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17,974,053 | 17,973,545 | 1 | 3 | 17,972,346 | train | <story><title>Tesla's Finance Team Is Losing Another Top Executive</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-12/tesla-s-finance-team-is-said-to-be-losing-another-top-executive</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>scotchio</author><text>Like a week or 2 ago saw a bunch of beautiful headlines like this:<p>- Tesla&#x27;s stock is getting crushed after TWO EXECUTIVES JUMP SHIP and CEO Elon Musk smokes weed [1]<p>- Tesla ERUPTS IN CHAOS After Senior Execs Leave, Musk Tokes Up [2]<p>Only to read internally it was a bit more tame than &quot;JUMPING SHIP!!!!!&quot;:<p>&gt; &quot;As many of you know, Tesla’s Chief People Officer Gaby Toledano has been on leave for a few months to spend more time with her family and has decided to continue doing so for personal reasons. She’s been amazing and I’m very grateful for everything she’s done for Tesla.&quot; [3]<p>So the executive was on LOA for multiple months beforehand? Seems really disingenuous to craft headlines like that. Does anyone have more detail?<p>But then again and to be fair, anything from Tesla would do serious controlled messaging.<p>Point is, with all Tesla news, I&#x27;m not even sure what to believe anymore. I see headline like this, and my first thought is &quot;Is this even true?&quot;. Maybe Tesla is really as in trouble as these headlines lead on, maybe they are not. Maybe Elon has &quot;gone mad&quot; and tanking the stock to go private. Maybe it&#x27;s just trendy and fun to write negative news against Tesla&#x27;s stock valuation right now. Who knows what&#x27;s actually happening.<p>It&#x27;s all just a bit too much reading in between the lines anymore... Just SHOW ME THE NUMBERS next earnings report and I&#x27;ll decide for myself.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nordic.businessinsider.com&#x2F;tesla-stock-down-musk-filmed-smoking-pot-executives-leave-2018-9" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nordic.businessinsider.com&#x2F;tesla-stock-down-musk-fil...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2018-09-07&#x2F;tesla-chief-accounting-officer-leaves-citing-level-of-scrutiny" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2018-09-07&#x2F;tesla-chi...</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tesla.com&#x2F;en_GB&#x2F;blog&#x2F;company-update" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tesla.com&#x2F;en_GB&#x2F;blog&#x2F;company-update</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>phkahler</author><text>&gt;&gt; Who knows what&#x27;s actually happening.<p>What&#x27;s actually happening is executives are leaving. Many more of them than is normal in such a short time. That&#x27;s what&#x27;s actually happening.<p>Why that&#x27;s happening is certainly open for debate, but there are no answers to &quot;why&quot; that are good. The only reason that wouldn&#x27;t suck is that it&#x27;s just a coincidence that they don&#x27;t want to be there. But keep in mind, one of the finance people was new to the company and quit. To me that says they walked in, saw what was happening and said &quot;yeah, sorry, no.&quot; But that&#x27;s speculation on my part. We should stick to the facts - an unusual number of executives have been leaving the company in a short time.</text></comment> | <story><title>Tesla's Finance Team Is Losing Another Top Executive</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-12/tesla-s-finance-team-is-said-to-be-losing-another-top-executive</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>scotchio</author><text>Like a week or 2 ago saw a bunch of beautiful headlines like this:<p>- Tesla&#x27;s stock is getting crushed after TWO EXECUTIVES JUMP SHIP and CEO Elon Musk smokes weed [1]<p>- Tesla ERUPTS IN CHAOS After Senior Execs Leave, Musk Tokes Up [2]<p>Only to read internally it was a bit more tame than &quot;JUMPING SHIP!!!!!&quot;:<p>&gt; &quot;As many of you know, Tesla’s Chief People Officer Gaby Toledano has been on leave for a few months to spend more time with her family and has decided to continue doing so for personal reasons. She’s been amazing and I’m very grateful for everything she’s done for Tesla.&quot; [3]<p>So the executive was on LOA for multiple months beforehand? Seems really disingenuous to craft headlines like that. Does anyone have more detail?<p>But then again and to be fair, anything from Tesla would do serious controlled messaging.<p>Point is, with all Tesla news, I&#x27;m not even sure what to believe anymore. I see headline like this, and my first thought is &quot;Is this even true?&quot;. Maybe Tesla is really as in trouble as these headlines lead on, maybe they are not. Maybe Elon has &quot;gone mad&quot; and tanking the stock to go private. Maybe it&#x27;s just trendy and fun to write negative news against Tesla&#x27;s stock valuation right now. Who knows what&#x27;s actually happening.<p>It&#x27;s all just a bit too much reading in between the lines anymore... Just SHOW ME THE NUMBERS next earnings report and I&#x27;ll decide for myself.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nordic.businessinsider.com&#x2F;tesla-stock-down-musk-filmed-smoking-pot-executives-leave-2018-9" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nordic.businessinsider.com&#x2F;tesla-stock-down-musk-fil...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2018-09-07&#x2F;tesla-chief-accounting-officer-leaves-citing-level-of-scrutiny" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2018-09-07&#x2F;tesla-chi...</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tesla.com&#x2F;en_GB&#x2F;blog&#x2F;company-update" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tesla.com&#x2F;en_GB&#x2F;blog&#x2F;company-update</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dforrestwilson</author><text>Almost every executive tasked with showing you the financial numbers is leaving or has left what should be one of the hottest&#x2F;sexiest startups of our time. Many of them have left with stock options still on the table.<p>That should say more than the numbers do by themselves.</text></comment> |
940,361 | 939,878 | 1 | 2 | 939,702 | train | <story><title>Things Worth Knowing About Coffee</title><url>http://theoatmeal.com/comics/coffee</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>stcredzero</author><text>The most important thing I know about coffee: most of what you buy in stores is <i>stale</i>. Even vacuum-sealed roasted whole beans are a compromise, expiration date notwithstanding. Buy roasted whole beans at a place that roasts every week, and posts the roast date on the bin. Never mind stuff being from Ethiopia, Costa Rica, Kona, &#38;c. It's most important to get the degree of roast you like, as recently as possible.<p>I go to the Allegro Roasters counter at Whole Foods each week and buy a medium roast from that day, or the day before. I have a cheap grinder at home, and I just use cheap #2 cone filters in a cheap single-cup cone brewer. I emphasize that those last 3 items are <i>cheap</i>. You don't need a fancy-schmancy grinder. You get a <i>huge</i> bang for the buck just by using beans roasted in the past 2 weeks. The other thing: make sure your water is the right temperature. (190 to 195 degrees seems to work for me.) Just borrow a candy thermometer, always use the same amount of water, the same pot, and figure out how long to wait to let the water cool to the right temp.<p>I have wowed friends with my coffee. Not rocket science. It's just brewed at the right temp, and it's fresh!<p>Cheap cone brewer: <a href="http://amzn.com/B001S353EQ" rel="nofollow">http://amzn.com/B001S353EQ</a><p>Cone filters (hate the eco-guilt marketing, though): <a href="http://amzn.com/B000U5ACLW" rel="nofollow">http://amzn.com/B000U5ACLW</a><p>My cheap grinder. Has nice design features. Still a mediocre grinder. Doesn't matter so much.
<a href="http://amzn.com/B00006IUX5" rel="nofollow">http://amzn.com/B00006IUX5</a><p>Aeropress for cheap DIY "Espresso"
<a href="http://amzn.com/B000GXZ2GS" rel="nofollow">http://amzn.com/B000GXZ2GS</a>
(Don't have one, but people seem to like it.)<p>EDIT: I grind for 20-25 seconds with my blade grinder. Again, this works for me. YMMV.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pwk</author><text>The Aeropress is pretty good. It's cheap, easy to use, and surprisingly easy to clean. I used to use it to make mochas and faux-cappuccinos (pseudo-espresso from the Aeropress plus milk frothified using a whirly-agitator thing instead of steam) but these days I just make Americano-style coffee, which I like because it comes out rich and smooth. I'm not really a coffee snob, though, so YMMV.</text></comment> | <story><title>Things Worth Knowing About Coffee</title><url>http://theoatmeal.com/comics/coffee</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>stcredzero</author><text>The most important thing I know about coffee: most of what you buy in stores is <i>stale</i>. Even vacuum-sealed roasted whole beans are a compromise, expiration date notwithstanding. Buy roasted whole beans at a place that roasts every week, and posts the roast date on the bin. Never mind stuff being from Ethiopia, Costa Rica, Kona, &#38;c. It's most important to get the degree of roast you like, as recently as possible.<p>I go to the Allegro Roasters counter at Whole Foods each week and buy a medium roast from that day, or the day before. I have a cheap grinder at home, and I just use cheap #2 cone filters in a cheap single-cup cone brewer. I emphasize that those last 3 items are <i>cheap</i>. You don't need a fancy-schmancy grinder. You get a <i>huge</i> bang for the buck just by using beans roasted in the past 2 weeks. The other thing: make sure your water is the right temperature. (190 to 195 degrees seems to work for me.) Just borrow a candy thermometer, always use the same amount of water, the same pot, and figure out how long to wait to let the water cool to the right temp.<p>I have wowed friends with my coffee. Not rocket science. It's just brewed at the right temp, and it's fresh!<p>Cheap cone brewer: <a href="http://amzn.com/B001S353EQ" rel="nofollow">http://amzn.com/B001S353EQ</a><p>Cone filters (hate the eco-guilt marketing, though): <a href="http://amzn.com/B000U5ACLW" rel="nofollow">http://amzn.com/B000U5ACLW</a><p>My cheap grinder. Has nice design features. Still a mediocre grinder. Doesn't matter so much.
<a href="http://amzn.com/B00006IUX5" rel="nofollow">http://amzn.com/B00006IUX5</a><p>Aeropress for cheap DIY "Espresso"
<a href="http://amzn.com/B000GXZ2GS" rel="nofollow">http://amzn.com/B000GXZ2GS</a>
(Don't have one, but people seem to like it.)<p>EDIT: I grind for 20-25 seconds with my blade grinder. Again, this works for me. YMMV.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mseebach</author><text>100% agree on freshly roasted bean. I see people put week-old store-brand coffee beans in a $500 Kitchen Aid grinder and serve a cup of absolutely vile tasting coffee. Some people simply don't deserve nice things.<p>However, a Burr grinder is good investment, especially if you need the finer grinds. The cheapest one you can find will do fine, however.<p>The blade-grinder will beat randomly around all your beans for the entire grind-time. This will kick the crap out of the aromatic oils, and you lose some flavour. The Burr grinder "crunches" each bean once and never touches it again, leaving the oils alone.</text></comment> |
35,039,100 | 35,033,133 | 1 | 3 | 35,031,589 | train | <story><title>Men Without Full-Time Jobs Are 33% More Likely to Divorce</title><url>https://time.com/4425061/unemployment-divorce-men-women/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>darth_avocado</author><text>Is it surprising though? Regardless of how far we’ve come in terms of viewing gender roles, the society still expects men to provide. Most women don’t prefer marrying down, while men are okay with it and that is a fact. And when married men do not have stable jobs, most women get additional pressure from people around them, friends, family, etc.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nobodyandproud</author><text>&gt; Most women don’t prefer marrying down, while men are okay with it and that is a fact<p>I’ve seen this once: Trophy husband (college buddy) to a high earning wife.<p>They are still happily married though I don’t keep in touch.<p>More common: I’ve met Ivy League women (or similar, very smart) who’ve underachieved in their career, who wouldn’t marry down.<p>They asked me if I knew anyone but thin pickings in the 40s: I know guy, but he’s in the milita…nope.”</text></comment> | <story><title>Men Without Full-Time Jobs Are 33% More Likely to Divorce</title><url>https://time.com/4425061/unemployment-divorce-men-women/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>darth_avocado</author><text>Is it surprising though? Regardless of how far we’ve come in terms of viewing gender roles, the society still expects men to provide. Most women don’t prefer marrying down, while men are okay with it and that is a fact. And when married men do not have stable jobs, most women get additional pressure from people around them, friends, family, etc.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>toomuchtodo</author><text>Citations:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pewresearch.org&#x2F;fact-tank&#x2F;2017&#x2F;09&#x2F;20&#x2F;americans-see-men-as-the-financial-providers-even-as-womens-contributions-grow&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pewresearch.org&#x2F;fact-tank&#x2F;2017&#x2F;09&#x2F;20&#x2F;americans-s...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dailymail.co.uk&#x2F;news&#x2F;article-6004239&#x2F;High-flying-career-women-refusing-marry-despite-struggling-Mr-Right.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dailymail.co.uk&#x2F;news&#x2F;article-6004239&#x2F;High-flying...</a></text></comment> |
6,137,420 | 6,136,326 | 1 | 3 | 6,135,837 | train | <story><title>RethinkDB: new documentation site, cookbook with examples, practical guides</title><url>http://rethinkdb.com/docs/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>andrewmunsell</author><text>I&#x27;ve been playing around with Rethink for a couple of days now, and I just can&#x27;t get over how nice the admin web UI is. Scaling up machines is quick and easy, and it&#x27;s pretty simple to resolve master&#x2F;secondary issues when one of the servers goes down (or it&#x27;s shut off).<p>I&#x27;m seeing some performance issues, and I&#x27;m definitely going to spend some time messing with my test data and optimizing it for Rethink. Right now, a couple of basic counting queries take ~1 second when the MySQL equivalent takes milliseconds. The other issue I&#x27;m having is that I simply did an import of existing data from MySQL that contains dates, which are treated as strings, so I&#x27;ll need to convert the dates into a native format (integer based timestamps) before I can get some more performance numbers.</text></comment> | <story><title>RethinkDB: new documentation site, cookbook with examples, practical guides</title><url>http://rethinkdb.com/docs/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>nemothekid</author><text>Is RethinkDB now &quot;production-ready&quot;? I recall some people using it production, however I think the devs still don&#x27;t call it production ready.</text></comment> |
25,540,808 | 25,540,656 | 1 | 2 | 25,539,586 | train | <story><title>ATT services down due to bombing in Nashville</title><url>https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/local/2020/12/25/att-outage-internet-down-hours-after-nashville-explosion/4045278001/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>orblivion</author><text>Interesting things to consider.<p>1) I heard something about &quot;fake reports&quot; about gunshots. But maybe the perp shot off some guns just to get the cops to show up?<p>2) This woman stuck around for 15 minutes or a half hour while this thing was saying &quot;you need to evacuate, this has a bomb&quot;???<p>3) This woman recalls a male voice but the news played a female voice. This goes to show how bad our memories are!</text></item><item><author>drtillberg</author><text>Local TV News managed to interview a neighbor from directly across the street where the explosion occurred[1].<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=iag6cTWpgq8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=iag6cTWpgq8</a></text></item><item><author>mintplant</author><text>Reportedly, there was a visible countdown timer on the vehicle that exploded, and an audible warning played for 15-20 minutes prior to the blast:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=5nygTJeu9fU" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=5nygTJeu9fU</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>doctorshady</author><text>Maybe she was right, and there were two voices? The female announcement sounds like it was edited. Badly. This might explain the strange verbiage as well (&quot;All buildings&quot; stands out. That particularly phrase, with its inflection, sounds like it originally came from the end of a sentence too). I&#x27;ve heard other people say it sounds like the same voice used by the city during the summer protests or something along those lines.<p>For the purposes of arguing, let&#x27;s say someone got ahold of some municipal evacuation recordings and chopped them up for this. It&#x27;s not likely they had enough phrases to warn people a bomb would be going off in specifically fifteen minutes.<p>EDIT: For anyone curious about other instances of bad edits, listen to the word &quot;this&quot;; there&#x27;s another word before that, and it was cut off: &quot;thi-this area must be evacuated now&quot;. Also, &quot;if you can hear this message, &lt;unnatural pause&gt; evacuate now.&quot; It&#x27;s not likely any professional voiceover person would announce this way, nor would anyone who&#x27;s paid attention to basic edits before consider this passable.<p>If this is all true, I guess the next question to ask is who would have access to those announcements, and who would think to use them? Most people would probably just use some text-to-speech thing unless it was easy&#x2F;they had good reason. I&#x27;m probably overthinking this, though.</text></comment> | <story><title>ATT services down due to bombing in Nashville</title><url>https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/local/2020/12/25/att-outage-internet-down-hours-after-nashville-explosion/4045278001/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>orblivion</author><text>Interesting things to consider.<p>1) I heard something about &quot;fake reports&quot; about gunshots. But maybe the perp shot off some guns just to get the cops to show up?<p>2) This woman stuck around for 15 minutes or a half hour while this thing was saying &quot;you need to evacuate, this has a bomb&quot;???<p>3) This woman recalls a male voice but the news played a female voice. This goes to show how bad our memories are!</text></item><item><author>drtillberg</author><text>Local TV News managed to interview a neighbor from directly across the street where the explosion occurred[1].<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=iag6cTWpgq8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=iag6cTWpgq8</a></text></item><item><author>mintplant</author><text>Reportedly, there was a visible countdown timer on the vehicle that exploded, and an audible warning played for 15-20 minutes prior to the blast:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=5nygTJeu9fU" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=5nygTJeu9fU</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>macintux</author><text>&gt; This woman stuck around for 15 minutes or a half hour while this thing was saying &quot;you need to evacuate, this has a bomb&quot;???<p>Watching a video, the audio was so surreal I had to ask myself how I would respond if I heard that without any clue where it was coming from.<p>Hopefully I never find out, but I guess now I&#x27;m a bit more mentally prepared to not linger.</text></comment> |
26,573,292 | 26,573,132 | 1 | 2 | 26,572,412 | train | <story><title>High IQs are associated with mental and physical disorders</title><url>https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bad-news-for-the-highly-intelligent/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>SavantIdiot</author><text>That&#x27;s interesting. I joined and was immediately turned off by the group.<p>The difference with joining a chess club is you get to play chess.<p>So let&#x27;s turn your proposal around: What do you get to do in a High IQ club that is different from any random collection of people?<p>Besides talk about how you are in MENSA?</text></item><item><author>pizza234</author><text>Update: I&#x27;m reading people with (more) negative experiences. I guess YMMV :) Still, I wouldn&#x27;t draw absolute conclusions based on this.<p>I was a Mensa associate, and participated to evening meetings in two countries (evening meetings are only part of the activities).<p>You&#x27;re assuming, with &quot;people insecure enough to join an IQ-restricted club&quot;, that associates sit on a high horse due to their IQ. It was quite the opposite; the clubs are very friendly, and what I remember is actually, fun nights playing board and social games (it&#x27;s amusing to think that a significant part of a &quot;high IQ&quot; club is games :)). Definitely, nobody would recognize it was a Mensa meeeting if they didn&#x27;t know it already.<p>In my personal view, joining the club because of (relatively) high IQ was no different than joining, say, a chess club - meeting people who have something in common.<p>Needless to say, there were lots of programmers :)</text></item><item><author>rory</author><text>&gt; <i>It’s also possible that people who join Mensa differ from other people in ways other than just IQ. For example, people preoccupied with intellectual pursuits may spend less time than the average person on physical exercise and social interaction, both of which have been shown to have broad benefits for psychological and physical health.</i><p>Is Mensa really an &quot;intellectual pursuit&quot;? I&#x27;m not sure exactly what Mensa does, but maybe people insecure enough to join an IQ-restricted club are more likely to be those who suffer from setbacks in other parts of their lives.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Alex3917</author><text>&gt; Besides talk about how you are in MENSA?<p>I was in an ultra-high IQ society called The Thousand. Not because my IQ is in the 99.9%, but because they weren&#x27;t smart enough to figure out how to password protect their Ning group.<p>There was very little content, and the average poster was probably less intelligent than the <i>average</i> HN poster.</text></comment> | <story><title>High IQs are associated with mental and physical disorders</title><url>https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bad-news-for-the-highly-intelligent/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>SavantIdiot</author><text>That&#x27;s interesting. I joined and was immediately turned off by the group.<p>The difference with joining a chess club is you get to play chess.<p>So let&#x27;s turn your proposal around: What do you get to do in a High IQ club that is different from any random collection of people?<p>Besides talk about how you are in MENSA?</text></item><item><author>pizza234</author><text>Update: I&#x27;m reading people with (more) negative experiences. I guess YMMV :) Still, I wouldn&#x27;t draw absolute conclusions based on this.<p>I was a Mensa associate, and participated to evening meetings in two countries (evening meetings are only part of the activities).<p>You&#x27;re assuming, with &quot;people insecure enough to join an IQ-restricted club&quot;, that associates sit on a high horse due to their IQ. It was quite the opposite; the clubs are very friendly, and what I remember is actually, fun nights playing board and social games (it&#x27;s amusing to think that a significant part of a &quot;high IQ&quot; club is games :)). Definitely, nobody would recognize it was a Mensa meeeting if they didn&#x27;t know it already.<p>In my personal view, joining the club because of (relatively) high IQ was no different than joining, say, a chess club - meeting people who have something in common.<p>Needless to say, there were lots of programmers :)</text></item><item><author>rory</author><text>&gt; <i>It’s also possible that people who join Mensa differ from other people in ways other than just IQ. For example, people preoccupied with intellectual pursuits may spend less time than the average person on physical exercise and social interaction, both of which have been shown to have broad benefits for psychological and physical health.</i><p>Is Mensa really an &quot;intellectual pursuit&quot;? I&#x27;m not sure exactly what Mensa does, but maybe people insecure enough to join an IQ-restricted club are more likely to be those who suffer from setbacks in other parts of their lives.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>no_one_ever</author><text>I don&#x27;t really care one way or the other, but my impression is the group offers a setting for like-minded (read &#x27;higher-IQ&#x27;) individuals to come talk about <i>anything</i> and not just <i>the thing</i> they are there for.</text></comment> |
5,900,521 | 5,900,085 | 1 | 2 | 5,899,766 | train | <story><title>The Constitution Applies When the Government Bans Americans From the Skies</title><url>http://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security-racial-justice/constitution-applies-when-government-bans-americans-skies</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>DanielBMarkham</author><text><i>Our brief highlighted the utter irrationality of the government&#x27;s No Fly List procedures. The plaintiffs in Latif all flew for years without any problems. But more than two years ago, they were suddenly branded as suspected terrorists based on secret evidence, publicly denied boarding on flights, and told by U.S. and airline officials that they were banned from flying¾perhaps forever.</i><p>One of the reasons that I&#x27;m not too attached to the specific details of the Snowden story (aside from supporting him, of course) is that it&#x27;s just a piece of a much larger picture. Snowden&#x27;s &quot;NSA direct server access&quot; is but a tiny speck in an ocean of civil liberties problems.<p>In this case, the government is effectively using a quasi-military&#x2F;police force to control who can travel the country. (Yes, I know you can drive, but for business travelers, air travel is many times the lifeblood of their work) People are banned from traveling, in many cases from performing their livelihoods. They do not know how they got on the list. They cannot get off the list.<p>In charge of all of this is an agency, best I can tell, that has a mission of making all <i>transportation</i> safe from random terror attacks.<p>It&#x27;s insane. Aside from not protecting anybody, can you begin to imagine the ways such a system could be abused? It staggers the mind.<p>There are probably around 100 people in the entire country that shouldn&#x27;t fly. But the way this no-fly list is constructed, it will continue to increase year-by-year, without any incentive to pare the numbers back. Is anybody doing the math on the kind of economic impact such a system will have over a few decades?<p>I&#x27;ve said it before. We need to completely disband the TSA. Structural adjustments are not going to fix its scope creep, conflict of interest with the military industrial complex, and lack of competence. It&#x27;s just gotta go.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Constitution Applies When the Government Bans Americans From the Skies</title><url>http://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security-racial-justice/constitution-applies-when-government-bans-americans-skies</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>gambiting</author><text>As a person coming from a former Soviet republic - it reminds me of times 30 years ago, where the usual conversation with any official would look like this :<p>&quot;no&quot;<p>&quot;why?&quot;<p>&quot;because the government says so&quot;<p>No trial, no hearing, someone somewhere in secret made the decision and you had nothing to say in that matter. Or if you tried, you would be charged with interfering with government business, or &quot;national security&quot; and jailed for a random amount of time.<p>Really that different to what the US government is doing right now?</text></comment> |
17,353,978 | 17,351,283 | 1 | 3 | 17,348,215 | train | <story><title>React Native at Airbnb</title><url>https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/react-native-at-airbnb-f95aa460be1c</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pjmlp</author><text>Yet another company discovers what many of us did ages ago with multi-platform frameworks.<p>Additional layers not supported by platform owners, mean extra debugging efforts tracking down which layer is responsible, catching up with native SDK features, need to be an expert at both layers, lack of integration with native debugging tools...<p>But business always wants the Ferrari solution at the cost of a Fiat panda.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vbezhenar</author><text>I&#x27;m not an expert in iOS or Android, but I shipped few React Native apps. Most of my debugging efforts were in webapp. In fact I don&#x27;t even remember anything about debugging native layer. And I actually built few native components including integration with compass and yandex maps. Sure, it&#x27;s not Ferrari, nobody outside of US has money for that kind of apps, it was just few hundred bucks for few weeks of my time, but app works on both platforms and customer was satisfied. I think that React Native is great for many apps. If you&#x27;re world-level corporation with dozens of developers and want absolutely best experience, go native, I guess, you don&#x27;t really care about few million bucks thrown here and there.<p>Also don&#x27;t underestimate a possibility to update app without those pesky moderators. It&#x27;s awesome, push button and all users are updated.</text></comment> | <story><title>React Native at Airbnb</title><url>https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/react-native-at-airbnb-f95aa460be1c</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pjmlp</author><text>Yet another company discovers what many of us did ages ago with multi-platform frameworks.<p>Additional layers not supported by platform owners, mean extra debugging efforts tracking down which layer is responsible, catching up with native SDK features, need to be an expert at both layers, lack of integration with native debugging tools...<p>But business always wants the Ferrari solution at the cost of a Fiat panda.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>RussianCow</author><text>While I don&#x27;t disagree with your premise, &quot;need to be an expert at both layers&quot; is absolutely still true if you build your app natively for each platform (more so, even). At least with a common platform, if nothing else, you can share quite a bit of code, and that alone might make it worth the extra layers.</text></comment> |
21,513,882 | 21,513,990 | 1 | 3 | 21,513,310 | train | <story><title>PeerTube v2</title><url>https://framablog.org/2019/11/12/peertube-has-worked-twice-as-hard-to-free-your-videos-from-youtube/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mcjiggerlog</author><text>I really want to like peertube but I think its UX, at least where it stands now, is going to hold it back from ever challenging youtube.<p>I use youtube a lot, and for a huge range of topics. I don&#x27;t have any interest in creating an account on a niche-specific instance and I think the average user who doesn&#x27;t even understand what federalization does even less. However, I literally don&#x27;t even understand how to make an account on what, as far I can tell, is supposed to be the go-to instance - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;peertube.social" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;peertube.social</a>. If there&#x27;s no main platform where you can watch and discover general content then there&#x27;s nothing that you can point new users to.<p>As a developer, if you want to host a niche video site, then peertube looks great. As a user, if you want to move off of youtube then I don&#x27;t think this is how you&#x27;re going to do that.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jaster</author><text>Probably because:<p>&gt; <i>Signups are currently closed, but you can get an account by sending a message (including your desired username) through the &quot;contact administrator&quot; button above. Please read the terms first.</i><p>(from <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;peertube.social&#x2F;about&#x2F;instance" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;peertube.social&#x2F;about&#x2F;instance</a>)</text></comment> | <story><title>PeerTube v2</title><url>https://framablog.org/2019/11/12/peertube-has-worked-twice-as-hard-to-free-your-videos-from-youtube/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mcjiggerlog</author><text>I really want to like peertube but I think its UX, at least where it stands now, is going to hold it back from ever challenging youtube.<p>I use youtube a lot, and for a huge range of topics. I don&#x27;t have any interest in creating an account on a niche-specific instance and I think the average user who doesn&#x27;t even understand what federalization does even less. However, I literally don&#x27;t even understand how to make an account on what, as far I can tell, is supposed to be the go-to instance - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;peertube.social" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;peertube.social</a>. If there&#x27;s no main platform where you can watch and discover general content then there&#x27;s nothing that you can point new users to.<p>As a developer, if you want to host a niche video site, then peertube looks great. As a user, if you want to move off of youtube then I don&#x27;t think this is how you&#x27;re going to do that.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>yorwba</author><text>There&#x27;s a list of instances that allow account creation: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;joinpeertube.org&#x2F;instances#instances-list" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;joinpeertube.org&#x2F;instances#instances-list</a> peertube.social is not one of them.</text></comment> |
14,142,283 | 14,141,845 | 1 | 2 | 14,141,454 | train | <story><title>A customer reported an error in the map used by Flight Simulator</title><url>https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20170418-00/?p=95985</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>kpao</author><text>It&#x27;s an everyday occurrence during the development of our app (Infinite Flight).<p>We often get customers complaining about a misplaced sticker on a livery, a missing exit door in a particular variant of a the 737-900... That type of stuff is easily verifiable. But for things like the airplane not behaving in a way they expect in certain conditions, or perhaps a wrong approach speed or angle, discussions usually start with:
&quot;We tuned the airplane based on information available to us at the time we built the airplane. We are happy to make any changes based on an actual report from one or more pilots flying on this airplane, or better yet, the aircraft manual if you can get your hands on one.&quot;<p>The discussion usually ends there :)<p>One we get often is about why it&#x27;s possible to do a barrel roll in a jet liner in Infinite Flight. We simply point them to the video of that test pilot who did one in a 707 ;-)</text></comment> | <story><title>A customer reported an error in the map used by Flight Simulator</title><url>https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20170418-00/?p=95985</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>sandworm101</author><text>Reminds me of the funniest thing i ever read on the internet. I once played FS with a realism mod that would simulate passenger needs. One day someone appeared on our &quot;virtual airline&quot; forum asking for help:<p>&quot; Hit severe turbulance over seattle on route to alaska. Didnt have seatbelt sign on. One dead, several injured. Am playing in-flight movie but passengers still angry. Should i serve meal early or wait until closer to destination?&quot;</text></comment> |
18,586,123 | 18,586,103 | 1 | 2 | 18,584,458 | train | <story><title>But why is a sphere's surface area four times its shadow? [video]</title><url>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNcFjFmqEc8</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Herodotus38</author><text>Does this relationship generalize? Hypothetically carrying further, if you take the derivative of the area (wrt radius) you get 2pi. A one dimensional circle is a line segment of length 2*r right? So how is 2 pi related to a line segment? Is it in some way analogous to the way perimeter and area are for 2d or surface area and volume? I don&#x27;t know the answer.</text></item><item><author>azernik</author><text>Fun fact: by the same logic, the perimeter of a circle is the derivative of its area.</text></item><item><author>war1025</author><text>It maybe answers a different question, but I always thought it was neat that the surface area for a sphere is just the derivative of its volume. Beyond that, I guess I never thought about it much.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>thaumasiotes</author><text>&gt; Does this relationship generalize?<p>Yes, the fundamental theorem of calculus guarantees this will be true. It&#x27;s the same phenomenon as that if your &quot;volume&quot; is the definite integral of f(t) from fixed <i>a</i> to variable <i>x</i>, then the rate of change of the volume (= the surface area) is f(<i>x</i>), the length of the infinitesimal sliver you&#x27;re about to add to the volume.<p>You can think of the solid sphere as an infinite stack of concentric infinitely thin hollow spheres. Each layer contributes volume to the solid sphere equal to its own area. (And this is what it means to calculate the volume of a sphere as the integral of the area of a spherical shell as the radius goes from 0 to r.)</text></comment> | <story><title>But why is a sphere's surface area four times its shadow? [video]</title><url>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNcFjFmqEc8</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Herodotus38</author><text>Does this relationship generalize? Hypothetically carrying further, if you take the derivative of the area (wrt radius) you get 2pi. A one dimensional circle is a line segment of length 2*r right? So how is 2 pi related to a line segment? Is it in some way analogous to the way perimeter and area are for 2d or surface area and volume? I don&#x27;t know the answer.</text></item><item><author>azernik</author><text>Fun fact: by the same logic, the perimeter of a circle is the derivative of its area.</text></item><item><author>war1025</author><text>It maybe answers a different question, but I always thought it was neat that the surface area for a sphere is just the derivative of its volume. Beyond that, I guess I never thought about it much.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>baddox</author><text>Seems to me that a one-dimensional circle would be two points on a number line separated by distance 2*r.</text></comment> |
28,039,972 | 28,038,111 | 1 | 2 | 28,032,226 | train | <story><title>Red delicious apples weren’t always horrible</title><url>https://newengland.com/today/food/red-delicious-apple/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mcv</author><text>As a kid, I was a fan of Golden Delicious, while others criticised it for being too mealy. That wasn&#x27;t my experience, at least at first. Eventually I encountered increasingly mealy Golden &quot;Delicious&quot;, and started favouring other apples. Even the cheapest apples here, like Elstar and Jonagold, are pretty good in comparison.<p>I wonder if it&#x27;s the fate of any breed to eventually be bred for looks instead of taste. If you see two apples (or any other fruit or vegetable) of the same name, aren&#x27;t you more likely to pick the tastier <i>looking</i> one? You can&#x27;t taste them in the shop, but you can compare by looks. So eventually, that&#x27;s what they end up being bred for.<p>I&#x27;d expect the only way to protect an apple from that fate, would be to trademark the name, and the rightsholder only licenses the name to apples from cultivars that breed for taste and don&#x27;t sacrifice taste for looks.<p>This might be a case where IP rights might be used for good.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>asdff</author><text>This is interesting, because I think apple picking orchards and farmers markets have an advantage here over supermarkets and delivery services. For public orchards, the apples are bred for taste first and foremost. Everyone goes in expecting to see dusty apples, with many worms too, but its fine since that&#x27;s how it is out in the countryside. Everyone is also eating apples constantly while out picking, even if encouraged not to its an open secret, since after you&#x27;ve tasted the honey you are going to end up with two huge bags of your favorite varieties at the end of the day. Farmers markets also do a lot of free samples, even in this pandemic. You can typically ask at a farmers market for a vendor to slice you a sample as well if you are curious, most of the time they just do it for you unprompted as you are browsing. People become regulars at farmers markets if the vendor has very high quality items. They are looking for freaky mutant looking heirloom stuff in a farmers market, not a perfect plastic looking apple for a good price.</text></comment> | <story><title>Red delicious apples weren’t always horrible</title><url>https://newengland.com/today/food/red-delicious-apple/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mcv</author><text>As a kid, I was a fan of Golden Delicious, while others criticised it for being too mealy. That wasn&#x27;t my experience, at least at first. Eventually I encountered increasingly mealy Golden &quot;Delicious&quot;, and started favouring other apples. Even the cheapest apples here, like Elstar and Jonagold, are pretty good in comparison.<p>I wonder if it&#x27;s the fate of any breed to eventually be bred for looks instead of taste. If you see two apples (or any other fruit or vegetable) of the same name, aren&#x27;t you more likely to pick the tastier <i>looking</i> one? You can&#x27;t taste them in the shop, but you can compare by looks. So eventually, that&#x27;s what they end up being bred for.<p>I&#x27;d expect the only way to protect an apple from that fate, would be to trademark the name, and the rightsholder only licenses the name to apples from cultivars that breed for taste and don&#x27;t sacrifice taste for looks.<p>This might be a case where IP rights might be used for good.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kqr</author><text>Sometimes you can go by smell! Produce that smells good also often tastes good.<p>I also have some luck going by looks, but by specifically looking for exemplars that have flawed looks (in ways that I know don&#x27;t negatively affect flavour). For types of produce where you can sort of tell which ones are good, other people tend to go for the ones that look good but also don&#x27;t have blemishes. That selection process results in the good ones being statistically overrepresented among the ones with flawed looks.</text></comment> |
20,290,840 | 20,289,467 | 1 | 3 | 20,284,298 | train | <story><title>Consumers Are Becoming Wise to Your Nudge</title><url>https://behavioralscientist.org/consumers-are-becoming-wise-to-your-nudge/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ForHackernews</author><text>It&#x27;s a perfectly apt comparison. Software &quot;engineers&quot; are not actually engineers. We are not professionals, we are wage labor.<p>* No professional code of ethics.<p>* No professional body that oversees the profession and sets standards.<p>* No licensing or certification (except maybe in Canada).<p>I&#x27;m sure I&#x27;ll get a bunch of flack for this, but it&#x27;s well past time developers stopped indulging in classist self-flattery pretending they&#x27;re the peers of doctors, lawyers, or accountants.</text></item><item><author>xorcist</author><text>What a strange comparison. Would you consider it equally unjustified to hold construction engineers and architects responsible for constructing a death trap? Even if that is what the customer ordered?<p>It&#x27;s probably not a coincidence that engineers and doctors are professionals well known to place their own ethical standards above their customers. It is expected that a doctor refuse to carry out a procedure that puts innocent people at harm.</text></item><item><author>learc83</author><text>When a building without enough exits burns down and kills 100 people, blaming the construction workers who built it isn&#x27;t going to help anything.<p>It&#x27;s rare that it&#x27;s developers who actually come up with these ideas, they&#x27;re usually just employees implementing someone else&#x27;s plan.<p>Unless we&#x27;re talking early startups--then there&#x27;s a good chance the developer is responsible.</text></item><item><author>ryandrake</author><text>Remember, for every software-based dark pattern or fraud out there, there was a software developer who implemented it. Before we throw stones, we, as a profession should get better about self-policing and cleaning our ethical house.</text></item><item><author>NeedMoreTea</author><text>At this point there&#x27;s little to no difference between con, dark pattern and fraud. I&#x27;d like to see them prosecuted as such.</text></item><item><author>seieste</author><text>Yesterday I went to book a hotel and Priceline had a room for $129, which was $20 cheaper than Expedia or any other site.<p>Curious, I clicked on it and went to the Priceline site, and watched as a JavaScript animation “rolled” the price from $129 to $149 and alerted me that someone <i>just</i> got the last room. Obviously the whole thing was fake. (Why would they implement such an animation, and how likely is it that someone got the room in those two seconds?)<p>At this point, it’s not even nudging or dark patterns but just straight out fraud.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>alexanderdmitri</author><text>Lawyers are notorious for being mercenaries for hire. The most successful firms contract with corporations that take advantage of the law to their gain and society&#x27;s detriment.<p>Medical doctors work for an industry that bankrupts sick people for being sick and and a huge number (if not a majority) of practicing doctors can be implicated in the opioid epidemic that has killed thousands and ruined countless lives.<p>Ethical contracts usually just lead to more politics imo. At the end of the day, we all bow to money in one way or another (some are just willing to bow lower than others).<p>Maybe we should stop pretending a profession can somehow make a person better than someone else in some sort of meta&#x2F;ethical way.<p>Addendum: Personally I wish the law were more open to allowing people to defend themselves. A few years ago I went to court to defend myself in what I was sure was a simple misunderstanding in traffic court. Halfway through my second sentence (not in the legal sense), the judge interrupted me. Then the police officer tried to explain what he put in the ticket may not have been comprehensive. The judge cut him off too and decided it was in my best interest to &quot;learn a lesson&quot; and found me guilty of a violation I was not guilty of. The lesson I learned was if I had paid a lawyer $500 I would have gotten an honest hearing. I don&#x27;t see the ethics or standards in that.</text></comment> | <story><title>Consumers Are Becoming Wise to Your Nudge</title><url>https://behavioralscientist.org/consumers-are-becoming-wise-to-your-nudge/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ForHackernews</author><text>It&#x27;s a perfectly apt comparison. Software &quot;engineers&quot; are not actually engineers. We are not professionals, we are wage labor.<p>* No professional code of ethics.<p>* No professional body that oversees the profession and sets standards.<p>* No licensing or certification (except maybe in Canada).<p>I&#x27;m sure I&#x27;ll get a bunch of flack for this, but it&#x27;s well past time developers stopped indulging in classist self-flattery pretending they&#x27;re the peers of doctors, lawyers, or accountants.</text></item><item><author>xorcist</author><text>What a strange comparison. Would you consider it equally unjustified to hold construction engineers and architects responsible for constructing a death trap? Even if that is what the customer ordered?<p>It&#x27;s probably not a coincidence that engineers and doctors are professionals well known to place their own ethical standards above their customers. It is expected that a doctor refuse to carry out a procedure that puts innocent people at harm.</text></item><item><author>learc83</author><text>When a building without enough exits burns down and kills 100 people, blaming the construction workers who built it isn&#x27;t going to help anything.<p>It&#x27;s rare that it&#x27;s developers who actually come up with these ideas, they&#x27;re usually just employees implementing someone else&#x27;s plan.<p>Unless we&#x27;re talking early startups--then there&#x27;s a good chance the developer is responsible.</text></item><item><author>ryandrake</author><text>Remember, for every software-based dark pattern or fraud out there, there was a software developer who implemented it. Before we throw stones, we, as a profession should get better about self-policing and cleaning our ethical house.</text></item><item><author>NeedMoreTea</author><text>At this point there&#x27;s little to no difference between con, dark pattern and fraud. I&#x27;d like to see them prosecuted as such.</text></item><item><author>seieste</author><text>Yesterday I went to book a hotel and Priceline had a room for $129, which was $20 cheaper than Expedia or any other site.<p>Curious, I clicked on it and went to the Priceline site, and watched as a JavaScript animation “rolled” the price from $129 to $149 and alerted me that someone <i>just</i> got the last room. Obviously the whole thing was fake. (Why would they implement such an animation, and how likely is it that someone got the room in those two seconds?)<p>At this point, it’s not even nudging or dark patterns but just straight out fraud.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fortran77</author><text>Amen! And as someone who is an actual licensed P.E., it still makes me a little angry when I see computer programmers who call themselves &quot;engineers.&quot; This is technically illegal under some circumstances in many states, but rarely enforced.</text></comment> |
14,732,911 | 14,732,987 | 1 | 2 | 14,732,660 | train | <story><title>iPhone Bugs Are Too Valuable to Report to Apple</title><url>https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/gybppx/iphone-bugs-are-too-valuable-to-report-to-apple</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>objclxt</author><text>But...this is true of every software vendor. Does anyone think Microsoft is paying market value for a remote code execution exploit in Edge? They&#x27;re not, they&#x27;ll give you $15k for it[1].<p>I find this particularly interesting:<p>&gt; [the security researchers] asked Apple&#x27;s security team for special iPhones that don&#x27;t have certain restrictions so it&#x27;s easier to hack them [...] these devices would have some security features, such as sandboxing, disabled in order to allow the researchers to continue doing their work.<p>If I go to Google or Facebook and ask them to, say, turn off some key security features on their site so I can find more bugs they&#x27;re gong to tell me to go take a hike. It&#x27;s unclear to me why a security researcher thinks Apple would give them access to a device with the sandbox bypassed. Why would they possibly trust them?<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;technet.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;library&#x2F;dn425036.aspx" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;technet.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;library&#x2F;dn425036.aspx</a></text></comment> | <story><title>iPhone Bugs Are Too Valuable to Report to Apple</title><url>https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/gybppx/iphone-bugs-are-too-valuable-to-report-to-apple</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>saurik</author><text>If you noticed your friend and neighbor left their car unlocked with the keys inside, would you steal their car, or would you tell them? I bet you would tell them.<p>Let&#x27;s say instead that there were some shady people who liked to hang out outside of the local gas station, and you have heard that they will give you a cut of any heist they pull off based on &quot;tips&quot;. Do you call them over to come steal the car? I bet you don&#x27;t do that either.<p>Let&#x27;s say that it is some random person&#x27;s car. I still doubt you steal the car, and I still doubt you tip off someone else to steal the car. However, I also doubt you go far out of your way to find and tell the owner of the car something is wrong.<p>What if, though, you knew that you could get a reward; something sizable enough to be at least worth your time, but nowhere near the value of either the car itself or what a band of thieves would be willing give you if you called them and tipped them off?<p>That&#x27;s all this bug bounty program is: it is designed to provide a reason for people who come across bugs to even bother coming to Apple at all rather than just putting it in a &quot;pile of fun bugs&quot;.<p>Only, instead of the moral issue being &quot;someone&#x27;s car might get stolen&quot;, it is more like &quot;you found a bug in the Tesla&#x27;s computer locks, which makes it trivial to walk up to any Tesla anywhere and just drive off (or even tell the Tesla to steal itself!)&quot;.<p>The companies that offer large sums of cash for key bugs, such as Zerodium, tend to be pretty &quot;black hat&quot;... their clients are doing stuff like corporate and governmental espionage; they might even have mafia-like organizations as clients for all you know.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wired.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;09&#x2F;top-shelf-iphone-hack-now-goes-1-5-million&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wired.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;09&#x2F;top-shelf-iphone-hack-now-goes...</a><p>So that&#x27;s the real ethical question involved here: do you go to Apple and get your $50-200,000, knowing that Apple will give you credit for the bug, let you talk about it at the next conference, and seems to care enough to try to fix these things quickly...<p>...or do you sell your bug to a group that resells it to some government which then uses it to try to spy on people like Ahmed Mansoor, &quot;an internationally recognized human rights defender, based in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and recipient of the Martin Ennals Award (sometimes referred to as a “Nobel Prize for human rights”)&quot;.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;citizenlab.org&#x2F;2016&#x2F;08&#x2F;million-dollar-dissident-iphone-zero-day-nso-group-uae&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;citizenlab.org&#x2F;2016&#x2F;08&#x2F;million-dollar-dissident-ipho...</a><p>FWIW, I have severe moral issues with this bug bounty program: I am a strong advocate of simultaneous disclosure, and while Apple does tend to fix bugs quickly, they have made it clear that they are not prepared to commit to timelines even while keeping users in the dark about what they need to do to protect themselves.<p>However, this article makes it sound like the entire concept of the bug bounty program is incompetent or something, as it is failing to pay as much money as the black market... while I have met a few people in the field who are more than happy to sell a bug to literally anyone with cash, the vast majority of people (even the ones whom I have sometimes called &quot;mercenaries&quot; for being willing to &quot;switch sides&quot;), have a pretty serious distaste for the idea of selling a bug to the highest bidder.<p>The real reasons you don&#x27;t hear much about people selling their bugs to Apple are that they are like Luca (who started doing this at the age of 17--he&#x27;s now either 19 or 20?--which is context that I think is really important for this evaluation) and are sitting on bugs because they are <i>personally valuable to them</i> (as without at least one bug, you don&#x27;t even own your own phone enough to look for others; so there&#x27;s a really big incentive to not disclose your last bug: this is the thing that Apple should really care to fix), that they are intending to release a public weaponized exploit in the form of a jailbreak (which, given the demand from legitimate users due to Apple&#x27;s insistence on locking down their devices for reasons that are more about business models than security, can be a ticket to world-wide fame that money just can&#x27;t buy, and which will also net you at least some donations on the side), or simply that they actually have been but they haven&#x27;t told anyone (a situation that seems so likely that it seems weird that this article discounts it).</text></comment> |
25,963,820 | 25,963,731 | 1 | 2 | 25,942,451 | train | <story><title>Disorderfs: FUSE-based filesystem that introduces non-determinism into metadata</title><url>https://salsa.debian.org/reproducible-builds/disorderfs</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>danbst</author><text>Sorry for plugging in. NixOS has a plan to use DisorderFS in making 100% reproducible build.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;r13y.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;r13y.com&#x2F;</a><p>As I understand it, currently several packages are not reproducible (like, python, pytest, gcc), so it is not priority, but when those large packages will be done, r13y will start using DisorderFS to uncover remaining reproducibility bugs.<p>This is too idealistic, but gives lots of pleasure about package space.</text></comment> | <story><title>Disorderfs: FUSE-based filesystem that introduces non-determinism into metadata</title><url>https://salsa.debian.org/reproducible-builds/disorderfs</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>EdSchouten</author><text>Buildbarn, a build cluster implementation for Bazel that I maintain, can also run build actions (compilation steps, unit tests) in a FUSE file system. Though the primary motivator for this is that it reduces the time to construct a build action&#x27;s file system to nearly instant, it has the advantage that I can also do things similar to disorderfs. Shuffling directory listings is actually something that I also added. Pretty useful!<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;buildbarn&#x2F;bb-remote-execution&#x2F;blob&#x2F;eb11502902afa733356d7f2027bd41ed3872766e&#x2F;pkg&#x2F;proto&#x2F;configuration&#x2F;fuse&#x2F;fuse.proto#L59-L70" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;buildbarn&#x2F;bb-remote-execution&#x2F;blob&#x2F;eb1150...</a></text></comment> |
1,120,807 | 1,120,827 | 1 | 2 | 1,120,145 | train | <story><title>Automatically followed by abusive ex-husband (and his friends) on Google Buzz</title><url>http://fugitivus.wordpress.com/2010/02/11/fuck-you-google/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>goodside</author><text>Recklessness and lack of foresight doesn't make you inhuman. If you forwarded this post back in time to the Buzz engineers, they would try to fix it before launch -- not laugh maniacally at the thought of an innocent woman fearing for her safety.</text></item><item><author>rwhitman</author><text>There are clearly no longer any humans working at google, just one giant heartless inhuman machine calling the shots...<p>Or at least thats how Google looks to the public these days. If thats the perception they want, they got it.<p>I think this Buzz privacy fiasco is an historic lesson in the convergence of humanity and software and the lesson learned is that privacy of personal relationships should be a fundamental right</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tom_rath</author><text>Time travel would be spiffy, but how easy is it to contact the Buzz engineers now?<p>If you've ever dealt with Google "technical support" (even if you're a customer who shovels them buckets of cash each week) you'll find that it's nearly impossible to reach an actual human being who can help you.<p>Convoluted as it is, getting a blog post ranked top in Hacker News seems the easiest (only?) way to get a genuine Google issue addressed. I hope they address this one AND create an actual means of contacting the people who are supposed to be running the place.</text></comment> | <story><title>Automatically followed by abusive ex-husband (and his friends) on Google Buzz</title><url>http://fugitivus.wordpress.com/2010/02/11/fuck-you-google/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>goodside</author><text>Recklessness and lack of foresight doesn't make you inhuman. If you forwarded this post back in time to the Buzz engineers, they would try to fix it before launch -- not laugh maniacally at the thought of an innocent woman fearing for her safety.</text></item><item><author>rwhitman</author><text>There are clearly no longer any humans working at google, just one giant heartless inhuman machine calling the shots...<p>Or at least thats how Google looks to the public these days. If thats the perception they want, they got it.<p>I think this Buzz privacy fiasco is an historic lesson in the convergence of humanity and software and the lesson learned is that privacy of personal relationships should be a fundamental right</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>petewarden</author><text>No, they wouldn't. I'm saying this as somebody who built a product around identifying your 'inner circle' from your email patterns[1]. The part I spent the most time on was figuring out how to protect people's privacy, and these scenarios were painfully obvious even to me.<p>Plenty of people at Google <i>have</i> to have thought this through, but decided the benefits to adoption of the current process outweigh the privacy problems that will happen to some people. That's pretty evil in my book...<p>[1] <a href="http://web.mailana.com/demoday/" rel="nofollow">http://web.mailana.com/demoday/</a></text></comment> |
28,683,892 | 28,683,523 | 1 | 2 | 28,682,305 | train | <story><title>Revenge Bedtime Procrastination</title><url>https://annehelen.substack.com/p/revenge-bedtime-procrastination</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pdpi</author><text>With all due respect, this is nonsense written by someone who doesn&#x27;t deal with this problem.<p>This argument comes from people seeing movement from A to B, and assuming all movement from A to B is identical. This particular pattern is that they&#x27;re motivated to <i>move toward</i> B (and the fact they started at A is incidental), and can&#x27;t understand that other people can move from A to B because they&#x27;re motivated to <i>move away</i> from A (and ending up at B is irrelevant). For an extreme example: A Saudi man and a Saudi woman both moving to Norway. The man might be motivated to move towards a country with snow where he can ski, while the woman is motivated to move away from somewhere where she has limited rights.<p>I understand (and sometimes fall prey to) the stereotypical Civilization &quot;one more turn&quot; phenomenon, and have e.g. booked holidays and pulled an all-nighter to power through a new Warcraft expansion or some such nonsense — a clear case of &quot;movement toward&quot;. But I also have anxiety issues, and this sort of &quot;movement away from&quot; procrastination is very much part of how it manifests itself. The two are distinct things that feel very, very different internally.<p>Ultimately, I don&#x27;t actually care what it is that I&#x27;m doing, scrolling through reddit or playing a game, or even tidying up the house. I might even be exhausted and struggling to stay awake — the point is I don&#x27;t want to go to bed, because high anxiety usually triggers my brain going into uncomfortable thoughts when I go to bed, and because going to bed puts me that much closer to the next day&#x27;s anxieties and stresses.<p>A different (and ultimately unhealthy) sort of &quot;movement toward&quot; is the choice to not go to bed as an act of self determination by way of rebellion. Sort of &quot;I don&#x27;t feel in control so I exercise control on the one thing I feel I can, consequences be damned&quot;. The important part isn&#x27;t the thing you&#x27;re doing, it&#x27;s that you&#x27;re choosing to do it. AIUI, self-harm works along these same lines.<p>In short: please don&#x27;t patronise people struggling with real problems by telling them they&#x27;re just over-intellectualising things.</text></item><item><author>kritiko</author><text>Ed Zitron just wrote about this, and I agree with him:<p><i>The whole conversation around “revenge bedtime procrastination” is a frustrating example - it is the idea that we are staying up late doing things we want to do instead of going to bed, which is otherwise known as “being a person.” I’ve seen several different articles about it, going into depths about “the why” of people staying awake doing stuff before bed. The answer is probably that they’re intellectually stimulated by the thing they’re doing and like doing it and are more interested in the thing than going to sleep. Big deal! But it’s now yet another codified entity for people to chew over and ask themselves about - am I “revenge bedtime procrastinating?” A take that seems profound and thoughtful, but is laser-focused on being shared by people saying “hey, I also do stuff instead of going to bed!” Entire articles now exist of people talking about why they stay awake instead of sleeping, as if that’s new, or thoughtful. And now people have a new term for something that didn’t need a term, and can bring intellectualism to “I stayed up until 1am playing Slay The Spire.”</i><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ez.substack.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;hot-takes-and-the-new-portable-intellectualism" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ez.substack.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;hot-takes-and-the-new-portable-int...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>haswell</author><text>This is really well stated and resonates with me deeply.<p>The “doing things I don’t even want to do” aspect of this is what also separates this from “just staying up late”.<p>For me, I’ve had some vague notion of trying to build a time buffer between today and tomorrow. Something to separate today’s stress from tomorrow’s stress.</text></comment> | <story><title>Revenge Bedtime Procrastination</title><url>https://annehelen.substack.com/p/revenge-bedtime-procrastination</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pdpi</author><text>With all due respect, this is nonsense written by someone who doesn&#x27;t deal with this problem.<p>This argument comes from people seeing movement from A to B, and assuming all movement from A to B is identical. This particular pattern is that they&#x27;re motivated to <i>move toward</i> B (and the fact they started at A is incidental), and can&#x27;t understand that other people can move from A to B because they&#x27;re motivated to <i>move away</i> from A (and ending up at B is irrelevant). For an extreme example: A Saudi man and a Saudi woman both moving to Norway. The man might be motivated to move towards a country with snow where he can ski, while the woman is motivated to move away from somewhere where she has limited rights.<p>I understand (and sometimes fall prey to) the stereotypical Civilization &quot;one more turn&quot; phenomenon, and have e.g. booked holidays and pulled an all-nighter to power through a new Warcraft expansion or some such nonsense — a clear case of &quot;movement toward&quot;. But I also have anxiety issues, and this sort of &quot;movement away from&quot; procrastination is very much part of how it manifests itself. The two are distinct things that feel very, very different internally.<p>Ultimately, I don&#x27;t actually care what it is that I&#x27;m doing, scrolling through reddit or playing a game, or even tidying up the house. I might even be exhausted and struggling to stay awake — the point is I don&#x27;t want to go to bed, because high anxiety usually triggers my brain going into uncomfortable thoughts when I go to bed, and because going to bed puts me that much closer to the next day&#x27;s anxieties and stresses.<p>A different (and ultimately unhealthy) sort of &quot;movement toward&quot; is the choice to not go to bed as an act of self determination by way of rebellion. Sort of &quot;I don&#x27;t feel in control so I exercise control on the one thing I feel I can, consequences be damned&quot;. The important part isn&#x27;t the thing you&#x27;re doing, it&#x27;s that you&#x27;re choosing to do it. AIUI, self-harm works along these same lines.<p>In short: please don&#x27;t patronise people struggling with real problems by telling them they&#x27;re just over-intellectualising things.</text></item><item><author>kritiko</author><text>Ed Zitron just wrote about this, and I agree with him:<p><i>The whole conversation around “revenge bedtime procrastination” is a frustrating example - it is the idea that we are staying up late doing things we want to do instead of going to bed, which is otherwise known as “being a person.” I’ve seen several different articles about it, going into depths about “the why” of people staying awake doing stuff before bed. The answer is probably that they’re intellectually stimulated by the thing they’re doing and like doing it and are more interested in the thing than going to sleep. Big deal! But it’s now yet another codified entity for people to chew over and ask themselves about - am I “revenge bedtime procrastinating?” A take that seems profound and thoughtful, but is laser-focused on being shared by people saying “hey, I also do stuff instead of going to bed!” Entire articles now exist of people talking about why they stay awake instead of sleeping, as if that’s new, or thoughtful. And now people have a new term for something that didn’t need a term, and can bring intellectualism to “I stayed up until 1am playing Slay The Spire.”</i><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ez.substack.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;hot-takes-and-the-new-portable-intellectualism" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ez.substack.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;hot-takes-and-the-new-portable-int...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rosstex</author><text>&gt;going to bed puts me that much closer to the next day&#x27;s anxieties and stresses<p>Rarely is this cycle of self-harm behavior expressed so plainly. Sorry you are dealing with this.</text></comment> |
19,931,249 | 19,931,314 | 1 | 2 | 19,930,819 | train | <story><title>Public's Dread of Nuclear Power Limits Its Deployment</title><url>https://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2019/may/nuclear-power-limits.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jwr</author><text>I have conflicted thoughts on this. On one hand, nuclear energy seems to be the only way we have right now to at least try to avoid the oncoming climate catastrophe. On the other hand, I&#x27;m reading &quot;Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies&quot; by Charles Perrow and it&#x27;s scary. Really scary. The combination of very complex systems with interactions that no one understands and greed, poor oversight, and other human behaviors results in something we should be afraid of. And yet, we might have no choice but to use nuclear power.<p>By the way, official statistics are one thing (I used to love quoting them as well), but if you look at the number of &quot;close calls&quot; that we had and if you look into the causes behind various incidents, a different picture emerges and you might lose some of the confidence.<p>I also now think that anyone taking part in the discussion should read Perrow&#x27;s book.<p>One thought I had while reading the book is that these days it might make sense to try to model these complex systems and run simulations to at least try to discover the unexpected interactions and mitigate them. Similar to (for example) how FoundationDB was developed. Simulations on that scale were likely difficult or impossible at the time when most nuclear plants were designed, but with modern computing power we might have better ways of reducing the problem domain.</text></comment> | <story><title>Public's Dread of Nuclear Power Limits Its Deployment</title><url>https://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2019/may/nuclear-power-limits.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>keiferski</author><text>Correct me if I’m wrong, but nuclear energy fundamentally requires a strong state, at least one capable enough of maintaining facilities and disposing of the waste.<p>Looking at human history, the assumption that some state power will always be able to manage it seems rather naive. There have been long stretches of feudalism, warfare, and all-out anarchy and indeed the current relatively stable forms of government are not the norm historically. If all it takes to cause a nuclear meltdown is a brief lapse in order or relative peace, then that doesn’t strike me as very anti-fragile.<p>Furthermore, nuclear power requires and perpetuates government control over things in a way that say, solar energy, doesn’t. Whether that’s a good thing or not depends on your political persuasion, of course.<p>That said, one could probably also make the opposite argument that nuclear power would lead to more incentives for peace and stability, in the same way that arguments for Mutually-Assured-Destruction argue that nuclear weapons prevent warfare.</text></comment> |
20,154,878 | 20,154,833 | 1 | 3 | 20,153,210 | train | <story><title>Google AMP Issue: Links to visit the site currently not working</title><url>https://twitter.com/scotch_io/status/1138316707150348288</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>xupybd</author><text>Just came to say I hate amp. If I want to go to a site I want that site not a google cache of it. It’s not a better experience. It just means another click to get to where I was going. Stop the madness Google kill amp.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>koboll</author><text>AMP should be the first stop on the federal government&#x27;s antitrust investigation. The sheer unfairness of being granted search priority if you hand over your content to Google is the pinnacle of leveraging monopoly power to gain power in another industry.</text></comment> | <story><title>Google AMP Issue: Links to visit the site currently not working</title><url>https://twitter.com/scotch_io/status/1138316707150348288</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>xupybd</author><text>Just came to say I hate amp. If I want to go to a site I want that site not a google cache of it. It’s not a better experience. It just means another click to get to where I was going. Stop the madness Google kill amp.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bmn__</author><text>&quot;Redirect AMP to HTML&quot;
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;amp2html&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;amp2html&#x2F;</a></text></comment> |
12,825,597 | 12,825,420 | 1 | 3 | 12,824,349 | train | <story><title>ESPN Loses 621,000 Subscribers; Worst Month in Company History</title><url>http://www.outkickthecoverage.com/espn-loses-621-000-subscribers-worst-month-in-company-history-102916</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Phlow</author><text>I would pay ESPN $10 a month for an ESPN streaming app that had access to all the college football games (no blackouts), alone, as long as it didn&#x27;t require a cable subscription. The current ESPN streaming app is garbage, compared to Netflix, and other on-demand interfaces. It&#x27;s not available on my Smart TV. The quality of the streaming is terrible. It&#x27;s slow to bring up video. The ads are repetitive and annoying, and it&#x27;s a second class citizen with wait screens while local ads are up on broadcast.<p>Comcast recently decided to institute a 1TB&#x2F;month cap in my area, with a charge of $10 per 50GB after up to $200, or $50 for unlimited (opt-in, by the sounds). There are no technical reasons why they did this, it was entirely to gain more revenue to make up for the cord cutters. Their own streaming service doesn&#x27;t apply to their data cap.<p>The whole thing is garbage and needs to be completely changed. The moment Google Fiber or something better comes along in my area, I&#x27;m going internet only, and I&#x27;ll just go without until they realize how badly they&#x27;ve managed to move with the trends and start fixing it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>IBM</author><text>Would you spend $25-35 per month for ESPN? Because that&#x27;s what it would probably cost if it wasn&#x27;t subsidized by the bundle.<p>Your answer to that question may in fact be yes, but the economics don&#x27;t work out. Disney would make more money getting $6 from every cable subscriber than try to scratch and claw to scale up an OTT service like Netflix that would inevitably cannibalize their current business.<p>The only thing that will change the economics is when the market forces their hand, which is what this story is about.</text></comment> | <story><title>ESPN Loses 621,000 Subscribers; Worst Month in Company History</title><url>http://www.outkickthecoverage.com/espn-loses-621-000-subscribers-worst-month-in-company-history-102916</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Phlow</author><text>I would pay ESPN $10 a month for an ESPN streaming app that had access to all the college football games (no blackouts), alone, as long as it didn&#x27;t require a cable subscription. The current ESPN streaming app is garbage, compared to Netflix, and other on-demand interfaces. It&#x27;s not available on my Smart TV. The quality of the streaming is terrible. It&#x27;s slow to bring up video. The ads are repetitive and annoying, and it&#x27;s a second class citizen with wait screens while local ads are up on broadcast.<p>Comcast recently decided to institute a 1TB&#x2F;month cap in my area, with a charge of $10 per 50GB after up to $200, or $50 for unlimited (opt-in, by the sounds). There are no technical reasons why they did this, it was entirely to gain more revenue to make up for the cord cutters. Their own streaming service doesn&#x27;t apply to their data cap.<p>The whole thing is garbage and needs to be completely changed. The moment Google Fiber or something better comes along in my area, I&#x27;m going internet only, and I&#x27;ll just go without until they realize how badly they&#x27;ve managed to move with the trends and start fixing it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sseagull</author><text>&gt; The moment Google Fiber or something better comes along in my area<p>I&#x27;ve got some bad news - Google has &quot;paused&quot; its fiber rollout. With that on life support and Verizon FIOS rollout seemingly dead, I don&#x27;t see much changing anytime soon.</text></comment> |
39,714,762 | 39,714,902 | 1 | 2 | 39,712,634 | train | <story><title>I figured out how DMARC works, and it almost broke me</title><url>https://simonandrews.ca/articles/how-to-set-up-spf-dkim-dmarc</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>RedShift1</author><text>You can boil it down to this:<p>* SPF: Tell the world which servers are allowed to send email for your domain<p>* DKIM: Weak version of digitally signed email, add a header that only mailservers that have the private key you supply can generate. Tampering invalidates the signature (for example when an email gets relayed for a second time). The private key used counts for your whole domain.<p>* DMARC: Tells other mailservers what to do when the SPF and&#x2F;or DKIM check fails, and also allows you to set an address where to send reports to. These reports contain counts of messages that failed the SPF and&#x2F;or DKIM checks.</text></comment> | <story><title>I figured out how DMARC works, and it almost broke me</title><url>https://simonandrews.ca/articles/how-to-set-up-spf-dkim-dmarc</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>pixelmonkey</author><text>Shortcuts for HN readers to avoid the pain of SPF, DKIM, and DMARC.<p>- Cloudflare Email Routing and DMARC Management. If all you need is inbound email inboxes at a custom domain that routes to your GMail or other addresses, this is the way to go.<p>- Fastmail. If you want an alternative to GWorkspace that is cheaper and more lightweight and that has its own non-Google mobile apps and a fast web app. Also if you need IMAP, POP, SMTP support.<p>- GWorkspace. Sometimes you just have to give in to the overlords. If you need inbound&#x2F;outbound business mail that just works and integrates with all the Googley services, including GMail and GDrive, you just have to give in to this. Cloudflare makes the DNS setup easier if you go with this option. (They have a x-admin-panel integration.)<p>- Honorable mention for Opalstack.com. They&#x27;ll give you open source powered email-server-in-a-box. On a shared Linux server, Procmail rule support, and with Roundcube access for mailboxes.<p>- The tool <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;learndmarc.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;learndmarc.com</a> is particularly helpful for debugging. It generates a unique email address you can send an email to and it&#x27;ll tell you what&#x27;s happening from an SPF, DKIM, and DMARC standpoint. All in the browser.</text></comment> |
18,565,234 | 18,562,475 | 1 | 3 | 18,561,587 | train | <story><title>Go 2, here we come</title><url>https://blog.golang.org/go2-here-we-come</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>joppy</author><text>I’m hoping that <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;golang&#x2F;go&#x2F;issues&#x2F;19623" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;golang&#x2F;go&#x2F;issues&#x2F;19623</a> will come through, and we’ll get a native “true integer” type (and hopefully a rational one as well, though maybe this is pushing it a bit). This is really something that should be implemented at the language level, so that “int” can become a true integer, yet still remain efficient in many cases.<p>It is bizarre to me that languages boasting built-in language-level data structures like lists, hashtables, etc are content to just leave us with the bare minimum support of <i>numbers</i>, being basically whatever the hardware thinks a number is. The semantics of integers and fractions are perfect, and everybody already knows them. On the other hand, overflows in int32’s are weird, and if your idea of a fraction is a floating-point number, then you can never have something like (5&#x2F;3)*6 evaluate to 10 exactly.<p>To be clear, I think fixed-width integers and floating-point numbers have their place, I just see no reason why they should be the default.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jolmg</author><text>I like how Haskell does it. When you simply write a number like &quot;3&quot; it will infer the type to be &quot;Num a =&gt; a&quot; which means it could be any type you have loaded that defines the functions in the typeclass Num:<p><pre><code> class Num a where
(+) :: a -&gt; a -&gt; a
(-) :: a -&gt; a -&gt; a
(*) :: a -&gt; a -&gt; a
negate :: a -&gt; a
abs :: a -&gt; a
signum :: a -&gt; a
fromInteger :: Integer -&gt; a
</code></pre>
&quot;3.0&quot; would be &quot;Fractional a =&gt; a&quot; which means it defines the functions in the typeclass Fractional (in addition to being a Num):<p><pre><code> class Num a =&gt; Fractional a where
(&#x2F;) :: a -&gt; a -&gt; a
recip :: a -&gt; a
fromRational :: Rational -&gt; a
</code></pre>
Depending on how you use the value, the type would be further refined in compile-time. For example, if you did `recip 3`, 3 couldn&#x27;t be any Num anymore, it would have to be some Fractional.<p>Regarding (5&#x2F;3)*6, it does equal 10 using floating point. A better example would be how 0.1 + 0.2 is not equal to 0.3. We can see this:<p><pre><code> ghci&gt; 0.1 + 0.2 == (0.3 :: Float)
False
</code></pre>
If we specified that we&#x27;re working with Rational values, which are also Fractional a =&gt; a, and which are defined as a pair of integers, one representing a numerator and the other a denominator, roughly like so:<p><pre><code> type Rational = Ratio Integer
data Ratio a = a :% a
</code></pre>
then we can see that 0.1 + 0.2 does equal to 0.3:<p><pre><code> ghci&gt; 0.1 + 0.2 == (0.3 :: Rational)
True
</code></pre>
It&#x27;s pretty cool that Haskell lets you define new types of numbers and use them like any other. While you can transparently support hardware type numbers, represented by types like Int, Float, Double, Word, Word8, Word16, Word32, Word64, you also have transparent support for arbitrary precision Integer and Rational. Writing your functions to work with the typeclasses like Num and Fractional lets your functions work with any of these types and future types defined.</text></comment> | <story><title>Go 2, here we come</title><url>https://blog.golang.org/go2-here-we-come</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>joppy</author><text>I’m hoping that <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;golang&#x2F;go&#x2F;issues&#x2F;19623" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;golang&#x2F;go&#x2F;issues&#x2F;19623</a> will come through, and we’ll get a native “true integer” type (and hopefully a rational one as well, though maybe this is pushing it a bit). This is really something that should be implemented at the language level, so that “int” can become a true integer, yet still remain efficient in many cases.<p>It is bizarre to me that languages boasting built-in language-level data structures like lists, hashtables, etc are content to just leave us with the bare minimum support of <i>numbers</i>, being basically whatever the hardware thinks a number is. The semantics of integers and fractions are perfect, and everybody already knows them. On the other hand, overflows in int32’s are weird, and if your idea of a fraction is a floating-point number, then you can never have something like (5&#x2F;3)*6 evaluate to 10 exactly.<p>To be clear, I think fixed-width integers and floating-point numbers have their place, I just see no reason why they should be the default.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tigershark</author><text>I am misunderstanding or really go is using the ‘int’ type that can be 32 or 64 bit depending on the system that it runs on???
If this is the case I think that is crazy and I can’t think of any useful use case for it.
If it’s not the case then please explain me what that proposal is really about...</text></comment> |
37,090,775 | 37,090,359 | 1 | 2 | 37,088,716 | train | <story><title>Want to pwn a satellite? Turns out it's surprisingly easy</title><url>https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/11/satellite_hacking_black_hat/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>_whiteCaps_</author><text>I post this on every satellite related thread, but if you&#x27;re interested in this stuff, you can easily listen to amateur radio satellites with an RTL-SDR dongle and a simple antenna.<p>There&#x27;s even a repeater on the ISS, and sometimes you can hear the astronauts making contact with people on the ground in their spare time.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amsat.org&#x2F;fm-satellite-frequency-summary&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amsat.org&#x2F;fm-satellite-frequency-summary&#x2F;</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Want to pwn a satellite? Turns out it's surprisingly easy</title><url>https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/11/satellite_hacking_black_hat/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Thervicarl</author><text>From what I read in the PDF, the analysis is very debatable (with The Register putting forward mostly the nonsensical allegations).<p>Disclosure: I work on satellite design and in the recent years on a program that is part of the NewSpace. I have an intimate knowledge of how what I help design works but a limited knowledge of what others may be doing.<p>A couple of insights:<p>* I started working on satellites in a large industrial group where, while not being handled by world class cybersecurity experts, secure communications with the satellites rely on a sane use of proven encryption protocols<p>* I am not sure when this level of security became standard and what was done to secure the satellites before hardware-level encryption with modern algorithms became available<p>* I was astounded when I discovered the level of casualness for everything related to security on scientific satellite projects, with even recent projects led by major agencies considering that always encrypting command and monitoring is overkill<p>And my main grip is that the study relies on asking universities that have the lowest bar in terms of caring about security (they already struggle enough to build a working thing) and then extrapolating from a specious argument that it must be worse on commercial spacecrafts.<p>&gt; One surprising result was that the larger the satellite, the more vulnerable it was. Larger machinery typically used more commercial off-the-shelf components and was thus more vulnerable since the code base was public, whereas smaller CubeSats tended to use custom code.<p>Also<p>&gt; a satellite should be designed so that TCs do not compromise the satellite’s stability without further validation<p>Says who ? What validation ? If an operator had the right to have a telecommand sent to the satellite, who or what aboard the satellite should decide if this telecommand was legitimate.<p>From experience, there is a myriad of things that you think are usually not a good idea to make your satellite do and then, when you need it as a workaround or mitigation for an unexpected condition, you are happy you have not implemented a list of authorized actions that is too constrained.<p>PS: It reminds me of the guy that was able to capture the GPS coordinates of an airplane broadcasted to the In-Flight Entertainment systems and got a lot of press coverage by extrapolating that it meant he could also take control of the aircraft from his seat in the cabin.</text></comment> |
5,879,299 | 5,879,268 | 1 | 2 | 5,878,970 | train | <story><title>Politicians call for UK security services to be given greater monitoring powers</title><url>http://bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-22891845</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>einhverfr</author><text>I also suspect that the timing works against this bill. It takes brashness (and not much sense) to propose this bill at this time.<p>Yes, in the middle of a major international scandal, let&#x27;s imitate the bad guys. That&#x27;s a great idea....</text></item><item><author>anon1385</author><text>This piece is by Allegra Stratton, somebody with well known ties to the Conservative party. She is giving this letter more weight than it is worth (none of those opposition MPs are part of the shadow cabinet, and their positions on this were already known as far as I remember) to try and put pressure on the Lib Dems to cave on this issue. Not that I believe Labour is going to fight this, just that this letter doesn&#x27;t represent any change or &quot;renewed pressure&quot;. John Reid, another Labour former Home Secretary, was already making a disgusting spectacle of himself all over the news in the days after Lee Rigby was murdered saying it showed the need for more government surveillance.<p>Additionally, when Jack Straw comes out in support of some new Home Office policy, you have to put that into context. He should be facing public trial over deporting people to be tortured and lying about it[1][2], and the current government aimed to prevent that with their expansion of secret courts (part of the Justice and Security Act)[3], so he owes them big time.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Jack_Straw#Rendition_and_torture_allegations" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Jack_Straw#Rendition_and_tortu...</a>
[2] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.guardian.co.uk&#x2F;politics&#x2F;2013&#x2F;apr&#x2F;02&#x2F;abdel-hakim-belhaj-jack-straw" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.guardian.co.uk&#x2F;politics&#x2F;2013&#x2F;apr&#x2F;02&#x2F;abdel-hakim-b...</a>
[3] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.guardian.co.uk&#x2F;law&#x2F;2012&#x2F;sep&#x2F;25&#x2F;secret-courts-the-essential-guide" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.guardian.co.uk&#x2F;law&#x2F;2012&#x2F;sep&#x2F;25&#x2F;secret-courts-the-...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>anon1385</author><text>It&#x27;s hard to say what will happen. Milliband will whip his MPs to vote in favour of it, so it can pass without Lib Dem support. That would risk collapsing the coalition though. Fixed terms mean that the Tories would probably limp on as a minority government till 2015, but without much ability to get anything through (and they have little chance of getting reelected in 2015) so they would have to be really committed to this issue to do that.<p>Lib Dems know they are going to get a hammering in 2015 and they need to start differentiating themselves from the Tories to have any hope at all, but it seems too soon for that at the moment. Thus-far they have proven incapable of taking a stand on anything of significance. Sadly polling probably indicates that this isn&#x27;t something the public care enough about to make it worth them bringing down the government over, so I can easily see them rolling over in exchange for a few more years sucking on the teat of power. Or perhaps the most cowardly thing of all: making it a free-vote so that enough Lib Dem MPs will vote for it while Lib Dem HQ can claim to oppose it without any risk to the coalition.<p>It may be decided by UKIP and backbench Tories. If they are against it I can&#x27;t see Cameron pushing it. Unfortunately a lot of the Tory backbench rebels are also staunch Atlanticists and heavily involved in the defence&#x2F;security industry (think Liam Fox).<p>Whatever happens this will be on the books by ~2016 unless there is a significant public backlash.</text></comment> | <story><title>Politicians call for UK security services to be given greater monitoring powers</title><url>http://bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-22891845</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>einhverfr</author><text>I also suspect that the timing works against this bill. It takes brashness (and not much sense) to propose this bill at this time.<p>Yes, in the middle of a major international scandal, let&#x27;s imitate the bad guys. That&#x27;s a great idea....</text></item><item><author>anon1385</author><text>This piece is by Allegra Stratton, somebody with well known ties to the Conservative party. She is giving this letter more weight than it is worth (none of those opposition MPs are part of the shadow cabinet, and their positions on this were already known as far as I remember) to try and put pressure on the Lib Dems to cave on this issue. Not that I believe Labour is going to fight this, just that this letter doesn&#x27;t represent any change or &quot;renewed pressure&quot;. John Reid, another Labour former Home Secretary, was already making a disgusting spectacle of himself all over the news in the days after Lee Rigby was murdered saying it showed the need for more government surveillance.<p>Additionally, when Jack Straw comes out in support of some new Home Office policy, you have to put that into context. He should be facing public trial over deporting people to be tortured and lying about it[1][2], and the current government aimed to prevent that with their expansion of secret courts (part of the Justice and Security Act)[3], so he owes them big time.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Jack_Straw#Rendition_and_torture_allegations" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Jack_Straw#Rendition_and_tortu...</a>
[2] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.guardian.co.uk&#x2F;politics&#x2F;2013&#x2F;apr&#x2F;02&#x2F;abdel-hakim-belhaj-jack-straw" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.guardian.co.uk&#x2F;politics&#x2F;2013&#x2F;apr&#x2F;02&#x2F;abdel-hakim-b...</a>
[3] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.guardian.co.uk&#x2F;law&#x2F;2012&#x2F;sep&#x2F;25&#x2F;secret-courts-the-essential-guide" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.guardian.co.uk&#x2F;law&#x2F;2012&#x2F;sep&#x2F;25&#x2F;secret-courts-the-...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>7952</author><text>Most &quot;normal&quot; people have probably been bored stupid by geeks getting upset over this issue in the last week. It is possible to follow a story passively in the background, and come to a conclusion about it based on faith rather than objective reasoning. However, bad things get; a lot of people will always believe that &quot;the war will be over by, Christmas&quot; because it is easier to just have faith and ignore the nerds.<p>There is a problem in how hackers&#x2F;geeks&#x2F;techies portray themselves. You know that this kind of monitoring is bad because if you had the data you could do bad things (but you wouldn&#x27;t because of ethics). But every app still expects people to hand over the same data and to trust the developer. Expecting people to know which geeks they can trust and which are creepy is a big ask.</text></comment> |
41,385,730 | 41,385,667 | 1 | 3 | 41,385,546 | train | <story><title>A post by Guido van Rossum removed for violating Python community guidelines</title><url>https://discuss.python.org/t/should-we-consider-ranked-choice-voting-for-sc-elections/61880</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>oblvious-earth</author><text>The original text stated:<p>&gt; I don’t know much about voting systems, but I know someone who does. Unfortunately he’s currently banned. Maybe we can wait until his 3-month ban expires and ask him for advice?<p>Currently, the text reads:<p>&gt; This post was flagged by the community and is temporarily hidden.<p>Since it has been hidden for more than 24 hours, this suggests that a moderator action has marked it as permanently hidden. Due to a recent decision, this means no one outside of the moderators or admins can view it: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;discuss.python.org&#x2F;t&#x2F;moderated-posts-are-no-longer-publicly-visible&#x2F;61648" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;discuss.python.org&#x2F;t&#x2F;moderated-posts-are-no-longer-p...</a><p>Edit: I meant to post slightly more direct link in title: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;discuss.python.org&#x2F;t&#x2F;should-we-consider-ranked-choice-voting-for-sc-elections&#x2F;61880&#x2F;6" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;discuss.python.org&#x2F;t&#x2F;should-we-consider-ranked-choic...</a><p>Edit 2: Some comments suggest that Guido was banned from posting, but this is not accurate. I have edited the title from &quot;Guido van Rossum&#x27;s Post Removed for Violating Python Community Guidelines&quot; to &quot;A Post by Guido van Rossum Removed for Violating Python Community Guidelines&quot; to clarify what actually happened.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>EvanAnderson</author><text>I&#x27;m an outsider who only knows Guido van Rossum by way of interviews his writing.<p>Assuming your quote is what the original text said (I don&#x27;t disbelieve you-- but nobody can see it to confirm) why would this have violated community standards? Is there some rule about not mentioning &quot;un-persons&quot; or something?<p>It&#x27;s very confusing.<p>Edit: Answering my own question. There appears to be a kerfuffle afoot. Apparently the Steering Council has suspended a core developer for 3 months[0] but isn&#x27;t naming the suspended developer or citing specific reasons why (per [1] and sparking a call for a vote of no confidence in the council which did not succeed).<p>Apparently even mentioning the suspended person (without naming them) is enough for even Guido van Rossum to be censored. Wow.<p>Edit 2: The suspended developer is Tim Peters[3].<p>Edit 3: Altered paragraph &quot;Edit:&quot; from &quot;...or the reason why[1] (&quot; to &quot;...or citing specific reasons why (per [1]&quot;.<p>Edit 4: Added &quot;which did not succeed&quot; after &quot;...vote of no confidence in the council&quot;.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;discuss.python.org&#x2F;t&#x2F;three-month-suspension-for-a-core-developer&#x2F;60250" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;discuss.python.org&#x2F;t&#x2F;three-month-suspension-for-a-co...</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;discuss.python.org&#x2F;t&#x2F;calling-for-a-vote-of-no-confidence&#x2F;61557" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;discuss.python.org&#x2F;t&#x2F;calling-for-a-vote-of-no-confid...</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrismcdonough.substack.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;the-shameful-defenestration-of-tim" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrismcdonough.substack.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;the-shameful-defenestr...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>A post by Guido van Rossum removed for violating Python community guidelines</title><url>https://discuss.python.org/t/should-we-consider-ranked-choice-voting-for-sc-elections/61880</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>oblvious-earth</author><text>The original text stated:<p>&gt; I don’t know much about voting systems, but I know someone who does. Unfortunately he’s currently banned. Maybe we can wait until his 3-month ban expires and ask him for advice?<p>Currently, the text reads:<p>&gt; This post was flagged by the community and is temporarily hidden.<p>Since it has been hidden for more than 24 hours, this suggests that a moderator action has marked it as permanently hidden. Due to a recent decision, this means no one outside of the moderators or admins can view it: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;discuss.python.org&#x2F;t&#x2F;moderated-posts-are-no-longer-publicly-visible&#x2F;61648" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;discuss.python.org&#x2F;t&#x2F;moderated-posts-are-no-longer-p...</a><p>Edit: I meant to post slightly more direct link in title: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;discuss.python.org&#x2F;t&#x2F;should-we-consider-ranked-choice-voting-for-sc-elections&#x2F;61880&#x2F;6" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;discuss.python.org&#x2F;t&#x2F;should-we-consider-ranked-choic...</a><p>Edit 2: Some comments suggest that Guido was banned from posting, but this is not accurate. I have edited the title from &quot;Guido van Rossum&#x27;s Post Removed for Violating Python Community Guidelines&quot; to &quot;A Post by Guido van Rossum Removed for Violating Python Community Guidelines&quot; to clarify what actually happened.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>_0ffh</author><text>&gt; this means no one outside of the moderators or admins can view it<p>Imo that kind of deliberate intransparency is a massive red flag. Here for example I can choose to see hidden comments and make up my own mind about the content, which is excellent. Even if I don&#x27;t use the feature, the fact that I could if I wanted to is a massive plus for trust in the process.</text></comment> |
13,181,212 | 13,181,185 | 1 | 3 | 13,180,973 | train | <story><title>Uber ordered to stop self-driving vehicle service in San Francisco</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2016/12/14/uber-ordered-to-stop-self-driving-vehicle-service-in-san-francisco/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kt9</author><text>Looks like the video was taken by a dash cam from a police car - am I reading that right?<p>If thats true I wonder why the cop didn&#x27;t pull the uber over.<p>edit: This also leads to another question - how does a cop pull a self driving car over? Does the car know to respond to police lights? And if it does pull over then who does the cop talk to?</text></item><item><author>stuckagain</author><text>Self-driving Uber car blows red signal at crosswalk in SF:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=_CdJ4oae8f4" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=_CdJ4oae8f4</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>maxerickson</author><text><i>The video, published by the San Francisco Examiner, was captured by a dashcam mounted inside a vehicle operated by Luxor Cab, one of SF’s licensed cab companies.</i><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;12&#x2F;14&#x2F;uber-looking-into-incident-of-self-driving-car-running-a-red-light-captured-on-dashcam&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;12&#x2F;14&#x2F;uber-looking-into-incident...</a><p>The car certainly should know how to respond to police lights&#x2F;sirens. I was reading Google&#x27;s monthly reports on their cars and they were talking about adding a pull over response to their system.</text></comment> | <story><title>Uber ordered to stop self-driving vehicle service in San Francisco</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2016/12/14/uber-ordered-to-stop-self-driving-vehicle-service-in-san-francisco/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kt9</author><text>Looks like the video was taken by a dash cam from a police car - am I reading that right?<p>If thats true I wonder why the cop didn&#x27;t pull the uber over.<p>edit: This also leads to another question - how does a cop pull a self driving car over? Does the car know to respond to police lights? And if it does pull over then who does the cop talk to?</text></item><item><author>stuckagain</author><text>Self-driving Uber car blows red signal at crosswalk in SF:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=_CdJ4oae8f4" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=_CdJ4oae8f4</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>russell_h</author><text>It was a taxi.</text></comment> |
41,705,431 | 41,705,000 | 1 | 2 | 41,699,730 | train | <story><title>GnuCash 5.9</title><url>https://www.gnucash.org/news.phtml</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>VonGuard</author><text>It&#x27;s great for personal or very small businesses but god help you if you are building a real startup with GNUCash. I am speaking from experience here, GNUCash zealotry is a plague. I honestly wish this project basically did not exist, because the business world despises GNUCash, ONLY cares about QuickBooks, and using anything else is a giant waste of everyone&#x27;s time. Believe me, I have been fighting this fight in non-profits and startups since the early 2000&#x27;s. It&#x27;s not a fight ANYONE should ever have. I USED TO BE THE &quot;WE MUST USE GNUCASH&quot; GUY!<p>Now, in a perfect world, yes, GNUCash and literally ANYTHING other than Quickbooks would be an option for small business accounting. But we do not live in a perfect world. We live in a world where Intuit has fought VERY hard to make damn sure no one can use anything but Quickbooks, and their iron fist is clad in very specific APIs and file formats.<p>If you do not use Quickbooks:<p>* Your bank will hate you.<p>* Your investors will hate you.<p>* Your payroll system won&#x27;t work.<p>* Your tax systems won&#x27;t work.<p>* Your accountant won&#x27;t work.<p>* Grants are even off the table in some cases.<p>* Some places won&#x27;t audit without Quickbooks.<p>I constantly run into well intentioned open source zealots who demand the use of GNUCash. This is terrible. Don&#x27;t be that person.<p>The world has chosen QuickBooks. This choice was made under duress and with corrupt power brokering. But the decision has been made. Maybe there are some OK SaaS options, but they only exist as long as Intuit allows them to exist. Anything competing with Quickbooks is going to be bought and killed by Intuit, so you&#x27;re going into a dead-end alley. I know that leaves GNUCash on the table, but...<p>Please, do not make the mistake my many non-profits and businesses have repeatedly made when I was not paying enough attention to scream bloody murder about it. I turn my back for one minute, and engineers are installing GNUCash on the accountant&#x27;s Mac Laptop.<p>It&#x27;s 100% always come back to bite us in the ass, as we&#x27;ve had to change platforms on-demand in order to meet a funding deadline, a bank requirement, a loan ask, or a grant application. And it&#x27;s ALWAYS the accountant in the org that gets saddled with the 60+ hour work weeks it takes to redo everything. If I was an acocuntant, I&#x27;d quit if told to use GNUCash, but most of them kinda don&#x27;t know any better because, hey, why not try some thing the techies are all excited about!<p>GNUCash is a wonderful project. I wish we could all use it. But we cannot. Not for real business. And honestly, this is only for contrived, arbitrary reasons. But these reasons exist. The world is 100% built to prevent people from not using Quickbooks at every turn, and you only harm yourself by demanding open source software for accounting. As I said to the director of my most recent non-profit: &quot;You would not tolerate the accountant coming in here and demanding you use NetBeans. Please, give them the same courtesy you&#x27;d expect them to give you on tool choice.&quot;</text></item><item><author>JaggerFoo</author><text>I use GnuCash for business accounting and it does what I need. I don&#x27;t use QuickBooks as VC&#x27;s recommend in blog posts. QB has some convenient features, but that is not enough for me to pay the price QB is asking. I don&#x27;t need VC money or a CPA.<p>I haven&#x27;t tried using GnuCash with Sqlite, but I would like to experiment when I get the time. Is it reliable?<p>I used to be a technical&#x2F;functional engineer for Oracle EBS, so I dealt with very complex schemas that interlinked with each other especially in the sub-ledgers.<p>I&#x27;ve always toyed with the idea of adding Revenue Recognition functionality to GnuCash but am too busy to do so. Perhaps after seeing the schema in Sqlite I can take a shot at it.<p>Cheers</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>skissane</author><text>&gt; We live in a world where Intuit has fought VERY hard to make damn sure no one can use anything but Quickbooks<p>It depends on geography. According to Codat&#x27;s 2021 report [0] on SME accounting market share:<p>- In the US, QuickBooks is the clear market leader, with 75.7% combined market share across their three main offerings (QB Online, QB SE and QB Desktop). FreshBooks is in second place at 4.5%, and Wave and Xero equal third at 3.5% each<p>- In the UK, Sage is the market leader, with a combined market share of 28.8% across their three main UK products (Sage 50&#x2F;50 Cloud, Sage Accounting, and Sage 200cloud); QuickBooks combined market share (Online+Desktop+SE) is closely behind, in second place at 26.2%; and Xero is in third place at 24%<p>- In Australia + New Zealand, Xero is in first place at 49.4% market share, MYOB in second place at 33.8%, QuickBooks comes third at 11.2%<p>- In Canada, QuickBooks is the clear market leader with a combined market share of 68.2%; FreshBooks is in second place at 6.9%; while Sage at 6.4% is in third place. Kashoo comes fourth at 4.3%, and Wave, Xero and Logiciel Actiff are equal fifth at 3.8% each.<p>So, it is really only in North America that &quot;no one can use anything but Quickbooks&quot; is remotely true – and even there, close to 25% of US SMEs and over 30% of Canadian SMEs are successfully using &quot;something other than Quickbooks&quot;.<p>But I agree it is likely true, that for the vast majority of US small-to-medium businesses, GNUCash is not a realistic alternative to Quickbooks. But what about FreshBooks or Wave or Xero? Or the dozen other commercial accounting software vendors with some presence in the US market?<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.codat.io&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2021&#x2F;02&#x2F;Codat_Global_Accounting_Guide_2021.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.codat.io&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2021&#x2F;02&#x2F;Codat_Global...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>GnuCash 5.9</title><url>https://www.gnucash.org/news.phtml</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>VonGuard</author><text>It&#x27;s great for personal or very small businesses but god help you if you are building a real startup with GNUCash. I am speaking from experience here, GNUCash zealotry is a plague. I honestly wish this project basically did not exist, because the business world despises GNUCash, ONLY cares about QuickBooks, and using anything else is a giant waste of everyone&#x27;s time. Believe me, I have been fighting this fight in non-profits and startups since the early 2000&#x27;s. It&#x27;s not a fight ANYONE should ever have. I USED TO BE THE &quot;WE MUST USE GNUCASH&quot; GUY!<p>Now, in a perfect world, yes, GNUCash and literally ANYTHING other than Quickbooks would be an option for small business accounting. But we do not live in a perfect world. We live in a world where Intuit has fought VERY hard to make damn sure no one can use anything but Quickbooks, and their iron fist is clad in very specific APIs and file formats.<p>If you do not use Quickbooks:<p>* Your bank will hate you.<p>* Your investors will hate you.<p>* Your payroll system won&#x27;t work.<p>* Your tax systems won&#x27;t work.<p>* Your accountant won&#x27;t work.<p>* Grants are even off the table in some cases.<p>* Some places won&#x27;t audit without Quickbooks.<p>I constantly run into well intentioned open source zealots who demand the use of GNUCash. This is terrible. Don&#x27;t be that person.<p>The world has chosen QuickBooks. This choice was made under duress and with corrupt power brokering. But the decision has been made. Maybe there are some OK SaaS options, but they only exist as long as Intuit allows them to exist. Anything competing with Quickbooks is going to be bought and killed by Intuit, so you&#x27;re going into a dead-end alley. I know that leaves GNUCash on the table, but...<p>Please, do not make the mistake my many non-profits and businesses have repeatedly made when I was not paying enough attention to scream bloody murder about it. I turn my back for one minute, and engineers are installing GNUCash on the accountant&#x27;s Mac Laptop.<p>It&#x27;s 100% always come back to bite us in the ass, as we&#x27;ve had to change platforms on-demand in order to meet a funding deadline, a bank requirement, a loan ask, or a grant application. And it&#x27;s ALWAYS the accountant in the org that gets saddled with the 60+ hour work weeks it takes to redo everything. If I was an acocuntant, I&#x27;d quit if told to use GNUCash, but most of them kinda don&#x27;t know any better because, hey, why not try some thing the techies are all excited about!<p>GNUCash is a wonderful project. I wish we could all use it. But we cannot. Not for real business. And honestly, this is only for contrived, arbitrary reasons. But these reasons exist. The world is 100% built to prevent people from not using Quickbooks at every turn, and you only harm yourself by demanding open source software for accounting. As I said to the director of my most recent non-profit: &quot;You would not tolerate the accountant coming in here and demanding you use NetBeans. Please, give them the same courtesy you&#x27;d expect them to give you on tool choice.&quot;</text></item><item><author>JaggerFoo</author><text>I use GnuCash for business accounting and it does what I need. I don&#x27;t use QuickBooks as VC&#x27;s recommend in blog posts. QB has some convenient features, but that is not enough for me to pay the price QB is asking. I don&#x27;t need VC money or a CPA.<p>I haven&#x27;t tried using GnuCash with Sqlite, but I would like to experiment when I get the time. Is it reliable?<p>I used to be a technical&#x2F;functional engineer for Oracle EBS, so I dealt with very complex schemas that interlinked with each other especially in the sub-ledgers.<p>I&#x27;ve always toyed with the idea of adding Revenue Recognition functionality to GnuCash but am too busy to do so. Perhaps after seeing the schema in Sqlite I can take a shot at it.<p>Cheers</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>elric</author><text>&gt; Your bank will hate you<p>Why? Surely all US banks use open, standardized data formats to export financial statements and to execute transactions in bulk? Or are you thinking of another reason?<p>US banking is a shitshow which is decades European banking, addressing that would benefit everyone.<p>&gt; Your investors will hate you<p>Why? Surely your investors are interested in accurate accounting? Can gnucash not generate some kind of report they need? If so, that should be a trivial fix.<p>&gt; Some places won&#x27;t audit without Quickbook<p>That is an impressive shitshow of a situation.</text></comment> |
25,285,891 | 25,284,366 | 1 | 3 | 25,278,625 | train | <story><title>South Africa's lottery probed as 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 drawn</title><url>https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-55154525</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>crazygringo</author><text>Does anyone have any idea how many daily &quot;official&quot; lotteries are drawn worldwide?<p>I&#x27;d guess something on the order of 1,000 maybe? (One per country, plus a bunch more for individual states within countries?)<p>I know they vary in numbers of positions and values, but I am kind of curious roughly how often you can expect a sequence of consecutive numbers (increasing or decreasing) to be chosen anywhere worldwide.<p>As an initial guess, if it&#x27;s 5 balls drawn from 50, a thousand times a day, then it&#x27;s something like a ~13% chance to happen <i>somewhere</i> yearly.<p>So since this is international news, and not the kind of thing that gets reported every year... it doesn&#x27;t seem implausibly unlikely, no? (It&#x27;s not like it&#x27;s a once-in-a-millenia or once-in-earth&#x27;s-lifetime kind of thing.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mrb</author><text>They draw 6 balls out of 50. There are C(50,6) = 15,890,700 possible draws (C(n,k) = binomial coefficient)<p>45 of the draws are made of 6 consecutive numbers (1-2-3-4-5-6, then 2-3-4-5-6-7, etc, until 45-46-47-48-49-50)<p>A single draw has a 45 out of 15,890,700 chances of being 6 consecutive numbers<p>A single draw has a probability of 1-(45&#x2F;15,890,700) of NOT being 6 consecutive numbers<p>Assuming 1000 draws (lotteries) per day, in a year we expect probability (1-(45&#x2F;15,890,700))^(1000*365) = 36% that none of the lotteries draw 6 consecutive numbers<p>So there is a 64% probability that at least one lottery will draw 6 consecutive numbers in a year. If there are 1000 draws per week (instead of per day) the probability is still 17% that this will happen in a year.<p>So this South African draw is kinda expected.</text></comment> | <story><title>South Africa's lottery probed as 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 drawn</title><url>https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-55154525</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>crazygringo</author><text>Does anyone have any idea how many daily &quot;official&quot; lotteries are drawn worldwide?<p>I&#x27;d guess something on the order of 1,000 maybe? (One per country, plus a bunch more for individual states within countries?)<p>I know they vary in numbers of positions and values, but I am kind of curious roughly how often you can expect a sequence of consecutive numbers (increasing or decreasing) to be chosen anywhere worldwide.<p>As an initial guess, if it&#x27;s 5 balls drawn from 50, a thousand times a day, then it&#x27;s something like a ~13% chance to happen <i>somewhere</i> yearly.<p>So since this is international news, and not the kind of thing that gets reported every year... it doesn&#x27;t seem implausibly unlikely, no? (It&#x27;s not like it&#x27;s a once-in-a-millenia or once-in-earth&#x27;s-lifetime kind of thing.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tyingq</author><text><i>&quot;Does anyone have any idea how many daily &quot;official&quot; lotteries are drawn worldwide?&quot;</i><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gamblingsites.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;how-many-different-lotteries-are-in-the-world&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gamblingsites.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;how-many-different-lotter...</a><p>Looks like a reasonable analysis. Their total is 180.</text></comment> |
32,499,618 | 32,499,234 | 1 | 3 | 32,498,251 | train | <story><title>You can’t buy one square foot of land in Scotland and become a Scottish lord</title><url>https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2022/06/15/no-you-cant-buy-one-square-foot-of-land-in-scotland-and-become-a-scottish-lord/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ad133</author><text>I was hoping there was going to be some minimum definition, and that I could call myself Lord, but alas, my ~300m^2 of land doesn&#x27;t seem to qualify me either (I live there, I didn&#x27;t get scammed ~3k times over for 1 sq foot).<p>I mean honestly if you could be a lord with 1 square foot, there would be a lot of lords in Scotland due to the ownership nature of buying a house (very little of this &quot;leasehold&quot; thing that&#x27;s prevalent in England). My parents would be a lord and lady, so would their parents...<p>I&#x27;ve not encountered these ads though, I guess it would be pretty dumb to geo-target it to people <i>living</i> in Scotland.<p>Edit, on the other hand, if you buy a house and let it out, I guess you can be a land lord, even if you still can&#x27;t call yourself lord.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>synu</author><text>Or you could just call yourself lord regardless, and the monarch won’t appear and throw you in the oubliette.</text></comment> | <story><title>You can’t buy one square foot of land in Scotland and become a Scottish lord</title><url>https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2022/06/15/no-you-cant-buy-one-square-foot-of-land-in-scotland-and-become-a-scottish-lord/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ad133</author><text>I was hoping there was going to be some minimum definition, and that I could call myself Lord, but alas, my ~300m^2 of land doesn&#x27;t seem to qualify me either (I live there, I didn&#x27;t get scammed ~3k times over for 1 sq foot).<p>I mean honestly if you could be a lord with 1 square foot, there would be a lot of lords in Scotland due to the ownership nature of buying a house (very little of this &quot;leasehold&quot; thing that&#x27;s prevalent in England). My parents would be a lord and lady, so would their parents...<p>I&#x27;ve not encountered these ads though, I guess it would be pretty dumb to geo-target it to people <i>living</i> in Scotland.<p>Edit, on the other hand, if you buy a house and let it out, I guess you can be a land lord, even if you still can&#x27;t call yourself lord.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>slowmovintarget</author><text>Or the square foot grant when you buy a bottle of Laphroaig... I have a few, though I&#x27;d strongly doubt they&#x27;re contiguous.</text></comment> |
37,294,238 | 37,293,888 | 1 | 3 | 37,293,557 | train | <story><title>E-bike industry blames consumers for fires to undermine right to repair laws</title><url>https://www.techdirt.com/2023/08/28/e-bike-industry-blames-consumers-for-fires-in-effort-to-undermine-right-to-repair-laws/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>taylodl</author><text>Here&#x27;s my take: you don&#x27;t really own something if you can&#x27;t repair it. Manufacturers prefer you don&#x27;t really own their products: they own it, they service it, you use it, and they charge you for the &quot;experience.&quot; It&#x27;s created a throwaway culture that&#x27;s an environmental disaster. We need to figure out how to right this course.</text></comment> | <story><title>E-bike industry blames consumers for fires to undermine right to repair laws</title><url>https://www.techdirt.com/2023/08/28/e-bike-industry-blames-consumers-for-fires-in-effort-to-undermine-right-to-repair-laws/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>josefresco</author><text>Was curious about the organization behind this. It&#x27;s called &quot;People for Bikes&quot; and the board* is made up of big bike co execs.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.peopleforbikes.org&#x2F;board" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.peopleforbikes.org&#x2F;board</a></text></comment> |
37,300,002 | 37,299,079 | 1 | 3 | 37,295,097 | train | <story><title>OpenTelemetry in 2023</title><url>https://bit.kevinslin.com/p/opentelemetry-in-2023</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>paulddraper</author><text>Two problems with OpenTelemetry:<p>1. It doesn&#x27;t know what the hell it is. Is it a semantic standard? Is a protocol? It is a facade? It is a library? What layer of abstraction does it provide? Answer: All of the above! All the things! All the layers!<p>2. No one from OpenTelemetry has actually tried instrumenting a library. And if they have, they haven&#x27;t the first suggestion on how instrumenters should actually use metrics, traces, and logs. Do you write to all three? To one? I asked this question two years ago, zero answers :( [1]<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;open-telemetry&#x2F;opentelemetry-specification&#x2F;issues&#x2F;2107">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;open-telemetry&#x2F;opentelemetry-specificatio...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>withinrafael</author><text>1. Agreed. It&#x27;s the sink and the house attached to it, and the docs are thin and confusing as a result.<p>2. I had a similar experience to you. I wanted to implement a simple heartbeat in our desktop app to get an idea of usage numbers. This is surprisingly not possible, which greatly confuses me given the name of the project. The low engagement on my question put me off and I abandoned my OpenTelemetry planning completely [1][2].<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;open-telemetry&#x2F;community&#x2F;discussions&#x2F;1598">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;open-telemetry&#x2F;community&#x2F;discussions&#x2F;1598</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;open-telemetry&#x2F;semantic-conventions&#x2F;issues&#x2F;199">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;open-telemetry&#x2F;semantic-conventions&#x2F;issue...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>OpenTelemetry in 2023</title><url>https://bit.kevinslin.com/p/opentelemetry-in-2023</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>paulddraper</author><text>Two problems with OpenTelemetry:<p>1. It doesn&#x27;t know what the hell it is. Is it a semantic standard? Is a protocol? It is a facade? It is a library? What layer of abstraction does it provide? Answer: All of the above! All the things! All the layers!<p>2. No one from OpenTelemetry has actually tried instrumenting a library. And if they have, they haven&#x27;t the first suggestion on how instrumenters should actually use metrics, traces, and logs. Do you write to all three? To one? I asked this question two years ago, zero answers :( [1]<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;open-telemetry&#x2F;opentelemetry-specification&#x2F;issues&#x2F;2107">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;open-telemetry&#x2F;opentelemetry-specificatio...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jauntywundrkind</author><text>Good deck of questions but I don&#x27;t think they matter. I don&#x27;t think those are answerable questions for observability, be it OpenTelemetry or other proprietary systems.<p>You can go read the leading observability companies web pages and they&#x27;ll have a 4 page writeup on custom instrumentation. That&#x27;s not much, just covers very elementary basics! It&#x27;s not like OTel is behind. The answer just tends heavily towards &quot;it depends.&quot;<p>Once you have experience - OTel or other - you can work through these things that might confound a neophyte.</text></comment> |
27,661,469 | 27,660,303 | 1 | 2 | 27,658,471 | train | <story><title>Sriracha hit revenue of $150M a year with no sales team or ad spend</title><url>https://twitter.com/TrungTPhan/status/1409185044501987340</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kenneth</author><text>As an expat who lives in China and loves Chinese food, it makes me incredibly sad that in the Western world Chinese food is basically greasy bland cheap garbage generally inspired by 19th century Cantonese immigration (chop suey, fried rice, and various stir frys, plus uniquely American inventions like orange chicken or fortune cookies). What happened to the amazing food of Taiwan, Hunan, Sichuan, Shaanxi? There&#x27;s so much better Chinese food than what you&#x27;ll find at your average American Chinese restaurant.<p>It&#x27;s getting a bit better but there&#x27;s still a long way to go even in the cities that have more Chinese options (NYC, west coast cities)</text></item><item><author>spoonjim</author><text>I don’t think the “franchise” is literal in terms of a royalty — it’s just that the vast majority of Chinese restaurants order their supplies from the same few distributors yielding largely similar results. It’s why you pretty much know what you’re getting when you go to a new Chinese restaurant in a way that you don’t at a new Italian restaurant.</text></item><item><author>hhmc</author><text>&gt;The &quot;local Chinese restaurant&quot; is a much more franchised thing than most people are aware of<p>This is interesting (but also makes sense) -- do you happen to have an article?</text></item><item><author>boomboomsubban</author><text>The part that strikes me is that they still have the same 10 distributors since the 80&#x27;s.<p>The &quot;local Chinese restaurant&quot; is a much more franchised thing than most people are aware of, and those 10 distributors meant it already ended up throughout the country and allowed everyone to try it for free. This is likely the secret to it&#x27;s success.<p>The only similar product I can think of is Mountain Dew Baja Blast. Though it did get some advertising, by automatically being available in every Taco Bell it became a minor craze. It&#x27;s not an easily reproducible concept though.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jrochkind1</author><text>Sichuan seems pretty popular in the USA these days.<p>In the medium-sized city where I live, there is a standard American Chinese place by a university which is frankly not very good even for American Chinese food, but was owned by people from sichuan and would make off menu sichuan dishes for immigrant students. But they noticed non-immigrant Americans ordering them too, and wisely noticed the general trend going on, and the same owners up a different place a few miles away with actual sichuan food and prices 2x+ higher, which has been very successful. :)<p>In Philadelphia there&#x27;s also the popular Han Dynasty chain of sichuan places.<p>I&#x27;d imagine even the places with food closer to &quot;actual&quot; sichuan food, if they are popular with non-Chinese people, have &quot;Americanized&quot; to some extent. I couldn&#x27;t say as they are my only exposure to it! But I know sometimes I get something where the flavors&#x2F;textures are just TOO different than what I&#x27;m used to, and I just don&#x27;t like it!</text></comment> | <story><title>Sriracha hit revenue of $150M a year with no sales team or ad spend</title><url>https://twitter.com/TrungTPhan/status/1409185044501987340</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kenneth</author><text>As an expat who lives in China and loves Chinese food, it makes me incredibly sad that in the Western world Chinese food is basically greasy bland cheap garbage generally inspired by 19th century Cantonese immigration (chop suey, fried rice, and various stir frys, plus uniquely American inventions like orange chicken or fortune cookies). What happened to the amazing food of Taiwan, Hunan, Sichuan, Shaanxi? There&#x27;s so much better Chinese food than what you&#x27;ll find at your average American Chinese restaurant.<p>It&#x27;s getting a bit better but there&#x27;s still a long way to go even in the cities that have more Chinese options (NYC, west coast cities)</text></item><item><author>spoonjim</author><text>I don’t think the “franchise” is literal in terms of a royalty — it’s just that the vast majority of Chinese restaurants order their supplies from the same few distributors yielding largely similar results. It’s why you pretty much know what you’re getting when you go to a new Chinese restaurant in a way that you don’t at a new Italian restaurant.</text></item><item><author>hhmc</author><text>&gt;The &quot;local Chinese restaurant&quot; is a much more franchised thing than most people are aware of<p>This is interesting (but also makes sense) -- do you happen to have an article?</text></item><item><author>boomboomsubban</author><text>The part that strikes me is that they still have the same 10 distributors since the 80&#x27;s.<p>The &quot;local Chinese restaurant&quot; is a much more franchised thing than most people are aware of, and those 10 distributors meant it already ended up throughout the country and allowed everyone to try it for free. This is likely the secret to it&#x27;s success.<p>The only similar product I can think of is Mountain Dew Baja Blast. Though it did get some advertising, by automatically being available in every Taco Bell it became a minor craze. It&#x27;s not an easily reproducible concept though.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>alliao</author><text>what you&#x27;re witness isn&#x27;t actually Chinese food it&#x27;s the melting pot of multiculturalism in action. Just like curry in UK, General Tso&#x27;s chicken is now part of the US identity. New comers will bring new forks but the old dare I say classics are here to stay.</text></comment> |
19,248,178 | 19,247,765 | 1 | 2 | 19,246,459 | train | <story><title>California lawmakers introduce plan to end surprise ER bills</title><url>https://www.vox.com/2019/2/24/18236482/zuckerberg-hospital-surprise-bills-california</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>geebee</author><text>I spent a night once in the ER for observation. I never got anything but Tylenol, though I think the concern that led to the overnight stay was reasonable. The bill was $16,000.<p>This was certainly a defensive, risk-averse treatment, but I think it was a reasonable decision. I think my insurance paid about 8,000. The magic words on the bill were &quot;Patient is nor responsible for the difference between the amount paid by insurance and amount billed&quot;. This is because I went to an in-network hospital with a contract.<p>I talked about this with some of my physician friends, and they told me this is typical. In fact, the original bill doesn&#x27;t represent what they expect to be paid. It represents an extreme position taken to start negotiations with an HMO or other insurance company.<p>Here&#x27;s the trap: if you don&#x27;t have insurance, you are not just hit with the high bill that represents what the hospital would pay an HMO, you&#x27;re hit with he wildly inflated bill they send to an HMO in anticipation of being paid much less.<p>So if you don&#x27;t have insurance in the US, you&#x27;re doubly hosed. I know I&#x27;m supposed to hate my HMO and all, but to me, this is a bit like belonging to a union. As part of a powerful group, I have someone not just paying the bill but knocking it down for me. I may not like being part of a group plan, but on my own, I&#x27;m toast.<p>Unfortunately, this story shows that you can still end up on the wrong side of this billing practice even if you do have insurance, because some hospitals remain out of network for all insurance, and if you&#x27;re incapacitated or simply don&#x27;t have the plan in front of you and a couple hours to research the billing practices of various hospitals as your head is bleeding and you&#x27;re being taken to the ER, you can end up in a similar situation to an uninsured person.<p>It turns out that it may in fact be impossible to insure yourself against ruinous bills. Nicely done, there.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>citilife</author><text>&gt; Here&#x27;s the trap: if you don&#x27;t have insurance, you are not just hit with the high bill that represents what the hospital would pay an HMO, you&#x27;re hit with he wildly inflated bill they send to an HMO in anticipation of being paid much less.<p>I spent years working in medical billing. You can negotiate these down to prices as much as 10% of the bill. Typically, you go: &quot;I don&#x27;t have insurance, but I&#x27;m willing to pay 50% now.&quot;<p>The vast majority of the time, they&#x27;ll accept, because that&#x27;s more than they expected.<p>DON&#x27;T give them the option to distribute the payments. Explain, you&#x27;re willing to pay now at X% AND that you don&#x27;t have insurance. The person on the other end is usually a human and can accept that (somewhere in the billing chain).<p>If they offer to distribute payments, explain financially, that may put more burden on you. If you actually can&#x27;t pay or are living pay-check-to-paycheck, explain it may bankrupt you. At that point, they get nothing, so negotiations can ensue.<p>Another thing to do is debate billing codes, as the error rate is relatively high. For reference, even a 1% error rate means out of 10 visits you&#x27;re likely to get one, because you&#x27;ll have multiple billing items every visit.</text></comment> | <story><title>California lawmakers introduce plan to end surprise ER bills</title><url>https://www.vox.com/2019/2/24/18236482/zuckerberg-hospital-surprise-bills-california</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>geebee</author><text>I spent a night once in the ER for observation. I never got anything but Tylenol, though I think the concern that led to the overnight stay was reasonable. The bill was $16,000.<p>This was certainly a defensive, risk-averse treatment, but I think it was a reasonable decision. I think my insurance paid about 8,000. The magic words on the bill were &quot;Patient is nor responsible for the difference between the amount paid by insurance and amount billed&quot;. This is because I went to an in-network hospital with a contract.<p>I talked about this with some of my physician friends, and they told me this is typical. In fact, the original bill doesn&#x27;t represent what they expect to be paid. It represents an extreme position taken to start negotiations with an HMO or other insurance company.<p>Here&#x27;s the trap: if you don&#x27;t have insurance, you are not just hit with the high bill that represents what the hospital would pay an HMO, you&#x27;re hit with he wildly inflated bill they send to an HMO in anticipation of being paid much less.<p>So if you don&#x27;t have insurance in the US, you&#x27;re doubly hosed. I know I&#x27;m supposed to hate my HMO and all, but to me, this is a bit like belonging to a union. As part of a powerful group, I have someone not just paying the bill but knocking it down for me. I may not like being part of a group plan, but on my own, I&#x27;m toast.<p>Unfortunately, this story shows that you can still end up on the wrong side of this billing practice even if you do have insurance, because some hospitals remain out of network for all insurance, and if you&#x27;re incapacitated or simply don&#x27;t have the plan in front of you and a couple hours to research the billing practices of various hospitals as your head is bleeding and you&#x27;re being taken to the ER, you can end up in a similar situation to an uninsured person.<p>It turns out that it may in fact be impossible to insure yourself against ruinous bills. Nicely done, there.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mindslight</author><text>I want to know what the legal basis for collecting from an ER patient is. At the point of needing ER services, most people are not able to form a binding contract so it cannot be that.<p>I do agree that hospitals <i>should</i> be paid for the services they perform. It&#x27;s just that our society&#x27;s free market notion of price-agreement is predicated on voluntary contracts.<p>&gt; <i>I talked about this with some of my physician friends, and they told me this is typical. In fact, the original bill doesn&#x27;t represent what they expect to be paid</i><p>For instance, if the hospital is billing under a theory of reimbursement for services provided on your behalf, lying about their costs is textbook fraud.<p>Or are there explicit state laws that allow hospitals to collect from ER patients without a contract in place? If so these need to be reformed to have uniform charges no matter who the payer is. Like say towing.</text></comment> |
19,876,053 | 19,876,128 | 1 | 3 | 19,875,531 | train | <story><title>Go makes it easier to write correct, clear and efficient code</title><url>https://yourbasic.org/golang/advantages-over-java-python/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>siscia</author><text>I do like go, but really this arguments start to be a little unprofessional if you ask me.<p>All those arguments are fine and correct in small projects or libraries, there go is perfect.<p>But they really don&#x27;t hold on big project like docker or containerd.<p>While it is clear what lines of code does, at a tactical level, it is extremely difficult to follow what happen in the big picture, the strategic level. Where the values comes from and where they go? When? How and why?<p>Honestly I keep seeing this in all big go project, despite the lack of generics.<p>Again if you need a small micorservice, use go! It is the best option right now. But I wouldn&#x27;t bet any big codebase on it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kenhwang</author><text>I think complexity in software becomes difficult to grok as software gets bigger, and go does seem to go out of their way to code easier to understand at a hilariously micro scale at a huge cost at the macro level.</text></comment> | <story><title>Go makes it easier to write correct, clear and efficient code</title><url>https://yourbasic.org/golang/advantages-over-java-python/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>siscia</author><text>I do like go, but really this arguments start to be a little unprofessional if you ask me.<p>All those arguments are fine and correct in small projects or libraries, there go is perfect.<p>But they really don&#x27;t hold on big project like docker or containerd.<p>While it is clear what lines of code does, at a tactical level, it is extremely difficult to follow what happen in the big picture, the strategic level. Where the values comes from and where they go? When? How and why?<p>Honestly I keep seeing this in all big go project, despite the lack of generics.<p>Again if you need a small micorservice, use go! It is the best option right now. But I wouldn&#x27;t bet any big codebase on it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fnord123</author><text>&gt;While it is clear what lines of code does, at a tactical level, it is extremely difficult to follow what happen in the big picture, the strategic level. Where the values comes from and where they go?<p>Compared to python or Java? Well written python basically resembles Go. And most Java I&#x27;ve come across tries to spread logic across class boundaries so you never get to have all the code in front of you at one time.</text></comment> |
3,489,881 | 3,489,581 | 1 | 2 | 3,489,316 | train | <story><title>Feds, Please Return My Personal Files Stored at MegaUpload</title><url>http://torrentfreak.com/feds-please-return-my-personal-files-megaupload-120120/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jsilence</author><text>"Welcome to the cloud!(tm)"<p>Some heuristics for evasion of the observed colateral damage scenario:<p>* Store your files in several places. For example use Dropbox and link two machines with it. One at home and your laptop maybe.<p>* Rent a cheap vserver and install your own URL-Shortener (<a href="http://freecode.com/search?q=url+shortener&#38;submit=Search" rel="nofollow">http://freecode.com/search?q=url+shortener&#38;submit=Search</a>)<p>* For files you'd like to distribute, put them into the Dropbox public folder. Generate your own short links with your own shortener.<p>* distribute the shortened links<p>* If Dropbox goes down, copy files to other webspace. Adjust URL-Shortener entries to new location.<p>If you don't trust Dropbox or any other file storage service, rent some webspace and sync your files there. There are a couple of 'How to build your own OpenSource Dropbox clone' recipies out there. (<a href="https://duckduckgo.com/?q=dropbox+clone" rel="nofollow">https://duckduckgo.com/?q=dropbox+clone</a>). AFAIR they all suck in different regards. Simply choose the one that does the job and sucks least.<p>If you are not capable of doing stuff like that, then contact your friendly neighbourhood tech collective. Where to find them? Start here: <a href="http://www.hackerspaces.org" rel="nofollow">http://www.hackerspaces.org</a> . Don't ask them to do stuff for you. Ask them to teach you how to do it. Then donate. DONATE!? Yes, donate. And remember, with all the commercial services you have been cheapsurfing on, if you are not paying for it, then you are not the customer, but the product.<p>The interwebs have offered us the opportunity of an empowered, self organized distributed digital information society. But alas! we lazy bums are opting for the cheap consumerism solution. And on top we are whining and sobbing, when the freebies are being taken away from us.<p>I have little compassion for people who store their files in the cloud only.<p>/rant</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>feralchimp</author><text>You're not wrong, Walter.<p>On the <i>other</i> hand, one of the reasons Normal People dislike the hacker community is the prevalence of "see I told you so" and/or "bad things wouldn't happen to you if you weren't such a dumbass" culture.<p>The fact that a technical workaround exists for this particular brand of destructive and capricious behavior by the U.S. Federales is not, in itself, a great reason to transform the story into Yet Another Personal I.T. Teaching Moment.<p>The safety deposit box example is apt here. If my local bank gets busted for some shady-ass shit, and the Feds confiscate some family heirloom along with all the bricks of heroin from the bank vault, what should we demand from our government in that case?<p>And if we're not likely to get what we feel entitled to demand, what are our realistic options for doing something about that?</text></comment> | <story><title>Feds, Please Return My Personal Files Stored at MegaUpload</title><url>http://torrentfreak.com/feds-please-return-my-personal-files-megaupload-120120/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jsilence</author><text>"Welcome to the cloud!(tm)"<p>Some heuristics for evasion of the observed colateral damage scenario:<p>* Store your files in several places. For example use Dropbox and link two machines with it. One at home and your laptop maybe.<p>* Rent a cheap vserver and install your own URL-Shortener (<a href="http://freecode.com/search?q=url+shortener&#38;submit=Search" rel="nofollow">http://freecode.com/search?q=url+shortener&#38;submit=Search</a>)<p>* For files you'd like to distribute, put them into the Dropbox public folder. Generate your own short links with your own shortener.<p>* distribute the shortened links<p>* If Dropbox goes down, copy files to other webspace. Adjust URL-Shortener entries to new location.<p>If you don't trust Dropbox or any other file storage service, rent some webspace and sync your files there. There are a couple of 'How to build your own OpenSource Dropbox clone' recipies out there. (<a href="https://duckduckgo.com/?q=dropbox+clone" rel="nofollow">https://duckduckgo.com/?q=dropbox+clone</a>). AFAIR they all suck in different regards. Simply choose the one that does the job and sucks least.<p>If you are not capable of doing stuff like that, then contact your friendly neighbourhood tech collective. Where to find them? Start here: <a href="http://www.hackerspaces.org" rel="nofollow">http://www.hackerspaces.org</a> . Don't ask them to do stuff for you. Ask them to teach you how to do it. Then donate. DONATE!? Yes, donate. And remember, with all the commercial services you have been cheapsurfing on, if you are not paying for it, then you are not the customer, but the product.<p>The interwebs have offered us the opportunity of an empowered, self organized distributed digital information society. But alas! we lazy bums are opting for the cheap consumerism solution. And on top we are whining and sobbing, when the freebies are being taken away from us.<p>I have little compassion for people who store their files in the cloud only.<p>/rant</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mapleoin</author><text><i>And remember, with all the commercial services you have been cheapsurfing on, if you are not paying for it, then you are not the customer, but the product.</i><p>I need to print T-shirts with this quote.</text></comment> |
8,384,736 | 8,384,146 | 1 | 3 | 8,383,716 | train | <story><title>Learning Online</title><url>http://christinacacioppo.com/blog/learning-online</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>zamfi</author><text>I really enjoyed reading this piece. It echoed many of the thoughts I&#x27;ve had over the past ten years of teaching programming off and on, and many of the frustrations I&#x27;ve had with existing online learn-to-code tools. (I actually wrote one such tool back in 2007, an interactive learn-to-code webapp called the AppJet Learn to Program Guide.)<p>In my experience, puzzling through problems with quick iteration and support from a mentor is the most effective way to learn programming. Especially in the early stages, as Christina identifies, the hardest task is simply articulating an algorithm in English:<p>&gt; For all the hemming about programming languages, the hardest part for these students was solving puzzles in English, not Java. Often, they’d skip to the Java, glossing over their logic. This didn’t work, but “forget Java for a moment; what are you trying to do in English?” and “How would you explain what you’re trying to do to a 5 year-old?” were the two questions most likely to unstick them. Once they explained the logic – “go through all the letters. If you find an A, swap it with the prior letter” – the Java came easily.<p>Nearly all online tools I&#x27;ve tried come up short in this regard, because of the major stumbling block that is building an accurate mental model (an &quot;intuition&quot;) for how computers run your program. None of these tools tell you how to correct your mental model, because none of them really identify your mental model in the first place. For this, a human teacher is very useful!<p>Tools like the one Christina is building -- tools that allow for quick iteration and quick communication between learner and teacher -- are critical in that they let teachers focus on the hard part, on developing that intuition.<p>Christina, I fully support your effort to create tools that help humans teach other humans how to program!</text></comment> | <story><title>Learning Online</title><url>http://christinacacioppo.com/blog/learning-online</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>teach</author><text>Hey, Christina.<p>Really thought-provoking article! I&#x27;ve been teaching students to code for seventeen years, and your experience dovetails with mine. (Disclosure: I&#x27;m also the author of &#x27;Learn Java the Hard Way&#x27;.)<p>I must admit that I&#x27;m skeptical that any &quot;regular&quot; student could learn Java well enough to pass the APCS exam in only twenty hours.<p>Can you explain a little better about the population you&#x27;re working with? These are high-aptitude students with prior programming experience, no?</text></comment> |
17,278,203 | 17,276,928 | 1 | 2 | 17,276,362 | train | <story><title>Minimalist C Libraries</title><url>http://nullprogram.com/blog/2018/06/10/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>xtrapolate</author><text>&gt; &quot;The library mustn’t call malloc() internally. It’s up to the caller to allocate memory for the library. What’s nice about this is that it’s completely up to the application exactly how memory is allocated. Maybe it’s using a custom allocator, or it’s not linked against the standard library.&quot;<p>OP&#x27;s approach will indeed work for most &quot;minimalist&quot;&#x2F;single-header libraries, but, I personally feel it pollutes the API you&#x27;re exposing to your users.<p>Depending on the specific situation, I may sometimes choose to expose a MODULE_CreateObject() and a MODULE_CreateObjectEx(custom_allocator, custom_deallocator).<p>Internally, MODULE_CreateObject() calls MODULE_CreateObjectEx(), passing the module&#x27;s default allocators and deallocators (ie. HeapAlloc and HeapFree). This strikes me as a more balanced approach.<p>One caveat here, is that you must enforce consistency across usage - you don&#x27;t want some API calls to use malloc() for allocation, whilst others use HeapFree() for deallocation, that would be a recipe for disaster.<p>To ensure that, I would often set the allocators and deallocators once, when the object is first created. They may be set through the object&#x27;s initialization function, and they persist as part of the object itself.</text></comment> | <story><title>Minimalist C Libraries</title><url>http://nullprogram.com/blog/2018/06/10/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>panic</author><text>These “single-file libraries” share a lot of the same ideals: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;nothings&#x2F;single_file_libs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;nothings&#x2F;single_file_libs</a></text></comment> |
28,337,258 | 28,335,598 | 1 | 3 | 28,333,274 | train | <story><title>Why San Francisco’s city government is so dysfunctional</title><url>https://www.economist.com/united-states/2021/08/28/why-san-franciscos-city-government-is-so-dysfunctional</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Talanes</author><text>&gt;But that isn&#x27;t on the police - they don&#x27;t arrest anyone because the DA doesn&#x27;t prosecute anyone.<p>This always struck me as a BS excuse, because if you&#x27;re trying to demonstrate that the DA is the problem, wouldn&#x27;t you want to be making arrests and creating a paper trail to prove your point? Apathy by the police just makes them look bad to anyone who&#x27;s on the receiving end of it.<p>And getting arrested is still a deterrent without charges. Hell, even &quot;A cop might begin asking me some questions&quot; is a mild deterrent.</text></item><item><author>lubujackson</author><text>Low because they don&#x27;t arrest anyone. But that isn&#x27;t on the police - they don&#x27;t arrest anyone because the DA doesn&#x27;t prosecute anyone.<p>Property crime is sky high... if you happen to get caught breaking into a car the penalty is a warning. That is the policy. You have to break into many cars and be caught (which is hard to do) many times for any action.<p>Boudin has indefensibly ignored violent criminals, too. Like a woman being assaulted while trying to open the door to here condo, fully on video and there was no prosecution. Even a few cases of murder from repeat offenders who were let go repeatedly after violent assault.<p>If you live in SF, try the Citizen phone app for alerts near you. There is some crazy stuff happening all around the city. Lately, cars keep inexplicably flipping over on city streets.<p>The craziest update I&#x27;ve seen was an alert about man dressed like a clown wielding a sword-cane.</text></item><item><author>ecf</author><text>Are incarceration rates low because people behave or are they low because SF police don’t bother to arrest people?</text></item><item><author>LordDragonfang</author><text>&gt;One City Hall insider suggests that San Francisco overreacts to issues that are in the national news, and designs solutions to the country’s problems rather than its own. For example, when Mr Boudin ran on his platform of less punitive justice, San Francisco already had one of the lowest incarceration rates in the country. In 2019, 106 adults were in prison for every 100,000 people, one-fifth the rate in California and the nation. If the rest of the country behaved like San Francisco, the prison population would decline by 80%, says James Austin of the jfa Institute, a think-tank that evaluates criminal-justice policies.<p>This seems like a very reasonable hypothesis</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ViViDboarder</author><text>It’s also demonstrably false. You can look at clearance and prosecution stats from both the PD and DA and you’ll see little too no change from pre and post Chesa.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sanfranciscopolice.org&#x2F;stay-safe&#x2F;crime-data&#x2F;clearance-rates-dashboard" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sanfranciscopolice.org&#x2F;stay-safe&#x2F;crime-data&#x2F;clea...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sfdistrictattorney.org&#x2F;policy&#x2F;da-stat&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sfdistrictattorney.org&#x2F;policy&#x2F;da-stat&#x2F;</a><p>Some court activity dropped in 2020, but filing rates are higher in 2021 already, highlighting the impact closed and reduced court capacity has had. Filings, even in 2020, though lower that 2021, were not out of the norm of the last decade. This year, rates are at 2018&#x2F;2019 levels and close to a high for the decade.<p>Lots of people come out and like to point a finger at our new DA when the data just doesn’t support it. If there is a problem with prosecutors in SF, it’s existed before Chesa.</text></comment> | <story><title>Why San Francisco’s city government is so dysfunctional</title><url>https://www.economist.com/united-states/2021/08/28/why-san-franciscos-city-government-is-so-dysfunctional</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Talanes</author><text>&gt;But that isn&#x27;t on the police - they don&#x27;t arrest anyone because the DA doesn&#x27;t prosecute anyone.<p>This always struck me as a BS excuse, because if you&#x27;re trying to demonstrate that the DA is the problem, wouldn&#x27;t you want to be making arrests and creating a paper trail to prove your point? Apathy by the police just makes them look bad to anyone who&#x27;s on the receiving end of it.<p>And getting arrested is still a deterrent without charges. Hell, even &quot;A cop might begin asking me some questions&quot; is a mild deterrent.</text></item><item><author>lubujackson</author><text>Low because they don&#x27;t arrest anyone. But that isn&#x27;t on the police - they don&#x27;t arrest anyone because the DA doesn&#x27;t prosecute anyone.<p>Property crime is sky high... if you happen to get caught breaking into a car the penalty is a warning. That is the policy. You have to break into many cars and be caught (which is hard to do) many times for any action.<p>Boudin has indefensibly ignored violent criminals, too. Like a woman being assaulted while trying to open the door to here condo, fully on video and there was no prosecution. Even a few cases of murder from repeat offenders who were let go repeatedly after violent assault.<p>If you live in SF, try the Citizen phone app for alerts near you. There is some crazy stuff happening all around the city. Lately, cars keep inexplicably flipping over on city streets.<p>The craziest update I&#x27;ve seen was an alert about man dressed like a clown wielding a sword-cane.</text></item><item><author>ecf</author><text>Are incarceration rates low because people behave or are they low because SF police don’t bother to arrest people?</text></item><item><author>LordDragonfang</author><text>&gt;One City Hall insider suggests that San Francisco overreacts to issues that are in the national news, and designs solutions to the country’s problems rather than its own. For example, when Mr Boudin ran on his platform of less punitive justice, San Francisco already had one of the lowest incarceration rates in the country. In 2019, 106 adults were in prison for every 100,000 people, one-fifth the rate in California and the nation. If the rest of the country behaved like San Francisco, the prison population would decline by 80%, says James Austin of the jfa Institute, a think-tank that evaluates criminal-justice policies.<p>This seems like a very reasonable hypothesis</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>spoonjim</author><text>Making an arrest is not risk free for a cop, the career lowlifes who have been arrested dozens of times aren’t afraid of anything (including incarceration), and burnout affects even tech workers, of course it affects cops who want to make arrests to get people in jail, and can’t find the motivation when it’s to “create a paper trail.”</text></comment> |
27,384,573 | 27,381,838 | 1 | 3 | 27,379,366 | train | <story><title>A Concrete Introduction to Probability (2018)</title><url>https://github.com/norvig/pytudes/blob/master/ipynb/Probability.ipynb</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>khazhoux</author><text>I&#x27;m always amazed at how Peter Norvig continues to create the kind of content that a top grad student would do, even as his career and rank in the industry has skyrocketed.<p>Back in university and grad school I would write tutorials and post them online (and still get thanks from random people many many years later). I would explore random interesting subjects and dive deep. I would constantly publish code and demos, etc. As my career grew, one of one these started to fall off. I look at my peers and it&#x27;s the same story: they were all vibrant hot-shots in their early-mid 20s, and now are just weighed down by the teams and projects they manage.<p>Peter is an inspiration. I will ponder this...</text></comment> | <story><title>A Concrete Introduction to Probability (2018)</title><url>https://github.com/norvig/pytudes/blob/master/ipynb/Probability.ipynb</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>at_a_remove</author><text>I got reasonably far in stats -- up to a single grad level course.<p>My biggest problem with the teaching of math (and I can weigh in on this a bit because I spent over a decade as a private tutor of math) is that math is often not introduced in a concrete manner, as well as in a way such that its utility is obvious. These are two sides of the same coin.<p>You can see this problem in <i>most</i> Wikipedia math pages. I took more math than most physics majors and I find quite a lot of what I stumble across either baffling or of unknown utility. Set theory is a great instance of this. I rarely see multiple examples listed as it is explained, nor does anyone bother to tell me what it is <i>for</i>, other than to do more set theory.<p>Stats at least has the benefit of having to stick closer to applicability, I think.</text></comment> |
7,229,168 | 7,227,939 | 1 | 3 | 7,227,028 | train | <story><title>Scientists Say Their Giant Laser Has Produced Nuclear Fusion</title><url>http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/02/12/275896094/scientists-say-their-giant-laser-has-produced-nuclear-fusion</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Finster</author><text>I&#x27;m on campus right now and can download the PDF. I&#x27;d upload it, but I don&#x27;t want to pull an Aaron Swartz. &lt;_&lt;<p>EDIT: Okay here, but I have limited bandwidth so get it while you can: <a href="https://mega.co.nz/#!CNgVhZra!JcsLGB5y0FGUffI4rdyNr-BBl82YJDNH1ah3_4kSPcU" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mega.co.nz&#x2F;#!CNgVhZra!JcsLGB5y0FGUffI4rdyNr-BBl82YJD...</a></text></item><item><author>throwaway_yy2Di</author><text>Here&#x27;s the paper.<p><a href="http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature13008.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;nature&#x2F;journal&#x2F;vaop&#x2F;ncurrent&#x2F;full&#x2F;natu...</a><p>They would like to charge you $32 to look at it, <i>nature</i>-ally.<p>The fusion yield is (?) 14 kilojoules (inferring this from physicist Mark Herrman&#x27;s &quot;5 million billion fusions&quot; [WaPo], at 18 MeV per fusion), which is a moderate improvement over the 8 kilojoule achivement from last fall:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6459289" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=6459289</a><p>[WaPo] <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/fusion-energy-milestone-reported-by-california-scientists/2014/02/12/f511ed18-936b-11e3-84e1-27626c5ef5fb_story.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;national&#x2F;health-science&#x2F;fusion...</a><p>The &quot;1%&quot; energy efficiency figure [a] is misleading: 14 kJ is about 1% of 1.5 MJ of ultraviolet light hitting the fuel capsule. But creating that UV pulse consumed 3 MJ of infrared light, which in turn took 400 MJ from the flash bulbs driving the IR laser. So the system efficiency is more like 0.003% (and throwing in hypothetical turbines to generate electricity, 0.001%).<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Ignition_Facility#NIF_and_ICF" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;National_Ignition_Facility#NIF...</a><p>[a] I&#x27;m referring to this: <i>&quot;while more energy came from fusion than went into the hydrogen fuel, only about 1 percent of the laser&#x27;s energy ever reached the fuel.&quot;</i><p>(update: from yosyp&#x27;s link, the fusion figures were 14.4 kJ, and 17.3 kJ, on two different runs:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7227950" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=7227950</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>suprgeek</author><text>Upvoted for the sentiment.
The actual paper marks just another incremental step in a triple marathon that we seem to be running veeeery slowly.<p>Also, if you do &quot;pull an Aaron Schwartz&quot; please change the ending - we need a very public Supreme court administered kick-in-the-teeth for all the out of control copyright regime and its criminal sentencing farce.</text></comment> | <story><title>Scientists Say Their Giant Laser Has Produced Nuclear Fusion</title><url>http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/02/12/275896094/scientists-say-their-giant-laser-has-produced-nuclear-fusion</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Finster</author><text>I&#x27;m on campus right now and can download the PDF. I&#x27;d upload it, but I don&#x27;t want to pull an Aaron Swartz. &lt;_&lt;<p>EDIT: Okay here, but I have limited bandwidth so get it while you can: <a href="https://mega.co.nz/#!CNgVhZra!JcsLGB5y0FGUffI4rdyNr-BBl82YJDNH1ah3_4kSPcU" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mega.co.nz&#x2F;#!CNgVhZra!JcsLGB5y0FGUffI4rdyNr-BBl82YJD...</a></text></item><item><author>throwaway_yy2Di</author><text>Here&#x27;s the paper.<p><a href="http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature13008.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;nature&#x2F;journal&#x2F;vaop&#x2F;ncurrent&#x2F;full&#x2F;natu...</a><p>They would like to charge you $32 to look at it, <i>nature</i>-ally.<p>The fusion yield is (?) 14 kilojoules (inferring this from physicist Mark Herrman&#x27;s &quot;5 million billion fusions&quot; [WaPo], at 18 MeV per fusion), which is a moderate improvement over the 8 kilojoule achivement from last fall:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6459289" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=6459289</a><p>[WaPo] <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/fusion-energy-milestone-reported-by-california-scientists/2014/02/12/f511ed18-936b-11e3-84e1-27626c5ef5fb_story.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;national&#x2F;health-science&#x2F;fusion...</a><p>The &quot;1%&quot; energy efficiency figure [a] is misleading: 14 kJ is about 1% of 1.5 MJ of ultraviolet light hitting the fuel capsule. But creating that UV pulse consumed 3 MJ of infrared light, which in turn took 400 MJ from the flash bulbs driving the IR laser. So the system efficiency is more like 0.003% (and throwing in hypothetical turbines to generate electricity, 0.001%).<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Ignition_Facility#NIF_and_ICF" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;National_Ignition_Facility#NIF...</a><p>[a] I&#x27;m referring to this: <i>&quot;while more energy came from fusion than went into the hydrogen fuel, only about 1 percent of the laser&#x27;s energy ever reached the fuel.&quot;</i><p>(update: from yosyp&#x27;s link, the fusion figures were 14.4 kJ, and 17.3 kJ, on two different runs:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7227950" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=7227950</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>TeMPOraL</author><text>They won&#x27;t get after you because of one paper. Please, do it for the betterment of mankind :).</text></comment> |
24,756,500 | 24,756,478 | 1 | 3 | 24,754,553 | train | <story><title>Removing Holocaust Denial Content</title><url>https://about.fb.com/news/2020/10/removing-holocaust-denial-content/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ephimetheus</author><text>Holocaust denial is banned in Germany (same as swastikas by the way). It works really well. The only people complaining are literally people trying to twist perception of the arguably worst crime in the history of humanity, to make Germany look like a victim. FB is clearly doing the right thing here. Free speech has limits.</text></item><item><author>jeffreyrogers</author><text>How are they going to determine what is HD? Some scholars get labeled denialists because they have different estimates for the number of Jews killed in concentration camps. Seems worrying to have FB moderators determining what&#x27;s acceptable historical debate and what is wrongthink.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>saas_sam</author><text>A cursory search reveals your characterization to be inaccurate. Note: I had no real interest in this topic until I read your critique which just sounded totally outlandish to me. The ONLY people complaining about this limitation are people with terrible motives? No legitimate philosophers, political scientists, free speech activists exist with valid critiques? They&#x27;re all just evil historical revisionists, eh? Doubtful...<p>Sure enough, plenty of well-reasoned critiques exist from Jewish groups, Noam Chomsky (hardly an anti-Semite), Christopher Hitchens, and others.</text></comment> | <story><title>Removing Holocaust Denial Content</title><url>https://about.fb.com/news/2020/10/removing-holocaust-denial-content/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ephimetheus</author><text>Holocaust denial is banned in Germany (same as swastikas by the way). It works really well. The only people complaining are literally people trying to twist perception of the arguably worst crime in the history of humanity, to make Germany look like a victim. FB is clearly doing the right thing here. Free speech has limits.</text></item><item><author>jeffreyrogers</author><text>How are they going to determine what is HD? Some scholars get labeled denialists because they have different estimates for the number of Jews killed in concentration camps. Seems worrying to have FB moderators determining what&#x27;s acceptable historical debate and what is wrongthink.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dcolkitt</author><text>&gt; It works really well.<p>The Weimar Republic did have hate speech laws, that were vigorously enforced and similar in spirit to modern-day Germany&#x27;s laws.[1] Not only did that fail to stop the rise of the Nazi party, but the legal machinery was actively co-opted post-1933 to censor anti-Nazi groups.<p>In contrast, in the 1930s the most ardent pro-free-speech countries were the America and Britain. (Contemporary British hate speech laws not being created until well after the war.) Yet unlike almost all of continental Europe, any nascent fascist movements in the US or UK remained extreme fringe groups that never gained any political traction.<p>The historical record is pretty clear. At best hate speech laws, do nothing to disarm extremist groups. America&#x27;s 250 year history of free speech absolutism, with virtually no extremist groups gaining widespread traction is evidence of this. At worse hate speech laws are a dangerous single-point of failure for liberal democracy.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cato.org&#x2F;policy-report&#x2F;mayjune-2015&#x2F;war-free-expression" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cato.org&#x2F;policy-report&#x2F;mayjune-2015&#x2F;war-free-exp...</a></text></comment> |
16,424,476 | 16,423,724 | 1 | 2 | 16,422,783 | train | <story><title>Tiny Art in Less Than 280 Characters (2017)</title><url>https://fronkonstin.com/2017/12/23/tiny-art-in-less-than-280-characters/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>bla2</author><text>If you like this, you&#x27;ll like <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dwitter.net" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dwitter.net</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Tiny Art in Less Than 280 Characters (2017)</title><url>https://fronkonstin.com/2017/12/23/tiny-art-in-less-than-280-characters/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>verytrivial</author><text>Reminds me of the SuperCollider audio &quot;album&quot; of tracks encoded under the old 140 character limit. I still often use this for coding background music.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;supercollider.github.io&#x2F;community&#x2F;sc140" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;supercollider.github.io&#x2F;community&#x2F;sc140</a></text></comment> |
23,646,806 | 23,645,735 | 1 | 3 | 23,644,253 | train | <story><title>Olympus quits camera business after 84 years</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53165293</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ISL</author><text>To me, the big monoculture risk is Sony&#x27;s image-sensor fab. As I understand it, Sony, Fuji, Nikon and many others all rely upon the output of one company&#x27;s manufacturing process.<p>There&#x27;s a good reason for it -- they appear to make the very best sensors (edit: in terms of dynamic range and noise) in the commercial-camera market. Canon makes their own sensors, which are good in absolute but not relative terms, which appears to hold them back in performance. I don&#x27;t know if it is patent-related or process-related.<p>While I use Canon imaging systems, I don&#x27;t see the choice to use other brands as better or worse. Each manufacturer&#x27;s line has strengths and weaknesses; you pick the best tool for the job. Essentially every camera and optical system on the market, in absolute terms, is a wonderful instrument for imaging.<p>This reality is intensely freeing -- it means you can focus more on the image and less on the instrumentation. &quot;f&#x2F;8 and be there&quot; is still wonderful advice.</text></item><item><author>akersten</author><text>Sad to see them go - photography&#x27;s such a great hobby and having competition in the space is healthy. There&#x27;s a few brands out there still, but there is a noticable stigma in the professional community around equipment that isn&#x27;t Canon. If you&#x27;re not using L-glass, it feels like you get the same kind of judgement that Android users experience when they show up with green texts in iMessage.<p>As a matter of principle, I&#x27;ve been buying exclusively Nikon for almost my entire time in the hobby. I always saw Canon as a large conglomerate who tacked on photography as another arm of their company, where to me Nikon feels more focused on optics as a primary business line. Honestly, I should almost start buying more Pentax gear.<p>I worry we&#x27;re slowly approaching a monoculture in photography, but it&#x27;s hard to convince folks outside of the hobby to care.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bayindirh</author><text>Sony&#x27;s image sensor fab business is a bit different.<p>First of all, there&#x27;s two companies: Semiconductor and Imaging. Sony opens some of their technologies to other customers by transferring Imaging unit&#x27;s patents to Semi and allows them for re-licensing. So, not everyone is using the same sensor even if they are coming out from the same fab.<p>Second, there&#x27;s customer tailored sensor business. Sony can provide a customer a baseline to start and, customer can customize this sensor according to their needs and got it produced for themselves.<p>Lastly, there&#x27;s strict division between customers in semiconductor side. So Sony Imaging can&#x27;t access to specs and design of other customers&#x27; sensors.<p>How it works in real life?<p>- Sony A7 series use Sony&#x27;s sensors with all their secrets at their disposal but, not with Nikon&#x27;s and Fuji&#x27;s secret sauces.<p>- Nikon orders customized, &quot;Designed by Nikon&quot; sensors to Sony Semi. Sony Imaging cannot access them (unless they buy and disassemble a Nikon Z).<p>- Same for Fuji. They have less rolling shutter in XT-4 for example, and it&#x27;s again built by Sony, for Fuji. No, Sony Imaging can&#x27;t play with them.<p>- Canon R5&#x27;s sensor is &quot;Designed by Canon&quot;. I&#x27;m not sure they are producing it. Sony or Tower Jazz maybe producing it. I don&#x27;t know.<p>At the end of the day, the fab is almost one but, designs are many and diversified and, nobody can see each other&#x27;s design. Like TSMC and Global Foundries.</text></comment> | <story><title>Olympus quits camera business after 84 years</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53165293</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ISL</author><text>To me, the big monoculture risk is Sony&#x27;s image-sensor fab. As I understand it, Sony, Fuji, Nikon and many others all rely upon the output of one company&#x27;s manufacturing process.<p>There&#x27;s a good reason for it -- they appear to make the very best sensors (edit: in terms of dynamic range and noise) in the commercial-camera market. Canon makes their own sensors, which are good in absolute but not relative terms, which appears to hold them back in performance. I don&#x27;t know if it is patent-related or process-related.<p>While I use Canon imaging systems, I don&#x27;t see the choice to use other brands as better or worse. Each manufacturer&#x27;s line has strengths and weaknesses; you pick the best tool for the job. Essentially every camera and optical system on the market, in absolute terms, is a wonderful instrument for imaging.<p>This reality is intensely freeing -- it means you can focus more on the image and less on the instrumentation. &quot;f&#x2F;8 and be there&quot; is still wonderful advice.</text></item><item><author>akersten</author><text>Sad to see them go - photography&#x27;s such a great hobby and having competition in the space is healthy. There&#x27;s a few brands out there still, but there is a noticable stigma in the professional community around equipment that isn&#x27;t Canon. If you&#x27;re not using L-glass, it feels like you get the same kind of judgement that Android users experience when they show up with green texts in iMessage.<p>As a matter of principle, I&#x27;ve been buying exclusively Nikon for almost my entire time in the hobby. I always saw Canon as a large conglomerate who tacked on photography as another arm of their company, where to me Nikon feels more focused on optics as a primary business line. Honestly, I should almost start buying more Pentax gear.<p>I worry we&#x27;re slowly approaching a monoculture in photography, but it&#x27;s hard to convince folks outside of the hobby to care.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lizknope</author><text>Some of Nikon&#x27;s sensors are probably made by Tower Jazz.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;petapixel.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;06&#x2F;05&#x2F;towerjazz-hints-that-nikon-is-using-their-sensors-in-the-z50-and-d7500&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;petapixel.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;06&#x2F;05&#x2F;towerjazz-hints-that-nikon-...</a><p>Nikon has also used Toshiba in the past but probably 80% of Nikon&#x27;s DSLR sensors were made by Sony.</text></comment> |
40,309,888 | 40,308,794 | 1 | 2 | 40,308,261 | train | <story><title>Microsoft PlayReady – Complete Client Identity Compromise</title><url>https://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2024/May/5</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jsheard</author><text>4K streaming content is hit or miss because most services lock that behind Widevine L1, which requires implementors to use a secure enclave and the entire signal path to use strong encryption. If an L1 implementation gets compromised it quickly has its keys revoked and is downgraded to L2&#x2F;L3, so piracy groups have a limited time window to dump as much 4K content as possible. Those lower Winevines tiers are permanently broken though so everything is immediately available in at least 1080p.<p>4K Blurays are currently always ripped due to an unfixable compromise in Intel SGX allowing PowerDVDs keys to be extracted, they could close that hole by revoking PowerDVDs keys for new Bluray releases but they haven&#x27;t done that yet. I imagine they will at some point because PowerDVD <i>requires</i> SGX to play UHDs, and Intel stopped supporting that on newer consumer hardware, so 4K Bluray playback on PCs is effectively being phased out.</text></item><item><author>londons_explore</author><text>Is there any video DRM scheme which successfully protects video content appearing on the pirate bay within 24 hours?<p>I really don&#x27;t see why so many millions (billions?) of dollars have been spent on technologies which so far have never kept the bad guys out.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>grishka</author><text>&gt; the entire signal path to use strong encryption<p>But the display panel itself still receives an unencrypted LVDS signal, which should not be too hard to decode. There are (were?) also cheap HDMI splitters that conveniently strip HDCP.<p>Your only issue is that yes, you can&#x27;t get at the original compressed video stream and have to reencode, possibly losing a tiny bit of quality.</text></comment> | <story><title>Microsoft PlayReady – Complete Client Identity Compromise</title><url>https://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2024/May/5</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jsheard</author><text>4K streaming content is hit or miss because most services lock that behind Widevine L1, which requires implementors to use a secure enclave and the entire signal path to use strong encryption. If an L1 implementation gets compromised it quickly has its keys revoked and is downgraded to L2&#x2F;L3, so piracy groups have a limited time window to dump as much 4K content as possible. Those lower Winevines tiers are permanently broken though so everything is immediately available in at least 1080p.<p>4K Blurays are currently always ripped due to an unfixable compromise in Intel SGX allowing PowerDVDs keys to be extracted, they could close that hole by revoking PowerDVDs keys for new Bluray releases but they haven&#x27;t done that yet. I imagine they will at some point because PowerDVD <i>requires</i> SGX to play UHDs, and Intel stopped supporting that on newer consumer hardware, so 4K Bluray playback on PCs is effectively being phased out.</text></item><item><author>londons_explore</author><text>Is there any video DRM scheme which successfully protects video content appearing on the pirate bay within 24 hours?<p>I really don&#x27;t see why so many millions (billions?) of dollars have been spent on technologies which so far have never kept the bad guys out.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ricktdotorg</author><text>^^^ great comment. hard to imagine a better synposis of 4k DRM in ~2 grafs. thanks!</text></comment> |
31,776,329 | 31,776,210 | 1 | 2 | 31,775,580 | train | <story><title>Quantum Algorithm Implementations for Beginners</title><url>https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3517340</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>desmond373</author><text>As someone who did most of IBMs quantum course, the difficulty didn&#x27;t come with the generating code part. It came with the application. How do I use this to speed up database access? How do I use this to better commute graphics? Can you make a neural net better with this?<p>Giving people useful applications will generate more interest than you will need.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nabla9</author><text>&gt; How do I use this to speed up database access? How do I use this to better commute graphics? Can you make a neural net better with this?<p>It seems that you have missed some of the basics of quantum computing.<p>For quantum computing to work the system must be isolated from the environment for the period of the computation. You can&#x27;t use it for anything interactive like graphics.<p>Any practical problem worth solving with quantum computer needs something like years or millions of years to solve using classical computer. Do you have database index where search takes years or graphics problem where output takes years?<p>Also consider the amount of qbits needed. For database search you need quantum computer with same order of magnitude qbits as the database index.<p>Practical problems for quantum computing are mostly scientific problems like simulating chemistry.</text></comment> | <story><title>Quantum Algorithm Implementations for Beginners</title><url>https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3517340</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>desmond373</author><text>As someone who did most of IBMs quantum course, the difficulty didn&#x27;t come with the generating code part. It came with the application. How do I use this to speed up database access? How do I use this to better commute graphics? Can you make a neural net better with this?<p>Giving people useful applications will generate more interest than you will need.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dr_dshiv</author><text>Useful applications don’t exist. They surely will, at some point, but not yet. That’s why they aren’t provided as examples.</text></comment> |
27,044,434 | 27,043,585 | 1 | 2 | 27,036,695 | train | <story><title>Efficiency Is the Enemy</title><url>https://fs.blog/2021/05/slack/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mlac</author><text>The thing that kills me about the ticketing systems is that they are often put into place in a way that is locally efficient but does not make sense globally.<p>For example, an application owner might have to submit a ticket to request an upgrade once a year (or when a new OS is supported). What often happens is that the application owner now has to know about, find, and correctly understand a form that they see once (or less) per year. That work has been offloaded from a single team (measurable impact to efficiency) to immeasurable shadow work for others in the organization. A form that would take 1 minute of effort from the team that runs the upgrade to fill out and track, because they are in it all day, ends up taking a half hour, cut across multiple starts and stops due to other similar interruptions.<p>This becomes pervasive (book your own travel with this system, book your own PTO here, track your time here, fill out tickets for this system, use the help desk ticketing system to request an application installation) and ends up eating a huge chunk of employee time doing unfamiliar overhead tasks on systems optimized for the team doing the work and not the customer. I think we are getting to the point where all of the systems that were designed to take away the need for administrative assistants may once again require an assistant to navigate efficiently.</text></item><item><author>allenu</author><text>Something that I&#x27;ve noticed recently is that in my work life, I&#x27;m finding there&#x27;s more bureaucracy in what I do, mostly in the name of &quot;efficiency&quot;. When you encounter a problem to solve, there&#x27;s often a process already defined that is most efficient (or at least thought to be most efficient), when accomplishing tasks, there&#x27;s a pre-defined way of laying out the tasks (i.e. tickets), updating them, reviewing them, and organizationally figuring out what&#x27;s best to do next.<p>In my opinion, these processes are an attempt at organizational efficiency. However, the flip side is it reduces personal agency for the worker. There&#x27;s little room to diverge or think about what you&#x27;re doing. If you diverge, such as taking longer to do something than what was prescribed, or using a different pattern to solve a problem, there is a cost to you within the system. You must explain why, which itself &quot;costs&quot; something. In a sense, you&#x27;re punished for doing things differently.<p>That loss of personal agency is absolutely soul-sucking. You feel like a machine, again at the cost of organizational efficiency. Slack is definitely important because it lets people acquire some sense of personal agency again.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cratermoon</author><text>A lot of medium-to-large organizations used to have dedicated administrative staff, not just for senior management, but for everyone. It was good because the people in the admin pools were experts at navigating the organizational structures. They did it every day, all the time, for everyone, so they knew the tricks.<p>In the interest of cutting labor costs, those jobs were cut, and self-service systems like the ones you describe became the standard.<p>I&#x27;ve been around long enough to remember a time when, if I needed to travel for work, someone made all the arrangements, and just handed me tickets and an itinerary. I was really junior at the time, it was just how travel was done.<p>Now I&#x27;m pretty senior, but not senior enough to have my own assistant. I get paid a lot more, too. But employers seem to think it&#x27;s more efficient for me to spend a day figuring out the corporate travel portal to plan and book my trip than to pay an expert to get it done in an hour or so.</text></comment> | <story><title>Efficiency Is the Enemy</title><url>https://fs.blog/2021/05/slack/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mlac</author><text>The thing that kills me about the ticketing systems is that they are often put into place in a way that is locally efficient but does not make sense globally.<p>For example, an application owner might have to submit a ticket to request an upgrade once a year (or when a new OS is supported). What often happens is that the application owner now has to know about, find, and correctly understand a form that they see once (or less) per year. That work has been offloaded from a single team (measurable impact to efficiency) to immeasurable shadow work for others in the organization. A form that would take 1 minute of effort from the team that runs the upgrade to fill out and track, because they are in it all day, ends up taking a half hour, cut across multiple starts and stops due to other similar interruptions.<p>This becomes pervasive (book your own travel with this system, book your own PTO here, track your time here, fill out tickets for this system, use the help desk ticketing system to request an application installation) and ends up eating a huge chunk of employee time doing unfamiliar overhead tasks on systems optimized for the team doing the work and not the customer. I think we are getting to the point where all of the systems that were designed to take away the need for administrative assistants may once again require an assistant to navigate efficiently.</text></item><item><author>allenu</author><text>Something that I&#x27;ve noticed recently is that in my work life, I&#x27;m finding there&#x27;s more bureaucracy in what I do, mostly in the name of &quot;efficiency&quot;. When you encounter a problem to solve, there&#x27;s often a process already defined that is most efficient (or at least thought to be most efficient), when accomplishing tasks, there&#x27;s a pre-defined way of laying out the tasks (i.e. tickets), updating them, reviewing them, and organizationally figuring out what&#x27;s best to do next.<p>In my opinion, these processes are an attempt at organizational efficiency. However, the flip side is it reduces personal agency for the worker. There&#x27;s little room to diverge or think about what you&#x27;re doing. If you diverge, such as taking longer to do something than what was prescribed, or using a different pattern to solve a problem, there is a cost to you within the system. You must explain why, which itself &quot;costs&quot; something. In a sense, you&#x27;re punished for doing things differently.<p>That loss of personal agency is absolutely soul-sucking. You feel like a machine, again at the cost of organizational efficiency. Slack is definitely important because it lets people acquire some sense of personal agency again.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>zmmmmm</author><text>&gt; all of the systems that were designed to take away the need for administrative assistants may once again require an assistant to navigate efficiently<p>Made me laugh. My org has a completely automated online self-service travel booking system that even includes dedicated support from a corporate travel agent - and I recently needed a single flight booked for a day in another city (about the simplest travel you can do) and somebody &quot;loaned&quot; me their PA to do the booking because it takes much time and knowledge to do it right. Part of the problem is that the org has implemented a gigantic set of strict rules about what kinds of flights can be booked to save money. So it can be quite hard to select the right flight that won&#x27;t get knocked back further downstream or alternatively navigate through the forms to justify why you aren&#x27;t selecting a compliant flight...</text></comment> |
33,552,491 | 33,551,109 | 1 | 2 | 33,523,032 | train | <story><title>Only solve one new problem at a time</title><url>https://www.bennadel.com/blog/4352-only-solve-one-new-problem-at-a-time.htm</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>edw519</author><text>As a general rule, successful programmers have been doing this forever:<p><pre><code> - It works. You added 2 things. It doesn&#x27;t work. Which thing broke it?
- It doesn&#x27;t work. You changed 2 things. It works. Which thing fixed it?
- It works. Two people changed it. It doesn&#x27;t work. Who broke it?
- One donut left. 2 programmers went into break room. No donuts left. Who ate it?
</code></pre>
Now change &quot;2&quot; to &quot;1&quot; in all of the above examples. See how much easier?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>flappyeagle</author><text><p><pre><code> - It works. You need to add 16 things. You add 1 thing at a time. 16 operations later you are good but the deadline has passed. Fired.
- It works. Add 16 things. It doesn&#x27;t work. Remove 8 things. It works. You&#x27;ve eliminated 8 culprits. 4 operations later done. Delivered on time. Get a promotion.
- One donut left. 2 programmers went into the break room. No donuts left. Who ate it? Not any of the 30 programmers outside of the break room. Ask the 2 programmers who did it. Prisoner&#x27;s dilemma. Fun had by all.</code></pre></text></comment> | <story><title>Only solve one new problem at a time</title><url>https://www.bennadel.com/blog/4352-only-solve-one-new-problem-at-a-time.htm</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>edw519</author><text>As a general rule, successful programmers have been doing this forever:<p><pre><code> - It works. You added 2 things. It doesn&#x27;t work. Which thing broke it?
- It doesn&#x27;t work. You changed 2 things. It works. Which thing fixed it?
- It works. Two people changed it. It doesn&#x27;t work. Who broke it?
- One donut left. 2 programmers went into break room. No donuts left. Who ate it?
</code></pre>
Now change &quot;2&quot; to &quot;1&quot; in all of the above examples. See how much easier?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>zelphirkalt</author><text>That can be a horrible time sink as well though. Imagine if only changing one thing means, that you need a test cycle of 15 minutes or even if it is only 5 minutes. You will need 5 minutes per change then. If you know multiple things you still need to change ahead of time, you might also go ahead and fix them all, and then fix resulting or remaining issues after only running one test cycle.<p>I think it depends on the situation, what the best approach is. Is it a system, which is running in production and you are operating an &quot;open heart&quot;? Well, better only change one thing and check. Is is a newly developed thing, which you develop on your own dev machine? You can easily fix many things and many more will still remain for further iterations.</text></comment> |
25,290,290 | 25,290,088 | 1 | 3 | 25,289,605 | train | <story><title>U.S. Hits Record Daily Death Toll, with Worse Likely to Come</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/live/2020/12/03/world/covid-19-coronavirus#us-virus-deaths-have-surpassed-the-spring-peak</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>satysin</author><text>This is so sad to see and from looking at the number of people who travelled for Thanksgiving last week I think it is almost certain that these kind of daily death numbers will continue into the new year :(<p>Honestly I don&#x27;t really know what to say when I see these headlines anymore. I am in [redacted] but have many friends and family in the US and hearing the stories from them is both saddening and infuriating.<p>Sadly my own friends and family that I used to respect and look up to have shown themselves as fools this year. People I used to think of as very intelligent falling for the most insane conspiracy theories and other such nonsense. It has been really eye opening in an increasingly depressing way.<p>And on top of that as someone from the UK (but now living in [redacted]) I also have the stupidness of Brexit to deal with.<p>People talk about the impact of lockdowns on mental health but honestly that wasn&#x27;t a big deal to me, the biggest impact to me this year has been the stupidity and selfishness of so many people. It is draining having to listen to people talk about 5G spreading the virus or Bill Gates wants to microchip you with the vaccine or going on rants that surgical masks lead to a dangerous build up of CO2.<p>There is something seriously wrong with the human race. A shocking lack of education and rational rather than emotional thinking for starters.<p>Sorry I guess my comment doesn&#x27;t really add to the discourse. Guess I just needed to just put something &#x27;out there&#x27; rather than it just rattle around in my head right now.</text></comment> | <story><title>U.S. Hits Record Daily Death Toll, with Worse Likely to Come</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/live/2020/12/03/world/covid-19-coronavirus#us-virus-deaths-have-surpassed-the-spring-peak</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mrfusion</author><text>What do excess deaths look like for 2020?</text></comment> |
15,459,253 | 15,459,193 | 1 | 2 | 15,458,655 | train | <story><title>Yemen's cholera outbreak now the worst in history as millionth case looms</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2017/oct/12/yemen-cholera-outbreak-worst-in-history-1-million-cases-by-end-of-year</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>k-ian</author><text>Nice, Guardian. Only a passing mention of the civil war that has led to all this. The US and UK need to stop funding Saudi Arabia&#x27;s military in order for this to stop happening in Yemen.</text></comment> | <story><title>Yemen's cholera outbreak now the worst in history as millionth case looms</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2017/oct/12/yemen-cholera-outbreak-worst-in-history-1-million-cases-by-end-of-year</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Geekette</author><text>I hit the link already mildly fuming at what I thought was clickbait because there&#x27;s no way any place could be on track for <i>one million</i> cases of cholera in today&#x27;s world. Quite heartbreaking to find out the headline is factual.</text></comment> |
22,314,965 | 22,314,753 | 1 | 3 | 22,313,131 | train | <story><title>Show HN: Broxy – An HTTP/HTTPS intercept proxy written in Go</title><url>https://github.com/rhaidiz/broxy</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>uranium235</author><text>I really would like to recommend go-any-proxy as well:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ryanchapman&#x2F;go-any-proxy" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ryanchapman&#x2F;go-any-proxy</a><p>It is pretty good you can masquerade it (configure it as a transparent proxy for any outbound TCP traffic and it uses HTTP CONNECT to proxies that support it to proxy the connection.) If you&#x27;re looking to unwrap SSL traffic you can use sslsplit, too.</text></comment> | <story><title>Show HN: Broxy – An HTTP/HTTPS intercept proxy written in Go</title><url>https://github.com/rhaidiz/broxy</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>qwerty456127</author><text>Does it have to look this ugly? Qt lets you make nice layouts easily and looks native by default.</text></comment> |
40,627,741 | 40,627,532 | 1 | 2 | 40,614,308 | train | <story><title>WARC-GPT: An open-source tool for exploring web archives using AI</title><url>https://lil.law.harvard.edu/blog/2024/02/12/warc-gpt-an-open-source-tool-for-exploring-web-archives-with-ai/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ttpphd</author><text>If you just want semantic search, check out Semantra: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;freedmand&#x2F;semantra">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;freedmand&#x2F;semantra</a></text></comment> | <story><title>WARC-GPT: An open-source tool for exploring web archives using AI</title><url>https://lil.law.harvard.edu/blog/2024/02/12/warc-gpt-an-open-source-tool-for-exploring-web-archives-with-ai/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Cedricgc</author><text>Looking into this, could be very useful for working with personal Zotero archives of webpages</text></comment> |
16,046,666 | 16,046,383 | 1 | 2 | 16,040,903 | train | <story><title>A basic income experiment in Kenya</title><url>http://nordic.businessinsider.com/kenya-village-disproving-biggest-myth-about-basic-income-2017-12</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>blueyes</author><text>The title is misleading, because this experiment start in late 2016. Sure, they plan to run for 12 years, but right now it&#x27;s more like a 14-month experiment. Even when the experiment is over, it will have been done on a very small sample. In the dozens, and some will surely drop out.<p>Slightly misleading headline aside, I&#x27;m glad the experiment is being done, since international aid had a lot of problems. The promise of UBI is that you don&#x27;t need huge bureaucratic infrastructure to help lots of people. Maybe all you need is a payment system. Direct cash can put more resources in the hands of the beneficiaries, and less in the hands of aid organizations that exist primarily to persist.[0]<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;2015&#x2F;06&#x2F;03&#x2F;411524156&#x2F;in-search-of-the-red-cross-500-million-in-haiti-relief" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;2015&#x2F;06&#x2F;03&#x2F;411524156&#x2F;in-search-of-the-re...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>A basic income experiment in Kenya</title><url>http://nordic.businessinsider.com/kenya-village-disproving-biggest-myth-about-basic-income-2017-12</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>DoreenMichele</author><text><i>Other research has found that people&#x27;s spending on alcohol and cigarettes actually went down when they received direct cash transfers. Faced with a brighter future, many people stop using temptation goods as a way to cope with a hopeless situation, researchers have discovered. In the village GiveDirectly is working with, interviews with nearly a dozen recipients showed that most people have actually worked more since the study began.</i><p>Well, this is encouraging.<p>I am not pro basic income because I think it won&#x27;t fix anything in the US without other changes first, such as universal basic healthcare and more affordable housing, and most discussions about basic income start from an assumption that it will be handled at the national level. I think the current focus on basic income actively takes attention away from things like healthcare and housing. We already don&#x27;t want to fix those things because they are hard problems to solve. Focusing on basic income strikes me as a variation on how so many people fantasize about winning the lottery. It seems like an easy answer. And people would rather imagine that there is an easy answer than wrestle with hard problems.<p>Like others are saying, I am unconvinced that this experiment really proves anything about basic income. But I think this may be the first time I have heard of a basic income experiment where the money came from elsewhere.<p>Maybe this approach does not further basic income. Maybe it will only provide new models for charity. Or maybe it provides a different model for basic income, one that puts a floor in globally and potentially starts the process of moving towards a world government, which doesn&#x27;t have to be <i>in place of</i> national governments. It can be another layer <i>on top of</i> them. So emergent global order makes more sense than a top down approach to creating it.<p>One of the issues with basic income is the questions surrounding how it impacts immigration. If you give all Americans $1000&#x2F;mo, that makes citizenship here an even more valuable commodity.<p>But if basic income starts as a global initiative to begin closing the gap between rich and poor nations, instead of a local initiative to help the poor within rich nations, maybe basic income can start resolving some of the problems currently fueling immigration pressures and bring barriers down to a more manageable level.</text></comment> |
35,280,086 | 35,279,692 | 1 | 2 | 35,270,806 | train | <story><title>The Cornell University Witchcraft Collection</title><url>https://rmc.library.cornell.edu/witchcraftcoll/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tppiotrowski</author><text>Carl Sagan did a great job describing the witch trial phenomenon in &quot;The Demon Haunted World&quot;. It discusses how unchecked beliefs without any evidence can wreak havoc on society. If you were accused of witchcraft your only choices were:<p>1. to deny it and be burned at the stake<p>2. admit it, implicate others and be put to death in a gentler way<p>I admire the ones who stood for reason and were brave enough to endure the consequences.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>somenameforme</author><text>Assuming this is about beliefs would imply the claims were made in earnest. In many (if not the vast majority?) of cases, this seems questionable. For instance during the Salem Witch Trials you even had a Minister [1] executed for witchcraft. His accusers were men who he owed debts to, and the evidence was a farce. It&#x27;s not like he was executed because of a society, drowned in their own beliefs, stumbled upon passable evidence of his crimes in an otherwise objective fashion. He was executed because some people really didn&#x27;t like him and simply weaponized the fears of the day, and that was more the rule than exception.<p>To me the risk seems to be when something becomes so popular to hate that nobody is willing to defend the accused. And this is made even worse due to an opposite bias in the other direction. Demonize and call for even more draconian treatment of the accused and you can signal your own incredible virtue. As his execution, Burroughs had turned the crowd to his side with a moving speech, as well as a recital of The Lord&#x27;s Prayer, which a witch was not supposed to be able to do. But fear not, along came some power seeking pompous posturing poser who offered his own counter-speech, an event recounted in a book he&#x27;d release the following year.<p>And this is a pattern that has repeated endlessly throughout history. All that changes is whatever one needs to label somebody.<p>[1] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;George_Burroughs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;George_Burroughs</a></text></comment> | <story><title>The Cornell University Witchcraft Collection</title><url>https://rmc.library.cornell.edu/witchcraftcoll/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tppiotrowski</author><text>Carl Sagan did a great job describing the witch trial phenomenon in &quot;The Demon Haunted World&quot;. It discusses how unchecked beliefs without any evidence can wreak havoc on society. If you were accused of witchcraft your only choices were:<p>1. to deny it and be burned at the stake<p>2. admit it, implicate others and be put to death in a gentler way<p>I admire the ones who stood for reason and were brave enough to endure the consequences.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>x3iv130f</author><text>Carl Sagan is an excellent communicator but he relies too heavily on literary tropes and popular fiction.<p>The issue of witchcraft is not unchecked beliefs, but the combustible mixture of politics and economics.<p>Early witches weren&#x27;t old women performing secret rituals in dense forests. They were the bourgeoisie, who found themselves newly rich during a time of political and economic uncertainty.<p>The &quot;Malleus Maleficarum&quot; never caught on among the religious elite. Why would they care about the imagined threat of witches when Protestants were out in the open and gaining ground amongst all levels of society?<p>Where the book did catch on was amongst secular courts. The book provided a convenient justification for condemning political and economic opponents. There it was used to great effect.</text></comment> |
31,753,217 | 31,753,246 | 1 | 3 | 31,752,892 | train | <story><title>What workers want: raises that beat inflation</title><url>https://www.axios.com/2022/06/15/what-workers-really-want-raises-that-beat-inflation</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>charlie0</author><text>Yes we want raises that beat inflation. But I think what we really want is a bigger share of the profits a company makes without them raising prices. Unfortunately, Wall Street demands ever growing profit margins and revenues. Meaning that whenever wage increase, they simply do their part to cancel them out by raising their prices as well.<p>I get that some companies have slim profit margins and can&#x27;t do this easily, but others can clearly choose to pay their employees more. They just choose not to. This is an ideological thing and not an impossibility. See Gravity Payments.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>zdragnar</author><text>I&#x27;ll be honest, having worked at companies with profit sharing, you&#x27;re better off taking the raise unless you&#x27;re working for commission, and even then now is a rough time to be on commission.<p>If you can afford to risk your income on your company&#x27;s fortunes, start your own or join a startup with a founder who seems trustworthy.<p>For me and most people, predictable income is much better than risky equity.</text></comment> | <story><title>What workers want: raises that beat inflation</title><url>https://www.axios.com/2022/06/15/what-workers-really-want-raises-that-beat-inflation</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>charlie0</author><text>Yes we want raises that beat inflation. But I think what we really want is a bigger share of the profits a company makes without them raising prices. Unfortunately, Wall Street demands ever growing profit margins and revenues. Meaning that whenever wage increase, they simply do their part to cancel them out by raising their prices as well.<p>I get that some companies have slim profit margins and can&#x27;t do this easily, but others can clearly choose to pay their employees more. They just choose not to. This is an ideological thing and not an impossibility. See Gravity Payments.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rgersten</author><text>This is spot on. I think there is a nuance across industries that is often missed here too. Certain industries really can’t raise prices or wages without tanking the business. Restaurants, mechanics, doctors, etc are often operating on razor thin margins with prices set by the market. For medical&#x2F;dental&#x2F;therapy their prices are often set by insurance reimbursement rates that haven’t kept up with inflation.<p>The flip side is like you said, companies raking in record profits with massive cash on hand. They could easily afford to share more with employees and would probably benefit from a happier and more invested work force. The stratification between C-level and everyone else is higher than it’s ever been.</text></comment> |
22,772,684 | 22,772,211 | 1 | 3 | 22,770,643 | train | <story><title>Ask HN: Who has been laid off?</title><text>There is a monthly “Who is hiring” post, but I thought it might be helpful to have a laid off post with unemployment rates rising.<p>Share your experience and what you’re looking for.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>Ididntdothis</author><text>Where can people volunteer with tech skills? Is there a demand for it?</text></item><item><author>3pt14159</author><text>I&#x27;m sorry to hear that dude.<p>Haskell is a demanding language, so you&#x27;re almost certainly a pretty senior dev. If so, consider volunteering to help organizations during the downtime. Worst case, if you can&#x27;t get that dream gig back it will certainly make your resume stand out when you&#x27;re looking for your next thing. Best of luck.</text></item><item><author>jbreckmckye</author><text>Just been put on furlough with likely redundancy at the end of the national lockdown period. Absolutely devastated. My job was hard and the pace relentless but the work was extremely stimulating and my colleagues were absolutely fantastic people.<p>(It was also a Haskell gig, which is a real rarity.)<p>Right now I&#x27;m just licking my wounds and waiting for the lockdown to end. I&#x27;m not sure if it makes sense to start a new job right now - the UK furlough scheme is essentially guaranteed income until June. Starting a new job would waive that, so unless you&#x27;re actually losing money on furlough I think it&#x27;s a bit unwise to jump companies.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>erikbye</author><text>While not what you meant, if people with coding skills have free time, it is greatly appreciated if they contribute to open source projects that are widely used. A lot of OSS are critical components in many systems we rely on daily, your contributions can have more value than you can even imagine.<p>It would be great if all devs could keep this in mind, but especially the ones that are about to get some time off (if life does not get too stressful for you).</text></comment> | <story><title>Ask HN: Who has been laid off?</title><text>There is a monthly “Who is hiring” post, but I thought it might be helpful to have a laid off post with unemployment rates rising.<p>Share your experience and what you’re looking for.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>Ididntdothis</author><text>Where can people volunteer with tech skills? Is there a demand for it?</text></item><item><author>3pt14159</author><text>I&#x27;m sorry to hear that dude.<p>Haskell is a demanding language, so you&#x27;re almost certainly a pretty senior dev. If so, consider volunteering to help organizations during the downtime. Worst case, if you can&#x27;t get that dream gig back it will certainly make your resume stand out when you&#x27;re looking for your next thing. Best of luck.</text></item><item><author>jbreckmckye</author><text>Just been put on furlough with likely redundancy at the end of the national lockdown period. Absolutely devastated. My job was hard and the pace relentless but the work was extremely stimulating and my colleagues were absolutely fantastic people.<p>(It was also a Haskell gig, which is a real rarity.)<p>Right now I&#x27;m just licking my wounds and waiting for the lockdown to end. I&#x27;m not sure if it makes sense to start a new job right now - the UK furlough scheme is essentially guaranteed income until June. Starting a new job would waive that, so unless you&#x27;re actually losing money on furlough I think it&#x27;s a bit unwise to jump companies.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>zigzaggy</author><text>New York has a tech response team that you can volunteer with to help out: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ny.gov&#x2F;programs&#x2F;new-york-state-covid-19-technology-swat-team" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ny.gov&#x2F;programs&#x2F;new-york-state-covid-19-technolo...</a><p>See HN thread: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=22723098" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=22723098</a></text></comment> |
24,413,356 | 24,413,628 | 1 | 2 | 24,412,810 | train | <story><title>Apple countersues Epic, seeks punitive damages</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-countersues-fortnite-maker-epic-games-seeking-to-halt-in-app-payments-11599592017</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jrockway</author><text>Apple writes in their court filing: “Epic sought to enjoy all of the benefits of Apple’s iOS platform and related services while its ‘hotfix’ lined Epic’s pockets at Apple’s expense.”<p>It seems that Apple has forgotten that each iPhone user already paid Apple hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars for the iPhone itself. It is reasonable to charge developers for development tools, but if that&#x27;s what you want to do, just charge them for development tools. Meanwhile, I bought an iPhone so that I can run the software that I like. If it costs money to develop a platform, it doesn&#x27;t seem that strange to just charge that upfront when someone buys an iPhone.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Traster</author><text>&gt; It is reasonable to charge developers for development tools, but if that&#x27;s what you want to do, just charge them for development tools.<p>This isn&#x27;t how the software development eco-system works. There are <i>tonnes</i> of examples of providing free development tools with restrictions on use and revenue sharing agreements. For example, there&#x27;s this little known company called Epic Games which provides the Unreal Engine for free- but with the following clause:<p>&gt; This license is free to use and incurs 5% royalties when you monetize your game or other interactive off-the-shelf product and your lifetime gross revenues from that product exceed $1,000,000 USD.<p>And Epic doesn&#x27;t even provide quality control, a discovery mechanism, or payment processing.</text></comment> | <story><title>Apple countersues Epic, seeks punitive damages</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-countersues-fortnite-maker-epic-games-seeking-to-halt-in-app-payments-11599592017</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jrockway</author><text>Apple writes in their court filing: “Epic sought to enjoy all of the benefits of Apple’s iOS platform and related services while its ‘hotfix’ lined Epic’s pockets at Apple’s expense.”<p>It seems that Apple has forgotten that each iPhone user already paid Apple hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars for the iPhone itself. It is reasonable to charge developers for development tools, but if that&#x27;s what you want to do, just charge them for development tools. Meanwhile, I bought an iPhone so that I can run the software that I like. If it costs money to develop a platform, it doesn&#x27;t seem that strange to just charge that upfront when someone buys an iPhone.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>balls187</author><text>&gt; If it costs money to develop a platform, it doesn&#x27;t seem that strange to just charge that upfront when someone buys an iPhone.<p>Epic runs their own digital distribution platform, in which they also take a cut of the sales. Their terms are different than Apples, but they still do take a cut of sales.<p>Epic also takes 5% royalties for any (non-free) game built with Epic&#x27;s Unreal Engine.<p>Epic and Apple have the same business model, however Epic&#x27;s terms are not as high as Apples.<p>On the other hand, Epic makes a lot of money selling &quot;cosmetics&quot; and loot boxes. In effect, you have a company that has profited immensely from gambling, going after a company that has profited immensely due to their own closed ecosystem.<p>(also not to mention Epic blatantly ripped off the success of PUBG when they switched Fortnite to be a Battle Royale game)</text></comment> |
10,596,638 | 10,596,788 | 1 | 2 | 10,588,849 | train | <story><title>Signs Point to Unencrypted Communications Between Terror Suspects</title><url>https://theintercept.com/2015/11/18/signs-point-to-unencrypted-communications-between-terror-suspects/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>rtl49</author><text>I don&#x27;t mean to downplay the importance of this tragedy for the people involved, but it&#x27;s interesting to observe the media reaction to this event with a more detached frame of mind than I was capable of as a child.<p>The attacks have played right into the hands of parties with political interests lying in wait. For months articles on one or the other side of the encryption &quot;debate&quot; have been produced by news organizations at a low hum. Now that something, anything, loosely relevant has occurred, they can now point to this as further evidence in support of whatever position was espoused over the course of the preceding months. It strikes a person who pays attention to such things as rather methodical.</text></comment> | <story><title>Signs Point to Unencrypted Communications Between Terror Suspects</title><url>https://theintercept.com/2015/11/18/signs-point-to-unencrypted-communications-between-terror-suspects/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>riskable</author><text>The moment my wife and I heard about the attacks in Paris I said to her, &quot;the spooks are going to use this as an excuse to take everyone&#x27;s rights away.&quot;<p>The media response on this was so predictable it was like clockwork:<p>* Conservative media immediately kicks off talking points in regards to, &quot;if more people were carrying guns this wouldn&#x27;t have happened!&quot;<p>* &quot;Where&#x27;s the outrage from Muslims?&quot;<p>* &quot;Outraged Muslims say the attackers aren&#x27;t true Muslims because Mohammed forbids killing innocents.&quot;<p>* &quot;It had to have been Syrian refugees!&quot;<p>* &quot;Can&#x27;t we just bomb the fsck out of Syria?&quot;<p>* All manner of insinuations that all Muslims are dangerous and we should &quot;kick them out&quot; or prevent them entry into the our country.<p>...then, attempting to time things just right the spy organizations all over the world ask for everyone to give up their privacy so they can &quot;stop terrorists&quot;.<p>What we <i>won&#x27;t</i> see in the major news media&#x2F;popular talking heads:<p>* Outrage that despite the billions upon billions invested in spying programs no one was able to predict or stop this attack. Proving that the vast spying powers granted to governmental organizations don&#x27;t work.<p>* Factual stories pointing out that encryption with back doors won&#x27;t be used by terrorists so it&#x27;s useless against terrorists by definition.<p>* Investigations into <i>why</i> the mass collection of everyone&#x27;s personal details didn&#x27;t work and can&#x27;t work to stop these kinds of attacks.<p>* Informative stories about what every-day people or politicians can do to hurt terrorists and stop terrorism. For example, there will be no one even remotely connecting the dots between oil usage and terrorism. Or how there&#x27;s a direct link between a country&#x27;s oil revenues and democracy.</text></comment> |
12,841,227 | 12,841,244 | 1 | 2 | 12,840,555 | train | <story><title>No One Saw Tesla’s Solar Roof Coming</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-31/no-one-saw-tesla-s-solar-roof-coming</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>amelius</author><text>&gt; I&#x27;m sure i&#x27;m not the only one who feels like this is possibly the iphone moment of Solarcity&#x2F;Tesla: an old-ish idea, made sexy and tasty to consumers, together with technology reaching a tipping point<p>Except one ingredient is missing: most people cannot afford one, even if they tried really hard.</text></item><item><author>wojcech</author><text>I&#x27;m sure i&#x27;m not the only one who feels like this is possibly the iphone moment of Solarcity&#x2F;Tesla: an old-ish idea, made <i>sexy</i> and tasty to consumers, together with technology reaching a tipping point(and also Musk <i>again</i> finding a way to maximally exploit government subsidies for clean tech.)<p>The tesla car itself could count as well, but felt less &quot;design driven&quot; imo. If this fails, everyone will call it obviously due to bad tech. If it succeeds, I&#x27;d say it was because the tech was barely sufficient to keep up with the excellent luster.<p>On a side note, I wonder whether or not the heavy government subsidies will be forgotten in the lore of clean tech, just like silicon valley seems to have forgotten the complete and utter reliance on government funding in it&#x27;s infancy(or possibly even today)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>robbrown451</author><text>He&#x27;s pitching it as being basically break even, when electricity costs are factored in. My guess is an awful lot of people can afford this, especially for new construction. Certainly enough to keep up with ability to ramp up manufacturing and training of installers.<p>And then the economies of scale (and hopefully competition) will kick in and it should reach a point where nearly every new house, and nearly every replacement roof, will be solar by default. At least in climates friendly to solar.<p>IPhone got a lot of attention when it was released, but it was a while before they became common with more than just the early adopter crowd. This might take a while longer for various reasons, but still, this is a big deal.<p>This has an interesting twist. While it is subtle, people can tell you have it. People like to impress their neighbors. But this one isn&#x27;t just &quot;look how much money I have&quot; but &quot;look how I am using my money to be a responsible citizen of the planet.&quot; If you are going to try to enter the &quot;keep up with the Jones&#x27;s&quot; race, this isn&#x27;t a bad way to go about it.</text></comment> | <story><title>No One Saw Tesla’s Solar Roof Coming</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-31/no-one-saw-tesla-s-solar-roof-coming</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>amelius</author><text>&gt; I&#x27;m sure i&#x27;m not the only one who feels like this is possibly the iphone moment of Solarcity&#x2F;Tesla: an old-ish idea, made sexy and tasty to consumers, together with technology reaching a tipping point<p>Except one ingredient is missing: most people cannot afford one, even if they tried really hard.</text></item><item><author>wojcech</author><text>I&#x27;m sure i&#x27;m not the only one who feels like this is possibly the iphone moment of Solarcity&#x2F;Tesla: an old-ish idea, made <i>sexy</i> and tasty to consumers, together with technology reaching a tipping point(and also Musk <i>again</i> finding a way to maximally exploit government subsidies for clean tech.)<p>The tesla car itself could count as well, but felt less &quot;design driven&quot; imo. If this fails, everyone will call it obviously due to bad tech. If it succeeds, I&#x27;d say it was because the tech was barely sufficient to keep up with the excellent luster.<p>On a side note, I wonder whether or not the heavy government subsidies will be forgotten in the lore of clean tech, just like silicon valley seems to have forgotten the complete and utter reliance on government funding in it&#x27;s infancy(or possibly even today)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jzwinck</author><text>The way I remember the first iPhone, it was hilariously expensive, yet lacked appeal to business users who at the time were the key demographic for such expensive widgets.<p>Relative to the benchmark of &quot;People who can afford to buy a home in the US,&quot; perhaps a solar roof is not so unattainable. It just has to look great, convey social status, and be durable.<p>Most US home owners don&#x27;t pay for their house (or car) outright. The putative purchase price of photovoltaic panels may not be prohibitive even for plebs.</text></comment> |
8,642,742 | 8,642,492 | 1 | 2 | 8,641,004 | train | <story><title>The Next Chapter</title><url>http://blog.aereo.com/2014/11/next-chapter/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>twelvedigits</author><text>I don&#x27;t think many people had the opportunity to use Aereo. They had a decent presence in New York City, and as the company expanded across the country reporters cited customer numbers in the mid five figures.<p>As an Aereo user, let me tell you what you missed out on: one of the most amazing products I&#x27;ve ever used.<p>Aereo &quot;worked.&quot; It worked like magic.<p>First, it lived up to its claim. You could stream live, broadcast television to your phone or computer, and you could AirPlay it to your television. Everything was in HD. It worked incredibly well. So many video products fail to deliver on the user experience, or the video is choppy, or it crashes all the time. Aereo&#x27;s software had its struggles, but it worked far more often than not. I could have people over and stream the Super Bowl and never worry that Aereo would crap out.<p>Aereo also worked remarkably well during Hurricane Sandy. I live in Brooklyn, and Aereo&#x27;s Brooklyn HQ was less than a mile from my apartment, but we streamed Aereo until we went to sleep that night. Considering reports that their antennae sucked a ton of power, that&#x27;s incredible on a night when power was out all across the city.<p>I also interviewed with the company in 2013 for a business development role. Everyone that I met was really great. They treated me well during the process while clearly balancing a million things, including their legal concerns. I really, really wanted to work there, but it wasn&#x27;t a fit for a lot of reasons, their uncertain future being one of them.<p>When my girlfriend told me that they were filing for bankruptcy, I was sad. This is innovative technology that worked for consumers, squashed by antiquated government regulation and a highly litigious, innovation-resistant, influential media industry.<p>Progress, halted.<p>A winning product that could have delighted millions, squashed.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kevincennis</author><text>Former Aereo employee here. Thanks so much for the kind words.<p>That brightened up my day a bit.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Next Chapter</title><url>http://blog.aereo.com/2014/11/next-chapter/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>twelvedigits</author><text>I don&#x27;t think many people had the opportunity to use Aereo. They had a decent presence in New York City, and as the company expanded across the country reporters cited customer numbers in the mid five figures.<p>As an Aereo user, let me tell you what you missed out on: one of the most amazing products I&#x27;ve ever used.<p>Aereo &quot;worked.&quot; It worked like magic.<p>First, it lived up to its claim. You could stream live, broadcast television to your phone or computer, and you could AirPlay it to your television. Everything was in HD. It worked incredibly well. So many video products fail to deliver on the user experience, or the video is choppy, or it crashes all the time. Aereo&#x27;s software had its struggles, but it worked far more often than not. I could have people over and stream the Super Bowl and never worry that Aereo would crap out.<p>Aereo also worked remarkably well during Hurricane Sandy. I live in Brooklyn, and Aereo&#x27;s Brooklyn HQ was less than a mile from my apartment, but we streamed Aereo until we went to sleep that night. Considering reports that their antennae sucked a ton of power, that&#x27;s incredible on a night when power was out all across the city.<p>I also interviewed with the company in 2013 for a business development role. Everyone that I met was really great. They treated me well during the process while clearly balancing a million things, including their legal concerns. I really, really wanted to work there, but it wasn&#x27;t a fit for a lot of reasons, their uncertain future being one of them.<p>When my girlfriend told me that they were filing for bankruptcy, I was sad. This is innovative technology that worked for consumers, squashed by antiquated government regulation and a highly litigious, innovation-resistant, influential media industry.<p>Progress, halted.<p>A winning product that could have delighted millions, squashed.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>serve_yay</author><text>&gt; You could stream live, broadcast television to your phone or computer, and you could AirPlay it to your television.<p>Television on your television, you say?</text></comment> |
31,271,061 | 31,271,087 | 1 | 2 | 31,268,861 | train | <story><title>Swarming drones autonomously navigate a dense forest</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2022/05/04/swarming-drones-autonomously-navigate-a-dense-forest-and-chase-a-human/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hibernator149</author><text>Everytime someone says: &quot;Our robot&#x2F;drone can be used for finding hidden people in hard to reach locations&quot; the cynic in me thinks that these are just codewords for: &quot;Our killbots will revolutionize the urban battlefield. DoD please fund us&quot;. Can someone please prove me wrong?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tgsovlerkhgsel</author><text>Slaughterbots was meant to be a video against such technology, but I&#x27;m 100% sure there are plenty of companies who are pointing at it and saying &quot;This. Exactly this. This is what we want.&quot;</text></comment> | <story><title>Swarming drones autonomously navigate a dense forest</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2022/05/04/swarming-drones-autonomously-navigate-a-dense-forest-and-chase-a-human/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hibernator149</author><text>Everytime someone says: &quot;Our robot&#x2F;drone can be used for finding hidden people in hard to reach locations&quot; the cynic in me thinks that these are just codewords for: &quot;Our killbots will revolutionize the urban battlefield. DoD please fund us&quot;. Can someone please prove me wrong?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>chinathrow</author><text>You&#x27;re not wrong, but at least some SAR (search and rescue) efforts are already leading to better response times in bad weather and thus saved lives.<p>Example from REGA, a swiss SAR provider.
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rega.ch&#x2F;en&#x2F;our-missions&#x2F;cutting-edge-technology&#x2F;rega-drone" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rega.ch&#x2F;en&#x2F;our-missions&#x2F;cutting-edge-technology&#x2F;...</a></text></comment> |
11,409,003 | 11,408,979 | 1 | 2 | 11,404,590 | train | <story><title>Apple at 40: The forgotten founder who gave it all away</title><url>http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-35940300</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>enraged_camel</author><text>&gt;&gt;For those reasons I went to Microsoft. And you know what? I felt great going into work every day. That&#x27;s way more important than a billion dollars.<p>Is it, though? I mean, don&#x27;t get me wrong, happiness is very important, but we&#x27;re talking about literally a billion dollars. You can use that type of money to do a shit ton of things, and virtually guarantee that your children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren etc. live very, very comfortable lives. Personally, given the choice, I&#x27;d gladly choose half a decade (or whatever) of absolute misery working for an asshole boss if it will net me a billion dollars in the end. Because for me, my own happiness is not more important than the happiness and comfort of those around me and those who come after me.</text></item><item><author>tomcam</author><text>You made the right choice. I have talked to lots of people who worked at Apple in the early days, including some key people from the first dozen or so employees. I never met anyone who said it was enjoyable working with Jobs. (Lots of people said they grew a lot, learned a lot, and so on, but never anything along the lines of &quot;I felt great going in to work every day&quot;.<p>For those reasons I went to Microsoft. And you know what? I felt great going into work every day. That&#x27;s way more important than a billion dollars.<p>Also, I&#x27;m a somewhat high net worth individual (nothing remotely in the Steve Jobs range). I&#x27;m lucky to be where I am, but the price of being a billionaire seems much too high for me.<p>You appear to be at peace with your decision. It is a much deserved peace.</text></item><item><author>Stratoscope</author><text>There are so many things that might have happened but for one key decision. You can&#x27;t spend the rest of your life wondering &quot;what if?&quot;<p>But it can be tempting!<p>In my case, I had the opportunity to be the first programmer at Apple. I told the story on Reddit a few years ago:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;IAmA&#x2F;comments&#x2F;h4n5w&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;IAmA&#x2F;comments&#x2F;h4n5w&#x2F;</a><p>As you can imagine, I have wondered &quot;what if?&quot; more than a few times. :-)<p>But &quot;what if?&quot; can work both ways. I could have become a billionaire and one of the most famous people in Silicon Valley. Or Steve could have driven me from the mild depression I&#x27;d occasionally experienced into full-blown mental illness, as happened with one of Apple&#x27;s earliest employees. You just don&#x27;t know which way it could have turned out.<p>The other story on the front page today about Regis McKenna reminds me of one of the more remarkable coincidences I&#x27;ve encountered.<p>As I told in the Reddit story, when I walked out of Apple&#x27;s answering service in 1976 I thought to myself, &quot;Those guys are flakes! They&#x27;re never going to make it.&quot;<p>It was one of those things that sticks in your mind. I remember vividly to this day exactly where I was walking and the exact words that were in my head.<p>A couple of years ago I was reading Michael Moritz&#x27;s <i>Return to the Little Kingdom</i> and ran across this:<p><i>At first there was great uncertainty at the Regis McKenna Agency about Apple&#x27;s prospects. The account executive, Frank Burge, explained, &quot;People who knew Markkula and Apple wondered whether they would make it. We kept saying &#x27;These guys are flakes. They’re never going to make it.&#x27;&quot;</i><p>Other than &quot;these&quot; vs. &quot;those&quot;, it&#x27;s the <i>exact same words</i> I was thinking.<p>It was definitely a strange feeling to run across that quote!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>adevine</author><text>&gt; You can use that type of money to do a shit ton of things, and virtually guarantee that your children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren etc. live very, very comfortable lives.<p>I think that is naive. I&#x27;ve met quite a few people with large trust funds, and in every case I thought &quot;Man, I am so glad I&#x27;m not them.&quot; Human joy and self-worth does NOT come about from being &quot;comfortable&quot;.</text></comment> | <story><title>Apple at 40: The forgotten founder who gave it all away</title><url>http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-35940300</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>enraged_camel</author><text>&gt;&gt;For those reasons I went to Microsoft. And you know what? I felt great going into work every day. That&#x27;s way more important than a billion dollars.<p>Is it, though? I mean, don&#x27;t get me wrong, happiness is very important, but we&#x27;re talking about literally a billion dollars. You can use that type of money to do a shit ton of things, and virtually guarantee that your children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren etc. live very, very comfortable lives. Personally, given the choice, I&#x27;d gladly choose half a decade (or whatever) of absolute misery working for an asshole boss if it will net me a billion dollars in the end. Because for me, my own happiness is not more important than the happiness and comfort of those around me and those who come after me.</text></item><item><author>tomcam</author><text>You made the right choice. I have talked to lots of people who worked at Apple in the early days, including some key people from the first dozen or so employees. I never met anyone who said it was enjoyable working with Jobs. (Lots of people said they grew a lot, learned a lot, and so on, but never anything along the lines of &quot;I felt great going in to work every day&quot;.<p>For those reasons I went to Microsoft. And you know what? I felt great going into work every day. That&#x27;s way more important than a billion dollars.<p>Also, I&#x27;m a somewhat high net worth individual (nothing remotely in the Steve Jobs range). I&#x27;m lucky to be where I am, but the price of being a billionaire seems much too high for me.<p>You appear to be at peace with your decision. It is a much deserved peace.</text></item><item><author>Stratoscope</author><text>There are so many things that might have happened but for one key decision. You can&#x27;t spend the rest of your life wondering &quot;what if?&quot;<p>But it can be tempting!<p>In my case, I had the opportunity to be the first programmer at Apple. I told the story on Reddit a few years ago:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;IAmA&#x2F;comments&#x2F;h4n5w&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;IAmA&#x2F;comments&#x2F;h4n5w&#x2F;</a><p>As you can imagine, I have wondered &quot;what if?&quot; more than a few times. :-)<p>But &quot;what if?&quot; can work both ways. I could have become a billionaire and one of the most famous people in Silicon Valley. Or Steve could have driven me from the mild depression I&#x27;d occasionally experienced into full-blown mental illness, as happened with one of Apple&#x27;s earliest employees. You just don&#x27;t know which way it could have turned out.<p>The other story on the front page today about Regis McKenna reminds me of one of the more remarkable coincidences I&#x27;ve encountered.<p>As I told in the Reddit story, when I walked out of Apple&#x27;s answering service in 1976 I thought to myself, &quot;Those guys are flakes! They&#x27;re never going to make it.&quot;<p>It was one of those things that sticks in your mind. I remember vividly to this day exactly where I was walking and the exact words that were in my head.<p>A couple of years ago I was reading Michael Moritz&#x27;s <i>Return to the Little Kingdom</i> and ran across this:<p><i>At first there was great uncertainty at the Regis McKenna Agency about Apple&#x27;s prospects. The account executive, Frank Burge, explained, &quot;People who knew Markkula and Apple wondered whether they would make it. We kept saying &#x27;These guys are flakes. They’re never going to make it.&#x27;&quot;</i><p>Other than &quot;these&quot; vs. &quot;those&quot;, it&#x27;s the <i>exact same words</i> I was thinking.<p>It was definitely a strange feeling to run across that quote!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Stratoscope</author><text>That&#x27;s a very valid point!<p>Besides the billion dollars or the fame, there is another question I&#x27;ve asked myself a few times when I&#x27;ve been in a speculative mood.<p>Steve was famous for his &quot;bozo bit&quot;. You could be his greatest hero one day, and the next day he would flip the bozo bit on you and you were the scum of the earth.<p>When he told me &quot;you couldn&#x27;t possibly program these microcomputers, they are completely different from the mainframes you&#x27;ve worked on,&quot; what if I <i>had</i> pushed back and shown him they weren&#x27;t so different and I could do a <i>great</i> job with them?<p>There&#x27;s a possibility he would have learned from that experience, realized he was mistaken in his snap judgment, and improved his relations with other people he worked with.<p>Of course that may be wishful thinking. And being Steve, he probably still would have had a bozo bit. But maybe he wouldn&#x27;t have flipped it so often! :-)</text></comment> |
2,763,163 | 2,763,274 | 1 | 2 | 2,763,022 | train | <story><title>What Google's Famous Cafeterias Can Teach Us About Health</title><url>http://www.theatlantic.com/life/print/2011/07/what-googles-famous-cafeterias-can-teach-us-about-health/241876/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>cletus</author><text>One correction and one comment:<p>The article says cafeterias are available 24/7. That is not technically correct. The cafeterias are open for various meals on various days (eg one might do breakfast and lunch 5 days a week, another might do lunch 5 days a week and dinner 4 days a week).<p>What are available 24/7 are the micro-kitchens, which have coffee machines, breakfast cereal, various snacks, sodas, ice tea, etc. It is true that these do tend to have a healthier focus but it depends on what office you're in.<p>Also, I don't know what vending machines there are. I haven't seen any but then again I'm based on New York (although I've spent quite a bit of time in Mountain View).<p>So I'm not sure how the article reaches the conclusion it does because, at least in Mountain View, it's entirely possible to eat nothing but Oreos and Kit-Kats from the MKs 24/7.<p>It is true however that those items do tend to be on the lower shelves.<p>Lastly, this article seems very focused on Mountain View but that's only one of many offices, although it is by far the largest. In New York for example there are no bikes but there are scooters (the building we're in is an entire downtown city block and one of our floors is the entire floor so scooters actually do come in handy for traversing level 4).<p>I haven't seen bikes or scooters outside of these two offices however.</text></comment> | <story><title>What Google's Famous Cafeterias Can Teach Us About Health</title><url>http://www.theatlantic.com/life/print/2011/07/what-googles-famous-cafeterias-can-teach-us-about-health/241876/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>scottyallen</author><text>The vending machine isn't quite what the article makes it out to be. For starters, it's one vending machine in all of Google (as far as I know).<p>It magically appeared one April Fool's day, and has been attributed to some of the SREs in charge of keeping web search running, but credit has never been claimed. There was a rather funny "I am spartacus" thread about the vending machine that appeared on a major email list after one of the facilities or kitchen management asked who was responsible, ostensibly so they could congratulate them.<p>I no longer work at Google (though I used to work downstairs from the vending machine), so it's awesome to hear it's still up and running and being stocked. I believe, at least for a while, facilities/cafe staff were officially condoning it if not restocking it. Definitely one of the more clever pranks I saw around campus.</text></comment> |
34,931,935 | 34,931,144 | 1 | 2 | 34,929,968 | train | <story><title>Show HN: Sail a historical full-rigged ship in real global weather</title><url>https://thapen.itch.io/painted-ocean</url><text>This is a simulator of a frigate from about 1800. It has realistic physics, tuned to match historical performance. The UI is based around commands given in period naval language. Rather than use the current weather, it has a full year&#x27;s weather data (for 1980 - taken from <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;psl.noaa.gov&#x2F;data&#x2F;gridded&#x2F;data.ncep.reanalysis2.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;psl.noaa.gov&#x2F;data&#x2F;gridded&#x2F;data.ncep.reanalysis2.html</a>). This allows the weather to change realistically under time acceleration.<p>To learn the basics of handling a square-rigged ship, start the &quot;Harbour&quot; scenario, click on the instructions button at the bottom left, and follow the instructions to try to get out of Portsmouth harbour.<p>To go for a long sail, start the &quot;The World&quot; scenario. Open the map, control+click anywhere on it to move there; control+click on the compass at the bottom left to turn the ship to that heading; then activate travel acceleration at the bottom right.<p>It&#x27;s a simulator more than a game - think MS flight simulator. There&#x27;s no sinking, but you can lose sails or spars in high winds. It&#x27;s windows only.<p>This was released a couple of years ago, but this is an updated version from the end of January. See the devlog (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thapen.itch.io&#x2F;painted-ocean&#x2F;devlog" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thapen.itch.io&#x2F;painted-ocean&#x2F;devlog</a>) for the changes. You can also find some discussions there on historical sailing performance numbers.</text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>inasio</author><text>This is a perfect use case for VR, specifically crappy VR, motion sickness is now a feature</text></comment> | <story><title>Show HN: Sail a historical full-rigged ship in real global weather</title><url>https://thapen.itch.io/painted-ocean</url><text>This is a simulator of a frigate from about 1800. It has realistic physics, tuned to match historical performance. The UI is based around commands given in period naval language. Rather than use the current weather, it has a full year&#x27;s weather data (for 1980 - taken from <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;psl.noaa.gov&#x2F;data&#x2F;gridded&#x2F;data.ncep.reanalysis2.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;psl.noaa.gov&#x2F;data&#x2F;gridded&#x2F;data.ncep.reanalysis2.html</a>). This allows the weather to change realistically under time acceleration.<p>To learn the basics of handling a square-rigged ship, start the &quot;Harbour&quot; scenario, click on the instructions button at the bottom left, and follow the instructions to try to get out of Portsmouth harbour.<p>To go for a long sail, start the &quot;The World&quot; scenario. Open the map, control+click anywhere on it to move there; control+click on the compass at the bottom left to turn the ship to that heading; then activate travel acceleration at the bottom right.<p>It&#x27;s a simulator more than a game - think MS flight simulator. There&#x27;s no sinking, but you can lose sails or spars in high winds. It&#x27;s windows only.<p>This was released a couple of years ago, but this is an updated version from the end of January. See the devlog (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thapen.itch.io&#x2F;painted-ocean&#x2F;devlog" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thapen.itch.io&#x2F;painted-ocean&#x2F;devlog</a>) for the changes. You can also find some discussions there on historical sailing performance numbers.</text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>kunwon1</author><text>I&#x27;ve always been interested in sailing. I&#x27;m from Illinois. I once went to Jamaica and sailed a small catamaran for several hours on a protected bay and had great fun. For years afterwards I was reading sailing textbooks and dreaming about it, but given my location, I don&#x27;t want to put money into it<p>I&#x27;ve played some sailing games and had fun, but they weren&#x27;t simulations. I&#x27;ve never tried a sailing simulator. This one looks great, and I&#x27;ll try it out, if I can make it run on Linux. (I notice you say that it&#x27;s Windows-only, I take that as a challenge)</text></comment> |
8,847,358 | 8,845,974 | 1 | 3 | 8,845,523 | train | <story><title>Kickstarter switches to Stripe</title><url>https://www.kickstarter.com/blog/making-payments-easier-for-creators-and-backers/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fiblye</author><text>I have no experience with Stripe, but Amazon Payments was a huge pain in the ass for me when trying to set up my Kickstarter. Kickstarter verified me just by asking for a bit of personal info. When I tried making an Amazon Payments account, it locked me out after one failed attempt of verification with absolutely no reason for why it failed. I was pretty sure I should&#x27;ve gotten 3 attempts, but nope.<p>I then had to fax a bill proving I exist to Amazon in order to unlock it and try again. Got another attempt, and it locked me out once more. I then got a warning saying the next failed attempt would permanently disable my account.<p>Called up Amazon and they unlocked it for me. The rep was about to hang up, but I made sure she stayed on the line to walk me through the issue step-by-step. Turns out Amazon&#x27;s system didn&#x27;t like the way I input my street address, even though it verified just fine on Kickstarter. Verification normally takes a few hours&#x2F;days to tell you that you failed, but the rep stayed on the line and made sure it went through fine that time.<p>Sorry for rambling on, but Amazon Payments gave me more trouble than any other payment service. Even Paypal was better. Googling for answers to my problems gave me countless results from other people who had the same mysterious problems, and it seemed many couldn&#x27;t even get a response from customer service. If Stripe is even marginally better, then I&#x27;m glad they&#x27;re moving on to them.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>johnmaguire2013</author><text>I used Amazon Payments for about 6 months for little freelance projects when I was 18. I loved it. Quick deposits to my bank, super-low fees, and I convinced a lot of people to join it.<p>Then they started saying they couldn&#x27;t verify me. There was no &quot;Talk to support,&quot; only &quot;try verifying again.&quot; I tried about 3 times, and then it finally locked me out. I finally found a way to call up support and they said &quot;Okay, we&#x27;ll get back to you in a few days about what&#x27;s wrong.&quot;<p>A few days later I got an email saying my account had been banned, would not be unbanned, and any further requests for information would be ignored.<p>Still wish I knew what I did wrong.<p>In the meantime, I&#x27;ve never been able to support Kickstarters because I couldn&#x27;t use Amazon Payments.</text></comment> | <story><title>Kickstarter switches to Stripe</title><url>https://www.kickstarter.com/blog/making-payments-easier-for-creators-and-backers/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fiblye</author><text>I have no experience with Stripe, but Amazon Payments was a huge pain in the ass for me when trying to set up my Kickstarter. Kickstarter verified me just by asking for a bit of personal info. When I tried making an Amazon Payments account, it locked me out after one failed attempt of verification with absolutely no reason for why it failed. I was pretty sure I should&#x27;ve gotten 3 attempts, but nope.<p>I then had to fax a bill proving I exist to Amazon in order to unlock it and try again. Got another attempt, and it locked me out once more. I then got a warning saying the next failed attempt would permanently disable my account.<p>Called up Amazon and they unlocked it for me. The rep was about to hang up, but I made sure she stayed on the line to walk me through the issue step-by-step. Turns out Amazon&#x27;s system didn&#x27;t like the way I input my street address, even though it verified just fine on Kickstarter. Verification normally takes a few hours&#x2F;days to tell you that you failed, but the rep stayed on the line and made sure it went through fine that time.<p>Sorry for rambling on, but Amazon Payments gave me more trouble than any other payment service. Even Paypal was better. Googling for answers to my problems gave me countless results from other people who had the same mysterious problems, and it seemed many couldn&#x27;t even get a response from customer service. If Stripe is even marginally better, then I&#x27;m glad they&#x27;re moving on to them.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>habosa</author><text>I had the exact same experience. I have to have my friends buy things on Kickstarter for me since I don&#x27;t feel like faxing Amazon proof of my existence (which they don&#x27;t seem to require when I want to Amazon Prime some more USB cables).</text></comment> |
9,676,156 | 9,676,137 | 1 | 2 | 9,675,386 | train | <story><title>Why Has Apple Spawned So Few Startups?</title><url>http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_28266341/why-has-apple-spawned-so-few-startups</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gumby</author><text>&gt; My impression, which comes from meeting a handful of Apple employees and several friends who took jobs and later left, is that the culture of Apple is that of “show up, do good work, cash the paycheck, and go home to your family.”<p>I have a lot of friends and former colleagues who are at Apple and you&#x27;re wrong about the &#x27;go home to your family.&#x27; At least the friends I have (mostly nerds admittedly) are routinely in the 60-70 hours mark (have only one exception and he&#x27;s worked at Apple since the 1980s). But they seem to like it.<p>&gt; It is not one of “Let’s conquer the world and become bazillionairres while we’re at it” — the Google culture — which is more prone to eventually jumping ship and creating a startup.<p>This feels more like Google propaganda. My impression is that google folks seem to work a lot less (long hours its true, but less) than the Apple folks. Unlike Apple I <i>only</i> know nerds at google -- no marketing or business folks, so it could be different.<p>But of my google friends there are two groups: the übernerds who get to work on whatever they like (basically research) and they seem to have a lot of fun. A bunch of them are former colleagues from PARC and MIT, so they are doing the same kind of work we did years ago -- probably Microsoft research is the same.<p>The rest are doing product work of some sort of another and none of them seem particularly happy. A lot of them are on the market (I have hired a couple). It feels like Google has reached the microsoft phase: they have two real cash cows and are struggling to find more. Product managers have a lot of sway. They aren&#x27;t really organized like an effective business.<p>Apple went through that mode and was within a few weeks of dying. Luckily they debugged themselves. My Apple friends, even those deep in the bowels of tools or drivers, amazingly are still super excited by the Apple products (I guess they would have given up by now if not).</text></item><item><author>Eric_WVGG</author><text>(I really hope I don’t offend any Apple people saying this)<p>My impression, which comes from meeting a handful of Apple employees and several friends who took jobs and later left, is that the culture of Apple is that of “show up, do good work, cash the paycheck, and go home to your family.”<p>It is not one of “Let’s conquer the world and become bazillionairres while we’re at it” — the Google culture — which is more prone to eventually jumping ship and creating a startup.<p>I could be totally wrong about this.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cromwellian</author><text>Working backbreaking hours with bad work&#x2F;life balance is considered unGoogley. There are sometimes when people burn the midnight oil, but in general Googlers don&#x27;t work 60hr weeks.<p>I think the primary difference may come down to a culture of secrecy. Openness breeds cross fertilization, couple that with very few restrictions on Googlers in working on side projects, open source，and collaborating outside Google and it it&#x27;s easy to see why so many Googlers are lured away by the allure of startups.<p>As for Googlers being unhappy with their projects, there&#x27;s two answers. One, google culture permits challenging your management and product vision even as far as calling out VPs, so people here are constantly voicing their criticisms instead of falling in line. That can breed dissatisfaction especially if your criticisms are later proven right.<p>The other is that Googlers switch products often when they get bored. It&#x27;s easy for people to get unhappy when you switch from development to maintenance. I think this is very healthy，enduring people working on a product are enthusiastic. If your jet collecting a paycheck while dreaming of more interesting stuff better to go do interesting stuff.<p>The level of secrecy and compartmentalization in Apple sounds like hell to me.</text></comment> | <story><title>Why Has Apple Spawned So Few Startups?</title><url>http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_28266341/why-has-apple-spawned-so-few-startups</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gumby</author><text>&gt; My impression, which comes from meeting a handful of Apple employees and several friends who took jobs and later left, is that the culture of Apple is that of “show up, do good work, cash the paycheck, and go home to your family.”<p>I have a lot of friends and former colleagues who are at Apple and you&#x27;re wrong about the &#x27;go home to your family.&#x27; At least the friends I have (mostly nerds admittedly) are routinely in the 60-70 hours mark (have only one exception and he&#x27;s worked at Apple since the 1980s). But they seem to like it.<p>&gt; It is not one of “Let’s conquer the world and become bazillionairres while we’re at it” — the Google culture — which is more prone to eventually jumping ship and creating a startup.<p>This feels more like Google propaganda. My impression is that google folks seem to work a lot less (long hours its true, but less) than the Apple folks. Unlike Apple I <i>only</i> know nerds at google -- no marketing or business folks, so it could be different.<p>But of my google friends there are two groups: the übernerds who get to work on whatever they like (basically research) and they seem to have a lot of fun. A bunch of them are former colleagues from PARC and MIT, so they are doing the same kind of work we did years ago -- probably Microsoft research is the same.<p>The rest are doing product work of some sort of another and none of them seem particularly happy. A lot of them are on the market (I have hired a couple). It feels like Google has reached the microsoft phase: they have two real cash cows and are struggling to find more. Product managers have a lot of sway. They aren&#x27;t really organized like an effective business.<p>Apple went through that mode and was within a few weeks of dying. Luckily they debugged themselves. My Apple friends, even those deep in the bowels of tools or drivers, amazingly are still super excited by the Apple products (I guess they would have given up by now if not).</text></item><item><author>Eric_WVGG</author><text>(I really hope I don’t offend any Apple people saying this)<p>My impression, which comes from meeting a handful of Apple employees and several friends who took jobs and later left, is that the culture of Apple is that of “show up, do good work, cash the paycheck, and go home to your family.”<p>It is not one of “Let’s conquer the world and become bazillionairres while we’re at it” — the Google culture — which is more prone to eventually jumping ship and creating a startup.<p>I could be totally wrong about this.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>marcell</author><text>I recently left Google and I think your characterization of those two groups is accurate. There is a large group of engineers at lower levels working on mundane products who are not especially excited or empowered. I wouldn&#x27;t recommend working there unless you are on a researchy project (eg. Brain), or you are focusing on things aside rom your career (eg. Many employees with families tolerate working there because of the good pay and benefits)</text></comment> |
12,228,540 | 12,228,581 | 1 | 2 | 12,227,874 | train | <story><title>Remove PG_ZERO and zeroidle (page-zeroing) entirely</title><url>http://lists.dragonflybsd.org/pipermail/commits/2016-August/624202.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jdub</author><text>When a program needs memory, the operating system maps a physical page of memory (4KB in most cases) into its virtual memory space.<p>That page might have been in use by a different program only moments before, so the new program could go poking around in it to find interesting stuff. Like SSH keys or passwords or whatever. So the operating system has a responsibility to tidy up pre-loved pages before giving them out.<p>Once upon a time, filling 4KB with zeroes was a costly operation. It took a bunch of CPU cycles, and worse, would have trashed memory caches closer to the CPU.<p>So operating systems tend to have queues of discarded pages, background threads to zero them (when nothing more important is happening), and queues of zeroed pages to hand out when a program wants more memory.<p>This change is DragonFly BSD saying, &quot;Fuck it, we&#x27;ll do it live&quot;. It turns out that with the speed of modern CPUs and the way memory caches work today, they reckon it&#x27;s faster to just zero the memory synchronously, when the program requests it. No more queues, no more background work, no more weird cache behaviour.</text></comment> | <story><title>Remove PG_ZERO and zeroidle (page-zeroing) entirely</title><url>http://lists.dragonflybsd.org/pipermail/commits/2016-August/624202.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>blinkingled</author><text>DragonFlyBSD is slowly but steadily becoming more attractive as a Linux&#x2F;FreeBSD alternative. 4.6 has good support for various newer Intel GPUs, hammer is stable and the SMP and Networking performance is stellar.<p>I had a 2.8TB backup archive that I have repeatedly tried to dedup with ZFS and the realtime while-you-are-writing architecture of ZFS dedup just kills the performance so badly that I have never actually succeeded going over the full dataset. Past week I made a 4.6-rc2 based DragonFly VM, attached a 3TB disk with RDM, formatted it with HAMMER, started rsync of the backed up data and ran hammer dedup every 30 min - I am now at 1.9TB used after the whole thing was done and a final dedup ran - no noticeable speed drops and I got around 900GB back!</text></comment> |
16,517,031 | 16,517,131 | 1 | 2 | 16,515,552 | train | <story><title>"Sonic attack" may have been two ultrasonic signals accidentally interfering</title><url>https://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/devices/finally-a-likely-explanation-for-the-sonic-weapon-used-at-the-us-embassy-in-cuba</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>weinzierl</author><text>&gt; Yan was even able to embed an ultrasonic version of the Rick Astley song “Never Gonna Give You Up,” which became audible at the point where the two signals crossed.<p>At 33C3 I rode an escalator when I suddenly heard &quot;Never Gonna Give You Up&quot; but apparently no one else did. It was over after a few seconds. At the top of escalator there was a guy pointing a directional speaker at random people.<p>Only reference I could find is in German, but it has a picture [1].
The story says the guy on the picture is not the inventor of the device.<p>EDIT: The thing is a parametric ultrasonic speaker and the design files and software are on GitHub [2].<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;motherboard.vice.com&#x2F;de&#x2F;article&#x2F;784z74&#x2F;33c3--hacker-zeigen-ihre-gadgets" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;motherboard.vice.com&#x2F;de&#x2F;article&#x2F;784z74&#x2F;33c3--hacker-...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;niklasfauth&#x2F;parametricspeaker" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;niklasfauth&#x2F;parametricspeaker</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jerf</author><text>It&#x27;s actually off-the-shelf tech now. I&#x27;ve been in a number of supermarkets where they use this to beam ads at you while standing in line for the checkout. (All of which have since stopped doing it, for what it&#x27;s worth. YMMV.)<p>There was some hope for a while that this might turn out to be a way to hack sound so that you could produce a flat speaker full of those tiny ultrasonic speakers, and then use non-linear interference to produce deep, booming bass sounds, without having to have the much-larger speakers you need today for that to work correctly. Unfortunately, either nobody could crack the technique, or it&#x27;s simply impossible, because the real speakers that emerged are quite tinny. Here&#x27;s a commercial offering, where they&#x27;re only willing to promise down to 150Hz in the text: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;ultrasonic-audio.com&#x2F;acouspade-technical-specification&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;ultrasonic-audio.com&#x2F;acouspade-technical-specificatio...</a> &quot;The sound is of high-quality, with low noise and great frequency response, which includes authentic reproduction of bass notes and frequencies as low as 150 Hz.&quot; Which, if accurate, is better than the speakers I&#x27;ve heard, but still a long ways from &quot;thumping bass&quot; coming out of a square that could be hung on the wall as casually as a picture frame.</text></comment> | <story><title>"Sonic attack" may have been two ultrasonic signals accidentally interfering</title><url>https://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/devices/finally-a-likely-explanation-for-the-sonic-weapon-used-at-the-us-embassy-in-cuba</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>weinzierl</author><text>&gt; Yan was even able to embed an ultrasonic version of the Rick Astley song “Never Gonna Give You Up,” which became audible at the point where the two signals crossed.<p>At 33C3 I rode an escalator when I suddenly heard &quot;Never Gonna Give You Up&quot; but apparently no one else did. It was over after a few seconds. At the top of escalator there was a guy pointing a directional speaker at random people.<p>Only reference I could find is in German, but it has a picture [1].
The story says the guy on the picture is not the inventor of the device.<p>EDIT: The thing is a parametric ultrasonic speaker and the design files and software are on GitHub [2].<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;motherboard.vice.com&#x2F;de&#x2F;article&#x2F;784z74&#x2F;33c3--hacker-zeigen-ihre-gadgets" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;motherboard.vice.com&#x2F;de&#x2F;article&#x2F;784z74&#x2F;33c3--hacker-...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;niklasfauth&#x2F;parametricspeaker" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;niklasfauth&#x2F;parametricspeaker</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ashleyn</author><text>I remember reading about this in <i>Popular Science</i> when I was eleven years old. They compared it to the difference between laser light and conventional light.</text></comment> |
36,617,887 | 36,617,042 | 1 | 2 | 36,615,965 | train | <story><title>A gigantic landslide shows the limit to how high mountains can grow</title><url>https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2023/07/06/a-gigantic-landslide-shows-the-limit-to-how-high-mountains-can-grow</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mjb</author><text>For comparison, this is between 4 and 5 times larger than the Osceola Mudflow (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Osceola_Mudflow" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Osceola_Mudflow</a>) that formed the 550km² of fertile plains around the south end of Puget Sound (near Seattle) and knocked a huge chunk out of Mount Rainier. If you drive from Auburn to Enumclaw, for example, notice how flat the land is and think about how that was hilly Cascade foothills and glaciated drumlins until 5500 years ago. The Osceola event was way bigger than Mt St Helens, and this one in the Himalayas was way bigger even that that.<p>Back-of-envelope, that Osceola event released about 10^19 Joules of energy*. The scale of these things is absolutely incredible.<p>According to my father, until around the time he was doing Geology at university (late 1960s), the consensus was that these kinds of events (and mass wasting more generally) were geologic processes that no longer happened (and hadn&#x27;t really happened throughout the Holocene). I don&#x27;t know the history in detail there, but it does seem true that only relatively recently we&#x27;ve had a real appreciation for how active Earth&#x27;s geology still is.<p>* 4e15 cubic centimeters of material, 2 g per cc mix of rock and ice, mean elevation change 1000m</text></comment> | <story><title>A gigantic landslide shows the limit to how high mountains can grow</title><url>https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2023/07/06/a-gigantic-landslide-shows-the-limit-to-how-high-mountains-can-grow</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>akiselev</author><text>Before anyone gets excited, the landslide occurred in the 12th century or so :(<p>I was all excited to plan a rock hounding trip to the Himalayas. I even sent out the Sherpa bat signal (it’s a silhouette of me shaving a Himalayan yak), only to find out I’m eight hundred years too late.</text></comment> |
25,706,804 | 25,706,275 | 1 | 2 | 25,706,252 | train | <story><title>An Invisible Tax on the Web: Video Codecs (2018)</title><url>https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2018/07/11/royalty-free-web-video-codecs/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>gnicholas</author><text>Some interesting details on how the H.264 patents are priced, from an article [1] about how much Google pays. Google had threatened to pull H.264 support circa 2011, but ultimately they decided in 2013 to pay a few million bucks&#x2F;yr to keep it.<p>IIRC, H.264 is one of a few non-Google technologies that is included in Chrome, but is not included in Chromium.<p>&gt; <i>So, how much does those rights cost? Under the terms in place for 2011-2015, the royalty rates are the same regardless of whether a product is part of an OS. There&#x27;s no royalty for the first 100,000 units of a licensed product; sublicensees pay 20 cents per unit up to 5 million and 10 cents per unit above 5 million. The current agreement includes an annual limit: “The maximum annual royalty (‘cap’) for an Enterprise [is] $6.5 million per year in 2011-2015.”<p>What happens in 2016? Under the MPEG LA license, the terms are &quot;renewable for successive five-year periods … on reasonable terms and conditions.” The per-copy royalty rates &quot;will not increase by more than 10% at each renewal.” If rates go up by the maximum 10% for that five-year period, the cost of 10 million licenses will increase by $150,000 from a current rate of $1.48 million to $1.63 million.<p>There&#x27;s a small gotcha in the new MPEG LA license agreement. Footnote 17, which appears in tiny print at the very end of the summary of license terms, notes that “Annual royalty caps are not subject to the 10% limitation.” Although that sounds like a loophole, it really only affects the largest players in the market.</i><p>1: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zdnet.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;a-closer-look-at-the-costs-and-fine-print-of-h-264-licenses&#x2F;#:~:text=Although%20the%20license%20agreement%20uses,until%20the%20end%20of%202015" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zdnet.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;a-closer-look-at-the-costs-and...</a>.</text></comment> | <story><title>An Invisible Tax on the Web: Video Codecs (2018)</title><url>https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2018/07/11/royalty-free-web-video-codecs/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>akersten</author><text>It&#x27;s incredible that the MPEG-LA mafia has gotten away with <i>23 patents</i> on a system of mathematical operations. Math is explicitly outlined as non-patentable. While this extends to all software patents, I&#x27;m astounded that even this very narrow case hasn&#x27;t been challenged on its face. We can&#x27;t move to unencumbered codecs quickly enough.</text></comment> |
11,115,214 | 11,115,220 | 1 | 2 | 11,114,756 | train | <story><title>Apple ordered to bypass auto-erase on San Bernadino shooter's iPhone</title><url>https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160216/17393733617/no-judge-did-not-just-order-apple-to-break-encryption-san-bernardino-shooters-iphone-to-create-new-backdoor.shtml</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gst</author><text>If you do this on purpose after asked to unlock your phone you will probably be charged with destruction of evidence or something like that.<p>However, while a court is (afaik) able to ask you to put your finger on the fingerprint reader, you do not need to tell them which of the fingers the correct one is. So instead of purposely using a wrong finger, I&#x27;d ask the court to explicitly tell me which of my fingers I should use to unlock the phone.</text></item><item><author>ggreer</author><text>After five failed fingerprint attempts, your password is required to unlock the phone. That seems pretty safe to me. If you&#x27;re ever ordered to unlock the phone, just touch an unregistered finger to it. Fingerprint sensors aren&#x27;t foolproof. It&#x27;d be hard to prove you deliberately sabotaged the effort.<p>Though, one feature I&#x27;d like would be to register a distress fingerprint. Then I could touch say... my left index finger to require a password unlock.</text></item><item><author>randyrand</author><text>Even if touch id, it would be of no use. TouchID requires a password after 48 hours. or after the device resets.<p>Which is interesting. If you happen to use TouchID, is your best bet to hope a court will not be able to compel you to unlock it within 48 hours of arrest? That sounds very probable.</text></item><item><author>tptacek</author><text>Remember, this is an iPhone 5C, which doesn&#x27;t have Touch ID or the Secure Enclave; the security model for this phone is significantly different from that of more recent iPhones.<p>On phones with a Secure Enclave, the wipe-on-failures state is managed in the coprocessor (which runs L4), and is not straightforwardly backdoor-able.<p>If you&#x27;re worried about the police brute-forcing your phone, enable Touch ID and set a passcode that is approximately as complex as the one on your computer.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>azernik</author><text>I think the court would similarly consider that obstruction and contempt. If they tell you to unlock your phone and you try to play some &quot;first you have to guess which finger&#x27;s the right one!&quot; game, the judge will slap you with either contempt of court or refusal to comply with a subpoena.</text></comment> | <story><title>Apple ordered to bypass auto-erase on San Bernadino shooter's iPhone</title><url>https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160216/17393733617/no-judge-did-not-just-order-apple-to-break-encryption-san-bernardino-shooters-iphone-to-create-new-backdoor.shtml</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gst</author><text>If you do this on purpose after asked to unlock your phone you will probably be charged with destruction of evidence or something like that.<p>However, while a court is (afaik) able to ask you to put your finger on the fingerprint reader, you do not need to tell them which of the fingers the correct one is. So instead of purposely using a wrong finger, I&#x27;d ask the court to explicitly tell me which of my fingers I should use to unlock the phone.</text></item><item><author>ggreer</author><text>After five failed fingerprint attempts, your password is required to unlock the phone. That seems pretty safe to me. If you&#x27;re ever ordered to unlock the phone, just touch an unregistered finger to it. Fingerprint sensors aren&#x27;t foolproof. It&#x27;d be hard to prove you deliberately sabotaged the effort.<p>Though, one feature I&#x27;d like would be to register a distress fingerprint. Then I could touch say... my left index finger to require a password unlock.</text></item><item><author>randyrand</author><text>Even if touch id, it would be of no use. TouchID requires a password after 48 hours. or after the device resets.<p>Which is interesting. If you happen to use TouchID, is your best bet to hope a court will not be able to compel you to unlock it within 48 hours of arrest? That sounds very probable.</text></item><item><author>tptacek</author><text>Remember, this is an iPhone 5C, which doesn&#x27;t have Touch ID or the Secure Enclave; the security model for this phone is significantly different from that of more recent iPhones.<p>On phones with a Secure Enclave, the wipe-on-failures state is managed in the coprocessor (which runs L4), and is not straightforwardly backdoor-able.<p>If you&#x27;re worried about the police brute-forcing your phone, enable Touch ID and set a passcode that is approximately as complex as the one on your computer.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>giancarlostoro</author><text>You better hope they don&#x27;t say the one that you designated to unlock your phone?</text></comment> |
9,180,280 | 9,180,251 | 1 | 2 | 9,178,773 | train | <story><title>Goodbye MongoDB, Hello PostgreSQL</title><url>http://developer.olery.com/blog/goodbye-mongodb-hello-postgresql/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>moe</author><text><i>How exactly are you going to &quot;just write SQL&quot; if the actual query statement needs to change based on the user input?</i><p>How about something like this:<p><pre><code> s = Select.new
s.add &quot;WHERE title LIKE #{title}&quot; if title
s.add &quot;WHERE price &lt;= #{price_range}&quot; if price_range
s.add &quot;LIMIT #{limit}&quot; if limit
s.add &quot;OFFSET #{offset}&quot; if offset
s.add &quot;id, blah, boo FROM products&quot;
s.execute
</code></pre>
Note how I deliberately shuffled the order and didn&#x27;t bother with escaping.<p>Also note how anyone who knows SQL could immediately work with this, learning curve: 5 seconds.<p>Why is there no ORM that works like this?</text></item><item><author>ad_hominem</author><text>Let&#x27;s say you have a product search screen in your application. There&#x27;s a text field for filtering on product title (WHERE title LIKE), one for filtering on UPC (WHERE upc LIKE), a couple range filters for min&#x2F;max prices (WHERE price &lt;= and&#x2F;or WHERE price &gt;=), and then on the results screen the user sort on a few different columns (ORDER BY) as well as paginate and set number of results per-page (LIMIT + OFFSET).<p>How exactly are you going to just write SQL if the actual query statement needs to change based on the user input? Are you going to hardcode every possible permutation, or are you going to use a query builder? Or are there some advanced Postgres features that I&#x27;m not aware of that would allow all these combinations in some kind of prepared statement?<p>edit: The question I&#x27;m asking is pointed towards the people who are implying that you can &quot;just use SQL&quot; as static statements that are not dynamically assembled. Like a static function or prepared statement that takes some parameters, and at runtime you only pass in those parameters - not rejigger the actual SQL statement fragments. Your ad-hoc query builder implementations with SQL injection vulnerabilities are not relevant to what I&#x27;m asking.</text></item><item><author>bigpeopleareold</author><text>I once agreed with this, but now I don&#x27;t. I just want to write SQL (dammit!).<p>I can never, ever remember the intricacies of the Sequel API or any one of these query builder APIs. I am always looking up something that is rather trivial because I am thinking in SQL, the language, and always have to convert back to Ruby or whatever language I am working in.<p>CTEs and SQL functions in PostgreSQL strike a good balance in the composibility department for me, while still being able to write SQL.</text></item><item><author>YorickPeterse</author><text>It&#x27;s not so much about not wanting to write&#x2F;understand SQL (both are still very
much required), but about composability. If you want to re-use bits of a SQL
query written as a string literal your only option is string concatention or
using some kind of string builder&#x2F;template system. In both cases there&#x27;s little
validation of the query&#x27;s correctness (syntax wise) until you actually run it.<p>While I agree that many ORMs go too far or even worse, not implement certain
powerful features, Sequel (and similar tools I imagine) strikes a nice balance.
The particular examples I gave on their own are not super useful, but we already
have quite a few queries that are composed&#x2F;re-used without having to concat
strings.<p>So tl;dr: it&#x27;s about composability, not being &quot;lazy&quot; or &quot;ignorant&quot; to SQL.</text></item><item><author>jgrahamc</author><text>As a greying developer I am most amused by people discovering that &#x27;old&#x27; technologies like SQL databases work really well.<p>The only useful piece of advice I can give a younger developer is... be careful when drinking the newtech koolaid.<p>And one more thing:<p><pre><code> star = Sequel.lit(&#x27;*&#x27;)
User.select(:locale)
.select_append { count(star).as(:amount) }
.select_append { ((count(star) &#x2F; sum(count(star)).over) * 100.0).as(:percentage) }
.group(:locale)
.order(Sequel.desc(:percentage))
</code></pre>
just makes me want to cry. Learn SQL rather than wrapping it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>zo1</author><text>Python SQLAlchemy works a bit like this, if you use it that way:<p><pre><code> query = session.query(Products)
if limit:
query = query.limit(limit_val)
if offset:
query = query.offset(offset_val)
</code></pre>
Sort is a bit tricky, but as I&#x27;m a noob at SQL Alchemy, I had some not-so-pretty boilerplate code implemented for decorating queries with custom sorts. But essentially it boiled down to:<p><pre><code> if sort_type == SORT_REVERSE_CONST:
sort_obj = sort_obj.desc()
else:
sort_obj = sort_obj.asc()
query = query.order_by(sort_obj)
</code></pre>
And if you want to search through dynamic tables, change the initial query instantiation to something along these lines:<p><pre><code> query = session.query(retrieve_db_object(table_name))
</code></pre>
And to execute:<p><pre><code> return query.all()</code></pre></text></comment> | <story><title>Goodbye MongoDB, Hello PostgreSQL</title><url>http://developer.olery.com/blog/goodbye-mongodb-hello-postgresql/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>moe</author><text><i>How exactly are you going to &quot;just write SQL&quot; if the actual query statement needs to change based on the user input?</i><p>How about something like this:<p><pre><code> s = Select.new
s.add &quot;WHERE title LIKE #{title}&quot; if title
s.add &quot;WHERE price &lt;= #{price_range}&quot; if price_range
s.add &quot;LIMIT #{limit}&quot; if limit
s.add &quot;OFFSET #{offset}&quot; if offset
s.add &quot;id, blah, boo FROM products&quot;
s.execute
</code></pre>
Note how I deliberately shuffled the order and didn&#x27;t bother with escaping.<p>Also note how anyone who knows SQL could immediately work with this, learning curve: 5 seconds.<p>Why is there no ORM that works like this?</text></item><item><author>ad_hominem</author><text>Let&#x27;s say you have a product search screen in your application. There&#x27;s a text field for filtering on product title (WHERE title LIKE), one for filtering on UPC (WHERE upc LIKE), a couple range filters for min&#x2F;max prices (WHERE price &lt;= and&#x2F;or WHERE price &gt;=), and then on the results screen the user sort on a few different columns (ORDER BY) as well as paginate and set number of results per-page (LIMIT + OFFSET).<p>How exactly are you going to just write SQL if the actual query statement needs to change based on the user input? Are you going to hardcode every possible permutation, or are you going to use a query builder? Or are there some advanced Postgres features that I&#x27;m not aware of that would allow all these combinations in some kind of prepared statement?<p>edit: The question I&#x27;m asking is pointed towards the people who are implying that you can &quot;just use SQL&quot; as static statements that are not dynamically assembled. Like a static function or prepared statement that takes some parameters, and at runtime you only pass in those parameters - not rejigger the actual SQL statement fragments. Your ad-hoc query builder implementations with SQL injection vulnerabilities are not relevant to what I&#x27;m asking.</text></item><item><author>bigpeopleareold</author><text>I once agreed with this, but now I don&#x27;t. I just want to write SQL (dammit!).<p>I can never, ever remember the intricacies of the Sequel API or any one of these query builder APIs. I am always looking up something that is rather trivial because I am thinking in SQL, the language, and always have to convert back to Ruby or whatever language I am working in.<p>CTEs and SQL functions in PostgreSQL strike a good balance in the composibility department for me, while still being able to write SQL.</text></item><item><author>YorickPeterse</author><text>It&#x27;s not so much about not wanting to write&#x2F;understand SQL (both are still very
much required), but about composability. If you want to re-use bits of a SQL
query written as a string literal your only option is string concatention or
using some kind of string builder&#x2F;template system. In both cases there&#x27;s little
validation of the query&#x27;s correctness (syntax wise) until you actually run it.<p>While I agree that many ORMs go too far or even worse, not implement certain
powerful features, Sequel (and similar tools I imagine) strikes a nice balance.
The particular examples I gave on their own are not super useful, but we already
have quite a few queries that are composed&#x2F;re-used without having to concat
strings.<p>So tl;dr: it&#x27;s about composability, not being &quot;lazy&quot; or &quot;ignorant&quot; to SQL.</text></item><item><author>jgrahamc</author><text>As a greying developer I am most amused by people discovering that &#x27;old&#x27; technologies like SQL databases work really well.<p>The only useful piece of advice I can give a younger developer is... be careful when drinking the newtech koolaid.<p>And one more thing:<p><pre><code> star = Sequel.lit(&#x27;*&#x27;)
User.select(:locale)
.select_append { count(star).as(:amount) }
.select_append { ((count(star) &#x2F; sum(count(star)).over) * 100.0).as(:percentage) }
.group(:locale)
.order(Sequel.desc(:percentage))
</code></pre>
just makes me want to cry. Learn SQL rather than wrapping it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ivanr</author><text>There is. MyBatis, which is a minimal ORM that aims to keep you as close to SQL as possible, has support for dynamic SQL: <a href="https://mybatis.github.io/mybatis-3/dynamic-sql.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mybatis.github.io&#x2F;mybatis-3&#x2F;dynamic-sql.html</a><p>Edit [responding to moe, below]: that&#x27;s a matter of taste. I prefer to have my SQL _outside_ my code. If I have to write a little XML to make it happen, so be it. Additionally, unlike your example, a strict separation of SQL and data ensures SQL injection is not possible. That&#x27;s also a worthy goal.</text></comment> |
29,019,124 | 29,016,122 | 1 | 2 | 29,014,681 | train | <story><title>DIY Acoustic Camera</title><url>https://navat.substack.com/p/diy-acoustic-camera-using-uma-16</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>davidb_</author><text>Combining this with Motion Amplification&#x2F;Video Magnification [1] could result in some very interesting visuals and applications for factory equipment.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=rEoc0YoALt0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=rEoc0YoALt0</a> Explainer Youtube video about Motion Amplification</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>loxias</author><text>Interesting. I&#x27;m casually familiar with Video Amplification (the approach at SIGGRAPH a decade ago IIRC), but have never implemented it myself. A really cool result, using the changes in the phase of the basis vectors over time to infer motion, without having to do dense optic flow.<p>I&#x27;m curious how you would combine acoustic localization in 3 space with motion amplification. I unreservedly agree that they are both &quot;super cool&quot;, but don&#x27;t see how they tie together to make something greater than the sum of their parts.<p>The only thing I thought of is, if two data channels (video, audio) are registered accurately enough, one could maybe combine the spatially limited frequency information from both channels for higher accuracy?<p>For example: voxel 10,10,10 is determined (by the audio system) to have a high amount of coherent sound with a fundamental frequency of 2khz. Can that 2khz + 10,10,10 be passed to the video system to do something.... cool? useful? If we know that sound of a certain spectral profile is coming from a specific region, is it useful to amplify (or deaden) video motion with a same frequency?</text></comment> | <story><title>DIY Acoustic Camera</title><url>https://navat.substack.com/p/diy-acoustic-camera-using-uma-16</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>davidb_</author><text>Combining this with Motion Amplification&#x2F;Video Magnification [1] could result in some very interesting visuals and applications for factory equipment.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=rEoc0YoALt0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=rEoc0YoALt0</a> Explainer Youtube video about Motion Amplification</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>elfchief</author><text>I don&#x27;t suppose you have any idea if there are publicly available motion amplification tools, yet?</text></comment> |
37,170,233 | 37,169,687 | 1 | 2 | 37,166,885 | train | <story><title>SUSE to go private</title><url>https://www.suse.com/news/EQT-announces-voluntary-public-purchase-offer-and-intention-to-delist-SUSE/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>treesciencebot</author><text>Is there any reason for the buyer here who already owns almost 80% of the company to offer a 67% premium for the remaining 20% of the shares? What would have happened if they offered a 30% premium or a 15% one (from what I understand, they have both simple majority and qualified majority so that means they don&#x27;t really need to ask anyone for anything). It&#x27;s not like they want to get 100% ownership since this is a purely voluntary buy-out and existing investors can choose to stay.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>buzer</author><text>In Finland if someone controls over 90% of the shares they have right to forcefully buy rest of the shares (and also obligation if someone wants to sell at at that point). So if they wanted to go fully own the company they need to high enough offer that they will at least hit 90%. I&#x27;m not sure if you could from public company to private without all shareholders agreeing to it as that would benefit large shareholder at minority holders cost.<p>No clue if there are similar laws in Germany or other countries.</text></comment> | <story><title>SUSE to go private</title><url>https://www.suse.com/news/EQT-announces-voluntary-public-purchase-offer-and-intention-to-delist-SUSE/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>treesciencebot</author><text>Is there any reason for the buyer here who already owns almost 80% of the company to offer a 67% premium for the remaining 20% of the shares? What would have happened if they offered a 30% premium or a 15% one (from what I understand, they have both simple majority and qualified majority so that means they don&#x27;t really need to ask anyone for anything). It&#x27;s not like they want to get 100% ownership since this is a purely voluntary buy-out and existing investors can choose to stay.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sdenton4</author><text>It&#x27;s probably a question of who exactly holds that other 20% of shares... There&#x27;s a decent chance it&#x27;s mostly held by one or a few long-time investors&#x2F;contributors&#x2F;??? and the premium is the price of good-will.</text></comment> |
14,834,856 | 14,832,714 | 1 | 3 | 14,832,622 | train | <story><title>Printed Solar Panels for Less Than $10 a Square Metre</title><url>https://www.newcastle.edu.au/newsroom/featured-news/the-clever-electronic-inks-rewriting-our-energy-future</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>kirrent</author><text>Hey, I know the phd student who printed out these cells and set up the demonstration! It&#x27;s part of the university&#x27;s push for large scale organic solar demonstrations along with the smaller test cells.<p>From talking with him, the technology isn&#x27;t really ready for prime time yet but it&#x27;s getting pretty close. I think the key point is that efficiencies in small scale cells and larger scale manufacturing are still climbing (the same group has achieved greater than 5% in a cm^2 test cell iirc) and the printing is incredibly cheap and very amenable to fast scaling up.<p>It seems pretty obvious that you needed more efficiency for it to be a viable rooftop solution but the guy who set this up claimed that the fact he could just stick down some velcro and stick on the cells opened up some different use cases with cheap and lean installations supporting cheap cells.<p>All in all, if you look at how far the technology has come in the last 5 years alone, then it&#x27;s a pretty exciting field to follow.</text></comment> | <story><title>Printed Solar Panels for Less Than $10 a Square Metre</title><url>https://www.newcastle.edu.au/newsroom/featured-news/the-clever-electronic-inks-rewriting-our-energy-future</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>HillaryBriss</author><text>For a <i>very</i> rough comparison, according to this, conventional solar panels cost about $10-$12 per square foot, or very roughly $100 per square meter.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.quora.com&#x2F;What-is-the-cost-per-Sq-ft-for-solar-panels" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.quora.com&#x2F;What-is-the-cost-per-Sq-ft-for-solar-p...</a><p>Of course, what we really want is a comparison in terms of cost per watt.<p>Maybe equally important to the cost of these panels is the ease and cost of <i>installing</i> them. These new printed panels are very flexible&#x2F;lightweight and can be deployed easily and even temporarily.</text></comment> |
40,875,610 | 40,875,735 | 1 | 3 | 40,874,013 | train | <story><title>Jeffrey Snover and the Making of PowerShell</title><url>https://corecursive.com/building-powershell-with-jeffrey-snover/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>adamgordonbell</author><text>Host here, thanks for sharing.<p>PowerShell faced extreme opposition at Microsoft, and its creator Jeffrey Snover was demoted for pursuing it.<p>Jeffrey was originally brought into Microsoft to help MS learn how to compete in the data center, but culturally they were so tied to the personal computer model of the world, that they fought him every step of the way.<p>Edit: Another interesting thing, is how Powershell exists because Windows isn&#x27;t file based. Jeffrey&#x27;s goal was server administration, but on Windows you can&#x27;t just edit files to administer things, you need to call various APIs and get structured data back forth. The rich object model fell out of that. It was the only way.<p>( Also, apologies if the transcript has errors. I&#x27;ve gone from professional transcriptions to Descript and then a pass of GPT4 trying to find the right punctation breaks and then me doing a quick read through. I don&#x27;t think its coming out as high quality as I&#x27;d like. )</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>7thaccount</author><text>If anyone from MS-PWSH team reads this, I&#x27;d love for y&#x27;all to add some basic GUI functionality that doesn&#x27;t involve me having to write a bunch of .NET. I&#x27;m sorry, but the reason I like PWSH in the first place is it&#x27;s a simple dynamic language with lots of easy to use commands that I can chain together. I&#x27;d love to have a new set of cmdlets for creating simple user interfaces and charts.<p>For example, something like the below would be so simple for Microsoft to add to the product and remove a page of boilerplate code that I don&#x27;t really understand well.<p>Create-Chart -Type &quot;Bar&quot; -XAxis $Cities -YAxis $GDP -OutputFile &quot;C:&#x2F;Documents&#x2F;ProjectAnalysis&#x2F;CitiesBarGraph.png&quot;<p>There are probably users in the millions that are ok at the basics of programming, but don&#x27;t have the job role to where tools like Java or C# make sense. Python is usually a good fit here, but I really wish Microsoft had something written for us common folks and not just server admins and IT folks.<p>If Microsoft put some more effort into PWSH to where it wasn&#x27;t turtle slow at things like parsing files and then started adding things like what I talk about above. Maybe even cmdlets for statistics and science...it could be something pretty amazing that your typical business analyst could quickly use to build some really amazing software to do their job better or a prototype for the software team to actually implement in a more robust manner. It&#x27;s such a really cool technology that has a lot of missing potential IMO.<p>It seems like Microsoft assumes that the three options are full software developer with C#, IT stuff with PWSH, or Excel for the business folks. Excel is really great in a lot of ways, but it is also pretty limited and VBA+Excel is one of the most limited ecosystems I&#x27;ve dealt with. I guess third party languages like Python, R, and so on make for another fourth option, but sometimes I wish Microsoft had spent more time in this area.</text></comment> | <story><title>Jeffrey Snover and the Making of PowerShell</title><url>https://corecursive.com/building-powershell-with-jeffrey-snover/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>adamgordonbell</author><text>Host here, thanks for sharing.<p>PowerShell faced extreme opposition at Microsoft, and its creator Jeffrey Snover was demoted for pursuing it.<p>Jeffrey was originally brought into Microsoft to help MS learn how to compete in the data center, but culturally they were so tied to the personal computer model of the world, that they fought him every step of the way.<p>Edit: Another interesting thing, is how Powershell exists because Windows isn&#x27;t file based. Jeffrey&#x27;s goal was server administration, but on Windows you can&#x27;t just edit files to administer things, you need to call various APIs and get structured data back forth. The rich object model fell out of that. It was the only way.<p>( Also, apologies if the transcript has errors. I&#x27;ve gone from professional transcriptions to Descript and then a pass of GPT4 trying to find the right punctation breaks and then me doing a quick read through. I don&#x27;t think its coming out as high quality as I&#x27;d like. )</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bloopernova</author><text>As someone who prefers to read interviews and articles rather than listen, I really appreciate you providing a transcript. Thank you!</text></comment> |
31,701,738 | 31,701,430 | 1 | 3 | 31,689,366 | train | <story><title>Apple M2 Die Shot and Architecture Analysis – Big Cost Increase and A15 Based IP</title><url>https://semianalysis.substack.com/p/apple-m2-die-shot-and-architecture</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>daguava</author><text>There&#x27;s a lot of claims of poached talent in the article, basically claiming [paraphrasing] &quot;Apple, maintaining their stressful work env and not paying to shore that up lost some rockstars&quot;<p>How true is this? If they&#x27;re on the money it&#x27;s an excellent example of a talent retention miss leading to a demonstrable mediocrity in delivery.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>modeless</author><text>Seems silly to me. CPU designs are important, but these companies have more than enough engineers to make competent designs even with some people leaving. There&#x27;s another factor that completely dominates. It&#x27;s all about the fabs. Intel lost the performance lead, was it because of their designs? No, it&#x27;s because they lost the lead in fabs. AMD passed Intel, was it because of their designs? No, it&#x27;s because they use TSMC&#x27;s fabs and TSMC passed Intel. Apple blew everyone away with M1, was it because of their designs? No, it&#x27;s because they paid TSMC boatloads of money for exclusivity on their latest fabs. Apple M2 disappoints on CPU performance, is it because of their designs? No, it&#x27;s because TSMC&#x27;s next fab isn&#x27;t ready yet so they&#x27;re still using the same fabs as M1.<p>These days I care more about which TSMC process node my chips came from than which company designed them. I need a new computer but I&#x27;m waiting until next year because there will be a wave of new CPUs and GPUs coming out with much better performance. Better designs? Maybe a little, but it&#x27;s really because they&#x27;re all moving to TSMC N4.<p>I really hope Pat Gelsinger can save Intel&#x27;s fab business because we really need another company that can compete in fabs and Samsung isn&#x27;t doing too hot either.</text></comment> | <story><title>Apple M2 Die Shot and Architecture Analysis – Big Cost Increase and A15 Based IP</title><url>https://semianalysis.substack.com/p/apple-m2-die-shot-and-architecture</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>daguava</author><text>There&#x27;s a lot of claims of poached talent in the article, basically claiming [paraphrasing] &quot;Apple, maintaining their stressful work env and not paying to shore that up lost some rockstars&quot;<p>How true is this? If they&#x27;re on the money it&#x27;s an excellent example of a talent retention miss leading to a demonstrable mediocrity in delivery.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>InvaderFizz</author><text>Looking at another article from the same author[0], we&#x27;ll have a pretty solid answer to the impact in September with the release of the A16. Apparently the A15 had very minimal CPU gains clock-for-clock over the A14.<p>To quote from that article:<p>&quot;SemiAnalysis believes that the next generation core was delayed out of 2021 into 2022 due to CPU engineer resource problems. In 2019, Nuvia was founded and later acquired by Qualcomm for $1.4B. Apple’s Chief CPU Architect, Gerard Williams, as well as over a 100 other Apple engineers left to join this firm. More recently, SemiAnalysis broke the news about Rivos Inc, a new high performance RISC V startup which includes many senior Apple engineers. The brain drain continues and impacts will be more apparent as time moves on. As Apple once drained resources out of Intel and others through the industry, the reverse seems to be happening now.&quot;<p>I was very optimistic on Apple on the CPU front until I read this today. Now I&#x27;m waiting to see how the A16 pans out for them to see if it&#x27;s a two generation loss of progress, or just a single generation stumble.<p>0: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;semianalysis.substack.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;apple-cpu-gains-grind-to-a-halt-and?s=r" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;semianalysis.substack.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;apple-cpu-gains-grind-to...</a></text></comment> |
20,000,708 | 20,000,699 | 1 | 2 | 19,999,045 | train | <story><title>The Huawei Disaster Reveals Google’s Iron Grip on Android</title><url>https://onezero.medium.com/the-huawei-disaster-reveals-googles-iron-grip-on-android-b1ccee34504d</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>harryf</author><text>It’s possible that Google cutting off Huawei will actually backfire, because it makes having a viable alternative to Android a MUST HAVE instead of just NICE TO HAVE.<p>Perhaps it’s possible to resurrect Blackberry 10 ( <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;BlackBerry_10" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;BlackBerry_10</a> ) for example, which seemed to be an impressive piece of engineering that got trampled by Blackberrys failing business. I played with a demo once that could run Android apps and was amazing at multi-tasking thanks to its microkernel architecture. Plus would be governed by Canadian export laws I guess. Perhaps I’m just daydreaming though.<p>Either way think it’s going to lead to more mobile OS competition again, which is a good thing</text></item><item><author>Roritharr</author><text>Google invested Billions into Android.<p>Samsung tried to hedge for this by building Tizen(Bada) and realized how much needed to be invested to get an Android competitor going, so they kept the development going, but focused for their Smartwatches, as this would have to be a &quot;if the worst happens&quot; plan, not something that could be a profitable venture.<p>LG has the Palm&#x2F;HP borne WebOS for their TVs, i suspect with a similar idea at the back of their minds.<p>Everyone else? They&#x27;re too small to realistically try to save their smartphone businesses when the green robot becomes their enemy.<p>Google bought this platform with every dollar invested over more than a decade, they didn&#x27;t do this only so that Apple had a competitor, but so that THEY had control over mobile eyeballs.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ehonda</author><text>I have both an S9 and a BlackBerry Q10 on me every day. The BB10 OS, even though its now defunct, was designed in a way that it is FAR easier and more practical to use. I really, really hate the Android interface as a result.<p>1: BlackBerry hub is a lot nicer to view messages<p>2: Smart use of Bezel gestures makes it much easier to actually interact with the phone:<p>-If you want to access the hub while using an app, you take your thumb from the bottom of the screen and swipe up and to the right. The interface is very forgiving of where you swipe, you can do it without even looking, yet you wont accidentally do it either. If you don&#x27;t want to fully enter the hub and just take a peak without leaving your app, just do a partial swipe.<p>-If you want to view all your running apps, you swipe up from the bottom of the screen to the middle of the screen, and voila , you get a tile arrangement of your running apps (easier to view than a Rolodex), as well as phone and camera access. And you are also less likely to lose track of what windows you have open. I find lots of peoples android phones have like 30 windows open - this is a fault of its interface.<p>-If you want to access your apps, swipe up from bottom bezel (shows running apps), and then swipe left, now you can view all your other apps.<p>-Every app is expected to have its settings menu accessible by swiping down from the top bezel.<p>There are no silly little cumbersome function buttons at the bottom like Android has (the back&#x2F;home&#x2F;apps buttons). Smart use of bezel gestures make this unnecessary.<p>Everything can be accessed easily in a simple, comfortable gesture with your thumb. As a result, it is a lot faster to use day in day out. And it is not as cluttered as Android.<p>I am sad the whole world chose Android. It&#x27;s a crappy interface.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Huawei Disaster Reveals Google’s Iron Grip on Android</title><url>https://onezero.medium.com/the-huawei-disaster-reveals-googles-iron-grip-on-android-b1ccee34504d</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>harryf</author><text>It’s possible that Google cutting off Huawei will actually backfire, because it makes having a viable alternative to Android a MUST HAVE instead of just NICE TO HAVE.<p>Perhaps it’s possible to resurrect Blackberry 10 ( <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;BlackBerry_10" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;BlackBerry_10</a> ) for example, which seemed to be an impressive piece of engineering that got trampled by Blackberrys failing business. I played with a demo once that could run Android apps and was amazing at multi-tasking thanks to its microkernel architecture. Plus would be governed by Canadian export laws I guess. Perhaps I’m just daydreaming though.<p>Either way think it’s going to lead to more mobile OS competition again, which is a good thing</text></item><item><author>Roritharr</author><text>Google invested Billions into Android.<p>Samsung tried to hedge for this by building Tizen(Bada) and realized how much needed to be invested to get an Android competitor going, so they kept the development going, but focused for their Smartwatches, as this would have to be a &quot;if the worst happens&quot; plan, not something that could be a profitable venture.<p>LG has the Palm&#x2F;HP borne WebOS for their TVs, i suspect with a similar idea at the back of their minds.<p>Everyone else? They&#x27;re too small to realistically try to save their smartphone businesses when the green robot becomes their enemy.<p>Google bought this platform with every dollar invested over more than a decade, they didn&#x27;t do this only so that Apple had a competitor, but so that THEY had control over mobile eyeballs.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>TheOperator</author><text>&gt;It’s possible that Google cutting off Huawei will actually backfire, because it makes having a viable alternative to Android a MUST HAVE instead of just NICE TO HAVE.<p>I got the impression that the United States forced their hand.</text></comment> |
40,276,222 | 40,275,104 | 1 | 3 | 40,262,543 | train | <story><title>With PowerPC, Windows CE and the WiiN-Pad Slate, Everyone's a WiiN-Er</title><url>http://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2024/05/with-powerpc-windows-ce-and-wiin-pad.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dfox</author><text>It is somehow weird to see MPC821 in this kind of device. The point of (Power)QUICC line is that the Communications Processor is some kind of RISC&#x2F;VLIW core, that offloads various communications tasks and has firmware support for various serial telco protocols. I would not be too surprised if MPC821 and MPC860 are in fact the same hardware only with different firmware that somehow bitbangs the LCD interface by (ab)using the SCC channels (original m68k QUICC datasheet mentions that there is a way to make one of the channels behave like Centronics parallel port).<p>In any case PowerQUICC with LCD interface is a device that is quite obviously meant for something like dektop phone with large LCD, not for tablets.<p>Quite large usage of PowerQUICC were Cisco 17xx&#x2F;26xx series routers (with 16xx using m68k QUICC) that were used by many telcos in early 2000&#x27;s as &quot;SHDSL modems&quot;. If you squint enough the m68k QUICC is an entire Cisco 2500 on a single chip (with the added benefit that the QUICC SCC can more or less do scatter gather DMA directly into IOS&#x27;s particle buffer datastructure, which IIRC was not the case with the Z8530-derived USARTs in 2500).</text></comment> | <story><title>With PowerPC, Windows CE and the WiiN-Pad Slate, Everyone's a WiiN-Er</title><url>http://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2024/05/with-powerpc-windows-ce-and-wiin-pad.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mlhpdx</author><text>Wow. Maybe if WinCE had this kind of thorough documentation back then it would have done better. Excellent article and history lesson.</text></comment> |
13,219,034 | 13,218,925 | 1 | 3 | 13,218,273 | train | <story><title>Blue Ocean</title><url>https://jenkins.io/projects/blueocean/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tzaman</author><text>Seeing how much people recommend other solutions, I&#x27;ve actually moved from Travis to Jenkins, and never looked back.<p>Yes, Jenkins has its issues (crappy UX, poor&#x2F;awkward docs), but where it shines is the fact it&#x27;s self-hosted, so I can SSH onto the instance to debug a failing build or replay it with a modified Jenkinsfile on the fly.<p>I&#x27;m quite proud of the current setup we have; We&#x27;re hosting our app with Google&#x27;s Container Engine (Kubernetes), so what we&#x27;re doing is on every build Jenkins creates a slave agent within the same cluster (just different node pool) as the production, so the environment in which test containers are ran is identical to production, and what&#x27;s more it actually talks to the same Kubernetes master, which means I can, for example, test our Nginx Reverse proxy with real backend endpoints and real certificates (that are mounted through glusterfs).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>scrollaway</author><text>The problem with travis and the like is most do not support arbitrary builds.<p>Drone for example is trying to sell itself as a &quot;jenkins replacement&quot; but has no concept of a build triggering arbitrarily, or that isn&#x27;t intrinsically linked to a git repo. It&#x27;s nonsense.<p>Once you set up a bunch of tooling jobs on Jenkins it&#x27;s very nice to be able to use it as some form of control center for a bunch of different operations. Calling it a build server is underselling it.</text></comment> | <story><title>Blue Ocean</title><url>https://jenkins.io/projects/blueocean/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tzaman</author><text>Seeing how much people recommend other solutions, I&#x27;ve actually moved from Travis to Jenkins, and never looked back.<p>Yes, Jenkins has its issues (crappy UX, poor&#x2F;awkward docs), but where it shines is the fact it&#x27;s self-hosted, so I can SSH onto the instance to debug a failing build or replay it with a modified Jenkinsfile on the fly.<p>I&#x27;m quite proud of the current setup we have; We&#x27;re hosting our app with Google&#x27;s Container Engine (Kubernetes), so what we&#x27;re doing is on every build Jenkins creates a slave agent within the same cluster (just different node pool) as the production, so the environment in which test containers are ran is identical to production, and what&#x27;s more it actually talks to the same Kubernetes master, which means I can, for example, test our Nginx Reverse proxy with real backend endpoints and real certificates (that are mounted through glusterfs).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Kudos</author><text>FWIW, Circle CI offers the ability to SSH in to build nodes and free nodes for public projects</text></comment> |
9,764,695 | 9,764,218 | 1 | 2 | 9,762,054 | train | <story><title>Implementing a Virtual Machine in C</title><url>http://www.felixangell.com/virtual-machine-in-c/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>TomNomNom</author><text>A good read.<p>One thing I thought of as a little weird is this:<p>&gt; But remember, we aren&#x27;t decoding anything since our instructions are just given to us raw. So that means we only have to worry about fetch, and evaluate!<p>The &#x27;decode&#x27; step is being done by the switch statement, it&#x27;s not being skipped. I think the author may be confusing turning assembly into machine code (i.e. what an assembler does) with decoding an opcode.<p>I built a (very simple) VM in Go live on stage at a local mini-conference last year. I really enjoyed it. There&#x27;s a video of it here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=GjGRhIl0xWs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=GjGRhIl0xWs</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Implementing a Virtual Machine in C</title><url>http://www.felixangell.com/virtual-machine-in-c/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>r4pha</author><text>There&#x27;s something really nice about these minimalistic C projects. You can quickly take a look at the source and immediatelly grasp what&#x27;s happening. A simple and didactic introduction. Super cool.</text></comment> |
26,400,896 | 26,400,600 | 1 | 2 | 26,387,100 | train | <story><title>Hertz, the original meme stock, is turning out to be worthless</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-02/hertz-the-original-meme-stock-is-turning-out-to-be-worthless</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>brandmeyer</author><text>Hol&#x27; up.<p>While in bankruptcy, some fools ran up the price of Hertz stock. Then, while the price was up <i>in the middle of bankruptcy proceedings</i>, Hertz sold some new shares to the same fools. The final result of the bankruptcy wiped out all of the shareholders.<p>While the buyers were obviously fools, Hertz should have known that zero shareholder value was a likely outcome. How was selling more stock in that situation legal? I see that the sale was quickly shut down... but it shouldn&#x27;t have happened in the first place.</text></comment> | <story><title>Hertz, the original meme stock, is turning out to be worthless</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-02/hertz-the-original-meme-stock-is-turning-out-to-be-worthless</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>throwaway5752</author><text>It&#x27;s not worth discussing BTC, TSLA, GME, or HTZ. That is missing the forest for the trees.<p>The degradation of even the appearance of an orderly market is the story. The money movement (volume of excess trades X magnitude of price change) seems out of reach of unleveraged retail. Faith in private and public institutions is justifiably poor, but also under organized attack.<p>This is going to end badly for everyone, except perhaps for China.</text></comment> |
11,853,171 | 11,852,914 | 1 | 3 | 11,852,293 | train | <story><title>Understanding the Elm type system</title><url>http://www.adamwaselnuk.com/elm/2016/05/27/understanding-the-elm-type-system.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>spion</author><text>&gt; For example, when writing an Elm program I might at some point decide that users should have an admin flag. I will then try to use that flag in a function at which point the compiler will tell me that I have failed to add it to the User model. I will add it to the model at which point the compiler will tell me that I have failed to account for it in my main update function.<p>This beautifully explains why types are so useful. I don&#x27;t know if the number of bugs goes down, but it sure is useful to have an assistant check <i>all</i> the implications of a change I want to make, and does that in a second.</text></comment> | <story><title>Understanding the Elm type system</title><url>http://www.adamwaselnuk.com/elm/2016/05/27/understanding-the-elm-type-system.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ghayes</author><text>At first glance, Elm&#x27;s type system looks like it borrows heavily from Haskell [0]. Learning Haskell&#x27;s type system is a great mental exercise, even if you don&#x27;t even up coding in the language.<p>[0] Basics: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;learnyouahaskell.com&#x2F;types-and-typeclasses" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;learnyouahaskell.com&#x2F;types-and-typeclasses</a></text></comment> |
19,422,328 | 19,422,268 | 1 | 2 | 19,421,815 | train | <story><title>Mobile data: Why India has the world's cheapest</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-47537201</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>chewz</author><text>Mobile telecom prices are just a pure licence to print money. The cost base (infrastructure and regulatory costs) is insignificant and the asking price maxed out - depending on the market.<p>Prices could be mitigated by competition but usualy we have oligopoly, by regulators (EU and roaming charges) or by taxation (licences to operate).<p>I always laugh when similar company with similar shareholders charge 15 times more in one country then in another.<p>Digi Malaysia extending prepaid for 1 year 68 ringit 15$, dtac Thailand 1$. Both owned by Telenor.</text></item><item><author>denzil_correa</author><text>&gt; The BBC report, citing a UK-based price comparison site, said that 1 gigabyte (GB) of mobile data cost $0.26 in India (£0.20), compared with $12.37 in the US, $6.66 in the UK, and a global average of $8.53.<p>According to OECD, the Purchasing Power Parities (PPP) for India is 17.729 , UK is 0.691 and US is 1.0 [0]. That&#x27;s a huge difference and hence, ignoring the purchasing power will not give you a full picture about the &quot;cost&quot;.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;data.oecd.org&#x2F;conversion&#x2F;purchasing-power-parities-ppp.htm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;data.oecd.org&#x2F;conversion&#x2F;purchasing-power-parities-p...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vvanders</author><text>I hate mobile companies as much as anyone else but that&#x27;s like saying that once you&#x27;re past the hard part of software development the rest is easy.<p>The bread and butter of mobile operators is infrastructure and spectrum licensing. FWIW I think there&#x27;s a fair amount of competition, at least more than you see in the ISP space. Building towers is usually much more straightforward than trenching fiber&#x2F;cable.</text></comment> | <story><title>Mobile data: Why India has the world's cheapest</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-47537201</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>chewz</author><text>Mobile telecom prices are just a pure licence to print money. The cost base (infrastructure and regulatory costs) is insignificant and the asking price maxed out - depending on the market.<p>Prices could be mitigated by competition but usualy we have oligopoly, by regulators (EU and roaming charges) or by taxation (licences to operate).<p>I always laugh when similar company with similar shareholders charge 15 times more in one country then in another.<p>Digi Malaysia extending prepaid for 1 year 68 ringit 15$, dtac Thailand 1$. Both owned by Telenor.</text></item><item><author>denzil_correa</author><text>&gt; The BBC report, citing a UK-based price comparison site, said that 1 gigabyte (GB) of mobile data cost $0.26 in India (£0.20), compared with $12.37 in the US, $6.66 in the UK, and a global average of $8.53.<p>According to OECD, the Purchasing Power Parities (PPP) for India is 17.729 , UK is 0.691 and US is 1.0 [0]. That&#x27;s a huge difference and hence, ignoring the purchasing power will not give you a full picture about the &quot;cost&quot;.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;data.oecd.org&#x2F;conversion&#x2F;purchasing-power-parities-ppp.htm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;data.oecd.org&#x2F;conversion&#x2F;purchasing-power-parities-p...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mcv</author><text>In many countries, mobile bandwidth licenses were auctioned for ridiculous sums, which were probably bid based on what they expected the market to be able to bear. That made the expected profit part of the cost.<p>There was a bit of a scandal back then because of the way the Dutch government handled that auction and tried to squeeze as much money as possible out of the various bidding companies.</text></comment> |
8,562,235 | 8,561,678 | 1 | 2 | 8,561,080 | train | <story><title>On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs</title><url>https://libcom.org/library/phenomenon-bullshit-jobs-david-graeber</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hammerzeit</author><text>This reads like a classic Graeber piece, in that he&#x27;s starts off by tackling some fascinating questions -- why are there 2x the administrative workers in the US as in Europe -- but then skips straight to the anarchist polemics.<p>Most of the jobs he categorizes as &quot;bullshit&quot; all share an element of arms-race components to them. i.e. if my competitor has really good telemarketers&#x2F;lobbyists&#x2F;corporate lawyers, I&#x27;d better have one too -- _or they&#x27;ll beat me_. How is it that that reflects some sort of keep-the-masses-down 1% malfeasance?<p>To me, the tell that he defined &quot;bullshit&quot; as &quot;jobs I don&#x27;t like or understand&quot; is that he lumped in actuaries with telemarketers -- does he think providing insurance has no value?<p>Similarly he writes: &quot;What does it say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand for talented poet-musicians, but an apparently infinite demand for specialists in corporate law?&quot; There are more musicians employed in this country [1] than there are people in biglaw [2].<p>Ultimately, it seems like Graeber wants to return to a butcher-and-baker economy, where all our jobs are focused on directly providing services to consumers. That sounds charming, but makes as much sense as a world with all consumer startups and no b2b&#x2F;enterprise startups.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.bls.gov/ooh/entertainment-and-sports/musicians-and-singers.htm" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bls.gov&#x2F;ooh&#x2F;entertainment-and-sports&#x2F;musicians-an...</a> -- 167,400 musicians<p>[2] see <a href="http://www.law.harvard.edu/programs/plp/pages/statistics.php#sotflf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.law.harvard.edu&#x2F;programs&#x2F;plp&#x2F;pages&#x2F;statistics.php...</a> -- 70,000 lawyers in biglaw</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>shanusmagnus</author><text>What always surprises me about articles like this, and the discussions they produce, is how so many engineers and builders-of-things discard the evidence of their years of experience and see the world through the eyes of people who&#x27;ve never built a complex system.<p>For instance, a couple of years ago I inherited a convoluted, needlessly ornate and grotesque application that could clearly be rewritten and even extended in one-fifth the LOC it currently occupied. When I finally got greenlit to perform the surgery the usual thing happened, which is that I realized, after much painful effort, that the system had become grotesque little by little, in much the same way that good people turn bad: by taking steps that seem appropriate at the time to what the situation demands. My solution, in the end, was somewhat less grotesque than the original, and certainly more capable, and yet it was not the glittering jewel that I had imagined beforehand, and the path to it was littered with bodies. I assume many people on this site have had a similar experience.<p>So with regard to repugnant systems (giant commerical banks) and jobs (middle management) or jobs and systems that are repugnant due to the types and numbers of people who seem to be filling them (lawyers, politicians) and wrt established habits and customs and traditions -- to all of it I now perceive that these jobs and systems are the survivors of a mighty selection pressure, and the whole creaky affair so vastly outperformed the alternatives that it has taken over the world to the extent that now it seems as if nothing else is possible.<p>Something else is possible, of course; but the costs of these theoretically more benign and humane alternatives are impossible to envision. And I&#x27;m positive that the whole thing could not be redone, elegantly, in one-fifth the code.</text></comment> | <story><title>On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs</title><url>https://libcom.org/library/phenomenon-bullshit-jobs-david-graeber</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hammerzeit</author><text>This reads like a classic Graeber piece, in that he&#x27;s starts off by tackling some fascinating questions -- why are there 2x the administrative workers in the US as in Europe -- but then skips straight to the anarchist polemics.<p>Most of the jobs he categorizes as &quot;bullshit&quot; all share an element of arms-race components to them. i.e. if my competitor has really good telemarketers&#x2F;lobbyists&#x2F;corporate lawyers, I&#x27;d better have one too -- _or they&#x27;ll beat me_. How is it that that reflects some sort of keep-the-masses-down 1% malfeasance?<p>To me, the tell that he defined &quot;bullshit&quot; as &quot;jobs I don&#x27;t like or understand&quot; is that he lumped in actuaries with telemarketers -- does he think providing insurance has no value?<p>Similarly he writes: &quot;What does it say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand for talented poet-musicians, but an apparently infinite demand for specialists in corporate law?&quot; There are more musicians employed in this country [1] than there are people in biglaw [2].<p>Ultimately, it seems like Graeber wants to return to a butcher-and-baker economy, where all our jobs are focused on directly providing services to consumers. That sounds charming, but makes as much sense as a world with all consumer startups and no b2b&#x2F;enterprise startups.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.bls.gov/ooh/entertainment-and-sports/musicians-and-singers.htm" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bls.gov&#x2F;ooh&#x2F;entertainment-and-sports&#x2F;musicians-an...</a> -- 167,400 musicians<p>[2] see <a href="http://www.law.harvard.edu/programs/plp/pages/statistics.php#sotflf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.law.harvard.edu&#x2F;programs&#x2F;plp&#x2F;pages&#x2F;statistics.php...</a> -- 70,000 lawyers in biglaw</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jseliger</author><text><i>all share an element of arms-race components to them</i><p>Sometimes arms races (in the figurative sense) can lead to better performance! This week&#x27;s New Yorker has a splendid example of this in James Surowiecki&#x27;s &quot;Better All the Time
How the &#x27;performance revolution&#x27; came to athletics—and beyond&quot; (<a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/11/10/better-time" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newyorker.com&#x2F;magazine&#x2F;2014&#x2F;11&#x2F;10&#x2F;better-time</a>). It&#x27;s not easy to excerpt, but he points out that athletes used to barely train at all and now they do it all the time; musicians are better; elite students are &quot;better&quot; in many respects; manufacturing has improved. As he writes:<p><i>as the sports columnist Mark Montieth wrote after reviewing a host of games from the nineteen-fifties and sixties, “The difference in skills and athleticism between eras is remarkable. Most players, even the stars, couldn’t dribble well with their off-hand. Compared to today’s athletes, they often appear to be enacting a slow-motion replay.”<p>What we’re seeing is, in part, the mainstreaming of excellent habits. In the late nineteen-fifties, Raymond Berry, the great wide receiver for the Baltimore Colts, was famous for his attention to detail and his obsessive approach to the game: he took copious notes, he ate well, he studied film of his opponents, he simulated entire games by himself, and so on. But, as the journalist Mark Bowden observed, Berry was considered an oddball.</i><p>The whole article is wroth reading.</text></comment> |
22,127,867 | 22,127,858 | 1 | 2 | 22,126,753 | train | <story><title>Is Venture Capital Worth the Risk?</title><url>https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/01/27/is-venture-capital-worth-the-risk</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>aloukissas</author><text>In short, this article can be summarized: &quot;VC used to fund R&amp;D-heavy startups like Genentech and Intel, now it&#x27;s used to make startups grow as fast as possible at any cost, just like cancer&quot;. Mostly agree with this.</text></comment> | <story><title>Is Venture Capital Worth the Risk?</title><url>https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/01/27/is-venture-capital-worth-the-risk</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>FanaHOVA</author><text>Sometimes I wonder why people spend all this energy to bash VC. It&#x27;s a 4,500 words article and there&#x27;s only have 5-6 companies to mention as failures of the model in the past decade, compared to the tends of thousands that raised money, and all of those are consumer-facing products.<p>The New Yorker uses Parse.ly (Venture backed company), GitHub (Venture backed company), BrowserStack (Venture backend company), Asana (Venture backed company), Hipchat (Venture backend company), just to name a few they listed on their Stackshare profile [0] (another venture backed company). I&#x27;m sure they are glad those were funded :)<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackshare.io&#x2F;new-yorker&#x2F;new-yorker" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackshare.io&#x2F;new-yorker&#x2F;new-yorker</a></text></comment> |
13,034,252 | 13,033,703 | 1 | 3 | 13,033,470 | train | <story><title>How to get started with DJing</title><url>https://medium.com/@asantash/how-to-get-started-with-djing-495c275be5e4#.2ajfzv1c4</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>empath75</author><text>Okay, so I was a rave DJ in the early 2000s and opened for some of the most popular DJ&#x27;s in the world at sold out clubs and I&#x27;m about to give some real advice.<p>Yes, all of this stuff about producing music is important, but people who can mix records are a dime a dozen. You need to be able to do it, but it&#x27;s not enough to get gigs.<p>The way you get gigs is to be popular. You need to go clubbing every weekend. You need to go to after parties. You need to promote on social media. You need to throw your own parties and book other DJ&#x27;s so they&#x27;ll book you at theirs.<p>Nobody is going to book you on talent. You get booked because you get people in the door and that really only has a little bit to do with talent and a lot to do with personality and networking.<p>You&#x27;ll never make a living that way, though, because nobody pays money for local DJ&#x27;s except at weddings and bar mitzvahs.<p>Alternatively, you can spend 10 years in your bedroom learning how to be a really good music producer and hope some popular DJ signs your single and then gradually build a following and then maybe in five more years you might make what a junior sysadmin makes.</text></comment> | <story><title>How to get started with DJing</title><url>https://medium.com/@asantash/how-to-get-started-with-djing-495c275be5e4#.2ajfzv1c4</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dpc59</author><text>I&#x27;m going to seem like an elitist prick, but in my opinion DJing is absolutely useless if you don&#x27;t produce&#x2F;compose. Basic 2 decks DJing is fucking boring, learn how to play instruments and all the theory behind pop music, then figure out the software and hardware to play live sets. Obviously you&#x27;re going to need to understand the basics of mixing to play live sets, but playing a regular DJ set in front of an audience to me is the same thing as covering stairway to heaven or wonderwall. Keep practicing until you&#x27;re actually good. All of my friends who could play instruments had a much easier time getting into producing than the people who never learned a single scale. And it&#x27;s not just the composition aspect, it&#x27;s all the sound design, sampling and just understand the programs that gets easier.</text></comment> |
34,791,506 | 34,791,485 | 1 | 2 | 34,789,688 | train | <story><title>Health concerns grow in East Palestine, Ohio, after train derailment</title><url>https://www.npr.org/2023/02/14/1156567743/health-east-palestine-ohio-train-derailment-chemicals</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>grecy</author><text>&gt; <i>which can cause headaches, nausea, and respiratory problems.... can make people dizzy and drowsy</i><p>I also love this phrasing that talks about the immediate uncomfortable reactions, but makes no mention on the extremely serious long-term implications of exposure.<p>These chemicals won&#x27;t just make you feel unpleasant in the moment, they&#x27;ll kill you in the long run.</text></item><item><author>perihelions</author><text>- <i>&quot;On Sunday, the EPA released a list, written by Norfolk Southern, of the toxic chemicals that were in the derailed cars. In addition to vinyl chloride and butyl acrylate, it mentions ethylhexyl acrylate, which can cause headaches, nausea, and respiratory problems in people exposed to it; as well as isobutylene, which can make people dizzy and drowsy.&quot;</i><p>This is anodyne phrasing that omits the lede, which is that this information was not previously disclosed. This expanded &quot;list of toxic chemicals&quot; was not public prior to Sunday.<p>Here&#x27;s ABC&#x27;s reporting by way of comparison: <i>&quot;There were more toxic chemicals on train that derailed in Ohio than originally reported, data shows&quot;</i><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;abcnews.go.com&#x2F;US&#x2F;toxic-chemicals-train-derailed-ohio-originally-reported-data&#x2F;story?id=97080179" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;abcnews.go.com&#x2F;US&#x2F;toxic-chemicals-train-derailed-ohi...</a><p>(Another notable diff is that ABC describes ethylhexyl acrylate as a &quot;carcinogen&quot;, linking to a CDC page as a cite. NPR&#x27;s exposition reads differently: &quot;ethylhexyl acrylate, which can cause headaches, nausea, and respiratory problems in people exposed to it;&quot;).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nimbius</author><text>&gt; can make people dizzy and drowsy<p>LMFAO vinyl chloride is a multi-organ carcinogen...its literally one of the quickest ways to stage 4 right up there with Benzene exposure.<p>phosgene was also part of the release when Ohio decided a &quot;controlled burn&quot; of the vinyl chloride was somehow a good idea. the plume could be seen from commercial flights.<p>honest to god the damage control media outlets are attempting in the midst of what by every definition is just under a massive environmental disaster is just ridiculous. If this happened in China it would be front page news.</text></comment> | <story><title>Health concerns grow in East Palestine, Ohio, after train derailment</title><url>https://www.npr.org/2023/02/14/1156567743/health-east-palestine-ohio-train-derailment-chemicals</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>grecy</author><text>&gt; <i>which can cause headaches, nausea, and respiratory problems.... can make people dizzy and drowsy</i><p>I also love this phrasing that talks about the immediate uncomfortable reactions, but makes no mention on the extremely serious long-term implications of exposure.<p>These chemicals won&#x27;t just make you feel unpleasant in the moment, they&#x27;ll kill you in the long run.</text></item><item><author>perihelions</author><text>- <i>&quot;On Sunday, the EPA released a list, written by Norfolk Southern, of the toxic chemicals that were in the derailed cars. In addition to vinyl chloride and butyl acrylate, it mentions ethylhexyl acrylate, which can cause headaches, nausea, and respiratory problems in people exposed to it; as well as isobutylene, which can make people dizzy and drowsy.&quot;</i><p>This is anodyne phrasing that omits the lede, which is that this information was not previously disclosed. This expanded &quot;list of toxic chemicals&quot; was not public prior to Sunday.<p>Here&#x27;s ABC&#x27;s reporting by way of comparison: <i>&quot;There were more toxic chemicals on train that derailed in Ohio than originally reported, data shows&quot;</i><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;abcnews.go.com&#x2F;US&#x2F;toxic-chemicals-train-derailed-ohio-originally-reported-data&#x2F;story?id=97080179" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;abcnews.go.com&#x2F;US&#x2F;toxic-chemicals-train-derailed-ohi...</a><p>(Another notable diff is that ABC describes ethylhexyl acrylate as a &quot;carcinogen&quot;, linking to a CDC page as a cite. NPR&#x27;s exposition reads differently: &quot;ethylhexyl acrylate, which can cause headaches, nausea, and respiratory problems in people exposed to it;&quot;).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>atoav</author><text>This. That&#x27;s like saying a radiation exposure can make you &quot;see funny lights&quot; — while being technically true, <i>this</i> is <i>not</i> the important thing to underline given a situation where such a danger is out there in the environment.<p>Makes you wonder.</text></comment> |
29,604,711 | 29,602,716 | 1 | 2 | 29,597,648 | train | <story><title>Public Staircases</title><url>https://tinyletter.com/HenryGrabar/letters/highway-expansion-electric-vehicle-charging-prison-dorm</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>delgaudm</author><text>It&#x27;s my understanding that Pittsburgh has more public staircases than virtually any other city. There are over 700 staircases, and many are quite long.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.frontiernet.net&#x2F;~rochballparks2&#x2F;towns&#x2F;pgh_steps.htm" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.frontiernet.net&#x2F;~rochballparks2&#x2F;towns&#x2F;pgh_steps.h...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Public Staircases</title><url>https://tinyletter.com/HenryGrabar/letters/highway-expansion-electric-vehicle-charging-prison-dorm</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>rexf</author><text>The stairs as better benches comparison is great.<p>It also mentions the [Los Angeles Loop](<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;socalstairclimbers.com&#x2F;los-angeles-loop&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;socalstairclimbers.com&#x2F;los-angeles-loop&#x2F;</a>) which I had never heard of. Interesting post</text></comment> |
18,743,574 | 18,742,215 | 1 | 2 | 18,740,000 | train | <story><title>Simple rules for documenting scientific software</title><url>https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1006561</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>acidburnNSA</author><text>I manage a team of power plant design engineers writing complex scientific HPC software, mostly in Python (which drives Fortran 77 codes behind the scenes, among other things). It&#x27;s been a long haul but through the years we&#x27;ve learned a lot of good lessons and are pretty productive at what I consider at least moderately good code. Everyone starts off by reading Clean Code and taking basic proficiency training. We know to try to make code speak for itself because, as we&#x27;ve all seen many times, comments lie. We&#x27;ve slowly learned from the software engineering community how to set up things like Jenkins for CI, black for Python code auto-formatting, Phabricator for revision control policy and code review. We&#x27;re writing docs in rst with sphinx, watching coverage, and getting pylint 10&#x2F;10. We&#x27;re waking up to the wonders of static types.<p>Mandatory code review has turned out to be a great way to train newbies, write better code, and make sure code is understandable to at least one other person. It&#x27;s been an investment (it&#x27;s slowww) but I still think it pays dividends. That&#x27;s what I&#x27;d add to this advice. And I&#x27;d tone down the comments focus. Comment only when you fail to express yourself clearly in the code.</text></comment> | <story><title>Simple rules for documenting scientific software</title><url>https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1006561</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>hprotagonist</author><text>A really great idea: put DOIs in your function documentation.<p>Writing things like:<p><i>Implements equation 3.2 of Foo et. al. (2005), doi:10.2.3&#x2F;baz</i><p>has saved me no end of pain in the past.</text></comment> |
40,049,326 | 40,049,098 | 1 | 2 | 40,048,842 | train | <story><title>California exceeds 100% of energy demand with renewables over a record 30 days</title><url>https://electrek.co/2024/04/15/renewables-met-100-percent-california-energy-demand-30-days/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>callalex</author><text>For a few minutes at low demand time. These kinds of over-grand claims are seriously harmful to the cause of promoting renewables because it makes it seem like we’re almost there and can stop caring. Just look at the excellent, accurate, and up-to-the-hour charts put out by the electricity market itself and you will see where and when the challenges we face still are.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.caiso.com&#x2F;TodaysOutlook&#x2F;Pages&#x2F;supply.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.caiso.com&#x2F;TodaysOutlook&#x2F;Pages&#x2F;supply.html</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>baseline-shift</author><text>This is incorrect. It is not for a few minutes!<p>We are way way past that at this point. The renewable generation meeting the total demand is over most of the day. Because of solar PV, the cheapest generation now, the daytime electricity supply is actually more than we need in California. Solar farms (and also wind farms)get curtailed here due to supplying more than the grid can take at times; this is usually for several hours.<p>Source; reporter covering solar news through interviews with grid operators, solar developers and policymakers since 2008</text></comment> | <story><title>California exceeds 100% of energy demand with renewables over a record 30 days</title><url>https://electrek.co/2024/04/15/renewables-met-100-percent-california-energy-demand-30-days/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>callalex</author><text>For a few minutes at low demand time. These kinds of over-grand claims are seriously harmful to the cause of promoting renewables because it makes it seem like we’re almost there and can stop caring. Just look at the excellent, accurate, and up-to-the-hour charts put out by the electricity market itself and you will see where and when the challenges we face still are.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.caiso.com&#x2F;TodaysOutlook&#x2F;Pages&#x2F;supply.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.caiso.com&#x2F;TodaysOutlook&#x2F;Pages&#x2F;supply.html</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mgraczyk</author><text>The most striking thing is how incredibly flat the line for nuclear is.</text></comment> |
35,400,601 | 35,399,049 | 1 | 2 | 35,383,527 | train | <story><title>A New Beginning for LifeHacker</title><url>https://lifehacker.com/a-new-beginning-for-lifehacker-1850278940</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rationalist</author><text>Gizmodo, LifeHacker, and The Consumerist used to be my daily reading back when they were high quality sites 15+ years ago.<p>Thanks for posting this to HN, because I&#x27;m bookmarking LH and willing to give it another go.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>JohnBooty</author><text>God, yeah. I miss that higher-quality version of LifeHacker. There was always fluff but the original incarnation was pretty cool.<p>I remember when the original founder (Gina Trapani) stepped aside, it sounded to me like she was burnt out on the &quot;post 76786 updates a day, no matter what&quot; business model that they&#x27;d found themselves stuck with... although, she was the one at the helm, so ¯\_(ツ)_&#x2F;¯ The idea of posting about multiple new &quot;life hacks&quot; per freaking day is just so obviously absurd. Life is hackable but not that hackable.<p>Hell, I wouldn&#x27;t mind a much slower version of that site. 1-2 thoughtful articles a week. Then maybe 1-2 roundup posts of smaller news items.<p>Call it <i>Slowhacker.</i></text></comment> | <story><title>A New Beginning for LifeHacker</title><url>https://lifehacker.com/a-new-beginning-for-lifehacker-1850278940</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rationalist</author><text>Gizmodo, LifeHacker, and The Consumerist used to be my daily reading back when they were high quality sites 15+ years ago.<p>Thanks for posting this to HN, because I&#x27;m bookmarking LH and willing to give it another go.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>roryisok</author><text>ditto. I was turned off LifeHacker a long time back by the ads and slideshows and junk content. delighted to start rediscovering it.</text></comment> |
34,783,255 | 34,783,446 | 1 | 2 | 34,782,814 | train | <story><title>Walmart to close three tech hubs, tells tech staff to return to offices</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/walmart-to-close-three-tech-hubs-tells-tech-staff-to-return-to-offices-3fb131e4</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>operatingthetan</author><text>I think given at-will employment they can renege on that agreement whenever they want. Obviously it&#x27;s best to have a meeting of minds, but can you really ever trust a corporation? Probably not.</text></item><item><author>walrus01</author><text>The short way of addressing this, if you are sufficiently senior in your position or in-demand for your tech skills, is to ensure that any offer letter has extremely unambiguous language written into it that your position is 100% remote and will remain remote. Tell that to the recruiter. If they don&#x27;t do it, proceed with a short &quot;thank you for your time but I am not interested&quot; and move on.</text></item><item><author>Mountain_Skies</author><text>Interesting that they contacted me just last week about an open position. I thought it was odd that the inside recruiter included an obviously abbreviated version of the job posting in her email to me. When I looked up some of the key phrases, I found the posting, which was listed as hybrid while my profile clearly indicates I only work 100% remote. When I asked her about how many days per week hybrid means, she said &quot;about three&quot;, which sounds an awful lot like four to me, which probably also means that one (possibly two) work from home days would soon go away. She didn&#x27;t respond to my request for their location. If she wasn&#x27;t an inside recruiter, I would have thought it was a scam attempt.<p>Got to wonder if the caginess is due to them having problems with finding people to take over the obviously on-site jobs. Sure, the initial contact could have been a simple mistake on her part, but then the editing of the job posting to exclude anything about hybrid and days in the office and then a resistance to explaining the details when I emailed her back is suspicious. I decided to not pursuit it further and now seeing this news, makes me feel like I made the right choice.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nordsieck</author><text>&gt; I think given at-will employment they can renege on that agreement whenever they want. Obviously it&#x27;s best to have a meeting of minds, but can you really ever trust a corporation? Probably not.<p>Sure.<p>But part of those precautions are so that you have a good story to tell your next company why you only worked somewhere for 4 months.<p>Although I suppose it&#x27;s not necessary to include such short jobs on your resume at all.</text></comment> | <story><title>Walmart to close three tech hubs, tells tech staff to return to offices</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/walmart-to-close-three-tech-hubs-tells-tech-staff-to-return-to-offices-3fb131e4</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>operatingthetan</author><text>I think given at-will employment they can renege on that agreement whenever they want. Obviously it&#x27;s best to have a meeting of minds, but can you really ever trust a corporation? Probably not.</text></item><item><author>walrus01</author><text>The short way of addressing this, if you are sufficiently senior in your position or in-demand for your tech skills, is to ensure that any offer letter has extremely unambiguous language written into it that your position is 100% remote and will remain remote. Tell that to the recruiter. If they don&#x27;t do it, proceed with a short &quot;thank you for your time but I am not interested&quot; and move on.</text></item><item><author>Mountain_Skies</author><text>Interesting that they contacted me just last week about an open position. I thought it was odd that the inside recruiter included an obviously abbreviated version of the job posting in her email to me. When I looked up some of the key phrases, I found the posting, which was listed as hybrid while my profile clearly indicates I only work 100% remote. When I asked her about how many days per week hybrid means, she said &quot;about three&quot;, which sounds an awful lot like four to me, which probably also means that one (possibly two) work from home days would soon go away. She didn&#x27;t respond to my request for their location. If she wasn&#x27;t an inside recruiter, I would have thought it was a scam attempt.<p>Got to wonder if the caginess is due to them having problems with finding people to take over the obviously on-site jobs. Sure, the initial contact could have been a simple mistake on her part, but then the editing of the job posting to exclude anything about hybrid and days in the office and then a resistance to explaining the details when I emailed her back is suspicious. I decided to not pursuit it further and now seeing this news, makes me feel like I made the right choice.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dragonwriter</author><text>&gt; I think given at-will employment they can renege on that agreement whenever they want.<p>“at-will” employment refers to the laws setting the baseline conditions that apply <i>absent</i> a specific contract to the contrary.<p>An offer and acceptance of employment on specific terms, if it meets the requirements for contract formatiom trumps the default terms unless it is blocked by something in the law. That’s <i>why</i> important employees (e.g., top execs, 9f nothing else) in most firms have specific contracts with terms that are not at-will employment (and why union contracts exist, too.)</text></comment> |
11,434,069 | 11,432,408 | 1 | 3 | 11,430,945 | train | <story><title>WhatsApp Just Switched on Encryption for a Billion People</title><url>http://www.wired.com/2016/04/forget-apple-vs-fbi-whatsapp-just-switched-encryption-billion-people/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dang</author><text><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11431108" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11431108</a></text></comment> | <story><title>WhatsApp Just Switched on Encryption for a Billion People</title><url>http://www.wired.com/2016/04/forget-apple-vs-fbi-whatsapp-just-switched-encryption-billion-people/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>aorth</author><text>So now WhatsApp is finally on par with iMessage and Signal, and shares the same weakness: public key distribution. Key distribution is controlled by a centralized server that could, for malicious or other reasons, send you new fake keys for people you communicate with. For iMessage, this is explained in this 2015 post by Matthew Green:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.cryptographyengineering.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;09&#x2F;lets-talk-about-imessage-again.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.cryptographyengineering.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;09&#x2F;lets-talk-ab...</a><p>At least with Signal you can compile your own client (though that doesn&#x27;t help if the server is going to send you fake public keys!).</text></comment> |
18,060,916 | 18,061,073 | 1 | 2 | 18,060,049 | train | <story><title>Creating a bash completion script</title><url>https://iridakos.com/tutorials/2018/03/01/bash-programmable-completion-tutorial</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>powercf</author><text>Shell programmable completion highlights how slow the OS community can be to change&#x2F;improve core tools (shell, coreutils, ttys). Completion should be specified in the binary, and compatible with all shells. A similar interface could be designed for all scripting languages. It was obvious ~20 years ago that it makes no sense for each shell to specify their own completion system, and yet here we still are.</text></comment> | <story><title>Creating a bash completion script</title><url>https://iridakos.com/tutorials/2018/03/01/bash-programmable-completion-tutorial</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>cellularmitosis</author><text>I noticed a while back that Debian 9 introduced some strange breakage with bash completion. Previously, if you were typing &#x27;dd if=&#x2F;dev&#x2F;...&#x27; and started using tab for completion, it would behave as expected. Under Debian 9, typing &#x27;dd if=&#x2F;dev&#x2F;&#x27; and hitting tab will turn the command into &#x27;dd &#x2F;dev&#x2F;&#x27;.<p>I&#x27;m sure this was an oversight in the march of progress, but it sure is annoying to see a regression.</text></comment> |
25,250,525 | 25,249,511 | 1 | 2 | 25,247,338 | train | <story><title>Would you be willing to fund a Linux port to Apple Silicon?</title><url>https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1333126001161773056</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>squarefoot</author><text>No, I wouldn&#x27;t, not even if I could print billions in a snap.<p>I&#x27;d rather help funding the port to a 10 times slower but open platform, rather to a technically superior but proprietary close one whose owner would make it incompatible two seconds after they would smell competition from Linux in any of their core business fields.
No thanks, I&#x27;ll send my small quid to whomever appears to be really in favor of openness, no strings attached, which is neither the case with Apple as it is not with Google or Microsoft.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;2019&#x2F;09&#x2F;05&#x2F;how-apple-uses-its-app-store-copy-best-ideas&#x2F;?itid=lk_interstitial_manual_10" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;2019&#x2F;09&#x2F;05&#x2F;how-app...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ashneo76</author><text>No.No.no.no.no.no.no.no.<p>A million thousand times no.<p>As some one else said, every spare dollar I have is going to fund a company that values open source hardware, open source software, right to repair and own.<p>A company that doesn&#x27;t purposefully force manufactured obsolescence as a business model, privacy intrusions, lip service to OSS, bullying right to repair in courts, tax evasions doesn&#x27;t deserve any free work from the skilled people in the community. All of this, just so that they can make more billions when people around the world are suffering just to give their restrictive supply chain their blood, lives and tears.<p>You know why open source hardware is expensive for lower quality? Because Apple pays the premium on the premium quality stuff. But I&#x27;m that process they also drive up the prices.<p>Hardware manufacturers want the Apple cash, so they wait for the Apple contract and when they get that, any other contracts that you might have will get delayed and sidelined with lower quality stuff. Essentially, a monopoly in the supply chain</text></comment> | <story><title>Would you be willing to fund a Linux port to Apple Silicon?</title><url>https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1333126001161773056</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>squarefoot</author><text>No, I wouldn&#x27;t, not even if I could print billions in a snap.<p>I&#x27;d rather help funding the port to a 10 times slower but open platform, rather to a technically superior but proprietary close one whose owner would make it incompatible two seconds after they would smell competition from Linux in any of their core business fields.
No thanks, I&#x27;ll send my small quid to whomever appears to be really in favor of openness, no strings attached, which is neither the case with Apple as it is not with Google or Microsoft.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;2019&#x2F;09&#x2F;05&#x2F;how-apple-uses-its-app-store-copy-best-ideas&#x2F;?itid=lk_interstitial_manual_10" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;2019&#x2F;09&#x2F;05&#x2F;how-app...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>eyelidlessness</author><text>Lol they highlighted running Linux <i>in the first announcement of the ISA switch</i>, they see no threat in Linux at all. Their business model would need to change dramatically for that to happen. They’re a hardware company that makes the hardware more attractive with software, service and device integration. Their software restrictions are part of the value proposition, but anyone fully ejecting from that would be on their own. Linux becoming attractive on their hardware would almost certainly be unsupported, but I seriously doubt it would be undermined.</text></comment> |
15,990,535 | 15,990,634 | 1 | 2 | 15,990,064 | train | <story><title>Please Don't Show Us Another “Typical Family Earning $270,000 a Year”</title><url>http://www.slate.com/redirect/business/2017/12/why-are-sample-families-in-tax-plan-analyses-so-rich.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>esmi</author><text>“Rafa Nadal and I have an average of 5 French Open titles.”
That is a quote I&#x27;m going to have to remember. Should come in handy often.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>chch</author><text>Reminds me of a similar factoid:<p>Wayne and Brent Gretzky hold the National Hockey League record for most combined points by two brothers:<p>Wayne Gretzky with 2,857, Brent Gretzky with 4.</text></comment> | <story><title>Please Don't Show Us Another “Typical Family Earning $270,000 a Year”</title><url>http://www.slate.com/redirect/business/2017/12/why-are-sample-families-in-tax-plan-analyses-so-rich.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>esmi</author><text>“Rafa Nadal and I have an average of 5 French Open titles.”
That is a quote I&#x27;m going to have to remember. Should come in handy often.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>twoodfin</author><text>It turns out, though, that the median family of four has an income pretty close to the average family of four, so this point is a little less clever than most of the folks who are making it believe.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonexaminer.com&#x2F;actually-the-average-family-of-four-really-will-save-more-than-2000-from-this-bill&#x2F;article&#x2F;2644184" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonexaminer.com&#x2F;actually-the-average-famil...</a></text></comment> |
20,026,352 | 20,026,202 | 1 | 2 | 20,025,060 | train | <story><title>Huawei reviewing FedEx relationship, says packages 'diverted'</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/article/us-huawei-tech-fedex-exclusive/exclusive-huawei-reviewing-fedex-relationship-says-packages-diverted-idUSKCN1SX1RZ</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>JumpCrisscross</author><text>&gt; <i>The illusion of the rule of law</i><p>Rule of law has always been national. International politics are anarchic. Huawei quite clearly broke the laws of the United States (<i>e.g.</i> with respect to Iran), repeatedly and wilfully.</text></item><item><author>strooper</author><text>Not related to this package delivery drama, but the way we are observing the live demolition of the world largest networking equipment maker and second largest smartphone maker (by number) in the name of trade war will never bring back the confidence in those who are flexing muscle.<p>The illusion of the rule of law, free world, globalization and the reality of control is simply frightening, and worrisome.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tepidandroid</author><text>Huawei <i>may</i> have broken the law with respect to violating U.S&#x27;s sanctions on Iran. These are still unproven allegations as of yet.<p>Meanwhile, Société Générale, Deutsche Bank, BNP Paribas, JP Morgan have <i>provably</i> done exactly that.<p>Yet there is only one C-suite level executive who is currently being held personally, criminally liable for corporate actions. I guarantee you won&#x27;t be seeing Jamie Dimon threatened with prison time for JP Morgan&#x27;s 87 violations of Iranian sanctions and Weapons of Mass Destruction sanctions, anytime soon.<p>Laws which are enforced selectively lack credibility.</text></comment> | <story><title>Huawei reviewing FedEx relationship, says packages 'diverted'</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/article/us-huawei-tech-fedex-exclusive/exclusive-huawei-reviewing-fedex-relationship-says-packages-diverted-idUSKCN1SX1RZ</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>JumpCrisscross</author><text>&gt; <i>The illusion of the rule of law</i><p>Rule of law has always been national. International politics are anarchic. Huawei quite clearly broke the laws of the United States (<i>e.g.</i> with respect to Iran), repeatedly and wilfully.</text></item><item><author>strooper</author><text>Not related to this package delivery drama, but the way we are observing the live demolition of the world largest networking equipment maker and second largest smartphone maker (by number) in the name of trade war will never bring back the confidence in those who are flexing muscle.<p>The illusion of the rule of law, free world, globalization and the reality of control is simply frightening, and worrisome.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dmurray</author><text>Importing goods to Iran really isn&#x27;t a violation of US laws, any more than, say, a twenty year old Huawei employee having a beer in Beijing or driving at 120 mph on a German autobahn. The rule of law is indeed national, and legally the US has very little jurisdiction outside its borders. Extralegally, of course, it has plenty of powers to arrest, kill or torture those it doesn&#x27;t like.</text></comment> |
857,945 | 857,747 | 1 | 3 | 857,432 | train | <story><title>Mark Zuckerberg: The evolution of a remarkable CEO</title><url>http://venturebeat.com/2009/10/02/mark-zuckerberg-the-evolution-of-a-remarkable-ceo/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>csallen</author><text>After all the negative press constantly surrounding Zuckerberg, it's refreshing to hear something positive for once. And, as always, it's inspiring to see evidence that tech founders can potentially be great CEOs.<p>I think the real value of this article is the info on Facebook's internal policies, though. Ranking people based on relative performance? Relentlessly replacing lack-luster employees? A focus on providing individual incentives? Sounds like a really good (though scary) environment for ensuring that people do their best work.<p>It's well-known that big companies are much less efficient than their smaller counterparts, but this seems like a step in the right direction for closing that gap.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mlinsey</author><text>This employee-ranking system is common at big companies, including Microsoft and Amazon. There are two key difficulties with such a system, and it would be interesting to learn how Facebook grapples with them:<p>1 - It's imperative that the criteria for ranking employees is well-aligned with company goals. At Microsoft for example, on most teams you are ranked mostly on what features you ship. That sounds great but it can lead to extreme feature bloat in products. It's hard to take a stand for simplicity and elegant design in a meeting when the other guy's job depends on shipping the feature, and your job depends on getting the other guy to agree to include <i>your</i> feature.<p>2 - AMZN and MSFT both merge each manager's ranked list of direct reports with the lists created by other managers who report to the same Director or Senior Manager. This process can often be much more political than meritocratic, since other managers usually don't know much about an individual engineer's performance. If a team is flat-out better than other team and all of their engineers deserved to be ranked higher, that can be very difficult to defend in a meeting in front of a VP.</text></comment> | <story><title>Mark Zuckerberg: The evolution of a remarkable CEO</title><url>http://venturebeat.com/2009/10/02/mark-zuckerberg-the-evolution-of-a-remarkable-ceo/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>csallen</author><text>After all the negative press constantly surrounding Zuckerberg, it's refreshing to hear something positive for once. And, as always, it's inspiring to see evidence that tech founders can potentially be great CEOs.<p>I think the real value of this article is the info on Facebook's internal policies, though. Ranking people based on relative performance? Relentlessly replacing lack-luster employees? A focus on providing individual incentives? Sounds like a really good (though scary) environment for ensuring that people do their best work.<p>It's well-known that big companies are much less efficient than their smaller counterparts, but this seems like a step in the right direction for closing that gap.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vaksel</author><text>sounds like a slave driver environment, if you ask me. It can't be good for morale, having people rotate through the company every month.</text></comment> |
32,464,178 | 32,463,905 | 1 | 3 | 32,462,275 | train | <story><title>Milwaukee Tool Raises the Bar with New USA Factory</title><url>https://toolguyd.com/milwaukee-tool-new-usa-factory/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gurumeditations</author><text>American manufacturing looks like low-wage workers making $12 an hour (a few years ago) making windshields. A real American manufacturing renaissance would be German, with high skilled trained professionals designing, building, and operating advanced machines to create complex products. Basically what the Chinese are continually getting better at.<p>There is no hope. America can’t even agree on giving community college to poor kids, let alone training a generation of toolmakers, electronic engineers, programmers, and every other profession involved in making things out of atoms more complex than a handtool or a radiator. This country is dying and wildly unstable politically.</text></item><item><author>kevin_thibedeau</author><text>That manufacturing process is the result of bean counters determining it&#x27;s a waste to ship boxed products that are 50% air overseas in a container. Ship the broken down components instead with denser packing and have a minimum wage worker bolt it together stateside. It isn&#x27;t an enlightened return to domestic production.</text></item><item><author>stacktrust</author><text>A handful of DeWalt power tools are &quot;assembled from global materials&quot; in USA, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.allamericanmade.com&#x2F;where-are-dewalt-tools-made&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.allamericanmade.com&#x2F;where-are-dewalt-tools-made&#x2F;</a><p><pre><code> Jackson, TN Air compressors
Hempstead, MD Drill and saw components
Charlotte, NC Cordless drills, screwdrivers
Greenfield, IN Grinder, recip saws, hammer drills</code></pre></text></item><item><author>blt</author><text>This is good news, but Milwaukee is primarily a power tool company. Bringing power tool manufacturing back to the USA would be much bigger news.<p>Project Farm is a YouTube channel that reviews tools. I&#x27;ve noticed that most of the made-in-USA products are relatively simple - hand tools, drill bits, adhesives, lubricants, and so on. Any complex assembly that includes electronics is almost invariably made in Asia.<p>It feels like the remaining made-in-USA tools are those where the manufacturer doesn&#x27;t need to do much more than maintain some old machines and keep them fed with raw materials.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nwiswell</author><text>&gt; A real American manufacturing renaissance would be German, with high skilled trained professionals designing, building, and operating advanced machines to create complex products.<p>So like Applied Materials, Lam Research, and KLA Tencor? The global leaders in semiconductor machinery are predominantly American, with honorable mentions for the Japanese (Tokyo Electron, Dainippon Screen) and Dutch (ASML, ASMI).<p>Most of the equipment is made stateside, e.g. Applied Materials manufacturing is in Austin.<p>&gt; America can’t even agree on giving community college to poor kids, let alone training a generation of toolmakers, electronic engineers, programmers, and every other profession involved in making things out of atoms more complex than a handtool or a radiator.<p>The &quot;America is doomed!&quot; rhetoric is older than the hills and, while we are in decline as the global hegemon, economically we are still as vibrant as ever. Last year KLA Tencor opened a second headquarters in Ann Arbor, Michigan... not in China.</text></comment> | <story><title>Milwaukee Tool Raises the Bar with New USA Factory</title><url>https://toolguyd.com/milwaukee-tool-new-usa-factory/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gurumeditations</author><text>American manufacturing looks like low-wage workers making $12 an hour (a few years ago) making windshields. A real American manufacturing renaissance would be German, with high skilled trained professionals designing, building, and operating advanced machines to create complex products. Basically what the Chinese are continually getting better at.<p>There is no hope. America can’t even agree on giving community college to poor kids, let alone training a generation of toolmakers, electronic engineers, programmers, and every other profession involved in making things out of atoms more complex than a handtool or a radiator. This country is dying and wildly unstable politically.</text></item><item><author>kevin_thibedeau</author><text>That manufacturing process is the result of bean counters determining it&#x27;s a waste to ship boxed products that are 50% air overseas in a container. Ship the broken down components instead with denser packing and have a minimum wage worker bolt it together stateside. It isn&#x27;t an enlightened return to domestic production.</text></item><item><author>stacktrust</author><text>A handful of DeWalt power tools are &quot;assembled from global materials&quot; in USA, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.allamericanmade.com&#x2F;where-are-dewalt-tools-made&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.allamericanmade.com&#x2F;where-are-dewalt-tools-made&#x2F;</a><p><pre><code> Jackson, TN Air compressors
Hempstead, MD Drill and saw components
Charlotte, NC Cordless drills, screwdrivers
Greenfield, IN Grinder, recip saws, hammer drills</code></pre></text></item><item><author>blt</author><text>This is good news, but Milwaukee is primarily a power tool company. Bringing power tool manufacturing back to the USA would be much bigger news.<p>Project Farm is a YouTube channel that reviews tools. I&#x27;ve noticed that most of the made-in-USA products are relatively simple - hand tools, drill bits, adhesives, lubricants, and so on. Any complex assembly that includes electronics is almost invariably made in Asia.<p>It feels like the remaining made-in-USA tools are those where the manufacturer doesn&#x27;t need to do much more than maintain some old machines and keep them fed with raw materials.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>stacktrust</author><text>TSMC is sending recent American college graduates to Taiwan for 12-18 months of internship&#x2F;training, in preparation for work at the TSMC fab in Phoenix, AZ, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=29676073" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=29676073</a></text></comment> |
23,336,531 | 23,335,826 | 1 | 2 | 23,333,891 | train | <story><title>The use of `class` for things that should be simple free functions</title><url>https://quuxplusone.github.io/blog/2020/05/28/oo-antipattern/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kqr</author><text>There&#x27;s one big difference in terms of convenience in many common implementations of classes and methods. There are essentially three different pieces involved:<p>In OO notation, we have A.B(C)<p>In almost all languages, you can store C in a variable and supply it &quot;later&quot;:<p><pre><code> z = C
A.B(z)
</code></pre>
You can also store A in a variable and supply it &quot;later&quot;:<p><pre><code> x = A
x.B(C)
</code></pre>
However, it is much more rare to be able to store B in a variable and supply it &quot;later&quot;. Often, you must store A.B:<p><pre><code> xy = A.B
xy(C)
</code></pre>
This means that at the time you select which method to call, you must also have at your disposal the instance on which you want to call it!<p>With functions, things get easier. If you have B(A, C), you can generally just store B in a variable on its own:<p><pre><code> y = B
y(A, C)
</code></pre>
Some OO languages allow you to store plain methods that aren&#x27;t yet bound to a particular instance (JavaScript, modern Java) but far from all do, without resorting to inconveniences like<p><pre><code> y = lambda o: o.B
</code></pre>
Please note that what this workaround accomplishes is effectively to turn the method into a function!<p>I suspect the main argument here is that it just doesn&#x27;t make sense notationally to treat the first argument to a function specially. It only introduces wierd edge cases that have to be worked around. Plain old function notation has stood the test of time for good reason: it&#x27;s flexible and handles most of the common cases we want.</text></item><item><author>cataphract</author><text>But if you&#x27;re passing a state object around, you might as well use a class, no? Admittedly simplifying a bit, an instance method is a function that implicitly takes &quot;this&quot; as the first argument.</text></item><item><author>amw-zero</author><text>None of these situations require an object to do. You can always have a function that takes in an extra ‘state’ argument. You can then do everything you said by passing in the corresponding state values.</text></item><item><author>dataflow</author><text>Counter-point: while in many situations this isn&#x27;t the right approach, it&#x27;s worth recognizing when this <i>is</i> the right approach, because they can look awfully similar. An example of this is graph searching, e.g. BFS or Dijkstra&#x27;s algorithm. The typical implementation is a function. But if you make Dijkstra a class, with (say) a function to iterate through nodes, it lets you do several things that would be difficult with a function: (a) you can now re-use the same object for computing distances to multiple vertices, which allows incremental search, (b) you can now fork&#x2F;copy the object and continue searching on <i>different</i> extensions of the original graph, (c) you can now save &amp; restore the searcher state to pause the search &amp; continue it later, (d) you can do multiple searches across one or more graphs <i>in lockstep</i>. IMHO these are very much <i>not</i> obvious, and to someone who doesn&#x27;t recognize what&#x27;s going on, a class for something like BFS will look <i>exactly</i> like an &quot;OO antipattern&quot;, when in reality it&#x27;s actually providing significant additional functionality for more complicated situations.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Huperniketes</author><text>&gt;There&#x27;s one big difference in terms of convenience in many common implementations of classes and methods.<p>Which ones?<p>&gt;However, it is much more rare to be able to store B in a variable and supply it &quot;later&quot;. Often, you must store A.B:<p>How is it rare? Smalltalk doesn&#x27;t require you to specify the receiver when storing a symbol. Neither does Objective-C (selector). Neither does Ruby. Nor Java.<p>Which commonly used languages require one to have the receiver tied to the method when memoized? C++ is the only one I&#x27;m aware of. So it might be rare to do it in C++, but not in OOP generally.</text></comment> | <story><title>The use of `class` for things that should be simple free functions</title><url>https://quuxplusone.github.io/blog/2020/05/28/oo-antipattern/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kqr</author><text>There&#x27;s one big difference in terms of convenience in many common implementations of classes and methods. There are essentially three different pieces involved:<p>In OO notation, we have A.B(C)<p>In almost all languages, you can store C in a variable and supply it &quot;later&quot;:<p><pre><code> z = C
A.B(z)
</code></pre>
You can also store A in a variable and supply it &quot;later&quot;:<p><pre><code> x = A
x.B(C)
</code></pre>
However, it is much more rare to be able to store B in a variable and supply it &quot;later&quot;. Often, you must store A.B:<p><pre><code> xy = A.B
xy(C)
</code></pre>
This means that at the time you select which method to call, you must also have at your disposal the instance on which you want to call it!<p>With functions, things get easier. If you have B(A, C), you can generally just store B in a variable on its own:<p><pre><code> y = B
y(A, C)
</code></pre>
Some OO languages allow you to store plain methods that aren&#x27;t yet bound to a particular instance (JavaScript, modern Java) but far from all do, without resorting to inconveniences like<p><pre><code> y = lambda o: o.B
</code></pre>
Please note that what this workaround accomplishes is effectively to turn the method into a function!<p>I suspect the main argument here is that it just doesn&#x27;t make sense notationally to treat the first argument to a function specially. It only introduces wierd edge cases that have to be worked around. Plain old function notation has stood the test of time for good reason: it&#x27;s flexible and handles most of the common cases we want.</text></item><item><author>cataphract</author><text>But if you&#x27;re passing a state object around, you might as well use a class, no? Admittedly simplifying a bit, an instance method is a function that implicitly takes &quot;this&quot; as the first argument.</text></item><item><author>amw-zero</author><text>None of these situations require an object to do. You can always have a function that takes in an extra ‘state’ argument. You can then do everything you said by passing in the corresponding state values.</text></item><item><author>dataflow</author><text>Counter-point: while in many situations this isn&#x27;t the right approach, it&#x27;s worth recognizing when this <i>is</i> the right approach, because they can look awfully similar. An example of this is graph searching, e.g. BFS or Dijkstra&#x27;s algorithm. The typical implementation is a function. But if you make Dijkstra a class, with (say) a function to iterate through nodes, it lets you do several things that would be difficult with a function: (a) you can now re-use the same object for computing distances to multiple vertices, which allows incremental search, (b) you can now fork&#x2F;copy the object and continue searching on <i>different</i> extensions of the original graph, (c) you can now save &amp; restore the searcher state to pause the search &amp; continue it later, (d) you can do multiple searches across one or more graphs <i>in lockstep</i>. IMHO these are very much <i>not</i> obvious, and to someone who doesn&#x27;t recognize what&#x27;s going on, a class for something like BFS will look <i>exactly</i> like an &quot;OO antipattern&quot;, when in reality it&#x27;s actually providing significant additional functionality for more complicated situations.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vanderZwan</author><text>I like the approach Wouter van Oortmerssen uses in Lobster:<p><pre><code> class Animal:
alive = true
class Cat : Animal
def hello(): print &quot;meow&quot;
class Dog : Animal
barked = 0
def hello(d::Dog):
print &quot;bark!&quot;
barked++
let d = Dog {}
d.hello()
let a:Animal = d
a.hello()
</code></pre>
In other words, A.B(C) is just syntactic sugar for B(A, C), and class definitions are just syntactic on top of that. The relation between OO and regular functions and stateful objects is completely transparent (the only real gotcha I can see is that <i>a.hello()</i> still works here because it was assigned a subclass where this method is defined). This makes it easy to store B for later usage, like you wanted to do in your example, and reason about its behavior.<p>[0] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;strlen.com&#x2F;lobster&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;strlen.com&#x2F;lobster&#x2F;</a></text></comment> |
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