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33,203,016 | 33,202,808 | 1 | 3 | 33,202,453 | train | <story><title>Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice</title><url>https://www.karlsutt.com/articles/you-should-not-be-using-aws/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Octabrain</author><text>&gt; - Terraform to create the API gateway, database, lambdas, queues, Route 53 records: 1 week<p>- Terraform to create the IAM policies: 4 weeks<p>Perhaps it&#x27;s because I am very familiar with the aforementioned tool and cloud but 5 weeks for writing those resources gives me the impresion of:<p>1. Lack of experience on AWS.<p>2. Lack of experience with Terraform.<p>3. Both.<p>I don&#x27;t want to sound arrogant by any means but a Terraform project for something like that, documented, with its CI and applying changes via CD, would take me 4 days being generous.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>marcus_holmes</author><text>I got handed a Terraform project for a GCP-based service. Simple dev, staging, prod environment. Secrets managed by secret manager, SQL Run without a public IP address for prod (but accessible via SSH for admins).<p>I more or less gave up after a month of beating my head on the brick wall. We hired an expert. Took him another month to get it all more or less sorted. There were still aspects that we wanted that we could not get Terraform&#x2F;GCP to do.<p>In the end, we dropped Terraform and went back to modifying the GCP manually.</text></comment> | <story><title>Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice</title><url>https://www.karlsutt.com/articles/you-should-not-be-using-aws/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Octabrain</author><text>&gt; - Terraform to create the API gateway, database, lambdas, queues, Route 53 records: 1 week<p>- Terraform to create the IAM policies: 4 weeks<p>Perhaps it&#x27;s because I am very familiar with the aforementioned tool and cloud but 5 weeks for writing those resources gives me the impresion of:<p>1. Lack of experience on AWS.<p>2. Lack of experience with Terraform.<p>3. Both.<p>I don&#x27;t want to sound arrogant by any means but a Terraform project for something like that, documented, with its CI and applying changes via CD, would take me 4 days being generous.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>throwaway2016a</author><text>Same, I do it routinely and maybe the first time I ever did it, it took me a week but after that it was fast. But I may be being generous.<p>The only thing that could make that tough is if you put the Lambdas in a VPC. That can get tricky because you have to plan out subnets and whatnot but still not a week.<p>The AWS documentation is also extremely good with regards to what properties are on each resource. I can&#x27;t speak for Terraform since I usually use CloudFormation &#x2F; SAM directly. Maybe it&#x27;s a Terraform problem?</text></comment> |
30,861,011 | 30,860,014 | 1 | 3 | 30,856,804 | train | <story><title>Generics can make your Go code slower</title><url>https://planetscale.com/blog/generics-can-make-your-go-code-slower</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>no_circuit</author><text>The article is from a database company, so I&#x27;ll assume that approximates the scope. My scope for the GC discussion would include other parts that could be considered similar software: cluster-control plane (Kubernetes), other databases, and possibly the first level of API services to implement a service like an internal users&#x2F;profiles or auth endpoints.<p>The tricky thing is GC works most of the time, but if you are working at scale you really can&#x27;t predict user behavior, and so all of those GC-tuning parameters that were set six months ago no longer work properly. A good portion of production outages are likely related to cascading failures due to too long GC pauses, and a good portion of developer time is spent testing and tuning GC parameters. It is easier to remove and&#x2F;or just not allow GC languages at these levels in the first place.<p>On the other hand IMO GC-languages at the frontend level are OK since you&#x27;d just need to scale horizontally.</text></item><item><author>reikonomusha</author><text>I have a slightly contrary opinion. Systems software is a very large umbrella, and much under that umbrella is not encumbered by a garbage collector whatsoever. (To add insult to injury, the term&#x27;s definition isn&#x27;t even broadly agreed upon, similar to the definition of a &quot;high-level language&quot;.) Yes, there are some systems applications where a GC can be a hindrance in practice, but these days I&#x27;m not even sure it&#x27;s a majority of systems software.<p>I think what&#x27;s more important for the systems programmer is (1) the ability to inspect the low-level behavior of functions, like through their disassembly; (2) be reasonably confident how code will compile; and (3) have some dials and levers to control aspects of compiled code and memory usage. All of these things can and are present, not only in some garbage collected languages, but also garbage-collected languages with a dynamic type system!<p>Yes, there are environments so spartan and so precision-oriented that even a language&#x27;s built-in allocator cannot be used (e.g., malloc), in which case using a GC&#x27;d language is going to be an unwinnable fight for control. But if you only need to do precision management of a memory that isn&#x27;t pervasive in all of your allocation patterns, then using a language like C feels like throwing the baby out with the bath water. It&#x27;s very rarely &quot;all or nothing&quot; in a modern, garbage-collected language.</text></item><item><author>nvarsj</author><text>I&#x27;d argue that golang is inherently not a systems language, with its mandatory GC managed memory. I think it&#x27;s a poor choice for anything performance or memory sensitive, especially a database. I know people would disagree (hence all the DBs written in golang these days, and Java before it), but I think C&#x2F;C++&#x2F;Rust&#x2F;D are all superior for that kind of application.<p>All of which is to say, I don&#x27;t think it matters. Use the right tool for the job - if you care about generic overhead, golang is not the right thing to use in the first place.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>EdwardDiego</author><text>&gt; A good portion of production outages are likely related to cascading failures due to too long GC pauses, and a good portion of developer time is spent testing and tuning GC parameters<p>After 14 years in JVM dev in areas where latency and reliability are business critical, I disagree.<p>Yes, excessive GC stop the world pauses can cause latency spikes, and excessive GC time is bad, and yes, when a new GC algorithm is released that you think might offer improvements, you test it thoroughly to determine if it&#x27;s better or worse for your workload.<p>But a &quot;good portion&quot; of outages and developer time?<p>Nope. Most outages occur for the same old boring reasons - someone smashed the DB with an update that hits a pathological case and deadlocks processes using the same table, a DC caught fire, someone committed code with a very bad logical bug, someone considered a guru heard that gRPC was cool and used it without adequate code review and didn&#x27;t understand that gRPC&#x27;s load balancing defaults to pick first, etc. etc.<p>The outages caused by GC were very very few.<p>Outages caused by screw-ups or lack of understanding of subtleties of a piece of tech, as common as they are in every other field of development.<p>Then there&#x27;s the question of what outages GCed languages _don&#x27;t_ suffer.<p>I&#x27;ve never had to debug corrupted memory, or how a use after free bug let people exfiltrate data.</text></comment> | <story><title>Generics can make your Go code slower</title><url>https://planetscale.com/blog/generics-can-make-your-go-code-slower</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>no_circuit</author><text>The article is from a database company, so I&#x27;ll assume that approximates the scope. My scope for the GC discussion would include other parts that could be considered similar software: cluster-control plane (Kubernetes), other databases, and possibly the first level of API services to implement a service like an internal users&#x2F;profiles or auth endpoints.<p>The tricky thing is GC works most of the time, but if you are working at scale you really can&#x27;t predict user behavior, and so all of those GC-tuning parameters that were set six months ago no longer work properly. A good portion of production outages are likely related to cascading failures due to too long GC pauses, and a good portion of developer time is spent testing and tuning GC parameters. It is easier to remove and&#x2F;or just not allow GC languages at these levels in the first place.<p>On the other hand IMO GC-languages at the frontend level are OK since you&#x27;d just need to scale horizontally.</text></item><item><author>reikonomusha</author><text>I have a slightly contrary opinion. Systems software is a very large umbrella, and much under that umbrella is not encumbered by a garbage collector whatsoever. (To add insult to injury, the term&#x27;s definition isn&#x27;t even broadly agreed upon, similar to the definition of a &quot;high-level language&quot;.) Yes, there are some systems applications where a GC can be a hindrance in practice, but these days I&#x27;m not even sure it&#x27;s a majority of systems software.<p>I think what&#x27;s more important for the systems programmer is (1) the ability to inspect the low-level behavior of functions, like through their disassembly; (2) be reasonably confident how code will compile; and (3) have some dials and levers to control aspects of compiled code and memory usage. All of these things can and are present, not only in some garbage collected languages, but also garbage-collected languages with a dynamic type system!<p>Yes, there are environments so spartan and so precision-oriented that even a language&#x27;s built-in allocator cannot be used (e.g., malloc), in which case using a GC&#x27;d language is going to be an unwinnable fight for control. But if you only need to do precision management of a memory that isn&#x27;t pervasive in all of your allocation patterns, then using a language like C feels like throwing the baby out with the bath water. It&#x27;s very rarely &quot;all or nothing&quot; in a modern, garbage-collected language.</text></item><item><author>nvarsj</author><text>I&#x27;d argue that golang is inherently not a systems language, with its mandatory GC managed memory. I think it&#x27;s a poor choice for anything performance or memory sensitive, especially a database. I know people would disagree (hence all the DBs written in golang these days, and Java before it), but I think C&#x2F;C++&#x2F;Rust&#x2F;D are all superior for that kind of application.<p>All of which is to say, I don&#x27;t think it matters. Use the right tool for the job - if you care about generic overhead, golang is not the right thing to use in the first place.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>throwaway894345</author><text>&gt; The tricky thing is GC works most of the time, but if you are working at scale you really can&#x27;t predict user behavior, and so all of those GC-tuning parameters that were set six months ago no longer work properly. A good portion of production outages are likely related to cascading failures due to too long GC pauses, and a good portion of developer time is spent testing and tuning GC parameters. It is easier to remove and&#x2F;or just not allow GC languages at these levels in the first place.<p>Getting rid of the GC doesn&#x27;t absolve you of the problem, it just means that rather than tuning GC parameters, you&#x27;ve encoded usage assumptions in thousands of places scattered throughout your code base.</text></comment> |
26,691,392 | 26,691,451 | 1 | 2 | 26,689,239 | train | <story><title>I can only think that modern front end development has failed</title><url>https://twitter.com/antirez/status/1378272801522597888</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jefftk</author><text>Doing most of the work on the client instead of the server can often make scaling much easier.<p>I read your comment as assuming that the division between the server&#x27;s job and the client&#x27;s job is fixed, but as the browser has become more powerful many things have moved to the client.</text></item><item><author>ocimbote</author><text>&gt; build apps that scale easily to hundreds of thousands of users<p>I don&#x27;t understand this.<p>Frontend dev is about writing a portable software to run on as many runtimes as there are users. There is literally nothing to prevent any frontend software, good or bad, to &quot;scale&quot;, because scaling in terms of users is nonsical for frontend dev (unless you consider browser compatibility as scaling, to which statement I&#x27;m orthogonal).<p>Note: meanwhile, back end dev is about writing a program that accepts as many users as possible, which make front and back nicely yin-yang together. But maybe I&#x27;m overstating things here :shrug:</text></item><item><author>j-krieger</author><text>I love modern frontend development. I can build apps that scale easily to hundreds of thousands of users. They are fast where they need to be fast, and building components means complexity lives only where it&#x27;s needed. Static parts are rendered statically, dynamic parts are rendered dynamically. I can write all code for the entire stack in Javascript. The entire workflow is streamlined in a simple way (webpack really isn&#x27;t that hard to grok). There are templates for every project imaginable. I don&#x27;t need an entire VPS for my web-apps, just a simple static hosting service. My apps run on every system and any browser back to IE9 without any issues whatsoever. No complex build tools or linking process or debugging weird architectures needed. Compatibility issues are solved automatically in any modern build pipeline by adding vendor prefixes. New code is transpiled to old code for older browsers. Debugging modern front-end code is a breeze, there are an infinite amount of tools both for styling and the code itself. My modern frontend app takes seconds to build; QT apps I built in the past needed up to twenty minutes, just to check a simple change. No need for that with hot reloading. My users are happy too: They don&#x27;t have to download an app which might not work on their specific system. Linux, Windows and Mac users alike can use it on their computers, laptops, tablets and phones without any issue. They can use the default environment a browser provides for an even better user experience (zooming, Screenreaders, upscaling fonts, copying images and text, preferences for dark mode, theming their browsers, saving credentials and auto filling them, sharing stuff, etc.). Integrating stuff from other companies has never been easier: Paypal, Stripe, Apple Products all provide a well tested and documented library for every framework out there. There are open source packages for anything, it&#x27;s a FOSS dream. Building prototypes for anything is insanely fast, thanks to modern debugging tools in Chrome and FireFox.<p>It&#x27;s much better than people make it out to be.</text></item><item><author>caseymarquis</author><text>I&#x27;d like to add a bit more nuance. Modern frontend development provides many opportunities for failure. These failures often make their way into production. I, personally, get great results with modern FE development. My users are happy. I am happy. It&#x27;s all very successful. All the defenders of modern FE development will likely chime in with the same sentiment. I also get great results with C, which arguably provides even more catastrophic opportunities for failure. I wouldn&#x27;t say &quot;C is a failure&quot;, but I absolutely hate working in C, and I&#x27;m glad we&#x27;ve made improvements to systems programming. I think the point I&#x27;m moving toward is that we absolutely should strive to make better tools for delivering web content, but the reasons for failure are far more complex than the tooling itself. So, let&#x27;s not frame things in black and white and call something that&#x27;s been used with large amounts of success a failure. That&#x27;s not very productive and is just flame bait. The real question is, &quot;What&#x27;s next?&quot;, how are we going to improve the current situation?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>JMTQp8lwXL</author><text>Doing the work on the client can sometimes be the right choice, but I&#x27;ll share a converse point. I was tasked with implementing a bulk record upload feature. The UI was to accept up a CSV file with up to 1 million records. The API provided by the backend team accept max 1,000 records in JSON.<p>So now I have to convert CSV, for which there&#x27;s no official specification, to JSON, and then make (up to) 1,000 HTTP requests via HTTP 1.1 -- and a different back end team owns rate limiting for all ingress. I end up using a package called &#x27;promise-limit&#x27; to ensure only N number of requests are open at a time; firing 1,000 simultaneous XMLHttpRequests is a bad idea. I end up fielding bug reports concerning the translation to JSON for edge cases. And collating the 1,000 network responses for any individual record that failed to persist was something we didn&#x27;t get to building. So users were uploading 1M records, had some proportion fail, and had 0 visibility into what data the system had, and what data didn&#x27;t make it.<p>Eventually, we gutted all of that and the backend team added a file upload endpoint. But explaining why this shouldn&#x27;t be a front end feature, to folks who primarily or exclusively do backend work, it&#x27;s tough to communicate (1) all the pain points of dealing with the complexity in the front end and (2) the scalability issues. &quot;Can&#x27;t you just do it on the front end&quot; is such a frequent retort I receive, for things we truthfully should do on the backend.</text></comment> | <story><title>I can only think that modern front end development has failed</title><url>https://twitter.com/antirez/status/1378272801522597888</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jefftk</author><text>Doing most of the work on the client instead of the server can often make scaling much easier.<p>I read your comment as assuming that the division between the server&#x27;s job and the client&#x27;s job is fixed, but as the browser has become more powerful many things have moved to the client.</text></item><item><author>ocimbote</author><text>&gt; build apps that scale easily to hundreds of thousands of users<p>I don&#x27;t understand this.<p>Frontend dev is about writing a portable software to run on as many runtimes as there are users. There is literally nothing to prevent any frontend software, good or bad, to &quot;scale&quot;, because scaling in terms of users is nonsical for frontend dev (unless you consider browser compatibility as scaling, to which statement I&#x27;m orthogonal).<p>Note: meanwhile, back end dev is about writing a program that accepts as many users as possible, which make front and back nicely yin-yang together. But maybe I&#x27;m overstating things here :shrug:</text></item><item><author>j-krieger</author><text>I love modern frontend development. I can build apps that scale easily to hundreds of thousands of users. They are fast where they need to be fast, and building components means complexity lives only where it&#x27;s needed. Static parts are rendered statically, dynamic parts are rendered dynamically. I can write all code for the entire stack in Javascript. The entire workflow is streamlined in a simple way (webpack really isn&#x27;t that hard to grok). There are templates for every project imaginable. I don&#x27;t need an entire VPS for my web-apps, just a simple static hosting service. My apps run on every system and any browser back to IE9 without any issues whatsoever. No complex build tools or linking process or debugging weird architectures needed. Compatibility issues are solved automatically in any modern build pipeline by adding vendor prefixes. New code is transpiled to old code for older browsers. Debugging modern front-end code is a breeze, there are an infinite amount of tools both for styling and the code itself. My modern frontend app takes seconds to build; QT apps I built in the past needed up to twenty minutes, just to check a simple change. No need for that with hot reloading. My users are happy too: They don&#x27;t have to download an app which might not work on their specific system. Linux, Windows and Mac users alike can use it on their computers, laptops, tablets and phones without any issue. They can use the default environment a browser provides for an even better user experience (zooming, Screenreaders, upscaling fonts, copying images and text, preferences for dark mode, theming their browsers, saving credentials and auto filling them, sharing stuff, etc.). Integrating stuff from other companies has never been easier: Paypal, Stripe, Apple Products all provide a well tested and documented library for every framework out there. There are open source packages for anything, it&#x27;s a FOSS dream. Building prototypes for anything is insanely fast, thanks to modern debugging tools in Chrome and FireFox.<p>It&#x27;s much better than people make it out to be.</text></item><item><author>caseymarquis</author><text>I&#x27;d like to add a bit more nuance. Modern frontend development provides many opportunities for failure. These failures often make their way into production. I, personally, get great results with modern FE development. My users are happy. I am happy. It&#x27;s all very successful. All the defenders of modern FE development will likely chime in with the same sentiment. I also get great results with C, which arguably provides even more catastrophic opportunities for failure. I wouldn&#x27;t say &quot;C is a failure&quot;, but I absolutely hate working in C, and I&#x27;m glad we&#x27;ve made improvements to systems programming. I think the point I&#x27;m moving toward is that we absolutely should strive to make better tools for delivering web content, but the reasons for failure are far more complex than the tooling itself. So, let&#x27;s not frame things in black and white and call something that&#x27;s been used with large amounts of success a failure. That&#x27;s not very productive and is just flame bait. The real question is, &quot;What&#x27;s next?&quot;, how are we going to improve the current situation?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>u801e</author><text>&gt; Doing most of the work on the client instead of the server can often make scaling much easier.<p>I&#x27;ve also found that it results in a non responsive webpage. For instance, text taking multiple seconds to render in an input box (Slack, Facebook, amongst others) and times where the browser tab process ends up allocating a signficant percentage of system resident memory and&#x2F;or CPU resources, which makes the computer itself slow to respond.</text></comment> |
6,741,849 | 6,741,561 | 1 | 2 | 6,741,442 | train | <story><title>PS4 UX is powered by WebGL</title><url>https://plus.google.com/+DonOlmstead/posts/Mzy6VEAwHaa</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>gisenberg</author><text>There&#x27;s a bit of irony in that the strengths of HTML5 shine through when confined to a single environment. If the best experience comes from targeting a single environment, then why go web at all? Further, HTML is considered a strong contender for true cross-platform app support, which is where it fails the hardest. In my experience, it&#x27;s less effort to target native apps per platform than to try and use something like PhoneGap for apps of reasonable quality and complexity.<p>The single environment HTML5 showcase is also often supported by another development team who is actively trying to support their specific use cases; Microsoft with IE&#x2F;WinJS, Mozilla with Firefox&#x2F;WebOS, Sony with a PS4-optimized WebGL implementation, etc.<p>When the big players hit roadblocks during the development of something as high profile as their UI for their next-gen console, the browser can be changed on-the-fly to overcome them. That option isn&#x27;t available to the rest of the world, and &quot;audio doesn&#x27;t work like we need it to&quot; being a solvable problem can certainly influence whether or not you believe HTML5 is a suitable app platform.</text></comment> | <story><title>PS4 UX is powered by WebGL</title><url>https://plus.google.com/+DonOlmstead/posts/Mzy6VEAwHaa</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>kllrnohj</author><text>So they have a web browser for the sole purpose of setting up an GLES context for their UI? On a video game console? I guess that&#x27;s what you do when you suddenly have 8GB of RAM, you piss it away on useless shit...</text></comment> |
31,579,280 | 31,578,414 | 1 | 2 | 31,577,960 | train | <story><title>Modern TUI calendar and task manager with customizable interface</title><url>https://github.com/anufrievroman/calcure</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>smartmic</author><text>Having more than one calender app is very problematic to me. My life maps only to one real calendar. And since my employer is dictating Outlook for my work life, I am stuck with it for the rest also. I would love to use other solutions though (have looked into calcurse and remind so far) but the hassle of importing&#x2F;exporting&#x2F;syncing with other calendar implementations is not worth the effort and has never really worked for me.</text></comment> | <story><title>Modern TUI calendar and task manager with customizable interface</title><url>https://github.com/anufrievroman/calcure</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ungamedplayer</author><text>It brings joy to my cold fingers to know that TUI&#x27;s are still being developed.</text></comment> |
37,352,408 | 37,351,985 | 1 | 3 | 37,350,123 | train | <story><title>AI model weight providers should not police uses, no matter how awful they are</title><url>http://marble.onl/posts/model_censorship.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>RandomLensman</author><text>Why have any prohibitions on anything then? Will only help outlaws and criminals, no? Outlawing slavery, for example, only working against good people who commit sins of omission?</text></item><item><author>motohagiography</author><text>AI model rules will be as successful as any other prohibition, where outlaws will act with defacto impunity, while good people who commit sins of omission will be made arbitrary examples of. I&#x27;m sure there&#x27;s a name for the dynamic, where policing rules of any kind are mainly enforced against people who generally abide by them, while simulataneously giving a huge arbitrage advantage to people who ignore them or are just outlaws.<p>There is another problem that doesn&#x27;t have any good solutions yet that will be a huge part of AI governance, and that&#x27;s software attestation (direct anonymous attestation). The basic problem is how does a program assert that it is an authentic instance of itself. We&#x27;ve been trying to solve it in security for apps, authenticators, and DRM for decades, and the solutions all seem fine until it&#x27;s worth it to someone break it. I think it&#x27;s probably just a poorly formed problem statement that defines itself in impossible terms, but when they can&#x27;t govern AI models, they&#x27;re going to try to govern which AI&#x27;s can access what data and systems, and we&#x27;re back to solving the same old cryptographic problems we&#x27;ve been working on for decades.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bassrattle</author><text>It comes down to life. Murder takes a life. Slavery takes someone&#x27;s life too. Theft&#x2F;fraud is taking life in the sense of time&#x2F;effort spent toward the stolen material. We already have these prohibitions. We don&#x27;t need new ones for every imaginable method of murder, slavery or theft.</text></comment> | <story><title>AI model weight providers should not police uses, no matter how awful they are</title><url>http://marble.onl/posts/model_censorship.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>RandomLensman</author><text>Why have any prohibitions on anything then? Will only help outlaws and criminals, no? Outlawing slavery, for example, only working against good people who commit sins of omission?</text></item><item><author>motohagiography</author><text>AI model rules will be as successful as any other prohibition, where outlaws will act with defacto impunity, while good people who commit sins of omission will be made arbitrary examples of. I&#x27;m sure there&#x27;s a name for the dynamic, where policing rules of any kind are mainly enforced against people who generally abide by them, while simulataneously giving a huge arbitrage advantage to people who ignore them or are just outlaws.<p>There is another problem that doesn&#x27;t have any good solutions yet that will be a huge part of AI governance, and that&#x27;s software attestation (direct anonymous attestation). The basic problem is how does a program assert that it is an authentic instance of itself. We&#x27;ve been trying to solve it in security for apps, authenticators, and DRM for decades, and the solutions all seem fine until it&#x27;s worth it to someone break it. I think it&#x27;s probably just a poorly formed problem statement that defines itself in impossible terms, but when they can&#x27;t govern AI models, they&#x27;re going to try to govern which AI&#x27;s can access what data and systems, and we&#x27;re back to solving the same old cryptographic problems we&#x27;ve been working on for decades.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vorpalhex</author><text>The question is enforcement.<p>Can you enforce, whether by force or by norm, the act?<p>Enforcement of marijuana prohibition, and before that alcohol prohibition, were failures.<p>On the other hand, ending slavery was very enforceable.<p>Enforcing AI uses is extremely difficult. Bad actors act with impunity and only the stupidly innocent suffer from the enforcement.</text></comment> |
17,793,513 | 17,792,778 | 1 | 3 | 17,790,657 | train | <story><title>Vitamin D, the Sunshine Supplement, Has Shadowy Money Behind It</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/18/business/vitamin-d-michael-holick.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>bookofjoe</author><text>I&#x27;m a board-certified physician (anesthesiology). I read the OP and all the comments here. I&#x27;ve followed the subject of vitamin D supplementation and whether it&#x27;s generally effective or overused for over 40 years, and I&#x27;m still uncertain.</text></comment> | <story><title>Vitamin D, the Sunshine Supplement, Has Shadowy Money Behind It</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/18/business/vitamin-d-michael-holick.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jeffdavis</author><text>The article makes the money sound evil, but I&#x27;m just not seeing the evil here. $1000&#x2F;mo to a doctor? So what?<p>The treatment is probably a little ahead of the science, but the answer to that is better science.<p>It makes sense to me that people get less sun than before, and therefore have lower and less consistent vitamin D levels. It doesn&#x27;t feel unnatural to me... I think of it more like a replacement of what we lose by staying indoors more.</text></comment> |
8,443,584 | 8,443,611 | 1 | 3 | 8,443,470 | train | <story><title>A Promising Pill, Not So Hard to Swallow</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/12/us/a-promising-pill-not-so-hard-to-swallow.html?ref=science</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Klinky</author><text>I&#x27;ve dealt with IBS symptoms for 17 years. I would love to try one of these pills. Digestive maladies can really hamper a person&#x27;s life. The digestive system is poorly understood, and there aren&#x27;t a lot of effective treatment options for IBS &amp; IBDs like Crohn&#x27;s &amp; Ulcerative Colitis. The treatments which are effective for IBD are often invasive or can have serious side effects.</text></comment> | <story><title>A Promising Pill, Not So Hard to Swallow</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/12/us/a-promising-pill-not-so-hard-to-swallow.html?ref=science</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>JetSpiegel</author><text><p><pre><code> &quot;If you can just open a freezer and take out a poop pill, that’s wonderful.”
While the pills are not being marketed yet
</code></pre>
Jee, I wonder why.
Selling a poop pill is a proper way to see if a marketer is worth their value.</text></comment> |
14,578,122 | 14,576,869 | 1 | 2 | 14,576,693 | train | <story><title>Instacart Tries to Hang on to Whole Foods as Amazon Swoops In</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-16/instacart-tries-to-hang-on-to-whole-foods-as-amazon-swoops-in</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>IBM</author><text>Even assuming that Amazon breaks the Instacart contract I&#x27;m not seeing the downside for them. Every single grocer should be more eager than ever to partner now that Amazon has shaken them to their core. It makes more sense for everyone to outsource delivery to Instacart than to have every grocery chain or retailer try to recreate it on their own. The scale of all the non-Amazon grocers should keep costs down.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>prostoalex</author><text>&gt; I&#x27;m not seeing the downside for them<p>The subset &quot;Americans who use Instacart for Whole Foods deliveries&quot; combined with the subset &quot;Americans who subscribe to Amazon Fresh&quot; might just add up to 100% of a subset &quot;Americans who pay to have their groceries delivered&quot;.<p>In other words, Amazon picked up the top end of the market, while Instacart is left with slim pickings. While their investor deck might feature millions of people worldwide ordering deliveries from their local grocery place, in reality most people (a) don&#x27;t consider grocery shopping stressful, (b) prefer to pick their own produce based on personal requirements on ripeness&#x2F;size&#x2F;shapes&#x2F;colors, (c) happen to drive by the grocery store anyways on their way from work or (d) are low-income and would rather not pay the delivery fees.</text></comment> | <story><title>Instacart Tries to Hang on to Whole Foods as Amazon Swoops In</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-16/instacart-tries-to-hang-on-to-whole-foods-as-amazon-swoops-in</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>IBM</author><text>Even assuming that Amazon breaks the Instacart contract I&#x27;m not seeing the downside for them. Every single grocer should be more eager than ever to partner now that Amazon has shaken them to their core. It makes more sense for everyone to outsource delivery to Instacart than to have every grocery chain or retailer try to recreate it on their own. The scale of all the non-Amazon grocers should keep costs down.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>crabasa</author><text>Every other retailer handing their destiny to Instacart and becoming undifferentiated warehouses of goods makes tons of sense for Instacart, but little sense for the retailers.<p>Sure, a bunch of small&#x2F;desperate retailers will do this in the short term, but the small handful that will still be around in 5-10 years know that owning the <i>direct</i> relationship with the customer is non-negotiable.</text></comment> |
30,618,857 | 30,618,019 | 1 | 2 | 30,614,623 | train | <story><title>Some tiny personal programs I've written</title><url>https://jvns.ca/blog/2022/03/08/tiny-programs/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>JamesMcMinn</author><text>I own the house I currently live in because of a script I wrote.<p>We had been looking for a new build for some time and had settled on a development and specific house we wanted to buy, but it was still months away from being released. We were told they released houses in person first, then listed them online later that day, but I was bored and wanted to see when new houses were listed, so I wrote a scraper to alert me whenever a new house became available.<p>One day, we got a call from the property developer telling us the house we were interested in would be available in person from 10am the next day. Because we wanted to be certain to get it, we appeared at 8am, only to find that 3 other people were already waiting. Houses are released in batches of 2 or 3, so whilst we weren&#x27;t hopeful, we joined the queue and waited.<p>At 9am, while waiting in line, I got an alert telling me that the house had been released online, so I open their website on my phone and paid the deposit.<p>At 10am, when the sales office opened, all hell broke loose as the person first in line (waiting since 5am...) discovered the house they wanted had already been reserved online. I&#x27;d effectively stolen his house. It was awkward to say the least as all of us were crammed into a tiny portacabin while this unfolded.<p>In truth, I felt awful for depriving him of the house he and his family wanted, but relieved that we had reserved the house we wanted after a 5 month wait. A few weeks later the developer got in touch to say that they had changed their policy nationwide and would only be releasing houses online in the future because of &quot;the incident&quot;...<p>Whilst I wasn&#x27;t willing to give up our reservation, I worked with the person who had wanted our house so that they were alerted whenever a similar house in the same development became available. He got one, there&#x27;s no hard feelings, and him and his family are now my next door neighbours.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>japhyr</author><text>I appreciate you bringing this up, because I think this plays out all the time. I live in a small isolated town, and there wasn&#x27;t a lot of turnover in houses even before the pandemic. I wrote a short script that scrapes all the listings, and alerts me to any new local listing. It was a fun little project to learn about generating text messages, and to see how effective a cron job on a sleeping MacBook can be. We ended up getting a house through a friend who sold their home without listing it, but those alerts were really helpful, and almost got us one house a little earlier.<p>The bigger story here is what this means for the divide between tech-literate people and the rest of the population. I don&#x27;t think the parent commenter was wrong to write their script, and I don&#x27;t think I was wrong to write mine, and if you wrote something similar I think it was a reasonable move as well. But we have to recognize the advantage this gives us, as people who are able to spot these opportunities and act on them.<p>I don&#x27;t have any answers, but I think this story brings up a good discussion. I&#x27;m curious to hear other people&#x27;s thoughts on this.</text></comment> | <story><title>Some tiny personal programs I've written</title><url>https://jvns.ca/blog/2022/03/08/tiny-programs/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>JamesMcMinn</author><text>I own the house I currently live in because of a script I wrote.<p>We had been looking for a new build for some time and had settled on a development and specific house we wanted to buy, but it was still months away from being released. We were told they released houses in person first, then listed them online later that day, but I was bored and wanted to see when new houses were listed, so I wrote a scraper to alert me whenever a new house became available.<p>One day, we got a call from the property developer telling us the house we were interested in would be available in person from 10am the next day. Because we wanted to be certain to get it, we appeared at 8am, only to find that 3 other people were already waiting. Houses are released in batches of 2 or 3, so whilst we weren&#x27;t hopeful, we joined the queue and waited.<p>At 9am, while waiting in line, I got an alert telling me that the house had been released online, so I open their website on my phone and paid the deposit.<p>At 10am, when the sales office opened, all hell broke loose as the person first in line (waiting since 5am...) discovered the house they wanted had already been reserved online. I&#x27;d effectively stolen his house. It was awkward to say the least as all of us were crammed into a tiny portacabin while this unfolded.<p>In truth, I felt awful for depriving him of the house he and his family wanted, but relieved that we had reserved the house we wanted after a 5 month wait. A few weeks later the developer got in touch to say that they had changed their policy nationwide and would only be releasing houses online in the future because of &quot;the incident&quot;...<p>Whilst I wasn&#x27;t willing to give up our reservation, I worked with the person who had wanted our house so that they were alerted whenever a similar house in the same development became available. He got one, there&#x27;s no hard feelings, and him and his family are now my next door neighbours.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gcheong</author><text>Great story though I initially thought you meant you wrote a script that paid off your house :).</text></comment> |
32,013,576 | 32,012,024 | 1 | 2 | 32,011,432 | train | <story><title>4th Gen KDE Slimbook – Linux Ultrabook with an AMD Ryzen 7 5700U</title><url>https://kde.slimbook.es/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>minimaul</author><text>Is there some hardware limitation of AMD Ryzen laptop processors that prevents a high-res display?<p>Every time I see one of these laptops (like the recent HP linux laptop, etc), I think they look really interesting except that I wish they had a higher res display - I&#x27;ve not seen <i>any</i> Ryzen laptop with what I&#x27;d call a premium display - something high DPI.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lhl</author><text>This laptop is a refresh based on the Tong Fang PF5NU1G chassis. Tuxedo just announced their version, the Pulse 15 Gen2 that has a WQHD 2560x1440 165Hz 350 nit display: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;tuxedocomputers&#x2F;comments&#x2F;vrb1me&#x2F;tuxedo_pulse_15_gen2_successor_with_wqhd_display&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;tuxedocomputers&#x2F;comments&#x2F;vrb1me&#x2F;tux...</a><p>There&#x27;s no limitation for Ryzen itself, it&#x27;s largely up to the ODM&#x2F;OEM to decide. For example, Lenovo and Asus have multiple QHD&#x2F;4K options for Ryzen 5000 and 6000 series (iGPU-only) laptops (just do a search for Yogas, Thinkpads, Zenbook, Vivobook, etc).<p>Note, certain designs might have display limitations. A couple years ago, for the 1st gen PF5NU1G, Schenker tried to get a 4K OLED panel to run, but failed due to PCON compatibility and then sourcing&#x2F;logistics issues: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;XMG_gg&#x2F;comments&#x2F;izg598&#x2F;no_4koled_panel_on_schenker_via_15_pro_sorry&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;XMG_gg&#x2F;comments&#x2F;izg598&#x2F;no_4koled_pa...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>4th Gen KDE Slimbook – Linux Ultrabook with an AMD Ryzen 7 5700U</title><url>https://kde.slimbook.es/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>minimaul</author><text>Is there some hardware limitation of AMD Ryzen laptop processors that prevents a high-res display?<p>Every time I see one of these laptops (like the recent HP linux laptop, etc), I think they look really interesting except that I wish they had a higher res display - I&#x27;ve not seen <i>any</i> Ryzen laptop with what I&#x27;d call a premium display - something high DPI.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>azangru</author><text>&gt; Is there some hardware limitation of AMD Ryzen laptop processors that prevents a high-res display?<p>It&#x27;s probably a limitation of the company they source the laptops from (Clevo?) :-)<p>The recently announced Tuxedo Pulse 2 [0] has a 1440p display; and the teased Starlabs Starfighter [1] is expected to come with a 4K display. Both are AMD laptops.<p>===<p>[0] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tuxedocomputers.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;Linux-Hardware&#x2F;Notebooks&#x2F;15-16-inch&#x2F;TUXEDO-Pulse-15-Gen2.tuxedo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tuxedocomputers.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;Linux-Hardware&#x2F;Notebooks&#x2F;...</a><p>[1] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;9to5linux.com&#x2F;star-labs-teases-the-starfighter-linux-laptop-with-4k-display-amd-or-intel-processors" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;9to5linux.com&#x2F;star-labs-teases-the-starfighter-linux...</a></text></comment> |
22,297,386 | 22,297,416 | 1 | 2 | 22,295,232 | train | <story><title>SciPy 1.0: fundamental algorithms for scientific computing in Python</title><url>https://www.nature.com/articles/s41592-019-0686-2</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dragonsh</author><text>&gt; Our policy for evolving the API over time is that new functionality can be added, while removing or changing existing functionality can only be done if the benefits exceed the (often significant) costs to users and only after giving clear deprecation warnings to those users for at least one year. In general, we encourage changes that improve clarity in the API of the library but strongly discourage breaking backward compatibility, given our position near the base of the scientific Python computing stack.<p>This is one of the nuggets out of it. I have been using Python with scipy and more extensively with it&#x27;s sci-kit library since 2014. Started with it by solving discrete traveling sales man problem for solution of sitting arrangements and was astonished with its ease of use of matrix algebra with these libraries and got hooked to it. It helped me to do scientific computing and create a user friendly user interface on web to help end-user to just focus on siting arrangement and conference Organization. Can solve it with Matlab or GNU octave, but couldn’t have developed easily the whole system with user interface in them.<p>If Swift wanted to be used in scientific computing it needs to follow the similar policy of managing its scientific stack.<p>Julia is good for scientific computing, but it’s UI and web development libraries are isn’t that powerful. So will see how it develops.<p>I constantly see on HN criticism of Python and something rewritten in Rust as something revolutionary or ground breaking that it will change the whole world. Earlier this fad was with go language. Probably in time to come Rust will be used for some core library development which brings substantial benefits like scipy, not something rewritten as wrapper around C library with unsafe code which can be done with Python much better.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Dowwie</author><text>Rust isn&#x27;t going to replace Python because it isn&#x27;t an interactive language that can be used for adhoc analysis, but it will be used to write the libraries that python imports when the existing ones are no longer sufficient for people&#x27;s needs.<p>Python isn&#x27;t criticized as much as it is recognized as the lesser tool for certain categories of development. That&#x27;s fine because it is a general purpose language with many great uses.</text></comment> | <story><title>SciPy 1.0: fundamental algorithms for scientific computing in Python</title><url>https://www.nature.com/articles/s41592-019-0686-2</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dragonsh</author><text>&gt; Our policy for evolving the API over time is that new functionality can be added, while removing or changing existing functionality can only be done if the benefits exceed the (often significant) costs to users and only after giving clear deprecation warnings to those users for at least one year. In general, we encourage changes that improve clarity in the API of the library but strongly discourage breaking backward compatibility, given our position near the base of the scientific Python computing stack.<p>This is one of the nuggets out of it. I have been using Python with scipy and more extensively with it&#x27;s sci-kit library since 2014. Started with it by solving discrete traveling sales man problem for solution of sitting arrangements and was astonished with its ease of use of matrix algebra with these libraries and got hooked to it. It helped me to do scientific computing and create a user friendly user interface on web to help end-user to just focus on siting arrangement and conference Organization. Can solve it with Matlab or GNU octave, but couldn’t have developed easily the whole system with user interface in them.<p>If Swift wanted to be used in scientific computing it needs to follow the similar policy of managing its scientific stack.<p>Julia is good for scientific computing, but it’s UI and web development libraries are isn’t that powerful. So will see how it develops.<p>I constantly see on HN criticism of Python and something rewritten in Rust as something revolutionary or ground breaking that it will change the whole world. Earlier this fad was with go language. Probably in time to come Rust will be used for some core library development which brings substantial benefits like scipy, not something rewritten as wrapper around C library with unsafe code which can be done with Python much better.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pjmlp</author><text>For Swift to be taken seriously, it needs to be actually usable across macOS, GNU&#x2F;Linux and Windows, and not be something that still resembles the heyday of GNUStep experience.</text></comment> |
20,975,719 | 20,975,710 | 1 | 3 | 20,975,094 | train | <story><title>For Online Courses, Questions Over How Success is Measured (2014)</title><url>https://www.texastribune.org/2014/01/21/low-completion-percentages-moocs-prompt-debate/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gamesbrainiac</author><text>I think this emphasis on completion rates are a problem. I take a lot of MOOCs, but not all the content in said MOOCs are important. I just watch the parts of courses that are important or relevant to what I am doing, and call it a day.<p>For people learning from non-conventional sources, they are used to using bits and pieces from different online sources and building up their own courses and their own paths.<p>This fascination with completion rates is simply our propensity to value what we measure instead of measuring what we value.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Chathamization</author><text>Very much this. I think a large issue with MOOCs is that they&#x27;re too focused on emulating the structure of a university class - focus on lectures, community built around specific classes, focusing on the metric of course completion rather than on attaining skills, etc. People who successfully teach themselves things (and right now, there are many people using the internet to teach themselves things) often have a very different approach.<p>It&#x27;s interesting that so many people have trouble even considering that there might be other ways to approach education.</text></comment> | <story><title>For Online Courses, Questions Over How Success is Measured (2014)</title><url>https://www.texastribune.org/2014/01/21/low-completion-percentages-moocs-prompt-debate/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gamesbrainiac</author><text>I think this emphasis on completion rates are a problem. I take a lot of MOOCs, but not all the content in said MOOCs are important. I just watch the parts of courses that are important or relevant to what I am doing, and call it a day.<p>For people learning from non-conventional sources, they are used to using bits and pieces from different online sources and building up their own courses and their own paths.<p>This fascination with completion rates is simply our propensity to value what we measure instead of measuring what we value.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>xchaotic</author><text>I was recently watching some courses on AWS, I passed the actual exam but I only watched a few videos where things were a bit ambiguous for me.
So the completion metric is not very useful or accurate IMO.</text></comment> |
12,161,826 | 12,161,780 | 1 | 2 | 12,160,709 | train | <story><title>Humans once opposed coffee and refrigeration: why we often hate new stuff</title><url>https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2016/07/21/humans-once-opposed-coffee-and-refrigeration-heres-why-we-often-hate-new-stuff/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hueving</author><text>&gt;That such technological innovation also created wealth was poor consolation for the workers getting the short end of the stick<p>That falls flat when you consider that lower middle class people have access to much greater things than upper middle class people and rich people did 50 years ago.</text></item><item><author>manachar</author><text>That would be helpful. It&#x27;s not always easy to know which innovation is actually a net benefit.<p>Leaded gasoline was a superior fuel in many respects but was clearly a fraudulent mistake (it was sold with false assurances of safety).<p>Even the original Luddites were not wrong in their original critiques - the technological innovations of machined industrialization did indeed replace workers and enrich employers. (That such technological innovation also created wealth was poor consolation for the workers getting the short end of the stick).<p>Chemical warfare was horrible enough to have military strategists more than willing to agree to ban its usage.<p>New is not universally a good. In fact, every change has benefits and detriments that will be unequally distributed. History has also shown a tendency for the detriments to be mostly felt by the poor and disenfranchised.<p>It seems fair to be cautious about the new.</text></item><item><author>crusso</author><text><i>In hindsight, opposition to innovations such as mechanical farm equipment or recorded music may seem ludicrous.</i><p>How about if the article talked about the problems with the people who rapidly embraced once &quot;nifty and new&quot; ideas like taking x-rays of feet at shoe stores, using Fen-Phen for weight loss, getting on airplanes in the early days of flying, etc.?<p>What the article ignores completely is the notion of idea survival bias. The article goes through pains to cast reluctance to adopt new ideas as being a defective mode of thinking by not talking about the risk model for the adoption of new ideas.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mindcrime</author><text><i>That falls flat when you consider that lower middle class people have access to much greater things than upper middle class people and rich people did 50 years ago.</i><p>To be fair, if you&#x27;re the guy losing your job <i>today</i>, you probably don&#x27;t care much about the idea that you might be better off twenty years down the road, or that society in general might be richer in 20 or 50 years. You care about putting food on the table <i>now</i>.<p>Even if you look at things like re-skilling and the creation of new jobs that results from technology, you&#x27;re still looking at a potential gap in employment and income where you might starve to death, when you look at this at the individual level. In that regard, it&#x27;s hard to say that people are <i>wrong</i> to oppose certain kinds of changes.</text></comment> | <story><title>Humans once opposed coffee and refrigeration: why we often hate new stuff</title><url>https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2016/07/21/humans-once-opposed-coffee-and-refrigeration-heres-why-we-often-hate-new-stuff/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hueving</author><text>&gt;That such technological innovation also created wealth was poor consolation for the workers getting the short end of the stick<p>That falls flat when you consider that lower middle class people have access to much greater things than upper middle class people and rich people did 50 years ago.</text></item><item><author>manachar</author><text>That would be helpful. It&#x27;s not always easy to know which innovation is actually a net benefit.<p>Leaded gasoline was a superior fuel in many respects but was clearly a fraudulent mistake (it was sold with false assurances of safety).<p>Even the original Luddites were not wrong in their original critiques - the technological innovations of machined industrialization did indeed replace workers and enrich employers. (That such technological innovation also created wealth was poor consolation for the workers getting the short end of the stick).<p>Chemical warfare was horrible enough to have military strategists more than willing to agree to ban its usage.<p>New is not universally a good. In fact, every change has benefits and detriments that will be unequally distributed. History has also shown a tendency for the detriments to be mostly felt by the poor and disenfranchised.<p>It seems fair to be cautious about the new.</text></item><item><author>crusso</author><text><i>In hindsight, opposition to innovations such as mechanical farm equipment or recorded music may seem ludicrous.</i><p>How about if the article talked about the problems with the people who rapidly embraced once &quot;nifty and new&quot; ideas like taking x-rays of feet at shoe stores, using Fen-Phen for weight loss, getting on airplanes in the early days of flying, etc.?<p>What the article ignores completely is the notion of idea survival bias. The article goes through pains to cast reluctance to adopt new ideas as being a defective mode of thinking by not talking about the risk model for the adoption of new ideas.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>manachar</author><text>It doesn&#x27;t fall flat, it just (potentially) shows a net benefit for most. You&#x27;ve also narrowed the debate to a purely materialistic benefit (.i.e. more things cheaper) while taking a broader view of the whole class of people at a time.<p>An individual does not have the luxury of evaluating the &quot;good of the many&quot; when they are unemployed by innovation. Equally horrid from the individual&#x27;s perspective is discovering the skills they&#x27;ve spent a life time accruing are suddenly worthless and make them unhireable.<p>White-collar workers have only just started feeling this pressure of good jobs disappearing only leaving more menial and lower-paid jobs.<p>To ignore that some people are harmed by innovation is as silly as pretending that all innovation is a positive.<p>It&#x27;s also important to note that you can&#x27;t just credit changes in living standard to technological innovation. Soft innovations in things like politics and philosophy are AT LEAST as important as technological innovation.</text></comment> |
8,256,938 | 8,256,621 | 1 | 2 | 8,256,357 | train | <story><title>HTTP/2 interop pains</title><url>http://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2014/09/02/http2-interop-pains/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>skrebbel</author><text>Is this a mistake or Google trying to force the standards process in their favour? Users seem to be blaming Firefox, not Google.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>josteink</author><text>&gt; Is this a mistake or Google trying to force the standards process in their favour? Users seem to be blaming Firefox, not Google.<p>Given Google&#x27;s history around this whole HTTP&#x2F;2.0 shenanigans, I see little reason to see anything in their favour.<p>They are probably gambling that Firefox will fold (like they forced them to with DRM) so that once again, they can have it their way internet-wide without having to wait for annoying things like feedback from others and standards-committees and such.<p>They will probably win.</text></comment> | <story><title>HTTP/2 interop pains</title><url>http://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2014/09/02/http2-interop-pains/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>skrebbel</author><text>Is this a mistake or Google trying to force the standards process in their favour? Users seem to be blaming Firefox, not Google.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bagder</author><text>This doesn&#x27;t drive the standards process in any particular direction, this is just a broken implementation that doesn&#x27;t adhere to the current standard draft!</text></comment> |
25,229,344 | 25,228,984 | 1 | 3 | 25,228,079 | train | <story><title>Rebuilding the Racket Compiler with Chez Scheme</title><url>https://notamonadtutorial.com/rebuilding-the-racket-compiler-with-chez-scheme-210e23a69484</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>patterns</author><text>I wonder whether the migration to Chez Scheme will improve the performance of Dr. Racket which consumes a lot of memory and feels very sluggish.<p>I have been experimenting with Racket for quite a while and I appreciate the effort that went into making the language extensible. That being said, I wish that the community would have embraced &quot;object-oriented&quot; techniques for building the VM - Ian Piumarta&#x27;s COLA (Combined Object-Lambda Architecture) comes to mind [1]. I think this would have saved them a lot of performance troubles (but this is mere speculation) and would make the system far more flexible and pleasant to use.<p>While it&#x27;s comforting to have a very powerful macro system at your fingertips to change the semantics of the language when needed, many of the macros in the base language and libraries could be eliminated with a more convenient <i>default</i> notation for closures and message-passing (to objects simulating control structures like in Smalltalk).<p>Racket has one of the best module systems I have worked with but modules cannot be (easily) parameterized. Research on systems such as Self and more recently Newspeak [2] gives ample of demonstration of the benefits (conceptual integrity, security) of having modules as objects.<p>What Racket also lacks is a good meta-object system with highly reflective capabilities (of say a CLOS or Smalltalk system). This makes it difficult to build tooling such as inspectors or browsers.<p>I hope that in the future these issues will be addressed.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.piumarta.com&#x2F;papers&#x2F;colas-whitepaper.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.piumarta.com&#x2F;papers&#x2F;colas-whitepaper.pdf</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;newspeaklanguage.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;newspeaklanguage.org&#x2F;</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Rebuilding the Racket Compiler with Chez Scheme</title><url>https://notamonadtutorial.com/rebuilding-the-racket-compiler-with-chez-scheme-210e23a69484</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>pmoriarty</author><text><i>&quot;Chez Scheme is one of the oldest Scheme implementations, and its evolution informed many parts of the Scheme standard through R6RS. (Racket&#x27;s influence on the Scheme standard, in contrast, is limited to aspects of the R6RS library design.)...&quot;</i><p>Why did Chez and Racket embrace R6RS, a standard widely rejected by the rest of the Scheme community?<p>Also, why did Racket choose Chez over some other high-performance Schemes, like Chicken?<p>Finally, how many Racket and Chez users are there compared to those of other Schemes?</text></comment> |
13,887,279 | 13,886,938 | 1 | 2 | 13,886,596 | train | <story><title>Launch HN: Effective Altruism Funds (YC W17 Nonprofit)</title><text>Hi HN! We’re the founders of the Centre for Effective Altruism, a nonprofit from Oxford, UK in the YC W17 batch. We’re the creators of Effective Altruism (EA) Funds, (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;app.effectivealtruism.org&#x2F;funds&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;app.effectivealtruism.org&#x2F;funds&#x2F;</a>) high-impact, individual giving portfolios, managed by expert researchers. It&#x27;s like Vanguard for charity.<p>We created EA Funds because we became frustrated with how difficult it was to find the best giving opportunities as an individual donor. Using EA Funds, you choose a problem area, and our fund managers find the best giving opportunities. Our initial funds are all managed by Program Officers at the Open Philanthropy Project, a $10B private foundation. In the future, we hope to expand the number of funds, building a competitive marketplace for giving, where the amount of funding a charity receives is directly correlated with the amount of good they do.<p>We started out 7 years ago, when 23 of our friends pledged to give 10% of their income to the most effective charities they could find. Since then, 2700 people have joined us, donating $33M, including $17M last year. We’ve found that some of the most cost-effective charities can buy one year of perfect health (a DALY) for as little as $80, while others have no effect. A study in the US found that $10B was spent each year on social programs that had been proven to have no effect on outcomes, and a further $1B was spent on programs that were actively harmful. We built EA Funds to replicate the success of groups like the Gates Foundation and GiveWell. By pooling our resources and utilising the expertise of our research community, we can give individual donors the same impact per dollar as billion dollar foundations.<p>We’d love to hear your feedback and answer questions about effective altruism, donating effectively or hear your stories about the charity sector!<p>(Edit: originally said QALY instead of DALY, but that was a typo, as commenters pointed out.)</text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>SEMW</author><text>Congrats on the launch!<p>&gt; We’ve found that some of the most cost-effective charities can buy one year of perfect health (a QALY) for as little as $80<p>Which was that? IIRC GiveWell only claim $100&#x2F;QALY for the AMF - have you found a charity you believe is 20% more efficient than that, or is this just a difference in how you measure cost per qaly?<p>[Edit] another question -- there&#x27;s recently been criticism[0] of the poor quality of data and effectiveness research in animal welfare EA, compared with human welfare EA. Would the animal welfare fund be doing things like actively commissioning new research into intervention effectiveness? Or would it be more hands-off, just limited to picking charities based on the data that&#x27;s out there at the moment?<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@harrisonnathan&#x2F;the-actual-number-is-almost-surely-higher-92c908f36517#.jgeac5y3n" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@harrisonnathan&#x2F;the-actual-number-is-almo...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Launch HN: Effective Altruism Funds (YC W17 Nonprofit)</title><text>Hi HN! We’re the founders of the Centre for Effective Altruism, a nonprofit from Oxford, UK in the YC W17 batch. We’re the creators of Effective Altruism (EA) Funds, (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;app.effectivealtruism.org&#x2F;funds&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;app.effectivealtruism.org&#x2F;funds&#x2F;</a>) high-impact, individual giving portfolios, managed by expert researchers. It&#x27;s like Vanguard for charity.<p>We created EA Funds because we became frustrated with how difficult it was to find the best giving opportunities as an individual donor. Using EA Funds, you choose a problem area, and our fund managers find the best giving opportunities. Our initial funds are all managed by Program Officers at the Open Philanthropy Project, a $10B private foundation. In the future, we hope to expand the number of funds, building a competitive marketplace for giving, where the amount of funding a charity receives is directly correlated with the amount of good they do.<p>We started out 7 years ago, when 23 of our friends pledged to give 10% of their income to the most effective charities they could find. Since then, 2700 people have joined us, donating $33M, including $17M last year. We’ve found that some of the most cost-effective charities can buy one year of perfect health (a DALY) for as little as $80, while others have no effect. A study in the US found that $10B was spent each year on social programs that had been proven to have no effect on outcomes, and a further $1B was spent on programs that were actively harmful. We built EA Funds to replicate the success of groups like the Gates Foundation and GiveWell. By pooling our resources and utilising the expertise of our research community, we can give individual donors the same impact per dollar as billion dollar foundations.<p>We’d love to hear your feedback and answer questions about effective altruism, donating effectively or hear your stories about the charity sector!<p>(Edit: originally said QALY instead of DALY, but that was a typo, as commenters pointed out.)</text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>andy_ppp</author><text>This is really interesting and a great idea; however, I&#x27;d almost trust charities more if they listed how they had failed each year and where delivery and services went wrong and what mitigation has been put in place.<p>It would be good to have a system where charities were allowed to fail like bad companies as well, but it&#x27;s difficult to be this honest.</text></comment> |
17,201,982 | 17,198,875 | 1 | 3 | 17,197,817 | train | <story><title>Telegram App Says Apple Is Blocking Updates Over Dispute with Russia</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/31/technology/telegram-apple-russia.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jenga22</author><text>Apple has now entered dangerous territory.<p>Over the last month they seem to have banned apps because some government out there didn&#x27;t like that app. To make matters worse, those very same governments weren&#x27;t happy with the app being removed from their regional app store but they demanded it removed from all app stores.<p>The VPN issue was a wake up call for a lot of developers. These apps were on the app store for years and because China didn&#x27;t like these apps one morning, they banned it and referred to some arbitrary clause in the app store TOS.<p>The thing is this script has played out before. Twitter also had a vibrant ecosystem of third party developers. Those developers made Twitter into a billion dollar company. Then one morning, they decided certain classes of apps were not okay. This back and forth went on for months until there were barely any apps left. Twitter eventua<p>The same thing is happening with Apple. Several founders I&#x27;ve spoken to, all with big exits in the past, refuse to write apps first for Apple or Google because of the threat of getting &quot;banned one morning&quot;.<p>Worse, VCs are now getting nervous in investing in startups where the app is the fundamental foundation of the business.<p>For any market to thrive, there needs to be transparency and stability. Just like Twitter, once developers are gone....they&#x27;re gone. They won&#x27;t come back and consumers will start wondering if the 1,000 dollar smartphone they purchased, with subpar apps, is really worth it.</text></comment> | <story><title>Telegram App Says Apple Is Blocking Updates Over Dispute with Russia</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/31/technology/telegram-apple-russia.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>JumpCrisscross</author><text>This is presently an accusation by Telegram, nothing more. Sample of reasons why Apple may be doing whatever they are doing:<p>1) Telegram is prevalently used by Syrian fighters [1]. (Why they chose Telegram over Signal beats me.) As the Syrian conflict winds down, these fighters are returning home. That creates a security imperative for many governments, including in the EU.<p>2) Telegram recently ran an ICO that, at the very least, probably runs afoul of American securities law.<p>3) All of the reasons any app gets held up in review that are not &quot;the Russian government pressured Apple.&quot;<p>TL; DR We have no evidence this is because of Russian meddling.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.huffingtonpost.com&#x2F;entry&#x2F;isis-telegram-app_us_59259254e4b0ec129d3136d5" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.huffingtonpost.com&#x2F;entry&#x2F;isis-telegram-app_us_59...</a></text></comment> |
37,533,712 | 37,533,154 | 1 | 2 | 37,527,720 | train | <story><title>I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it</title><url>https://basta.substack.com/p/no-sacred-masterpieces</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>iancmceachern</author><text>This isn&#x27;t that.<p>This is engineers deliberately taking tech to somewhere where they know IP laws won&#x27;t be enforced.<p>It&#x27;s not like I&#x27;m saying they can learn calculus here and then go to China and use calculus to design things.<p>It&#x27;s that I&#x27;m saying they design a very specific thing, a very specific way, for hire, then go make that exact specific thing, that same specific way.<p>If it were in any other country but China, it wouldn&#x27;t be allowed to happen.</text></item><item><author>vkazanov</author><text>So an engineer learns how to make something, and then goes elsewhere to make it.<p>To be honest, the way you put ut, the story feels OK to me.<p>There are many truly bad examples, e.g. the arm china story, but engineers doing their thing is not one of them.</text></item><item><author>iancmceachern</author><text>I&#x27;ve watched this happen.<p>I&#x27;ve watched key, core engineers and technical leaders work for US and European companies, develop their next generation products, then turn around and design and develop essentially the exact same thing for the Chinese market. They then build a company, in China, that makes essentially the same product, but for the Chinese Market, and with Chinese investors, etc.<p>Examples:
Thoratec&#x2F;Abbot Heartmate III &amp; CH Biomedical<p>Auris&#x2F;Verb&#x2F;J&amp;J Robotic &amp; Digital Solutions &amp; Renovo Surgical<p>The ironic thing, is that some of these companies after success in China are working to sell and be competitive in the US and Europe.<p>It&#x27;s not even secret or under the table anymore, it&#x27;s overt and largely accepted as the way it is in our industry. A brave new world.<p>The other factor, is that it is very very difficult for a foreign company to do business and protect their assets in China, so often the wise companies don&#x27;t even try. They often just license their stuff for the Chinese market to a Chinese company. That way they at least have a chance of not having it all just stolen.</text></item><item><author>ipython</author><text>Best quote: &quot;People working for Didi apply for intern jobs at Uber China and then exfiltrate our data. We can’t let them see the formulas or they’ll just copy what we do!”<p>This is so true. People in the US just don&#x27;t understand the level of economic and industrial espionage that happens in China on a daily basis. I was responding to an unrelated breach at an unnamed tech company back in mid-2000s time frame and had a side bar conversation that went like the following:<p>Them: &quot;Yeah, we just opened a tech center in Xinjiang and ... wow, we&#x27;ve had quite the rash of lost ID badges there recently&quot;<p>Me: &quot;Have you considered that they&#x27;re not &#x27;lost&#x27;, but rather &#x27;sold&#x27; for profit?&quot;<p>... silence ...<p>I don&#x27;t know if executives are aware but just don&#x27;t care, or if they&#x27;re simply incompetent, but China has productized industrial espionage on a massive scale. GE Aviation was a victim more recently: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cincinnati.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;news&#x2F;2022&#x2F;11&#x2F;16&#x2F;accused-chinese-spy-who-targeted-ge-aviation-sentenced-to-20-years&#x2F;69653460007&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cincinnati.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;news&#x2F;2022&#x2F;11&#x2F;16&#x2F;accused-chi...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ak_111</author><text>This feels like the debate between tax evasion and tax avoidance. What the engineer did here going to an IP lawless place is more like tax avoidance. It has a bad smell but he <i>legally</i> exploited a loophole in the international IP system if I understood correctly. Sort of migrating to a tax haven to avoid taxes.<p>Unless there is something explicitly stated in your contract banning you from taking the &quot;know-how&quot; in your brains and use it elsewhere (so long as you don&#x27;t breach any patent) then it sounds there is nothing technically wrong.</text></comment> | <story><title>I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it</title><url>https://basta.substack.com/p/no-sacred-masterpieces</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>iancmceachern</author><text>This isn&#x27;t that.<p>This is engineers deliberately taking tech to somewhere where they know IP laws won&#x27;t be enforced.<p>It&#x27;s not like I&#x27;m saying they can learn calculus here and then go to China and use calculus to design things.<p>It&#x27;s that I&#x27;m saying they design a very specific thing, a very specific way, for hire, then go make that exact specific thing, that same specific way.<p>If it were in any other country but China, it wouldn&#x27;t be allowed to happen.</text></item><item><author>vkazanov</author><text>So an engineer learns how to make something, and then goes elsewhere to make it.<p>To be honest, the way you put ut, the story feels OK to me.<p>There are many truly bad examples, e.g. the arm china story, but engineers doing their thing is not one of them.</text></item><item><author>iancmceachern</author><text>I&#x27;ve watched this happen.<p>I&#x27;ve watched key, core engineers and technical leaders work for US and European companies, develop their next generation products, then turn around and design and develop essentially the exact same thing for the Chinese market. They then build a company, in China, that makes essentially the same product, but for the Chinese Market, and with Chinese investors, etc.<p>Examples:
Thoratec&#x2F;Abbot Heartmate III &amp; CH Biomedical<p>Auris&#x2F;Verb&#x2F;J&amp;J Robotic &amp; Digital Solutions &amp; Renovo Surgical<p>The ironic thing, is that some of these companies after success in China are working to sell and be competitive in the US and Europe.<p>It&#x27;s not even secret or under the table anymore, it&#x27;s overt and largely accepted as the way it is in our industry. A brave new world.<p>The other factor, is that it is very very difficult for a foreign company to do business and protect their assets in China, so often the wise companies don&#x27;t even try. They often just license their stuff for the Chinese market to a Chinese company. That way they at least have a chance of not having it all just stolen.</text></item><item><author>ipython</author><text>Best quote: &quot;People working for Didi apply for intern jobs at Uber China and then exfiltrate our data. We can’t let them see the formulas or they’ll just copy what we do!”<p>This is so true. People in the US just don&#x27;t understand the level of economic and industrial espionage that happens in China on a daily basis. I was responding to an unrelated breach at an unnamed tech company back in mid-2000s time frame and had a side bar conversation that went like the following:<p>Them: &quot;Yeah, we just opened a tech center in Xinjiang and ... wow, we&#x27;ve had quite the rash of lost ID badges there recently&quot;<p>Me: &quot;Have you considered that they&#x27;re not &#x27;lost&#x27;, but rather &#x27;sold&#x27; for profit?&quot;<p>... silence ...<p>I don&#x27;t know if executives are aware but just don&#x27;t care, or if they&#x27;re simply incompetent, but China has productized industrial espionage on a massive scale. GE Aviation was a victim more recently: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cincinnati.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;news&#x2F;2022&#x2F;11&#x2F;16&#x2F;accused-chinese-spy-who-targeted-ge-aviation-sentenced-to-20-years&#x2F;69653460007&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cincinnati.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;news&#x2F;2022&#x2F;11&#x2F;16&#x2F;accused-chi...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>barry-cotter</author><text>&gt; It&#x27;s that I&#x27;m saying they design a very specific thing, a very specific way, for hire, then go make that exact specific thing, that same specific way.<p>I really doubt this unless all the inputs are commoditised. Industrial espionage usually fails because if you don’t have the know how to make the tools that make the tools it’s difficult to impossible to literally copy it. Not saying what you’re saying doesn’t happen, it does, all the time. But usually the engineering is substantially different if only because different things are cheap or expensive, or just unavailable.<p>&gt; If it were in any other country but China, it wouldn&#x27;t be allowed to happen.<p>Historically, the US, Japan, Korea, Taiwan all did it. No doubt Vietnam does it now too. Not like they have an excellent civil legal system. Joys of working in developing countries.</text></comment> |
19,558,377 | 19,558,465 | 1 | 3 | 19,557,850 | train | <story><title>On-Demand Startups Are Hemorrhaging Tens of Billions a Year</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-01/on-demand-startups-are-hemorrhaging-tens-of-billions-a-year</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Johnny555</author><text>Where does the money go for Lyft&#x2F;Uber? The software platform can&#x27;t be that expensive amortized across a million+ drivers.<p>It&#x27;s not like the drivers are overpaid (and in many cases, they are barely (or not even) paid enough to cover costs)<p>What else do they spend it on? Marketing? Bribing...err... lobbying politicians for favorable treatment?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mlinsey</author><text>From what I&#x27;ve seen at other on-demand co&#x27;s, the three most likely culprits are:<p>1- User acquisition costs (discounts, marketing, etc - for <i>both</i> sides of the platform). this gets more expensive in the face of competition, and there&#x27;s some hope that if you can &quot;win&quot; the market then eventually these costs will be reduced sharply.<p>2- Money as a band-aid for reliability&#x2F;support issues. Frequently, an Uber driver refuses to take me on a long trip (SF to Mountain View, for example), makes me get out of the car, then marks me as a no-show or that <i>I</i> canceled the ride. Fortunately, my rider score is high enough that I just fill out the form describing what happened, and Uber (usually almost instantly) refunds the fee and sometimes also gives me a make-up $5 credit to apologize. With food delivery options, a non-trivial fraction of the time, the wrong order arrives, and similarly any complaint to support usually results in an immediate refund + credit.
Without an easy, scalable way for the support team to audit what really happened on the ground, chances are they are not penalizing the driver &#x2F; restaurant for these incidents unless there is a clear pattern in the data with a particular provider. So this is just loss for the platform. With very small margins it takes a surprisingly low percentage of such cases to really eat away your unit model.<p>3- Subsidizing low-utilization markets. Markets with a much higher density of supply&#x2F;demand will be more efficient and profitable; newer markets will often need subsidies to get over the cold start problem (eg when uber launches a new city, you&#x27;re gonna need to pay some drivers to sit idling on the road, or else someone opening the app won&#x27;t see a driver; you might also discount rides even more heavily to get past this phase quicker). Compared to the other two factors, this is probably the best-case scenario for why a company might be bleeding money, and why you sometimes hear people say &quot;Uber is profitable in XYZ cities&quot;, but it&#x27;s hard to say from the outside if this is actually what&#x27;s happening or if there&#x27;s something more fundamentally wrong.</text></comment> | <story><title>On-Demand Startups Are Hemorrhaging Tens of Billions a Year</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-01/on-demand-startups-are-hemorrhaging-tens-of-billions-a-year</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Johnny555</author><text>Where does the money go for Lyft&#x2F;Uber? The software platform can&#x27;t be that expensive amortized across a million+ drivers.<p>It&#x27;s not like the drivers are overpaid (and in many cases, they are barely (or not even) paid enough to cover costs)<p>What else do they spend it on? Marketing? Bribing...err... lobbying politicians for favorable treatment?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vkou</author><text>&gt; Where does the money go for Lyft&#x2F;Uber?<p>Mostly into customer discounts and driver incentives.<p>Both companies are burning billions of dollars on selling people a $10 taxi ride for $5, while paying the driver $12.<p>Once they stop spending their way to market-share, customer demand, and driver supply will drop.<p>There&#x27;s a price point where they are a viable, profitable business (After all, taxi firms have existed for centuries), but that price point will be higher for riders and lower for drivers, than it is today.</text></comment> |
28,889,633 | 28,889,557 | 1 | 3 | 28,888,253 | train | <story><title>Researchers show Facebook’s ad tools can target a single user</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2021/10/15/researchers-show-facebooks-ad-tools-can-target-a-single-user/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>stuaxo</author><text>This was famously used to target Jeremy Corbyn.<p>Labour staffers working to prevent their own party winning under him were not posting the adverts they were meant to, but were able to use geofencing and other specifiers so it looked like everything was it should be when he was browsing.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thetimes.co.uk&#x2F;article&#x2F;labour-hq-used-facebook-ads-to-deceive-corbyn-3hvn0jzr8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thetimes.co.uk&#x2F;article&#x2F;labour-hq-used-facebook-a...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Researchers show Facebook’s ad tools can target a single user</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2021/10/15/researchers-show-facebooks-ad-tools-can-target-a-single-user/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>pixelgeek</author><text>Of interest is that my blocker stopped 45 tracking elements on that Techcrunch article.</text></comment> |
11,206,578 | 11,206,430 | 1 | 3 | 11,205,594 | train | <story><title>GitKraken: git GUI Client for Windows Mac and Linux</title><url>http://www.gitkraken.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lallysingh</author><text>Yeah. I don&#x27;t know when this happened, but that&#x27;s become a deal breaker for me. Strange, right?<p>Edit to add:
It&#x27;s particularly strange because I wouldn&#x27;t depend on this tool in some infrastructural way -- I could switch clients anytime without any lock in. But I&#x27;m no longer willing to even try anymore. Odd.</text></item><item><author>0942v8653</author><text>Not open source: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gitkraken.com&#x2F;faq" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gitkraken.com&#x2F;faq</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bengotow</author><text>I don&#x27;t think this is a dealbreaker for 99% of people. I currently use Tower (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.git-tower.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.git-tower.com&#x2F;</a>), a closed-source Mac Git client that costs $70.<p>It&#x27;s beautiful, it speeds up my work day to day, and it&#x27;s been worth every cent. Open source is great and I spend my days building an open-source mail client, but I have no problem paying for great tools.</text></comment> | <story><title>GitKraken: git GUI Client for Windows Mac and Linux</title><url>http://www.gitkraken.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lallysingh</author><text>Yeah. I don&#x27;t know when this happened, but that&#x27;s become a deal breaker for me. Strange, right?<p>Edit to add:
It&#x27;s particularly strange because I wouldn&#x27;t depend on this tool in some infrastructural way -- I could switch clients anytime without any lock in. But I&#x27;m no longer willing to even try anymore. Odd.</text></item><item><author>0942v8653</author><text>Not open source: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gitkraken.com&#x2F;faq" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gitkraken.com&#x2F;faq</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dd9990</author><text>Not strange at all. Getting to know a tool and building muscle memory is also an investment you don&#x27;t want to waste.</text></comment> |
18,344,803 | 18,344,901 | 1 | 3 | 18,343,913 | train | <story><title>Monzo, a U.K. challenger bank, raises £85M Series E</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/30/monzocorn/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>grey-area</author><text>You mean they recently stopped you using a debit card to pay money into your bank account? Why would you do that? If you want to move money between banks you can do so instantly with faster payments.<p>I don&#x27;t say that to be facetious, I think there&#x27;s a difference of perspective here which is only going to widen if you think they are a prepaid card. They set out to make a bank, and started with prepaid cards, but that was never the end goal, it was just a way to test out the UI before getting a banking license, so expecting people to pay money in as you would to any other bank account makes perfect sense. This is not a prepaid card you load up, it&#x27;s a bank account, and they don&#x27;t want users to think of it as a prepaid card.<p>So I think their user satisfaction for people who want a bank account is doing well - as evidenced by their new customer growth. Can&#x27;t wait to see them launch in the US market as it is also ripe for disruption and I think they have the scale and ambition to do well there.</text></item><item><author>gadders</author><text>You can tell they are starting to optimise for revenue rather than user satisfaction, though. They recently prevented you from loading your Monzo card via another debit card.</text></item><item><author>Sholmesy</author><text>Monzo is awesome; they deserve all their success. They have single handedly forced banks to compete on UX, though Monzo still wins by a significant margin.<p>Huge stat from the article;<p>&gt; And in terms of customer growth, extrapolating stats from a recent Nationwide annual report (PDF link), the challenger bank says it now accounts for 15 percent of all new bank accounts opened each month in the U.K<p>Is this accurate? 15% of bank accounts opened in the UK each month are for Monzo? That&#x27;s an insane stat.<p>No affiliation, just a happy Monzo Beta user.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>raesene9</author><text>I think the comment was around reduced usuability. It used to be if you wanted to move money into a Monzo account, you could do in all in-app, via a linked debit card.<p>This provided a nice usuable way to get money into the account from a &quot;legacy&quot; bank that doesn&#x27;t have a good mobile story.<p>Now if you have Monzo + a legacy account (as many do) you have to go log-in to the legacy account to move money to Monzo.<p>Ofc once you go &quot;full monzo&quot; that&#x27;s not a problem any more but it&#x27;s still early days for that and Monzo have had enough service glitches to make people a little nervous of committing to having it as their only account, I think.</text></comment> | <story><title>Monzo, a U.K. challenger bank, raises £85M Series E</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/30/monzocorn/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>grey-area</author><text>You mean they recently stopped you using a debit card to pay money into your bank account? Why would you do that? If you want to move money between banks you can do so instantly with faster payments.<p>I don&#x27;t say that to be facetious, I think there&#x27;s a difference of perspective here which is only going to widen if you think they are a prepaid card. They set out to make a bank, and started with prepaid cards, but that was never the end goal, it was just a way to test out the UI before getting a banking license, so expecting people to pay money in as you would to any other bank account makes perfect sense. This is not a prepaid card you load up, it&#x27;s a bank account, and they don&#x27;t want users to think of it as a prepaid card.<p>So I think their user satisfaction for people who want a bank account is doing well - as evidenced by their new customer growth. Can&#x27;t wait to see them launch in the US market as it is also ripe for disruption and I think they have the scale and ambition to do well there.</text></item><item><author>gadders</author><text>You can tell they are starting to optimise for revenue rather than user satisfaction, though. They recently prevented you from loading your Monzo card via another debit card.</text></item><item><author>Sholmesy</author><text>Monzo is awesome; they deserve all their success. They have single handedly forced banks to compete on UX, though Monzo still wins by a significant margin.<p>Huge stat from the article;<p>&gt; And in terms of customer growth, extrapolating stats from a recent Nationwide annual report (PDF link), the challenger bank says it now accounts for 15 percent of all new bank accounts opened each month in the U.K<p>Is this accurate? 15% of bank accounts opened in the UK each month are for Monzo? That&#x27;s an insane stat.<p>No affiliation, just a happy Monzo Beta user.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gadders</author><text>I already have a bank account I&#x27;m happy with. I specifically got the Monzo card as a prepaid card to use when spending abroad, which is what they originally sold as one of their key benefits.</text></comment> |
5,709,995 | 5,709,719 | 1 | 2 | 5,703,681 | train | <story><title>Every odd number greater than five is the sum of three primes</title><url>https://plus.google.com/114134834346472219368/posts/8qpSYNZFbzC</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>danbruc</author><text>It is absolutely mind-blowing how much time and passion humans have invested in understanding the consequences of nine simple statements...and how hard they resist against unveiling their secrets.<p><pre><code> 0∈ℕ
∀x∈ℕ:S(x)∈ℕ
∀x∈ℕ:S(x)≠0
∀x,y∈ℕ:S(x)=S(y) ⇒ x=y
0∈X∧∀x∈ℕ:(x∈X ⇒ S(x)∈X) ⇒ ℕ⊆X
x + 0 := x
x + S(y) := S(x + y)
x · 0 := 0
x · S(y) := x · y + x
</code></pre>
These are the Peano axioms [1] defining the natural numbers with addition and multiplication. And for at least 3000 years humans are tying to figure out properties of these natural numbers, all consequences of these definition, and the end is not in sight.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peano_axioms" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peano_axioms</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Houshalter</author><text>To be fair there are a lot of possible systems from which you could derive infinite complexity. There are an infinite number of true statements that can be discovered after all. Most are not particularly interesting or useful. You could come up with proofs for more and more specific behaviors that occur in turing machines under specific conditions. Or cellular automata. Or any number of arbitrary systems. But most wouldn't be relevant to the real world. The cool thing about numbers is that there are a lot of possible applications to the real world. But there are also an infinite number of trails you could follow with mathematics that lead nowhere useful at all.<p>Automated Mathematician tried to explore mathematics and find interesting concepts the same way mathematicians do and using similar heuristics. And it got fairly far, discovering numbers and primes and Goldbach's conjecture. But eventually it just started discovering useless concepts which had no apparent relevance to anything and were pointlessly complex or specific.</text></comment> | <story><title>Every odd number greater than five is the sum of three primes</title><url>https://plus.google.com/114134834346472219368/posts/8qpSYNZFbzC</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>danbruc</author><text>It is absolutely mind-blowing how much time and passion humans have invested in understanding the consequences of nine simple statements...and how hard they resist against unveiling their secrets.<p><pre><code> 0∈ℕ
∀x∈ℕ:S(x)∈ℕ
∀x∈ℕ:S(x)≠0
∀x,y∈ℕ:S(x)=S(y) ⇒ x=y
0∈X∧∀x∈ℕ:(x∈X ⇒ S(x)∈X) ⇒ ℕ⊆X
x + 0 := x
x + S(y) := S(x + y)
x · 0 := 0
x · S(y) := x · y + x
</code></pre>
These are the Peano axioms [1] defining the natural numbers with addition and multiplication. And for at least 3000 years humans are tying to figure out properties of these natural numbers, all consequences of these definition, and the end is not in sight.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peano_axioms" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peano_axioms</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dmvaldman</author><text>It's not so surprising. This could also be summarized as "God created the integers."<p>But really the process is reversed: given arithmetic, what is the smallest axiom set to give us the power to prove our theorems.<p>It's like, given all code, what is the smallest language we can use to express it. Which is sequences of 0s and 1s.</text></comment> |
10,070,909 | 10,070,877 | 1 | 2 | 10,070,707 | train | <story><title>GPS Trackers in Fake Elephant Tusks Reveal Ivory Smuggling Route</title><url>http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2015/08/12/431908397/gps-trackers-in-fake-elephant-tusks-reveal-ivory-smuggling-route</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>adamnemecek</author><text>If you live in Washington state and would like to do something about preventing further poaching, please vote Yes on Initiative-1401 which will be on the state ballot in this fall [0].<p>Furthermore, anyone can donate for example to the International Anti-Poaching Foundation[1][2] which fights these poachers. The founder, Damien Mander[3], is an Australian ex spec-ops sniper who is using his military experience to train the park rangers since they, unlike the poachers, tend to be poorly equipped and trained as well as understaffed.<p>There is also the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust[4][5] which takes care of elephant and rhino orphans (most of them are orphans due to poaching). For $50 a year, you can become a sponsor of a particular orphan and they&#x27;ll send you photos and updates about how your sponsored orphan is doing. I&#x27;ve been giving these out as gifts with good successes. You can for example sponsor this little fella [6].<p>[0] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;saveanimalsfacingextinction.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;saveanimalsfacingextinction.org&#x2F;</a><p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.iapf.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.iapf.org&#x2F;</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;International_Anti-Poaching_Foundation" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;International_Anti-Poaching_Fo...</a><p>[3] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Damien_Mander" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Damien_Mander</a><p>[4] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sheldrickwildlifetrust.org" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sheldrickwildlifetrust.org</a><p>[5] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;David_Sheldrick_Wildlife_Trust" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;David_Sheldrick_Wildlife_Trust</a><p>[6] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sheldrickwildlifetrust.org&#x2F;asp&#x2F;orphan_profile.asp?N=337" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sheldrickwildlifetrust.org&#x2F;asp&#x2F;orphan_profile.as...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>GPS Trackers in Fake Elephant Tusks Reveal Ivory Smuggling Route</title><url>http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2015/08/12/431908397/gps-trackers-in-fake-elephant-tusks-reveal-ivory-smuggling-route</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>flashman</author><text>Check out the National Geographic article with much more detail: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nationalgeographic.com&#x2F;tracking-ivory&#x2F;article.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nationalgeographic.com&#x2F;tracking-ivory&#x2F;article.htm...</a><p>There&#x27;s an interactive map too: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nationalgeographic.com&#x2F;tracking-ivory&#x2F;map.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nationalgeographic.com&#x2F;tracking-ivory&#x2F;map.html</a></text></comment> |
33,259,265 | 33,258,286 | 1 | 3 | 33,257,197 | train | <story><title>IDA cybersecurity software provider Hex-Rays acquired</title><url>https://smartfinvc.com/news/smartfin-acquires-leading-cybersecurity-software-provider-hex-rays-together-with-sfpim-and-sriw/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rjzzleep</author><text>For me I got the Company I was contracting for to buy me an IDA license and as I was trying to take over from there Hexrays never responded to any requests.<p>I&#x27;m guessing that I&#x27;m on the same pirate blacklist that a lot of people landed. I guess I should have expensed it instead of having the Company buy it. I was the only person doing RE work, it was a single user person license and I was also the only linux user out of that 300 people org.<p>I think there are a lot of people that would like to pay for IDA but can&#x27;t get it.<p>On the other hand I really don&#x27;t like the Ghidra user experience.<p>Is there something similar to FLIRT in r2 or ghidra?</text></item><item><author>pseudo0</author><text>Hopefully this works out for Hex-Rays, allowing them to invest more into developing IDA and expanding their low-cost product offerings. The general sentiment I have seen among people doing SRE is that IDA is rapidly losing market share to Ghidra. While it excels in some areas, the licenses are pricy even for tech employers, and entirely out of reach for students or colleges. It&#x27;s hard to convince an employer to fork out cash for IDA licenses when new employees are asking to use Ghidra, because that&#x27;s what they use at home and at school.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>grzaks</author><text>&gt; I think there are a lot of people that would like to pay for IDA but can&#x27;t get it.<p>Many years ago we wanted to buy IDA Pro license and were quickly declined because we had whois privacy protection enabled on our domain.</text></comment> | <story><title>IDA cybersecurity software provider Hex-Rays acquired</title><url>https://smartfinvc.com/news/smartfin-acquires-leading-cybersecurity-software-provider-hex-rays-together-with-sfpim-and-sriw/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rjzzleep</author><text>For me I got the Company I was contracting for to buy me an IDA license and as I was trying to take over from there Hexrays never responded to any requests.<p>I&#x27;m guessing that I&#x27;m on the same pirate blacklist that a lot of people landed. I guess I should have expensed it instead of having the Company buy it. I was the only person doing RE work, it was a single user person license and I was also the only linux user out of that 300 people org.<p>I think there are a lot of people that would like to pay for IDA but can&#x27;t get it.<p>On the other hand I really don&#x27;t like the Ghidra user experience.<p>Is there something similar to FLIRT in r2 or ghidra?</text></item><item><author>pseudo0</author><text>Hopefully this works out for Hex-Rays, allowing them to invest more into developing IDA and expanding their low-cost product offerings. The general sentiment I have seen among people doing SRE is that IDA is rapidly losing market share to Ghidra. While it excels in some areas, the licenses are pricy even for tech employers, and entirely out of reach for students or colleges. It&#x27;s hard to convince an employer to fork out cash for IDA licenses when new employees are asking to use Ghidra, because that&#x27;s what they use at home and at school.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ylk</author><text>It’s not r2 or ghidra, but binary ninja has signature libraries: “The matching algorithm is inspired by FLIRT, which was designed with similar requirements in mind.”<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;binary.ninja&#x2F;2020&#x2F;03&#x2F;11&#x2F;signature-libraries.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;binary.ninja&#x2F;2020&#x2F;03&#x2F;11&#x2F;signature-libraries.html</a></text></comment> |
37,782,544 | 37,782,555 | 1 | 2 | 37,782,218 | train | <story><title>U.S. federal price tag for the post-9/11 wars is over $8T</title><url>https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/figures/2021/BudgetaryCosts</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>AdamJacobMuller</author><text>Factor in the lost opportunity cost due to our reputational damage.<p>We lied about WMDs to cajole and entice other countries to join us in invading Iraq.<p>We tortured prisoners.<p>We killed reporters (accidentally) and lied about it (intentionally).<p>We drone-killed a minor US citizen in a foreign country without a trial.<p>I watched 9&#x2F;11 happen with my own eyes and it was incalculably tragic but we&#x27;ve done some very shitty things in return.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>paxys</author><text>This stuff isn&#x27;t even ancient history. During the withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021 the military blew up a random vehicle from a drone in the middle of Kabul, killing 10 civilians (including 7 children), and then immediately branded them terrorists.</text></comment> | <story><title>U.S. federal price tag for the post-9/11 wars is over $8T</title><url>https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/figures/2021/BudgetaryCosts</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>AdamJacobMuller</author><text>Factor in the lost opportunity cost due to our reputational damage.<p>We lied about WMDs to cajole and entice other countries to join us in invading Iraq.<p>We tortured prisoners.<p>We killed reporters (accidentally) and lied about it (intentionally).<p>We drone-killed a minor US citizen in a foreign country without a trial.<p>I watched 9&#x2F;11 happen with my own eyes and it was incalculably tragic but we&#x27;ve done some very shitty things in return.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sschueller</author><text>Guantanamo Bay prison is still holding detainies indefinitely and Julian Assange is still facing a lifetime in prison for exposing war crimes.</text></comment> |
20,154,527 | 20,152,911 | 1 | 2 | 20,152,197 | train | <story><title>Amazon to shut down its Amazon Restaurants business in the U.S.</title><url>https://www.geekwire.com/2019/amazon-shut-amazon-restaurants-business-u-s/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>pxtail</author><text>I&#x27;m amazed and amused reading some replies - it looks like some people would love to live in a world where single corporation fulfills all their basic needs:<p>* restaurants from amazon<p>* home real estate market[0]<p>* shopping from amazon<p>* entertainment from amazon<p>* alexa from amazon, listening all the time<p>* education (already some basic form of it exists - alexa is used to answer kids questions)<p>Although many important key services are still missing: healthcare, insurances, banking.. etc.<p>edit: banking-related product already out [1]<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20152956" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20152956</a><p>[1] Banking - Amazon.com Credit Builder - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20149304" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20149304</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Amazon to shut down its Amazon Restaurants business in the U.S.</title><url>https://www.geekwire.com/2019/amazon-shut-amazon-restaurants-business-u-s/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ronnier</author><text>Sad to see it go. I was on the original Amazon Local team for about two years, that ultimately turned into restaurants. A lot of my growth came from the people on amazon local, really solid people and good people, the product just had trouble catching on. That’s amazon, they’ll give just about everything a solid try and do their best knowing it may not work out.</text></comment> |
30,574,080 | 30,573,948 | 1 | 2 | 30,572,543 | train | <story><title>How Does This End?</title><url>https://carnegieendowment.org/2022/03/03/how-does-this-end-pub-86570</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hughrr</author><text>I think it&#x27;ll end when the Russian populace is squeezed hard and turns on the government. Forces will be withdrawn from Ukraine to deal with civil issues. A bloody military coup will occur, supported by sympathetic members. New government will be appointed. This government will eventually end up a NATO member and piss off China and then we&#x27;ll have to do the same thing again.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>barry-cotter</author><text>Just like Cuba, North Korea and Iran. Sanctions work and it doesn’t take long.</text></comment> | <story><title>How Does This End?</title><url>https://carnegieendowment.org/2022/03/03/how-does-this-end-pub-86570</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hughrr</author><text>I think it&#x27;ll end when the Russian populace is squeezed hard and turns on the government. Forces will be withdrawn from Ukraine to deal with civil issues. A bloody military coup will occur, supported by sympathetic members. New government will be appointed. This government will eventually end up a NATO member and piss off China and then we&#x27;ll have to do the same thing again.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>moltar</author><text>Don’t think this will happen. Russian have been hardened historically thru wars, 90s and other crises. Common people are very resilient and many grow their own food up to this day.</text></comment> |
34,819,263 | 34,819,088 | 1 | 2 | 34,817,457 | train | <story><title>‘I will show you how safe Telegram is’</title><url>https://twitter.com/jsrailton/status/1625720504366555137</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vbezhenar</author><text>I monitor Russian war channels and some people there insist on using Telegram only for Russian military people. If you use Whatsapp, Ukrainian officers will get all chats from NATO.<p>Telegram accounts of opposition were hacked by belarus police as well. It&#x27;s known and documented.<p>My takeaway is that for truly private chat one should write his own software using simple crypto without all those fancy clients. Ideally just use one time keys and xor everything. Can do it with pen and paper.<p>Signal might be safe, but I think it&#x27;s a honeypot.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lxgr</author><text>&gt; My takeaway is that for truly private chat one should write his own software using simple crypto without all those fancy clients.<p>That‘s actually pretty secure in practice, because you won‘t be communicating with anybody.<p>&gt; Ideally just use one time keys and xor everything.<p>How do you generate the keys? How do you share them? And you only care about encryption, authentication does not matter to you at all?<p>The chance of getting this right as an individual developer, especially given this level of understanding of cryptography, is next to zero.</text></comment> | <story><title>‘I will show you how safe Telegram is’</title><url>https://twitter.com/jsrailton/status/1625720504366555137</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vbezhenar</author><text>I monitor Russian war channels and some people there insist on using Telegram only for Russian military people. If you use Whatsapp, Ukrainian officers will get all chats from NATO.<p>Telegram accounts of opposition were hacked by belarus police as well. It&#x27;s known and documented.<p>My takeaway is that for truly private chat one should write his own software using simple crypto without all those fancy clients. Ideally just use one time keys and xor everything. Can do it with pen and paper.<p>Signal might be safe, but I think it&#x27;s a honeypot.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>benhurmarcel</author><text>&gt; Signal might be safe, but I think it&#x27;s a honeypot.<p>Telegram smells a lot more like a honeypot than Signal</text></comment> |
39,894,543 | 39,894,490 | 1 | 2 | 39,891,847 | train | <story><title>Will any crap we put into graphene increase its electrocatalytic effect? (2020)</title><url>https://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/acsnano.9b00184</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>pfdietz</author><text>The paper did not answer the question in the title, since it used only one kind of crap. A broader study is called for.</text></comment> | <story><title>Will any crap we put into graphene increase its electrocatalytic effect? (2020)</title><url>https://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/acsnano.9b00184</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>photochemsyn</author><text>I guess they were trying for an IgNobel Prize? However, they don&#x27;t report anything on the stability of the catalyst under reaction conditions, that is how many reaction cycles it goes through before losing catalytic effect.<p>If they don&#x27;t report the lifetime, it&#x27;s usually because the lifetime is crap, and all they have is a laboratory curiousity - which might, with futher diligent effort (and please, another research grant!), become industrially useful... maybe.</text></comment> |
21,446,977 | 21,445,830 | 1 | 3 | 21,443,038 | train | <story><title>Designing the Facebook Company Brand</title><url>https://facebook.design/companybrand</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>oflannabhra</author><text>I know it is easy to be cynical on these types of &quot;announcements&quot;, but I am having a really, really hard time understanding how curved strokes (or any branding decision) can result in empathy or &quot;open space for peoples stories&quot;.<p>Empathy is a human characteristic. To think that a word mark can have (or even <i>create</i>) it is patently ridiculous. In fact, I&#x27;d say it cheapens the meaning of the word to the point where true empathy means less.<p>This press release contains a type of language specific to our current time that will age like milk.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pembrook</author><text>You don&#x27;t understand it because, like myself and most people on this site, you&#x27;re probably a hyper-rational engineering type. We gravitated towards working in this field for a reason.<p>The rest of the world has very strong negative reactions when confronted with a product branded like this:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vim.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vim.org</a><p>...and they have very positive reactions to a product branded like this:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;slack.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;slack.com</a><p>How could the reaction be so different when we&#x27;re just talking about a few lines, curves, colors and aesthetics?<p>It turns out, most humans are emotionally stimulated by visual associations and stories. This is the definition of branding. Empathy would be understanding that most people are not like us.</text></comment> | <story><title>Designing the Facebook Company Brand</title><url>https://facebook.design/companybrand</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>oflannabhra</author><text>I know it is easy to be cynical on these types of &quot;announcements&quot;, but I am having a really, really hard time understanding how curved strokes (or any branding decision) can result in empathy or &quot;open space for peoples stories&quot;.<p>Empathy is a human characteristic. To think that a word mark can have (or even <i>create</i>) it is patently ridiculous. In fact, I&#x27;d say it cheapens the meaning of the word to the point where true empathy means less.<p>This press release contains a type of language specific to our current time that will age like milk.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>madoublet</author><text>I feel the irony is that a lot of the text arrangements in the examples do not have enough contrast to be universally accessible. So, I feel like even the designers are missing the point on empathy.</text></comment> |
17,522,945 | 17,523,130 | 1 | 2 | 17,519,547 | train | <story><title>No Paper Is That Good</title><url>https://www.econlib.org/no-paper-is-that-good/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kabouseng</author><text>Claude Shannon&#x27;s paper on information theory [1] is possibly an example of such a paragon of work. No citations, 50 pages of pure awesome, spawned a whole research field of its own and 70 years on just as valid.<p>[1] A Mathematical Theory of Communication - <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;math.harvard.edu&#x2F;~ctm&#x2F;home&#x2F;text&#x2F;others&#x2F;shannon&#x2F;entropy&#x2F;entropy.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;math.harvard.edu&#x2F;~ctm&#x2F;home&#x2F;text&#x2F;others&#x2F;shannon&#x2F;entrop...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>eboyjr</author><text>You said it. He proposed the model for digital AND analog communication still in use today. Although being a digital software person I admit I&#x27;ve never been motivated to read the part about continuous channels.<p>I was motivated however to install an archway for my house from the exact shape in Figure 7 (binary entropy function)</text></comment> | <story><title>No Paper Is That Good</title><url>https://www.econlib.org/no-paper-is-that-good/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kabouseng</author><text>Claude Shannon&#x27;s paper on information theory [1] is possibly an example of such a paragon of work. No citations, 50 pages of pure awesome, spawned a whole research field of its own and 70 years on just as valid.<p>[1] A Mathematical Theory of Communication - <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;math.harvard.edu&#x2F;~ctm&#x2F;home&#x2F;text&#x2F;others&#x2F;shannon&#x2F;entropy&#x2F;entropy.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;math.harvard.edu&#x2F;~ctm&#x2F;home&#x2F;text&#x2F;others&#x2F;shannon&#x2F;entrop...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>xurukefi</author><text>&gt; No citations<p>The paper contains citations. But they are hidden in the footnotes - see page 1 or page 5 for example.</text></comment> |
37,516,226 | 37,516,079 | 1 | 2 | 37,509,624 | train | <story><title>Googlers told to avoid words like ‘share’ and ‘bundle,’ US says</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-09-14/googlers-told-to-avoid-words-like-share-and-bundle-us-says-lmj27bhl</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>steveBK123</author><text>Well put another way -
It&#x27;s one thing to tell your employees not to break the law. That&#x27;s good!<p>It&#x27;s another thing to tell your employees not to use a bunch of words while doing their job which implicate the firm in breaking laws they&#x27;ve been accused of breaking. It&#x27;s almost like an admission of guilt or attempt to obfuscate.<p>From a bank&#x2F;fund perspective - we get tons and tons of training about how we should not insider trade, money launder, etc. They have people who have gone to jail come give talks about how it&#x27;s not worth it, it was the biggest mistake of their lives, etc. Never ever, across half a dozen firms and 20 years, have I had training that was like &quot;so hey don&#x27;t use these terms that are used by insider traders because that would give the wrong impression when you are um.. doing your job and stuff..&quot;.<p>It&#x27;s stupid and hubristic. Just like the other stuff that came out of GOOG execs sending emails telling people not to put stuff in emails, lol. Cmon guys.</text></item><item><author>jsheller</author><text>For things like this, Matt Levine is insightful:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.bloomberglaw.com&#x2F;securities-law&#x2F;matt-levines-money-stuff-people-worry-about-the-basis-trade" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.bloomberglaw.com&#x2F;securities-law&#x2F;matt-levines-mo...</a><p>Summary is that not only can you not say things like &quot;lock up&quot; or &quot;market share&quot;, you also can&#x27;t tell employees not to say those things or you&#x27;ll see headlines like the posted article and have the government claiming at trial that you&#x27;re trying to hide evidence. This feels kind of odd and kind of unfair.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>caturopath</author><text>&gt; From a bank&#x2F;fund perspective - we get tons and tons of training about how we should not insider trade, money launder, etc. They have people who have gone to jail come give talks about how it&#x27;s not worth it, it was the biggest mistake of their lives, etc. Never ever, across half a dozen firms and 20 years, have I had training that was like &quot;so hey don&#x27;t use these terms that are used by insider traders because that would give the wrong impression when you are um.. doing your job and stuff..&quot;.<p>I got the same takeaway when I was at Google as when I was in the hedge fund space: be careful what you say, regulators and judges might not be very charitable. In both cases, the concept of something you say being in the New York Times was present for me.<p>The Googlewide training and messaging when I was there did focus on not using anti-trust-triggering _language_ over the specific acts, but I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s fair to interpret this as &quot;Violate anti-trust regulations&quot; but rather a recognition that the common fuck-up some random employee can make isn&#x27;t to commit a material anti-trust violation, but to provide nasty evidence by writing a puffy email about &quot;crushing the competition&quot;. Telling people to write emails about &quot;making users happy&quot; rather than &quot;owning the market&quot; is not telling people to behave badly.<p>I don&#x27;t know what you&#x27;re doing in finance, but it&#x27;s my understanding that folks who are actually involved in stuff where their job could look like insider trading probably do get subtler lines drawn than I ever sought (I was in systematic&#x2F;program trading.) Places where doing my job well could be confused for something bad, e.g., tax optimization, we did discuss how to properly communicate in order to avoid misunderstanding if a regulator, court, or journalist ever read our communication.</text></comment> | <story><title>Googlers told to avoid words like ‘share’ and ‘bundle,’ US says</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-09-14/googlers-told-to-avoid-words-like-share-and-bundle-us-says-lmj27bhl</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>steveBK123</author><text>Well put another way -
It&#x27;s one thing to tell your employees not to break the law. That&#x27;s good!<p>It&#x27;s another thing to tell your employees not to use a bunch of words while doing their job which implicate the firm in breaking laws they&#x27;ve been accused of breaking. It&#x27;s almost like an admission of guilt or attempt to obfuscate.<p>From a bank&#x2F;fund perspective - we get tons and tons of training about how we should not insider trade, money launder, etc. They have people who have gone to jail come give talks about how it&#x27;s not worth it, it was the biggest mistake of their lives, etc. Never ever, across half a dozen firms and 20 years, have I had training that was like &quot;so hey don&#x27;t use these terms that are used by insider traders because that would give the wrong impression when you are um.. doing your job and stuff..&quot;.<p>It&#x27;s stupid and hubristic. Just like the other stuff that came out of GOOG execs sending emails telling people not to put stuff in emails, lol. Cmon guys.</text></item><item><author>jsheller</author><text>For things like this, Matt Levine is insightful:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.bloomberglaw.com&#x2F;securities-law&#x2F;matt-levines-money-stuff-people-worry-about-the-basis-trade" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.bloomberglaw.com&#x2F;securities-law&#x2F;matt-levines-mo...</a><p>Summary is that not only can you not say things like &quot;lock up&quot; or &quot;market share&quot;, you also can&#x27;t tell employees not to say those things or you&#x27;ll see headlines like the posted article and have the government claiming at trial that you&#x27;re trying to hide evidence. This feels kind of odd and kind of unfair.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>blindriver</author><text>&gt; Never ever, across half a dozen firms and 20 years, have I had training that was like &quot;so hey don&#x27;t use these terms that are used by insider traders because that would give the wrong impression when you are um.. doing your job and stuff..&quot;.<p>Well, I have.<p>At a large well known tech company I used to work for, we were told not to use terms like &quot;killing our competitors&quot;, &quot;smoking them&quot;, etc. or any words that implied we had any dominance or monopoly in our industry. We even had a &quot;War Room&quot; undergo a name change. The reason is exactly the same as Google&#x27;s, where they were worried about reporters using it to twist narratives or in discovery by lawyers who came across emails.</text></comment> |
39,245,466 | 39,244,894 | 1 | 2 | 39,206,842 | train | <story><title>Show HN: Visualize the entropy of a codebase with a 3D force-directed graph</title><url>https://github.com/gabotechs/dep-tree</url><text>Hi HN! I&#x27;m Gabriel, the author of dep-tree (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;gabotechs&#x2F;dep-tree">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;gabotechs&#x2F;dep-tree</a>), and I wanted to show off this tool and explain why it&#x27;s being really useful at my current org for dealing with code complexity.<p>I work at a startup where business evolves really fast, and requirements change frequently, so it&#x27;s easy to end up with big piles of code stacked together without a clear structure, specially with tight deadlines. I made dep-tree [1] to help us maintain a clean code architecture and a logical separation of concerns between parts of the application, which is accomplished by: (1) Visualizing the source files and the dependencies between them using a 3D force-directed graph; and (2) Enforcing some dependency rules that allow&#x2F;forbid dependencies between different parts of the application.<p>The 3D force-directed graph visualization works like this: - It takes an entrypoint to the codebase, usually the main executable file or a library&#x27;s entrypoint (index.js, main.py, etc...) - It recursively crawls import statements gathering other source files that are being depended upon - It creates a directed graph out of that, where nodes are source files and edges are the dependencies between them - It renders this graph in the browser using a 3D force-directed layout, where attraction&#x2F;repulsion forces will be applied to each node depending on which other nodes it is connected to.<p>With this, properly decoupled codebases will tend to form clusters of nodes, representing logical parts that live together and are clearly separated from other parts, and tightly coupled codebases will be rendered without clear clustering or without a clear structural pattern in the node placement.<p>Some examples of this visualization for well-known codebases are:<p>TypeScript: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dep-tree-explorer.vercel.app&#x2F;api?repo=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2Fmicrosoft%2FTypeScript&amp;entrypoint=src%2Ftypescript%2Ftypescript.ts" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dep-tree-explorer.vercel.app&#x2F;api?repo=https%3A%2F%2F...</a><p>React: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dep-tree-explorer.vercel.app&#x2F;api?repo=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2Ffacebook%2Freact&amp;entrypoint=packages%2Freact-dom%2Findex.js" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dep-tree-explorer.vercel.app&#x2F;api?repo=https%3A%2F%2F...</a><p>Svelte: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dep-tree-explorer.vercel.app&#x2F;api?repo=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2Fsveltejs%2Fsvelte&amp;entrypoint=packages%2Fsvelte%2Fsrc%2Fcompiler%2Findex.js" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dep-tree-explorer.vercel.app&#x2F;api?repo=https%3A%2F%2F...</a><p>Langchain: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dep-tree-explorer.vercel.app&#x2F;api?repo=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2Flangchain-ai%2Flangchain&amp;entrypoint=libs%2Flangchain%2Flangchain%2F__init__.py" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dep-tree-explorer.vercel.app&#x2F;api?repo=https%3A%2F%2F...</a><p>Numpy: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dep-tree-explorer.vercel.app&#x2F;api?repo=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2Fnumpy%2Fnumpy&amp;entrypoint=numpy%2F__init__.py" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dep-tree-explorer.vercel.app&#x2F;api?repo=https%3A%2F%2F...</a><p>Deno: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dep-tree-explorer.vercel.app&#x2F;api?repo=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2Fdenoland%2Fdeno&amp;entrypoint=cli%2Fmain.rs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dep-tree-explorer.vercel.app&#x2F;api?repo=https%3A%2F%2F...</a><p>The visualizations are cool, but it&#x27;s just the first step. The dependency rules checking capabilities is what makes the tool actually useful in a daily basis and what keeps us using it every day in our CI pipelines for enforcing decoupling. More info about this feature is available in the repo: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;gabotechs&#x2F;dep-tree?tab=readme-ov-file#check">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;gabotechs&#x2F;dep-tree?tab=readme-ov-file#che...</a>. The code is fully open-source.</text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ytjohn</author><text>This is really cool. And as OP pointed out, I really like the pipeline integration. Like when linting catches function-level complexity, but in a cross functional way. I prefer to think of programs in layers where the top layers can import lower layers, but never the other way (and also very cautious on horizontal imports). Something like this would help track that. Unfortunately, I&#x27;d really need to support Go. I find it interesting the the code is written in Go, but doesn&#x27;t support Go. But I will watch this project.<p>From the visualization perspective, it reminds me a lot of Gource. Gource is a cool visualization showing contributions to a repo. You see individual contributors buzzing around updating files on per-commit and per-merge.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;acaudwell&#x2F;Gource">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;acaudwell&#x2F;Gource</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Show HN: Visualize the entropy of a codebase with a 3D force-directed graph</title><url>https://github.com/gabotechs/dep-tree</url><text>Hi HN! I&#x27;m Gabriel, the author of dep-tree (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;gabotechs&#x2F;dep-tree">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;gabotechs&#x2F;dep-tree</a>), and I wanted to show off this tool and explain why it&#x27;s being really useful at my current org for dealing with code complexity.<p>I work at a startup where business evolves really fast, and requirements change frequently, so it&#x27;s easy to end up with big piles of code stacked together without a clear structure, specially with tight deadlines. I made dep-tree [1] to help us maintain a clean code architecture and a logical separation of concerns between parts of the application, which is accomplished by: (1) Visualizing the source files and the dependencies between them using a 3D force-directed graph; and (2) Enforcing some dependency rules that allow&#x2F;forbid dependencies between different parts of the application.<p>The 3D force-directed graph visualization works like this: - It takes an entrypoint to the codebase, usually the main executable file or a library&#x27;s entrypoint (index.js, main.py, etc...) - It recursively crawls import statements gathering other source files that are being depended upon - It creates a directed graph out of that, where nodes are source files and edges are the dependencies between them - It renders this graph in the browser using a 3D force-directed layout, where attraction&#x2F;repulsion forces will be applied to each node depending on which other nodes it is connected to.<p>With this, properly decoupled codebases will tend to form clusters of nodes, representing logical parts that live together and are clearly separated from other parts, and tightly coupled codebases will be rendered without clear clustering or without a clear structural pattern in the node placement.<p>Some examples of this visualization for well-known codebases are:<p>TypeScript: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dep-tree-explorer.vercel.app&#x2F;api?repo=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2Fmicrosoft%2FTypeScript&amp;entrypoint=src%2Ftypescript%2Ftypescript.ts" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dep-tree-explorer.vercel.app&#x2F;api?repo=https%3A%2F%2F...</a><p>React: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dep-tree-explorer.vercel.app&#x2F;api?repo=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2Ffacebook%2Freact&amp;entrypoint=packages%2Freact-dom%2Findex.js" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dep-tree-explorer.vercel.app&#x2F;api?repo=https%3A%2F%2F...</a><p>Svelte: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dep-tree-explorer.vercel.app&#x2F;api?repo=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2Fsveltejs%2Fsvelte&amp;entrypoint=packages%2Fsvelte%2Fsrc%2Fcompiler%2Findex.js" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dep-tree-explorer.vercel.app&#x2F;api?repo=https%3A%2F%2F...</a><p>Langchain: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dep-tree-explorer.vercel.app&#x2F;api?repo=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2Flangchain-ai%2Flangchain&amp;entrypoint=libs%2Flangchain%2Flangchain%2F__init__.py" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dep-tree-explorer.vercel.app&#x2F;api?repo=https%3A%2F%2F...</a><p>Numpy: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dep-tree-explorer.vercel.app&#x2F;api?repo=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2Fnumpy%2Fnumpy&amp;entrypoint=numpy%2F__init__.py" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dep-tree-explorer.vercel.app&#x2F;api?repo=https%3A%2F%2F...</a><p>Deno: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dep-tree-explorer.vercel.app&#x2F;api?repo=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2Fdenoland%2Fdeno&amp;entrypoint=cli%2Fmain.rs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dep-tree-explorer.vercel.app&#x2F;api?repo=https%3A%2F%2F...</a><p>The visualizations are cool, but it&#x27;s just the first step. The dependency rules checking capabilities is what makes the tool actually useful in a daily basis and what keeps us using it every day in our CI pipelines for enforcing decoupling. More info about this feature is available in the repo: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;gabotechs&#x2F;dep-tree?tab=readme-ov-file#check">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;gabotechs&#x2F;dep-tree?tab=readme-ov-file#che...</a>. The code is fully open-source.</text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>sam_bristow</author><text>A tangentially related tool you can use to look at a repo over time is Git of Theseus[1]. It shows things like &quot;what percentage of the code in this repo survives 6 months.<p>[1]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;erikbern.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;12&#x2F;05&#x2F;the-half-life-of-code.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;erikbern.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;12&#x2F;05&#x2F;the-half-life-of-code.html</a></text></comment> |
22,446,441 | 22,445,763 | 1 | 2 | 22,443,772 | train | <story><title>A high school student created a fake 2020 candidate, and Twitter verified it</title><url>https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/28/tech/fake-twitter-candidate-2020/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mc32</author><text>Such farcical comedy. They verify a fake candidate but refuse to verify well known but “problematic” public figures...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>injb</author><text>Exactly. The article is part of the farce as I see it, in that they still continue to take Twitter seriously:<p>&gt;&gt;...that a teenager using next to no resources was able to quickly create a fake candidate in his free time and get it verified by Twitter raises questions about the company&#x27;s preparedness ...<p>Raises questions? On the contrary - it settles any questions about about their preparedness.<p>&gt;&gt;The creation of a fake candidate account is in violation of our rules and the account has been permanently suspended<p>So the punishment for not existing is, you get banned. That&#x27;s actually their response.<p>Next up: teenager uploads photo of all legitimate candidates to ThisPersonIsNotReal.com and gets them all perma-banned from Twitter...</text></comment> | <story><title>A high school student created a fake 2020 candidate, and Twitter verified it</title><url>https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/28/tech/fake-twitter-candidate-2020/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mc32</author><text>Such farcical comedy. They verify a fake candidate but refuse to verify well known but “problematic” public figures...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Pfhreak</author><text>These are two different issues. They both relate to verification, but they are orthogonal. An accident in verifying someone is a failure in the system&#x27;s ability to correctly find evidence.<p>Removing verification from people who violate TOS or spread messages that Twitter does not want to endorse is deliberate but unrelated.</text></comment> |
6,118,291 | 6,118,297 | 1 | 3 | 6,118,186 | train | <story><title>Patent US8296192 – Method for making money on the internet</title><url>http://www.google.com/patents/US8296192</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>michaelhoffman</author><text>This is another example of a patent with a specific scope being given an incredibly broad title.<p>This patent is actually on selling web site commenters the ability to have their comment appear in some kind of distinctive format, which might be a different font, or it might be appearing before the other comments.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>danmaz74</author><text>Are you trying to imply that claim 1 has anything, and I mean <i>anything</i>, inventive? BTW this was filed in 2011, not in 1996...</text></comment> | <story><title>Patent US8296192 – Method for making money on the internet</title><url>http://www.google.com/patents/US8296192</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>michaelhoffman</author><text>This is another example of a patent with a specific scope being given an incredibly broad title.<p>This patent is actually on selling web site commenters the ability to have their comment appear in some kind of distinctive format, which might be a different font, or it might be appearing before the other comments.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>charonn0</author><text>Still doesn&#x27;t seem like a very novel idea worthy of a patent.</text></comment> |
33,997,431 | 33,996,338 | 1 | 2 | 33,994,053 | train | <story><title>Two temperate Earth-mass planets orbiting the nearby star GJ1002</title><url>https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.07332</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>akiselev</author><text>Do you want an HN flamewar? Cause that’s how you start an HN flamewar! :-)<p>The warp factor table at [1] makes absolutely no sense.<p>Enterprise (the show) warp 4.6: 90 light years in 4 days.<p>Voyager warp 4.7: 10 light years in 3 weeks.<p>Enterprise (the show) warp 5: 50 light years in 3 months.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;memory-alpha.fandom.com&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Warp_factor" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;memory-alpha.fandom.com&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Warp_factor</a></text></item><item><author>vondur</author><text>At warp factor 5 it&#x27;s only 27 days away!</text></item><item><author>akiselev</author><text>The star system in question: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Gliese_1002" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Gliese_1002</a><p>Only 15.8 lightyears away. Unfortunately I can’t find an estimate for the age but it’s a main sequence red dwarf with under 0.35 solar masses which implies it can burn for much longer than our sun - on the order of trillions of years: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Red_dwarf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Red_dwarf</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>moffkalast</author><text>On that wiki entry:<p>&gt; Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual (p. 55) states the actual speed values of a warp factor are dependent upon interstellar conditions, for example gas density, electric and magnetic fields in different regions of the galaxy, and fluctuations of the subspace domain. Also quantum drag forces and motive power oscillation cause energy penalties to a ship using warp drive.<p>Depends on road conditions, very convenient for plot.</text></comment> | <story><title>Two temperate Earth-mass planets orbiting the nearby star GJ1002</title><url>https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.07332</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>akiselev</author><text>Do you want an HN flamewar? Cause that’s how you start an HN flamewar! :-)<p>The warp factor table at [1] makes absolutely no sense.<p>Enterprise (the show) warp 4.6: 90 light years in 4 days.<p>Voyager warp 4.7: 10 light years in 3 weeks.<p>Enterprise (the show) warp 5: 50 light years in 3 months.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;memory-alpha.fandom.com&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Warp_factor" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;memory-alpha.fandom.com&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Warp_factor</a></text></item><item><author>vondur</author><text>At warp factor 5 it&#x27;s only 27 days away!</text></item><item><author>akiselev</author><text>The star system in question: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Gliese_1002" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Gliese_1002</a><p>Only 15.8 lightyears away. Unfortunately I can’t find an estimate for the age but it’s a main sequence red dwarf with under 0.35 solar masses which implies it can burn for much longer than our sun - on the order of trillions of years: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Red_dwarf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Red_dwarf</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lucioperca</author><text>Well well as long as you do not understand warp technology and do not have warp technology no one will explain it to you - prime directive</text></comment> |
10,444,118 | 10,444,102 | 1 | 3 | 10,443,932 | train | <story><title>The Plum-O-Meter: Weighing Plums Using 3D Touch in Swift</title><url>http://flexmonkey.blogspot.com/2015/10/the-plum-o-meter-weighing-plums-using.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>cryptoz</author><text>That&#x27;s awesome. You can make a scale another way too, by using the barometer in the iPhone. You will need a ziplock or other airtight clear plastic bag, and an object of known weight for calibration.<p>You can measure the change in air pressure in the bag with your iPhone inside, and put your object to weigh on top of the bag (carefully balanced). There is a linear relationship between the rise in air pressure and the weight of the object on the bag (I tried this and it does work)</text></comment> | <story><title>The Plum-O-Meter: Weighing Plums Using 3D Touch in Swift</title><url>http://flexmonkey.blogspot.com/2015/10/the-plum-o-meter-weighing-plums-using.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>longlivegnu</author><text>Wow, time to build one of these for drugs</text></comment> |
8,804,080 | 8,803,561 | 1 | 2 | 8,803,389 | train | <story><title>Ask HN: How to use small chunks of time productively</title><text>We all know about Flow and how long of uninterrupted periods one needs to get into it. I am wondering about how to take advantage of the opposite of those long periods.<p>Due to many different unforeseen circumstances, I can&#x27;t get more than about 20-30 uninterrupted minutes at a time throughout the day from 7am-8PM. I am sure I am not alone in this.<p>All of the tricks of the trade (email once a day, phone off during set periods, scheduled alone time etc...) are not possible for the foreseeable future. I am wondering if anyone has any good ideas for how to be productive in those short windows. Assume that standard work&#x2F;sleep hours are enforced and that the job is as a Product Manager.</text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>drewcrawford</author><text>The best algorithm for interruptions I know is the one that computers use: the journaling filesystem [0].<p>The way it works is simple. When you want to do a disk operation, first, you write down in a special place (called a <i>journal</i>) what you are going to do, at a high level. &quot;I&#x27;m going to delete this directory and all its files.&quot; Then, you go through the steps of actually doing that. Finally, you record in your journal that&#x27;s what you did.<p>Now when power is interrupted during a disk operation you simply look at the journal and you can complete any operations that were in-flight at the time of the interruption. For example if the journal says &quot;Delete X folder&quot; and you see it still exists, now you can pick up where you left off.<p>The application to interruptible programming is straightforward. I have an actual paper journal and I will in a few words explain a task to the journal before I begin. Often I end up with a hierarchical journal, like<p><pre><code> get the unit tests to pass
the unit test doesn&#x27;t pass on OSX because postgres isn&#x27;t running
start postgres
the unit test doesn&#x27;t pass on Linux because the postgres credentials are wrong
refactor postgres credentials to work right on both platforms
one particular Linux machine still doesn&#x27;t work
Is it 32-bit related?
No
Are we using the same compiler on that machine?
</code></pre>
The overhead of recording this information is microscopic, and the benefit of returning from every interruption to a page or so of context is awesome. It&#x27;s almost better to be interrupted now, because I come back to a clearly defined problem, as opposed to starting on &quot;blank slate&quot; items with no direction.<p>As a side benefit, I now write really good commit messages, because I just write what my journal says I did. Which is quite a lot more detail than it was when I was trying to remember things after the fact.<p>[0] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journaling_file_system" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Journaling_file_system</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Ask HN: How to use small chunks of time productively</title><text>We all know about Flow and how long of uninterrupted periods one needs to get into it. I am wondering about how to take advantage of the opposite of those long periods.<p>Due to many different unforeseen circumstances, I can&#x27;t get more than about 20-30 uninterrupted minutes at a time throughout the day from 7am-8PM. I am sure I am not alone in this.<p>All of the tricks of the trade (email once a day, phone off during set periods, scheduled alone time etc...) are not possible for the foreseeable future. I am wondering if anyone has any good ideas for how to be productive in those short windows. Assume that standard work&#x2F;sleep hours are enforced and that the job is as a Product Manager.</text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>japhyr</author><text>My kid will turn 4 this spring, so I&#x27;ve been dealing with fragmented time constantly for the past few years. It&#x27;s been frustrating at times because I have tremendous mental energy, but can&#x27;t get much done because I can rarely get more than 20-30 minutes of uninterrupted time. I&#x27;ve done a few things to make effective use of the time I have:<p>- Learn to manage workspaces efficiently on my OS. I can&#x27;t afford to open all the files for a project and get significant work done, so I keep more projects open at a time. I went from typically using 4 workspaces before I had a kid, to consistently using 12 workspaces these days. It&#x27;s nice to have 3-4 projects open, spread across 2-3 workspaces each.<p>- Documentation of my own projects. I keep a text file for each project, with notes about what&#x27;s been working, where I&#x27;m getting stuck, and which resources are helpful. I&#x27;ve used more complicated tools at times such as issue trackers, but simple text files with names such as <i>notes</i>, <i>next</i>, and <i>mental_dump</i> still offer the least friction for recording the little notes that make it easier to pick up wherever I end up having to leave off when I get interrupted.<p>- Recognizing my mental state, and what I can get done in any given block of time. Sometimes that&#x27;s moving a project forward, sometimes that&#x27;s catching up on HN, sometimes it&#x27;s reading a technical article I&#x27;ve kept open for a while. Sometimes it&#x27;s recognizing I shouldn&#x27;t try to get anything done, and I should sit and stretch instead.<p>I find that I&#x27;m using each of these strategies in my day job as well. I&#x27;ve got to go serve some porridge now, but those are a few things I&#x27;ve come up with.</text></comment> |
1,825,873 | 1,825,897 | 1 | 2 | 1,825,511 | train | <story><title>BVP Anti-Portfolio</title><url>http://www.bvp.com/portfolio/antiportfolio.aspx</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>msy</author><text>That's some incredibly refreshing brutal honesty, makes me incalculably more tempted to invest with them than the usual 30 pages of financial-marketing bumph about said firms unblemished perfection, mathematically perfect risk system and strangely graphed double-digit alpha.</text></comment> | <story><title>BVP Anti-Portfolio</title><url>http://www.bvp.com/portfolio/antiportfolio.aspx</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>rfrey</author><text>"In some cases, we were making a conscious act of generosity to another, younger venture firm, down on their luck, who we felt could really use a billion dollars in gains."<p>Besides showing a fantastic human side of their firm, a post like this should be raw encouragement to entrepreneurs who, despite their bottomless well of optimism, once in a while get "no" fatigue.</text></comment> |
17,598,311 | 17,598,408 | 1 | 2 | 17,598,113 | train | <story><title>Trump is going after California’s clean car mandate</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/23/trump-is-going-after-californias-clean-car-mandate/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>triviatise</author><text>In wickard vs filburn the govt made the case that a wheat farmer that grew wheat only for himself was subject to the interstate commerce clause. The reasoning was that he impacted markets by not having to buy wheat and therefore he should be fined for violating farming restrictions. The supreme court ruled in favor of the US govt.<p>This expansion of the commerce clause could lead to trump being able to get something like this through. Be wary of expansions of federal power predicated on reinterpretation of the constitution.</text></comment> | <story><title>Trump is going after California’s clean car mandate</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/23/trump-is-going-after-californias-clean-car-mandate/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>elgenie</author><text>This is just nonsensical saber-rattling without Congressional action that stands approximately zero chance of taking place.<p>The relevant portion of the law [1] is pretty clear. The &quot;waiver&quot; granted to California is automatic, with no discretion for the EPA, &quot;if the State determines that the State standards will be, in the aggregate, at least as protective of public health and welfare as applicable Federal standards&quot;, unless the standards are &quot;arbitrary and capricious&quot; or not needed for &quot;compelling and extraordinary conditions&quot;. If they go to court with the current law, they&#x27;ll get laughed at and then either give up or get an early 2020s Supreme Court to upend over two hundred years of federalism jurisprudence. Good luck with that.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.law.cornell.edu&#x2F;uscode&#x2F;text&#x2F;42&#x2F;7543" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.law.cornell.edu&#x2F;uscode&#x2F;text&#x2F;42&#x2F;7543</a></text></comment> |
13,600,664 | 13,600,676 | 1 | 2 | 13,592,659 | train | <story><title>What Historians Wish People Knew About Drugs, Part II: Isaac Campos</title><url>https://pointsadhsblog.wordpress.com/2017/02/07/what-historians-wish-people-knew-about-drugs-part-ii-isaac-campos/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>iamcasen</author><text>I always find it funny how polarized the world is about drugs. Why is nearly every culture against it, with the exception of mostly indigenous tribes?<p>I can&#x27;t really imagine it&#x27;s for any other reason than to have a firmer control on the population, or an excuse to imprison people or criminalize them in a convenient way.<p>People are always going to take drugs, and by and large, they are harmless. I wish we could collectively just... get over it already.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jlos</author><text>Appropriate punishmments, which drugs should be illegal and under what circumstances is a totally different area of discussion but the general attitude of most societies to the recreation use of more powerful drugs is quite sensible. Drug use is also nearly universally accepted in medical circumstances so we aren&#x27;t really all that polarized.<p>&gt;&gt; Why is nearly every culture against it<p>Sobriety and self-control are essential to a functioning society and especially a liberal democracy. Freedom, to the extent we have it, requires that we can govern ourselves.<p>&gt;&gt; People are always going to take drugs, and by and large, they are harmless<p>This is an argument that has never made much sense to me. People are always going to commit every crime. Laws exist because people will break them. And laws are effective deterents if the penalties are appropriately harsh. Consider that alcohol consumption took almost a generation to return to its pre-prohibition levels (around the 60&#x27;s-70s&#x27;).<p>And most illegal drugs are demonstratively not harmless, to the point its almost axiomatic.</text></comment> | <story><title>What Historians Wish People Knew About Drugs, Part II: Isaac Campos</title><url>https://pointsadhsblog.wordpress.com/2017/02/07/what-historians-wish-people-knew-about-drugs-part-ii-isaac-campos/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>iamcasen</author><text>I always find it funny how polarized the world is about drugs. Why is nearly every culture against it, with the exception of mostly indigenous tribes?<p>I can&#x27;t really imagine it&#x27;s for any other reason than to have a firmer control on the population, or an excuse to imprison people or criminalize them in a convenient way.<p>People are always going to take drugs, and by and large, they are harmless. I wish we could collectively just... get over it already.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mattnewton</author><text>I imagine its more acceptable to prohibit or demonize affectations of a minority culture than it is to prohibit the culture itself. The original American war on drugs has testimonies to suggest it came from a desire to persecute blacks and anti-war protesters.<p>Anecdotally, where I live the city has passed ordnances against selling or displaying wire-wrap jewelry on the streets, and I can&#x27;t think of a reason to single that out except that, because the materials are cheap it is a common source of income for transient populations. You can&#x27;t make them illegal directly, but you can make all their activities illegal and arrest them when they inevitably break the law.</text></comment> |
9,343,732 | 9,343,760 | 1 | 2 | 9,342,994 | train | <story><title>I Quit: What really goes on at Apple</title><url>http://roadlesstravelled.me/2015/04/06/why-steve-jobs-motivated-me-to-quit-apple/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>archagon</author><text>In &quot;Becoming Steve Jobs&quot;, Tim Cook says the following in regards to Apple&#x27;s collusion scandal:<p>&quot;I know where Steve&#x27;s head was. He wasn&#x27;t doing anything to hold down salaries; it never came up. He had a simple objective: if we were working together on something, like with Intel, where we threw everything in the middle of the table and said, &#x27;let&#x27;s convert the Mac to the Intel processor&#x27;, well, when we did that, we didn&#x27;t want them poaching our employees that they were meeting, and they didn&#x27;t want us poaching theirs. Doesn&#x27;t it make sense that you wouldn&#x27;t, that it&#x27;s an OK thing? I don&#x27;t think for a minute he thought he was doing anything bad. And I don&#x27;t think he was thinking about saving any money. He was just very protective of his employees.&quot;<p>Ed Catmull of Pixar, a seemingly gentle person, is similarly unapologetic about the issue. Why is it that, at a certain level, intelligent company leaders seem to stop thinking of their employees as individuals and instead start thinking of them as company assets?<p>(I don&#x27;t mean this as an anti-Apple comment. In fact, I want to give Jobs, Cook, and Catmull the benefit of the doubt, in the sense that they probably <i>did</i> approach the issue from the perspective of doing what&#x27;s best for their companies, not as a quick way to save some paltry money. But that&#x27;s kind of the underlying problem, isn&#x27;t it? Once you&#x27;ve internalized the idea that your employees are company assets — that they aren&#x27;t hard workers who make the company tick, but that they literally <i>are</i> the company — it&#x27;s easy to slide down the slippery slope towards incredibly unethical and shady dealings like collusion. I wonder how this can be avoided.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lewisl9029</author><text>&quot;He was just very protective of his employees.&quot;<p>The word &quot;protective&quot; doesn&#x27;t seem apt here, as that would imply he had his employees&#x27; best interests at heart, when clearly he only had the company&#x27;s best interests in mind (which is fair, given that&#x27;s the job of the CEO).<p>Try &quot;possessive&quot;.</text></comment> | <story><title>I Quit: What really goes on at Apple</title><url>http://roadlesstravelled.me/2015/04/06/why-steve-jobs-motivated-me-to-quit-apple/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>archagon</author><text>In &quot;Becoming Steve Jobs&quot;, Tim Cook says the following in regards to Apple&#x27;s collusion scandal:<p>&quot;I know where Steve&#x27;s head was. He wasn&#x27;t doing anything to hold down salaries; it never came up. He had a simple objective: if we were working together on something, like with Intel, where we threw everything in the middle of the table and said, &#x27;let&#x27;s convert the Mac to the Intel processor&#x27;, well, when we did that, we didn&#x27;t want them poaching our employees that they were meeting, and they didn&#x27;t want us poaching theirs. Doesn&#x27;t it make sense that you wouldn&#x27;t, that it&#x27;s an OK thing? I don&#x27;t think for a minute he thought he was doing anything bad. And I don&#x27;t think he was thinking about saving any money. He was just very protective of his employees.&quot;<p>Ed Catmull of Pixar, a seemingly gentle person, is similarly unapologetic about the issue. Why is it that, at a certain level, intelligent company leaders seem to stop thinking of their employees as individuals and instead start thinking of them as company assets?<p>(I don&#x27;t mean this as an anti-Apple comment. In fact, I want to give Jobs, Cook, and Catmull the benefit of the doubt, in the sense that they probably <i>did</i> approach the issue from the perspective of doing what&#x27;s best for their companies, not as a quick way to save some paltry money. But that&#x27;s kind of the underlying problem, isn&#x27;t it? Once you&#x27;ve internalized the idea that your employees are company assets — that they aren&#x27;t hard workers who make the company tick, but that they literally <i>are</i> the company — it&#x27;s easy to slide down the slippery slope towards incredibly unethical and shady dealings like collusion. I wonder how this can be avoided.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>serve_yay</author><text>That quote is so nuts! He didn&#x27;t think for a minute he was doing anything wrong. That&#x27;s supposed to make me feel <i>better</i>?<p>I agree with you, the way these rich people look at employees as chess pieces rather than humans is awful. If you&#x27;re so afraid of someone quitting, then address that by making it worth their while not to quit! Not with collusion for god&#x27;s sake.<p>The fact that they call someone getting a better job &quot;being poached&quot; just says it all really. (If you use this phrase, take a moment to really think about what you are saying.)</text></comment> |
14,157,343 | 14,154,581 | 1 | 3 | 14,153,346 | train | <story><title>Analysis of the United Airlines passenger removal incident</title><url>https://hasbrouck.org/blog/archives/002292.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tuna-piano</author><text>I see this whole event kind of like the Rosa Parks situation. I&#x27;m not comparing the magnitude of injustice, just that (a)There was an unjust system and (b)It took an individual to stick up for the just result, even though it was breaking the rules.<p>Also, the author is wrong in this passage:<p>From the article: &quot;The gate agents offered offered $800 in airline scrip to anyone willing to deplane, which from past observation I think is the maximum that was allowed by United policy. That&#x27;s an illegal cheapskate policy for which United fully deserves the condemnation it has received, and the fines it should be assessed for violating Department of Transportation regulations on denied boarding compensation. Obviously, the gate agents should have been allowed to offer more, and in cash, as Federal law requires. &quot;<p>The truth:<p>The airline can try and get people to voluntary give up their seats with whatever method they would like. They can offer free kittens, cash, vouchers, etc. If no one accepts the airlines arbitrary amount, THEN DoT rules take effect, mandating the cash compensation amounts. So Dr Dao and the other 3 passengers that left the plane are entitled to a completely separate amount from what United offered.<p>From the DoT website[1]:<p>&quot;DOT has not mandated the form or amount of compensation that airlines offer to volunteers. DOT does, however, require airlines to advise any volunteer whether he or she might be involuntarily bumped and, if that were to occur, the amount of compensation that would be due. Carriers can negotiate with their passengers for mutually acceptable compensation.&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.transportation.gov&#x2F;airconsumer&#x2F;fly-rights" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.transportation.gov&#x2F;airconsumer&#x2F;fly-rights</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dalbasal</author><text>I&#x27;m not American, so I guess it&#x27;s a bit out of place for me to comment . That said, my reading of this incident is naked corporatism.<p>Laws, industry regulations, corporate policies and police enforcement are jumbled together, collaborating in a corporatist manner.<p>(A) The airline has policies and business practices such as overbooking &amp; &quot;must fly.&quot; These save money, get staff to their required destinations, whatever.<p>(B) Police enforcement is a required for these business practices to actually be practiced.<p>The only reason they can practically have this <i>involuntary removal by lottery</i> policy is police are willing to enforce it. If police of any city&#x2F;airport refused to execute these corporate polices, the policies would have to change.<p>That&#x27;s ultimately who outrage should be directed at, the police. Why did they come in the first place? Had a crime been committed? Passenger safety endangered? Police were summoned by a &quot;private&quot; company. They were informed that corporate policy required them to drag a passenger of the plane. They said OK, I guess that&#x27;s our job.<p>I&#x27;m not as concerned about United or anyone else having nasty policies. Many companies do. I care more about police enforcing those policies. There is no consumer protection against police action.</text></comment> | <story><title>Analysis of the United Airlines passenger removal incident</title><url>https://hasbrouck.org/blog/archives/002292.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tuna-piano</author><text>I see this whole event kind of like the Rosa Parks situation. I&#x27;m not comparing the magnitude of injustice, just that (a)There was an unjust system and (b)It took an individual to stick up for the just result, even though it was breaking the rules.<p>Also, the author is wrong in this passage:<p>From the article: &quot;The gate agents offered offered $800 in airline scrip to anyone willing to deplane, which from past observation I think is the maximum that was allowed by United policy. That&#x27;s an illegal cheapskate policy for which United fully deserves the condemnation it has received, and the fines it should be assessed for violating Department of Transportation regulations on denied boarding compensation. Obviously, the gate agents should have been allowed to offer more, and in cash, as Federal law requires. &quot;<p>The truth:<p>The airline can try and get people to voluntary give up their seats with whatever method they would like. They can offer free kittens, cash, vouchers, etc. If no one accepts the airlines arbitrary amount, THEN DoT rules take effect, mandating the cash compensation amounts. So Dr Dao and the other 3 passengers that left the plane are entitled to a completely separate amount from what United offered.<p>From the DoT website[1]:<p>&quot;DOT has not mandated the form or amount of compensation that airlines offer to volunteers. DOT does, however, require airlines to advise any volunteer whether he or she might be involuntarily bumped and, if that were to occur, the amount of compensation that would be due. Carriers can negotiate with their passengers for mutually acceptable compensation.&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.transportation.gov&#x2F;airconsumer&#x2F;fly-rights" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.transportation.gov&#x2F;airconsumer&#x2F;fly-rights</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dba7dba</author><text>&gt; Carriers can negotiate with their passengers for mutually acceptable compensation.&quot;<p>How do you negotiate with an entity that has the ability to call in the goons on you but you cannot?</text></comment> |
21,938,054 | 21,938,033 | 1 | 2 | 21,934,736 | train | <story><title>Ask HN: How do you protect your parents from tech scammers?</title><text>My dad recently received a call from “Windows support”. He figured out it was a scam call and so luckily no further harm came from it. However, how do you protect your parents from similar tech scams - short of locking down their computers with parental controls?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>dpcan</author><text>It&#x27;s all good until they don&#x27;t realize the thing that is happening is something they should call about.<p>You&#x27;ll sit down to talk to your parents someday and the damage will already be done.<p>The scammers are fast. They are good. They are like vultures hovering over the elderly. Our parents don&#x27;t see this stuff coming, and they comply too quickly.<p>My wife administers a nursing home and this is a daily problem. Their residents get calls from scammers constantly and they have to stop little old men and women from walking out of the building to catch a bus to go to the bank to send money to one scammer after another.<p>They are always telling them, no, the medicare office does not want you to put all your money in a government bank account for them to make deposits to - those are scammer accounts. No, a nephew you never heard about does NOT need to be bailed out of jail. No, you do not have to buy a pre-paid visa card over the phone in order to pay for medications. No, you never have to purchase a coupon for $50 that will save you $100 at the store, those don&#x27;t exist. It goes on and on and on and on.</text></item><item><author>thrownaway954</author><text>simple... they call me first.<p>if there is one thing i have _never_ done to my parents, or _anyone_ for that matter, is make fun of them if they call me and ask me for my professional opinion in tech matters. this has extended to situations when they think the situation is shoddy like they are being taken in a scam. i think _this_ is the single reason why my parents have never fell victim to scams. i feel that _most_ parents, or elderly people for that matter, fall victim cause they feel pressure from both ends... the first being the scammers themselves, the second being scared to ask _anyone_ if the situation is legit for fear of being made fun of.<p>_noone_ should feel scared of being ridicule when asking any question regarding their safety or well-being.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tialaramex</author><text>Definitely. But it may be enough depending on your parents, I think for now it&#x27;s enough for my mother for example. And the title question is &quot;How do you protect your parents?&quot; not &quot;How, hypothetically, should everybody&#x27;s parents be protected?&quot;<p>My mother phoned me because her laptop was yelling at her. Bad guys had taken over her browser (IE maybe? Or Edge? I genuinely don&#x27;t remember) and on start-up it was repeating a verbal message on maximum volume about how they now controlled her computer and she needed to call them to... well you know how these go.<p>But she had the sense to realise that even though it said she must call _them_ she could rather call _me_ and since it was yelling at her she put the laptop down and left it yelling into thin air. I walked her through the surprisingly easy process to disable it and get her back in her comfort zone. I explained what they&#x27;d tried to achieve, that they had tried to trick her into thinking they were more powerful than they really were - and praised her for taking the time to call me.</text></comment> | <story><title>Ask HN: How do you protect your parents from tech scammers?</title><text>My dad recently received a call from “Windows support”. He figured out it was a scam call and so luckily no further harm came from it. However, how do you protect your parents from similar tech scams - short of locking down their computers with parental controls?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>dpcan</author><text>It&#x27;s all good until they don&#x27;t realize the thing that is happening is something they should call about.<p>You&#x27;ll sit down to talk to your parents someday and the damage will already be done.<p>The scammers are fast. They are good. They are like vultures hovering over the elderly. Our parents don&#x27;t see this stuff coming, and they comply too quickly.<p>My wife administers a nursing home and this is a daily problem. Their residents get calls from scammers constantly and they have to stop little old men and women from walking out of the building to catch a bus to go to the bank to send money to one scammer after another.<p>They are always telling them, no, the medicare office does not want you to put all your money in a government bank account for them to make deposits to - those are scammer accounts. No, a nephew you never heard about does NOT need to be bailed out of jail. No, you do not have to buy a pre-paid visa card over the phone in order to pay for medications. No, you never have to purchase a coupon for $50 that will save you $100 at the store, those don&#x27;t exist. It goes on and on and on and on.</text></item><item><author>thrownaway954</author><text>simple... they call me first.<p>if there is one thing i have _never_ done to my parents, or _anyone_ for that matter, is make fun of them if they call me and ask me for my professional opinion in tech matters. this has extended to situations when they think the situation is shoddy like they are being taken in a scam. i think _this_ is the single reason why my parents have never fell victim to scams. i feel that _most_ parents, or elderly people for that matter, fall victim cause they feel pressure from both ends... the first being the scammers themselves, the second being scared to ask _anyone_ if the situation is legit for fear of being made fun of.<p>_noone_ should feel scared of being ridicule when asking any question regarding their safety or well-being.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>aswanson</author><text>It can also happen quickly with isolated parents if they&#x27;re at a transition point (still living home) and a scammer walks in. I had a friend who&#x27;s father was starting to suffer from dementia and had a woman who got control of some of his bank account info and was emptying him out. After my friend had his dad hospitalized, she was calling the hospital trying to get access to him and he had to get his room changed to an alias. Hospitals have frighteningly poor security measures.</text></comment> |
170,909 | 170,765 | 1 | 2 | 170,719 | train | <story><title>DHH: Are you sure you want to be in San Francisco?</title><url>http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/987-are-you-sure-you-want-to-be-in-san-francisco</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>rob</author><text>I think people are too focused on the logistics of "startups" and getting investors instead of actually creating websites that make money.<p>The fact of the matter is, there are tons of individuals across the country that make thousands of dollars a month creating websites <i>themselves</i>. They don't seek funding, they either hire a designer/programmer or do it themselves. They don't have a beta, they launch whatever they they are making. They don't have one obscure idea that they think they need to go out and pay $5,000 to form an official company for, but instead have a couple of useful websites that generate money. If they start to make a lot of money, then they'll open a LLC for tax benefits.<p>On top of that, I'd bet a majority of them have no computer science degree or the knowledge that the hackers here do, which means anyone here can make as much as them since they won't need to pay for programmers.</text></comment> | <story><title>DHH: Are you sure you want to be in San Francisco?</title><url>http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/987-are-you-sure-you-want-to-be-in-san-francisco</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>geebee</author><text>San Francisco is an interesting place. I live in SF, and I know a lot of programmers (and other tech workers) who live in SF, but I doubt that more than a third of them actually work in SF proper. Most of us engage in long and soul destroying drives to sterile office buildings in the midst of pedestrian-unfriendly parking lots on the peninsula and in the south bay. And we pay <i>a lot</i> for the privilege.<p>I think that other cities, like Portland, Seattle, Austin in the US (and maybe Barcelona, Copenhagen internationally) might actually be better places to work.<p>I wouldn't leave SF, but I grew up here and have family around. If I were starting out, I'd definitely consider other cities.</text></comment> |
21,430,076 | 21,428,934 | 1 | 2 | 21,427,059 | train | <story><title>NoSnoop – Find out if your HTTPS traffic is being monitored</title><url>https://www.trustprobe.com/fs1/nosnoop.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>fefe23</author><text>A tool like this should be running in a browser.<p>Otherwise, if the method of intercepting the traffic only manipulates the browser (for example a rogue extension or proxy setting you were not aware of), a standalone tool could not detect it. Right?<p>Also, I would generally avoid any security tools that do not come as source code. Mentioning that you are an infosec guy with 15 years of experience only makes this point hit even harder.</text></comment> | <story><title>NoSnoop – Find out if your HTTPS traffic is being monitored</title><url>https://www.trustprobe.com/fs1/nosnoop.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Mizza</author><text>Does anybody remember a project called &quot;Perspectives&quot;? It was a Firefox plugin that would verify your certificates and handshakes were the same as the ones other users were getting. Cool idea.</text></comment> |
39,039,590 | 39,039,484 | 1 | 2 | 39,039,209 | train | <story><title>EU NGI TALER will bring private and secure online payments to the Eurozone</title><url>https://taler.net/en/news/2024-02.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Animats</author><text><i>Where is the balance in my wallet stored?</i><p><i>Your wallet stores digital coins and thus ultimately your computer holds your balance. The exchange keeps funds matching all unspent coins in a settlement account.</i><p><i>What if my wallet is lost?</i><p><i>Since the digital coins of value in your wallet are anonymized, the exchange can not assist you in recovering a lost or stolen wallet. Just like with a physical wallet for cash, you are responsible for keeping it safe.</i><p><i>The risk of losing a wallet can be mitigated by making backups or keeping the balance reasonably low.</i>[1]<p>Ah. This is Chaum&#x27;s DigiCash, from 1990.[2] A good idea, too early.<p>It&#x27;s a system where coins are protected against double-spending by a database back-end.
Which is how some centrally issued cryptocurrencies actually work.<p>The half-anonymity is interesting. The recipient is not anonymous, but the sender is. That
may make it a politically acceptable substitute for cash.<p>It has the nice property that, unlike debit cards, etc., the recipient can&#x27;t take more of your money than you give them.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;taler.net&#x2F;en&#x2F;faq.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;taler.net&#x2F;en&#x2F;faq.html</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;DigiCash" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;DigiCash</a></text></comment> | <story><title>EU NGI TALER will bring private and secure online payments to the Eurozone</title><url>https://taler.net/en/news/2024-02.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>some-username</author><text>People should know that<p>1. it&#x27;s not based on any kind of blockchain,<p>2. it&#x27;s not a currency, it&#x27;s a payment system which you could use to transfer other currencies (euro, dollar, ...) and<p>3. unlike most blockchain-based currencies it offers anonymity (only for buyers, not for sellers, though)</text></comment> |
22,470,865 | 22,470,944 | 1 | 2 | 22,470,345 | train | <story><title>Twitter – “we are strongly encouraging all employees globally to work from home”</title><url>https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/keeping-our-employees-and-partners-safe-during-coronavirus.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cylinder</author><text>I don&#x27;t really see any reason why the US shouldn&#x27;t already be on lockdown the way most of Asia is.</text></item><item><author>idnefju</author><text>That isn&#x27;t the full sentence though, the sentence continues &quot;if they’re able.&quot;<p>It further states<p>&gt; Working from home will be mandatory for employees based in our Hong Kong, Japan, and South Korea offices due in part to government restrictions.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lanstin</author><text>We like to wait until it is too late before taking steps.</text></comment> | <story><title>Twitter – “we are strongly encouraging all employees globally to work from home”</title><url>https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/keeping-our-employees-and-partners-safe-during-coronavirus.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cylinder</author><text>I don&#x27;t really see any reason why the US shouldn&#x27;t already be on lockdown the way most of Asia is.</text></item><item><author>idnefju</author><text>That isn&#x27;t the full sentence though, the sentence continues &quot;if they’re able.&quot;<p>It further states<p>&gt; Working from home will be mandatory for employees based in our Hong Kong, Japan, and South Korea offices due in part to government restrictions.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Barrin92</author><text>because a lockdown doesn&#x27;t necessarily slow down the spread by much (some epidemiologists suggested the Chinese lockdown only slowed the virus by 20% or so) while it has drastic effects on supply chains and the economy in the country. The trade-off is probably not worth it.<p>I can also be plain counterproductive by making people suspicious of authorities, with the result of sick people avoiding registering their infections or seeking help.</text></comment> |
4,380,945 | 4,380,591 | 1 | 2 | 4,380,327 | train | <story><title>Curiosity rover: Martian solar day 2</title><url>http://www.360cities.net/image/curiosity-rover-martian-solar-day-2</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>nkoren</author><text>Note that this is actually missing a very major feature of the landscape: Aeolis Mons, or mount Sharp. The NASA panorama that this was adapted from failed to image the upper 2/5ths of the environment (roughly), and therefore did not capture the 15,000-foot mountain that is looming above the rover.<p>The maker of this panorama cleverly edited the image to show a false horizon where the mountain would actually be. It looks good, but gives the misleading impression that the rover is surrounded by a band of low hills, when the truth is rather different.<p>Here's a picture of mount Sharp, taken from a different camera than did the panorama:<p><a href="http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/images/?ImageID=4271" rel="nofollow">http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/images/?ImageID=4271</a><p>If you look at the foreground terrain, you'll see that it matches the WSW terrain of the OP. There should be a gobsmackingly big mountain there!</text></comment> | <story><title>Curiosity rover: Martian solar day 2</title><url>http://www.360cities.net/image/curiosity-rover-martian-solar-day-2</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>biesnecker</author><text>A high-res panorama of Mars, taken by a semi-autonomous robot that was landed via rocket sky crane, transmitted 14 light minutes across space, then transmitted on demand through a global information network to my computer.<p>And people say the future isn't what it was made out to be.</text></comment> |
17,336,409 | 17,336,475 | 1 | 2 | 17,335,856 | train | <story><title>Obfuscated Tiny C Compiler (2002)</title><url>https://bellard.org/otcc/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Ecco</author><text>Every other month an amazing project from Fabrice Bellard comes back under the spotlight on HN. I guess you could train a ML model on previous posts and make a automatic karma-generating machine :-)</text></comment> | <story><title>Obfuscated Tiny C Compiler (2002)</title><url>https://bellard.org/otcc/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>saagarjha</author><text>Also see the Tiny C Compiler, which was born out of this project and now is a pretty-full featured C compiler in its own right: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bellard.org&#x2F;tcc&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bellard.org&#x2F;tcc&#x2F;</a>. It has a couple pretty interesting features by virtue of its small size, such as being able to &quot;interpret&quot; C code as well as generating executables in-memory so they&#x27;re portable across platforms without a lot of work.</text></comment> |
37,839,453 | 37,838,047 | 1 | 3 | 37,832,017 | train | <story><title>Be an Open Source Absolutist</title><url>https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1711737838889242880</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>kromem</author><text>Nearly every comment is missing his take given the title here.<p>He&#x27;s not saying <i>everything</i> should be open source.<p>He&#x27;s saying that the right to have an open source version of anything is what we should be absolutists about.<p>So not that every OS, or encryption, or AI model should be open - but that people should fight and stand up for the right to have access to open OSes, encryption, or AI models if produced.<p>Windows can exist, but shouldn&#x27;t be able to prevent Linux from existing basically.<p>That&#x27;s the absolutism. He hasn&#x27;t suddenly turned into Stallman.</text></comment> | <story><title>Be an Open Source Absolutist</title><url>https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1711737838889242880</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>gentleman11</author><text>Speaking of which, doom being released as free software has led, indirectly, to this being nanoWADmo, national wad creating month, where people make doom maps. The community is thriving all these years later, you should see modern doom mega wads by people like skillsaw. There are hundreds of these projects</text></comment> |
18,319,131 | 18,318,532 | 1 | 3 | 18,317,128 | train | <story><title>Computing sin and cos in hardware with synthesisable Verilog</title><url>http://kierdavis.com/cordic.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>GeertB</author><text>While CORDIC is great for fixed point, it has limitations for floating point. The original 8087 fsin and fcos instructions used CORDIC, but later versions of the architecture switched to polynomial approximations, see <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;software.intel.com&#x2F;sites&#x2F;default&#x2F;files&#x2F;managed&#x2F;f8&#x2F;9c&#x2F;x87TrigonometricInstructionsVsMathFunctions.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;software.intel.com&#x2F;sites&#x2F;default&#x2F;files&#x2F;managed&#x2F;f8&#x2F;9c...</a>. Today it&#x27;s possible to develop implementations of these elementary functions on x86 CPUs that are more precise and more performant using regular multiply&#x2F;addition&#x2F;fused multiply add than even the current improved post-CORDIC fsin and fcos functions.<p>The main issue is that having an instruction executing a fixed-function block with a given (high) latency and little if any pipelining tends to be far worse than having many more fully pipelined multiply&#x2F;add instructions. The other issue is that argument reduction and approximation over the reduced domain are not independent. For some parts of the domain, such as computing the sine of a number very close to a multiple of pi, you may need to spend more cycles reducing the argument accurately to counter cancelation effects. However, as the reduced argument is then very close to zero, a simple polynomial suffices.<p>So, for most modern systems, I&#x27;d put the effort in efficient pipelined fused-multiply-add and use that for all elementary functions. Fixed-function hardware for elementary functions has generally been proved sub-optimal.</text></comment> | <story><title>Computing sin and cos in hardware with synthesisable Verilog</title><url>http://kierdavis.com/cordic.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>hatsunearu</author><text>Oh wow, I literally <i>just</i> finished my quadrature sinusoid DDS generator using MyHDL last night. I didn&#x27;t use CORDIC but rather a LUT. I found out I can optimize generating quadrature sinusoids by having two separate LUTs where each one stores from 0 to pi&#x2F;2 and the other from pi&#x2F;2 to pi, and this has an advantage because when the sine output takes inputs from the first LUT, the cos output takes inputs from the second LUT and vice versa, thus saving duplicates.<p>I&#x27;m still cleaning up the testbench code and I plan to put out a blog post here if y&#x27;all are interested: hatsunearu.github.io</text></comment> |
40,418,177 | 40,418,455 | 1 | 3 | 40,417,624 | train | <story><title>Lumina's legal threats and my about-face</title><url>https://trevorklee.substack.com/p/luminas-legal-threats-and-my-about</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jawns</author><text>Former journalist here. I spent lots of time in college learning about libel law, and then applying it in my professional life as an editor.<p>One thing about libel that many people don&#x27;t understand is that retraction and editing of the content isn&#x27;t a defense. So where it says &quot;note the libel-friendly phrasing&quot; and &quot;now edited to avoid any possible threats of libel&quot; and &quot;[editor’s note: removed a possibly incorrect claim]&quot; he could still be found guilty of libel if previously published assertions contained non &quot;libel-friendly&quot; phrasing. As long as a defamatory assertion was published <i>at some point</i>, you can still be found guilty of libel.<p>It probably goes without saying, but it is also not a defense to libel to say that you asserted something to be true merely because there was no evidence to the contrary. Absent a contractual or legal obligation, Lumina had no duty to engage with him and answer his questions. So if Lumina can provide evidence that Trevor asserted things that are demonstrably false, and they damaged Lumina&#x27;s business, then Trevor can&#x27;t argue as a defense that he merely had no way of knowing that they were false.<p>Finally, Trevor seems to be saying in his update that he was merely asking questions -- but it&#x27;s possible for a court to find that merely phrasing false, defamatory assertions in the form of a question is not an absolute protection against a libel claim.</text></comment> | <story><title>Lumina's legal threats and my about-face</title><url>https://trevorklee.substack.com/p/luminas-legal-threats-and-my-about</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>someotherperson</author><text>The writing by Trevor didn&#x27;t make me shy away from Lumina&#x27;s product, I was still quite excited. It would have been good to see scientific debate which could hopefully improve or clarify processes and safety.<p>Lumina&#x27;s court threats, however, would definitely make me shy away. I imagine for myself (and many others) that this would be the case.</text></comment> |
18,572,439 | 18,570,784 | 1 | 2 | 18,566,929 | train | <story><title>Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview</title><url>https://patentpandas.org/stories/company-patented-my-idea</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pmarreck</author><text>This is a level of douchiness I cannot fathom. What possesses these people to act in this fashion and how do they sleep at night? How is this not seen as clearly unethical behavior? A clear violation of Wheaton&#x27;s Law, here.<p>I mean... I could easily take that lollipop from that naïve baby in that baby carriage... but I don&#x27;t, simply because I&#x27;m Not A Dick™.<p>Did all of Silicon Valley get the wrong takeaway from the Apple&#x2F;Xerox thing, or something?</text></item><item><author>paul7986</author><text>I met&#x2F;had a similar experience with Google ATAP in 2013 (was Motorala ATAP then; Google recently bought them) though not for a job interview but to discuss working together to build our tech SpeakerBlast into the Moto X.<p>They asked if we ever thought about selling our technology to them before the meeting and at the meeting they baited us for how our tech worked saying we&#x27;d like to work with you tell us how it works. Once we did they left the room (Dugan&#x27;s 2nd right hand man at the time and another) &amp; 3 minutes later showed us the door saying the &quot;race is on.&quot;<p>They have since been awarded patents for audio syncing across phones.<p>Many here will say that&#x27;s just how Silicon Valley works.... takes advantage and stomps on the little guy innovators &amp; their dreams. That&#x27;s not professional and I met with many other companies like Samsung who acted with the utmost respect &amp; professionalism towards us. Yet, Google whose motto is &quot;Don&#x27;t Be Evil,&quot; can&#x27;t act in the same fashion?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mindslight</author><text>Why do people carry out muggings? Because they gain from it. Morality and legality aren&#x27;t just divergent - they&#x27;re <i>orthogonal</i>. Just like one can perform moral and immoral actions in physical space, one can perform moral or immoral actions using the legal system. Despite the goal of the legal system being to punish immoral behavior, being able to actually formalize that is up against the limit of complexity - as soon as rules are made to discourage bad behavior, the lawful bad actors move on to using those very laws to carry out attacks.<p>A major meta problem in the current system is that even when bad behavior is able to be formally judged and is called out, there is still little downside for getting caught. Under a functioning legal system, Google would have to make OP whole for their time&#x2F;stress&#x2F;legalfees&#x2F;etc incurred, and would therefore be discouraged from attacking again. Alas.<p>The individuals have no problem sleeping at night because there is no shortage of narratives to pick from to justify their actions - then further normalized by their peer group engaging in similar business. Nobody sees themselves as a bad person.</text></comment> | <story><title>Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview</title><url>https://patentpandas.org/stories/company-patented-my-idea</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pmarreck</author><text>This is a level of douchiness I cannot fathom. What possesses these people to act in this fashion and how do they sleep at night? How is this not seen as clearly unethical behavior? A clear violation of Wheaton&#x27;s Law, here.<p>I mean... I could easily take that lollipop from that naïve baby in that baby carriage... but I don&#x27;t, simply because I&#x27;m Not A Dick™.<p>Did all of Silicon Valley get the wrong takeaway from the Apple&#x2F;Xerox thing, or something?</text></item><item><author>paul7986</author><text>I met&#x2F;had a similar experience with Google ATAP in 2013 (was Motorala ATAP then; Google recently bought them) though not for a job interview but to discuss working together to build our tech SpeakerBlast into the Moto X.<p>They asked if we ever thought about selling our technology to them before the meeting and at the meeting they baited us for how our tech worked saying we&#x27;d like to work with you tell us how it works. Once we did they left the room (Dugan&#x27;s 2nd right hand man at the time and another) &amp; 3 minutes later showed us the door saying the &quot;race is on.&quot;<p>They have since been awarded patents for audio syncing across phones.<p>Many here will say that&#x27;s just how Silicon Valley works.... takes advantage and stomps on the little guy innovators &amp; their dreams. That&#x27;s not professional and I met with many other companies like Samsung who acted with the utmost respect &amp; professionalism towards us. Yet, Google whose motto is &quot;Don&#x27;t Be Evil,&quot; can&#x27;t act in the same fashion?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>everyone</author><text>Why do elite decision makers, CEO&#x27;s, boards of directors, make decisions that will certainly have adverse effects, that will literally <i>kill</i> people (eg. Trafigura), just to make more profit? Despite the fact that they are all already individually multi-millionaires and could not really materially improve their lives with more money?<p>I&#x27;ve ruminated on this.<p>I think the only reason that could explain such excess is competitiveness. To them, it is like a game. Its not about getting another yacht, its about beating the <i>other</i> guy. I think its the same mechanism that will drive someone to grind for many hours in an MMO or suchlike.</text></comment> |
9,714,905 | 9,714,843 | 1 | 2 | 9,714,770 | train | <story><title>Key for chromium's encrypted cookies store in Linux is “peanuts”</title><url>https://code.google.com/p/chromium/codesearch#chromium/src/components/os_crypt/os_crypt_posix.cc&q=peanuts&sq=package:chromium&type=cs&l=40</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>teraflop</author><text>This is misleading. If you follow the links to the Chromium bug tracker, you&#x27;ll note that Chrome integrates with the GNOME and KDE encrypted password managers when they&#x27;re available. If they&#x27;re not, it falls back to storing passwords itself with obfuscation, which is the best it can do. (On Windows and OS X, it uses CryptProtectData and the Keychain API, respectively.)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;code.google.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;chromium&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;LinuxPasswordStorage" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;code.google.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;chromium&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;LinuxPasswordStorage</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Key for chromium's encrypted cookies store in Linux is “peanuts”</title><url>https://code.google.com/p/chromium/codesearch#chromium/src/components/os_crypt/os_crypt_posix.cc&q=peanuts&sq=package:chromium&type=cs&l=40</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>userbinator</author><text>I guess a lot of others are also wondering, &quot;What&#x27;s the point?&quot;<p>If an attacker can read the file the cookies are stored in, you have already lost.<p>It even mentions &quot;obfuscation&quot; - which might be a <i>slight</i> obstacle if this was closed-source - but Chromium is open-source.</text></comment> |
24,818,851 | 24,818,539 | 1 | 2 | 24,817,173 | train | <story><title>Object Detection at 1840 FPS with TorchScript, TensorRT and DeepStream</title><url>https://paulbridger.com/posts/video-analytics-deepstream-pipeline/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mozak1111</author><text>I see this and I immediately think of &quot;trash sorting&quot; at ultra high speed. If one can combine this with a bunch of accurate (laser precision) air guns, to shoot and move individual pieces of trash you can sort through a truck load of trash in a matter of seconds, perhaps in the air while they are being dumped! compare this approach with how we are currently doing it [0] - Somebody should get Elon Musk on this project right away!<p>[0] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=QbKA9uNgzYQ" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=QbKA9uNgzYQ</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Cerium</author><text>Sorting by optical recognition and air guns to separate a falling curtain of product into two output streams is already a product. The development of these machines are the reason that 10 or 15 years ago you stopped seeing bad beans in bulk bean bags. I am involved in the tea industry where they are used to sort tea by grade - stems, bad leaves, broken leaves, full leaves.<p>Here is a diagram: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.satake-usa.com&#x2F;what-is-optical-sorting.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.satake-usa.com&#x2F;what-is-optical-sorting.html</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Object Detection at 1840 FPS with TorchScript, TensorRT and DeepStream</title><url>https://paulbridger.com/posts/video-analytics-deepstream-pipeline/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mozak1111</author><text>I see this and I immediately think of &quot;trash sorting&quot; at ultra high speed. If one can combine this with a bunch of accurate (laser precision) air guns, to shoot and move individual pieces of trash you can sort through a truck load of trash in a matter of seconds, perhaps in the air while they are being dumped! compare this approach with how we are currently doing it [0] - Somebody should get Elon Musk on this project right away!<p>[0] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=QbKA9uNgzYQ" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=QbKA9uNgzYQ</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ebalit</author><text>Not related to Elon but there is a company called Pellenc ST in the south of France that work exactly on this kind of problem. You can see a video of one of their machines here [0].<p>I work at an AI consultancy [1] that help them use deep neural nets in these high throughput and low latency conditions. It&#x27;s an interesting challenge and the performance than can be squeezed from modern hardware are indeed impressive.<p>0: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;XLciSGE82DY?t=280" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;XLciSGE82DY?t=280</a><p>1: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;neovision.fr" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;neovision.fr</a></text></comment> |
16,414,670 | 16,414,246 | 1 | 2 | 16,413,668 | train | <story><title>Elm changed my mind about unpopular languages</title><url>https://blog.realkinetic.com/elm-changed-my-mind-about-unpopular-languages-190a23f4a834</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mooreds</author><text>My question is, how will he feel about this three years from now? When he is trying to hire someone? Or when the folks behind Elm don&#x27;t update it as often as they should?<p>The problem with unpopular languages is twofold:<p>* lack of talent that can step right in and be effective<p>* lack of resources to push the language forward<p>The first can be remediated by planning to bring new hires up to speed, and just making that investment in them. (It can also be a useful filter, making sure you are hiring someone who is really interested to the company and is willing to make the time investment to learn what is probaly not a very portable skill.)<p>The second is a bigger problem, if the main sponsor of the language moves on. If the main sponsor is committed, then you&#x27;re probably fine. (I have no idea who pushes Elm forward, looks like there&#x27;s a foundation from the wikipedia page.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rtfeldman</author><text>Worth noting that in our experience, hiring has gotten <i>way</i> easier for us since we became an Elm shop. We really struggled to hire React engineers (who have a zillion positions to choose among - why would they pick ours?), whereas there seem to be a lot more great programmers who want to use Elm than there are companies hiring for Elm positions.<p>Here&#x27;s a verbatim quote from a cover letter (one I happened to be reading this morning; we see a lot of similar stories):<p>&gt; Despite my valiant evangelizing of Elm, my company has decided to embrace React over Elm, so I am looking for opportunities to develop Elm professionally.<p>Our Head of Talent said she&#x27;d never seen an inbound pipeline as strong as ours, and the #1 reason people cite for wanting to apply is Elm. The &quot;Python Paradox&quot;[0] is real!<p>[0] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.paulgraham.com&#x2F;pypar.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.paulgraham.com&#x2F;pypar.html</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Elm changed my mind about unpopular languages</title><url>https://blog.realkinetic.com/elm-changed-my-mind-about-unpopular-languages-190a23f4a834</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mooreds</author><text>My question is, how will he feel about this three years from now? When he is trying to hire someone? Or when the folks behind Elm don&#x27;t update it as often as they should?<p>The problem with unpopular languages is twofold:<p>* lack of talent that can step right in and be effective<p>* lack of resources to push the language forward<p>The first can be remediated by planning to bring new hires up to speed, and just making that investment in them. (It can also be a useful filter, making sure you are hiring someone who is really interested to the company and is willing to make the time investment to learn what is probaly not a very portable skill.)<p>The second is a bigger problem, if the main sponsor of the language moves on. If the main sponsor is committed, then you&#x27;re probably fine. (I have no idea who pushes Elm forward, looks like there&#x27;s a foundation from the wikipedia page.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>robertkluin</author><text>I&#x27;m a partner at Real Kinetic.<p>At Real Kinetic we&#x27;ve actually been internally using Elm for 2 years. While at Workiva, I OKed some internal projects to use Elm as well. Your observations are absolutely correct.<p>We have actually found on-boarding engineers to Elm is fast and relatively easy. There is a very predictable learning curve engineers seem to follow. That&#x27;s one of the things we like about Elm versus some other solutions. The even bigger observation I&#x27;ve made is that all of the engineers we&#x27;ve exposed have become fans, like Alex.<p>The lack of resources and other companies contributing to the community and libraries is a challenge, and a concern. As an example, we use Elm Native UI for some projects. It has a limited user-base, which has at times been frustrating. We&#x27;re hoping to see more adoption of Elm to help mitigate this problem.</text></comment> |
20,951,346 | 20,949,903 | 1 | 2 | 20,948,826 | train | <story><title>Can I Email: ‘Can I Use’ for email</title><url>https://www.caniemail.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ktpsns</author><text>It would be really nice to have a small and simple markup language, say some markdown standard, to be the layouting language for E-Mails. No (external) images, just links, lists, headings, basic formatting.<p>HTML E-Mails are a security nightmare, even if &quot;only&quot; CSS is &quot;allowed&quot; and JS&#x2F;iframes&#x2F;external images are not loaded.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jcranmer</author><text>You&#x27;re basically advocating for text&#x2F;richtext (aka text&#x2F;enriched), which was originally proposed explicitly as a replacement for HTML in email. It failed essentially because everyone who didn&#x27;t want HTML wanted only plain text, and everyone who wanted something like HTML was happy to just use HTML.<p>Factoid of the day: Netscape added support for a &lt;blink&gt; tag to text&#x2F;enriched bodies, and that support remains in every client that&#x27;s still using Netscape&#x27;s MIME code. The comment above this code just says: &quot;Of course, both text&#x2F;richtext and text&#x2F;enriched must be enhanced <i>somehow</i>... Or else what would people think.&quot;</text></comment> | <story><title>Can I Email: ‘Can I Use’ for email</title><url>https://www.caniemail.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ktpsns</author><text>It would be really nice to have a small and simple markup language, say some markdown standard, to be the layouting language for E-Mails. No (external) images, just links, lists, headings, basic formatting.<p>HTML E-Mails are a security nightmare, even if &quot;only&quot; CSS is &quot;allowed&quot; and JS&#x2F;iframes&#x2F;external images are not loaded.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cygned</author><text>No markdown, but we had success with this one: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mjml.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mjml.io&#x2F;</a><p>Try out the online examples.</text></comment> |
33,396,419 | 33,395,052 | 1 | 2 | 33,393,257 | train | <story><title>Talking to strangers can make us smarter?</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20221026-why-talking-to-strangers-can-make-us-happier</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nonrandomstring</author><text>I loved the understated humour of:<p><pre><code> &quot;Some social scientists believe teaching kids that literally
everyone in the world they hadn&#x27;t met is dangerous may have been
actively harmful.&quot;
</code></pre>
Harms take many guises. Mutual distrust drives people to mediate and
avoid others through technology as a psychological shield.<p>That breeds bad technology which divides and dehumanises, and feeds the
loop.<p>Here on HN some people have argued for using cashless and automatic
systems, not because they are &quot;more efficient&quot; but as a way to avoid
smalltalk with a cashier or waiter. Having a map&#x2F;GPS smartphone is
handy, but it stops casual interaction for directions or local advice.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>polio</author><text>I enjoy thinking of trust as a social technology. We&#x27;ve seen how ridiculous a trustless transaction system would look with Bitcoin having to validate things to a ridiculous extent. Similarly, a society that distrusts wastes a lot of time and energy doing things by themselves, which is inefficient in the best case and leads down harmful and delusional avenues in the worst. We should be engineering our cities and communities with the intention of creating surface area for trust to emerge (e.g. public transit where we can just coexist in the same space), rather than mandating that trust ought to occur, since that isn&#x27;t how brains work. Give strangers the opportunity to see that others are not so bad. We all prosper, economically and spiritually.</text></comment> | <story><title>Talking to strangers can make us smarter?</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20221026-why-talking-to-strangers-can-make-us-happier</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nonrandomstring</author><text>I loved the understated humour of:<p><pre><code> &quot;Some social scientists believe teaching kids that literally
everyone in the world they hadn&#x27;t met is dangerous may have been
actively harmful.&quot;
</code></pre>
Harms take many guises. Mutual distrust drives people to mediate and
avoid others through technology as a psychological shield.<p>That breeds bad technology which divides and dehumanises, and feeds the
loop.<p>Here on HN some people have argued for using cashless and automatic
systems, not because they are &quot;more efficient&quot; but as a way to avoid
smalltalk with a cashier or waiter. Having a map&#x2F;GPS smartphone is
handy, but it stops casual interaction for directions or local advice.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nixpulvis</author><text>Yes!<p>I think people are so afraid to be wrong or give bad advice since it&#x27;s all to easy to be disproven (you said the street was X but it&#x27;s actually Y, never-mind the fact that X runs parallel to Y and is just one block away) that they would rather remain silent. We used to learn better by being OK to be slightly wrong, then taking no offense when offered a gentle correction.</text></comment> |
11,012,974 | 11,012,389 | 1 | 2 | 11,006,254 | train | <story><title>Treasure in a Cornfield</title><url>http://imgur.com/gallery/tj4Ef</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>digibri</author><text>I&#x27;ve lived in Kansas City for years. The Steamboat Arabia museum is a great experience. In the early days, one of the original guys would often be there and tell the whole story to groups.<p>Interestingly, they had a lot to learn about saving the artifacts. Since everything was submerged for so long in fresh water mud the wood artifacts would shrivel up when they dried up. For many months, they stored all the wood artifacts in one of the guy&#x27;s backyard pool until they could learn how to properly transition the wood artifacts to a restored state.</text></comment> | <story><title>Treasure in a Cornfield</title><url>http://imgur.com/gallery/tj4Ef</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jcromartie</author><text>This is a fantastic illustration of geological processes. Sometimes I look at hillsides and geological layers and wonder how they could ever be built up so much. How could hundreds of feet of rock be deposited little by little, to make such thick layers? Well, here it is. A boat that sank in a river is 49 feet below a cornfield only a few human generations later. Amazing.</text></comment> |
7,846,544 | 7,846,444 | 1 | 3 | 7,845,921 | train | <story><title>U.S. Marshals Seize Cops’ Spying Records to Keep Them From the ACLU</title><url>http://www.wired.com/2014/06/feds-seize-stingray-documents/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>wmeredith</author><text>Vote with your dollars, it&#x27;s likely the most important vote you&#x27;ve got.<p>The ACLU single donation page is here: <a href="https://www.aclu.org/secure/make-gift-aclu-3?s_src=UNS140001C00" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aclu.org&#x2F;secure&#x2F;make-gift-aclu-3?s_src=UNS140001...</a><p>The ACLU membership page is here: <a href="https://www.aclu.org/secure/our-civil-liberties-are-under-attack-1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aclu.org&#x2F;secure&#x2F;our-civil-liberties-are-under-at...</a><p>I have been an ACLU member for years, but am otherwise unaffiliated. Crap like this is why I&#x27;m a member. They are on the front lines.</text></comment> | <story><title>U.S. Marshals Seize Cops’ Spying Records to Keep Them From the ACLU</title><url>http://www.wired.com/2014/06/feds-seize-stingray-documents/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ceejayoz</author><text>&gt; In the Sarasota case, the U.S. Marshals Service claimed it owned the records Sarasota police offered to the ACLU because it had deputized the detective in the case, making all documentation in the case federal property.<p>This is pretty outrageous.</text></comment> |
17,536,101 | 17,535,231 | 1 | 2 | 17,534,985 | train | <story><title>Unidentified Plane-Bae Woman’s Statement Confirms the Worst</title><url>https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/07/unidentified-plane-bae-womans-statement-confirms-the-worst/565139/?single_page=true</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sorenjan</author><text>I hate how everything has to be public nowadays. If you do something silly or embarrassing you need to take into account that everybody have cameras with them at all times, and enough people have no qualms about posting others private moments online for the world to see. I&#x27;m a private person, I don&#x27;t want videos or pictures of me available for everyone. To be constantly surrounded by internet connected cameras definitely makes me less likely to risk look like an ass, even among friends.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rdiddly</author><text>What gets me about this is how you can be as scrupulous and disciplined as you please about staying off social media, wiping up your digital footprints, etc., but then as soon as you go out in public, someone can just blithely make the decision for you, to put you on social media.<p>To say nothing of all the proliferating random stationary surveillance cameras and police bodycams out there. Which if you&#x27;re &quot;fortunate&quot; enough to live in Orlando FL or Washington County OR, is now connected to a facial recognition ML model.<p>Where is the backlash, where is the outrage about this? Why do people just stupidly let dumb shit proliferate, and only years later say &quot;Oops we did it again?&quot;</text></comment> | <story><title>Unidentified Plane-Bae Woman’s Statement Confirms the Worst</title><url>https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/07/unidentified-plane-bae-womans-statement-confirms-the-worst/565139/?single_page=true</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sorenjan</author><text>I hate how everything has to be public nowadays. If you do something silly or embarrassing you need to take into account that everybody have cameras with them at all times, and enough people have no qualms about posting others private moments online for the world to see. I&#x27;m a private person, I don&#x27;t want videos or pictures of me available for everyone. To be constantly surrounded by internet connected cameras definitely makes me less likely to risk look like an ass, even among friends.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sp332</author><text>Telling a few friends used to be the default, and telling <i>everybody</i> took more effort. Now the default is for people to share their comments with ~2 billion people. It&#x27;s actually more work to tell only your friends.</text></comment> |
36,004,029 | 36,003,102 | 1 | 3 | 35,999,438 | train | <story><title>Satellites reveal widespread decline in global lake water storage</title><url>https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abo2812</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ooz16</author><text>Genuine question here. What would be the expected change over the same period? The abstract says 53% of lakes saw declines...does that mean 47% saw no change or gains? If so, that seems pretty close to net stable to me globally. Or frankly what we would expect to see (some gains, some losses)<p>Also, this is stated later in the doc:<p>&quot;Between 1984 and 2015, a loss of 90,000 km2 of permanent water area was observed by satellites—an area equivalent to the surface of Lake Superior, whereas 184,000 km2 of new water bodies, primarily reservoirs, were formed elsewhere (14)&quot;<p>My first impression was that this means there has been a growth in total permanent water area from 1984-2015. Am I just reading this wrong?</text></comment> | <story><title>Satellites reveal widespread decline in global lake water storage</title><url>https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abo2812</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Mbioguy</author><text>History may not repeat but it does rhyme. Harappan civ thought to have declined due to less water. Petra once thrived due to a system of dams, cisterns, and water conduits, but never-repaired damage after an earthquake and increasing aridity meant it less and less supported urbanism and so declined. The Soviets overexploited the Aral Sea which has yet to (and will likely never) recover. It is now spoiling the surrounding region with dust storms carrying with them pollutants from industry that settled in the drying lakebed. Owens Lake in California once fed LA, but when it dried up it too caused polluting dust storms.
Gov&#x27;t has not learned from this history. The western US&#x27;s water rights are outdated to the point of creating utterly backwards incentives. For example, Utah has use-it-or-lose-it water rights and the lion&#x27;s share of water in the Great Salt Lake&#x27;s watershed gets used to grow alfalfa. Alfalfa itself isn&#x27;t necessarily a bad choice if you&#x27;re going to grow stuff in an arid region, the issue is more how much of it is grown and in a wasteful way (little to no drip irrigation and no incentive to start using it, instead farmers are incentivized to flood areas during times of heavy rainfall or risk losing water rights). However even city and residential water use (a much smaller %) is still per capita wasteful compared to nearby Vegas which has done a much better job of becoming efficient in its water use. Utah got lucky this year in its snowpack, potentially buying some time to change, but is that gonna happen? No, they&#x27;re praying for moisture and thinking their prayers got answered. Any guesses how long it&#x27;ll be before the Great Salt Lake becomes the US&#x2F;capitalism&#x27;s Aral Sea? 5 years, 10, 15? Any techies wanting to move out here might think twice, homes without water and with seasonal arsenic-laden dust clouds probably won&#x27;t have much resale value.</text></comment> |
31,247,492 | 31,246,464 | 1 | 3 | 31,219,552 | train | <story><title>What I wish I knew when learning OCaml (2018)</title><url>https://baturin.org/docs/ocaml-faq/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>bmc7505</author><text>ML really is a beautiful and under-appreciated family of languages. Haskell is a bit too supernatural for my taste, but ML and its derivatives hit the sweet spot between powerful type systems and natural syntax. As a Kotlin developer, I find reading OCaml code a breeze and the compiler is refreshingly snappy (much faster than Gradle). I just wish it had better developer tools.</text></comment> | <story><title>What I wish I knew when learning OCaml (2018)</title><url>https://baturin.org/docs/ocaml-faq/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dgan</author><text>TIL that Ocaml&#x2F;SML are compiled into lambda expressions... I literally thought lambda calculus is only used in CS classes.<p>OCaml&#x27;s syntax is pretty annoying but type inference is actually amazing.. I changed my mind over it, as previously I thought explicit type annotations are simpler. Turns out, it would be humanly impossible to explicitly annotate every piece of OCaml, just let the compiler do it for you</text></comment> |
16,865,924 | 16,864,630 | 1 | 3 | 16,863,591 | train | <story><title>On becoming a better developer (2015)</title><url>https://gist.github.com/prakhar1989/1b0a2c9849b2e1e912fb</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>edanm</author><text>You have to decide what exactly it means to be a better developer, and what exactly <i>you</i> specifically want to achieve.<p>I personally made the choice, a few years ago, to focus a lot less on being a &quot;great developer&quot; in terms of writing the best code, and focus almost solely on &quot;what can I actually achieve with code I write&quot;. That&#x27;s why I refocused on learning new <i>domains</i> rather than deepen my knowledge about programming, e.g. learning ML and Data Science, instead of learning new languages or getting better at software design principles.<p>The end result is that, while I might never achieve <i>mastery</i> of software architecture or of Python or other more software development oriented things, I can effectively do new things that I had no idea how to do before.<p>Another example - let&#x27;s say you know just Python. In choosing between learning Haskell or learning 3d programming, learning Haskell will definitely deepen your knowledge of programming, of languages, of functional programming. But, end result, you won&#x27;t be able to make something qualitatively different that you couldn&#x27;t make using Python. Learning 3d <i>will</i> allow you to make new things.<p>Note: I&#x27;m <i>not</i> saying one thing is better than the other. Different people care about different things. I&#x27;ll also point out that I&#x27;ve been a developer for 20 years, so I hopefully achieved a pretty high level of knowledge in many purely software development ideas before branching off to learn whole new domains. :)</text></comment> | <story><title>On becoming a better developer (2015)</title><url>https://gist.github.com/prakhar1989/1b0a2c9849b2e1e912fb</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>twblalock</author><text>In my career, the biggest factor in my growth as a developer has been working with better developers. To work closely with someone who is really good at what they do is the best education you can get.</text></comment> |
16,052,477 | 16,052,432 | 1 | 3 | 16,051,062 | train | <story><title>Basecamp doesn’t employ anyone in SF, but now we pay everyone as though all did</title><url>https://m.signalvnoise.com/basecamp-doesnt-employ-anyone-in-san-francisco-but-now-we-pay-everyone-as-though-all-did-3ee87013cfc2</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>overcast</author><text>No way on this earth, $150,000 is anywhere near normal in the Bay Area, let alone in other less expensive metros. Most people are absolutely not making that much money writing code. People have serious tunnel vision on HN.</text></item><item><author>pmorici</author><text>150k sounds way low for the Bay Area you can get that in other much less expensive metro areas.</text></item><item><author>CiPHPerCoder</author><text>People often tell me, &quot;Yeah the Bay Area is expensive but the tech salaries make up for it.&quot;<p>By being able to get a Bay Area salary (e.g. $150k&#x2F;year) while working from anywhere in the world (e.g. any city where $40k&#x2F;year is considered comfortable living and $80k&#x2F;year is considered &quot;well off&quot;), the incentive to continue saturating the area with local talent decreases.<p>Same salary, lower cost of living, AND the ability to be a homeowner in the foreseeable future? That&#x27;s a hard deal to beat.</text></item><item><author>flexie</author><text>Basecamp is selling all over the world. What should their salary level be like? Bay Area because that’s where a lot of the larger tech companies are situated? Washington State (Microsoft, Amazon)? Copenhagen (where one founder, DHH is from)? Sudney where one major competitor, Jira, is from? I’d say whatever the market is that they hire in. If you wanna pay above market rate, by all means do that. If you can attract employees in Chicago for less than Copenhagen or Bay Area salaries, then by all means, feel free to do that. Employees are free to leave.<p>What I don’t see is why all companies should follow Bay Area salaries.</text></item><item><author>jasonkester</author><text>Well done. Personally, as a remote developer, I always make a point of billing at my &quot;Bay Area Rate&quot;, even though I&#x27;ve never lived there.<p>There was a point, early in my guy-on-the-beach-with-a-laptop era where I would cut my bill rate in half while working from the beach with a laptop. Clients were happy about that, and it more than paid for beers and thatch huts. Then one time I tried <i>not</i> cutting my bill rate in half on a proposal. Nobody but me seemed to notice. So now I don&#x27;t do that anymore.<p>As the article so nicely points put, the work you&#x27;re doing is exactly the same regardless of where you do it from. Charge accordingly.<p>It&#x27;s true that living costs are less in other places. It makes a lot more sense for that difference to be captured by <i>me</i> rather than somebody else&#x27;s company.<p>Glad to see these guys stepping up and setting an example from the employer side.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>compumike</author><text>(Disclosure: I work for Triplebyte and helped publish our salary dataset recently.)<p>$150K is below the median base salary offer we see for <i>senior</i> software engineers. See <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;triplebyte.com&#x2F;software-engineer-salary" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;triplebyte.com&#x2F;software-engineer-salary</a> -- with a few notes:<p>* This is base salary only. Total compensation is significantly higher once you include factors like equity compensation, bonuses, benefits.<p>* This does vary a lot with stage of company. Earlier-stage startups use more equity and less salary. We work with companies from pre-series A to public megacorp.<p>* This is for senior engineers. Less experienced engineers do typically earn less.<p>* We&#x27;re fairly selective in the engineers we work with, but it&#x27;s based on the abilities you demonstrate in our multiple-choice quiz and technical interview, rather than your credentials.</text></comment> | <story><title>Basecamp doesn’t employ anyone in SF, but now we pay everyone as though all did</title><url>https://m.signalvnoise.com/basecamp-doesnt-employ-anyone-in-san-francisco-but-now-we-pay-everyone-as-though-all-did-3ee87013cfc2</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>overcast</author><text>No way on this earth, $150,000 is anywhere near normal in the Bay Area, let alone in other less expensive metros. Most people are absolutely not making that much money writing code. People have serious tunnel vision on HN.</text></item><item><author>pmorici</author><text>150k sounds way low for the Bay Area you can get that in other much less expensive metro areas.</text></item><item><author>CiPHPerCoder</author><text>People often tell me, &quot;Yeah the Bay Area is expensive but the tech salaries make up for it.&quot;<p>By being able to get a Bay Area salary (e.g. $150k&#x2F;year) while working from anywhere in the world (e.g. any city where $40k&#x2F;year is considered comfortable living and $80k&#x2F;year is considered &quot;well off&quot;), the incentive to continue saturating the area with local talent decreases.<p>Same salary, lower cost of living, AND the ability to be a homeowner in the foreseeable future? That&#x27;s a hard deal to beat.</text></item><item><author>flexie</author><text>Basecamp is selling all over the world. What should their salary level be like? Bay Area because that’s where a lot of the larger tech companies are situated? Washington State (Microsoft, Amazon)? Copenhagen (where one founder, DHH is from)? Sudney where one major competitor, Jira, is from? I’d say whatever the market is that they hire in. If you wanna pay above market rate, by all means do that. If you can attract employees in Chicago for less than Copenhagen or Bay Area salaries, then by all means, feel free to do that. Employees are free to leave.<p>What I don’t see is why all companies should follow Bay Area salaries.</text></item><item><author>jasonkester</author><text>Well done. Personally, as a remote developer, I always make a point of billing at my &quot;Bay Area Rate&quot;, even though I&#x27;ve never lived there.<p>There was a point, early in my guy-on-the-beach-with-a-laptop era where I would cut my bill rate in half while working from the beach with a laptop. Clients were happy about that, and it more than paid for beers and thatch huts. Then one time I tried <i>not</i> cutting my bill rate in half on a proposal. Nobody but me seemed to notice. So now I don&#x27;t do that anymore.<p>As the article so nicely points put, the work you&#x27;re doing is exactly the same regardless of where you do it from. Charge accordingly.<p>It&#x27;s true that living costs are less in other places. It makes a lot more sense for that difference to be captured by <i>me</i> rather than somebody else&#x27;s company.<p>Glad to see these guys stepping up and setting an example from the employer side.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>carlivar</author><text>May want to browse the countless compensation discussions in the app Blind. Lots of Bay Area offer info there.<p>Note that salary is a misnomer. The term now is &quot;total compensation&quot; which has a significant RSU portion.</text></comment> |
41,416,544 | 41,415,569 | 1 | 3 | 41,415,144 | train | <story><title>E Ink faces growing competition in the "paper-like" display space</title><url>https://liliputing.com/e-ink-faces-growing-competition-in-the-paper-like-display-space/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>londons_explore</author><text>Readers might be interested in this:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aliexpress.com&#x2F;item&#x2F;1005006647598296.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aliexpress.com&#x2F;item&#x2F;1005006647598296.html</a><p>never used it, but am considering getting it to lay on top of my laptop screen for outdoor coding.<p>One of the reviewers seems to suggest it is made out of the CPU etc from an old bitcoin miner which is no longer economic to run, but with an extra circuit board added, which is a neat way to get value out of old electronics!</text></comment> | <story><title>E Ink faces growing competition in the "paper-like" display space</title><url>https://liliputing.com/e-ink-faces-growing-competition-in-the-paper-like-display-space/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mcbetz</author><text>Any first-hand experiences with the Nxtpaper devices? There&#x27;s a lot of press coverage of the release official material, especially on the 14 inch model, but few actual reviews. Availability or even infos on availability is an issue, at least in Europe as well.</text></comment> |
22,360,220 | 22,358,369 | 1 | 2 | 22,357,194 | train | <story><title>New AMD EPYC-based Compute Engine family, now in beta</title><url>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/compute/announcing-the-n2d-vm-family-based-on-amd</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>boulos</author><text>Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.<p>This has come up a few times, so I wanted to reiterate that these are the Zen2&#x2F;Rome parts not the first generation “Naples” parts. We didn’t bother launching Naples for GCE, because (as you can see) Rome is a huge step up.</text></comment> | <story><title>New AMD EPYC-based Compute Engine family, now in beta</title><url>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/compute/announcing-the-n2d-vm-family-based-on-amd</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mdasen</author><text>Since people from Google Cloud are likely here, one thing I&#x27;d like to ask&#x2F;talk about: are we getting too many options for compute? One of the great things about Google Cloud was that it was very easy to order. None of this &quot;t2.large&quot; where you&#x27;d have to look up how much memory and CPU that it has and potentially how many credits you&#x27;re going to get per hour and such. I think Google Cloud is still easier, but it&#x27;s getting harder to know what is the right direction.<p>For example, the N2D instances are basically the price of the N1 instances or even cheaper with committed-use discounts. Given that they provide 39% more performance, should the N1 instances be considered obsolete once the N2D exits beta? I know that there could be workloads that would be better on Intel than AMD, but it seems like there would be little reason to get an N1 instance once the N2D exits beta.<p>Likewise, the N2D has the basically same sustained-use price as the E2 instances (which only have the performance of N1 instances). What&#x27;s the point of E2 instances if they&#x27;re the same price? Shouldn&#x27;t I be getting a discount given that Google can more efficiently use the resources?<p>It&#x27;s great to see the improvements at Google Cloud. I&#x27;m glad to see lower-cost, high-performance options available. However, I guess I&#x27;m left wondering who is choosing what. I look at the pricing and think, &quot;who would choose an N1 or N2 given the N2D?&quot; Sure, there are people with specific requirements, but it seems like the N2D should be the default in my mind.<p>This might sound a bit like complaining, but I do love how I can just lookup memory and CPU pricing easily. Rather than having to remember name-mappings, I just choose from one of the families (N1, N2, E2, N2D) and can look at the memory and CPU pricing. It makes it really simple to understand what you&#x27;re paying. It&#x27;s just that as more families get added and Google varies how it applies sustained-use and committed-use discounts between the families, it becomes more difficult to choose between them.<p>For example, if I&#x27;m going for a 1-year commitment, should I go with an E2 at $10.03&#x2F;vCPU or an N2D at $12.65&#x2F;vCPU. The N2D should provide more performance than the 26% price increase, yes? Why can&#x27;t I get an EPYC based E-series to really drive down costs?<p>Again, I want to reiterate that Google Cloud&#x27;s simpler pricing is great, but complications have crept in. E2 machines don&#x27;t get sustained-use discounts which means they&#x27;re really only valuable if you&#x27;re doing a yearly commitment or non-sustained-use. The only time N1 machines are cheaper is in sustained-use - they&#x27;re the same price as Intel N2 machines if you&#x27;re doing a yearly commitment or non-sustained-use. Without more guidance on performance differences between the N2D and N2, why should I ever use N2? I guess this is a bit of rambling to say, &quot;keep an eye on pricing complexity - I don&#x27;t like spending a lot of time thinking about optimizing costs&quot;.</text></comment> |
19,519,778 | 19,519,602 | 1 | 2 | 19,519,275 | train | <story><title>In the Latest Version of macOS, Macs Sold in China Cannot Display Taiwanese Flag</title><url>https://twitter.com/thisboyuan/status/1110743058201473025?s=21</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>miles</author><text>Turns out this has been going on for some time:<p>Can&#x27;t see this emoji (Taiwanese Flag) on macOS <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;apple.stackexchange.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;328474&#x2F;cant-see-this-emoji-on-macos" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;apple.stackexchange.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;328474&#x2F;cant-see-th...</a><p>You can’t use the Taiwan flag emoji on a Chinese iPhone <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;qz.com&#x2F;1250884&#x2F;you-cant-use-the-taiwan-flag-emoji-on-a-chinese-iphone&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;qz.com&#x2F;1250884&#x2F;you-cant-use-the-taiwan-flag-emoji-on...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>In the Latest Version of macOS, Macs Sold in China Cannot Display Taiwanese Flag</title><url>https://twitter.com/thisboyuan/status/1110743058201473025?s=21</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>CompuHacker</author><text>Selectively break Unicode without warning because... politics?<p>People with out of date versions of OSX may now be subjected to more scrutiny. Apple may have made an undocumented decision (or introduced a bug) that could cause death.</text></comment> |
7,578,173 | 7,576,820 | 1 | 2 | 7,576,445 | train | <story><title>Japanese railway operator to license maglev tech to US for free</title><url>http://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Companies/Japanese-railway-operator-to-offer-maglev-tech-to-US-for-free</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ThePhysicist</author><text>I think the problem with the US railway system is not the lack of technology, but politics: People seem to love bold and mostly unrealistic proposals like Elon Musk&#x27;s &quot;Hyperloop&quot; or the Maglev technology but seem to be a lot less passionate about making existing infrastructure better (which understandably is much more boring):<p>As an example, I just took the Amtrak train from NYC to Montreal to attend PyCon (which is awesome!), which took all in all 11 hours to cover a distance a little over 530 km. For comparison, going from my hometown Saarbrücken in Germany to Paris (which is about the same distance) takes less than two hours (1:40h to be exact) with TGV or ICE trains. Arguably for the latter there is no border to be crossed (OK actually there is but none that is patroled) but still, this kind of makes you wonder why a high-tech nation like the USA doesn&#x27;t have a similar system of high-speed trains in place, and I think that the answer has more to do with political unwillingness and lobbying than with lack of technology.<p>BTW, in Germany there once was an attempt to build a Transrapid (our version of Maglev that is deployed in Shanghai, developed by Siemens <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transrapid" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Transrapid</a>) track to connect the Munich airport to the city centre (see &quot;Munich Link&quot; section in the article above), but calculations showed that the achievable time saving compared to the latest generation of ICE high-speed trains would be only 3 minutes, whereas the additional cost would have been around 3 BN €, which lead to the project being eventually ditched.</text></comment> | <story><title>Japanese railway operator to license maglev tech to US for free</title><url>http://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Companies/Japanese-railway-operator-to-offer-maglev-tech-to-US-for-free</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>arrrg</author><text>The technology has existed for so long but never really went anywhere. After half a century there are 30km in Shanghai, that’s all.<p>Maybe it will work out better in the future.<p>The biggest problem I see is that the gains of this technology would be rather small anywhere with conventional high-speed rail or existing infrastructure that can be upgraded to that. With Maglev everything needs to be built from scratch. That’s just not very attractive for any place that has consistently expanded its rail network ever since the height of the industrial revolution.<p>And for what? A 180km&#x2F;h faster train? I personally very much want that, sure, but is it worth it for anyone building it? I’m pretty sure I know the answer in Western Europe (though I can always hope that maglev has a future there), I’m not so sure when it comes to the US.</text></comment> |
24,793,527 | 24,792,916 | 1 | 2 | 24,791,357 | train | <story><title>Google disabled my husband's account</title><url>https://twitter.com/miguelytob/status/1315749803041619981</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jbay808</author><text>I definitely think that what you&#x27;re saying is true, and is part of the explanation. But another part is that the Wild West internet also had its own major issues -- roving bandits, to carry the analogy -- and these big companies did solve real problems that were only growing with time.<p>Gmail&#x27;s spam filtering. Recaptcha&#x27;s bot rejection. Facebook&#x27;s identity verification. Paypal&#x27;s secure credit card processing. Google de-ranking link farms. Youtube&#x27;s hosting costs. All of these very effectively solved real problems with the old web, and those problems were growing as bad actors became more sophisticated.<p>I like the old web too, but I do appreciate that an attempt to return to it would still require very effective tools to solve at least some of these problems, and they&#x27;d require constant improvement to keep the roving bandits at bay.</text></item><item><author>kodah</author><text>I don&#x27;t think the internet was ever going to become regulated. What did occur post-2007 was that what made the internet work as a disparate ecosystem of loosely connected destinations (news groups, message boards, blogs, misc websites) that all played their own very important role, controlled and owned by their own communities became one platform under Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc... and was controlled and owned by people who had no identity-based connection to the people using those platforms.<p>This is largely based on my own observations and could be wrong, but it&#x27;s my theory. Tech companies robbed an internet culture they didn&#x27;t even realize or appreciate existed, and then shoved a bunch of people who had never used the internet before on it and convinced them that Facebook was the internet. Or rather, that the standards, norms, and culture on Facebook was somehow reflective of everything outside of Facebook. Just replace Facebook with the growing list of companies who engage in &quot;platforms&quot; in varying degrees.<p>tldr: this obsession with centralization made no sense to the way we do things as a human species, any of our values, any of our culture, and we let it happen anyway. The chickens have come home to roost.</text></item><item><author>breakingcups</author><text>It&#x27;s incredibly Kafka-eqsue that you get banned for a supposed violation that you&#x27;re supposed to appeal, but you don&#x27;t know what you&#x27;re being accused of doing.<p>This is exacerbated by the fact that 9 out of 10 times a story like this appears it&#x27;s an algorithm gone rogue which its billion-dollar shepherd assumes is infallible.<p>The remaining 1 time it&#x27;s because someone knows how to abuse reporting systems to get someone locked out on purpose.<p>The only reason these tech companies managed to get so big is because they&#x27;ll cheat at anything that requires human scale. Support, moderation, taking responsibility for the content they host. They somehow managed to skirt on that just as the web was transitioning from a wild west to a somewhat ingrained, regulated place and the world is worse off for it.<p>Because they skirted on all this, they are now somehow the world&#x27;s gatekeepers on modern communications. If you don&#x27;t play ball with them, you&#x27;re cut off from almost everyone. Their recklessness and callousness ironically put them in the position to rule over the rest.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jjav</author><text>I believe this is an overly rosy-glasses view of the current heavily centralized internet.<p>Gmail spam filtering? Isn&#x27;t particularly good. I run my own email infrastructure and I get way less spam through it than on my gmail address. And I don&#x27;t do anything particularly special other than configure postfix correctly.<p>Recaptcha? Was there ever a more hated piece of user abusive technology? Plenty of rage against it here in many discussions. I won&#x27;t do business anymore with any site that won&#x27;t let me buy without identifying 27 traffic lights in slow motion (looking at you adorama). We&#x27;re all better off if this dies.<p>Facebook verification? Don&#x27;t know what value this brings to anyone other than FB.<p>Youtube? Granted.. Hopefully with bandwidth costs reducing over time, decentralization becomes more viable.<p>Paypal? Always pay with credit card directly. The regulatory consumer protection for that was well in place before internet commerce even took off.<p>The original potential of the internet was in its fully decentralized functionality. Usenet being a great example (owned by nobody, hosted peer to peer) which should be studied a bit more now that we have generations of developers coming up never having known it. Of course, it was (mostly) overrun by spam. But unlike email where spam is pretty much defeated, there was never a meaningful effort in addressing spam on Usenet (forums and mailing lists took over instead). Applying the same techniques to NNTP could well be equally successful.<p>If there is any desire to avoid the internet becoming fully a new cable-tv controlled by just a few major player we need to pursue research into decentralized services as a priority.<p>(If nothing else, consider at least running your own email infrastructure if you&#x27;re technically capable. Keep the foot in the door so it doesn&#x27;t close permanently.)</text></comment> | <story><title>Google disabled my husband's account</title><url>https://twitter.com/miguelytob/status/1315749803041619981</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jbay808</author><text>I definitely think that what you&#x27;re saying is true, and is part of the explanation. But another part is that the Wild West internet also had its own major issues -- roving bandits, to carry the analogy -- and these big companies did solve real problems that were only growing with time.<p>Gmail&#x27;s spam filtering. Recaptcha&#x27;s bot rejection. Facebook&#x27;s identity verification. Paypal&#x27;s secure credit card processing. Google de-ranking link farms. Youtube&#x27;s hosting costs. All of these very effectively solved real problems with the old web, and those problems were growing as bad actors became more sophisticated.<p>I like the old web too, but I do appreciate that an attempt to return to it would still require very effective tools to solve at least some of these problems, and they&#x27;d require constant improvement to keep the roving bandits at bay.</text></item><item><author>kodah</author><text>I don&#x27;t think the internet was ever going to become regulated. What did occur post-2007 was that what made the internet work as a disparate ecosystem of loosely connected destinations (news groups, message boards, blogs, misc websites) that all played their own very important role, controlled and owned by their own communities became one platform under Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc... and was controlled and owned by people who had no identity-based connection to the people using those platforms.<p>This is largely based on my own observations and could be wrong, but it&#x27;s my theory. Tech companies robbed an internet culture they didn&#x27;t even realize or appreciate existed, and then shoved a bunch of people who had never used the internet before on it and convinced them that Facebook was the internet. Or rather, that the standards, norms, and culture on Facebook was somehow reflective of everything outside of Facebook. Just replace Facebook with the growing list of companies who engage in &quot;platforms&quot; in varying degrees.<p>tldr: this obsession with centralization made no sense to the way we do things as a human species, any of our values, any of our culture, and we let it happen anyway. The chickens have come home to roost.</text></item><item><author>breakingcups</author><text>It&#x27;s incredibly Kafka-eqsue that you get banned for a supposed violation that you&#x27;re supposed to appeal, but you don&#x27;t know what you&#x27;re being accused of doing.<p>This is exacerbated by the fact that 9 out of 10 times a story like this appears it&#x27;s an algorithm gone rogue which its billion-dollar shepherd assumes is infallible.<p>The remaining 1 time it&#x27;s because someone knows how to abuse reporting systems to get someone locked out on purpose.<p>The only reason these tech companies managed to get so big is because they&#x27;ll cheat at anything that requires human scale. Support, moderation, taking responsibility for the content they host. They somehow managed to skirt on that just as the web was transitioning from a wild west to a somewhat ingrained, regulated place and the world is worse off for it.<p>Because they skirted on all this, they are now somehow the world&#x27;s gatekeepers on modern communications. If you don&#x27;t play ball with them, you&#x27;re cut off from almost everyone. Their recklessness and callousness ironically put them in the position to rule over the rest.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>skratlo</author><text>I don&#x27;t think you&#x27;re right.<p>&gt; Facebook&#x27;s identity verification<p>in real life, do you need to know the real name of the cashier and see their contract so you can trust them with your payment? You don&#x27;t, you use common sense.<p>&gt; Google de-ranking link farms<p>hey, haha, and what do we get instead? Monopoly on ad-driven search engine, great, I&#x27;d rather have link farms since I can easily filter those out with little brain-power. I can&#x27;t do that with paid-for-propaganda<p>Now imagine we&#x27;d leave the way it was, people would learn how to deal with it, the same way you learned you can&#x27;t leave unlocked bicycle in a city. It&#x27;s a price to pay for anonymity, and we should all have right to be anonymous on internet.</text></comment> |
6,243,895 | 6,243,658 | 1 | 3 | 6,243,187 | train | <story><title>Crosswords don’t make you clever</title><url>http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2013/08/quick-study-neuroscience</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>peterwwillis</author><text>I went to a conference on Multiple Sclerosis with a friend who has the disease, and one of the much-hyped research topics (this was a few years ago) was how more and more papers are finding a link between low levels of Vitamin D and severity of the disease. Essentially, vitamin D may lesson symptoms or even make you less susceptible to the disease.<p>This is a pretty good article about natural vs supplemental Vitamin D intake: <a href="http://www.marksdailyapple.com/vitamin-d-sun-exposure-supplementation-and-doses/#axzz2cWFDNpxb" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.marksdailyapple.com&#x2F;vitamin-d-sun-exposure-supple...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Crosswords don’t make you clever</title><url>http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2013/08/quick-study-neuroscience</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ltcoleman</author><text>I 100% agree with this article in my own life. Went through a huge lifestyle change, and noticed my entire life and cognitive ability grow once I started exercising, getting out more, and really experiencing life with friends and family. If you want to be lazy that&#x27;s fine, but after having my eyes open to a better, more energetic, more intelligent self, I would never go back to the couch and bon bons</text></comment> |
40,428,716 | 40,428,849 | 1 | 3 | 40,428,419 | train | <story><title>“Dark money” groups help private ISPs lobby against municipal broadband</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/05/how-dark-money-groups-help-private-isps-lobby-against-municipal-broadband/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Ajay-p</author><text>Dark money is such a weird phrase and a mischaracterized label. The practice is not unique to any one group or issue. &quot;Dark money&quot; - defined as funds raised for the purpose of influencing elections by nonprofit organizations that are not required to disclose the identities of their donors - is used by all interest groups, good and bad.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>afavour</author><text>&gt; not required to disclose the identities of their donors<p>This is the part that’s always bad.<p>IMO “dark money” is the perfect term. Even if it’s in aid of a cause I agree with I still think the concept is sinister and would rather it not exist.</text></comment> | <story><title>“Dark money” groups help private ISPs lobby against municipal broadband</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/05/how-dark-money-groups-help-private-isps-lobby-against-municipal-broadband/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Ajay-p</author><text>Dark money is such a weird phrase and a mischaracterized label. The practice is not unique to any one group or issue. &quot;Dark money&quot; - defined as funds raised for the purpose of influencing elections by nonprofit organizations that are not required to disclose the identities of their donors - is used by all interest groups, good and bad.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nimbius</author><text>&gt; defined as funds raised for the purpose of influencing elections by nonprofit organizations that are not required to disclose the identities of their donor<p>&quot;Dark money&quot; is the alternate term most of the beltway prefers as it keeps them safe from RICO indictments and uncomfortable attention to the hypocritic duality of a country that practically river-dances to democracy.<p>This is just political bribery with more steps and ceremony.</text></comment> |
38,316,606 | 38,315,586 | 1 | 2 | 38,315,265 | train | <story><title>Board Members (2014)</title><url>https://blog.samaltman.com/board-members</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>wavemode</author><text>&gt; The companies that have had the biggest impact and created the most value have had excellent board members (and executives).<p>It&#x27;s easy to say in hindsight that a board member was good, after the company has succeeded. Harder to tell in advance.</text></comment> | <story><title>Board Members (2014)</title><url>https://blog.samaltman.com/board-members</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>RyanShook</author><text>“It’s a good idea to keep enough control so that investors can’t fire you (there are a lot of different ways to do this), but beyond that, it’s important to bring in other people and trust them to help you build the company.”</text></comment> |
24,094,042 | 24,091,586 | 1 | 2 | 24,091,585 | train | <story><title>A Linux driver to connect PATA/IDE directly to GPIO</title><url>https://github.com/Manawyrm/pata-gpio</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>myself248</author><text>Going the other way, a PATA port in PIO mode can be used as GPIO: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hackaday.com&#x2F;2011&#x2F;02&#x2F;03&#x2F;stk200-pocket-change-programmer&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hackaday.com&#x2F;2011&#x2F;02&#x2F;03&#x2F;stk200-pocket-change-program...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>A Linux driver to connect PATA/IDE directly to GPIO</title><url>https://github.com/Manawyrm/pata-gpio</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>crizzlenizzle</author><text>An interesting project I found on twitter. Interfacing PATA&#x2F;IDE directly to Raspberry Pi’s GPIO is pretty trivial and manages to transfer 500 KiB&#x2F;s. Enough to play CDs. The driver code is around 500 LOC.</text></comment> |
5,824,382 | 5,824,368 | 1 | 3 | 5,824,266 | train | <story><title>Minute 53, very emotional moment by Elon Musk</title><url>http://www.teslamotors.com/2013shareholdermeeting</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mtgx</author><text>He gets like that sometimes, and you can see he really cares about the products he's making and the change he's trying to make in the world. So sometimes he seems deeply affected that others are so much against him, especially when they aren't playing fair.<p>He became a bit emotional in another interview where he said that Neil Armstrong was opposed to the idea of having SpaceX making commercial rockets (or any other private company), and that Neil Armstrong was a hero of his before, and he was very disappointed seeing Neil fight against SpaceX.<p>You can see at 0:40, but I'm not sure it was all of it (from that part). It was on the 60 Minutes interview.<p><a href="http://www.space.com/14936-spacex-ceo-elon-musk-60-minutes-interview.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.space.com/14936-spacex-ceo-elon-musk-60-minutes-i...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Minute 53, very emotional moment by Elon Musk</title><url>http://www.teslamotors.com/2013shareholdermeeting</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>krosaen</author><text>Start at minute 49 to see the full context - it's about fighting the automotive dealers association for the right to sell directly to consumers.</text></comment> |
34,918,128 | 34,917,921 | 1 | 2 | 34,916,239 | train | <story><title>The FBI now recommends using an ad blocker when searching the web</title><url>https://www.standard.co.uk/tech/fbi-recommends-ad-blocker-online-scams-b1048998.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>madars</author><text>Or, in other words, FBI now recommends using Android :-) It&#x27;s baffling how much better uBlock Origin + Firefox experience on Android is compared to any iOS ad blocker I have tried. They kind-of work but let half of the ads through.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>happybuy</author><text>I develop a popular iOS and macOS ad blocker that block almost all ads[1] including all YouTube ads.<p>Will be interested to hear if you&#x27;ve tried it out and what may have been missing?<p>The only things we don&#x27;t block at the moment is some non-English content and Adult sites. With a small team these haven&#x27;t been the primary focus for the time being. Other than those though we should stop pretty much everything else.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.magiclasso.co&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.magiclasso.co&#x2F;</a></text></comment> | <story><title>The FBI now recommends using an ad blocker when searching the web</title><url>https://www.standard.co.uk/tech/fbi-recommends-ad-blocker-online-scams-b1048998.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>madars</author><text>Or, in other words, FBI now recommends using Android :-) It&#x27;s baffling how much better uBlock Origin + Firefox experience on Android is compared to any iOS ad blocker I have tried. They kind-of work but let half of the ads through.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hailwren</author><text>Yeah, android trades browser ads for system wide tracking. I’m not really sure that’s a good deal.</text></comment> |
1,174,906 | 1,174,745 | 1 | 3 | 1,174,714 | train | <story><title>Edward Tufte appointed by Obama to help track, and explain stimulus funds</title><url>http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0003e0&topic_id=1#</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>CoreDumpling</author><text>I sincerely hope Tufte can successfully counteract the Washington tradition of applying the methods from <i>How to Lie with Statistics</i>. A good visualization can just as well expose the fraud from a contrived one.</text></comment> | <story><title>Edward Tufte appointed by Obama to help track, and explain stimulus funds</title><url>http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0003e0&topic_id=1#</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>nkh</author><text>Obama scored some big points in my book for this one.<p>Edit:<p>When he did not follow up on his promise to have C-Span follow the health care debates, left a bad taste in my mouth.<p>I have attended a Tufte conference, and he spent a lot of time discussing the challenger disaster. While he was no where near the as good as Feynman (who is?), he graphically presented the government information very well.<p>If anything it will draw attention to the problem as he is a big name in this space.</text></comment> |
16,892,223 | 16,891,912 | 1 | 2 | 16,891,276 | train | <story><title>Not your Tibetan Buddhism</title><url>https://aeon.co/essays/what-lies-behind-the-simplistic-image-of-the-happy-buddhist</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tombh</author><text>Glad to see this article getting some attention. My university training is in Religious Studies and it became clear pretty quickly that Buddhism suffers just as much as any other religion from the pathologies of global institutions of power.<p>The one that always gets me, as it&#x27;s so glaringly obvious, is that Buddhism is so audaciously and unapologetically male-dominated. It just seems embarrassing to me that on the one hand the teachings place so much emphasis on kindness to all living beings, yet none of the major lineages (until recently under Western influence) have female lineage holders - therefore those that are considered worthy enough to pass the teachings on to the next generation.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>KingMob</author><text>When I became a monk in Burma, sayalays (sort of like female novitiates) in the monastery were expected to show respect to me, even when they had been there for 30 years, and I had only been a monk for two weeks.<p>A western monk friend and I discussed it a lot, and we concluded that the rules of the sangha (the monastic community) ensured it would be roughly as sexist as the society around it.<p>See, one of the rules of the vinaya (the ancient monastic code) is that monks are forbidden to grow their own food; all food is a gift from someone. This is an interesting rule, with both good and bad consequences.<p>The beneficial aspect is that it keeps the sangha tied to the lay community; it prevents Theravadan monks from disappearing into the forest with no ties, and is probably crucial to maintaining the existence of a religious order for over two millennia.<p>The detrimental aspect is that it punishes sanghas that are too progressive for their community. Every morning, we would walk out at 6:00 for alms. If the townfolk were pissed at us, we&#x27;d have starved.<p>One of the things western buddhist communities have done better is gender-inclusion. In fact, most of my teachers in both zen and theravada have been women.</text></comment> | <story><title>Not your Tibetan Buddhism</title><url>https://aeon.co/essays/what-lies-behind-the-simplistic-image-of-the-happy-buddhist</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tombh</author><text>Glad to see this article getting some attention. My university training is in Religious Studies and it became clear pretty quickly that Buddhism suffers just as much as any other religion from the pathologies of global institutions of power.<p>The one that always gets me, as it&#x27;s so glaringly obvious, is that Buddhism is so audaciously and unapologetically male-dominated. It just seems embarrassing to me that on the one hand the teachings place so much emphasis on kindness to all living beings, yet none of the major lineages (until recently under Western influence) have female lineage holders - therefore those that are considered worthy enough to pass the teachings on to the next generation.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gtirloni</author><text>Religion is not detached from the cultural aspects of where it exists. Such was&#x2F;is the situation in Tibet, male-oriented.<p>The Catholic Church says priests can only be male too. Women weren&#x27;t given much freedom in society when these policies were defined.<p>Western-adapted Buddhism lineages are much more open to women in general.</text></comment> |
5,955,328 | 5,955,107 | 1 | 3 | 5,953,347 | train | <story><title>Netflix ditches Silverlight with support for HTML5 video in IE11</title><url>http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/06/26/netflix-ditches-silverlight-with-support-for-html5-video-in-ie11-available-today-with-windows-8-1-preview/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wmf</author><text>A DRM-free subscription service would immediately lead to a ripper tool that would download everything in one month, which would immediately lead to Hollywood studio execs pitching hissy fits.</text></item><item><author>weavejester</author><text>Why do you equate DRM with subscriptions? It&#x27;s perfectly possible to have subscriptions to content without DRM.</text></item><item><author>thezilch</author><text>I think your feelings and assertions are valid, but I can&#x27;t really blame Netflix here, which was my reaction, and I don&#x27;t really think you meant to paint them in that light. I feel they are hamstrung between staying profitable and trying to court the dinosaurs that are content providers.<p>It always strikes me as odd that it would appear the &quot;internet crowd&quot; would both like to abolish advertising (re: commercials) _and_ DRM (re: subscriptions). I don&#x27;t know that Netflix or Steam exists without the later, and I much prefer the &quot;price&quot; I pay for that &quot;burden&quot; over the alternative(s?).<p>And I have to say, it&#x27;s hard for me to cast stones at MS for the innovations IE5 brought to market, in the late 90s. It&#x27;s pretty crummy to subject MS to feelings that only manifested many years later and only because of things they didn&#x27;t do -- continue supporting and innovating in the browser space. We&#x27;re just pissed it was so good that people could hold onto it until pried from the cold, dead hands.</text></item><item><author>isomorphic</author><text>You are correct in asserting that the EME should become standardized, and that Netflix is participating in that process. I should not throw stones unless I&#x27;m willing to help.<p>I admit to being conflicted about the philosophical need for such extensions--although I have no pragmatic objections. Netflix makes their coin by selling limited access to an artificially-restricted resource; the resource would probably not exist in its present form without the restrictions.<p>However, as someone who lived through web development in the 1990s, my brain shut off after reading &quot;away from using proprietary&quot; followed by &quot;Microsoft MarketingTerm&quot;.</text></item><item><author>thezilch</author><text>&quot;Continue to shift away&quot; doesn&#x27;t mean proprietary steps can&#x27;t or shouldn&#x27;t be taken nor does it mean there will never be proprietary parts behind the scenes. The API to these Extensions are trying to become stable and not proprietary [0]; do you have suggestions or time to contribute? If Netflix is made to simply talk to a ratified API, it is a big step forward from a non-standard API exposed by the likes of Silverlight.<p>[0] <a href="https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/html-media/raw-file/tip/encrypted-media/encrypted-media.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dvcs.w3.org&#x2F;hg&#x2F;html-media&#x2F;raw-file&#x2F;tip&#x2F;encrypted-med...</a></text></item><item><author>isomorphic</author><text>Quoting Netflix, from the article:<p><pre><code> We expect premium video on the web to continue to shift away from using proprietary plugin technologies to using these new Premium Video Extensions.
</code></pre>
Quoting the article:<p><pre><code> According to Netflix, Microsoft made this possible by implementing three features in its still-unfinished IE11:
The Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) using Microsoft PlayReady DRM.
</code></pre>
Netflix is using some doublespeak here. Yes, Silverlight was a &quot;proprietary plugin&quot;, but they&#x27;ve just shifted to using proprietary DRM with proprietary extensions to HTML5. They got rid of the plugin--great! But they&#x27;ve replaced one proprietary experience with another.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tbirdz</author><text>It&#x27;s not like having DRM is really stopping piracy, especially in Netflix&#x27;s case. For example their new original series of House of Cards and season 4 of Arrested Development were both pirated (I assume using some kind of desktop screen recorder?) and posted online within days of their netflix release. So the use of DRM did not stop people from pirating their content, in only prevented potential customers on other systems, like Linux, from legally purchasing their content.</text></comment> | <story><title>Netflix ditches Silverlight with support for HTML5 video in IE11</title><url>http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/06/26/netflix-ditches-silverlight-with-support-for-html5-video-in-ie11-available-today-with-windows-8-1-preview/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wmf</author><text>A DRM-free subscription service would immediately lead to a ripper tool that would download everything in one month, which would immediately lead to Hollywood studio execs pitching hissy fits.</text></item><item><author>weavejester</author><text>Why do you equate DRM with subscriptions? It&#x27;s perfectly possible to have subscriptions to content without DRM.</text></item><item><author>thezilch</author><text>I think your feelings and assertions are valid, but I can&#x27;t really blame Netflix here, which was my reaction, and I don&#x27;t really think you meant to paint them in that light. I feel they are hamstrung between staying profitable and trying to court the dinosaurs that are content providers.<p>It always strikes me as odd that it would appear the &quot;internet crowd&quot; would both like to abolish advertising (re: commercials) _and_ DRM (re: subscriptions). I don&#x27;t know that Netflix or Steam exists without the later, and I much prefer the &quot;price&quot; I pay for that &quot;burden&quot; over the alternative(s?).<p>And I have to say, it&#x27;s hard for me to cast stones at MS for the innovations IE5 brought to market, in the late 90s. It&#x27;s pretty crummy to subject MS to feelings that only manifested many years later and only because of things they didn&#x27;t do -- continue supporting and innovating in the browser space. We&#x27;re just pissed it was so good that people could hold onto it until pried from the cold, dead hands.</text></item><item><author>isomorphic</author><text>You are correct in asserting that the EME should become standardized, and that Netflix is participating in that process. I should not throw stones unless I&#x27;m willing to help.<p>I admit to being conflicted about the philosophical need for such extensions--although I have no pragmatic objections. Netflix makes their coin by selling limited access to an artificially-restricted resource; the resource would probably not exist in its present form without the restrictions.<p>However, as someone who lived through web development in the 1990s, my brain shut off after reading &quot;away from using proprietary&quot; followed by &quot;Microsoft MarketingTerm&quot;.</text></item><item><author>thezilch</author><text>&quot;Continue to shift away&quot; doesn&#x27;t mean proprietary steps can&#x27;t or shouldn&#x27;t be taken nor does it mean there will never be proprietary parts behind the scenes. The API to these Extensions are trying to become stable and not proprietary [0]; do you have suggestions or time to contribute? If Netflix is made to simply talk to a ratified API, it is a big step forward from a non-standard API exposed by the likes of Silverlight.<p>[0] <a href="https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/html-media/raw-file/tip/encrypted-media/encrypted-media.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dvcs.w3.org&#x2F;hg&#x2F;html-media&#x2F;raw-file&#x2F;tip&#x2F;encrypted-med...</a></text></item><item><author>isomorphic</author><text>Quoting Netflix, from the article:<p><pre><code> We expect premium video on the web to continue to shift away from using proprietary plugin technologies to using these new Premium Video Extensions.
</code></pre>
Quoting the article:<p><pre><code> According to Netflix, Microsoft made this possible by implementing three features in its still-unfinished IE11:
The Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) using Microsoft PlayReady DRM.
</code></pre>
Netflix is using some doublespeak here. Yes, Silverlight was a &quot;proprietary plugin&quot;, but they&#x27;ve just shifted to using proprietary DRM with proprietary extensions to HTML5. They got rid of the plugin--great! But they&#x27;ve replaced one proprietary experience with another.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>weavejester</author><text><i>&quot;A DRM-free subscription service would immediately lead to a ripper tool that would download everything in one month&quot;</i><p>Why would anyone bother doing that when they could just download what they wanted over bittorrent?</text></comment> |
14,507,194 | 14,503,474 | 1 | 2 | 14,501,894 | train | <story><title>List of Printers Which Do or Do Not Display Tracking Dots</title><url>https://www.eff.org/pages/list-printers-which-do-or-do-not-display-tracking-dots</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>schoen</author><text>I wrote this article&#x2F;originally created this list, and I would like to emphasize that there is a second generation of this technology that probably uses dithering parameters or something of that sort, and that does not produce visible dots but still creates a tracking code. We don&#x27;t know the details but we do know that some companies told governments that they were going to do this, and that some newer printers from companies that the government agencies said were onboard with forensic marking no longer print yellow dots.<p>That makes me think that it may have been a mistake to create this list in the first place, because the main practical use of the list would be to help people buy color laser printers that don&#x27;t do forensic tracking, yet it&#x27;s not clear that any such printers are actually commercially available.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kefka</author><text>Well, that being said, it sounds like there needs to be a more rigorous way of detecting these new codes.<p>One way I can think of, is to record data on the CMYK pins on the inkjet head itself. IIRC, they activate between 17v and 22v, and pulse per high.<p>The goal here is to make the printer think its printing, while recording all the data of the pulse operations. We would get a lengthy file out.<p>Ideally, the pulse coding should be consistent if printing the same image. &quot;Printing&quot; the same thing over multiple times could show time&#x2F;date codes embedded.<p>I should also be able to compare underlying system internals too, with multiple clones of VMs with small config details different. They should be the same data. If they aren&#x27;t, we know its encoding system stuffs.<p>But yeah, there <i>is</i> a way to attack this, and that&#x27;s by going lower in the stack and treating the printers as a black box. It&#x27;s not the best way, but a way I&#x27;ve thought of that could at least detect this new technique.</text></comment> | <story><title>List of Printers Which Do or Do Not Display Tracking Dots</title><url>https://www.eff.org/pages/list-printers-which-do-or-do-not-display-tracking-dots</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>schoen</author><text>I wrote this article&#x2F;originally created this list, and I would like to emphasize that there is a second generation of this technology that probably uses dithering parameters or something of that sort, and that does not produce visible dots but still creates a tracking code. We don&#x27;t know the details but we do know that some companies told governments that they were going to do this, and that some newer printers from companies that the government agencies said were onboard with forensic marking no longer print yellow dots.<p>That makes me think that it may have been a mistake to create this list in the first place, because the main practical use of the list would be to help people buy color laser printers that don&#x27;t do forensic tracking, yet it&#x27;s not clear that any such printers are actually commercially available.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>RachelF</author><text>What is annoying is that the user pays for this. How much more yellow toner do I need to buy because my print outs are covered in yellow dots?<p>I wonder how many million extra gallons of yellow toner and ink are wasted every year printing these tracker dots?</text></comment> |
9,402,311 | 9,402,340 | 1 | 2 | 9,402,093 | train | <story><title>BuzzFeed Says Posts Were Deleted Because of Advertising Pressure</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/20/business/media/buzzfeed-says-posts-were-deleted-because-of-advertising-pressure.html?partner=socialflow&smid=tw-nytimes&_r=0</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kyllo</author><text><i>I work in the online advertising space.</i><p><i>They also use AdBlock to basically steal content</i><p>The whole problem with your industry is that you are still operating under the mistaken belief that &quot;impressions&quot; drive purchasing behavior. As if having some image forcibly burnt into my brain will influence my subconscious desires enough to cause me to make a purchase sometime later. This idea is and has always been pure snake oil. I don&#x27;t want to see your ads, and I&#x27;m not going to click on them or buy what they are selling anyway. If anything I&#x27;m <i>less</i> likely to buy a product after I see it in a banner ad because they are annoying and I don&#x27;t buy products that annoy me. You have no business telling me that it&#x27;s &quot;stealing&quot; when I configure my browser client not to show me ads that I don&#x27;t want to see. The implication is offensive. Do you think that running a spam e-mail filter is &quot;basically stealing&quot; too?</text></item><item><author>manigandham</author><text>I work in the online advertising space. Unwilling is probably an understatement.<p>Although &quot;people&quot; shell out tons of money on casual&#x2F;social Facebook games and such, they are incredibly price sensitive to content like news or videos. They also use AdBlock to basically steal content without letting publishers recoup the production costs and other investments.<p>I&#x27;ve spoken to and worked with several major publisher networks over the years that have tried various solutions with subscriptions but every attempt has led to a massive backlash or drop in traffic as users would rather go elsewhere then pay to read. Just look at how much negative feelings there are towards paywalls or any site that requires membership.<p>There have been trials already by Google to solve for this but the original idea with Google Wallet [1] failed and they&#x27;re now trying out the Contributor program [2] but still having trouble.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.digitaltrends.com&#x2F;web&#x2F;google-launches-micropayments-for-web-content&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.digitaltrends.com&#x2F;web&#x2F;google-launches-micropaymen...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;contributor&#x2F;welcome&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;contributor&#x2F;welcome&#x2F;</a></text></item><item><author>wtallis</author><text>People <i>aren&#x27;t</i> paying for content. But extrapolating that to say that they&#x27;re <i>unwilling</i> to pay for content is a bit of a stretch, given the unwillingness of content producers to offer ad-free access at a fair market price, and the lack of an easy payments system to process such small transactions.</text></item><item><author>vonklaus</author><text>Well, if people would fucking pay for content, these conflicts wouldn&#x27;t happen. However, people have largely decided not to pay for content. I personally don&#x27;t pay for content very often, I also don&#x27;t expect unbiased journalism from buzzfeed.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>manigandham</author><text>You&#x27;re conflating a lot of issues.<p>1) Spam is not the same, you didnt ask for it so you are rightly refusing and actively blocking it.<p>2) Content is not free. Someone had to create it, and they can either charge you directly or let you see it for free by also showing you ads. When you block those ads but still read the content, you&#x27;re stealing the access&#x2F;time&#x2F;production&#x2F;value of that content without letting the publisher recoup any of their investment or make any profit.<p>3) I&#x27;m not really sure where this anger comes from. Advertising is such a big and growing industry because it works. This is not some evil conspiracy nor are all the companies full of idiots. You will find regular people much like yourself working at all of the advertising agencies, networks and publishers.<p>Impressions do work. It&#x27;s not a &quot;belief&quot;, it&#x27;s a fact. Think of it like an empty road with a billboard and a store at the next exit. You can have a blank billboard and see how many people stop at the store. Then put up an ad and measure again. That delta is a significant and measurable difference and with digital advertising, it can be tracked to a very specific level to prove it works. There are also many different types and formats of ads which work in different stages of the sales conversion funnel. YOU might not think it works, but that&#x27;s not what the massive amount of data and results show every day.</text></comment> | <story><title>BuzzFeed Says Posts Were Deleted Because of Advertising Pressure</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/20/business/media/buzzfeed-says-posts-were-deleted-because-of-advertising-pressure.html?partner=socialflow&smid=tw-nytimes&_r=0</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kyllo</author><text><i>I work in the online advertising space.</i><p><i>They also use AdBlock to basically steal content</i><p>The whole problem with your industry is that you are still operating under the mistaken belief that &quot;impressions&quot; drive purchasing behavior. As if having some image forcibly burnt into my brain will influence my subconscious desires enough to cause me to make a purchase sometime later. This idea is and has always been pure snake oil. I don&#x27;t want to see your ads, and I&#x27;m not going to click on them or buy what they are selling anyway. If anything I&#x27;m <i>less</i> likely to buy a product after I see it in a banner ad because they are annoying and I don&#x27;t buy products that annoy me. You have no business telling me that it&#x27;s &quot;stealing&quot; when I configure my browser client not to show me ads that I don&#x27;t want to see. The implication is offensive. Do you think that running a spam e-mail filter is &quot;basically stealing&quot; too?</text></item><item><author>manigandham</author><text>I work in the online advertising space. Unwilling is probably an understatement.<p>Although &quot;people&quot; shell out tons of money on casual&#x2F;social Facebook games and such, they are incredibly price sensitive to content like news or videos. They also use AdBlock to basically steal content without letting publishers recoup the production costs and other investments.<p>I&#x27;ve spoken to and worked with several major publisher networks over the years that have tried various solutions with subscriptions but every attempt has led to a massive backlash or drop in traffic as users would rather go elsewhere then pay to read. Just look at how much negative feelings there are towards paywalls or any site that requires membership.<p>There have been trials already by Google to solve for this but the original idea with Google Wallet [1] failed and they&#x27;re now trying out the Contributor program [2] but still having trouble.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.digitaltrends.com&#x2F;web&#x2F;google-launches-micropayments-for-web-content&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.digitaltrends.com&#x2F;web&#x2F;google-launches-micropaymen...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;contributor&#x2F;welcome&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;contributor&#x2F;welcome&#x2F;</a></text></item><item><author>wtallis</author><text>People <i>aren&#x27;t</i> paying for content. But extrapolating that to say that they&#x27;re <i>unwilling</i> to pay for content is a bit of a stretch, given the unwillingness of content producers to offer ad-free access at a fair market price, and the lack of an easy payments system to process such small transactions.</text></item><item><author>vonklaus</author><text>Well, if people would fucking pay for content, these conflicts wouldn&#x27;t happen. However, people have largely decided not to pay for content. I personally don&#x27;t pay for content very often, I also don&#x27;t expect unbiased journalism from buzzfeed.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>smtddr</author><text><i>&gt;&gt;As if having some image forcibly burnt into my brain will influence my subconscious desires enough to cause me to make a purchase sometime later. This idea is and has always been pure snake oil.</i><p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Brand_awareness" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Brand_awareness</a><p>This absolutely does work on a non-trivial amount of people. Even when said people are aware they are being influenced. Anecdotal; I grew up with McDonald&#x27;s fast food. Even though today I&#x27;ve taken up a much healthier diet for years, I&#x27;m still a bit sad McD&#x27;s cannot be a part of my family&#x27;s life. I&#x27;m aware it&#x27;s because of those golden arches and that Ronald person that was always in commercials during my Saturday morning cartoons. My superMarioBros.3 toys came from McD&#x27;s happymeals. To this day I still buy many Nintendo-brand t-shirts for myself, and even Nintendo stuff for my kids, and I know it&#x27;s because Nintendo has etched into my head their marketing from before I was even 10 years old.... but I can&#x27;t shake it off. McD&#x27;s mixing Nintendo characters into their marketing image makes it even harder for me to ignore them... but I do because I see the real effects of eating unhealthy. Otherwise anything that doesn&#x27;t have a very clear negative effect, the Ads do work on me. If I see something advertised often enough without running into any negative commentary about it, the next time I need whatever that company was advertising I will look to them first.</text></comment> |
2,509,764 | 2,509,495 | 1 | 2 | 2,509,451 | train | <story><title>The 10 commandments of good source control management</title><url>http://www.troyhunt.com/2011/05/10-commandments-of-good-source-control.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Xixi</author><text><i>"10. Dependencies need a home too"</i><p>I agree with this statement, but that home is definitely not with your code. There are tools better suited for that. For instance nexus &#38; maven.<p>Nexus store artifacts (which are really any piece of data: a jar, a tar.gz, a zip file). That's where you put your dependencies. Maven manage a project's build, that's where you tell what are your dependencies.<p>But really, there are many other tools out there to handle that (ant, nant, pypi, etc.).</text></comment> | <story><title>The 10 commandments of good source control management</title><url>http://www.troyhunt.com/2011/05/10-commandments-of-good-source-control.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Luyt</author><text><i>"In all fairness, VSS was a great tool."</i><p>I disagree. Even back in 1995 it had fatal flaws. More than once it got so confused that we had to restore the source tree from backup. There was also the continual problem of files being locked by others when they should not have been, hampering progress and complexities. I was glad when we could kick it out of the door.</text></comment> |
18,703,367 | 18,703,437 | 1 | 2 | 18,702,900 | train | <story><title>Millitext – A subpixel text encoding font</title><url>https://advent.morr.cc/2018/17</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>detaro</author><text><i>The Fellowship of the Ring</i> as a 3500x3500 px image: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;files.morr.cc&#x2F;lotr1.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;files.morr.cc&#x2F;lotr1.png</a> - if you have a 4k screen, you only need to scroll once for the entire book. (via the authors twitter: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;blinry&#x2F;status&#x2F;1074774555707797509" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;blinry&#x2F;status&#x2F;1074774555707797509</a>)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>loeg</author><text>Is that not some kind of copyright violation? Or does this count as a fair use derivative due to the transformative purpose of ... something?</text></comment> | <story><title>Millitext – A subpixel text encoding font</title><url>https://advent.morr.cc/2018/17</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>detaro</author><text><i>The Fellowship of the Ring</i> as a 3500x3500 px image: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;files.morr.cc&#x2F;lotr1.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;files.morr.cc&#x2F;lotr1.png</a> - if you have a 4k screen, you only need to scroll once for the entire book. (via the authors twitter: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;blinry&#x2F;status&#x2F;1074774555707797509" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;blinry&#x2F;status&#x2F;1074774555707797509</a>)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kazinator</author><text>If you stare at this it looks mostly purple, laced with a green webbing. There is a distinct pattern to it which is more or less uniform across the image.</text></comment> |
16,660,928 | 16,661,212 | 1 | 2 | 16,659,656 | train | <story><title>Elon Musk Deletes Own, SpaceX and Tesla Facebook Pages After #deletefacebook</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/23/elon-musk-deletes-own-spacex-and-tesla-facebook-pages-after-deletefacebook/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dandelany</author><text>Sounds overblown to me. Zuck&#x27;s statement was: “As I’m here in Africa, I’m deeply disappointed to hear that SpaceX’s launch failure destroyed our satellite that would have provided connectivity to so many entrepreneurs and everyone else across the continent.”<p>I don&#x27;t see anything nasty about that. It <i>was</i> SpaceX&#x27;s failure.</text></item><item><author>iooi</author><text>While I don&#x27;t normally give much weight to Business Insider, they have an interesting theory [1] that this is related to Zuckerberg&#x27;s nasty comments about SpaceX after the rocket carrying Facebook&#x27;s 85M satellite blew up.<p>Must feel pretty good for Elon considering how much press this is getting.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;elon-musk-deletes-tesla-spacex-facebook-pages-2018-3" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;elon-musk-deletes-tesla-space...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kemiller</author><text>It&#x27;s passive-aggressive. A bit like deleting one&#x27;s facebook profile I guess.</text></comment> | <story><title>Elon Musk Deletes Own, SpaceX and Tesla Facebook Pages After #deletefacebook</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/23/elon-musk-deletes-own-spacex-and-tesla-facebook-pages-after-deletefacebook/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dandelany</author><text>Sounds overblown to me. Zuck&#x27;s statement was: “As I’m here in Africa, I’m deeply disappointed to hear that SpaceX’s launch failure destroyed our satellite that would have provided connectivity to so many entrepreneurs and everyone else across the continent.”<p>I don&#x27;t see anything nasty about that. It <i>was</i> SpaceX&#x27;s failure.</text></item><item><author>iooi</author><text>While I don&#x27;t normally give much weight to Business Insider, they have an interesting theory [1] that this is related to Zuckerberg&#x27;s nasty comments about SpaceX after the rocket carrying Facebook&#x27;s 85M satellite blew up.<p>Must feel pretty good for Elon considering how much press this is getting.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;elon-musk-deletes-tesla-spacex-facebook-pages-2018-3" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;elon-musk-deletes-tesla-space...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tomc1985</author><text>&gt; It was SpaceX&#x27;s failure.<p>In an extremely high-risk endeavor where all parties knew all possible outcomes</text></comment> |
17,220,027 | 17,219,068 | 1 | 3 | 17,218,831 | train | <story><title>How microbes survive clean rooms and contaminate spacecraft</title><url>https://phys.org/news/2018-06-team-microbes-survive-rooms-contaminate.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>TheSpiceIsLife</author><text>I don’t know what Kleenol 30 is, but I would have thought it obvious that ethanol and isopropyl alcohol are insufficient to sterilise.<p>My immediate thought with regard to cleanliness is always moulds.<p>It’s not clean until it’s been soaked in sodium hypochlorite and sodium hydroxide, UV sterilised, gamma irradiated, then parked in a decaying orbit above the sun.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>arkades</author><text>They didn’t test whether Kleenol was sufficient to sterilize. They were showing that without access to any other nutrient&#x2F;carbon source, the bacteria were able to degrade and metabolize a variety of cleaning agents, Kleenol among those tested.<p>That is, they weren’t saying “hey, this bullet is ineffective against that tank.” They were saying, “deprived of oil, that tank started eating bullets.”</text></comment> | <story><title>How microbes survive clean rooms and contaminate spacecraft</title><url>https://phys.org/news/2018-06-team-microbes-survive-rooms-contaminate.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>TheSpiceIsLife</author><text>I don’t know what Kleenol 30 is, but I would have thought it obvious that ethanol and isopropyl alcohol are insufficient to sterilise.<p>My immediate thought with regard to cleanliness is always moulds.<p>It’s not clean until it’s been soaked in sodium hypochlorite and sodium hydroxide, UV sterilised, gamma irradiated, then parked in a decaying orbit above the sun.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>joosteto</author><text><i>&quot;It’s not clean until it’s been soaked in sodium hypochlorite and sodium hydroxide, UV sterilised, gamma irradiated, then parked in a decaying orbit above the sun.&quot;</i><p>By that time, you&#x27;ve also &#x27;sterilised&#x27; most electronics...</text></comment> |
4,029,923 | 4,029,882 | 1 | 2 | 4,029,632 | train | <story><title>Stop Taking Yourself So Seriously</title><url>http://danshipper.com/stop-taking-yourself-so-seriously</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Swizec</author><text>Best fitness advice I ever got:<p>1. Find a sport you like and enjoy<p>2. Have fun [often]</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jcfrei</author><text>well... If you wanna stay healthy and maybe lose some weight endurance sports are the way to go. swimming is great, as well as bicycling (running as well, though might damage your joints when you get older). frankly anything that gets your cardiovascular system going for a long time. humans, in contrast to a lot of other mammals, have an excellent endurance. it's one of the physical conditions that made us superior hunterers a long time ago, when we would simply chase an antilope thru the desert, until it was exhausted. capitalize on that and always do some endurance sports if you are serious about your health.</text></comment> | <story><title>Stop Taking Yourself So Seriously</title><url>http://danshipper.com/stop-taking-yourself-so-seriously</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Swizec</author><text>Best fitness advice I ever got:<p>1. Find a sport you like and enjoy<p>2. Have fun [often]</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tomjen3</author><text>Unfortunately gun shooting doesn't really grow much muscle.</text></comment> |
12,167,128 | 12,163,904 | 1 | 2 | 12,163,109 | train | <story><title>People can sense single photons</title><url>http://www.nature.com/news/people-can-sense-single-photons-1.20282</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>white-flame</author><text>If you pay close attention in very low level light situations, you&#x27;ll notice that what you do see (or at least what <i>I</i> see) is actually reminiscent of the RGB graininess of low level light photographs. That graininess is to my understanding caused by the variation of the number of photons hitting that portion of the receptors, which is unnoticeable when flooded with quadjillions of them in decent lighting.<p>So this is a nice semi-expected result in this experiment, though it does seem to be near the limit of default human perception.<p>I wonder how well somebody could train themselves to notice single-photon events, much like musicians can notice tiny audio events and variations.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>devindotcom</author><text>Actually, I would guess that the &#x27;noise&#x27; you see is from the highly noisy system of retinal ganglia and such... the eye is a wonderful thing but it has a few, shall we say, quirks. Check out this diagram:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.corpshumain.ca&#x2F;en&#x2F;images&#x2F;Retine_couches_couleur_(FF)_en.jpg" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.corpshumain.ca&#x2F;en&#x2F;images&#x2F;Retine_couches_couleur_(...</a><p>Note that the light comes from the TOP and passes through all those layers before hitting the photosensitive one!<p>So - at the Earth&#x27;s surface, even on a very dark night, I think you would be receiving far, far too many photons for them to each register as a sort of noise blob. More likely it is the natural noise of your nervous system as it does all the things that cells need to do and produces the slight visible side effect that&#x27;s more pronounced in darkness and low contrast.<p>Edit: Also, since I remember this coming up in my neuro classes, this has been shown in less rigorous experimentation before:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;math.ucr.edu&#x2F;home&#x2F;baez&#x2F;physics&#x2F;Quantum&#x2F;see_a_photon.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;math.ucr.edu&#x2F;home&#x2F;baez&#x2F;physics&#x2F;Quantum&#x2F;see_a_photon.h...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>People can sense single photons</title><url>http://www.nature.com/news/people-can-sense-single-photons-1.20282</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>white-flame</author><text>If you pay close attention in very low level light situations, you&#x27;ll notice that what you do see (or at least what <i>I</i> see) is actually reminiscent of the RGB graininess of low level light photographs. That graininess is to my understanding caused by the variation of the number of photons hitting that portion of the receptors, which is unnoticeable when flooded with quadjillions of them in decent lighting.<p>So this is a nice semi-expected result in this experiment, though it does seem to be near the limit of default human perception.<p>I wonder how well somebody could train themselves to notice single-photon events, much like musicians can notice tiny audio events and variations.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rcthompson</author><text>My understanding is that the &quot;grain&quot; is not necessarily caused by your eyes detecting isolated photons, but rather by the electrons in the light-absorbing molecules of your rods &amp; cones becoming spontaneously excited by ambient heat energy rather than absorption of a photon. Either way, it shows that we can indeed consciously perceive single-molecule excitation events, whatever the cause.</text></comment> |
37,190,609 | 37,188,777 | 1 | 2 | 37,188,015 | train | <story><title>Why do old books smell so good?</title><url>https://scienceswitch.com/2023/08/19/why-do-old-books-smell-so-good/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nmeagent</author><text>This article immediately brought to mind a particular conversation in season one of Buffy the Vampire Slayer...<p>Jenny: &quot;Honestly, what is it about them that bothers you so much?&quot;<p>Giles: &quot;The smell.&quot;<p>Jenny: &quot;Computers don&#x27;t smell, Rupert.&quot;<p>Giles: &quot;I know. Smell is the most powerful trigger to the memory there is. A certain flower, or a a whiff of smoke can bring up experiences long forgotten. Books smell musty and-and-and rich. The knowledge gained from a computer is a - it, uh, it has no no texture, no-no context. It&#x27;s-it&#x27;s there and then it&#x27;s gone. If it&#x27;s to last, then-then the getting of knowledge should be, uh, tangible, it should be, um, smelly.&quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>el_benhameen</author><text>The first computer shop that I went to as a kid (back when computer shops were a thing) had a very distinct smell that still evokes very strong memories for me now. I guess it probably wasn’t the computers themselves, but maybe that foamed rubber material used for mousepads and such, plus maybe some static charge in the air from CRTs or something? Any time I catch that smell, I’m immediately back playing Loom and Monkey Island and oogling at Pentiums and 1 GB hard drives.</text></comment> | <story><title>Why do old books smell so good?</title><url>https://scienceswitch.com/2023/08/19/why-do-old-books-smell-so-good/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nmeagent</author><text>This article immediately brought to mind a particular conversation in season one of Buffy the Vampire Slayer...<p>Jenny: &quot;Honestly, what is it about them that bothers you so much?&quot;<p>Giles: &quot;The smell.&quot;<p>Jenny: &quot;Computers don&#x27;t smell, Rupert.&quot;<p>Giles: &quot;I know. Smell is the most powerful trigger to the memory there is. A certain flower, or a a whiff of smoke can bring up experiences long forgotten. Books smell musty and-and-and rich. The knowledge gained from a computer is a - it, uh, it has no no texture, no-no context. It&#x27;s-it&#x27;s there and then it&#x27;s gone. If it&#x27;s to last, then-then the getting of knowledge should be, uh, tangible, it should be, um, smelly.&quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>thret</author><text>It reminded me of a similar sentiment by Marcel Proust:<p>“So we don&#x27;t believe that life is beautiful because we don&#x27;t recall it but if we get a whiff of a long-forgotten smell we are suddenly intoxicated and similarly we think we no longer love the dead because we don&#x27;t remember them but if by chance we come across an old glove we burst into tears.”</text></comment> |
39,690,793 | 39,690,729 | 1 | 3 | 39,682,852 | train | <story><title>Identifying Software</title><url>https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2024/identifying-software/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Zambyte</author><text>I have felt spoiled by GNU Guix honestly. It has documentation that is comparable to Gentoo or Arch, power over your system that generally matches Gentoo (though a system-wide equivalent of USE flags is not yet available, individual packages can be configured), the ease of maintenance of a system like Fedora Silverblue, and one of the most approachable communities I have ever dealt with. I highly recommend playing around with it :)</text></comment> | <story><title>Identifying Software</title><url>https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2024/identifying-software/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>datadrivenangel</author><text>&quot;we believe binary artifacts should instead be treated as the result of a computational process; it is that process that needs to be fully captured to support independent verification of the source&#x2F;binary correspondence. &quot;<p>So binary artifacts should verifiably come from source code, which can be accomplished by signing it with a signing mechanism specified in the source code?</text></comment> |
24,378,629 | 24,377,333 | 1 | 3 | 24,376,162 | train | <story><title>Bullfrog After Populous</title><url>https://www.filfre.net/2020/09/bullfrog-after-populous/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>richardjdare</author><text>When people ask me what game developer I&#x27;d like to work for I used to say either Lucasfilm Games in 1987 or Bullfrog in 1990. Bullfrog had a huge amount of prestige amongst Amiga gamers. It might not look like it now, but everything they did appeared original and innovative at the time. Peter Molyneux was seemingly up there with Sid Meier as one of the great designers of the era. It was only later that he soured his reputation.<p>I remember Bullfrog&#x27;s programming tutorials in Amiga format [0]. If that was all you had (it was all <i>i</i> had) then it wasn&#x27;t enough to let you write your own games or learn enough to get a job.<p>I got my parents to buy me a book on 68000 assembly to go with it, only to find that the Devpac assembler from the tutorial didn&#x27;t come with any of the OS include files, so I couldn&#x27;t get past the second chapter. These kinds of setbacks were typical.<p>When I think back to those days, I loved the Amiga community and magazines, I loved the seemingly accessible, informal world of game development, but it was so damn hard to just climb the first step and learn to code if you didn&#x27;t have much money.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;details&#x2F;AmigaFormatIssue039199210_201901&#x2F;page&#x2F;n61&#x2F;mode&#x2F;2up" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;details&#x2F;AmigaFormatIssue039199210_201901...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>simonebrunozzi</author><text>For me it would be Steve Barcia [0], the creator of Master of Magic (MoM) and Master of Orion II (MoO 2). (MoO 1 wasn&#x27;t as great as the 2).<p>I surely played thousands of hours just with these two games, over 20+ years.<p>A while ago I tried to get in touch with him (among other things I started a tech podcast and I wanted him as a guest), but I couldn&#x27;t find any way to contact him. I messaged him on Linkedin, but never responded.<p>What a pity. I would have loved to ask him how was his life when he developed these two games.<p>Fun fact: MoM has an incredible mod, called Caster of Magic, built by this lonely Japanese developer. [1]<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Steve_Barcia" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Steve_Barcia</a><p>[1]: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;seravy.x10.mx&#x2F;Wordpress&#x2F;?p=2027" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;seravy.x10.mx&#x2F;Wordpress&#x2F;?p=2027</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Bullfrog After Populous</title><url>https://www.filfre.net/2020/09/bullfrog-after-populous/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>richardjdare</author><text>When people ask me what game developer I&#x27;d like to work for I used to say either Lucasfilm Games in 1987 or Bullfrog in 1990. Bullfrog had a huge amount of prestige amongst Amiga gamers. It might not look like it now, but everything they did appeared original and innovative at the time. Peter Molyneux was seemingly up there with Sid Meier as one of the great designers of the era. It was only later that he soured his reputation.<p>I remember Bullfrog&#x27;s programming tutorials in Amiga format [0]. If that was all you had (it was all <i>i</i> had) then it wasn&#x27;t enough to let you write your own games or learn enough to get a job.<p>I got my parents to buy me a book on 68000 assembly to go with it, only to find that the Devpac assembler from the tutorial didn&#x27;t come with any of the OS include files, so I couldn&#x27;t get past the second chapter. These kinds of setbacks were typical.<p>When I think back to those days, I loved the Amiga community and magazines, I loved the seemingly accessible, informal world of game development, but it was so damn hard to just climb the first step and learn to code if you didn&#x27;t have much money.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;details&#x2F;AmigaFormatIssue039199210_201901&#x2F;page&#x2F;n61&#x2F;mode&#x2F;2up" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;details&#x2F;AmigaFormatIssue039199210_201901...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bartread</author><text>When I was 15 I actually spoke to Peter Molyneux on the phone a couple of times.<p>In year 11 we had to organise our own work experience, and I decided I wanted to try to do mine at Bullfrog - this would have been 1991. My friend Chris and I had started fiddling around with building games using STOS and AMOS on the Atari ST and Amiga, and so I asked him if he wanted to try to get in as well.<p>We talked to our form tutor about it. He was very supportive, got the deputy head involved, and they let us make some phone calls (a big deal for schoolkids at the time) to try to get in touch with Bullfrog. We didn&#x27;t get anywhere with Electronic Arts, their publisher at the time, who flatly refused to give us Bullfrog&#x27;s contact details, but then I decided to phone up Amiga Format, explained what we were trying to do, and we ended up speaking to one of their staff writers or editors who gave us Bullfrog&#x27;s number straight away.<p>A totally surreal experience then occurred as I rang the number for Bullfrog, asked to speak to Peter Molyneux, somebody gave him the phone and we ended up talking. After explaning to him that Chris and I were looking for work experience, I handed the phone to my form tutor who verified the whole story and, long and the short of it, Peter Molyneux was totally up for us coming on board for a couple of weeks.<p>Absolutely unbelievable and therefore, in my eyes, regardless of what has happened since, the guy is and will always remain a legend.<p>Here&#x27;s where the story gets a little sad though, at least for me.<p>I hadn&#x27;t mentioned this scheme to my parents because I thought they&#x27;d poo-poo the idea before I&#x27;d even started, and I just didn&#x27;t want to deal with the argument and the discouragement. I thought it would be better to see if we could get anywhere with it, and then talk to them about it if it worked out.<p>So I did talk to them and, long story short, they wouldn&#x27;t let me go and stay up in Guildford (I grew up in Dorset). But Chris&#x27;s parents did let him go, so my final conversation with Peter Molyneux was to thank him very much for the opportunity, apologise that I couldn&#x27;t come after all, but let him know that Chris was still going to come.<p>So at least one of us had a great time at Bullfrog, and I think it was probably the coolest piece of work experience anyone in our year group did. For my placement I was instead a teaching assistant in a local middle school, which was still pretty fun, but not as much as working at Bullfrog!<p>---<p>EDIT: I&#x27;ve added the below in response to a reply on this comment, but I thought worth including it here as well to round out the story because I don&#x27;t want to give an unbalanced view of the situation.<p>This whole idea of work experience at Bullfrog was always a long shot. I grew up poor. So I was disappointed that my folks said no, but there is no way they could have afforded to pay for a couple of weeks&#x27; accommodation for me in Guildford (and I obviously didn&#x27;t have the money). In my heart of hearts, I knew that all along. Really I think I just wanted to see if it could possibly work[0].<p>It&#x27;s also worth pointing out that whilst they didn&#x27;t let me do that - and disagreements between stroppy teenagers and their parents are hardly unique - they did help me in a lot of other ways, and made plenty of sacrifices for my benefit, for which I will always be grateful.<p><i>[0] Of course, if I&#x27;d really had some hustle about me I&#x27;d have taken a more bullish approach to the setback and gone on some sort of fundraising drive.</i></text></comment> |
10,065,695 | 10,065,686 | 1 | 2 | 10,064,700 | train | <story><title>Snake Oil Crypto Competition</title><url>http://snakeoil.cr.yp.to/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>chatmasta</author><text>I was disappointed to realize the snake-oil competition is a parody, because a properly-implemented version of it could teach valuable lessons to non-technical consumers.<p>Many products make outrageous claims about their security. Try browsing the aisles of Best Buy or any major department store. From smart-home sensors to security-cameras to anti-virus software, the shelves are stocked full with snake-oil security products advertising themselves as legitimate. These are the products that big retailers and OEM partners are marketing to the public as &quot;secure,&quot; with much lower standards for security than any expert would assert.<p>To prove this to the public, what better way than a competition for benevolent security researchers to create a wolf-in-sheeps-clothing? The competition is to produce most shiny, marketable product design that looks like a &quot;security&quot; product, but does something far more sinister than protect its users.<p>Product ideas: &quot;Anonymous router&quot; that actually logs all traffic and sends it to a printer in the local police office; &quot;Smart Home Hub&quot; that performs active exploitation attacks against connected devices; &quot;Smart TV&quot; that actually films its users and live streams their living room to a website.<p>(Bonus points if they credit real products!)</text></comment> | <story><title>Snake Oil Crypto Competition</title><url>http://snakeoil.cr.yp.to/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>zymhan</author><text>I clicked on one of the submissions and the paper is in Comic Sans: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;snakeoil.cr.yp.to&#x2F;submissions&#x2F;Lolcipher%20Submission.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;snakeoil.cr.yp.to&#x2F;submissions&#x2F;Lolcipher%20Submission....</a><p>This is hilarious.</text></comment> |
29,167,966 | 29,167,508 | 1 | 2 | 29,163,805 | train | <story><title>USC pushed a $115k online degree – graduates got low salaries, huge debts</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/usc-online-social-work-masters-11636435900</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>999900000999</author><text>Ehh eh.<p>I went to a CSU for like 6k a year.<p>If you want to be elitist and attend the most expensive school possible, you have to eventually pay for it.<p>&gt;
Ms. Fowler, a 2018 graduate, enjoyed the program but owes $307,000 in total student-loan debt, including about $200,000 from the master’s degree. She said she earns $48,000 as a community mental-health therapist in Mount Pleasant, Iowa.<p>This translates into paying 300k to feel prestigious. At dinner parties she gets to tell everyone about how she&#x27;s a USC grad.<p>Adults have a right to make poor choices.<p>That said, having a hard cap of 100k unless enrolling in a high paid field ( Dr , Lawyer, anything that requires a state sanctioned license) would be a good idea.<p>The problem with Student Loan forgiveness is it would typically help the highest paid Americans. Most people with 100k plus in loans also make very good money.<p>Why in God&#x27;s name would you go 300k in debt to make 50k ?<p>I see the same problem with boot camps, instead of accepting that building a six-figure career just takes a while, people want a shortcut. I got to six-figure figures without even having a BA, but it took a long time in a lot of very hard work.<p>Actually it only took me about 3 years from dropping out of college to my first six-figure job, but I was programming at least 40 hours a week back then. This was after work of course. Even now I&#x27;m off and happiest when I&#x27;m building my side projects.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>david38</author><text>Yes, adults can make poor choices. Agreed.<p>Said choices should be constrained though. She wouldn&#x27;t be allowed to buy a 300k car with no possibility of bankruptcy.<p>The lender is made of adults as well. They also made poor choices. Why is a group of adults hiding behind a piece of paper allowed to be saved from their poor choices while an individual not?</text></comment> | <story><title>USC pushed a $115k online degree – graduates got low salaries, huge debts</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/usc-online-social-work-masters-11636435900</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>999900000999</author><text>Ehh eh.<p>I went to a CSU for like 6k a year.<p>If you want to be elitist and attend the most expensive school possible, you have to eventually pay for it.<p>&gt;
Ms. Fowler, a 2018 graduate, enjoyed the program but owes $307,000 in total student-loan debt, including about $200,000 from the master’s degree. She said she earns $48,000 as a community mental-health therapist in Mount Pleasant, Iowa.<p>This translates into paying 300k to feel prestigious. At dinner parties she gets to tell everyone about how she&#x27;s a USC grad.<p>Adults have a right to make poor choices.<p>That said, having a hard cap of 100k unless enrolling in a high paid field ( Dr , Lawyer, anything that requires a state sanctioned license) would be a good idea.<p>The problem with Student Loan forgiveness is it would typically help the highest paid Americans. Most people with 100k plus in loans also make very good money.<p>Why in God&#x27;s name would you go 300k in debt to make 50k ?<p>I see the same problem with boot camps, instead of accepting that building a six-figure career just takes a while, people want a shortcut. I got to six-figure figures without even having a BA, but it took a long time in a lot of very hard work.<p>Actually it only took me about 3 years from dropping out of college to my first six-figure job, but I was programming at least 40 hours a week back then. This was after work of course. Even now I&#x27;m off and happiest when I&#x27;m building my side projects.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>BizarroLand</author><text>I don&#x27;t know if there is a solution to this, but it seems like the cost should be somehow equivalent to the average payout. I feel that college in general would serve the country better if the results were tied to the expenses and efforts required. A Sociology degree that empowers people to make life changes for disadvantaged and neglected people (while living on subsistence wages) would serve our future better if it were basically free, whereas STEM degrees that increase your likelihood of retiring a millionaire by 50% over the average could be feasibly worthwhile if they cost $300k.<p>I took on $65k of loans for my BS but make six figures myself, so it was worth it for me. I can&#x27;t image 5x the cost for 1&#x2F;3rd the reward. That&#x27;s just stupid.<p>I admit that the person who took this path is to blame for some of it, but a college tying $300,000 to a degree that earns $5&#x2F;hr more than a fry cook is also at some level to blame along with the path society took to enable this scenario to exist in the first place.</text></comment> |
18,010,373 | 18,009,450 | 1 | 2 | 18,007,545 | train | <story><title>ProtonMail Hits 5M Accounts</title><url>https://www.inverse.com/article/49041-protonmail-ceo-andy-yen-interview</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rootusrootus</author><text>There are two reasons I&#x27;m still with Google for mail at this point: Inertia, and cost. The former is pretty easy to understand. The latter has more to do with the fact that I have a private domain for our family and I&#x27;ve been using Google Apps since the days when it was free. If I want to convert to another service like ProtonMail then I&#x27;m either going to tell a bunch of people in my family to pay up (with all the accompanying annoyances), or I pay $50+&#x2F;year on their behalf out of my own pocket. And in either case I probably get to move their email for them. It&#x27;s hard to get up the enthusiasm to do any of that, even if I do have a growing desire to disconnect from Google.<p>I haven&#x27;t done any thorough searching recently, but if I could find a reputable provider that had a reasonable family-priced solution that would be ideal. The per-account pricing adds up relatively quickly.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>eikenberry</author><text>Just as someone who has done a decent amount of research on what would be the best&#x2F;cheapest way to host my family email... I found that runbox.com had the best deal. You pay more for a base&#x2F;master account w&#x2F; a custom domain ($35&#x2F;yr and up) then you pay a lesser amount for sub-accounts ($8&#x2F;yr and up). It quickly overtakes the 2-3&#x2F;mon&#x2F;account rates that the other providers cost.</text></comment> | <story><title>ProtonMail Hits 5M Accounts</title><url>https://www.inverse.com/article/49041-protonmail-ceo-andy-yen-interview</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rootusrootus</author><text>There are two reasons I&#x27;m still with Google for mail at this point: Inertia, and cost. The former is pretty easy to understand. The latter has more to do with the fact that I have a private domain for our family and I&#x27;ve been using Google Apps since the days when it was free. If I want to convert to another service like ProtonMail then I&#x27;m either going to tell a bunch of people in my family to pay up (with all the accompanying annoyances), or I pay $50+&#x2F;year on their behalf out of my own pocket. And in either case I probably get to move their email for them. It&#x27;s hard to get up the enthusiasm to do any of that, even if I do have a growing desire to disconnect from Google.<p>I haven&#x27;t done any thorough searching recently, but if I could find a reputable provider that had a reasonable family-priced solution that would be ideal. The per-account pricing adds up relatively quickly.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nigifabio</author><text>I was in a similar situation and I moved everything to Runbox <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;Runbox.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;Runbox.com</a>, the business and social model are amazing and running on green energy</text></comment> |
5,109,441 | 5,109,186 | 1 | 2 | 5,108,820 | train | <story><title>An Amaz-ing Resume</title><url>http://www.phildub.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zacharyvoase</author><text>One concern is this, in the footer:<p>&#62; This website was made in Jan 2013 by Philippe Dubost for the sole purpose of a playful and creative job search. No copyright infrigement intended.<p>"No copyright infringement intended" is not a thing. Also, right below that it then says:<p>&#62; © 2013, Philippe Dubost<p>Seems a bit strange to me.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dctoedt</author><text>1. At least in the U.S., this is clearly fair use [1] [EDIT: for purposes of <i>copyright</i> law], first because the use is "transformative," and second because it will have <i>zero</i> impact on the market for authorized copies (or displays or performances) of (i) the original copyrighted work, namely the Amazon Web site; or (ii) licensed derivatives of the Amazon Web site. See the Supreme Court's decision in <i>Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music</i>, the "Oh Pretty Woman" parody case in which rappers 2 Live Crew prevailed [2].<p>2. If Amazon were to sue Philippe Dubost in the U.S. for infringement, the judge likely would toss out the case under the Supreme Court's <i>Twombly/Iqbal</i> doctrine [3], assuming Dubost filed a motion to dismiss --- I can't imagine how Amazon could plead a <i>plausible</i> case that the infringement had affected its market, as would be required by <i>Twombly/Iqbal.</i><p>3. In the unlikely event that Amazon did sue Philippe Dubost in the U.S. for infringement, if Dubost won, he might very well be able to recover reasonable attorneys' fees from Amazon [4].<p>4. The resume suggests that Philippe Dubost is in Paris, so Amazon could sue in France for infringement of the French copyright; I don't know what the outcome would be in that case.<p>5. If someone at Amazon did want to file suit for infringement, the marketing people should throw their bodies in front of the train, because Amazon would be widely mocked. If anything, the resume's mimicry of the Amazon style provides (incremental) validation of Amazon's status as a First World icon.<p>5A. [EDIT:] On the trademark side, Amazon might have a plausible case against Dubost for "dilution" of a famous trademark, namely the totality of the Amazon Web site's look and feel. [5]<p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use</a><p>[2] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell_v._Acuff-Rose_Music,_Inc" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell_v._Acuff-Rose_Music,_I...</a>.<p>[3] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashcroft_v._Iqbal#Rule_8_pleading_standard" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashcroft_v._Iqbal#Rule_8_pleadi...</a><p>[4] <a href="http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap5.html#505" rel="nofollow">http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap5.html#505</a><p>[5] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark_dilution" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark_dilution</a></text></comment> | <story><title>An Amaz-ing Resume</title><url>http://www.phildub.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zacharyvoase</author><text>One concern is this, in the footer:<p>&#62; This website was made in Jan 2013 by Philippe Dubost for the sole purpose of a playful and creative job search. No copyright infrigement intended.<p>"No copyright infringement intended" is not a thing. Also, right below that it then says:<p>&#62; © 2013, Philippe Dubost<p>Seems a bit strange to me.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>samfoo</author><text>This has clearly been infringed on for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain; vis-a-vis, employment.<p>Amazon's monetary losses over this offense must be immeasurable. Jail time or crippling life-time debt could be the only satisfactory retribution.<p>/s</text></comment> |
27,188,255 | 27,188,438 | 1 | 2 | 27,186,675 | train | <story><title>Why is the Gaza Strip blurry on Google Maps?</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/news/57102499</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sequoia</author><text>Tangentially related but where does this come from and why is it so widely repeated (as in this article):<p>&gt; ...Gaza, one of the most densely populated places in the world<p>I&#x27;ve seen this claim (both in the &quot;one of the most...&quot; and &quot;<i>the</i> #1 most...&quot; forms) many times and I don&#x27;t know where it comes from. What am I missing?<p>Here[0] wikipedia says Gaza Strip has ~5,046&#x2F;sqkm. I thought maybe Gaza City was meant, it&#x27;s density is 13,000&#x2F;sqkm[1]. Neither of these come close to ranking on wikipedias list of cities by population density[2], and I haven&#x27;t been able to find any &quot;most populated places&quot; lists that list anything below 15,000 people per square kilometer, which Gaza city is well below.<p>Is the BBC just plain wrong here or am I missing something? I hope it&#x27;s me because if it&#x27;s the former, that says something really bad about their fact checking and would suggest that BBC is not a reliable&#x2F;trustworthy source, at least on this topic.<p><pre><code> 0: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Gaza_Strip
1: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Gaza_City
2: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_cities_proper_by_population_density</code></pre></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jcranmer</author><text>You&#x27;re probably missing this listing:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_population_density" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_countries_and_dependen...</a><p>Where Gaza listed as its own country, it would be one of the densest, since it&#x27;s basically a city and its urban sprawl and nothing more (like the other densest entries on the list). Of course, Gaza is itself arguably only part of Palestine, but the West Bank itself is pretty dense (see how high Palestine ranks on that list).</text></comment> | <story><title>Why is the Gaza Strip blurry on Google Maps?</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/news/57102499</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sequoia</author><text>Tangentially related but where does this come from and why is it so widely repeated (as in this article):<p>&gt; ...Gaza, one of the most densely populated places in the world<p>I&#x27;ve seen this claim (both in the &quot;one of the most...&quot; and &quot;<i>the</i> #1 most...&quot; forms) many times and I don&#x27;t know where it comes from. What am I missing?<p>Here[0] wikipedia says Gaza Strip has ~5,046&#x2F;sqkm. I thought maybe Gaza City was meant, it&#x27;s density is 13,000&#x2F;sqkm[1]. Neither of these come close to ranking on wikipedias list of cities by population density[2], and I haven&#x27;t been able to find any &quot;most populated places&quot; lists that list anything below 15,000 people per square kilometer, which Gaza city is well below.<p>Is the BBC just plain wrong here or am I missing something? I hope it&#x27;s me because if it&#x27;s the former, that says something really bad about their fact checking and would suggest that BBC is not a reliable&#x2F;trustworthy source, at least on this topic.<p><pre><code> 0: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Gaza_Strip
1: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Gaza_City
2: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_cities_proper_by_population_density</code></pre></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>avip</author><text>Gaza would have ranked 5th on population density, or 3rd if you remove places with tiny population (i.e take a &quot;pop &gt; 1MM&quot; threshold).<p>It&#x27;s basically after Singapore and Hong-Kong.</text></comment> |
28,639,584 | 28,639,593 | 1 | 2 | 28,638,617 | train | <story><title>If AT&T Had Managed the Phone Business Like Google</title><url>https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/if-at-and-t-had-managed-the-phone</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>paxys</author><text>I don&#x27;t think people realize just how expensive and congested these networks were back in the day. Phone calls cost what they did because capacity was a real constraint. It&#x27;s not that they were all ethical businessmen doing a public service as the article makes them out to be (some old business tactics of AT&amp;T, Standard Oil, American Tobacco etc. would make the most ruthless big tech exec of today blush). They simply could not conceive of a business model where customers could use their service 24x7 because it was impossible to provide it.<p>You don&#x27;t even have to go all the way back to the 70s or 80s to see this. We used to pay by the minute for dial up internet and cell phone calls well into the 00s.<p>The &quot;all you can eat&quot; business model — whether ad-supported or for a fixed monthly fee — is a very recent invention, and is only possible because of massive improvements to the underlying infrastructure (fiber, LTE, cheap servers).</text></comment> | <story><title>If AT&T Had Managed the Phone Business Like Google</title><url>https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/if-at-and-t-had-managed-the-phone</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jay_kyburz</author><text>This is not a good analogy at all for so many reasons.<p>Here is something closer.<p>Google went to University and read all books and created the worlds largest filing cabinet with an amazing index of the worlds information.<p>They decided to allow other students to use the index to help track down the information they need for their assignment. They ask Google, where do I find information about X and Google tells them they will find it in some obscure corner of the library they would never have thought to look.<p>The index becomes so popular that some business people show up and suggest to Google that if people are looking for information about X, they might also want to buy some Y. Google shrugs and says, sure I&#x27;ll tell them about your product as I send them off to find what they are looking for.<p>Then Google notices that email sucks (and they fix it), and maps suck (so they fix it). Then they buy the local video store and make it really popular.<p>But by this time Google is so huge its a mostly out of control monster.</text></comment> |
23,886,764 | 23,886,860 | 1 | 2 | 23,886,501 | train | <story><title>Low-Background Steel</title><url>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>xattt</author><text>Is there a particular trigger for this post?<p>Is this a case of someone stumbling into the concept and wanting to share it with the world? Is there some trend in SV around low-background steel right now?<p>Genuinely curious about the phenomenon of posts around topics that have a great deal of understanding and aren’t necessarily trending in the general news cycle.</text></item><item><author>Cerium</author><text>This comes up on HN every now and then, it is how I learned about low background steel. If this is new to you, you may also enjoy reading about the cesium content of wine: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.technologyreview.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;07&#x2F;19&#x2F;141390&#x2F;fukushimas-nuclear-signature-found-in-california-wine&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.technologyreview.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;07&#x2F;19&#x2F;141390&#x2F;fukushima...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>confeit</author><text>I saw it linked from the comments on a Tweet by Karpathy and found it intellectually curious.<p>&gt; By posting GPT generated text we’re polluting the data for its future versions<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;karpathy&#x2F;status&#x2F;1284660899198820352" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;karpathy&#x2F;status&#x2F;1284660899198820352</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Low-Background Steel</title><url>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>xattt</author><text>Is there a particular trigger for this post?<p>Is this a case of someone stumbling into the concept and wanting to share it with the world? Is there some trend in SV around low-background steel right now?<p>Genuinely curious about the phenomenon of posts around topics that have a great deal of understanding and aren’t necessarily trending in the general news cycle.</text></item><item><author>Cerium</author><text>This comes up on HN every now and then, it is how I learned about low background steel. If this is new to you, you may also enjoy reading about the cesium content of wine: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.technologyreview.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;07&#x2F;19&#x2F;141390&#x2F;fukushimas-nuclear-signature-found-in-california-wine&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.technologyreview.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;07&#x2F;19&#x2F;141390&#x2F;fukushima...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>timeinput</author><text>It could be as simple as OP being one of [today&#x27;s lucky 10,000](<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;1053&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;1053&#x2F;</a>).</text></comment> |
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