke it from unit&#x2F;functional tests so the test runner would run out of memory and explode :( For DMD tests do you just eat the cost of a process setup and compiler startup for every test run?</text></item><item><author>WalterBright</author><text>This article chronicles some fun I had boosting DMD&#x27;s speed by doing some simple changes.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>acqq</author><text>I do the related small allocations from the pools, and the pools are destroyed at every compilation end. If the pool element is for example 32K and the average element is e.g. 32 bytes that&#x27;s 1K times less &quot;real&quot; mallocs. Having separate pools for the members of different &quot;structures&quot; also makes for better CPU cache usage.<p>Edit: as aaronblohowiak writes, this method is commonly known as a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Region-based_memory_management" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Region-based_memory_management</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Increasing the D Compiler Speed by Over 75%</title><url>http://www.drdobbs.com/cpp/increasing-compiler-speed-by-over-75/240158941</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kevingadd</author><text>The idea of never free()ing and then taking advantage of that with a dumb allocator to get better performance is pretty clever. I wish I could do that with my compiler; sadly I can&#x27;t let it leak since I invoke it from unit&#x2F;functional tests so the test runner would run out of memory and explode :( For DMD tests do you just eat the cost of a process setup and compiler startup for every test run?</text></item><item><author>WalterBright</author><text>This article chronicles some fun I had boosting DMD&#x27;s speed by doing some simple changes.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>WalterBright</author><text>The compiler is a batch tool, so restarting the process for every run is normal usage.</text></comment> |
40,643,999 | 40,642,131 | 1 | 3 | 40,641,361 | train | <story><title>Noam Chomsky 'no longer able to talk' after 'medical event'</title><url>https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/noam-chomsky-health-update-tributes-b2559831.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cbanek</author><text>I actually emailed Noam Chomsky asking questions about Manufacturing Consent and actually got a reply. I always thought he was really cool for being so accessible to those who just had honest questions. I really hope he gets well soon.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>serf</author><text>Same.<p>When I was young I emailed him with a question something like &quot;I am too young to have witnessed the events of the Vietnam War, can you please recommend me some reading material or push me in the right direction?&quot;<p>That question turned into 5 or 6 (long) emails back and fourth that i&#x27;ll always cherish that delved into his unique perspective on what the war was like as a protestor from the West, which papers got released that actually had some truth in them, among a lot of other valuable insights into the time period I had no access to myself.<p>At the end of our conversation he advocated finding a group that needs volunteers and effort. He didn&#x27;t care what group that might be, he only cared that individual political concern of individuals be empowered by the necessary groups and collective effort.<p>I think that kind unequivocal support of &#x27;being political&#x27; is something that is truly special.<p>I hope the best for him -- I view him as one of the only &#x27;truly accessible&#x27; academics in this world; just as happy to slowly and carefully explain his thoughts to &#x27;the rabble&#x27; as he would be while explaining the same thoughts to high academia and the press.<p>A great man.</text></comment> | <story><title>Noam Chomsky 'no longer able to talk' after 'medical event'</title><url>https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/noam-chomsky-health-update-tributes-b2559831.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cbanek</author><text>I actually emailed Noam Chomsky asking questions about Manufacturing Consent and actually got a reply. I always thought he was really cool for being so accessible to those who just had honest questions. I really hope he gets well soon.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nomilk</author><text>Documentary of the same title for anyone curious: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Li2m3rvsO0I" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Li2m3rvsO0I</a></text></comment> |
27,412,348 | 27,412,099 | 1 | 3 | 27,411,276 | train | <story><title>Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998)</title><url>https://norvig.com/21-days.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>BossingAround</author><text>The title is a bit misleading to me.<p>10 years is not to &quot;teach yourself programming,&quot; it&#x27;s to &quot;become an expert in programming.&quot;<p>Most people do not want to learn programming to become experts, most people want to learn programming to get a job. After getting a job, some will plateau right away, others will plateau after some time, and others still will keep learning even after years and years.<p>The problem is &quot;how long until I become employable,&quot; not &quot;how long until I become an expert&quot;.<p>The answer to the former is months of deliberate practice.
The answer to the latter is [tens of] years of deliberate practice.<p>Books with titles like &quot;learn C++ in 24 hours&quot; target the former. And, I would say that the number of jobs that require the mastery of the craft is not large.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Hendrikto</author><text>&gt; And, I would say that the number of jobs that require the mastery of the craft is not large.<p>This mindset is how we end up with layers upon layers of badly designed and buggy software that underpins almost every aspect of modern life.<p>Just apply the same reasoning to other areas: Would you want to drive in a bus with a bus driver who just barely got his driver&#x27;s license? Would you want to use a bridge designed by an architect who knows just enough to complete the job and does not care a bit for more?<p>It does not take mastery to write one-off scripts that &quot;get the job done&quot;. However, they will probably not be a general purpose solution of the problem at hand, ignore corner cases, contain bugs… and the real test comes when requirements inevitably change.<p>If you want to write dependable, high-quality, maintainable, reusable software you better know more than the bare minimum.</text></comment> | <story><title>Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998)</title><url>https://norvig.com/21-days.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>BossingAround</author><text>The title is a bit misleading to me.<p>10 years is not to &quot;teach yourself programming,&quot; it&#x27;s to &quot;become an expert in programming.&quot;<p>Most people do not want to learn programming to become experts, most people want to learn programming to get a job. After getting a job, some will plateau right away, others will plateau after some time, and others still will keep learning even after years and years.<p>The problem is &quot;how long until I become employable,&quot; not &quot;how long until I become an expert&quot;.<p>The answer to the former is months of deliberate practice.
The answer to the latter is [tens of] years of deliberate practice.<p>Books with titles like &quot;learn C++ in 24 hours&quot; target the former. And, I would say that the number of jobs that require the mastery of the craft is not large.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Aeolun</author><text>&gt; the number of jobs that require the mastery of the craft is not large<p>The number of jobs that <i>benefit</i> from mastery of the craft is essentially equal to the number of jobs.<p>I do not enjoy finding the work of a bunch of people that studied enough to get hired and no more.</text></comment> |
20,061,043 | 20,060,719 | 1 | 3 | 20,060,404 | train | <story><title>Let’s fix up Notre Dame with concrete and steel, but let the sun shine into it</title><url>https://stainedglassattitudes.wordpress.com/2019/05/21/lets-fix-up-notre-dame-with-concrete-and-steel-but-let-the-sun-shine-into-it/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>chadash</author><text>A lot of the comments here are assuming that the author is proposing something that he is not (perhaps making this assumption from reading the title not the article itself). So I&#x27;ll summarize.<p>He&#x27;s arguing that rebuilding the internal structure of the roof with wood beams would inevitably lead to another fire. Concrete and steel would last longer and be more structurally stable and resilient to fires.<p>What he&#x27;s not arguing for is changing the visual character of the building. The steel and concrete he proposes would be in internal areas that people don&#x27;t see. The <i>ceiling</i> which is what people see from the inside would remain visually the same. So would the exterior. The part that would use concrete and steel would be the interior section of the roof which is only seen by maintenance crews.<p>Separately, he makes the argument that much of the stained glass installed during the 19th century was &quot;severe and flat&quot; rather than &quot;delicate and jewel-like like genuine medieval glass&quot;. He&#x27;s arguing that we should install glass more closely resembling the original medieval glass, which would allow more light into the structure.<p>I think all of this is very much in line with trying to keep the character of the building the same.<p>EDIT: Reading the end of the article again, it&#x27;s actually not clear to me whether he is proposing to put in clear glass or a stained glass that&#x27;s a bit lighter than what was there before the fire. I think I initially misinterpreted and the former is what he&#x27;s getting at.</text></comment> | <story><title>Let’s fix up Notre Dame with concrete and steel, but let the sun shine into it</title><url>https://stainedglassattitudes.wordpress.com/2019/05/21/lets-fix-up-notre-dame-with-concrete-and-steel-but-let-the-sun-shine-into-it/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Veen</author><text>Roger Scruton recently wrote about where he suspects the plans for the repair will go:<p>&gt; It would be wrong to assume that a gang of modernists set fire to Notre Dame – it could perhaps have been an accident. But there was no better way to advance the great project, shared by all forward-looking architects from Le Corbusier to Richard Rogers, of razing Paris to the ground and rebuilding it in concrete, steel and glass. An international competition of the kind proposed by President Macron will in all probability result in a replica of Norman Foster’s Sage Gateshead, expectorated onto the walls of the cathedral, to cling trembling above them like a gob of shiny snot.</text></comment> |
3,786,890 | 3,786,872 | 1 | 2 | 3,786,624 | train | <story><title>The x86 PlayStation 4 could signal a sea-change in the console industry</title><url>http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2012/04/the-x86-playstation-4-signals-a-sea-change-in-the-console-industry.ars</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Osiris</author><text>The rumor that they are attempting to block the used game market through a sort of DRM scheme is disappointing. While I've only ever bought 1 or 2 used games in the past, the act itself is a huge "F* YOU" to consumers and leaves a bad taste in the mouth.<p>No one likes to feel controller or compelled to act in a certain way, which is why pretty much all DRM schemes have been broken and why the MP3 became so incredibly popular.<p>I feel like game producers are making the same argument for the second-hand game market as the MPAA makes for pirating movies: Every used game sale is a lost new game sale and blocking used games is better than innovating or changing the pricing/sales structure.</text></comment> | <story><title>The x86 PlayStation 4 could signal a sea-change in the console industry</title><url>http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2012/04/the-x86-playstation-4-signals-a-sea-change-in-the-console-industry.ars</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>gfodor</author><text>The article fails to mention the audience this is good news for: PC gamers. If next generation consoles are x86 based, expect to see future games being more widely available on PC, and, better yet, expect the "best" versions of those games (in terms of graphics, features, etc.) to be the PC versions. The only catch is if the game developers hold back on PC releases due to fears of piracy, but on the whole this probably will still mean many more releases on PC.<p>That said, most flagship titles (Halo, Metal Gear, Final Fantasy, etc.) will probably stick to a single console due to contractual obligations.</text></comment> |
11,021,158 | 11,019,983 | 1 | 3 | 11,004,559 | train | <story><title>Death of a Troll</title><url>http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/28/death-of-a-troll</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>lucidrains</author><text>Haha I&#x27;m the owner of the site. Surprised it made it to hacker news. There&#x27;s a whole world out there with countless stories unravelling that the naked eye can&#x27;t see. I&#x27;m very happy to have had a special glimpse into one of these worlds.</text></comment> | <story><title>Death of a Troll</title><url>http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/28/death-of-a-troll</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>danso</author><text>A bit pedantic...but I couldn&#x27;t help but think, WTF is going on with the Epic Mafia&#x27;s website? The article describes the troll as effortlessly hacking the site, including locking mods out of their own forum, and sending them emails with links that unban friends upon clicking. The smallest site operator can throw up a phpBB board without such issues...It sounds like Epic Mafia is running on a custom written app that is full of SQL injection vulnerabilities. I hope they&#x27;ve gotten them fixed up before trolls external to the community prey on them.<p>This is not to say that the troll is just some script kiddie. It sounds like he has some serious social engineering chops, besides programming experience. I&#x27;m guessing this is the fake newspaper website he made to post his own obit? <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sctribune.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sctribune.com</a></text></comment> |
17,151,968 | 17,150,288 | 1 | 3 | 17,145,844 | train | <story><title>Google 'stole my videos', says film-maker Philip Bloom</title><url>http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-44228756</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>falcon620</author><text>Bingo.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;static?template=terms&amp;gl=US" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;static?template=terms&amp;gl=US</a><p>From section 6c:<p>&quot;For clarity, you retain all of your ownership rights in your Content. However, by submitting Content to YouTube, you hereby grant YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the Content in connection with the Service and YouTube&#x27;s (and its successors&#x27; and affiliates&#x27;) business, including without limitation for promoting and redistributing part or all of the Service (and derivative works thereof) in any media formats and through any media channels.&quot;</text></item><item><author>cwkoss</author><text>If Phillip Bloom uploaded these videos to Youtube, didn&#x27;t he consent to a broad TOS on the usage of these videos for internal company purposes?<p>I&#x27;d be surprised if he had a case, which may be why he&#x27;s taking his grievance to the media instead.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>raesene9</author><text>IANAL but I&#x27;m not sure that clause applies to this case. From the article it wasn&#x27;t a Youtube executive who used the footage but someone from Google&#x27;s research division.<p>Also that clause appears to apply to Youtube using content from the site to promote Youtube&#x27;s service(s) and not for content entirely unrelated to Youtube but to Google&#x27;s wider interests.</text></comment> | <story><title>Google 'stole my videos', says film-maker Philip Bloom</title><url>http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-44228756</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>falcon620</author><text>Bingo.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;static?template=terms&amp;gl=US" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;static?template=terms&amp;gl=US</a><p>From section 6c:<p>&quot;For clarity, you retain all of your ownership rights in your Content. However, by submitting Content to YouTube, you hereby grant YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the Content in connection with the Service and YouTube&#x27;s (and its successors&#x27; and affiliates&#x27;) business, including without limitation for promoting and redistributing part or all of the Service (and derivative works thereof) in any media formats and through any media channels.&quot;</text></item><item><author>cwkoss</author><text>If Phillip Bloom uploaded these videos to Youtube, didn&#x27;t he consent to a broad TOS on the usage of these videos for internal company purposes?<p>I&#x27;d be surprised if he had a case, which may be why he&#x27;s taking his grievance to the media instead.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ocdtrekkie</author><text>This is why I didn&#x27;t let Google index my podcast. Other sites just ship your RSS, Google insists on hosting your podcasts and granting itself a license to them.</text></comment> |
12,761,993 | 12,759,344 | 1 | 2 | 12,757,946 | train | <story><title>Why we chose Vue.js</title><url>https://about.gitlab.com/2016/10/20/why-we-chose-vue/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>iotscale</author><text>I started reading through the docs and found it very similar to Knockout.js. Is here anyone who used both to tell the advantages of Vue?<p>FYI, I&#x27;m thinking about dropping Knockout because some performance problems I&#x27;m having with a very specific use-case.</text></item><item><author>anonyfox</author><text>As someone who went through the complete frontend hype-trains (jquery, backbone, angular, ember, react, all in production): Vue.js 2.0 with single file components is exactly what everyone looks for desperately.<p>- performance: faster than react now<p>- learning curve: a few hours from scratch<p>- getting started: cli-tool for initial scaffold &amp; configuration<p>- components: simple .vue files with a &lt;template&#x2F;&gt;, &lt;script&#x2F;&gt; and &lt;style&#x2F;&gt;. Super easy to get going, no need for JSX<p>- &quot;official&quot; packages for routing, ajax and state management. No wasting of days for choosing every tiny package for days<p>- vuex 2.0 is one of the cleanest flux implementation i&#x27;ve seen in the last year<p>... and much more. Give it a try with the full webpack template of the cli tool!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>holon</author><text>I&#x27;ve used both Knockout and Vue for frontends that needed to render reasonably large amounts of disparate elements with near real-time updates, so I think I can answer this. Knockout is nice but feels closer to jQuery in that it requires a lot more discipline on the behalf of the developer to organise and maintain code. Things like ObservableArrays means dealing with another layer of abstraction; the wonderful thing with Vue is that it&#x27;s just native JS objects all the way down. It also has a better structured child&#x2F;parent component model with event flow, not to mention being much faster for rendering. I would also recommend Vue over Knockout.</text></comment> | <story><title>Why we chose Vue.js</title><url>https://about.gitlab.com/2016/10/20/why-we-chose-vue/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>iotscale</author><text>I started reading through the docs and found it very similar to Knockout.js. Is here anyone who used both to tell the advantages of Vue?<p>FYI, I&#x27;m thinking about dropping Knockout because some performance problems I&#x27;m having with a very specific use-case.</text></item><item><author>anonyfox</author><text>As someone who went through the complete frontend hype-trains (jquery, backbone, angular, ember, react, all in production): Vue.js 2.0 with single file components is exactly what everyone looks for desperately.<p>- performance: faster than react now<p>- learning curve: a few hours from scratch<p>- getting started: cli-tool for initial scaffold &amp; configuration<p>- components: simple .vue files with a &lt;template&#x2F;&gt;, &lt;script&#x2F;&gt; and &lt;style&#x2F;&gt;. Super easy to get going, no need for JSX<p>- &quot;official&quot; packages for routing, ajax and state management. No wasting of days for choosing every tiny package for days<p>- vuex 2.0 is one of the cleanest flux implementation i&#x27;ve seen in the last year<p>... and much more. Give it a try with the full webpack template of the cli tool!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>LaurentVB</author><text>Exactly my thought when I tried Vue.js: on the surface, it&#x27;s knockout with some react-inspired additions that make it faster. I loved being able to pick up Vue.js and make something that just worked in 30 minutes.</text></comment> |
9,415,687 | 9,415,842 | 1 | 2 | 9,415,316 | train | <story><title>Keywhiz: Square's system for distributing and managing secrets</title><url>https://square.github.io/keywhiz/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mtsmith85</author><text>Coincidentally Coda Hale&#x27;s sneaker (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;codahale&#x2F;sneaker" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;codahale&#x2F;sneaker</a>) just popped up in my Twitter feed earlier. Sneaker stores the secrets on S3. Keywhiz stores the secrets in a central database and then ephemerally on the client servers. I guess if you started with something like sneaker on AWS using Amazon&#x27;s KMS you could then move to Keywhiz if you eventually moved out of AWS.</text></comment> | <story><title>Keywhiz: Square's system for distributing and managing secrets</title><url>https://square.github.io/keywhiz/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tdicola</author><text>Wow this looks great! If the whole online payment system thing doesn&#x27;t work out for square the engineers there should fire the entire management chain and pivot into a developer services company, because the projects and libraries they publish are just stellar (particularly the Android stuff).</text></comment> |
16,210,067 | 16,208,248 | 1 | 2 | 16,206,053 | train | <story><title>The Evolution of Pleasure and Pain</title><url>http://nautil.us/issue/56/perspective/antonio-damasio-tells-us-why-pain-is-necessary</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tremendulo</author><text>Pain and pleasure may not be as distinct as common sense assumes. The purpose of both seems to be to draw one&#x27;s attention.<p>A simple example would be eating chilli which is painful the first time. After one has learnt to enjoy it then the experience becomes pleasurable.<p>More controversially perhaps is when I stub my toe these days. Instead of yelling and hopping around the room I try to transfer as much of my attention to the affected toe as I possibly can. I won&#x27;t say it feels exactly nice now but it&#x27;s a heck of a lot better than when I was a kid trying to distract myself from the pain.<p>It seems plausible that if one could get very proficient at paying attention then the experience might be comparable to a highly intense pleasure (a pleasure <i>too</i> intense to be comfortable, at least to begin with).</text></comment> | <story><title>The Evolution of Pleasure and Pain</title><url>http://nautil.us/issue/56/perspective/antonio-damasio-tells-us-why-pain-is-necessary</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>incompatible</author><text>&gt;How does consciousness emerge out of nerve cells? Well, it doesn’t. You’re not dealing with the brain alone.<p>I&#x27;m not sure that this gives any real insight. Perhaps some other types of cells in the body are also involved in creating consciousness, but then the question is &quot;How does consciousness emerge out of cells?&quot;.<p>Saying the brain is &quot;just a computer&quot; understates the complexity of computers with arbitrary software. Just because the brain (and any other cells involved) isn&#x27;t implemented as a simple Turing machine, it doesn&#x27;t follow that it does anything that couldn&#x27;t be alternatively implemented using a simple Turing machine.</text></comment> |
15,572,529 | 15,572,555 | 1 | 2 | 15,570,947 | train | <story><title>Sorting Algorithms Revisualized</title><url>https://imgur.com/gallery/GD5gi</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mrguyorama</author><text>The problem with colorblindness is a common one. I saw the post in question and it was just a typical rainbow color scheme, and it never even occurred to me that they might cause trouble for color blind users.<p>Is it possible to map the RGB colorspace onto a colorblindness safe colorspace? This would be a cool feature that I feel Web Browsers could provide to be more accessible for their users</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kzrdude</author><text>You might find this interesting, the story about the new default colormap in matplotlib 2.0<p>It&#x27;s about more than colorblindness -- about how represent a steady linear scale with color and how to keep it faithful in grayscale.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;medvis.org&#x2F;2016&#x2F;02&#x2F;23&#x2F;better-than-the-rainbow-the-matplotlib-alternative-colormaps&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;medvis.org&#x2F;2016&#x2F;02&#x2F;23&#x2F;better-than-the-rainbow-the-mat...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Sorting Algorithms Revisualized</title><url>https://imgur.com/gallery/GD5gi</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mrguyorama</author><text>The problem with colorblindness is a common one. I saw the post in question and it was just a typical rainbow color scheme, and it never even occurred to me that they might cause trouble for color blind users.<p>Is it possible to map the RGB colorspace onto a colorblindness safe colorspace? This would be a cool feature that I feel Web Browsers could provide to be more accessible for their users</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vanderZwan</author><text>There is the cube-helix approach, but I suspect you&#x27;re thinking about something else.<p>The linked talk about the creation of the viridis colour map[0] actually spends a good ten minutes on explaining colour theory, and makes it look very simple in the process.<p>About ten minutes in it shows the &quot;perceptual colour space&quot; of a typical non-colourblind person. A few minutes later it shows the color spaces for people with various types of colourblindness.<p>Perhaps one could project one perceptual space into the other in a way that more-or-less preserves the original information, but essentially with more banding?<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=xAoljeRJ3lU" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=xAoljeRJ3lU</a></text></comment> |
22,955,179 | 22,954,568 | 1 | 3 | 22,953,891 | train | <story><title>UK’s Investigatory Powers Act is set to expand</title><url>https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/04/23/uk_snoopers_charter_sequel/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>digikazi</author><text>I find this deeply worrying, but among the people I work with and my immediate circle of friends and acquaintances I am in the minority. In my experience, people just don&#x27;t care that much (a fact which I find very, very sad and troubling). My partner for example who is an otherwise intelligent woman doesn&#x27;t really care - her 12 year old son even less so. In fact, I&#x27;m pretty sure he will be part of the generation that will grow up to regard privacy as some sort of slightly weird, exotic commodity.<p>I grew up behind the Iron Curtain, and for a chunk of my life we lived with this sort of government intrusion - nay, we expected it. We expected letters from abroad to be opened and read, we expected telephone calls to be listened to and so on. Obviously, there was no judicial oversight. I remember we looked at the West with something akin to awe and longing: in the West, they don&#x27;t read your mail, they don&#x27;t snoop on your calls and sure as s<i></i>t they don&#x27;t confiscate subversive magazines sent from abroad. It was like a fairy tale; in the West, they took your rights seriously.<p>30 years on, I look at the UK, my adopted home like a lover who fell out of love with the object of his desire. It turns out that when presented with the technical means to do so, the West is just as keen to eavesdrop and hoover up all your data: emails, phone calls, text messages, the lot.<p>Freedom and privacy are like a sausage comrades: you keep slicing at it until there&#x27;s nothing left!</text></item><item><author>samizdis</author><text>&gt; Taken together, the requests reflect exactly what critics of the Investigatory Powers Act feared would happen: that a once-shocking power that was granted on the back of terrorism fears is being slowly extended to even the most obscure government agency for no reason other that it will make bureaucrats&#x27; lives easier.<p>&gt; None of the agencies would be required to apply for warrants to access people’s internet connection data, and they would be added to another 50-plus agencies that already have access, including the Food Standards Agency, Gambling Commission, and NHS Business Services Authority.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tomatocracy</author><text>I&#x27;m a native Brit and whilst I agree our national lack of care about freedom is concerning I think it&#x27;s slightly more nuanced than that.<p>My view is that people here are far too trusting of those in authority, and in particular counter-terrorist police and security services personnel. The attitude seems to be &quot;if they think they need this then they know best&quot;. The collective psyche seems to take more comfort in the moral character of the people given the powers than in the safeguards against misuse.<p>On the positive side, almost noone I know thinks that it&#x27;s appropriate that local councils or the Food Standards Agency have these powers. Those parts of government are largely viewed as &quot;nannying busybodies&quot; and the &quot;nannying&quot; bits of government are mostly distrusted - there does remain a British sense of freedom.<p>What&#x27;s worrying though is that people don&#x27;t seem to believe that minor agencies actually have been given these powers. When I&#x27;ve had conversations with people about this the reaction is &quot;you&#x27;re just exaggerating to make a point&quot; or &quot;they won&#x27;t really do that, you&#x27;re just concocting a far-fetched scenario that&#x27;s technically legal but wouldn&#x27;t happen in practice&quot;.</text></comment> | <story><title>UK’s Investigatory Powers Act is set to expand</title><url>https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/04/23/uk_snoopers_charter_sequel/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>digikazi</author><text>I find this deeply worrying, but among the people I work with and my immediate circle of friends and acquaintances I am in the minority. In my experience, people just don&#x27;t care that much (a fact which I find very, very sad and troubling). My partner for example who is an otherwise intelligent woman doesn&#x27;t really care - her 12 year old son even less so. In fact, I&#x27;m pretty sure he will be part of the generation that will grow up to regard privacy as some sort of slightly weird, exotic commodity.<p>I grew up behind the Iron Curtain, and for a chunk of my life we lived with this sort of government intrusion - nay, we expected it. We expected letters from abroad to be opened and read, we expected telephone calls to be listened to and so on. Obviously, there was no judicial oversight. I remember we looked at the West with something akin to awe and longing: in the West, they don&#x27;t read your mail, they don&#x27;t snoop on your calls and sure as s<i></i>t they don&#x27;t confiscate subversive magazines sent from abroad. It was like a fairy tale; in the West, they took your rights seriously.<p>30 years on, I look at the UK, my adopted home like a lover who fell out of love with the object of his desire. It turns out that when presented with the technical means to do so, the West is just as keen to eavesdrop and hoover up all your data: emails, phone calls, text messages, the lot.<p>Freedom and privacy are like a sausage comrades: you keep slicing at it until there&#x27;s nothing left!</text></item><item><author>samizdis</author><text>&gt; Taken together, the requests reflect exactly what critics of the Investigatory Powers Act feared would happen: that a once-shocking power that was granted on the back of terrorism fears is being slowly extended to even the most obscure government agency for no reason other that it will make bureaucrats&#x27; lives easier.<p>&gt; None of the agencies would be required to apply for warrants to access people’s internet connection data, and they would be added to another 50-plus agencies that already have access, including the Food Standards Agency, Gambling Commission, and NHS Business Services Authority.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>TomMarius</author><text>People like you, who care about freedom and privacy, exist. I am also from behind the Iron Curtain, albeit I was born some years after it has fallen - fortunately, but the experience was ingrained in my parents. IMHO the problem is that people like us are distributed around the world, which puts us in a minority anywhere; we need to group up and watch each other&#x27;s backs.</text></comment> |
18,534,054 | 18,531,528 | 1 | 2 | 18,531,393 | train | <story><title>How to run a program without an operating system?</title><url>https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22054578/how-to-run-a-program-without-an-operating-system/32483545#32483545</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>emilfihlman</author><text>&gt;Technically, a program that runs without an OS, is an OS.<p>It is not. A program that runs without an OS just doesn&#x27;t need the OS provided services but instead manages everything itself.<p>A perfectly valid program might be:<p><pre><code> #include &lt;avr&#x2F;io.h&gt;
int main(void)
{
DDRB=255;
while(1)
{
PORTB++;
}
}</code></pre></text></comment> | <story><title>How to run a program without an operating system?</title><url>https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22054578/how-to-run-a-program-without-an-operating-system/32483545#32483545</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>CoolGuySteve</author><text>If you ever programmed a ROM for a Gameboy or something this should look familiar. The BIOS of those old systems just jumps right into a certain address and all you have to do is make sure your linker is setup properly to put crt0.s there.<p>The Gameboy Advance in particular is pretty fun and simple, I recommend it.</text></comment> |
9,910,942 | 9,910,845 | 1 | 2 | 9,910,622 | train | <story><title>If David Cameron bans secure encryption he can't intercept</title><url>http://blog.mythic-beasts.com/2015/01/15/a-day-in-the-life-of-a-mythic-beasts-employee-after-david-cameron-bans-the-secure-encryption/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>chao-</author><text>Who are the security services employed by? I certainly wouldn&#x27;t call them private industry!<p>Did you mean to say it&#x27;s not <i>elected</i> government officials? Just curious, because I definitely consider a country&#x27;s intelligence apparatus to be completely and wholly part of its &quot;government&quot;, and would be surprised to find someone who didn&#x27;t.</text></item><item><author>tonyedgecombe</author><text>It&#x27;s not really the elected government, it&#x27;s the security services asking for an expanded remit and being granted one by uncritical politicians and an apathetic media.</text></item><item><author>mike-cardwell</author><text>It&#x27;s pretty clear that the UK government doesn&#x27;t have the power to ban encryption. This is just a distraction so that we are happy to accept whatever &quot;less bad&quot; proposals they come up with to increase their surveillance powers. I can&#x27;t help but feel that peoples dislike of Cameron is a pointless distraction too. This is not Cameron. This is government. We will still be having this same discussion in 50 years, unless some miracle technical advancement makes it moot.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Luc</author><text>&#x27;The government&#x27; refers to something different in the US than in (most of?) Europe.<p>My American friends were mightily amused and amazed when Belgium spent &gt;500 days without government a couple of years ago, but of course they were interpreting the word in a much more encompassing way than it is done in Belgium. &#x27;The goverment&#x27; is really just a couple of dozen people (with perhaps a couple of dozen assistants each).</text></comment> | <story><title>If David Cameron bans secure encryption he can't intercept</title><url>http://blog.mythic-beasts.com/2015/01/15/a-day-in-the-life-of-a-mythic-beasts-employee-after-david-cameron-bans-the-secure-encryption/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>chao-</author><text>Who are the security services employed by? I certainly wouldn&#x27;t call them private industry!<p>Did you mean to say it&#x27;s not <i>elected</i> government officials? Just curious, because I definitely consider a country&#x27;s intelligence apparatus to be completely and wholly part of its &quot;government&quot;, and would be surprised to find someone who didn&#x27;t.</text></item><item><author>tonyedgecombe</author><text>It&#x27;s not really the elected government, it&#x27;s the security services asking for an expanded remit and being granted one by uncritical politicians and an apathetic media.</text></item><item><author>mike-cardwell</author><text>It&#x27;s pretty clear that the UK government doesn&#x27;t have the power to ban encryption. This is just a distraction so that we are happy to accept whatever &quot;less bad&quot; proposals they come up with to increase their surveillance powers. I can&#x27;t help but feel that peoples dislike of Cameron is a pointless distraction too. This is not Cameron. This is government. We will still be having this same discussion in 50 years, unless some miracle technical advancement makes it moot.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tonyedgecombe</author><text>I was thinking of government as the elected officials, the rest is the civil service and departments including the security services.<p>I was trying to say the security services will always press for more powers and it&#x27;s the job of politicians to know when to resist those requests.</text></comment> |
6,556,061 | 6,556,070 | 1 | 2 | 6,555,696 | train | <story><title>Lavabit gets new crypto key, gives users 72 hours to recover e-mails</title><url>http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/10/lavabit-gets-new-crypto-key-gives-users-72-hours-to-recover-e-mails/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>robhu</author><text>The new certificate does not offer Forward Secrecy <a href="https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=liberty.lavabit.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ssllabs.com&#x2F;ssltest&#x2F;analyze.html?d=liberty.lavab...</a><p>Does this not mean that the NSA could patiently log all the traffic going in and out of the site over the next few days, then get a court order for this new SSL private key, then decrypt the traffic they collected?<p>I may have misunderstood, but doesn&#x27;t that make this something of a trojan horse? Many users will login and try to download all their email, and for everyone who does, when the NSA (very likely) get a court order for the new SSL key, they&#x27;ll have that large amount of private email everyone tried to copy from the site?</text></comment> | <story><title>Lavabit gets new crypto key, gives users 72 hours to recover e-mails</title><url>http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/10/lavabit-gets-new-crypto-key-gives-users-72-hours-to-recover-e-mails/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>drraoulduke</author><text>I wouldn&#x27;t trust this. The government could be running the site now. It&#x27;s happened before.</text></comment> |
26,478,092 | 26,476,541 | 1 | 3 | 26,472,452 | train | <story><title>We Don’t Use Docker</title><url>https://launchyourapp.meezeeworkouts.com/2021/03/why-we-dont-use-docker-we-dont-need-it.html?m=1</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>movedx</author><text>F- me. I love this. This is a really important message.<p>It&#x27;s like Jonathon Blow asks: why does Photoshop take longer to load today than it did in the 90s despite the (insane) advances in hardware?<p>I believe it&#x27;s due to a bunch of things, but over complicating the entire process is one of the big issues. If people (developers&#x2F;engineers) would only sit back and realise just how much computing power they have available to them, and then realised that if they kept things simple and efficient, they could build blazing fast solutions over night.<p>I cringe thinking about the wasted opportunities out there.</text></item><item><author>SatvikBeri</author><text>Several years ago, I was chatting with another engineer from a close competitor. He told me about how they&#x27;d set up a system to run hundreds of data processing jobs a day over a dozen machines, using docker, load balancing, a bunch of AWS stuff. I knew these jobs very well, they were basically identical for any company in the space.<p>He then mentioned that he&#x27;d noticed that somehow my employer had been processing thousands of jobs, much faster than his, and asked how many machines we were using.<p>I didn&#x27;t have the heart to tell him we were running everything manually on my two-year-old macbook air.</text></item><item><author>systemvoltage</author><text>Along with this, vertical scaling is severely underrated. You can do a lot and possibly <i>everything ever</i> for your company with vertical scaling. It would apply to 99% of the companies or even more.<p>Edit:
Since people are confused, here is how StackOverflow handles of all of its web operations. If SO can run with this, so can your 0.33 req&#x2F;minute app which is mostly doomed for failure. I am only half joking.<p>StackOverflow architecture, current load (it will surprise you): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackexchange.com&#x2F;performance" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackexchange.com&#x2F;performance</a><p>Everytime you go to SO, it hits one of these 9 web servers and all data on SO sits on those 2 massive SQL servers. That&#x27;s pretty amazing.<p>I want to be clear though, Horizontal scaling has a place in companies that has a team of corporate lawyers. Big. And in many many other scenarios for ETL and backend microservices.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dzonga</author><text>Jonathan Blow&#x27;s Preventing the Collapse of Civilization [0] is an excellent talk, on how too much abstractions destroy knowledge.<p>This is a problem with the software industry today. we have forgotten how to do the simple stuff, that works and is robust.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko</a></text></comment> | <story><title>We Don’t Use Docker</title><url>https://launchyourapp.meezeeworkouts.com/2021/03/why-we-dont-use-docker-we-dont-need-it.html?m=1</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>movedx</author><text>F- me. I love this. This is a really important message.<p>It&#x27;s like Jonathon Blow asks: why does Photoshop take longer to load today than it did in the 90s despite the (insane) advances in hardware?<p>I believe it&#x27;s due to a bunch of things, but over complicating the entire process is one of the big issues. If people (developers&#x2F;engineers) would only sit back and realise just how much computing power they have available to them, and then realised that if they kept things simple and efficient, they could build blazing fast solutions over night.<p>I cringe thinking about the wasted opportunities out there.</text></item><item><author>SatvikBeri</author><text>Several years ago, I was chatting with another engineer from a close competitor. He told me about how they&#x27;d set up a system to run hundreds of data processing jobs a day over a dozen machines, using docker, load balancing, a bunch of AWS stuff. I knew these jobs very well, they were basically identical for any company in the space.<p>He then mentioned that he&#x27;d noticed that somehow my employer had been processing thousands of jobs, much faster than his, and asked how many machines we were using.<p>I didn&#x27;t have the heart to tell him we were running everything manually on my two-year-old macbook air.</text></item><item><author>systemvoltage</author><text>Along with this, vertical scaling is severely underrated. You can do a lot and possibly <i>everything ever</i> for your company with vertical scaling. It would apply to 99% of the companies or even more.<p>Edit:
Since people are confused, here is how StackOverflow handles of all of its web operations. If SO can run with this, so can your 0.33 req&#x2F;minute app which is mostly doomed for failure. I am only half joking.<p>StackOverflow architecture, current load (it will surprise you): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackexchange.com&#x2F;performance" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackexchange.com&#x2F;performance</a><p>Everytime you go to SO, it hits one of these 9 web servers and all data on SO sits on those 2 massive SQL servers. That&#x27;s pretty amazing.<p>I want to be clear though, Horizontal scaling has a place in companies that has a team of corporate lawyers. Big. And in many many other scenarios for ETL and backend microservices.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mason55</author><text>I think there are two things that cause this.<p>One is that there’s a minimum performance that people will tolerate. Beyond that you get quickly diminishing user satisfaction returns when trying to optimize. The difference between 30 seconds and 10 seconds in app startup time isn’t going to make anyone choose or not choose Photoshop. People who use PS a lot probably keep it open all day and everyone else doesn’t care enough about the 20 seconds.<p>The second problem is that complexity scales super-linearly with respect to feature grown because each feature interacts with every other feature. This means that the difficulty of optimizing startup times gets harder as the application grows in complexity. No single engineer or team of engineers could fix the problem at this point, it would have to be a mandate from up high, which would be a silly mandate since the returns would likely be very small.</text></comment> |
20,724,475 | 20,724,282 | 1 | 2 | 20,721,609 | train | <story><title>Google Plans to Deprecate FTP URL Support in Chrome</title><url>https://www.pulltech.net/article/1566007822-Google-plans-to-deprecate-FTP-URL-support-in-Chrome</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dmix</author><text>I just hope this isn&#x27;t like how Google basically killed off RSS when they killed off the best client that everyone was using (which I&#x27;ve still never heard a good reason why) which I believe played a role in the decline of everyone having a blog.<p>And yes I know there&#x27;s some niche support still, just as FTP will live on.</text></item><item><author>weinzierl</author><text>There was a time when www was just a part of the Internet and we had www search and ftp search engines. The one I used to use was called <i>&quot;ftpsearch&quot;</i> and the only thing (besides the name) I remember is that it used to say <i>&quot;This server is located in Trondheim&quot;</i> on the front page. A quick web search turns out that it still seems to exist in some form [1]. Unfortunately it apparently doesn&#x27;t really work anymore.<p>Maybe it&#x27;s time to bring ftp search engines back.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mi.uni-koeln.de&#x2F;~jbe&#x2F;ref&#x2F;ftpsearch&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mi.uni-koeln.de&#x2F;~jbe&#x2F;ref&#x2F;ftpsearch&#x2F;</a></text></item><item><author>userbinator</author><text>Considering that Google (search) still lists plenty of FTP results, many of which have been <i>extremely</i> useful to me, this seems like another move to bully the Internet into what Google wants it to be. Will it start removing those results, effectively censoring another huge chunk of the Internet? It&#x27;s already hard enough to find older&#x2F;more obscure information, and FTP sites are more likely to be in that category.<p>Also, I can&#x27;t be the only one who&#x27;s absolutely sick of hearing that bloody &quot;security&quot; argument again. Yes, everyone knows FTP is plaintext, and so is HTTP. But drivers, which I&#x27;d say are a significant part of FTP use, are almost always themselves signed anyway, and I don&#x27;t think malware is widely distributed via FTP either (I&#x27;m curious why FTPS&#x2F;SFTP doesn&#x27;t see to be indexed, or why they didn&#x27;t decide to add that to the browser instead --- or at least I&#x27;ve never come across a search result that links to one.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Kye</author><text>RSS is still alive and well. Podcasting depends on it.</text></comment> | <story><title>Google Plans to Deprecate FTP URL Support in Chrome</title><url>https://www.pulltech.net/article/1566007822-Google-plans-to-deprecate-FTP-URL-support-in-Chrome</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dmix</author><text>I just hope this isn&#x27;t like how Google basically killed off RSS when they killed off the best client that everyone was using (which I&#x27;ve still never heard a good reason why) which I believe played a role in the decline of everyone having a blog.<p>And yes I know there&#x27;s some niche support still, just as FTP will live on.</text></item><item><author>weinzierl</author><text>There was a time when www was just a part of the Internet and we had www search and ftp search engines. The one I used to use was called <i>&quot;ftpsearch&quot;</i> and the only thing (besides the name) I remember is that it used to say <i>&quot;This server is located in Trondheim&quot;</i> on the front page. A quick web search turns out that it still seems to exist in some form [1]. Unfortunately it apparently doesn&#x27;t really work anymore.<p>Maybe it&#x27;s time to bring ftp search engines back.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mi.uni-koeln.de&#x2F;~jbe&#x2F;ref&#x2F;ftpsearch&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mi.uni-koeln.de&#x2F;~jbe&#x2F;ref&#x2F;ftpsearch&#x2F;</a></text></item><item><author>userbinator</author><text>Considering that Google (search) still lists plenty of FTP results, many of which have been <i>extremely</i> useful to me, this seems like another move to bully the Internet into what Google wants it to be. Will it start removing those results, effectively censoring another huge chunk of the Internet? It&#x27;s already hard enough to find older&#x2F;more obscure information, and FTP sites are more likely to be in that category.<p>Also, I can&#x27;t be the only one who&#x27;s absolutely sick of hearing that bloody &quot;security&quot; argument again. Yes, everyone knows FTP is plaintext, and so is HTTP. But drivers, which I&#x27;d say are a significant part of FTP use, are almost always themselves signed anyway, and I don&#x27;t think malware is widely distributed via FTP either (I&#x27;m curious why FTPS&#x2F;SFTP doesn&#x27;t see to be indexed, or why they didn&#x27;t decide to add that to the browser instead --- or at least I&#x27;ve never come across a search result that links to one.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ksec</author><text>&gt;I believe played a role in the decline of everyone having a blog.<p>Is that really the case though? Wordpress ( Love it or Hate it ), both .com and self hosted is still thriving.<p>And if people are writing less blog, I think it has more to do with Social Media ( Facebook ) than RSS or Google Search &#x2F; Reader.</text></comment> |
11,663,403 | 11,663,089 | 1 | 3 | 11,662,364 | train | <story><title>Git-secret – store private data in a Git repo</title><url>https://coderwall.com/p/e-azzg/store-your-private-data-inside-a-git-repository</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jedberg</author><text>This project scares me because it helps foster a bad practice -- keeping secrets in a repo. You really shouldn&#x27;t be keeping secrets in the repo.<p>You should be using a secrets service that is designed for such a purpose, like Hashicorp&#x27;s Vault[0], so that you never have to keep a secret in the code.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;hashicorp&#x2F;vault" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;hashicorp&#x2F;vault</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Git-secret – store private data in a Git repo</title><url>https://coderwall.com/p/e-azzg/store-your-private-data-inside-a-git-repository</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Confiks</author><text>I&#x27;ve been using ansible-vault to solve this problem in our infrastructure repository. A symmetric vault key is encrypted using gpg, and Ansible&#x27;s vault_password_file is set to to an executable shell script containing `gpg --batch --use-agent --descrypt vault_key.gpg`.<p>Very specific to Ansible, but works fine. It&#x27;s a shame only files containing variables (we&#x27;re using group_vars) can be encrypted, and not arbitrary files or templates.</text></comment> |
13,431,896 | 13,431,809 | 1 | 2 | 13,430,222 | train | <story><title>U.S. sues Oracle, alleges salary and hiring discrimination</title><url>http://www.reuters.com/article/us-oracle-usa-labor-idUSKBN1522O6?il=0</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>freditup</author><text>That means we so far have:<p>* Palantir sued for not hiring enough Asians [0]<p>* Google sued for not turning over compensation data [1]<p>* Oracle sued for hiring too many Asians<p>While it&#x27;s possible that discriminatory processes have happened at all these places, it seems these lawsuits can be targeted at whoever one wishes. It&#x27;s always going to be possible to find data that indicates discrimination, unless companies hire in exact quotas (which would also be discriminatory really).<p>[0]: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.usatoday.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;tech&#x2F;news&#x2F;2016&#x2F;09&#x2F;26&#x2F;palantir-department-of-labor-discrimination-asians-lawsuit&#x2F;91131284&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.usatoday.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;tech&#x2F;news&#x2F;2016&#x2F;09&#x2F;26&#x2F;palantir-...</a><p>[1]: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.usatoday.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;tech&#x2F;news&#x2F;2017&#x2F;01&#x2F;04&#x2F;google-sued-labor-department-over-anti-discrimination-compensation-data&#x2F;96170296&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.usatoday.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;tech&#x2F;news&#x2F;2017&#x2F;01&#x2F;04&#x2F;google-su...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wallace_f</author><text>&gt;It&#x27;s always going to be possible to find data that indicates discrimination, unless companies hire in exact quotas (which would also be discriminatory really).<p>There already are off-the-record quotas. Who in management hasn&#x27;t heard discussion at least eluding the the need for a diversity hire? Probably very few people at this point.<p>I believe a distinction must be made: Equality of <i>opportunity</i> is good. Equality of <i>outcome</i> will lead us to the world of Harrison Bergeron&#x27;s.</text></comment> | <story><title>U.S. sues Oracle, alleges salary and hiring discrimination</title><url>http://www.reuters.com/article/us-oracle-usa-labor-idUSKBN1522O6?il=0</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>freditup</author><text>That means we so far have:<p>* Palantir sued for not hiring enough Asians [0]<p>* Google sued for not turning over compensation data [1]<p>* Oracle sued for hiring too many Asians<p>While it&#x27;s possible that discriminatory processes have happened at all these places, it seems these lawsuits can be targeted at whoever one wishes. It&#x27;s always going to be possible to find data that indicates discrimination, unless companies hire in exact quotas (which would also be discriminatory really).<p>[0]: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.usatoday.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;tech&#x2F;news&#x2F;2016&#x2F;09&#x2F;26&#x2F;palantir-department-of-labor-discrimination-asians-lawsuit&#x2F;91131284&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.usatoday.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;tech&#x2F;news&#x2F;2016&#x2F;09&#x2F;26&#x2F;palantir-...</a><p>[1]: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.usatoday.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;tech&#x2F;news&#x2F;2017&#x2F;01&#x2F;04&#x2F;google-sued-labor-department-over-anti-discrimination-compensation-data&#x2F;96170296&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.usatoday.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;tech&#x2F;news&#x2F;2017&#x2F;01&#x2F;04&#x2F;google-su...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pippy</author><text>This is why merit based evaluation is the only sane hiring practice. I&#x27;d love to see legal protection for companies that can provide evidence they strictly adhered to the merit based hires.<p>You can also apply this rationale to your own projects, by including the Code of Merit into your projects[0][1].<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;rosarior&#x2F;Code-of-Merit&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;CODE_OF_MERIT.md" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;rosarior&#x2F;Code-of-Merit&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;CODE_O...</a><p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;code-of-merit.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;code-of-merit.org&#x2F;</a></text></comment> |
28,709,799 | 28,709,692 | 1 | 2 | 28,709,229 | train | <story><title>US Published National Debt: $28T. The Truth: $146T. Each Taxpayer's Share: $951k</title><url>https://www.truthinaccounting.org/about/our_national_debt</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>janandonly</author><text>This is more a discussion of semantics than about the amount itself.<p>The way I read the statistics is that the current debt is $28T <i>of money that is already spent</i> while the quoted debt of $146T is the amount of money <i>needed to be spent to fill full current promises and expenses</i>.<p>It&#x27;s interesting that since the USA got off the gold standard in 1971[1], and thereby all countries that had a currency backed by dollars, the average household income has risen 5x but the price of goods like a house have gone up 10x.
This became possible because all for a sudden money was not backed by gold anymore, but could simply be printed when needed. This created huge money supply inflation [2].<p>Everything is getting too expensive, and the only reason we don&#x27;t feel this too much just yet, is because often times cheaper alternatives where available.<p>My parents are in their 70&#x27;s and they still have furniture that was (second hand) given to them when they got married. Can you imagine an piece of IKEA furniture being used daily and lasting for &gt;40 years? My point about &quot;cheaper alternatives&quot; exactly...<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mises.org&#x2F;wire&#x2F;today-1971-president-nixon-closes-gold-window" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mises.org&#x2F;wire&#x2F;today-1971-president-nixon-closes-gol...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;WTF_1971" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;WTF_1971</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mfer</author><text>&gt; My parents are in their 70&#x27;s and they still have furniture that was (second hand) given to them when they got married. Can you imagine an piece of IKEA furniture being used daily and lasting for &gt;40 years? My point about &quot;cheaper alternatives&quot; exactly...<p>Part of this is cultural.<p>People now consume more than they used to. For many generations people patched their clothes. Now they throw them out. It&#x27;s a culture of consume, toss it, consume some more.<p>That culture influences personal decisions and those we influence for our companies.<p>You can still get high quality furniture. If you&#x27;re going to replace it soon due to style changes do you care about quality?</text></comment> | <story><title>US Published National Debt: $28T. The Truth: $146T. Each Taxpayer's Share: $951k</title><url>https://www.truthinaccounting.org/about/our_national_debt</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>janandonly</author><text>This is more a discussion of semantics than about the amount itself.<p>The way I read the statistics is that the current debt is $28T <i>of money that is already spent</i> while the quoted debt of $146T is the amount of money <i>needed to be spent to fill full current promises and expenses</i>.<p>It&#x27;s interesting that since the USA got off the gold standard in 1971[1], and thereby all countries that had a currency backed by dollars, the average household income has risen 5x but the price of goods like a house have gone up 10x.
This became possible because all for a sudden money was not backed by gold anymore, but could simply be printed when needed. This created huge money supply inflation [2].<p>Everything is getting too expensive, and the only reason we don&#x27;t feel this too much just yet, is because often times cheaper alternatives where available.<p>My parents are in their 70&#x27;s and they still have furniture that was (second hand) given to them when they got married. Can you imagine an piece of IKEA furniture being used daily and lasting for &gt;40 years? My point about &quot;cheaper alternatives&quot; exactly...<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mises.org&#x2F;wire&#x2F;today-1971-president-nixon-closes-gold-window" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mises.org&#x2F;wire&#x2F;today-1971-president-nixon-closes-gol...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;WTF_1971" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;WTF_1971</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>whimsicalism</author><text>&gt; thereby all countries that had a currency backed by dollars, the average household income has risen 5x but the price of goods like a house have gone up 10x<p>Real personal income has consistently gone upwards.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fred.stlouisfed.org&#x2F;series&#x2F;RPI" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fred.stlouisfed.org&#x2F;series&#x2F;RPI</a></text></comment> |
22,796,299 | 22,794,837 | 1 | 2 | 22,793,637 | train | <story><title>Mysterious heart damage, not just lung troubles, befalling Covid-19 patients</title><url>https://khn.org/news/mysterious-heart-damage-not-just-lung-troubles-befalling-covid-19-patients/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jacquesm</author><text>So, I&#x27;ve been battling this bug for the last three weeks or so, probably caught it on the way back from my last job in Finland. I expected an empty plane instead it was packed like it was the last train out of San Fernando and everybody was scared there never would be another one.<p>After a week or so symptoms started in spite of having self-isolated already after the flight, so that&#x27;s why I figure that is where I caught it, no positive confirmation because tests are still pretty rare around here but all the symptoms are present. At least I hope that I did not infect anybody else by taking that precaution. One thing I noticed (besides the hacking cough that does not seem to want to go away) was a pretty highly elevated heartrate at rest. Up to 20% higher than normal.<p>I already had some lung damage to my right lung due to an earlier pneumonia, but also played saxophone which does a good job of teaching you how to breathe properly and may improve your lungcapacity a bit.<p>The last couple of weeks have been a continuous rodeo of improvement and falling back again, today is the first day that I have a bit more energy, other than that the time over the last weeks was mostly spent sleeping.<p>Today is the first time I&#x27;ve seen my heart rate at rest below 60, and I take that as a very good sign that I&#x27;m on the tail end of this.<p>Wouldn&#x27;t wish this on my worst enemy.<p>If you can avoid this bug you really should. I totally believe that if I had had a worse general condition that I may have ended up in the hospital, and given the extra strain on the heart I find the heart damage not so much mysterious as logical. After all, if your lung capacity decreases due to fluid in your lungs then your heart and chest muscles will have to work harder (possibly <i>much</i> harder) to get your blood O2 levels to saturation (if they still can...).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tandr</author><text>I totally agree with your &quot;wouldn&#x27;t wish this on my worst enemy&quot; - this is probably the worst pneumonia-flu-like sickness I went (still going?) through. I am now convinced that if I will catch it (or some mutated off-spring of this) again, I might not make it.<p>Looks like I got it too about 3 or 4 weeks ago. No cough, no fewer, just a growing chest pain. Went to doctor back then, he prescribed antibiotics against pneumonia, and send me home. Thing that really scared me was (is) constant mild trouble breathing. It is hard to walk any distance and you have to catch wind after walking upstairs - never happened to me before. As you described &quot;ups&quot; and &quot;downs&quot; - you kind of feel ok for a day or so, and then boom, feeling like walking dead again. Worst part (to me) is that I cannot for the life of me (no pun intended) to explain this to my SO - she thinks once you got sick and got better, everything else is bs and &quot;you just don&#x27;t want to leave the house&quot; etc. Better is forever, right?<p>I would like to wish you (and all of us) best of luck and as much recovery as you can get. Take care.</text></comment> | <story><title>Mysterious heart damage, not just lung troubles, befalling Covid-19 patients</title><url>https://khn.org/news/mysterious-heart-damage-not-just-lung-troubles-befalling-covid-19-patients/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jacquesm</author><text>So, I&#x27;ve been battling this bug for the last three weeks or so, probably caught it on the way back from my last job in Finland. I expected an empty plane instead it was packed like it was the last train out of San Fernando and everybody was scared there never would be another one.<p>After a week or so symptoms started in spite of having self-isolated already after the flight, so that&#x27;s why I figure that is where I caught it, no positive confirmation because tests are still pretty rare around here but all the symptoms are present. At least I hope that I did not infect anybody else by taking that precaution. One thing I noticed (besides the hacking cough that does not seem to want to go away) was a pretty highly elevated heartrate at rest. Up to 20% higher than normal.<p>I already had some lung damage to my right lung due to an earlier pneumonia, but also played saxophone which does a good job of teaching you how to breathe properly and may improve your lungcapacity a bit.<p>The last couple of weeks have been a continuous rodeo of improvement and falling back again, today is the first day that I have a bit more energy, other than that the time over the last weeks was mostly spent sleeping.<p>Today is the first time I&#x27;ve seen my heart rate at rest below 60, and I take that as a very good sign that I&#x27;m on the tail end of this.<p>Wouldn&#x27;t wish this on my worst enemy.<p>If you can avoid this bug you really should. I totally believe that if I had had a worse general condition that I may have ended up in the hospital, and given the extra strain on the heart I find the heart damage not so much mysterious as logical. After all, if your lung capacity decreases due to fluid in your lungs then your heart and chest muscles will have to work harder (possibly <i>much</i> harder) to get your blood O2 levels to saturation (if they still can...).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>MrBuddyCasino</author><text>There is a hypothesis [0] that the virus attacks red blood cells and impacts their capacity to transport O2, and that the lung damage is actually caused by that, and not directly by the virus. Elevated heart rate makes a lot of sense.<p>[0] see thread and linked paper: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;yishan&#x2F;status&#x2F;1244717172871409666" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;yishan&#x2F;status&#x2F;1244717172871409666</a></text></comment> |
17,312,108 | 17,311,929 | 1 | 2 | 17,311,620 | train | <story><title>Boulder moves to fund citywide fiber buildout through debt</title><url>http://www.dailycamera.com/news/boulder/ci_31941127/public-support-high-boulder-moves-fund-citywide-fiber?source=mostpopular</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rayiner</author><text>Some back of the napkin math. $140 million for 40,000 households in Boulder = $3,500 per household. If 50% of people subscribe (typical for municipal broadband), that&#x27;s $7,000 per subscribing household, or higher than Charter&#x27;s market cap per subscriber.<p>A quarter of the population of the city is below the poverty line. If the intent is to offer them subsidized broadband, let&#x27;s assume we get no capital recovery from those households. That brings the cost to $4,666 per household, or $9,300 per subscribing household.<p>This is high, but not out of the ballpark. Verizon spent about $3,500 on average for each paying subscriber for FiOS. Chattanooga&#x27;s system was about $5,500 per household.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gonzo</author><text>$1.1m&#x2F;year payback (20 years)<p>$1,100,000&#x2F;year, 40,000 households, so $27.50&#x2F;year mean income per household to service the debt.<p>If only 50% of households (you said people) subscribe, then $55&#x2F;year mean income per household to service the debt. If, again, as you state, no capital contribution from households below the poverty line, then, using your math (which, btw, double counts these), we&#x27;re talking $110&#x2F;year, or $9.16&#x2F;sub&#x2F;month to service the debt.<p>Here in Austin, there are three providers of 1gbps&#x2F;1gbps FTTH internet, and all are priced just under $60&#x2F;mo.<p>I think someone can probably figure out how to build a similar service in Boulder, paying the City of Boulder $10&#x2F;mo per subscriber household, and still make fat rolls of cash.</text></comment> | <story><title>Boulder moves to fund citywide fiber buildout through debt</title><url>http://www.dailycamera.com/news/boulder/ci_31941127/public-support-high-boulder-moves-fund-citywide-fiber?source=mostpopular</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rayiner</author><text>Some back of the napkin math. $140 million for 40,000 households in Boulder = $3,500 per household. If 50% of people subscribe (typical for municipal broadband), that&#x27;s $7,000 per subscribing household, or higher than Charter&#x27;s market cap per subscriber.<p>A quarter of the population of the city is below the poverty line. If the intent is to offer them subsidized broadband, let&#x27;s assume we get no capital recovery from those households. That brings the cost to $4,666 per household, or $9,300 per subscribing household.<p>This is high, but not out of the ballpark. Verizon spent about $3,500 on average for each paying subscriber for FiOS. Chattanooga&#x27;s system was about $5,500 per household.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>julienchastang</author><text>Repaid over twenty years, as I understand it: &quot;A 20-year debt structure would require annual payments of $1.1 million from the city, according to staff estimates. That could be supplemented with money from the city&#x27;s general fund and, perhaps, revenue generated by early customers of the fiber network.&quot; Though there is some math discrepancy since that would not cover the $140 million. Nonetheless, as a Boulderite, I am happy to finally see this happening.</text></comment> |
36,775,384 | 36,774,922 | 1 | 2 | 36,774,627 | train | <story><title>Llama 2</title><url>https://ai.meta.com/llama/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>stu2b50</author><text>I think more Apple. It&#x27;s not like Google or Microsoft would <i>want</i> to use LLaMA when they have fully capable models themselves. I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised if Amazon does as well.<p>Apple is the big laggard in terms of big tech and complex neural network models.</text></item><item><author>minimaxir</author><text>That&#x27;s an oddly high number for blocking competition. OpenAI&#x27;s ChatGPT hit 100 million MAUs in January, and has gone down since.<p>It&#x27;s essentially a &quot;Amazon and Google don&#x27;t use this k thx.&quot;</text></item><item><author>whimsicalism</author><text>Key detail from release:<p>&gt; If, on the Llama 2 version release date, the monthly active users of the products or services made available by or for Licensee, or Licensee’s affiliates, is greater than 700 million monthly active users in the preceding calendar month, you must request a license from Meta, which Meta may grant to you in its sole discretion, and you are not authorized to exercise any of the rights under this Agreement unless or until Meta otherwise expressly grants you such rights.<p>Looks like they are trying to block out competitors, it&#x27;s the perfect commoditize your complement but don&#x27;t let your actual competitors try to eke out any benefit from it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lacker</author><text>I think Google or Microsoft probably would want to use LLaMa for various purposes like benchmarking and improving their own products. Check out this other condition from the license:<p><i>v. You will not use the Llama Materials or any output or results of the
Llama Materials to improve any other large language model (excluding Llama 2 or
derivative works thereof).</i><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;facebookresearch&#x2F;llama&#x2F;blob&#x2F;main&#x2F;LICENSE">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;facebookresearch&#x2F;llama&#x2F;blob&#x2F;main&#x2F;LICENSE</a><p>Just like Google scrapes the internet to improve their models, it might make sense to ingest outputs from other models to improve their models. This licensing prevents them from doing that. Using Llama to improve other LLMs is specifically forbidden, but Google will also be forbidden from using Llama to improve any other AI products they might be building.</text></comment> | <story><title>Llama 2</title><url>https://ai.meta.com/llama/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>stu2b50</author><text>I think more Apple. It&#x27;s not like Google or Microsoft would <i>want</i> to use LLaMA when they have fully capable models themselves. I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised if Amazon does as well.<p>Apple is the big laggard in terms of big tech and complex neural network models.</text></item><item><author>minimaxir</author><text>That&#x27;s an oddly high number for blocking competition. OpenAI&#x27;s ChatGPT hit 100 million MAUs in January, and has gone down since.<p>It&#x27;s essentially a &quot;Amazon and Google don&#x27;t use this k thx.&quot;</text></item><item><author>whimsicalism</author><text>Key detail from release:<p>&gt; If, on the Llama 2 version release date, the monthly active users of the products or services made available by or for Licensee, or Licensee’s affiliates, is greater than 700 million monthly active users in the preceding calendar month, you must request a license from Meta, which Meta may grant to you in its sole discretion, and you are not authorized to exercise any of the rights under this Agreement unless or until Meta otherwise expressly grants you such rights.<p>Looks like they are trying to block out competitors, it&#x27;s the perfect commoditize your complement but don&#x27;t let your actual competitors try to eke out any benefit from it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>whimsicalism</author><text>Google&#x27;s model is not as capable as llama-derived models, so I think they would actually benefit from this.<p>&gt; I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised if Amazon does as well.<p>I would - they are not a very major player in this space.<p>TikTok also meets this definition and probably doesn&#x27;t have LLM.</text></comment> |
40,161,251 | 40,160,498 | 1 | 3 | 40,154,395 | train | <story><title>Tor: From the Dark Web to the Future of Privacy</title><url>https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5761/TorFrom-the-Dark-Web-to-the-Future-of-Privacy</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tarruda</author><text>One thing I&#x27;m curious about Tor: What are the incentives for running a node?<p>If there are no monetary incentives, then how does it achieves decentralization? Also, what stops a malicious actor with enough resources (a government) from controlling a big portion of the network?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>susan_segfault</author><text>(with the understanding that I&#x27;m only speaking for what I found, not for the Tor project or the relay community)<p>Most of the people I spoke to saw themselves as providing a service - they wanted to help do something to bring a particular kind of future Internet about and found it rewarding to be a part of that. A number of them found the act of running a relay interesting and fun in itself - something they could get better at. Plus, membership of the relay community itself (especially now) is a kind of shared experience of community - and that&#x27;s attractive to people in itself.<p>In terms of malicious actors, Tor does a lot to avoid this, from hunting down bad relays actively, monitoring the network as best as it can, continuously developing the algorithms which select routes through the network, and other mechanisms, like forcing relays to operate for a while before they get trusted with a lot of connections.</text></comment> | <story><title>Tor: From the Dark Web to the Future of Privacy</title><url>https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5761/TorFrom-the-Dark-Web-to-the-Future-of-Privacy</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tarruda</author><text>One thing I&#x27;m curious about Tor: What are the incentives for running a node?<p>If there are no monetary incentives, then how does it achieves decentralization? Also, what stops a malicious actor with enough resources (a government) from controlling a big portion of the network?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>6LLvveMx2koXfwn</author><text>There are no incentives for running a Tor node except altruism and the perhaps nebulous claim that by doing so you will be making the network better.<p>There is nothing stopping a state actor controlling a large percentage of nodes thus increasing the likelihood that your anonymous communications are nothing of the sort.</text></comment> |
34,205,383 | 34,204,256 | 1 | 3 | 34,197,613 | train | <story><title>React Native is not the future</title><url>https://blog.standardnotes.com/40921/no-react-native-is-not-the-future</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>crossroadsguy</author><text>There is no better way to build a mobile app than a native app. This was shown yet again when I tried Standard Notes few days ago for the nth time. It still is sluggish and slow and felt like having too many jerks and clunks. Downright unusable for a major notes app in 2022.. well 23.<p>Among Joplin, Obsidian, FS Notes, Bear and few more Standard Note was the worst experience by a margin. Not to mention they still not allowing local raw files citing “but encryption”, or maybe they’ve moved to another reason now.<p>Another example of how developers can become blissfully oblivious of what users find good and start confusing it for what is “good” for developers themselves.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jstummbillig</author><text>&gt; There is no better way to build a mobile app than a native app.<p>There is, if the only tangible alternative to building a native app is not building a mobile app at all.<p>Every application deals with some amount of sluggishness. Performance is not a mobile app only problem, it&#x27;s not a new thing and it&#x27;s not entirely clear, when it&#x27;s going to be a big problem and when people will be okay with it.<p>With all the strides being made, the future is almost certainly not going to be 3 code bases for 90% of simple CRUD apps, because while the problem of maintaining a lot of code is not getting better for developers, the js glue layer so many people long for most certainly is, and rapidly.</text></comment> | <story><title>React Native is not the future</title><url>https://blog.standardnotes.com/40921/no-react-native-is-not-the-future</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>crossroadsguy</author><text>There is no better way to build a mobile app than a native app. This was shown yet again when I tried Standard Notes few days ago for the nth time. It still is sluggish and slow and felt like having too many jerks and clunks. Downright unusable for a major notes app in 2022.. well 23.<p>Among Joplin, Obsidian, FS Notes, Bear and few more Standard Note was the worst experience by a margin. Not to mention they still not allowing local raw files citing “but encryption”, or maybe they’ve moved to another reason now.<p>Another example of how developers can become blissfully oblivious of what users find good and start confusing it for what is “good” for developers themselves.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rvz</author><text>&gt; There is no better way to build a mobile app than a native app.<p>Clubhouse (a native app) said the same thing years ago and ended up becoming irrelevant and its features were absorbed and overtaken by Discord (a React Native app) with its Stage Channels feature, all before Clubhouse could build it&#x27;s Android app.<p>By the time Clubhouse released its Android app, their lunch was already eaten and it was too late. It turns out that, after recently looking at their latest app build they are slowly integrating React Native in their app.<p>This sounds like a quiet way of them admitting that they should have used React Native in the first place for both iOS and Android to release quicker had they done that as I said before. [0]<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28478951" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28478951</a></text></comment> |
39,871,824 | 39,871,779 | 1 | 2 | 39,868,630 | train | <story><title>Santa Barbara's collective memory, sold for kindling</title><url>https://www.independent.com/2024/03/29/santa-barbaras-collective-memory-sold-for-kindling/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>KennyBlanken</author><text>&gt; The paper declared bankruptcy on July 21, 2023. In a fitting final insult, the court filing listed more than $116,000 in company assets — an implausibly low valuation — as it was revealed McCaw had previously shifted the real estate property of the newspaper’s historic De la Guerra Plaza headquarters and Goleta printing plant into private LLCs under her control<p>This is also a very standard play in the private equity field. The property (which is usually what they really wanted) is forked off to a different entity, and then that entity charges rent back to the original corp.<p>This is how they kill off assisted living homes. They don&#x27;t bother with cost-cutting; they just keep jacking the &quot;rent&quot; the property-owning corp charges the assisted living facility entity. In desperation to keep the home for residents, the staff cut every cost they can. Cracks in care quickly appear, everyone who can leave does which means lots of lost cash flow and expenses split among fewer residents...at some point there&#x27;s just no more squeezing possible, the corp misses a rent payment...and that&#x27;s that.<p>It&#x27;s also the classic plot for many stories; gang&#x2F;army strong-arms a village and keeps asking for larger and larger takes of the village&#x27;s crops, eventually leading to the villagers starving, etc.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lotsofpulp</author><text>&gt; The property (which is usually what they really wanted) is forked off to a different entity, and then that entity charges rent back to the original corp.<p>The IRS treats the owner’s basis in an entity differently based on being a business or passive activity. Included in basis for a passive investment is both recourse and nonrecourse debt, while the basis in a business such as a newspaper takes into account the recourse debt.<p>If the business and passive activity are not separated, then if the owners refinance the asset with non recourse debt and distribute additional proceeds, it is a capital gain since the non recourse debt does not increase each partner’s basis.<p>However, if you separate the business activity and passive activity, then the partners can include all the non recourse debt in their basis, and any distribution from refinancing would not be taxable.<p>This is why you typically want your real estate to be a separate entity collecting rent from the entity operating the business.</text></comment> | <story><title>Santa Barbara's collective memory, sold for kindling</title><url>https://www.independent.com/2024/03/29/santa-barbaras-collective-memory-sold-for-kindling/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>KennyBlanken</author><text>&gt; The paper declared bankruptcy on July 21, 2023. In a fitting final insult, the court filing listed more than $116,000 in company assets — an implausibly low valuation — as it was revealed McCaw had previously shifted the real estate property of the newspaper’s historic De la Guerra Plaza headquarters and Goleta printing plant into private LLCs under her control<p>This is also a very standard play in the private equity field. The property (which is usually what they really wanted) is forked off to a different entity, and then that entity charges rent back to the original corp.<p>This is how they kill off assisted living homes. They don&#x27;t bother with cost-cutting; they just keep jacking the &quot;rent&quot; the property-owning corp charges the assisted living facility entity. In desperation to keep the home for residents, the staff cut every cost they can. Cracks in care quickly appear, everyone who can leave does which means lots of lost cash flow and expenses split among fewer residents...at some point there&#x27;s just no more squeezing possible, the corp misses a rent payment...and that&#x27;s that.<p>It&#x27;s also the classic plot for many stories; gang&#x2F;army strong-arms a village and keeps asking for larger and larger takes of the village&#x27;s crops, eventually leading to the villagers starving, etc.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>moomoo11</author><text>Yikes man do MBA types and PE just wake up and think of evil fucked up ways to make money?<p>My dad works at a company run by PE monkeys who are some of the most evil mfs. My dad is a smart guy but he’s an immigrant and he says he can think but he can’t talk. It’s unfortunate but it pisses me off how badly they treat him and others.</text></comment> |
29,150,763 | 29,151,070 | 1 | 2 | 29,149,961 | train | <story><title>The benefits of staying off social media</title><url>https://durmonski.com/life-advice/benefits-of-staying-off-social-media/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>croutonwagon</author><text>This may not be terribly popular, and its admittedly just conjecture, but I&#x27;m of the opinion that its less about the quantity of social media, and more how one interacts with it and even more so consumes it.<p>Some platforms are clearly more toxic than others, though I&#x27;m increasingly of the opinion that they are all pretty toxic, just different flavors of &quot;world outlooks&quot; to choose from.<p>I feel that those that actively participate (commenting, posting, responding, reacting) are more affected and more caught in the feedback loop. Those that more or less passively read these platforms, rarely interact, and largely work to keep &quot;perspective&quot; seem to have less of a tough time on it and allow it to impact their outlooks and moods less.<p>Those that tend to interact more seem to get caught in a sort of feedback loop. measured&#x2F;Nuanced&#x2F;Moderate or considerate takes are generally frowned upon on most of the major platforms these days. Outrage and simplistic viewpoints reign supreme, and most will bury the rest, forcing even those with moderate stances to either &quot;consider a side&quot; when continuing or just outright not partake. And all of these seem to be, relatively speaking, vocal minorities.<p>There are plenty of people that consume stuff and just dont have anything useful to say, or just dont have the energy to say it and defend it etc. Of course this seems to depend on the platform as well, for example I would never post this take on reddit....<p>With that said, I go agree generally, that these are toxic and create unbalanced viewpoints and world views. As Dave Chappelle said, &quot;twitter isnt real&quot;, and to an effect that true. Twitter, reddit, youtube, facebook, dont necessarily pan out to the larger population&#x27;s opinion as a whole, at least where its measured (such as in politics and polling)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>88913527</author><text>I concur with your view. After taking a long break from social media, it becomes obvious what the issues are. Look at these and suggested posts for people wealthier, fitter, and presumably happier than myself. For some people, incessant exposure to that content is toxic. It makes me feel behind in life, and I feel better without constantly viewing it. When you doomscroll, it absolutely produces a positive feedback cycle and gets worse. And this cycle applies not to just the aforementioned Instafit-type content, it applies to politics, it applies everywhere. I had to stop reading &#x2F;r&#x2F;FatFIRE, but &#x2F;r&#x2F;financialindependence is fine.</text></comment> | <story><title>The benefits of staying off social media</title><url>https://durmonski.com/life-advice/benefits-of-staying-off-social-media/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>croutonwagon</author><text>This may not be terribly popular, and its admittedly just conjecture, but I&#x27;m of the opinion that its less about the quantity of social media, and more how one interacts with it and even more so consumes it.<p>Some platforms are clearly more toxic than others, though I&#x27;m increasingly of the opinion that they are all pretty toxic, just different flavors of &quot;world outlooks&quot; to choose from.<p>I feel that those that actively participate (commenting, posting, responding, reacting) are more affected and more caught in the feedback loop. Those that more or less passively read these platforms, rarely interact, and largely work to keep &quot;perspective&quot; seem to have less of a tough time on it and allow it to impact their outlooks and moods less.<p>Those that tend to interact more seem to get caught in a sort of feedback loop. measured&#x2F;Nuanced&#x2F;Moderate or considerate takes are generally frowned upon on most of the major platforms these days. Outrage and simplistic viewpoints reign supreme, and most will bury the rest, forcing even those with moderate stances to either &quot;consider a side&quot; when continuing or just outright not partake. And all of these seem to be, relatively speaking, vocal minorities.<p>There are plenty of people that consume stuff and just dont have anything useful to say, or just dont have the energy to say it and defend it etc. Of course this seems to depend on the platform as well, for example I would never post this take on reddit....<p>With that said, I go agree generally, that these are toxic and create unbalanced viewpoints and world views. As Dave Chappelle said, &quot;twitter isnt real&quot;, and to an effect that true. Twitter, reddit, youtube, facebook, dont necessarily pan out to the larger population&#x27;s opinion as a whole, at least where its measured (such as in politics and polling)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Sohcahtoa82</author><text>&gt; This may not be terribly popular, and its admittedly just conjecture, but I&#x27;m of the opinion that its less about the quantity of social media, and more how one interacts with it and even more so consumes it.<p>I feel the same way.<p>Facebook is a great way to keep up with what friends are doing. When I adopted a kitten, it was the perfect place to show pictures to all my friends.<p>The problem is, &quot;keeping up with your friends&quot; turns into living vicariously through them. This type of social media is just a highlight reel of your friends, and some people have a hard time internalizing that.<p>Personally, I&#x27;m in a great position in my life, so I don&#x27;t really live through other people&#x27;s posts.<p>I don&#x27;t use Instagram <i>at all</i>. On Twitter, I follow a bunch of people in the InfoSec world and a couple politicians, and I don&#x27;t read replies to the political posts, half of which are probably bots anyways[0].<p>I keep my Facebook friends list relatively slim. I deleted and blocked my racist uncle. Everyone one of my friends, I can tell you exactly how I know them. I don&#x27;t accept random requests. I don&#x27;t follow political pages. I&#x27;m in a few groups, but they&#x27;re well-moderated.<p>[0] I wish I could use a regex as a block list. &quot;[A-Za-z]{4,}[0-9]{4,}&quot; would probably block 90% of bots.</text></comment> |
9,990,148 | 9,989,091 | 1 | 2 | 9,987,606 | train | <story><title>Breaking Smart</title><url>http://breakingsmart.com/season-1/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vezzy-fnord</author><text>This is a very syncretic fusion between computing, dialectical materialism, entrepreneurial laissez-faire idealism and a bombastic techno-optimism.<p>Unsurprisingly, it harbors plenty of confusion.<p>&quot;Towards a Mass Flourishing&quot; makes the outrageous claim that the hacker ethos is best embodied in Silicon Valley. In reality, SV is one of the most detached from the MIT hacker ethos, instead having its own entrepreneurial hacker culture that is markedly distinct.<p>The &quot;Purists versus Pragmatists&quot; essay romanticizes the release of Mosaic and gives little credit at all to Ted Nelson&#x27;s ideas, who is shoved aside as a purist crank. It&#x27;s a false dichotomy through and through.<p>&quot;Agility and Illegibility&quot; again romanticizes widespread access to personal computers as some entrepreneurial Randian vision, that of Bill Gates specifically.<p>The &quot;Rough Consensus and Maximal Interestingness&quot; essay misquotes Knuth and incorrectly attaches philosophical meanings to technical terms like dynamic binding and lazy evaluation. It further espouses the &quot;direction of maximal interestingness&quot; and grand visions in the post-dot com bust era, when in fact systems software research is becoming increasingly conservative compared to as recent as the 90s.<p>&quot;Running Code and Perpetual Beta&quot; presents the dogmas of &quot;release early, release often&quot; and constant chaotic flux in software as a natural result of great ideas, as opposed to being the result of a cascade of attention-deficit teenagers. Note that fault tolerance, stability and security are not mentioned <i>once</i>.<p>&quot;Software as Subversion&quot; equivocates &quot;forking&quot; as being a Git terminology that somehow reclaimed its negative stigma, when it is purely a GitHub redefinition. The author makes no distinction between a clone and a fork. Also a misrepresentation of OS&#x2F;2&#x27;s mismanagement to argue in favor of &quot;worse is better&quot; (ignoring all other great systems besides OS&#x2F;2) and babble about how blockchains are pixie dust.<p>&quot;The Principle of Generative Pluralism&quot; sets up the false dichotomies of hardware-centric&#x2F;software-centric and car-centric&#x2F;smartphone-centric. I suppose it somewhat reflects the end user application programmer&#x27;s understanding of hardware.<p>&quot;A Tale of Two Computers&quot; prematurely sets up mainframes as obsolete compared to distributed networked computers (they are not exclusive) and makes the error of ascribing a low-level property to an ephemeral, unimportant abstraction - its marvel at the hashtag when the core idea of networking has enabled the same for much longer, and will continue to.<p>&quot;The Immortality of Bits&quot; is one of the worst, and makes this claim: &quot;Surprisingly, as a consequence of software eating the technology industry itself, the specifics of the hardware are not important in this evolution. Outside of the most demanding applications, data, code, and networking are all largely hardware-agnostic today.&quot; This reeks of an ignorant programmer, oblivious as to how just how much hardware design decisions control them and shape their view. In fact, this is a very <i>dangerous</i> view to propagate. Our hardware is in desperate need of being upgraded to handle things like capability-based addressing, high-level assembly and thread-level over instruction-level parallelism. This stupid &quot;hardware doesn&#x27;t matter&quot; thinking will delay it. The essay also wrongly thinks containerization is a form of hardware virtualization. It further says the &quot;sharing economy&quot; will usurp everything, which is ridiculous.<p>&quot;Tinkering versus Goals&quot; again sets up tinkering for the sake of it as leading to disruption and innovation, and not churn and CADT.<p>The &quot;Free as in Beer, and as in Speech&quot; essay clumsily and classically gets the chronology and values of open source and free software wrong. Moreover, the footnote demonstrates a profound bias for the &quot;open source&quot; ideal of pragmatism. This is in spite of the fact that many of the consequentialist technical arguments for OSS like the &quot;many eyes make all bugs shallow&quot; argument have proven to be flawed, whereas free software making no claims of technical superiority and using ethical arguments has a much stronger, if less popular case.<p>----<p>Overall, I do not recommend this.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>enraged_camel</author><text>There&#x27;s something about the HN users that makes them enjoy taking a shit on other people&#x27;s work without including positive or at least constructive feedback.<p>I&#x27;ve been a member for almost four years and I still haven&#x27;t figured out what it is, but it makes me shake my head every time.</text></comment> | <story><title>Breaking Smart</title><url>http://breakingsmart.com/season-1/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vezzy-fnord</author><text>This is a very syncretic fusion between computing, dialectical materialism, entrepreneurial laissez-faire idealism and a bombastic techno-optimism.<p>Unsurprisingly, it harbors plenty of confusion.<p>&quot;Towards a Mass Flourishing&quot; makes the outrageous claim that the hacker ethos is best embodied in Silicon Valley. In reality, SV is one of the most detached from the MIT hacker ethos, instead having its own entrepreneurial hacker culture that is markedly distinct.<p>The &quot;Purists versus Pragmatists&quot; essay romanticizes the release of Mosaic and gives little credit at all to Ted Nelson&#x27;s ideas, who is shoved aside as a purist crank. It&#x27;s a false dichotomy through and through.<p>&quot;Agility and Illegibility&quot; again romanticizes widespread access to personal computers as some entrepreneurial Randian vision, that of Bill Gates specifically.<p>The &quot;Rough Consensus and Maximal Interestingness&quot; essay misquotes Knuth and incorrectly attaches philosophical meanings to technical terms like dynamic binding and lazy evaluation. It further espouses the &quot;direction of maximal interestingness&quot; and grand visions in the post-dot com bust era, when in fact systems software research is becoming increasingly conservative compared to as recent as the 90s.<p>&quot;Running Code and Perpetual Beta&quot; presents the dogmas of &quot;release early, release often&quot; and constant chaotic flux in software as a natural result of great ideas, as opposed to being the result of a cascade of attention-deficit teenagers. Note that fault tolerance, stability and security are not mentioned <i>once</i>.<p>&quot;Software as Subversion&quot; equivocates &quot;forking&quot; as being a Git terminology that somehow reclaimed its negative stigma, when it is purely a GitHub redefinition. The author makes no distinction between a clone and a fork. Also a misrepresentation of OS&#x2F;2&#x27;s mismanagement to argue in favor of &quot;worse is better&quot; (ignoring all other great systems besides OS&#x2F;2) and babble about how blockchains are pixie dust.<p>&quot;The Principle of Generative Pluralism&quot; sets up the false dichotomies of hardware-centric&#x2F;software-centric and car-centric&#x2F;smartphone-centric. I suppose it somewhat reflects the end user application programmer&#x27;s understanding of hardware.<p>&quot;A Tale of Two Computers&quot; prematurely sets up mainframes as obsolete compared to distributed networked computers (they are not exclusive) and makes the error of ascribing a low-level property to an ephemeral, unimportant abstraction - its marvel at the hashtag when the core idea of networking has enabled the same for much longer, and will continue to.<p>&quot;The Immortality of Bits&quot; is one of the worst, and makes this claim: &quot;Surprisingly, as a consequence of software eating the technology industry itself, the specifics of the hardware are not important in this evolution. Outside of the most demanding applications, data, code, and networking are all largely hardware-agnostic today.&quot; This reeks of an ignorant programmer, oblivious as to how just how much hardware design decisions control them and shape their view. In fact, this is a very <i>dangerous</i> view to propagate. Our hardware is in desperate need of being upgraded to handle things like capability-based addressing, high-level assembly and thread-level over instruction-level parallelism. This stupid &quot;hardware doesn&#x27;t matter&quot; thinking will delay it. The essay also wrongly thinks containerization is a form of hardware virtualization. It further says the &quot;sharing economy&quot; will usurp everything, which is ridiculous.<p>&quot;Tinkering versus Goals&quot; again sets up tinkering for the sake of it as leading to disruption and innovation, and not churn and CADT.<p>The &quot;Free as in Beer, and as in Speech&quot; essay clumsily and classically gets the chronology and values of open source and free software wrong. Moreover, the footnote demonstrates a profound bias for the &quot;open source&quot; ideal of pragmatism. This is in spite of the fact that many of the consequentialist technical arguments for OSS like the &quot;many eyes make all bugs shallow&quot; argument have proven to be flawed, whereas free software making no claims of technical superiority and using ethical arguments has a much stronger, if less popular case.<p>----<p>Overall, I do not recommend this.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ekianjo</author><text>They describe Richard Stallman as &quot;pioneer of the open source movement&quot;.<p>Seriously. Facepalm.<p>RMS would not be happy to read this.</text></comment> |
12,841,152 | 12,841,163 | 1 | 3 | 12,840,555 | train | <story><title>No One Saw Tesla’s Solar Roof Coming</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-31/no-one-saw-tesla-s-solar-roof-coming</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wojcech</author><text>I&#x27;m sure i&#x27;m not the only one who feels like this is possibly the iphone moment of Solarcity&#x2F;Tesla: an old-ish idea, made <i>sexy</i> and tasty to consumers, together with technology reaching a tipping point(and also Musk <i>again</i> finding a way to maximally exploit government subsidies for clean tech.)<p>The tesla car itself could count as well, but felt less &quot;design driven&quot; imo. If this fails, everyone will call it obviously due to bad tech. If it succeeds, I&#x27;d say it was because the tech was barely sufficient to keep up with the excellent luster.<p>On a side note, I wonder whether or not the heavy government subsidies will be forgotten in the lore of clean tech, just like silicon valley seems to have forgotten the complete and utter reliance on government funding in it&#x27;s infancy(or possibly even today)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>aerovistae</author><text>Another side note: it always annoys me when people insinuate that Musk using government funds is a bad thing.<p>The government is literally just US....it&#x27;s our money and a collection of individuals from among us who we&#x27;ve appointed to handle the general administration of us and the space we take up.<p>Why should American entrepreneurs, particularly ones doing such an outstanding job of moving technology in a positive direction, not get our financial support (a.k.a. the government&#x27;s support)?<p>Who exactly is losing out when we support our own business initiatives with our own money?</text></comment> | <story><title>No One Saw Tesla’s Solar Roof Coming</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-31/no-one-saw-tesla-s-solar-roof-coming</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wojcech</author><text>I&#x27;m sure i&#x27;m not the only one who feels like this is possibly the iphone moment of Solarcity&#x2F;Tesla: an old-ish idea, made <i>sexy</i> and tasty to consumers, together with technology reaching a tipping point(and also Musk <i>again</i> finding a way to maximally exploit government subsidies for clean tech.)<p>The tesla car itself could count as well, but felt less &quot;design driven&quot; imo. If this fails, everyone will call it obviously due to bad tech. If it succeeds, I&#x27;d say it was because the tech was barely sufficient to keep up with the excellent luster.<p>On a side note, I wonder whether or not the heavy government subsidies will be forgotten in the lore of clean tech, just like silicon valley seems to have forgotten the complete and utter reliance on government funding in it&#x27;s infancy(or possibly even today)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>amelius</author><text>&gt; I&#x27;m sure i&#x27;m not the only one who feels like this is possibly the iphone moment of Solarcity&#x2F;Tesla: an old-ish idea, made sexy and tasty to consumers, together with technology reaching a tipping point<p>Except one ingredient is missing: most people cannot afford one, even if they tried really hard.</text></comment> |
14,416,152 | 14,415,644 | 1 | 2 | 14,415,265 | train | <story><title>What I Learned When Facebook Disabled My Account (2012)</title><url>http://www.optimizationtoday.com/social-media/what-i-learned-when-facebook-disabled-my-account/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Jaruzel</author><text>I know the article is old, but the author showed a severe lack of common sense.<p>Facebook is NOT a backup. If you only keep stuff in your Facebook account, then it is as &#x27;at risk&#x27; as if you only kept on the hard-drive of your ageing laptop that you bought on discount in Walmart&#x2F;ASDA ten years ago.<p>This oft quoted adage also applies: &#x27;If you are not paying for the product, then you are the product&#x27;. The author seemed to think that Facebook owe him for some reason, and that he is fully justified&#x2F;entitled in begging for his account back. Facebook is a private company who most of the time let the general public mingle in the lobby of its HQ[1]. As their lobby is still their property, they can refuse entry <i>whenever they like</i>.<p>Something needs to be done about Facebook&#x27;s near dominance of the Social Media space. If we let this run unchecked for much longer, there won&#x27;t be an &#x27;internet&#x27; - just millions of stale, abandoned websites all simply redirecting you to their respective Facebook Pages instead. It also wouldn&#x27;t surprise me if at some point, new phones will be released where the browser app is no longer installed by default, but the Facebook app is. Even if this happened today, most non-technical users wouldn&#x27;t even notice.<p>---<p>[1] Because the lobby is full of adverts from Facebook&#x27;s business partners and Facebook gets a nice cut if you buy something being advertised.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>flexie</author><text>Law is full of regulations and court precedents that restrict what people can do to their private property. Here on HN people seem to think that private property is like a subclass in python where the owner is free to define whatever method or property he wants and overwrite rules inherited from the society superclass. It&#x27;s not.<p>Landlords cannot just evict renters based on the landlord&#x27;s own terms of service, not even a renter&#x27;s non-paying children or girlfriend with whom the landlord didn&#x27;t contract, and not even the renter himself although the stopped paying: The landlord needs to follow the rules of society, go through a bailiff&#x27;s court or follow similar strict procedures defined in society to ensure that mandatory law is followed.<p>Not everybody can set up a medical clinic on their private property, even if they offer their services for free.<p>TV stations in many European countries can&#x27;t show hidden ads in programmes and cannot show ads for kids for certain products. Even though the viewers didn&#x27;t pay. Even though they are free not to watch.<p>In most places landowners cannot freely decide to do what they want with their land, like building a factory, without taking into consideration zoning laws and without hearing the neighbors or wider community as well.<p>For millennia, what we today call criminal laws, have applied on private property as well. You can&#x27;t just hit somebody in the face because they are in your house and the terms on the door clearly says that you can. Think that&#x27;s ridiculous? Well, it used to be that restaurants in America could chose to serve whites only. It was the choice of the property owner. Until it wasn&#x27;t. Courts and congress decided that such practices were so despicable that the general interest of non-discrimination outweighed the interest in business owners getting to decide for themselves. Same with businesses hiring men only. Today most of us regard it as obvious that non discrimination laws trump the interest of private owners. A few decades ago, most people thought the owner could choose freely whom to hire.<p>I hope we will start regulating the new advertising industry comprised of social networks and search engines more tightly.</text></comment> | <story><title>What I Learned When Facebook Disabled My Account (2012)</title><url>http://www.optimizationtoday.com/social-media/what-i-learned-when-facebook-disabled-my-account/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Jaruzel</author><text>I know the article is old, but the author showed a severe lack of common sense.<p>Facebook is NOT a backup. If you only keep stuff in your Facebook account, then it is as &#x27;at risk&#x27; as if you only kept on the hard-drive of your ageing laptop that you bought on discount in Walmart&#x2F;ASDA ten years ago.<p>This oft quoted adage also applies: &#x27;If you are not paying for the product, then you are the product&#x27;. The author seemed to think that Facebook owe him for some reason, and that he is fully justified&#x2F;entitled in begging for his account back. Facebook is a private company who most of the time let the general public mingle in the lobby of its HQ[1]. As their lobby is still their property, they can refuse entry <i>whenever they like</i>.<p>Something needs to be done about Facebook&#x27;s near dominance of the Social Media space. If we let this run unchecked for much longer, there won&#x27;t be an &#x27;internet&#x27; - just millions of stale, abandoned websites all simply redirecting you to their respective Facebook Pages instead. It also wouldn&#x27;t surprise me if at some point, new phones will be released where the browser app is no longer installed by default, but the Facebook app is. Even if this happened today, most non-technical users wouldn&#x27;t even notice.<p>---<p>[1] Because the lobby is full of adverts from Facebook&#x27;s business partners and Facebook gets a nice cut if you buy something being advertised.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gizmo686</author><text>There is another option. Consider sites like Facebook to be public accommodations, and create new laws regulating acceptable behavior of digital public accommodations.<p>Facebook is a significant part of our society. It is not clear why it should be free democratic oversight.</text></comment> |
14,574,987 | 14,574,989 | 1 | 2 | 14,573,996 | train | <story><title>Tesla Autopilot</title><url>https://www.tesla.com/autopilot</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>willvarfar</author><text>&gt; It terrifies me to think of relying on image recognition software to correctly determine (... snip)<p>Do you not drive using only your eyes? If you are not terrified of the sensors, then software? Turing&#x27;s central belief was that the human brain was &#x27;just&#x27; a computer.<p>Regards doing things like embedding reflectors in roads and other ways to simplify lane holding, completely agree. But we can&#x27;t forego the cameras etc that deal with situations that don&#x27;t contain reflectors.</text></item><item><author>the_rosentotter</author><text>It terrifies me to think of relying on image recognition software to correctly determine an upcoming crossing road (with cars zipping across) so it can properly slow down, rather than get broadsided at full speed. Or a number of other life-and-death situations (which are common during driving). It just seems fragile (what if the &#x27;vision&#x27; is somehow impaired, f.ex. blinded by sunlight, or the road markings are wrong or obscured) when the failure mode is so catastrophic.<p>I suppose once statistics start to prove that these cars are safer than human-driven ones, we can chalk it up to an irrational fear, but for now it seems crazy to me to put my life in the hands of an AI, when a mistake means that I die or kill someone, rather than play the wrong song on Spotify.<p>I don&#x27;t fully understand why more effort is not put into a hardware solution, where roads are simply marked up for self-driving vehicles, e.g. magnets lining the lanes or something like that. Of course a more expensive solution, but seems like it would make the vehicles themselves a whole lot simpler and safer. Begin with inner cities, where the area is limited and traffic is most complex.</text></item><item><author>Animats</author><text>Watch this at 0.25x speed or slower to see what&#x27;s going on. This is a carefully chosen environment. Every place it drives has very clear highway centerline markings. It seems to be highly dependent on those for guidance. Sometimes it can&#x27;t quite identify the road edge, but the centerline provides a position reference.<p>The inputs seem to be road line recognition, optical flow for the road, and solid object recognition, all vision-driven. Object recognition is limited. It doesn&#x27;t recognize traffic cones as obstacles, either on the road centerline or on the road edge. Nor does it seem to be aware of guard rails or bridge railings just outside the road edge. It probably can&#x27;t drive around an obstacle; we never see it do that in the video.<p>This looks like lane following plus smart cruise control plus GPS-based route guidance. That&#x27;s nice, but it&#x27;s not good enough that you can go to sleep while it&#x27;s driving.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>TeMPOraL</author><text>The thing is, human &quot;machine vision&quot; has graceful failure modes. You don&#x27;t switch from seeing cars to seeing nothing to seeing an elephant just because the input got a little noisy. The same cannot be said about current ML demonstrations - because they operate on <i>just</i> vision. Humans continuously reconcile visual input with their model of the world and with other inputs, to the point of overriding visual data if needed.<p>I suppose you could make ML avoid sharp changes in recognition, but I don&#x27;t trust the current neural-network models to do so reliably.</text></comment> | <story><title>Tesla Autopilot</title><url>https://www.tesla.com/autopilot</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>willvarfar</author><text>&gt; It terrifies me to think of relying on image recognition software to correctly determine (... snip)<p>Do you not drive using only your eyes? If you are not terrified of the sensors, then software? Turing&#x27;s central belief was that the human brain was &#x27;just&#x27; a computer.<p>Regards doing things like embedding reflectors in roads and other ways to simplify lane holding, completely agree. But we can&#x27;t forego the cameras etc that deal with situations that don&#x27;t contain reflectors.</text></item><item><author>the_rosentotter</author><text>It terrifies me to think of relying on image recognition software to correctly determine an upcoming crossing road (with cars zipping across) so it can properly slow down, rather than get broadsided at full speed. Or a number of other life-and-death situations (which are common during driving). It just seems fragile (what if the &#x27;vision&#x27; is somehow impaired, f.ex. blinded by sunlight, or the road markings are wrong or obscured) when the failure mode is so catastrophic.<p>I suppose once statistics start to prove that these cars are safer than human-driven ones, we can chalk it up to an irrational fear, but for now it seems crazy to me to put my life in the hands of an AI, when a mistake means that I die or kill someone, rather than play the wrong song on Spotify.<p>I don&#x27;t fully understand why more effort is not put into a hardware solution, where roads are simply marked up for self-driving vehicles, e.g. magnets lining the lanes or something like that. Of course a more expensive solution, but seems like it would make the vehicles themselves a whole lot simpler and safer. Begin with inner cities, where the area is limited and traffic is most complex.</text></item><item><author>Animats</author><text>Watch this at 0.25x speed or slower to see what&#x27;s going on. This is a carefully chosen environment. Every place it drives has very clear highway centerline markings. It seems to be highly dependent on those for guidance. Sometimes it can&#x27;t quite identify the road edge, but the centerline provides a position reference.<p>The inputs seem to be road line recognition, optical flow for the road, and solid object recognition, all vision-driven. Object recognition is limited. It doesn&#x27;t recognize traffic cones as obstacles, either on the road centerline or on the road edge. Nor does it seem to be aware of guard rails or bridge railings just outside the road edge. It probably can&#x27;t drive around an obstacle; we never see it do that in the video.<p>This looks like lane following plus smart cruise control plus GPS-based route guidance. That&#x27;s nice, but it&#x27;s not good enough that you can go to sleep while it&#x27;s driving.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Cybiote</author><text>We don&#x27;t drive with just our eyes. We fuse vision, sound, touch and proprioception. We self-locate easily. Most important though, is we do sophisticated visual, theory of mind and physics based inference.<p>If you take the example of Chess, humans and machines play very different styles. Computers replace predictive understanding with excellent memory and fast search.<p>Similarly for cars, we want to replace the lack of a powerful predictive model with some compensatory mechanism, such as sophisticated sensors. The problem is that, even with faster reaction times, better sensors and fuller awareness, these cars&#x27; compensatory abilities against a lack of powerful predictive models are still far from sufficient.<p>At this point in time, a car with more sensors and failsafes to augment the human against collision is safer than a self-driving car that depends on a lack of lapses of attention. That depends on proper behavior in the customer. Even dividing tasks, with the human controlling the steering (but allowing the car to takeover when highly certain of danger) and the car controlling acceleration would be safer. This set up acknowledges the human propensity to mind wander when attention is not engaged.<p>Until self-driving cars no longer require human rescue in difficult situations, one can&#x27;t rightly say that self-driving software are better drivers than humans.</text></comment> |
2,592,464 | 2,591,516 | 1 | 3 | 2,591,367 | train | <story><title>The problem is we don't understand the problem</title><url>http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/the-wrong-problem/#</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ChuckMcM</author><text>Its axiomatic that every proposal should start with a statement of the problem.<p>MacCready's insight was that building a human-powered aircraft was 'easy' if you knew how to build such a craft. (And in fact today you can take his work and build your own Gossamer creation) So the challenge was this was a search for a new airplane design methodology to explore the airplane design space, and that this 'meta' problem had a much different form of solution than the stated problem of 'build an airplane that does this.'<p>The applicable insight for entrepreneurs is that if someone thinks solving problem 'x' in a cost effective (i.e. monetizable way) is "impossible", then the search is for new and different ways to solve 'x' which are more efficient than the well known ways. Too meta I know, sorry.</text></comment> | <story><title>The problem is we don't understand the problem</title><url>http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/the-wrong-problem/#</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>rvkennedy</author><text>This article summarizes my approach to just about every technical challenge I've encountered since school. In grad school in particular, I could never get my head around the approach of uploading code to a Unix server and running it blind overnight. Instead, I would write it in Windows, but with a graphical display of results coming out in minutes rather than hours. The errors would then stand out glaringly. This is not to argue Windows v Unix as of course you can do it either way on both platforms. But calculations you can see working are priceless.</text></comment> |
40,812,996 | 40,812,969 | 1 | 2 | 40,810,802 | train | <story><title>Gemma 2: Improving Open Language Models at a Practical Size [pdf]</title><url>https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/gemma/gemma-2-report.pdf</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>luke-stanley</author><text>It&#x27;s fairly easy to pay OpenAI or Mistral money to use their API&#x27;s.
Figuring out how Google Cloud Vertex works and how it&#x27;s billed is more complicated. Azure and AWS are similar in how complex they are to use for this.
Could Google Cloud please provide an OpenAI compatible API and service?
I know it&#x27;s a different department. But it&#x27;d make using your models way easier.
It often feels like Google Cloud has no UX or end-user testing done on it at all (not true for aistudio.google.com - that is better than before, for sure!).</text></item><item><author>alekandreev</author><text>Hello (again) from the Gemma team! We are quite excited to push this release out and happy to answer any questions!<p>Opinions are our own and not of Google DeepMind.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Deathmax</author><text>Gemini models on Vertex AI can be called via a preview OpenAI-compatible endpoint [1], but shoving it into existing tooling where you don&#x27;t have programmatic control over the API key and is long lived is non-trivial because GCP uses short lived access tokens (and long-lived ones are not great security-wise).<p>Billing for the Gemini models (on Vertex AI, the Generative Language AI variant still charges by tokens) I would argue is simpler than every other provider, simply because you&#x27;re charged by characters&#x2F;image&#x2F;video-second&#x2F;audio-second and don&#x27;t need to run a tokenizer (if it&#x27;s even available <i>cough</i> Claude 3 and Gemini) and having to figure out what the chat template is to calculate the token cost per message [2] or figure out how to calculate tokens for an image [3] to get cost estimates before actually submitting the request and getting usage info back.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cloud.google.com&#x2F;vertex-ai&#x2F;generative-ai&#x2F;docs&#x2F;multimodal&#x2F;call-gemini-using-openai-library" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cloud.google.com&#x2F;vertex-ai&#x2F;generative-ai&#x2F;docs&#x2F;multim...</a><p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;platform.openai.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;guides&#x2F;text-generation&#x2F;managing-tokens" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;platform.openai.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;guides&#x2F;text-generation&#x2F;mana...</a><p>[3]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;platform.openai.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;guides&#x2F;vision&#x2F;calculating-costs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;platform.openai.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;guides&#x2F;vision&#x2F;calculating-c...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Gemma 2: Improving Open Language Models at a Practical Size [pdf]</title><url>https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/gemma/gemma-2-report.pdf</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>luke-stanley</author><text>It&#x27;s fairly easy to pay OpenAI or Mistral money to use their API&#x27;s.
Figuring out how Google Cloud Vertex works and how it&#x27;s billed is more complicated. Azure and AWS are similar in how complex they are to use for this.
Could Google Cloud please provide an OpenAI compatible API and service?
I know it&#x27;s a different department. But it&#x27;d make using your models way easier.
It often feels like Google Cloud has no UX or end-user testing done on it at all (not true for aistudio.google.com - that is better than before, for sure!).</text></item><item><author>alekandreev</author><text>Hello (again) from the Gemma team! We are quite excited to push this release out and happy to answer any questions!<p>Opinions are our own and not of Google DeepMind.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ankeshanand</author><text>If you&#x27;re an individual developer and not an enterprise, just go straight to Google AIStudio or GeminiAPI instead: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aistudio.google.com&#x2F;app&#x2F;apikey" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aistudio.google.com&#x2F;app&#x2F;apikey</a>. It&#x27;s dead simple getting an API key and calling with a rest client.</text></comment> |
9,464,392 | 9,464,144 | 1 | 2 | 9,463,693 | train | <story><title>Open Sourcing Visual Studio’s GDB/LLDB Debug Engine</title><url>http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vcblog/archive/2015/04/29/open-sourcing-visual-studio-s-gdb-lldb-debug-engine.aspx</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>solutionyogi</author><text>I personally don&#x27;t use debugger that much but whenever I have used it, I have always been amazed at VS&#x27;s debugger capability. I don&#x27;t think I am exaggerating when I say that VS has the best debugger across all languages&#x2F;platforms. I think this is a GREAT news for all the developers.</text></comment> | <story><title>Open Sourcing Visual Studio’s GDB/LLDB Debug Engine</title><url>http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vcblog/archive/2015/04/29/open-sourcing-visual-studio-s-gdb-lldb-debug-engine.aspx</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>bithush</author><text>I am really loving this new Microsoft. What I would <i>love</i> would be for Microsoft to offer resources to get Clang&#x2F;LLVM working on Windows as well as MSVC so it can be a first class compiler in VS.</text></comment> |
28,851,974 | 28,851,773 | 1 | 2 | 28,851,510 | train | <story><title>Windows 11’s first update makes AMD CPU performance even worse</title><url>https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/13/22723998/windows-11-update-amd-ryzen-cpu-performance-worse</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>_l4jh</author><text>I honestly don&#x27;t understand Microsoft&#x27;s plan with Windows 11.<p>6 years ago, with the release of Windows 10, it was all about &quot;this is the last version of Windows!&quot; and they went with the rolling release model. A little strange but they stuck with it for <i>6 years</i> until suddenly this summer they announce Windows 11 and they went <i>hard</i> talking up how it was a huge change to Windows but in reality it isn&#x27;t. At all.<p>It has a new visual layer sure but the applications are still the old Windows 10 (and so really the old Windows XP?) ones with that new look. They introduced a new store and support for additional stores such as the Amazon Android app store.<p>I guess what I am saying is I don&#x27;t get <i>why now</i> they are calling it Windows 11? They could have just carried on calling it Windows 10. They have introduced big UI and feature changes in previous Windows 10 updates (perhaps not quite as big as the new taskbar and Explorer changes).<p>It is a free upgrade for Windows 10 license holders (consumer anyway, not sure how it works for Enterprise?).<p>It just all feels so rushed and messy and the end product is just not very good as we can clearly see here.<p>I don&#x27;t want to hate on Windows, after all they have introduced some really interesting new things since Windows 10 initial release such as WSL. It is just there didn&#x27;t appear to be a want or need for a Windows 11 and this rushed mess makes it look like Microsoft didn&#x27;t (doesn&#x27;t?) know what it is doing with Windows either. Shrug.</text></comment> | <story><title>Windows 11’s first update makes AMD CPU performance even worse</title><url>https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/13/22723998/windows-11-update-amd-ryzen-cpu-performance-worse</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Someone1234</author><text>Well of course, that makes sense Windows 11 is an unfinished beta product, right? Wait, they went RTM? Four months after the first public insider builds? Without fixing most of the bugs&#x2F;issues&#x2F;complaints?<p>By the way, this comment is posted from Windows 11. Trust me when I tell you that this isn&#x27;t ready for most of the general public. It is still for early adopters willing to suck up problems. I&#x27;d wait until March 2022 or more, and then see where it is at.<p>While they&#x27;ve made some positive moves forward UI wise, this still definitely feels like an insider build. I&#x27;ve had the DWM crash a few of times, requiring a hard reboot twice (even CTRL+ALT+Del or Win+Ctrl+Shift+B didn&#x27;t work, while my mouse cursor still moved). That&#x27;s more times than Windows 10&#x27;s entire life.<p>Plus it is missing very &quot;101&quot;&#x2F;polish features (e.g. just today I discovered that moving pinned start menu icons between pages was impossible, you have to move it to the start of the second page then delete icons from the first page).</text></comment> |
24,310,290 | 24,309,723 | 1 | 2 | 24,308,588 | train | <story><title>Ethereum Is a Dark Forest</title><url>https://medium.com/@danrobinson/ethereum-is-a-dark-forest-ecc5f0505dff</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pjc50</author><text>As an elaborate real-money PVP system, Etherum is amazing. As a means of doing relatively normal business, being sniped, frontrun, or exploited is hugely off-putting.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>DennisP</author><text>True, but the article was about a situation in which they were retrieving money that was inadvertently available to anyone. That&#x27;s not normal.<p>Any well-written smart contract has protections against front-running. For about a year I audited them for a living, and front-running opportunities are definitely something we looked for.</text></comment> | <story><title>Ethereum Is a Dark Forest</title><url>https://medium.com/@danrobinson/ethereum-is-a-dark-forest-ecc5f0505dff</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pjc50</author><text>As an elaborate real-money PVP system, Etherum is amazing. As a means of doing relatively normal business, being sniped, frontrun, or exploited is hugely off-putting.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>redahs</author><text>In order for money to be both real and useful it should be secured by unencumbered interest in durable real property.<p>The simplest way to circulate commercial paper for daily transactions is the Benjamin Franklin paper money system which involves appointing public loan officers throughout a nation to issue equity loans to anyone in possession of unencumbered interest in durable real property which they are willing to pledge as collateral which the public can auction in the event of non-payment.<p>This way money is placed in circulation so that the interest paid for the first use of legal tender is publicly collected and immediately spent back into the economy and so that the total quantity of money expands dynamically in proportion to the aggregate quantity of physical durable capital.</text></comment> |
41,477,209 | 41,476,799 | 1 | 2 | 41,440,997 | train | <story><title>Dogs can remember names of toys years after not seeing them, study shows</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/science/article/2024/sep/04/dogs-remember-names-toys-years-study-pets-memory</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jumploops</author><text>It always bothers me how little intelligence we assume of and thus ascribe to the animal kingdom.<p>Especially to our mammalian brethren, who have many of the same underlying neurological mechanisms (though in differing quantities).<p>Dogs have co-evolved with humans for thousands of years.<p>Remembering names seems like a useful albeit unsurprising skill, especially when it comes to recognizing&#x2F;avoiding danger.<p>“The bear&#x2F;wolf&#x2F;demon tribe is back!”<p>Will we ever stop looking down from our heavenly pedestal? Can we instead treat at our earthly contemporaries as different but equal?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hdivider</author><text>Every time I encounter resistance to your points here, I feel like an alien among humans.<p>I think it cuts so deep into people&#x27;s psychology, and frequently religion. The very notion that we are not the apex of anything. And that we no longer need to eat other animals to live and be healthy. Too much to bear for many, so it frequently results in low-quality conversation, laden with emotions.<p>The fact remains, however. Non-human animals are not that different from us. Pretty much all mental behavior is represented in the animal kingdom. <i>They</i>, in so many ways, are <i>us</i>. And we are them.<p>Why should it be otherwise, after all? It would be strange to have a quantum jump in mental behavior with humans, and only primitive behavior in all other animals.<p>It&#x27;ll probably take some centuries for humans to see other animals as inherently worthy of respect.</text></comment> | <story><title>Dogs can remember names of toys years after not seeing them, study shows</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/science/article/2024/sep/04/dogs-remember-names-toys-years-study-pets-memory</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jumploops</author><text>It always bothers me how little intelligence we assume of and thus ascribe to the animal kingdom.<p>Especially to our mammalian brethren, who have many of the same underlying neurological mechanisms (though in differing quantities).<p>Dogs have co-evolved with humans for thousands of years.<p>Remembering names seems like a useful albeit unsurprising skill, especially when it comes to recognizing&#x2F;avoiding danger.<p>“The bear&#x2F;wolf&#x2F;demon tribe is back!”<p>Will we ever stop looking down from our heavenly pedestal? Can we instead treat at our earthly contemporaries as different but equal?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>accrual</author><text>I agree, I think there is a lot of intelligence around us, perhaps even in ways we don&#x27;t fully see or imagine. One of the largest organisms on Earth is a mycelium network in Oregon, it&#x27;s nearly 4 square miles in size.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scientificamerican.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;strange-but-true-largest-organism-is-fungus&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scientificamerican.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;strange-but-true-...</a><p>Is it possible this mass of mycelium has some form of intelligence that is difficult for humans to measure? Maybe it &quot;knows&quot; things we can barely conceptualize. What about trees that stand in place for hundreds, or even thousands of years?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.treehugger.com&#x2F;the-worlds-oldest-living-trees-4869356" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.treehugger.com&#x2F;the-worlds-oldest-living-trees-48...</a><p>Perhaps the trees experience time differently due to their slow growth, and they too have &quot;witnessed&quot; many different events in their environment over time, encapsulating them in the rings and structures within themselves.<p>We could write this off as non-sense as trees have no nervous system, but maybe a lack of such a system doesn&#x27;t necessarily preclude some type of intelligence we just don&#x27;t consider &quot;intelligent&quot;.</text></comment> |
24,864,445 | 24,864,584 | 1 | 2 | 24,863,670 | train | <story><title>Sacklers–who made $11B off opioid crisis–to pay $225M in damages</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/10/sacklers-who-made-11-billion-off-opioid-crisis-to-pay-225-million-in-damages/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bananabreakfast</author><text>While you&#x27;re clearly in pain and vindictive for lack of access to effective treatment, putting &quot;crisis&quot; in quotes like it&#x27;s a manufactured epidemic with no real impact is extremely disingenuous.<p>In 2018 ~130 people died every day in the US overdosing on opioids[1]. I&#x27;m sure they&#x27;re effective for you but if people are not responsible enough to be trusted taking them without killing themselves then you might as well be arguing to legalize heroine for treatment as well. It would probably be even more effective.<p>And for the record I do think it probably should be legal for treatment anyway.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.drugabuse.gov&#x2F;drug-topics&#x2F;opioids&#x2F;opioid-overdose-crisis" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.drugabuse.gov&#x2F;drug-topics&#x2F;opioids&#x2F;opioid-overdos...</a></text></item><item><author>BaronVonSteuben</author><text>I know everybody loves to hate on the Sacklers, but my life was dramatically better when I had access to opioids. Because of the &quot;crisis&quot; it has gotten really difficult to get them, even for people who need them. There are days when it&#x27;s difficult to do much more than lie in bed in agony, but nobody beyond a small community of other pain sufferers seems to care.<p>I&#x27;m at least grateful for the few good years I <i>did</i> get thanks to opioids, before they became radioactive. I hope some day we can swing the pendulum back toward compassion a bit.<p>Everybody seems to want politicians and cops (DEA) deciding who should get them and who shouldn&#x27;t. That may be an impossible mindset to change.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bredren</author><text>Just so this doesn’t come off like too radical an idea: legalization of all drugs has been a position of The Economist since 1989. “Legalize, Control, Discourage.”<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.economist.com&#x2F;leaders&#x2F;1989&#x2F;01&#x2F;21&#x2F;hooked-on-just-saying-no" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.economist.com&#x2F;leaders&#x2F;1989&#x2F;01&#x2F;21&#x2F;hooked-on-just-...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Sacklers–who made $11B off opioid crisis–to pay $225M in damages</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/10/sacklers-who-made-11-billion-off-opioid-crisis-to-pay-225-million-in-damages/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bananabreakfast</author><text>While you&#x27;re clearly in pain and vindictive for lack of access to effective treatment, putting &quot;crisis&quot; in quotes like it&#x27;s a manufactured epidemic with no real impact is extremely disingenuous.<p>In 2018 ~130 people died every day in the US overdosing on opioids[1]. I&#x27;m sure they&#x27;re effective for you but if people are not responsible enough to be trusted taking them without killing themselves then you might as well be arguing to legalize heroine for treatment as well. It would probably be even more effective.<p>And for the record I do think it probably should be legal for treatment anyway.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.drugabuse.gov&#x2F;drug-topics&#x2F;opioids&#x2F;opioid-overdose-crisis" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.drugabuse.gov&#x2F;drug-topics&#x2F;opioids&#x2F;opioid-overdos...</a></text></item><item><author>BaronVonSteuben</author><text>I know everybody loves to hate on the Sacklers, but my life was dramatically better when I had access to opioids. Because of the &quot;crisis&quot; it has gotten really difficult to get them, even for people who need them. There are days when it&#x27;s difficult to do much more than lie in bed in agony, but nobody beyond a small community of other pain sufferers seems to care.<p>I&#x27;m at least grateful for the few good years I <i>did</i> get thanks to opioids, before they became radioactive. I hope some day we can swing the pendulum back toward compassion a bit.<p>Everybody seems to want politicians and cops (DEA) deciding who should get them and who shouldn&#x27;t. That may be an impossible mindset to change.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>brandonmenc</author><text>&gt; In 2018 ~130 people died every day in the US overdosing on opioids<p>Alcohol kills literally twice that number of people per day and is a factor in nearly half of all violent crime and is a quarter of a trillion dollar market, and yet we seem to fine with that trade-off even though it has absolutely ZERO therapeutic application.<p>&gt; putting &quot;crisis&quot; in quotes like it&#x27;s a manufactured epidemic<p>The epidemic might not be manufactured, but given the numbers re: alcohol the outrage certainly seems to be. It&#x27;s a moral panic, imo.</text></comment> |
41,725,933 | 41,722,526 | 1 | 3 | 41,721,318 | train | <story><title>The bunkbed conjecture is false</title><url>https://igorpak.wordpress.com/2024/10/01/the-bunkbed-conjecture-is-false/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tsimionescu</author><text>This is an interesting case of a conjecture holding true for small objects but breaking down for huge ones, without specifically adding that size in somehow.<p>Sometimes we tend to have this intuition that if a rule applies to all low numbers, than it must apply to all numbers, that there can&#x27;t be some huge number after which it breaks down (unless of course it explicitly includes that huge number, such as the rule &quot;all numbers are smaller than a billion billion billion&quot;).<p>This is such a powerful intuition, even though it&#x27;s obviously wrong, that rules that break it are even seen as a problem. For example there is the so-called &quot;hierarchy problem&quot; in physics, which states something like &quot;there is no reason why the weak force is so much stronger than gravity&quot;. As if 2 times as strong is somehow fundamentally different than it being 10^24 times as strong from a mathematical perspective. And this has ended up being called a major problem with the standard model, even though it&#x27;s completely normal from a mathematical perspective.</text></comment> | <story><title>The bunkbed conjecture is false</title><url>https://igorpak.wordpress.com/2024/10/01/the-bunkbed-conjecture-is-false/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>andrewflnr</author><text>While I wouldn&#x27;t accept a probabilistic &quot;proof&quot; of a theorem like this, it does seem clear to me that those results are important for directing the focus of research, especially in cases where they go against intuition. Given that most of the math community was barking up the wrong tree, even if these guys only had the probabilistic result, surely that would eventually help someone find the right proof? That&#x27;s at least worth publishing as a letter or something, right?<p>Ed: reflecting on my first sentence, I guess I tend to think of proofs as being at least as important a product of math as the raw truth of a statement. A fact is a fact, but a proof represents (some level of) understanding, and that&#x27;s the good stuff. Experiments are potentially good science, but usually not math.</text></comment> |
39,829,046 | 39,828,930 | 1 | 2 | 39,828,424 | train | <story><title>Flipping Pages: New Linux vulnerability in nf_tables and exploitation techniques</title><url>https://pwning.tech/nftables/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Unroll0201</author><text>Today I published a proof-of-concept exploit for CVE-2024-1086, working on Debian and Ubuntu among others.<p>The affected exploit versions are from Linux kernel v5.14 up to v6.6. The support for v6.4 to v6.6 is depending on the `CONFIG_INIT_ON_ALLOC_DEFAULT_ON` kernel config variable, but please check README.md for this info.<p>The bug was patched in February 2024, and has been labelled CVE-2024-1086.<p>Make sure to update your Linux devices!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dev_snd</author><text>Great work and great write-up! I especially love the MAINFRAME BREACH PROTOCOL that comes with it.</text></comment> | <story><title>Flipping Pages: New Linux vulnerability in nf_tables and exploitation techniques</title><url>https://pwning.tech/nftables/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Unroll0201</author><text>Today I published a proof-of-concept exploit for CVE-2024-1086, working on Debian and Ubuntu among others.<p>The affected exploit versions are from Linux kernel v5.14 up to v6.6. The support for v6.4 to v6.6 is depending on the `CONFIG_INIT_ON_ALLOC_DEFAULT_ON` kernel config variable, but please check README.md for this info.<p>The bug was patched in February 2024, and has been labelled CVE-2024-1086.<p>Make sure to update your Linux devices!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>junon</author><text>Haha. Nice sources. And nice work, curious what the larger response to this will be.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Notselwyn&#x2F;CVE-2024-1086&#x2F;blob&#x2F;main&#x2F;src&#x2F;main.c#L197">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Notselwyn&#x2F;CVE-2024-1086&#x2F;blob&#x2F;main&#x2F;src&#x2F;mai...</a></text></comment> |
35,663,156 | 35,662,347 | 1 | 2 | 35,655,910 | train | <story><title>Scaling Databases at Activision [pdf]</title><url>https://static.sched.com/hosted_files/kccnceu2023/3d/KubeCon-2023-Scaling-Databases-Activision.pdf</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Nathanba</author><text>I really wonder about the justification for using MySQL&#x2F;Postgres sometimes. How is it not simply superior in almost every way to start with ScyllaDB which is faster in every way and the only downside I can see is that you have a very limited way to query things. But so what, at least it&#x27;s fast. I mean isn&#x27;t that the nr.1 thing you want from a database, it&#x27;s not about comfort.. it&#x27;s about storing data. It is genuinely annoying though for example that you can&#x27;t even alter a column type after the column was created in ScyllaDB.</text></item><item><author>aeyes</author><text>I see 500k qps with 30TB data doubling every 2 years on slide 19.<p>In my experience me this isn&#x27;t close to being possible with a single Postgres box. There is no way around sharding this workload.<p>Vitess has different consistency models, it&#x27;s not as eventually consistent as you describe.</text></item><item><author>geenat</author><text>These numbers make more sense on hardware from 5 years ago (to be fair, what they were dealing with), but postgres, on modern consumer hardware (Yes, consumer! Ex: KC3000 + Ryzen 7950x), already does over 50k QPS without being overburdened. You could probably squeeze out 100k QPS with faster NVME&#x27;s.<p>That&#x27;s like 10 tall servers for their peak QPS? (500k QPS on slide 19)<p>Lots of natural sharding points here too: company, game, usage of data, etc.<p>This is assuming you avoid or go light on expensive features like foreign keys (as Vitess already does).<p>The &quot;scale magic&quot; in Spanner (Big Table) inspired DB&#x27;s are just hidden automation of traditional sharding-<p>CockroachDB: Sharded indexes, then runs map reduce for you.<p>Scylla&#x2F;Cassanda: Sharded indexes again, but more limitations for speedups: Eventually consistent. You don&#x27;t have fast delete- only update (discord uses tombstones). JOIN&#x27;s are &quot;in app&quot; only.<p>Vitess: Proxy that dismantles&#x2F;routes your query to the correct server. This scales, but is eventually consistent. JOIN&#x27;s on co-located data, or &quot;in app&quot;.... in simple terms, Vitess is like an externally managed &quot;in app&quot; query parser&#x2F;router.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tomnipotent</author><text>&gt; the only downside I can see is that you have a very limited way to query things<p>Which is a huge downside.<p>&gt; But so what, at least it&#x27;s fast<p>So is an RDBMS for most read&#x2F;write workloads. Few will see an overall benefit from Cassandra and the labor needed to replicate the conveniences offered by an RDBMS.<p>&gt; it&#x27;s about storing data<p>It&#x27;s not about storing data, it&#x27;s about using data to accomplish business objectives with the promises that entails. You opt for something like Cassandra&#x2F;Scylla because it solves a technical challenge otherwise untenable or more expensive, but it&#x27;s a poor choice if your problem is reasonably solved with what Postgres can offer.</text></comment> | <story><title>Scaling Databases at Activision [pdf]</title><url>https://static.sched.com/hosted_files/kccnceu2023/3d/KubeCon-2023-Scaling-Databases-Activision.pdf</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Nathanba</author><text>I really wonder about the justification for using MySQL&#x2F;Postgres sometimes. How is it not simply superior in almost every way to start with ScyllaDB which is faster in every way and the only downside I can see is that you have a very limited way to query things. But so what, at least it&#x27;s fast. I mean isn&#x27;t that the nr.1 thing you want from a database, it&#x27;s not about comfort.. it&#x27;s about storing data. It is genuinely annoying though for example that you can&#x27;t even alter a column type after the column was created in ScyllaDB.</text></item><item><author>aeyes</author><text>I see 500k qps with 30TB data doubling every 2 years on slide 19.<p>In my experience me this isn&#x27;t close to being possible with a single Postgres box. There is no way around sharding this workload.<p>Vitess has different consistency models, it&#x27;s not as eventually consistent as you describe.</text></item><item><author>geenat</author><text>These numbers make more sense on hardware from 5 years ago (to be fair, what they were dealing with), but postgres, on modern consumer hardware (Yes, consumer! Ex: KC3000 + Ryzen 7950x), already does over 50k QPS without being overburdened. You could probably squeeze out 100k QPS with faster NVME&#x27;s.<p>That&#x27;s like 10 tall servers for their peak QPS? (500k QPS on slide 19)<p>Lots of natural sharding points here too: company, game, usage of data, etc.<p>This is assuming you avoid or go light on expensive features like foreign keys (as Vitess already does).<p>The &quot;scale magic&quot; in Spanner (Big Table) inspired DB&#x27;s are just hidden automation of traditional sharding-<p>CockroachDB: Sharded indexes, then runs map reduce for you.<p>Scylla&#x2F;Cassanda: Sharded indexes again, but more limitations for speedups: Eventually consistent. You don&#x27;t have fast delete- only update (discord uses tombstones). JOIN&#x27;s are &quot;in app&quot; only.<p>Vitess: Proxy that dismantles&#x2F;routes your query to the correct server. This scales, but is eventually consistent. JOIN&#x27;s on co-located data, or &quot;in app&quot;.... in simple terms, Vitess is like an externally managed &quot;in app&quot; query parser&#x2F;router.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>geenat</author><text>It&#x27;s a great point- I&#x27;ve been looking into this path myself: ScyllaDB + logic inside app.<p>The main issue I&#x27;ve run into is deployment. It&#x27;s just very rough compared to CockroachDB or Postgres, which are single binary or very close to it.<p>If ScyllaDB became as easy to set up as CockroachDB (or close-ish), they&#x27;d have a lot more users, I think.<p>You can make Postgres setup this easy: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;gnat&#x2F;cfe3754c3dc817c7fb8b2225ef4db628" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;gnat&#x2F;cfe3754c3dc817c7fb8b2225ef4db62...</a><p>CockroachDB, also dead easy: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cockroachlabs.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;v22.2&#x2F;start-a-local-cluster" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cockroachlabs.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;v22.2&#x2F;start-a-local-clust...</a><p>ScyllaDB is an enormous mess of daemons and ports: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;university.scylladb.com&#x2F;courses&#x2F;scylla-operations&#x2F;lessons&#x2F;installation&#x2F;topic&#x2F;installation&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;university.scylladb.com&#x2F;courses&#x2F;scylla-operations&#x2F;le...</a></text></comment> |
31,388,249 | 31,388,137 | 1 | 3 | 31,387,019 | train | <story><title>About iCloud Private Relay</title><url>https://support.apple.com/en-au/HT212614</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>petesergeant</author><text>&gt; It&#x27;s not obvious that it immediately helps their bottom line<p>In the UK phone operators have complained about it on the basis that:<p>&gt; [it allows Apple] to leverage its considerable market power into many areas of the market and thus being able to further entrench its position ... Network providers would no longer be able to use web traffic data over Safari to develop their own digital products and services that complete directly with Apple. For example, a network provider may no longer have access to information about a user&#x27;s content viewing habits to develop their own content that competes with Apple TV. Similarly, a network provider may no longer be able to share consumer insight with third parties that provide digital advertizing services in competition with Apple Search Ads...<p>How true that is, who knows, but it&#x27;s an interesting angle on how it benefits Apple</text></item><item><author>plg</author><text>It may not work perfectly for all people in all use cases, yet ... but I have to say I appreciate and admire Apple&#x27;s initiative and the values that this approach reflects. They didn&#x27;t have to do this. It&#x27;s not obvious that it immediately helps their bottom line. It does seem like the right thing to do for individual privacy. I appreciate that and it contributes to my overall respect for the company and its approach.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>AlexandrB</author><text>The entitlement of companies that make money on surveillance is staggering.<p>There is no world where I want my ISP to have access to information about my content viewing habits. Why is this not an opt-in?</text></comment> | <story><title>About iCloud Private Relay</title><url>https://support.apple.com/en-au/HT212614</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>petesergeant</author><text>&gt; It&#x27;s not obvious that it immediately helps their bottom line<p>In the UK phone operators have complained about it on the basis that:<p>&gt; [it allows Apple] to leverage its considerable market power into many areas of the market and thus being able to further entrench its position ... Network providers would no longer be able to use web traffic data over Safari to develop their own digital products and services that complete directly with Apple. For example, a network provider may no longer have access to information about a user&#x27;s content viewing habits to develop their own content that competes with Apple TV. Similarly, a network provider may no longer be able to share consumer insight with third parties that provide digital advertizing services in competition with Apple Search Ads...<p>How true that is, who knows, but it&#x27;s an interesting angle on how it benefits Apple</text></item><item><author>plg</author><text>It may not work perfectly for all people in all use cases, yet ... but I have to say I appreciate and admire Apple&#x27;s initiative and the values that this approach reflects. They didn&#x27;t have to do this. It&#x27;s not obvious that it immediately helps their bottom line. It does seem like the right thing to do for individual privacy. I appreciate that and it contributes to my overall respect for the company and its approach.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jen20</author><text>&gt; a network provider may no longer have access to information about a user&#x27;s content viewing<p>That’s… kinda the point, no? To prevent scummy people doing scummy things.</text></comment> |
20,237,305 | 20,236,338 | 1 | 3 | 20,230,241 | train | <story><title>A Growing Problem in Real Estate: Too Many Too Big Houses</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-growing-problem-in-real-estate-too-many-too-big-houses-11553181782?mod=rsswn</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rdiddly</author><text>On one of my harder-hearted days I would&#x27;ve felt schadenfreude (rich assholes waste obscene amounts of money on tacky shit, get burned, film at 11), but today I feel sorry for them. The whole thing is just sad. On the macro level, such a tragic mis-deployment of resources. And on the micro level, misplacing one&#x27;s priorities on material things and finding out the hard way that it doesn&#x27;t bring any meaning to your life. I know someone going through this now in a more modest house... slowly but surely, starting to get tired earlier and earlier in the afternoons (granted, she smokes), getting sick of chores like cleaning gutters, mowing, clearing spiderwebs etc.<p>And all those empty rooms in the photographs! I don&#x27;t imagine they see many days of being filled with smiling, laughing guests. Which is really the only true use of a house that big... you need to entertain, you need hundreds of friends to share it with, right? Otherwise what&#x27;s the use? Maybe that&#x27;s just me. I would probably get supremely depressed otherwise, all that space around me, waiting to be used, reminding me how empty it is.<p>Everybody gets old. Everybody dies. Everybody follows each other in a grand parade to oblivion. These people won the game the mid-20th century told them was being played, but everybody ultimately loses the Big Game.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Balgair</author><text>With the lack of &#x27;wealth&#x27; that many Millenials are experiencing, it&#x27;s not only real estate that is going to be affected. Stocks and other areas are also going to feel the effects. Strangely, it&#x27;s not a lack of supply that will be the issue here, it&#x27;s a lack of buyers. Millenials just don&#x27;t have the cash to pay the Boomers for the houses and stocks they accumulated and the Banks can only buy and sell the properties to each other for so long, collecting fees each time they hand off. Though we&#x27;re in a good job market right now, we&#x27;re still not seeing any real rise in wages.<p>EDIT: As an example of the Banks buying up houses: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;interactive&#x2F;2019&#x2F;06&#x2F;20&#x2F;business&#x2F;economy&#x2F;starter-homes-investors.html?action=click&amp;module=Top%20Stories&amp;pgtype=Homepage" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;interactive&#x2F;2019&#x2F;06&#x2F;20&#x2F;business&#x2F;econ...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>A Growing Problem in Real Estate: Too Many Too Big Houses</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-growing-problem-in-real-estate-too-many-too-big-houses-11553181782?mod=rsswn</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rdiddly</author><text>On one of my harder-hearted days I would&#x27;ve felt schadenfreude (rich assholes waste obscene amounts of money on tacky shit, get burned, film at 11), but today I feel sorry for them. The whole thing is just sad. On the macro level, such a tragic mis-deployment of resources. And on the micro level, misplacing one&#x27;s priorities on material things and finding out the hard way that it doesn&#x27;t bring any meaning to your life. I know someone going through this now in a more modest house... slowly but surely, starting to get tired earlier and earlier in the afternoons (granted, she smokes), getting sick of chores like cleaning gutters, mowing, clearing spiderwebs etc.<p>And all those empty rooms in the photographs! I don&#x27;t imagine they see many days of being filled with smiling, laughing guests. Which is really the only true use of a house that big... you need to entertain, you need hundreds of friends to share it with, right? Otherwise what&#x27;s the use? Maybe that&#x27;s just me. I would probably get supremely depressed otherwise, all that space around me, waiting to be used, reminding me how empty it is.<p>Everybody gets old. Everybody dies. Everybody follows each other in a grand parade to oblivion. These people won the game the mid-20th century told them was being played, but everybody ultimately loses the Big Game.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mensetmanusman</author><text>Maybe someone could disrupt the ownership model here and invite a number of families to move in together?</text></comment> |
5,900,012 | 5,899,739 | 1 | 2 | 5,899,226 | train | <story><title>Live: Head of NSA meets with House Intelligence Committee</title><url>http://www.c-spanvideo.org/event/220343</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>marknutter</author><text>Arguing that these programs are effective by revealing a few foiled terrorist plots is entirely beside the point. Obviously monitoring every communication on the planet would help the government track down a few terrorist plots here and there. If they really want the debate to focus on the effectiveness of these programs then they should explain why they failed so spectacularly to prevent the Boston Marathon bombings, a plot carried out by two of the most careless and naive terrorists to date. Heck, even a direct warning from Russian officials fell on deaf ears. Perhaps the NSA was too busy listening to innocent people&#x27;s phone calls to respond?<p>The effectiveness isn&#x27;t what&#x27;s at issue here, though. The problem is the loss of privacy for innocent civilians, to which Obama and other government officials respond to with wishy-washy arguments about &quot;tradeoffs&quot; between security and privacy.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>GVIrish</author><text>I would argue that even if these programs were effective in foiling some terrorist plots, that it&#x27;s still not worth it. I mean, we could probably could prevent some mass shootings if we put everyone with a history of serious mental illness in an institution for the rest of their lives but that wouldn&#x27;t make it right.<p>And perhaps the bigger risk to using the &#x27;it prevented terorrist plots&#x27; argument is that it creates a convenient excuse for more surveillance and curtailing of rights. All that needs to happen is for a few more terorrist plots to slip through, then the argument will be, &#x27;We need MORE power to stop these people&#x27; or, &#x27;If you just allowed us to do this, this, and this, we could&#x27;ve prevented that&#x27;.<p>Then long after a significant threat of Jihadist terrorist attack is gone, we&#x27;ll still be dealing with a uber-powerful police state.</text></comment> | <story><title>Live: Head of NSA meets with House Intelligence Committee</title><url>http://www.c-spanvideo.org/event/220343</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>marknutter</author><text>Arguing that these programs are effective by revealing a few foiled terrorist plots is entirely beside the point. Obviously monitoring every communication on the planet would help the government track down a few terrorist plots here and there. If they really want the debate to focus on the effectiveness of these programs then they should explain why they failed so spectacularly to prevent the Boston Marathon bombings, a plot carried out by two of the most careless and naive terrorists to date. Heck, even a direct warning from Russian officials fell on deaf ears. Perhaps the NSA was too busy listening to innocent people&#x27;s phone calls to respond?<p>The effectiveness isn&#x27;t what&#x27;s at issue here, though. The problem is the loss of privacy for innocent civilians, to which Obama and other government officials respond to with wishy-washy arguments about &quot;tradeoffs&quot; between security and privacy.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vermontdevil</author><text>I would also add to the argument that the following things are also happening and will happen:<p>1) More money being wasted to support certain corporations (Booz etc) in return for future plum jobs by these representatives&#x2F;senators or heads of these agencies. Thus the cycle continues in favor of supporting these programs rather than analyzing whether we really need it or not.<p>2) Abuses by contractors or employees when they have this much access and power in seeing all the private data<p>3) Corruption of these committees due to the feeling of being &quot;in&quot; where others are not.<p>In other words, it&#x27;s going to get worse.</text></comment> |
25,474,191 | 25,474,101 | 1 | 3 | 25,473,330 | train | <story><title>Seuss-Star Trek mashup crashes and burns at Ninth Circuit</title><url>https://www.courthousenews.com/seuss-star-trek-mash-up-crash-lands-with-ninth-circuit/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tehjoker</author><text>It&#x27;ll be nice when we can finally get rid of copyright when the writers of a property are long dead. Looks like Dr. Seuss and Gene Roddenberry died almost 30 years ago.<p>It&#x27;s kind of ironic that Star Trek envisions a post-scarcity society where we can abandon pettiness like this and build on each others works and explore the universe while in the real world the petty owners of the copyright use the power of the state to prevent people from writing their own book using their own labor, creativity, and funds using characters from the 1960s or earlier.<p>In effect, the copyright owners are saying: &quot;We own the society and its culture. Do not touch.&quot;</text></comment> | <story><title>Seuss-Star Trek mashup crashes and burns at Ninth Circuit</title><url>https://www.courthousenews.com/seuss-star-trek-mash-up-crash-lands-with-ninth-circuit/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jrockway</author><text>I don&#x27;t necessarily disagree with the legal opinion here, but I think copyright has gotten way out of control and it&#x27;s time to remake these laws. It should prevent flat-out photocopying and resale of a book, but nothing else. If you draw your own illustrations for the text of some book -- have at it. If you invent your own scenarios involving the characters of a book -- have at it. If you invent new words for an existing song -- have at it.<p>All of these things are under threat and probably completely illegal at this point, and I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;s where society wants to be in another 200 years. It might be time to rethink what people actually want here, and change the laws.</text></comment> |
17,001,095 | 16,999,285 | 1 | 2 | 16,995,262 | train | <story><title>How to Train and Build a Conversational News Chatbot</title><url>https://github.com/tzano/wren/blob/master/docs/news_assistant.md</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jakeogh</author><text>Future parents will teach their children to never talk to computers.</text></comment> | <story><title>How to Train and Build a Conversational News Chatbot</title><url>https://github.com/tzano/wren/blob/master/docs/news_assistant.md</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>vrk7bp</author><text>This is cool, I bookmarked it to check out later.<p>I’ve always been curious about chatbots. I feel like in the right situations they can provide a good customer experience, but I’ve never seen them as being able to stand-alone as their own product.</text></comment> |
28,458,211 | 28,457,809 | 1 | 2 | 28,457,655 | train | <story><title>Archive.is owner on “continuity of his project”</title><url>https://blog.archive.today/post/660719734341386240/is-there-any-structure-in-place-to-assure-the</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>fouc</author><text>Archive.is is an incredible service, but the fact he&#x27;s paying out $3k-4k&#x2F;mo out of pocket in expenses &amp; time doesn&#x27;t strike me as sustainable for the long term.<p>I&#x27;m reminded of some non-profit organization that was forced to shut down their websites because they ran out of money. In retrospect they could&#x27;ve setup a trust fund early on, stuck all their money in there, and then had a perpetual annual income from that for operating costs, instead of spending down. All fundraising could&#x27;ve gone into the trust fund in order to boost the annual budget, etc.</text></comment> | <story><title>Archive.is owner on “continuity of his project”</title><url>https://blog.archive.today/post/660719734341386240/is-there-any-structure-in-place-to-assure-the</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>spzx</author><text>Also some interesting numbers in this post:<p>&gt;How much does hosting cost you per month at the moment?<p>&gt;about ~$2600&#x2F;mo of pure expenses on servers&#x2F;domains, not counting “work time”, “buying laptop&#x2F;furniture”, etc. ($100…300&#x2F;mo covered by donations + $300…500 by ads)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.archive.today&#x2F;post&#x2F;659383959382294528&#x2F;you-said-that-before-you-die-of-old-age-you-would" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.archive.today&#x2F;post&#x2F;659383959382294528&#x2F;you-said-...</a></text></comment> |
24,272,507 | 24,272,565 | 1 | 2 | 24,266,056 | train | <story><title>The wildest insurance fraud scheme in Texas</title><url>https://www.texasmonthly.com/articles/it-was-never-enough/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>NelsonMinar</author><text>I gotta say, ditching a small airplane 30 miles off shore in the Gulf of Mexico is a hell of a risky way to collect $50,000 in an insurance payout. You&#x27;ve got a lot of faith in your ability to make a &quot;water landing&quot;, much less that someone comes out and gets you before something goes wrong.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fny</author><text>Sounds like a hell of a lot more fun than setting a house on fire.</text></comment> | <story><title>The wildest insurance fraud scheme in Texas</title><url>https://www.texasmonthly.com/articles/it-was-never-enough/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>NelsonMinar</author><text>I gotta say, ditching a small airplane 30 miles off shore in the Gulf of Mexico is a hell of a risky way to collect $50,000 in an insurance payout. You&#x27;ve got a lot of faith in your ability to make a &quot;water landing&quot;, much less that someone comes out and gets you before something goes wrong.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>refurb</author><text>Same thought occurred to me. I would have thought proving that was intention would be pretty hard considering the personal risk involved.</text></comment> |
29,807,359 | 29,807,383 | 1 | 2 | 29,803,817 | train | <story><title>Show HN: I make $3K/mo from a browser extension</title><url>https://newsletter.tonydinh.com/issues/i-make-3k-mo-from-a-browser-extension-december-2021-updates-966892</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Timwi</author><text>Hate to be the party pooper, but the fact that you could talk about nothing but marketing and money and never spend a single word telling us what the software even does, speaks volumes on where your priorities lie. I am left with the impression that the software probably does nothing special, or even useful, and if I ever have any issues with it or suggestions for improvement, I will probably be completely ignored unless I come up with a way it would make you more money. I find it strange that this type of personality even calls themselves a hacker.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>have_faith</author><text>This sentence seems to sum up why the money was important to him<p>&gt; I finally have the confidence to take things a bit slowly, take care more of myself, and go on this vacation I really need.<p>On top of that we don&#x27;t know what else the money will help with (maybe they have an aging parent to take care of, we don&#x27;t know).<p>Your comment reads in a very overyly negative tone to me when the article seems to purposely exist to go over the financial aspect of the product.</text></comment> | <story><title>Show HN: I make $3K/mo from a browser extension</title><url>https://newsletter.tonydinh.com/issues/i-make-3k-mo-from-a-browser-extension-december-2021-updates-966892</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Timwi</author><text>Hate to be the party pooper, but the fact that you could talk about nothing but marketing and money and never spend a single word telling us what the software even does, speaks volumes on where your priorities lie. I am left with the impression that the software probably does nothing special, or even useful, and if I ever have any issues with it or suggestions for improvement, I will probably be completely ignored unless I come up with a way it would make you more money. I find it strange that this type of personality even calls themselves a hacker.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>trungdq88</author><text>Sorry that the post give you that impression.<p>I do have some links in the post that link to the product, but yeah I agree the context is a bit vague for the HN crowd. I added a small notice to the post hopefully to fix it.<p>FYI, I&#x27;m not trying to promote the product, it&#x27;s the story I want to share.<p>Cheers!</text></comment> |
4,107,348 | 4,107,041 | 1 | 2 | 4,105,587 | train | <story><title>Linux creator Linus Torvalds shares Millennium Technology Prize</title><url>http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18423502</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ChuckMcM</author><text>That's pretty cool. Remembering back to the old Minix/Linux flame fest I would not have ever predicted it would end up this way.<p>I'm struck by the fact that these sorts of things are often given to people who have persisted, year after year, in pursuit of singular excellence in a particular topic. I highly respect folks who have that level of grit.</text></comment> | <story><title>Linux creator Linus Torvalds shares Millennium Technology Prize</title><url>http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18423502</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>kvnn</author><text>I have always been curious whether Linus has made good money for his contributions. This both made me happy that he was given some money and prompted me to find out whether he has made money otherwise.<p>It looks like he has [1], and thats awesome.<p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Torvalds#Later_years" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Torvalds#Later_years</a></text></comment> |
37,183,315 | 37,182,960 | 1 | 3 | 37,171,553 | train | <story><title>Complexity theory’s 50-year journey to the limits of knowledge</title><url>https://www.quantamagazine.org/complexity-theorys-50-year-journey-to-the-limits-of-knowledge-20230817/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wddkcs</author><text>Can you really separate the two? For something like NP-completeness, I&#x27;m having trouble conceptualizing how a proof for existence would not require demonstration.</text></item><item><author>bumbledraven</author><text>&gt; Suppose that P = NP. To prove it, researchers would need to find a fast algorithm for an NP-complete problem, which might be hiding in some obscure corner of that vast landscape.<p>They wouldn&#x27;t need to <i>find</i> such an algorithm. They would just need to prove that such an algorithm <i>exists</i>.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>danbruc</author><text>Yes, there are non-constructive proofs for the existence of polynomial time algorithms [1]. The Robertson–Seymour theorem [2] is a common example, it shows that certain classes of graphs can be characterized by finite sets of forbidden subgraphs [3] which can be checked for in polynomial time but it does say what those sets of forbidden subgraphs are or how they can be found.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Non-constructive_algorithm_existence_proofs" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Non-constructive_algorithm_exi...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Robertson%E2%80%93Seymour_theorem" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Robertson%E2%80%93Seymour_theo...</a><p>[3] More precisely forbidden minors.</text></comment> | <story><title>Complexity theory’s 50-year journey to the limits of knowledge</title><url>https://www.quantamagazine.org/complexity-theorys-50-year-journey-to-the-limits-of-knowledge-20230817/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wddkcs</author><text>Can you really separate the two? For something like NP-completeness, I&#x27;m having trouble conceptualizing how a proof for existence would not require demonstration.</text></item><item><author>bumbledraven</author><text>&gt; Suppose that P = NP. To prove it, researchers would need to find a fast algorithm for an NP-complete problem, which might be hiding in some obscure corner of that vast landscape.<p>They wouldn&#x27;t need to <i>find</i> such an algorithm. They would just need to prove that such an algorithm <i>exists</i>.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fooker</author><text>Yes, proofs don&#x27;t have to be constructive.<p>Consider proofs by contradiction, you could potentially show that if such an algorithm does not exist some important true statement would be rendered false.</text></comment> |
3,135,592 | 3,135,491 | 1 | 2 | 3,135,326 | train | <story><title>Amateur rocket launch reaches 121,000 feet</title><url>http://ddeville.com/derek/Qu8k.html</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>alphadog</author><text>121,000 feet = 36.88 km<p>From Wikipedia:
The Kármán line lies at an altitude of 100 kilometres (62 mi) above the Earth's sea level, and is commonly used to define the boundary between the Earth's atmosphere and outer space.<p>That's not space. Though it's an amazing feat nonetheless.</text></comment> | <story><title>Amateur rocket launch reaches 121,000 feet</title><url>http://ddeville.com/derek/Qu8k.html</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>willyt</author><text>If you look at the cut open V2 rocket in the Imperial War museum in London you can see about 1/3 of the innards is the control system; gyro's, inertial guidance etc. Today you can buy that on a chips from digi-key, farnell, sparkfun or wherever for say $50 or even just root your smartphone and use it as the control system. It always surprises me that there is very little precision rocketry or ROV proliferation amongst the countries and political/religious movements with extreme agendas out there.</text></comment> |
34,026,499 | 34,025,879 | 1 | 3 | 34,020,654 | train | <story><title>The Twitter Files, Part Six</title><url>https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1603857534737072128</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>angelbreakfree</author><text>The wildest part of the Twitter files is the unhinged framing that they are presented under.<p>1. Anyone who has been in a tech company knows that there is internal lingo that refers to features we devs make. But it&#x27;s presented as being an &quot;Orwellian language&quot;<p>2. Based on the emails he posts, the agencies give links to review based on tips they receive or their own intel and twitter then decides if it violates ToS or not (and they sometimes did not act or simply temporarily suspended). But it&#x27;s presented as a &quot;deep state&quot;-like collusion where the agencies control if twitter act on them or not.<p>3. The people in the company discuss internal matters and are sometimes critical of potential decisions. But they are presented mostly stripped of context and the focus is on anonymized employees snarky comments to make it seem like decisions were arbitrary, partisan, and without any regard to logic or context.<p>I could go for hours listing these.<p>Most quote tweets are people thinking this confirms a suspected malicious intent from twitter and that they intentionally dramatically shifted the outcomes while colluding with one side.<p>If anything, this confirms that Twitter acted (outside of a couple isolated occurences) in a way tamer way than I ever imagined them acting while handling the issues at hand.<p>EDIT: Formatting</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>partiallypro</author><text>That&#x27;s all well and good, and I am not a fan of Elon&#x27;s latest moves toward Twitter (banning some journalists and sources of freely available information on other platforms), but the FBI has absolutely no right to try to get a private company to stop free speech. That&#x27;s a direct violation of the 1st Amendment. This is a story because the FBI has absolutely no business doing this. There is no &quot;framing&quot; in that, the FBI has overstepped its bounds, forget Twitter and Elon Musk.<p>I&#x27;ve seen people here say, &quot;this is normal&quot; and &quot;the FBI is making no threats, so no big deal.&quot; That viewpoint is very problematic and has a fundamental lack of understanding about how federal agencies coerce private companies to do their bidding. I&#x27;ve seen other comments &quot;it didn&#x27;t happen that often, only once a week,&quot; it should have never happened at all. Unless there is something that is a threat to an investigation, jury identity, literally against federal law, etc...the FBI has absolutely no business doing this. I&#x27;m baffled it has any sort of support.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Twitter Files, Part Six</title><url>https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1603857534737072128</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>angelbreakfree</author><text>The wildest part of the Twitter files is the unhinged framing that they are presented under.<p>1. Anyone who has been in a tech company knows that there is internal lingo that refers to features we devs make. But it&#x27;s presented as being an &quot;Orwellian language&quot;<p>2. Based on the emails he posts, the agencies give links to review based on tips they receive or their own intel and twitter then decides if it violates ToS or not (and they sometimes did not act or simply temporarily suspended). But it&#x27;s presented as a &quot;deep state&quot;-like collusion where the agencies control if twitter act on them or not.<p>3. The people in the company discuss internal matters and are sometimes critical of potential decisions. But they are presented mostly stripped of context and the focus is on anonymized employees snarky comments to make it seem like decisions were arbitrary, partisan, and without any regard to logic or context.<p>I could go for hours listing these.<p>Most quote tweets are people thinking this confirms a suspected malicious intent from twitter and that they intentionally dramatically shifted the outcomes while colluding with one side.<p>If anything, this confirms that Twitter acted (outside of a couple isolated occurences) in a way tamer way than I ever imagined them acting while handling the issues at hand.<p>EDIT: Formatting</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rlt</author><text>&gt; Based on the emails he posts, the agencies give links to review based on tips they receive or their own intel and twitter then decides if it violates ToS or not (and they sometimes did not act or simply temporarily suspended). But it&#x27;s presented as a &quot;deep state&quot;-like collusion where the agencies control if twitter act on them or not.<p>This is an extension of the whole “Three Felonies a Day” idea: it’s likely any prolific account will violate Twitter Terms of Service at some point, so you can target almost anyone by looking hard enough.<p>And Twitter is likely to look harder at reports from the FBI than your average user, therefore the FBI has more influence over who they can silence. Maybe they’re abusing it, maybe they’re not, either way it feels improper at best.</text></comment> |
39,756,608 | 39,755,345 | 1 | 2 | 39,753,650 | train | <story><title>BootLogo: Logo language in 508 bytes of x86 machine code</title><url>https://github.com/nanochess/bootLogo</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>fsmv</author><text>Hello friend. I&#x27;m on a crusade to make people&#x27;s bootsector code work on real hardware.<p>You&#x27;re missing several reserved memory areas and state bits to reset. Check out my bootsector I have lots of comments on what things are needed <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;fsmv&#x2F;bootstrap-os&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;bootloader&#x2F;bootsect.asm">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;fsmv&#x2F;bootstrap-os&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;bootloader&#x2F;...</a><p>You can probably drop the extra sector loading code and error printing and only use the header and footer.</text></comment> | <story><title>BootLogo: Logo language in 508 bytes of x86 machine code</title><url>https://github.com/nanochess/bootLogo</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>pragma_x</author><text><p><pre><code> mov ax,0x0013 ; VGA 320x200x256 colors mode.
int 0x10 ; Set video mode.
</code></pre>
Oh man that takes me back. Also this is sporting a fixed-point sin table and compiled down to a .com. It&#x27;s like 1994 all over again.</text></comment> |
15,838,542 | 15,838,622 | 1 | 2 | 15,836,907 | train | <story><title>A Generation Lost in the Bazaar (2012)</title><url>http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2349257</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>OliverJones</author><text>Stone cathedrals (the ones still standing, anyhow) were built by generations of skilled craftspeople guided by a self-perpetuating hierarchy. The hierarchy had access to, and the craftspeople had the benefit of, ways of extracting wealth from the economy. The availability of unlimited resources allowed them to cover for plenty of mistakes.<p>Sure, the cathedral structures look elegant and eternal. That&#x27;s because time favors the stable ones. The other ones fell down long ago. It&#x27;s the same reason that the orbits of planets are seemingly so well-ordered: everthing that wasn&#x27;t in such an orbit has crashed into something else and disappeared. (Look at the surface of the moon for evidence of that.)<p>Music and literature work like that. We think the age of Mozart was particularly wonderful, because we have Mozart&#x27;s music. But there was plenty of other music in that era, most of it bellowed by bad musicians in taverns. That&#x27;s not so different from today&#x27;s music scene.<p>Why shouldn&#x27;t software work like that? Why isn&#x27;t Dr. Kamp&#x27;s lament morally the same as the lament of the guy with the cabin in the woods? I&#x27;m talking about the guy who finds himself with more and more neighbors, and grouses that &quot;nobody respects the wilderness any more.&quot;<p>We all respect elegant lasting structures (fork &#x2F; exec &#x2F; stdin &#x2F; stdout is one such structure). a creative field with huge output will generate more elegant lasting structures. We just can&#x27;t tell which ones will survive from where we sit in the middle of it all.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jancsika</author><text>&gt; We think the age of Mozart was particularly wonderful, because we have Mozart&#x27;s music. But there was plenty of other music in that era, most of it bellowed by bad musicians in taverns. That&#x27;s not so different from today&#x27;s music scene.<p>That&#x27;s easily disproven-- even musicologists tasked with cataloging Mozart&#x27;s output erroneously attributed symphonies and other pieces to him that were written by lesser known composers.<p>The reason attribution is such a hard problem is because it&#x27;s <i>non-trivial</i> to separate the stylistic characteristics of late 18th century courtly and sacred music from the characteristics of Mozart&#x27;s music we wish to claim were inspired by his genius. (There&#x27;s a great paper written I believe by Rifkin on Josquin scholarship having been circular in just this way.)<p>What your royal &quot;we&quot; finds &quot;particularly wonderful&quot; about the &quot;age of Mozart&quot; is the style, not the particular composer. And there is <i>plenty</i> of well-written, beautiful symphonic, choral, and chamber music written by all kinds of composers of that period.<p>The modern world does not strive to have a composer in each and every town who can competently write compelling tonal music with the constraints of late 18th century form, texture, and counterpoint. As misguided as it may be, the longing of your royal &quot;we&quot; for the age of Mozart is a valid longing, regardless of what drinking songs bad musicians were playing in biergartens.</text></comment> | <story><title>A Generation Lost in the Bazaar (2012)</title><url>http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2349257</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>OliverJones</author><text>Stone cathedrals (the ones still standing, anyhow) were built by generations of skilled craftspeople guided by a self-perpetuating hierarchy. The hierarchy had access to, and the craftspeople had the benefit of, ways of extracting wealth from the economy. The availability of unlimited resources allowed them to cover for plenty of mistakes.<p>Sure, the cathedral structures look elegant and eternal. That&#x27;s because time favors the stable ones. The other ones fell down long ago. It&#x27;s the same reason that the orbits of planets are seemingly so well-ordered: everthing that wasn&#x27;t in such an orbit has crashed into something else and disappeared. (Look at the surface of the moon for evidence of that.)<p>Music and literature work like that. We think the age of Mozart was particularly wonderful, because we have Mozart&#x27;s music. But there was plenty of other music in that era, most of it bellowed by bad musicians in taverns. That&#x27;s not so different from today&#x27;s music scene.<p>Why shouldn&#x27;t software work like that? Why isn&#x27;t Dr. Kamp&#x27;s lament morally the same as the lament of the guy with the cabin in the woods? I&#x27;m talking about the guy who finds himself with more and more neighbors, and grouses that &quot;nobody respects the wilderness any more.&quot;<p>We all respect elegant lasting structures (fork &#x2F; exec &#x2F; stdin &#x2F; stdout is one such structure). a creative field with huge output will generate more elegant lasting structures. We just can&#x27;t tell which ones will survive from where we sit in the middle of it all.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dalbasal</author><text>&gt;&gt;Music and literature work like that.<p>It&#x27;s possible to go too far with this kind of thinking. Yes the pyramid still in pristine condition is the best built one, with all the shoddy pyramids long collapsed. That does encourage a bias. This does not mean any &quot;golden era&quot; thinking I necessarily fallacious, just that we need to watch out for a particular fallacy.<p>Between about 1967-73 a lot of good rock albums were recorded. A lot of shite too, mostly forgotten about. The filter of time applies equally to the next 7 years, but most people&#x27;s record collections feature more &quot;golden age albums.&quot;</text></comment> |
21,373,316 | 21,373,242 | 1 | 2 | 21,371,577 | train | <story><title>Startpage is now owned by an advertising company</title><url>https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/di5rn3/startpage_is_now_owned_by_an_advertising_company/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rdbell</author><text>Former adtech CTO here.<p>I&#x27;ve heard this argument a lot but it&#x27;s hard for me to agree.<p>Saying that ad arbitrage doesn&#x27;t &quot;add value&quot; is kind of like arguing that someone with a media-buying&#x2F;sales role doesn&#x27;t &quot;add value&quot; because they&#x27;re just sitting in the middle taking a paycheck&#x2F;commission.<p>Partnering with ad arbitragers isn&#x27;t much different than outsourcing internal media buying&#x2F;sales roles to an agency to increase reach or fill-rate.<p>Your point about ads being annoying to end-users isn&#x27;t unique to digital. Advertisements on all mediums have always annoyed end-users. Certain implementations like full-page takeovers &amp; loading 100 ads on a page are the most annoying. Generally it&#x27;s the publisher&#x27;s fault for the bad UX.</text></item><item><author>graaben</author><text>I&#x27;ve worked with System1 in a previous job. One of their main products is ad arbitrage, which as far as I can tell adds zero (or negative) value to the average consumer&#x27;s browsing experience. This is a company that only cares about extracting as much money as they can by finding new ways of showing you ads.<p>As a side note - the whole digital advertising industry reminds me a little of the financial engineering on Wall Street of the last decade. Doesn&#x27;t add any new value to society - and in many ways actually harms it - but makes so much money that companies build their whole strategy around it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>eropple</author><text><i>&gt; Advertisements on all mediums have always annoyed end-users.</i><p>This is untrue. Historically speaking, print advertisements in many markets (even when restricted to English-speaking ones) could and did serve multiple purposes, including the relation of interesting topics and stories--ones that certainly were brought-to-you-by or even featured products in them, but worked in concert with the material of the publlication to entertain and inform the reader.<p>It wasn&#x27;t until the 1960s, approximately, that print advertisements turned into the screaming look-at-me garbage that they have continued to amplify in volume to this day.<p>Advertising does not have to be a pustule on society, but we have chosen to allow such.</text></comment> | <story><title>Startpage is now owned by an advertising company</title><url>https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/di5rn3/startpage_is_now_owned_by_an_advertising_company/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rdbell</author><text>Former adtech CTO here.<p>I&#x27;ve heard this argument a lot but it&#x27;s hard for me to agree.<p>Saying that ad arbitrage doesn&#x27;t &quot;add value&quot; is kind of like arguing that someone with a media-buying&#x2F;sales role doesn&#x27;t &quot;add value&quot; because they&#x27;re just sitting in the middle taking a paycheck&#x2F;commission.<p>Partnering with ad arbitragers isn&#x27;t much different than outsourcing internal media buying&#x2F;sales roles to an agency to increase reach or fill-rate.<p>Your point about ads being annoying to end-users isn&#x27;t unique to digital. Advertisements on all mediums have always annoyed end-users. Certain implementations like full-page takeovers &amp; loading 100 ads on a page are the most annoying. Generally it&#x27;s the publisher&#x27;s fault for the bad UX.</text></item><item><author>graaben</author><text>I&#x27;ve worked with System1 in a previous job. One of their main products is ad arbitrage, which as far as I can tell adds zero (or negative) value to the average consumer&#x27;s browsing experience. This is a company that only cares about extracting as much money as they can by finding new ways of showing you ads.<p>As a side note - the whole digital advertising industry reminds me a little of the financial engineering on Wall Street of the last decade. Doesn&#x27;t add any new value to society - and in many ways actually harms it - but makes so much money that companies build their whole strategy around it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>graaben</author><text>The biggest issue that I have with companies like System1 is that a huge portion of their business model is tricking technically un-savvy people into clicking on ads they otherwise would not want to click on. How is that adding any value to society, other than a check in the pocket of the middle man?</text></comment> |
10,172,006 | 10,172,027 | 1 | 3 | 10,170,791 | train | <story><title>Monads in Scheme</title><url>http://okmij.org/ftp/Scheme/monad-in-Scheme.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>nicklaf</author><text>Oleg&#x27;s entire site is a veritable gold mine of Scheme and Haskell treasures. Poke around--you won&#x27;t be disappointed.</text></comment> | <story><title>Monads in Scheme</title><url>http://okmij.org/ftp/Scheme/monad-in-Scheme.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>kenko</author><text>There are several monad libraries for Clojure---mine (of which I&#x27;m fond) is here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;bwo&#x2F;monads&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;bwo&#x2F;monads&#x2F;</a></text></comment> |
30,803,536 | 30,803,092 | 1 | 2 | 30,802,246 | train | <story><title>VoWiFi</title><url>https://computer.rip/2022-03-24-VoWiFi.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>AshamedCaptain</author><text>You don&#x27;t need eUICC or anything of the sort to do roaming, which is just what he&#x27;s describing. Even the behavior with the international prefix on numbers.<p>Also, the simultaneous data + voice story is kinda more complicated. You couldn&#x27;t do simultaneous voice+data on 2G phones. You could do it on UMTS&#x2F;HSDPA for sure (it was one of the marketing points...). Then when LTE came, for a time phones could not do phone calls over LTE (VoLTE) (something which I was told was just a &quot;missing software thing&quot;) so they had to drop down to some 3G standard during any phone call. If your 3G standard didn&#x27;t have support for simultaneous voice+data, like it used to be on CDMA networks, then you just didn&#x27;t have data (see CDMA iPhone 5). But it was just fine on GSM ones.</text></comment> | <story><title>VoWiFi</title><url>https://computer.rip/2022-03-24-VoWiFi.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mdb31</author><text>Yes, when roaming, VoWiFi or VoLTE can have quite unexpected results due to your &#x27;data&#x27; being backhauled to your &#x27;home&#x27; provider, for both billing and dialing. Former you can&#x27;t do much about, except complain when things go wrong, but as for numbers: always store (and dial) these in +countrycode-subscribernumber (minus the leading 0, <i>unless</i> it&#x27;s an Italian number, +39) format, and you&#x27;ll be mostly* fine.<p>*Unless visiting countries that have providers with woefully misconfigured dial plans, say, Nigeria...</text></comment> |
13,600,702 | 13,600,817 | 1 | 2 | 13,599,952 | train | <story><title>RegExr: Learn, Build, and Test RegEx</title><url>http://regexr.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jasode</author><text>For those not aware of all the alternative online regex testers out there... I prefer regex101.com because of the better color coding. I previously made a snippet demonstrating that benefit: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9581225" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9581225</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jmiserez</author><text>Also regex101.com (and debuggex.com) have they&#x27;re own PCRE implementation, which is really useful if you need something other than JS regexes.</text></comment> | <story><title>RegExr: Learn, Build, and Test RegEx</title><url>http://regexr.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jasode</author><text>For those not aware of all the alternative online regex testers out there... I prefer regex101.com because of the better color coding. I previously made a snippet demonstrating that benefit: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9581225" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9581225</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sphix</author><text>Sometimes I wonder if these online tools mine data on text blobs and regex we pass in. I can only imagine how potential IP could be leaked if the data was correlated to a company that the user is using the tool from. Has anyone done analysis to see whether to tools send data back to the servers? In theory the entire app should be client side only.</text></comment> |
17,527,547 | 17,526,177 | 1 | 2 | 17,526,016 | train | <story><title>How the BBC and ITV are fixing delays on World Cup live streams</title><url>http://www.wired.co.uk/article/england-vs-croatia-live-stream-bbc-iplayer-itv</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jscholes</author><text>I haven&#x27;t been watching the football, but I have been streaming another live event for the past two weeks: Wimbledon. My advantage comes from two things: I&#x27;m blind, and the BBC&#x27;s CDNs have audio-only variants for every HLS stream. So I&#x27;ve been able to cut out the huge amount of bandwidth that would otherwise be consumed by streaming HD video, run the audio-only variants through FFmpeg and seek right to the end until the stream buffers. I&#x27;m usually ahead of the official Wimbledon live scoreboard, and the same coverage on cable TV, by a few seconds.</text></comment> | <story><title>How the BBC and ITV are fixing delays on World Cup live streams</title><url>http://www.wired.co.uk/article/england-vs-croatia-live-stream-bbc-iplayer-itv</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>untog</author><text>It&#x27;s really interesting to see the tech being deployed to fix this problem. But it also amazes me how complicated we&#x27;ve managed to make things. In the UK in particular - just a few years ago the vast majority of people received their TV through over-the-air broadcast. It&#x27;s instant and scales infinitely, kind of beautiful simplicity, technically speaking.<p>Sports are a good test case, not just for latency but sheer demand. I worry that we&#x27;ll face some kind of natural disaster in the not too distant future that&#x27;ll make us wonder why we abandoned the resilience of OTA broadcast.</text></comment> |
30,027,273 | 30,027,264 | 1 | 3 | 30,025,276 | train | <story><title>G Suite free edition no longer available starting July 1, 2022</title><url>https://accounts.google.com/ServiceLogin?passive=1209600&continue=https://apps.google.com/supportwidget/articlehome?hl%3Den%26article_url%3Dhttps://support.google.com/a/answer/2855120?hl%253Den%26product_context%3D2855120%26product_name%3DUnuFlow%26trigger_context%3Da&followup=https://apps.google.com/supportwidget/articlehome?hl%3Den%26article_url%3Dhttps://support.google.com/a/answer/2855120?hl%253Den%26product_context%3D2855120%26product_name%3DUnuFlow%26trigger_context%3Da&hl=en</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jaywalk</author><text>Self-hosting is great, but self-hosting email is generally nothing but a world of hurt. That&#x27;s the one thing I would always leave to an established company.</text></item><item><author>anthropodie</author><text>I mentioned below comment in another thread[0] some time back and I think it&#x27;s relevant here too<p>Three months ago I picked up new hobby: Self Hosting. It has been an amazing ride. I learned a lot and I also get peace of mind knowing I am in control of my data. I understand that there is no self-hosted alternative for certain SaaS services but I think that will change as more and more people choose to be in control of their data.<p>A good place to start [1]<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=30021404" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=30021404</a><p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;selfhosted" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;selfhosted</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pushrax</author><text>Agreed, I self hosted for many years and eventually gave it up. Maintaining high IP trust is tricky.<p>A fun hack is to run a captcha-free fake forum and allow random bot signups to generate outbound mail volume and trust.</text></comment> | <story><title>G Suite free edition no longer available starting July 1, 2022</title><url>https://accounts.google.com/ServiceLogin?passive=1209600&continue=https://apps.google.com/supportwidget/articlehome?hl%3Den%26article_url%3Dhttps://support.google.com/a/answer/2855120?hl%253Den%26product_context%3D2855120%26product_name%3DUnuFlow%26trigger_context%3Da&followup=https://apps.google.com/supportwidget/articlehome?hl%3Den%26article_url%3Dhttps://support.google.com/a/answer/2855120?hl%253Den%26product_context%3D2855120%26product_name%3DUnuFlow%26trigger_context%3Da&hl=en</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jaywalk</author><text>Self-hosting is great, but self-hosting email is generally nothing but a world of hurt. That&#x27;s the one thing I would always leave to an established company.</text></item><item><author>anthropodie</author><text>I mentioned below comment in another thread[0] some time back and I think it&#x27;s relevant here too<p>Three months ago I picked up new hobby: Self Hosting. It has been an amazing ride. I learned a lot and I also get peace of mind knowing I am in control of my data. I understand that there is no self-hosted alternative for certain SaaS services but I think that will change as more and more people choose to be in control of their data.<p>A good place to start [1]<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=30021404" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=30021404</a><p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;selfhosted" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;selfhosted</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bshipp</author><text>My experience as well. Self host email if you want most of your messages to end up in spam...that&#x27;s even if your ISP allows a self-hosted email server on their network. Read the fine print first.<p>But pretty much everything else is super fun to self-host, especially if you get comfortable with docker and reverse proxies like nginx.</text></comment> |
29,475,891 | 29,475,099 | 1 | 2 | 29,472,189 | train | <story><title>Regularized Newton Method with Global $O(1/k^2)$ Convergence</title><url>https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.02089</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>rahimiali</author><text>People who&#x27;re familiar with Newton&#x27;s method might be surprised at the convergence rate. 1&#x2F;k^2 is slower than the textbook rate for Newton&#x27;s method with line search, which is 2^{-2^k}, basically implying convergence in a constant number of steps. The rate in this paper seems to be no faster than plain gradient descent on a strongly convex function! So why go through the trouble of the much more complicated update?<p>Because the textbook proof of the fast convergence of Newton&#x27;s method make additional assumptions on the objective function, for example that it is strongly convex, or it is self concordant. This paper only assumes Lipschitz continuous Hessians.<p>The idea of dampening the Hessian is old (it&#x27;s sometimes called &quot;damped newton method&quot;, or &quot;trust region newton method&quot;, or &quot;levenberg-marquardt&quot;, though the latter two refer to more specific ideas). This paper offers a view to how much dampening to apply.</text></comment> | <story><title>Regularized Newton Method with Global $O(1/k^2)$ Convergence</title><url>https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.02089</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>civilized</author><text>This is very interesting. It looks like the innovation is to scale the identity matrix in the L-M step formula by the square root of the norm of the gradient. Very simple and elegant, and trivial to implement. Lots of people are going to be shaking their heads wondering why they didn&#x27;t think of this first.<p>The motivation for the idea is very nice and easy to understand. The author completely explains it before the middle of the second page. I encourage you to look at it if you know enough vector calc to make sense of the notation. Essentially, he takes a well-known fast-converging method whose steps are hard to compute and shows how these steps can be approximated cheaply while still retaining much of the convergence rate benefit.<p>This may have implications for many large-scale optimization problems as L-M regularized Newton steps are a sort of natural halfway house between gradient descent and the full Newton&#x27;s method, both theoretically and practically.</text></comment> |
24,588,511 | 24,565,931 | 1 | 2 | 24,565,930 | train | <story><title>Graalphp: An Efficient PHP Implementation Built on GraalVM</title><url>https://github.com/abertschi/graalphp</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>sradman</author><text>Truffle is an integration layer for interpreted languages in GraalVM. The canonical Truffle language included in the Graal distribution is GraalJS, a replacement for the now deprecated Nashorn JavaScript engine for the JVM. Similarly, TruffleRuby is an alternative to JRuby and GraalPython is an alternative to Jython. Neither of these Truffle implementations has gained traction and they will not until they fully implement the main frameworks for each ecosystem (Ruby on Rails and Django&#x2F;NumPy respectively).<p>The same will hold true for a Truffle implementation of PHP. It will need to support the C interface components like PDO database drivers and the Laravel web framework.<p>The linked project was created as part of a graduate thesis and demonstrates the feasibility of GraalVM&#x2F;Truffle as a performant polyglot platform. I&#x27;m not convinced that Ruby&#x2F;Python&#x2F;PHP integration with Java Bytecode is an important use case moving forward. It could have been when Rails&#x2F;Django&#x2F;Laravel were on top of the web framework game but the demand for this use case is diminishing.</text></comment> | <story><title>Graalphp: An Efficient PHP Implementation Built on GraalVM</title><url>https://github.com/abertschi/graalphp</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mrigger</author><text>From the report at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;abertschi.ch&#x2F;default_public&#x2F;ethz&#x2F;graalphp&#x2F;download.php" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;abertschi.ch&#x2F;default_public&#x2F;ethz&#x2F;graalphp&#x2F;download.p...</a>: &quot;Experimental results indicate that our runtime reaches competitive results with performance gains of up to 859% compared to PHP 7. These preliminary results suggest that a Truffle-hosted PHP implementation might be significantly faster than existing language implementations.&quot;</text></comment> |
17,701,599 | 17,700,045 | 1 | 2 | 17,699,530 | train | <story><title>Introducing Android 9 Pie</title><url>https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2018/08/introducing-android-9-pie.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mmastrac</author><text>One of the quieter features of Android 9 is that they are reducing the API surface of Android by explicitly black-listing and white-listing various APIs and fields that previously required reflection to access. None of these APIs were documented, but none of them were explicitly &quot;off limits&quot; before Android P.<p>That suggests that the life of Java as Android&#x27;s primary language might be really coming to an end, even though Android is very much a platform built on Java&#x2F;C++ at its core.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jmgao</author><text>That&#x27;s a bizarre conclusion to come to. The real motivation is that if you know apps are reflecting into your internal implementation details, and you want to make a change, you&#x27;re stuck with a bunch of bad choices.<p>1. Break the apps.<p>Users tend to get annoyed when they upgrade the OS and their apps stop working.<p>2. Maintain a compatibility shim.<p>Depending on what the change you&#x27;re making does, this might not even be possible. Assuming that it is possible, how do you know what needs a shim and what behavior is actually expected?<p>3. Give up and do something else instead.<p>Things get worse if you consider that OEMs may want to modify implementations as well, so you&#x27;ll end up with apps that work, except on some devices. There&#x27;s no sensible way to prevent app breakage when there are apps depending on your internal (and <i>explicitly</i> private) API; the solution is enforcement.</text></comment> | <story><title>Introducing Android 9 Pie</title><url>https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2018/08/introducing-android-9-pie.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mmastrac</author><text>One of the quieter features of Android 9 is that they are reducing the API surface of Android by explicitly black-listing and white-listing various APIs and fields that previously required reflection to access. None of these APIs were documented, but none of them were explicitly &quot;off limits&quot; before Android P.<p>That suggests that the life of Java as Android&#x27;s primary language might be really coming to an end, even though Android is very much a platform built on Java&#x2F;C++ at its core.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>makmanalp</author><text>&gt; That suggests that the life of Java as Android&#x27;s primary language might be really coming to an end<p>Huh - how did you get to this conclusion? What would be the alternative? Do you mean Java was essentially &quot;better&quot; because it had access to all the undocumented APIs while other languages didn&#x27;t?</text></comment> |
19,398,550 | 19,397,368 | 1 | 2 | 19,396,563 | train | <story><title>How Inuit parents teach kids to control their anger</title><url>https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/03/13/685533353/a-playful-way-to-teach-kids-to-control-their-anger</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>emmanuel_1234</author><text>This kind of article is inspiring, but also makes me depressed at what a shit parent I must be and all the various ways I&#x27;m screwing up with my kids head, despite trying my best, out of my own imperfections and ignorance.<p>Scary.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>oarsinsync</author><text>The joy of parenting is that we get to learn from the mistakes our parents made with us, while dreaming up ingenious new ways to screw our own kids up.<p>The key is just to try and do the best you can. Try not to worry too much about what other people are doing.<p>Your parents were likely just as imperfect and ignorant as you are, albeit in their own ways. If they were able to get you to a point where you&#x27;ve got these kinds of concerns doing it yourself, you&#x27;ve probably turned out ok, and your kids will too.</text></comment> | <story><title>How Inuit parents teach kids to control their anger</title><url>https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/03/13/685533353/a-playful-way-to-teach-kids-to-control-their-anger</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>emmanuel_1234</author><text>This kind of article is inspiring, but also makes me depressed at what a shit parent I must be and all the various ways I&#x27;m screwing up with my kids head, despite trying my best, out of my own imperfections and ignorance.<p>Scary.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>m_mueller</author><text>I have a 3yo myself and I think it&#x27;s all a trade-off, there&#x27;s no such thing as perfect parenting. Old cultures tend to land in a local optimum.<p>That being said I&#x27;d consciously not move to an average US town as I think there&#x27;s too much fear spread, it doesn&#x27;t fit my own culture of giving children space&#x2F;responsibility as early as possible. Depending on community reaction that can be impossible - not just in many parts of the US but also in Southern Europe for example. There tends to be much more support from the wider family there however.<p>Another local optimum I&#x27;ve seen in Japan where almost everyone is incredibly well behaved but almost no-one learns to think outside the box. Eh. I say choose what you think works and try to choose a community supporting it, within the options you have.</text></comment> |
36,104,072 | 36,104,143 | 1 | 2 | 36,103,559 | train | <story><title>Churchill’s Famine: The killing of three million is a story waiting to be retold</title><url>https://openthemagazine.com/columns/churchills-bengal-famine/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>HL33tibCe7</author><text>If you’re interested in a counter argument, see <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.spectator.co.uk&#x2F;article&#x2F;winston-churchill-isnt-to-blame-for-the-bengal-famine&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.spectator.co.uk&#x2F;article&#x2F;winston-churchill-isnt-t...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hirundo</author><text>Fascinating article, it argues that Churchill was indeed racist and imperialist toward these people, and yet strove to head off the famine from humanitarian impulses. The more informed histories always seem to be written in shades of grey.</text></comment> | <story><title>Churchill’s Famine: The killing of three million is a story waiting to be retold</title><url>https://openthemagazine.com/columns/churchills-bengal-famine/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>HL33tibCe7</author><text>If you’re interested in a counter argument, see <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.spectator.co.uk&#x2F;article&#x2F;winston-churchill-isnt-to-blame-for-the-bengal-famine&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.spectator.co.uk&#x2F;article&#x2F;winston-churchill-isnt-t...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>iamshs</author><text>Original article is just Hindu Nationalist &#x27;history&#x27; project. Not a single Brahmin merchant released any grain that they hoarded in their warehouses, they were looking for profit. Nobody even bothers to tell this part of the famine. We already hate Churchill for being racist, but complete the picture and tell the role of Brahmins too.</text></comment> |
13,920,349 | 13,918,538 | 1 | 2 | 13,916,255 | train | <story><title>Has Li-battery genius John Goodenough done it again? Colleagues are skeptical</title><url>https://qz.com/929794/has-lithium-battery-genius-john-goodenough-done-it-again-colleagues-are-skeptical/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>logfromblammo</author><text>From what I understand of this, the battery works like this:<p>You have a sodium or lithium metal anode, and a sulfur-carbon &quot;ink&quot; cathode on a copper charge collector. The battery is encased in steel, so a cross section would be steel-Na|Li-glass-S (aq)-copper-S (aq)-glass-Na|Li-steel. The anode has to be sealed away from oxidizers and water, or it will react violently with a direct chemical reaction rather than through the desired electrochemistry.<p>During discharge, at the anode, the reactive metal violently throws its extra electron away as hard as it can, because it <i>hates</i> having that extra one. It <i>really, really</i> wants to have +1 charge. The steel casing doesn&#x27;t help, but that glass electrolyte is apparently porous enough that +1 ions can pass into it. So the lithium&#x2F;sodium throws an electron down the wire and jumps into the electrolyte, because positively charged ions repel each other. That works fine until the electrolyte fills up all those empty spaces with positive ions. The anode can&#x27;t throw any more electrons down the wire, because positive ions have nowhere to go, and attract the electrons right back out of the wire just as strongly as the atoms could throw them.<p>On the cathode side, electrons are coming in from the wire, spreading out across a copper plate, and jumping onto sulfur atoms, which devour extra electrons with a passion. Sulfurs <i>love</i> to have 2 more electrons than they usually own. Sulfurs near the copper plate devour two free electrons and become [S]--. It just so happens they live in a thin &quot;ink&quot; cathode, and are therefore very close to the positive ions that have been filling up the electrolyte when they become charged. They get yanked across to the glass. Ordinarily, if all this happened in an aqueous electrode, each negative sulfur ion would coordinate with the two positive ions in solution so that the sulfur can keep its extra two electrons, and the lithium or sodium wouldn&#x27;t have to take back their hated extra. The glass-aqueous interface probably prevents this?<p>I would guess that the glass electrolyte allows so much positive charge to be present in it, without allowing the sulfur inside, that as soon as the sulfur hits the glass, it fumbles its extra electrons that fly out of its grasp and home in on one of the positive ions, converting it back to neutral metal. Sulfur grumbles and goes back to the copper to pick up another pair. Repeat until the positively charged layer in the electrolyte is not strong enough to yank the electrons off of sulfur, and it hangs on to its electrons at the ink-glass interface. The battery is now fully discharged. Physically, you have layers Li, [Li]+ (glass), Li (glass), [S]-- (aq), Cu. I&#x27;m guessing here, as I haven&#x27;t read the paper.<p>During recharge, you are pushing electrons into the anode and pulling them from the cathode. That reactive metal wants nothing to do with extra electrons, so it starts attracting positive ions back through the electrolyte toward the metal anode. Meanwhile, that copper plate is having electrons sucked out, getting positively charged, and yanking the sulfurs across to take their borrowed electrons back. The neutral sulfurs can then wander back to the glass and grab electrons from the reactive metal in it. They shuttle the electrons back and forth, turning the metal on the cathode side of the glass back into ions that transport back toward the anode. Eventually, the electrolyte is once again saturated with only positive ions, and the battery is fully charged. As soon as the charge is removed, the atoms in the anode will once again try to throw away their extra electrons and escape into the electrolyte.<p>It seems important that the glass electrolyte be constructed such that the cathodic atoms and ions cannot enter it. While the battery is charging or discharging, those will be bouncing back and forth like ping pong balls in a Chinese recreation center, shuttling electrons between the glass-ink interface and the ink-copper interface. The action of the battery is allowing the reactive species to ionize, and get their charges closer together, but not so close that they can coexist in the same ionic crystal or aqueous solution. That would make it too difficult to separate the charges again, to recharge.<p>Of course, as I am not a chemist, I might be completely wrong about this.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dotancohen</author><text>This is going to be my children&#x27;s bedtime story tonight. Thanks!</text></comment> | <story><title>Has Li-battery genius John Goodenough done it again? Colleagues are skeptical</title><url>https://qz.com/929794/has-lithium-battery-genius-john-goodenough-done-it-again-colleagues-are-skeptical/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>logfromblammo</author><text>From what I understand of this, the battery works like this:<p>You have a sodium or lithium metal anode, and a sulfur-carbon &quot;ink&quot; cathode on a copper charge collector. The battery is encased in steel, so a cross section would be steel-Na|Li-glass-S (aq)-copper-S (aq)-glass-Na|Li-steel. The anode has to be sealed away from oxidizers and water, or it will react violently with a direct chemical reaction rather than through the desired electrochemistry.<p>During discharge, at the anode, the reactive metal violently throws its extra electron away as hard as it can, because it <i>hates</i> having that extra one. It <i>really, really</i> wants to have +1 charge. The steel casing doesn&#x27;t help, but that glass electrolyte is apparently porous enough that +1 ions can pass into it. So the lithium&#x2F;sodium throws an electron down the wire and jumps into the electrolyte, because positively charged ions repel each other. That works fine until the electrolyte fills up all those empty spaces with positive ions. The anode can&#x27;t throw any more electrons down the wire, because positive ions have nowhere to go, and attract the electrons right back out of the wire just as strongly as the atoms could throw them.<p>On the cathode side, electrons are coming in from the wire, spreading out across a copper plate, and jumping onto sulfur atoms, which devour extra electrons with a passion. Sulfurs <i>love</i> to have 2 more electrons than they usually own. Sulfurs near the copper plate devour two free electrons and become [S]--. It just so happens they live in a thin &quot;ink&quot; cathode, and are therefore very close to the positive ions that have been filling up the electrolyte when they become charged. They get yanked across to the glass. Ordinarily, if all this happened in an aqueous electrode, each negative sulfur ion would coordinate with the two positive ions in solution so that the sulfur can keep its extra two electrons, and the lithium or sodium wouldn&#x27;t have to take back their hated extra. The glass-aqueous interface probably prevents this?<p>I would guess that the glass electrolyte allows so much positive charge to be present in it, without allowing the sulfur inside, that as soon as the sulfur hits the glass, it fumbles its extra electrons that fly out of its grasp and home in on one of the positive ions, converting it back to neutral metal. Sulfur grumbles and goes back to the copper to pick up another pair. Repeat until the positively charged layer in the electrolyte is not strong enough to yank the electrons off of sulfur, and it hangs on to its electrons at the ink-glass interface. The battery is now fully discharged. Physically, you have layers Li, [Li]+ (glass), Li (glass), [S]-- (aq), Cu. I&#x27;m guessing here, as I haven&#x27;t read the paper.<p>During recharge, you are pushing electrons into the anode and pulling them from the cathode. That reactive metal wants nothing to do with extra electrons, so it starts attracting positive ions back through the electrolyte toward the metal anode. Meanwhile, that copper plate is having electrons sucked out, getting positively charged, and yanking the sulfurs across to take their borrowed electrons back. The neutral sulfurs can then wander back to the glass and grab electrons from the reactive metal in it. They shuttle the electrons back and forth, turning the metal on the cathode side of the glass back into ions that transport back toward the anode. Eventually, the electrolyte is once again saturated with only positive ions, and the battery is fully charged. As soon as the charge is removed, the atoms in the anode will once again try to throw away their extra electrons and escape into the electrolyte.<p>It seems important that the glass electrolyte be constructed such that the cathodic atoms and ions cannot enter it. While the battery is charging or discharging, those will be bouncing back and forth like ping pong balls in a Chinese recreation center, shuttling electrons between the glass-ink interface and the ink-copper interface. The action of the battery is allowing the reactive species to ionize, and get their charges closer together, but not so close that they can coexist in the same ionic crystal or aqueous solution. That would make it too difficult to separate the charges again, to recharge.<p>Of course, as I am not a chemist, I might be completely wrong about this.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lostsock</author><text>I don&#x27;t really care if it&#x27;s correct or not, it was super entertaining. Thanks for sharing</text></comment> |
32,148,062 | 32,147,993 | 1 | 2 | 32,143,344 | train | <story><title>Blue Zones, where people reach age 100 at 10 times greater rates</title><url>https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6125071/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>garyfirestorm</author><text><i>One Ikarian in particular, Stamatis Moraitis, moved to America when he was 22 years old to pursue the American dream. He was a painter, and immediately started having success, bought a house, married, and had 3 kids. At the age of 66 years, he developed terminal lung cancer. Instead of dying in America, he decided to move back to Ikaria and moved in with his parents. He started breathing the air, drinking the wine, and eating a Mediterranean diet. After a few months, he planted a garden not planning on ever getting to harvest the vegetables; 37 years later he has a vineyard producing 200 L of wine a year. His secret he says? “I just forgot to die.”</i><p>This is where I think the article loses its credibility significantly.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Gatsky</author><text>This was likely tuberculosis and not lung cancer. Autopsy series have shown that TB is easily confused with cancers. 40 years ago the diagnostic tools available were very crude.<p>There is a crackpot promoting weird cancer therapies in my country who claims to have cured himself of metastatic sarcoma, but a peer reviewed medical analysis of the details suggests that was also TB.</text></comment> | <story><title>Blue Zones, where people reach age 100 at 10 times greater rates</title><url>https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6125071/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>garyfirestorm</author><text><i>One Ikarian in particular, Stamatis Moraitis, moved to America when he was 22 years old to pursue the American dream. He was a painter, and immediately started having success, bought a house, married, and had 3 kids. At the age of 66 years, he developed terminal lung cancer. Instead of dying in America, he decided to move back to Ikaria and moved in with his parents. He started breathing the air, drinking the wine, and eating a Mediterranean diet. After a few months, he planted a garden not planning on ever getting to harvest the vegetables; 37 years later he has a vineyard producing 200 L of wine a year. His secret he says? “I just forgot to die.”</i><p>This is where I think the article loses its credibility significantly.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kashunstva</author><text>The story is repeated all over the internet but even reasonably thorough articles fail to bring medical clarity. It’s always “nine doctors agreed”, “x-rays showed terminal cancer”, etc. In 1976, when he was diagnosed its possible, though somewhat unlikely he had a chest CT since scanners were just becoming available then. More importantly, what no accounting of this history mentions is a <i>biopsy</i>. Without a tissue diagnosis and without sophisticated imaging the story is sketchy.</text></comment> |
16,534,359 | 16,534,318 | 1 | 2 | 16,534,028 | train | <story><title>How Amazon Can Blow Up Asset Management</title><url>https://jirisancapital.com/amazon-can-blow-up-asset-management/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>thisisit</author><text>Amazon has a serious problem with counterfeit goods and fake reviews. One might think that with the rise of AI&#x2F;ML catching fake reviews and counterfeits will be much easier but Amazon doesn&#x27;t seem to be doing any thing. In which case, allowing them to handle money seems like a recipe for disaster.<p>As for the Ant Financial comparison, I find it hard to believe that Amazon is not utilizing the reserves it gathers by selling gift cards on its platform. Those too are excess reserves to be paid to suppliers once customers utilizes and buys something from a supplier.</text></comment> | <story><title>How Amazon Can Blow Up Asset Management</title><url>https://jirisancapital.com/amazon-can-blow-up-asset-management/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>obblekk</author><text>If Robinhood, a start up with very few resources, can offer commission free trading, I&#x27;d bet Amazon could offer approximately 0 cost S&amp;P500 funds.<p>If the partnership with JP Morgan works, people could direct deposit money into their Amazon account, auto-invest into Amazon funds, and then spend on Amazon ecommerce. In this model, Amazon immediately saves ~2% on credit card transaction fees, a small portion of which could be used to subsidize cheap or 0 cost investments.<p>Essentially Amazon could vertically integrate the money that will be spent on their products in the future...</text></comment> |
27,669,058 | 27,666,893 | 1 | 2 | 27,665,188 | train | <story><title>YouTube permanently bans Right Wing Watch</title><url>https://www.thedailybeast.com/youtube-permanently-bans-right-wing-watch-a-media-watchdog-devoted-to-exposing-right-wing-conspiracies</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zephrx1111</author><text>So how about the left extremists accounts? Is it double standard?</text></item><item><author>tehwebguy</author><text>For those that haven&#x27;t seen a RWW video, they don&#x27;t add commentary to their video content, they simply memorialize extremist right wing messages from politicians and talking heads.<p>That&#x27;s the point being made here: they are being banned <i>not</i> for copyright reasons (e.g. their act of re-uploading clips) but for the content in those clips. That is, YouTube is banning them for posting (exclusively right wing) extremist content, which they are posting specifically to expose. People who don&#x27;t watch the handful of national right wing news outlets or the hundreds of local stations likely won&#x27;t otherwise know what half of the country is being fed daily.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tehwebguy</author><text>I mean no, you&#x27;re not going to get banned for posting support for universal healthcare, ending the drug war, ending for-profit prisons, etc even though these are <i>extreme</i> left positions in current US politics.<p>If you post misinformation telling people that it&#x27;s illegal to charge for healthcare and that you can just throw out any medical bills you receive without recourse, or that drug laws are unconstitutional so you can&#x27;t actually go to jail for them, or that private prisons don&#x27;t count so you are allowed to break out of them, well yeah you might get banned!</text></comment> | <story><title>YouTube permanently bans Right Wing Watch</title><url>https://www.thedailybeast.com/youtube-permanently-bans-right-wing-watch-a-media-watchdog-devoted-to-exposing-right-wing-conspiracies</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zephrx1111</author><text>So how about the left extremists accounts? Is it double standard?</text></item><item><author>tehwebguy</author><text>For those that haven&#x27;t seen a RWW video, they don&#x27;t add commentary to their video content, they simply memorialize extremist right wing messages from politicians and talking heads.<p>That&#x27;s the point being made here: they are being banned <i>not</i> for copyright reasons (e.g. their act of re-uploading clips) but for the content in those clips. That is, YouTube is banning them for posting (exclusively right wing) extremist content, which they are posting specifically to expose. People who don&#x27;t watch the handful of national right wing news outlets or the hundreds of local stations likely won&#x27;t otherwise know what half of the country is being fed daily.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>amerine</author><text>What left extremists accounts?</text></comment> |
9,063,051 | 9,062,207 | 1 | 2 | 9,061,901 | train | <story><title>Tesla Motors Announces a New Home Battery</title><url>http://offgridquest.com/news/tesla-motors-announces-a-new-home-batter</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>brudgers</author><text><i>So, where does lithium come from? It comes from the Earth, of course, but it doesn&#x27;t require strip mining or blowing the tops off mountains like other resources do...most often, lithium is found in briny underground ponds. The liquid is pumped out and left to dry in the sun.</i><p>TANSTAAFL<p><a href="https://duckduckgo.com/?q=lithium+pond+photos&amp;iax=1&amp;ia=images&amp;iai=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sciencephoto.com%2Fimage%2F438264%2Flarge%2FC0115790-Lithium_evaporation_pond-SPL.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;duckduckgo.com&#x2F;?q=lithium+pond+photos&amp;iax=1&amp;ia=image...</a><p>Mining is mining. There isn&#x27;t a &quot;green&quot; form. Tearing holes in the earth is not the worst ecological damage or the great health risk. The big problem is the water...and it will run downhill from the Andes and wherever else Lithium is mined and into the Ocean.<p>The house off the grid is built on industrial infrastructure.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tessierashpool</author><text><p><pre><code> The house off the grid is built on
industrial infrastructure.
</code></pre>
So what? It&#x27;s a matter of degree.<p>I helped my parents build their off-the-grid house. It&#x27;s solar-powered, but uses batteries for backup storage. It collects and filters rainwater, recycles and purifies its own sewage, and is made mostly of recycled materials (in the style of what&#x27;s called an &quot;Earthship,&quot; but with a more traditional, house-like form factor).<p>Did industrial infrastructure come into play? Of course. We used cars and trucks to get stuff there to build with. We used machines and materials produced in the modern world. What difference could that possibly make? The house is still much less ecologically destructive than the vast majority of dwellings worldwide, both in terms of ongoing damage and initial construction.<p>It&#x27;s possible to create buildings today which get all their electricity from the sun; which require no industrial infrastructure at all for sewage, heat, or clean water; and which cost much, much less than earlier housing models. That&#x27;s an amazing improvement.<p>All tech&#x27;s based to some degree on tech which came before.</text></comment> | <story><title>Tesla Motors Announces a New Home Battery</title><url>http://offgridquest.com/news/tesla-motors-announces-a-new-home-batter</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>brudgers</author><text><i>So, where does lithium come from? It comes from the Earth, of course, but it doesn&#x27;t require strip mining or blowing the tops off mountains like other resources do...most often, lithium is found in briny underground ponds. The liquid is pumped out and left to dry in the sun.</i><p>TANSTAAFL<p><a href="https://duckduckgo.com/?q=lithium+pond+photos&amp;iax=1&amp;ia=images&amp;iai=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sciencephoto.com%2Fimage%2F438264%2Flarge%2FC0115790-Lithium_evaporation_pond-SPL.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;duckduckgo.com&#x2F;?q=lithium+pond+photos&amp;iax=1&amp;ia=image...</a><p>Mining is mining. There isn&#x27;t a &quot;green&quot; form. Tearing holes in the earth is not the worst ecological damage or the great health risk. The big problem is the water...and it will run downhill from the Andes and wherever else Lithium is mined and into the Ocean.<p>The house off the grid is built on industrial infrastructure.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>headShrinker</author><text>Also many municipalities don&#x27;t allow battery &#x27;grid-tie&#x27; with the option of &#x27;off the grid&#x27; living. For example, Connecticut has laws which don&#x27;t allow houses to have batteries that would allow a house to be self sustaining and have a connection to the grid. This is because if you have batteries which cause a back flow during a power outage to the power station, an electrical worker could get shocked down the road.<p>The fact that lithium batteries aren&#x27;t the greenest combined with the fact that you can&#x27;t even live &#x27;off the grid&#x27; in a grid tied system is a big uphill for these batteries.</text></comment> |
8,807,491 | 8,807,361 | 1 | 3 | 8,806,950 | train | <story><title>Ask HN: How do you manage/organize information and knowledge in your life?</title><text>This is a general question, but I didn&#x27;t want to ask specific one because I&#x27;m still trying to understand the bigger picture.<p>We &quot;collect&quot; data all the time, and sometimes it helps us learn something. On one hand we have things that were created by others: funny images, movies, articles on the web, books. On the other we have things creted by us: personal insights, thoughts, snippets of code. How do you manage&#x2F;organize all of this? Do you have apps&#x2F;tools for organizing specific type of information and if so, why this particular one? Do you have ideas how to organize&#x2F;manage this efficiently?<p>But we&#x27;re not only collecting information [0], we also learn from it. Most people store all this knowledge in their heads for their whole life, but I think it&#x27;s not efficient (memory loss, can&#x27;t search, not always reliable etc.), some people create some kind of personal knowledge bases (e.g. personal dokuwiki&#x2F;mediawiki on localhost). How do you manage&#x2F;organize things you learn?<p>It may seem that I should create 2 different topics, but for me both concepts are connected[1]. What I&#x27;m trying to find is an efficient solution to managing (almost) all the information that enters (and already is in) my life. I don&#x27;t think that there exist a good app for that, I know that there are some that solve parts of this problem (evernote, wikis etc.), but I&#x27;m more interested in your ideas on the whole topic, how to approach this problem, where to look, how to think about this etc.<p>I&#x27;m curious about your solutions, ideas and &quot;setups&quot; for this problem(s). If you have any resources (books, research papers etc.) about the topic, I&#x27;d love to learn from them. Thank you for your time.<p>[0] as in bits on the disk, learning can be viewed as collecting new information, I guess<p>[1] I liked quote from a book, some code from LLVM gave me an insight into a compiler design etc.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>thaumaturgy</author><text>1. Live simply. As I&#x27;ve gotten older I&#x27;ve found more and more value in not having too many things going on. Gradually I&#x27;m sleeping better, eating better, reducing stress, and getting more exercise, all of which is important for the next thing:<p>2. Memorize as much as I can. It&#x27;s an exercise; I memorize phone numbers, schedules, people&#x27;s names, trivia, all kinds of stuff. I&#x27;ve never found anything that matches the flexibility and utility of my own brain. I should use the best tool I have, and that&#x27;s in my head. Technology is unreliable and constantly changing and difficult to organize and search. I&#x27;ve been practicing this for long enough that now I&#x27;m pretty good at it.<p>3. For everything else, I use a few simple systems: a few sheets of paper to the right side of my desk for scribbling and note-taking (meant to be discarded after a day or two), a pile of to-do to my left, a tab open in my text editor labeled &quot;notepad&quot; for longer-term stuff, and a well-organized directory of documents on my laptop with subfolders like &quot;projects&quot;, &quot;writing&quot;, &quot;sysadmin&quot;, etc. -- I try to keep this directory as small as possible by dedicating time here and there to either finishing or pruning projects.<p>I disagree that keeping knowledge in your head isn&#x27;t efficient. I think a lot of people just don&#x27;t practice it enough. Smartphones and computers and everything else make it really easy to not bother. But, my brain is always with me, doesn&#x27;t require batteries (well...), can store any type of information I want, and can instantly recall it without having to craft some kind of search query or organize the information in a rigorous way. It is exactly the kind of database storage we all wish we had. It never changes data formats, it never tries to get acquired by a bigger company and then shut down, and it gets reception everywhere I go. If my brain were an electronic tool, I would want to use it all the time. And, the more I use it, the better it works.<p>(edit: oh yeah, and pinboard. Looove pinboard.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>meesterdude</author><text>One of the problems of keeping everything in your head is trust. People forget! Maybe you have a great memory, but eventually it&#x27;ll forget things. And it should! otherwise there won&#x27;t be room for any new stuff. I don&#x27;t think we have infinite storage available; at some point things have to be erased to make room.<p>But also, keeping that stuff in a system you can trust frees your brain to do other things. Instead of falling asleep reminding yourself to buy milk tomorrow, you can leave it to the system to remember. The system being anything - a notebook, an app, or what have you. There is some good evidence that this kind of delegation allows for more high-level thinking to come about, since your brain is more free to do other things.<p>Now, as you&#x27;ve touched on - sometimes technology screws you one way or another, and that trust is broken. So if you have no redundancy or backup or plan for that dependency, maybe you&#x27;d be better off keeping things in your head.<p>But you are human and your head is human by extension. it is faulty, imperfect, and not nearly as good at storing things as pretty much anything else. Even if its good now, it won&#x27;t necessarily always be, and isn&#x27;t in such good shape for a lot of folk. So I would not paint it in such a rosy light.<p>I&#x27;m curious, Have you done any experimentation with Method of loci?</text></comment> | <story><title>Ask HN: How do you manage/organize information and knowledge in your life?</title><text>This is a general question, but I didn&#x27;t want to ask specific one because I&#x27;m still trying to understand the bigger picture.<p>We &quot;collect&quot; data all the time, and sometimes it helps us learn something. On one hand we have things that were created by others: funny images, movies, articles on the web, books. On the other we have things creted by us: personal insights, thoughts, snippets of code. How do you manage&#x2F;organize all of this? Do you have apps&#x2F;tools for organizing specific type of information and if so, why this particular one? Do you have ideas how to organize&#x2F;manage this efficiently?<p>But we&#x27;re not only collecting information [0], we also learn from it. Most people store all this knowledge in their heads for their whole life, but I think it&#x27;s not efficient (memory loss, can&#x27;t search, not always reliable etc.), some people create some kind of personal knowledge bases (e.g. personal dokuwiki&#x2F;mediawiki on localhost). How do you manage&#x2F;organize things you learn?<p>It may seem that I should create 2 different topics, but for me both concepts are connected[1]. What I&#x27;m trying to find is an efficient solution to managing (almost) all the information that enters (and already is in) my life. I don&#x27;t think that there exist a good app for that, I know that there are some that solve parts of this problem (evernote, wikis etc.), but I&#x27;m more interested in your ideas on the whole topic, how to approach this problem, where to look, how to think about this etc.<p>I&#x27;m curious about your solutions, ideas and &quot;setups&quot; for this problem(s). If you have any resources (books, research papers etc.) about the topic, I&#x27;d love to learn from them. Thank you for your time.<p>[0] as in bits on the disk, learning can be viewed as collecting new information, I guess<p>[1] I liked quote from a book, some code from LLVM gave me an insight into a compiler design etc.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>thaumaturgy</author><text>1. Live simply. As I&#x27;ve gotten older I&#x27;ve found more and more value in not having too many things going on. Gradually I&#x27;m sleeping better, eating better, reducing stress, and getting more exercise, all of which is important for the next thing:<p>2. Memorize as much as I can. It&#x27;s an exercise; I memorize phone numbers, schedules, people&#x27;s names, trivia, all kinds of stuff. I&#x27;ve never found anything that matches the flexibility and utility of my own brain. I should use the best tool I have, and that&#x27;s in my head. Technology is unreliable and constantly changing and difficult to organize and search. I&#x27;ve been practicing this for long enough that now I&#x27;m pretty good at it.<p>3. For everything else, I use a few simple systems: a few sheets of paper to the right side of my desk for scribbling and note-taking (meant to be discarded after a day or two), a pile of to-do to my left, a tab open in my text editor labeled &quot;notepad&quot; for longer-term stuff, and a well-organized directory of documents on my laptop with subfolders like &quot;projects&quot;, &quot;writing&quot;, &quot;sysadmin&quot;, etc. -- I try to keep this directory as small as possible by dedicating time here and there to either finishing or pruning projects.<p>I disagree that keeping knowledge in your head isn&#x27;t efficient. I think a lot of people just don&#x27;t practice it enough. Smartphones and computers and everything else make it really easy to not bother. But, my brain is always with me, doesn&#x27;t require batteries (well...), can store any type of information I want, and can instantly recall it without having to craft some kind of search query or organize the information in a rigorous way. It is exactly the kind of database storage we all wish we had. It never changes data formats, it never tries to get acquired by a bigger company and then shut down, and it gets reception everywhere I go. If my brain were an electronic tool, I would want to use it all the time. And, the more I use it, the better it works.<p>(edit: oh yeah, and pinboard. Looove pinboard.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>toomuchtodo</author><text>Having turned 32 this year, I can relate with all of your points.<p>Make life as simple as possible (&quot;simplicity is the ultimate sophistication&quot;). Use paper when necessary.<p>Also, try hard not to multi-task. It&#x27;s been proven the human brain isn&#x27;t built to handle it.</text></comment> |
10,123,851 | 10,123,886 | 1 | 2 | 10,123,456 | train | <story><title>“I Had a Baby and Cancer When I Worked at Amazon”</title><url>https://medium.com/@jcheiffetz/i-had-a-baby-and-cancer-when-i-worked-at-amazon-this-is-my-story-9eba5eef2976</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>curveship</author><text>Holy cow:<p><pre><code> &quot;After my surgery [for cancer], while I was still on
maternity leave, I received a form letter saying
that the health insurance provided by my employer
had been terminated. Dozens of panicked emails
and phone calls later, the whole thing was, I was
told, a glitch in the system. After a week of back
and forth, I was offered COBRA coverage, by which
point I had already switched to my husband’s
insurance, where I remained for the duration of my
care.&quot;
</code></pre>
That&#x27;s a pretty GIGANTIC &quot;glitch,&quot; one that turned out hugely in Amazon&#x27;s favor. Cheiffetz claims she accepts that it was an &quot;administrative error,&quot; but you have to wonder. By getting her to switch to her husband&#x27;s plan, Amazon may have saved themselves hundreds of thousands of dollars.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>xcyu</author><text>Sounds like a great application of their Frugality principle.
<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.jobs&#x2F;principles" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.jobs&#x2F;principles</a></text></comment> | <story><title>“I Had a Baby and Cancer When I Worked at Amazon”</title><url>https://medium.com/@jcheiffetz/i-had-a-baby-and-cancer-when-i-worked-at-amazon-this-is-my-story-9eba5eef2976</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>curveship</author><text>Holy cow:<p><pre><code> &quot;After my surgery [for cancer], while I was still on
maternity leave, I received a form letter saying
that the health insurance provided by my employer
had been terminated. Dozens of panicked emails
and phone calls later, the whole thing was, I was
told, a glitch in the system. After a week of back
and forth, I was offered COBRA coverage, by which
point I had already switched to my husband’s
insurance, where I remained for the duration of my
care.&quot;
</code></pre>
That&#x27;s a pretty GIGANTIC &quot;glitch,&quot; one that turned out hugely in Amazon&#x27;s favor. Cheiffetz claims she accepts that it was an &quot;administrative error,&quot; but you have to wonder. By getting her to switch to her husband&#x27;s plan, Amazon may have saved themselves hundreds of thousands of dollars.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ninv</author><text>&quot;glitch in the system&quot;, sounds like business requirement to me. HR could not reactivate her health insurance so they called it a glitch in the system.<p>I am sorry for all the folks working there.</text></comment> |
20,976,622 | 20,976,676 | 1 | 2 | 20,976,397 | train | <story><title>Test-driven development: A great idea hiding behind a terrible implementation?</title><url>https://itnext.io/test-driven-development-is-dumb-fight-me-a38b3033280c</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Illniyar</author><text>He&#x27;s right, but also wrong. It really depends on what you are developing.<p>TDD is awesome when fixing bugs (as opposed to writing features), when writing straight up business logic (especially when there are a lot of edge cases) and when you know exactly how something is going to work.<p>It&#x27;s really bad when doing anything that requires exploration and research (which is the example in the article).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>moksly</author><text>I work for a Danish municipality and we buy quite a lot of development from various software houses. Being the public sector we track and benchmark almost everything, and we actually have a dataset on automated testing that’s been running for two decades.<p>It’s hard to use the data, because we’re comparing different projects, teams and suppliers but our data shows no advantage in choosing the companies that are very test-focused.<p>They are often slower, more expensive but have the same amount of incident reports as the companies which tests less or doesn’t do automated test at all.</text></comment> | <story><title>Test-driven development: A great idea hiding behind a terrible implementation?</title><url>https://itnext.io/test-driven-development-is-dumb-fight-me-a38b3033280c</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Illniyar</author><text>He&#x27;s right, but also wrong. It really depends on what you are developing.<p>TDD is awesome when fixing bugs (as opposed to writing features), when writing straight up business logic (especially when there are a lot of edge cases) and when you know exactly how something is going to work.<p>It&#x27;s really bad when doing anything that requires exploration and research (which is the example in the article).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>simonh</author><text>One thing to consider I think is that TDD isn&#x27;t just about the tests. It&#x27;s also about architecting the software into small functions and lightweight classes, which are easy to write concise tests for and then implement incrementally. To TDD advocates, this resulting characteristic of the code is a valuable goal in itself, even just as a side effect of TDD.</text></comment> |
3,709,078 | 3,709,239 | 1 | 3 | 3,708,837 | train | <story><title>How I built a startup while working full-time in Finance</title><url>http://andypickens.tumblr.com/post/19345391305/how-i-built-a-startup-while-working-full-time-in</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>andyokdj</author><text>I worked most nights during the week for a 1-2hrs and every weekend, sometimes spending full days working on the weekends. I found the time when I could and delegated work to my cofounders who did the same. It was just a lot of hard work and extra hours. I sacrificed some social life but still managed to enjoy New York hugely over the past year.</text></item><item><author>upthedale</author><text>This doesn't really address any practical issues you faced in holding down a full-time job whilst also building the startup.<p>Based on the title, I was expecting more. Something like how you managed your time?<p>That said, congrats on launching.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lusr</author><text>I think people underestimate how much you can get done if you commit to at least 1-2 hours during the week EVERY DAY, and at least another 12-16 hours on the weekend. Working during the week is critical, even if it's difficult, simply because it keeps the momentum going and motivation fresh (in my experience of trying it every other way). It's also a deceptive 30-80% additional capacity than what you have merely working weekends.<p>Oh and paying attention to what you're doing and how long it took, and making sure not to waste unnecessary time on nice-to-haves or unnecessary research rather than critical functionality. This is particularly important if you're working alone; I find reviewing my source control checkins and my PivotalTracker progress very helpful in this respect.<p>Then again I ended a great relationship for work so perhaps I'm not the best exemplar of priorities.</text></comment> | <story><title>How I built a startup while working full-time in Finance</title><url>http://andypickens.tumblr.com/post/19345391305/how-i-built-a-startup-while-working-full-time-in</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>andyokdj</author><text>I worked most nights during the week for a 1-2hrs and every weekend, sometimes spending full days working on the weekends. I found the time when I could and delegated work to my cofounders who did the same. It was just a lot of hard work and extra hours. I sacrificed some social life but still managed to enjoy New York hugely over the past year.</text></item><item><author>upthedale</author><text>This doesn't really address any practical issues you faced in holding down a full-time job whilst also building the startup.<p>Based on the title, I was expecting more. Something like how you managed your time?<p>That said, congrats on launching.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>j45</author><text>Can you elaborate on the level and detail of planning you had to do to be effective in 1-2 hour chunks?<p>I think it would be really interesting for the productivity obsessed to maybe even see a mockup of the task lists you would generate to get a sense of how detailed of a list was good.</text></comment> |
15,039,874 | 15,037,839 | 1 | 3 | 15,037,499 | train | <story><title>iOS 11 has a feature to temporarily disable Touch ID</title><url>https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/17/16161758/ios-11-touch-id-disable-emergency-services-lock</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>will_brown</author><text>On 08&#x2F;05&#x2F;17 I was kidnapped at gun point and at one point forced to turn over my iPhone and on two occasions had to provide the gunman my passcode.<p>I learned about tapping the power button 5x&#x27;s but still don&#x27;t know what would have occurred and if such a function would have endangered by life (I believe it triggers a emergency services call, but that could have tipped off the gunman if he heard an voice asking &quot;911, what&#x27;s your emergency?&quot; From the phone). So I believe the following would have been useful: an alternate passcode that would have unknowingly triggered my location and activated the mic to emergency services without the gunman being aware.</text></comment> | <story><title>iOS 11 has a feature to temporarily disable Touch ID</title><url>https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/17/16161758/ios-11-touch-id-disable-emergency-services-lock</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>amelius</author><text>&gt; The new iOS 11 feature is even more relevant when you consider that Apple is expected to introduce face unlocking with the next iPhone.<p>I read that as &quot;fake unlocking&quot;.<p>Which would be a really cool option: a cop or TSA tries to unlock your phone but gets instead a sandboxed environment which makes them think they actually unlocked the phone.</text></comment> |
28,996,414 | 28,996,389 | 1 | 2 | 28,986,557 | train | <story><title>Hertz orders 100k Teslas</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-25/hertz-orders-100-000-teslas-tsla-stock-soars</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>thehappypm</author><text>Electric cars are actually a very good fit for many rentals. Thinking through my last 5 rentals.<p>A wedding that was 1 hour from an airport, ~100 miles RT.<p>A ski trip where I wanted to drive from Denver to my AirBnB near Winter Park Colorado, ~200 miles RT.<p>A hiking trip where I needed a second car for a point-to-point car shuttle (New Hampshire!), ~120 miles RT.<p>A bachelor party where I needed to drive from the airport to a trailhead then to an AirBnB then back to airport, ~150 miles RT.<p>A national park trip to the Grand Canyon, ~500 miles RT.<p>Each of those scenarios would have been 1 full charge of a Tesla round-trip, with the exception of the Grand Canyon. <i>Maybe</i> not the ski trip since it&#x27;s mountainous and cold weather kills the battery so 200 miles might be a stretch, but I could have trickle-charged at my AirBnB. So basically I can see how many quick rental car needs are met by EVs, plus no dealing with filling with gas!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>quantified</author><text>When you bring a gas car back empty, you get charged heavily.<p>Wonder how the pricing and will be affected by the juice left in when you return it. And how their scheduling manages it.<p>Also, will “FSD” be enabled or disabled? There’s an interesting liability chain.</text></comment> | <story><title>Hertz orders 100k Teslas</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-25/hertz-orders-100-000-teslas-tsla-stock-soars</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>thehappypm</author><text>Electric cars are actually a very good fit for many rentals. Thinking through my last 5 rentals.<p>A wedding that was 1 hour from an airport, ~100 miles RT.<p>A ski trip where I wanted to drive from Denver to my AirBnB near Winter Park Colorado, ~200 miles RT.<p>A hiking trip where I needed a second car for a point-to-point car shuttle (New Hampshire!), ~120 miles RT.<p>A bachelor party where I needed to drive from the airport to a trailhead then to an AirBnB then back to airport, ~150 miles RT.<p>A national park trip to the Grand Canyon, ~500 miles RT.<p>Each of those scenarios would have been 1 full charge of a Tesla round-trip, with the exception of the Grand Canyon. <i>Maybe</i> not the ski trip since it&#x27;s mountainous and cold weather kills the battery so 200 miles might be a stretch, but I could have trickle-charged at my AirBnB. So basically I can see how many quick rental car needs are met by EVs, plus no dealing with filling with gas!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nroets</author><text>Electric cars are also a good fit for rental companies for another reason: Their customers want to make a good first impression on customers, new friends and other individuals they rarely see.</text></comment> |
16,274,753 | 16,274,668 | 1 | 3 | 16,273,308 | train | <story><title>Why Did a Billionaire Give $75M to a Philosophy Department?</title><url>http://nautil.us/blog/why-did-a-billionaire-give-75-million-to-a-philosophy-department</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>meri_dian</author><text>This is why philosophy is important:<p>Education has two related yet distinct purposes. The first is to endow us with specific domain knowledge and reasoning. The second is to endow us with general reasoning and critical thinking skills.<p>The value of natural language philosophy - not formal logic and other mathematically adjacent subfields - is that it teaches us to be as rigorous as possible when reasoning in natural language.<p>Given that so much of our lives and the events of history and society unfold in natural language and that it is in natural language that we do much of our critical thinking and reasoning, it&#x27;s important that we hold ourselves to as high a standard as is reasonably possible when talking (either to ourselves or others) as when performing mathematical calculations.<p>It&#x27;s often said that one of the benefits of studying math is that it improves critical thinking skills. I believe this to be true, but I also believe that if our primary concern is improving our day to day critical thinking skills, then we would be better served studying natural language philosphy than mathematics, because on a day to day basis we tend to think and reason and debate and engage with one another in natural language.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dsacco</author><text><i>&gt; It&#x27;s often said that one of the benefits of studying math is that it improves critical thinking skills. I believe this to be true, but I also believe that if our primary concern is improving our day to day critical thinking skills, then we would be better served studying natural language philosphy than mathematics, because on a day to day basis we tend to think and reason and debate and engage with one another in natural language.</i><p>I agree. For this reason, my favorite philosopher has always been Wittgenstein. I also have an affection for the existentialists, but language games demonstrate that philosophy can be eminently practical and relevant despite the pejorative connotations of the term, &quot;philosophizing.&quot;<p>That said, I really don&#x27;t think philosophy should be its own major in most schools. It would be better, in my opinion, to teach philosophy as we teach arithmetic and language, rather than a focused degree.</text></comment> | <story><title>Why Did a Billionaire Give $75M to a Philosophy Department?</title><url>http://nautil.us/blog/why-did-a-billionaire-give-75-million-to-a-philosophy-department</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>meri_dian</author><text>This is why philosophy is important:<p>Education has two related yet distinct purposes. The first is to endow us with specific domain knowledge and reasoning. The second is to endow us with general reasoning and critical thinking skills.<p>The value of natural language philosophy - not formal logic and other mathematically adjacent subfields - is that it teaches us to be as rigorous as possible when reasoning in natural language.<p>Given that so much of our lives and the events of history and society unfold in natural language and that it is in natural language that we do much of our critical thinking and reasoning, it&#x27;s important that we hold ourselves to as high a standard as is reasonably possible when talking (either to ourselves or others) as when performing mathematical calculations.<p>It&#x27;s often said that one of the benefits of studying math is that it improves critical thinking skills. I believe this to be true, but I also believe that if our primary concern is improving our day to day critical thinking skills, then we would be better served studying natural language philosphy than mathematics, because on a day to day basis we tend to think and reason and debate and engage with one another in natural language.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>humanrebar</author><text>&gt; ...it teaches us to be as rigorous as possible when reasoning in natural language.<p>A philosopher should explain to all the natural-language-as-code people why their endeavor is much, much harder than they think it is. If a philosopher isn&#x27;t available, a lawyer would probably be qualified as well.<p>Point being, I feel like I&#x27;m getting <i>some</i> of those benefits just writing code and talking about it on a regular basis.</text></comment> |
4,836,732 | 4,835,555 | 1 | 2 | 4,834,372 | train | <story><title>Leaping Brain's "Virtually Uncrackable" DRM is just an XOR with "RANDOM_STRING"</title><url>https://plus.google.com/101700526665328331501/posts/Yk71MgkvAXx</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Eliezer</author><text>Maybe there's a scheme here to prevent good DRM by flooding the market with highly inflated impressive-sounding claims attached to laughable security. The Old Media crowd won't be able to solve the Design Paradox (<a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html</a>) well enough to tell who's lying, good designs won't be able to charge more than laughable competition, and the DRM field will slowly die.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jwr</author><text>I have this theory that some DRM schemes were intentionally sabotaged by engineers (DVD CSS comes to mind) to be weaker than they could be, for moral reasons.</text></comment> | <story><title>Leaping Brain's "Virtually Uncrackable" DRM is just an XOR with "RANDOM_STRING"</title><url>https://plus.google.com/101700526665328331501/posts/Yk71MgkvAXx</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Eliezer</author><text>Maybe there's a scheme here to prevent good DRM by flooding the market with highly inflated impressive-sounding claims attached to laughable security. The Old Media crowd won't be able to solve the Design Paradox (<a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html</a>) well enough to tell who's lying, good designs won't be able to charge more than laughable competition, and the DRM field will slowly die.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>KateLawson</author><text>Though there is no organized conspiracy, this is actually not far from the truth, especially in some areas of content protection. Companies that don't have the in-house technical expertise (music labels), working from an unprotected distribution system (audio CD) are at a particular disadvantage.<p>At the other end of the spectrum, you have satellite TV. In this area, a lot of money invested and full control of the playback platform have resulted in some strong systems. But still, it took a long time and a lot of cracks of intermediate systems for this industry to become the success story it is today.<p>Disclaimer: I worked for a company involved in the above.</text></comment> |
41,504,484 | 41,504,176 | 1 | 2 | 41,498,358 | train | <story><title>Apple must pay 13B euros in back taxes, EU's top court rules</title><url>https://www.cnbc.com/2024/09/10/apple-loses-eu-court-battle-over-13-billion-euro-tax-bill-in-ireland.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vasco</author><text>I think you make it seem like EU doesn&#x27;t care at all about what member states do in regards to taxation but there&#x27;s many limitations to what can be done by any member state in order to harmonize and prevent corruption etc. This in practice makes the EU have a lot of say in regards to taxation. Moreover the EU has special rules to limit moving funds to jurisdictions that have taxes that are deemed too low (read tax havens) - this directly implies no member state has agency to lower their own taxes as much.<p>Here&#x27;s some example limitations: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;eur-lex.europa.eu&#x2F;EN&#x2F;legal-content&#x2F;summary&#x2F;tackling-corporate-tax-avoidance.html?fromSummary=21" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;eur-lex.europa.eu&#x2F;EN&#x2F;legal-content&#x2F;summary&#x2F;tackling-...</a><p>I focused on direct taxation, but in indirect taxation I think there&#x27;s even more examples.</text></item><item><author>anonymousDan</author><text>For non-EU readers, note that taxation is explicitly not a competency of the EU (i.e. Ireland can set its tax levels to whatever it wants). The only thing in question here is whether it was applying the same taxation rules to all companies, as granting special exceptions to certain companies could be viewed as state aid (which is not allowed). Ireland claimed it wasn&#x27;t, the current (over-)ruling says otherwise. This case is also specific to tax rules from many years back. AFAIK the rules have subsequently been tightened and the exemption no longer exists.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nine_k</author><text>Specifically in Ireland, corporate taxes were being lowered from late 1980s until 2003, in a series of agreements with the EU regulators. It&#x27;s not like Ireland lowered the taxes in a sneaky scheme, or grandfathered-in an abnormally low rate.</text></comment> | <story><title>Apple must pay 13B euros in back taxes, EU's top court rules</title><url>https://www.cnbc.com/2024/09/10/apple-loses-eu-court-battle-over-13-billion-euro-tax-bill-in-ireland.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vasco</author><text>I think you make it seem like EU doesn&#x27;t care at all about what member states do in regards to taxation but there&#x27;s many limitations to what can be done by any member state in order to harmonize and prevent corruption etc. This in practice makes the EU have a lot of say in regards to taxation. Moreover the EU has special rules to limit moving funds to jurisdictions that have taxes that are deemed too low (read tax havens) - this directly implies no member state has agency to lower their own taxes as much.<p>Here&#x27;s some example limitations: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;eur-lex.europa.eu&#x2F;EN&#x2F;legal-content&#x2F;summary&#x2F;tackling-corporate-tax-avoidance.html?fromSummary=21" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;eur-lex.europa.eu&#x2F;EN&#x2F;legal-content&#x2F;summary&#x2F;tackling-...</a><p>I focused on direct taxation, but in indirect taxation I think there&#x27;s even more examples.</text></item><item><author>anonymousDan</author><text>For non-EU readers, note that taxation is explicitly not a competency of the EU (i.e. Ireland can set its tax levels to whatever it wants). The only thing in question here is whether it was applying the same taxation rules to all companies, as granting special exceptions to certain companies could be viewed as state aid (which is not allowed). Ireland claimed it wasn&#x27;t, the current (over-)ruling says otherwise. This case is also specific to tax rules from many years back. AFAIK the rules have subsequently been tightened and the exemption no longer exists.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hinkley</author><text>Maybe they should do it like Roth IRAs. You can move the money to a tax haven only after you’ve paid taxes on it.<p>So if you’re building hotels or factories in the haven that’s fine. If you’re hiding money we demand our pound of flesh.</text></comment> |
34,622,839 | 34,621,855 | 1 | 2 | 34,617,844 | train | <story><title>Meta Reports Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2022 Results</title><url>https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/2023/Meta-Reports-Fourth-Quarter-and-Full-Year-2022-Results/default.aspx</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kccqzy</author><text>The S&amp;P 500 is up by about 10.7% in the past three months. Meta is up by 72.2%.</text></item><item><author>another_story</author><text>In the last 3 months the entire market has come back up. I have safe agricultural stocks that have risen nearly as much in this time. FB bouncing back and having a low PE doesn&#x27;t make it a good investment. People are looking longterm at their prospects and where they&#x27;re dumping their cash and they don&#x27;t like it.</text></item><item><author>melling</author><text>It feels like only 3 months ago I was repeatedly trying to convince HN readers that Meta was a great investment opportunity at a P&#x2F;E of 9. In fact, it was…:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33572187" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33572187</a><p>Markets aren’t efficient. People are biased and can’t look past them.<p>There’s quite a bit of knowledge on HN. As a group, we could do much better understanding the markets.</text></item><item><author>paulpauper</author><text>Up 17% in AH, on top of huge gains over the past 2 months. Nuts. It looks like it really wants to get back to $300+ It shows how all this talk about metaverse losses was overblown. This is why my best piece of financial advice is to tune out the media. By the time something is a narrative, it&#x27;s too late. If the media is talking about how Facebook peaked or is the next myspace, this is time to buy. Same for Netflix.<p>Metaverse notwithstanding, Facebook and Instagram are still huge cash cows. Ad CPCs are really high, especially mobile ads. Companies, especially in financial services and healthcare, paying so much $ for clicks to target older people, retirees, etc. and also people with medical problems. Obesity epidemic means more healthcare spending, same for people living longer.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fdsjjfds</author><text>Even with that, it&#x27;s still down by 50% from a year ago.</text></comment> | <story><title>Meta Reports Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2022 Results</title><url>https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/2023/Meta-Reports-Fourth-Quarter-and-Full-Year-2022-Results/default.aspx</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kccqzy</author><text>The S&amp;P 500 is up by about 10.7% in the past three months. Meta is up by 72.2%.</text></item><item><author>another_story</author><text>In the last 3 months the entire market has come back up. I have safe agricultural stocks that have risen nearly as much in this time. FB bouncing back and having a low PE doesn&#x27;t make it a good investment. People are looking longterm at their prospects and where they&#x27;re dumping their cash and they don&#x27;t like it.</text></item><item><author>melling</author><text>It feels like only 3 months ago I was repeatedly trying to convince HN readers that Meta was a great investment opportunity at a P&#x2F;E of 9. In fact, it was…:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33572187" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33572187</a><p>Markets aren’t efficient. People are biased and can’t look past them.<p>There’s quite a bit of knowledge on HN. As a group, we could do much better understanding the markets.</text></item><item><author>paulpauper</author><text>Up 17% in AH, on top of huge gains over the past 2 months. Nuts. It looks like it really wants to get back to $300+ It shows how all this talk about metaverse losses was overblown. This is why my best piece of financial advice is to tune out the media. By the time something is a narrative, it&#x27;s too late. If the media is talking about how Facebook peaked or is the next myspace, this is time to buy. Same for Netflix.<p>Metaverse notwithstanding, Facebook and Instagram are still huge cash cows. Ad CPCs are really high, especially mobile ads. Companies, especially in financial services and healthcare, paying so much $ for clicks to target older people, retirees, etc. and also people with medical problems. Obesity epidemic means more healthcare spending, same for people living longer.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>acchow</author><text>Including the after hours jump today, Meta is up about 92% since Nov 1 (3 months ago)</text></comment> |
8,279,647 | 8,279,282 | 1 | 2 | 8,279,081 | train | <story><title>Bleve – A modern text indexing library for Go</title><url>https://github.com/blevesearch/bleve</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>alrs</author><text>Wishful thinking: I hope this prefaces an Elasticsearch rewrite in Go. I&#x27;m happy to be rid of the JVM wherever I find it.<p>No hard feelings, but we just spent 20 years crowbaring Microsoft into irrelevance. It&#x27;s time to get started on Larry.</text></comment> | <story><title>Bleve – A modern text indexing library for Go</title><url>https://github.com/blevesearch/bleve</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>SaberTail</author><text>Is the name meant to bring to mind a large explosion?<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_liquid_expanding_vapor_explosion" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Boiling_liquid_expanding_vapor_...</a></text></comment> |
27,936,237 | 27,936,264 | 1 | 3 | 27,933,334 | train | <story><title>Old Vidme embeds turn into porn after domain purchase</title><url>https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/22/22589403/porn-site-bought-expired-video-hosting-site-old-embeds</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>skipants</author><text>I don&#x27;t have expertise in video codecs or file formats, but couldn&#x27;t you hash the first N bytes of a stream? Stream those N bytes to the client and if it matches start the video, else stop the download and not start the video.</text></item><item><author>kazinator</author><text>Problem is, you have to download the entire video to check the hash. That&#x27;s not how video embedding works; the client browser is just handed some link, and it obtains pieces of the video, rendering it instantly.<p>Basically, little segments of the video have to have a signature which is continuously validated. Or something like that.</text></item><item><author>elihu</author><text>One idea that&#x27;s been around for awhile is to identify files by their hash. That has pros and cons. The good side of that is that the file is immutable; you can&#x27;t accidentally link to something else unless someone can manufacture a hash collision somehow. The down side is that if the file is corrected in some way, you don&#x27;t get the fixes.<p>In a lot of the peer-to-peer distributed hash table designs, all you need to retrieve a file is its hash.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Content_addressable_network" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Content_addressable_network</a></text></item><item><author>ignitionmonkey</author><text>We can&#x27;t and shouldn&#x27;t expect people to keep their old domains forever. We need a way for pages to be signed and hyperlinks to enforce authorship. When we link to stuff, we should have a way to say whose stuff we&#x27;re linking to. It&#x27;s no different from installing signed software and using trusted repositories.<p>This is one of the reasons I created a proof-of-concept web extension that verifies links and pages using PGP. On a mismatch, it flags the page and offers a web archive link instead.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;webverify.jahed.dev&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;webverify.jahed.dev&#x2F;</a><p>It was pretty fun to make, but currently due to performance, Web Extensions API doesn&#x27;t provide the features to do this perfectly. Firefox provides just about enough additional APIs to hack it together.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>giantrobot</author><text>This has a number of problems.<p>The most egregious is if I&#x27;m an attacker and I have the file you request I can hash the appropriate portion you&#x27;d use to verify it but fill the rest with junk or exploits. You&#x27;d receive the file, it would emit the correct hash, yet be not what you were expecting.<p>For video especially what you receive isn&#x27;t necessarily predictable by the client. With HLS or MPEG DASH streaming the video you receive could be one of a number of different encoding e.g. lower or higher bitrates to deal with changing network conditions. The actual m3u8&#x2F;mpd file you might receive could change arbitrarily as the video provider adds or drops different encodings. The hash of such a file today isn&#x27;t guaranteed to match the hash tomorrow for entirely banal non-malicious reasons.<p>Fun fact: the UUHash algorithm used by the FastTrack network (Kazaa, Morpheus, etc) only hashed the first bit of a file. Hashing a large file took forever on hardware of the day. Even hashing small files was non-trivial. The RIAA through various fronts would insert spoofed files where the first portion of the file was legitimate but the content of the file would be junk or annoying sounds. The files would be named like any other MP3 someone was searching for and even have seemingly good IDv3 tags.</text></comment> | <story><title>Old Vidme embeds turn into porn after domain purchase</title><url>https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/22/22589403/porn-site-bought-expired-video-hosting-site-old-embeds</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>skipants</author><text>I don&#x27;t have expertise in video codecs or file formats, but couldn&#x27;t you hash the first N bytes of a stream? Stream those N bytes to the client and if it matches start the video, else stop the download and not start the video.</text></item><item><author>kazinator</author><text>Problem is, you have to download the entire video to check the hash. That&#x27;s not how video embedding works; the client browser is just handed some link, and it obtains pieces of the video, rendering it instantly.<p>Basically, little segments of the video have to have a signature which is continuously validated. Or something like that.</text></item><item><author>elihu</author><text>One idea that&#x27;s been around for awhile is to identify files by their hash. That has pros and cons. The good side of that is that the file is immutable; you can&#x27;t accidentally link to something else unless someone can manufacture a hash collision somehow. The down side is that if the file is corrected in some way, you don&#x27;t get the fixes.<p>In a lot of the peer-to-peer distributed hash table designs, all you need to retrieve a file is its hash.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Content_addressable_network" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Content_addressable_network</a></text></item><item><author>ignitionmonkey</author><text>We can&#x27;t and shouldn&#x27;t expect people to keep their old domains forever. We need a way for pages to be signed and hyperlinks to enforce authorship. When we link to stuff, we should have a way to say whose stuff we&#x27;re linking to. It&#x27;s no different from installing signed software and using trusted repositories.<p>This is one of the reasons I created a proof-of-concept web extension that verifies links and pages using PGP. On a mismatch, it flags the page and offers a web archive link instead.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;webverify.jahed.dev&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;webverify.jahed.dev&#x2F;</a><p>It was pretty fun to make, but currently due to performance, Web Extensions API doesn&#x27;t provide the features to do this perfectly. Firefox provides just about enough additional APIs to hack it together.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>AgentME</author><text>Merkle trees basically accomplish this with separate hashes over every N bytes, so that the content can be verified continuously as it&#x27;s downloaded.</text></comment> |
6,403,943 | 6,403,782 | 1 | 2 | 6,403,285 | train | <story><title>A Jewel at the Heart of Quantum Physics</title><url>https://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20130917-a-jewel-at-the-heart-of-quantum-physics</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gruseom</author><text>Is anyone here familiar with this work? I would like to hear more about it. At a minimum, this article is very much better than the usual science blog filler—it contains signs of a genuine conceptual breakthrough. For example:<p><i>“You can easily do, on paper, computations that were infeasible even with a computer before.”</i><p>That doesn&#x27;t happen very often! Or this:<p><i>[T]he new geometric approach to particle interactions removes locality and unitarity from its starting assumptions. The amplituhedron is not built out of space-time and probabilities; these properties merely arise as consequences of the jewel’s geometry. The usual picture of space and time, and particles moving around in them, is a construct.</i><p>That is exactly the kind of thing that happens when one model is replaced with a deeper one.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ssivark</author><text>I&#x27;ve been keenly following this area of research and have heard some of the talks and read some papers. I concur with the sketch given by @gaze.<p>1. The notion of <i>unitarity</i> is a &quot;common sense&quot; rule that implies that you can consistently assign probabilities to possible outcomes in a quantum mechanical experiment (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitarity_%28physics%29" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Unitarity_%28physics%29</a>)<p>2. The notion of <i>locality</i> states that what happens on Jupiter better not affect how fast your code compiles this morning (or how experiments run on earth). This is an important postulate, because if this weren&#x27;t true, we might as well give up on doing science as there would be arbitrarily many external influences we couldn&#x27;t take into account.<p>All our experiments so far are perfectly consistent with these two principles. Quantum field theory is the brainchild of the marriage of unitarity (from quantum mechanics) and the idea of locality (in field theory). Our world view today (&quot;Standard model of particle physics&quot;) is based on this.<p>In practice, calculating answers using this theory is painfully difficult. YOu will add up thousand pages worth of algebraic terms and then your answer will &#x27;miraculously&#x27; reduce to a few terms. This and other observations have inspired researchers to search for underlying structure... leading to what is now being called the &#x27;amplitude revolution&#x27; by some people.</text></comment> | <story><title>A Jewel at the Heart of Quantum Physics</title><url>https://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20130917-a-jewel-at-the-heart-of-quantum-physics</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gruseom</author><text>Is anyone here familiar with this work? I would like to hear more about it. At a minimum, this article is very much better than the usual science blog filler—it contains signs of a genuine conceptual breakthrough. For example:<p><i>“You can easily do, on paper, computations that were infeasible even with a computer before.”</i><p>That doesn&#x27;t happen very often! Or this:<p><i>[T]he new geometric approach to particle interactions removes locality and unitarity from its starting assumptions. The amplituhedron is not built out of space-time and probabilities; these properties merely arise as consequences of the jewel’s geometry. The usual picture of space and time, and particles moving around in them, is a construct.</i><p>That is exactly the kind of thing that happens when one model is replaced with a deeper one.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ISL</author><text>Physicist here: This has a higher probability of being important than your usual science blog material. The Simons Foundation is a serious entity, backed with serious funds.<p>Arkani-Hamed had some compelling things to say recently at a talk and colloquium at our university; looking forward to learning more.</text></comment> |
41,312,646 | 41,311,964 | 1 | 2 | 41,311,071 | train | <story><title>Mimalloc Cigarette: Losing one week of my life catching a memory leak (Rust)</title><url>https://pwy.io/posts/mimalloc-cigarette/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>hinkley</author><text>We had learned helplessness on a drag and drop bug in jquery UI. I had like three hours every second or third Friday and would just step through the code trying to find the bug. That code was so sketchy the jquery team was trying to rewrite it from scratch one component at a time, and wouldn’t entertain any bug discussions on the old code even though they were a year behind already.<p>After almost six months, I finally found a spot where I could monkey patch a function to wrap it with a short circuit if the coordinates were out of bounds. Not only fixed the bug but made drag and drop several times faster. Couldn’t share this with the world because they weren’t accepting PRs against the old widgets.<p>I’ve worked harder on bug fixes, but I think that’s the longest I’ve worked on one.</text></comment> | <story><title>Mimalloc Cigarette: Losing one week of my life catching a memory leak (Rust)</title><url>https://pwy.io/posts/mimalloc-cigarette/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>kibwen</author><text>Level 1 systems programmer: &quot;wow, it feels so nice having control over my memory and getting out from under the thumb of a garbage collector&quot;<p>Level 2 systems programmer: &quot;oh no, my memory allocator is a garbage collector&quot;</text></comment> |
28,339,518 | 28,339,760 | 1 | 2 | 28,338,893 | train | <story><title>Missile Base for Sale</title><url>http://mobile.missilebaseforsale.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mjreacher</author><text>Here&#x27;s a 6 minute video explaining the sprint missile for those unaware and interested (rather fascinating technology for the 70s) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=3dl9Ovwmnxw" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=3dl9Ovwmnxw</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jcims</author><text>That&#x27;s honestly why I clicked on the article, it&#x27;s actually an ABM (anti-ballistic missle)<p>For those that need a little teaser to be incentivized to click on the YouTube link, here&#x27;s the title of the video &#x27;Super Pointy Sprint Missile - 0 to Mach 10 in 15 Seconds - 100Gs &amp; 6000°F&#x27;<p>If you have any interest in aerospace at all and have never heard of the Sprint, take a gander, it&#x27;s a spectacular edge case in engineering.</text></comment> | <story><title>Missile Base for Sale</title><url>http://mobile.missilebaseforsale.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mjreacher</author><text>Here&#x27;s a 6 minute video explaining the sprint missile for those unaware and interested (rather fascinating technology for the 70s) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=3dl9Ovwmnxw" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=3dl9Ovwmnxw</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>zerocount</author><text>It&#x27;d be a great video if not for the robot narration voice. I wish people would just read it themselves. I couldn&#x27;t watch it with that voice talking.</text></comment> |
25,060,913 | 25,061,124 | 1 | 2 | 25,060,418 | train | <story><title>Doomsday prepping – Disaster planning for less crazy folk (2016)</title><url>https://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/prep/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>kochb</author><text>Discussion from prior submission:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=15110850" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=15110850</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Doomsday prepping – Disaster planning for less crazy folk (2016)</title><url>https://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/prep/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ajsnigrutin</author><text>I think reality TV has ruined what normal preppers are trying to teach us.<p>There are many, many realistic situatiations, where you might end up without power, outside, or even locked at home (like going abroad when the neighbouring country is in a &quot;green&quot; covid state, and your government changing their mind overnight, how they decide &#x27;colors&#x27;, and classifing it as &quot;red&quot;, and you need to quarantene for 14 days). Plus all the &quot;i have the flu, I don&#x27;t want to go to the supermarket today&quot; situations.<p>Having some supplies at home (canned food, pasta, etc.) and some extra other stuff, a barbecue or something to cook stuff in, and an extra pair of socks &amp; a shirt in your car is a very smart thing to do. Our grandmothers, living in villages had full cellars of food not that long ago, with sacks of flour, salt, and knowledge how to bake bread, and it was a totally normal thing to do and have (and people outside of big cities still do that).<p>And reality TV? Show a nutter, thinking about rapture, with a cellar full of some dry freezed crap, some 5 year food supply pack on a couple of pallets, still unopened, with an expiration date two years in the future, a huge amount of guns and ammo, and a &quot;tactical&quot; toilet bag, with a tacital, camo colored emergency toilet paper cutter, ...just in case.<p>This makes preppers look stupid, their prep cases look unrealistic, people having half a slice of toast and a jar of mouldy mustard as only food items in their house and people literally starving when their delivery driver cancells their order due to icy roads.</text></comment> |
17,507,889 | 17,507,846 | 1 | 2 | 17,507,602 | train | <story><title>TSA screeners win immunity from flier abuse claims: U.S. appeals court</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-tsa-lawsuit/tsa-screeners-win-immunity-from-flier-abuse-claims-u-s-appeals-court-idUSKBN1K125W</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>rayiner</author><text>The opinion is here (should be up on the CA3 website later today): <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;s000.tinyupload.com&#x2F;index.php?file_id=31076227891884466185" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;s000.tinyupload.com&#x2F;index.php?file_id=310762278918844...</a>. The relevant discussion starts at 12-13.<p>The gist of the suit is this: Ordinarily, you cannot sue the federal government (sovereign immunity). The Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA), broadly waives sovereign immunity for tort claims. An exception to that waiver of immunity is where the agent of the government commits an intentional tort (<i>e.g.</i> federal employee punches you, as opposed to accidentally running over your dog, which would be a negligent tort). However, that exception does not apply to law enforcement officers--under the FTCA, the federal government takes responsibility for the intentional torts of law enforcement.<p>Ordinarily, even if you cannot sue the government, you can sue the individual officer in his personal capacity. Under the Westfall Act, however, the FTCA is the exclusive remedy for torts of federal agents acting within the scope of their employment.<p>That leaves a loophole: you can sue federal law enforcement officers under the FTCA for both intentional and negligent torts. But if the federal agent is not a law enforcement officer, you can only sue her for negligent torts. The issue in this case is whether TSA agents are law enforcement officers such that you can sue the federal government for their intentional torts.<p>The majority holding is probably correct as a matter of statutory interpretation. Still, it puts TSA in a weird loophole, where they act like law enforcement officers (including all of the power-tripping that can result in commission of intentional torts), but can&#x27;t be held liable under the FTCA like law enforcement officers. The dissent makes a good point:<p>&gt; Circuit Judge Thomas Ambro dissented from Wednesday’s decision.<p>&gt; “By analogizing TSA searches to routine administrative inspections, my colleagues preclude victims of TSA abuses from obtaining any meaningful remedy for a variety of intentional tort claims,” he wrote.</text></comment> | <story><title>TSA screeners win immunity from flier abuse claims: U.S. appeals court</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-tsa-lawsuit/tsa-screeners-win-immunity-from-flier-abuse-claims-u-s-appeals-court-idUSKBN1K125W</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>everdev</author><text>&gt; She and her husband had sued for false arrest, false imprisonment and malicious prosecution over a July 2006 altercation at Philadelphia International Airport.<p>Why does it take 12 years to get this far in a case? It seems like a right to a speedy trial should apply to civil cases too.</text></comment> |
21,995,534 | 21,995,390 | 1 | 2 | 21,993,208 | train | <story><title>Specification for the D Programming Language</title><url>https://dlang.org/spec/spec.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sam0x17</author><text>I wish I had known about D 10 years ago. It&#x27;s everything I ever wanted out of an LLVM language, but I feel like it&#x27;s dying and the package ecosystem is tiny, which is crazy with how old it is. What they need is some new web design and docs and exciting stuff to make it feel like a new language so people recognize how truly awesome it is :&#x2F;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bachmeier</author><text>&gt; I feel like it&#x27;s dying<p>I can&#x27;t control how someone else feels, but I can tell you your feeling is very wrong. Just a few of the things people are being <i>paid</i> to work on right now:<p>Android support<p>Webassembly<p>Symmetry Autumn of Code projects<p>There will also be paid work on iOS once they find someone that can do the job (if they haven&#x27;t already). And yet another annual DConf will be taking place in London in June.<p>These are just a few of the examples where folks are putting real money into the D ecosystem. The language continues to evolve (for example, moving to safe by default). This is by far the most active D has been in the seven years I&#x27;ve been using it.</text></comment> | <story><title>Specification for the D Programming Language</title><url>https://dlang.org/spec/spec.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sam0x17</author><text>I wish I had known about D 10 years ago. It&#x27;s everything I ever wanted out of an LLVM language, but I feel like it&#x27;s dying and the package ecosystem is tiny, which is crazy with how old it is. What they need is some new web design and docs and exciting stuff to make it feel like a new language so people recognize how truly awesome it is :&#x2F;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Neku42</author><text>I found D 10 years before and it had the same stale feeling it seems to irradiating today and this is turning people away<p>The truth is it was good enough for most uses already but people waited out for someone to step up and make things better before they felt it would be worth trying D<p>D really shines if you do greenfield projects where you have the luxury to reinvent some wheels. Its surprisingly pleasant to see a lot of boilerplate one might expect to accumulate to just not be there because it’s either generated or is just not necessary because the language is flexible enough</text></comment> |
4,397,258 | 4,397,306 | 1 | 2 | 4,396,747 | train | <story><title>Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News..</title><text>I joined Hacker News around 5 years ago. I used to wake up and do the grim commute each morning to London from my home and the only thing that made it vaguely ok was Hacker News. It was a great place to go and find interesting articles from genuinely passionate people. It also used to be a really safe place to launch a startup that you'd spent days, weeks, years on - your project. It was a place where you could launch your startup and know you'd get great constructive feedback. People may not necessarily like your site but they'd admire you for having the balls to launch it, for spending time developing something that you hoped could benefit people in some way. They'd want you to succeed and they'd try and help you succeed with feedback that would ultimately help you. Unfortunately, today's Hacker News audience is no longer the same.
Today's Hacker News is a place where users want to snipe at other users and find negative aspects to anything thing submitted. No longer does someone say 'This and this I like but this needs work'. Oh no, now the response is 'Hate this, hate that, this is pointless.'. Hacker News now is about correcting grammar and points scoring. It is pointing out anything negative at all that anyone has done, has said. It is no longer a safe place. It has fast become an acidic forum.<p>I've launched 2 projects (11kclub and Favilous) on here over the last year - both got a similar response. There was nothing constructive, it was just sniping - they saw someone had put themselves up there and they just shot them down. It's a real shame. I hope one day the site returns with the kind of audience it once had. Until that happens, I won't be going on my favourite site anymore - the commute just got a whole lot longer.<p>For now I wish you all the best...<p>Thanks<p>Steve</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>victork2</author><text>Hi Steve,<p>I don't know if you are going to read this, but I'm going to write it for the rest of the audience too.<p>I think the trend of dismissing critics and commenting along the lines of "sour grapes" or "haters" very disturbing. Yes I go against your commentary. The great thing about internet and communities based on pseudonyms is that you get the first reaction that people have. Very few will take a few minutes to give their opinion, weight the different possibilities etc... It's brutal, it's direct. If you have run a service online you certainly know that you receive very angry/ threatening emails from people that use your services and are displeased. If it disturbs you it means that you are not ready for having a personal project on display, it's as simple as that. People in life and particularly on the internet are very angry and you have disturbed individuals. Opening a service with your name and your address is becoming some kind of "celebrity", people will HATE you for no good reason.<p>To come back to what I think is bad/annoying on Hacker News is of a different nature and I'll list a few:<p>* Well thought comments are often ignored and not read ( not up/downvoted, just ignored )<p>* Stardom: No matter what they post some ""famous"" people around here get their post on the front page. By courtesy I won't list who they are but everybody can spot it pretty easily. I'm very disappointed by this attitude personally, and it doesn't speak highly of a place that is supposed to be almost a pure meritocracy.<p>* Fads/ Jealousy: A lot of people here want to be rich and famous thus it creates tension. It allows me to come back to your point: these people are likely going to dismiss your ideas based on jealousy.<p>* Over-repetition of some stories ad nauseum: dumb benchmarks to see the number of req/s, analysis App.net, Education sucks...<p>All that being said it remains an interesting community but with some drawbacks. I guess nothing can have it all.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nonrecursive</author><text>With all due respect, I think you missed the point of this post. The OP is not dismissing critics with claims of "sour grapes" and "hating". He is saying that the community is no longer a "safe place" where he feels OK to share work in its early stages.<p>In other words, he was not saying that negative criticism should be dismissed. He was saying that there is too much negativity for him to find the site enjoyable and that he thinks the change in attitude is for the worse.<p>That said, I also think that you're off the mark when you say the OP is not ready for having a personal project on display. The premise of OP's note is that he considered HN to be a more positive, supportive community than the larger Internet. There is nothing wrong with wanting to associate yourself with people who will build you up rather than tear you down. If Steve's been using HN for five years, he's probably well aware of how vicious people can be on the Internet. It sounds like he's sad that HN isn't a haven from this viciousness like it once was. And just because he's sad that this one community has deteriorated, that doesn't mean he's not capable of handling the slings and arrows of the wider Internet population.</text></comment> | <story><title>Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News..</title><text>I joined Hacker News around 5 years ago. I used to wake up and do the grim commute each morning to London from my home and the only thing that made it vaguely ok was Hacker News. It was a great place to go and find interesting articles from genuinely passionate people. It also used to be a really safe place to launch a startup that you'd spent days, weeks, years on - your project. It was a place where you could launch your startup and know you'd get great constructive feedback. People may not necessarily like your site but they'd admire you for having the balls to launch it, for spending time developing something that you hoped could benefit people in some way. They'd want you to succeed and they'd try and help you succeed with feedback that would ultimately help you. Unfortunately, today's Hacker News audience is no longer the same.
Today's Hacker News is a place where users want to snipe at other users and find negative aspects to anything thing submitted. No longer does someone say 'This and this I like but this needs work'. Oh no, now the response is 'Hate this, hate that, this is pointless.'. Hacker News now is about correcting grammar and points scoring. It is pointing out anything negative at all that anyone has done, has said. It is no longer a safe place. It has fast become an acidic forum.<p>I've launched 2 projects (11kclub and Favilous) on here over the last year - both got a similar response. There was nothing constructive, it was just sniping - they saw someone had put themselves up there and they just shot them down. It's a real shame. I hope one day the site returns with the kind of audience it once had. Until that happens, I won't be going on my favourite site anymore - the commute just got a whole lot longer.<p>For now I wish you all the best...<p>Thanks<p>Steve</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>victork2</author><text>Hi Steve,<p>I don't know if you are going to read this, but I'm going to write it for the rest of the audience too.<p>I think the trend of dismissing critics and commenting along the lines of "sour grapes" or "haters" very disturbing. Yes I go against your commentary. The great thing about internet and communities based on pseudonyms is that you get the first reaction that people have. Very few will take a few minutes to give their opinion, weight the different possibilities etc... It's brutal, it's direct. If you have run a service online you certainly know that you receive very angry/ threatening emails from people that use your services and are displeased. If it disturbs you it means that you are not ready for having a personal project on display, it's as simple as that. People in life and particularly on the internet are very angry and you have disturbed individuals. Opening a service with your name and your address is becoming some kind of "celebrity", people will HATE you for no good reason.<p>To come back to what I think is bad/annoying on Hacker News is of a different nature and I'll list a few:<p>* Well thought comments are often ignored and not read ( not up/downvoted, just ignored )<p>* Stardom: No matter what they post some ""famous"" people around here get their post on the front page. By courtesy I won't list who they are but everybody can spot it pretty easily. I'm very disappointed by this attitude personally, and it doesn't speak highly of a place that is supposed to be almost a pure meritocracy.<p>* Fads/ Jealousy: A lot of people here want to be rich and famous thus it creates tension. It allows me to come back to your point: these people are likely going to dismiss your ideas based on jealousy.<p>* Over-repetition of some stories ad nauseum: dumb benchmarks to see the number of req/s, analysis App.net, Education sucks...<p>All that being said it remains an interesting community but with some drawbacks. I guess nothing can have it all.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wickedchicken</author><text>&#62; Education sucks...<p>This is my main gripe with HN right now -- the anti-intellectualism of the community. I recall an article submitted where the author claimed "Academic papers are shitloads of crap. Want to read something? Read some beautiful source code instead."<p>Nearly all breakthroughs in computing sprung up from an academic context; why would you be so cavalier in dismissing it? You might actually find out what a Y Combinator is!<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed-point_combinator#Y_combinator" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed-point_combinator#Y_combin...</a></text></comment> |
1,385,193 | 1,385,172 | 1 | 3 | 1,385,056 | train | <story><title>500MB download? Why didn't Wired Magazine use HTML5 for their iPad app?</title><url>http://interfacelab.com/is-this-really-the-future-of-magazines-or-why-didnt-they-just-use-html-5</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ajg1977</author><text>A better article would be "Why Wired Didn't use HTML5 for their iPad App". Since that probably wouldn't have the same link-bait worthy title, I'll write one here.<p>Why didn't Wired use HTML5?<p>1) a) it was built by Adobe who build it on Flash to begin with, b) the tools just aren't there yet. c) because of #2.<p>2) Why is the app 500MB? Because all the rich content (images, movies, audio) are bundled into the app so you do not need an internet connection to view it. I think we can all agree that downloading a "magazine" before you leave the house, then finding you can't view most of it, would be an uber fail.<p>If the app had been based on HTML5 it would have been a 'mare to cache all of the content locally for offline viewing. HTML5 does offer local storage, but not in a way that would allow sites to cache 500MB of content. And even if they could, do you really want to wait 20 minutes for that Pixar feature to download over 3G?<p>I suppose you could have created a native app with everything bundled locally and a UIWebView for rendering the HTML5 content, but really what do you gain from that?</text></comment> | <story><title>500MB download? Why didn't Wired Magazine use HTML5 for their iPad app?</title><url>http://interfacelab.com/is-this-really-the-future-of-magazines-or-why-didnt-they-just-use-html-5</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>GR8K</author><text>He should have mentioned Sports Illustrated at I/O 2010 for their magazine demo built in HTML5 to make his point: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3j7mM_JBNw" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3j7mM_JBNw</a></text></comment> |
35,653,917 | 35,653,669 | 1 | 3 | 35,653,125 | train | <story><title>AI is taking the jobs of Kenyans who write essays for U.S. college students</title><url>https://restofworld.org/2023/chatgpt-taking-kenya-ghostwriters-jobs/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hospitalJail</author><text>I wonder if this is going to level the playing field a bit.<p>People who cheated in school had a bit of an advantage, but with these advances, it forces teachers to find ways to test people in different ways.<p>I once had a teacher who gave us open book, open note, etc... for chemistry. The trick was, you had ~60 minutes to do it. If you didn&#x27;t practice, you&#x27;d never finish the test in time.<p>I also had a different teacher in thermo 2 give us two different insane problems, and we had to solve them. GPT would easily fail at this. It involved drawing a few diagrams of layers and calculations. (although, I wonder if you could train LLMs on this problem) Still, you had to do this in class, no calculator, just set up the equations.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pmarreck</author><text>&gt; I once had a teacher who gave us open book, open note, etc... for chemistry. The trick was, you had ~60 minutes to do it. If you didn&#x27;t practice, you&#x27;d never finish the test in time.<p>I hated tests like this... because I was a lazy kid who coasted through school and didn&#x27;t understand why &quot;simply understanding the material&quot; was insufficient. In college (Cornell) the chaos continued, I got poor grades in calc because despite getting all the bonus questions right (which tested your understanding of the material), I couldn&#x27;t finish the actual test in time because I hadn&#x27;t done the problem-set homework (these problem sets took 6 hours to do btw... coming from a high school that only started challenging me towards the end, I was completely ill-equipped to handle that level of self-discipline).<p>Of course, in the working world, it turns out that persistence&#x2F;commitment&#x2F;self-discipline is the real payoff. I had to learn that the hard way later on.</text></comment> | <story><title>AI is taking the jobs of Kenyans who write essays for U.S. college students</title><url>https://restofworld.org/2023/chatgpt-taking-kenya-ghostwriters-jobs/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hospitalJail</author><text>I wonder if this is going to level the playing field a bit.<p>People who cheated in school had a bit of an advantage, but with these advances, it forces teachers to find ways to test people in different ways.<p>I once had a teacher who gave us open book, open note, etc... for chemistry. The trick was, you had ~60 minutes to do it. If you didn&#x27;t practice, you&#x27;d never finish the test in time.<p>I also had a different teacher in thermo 2 give us two different insane problems, and we had to solve them. GPT would easily fail at this. It involved drawing a few diagrams of layers and calculations. (although, I wonder if you could train LLMs on this problem) Still, you had to do this in class, no calculator, just set up the equations.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>VeninVidiaVicii</author><text>Yeah, same for my prokaryotic molecular biology class. The questions were 100 percent theoretical, and you were even allowed to take the test at home. After the first one, it made sense why — the questions are totally ungooglable, and working with anyone else would’ve immediately polluted my mind and been obvious.</text></comment> |
14,628,956 | 14,628,516 | 1 | 2 | 14,627,704 | train | <story><title>Wikimedia Foundation v. NSA</title><url>https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/06/23/wikimedia-v-nsa-present-future/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>asher</author><text>Seems like it&#x27;s trendy to hate the NSA. It gets conflated with an anti-authoritarian mindset. I wish smart people would gain some perspective - I got some by reading Bamford&#x27;s books and a new one by Fred Kaplan - Dark Territories, about NSAs painful move to cyber. Some key points:<p>* All the great powers have NSA equivalents. Meaning they play offence and defense in crypto, RF, and cyber. We (USA) can impose restrictions on our NSA but not on anyone else&#x27;s. Our exploit-riddled networks are a playground for American, Russian and Chinese cyber warriors - and probably many others.<p>* In cyber, offense and defense become the same. Kaplan&#x27;s book covers this. So a smart country seeks cyber-superiority. The more we hamper NSA, the more we empower foreign cyber-warriors.<p>* The focus has moved from RF to cyber. Giant antennas are far less important and giant datacenters are the new stars. Vacuuming up packets is less alarming when you understand we&#x27;ve been vacuuming up radio and telephone signals for decades. When comsats were important, NSA was vacuuming up their downlinks. When international telegrams were punched on paper tape, NSA&#x27;s predecessors picked up the tape each day.<p>* The US has tried going &quot;NSA-less&quot;. It happened in 1929 under the slogan &quot;Gentlemen do not read each other&#x27;s mail&quot;. That noble slogan led to the US operating at a disadvantage in the lead up to WWII. It doesn&#x27;t pay to fly blind.<p>* Fear of an overreaching state is always justified; however we should focus that fear more on how NSA shares data than how it acquires it. For instance fusion centers: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eff.org&#x2F;deeplinks&#x2F;2014&#x2F;04&#x2F;why-fusion-centers-matter-faq" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eff.org&#x2F;deeplinks&#x2F;2014&#x2F;04&#x2F;why-fusion-centers-mat...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Wikimedia Foundation v. NSA</title><url>https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/06/23/wikimedia-v-nsa-present-future/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dmurawsky</author><text>Great article, thanks for doing what you do ;)</text></comment> |
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