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22,005,203 | 22,005,256 | 1 | 2 | 22,003,832 | train | <story><title>Lime shuts in 12 markets, lays off around 100</title><url>https://www.axios.com/e-scooter-startup-lime-shuts-in-12-markets-lays-off-around-100-d25d44e4-c0f1-4713-9a89-868f4da40e03.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Hasz</author><text>Ah, but public transit is inherently the slowest option. I have no desire to make 10 stops before I get where I&#x27;m going. I also have zero desire to rent my modes, as that encourages literally rent seeking behavior.<p>Either we need to figure out how to drop off and pickup passengers at speed, or penalize individualized transport that is space inefficient (like cars). Good luck pursuing the latter in the US; punitive measure seem to work elsewhere.<p>I think the way forward is compact private transport, like bikes, scooters, walking, etc, augmented by a robust mass public transit. Unfortunately, that mix implies a expensive re-configuring of most American cities.</text></item><item><author>the_imp</author><text>The whole model of needing to own your own transportation devices is flawed.<p>9&#x2F;10 times, I&#x27;m moving from one location with many other people in it to another location with many other people. I would prefer not needing to own any medium in order to move between them, but instead be able to use a public service to do so. Bus, tram, metro, citybike, scooter. I&#x27;d really rather not own stuff with really high capital costs, like cars.<p>At this point, the only reason to own anything more expensive than a bike is bad city planning and infrastructure.</text></item><item><author>Hasz</author><text>This whole model is incredibly, impossibly, flawed.<p>9&#x2F;10 times, my net displacement for the day is 0. If my net displacement is zero, I would prefer to own the medium I&#x27;m using to move. Bike, car, scooter etc. Only exception is stuff with really high capital costs, like planes and trains, in which case I pay a small fee to avoid owning a railway or airline.<p>For scooters, there are no high capitals costs; the cost of a scooter is laughably low. It&#x27;s sold as a quicker-than-walking, less-hassle-than-a-car last mile solution, but again, 9&#x2F;10 of my trips are 0 displacement, so, why not just buy the scooter outright? Cheaper, safer, faster (I know where it is, no need to walk to it, etc).<p>They only way Lime, Bird etc survive is by legislation. Lobby for scooter licensure, buy up all the licenses, and become the taxi industry (except for scooters, and you have to drive!)<p>What an ironic loop.<p>At this point, the only reason to fund these guys is FOMO.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>robrenaud</author><text>&gt; Ah, but public transit is inherently the slowest option.<p>This isn&#x27;t true if you are in a dense city with good public transit. This is currently mid day (3 PM), and it&#x27;s about 30% faster (21 minutes vs 29 minutes) to go from my current location in Manhattan to a bar I enjoy hanging out in Brooklyn via public transit than car, according to Google Maps. It would be even better around rush hour.</text></comment> | <story><title>Lime shuts in 12 markets, lays off around 100</title><url>https://www.axios.com/e-scooter-startup-lime-shuts-in-12-markets-lays-off-around-100-d25d44e4-c0f1-4713-9a89-868f4da40e03.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Hasz</author><text>Ah, but public transit is inherently the slowest option. I have no desire to make 10 stops before I get where I&#x27;m going. I also have zero desire to rent my modes, as that encourages literally rent seeking behavior.<p>Either we need to figure out how to drop off and pickup passengers at speed, or penalize individualized transport that is space inefficient (like cars). Good luck pursuing the latter in the US; punitive measure seem to work elsewhere.<p>I think the way forward is compact private transport, like bikes, scooters, walking, etc, augmented by a robust mass public transit. Unfortunately, that mix implies a expensive re-configuring of most American cities.</text></item><item><author>the_imp</author><text>The whole model of needing to own your own transportation devices is flawed.<p>9&#x2F;10 times, I&#x27;m moving from one location with many other people in it to another location with many other people. I would prefer not needing to own any medium in order to move between them, but instead be able to use a public service to do so. Bus, tram, metro, citybike, scooter. I&#x27;d really rather not own stuff with really high capital costs, like cars.<p>At this point, the only reason to own anything more expensive than a bike is bad city planning and infrastructure.</text></item><item><author>Hasz</author><text>This whole model is incredibly, impossibly, flawed.<p>9&#x2F;10 times, my net displacement for the day is 0. If my net displacement is zero, I would prefer to own the medium I&#x27;m using to move. Bike, car, scooter etc. Only exception is stuff with really high capital costs, like planes and trains, in which case I pay a small fee to avoid owning a railway or airline.<p>For scooters, there are no high capitals costs; the cost of a scooter is laughably low. It&#x27;s sold as a quicker-than-walking, less-hassle-than-a-car last mile solution, but again, 9&#x2F;10 of my trips are 0 displacement, so, why not just buy the scooter outright? Cheaper, safer, faster (I know where it is, no need to walk to it, etc).<p>They only way Lime, Bird etc survive is by legislation. Lobby for scooter licensure, buy up all the licenses, and become the taxi industry (except for scooters, and you have to drive!)<p>What an ironic loop.<p>At this point, the only reason to fund these guys is FOMO.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>smallgovt</author><text>&gt;&gt; Ah, but public transit is inherently the slowest option.<p>I don&#x27;t see how it is &#x27;inherently&#x27; the slowest, especially given the traffic patterns that inherently result from private transit options.<p>&gt;&gt; I have no desire to make 10 stops before I get where I&#x27;m going.<p>The point of public transit in the form of e-scooters and e-bikes is to make your door-to-door commute one trip.<p>&gt;&gt; I also have zero desire to rent my modes, as that encourages literally rent seeking behavior.<p>Most people just care about convenience and price. Shared mobility options like e-bikes and e-scooters check both boxes if they can reach scale.</text></comment> |
7,234,834 | 7,234,736 | 1 | 2 | 7,234,010 | train | <story><title>Silk Road 2 Hacked, All Bitcoins Stolen</title><url>http://www.deepdotweb.com/2014/02/13/silk-road-2-hacked-bitcoins-stolen-unknown-amount/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sillysaurus2</author><text><i>If SR was re-issuing coins automatically, it&#x27;s because they were being intentionally stupid.</i><p>MtGox was re-issuing coins automatically. Due to this, Gox has lost money. Possibly a huge amount. Were they being intentionally stupid, or just stupid?<p>Source: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7222690" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=7222690</a><p>This transaction malleability flaw is certainly a convenient excuse. But if these people implemented their wallet software in the same manner as Gox, then they would&#x27;ve suffered the same fate: a loss of thousands of coins, which is exactly what they claim happened.</text></item><item><author>blhack</author><text>This is almost certainly hogshit, and anybody who has been paying even a little bit of attention over the last week can probably smell it.<p>The &quot;hole&quot; in MtGox&#x27;s security was a social one. You could contact customer support and claim that you had not received your coins, and they could re-issue you new ones if they chose to. There is also no evidence that this ever happened.<p>This wasn&#x27;t, and isn&#x27;t, a flaw in the underlying architecture, it&#x27;s just a way to convince a customer service rep that you weren&#x27;t lying.<p>If SR was re-issuing coins <i>automatically</i>, it&#x27;s because they were being intentionally stupid.<p>--<p>They&#x27;re using this as a scapegoat. Either somebody ran off with the coins, or something otherwise hacked them and they&#x27;re using this as an explanation.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>blhack</author><text>&gt;MtGox was re-issuing coins automatically<p>They worded that very strangely in their statement about it:<p>&gt;This means that an individual could request bitcoins from an exchange or wallet service, alter the resulting transaction&#x27;s hash before inclusion in the blockchain, <i>then contact the issuing service while claiming the transaction did not proceed.</i> If the alteration fails, the user can simply send the bitcoins back and try again until successful.<p>Emphasis mine.<p>The reference client certainly doesn&#x27;t do this on spends. Why would gox have implemented it in this way? It doesn&#x27;t make any sense <i>at all</i>.</text></comment> | <story><title>Silk Road 2 Hacked, All Bitcoins Stolen</title><url>http://www.deepdotweb.com/2014/02/13/silk-road-2-hacked-bitcoins-stolen-unknown-amount/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sillysaurus2</author><text><i>If SR was re-issuing coins automatically, it&#x27;s because they were being intentionally stupid.</i><p>MtGox was re-issuing coins automatically. Due to this, Gox has lost money. Possibly a huge amount. Were they being intentionally stupid, or just stupid?<p>Source: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7222690" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=7222690</a><p>This transaction malleability flaw is certainly a convenient excuse. But if these people implemented their wallet software in the same manner as Gox, then they would&#x27;ve suffered the same fate: a loss of thousands of coins, which is exactly what they claim happened.</text></item><item><author>blhack</author><text>This is almost certainly hogshit, and anybody who has been paying even a little bit of attention over the last week can probably smell it.<p>The &quot;hole&quot; in MtGox&#x27;s security was a social one. You could contact customer support and claim that you had not received your coins, and they could re-issue you new ones if they chose to. There is also no evidence that this ever happened.<p>This wasn&#x27;t, and isn&#x27;t, a flaw in the underlying architecture, it&#x27;s just a way to convince a customer service rep that you weren&#x27;t lying.<p>If SR was re-issuing coins <i>automatically</i>, it&#x27;s because they were being intentionally stupid.<p>--<p>They&#x27;re using this as a scapegoat. Either somebody ran off with the coins, or something otherwise hacked them and they&#x27;re using this as an explanation.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>blhack</author><text>Maybe I just haven&#x27;t had enough coffee today, but: where does it say there that gox was re-issuing coins automatically?</text></comment> |
29,406,910 | 29,406,517 | 1 | 2 | 29,403,947 | train | <story><title>Ask HN: What are these low quality “code snippet” sites?</title><text>Whenever i am trying to google a code issue i have, there is countless low quality sites just showing SO threads with no added value whatsoever.
It is so annoying it actually drives me mad.<p>Does anyone know what&#x27;s up with that?<p>I am really disappointed because the guys creating these sites (i guess for some kind of monetization) must have some relation to coding. But i feel this is an attack against all of us. Every programmer should be grateful for the opportunity to find good quality content quickly. Now my search results are flooded with copy &amp; paste from SO.
They are killing that.<p>Am I the only one experiencing this or being that annoyed by it?<p>P.S: I don&#x27;t name URLs because if you don&#x27;t know what I am talking about already, you probably don&#x27;t have that issue.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>Rastonbury</author><text>Somewhat tangential but I believe Google Search is going downhill, they seem to be losing the content junk spam SEO fight. Recently, I&#x27;ve had to append wiki&#x2F;reddit&#x2F;hn to queries I search for because everything near the top is shallow copied content marketing.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>BLanen</author><text>They seem to keep giving more and more confidence in their language semantic ai.<p>Quoted words in the search should return only pages with that actually on the page. That used to work. Now it often shows pages that don&#x27;t contain it all, not in the search results page itself, nor on the page when you go there. So you&#x27;d think it just ignored the quoted text and gave me results without it instead, right? Wrong. Removing the quoted text to either unquoted text or removing it entirely both result in different results. So it DOES process the quotes SOMEHOW. But it&#x27;s not a clear RULE because probably it&#x27;s also just processed as an input to the semantics engine. Just tell me you don&#x27;t have any pages with the text instead, please. Which it actually also some sometimes...<p>It&#x27;s an unfixable mess. And I don&#x27;t think this can be turned back. Building a competitor costs hundreds of billions. A competitor will likely end up taking the same approach anyway.<p>I just wanted a list of google&#x27;s big search engine updates but even searching this I get SEO-d blogspam ABOUT THE SEO IMPACT OF THE UPDATES.</text></comment> | <story><title>Ask HN: What are these low quality “code snippet” sites?</title><text>Whenever i am trying to google a code issue i have, there is countless low quality sites just showing SO threads with no added value whatsoever.
It is so annoying it actually drives me mad.<p>Does anyone know what&#x27;s up with that?<p>I am really disappointed because the guys creating these sites (i guess for some kind of monetization) must have some relation to coding. But i feel this is an attack against all of us. Every programmer should be grateful for the opportunity to find good quality content quickly. Now my search results are flooded with copy &amp; paste from SO.
They are killing that.<p>Am I the only one experiencing this or being that annoyed by it?<p>P.S: I don&#x27;t name URLs because if you don&#x27;t know what I am talking about already, you probably don&#x27;t have that issue.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>Rastonbury</author><text>Somewhat tangential but I believe Google Search is going downhill, they seem to be losing the content junk spam SEO fight. Recently, I&#x27;ve had to append wiki&#x2F;reddit&#x2F;hn to queries I search for because everything near the top is shallow copied content marketing.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>stevesimmons</author><text>&gt; they seem to be losing the content junk spam SEO fight<p>Google clearly isn&#x27;t even trying.<p>So many of these sites are polluting search results for months. It isn&#x27;t a case of sites that pop up for a few hours until Google notices and blacklists them.<p>Google Search has gone so far downhill. I&#x27;m not sure what they&#x27;re optimising for. Long-term irrelevance, it seems.</text></comment> |
17,558,378 | 17,558,375 | 1 | 3 | 17,556,497 | train | <story><title>European Commission fines Google €4.34B in Android antitrust case</title><url>http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-18-4581_en.htm</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Ajedi32</author><text>So it&#x27;s only against the law once the company becomes big enough?<p>If, for example, BMW _did_ become an extremely successful car manufacturer to the point where they were capturing &gt;80% of the market, would they suddenly no longer be allowed to bundle their own entertainment system with their cars?</text></item><item><author>Dayshine</author><text>&gt;And if we just go around clubbing everything coarsely, why does my BMW have a BMW entertainment system<p>Because BMW don&#x27;t have market dominance in either the car industry or the entertainment system industry. If they used dominance in one to affect the other, they would be in breach of that legislation.<p>&gt;This is absolutely not at all clear cut. It is incredibly nuanced<p>So how do you explain Google&#x27;s non-compliance when explicitly and clearly informed that they were in breach over two years ago?</text></item><item><author>endorphone</author><text><i>How is that not clearly breaching d?</i><p>They&#x27;re a part of the same suite of apps that provide the &quot;Android experience&quot; (Google experience, whatever -- the thing that most consumers think of when they consider Android). They manifestly have a <i>profound</i> connection with each other.<p>And let&#x27;s be clear here lest there be any confusion -- zero customers want a vendor to do anything different, and the only reason some vendors wanted to is because they could double dip: Pitch the Android experience and get the market inroads, while getting some Bing or whatever payola to &quot;force&quot; that on a consumer.<p>The same is true of the other claim-<p><i>Then they said &quot;You can&#x27;t use Google Play if you try to help develop any android forks.&quot;</i><p>Google&#x27;s argument, whether honest or not, is that if you need a consistent representation of the Android experience that you&#x27;re selling to consumers. If the GS8 has the full Android experience, but then the GS8P has the Android Fun Store and Bing Search, this can seriously dilute the market opinion of Android and cause consumer confusion.<p>This is absolutely not at all clear cut. It is incredibly nuanced. And if we just go around clubbing everything coarsely, why does my BMW have a BMW entertainment system? Why couldn&#x27;t I choose Alpine at the dealer? An entertainment system is not an engine, right? I don&#x27;t want to go down the road of absurd analogies, but if you&#x27;re seriously presenting the notion that this is clear cut, you are not really thinking about it much.<p>As an aside, Google has had the same policies regard their suite of apps since day 1 of Android. Since the very beginning. When iOS absolutely <i>dwarfed</i> it. When Blackberry reigned supreme. When I was hefting around my sad little HTC Dream and listening to the John Gruber&#x27;s tell us how doomed it was.</text></item><item><author>Dayshine</author><text>Let&#x27;s read the law: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;eur-lex.europa.eu&#x2F;legal-content&#x2F;EN&#x2F;TXT&#x2F;HTML&#x2F;?uri=CELEX:12008E102&amp;from=EN" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;eur-lex.europa.eu&#x2F;legal-content&#x2F;EN&#x2F;TXT&#x2F;HTML&#x2F;?uri=CEL...</a><p>&gt;Article 102<p>&gt;Any abuse by one or more undertakings of a dominant position within the internal market or in a substantial part of it shall be prohibited as incompatible with the internal market in so far as it may affect trade between Member States.<p>&gt;Such abuse may, in particular, consist in:<p>&gt;b) limiting production, markets or technical development to the prejudice of consumers<p>&gt;d)making the conclusion of contracts subject to acceptance by the other parties of supplementary obligations which, by their nature or according to commercial usage, have no connection with the subject of such contracts<p>Ok, so, Google said &quot;You can&#x27;t use Google Play unless you force users to have Google Search installed&quot;.<p>How is that not <i></i>clearly<i></i> breaching d?<p>Then they said &quot;You can&#x27;t use Google Play if you try to help develop <i></i>any android forks<i></i>.&quot;<p>How is that not clearly breaching b?<p>&gt;but simply saying &quot;Surprise....enormous fine&quot; is ridiculous<p>They&#x27;ve had at least two years notice, so could have reduced their fine by complying when they were first warned. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;europa.eu&#x2F;rapid&#x2F;press-release_IP-16-1492_en.htm" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;europa.eu&#x2F;rapid&#x2F;press-release_IP-16-1492_en.htm</a> The article literally warns about the exact things they&#x27;re still doing.</text></item><item><author>endorphone</author><text>This is a dangerous ruling that pushes the world further into the potential for trade wars by proxy.<p>Contrary to numerous posts-<p>-no, the law isn&#x27;t &quot;clear&quot;. This is an incredibly nuanced situation, and the notion that Google was just overtly flouting (ed: thx sjcsjc) the law is outright nonsense. Google has a huge litany of bad practices (I personally recently switched my daily driver to an iPhone for that reason), but simply saying &quot;Surprise....enormous fine&quot; is ridiculous.<p>-the fine is <i>enormous</i>. Various &quot;well it&#x27;s only a quarter&#x27;s earnings across all of Google&quot; are outrageous. Over 6 years Google spent a grand total of $1.1B in all expenses for Waymo, for instance. $5B is an enormous, enormous amount of money for any company.<p>I highly doubt this will be a &quot;pay it and forget it&quot; fine, but is going to ring across all multinationals as a warning.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>orf</author><text>No, they would be able to bundle their own entertainment system with their cars, but they would not be able to force <i>anyone else</i> who wants to use their engines in <i>their</i> cars to bundle the entertainment system as well, as a contractual precondition to be able to use those engines.<p>Of course the size of the company and the market dominance comes into play here. It&#x27;s not a monopoly if people can go elsewhere to get their engines, it is if there is only one realistic choice of supplier (Android).</text></comment> | <story><title>European Commission fines Google €4.34B in Android antitrust case</title><url>http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-18-4581_en.htm</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Ajedi32</author><text>So it&#x27;s only against the law once the company becomes big enough?<p>If, for example, BMW _did_ become an extremely successful car manufacturer to the point where they were capturing &gt;80% of the market, would they suddenly no longer be allowed to bundle their own entertainment system with their cars?</text></item><item><author>Dayshine</author><text>&gt;And if we just go around clubbing everything coarsely, why does my BMW have a BMW entertainment system<p>Because BMW don&#x27;t have market dominance in either the car industry or the entertainment system industry. If they used dominance in one to affect the other, they would be in breach of that legislation.<p>&gt;This is absolutely not at all clear cut. It is incredibly nuanced<p>So how do you explain Google&#x27;s non-compliance when explicitly and clearly informed that they were in breach over two years ago?</text></item><item><author>endorphone</author><text><i>How is that not clearly breaching d?</i><p>They&#x27;re a part of the same suite of apps that provide the &quot;Android experience&quot; (Google experience, whatever -- the thing that most consumers think of when they consider Android). They manifestly have a <i>profound</i> connection with each other.<p>And let&#x27;s be clear here lest there be any confusion -- zero customers want a vendor to do anything different, and the only reason some vendors wanted to is because they could double dip: Pitch the Android experience and get the market inroads, while getting some Bing or whatever payola to &quot;force&quot; that on a consumer.<p>The same is true of the other claim-<p><i>Then they said &quot;You can&#x27;t use Google Play if you try to help develop any android forks.&quot;</i><p>Google&#x27;s argument, whether honest or not, is that if you need a consistent representation of the Android experience that you&#x27;re selling to consumers. If the GS8 has the full Android experience, but then the GS8P has the Android Fun Store and Bing Search, this can seriously dilute the market opinion of Android and cause consumer confusion.<p>This is absolutely not at all clear cut. It is incredibly nuanced. And if we just go around clubbing everything coarsely, why does my BMW have a BMW entertainment system? Why couldn&#x27;t I choose Alpine at the dealer? An entertainment system is not an engine, right? I don&#x27;t want to go down the road of absurd analogies, but if you&#x27;re seriously presenting the notion that this is clear cut, you are not really thinking about it much.<p>As an aside, Google has had the same policies regard their suite of apps since day 1 of Android. Since the very beginning. When iOS absolutely <i>dwarfed</i> it. When Blackberry reigned supreme. When I was hefting around my sad little HTC Dream and listening to the John Gruber&#x27;s tell us how doomed it was.</text></item><item><author>Dayshine</author><text>Let&#x27;s read the law: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;eur-lex.europa.eu&#x2F;legal-content&#x2F;EN&#x2F;TXT&#x2F;HTML&#x2F;?uri=CELEX:12008E102&amp;from=EN" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;eur-lex.europa.eu&#x2F;legal-content&#x2F;EN&#x2F;TXT&#x2F;HTML&#x2F;?uri=CEL...</a><p>&gt;Article 102<p>&gt;Any abuse by one or more undertakings of a dominant position within the internal market or in a substantial part of it shall be prohibited as incompatible with the internal market in so far as it may affect trade between Member States.<p>&gt;Such abuse may, in particular, consist in:<p>&gt;b) limiting production, markets or technical development to the prejudice of consumers<p>&gt;d)making the conclusion of contracts subject to acceptance by the other parties of supplementary obligations which, by their nature or according to commercial usage, have no connection with the subject of such contracts<p>Ok, so, Google said &quot;You can&#x27;t use Google Play unless you force users to have Google Search installed&quot;.<p>How is that not <i></i>clearly<i></i> breaching d?<p>Then they said &quot;You can&#x27;t use Google Play if you try to help develop <i></i>any android forks<i></i>.&quot;<p>How is that not clearly breaching b?<p>&gt;but simply saying &quot;Surprise....enormous fine&quot; is ridiculous<p>They&#x27;ve had at least two years notice, so could have reduced their fine by complying when they were first warned. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;europa.eu&#x2F;rapid&#x2F;press-release_IP-16-1492_en.htm" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;europa.eu&#x2F;rapid&#x2F;press-release_IP-16-1492_en.htm</a> The article literally warns about the exact things they&#x27;re still doing.</text></item><item><author>endorphone</author><text>This is a dangerous ruling that pushes the world further into the potential for trade wars by proxy.<p>Contrary to numerous posts-<p>-no, the law isn&#x27;t &quot;clear&quot;. This is an incredibly nuanced situation, and the notion that Google was just overtly flouting (ed: thx sjcsjc) the law is outright nonsense. Google has a huge litany of bad practices (I personally recently switched my daily driver to an iPhone for that reason), but simply saying &quot;Surprise....enormous fine&quot; is ridiculous.<p>-the fine is <i>enormous</i>. Various &quot;well it&#x27;s only a quarter&#x27;s earnings across all of Google&quot; are outrageous. Over 6 years Google spent a grand total of $1.1B in all expenses for Waymo, for instance. $5B is an enormous, enormous amount of money for any company.<p>I highly doubt this will be a &quot;pay it and forget it&quot; fine, but is going to ring across all multinationals as a warning.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>eastendguy</author><text>Exactly. That is the whole point of anti-monopoly laws.</text></comment> |
21,011,685 | 21,011,620 | 1 | 2 | 21,011,075 | train | <story><title>Tom Delonge’s UFO Research Center Is Making Politicians Demand Answers</title><url>https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/wjwqp5/tom-delonges-ufo-research-center-is-making-politicians-demand-answers</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>simonblack</author><text>I reckon it&#x27;s misdirection. &quot;We&#x27;ll say it&#x27;s a UFO, but really it&#x27;s a hypersonic plane in development.&quot;<p>Just like the SR71 had a cover story during its development phase. &quot;The wreckage was recovered in two days, and persons at the scene were identified and requested to sign secrecy agreements. A cover story for the press described the accident as occurring to a F-105, and it is still listed in this way on official records.&quot; - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cia.gov&#x2F;library&#x2F;center-for-the-study-of-intelligence&#x2F;kent-csi&#x2F;vol15no1&#x2F;html&#x2F;v15i1a01p_0001.htm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cia.gov&#x2F;library&#x2F;center-for-the-study-of-intellig...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lamontcg</author><text>Its probably a system for &quot;jamming&quot; FLIR sensors an allowing the attacker to project targets onto the system. The pilots were guinea pigs. Which is made more plausible by the fact that the USS Princeton asked the Nimitz pilots first if they were armed, and only after they informed the Princeton that they were not that they were given the orders to investigate. There probably was a real object -- since one was sighted but it was a drone with the advanced jamming equipment (that they didn&#x27;t want to accidentally get shot down). It did not move at supersonic speed, but it projected an image onto the FLIR sensor which did. The submerged object was probably a submarine that the equipment was launched from.</text></comment> | <story><title>Tom Delonge’s UFO Research Center Is Making Politicians Demand Answers</title><url>https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/wjwqp5/tom-delonges-ufo-research-center-is-making-politicians-demand-answers</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>simonblack</author><text>I reckon it&#x27;s misdirection. &quot;We&#x27;ll say it&#x27;s a UFO, but really it&#x27;s a hypersonic plane in development.&quot;<p>Just like the SR71 had a cover story during its development phase. &quot;The wreckage was recovered in two days, and persons at the scene were identified and requested to sign secrecy agreements. A cover story for the press described the accident as occurring to a F-105, and it is still listed in this way on official records.&quot; - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cia.gov&#x2F;library&#x2F;center-for-the-study-of-intelligence&#x2F;kent-csi&#x2F;vol15no1&#x2F;html&#x2F;v15i1a01p_0001.htm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cia.gov&#x2F;library&#x2F;center-for-the-study-of-intellig...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>burnte</author><text>I hate to be the pedant, but UFO really does just mean unidentified flying object. Everything is a UFO before you know what it is, so this isn&#x27;t even a lie.</text></comment> |
41,491,381 | 41,490,569 | 1 | 3 | 41,488,353 | train | <story><title>Synthetic diamonds are now purer, more beautiful, and cheaper than mined</title><url>https://worksinprogress.co/issue/lab-grown-diamonds/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>A_D_E_P_T</author><text>Over the past 10 years, there has been an explosion in cheap lab diamond and moissanite producers in China and India. 10 years ago, it was hard to find quality lab diamonds at a reasonable price, and moissanite was still reasonably expensive at $400-600&#x2F;ct.<p>Today, given cutthroat competition and &quot;race to the bottom&quot; pricing strategies, lab diamonds are ubiquitous, extremely high quality, and cheap. Less than $200&#x2F;ct and sometimes much less: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;detail.1688.com&#x2F;offer&#x2F;751071300271.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;detail.1688.com&#x2F;offer&#x2F;751071300271.html</a><p>Moissanites are now less than $5&#x2F;carat at retail: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;detail.1688.com&#x2F;offer&#x2F;586468555080.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;detail.1688.com&#x2F;offer&#x2F;586468555080.html</a><p>These are legit. I&#x27;ve bought some.<p>Within 10 years of today, I expect diamonds to lose almost all of their value. Moissanites have already become as near-worthless as synthetic rubies. This is going to open up new industrial uses for those gemstones.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>godelski</author><text>Diamonds have lots of uses beyond being pretty.<p>I have to bring this up because a lot of people are talking as if this is the entirety of the reason for their decrease. But there&#x27;s diamond files, diamond cutting blades&#x2F;wheels&#x2F;drills, you can make glass from it (really only used in labs that absolutely need them because the price), and many more uses. Many of these don&#x27;t care about size, quality, or clarity. So instead of pulling from scrap material from jewelry making or rejected diamonds you could just make your own and ensure your own supply.<p>One of the things I&#x27;ve loved about synthetic diamond prices coming down is just how cheap and available diamond cutting wheels and filing tools have become. You can now get a set of diamond files on Amazon for under $10. That&#x27;s crazy</text></comment> | <story><title>Synthetic diamonds are now purer, more beautiful, and cheaper than mined</title><url>https://worksinprogress.co/issue/lab-grown-diamonds/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>A_D_E_P_T</author><text>Over the past 10 years, there has been an explosion in cheap lab diamond and moissanite producers in China and India. 10 years ago, it was hard to find quality lab diamonds at a reasonable price, and moissanite was still reasonably expensive at $400-600&#x2F;ct.<p>Today, given cutthroat competition and &quot;race to the bottom&quot; pricing strategies, lab diamonds are ubiquitous, extremely high quality, and cheap. Less than $200&#x2F;ct and sometimes much less: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;detail.1688.com&#x2F;offer&#x2F;751071300271.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;detail.1688.com&#x2F;offer&#x2F;751071300271.html</a><p>Moissanites are now less than $5&#x2F;carat at retail: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;detail.1688.com&#x2F;offer&#x2F;586468555080.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;detail.1688.com&#x2F;offer&#x2F;586468555080.html</a><p>These are legit. I&#x27;ve bought some.<p>Within 10 years of today, I expect diamonds to lose almost all of their value. Moissanites have already become as near-worthless as synthetic rubies. This is going to open up new industrial uses for those gemstones.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jajko</author><text>They never had any value, apart from specialized ie glass cutting tool. Only when DeBeers realized they could push some fictious heavy marketing &#x27;to prove your worth to woman you are asking to marry&#x27; for those shiny stones nobody wanted to buy, people who didn&#x27;t know better got manipulated into buying them. They are supposedly very common in universe, and probably in deeper Earth too.<p>Correction is healthy and benefits mankind long term, there was nothing good coming from ie impact on Africa. Nobody cared about that, so things are fixed from another direction.</text></comment> |
17,748,483 | 17,747,761 | 1 | 2 | 17,747,635 | train | <story><title>AssemblyAI: speech-to-text API</title><url>http://assemblyai.com</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dylanbfox</author><text>This is Dylan from AssemblyAI. We&#x27;re really surprised to see ourselves on HN tonight!<p>We had a big launch planned for 4-6 weeks from now, and have been working towards getting things ready for that. As a result, we&#x27;re missing a lot of things we know we need like benchmarks comparing ourselves to other services. Please bear with us!<p>If you do end up trying the API, we&#x27;d love your feedback. We&#x27;re trying to build a really simple speech-to-text API for developers, that you can get up and running with in just a few minutes, and that doesn&#x27;t require you to implement &lt;insert big tech co here&gt; into more of your stack.<p>There&#x27;s a lot more we offer too, like:<p>- customization via transfer learning for higher accuracy (language models now, acoustic models soon)<p>- supporting lossy audio like low bitrate mp3 files from phone calls<p>- transcribe any audio file without having to specify it&#x27;s metadata like sampling rate or encoding<p>We&#x27;re also constantly improving our models for higher accuracy. Every few weeks we ship accuracy improvements based on improvements to our DNN architectures, better data, better data augmentation, etc.<p>In terms of our STT stack, we&#x27;re using CTC based models combined with RNN-LMs -- all built in TensorFlow and PyTorch -- for decoding. Happy to provide more info around our stack if you&#x27;re interested!<p>For any questions off HN -- you can reach me at dylan at assemblyai dot com<p>Thank you!!</text></comment> | <story><title>AssemblyAI: speech-to-text API</title><url>http://assemblyai.com</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ironfootnz</author><text>A very bold statement, no blog post commenting on which technique, hard to sell out.<p>&gt; The world&#x27;s most advanced Speech-to-Text, customized for your application.</text></comment> |
17,302,916 | 17,302,457 | 1 | 3 | 17,300,893 | train | <story><title>Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript</title><url>https://twitter.com/thelarkinn/status/1006746626617008128?s=21</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>thelarkinn</author><text>Hi there, original tweeter here. Just to clarify: no one said when this work would land, simply that we are working on it! Sorry to disappoint XD, but I guess blame the OP.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dentemple</author><text>Does this mean that VBA will finally die?<p>Please tell me that VBA will finally die.</text></comment> | <story><title>Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript</title><url>https://twitter.com/thelarkinn/status/1006746626617008128?s=21</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>thelarkinn</author><text>Hi there, original tweeter here. Just to clarify: no one said when this work would land, simply that we are working on it! Sorry to disappoint XD, but I guess blame the OP.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mhoad</author><text>Happy to take the blame :) It was too interesting a tidbit not to share though.</text></comment> |
35,969,554 | 35,968,944 | 1 | 3 | 35,966,680 | train | <story><title>Show HN: A little web server in C</title><url>https://github.com/robdelacruz/lkwebserver</url><text>A little web server written in C for Linux.<p>Supports: CGI, Reverse Proxy.<p>Single threaded using I&#x2F;O multiplexing (select).</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>skulk</author><text>Cool project, but this project demonstrates the reason I&#x27;ve stopped writing things in C. The standard library has garbage string functions and it seems every project has its own version of this file:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;robdelacruz&#x2F;lkwebserver&#x2F;blob&#x2F;main&#x2F;lkstring.c">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;robdelacruz&#x2F;lkwebserver&#x2F;blob&#x2F;main&#x2F;lkstrin...</a><p>It&#x27;s fun to write this (and read others&#x27; versions) the first 3 or 4 times, but it gets old quickly.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>userbinator</author><text>That&#x27;s the &quot;lazy, dumb&quot; way of doing it --- write another string library. A much better way is to design your algorithms so they need a minimum of string manipulation, which is unfortunately on the more difficult side for text-based protocols like HTTP.<p>Personally, I wish HTTP messages were closer to something like ASN.1 DER; there&#x27;s little in the way of string manipulation necessary for those, and all the lengths are prefixes instead of &quot;try to find the terminator&quot; (and don&#x27;t forget to not run past the end of the buffer...)</text></comment> | <story><title>Show HN: A little web server in C</title><url>https://github.com/robdelacruz/lkwebserver</url><text>A little web server written in C for Linux.<p>Supports: CGI, Reverse Proxy.<p>Single threaded using I&#x2F;O multiplexing (select).</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>skulk</author><text>Cool project, but this project demonstrates the reason I&#x27;ve stopped writing things in C. The standard library has garbage string functions and it seems every project has its own version of this file:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;robdelacruz&#x2F;lkwebserver&#x2F;blob&#x2F;main&#x2F;lkstring.c">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;robdelacruz&#x2F;lkwebserver&#x2F;blob&#x2F;main&#x2F;lkstrin...</a><p>It&#x27;s fun to write this (and read others&#x27; versions) the first 3 or 4 times, but it gets old quickly.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>alex_lav</author><text>This is how I felt writing Go. Writing the same nongeneric functions with slightly different type signatures and&#x2F;or endless interfaces and&#x2F;or interface{} signatures. It&#x27;s 2023.</text></comment> |
4,882,816 | 4,882,684 | 1 | 3 | 4,882,364 | train | <story><title>Staffer axed by Republican group over retracted copyright reform memo</title><url>http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/12/staffer-axed-by-republican-group-over-retracted-copyright-reform-memo/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tptacek</author><text>Copyright hawk here:<p>Content is a $100Bn industry. Technology is 5-6x bigger, but the tech companies trying to disrupt content are an insignificant fraction of that industry.<p>Meanwhile, set aside whether you believe in the reforms proposed in the Khanna memo --- reducing statutory damages, increasing cost of enforcement, reducing copyright terms. Ask instead, "was this a politically effective policy memo?" Were its goals in the 113th congress realistic? Were its arguments persuasive? Something like 35% of all congresspeople are lawyers, and this memo starts out with a highly dubious argument about the meaning of the copyright clause.<p>It seems to me (and I am prepared to hear smart people tell me how wrong I am about this) that a reasonable short-term goal would have been to reduce the term of copyright, ratcheting it back to where it was, say, before Sonny Bono. Instead, this "RSC" memo proposed beyond that a gift basket of what seem like mostly not-useful policy trinkets for Redditors: expanded fair use for DJ culture (really? spend political capital to modify regulations on a $100bn industry for... DJs?), lower statutory caps for damages (the MPAA and RIAA already sue for a tiny fraction of the likely liability for many infringers), and punishing false copyright claims (the claims studios take to court are overwhelmingly not false; penalizing bogus DMCA takedowns wouldn't move the dials at all).<p>The real copyright reform is probably something like reduced term and compulsory licensing. What was the value to the RSC of trolling the Content industry for reforms that had no chance of happening, that wouldn't have actually kept people from being bankrupted by lawsuits, that wouldn't make it easier to launch tech companies, and that at the same time manage to almost uniformly enrage rightsholders?<p>Was this memo really "shockingly sensible"? A lot of smart people say it was. But I wonder whether they're more shocked that any conversation could have happened at all, and not really looking closely at the content of the memo itself.</text></comment> | <story><title>Staffer axed by Republican group over retracted copyright reform memo</title><url>http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/12/staffer-axed-by-republican-group-over-retracted-copyright-reform-memo/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>iyulaev</author><text><i>The memo was widely hailed by tech policy scholars and public interests advocates.</i><p>And also the internet.<p>At least one thing is certain - there is vehement opposition to any sort of copyright reform, and it is embedded deep into the political system. I don't think I've ever heard of a policy proposal being met with this kind of reaction. Really pushed some buttons.</text></comment> |
17,102,837 | 17,100,816 | 1 | 3 | 17,100,312 | train | <story><title>Mathematicians Disprove Conjecture Made to Save Black Holes</title><url>https://www.quantamagazine.org/mathematicians-disprove-conjecture-made-to-save-black-holes-20180517/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>habitue</author><text>Ok, yes, <i>this</i> is how you promote scientific research to a lay audience:<p>1) They don&#x27;t bury the lede. The first paragraph says what the result is immediately, if you understand it already, you&#x27;re done reading.<p>2) Inverted pyramid structure. After they explain what happened, they break apart the historical context <i>of the problem itself</i> and give copious examples and metaphors to give the gist of what the problem is about and why it matters that it was solved.<p>I can&#x27;t tell you how many of these popsci articles start out with &quot;When Mary was a 3 year old, she used to look up at the stars and ... blah blah ... Now, she&#x27;s taking on the scientific establishment and daring to do the unthinkable...&quot; etc etc. I just dread skimming through the fluff to try to pick out what the hell was actually done.<p>Thank you Kevin Hartnett (the author of this piece) for not attempting to turn scientific papers into a human interest story.</text></comment> | <story><title>Mathematicians Disprove Conjecture Made to Save Black Holes</title><url>https://www.quantamagazine.org/mathematicians-disprove-conjecture-made-to-save-black-holes-20180517/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>bencollier49</author><text>So spacetime exists beyond the Cauchy horizon, but it&#x27;s discontinuous?<p>What on earth would discontinuous spacetime involve? It sounds like a sort of shattered chaos of torn-up bits of space.</text></comment> |
17,859,890 | 17,860,109 | 1 | 3 | 17,859,589 | train | <story><title>Zero-Day Vulnerability in Microsoft Windows Leaked on Twitter</title><url>https://twitter.com/SandboxEscaper/status/1034125195148255235</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>qeternity</author><text>Earlier tweets from this account seem to indicate they believe MS intentionally sabotaged the process so that they could sell the bugs, including to oppressive governments:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;SandboxEscaper&#x2F;status&#x2F;1034116189373521920" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;SandboxEscaper&#x2F;status&#x2F;103411618937352192...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;SandboxEscaper&#x2F;status&#x2F;1034112926045622274" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;SandboxEscaper&#x2F;status&#x2F;103411292604562227...</a><p><i>EDIT</i> as @dixie_land points out, it appears the author is open to selling indiscriminately.</text></item><item><author>ghostbrainalpha</author><text>&quot;Here is the alpc bug as 0day: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;SandboxEscaper&#x2F;randomrepo&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;PoC-LPE.rar" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;SandboxEscaper&#x2F;randomrepo&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;PoC...</a> … I don&#x27;t fucking care about life anymore. Neither do I ever again want to submit to MSFT anyway. Fuck all of this shit.&quot;<p>So is this person upset because Microsoft wouldn&#x27;t patch the bug? Or that they didn&#x27;t want to pay for the information?<p>Comments seem to reference Apple pays 25k for this type of info.<p>Can anyone with background give some context here?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dixie_land</author><text>I don&#x27;t know how you reached that conclusion. The tweets read to me that the <i>author</i> is willing to sell to the highest bidder.</text></comment> | <story><title>Zero-Day Vulnerability in Microsoft Windows Leaked on Twitter</title><url>https://twitter.com/SandboxEscaper/status/1034125195148255235</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>qeternity</author><text>Earlier tweets from this account seem to indicate they believe MS intentionally sabotaged the process so that they could sell the bugs, including to oppressive governments:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;SandboxEscaper&#x2F;status&#x2F;1034116189373521920" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;SandboxEscaper&#x2F;status&#x2F;103411618937352192...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;SandboxEscaper&#x2F;status&#x2F;1034112926045622274" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;SandboxEscaper&#x2F;status&#x2F;103411292604562227...</a><p><i>EDIT</i> as @dixie_land points out, it appears the author is open to selling indiscriminately.</text></item><item><author>ghostbrainalpha</author><text>&quot;Here is the alpc bug as 0day: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;SandboxEscaper&#x2F;randomrepo&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;PoC-LPE.rar" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;SandboxEscaper&#x2F;randomrepo&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;PoC...</a> … I don&#x27;t fucking care about life anymore. Neither do I ever again want to submit to MSFT anyway. Fuck all of this shit.&quot;<p>So is this person upset because Microsoft wouldn&#x27;t patch the bug? Or that they didn&#x27;t want to pay for the information?<p>Comments seem to reference Apple pays 25k for this type of info.<p>Can anyone with background give some context here?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mockingbirdy</author><text><i>Please see <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17860480" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17860480</a> before downvoting.</i><p>From her website - <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;sandboxescaper.blogspot.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;sandboxescaper.blogspot.com</a>:<p>&gt; I&#x27;m also transgender. But my transition so far has been really difficult (social isolation, lack of support.. etc), my voice is still really manly and I don&#x27;t really pass at all (which probably weirds people out.. so I would rather say it upfront so I don&#x27;t need to have anxiety about it, I have alot of anxiety issues). I also have not been able to change my name yet, legally its still &quot;Thomas&quot;.<p>- - -<p>w.r.t. the 0-day release: Well that&#x27;s some seriously irresponsible stuff right there.<p>I think she has a tough time (she&#x27;s transgender and doesn&#x27;t have support from her peers). It&#x27;s sad that she hasn&#x27;t found a way to live a happy life although she clearly has serious skills. I hope she&#x27;ll be fine.<p>It&#x27;s just annoying that a lot of users are now at risk, I hope the patches will be installed ASAP.</text></comment> |
24,175,858 | 24,175,552 | 1 | 3 | 24,174,276 | train | <story><title>Amazon Liable for Defective Third-Party Products Rules CA Appellate Court</title><url>https://californiaglobe.com/section-2/amazon-liable-for-defective-third-party-products-rules-ca-appelate-court/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>an_opabinia</author><text>Has Amazon systemically refuses refunds for people who try to return counterfeit goods?<p>It definitely doesn’t care if you don’t even notice. But they do the returns if you ask. The former is what needs to change.</text></item><item><author>ashtonkem</author><text>More specifically, the responsibility for chasing down the manufacturer for a refund is shifted onto the retailer, not the consumer.</text></item><item><author>jarym</author><text>Common sense. Amazon want to ‘own’ the customer relationship and go to great lengths to that end then it follows they will have to ‘own’ any liability too.<p>Imagine you went into a retail store with a faulty product and they were to try fob you off saying you need to go to their supplier&#x2F;wholesaler&#x2F;manufacturer. It mostly doesn’t work that way thanks to most consumer protection laws in place.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>heavyset_go</author><text>You can&#x27;t even report that the reason for your return is that you suspect or know that the item you received is counterfeit during the return process. If Amazon <i>cared</i> about a problem this big, they would collect metrics from customers on it.</text></comment> | <story><title>Amazon Liable for Defective Third-Party Products Rules CA Appellate Court</title><url>https://californiaglobe.com/section-2/amazon-liable-for-defective-third-party-products-rules-ca-appelate-court/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>an_opabinia</author><text>Has Amazon systemically refuses refunds for people who try to return counterfeit goods?<p>It definitely doesn’t care if you don’t even notice. But they do the returns if you ask. The former is what needs to change.</text></item><item><author>ashtonkem</author><text>More specifically, the responsibility for chasing down the manufacturer for a refund is shifted onto the retailer, not the consumer.</text></item><item><author>jarym</author><text>Common sense. Amazon want to ‘own’ the customer relationship and go to great lengths to that end then it follows they will have to ‘own’ any liability too.<p>Imagine you went into a retail store with a faulty product and they were to try fob you off saying you need to go to their supplier&#x2F;wholesaler&#x2F;manufacturer. It mostly doesn’t work that way thanks to most consumer protection laws in place.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cscurmudgeon</author><text>Only within their refund period. I have had so many products break down after their return window. Most recent example: Expensive chargers which stopped work within a few months. The seller’s page was gone. Customer support was of no use.<p>This seems to be a common pattern. Fly by night sellers whose pages disappear within a few days.</text></comment> |
38,615,369 | 38,615,078 | 1 | 3 | 38,604,265 | train | <story><title>A rare occultation of Betelgeuse</title><url>https://spaceweatherarchive.com/2023/12/10/an-extremely-rare-occultation-of-betelgeuse/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>1970-01-01</author><text>This was the result:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;spaceweathergallery2.com&#x2F;indiv_upload.php?upload_id=202389" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;spaceweathergallery2.com&#x2F;indiv_upload.php?upload_id=...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>A rare occultation of Betelgeuse</title><url>https://spaceweatherarchive.com/2023/12/10/an-extremely-rare-occultation-of-betelgeuse/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jihadjihad</author><text>I was excited to check it out last night, as it was clear in my area and I had a nice view of Orion. But then I realized you had to be waaaay down south, like southern FL, to see it :(</text></comment> |
4,545,322 | 4,545,311 | 1 | 3 | 4,545,088 | train | <story><title>Makerbot announces new 3D printer: Replicator 2</title><url>http://makerbot.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kiba</author><text>I do not know why makerbots keep getting more expensive than the next. I thought with advances in tech, they would get cheaper and eventually I would be able to afford one.<p>What the heck are they thinking?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ajross</author><text>With Cupcake -&#62; Replicator -&#62; Replicator 2 the devices are getting physically larger and more capable. Larger machines are more expensive to manufacture and assemble, and this is still a small-volume, mostly hand-assembled (in Manhattan! <i>{edit: sorry, Brooklyn. I misremembered.}</i>) industry.<p>If you want a 3D printer and cash is an issue, look to building your own Reprap. Assuming you get it right the first time and don't need to buy tools, a total cost of under $500 for a Prusa Mendel is achievable. Obviously you have to build it, but given the target market that's often not a problem. Most people who want to build 3D printed stuff are generally happy to assemble robots too.</text></comment> | <story><title>Makerbot announces new 3D printer: Replicator 2</title><url>http://makerbot.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kiba</author><text>I do not know why makerbots keep getting more expensive than the next. I thought with advances in tech, they would get cheaper and eventually I would be able to afford one.<p>What the heck are they thinking?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>libraryatnight</author><text>When I saw this announcement my instant hope was, "Maybe it's one in my price range!" My excitement was sapped fairly quickly.<p>I think it's neat they're offering more advanced machines, but I'd also like to see them release a budget model.</text></comment> |
19,401,825 | 19,401,819 | 1 | 3 | 19,400,833 | train | <story><title>Farewell from Waffle</title><url>https://blog.waffle.io/farewell-from-waffle-%EF%B8%8F-794da4a72851</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bastawhiz</author><text>Oftentimes I see farewell posts like this, but the company website has already been mostly turned down. It would be helpful for folks like me who have never heard of Waffle to know what the service was. Having that tiny bit of context at the top of the article (or even just keeping the marketing site alive!) helps to put the shutdown in context.<p>And yes, I can search, but more often than not the first page of search results are news stories that the service is shutting down rather than resources that describes what it actually was.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>davweb</author><text>In short: Trello, but with GitHub integration.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;help.waffle.io&#x2F;getting-started&#x2F;what-is-waffle" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;help.waffle.io&#x2F;getting-started&#x2F;what-is-waffle</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Farewell from Waffle</title><url>https://blog.waffle.io/farewell-from-waffle-%EF%B8%8F-794da4a72851</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bastawhiz</author><text>Oftentimes I see farewell posts like this, but the company website has already been mostly turned down. It would be helpful for folks like me who have never heard of Waffle to know what the service was. Having that tiny bit of context at the top of the article (or even just keeping the marketing site alive!) helps to put the shutdown in context.<p>And yes, I can search, but more often than not the first page of search results are news stories that the service is shutting down rather than resources that describes what it actually was.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Cederfjard</author><text>In case anyone is wondering about this particular case:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;waffleio&#x2F;waffle.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;waffleio&#x2F;waffle.io</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;waffle.io&#x2F;waffleio&#x2F;waffle.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;waffle.io&#x2F;waffleio&#x2F;waffle.io</a></text></comment> |
40,572,645 | 40,572,527 | 1 | 2 | 40,571,395 | train | <story><title>I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews</title><url>https://nelson.cloud/i-am-so-sick-of-leetcode-style-interviews/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>XorNot</author><text>Do you tell them what the &quot;mod&quot; operator is before giving it?<p>The failure rate of FizzBuzz has always struck me as depending on the idea that you can do a lot of programming and just never need that operator.</text></item><item><author>sjaak</author><text>I&#x27;ve also used FizzBuzz at several companies, and the insane amount of people it filters out continues to boggle my mind.</text></item><item><author>ownagefool</author><text>I don&#x27;t think the problem is the format, i.e. a 30-50 minute interview on simple coding with DS&amp;A problems, but the escalation.<p>The reality is, fizz buzz got us 75% of the way there. It turns out when pressed, a lot of people can&#x27;t write code. Yes, there&#x27;s false positives, but there&#x27;s also people brute focing their way through via copy &amp; paste.<p>This doesn&#x27;t manifest as a person who can&#x27;t do any task, just as a person that&#x27;s slow, delivers weird abstractions, and would take a lot of your time to get anything useful from.<p>But those people are also making those arguments, because, as you said, there&#x27;s hundreds of thousands of dollars in it.</text></item><item><author>dinobones</author><text>Leetcode style interviews probably serve two functions:<p>1) A way to suppress wages and job mobility for SWE. Who wants to switch jobs when it means studying for a month or two? Also, if you get unlucky and some try hard drops an atomic LC hard bomb on you now you have an entire company you can no longer apply to for a year.<p>2) A way to mask bias in the process while claiming that it’s a fair process because everyone has a clear&#x2F;similar objective.<p>Meet someone who went to your Alma mater? Same gender? Same race? Give them the same question as everyone else, but hint them through it, ignore some syntax errors, and give them a strong hire for “communication” when they didn’t even implement the optimal approach…<p>Or is it someone you don’t like for X reason? Drop a leetcode hard on them and send them packing and just remain silent the entire interview.<p>To the company this is acceptable noise, but to the individual, this is costing us 100s of thousands of dollars, because there’s only a handful of companies that pay well and they all have the same interview process. Failing 3 interviews probably means you’re now out $200-300k of additional compensation from the top paying companies.<p>I’ve interviewed for and at FAANGs. I can’t believe the low bar of people that we’ve hired, while simultaneously seeing insane ridiculous quad tree&#x2F;number theory type questions that have caused other great engineers to miss out on good opportunities.<p>Someone will reply to me “if you know how to problem solve you will always pass.” Ok, come interview with me and I will ask you verbatim one of those quad tree&#x2F;number theory&#x2F;inclusion exclusion principle questions and I’d love to see you squirm, meanwhile another candidate is asked a basic hash map question.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>arethuza</author><text>I once worked with a guy who was an incredibly good developer and I was surprised when he didn&#x27;t see anything special about the number 64 (i.e. a power of two) - turns out that he&#x27;d never done any bit fiddling type work so he hadn&#x27;t had to think in those terms. It wouldn&#x27;t surprise me if a lot of people hadn&#x27;t heard of &quot;mod&quot; either....</text></comment> | <story><title>I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews</title><url>https://nelson.cloud/i-am-so-sick-of-leetcode-style-interviews/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>XorNot</author><text>Do you tell them what the &quot;mod&quot; operator is before giving it?<p>The failure rate of FizzBuzz has always struck me as depending on the idea that you can do a lot of programming and just never need that operator.</text></item><item><author>sjaak</author><text>I&#x27;ve also used FizzBuzz at several companies, and the insane amount of people it filters out continues to boggle my mind.</text></item><item><author>ownagefool</author><text>I don&#x27;t think the problem is the format, i.e. a 30-50 minute interview on simple coding with DS&amp;A problems, but the escalation.<p>The reality is, fizz buzz got us 75% of the way there. It turns out when pressed, a lot of people can&#x27;t write code. Yes, there&#x27;s false positives, but there&#x27;s also people brute focing their way through via copy &amp; paste.<p>This doesn&#x27;t manifest as a person who can&#x27;t do any task, just as a person that&#x27;s slow, delivers weird abstractions, and would take a lot of your time to get anything useful from.<p>But those people are also making those arguments, because, as you said, there&#x27;s hundreds of thousands of dollars in it.</text></item><item><author>dinobones</author><text>Leetcode style interviews probably serve two functions:<p>1) A way to suppress wages and job mobility for SWE. Who wants to switch jobs when it means studying for a month or two? Also, if you get unlucky and some try hard drops an atomic LC hard bomb on you now you have an entire company you can no longer apply to for a year.<p>2) A way to mask bias in the process while claiming that it’s a fair process because everyone has a clear&#x2F;similar objective.<p>Meet someone who went to your Alma mater? Same gender? Same race? Give them the same question as everyone else, but hint them through it, ignore some syntax errors, and give them a strong hire for “communication” when they didn’t even implement the optimal approach…<p>Or is it someone you don’t like for X reason? Drop a leetcode hard on them and send them packing and just remain silent the entire interview.<p>To the company this is acceptable noise, but to the individual, this is costing us 100s of thousands of dollars, because there’s only a handful of companies that pay well and they all have the same interview process. Failing 3 interviews probably means you’re now out $200-300k of additional compensation from the top paying companies.<p>I’ve interviewed for and at FAANGs. I can’t believe the low bar of people that we’ve hired, while simultaneously seeing insane ridiculous quad tree&#x2F;number theory type questions that have caused other great engineers to miss out on good opportunities.<p>Someone will reply to me “if you know how to problem solve you will always pass.” Ok, come interview with me and I will ask you verbatim one of those quad tree&#x2F;number theory&#x2F;inclusion exclusion principle questions and I’d love to see you squirm, meanwhile another candidate is asked a basic hash map question.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>azornathogron</author><text>You don&#x27;t actually <i>need</i> mod to do fizzbuzz, even if that&#x27;s the most obvious way for people who know what mod is.<p>But without any &quot;real&quot; math at all you can do it with, eg, two counters and some if statements. Or if you recognise that there&#x27;s a repeating pattern you can work out that pattern manually and just write code to emit it over and over.</text></comment> |
24,104,101 | 24,104,053 | 1 | 3 | 24,103,725 | train | <story><title>The Most Counterintuitive Recession Ever</title><url>https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2020/08/the-most-counterintuitive-recession-ever/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>treyfitty</author><text>What is baffling is how the delinquency rates for credit cards have plummeted. Sure, it&#x27;s easy to say in hindsight that people are buckling down, and that the stimulus payments are making it easier for those in the low income demographic to pay down credit card debt, but that can&#x27;t be the complete picture.<p>The economy was put on pause, and small businesses are being decimated. If people need financing, the status quo was to use credit card debt to keep people&#x2F;business afloat as the debt is unsecured.<p>As the article posits, the situation is quite unique and very counterintuitive...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rectang</author><text>&gt; <i>What is baffling is how the delinquency rates for credit cards have plummeted.</i><p>Mortgage deferments! If you can stop paying your mortgage for a while, then you have more money to pay down your credit cards.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Most Counterintuitive Recession Ever</title><url>https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2020/08/the-most-counterintuitive-recession-ever/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>treyfitty</author><text>What is baffling is how the delinquency rates for credit cards have plummeted. Sure, it&#x27;s easy to say in hindsight that people are buckling down, and that the stimulus payments are making it easier for those in the low income demographic to pay down credit card debt, but that can&#x27;t be the complete picture.<p>The economy was put on pause, and small businesses are being decimated. If people need financing, the status quo was to use credit card debt to keep people&#x2F;business afloat as the debt is unsecured.<p>As the article posits, the situation is quite unique and very counterintuitive...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>newacct583</author><text>&gt; If people need financing, the status quo was to use credit card debt to keep people&#x2F;business afloat as the debt is unsecured.<p>Was it? How much of the total credit debt held in the US was being used to weather short term cash shortfalls like this?<p>It seems like a more reasonable hypothesis is that &quot;most&quot; credit debt in fact was being used to finance luxury expenditures by the middle class instead, and that when these were suppressed by the pandemic along with everything else credit spending dropped.<p>Note also that for people in the first category, the very generous UI and stimulus benefits we available to bridge the gap too. We&#x27;ll see what happens now that most of these are being rolled back or replaced with more regressive measures like the payroll tax suspension (which only benefits people who are employed).</text></comment> |
26,211,753 | 26,211,290 | 1 | 2 | 26,182,122 | train | <story><title>Handheld two-way radios for preppers and other curious folks</title><url>https://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/prep/handheld.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Mister_X</author><text>I live in a remote area where Ham radio is still a vital communication protocol during power outages and such, but lately groups of non Hams (preppers, and such) have decided that buying those cheap FRS radios will serve them during an emergency.<p>And some of those groups are pushing people to get their FCC Ham license and use VHF radios because they can be used over greater distances.<p>Unfortunately, almost none of those folks are actually practicing with their radios to become comfortable using them.<p>So when an emergency occurs, they have no idea of what to do on the air, and they will cause harmful interference because they are willfully ignorant of the local communication protocols already set up by generations of Ham operators.<p>They will be a part of the problem, not a part of the solution.<p>I put on a &quot;Jump Bag&quot; presentation every year in my small town, and I warn folks that if they get an FRS radio or Ham radio, that they need to practice with it and become comfortable using it, otherwise they will not be helpful during an emergency, and will cause problems with the coordinated Hams.<p>Aside from that, I also recommend against getting an FRS radio unless they are willing to make sure the batteries in them are replaced on a regular basis, otherwise when the emergency occurs, they will find a dead FRS radio with corroded battery contacts, basically a paperweight and nothing more.<p>73,
KE6---</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>themodelplumber</author><text>How will FRS users cause harmful interference on the ham bands? I think FRS is pretty amazing for what it is. It builds confidence if practiced in its simplicity and there are FRS neighborhood nets run by ham radio operators as well.<p>I was surprised to find that during an emergency, FM broadcast reception alone can be an awesome solution for many, if not most. Some friends wandered over to my ham shack to ask if that was where the action was, but most of my information came from the local public&#x2F;NPR station&#x27;s hourly reports. (The ham repeaters were useful for hyper-local fire spotting, and generator&#x2F;gear questions.)</text></comment> | <story><title>Handheld two-way radios for preppers and other curious folks</title><url>https://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/prep/handheld.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Mister_X</author><text>I live in a remote area where Ham radio is still a vital communication protocol during power outages and such, but lately groups of non Hams (preppers, and such) have decided that buying those cheap FRS radios will serve them during an emergency.<p>And some of those groups are pushing people to get their FCC Ham license and use VHF radios because they can be used over greater distances.<p>Unfortunately, almost none of those folks are actually practicing with their radios to become comfortable using them.<p>So when an emergency occurs, they have no idea of what to do on the air, and they will cause harmful interference because they are willfully ignorant of the local communication protocols already set up by generations of Ham operators.<p>They will be a part of the problem, not a part of the solution.<p>I put on a &quot;Jump Bag&quot; presentation every year in my small town, and I warn folks that if they get an FRS radio or Ham radio, that they need to practice with it and become comfortable using it, otherwise they will not be helpful during an emergency, and will cause problems with the coordinated Hams.<p>Aside from that, I also recommend against getting an FRS radio unless they are willing to make sure the batteries in them are replaced on a regular basis, otherwise when the emergency occurs, they will find a dead FRS radio with corroded battery contacts, basically a paperweight and nothing more.<p>73,
KE6---</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>chmod600</author><text>How do you recommend practicing? I often have trouble with the basics, like connecting to repeaters. When I do, I don&#x27;t hear much traffic or it seems like a semi-private conversation where it would feel &quot;rude&quot; to say something.<p>Do I just keep talking into the void and waiting?<p>Also, I have cheap equipment, so scanning is really slow and I don&#x27;t know if it even really works. I can make simplex connections on 70cm and 2m with friends when I prearrange, but that&#x27;s it.<p>I don&#x27;t have tons of time but if I felt like I could hop into a conversation and be welcome (and others would be patient) then I would sometimes.</text></comment> |
24,025,179 | 24,024,866 | 1 | 2 | 24,023,979 | train | <story><title>Hacking Portable Air Conditioners</title><url>https://pmarks.net/ac/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>esaym</author><text>&gt;and there&#x27;s very little change happening.<p>There&#x27;s honestly a lot happening and changing. Obviously you won&#x27;t see it by buying &quot;HVAC&quot; junk from a box store. What this person should have done is paid an actual HVAC tech to install a ductless mini-split [0]. It would have been a heck of a lot more efficient. He states his one unit is drawing 10 amps (110 volt I assume). Whereas my american standard 4 ton (48,000 btu) unit draws 10 amps as well (240 volt) and cools a 2200 square ft house in 100+ degree texas weather with an electric bill usually not higher than $120 per month (1200 - 1400 kwh or so).<p>By comparison, at my old house (which was half the size, 1100 sq ft) with a much older 12 Seer unit, my electric bill was regularly over $200. I measured that unit at drawing 18 amps (at 240 volt) and it was only a 3 ton 36,000 btu out door unit. The latest and greatest 21&#x2F;22 seer units are even more efficient than my current one mentioned above (which is probably only 17 seer).<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.americanstandardair.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;heating-and-cooling&#x2F;ductless&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.americanstandardair.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;heating-and-coo...</a></text></item><item><author>leoedin</author><text>This is interesting. We collectively spend _so much_ of our energy on heating and cooling buildings, and there&#x27;s very little change happening.<p>The problems identified in the article are such low hanging fruit. Everywhere you look in residential housing there&#x27;s huge efficieny gains to be made, but very little effort is going in to making them.<p>I&#x27;d love to find ways we can use technology to make housing more efficient. We need to - it&#x27;s such a crucial pillar in dealing with climate change, and the vast majority of housing is so comically inefficient. The single tube air conditioners mentioned in the article are just the icing on the cake of all these massive energy wastes we accept because they&#x27;re marginally more convenient. Does anyone know how to fix this?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>eigenvector</author><text>One of the biggest reasons portable air conditioners exist is for apartments. It&#x27;s something anyone can buy without having to get permission from their landlord to make modifications to the property. So I would not compare them directly to anything that cannot be installed by a tenant without additional permission.</text></comment> | <story><title>Hacking Portable Air Conditioners</title><url>https://pmarks.net/ac/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>esaym</author><text>&gt;and there&#x27;s very little change happening.<p>There&#x27;s honestly a lot happening and changing. Obviously you won&#x27;t see it by buying &quot;HVAC&quot; junk from a box store. What this person should have done is paid an actual HVAC tech to install a ductless mini-split [0]. It would have been a heck of a lot more efficient. He states his one unit is drawing 10 amps (110 volt I assume). Whereas my american standard 4 ton (48,000 btu) unit draws 10 amps as well (240 volt) and cools a 2200 square ft house in 100+ degree texas weather with an electric bill usually not higher than $120 per month (1200 - 1400 kwh or so).<p>By comparison, at my old house (which was half the size, 1100 sq ft) with a much older 12 Seer unit, my electric bill was regularly over $200. I measured that unit at drawing 18 amps (at 240 volt) and it was only a 3 ton 36,000 btu out door unit. The latest and greatest 21&#x2F;22 seer units are even more efficient than my current one mentioned above (which is probably only 17 seer).<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.americanstandardair.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;heating-and-cooling&#x2F;ductless&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.americanstandardair.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;heating-and-coo...</a></text></item><item><author>leoedin</author><text>This is interesting. We collectively spend _so much_ of our energy on heating and cooling buildings, and there&#x27;s very little change happening.<p>The problems identified in the article are such low hanging fruit. Everywhere you look in residential housing there&#x27;s huge efficieny gains to be made, but very little effort is going in to making them.<p>I&#x27;d love to find ways we can use technology to make housing more efficient. We need to - it&#x27;s such a crucial pillar in dealing with climate change, and the vast majority of housing is so comically inefficient. The single tube air conditioners mentioned in the article are just the icing on the cake of all these massive energy wastes we accept because they&#x27;re marginally more convenient. Does anyone know how to fix this?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>p1mrx</author><text>Installing a mini-split would be a year-long project, including HOA negotiations, architectural design, electrical load calculations, city permits, and invasive construction. It&#x27;s not the sort of thing you&#x27;d want to attempt at the beginning of a pandemic (or ever, for most people.)<p>Given the orders of magnitude less work required to find a product and click &quot;Buy&quot;, it&#x27;d greatly benefit society for portable A&#x2F;C manufacturers to compete on efficiency.</text></comment> |
23,011,204 | 23,011,260 | 1 | 2 | 23,010,868 | train | <story><title>Zoom taps Oracle for cloud deal, passing over Amazon, Microsoft</title><url>https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/28/zoom-taps-oracle-for-cloud-deal-passing-over-amazon-microsoft.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>partiallypro</author><text>My guess is simply, they don&#x27;t want to fund their own competitors. Microsoft is a direct competitor already (so is Google,) and who knows what Amazon will do. That really only leaves IBM and Oracle. I&#x27;ve always been baffled when someone hosts on their competitors&#x27; platform. Like Netflix hosting on AWS, and Grocery Stores hosting on AWS. Microsoft &amp; Google rarely have that problem (except on this one.)</text></item><item><author>cmauniada</author><text>Why? Is it because of cost? Perhaps nepotism? I don&#x27; see a reason why Amazon or Azure would be passed over in favour of Oracle. Why wasn&#x27;t GCP a contender either? Something seems fishy... someone from Zoom care to chime in?<p>Maybe they are afraid that Amazon or Microsoft with their tradition of copying competition would pose a threat? Even then, Microsoft is already competing using Microsoft Teams and if Amazon wanted to it wouldn&#x27;t be hard for them at all to come up with a product.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ViViDboarder</author><text>I’ve been impressed by what I’ve heard about Walmart. They apparently won’t even use a SaaS tool if it’s hosted on Amazon.</text></comment> | <story><title>Zoom taps Oracle for cloud deal, passing over Amazon, Microsoft</title><url>https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/28/zoom-taps-oracle-for-cloud-deal-passing-over-amazon-microsoft.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>partiallypro</author><text>My guess is simply, they don&#x27;t want to fund their own competitors. Microsoft is a direct competitor already (so is Google,) and who knows what Amazon will do. That really only leaves IBM and Oracle. I&#x27;ve always been baffled when someone hosts on their competitors&#x27; platform. Like Netflix hosting on AWS, and Grocery Stores hosting on AWS. Microsoft &amp; Google rarely have that problem (except on this one.)</text></item><item><author>cmauniada</author><text>Why? Is it because of cost? Perhaps nepotism? I don&#x27; see a reason why Amazon or Azure would be passed over in favour of Oracle. Why wasn&#x27;t GCP a contender either? Something seems fishy... someone from Zoom care to chime in?<p>Maybe they are afraid that Amazon or Microsoft with their tradition of copying competition would pose a threat? Even then, Microsoft is already competing using Microsoft Teams and if Amazon wanted to it wouldn&#x27;t be hard for them at all to come up with a product.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>toyg</author><text>That, and likely Oracle is doing it for free (or thereabout), financing it out of their advertising budget.<p>Zoom is the success story of these corona-times of ours; the headline alone is marketing gold, particularly considering <i>nobody else</i> in the &quot;startupsphere&quot; will ever give Oracle this sort of visibility - or even the time of day. At a time when Oracle is trying to push an image of being startup-friendly, this is better than the alternatives (each word they tweet on &quot;helping startups&quot; unleashes waves of mean and snarky jokes).</text></comment> |
13,682,871 | 13,682,378 | 1 | 2 | 13,682,022 | train | <story><title>Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber</title><url>https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-one-very-strange-year-at-uber</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jacquesm</author><text>What&#x27;s with all the &#x27;this is unbelievable&#x27; comments here?<p>This is absolutely believable, Uber has pretty much made it their standard to break the laws where-ever they can, why should work place conduct be any different? In for a penny, in for a pound.<p>You&#x27;d never hear something even close to this from Stripe or some other company run by upstanding folks.<p>Fish rots from the head.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tptacek</author><text>I fully expected this thread to be a shitshow, but comments here are overwhelmingly supportive of Fowler, and except perhaps for the very bottom of the thread, I don&#x27;t see much much &quot;this is unbelievable&quot; at all. I&#x27;m pleasantly surprised.</text></comment> | <story><title>Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber</title><url>https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-one-very-strange-year-at-uber</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jacquesm</author><text>What&#x27;s with all the &#x27;this is unbelievable&#x27; comments here?<p>This is absolutely believable, Uber has pretty much made it their standard to break the laws where-ever they can, why should work place conduct be any different? In for a penny, in for a pound.<p>You&#x27;d never hear something even close to this from Stripe or some other company run by upstanding folks.<p>Fish rots from the head.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>brudgers</author><text>If taking a billion dollars from the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia says something about a company&#x27;s stance regarding women&#x27;s equality, what it says is not terribly inconsistent with Fowler&#x27;s story.</text></comment> |
4,020,976 | 4,020,738 | 1 | 2 | 4,019,682 | train | <story><title>Github: CoffeeScript cracks the top 10 languages </title><url>https://github.com/languages</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jashkenas</author><text>Whoops -- cancel the party folks. Apparently the rankings just count the percentage of GitHub repos with <i>any</i> amount of the language in it. I bet CoffeeScript's recent rise has a lot to do with a handful of auto-generated-by-default files in Rails projects.<p>Source: <a href="https://twitter.com/joshpeek/status/205783659830198273" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/joshpeek/status/205783659830198273</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Github: CoffeeScript cracks the top 10 languages </title><url>https://github.com/languages</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>timr</author><text>I don't get it.<p>I'm in the process of ripping the last bit of coffeescript out of our code. The marginal benefits of the language don't exceed the costs of having another build dependency, and another syntax to understand. For daily work, I <i>already</i> have to switch contexts between Javascript, CSS, SCSS, HTML, rHTML, HAML and Ruby (not to mention other <i>tools</i> like Bash, Rake, etc., along with API knowledge like the Rails API, jQuery, and all of the various un- or poorly-documented gems). Ultimately, it's a huge mental burden. Every new thing is a <i>new thing</i> that someone has to understand to be productive.<p>To justify the extra mental cost of another piece of technology, it has to do something pretty amazing. A minor syntactical transformation of javascript just doesn't cut it.</text></comment> |
7,191,250 | 7,190,795 | 1 | 3 | 7,190,387 | train | <story><title>Money for Nothing</title><url>http://www.dansdata.com/gz146.htm </url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>llimllib</author><text>I actually used to write book arbitrage software, and this person has managed to completely misunderstand it.<p>I&#x27;m not arguing here for its societal value, just that dan appears to have misunderstood some fundamental bits about how it works.<p>&gt; Robot 1 offers Book A for $10. It probably doesn&#x27;t have it in stock, but it knows where it can buy it for, say, $9, drop-ship it to the customer without ever seeing the acutal product, and make a buck on the arbitrage. Robot 2 notices this and lists the same book for $11, hoping to do the same thing. Robot 1 notices Robot 2&#x27;s listing, doesn&#x27;t know or care that Robot 2 is another arbitrage trader, and reprices its listing for the book to $12. Robot 2 notices this and goes to $13, and away we go.<p>This makes no sense; the fundamental rule of amazon bots is that consumers buying used books almost always buy the <i>lowest-priced</i> used book available. So the bot war would send the price <i>down</i>, not up.<p>Why in the world would bot 2 offer the book for $11? It would know that nobody would buy it when there was one already listed for $10.<p>The silly-high-priced books that I saw when I was working for the book company were rare long-tail books. One of the discoveries that many people have made is that for rare books, whether or not you understand what the heck it is, some % of them will get bought even if they&#x27;re listed for <i>silly</i> high prices. Enough people will pay thousands of dollars (not an exaggeration) for a used copy of a book that they can&#x27;t find elsewhere that stocking the long tail of books can in fact be very valuable.<p>That means that, when you find lots of rare books, your incentive is to throw out some crazy-high price for each, because some % of them will, in fact, get paid, making the whole enterprise worthwhile.<p>edit: Arbitrage on the same market Does Not Work, in my experience, and to just claim that it does with no evidence doesn&#x27;t make it any more likely to do so.</text></comment> | <story><title>Money for Nothing</title><url>http://www.dansdata.com/gz146.htm </url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jonnathanson</author><text>Money laundering seems like an interesting explanation, but there are far better and less risky ways to launder money. Cash businesses, or even bitcoin are superior to &quot;selling&quot; an app that could be taken down at any time, that requires credit cards on file to purchase, and whose transactions Apple or a credit card company could freeze, reverse, or cancel at will.<p>It would be fairly trivial for Apple, in cooperation with a law enforcement agency, to source the transactions, map the patterns, and triangulate to likely points of origin. And it would probably arouse a lot of suspicion if an app of such obviously bullshit quality suddenly started raking in millions of dollars in sales -- thereby making sales of the app inefficient and risky as a laundry-integration method.<p>I suppose the whole thing relies on iTunes gift cards and credits, rather than credit cards, but why overcomplicate things beyond there? Buying and reselling gift cards at a moderate discount would launder your money just fine, while limiting your exposure to third-party risk.<p>Apropos of nothing, the dissection of the high-priced crapware reminded me of &quot;I Am Rich,&quot; the infamous and short-lived iOS app from 2008. It cost $999.99, and all it did was display a glowing red gem and a tagline on your screen. Evidently, at least eight to ten people bought a copy before Apple swung the ban hammer.</text></comment> |
476,175 | 475,966 | 1 | 2 | 475,581 | train | <story><title>How The World Almost Came To An End At 2PM On September 18</title><url>http://zerohedge.blogspot.com/2009/02/how-world-almost-came-to-end-at-2pm-on.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mattobrien</author><text>This was a bank run, except it involved money market accounts. Money market accounts hold a lot of short term corporate debt. After Lehman went bankrupt, a few prominent money market accounts that held Lehman debt "broke the buck", ie paid out less than what investors put in. Since money market accounts weren't insured at the time, this set off a panic. People likely called their fund managers, trying to redeem their funds, to move it to FDIC insured bank accounts. If fund managers tried to redeem over 50% of their funds at once (as some funds experienced), that would explain hundreds of billions of dollars draining out in an hour.<p>If the money market accounts crashed, financial companies wouldn't have been able to roll over their short term debt, which they rely on for day-to-day operations. Non-depository institutions (like the surviving investment banks) would be forced into bankruptcy. Those bankruptcies would cascade, and depository institutions would fail as well, probably with bank runs on accounts over the FDIC limit.<p>What made the Great Depression great were the banking crises. Without a functioning financial system, a modern economy can't grow. And if we reached a point where people couldn't even get money out of ATMs, we're talking about complete social breakdown. One Congressman claimed the administration talked about martial law as a real possibility. We really did come close to the brink. And the downward cycle went even faster than prescient bears like Nouriel Roubini thought it would.</text></item><item><author>ryanwaggoner</author><text>Can someone explain this to a non-finance / non-macroeconomics type? Was it foreigners who were pulling money out? Was it people in the US? If they pull $5.5 trillion in cash out, where would it have gone? Just don't understand why everything would have collapsed.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>anamax</author><text>&#62; Non-depository institutions (like the surviving investment banks) would be forced into bankruptcy.<p>Forced by whom?<p>Banks are required by govt law to have more assets than liabilities, but many institutions and individuals owe more than they have to no ill effect.<p>In the short-term, cash flow is the only thing that matters and even that is under some control. A bank can "simply" refuse to pay money that it doesn't have.<p>Yes, there will be consequences, but later, giving the bank time to do something useful.<p>However, current govt reserve requirements don't allow that.<p>Yes, I know the reason behind such requirements. My point is that they make certain bad situations worse and it's not clear that such amplification is required for the claimed benefits.</text></comment> | <story><title>How The World Almost Came To An End At 2PM On September 18</title><url>http://zerohedge.blogspot.com/2009/02/how-world-almost-came-to-end-at-2pm-on.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mattobrien</author><text>This was a bank run, except it involved money market accounts. Money market accounts hold a lot of short term corporate debt. After Lehman went bankrupt, a few prominent money market accounts that held Lehman debt "broke the buck", ie paid out less than what investors put in. Since money market accounts weren't insured at the time, this set off a panic. People likely called their fund managers, trying to redeem their funds, to move it to FDIC insured bank accounts. If fund managers tried to redeem over 50% of their funds at once (as some funds experienced), that would explain hundreds of billions of dollars draining out in an hour.<p>If the money market accounts crashed, financial companies wouldn't have been able to roll over their short term debt, which they rely on for day-to-day operations. Non-depository institutions (like the surviving investment banks) would be forced into bankruptcy. Those bankruptcies would cascade, and depository institutions would fail as well, probably with bank runs on accounts over the FDIC limit.<p>What made the Great Depression great were the banking crises. Without a functioning financial system, a modern economy can't grow. And if we reached a point where people couldn't even get money out of ATMs, we're talking about complete social breakdown. One Congressman claimed the administration talked about martial law as a real possibility. We really did come close to the brink. And the downward cycle went even faster than prescient bears like Nouriel Roubini thought it would.</text></item><item><author>ryanwaggoner</author><text>Can someone explain this to a non-finance / non-macroeconomics type? Was it foreigners who were pulling money out? Was it people in the US? If they pull $5.5 trillion in cash out, where would it have gone? Just don't understand why everything would have collapsed.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jacquesm</author><text>Thank you, that's the clearest explanation of this whole thing that I've read to date.</text></comment> |
5,979,238 | 5,979,012 | 1 | 3 | 5,978,694 | train | <story><title>Pebble Smartwatch Is Coming To Best Buy On July 7 For $149.95</title><url>http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/02/pebble-smartwatch-is-coming-to-best-buy-july-7-for-149-95/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>SnowLprd</author><text>Here&#x27;s the product page: <a href="http://www.bestbuy.com/pebble" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bestbuy.com&#x2F;pebble</a><p>This news makes me very disappointed in the company&#x27;s handling of their KickStarter campaign.<p>I backed their KickStarter campaign and ordered a white Pebble in May of last year, and I still haven&#x27;t received it. So if I understand correctly, someone who walks into Best Buy next week will get a Pebble before I do?<p>While I understand the desire to stay out in front of Apple, Sony, and any other companies who may enter the smartwatch market, as one of the people who funded and helped make the Pebble possible, I am disappointed at how this was handled. The whole experience will make me think twice about backing KS campaigns in the future.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>smackfu</author><text>They offered you the chance to switch to the black one a month or two ago, which is what Best Buy is selling. That seems fair and reasonable. You can certainly still be upset that the color you picked got the short end of the stick, but one of them had to be last.</text></comment> | <story><title>Pebble Smartwatch Is Coming To Best Buy On July 7 For $149.95</title><url>http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/02/pebble-smartwatch-is-coming-to-best-buy-july-7-for-149-95/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>SnowLprd</author><text>Here&#x27;s the product page: <a href="http://www.bestbuy.com/pebble" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bestbuy.com&#x2F;pebble</a><p>This news makes me very disappointed in the company&#x27;s handling of their KickStarter campaign.<p>I backed their KickStarter campaign and ordered a white Pebble in May of last year, and I still haven&#x27;t received it. So if I understand correctly, someone who walks into Best Buy next week will get a Pebble before I do?<p>While I understand the desire to stay out in front of Apple, Sony, and any other companies who may enter the smartwatch market, as one of the people who funded and helped make the Pebble possible, I am disappointed at how this was handled. The whole experience will make me think twice about backing KS campaigns in the future.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>spullara</author><text>You aren&#x27;t missing anything. I got mine months ago. It is the most disappointing thing I have supported on kickstarter. I would literally send you mine but one of the buttons fell off the first (and only) day I wore it.</text></comment> |
12,359,212 | 12,359,135 | 1 | 3 | 12,358,421 | train | <story><title>Arguments against JSON-driven development</title><url>http://okigiveup.net/arguments-against-json-driven-development/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wtbob</author><text>&gt; The fundamental advice on Unicode is decode and encode on system boundaries. That is, you should never be working on non-unicode strings within your business logic. The same should apply to JSON. Decode it into business logic objects on entry into system, rejecting invalid data. Instead of relying on key errors and membership lookups, leave the orthogonal business of type validity to object instantiation.<p>This right here is the correct approach. Serialisation formats should be serialisation formats, whether they be JSON, S-expressions, protobufs, XML, Thrift or what-have-you; application data should be application data. There are cases where it makes sense to operate on the serialised data directly, for performance or because it makes sense in context, but in the general case operate on typed application values.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>qwertyuiop924</author><text>Part of the problem is that JSON and Sexprs aren&#x27;t that they AREN&#x27;T serialization formats. They&#x27;ve been pressed into service as such, but they are actually notation for datastructures: In python, it may not be idiomatic to crawl dicts like this, but in JS, those aren&#x27;t dicts, they&#x27;re objects. If they&#x27;ve been de-serialized to some degree, they may even have their own methods.<p>By the same token, in Lisp, Sexprs aren&#x27;t a serialization format. They&#x27;re a notation for the linked cons cells that Lisp data is made of. In Lisp, that Sexpr will be crawled for data, or maybe even executed.<p>So while in Python, both may <i>seem</i> to be serialization formats, they aren&#x27;t.<p>Either way, if the application programmer has any sense, they&#x27;ll abstract away the format of their data. In a lisp app, you won&#x27;t be cdring down a sexpr, you&#x27;ll be calling a function to grab the necessary data for you, usually from a set of functions that abstract away the underlying sexpr implementation, and treat whatever it is as a separate datatype.<p>Of course, the sexpr might have been fed to an object constructor. Heck, it might <i>be</i> an object constructor, or a struct constructor. All of those types typically provide O(1) access, and autogenerated access functions, so it&#x27;s the same story.</text></comment> | <story><title>Arguments against JSON-driven development</title><url>http://okigiveup.net/arguments-against-json-driven-development/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wtbob</author><text>&gt; The fundamental advice on Unicode is decode and encode on system boundaries. That is, you should never be working on non-unicode strings within your business logic. The same should apply to JSON. Decode it into business logic objects on entry into system, rejecting invalid data. Instead of relying on key errors and membership lookups, leave the orthogonal business of type validity to object instantiation.<p>This right here is the correct approach. Serialisation formats should be serialisation formats, whether they be JSON, S-expressions, protobufs, XML, Thrift or what-have-you; application data should be application data. There are cases where it makes sense to operate on the serialised data directly, for performance or because it makes sense in context, but in the general case operate on typed application values.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>VikingCoder</author><text>...unless your application is doing an in-place edit.<p>For instance, if your image compression application throws out my EXIF data that it doesn&#x27;t understand, I&#x27;m going to be pissed. (Unless you give me an option to preserve it.)</text></comment> |
36,477,034 | 36,475,405 | 1 | 3 | 36,472,613 | train | <story><title>The .meta directory: let's tidy things up</title><url>https://dotmeta.org/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>paulhodge</author><text>I&#x27;d suggest having them in a directory just called config&#x2F;<p>On having it start with a dot: Why? Why would we pretend that these crucial files don&#x27;t exist?<p>On having it named meta: These files aren&#x27;t &quot;about&quot; the project or &quot;above&quot; the project, they ARE the project.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sph</author><text>It&#x27;s not configuration though. Specifically, it&#x27;s not configuration of the project in question, it&#x27;s configuration for third party accessories.<p>If I&#x27;m writing an editor, I expect the config directory in the source code to hold the configuration for the editor, not .babelrc<p>meta is a much better name and they are &quot;about&quot; the project, not the project itself, so I disagree on that point. Though I agree it should not be hidden. I will start having a &quot;meta&quot; directory in my projects</text></comment> | <story><title>The .meta directory: let's tidy things up</title><url>https://dotmeta.org/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>paulhodge</author><text>I&#x27;d suggest having them in a directory just called config&#x2F;<p>On having it start with a dot: Why? Why would we pretend that these crucial files don&#x27;t exist?<p>On having it named meta: These files aren&#x27;t &quot;about&quot; the project or &quot;above&quot; the project, they ARE the project.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>activiation</author><text>~&#x2F;.config is already a thing</text></comment> |
15,721,382 | 15,721,092 | 1 | 2 | 15,719,262 | train | <story><title>Tesla Roadster</title><url>https://www.tesla.com/roadster/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>in3d</author><text>Sounds really good on paper but the production is scheduled for 2020, so it’s unfair to compare it to the cars currently on the market. No other manufacturers announce cars so far ahead so it seems at least partly like a hype for Tesla investors. Acceleration is just one part of what makes a great sports car. And how is the acceleration past 100 mph? That’s the traditional weakness of electric cars and it matters more on the track. How about its weight, brakes, turning, steering feel, grip, suspension, weight distribution (it should be quite good), downforce? Will the battery last for a full track day? Of course sound has always been a very important part of what made sports cars exhilarating to drive and Tesla can’t compete there. And the design and brand matter too. Ferrari and Lamborghini don’t make $40k cars (or even $100k cars).</text></item><item><author>ardit33</author><text>The Tesla roadster specs are insane! No exotic carmaker will be able to match it (taking price as a consideration). (no Ferrari, or Lambo, can get that close. This is Formula 1 acceleration speeds).<p>Plus 620 miles of range, and it is a 4 seater. Expensive as hell, but this is exotic car territory.<p>Base Specs<p>Acceleration 0-60 mph1.9 sec<p>Acceleration 0-100 mph4.2 sec<p>Acceleration 1&#x2F;4 mile8.8 sec<p>Top SpeedOver 250 mph<p>Wheel Torque 10,000 Nm<p>Mile Range 620 miles<p>Seating 4<p>Drive All-Wheel Drive<p>Base Price $200,000<p>Base Reservation $50,000<p>Founders Series Price $250,000<p>Founders Series Reservation<p>(1,000 reservations available)$250,000</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>DennisP</author><text>MotorTrend&#x27;s review of the Model 3 makes me optimistic about the Roadster:<p>&quot;What’s blanching, though, is the car’s ride and handling. If anybody was expecting a typical boring electric sedan here, nope. The ride is Alfa Giulia (maybe even Quadrifoglio)–firm, and quickly, I’m carving Stunt Road like a Sochi Olympics giant slalomer, micrometering my swipes at the apexes. I glance at Franz—this OK? “Go for it,” he nods. The Model 3 is so unexpected scalpel-like, I’m sputtering for adjectives. The steering ratio is quick, the effort is light (for me), but there’s enough light tremble against your fingers to hear the cornering negotiations between Stunt Road and these 235&#x2F;40R19 tires (Continental ProContact RX m+s’s). And to mention body roll is to have already said too much about it.&quot;<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.motortrend.com&#x2F;cars&#x2F;tesla&#x2F;model-3&#x2F;2018&#x2F;exclusive-tesla-model-3-first-drive-review&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.motortrend.com&#x2F;cars&#x2F;tesla&#x2F;model-3&#x2F;2018&#x2F;exclusive-...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Tesla Roadster</title><url>https://www.tesla.com/roadster/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>in3d</author><text>Sounds really good on paper but the production is scheduled for 2020, so it’s unfair to compare it to the cars currently on the market. No other manufacturers announce cars so far ahead so it seems at least partly like a hype for Tesla investors. Acceleration is just one part of what makes a great sports car. And how is the acceleration past 100 mph? That’s the traditional weakness of electric cars and it matters more on the track. How about its weight, brakes, turning, steering feel, grip, suspension, weight distribution (it should be quite good), downforce? Will the battery last for a full track day? Of course sound has always been a very important part of what made sports cars exhilarating to drive and Tesla can’t compete there. And the design and brand matter too. Ferrari and Lamborghini don’t make $40k cars (or even $100k cars).</text></item><item><author>ardit33</author><text>The Tesla roadster specs are insane! No exotic carmaker will be able to match it (taking price as a consideration). (no Ferrari, or Lambo, can get that close. This is Formula 1 acceleration speeds).<p>Plus 620 miles of range, and it is a 4 seater. Expensive as hell, but this is exotic car territory.<p>Base Specs<p>Acceleration 0-60 mph1.9 sec<p>Acceleration 0-100 mph4.2 sec<p>Acceleration 1&#x2F;4 mile8.8 sec<p>Top SpeedOver 250 mph<p>Wheel Torque 10,000 Nm<p>Mile Range 620 miles<p>Seating 4<p>Drive All-Wheel Drive<p>Base Price $200,000<p>Base Reservation $50,000<p>Founders Series Price $250,000<p>Founders Series Reservation<p>(1,000 reservations available)$250,000</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mtgx</author><text>&gt; No other manufacturers announce cars so far ahead<p>Surely, you&#x27;re joking? Virtually every carmaker has announced a <i>whole bunch</i> of electric cars for 2020-2021 (without giving nearly as many details or demoing the cars already). And that&#x27;s discounting their &quot;concept cars&quot;.</text></comment> |
20,598,715 | 20,598,688 | 1 | 2 | 20,598,086 | train | <story><title>Amazon allegedly scammed out of $370K by 22-year-old's return shipments of dirt</title><url>https://www.foxbusiness.com/retail/amazon-dirt-scam-22-year-old</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>eco</author><text>I just ordered a MyQ garage door hub from Amazon Warehouse (listed as missing or damaged original packaging). When I opened it up it felt a little off. The protective film on the device had obviously been removed and reattached and nothing fit very well in the designated slots in the packaging. The device itself had faint scratches and dust on it.<p>I decided to check the model number and sure enough, it was the previous model. Someone had obviously ordered the new model (presumably because the new one gained support for Apple HomeKit) then stuffed their old one in the box and done a refund through Amazon.<p>Amazon handled it fine and I got a replacement that was correct but now I&#x27;m pretty skeptical of how Amazon processes the returned items they place up for sale again.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rahimnathwani</author><text>I had a similar experience with an expensive Toto toilet seat from Amazon Warehouse Deals.<p>When it arrived, it was clear the packaging had been opened (which I expected), but:<p>- the toilet seat had signs of handling<p>- it didn&#x27;t work when installed<p>- the previous purchasers return note was in the box. IIRC they said the reason for return was that they changed their mind about wanting it<p>My guess is that they bought a replacement on Amazon, and fraudulently sent back their old non-functioning one in the new packaging.<p>Amazon gave me a refund without fuss.</text></comment> | <story><title>Amazon allegedly scammed out of $370K by 22-year-old's return shipments of dirt</title><url>https://www.foxbusiness.com/retail/amazon-dirt-scam-22-year-old</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>eco</author><text>I just ordered a MyQ garage door hub from Amazon Warehouse (listed as missing or damaged original packaging). When I opened it up it felt a little off. The protective film on the device had obviously been removed and reattached and nothing fit very well in the designated slots in the packaging. The device itself had faint scratches and dust on it.<p>I decided to check the model number and sure enough, it was the previous model. Someone had obviously ordered the new model (presumably because the new one gained support for Apple HomeKit) then stuffed their old one in the box and done a refund through Amazon.<p>Amazon handled it fine and I got a replacement that was correct but now I&#x27;m pretty skeptical of how Amazon processes the returned items they place up for sale again.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>muzika</author><text>I buy many retuned items from Amazon warehouse. I find that about 5% of them are like this - people put either their old item or some other junk back in the box. Just happened again 2 days ago with a stroller my wife bought.</text></comment> |
31,754,860 | 31,755,094 | 1 | 2 | 31,751,015 | train | <story><title>As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for change in academia</title><url>https://www.science.org/content/article/professors-struggle-recruit-postdocs-calls-structural-change-academia-intensify</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>feet</author><text>I think this is a short sighted perspective. Basic research is important and has farther reaching impacts than a CRUD web app. Just because you don&#x27;t see immediate impact doesn&#x27;t mean it isn&#x27;t there</text></item><item><author>coldpie</author><text>&gt; I like building stuff that people use, not writing papers that mostly went unread.<p>Circa 2010, as I was finishing up my BS in CS, one of my professors asked me to have a meeting in his office. He was trying to recruit me into a graduate program under him, since he liked my performance in his class. I said I wasn&#x27;t very interested, since I wanted to make things people will actually use. His response was there was a team in Utah that helped make part of the USB spec the decade previous. I was attending the University of Minnesota.<p>Yeah, no thanks.</text></item><item><author>arethuza</author><text>I stopped doing a PhD after about 5 years - I was a Research Associate in a UK university so I actually got a salary which wasn&#x27;t too bad but quite a bit below the going rate (I had a few job offers during that time).<p>I left to co-found a start-up - never regretted it as I was &quot;hyper cynical&quot; (a direct quote from a colleague) about the whole academic world and how easy it was to play the &quot;publish or perish&quot; game.<p>I like building stuff that people use, not writing papers that mostly went unread.</text></item><item><author>baka367</author><text>I spent 4 + 1 (extra year) going for the PhD. Getting funding for anything was nothing short of nightmare and the workload was (obviously) very high.<p>Eventually I decided to scrap those 5 years for a triple salary as a junior developer and had a successful career since.<p>Is casual coding more interesting than research&#x2F;teaching - no, but staying in academia requires way more altruism than I could find in me.<p>I also still find how to get some of the joys of academia in industry, namely, mentoring&#x2F;holding workshops&#x2F;writing design specs&#x2F;turning the cluttered documentation into a nicely flowing coherent one~</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>arethuza</author><text>I&#x27;m not saying that people shouldn&#x27;t do basic research, far from it, more that I learned that given the way basic research <i>actually</i> works then I had relatively little interest in actually doing it myself.</text></comment> | <story><title>As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for change in academia</title><url>https://www.science.org/content/article/professors-struggle-recruit-postdocs-calls-structural-change-academia-intensify</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>feet</author><text>I think this is a short sighted perspective. Basic research is important and has farther reaching impacts than a CRUD web app. Just because you don&#x27;t see immediate impact doesn&#x27;t mean it isn&#x27;t there</text></item><item><author>coldpie</author><text>&gt; I like building stuff that people use, not writing papers that mostly went unread.<p>Circa 2010, as I was finishing up my BS in CS, one of my professors asked me to have a meeting in his office. He was trying to recruit me into a graduate program under him, since he liked my performance in his class. I said I wasn&#x27;t very interested, since I wanted to make things people will actually use. His response was there was a team in Utah that helped make part of the USB spec the decade previous. I was attending the University of Minnesota.<p>Yeah, no thanks.</text></item><item><author>arethuza</author><text>I stopped doing a PhD after about 5 years - I was a Research Associate in a UK university so I actually got a salary which wasn&#x27;t too bad but quite a bit below the going rate (I had a few job offers during that time).<p>I left to co-found a start-up - never regretted it as I was &quot;hyper cynical&quot; (a direct quote from a colleague) about the whole academic world and how easy it was to play the &quot;publish or perish&quot; game.<p>I like building stuff that people use, not writing papers that mostly went unread.</text></item><item><author>baka367</author><text>I spent 4 + 1 (extra year) going for the PhD. Getting funding for anything was nothing short of nightmare and the workload was (obviously) very high.<p>Eventually I decided to scrap those 5 years for a triple salary as a junior developer and had a successful career since.<p>Is casual coding more interesting than research&#x2F;teaching - no, but staying in academia requires way more altruism than I could find in me.<p>I also still find how to get some of the joys of academia in industry, namely, mentoring&#x2F;holding workshops&#x2F;writing design specs&#x2F;turning the cluttered documentation into a nicely flowing coherent one~</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>randomsearch</author><text>This is definitely false in many cases.<p>Source: I’ve worked on both.</text></comment> |
7,668,131 | 7,668,058 | 1 | 3 | 7,666,501 | train | <story><title>Divide Your Rent Fairly</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/science/rent-division-calculator.html?_r=0</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bendauphinee</author><text>Myself and my g&#x2F;f moved into a house with 2 friends. We figured a fair way to divide the rent and expenses.<p>We measured out the sqft of the bedrooms, and used the percentages of each room from the total bedroom sqft to split the rent and any fixed expenses like internet and lawn care (since those costs don&#x27;t change based on per person usage). We applied the same to cleaning supplies and things like light bulbs in common spaces.<p>(Chosen Bedroom SQFT &#x2F; Total Bedroom SQFT = Chosen Bedroom Expense %)<p>For power, since that can vary month to month based on usage, we split it by the number of people in the house.<p>This month, one of the friends is moving out and we&#x27;re taking her room over as an office, so the power split changes to 3 way instead of 4 way, but the other friend won&#x27;t see a change in her other expenses because her percentage of the bedrooms floor space is still the same.<p>Easy on math and easy to manage.<p>All expenses are tracked in a Google Doc shared to all of us, and at the end of each month I run the numbers to calculate who pays what to who to balance it out.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tel</author><text>That approach is directly suggested in the accompanying article. The suggested problem is that square footage may not be sufficient to express the actual value preference difference between rooms. For instance, as the article suggests, what is the value of having a window?<p>That&#x27;s, thus, exactly the neat part of this algorithm. So long as the participants are honest then it converges on an &quot;envy-free&quot; set of room selections and prices. In other words, by using only your own preference for room-X-at-price-Y it builds a set of compatible room-X-at-price-Y choices provided to each participant such that they&#x27;ve shown they would not want to trade with anyone else for their room-X-at-price-Y option.<p>The beauty of this is that the entire interface is done through these room-X-at-price-Y preferences and options so it abstracts over technical details like the relative value of a window. It&#x27;s simply up to the participants to decide what they value.</text></comment> | <story><title>Divide Your Rent Fairly</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/science/rent-division-calculator.html?_r=0</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bendauphinee</author><text>Myself and my g&#x2F;f moved into a house with 2 friends. We figured a fair way to divide the rent and expenses.<p>We measured out the sqft of the bedrooms, and used the percentages of each room from the total bedroom sqft to split the rent and any fixed expenses like internet and lawn care (since those costs don&#x27;t change based on per person usage). We applied the same to cleaning supplies and things like light bulbs in common spaces.<p>(Chosen Bedroom SQFT &#x2F; Total Bedroom SQFT = Chosen Bedroom Expense %)<p>For power, since that can vary month to month based on usage, we split it by the number of people in the house.<p>This month, one of the friends is moving out and we&#x27;re taking her room over as an office, so the power split changes to 3 way instead of 4 way, but the other friend won&#x27;t see a change in her other expenses because her percentage of the bedrooms floor space is still the same.<p>Easy on math and easy to manage.<p>All expenses are tracked in a Google Doc shared to all of us, and at the end of each month I run the numbers to calculate who pays what to who to balance it out.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dntrkv</author><text>That&#x27;s a good start but it doesn&#x27;t account for bedrooms that are better. For example, one bedroom may have a huge bay window with a nice view and the other has a tiny alley alley facing window. How do you count that into the cost?</text></comment> |
17,197,455 | 17,197,327 | 1 | 3 | 17,196,507 | train | <story><title>Vermont will cover $10K of expenses for people who move there and work remotely</title><url>https://work.qz.com/1289727/vermont-will-pay-you-10000-to-move-there-and-work-remotely/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jimhefferon</author><text>&gt; notoriously high-tax state<p>Some societies think that it is wise to spend on some things such as education (see <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;local&#x2F;wp&#x2F;2015&#x2F;06&#x2F;02&#x2F;the-states-that-spend-the-most-and-the-least-on-education-in-one-map&#x2F;?utm_term=.62e31ec15029" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;local&#x2F;wp&#x2F;2015&#x2F;06&#x2F;02&#x2F;the-...</a>). Others think that lowering taxes at whatever cost is better. The former fits with my thinking, which is why I like it here.</text></item><item><author>jackhack</author><text>For many, this won&#x27;t even begin to offset the increase in income and property taxes from this notoriously high-tax state. Individual or business, you&#x27;re likely to pay more.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;money.cnn.com&#x2F;gallery&#x2F;smallbusiness&#x2F;2012&#x2F;10&#x2F;15&#x2F;state-taxes&#x2F;4.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;money.cnn.com&#x2F;gallery&#x2F;smallbusiness&#x2F;2012&#x2F;10&#x2F;15&#x2F;state-...</a><p>&gt;&gt;The income tax has a top rate of 8.95%. This ranks as the sixth-highest in the U.S., although it only applies to taxpayers making over $413,350 per year. Meanwhile, total state and local sales taxes range from 6% to 7%.<p>&gt;&gt;There are five income brackets. The highest marginal rate is 8.95% on any income over $388,350. That&#x27;s on top of federal income taxes.<p>&gt;&gt;Businesses pay an effective property tax rate of 5.27%, the third highest in the country.<p>&gt;&gt;At 6%, sales taxes are also on the high side. Meanwhile, those businesses that pay corporate taxes get hit with an 8.5% rate for any profit made above $25,000.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>swebs</author><text>And yet the neighboring state of New Hampshire, which has some of the lowest taxes in the country (0% sales tax, 0% state income tax), beats Vermont handily in SAT scores.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.prepscholar.com&#x2F;average-sat-and-act-scores-by-stated-adjusted-for-participation-rate" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.prepscholar.com&#x2F;average-sat-and-act-scores-by-s...</a><p>What does Vermont have to show for its higher spending? Why do you see higher spending as an automatically good thing if it doesn&#x27;t have any evidence of having a beneficial effect?</text></comment> | <story><title>Vermont will cover $10K of expenses for people who move there and work remotely</title><url>https://work.qz.com/1289727/vermont-will-pay-you-10000-to-move-there-and-work-remotely/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jimhefferon</author><text>&gt; notoriously high-tax state<p>Some societies think that it is wise to spend on some things such as education (see <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;local&#x2F;wp&#x2F;2015&#x2F;06&#x2F;02&#x2F;the-states-that-spend-the-most-and-the-least-on-education-in-one-map&#x2F;?utm_term=.62e31ec15029" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;local&#x2F;wp&#x2F;2015&#x2F;06&#x2F;02&#x2F;the-...</a>). Others think that lowering taxes at whatever cost is better. The former fits with my thinking, which is why I like it here.</text></item><item><author>jackhack</author><text>For many, this won&#x27;t even begin to offset the increase in income and property taxes from this notoriously high-tax state. Individual or business, you&#x27;re likely to pay more.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;money.cnn.com&#x2F;gallery&#x2F;smallbusiness&#x2F;2012&#x2F;10&#x2F;15&#x2F;state-taxes&#x2F;4.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;money.cnn.com&#x2F;gallery&#x2F;smallbusiness&#x2F;2012&#x2F;10&#x2F;15&#x2F;state-...</a><p>&gt;&gt;The income tax has a top rate of 8.95%. This ranks as the sixth-highest in the U.S., although it only applies to taxpayers making over $413,350 per year. Meanwhile, total state and local sales taxes range from 6% to 7%.<p>&gt;&gt;There are five income brackets. The highest marginal rate is 8.95% on any income over $388,350. That&#x27;s on top of federal income taxes.<p>&gt;&gt;Businesses pay an effective property tax rate of 5.27%, the third highest in the country.<p>&gt;&gt;At 6%, sales taxes are also on the high side. Meanwhile, those businesses that pay corporate taxes get hit with an 8.5% rate for any profit made above $25,000.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dahdum</author><text>It depends heavily on how the money is spent, Illinois spends half the education budget on funding pensions alone [1].<p>89% of all education budget increases went straight to pension funding, with only 11% to the classroom. They already spend far more than other midwest states, with outcomes that lag behind Montana, Minnesota, and other frugal states.<p>So while I agree that education spending is critical to our future, money alone is not the magic wand.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.illinoispolicy.org&#x2F;reports&#x2F;pensions-vs-schools&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.illinoispolicy.org&#x2F;reports&#x2F;pensions-vs-schools&#x2F;</a></text></comment> |
37,884,236 | 37,884,287 | 1 | 3 | 37,881,767 | train | <story><title>Germany's terrible trains are no joke for a nation built on efficiency</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/oct/14/its-the-same-daily-misery-germanys-terrible-trains-are-no-joke-for-a-nation-built-on-efficiency</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>saiya-jin</author><text>It boggles my mind how such an efficiency powerhouse can be that bad.<p>I live in Switzerland and although I am not involved in trains, what Swiss do aint magic, just simple following the rules, and rules they do. Maybe even less efficient than Germans at the end.<p>I really dont see any difference with Germany on the ground, yet when I look at Germany&#x27;s politicians and their actions, at least the public part leaves a lot to be desired. Rather then the question becomes how come this country is actually economically so successful? Certainly not due to perfect environment for private businessess.</text></item><item><author>christkv</author><text>Start looking at public infrastructure works in Germany and you’ll a series of massive cost overruns and hugely delayed delivery times. Airport in Berlin is a classic.</text></item><item><author>sschueller</author><text>They should be embarrassed because Switzerland assumed the Italian part would be the one not finished on time and even helped a bit financially on that side to make sure it gets done. No one ever thought the Germans were incapable of getting it done. They are still buying land! Meanwhile Switzerland dug the longest train tunnel in the world. Italy is completely done as well and cargo imports are now shifting to the south instead of through the north.</text></item><item><author>bradley13</author><text>There are many international routes where the same train continues from Germany into Switzerland, and then possibly into other countries. Germany has gotten so unreliable that Switzerland is stopping this practice on some routes, because late German trains have a knock-on effect throughout the system.<p>So now, the German trains stop at the first Swiss station, when they finally arrive, and people gave to switch trains.<p>Germany is also years behind on their commitment to getting cargo on trains. Switzerland built a rail tunnel especially for trans-European traffic, but Germany is apparently incapable of getting cargo onto trains.<p>It ought to be mortally embarrassing for the supposed industrial powerhouse of Europe. But that&#x27;s OK, they are building more autobahn.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sschueller</author><text>Germany has privatized a lot of infrastructure and what happens is as expected. The only way to make money is to cut corners, unlike a state which gets that &quot;value&quot; back in its economy growing due to go infrastructure, private industry can&#x27;t make profit that way.<p>The profit in infrastructure is economic growth and optimizations of people&#x27;s mobility. This can only be done by a state. A state can still mess it up but it is the only entity that can do it.<p>Good luck getting a &quot;Taktfahrplan&quot; working if you have to rely on private rail companies optimizing for every last dollar and having the locomotives catch fire blocking lines for hours. When the Fung Wah Bus breaks down for the 10th time on the way to NY it doesn&#x27;t block all traffic but with rail you don&#x27;t have the luxury to drive around it.<p>The extensive damage in the Swiss Gotthard Base Tunnel was caused by a bad wheel from a foreign rail company that cut costs to a point of running rail cars with wheels that have way too many km on them.</text></comment> | <story><title>Germany's terrible trains are no joke for a nation built on efficiency</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/oct/14/its-the-same-daily-misery-germanys-terrible-trains-are-no-joke-for-a-nation-built-on-efficiency</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>saiya-jin</author><text>It boggles my mind how such an efficiency powerhouse can be that bad.<p>I live in Switzerland and although I am not involved in trains, what Swiss do aint magic, just simple following the rules, and rules they do. Maybe even less efficient than Germans at the end.<p>I really dont see any difference with Germany on the ground, yet when I look at Germany&#x27;s politicians and their actions, at least the public part leaves a lot to be desired. Rather then the question becomes how come this country is actually economically so successful? Certainly not due to perfect environment for private businessess.</text></item><item><author>christkv</author><text>Start looking at public infrastructure works in Germany and you’ll a series of massive cost overruns and hugely delayed delivery times. Airport in Berlin is a classic.</text></item><item><author>sschueller</author><text>They should be embarrassed because Switzerland assumed the Italian part would be the one not finished on time and even helped a bit financially on that side to make sure it gets done. No one ever thought the Germans were incapable of getting it done. They are still buying land! Meanwhile Switzerland dug the longest train tunnel in the world. Italy is completely done as well and cargo imports are now shifting to the south instead of through the north.</text></item><item><author>bradley13</author><text>There are many international routes where the same train continues from Germany into Switzerland, and then possibly into other countries. Germany has gotten so unreliable that Switzerland is stopping this practice on some routes, because late German trains have a knock-on effect throughout the system.<p>So now, the German trains stop at the first Swiss station, when they finally arrive, and people gave to switch trains.<p>Germany is also years behind on their commitment to getting cargo on trains. Switzerland built a rail tunnel especially for trans-European traffic, but Germany is apparently incapable of getting cargo onto trains.<p>It ought to be mortally embarrassing for the supposed industrial powerhouse of Europe. But that&#x27;s OK, they are building more autobahn.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>stratom</author><text>Germany is simply investing to little.
Last year Switzerland invested more than 3 times the amount per person (413€) in rail infrastructure compared to Germany(124€).
And the years before Germans spent even less. They increased the budget already by 40% from 2021 to 2022.</text></comment> |
24,249,768 | 24,248,996 | 1 | 3 | 24,245,909 | train | <story><title>Jeff Bezos convinced 22 investors to back his new company Amazon in 1994 (2018)</title><url>https://www.scmp.com/news/world/united-states-canada/article/2143375/1994-he-convinced-22-family-and-friends-each-pay</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>PaulDavisThe1st</author><text>Robert Spector documented a lot of the earliest stuff in
his book &quot;Get Big Fast&quot; (he even managed to speak to quite a few of the actual people involved).<p>One of the problems with properly documenting the first year or so is that the people involved mostly don&#x27;t want to talk about it, or want to turn it into the stuff of legend.<p>The one person who was there for the full first 5 years besides Jeff (and Mackenzie, to whatever extent she was deeply involved, which I never sensed was a lot, but I may be wrong about that) doesn&#x27;t like talking about Amazon publicly (though he did a little for a recent PBS documentary). Lots of other people came and went during that time (including me), and we&#x27;re all a bit like the blind folk feeling out the elephant: we know part of the story, but not the full picture.<p>Jeff himself doesn&#x27;t seem very interested in talking about the early period, or if he does, it seems important to him that the story describes a trajectory that obviously connects with what was to come (which is not entirely unfair).<p>The people who stayed for the long haul generally don&#x27;t want to talk, it seems; the people who left mostly have not-so-positive stories to tell at this point (partly because of the behemoth that the company has become).<p>Personally, I think that Amazon&#x27;s complete failure to take the high road in creating the model of retail in the 21st century is the more important story than details from the early days. The appalling treatment of employees, the conflicts between operating a marketplace and being a seller within that marketplace, and the general emphasis on our lives as consumers instead of the more important roles of citizen and employee .... this is what&#x27;s really important about the Amazon story in my opinion.<p>Oh wait, it&#x27;s HN. You want to hear about how I pushed and pulled C++ objects to and from Oracle in 1994, and how integrated that into NSAPI, amirite? :)</text></item><item><author>simonebrunozzi</author><text>Seconded. Please. Share as much as you can.</text></item><item><author>WalterBright</author><text>&gt; I was the 2nd employee at the company<p>I encourage you to write down everything you remember of your experience there. You don&#x27;t have to publish it, but future historians will surely find it very interesting.<p>People are always eager for anecdotes about the early days of Apple and Microsoft, but surprisingly there&#x27;s very little about Amazon.</text></item><item><author>PaulDavisThe1st</author><text>I persuaded my (then) in-laws not to invest in Amazon at this stage (I was the 2nd employee at the company). They would have certainly put in $50k or so. Fortunately, they are lovely Quaker people and as far as I know have never held a grudge against me because of this (incorrect) advice.<p>There are some inaccuracies in this article, too. Most of the investment window described here actually took place in 1995 - Jeff had enough cash to see things through the end of 1994. He and Mackenzie did not live in a 1 bedroom apartment that they &quot;rented when they moved to the city&quot; - they rented a house in Bellevue and the already-converted garage was the first Amazon office. They may well have moved to 1 room apartment later, as it became clear that the company would definitely be in Seattle itself.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>simonebrunozzi</author><text>&gt; Oh wait, it&#x27;s HN. You want to hear about how I pushed and pulled C++ objects to and from Oracle in 1994, and how integrated that into NSAPI, amirite? :)<p>No. In fact, everything you shared is really interesting.<p>By the way, I was at AWS from 2008 to 2014, I started when the team was about 150 people or so. It&#x27;s now in the ballpark of 50k I think, or even north of that.<p>It&#x27;s interesting how the &quot;beginnings&quot; of a business that eventually gets big are always &quot;adapted&quot; to current times.</text></comment> | <story><title>Jeff Bezos convinced 22 investors to back his new company Amazon in 1994 (2018)</title><url>https://www.scmp.com/news/world/united-states-canada/article/2143375/1994-he-convinced-22-family-and-friends-each-pay</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>PaulDavisThe1st</author><text>Robert Spector documented a lot of the earliest stuff in
his book &quot;Get Big Fast&quot; (he even managed to speak to quite a few of the actual people involved).<p>One of the problems with properly documenting the first year or so is that the people involved mostly don&#x27;t want to talk about it, or want to turn it into the stuff of legend.<p>The one person who was there for the full first 5 years besides Jeff (and Mackenzie, to whatever extent she was deeply involved, which I never sensed was a lot, but I may be wrong about that) doesn&#x27;t like talking about Amazon publicly (though he did a little for a recent PBS documentary). Lots of other people came and went during that time (including me), and we&#x27;re all a bit like the blind folk feeling out the elephant: we know part of the story, but not the full picture.<p>Jeff himself doesn&#x27;t seem very interested in talking about the early period, or if he does, it seems important to him that the story describes a trajectory that obviously connects with what was to come (which is not entirely unfair).<p>The people who stayed for the long haul generally don&#x27;t want to talk, it seems; the people who left mostly have not-so-positive stories to tell at this point (partly because of the behemoth that the company has become).<p>Personally, I think that Amazon&#x27;s complete failure to take the high road in creating the model of retail in the 21st century is the more important story than details from the early days. The appalling treatment of employees, the conflicts between operating a marketplace and being a seller within that marketplace, and the general emphasis on our lives as consumers instead of the more important roles of citizen and employee .... this is what&#x27;s really important about the Amazon story in my opinion.<p>Oh wait, it&#x27;s HN. You want to hear about how I pushed and pulled C++ objects to and from Oracle in 1994, and how integrated that into NSAPI, amirite? :)</text></item><item><author>simonebrunozzi</author><text>Seconded. Please. Share as much as you can.</text></item><item><author>WalterBright</author><text>&gt; I was the 2nd employee at the company<p>I encourage you to write down everything you remember of your experience there. You don&#x27;t have to publish it, but future historians will surely find it very interesting.<p>People are always eager for anecdotes about the early days of Apple and Microsoft, but surprisingly there&#x27;s very little about Amazon.</text></item><item><author>PaulDavisThe1st</author><text>I persuaded my (then) in-laws not to invest in Amazon at this stage (I was the 2nd employee at the company). They would have certainly put in $50k or so. Fortunately, they are lovely Quaker people and as far as I know have never held a grudge against me because of this (incorrect) advice.<p>There are some inaccuracies in this article, too. Most of the investment window described here actually took place in 1995 - Jeff had enough cash to see things through the end of 1994. He and Mackenzie did not live in a 1 bedroom apartment that they &quot;rented when they moved to the city&quot; - they rented a house in Bellevue and the already-converted garage was the first Amazon office. They may well have moved to 1 room apartment later, as it became clear that the company would definitely be in Seattle itself.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>henvic</author><text>Would you have any advice to share for someone working on building an online store &#x2F; e-commerce system for small businesses (not a marketplace, one a store could conceivable pay as a SaaS solution or deploy themselves with no strings attached - not even through licensing)?</text></comment> |
14,827,020 | 14,826,987 | 1 | 2 | 14,825,536 | train | <story><title>How economists rode maths to become our era’s astrologers</title><url>https://aeon.co/essays/how-economists-rode-maths-to-become-our-era-s-astrologers</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>throwaway7645</author><text>Not sure if that quotation inspires much confidence. Economics has math behind it. Subjects like Sociology have none of the rigor of math and are thus a large waste of time.</text></item><item><author>MatthiasP</author><text>&quot;To put it bluntly, the discipline of economics has yet to get over its childish passion for mathematics and for purely theoretical and often highly ideological speculation, at the expense of historical research and collaboration with the other social sciences. Economists are all too often preoccupied with petty mathematical problems of interest only to themselves. This obsession with mathematics is an easy way of acquiring the appearance of scientificity without having to answer the far more complex questions posed by the world we live in.&quot;<p>Piketty T. &quot;Capital in the 21st century&quot;, p. 36.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>olavk</author><text>This is exactly the fallacy he is addressing. Math = rigor, so clearly the discipline which uses the most math is the most rigorous, right? But actually math is only useful when it is based on a useful model of reality. If the underlying assumptions are unfounded or faulty, then math does not help you at all.</text></comment> | <story><title>How economists rode maths to become our era’s astrologers</title><url>https://aeon.co/essays/how-economists-rode-maths-to-become-our-era-s-astrologers</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>throwaway7645</author><text>Not sure if that quotation inspires much confidence. Economics has math behind it. Subjects like Sociology have none of the rigor of math and are thus a large waste of time.</text></item><item><author>MatthiasP</author><text>&quot;To put it bluntly, the discipline of economics has yet to get over its childish passion for mathematics and for purely theoretical and often highly ideological speculation, at the expense of historical research and collaboration with the other social sciences. Economists are all too often preoccupied with petty mathematical problems of interest only to themselves. This obsession with mathematics is an easy way of acquiring the appearance of scientificity without having to answer the far more complex questions posed by the world we live in.&quot;<p>Piketty T. &quot;Capital in the 21st century&quot;, p. 36.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jbooth</author><text>The takeaway is that the math used in econ obscures the truth while lending a fake gravitas to pure opinion.<p>At least sociology is honest that they&#x27;re going pure opinion.</text></comment> |
29,138,336 | 29,137,613 | 1 | 3 | 29,136,820 | train | <story><title>Stop Making Students Use Eclipse (2020)</title><url>https://nora.codes/post/stop-making-students-use-eclipse/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kelnos</author><text>Completely disagree.<p>&gt; <i>full teams can and have built huge java projects just by using the intellij project wizard and maybe a tiny bit of Gradle from stack overflow.</i><p>I would not ever want to work with anyone from those types of teams. They are the kind of programmers who have a very narrow range of abilities, and whenever they see a problem outside those abilities, they get completely lost.<p>&gt; <i>But this is stuff that should come in later classes, particularly for students who are interested in those details. Not everyone needs to know it.</i><p>Yes, they do. They absolutely do. There seems to be this mindset that&#x27;s starting to infect software development that pushes the idea that people can be good at programming computers without actually knowing anything about how those computers work. I just do not understand how anyone could seriously believe that. My experience over the past 20+ years tells me that people who avoid learning about these topics are generally just not good at their jobs, or at best can do a decent job of things, but then completely freeze when they encounter something outside of their narrow comfort zone.<p>&gt; <i>In fact my experience is that some colleges have the exact opposite problem: they teach students old tools and techniques</i><p>That&#x27;s lame, but has nothing to do with the point you&#x27;re trying to make.</text></item><item><author>armchairhacker</author><text>I don’t agree with this perspective: why do entry-level students have to understand the internals behind compiling their code, and weird edge-cases like misspelling import? In my experience this is actually the stuff that hinders learning and confuses students.<p>The author claims that students won’t be able to do real-world programming without learning this esoteric stuff, but actually this is the exact stuff they don’t need to know: full teams can and have built huge java projects just by using the intellij project wizard and maybe a tiny bit of Gradle from stack overflow. Actually students can solve most of the author’s problems by spending 5 seconds on Stack Overflow.<p>I’m not saying that these more esoteric details are completely useless. Learning e.g. the difference between char and UTF8 “character” is actually pretty important so that emoji inputs don’t crash your website. But this is stuff that should come in later classes, particularly for students who are interested in those details. Not everyone needs to know it.<p>In fact my experience is that some colleges have the exact opposite problem: they teach students old tools and techniques which are tedious and not actually used much later on. Like writing code by hand and deducting points for syntax errors, or using some outdated framework e.g. jQuery. When I saw the title my first thought was literally “yeah stop making students use eclipse, they should be using IntelliJ!”</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>simonh</author><text>You only like to work with experienced engineers, who are already experienced with the specific tooling you use on your projects fine.<p>Students by definition are not experienced engineers. They’re in a given class to learn the topic for that class, and hopefully that class with be a challenging program of learning. In CS often the fact they’re even working in Java is incidental, they’re not even there to learn Java, but generalisable CS concepts.<p>I’ve got no problem teaching students practical software engineering skills, sure, that can be very valuable. It should be on a course on that topic though.</text></comment> | <story><title>Stop Making Students Use Eclipse (2020)</title><url>https://nora.codes/post/stop-making-students-use-eclipse/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kelnos</author><text>Completely disagree.<p>&gt; <i>full teams can and have built huge java projects just by using the intellij project wizard and maybe a tiny bit of Gradle from stack overflow.</i><p>I would not ever want to work with anyone from those types of teams. They are the kind of programmers who have a very narrow range of abilities, and whenever they see a problem outside those abilities, they get completely lost.<p>&gt; <i>But this is stuff that should come in later classes, particularly for students who are interested in those details. Not everyone needs to know it.</i><p>Yes, they do. They absolutely do. There seems to be this mindset that&#x27;s starting to infect software development that pushes the idea that people can be good at programming computers without actually knowing anything about how those computers work. I just do not understand how anyone could seriously believe that. My experience over the past 20+ years tells me that people who avoid learning about these topics are generally just not good at their jobs, or at best can do a decent job of things, but then completely freeze when they encounter something outside of their narrow comfort zone.<p>&gt; <i>In fact my experience is that some colleges have the exact opposite problem: they teach students old tools and techniques</i><p>That&#x27;s lame, but has nothing to do with the point you&#x27;re trying to make.</text></item><item><author>armchairhacker</author><text>I don’t agree with this perspective: why do entry-level students have to understand the internals behind compiling their code, and weird edge-cases like misspelling import? In my experience this is actually the stuff that hinders learning and confuses students.<p>The author claims that students won’t be able to do real-world programming without learning this esoteric stuff, but actually this is the exact stuff they don’t need to know: full teams can and have built huge java projects just by using the intellij project wizard and maybe a tiny bit of Gradle from stack overflow. Actually students can solve most of the author’s problems by spending 5 seconds on Stack Overflow.<p>I’m not saying that these more esoteric details are completely useless. Learning e.g. the difference between char and UTF8 “character” is actually pretty important so that emoji inputs don’t crash your website. But this is stuff that should come in later classes, particularly for students who are interested in those details. Not everyone needs to know it.<p>In fact my experience is that some colleges have the exact opposite problem: they teach students old tools and techniques which are tedious and not actually used much later on. Like writing code by hand and deducting points for syntax errors, or using some outdated framework e.g. jQuery. When I saw the title my first thought was literally “yeah stop making students use eclipse, they should be using IntelliJ!”</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>brtkdotse</author><text>&gt; They are the kind of programmers who have a very narrow range of abilities, and whenever they see a problem outside those abilities, they get completely lost.<p>The vast, VAST majority of programming is of the type OP described. It ugly and has warts, but is good enough to deliver business value. I’ve seen it first hand.<p>The truth is that developers working on projects like that outnumber everyone else probably 10-1. See <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hanselman.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;dark-matter-developers-the-unseen-99" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hanselman.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;dark-matter-developers-the-un...</a></text></comment> |
36,859,491 | 36,857,967 | 1 | 2 | 36,857,506 | train | <story><title>Parents, environmentalists to Google: stop Chromebooks from expiring this summer</title><url>https://pirg.org/edfund/resources/chromebook-expiration-full-letter/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>zokier</author><text>To be completely clear, I think this sort of short expiry for devices is bullshit. BUT<p>But, it was completely predictable thing, the schools knew perfectly well that they would expire. Saying that the expiry &quot;jeopardizes students’ educations&quot; is straight out dishonest when its just poor planning that is jeopardizing anything. This feels bit like people buying disposable cameras and then complaining that they can&#x27;t change film on them. Yes, the expiry on Chromebooks is bit more arbitrary. But nevertheless it was something that would have been very clear if they did basic due diligence when purchasing the devices.</text></comment> | <story><title>Parents, environmentalists to Google: stop Chromebooks from expiring this summer</title><url>https://pirg.org/edfund/resources/chromebook-expiration-full-letter/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>rtpg</author><text>It would be a very big win for goodwill if Google built out a team that took over as much of this as possible. Just have a bunch of this hardware and try to keep these machines up to date.<p>The biggest problem from the outside feels like people working at Google might not be super hype about this (no I&#x27;m not talking about the &quot;new project to get promoted&quot; treadmill, just vibes), and really there&#x27;s probably external people who are up to this.<p>But seriously, just figuring out how to get these to run &quot;forever&quot; in whatever degraded capacity is possible. At least until the hardware itself starts falling apart of course.</text></comment> |
36,298,782 | 36,298,619 | 1 | 3 | 36,297,477 | train | <story><title>A developer's view of Vision Pro</title><url>https://www.david-smith.org/blog/2023/06/12/new-post/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Dudester230602</author><text><i>&gt; ...doing work in headsets...</i><p>Is it possible to use Vision Pro to build and publish a Vision Pro app?<p>Because it seems to be another Apple device separating producers and consumers just like iPad and iPhone.</text></item><item><author>ladberg</author><text>&gt; In short, my brain has crossed a Rubicon and now feels like experiences constrained to small, rectangular screens are lesser experiences.<p>I left Apple 1.5 years ago but was working on the Vision Pro while I was there. I have spend many hours working in the headset and I know exactly the feeling he&#x27;s describing! Leaving felt like going back in time to using clunky technology and I&#x27;ve been waiting for outside world to catch up (and will still be waiting until it comes out at least).<p>For the past week I&#x27;ve been trying to explain to people how certain I am that doing work in headsets will become mainstream but am (understandably) met with doubt, and I think you&#x27;d need to try it on to fully understand.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bamfly</author><text>&gt; Because it seems to be another Apple device separating producers and consumers just like iPad and iPhone.<p>The persistent framing of i-devices this way on HN, after all these years, is baffling to me. Tons of creation happens on them, or using them as a tool in service of creation, much of which would be harder or impossible with traditional computer. Just not a lot of software creation.</text></comment> | <story><title>A developer's view of Vision Pro</title><url>https://www.david-smith.org/blog/2023/06/12/new-post/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Dudester230602</author><text><i>&gt; ...doing work in headsets...</i><p>Is it possible to use Vision Pro to build and publish a Vision Pro app?<p>Because it seems to be another Apple device separating producers and consumers just like iPad and iPhone.</text></item><item><author>ladberg</author><text>&gt; In short, my brain has crossed a Rubicon and now feels like experiences constrained to small, rectangular screens are lesser experiences.<p>I left Apple 1.5 years ago but was working on the Vision Pro while I was there. I have spend many hours working in the headset and I know exactly the feeling he&#x27;s describing! Leaving felt like going back in time to using clunky technology and I&#x27;ve been waiting for outside world to catch up (and will still be waiting until it comes out at least).<p>For the past week I&#x27;ve been trying to explain to people how certain I am that doing work in headsets will become mainstream but am (understandably) met with doubt, and I think you&#x27;d need to try it on to fully understand.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jayd16</author><text>If you count streaming a Mac running xcode, then yes.</text></comment> |
40,235,136 | 40,234,532 | 1 | 2 | 40,201,865 | train | <story><title>A smooth and sharp image interpolation you probably haven't heard of</title><url>https://wordsandbuttons.online/a_smooth_and_sharp_image_interpolation.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>GrantMoyer</author><text>With k = 1&#x2F;x, the inverse weight interpolation is equivalent to bilinear. Perhaps it&#x27;s better to show the result for k = 1&#x2F;x^2.<p>Neat aside, k = 1&#x2F;x^∞ seems to be equivalent to nearest neighbor. (please excuse the abuse of notation)</text></comment> | <story><title>A smooth and sharp image interpolation you probably haven't heard of</title><url>https://wordsandbuttons.online/a_smooth_and_sharp_image_interpolation.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ImHereToVote</author><text>Why aren&#x27;t the results of different interpolation methods shown in the website?</text></comment> |
9,117,652 | 9,117,580 | 1 | 2 | 9,113,976 | train | <story><title>FCC Passes Strict Net Neutrality Regulations on 3-2 Vote</title><url>http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/26/fcc-passes-strict-net-neutrality-regulations-on-3-2-vote/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mehwoot</author><text><i>I think at least part of it is because the people on HN enjoy solving problems so much.</i><p>Or we&#x27;re all cynical assholes. Just possibly.</text></item><item><author>ertdfgcb</author><text>I think at least part of it is because the people on HN enjoy solving problems so much. When there&#x27;s a post that says &quot;we solved this problem&quot;, a lot of people here (me included) think &quot;great, what&#x27;s the next problem to solve&quot;. The focus is on &quot;the next problem to solve&quot; more than the &quot;great&quot;, sometimes to the degree that the &quot;great&quot; is completely ignored. I don&#x27;t think this is necessarily a <i>bad</i> thing, but it can get grating. It reminds me a lot of a part of the essay &quot;How to ask questions the smart way&quot;[0] by Eric Raymond:<p>&gt; Much of what looks like rudeness in hacker circles is not intended to give offence. Rather, it&#x27;s the product of the direct, cut-through-the-bullshit communications style that is natural to people who are more concerned about solving problems than making others feel warm and fuzzy<p>It&#x27;s not quite the same, but it comes from the same cut-through-the-bullshit attitude.<p>[0]: <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.catb.org&#x2F;~esr&#x2F;faqs&#x2F;smart-questions.html</a></text></item><item><author>ChrisAntaki</author><text>There does seem to be a bias towards overly worded critical comments.</text></item><item><author>bobbles</author><text>The headline could say that world hunger was cured but the top comment on HN would still be something like &quot;yes, but X people are still dying in car crashes every year&quot;</text></item><item><author>grecy</author><text>There are two problems, and the FCC has solved one of them perfectly.<p>Problem 1: ISPs trying to charge to (de)prioritize packets.<p>Problem 2: The two biggest ISPs suck, and should be broken up, and&#x2F;or it should be mandated that competition is much easier.<p>Would you be happy if they solved problem 2 without solving problem 1?<p>Leave problem 2 for another day, and celebrate that problem 1 has been dealt with.</text></item><item><author>xnull2guest</author><text>Unfortunately the Net Neutrality &#x27;debate&#x27; was another lose-lose situation for the United States. What we wanted wasn&#x27;t for the big telecom duopoly to be forced to either run their business as a tiered service or as a regulated utility. What we wanted was for the US Government to exercise its Anti-Trust capabilities and bust the universally hated Comcast and Time Warner into a bunch of small companies, and set &quot;Goldilocks&quot; regulation so that it&#x27;s easy for small and new ISPs to compete on both price and service. Additional laws preventing corporations from discriminating by content, protocol, or customer may also have been nice, but would have been that extra nice something.<p>Are Comcast and Time Warner going to be somehow less shitty now? Are they going to monitor our communications less? Are they going to provide better prices and better customer service? Are they going to cease fraudulently charging customers? No.<p>Of the two options the FCC chose the better one. But it&#x27;s America&#x27;s fatal flaw that all problems have two political solutions, neither of which address real issues or people&#x27;s needs.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Thimothy</author><text>I&#x27;d rather &quot;Idealistic Perfectionist&quot;, thank you.</text></comment> | <story><title>FCC Passes Strict Net Neutrality Regulations on 3-2 Vote</title><url>http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/26/fcc-passes-strict-net-neutrality-regulations-on-3-2-vote/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mehwoot</author><text><i>I think at least part of it is because the people on HN enjoy solving problems so much.</i><p>Or we&#x27;re all cynical assholes. Just possibly.</text></item><item><author>ertdfgcb</author><text>I think at least part of it is because the people on HN enjoy solving problems so much. When there&#x27;s a post that says &quot;we solved this problem&quot;, a lot of people here (me included) think &quot;great, what&#x27;s the next problem to solve&quot;. The focus is on &quot;the next problem to solve&quot; more than the &quot;great&quot;, sometimes to the degree that the &quot;great&quot; is completely ignored. I don&#x27;t think this is necessarily a <i>bad</i> thing, but it can get grating. It reminds me a lot of a part of the essay &quot;How to ask questions the smart way&quot;[0] by Eric Raymond:<p>&gt; Much of what looks like rudeness in hacker circles is not intended to give offence. Rather, it&#x27;s the product of the direct, cut-through-the-bullshit communications style that is natural to people who are more concerned about solving problems than making others feel warm and fuzzy<p>It&#x27;s not quite the same, but it comes from the same cut-through-the-bullshit attitude.<p>[0]: <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.catb.org&#x2F;~esr&#x2F;faqs&#x2F;smart-questions.html</a></text></item><item><author>ChrisAntaki</author><text>There does seem to be a bias towards overly worded critical comments.</text></item><item><author>bobbles</author><text>The headline could say that world hunger was cured but the top comment on HN would still be something like &quot;yes, but X people are still dying in car crashes every year&quot;</text></item><item><author>grecy</author><text>There are two problems, and the FCC has solved one of them perfectly.<p>Problem 1: ISPs trying to charge to (de)prioritize packets.<p>Problem 2: The two biggest ISPs suck, and should be broken up, and&#x2F;or it should be mandated that competition is much easier.<p>Would you be happy if they solved problem 2 without solving problem 1?<p>Leave problem 2 for another day, and celebrate that problem 1 has been dealt with.</text></item><item><author>xnull2guest</author><text>Unfortunately the Net Neutrality &#x27;debate&#x27; was another lose-lose situation for the United States. What we wanted wasn&#x27;t for the big telecom duopoly to be forced to either run their business as a tiered service or as a regulated utility. What we wanted was for the US Government to exercise its Anti-Trust capabilities and bust the universally hated Comcast and Time Warner into a bunch of small companies, and set &quot;Goldilocks&quot; regulation so that it&#x27;s easy for small and new ISPs to compete on both price and service. Additional laws preventing corporations from discriminating by content, protocol, or customer may also have been nice, but would have been that extra nice something.<p>Are Comcast and Time Warner going to be somehow less shitty now? Are they going to monitor our communications less? Are they going to provide better prices and better customer service? Are they going to cease fraudulently charging customers? No.<p>Of the two options the FCC chose the better one. But it&#x27;s America&#x27;s fatal flaw that all problems have two political solutions, neither of which address real issues or people&#x27;s needs.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>asdkl234890</author><text>I think it&#x27;s because we are pedantic. In a pedantic way no more world hunger, but people still die in car crashes, is correct. Pedantically correct.</text></comment> |
7,438,450 | 7,438,108 | 1 | 3 | 7,437,940 | train | <story><title>Larry Page: I’d Rather Leave My Billions to Elon Musk Than to Charity</title><url>http://www.slate.com/blogs/business_insider/2014/03/20/google_ceo_larry_page_elon_musk_would_get_my_inheritance_over_charity.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jobu</author><text>The stated reason for going to Mars is to create a backup population for humanity. If a major asteroid impacts earth (or any other Extinction Level Event) then potentially every human will be as dead as those killed by Polio.</text></item><item><author>outside1234</author><text>Frankly, I&#x27;d rather he leave it to Bill Gates.<p>Going to Mars may be sexy, but stomping out Polio makes millions of lives better.<p>Its hard to realize that, I suppose, when your life is in the bubble of a limo. That&#x27;s honestly what makes Bill Gates second act so amazing.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>glimcat</author><text>Okay, putting on my astronomer hat:<p>The asteroid was the root cause of the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event. The direct cause was ecological collapse.<p>To oversimplify things a bit, the impact event kicked up enough pollution to undercut the food chain by starving out anything that relied on photosynthesis, which starved out the herbivores, which starved out the carnivores and omnivores.<p>Typical asteroids are not large enough to wipe out all human life in one go. A large impact could kill billions between direct fatalities and follow-on deaths via starvation and plagues, but your survivor population would still easily exceed anything we can sustainably place on Mars (or any other extraterrestrial location) within the next few hundred years.<p>Even if it completely refactored modern civilization, you&#x27;d probably see some population capable of organizing and recovering a sustainable society. And that is <i>with</i> mass starvation, <i>with</i> plagues due to loss of sanitation infrastructure, <i>with</i> conventional farming being disrupted for years, and <i>with</i> the assumption that some idiot decides it&#x27;s time for a preemptive nuclear war.<p>Furthermore, any sustainable Martian colony you could produce could equally well be isolated in a hardened bunker on Earth, if surviving a large asteroid impact were the only concern.<p>To wipe out all humanity with one impact, you would need to hit the Earth with something in a slightly larger class - say, the Moon.</text></comment> | <story><title>Larry Page: I’d Rather Leave My Billions to Elon Musk Than to Charity</title><url>http://www.slate.com/blogs/business_insider/2014/03/20/google_ceo_larry_page_elon_musk_would_get_my_inheritance_over_charity.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jobu</author><text>The stated reason for going to Mars is to create a backup population for humanity. If a major asteroid impacts earth (or any other Extinction Level Event) then potentially every human will be as dead as those killed by Polio.</text></item><item><author>outside1234</author><text>Frankly, I&#x27;d rather he leave it to Bill Gates.<p>Going to Mars may be sexy, but stomping out Polio makes millions of lives better.<p>Its hard to realize that, I suppose, when your life is in the bubble of a limo. That&#x27;s honestly what makes Bill Gates second act so amazing.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>outside1234</author><text>I think what rubs me the wrong way about this is giving it to a for-profit enterprise.<p>If Elon is willing to step down and run a non-profit to get to Mars, I&#x27;m all for it. But I suspect he isn&#x27;t willing to do that. This is about profit - which isn&#x27;t bad - but its not charity and therefore is very unlikely in the end to help the bottom 10%.</text></comment> |
23,597,710 | 23,596,674 | 1 | 2 | 23,593,872 | train | <story><title>Video Games Are the Future of Education</title><url>https://nabeelqu.co/education</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mcv</author><text>&gt; <i>&quot;Like Minecraft, Age of Empires, Sim City or Kerbal Space Program. But noone would see them or describe them as &quot;educational&quot; games.&quot;</i><p>And that&#x27;s the problem. Because they are educational. And because they are both educational and fun, people are much more engaged to learn from them than from &quot;real&quot; educational games.<p>People who play Europe Universalis learn way more about early modern history than they ever learned at school. As Randal Munroe pointed out, you learn way more about orbital mechanics from KSP.<p>If you want to make truly educational games, you shouldn&#x27;t focus on the educational part, but take the educational part and wrap it in tons of fun.<p>Of course there are topics where this is going to be hard. I have absolutely no idea how anyone could make a fun game that revolves around German grammar. (Or do I? The best way to learn a language always seems to be to actually use it with a native speaker. Having a friend who speaks the language you&#x27;re trying to learn would be a great way to do that. There might be something here.)<p>But something like geology could be part of a simulation where you need to find certain resources, and that&#x27;s easier once you understand how those resources are formed. And then there needs to be something fun to do with those resources, of course.</text></item><item><author>shafyy</author><text>We also tried to make educational games and came to a similar conclusion. The truth is, kids (or adults) don&#x27;t want to play &quot;educational&quot; games. They just want to play fun games.<p>And, let&#x27;s be honest, games that try to teach you math or science are just not as fun as Fortnite or Minecraft.<p>Now, you can make the case that some games are educational by mistake. Like Minecraft, Age of Empires, Sim City or Kerbal Space Program. But noone would see them or describe them as &quot;educational&quot; games.<p>So, what we&#x27;re trying to make now are creative games. In my opinion, creativity is extremley important and there are fun ways to be creative, that are not eductional in the strict sense. For example, Lego comes to mind.</text></item><item><author>speeder</author><text>I own a educational game company.<p>Long story short: it doesn&#x27;t sell.<p>At my company we identified, at least if your target is kids, two ways to sell edu games.<p>1. Sell them to institutions, like governments, schools, companies, whatever. Thing is, the features they look when choosing a game to buy, are ones most likely to make the game unfun, the end result is often boring stuff noone WANTS to play.<p>2. Sell them to the public directly, but word of mouth here is often poor, specially if your age range is narrow, for example if your target is kids between 4 and 8, the kids will play the game, love it, but parents won&#x27;t tell other parents to buy it, most of their friends probably WON&#x27;T have kids the same age.<p>Thus if you are going for fun games, you need path 2, and to do path 2 you need a ton of exposure that is NOT word of mouth, we found out this means or you have massive marketing budget, or you have some kind of connection to media so they advertise you cheaper.<p>Our biggest competitors all ended being media companies themselves, for example Disney is an obvious one, but another was Toca-Boca, at first they looked like a tiny indie studio, but somehow they ALWAYS get featured in multiple magazines, store front pages and so on, eventually I found out they were created by a multi-billion media empire named Bonnier,<p>Since then I found that is easier to get money from creating other things, since I don&#x27;t have the necessary media connections.<p>Well, even NORMAL games often need media connectios (for example, Jon Blow was a journalist before he made Braid, Nintendo literally printed their own magazine for a while, the indie clique that existed around TIGSource was heavily tied to CMPMedia, many of them being presenters in events, or being friends of their employees, or working for them directly, the whole thing is very &quot;incestuous&quot;).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>shafyy</author><text>&gt; If you want to make truly educational games, you shouldn&#x27;t focus on the educational part, but take the educational part and wrap it in tons of fun.<p>That&#x27;s the problem. I think if you define &quot;educational&quot; as the curriculum taught in school, this is not possible. There&#x27;s no way around working a ton of math problems to get better at math. You maybe can make it a bit more engaging if you pack it in a video game, but it will never be fun for most people.<p>Therefore, I think, the educational role of video games must be to spark interest. For example, KSP sparks interest in aerospace engineering, and I bet there&#x27;s a significant number of people who went on to study rocketry because they played KSP.<p>Sparking interest is an important function. In fact, I think it becomes increasingly important as a lot of material and courses are now available for little money ubiquitously. Great education starts with a spark of interest.<p>Let me explain in more detail:<p>Back in the days, an important part of going to school was having access to knowledge. Now, thanks to the internet and millions of amazing humans, knowledge is accessible all over the place, virtually for no money.
Today, the <i>motivation</i> to learn something is therefore more important. To get motivated, first you need to know that something exists, and second you need to know if you like it or not. Before motivation comes sparking interest. And here, video games have an extremely important role to play - and unlike &quot;educational&quot; video games that are math exercises disguised as video games, video games that can try to achieve the spark can be genuinely fun to play.</text></comment> | <story><title>Video Games Are the Future of Education</title><url>https://nabeelqu.co/education</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mcv</author><text>&gt; <i>&quot;Like Minecraft, Age of Empires, Sim City or Kerbal Space Program. But noone would see them or describe them as &quot;educational&quot; games.&quot;</i><p>And that&#x27;s the problem. Because they are educational. And because they are both educational and fun, people are much more engaged to learn from them than from &quot;real&quot; educational games.<p>People who play Europe Universalis learn way more about early modern history than they ever learned at school. As Randal Munroe pointed out, you learn way more about orbital mechanics from KSP.<p>If you want to make truly educational games, you shouldn&#x27;t focus on the educational part, but take the educational part and wrap it in tons of fun.<p>Of course there are topics where this is going to be hard. I have absolutely no idea how anyone could make a fun game that revolves around German grammar. (Or do I? The best way to learn a language always seems to be to actually use it with a native speaker. Having a friend who speaks the language you&#x27;re trying to learn would be a great way to do that. There might be something here.)<p>But something like geology could be part of a simulation where you need to find certain resources, and that&#x27;s easier once you understand how those resources are formed. And then there needs to be something fun to do with those resources, of course.</text></item><item><author>shafyy</author><text>We also tried to make educational games and came to a similar conclusion. The truth is, kids (or adults) don&#x27;t want to play &quot;educational&quot; games. They just want to play fun games.<p>And, let&#x27;s be honest, games that try to teach you math or science are just not as fun as Fortnite or Minecraft.<p>Now, you can make the case that some games are educational by mistake. Like Minecraft, Age of Empires, Sim City or Kerbal Space Program. But noone would see them or describe them as &quot;educational&quot; games.<p>So, what we&#x27;re trying to make now are creative games. In my opinion, creativity is extremley important and there are fun ways to be creative, that are not eductional in the strict sense. For example, Lego comes to mind.</text></item><item><author>speeder</author><text>I own a educational game company.<p>Long story short: it doesn&#x27;t sell.<p>At my company we identified, at least if your target is kids, two ways to sell edu games.<p>1. Sell them to institutions, like governments, schools, companies, whatever. Thing is, the features they look when choosing a game to buy, are ones most likely to make the game unfun, the end result is often boring stuff noone WANTS to play.<p>2. Sell them to the public directly, but word of mouth here is often poor, specially if your age range is narrow, for example if your target is kids between 4 and 8, the kids will play the game, love it, but parents won&#x27;t tell other parents to buy it, most of their friends probably WON&#x27;T have kids the same age.<p>Thus if you are going for fun games, you need path 2, and to do path 2 you need a ton of exposure that is NOT word of mouth, we found out this means or you have massive marketing budget, or you have some kind of connection to media so they advertise you cheaper.<p>Our biggest competitors all ended being media companies themselves, for example Disney is an obvious one, but another was Toca-Boca, at first they looked like a tiny indie studio, but somehow they ALWAYS get featured in multiple magazines, store front pages and so on, eventually I found out they were created by a multi-billion media empire named Bonnier,<p>Since then I found that is easier to get money from creating other things, since I don&#x27;t have the necessary media connections.<p>Well, even NORMAL games often need media connectios (for example, Jon Blow was a journalist before he made Braid, Nintendo literally printed their own magazine for a while, the indie clique that existed around TIGSource was heavily tied to CMPMedia, many of them being presenters in events, or being friends of their employees, or working for them directly, the whole thing is very &quot;incestuous&quot;).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>eru</author><text>Geology is a big part of Dwarf Fortress. They take their different stone types very serious.<p>About &#x27;German Grammar&#x27;: check out Heaven&#x27;s Vault <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Heaven%27s_Vault" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Heaven%27s_Vault</a><p>But honestly, humans don&#x27;t learn languages by understand their grammars with the logic part of their brain. Games would be ideal to produce comprehensible input, and test players on their comprehension via actions, instead of making them reply with words.<p>There&#x27;s some evidence that trying to produce language to early in your learning just ingrains bad habits. So instead you can just follow increasingly complex instructions to show that you understand. See <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Input_hypothesis" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Input_hypothesis</a></text></comment> |
31,166,100 | 31,164,557 | 1 | 3 | 31,152,385 | train | <story><title>Beginners Guide to 0day/CVE AppSec Research</title><url>https://0xboku.com/2021/09/14/0dayappsecBeginnerGuide.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>spydum</author><text>Makes no attempt to contact the software maintainer, just weaponize the vuln for street cred, and spam the vuln everywhere for resume padding. I&#x27;m fine with vulnerability research, but come on, at least give the creators an opportunity to fix their issues.</text></comment> | <story><title>Beginners Guide to 0day/CVE AppSec Research</title><url>https://0xboku.com/2021/09/14/0dayappsecBeginnerGuide.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mikeodds</author><text>Trying to get intentionally slightly broken exploits running was the early 00’s version of CodeAcademy</text></comment> |
12,601,268 | 12,601,436 | 1 | 2 | 12,600,413 | train | <story><title>How to Crash Systemd in One Command</title><url>https://www.agwa.name/blog/post/how_to_crash_systemd_in_one_tweet</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>korethr</author><text>&gt; I hold no animus towards the systemd project&#x27;s goals or aspirations, but I have yet to hear a compelling reason for systemd to be shipping in it&#x27;s current state.<p>I am, in a way, reminded reminded of PulseAudio. I kept PA of my desktop and laptop for years, having heard about PA being a complex nightmare to configure and make work that caused audio to break. Eventually, there was an application I needed to use that had a hard dependency on PA, so I bit the bullet and installed it. And everything magically Just Worked. My only complaint at the moment is that the pactl command seems more fiddly and verbose than it might need to be.<p>A closer look at the complaints about PA showed that many of them were older. This gives me the impression that PA <i>was</i> in fact a steaming pile that broke audio at one point, but eventually matured into something functional and useful.<p>And I think this is where systemd is at present: perhaps a good idea, but its implementation is not yet production ready, and should not be the default on production systems. And the project&#x27;s continued scope creep is working against it in that regard.</text></item><item><author>namecast</author><text>I strongly disagree. I didn&#x27;t need anyone to &quot;show up&quot; to replace my init system in production across several thousand servers, and the way systemd &quot;won&quot; that battle wrt Debian was, to be polite, controversial, political and extremely divisive. They sure as heck didn&#x27;t win because &quot;they showed up and no one else did&quot;. They showed up and RedHat&#x27;s money showed up with them.<p>I hold no animus towards the systemd project&#x27;s goals or aspirations, but I have yet to hear a compelling reason for systemd to be <i>shipping</i> in it&#x27;s current state.</text></item><item><author>justin_vanw</author><text>It seems like it is quite fashionable to hate on systemd, and it seems like systemd is kindof a piece of crap - in some ways.<p>However, linux is missing basic functionality other os&#x27;s offer, and systemd is showing up and trying to fill in those blanks. This is open source, if you don&#x27;t like systemd, if you think it&#x27;s crap, if you think there are obviously better ways to do it, well, what are you waiting for then?<p>Systemd is winning because they showed up and basically nobody else did. It&#x27;s open source fork it and &#x27;do it right&#x27;. Or point out the problems and hope that someone else will step up instead?<p>I think the world would better place if people spent less time griping and more time fighting to get their patch that fixes the problems merged. I guess coding is harder than writing blog posts though.<p>EDIT: I&#x27;m not saying systemd is perfect or even good. My point is that the people writing the code are going to have the final say, whether it&#x27;s right or wrong, and it is unlikely that people writing blog posts lampooning it are really going to make a difference. I mean systemd has been despised and highly criticized from the beginning, and look where we are.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Twirrim</author><text>PulseAudio took <i>ages</i> to get to a stable and reliable state. There are still warts (try and make your machine act as a bluetooth audio receiver. It&#x27;s horribly ugly.)<p>systemd wasn&#x27;t reliable or fit for purpose for <i>servers</i> when it got shoehorned in to everything.<p>When it comes to production servers you need stable and reliable. Not new and shiny. You&#x27;re ideally rarely having anything happen on the server other than &quot;run this software&quot;</text></comment> | <story><title>How to Crash Systemd in One Command</title><url>https://www.agwa.name/blog/post/how_to_crash_systemd_in_one_tweet</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>korethr</author><text>&gt; I hold no animus towards the systemd project&#x27;s goals or aspirations, but I have yet to hear a compelling reason for systemd to be shipping in it&#x27;s current state.<p>I am, in a way, reminded reminded of PulseAudio. I kept PA of my desktop and laptop for years, having heard about PA being a complex nightmare to configure and make work that caused audio to break. Eventually, there was an application I needed to use that had a hard dependency on PA, so I bit the bullet and installed it. And everything magically Just Worked. My only complaint at the moment is that the pactl command seems more fiddly and verbose than it might need to be.<p>A closer look at the complaints about PA showed that many of them were older. This gives me the impression that PA <i>was</i> in fact a steaming pile that broke audio at one point, but eventually matured into something functional and useful.<p>And I think this is where systemd is at present: perhaps a good idea, but its implementation is not yet production ready, and should not be the default on production systems. And the project&#x27;s continued scope creep is working against it in that regard.</text></item><item><author>namecast</author><text>I strongly disagree. I didn&#x27;t need anyone to &quot;show up&quot; to replace my init system in production across several thousand servers, and the way systemd &quot;won&quot; that battle wrt Debian was, to be polite, controversial, political and extremely divisive. They sure as heck didn&#x27;t win because &quot;they showed up and no one else did&quot;. They showed up and RedHat&#x27;s money showed up with them.<p>I hold no animus towards the systemd project&#x27;s goals or aspirations, but I have yet to hear a compelling reason for systemd to be <i>shipping</i> in it&#x27;s current state.</text></item><item><author>justin_vanw</author><text>It seems like it is quite fashionable to hate on systemd, and it seems like systemd is kindof a piece of crap - in some ways.<p>However, linux is missing basic functionality other os&#x27;s offer, and systemd is showing up and trying to fill in those blanks. This is open source, if you don&#x27;t like systemd, if you think it&#x27;s crap, if you think there are obviously better ways to do it, well, what are you waiting for then?<p>Systemd is winning because they showed up and basically nobody else did. It&#x27;s open source fork it and &#x27;do it right&#x27;. Or point out the problems and hope that someone else will step up instead?<p>I think the world would better place if people spent less time griping and more time fighting to get their patch that fixes the problems merged. I guess coding is harder than writing blog posts though.<p>EDIT: I&#x27;m not saying systemd is perfect or even good. My point is that the people writing the code are going to have the final say, whether it&#x27;s right or wrong, and it is unlikely that people writing blog posts lampooning it are really going to make a difference. I mean systemd has been despised and highly criticized from the beginning, and look where we are.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>digi_owl</author><text>Best i can tell, Poettering cooked up PA back when ALSAs dmix was something you manually enabled on cheap soundchips.<p>Frankly i think it would have gone nowhere if Canonical didn&#x27;t decide they needed to copy Windows&#x27; &quot;one volume slider pr program&quot; thingy that was introduced in Windows 7 or there about.<p>Note btw that these days Poettering is no longer involved with PA development.<p>BTW, the main goal of systemd seems to be to create a single baseline for desktop Linux in code rather than spec.<p>It is a &quot;continuation&quot; of the -kit mentality that spawned within Freedesktop (or frankly within Fedora, at it seems said distro is basically the Petrie dish for anything under the Freedesktop umbrella).</text></comment> |
13,324,362 | 13,322,234 | 1 | 2 | 13,321,322 | train | <story><title>Renewing Medium’s focus</title><url>https://blog.medium.com/renewing-mediums-focus-98f374a960be</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>matt4077</author><text>It&#x27;s disheartening to learn that advertisement apparently isn&#x27;t even profitable (enough) for a platform that doesn&#x27;t even pay for its content.<p>Just let it sink in what that means for journalism. If the economics of the internet come to be all-encompassing, there will be no revenue model to support any professional publications.<p>There&#x27;s obviously no shortage of hate for &quot;mainstream media&quot; right now, so probably many people can&#x27;t await the demise of that industry. I&#x27;m just wondering which blogger we&#x27;ll send to cover Ebola in Guinea-Bissau and which twitterer will file &amp; finance 14 FOIA lawsuits[0]. But maybe democracy works just as well without people digging into &quot;Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court documents&quot;.<p>[0]: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.charliesavage.com&#x2F;?page_id=303" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.charliesavage.com&#x2F;?page_id=303</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hkmurakami</author><text>&gt;Just let it sink in what that means for journalism. If the economics of the internet come to be all-encompassing, there will be no revenue model to support any professional publications.<p>Even at the Washington Post (profitable now), what drove growth was their opinion pieces (which they&#x27;re doubling down on). And opinion pieces, while having their own merit, is rarely <i>journalism</i>. It makes me sad.</text></comment> | <story><title>Renewing Medium’s focus</title><url>https://blog.medium.com/renewing-mediums-focus-98f374a960be</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>matt4077</author><text>It&#x27;s disheartening to learn that advertisement apparently isn&#x27;t even profitable (enough) for a platform that doesn&#x27;t even pay for its content.<p>Just let it sink in what that means for journalism. If the economics of the internet come to be all-encompassing, there will be no revenue model to support any professional publications.<p>There&#x27;s obviously no shortage of hate for &quot;mainstream media&quot; right now, so probably many people can&#x27;t await the demise of that industry. I&#x27;m just wondering which blogger we&#x27;ll send to cover Ebola in Guinea-Bissau and which twitterer will file &amp; finance 14 FOIA lawsuits[0]. But maybe democracy works just as well without people digging into &quot;Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court documents&quot;.<p>[0]: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.charliesavage.com&#x2F;?page_id=303" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.charliesavage.com&#x2F;?page_id=303</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>FT_intern</author><text>I don&#x27;t think these difficulties of Medium can be generalized to the wider industry. The CEO&#x2F;founder Evan Williams is a billionaire who set out to create a good publishing platform for everyday Joes and Sues with little to no focus on monetization (as far as I can tell). Other text content based sites are more willing to sacrifice UX for higher ad revenue.</text></comment> |
15,878,065 | 15,877,578 | 1 | 3 | 15,875,627 | train | <story><title>Japan eyes startup visa program</title><url>https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics-Economy/Policy-Politics/Japan-eyes-startup-visa-program-to-lure-foreign-businesses</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ThrustVectoring</author><text>wait, as a non-citizen of Japan you are allowed to sponsor yourself for a work visa? That sounds, uhh, strange.</text></item><item><author>patio11</author><text><i>You can&#x27;t start a side business on a regular work visa.</i><p>You know YC&#x27;s question &quot;How have you ever hacked a non-technical system?&quot; This is my answer to it. You <i>can</i> start a side business on a regular work visa <i>if</i> the character of your business matches your status of residence <i>and</i> you don&#x27;t intensify the business to the point where it is undeniable that it is a <i>business</i> as opposed to employment, e.g. by hiring full-time employees.<p>So, for example, if you were an engineer, and you happened to run a software company on the side, you could convince the Ministry of Justice to accept the argument that you were employed as an engineer by the 個人事業 (sole proprietorship) of you, which (since you have an engineering status of residence) doesn&#x27;t require their pre-approval, and then (while establishing a record of e.g. tax paying and similar) bootstrap that into a renewal of your status of residence with yourself as the sponsor, and from there roll on to either a management&#x2F;investor status of residence or one of the other more stable options.<p>For totally-not-a-lawyer gloss on this I&#x27;m happy to chat with anyone; you can make reasonable assumptions as to why I am fairly confident that the MoJ can be convinced to allow this.</text></item><item><author>laurieg</author><text>Japan&#x27;s immigration system seems heavily set up to encourage young people to come, work and then leave.<p>This startup visa is good for getting a toe-hold on Japan but only targets people out of country. If you live in Japan already (so you might already speak the language and have helpful local knowledge) there aren&#x27;t any great paths to starting a business without permanent residency. You can&#x27;t start a side business on a regular work visa. If you change your visa to manage the business and the startup failed you are likely to be &quot;directed to return to your home country&quot;, losing all the residence time you have accrued so far.<p>I&#x27;ve been working as an engineer in Japanese startups for the past few years and I&#x27;m kept on 1 year visa renewals. On a one year visa you can never apply for permanent residency.<p>And on top of this, there is the 5 year &quot;technical trainee&quot; visa, which is a means of getting manual labor in the country temporarily without having to publicize it. All the people on this visa do not have university degrees so after their 5 years are up they must return home and have no chance of residence in Japan (outside of marriage).<p>Of course, Japan is free to set its own laws. If you look at them the message is clear: &quot;Japan wants your work and taxes, but it doesn&#x27;t want you&quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cgarrigue</author><text>A friend who is freelance translator sponsored herself when renewing her work visa (previously she was a colleague of mine and our company sponsored her at that time, but since becoming freelance she&#x27;s not employed by anybody but herself). She just had to produce proofs for each the recurrent contracts she&#x27;s got so she can show that she&#x27;s earning enough money. So yes, sponsoring yourself is possible, but it requires a lot of paperwork to prove you have the mean to live in the country.<p>I don&#x27;t know how much difficult it is start your own business in Japan, for this Patrick is clearly the most knowledgeable person here, but once it&#x27;s done, you just need to give yourself a salary to be able to renew your visa.</text></comment> | <story><title>Japan eyes startup visa program</title><url>https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics-Economy/Policy-Politics/Japan-eyes-startup-visa-program-to-lure-foreign-businesses</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ThrustVectoring</author><text>wait, as a non-citizen of Japan you are allowed to sponsor yourself for a work visa? That sounds, uhh, strange.</text></item><item><author>patio11</author><text><i>You can&#x27;t start a side business on a regular work visa.</i><p>You know YC&#x27;s question &quot;How have you ever hacked a non-technical system?&quot; This is my answer to it. You <i>can</i> start a side business on a regular work visa <i>if</i> the character of your business matches your status of residence <i>and</i> you don&#x27;t intensify the business to the point where it is undeniable that it is a <i>business</i> as opposed to employment, e.g. by hiring full-time employees.<p>So, for example, if you were an engineer, and you happened to run a software company on the side, you could convince the Ministry of Justice to accept the argument that you were employed as an engineer by the 個人事業 (sole proprietorship) of you, which (since you have an engineering status of residence) doesn&#x27;t require their pre-approval, and then (while establishing a record of e.g. tax paying and similar) bootstrap that into a renewal of your status of residence with yourself as the sponsor, and from there roll on to either a management&#x2F;investor status of residence or one of the other more stable options.<p>For totally-not-a-lawyer gloss on this I&#x27;m happy to chat with anyone; you can make reasonable assumptions as to why I am fairly confident that the MoJ can be convinced to allow this.</text></item><item><author>laurieg</author><text>Japan&#x27;s immigration system seems heavily set up to encourage young people to come, work and then leave.<p>This startup visa is good for getting a toe-hold on Japan but only targets people out of country. If you live in Japan already (so you might already speak the language and have helpful local knowledge) there aren&#x27;t any great paths to starting a business without permanent residency. You can&#x27;t start a side business on a regular work visa. If you change your visa to manage the business and the startup failed you are likely to be &quot;directed to return to your home country&quot;, losing all the residence time you have accrued so far.<p>I&#x27;ve been working as an engineer in Japanese startups for the past few years and I&#x27;m kept on 1 year visa renewals. On a one year visa you can never apply for permanent residency.<p>And on top of this, there is the 5 year &quot;technical trainee&quot; visa, which is a means of getting manual labor in the country temporarily without having to publicize it. All the people on this visa do not have university degrees so after their 5 years are up they must return home and have no chance of residence in Japan (outside of marriage).<p>Of course, Japan is free to set its own laws. If you look at them the message is clear: &quot;Japan wants your work and taxes, but it doesn&#x27;t want you&quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>coinme</author><text>This is possible in Singapore too. It’s technically the business that is sponsoring you.</text></comment> |
29,512,397 | 29,512,540 | 1 | 3 | 29,510,616 | train | <story><title>Inflation rises to 6.8% year over year</title><url>https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wonderwonder</author><text>Based on my anecdotal experience this seems to very much understate inflation.
How is housing up only 3.8%? This site says over 17% rent increase nationally over the last year: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apartmentlist.com&#x2F;research&#x2F;national-rent-data" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apartmentlist.com&#x2F;research&#x2F;national-rent-data</a> which seems to be more accurate. Anyone with a web browser knows that home prices have experienced a monumental increase.<p>Also a trip to the grocery store appears to cost me 50% more now for essentially the same goods. Every trip to the store pre-covid cost me around $100, now its $150. I do buy primarily proteins so that is the source of the increase but to ignore that seems ill advised.<p>Not generally a conspiracy theorist but unless the people that built this report are using some accepted formula that is very different than the real world this report seems to be intentionally underselling inflation.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>boc</author><text>The BLS has a very well-documented method [1] of measuring core consumer inflation. The basket of goods they track likely does not reflect your personal consumption patterns.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bls.gov&#x2F;opub&#x2F;hom&#x2F;cpi&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bls.gov&#x2F;opub&#x2F;hom&#x2F;cpi&#x2F;</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Inflation rises to 6.8% year over year</title><url>https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wonderwonder</author><text>Based on my anecdotal experience this seems to very much understate inflation.
How is housing up only 3.8%? This site says over 17% rent increase nationally over the last year: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apartmentlist.com&#x2F;research&#x2F;national-rent-data" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apartmentlist.com&#x2F;research&#x2F;national-rent-data</a> which seems to be more accurate. Anyone with a web browser knows that home prices have experienced a monumental increase.<p>Also a trip to the grocery store appears to cost me 50% more now for essentially the same goods. Every trip to the store pre-covid cost me around $100, now its $150. I do buy primarily proteins so that is the source of the increase but to ignore that seems ill advised.<p>Not generally a conspiracy theorist but unless the people that built this report are using some accepted formula that is very different than the real world this report seems to be intentionally underselling inflation.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jacobr1</author><text>I&#x27;m not sure if this is the case with these data sets, but one common difference that causes confusion are current advertised rates vs total inventory. It could both be true that apartments on the market cost 17% more, but all rents (including those not marketed or not renewing) are only up 3.8.<p>Another methodological difference might be mix of goods. For example, you probably can afford to pay 150&#x2F;grocery-visit, but someone else might have just cut their meat intake, or switch to cheaper cuts, or have otherwise substituted such that maybe they pay $120. If you measure by the visit, or gross store receipts then the numbers will seem lower than they would comparing the same exact goods.</text></comment> |
40,346,934 | 40,346,398 | 1 | 2 | 40,345,696 | train | <story><title>Show HN: An open source framework for voice assistants</title><url>https://github.com/pipecat-ai/pipecat</url><text>I&#x27;ve been obsessed for the past ~year with the possibilities of talking to LLMs. I built a bunch of one-off prototypes, shared code on X, started a Meetup group in SF, and co-hosted a big hackathon. It turns out that there are a few low-level problems that everybody building conversational&#x2F;real-time AI needs to solve on the way to building&#x2F;shipping something that works well: low-latency media transport, echo cancellation, voice activity detection, phrase endpointing, pipelining data between models&#x2F;services, handling voice interruptions, swapping out different models&#x2F;services.<p>On the theory that something like a LlamaIndex or LangChain for real-time&#x2F;conversational AI would be useful, a few of us started working on a Python library for voice (and multimodal) AI assistants&#x2F;agents.<p>So ... Pipecat: a framework for building things like personal coaches, meeting assistants, story-telling toys for kids, customer support bots, virtual friends, and snarky social bots.<p>Most of the core contributors to Pipecat so far work together at our day jobs. This has been a kind of &quot;20% time&quot; thing at our company. But we&#x27;re serious about welcoming all contributions. We want Pipecat to support any and all models, services, transport layers, and infrastructure tooling. If you&#x27;re interested in this stuff, please check it out and let us know what you think. Submit PRs. Become a maintainer. Join the Discord. Post cool stuff. Post funny stuff when your voice agent goes completely off the rails (as mine sometimes do).</text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>awenix</author><text>Nice to see an open source implementation, i have been seeing many startups get into this space like <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.retellai.com&#x2F;">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.retellai.com&#x2F;</a>, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fixie.ai&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fixie.ai&#x2F;</a> etc. They always end up needing speech-to-speech models (current approach seems speech-text-text-speech with multiple agents handling 1 listening + 1 speaking), excited to see how this plays with recently announced gpt-4o</text></comment> | <story><title>Show HN: An open source framework for voice assistants</title><url>https://github.com/pipecat-ai/pipecat</url><text>I&#x27;ve been obsessed for the past ~year with the possibilities of talking to LLMs. I built a bunch of one-off prototypes, shared code on X, started a Meetup group in SF, and co-hosted a big hackathon. It turns out that there are a few low-level problems that everybody building conversational&#x2F;real-time AI needs to solve on the way to building&#x2F;shipping something that works well: low-latency media transport, echo cancellation, voice activity detection, phrase endpointing, pipelining data between models&#x2F;services, handling voice interruptions, swapping out different models&#x2F;services.<p>On the theory that something like a LlamaIndex or LangChain for real-time&#x2F;conversational AI would be useful, a few of us started working on a Python library for voice (and multimodal) AI assistants&#x2F;agents.<p>So ... Pipecat: a framework for building things like personal coaches, meeting assistants, story-telling toys for kids, customer support bots, virtual friends, and snarky social bots.<p>Most of the core contributors to Pipecat so far work together at our day jobs. This has been a kind of &quot;20% time&quot; thing at our company. But we&#x27;re serious about welcoming all contributions. We want Pipecat to support any and all models, services, transport layers, and infrastructure tooling. If you&#x27;re interested in this stuff, please check it out and let us know what you think. Submit PRs. Become a maintainer. Join the Discord. Post cool stuff. Post funny stuff when your voice agent goes completely off the rails (as mine sometimes do).</text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ilaksh</author><text>This is great but we really need an audio-to-audio model like they demoed in the open source world. Does anyone know of anything like that?<p>Edit: someone found one: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=40346992">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=40346992</a></text></comment> |
40,613,099 | 40,613,198 | 1 | 2 | 40,612,321 | train | <story><title>Why are debut novels failing to launch?</title><url>https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a60924704/debut-fiction-challenges/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>boznz</author><text>Spent several years writing and editing my first book before thinking the job was finished when I hit the publish now button. But it is literally only half the job done.<p>The hell now is unless you get friends and family or an agency involved to push it and market it it will languish on the 500th page of any Amazon search forever. Oh and did I say that there are thousands of books a day released and there is nowhere you can self-promote stuff if you do not have social media, HN and reddit will also immediately block self-promotion even if relevant to the audience (I guess I can understand why). I guess the only ones destined to read it are the AI training algorithms.<p>Still it wont stop me writing, having a book published, even if nobody reads it is very self-satisfying and leaves something of you in this world when you are gone.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pavlov</author><text>Ten years ago I wrote a science fiction novel in Finnish, printed 300 hardcover copies at my own expense, and gave them away to people over the years. I would guess less than 10% of those copies have actually been read. (A few people claim they liked it, but of course that doesn&#x27;t necessarily mean they read it.)<p>So, a waste of time and money? That&#x27;s not how I feel about it at all. The creative process was illuminating. And as you say, it&#x27;s satisfying to think that there&#x27;s now a physical artifact of my mind that&#x27;s longer and deeper than any other work I&#x27;ve produced, and it will probably stay for a while on somebody&#x27;s bookshelf after I&#x27;m gone.</text></comment> | <story><title>Why are debut novels failing to launch?</title><url>https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a60924704/debut-fiction-challenges/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>boznz</author><text>Spent several years writing and editing my first book before thinking the job was finished when I hit the publish now button. But it is literally only half the job done.<p>The hell now is unless you get friends and family or an agency involved to push it and market it it will languish on the 500th page of any Amazon search forever. Oh and did I say that there are thousands of books a day released and there is nowhere you can self-promote stuff if you do not have social media, HN and reddit will also immediately block self-promotion even if relevant to the audience (I guess I can understand why). I guess the only ones destined to read it are the AI training algorithms.<p>Still it wont stop me writing, having a book published, even if nobody reads it is very self-satisfying and leaves something of you in this world when you are gone.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>devbent</author><text>&gt; HN and reddit will also immediately block self-promotion even if relevant to the audience (<p>HN doesn&#x27;t block self promotion if it comes up as part of a conversation, e.g. &quot;I&#x27;m having this technical problem.&quot; Re: &quot;I wrote a book about how to solve that!&quot;<p>Also you can at least put a link in your profile!<p>Reddit has tons of self promos all the time, it just depends on the subreddit. Also it helps if you&#x27;re a long time active member in a community.</text></comment> |
27,993,206 | 27,993,119 | 1 | 2 | 27,992,500 | train | <story><title>Duolingo reaches $6.5B valuation on day of IPO</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/technology/duolingo-valued-65-bln-shares-soar-debut-2021-07-28/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>poorjohnmacafee</author><text>Quick look at financials, they lost $25M in trailing 12 months, lost $14M in the previous year, lost $10M in the year before.<p>How is Duolingo supposed to become profitable?<p>How is a $6.5B valuation justified?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jonas21</author><text>1. So it looks like they lost $14M on revenue of $71M in 2019, and $16M on revenue of $162M in 2020. Revenue more than doubled YoY, which is impressive. Costs also grew (by a smaller percentage), but they&#x27;re presumably spending a lot to chase after the growth opportunity and can dial back later.<p>2. They had positive free cash flow of $14M in 2020, which may be a better metric to look at when assessing their financial health.</text></comment> | <story><title>Duolingo reaches $6.5B valuation on day of IPO</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/technology/duolingo-valued-65-bln-shares-soar-debut-2021-07-28/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>poorjohnmacafee</author><text>Quick look at financials, they lost $25M in trailing 12 months, lost $14M in the previous year, lost $10M in the year before.<p>How is Duolingo supposed to become profitable?<p>How is a $6.5B valuation justified?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>paxys</author><text>Why is this always the comment whenever any startup or IPO is discussed on this site? Every company at this stage loses money. It would be stupid to chase profits over user or revenue growth. They have 40 million monthly active users. Registrations grew 67% YoY. Their revenue doubled in a single quarter. Expenses are mostly stock comp. They have nearly $200M cash on hand. The numbers are all solid.</text></comment> |
2,421,682 | 2,421,601 | 1 | 3 | 2,420,325 | train | <story><title>Facebook open sources its servers and data centers</title><url>http://gigaom.com/cloud/facebook-open-sources-its-servers-and-data-centers/ </url></story><parent_chain><item><author>codex</author><text>This is a strategic attack on Google. A proliferation of scalable data centers hurts Google a lot more than Facebook by enabling Google's competitors. Cheap computation matters much more to search engines than social networking sites.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ssp</author><text>It could be. I always thought that an interesting way to compete with Google would be to index the web and then sell map/reduce access to that index.</text></comment> | <story><title>Facebook open sources its servers and data centers</title><url>http://gigaom.com/cloud/facebook-open-sources-its-servers-and-data-centers/ </url></story><parent_chain><item><author>codex</author><text>This is a strategic attack on Google. A proliferation of scalable data centers hurts Google a lot more than Facebook by enabling Google's competitors. Cheap computation matters much more to search engines than social networking sites.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>diegob</author><text>A proliferation of scalable data centers could also enable the next generation of social networking sites ... I don't see why it's limited to helping Google's competitors and not Facebook's.</text></comment> |
30,452,526 | 30,452,249 | 1 | 3 | 30,451,110 | train | <story><title>Estonia, allies to trigger NATO Article 4</title><url>https://twitter.com/EstonianGovt/status/1496728085890273284</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>throwaway5752</author><text><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;valitsus.ee&#x2F;en&#x2F;news&#x2F;estonian-government-requests-consultations-under-article-4-nato-treaty" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;valitsus.ee&#x2F;en&#x2F;news&#x2F;estonian-government-requests-con...</a><p>People are minimizing this, based on the word &quot;consultation&quot;. Don&#x27;t be fooled, this is grave news, even though it is not Article 5. Article 5 invocation under these circumstances have substantial risk of full scale thermonuclear exchange.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vmception</author><text>Article 4 was done in 2014 too and it was hardly news while <i>again</i> in reaction to Ukraine which was experiencing its own civil war <i>against</i> a pro-Russian puppet leader that resulted in regime change aannnnnnd.... nothing else.<p>The military operation by Russia is alarming.<p>The Article 4 invocation is not.</text></comment> | <story><title>Estonia, allies to trigger NATO Article 4</title><url>https://twitter.com/EstonianGovt/status/1496728085890273284</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>throwaway5752</author><text><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;valitsus.ee&#x2F;en&#x2F;news&#x2F;estonian-government-requests-consultations-under-article-4-nato-treaty" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;valitsus.ee&#x2F;en&#x2F;news&#x2F;estonian-government-requests-con...</a><p>People are minimizing this, based on the word &quot;consultation&quot;. Don&#x27;t be fooled, this is grave news, even though it is not Article 5. Article 5 invocation under these circumstances have substantial risk of full scale thermonuclear exchange.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>awb</author><text>&gt; substantial risk of full scale thermonuclear exchange.<p>To what end?<p>If Russia wants more territory they presumably care about the future. Why conquer all this territory just to blow up the world? Sounds like a waste of time.<p>The scariest situation is one nuke. How do you respond? One nuke back or two? Then things escalate quickly.<p>But I don’t see either country launching their full nuke arsenal unprovoked with their homeland not under any immediate danger. That’s just a death wish. And at that point there’s no one left to brag to about how great your country is.</text></comment> |
8,029,007 | 8,028,669 | 1 | 2 | 8,028,620 | train | <story><title>Program Synthesis Demo</title><url>http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/sumitg/pubs/mobisys13.mp4</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>krilnon</author><text>The demo is neat, although the flashy, impressive part (NL-&gt;program) predates this particular piece of work. For example, Greg Little&#x27;s &quot;sloppy programming&quot; is from 2008-ish: <a href="http://groups.csail.mit.edu/uid/projects/keyword-commands/index.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;groups.csail.mit.edu&#x2F;uid&#x2F;projects&#x2F;keyword-commands&#x2F;in...</a><p>Le and Gulwani&#x27;s paper does cite Little, but the refutation is a bit weak.<p>&gt; Little and Miller propose a code completion tool that synthesizes the most likely Java expression in a code context from a set of keywords [23]. Smart-Synth is different, in that it synthesizes a complete script and does not require extra contextual information.<p>From the video, a &quot;complete script&quot; appears to be 1 or 2 simple expressions. And not requiring contextual information sounds like it can&#x27;t take advantage of contextual information.</text></comment> | <story><title>Program Synthesis Demo</title><url>http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/sumitg/pubs/mobisys13.mp4</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>opless</author><text>And a link to his homepage where you might find more work on program synthesis <a href="http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/sumitg/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;research.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;um&#x2F;people&#x2F;sumitg&#x2F;</a></text></comment> |
13,399,567 | 13,397,681 | 1 | 2 | 13,396,715 | train | <story><title>Seagate to Shut Down One of Its Largest HDD Assembly Plants</title><url>http://www.anandtech.com/show/11037/seagate-to-shut-down-one-of-its-largest-hdd-assembly-plants</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vidarh</author><text>It&#x27;s not that simple. How much do you pay to keep those HDDs powered per TB per year? How much does maintenance cost (replacing drives etc.)? How does the low IOPS of those drives affect your workload?<p>SSDs may not win in every area yet, but if you only look at purchase price, you&#x27;re not getting the right picture.</text></item><item><author>Taek</author><text>You can buy HDDs for $20 &#x2F; TB. There are companies with millions of TB. Unless SSDs can meet that price point, HDDs have a very comfortable place in society.</text></item><item><author>shiftpgdn</author><text>My day job is working as an HPC Sysadmin on a decent sized supercomputer with petabyte scale storage for a private consulting company. I spend a lot of time dealing with and thinking about storage and honestly I don&#x27;t think mechanical disks are long for this world.<p>For our next storage expansion it&#x27;s ALMOST worth ditching storage tiering and going to an all flash&#x2F;SSD configuration. There is so much hassle involved with mechanical disks relative to SSD. SSDs are by no means perfect but I don&#x27;t have a steady stream of SSDs being pulled out of production due to mechanical failures.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tw04</author><text>&gt; How much does maintenance cost (replacing drives etc.)?<p>The maintenance on enterprise storage is generally a percentage of purchase price. So it&#x27;s actually cheaper.<p>&gt;How much do you pay to keep those HDDs powered per TB per year?<p>4.5 watts idle&#x2F;8 watts max for a spinning drive vs. 4.5 watts idle&#x2F;11 watts max for a large capacity SSD (15TB Samsung). The power consumption thing was a much better story comparing 3.5&quot; 15k RPM drives. 7200 RPM drives it&#x27;s basically a wash unless you&#x27;re talking about relatively small capacity SSDs.<p>&gt;How does the low IOPS of those drives affect your workload?<p>That&#x27;s really the crux of the issue. <i>SPINNING</i> drives are not dead. <i>FAST</i> spinning drives are dead. 10k&#x2F;15k drives are going to see the end of their useful life in the modern datacenter far faster than anyone predicted 2 years ago. Outside of legacy systems I would expect sales of 10k RPM drives to fall off a cliff if not completely disappear before the end of 2020.</text></comment> | <story><title>Seagate to Shut Down One of Its Largest HDD Assembly Plants</title><url>http://www.anandtech.com/show/11037/seagate-to-shut-down-one-of-its-largest-hdd-assembly-plants</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vidarh</author><text>It&#x27;s not that simple. How much do you pay to keep those HDDs powered per TB per year? How much does maintenance cost (replacing drives etc.)? How does the low IOPS of those drives affect your workload?<p>SSDs may not win in every area yet, but if you only look at purchase price, you&#x27;re not getting the right picture.</text></item><item><author>Taek</author><text>You can buy HDDs for $20 &#x2F; TB. There are companies with millions of TB. Unless SSDs can meet that price point, HDDs have a very comfortable place in society.</text></item><item><author>shiftpgdn</author><text>My day job is working as an HPC Sysadmin on a decent sized supercomputer with petabyte scale storage for a private consulting company. I spend a lot of time dealing with and thinking about storage and honestly I don&#x27;t think mechanical disks are long for this world.<p>For our next storage expansion it&#x27;s ALMOST worth ditching storage tiering and going to an all flash&#x2F;SSD configuration. There is so much hassle involved with mechanical disks relative to SSD. SSDs are by no means perfect but I don&#x27;t have a steady stream of SSDs being pulled out of production due to mechanical failures.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ksec</author><text>Yes but when you are looking at Petabyte scale system, unless those data are Hot and IOPs are concerned, HDD still wins given it is 10x cheaper.<p>And NAND has already hit the curve where it isn&#x27;t going to get cheaper every year. NAND price is actually on the rise. Smaller Node is now actually more expensive, multiple layer are hard to yield.<p>So relatively speaking the 10x gap between HDD and SSD wont change in the next 5 years or so.</text></comment> |
18,817,884 | 18,818,133 | 1 | 2 | 18,816,385 | train | <story><title>One Year in San Francisco as a Software Engineer</title><url>https://evertpot.com/a-look-back-at-sf/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>komali2</author><text>&gt;But when you go home after work, also be prepared to see the dystopia that your industry has created as a by-product.<p>Has this actually been concluded? That it is the &quot;tech industry&#x27;s fault?&quot; Because I feel like I could fence off any claims as such by asking, &quot;well, why didn&#x27;t the government do anything about it?&quot;<p>Based on my experience in multiple major metropolitan areas, the &quot;tech industry&quot; here in SF seems to be the most engaged in &quot;doing something about it&quot; than anywhere else. Is it because the problem is bigger? Maybe they&#x27;re just better at marketing than the companies in other cities? Fair questions. Maybe.<p>I remember reading in the local papers when I lived in Mountain View that Google was going to assign some # of a new housing project they wanted to be low income housing - at my understanding, to be a total loss to them. They were going to build bridges, footpaths, and parks to &quot;offset&quot; the burden of the increased number of residents in Mountain View. I have seen similar from other companies.<p>In Houston, BP nuked the gulf of mexico and then fought <i>everyone</i> over how &quot;responsible&quot; they are for it. Chevron donated some fossils to the Museum of Natural Science. I dunno, I just feel like people are being unduly critical of the tech industry in SF, as if some homeless people poop on the streets because rich engineers ride buses paid for by google. Why isn&#x27;t there better public transit, so the buses aren&#x27;t necessary? Why block the proliferation of scooters and bicycles, so people are far more motivated to take Lyft or Uber? Why aren&#x27;t there more public, 24&#x2F;7 restrooms? And why isn&#x27;t the Oil industry taking more flack for turning Houston into a 75x75 mile square of choking freeways? Because poop is grosser? Grosser than runaway climate change? Poop happens in Houston, too.<p>I just feel like SF is a big giant target, the go-to punching bag, because Big Tech, and yet meanwhile Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Finance, Big Ag gets away with dramatically worse in cost and human suffering.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>abalone</author><text>See the Prop C campaign (e.g. Marc Benioff) for more insight in this issue. SF tech didn’t invent homelessness but it has clearly exacerbated it, simply by generating a lot of demand for housing.<p>In a nutshell, the tech industry generally tries to point the finger at lack of supply and blame NIMBYS for obstructing housing construction. But this can be seen as a defensive strategy: it’s pretty clear that a sudden, massive surge of high income earners into a constrained area in the top of a peninsula with weak tenant protections will push a lot of poorer people out of their housing.<p>It’s not only the fault of the city not to build housing fast enough. We’ve even seen “strange” effects in other boomtowns (Seattle) where building doesn’t solve the problem.[1]<p>It’s not that strange if you <i>truly</i> understand economics 101. It contains the concept of price inelasticity, which one might see under boomtown conditions (insatiable demand for a necessity, essentially). But to even engage in a real economics discussion kind of misses the point. Mostly the tech industry wants to deflect blame for the problem.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;knock-la.com&#x2F;seattle-a-cautionary-tale-for-supply-side-housing-advocates-5b4ca5ed6d02" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;knock-la.com&#x2F;seattle-a-cautionary-tale-for-supply-si...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>One Year in San Francisco as a Software Engineer</title><url>https://evertpot.com/a-look-back-at-sf/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>komali2</author><text>&gt;But when you go home after work, also be prepared to see the dystopia that your industry has created as a by-product.<p>Has this actually been concluded? That it is the &quot;tech industry&#x27;s fault?&quot; Because I feel like I could fence off any claims as such by asking, &quot;well, why didn&#x27;t the government do anything about it?&quot;<p>Based on my experience in multiple major metropolitan areas, the &quot;tech industry&quot; here in SF seems to be the most engaged in &quot;doing something about it&quot; than anywhere else. Is it because the problem is bigger? Maybe they&#x27;re just better at marketing than the companies in other cities? Fair questions. Maybe.<p>I remember reading in the local papers when I lived in Mountain View that Google was going to assign some # of a new housing project they wanted to be low income housing - at my understanding, to be a total loss to them. They were going to build bridges, footpaths, and parks to &quot;offset&quot; the burden of the increased number of residents in Mountain View. I have seen similar from other companies.<p>In Houston, BP nuked the gulf of mexico and then fought <i>everyone</i> over how &quot;responsible&quot; they are for it. Chevron donated some fossils to the Museum of Natural Science. I dunno, I just feel like people are being unduly critical of the tech industry in SF, as if some homeless people poop on the streets because rich engineers ride buses paid for by google. Why isn&#x27;t there better public transit, so the buses aren&#x27;t necessary? Why block the proliferation of scooters and bicycles, so people are far more motivated to take Lyft or Uber? Why aren&#x27;t there more public, 24&#x2F;7 restrooms? And why isn&#x27;t the Oil industry taking more flack for turning Houston into a 75x75 mile square of choking freeways? Because poop is grosser? Grosser than runaway climate change? Poop happens in Houston, too.<p>I just feel like SF is a big giant target, the go-to punching bag, because Big Tech, and yet meanwhile Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Finance, Big Ag gets away with dramatically worse in cost and human suffering.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Kalium</author><text>&gt; Has this actually been concluded? That it is the &quot;tech industry&#x27;s fault?&quot;<p>A lot of people believe it. The idea that this dystopia is the tech industry&#x27;s sole fault has common currency, especially in young-and-progressive circles.<p>Among other things, it means not really having to come to terms with decades of policy failure. It also means not having to examine how local government seems to keep failing, such as with public transit or public restrooms.<p>Tech is an <i>excellent</i> newcomer and outsider. This makes it collectively an ideal scapegoat. Which is not to say the tech industry is innocent! But it is to say the way blame is apportioned could be better aligned with reality.</text></comment> |
33,352,399 | 33,352,080 | 1 | 3 | 33,350,437 | train | <story><title>Galactic settlement of low-mass stars as a resolution to the Fermi paradox</title><url>https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.10656</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>roca</author><text>This seems like a bad assumption:<p>&gt; stars suitable for settlement should provide “environments nearly identical to that of the home planet.”<p>Seems pretty clear that we&#x27;re on a path to machine intelligence, and that interstellar voyages will be undertaken by those intelligences, not meatbags. That humans like a class G sun is irrelevant to the prospering of those intelligences.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>JohnJamesRambo</author><text>I’m not so sure about that. It’s a long way from a machine intelligence in your computer to one that is even as self sufficient as a cockroach with regard to not getting stuck on stuff in the real world, constantly having energy, able to repair itself in the physical world. I think people hand wave these things away and they are very huge hurdles. Even something as simple as a car can’t run a decade autonomously. We expect it to explore the stars, make robots that can remove circuit boards, troubleshoot, etc.?<p>Nothing around me keeps working without human interaction for even very small timescales.</text></comment> | <story><title>Galactic settlement of low-mass stars as a resolution to the Fermi paradox</title><url>https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.10656</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>roca</author><text>This seems like a bad assumption:<p>&gt; stars suitable for settlement should provide “environments nearly identical to that of the home planet.”<p>Seems pretty clear that we&#x27;re on a path to machine intelligence, and that interstellar voyages will be undertaken by those intelligences, not meatbags. That humans like a class G sun is irrelevant to the prospering of those intelligences.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Udo</author><text><i>&gt; That humans like a class G sun is irrelevant to the prospering of those intelligences.</i><p>It&#x27;s also worth noting that the types of star or planet available don&#x27;t matter much to meatbags either once they have learned to leave their homeworld. Orbital or even deep space habitats are much more efficient and easier to construct than livable planets. As long as there is a <i>reasonable</i> energy source nearby, you can have any environment you like in a spinning cylinder.<p><i>&gt; and that interstellar voyages will be undertaken by those intelligences</i><p>Probably, although I would much prefer if we humans became hybrids of some sort (maybe uploaded and virtualized, or extensively augmented) instead of just falling by the wayside. It would be sad if our only job in cosmic history turns out to be giving birth to the <i>real</i> main characters of the story.</text></comment> |
38,644,099 | 38,643,903 | 1 | 2 | 38,643,046 | train | <story><title>The AI Trust Crisis</title><url>https://simonwillison.net/2023/Dec/14/ai-trust-crisis/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>karaterobot</author><text>&gt; I took that screenshot on my own account. It’s toggled “on”—but I never turned it on myself.<p>There is a <i>consent</i> crisis as well, though I agree it&#x27;s a smaller issue related to trust. There needs to be an actionable, legal definition of consent as it applies to website privacy—my naive assumption is that there was, but clearly that&#x27;s not true, or it&#x27;s not good enough or actionable enough—and it needs to preclude implying users must positively grant consent to harvest, process, or transfer data to third parties, when in fact the dirty deeds have already been done in secret.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>thomastjeffery</author><text>There already is. There always has been! It&#x27;s called fraud.<p>If you trick someone into signing a contract, then that contract is fraudulent.<p>If you tell someone that you will ask their permission before doing something; then silently claim you already obtained that permission in a prior contract, <i>you are committing fraud</i>.<p>I don&#x27;t know when our judicial system lost all of its teeth, but you sure as hell can&#x27;t blame that on the citizens they are failing to defend.</text></comment> | <story><title>The AI Trust Crisis</title><url>https://simonwillison.net/2023/Dec/14/ai-trust-crisis/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>karaterobot</author><text>&gt; I took that screenshot on my own account. It’s toggled “on”—but I never turned it on myself.<p>There is a <i>consent</i> crisis as well, though I agree it&#x27;s a smaller issue related to trust. There needs to be an actionable, legal definition of consent as it applies to website privacy—my naive assumption is that there was, but clearly that&#x27;s not true, or it&#x27;s not good enough or actionable enough—and it needs to preclude implying users must positively grant consent to harvest, process, or transfer data to third parties, when in fact the dirty deeds have already been done in secret.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Log_out_</author><text>Whatever comes out of the courts will be just another anchor point to abuse civilian VS cooperate power asymmetry. What we need is the ability to revert laws back to the thrust bust new deal era laws, crush the bad influence and rebuild.</text></comment> |
2,061,079 | 2,061,173 | 1 | 3 | 2,060,931 | train | <story><title>What Could Have Been Entering the Public Domain on January 1, 2011?</title><url>http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/pre1976</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ajays</author><text>The current copyright law is a prime example of the impotence of the electorate in the face of the power of Big Money. It is in the public interest to have works move into the public domain, so that others can build upon them (I'll refrain from linking to the myriad talks by Lessig and others about how the current copyright system is broken).<p>And yet Hollywood keeps buying the legislators and perpetuates this broken system.</text></comment> | <story><title>What Could Have Been Entering the Public Domain on January 1, 2011?</title><url>http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/pre1976</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>praptak</author><text>The deal between copyright holders and society was changed retroactively in favor of the former. Why then should the latter uphold their end of the deal, i.e. not pirate?</text></comment> |
31,352,602 | 31,352,194 | 1 | 3 | 31,349,988 | train | <story><title>Tether starting to lose its peg too, after Terra did</title><url>https://community.intercoin.org/t/what-backs-a-currency-terra-luna-drops-nearly-100/2518</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jiggawatts</author><text>Statements like this <i>blow my mind</i>.<p>The entire point of Tether is that you can absolutely trust them with $100K, $1M, $10M, or <i>whatever</i>. It&#x27;s backed, it&#x27;s robust, it&#x27;s <i>tethered</i>, and they guarantee payout. The promise is essentially the AAA security of the crypto world, the equivalent to US Treasury bonds or whatever.<p>Meanwhile, the sentiment I keep hearing is yours: &quot;You&#x27;d have to be absolutely nuts to trust these guys!&quot;<p>Which is not only diametrically opposed to the picture Tether is trying to paint, but it&#x27;s saying that AAA is actually a CCC− and hence that there is <i>nothing</i> in the crypto world that&#x27;s above, oh, I dunno, B- or thereabouts.<p>But the entire <i>point</i> of Tether hinges on it being <i>perceived</i> as AAA.<p>Take for example the US dollar treasury bonds. Even countries and people <i>opposed</i> to the United States and everything it stands for agree that it is AAA. People that <i>hate</i> the US agree that the USD is a stable currency and their bonds are secure. Literal enemies, <i>legally at war</i> will prefer to use USD over their <i>own</i> currency for many transactions!<p>Meanwhile it&#x27;s hard to find <i>anyone</i> that hasn&#x27;t apparently drunk crypto Kool-Aid that thinks Tether is anything but a trash fire.<p>It&#x27;s just so bizarre...</text></item><item><author>rwmj</author><text>Apparently you have to bring a minimum of $100K of USDT to get it redeemed into real money.<p>I would say this is an incredibly stupid trade to try because you&#x27;re relying on Tether actually paying out as promised.</text></item><item><author>pjc50</author><text>&gt; redeem at Tether for $1<p>Is the redemption window really open? That&#x27;s something people have been extremely skeptical of.</text></item><item><author>sdgdfgsfdfgsdfg</author><text>The high buy volume at $0.98 is due to arbitrage. This is to be expected before the final crash.<p>People are using the opportunity to net an instant 2% return. Buy $10M USDT at $0.98, redeem at Tether for $1, take home $200K of profit instantly.<p>Thing is, this will only last until Tether runs out of liquidity. Then all bets are off.</text></item><item><author>Animats</author><text>Tether is back up to around $0.98, but volume is high. Somebody is pouring cash into Tether to support the price.<p>Similar over at UST. Price is back up to $0.60, but volume is far above normal.<p>Remember, with a stablecoin, <i>there is no upside to holding</i>. Any indication of risk means it&#x27;s time to get out. Even if Tether has enough reserves to get the price back to $1, there will be substantial cashing out.<p>That&#x27;s why a stablecoin has only two stable points: 1 and 0.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>abzolv</author><text>&gt; The entire point of Tether is that you can absolutely trust them with $100K, $1M, $10M, or whatever. It&#x27;s backed, it&#x27;s robust, it&#x27;s tethered, and they guarantee payout.<p>No, they don&#x27;t. This is what Tether says in its ToS at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tether.to&#x2F;en&#x2F;legal" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tether.to&#x2F;en&#x2F;legal</a> :<p>&quot;Tether reserves the right to delay the redemption or withdrawal of Tether Tokens if such delay is necessitated by the illiquidity or unavailability or loss of any Reserves held by Tether to back the Tether Tokens, and Tether reserves the right to redeem Tether Tokens by in-kind redemptions of securities and other assets held in the Reserves.&quot;<p>So, instead of redeeming your $1M in USD fiat, they can give you an equivalent amount of Dogecoin or Chinese commercial paper.<p>Furthermore, they say: &quot;In order to cause Tether Tokens to be issued or redeemed directly by Tether, you must be a verified customer of Tether.&quot; You are not a &quot;verified customer&quot; of Tether if you exchanged USD for USDT at Coinbase or Binance.</text></comment> | <story><title>Tether starting to lose its peg too, after Terra did</title><url>https://community.intercoin.org/t/what-backs-a-currency-terra-luna-drops-nearly-100/2518</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jiggawatts</author><text>Statements like this <i>blow my mind</i>.<p>The entire point of Tether is that you can absolutely trust them with $100K, $1M, $10M, or <i>whatever</i>. It&#x27;s backed, it&#x27;s robust, it&#x27;s <i>tethered</i>, and they guarantee payout. The promise is essentially the AAA security of the crypto world, the equivalent to US Treasury bonds or whatever.<p>Meanwhile, the sentiment I keep hearing is yours: &quot;You&#x27;d have to be absolutely nuts to trust these guys!&quot;<p>Which is not only diametrically opposed to the picture Tether is trying to paint, but it&#x27;s saying that AAA is actually a CCC− and hence that there is <i>nothing</i> in the crypto world that&#x27;s above, oh, I dunno, B- or thereabouts.<p>But the entire <i>point</i> of Tether hinges on it being <i>perceived</i> as AAA.<p>Take for example the US dollar treasury bonds. Even countries and people <i>opposed</i> to the United States and everything it stands for agree that it is AAA. People that <i>hate</i> the US agree that the USD is a stable currency and their bonds are secure. Literal enemies, <i>legally at war</i> will prefer to use USD over their <i>own</i> currency for many transactions!<p>Meanwhile it&#x27;s hard to find <i>anyone</i> that hasn&#x27;t apparently drunk crypto Kool-Aid that thinks Tether is anything but a trash fire.<p>It&#x27;s just so bizarre...</text></item><item><author>rwmj</author><text>Apparently you have to bring a minimum of $100K of USDT to get it redeemed into real money.<p>I would say this is an incredibly stupid trade to try because you&#x27;re relying on Tether actually paying out as promised.</text></item><item><author>pjc50</author><text>&gt; redeem at Tether for $1<p>Is the redemption window really open? That&#x27;s something people have been extremely skeptical of.</text></item><item><author>sdgdfgsfdfgsdfg</author><text>The high buy volume at $0.98 is due to arbitrage. This is to be expected before the final crash.<p>People are using the opportunity to net an instant 2% return. Buy $10M USDT at $0.98, redeem at Tether for $1, take home $200K of profit instantly.<p>Thing is, this will only last until Tether runs out of liquidity. Then all bets are off.</text></item><item><author>Animats</author><text>Tether is back up to around $0.98, but volume is high. Somebody is pouring cash into Tether to support the price.<p>Similar over at UST. Price is back up to $0.60, but volume is far above normal.<p>Remember, with a stablecoin, <i>there is no upside to holding</i>. Any indication of risk means it&#x27;s time to get out. Even if Tether has enough reserves to get the price back to $1, there will be substantial cashing out.<p>That&#x27;s why a stablecoin has only two stable points: 1 and 0.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vkou</author><text>&gt;
But the entire point of Tether hinges on it being perceived as AAA.<p>No, the entire point of Tether hinges on everyone pretending that it&#x27;s AAA, and just letting the Tether money printer lift all crypto boats.<p>Anyone paying attention knows its a fraud, but are happy to look the other way, because it&#x27;s the reason BTC is $30K, instead of $600 right now. Sure, they&#x27;ll lose whatever they have invested at the moment when the house of cards collapses, but if you can&#x27;t predict when the music will stop, the smart move <i>today</i> is to keep playing.</text></comment> |
25,361,236 | 25,360,828 | 1 | 2 | 25,358,111 | train | <story><title>EU countries team up for semiconductor push</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/article/eu-tech-semiconductor-idUSKBN28H1HV</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rossdavidh</author><text>So, as someone who used to be an engineer in semiconductor manufacturing facilities, this reminds me a lot of Sematech. That was a joint venture between American companies in the 90&#x27;s, when there was a concern that we were falling behind Japan. I&#x27;m sure there will be people who try to claim otherwise, but my view from inside AMD (at that time still doing its own manufacturing) was that nothing much ever came out of Sematech. It was a lot of hype, but not much result.<p>If, at the time of the founding of TSMC, you had tried to get a consortium of companies, much less nations, to agree on the idea of a semiconductor foundry, you would not have been able to get agreement to do it. Consortiums can help to pool resources when everyone knows what needs doing, but even Intel has had a problem getting the latest generation of semi manufacturing going, and their problem sure wasn&#x27;t a lack of resources. Sometimes the problem is the speed of innovation, and the more parties you have involved the harder it is to get agreement to try any given thing, especially if it is innovative (i.e. not certain to work).<p>I wish them good fortune, it would be good for the stability of the world economy not to have all the world&#x27;s advanced semiconductors made in one region, but I am skeptical of whether or not this can make a big difference, no matter how much money is spent.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mrtksn</author><text>Europe has some successful international projects like CERN or Airbus. Besides, what are the other options?<p>Europe is in this strange place where collectively account for enormous wealth and power but individually no country is a match to the big boys like USA&#x2F;China when simultaneously are super unoptimised due to cultural&#x2F;lingual differences.<p>The younger Europeans I met were all very eager to learn English, so who knows, maybe as the UK is out of the EU the English language can become the lingua franca with less resistance as it is no ones language(Well, there are the Irish but it&#x27;s a small country).<p>At the end of the day, those large Eurpoean projects bring a lot of good. Be it political or simply keeping some talent in Europe. I am also hopeful for some competition from the UK :) Since the collapse of the USSR, finally there&#x27;s a competition.</text></comment> | <story><title>EU countries team up for semiconductor push</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/article/eu-tech-semiconductor-idUSKBN28H1HV</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rossdavidh</author><text>So, as someone who used to be an engineer in semiconductor manufacturing facilities, this reminds me a lot of Sematech. That was a joint venture between American companies in the 90&#x27;s, when there was a concern that we were falling behind Japan. I&#x27;m sure there will be people who try to claim otherwise, but my view from inside AMD (at that time still doing its own manufacturing) was that nothing much ever came out of Sematech. It was a lot of hype, but not much result.<p>If, at the time of the founding of TSMC, you had tried to get a consortium of companies, much less nations, to agree on the idea of a semiconductor foundry, you would not have been able to get agreement to do it. Consortiums can help to pool resources when everyone knows what needs doing, but even Intel has had a problem getting the latest generation of semi manufacturing going, and their problem sure wasn&#x27;t a lack of resources. Sometimes the problem is the speed of innovation, and the more parties you have involved the harder it is to get agreement to try any given thing, especially if it is innovative (i.e. not certain to work).<p>I wish them good fortune, it would be good for the stability of the world economy not to have all the world&#x27;s advanced semiconductors made in one region, but I am skeptical of whether or not this can make a big difference, no matter how much money is spent.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>MangoCoffee</author><text>&gt;If, at the time of the founding of TSMC, you had tried to get a consortium of companies, much less nations, to agree on the idea of a semiconductor foundry, you would not have been able to get agreement to do it. Consortiums can help to pool resources when everyone knows what needs doing<p>TSMC or its ecosystem is already like a consortium.<p>this semiwiki article point that out.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;semiwiki.com&#x2F;semiconductor-manufacturers&#x2F;intel&#x2F;293645-how-intel-stumbled-a-perspective-from-the-trenches&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;semiwiki.com&#x2F;semiconductor-manufacturers&#x2F;intel&#x2F;29364...</a><p>&quot;TSMC, for example, has a massive ecosystem of partners and customers who together spend trillions of dollars on research and development for the greater good of the fabless semiconductor ecosystem. There is also an inner circle of partners and customers that TSMC intimately collaborates with on new process development and deployment. This includes Apple of course, AMD, Arm, Applied Materials, ASML, Cadence, and Synopsys just to name a few.&quot;<p>TSMC hand out their kit to their partners on their node process.<p>bottom line: fabless no longer just simply toss design over to the foundry.</text></comment> |
16,461,697 | 16,461,709 | 1 | 2 | 16,461,595 | train | <story><title>ASCIIToSVG: Convert ASCII Diagrams to Beautiful SVGs</title><url>https://github.com/dhobsd/asciitosvg#asciitosvg</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>lwansbrough</author><text>Really important tip for anyone that wants to show off something that has a visual output: show the output!</text></comment> | <story><title>ASCIIToSVG: Convert ASCII Diagrams to Beautiful SVGs</title><url>https://github.com/dhobsd/asciitosvg#asciitosvg</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>blitmap</author><text>This is also neat: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;casual-effects.com&#x2F;markdeep&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;casual-effects.com&#x2F;markdeep&#x2F;</a></text></comment> |
9,861,852 | 9,861,510 | 1 | 2 | 9,861,042 | train | <story><title>Why we maintain desktop apps for OS X, Windows, and a web application</title><url>https://medium.com/@collinmathilde/why-desktop-apps-are-making-a-comeback-5b4eb0427647</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>vbezhenar</author><text>What I don&#x27;t like is WebView distributed as a &quot;native app&quot;. It&#x27;s not native app and it&#x27;s not something I want to install, don&#x27;t cheat me. Webpages should stay in browser.<p>I expect native app to be written with Objective C (OS X&#x2F;iOS user here), having very low memory usage, fast startup and offline usage. Also I expect as much integration with the system, as possible, native controls (not that buggy emulation without my favorite emacs-like keybindings) and native behavior.<p>Probably we miss an important piece of technology: installable web-apps. Website opened in the frameless browser window, identifiable as a different application which could be easily pinned to Launchpad. With all advantages that &quot;separate webview&quot; has, but with some important difference: sandboxing. So I can feel safe when I launch this application, because I don&#x27;t need to trust all my files, passwords and system to another application. I&#x27;ve seen that kind of technology in the iOS: website bookmark could be pinned as a desktop icon, but it&#x27;s just a bookmark.</text></comment> | <story><title>Why we maintain desktop apps for OS X, Windows, and a web application</title><url>https://medium.com/@collinmathilde/why-desktop-apps-are-making-a-comeback-5b4eb0427647</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>saurik</author><text>&gt; At Front for example, people using the desktop app spend on average 34% more time on the app that those using the web version.<p>...maybe I&#x27;m crazy, but the primary metric I would evaluate a tool designed to increase business productivity is not how much time I spend using it, and in fact would normally be summarized as the exact opposite of this metric...</text></comment> |
15,577,116 | 15,577,170 | 1 | 2 | 15,576,751 | train | <story><title>Why Snapchat Spectacles failed</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/28/why-snapchat-spectacles-failed/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sssparkkk</author><text>So how about this: the influencers on Snapchat are all recording <i>themselves</i> most of the time. These glasses did nothing to help with that particular and most popular use case.<p>I feel really weird for being the first to bring this up, it seems pretty obvious to me the main reason these glasses weren&#x27;t going to catch on.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>AJ007</author><text>After I got the spectacles here were the reactions I got, from people in the 21-35 demographic:<p>First, wow I had no idea these existed<p>Second, where can I get them<p>Third, (months later) lost interest<p>Snapchat should have just had a buy now button in the app. Instead they tried to do some guerrilla marketing thing. If you have a captive audience of tens of millions of people, you don&#x27;t need to create buzz around your product. Either you made something people want or you didn&#x27;t. Me personally, they hurt my face. So I wore them about twice.</text></comment> | <story><title>Why Snapchat Spectacles failed</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/28/why-snapchat-spectacles-failed/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sssparkkk</author><text>So how about this: the influencers on Snapchat are all recording <i>themselves</i> most of the time. These glasses did nothing to help with that particular and most popular use case.<p>I feel really weird for being the first to bring this up, it seems pretty obvious to me the main reason these glasses weren&#x27;t going to catch on.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>yourapostasy</author><text>There is a possibility that Snapchat realized that aspect of the influencers population, and sought to expand their revenue base by creating another large use case with Spectacles.<p>I think we&#x27;re in a spontaneity uncanny valley for that kind of use case, though, and we have to wait for the hardware (mostly low energy processing and battery) tech to catch up before we climb out of the valley. A lot of the popular content has some element of surprise&#x2F;spontaneity to hook eyeballs in. I suspect a device form factor like Spectacles, or really, the &quot;recording others&quot; use case, won&#x27;t take off for the masses until it is as light as normal sunglasses, as stylish, continuously records HD video and high-grade audio 16-20 hours before needing a recharge, and is coupled with management software that makes it easy to pick out what you want to publish (if you exclaim, &quot;Woah! Did you see that!?&quot;, or more prosaically, &quot;Worldsta-a-a-r!&quot;, that&#x27;s picked up for a potential clip to publish, so you don&#x27;t have to scrub through hours of video). Maybe coupled with an AR interface that gives you on-the-spot access to the publishing interface.<p>Until then, the &quot;recording others&quot; use case will likely continue to be dominated by right-place-right-time smartphone recordings, and pro&#x2F;pro-am publishers&#x2F;bloggers with scripted&#x2F;guided content like what we see on YouTube today.</text></comment> |
10,608,356 | 10,608,341 | 1 | 3 | 10,607,422 | train | <story><title>How a little bit of TCP knowledge is essential</title><url>http://jvns.ca/blog/2015/11/21/why-you-should-understand-a-little-about-tcp/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Animats</author><text>That still irks me. The real problem is not tinygram prevention. It&#x27;s ACK delays, and that stupid fixed timer. They both went into TCP around the same time, but independently. I did tinygram prevention (the Nagle algorithm) and Berkeley did delayed ACKs, both in the early 1980s. The combination of the two is awful. Unfortunately by the time I found about delayed ACKs, I had changed jobs, was out of networking, and doing a product for Autodesk on non-networked PCs.<p>Delayed ACKs are a win only in certain circumstances - mostly character echo for Telnet. (When Berkeley installed delayed ACKs, they were doing a lot of Telnet from terminal concentrators in student terminal rooms to host VAX machines doing the work. For that particular situation, it made sense.) The delayed ACK timer is scaled to expected human response time. A delayed ACK is a bet that the other end will reply to what you just sent almost immediately. Except for some RPC protocols, this is unlikely. So the ACK delay mechanism loses the bet, over and over, delaying the ACK, waiting for a packet on which the ACK can be piggybacked, not getting it, and then sending the ACK, delayed. There&#x27;s nothing in TCP to automatically turn this off. However, Linux (and I think Windows) now have a TCP_QUICKACK socket option. Turn that on unless you have a very unusual application.<p>Turning on TCP_NODELAY has similar effects, but can make throughput worse for small writes. If you write a loop which sends just a few bytes (worst case, one byte) to a socket with &quot;write()&quot;, and the Nagle algorithm is disabled with TCP_NODELAY, each write becomes one IP packet. This increases traffic by a factor of 40, with IP and TCP headers for each payload. Tinygram prevention won&#x27;t let you send a second packet if you have one in flight, unless you have enough data to fill the maximum sized packet. It accumulates bytes for one round trip time, then sends everything in the queue. That&#x27;s almost always what you want. If you have TCP_NODELAY set, you need to be much more aware of buffering and flushing issues.<p>None of this matters for bulk one-way transfers, which is most HTTP today. (I&#x27;ve never looked at the impact of this on the SSL handshake, where it might matter.)<p>Short version: set TCP_QUICKACK. If you find a case where that makes things worse, let me know.<p>John Nagle</text></comment> | <story><title>How a little bit of TCP knowledge is essential</title><url>http://jvns.ca/blog/2015/11/21/why-you-should-understand-a-little-about-tcp/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jfb</author><text>I really enjoy reading Julia&#x27;s blog. Not only does she have a real, infectious enthusiasm for learning; not only is the blog well written; but I also often learn a lot. Kudos.</text></comment> |
27,727,162 | 27,723,972 | 1 | 2 | 27,723,772 | train | <story><title>Freespin: C64 demo running on 1541 floppy drive</title><url>http://www.quiss.org/freespin/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>stevep98</author><text>The processor in the 1541 was identical to the c64… 6502. (Or 6510C)<p>The serial link between them was notoriously slow. I studied them extensively as a teenager, and had reams of disassembly printed out in fanfold dot matrix, with my own scribbles. This is how I learned 80% of my computing skill set.<p>The signaling between the drive and computer used a clock line and a data line. When reading from the drive, the drive would set the data bit then invert the clock. The
CPU would be polling the clock line, and when it changed, it would read the data bit. There wasn’t any fancy hardware like DMA. It was basically two cpus connected to get her with a couple of I&#x2F;O pins.<p>I can’t remember where I saw it, but there was an extremely fast driver going around, and sure enough I disassembled it to find out what they were doing.<p>Before each 256-byte sector was transferred there was a loop which synchronized the cpus in the drive and host computer, down the the clock cycle. Then they used both clock line and data line to blast all the data, two bits at a time down the lines. The cpus didn’t wait for any clock to change, they just read the data as fast as possible. Wrapped with a bit of error detection to top it off.. in the end it was about a 10x speedup with the same hardware…. Which at the time was totally mind blowing</text></comment> | <story><title>Freespin: C64 demo running on 1541 floppy drive</title><url>http://www.quiss.org/freespin/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>peter_d_sherman</author><text>&gt;&quot;Freespin is a Commodore 1541 demo, released in 2021. It runs on the Commodore floppy drive. It is is the first demo on this device. [<i>Without</i> the C64 attached!]<p>[...]<p>Freespin generates sound&#x2F;music using the floppy drive mechanic (in particular, the stepper motor responsible for moving the head to the right track).<p><i>Video is generated through the [1541&#x27;s] serial bus.</i>&quot;<p>PDS: <i>Absolutely amazing!</i><p>I have never seen this done before!<p>Related:<p>&quot;How freespin bit bangs the video signal&quot;<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.quiss.org&#x2F;freespin&#x2F;raster.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.quiss.org&#x2F;freespin&#x2F;raster.html</a></text></comment> |
27,434,734 | 27,434,753 | 1 | 2 | 27,432,326 | train | <story><title>IRS records reveal how the wealthiest avoid income tax</title><url>https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trove-of-never-before-seen-records-reveal-how-the-wealthiest-avoid-income-tax</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ashtonkem</author><text>&gt; I’m all for people paying taxes they owe. I’m against vigilante style leaks when the target hasn’t committed a crime.<p>This is the obvious consequence of a system that feels unfair and unresponsive via normal channels.</text></item><item><author>mc32</author><text>I’m all for people paying taxes they owe. I’m against vigilante style leaks when the target hasn’t committed a crime.<p>Just because the person is not a sympathetic figure doesn’t mean it gives people the right to leak this kind of info, be they Bezos, Clinton, Soros, Koch, Gates, etc. get them on actual evasion if they have.<p>Otherwise what’s the purpose, rich people use tools to minimize their taxes? Ok, publish what the tools are and promote change in the tax code.</text></item><item><author>danso</author><text>&gt; <i>It&#x27;s everything we&#x27;ve already known.</i><p>&gt; <i>A more interesting question is how did ProPublica get a copy of Jeff Bezos&#x27; tax returns. Seems like a leak at the IRS?</i><p>Yes the actual tax records are what make the story interesting, even if the data only confirms what “everyone knows” — at least there’s actual data and empirical analysis of the scope.<p>According to this accompanying explainer, the leak is anonymous:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.propublica.org&#x2F;article&#x2F;why-we-are-publishing-the-tax-secrets-of-the-001" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.propublica.org&#x2F;article&#x2F;why-we-are-publishing-the...</a><p>&gt; <i>A second question certain to arise is the motives and identity of the source who has provided this data to ProPublica. We live in an age in which people with access to information can copy it with the click of a mouse and transmit it in a variety of ways to news organizations. Many years ago, ProPublica and other news organizations set up secure systems that allow whistleblowers to transmit information to us without revealing their identity.</i><p>&gt; <i>We do not know the identity of our source. We did not solicit the information they sent us. The source says they were motivated by our previous coverage of issues surrounding the IRS and tax enforcement, but we do not know for certain that is true. We have considered the possibility that information we have received could have come from a state actor hostile to American interests. In particular, a number of government agencies were compromised last year by what the U.S. has said were Russian hackers who exploited vulnerabilities in software sold by SolarWinds, a Texas-based information technology company. We do note, however, that the Treasury Department’s inspector general for tax administration wrote in December that, “At this time, there is no evidence that any taxpayer information was exposed” in the SolarWinds hack.</i></text></item><item><author>koheripbal</author><text>Summary:<p>1. Capital Gain taxes are delayed until you actually sell the stock.<p>2. Corporate taxes are being reduced because companies are moving profits to foreign jurisdictions.<p>3. Estate taxes &amp; income taxes are being avoided by the creation of charitable foundations.<p>The 2nd and 3rd points are very valid, and I wish the author had spent more time on them. Unfortunately instead, the author spends much more time on point 1, conflating wealth with income, and avoiding the obvious argument that capital gains are <i>eventually</i> taxed - the rich are not escaping that.<p>...unless point 3 (foundation) occurs. And that should be the main story.<p>Squabbling over a wealth tax is not useful. The real issue is that the super rich create these personal &quot;foundations&quot; that act as never-taxed income holes, and then use them as personal and political tools.<p>In total, there&#x27;s nothing very revealing about this article. It&#x27;s everything we&#x27;ve already known. IMO, we need to curb foreign tax havens, and severely limit tax exemptions for charitable donations.<p>A more interesting question is how did ProPublica get a copy of Jeff Bezos&#x27; tax returns. Seems like a leak at the IRS?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>koheripbal</author><text>I don&#x27;t think these vague emotional statements are constructive.<p>The rules outlined in the article apply to everyone, not just the rich, and they should be fixed for everyone, not just the rich.<p>In this case leaking Jeff Bezos&#x27; tax returns targeted one individual and provided no new useful information. It&#x27;s exactly what we already expected about his taxes.<p>...and frankly, the &quot;rich are evil - look how they don&#x27;t pay taxes on unrealized gains&quot; is a huge distraction from fixing the <i>actual</i> problems with the tax system.<p>We need to eliminate foreign tax havens, and severely limit non-profit &quot;Foundations&quot;.</text></comment> | <story><title>IRS records reveal how the wealthiest avoid income tax</title><url>https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trove-of-never-before-seen-records-reveal-how-the-wealthiest-avoid-income-tax</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ashtonkem</author><text>&gt; I’m all for people paying taxes they owe. I’m against vigilante style leaks when the target hasn’t committed a crime.<p>This is the obvious consequence of a system that feels unfair and unresponsive via normal channels.</text></item><item><author>mc32</author><text>I’m all for people paying taxes they owe. I’m against vigilante style leaks when the target hasn’t committed a crime.<p>Just because the person is not a sympathetic figure doesn’t mean it gives people the right to leak this kind of info, be they Bezos, Clinton, Soros, Koch, Gates, etc. get them on actual evasion if they have.<p>Otherwise what’s the purpose, rich people use tools to minimize their taxes? Ok, publish what the tools are and promote change in the tax code.</text></item><item><author>danso</author><text>&gt; <i>It&#x27;s everything we&#x27;ve already known.</i><p>&gt; <i>A more interesting question is how did ProPublica get a copy of Jeff Bezos&#x27; tax returns. Seems like a leak at the IRS?</i><p>Yes the actual tax records are what make the story interesting, even if the data only confirms what “everyone knows” — at least there’s actual data and empirical analysis of the scope.<p>According to this accompanying explainer, the leak is anonymous:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.propublica.org&#x2F;article&#x2F;why-we-are-publishing-the-tax-secrets-of-the-001" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.propublica.org&#x2F;article&#x2F;why-we-are-publishing-the...</a><p>&gt; <i>A second question certain to arise is the motives and identity of the source who has provided this data to ProPublica. We live in an age in which people with access to information can copy it with the click of a mouse and transmit it in a variety of ways to news organizations. Many years ago, ProPublica and other news organizations set up secure systems that allow whistleblowers to transmit information to us without revealing their identity.</i><p>&gt; <i>We do not know the identity of our source. We did not solicit the information they sent us. The source says they were motivated by our previous coverage of issues surrounding the IRS and tax enforcement, but we do not know for certain that is true. We have considered the possibility that information we have received could have come from a state actor hostile to American interests. In particular, a number of government agencies were compromised last year by what the U.S. has said were Russian hackers who exploited vulnerabilities in software sold by SolarWinds, a Texas-based information technology company. We do note, however, that the Treasury Department’s inspector general for tax administration wrote in December that, “At this time, there is no evidence that any taxpayer information was exposed” in the SolarWinds hack.</i></text></item><item><author>koheripbal</author><text>Summary:<p>1. Capital Gain taxes are delayed until you actually sell the stock.<p>2. Corporate taxes are being reduced because companies are moving profits to foreign jurisdictions.<p>3. Estate taxes &amp; income taxes are being avoided by the creation of charitable foundations.<p>The 2nd and 3rd points are very valid, and I wish the author had spent more time on them. Unfortunately instead, the author spends much more time on point 1, conflating wealth with income, and avoiding the obvious argument that capital gains are <i>eventually</i> taxed - the rich are not escaping that.<p>...unless point 3 (foundation) occurs. And that should be the main story.<p>Squabbling over a wealth tax is not useful. The real issue is that the super rich create these personal &quot;foundations&quot; that act as never-taxed income holes, and then use them as personal and political tools.<p>In total, there&#x27;s nothing very revealing about this article. It&#x27;s everything we&#x27;ve already known. IMO, we need to curb foreign tax havens, and severely limit tax exemptions for charitable donations.<p>A more interesting question is how did ProPublica get a copy of Jeff Bezos&#x27; tax returns. Seems like a leak at the IRS?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mc32</author><text>It’s still not acceptable. At least the tax minimizer is following applicable laws, this vigilante is not.<p>They are taking it upon themselves outside the law to settle disagreements, but they want to leverage new laws to make taxes more aligned with their policy (but obviously they are okay with ignoring other parts of the law —that’s a disconnect).</text></comment> |
10,997,058 | 10,994,775 | 1 | 3 | 10,994,736 | train | <story><title>Kinto by Mozilla – An open-source Parse alternative</title><url>https://github.com/Kinto/kinto/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>gecko</author><text>CouchDB is so underrated in this space.<p>I get it: CouchDB was a very early (the first real?) document-based database, and it got some things wrong, or at least weird early on (e.g. map&#x2F;reduce queries, a reduce step to the map&#x2F;reduce query that is actually one-to-many (on purpose! there are concrete reasons in real life you want this!), etc.).<p>But they also got so much right:<p><pre><code> - The database is all HTTP, all the time. Connecting up your
choice language takes about an hour.
- Offline replication and database streaming, standardized at the
protocol level, which allows you to use various combinations of
CouchDB, Couchbase, Coucbase Lite, and PouchDB without interop
problems. Plus, it means in the early part of an app (like the 0.X
bit), I can trivially replicate the prod DB down when I&#x27;m trying
to repro something.
- You can store your HTTP assets right alongside the DB for
Firebase-like asset hosting. Throw it behind a caching service
for prod if you want.
- You can store full-blown files, which is great for lots of practical
app these days.
- Trivial replication. The scaling of CouchDB itself is honestly a
bit crappy, but Couchbase has great scaling, and since they speak
the same protocol, you can easily scale from CouchDB to Couchbase
without missing a beat.
</code></pre>
CouchDB is actually my favorite &quot;I just wanna hack something&quot; database for the above reasons. No, I have not and do not know if I&#x27;d seriously recommend using CouchDB 1.6 in prod for something you expected to grow huge, but it&#x27;s a great &quot;get it done&quot; platform like Parse or Firebase, and you can really trivially move to Couchbase as you scale up if you need to.</text></comment> | <story><title>Kinto by Mozilla – An open-source Parse alternative</title><url>https://github.com/Kinto/kinto/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>johnm1019</author><text>Their website says this is a storage service.
<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;kinto.readthedocs.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;latest&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;kinto.readthedocs.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;latest&#x2F;</a><p>Parse is much more.
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;parse.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;android&#x2F;guide" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;parse.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;android&#x2F;guide</a></text></comment> |
9,377,635 | 9,377,631 | 1 | 3 | 9,374,842 | train | <story><title>The Cryptographic Doom Principle</title><url>http://www.thoughtcrime.org/blog/the-cryptographic-doom-principle/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>richo</author><text>If you believe that &quot;don&#x27;t roll your own crypto&quot; is some kind of absurd mantra the security industry uses to keep us in business, I recommend that you roll your own crypto, and keep us in business.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>a1a</author><text>Schneier&#x27;s Law comes to mind<p>&quot;Anyone, from the most clueless amateur to the best cryptographer, can create an algorithm that he himself can&#x27;t break.&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.schneier.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;archives&#x2F;2011&#x2F;04&#x2F;schneiers_law.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.schneier.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;archives&#x2F;2011&#x2F;04&#x2F;schneiers_law...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>The Cryptographic Doom Principle</title><url>http://www.thoughtcrime.org/blog/the-cryptographic-doom-principle/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>richo</author><text>If you believe that &quot;don&#x27;t roll your own crypto&quot; is some kind of absurd mantra the security industry uses to keep us in business, I recommend that you roll your own crypto, and keep us in business.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kkl</author><text>I do not have concerns with the mantra itself just it&#x27;s usage and the entitlement that often comes along with using it. The top answer on this Stack Exchange question is a good example of what I believe to be proper usage of the mantra.
<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;security.stackexchange.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;18197&#x2F;why-shouldnt-we-roll-our-own" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;security.stackexchange.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;18197&#x2F;why-should...</a></text></comment> |
8,268,995 | 8,269,032 | 1 | 3 | 8,268,642 | train | <story><title>Where does Ruby go from here?</title><url>http://blog.sefindustries.com/the-happiness-manifesto/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tmorton</author><text>I think this is a great idea. The ruby community is a wonderful thing, and part of that is reflected in the technology.<p>However, the original Agile Manifesto was powerful because it made tradeoffs. &quot;We value X over Y&quot;, even when Y is a valuable thing. For this HDD thing to take off, it has to make the similar tradeoffs explicit.<p>For example:<p><pre><code> We value readable code over runtime performance.
We value open-source frameworks and libraries over developing for popular ecosystems.
We value inclusiveness, diversity, and respect over pure meritocracy.
We value teaching, learning, and improving our craft over short-term productivity.
We value creating wealth over capturing wealth.</code></pre></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>angersock</author><text>That&#x27;s a really nice feel-good list, but it also doesn&#x27;t make a lot of sense in several cases:<p><i>&quot;We value open-source frameworks and libraries over developing for popular ecosystems.&quot;</i><p>Most popular ecosystems nowadays are all open-source frameworks and libraries? Unless you&#x27;re talking about Windows or Mac OSX, I guess?<p><i>&quot;We value inclusiveness, diversity, and respect over pure meritocracy.&quot;</i><p>These are not mutually exclusive goals--even if they are, I&#x27;d rather have really good code, even if written by a racist or sexist, than bad code (period). Again, I&#x27;m not sure we have to make that choice.<p><i>&quot;We value creating wealth over capturing wealth.&quot;</i><p>What does this even mean? This is a <i>programming language</i>, ffs. Your statement makes sense in, say, the heyday of APL or Smalltalk or some other very vendor-specific language, but that&#x27;s not quite the case today. Are you talking about <i>not</i> doing data-mining to monetize your fellow man? About not creating yet-another analytics or ad platform? What then, exactly, are you driving at?<p><i>&quot;We value teaching, learning, and improving our craft over short-term productivity.&quot;</i><p>Again, not mutually exclusive. Also, part of learning and improving your craft is knowing when a quick hack is the right answer instead of a full solution.</text></comment> | <story><title>Where does Ruby go from here?</title><url>http://blog.sefindustries.com/the-happiness-manifesto/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tmorton</author><text>I think this is a great idea. The ruby community is a wonderful thing, and part of that is reflected in the technology.<p>However, the original Agile Manifesto was powerful because it made tradeoffs. &quot;We value X over Y&quot;, even when Y is a valuable thing. For this HDD thing to take off, it has to make the similar tradeoffs explicit.<p>For example:<p><pre><code> We value readable code over runtime performance.
We value open-source frameworks and libraries over developing for popular ecosystems.
We value inclusiveness, diversity, and respect over pure meritocracy.
We value teaching, learning, and improving our craft over short-term productivity.
We value creating wealth over capturing wealth.</code></pre></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kybernetyk</author><text>&gt; We value inclusiveness, diversity, and respect over pure meritocracy.<p>Heh, until not long ago a &quot;meritocracy&quot; was seen as something good and desirable. Nowadays it seems to be something bad (at least in some circles). Funny how things can change.</text></comment> |
28,869,430 | 28,866,637 | 1 | 2 | 28,865,033 | train | <story><title>Global Climate Report – September 2021</title><url>https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/202109</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>photochemsyn</author><text>There&#x27;s some interesting data in there. If you look at the supplemental info, note that this year is well on track to be bracketed within the top ten hottest years on record:<p>&gt; &quot;This graphic compares the year-to-date temperature anomalies for 2021 (black line) to what were ultimately the ten warmest years on record: 2016 (1st), 2020 (2nd), 2019 (3rd), 2015 (4th), 2017 (5th), 2018 (6th), 2014 (7th), 2010 (8th), 2013 (9th), and 2005 (10th).&quot;<p>Now, consider the lag effect on climate response and atmospheric forcing (i.e. the ocean absorbs a fair amount of the extra heat, but as the ocean warms, that heat gets injected back into the atmosphere, especially polewards, so there&#x27;s a lag time before current atmospheric forcings are full realized, and that&#x27;s a multidecade effect, so we won&#x27;t feel today&#x27;s forcing completely for decades, even a century).<p>Conclusion as I see it: every year for the next 50 years is going to be bracketed in the top ten hottest years, meaning the years 2030-2040 will all be hotter than 2010-2020 and so on. Decade by decade for the rest of the lives of people alive today, this will continue - and while getting off fossil fuels is needed, is indeed the only way to slow this trend, it&#x27;s only going to slow down the year-to-year increase.<p>Additionally, as polar melt proceeds, permafrost melt and outgassing becomes self-sustaining even if humans completely stop fossil fuel use and deforestation.<p>Practically, this means adaptation is simply a must. People have to move out of flood plains, waste treatment plants in low-lying coastal zones needed to be moved uphill, people need to realize the global refugee crisis is going to be 10X as bad as anything seen yet at least, perhaps a steady rate of 1,000,000 per year fleeing climate disaster zones.<p>In reality we are heading back to climate conditions last seen ~3-5 million years ago, before the ice ages set in, with sea levels dozens of meters higher than they are now. Nobody likes to hear this it seems, but the science does seem to be saying that this has already happened, sort of.</text></comment> | <story><title>Global Climate Report – September 2021</title><url>https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/202109</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Glench</author><text>Love that NOAA is getting shit done. They just redid the climate.gov website to be more useful: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.climate.gov&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.climate.gov&#x2F;</a></text></comment> |
17,283,995 | 17,281,187 | 1 | 3 | 17,280,757 | train | <story><title>Intel 28-core fantasy vs. AMD 32-core reality</title><url>https://www.techspot.com/news/75009-intel-28-core-fantasy-vs-amd-32-core.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>hardwaresofton</author><text>I&#x27;m excited for what this will do to the cost of dedicated servers in ~1 year.<p>Also, as a person who used to work at Intel, I don&#x27;t know whose idea this was, but that person should probably have a long hard look at themselves -- hardware people are exactly the people that this kind of shit wouldn&#x27;t fly with, because they&#x27;ll almost always ask for details and can spot a hack from a mile away.<p>On the one hand I can sympathize with Intel -- seeing how tough it was to stay on the market year over year, trying to predict and start developing the next trend in hardware. But on the other hand... Why in the world would you do this -- Intel basically dominates the high end market right now, just take your time and make a properly better thing.</text></comment> | <story><title>Intel 28-core fantasy vs. AMD 32-core reality</title><url>https://www.techspot.com/news/75009-intel-28-core-fantasy-vs-amd-32-core.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dingo_bat</author><text>It&#x27;s awesome that TR2 will be a drop in replacement on existing motherboards! Props to AMD for delivering real value to consumers.</text></comment> |
21,945,466 | 21,935,050 | 1 | 2 | 21,932,004 | train | <story><title>Authoritarian nations are turning the internet into a weapon</title><url>https://onezero.medium.com/authoritarian-nations-are-turning-the-internet-into-a-weapon-10119d4e9992</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>datashow</author><text>I&#x27;m not sure what is your point, authoritarian or democratic does not make a difference? Both kind of nations have same kind of access to citizens&#x27; private information? Both use the monitoring for the same purpose? US is throwing people who offended Trump online into jail like China is doing for Xi?<p>I just can&#x27;t live with this kind of intentional defense of authoritarian by making nonsensical and shameless equalization.<p>Plug:<p>China Sentences Wang Yi, Christian Pastor, to 9 Years in Prison <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;12&#x2F;30&#x2F;world&#x2F;asia&#x2F;china-wang-yi-christian-sentence.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;12&#x2F;30&#x2F;world&#x2F;asia&#x2F;china-wang-yi-...</a><p>Kaifeng Jewish Community Suffers New Suppression <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bitterwinter.org&#x2F;kaifeng-jewish-community-suffers-new-suppression&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bitterwinter.org&#x2F;kaifeng-jewish-community-suffers-ne...</a><p>Inside China’s Push to Turn Muslim Minorities Into an Army of Workers <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;12&#x2F;30&#x2F;world&#x2F;asia&#x2F;china-xinjiang-muslims-labor.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;12&#x2F;30&#x2F;world&#x2F;asia&#x2F;china-xinjiang...</a></text></item><item><author>roenxi</author><text>&quot;Authoritarian Nations are...&quot; makes it sound like the same trends aren&#x27;t prevalent everywhere.<p>The cost of monitoring and enforcing compliance with the law is dropping very rapidly. Cameras, automated monitoring systems, etc, have all blossomed since around 2007 when phones suddenly became computers and cameras in one fell swoop.<p>It is no longer a default expectation that someone can commit a crime without being detected. Or do anything without it being recorded in triplicate on the internet. We&#x27;d better all hope we aren&#x27;t doing anything the government doesn&#x27;t like!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Vinnl</author><text>I&#x27;d think the point is that the qualification in the headline might give people in non-authoritarian nations a false sense of security that GP is trying to warn us for.</text></comment> | <story><title>Authoritarian nations are turning the internet into a weapon</title><url>https://onezero.medium.com/authoritarian-nations-are-turning-the-internet-into-a-weapon-10119d4e9992</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>datashow</author><text>I&#x27;m not sure what is your point, authoritarian or democratic does not make a difference? Both kind of nations have same kind of access to citizens&#x27; private information? Both use the monitoring for the same purpose? US is throwing people who offended Trump online into jail like China is doing for Xi?<p>I just can&#x27;t live with this kind of intentional defense of authoritarian by making nonsensical and shameless equalization.<p>Plug:<p>China Sentences Wang Yi, Christian Pastor, to 9 Years in Prison <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;12&#x2F;30&#x2F;world&#x2F;asia&#x2F;china-wang-yi-christian-sentence.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;12&#x2F;30&#x2F;world&#x2F;asia&#x2F;china-wang-yi-...</a><p>Kaifeng Jewish Community Suffers New Suppression <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bitterwinter.org&#x2F;kaifeng-jewish-community-suffers-new-suppression&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bitterwinter.org&#x2F;kaifeng-jewish-community-suffers-ne...</a><p>Inside China’s Push to Turn Muslim Minorities Into an Army of Workers <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;12&#x2F;30&#x2F;world&#x2F;asia&#x2F;china-xinjiang-muslims-labor.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;12&#x2F;30&#x2F;world&#x2F;asia&#x2F;china-xinjiang...</a></text></item><item><author>roenxi</author><text>&quot;Authoritarian Nations are...&quot; makes it sound like the same trends aren&#x27;t prevalent everywhere.<p>The cost of monitoring and enforcing compliance with the law is dropping very rapidly. Cameras, automated monitoring systems, etc, have all blossomed since around 2007 when phones suddenly became computers and cameras in one fell swoop.<p>It is no longer a default expectation that someone can commit a crime without being detected. Or do anything without it being recorded in triplicate on the internet. We&#x27;d better all hope we aren&#x27;t doing anything the government doesn&#x27;t like!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>buboard</author><text>&gt; authoritarian or democratic does not make a difference?<p>You think it it does? Democracy without freedom is an empty shell. And surveillance is antithetical to freedom</text></comment> |
28,259,257 | 28,259,340 | 1 | 2 | 28,258,189 | train | <story><title>An Opinionated Guide to Xargs</title><url>https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2021/08/xargs.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fiddlerwoaroof</author><text>I frequently find myself reaching for this pattern instead of xargs:<p><pre><code> do_something | ( while read -r v; do
. . .
done )
</code></pre>
I’ve found that it has fewer edge cases (except it creates a subshell, which can be avoided in some shells by using braces instead of parens)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>aaaaaaaaaaab</author><text>Some additional tips:<p>1. You don&#x27;t need the parentheses.<p>2. If you use process substitution [1] instead of a pipe, you will stay in the same process and can modify variables of the enclosing scope:<p><pre><code> i=0
while read -r v; do
...
i=$(( i + 1))
done &lt; &lt;(do_something)
</code></pre>
The drawback is that this way `do_something` has to come after `done`, but that&#x27;s bash for you ¯\_(ツ)_&#x2F;¯<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gnu.org&#x2F;software&#x2F;bash&#x2F;manual&#x2F;html_node&#x2F;Process-Substitution.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gnu.org&#x2F;software&#x2F;bash&#x2F;manual&#x2F;html_node&#x2F;Process-S...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>An Opinionated Guide to Xargs</title><url>https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2021/08/xargs.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fiddlerwoaroof</author><text>I frequently find myself reaching for this pattern instead of xargs:<p><pre><code> do_something | ( while read -r v; do
. . .
done )
</code></pre>
I’ve found that it has fewer edge cases (except it creates a subshell, which can be avoided in some shells by using braces instead of parens)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>aaaaaaaaaaab</author><text>Also for the `while` enthusiasts, here&#x27;s how you zip the output of two processes in bash:<p><pre><code> paste -d \\n &lt;(do_something1) &lt;(do_something2) | while read -r var1 &amp;&amp; read -r var2; do
... # var1 comes from do_something1, var2 comes from do_something2
done</code></pre></text></comment> |
16,224,585 | 16,224,576 | 1 | 3 | 16,224,346 | train | <story><title>How to solve most NLP problems: a step-by-step guide</title><url>https://blog.insightdatascience.com/how-to-solve-90-of-nlp-problems-a-step-by-step-guide-fda605278e4e</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>minimaxir</author><text>Word2Vec and bag-of-words&#x2F;tf-idf are somewhat obsolete in 2018 for modeling. For classification tasks, fasttext (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;facebookresearch&#x2F;fastText" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;facebookresearch&#x2F;fastText</a>) performs better and faster.<p>Fasttext is also available in the popular NLP Python library gensim, with a good demo notebook: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;radimrehurek.com&#x2F;gensim&#x2F;models&#x2F;fasttext.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;radimrehurek.com&#x2F;gensim&#x2F;models&#x2F;fasttext.html</a><p>And of course, if you have a GPU, recurrent neural networks (or other deep learning architectures) are the endgame for the remaining 10% of problems (a good example is SpaCy&#x27;s DL implementation: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;spacy.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;spacy.io&#x2F;</a>). Or use those libraries to incorporate fasttext for text encoding, which has worked well in my use cases.</text></comment> | <story><title>How to solve most NLP problems: a step-by-step guide</title><url>https://blog.insightdatascience.com/how-to-solve-90-of-nlp-problems-a-step-by-step-guide-fda605278e4e</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>paulsutter</author><text>NLP is one of the most challenging areas of research, and nothing in this article will help solve even 0.009% of those challenges<p>Example of the wisdom herein:<p>&gt; Remove words that are not relevant, such as “@” twitter mentions or urls</text></comment> |
4,946,910 | 4,946,708 | 1 | 2 | 4,946,629 | train | <story><title>When I first heard the name "Safari"</title><url>http://donmelton.com/2012/12/19/when-i-first-heard-the-name-safari/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>SimHacker</author><text>At Maxis, we didn't arrive at the totally obvious name The Sims until very late in development.<p>At first there was the secret development name, Project X, but everybody had a Project X, and we certainly couldn't ship with that.<p>Then there was Jamie's obvious name, Dollhouse, which was quite descriptive, but boys would hate it.<p>Then there was Will's quirky name, Super Happy Friends Home, which only the Japanese would love.<p>Then there was Jim's high minded name, Jefferson, for the pursuit of happiness, but it made everybody think of the sitcom The Jeffersons.<p>Then there was the legendary perfectly descriptive catchy epic name, that everyone on the team really loved, which we dreamed up together in a brainstorming session when we were all quite stoned, but by the next day we all forgot it, and nobody could ever remember what it was again, although we could all distinctly remember the warm glow of knowing that it was the best possible name in the world, which everyone would love. Those were good times! ;)<p>But for some reason, during all that time, despite racking our brains, nobody ever though of "The Sims", which is retrospect was a totally obvious name for a continuation of the SimCity franchise focusing on the people in the city. (The original SimCity manual referred to the people in the city as "the Sims," so there was a long standing precedent.)<p>I have no idea who eventually came up with the name The Sims, and I'm happy with it, but it definitely wasn't the perfect name that everybody forgot. It's lost in the sands of time...</text></comment> | <story><title>When I first heard the name "Safari"</title><url>http://donmelton.com/2012/12/19/when-i-first-heard-the-name-safari/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>augustl</author><text>I think many of you in the Hacker News crowd will recognize this problem that I'm yet to find a solution to myself:<p><pre><code> mkdir [blinking cursor]
</code></pre>
Then 30 minutes passes and you didn't end up making that thing anyway since you got distracted while thinking up a name for it.</text></comment> |
23,672,237 | 23,670,282 | 1 | 3 | 23,669,051 | train | <story><title>Chromium and Mozilla to enforce 1 year validity for TLS certificates</title><url>https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/ae4d6809912f8171b23f6aa43c6a4e8e627de784</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>elcritch</author><text>It’s a glaring security hole, IMHO. I create such devices and the only way I know is self-signed certs, but the browsers complain a lot about that. Ideally there’d be a way to sign .local domains with browsers handling it while letting people know to verify the identity of their local devices&#x2F;services and that the identity isn’t verified by https like most sites.<p>The issue lies between the browsers and https system. SSH can do encryption without requiring identity verification. It handles it by asking &quot;Do you want to trust this new server?&quot;. Then if it changes informs you of that. Browsers could easily implement that for .local with self-signed certs.<p>Of course browser developers assume everyone has internet all the time and you only access servers with signed domains. I’ve wondered what it’d take to get an ITEF&#x2F;W3C RFQ published for .local self-signed behavior.<p>(Edit: RFQ, not my autocomplete’s RTF)</text></item><item><author>paledot</author><text>With the tightening of certificate trust, demise of self-signed certificates, etc., is there any remaining way to establish a consumer-oriented HTTPS server on a local network? Thinking of things like routers, printers, and self-hosted IoT devices here. Some of the label printers we support at work have simply atrocious workarounds to get them to work, and I&#x27;m wondering if it&#x27;s the manufacturer&#x27;s fault or if that use case has been completely abandoned in the push for tighter security on the Internet.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>akira2501</author><text>&gt; Ideally there’d be a way to sign .local domains with browsers handling it while letting people know to verify the identity of their local devices&#x2F;services and that the identity isn’t verified by https like most sites.<p>For these types of sites we run a local CA, and sign regular certificates for these domains and then distribute the CA certificate to our windows clients through a GPO. When put into the correct store, all our &quot;locally-signed&quot; certificates show as valid.<p>In other instances, where I haven&#x27;t been able to do that, like for disparate VPN clients and such I will generally assign a RFC1918 address to it. Like service.vpn.ourdomain.com resolves to 10.92.83.200. As long as I can respond to a DNS challenge, I can still get a letsencrypt certificate for that domain.</text></comment> | <story><title>Chromium and Mozilla to enforce 1 year validity for TLS certificates</title><url>https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/ae4d6809912f8171b23f6aa43c6a4e8e627de784</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>elcritch</author><text>It’s a glaring security hole, IMHO. I create such devices and the only way I know is self-signed certs, but the browsers complain a lot about that. Ideally there’d be a way to sign .local domains with browsers handling it while letting people know to verify the identity of their local devices&#x2F;services and that the identity isn’t verified by https like most sites.<p>The issue lies between the browsers and https system. SSH can do encryption without requiring identity verification. It handles it by asking &quot;Do you want to trust this new server?&quot;. Then if it changes informs you of that. Browsers could easily implement that for .local with self-signed certs.<p>Of course browser developers assume everyone has internet all the time and you only access servers with signed domains. I’ve wondered what it’d take to get an ITEF&#x2F;W3C RFQ published for .local self-signed behavior.<p>(Edit: RFQ, not my autocomplete’s RTF)</text></item><item><author>paledot</author><text>With the tightening of certificate trust, demise of self-signed certificates, etc., is there any remaining way to establish a consumer-oriented HTTPS server on a local network? Thinking of things like routers, printers, and self-hosted IoT devices here. Some of the label printers we support at work have simply atrocious workarounds to get them to work, and I&#x27;m wondering if it&#x27;s the manufacturer&#x27;s fault or if that use case has been completely abandoned in the push for tighter security on the Internet.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>paledot</author><text>I love this idea. There are enough influential tech people who read HN, can we make this happen please?</text></comment> |
16,757,576 | 16,757,507 | 1 | 2 | 16,755,624 | train | <story><title>JavaScript to Rust and Back Again: A Wasm-Bindgen Tale</title><url>https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/04/javascript-to-rust-and-back-again-a-wasm-bindgen-tale/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jerf</author><text>&quot;Faster-than-JS DOM performance&quot;<p>That will be when the clock starts ticking on Javascript.<p>Who&#x27;da thunk one language might eventually eat both a significant chunk of C <i>and</i> a significant chunk of Javascript someday?<p>I&#x27;m <i>not</i> saying Rust will completely eat Javascript; there is no chance that all web developers would or even necessarily <i>could</i> switch to Rust. But the framework war will take a <i>very</i> interesting turn if Rust gets faster access to the DOM than JS can provide, and is <i>also</i> a faster language than JS, and also tends to afford the use of more efficient constructs that Javascript can provide (i.e., can&#x27;t do anything about cache coherency in JS, can&#x27;t manage how much copying you do in JS directly, etc.). And if the ball starts rolling on this, the browsers will start doing things like allowing WASM to register correctly-typed events handlers that don&#x27;t have to be marshaled into JS and back... it&#x27;s been a long road and there&#x27;s a long road ahead still but do I see the glimmer of a world in which browsers can actually perform within a factor of 2 of native UIs?</text></item><item><author>vvanders</author><text>&gt; Faster-than-JS DOM performance<p>...<p>&gt; The wasm-bindgen code generation has been designed with the future host bindings proposal in mind from day 1. As soon as that’s a feature available in WebAssembly, we’ll be able to directly invoke imported functions without any of wasm-bindgen‘s JS shims.<p>Sweet.<p>Once again, Rust team knocking it out of the park.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>flavio81</author><text>&gt;Who&#x27;da thunk one language might eventually eat both a significant chunk of C and a significant chunk of Javascript someday?<p>Erm... PSA: Rust isn&#x27;t the <i>only</i> language that is compiling to WASM.<p>I&#x27;m glad for Rust developers (How exciting is for them to be able to target WASM), but what is really exciting is to have alternatives; even more exciting if they have nothing to do with javascript.</text></comment> | <story><title>JavaScript to Rust and Back Again: A Wasm-Bindgen Tale</title><url>https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/04/javascript-to-rust-and-back-again-a-wasm-bindgen-tale/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jerf</author><text>&quot;Faster-than-JS DOM performance&quot;<p>That will be when the clock starts ticking on Javascript.<p>Who&#x27;da thunk one language might eventually eat both a significant chunk of C <i>and</i> a significant chunk of Javascript someday?<p>I&#x27;m <i>not</i> saying Rust will completely eat Javascript; there is no chance that all web developers would or even necessarily <i>could</i> switch to Rust. But the framework war will take a <i>very</i> interesting turn if Rust gets faster access to the DOM than JS can provide, and is <i>also</i> a faster language than JS, and also tends to afford the use of more efficient constructs that Javascript can provide (i.e., can&#x27;t do anything about cache coherency in JS, can&#x27;t manage how much copying you do in JS directly, etc.). And if the ball starts rolling on this, the browsers will start doing things like allowing WASM to register correctly-typed events handlers that don&#x27;t have to be marshaled into JS and back... it&#x27;s been a long road and there&#x27;s a long road ahead still but do I see the glimmer of a world in which browsers can actually perform within a factor of 2 of native UIs?</text></item><item><author>vvanders</author><text>&gt; Faster-than-JS DOM performance<p>...<p>&gt; The wasm-bindgen code generation has been designed with the future host bindings proposal in mind from day 1. As soon as that’s a feature available in WebAssembly, we’ll be able to directly invoke imported functions without any of wasm-bindgen‘s JS shims.<p>Sweet.<p>Once again, Rust team knocking it out of the park.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jcoffland</author><text>Rust is also still very far from having eaten any significant chunk of C.</text></comment> |
21,234,863 | 21,234,221 | 1 | 2 | 21,233,815 | train | <story><title>Amazon stops charitable donations via Amazon Smile if you turn off notifications</title><url>https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/dgtgr4/amazon_app_disables_charitable_donations_via/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>cwkoss</author><text>Amazon has recently started providing third party sellers for &#x27;fulfilled by Amazon&#x27; orders with all of your personal information. There is no reason for them to have this.<p>I&#x27;ve gotten three marketing postcards and have a persistent Facebook ad that started appearing from a brand the day after I ordered one of their products. Don&#x27;t buy stuff on Amazon if you don&#x27;t want the third party seller to get all your info.</text></comment> | <story><title>Amazon stops charitable donations via Amazon Smile if you turn off notifications</title><url>https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/dgtgr4/amazon_app_disables_charitable_donations_via/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>verdverm</author><text>I closed all of my Amazon accounts about a year ago, now I buy so much less crap I never needed. The only thing I miss is books... can&#x27;t always find them with local stores, even on order.<p>I had to go through all those &quot;are you really, really sure?&quot; Only to be required to call them after all that and say, YES! I AM SURE<p>#BoycottBezos<p>Because the only good thing he can think to do with his money is go to space. Maybe he&#x27;s doing this so he can keep the profits and try to catch Elon</text></comment> |
29,958,873 | 29,957,426 | 1 | 3 | 29,954,607 | train | <story><title>Why Galesburg has no money</title><url>https://inlandnobody.substack.com/p/why-galesburg-has-no-money</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rexreed</author><text>Many Roman roads have lasted a long while. Maybe we should move back to cobble stone? Certainly easier to patch and replace and open up for underground utilities.</text></item><item><author>KennyBlanken</author><text>The problem boils down to this: we&#x27;ve vastly over-paved and in general overbuilt our road network. We&#x27;ve paved all sorts of roads we should have left as dirt&#x2F;gravel, but they got paved because it&#x27;s a sign your neighborhood has &quot;made it.&quot; It&#x27;s a pretty high level problem a well; we built a ton of bridges starting around the 50&#x27;s, without anyone thinking about how we were going to pay for them. Well, those bridges are starting to crumble because repairing or replacing them would mean massive hikes in taxes, and no politician wants to touch that.<p>Ironically, the vast majority of vehicles purchased are SUVs and trucks to the point that Ford will stop selling sedans entirely. At least everyone is prepared for the coming changes?<p>If we hadn&#x27;t allowed the automotive industry to essentially dominate american society, we&#x27;d have neighborhoods with dirt&#x2F;gravel roads or narrow paved paths for walking and bicycles, neighborhood parking lots for those who own cars, functioning bus services, lots of passenger rail, etc.<p>Instead we have a country where we&#x27;re slaves to cars.</text></item><item><author>TulliusCicero</author><text>This is basically what Strong Towns harps on: the infrastructure for super low density development is extremely costly relative to how much &#x27;stuff&#x27; you&#x27;re building the infrastructure for.<p>Initially it&#x27;s not so bad, because it takes decades before you need to do replacement-level repairs&#x2F;maintenance, but eventually it catches up with you. Some cities escape it (at least for a while) by building even more or by simply having a fantastic economy, but the ones that don&#x27;t...it&#x27;s not pretty.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>occz</author><text>The roman roads didn&#x27;t have to bear the load that modern roads do. Road wear is approximately (weight^4 ), meaning that the only vehicles that even matter in the calculation are trucks.</text></comment> | <story><title>Why Galesburg has no money</title><url>https://inlandnobody.substack.com/p/why-galesburg-has-no-money</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rexreed</author><text>Many Roman roads have lasted a long while. Maybe we should move back to cobble stone? Certainly easier to patch and replace and open up for underground utilities.</text></item><item><author>KennyBlanken</author><text>The problem boils down to this: we&#x27;ve vastly over-paved and in general overbuilt our road network. We&#x27;ve paved all sorts of roads we should have left as dirt&#x2F;gravel, but they got paved because it&#x27;s a sign your neighborhood has &quot;made it.&quot; It&#x27;s a pretty high level problem a well; we built a ton of bridges starting around the 50&#x27;s, without anyone thinking about how we were going to pay for them. Well, those bridges are starting to crumble because repairing or replacing them would mean massive hikes in taxes, and no politician wants to touch that.<p>Ironically, the vast majority of vehicles purchased are SUVs and trucks to the point that Ford will stop selling sedans entirely. At least everyone is prepared for the coming changes?<p>If we hadn&#x27;t allowed the automotive industry to essentially dominate american society, we&#x27;d have neighborhoods with dirt&#x2F;gravel roads or narrow paved paths for walking and bicycles, neighborhood parking lots for those who own cars, functioning bus services, lots of passenger rail, etc.<p>Instead we have a country where we&#x27;re slaves to cars.</text></item><item><author>TulliusCicero</author><text>This is basically what Strong Towns harps on: the infrastructure for super low density development is extremely costly relative to how much &#x27;stuff&#x27; you&#x27;re building the infrastructure for.<p>Initially it&#x27;s not so bad, because it takes decades before you need to do replacement-level repairs&#x2F;maintenance, but eventually it catches up with you. Some cities escape it (at least for a while) by building even more or by simply having a fantastic economy, but the ones that don&#x27;t...it&#x27;s not pretty.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Naga</author><text>I&#x27;m assuming you&#x27;re speaking tongue in cheek, but I thought about why we have problems that the Romans didn&#x27;t.<p>I don&#x27;t know about ease of maintenance and access to utilities, but Romans did not have trucks that destroyed the roads (the ratio of weight of vehicles to the wear on the road is exponential, not linear), but I have no concept of how cobblestone is affected by trucks. Roman roads are also affected by survivorship bias (we see the roads that survived, not 90% of the roads that haven&#x27;t) and they were not affected as much by freeze&#x2F;thaw cycles as North American roads are.<p>My intutition says that they also probably were not generally as wide as North American roads. Drivers here have an expectation of being able to drive at high speeds without worrying about passing on coming traffic - Pictures I&#x27;ve seen of Roman highways were not two wagons wide. Less road width means less maintenance since there&#x27;s physically less roads.</text></comment> |
13,004,186 | 13,003,538 | 1 | 2 | 13,002,596 | train | <story><title>U.S. Citizens Now Hold About $1.3 Trillion in Student Loan Debt</title><url>http://financeography.com/us-citizens-hold-about-13-trillion-student-loan-debt/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>skwosh</author><text>There seems to be a strong sentiment in this thread that the only value provided by education is the contribution to career (e.g. that loans should only be provided for financially viable courses, that studying arts is as useful to one&#x27;s career as studying finger painting, etc).<p>This just seems <i>so</i> wrong.<p>Optimising for vocational training means you&#x27;re effectively tuning out the abstract arts and sciences and... oh, the humanities. These fields don&#x27;t usually&#x2F;directly translate into a financial success, but they broaden our perspective and deepen our experience. And in doing so provide the tools and language to more effectively analyse and engage with human culture.<p>And to a certain extent, &quot;true&quot; art is antithetical to capitalism, in a similar way that &quot;true&quot; journalism is antithetical to surveillance (honesty&#x2F;transparency vs main-stream popularity), and I&#x27;d argue equally as important. For that reason these fields <i>absolutely</i> should be subsidised, otherwise art becomes about marketing, journalism becomes about propaganda, and science becomes about start-ups...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Lazare</author><text>Okay, but how does that translate into policy?<p>Fact 1: Education in the US is very expensive, in large part because the ready availability of loans removes most downwards pressure on prices.<p>Fact 2: If you are loaned money to obtain a degree which is not economically valued then you will not be able to pay it back.<p>Fact 3: If you loan people money without expecting people to pay it back, then it&#x27;s not a loan, it&#x27;s a grant.<p>Fact 4: If you offer grants to high school graduates to take non-economically values classes, a lot of them will do so. This pushes up the cost of the education, and pushes down the wages graduates will make, excerbating the problem.<p>&gt; For that reason these fields absolutely should be subsidised<p>Perhaps. But in which case by how much, by whom, and in what fashion? Because offhand offering free arts degrees sounds like one of the worst possible ways you could subsidise art as a field, and one of the best ways you can cause a lot of harm to young people while enriching the existing education institutions and not really advancing art at all.<p>Mind you...<p>&gt; otherwise art becomes about marketing, journalism becomes about propaganda, and science becomes about start-ups...<p>Artists, journalists, and scientists have always had to earn a living. To the best of my knowledge, there was no &quot;golden age&quot;. We&#x27;ve never subsidized artists (or scientists, or journalists) in the way you say we should; the future you&#x27;re afraid of &quot;becoming&quot; is our present and past.</text></comment> | <story><title>U.S. Citizens Now Hold About $1.3 Trillion in Student Loan Debt</title><url>http://financeography.com/us-citizens-hold-about-13-trillion-student-loan-debt/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>skwosh</author><text>There seems to be a strong sentiment in this thread that the only value provided by education is the contribution to career (e.g. that loans should only be provided for financially viable courses, that studying arts is as useful to one&#x27;s career as studying finger painting, etc).<p>This just seems <i>so</i> wrong.<p>Optimising for vocational training means you&#x27;re effectively tuning out the abstract arts and sciences and... oh, the humanities. These fields don&#x27;t usually&#x2F;directly translate into a financial success, but they broaden our perspective and deepen our experience. And in doing so provide the tools and language to more effectively analyse and engage with human culture.<p>And to a certain extent, &quot;true&quot; art is antithetical to capitalism, in a similar way that &quot;true&quot; journalism is antithetical to surveillance (honesty&#x2F;transparency vs main-stream popularity), and I&#x27;d argue equally as important. For that reason these fields <i>absolutely</i> should be subsidised, otherwise art becomes about marketing, journalism becomes about propaganda, and science becomes about start-ups...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>acchow</author><text>You really don&#x27;t need to pay tuition to gain a rich education in art and humanities and sciences if you want one. There are resources aplenty - buy a book!<p>I&#x27;d even go so far as to say the majority of college grads learned almost nothing during college, and the few who did would, after a few years of maturity, pick up a book of their own free will and enrich themselves.<p>I think the costs of university (huge amounts of debt and enormous human and physical resources put into holding lectures in giant buildings that need to be maintained and heated, the social divide created between those who got to hang out among the privileged for 4 years and those who couldn&#x27;t) generally outweighs the hypothetical benefits you mention that some people might gain during college. Except perhaps for a few fields (like medicine, or dramatical arts, or music) where you can&#x27;t just pick up a textbook and learn it all.</text></comment> |
23,053,828 | 23,053,891 | 1 | 2 | 23,052,108 | train | <story><title>Ubuntu 20.04 LTS’ snap obsession has snapped me off of it</title><url>https://jatan.blog/2020/05/02/ubuntu-snap-obsession-has-snapped-me-off-of-it/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nromiun</author><text>&gt; Snap applications auto-update and that’s fine if Ubuntu wants to keep systems secure. But it can’t even be turned off manually.<p>OMG. Is this real? This is the exact reason I use Linux instead of Windows 10 or macOS. I am not a grandma who can&#x27;t stay up to date on tech news. At the least there should be a toggle for power users. But no, you can only defer it. Am I the only one who doesn&#x27;t like it when your already slow internet slows down even further? It feels like hell when you are working.<p>I am not upgrading to this. I have been using Arch Linux as my personal OS. Maybe I should look into Debian for my VMs.<p>And just read this thread[1]. Is this how they treat their users? Even Reddit is better then this.<p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;discourse.ubuntu.com&#x2F;t&#x2F;is-ubuntu-software-going-to-be-remove-for-snap-snap-store&#x2F;14542&#x2F;58" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;discourse.ubuntu.com&#x2F;t&#x2F;is-ubuntu-software-going-to-b...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ultrarunner</author><text>We work at remote sites on cell connections. Part of the reason we moved to Ubuntu from Windows was the ability to control data usage, which is expensive. Automatic updates quickly become a significant slice of the bill when random decisions like these get pushed on users. Ubuntu was supposed to help prevent us from needing to chase this.</text></comment> | <story><title>Ubuntu 20.04 LTS’ snap obsession has snapped me off of it</title><url>https://jatan.blog/2020/05/02/ubuntu-snap-obsession-has-snapped-me-off-of-it/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nromiun</author><text>&gt; Snap applications auto-update and that’s fine if Ubuntu wants to keep systems secure. But it can’t even be turned off manually.<p>OMG. Is this real? This is the exact reason I use Linux instead of Windows 10 or macOS. I am not a grandma who can&#x27;t stay up to date on tech news. At the least there should be a toggle for power users. But no, you can only defer it. Am I the only one who doesn&#x27;t like it when your already slow internet slows down even further? It feels like hell when you are working.<p>I am not upgrading to this. I have been using Arch Linux as my personal OS. Maybe I should look into Debian for my VMs.<p>And just read this thread[1]. Is this how they treat their users? Even Reddit is better then this.<p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;discourse.ubuntu.com&#x2F;t&#x2F;is-ubuntu-software-going-to-be-remove-for-snap-snap-store&#x2F;14542&#x2F;58" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;discourse.ubuntu.com&#x2F;t&#x2F;is-ubuntu-software-going-to-b...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>DoofusOfDeath</author><text>I agree entirely. Unavoidable updates were one of the key factors in my choice to avoid Windows 10 for business-critical computing. I standardized on Ubuntu instead, but this could be a deal-breaker for me.<p>I hope Canonical fixes this immediately. I&#x27;m not eager to spend time re-researching to market for a suitable OS.</text></comment> |
14,706,694 | 14,706,772 | 1 | 3 | 14,706,224 | train | <story><title>Tesla drops 7% after Goldman Sachs says the stock is worth $180</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/05/tesla-drops-7-after-goldman-sachs-says-the-stock-is-worth-180</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>redm</author><text>I just don&#x27;t see Tesla becoming mainstream before traditional manufacturers fill the potential market opportunity. Volvo just announced they will only produce Hybrids in the future. [1] All the major manufacturers have hybrid programs they are bringing to the mass market.<p>It&#x27;s not that Tesla will or won&#x27;t be successful, it&#x27;s just that as it succeeds, it&#x27;s changing the ecosystem around it. Traditional manufacturers offerings are becoming more and more attractive.<p>I think Tesla is appealing to the tech&#x2F;gadget market right now. For me, everything about Tesla cars and its buying process feels new and fresh. But..<p>When it comes time to buy my next car I&#x27;ll probably end up going to traditional car dealerships, looking around, test driving, and picking something through a traditional channel. It&#x27;s just the path of least resistance and there&#x27;s a lot more variety.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.yorkdispatch.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;money&#x2F;business&#x2F;2017&#x2F;07&#x2F;05&#x2F;volvo-make-electric-hybrid-vehicles&#x2F;103446460&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.yorkdispatch.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;money&#x2F;business&#x2F;2017&#x2F;07&#x2F;05&#x2F;...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>primigenus</author><text>&gt; It&#x27;s not that Tesla will or won&#x27;t be successful, it&#x27;s just that as it succeeds, it&#x27;s changing the ecosystem around it.<p>I invested in Tesla because I wanted this to happen. For me, Tesla is not successful <i>unless</i> it changes the ecosystem around it. If, while doing that, it goes under as a car manufacturer, but in the end changed the ecosystem for the better, that&#x27;s great! Sometimes a thing only exists in order to make itself redundant.<p>I doubt this will happen, though. Instead, I expect it to be like the iPhone vs Android: there will continue to be a premium electric car by the people who launched the first real contender, but other companies will outscale them and eventually provide really competitive products. That&#x27;s also fine. (Note that Android was a newcomer as well....)</text></comment> | <story><title>Tesla drops 7% after Goldman Sachs says the stock is worth $180</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/05/tesla-drops-7-after-goldman-sachs-says-the-stock-is-worth-180</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>redm</author><text>I just don&#x27;t see Tesla becoming mainstream before traditional manufacturers fill the potential market opportunity. Volvo just announced they will only produce Hybrids in the future. [1] All the major manufacturers have hybrid programs they are bringing to the mass market.<p>It&#x27;s not that Tesla will or won&#x27;t be successful, it&#x27;s just that as it succeeds, it&#x27;s changing the ecosystem around it. Traditional manufacturers offerings are becoming more and more attractive.<p>I think Tesla is appealing to the tech&#x2F;gadget market right now. For me, everything about Tesla cars and its buying process feels new and fresh. But..<p>When it comes time to buy my next car I&#x27;ll probably end up going to traditional car dealerships, looking around, test driving, and picking something through a traditional channel. It&#x27;s just the path of least resistance and there&#x27;s a lot more variety.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.yorkdispatch.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;money&#x2F;business&#x2F;2017&#x2F;07&#x2F;05&#x2F;volvo-make-electric-hybrid-vehicles&#x2F;103446460&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.yorkdispatch.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;money&#x2F;business&#x2F;2017&#x2F;07&#x2F;05&#x2F;...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>HiJon89</author><text>There&#x27;s good reason to believe that electric cars are the future and will soon be a massive market. I think there&#x27;s also good reason to believe that Tesla has a big head start on the competition and has the opportunity to dominate this market if they execute well.<p>For example, just look at the battery packs which are essential to an electric car. Tesla was unable to find a supplier that could meet their requirements, so they designed and produced their own batteries and now have a $5 billion gigafactory to increase production volume and decrease costs (with more gigafactories on the way). If you&#x27;re another car company trying to enter the EV market, what are your options? Buy inferior battery packs at a higher cost from a different supplier? Try to replicate Tesla&#x27;s battery technology and then convince your board to build a gigafactory so you can produce them at the required volume and cost?</text></comment> |
17,998,009 | 17,997,606 | 1 | 2 | 17,993,171 | train | <story><title>WwwBasic – An implementation of BASIC designed to be easy to run on the Web</title><url>https://github.com/google/wwwbasic</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pedasmith</author><text>New versions of BASIC are surprisingly common (heck, I even have one that&#x27;s gotten some super-nice comments).<p>Mind-blowing BASIC example from the 1970&#x27;s:<p><pre><code> 100 A$=&quot;ABCDEF&quot;
110 A$ = REP (&quot;123&quot;, 4, 0)
120 PRINT A$
</code></pre>
The result is ABC123DEF -- at position 4 (strings start at 1), replace 0 characters with &quot;123&quot;. So the REP function looks at the statement it&#x27;s part of, finds the variable that is being assigned to, and uses that as the starting string (!). It&#x27;s kind of like a function, only with a weird implied variable that only works in an assignment.<p>You can&#x27;t just PRINT the result directly, because then how would REP know what the string to change is?<p>Nowadays &quot;weird&quot; syntax has some solid foundational reason why it&#x27;s useful or important. This not-really-a-function, though, simply has no justification whatsoever.<p>(This example is from the BASIC embedded in the Tektronix 4050 terminal).<p>There are enough variants of BASIC that there&#x27;s a really nifty handbook with the differences at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;details&#x2F;Basic_Handbook_2nd_Edition_1981_CompuSoft_Publishing" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;details&#x2F;Basic_Handbook_2nd_Edition_1981_...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tralarpa</author><text>I did my first serious programming steps with BASIC on the C64 and the Amiga.<p>The (actually second) BASIC interpreter on the Amiga was made by Microsoft. It was great and horrible at the same time. Great because it had while-loops, labels instead of line numbers, and basic (no pun intended) support for the Amiga GUI, i.e you could open windows and create menus. Horrible because it was super slow and, for some reasons unknown to me, Microsoft had decided to not implement stack frames for subroutines. So, all local variables in subroutines were static and recursions were not allowed.<p>The weird thing: You still had to write the &quot;STATIC&quot; keyword although <i>all</i> subroutines were static anyway! (I assume the STATIC keyword was optional in the other Microsoft BASIC version and non-static subroutines were supported there)</text></comment> | <story><title>WwwBasic – An implementation of BASIC designed to be easy to run on the Web</title><url>https://github.com/google/wwwbasic</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pedasmith</author><text>New versions of BASIC are surprisingly common (heck, I even have one that&#x27;s gotten some super-nice comments).<p>Mind-blowing BASIC example from the 1970&#x27;s:<p><pre><code> 100 A$=&quot;ABCDEF&quot;
110 A$ = REP (&quot;123&quot;, 4, 0)
120 PRINT A$
</code></pre>
The result is ABC123DEF -- at position 4 (strings start at 1), replace 0 characters with &quot;123&quot;. So the REP function looks at the statement it&#x27;s part of, finds the variable that is being assigned to, and uses that as the starting string (!). It&#x27;s kind of like a function, only with a weird implied variable that only works in an assignment.<p>You can&#x27;t just PRINT the result directly, because then how would REP know what the string to change is?<p>Nowadays &quot;weird&quot; syntax has some solid foundational reason why it&#x27;s useful or important. This not-really-a-function, though, simply has no justification whatsoever.<p>(This example is from the BASIC embedded in the Tektronix 4050 terminal).<p>There are enough variants of BASIC that there&#x27;s a really nifty handbook with the differences at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;details&#x2F;Basic_Handbook_2nd_Edition_1981_CompuSoft_Publishing" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;details&#x2F;Basic_Handbook_2nd_Edition_1981_...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pvg</author><text>Isn&#x27;t that just someone putting some weird thing in some oddball BASIC implementation? I don&#x27;t think any of the popular ones did anything like that.</text></comment> |
33,832,280 | 33,831,635 | 1 | 2 | 33,830,014 | train | <story><title>'Nobody Wants to Work Anymore' Meme Cites Real Newspaper Articles</title><url>https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/nobody-wants-to-work-anymore/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ldjkfkdsjnv</author><text>Its barely working. Maybe 5-15 hours a week. The income is actually surprising though, can range 5k-15k a month</text></item><item><author>binarymax</author><text>&quot;They make money through odd jobs, day trading, selling online products.&quot;<p>...Is this not working?</text></item><item><author>ldjkfkdsjnv</author><text>True story, as an american, most people I grew up with are not working corporate jobs. Of my cousins, probably 60% are willfully unemployed and refuse to work for anyone. They make money through odd jobs, day trading, selling online products. Anything to not have to work. The crazy thing is they are generally very happy and have had not trouble dating. Its the people day in and out in their 150k-300k a year corporate job that seem the most miserable to me.<p>For reference I&#x27;m white upper middle class, and all the people spoken about above are college educated.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rqtwteye</author><text>If they make 5k-15k with that amount of work and freedom I’d say they are the smart ones and people working the 40h+ corporate job are the suckers.</text></comment> | <story><title>'Nobody Wants to Work Anymore' Meme Cites Real Newspaper Articles</title><url>https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/nobody-wants-to-work-anymore/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ldjkfkdsjnv</author><text>Its barely working. Maybe 5-15 hours a week. The income is actually surprising though, can range 5k-15k a month</text></item><item><author>binarymax</author><text>&quot;They make money through odd jobs, day trading, selling online products.&quot;<p>...Is this not working?</text></item><item><author>ldjkfkdsjnv</author><text>True story, as an american, most people I grew up with are not working corporate jobs. Of my cousins, probably 60% are willfully unemployed and refuse to work for anyone. They make money through odd jobs, day trading, selling online products. Anything to not have to work. The crazy thing is they are generally very happy and have had not trouble dating. Its the people day in and out in their 150k-300k a year corporate job that seem the most miserable to me.<p>For reference I&#x27;m white upper middle class, and all the people spoken about above are college educated.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bodge5000</author><text>The idea of making half that with those kind of hours seems insane to me. I know these people exist, but have no idea how. If anyone has any specific examples of what they&#x27;re doing, I&#x27;d greatly appreciate it</text></comment> |
24,093,250 | 24,092,804 | 1 | 2 | 24,090,492 | train | <story><title>Oatly: The New Coke?</title><url>https://divinations.substack.com/p/oatly-the-new-coke#</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>317070</author><text>As a non-coffee drinker, I drink my oatly pure, in the same way as I drank my milk growing up. So yeah, 340 ml is apt when I use my big mug.<p>You make it sound as if no-one drinks pure milk in your environment? I find THAT weird.</text></item><item><author>ejolto</author><text>&gt; The author engages in a little deceptive rhetoric himself by setting a 12oz serving as the baseline.<p>Yeah what is up with that? 12 oz is over 340 ml, who puts that much milk in their coffee? I had to measure the volume of my coffee cup, it&#x27;s 250 ml or 8.8 oz.<p>I usually drink my coffee black, but if I do have milk in it it is usually a tenth of what the author uses. Unless the author is drinking a quarter gallon of coffee at a time he&#x27;s not drinking coffee, but really drinking milk with a splash of coffee.</text></item><item><author>cribbles</author><text>I&#x27;m sympathetic to marketing counterfactuals, so I wanted to like this article, but its claims did not sway me.<p>- The appalling environmental footprint of the dairy industry was never addressed.<p>- The canola oil claims cited were nowhere near conclusive (see twanvl and NotOscarWilde&#x27;s comments below).<p>- The nutritional comparison seemed to me to be more or less trivial.<p>Okay, it&#x27;s got a higher glycemic index and similar sugar content compared to cow milk. If you share the author&#x27;s concern about tacitly &quot;health-adjacent&quot; marketing, this is problematic, but not an outright lie. At worst the product has a pretty comparable nutritional portfolio to cow milk. Seems appropriate for a &quot;milk substitute,&quot; no?<p>The author engages in a little deceptive rhetoric himself by setting a 12oz serving as the baseline. It&#x27;s true that a portion that size is bad for you. Lattes are bad for you. Like many people, though, I only rarely use milk substitutes to add a dash of not-coffee to coffee that would otherwise be too hot or too burnt. Guess I shouldn&#x27;t be concerned?<p>- Most glaringly, the moral dimension of dairy consumption is never addressed. I won&#x27;t harp on about this too much as many other commenters have already, but this seemed like a glaring omission: who cares about sugar content if the alternative is needless suffering? I guess you could have the best of both worlds by not drinking a milk substitute in the first place, but that&#x27;s not Oatly&#x27;s market segment, so...<p>Overall, this article came away as basically validating Oatly&#x27;s marketing claims to me. Which is frustrating, since as I stated above, I&#x27;m biased toward marketing scrutiny!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sillysaurusx</author><text>It&#x27;s absolutely fascinating to read these replies! We have a very diverse set of people here.<p>I had no idea that people <i>didn&#x27;t</i> drink milk on its own. Apparently some Europeans don&#x27;t. I eat cereal mostly to drink milk. If Oatly was a good substitute, I&#x27;d probably have started using it. (I haven&#x27;t tried it yet.)<p>340ml is 0.08 gallons. That&#x27;s consistent with &quot;about a bowl of cereal.&quot;</text></comment> | <story><title>Oatly: The New Coke?</title><url>https://divinations.substack.com/p/oatly-the-new-coke#</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>317070</author><text>As a non-coffee drinker, I drink my oatly pure, in the same way as I drank my milk growing up. So yeah, 340 ml is apt when I use my big mug.<p>You make it sound as if no-one drinks pure milk in your environment? I find THAT weird.</text></item><item><author>ejolto</author><text>&gt; The author engages in a little deceptive rhetoric himself by setting a 12oz serving as the baseline.<p>Yeah what is up with that? 12 oz is over 340 ml, who puts that much milk in their coffee? I had to measure the volume of my coffee cup, it&#x27;s 250 ml or 8.8 oz.<p>I usually drink my coffee black, but if I do have milk in it it is usually a tenth of what the author uses. Unless the author is drinking a quarter gallon of coffee at a time he&#x27;s not drinking coffee, but really drinking milk with a splash of coffee.</text></item><item><author>cribbles</author><text>I&#x27;m sympathetic to marketing counterfactuals, so I wanted to like this article, but its claims did not sway me.<p>- The appalling environmental footprint of the dairy industry was never addressed.<p>- The canola oil claims cited were nowhere near conclusive (see twanvl and NotOscarWilde&#x27;s comments below).<p>- The nutritional comparison seemed to me to be more or less trivial.<p>Okay, it&#x27;s got a higher glycemic index and similar sugar content compared to cow milk. If you share the author&#x27;s concern about tacitly &quot;health-adjacent&quot; marketing, this is problematic, but not an outright lie. At worst the product has a pretty comparable nutritional portfolio to cow milk. Seems appropriate for a &quot;milk substitute,&quot; no?<p>The author engages in a little deceptive rhetoric himself by setting a 12oz serving as the baseline. It&#x27;s true that a portion that size is bad for you. Lattes are bad for you. Like many people, though, I only rarely use milk substitutes to add a dash of not-coffee to coffee that would otherwise be too hot or too burnt. Guess I shouldn&#x27;t be concerned?<p>- Most glaringly, the moral dimension of dairy consumption is never addressed. I won&#x27;t harp on about this too much as many other commenters have already, but this seemed like a glaring omission: who cares about sugar content if the alternative is needless suffering? I guess you could have the best of both worlds by not drinking a milk substitute in the first place, but that&#x27;s not Oatly&#x27;s market segment, so...<p>Overall, this article came away as basically validating Oatly&#x27;s marketing claims to me. Which is frustrating, since as I stated above, I&#x27;m biased toward marketing scrutiny!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mgbmtl</author><text>Not judging, but around me, it&#x27;s usually rare to drink milk after the age of 8 (my kid stopped liking milk around that time, and most of their friends too).<p>We do eat a lot of yogourt and cheese. The province use to over-produce milk and there was so much advertising to consume it. Everyone kind of got fed up I guess.</text></comment> |
19,518,151 | 19,516,410 | 1 | 2 | 19,515,362 | train | <story><title>An amphibian fungus has become “the most deadly pathogen known”</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/28/science/frogs-fungus-bd.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>openasocket</author><text>How on Earth does someone discover that? What possible series of events or hypotheses would lead someone to perform such an experiment?</text></item><item><author>tptacek</author><text>Fun factoid: in the 1930s, it was discovered that you could inject human urine into African clawed frogs; if the frogs subsequently ovulated, the human was pregnant, and for something like 2 decades this became the universal standard test for human pregnancy. It&#x27;s thought by some that the circulation of those African clawed frogs introduced chytrid pathogens to habitats around the world, since the first recorded pathological chytrid specimens were from South Africa.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>busyant</author><text>I don&#x27;t know why, but this conversation reminds me of a guy I used to work with.<p>The guy had studied animal husbandry and he told my co-workers and me that if you inserted a foreign object (about the size of a quarter) up into the reproductive area of a hen at _just the right time_, the hen would often lay an egg with the foreign object trapped inside.[1]<p>Our business plan:<p>* get a bunch of hens<p>* have guys mail $500 + engagement rings to us.<p>* insert engagement ring into hen<p>* ship back ring-encased egg to the dudes.<p>* dudes ask girlfriends to cook an omelette...<p>I still wonder how anyone figured that out.<p>[1] There might have been surgery involved. Can&#x27;t remember.</text></comment> | <story><title>An amphibian fungus has become “the most deadly pathogen known”</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/28/science/frogs-fungus-bd.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>openasocket</author><text>How on Earth does someone discover that? What possible series of events or hypotheses would lead someone to perform such an experiment?</text></item><item><author>tptacek</author><text>Fun factoid: in the 1930s, it was discovered that you could inject human urine into African clawed frogs; if the frogs subsequently ovulated, the human was pregnant, and for something like 2 decades this became the universal standard test for human pregnancy. It&#x27;s thought by some that the circulation of those African clawed frogs introduced chytrid pathogens to habitats around the world, since the first recorded pathological chytrid specimens were from South Africa.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>shoes_for_thee</author><text>perhaps it was known that hCG is present in the urine of pregnant women.<p>and also that hCG induces ovulation in frogs.<p>If injecting frogs with urine is cheaper than other methods of detecting signaling horomones.. well, there ya go.</text></comment> |
17,201,556 | 17,201,565 | 1 | 2 | 17,201,485 | train | <story><title>Canada hits back at 'punitive' U.S. tariffs in 'turning point' in relations</title><url>http://theprovince.com/pmn/news-pmn/canada-news-pmn/newsalert-canada-responds-to-u-s-tariffs-with-its-own-countermeasures/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>huangc10</author><text>Even though this decision may potentially affect my TN status in the states and more importantly will result in negative consequences for both countries, I am 100% behind Trudeau on this.</text></comment> | <story><title>Canada hits back at 'punitive' U.S. tariffs in 'turning point' in relations</title><url>http://theprovince.com/pmn/news-pmn/canada-news-pmn/newsalert-canada-responds-to-u-s-tariffs-with-its-own-countermeasures/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>wwweston</author><text>Opinion: Trade sanctions against America won’t work. Sanctioning Trump himself might.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.macleans.ca&#x2F;opinion&#x2F;trade-sanctions-against-america-wont-work-sanctioning-trump-himself-might&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.macleans.ca&#x2F;opinion&#x2F;trade-sanctions-against-amer...</a></text></comment> |
15,626,836 | 15,626,501 | 1 | 3 | 15,624,672 | train | <story><title>Create React apps using Kotlin</title><url>https://github.com/JetBrains/create-react-kotlin-app</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>maxfurman</author><text>Does this mean that Kotlin -&gt; React -&gt; React Native is feasible too? It&#x27;s a bit ridiculous on its face, but is there a better way to run Kotlin on iOS? Kotlin is a godsend for Android but if you have to support both platforms one codebase is better</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>on_and_off</author><text>Kotlin Native is what you are looking for.<p>Or maybe j2Objc<p>One codebase for both platforms is not necessarily what you want though.<p>Let me rephrase, it might be what you want for a pretty small app : if you have to create an app for a restaurant with orders and menu, a cross platform solution is probably the best use of your time.<p>For anything bigger, it becomes a harder sell. All these solutions tend to have the same downsides :<p>- limited access to new platform features. Especially damaging when Apple tells you that you are going to get featured if you do a Watch app but your SDK does not support that yet.<p>- one design does not scale well to two platforms with different UX and features.<p>- one more layer of abstraction to manage; making maintainability harder<p>I think that there is clearly a space for a cross platform business logic framework though. It tends to be the same on both platform with minor differences. It is a pity that only j2objc seems to clearly target this. k2objc&#x2F;swift would be awesome.</text></comment> | <story><title>Create React apps using Kotlin</title><url>https://github.com/JetBrains/create-react-kotlin-app</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>maxfurman</author><text>Does this mean that Kotlin -&gt; React -&gt; React Native is feasible too? It&#x27;s a bit ridiculous on its face, but is there a better way to run Kotlin on iOS? Kotlin is a godsend for Android but if you have to support both platforms one codebase is better</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ceronman</author><text>It&#x27;s not production ready yet, but Kotlin Native is probably the way to go for iOS support.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;JetBrains&#x2F;kotlin-native" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;JetBrains&#x2F;kotlin-native</a></text></comment> |
1,898,899 | 1,898,966 | 1 | 2 | 1,898,573 | train | <story><title>Anic -- Faster than C, Safer than Java, Simpler than *sh</title><url>http://code.google.com/p/anic/wiki/Tutorial</url><text>ANI is a dataflow programming language, with strong typing, implicit parallelism, oop and the beggining of an implementation.<p>"Q: How does ANI resolve the fundamental issue of deadlock in parallel programming? How does the Dining Philosophers example on the main page work?<p>A: In ANI, under the hood, pipes implicitly enforce total resource orderings for acquiring data. Somewhat surprisingly, deadlock theory guarantees that there will be no deadlock if this condition is met."</text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>gibeson</author><text>Still reading through, it's definitely piqued my interest. However, in the interest of consistency [as it translates to readability] two issues right away:<p>1) Get rid of the infix modifier to the filter. The statement is made that in ANI everything flows left to right. The infix operator while providing familiar 1+6-&#62;7 notation conflicts with the above flow statement. 1,6+-&#62;7 while not immediately familiar is easy to understand after explained. However, added special case rules for infix operation muddies the water.<p>2) In the following code sample provided, the left to right rule is again not followed and thus leads to increased difficulty in [human] parsing:<p>multiPrint= [string\ s, int\ times] {<p><pre><code> \\[std.gen] &#60;- \times s -&#62;std.out;
</code></pre>
};<p>"Hello, World!\n", 10 -&#62;multiPrint;<p>Instead, to be consistent and follow the previous left to right flow rule, use the following syntax:<p>multiPrint= [string\ s, int\ times] {<p><pre><code> \times -&#62; \\[std.gen];
s -&#62;std.out;
</code></pre>
};<p>"Hello, World!\n", 10 -&#62;multiPrint;<p>In general if there is an everything flows left to right rule, there should not be a &#60;- operator.<p>imho</text></comment> | <story><title>Anic -- Faster than C, Safer than Java, Simpler than *sh</title><url>http://code.google.com/p/anic/wiki/Tutorial</url><text>ANI is a dataflow programming language, with strong typing, implicit parallelism, oop and the beggining of an implementation.<p>"Q: How does ANI resolve the fundamental issue of deadlock in parallel programming? How does the Dining Philosophers example on the main page work?<p>A: In ANI, under the hood, pipes implicitly enforce total resource orderings for acquiring data. Somewhat surprisingly, deadlock theory guarantees that there will be no deadlock if this condition is met."</text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>milkshakes</author><text>gotta love the url
<i><a href="http://code.google.com/p/anic/" rel="nofollow">http://code.google.com/p/anic/</a> </i></text></comment> |
26,332,406 | 26,330,827 | 1 | 2 | 26,327,678 | train | <story><title>A Cephalopod Has Passed a Cognitive Test Designed for Human Children</title><url>https://www.sciencealert.com/cuttlefish-can-pass-a-cognitive-test-designed-for-children</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>40four</author><text>I agree with the main thesis of the article, stated in the first paragraph. That idea of <i>”how important it is for us humans to not underestimate animal intelligence”</i>.<p>I think folks in modern times are less &amp; less prone to thinking animals are ‘dumb’. But 1 or 2 generations ago this was not the case. I think humans for a long time have regarded animal intelligence in an inferior light.<p>Cephalopods have proven to to be incredibly intelligent, and emotional. I think you could easily argue many of them are smarter than human children, maybe even a lot of adults :)<p>I highly recommend an episode of ‘Nature’ I saw recently on PBS about octopi. It’s called “Octopus: Making Contact”. It’s the story of a professor who decided to install a tank and keep an octopus in his home, and the relationship he &amp; his daughter developed with it. Absolutely stunning!<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pbs.org&#x2F;wnet&#x2F;nature&#x2F;octopus-making-contact-preview-a98u9n&#x2F;19851&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pbs.org&#x2F;wnet&#x2F;nature&#x2F;octopus-making-contact-previ...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pbs.org&#x2F;wnet&#x2F;nature&#x2F;baby-cephalopods-first-moments-tzuuij&#x2F;19380&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pbs.org&#x2F;wnet&#x2F;nature&#x2F;baby-cephalopods-first-momen...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lurquer</author><text>&gt; I think folks in modern times are less &amp; less prone to thinking animals are ‘dumb’. But 1 or 2 generations ago this was not the case. I think humans for a long time have regarded animal intelligence in an inferior light.<p>Great post. Respectfully, though, I disagree with the excerpt above.<p>I find that urbanization has led to a disconnect between people and animals. In times past, a person would have regular contact with a host of domesticated animals (cattle, horses, mules, donkeys, sheep, goat, chickens, pigs, etc.) as well as the wild animals that are a part of everyday life in rural settings (rodents, possums, armadillos, foxes, coyotes, snakes, deer, birds, etc.)<p>Without question, people in the past had a far greater appreciation of the ‘intelligence’ and behavior of animals than modern city-dwellers.<p>One need look no further than the numerous metaphors that have been passed down from these non-urban times: stubborn as a mule, wise as serpents, cunning like a fox, horse-sense, wise as an owl, etc...<p>In short, I’d suggest that the more modern (or, perhaps, urbanized is a better word) the LESS appreciation one finds for animal intelligence.</text></comment> | <story><title>A Cephalopod Has Passed a Cognitive Test Designed for Human Children</title><url>https://www.sciencealert.com/cuttlefish-can-pass-a-cognitive-test-designed-for-children</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>40four</author><text>I agree with the main thesis of the article, stated in the first paragraph. That idea of <i>”how important it is for us humans to not underestimate animal intelligence”</i>.<p>I think folks in modern times are less &amp; less prone to thinking animals are ‘dumb’. But 1 or 2 generations ago this was not the case. I think humans for a long time have regarded animal intelligence in an inferior light.<p>Cephalopods have proven to to be incredibly intelligent, and emotional. I think you could easily argue many of them are smarter than human children, maybe even a lot of adults :)<p>I highly recommend an episode of ‘Nature’ I saw recently on PBS about octopi. It’s called “Octopus: Making Contact”. It’s the story of a professor who decided to install a tank and keep an octopus in his home, and the relationship he &amp; his daughter developed with it. Absolutely stunning!<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pbs.org&#x2F;wnet&#x2F;nature&#x2F;octopus-making-contact-preview-a98u9n&#x2F;19851&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pbs.org&#x2F;wnet&#x2F;nature&#x2F;octopus-making-contact-previ...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pbs.org&#x2F;wnet&#x2F;nature&#x2F;baby-cephalopods-first-moments-tzuuij&#x2F;19380&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pbs.org&#x2F;wnet&#x2F;nature&#x2F;baby-cephalopods-first-momen...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>throwanem</author><text>&gt; I think folks in modern times are less &amp; less prone to thinking animals are ‘dumb’. But 1 or 2 generations ago this was not the case.<p>The naturalist Jean-Henri Fabre, in the 19th century, made an extensive study of solitary, spider-hunting wasps. Much of what he discovered, with regard to the surprising complexity of their hunting and nesting behavior, became well known in his day - he was one of the first writers I discovered when I started delving into the literature to feed my own burgeoning interest in the aculeates, and one of the reasons his work is so easy to come by is that it was popular, and thus well preserved.<p>It was very much new to me, though; to whatever extent it had entered common knowledge a century and a half ago, it has since exited again. If anything, I think that in recent generations we have become <i>less</i> likely to recognize complex behavior and intelligence in nonhuman animals, not more so; that may be changing, but if so, I think it must have begun quite recently.</text></comment> |
36,200,537 | 36,199,926 | 1 | 2 | 36,193,326 | train | <story><title>The Rust I wanted had no future</title><url>https://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/307291.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>divan</author><text>It&#x27;s crazy that the programming community even accepted the concept of async&#x2F;await as a sane one.<p>Being sync or async is essentially a property of the attention of the caller, not of the action itself. Is &quot;eating a donut&quot; a sync or async action? If I&#x27;m focusing all my attention on it, essentially putting all tasks aside (after) - then it&#x27;s a synchronous action. If I&#x27;m reading a book&#x2F;watching a video&#x2F;walking&#x2F;etc, while eating – it&#x27;s an async action.<p>How does &quot;func EatADonut() async {}&quot; aka &quot;eating a donut is an inherently async action&quot; even make sense to people?</text></item><item><author>sph</author><text>Very interesting insight from Graydon, in hindsight I too would have loved something more towards ML than C++. I never liked the kitchen sink approach that I see first C++, now Rust moving towards, but I respect what Rust has managed to solidify into. It&#x27;s a good language.<p>That said, I still hate async with a passion, it makes the language more complex and not very elegant (i.e. function coloring). And now that I know how it works behind the scene (thanks to Jon Gjengset [1]), it feels so complicated and hacky, a mediocre very high level concept that someone managed to implement as a zero-cost abstraction. Impressive, but still a bad idea.<p>I&#x27;m sure the pro of having a BDFL instead of a committee is being able to follow a singular vision, instead of trying to appease members by adding the fad du jour which might stray a little too far from the original vision. Too many chefs in the kitchen and all.<p>1: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ThjvMReOXYM">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ThjvMReOXYM</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pmoleri</author><text>&gt; How does &quot;func EatADonut() async {}&quot; aka &quot;eating a donut is an inherently async action&quot; even make sense to people?<p>Of course it does, read it as &quot;beware, something blocking down the road&quot;.<p>If you can EatADonout without blocking, please do, but want it or not that&#x27;s a different implementation, one that doesn&#x27;t block and the signature it&#x27;s telling you so.<p>We&#x27;re so used to sync and having hidden blocking operations. I wonder if in an alternate universe the first languages considered the blocking&#x2F;async nature of operations and then some newer languages considered hiding this information into seemingly sync functions would produce similar but opposite outrage against it.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Rust I wanted had no future</title><url>https://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/307291.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>divan</author><text>It&#x27;s crazy that the programming community even accepted the concept of async&#x2F;await as a sane one.<p>Being sync or async is essentially a property of the attention of the caller, not of the action itself. Is &quot;eating a donut&quot; a sync or async action? If I&#x27;m focusing all my attention on it, essentially putting all tasks aside (after) - then it&#x27;s a synchronous action. If I&#x27;m reading a book&#x2F;watching a video&#x2F;walking&#x2F;etc, while eating – it&#x27;s an async action.<p>How does &quot;func EatADonut() async {}&quot; aka &quot;eating a donut is an inherently async action&quot; even make sense to people?</text></item><item><author>sph</author><text>Very interesting insight from Graydon, in hindsight I too would have loved something more towards ML than C++. I never liked the kitchen sink approach that I see first C++, now Rust moving towards, but I respect what Rust has managed to solidify into. It&#x27;s a good language.<p>That said, I still hate async with a passion, it makes the language more complex and not very elegant (i.e. function coloring). And now that I know how it works behind the scene (thanks to Jon Gjengset [1]), it feels so complicated and hacky, a mediocre very high level concept that someone managed to implement as a zero-cost abstraction. Impressive, but still a bad idea.<p>I&#x27;m sure the pro of having a BDFL instead of a committee is being able to follow a singular vision, instead of trying to appease members by adding the fad du jour which might stray a little too far from the original vision. Too many chefs in the kitchen and all.<p>1: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ThjvMReOXYM">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ThjvMReOXYM</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kmac_</author><text>How about waiting until all or part of donut pack is eaten by multiple eaters? Jokes aside, async&#x2F;await comes from easier handling of a callback code and automatic function splitting. Writing asynchronous donut eating in loops or with yielding of partial results is very easy to swallow with such syntactic sugar. The whole model is very easy to grasp and to work with. I&#x27;m not saying that&#x27;s the best solution but it definitely works well.<p>Regarding stickiness of function colors - it never happens when async&#x2F;await is used correctly (in the same principle as IO monad isn&#x27;t sticky).</text></comment> |
13,610,777 | 13,610,502 | 1 | 3 | 13,609,762 | train | <story><title>Tesla factory worker calls for a union: “We need to stand up for ourselves”</title><url>https://medium.com/@moran2017j/time-for-tesla-to-listen-ab5c6259fc88</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mikeash</author><text>It would be sensible to sacrifice the well-being of a small group in order to save the whole, if it&#x27;s necessary to do so. I don&#x27;t think your inference makes any sense. Poor working conditions for one factory and saving the planet as a whole are different concerns.<p>That said, I would certainly like to see them improve in this area. I&#x27;m a big fan of Tesla, but they are not without their flaws, and working conditions appear to be one of them. They should do better. Not because it somehow conflicts with their mission, but just because it&#x27;s the right thing to do.</text></item><item><author>xmonkee</author><text>Tesla&#x27;s entire marketing message is about how they are saving the planet. It&#x27;s really ironic then how many times I&#x27;ve heard about the terrible working conditions at their factories. One cannot really trust a message about saving the planet when you don&#x27;t care about the people who need the saving.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>AlexandrB</author><text>&gt; It would be sensible to sacrifice the well-being of a small group in order to save the whole, if it&#x27;s necessary to do so.<p>To paraphrase: &quot;The ends justify the means&quot;.<p>I disagree. That road leads to all kinds of evil.</text></comment> | <story><title>Tesla factory worker calls for a union: “We need to stand up for ourselves”</title><url>https://medium.com/@moran2017j/time-for-tesla-to-listen-ab5c6259fc88</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mikeash</author><text>It would be sensible to sacrifice the well-being of a small group in order to save the whole, if it&#x27;s necessary to do so. I don&#x27;t think your inference makes any sense. Poor working conditions for one factory and saving the planet as a whole are different concerns.<p>That said, I would certainly like to see them improve in this area. I&#x27;m a big fan of Tesla, but they are not without their flaws, and working conditions appear to be one of them. They should do better. Not because it somehow conflicts with their mission, but just because it&#x27;s the right thing to do.</text></item><item><author>xmonkee</author><text>Tesla&#x27;s entire marketing message is about how they are saving the planet. It&#x27;s really ironic then how many times I&#x27;ve heard about the terrible working conditions at their factories. One cannot really trust a message about saving the planet when you don&#x27;t care about the people who need the saving.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>yarou</author><text>&gt; Poor working conditions for one factory and saving the planet as a whole are different concerns.<p>I think that&#x27;s contradictory. If you are setting out to save the world, but you can&#x27;t improve factory conditions for your own workers, how have you shown the capability to save the world?<p>I&#x27;m reminded of having a strong AI agent that&#x27;s given the condition &quot;save humanity&quot;. That condition can be satisfied by having no humans on the planet to save.</text></comment> |
16,335,953 | 16,335,942 | 1 | 3 | 16,335,205 | train | <story><title>Why Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google Need to Be Disrupted</title><url>http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/amp15895746/bust-big-tech-silicon-valley/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wpasc</author><text>Working in tech (not companies listed), I get somewhat irked at the recent barrage of &quot;regulate&#x2F;break them up&quot; articles I keep seeing about tech companies.<p>Not being a big fan of regulation in general, but if you&#x27;re going to regulate, should these companies be at the top of your list? There are plenty of wrongs being committed by a variety of companies and industries right now. Not saying these companies are as holier than thou than they preach to be, but they are all innovative and good companies. While they have practices that merit examination, so do many other companies that have histories of being far less transparent and far less proactive about change.<p>I don&#x27;t mean to say the world of tech doesn&#x27;t need a fair amount of reflection and self reflection, but this recent bandwagoning of &quot;regulate tech!&quot; seems reactionary and hype driven as opposed to more well intentioned. This guy was even mentioning his book... The media has covered tech in the last year in a &quot;if it bleeds it leads&quot; capacity that I think undercuts many of the valid points being raised. Idk, I could be wrong, but that&#x27;s my two cents</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Slansitartop</author><text>&gt; if you&#x27;re going to regulate, should these companies be at the top of your list<p>Yes. Two of them (Google and Facebook) basically control a huge fraction of the information people are exposed to on a daily basis, either directly on indirectly. They&#x27;re so dominant and aloof, that they can make or break businesses without even realizing it or caring. Their control over information flow also has important civil society implications.<p>Amazon could conceivably control most American retail activity in the future, though it has a few retail titans that could conceivably stand up to it if they get their acts together [1]. At best, we seem to be headed towards a retail oligopoly.<p>Personally, I&#x27;m much less worried about Apple, its control is much less pervasive. Though I wish there were more alternatives to it other than Android.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fool.com&#x2F;investing&#x2F;general&#x2F;2016&#x2F;01&#x2F;01&#x2F;amazon-is-dominating-the-entire-retail-industry.aspx" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fool.com&#x2F;investing&#x2F;general&#x2F;2016&#x2F;01&#x2F;01&#x2F;amazon-is-...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Why Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google Need to Be Disrupted</title><url>http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/amp15895746/bust-big-tech-silicon-valley/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wpasc</author><text>Working in tech (not companies listed), I get somewhat irked at the recent barrage of &quot;regulate&#x2F;break them up&quot; articles I keep seeing about tech companies.<p>Not being a big fan of regulation in general, but if you&#x27;re going to regulate, should these companies be at the top of your list? There are plenty of wrongs being committed by a variety of companies and industries right now. Not saying these companies are as holier than thou than they preach to be, but they are all innovative and good companies. While they have practices that merit examination, so do many other companies that have histories of being far less transparent and far less proactive about change.<p>I don&#x27;t mean to say the world of tech doesn&#x27;t need a fair amount of reflection and self reflection, but this recent bandwagoning of &quot;regulate tech!&quot; seems reactionary and hype driven as opposed to more well intentioned. This guy was even mentioning his book... The media has covered tech in the last year in a &quot;if it bleeds it leads&quot; capacity that I think undercuts many of the valid points being raised. Idk, I could be wrong, but that&#x27;s my two cents</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>r00fus</author><text>Exactly. Wouldn&#x27;t say, Monsanto or BP be considered far more evil and manipulative? What about those opioids pharmas that have literally destroyed small-town America through outright fraud&#x2F;malfeasance?<p>Yeah, tech companies aint goody two-shoes, but there are bigger fish that need frying.</text></comment> |
28,286,608 | 28,286,445 | 1 | 2 | 28,286,194 | train | <story><title>Y Combinator’s European founder intake continues to grow</title><url>https://sifted.eu/articles/y-combinator-founder-intake/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lrem</author><text>It&#x27;s not &quot;European startup ecosystem&quot;, it&#x27;s basically &quot;European societies&quot;. Imagine how well would SV work if being involved in a bankrupt company (co-founder, major investor, C-suite) made banks refuse to talk to you again for 10-20 years. I believe that was the case in France. You wouldn&#x27;t even be able to open a checking account, never mention any credit again.</text></item><item><author>antupis</author><text>This is basically failure in European startup ecosystem that companies needs to go SF, but good for Y Combinator and SF that they can attract best talent.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>antupis</author><text>I think it is set of different problems Southern Europe and France are almost hostile to entrepreneurship and startups. Nordics, Baltic and Benelux countries mostly nail culture and regulatory frameworks but small markets slows down starting and scaling business. Personally I don&#x27;t know what is problem with Germany probably something to do with how German is organised around manufacturing.</text></comment> | <story><title>Y Combinator’s European founder intake continues to grow</title><url>https://sifted.eu/articles/y-combinator-founder-intake/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lrem</author><text>It&#x27;s not &quot;European startup ecosystem&quot;, it&#x27;s basically &quot;European societies&quot;. Imagine how well would SV work if being involved in a bankrupt company (co-founder, major investor, C-suite) made banks refuse to talk to you again for 10-20 years. I believe that was the case in France. You wouldn&#x27;t even be able to open a checking account, never mention any credit again.</text></item><item><author>antupis</author><text>This is basically failure in European startup ecosystem that companies needs to go SF, but good for Y Combinator and SF that they can attract best talent.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>qwerty456127</author><text>AFAIK banks are legally required to open checking accounts on demand of any resident in Germany, no matter their background. But I am not sure, just a rumor.</text></comment> |
27,382,068 | 27,380,246 | 1 | 2 | 27,352,049 | train | <story><title>Simone Biles Makes History as First Woman to Ever Land Yurchenko Double Pike</title><url>https://www.teenvogue.com/story/simone-biles-first-woman-yurchenko-double-pike</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ceejayoz</author><text>&gt; It’s been speculated that the decision is a tactical one. Partly to deter other gymnasts who, frankly, do not match Biles in ability, from attempting the dangerous move, and partly to ensure that Biles does not score far beyond her peers by performing challenging moves other gymnasts cannot risk.<p>Score her fairly, and let her run away with it. That&#x27;s the whole point of this level of competition - it&#x27;s not supposed to be elementary school gym class where the goal is having fun and working some energy out. If she&#x27;s got no one who can rival her, that&#x27;s amazing and awesome.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nonameiguess</author><text>There is some precedent for this kind of nonsense. The NCAA banned the slam dunk in 1967 because Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was so unstoppable that they wanted to slow him down. The NBA allowing the zone in 2001 was done so teams could double and triple-team Shaquille O&#x27;Neal before he got the ball because he was so impossible to guard.<p>I&#x27;m definitely not saying they <i>should</i> do this, of course, especially in the Olympics. Crippling dominant teams and players to promote competitive balance in team sports tends to be a more practical measure to keep fans of the crappier teams interested and paying.</text></comment> | <story><title>Simone Biles Makes History as First Woman to Ever Land Yurchenko Double Pike</title><url>https://www.teenvogue.com/story/simone-biles-first-woman-yurchenko-double-pike</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ceejayoz</author><text>&gt; It’s been speculated that the decision is a tactical one. Partly to deter other gymnasts who, frankly, do not match Biles in ability, from attempting the dangerous move, and partly to ensure that Biles does not score far beyond her peers by performing challenging moves other gymnasts cannot risk.<p>Score her fairly, and let her run away with it. That&#x27;s the whole point of this level of competition - it&#x27;s not supposed to be elementary school gym class where the goal is having fun and working some energy out. If she&#x27;s got no one who can rival her, that&#x27;s amazing and awesome.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>whizzter</author><text>I think this is the problem with many &quot;judgement sports&quot;, literally too much politics into it (see 2008 olympics wrestling scandal, suspending of all Rio Olympics boxing judges or the Pelletier&#x2F;Sale olympic figure skating scandal).<p>Honestly most of these sports are losing popularity and money over unfair judging whilst athletics celebrates superstars like Usain Bolt that then draws crowds and new talents to these sports.</text></comment> |
15,424,793 | 15,424,622 | 1 | 2 | 15,423,193 | train | <story><title>Driving the “Worst Car Ever Built” (2015)</title><url>https://jalopnik.com/what-its-like-to-drive-the-worst-car-ever-built-1735448480</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bitL</author><text>One of the universities I was attending had a policy that when you get all answers on a multiple-choice test wrong, you get an A, because the probability of that happening by chance is impossibly low. Seems like 1951 Hoffmann is an example of that attitude ;-)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fspeech</author><text>This does not seem like a viable scheme in typical multiple choice tests. In a typical test question, there are often (almost always?) obvious non-answers, so it is significantly easier to guess what is wrong than to guess what is right. When you make a multiple choice test question with, say, 4 choices, it is actually hard to make all 4 choices look reasonable.<p>I guess the deterrent to taking advantage of such a strategy is the risk involved. You are wiped out if you miss just one. So you have to be supremely confident or a real gambler to knowingly adopt such a strategy.</text></comment> | <story><title>Driving the “Worst Car Ever Built” (2015)</title><url>https://jalopnik.com/what-its-like-to-drive-the-worst-car-ever-built-1735448480</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bitL</author><text>One of the universities I was attending had a policy that when you get all answers on a multiple-choice test wrong, you get an A, because the probability of that happening by chance is impossibly low. Seems like 1951 Hoffmann is an example of that attitude ;-)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>apozem</author><text>Reminds me of an interview I saw with one of the co-authors of &quot;The Disaster Artist,&quot; the book about the making of &quot;The Room,&quot; a famously terrible movie. He said that was what made &quot;The Room&quot; so fascinating - it&#x27;s rare to find a creative work where <i>every single decision</i> was wrong.</text></comment> |
17,786,149 | 17,785,852 | 1 | 3 | 17,785,168 | train | <story><title>Python Fire – Generates CLIs from any Python object</title><url>https://github.com/google/python-fire</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dbieber</author><text>Author of Fire here. Was super happy to pass the 10000 star mark on GitHub today thanks to this HN post :) -- that boosted my spirits on an otherwise long and rainy (and now delayed) bus ride.<p>Hope you find Fire useful!<p>What&#x27;s next for Python Fire? We&#x27;re working on improving the help screens and usage outputs so it feels less like a developer tool and more like a professional grade CLI. So stay tuned as it gets better!</text></comment> | <story><title>Python Fire – Generates CLIs from any Python object</title><url>https://github.com/google/python-fire</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>shezi</author><text>I am the author of commandeer[1], which does similar things and has been around since 2013. Try that, too, if you&#x27;re interested!<p>Seeing another library that makes it easier to access things from the command line is awesome, and finding that there are even more I didn&#x27;t know about in the comments is even better.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;commandeer.readthedocs.io&#x2F;en&#x2F;latest&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;commandeer.readthedocs.io&#x2F;en&#x2F;latest&#x2F;</a></text></comment> |
33,862,704 | 33,862,481 | 1 | 2 | 33,861,459 | train | <story><title>Autonomous trucking upstart Embark has gone from $5B+ to basically worthless</title><url>https://news.crunchbase.com/transportation/autonomous-driving-spac-embk/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>supernova87a</author><text>Does anyone have (or has anyone read) any smart summary&#x2F;analysis about the phase we find ourselves in with the autonomous driving industry?<p>Is it like CVML was in a desert for some decade(s) where there were no big advances, but lots of hope and unrealized claims of some impending breakthrough, only for lots of money to be dumped into it, and companies to be led astray? Are we waiting for some major improvement in algorithms, or hardware, like GPU progress, and things will suddenly take off?<p>Or are there fundamental difficulties that are startups (and their researchers) keep banging their heads against thinking that they&#x27;re the ones to be able to solve it? Or just that they need to go through the same mistakes over and over but make little progress?<p>It seems to have been a decade and what, $20B poured into this, but we are really not much closer to the goal? (and I&#x27;m not even sure whether we mean solving the AV problem, much less achieving a viable business model) Sure Waymo is driving in San Francisco, but that seems like a very handheld single example.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>thrashh</author><text>The way I think about is that when we drive as humans and an obstacle appears, we have over 15 years of knowledge that we have to determine our next step. And we coalesce a lifetime of knowledge in a matter of seconds.<p>These modern algorithms do not try to implement general AI. They do not work with 15 years of knowledge. They just recognize some patterns with no understanding of what they’re are looking at. It’s a different and
easier approach but I think it has some severe limits that will
never be overcome.<p>To me it’s like a software programmer that copies Stack Overflow snippets but doesn’t really understand programming. They get only so far</text></comment> | <story><title>Autonomous trucking upstart Embark has gone from $5B+ to basically worthless</title><url>https://news.crunchbase.com/transportation/autonomous-driving-spac-embk/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>supernova87a</author><text>Does anyone have (or has anyone read) any smart summary&#x2F;analysis about the phase we find ourselves in with the autonomous driving industry?<p>Is it like CVML was in a desert for some decade(s) where there were no big advances, but lots of hope and unrealized claims of some impending breakthrough, only for lots of money to be dumped into it, and companies to be led astray? Are we waiting for some major improvement in algorithms, or hardware, like GPU progress, and things will suddenly take off?<p>Or are there fundamental difficulties that are startups (and their researchers) keep banging their heads against thinking that they&#x27;re the ones to be able to solve it? Or just that they need to go through the same mistakes over and over but make little progress?<p>It seems to have been a decade and what, $20B poured into this, but we are really not much closer to the goal? (and I&#x27;m not even sure whether we mean solving the AV problem, much less achieving a viable business model) Sure Waymo is driving in San Francisco, but that seems like a very handheld single example.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lnsru</author><text>It’s closer to 3 decades today starting with European project: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Eureka_Prometheus_Project" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Eureka_Prometheus_Project</a><p>Looks like, that some problems can’t be solved just throwing money at them. Modern hardware is light years away from the one in Prometheus Project. Radars, lidars and cameras are superior now. Heck one can design and build dedicated ASIC for cheap nowadays. Maybe taking Nvidia Drive and tweaking it is just not enough to get there.</text></comment> |
11,725,085 | 11,725,016 | 1 | 3 | 11,723,652 | train | <story><title>Google Home</title><url>http://home.google.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>scrollaway</author><text>How would you make it self-hosted without making it suck? High quality voice recognition in a small box doesn&#x27;t seem to be a thing that&#x27;s even remotely possible today, let alone the query processing and knowledge database that comes with it.<p>You <i>could</i> build this on a pi with a mic, speakers, some foss stt and tts engines and some basic training data. But it&#x27;ll suck.</text></item><item><author>TeMPOraL</author><text>I have only two wishes:<p>&gt; <i>Please, please, please be a completely open, extensible platform...</i><p>That&#x27;s one. The second one is, please make it self-hosted. No cloud bullshit.<p>I know I&#x27;ll probably never live to see the second one coming true.</text></item><item><author>t0mbstone</author><text>Please, please, please be a completely open, extensible platform...<p>I want to be able to control my Apple TV with my Google Home device.<p>I want to be able to control my Phillips Hue and LiFX bulbs.<p>I want to be able to build my own custom home automation server endpoints and point my Google Home commands at them.<p>I want to be able to remote start my car with a voice command.<p>I want to be able to control my Harmony remote, and all of the devices connected to my Harmony hub.<p>I want to be able to access my Google calendar.<p>I want to be able to make hands-free phone calls to anyone on my Google contacts.<p>If my grandmother falls, I want her to be able to call 911 by talking to the Google Home device.<p>I want to be able to ask wolfram alpha questions by voice.<p>I want to be able to have a back-and-forth conversation to arrive at a conclusion. I don&#x27;t want to have to say a perfectly formulated command like, &quot;Add an event to my calendar on Jan 1, 2016 at 2:00 pm titled go to the pool party&quot;. I want to be able to say, &quot;Can you add an event to my calendar?&quot;, and then answer a series of questions. I hate having to formulate complex commands as a single sentence.<p>I want to be able to have a Google Home device in each room, without having to give each one its own wake-up word. Just have the closest one to me respond to my voice (based on how well it can hear me).<p>I want to be able to play music on all of my Google Home devices at the same time, and have the music perfectly synchronized.<p>This is my wish list. I am currently able to do more than half of these items with Amazon Echo, but I had to do a bunch of hacking and it was a pain in the ass.<p>If Google Home can deliver on these points, I would switch from Amazon Echo in a heartbeat.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>TeMPOraL</author><text>Ten years ago I played with Microsoft Speech API - which was completely off-line and trained off your voice. In restricted grammar mode, it worked flawlessly - I built a music control application on it, and utilized it like you would use Amazon Echo - I just said &quot;computer, volume, three quarters&quot; from any place in the room, and the <i>loud</i> music turned down a notch. Etc. That was <i>ten years ago</i>, with a crappy electret microphone I soldered to a cable myself and sticked to my wardrobe with a bit of insulating tape.<p>I&#x27;m not buying you couldn&#x27;t make a decent, self-contained, off-line speech recognition system. Sure, it may not be <i>as</i> good as Echo or Google Now (though the latter does suck hardly at times, it&#x27;s nowhere near reliable to use, and it doesn&#x27;t understand shit over a <i>quite good and expensive</i> Bluetooth headset). But it would be hackable, customizable. You could make it do some actual work for you.<p>Oh, and it wouldn&#x27;t lag so terribly as Google Now does. Realtime applications and data over mobile networks don&#x27;t mix.</text></comment> | <story><title>Google Home</title><url>http://home.google.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>scrollaway</author><text>How would you make it self-hosted without making it suck? High quality voice recognition in a small box doesn&#x27;t seem to be a thing that&#x27;s even remotely possible today, let alone the query processing and knowledge database that comes with it.<p>You <i>could</i> build this on a pi with a mic, speakers, some foss stt and tts engines and some basic training data. But it&#x27;ll suck.</text></item><item><author>TeMPOraL</author><text>I have only two wishes:<p>&gt; <i>Please, please, please be a completely open, extensible platform...</i><p>That&#x27;s one. The second one is, please make it self-hosted. No cloud bullshit.<p>I know I&#x27;ll probably never live to see the second one coming true.</text></item><item><author>t0mbstone</author><text>Please, please, please be a completely open, extensible platform...<p>I want to be able to control my Apple TV with my Google Home device.<p>I want to be able to control my Phillips Hue and LiFX bulbs.<p>I want to be able to build my own custom home automation server endpoints and point my Google Home commands at them.<p>I want to be able to remote start my car with a voice command.<p>I want to be able to control my Harmony remote, and all of the devices connected to my Harmony hub.<p>I want to be able to access my Google calendar.<p>I want to be able to make hands-free phone calls to anyone on my Google contacts.<p>If my grandmother falls, I want her to be able to call 911 by talking to the Google Home device.<p>I want to be able to ask wolfram alpha questions by voice.<p>I want to be able to have a back-and-forth conversation to arrive at a conclusion. I don&#x27;t want to have to say a perfectly formulated command like, &quot;Add an event to my calendar on Jan 1, 2016 at 2:00 pm titled go to the pool party&quot;. I want to be able to say, &quot;Can you add an event to my calendar?&quot;, and then answer a series of questions. I hate having to formulate complex commands as a single sentence.<p>I want to be able to have a Google Home device in each room, without having to give each one its own wake-up word. Just have the closest one to me respond to my voice (based on how well it can hear me).<p>I want to be able to play music on all of my Google Home devices at the same time, and have the music perfectly synchronized.<p>This is my wish list. I am currently able to do more than half of these items with Amazon Echo, but I had to do a bunch of hacking and it was a pain in the ass.<p>If Google Home can deliver on these points, I would switch from Amazon Echo in a heartbeat.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mbrock</author><text>Hey, people with experience in speech recognition, please chime in!<p>Just the other day I was looking at CMU&#x27;s Sphinx project for speech recognition. It seems quite capable, even of building something like this Google thing, but I haven&#x27;t tried to actually use it.<p>Large-vocabulary recognition probably needs something better than a Raspberry Pi... so, just use a more powerful CPU.<p>Yes, Google has an incomprehensibly enormous database of proprietary knowledge and information. Good for them! If we want to build a home assistant that doesn&#x27;t depend on Google, we&#x27;ll have to make tradeoffs. That doesn&#x27;t mean it has to suck.</text></comment> |
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