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22,689,202 | 22,688,743 | 1 | 2 | 22,688,509 | train | <story><title>Kubernetes 1.18</title><url>https://kubernetes.io/blog/2020/03/25/kubernetes-1-18-release-announcement/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>fosk</author><text>Although I understand the fear that many have of being left behind the technology curve by not having the time - or the chance - to run Kubernetes in their day to day work, we really must appreciate that Kubernetes really is the future of infrastructure. For those that are looking at Kubernetes with suspicion, it is a natural instinct to think of K8s as a threat to all the knowledge we have built in the past few years, but it doesn&#x27;t have to be that way. So many things that we would have built ourselves (deployments, upgrades, monitoring, etc) can now be streamlined with K8s, and existing knowledge around those topics will just make our transition to Kubernetes faster (besides still being able to use most of our expertise within K8s anyways).<p>Managed solutions make K8s easy to use, while we can still benefit from being able to run out workloads left and right on any cloud vendor. In one word: portability. Which in the day and age of cloud vendor lock-in it is to be protected at all cost.<p>I know that some organizations allow to allocate time to explore new technologies and learn new practices. If your organization has no policy around this, it is worth try asking. Ultimately it will benefit the organization and the business as a whole, as they will be able to build a solid foundation to more rapidly transition and execute on their digital products. Kubernetes is good for business.</text></comment> | <story><title>Kubernetes 1.18</title><url>https://kubernetes.io/blog/2020/03/25/kubernetes-1-18-release-announcement/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>taywrobel</author><text>Reminder to everyone that unless you have a truly massive or complex system, you probably don’t need to run K8s, and will save yourself a ton of headaches avoiding it in favor of a more simple system or using a managed option.</text></comment> |
6,566,301 | 6,566,180 | 1 | 2 | 6,565,869 | train | <story><title>LSD microdosing: a randomized, blind self-experiment</title><url>http://www.gwern.net/LSD%20microdosing</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>joezydeco</author><text>Impressive amount of data and data reduction...but it all hinges on a 100 ug dose of LSD purchased anonymously from Silk Road?<p>How can the OP be sure that the 100 micrograms was pure and accurate? If you can&#x27;t prove that, what good is all the math?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tedks</author><text>From a comment on the page:<p>&quot;&quot;&quot;
There are a great many errors in your methodology, and I do not believe you received any of the drug in any of your doses.<p>First off, you have no way of knowing that what you purchased actually contained the drug. The blotter may have had none in it. Secondly, even if there was some drug, you haven no way of knowing what other chemicals were in that paper, including strychnine, and its effects after being mixed with water, on the drug. Thirdly, I&#x27;m not sure that 24 hours in a fridge is a sufficient method of extraction.<p>But more damaging is that the drug degrades quickly and is very sensitive to its environment. It degrades in the presence of oxygen, heat and light. A common house fridge provides all three- the door is opened at least once a day (to get your dose) letting light in. The container is open to the air which provides oxygen, and while a fridge is cool, it is does not absolutely prevent degradation of the drug due to heat. I&#x27;ve seen storage recommendations for this drug involving sealed, light opaque containers, kept frozen in an icebox and the admonition that this will only preserve it for a few weeks.<p>You provided less protection, significant dilution, questionable extraction, and stored it for <i>months.</i><p>Basically, the conclusion from your research is this: The drug war prevents the kind of exploration of the possible positive effects of such a drug, that could be carried out by a well appointed lab.
&quot;&quot;&quot;<p>LSD is an incredibly volatile molecule and after months I wouldn&#x27;t expect any to remain. I think this is a bigger deal than the sketchiness factor of buying drugs -- a silk road vendor selling adulterated product would be severely penalized if caught and the economics don&#x27;t work out.</text></comment> | <story><title>LSD microdosing: a randomized, blind self-experiment</title><url>http://www.gwern.net/LSD%20microdosing</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>joezydeco</author><text>Impressive amount of data and data reduction...but it all hinges on a 100 ug dose of LSD purchased anonymously from Silk Road?<p>How can the OP be sure that the 100 micrograms was pure and accurate? If you can&#x27;t prove that, what good is all the math?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>NathanKP</author><text>The OP also wrote a very detailed study of how Silk Road works:<p><a href="http://www.gwern.net/Silk%20Road#lsd-case-study" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gwern.net&#x2F;Silk%20Road#lsd-case-study</a><p>In it he mentions a potential test to verify that what you receive really is LSD:<p><i>An Ehrlich test is a reagant for indole alkaloids, a category which includes psychedelics like LSD &amp; psilocybin. As such, it can be used as a kind of quality check.</i><p>I&#x27;d assume given the rigorous treatment I&#x27;ve seen so far in all his posts that he probably did this test.</text></comment> |
27,918,683 | 27,918,676 | 1 | 3 | 27,918,331 | train | <story><title>Even if you’re paying, you’re still the product</title><url>https://odysee.com/@CyberLounge:a/even-if-youre-paying-youre-still-the-product:7</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pdpi</author><text>The next to last paragraph bothers me:<p><pre><code> On Hackernews, they think it&#x27;s &quot;entitlement&quot; to think that you can use free email
and search engines and expect not to be tracked. The main problem with this line
of thinking is that even if you had the option to pay for your email and for your
search engine, some G**gle executive somewhere would mention during a meeting that
they could add an extra $X million of revenue if they started using data from it
from targeted advertising.
</code></pre>
Expecting a valuable service with absolutely no consideration in return absolutely <i>is</i> a case of entitlement. If that consideration isn&#x27;t cash, it has to be something else. If you&#x27;re paying cash for the service, though, you&#x27;re well within your right to set expectations on the terms the service is provided on.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nonameiguess</author><text>That doesn&#x27;t seem like a fair representation. The quote there isn&#x27;t saying you should expect totally free services. It&#x27;s saying you have the right to expect <i>not to be tracked</i>. Advertising up until 20 years ago relied entirely upon context and behavioral and engagement studies were conducted on an opt-in basis on Nielsen families and focus groups composed either of volunteers or people being compensated for participating in market research.<p>It is quite different to say you have a right to no advertisements on free services, which is not what this is saying, and to say you have a right to expect not to have your every digital action surveilled and studied 24&#x2F;7 for the purposes of advertisers getting free research subjects who often don&#x27;t realize they&#x27;re being used as research subjects, which is what this <i>is</i> saying.</text></comment> | <story><title>Even if you’re paying, you’re still the product</title><url>https://odysee.com/@CyberLounge:a/even-if-youre-paying-youre-still-the-product:7</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pdpi</author><text>The next to last paragraph bothers me:<p><pre><code> On Hackernews, they think it&#x27;s &quot;entitlement&quot; to think that you can use free email
and search engines and expect not to be tracked. The main problem with this line
of thinking is that even if you had the option to pay for your email and for your
search engine, some G**gle executive somewhere would mention during a meeting that
they could add an extra $X million of revenue if they started using data from it
from targeted advertising.
</code></pre>
Expecting a valuable service with absolutely no consideration in return absolutely <i>is</i> a case of entitlement. If that consideration isn&#x27;t cash, it has to be something else. If you&#x27;re paying cash for the service, though, you&#x27;re well within your right to set expectations on the terms the service is provided on.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>raxxorrax</author><text>If you are strict with this argument, there would also be no free internet sites to visit.<p>I don&#x27;t need to use any of Googles services to be tracked by Google, although Facebook is probably the largest offender here.<p>In social networks, friends of mine have shared my contact information without me even knowing it. So other people might pay with your data.<p>And I believe the text is correct. You would pay and be tracked. Companies found out that the mass of users is pretty uncritical and if they are allowed to do it, they will do it.<p>Also, websites could be financed through advertising that doesn&#x27;t rely on tracking. A simple policy change and you blow a lot of mostly useless ad company out of the water.<p>I think that would be good.</text></comment> |
19,836,806 | 19,834,928 | 1 | 3 | 19,833,737 | train | <story><title>The Access Economy: Why the Normal Distribution Is Vanishing (2015)</title><url>https://alexdanco.com/2015/12/17/taylor-swift-ios-and-the-access-economy-why-the-normal-distribution-is-vanishing/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>onlyrealcuzzo</author><text>Software engineers follow for the same reason as footballers or doctors.<p>In football, there&#x27;s only a market for the best. Nobody likes a loser.<p>It&#x27;s the same in health. There&#x27;s no market for mediocre or bad doctors.<p>Similarly, there&#x27;s not really a market for software that doesn&#x27;t work. Writing novel software that solves real problems isn&#x27;t yet trivial. So there&#x27;s not a huge market for bad software engineers. And there isn&#x27;t yet a big enough supply of good ones to meet demand.<p>See why Google doesn&#x27;t just lower their bar to hire more candidates. It wouldn&#x27;t do them any good.</text></item><item><author>pjc50</author><text>Tournament wages theory: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Tournament_theory" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Tournament_theory</a><p>This seems to happen whenever there&#x27;s (a) direct competition (b) the value provided by the winner is very scalable (media, sports, software) and (c) most importantly, it can&#x27;t be substituted by splitting the job among more people.<p>So footballers follow this model because you can only have 11 people on the pitch - there&#x27;s no amount of low-wage non-first-worlders you can replace Ronaldo with. Megastars follow this model; if you want to see Taylor Swift, that doesn&#x27;t substitute cleanly with Ariana Grande or your local bar band.<p>And software engineers follow this to some extent because splitting problems up is in itself the difficult bit.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>throwawaymath</author><text><i>&gt; Similarly, there&#x27;s not really a market for software that doesn&#x27;t work.</i><p>Not sure you and I are in the same market, friend.<p>Engineers and doctors are highly commoditized compared to professional athletes and celebrity entertainers. We produce a fundamentally fungible good.<p>If you can pay the market rate, you can find a replacement engineer to work your software. If Taylor Swift&#x27;s concert is sold out, you cannot see Taylor Swift. If Aaron Rodgers dies, there are how many quarterbacks in the world capable of replacing him?<p>These are categorically different things with categorically different market dynamics. Approximately no software engineers (or doctors) have a personal brand, nor an <i>objectively</i> superior skillset.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Access Economy: Why the Normal Distribution Is Vanishing (2015)</title><url>https://alexdanco.com/2015/12/17/taylor-swift-ios-and-the-access-economy-why-the-normal-distribution-is-vanishing/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>onlyrealcuzzo</author><text>Software engineers follow for the same reason as footballers or doctors.<p>In football, there&#x27;s only a market for the best. Nobody likes a loser.<p>It&#x27;s the same in health. There&#x27;s no market for mediocre or bad doctors.<p>Similarly, there&#x27;s not really a market for software that doesn&#x27;t work. Writing novel software that solves real problems isn&#x27;t yet trivial. So there&#x27;s not a huge market for bad software engineers. And there isn&#x27;t yet a big enough supply of good ones to meet demand.<p>See why Google doesn&#x27;t just lower their bar to hire more candidates. It wouldn&#x27;t do them any good.</text></item><item><author>pjc50</author><text>Tournament wages theory: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Tournament_theory" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Tournament_theory</a><p>This seems to happen whenever there&#x27;s (a) direct competition (b) the value provided by the winner is very scalable (media, sports, software) and (c) most importantly, it can&#x27;t be substituted by splitting the job among more people.<p>So footballers follow this model because you can only have 11 people on the pitch - there&#x27;s no amount of low-wage non-first-worlders you can replace Ronaldo with. Megastars follow this model; if you want to see Taylor Swift, that doesn&#x27;t substitute cleanly with Ariana Grande or your local bar band.<p>And software engineers follow this to some extent because splitting problems up is in itself the difficult bit.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pjc50</author><text>Few markets have a market for &quot;bad&quot; employees, surely? What matters in the tournament situation is that the number #2 employee isn&#x27;t as good as the #1 employee, regardless of what absolute quality level we&#x27;re talking about.</text></comment> |
24,979,648 | 24,979,548 | 1 | 3 | 24,974,759 | train | <story><title>The public has a right to know how companies that pay no taxes pull it off</title><url>http://larrysummers.com/2020/11/02/many-companies-pay-nothing-in-taxes-the-public-has-a-right-to-know-how-they-pull-it-off/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>adeptus</author><text>I am still confused as to why companies have to pay tax at all? If every single employee including owners already pay income tax, and IVA&#x2F;GST&#x2F;purchase taxes, property taxes, xyz additional personal taxes levied by respective governments, why then on top of all that make companies pay tax, doesn&#x27;t that just detract from people wanting to start companies and&#x2F;or seek countries with the least taxes&#x2F;best loopholes?<p>Disclaimer: I own no companies. I don&#x27;t even own stocks at the moment.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lm28469</author><text>&gt; I am still confused as to why companies have to pay tax at all?<p>Because that&#x27;s how we decided to build our societies. Money flows up very easily but doesn&#x27;t flow down anywhere as fast, that&#x27;s why we tax companies and people.<p>The sole purpose of a company is to make as much money as possible. Laws are there to make sure they do it safely (ie. don&#x27;t send 12 years old kids to the mine, don&#x27;t make employees work 7 days a week), make sure the system isn&#x27;t abused (Amazon trucks use public infrastructures to deliver goods, why shouldn&#x27;t they participate to the maintenance of said infrastructures ? &amp;c.), and make sure the country benefits of having such companies operating within their borders.<p>Not sure about other countries but in France taxes are used to finance schools, universities, hospitals, justice courts, reduce the cost of doctor visits, train tickets, housing assistance, allowance for disabled people, active solidarity income, public education and a lot of other things.<p>I could find endless arguments to support why companies _should_ pay taxes but none to support the opposite, besides &quot;I own a company and want to accumulate more money&quot;</text></comment> | <story><title>The public has a right to know how companies that pay no taxes pull it off</title><url>http://larrysummers.com/2020/11/02/many-companies-pay-nothing-in-taxes-the-public-has-a-right-to-know-how-they-pull-it-off/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>adeptus</author><text>I am still confused as to why companies have to pay tax at all? If every single employee including owners already pay income tax, and IVA&#x2F;GST&#x2F;purchase taxes, property taxes, xyz additional personal taxes levied by respective governments, why then on top of all that make companies pay tax, doesn&#x27;t that just detract from people wanting to start companies and&#x2F;or seek countries with the least taxes&#x2F;best loopholes?<p>Disclaimer: I own no companies. I don&#x27;t even own stocks at the moment.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>linuxftw</author><text>In the US, some companies do not pay tax, the shareholders pay the tax on any income (S Corporations). Sole proprietors and partnerships are the same. C Corporations are like a legally distinct &#x27;person&#x27;, and what they pay in salaries, etc, are deductions.<p>It is 100% possible for a C corporation to pay no tax because it pays out all profits (income minus deductions) or operates at a loss.<p>Many large firms are hiring contractors to perform &#x27;capex&#x27; work that qualifies for R&amp;D Tax credits: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cpajournal.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;10&#x2F;30&#x2F;u-s-research-development-tax-credit&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cpajournal.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;10&#x2F;30&#x2F;u-s-research-developme...</a><p>Tax laws drive some crazy incentives.</text></comment> |
19,165,359 | 19,164,243 | 1 | 2 | 19,161,564 | train | <story><title>Data science is different now</title><url>https://veekaybee.github.io/2019/02/13/data-science-is-different/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>lordnacho</author><text>There&#x27;s something very relevant in this story. Data Science is too glamorous a term. There&#x27;s an implication that the DS person is some sort of magician who maybe isn&#x27;t as good at general coding but has special data magic skills, making them more valuable than your average grunt.<p>In my years in finance, there was a similar problem. One guy in particular I worked with reckoned himself an &quot;ideas guy&quot; and would simply spout out gibberish that he expected the rest of us to implement. He could barely use excel himself, let alone code.<p>The fact is the best coders I met never fancied themselves as specialists. They could certainly fit some models for you, but they could also write some SQL, set up replication and other maintenance, write cron jobs, set up ssh keys, merge some git branches, and write front and back end code in several different languages, declarative and imperative. I always put it down to a mix of curiosity and humility, giving these people a very good grasp of the fundamentals plus a foothold in almost every area of coding that I could think of.</text></comment> | <story><title>Data science is different now</title><url>https://veekaybee.github.io/2019/02/13/data-science-is-different/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>perturbation</author><text>I have been a data scientist for the last 4 years.<p>I think (one of) the problems with the data science career field is that there are a lot of juniors who want to run sklearn and call it a day, following the tutorials that seem to &#x27;just work&#x27; that real-world data doesn&#x27;t without a fight.<p>To get value out of the work, you have to be methodical, careful, and really dig into the data. The observation that 85% of the time is cleaning doesn&#x27;t eliminate the need to know what you&#x27;re doing, what approaches to use, how to judge success, how to communicate results, etc.<p>Another thing to consider:
I&#x27;ve found big, boring companies are usually better to do DS at than small ones. Big, boring companies have better discipline in collecting and managing data. Also, a 1% improvement to an existing process matters a lot at BigCo, and very little at a startup - and a lot of DS models are that sort of incremental progress over rules engines or heuristics.</text></comment> |
10,638,198 | 10,638,169 | 1 | 3 | 10,637,980 | train | <story><title>Paris Attacks Plot Was Hatched in Plain Sight</title><url>http://www.wsj.com/articles/paris-attacks-plot-was-hatched-in-plain-sight-1448587309</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>aresant</author><text>You make a good top level point that I think most would agree with - successful terror plots degrade our freedom because we fearfululy grant our government more power.<p>But to broadly call spying apparatus ineffective and incompetent weakens your argument.<p>There have been dozens of publicly disclosed terror plots interrupted against the USA alone, surely many more we will never know about.(1)<p>There is a clear underlying reason for survellience - it works.<p>The complexity in the discussion is that it clearly doesn&#x27;t work 100% of the time and comes at a significant cost<p>But this isn&#x27;t a black and white issue, we are in the grey.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_unsuccessful_terrorist_plots_in_the_United_States_post-9&#x2F;11" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_unsuccessful_terrori...</a></text></item><item><author>mgo</author><text>Yet this whole event is being used as a catalyst for further degradation of freedom and encryption.<p>How can we take the powers above seriously when they can&#x27;t even catch a fairly large network of terrorists scheming over the clearnet?<p>This is a lesson in the ineffectiveness and incompetence of the spying apparatus of the free world.<p>We&#x27;ve given up so much already for no benefit, and whenever they fail it&#x27;s never because they were bad at their job, they just didn&#x27;t have enough power or money to do their job.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sjm-lbm</author><text>The real complexity of the discussion comes from the unknown number of attacks that would be prevented with very mild pre-9&#x2F;11 security measures.<p>Earlier this year, I read <i>The Looming Towers</i>, an overview of various historical factors that led to the 9&#x2F;11 attacks. Its focus is really more on the origins on Islamic extremism, not logistical planning of the 9&#x2F;11 attacks, but it did cover several aspects of 9&#x2F;11 specifically that were very interesting. Importantly, the FBI and CIA - between them - had enough information to stop the attacks but did not collaborate well enough, mostly due to the differing goals between the CIA and the FBI. To the CIA, a potential terrorist is an <i>asset</i> - they hope that person, if left on the street, will attempt to contact someone higher up in (say) al Qaeda and therefore generate more data for the agency. To the FBI, such a person is a <i>suspect</i>, and really needs to be taken off the street as soon as enough evidence has been gathered to build a criminal case against him. During the summer of 2001, the FBI was blocked form getting the full CIA info on several important 9&#x2F;11 figures because the CIA knew they&#x27;d be immediately arrested with that information.<p>(that is, of course, a broad overview, but the main point is more or less correct)<p>It&#x27;s frustrating to see so many people embracing their lack of freedom as a security blanket. We don&#x27;t need to use terror to grant our governments more control over our lives, we need just need to hold those who claim to be keeping us safe accountable.</text></comment> | <story><title>Paris Attacks Plot Was Hatched in Plain Sight</title><url>http://www.wsj.com/articles/paris-attacks-plot-was-hatched-in-plain-sight-1448587309</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>aresant</author><text>You make a good top level point that I think most would agree with - successful terror plots degrade our freedom because we fearfululy grant our government more power.<p>But to broadly call spying apparatus ineffective and incompetent weakens your argument.<p>There have been dozens of publicly disclosed terror plots interrupted against the USA alone, surely many more we will never know about.(1)<p>There is a clear underlying reason for survellience - it works.<p>The complexity in the discussion is that it clearly doesn&#x27;t work 100% of the time and comes at a significant cost<p>But this isn&#x27;t a black and white issue, we are in the grey.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_unsuccessful_terrorist_plots_in_the_United_States_post-9&#x2F;11" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_unsuccessful_terrori...</a></text></item><item><author>mgo</author><text>Yet this whole event is being used as a catalyst for further degradation of freedom and encryption.<p>How can we take the powers above seriously when they can&#x27;t even catch a fairly large network of terrorists scheming over the clearnet?<p>This is a lesson in the ineffectiveness and incompetence of the spying apparatus of the free world.<p>We&#x27;ve given up so much already for no benefit, and whenever they fail it&#x27;s never because they were bad at their job, they just didn&#x27;t have enough power or money to do their job.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kefs</author><text>The Talk section of the Wiki article lists the many problems with that list.. You really should stop citing it.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Talk:List_of_unsuccessful_terrorist_plots_in_the_United_States_post-9&#x2F;11#Incredibly_biased_title_and_premise" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Talk:List_of_unsuccessful_terr...</a></text></comment> |
15,647,930 | 15,646,248 | 1 | 2 | 15,646,037 | train | <story><title>Feature Visualization: How neural nets build up their understanding of images</title><url>https://distill.pub/2017/feature-visualization/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>muxator</author><text>Looking at the finger instead of the moon: I like the HTML layout (responsive, inline images with captions, lateral notes).<p>Any insights on how it&#x27;s generated? Markdown, Rst, Latex -&gt; HTML? I would love to produce my documentation in this way.<p>Edit: I was too hurried. Everything is explained in <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;distill.pub&#x2F;guide&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;distill.pub&#x2F;guide&#x2F;</a>, the template is at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;distillpub&#x2F;template" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;distillpub&#x2F;template</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Feature Visualization: How neural nets build up their understanding of images</title><url>https://distill.pub/2017/feature-visualization/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>colah3</author><text>Hey! I&#x27;m one of the authors, along with Alex and Ludwig. We&#x27;re happy to answer any questions! :)</text></comment> |
40,338,348 | 40,338,031 | 1 | 2 | 40,322,137 | train | <story><title>Peter Jackson on how Tolkien stopped a Beatles LOTR film (2021)</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-59387182</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>karaterobot</author><text>&gt; &quot;Ultimately, they couldn&#x27;t get the rights from Tolkien, because he didn&#x27;t like the idea of a pop group doing his story. So it got nixed by him. They tried to do it. There&#x27;s no doubt about it.<p>I&#x27;m a Beatles fan. Tolkien was right to be skeptical, it would have been terrible. No doubt in my mind: campy, perfunctory, self-mocking. Please recall how &quot;nerd&quot; material was treated before the 2000s, if you&#x27;d like some precedent for what this would have looked like.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>shagie</author><text>&gt; Please recall how &quot;nerd&quot; material was treated before the 2000s<p>And I present The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;BC35cQKHwzg?si=KWIbiEpEVb36tqh1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;BC35cQKHwzg?si=KWIbiEpEVb36tqh1</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Peter Jackson on how Tolkien stopped a Beatles LOTR film (2021)</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-59387182</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>karaterobot</author><text>&gt; &quot;Ultimately, they couldn&#x27;t get the rights from Tolkien, because he didn&#x27;t like the idea of a pop group doing his story. So it got nixed by him. They tried to do it. There&#x27;s no doubt about it.<p>I&#x27;m a Beatles fan. Tolkien was right to be skeptical, it would have been terrible. No doubt in my mind: campy, perfunctory, self-mocking. Please recall how &quot;nerd&quot; material was treated before the 2000s, if you&#x27;d like some precedent for what this would have looked like.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Animats</author><text>Yes. The breakthrough was &quot;Batman&quot;, 1989, which redefined the fantasy&#x2F;superhero genre. Before that, fantasy&#x2F;superhero stuff was silly, unrealistic, or both. &quot;Batman&quot; changed that.<p>Of course, where that got us was franchises with endless sequels.</text></comment> |
41,756,483 | 41,754,845 | 1 | 3 | 41,745,788 | train | <story><title>LLMs, Theory of Mind, and Cheryl's Birthday</title><url>https://github.com/norvig/pytudes/blob/main/ipynb/CherylMind.ipynb</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>whack</author><text>&gt; <i>At least with respect to this problem, they had no theory of mind.</i><p>This is very interesting and insightful, but I take issue with the above conclusion. Your average software engineer would probably fail to code up a python solution to this problem. But most people would agree that the average software engineer, and the average person, possesses some theory of mind.<p>This seems to be a pattern I&#x27;m noticing with AI. The goalposts keep moving. When I was a kid, the turing test was the holy grail for &quot;artificial intelligence.&quot; Now, your run-of-the-mill LLM can breeze through the turing test. But no one seems to care. <i>&quot;They are just imitating us, that doesn&#x27;t count.&quot;</i> Every couple years, AI&#x2F;ML systems make revolutionary advances, but everyone pretends it&#x27;s not a big deal because of some new excuse. The latest one being <i>&quot;LLMs can&#x27;t write a python program to solve an entire class of very challenging logic problems. Therefore LLMs possess no theory of mind.&quot;</i><p>Let me stick my neck out and say something controversial. Are the latest LLMs as smart as Peter Norvig? No. Are they smarter than your average human? Yes. Can they outperform your average human at a randomly chosen cognitive task that has real-world applications? Yes. This is pretty darn revolutionary. We have crossed the rubicon. We are watching history unfold in real-time.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hyperG</author><text>It is because the goalposts were wrong.<p>We once thought that a computer could not beat a grandmaster in chess or pass the Turing test without some undefined special human property. We were wrong about the computer needing this undefined special human property.<p>A spreadsheet has been much better at math than the average person for a long time too. A spreadsheet is a very useful human tool. LLMs are a revolutionary useful tool. For some people that doesn&#x27;t seem to be enough though and they have to try to find or insist the LLM has the undefined special human property.</text></comment> | <story><title>LLMs, Theory of Mind, and Cheryl's Birthday</title><url>https://github.com/norvig/pytudes/blob/main/ipynb/CherylMind.ipynb</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>whack</author><text>&gt; <i>At least with respect to this problem, they had no theory of mind.</i><p>This is very interesting and insightful, but I take issue with the above conclusion. Your average software engineer would probably fail to code up a python solution to this problem. But most people would agree that the average software engineer, and the average person, possesses some theory of mind.<p>This seems to be a pattern I&#x27;m noticing with AI. The goalposts keep moving. When I was a kid, the turing test was the holy grail for &quot;artificial intelligence.&quot; Now, your run-of-the-mill LLM can breeze through the turing test. But no one seems to care. <i>&quot;They are just imitating us, that doesn&#x27;t count.&quot;</i> Every couple years, AI&#x2F;ML systems make revolutionary advances, but everyone pretends it&#x27;s not a big deal because of some new excuse. The latest one being <i>&quot;LLMs can&#x27;t write a python program to solve an entire class of very challenging logic problems. Therefore LLMs possess no theory of mind.&quot;</i><p>Let me stick my neck out and say something controversial. Are the latest LLMs as smart as Peter Norvig? No. Are they smarter than your average human? Yes. Can they outperform your average human at a randomly chosen cognitive task that has real-world applications? Yes. This is pretty darn revolutionary. We have crossed the rubicon. We are watching history unfold in real-time.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>GolDDranks</author><text>&gt; Now, your run-of-the-mill LLM can breeze through the turing test.<p>Can they? You can ask arbitrary questions in the Turing test. I doubt many models would be able successfully imitate humans in such adversarial conditions. Note that the Turing test doesn&#x27;t require to judge to be unsophisticated or unknowledgeable about AI&#x27;s capabilities or weaknesses. I believe that AI&#x27;s are closer than ever passing the Turing test, but I&#x27;m sceptical until I see it.</text></comment> |
35,316,526 | 35,316,080 | 1 | 3 | 35,315,542 | train | <story><title>Using ChatGPT Plugins with LLaMA</title><url>https://blog.lastmileai.dev/using-openais-retrieval-plugin-with-llama-d2e0b6732f14</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>carlycue</author><text>OpenAI with 400 employees are breaking Google’s ankles on the court. What do you guys think? Is Google in trouble? Their entire business model is in jeopardy. If Google releases a oroduct as as good as ChatGPT 4, which is unlikely, they’ll
kill their revenue. If they don’t release it, they’ll gradually lose market share. They are in an unwinnable situation.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>qwertox</author><text>This week I created a Microsoft account just to check how they are integrating GPT into Bing, and while they made me believe that I was using a Chat-enabled Bing, it was worthless for me.<p>I basically wanted to know how I can do raycasting in Three.js, but after a lot of using ChatGPT for trying to solve my issue, I learned that I can&#x27;t do what I want by using the normal raycaster integrated Three.js: Intersect a geometry which has a displacement map on it.<p>ChatGPT failed to understand that the raycaster works on the CPU, but the displacement map of the material is applied on the GPU side, so the displaced geometry won&#x27;t be used, only the original one. It managed to explain this to me, that this was not possible, but each sample code repeatedly did as if it was possible, until I gave up.<p>Then I created the Microsoft account and started to ask for solutions, and it was the most useless garbage, despite of the web claiming that it is using GPT-4.<p>In my eyes MS has failed at integrating a chatbot; maybe it&#x27;s ok for cooking or having fun, I haven&#x27;t tried that. And OpenAI has nothing else but a chatbot and other nice AI. Let someone better come and OpenAI will be a remarkable entry in the history books (first popular AI application) with a final entry that OpenAI got acquired by Microsoft.<p>Let&#x27;s see what Google makes out of it.</text></comment> | <story><title>Using ChatGPT Plugins with LLaMA</title><url>https://blog.lastmileai.dev/using-openais-retrieval-plugin-with-llama-d2e0b6732f14</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>carlycue</author><text>OpenAI with 400 employees are breaking Google’s ankles on the court. What do you guys think? Is Google in trouble? Their entire business model is in jeopardy. If Google releases a oroduct as as good as ChatGPT 4, which is unlikely, they’ll
kill their revenue. If they don’t release it, they’ll gradually lose market share. They are in an unwinnable situation.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>visarga</author><text>Google is only temporarily behind. It will release a decent model in max 6-12 months, and not just Google, everyone will release a model, even open source will have some. OpenAI is enjoying a short window of exclusivity.</text></comment> |
10,123,280 | 10,122,478 | 1 | 2 | 10,122,333 | train | <story><title>How to Onboard Software Engineers</title><url>http://blog.fogcreek.com/how-to-onboard-software-engineers-interview-with-kate-heddleston/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>agentultra</author><text>Kate Heddleston is freaking awesome, if you don&#x27;t know. Her talk at Pycon 2015 about diversity in engineering environments is fantastic. Well explained in language free of activist rhetoric -- it was a pragmatic and thoughtful speech. Her blog expands on much of what she covers and should be read.<p>On the topic of on-boarding -- <i>super</i> important to get right! The idea of <i>making</i> your people the best they can be is lost, I think, on our generation. My grandfather-in-law was a mechanical engineer at Chrysler back in the day when they had a special school they ran to train their new recruits. When he started he had no idea of how cars worked but they picked him up from school and gave him the training he needed to become an important figure in their company.<p>Focusing on hiring the best because hiring someone mediocre will damage your business is negative thinking that can kill your on-boarding, and thus your culture and business. I&#x27;ve worked at places with terrible on-boarding and it was a fight just to get some direction and support for your work. Getting the attention of management was something you wanted to avoid which led to people becoming complacent about their work and its quality.<p>Great article. On-boarding is important to get right.</text></comment> | <story><title>How to Onboard Software Engineers</title><url>http://blog.fogcreek.com/how-to-onboard-software-engineers-interview-with-kate-heddleston/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>patio11</author><text>Onboarding is a people&#x2F;process&#x2F;docs&#x2F;technology problem. To the limited extent that it is a technology problem, you <i>really</i> can&#x27;t go wrong with a) treating it like it is an actual shipping product of the company (implying a minimum standard of care like e.g. a repository, documentation about it, and a dedicated place to put issues) and b) actively maintaining something with the goal of getting someone up-and-running <i>quickly</i>.<p>None of my projects are at the point where you can just &quot;vagrant up and go&quot;, but the next-best thing has been READMEs in the relevant repositories with exact lists of &quot;Type this, type this, type this, type this. You now have a fully-working system running on localhost and you should be able to type this to get a full green test suite. If you can type this and it does not come out green, fixing that is more important than anything Patrick is doing right now.&quot;<p>Here&#x27;s, for example, what we have for getting someone up and running on Appointment Reminder (in preparation for me soon no longer being the engineer who keeps all of that system in my head): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;patio11&#x2F;a0b1063c5d33b5748da6" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;patio11&#x2F;a0b1063c5d33b5748da6</a> Feel free to steal ideas in terms of level of detail or useful things to include. (A lot of the magic is in the rake commands like &quot;setup_site&quot;, which take care of &quot;All that crufty configuration stuff which you would otherwise need a senior engineer to do for you prior to actually seeing the page render correctly on localhost:3000.&quot;)<p>Quick hack which helped us on making sure this guide was actually accurate: we had two engineers coming into the project at the same time. I wrote down everything <i>I</i> thought they needed to know. Engineer #1 implemented to the document I had written, filled in the blank spots where he needed to ask questions, and then we committed the readme. Engineer #2 then had to do it off the readme <i>without</i> asking me any questions. Given that he was actually able to do this, we have high confidence that there is not at the moment anything rattling around in my head which is absolutely required to get up-and-running and documented nowhere else.</text></comment> |
14,153,513 | 14,153,528 | 1 | 2 | 14,152,688 | train | <story><title>Google plans ad-blocking feature in Chrome browser</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-plans-ad-blocking-feature-in-popular-chrome-browser-1492643233</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>forgotpwtomain</author><text>On mobile Chrome does not support extensions while Firefox does. Recently on acquiring a new phone I used Chrome for a few days -- I had entirely forgotten how terrible the user-experience is without UBlock!</text></item><item><author>TechRemarker</author><text>At first it sounds insane that Google would do such a thing since while ad blocking is growing, enabling the feature natively especially by default would incredibly increase the number of ads blocked.<p>My guess is, that where other blockers by default can easily block all google ads, Chrome blocker would not block Google Ads because it would classify them as acceptable. And Google would then hope that people would use their built in blocker rather than downloading a third party extension which would highly likely block there ads. And if people have a built in blocker that blocks the mostly bad ads, the people would start to hate ads less and be okay with &#x27;good ads&#x27;. Also since people wouldn&#x27;t use third party blockers as much those companies would go out business more likely.<p>It&#x27;s a very risky move on Google&#x27;s part, so would be a bit surprised if it happens. But doing nothing, is equally if not more risky in the long run for there business model.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>CoryG89</author><text>I always suspected the reason we never got extensions in mobile Chrome is that they didn&#x27;t want the ad blockers. I wasn&#x27;t aware that Firefox mobile started supporting them. Going to give it a try.</text></comment> | <story><title>Google plans ad-blocking feature in Chrome browser</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-plans-ad-blocking-feature-in-popular-chrome-browser-1492643233</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>forgotpwtomain</author><text>On mobile Chrome does not support extensions while Firefox does. Recently on acquiring a new phone I used Chrome for a few days -- I had entirely forgotten how terrible the user-experience is without UBlock!</text></item><item><author>TechRemarker</author><text>At first it sounds insane that Google would do such a thing since while ad blocking is growing, enabling the feature natively especially by default would incredibly increase the number of ads blocked.<p>My guess is, that where other blockers by default can easily block all google ads, Chrome blocker would not block Google Ads because it would classify them as acceptable. And Google would then hope that people would use their built in blocker rather than downloading a third party extension which would highly likely block there ads. And if people have a built in blocker that blocks the mostly bad ads, the people would start to hate ads less and be okay with &#x27;good ads&#x27;. Also since people wouldn&#x27;t use third party blockers as much those companies would go out business more likely.<p>It&#x27;s a very risky move on Google&#x27;s part, so would be a bit surprised if it happens. But doing nothing, is equally if not more risky in the long run for there business model.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>altern8tif</author><text>Go with Brave on mobile (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.brave.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.brave.com&#x2F;</a>). They&#x27;ve got an ad-blocker built in.</text></comment> |
11,502,048 | 11,501,434 | 1 | 2 | 11,500,384 | train | <story><title>Famous Photo of Chernobyl's Most Radioactive Material Was a Selfie</title><url>http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-famous-photo-of-chernobyls-most-dangerous-radioactive-material-was-a-selfie</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>owyn</author><text>There&#x27;s an amazing documentary about this that contains a lot of footage of the actual incident and cleanup called the &quot;Battle of Chernobyl&quot;.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;topdocumentaryfilms.com&#x2F;the-battle-of-chernobyl&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;topdocumentaryfilms.com&#x2F;the-battle-of-chernobyl&#x2F;</a><p>Things that still haunt me: the helicopter pilots who put the initial fires out flew in 120-180C temperatures and pretty much all died of radiation. And the sequence that starts about here:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;ezohqY-vg4s?t=3430" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;ezohqY-vg4s?t=3430</a><p>Where they are picking up radioactive materials by hand and throwing it off the roof next to the reactor because the robots they were trying to use all break down. Even 1 hour of exposure was deadly so they rotated through shifts, and the guys who did it were called &quot;Bio Robots&quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pdkl95</author><text>One of the most impressive documentaries I&#x27;ve ever seen is &quot;Chernobyl 3828&quot;[1]. It is about the 3828 &quot;liquidators&quot; (cleanup crew) - euphemistically called the &quot;bio robots&quot; - that had to clean up the worst section of roof above the reactor. Maximum allowed dose was two minutes exposure to that section the roof.<p>It has some of the same footage as the sequence in your link to t=3430, but there is a key difference: Chernobyl 3828 is about <i>the people</i>. The psychology of the cleanup was complicated. Some people ran while others faced the danger and accepted a &quot;red badge of courage&quot; because if they didn&#x27;t, <i>someone else would have to go in their place</i>.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=FfDa8tR25dk" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=FfDa8tR25dk</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Famous Photo of Chernobyl's Most Radioactive Material Was a Selfie</title><url>http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-famous-photo-of-chernobyls-most-dangerous-radioactive-material-was-a-selfie</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>owyn</author><text>There&#x27;s an amazing documentary about this that contains a lot of footage of the actual incident and cleanup called the &quot;Battle of Chernobyl&quot;.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;topdocumentaryfilms.com&#x2F;the-battle-of-chernobyl&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;topdocumentaryfilms.com&#x2F;the-battle-of-chernobyl&#x2F;</a><p>Things that still haunt me: the helicopter pilots who put the initial fires out flew in 120-180C temperatures and pretty much all died of radiation. And the sequence that starts about here:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;ezohqY-vg4s?t=3430" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;ezohqY-vg4s?t=3430</a><p>Where they are picking up radioactive materials by hand and throwing it off the roof next to the reactor because the robots they were trying to use all break down. Even 1 hour of exposure was deadly so they rotated through shifts, and the guys who did it were called &quot;Bio Robots&quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rdtsc</author><text>That&#x27;s a good documentary. Haven&#x27;t seen it before.<p>I remembered distinctly when it happened, well when it was anounced on TV on evening news. It was really mentioned in passing -- oh by the way, there was incident at Chernobyl, a quick flash or some white smoke coming out in the distance and then ... sports.<p>My dad knew it was something more than that and said something like &quot;Oh shit, this could be really bad&quot;. People have learned when they published something as small in the news, they would multiply by some factor to get an idea how bad it really was.<p>Then something really bizare happened. Refuges had started to stream into different cities. And for some strange reason, they were shunned. Others somehow thought these survivors were contaminated, cursed, builty or what have you. So instead of being embraced and helped, they found themselves trying to hide who they are and where they came from.</text></comment> |
14,538,529 | 14,538,768 | 1 | 2 | 14,536,410 | train | <story><title>Automattic is closing its San Francisco office as most employees work remotely</title><url>https://qz.com/1002655/the-company-behind-wordpress-is-closing-its-gorgeous-san-francisco-office-because-its-employees-never-show-up/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tuna-piano</author><text>If true, it seems like a silly way to reduce headcount. The employees who feel like they need the job will move, but those who know they can get a job elsewhere will not. This adverse selection leads to some of your best employees leaving, with your worst staying.<p>Better to just pick and choose who you want to keep.</text></item><item><author>Androider</author><text>If you ask anyone inside IBM or Yahoo, going from remote to in-office was all about significantly reducing the headcount. The moves also coincided with reducing the number of sites, so many people would have to move far away or resign.<p>I think the benefits of working remotely are still poorly understood, and long-term the companies that are being built remote-first are going to have a significant engineering advantage over those that bolt remote working on after the fact.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dreamcompiler</author><text>&gt; This adverse selection leads to some of your best employees leaving, with your worst staying.<p>Doesn&#x27;t matter. Failing public companies like IBM and Yahoo don&#x27;t care about better vs. worse employees; what they care about is reducing costs, and that tends to make better employees <i>more</i> likely to be laid off, because they&#x27;re more expensive. Wall Street doesn&#x27;t give a damn how good your employees are; it just wants them to be cheap.</text></comment> | <story><title>Automattic is closing its San Francisco office as most employees work remotely</title><url>https://qz.com/1002655/the-company-behind-wordpress-is-closing-its-gorgeous-san-francisco-office-because-its-employees-never-show-up/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tuna-piano</author><text>If true, it seems like a silly way to reduce headcount. The employees who feel like they need the job will move, but those who know they can get a job elsewhere will not. This adverse selection leads to some of your best employees leaving, with your worst staying.<p>Better to just pick and choose who you want to keep.</text></item><item><author>Androider</author><text>If you ask anyone inside IBM or Yahoo, going from remote to in-office was all about significantly reducing the headcount. The moves also coincided with reducing the number of sites, so many people would have to move far away or resign.<p>I think the benefits of working remotely are still poorly understood, and long-term the companies that are being built remote-first are going to have a significant engineering advantage over those that bolt remote working on after the fact.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mprovost</author><text>This is called the Dead Sea Effect:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;brucefwebster.com&#x2F;2008&#x2F;04&#x2F;11&#x2F;the-wetware-crisis-the-dead-sea-effect&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;brucefwebster.com&#x2F;2008&#x2F;04&#x2F;11&#x2F;the-wetware-crisis-the-d...</a></text></comment> |
39,417,411 | 39,417,332 | 1 | 2 | 39,416,602 | train | <story><title>Apple Watch Ultra 2 Hacked</title><url>https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255453237</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rockbruno</author><text>One of the posters posted a video of the problem: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=G6dazJk9AtU" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=G6dazJk9AtU</a><p>It seems like the ghost touch issue, and not actual hacking.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>summarity</author><text>I have the same issue. It’s clearly a bug and maybe both the funniest and most serious one I’ve ever had to deal with.<p>In my case I was waking up to my watch using itself. It changed contacts, added locations in maps, placed and cancelled two calls to emergency services and more. I then made the mistake of taking it off my wrist. Now the screen is locked and the watch will continue to enter wrong PINs, locking itself for more time every time. You can’t shut it down - the watch will start to type and dismiss the shutdown dialog (or call 911 again!).<p>I haven’t gotten around to taking it to an Apple Store and have returned to my Garmin watch.</text></comment> | <story><title>Apple Watch Ultra 2 Hacked</title><url>https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255453237</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rockbruno</author><text>One of the posters posted a video of the problem: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=G6dazJk9AtU" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=G6dazJk9AtU</a><p>It seems like the ghost touch issue, and not actual hacking.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pflenker</author><text>Typing „we are in control“ would go beyond the ghost touch issue, if we believe the first reporter.</text></comment> |
13,956,352 | 13,955,903 | 1 | 3 | 13,954,232 | train | <story><title>Surviving the New MacBook Pro</title><url>http://bradfrost.com/blog/post/surviving-the-new-macbook-pro/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nrjames</author><text>I have a mostly maxed-out 15&quot; new MBP. I love it. Now that I&#x27;m used to the new keyboard, I can type much faster than with the older ones and it feels far less mushy. I never have problems with stuck keys, audio, etc. From time to time, I see some graphical artifacts around in the window shadows when I first open it up after sleeping, but they go away after a moment.<p>The biggest annoyance, to me, is the placement of a touch bar hotspot above the delete key. I hit it all the time. At first, by default, Siri was there. I switched it to be the &quot;show desktop&quot; button, but what I really want to do is to shift everything to the left so that nothing is above the delete key.<p>Even with that, however, I&#x27;ve adjusted my typing so that I rarely hit the touch bar above the delete key.<p>I&#x27;ve never had battery problems, the USB-C ports don&#x27;t bother me because I rarely have anything plugged into the laptop other than the power cable, and in my work environments, we use Apple TVs for conference room televisions, so I can just connect wirelessly to show presentations.<p>I was skeptical when I bought it, due to all of the moaning that shows up here on HN, but all in all, I&#x27;m really enjoying this computer and I&#x27;m glad that I replaced my old MBP with it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>6t6t6t6</author><text>Same here. MBP 13&quot; with 16GB of RAM. Fast enough to develop web apps with Rails and JS. It&#x27;s light and the battery life allows me to go to any meeting without having to bring the charger.<p>USB-C doesn&#x27;t bother me, and I guess that in the near future it will be the standard. I just had to buy a new Ethernet adaptor.<p>I agree that the touchbar is annoying. I summon Siri way too often, but it&#x27;s not the end of the world. The keyboard is good.<p>I just think that it is a bit too expensive for what it is, but I didn&#x27;t pay for it.</text></comment> | <story><title>Surviving the New MacBook Pro</title><url>http://bradfrost.com/blog/post/surviving-the-new-macbook-pro/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nrjames</author><text>I have a mostly maxed-out 15&quot; new MBP. I love it. Now that I&#x27;m used to the new keyboard, I can type much faster than with the older ones and it feels far less mushy. I never have problems with stuck keys, audio, etc. From time to time, I see some graphical artifacts around in the window shadows when I first open it up after sleeping, but they go away after a moment.<p>The biggest annoyance, to me, is the placement of a touch bar hotspot above the delete key. I hit it all the time. At first, by default, Siri was there. I switched it to be the &quot;show desktop&quot; button, but what I really want to do is to shift everything to the left so that nothing is above the delete key.<p>Even with that, however, I&#x27;ve adjusted my typing so that I rarely hit the touch bar above the delete key.<p>I&#x27;ve never had battery problems, the USB-C ports don&#x27;t bother me because I rarely have anything plugged into the laptop other than the power cable, and in my work environments, we use Apple TVs for conference room televisions, so I can just connect wirelessly to show presentations.<p>I was skeptical when I bought it, due to all of the moaning that shows up here on HN, but all in all, I&#x27;m really enjoying this computer and I&#x27;m glad that I replaced my old MBP with it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jghn</author><text>I&#x27;m curious to see how the keyboards hold up. I have a 2016 12&quot; rMB. I believe that&#x27;s the same keyboard as the new MBP. It&#x27;s less than a year old and some of the keys are starting to become unresponsive. Admittedly I&#x27;m a very &quot;hard&quot; typist, but still.<p>I actually quite like typing on this keyboard, although it was weird at first, but I wonder how these things are going to hold up.</text></comment> |
13,616,099 | 13,615,709 | 1 | 2 | 13,614,507 | train | <story><title>H-1B visas mainly go to Indian outsourcing firms</title><url>http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21716630-not-good-argument-against-them-h-1b-visas-do-mainly-go-indian-outsourcing</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>loph</author><text>This one sentence says it all:<p>&quot;The Economist found that between 2012 and 2015 the three biggest Indian outsourcing firms—TCS, Wipro and Infosys—submitted over 150,000 visa applications for positions that paid a median salary of $69,500. In contrast, America’s five biggest tech firms—Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google and Microsoft—submitted just 31,000 applications, and proposed to pay their workers a median salary of $117,000.&quot;<p><i>None</i> of those salaries listed are competitive with what a non-H1B (read citizen or permanent resident) would earn. Indeed.com quotes the average SD salary in Seattle (think Amazon and Microsoft) as 126,000 and San Francisco at 134,000. Companies sponsoring H1B need to be held to the letter of the law -- the salaries must be competitive. The demand for H1B visas would fall if the imported labor was paid fairly.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>freyr</author><text>You&#x27;re comparing the average salary of <i>all</i> H-1B jobs (developer, accountant, analyst, etc.) to the salary of a developer. Instead, look at the average salaries for H-1B software engineers in 2016:<p>Facebook @ Menlo Park: $152k<p>Google @ Mountain View: $130k<p>Apple @ Cupertino: $154k<p>Amazon @ Seattle: $124k<p>Microsoft @ Redmond: $120<p>So comparing base salary alone, these companies are definitely not underpaying their H-1B hires.<p>To see salaries for yourself, you can go here and filter by year to see the latest data:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;h1bpay.com&#x2F;companies&#x2F;Facebook&#x2F;cities&#x2F;Menlo%20Park-CA&#x2F;job-titles&#x2F;Software%20Engineer&#x2F;salaries" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;h1bpay.com&#x2F;companies&#x2F;Facebook&#x2F;cities&#x2F;Menlo%20Park-CA&#x2F;...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>H-1B visas mainly go to Indian outsourcing firms</title><url>http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21716630-not-good-argument-against-them-h-1b-visas-do-mainly-go-indian-outsourcing</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>loph</author><text>This one sentence says it all:<p>&quot;The Economist found that between 2012 and 2015 the three biggest Indian outsourcing firms—TCS, Wipro and Infosys—submitted over 150,000 visa applications for positions that paid a median salary of $69,500. In contrast, America’s five biggest tech firms—Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google and Microsoft—submitted just 31,000 applications, and proposed to pay their workers a median salary of $117,000.&quot;<p><i>None</i> of those salaries listed are competitive with what a non-H1B (read citizen or permanent resident) would earn. Indeed.com quotes the average SD salary in Seattle (think Amazon and Microsoft) as 126,000 and San Francisco at 134,000. Companies sponsoring H1B need to be held to the letter of the law -- the salaries must be competitive. The demand for H1B visas would fall if the imported labor was paid fairly.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>0xfeba</author><text>Yup. I&#x27;ve said it before[1][2] and people just kept replying &quot;Oh but we hire them for their talent, therefore everyone does.&quot;<p>I work at a run of the mill SaaS company. We have 60% H-1Bs devs here as contractors from a certain contracting company (more in QA). They live paycheck to paycheck. I get paid, literally, twice as much (I&#x27;ve seen the H-1B Labor Condition Applications for ones we hire directly--The contracting companies pay likely about as much but take some 20% of their salary).<p>We don&#x27;t hire them because they are particularly talented. I&#x27;ve been on interview calls with ones from the contracting companies, all their resumes are the same [3]. They are just code monkeys. Our company does it to save costs, period. Upper management knows nothing of the mythical man-month.<p>The system is being rampantly abused.<p>[1] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=13521791" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=13521791</a><p>[2] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=13525766" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=13525766</a><p>[3] - <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vocativ.com&#x2F;money&#x2F;business&#x2F;theyll-sponsor-american-dream-might-cost-soul&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vocativ.com&#x2F;money&#x2F;business&#x2F;theyll-sponsor-america...</a></text></comment> |
25,900,292 | 25,900,249 | 1 | 3 | 25,899,814 | train | <story><title>Tell HN: My entire company's Gsuite access has been banned</title><text>Google support is refusing to let us know what happened and not even giving access to retrieve emails to other drive data.<p>We are facing completely hopeless situation where no one is providing us any answers or providing support for PAID service.<p>Can anyone help or provide any clues on how we can talk to actual support team?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>meddlepal</author><text>The annual Google bit my hand thread.<p>I just cannot recommend anyone seriously use GSuite or GCP until Google starts treating customers better.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>technion</author><text>There is definitely a bubble effect here. Every trendy startup seems to use gsuite, but you&#x27;d be looked at quite strangely if you suggested it in some of the circles I&#x27;ve worked in.</text></comment> | <story><title>Tell HN: My entire company's Gsuite access has been banned</title><text>Google support is refusing to let us know what happened and not even giving access to retrieve emails to other drive data.<p>We are facing completely hopeless situation where no one is providing us any answers or providing support for PAID service.<p>Can anyone help or provide any clues on how we can talk to actual support team?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>meddlepal</author><text>The annual Google bit my hand thread.<p>I just cannot recommend anyone seriously use GSuite or GCP until Google starts treating customers better.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sneak</author><text>After 10-ish years of using G Suite for my corp email, I finally switched last year when they started rewriting URLs in my emails to the google redirector, breaking PGP signatures and the like, even via IMAP. The only way to get my original unmodified emails is via Takeout now.<p>The situation is getting worse, not better. :(</text></comment> |
26,356,605 | 26,356,618 | 1 | 2 | 26,347,654 | train | <story><title>Dr. Seuss books deemed offensive will be delisted from eBay</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/dr-seuss-books-deemed-offensive-will-be-delisted-from-ebay-11614884201</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>NeverFade</author><text>Amazon has started to remove books on political grounds as well: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ncac.org&#x2F;news&#x2F;amazon-book-removal" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ncac.org&#x2F;news&#x2F;amazon-book-removal</a><p>The Dr. Seuss books were banned not just by eBay but also by their publisher, which holds the copyright, so you can still buy them used on Amazon... for $1,500+ per copy: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wane.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;prices-skyrocket-for-dr-seuss-books-on-amazon&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wane.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;prices-skyrocket-for-dr-seuss-book...</a><p>The reality is that these books will not be accessible to the vast majority of future American readers. This is just a fact at this point.<p>It doesn&#x27;t even matter if Amazon keeps selling them, as the publisher banned them, so the number of (legal) copies will dwindle to zero. Also, with Amazon starting to ban books on similar political grounds, saying &quot;but Amazon didn&#x27;t ban <i>this</i> specific book (yet)&quot; or &quot;you can still get a copy at some obscure second-hand stores&quot; is burying our heads in the sand and ignoring the reality of what is happening.</text></item><item><author>UncleMeat</author><text>&gt; These are huge book distributors like Amazon and eBay effectively deciding what people can and cannot read.<p>The books are available on Amazon.<p>&gt; This is book-banning, pure and simple.<p>I&#x27;d wager that sales of these six books will be higher in the next week than they were in the last two years combined.</text></item><item><author>NeverFade</author><text>These are market-dominating book distributors like Amazon and eBay effectively deciding what people can and cannot read.<p>The fact that a few people might still be able to view images of these books (illegally, as they are copyrighted) on some tiny closed forum on the internet isn&#x27;t a real comfort.<p>In the Soviet Union, there were also tiny isolated pockets where &quot;forbidden books&quot; were surreptitiously copied and read. However, the project to ban them was still very successful overall. The average subject of the Soviet regime would not have access to these books.<p>This is very much what is happening in the US right now. These books are being banned, and the next generations of US readers will have no access to them. The fact that one person in ten thousand might be able to find a used copy at a rare used bookstore (and pay pay thousands of dollars for it) doesn&#x27;t really change anything, and it&#x27;s dishonest to pretend otherwise.<p>This is book-banning, pure and simple.<p>&gt; <i>The actions of the publisher and ebay enhance the first (freedom from)</i><p>I would also like to thank our cultural commissars at Amazon and eBay for &quot;freeing&quot; us from dangerous ideas by forcibly preventing us from buying and selling the books which contain them.<p>eBay just took away the freedom of private individuals to sell books they legally own to each other.<p>You are calling this &quot;freedom&quot;, using the word to refer to its exact opposite. This is Newspeak.</text></item><item><author>helsinkiandrew</author><text>There&#x27;s two kinds of freedom: freedom from and freedom to.<p>These are some children&#x27;s books that contain illustrations that some people find offensive and the publisher (and sellers) are deciding they no longer want to be associated with and sell to children. There are internet forums where the images are available and people can view them without the police knocking your door down, and I&#x27;m sure these are available in 2nd hand bookshops.<p>The actions of the publisher and ebay enhance the first (freedom from) without inhibiting the second much (freedom to) for those that really want to view the images.<p>There&#x27;s a difference between &quot;utterly repugnant&quot; content being available and it being casually given to children, and people and companies being forced to sell it.</text></item><item><author>lgleason</author><text>As dis-heartening as this story is, compared to a couple of years ago, it is encouraging to see lots of comments from people beginning to wake up to what is going on with this craziness and not being modded here.<p>Free speech is about protecting the right of the un-popular and views that some may find utterly repugnant. Why? because, as we are seeing with all of the woke craziness, when you don&#x27;t stand up for everyones ability (including views you do not like) to freely speak, the censorship will end up being turned against you.<p>The key things with all of this, is that if enough people were to collectively have the courage to push back against this craziness it would stop...people recognizing that there is a problem is a good first step.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dr_dshiv</author><text>Isn&#x27;t this more of a matter of copyright and, specifically, the moral rights of authors and copyright holders to control their work? It&#x27;s not that ebay is so offended—it&#x27;s that Dr Seuss Enterprises doesn&#x27;t want to lose billions due to a tarnished legacy. (Oops!) To me, this is just like a mature author that wants to stop the sale of an embarrassing early book because it was poorly written. In this case, the rightsholder thinks the early books are in poor taste and no longer wants them associated with the brand.<p>For the record, the same whitewashing (wokewashing?) happened to the Richard Scarry books which are all &quot;abridged&quot; because they were so offensively conservative about the role of women.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.upworthy.com&#x2F;8-changes-that-were-made-to-a-classic-richard-scarry-book-to-keep-up-with-the-times-progress" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.upworthy.com&#x2F;8-changes-that-were-made-to-a-class...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Dr. Seuss books deemed offensive will be delisted from eBay</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/dr-seuss-books-deemed-offensive-will-be-delisted-from-ebay-11614884201</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>NeverFade</author><text>Amazon has started to remove books on political grounds as well: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ncac.org&#x2F;news&#x2F;amazon-book-removal" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ncac.org&#x2F;news&#x2F;amazon-book-removal</a><p>The Dr. Seuss books were banned not just by eBay but also by their publisher, which holds the copyright, so you can still buy them used on Amazon... for $1,500+ per copy: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wane.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;prices-skyrocket-for-dr-seuss-books-on-amazon&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wane.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;prices-skyrocket-for-dr-seuss-book...</a><p>The reality is that these books will not be accessible to the vast majority of future American readers. This is just a fact at this point.<p>It doesn&#x27;t even matter if Amazon keeps selling them, as the publisher banned them, so the number of (legal) copies will dwindle to zero. Also, with Amazon starting to ban books on similar political grounds, saying &quot;but Amazon didn&#x27;t ban <i>this</i> specific book (yet)&quot; or &quot;you can still get a copy at some obscure second-hand stores&quot; is burying our heads in the sand and ignoring the reality of what is happening.</text></item><item><author>UncleMeat</author><text>&gt; These are huge book distributors like Amazon and eBay effectively deciding what people can and cannot read.<p>The books are available on Amazon.<p>&gt; This is book-banning, pure and simple.<p>I&#x27;d wager that sales of these six books will be higher in the next week than they were in the last two years combined.</text></item><item><author>NeverFade</author><text>These are market-dominating book distributors like Amazon and eBay effectively deciding what people can and cannot read.<p>The fact that a few people might still be able to view images of these books (illegally, as they are copyrighted) on some tiny closed forum on the internet isn&#x27;t a real comfort.<p>In the Soviet Union, there were also tiny isolated pockets where &quot;forbidden books&quot; were surreptitiously copied and read. However, the project to ban them was still very successful overall. The average subject of the Soviet regime would not have access to these books.<p>This is very much what is happening in the US right now. These books are being banned, and the next generations of US readers will have no access to them. The fact that one person in ten thousand might be able to find a used copy at a rare used bookstore (and pay pay thousands of dollars for it) doesn&#x27;t really change anything, and it&#x27;s dishonest to pretend otherwise.<p>This is book-banning, pure and simple.<p>&gt; <i>The actions of the publisher and ebay enhance the first (freedom from)</i><p>I would also like to thank our cultural commissars at Amazon and eBay for &quot;freeing&quot; us from dangerous ideas by forcibly preventing us from buying and selling the books which contain them.<p>eBay just took away the freedom of private individuals to sell books they legally own to each other.<p>You are calling this &quot;freedom&quot;, using the word to refer to its exact opposite. This is Newspeak.</text></item><item><author>helsinkiandrew</author><text>There&#x27;s two kinds of freedom: freedom from and freedom to.<p>These are some children&#x27;s books that contain illustrations that some people find offensive and the publisher (and sellers) are deciding they no longer want to be associated with and sell to children. There are internet forums where the images are available and people can view them without the police knocking your door down, and I&#x27;m sure these are available in 2nd hand bookshops.<p>The actions of the publisher and ebay enhance the first (freedom from) without inhibiting the second much (freedom to) for those that really want to view the images.<p>There&#x27;s a difference between &quot;utterly repugnant&quot; content being available and it being casually given to children, and people and companies being forced to sell it.</text></item><item><author>lgleason</author><text>As dis-heartening as this story is, compared to a couple of years ago, it is encouraging to see lots of comments from people beginning to wake up to what is going on with this craziness and not being modded here.<p>Free speech is about protecting the right of the un-popular and views that some may find utterly repugnant. Why? because, as we are seeing with all of the woke craziness, when you don&#x27;t stand up for everyones ability (including views you do not like) to freely speak, the censorship will end up being turned against you.<p>The key things with all of this, is that if enough people were to collectively have the courage to push back against this craziness it would stop...people recognizing that there is a problem is a good first step.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>XorNot</author><text>If the publisher shutdown and the IP on the books went into legal limbo, then the exact same thing would happen - has happened - to numerous works. For example try to get the Sid Meier Alpha Centauri novelizations - they&#x27;re almost impossible to find, they&#x27;re out of print (they&#x27;re expensive as hell on ebay).<p>It&#x27;s been a problem for <i>years</i> that there&#x27;s been so redress available when a publisher either owns an IP and refuses to sell or license it freely, or when an IP falls into unclear ownership and the same basic thing results.<p>This all has nothing to do with anything political (because these are not being suppressed by a government, and citizens and organizations are free to choose their own speech and associations) and <i>everything</i> to do with just how garbage copyright law is.</text></comment> |
8,220,781 | 8,220,414 | 1 | 2 | 8,218,809 | train | <story><title>Wayland in Gnome: two progress reports</title><url>http://lwn.net/Articles/607091/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pippy</author><text>Each time I&#x27;ve attempted to use Linux as my main OS it&#x27;s always X11 that scares me off. Booting into console to edit xorg.conf gets tiring after a while, spending hundreds of dollars for graphics card that has more stable drivers, the general ancient 90&#x27;s feel. I&#x27;ve tried it multiple times, but gave up each time.</text></item><item><author>jmhain</author><text>I&#x27;m typing this from a wayland session of the GNOME 3.14 beta (via Fedora 21 Branched). While there are still some serious bugs, I have to say I am very impressed. The synchronization problems and graphical glitches of X always made the Linux desktop feel second rate compared to Mac or Windows. With wayland, interactions with elements on the screen such as moving and resizing windows or dragging apps to the dash are perfectly in sync with the cursor. Not even Android has achieved this.<p>In addition, GNOME 3.14 is looking outstanding. With the latest design refinements, I find the interface significantly more attractive than OS X (before or after redesign). It&#x27;s not quite there yet, but if the community can deliver a system with fully functional wayland, portable sandboxed app containers, and a stable development target, the Linux desktop truly will stand a chance against the proprietary competitors.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mercurial</author><text>Per default, you don&#x27;t have xorg.conf anymore on modern distros. I have been in the &quot;edit xorg.conf&quot; boat as well, but there have been tremendous improvements since the bad old days.</text></comment> | <story><title>Wayland in Gnome: two progress reports</title><url>http://lwn.net/Articles/607091/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pippy</author><text>Each time I&#x27;ve attempted to use Linux as my main OS it&#x27;s always X11 that scares me off. Booting into console to edit xorg.conf gets tiring after a while, spending hundreds of dollars for graphics card that has more stable drivers, the general ancient 90&#x27;s feel. I&#x27;ve tried it multiple times, but gave up each time.</text></item><item><author>jmhain</author><text>I&#x27;m typing this from a wayland session of the GNOME 3.14 beta (via Fedora 21 Branched). While there are still some serious bugs, I have to say I am very impressed. The synchronization problems and graphical glitches of X always made the Linux desktop feel second rate compared to Mac or Windows. With wayland, interactions with elements on the screen such as moving and resizing windows or dragging apps to the dash are perfectly in sync with the cursor. Not even Android has achieved this.<p>In addition, GNOME 3.14 is looking outstanding. With the latest design refinements, I find the interface significantly more attractive than OS X (before or after redesign). It&#x27;s not quite there yet, but if the community can deliver a system with fully functional wayland, portable sandboxed app containers, and a stable development target, the Linux desktop truly will stand a chance against the proprietary competitors.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>1_player</author><text>You may be surprised by the latest versions, then.<p>I haven&#x27;t edited xorg.conf in a long time (years?). And I&#x27;m using a power user oriented distro, Arch Linux.</text></comment> |
13,961,975 | 13,962,065 | 1 | 2 | 13,961,176 | train | <story><title>Ask HN: Is there room for another search engine?</title></story><parent_chain><item><author>Animats</author><text>That&#x27;s a good question, and something I&#x27;ve spent much time on. Cuil (2008-2010) tried. I knew some of those people. It cost them about $30 million to launch a full scale search engine. They had no revenue model. In retrospect, they were hoping to be acquired by somebody. It was some ex-Google people, trying to replicate older Google technology. They had a great launch, but the system wasn&#x27;t very good and traffic rapidly fell off. Their technology wasn&#x27;t that great. Their big selling point was that they could do the job on less hardware than Google used.<p>Yahoo had a search engine from 1995 to 2009. Yahoo is now a Bing reseller. There was a period around 2007 when Yahoo search was better than Google search. They pioneered integrated vertical search: special cases for weather, celebrities, and such. But Google copied that.<p>Blekko (2010-2015) had a scheme with &quot;slashtags&quot; which attracted a small following but never caught on. They were trying to crowdsource part of the problem. Eventually, Blekko was acquired by IBM&#x27;s Watson unit, and ceased offering public search.<p>Bing, Microsoft&#x27;s entry, remains active. Microsoft seems to have given up on trying to raise Bing&#x27;s market share. Bing no longer has a CEO of its own; it&#x27;s just a miscellaneous online service Microsoft provides. It&#x27;s still #2 in search, but only has 7% market share.<p>There remain a few little search engines. Ask, formerly Ask Jeeves, continues to operate, but has only 0.17% market share. Ask is from IAC, in Oakland, a spinoff of Barry Diller&#x27;s Home Shopping Network. Excite, formerly Excite@Home, with 0.02% market share, continues to operate. Excite, in its day, was a hot startup powered by too much venture capital.<p>Outside the US, there&#x27;s Baidu (China) and Yandex (Russia). Neither has much traction outside their home countries.<p>It&#x27;s possible to do a better search engine than Google from the user perspective. It&#x27;s not clear how to get it to profitability. There are two things Google does badly - business legitimacy and provenance. Google doesn&#x27;t background-check businesses online. (I do that with Sitetruth; it&#x27;s not only possible, it could be done better with a tie-in to costly business background services such as Dun and Bradstreet.) This allows bogus and marginal businesses to reach the top of search via the usual SEO techniques. Google is also bad at provenance - figuring out that site A is using text derived from site B, and thus B should be ranked higher. This is what allows scraper sites to rank highly in Google.<p>Fix those two problems, and a new search engine could be better than Google. Whether anyone would notice is questionable. Profitability would be tough. The reward for success is high. Search ads are more relevant and more profitable than any other form of advertising. When someone sees a search ad, they&#x27;re actively looking for the item of interest and may be ready to buy. Almost all other ads are interruptions or annoyances. That&#x27;s the basic reason for Google&#x27;s success.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>thesmallestcat</author><text>There are way more than two things that Google does wrong. Remapping my search terms into oblivion so it can pretend it&#x27;s fast is the worst one. Especially when this happens to a query I&#x27;ve modified to quote &quot;every&quot; &quot;single&quot; &quot;flipping&quot; &quot;term.&quot; I think Google is cheating, and that their usable index is much shallower than they&#x27;d have you believe.<p>What&#x27;s needed is a search engine with functional queries (as opposed to Google, which now only operates in &quot;the user is drunk&quot; mode), that doesn&#x27;t give a damn about your robots.txt, and that can capture content in a way that is more akin to archive.org than Google&#x27;s shoddy and increasingly absent cache.<p>Another issue is spam&#x2F;false matches. Why does Google return illegitimate results? Because, let me tell you, any search for &quot;some nifty computer book pdf&quot; returns pages upon pages of bogus links leading to ad link mazes. A crawler should be able to trivially crawl such a page, determine that no PDF is linked, and blacklist the result, but this doesn&#x27;t happen.<p>Google is slow and preoccupied. Their business is ripe for disruption.</text></comment> | <story><title>Ask HN: Is there room for another search engine?</title></story><parent_chain><item><author>Animats</author><text>That&#x27;s a good question, and something I&#x27;ve spent much time on. Cuil (2008-2010) tried. I knew some of those people. It cost them about $30 million to launch a full scale search engine. They had no revenue model. In retrospect, they were hoping to be acquired by somebody. It was some ex-Google people, trying to replicate older Google technology. They had a great launch, but the system wasn&#x27;t very good and traffic rapidly fell off. Their technology wasn&#x27;t that great. Their big selling point was that they could do the job on less hardware than Google used.<p>Yahoo had a search engine from 1995 to 2009. Yahoo is now a Bing reseller. There was a period around 2007 when Yahoo search was better than Google search. They pioneered integrated vertical search: special cases for weather, celebrities, and such. But Google copied that.<p>Blekko (2010-2015) had a scheme with &quot;slashtags&quot; which attracted a small following but never caught on. They were trying to crowdsource part of the problem. Eventually, Blekko was acquired by IBM&#x27;s Watson unit, and ceased offering public search.<p>Bing, Microsoft&#x27;s entry, remains active. Microsoft seems to have given up on trying to raise Bing&#x27;s market share. Bing no longer has a CEO of its own; it&#x27;s just a miscellaneous online service Microsoft provides. It&#x27;s still #2 in search, but only has 7% market share.<p>There remain a few little search engines. Ask, formerly Ask Jeeves, continues to operate, but has only 0.17% market share. Ask is from IAC, in Oakland, a spinoff of Barry Diller&#x27;s Home Shopping Network. Excite, formerly Excite@Home, with 0.02% market share, continues to operate. Excite, in its day, was a hot startup powered by too much venture capital.<p>Outside the US, there&#x27;s Baidu (China) and Yandex (Russia). Neither has much traction outside their home countries.<p>It&#x27;s possible to do a better search engine than Google from the user perspective. It&#x27;s not clear how to get it to profitability. There are two things Google does badly - business legitimacy and provenance. Google doesn&#x27;t background-check businesses online. (I do that with Sitetruth; it&#x27;s not only possible, it could be done better with a tie-in to costly business background services such as Dun and Bradstreet.) This allows bogus and marginal businesses to reach the top of search via the usual SEO techniques. Google is also bad at provenance - figuring out that site A is using text derived from site B, and thus B should be ranked higher. This is what allows scraper sites to rank highly in Google.<p>Fix those two problems, and a new search engine could be better than Google. Whether anyone would notice is questionable. Profitability would be tough. The reward for success is high. Search ads are more relevant and more profitable than any other form of advertising. When someone sees a search ad, they&#x27;re actively looking for the item of interest and may be ready to buy. Almost all other ads are interruptions or annoyances. That&#x27;s the basic reason for Google&#x27;s success.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dhimes</author><text><i>When someone sees a search ad, they&#x27;re actively looking for the item of interest and may be ready to buy.</i><p>My experience with Google is the opposite of this. When people are searching google they are looking for information. When people go to Amazon they have their credit card in their hand.<p>Most of my google-ad clicks (85% last check) are clearly not interested in buying what they are looking for. They are only on my page for seconds. If I try to qualify my ads better I lose &#x27;quality score,&#x27; which is a measure that is entirely, at least to a first-order approximation, about whether or not people will click the ad. That, if my ad say &#x27;This site is X&#x27; I get a good quality score but shitty leads. If I say &#x27;This site is X for $49.99&#x27; I get shitty quality score but the people who come to the site (the clicks I have to pay for) are ready to buy.<p>The profitability isn&#x27;t because their initial hypothesis of Search Marketing (that people are searching what they want to purchase and will therefore purchase) was correct, but because they are far-and-away the search winners and if you want to be found at all you have to play it.<p>At least, in my experience and IMHO.</text></comment> |
30,736,861 | 30,733,605 | 1 | 3 | 30,731,983 | train | <story><title>Apple’s Universal Control</title><url>https://500ish.com/it-really-just-works-d359cfcdffe6?gi=5e5236274b4e</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>waffleiron</author><text>I’ve never been an real Apple user, however I got a MacBook Pro from my employer. Recently my android broke, and a friend gave me an 2020 iPhone SE as temporary replacement while I look for a replacement.<p>The thing that really blew my mind was the shared clipboard, I’ve always been sending myself messages through Signal or Discord to share my clipboard. Now it’s just automatic. The only thing I would have liked was a better way to discover this, I only did by accident.<p>I’ve used KDE connect in the past, and this feels like the polished version of it.<p>edit: Mac Pro -&gt; MacBook Pro</text></item><item><author>knolan</author><text>This is exactly what Apple have done again and again and yet people are still surprised when it happens.<p>Touch screens, FaceTime, AirDrop, Handoff, Sidecar. These are generally polished and reliable iterations of existing ideas that don’t require a bunch of other apps and configuration. They are usually marketed and smartly named, unlike Windows where they can’t seem to name anything or features are locked behind different tiers of the OS.<p>Even the PC Master Race brigade who love to shout that they could build a better machine for less than whatever desktop Apple releases miss the point. Macs are appliances. They work reliably and do so for a long time and you know what you’re getting in terms of functionality.</text></item><item><author>samwillis</author><text>Everyone is quite right there have been systems like this available to the “Pro User” for a long time <i>but</i> what’s different here is it’s being brought to the main stream. They are taking a niche professional tool and making it available in a “just works” way to literally everyone. A lot of people have a Mac and an iPad, this will be their first experience of this. It’s going to be very popular with people who had no idea it was possible.<p>The other thing to consider is that Apple will be able to integrate at a lower deeper level than third party apps. It’s the drag and drop between devices that is going to be the game changer, that isn’t currently possible with the iPad with a third party app, the APIs don’t exist.<p>So yes, it’s not new but it is new to 99% of people. Just like smart phones, tablets or portable music “jukebox” players weren’t new but apple took them mainstream.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fitzroy</author><text>My recent&#x2F;related iOS hack is screenshotting difficult-to-select text in sites and apps. Live Text immediately performs OCR on the screenshot and the text can then be copied&#x2F;pasted.</text></comment> | <story><title>Apple’s Universal Control</title><url>https://500ish.com/it-really-just-works-d359cfcdffe6?gi=5e5236274b4e</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>waffleiron</author><text>I’ve never been an real Apple user, however I got a MacBook Pro from my employer. Recently my android broke, and a friend gave me an 2020 iPhone SE as temporary replacement while I look for a replacement.<p>The thing that really blew my mind was the shared clipboard, I’ve always been sending myself messages through Signal or Discord to share my clipboard. Now it’s just automatic. The only thing I would have liked was a better way to discover this, I only did by accident.<p>I’ve used KDE connect in the past, and this feels like the polished version of it.<p>edit: Mac Pro -&gt; MacBook Pro</text></item><item><author>knolan</author><text>This is exactly what Apple have done again and again and yet people are still surprised when it happens.<p>Touch screens, FaceTime, AirDrop, Handoff, Sidecar. These are generally polished and reliable iterations of existing ideas that don’t require a bunch of other apps and configuration. They are usually marketed and smartly named, unlike Windows where they can’t seem to name anything or features are locked behind different tiers of the OS.<p>Even the PC Master Race brigade who love to shout that they could build a better machine for less than whatever desktop Apple releases miss the point. Macs are appliances. They work reliably and do so for a long time and you know what you’re getting in terms of functionality.</text></item><item><author>samwillis</author><text>Everyone is quite right there have been systems like this available to the “Pro User” for a long time <i>but</i> what’s different here is it’s being brought to the main stream. They are taking a niche professional tool and making it available in a “just works” way to literally everyone. A lot of people have a Mac and an iPad, this will be their first experience of this. It’s going to be very popular with people who had no idea it was possible.<p>The other thing to consider is that Apple will be able to integrate at a lower deeper level than third party apps. It’s the drag and drop between devices that is going to be the game changer, that isn’t currently possible with the iPad with a third party app, the APIs don’t exist.<p>So yes, it’s not new but it is new to 99% of people. Just like smart phones, tablets or portable music “jukebox” players weren’t new but apple took them mainstream.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>catach</author><text>&gt; The thing that really blew my mind was the shared clipboard<p>I wasn&#x27;t aware this was a thing, and my mind just got blown. Thanks.</text></comment> |
35,261,909 | 35,261,612 | 1 | 3 | 35,261,065 | train | <story><title>GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview</title><url>https://github.blog/2023-03-22-github-copilot-x-the-ai-powered-developer-experience/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>w-m</author><text>I tried getting myself on the CLI waitlist (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;githubnext.com&#x2F;projects&#x2F;copilot-cli&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;githubnext.com&#x2F;projects&#x2F;copilot-cli&#x2F;</a>). That they use ffmpeg as the example hits a huge pain point for me. But:<p>&quot;Next Waitlist by GitHub Next would like permission to: Act on your behalf<p>Not owned or operated by GitHub&quot;<p>Why does signing up for a waitlist require me to give permissions to an app to act in my account? An app that isn&#x27;t even officially from GitHub?<p>This sets a bad example for permission requests, getting people to just click through the dialog, which requests too much access, and from the wrong domain.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>filmgirlcw</author><text>It’s officially from GitHub. There is some weird language (that I’ll absolutely pass feedback on to the team), I think because GitHub Next is a different organization from GitHub proper, but I can assure you, this is an official GitHub app.<p>But I totally agree that this isn’t a great&#x2F;clear message about where this is from.</text></comment> | <story><title>GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview</title><url>https://github.blog/2023-03-22-github-copilot-x-the-ai-powered-developer-experience/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>w-m</author><text>I tried getting myself on the CLI waitlist (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;githubnext.com&#x2F;projects&#x2F;copilot-cli&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;githubnext.com&#x2F;projects&#x2F;copilot-cli&#x2F;</a>). That they use ffmpeg as the example hits a huge pain point for me. But:<p>&quot;Next Waitlist by GitHub Next would like permission to: Act on your behalf<p>Not owned or operated by GitHub&quot;<p>Why does signing up for a waitlist require me to give permissions to an app to act in my account? An app that isn&#x27;t even officially from GitHub?<p>This sets a bad example for permission requests, getting people to just click through the dialog, which requests too much access, and from the wrong domain.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Bedon292</author><text>I was wondering the same thing. It seems like it is labeled weirdly since it is part of GitHub, but definitely was triple checking what was going on with that.</text></comment> |
4,669,873 | 4,670,011 | 1 | 2 | 4,669,679 | train | <story><title>Google Earnings Come Early; Shares Drop</title><url>http://blogs.wsj.com/marketbeat/2012/10/18/google-earnings-come-early-shares-drop/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>diego</author><text>As an interesting aside, I created a word cloud with the last 1000 Hacker News headlines to cross the 250-point threshold. I found Google was in 49 of those. Hacker News seems to care more about Google than any other company.<p><a href="http://images.diegobasch.com/newsyc250.png" rel="nofollow">http://images.diegobasch.com/newsyc250.png</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Google Earnings Come Early; Shares Drop</title><url>http://blogs.wsj.com/marketbeat/2012/10/18/google-earnings-come-early-shares-drop/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>revelation</author><text>I love this talk of "analysts". Did the "analysts" miss that Google just bought a struggling 10B+ Motorola? Do they expect it to be some magic unicorn that can turn Motorolas losses into Googles profits in a single quarter?</text></comment> |
13,257,573 | 13,257,406 | 1 | 3 | 13,257,252 | train | <story><title>Learning Machine Learning: A beginner's journey</title><url>http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2016/12/learning-machine-learning-beginners.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>saurabhjha</author><text>I think this &quot;machine learning for hackers&quot; approach is just not enough. Oftentimes, you do need a solid theoretical&#x2F;mathematical background. Most people seems to approach ML like they approach programming tools or libraries - learn just enough to get job done and move on.<p>I was studying machine learning from Andrew Ng&#x27;s CS229 (the class videos are online. I think they date from 2008 or hereabout). There is no way you can progress beyond lecture 2 (out of 20) without a solid probability background. A solid background in probability&#x2F;statistics probably means a good first course in Probability or maybe the first five chapters of &quot;Statistical Inference&quot; by Cassias and Berger. Similarly, for SVM, you need a solid background in Linear Algebra and so on. You probably also need a background Linear Optimization. Here are the recommendations by Prof. Michael Jordan <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=1055389" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=1055389</a><p>Not a lot of people want to dive in this much. They have got things to do and who cares about proofs anyway. The thinking goes like &quot;Most of the mathematics is abstracted away by libraries like scikit-learn. Let&#x27;s get shit done.&quot;. Well, I think a lot of competitive advantage of Google&#x2F;Facebook in ML is because they have staffed their engineering with people who have studied these things for years (by PhD). Compare that to flipkart&#x27;s recommendations.<p>However, I don&#x27;t think this problem is unique to ML&#x2F;Data Science. It is equally bad in &quot;Distributed systems&quot;. Let&#x27;s use Docker, that&#x27;s the future!</text></comment> | <story><title>Learning Machine Learning: A beginner's journey</title><url>http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2016/12/learning-machine-learning-beginners.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>minimaxir</author><text>&gt; So I am doubling down on ML&#x2F;DL.<p>The amount of free resources now available for learning machine learning&#x2F;deep learning nowadays is robust and easy to comprehend. (indeed, Andrew Ng&#x27;s Coursera class is very good). And running running ML code is even easier, with libraries like Tensorflow&#x2F;Theano to abstract the ML gruntwork (and Keras to abstract the abstraction!)<p>I suspect that there may be machine learning knowledge <i>crash</i>, where the basics are repeated endlessly, but there is less <i>unique, real world application</i> of the knowledge learned. I&#x27;ve seen many Internet testimonials saying how &quot;I followed an online tutorial and now I can classify handwritten digits, AI is the future!&quot; The meme that Kaggle competitions are a metric of practical ML skill encourages budding ML enthusiasts to look at minimizing log-loss or maximizing accuracy <i>without considering time&#x2F;cost tradeoffs</i>, which doesn&#x27;t reflect real-world constraints.<p>Unfortunately, many successful real world applications of ML&#x2F;DL are the ones <i>not</i> being instructed in tutorials as they are trade secrets (this is the case with &quot;big data&quot; literature, to my frustration). OpenAI is a good step toward transparency in the field, but that won&#x27;t stop the ML-trivializing &quot;this program can play Pong, AI is the future!&quot; thought pieces (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=13256962" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=13256962</a>).</text></comment> |
2,206,822 | 2,206,566 | 1 | 3 | 2,206,407 | train | <story><title>Pervasive myths about older software developers</title><url>http://www.lessonsoffailure.com/developers/pervasive-myths-older-software-developers/</url><text>A topic near and dear to my heart. ;-)</text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>edw519</author><text>Another "I have witnessed X" so "Y must be true" post.<p>I've been programming commercially for 32 years and in all that time, I have found very little correlation between age and ability to deliver quality software.<p>I have worked with younger, inexperienced, and uneducated programmers who were willing to learn, with minds like sponges and who were a pleasure to work with. They often found or thought of things the rest of us overlooked.<p>I have worked with younger, inexperienced, and well educated programmers who thought they knew better and were obstacles to progress.<p>I have worked with older programmers with the same one year's experience 22 times. Oy.<p>I have worked with older programmers with excellent domain knowledge and limited technical range. Their personality and willingness to succeed were often the key to progress.<p>I have worked with older programmers with excellent technical range and limited domain knowledge. Sometimes it's hard to teach an old dog new tricks, but when you can, results can be golden.<p>I have worked with brilliant older programmers with extensive experience and open minds. The best of all worlds.<p>(By the way, I have also worked with programmers of many ethnicities, female, handicapped, gay, Republican, religious, even left-handed, and have found little or no correlation between their "description" and their "performance". One of the beauties of programming is that the easiest way to evaluate your performance is through your work itself and not much else.)</text></comment> | <story><title>Pervasive myths about older software developers</title><url>http://www.lessonsoffailure.com/developers/pervasive-myths-older-software-developers/</url><text>A topic near and dear to my heart. ;-)</text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Isamu</author><text>Old developer here. Nice to affirm that these are "myths" in the sense that they are often not true, but given a random old guy these may be quite accurate. These are observations that people have made of real individuals that do not generalize to the whole group.<p>&#62; Myth: Older software developers are more jaded and cynical and therefore, less desirable in the workplace than younger ones. Younger developers are more enthusiastic than older ones.<p>I would have to say I have been both growing in enthusiasm and getting more jaded. The getting jaded part means you no longer want to hurl yourself at something that experience tells you is doomed from the start, but the enthusiasm means maybe this new twist will make it work.<p>One of the great powers of youth is ignorance - the kind of ignorance that enables you to take on projects that are too big and require you to push beyond your original capabilities until you conquer. This ignorance is the source of tales that start: "if I had known what I was getting into...."</text></comment> |
39,727,383 | 39,727,579 | 1 | 2 | 39,725,678 | train | <story><title>Y Combinator's chief startup whisperer is demoting himself</title><url>https://www.wired.com/story/plaintext-y-combinator-michael-seibel-startup-whisperer/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>swyx</author><text>siebel’s podcast youtube series with dalton caldwell of founder advice has been great recently, in case anyone hasnt been following</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>neom</author><text>Dalton &amp; Michael - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;playlist?list=PLQ-uHSnFig5Nd98Sc9I-kkc0ZWe8peRMC" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;playlist?list=PLQ-uHSnFig5Nd98Sc9I-k...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Y Combinator's chief startup whisperer is demoting himself</title><url>https://www.wired.com/story/plaintext-y-combinator-michael-seibel-startup-whisperer/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>swyx</author><text>siebel’s podcast youtube series with dalton caldwell of founder advice has been great recently, in case anyone hasnt been following</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>asim</author><text>It&#x27;s a gem. What I&#x27;m curious about is how these two ended up at YC as partners and not founding another company. I think I know the answer but always interested to know other people&#x27;s journeys.</text></comment> |
17,959,518 | 17,959,278 | 1 | 2 | 17,959,085 | train | <story><title>Amazon is stuffing its search results pages with ads</title><url>https://www.recode.net/2018/9/10/17797720/amazon-is-stuffing-its-search-results-pages-with-ads</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>maaaats</author><text>Unless you know exctly brand&#x2F;make&#x2F;model you wan&#x27;t to buy on Amazon, the search is useless. Hundreds of similar results from dozens of vendors of varying quality.<p>I liked it better when they sold things themselves, now they&#x27;re just an eBay clone selling cheap knockoffs trying to hide the fact.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>NeedMoreTea</author><text>Even then it&#x27;s borderline useless as when you search for the exact pair of trousers you want you&#x27;ll now get other ranges, and dozens upon dozens of fake-brand cheap knockoffs.<p>When you do find the item, you&#x27;ll find in amongst the &quot;customers also looked at&#x2F;bought&quot; 4 or 5 other pages containing the exact same item. At different prices and stock levels. None of which showed up in the search you just did for that item.<p>It&#x27;s completely broken and absurd.</text></comment> | <story><title>Amazon is stuffing its search results pages with ads</title><url>https://www.recode.net/2018/9/10/17797720/amazon-is-stuffing-its-search-results-pages-with-ads</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>maaaats</author><text>Unless you know exctly brand&#x2F;make&#x2F;model you wan&#x27;t to buy on Amazon, the search is useless. Hundreds of similar results from dozens of vendors of varying quality.<p>I liked it better when they sold things themselves, now they&#x27;re just an eBay clone selling cheap knockoffs trying to hide the fact.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Loughla</author><text>&gt;now they&#x27;re just an eBay clone selling cheap knockoffs trying to hide the fact.<p>I&#x27;ve moved almost all of my online purchases BACK to ebay actually because of this. At least ebay&#x27;s trust system is easy to understand and harder to game than what amazon has in terms of reviews.<p>I&#x27;m interested to see if this is a trend, or if my circle of friends is an outlier.</text></comment> |
16,717,241 | 16,716,681 | 1 | 2 | 16,715,751 | train | <story><title>Mailchimp Is Shutting Down ICO and Blockchain-Related Emails</title><url>https://futurism.com/mailchimp-is-shutting-down-ico-and-blockchain-related-emails-and-people-are-freaking-out/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ISL</author><text>A middle-ground alternative might be to say, &quot;Hey, delivering blockchain&#x2F;ICO emails costs <i>us</i> <i>n</i>% more than your average email. Therefore, we will still deliver them, but at <i>n</i>% the usual price.&quot;<p>It&#x27;s a little like UPS&#x2F;FedEx charging more for hazardous-material shipping.<p>If <i>n</i> is large, it will have a similar effect without feeling like MailChimp is out to censor cryptocurrency.</text></item><item><author>spamizbad</author><text>Strongly disagree. A cornerstone of Mailchimp&#x27;s value proposition is its email deliverability, and its one of the best in the industry at landing emails in people&#x27;s inboxes. Anything that could compromise that reputation would be a huge blow to their business. ICO and blockchain emails can make spam filters go crazy, I&#x27;ve seen this first-hand. Mailchimp can&#x27;t control how spam filters work, but it can control, in a broad sense, how it permits customers to utilize their platform.<p>Mailchimp shouldn&#x27;t fall on its sword and harm the delivery of its thousands of customers because some people like the blockchain.</text></item><item><author>stoev</author><text>When Facebook banned blockchain-related ads it was understandable - they are a closed platform and can chose to accept whatever content they decide to.<p>When Google banned blockchain-related ads it was a much more serious issue - millions of websites are supported by Google ads through AdSense and AdX. Google is the main revenue source of the vast majority of publishers on the open internet. It seems incredibly unfair to punish researchers, entrepreneurs, publishers, and enthusiasts for a technology that is used by millions of people.<p>What Mailchimp is doing goes one step further - they are directly censoring what companies can share with their customers and what they cannot. This feels incredibly intrusive whether you are a fan of blockchain tech or not.<p>A private company censoring people for discussing a perfectly legal technology deserves a boycott. My company is a Mailchimp customer and has never sent an email mentioning blockchains, ICOs, or anything related, but this news means that we will never use them again.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>awj</author><text>Except it&#x27;s not a pure cost thing. Delivering blockchain&#x2F;ICO emails impacts the deliverability scores of everyone else routed through those same domains and IPs. It&#x27;s incredibly difficult to pin that to a number, because it&#x27;s hard to quantify in advance how much of an impact one customer&#x27;s blockchain emails will have on your IP&#x2F;domain reputation.<p>The only way to make it a pure <i>n%</i> cost is to isolate the individual customer or all blockchain-email customers to a dedicated set of IPs&#x2F;domains that can have their own (probably: really shitty) reputations. At that point, it&#x27;s highly likely you&#x27;ll go through all that effort just to take money from people and <i>still</i> not be able to deliver their email due to catastrophically low reputation infrastructure.<p>Refusing to accept the impact to your other customers of a hot spam topic is not &quot;censorship&quot;. People <i>really</i> need to stop misusing this word. Mailchimp is a business, and has every right to take reasonable steps to protect their customers. It&#x27;s already pretty common for porn and get-rich-quick businesses to be refused by these services, largely for the exact same reasons.</text></comment> | <story><title>Mailchimp Is Shutting Down ICO and Blockchain-Related Emails</title><url>https://futurism.com/mailchimp-is-shutting-down-ico-and-blockchain-related-emails-and-people-are-freaking-out/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ISL</author><text>A middle-ground alternative might be to say, &quot;Hey, delivering blockchain&#x2F;ICO emails costs <i>us</i> <i>n</i>% more than your average email. Therefore, we will still deliver them, but at <i>n</i>% the usual price.&quot;<p>It&#x27;s a little like UPS&#x2F;FedEx charging more for hazardous-material shipping.<p>If <i>n</i> is large, it will have a similar effect without feeling like MailChimp is out to censor cryptocurrency.</text></item><item><author>spamizbad</author><text>Strongly disagree. A cornerstone of Mailchimp&#x27;s value proposition is its email deliverability, and its one of the best in the industry at landing emails in people&#x27;s inboxes. Anything that could compromise that reputation would be a huge blow to their business. ICO and blockchain emails can make spam filters go crazy, I&#x27;ve seen this first-hand. Mailchimp can&#x27;t control how spam filters work, but it can control, in a broad sense, how it permits customers to utilize their platform.<p>Mailchimp shouldn&#x27;t fall on its sword and harm the delivery of its thousands of customers because some people like the blockchain.</text></item><item><author>stoev</author><text>When Facebook banned blockchain-related ads it was understandable - they are a closed platform and can chose to accept whatever content they decide to.<p>When Google banned blockchain-related ads it was a much more serious issue - millions of websites are supported by Google ads through AdSense and AdX. Google is the main revenue source of the vast majority of publishers on the open internet. It seems incredibly unfair to punish researchers, entrepreneurs, publishers, and enthusiasts for a technology that is used by millions of people.<p>What Mailchimp is doing goes one step further - they are directly censoring what companies can share with their customers and what they cannot. This feels incredibly intrusive whether you are a fan of blockchain tech or not.<p>A private company censoring people for discussing a perfectly legal technology deserves a boycott. My company is a Mailchimp customer and has never sent an email mentioning blockchains, ICOs, or anything related, but this news means that we will never use them again.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kristianc</author><text>The problem is that the cost of Blockchain &#x2F; ICO spam does not just fall on Mailchimp as a company, it falls on MailChimp&#x27;s customers, who have to suffer through reduced email deliverability (for the same cost they are already paying).<p>Other than that, MailChimp is a private company, not the government, and can damn well serve who they want.</text></comment> |
26,296,588 | 26,296,609 | 1 | 2 | 26,295,435 | train | <story><title>Strange chip: Teardown of a vintage IBM token ring controller</title><url>https://www.righto.com/2021/02/strange-chip-teardown-of-vintage-ibm.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>devoutsalsa</author><text>I worked on a token ring network back in the 90s. There were more employees than network ports. So every time someone complained of not having network connectivity, we&#x27;d find a network cable where the light on the port wasn&#x27;t lit up from activity, usually because someone was out sick or on vacation. If everyone decided to come into the office, we would have had a problem, but I don&#x27;t think it ever happened while I was there.</text></comment> | <story><title>Strange chip: Teardown of a vintage IBM token ring controller</title><url>https://www.righto.com/2021/02/strange-chip-teardown-of-vintage-ibm.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>TedDoesntTalk</author><text>Token-ring networks could have ruled the world. But IBM’s insistence on licensing fees made the equipment expensive compared to Ethernet.<p>Token-ring was faster: 16 Mbps with no collisions, vs Ethernet’s 10 Mbps in a perfect world... but in reality it was slower when accounting for collisons and retries. No so with token ring.<p>If IBM had licensed the tech without fees, hardware would have been competitive to Ethernet and today we’d all be using 1 Gbps token ring in our homes.<p>But now I’d be surprised if a token-ring driver even exists for Windows 10 or MacOS.</text></comment> |
24,356,367 | 24,355,334 | 1 | 2 | 24,353,423 | train | <story><title>On modern hardware the min-max heap beats a binary heap</title><url>https://probablydance.com/2020/08/31/on-modern-hardware-the-min-max-heap-beats-a-binary-heap/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>noctune</author><text>And if you only need a monotone priority queue (i.e. priority queue where the popped elements are monotonically increasing&#x2F;decreasing) you should consider using a radix heap. This monotone requirement can be satisfied more than you would expect when eg. using time as key or in pathfinding. I have a simple radix heap implementation here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mpdn&#x2F;radix-heap" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mpdn&#x2F;radix-heap</a></text></comment> | <story><title>On modern hardware the min-max heap beats a binary heap</title><url>https://probablydance.com/2020/08/31/on-modern-hardware-the-min-max-heap-beats-a-binary-heap/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>twotwotwo</author><text>Like folks mentioned there, I wonder if a higher-fanout heap (people asked about 4-ary) might also do well in practice. Looking at Wikipedia (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;D-ary_heap" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;D-ary_heap</a>), it looks like maybe so -- the growth in number of comparisons isn&#x27;t that bad, and it mentions 4-ary heaps working well specifically.<p>(Like how linear search wins for small N, or insertion sort helps with small subarrays in introsort: more steps, but each step is also a lot cheaper on modern hardware due to fewer branch mispredictions, better cache locality, or something else that better fits the hardware&#x27;s strengths.)</text></comment> |
10,315,505 | 10,313,274 | 1 | 3 | 10,312,652 | train | <story><title>GitHub supports Universal 2nd Factor authentication</title><url>https://github.com/blog/2071-github-supports-universal-2nd-factor-authentication</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>moreati</author><text>A few U2F details worth mentioning<p>Browser support is currently limited to Chrome, and possible Windows Edge*<p>For now it only works with USB. Bluetooth and NFC specs are out, browser support is the bottleneck<p>The protocol is public&#x2F;private key based, with the private key strongly encouraged to be in tamper resistant&#x2F;evident storage.<p>The protocol is authentication method agnostic. It doesn&#x27;t care if you use a USB key, a retinal scan, a pin or divination.<p>You could write a software only authenticator if you wanted, but servers could detect that (and reject it if they chose to) through the attestation certificate you provided. You can&#x27;t pretend to be a brand X authenticator, because only company X will have the private key(s) matching the attestation certs to sign (batches) of model X authenticator.<p>Yubikeys are just one implementation of a U2F authenticator. In theory GitHub now works with any present&#x2F;future authenticators that talks U2F (modulo browser support) e.g. an iPhone+TouchID+NokNok SDK, a Pebble watch+app, an Android Phone+$your_app, an NFC implant, m-of-n wearables<p>* Microsoft announced something U2F related for Windows 10, I never got to the bottom of what exactly<p>For more detail I did a talk at EuroPython this year <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;moreati.github.io&#x2F;passwordspain&#x2F;#&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;moreati.github.io&#x2F;passwordspain&#x2F;#&#x2F;</a> <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=YSTsgldazSU" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=YSTsgldazSU</a></text></comment> | <story><title>GitHub supports Universal 2nd Factor authentication</title><url>https://github.com/blog/2071-github-supports-universal-2nd-factor-authentication</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>gbraad</author><text>&quot;Note: FIDO U2F authentication is currently only available for the Chrome browser.&quot; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;help.github.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;providing-your-2fa-authentication-code&#x2F;#using-a-fido-u2f-security-key" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;help.github.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;providing-your-2fa-authenti...</a></text></comment> |
38,100,087 | 38,099,463 | 1 | 3 | 38,099,145 | train | <story><title>Htmx, Rust and Shuttle: A New Rapid Prototyping Stack</title><url>https://www.shuttle.rs/blog/2023/10/25/htmx-with-rust</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>danpalmer</author><text>HTMX is great for rapid prototyping, but Rust has never struck me as suitable for rapid prototyping. There are some nice abstractions here than reduce the amount of code for sure, but that&#x27;s only one aspect of rapid prototyping. Rust still has a high learning curve, compiles relatively slowly, and still takes a lot more code to achieve things than the equivalent Python or even JavaScript&#x2F;TypeScript.<p>Shuttle looks pretty cool as a platform, but it seems that it has decided that because Rust is a good language for a platform (makes sense!) that it must be good for usage on the platform. I really don&#x27;t think I agree with this.<p>In my experience, Django + Heroku (or the Heroku competitor du jour) is a convincing rapid prototyping setup for larger sites. And things like RunKit or Glitch are a convincing setup for smaller builds. I&#x27;m not sure whether Shuttle adds anything over these options unless the requirement is to use Rust.</text></comment> | <story><title>Htmx, Rust and Shuttle: A New Rapid Prototyping Stack</title><url>https://www.shuttle.rs/blog/2023/10/25/htmx-with-rust</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ge96</author><text>At some point I wonder when is progress enough.<p>Comparing htmx (modifiers in html, lot of abstraction) vs remix (front&#x2F;backend in same file) and then the readability of rust (lot of chaining&#x2F;calls and &quot;decorators&quot; eg. tokio). It just works but if you get used to that syntax&#x2F;rely on abstraction. I&#x27;ll learn what&#x27;s hot to be employed but yeah. I&#x27;ve been happy with just ReactJS&#x2F;Express.</text></comment> |
23,561,757 | 23,561,740 | 1 | 2 | 23,561,113 | train | <story><title>Apple is threatening to terminate my developer account with no clear reason</title><url>https://www.andyibanez.com/posts/please-help-apple-threatening-terminate-apple-developer-account/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>BiteCode_dev</author><text>And Apple is not even an isolated case.<p>Google will close gmail accounts, take away adsense revenues, or remove youtube videos on a whim.<p>Visa blocked users from giving their money to political causes they decided didn&#x27;t aligned with their view of the world.<p>For years Microsoft made it super hard to buy hardware without paying the Windows licence. They killed xbox remotely. They have invasive telemetry in Win 10.<p>Paypal may refuse to pay the money you have on their account at any moment. Your money, no appeal.<p>Twitter and facebook censorship rules are on a case by case basis. If your famous, you may be able to use hate speech. I you are an anonymous political activist, China may ask for your shut down.<p>Big companies exist to make money. If they get too much power, they will abuse it. Not because they are evil, but because it&#x27;s the logical thing to do for them.<p>This is why I was advocating in another comment that we should not use WhatsApp new payment system:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23553455" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23553455</a><p>Thinking about the power we give to big entities is a central mechanism to build the society we live on. That&#x27;s why we should think about what we buy, the media we consumme, etc.<p>They are votes, just as much as during an election.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jcfields</author><text>Amazon suspended my parents&#x27; seller account last August or September with no explanation. All listings removed, couldn&#x27;t log in, no direct customer service number that connects you with someone who knows what&#x27;s going on, and kept taking the monthly fee anyway. Finally, they closed it entirely (again without explanation) a month or two ago. They&#x27;re still holding their inventory in their distribution centers, probably a few thousand dollars worth. I&#x27;m sure they&#x27;ll charge storage and shipping fees to send it back, so it&#x27;s almost certainly not worth bothering about given how thin their margins were in the first place. Yeah, it&#x27;s not a great direction we&#x27;re going in here. These companies just don&#x27;t have enough incentive to care.</text></comment> | <story><title>Apple is threatening to terminate my developer account with no clear reason</title><url>https://www.andyibanez.com/posts/please-help-apple-threatening-terminate-apple-developer-account/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>BiteCode_dev</author><text>And Apple is not even an isolated case.<p>Google will close gmail accounts, take away adsense revenues, or remove youtube videos on a whim.<p>Visa blocked users from giving their money to political causes they decided didn&#x27;t aligned with their view of the world.<p>For years Microsoft made it super hard to buy hardware without paying the Windows licence. They killed xbox remotely. They have invasive telemetry in Win 10.<p>Paypal may refuse to pay the money you have on their account at any moment. Your money, no appeal.<p>Twitter and facebook censorship rules are on a case by case basis. If your famous, you may be able to use hate speech. I you are an anonymous political activist, China may ask for your shut down.<p>Big companies exist to make money. If they get too much power, they will abuse it. Not because they are evil, but because it&#x27;s the logical thing to do for them.<p>This is why I was advocating in another comment that we should not use WhatsApp new payment system:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23553455" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23553455</a><p>Thinking about the power we give to big entities is a central mechanism to build the society we live on. That&#x27;s why we should think about what we buy, the media we consumme, etc.<p>They are votes, just as much as during an election.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ksec</author><text>&gt;Visa blocked users from giving their money to political causes they decided didn&#x27;t aligned with their view of the world.<p>That is why I am absolutely against abolishing paper cash.<p>Edit: I know there are countries where you have a democratically elected representatives and every part of the government and even companies is held ( more or less ) accountable to the people and does not need to worry ( much ) about big business or government taking over some basic right. Yes cashless in that case is great. Is like utopian.<p>Unfortunately not everyone has that luxury.</text></comment> |
31,086,265 | 31,085,269 | 1 | 2 | 31,084,301 | train | <story><title>Netlify Edge Functions: A new serverless runtime powered by Deno</title><url>https://www.netlify.com/blog/announcing-serverless-compute-with-edge-functions</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lewisjoe</author><text>This is great news. I&#x27;m really rooting for a successful trend of Serverless runtimes, mainly as a weapon against rising cloud deployment costs.<p>While the general trend today is to back the serverless environment with Javascript runtimes (Cloudflare runs its edge on top of V8, Netlify uses deno, most other serverless runtimes use nodejs), I&#x27;m optimistic that WebAssembly will take over this space eventually, for a bunch of reasons like:<p>1. Running a WASM engine on the cloud means, running user code with all security
controls, but with a fraction of the overhead of a container or nodejs environment. Even the existing Javascript runtimes, comes with WebAssembly execution support out of the box! which means these companies can launch support for WASM with minimal infra changes.<p>2.It unlocks the possibility of running a wide range of languages. So there’s no lock-in with
the language that the Serverless provider mandates.<p>3.Web pages that are as ancient as the early 90s are perfectly
rendered even today in the most modern browsers because the group behind
the web standards strive for backward compatibility. WebAssembly’s specifications are
driven by those same folks - which means WASM is the ultimate format for any form of
code to exist. Basically, it means a WASM binary is future proof by default.<p>I&#x27;ve published my (ranty) notes on why Serverless will eventually replace Kubernetes as the dominant software deployment technique, here - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;writer.zohopublic.com&#x2F;writer&#x2F;published&#x2F;nqy9o87cf7aa789ba49419eac167d0c34cfcb" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;writer.zohopublic.com&#x2F;writer&#x2F;published&#x2F;nqy9o87cf7aa7...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>syrusakbary</author><text>I fully agree with your take. I think JS-directed computation is very good towards short-term adoption (since running JS on the Edge is probably the most popular use case), but eventually the needs to run other programming languages at the Edge will likely eclipse the JS use case.<p>At Wasmer [1] we have been working actively towards this future. Lately more companies have been also doing awesome work on these fronts: Lunatic, Suborbital, Cosmonic (WasmCloud) and Fermyon (Spin). However, each of us with a different take&#x2F;vision on how to approach the future of Computation at the Edge. I&#x27;m very excited about to see what each approach will bring into the table.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wasmer.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wasmer.io&#x2F;</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Netlify Edge Functions: A new serverless runtime powered by Deno</title><url>https://www.netlify.com/blog/announcing-serverless-compute-with-edge-functions</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lewisjoe</author><text>This is great news. I&#x27;m really rooting for a successful trend of Serverless runtimes, mainly as a weapon against rising cloud deployment costs.<p>While the general trend today is to back the serverless environment with Javascript runtimes (Cloudflare runs its edge on top of V8, Netlify uses deno, most other serverless runtimes use nodejs), I&#x27;m optimistic that WebAssembly will take over this space eventually, for a bunch of reasons like:<p>1. Running a WASM engine on the cloud means, running user code with all security
controls, but with a fraction of the overhead of a container or nodejs environment. Even the existing Javascript runtimes, comes with WebAssembly execution support out of the box! which means these companies can launch support for WASM with minimal infra changes.<p>2.It unlocks the possibility of running a wide range of languages. So there’s no lock-in with
the language that the Serverless provider mandates.<p>3.Web pages that are as ancient as the early 90s are perfectly
rendered even today in the most modern browsers because the group behind
the web standards strive for backward compatibility. WebAssembly’s specifications are
driven by those same folks - which means WASM is the ultimate format for any form of
code to exist. Basically, it means a WASM binary is future proof by default.<p>I&#x27;ve published my (ranty) notes on why Serverless will eventually replace Kubernetes as the dominant software deployment technique, here - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;writer.zohopublic.com&#x2F;writer&#x2F;published&#x2F;nqy9o87cf7aa789ba49419eac167d0c34cfcb" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;writer.zohopublic.com&#x2F;writer&#x2F;published&#x2F;nqy9o87cf7aa7...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>electroly</author><text>&gt; a fraction of the overhead of a container<p>I mean, only in theory or when looking at it from the right angle, right? Or are you only comparing against JavaScript (unclear)? WASM is still much slower than native code. Containers spend most of their time executing native code; the &quot;overhead&quot; of containers is at the boundaries and is minor compared to the slowdown by moving from native code to WASM. In the future WASM may approach native performance, but it&#x27;s not there now. I&#x27;m 100% certain that transitioning my native-code-in-containers workloads to WASM would be slower, not faster.</text></comment> |
13,389,681 | 13,388,972 | 1 | 2 | 13,388,357 | train | <story><title>Nintendo Switch</title><url>https://www.nintendo.co.jp/switch/index.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ericzawo</author><text>That[1] was masterful marketing of an upcoming videogame console on all fronts. From the beginning it emphasises mobility with a (hopefully good!) smartphone app to manage online&#x2F;local wifi matches, as well as multiple levels of play while on the go. It&#x27;s reasonably priced (matches current generation in total at the register) and has an incredibly diverse range of titles to be excited about this calendar year. It managed to loop &quot;The Americas&quot; in with a Reggie appearance that worked well, and upsold Skyrim and Fifa, two gigantic American games with international appeal. They also talked up Dragon Quest X, which is an MMORPG, launching on Switch, as well as Dragon Quest XI, which until tonight was a PS4 exclusive.<p>Essentially, they placed value squarely in the face of everything your PC&#x2F;enthusiast-level gaming rig won&#x27;t ever replace. The ability to pick up and play elsewhere. Like the Wii, it&#x27;s not even trying to compete with the current crop of consoles. It&#x27;s value proposition will be placed somewhere a bit obtusely, between your mobile phone and everything else you leave at home. Yes, this obviously functions as a home console as well, but I can&#x27;t help but suspect Nintendo absolutely meant to go for what makes handhelds great. If any company can do it, they can. So what if it cannibalises their current 3DS offerings? Pokemon seems to be going strong with its fanbase.<p>The whole presentation, from the demonstration of the hardware to especially the finishing trademark &quot;One more thing!&quot; with Zelda making a predictable but nonetheless amazing launch date. It&#x27;s a strategy that worked wonders for the Wii, remember, so why not?<p>Nintendo absolutely killed it, and I&#x27;ll be keeping a really close eye on this thing. But the marketing and presentation was honestly textbook.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;uuC4YLLkqME?t=33m20s" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;uuC4YLLkqME?t=33m20s</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>agd</author><text>&#x27;Nintendo absolutely killed it&#x27;<p>I&#x27;m afraid I have to disagree. Here&#x27;s why:<p>- price: much more expensive than most people were expecting (£280 vs for example, £200 for a PS4 with a game)<p>- battery life: potentially only 2.5 hours? Really not good enough for a handheld.<p>- storage: only 32gb, will run out very quickly<p>- online offering weak vs ps4&#x2F;xbox as only NES&#x2F;SNES games and you only get them for a month<p>- very few titles on launch and key titles (e.g. Skyrim) delayed until much later in the year<p>Battery life and price are the real killers for me. I can see Nintendo slashing the price soon, just like they had to with the 3DS.<p>Edit: It seems like many others weren&#x27;t impressed either. e.g. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eurogamer.net&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2017-01-13-nintendos-precarious-reveal-runs-risk-of-switching-off-fans" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eurogamer.net&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2017-01-13-nintendos-preca...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Nintendo Switch</title><url>https://www.nintendo.co.jp/switch/index.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ericzawo</author><text>That[1] was masterful marketing of an upcoming videogame console on all fronts. From the beginning it emphasises mobility with a (hopefully good!) smartphone app to manage online&#x2F;local wifi matches, as well as multiple levels of play while on the go. It&#x27;s reasonably priced (matches current generation in total at the register) and has an incredibly diverse range of titles to be excited about this calendar year. It managed to loop &quot;The Americas&quot; in with a Reggie appearance that worked well, and upsold Skyrim and Fifa, two gigantic American games with international appeal. They also talked up Dragon Quest X, which is an MMORPG, launching on Switch, as well as Dragon Quest XI, which until tonight was a PS4 exclusive.<p>Essentially, they placed value squarely in the face of everything your PC&#x2F;enthusiast-level gaming rig won&#x27;t ever replace. The ability to pick up and play elsewhere. Like the Wii, it&#x27;s not even trying to compete with the current crop of consoles. It&#x27;s value proposition will be placed somewhere a bit obtusely, between your mobile phone and everything else you leave at home. Yes, this obviously functions as a home console as well, but I can&#x27;t help but suspect Nintendo absolutely meant to go for what makes handhelds great. If any company can do it, they can. So what if it cannibalises their current 3DS offerings? Pokemon seems to be going strong with its fanbase.<p>The whole presentation, from the demonstration of the hardware to especially the finishing trademark &quot;One more thing!&quot; with Zelda making a predictable but nonetheless amazing launch date. It&#x27;s a strategy that worked wonders for the Wii, remember, so why not?<p>Nintendo absolutely killed it, and I&#x27;ll be keeping a really close eye on this thing. But the marketing and presentation was honestly textbook.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;uuC4YLLkqME?t=33m20s" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;uuC4YLLkqME?t=33m20s</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>chalupa-man</author><text>I do want to point out that it matches current consoles in the US, but is actually going to be significantly more expensive than anything on the market in many countries. Where I am, for example, if they release at exactly the US price -- which they won&#x27;t, prices always get inflated -- a Switch will cost more than a PS4 that comes packed with Fallout 4, Skyrim, and Dishonored 2, three hit games.<p>On top of this, I think they&#x27;ve made a fatal flaw when it comes to handheld pricing. If you remember, the 3DS launched at $250, tanked hard, and received a whopping 33% price cut only 4 months after it launched, followed by the announcement of the new 2DS which would be even cheaper. One of the things Nintendo produced the 2DS is because they found, to their great surprise, that almost 80% of 3DS customers outside Japan never took their 3DS outside the home. They weren&#x27;t buying it for portability, like Japanese customers usually did; they were buying it because it was the cheapest way to play videogames, only a third the price of a console and with games that were half the price of console games (in many countries even less). Right now I can buy a 2DS for 105 and brand-new games for 40 where an Xbox One is 400 and games are 80 - 100. That&#x27;s a big reason many of my friends have one.<p>Then note that they&#x27;ve also priced the Switch above the iPad Mini. Most handhelds are bought by parents for kids. If parents see that they can get an iPad for less than the price of this new console, they&#x27;re very likely to: iPads are seen as luxury products with a wider variety of uses and many cheap games, and the iPad Mini is even more portable. This is the first handheld Nintendo have announced since iPads hit the market and I worry they haven&#x27;t taken this into account.<p>For those customers, who make up a majority of 3DS customers worldwide, the Switch is a non-starter; it&#x27;s likely to be considerably more expensive than its rivals, and those rivals happen to have either larger libraries, greater popularity, free online, and better graphics (Xbox One&#x2F;PS4) or a luxury image, greater portability, lower software costs, and a wider variety of uses including educational uses (iPad Mini). I&#x27;m really hoping Nintendo succeeds, because I&#x27;m a big fan of theirs, but I worry they have totally killed the big draws to handhelds.</text></comment> |
16,575,687 | 16,575,088 | 1 | 2 | 16,574,893 | train | <story><title>Show HN: Gitkube – Deploy to Kubernetes Using Git Push</title><url>https://gitkube.sh/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>praseodym</author><text>We’ve been using a similar solution for a while now: pushes to GitHub trigger Travis CI to build a Docker images. These get pushed to Docker Hub or Quay, which triggers a webhook to Keel.sh[1] running in our Kubernetes cluster. Keel then updates the Kubernetes deployment to perform a rolling update of the application.<p>1: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;keel.sh" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;keel.sh</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Show HN: Gitkube – Deploy to Kubernetes Using Git Push</title><url>https://gitkube.sh/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>lima</author><text>Red Hat&#x27;s OpenShift[1] Kubernetes distribution can do this too - you even get a webhook for GitHub copy and paste.<p>Kubernetes is a toolbox, not a product. There&#x27;s so much you have to set up yourself (build system, registry, security, logging stack, metrics...). That&#x27;s fine if you&#x27;re in the business of selling Kubernetes itself, but otherwise, most teams should use something like OpenShift and not re-invent the wheel.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;openshift&#x2F;origin" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;openshift&#x2F;origin</a></text></comment> |
33,730,654 | 33,730,377 | 1 | 2 | 33,729,345 | train | <story><title>maps.google.com now redirects to google.com/maps</title><url>https://garrit.xyz/posts/2022-11-24-smart-move-google</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>__michaelg</author><text>This is a fantastic example of motivated reasoning. This &quot;change&quot; (which apparently isn&#x27;t even new) can have so many different reasons, some of which are less harmful and some of which are probably worse (privacy-wise) than the one mentioned here. There is no indication that re&#x2F;mis-using permissions is specifically what they wanted to do here, there is also no example of them doing it right now. Don&#x27;t get me wrong, there is also no evidence that this isn&#x27;t the real reason and that they wouldn&#x27;t do that in the future. But the blog post basically list a single symptom and jumps right to the one conclusion that fits what the author expects.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hooby</author><text>1. The change does exist (although it apparently has been live for quite some time in some regions at least)<p>2. The change does have the effect of Google gaining more permissions (and subsequently more data) than previously<p>3. The author assumes that (2) is the (main) reason why (1) was done in the first place<p>Regardless of whether (3) is correct or completely wrong - and regardless of whether the author truly believes (3), or only uses it as a rhetorical trick to increase the controversy (and therefore the reach) of their post - both (1) and (2) remain fact.<p>And (2) is the actual problem here - regardless of whether it was done intentionally by Google or not.</text></comment> | <story><title>maps.google.com now redirects to google.com/maps</title><url>https://garrit.xyz/posts/2022-11-24-smart-move-google</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>__michaelg</author><text>This is a fantastic example of motivated reasoning. This &quot;change&quot; (which apparently isn&#x27;t even new) can have so many different reasons, some of which are less harmful and some of which are probably worse (privacy-wise) than the one mentioned here. There is no indication that re&#x2F;mis-using permissions is specifically what they wanted to do here, there is also no example of them doing it right now. Don&#x27;t get me wrong, there is also no evidence that this isn&#x27;t the real reason and that they wouldn&#x27;t do that in the future. But the blog post basically list a single symptom and jumps right to the one conclusion that fits what the author expects.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>stingraycharles</author><text>It may not be the only reason, but you’re being too generous if you don’t think this was at least one of the reasons they did it.<p>Other than some abstract “branding” campaign, I cannot really see many other reasons why they would be doing this.<p>And as someone who worked in adtech in the past, it was very well known that Google used their domain as their tracking cookie domain as it’s nearly impossible for adblockers to just block without crippling other functionality. So they even have a history of using precisely these types of techniques.</text></comment> |
5,553,428 | 5,553,282 | 1 | 2 | 5,552,823 | train | <story><title>How much usage can a Lego piece take before it loses its 'clutch power'?</title><url>http://phillipecantin.blogspot.com/2013/02/legos-magic-number-is-37112.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>famousactress</author><text>My first tech job was testing software at Hewlett Packard, circa '96-97. One of the projects I worked on was HP's first (I think) digital camera. The hardware testing was apparently running behind due to challenges the hardware team was having with abrasive qualities of some of the paints they'd chosen, and one day a bunch of us were asked to go help expedite some hardware tests.<p>Every button, latch, and moveable part on that camera was rated to a certain number of presses and uses. A team of folks (which for one day that winter included myself) sat in a room pressing buttons and drawing notches on a sheet of paper until the product failed or qualified. It was kind of eye opening, actually. For weeks afterward I was nervous about whether the next button press on my tv remote was the last :)<p>I'm curious, 16 years later.. How much of this testing is remains so manual? At HP I think the number of products and rate of change in early development made building fixtures to do this sort of thing pretty costly compared to low wage human testers.</text></comment> | <story><title>How much usage can a Lego piece take before it loses its 'clutch power'?</title><url>http://phillipecantin.blogspot.com/2013/02/legos-magic-number-is-37112.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>martin-adams</author><text>After 4 days 6 hours it did 36,720 iterations.
After 10 days it failed on 37,112 iterations.<p>It takes 10 seconds per iteration. My calculations say it would have failed after 4 days and 7 hours. I wonder what happened to the other 5 and a half days.<p>Very cool experiment. It's this type of testing that makes me feel reassured in mechanical engineering. It's about reassuring that a car air bag will work after years of inactivity, or a car seat belt buckle will not break under pressure in a collision. The only way to know is to test, test, test.</text></comment> |
34,860,072 | 34,858,781 | 1 | 2 | 34,858,321 | train | <story><title>Germany raises red flags about Palantir’s big data dragnet</title><url>https://www.wired.com/story/palantir-germany-gotham-dragnet/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>snowpid</author><text>linked letter to share holders by Palantine (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.palantir.com&#x2F;newsroom&#x2F;letters&#x2F;letter-to-shareholders&#x2F;november-7-2022&#x2F;en&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.palantir.com&#x2F;newsroom&#x2F;letters&#x2F;letter-to-sharehol...</a>)<p>:
&quot;It has been our experience, however, that some countries, particularly in continental Europe, including Germany, have fallen behind the United States in their willingness and ability to implement enterprise software systems that challenge existing habits and modes of operation.
There have been repeated attempts to build replicas of Silicon Valley in continental Europe, in Germany and elsewhere, but the results have been decidedly mixed.
We have found that large institutions in the United States have been far more willing to investigate the most significant sources of systemic dysfunction within their organizations, which in the current moment often relate to the ability or rather inability of an institution to metabolize its own data.&quot;<p>Honestly I feel the opposite in this high level description of cultural difference but it is the only rationalisation of the CEO who is very likely pissed off by data protection.<p>Oh boy, at least they are honest in their arrogance.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>t8sr</author><text>Having experienced American bureaucracy, I find the claim that US institutions have been &quot;willing to investigate systemic dysfunction&quot; completely hilarious.<p>I think what Palantir means is that American organizations have been faster to adopt big data and centralize decision-making. Having worked for multiple large US businesses, I am not convinced that this leads to &quot;less dysfunction&quot;.<p>Having a few technocrats with some data make all the decisions centrally is just a reinvention of Planned Economy. It didn&#x27;t work in the USSR and it doesn&#x27;t work now.</text></comment> | <story><title>Germany raises red flags about Palantir’s big data dragnet</title><url>https://www.wired.com/story/palantir-germany-gotham-dragnet/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>snowpid</author><text>linked letter to share holders by Palantine (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.palantir.com&#x2F;newsroom&#x2F;letters&#x2F;letter-to-shareholders&#x2F;november-7-2022&#x2F;en&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.palantir.com&#x2F;newsroom&#x2F;letters&#x2F;letter-to-sharehol...</a>)<p>:
&quot;It has been our experience, however, that some countries, particularly in continental Europe, including Germany, have fallen behind the United States in their willingness and ability to implement enterprise software systems that challenge existing habits and modes of operation.
There have been repeated attempts to build replicas of Silicon Valley in continental Europe, in Germany and elsewhere, but the results have been decidedly mixed.
We have found that large institutions in the United States have been far more willing to investigate the most significant sources of systemic dysfunction within their organizations, which in the current moment often relate to the ability or rather inability of an institution to metabolize its own data.&quot;<p>Honestly I feel the opposite in this high level description of cultural difference but it is the only rationalisation of the CEO who is very likely pissed off by data protection.<p>Oh boy, at least they are honest in their arrogance.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hef19898</author><text>Well, Palantir is a glorified spreadsheet provider whose only selling point is access to a ton of data its clients could not have otherwise. Their sales people are pretty good so, kind of the equivalent of the stereotypical IBM or SAP sales rep.</text></comment> |
24,652,495 | 24,651,504 | 1 | 2 | 24,650,817 | train | <story><title>Employee works for both Google and Facebook from home</title><url>https://twitter.com/arrington/status/1311520168200163328</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>deepsun</author><text>I don&#x27;t understand why people assume it&#x27;s scamming or cheating.
It&#x27;s perfectly legal, and I&#x27;d say it&#x27;s even good for country economy.<p>The employer might state that &quot;it&#x27;s our mutual understanding&quot; about anything in job offer, but it&#x27;s not a legally binding statement. Anti-competitive statements can be binding, though, so it might be illegal for them to work at FB and Google, as their business might intersect. But it&#x27;s a different story than just right to hold two &quot;full-time&quot; jobs.<p>One possibility I might think of -- if an employee is really a high performer, but couldn&#x27;t negotiate compensation above &quot;market price&quot; for their level.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gumby</author><text>In a salaried position your offer letter (that you sign) specifies you won’t do other renumeratwd work without the permission of your employer. Technically that’s not violating the <i>law</i> but it’s a violation of contract.<p>It’s funny though!</text></comment> | <story><title>Employee works for both Google and Facebook from home</title><url>https://twitter.com/arrington/status/1311520168200163328</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>deepsun</author><text>I don&#x27;t understand why people assume it&#x27;s scamming or cheating.
It&#x27;s perfectly legal, and I&#x27;d say it&#x27;s even good for country economy.<p>The employer might state that &quot;it&#x27;s our mutual understanding&quot; about anything in job offer, but it&#x27;s not a legally binding statement. Anti-competitive statements can be binding, though, so it might be illegal for them to work at FB and Google, as their business might intersect. But it&#x27;s a different story than just right to hold two &quot;full-time&quot; jobs.<p>One possibility I might think of -- if an employee is really a high performer, but couldn&#x27;t negotiate compensation above &quot;market price&quot; for their level.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>andrewcl</author><text>Big companies guard their IP quite strongly. I&#x27;d be surprised if he or she isn&#x27;t fired immediately once this is discovered for reasons related to that.</text></comment> |
35,423,109 | 35,422,566 | 1 | 2 | 35,422,127 | train | <story><title>Japan Breaks with U.S. Allies, Buys Russian Oil at Prices Above Cap</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/japan-breaks-with-u-s-allies-buys-russian-oil-at-prices-above-cap-1395accb</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>carlivar</author><text><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;NHWxq" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;NHWxq</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Japan Breaks with U.S. Allies, Buys Russian Oil at Prices Above Cap</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/japan-breaks-with-u-s-allies-buys-russian-oil-at-prices-above-cap-1395accb</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>defrost</author><text>In related news; backstory [1]:<p><pre><code> Australia is the biggest supplier of energy and key minerals to Japan, reflecting Australia’s position as a reliable, safe and competitive producer of raw resources. Australia provides around two-thirds of Japan’s coal, and a third of Japan’s LNG imports. Australia also provides about 60 per cent of Japan’s iron ore imports.
</code></pre>
and, just the other day [2]:<p><pre><code> The head of Japan&#x27;s biggest oil and gas producer has warned that Australia risks undermining global security through a decision to &quot;quietly quit&quot; the international gas trade.
In an extraordinary speech delivered at a federal parliamentary event on Thursday, Inpex chief executive Takayuki Ueda suggested Japan had been rattled by government interventions in Australia&#x27;s gas industry.
</code></pre>
[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;japan.embassy.gov.au&#x2F;tkyo&#x2F;resources.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;japan.embassy.gov.au&#x2F;tkyo&#x2F;resources.html</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.abc.net.au&#x2F;news&#x2F;2023-03-30&#x2F;japan-warns-world-peace-at-stake-in-australian-gas-exit&#x2F;102167908" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.abc.net.au&#x2F;news&#x2F;2023-03-30&#x2F;japan-warns-world-pea...</a></text></comment> |
5,875,557 | 5,874,561 | 1 | 2 | 5,874,274 | train | <story><title>Supreme Court rules human genes may not be patented</title><url>http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/supreme-court-says-human-genes-cannot-be-patented/2013/06/13/f7681b22-d436-11e2-b3a2-3bf5eb37b9d0_story.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>grellas</author><text>Like <i>Bilski</i>, this represents a short-term victory for those favoring patent protection but also shows that the Supreme Court is at least <i>trying</i> to impose limits on the Federal Circuit&#x27;s idea that basically everything under the sun should be eligible for patent protection.<p>Here is an informed summing up by Dennis Crouch at PatentlyO: &quot;What are the consequences [of the ruling]? My immediate reaction is that for most practical applications, the Court&#x27;s holding means that even though the broadest possible biotechnology product claims (to the isolated DNA itself) aren&#x27;t going to be patentable, the key elements in making and using a biotechnology-based invention are still going to be protectable via patents (Part III of the Court&#x27;s opinion makes this especially clear). This will allow researchers and competitors a little bit of wiggle room to design around biotechnology patents because they can use the basic isolated sequence but there will still be substantial limitations on what they can do with that isolated sequence. For this reason, I&#x27;m skeptical that the Court&#x27;s opinion will have a negative effect on the incentives for creating biotechnology-based applications. To the contrary: by affirming that cDNA can be patented, it may strengthen the incentives for investing in research in this area.&quot; (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.patentlyo.com&#x2F;patent&#x2F;2013&#x2F;06&#x2F;myriad-isolated-dna-out-cdna-in.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.patentlyo.com&#x2F;patent&#x2F;2013&#x2F;06&#x2F;myriad-isolated-dna-...</a>)</text></comment> | <story><title>Supreme Court rules human genes may not be patented</title><url>http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/supreme-court-says-human-genes-cannot-be-patented/2013/06/13/f7681b22-d436-11e2-b3a2-3bf5eb37b9d0_story.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>300bps</author><text>Anyone that has used a genetic testing service has seen that they test you for hundreds of genetic disorders and traits. If not for patents on genes they could test for thousands.<p>For example, the test at 23andme was only able to test for a couple BRCA1 mutations because most of them are patented. My wife (whose grandmother died at 29 from breast cancer) had to pay $1,500 to get the test done because of these stupid patents.</text></comment> |
12,186,872 | 12,186,665 | 1 | 2 | 12,186,381 | train | <story><title>Billion-year-old air reveals surprise about oxygen on ancient Earth</title><url>http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/ancient-air-oxygen-life-1.3698842</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>rebelde</author><text>I see articles like this one every once in a while.<p>A chemistry professor once told my class that due to the rate of diffusion, that we had just learned, the test of the &quot;old air&quot; would be wrong.<p>I don&#x27;t know chemistry well. My question is if the salt completely stopped all diffusion over the last billion years. Maybe somebody here can answer.</text></comment> | <story><title>Billion-year-old air reveals surprise about oxygen on ancient Earth</title><url>http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/ancient-air-oxygen-life-1.3698842</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>TimGremalm</author><text>&quot;What they found may have implications for the origin of complex life.<p>The air, which has been preserved, undisturbed, in tiny pockets in the crystals for about 815 million years, appears to contain 10.9 per cent oxygen — just half the amount in the atmosphere today.<p>But it&#x27;s about five times more than scientists expected for that time period, which is about 200 million years before the first known multicellular fossils.&quot;</text></comment> |
6,849,090 | 6,848,116 | 1 | 3 | 6,846,428 | train | <story><title>Valve joins the Linux Foundation</title><url>http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/12/04/valve-joins-linux-foundation-prepares-linux-powered-steam-os-steam-machines/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kayoone</author><text>While this is great, its a bit sad that Valve is mostly doing all of this now, because they fear losing their dominance on windows to the native Store in Win 8.x<p>In the end its a win-win for everyone if it works out, just their motives are questionable.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sliverstorm</author><text>Well, their motives aren&#x27;t <i>sinister</i>, which is all you can really want or hope for. In a capitalistic market, vanishingly few players will switch to Linux out of altruism.<p>Which is perfectly fine, in my opinion. Everything is more predictable when each player acts in their own best interests. Then it&#x27;s just a matter of understanding their incentives.</text></comment> | <story><title>Valve joins the Linux Foundation</title><url>http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/12/04/valve-joins-linux-foundation-prepares-linux-powered-steam-os-steam-machines/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kayoone</author><text>While this is great, its a bit sad that Valve is mostly doing all of this now, because they fear losing their dominance on windows to the native Store in Win 8.x<p>In the end its a win-win for everyone if it works out, just their motives are questionable.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Skoofoo</author><text>Before Windows 8, Valve seemingly couldn&#x27;t care less about Linux! It bothers me how Valve tries to make itself out to be Linux&#x27;s best friend nowadays. They also talk about open source a lot despite them ever releasing only proprietary software.</text></comment> |
35,519,223 | 35,519,138 | 1 | 3 | 35,513,636 | train | <story><title>I fixed a parasitic drain on my car in 408 days</title><url>https://davidmuller.github.io/posts/2023/04/10/how-i-fixed-a-parasitic-drain-in-408-days.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Dalewyn</author><text>Tangent, but what&#x27;s the rationale for car doors requiring slams? They are the only door I know, at least in common, daily life contexts, that require slamming them with the force of Thor to properly close them.</text></item><item><author>civilized</author><text>My wife and I gave our old car to her parents. In the subsequent years, its battery kept dying and we had to go over to their place and jump it. Never happened in the prior 7 years we&#x27;d owned the car. The mechanic said nothing wrong with the battery, but suggested there might be a parasitic drain somewhere.<p>A few days later, we were visiting them. I looked at the car and saw the door closed, but not properly latched and ever-so-slightly ajar. You know, that half-closed thing car doors do when you don&#x27;t close them hard enough.<p>It turns out someone, possibly my son, had been not closing the door completely. This did not keep the lights on or cause any other visible sign, as it would in some cars.<p>After I told them to slam the door fully shut, never a problem again for 2 years and counting.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dTal</author><text>At a guess it has something to do with needing to withstand 70+ mph winds. There needs to be considerable force holding the door against its seals at all times, and in a mechanical latching system this force must come from a spring, which must be charged with energy via a good slam.<p>However there are minivans with electronically operated sliding doors, which either power the latch allowing you to gently close the door, or (going further) powering the entire closing operation at a button push. I surmise the reason we see it moreso on minivans is because 1) it is particularly difficult to work up enough energy to properly latch a sliding door, due to losses from the 90-degree change in direction at the end, and 2) violently slamming the sliding doors on a minivan is very dangerous to children&#x27;s fingers.</text></comment> | <story><title>I fixed a parasitic drain on my car in 408 days</title><url>https://davidmuller.github.io/posts/2023/04/10/how-i-fixed-a-parasitic-drain-in-408-days.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Dalewyn</author><text>Tangent, but what&#x27;s the rationale for car doors requiring slams? They are the only door I know, at least in common, daily life contexts, that require slamming them with the force of Thor to properly close them.</text></item><item><author>civilized</author><text>My wife and I gave our old car to her parents. In the subsequent years, its battery kept dying and we had to go over to their place and jump it. Never happened in the prior 7 years we&#x27;d owned the car. The mechanic said nothing wrong with the battery, but suggested there might be a parasitic drain somewhere.<p>A few days later, we were visiting them. I looked at the car and saw the door closed, but not properly latched and ever-so-slightly ajar. You know, that half-closed thing car doors do when you don&#x27;t close them hard enough.<p>It turns out someone, possibly my son, had been not closing the door completely. This did not keep the lights on or cause any other visible sign, as it would in some cars.<p>After I told them to slam the door fully shut, never a problem again for 2 years and counting.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>noizejoy</author><text>I think one of the reasons is air pressure inside the car.<p>I&#x27;ve always found it amazing how much less slamming the doors needed when a window was left wide open and the air inside the car could escape freely.</text></comment> |
29,990,041 | 29,987,780 | 1 | 3 | 29,983,043 | train | <story><title>How A.I. Conquered Poker</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/18/magazine/ai-technology-poker.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>splonk</author><text>(Former pro and high stakes player, occasional solver developer)<p>This is actually one of the best poker articles I&#x27;ve ever seen in generalist media. Not too clickbaity, reasonable high level overview of game theory, a (very accurate IMO) quote from old pro Erik Seidel about the state of the game just 15 years ago, a discussion on variance vs. EV and results, and most importantly, an emphasis on math, randomization techniques and emotional control rather than the TV image of staring in someone&#x27;s eyes and reading their soul. Probably the one biggest misconception people have is that pros have sick reading abilities since TV likes to emphasize staredowns, when the actual single biggest skill long term pros have is the ability to lose hand after hand for hours and still play their best game.<p>Incidentally, the anecdote at the top of the article is pretty intuitive game theoretically. Basically on the river you need to bluff with some portion of your hands, or else nobody will ever call when you have a good hand. The natural portion of your hands to bluff with is the absolute worst ones - you don&#x27;t want to bluff with your middling hands because you have some small chance of just winning a showdown when it checks around. On a board of Kc4c5c2d2c, 7d6d is quite likely the absolute worst hand you can hold given the action that&#x27;s taken place, therefore it&#x27;s the one you bluff with. (For some pot&#x2F;stack sizes it&#x27;s possible that you bluff so rarely that you have to choose between 7d6d&#x2F;7h6h&#x2F;7s6s, but that&#x27;s getting into details.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ramoz</author><text>Similar story here. I’ve always played, mostly online, before Black Friday (pretty sure I was a minor when it happened) but played all the offshore sites through college. Professional software career took off and bounced out, finally ~3y ago I decided to get back into it and I would only play challenging games (only thing challenging about a 1&#x2F;3 or tourneys is the grind). So, started with 2&#x2F;5, within a week was playing the 10&#x2F;25, 25&#x2F;50.<p>1. Emotional control and pushing through the variance are key, I would play all nighters and it was mostly a subtle rise up vs big pots (except the one that did me in)<p>2. You absolutely do read players, I didn’t need to be a pro to learn how to observe the degenerates. Even decent players signaled things here or there (obv not how they eat an oreo , but I had a knack for knowing when someone was off their style). And it’s not even close wit a normal group of friends.<p>3. the sharks and their meta game… I had run up to about 50K within 3 weeks from my starting 2-3K. Had the pipe dream. I thought I had a growing bond with the pros. When I say pros I’m not talking grinders, I’m talking consistent big winners. About a handful of them. None of them tv personalities. - There were few times we’d run into each other, but I picked off a few donk bets here or there. However their persistence is what did me in. Went the entire month observing their advanced play style, which the meta was harsh, there were few rivers that mattered more than pre flop and continuation&#x2F;donk betting. This style of play was like nothing I was seeing on tv. But I was winning with them. The last time I played, about a month into my run, I was on a 12h 25&#x2F;50 game winding down, turned 30k into 70k (had 20k sitting back) pulled QQ and went up against a pre-flop donker. I face a 3 bet and get that gut feeling but put on lower pair or AK. Flop rainbows, large betting action. Turn, junk, I face an insane Re raise after testing a raise of my own, I know it’s off but it’s either AA&#x2F;KK or AK at this point. My guts off but I’m too far in to quit. On the river I’m defeated, check, face bet, ultimately end up throwing 50K into the pot, lose to aces.<p>I never had a gut feeling so intense though. Like I was screaming at myself to get out. But I was caught.<p>Such a draining hand I never went back. I don’t have the discipline to grind games, and the tech industry pays more.</text></comment> | <story><title>How A.I. Conquered Poker</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/18/magazine/ai-technology-poker.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>splonk</author><text>(Former pro and high stakes player, occasional solver developer)<p>This is actually one of the best poker articles I&#x27;ve ever seen in generalist media. Not too clickbaity, reasonable high level overview of game theory, a (very accurate IMO) quote from old pro Erik Seidel about the state of the game just 15 years ago, a discussion on variance vs. EV and results, and most importantly, an emphasis on math, randomization techniques and emotional control rather than the TV image of staring in someone&#x27;s eyes and reading their soul. Probably the one biggest misconception people have is that pros have sick reading abilities since TV likes to emphasize staredowns, when the actual single biggest skill long term pros have is the ability to lose hand after hand for hours and still play their best game.<p>Incidentally, the anecdote at the top of the article is pretty intuitive game theoretically. Basically on the river you need to bluff with some portion of your hands, or else nobody will ever call when you have a good hand. The natural portion of your hands to bluff with is the absolute worst ones - you don&#x27;t want to bluff with your middling hands because you have some small chance of just winning a showdown when it checks around. On a board of Kc4c5c2d2c, 7d6d is quite likely the absolute worst hand you can hold given the action that&#x27;s taken place, therefore it&#x27;s the one you bluff with. (For some pot&#x2F;stack sizes it&#x27;s possible that you bluff so rarely that you have to choose between 7d6d&#x2F;7h6h&#x2F;7s6s, but that&#x27;s getting into details.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sillysaurusx</author><text>So how much have you won and lost in total? I don’t have any knowledge of poker, so I don’t know how to ballpark this. And the impersonal questions are boring after seven lifetimes, so I thought I’d ask.<p>It would be interesting to see a GitHub style graph of poker activity, with won and lost corresponding to added lines and removed lines.</text></comment> |
40,137,333 | 40,137,546 | 1 | 2 | 40,136,010 | train | <story><title>FTC announces rule banning noncompetes</title><url>https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/04/ftc-announces-rule-banning-noncompetes</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cjen</author><text>This seems incredibly important. I know non-compete rules personally held me back at a previous tech job.<p>I&#x27;m interested to see how this hits finance firms – I know people who were forced to take a year off between jobs (although they were compensated the whole time). Always thought that would be a pretty sweet deal.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>andthenzen</author><text>Page 83-84 provides some guidance on garden leave and suggests that it will still be allowed under the new rule:<p>&gt; With respect to garden leave agreements, as noted previously, commenters used the term “garden leave” to refer to a wide variety of agreements. The Commission declines to opine on how the definition of non-compete clause in § 910.1 would apply in every potential factual scenario. However, the Commission notes that an agreement whereby the worker is still employed and receiving the same total annual compensation and benefits on a pro rata basis would not be a non-compete clause under the definition, because such an agreement is not a post-employment restriction. Instead, the worker continues to be employed, even though the worker’s job duties or access to colleagues or the workplace may be significantly or entirely curtailed. Furthermore, where a worker does not meet a condition to earn a particular aspect of their expected compensation, like a prerequisite for a bonus, the Commission would still consider the arrangement “garden leave” that is not a non-compete clause under this final rule
even if the employer did not pay the bonus or other expected compensation. Similarly, a severance agreement that imposes no restrictions on where the worker may work following the employment associated with the severance agreement is not a non-compete clause under § 910.1, because it does not impose a post-employment restriction.</text></comment> | <story><title>FTC announces rule banning noncompetes</title><url>https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/04/ftc-announces-rule-banning-noncompetes</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cjen</author><text>This seems incredibly important. I know non-compete rules personally held me back at a previous tech job.<p>I&#x27;m interested to see how this hits finance firms – I know people who were forced to take a year off between jobs (although they were compensated the whole time). Always thought that would be a pretty sweet deal.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bagels</author><text>I was denied a job I was well qualified for because, (paraphrased, besides the quoted part): Our CEO and your CEO have a &quot;gentleman&#x27;s agreement&quot; not to hire people that work at eachother&#x27;s company.<p>I have no idea why the recruiter was willing to put this in writing, and thankfully, I was able to find other work instead.<p>I know it&#x27;s not a non-compete, but there are other ways that companies can illegally form cartels to suppress labor.</text></comment> |
1,335,496 | 1,334,730 | 1 | 3 | 1,334,720 | train | <story><title>Let me Duck Duck Go that for you</title><url>http://lmddgtfy.com</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>antirez</author><text>Using DDG as a replacement for Google in the latest two months. I'm impressed. If it's better or not than google for certain types of usage, I'll let other users to decide (but it <i>is</i> better, for my usage). But what is truly impressive is how this guy build a search engine that works in a way that is comparable to Google for the end user, with limited resources.</text></comment> | <story><title>Let me Duck Duck Go that for you</title><url>http://lmddgtfy.com</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mattmaroon</author><text>Or they could just change their name to something people would take seriously. Just a thought.</text></comment> |
29,081,015 | 29,081,425 | 1 | 3 | 29,076,379 | train | <story><title>When “Foundation” Gets the Blockbuster Treatment, Asimov’s Vision Gets Lost</title><url>https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/11/08/when-foundation-gets-the-blockbuster-treatment-isaac-asimovs-vision-gets-lost-sci-fi</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>robbiep</author><text>I agree with you. It took me a while to get my head around the approach they were taking (I re-read the whole series prior to it airing) but what struck me most on re-reading was how completely boring it would be to be faithful to it. Even just getting rid of the 1950s stereotype gender roles - which is the obvious place to start - doesn’t change the long arcs of obvious dialogue.<p>It’s a really grand scope for a universe - but I’m enjoying the series so far and it will be interesting to see where they go with it. Basically I’m just hungry for more space and since it’s visually very appealing and the universe is compelling, I think it deserves a chance.</text></item><item><author>burlesona</author><text>There are a lot of people really hating on the TV show here, so I’ll offer a slightly contrarian take:<p>I would say the biggest problem is the marketing that implies they faithfully are telling the books, when they’re not. The TV show is not faithful to the books.<p>That said: the books are fascinating, but they are almost more like historical documentaries then narrative fiction. It works well because they are _short_ stories, and following the span of history, frequently jumping ahead a generation, is cool. But it would’ve been very difficult to render that as-is for television and have much of an audience. Also, the original stories were written in the 1940s and some parts feel quite dated (everyone is smoking all the time, the hyper focus on nuclear power, the relative role of women). So whoever picked the stories up, they were going to make a lot of changes.<p>If you think of the series merely as “inspired by” them not “based on them,” then the show isn’t <i>bad</i>. It has some corny flaws like most TV (the combat, just terrible), but they’ve developed a few good characters, added some new mysteries, and the order in which they’re unfolding events over time is interesting.<p>So, is it a classic? No. Is it faithful to the books? Not at all. But IMO it’s decent sci-fi, and interesting enough to watch if you’re bored :)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>GeekyBear</author><text>&gt;what struck me most on re-reading was how completely boring it would be to be faithful to it<p>Agreed.<p>The inspiration behind the Foundation series, setting out to shorten the Dark Ages after the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, is great.<p>However, if you try reading those short stories again today, you&#x27;re quickly reminded that early in his career, Asimov was already great at world building, but terrible with characters and dialog.<p>Add in the mismatch between the cultural norms of the 1940&#x27;s (when the early Foundation stories were written) and the cultural norms today, and a rewrite was always going to be required.</text></comment> | <story><title>When “Foundation” Gets the Blockbuster Treatment, Asimov’s Vision Gets Lost</title><url>https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/11/08/when-foundation-gets-the-blockbuster-treatment-isaac-asimovs-vision-gets-lost-sci-fi</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>robbiep</author><text>I agree with you. It took me a while to get my head around the approach they were taking (I re-read the whole series prior to it airing) but what struck me most on re-reading was how completely boring it would be to be faithful to it. Even just getting rid of the 1950s stereotype gender roles - which is the obvious place to start - doesn’t change the long arcs of obvious dialogue.<p>It’s a really grand scope for a universe - but I’m enjoying the series so far and it will be interesting to see where they go with it. Basically I’m just hungry for more space and since it’s visually very appealing and the universe is compelling, I think it deserves a chance.</text></item><item><author>burlesona</author><text>There are a lot of people really hating on the TV show here, so I’ll offer a slightly contrarian take:<p>I would say the biggest problem is the marketing that implies they faithfully are telling the books, when they’re not. The TV show is not faithful to the books.<p>That said: the books are fascinating, but they are almost more like historical documentaries then narrative fiction. It works well because they are _short_ stories, and following the span of history, frequently jumping ahead a generation, is cool. But it would’ve been very difficult to render that as-is for television and have much of an audience. Also, the original stories were written in the 1940s and some parts feel quite dated (everyone is smoking all the time, the hyper focus on nuclear power, the relative role of women). So whoever picked the stories up, they were going to make a lot of changes.<p>If you think of the series merely as “inspired by” them not “based on them,” then the show isn’t <i>bad</i>. It has some corny flaws like most TV (the combat, just terrible), but they’ve developed a few good characters, added some new mysteries, and the order in which they’re unfolding events over time is interesting.<p>So, is it a classic? No. Is it faithful to the books? Not at all. But IMO it’s decent sci-fi, and interesting enough to watch if you’re bored :)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>brodouevencode</author><text>&gt; how completely boring it would be to be faithful to it<p>What movies have you seen that have been faithful to the literary work but still were great movies? I&#x27;m struggling to come up with one.</text></comment> |
21,136,971 | 21,136,985 | 1 | 2 | 21,135,424 | train | <story><title>How a double-free bug in WhatsApp turns to remote code execution</title><url>https://awakened1712.github.io/hacking/hacking-whatsapp-gif-rce/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mgrviper</author><text>At first i was wondering how one can get RCE out of double-free and then author proceed to drop a bomb - android would reliably return same adress to the next two allocations of same size as freed memory. Android behaviour here is simply unacceptable. One would expect (yeah) memory managment bugs from user space applications, but return same memory from a default allocator twice because of double-free is a terrible peculiarity, undefined behavour or not.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>umanwizard</author><text>How do other malloc implementations avoid this? It seems natural if what “free” does involves adding the pointer to some free list. Obviously you wouldn’t want to scan the whole free list every time looking for duplicates - is there another way to avoid this behavior?</text></comment> | <story><title>How a double-free bug in WhatsApp turns to remote code execution</title><url>https://awakened1712.github.io/hacking/hacking-whatsapp-gif-rce/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mgrviper</author><text>At first i was wondering how one can get RCE out of double-free and then author proceed to drop a bomb - android would reliably return same adress to the next two allocations of same size as freed memory. Android behaviour here is simply unacceptable. One would expect (yeah) memory managment bugs from user space applications, but return same memory from a default allocator twice because of double-free is a terrible peculiarity, undefined behavour or not.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>shaklee3</author><text>This has happened to me in ubuntu 18.04 frequently. Do you have something showing that this is really that rare? If anything, it might help you track down bugs quicker.</text></comment> |
24,339,331 | 24,335,723 | 1 | 2 | 24,334,657 | train | <story><title>Ask HN: Captcha Alternatives?</title><text>TLDR: I help with a gaming community-related site that is being targetted by a script kiddie, they are registering hundreds of thousands of accounts on our forums to &#x27;protest&#x27; a cheating (aimbot) ban. They then post large ASCII art spam, giant shock images (the first one started after we blocked new accounts from posting [img]), the usual.<p>Currently we use a simple question&#x2F;answer addon at registration time - it works against all untargeted bots and is just a little &quot;what is 4 plus six&quot; or &quot;what is the abbreviation for this website&quot; type of question. It&#x27;s worked fine for years and we don&#x27;t really get general untargeted spam.<p>I am somewhat ethically disinclined to use reCAPTCHA, and there are some older members that can&#x27;t reasonably solve hcaptcha easily. Same for using heavy fingerprinting or other privacy invading methods. It&#x27;s also donation-run, so enterprise services that would block something like this (such as Distil) are both out of budget and out of ethics.<p>Is there a way I can possibly solve this? Negotiation is not really an option on the table, the last time one of the other volunteers responded at all we got a ~150Gbps volumetric attack.<p>I&#x27;ve tried some basic things, like requiring cookie and JS support via middleware; they moved from a Java HTTP-library script to some kind of Selenium equivalent afterward. They also use a massive amount of proxies, largely compromised machines being sold for abuse.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>huhtenberg</author><text>* Allow new accounts, but hide messages from them until their posts are verified manually and the accounts are either approved or shadow-banned.<p>* Don&#x27;t delete ban accounts, don&#x27;t notify them in any way, but tag their IPs and cookies to auto shadow-ban any sock puppets, so that these don&#x27;t even make into an approval queue.<p>* Use heuristics to automate the approval process, e.g. if they looked around prior to registering, or if they took time to fill in the form, etc.<p>* Add a content filter for messages, including heuristics for an ASCII art as a first post, for example, and shadow-ban based on that.<p>* Hook it up to StopForumSpam to auto shadow-ban known spammers by email address &#x2F; IP.<p>* Optionally, check for people coming from Tor and VPN IP, and act on that.<p>Basically, make it so that if they spam once, they will need both to change the IP <i>and</i> to clear the cookies to NOT be auto shadow-banned. You&#x27;d be surprised how effective this trivial tactic is.<p>All in all, the point is not to block trolls and tell them about it, but to block them quietly - to discourage and to frustrate.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mcv</author><text>I don&#x27;t think cookies will do much against a large-scale automated attack, but everything else in this list is solid:<p>Hide posts until legitimacy of the poster has been verified. Allow them to post and respond, but don&#x27;t show it to anyone yet, except to the moderators. If they&#x27;re posting something sensible, unhide them. If it&#x27;s spam, shadow-ban them. Don&#x27;t let the user know. Let them guess why nobody is responding to the spam.<p>For that reason, it may also be a good idea to post an announcement that nobody should respond to this spam. Tat way the spammer won&#x27;t know if he&#x27;s being ignored manually or auto-hidden. Let him waste time and frustration on that.<p>Only use this against people who are this malicious. For regular hot-headed people who accidentally break forum rules but do want to meaningfully contribute to the community, always remain open and honest. Give people the opportunity to learn. Only people who are determined not to learn and to remain purely destructive, do you use the shadow ban.<p>Of course once they catch on, they&#x27;ll probably start making new accounts with some legitimate posts, and once people start responding, they go back into spamming mode. This is tricky. Ideally, it&#x27;d be nice if you had a system that could automatically detect that sort of spam. If someone suddenly starts posting ascii art, bigimages, all caps, or anything like that, or goes on a rapid posting spree, automatically put them back on probation with hidden posts requiring approval, so you can check this change in posting behaviour.</text></comment> | <story><title>Ask HN: Captcha Alternatives?</title><text>TLDR: I help with a gaming community-related site that is being targetted by a script kiddie, they are registering hundreds of thousands of accounts on our forums to &#x27;protest&#x27; a cheating (aimbot) ban. They then post large ASCII art spam, giant shock images (the first one started after we blocked new accounts from posting [img]), the usual.<p>Currently we use a simple question&#x2F;answer addon at registration time - it works against all untargeted bots and is just a little &quot;what is 4 plus six&quot; or &quot;what is the abbreviation for this website&quot; type of question. It&#x27;s worked fine for years and we don&#x27;t really get general untargeted spam.<p>I am somewhat ethically disinclined to use reCAPTCHA, and there are some older members that can&#x27;t reasonably solve hcaptcha easily. Same for using heavy fingerprinting or other privacy invading methods. It&#x27;s also donation-run, so enterprise services that would block something like this (such as Distil) are both out of budget and out of ethics.<p>Is there a way I can possibly solve this? Negotiation is not really an option on the table, the last time one of the other volunteers responded at all we got a ~150Gbps volumetric attack.<p>I&#x27;ve tried some basic things, like requiring cookie and JS support via middleware; they moved from a Java HTTP-library script to some kind of Selenium equivalent afterward. They also use a massive amount of proxies, largely compromised machines being sold for abuse.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>huhtenberg</author><text>* Allow new accounts, but hide messages from them until their posts are verified manually and the accounts are either approved or shadow-banned.<p>* Don&#x27;t delete ban accounts, don&#x27;t notify them in any way, but tag their IPs and cookies to auto shadow-ban any sock puppets, so that these don&#x27;t even make into an approval queue.<p>* Use heuristics to automate the approval process, e.g. if they looked around prior to registering, or if they took time to fill in the form, etc.<p>* Add a content filter for messages, including heuristics for an ASCII art as a first post, for example, and shadow-ban based on that.<p>* Hook it up to StopForumSpam to auto shadow-ban known spammers by email address &#x2F; IP.<p>* Optionally, check for people coming from Tor and VPN IP, and act on that.<p>Basically, make it so that if they spam once, they will need both to change the IP <i>and</i> to clear the cookies to NOT be auto shadow-banned. You&#x27;d be surprised how effective this trivial tactic is.<p>All in all, the point is not to block trolls and tell them about it, but to block them quietly - to discourage and to frustrate.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ev1</author><text>We already tag&#x2F;drop all Tor and VPN traffic. Cookies don&#x27;t make much sense because this looks like browser automation, not someone just swapping VPNs by hand repeatedly.<p>For IP bans, they are now using illegitimately acquired or fraudulent IP space (the guy is not intelligent enough for this, he&#x27;s almost certainly just buying proxies with in-game gold or some BS - but there is a criminal element here), including what might involve significant hijacking of AT&amp;T, CenturyLink, Level3, and Windstream network resources.<p>(if you work at one of those places and are clueful, I would be very interested in asking about this)</text></comment> |
23,263,502 | 23,263,597 | 1 | 3 | 23,262,763 | train | <story><title>An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015)</title><url>https://pastebin.com/BjD84BQ3</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>samirillian</author><text>This is what I don&#x27;t understand. When Tbray left, he said he was doing so in solidarity with the distribution center types, but he held to the line that AWS was great. This despite nightmare stories like this one regularly bubbling up, and I&#x27;ve heard similar from friends.<p>What is it about tech culture that people within it refuse to admit the level of abuse-by-design that happens at these companies? Is it that they want to believe that they are somehow fundamentally different from the distribution and grocery store workers, and fundamentally similar to Bezos? I can&#x27;t help but feel it&#x27;s just this kind of false consciousness that prevents developers from _getting organized_.<p>Sidenote, payroll tax on Amazon in Seattle trying to get revived. It&#x27;s a long and winding story. Check out taxamazon.net</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>AnHonestComment</author><text>It’s worth pointing out why it needs to be “revived”: because the first iteration of the tax would have destroyed grocery stores and was protested by construction unions due to its disastrous policy.<p>This iteration is targeting the 800 largest employers in Seattle, many of whom aren’t currently profitable.<p>“Tax Amazon” is classic dishonesty — neither bill has been focused on Amazon, both would be a disaster for Seattle, and proponents try to focus on Amazon to keep people from noticing how damaging their out of control spending is.<p>In 2010, the Seattle budget was 3.8B; in 2020, it’s 6.5B. An increase of 2.7B and growth of 71% in a decade. (Per capita, the Seattle budget is 37% more now than in 2010.)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.geekwire.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;seattle-socialists-construction-workers-clash-amazon-hq-tax-big-business&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.geekwire.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;seattle-socialists-constructio...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.seattletimes.com&#x2F;seattle-news&#x2F;politics&#x2F;seattle-city-councilmember-sawant-says-her-tax-on-big-businesses-would-raise-300-million-a-year&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.seattletimes.com&#x2F;seattle-news&#x2F;politics&#x2F;seattle-c...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015)</title><url>https://pastebin.com/BjD84BQ3</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>samirillian</author><text>This is what I don&#x27;t understand. When Tbray left, he said he was doing so in solidarity with the distribution center types, but he held to the line that AWS was great. This despite nightmare stories like this one regularly bubbling up, and I&#x27;ve heard similar from friends.<p>What is it about tech culture that people within it refuse to admit the level of abuse-by-design that happens at these companies? Is it that they want to believe that they are somehow fundamentally different from the distribution and grocery store workers, and fundamentally similar to Bezos? I can&#x27;t help but feel it&#x27;s just this kind of false consciousness that prevents developers from _getting organized_.<p>Sidenote, payroll tax on Amazon in Seattle trying to get revived. It&#x27;s a long and winding story. Check out taxamazon.net</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gameswithgo</author><text>Every company is full of nightmares, especially anyone doing something big enough to be interesting. For instance that guy who started blogging about how janky Tesla&#x27;s software was, most of us who have been around a while read all that and shrugged. Not that bad. It is easy to imagine perfection or competence but very hard to actually achieve it at large scales with humans.<p>So at the same time it can be true that company X is a great place and also true that company X is a nightmare.</text></comment> |
16,413,025 | 16,412,655 | 1 | 2 | 16,412,263 | train | <story><title>Rust things I miss in C</title><url>https://people.gnome.org/~federico/blog/rust-things-i-miss-in-c.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>phkahler</author><text>One thing jumped out for me. No integer overflow. In my embedded work we use that all the time. We represent angles as a int16_t or uint16_t where you can add and subtract angles and never have to worry about a discontinuity at 2pi because 2pi=65536.<p>Is this a hack that should not be allowed? I don&#x27;t think so. Every processor made (that I&#x27;m aware of) in the last 30+ years has used 2&#x27;s complement arithmetic. I don&#x27;t think overflow is a bad thing, I think C made a mistake in calling it &quot;undefined&quot;. They had to because when the language came along there were other options fresh in peoples minds.<p>I&#x27;ve also worked on systems in asm that had saturating arithmetic, and that has it&#x27;s own nice use cases. My preference is still to have the rollover. People can implement bounds checking when they need to.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>masklinn</author><text>&gt; One thing jumped out for me. No integer overflow.<p>FWIW that&#x27;s not quite true, Rust will panic on overflow in debug but can (and currently does on all platforms I think) allow them in release. They&#x27;re not UB though, they&#x27;re defined as 2&#x27;s complement.<p>&gt; In my embedded work we use that all the time. We represent angles as a int16_t or uint16_t where you can add and subtract angles and never have to worry about a discontinuity at 2pi because 2pi=65536.<p>&gt; Is this a hack that should not be allowed? I don&#x27;t think so.<p>Rust provides APIs to make these behaviours explicit decisions rather than implicit hacks: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;doc.rust-lang.org&#x2F;core&#x2F;num&#x2F;struct.Wrapping.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;doc.rust-lang.org&#x2F;core&#x2F;num&#x2F;struct.Wrapping.html</a>, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;doc.rust-lang.org&#x2F;std&#x2F;?search=wrapping_" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;doc.rust-lang.org&#x2F;std&#x2F;?search=wrapping_</a>, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;doc.rust-lang.org&#x2F;std&#x2F;?search=saturating_" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;doc.rust-lang.org&#x2F;std&#x2F;?search=saturating_</a> (and <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;doc.rust-lang.org&#x2F;std&#x2F;?search=checked_" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;doc.rust-lang.org&#x2F;std&#x2F;?search=checked_</a>).<p>&gt; People can implement bounds checking when they need to.<p>Being unsafe by default always ends up in tears. Checking Mitre, just this year there have already been 11 public CVE for integer overflows.</text></comment> | <story><title>Rust things I miss in C</title><url>https://people.gnome.org/~federico/blog/rust-things-i-miss-in-c.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>phkahler</author><text>One thing jumped out for me. No integer overflow. In my embedded work we use that all the time. We represent angles as a int16_t or uint16_t where you can add and subtract angles and never have to worry about a discontinuity at 2pi because 2pi=65536.<p>Is this a hack that should not be allowed? I don&#x27;t think so. Every processor made (that I&#x27;m aware of) in the last 30+ years has used 2&#x27;s complement arithmetic. I don&#x27;t think overflow is a bad thing, I think C made a mistake in calling it &quot;undefined&quot;. They had to because when the language came along there were other options fresh in peoples minds.<p>I&#x27;ve also worked on systems in asm that had saturating arithmetic, and that has it&#x27;s own nice use cases. My preference is still to have the rollover. People can implement bounds checking when they need to.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>simias</author><text>Using 2&#x27;s complement is not the entire story, some CPUs can trap on overflows (MIPS for instance). X86 doesn&#x27;t but it does set the carry&#x2F;overflow flags in case of unsigned&#x2F;signed overlow to make it easy to test for it if necessary. Leaving the freedom to the implementation to catch signed overflows like it can catch divisions by zero might actually be a feature. Admittedly it&#x27;s not very consistent to make unsigned overflow defined.<p>I like rust&#x27;s approach that you <i>can</i> explicitly decide to use overflowing arithmetic if you want, otherwise it triggers a runtime error in debug mode. That alongside with the checked_ variants make it very easy to deal with potentially overflowing code whereas in C it&#x27;s a minefield, it&#x27;s not difficult to trigger an UB while trying to defend against an other UB. Ask a beginner to write a &quot;checked_add&quot; function in C (no Stack Overflow allowed) and see how many bugs and UB you can spot.<p>On the other hand advocating for implicit wrapping overflow all the time sounds risky to me. In my experience there&#x27;s only a very tiny subset of operations where an overflow is desired and wouldn&#x27;t lead to a bug.</text></comment> |
35,005,073 | 35,005,253 | 1 | 3 | 35,002,942 | train | <story><title>A replicable decline in mood during rest and simple tasks</title><url>https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01519-7</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>PragmaticPulp</author><text>I know you’re joking, but this kind of hyperbole is kind of out of control when discussing kids on the internet. People seem to forget that young kids sleep <i>a lot</i> and eventually they go to school and&#x2F;or daycare.</text></item><item><author>op00to</author><text>I have two small kids at home. I would electric shock mother Theresa for a few minutes in a quiet room.</text></item><item><author>sp332</author><text>2014 study: People (2&#x2F;3 of men and 1&#x2F;4 of women) would rather give themselves electric shocks than sit quietly in an empty room. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;science&#x2F;2014&#x2F;07&#x2F;men-would-rather-give-themselves-electric-shocks-than-sit-quietly&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;science&#x2F;2014&#x2F;07&#x2F;men-would-rather-giv...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>r3trohack3r</author><text>Serious question, do you have kids?<p>The age from 0-4 for me has been nothing like what you describe.<p>The first year is nothing but chronic sleep deprivation and recovery from it.<p>The next three years they are extremely dependent. Yeah they sleep for 10-12 hours, but you’re drained by then especially if you’re working a job on top of it. You have the time to do things but not the energy. Even when they sleep you’re still trapped at home because you legally (and ethically) can’t leave the house with them alone. If you’re lucky enough to have the financial stability to afford a nanny&#x2F;babysitter for date nights you have to be strategic, is that random movie really worth blowing your one night out on?<p>Every moment that isn’t necessary for work or parenthood has to be strategically spent because moments of both high energy and free time are rare.<p>The workload is double (maybe more) for mom given the 9months of carrying the child, having a tiny person relying on them for food supply non-stop, and the raging hormones from all that.<p>This 4 year window resets every time you have a kid.<p>I’m guessing you’re not a parent, but maybe you have had an entirely different experience than me. Maybe I’m doing it wrong.</text></comment> | <story><title>A replicable decline in mood during rest and simple tasks</title><url>https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01519-7</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>PragmaticPulp</author><text>I know you’re joking, but this kind of hyperbole is kind of out of control when discussing kids on the internet. People seem to forget that young kids sleep <i>a lot</i> and eventually they go to school and&#x2F;or daycare.</text></item><item><author>op00to</author><text>I have two small kids at home. I would electric shock mother Theresa for a few minutes in a quiet room.</text></item><item><author>sp332</author><text>2014 study: People (2&#x2F;3 of men and 1&#x2F;4 of women) would rather give themselves electric shocks than sit quietly in an empty room. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;science&#x2F;2014&#x2F;07&#x2F;men-would-rather-give-themselves-electric-shocks-than-sit-quietly&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;science&#x2F;2014&#x2F;07&#x2F;men-would-rather-giv...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>JenrHywy</author><text>I really enjoy being a father. It is 100% worth it. But the first 4 or 5 years are <i>brutal</i>. Tack on a few more if your kids a &quot;special needs&quot;.<p>There is a ton of that period is which is amazing and profound. I think in general parenting get a bad rap. But I literally LOL&#x27;d at the GP&#x27;s comment because it was so relatable. Also because I&#x27;m sleep deprived after being up several nights in a row helping one of my kids deal with a medication change that has messed with his sleep.</text></comment> |
11,222,420 | 11,222,364 | 1 | 2 | 11,221,440 | train | <story><title>Why Forcing Apple to Write and Sign Code Violates the First Amendment</title><url>https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/03/deep-dive-why-forcing-apple-write-and-sign-code-violates-first-amendment</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rayiner</author><text>Note that the focus of the EFF&#x27;s argument is not on writing the code, but on expressive act of signing the code. Part I of its argument establishes that the government cannot compel a company to <i>convey a message</i> it disagrees with. Part II argues that the act of conveying trust in code by signing it is still expression <i>even though it involves code</i>.<p>The EFF&#x27;s framing has the advantage that it doesn&#x27;t require the unworkable corollary that the government cannot dictate the content of code--and so operation of digital products--because &quot;code is speech&quot; in all circumstances.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>leereeves</author><text>The courts have already ruled that code is speech.<p>In Universal City Studios, Inc. v. Corley (the case about the DVD decryption tool DeCSS), the Court of Appeals stated:<p>&gt; Computer programs are not exempted from the category of First Amendment speech simply because their instructions require use of a computer.<p>&gt; we join the other courts that have concluded that computer code, and computer programs constructed from code, can merit First Amendment protection, although the scope of such protection remains to be determined.<p>But First Amendment protections are not unlimited. The court ruled in that case (and others) that:<p>&gt; the scope of protection for speech generally depends on whether the restriction is imposed because of the content of the speech. Content-based restrictions are permissible only if they serve compelling state interests and do so by the least restrictive means available. A content-neutral restriction is permissible if it serves a substantial governmental interest, the interest is unrelated to the suppression of free expression, and the regulation is narrowly tailored, which &quot;in this context requires . . . that the means chosen do not ‘burden substantially more speech than is necessary to further the government&#x27;s legitimate interests.&#x27;&quot;</text></comment> | <story><title>Why Forcing Apple to Write and Sign Code Violates the First Amendment</title><url>https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/03/deep-dive-why-forcing-apple-write-and-sign-code-violates-first-amendment</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rayiner</author><text>Note that the focus of the EFF&#x27;s argument is not on writing the code, but on expressive act of signing the code. Part I of its argument establishes that the government cannot compel a company to <i>convey a message</i> it disagrees with. Part II argues that the act of conveying trust in code by signing it is still expression <i>even though it involves code</i>.<p>The EFF&#x27;s framing has the advantage that it doesn&#x27;t require the unworkable corollary that the government cannot dictate the content of code--and so operation of digital products--because &quot;code is speech&quot; in all circumstances.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sigmar</author><text>It definitely focuses on the digital signature, but the EFF is also arguing the expression of Apple&#x27;s beliefs within the operating system should be protected by the first amendment.<p>&gt;The Order is unconstitutional because it compels Apple to express itself in conflict with its stated beliefs. The Order forces Apple to say something it does not want to say and that it believes is “dangerous.” It then forces Apple to endorse code it does not want to endorse and thereby undermine the trust it has established in its digital signature. Each of these acts of compelled expression implicate the First Amendment independently, but together they are even more harmful, hindering Apple’s ability to communicate its desired messages to its users, and to the world, into the future.</text></comment> |
25,224,660 | 25,223,841 | 1 | 3 | 25,221,238 | train | <story><title>Things I Don’t Know as of 2018</title><url>https://overreacted.io/things-i-dont-know-as-of-2018/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>watermelon59</author><text>Not exactly that, but when reading Coders at Work I was surprised to learn that a lot of big names in our field use &quot;printf debugging&quot; and don&#x27;t like actual debugging tools.<p>Made me feel less bad about it :)</text></item><item><author>nemo1618</author><text>I&#x27;d love to see lists like this from more high-profile programmers. What does John Carmack not know? What does Dan Bernstein not know? What does Bryan Cantrill not know?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wbsun</author><text>As a distributed software developer, I have found debuggers less useful these days. If I need a debugger, it probably means I don&#x27;t really know the code that I am working on.<p>Good IDEs with good static analysis, good unit test&#x2F;integration test&#x2F;e2e test coverage, a true understanding of the code base before changing it, all these avoid most bugs.<p>When the production hits a bug, good monitoring and logging can help root-causing. It is extremely difficult to debug and reproduce a bug in a distributed environment. Many bugs I have root-caused are purely based on monitoring and logging then show the proof with mind-execution of the code.</text></comment> | <story><title>Things I Don’t Know as of 2018</title><url>https://overreacted.io/things-i-dont-know-as-of-2018/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>watermelon59</author><text>Not exactly that, but when reading Coders at Work I was surprised to learn that a lot of big names in our field use &quot;printf debugging&quot; and don&#x27;t like actual debugging tools.<p>Made me feel less bad about it :)</text></item><item><author>nemo1618</author><text>I&#x27;d love to see lists like this from more high-profile programmers. What does John Carmack not know? What does Dan Bernstein not know? What does Bryan Cantrill not know?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>enriquto</author><text>It&#x27;s not only a matter of usage. Many good programmers will argue that &quot;actual debugging tools&quot; are mostly useless and that logging the execution of your program is a more productive use of your time. In some sense, time spent inside the debugger is lost forever. On the other hand, the time spend writing good logging code is really worth, and will be especially helpful to detect future bugs that you have not yet written.<p>I&#x27;m not a good programmer, but I can say very proudly that I&#x27;ve never used any debugger (except for assembly language, where the debugger is more like an interactive shell).</text></comment> |
4,808,338 | 4,808,282 | 1 | 2 | 4,808,061 | train | <story><title>Low-cost Solution to Clearing Afghan Landmines</title><url>http://m.good.is/posts/hauntingly-beautiful-wildly-low-cost-solution-to-clearing-afghan-landmines</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>_djo_</author><text>Sadly, demining is not this simple or easy.<p>Mine rollers and mine flails like this have been tried and tested since WWI but none have proven completely effective in finding and clearing mines. This is partially because they only work well on totally flat terrain and rapidly lose effectiveness in rougher terrain where a large number of mines are typically buried.<p>In practice, solutions like this achieve only 50-60% effectiveness at clearing minefields, which makes them useless for civilian demining which demands a 99% clearance rate.<p>For that reason there's been a ton of research in this area which has resulted in better demining vehicles and interesting new techniques such as using sniffer dogs or rats to detect the explosives inside landmines. This is especially useful for the numerous plastic-shelled landmines that resist standard detection methods.<p>Using a layered approach with these techniques, civilian demining organisations like Mechem[0] (which pioneered the use of sniffer dogs) are now able to achieve a high enough clearance rate to make areas safe, though the work is expensive and time-consuming. If you support this sort of work, donating money to demining NGOs would be better than funding yet another ineffective mine roller.<p>[0]<a href="http://www.mechemdemining.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.mechemdemining.com/</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cflee</author><text>Turns out that the Dutch armed forces agree[1] that it's not so easy either:<p>"The Mine Kafon has just been tested by the Dutch Explosive Ordnance Disposal Unit, which has concluded that it is not suitable for mine clearance (which requires a more systematic approach), but at $50 each could be used as a cheap and safe way to identify dangerous areas that need demining."<p>[1]<a href="http://australia.icbl.org/index_htm_files/May.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://australia.icbl.org/index_htm_files/May.pdf</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Low-cost Solution to Clearing Afghan Landmines</title><url>http://m.good.is/posts/hauntingly-beautiful-wildly-low-cost-solution-to-clearing-afghan-landmines</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>_djo_</author><text>Sadly, demining is not this simple or easy.<p>Mine rollers and mine flails like this have been tried and tested since WWI but none have proven completely effective in finding and clearing mines. This is partially because they only work well on totally flat terrain and rapidly lose effectiveness in rougher terrain where a large number of mines are typically buried.<p>In practice, solutions like this achieve only 50-60% effectiveness at clearing minefields, which makes them useless for civilian demining which demands a 99% clearance rate.<p>For that reason there's been a ton of research in this area which has resulted in better demining vehicles and interesting new techniques such as using sniffer dogs or rats to detect the explosives inside landmines. This is especially useful for the numerous plastic-shelled landmines that resist standard detection methods.<p>Using a layered approach with these techniques, civilian demining organisations like Mechem[0] (which pioneered the use of sniffer dogs) are now able to achieve a high enough clearance rate to make areas safe, though the work is expensive and time-consuming. If you support this sort of work, donating money to demining NGOs would be better than funding yet another ineffective mine roller.<p>[0]<a href="http://www.mechemdemining.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.mechemdemining.com/</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Vivtek</author><text>The difference is this costs 40 € and can clear a couple of mines for that money. Afghanistan is not exactly rolling in cash, so any cheap improvement is a valuable addition to the toolbox - it provides a way for poor communities to do <i>something</i> while they're waiting for America to donate enough money to clean up their mess.<p>My guess is that demining NGOs will be using something like this soon enough if it proves effective, though, so any donation dollar really is best sent there for maximum effectiveness.</text></comment> |
4,877,552 | 4,877,579 | 1 | 3 | 4,876,226 | train | <story><title>Tesla Was Cash Flow Positive Last Week, CEO Musk Says</title><url>http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-12-04/tesla-was-cash-flow-positive-last-week-ceo-musk-says.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dave1619</author><text>Tesla Motors is in great shape. I've been following the company for a while and recently drove the Model S. Amazing car in almost every way. What struck me was that it's not an incremental improvement but really a radical (might I say disruptive) improvement in terms of ride quality (super quiet), handling (low center of gravity with skateboard powertrain), electronics (17" touchscreen), cargo space (heard of the frunk?), reliability (electric cars have far less moving parts), and store experience (Tesla retail stores are a way better customer experience than a typical car dealership). It's difficult to drive a Model S and NOT say that you've driven the future.<p>The Model S is so good that all they need to do is make it into a SUV (Model X) and they'll have the coolest high-end SUV (coming 2014).<p>Then, they just need to make the Model S smaller (GenIII Bluestar) and then they'll have the best small luxury sport sedan on the market (ie., BMW 3 series, Lexus IS, Audi A4 market). Elon Musk has said they're going after the BMW 3 Series market with the GenIII car, and he's determined to make a best car in that market. Just like the Model S is better than a BMW 5 Series in most regards, the GenIII will be better than the BMW 3 Series in most regards. I know it might be difficult for many people to accept that (especially since the BMW 3 Series is legendary) but Tesla's got all the right pieces and has proven they can do it with the Model S. Again, they just need to shrink the Model S and make it more affordable.<p>But GenIII is slated for 2015 at the earliest and it takes a while to dominate a car segment even after you have a stellar car. I expect Tesla to become increasingly competitive (in terms of # sales) to the BMW 3 series by 2020 and perhaps dominant by 2025 (if not earlier).<p>Elon Musk has repeatedly said that Tesla Motors is not a typical car company but rather a technology company that will innovate at a blistering pace. As long as they continue to do that, they'll be fine.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>yid</author><text>Great comment, thank you. I'd just like to add that the "frunk" isn't new -- I've been stashing my gym bag in my Porsche 911's frunk for years (it's a rear-engined car).<p>Edit: While I absolutely live the Model S, I can assure you that exceeding stalwarts of the 5-series category, like the BMW M5, will not be as easy to disrupt as the market the Model S aims for.</text></comment> | <story><title>Tesla Was Cash Flow Positive Last Week, CEO Musk Says</title><url>http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-12-04/tesla-was-cash-flow-positive-last-week-ceo-musk-says.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dave1619</author><text>Tesla Motors is in great shape. I've been following the company for a while and recently drove the Model S. Amazing car in almost every way. What struck me was that it's not an incremental improvement but really a radical (might I say disruptive) improvement in terms of ride quality (super quiet), handling (low center of gravity with skateboard powertrain), electronics (17" touchscreen), cargo space (heard of the frunk?), reliability (electric cars have far less moving parts), and store experience (Tesla retail stores are a way better customer experience than a typical car dealership). It's difficult to drive a Model S and NOT say that you've driven the future.<p>The Model S is so good that all they need to do is make it into a SUV (Model X) and they'll have the coolest high-end SUV (coming 2014).<p>Then, they just need to make the Model S smaller (GenIII Bluestar) and then they'll have the best small luxury sport sedan on the market (ie., BMW 3 series, Lexus IS, Audi A4 market). Elon Musk has said they're going after the BMW 3 Series market with the GenIII car, and he's determined to make a best car in that market. Just like the Model S is better than a BMW 5 Series in most regards, the GenIII will be better than the BMW 3 Series in most regards. I know it might be difficult for many people to accept that (especially since the BMW 3 Series is legendary) but Tesla's got all the right pieces and has proven they can do it with the Model S. Again, they just need to shrink the Model S and make it more affordable.<p>But GenIII is slated for 2015 at the earliest and it takes a while to dominate a car segment even after you have a stellar car. I expect Tesla to become increasingly competitive (in terms of # sales) to the BMW 3 series by 2020 and perhaps dominant by 2025 (if not earlier).<p>Elon Musk has repeatedly said that Tesla Motors is not a typical car company but rather a technology company that will innovate at a blistering pace. As long as they continue to do that, they'll be fine.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>el_cuadrado</author><text>This is assuming BMW et all stop any innovation. But they won't. They will offer an electric vehicle the moment it becomes feasible (and I am sorry but 200 miles range is still an exciting and expensive toy).</text></comment> |
35,561,336 | 35,561,618 | 1 | 2 | 35,559,925 | train | <story><title>Elixir and Rust is a good mix</title><url>https://fly.io/phoenix-files/elixir-and-rust-is-a-good-mix/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>RhodesianHunter</author><text>&gt;Also, some of us are as anti-typing as you are pro-typing.<p>Assuming ample experience with both, how does one reach this conclusion?<p>I have yet to see a project of any size that needs to be worked on by multiple teams and is written in an untyped language not descend into dumpster fire.</text></item><item><author>toast0</author><text>Rust doesn&#x27;t have a lot of good runtime introspection tools (or they&#x27;re very not obvious). If you&#x27;re running a system with a lot of concurrency, it&#x27;s nice to be able to attach a debugger and find out exactly what&#x27;s going on with each of your tasks.<p>I haven&#x27;t seen hot loading for Rust (but a quick search shows there&#x27;s some out there), and I&#x27;m not sure how amenable Rust is to dlopen and friends to force the issue.<p>Erlang (and Elixir) have a constrained language that allows for BEAM to be effectively premptive in a way that a Rust concurrent runtime can&#x27;t be. At every function call, BEAM checks if the process should be preempted, and because the only way to loop is recursion, a process <i>must</i> call a function in a finite amount of time. A Rust runtime cannot preempt, if you need preemption, you&#x27;ve got to use OS threads, which limits capacity, or you need to accept cooperative task switching.<p>Also, some of us are as anti-typing as you are pro-typing. :)</text></item><item><author>satvikpendem</author><text>I used to use Elixir, but the lack of static types got to me (especially since I prefer the type-driven development methodology). Using Rust afterwards was great, plus it was faster than the BEAM. I guess, why not use Rust entirely instead of as a FFI into Elixir or other backend language? I&#x27;ve been using Axum and it works pretty well. The only time I had to do FFI with Rust was with Flutter via flutter_rust_bridge, for running a CRDT library (automerge) that was implemented in Rust, for offline app functionality.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>toast0</author><text>I work on a lot of &#x27;glue&#x27; issues, often with languages like Perl, PHP, and Erlang (and a bit of Javascript here and there). Specifying types all over the place in languages like C, C++, Java, and Rust feels like it gets in the way and limits more than it helps. (feelings more than data here, of course)<p>Sure, at boundaries between teams, you need to specify the data in some way. That could be a type, but for me, often the other team is using a different language than me, so it needs to be a language agnostic type, and it can&#x27;t include unsigned numbers because Java can&#x27;t cope, and it can&#x27;t include large integers because Javascript can&#x27;t cope, etc. Protobufs are popular, json is too.<p>I have a lot of unpopular opinions though, and that&#x27;s fine. It&#x27;s just tiresome that everyone wants to come in and add types to things that don&#x27;t need them. Also, I agree with dllthomas, most developers and teams are capable of creating dumpster fires in all sorts of environments, with all sorts of tooling. :)</text></comment> | <story><title>Elixir and Rust is a good mix</title><url>https://fly.io/phoenix-files/elixir-and-rust-is-a-good-mix/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>RhodesianHunter</author><text>&gt;Also, some of us are as anti-typing as you are pro-typing.<p>Assuming ample experience with both, how does one reach this conclusion?<p>I have yet to see a project of any size that needs to be worked on by multiple teams and is written in an untyped language not descend into dumpster fire.</text></item><item><author>toast0</author><text>Rust doesn&#x27;t have a lot of good runtime introspection tools (or they&#x27;re very not obvious). If you&#x27;re running a system with a lot of concurrency, it&#x27;s nice to be able to attach a debugger and find out exactly what&#x27;s going on with each of your tasks.<p>I haven&#x27;t seen hot loading for Rust (but a quick search shows there&#x27;s some out there), and I&#x27;m not sure how amenable Rust is to dlopen and friends to force the issue.<p>Erlang (and Elixir) have a constrained language that allows for BEAM to be effectively premptive in a way that a Rust concurrent runtime can&#x27;t be. At every function call, BEAM checks if the process should be preempted, and because the only way to loop is recursion, a process <i>must</i> call a function in a finite amount of time. A Rust runtime cannot preempt, if you need preemption, you&#x27;ve got to use OS threads, which limits capacity, or you need to accept cooperative task switching.<p>Also, some of us are as anti-typing as you are pro-typing. :)</text></item><item><author>satvikpendem</author><text>I used to use Elixir, but the lack of static types got to me (especially since I prefer the type-driven development methodology). Using Rust afterwards was great, plus it was faster than the BEAM. I guess, why not use Rust entirely instead of as a FFI into Elixir or other backend language? I&#x27;ve been using Axum and it works pretty well. The only time I had to do FFI with Rust was with Flutter via flutter_rust_bridge, for running a CRDT library (automerge) that was implemented in Rust, for offline app functionality.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fiddlerwoaroof</author><text>I tried Haskell for a while and switched to Common Lisp (although I still follow Haskell from a distance). My experience just doesn&#x27;t match up with the claim that a project of any size written in an untyped inevitably descends into a dumpster fire. I&#x27;ve worked on largish systems in several dynamically-typed languages and several statically-typed and I personally haven&#x27;t noticed any major difference in overall productivity suggesting that static types are better: they just have different friction points and different ways of working work better in each paradigm.</text></comment> |
17,513,495 | 17,510,402 | 1 | 3 | 17,507,511 | train | <story><title>The San Franciso Fire Department makes its own wooden ladders by hand</title><url>https://gizmodo.com/inside-san-francisos-fire-department-where-ladders-are-1552279252</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>curun1r</author><text>LOL at SFFD giving any shits about costs. This is the same department that power grabbed emergency medical response away from dedicated paramedics in ambulances. Responding in full ladder trucks to take care of drunk homeless people...yeah, they do that, costing millions every year in added expenses and road repairs. But good for them for saving a few bucks on ladders, that must make a huge difference.</text></item><item><author>AdieuToLogic</author><text>The Discovery Channel&#x27;s &quot;Dirty Jobs&quot;[0] show made a segment involving the SFFD&#x27;s ladder construction&#x2F;maintenance crew. In it, they explained that wooden ladders are cheaper to maintain than aluminum ones and I <i>think</i> also discount fiberglass ladders as well.<p>It&#x27;s worth a watch if one is interested in this topic.<p>0 - <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.discovery.com&#x2F;tv-shows&#x2F;dirty-jobs&#x2F;about-this-show&#x2F;dirty-jobs-about&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.discovery.com&#x2F;tv-shows&#x2F;dirty-jobs&#x2F;about-this-show...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Broken_Hippo</author><text>This is part of a first responder program, occasionally saving lives. Plenty of cities across the US do this sort of thing.<p>If you have an emergency - especially a medical one - whoever is closest is the right person to respond, be it fire department, ambulance, or police. 3 to 10 minutes in an emergency can make a huge difference. Like it or not, a drunk homeless person is generally a health and&#x2F;or safety issue. Coming in trucks that they would usually drive also means that if there happens to be a fire call while they are out helping someone with possible first aid, they can leave from the scene, keeping more people safe. For auto accidents, sometimes the fire truck is one of the better things to have at the scene for visibility purposes.<p>I would also like to add that many - but not all - fire departments also drive ambulances.<p>Does it cost money? Sure. But if it helps folks, I&#x27;m for it. There are other options, but I&#x27;m not convinced they will cost less money (more ambulances of different sorts, more manpower for first responders positioned in places across cities, and so on... all have their costs).<p>I&#x27;d fully recommend actually looking into the reasons for some of this, and what other options are for similar outcomes.</text></comment> | <story><title>The San Franciso Fire Department makes its own wooden ladders by hand</title><url>https://gizmodo.com/inside-san-francisos-fire-department-where-ladders-are-1552279252</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>curun1r</author><text>LOL at SFFD giving any shits about costs. This is the same department that power grabbed emergency medical response away from dedicated paramedics in ambulances. Responding in full ladder trucks to take care of drunk homeless people...yeah, they do that, costing millions every year in added expenses and road repairs. But good for them for saving a few bucks on ladders, that must make a huge difference.</text></item><item><author>AdieuToLogic</author><text>The Discovery Channel&#x27;s &quot;Dirty Jobs&quot;[0] show made a segment involving the SFFD&#x27;s ladder construction&#x2F;maintenance crew. In it, they explained that wooden ladders are cheaper to maintain than aluminum ones and I <i>think</i> also discount fiberglass ladders as well.<p>It&#x27;s worth a watch if one is interested in this topic.<p>0 - <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.discovery.com&#x2F;tv-shows&#x2F;dirty-jobs&#x2F;about-this-show&#x2F;dirty-jobs-about&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.discovery.com&#x2F;tv-shows&#x2F;dirty-jobs&#x2F;about-this-show...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>exegete</author><text>Also from the article:<p>&gt;There&#x27;s a city-specific reason why San Francisco has stuck with wood rather than swap over to metals, and the answer lies in looking up. The high-voltage cables and wires that guide the city&#x27;s (oft-maligned) public transport system Muni, and trolley cars crisscross above nearly every street, mean that ladders made of conductive elements are generally just too dangerous to use.<p>&gt;&quot;I think there&#x27;s a lot of fire departments that went aluminum and wish they could go back to wood but it&#x27;s too expensive,&quot; Braun says. &quot;There&#x27;s only two ladders manufacturers in the states—and we&#x27;re one of &#x27;em. We only make our own ladders and can barely even keep up with what we have.&quot;</text></comment> |
17,161,294 | 17,160,408 | 1 | 2 | 17,154,971 | train | <story><title>GDPR for lazy people: Block all European users with Cloudflare Workers</title><url>https://apility.io/2018/05/25/gdpr-lazy-block-eu-users-cloudflare-workers/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>eli</author><text>It&#x27;s reassuring to hear that the GDPR is not meant to target little startups and projects but I would like it a lot better if it said that in the actual law, rather than just trusting all current and future regulators to treat me kindly.<p>If it&#x27;s only meant to be used against big companies or extreme offenders, why doesn&#x27;t it say so? It seems like the spirit of the law and the language of the law are not aligned and in my opinion that&#x27;s a sign of poorly designed regulation.<p>I object to the idea that small projects should be ok with breaking the law merely because they very likely won&#x27;t get caught.</text></item><item><author>gerdesj</author><text>I&#x27;m a Brit. I am the MD of a small IT company. I have two partners and 20 employees. We started in 2000. We turn over about £1.5Mpa. We sell our services to people and organisations. Our backups are now smaller these days (thanks to GDPR).<p>I understand that because you are outside the EU you might feel like a target but that is not the point of GDPR. There is no way on earth that the EU as a whole has looked on your company&#x2F;project or whatever and decided to screw you.<p>Have a look at the first few paras of this: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;eur-lex.europa.eu&#x2F;legal-content&#x2F;EN&#x2F;TXT&#x2F;PDF&#x2F;?uri=CELEX:32016R0679" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;eur-lex.europa.eu&#x2F;legal-content&#x2F;EN&#x2F;TXT&#x2F;PDF&#x2F;?uri=CELEX...</a> after it says &quot;Whereas&quot;. Does the language look a little familiar? Do the sentiments look strangely familiar in some way?<p>GDPR is not about destroying people&#x27;s livelihoods. It is about protecting basic, fundamental rights that say 30 years ago we never knew needed to exist.<p>After all the knee jerk reactions have calmed down a bit, you may find that you personally have benefited in some way from EU regs. If you find that, then I suggest you fight tooth and nail for similar to be enacted at home. I&#x27;ll be the first to thank you for that.</text></item><item><author>jeremyt</author><text> I’ve been reading hacker news for about a decade, and it’s getting to the point where I don’t think there are many entrepreneurs and&#x2F;or technical people on here anymore.<p>The number of people who are saying it’s no big deal to comply with this huge law, especially for very small startups, is mind boggling.<p>Let’s just take one feature: the requirement that you can permanently delete all of your information. Most early-stage startups use the (in 2008, when I did mine) best practice of “delete=1”. Changing your whole database over to permanent cascade delete is only easy if you’re a very experienced programmer or who knows what he’s doing. And that sets aside the fact that even if you know what you’re doing technically, there are lots of business logic problems with just deleting things out of the database and anonymizing users is very tricky.<p>I was not a great programmer when I started my first startup. I was learning as I went along.<p>We couldn’t afford a lawyer, and the amount of time for me (the only programmer) to go through and read all the regulations and make all the requisite changes in the product I would estimate might take on the order of a month or two, which if timed poorly would’ve killed our company. I say again: at an early stage startup with one programmer, you cannot have that one programmer spending two months on compliance.<p>It’s just gotten to the point that there’s one comment after another responding to this regulation or that regulation or this situation or whatever with “well, just call HR“, or “I can’t believe you don’t have a company policy for that!”<p>Or “well just ask your lawyers“. It ain’t that easy. Do you have any idea how much it would cost to have “your lawyers” go through the GDPR, tell you what you need to do, and deal with all of the edge cases and gray areas? $20k or $30k doesn’t seem too high.<p>My biggest fear is that all of these complex bureaucratic laws are just raising the bar for doing a startup. Maybe the days of two people doing a startup in someone’s garage should be in the past? If so, that makes me kind of sad.<p>Regardless it’s not obvious that GDPR is the right policy or that it’s well designed or clear.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>beojan</author><text>Because if your business model is based on selling user data, it doesn&#x27;t matter if you&#x27;re a small startup, it absolutely is meant to target you.<p>If you aren&#x27;t competent at responsibly handling personal data and you want to build a project or startup, pick one that doesn&#x27;t handle personal data, or put in the effort to learn how to do things properly.</text></comment> | <story><title>GDPR for lazy people: Block all European users with Cloudflare Workers</title><url>https://apility.io/2018/05/25/gdpr-lazy-block-eu-users-cloudflare-workers/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>eli</author><text>It&#x27;s reassuring to hear that the GDPR is not meant to target little startups and projects but I would like it a lot better if it said that in the actual law, rather than just trusting all current and future regulators to treat me kindly.<p>If it&#x27;s only meant to be used against big companies or extreme offenders, why doesn&#x27;t it say so? It seems like the spirit of the law and the language of the law are not aligned and in my opinion that&#x27;s a sign of poorly designed regulation.<p>I object to the idea that small projects should be ok with breaking the law merely because they very likely won&#x27;t get caught.</text></item><item><author>gerdesj</author><text>I&#x27;m a Brit. I am the MD of a small IT company. I have two partners and 20 employees. We started in 2000. We turn over about £1.5Mpa. We sell our services to people and organisations. Our backups are now smaller these days (thanks to GDPR).<p>I understand that because you are outside the EU you might feel like a target but that is not the point of GDPR. There is no way on earth that the EU as a whole has looked on your company&#x2F;project or whatever and decided to screw you.<p>Have a look at the first few paras of this: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;eur-lex.europa.eu&#x2F;legal-content&#x2F;EN&#x2F;TXT&#x2F;PDF&#x2F;?uri=CELEX:32016R0679" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;eur-lex.europa.eu&#x2F;legal-content&#x2F;EN&#x2F;TXT&#x2F;PDF&#x2F;?uri=CELEX...</a> after it says &quot;Whereas&quot;. Does the language look a little familiar? Do the sentiments look strangely familiar in some way?<p>GDPR is not about destroying people&#x27;s livelihoods. It is about protecting basic, fundamental rights that say 30 years ago we never knew needed to exist.<p>After all the knee jerk reactions have calmed down a bit, you may find that you personally have benefited in some way from EU regs. If you find that, then I suggest you fight tooth and nail for similar to be enacted at home. I&#x27;ll be the first to thank you for that.</text></item><item><author>jeremyt</author><text> I’ve been reading hacker news for about a decade, and it’s getting to the point where I don’t think there are many entrepreneurs and&#x2F;or technical people on here anymore.<p>The number of people who are saying it’s no big deal to comply with this huge law, especially for very small startups, is mind boggling.<p>Let’s just take one feature: the requirement that you can permanently delete all of your information. Most early-stage startups use the (in 2008, when I did mine) best practice of “delete=1”. Changing your whole database over to permanent cascade delete is only easy if you’re a very experienced programmer or who knows what he’s doing. And that sets aside the fact that even if you know what you’re doing technically, there are lots of business logic problems with just deleting things out of the database and anonymizing users is very tricky.<p>I was not a great programmer when I started my first startup. I was learning as I went along.<p>We couldn’t afford a lawyer, and the amount of time for me (the only programmer) to go through and read all the regulations and make all the requisite changes in the product I would estimate might take on the order of a month or two, which if timed poorly would’ve killed our company. I say again: at an early stage startup with one programmer, you cannot have that one programmer spending two months on compliance.<p>It’s just gotten to the point that there’s one comment after another responding to this regulation or that regulation or this situation or whatever with “well, just call HR“, or “I can’t believe you don’t have a company policy for that!”<p>Or “well just ask your lawyers“. It ain’t that easy. Do you have any idea how much it would cost to have “your lawyers” go through the GDPR, tell you what you need to do, and deal with all of the edge cases and gray areas? $20k or $30k doesn’t seem too high.<p>My biggest fear is that all of these complex bureaucratic laws are just raising the bar for doing a startup. Maybe the days of two people doing a startup in someone’s garage should be in the past? If so, that makes me kind of sad.<p>Regardless it’s not obvious that GDPR is the right policy or that it’s well designed or clear.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>raverbashing</author><text>&gt; If it&#x27;s only meant to be used against big companies or extreme offenders, why doesn&#x27;t it say so?<p>Because, and this has been repeated millions of times on HN, Europe and the US follow different systems in writing laws</text></comment> |
4,210,675 | 4,210,611 | 1 | 2 | 4,210,030 | train | <story><title>The Pal-V flying car</title><url>http://pal-v.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vibrunazo</author><text>Self driving cars first. Flying cars second. In that order, cannot happen the other way around. I agree with Erick Schmidt when he said "It's a bug that cars were invented before computers, or else humans would have never driven cars themselves". Hopefully we won't implement the same bug again.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mvzink</author><text>Prescriptively, I agree. But descriptively, the economy isn't rational, and I bet we will implement that bug again: arguably the most essential and accurate message on that page is "ultimate freedom"—flying cars, and normal cars, and planes have rarely been motivated by the goal of efficient or safe transportation. Practical, rational people ride the train (or the bus) and rowdy kids whose prefrontal cortex still hasn't fully developed love their off roaders and street racers. As far as the "spirit of driving" goes, letting your car (or flying car or plane) drive (or fly) itself is tantamount to putting it on tracks. This website, their product, and the marketing all indicate that the motivation is purely irrational: the perennial lust for freedom, not for practical transportation.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Pal-V flying car</title><url>http://pal-v.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vibrunazo</author><text>Self driving cars first. Flying cars second. In that order, cannot happen the other way around. I agree with Erick Schmidt when he said "It's a bug that cars were invented before computers, or else humans would have never driven cars themselves". Hopefully we won't implement the same bug again.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dwhly</author><text>What kind of nonsense is this? As a pilot (of both land and air vehicles) your sentiments seem completely irrational. Define "flying car"! There are tons of entrants in this category, and many that are fully functional. I can't say that I find them practical, or myself a potential early customer-- but not because of some misplaced sense that we need computers to handle the piloting for us.<p>And what of Eric's quote? Sounds like someone who's busy building a self-driving car-- not someone who loves the beauty of being a pilot!<p>Are we to cede all functions that we used to master to computers? Really?<p>Give me a break.</text></comment> |
18,028,736 | 18,028,423 | 1 | 2 | 18,025,209 | train | <story><title>Ticketmaster recruits pros for secret scalper program</title><url>https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/a-public-relations-nightmare-ticketmaster-recruits-pros-for-secret-scalper-program-1.4828535</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>chongli</author><text>Ticketmaster provides a valuable service for the associated acts:<p>Reputation shield<p>If artists started charging fair market prices for their tickets the fans would go ballistic and the artists&#x27; reputations would be severely damaged. By ostensibly selling the tickets below, even if normal people never get to buy them at face value, they outsource the reputation damage to Ticketmaster. Since Ticketmaster already has a detestable reputation, they are well-equipped to provide this service with minimal damage to their brand. In exchange, Ticketmaster pays a portion of their revenues to the promoters and their associated acts. It&#x27;s a win win: artists get more money without damaging their credibility with their fans.</text></item><item><author>ageitgey</author><text>This is super sleezy and I think Ticketmaster is one of the most awful companies in the world. But given the ridiculous levels of scalping that goes on every day (including all the companies that attempt to normalize it, like StubHub), doesn&#x27;t it all imply that the fair market price of a lot of tickets is way higher than what they sell for? Obviously demand is way outstripping supply or people wouldn&#x27;t pay $500-$1000 for $100 tickets on a daily basis.<p>By making all event tickets available at exactly the same time for an effectively-lower-than-market price, of course professional scalpers are going to snap up almost all of them and normal people without scripts won&#x27;t be able to compete. I wonder what would happen if tickets went on sale for a really high price (like $500 each) and then the prices kept dropping automatically every hour until they were all sold. That would kill a lot of advantage that the scalpers have.<p>I guess customers would hate it and promoters would hate it, but I wonder if there isn&#x27;t some other kind of sales model that would make this kind of sleezy self-scalping less profitable. Because with market forces this strong, companies are going to do anything that is legal-ish to get a piece of it. If Ticketmaster doesn&#x27;t figure out a way to get a piece of the massive resell market, they are essentially just giving away free money to StubHub (from their point of view).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mehrdadn</author><text>I&#x27;m confused, so like an artist would be paying 80% of his potential revenue ($100 vs. $500) in return for reputation shield? That&#x27;s how valuable this service is?</text></comment> | <story><title>Ticketmaster recruits pros for secret scalper program</title><url>https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/a-public-relations-nightmare-ticketmaster-recruits-pros-for-secret-scalper-program-1.4828535</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>chongli</author><text>Ticketmaster provides a valuable service for the associated acts:<p>Reputation shield<p>If artists started charging fair market prices for their tickets the fans would go ballistic and the artists&#x27; reputations would be severely damaged. By ostensibly selling the tickets below, even if normal people never get to buy them at face value, they outsource the reputation damage to Ticketmaster. Since Ticketmaster already has a detestable reputation, they are well-equipped to provide this service with minimal damage to their brand. In exchange, Ticketmaster pays a portion of their revenues to the promoters and their associated acts. It&#x27;s a win win: artists get more money without damaging their credibility with their fans.</text></item><item><author>ageitgey</author><text>This is super sleezy and I think Ticketmaster is one of the most awful companies in the world. But given the ridiculous levels of scalping that goes on every day (including all the companies that attempt to normalize it, like StubHub), doesn&#x27;t it all imply that the fair market price of a lot of tickets is way higher than what they sell for? Obviously demand is way outstripping supply or people wouldn&#x27;t pay $500-$1000 for $100 tickets on a daily basis.<p>By making all event tickets available at exactly the same time for an effectively-lower-than-market price, of course professional scalpers are going to snap up almost all of them and normal people without scripts won&#x27;t be able to compete. I wonder what would happen if tickets went on sale for a really high price (like $500 each) and then the prices kept dropping automatically every hour until they were all sold. That would kill a lot of advantage that the scalpers have.<p>I guess customers would hate it and promoters would hate it, but I wonder if there isn&#x27;t some other kind of sales model that would make this kind of sleezy self-scalping less profitable. Because with market forces this strong, companies are going to do anything that is legal-ish to get a piece of it. If Ticketmaster doesn&#x27;t figure out a way to get a piece of the massive resell market, they are essentially just giving away free money to StubHub (from their point of view).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hashkb</author><text>Before Ticketmaster, you could go to or call the box office and reliably get tickets to shows in your own city. Now I have to buy them from scalpers in Canada. Ticketmaster artificially expanded the market and used its leverage to force venues into exclusive deals. It&#x27;s got nothing to do with &quot;market price&quot;.<p>Edit: Also artists get a cut of the bar and to sell their merch. Also also, there is a massive range of costs of tickets already. It&#x27;s really not a market price issue for tickets.</text></comment> |
28,526,492 | 28,524,653 | 1 | 2 | 28,521,992 | train | <story><title>Scikit-Learn Version 1.0</title><url>https://scikit-learn.org/dev/whats_new/v1.0.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>disgruntledphd2</author><text>I&#x27;m with you on sklearn, the DL libraries and Numpy, but Pandas and Matplotlib are poor, poor relations of the tools available in the R ecosystem (dplyr&#x2F;ggplot etc).</text></item><item><author>lysecret</author><text>Excellent library for train_test_split.
Jokes aside. This next to Numpy, Pandas Jupyter and Matplotlib + the DL libraries are the reason Python is the powerhouse it is for Data Science.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>baron_harkonnen</author><text>I used to very strongly agree with you re: matplotlib, but I&#x27;ve recently switched from using almost exclusively ggplot2 to almost exlusively Matplotlib and my realization is that they are very different tools serving very different purposes.<p>ggplot2 is obviously fantastic and makes beautiful plots, and very easily at that. However it is definitely a &quot;convention over configuration&quot; tool. For 99% of the typical plot you might want to create, ggplot is going to be easier and look nicer.<p>However matplotlib lib really shines when you want to make very custom plots. If you have a plot in your mind that you want to see on paper, matplotlib will be the better tool for helping you create exactly what you are looking for.<p>For certain projects I&#x27;ve done, where I want to do a bunch of non-standard visualizations, especially ones that tend to be fairly dense, I prefer matplotlib. For day to day analytics ggplot2 is so much better it&#x27;s ridiculous. The real issue is that Python doesn&#x27;t really offer anything in the same league as ggplot2 for &quot;convention over configuration&quot; type plotting.<p>Fully agree on Pandas. R&#x27;s native data frame + tidyverse is world&#x27;s easier. Pandas&#x27; overly complex indexing system is a persistent source of annoyance no matter how much I use that library.</text></comment> | <story><title>Scikit-Learn Version 1.0</title><url>https://scikit-learn.org/dev/whats_new/v1.0.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>disgruntledphd2</author><text>I&#x27;m with you on sklearn, the DL libraries and Numpy, but Pandas and Matplotlib are poor, poor relations of the tools available in the R ecosystem (dplyr&#x2F;ggplot etc).</text></item><item><author>lysecret</author><text>Excellent library for train_test_split.
Jokes aside. This next to Numpy, Pandas Jupyter and Matplotlib + the DL libraries are the reason Python is the powerhouse it is for Data Science.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>boringg</author><text>Wait how many companies are actually using R in the wild? As I understand it, R is born of academia, great for statistics&#x2F;analysis but breaks down on data manipulation and isn&#x27;t used in production&#x2F;data engineering. Maybe my understanding is dated though?</text></comment> |
19,893,935 | 19,893,163 | 1 | 3 | 19,891,072 | train | <story><title>The Notion of “Trolling” in Ancient Sanskrit</title><url>https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=42700</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>svat</author><text>The tradition of debate in India that this article is about (or dialogue, or dialectic, or whatever you want to call it) is very interesting, and unfortunately not well-known because most of the sources on the topic quickly get into technicalities.<p>Two non-technical (somewhat accessible to the general public) sources I&#x27;ve found are:<p>1. The book “Religions, Reasons, and Gods” by the late John Clayton has many interesting essays that touch on the vāda tradition. One of his interesting points is that the goal of dialogue need not be consensus or establishing common ground, but simply the “clarification of defensible difference”: understanding the other party better, and coming to shared understanding of what our differences are. Some of it is also touched on in his lecture here: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bu.edu&#x2F;religion&#x2F;mar25-98&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bu.edu&#x2F;religion&#x2F;mar25-98&#x2F;</a><p>2. Elaborating on the <i>jalpa</i>&#x2F;<i>vitaṇḍa</i> mentioned in this article, the <i>nyāya</i> tradition recognized a long list of logical fallacies and poor arguments that were grounds for losing a (formal) debate. A list I&#x27;ve found is in the paper “Twenty-Two Ways to Lose a Debate” (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;doi.org&#x2F;10.1007&#x2F;s10781-009-9083-y" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;doi.org&#x2F;10.1007&#x2F;s10781-009-9083-y</a>) which also carries out some comparison with the ideas of Grice.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Notion of “Trolling” in Ancient Sanskrit</title><url>https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=42700</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tanderson92</author><text>On a slight tangent, has anyone ever looked into the etymology of the modern term troll? There hasn&#x27;t been too much serious scholarship that I can find on the term, seemingly arising in mid-1980s newsgroups. But, I did find this which is my current best understanding; I also read in an old student newspaper edition that it refers to the trollish inhabitants underneath Bridge building on campus. From an Oral History of Caltech:<p>&gt; ERWIN:Could you perhaps tell about bringing back A Broader View with its sequel, the new sequel? Because I think that’s very interesting. CLARK:Well, that was fun to do. The play readers group in 1987 decided to renew the play-reading party, which was one of the great traditions of the fifties and early sixties. And Bob Oliver asked me if I’d dust of f A Broader View. Well, I looked at it and I thought of updating it. But the shift in the twenty years had been so much that updating was impossible; it’s just a period piece or nothing. So we had to do it unchanged. And then I felt honor bound to write a sequel to it, which is called Troll’s Progress. The theme of it is that the essential Caltech never changes. It’s firmly founded on terror. [Laughter] And no froufrou can disguise that fact. And people who play together pray together, twitch together, stay together. Anyway, that theme allowed for a number of wisecracks, and I like to think the dialogue is rather funny. The kids who did it were tremendous. The undergraduates, of course, we know are stars.<p>&gt; ERWIN:What was the origin of the troll?<p>&gt; CLARK:Well, that goes back into Caltech history. And it’s probably Caltech’s only contribution to American culture. [Laughter] If you have to ask the meaning of the word, you’ll never understand what it means. But to put you sort of in the framework—that’s discussed, incidentally, in the dialogue of Beautiful Beckman there’s a segment on that. But a troll is a very high-voltage nerd. It used to be he lived “under DuBridge.” The kid that never sees the light of day, really, he’s so busy with his books. There are apprentice trolls at other schools, but ours are an order of magnitude more trollish. People who are compulsive and pathological students are much more so here.
&gt; ERWIN:Somewhere you referred to this as a “random troll.”<p>&gt; CLARK:Oh, that’s the worst thing you can be called. You see, it means you’re just like a number; you have no personality. You might as well be a computer—nothing to distinguish. Oh, man, when you’re a random troll, you’re beyond the pale. [Laughter]<p>&gt; ERWIN:In A Broader View, you called the Caltech undergrad “intellectually brilliant, emotionally immature, culturally deprived, and socially gauche.” And then, immediately afterward, I believe you gave the Caltech professor the identical description. That brings us to the point of what the shows were for underneath it all.<p>Source: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;oralhistories.library.caltech.edu&#x2F;95&#x2F;1&#x2F;OH_Clark_K.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;oralhistories.library.caltech.edu&#x2F;95&#x2F;1&#x2F;OH_Clark_K.pdf</a></text></comment> |
14,824,313 | 14,824,405 | 1 | 2 | 14,823,807 | train | <story><title>The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs</title><url>https://metafluff.com/2017/07/21/i-am-a-tab-hoarder/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zdkl</author><text>&gt; It&#x27;s similar to saying &quot;Surely there&#x27;s a better solution than having 1000 files on your file system. That sounds like a nightmare.&quot;<p>No, it&#x27;s similar to saying &quot;Surely there&#x27;s a better solution than having 1000 radio&#x2F;tv channels tuned on at once, waiting for you to decide which one is relevant&quot;<p>Like why not open what you need when you need it rather than squirreling all those &quot;maybes&quot;?</text></item><item><author>awalton</author><text>I don&#x27;t understand this perspective. It&#x27;s similar to saying &quot;Surely there&#x27;s a better solution than having 1000 files on your file system. That sounds like a nightmare.&quot;<p>It&#x27;s not like you&#x27;re actively monitoring every tab at once, you just have the knowledge ready to go and at a finger&#x27;s whim. You use extensions like Tab Hunter to jump directly to the tab you care about.<p>Yeah, you could do the same with using a bunch of profiles and bookmarks... but then you need to copy your login cookies and such and it just becomes a mess. I&#x27;ve tried many, many other solutions over the years and simply having a huge number of tabs is the one that continues to Just Work.</text></item><item><author>fletchowns</author><text>There has got to be a better solution to this problem than having 1,000 tabs open in a web browser. That sounds like an absolute nightmare.</text></item><item><author>sillysaurus3</author><text>It&#x27;s unfortunate because back in ~2010 I used to open over 1,000 tabs in Chrome at a time. It&#x27;s very useful when doing research: each window represents a topic, and each topic can spawn 30+ tabs.<p>Nowadays Chrome keels over at around 150, like you say. It also leaks memory like a sieve, so if your hard drive is anywhere close to full you&#x27;ll end up with a lovely OS X popup saying all your running programs have been frozen and that your system is out of memory (since it can&#x27;t page to disk because it&#x27;s full).</text></item><item><author>elfchief</author><text>Wow. I&#x27;ve been getting more and more frustrated with how poorly Chrome handles even a moderately large number of tabs (~150), and it sounds like my savior is going to be ... Firefox. Huh.<p>Wouldn&#x27;t have guessed it, but I&#x27;ll totally take it.<p>I have a nice extension for Chrome called Quick Tabs that gives me a searchable list of my open tabs and makes it easy to find things I have open... anyone know which of the several things that seem to do that with Firefox would be the best to use?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sillysaurus3</author><text>Different people are different. When researching a question without a direct answer, it&#x27;s more effective for me to open up tabs as I read a page and then search the most likely candidate. Whenever I reach a dead-end I can just switch tabs as opposed to pressing the back button N times. zzalpha&#x27;s comment sums it up nicely: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=14824086" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=14824086</a><p>I know I&#x27;m a power user, but I miss how effective old Chrome was at this.</text></comment> | <story><title>The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs</title><url>https://metafluff.com/2017/07/21/i-am-a-tab-hoarder/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zdkl</author><text>&gt; It&#x27;s similar to saying &quot;Surely there&#x27;s a better solution than having 1000 files on your file system. That sounds like a nightmare.&quot;<p>No, it&#x27;s similar to saying &quot;Surely there&#x27;s a better solution than having 1000 radio&#x2F;tv channels tuned on at once, waiting for you to decide which one is relevant&quot;<p>Like why not open what you need when you need it rather than squirreling all those &quot;maybes&quot;?</text></item><item><author>awalton</author><text>I don&#x27;t understand this perspective. It&#x27;s similar to saying &quot;Surely there&#x27;s a better solution than having 1000 files on your file system. That sounds like a nightmare.&quot;<p>It&#x27;s not like you&#x27;re actively monitoring every tab at once, you just have the knowledge ready to go and at a finger&#x27;s whim. You use extensions like Tab Hunter to jump directly to the tab you care about.<p>Yeah, you could do the same with using a bunch of profiles and bookmarks... but then you need to copy your login cookies and such and it just becomes a mess. I&#x27;ve tried many, many other solutions over the years and simply having a huge number of tabs is the one that continues to Just Work.</text></item><item><author>fletchowns</author><text>There has got to be a better solution to this problem than having 1,000 tabs open in a web browser. That sounds like an absolute nightmare.</text></item><item><author>sillysaurus3</author><text>It&#x27;s unfortunate because back in ~2010 I used to open over 1,000 tabs in Chrome at a time. It&#x27;s very useful when doing research: each window represents a topic, and each topic can spawn 30+ tabs.<p>Nowadays Chrome keels over at around 150, like you say. It also leaks memory like a sieve, so if your hard drive is anywhere close to full you&#x27;ll end up with a lovely OS X popup saying all your running programs have been frozen and that your system is out of memory (since it can&#x27;t page to disk because it&#x27;s full).</text></item><item><author>elfchief</author><text>Wow. I&#x27;ve been getting more and more frustrated with how poorly Chrome handles even a moderately large number of tabs (~150), and it sounds like my savior is going to be ... Firefox. Huh.<p>Wouldn&#x27;t have guessed it, but I&#x27;ll totally take it.<p>I have a nice extension for Chrome called Quick Tabs that gives me a searchable list of my open tabs and makes it easy to find things I have open... anyone know which of the several things that seem to do that with Firefox would be the best to use?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mustacheemperor</author><text>I&#x27;d compare it more to bringing a stack of books to your table at the library. Just because you could notate the name and position of each and fetch them as needed doesn&#x27;t mean it&#x27;s not helpful to have them all handy. I&#x27;ve never personally used that many tabs for research, but vetting sources often requires taking a look at a lot of different links for any given subtopic.</text></comment> |
38,911,593 | 38,911,665 | 1 | 3 | 38,910,731 | train | <story><title>Big Tech has already made enough money in 2024 to pay all its 2023 fines</title><url>https://proton.me/blog/big-tech-2023-fines-vs-revenue</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vnjxk</author><text>Could you imagine adding additional fine to shareholders? Like a reverse dividend? I wonder what disasters or blesses this will cause</text></item><item><author>hliyan</author><text>Either the fines need to be high enough until there is a material impact to shareholders, or natural persons who make decisions within the corporation needs to be held accountable (not just the legal person), OR, we need to fundamentally rethink what a corporation&#x27;s charter must necessarily include (in addition to shareholder returns).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>xur17</author><text>Fining shareholders would effectively force unlimited liability to shareholders, which comes with a bunch of negatives (ex: bigger shareholders would just own inside of an LLC wrapper).<p>Wouldn&#x27;t fining more accomplish the same goal? If it was big enough, it would cause major drawdowns in the stock price, which would cause financial losses for the shareholders.</text></comment> | <story><title>Big Tech has already made enough money in 2024 to pay all its 2023 fines</title><url>https://proton.me/blog/big-tech-2023-fines-vs-revenue</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vnjxk</author><text>Could you imagine adding additional fine to shareholders? Like a reverse dividend? I wonder what disasters or blesses this will cause</text></item><item><author>hliyan</author><text>Either the fines need to be high enough until there is a material impact to shareholders, or natural persons who make decisions within the corporation needs to be held accountable (not just the legal person), OR, we need to fundamentally rethink what a corporation&#x27;s charter must necessarily include (in addition to shareholder returns).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>devjab</author><text>Our entire western society depends on the ability to own and run businesses without personal responsibility for what the business does as an organisation. Sometimes in the case of fraud, or similar individual crimes within an organisation can be placed as blame on individuals or even management found to wilfully ignore internal warnings and so on, but on the whole, it’s rare that we go after private persons for what the organisations where they work does.<p>Shareholders are even further detached from this process, often having very little knowledge of what happens within organisations. Often having no influence on what happens within organisations. You likely own stock yourself through your pension funds, and if you made these laws your pension would be fined for what the index fonds it invest in does.<p>I guess from some political points of views all of this would be a good thing based on our current inequality in society, but the way to solve this isn’t through collective punishment. It’s through taxation. Right now, the entire economy is very much geared in favour of increasing the inequality by transferring more and more wealth to those who already have it. It hasn’t always been like this, 50 years ago, before the age of new public management, the taxation on things like wealth, stock and so on were high and the wealthy in our society paid most 80% of their total (not income tax) wealth generation. Today it’s often less than 10-20% through various tax law loop holes, and that’s if you keep your wealth generation absolutely legal.<p>Af far as organisation fines go, the situation is sort of similar to the general economy, in that major organisations and wealth owners have “rigged” the system in ways where it’s very hard to punish major corporations on a global scale. In Denmark we might find Facebook or Google guilty of something and fine them up to 10% of their income, but its income in Denmark, which is frankly so small on the global scale that they often don’t even bother fighting it in our courts like they do with the larger EU rulings. This could change, but it’s hard to do so, as the US isn’t interested in forcing US non-token companies fines to foreign countries. Similarly it would seem that even within the US there is competition between the various states to be the most company friendly.</text></comment> |
33,385,160 | 33,384,600 | 1 | 2 | 33,383,238 | train | <story><title>Texas solar and wind resources saved consumers nearly $28B over 12 years</title><url>https://www.utilitydive.com/news/texas-solar-and-wind-resources-saved-consumers-nearly-28-billion-over-12-y/634893/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jeffbee</author><text>Texas is likely to pass California in total renewable energy resources soon, which kind of annoys me. I would like California to step up its construction game, and not just rest on our head start.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>HWR_14</author><text>Texas is, in many places, a wind-swept desert. Texas gets more direct sun because it is closer to the equator. Texas is also 70% larger in area. If it didn&#x27;t surpass California in total renewables, that would be an amazing story.</text></comment> | <story><title>Texas solar and wind resources saved consumers nearly $28B over 12 years</title><url>https://www.utilitydive.com/news/texas-solar-and-wind-resources-saved-consumers-nearly-28-billion-over-12-y/634893/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jeffbee</author><text>Texas is likely to pass California in total renewable energy resources soon, which kind of annoys me. I would like California to step up its construction game, and not just rest on our head start.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>macromaniac</author><text>Texas is more wind focused too (24%
wind vs 6% solar) which is better for the local economy. 80% of solar panels come from china.</text></comment> |
37,538,897 | 37,537,134 | 1 | 3 | 37,536,103 | train | <story><title>The database servers powering Let's Encrypt (2021)</title><url>https://letsencrypt.org/2021/01/21/next-gen-database-servers.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>distract8901</author><text>Interesting that their previous server is just one or two models up from the server I recently grabbed foe $150 on eBay.<p>I&#x27;m just now getting serious about a homelab and it&#x27;s <i>shocking</i> how much compute you can get for peanuts from enterprise surplus. I&#x27;ve had this machine (1U poweredge r620) for about a year and I&#x27;m already itching for an upgrade. Hopefully something with a lot of 3.5&quot; drive bays for long-term data hoarding.</text></comment> | <story><title>The database servers powering Let's Encrypt (2021)</title><url>https://letsencrypt.org/2021/01/21/next-gen-database-servers.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>candiddevmike</author><text>Doesn&#x27;t mention if they&#x27;re running Linux&#x2F;what flavor they&#x27;re running. I personally would be wary of running OpenZFS in production on Linux, especially ZFS on root. It has bit me in the ass too many times on Debian with an update breaking DKMS and rendering my system unbootable.<p>Also, it&#x27;s very, very strange&#x2F;worrying to see no mention of disk encryption anywhere in the post or the tuning guide. For a company with encrypt in the name, that is responsible for the majority of trust on the internet, WTF? That should be highlighted in their benchmarking. ZFS supports native encryption, MariaDB does encryption, how are they encrypting at rest&#x2F;transit&#x2F;use?</text></comment> |
9,633,515 | 9,633,383 | 1 | 3 | 9,631,418 | train | <story><title>Modelling game economy with Neo4j</title><url>http://theburningmonk.com/2015/04/modelling-game-economy-with-neo4j/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>ginatron</author><text>Considering OrientDB does everything and more, is Neo4j withering away?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rurounijones</author><text>I was rather interested in OrientDB but the lack of any quality ruby drivers was a roadblock.<p>I have just checked again - There are currently 3, which is much better than I remember.<p>* One uses the Java driver via JRuby only.<p>* One hasn&#x27;t been updated since 2012<p>* One is HTTP which isn&#x27;t the end of the world but it is not an official driver which doesn&#x27;t inspire a lot of confidence.</text></comment> | <story><title>Modelling game economy with Neo4j</title><url>http://theburningmonk.com/2015/04/modelling-game-economy-with-neo4j/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>ginatron</author><text>Considering OrientDB does everything and more, is Neo4j withering away?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jaytaylor</author><text><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;orientdb.com&#x2F;orientdb&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;orientdb.com&#x2F;orientdb&#x2F;</a></text></comment> |
1,171,157 | 1,171,112 | 1 | 2 | 1,169,992 | train | <story><title>JavaScript: It’s Not Just for Browsers Any More</title><url>http://pragprog.com/magazines/2010-03/javascript-its-not-just-for-browsers-any-more</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jerf</author><text>I'm really at a loss as to how people seem to just swallow this claim without question. What's so special about Javascript's closure support vs Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP, Lua, C#, Lisp, Erlang, or ${all other functional languages}? What's Node.js got over Twisted, POE, EventMachine, or every single thing ever written in Erlang?<p><i>Most</i> languages used in web development have closures. A large number of them have event-based frameworks. I found quite a few other candidates poking around in the other languages but lacked the skills or time to evaluate whether they were also structured like Node.js.<p>I don't mind the existence of Node.js, but the people claiming it's "better than most" make me wonder if they've ever used the "most" they claim it's better than. Erlang in particular. <i>That's</i> something that's "better at the event-driven paradigm than most". Javascript has nothing on Erlang, Javascript's just another C-derived manually-chop-your-code-up-to-work-with-callbacks monstrosity by comparison.<p>Edit: No, if I were going to pitch Node.js, I would pitch it as "Use the same language on both the client and the server; it's adequate on the client, it's adequate on the server." OK, "adequate" isn't the best pitch but it's honest. The stupidest thing about web development today is needing to know three languages (HTML + browser quirks counts as roughly as complex as a language, client-side JS, server side not-Javascript language) just to get your foot in the door. Having the same language on client and server will probably provide some interesting capabilities, such as the thing mentioned in another comment where your comment formatting code can be run in either place (show on the client <i>exactly</i> what they'll get if they submit, run on the server to validate it), or validation code that is guaranteed identical on both client and server, or several other interesting things I can imagine where you can play games with exactly where something is run. Server-side Javascript just shouldn't be pitched as a "uniquely capable" language in a field full of PHP, Perl, Python, and Ruby... "uniquely capable" is Erlang or a the Seaside framework, not Yet Another (Dynamic) Algol Variant.</text></item><item><author>IgorPartola</author><text>It's a nice clean language that fits the event-driven paradigm better than most. When every function is an automatic closure, things are much easier.</text></item><item><author>Ygor</author><text>Why do we want javascript on the server side, when we already have so many other options?<p>I'm not trying to imply something against this aproach, this really is a question.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ryah</author><text>Something that's different, at least from POE, EventMachine, Twisted is that it is attempting non-blocking purity. You can snub your nose at this but it turns out to be very important. It ends up abstracting away a problem in a way that EventMachine or Twisted will never be able to do simply because of the existence of massive amounts of blocking Ruby and Python libraries. The programmer simply doesn't have to know what non-blocking I/O is - they don't have to know that if they do "node script.js &#60; hugefile" - that STDIN_FILENO cannot be selected on.<p>Erlang is different. Node presents a different programming model than Erlang - Node handles thousands of connections per process - and keeps itself close to the metal. Erlang is it's own operating system handling one connection per processes but allowing very many processes. Is Node's model better? Well at the moment it's incomparable since Erlang is very much a solid, production ready system and Node is not more than some dude's hack. But supposing that Node becomes stable and usable at some point, a major advantage of the Node model is that for the first 10,000-1,000,000 concurrent connections the programmer doesn't have to know anything about concurrency - a single process will just handle it. There is no forking or IPC - it's just synchronous events and callbacks. In Erlang you have to think about about IPC on the first connection. The Erlang-model might turn out to be the wrong level of process granularity. Maybe the right level of process granularity is how computers are already designed: 10,000-1,000,000 connections per process, use one per core.<p>I also wish for less hype around the Node project but I think you're short changing it by saying it's same thing as Twisted but in Javascript instead of Python. The main selling point is <i>not</i> that you can run the same code on browser and server. The main selling point is that you don't have to know what you're doing, at least for the first 10,000 concurrent connections.</text></comment> | <story><title>JavaScript: It’s Not Just for Browsers Any More</title><url>http://pragprog.com/magazines/2010-03/javascript-its-not-just-for-browsers-any-more</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jerf</author><text>I'm really at a loss as to how people seem to just swallow this claim without question. What's so special about Javascript's closure support vs Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP, Lua, C#, Lisp, Erlang, or ${all other functional languages}? What's Node.js got over Twisted, POE, EventMachine, or every single thing ever written in Erlang?<p><i>Most</i> languages used in web development have closures. A large number of them have event-based frameworks. I found quite a few other candidates poking around in the other languages but lacked the skills or time to evaluate whether they were also structured like Node.js.<p>I don't mind the existence of Node.js, but the people claiming it's "better than most" make me wonder if they've ever used the "most" they claim it's better than. Erlang in particular. <i>That's</i> something that's "better at the event-driven paradigm than most". Javascript has nothing on Erlang, Javascript's just another C-derived manually-chop-your-code-up-to-work-with-callbacks monstrosity by comparison.<p>Edit: No, if I were going to pitch Node.js, I would pitch it as "Use the same language on both the client and the server; it's adequate on the client, it's adequate on the server." OK, "adequate" isn't the best pitch but it's honest. The stupidest thing about web development today is needing to know three languages (HTML + browser quirks counts as roughly as complex as a language, client-side JS, server side not-Javascript language) just to get your foot in the door. Having the same language on client and server will probably provide some interesting capabilities, such as the thing mentioned in another comment where your comment formatting code can be run in either place (show on the client <i>exactly</i> what they'll get if they submit, run on the server to validate it), or validation code that is guaranteed identical on both client and server, or several other interesting things I can imagine where you can play games with exactly where something is run. Server-side Javascript just shouldn't be pitched as a "uniquely capable" language in a field full of PHP, Perl, Python, and Ruby... "uniquely capable" is Erlang or a the Seaside framework, not Yet Another (Dynamic) Algol Variant.</text></item><item><author>IgorPartola</author><text>It's a nice clean language that fits the event-driven paradigm better than most. When every function is an automatic closure, things are much easier.</text></item><item><author>Ygor</author><text>Why do we want javascript on the server side, when we already have so many other options?<p>I'm not trying to imply something against this aproach, this really is a question.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>silentbicycle</author><text>Yeah, Lua and Erlang in particular seem better suited to this role. Erlang's whole model is fundamentally event-driven, and Lua is remarkably similar to Javascript, only without the design errors made permanent, and with a better JIT compiler.<p>Javascript's already closely tied to the web, though, and it gets plenty of word-of-mouth since web developers already know it. That will probably beat any technical advantage.</text></comment> |
28,284,401 | 28,283,674 | 1 | 3 | 28,283,030 | train | <story><title>Linux Kernel Module Programming Guide</title><url>https://sysprog21.github.io/lkmpg/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>justinclift</author><text>This looks really good. :)<p>Pity it&#x27;s on GitHub Pages though, so people using IPv6 only can&#x27;t access it. :(</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Arnavion</author><text>See if your router supports DNS64 (DNS server maps IPv4 addresses in responses to IPv6 addresses under a chosen prefix) and NAT64 (firewall translates IPv6 LAN packets with addresses under that prefix to the original IPv4 packets, and back). I don&#x27;t know about consumer routers, but it&#x27;s relatively straightforward to do on pfSense &#x2F; OPNsense.<p>It doesn&#x27;t work for protocols that embed IP addresses, like BitTorrent, since you&#x27;d need a protocol-aware proxy for that rather than just an IP firewall, but for something like HTTP there won&#x27;t be any problem.</text></comment> | <story><title>Linux Kernel Module Programming Guide</title><url>https://sysprog21.github.io/lkmpg/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>justinclift</author><text>This looks really good. :)<p>Pity it&#x27;s on GitHub Pages though, so people using IPv6 only can&#x27;t access it. :(</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>zrail</author><text>Do you have real examples of people that actually have zero access to IPv4 sites, or is this just a theoretical concern?</text></comment> |
12,142,918 | 12,142,101 | 1 | 2 | 12,141,334 | train | <story><title>Nvidia CEO Reveals New TITAN X at Stanford Deep Learning Meetup</title><url>https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2016/07/21/titan-x/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>cs702</author><text>Great news all-around for deep learning practitioners.<p>Nvidia says memory bandwidth is &quot;460GB&#x2F;s,&quot; which will probably have the most impact on deep learning applications (lots of giant matrices must be fetched from memory, repeatedly, for extended periods of time). For comparison, the GTX 1080&#x27;s memory bandwidth is quoted as &quot;320GB&#x2F;s.&quot; The new Titan X also has 3,584 CUDA cores (1.3x more than GTX 1080) and 12GB of RAM (1.5x more than GTX 1080).<p>We&#x27;ll have to wait for benchmarks, but based on specs, this new Titan X looks like the best single GPU card you can buy for deep learning today. For certain deep learning applications, if properly configured, two GTX 1080&#x27;s might outperform the Titan X and cost about the same, but that&#x27;s not an apples-to-apples comparison.<p>A beefy desktop computer with four of these Titan X&#x27;s will have 44 Teraflops of raw computing power, about &quot;one fifth&quot; of the raw computing power of the world&#x27;s current 500th most powerful supercomputer.[1] While those 44 Teraflops are usable only for certain kinds of applications (involving 32-bit floating point linear algebra operations), the figure is still kind of incredible.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.top500.org&#x2F;list&#x2F;2015&#x2F;06&#x2F;?page=5" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.top500.org&#x2F;list&#x2F;2015&#x2F;06&#x2F;?page=5</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Nvidia CEO Reveals New TITAN X at Stanford Deep Learning Meetup</title><url>https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2016/07/21/titan-x/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tylerwhipple</author><text>As great as this product may be, I went to the Stanford Deep Learning Meetup to learn more about how Baidu Research&#x2F;Andrew Ng are solving large scale deep learning problems. I am disappointed by how much (unannounced) time was dedicated to the keynote&#x2F;sales pitch.</text></comment> |
23,730,293 | 23,729,293 | 1 | 3 | 23,728,212 | train | <story><title>The Silence Is Deafening</title><url>https://devonzuegel.com/post/the-silence-is-deafening</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Barrin92</author><text>I honestly feel it would be a good idea to remove them. Just let people upvote. There&#x27;s something disproportionately mean about downvotes. They&#x27;re not just a lack of upvotes, they&#x27;re like beating someone up with a stick.<p>They&#x27;re almost never used for their actual purpose anyway, which is to rank down uninformative or just dumb posts, they always end up being utilized in heated discussions as a way to stick it to whoever someone is arguing with.</text></item><item><author>stevedewald</author><text>I&#x27;d encourage you to consider NOT nuking a post&#x2F;comment just because it gets downvotes. We already have too many people afraid to speak for fear of judgement by the mob. You&#x27;re clearly a thoughtful person, and I believe the silent majority out there would appreciate more diversity of opinions.</text></item><item><author>ChrisMarshallNY</author><text>I suspect that a lot of the nice behavior on HN is because, for the most part, people value the community, and consider this a &quot;professional&quot; environment, and it&#x27;s not a bad idea to play nice in places where employers&#x2F;ees can see us show our butts.<p>LinkedIn was like that (in fact, sickeningly saccharine), but it&#x27;s starting to fray.<p>Slashdot was good for a while, then CNN and YouTube kicked off their trolls, and they all went to &#x2F;. It&#x27;s now the place to go, if you want swastika ASCII art.<p>StackOverflow manages to be a painful place to participate, even though they are sincerely trying to be decent. I think it&#x27;s way too &quot;gamified,&quot; and competitive.<p>For myself, I&#x27;m an old troll. I admit that I was a right bastard, back in the UseNet days.<p>I am trying to atone.<p>One of the ways that I do that, is make all my info connected with every place I participate. If I am a jerk, you know where to find me. Alternatively, if I make a good impression, you know where to find me.<p>I also pay attention to downvotes. If a post I make gets a couple of rapid downvotes, I nuke it. Sometimes, I understand why; sometimes, not. It&#x27;s just not worth it to me.<p>I am also making an effort not to engage too much. I may have a one-or-two-post back and forth, just to see if we can come to an accommodation, then it&#x27;s &quot;Have a great day!&quot;. Totally OK to let someone else have the last word. I have better uses for my time.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Reelin</author><text>It seems like having only (up &#x2F; down) conflates at least two distinct messages that a reader might want to quickly express. The &quot;official&quot; one is dispassionately judging post quality for moderation purposes. The &quot;wrong&quot; one is expressing personal opinion of the content.<p>Many users clearly want to quickly express their personal opinion in a low effort manner and are more than willing to &quot;misuse&quot; the voting mechanism for that. There was a post on the front page of HN earlier today about railroad crossings and blaming end users for (arguably) systemic failures. It seems like the current incarnation of social media runs afoul of this quite badly in all cases I&#x27;m aware of.<p>(I&#x27;m reminded of an SO comment by Tim Post about comments being their version of a public trash can and the reputation requirement for them roughly equating to a municipality welding them shut. The result is pretty much what you would expect.)</text></comment> | <story><title>The Silence Is Deafening</title><url>https://devonzuegel.com/post/the-silence-is-deafening</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Barrin92</author><text>I honestly feel it would be a good idea to remove them. Just let people upvote. There&#x27;s something disproportionately mean about downvotes. They&#x27;re not just a lack of upvotes, they&#x27;re like beating someone up with a stick.<p>They&#x27;re almost never used for their actual purpose anyway, which is to rank down uninformative or just dumb posts, they always end up being utilized in heated discussions as a way to stick it to whoever someone is arguing with.</text></item><item><author>stevedewald</author><text>I&#x27;d encourage you to consider NOT nuking a post&#x2F;comment just because it gets downvotes. We already have too many people afraid to speak for fear of judgement by the mob. You&#x27;re clearly a thoughtful person, and I believe the silent majority out there would appreciate more diversity of opinions.</text></item><item><author>ChrisMarshallNY</author><text>I suspect that a lot of the nice behavior on HN is because, for the most part, people value the community, and consider this a &quot;professional&quot; environment, and it&#x27;s not a bad idea to play nice in places where employers&#x2F;ees can see us show our butts.<p>LinkedIn was like that (in fact, sickeningly saccharine), but it&#x27;s starting to fray.<p>Slashdot was good for a while, then CNN and YouTube kicked off their trolls, and they all went to &#x2F;. It&#x27;s now the place to go, if you want swastika ASCII art.<p>StackOverflow manages to be a painful place to participate, even though they are sincerely trying to be decent. I think it&#x27;s way too &quot;gamified,&quot; and competitive.<p>For myself, I&#x27;m an old troll. I admit that I was a right bastard, back in the UseNet days.<p>I am trying to atone.<p>One of the ways that I do that, is make all my info connected with every place I participate. If I am a jerk, you know where to find me. Alternatively, if I make a good impression, you know where to find me.<p>I also pay attention to downvotes. If a post I make gets a couple of rapid downvotes, I nuke it. Sometimes, I understand why; sometimes, not. It&#x27;s just not worth it to me.<p>I am also making an effort not to engage too much. I may have a one-or-two-post back and forth, just to see if we can come to an accommodation, then it&#x27;s &quot;Have a great day!&quot;. Totally OK to let someone else have the last word. I have better uses for my time.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tartoran</author><text>I agree that upvotes only would make for a better dynamic with less mob abuse. And, if someone is mean or makes a dumb contribution, being completely ignored is a good lesson, much better than a shower of downvotes without any reason</text></comment> |
8,066,934 | 8,064,528 | 1 | 3 | 8,063,358 | train | <story><title>Show HN: Star Trek DS9 Episodes Worth Watching</title><url>http://tessalt.github.io/ds9-episodeguide/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jonnathanson</author><text>The problem with TNG is that it didn&#x27;t necessarily get better in linear fashion, the way one could argue that DS9 got better as it &quot;found its voice&quot; and established a continuous storyline. TNG has some high points and some clunkers in almost every season, though there are <i>slightly</i> more low points in the first two seasons. Having recently rewatched the run of the show, in chronological order, I&#x27;d guesstimate that 10% of the episodes are bad, 50% are decent, 20% are great, and 20% are spectacular. [1]<p>So something like this would be especially helpful for TNG, where a) there are a lot of episodes in total, and b) there are no useful rules of thumb or shorthand (such as &quot;skip season X,&quot; or &quot;it gets better beyond Y&quot;).<p>Now, the great news about TNG is that it&#x27;s mostly episodic. Which means she can watch any episode, at random, and enjoy it as a self-contained story. (Aside from the two-parters.) TNG really lends itself to randomized viewing. DS9 needs to be watched in chronological order (at least for the first-time viewer). TNG can be watched in any order.<p>[1] Some people will find this assessment overly generous, and others will find it overly harsh. That&#x27;s the beauty of Trek fandom; there&#x27;s plenty of room for disagreement. :) Just about the only things TNG fans can agree on are that: 1) Riker with beard &gt; Riker without beard; 2) &quot;The Naked Now&quot; is probably the series&#x27; worst episode, although it&#x27;s enjoyable in a kitschy, ironic sort of way; 3) Wesley Crusher sucks (although Wil Wheaton himself is a pretty awesome guy).</text></item><item><author>jerf</author><text>I&#x27;d be interested in a version of this for TNG as well. My wife recently expressed interest in running through TNG on Netflix, but there&#x27;s several fairly bad episodes and a lot that are pretty tedious with little point. But I sampled a few of the ones I remembered as being good, and seen through eyes with 20 years more experience there&#x27;s definitely more to them than I remember. So I&#x27;m not intrinsically against the idea, but I don&#x27;t want to walk through the entire series.<p>For instance, we watched the episode where Picard is kidnapped by the Borg. As a teenager, my drama-IQ was not so low that I entirely missed the major storyline that Riker gets in that story about his career as he is challenged by the up-and-coming Shelby, but I certainly see it much more clearly and with far more nuance now.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>glenra</author><text>By way of a friend-of-a-friend being one of the TNG writers, I was given a pretty cool explanation for what happened with Wesley. Upshot: It was the writers&#x27; strike.<p>What happened was this: The TNG team had regular meetings where the writers and producers got together and reviewed the state of the series - what kinds of scripts and stories they were looking for and what was in the pipeline and what sort of course corrections they wanted to see. At one such meeting the producers said &quot;we&#x27;ve got this character Wesley but we haven&#x27;t really DONE anything with him - the audience doesn&#x27;t know much about him. We&#x27;d really like to see some stories that let us connect more with that character.&quot; Then the dozen writers all went home with that thought in mind: let&#x27;s get to know Wesley! And how do you &quot;get to know a character better&quot; on a Trek show? Have him save the ship! So the following week, a dozen writers all submitted their own independent &quot;Wesley saves the ship&quot; scripts.<p>...and right after that the writers&#x27; strike happened and nobody could write any NEW scripts, so to keep the series going they had to film and show any decent scripts they already had handy, far too many of which (by pure chance) featured Wesley saving the ship. If they had had a choice, they would have filmed fewer of those scripts at all, sent a few back for rewrites, and staggered them out much farther apart between runs of episodes in which a little kid DOESN&#x27;T manage to make everyone else on the ship look stupid or redundant.</text></comment> | <story><title>Show HN: Star Trek DS9 Episodes Worth Watching</title><url>http://tessalt.github.io/ds9-episodeguide/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jonnathanson</author><text>The problem with TNG is that it didn&#x27;t necessarily get better in linear fashion, the way one could argue that DS9 got better as it &quot;found its voice&quot; and established a continuous storyline. TNG has some high points and some clunkers in almost every season, though there are <i>slightly</i> more low points in the first two seasons. Having recently rewatched the run of the show, in chronological order, I&#x27;d guesstimate that 10% of the episodes are bad, 50% are decent, 20% are great, and 20% are spectacular. [1]<p>So something like this would be especially helpful for TNG, where a) there are a lot of episodes in total, and b) there are no useful rules of thumb or shorthand (such as &quot;skip season X,&quot; or &quot;it gets better beyond Y&quot;).<p>Now, the great news about TNG is that it&#x27;s mostly episodic. Which means she can watch any episode, at random, and enjoy it as a self-contained story. (Aside from the two-parters.) TNG really lends itself to randomized viewing. DS9 needs to be watched in chronological order (at least for the first-time viewer). TNG can be watched in any order.<p>[1] Some people will find this assessment overly generous, and others will find it overly harsh. That&#x27;s the beauty of Trek fandom; there&#x27;s plenty of room for disagreement. :) Just about the only things TNG fans can agree on are that: 1) Riker with beard &gt; Riker without beard; 2) &quot;The Naked Now&quot; is probably the series&#x27; worst episode, although it&#x27;s enjoyable in a kitschy, ironic sort of way; 3) Wesley Crusher sucks (although Wil Wheaton himself is a pretty awesome guy).</text></item><item><author>jerf</author><text>I&#x27;d be interested in a version of this for TNG as well. My wife recently expressed interest in running through TNG on Netflix, but there&#x27;s several fairly bad episodes and a lot that are pretty tedious with little point. But I sampled a few of the ones I remembered as being good, and seen through eyes with 20 years more experience there&#x27;s definitely more to them than I remember. So I&#x27;m not intrinsically against the idea, but I don&#x27;t want to walk through the entire series.<p>For instance, we watched the episode where Picard is kidnapped by the Borg. As a teenager, my drama-IQ was not so low that I entirely missed the major storyline that Riker gets in that story about his career as he is challenged by the up-and-coming Shelby, but I certainly see it much more clearly and with far more nuance now.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nkohari</author><text>Hey, when I was 12, Wesley was pretty awesome.</text></comment> |
28,742,941 | 28,742,928 | 1 | 2 | 28,741,532 | train | <story><title>Facebook whistleblower says she wants to fix company, not harm it</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-whistleblower-frances-haugen-says-she-wants-to-fix-the-company-not-harm-it-11633304122</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bjt</author><text>&gt; A few years ago, some bad actors were successful in convincing Congress of a crazy conspiracy theory that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction ... They used a platform called The New York Times to spread their lies.<p>Citation needed that this was a knowing conspiracy as opposed to bad intelligence.<p>Setting that aside, there&#x27;s a big difference between an institution like the NY Times getting it wrong on occasion, despite all their research and fact checking, vs an institution like Facebook building a platform that systematically rewards disinformation at massive scale.</text></item><item><author>mrxd</author><text>I think misinformation and conspiracy theories on these platforms are a huge problem. A few years ago, some bad actors were successful in convincing Congress of a crazy conspiracy theory that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The results were far-reaching. The US violated the UN charter and launched a disastrous war in Iraq where millions of Iraqis were killed, injured and displaced. They used a platform called The New York Times to spread their lies.<p>All of the problems of Facebook and social media are just problems of the media in general. Misinformation? Conspiracies? Social comparison? Outrage-driven content? Body image issues? All rampant in the mainstream press, but no journalists are calling for regulation of their industry.<p>If you were to propose federal regulation of the New York Times, journalists would object and talk about the first amendment, the 4th estate and the need for a free and independent press. It&#x27;s an elitist double standard with content controls for the masses and first amendment rights for the graduates of Princeton and Columbia with jobs at prestigious publications.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jamestnz</author><text>&gt; Citation needed that this was a knowing conspiracy as opposed to bad intelligence<p>Within hours of the planes hitting the towers on 9&#x2F;11, before any information was in, Rumsfeld&#x27;s aides were drawing up plans for striking Iraq, despite zero evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the attacks. The number one priority for the White House, above finding out who the real culprits were, was to figure out how to use it as a rationale to invade Iraq. This is not really a controversial viewpoint, it is documented fact [1].<p>When the 9&#x2F;11 rationale for invading Iraq became untenable, it was replaced by the idea that Saddam had Weapons of Mass Destruction, that he&#x27;d definitely been procuring uranium from Niger. Except these were lies too (and the WH knew it, because they&#x27;d sent Joe Wilson to investigate and he&#x27;d reported back as such). When Wilson heard them saying it despite knowing it was false, he contradicted them in public [2]. In an act of retribution, the WH leaked his wife&#x27;s position as a CIA agent, burning valuable contacts and networks, and endangering friendly lives.<p>Then they moved onto the argument that regardless of WMDs, the Iraqi people actually wanted the invasion anyway, US forces would be welcomed as liberators by gift-bearing citizens, etc. When that didn&#x27;t pan out either, a final argument became that Saddam was a tyrant and that fact alone provided sufficient moral and legal justification for preemptive war (i.e. The Bush Doctrine) [3].<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cbsnews.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;plans-for-iraq-attack-began-on-9-11&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cbsnews.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;plans-for-iraq-attack-began-on-...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;world-us-canada-49856792" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;world-us-canada-49856792</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pbs.org&#x2F;wgbh&#x2F;pages&#x2F;frontline&#x2F;shows&#x2F;truth&#x2F;why&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pbs.org&#x2F;wgbh&#x2F;pages&#x2F;frontline&#x2F;shows&#x2F;truth&#x2F;why&#x2F;</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Facebook whistleblower says she wants to fix company, not harm it</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-whistleblower-frances-haugen-says-she-wants-to-fix-the-company-not-harm-it-11633304122</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bjt</author><text>&gt; A few years ago, some bad actors were successful in convincing Congress of a crazy conspiracy theory that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction ... They used a platform called The New York Times to spread their lies.<p>Citation needed that this was a knowing conspiracy as opposed to bad intelligence.<p>Setting that aside, there&#x27;s a big difference between an institution like the NY Times getting it wrong on occasion, despite all their research and fact checking, vs an institution like Facebook building a platform that systematically rewards disinformation at massive scale.</text></item><item><author>mrxd</author><text>I think misinformation and conspiracy theories on these platforms are a huge problem. A few years ago, some bad actors were successful in convincing Congress of a crazy conspiracy theory that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The results were far-reaching. The US violated the UN charter and launched a disastrous war in Iraq where millions of Iraqis were killed, injured and displaced. They used a platform called The New York Times to spread their lies.<p>All of the problems of Facebook and social media are just problems of the media in general. Misinformation? Conspiracies? Social comparison? Outrage-driven content? Body image issues? All rampant in the mainstream press, but no journalists are calling for regulation of their industry.<p>If you were to propose federal regulation of the New York Times, journalists would object and talk about the first amendment, the 4th estate and the need for a free and independent press. It&#x27;s an elitist double standard with content controls for the masses and first amendment rights for the graduates of Princeton and Columbia with jobs at prestigious publications.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>speeder</author><text>I googled it and found some articles about it, link to one of them:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;politics&#x2F;2019&#x2F;03&#x2F;22&#x2F;iraq-war-wmds-an-intelligence-failure-or-white-house-spin&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;politics&#x2F;2019&#x2F;03&#x2F;22&#x2F;iraq-war-...</a><p>Now for more context why I did this: Back then when Bush started pushing for the war, I immediately considered him a liar, I am not from US, and from my perspective and from many people where I live, it was blatantly obvious he was lying, for example some of the &quot;evidence&quot; he used was obviously bullshit, like his description of satellite photos on UN, or saying that WMD was found in certain places right after UN inspectors visited those places and said they found nothing there.<p>Sometimes I wonder how people from USA don&#x27;t see how evil they country is, for example when Brazil said they would vote against the war in the security council, John Bolton just went and threatened his family (his exact words were: &quot;I know where your kids live.&quot;), while the rest of the world was horrified by the lies spouted by US media, the US public was cheerily supporting the warmongers, in some cases even more than needed, for example some public polls done at the time found out a majority of the population were in favor of the wars, in Afghanistan case some people even agreed with the assertion that USA should &quot;glass&quot; afghanistan.</text></comment> |
15,551,051 | 15,551,042 | 1 | 2 | 15,547,631 | train | <story><title>U.S. Consumer Bureau Loses Fight to Allow More Class-Action Suits</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/24/business/senate-vote-wall-street-regulation.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>morley</author><text>I&#x27;m going to ask what might be a dumb question, because I don&#x27;t know any better. But is there any statistical evidence that arbitration results in worse outcomes for the consumer, or is all the hate theoretical for now? People on HN and otherwise speak about arbitration like it&#x27;s an auto-loss for the consumer, but it&#x27;s not like our court systems are guaranteed to be much fairer.<p>EDIT:<p>It looks like the bottom of the article explains that the US Consumer Bureau studied arbitration and found it anti-consumer:<p>As arbitration clauses appeared in tens of millions of contracts, the consumer agency was specifically mandated to study arbitration under the Dodd-Frank financial law in 2010. That effort culminated in a 728-page report, released in March 2015, that challenged longstanding assumptions about arbitration.<p>The agency found that once blocked from suing, few people went to arbitration at all. And the results for those who did were dismal. During the two-year period studied, only 78 arbitration claims resulted in judgments in favor of consumers, who got $400,000 in total relief.</text></item><item><author>dwyerm</author><text>I was offered over $1000 off to &#x27;just sign the damned contract&#x27;, but still ended up walking. I was fortunate to find a different dealer that didn&#x27;t have an arbitration clause, though. I fear I wouldn&#x27;t find that next time around, and was really hanging my hopes upon legislation like this.</text></item><item><author>wingspar</author><text>When I last purchased a car I used accepting the arbitration clause to extract $150 in accessories from the dealer. The sales agent was a bit confused, it’s usually the paperwork guy that deals with the arbitration and at point most people just want it over with..</text></item><item><author>defined</author><text>&gt; Today, it is hard to open up a checking account, rent a car, get cable service or check a loved one into a nursing home without agreeing to mandatory arbitration.<p>This is the part that gives me ulcers, and it&#x27;s no exaggeration. So many companies insist on us giving up our 7th Amendment rights that we either give in, or don&#x27;t fly, buy a car, or get a job. We can&#x27;t even go to the competition because they also have mandatory binding arbitration clauses in their contracts.<p>As bad as the Equifax breach is, IMO this is a greater danger to our freedoms.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pmyteh</author><text>Per the article: &quot;During the two-year period studied, only 78 arbitration claims resulted in judgments in favor of consumers, who got $400,000 in total relief.&quot;<p>It&#x27;s not clear what the denominator on that sum is, though it is also stated that the rate of customers taking up arbitration was very low</text></comment> | <story><title>U.S. Consumer Bureau Loses Fight to Allow More Class-Action Suits</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/24/business/senate-vote-wall-street-regulation.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>morley</author><text>I&#x27;m going to ask what might be a dumb question, because I don&#x27;t know any better. But is there any statistical evidence that arbitration results in worse outcomes for the consumer, or is all the hate theoretical for now? People on HN and otherwise speak about arbitration like it&#x27;s an auto-loss for the consumer, but it&#x27;s not like our court systems are guaranteed to be much fairer.<p>EDIT:<p>It looks like the bottom of the article explains that the US Consumer Bureau studied arbitration and found it anti-consumer:<p>As arbitration clauses appeared in tens of millions of contracts, the consumer agency was specifically mandated to study arbitration under the Dodd-Frank financial law in 2010. That effort culminated in a 728-page report, released in March 2015, that challenged longstanding assumptions about arbitration.<p>The agency found that once blocked from suing, few people went to arbitration at all. And the results for those who did were dismal. During the two-year period studied, only 78 arbitration claims resulted in judgments in favor of consumers, who got $400,000 in total relief.</text></item><item><author>dwyerm</author><text>I was offered over $1000 off to &#x27;just sign the damned contract&#x27;, but still ended up walking. I was fortunate to find a different dealer that didn&#x27;t have an arbitration clause, though. I fear I wouldn&#x27;t find that next time around, and was really hanging my hopes upon legislation like this.</text></item><item><author>wingspar</author><text>When I last purchased a car I used accepting the arbitration clause to extract $150 in accessories from the dealer. The sales agent was a bit confused, it’s usually the paperwork guy that deals with the arbitration and at point most people just want it over with..</text></item><item><author>defined</author><text>&gt; Today, it is hard to open up a checking account, rent a car, get cable service or check a loved one into a nursing home without agreeing to mandatory arbitration.<p>This is the part that gives me ulcers, and it&#x27;s no exaggeration. So many companies insist on us giving up our 7th Amendment rights that we either give in, or don&#x27;t fly, buy a car, or get a job. We can&#x27;t even go to the competition because they also have mandatory binding arbitration clauses in their contracts.<p>As bad as the Equifax breach is, IMO this is a greater danger to our freedoms.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Larrikin</author><text>The normal system is that these civil disputes are done in a court of law. Justify the change.</text></comment> |
16,247,872 | 16,247,890 | 1 | 2 | 16,246,531 | train | <story><title>The good guy/bad guy myth</title><url>https://aeon.co/essays/why-is-pop-culture-obsessed-with-battles-between-good-and-evil</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>coldtea</author><text>I think it&#x27;s the inverse. Good-vs-evil narratives are not some progression, rather the inverse.<p>Whereas ancient peoples and older eras saw war as a necessary evil in some cases, and could see the enemy as regular people that they just had to fight (even down to the Iliad, the most heroic figure, Hector, is on the enemy side), the Good-vs-Evil narrative doesn&#x27;t come to prevent war (except in dire circumstances), but to refuse the enemy its humanity and justify total war.<p>Good-vs-evil was used to justify the pillaging and goring of the colonial era, to the Nazi&#x27;s extinction of the Jews, and so on.<p>That&#x27;s the route of modern diplomatic terminology (&quot;axis of evil&quot; and so on), and behind the dehumanizing of the enemy. And even civilian casualties don&#x27;t matter much when you&#x27;re fighting &quot;evil&quot; (e.g. Dresden, Hiroshima, modern Middle East, etc).<p>Another such trick is to promote (with articles, movies, etc) the &quot;inner conflict&quot; of your side (how they fear they&#x27;re fighting an unjust war, the pain they get from the killings they had to do, PTSI, etc), thus humanize them more into good guys, while still painting the other side as caricatures. This faux-critique of war is an excellent way to say &quot;we might do bad, but we&#x27;re ultimately the good guys, the ones who actually do question what we do&quot;.</text></item><item><author>mjw1007</author><text>I think people telling stories like Star Wars choose to make the antagonists Capital-E-Evil because modern audiences are much less happy to root for people who are fighting a war if they aren&#x27;t shown that the war is thoroughly justifiable.<p>A few hundred years ago you could happily put a character in a saga and have them go off on viking raids and kill any number of people whose only crime is living near the coast, and still put them forward as morally admirable.<p>Nowadays if you want to have your protagonists shooting at their enemies or hitting them with sharp bits of metal you basically have to choose between a good-vs-evil narrative or having only anti-heroes rather than plain heroes (and both choices are now common).<p>So I think this bit is pretty much backwards: «
Good guy&#x2F;bad guy narratives might not possess any moral sophistication, but they do promote social stability, and they’re useful for getting people to sign up for armies and fight in wars with other nations.
»<p>What modern Good-vs-Evil narratives are collectively yelling at us is the idea that _only_ outright visible evil justifies making war.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mjw1007</author><text>I think the main change over the last hundred years or so is that most people will no longer accept &quot;we should go to war because war is in itself glorious and we will win&quot;, or &quot;to be a warrior is the ideal way for a man to live a flourishing life.&quot;<p>I agree entirely that if a country&#x27;s leaders manage to persuade their people that they should go to war against their neighbour because they are Evil then the result is likely to be worse than if they just have a war because they think that marching an army in to take over a couple of counties is a legitimate thing to do.<p>But nonetheless I think that getting the latter generally seen as illegitimate is Progress with a capital P.</text></comment> | <story><title>The good guy/bad guy myth</title><url>https://aeon.co/essays/why-is-pop-culture-obsessed-with-battles-between-good-and-evil</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>coldtea</author><text>I think it&#x27;s the inverse. Good-vs-evil narratives are not some progression, rather the inverse.<p>Whereas ancient peoples and older eras saw war as a necessary evil in some cases, and could see the enemy as regular people that they just had to fight (even down to the Iliad, the most heroic figure, Hector, is on the enemy side), the Good-vs-Evil narrative doesn&#x27;t come to prevent war (except in dire circumstances), but to refuse the enemy its humanity and justify total war.<p>Good-vs-evil was used to justify the pillaging and goring of the colonial era, to the Nazi&#x27;s extinction of the Jews, and so on.<p>That&#x27;s the route of modern diplomatic terminology (&quot;axis of evil&quot; and so on), and behind the dehumanizing of the enemy. And even civilian casualties don&#x27;t matter much when you&#x27;re fighting &quot;evil&quot; (e.g. Dresden, Hiroshima, modern Middle East, etc).<p>Another such trick is to promote (with articles, movies, etc) the &quot;inner conflict&quot; of your side (how they fear they&#x27;re fighting an unjust war, the pain they get from the killings they had to do, PTSI, etc), thus humanize them more into good guys, while still painting the other side as caricatures. This faux-critique of war is an excellent way to say &quot;we might do bad, but we&#x27;re ultimately the good guys, the ones who actually do question what we do&quot;.</text></item><item><author>mjw1007</author><text>I think people telling stories like Star Wars choose to make the antagonists Capital-E-Evil because modern audiences are much less happy to root for people who are fighting a war if they aren&#x27;t shown that the war is thoroughly justifiable.<p>A few hundred years ago you could happily put a character in a saga and have them go off on viking raids and kill any number of people whose only crime is living near the coast, and still put them forward as morally admirable.<p>Nowadays if you want to have your protagonists shooting at their enemies or hitting them with sharp bits of metal you basically have to choose between a good-vs-evil narrative or having only anti-heroes rather than plain heroes (and both choices are now common).<p>So I think this bit is pretty much backwards: «
Good guy&#x2F;bad guy narratives might not possess any moral sophistication, but they do promote social stability, and they’re useful for getting people to sign up for armies and fight in wars with other nations.
»<p>What modern Good-vs-Evil narratives are collectively yelling at us is the idea that _only_ outright visible evil justifies making war.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>humanrebar</author><text>Is the good-vs-evil narrative always a regression?<p>Caricature-painting is a basic tool of modern morality tales. Is it so universally regressive? Would we be better off if we portrayed Pol Pot, Heath Ledger&#x27;s Joker, or Opposing Racist White Guy as trying to balance conflicting motivations?</text></comment> |
24,797,900 | 24,797,923 | 1 | 2 | 24,796,999 | train | <story><title>FreePN: Open-source peer-to-peer VPN service</title><url>https://www.freepn.org/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>oefrha</author><text>&gt; I can&#x27;t imagine many of the owners of those IPs know what they&#x27;re being used for.<p>They don’t. For instance, Luminati, possibly the best known player in this market, uses HolaVPN users as exit nodes.[1]<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.trendmicro.com&#x2F;vinfo&#x2F;hk-en&#x2F;security&#x2F;news&#x2F;cybercrime-and-digital-threats&#x2F;shining-a-light-on-the-risks-of-holavpn-and-luminati" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.trendmicro.com&#x2F;vinfo&#x2F;hk-en&#x2F;security&#x2F;news&#x2F;cybercr...</a></text></item><item><author>anderspitman</author><text>I have a project I want to do that would involve a lot of YouTube scraping. But they&#x27;ll throttle you if they detect it. This led me down the rabbit hole into the world of residential proxy services. Some of them[0] advertise up to 40 million IPs. I can&#x27;t imagine many of the owners of those IPs know what they&#x27;re being used for.<p>It would be cool if there was a reputable open source project that would let people share&#x2F;buy residential proxy usage, but at the end of the day there&#x27;s no way to guarantee people aren&#x27;t doing horrible things with your IP.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;smartproxy.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;smartproxy.com&#x2F;</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dessant</author><text>I was approached by Luminati on Twitter to turn my browser extensions into exit nodes, they are enticing developers to exploit users.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;EbT96an.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;EbT96an.png</a></text></comment> | <story><title>FreePN: Open-source peer-to-peer VPN service</title><url>https://www.freepn.org/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>oefrha</author><text>&gt; I can&#x27;t imagine many of the owners of those IPs know what they&#x27;re being used for.<p>They don’t. For instance, Luminati, possibly the best known player in this market, uses HolaVPN users as exit nodes.[1]<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.trendmicro.com&#x2F;vinfo&#x2F;hk-en&#x2F;security&#x2F;news&#x2F;cybercrime-and-digital-threats&#x2F;shining-a-light-on-the-risks-of-holavpn-and-luminati" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.trendmicro.com&#x2F;vinfo&#x2F;hk-en&#x2F;security&#x2F;news&#x2F;cybercr...</a></text></item><item><author>anderspitman</author><text>I have a project I want to do that would involve a lot of YouTube scraping. But they&#x27;ll throttle you if they detect it. This led me down the rabbit hole into the world of residential proxy services. Some of them[0] advertise up to 40 million IPs. I can&#x27;t imagine many of the owners of those IPs know what they&#x27;re being used for.<p>It would be cool if there was a reputable open source project that would let people share&#x2F;buy residential proxy usage, but at the end of the day there&#x27;s no way to guarantee people aren&#x27;t doing horrible things with your IP.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;smartproxy.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;smartproxy.com&#x2F;</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bscphil</author><text>This is said way too often, but in this case I think it&#x27;s justified - I <i>really</i> don&#x27;t understand how this is legal. Doesn&#x27;t using a non-consenting person&#x27;s computer and network resources for your own purposes meet the definition of &quot;hacking&quot; in most jurisdictions?</text></comment> |
21,888,294 | 21,888,312 | 1 | 2 | 21,887,538 | train | <story><title>Thoughts On a Year of Exercise</title><url>https://whatever.scalzi.com/2019/12/26/thoughts-on-a-year-of-exercise/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tootie</author><text>I tried this for a while. I was hitting the gym for HIIT and weights and counting calories with MyFitnessPal. I estimated a pretty huge calorie deficit and it felt like it (felt woozy more than once). Lost zero pounds. After that I stopped being so careful with counting and just tried to eat right and keep exercising. Lost zero pounds. I wanted to get some hormone levels tested but my doctor said not too.</text></item><item><author>groby_b</author><text>After doing it for a while, you get a rough feeling for the calories involved - you can tell just by looking at your dish if it&#x27;s 500 or 1,000 calories.<p>That means you don&#x27;t get high precision data, and the nutrients may be off, but it&#x27;s more than enough to keep yourself in a caloric deficit&#x2F;surplus as you choose.<p>(Also, don&#x27;t eat lunch at work if you can avoid it. It&#x27;s greasy, over-salted, and not the best food for you. No matter what corporate propaganda tells you)</text></item><item><author>flexd</author><text>I find that the hardest thing about logging what I eat is knowing what I eat, and what calories those things contain. Often I eat lunch at work where they serve a ton of different dishes, and I dont have the opportunity to weigh what I eat, and I have no idea what exactly they put in that said that day. If I try to err on the side of caution, I&#x27;ll be super hungry because the number of calories I ate does not add up to the number logged. Unless I have the time to make all my food and measure it or only eat processed&#x2F;pre-made food that is labeled it&#x27;s hard to keep accurate track.<p>Do any of you feel the same way? I have used Myfitnesspal and similar before, but have never stuck with it. Before I have stayed reasonably fit because I usually ride mountain bikes a lot,but the past few years there has been less riding and I&#x27;m now +10kg my normal weight at least.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>brogrammernot</author><text>See a new doctor. Getting blood work is super important and can help pinpoint if you’ve got something else going on. When dieting it’s also important to weigh yourself once a week, ideally in the morning about 20-30 minutes after you wake up. You may not lose weight your first 2-3 weeks on a caloric deficit as your body adjusts.<p>Coming back to the bloodwork, you should get a full panel at least 1x&#x2F;year if not twice a year. I realize not everyone is fortunate enough to do so, but most of the time insurances cover a large portion of it as preventative care. Blood work can show if you’re out of range on items like your test&#x2F;estrogen levels, thyroid function &amp; many more areas.<p>If your current doctor doesn’t support that, I’m sorry but that’s not a great doctor. Blood work is important.</text></comment> | <story><title>Thoughts On a Year of Exercise</title><url>https://whatever.scalzi.com/2019/12/26/thoughts-on-a-year-of-exercise/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tootie</author><text>I tried this for a while. I was hitting the gym for HIIT and weights and counting calories with MyFitnessPal. I estimated a pretty huge calorie deficit and it felt like it (felt woozy more than once). Lost zero pounds. After that I stopped being so careful with counting and just tried to eat right and keep exercising. Lost zero pounds. I wanted to get some hormone levels tested but my doctor said not too.</text></item><item><author>groby_b</author><text>After doing it for a while, you get a rough feeling for the calories involved - you can tell just by looking at your dish if it&#x27;s 500 or 1,000 calories.<p>That means you don&#x27;t get high precision data, and the nutrients may be off, but it&#x27;s more than enough to keep yourself in a caloric deficit&#x2F;surplus as you choose.<p>(Also, don&#x27;t eat lunch at work if you can avoid it. It&#x27;s greasy, over-salted, and not the best food for you. No matter what corporate propaganda tells you)</text></item><item><author>flexd</author><text>I find that the hardest thing about logging what I eat is knowing what I eat, and what calories those things contain. Often I eat lunch at work where they serve a ton of different dishes, and I dont have the opportunity to weigh what I eat, and I have no idea what exactly they put in that said that day. If I try to err on the side of caution, I&#x27;ll be super hungry because the number of calories I ate does not add up to the number logged. Unless I have the time to make all my food and measure it or only eat processed&#x2F;pre-made food that is labeled it&#x27;s hard to keep accurate track.<p>Do any of you feel the same way? I have used Myfitnesspal and similar before, but have never stuck with it. Before I have stayed reasonably fit because I usually ride mountain bikes a lot,but the past few years there has been less riding and I&#x27;m now +10kg my normal weight at least.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>shantly</author><text>Weight lifting&#x27;s more effective for me at controlling fat than it &quot;should&quot; be according to charts and calculators and such, cardio and calorie deficits, even largish ones (1400 calories&#x2F;day was one I kept up for 60ish days straight, once, and no, I didn&#x27;t once cheat, so yeah, I&#x27;ve actually tried) OTOH are way <i>less</i> effective than they &quot;should&quot; be. Flat-out not eating for a day or two at a time does work, though. IDK why, that&#x27;s just how my body works. Sucks, because dieting&#x27;s easy for me and saves time &amp; money, versus lifting weights, which uses up time (and space, if you do it at home, and sometimes money). At least straight-up fasts work.</text></comment> |
3,211,382 | 3,211,319 | 1 | 3 | 3,210,546 | train | <story><title>Amazon Won’t Pay Self-Published Author For Books It Mistakenly Gave Away</title><url>http://paidcontent.org/article/419-amazon-wont-pay-self-published-author-for-books-it-mistakenly-gave-away/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>toyg</author><text>"If these were physical books", there would be a material loss involved: Publisher A paid to produce X books, the distributor lost part of them, and now the Publisher cannot sell them anymore, suffering a direct and quantifiable economic loss.<p>Here, it's more like the distributor left their books around in a library, and some people got to read them for free. The publisher can still sell them. There is no direct loss, the damage is hardly quantifiable (it might actually turn out to be a net positive in the end, given all this free publicity).<p>The digital world is funny like that.<p>EDIT: this is not to say that Amazon shouldn't be held accountable for their mistake, if there is a breach of contract involved; just that it doesn't matter whether there were 6000 downloads or 60.</text></item><item><author>wccrawford</author><text>Amazon should own up and pay. They have effectively stolen from this author. No, we can't guarantee that those people would have bought it for free, but if these were physical books, the law would require that they pay the author.<p>The agreement wasn't that they get to change the price any time they like. The agreement was that they get to match competitors. They violated that.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jerf</author><text>Never use metaphors for online issues. They simply don't apply, the online world has far too many differences from the physical world for them to ever work. It isn't like "leaving books around a library", it is like "digital online content was accidentally priced for free when it shouldn't have been and some people downloaded them". This isn't such a complicated situation that we need metaphors to navigate the morass, not that they ever help anyhow since it inevitably causes people to get distracted by arguing over which inapplicable metaphor is more accurate instead of simply addressing the question at hand.<p>What <i>really</i> matter here is the breach of contract. The contract specified when Amazon can drop the price, that condition was not met, they dropped the price. Apologies or blaming computers are not what is called for here.</text></comment> | <story><title>Amazon Won’t Pay Self-Published Author For Books It Mistakenly Gave Away</title><url>http://paidcontent.org/article/419-amazon-wont-pay-self-published-author-for-books-it-mistakenly-gave-away/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>toyg</author><text>"If these were physical books", there would be a material loss involved: Publisher A paid to produce X books, the distributor lost part of them, and now the Publisher cannot sell them anymore, suffering a direct and quantifiable economic loss.<p>Here, it's more like the distributor left their books around in a library, and some people got to read them for free. The publisher can still sell them. There is no direct loss, the damage is hardly quantifiable (it might actually turn out to be a net positive in the end, given all this free publicity).<p>The digital world is funny like that.<p>EDIT: this is not to say that Amazon shouldn't be held accountable for their mistake, if there is a breach of contract involved; just that it doesn't matter whether there were 6000 downloads or 60.</text></item><item><author>wccrawford</author><text>Amazon should own up and pay. They have effectively stolen from this author. No, we can't guarantee that those people would have bought it for free, but if these were physical books, the law would require that they pay the author.<p>The agreement wasn't that they get to change the price any time they like. The agreement was that they get to match competitors. They violated that.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pbhjpbhj</author><text>&#62;<i>The publisher can still sell them. There is no direct loss, the damage is hardly quantifiable (it might actually turn out to be a net positive in the end, given all this free publicity).</i> //<p>Legally you're wrong.<p>This is the reason why you can't call giving away someone else's copyright work on purpose "non-commercial". If you enter the market with the same product for free you interfere with the commercial operation of the rightful owner who is selling for a higher price. You can't generally sell a book to a person who has already been given that book for free. Moreover the effort in promoting the book has been lost without reward.<p>Now granted it might work out that giving away the product for free acts to increase overall sales. But it's not Amazon's place to make that call (the Bit-torrent/bootlegger defence I suppose you'd call this). Amazon infringed on the copyright of the author.<p>IMO the legal system should come down hard on a company that is trying to leverage copyright for their own gains whilst simultaneously denying the creator of copyright works the reward of their labours.<p>Consider a converse situation, that I take a product from a distributor (Disney say), duplicate it and give it away for free. How many millions of pounds do you think I'd be on the hook for?<p>Incidentally I'm not saying that is right, I'm saying that's how copyright law plays out.</text></comment> |
17,308,261 | 17,308,036 | 1 | 2 | 17,307,015 | train | <story><title>WeWork Is Raising Funds at $35B Valuation</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-13/softbank-executive-says-wework-is-raising-funds-at-35-billion-valuation</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>z0a</author><text>If the tech bubble and real estate bubble had a baby, it&#x27;s name would be WeWork. How is a company that had a net loss of $933 million and that owes $18 billion in rent even remotely worth $35 billion. I&#x27;d consider the lemonade stand on the corner to be more of a business than WeWork in the true sense of the word. What&#x27;s inherently hard about what WeWork is doing? With enough money, anyone can rent out buildings, chop it up, and make it appealing to hipsters with some interior work, then over charge companies and individuals to rent out tiny spaces.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>shimms</author><text>I find this whole “owe $18b in rent” thing that’s come up recently interesting.<p>They only &quot;owe&quot; $18b in rent the same way any company leasing office space &quot;owes&quot; their landlord money. The word &quot;owe&quot; is thrown around here in relation (almost exclusively to WeWork) to imply they&#x27;re in arrears to the landlords to the sum of sum of $18b.<p>It isn&#x27;t anything like that - they have leases over the next 10-15 years with a contract value of $18b.<p>Over the length of their leases they have an $18b obligation, but that isn&#x27;t the same as the way &quot;they owe 18b&quot; is used colloquially to mean currently in arrears&#x2F;default.<p>It is the same as entering into any agreement - over the agreements length you have an obligation, which if you can&#x27;t service you&#x27;re insolvent.<p>I guess I find the narrative that they &quot;owe&quot; $18b to imply a far greater extent of distress than the reality of their leasing obligations actually entail.</text></comment> | <story><title>WeWork Is Raising Funds at $35B Valuation</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-13/softbank-executive-says-wework-is-raising-funds-at-35-billion-valuation</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>z0a</author><text>If the tech bubble and real estate bubble had a baby, it&#x27;s name would be WeWork. How is a company that had a net loss of $933 million and that owes $18 billion in rent even remotely worth $35 billion. I&#x27;d consider the lemonade stand on the corner to be more of a business than WeWork in the true sense of the word. What&#x27;s inherently hard about what WeWork is doing? With enough money, anyone can rent out buildings, chop it up, and make it appealing to hipsters with some interior work, then over charge companies and individuals to rent out tiny spaces.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>code4tee</author><text>When you consider that much of WeWork’s revenue is likey just VC dollars paying the expenses of their tenants then the whole thing looks even crazier. VC money paying revenue of a startup that uses that revenue to justify raising more money from VCs. I have some bridges to sell.</text></comment> |
16,621,747 | 16,621,720 | 1 | 3 | 16,619,917 | train | <story><title>Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/article/us-autos-selfdriving-uber/self-driving-uber-car-kills-arizona-woman-crossing-street-idUSKBN1GV296</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>orbitur</author><text>&gt; I won&#x27;t be surprised if someone at some point wears a stripy outfit, and the car thinks they are a part of the road, and tries to explicitly chase them down until they are under the wheels. Or if the car suddenly decides that the road continues at a 90 degree angle off a bridge. Or that the splashes from a puddle in front is actually an oncoming car and it must swerve into the school kids crossing the perpendicular road.<p>Are you working on the next season of Black Mirror?<p>In all seriousness, my fear (and maybe not fear, maybe it&#x27;s happy expectation in light of the nightmare scenarios) is that if a couple of the &quot;weird and terrifying&quot; accidents happen, the gov&#x27;t would shut down self-driving car usage immediately.</text></item><item><author>IgorPartola</author><text>This is what&#x27;s going to happen. If you&#x27;ve ever seen a machine learning algorithm in action, this isn&#x27;t surprising at all. Basically, they&#x27;ll behave as expected some well known percentage of the time. But when they don&#x27;t, the result will not be just a slight deviation from the normal algorithm, but a very unexpected one.<p>So we will have overall a much smaller number of deaths caused by self driving cars, but ones that do happen will be completely unexpected and scary and shitty. You can&#x27;t really get away from this without putting these cars on rails.<p>Moreover, the human brain won&#x27;t like processing these freak accidents. People die in car crashes every damn day. But we have become really accustomed to rationalizing that: &quot;they were struck by a drunk driver&quot;, &quot;they were texting&quot;, &quot;they didn&#x27;t see the red light&quot;, etc. These are &quot;normal&quot; reasons for bad accidents and we can not only rationalize them, but also rationalize how it wouldn&#x27;t happen to us: &quot;I don&#x27;t drive near colleges where young kids are likely to drive drunk&quot;, &quot;I don&#x27;t text (much) while I drive&quot;, &quot;I pay attention&quot;.<p>But these algorithms will not fail like that. Each accident will be unique and weird and scary. I won&#x27;t be surprised if someone at some point wears a stripy outfit, and the car thinks they are a part of the road, and tries to explicitly chase them down until they are under the wheels. Or if the car suddenly decides that the road continues at a 90 degree angle off a bridge. Or that the splashes from a puddle in front is actually an oncoming car and it must swerve into the school kids crossing the perpendicular road. It&#x27;ll always be tragic, unpredictable and one-off.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>IgorPartola</author><text>I am definitely not. Their version of the future is too damn bleak for me.<p>Your fear is very much grounded in reality. US lawmakers tend to be very reactionary, except in rare cases like gun laws. So it won&#x27;t take much to have restrictions imposed like this. Granted, I believe some regulation is good; after all the reason today&#x27;s cars are safer than those built 20 years ago isn&#x27;t because the free market decided so, but because of regulation. But self driving cars are so new and our lawmakers are by and large so ignorant, that I wouldn&#x27;t trust them to create good regulation from the get go.</text></comment> | <story><title>Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/article/us-autos-selfdriving-uber/self-driving-uber-car-kills-arizona-woman-crossing-street-idUSKBN1GV296</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>orbitur</author><text>&gt; I won&#x27;t be surprised if someone at some point wears a stripy outfit, and the car thinks they are a part of the road, and tries to explicitly chase them down until they are under the wheels. Or if the car suddenly decides that the road continues at a 90 degree angle off a bridge. Or that the splashes from a puddle in front is actually an oncoming car and it must swerve into the school kids crossing the perpendicular road.<p>Are you working on the next season of Black Mirror?<p>In all seriousness, my fear (and maybe not fear, maybe it&#x27;s happy expectation in light of the nightmare scenarios) is that if a couple of the &quot;weird and terrifying&quot; accidents happen, the gov&#x27;t would shut down self-driving car usage immediately.</text></item><item><author>IgorPartola</author><text>This is what&#x27;s going to happen. If you&#x27;ve ever seen a machine learning algorithm in action, this isn&#x27;t surprising at all. Basically, they&#x27;ll behave as expected some well known percentage of the time. But when they don&#x27;t, the result will not be just a slight deviation from the normal algorithm, but a very unexpected one.<p>So we will have overall a much smaller number of deaths caused by self driving cars, but ones that do happen will be completely unexpected and scary and shitty. You can&#x27;t really get away from this without putting these cars on rails.<p>Moreover, the human brain won&#x27;t like processing these freak accidents. People die in car crashes every damn day. But we have become really accustomed to rationalizing that: &quot;they were struck by a drunk driver&quot;, &quot;they were texting&quot;, &quot;they didn&#x27;t see the red light&quot;, etc. These are &quot;normal&quot; reasons for bad accidents and we can not only rationalize them, but also rationalize how it wouldn&#x27;t happen to us: &quot;I don&#x27;t drive near colleges where young kids are likely to drive drunk&quot;, &quot;I don&#x27;t text (much) while I drive&quot;, &quot;I pay attention&quot;.<p>But these algorithms will not fail like that. Each accident will be unique and weird and scary. I won&#x27;t be surprised if someone at some point wears a stripy outfit, and the car thinks they are a part of the road, and tries to explicitly chase them down until they are under the wheels. Or if the car suddenly decides that the road continues at a 90 degree angle off a bridge. Or that the splashes from a puddle in front is actually an oncoming car and it must swerve into the school kids crossing the perpendicular road. It&#x27;ll always be tragic, unpredictable and one-off.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jessaustin</author><text>If that&#x27;s bad, what happens when the robocars get hacked?</text></comment> |
13,004,643 | 13,004,569 | 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>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></item><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>huxley</author><text>Those aren&#x27;t facts, they are premises<p>It is as likely that tying a university degree as the minimum pre-requisite for a decently paying career is driving the price upwards. Increased competition for desirable placements is the classic limited supply high demand scenario.<p>The problem isn&#x27;t the availability of loans which are just a side effect but the focus of education as a gate to future success.<p>BTW from ancient times up until the last couple of centuries, patronage was often the primary income source for artists and scientists, the rich and powerful would subsidize them, offer sinecures to allow them to create, and the patron would get to show how wealthy and sophisticated they were.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Patronage#Arts" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Patronage#Arts</a></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>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></item><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>JulianMorrison</author><text>Basic income. Free tuition. An outright grant, no repayments. Literally zero barriers except ability for anyone, for any level of academic achievement in anything. Result: a culture with a lot more understanding of the real world, and the preservation of human and humane values, rather than a laser focus on the hand-to-mouth of Jobs Right Now.</text></comment> |
24,333,058 | 24,332,700 | 1 | 2 | 24,331,151 | train | <story><title>China again boosts R&D spending by more than 10%</title><url>https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/08/china-again-boosts-rd-spending-more-10</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gamblor956</author><text>A lot of that IP was stolen from US and EU companies.<p>Cost isn&#x27;t the only reason that manufacturing is moving out of China; companies are finally realizing that using Chinese factories is tantamount to giving the PRC access to all of your technical IP.</text></item><item><author>bserge</author><text>At the very least we know Chinese companies (and by extension, the government) do indeed spend a lot on research, development and production.<p>The sheer amount of tech made and shipped from China is astonishing. And the quality has massively improved, while prices stay low. Everything from amazing BGA reballing stations to high quality solar panels and power tools.</text></item><item><author>rvba</author><text>Can those numbers be trusted?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;foreignpolicy.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;03&#x2F;21&#x2F;nobody-knows-anything-about-china&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;foreignpolicy.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;03&#x2F;21&#x2F;nobody-knows-anything-a...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>arcticbull</author><text>That&#x27;s an incredibly short-sighted way of looking at what&#x27;s happening. If you want to become a Chef, you don&#x27;t start by inventing new Michelin star dishes de novo. You copy your betters. Over and over and over. Then, once you learn how they do what they do, you innovate.<p>Japan did this. Do not underestimate China.</text></comment> | <story><title>China again boosts R&D spending by more than 10%</title><url>https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/08/china-again-boosts-rd-spending-more-10</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gamblor956</author><text>A lot of that IP was stolen from US and EU companies.<p>Cost isn&#x27;t the only reason that manufacturing is moving out of China; companies are finally realizing that using Chinese factories is tantamount to giving the PRC access to all of your technical IP.</text></item><item><author>bserge</author><text>At the very least we know Chinese companies (and by extension, the government) do indeed spend a lot on research, development and production.<p>The sheer amount of tech made and shipped from China is astonishing. And the quality has massively improved, while prices stay low. Everything from amazing BGA reballing stations to high quality solar panels and power tools.</text></item><item><author>rvba</author><text>Can those numbers be trusted?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;foreignpolicy.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;03&#x2F;21&#x2F;nobody-knows-anything-about-china&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;foreignpolicy.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;03&#x2F;21&#x2F;nobody-knows-anything-a...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>0_____0</author><text>was the same not true with Japan? at some point China may move past Western nations in practical sophistication, and start making better stuff.<p>example: you want a photography drone? Like, the best commerical one available? It&#x27;s a Chinese product. Most of the other stuff on the market doesn&#x27;t come close. The closest we had domestically in the US was 3D systems, and then went under if I recall correctly.</text></comment> |
5,420,658 | 5,420,758 | 1 | 3 | 5,420,395 | train | <story><title>Critical PRNG Bug in NetBSD Kernel</title><url>http://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/security/advisories/NetBSD-SA2013-003.txt.asc</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>yk</author><text><p><pre><code> Due to a misplaced parenthesis, if insufficient GOOD
bits were available to satisfy a request, the
keying/rekeying code requested either 32 or 64 ANY bits,
rather than the balance of bits required to key the
stream generator.
</code></pre>
I think this paragraph is a nice reminder, how hard crypto can be.</text></comment> | <story><title>Critical PRNG Bug in NetBSD Kernel</title><url>http://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/security/advisories/NetBSD-SA2013-003.txt.asc</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>beering</author><text>The advisory says that reading from /dev/random is fine, but reading from /dev/urandom is affected. Shouldn't cryptographic applications be using /dev/random to begin with? I was under the impression that /dev/urandom is only for when low-quality randomness is acceptable.</text></comment> |
16,688,205 | 16,688,240 | 1 | 2 | 16,687,293 | train | <story><title>V8 release v6.6</title><url>https://v8project.blogspot.com/2018/03/v8-release-66.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tim_hutton</author><text>I like JavaScript a lot, I&#x27;ve got no problem with it. But when WebAssembly can access the DOM (or replace it) it seems likely that performance-critical code will use that instead.</text></item><item><author>fvdessen</author><text>JavaScript ES6 is actually a very pleasant language to program in. JS already had good foundations with first class JSON, closures and event based asynchronous programming. Now it has a modern syntax with await, classes, destructuring, default parameters, the spread operator, etc. Add to that an incredible debugger and amazing performance. Frankly at this point JS can stand on its own as a great programming language.</text></item><item><author>tim_hutton</author><text>Is there still a need for performant JavaScript now that we have WebAssembly?<p>Edit: Apologies for wording this poorly. Clearly there is a need for performant JavaScript. My question is more about how much we expect WebAssembly to take over from what JavaScript is currently used for. Thank you for all the insightful comments!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fvdessen</author><text>AFAIK web assembly is not much faster than native javascript for general purpose code. I think the main usage of web assembly will be in optimising hot paths in math libraries, codecs and various performance sensitive code, but those are not critical parts for the majority of JS projects.</text></comment> | <story><title>V8 release v6.6</title><url>https://v8project.blogspot.com/2018/03/v8-release-66.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tim_hutton</author><text>I like JavaScript a lot, I&#x27;ve got no problem with it. But when WebAssembly can access the DOM (or replace it) it seems likely that performance-critical code will use that instead.</text></item><item><author>fvdessen</author><text>JavaScript ES6 is actually a very pleasant language to program in. JS already had good foundations with first class JSON, closures and event based asynchronous programming. Now it has a modern syntax with await, classes, destructuring, default parameters, the spread operator, etc. Add to that an incredible debugger and amazing performance. Frankly at this point JS can stand on its own as a great programming language.</text></item><item><author>tim_hutton</author><text>Is there still a need for performant JavaScript now that we have WebAssembly?<p>Edit: Apologies for wording this poorly. Clearly there is a need for performant JavaScript. My question is more about how much we expect WebAssembly to take over from what JavaScript is currently used for. Thank you for all the insightful comments!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dspillett</author><text><i>&gt; performance-critical code will use that instead</i><p>Yes, but how much of the browser code out there is is truly performance <i>critical</i>.<p>For a lot of code out there it is important that it perform well enough but it won&#x27;t see much benefit from WebAssembly because of bottlenecks elsewhere (the DOM, the user, the network). Keeping the maintainability benefits JS currently has over WA is a bonus worth paying a small performance price, but you still want that price to be as small as practically possible.<p>As WA and the toolchanins for which it is the final compile target mature, this may change. But I suspect JS has a place, a place where performance considerations are often not insignificant, for some time to come, with WA for extra performance in truly critical areas (i.e. proper number crunching).</text></comment> |
16,272,243 | 16,270,665 | 1 | 3 | 16,269,998 | train | <story><title>Content-aware image resize library</title><url>https://github.com/esimov/caire</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>rudi-c</author><text>Happy to see this here! Seam carving is one of those neat little algorithms that hit a sweet spot, being a sum of a few moderately complex algorithms, comes from a readable paper, and gives very satisfying result. I had a lot of fun implementing it in undergrad.<p>One thing that I always wondered is how Photoshop managed to make it so fast that you can resize in real-time. If n is the width or height of the image, then the dynamic programming part is O(n^2) and needs to be recomputed after every seam removed. Since every seam is a single pixel wide, resizing the image by a non-trivial amount (say half) is O(n^3). There are other papers that remove multiple seams at a time but the quality isn&#x27;t as good. GPU acceleration perhaps?<p>Another thing I learned while testing seam carving extensively is that it works nicely in certain scenes&#x2F;situations, but tends to break down most of the time. The two most common scenarios are: 1) lines that are off by the horizontal by more than a few degrees get cutoff 2) objects loose their proportions and even when the manipulation is not directly obvious, it tends to feel off (in the uncanny valley sense).<p>I expect some interesting work to use deep learning for content-aware resizing, since neural nets could theoretically be more semantically and holistically aware of objects in the image.</text></comment> | <story><title>Content-aware image resize library</title><url>https://github.com/esimov/caire</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mstade</author><text>I remember first seeing content aware image scaling at Adobe MAX in Barcelona I think it was. We were completely dumbfounded by what was surely magic happening on stage. When they showed removing objects we just lost it, jaws on the floor and all. That was a fun conference.</text></comment> |
22,549,149 | 22,549,133 | 1 | 3 | 22,547,283 | train | <story><title>Covid-19 is now officially a pandemic, WHO says</title><url>https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/03/11/814474930/coronavirus-covid-19-is-now-officially-a-pandemic-who-says</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mikestew</author><text>See also: Y2K.<p>I don’t say that lightly. That was 20 years ago, so maybe you youngsters just read about it in books. But in summary, a bunch of us busted ass to make sure the predictions of ATM and power failures did not come to pass on 1&#x2F;1&#x2F;2000. Our reward was, “See? We got all up in arms about nothing.”<p>Plenty of those same short-sighted dipshits are still alive, and of those now deceased, I’m sure replacements are just reaching voting age.<p>That’s assuming the U. S. puts forth anything close to the effort of fixing Y2K. Which is not even remotely guaranteed.</text></item><item><author>fokinsean</author><text>Playing Devil&#x27;s advocate, but if the situation does fizzle out in the US due to active measures, people will likely look back and say how it &quot;ended up not being a big deal&quot;.</text></item><item><author>beamatronic</author><text>Curious if anyone has tried to look on the bright side, and see where humanity will be in the long run.<p>1. Will take infectious disease more seriously<p>2. Will build out health care infrastructure to guard against future occurrences<p>3. Personal sanitation will be improved<p>4. People less likely to take risky behaviors like getting together in huge groups<p>edit: formatting</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>corel_</author><text>I also was around for this but my favourite thing about it wasn&#x27;t the resignation of &quot;it wasn&#x27;t a big deal&quot; from the public but the mockery of people at the time talking about 2038 as alarmist nutjobs. It was not going to be a issue in 2038 because we&#x27;d all be running 64 bit quantum computers by then.<p>18 years away now and an absolute ton of affected systems are still out there and mission critical.<p>These type pf issues, from Corona to 2038 to climate change, always remind me of that Homer Simpson quote.<p>&quot;Pfft, that&#x27;s a problem for future Homer. Man I don&#x27;t envy that guy.&quot;</text></comment> | <story><title>Covid-19 is now officially a pandemic, WHO says</title><url>https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/03/11/814474930/coronavirus-covid-19-is-now-officially-a-pandemic-who-says</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mikestew</author><text>See also: Y2K.<p>I don’t say that lightly. That was 20 years ago, so maybe you youngsters just read about it in books. But in summary, a bunch of us busted ass to make sure the predictions of ATM and power failures did not come to pass on 1&#x2F;1&#x2F;2000. Our reward was, “See? We got all up in arms about nothing.”<p>Plenty of those same short-sighted dipshits are still alive, and of those now deceased, I’m sure replacements are just reaching voting age.<p>That’s assuming the U. S. puts forth anything close to the effort of fixing Y2K. Which is not even remotely guaranteed.</text></item><item><author>fokinsean</author><text>Playing Devil&#x27;s advocate, but if the situation does fizzle out in the US due to active measures, people will likely look back and say how it &quot;ended up not being a big deal&quot;.</text></item><item><author>beamatronic</author><text>Curious if anyone has tried to look on the bright side, and see where humanity will be in the long run.<p>1. Will take infectious disease more seriously<p>2. Will build out health care infrastructure to guard against future occurrences<p>3. Personal sanitation will be improved<p>4. People less likely to take risky behaviors like getting together in huge groups<p>edit: formatting</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>badsectoracula</author><text>LGR had a great Y2K video where he presented what the problem was: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Xm5OiB3CPxg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Xm5OiB3CPxg</a><p>In short, it was <i>massively</i> overblown and misunderstood - people expected their own computers to blow up and even made shelters - and some scammers even took advantage of those fears. It made perfect sense for someone who didn&#x27;t knew what was going on and was fed on doom and destruction to see things continuing without any hitch and wonder what was the fuss all about.</text></comment> |
8,612,154 | 8,612,138 | 1 | 3 | 8,611,991 | train | <story><title>Why Germans Work Fewer Hours but Produce More: A Study in Culture</title><url>http://knote.com/2014/11/10/why-germans-work-fewer-hours-but-produce-more-a-study-in-culture/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>spindritf</author><text>Do they actually produce more? It seems like they produce almost 15% less per hour worked than Americans for example.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28PPP%29_per_hour_worked" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28PP...</a><p>And while the stats here are collated, it&#x27;s not nearly as worthless a measure as nominal GDP of the whole country.<p>In Europe (according to Eurostat so possibly using comparable methodology), they&#x27;re behind France.<p><a href="http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/tgm/table.do?tab=table&amp;init=1&amp;language=en&amp;pcode=tsdec310&amp;plugin=0" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu&#x2F;tgm&#x2F;table.do?tab=table&amp;init...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pedrocr</author><text>You&#x27;d probably need to have a per-industry dataset to make a robust conclusion. The two countries above the US are Norway and Luxembourg that are probably as high as that because of oil and financial services respectively being a larger part of their economy.</text></comment> | <story><title>Why Germans Work Fewer Hours but Produce More: A Study in Culture</title><url>http://knote.com/2014/11/10/why-germans-work-fewer-hours-but-produce-more-a-study-in-culture/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>spindritf</author><text>Do they actually produce more? It seems like they produce almost 15% less per hour worked than Americans for example.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28PPP%29_per_hour_worked" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28PP...</a><p>And while the stats here are collated, it&#x27;s not nearly as worthless a measure as nominal GDP of the whole country.<p>In Europe (according to Eurostat so possibly using comparable methodology), they&#x27;re behind France.<p><a href="http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/tgm/table.do?tab=table&amp;init=1&amp;language=en&amp;pcode=tsdec310&amp;plugin=0" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu&#x2F;tgm&#x2F;table.do?tab=table&amp;init...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tormeh</author><text>The us is a service economy, while germany is a manufacturing one. It&#x27;s a bit hard to compare. As for the French with their short work weeks, it makes sense that they&#x27;re very efficient.</text></comment> |
27,702,108 | 27,700,543 | 1 | 2 | 27,699,158 | train | <story><title>British right to repair law excludes smartphones and computers</title><url>https://9to5mac.com/2021/07/01/british-right-to-repair-law/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ShaneMcGowan</author><text>Trying to find a good non smart tv is impossible now, I want dumb tv and dumb fridge</text></item><item><author>ivoras</author><text>It&#x27;s all fun and games until your fridge gets reclasiffied as a computer.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>LeoPanthera</author><text>It&#x27;s expensive, but certainly not impossible. What you are looking for is a &quot;commercial monitor&quot;. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bhphotovideo.com&#x2F;c&#x2F;buy&#x2F;Flat-Panel-Displays&#x2F;ci&#x2F;16073&#x2F;N&#x2F;4205668456" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bhphotovideo.com&#x2F;c&#x2F;buy&#x2F;Flat-Panel-Displays&#x2F;ci&#x2F;16...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>British right to repair law excludes smartphones and computers</title><url>https://9to5mac.com/2021/07/01/british-right-to-repair-law/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ShaneMcGowan</author><text>Trying to find a good non smart tv is impossible now, I want dumb tv and dumb fridge</text></item><item><author>ivoras</author><text>It&#x27;s all fun and games until your fridge gets reclasiffied as a computer.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nerdawson</author><text>TV manufacturers are responding, often clumsily and based on their self-interest (data collection), to what consumers want.<p>Trying to find a dumb TV is like trying to find a car without a built in radio. You&#x27;re welcome to leave it switched off.<p>Smart TVs are dumb if they aren&#x27;t connected to the internet. Some may be slow. Some may have a poor interface. I&#x27;d worry about solving for that rather than expecting manufacturers to cater to a very niche group.</text></comment> |
31,169,557 | 31,169,632 | 1 | 2 | 31,167,935 | train | <story><title>Effective Go</title><url>https://go.dev/doc/effective_go</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ses1984</author><text>What do you do if you&#x27;re working on a go project and you need to fork one of its dependencies? Or the project you&#x27;re working on is a fork?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;14323872&#x2F;using-forked-package-import-in-go" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;14323872&#x2F;using-forked-pa...</a><p>There are a lot of different approaches listed in here that have changed over time. Different projects evolve at different rates. You might need to become familiar with multiple old ways of dependency management to be really effective.</text></item><item><author>usrme</author><text>I&#x27;m just starting out with Go, but how has the official guide[1] failed you? Genuinely curious as it seems to cover both new installations and the management of multiple versions.<p>---<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;go.dev&#x2F;doc&#x2F;install" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;go.dev&#x2F;doc&#x2F;install</a></text></item><item><author>rplnt</author><text>What I would like is an official guide on how to set up go environment on various platforms. The language is stable, but tooling went through so many radical changes that most of the guides out there are outdated. And setting it up as you go just results in a messy setup.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>CraigJPerry</author><text>Not a Go developer (but i <i>really</i> admire their devops-friendly toolchain and general ethos of keeping things simple).<p>I went to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;go.dev&#x2F;doc&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;go.dev&#x2F;doc&#x2F;</a><p>I clicked on &quot;Managing Dependencies&quot; -&gt; &quot;Requiring external module code from your own repository fork&quot;<p>And arrived at:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;go.dev&#x2F;doc&#x2F;modules&#x2F;managing-dependencies#external_fork" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;go.dev&#x2F;doc&#x2F;modules&#x2F;managing-dependencies#external_fo...</a><p>Assuming that information is correct - and i&#x27;m not in a place to judge that, i just don&#x27;t have the knowledge unfortunately - that journey felt pretty short and discoverable.</text></comment> | <story><title>Effective Go</title><url>https://go.dev/doc/effective_go</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ses1984</author><text>What do you do if you&#x27;re working on a go project and you need to fork one of its dependencies? Or the project you&#x27;re working on is a fork?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;14323872&#x2F;using-forked-package-import-in-go" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;14323872&#x2F;using-forked-pa...</a><p>There are a lot of different approaches listed in here that have changed over time. Different projects evolve at different rates. You might need to become familiar with multiple old ways of dependency management to be really effective.</text></item><item><author>usrme</author><text>I&#x27;m just starting out with Go, but how has the official guide[1] failed you? Genuinely curious as it seems to cover both new installations and the management of multiple versions.<p>---<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;go.dev&#x2F;doc&#x2F;install" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;go.dev&#x2F;doc&#x2F;install</a></text></item><item><author>rplnt</author><text>What I would like is an official guide on how to set up go environment on various platforms. The language is stable, but tooling went through so many radical changes that most of the guides out there are outdated. And setting it up as you go just results in a messy setup.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>p2detar</author><text>Are there really that many mainstream projects that use alternative dependency handling? Go modules were introduced in v1.11 and they seem pretty mature.<p>The replace directive seems to solve the issues with forked projects in particular. [1]<p>1 - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;golang&#x2F;go&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Modules#when-should-i-use-the-replace-directive" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;golang&#x2F;go&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Modules#when-should-i-use-...</a></text></comment> |
14,398,221 | 14,398,096 | 1 | 2 | 14,394,864 | train | <story><title>Alone on the Open Road: Truckers Feel Like ‘Throwaway People’</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/22/us/trucking-jobs.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>treehau5</author><text>I agree that there must be jobs, but with one important and subtle distinction. There should always be jobs for anyone <i>willing to work</i>. The difference is it leaves out the subtle dehumanization implied in your response (and I know it was unintended), and leaves out our limited, market-driven and popsci ideals about human intelligence out of it.<p>We have all met some damn smart people who never went to college, or learned how to read or write profeciently. My father was brilliant at arithmetic from learning to count money in restaurants and gambling. He was a middle school dropout. The trucker didn&#x27;t all of a sudden go from stupid to intelligent once someone showed him how to read -- all he needed to do is for someone to teach him!<p>There is a wonderful TED talk about how our STEM-driven craze is a tragedy in terms of how it defines human intelligence by a renounced English teacher and professor, highly recommend it.<p>The short of it is we should never discriminate on arbitrary things like IQ, reading levels, etc, because we have no idea what even constitutes &quot;intelligence&quot;, much less how to duplicate it from adolescent to adolescent.</text></item><item><author>gumby</author><text>It&#x27;s important that there be jobs for people without much education. When I was in my twenties I volunteered as a reading instructor. One of the students was a trucker in his late 30s who had never learned to read. He had just memorized certain routes and took the same ones. He wanted to read so he could get better jobs.<p>Not a dumb guy, but he&#x27;d slipped off the rails at a <i>very</i> early age, and dropped out of school as soon as he could. He did already know the alphabet and numbers. He was embarrassed to even talk about this with his peers.<p>Abstract ideas of &quot;job retraining&quot; may sound great but I think they are generally unrealistic. Folks who figured they were &quot;done with school&quot; at 18 or even 22 and then find themselves unemployed in their 40s have a hard time changing direction in my somewhat limited experience.<p>(But those students at community college who are aged between late 30 and 50? <i>Really driven</i>. It&#x27;s embarrassing to compare typical college students to them.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>int_19h</author><text>If it&#x27;s a job that doesn&#x27;t actually need to be done (i.e. it&#x27;s only done to keep the person willing to do it occupied), is it still a job, or is it just a hobby?<p>You might say it depends on whether it pays or not... but if there&#x27;s a paycheck in exchange for essentially useless work, it&#x27;s just welfare in disguise.</text></comment> | <story><title>Alone on the Open Road: Truckers Feel Like ‘Throwaway People’</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/22/us/trucking-jobs.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>treehau5</author><text>I agree that there must be jobs, but with one important and subtle distinction. There should always be jobs for anyone <i>willing to work</i>. The difference is it leaves out the subtle dehumanization implied in your response (and I know it was unintended), and leaves out our limited, market-driven and popsci ideals about human intelligence out of it.<p>We have all met some damn smart people who never went to college, or learned how to read or write profeciently. My father was brilliant at arithmetic from learning to count money in restaurants and gambling. He was a middle school dropout. The trucker didn&#x27;t all of a sudden go from stupid to intelligent once someone showed him how to read -- all he needed to do is for someone to teach him!<p>There is a wonderful TED talk about how our STEM-driven craze is a tragedy in terms of how it defines human intelligence by a renounced English teacher and professor, highly recommend it.<p>The short of it is we should never discriminate on arbitrary things like IQ, reading levels, etc, because we have no idea what even constitutes &quot;intelligence&quot;, much less how to duplicate it from adolescent to adolescent.</text></item><item><author>gumby</author><text>It&#x27;s important that there be jobs for people without much education. When I was in my twenties I volunteered as a reading instructor. One of the students was a trucker in his late 30s who had never learned to read. He had just memorized certain routes and took the same ones. He wanted to read so he could get better jobs.<p>Not a dumb guy, but he&#x27;d slipped off the rails at a <i>very</i> early age, and dropped out of school as soon as he could. He did already know the alphabet and numbers. He was embarrassed to even talk about this with his peers.<p>Abstract ideas of &quot;job retraining&quot; may sound great but I think they are generally unrealistic. Folks who figured they were &quot;done with school&quot; at 18 or even 22 and then find themselves unemployed in their 40s have a hard time changing direction in my somewhat limited experience.<p>(But those students at community college who are aged between late 30 and 50? <i>Really driven</i>. It&#x27;s embarrassing to compare typical college students to them.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Bakary</author><text>I agree with the sentiment wholeheartedly, but the problem is that some types of intelligence become less useful than others as society changes. STEM-type intelligence becomes more in demand while a very smart person who lacks skills like these (whether they are not attuned to it or didn&#x27;t have the opportunity to learn) will still struggle because the competition pool is so large that there are tons of people in the same situation and a limited number of ways they can become economically useful. The end result is likely to be a large scale dehumanization even for smart folks unless there is some intervention.<p>Edit: to clarify, the market driven popsci definition is paramount because the market determines your dehumanization</text></comment> |
25,143,692 | 25,143,742 | 1 | 3 | 25,143,309 | train | <story><title>Apple Agrees to Pay $113M to Settle 'Batterygate' Case over iPhone Slowdowns</title><url>https://text.npr.org/936268845</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>CapriciousCptl</author><text>So, I&#x27;m somehow developing a pro-Apple bias these days. This whole batterygate to me is kind of based on conjecture-- that Apple slowed old phones with the intention to sell more new ones. If there&#x27;s any supporting evidence, or anything that&#x27;s come up in discovery that Apple acted in bad faith, I&#x27;d possibly change my (admittedly biased) mind.<p>But really, slowing the phones down to extend battery life is a reasonable tradeoff and there&#x27;s just not a preponderance of evidence suggesting Apple acted in its own interests and hurt existing users. The main problem is this &quot;feature&quot; wasn&#x27;t out in the open, but again, it just doesn&#x27;t seem that bad to me.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>reducesuffering</author><text>I think this is the crux of the issue. Apple had to make a call for their customers: ensure the low battery is as long-lasting and predictable as possible around 1-5%, or keep high performance as the phone battery degrades quicker and shuts off. I think many people thoroughly understand how crucial it can be to have that last 1-2% and going into a situation where you think you have 5%, but then the phone dies, is a pretty bad experience for the &quot;premium experience&quot; that Apple sells. So for most customers they made the right call to preserve the battery.<p>This is an engineering trade-off and not something that typically gets publically broadcast to customers. I&#x27;m sure there&#x27;s lots of other niche feature tweaks like this to the iPhone that we&#x27;re unaware of. They definitely could&#x27;ve and should&#x27;ve been more transparent about this, but I understand why it didn&#x27;t occur to them.</text></comment> | <story><title>Apple Agrees to Pay $113M to Settle 'Batterygate' Case over iPhone Slowdowns</title><url>https://text.npr.org/936268845</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>CapriciousCptl</author><text>So, I&#x27;m somehow developing a pro-Apple bias these days. This whole batterygate to me is kind of based on conjecture-- that Apple slowed old phones with the intention to sell more new ones. If there&#x27;s any supporting evidence, or anything that&#x27;s come up in discovery that Apple acted in bad faith, I&#x27;d possibly change my (admittedly biased) mind.<p>But really, slowing the phones down to extend battery life is a reasonable tradeoff and there&#x27;s just not a preponderance of evidence suggesting Apple acted in its own interests and hurt existing users. The main problem is this &quot;feature&quot; wasn&#x27;t out in the open, but again, it just doesn&#x27;t seem that bad to me.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>invisible</author><text>I agree that it&#x27;s possible they weren&#x27;t being malicious. The part that gets me is that they didn&#x27;t decide to instead allow folks to set a max battery charge to extend their battery life. It&#x27;s pretty widely accepted that charging a battery to 100% over-and-over will cause battery degradation.<p>It seems fair to me that decisions that are hidden from consumers and obviously degrade the consumer&#x27;s experience should negatively affect a company (and more than just the loss of goodwill).</text></comment> |
3,656,599 | 3,656,395 | 1 | 2 | 3,656,314 | train | <story><title>Vortex radio waves could boost wireless capacity “infinitely”</title><url>http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/120803-vortex-radio-waves-could-boost-wireless-capacity-infinitely</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>femto</author><text>Nature has a clearer report.<p><a href="http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110222/full/news.2011.114.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110222/full/news.2011.114.ht...</a><p>It bears a similarity to MIMO, in that MIMO initially promised "infinite" capacity. MIMO did give an improvement in capacity, but it wasn't infinite, the limit being related to the volume occupied by the antenna array (see papers by Leif Hanlen). One has to think that this technology will turn out to have a similar limit on fuller analysis. In fact one has to wonder whether the limit will turn out to be exactly the same, and whether it turns out to be a form of space-time coding? After all, one could presumably emulate the "slotted parabolic dish" antenna mentioned by using a suitably coded antenna array?</text></comment> | <story><title>Vortex radio waves could boost wireless capacity “infinitely”</title><url>http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/120803-vortex-radio-waves-could-boost-wireless-capacity-infinitely</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>DanielBMarkham</author><text>This has the feel of one of those articles that promise much more than it delivers. But the site is good, the idea interesting, and it definitely could be a game-changer. If this pans out, it also has interesting implications for SETI, because if our receivers are set up in a different configuration than some potential sender might be, we'll never receive anything.</text></comment> |
24,839,086 | 24,838,993 | 1 | 2 | 24,838,816 | train | <story><title>Apple's apps bypass firewalls like LittleSnitch and LuLu on macOS Big Sur</title><url>https://twitter.com/patrickwardle/status/1318465421796782082</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>3pt14159</author><text>This is one of those tough cases where software cuts both ways.<p>Some people are smart, informed developers that install a trusted tool to monitor their traffic and have legitimate reasons to want to inspect Apple traffic. They&#x27;re dismayed.<p>Most people are the opposite and this move protects the most sensitive data from being easily scooped up or muddled in easily installed apps, or at least easily installed apps that don&#x27;t use zero days.<p>Is the world better or worse due to this change? I&#x27;d say a touch better, but I don&#x27;t like the fact that this change was needed in the first place. I trust Apple, but I don&#x27;t like trusting trust.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ballenf</author><text>I&#x27;d argue this opens up a giant attack surface where malicious software will try to route its command and control communication through a protected service. Do we really want to trust that Apple will keep all 50+ of these privileged services fully protected?<p>I think it makes the &quot;world&quot; slightly worse in that it will be harder to discover malware. Little snitch has a small user base, but it&#x27;s been used to identify many forms of malware and protect many more people once the threat is identified.</text></comment> | <story><title>Apple's apps bypass firewalls like LittleSnitch and LuLu on macOS Big Sur</title><url>https://twitter.com/patrickwardle/status/1318465421796782082</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>3pt14159</author><text>This is one of those tough cases where software cuts both ways.<p>Some people are smart, informed developers that install a trusted tool to monitor their traffic and have legitimate reasons to want to inspect Apple traffic. They&#x27;re dismayed.<p>Most people are the opposite and this move protects the most sensitive data from being easily scooped up or muddled in easily installed apps, or at least easily installed apps that don&#x27;t use zero days.<p>Is the world better or worse due to this change? I&#x27;d say a touch better, but I don&#x27;t like the fact that this change was needed in the first place. I trust Apple, but I don&#x27;t like trusting trust.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Wowfunhappy</author><text>If I install Little Snitch, it&#x27;s because I trust Little Snitch to be responsible for my computer&#x27;s network traffic, over and above anyone else.<p>I recognize that this won&#x27;t necessarily apply to all users or all apps, but there needs to be a way for the user to designate trust. Apple services and traffic should not get special treatment.</text></comment> |
35,475,067 | 35,469,355 | 1 | 2 | 35,468,637 | train | <story><title>Website hosted on a 24 year old Linux server</title><url>http://raq.serialport.org/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>seba_dos1</author><text>Except it&#x27;s not, not really - it&#x27;s hosted by Cloudflare which even requires you to enable JavaScript to pass.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kristopolous</author><text>I&#x27;ve got a pentium 90 I occasionally turn on and I&#x27;ll reply again when I do here. Hosting stuff from it is wildly taxing. It&#x27;s on my internal network and I proxy it through apache over a raspberry pi. But it does genuinely serve content to the proxy - which does not cache it.<p>The machine runs netbsd with apache and has 128MB of memory and, as a cheat I&#x27;ll admit, uses a SD&#x2F;IDE bridge device to go to an ATA&#x2F;100 interface (my older compatible PATA drives were failing on it ... I think there&#x27;s some shelf-life degradation on those things although I never actually looked it up).<p>But even on the 100MB&#x2F;s nic, the thing is unacceptably slow in serving pages. Maybe modern apache not being designed for 1994 hardware has something to do with it. I have some bullshit toy webserver I wrote, geez, 18 years ago, I wonder if it will be faster (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;kristopolous&#x2F;apac">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;kristopolous&#x2F;apac</a>) ... exciting things to look forward to after I bike home from this coffee shop.<p>That weird readme was some kind of pre-markdown markdown I had made and have long lost the interpreter for.<p>update: just tried compiling it. still works and serves pages. I like how I had SunOS support, lol. It&#x27;s probably comically insecure so have fun I guess?<p>Here&#x27;s the pentium 90 running apache: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bootstra386.com&#x2F;~hn&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bootstra386.com&#x2F;~hn&#x2F;</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Website hosted on a 24 year old Linux server</title><url>http://raq.serialport.org/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>seba_dos1</author><text>Except it&#x27;s not, not really - it&#x27;s hosted by Cloudflare which even requires you to enable JavaScript to pass.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bombcar</author><text>The server may be 24 years old and serving pages, but it&#x27;s only serving them to the Cloudflare cache, which is kinda meh.</text></comment> |
19,248,002 | 19,247,780 | 1 | 3 | 19,246,668 | train | <story><title>As AWS Use Soars, Companies Surprised by Cloud Bills</title><url>https://www.theinformation.com/articles/as-aws-use-soars-companies-surprised-by-cloud-bills</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Tistel</author><text>I have worked at a startup that was paying &gt; 20k <i>per month</i> for AWS. I am certain the whole system could run on one dedicated blade. There was just this culture (made easy with docker containers) of &quot;spin up another box&quot; for every silly little tool. I have met self taught dev ops people who did not understand that you could create more than one user on a aws ubuntu machine. I was like: &quot;if cost is a big issue, then lets spin up one beefy machine and create users for each dev&quot;, because thats what everyone using unix did back in the day (it works fine). The reply was &quot;thats not possible&quot; so every dev got their own dedicated instance that was 99% idle. We are paying &gt;3k per month to aws and the business team is complaining about waste. <i>sigh</i>. old guy rant over.</text></item><item><author>jdblair</author><text>When I joined a particular startup 4 years ago I was surprised that they owned their own servers mounted in racks in a rented colo. I was all, how retro! But then the head of IT showed me the cost savings over AWS and how he orchestrated it all using VMWare images, and I saw he had a point. He saved more than enough money to pay for his full time salary to keep it all going, even dealing with hardware maintenance. What was unique was that the company had a predictable load that didn&#x27;t change much. If we had needed to change capacity level drastically over a regular cycle then AWS would have started to make sense.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>thruhiker</author><text>Did you weigh these costs against the value of the developers not stepping on eachother&#x27;s toes using the same instance?Separate users with sudo privileges provides zero isolation.<p>I&#x27;m unsure what use case was, but if it was a testing or staging environment dedicated to each developer, having a separate right-sized instance for each is quite sane and reasonable.<p>EC2 instances such as the T2&#x2F;T3 series are cheap enough that there&#x27;s normally not a need to be so miserly in my experience.</text></comment> | <story><title>As AWS Use Soars, Companies Surprised by Cloud Bills</title><url>https://www.theinformation.com/articles/as-aws-use-soars-companies-surprised-by-cloud-bills</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Tistel</author><text>I have worked at a startup that was paying &gt; 20k <i>per month</i> for AWS. I am certain the whole system could run on one dedicated blade. There was just this culture (made easy with docker containers) of &quot;spin up another box&quot; for every silly little tool. I have met self taught dev ops people who did not understand that you could create more than one user on a aws ubuntu machine. I was like: &quot;if cost is a big issue, then lets spin up one beefy machine and create users for each dev&quot;, because thats what everyone using unix did back in the day (it works fine). The reply was &quot;thats not possible&quot; so every dev got their own dedicated instance that was 99% idle. We are paying &gt;3k per month to aws and the business team is complaining about waste. <i>sigh</i>. old guy rant over.</text></item><item><author>jdblair</author><text>When I joined a particular startup 4 years ago I was surprised that they owned their own servers mounted in racks in a rented colo. I was all, how retro! But then the head of IT showed me the cost savings over AWS and how he orchestrated it all using VMWare images, and I saw he had a point. He saved more than enough money to pay for his full time salary to keep it all going, even dealing with hardware maintenance. What was unique was that the company had a predictable load that didn&#x27;t change much. If we had needed to change capacity level drastically over a regular cycle then AWS would have started to make sense.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sigfubar</author><text>I&#x27;ve worked for a certain IoT startup that at one point paid $850k&#x2F;month (eight hundred and fifty thousand USD per month) for AWS usage. After about a year of full time work by a team of SREs and programmers, the bill was made to go down by half.</text></comment> |
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