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18,169,698 | 18,163,695 | 1 | 2 | 18,158,170 | train | <story><title>As fake videos become more realistic, seeing shouldn't always be believing</title><url>http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-fake-videos-20180219-story.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>acjohnson55</author><text>I don&#x27;t think it matters. Those people are already in an intellectually closed pocket universe. People overestimate the extent to which universal consensual reality exists or has ever existed.<p>The first line of defense is education. Fundamentally, we have to make the case for why we know what we know. This is why K-12 exists, although the availability of effective primary and secondary education remains a major issue.<p>The next line of defense is social interaction. Most people will have to leave their bubbles to have any sort of upward mobility and ability to steer society. There will always be cynical people who exploit constituencies of deceived people to gain power, but many others eventually defect.<p>We have little reason to believe that this is a long-term equilibrium, but it&#x27;s the story of the past 500 years of history, ever since the printing press created decentralized mass media.</text></item><item><author>davidgh</author><text>My fear is less about people being “duped” by a fake video and more that fake videos will serve as feedback loops for misguided or false beliefs that people already “cherish” and “love”. Most will make little effort to research the legitimacy of a video that agrees with their current beliefs, but those beliefs will probably be strongly reinforced by fake videos.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>droneOperator</author><text>This is first-order thinking, and neglects deeper strategies, that tamper with how society currently functions, as compared with moving through a transition phase for how society will have to function in the future, which requires some second and third order thinking.<p>It&#x27;s not only the flashy, obvious attention grabbing deception that matters, it&#x27;s also some really mediocre day-to-day stuff that&#x27;s going to matter too. Take your typical tendencies for human dysfunction, and now amplify the effects of poor communication with augmented miscommunication.<p>Areas involving identity theft, SWATTING, security camera evidence, security cameras as crime deterrence, post divorce child custody, blackmail, and worse.<p>If you don&#x27;t trust MD5 hashes to protect your password, this will be the corollary in terms of video cameras as de facto evidence. Sure, an MD5 quickly masks a string in a deterministic way, that requires privilege escalation to access and limited skill to unmask, but the level of technology we&#x27;ve reached raises the bar, and MD5 is understood as untrustworthy, such that even a well guarded data set should still not utilize MD5 hashes.<p>So too with video, which requires skill to tamper with, and likely privilege escalation even to do so, but we&#x27;re moving into a world where it won&#x27;t be enough to assume that the data assets themselves were too complex to tamper with, too few would know how, and best practices always kept all the footage 100% secure in an impregnable, incorruptible repository under lock and key.</text></comment> | <story><title>As fake videos become more realistic, seeing shouldn't always be believing</title><url>http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-fake-videos-20180219-story.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>acjohnson55</author><text>I don&#x27;t think it matters. Those people are already in an intellectually closed pocket universe. People overestimate the extent to which universal consensual reality exists or has ever existed.<p>The first line of defense is education. Fundamentally, we have to make the case for why we know what we know. This is why K-12 exists, although the availability of effective primary and secondary education remains a major issue.<p>The next line of defense is social interaction. Most people will have to leave their bubbles to have any sort of upward mobility and ability to steer society. There will always be cynical people who exploit constituencies of deceived people to gain power, but many others eventually defect.<p>We have little reason to believe that this is a long-term equilibrium, but it&#x27;s the story of the past 500 years of history, ever since the printing press created decentralized mass media.</text></item><item><author>davidgh</author><text>My fear is less about people being “duped” by a fake video and more that fake videos will serve as feedback loops for misguided or false beliefs that people already “cherish” and “love”. Most will make little effort to research the legitimacy of a video that agrees with their current beliefs, but those beliefs will probably be strongly reinforced by fake videos.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>exolymph</author><text>&quot;Those people&quot; indicates that the majority on this forum (including myself) is part of the general dupe-susceptible population. That seems dubious to me.<p>Edit: *is not! I do think Hacker News readers are dupe-susceptible.</text></comment> |
39,474,663 | 39,470,911 | 1 | 2 | 39,447,603 | train | <story><title>Eclipse viewing at 30k feet: Delta to offer path-of-totality flight</title><url>https://news.delta.com/eclipse-viewing-30000-feet-delta-offer-path-totality-flight</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>londons_explore</author><text>Banking the plane for people to see is a safety thing.<p>If people think they <i>won&#x27;t</i> get a chance to see, they might all crowd to one side of the plane, causing enough weight imbalance so as to cause a crash.<p>It&#x27;s a big problem on boats, and there are countless stories of someone on a crowded boat seeing a dolphin, shouting about it, everyone crowds to one side to get closer, and the whole boat capsizes.<p>Regulations now require that boats stay afloat if everyone stands on one side, but the regulations aren&#x27;t perfectly adhered to and that still doesn&#x27;t prevent people crowding to one side enough to push&#x2F;knock others overboard.</text></item><item><author>mackman</author><text>Story time. In the last total eclipse, I was commuting from Boston to San Francisco a bunch and planned my flight to coincide with the path of totality. I brought enough eclipse glasses for the entire flight. The flight attendants were kind enough to distribute them and even gave them to the pilot and copilot. The flight crew was excited about it and actually got approval a change to their flight plan so that they could bank the plane so that people on both sides of the plane could actually look out the window to see the eclipse. This is back in the days of Virgin America, and as a thank you they sent me a little desk statue of a Virgin America plane. I keep it on my desk in fond memory of my favorite airline. Also got some cool photos of the flight crew and passengers all wearing eclipse glasses. (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mackman.net&#x2F;va.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mackman.net&#x2F;va.jpg</a>)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dghlsakjg</author><text>Banking the plane is a convenience thing.<p>Side to side weight balance of passengers is not a major factor in any plane I have ever read the manual for. They are too close to the centerline to impart much force. The pilots might notice it and trim it out, but I doubt they would have to do anything beyond that. Fore and aft balance is critical, but still unlikely to be an issue with passengers at cruise speed since the elevator has <i>a lot</i> of control authority at 500mph.<p>A 737 can fly fine with a completely empty wing tank on one side and a completely full wing tank on the other. The wing tanks of some models can carry 4,500 kgs of fuel in each side, so that amounts to a 9,000 kg imbalance outboard of the fuselage. That is the equivalent of about 111 &quot;standard&quot; passengers&#x27; weight on the wing that can be handled with trim alone, and 737s are capable of safely landing in that configuration.<p>Boats are different because as they heal farther and farther the righting moment diminishes (for conventional monohull powercraft at least), and the passengers are able to get all the way to the extreme.<p>Planes on the other hand have the same &quot;righting moment&quot; no matter how far over they bank since it is a function of airflow over control surfaces rather than buoyancy and gravity.</text></comment> | <story><title>Eclipse viewing at 30k feet: Delta to offer path-of-totality flight</title><url>https://news.delta.com/eclipse-viewing-30000-feet-delta-offer-path-totality-flight</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>londons_explore</author><text>Banking the plane for people to see is a safety thing.<p>If people think they <i>won&#x27;t</i> get a chance to see, they might all crowd to one side of the plane, causing enough weight imbalance so as to cause a crash.<p>It&#x27;s a big problem on boats, and there are countless stories of someone on a crowded boat seeing a dolphin, shouting about it, everyone crowds to one side to get closer, and the whole boat capsizes.<p>Regulations now require that boats stay afloat if everyone stands on one side, but the regulations aren&#x27;t perfectly adhered to and that still doesn&#x27;t prevent people crowding to one side enough to push&#x2F;knock others overboard.</text></item><item><author>mackman</author><text>Story time. In the last total eclipse, I was commuting from Boston to San Francisco a bunch and planned my flight to coincide with the path of totality. I brought enough eclipse glasses for the entire flight. The flight attendants were kind enough to distribute them and even gave them to the pilot and copilot. The flight crew was excited about it and actually got approval a change to their flight plan so that they could bank the plane so that people on both sides of the plane could actually look out the window to see the eclipse. This is back in the days of Virgin America, and as a thank you they sent me a little desk statue of a Virgin America plane. I keep it on my desk in fond memory of my favorite airline. Also got some cool photos of the flight crew and passengers all wearing eclipse glasses. (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mackman.net&#x2F;va.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mackman.net&#x2F;va.jpg</a>)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sorenjan</author><text>That&#x27;s an even bigger issue if it&#x27;s a Polish plane, you don&#x27;t want too many poles on the right side of the plane.</text></comment> |
36,651,958 | 36,651,692 | 1 | 2 | 36,651,506 | train | <story><title>Ask HN: Problems for the next decade?</title><text>Environment, people, technology are changing rapidly. What are some worthwhile problems or ideas that you think would be important to solve or work on by end of the decade.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>ssss11</author><text>This aging topic is very important. Re: stock markets, economies need to shift from eternal $ growth to share holder wallets, to providing equitable outcomes for all people and the planet - that will be very interesting to watch, i can’t see it going well.</text></item><item><author>xerxesaa</author><text>We have an aging population and many places have a flat birthrate. We need to solve how to deal with this consequences.<p>Who will care for these people? How will we deal with the consequences of flat population growth? How will we deal with the stock market&#x27;s expectations of perpetual growth when the underlying population itself is not growing (and especially since productivity has also been relatively flat)?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>defrost</author><text><i>Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered</i><p><pre><code> is a collection of essays published in 1973 by German-born British economist E. F. Schumacher.
The title *Small Is Beautiful* came from a principle espoused by Schumacher&#x27;s teacher Leopold Kohr (1909–1994) advancing small, appropriate technologies, policies, and polities as a superior alternative to the mainstream ethos of &quot;bigger is better&quot;.
Overlapping environmental, social, and economic forces such as the 1973 energy crisis and popularisation of the concept of globalisation helped bring Schumacher&#x27;s *Small Is Beautiful* critiques of mainstream economics to a wider audience during the 1970s.
In 1995 The Times Literary Supplement ranked *Small Is Beautiful* among the 100 most influential books published since World War II.
</code></pre>
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Small_Is_Beautiful" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Small_Is_Beautiful</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Ask HN: Problems for the next decade?</title><text>Environment, people, technology are changing rapidly. What are some worthwhile problems or ideas that you think would be important to solve or work on by end of the decade.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>ssss11</author><text>This aging topic is very important. Re: stock markets, economies need to shift from eternal $ growth to share holder wallets, to providing equitable outcomes for all people and the planet - that will be very interesting to watch, i can’t see it going well.</text></item><item><author>xerxesaa</author><text>We have an aging population and many places have a flat birthrate. We need to solve how to deal with this consequences.<p>Who will care for these people? How will we deal with the consequences of flat population growth? How will we deal with the stock market&#x27;s expectations of perpetual growth when the underlying population itself is not growing (and especially since productivity has also been relatively flat)?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dools</author><text>You might be interested in the work of Steven Hail and Gabrielle Bond. There&#x27;s an online course they run through Torrens University that covers a lot of this stuff:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.torrens.edu.au&#x2F;courses&#x2F;business&#x2F;economics" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.torrens.edu.au&#x2F;courses&#x2F;business&#x2F;economics</a></text></comment> |
25,525,759 | 25,525,634 | 1 | 2 | 25,525,400 | train | <story><title>Covid: France rewards frontline immigrant workers with citizenship</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-55423257</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jollofricepeas</author><text>The US could learn from this but is far too anti-immigrant to do the same.<p>Americans accept immigrants into their Armed Forces but regularly deport them even after they’ve served and been in combat.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bruceb</author><text>This isn&#x27;t really true.
There have been a few isolated cases of former members of the armed services who were convicted of a felony being deported. I don&#x27;t agree with that happening either but to say they are regularly deported just isn&#x27;t true.<p>If you serve in the armed forces and don&#x27;t commit crimes, and apply for citizenship you will most likely get it.<p>Also the US accepts alot more immigrants than Japan, China, and many other countries.<p>Most of the complaints about immigration come down to this, there is much more demand than &quot;supply&quot;.</text></comment> | <story><title>Covid: France rewards frontline immigrant workers with citizenship</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-55423257</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jollofricepeas</author><text>The US could learn from this but is far too anti-immigrant to do the same.<p>Americans accept immigrants into their Armed Forces but regularly deport them even after they’ve served and been in combat.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>markdown</author><text>&gt; Americans accept immigrants into their Armed Forces but regularly deport them even after they’ve served and been in combat.<p>The United Kingdom as well: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;world&#x2F;2020&#x2F;dec&#x2F;05&#x2F;where-is-the-fairness-fijis-british-army-veterans-fight-for-a-life-in-uk" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;world&#x2F;2020&#x2F;dec&#x2F;05&#x2F;where-is-the-f...</a></text></comment> |
11,690,003 | 11,688,647 | 1 | 2 | 11,688,397 | train | <story><title>Who Pays Writers?</title><url>http://whopayswriters.com/#/results</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>nickjj</author><text>On a related topic, a lot of tech companies will pay you $100-400 per blog post. For example DigitalOcean pays $200 per 1500ish words for in depth tutorials.<p>That&#x27;s a little above 13 cents per word for a complex tutorial which solves a real problem and potentially has source code.</text></comment> | <story><title>Who Pays Writers?</title><url>http://whopayswriters.com/#/results</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ChuckMcM</author><text>I realize &quot;its the web&quot; is a thing but back when I was doing freelance writing for tech magazines I found the Writers Market[1] very handy. For print publications it had print calendars and editorial descriptions of what they liked to publish. I&#x27;ve not bought one since the rise of web journalism but I expect there are resources out there which have this info.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Writers-Market-2016-Trusted-Published&#x2F;dp&#x2F;1599639378&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Writers-Market-2016-Trusted-Published&#x2F;...</a></text></comment> |
31,600,894 | 31,600,719 | 1 | 2 | 31,600,505 | train | <story><title>Update on Hiring Plans</title><url>https://blog.coinbase.com/update-on-hiring-plans-bcedfa634989</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>paxys</author><text>&gt; We will rescind a number of accepted offers.<p>This continues to happen over and over again in the industry, and is the reason why I always advise people who get exploding offers from companies to just accept them and then back out later if they need to. Loyalty and respect cannot be a one way street. There&#x27;s so much propaganda around &quot;burning bridges&quot; that keeps prospective employees in line (and it also extends to stuff like negotiating wages, discussing salaries at work, job hopping and more). Look out for yourself out there, no one else is going to do it. <i>Certainly</i> not the HR department.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>throwaway5752</author><text>Don&#x27;t have your personal ethics be subject to someone else&#x27;s ethics, because if you do that, then it means you don&#x27;t really have ethics.<p>You aren&#x27;t accepting to an industry, you are accepting to a hiring manager. And it&#x27;s just rude to act this way. Exploding offers aren&#x27;t great, and if you have a problem with them, then simply don&#x27;t accept them. You miss some opportunities this way but you feel better when you look in the mirror. Regardless, as others have noted, Coinbase has some specific issues that aren&#x27;t indicative of a broader industry probem. They seem to be handling this as well as can be expected given those problems.</text></comment> | <story><title>Update on Hiring Plans</title><url>https://blog.coinbase.com/update-on-hiring-plans-bcedfa634989</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>paxys</author><text>&gt; We will rescind a number of accepted offers.<p>This continues to happen over and over again in the industry, and is the reason why I always advise people who get exploding offers from companies to just accept them and then back out later if they need to. Loyalty and respect cannot be a one way street. There&#x27;s so much propaganda around &quot;burning bridges&quot; that keeps prospective employees in line (and it also extends to stuff like negotiating wages, discussing salaries at work, job hopping and more). Look out for yourself out there, no one else is going to do it. <i>Certainly</i> not the HR department.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wdb</author><text>Yeah, I had job offers rescinded on me. Funny enough these companies still have the audacity to have recruiters message me about new roles. Personally, I also stopped using these companies as a customer.</text></comment> |
11,053,633 | 11,053,555 | 1 | 2 | 11,052,905 | train | <story><title>America Is Flint</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/07/opinion/sunday/america-is-flint.html?ref=opinion&_r=0</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>grandalf</author><text>The broader point is that incompetence and corruption plagues institutions (public and private) of all sizes.<p>Regardless of one&#x27;s politics, it&#x27;s critical that we hold our institutions accountable and help them get better over time.<p>This includes our country, our state, our county, our city, our company, our social and professional groups, open source communities, etc.<p>There is a strong human tendency to want to defend organizations we are part of (or rely on) rather than trying to constructively improve them.<p>Flint is an example of institutional failures at multiple levels, but over all the loss of life and suffering pales in comparison to what our failed institutions did in Iraq and around the world, and what they do to our schools all across the country, etc.<p>The more official an organization (government, etc.), the more fancy its facilities (buildings with columns, spires, domes, etc.) the more we must realize its credibility is based on self-perpetuation rather than on tangible, auditable results.<p>There are so many failures happening across the board, and the biggest enemy to progress is the idea that loyalty means keeping quiet.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rayiner</author><text>Having worked in this area, I can say that &quot;incompetence and corruption&quot; is an intellectually lazy explanation for the problems facing municipal water supplies. The real problem is that water is a municipal utility and municipal rate setting boards set water rates far too low. There is simply not enough money to rip out all the old lead pipe and replace it: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.huffpost.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;entry&#x2F;clean-water-at-any-rate_b_504263.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.huffpost.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;entry&#x2F;clean-water-at-any-rate_b_504...</a>. It&#x27;s politically untenable for water boards to raise rates, especially since water bills are not progressive (seniors and the poor pay the same rate as rich people).</text></comment> | <story><title>America Is Flint</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/07/opinion/sunday/america-is-flint.html?ref=opinion&_r=0</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>grandalf</author><text>The broader point is that incompetence and corruption plagues institutions (public and private) of all sizes.<p>Regardless of one&#x27;s politics, it&#x27;s critical that we hold our institutions accountable and help them get better over time.<p>This includes our country, our state, our county, our city, our company, our social and professional groups, open source communities, etc.<p>There is a strong human tendency to want to defend organizations we are part of (or rely on) rather than trying to constructively improve them.<p>Flint is an example of institutional failures at multiple levels, but over all the loss of life and suffering pales in comparison to what our failed institutions did in Iraq and around the world, and what they do to our schools all across the country, etc.<p>The more official an organization (government, etc.), the more fancy its facilities (buildings with columns, spires, domes, etc.) the more we must realize its credibility is based on self-perpetuation rather than on tangible, auditable results.<p>There are so many failures happening across the board, and the biggest enemy to progress is the idea that loyalty means keeping quiet.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>craigyk</author><text>I think a major factor is that the US hasn&#x27;t been around for very long and we&#x27;re coming to a point where a lot of infrastructure is coming under need of repair or replacement simultaneously. In particular instances, this infrastructure degradation has been greatly exacerbated by decisions to save money in the short-term. My personal opinion is that this is all part of a decades long rightward shift away from &quot;big government&quot; and willingness to pay for proper maintenance of public works. 2008 was a wasted opportunity to combine much needed infrastructure investment with fiscal stimulus.<p>There is no question a lot of work will need to be done over the next decade. The question is, who will do the work, and how will it get paid for?</text></comment> |
18,334,762 | 18,333,225 | 1 | 2 | 18,325,498 | train | <story><title>The D Language Front-End Merged Into GCC 9</title><url>https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GCC-9-Merges-D-Language</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ilovecaching</author><text>I was sad that D never took off. I had high hopes that it would eventually replace C++ for my professional development. D was a language that really enabled functional programming, and I mean <i>real</i> functional programming while retaining the low level control of C.<p>We learned a lot from pushing D, and now I am working full time as a Rust developer. Rust doesn&#x27;t have everything D has, but it also has plenty that D doesn&#x27;t have and it&#x27;s still in the same spirit of safer, more expressive C++ with the same efficiency. I hope that D developers will check out Rust and try to push a single front, I think it has a better chance of knocking C++ off its pedestal.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>carlmr</author><text>&gt;Rust doesn&#x27;t have everything D has, but it also has plenty that D doesn&#x27;t have and it&#x27;s still in the same spirit of safer, more expressive C++ with the same efficiency.<p>And no GC, which is major for my hopes that it might be a viable alternative for us forgotten embedded programmers out there. LLVM seems to be a good backend for getting more embedde support in the future as well.<p>Rust for me has almost everything I expect from a &quot;better C++&quot;, the Cargo project management is stellar, rustup is great for staying up to date, integrated testing and benchmarking is amazing. I just find there&#x27;s still a lack of crates which should solve itself over time and a bit of a lack of good documentation (outside of the basic Rust language resources most crates are very hard to understand looking at docs.rs, which is especially sad given how well integrated documentation is).</text></comment> | <story><title>The D Language Front-End Merged Into GCC 9</title><url>https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GCC-9-Merges-D-Language</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ilovecaching</author><text>I was sad that D never took off. I had high hopes that it would eventually replace C++ for my professional development. D was a language that really enabled functional programming, and I mean <i>real</i> functional programming while retaining the low level control of C.<p>We learned a lot from pushing D, and now I am working full time as a Rust developer. Rust doesn&#x27;t have everything D has, but it also has plenty that D doesn&#x27;t have and it&#x27;s still in the same spirit of safer, more expressive C++ with the same efficiency. I hope that D developers will check out Rust and try to push a single front, I think it has a better chance of knocking C++ off its pedestal.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jake_the_third</author><text>The critical faults with D that prevented it from displacing C* were that it relied on a GC by default and that it wasn&#x27;t open source. Things might have played out much differently had they addressed these issues early on.<p>* aside from inertia, but older languages also had inertia once.</text></comment> |
34,107,443 | 34,107,236 | 1 | 2 | 34,105,770 | train | <story><title>Ask HN: Learn C in 2023?</title><text>Hello,<p>I always have the itch to learn C, juts because it was such an influental language and when you are digging around a lot in GNU&#x2F;linux you will have contact with it one way or another.<p>What is the way you would suggest learning C in 2023? I am already familiar with other languages (rust..) but would like to have an introduction to the C basics and program some hands-on projects in C, so I can learn the pecularities of the language.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>suprjami</author><text><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.learn-c.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.learn-c.org&#x2F;</a><p>If you have lots of time: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hal.inria.fr&#x2F;hal-02383654" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hal.inria.fr&#x2F;hal-02383654</a><p>If you can&#x27;t be bothered reading a whole book: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;matt.sh&#x2F;howto-c" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;matt.sh&#x2F;howto-c</a><p>Exercises: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.codestepbystep.com&#x2F;problem&#x2F;list&#x2F;c" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.codestepbystep.com&#x2F;problem&#x2F;list&#x2F;c</a> and <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;exercism.org&#x2F;tracks&#x2F;c" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;exercism.org&#x2F;tracks&#x2F;c</a><p>Once you have syntax and basic algorithms down well, watch this, the only 2 hour YouTube video I&#x27;ll ever recommend: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=443UNeGrFoM">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=443UNeGrFoM</a><p>Both r&#x2F;cprogramming and r&#x2F;C_programming are active, also full of lazy students trying to get people to do their homework. If you come by, describe your problem well with code. Say you&#x27;re learning for yourself, not for school.<p>Together C &amp; C++ is a good Discord if you prefer live chat: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;discord.gg&#x2F;tccpp" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;discord.gg&#x2F;tccpp</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>flohofwoe</author><text>From the learn-c link:<p><pre><code> &#x2F;* draws a point at 10, 5 *&#x2F;
struct point p;
p.x = 10;
p.y = 5;
draw(p);
</code></pre>
I wish that would be a bit more &#x27;modern&#x27;, for instance:<p><pre><code> struct point p = {
.x = 10,
.y = 5
};
draw(p);
</code></pre>
...or even:<p><pre><code> draw((struct point){ .x = 10, .y = 5 });
</code></pre>
...main reason being that this avoids any accidents with unitialized data if the struct grows (the compound literal initialization makes sure that any struct members that are not mentioned are set to zero, while with the &#x27;old school&#x27; approach you might end up with random junk in the struct).</text></comment> | <story><title>Ask HN: Learn C in 2023?</title><text>Hello,<p>I always have the itch to learn C, juts because it was such an influental language and when you are digging around a lot in GNU&#x2F;linux you will have contact with it one way or another.<p>What is the way you would suggest learning C in 2023? I am already familiar with other languages (rust..) but would like to have an introduction to the C basics and program some hands-on projects in C, so I can learn the pecularities of the language.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>suprjami</author><text><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.learn-c.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.learn-c.org&#x2F;</a><p>If you have lots of time: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hal.inria.fr&#x2F;hal-02383654" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hal.inria.fr&#x2F;hal-02383654</a><p>If you can&#x27;t be bothered reading a whole book: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;matt.sh&#x2F;howto-c" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;matt.sh&#x2F;howto-c</a><p>Exercises: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.codestepbystep.com&#x2F;problem&#x2F;list&#x2F;c" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.codestepbystep.com&#x2F;problem&#x2F;list&#x2F;c</a> and <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;exercism.org&#x2F;tracks&#x2F;c" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;exercism.org&#x2F;tracks&#x2F;c</a><p>Once you have syntax and basic algorithms down well, watch this, the only 2 hour YouTube video I&#x27;ll ever recommend: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=443UNeGrFoM">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=443UNeGrFoM</a><p>Both r&#x2F;cprogramming and r&#x2F;C_programming are active, also full of lazy students trying to get people to do their homework. If you come by, describe your problem well with code. Say you&#x27;re learning for yourself, not for school.<p>Together C &amp; C++ is a good Discord if you prefer live chat: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;discord.gg&#x2F;tccpp" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;discord.gg&#x2F;tccpp</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>voidhorse</author><text>+1 to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hal.inria.fr&#x2F;hal-02383654" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hal.inria.fr&#x2F;hal-02383654</a>. It covers the language in extreme depth, and you likely won&#x27;t remember it all on a first read but you&#x27;ll walk away with a pretty good general understanding of the language. Plus, the author is an active contributor to the language.<p>I love C. As dangerous and as tedious it can be for large projects, I think it&#x27;s my top choice for solo endeavors that don&#x27;t require too many string manipulations. I don&#x27;t think any language has come close to achieving the same balance of elegance and simplicity--maybe scheme? (zig comes close but has a substantial number of features that move it away from simplicity (e.g. payload capture))</text></comment> |
39,874,367 | 39,874,170 | 1 | 3 | 39,873,272 | train | <story><title>Prolog language for PostgreSQL proof of concept</title><url>https://github.com/tatut/pgprolog</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mark_l_watson</author><text>As a proof of concept, this looks very cool. Suggestion: add a short example to the README.<p>I had one experience with Prolog in the 1980s that blew my mind. I had an IR&amp;D project to build a complete prototype of an air&#x2F;land battle simulator (yes, I was a defense contractor back then) in Common Lisp given 6 weeks of coverage to write it and demo it. After a month I was satisfied with the functionality and after demoing it I asked permission to rewrite it in ExperProlog on the Mac (I had done the Common Lisp version in my Xerox 1108 Lisp Machine). In ten days time it was done, and also had nice graphics and UI extensions that the Common Lisp version did not have. Anyway, except for few small open source things, that was the only large project I ever did in Prolog.</text></comment> | <story><title>Prolog language for PostgreSQL proof of concept</title><url>https://github.com/tatut/pgprolog</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>larodi</author><text>Love this, I&#x27;ve long considered that this should&#x27;ve been made as Prolog and SQL are ternary logic and basically SQL derives from Datalog and it itself from Prolog. A table record can be taught as of as a Prolog fact, so this makes the WHERE clauses the predicates in the conjunction on the right-hand side of a rule. And then exhausting the goal is actually returning the result-set.<p>Hope to see this develop even further, as Prolog has its place with relational databases.</text></comment> |
3,476,143 | 3,475,307 | 1 | 2 | 3,475,160 | train | <story><title>World IPv6 Launch on June 6, 2012, To Bring Permanent IPv6 Deployment</title><url>http://www.internetsociety.org/deploy360/blog/2012/01/world-ipv6-launch-on-june-6-2012-to-bring-permanent-ipv6-deployment/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>riobard</author><text>This is great news, but does anyone have any idea how to get IPv4-over-IPv6 tunnels to work? I'm in an all-IPv6 network, but unless all websites automatically work flawlessly after Jun 6, 2012, I still need to access IPv4 resources.<p>I have an IPv4/IPv6 dual-stack server which I can access from home via IPv6. I want to setup an IPv4-over-IPv6 tunnel to connect to the server so that all devices in my home network can still operate in a private IPv4 network (for compatibility), and access to public IPv4 network is routed through the IPv4-over-IPv6 tunnel to the dual-stack server.<p>The only solution that seems feasible right now is DS-Lite, but I couldn't find any helpful tutorial on how to setup it.<p>Right now I use DNS64/NAT64 on another server to access IPv4-only resources, but this combination doesn't work all the time. For example, Dropbox client doesn't work because (I suspect) it hard-coded the IPv4 addresses of remote servers. DNS64 cannot intercept direct IPv4 addressing so there is no way to translate it into fake IPv6 addresses to be routable via NAT64. In addition, DNS64/NAT64 requires a full /64 subnet on the remote server, which might not always be possible.<p>What is the general and practical strategy during the transition from IPv4 to IPv6?<p>Edited: here is the relavent link on serverfault.com where I posted the original question <a href="http://serverfault.com/questions/326132/ipv6-only-client-to-ipv6-ipv4-dual-stack-server-tunnel" rel="nofollow">http://serverfault.com/questions/326132/ipv6-only-client-to-...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>World IPv6 Launch on June 6, 2012, To Bring Permanent IPv6 Deployment</title><url>http://www.internetsociety.org/deploy360/blog/2012/01/world-ipv6-launch-on-june-6-2012-to-bring-permanent-ipv6-deployment/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>obtu</author><text>Here is the press release:<p>WASHINGTON &#38; GENEVA, Jan 17, 2012 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Major Internet service providers (ISPs), home networking equipment manufacturers, and web companies around the world are coming together to permanently enable IPv6 for their products and services by 6 June 2012.<p>Organized by the Internet Society, and building on the successful one-day World IPv6 Day event held on 8 June 2011, World IPv6 Launch represents a major milestone in the global deployment of IPv6. As the successor to the current Internet Protocol, IPv4, IPv6 is critical to the Internet's continued growth as a platform for innovation and economic development.<p>"The fact that leading companies across several industries are making significant commitments to participate in World IPv6 Launch is yet another indication that IPv6 is no longer a lab experiment; it's here and is an important next step in the Internet's evolution," commented Leslie Daigle, the Internet Society's Chief Internet Technology Officer. "And, as there are more IPv6 services, it becomes increasingly important for companies to accelerate their own deployment plans."<p>ISPs participating in World IPv6 Launch will enable IPv6 for enough users so that at least 1% of their wireline residential subscribers who visit participating websites will do so using IPv6 by 6 June 2012. These ISPs have committed that IPv6 will be available automatically as the normal course of business for a significant portion of their subscribers. Committed ISPs are:<p>-- AT&#38;T<p>-- Comcast<p>-- Free Telecom<p>-- Internode<p>-- KDDI<p>-- Time Warner Cable<p>-- XS4ALL<p>Participating home networking equipment manufacturers will enable IPv6 by default through the range of their home router products by 6 June 2012. Committed equipment manufacturers are:<p>-- Cisco<p>-- D-Link<p>Web companies participating in World IPv6 Launch will enable IPv6 on their main websites permanently beginning 6 June 2012. Inaugural participants are:<p>-- Facebook ( www.facebook.com )<p>-- Google ( www.google.com )<p>-- Microsoft Bing ( www.bing.com )<p>-- Yahoo! ( www.yahoo.com )<p>Content delivery network providers Akamai and Limelight will be enabling their customers to join this list of participating websites by enabling IPv6 throughout their infrastructure.<p>As IPv4 addresses become increasingly scarce, every segment of the industry must act quickly to accelerate full IPv6 adoption or risk increased costs and limited functionality online for Internet users everywhere. World IPv6 Launch participants are leading the way in this effort.<p>For more information about World IPv6 Launch, products and services covered, as well as links to useful information for users and information about how other companies may participate, visit:<p><a href="http://www.worldipv6launch.org" rel="nofollow">http://www.worldipv6launch.org</a><p>About the need for IPv6<p>IPv4 has approximately four billion IP addresses (the sequence of numbers assigned to each Internet-connected device). The explosion in the number of people, devices, and web services on the Internet means that IPv4 is running out of space. IPv6, the next-generation Internet protocol which provides more than 340 trillion, trillion, trillion addresses, will connect the billions of people not connected today and will help ensure the Internet can continue its current growth rate indefinitely.<p>About the Internet Society<p>The Internet Society is the world's trusted independent source of leadership for Internet policy, technology standards and future development. Based on its principled vision and substantial technological foundation, the Internet Society works with its members and Chapters around the world to promote the continued evolution and growth of the open Internet through dialog among companies, governments, and other organizations around the world. For more information, see: www.internetsociety.org</text></comment> |
15,569,607 | 15,569,713 | 1 | 2 | 15,567,657 | train | <story><title>Netflix: Removing client-side React.js improved performance by 50%</title><url>https://twitter.com/NetflixUIE/status/923374215041912833</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>clarle</author><text>Hey, I work on the team at Netflix that gave the talk on React in the signup flow in the tweet.<p>The full talks are available here if people want to watch them:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=V8oTJ8OZ5S0&amp;t=11m30s" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=V8oTJ8OZ5S0&amp;t=11m30s</a><p>Thought I&#x27;d also provide some more context on some common questions that people have asked.<p>### Why are you using React to render a landing page?<p>The Netflix landing page is a lot more dynamic than most people think it is.<p>It&#x27;s our most heavily A&#x2F;B-tested page in the signup flow, with even some machine learning models being used to customize the messaging and imagery that you get depending on location, whether or not you were a previous Netflix member, device type, and a lot more. Even beyond that, Netflix supports almost 200 countries now, and there&#x27;s a different combination of localization, legal challenges, and value messaging for each one. We end up sharing a lot of the logic and UI for these A&#x2F;B testing and localization challenges throughout the signup flow, mainly through React components.<p>The example I always love to give is the &lt;TermsOfUse&#x2F;&gt; component that we have, which to a Netflix customer signing up is literally one or two checkboxes on the UI, but has some of the most complicated logic in the codebase due to the vast number of countries and user states we support. Because of all this, it&#x27;s more valuable for us to share these common React components across the entire signup process, both the landing page and the rest of the flow, which is a single-page React and Redux application.<p>We&#x27;ve seen a lot of conversion value though in improving the performance of the landing page, especially in countries with slower connections, but we don&#x27;t also want to re-duplicate a lot of the shared UI logic that we have.<p>The tradeoff that we decided to make is to server-render the landing page using React, but also pre-fetching React &#x2F; Redux &#x2F; the code for the rest of the signup flow while on it. This optimizes first load performance, but also optimizes the time to load for the rest of the signup flow, which has a much larger JS bundle size to download since it&#x27;s a single-page app.<p>### What&#x27;s the performance metric that&#x27;s being used?<p>It&#x27;s TTI (Time to Interactive), when the user can fully interact with the page. This is different than TTR (Time to Render) for us, when the user can fully view the page. There&#x27;s more information in the talk about the differences.<p>### Why not Service Workers or some other pre-loading &#x2F; caching mechanism?<p>We have been experimenting with it, but it&#x27;s mainly the lack of some browser support - Safari is the main one. Generally the Netflix signup flow needs to have more legacy browser support than the Netflix member experience. Lots of people sign up on a pretty old browser, but only ever watch Netflix on the native mobile apps or a TV device.<p>#####<p>Feel free to comment here or tweet at Tony (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;tedwards947" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;tedwards947</a>) or me (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;clarler" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;clarler</a>) if there&#x27;s any other questions that we can help answer.<p>Though from a lot of experience, 140 characters isn&#x27;t always enough to provide enough context for JavaScript framework discussions. ;)<p>If these sort of performance and UI challenges seem interesting to you, our team is also hiring for UI engineers and an engineering manager!<p>* Senior Software Engineer (React, Node): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jobs.netflix.com&#x2F;jobs&#x2F;864767" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jobs.netflix.com&#x2F;jobs&#x2F;864767</a><p>* Senior Software Engineer (Android): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jobs.netflix.com&#x2F;jobs&#x2F;864766" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jobs.netflix.com&#x2F;jobs&#x2F;864766</a><p>* Engineering Manager: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jobs.netflix.com&#x2F;jobs&#x2F;865119" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jobs.netflix.com&#x2F;jobs&#x2F;865119</a><p>Cheers!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>spicyj</author><text>I work on React. We’d love to hear from your team sometimes and collaborate on this sort of thing. We’re solving many of the same problems but I rarely hear from Netflix engineers except at talks when announcing they’re avoiding React or have forked it, often for reasons we weren’t even aware of.</text></comment> | <story><title>Netflix: Removing client-side React.js improved performance by 50%</title><url>https://twitter.com/NetflixUIE/status/923374215041912833</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>clarle</author><text>Hey, I work on the team at Netflix that gave the talk on React in the signup flow in the tweet.<p>The full talks are available here if people want to watch them:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=V8oTJ8OZ5S0&amp;t=11m30s" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=V8oTJ8OZ5S0&amp;t=11m30s</a><p>Thought I&#x27;d also provide some more context on some common questions that people have asked.<p>### Why are you using React to render a landing page?<p>The Netflix landing page is a lot more dynamic than most people think it is.<p>It&#x27;s our most heavily A&#x2F;B-tested page in the signup flow, with even some machine learning models being used to customize the messaging and imagery that you get depending on location, whether or not you were a previous Netflix member, device type, and a lot more. Even beyond that, Netflix supports almost 200 countries now, and there&#x27;s a different combination of localization, legal challenges, and value messaging for each one. We end up sharing a lot of the logic and UI for these A&#x2F;B testing and localization challenges throughout the signup flow, mainly through React components.<p>The example I always love to give is the &lt;TermsOfUse&#x2F;&gt; component that we have, which to a Netflix customer signing up is literally one or two checkboxes on the UI, but has some of the most complicated logic in the codebase due to the vast number of countries and user states we support. Because of all this, it&#x27;s more valuable for us to share these common React components across the entire signup process, both the landing page and the rest of the flow, which is a single-page React and Redux application.<p>We&#x27;ve seen a lot of conversion value though in improving the performance of the landing page, especially in countries with slower connections, but we don&#x27;t also want to re-duplicate a lot of the shared UI logic that we have.<p>The tradeoff that we decided to make is to server-render the landing page using React, but also pre-fetching React &#x2F; Redux &#x2F; the code for the rest of the signup flow while on it. This optimizes first load performance, but also optimizes the time to load for the rest of the signup flow, which has a much larger JS bundle size to download since it&#x27;s a single-page app.<p>### What&#x27;s the performance metric that&#x27;s being used?<p>It&#x27;s TTI (Time to Interactive), when the user can fully interact with the page. This is different than TTR (Time to Render) for us, when the user can fully view the page. There&#x27;s more information in the talk about the differences.<p>### Why not Service Workers or some other pre-loading &#x2F; caching mechanism?<p>We have been experimenting with it, but it&#x27;s mainly the lack of some browser support - Safari is the main one. Generally the Netflix signup flow needs to have more legacy browser support than the Netflix member experience. Lots of people sign up on a pretty old browser, but only ever watch Netflix on the native mobile apps or a TV device.<p>#####<p>Feel free to comment here or tweet at Tony (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;tedwards947" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;tedwards947</a>) or me (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;clarler" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;clarler</a>) if there&#x27;s any other questions that we can help answer.<p>Though from a lot of experience, 140 characters isn&#x27;t always enough to provide enough context for JavaScript framework discussions. ;)<p>If these sort of performance and UI challenges seem interesting to you, our team is also hiring for UI engineers and an engineering manager!<p>* Senior Software Engineer (React, Node): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jobs.netflix.com&#x2F;jobs&#x2F;864767" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jobs.netflix.com&#x2F;jobs&#x2F;864767</a><p>* Senior Software Engineer (Android): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jobs.netflix.com&#x2F;jobs&#x2F;864766" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jobs.netflix.com&#x2F;jobs&#x2F;864766</a><p>* Engineering Manager: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jobs.netflix.com&#x2F;jobs&#x2F;865119" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jobs.netflix.com&#x2F;jobs&#x2F;865119</a><p>Cheers!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pluma</author><text>So in other words: the main reason removing the React code in the frontend in this case gave such an immense performance benefit is that the logic used to compute the rendered UI is significantly more complex than the logic necessary to make that UI interactive.<p>It&#x27;s not React that&#x27;s slow, it&#x27;s the logic needed to render the page?</text></comment> |
19,182,435 | 19,182,251 | 1 | 3 | 19,181,257 | train | <story><title>Finding Lena Forsen, the Patron Saint of JPEGs</title><url>https://www.wired.com/story/finding-lena-the-patron-saint-of-jpegs/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>iamleppert</author><text>What’s wrong with female beauty? It’s not like it’s porn or a nude image. I’m not even a straight male but I can still appreciate female beauty and I don’t think it’s sexist. The photo is more artistic than anything. I wonder if the same people who complain about this photo lodge similar complaints when they visit art museums that have female nudity in oil paintings or nude female sculptures?<p>I know nudity and even a slight sexual undertone in anything upsets some people, but I don’t understand why. I think it says something more about the person than our culture. Sexuality is a core part of the human experience and to deny it is to remove that part of our humanity.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>yawaramin</author><text>Because it&#x27;s not about you. It&#x27;s about the women who see the image, understand its history, and see it as another reminder of how tech is not just male-dominated but thoughtlessly so (having <i>Playboy</i> issues lying around in the research lab) and where women are literally reduced to objects. From the article:<p>&gt; “As silly as it sounds, they were surprised she was a real person,” he told me.<p>Women notice stuff like that, I guess.</text></comment> | <story><title>Finding Lena Forsen, the Patron Saint of JPEGs</title><url>https://www.wired.com/story/finding-lena-the-patron-saint-of-jpegs/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>iamleppert</author><text>What’s wrong with female beauty? It’s not like it’s porn or a nude image. I’m not even a straight male but I can still appreciate female beauty and I don’t think it’s sexist. The photo is more artistic than anything. I wonder if the same people who complain about this photo lodge similar complaints when they visit art museums that have female nudity in oil paintings or nude female sculptures?<p>I know nudity and even a slight sexual undertone in anything upsets some people, but I don’t understand why. I think it says something more about the person than our culture. Sexuality is a core part of the human experience and to deny it is to remove that part of our humanity.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Pharmakon</author><text>Personally I’m not bothered, and while the image isn’t pornographic, it is from Playboy which does make it at least porn adjacent. I see it’s use less as a matter of offensiveness or some headfuck of “intersectionality” and more as just immature and unprofessional. Sexuality is great, it’s everywhere, and I think it has literally nothing to do with this issue.<p>I can understand not wanting a Playboy model to be the standard image in a professional setting, especially a setting that is overwhelmingly full of guys.</text></comment> |
21,355,457 | 21,354,540 | 1 | 2 | 21,354,285 | train | <story><title>Australia’s Darling River is running dry</title><url>https://widerimage.reuters.com/story/thirst-turns-to-anger-as-australias-mighty-river-runs-dry</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>moomin</author><text>Australia has a serious problem with water, and it would have a serious problem even without climate change. The water in the Darling, and in any river, can be extracted free of charge if your land includes the river. This produces permanent drought conditions in a country that exports oranges.<p>Australia has limited water resources and laws that treat it as unlimited. It will be incredibly hard to square that circle. Imagine being told your entire business is toast because Sydney has no drinking water and you’ll have some idea of how toxic it’s going to be _before_ it get politicised.</text></comment> | <story><title>Australia’s Darling River is running dry</title><url>https://widerimage.reuters.com/story/thirst-turns-to-anger-as-australias-mighty-river-runs-dry</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>PixyMisa</author><text>Here&#x27;s some background information: The Darling River at Menindee (the town mentioned in the article) dried up 48 times between 1885 and 1960.</text></comment> |
34,723,614 | 34,723,595 | 1 | 3 | 34,722,979 | train | <story><title>RustDesk – Remote desktop software, written in Rust</title><url>https://github.com/rustdesk</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>xwowsersx</author><text>I guess it&#x27;s a testament to how loved Rust is as a language that there are so many projects posted here with &quot;...built in Rust&quot;..&quot;written in Rust&quot;. I like Rust, but in some contexts I wonder how or why it matters that it was written in Rust (I know there are some projects where for security or other reasons it may actually matter) to me as an end user or at least why it&#x27;s so important that posts introducing the project lead with that fact. Sometimes, it just seems like a low level implementation detail that is unimportant. Naming the entire project after Rust (&quot;rustdesk&quot;) is a whole new level though :)</text></comment> | <story><title>RustDesk – Remote desktop software, written in Rust</title><url>https://github.com/rustdesk</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>codeslave13</author><text>Lots of chatter that it has some issues<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;JIAdEGX_sIU" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;JIAdEGX_sIU</a><p>Makes changes to system<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;rustdesk&#x2F;rustdesk&#x2F;blob&#x2F;1.1.9&#x2F;src&#x2F;platform&#x2F;linux.rs#L411-L422">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;rustdesk&#x2F;rustdesk&#x2F;blob&#x2F;1.1.9&#x2F;src&#x2F;platform...</a><p>I prefer meshcentral myself</text></comment> |
7,060,505 | 7,060,046 | 1 | 2 | 7,059,548 | train | <story><title>Google's new business model</title><url>http://stratechery.com/2014/googles-new-business-model/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>notatoad</author><text>&gt;That is why I ... am inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt with regards to Nest data.<p>What is with the paranoia over Nest&#x27;s data? Yes, google is a data-hungry company. but Nest doesn&#x27;t collect any valuable data that google doesn&#x27;t already have. Sure, the motion sensors in a nest thermostat can sense when somebody is in your house, and what the temperature is. But Google already has your cell phone, they know where <i>you</i> are at all times, that&#x27;s a hell of a lot more valuable than knowing whether somebody is currently inside whatever building where you installed your thermostat in.<p>I suspect that the nest acquisition is about finding new uses for all the data they have, not about collecting more data. Google already knows, without installing sensors in my house, when i leave for work. they know when i&#x27;m heading home, and when i go on holidays. That all seems like information that a home automation system would love to have access to.</text></comment> | <story><title>Google's new business model</title><url>http://stratechery.com/2014/googles-new-business-model/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>evv</author><text>Google clearly has an unprecedented (well, maybe except for sun..) set of technologies on the horizon. Between network infastructure, mapping, energy, robots, and now home automation, their dominance in the future is easy to forsee.<p>However, there was no mention about Google&#x27;s rise to power being centered around a focused set of high-quality web services. And now they are starting their &quot;3rd business model leg&quot; of consumer devices before they have truly mastered their second, the SaaS market. I find it funny how the OP quickly glances over Apples unprecedented focus, althewhile highlighting and admiring Google&#x27;s unwarranted diversification.<p>The obvious question is: can Google get away with it all, or will they fail without focus? They have managed to stay cohesive so far, but as the author rightly points out, Google&#x27;s true diversification has only just begun.</text></comment> |
3,445,214 | 3,444,604 | 1 | 2 | 3,444,473 | train | <story><title>MacGap: Desktop WebKit wrapper for HTML/CSS/JS applications</title><url>https://github.com/maccman/macgap</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>zbowling</author><text>I'm building a framework some what like this but maybe better for some use cases.<p>It's still a work in progress but it's part of my tinderbox application.<p><a href="https://github.com/zbowling/tinderbox" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/zbowling/tinderbox</a><p>It embeds a node.js server in the background (soon it will embed a custom Node server were I forked libev to use libdispatch on the mac and run behind inside a secure XPC server that launchd will manage on the Mac). Then using a Unix socket, it serves up through a custom webkit protocol handler. Two way communication to the frontend from a custom webserver written in Cocoa.<p>Instead of going down the road of trying to write Cocoa code with Javascript, instead just surface what you need as you need to your own backend. It's abstract so that it can be reused in other applications on other platforms in the future. Node.js was a good solution because it offers sandboxing and eventbased IO which for my first use case (Campfire) made prefect sense.<p>Doing this kind of binding with a generated kind of interface is always going to keep fighting an abstraction. (Like fighting some C++ lib you wrapped and are trying access through SWIG). My approach you just use the tool best suited for the job and embrace both Cocoa and Javascript.</text></comment> | <story><title>MacGap: Desktop WebKit wrapper for HTML/CSS/JS applications</title><url>https://github.com/maccman/macgap</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mceachen</author><text>Sitting next to the developer of MacGap (we both work at Twitter), the first thing that I asked was "what about Fluid?" <a href="http://fluidapp.com/" rel="nofollow">http://fluidapp.com/</a> -- and Alex's first retort was that this was open source, and free.</text></comment> |
38,299,848 | 38,299,831 | 1 | 3 | 38,292,915 | train | <story><title>I spent 3 years working on a coat hanger [video]</title><url>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vREokZa4dNU</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>amanzi</author><text>Looks so simple, but I guess that&#x27;s a sign of good design. I was also surprised something like this didn&#x27;t exist already.<p>But my first thought was that it will almost certainly be cloned and sold en masse pretty quickly, so I hope she gets enough revenue from it to pay for her time.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>godelski</author><text>&gt; Looks so simple, but I guess that&#x27;s a sign of good design.<p>I find that this is tends to be the rule, not the exception and it&#x27;s really reworked how I view things. I&#x27;ve started to almost (more jokingly than seriously) believe that the less novel something appears the more it actually is. The real mark for a good work seems to be &quot;wow, how did you spend so much time on that? It&#x27;s so fucking obvious&quot; combined with &quot;why has no one else done this?&quot; But it is also easy to post hoc attribute something to being &quot;well that&#x27;s just x and y, so not really novel.&quot; But far too many things can be trivialized that way.<p>I wanted to say this because I think especially in engineering circles we have this wild novelty paradox. Where we can understand how our work, despite all outward appearances, is exceptionally nuanced and has minor details that are critical but when we judge others&#x27; works we don&#x27;t consider such details. I think this is because most details are baked in when you learn of the new thing. But we got a good litmus test: is anyone else making&#x2F;producing&#x2F;doing this &quot;super simple blatantly obvious&quot; thing. If no? It&#x27;s probably deceptively complex. (It&#x27;s also why you should laugh at anyone who starts a sentence with &quot;It&#x27;s so simple, you just...&quot;)</text></comment> | <story><title>I spent 3 years working on a coat hanger [video]</title><url>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vREokZa4dNU</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>amanzi</author><text>Looks so simple, but I guess that&#x27;s a sign of good design. I was also surprised something like this didn&#x27;t exist already.<p>But my first thought was that it will almost certainly be cloned and sold en masse pretty quickly, so I hope she gets enough revenue from it to pay for her time.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ImageXav</author><text>This is an extremely useful design. I never thought I&#x27;d get excited about something like this but I recently moved to an old house with chimney flues running through every room, resulting in shallow alcoves that are of differing sizes.<p>A fitted wardrobe would be pricey (~$4000), barely fit depthwise and half of the space would just be covering the flue if we wanted it wall to wall.<p>On the other hand I can just buy 3&#x2F;4 of these for each wall and still come out ahead. The grooves in the rods are well thought out and mean that I can saw them to size myself, as can anyone.<p>The only drawback I can think of is having clothes up directly against a wall. This could obstruct airflow and be an incentive for mould to grow.<p>Might be time for my first ever pledge.</text></comment> |
16,763,868 | 16,759,492 | 1 | 2 | 16,758,525 | train | <story><title>Introducing Fly Edge Apps</title><url>https://fly.io/articles/fly-edge-applications-global-javascript/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>igammarays</author><text>It&#x27;s been fascinating to watch this startup pivot to find product-market fit over the past year. First I heard from them, fly.io billed themselves as a way to avoid multiple subdomains (blog.yourcompany.com, app.yourcompany.com, etc.), and now they&#x27;re doing serverless edge deployments. This actually makes me trust them more, as they seem dedicated to build something that provides value.</text></comment> | <story><title>Introducing Fly Edge Apps</title><url>https://fly.io/articles/fly-edge-applications-global-javascript/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>myoffe</author><text>I don&#x27;t fully get it. What does the &quot;edge&quot; here means?
How is it like a CDN? How is this different than Heroku&#x2F;GCloud?</text></comment> |
36,592,554 | 36,591,427 | 1 | 2 | 36,591,079 | train | <story><title>Designing a Language Without a Parser</title><url>https://thunderseethe.dev/posts/type-inference/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>electroly</author><text>&gt; However, once I start constructing a parser, progress slows to a crawl<p>I can&#x27;t really relate here. The parser is the easiest part of a compiler; the work only increases from there. I feel like if you ran out of steam at the parser, you never had enough steam to write a whole compiler. I don&#x27;t think removing the parser will take you across the finish line if you otherwise were running out of steam.<p>My advice is to write your language in vertical slices. Write the parsing, semantic checking, and code generation for the simplest features first and progressively add feature slices, rather than trying to write the entire parser for a fully-baked language before proceeding. Consider including &quot;print&quot; as a built-in statement so you can print things out (and thus write tests) before you have working expressions and function calls.</text></comment> | <story><title>Designing a Language Without a Parser</title><url>https://thunderseethe.dev/posts/type-inference/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>wpietri</author><text>Ooh, I like this. Too many people start projects at the logical beginning. But what you really want early on in a project is to maximize speed of exploration of the interesting parts.<p>To me there&#x27;s a clear analogy with startups. The naive conception of starting a company is that you get a pile of money so you can hire a bunch of people and create important infrastructure. But with startups, you&#x27;re trying something new, so the most efficient use of time is to find the riskiest hypotheses and test them as directly as possible. That often involves doing things that seem wrong if you proceed in the &quot;logical&quot; way. E.g., I knew a successful UGC company that didn&#x27;t implement accounts and logins until like 6 months in. But that was fine, because actual accounts were not needed to figure out whether the business worked.</text></comment> |
22,634,198 | 22,634,005 | 1 | 3 | 22,633,798 | train | <story><title>California governor issues statewide 'stay at home' order</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-california-stay-at/california-governor-issues-statewide-stay-at-home-order-idUSKBN21707B</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rootusrootus</author><text>This works for a while, but we can&#x27;t realistically expect to just shut the country down for the next year or so. Surely there is some kind of plan to try to actively suppress the virus rather than just reduce the R0 slightly? While Congress throws around a trillion here, trillion there, why not make testing every last American (multiple times, as necessary) priority #1? Then we can get people back to work much sooner, and let the economy start to recover.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>anarazel</author><text>(not not an epidemiologist, just interested)<p>Once testing becomes widespread enough that it&#x27;s feasible to test a lot more people it&#x27;s quite plausible to relax the restrictions. One big problem before the recent &quot;shelter in place&quot; state is that community transmission by asymptomatic people was&#x2F;is out of control.<p>If only strongly symptomatic people are &quot;allowed&quot; to be tested and health care professions aren&#x27;t tested, it&#x27;s basically impossible to restrict spread of something as infectious as covid-19. And once people with a lot of contacts have it, and stay in contact, further spread will obviously accelerate.<p>If you look at the buildup of test capacity in the US (far far to late obviously), it&#x27;s improving at a decent rate (from a totally embarrassing starting point):<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;covidtracking.com&#x2F;us-daily&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;covidtracking.com&#x2F;us-daily&#x2F;</a><p>(there&#x27;s a lot of differening sources, several lagging, but the trend is similar afaictl)<p>So there <i>finally</i> does appear to be some serious and successful effort in building up test capacity. Testing everyone in the US seems far off still though.<p>Given the rates of hospitalization and available beds &#x2F; respirators, it&#x27;d however be insane to rely on testing at this point. Spread would be far too fast, and there&#x27;s obviously not enough testing.<p>But if infections slow down due to the isolation, and testing ramps up at the same time...</text></comment> | <story><title>California governor issues statewide 'stay at home' order</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-california-stay-at/california-governor-issues-statewide-stay-at-home-order-idUSKBN21707B</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rootusrootus</author><text>This works for a while, but we can&#x27;t realistically expect to just shut the country down for the next year or so. Surely there is some kind of plan to try to actively suppress the virus rather than just reduce the R0 slightly? While Congress throws around a trillion here, trillion there, why not make testing every last American (multiple times, as necessary) priority #1? Then we can get people back to work much sooner, and let the economy start to recover.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dimator</author><text>you&#x27;re right, testing is the long term solution. you can&#x27;t control what you can&#x27;t measure.<p>the embarrassing point is that in the US, isolation is the only effective tool at this point. it&#x27;s embarrassing because ramping up testing was what South Korea did, and they started much sooner, and that&#x27;s why they are over the hump now. the US simply doesn&#x27;t have the testing scaled up.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reuters.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;us-health-coronavirus-testing-specialrep&#x2F;special-report-how-korea-trounced-u-s-in-race-to-test-people-for-coronavirus-idUSKBN2153BW" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reuters.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;us-health-coronavirus-testin...</a></text></comment> |
14,172,726 | 14,172,745 | 1 | 2 | 14,171,781 | train | <story><title>What I Learned About Life by Becoming a Landlord</title><url>http://www.popularmechanics.com/home/a25120/landlord/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ryanmarsh</author><text>Being a landlord, hiring people, working directly with the general public (retail, food service) are eye opening experiences.<p>I watched my father be the kind of land lord anyone would hope to have just to watch some people destroy his property and treat him with hostility.<p>Now I know why your landlord treats you like he expects the worst from you.<p>I hired people for work they cared about (non profit), treated them well, the earned prestige and leadership experience they couldn&#x27;t have had in their previous jobs just to watch them turn on me and spread lies and toxicity and try to destroy the organization because I praised someone else&#x27;s work too.<p>Now I know why companies treat people like they expect the worst from them.<p>I worked at a Taco Bell and Starbucks. People yelled at us and treated us like scum for the offense of working for minimum wage.<p>Apparently people who make more than minimum wage automatically have more intrinsic human value? I&#x27;ll never know. But I know I&#x27;ll excuse a lot with retail and food workers because my life is roughly 30x times better than theirs.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>manyxcxi</author><text>I don&#x27;t know about people actually believing they have more intrinsic value because they make more than minimum wage, I just think the problems comes from a few areas:<p>- They were&#x2F;are getting treated like shit and are transferring the energy on<p>- People are increasingly &#x27;busy&#x27; leading to higher levels of stress and anxiety that just have them snapping easier<p>- There&#x27;s a lot more of us than there used to be, so even if the percentages stayed constant, there&#x27;s a lot more f%cking twats running around out there<p>Especially with younger people I professionally interact with (I&#x27;m 34), but also with age peers, I&#x27;ve noticed that a shockingly large percentage have never had that job experience of working at a place that was crappy, for minimal pay, bad hours, tough work, etc. Generally they didn&#x27;t work at all until maybe a couple of internships in college, or some other form of light entry into the workforce. I think it really does something to create a lack of empathy for those people not in a situation exactly like ours.<p>My personal belief is it doesn&#x27;t matter what our two situations are, being an asshole is being an asshole. If you&#x27;re going to be a jerk to someone who&#x27;s working a random lunch counter, you&#x27;re probably just generally a jerk the majority of the time. Wealth, status, fame, are no excuses for a lack of human decency.</text></comment> | <story><title>What I Learned About Life by Becoming a Landlord</title><url>http://www.popularmechanics.com/home/a25120/landlord/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ryanmarsh</author><text>Being a landlord, hiring people, working directly with the general public (retail, food service) are eye opening experiences.<p>I watched my father be the kind of land lord anyone would hope to have just to watch some people destroy his property and treat him with hostility.<p>Now I know why your landlord treats you like he expects the worst from you.<p>I hired people for work they cared about (non profit), treated them well, the earned prestige and leadership experience they couldn&#x27;t have had in their previous jobs just to watch them turn on me and spread lies and toxicity and try to destroy the organization because I praised someone else&#x27;s work too.<p>Now I know why companies treat people like they expect the worst from them.<p>I worked at a Taco Bell and Starbucks. People yelled at us and treated us like scum for the offense of working for minimum wage.<p>Apparently people who make more than minimum wage automatically have more intrinsic human value? I&#x27;ll never know. But I know I&#x27;ll excuse a lot with retail and food workers because my life is roughly 30x times better than theirs.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>e40</author><text>Yes, a good percentage of people suck. They are nasty, selfish and, TBH, just assholes. The best thing you can do in life is to surround yourself with good, honest, hardworking, thoughtful people that you can care about. Excise toxic people from your life&#x2F;business as soon as they are discovered. That is all you can do.</text></comment> |
22,711,555 | 22,709,393 | 1 | 3 | 22,708,535 | train | <story><title>FDA grants emergency use authorization for 5-13 minute Covid-19 test</title><url>https://www.abbott.com/corpnewsroom/product-and-innovation/detect-covid-19-in-as-little-as-5-minutes.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>edouard-harris</author><text>Hi - I posted this submission to HN. Based on the comments I&#x27;m seeing, it might be helpful if I clarified why I think this news is of extreme significance.<p>The key facts are:<p>1. This is a test that directly detects SARS-Cov-2 virus. It can, if sensitive enough, tell you if you&#x27;re infected even if you don&#x27;t have any symptoms.<p>2. The detection time is <i>very</i> fast: 5 minutes for a positive result; 13 minutes for a negative.<p>3. The testing device is pretty compact. (Fits on a tabletop.)<p>If, in addition to the above, the following are <i>also</i> true:<p>4. The sensitivity of the test is high enough.<p>5. We can quickly scale manufacture of the testing platform and its reagents.<p>Then this development means the beginning of the end of the pandemic.* If all of the above are true, we can deploy fast testing to the entries&#x2F;exits of factories, offices, etc. Folks who test positive get sent home to self-quarantine; folks who test negative can go back to work. Everyone gets ~13 minutes added to their daily commute, but they can work safely without spreading the virus.<p>The specificity of this test almost doesn&#x27;t matter. Even if flu cases trigger a positive, those folks can still be sent to secondary testing or home quarantine. The government could pay them 100% of their salary for two weeks and it would still be a fantastic deal for the rest of us.<p>We can also ignore regulatory obstacles such as &quot;this is only allowed in hospitals right now&quot;. The wider this testing regime is deployed, the higher a level of economic activity we can sustain while keeping R0 &lt; 1. And given the scale of the stimulus efforts already underway, it&#x27;s clear the government will do anything it can to revive the economy. Administrative barriers will be abolished as needed.<p>Obviously this scenario is conditional on all the above actually being true. But this is the most hopeful development I&#x27;ve heard of since mid-February.<p>* To be absolutely pedantic, it probably means more like a 95-98% mitigation of the pandemic within a few months.</text></comment> | <story><title>FDA grants emergency use authorization for 5-13 minute Covid-19 test</title><url>https://www.abbott.com/corpnewsroom/product-and-innovation/detect-covid-19-in-as-little-as-5-minutes.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mcbits</author><text>Do these faster and faster tests all use the same reagent that has been in short supply? And has there been any progress on producing it faster, or using less of it for an accurate test?</text></comment> |
27,146,862 | 27,147,172 | 1 | 2 | 27,145,504 | train | <story><title>A Recap of the Mars Terraforming Debate</title><url>https://nautil.us/issue/100/outsiders/should-we-terraform-mars-lets-recap</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Pfhreak</author><text>There&#x27;s a fantastic novel series that starts with <i>Red Mars</i>, by Kim Stanley Robinson. It follows a series of the first colonizers of Mars, and every time it shifts perspective it dives into a new science&#x2F;technology frame.<p>For a few chapters you are following an engineer, and it talks about the alloys and techniques she&#x27;s using to build housing. A little while later you follow a geologist and the topic shifts a bit as this geologist goes out exploring.<p>You follow biologists, psychologists, economists, and each time it dives into the challenges they have in how they perceive Mars and what to do with it.<p>Inevitably, there&#x27;s a conflict between the &quot;Reds&quot; and the &quot;Greens&quot;. Given the series titles (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars), I&#x27;m sure you can figure out who wins. However, it seems to suggest a result that I find fairly likely -- it doesn&#x27;t matter what you <i>say</i> we should do with Mars, people are going to do what they want. We already don&#x27;t care about externalities here on Earth, there&#x27;s no way we can police them on Mars.<p>That said, while I used to be a huge fan of the idea of colonizing Mars, I&#x27;ve swung around to the idea that colonizing asteroids is far more interesting. Mars is relatively resource poor, and asteroids are incredibly resource rich. There are some kilometers wide balls of iron, nickel, and platinum group metals out there. Not to mention water and carbon. All the materials you&#x27;d need to undertake construction in space and none of the challenges of having to lift it into orbit.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Robotbeat</author><text>On the contrary, Mars has all the resources of asteroids but the advantage of a water cycle that has concentrated and reformed minerals like on Earth. The ability to process the atmosphere directly is a massive and under-rated advantage. MOXIE proves it’s not just possible but feasible to generate fuel (carbon monoxide) and oxidizer (oxygen) from the Martian atmosphere, and nitrogen and even a bit of water (hydrogen and oxygen) as well as argon are available anywhere on the planet.<p>The “let’s just build cylinders” (which I think we should eventually do!!) often strikes me as a knee jerk contrarian position, an attempt to avoid hard questions about environment, and a “grass is always greener in fields further in the future and with less solid understanding.”<p>Planetary bodies with water cycles (or a history of them) are rich. Airless bodies have massive difficulties that are often handwaved away.<p>And now we have powered flight (without needing propellant) demonstrated. Mars really is a much better place to establish a permanent human presence.</text></comment> | <story><title>A Recap of the Mars Terraforming Debate</title><url>https://nautil.us/issue/100/outsiders/should-we-terraform-mars-lets-recap</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Pfhreak</author><text>There&#x27;s a fantastic novel series that starts with <i>Red Mars</i>, by Kim Stanley Robinson. It follows a series of the first colonizers of Mars, and every time it shifts perspective it dives into a new science&#x2F;technology frame.<p>For a few chapters you are following an engineer, and it talks about the alloys and techniques she&#x27;s using to build housing. A little while later you follow a geologist and the topic shifts a bit as this geologist goes out exploring.<p>You follow biologists, psychologists, economists, and each time it dives into the challenges they have in how they perceive Mars and what to do with it.<p>Inevitably, there&#x27;s a conflict between the &quot;Reds&quot; and the &quot;Greens&quot;. Given the series titles (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars), I&#x27;m sure you can figure out who wins. However, it seems to suggest a result that I find fairly likely -- it doesn&#x27;t matter what you <i>say</i> we should do with Mars, people are going to do what they want. We already don&#x27;t care about externalities here on Earth, there&#x27;s no way we can police them on Mars.<p>That said, while I used to be a huge fan of the idea of colonizing Mars, I&#x27;ve swung around to the idea that colonizing asteroids is far more interesting. Mars is relatively resource poor, and asteroids are incredibly resource rich. There are some kilometers wide balls of iron, nickel, and platinum group metals out there. Not to mention water and carbon. All the materials you&#x27;d need to undertake construction in space and none of the challenges of having to lift it into orbit.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>BurningFrog</author><text>I wanted to like Red Mars, and the science stuff was well made, but a lot of the book is about politics, and to me, those parts were painful to read.<p>I found it incredibly naive and unrealistic. Clearly many others disagree :)</text></comment> |
16,662,624 | 16,661,535 | 1 | 2 | 16,659,378 | train | <story><title>How Facebook handles account deletions</title><url>https://pageflows.com/blog/delete-facebook/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>JoshMnem</author><text>&gt; &quot;Your friends will miss you!&quot;<p>The company seems to have a strong culture of gaslighting and manipulating users. When I saw that screen, there were people there that definitely wouldn&#x27;t miss me and who would probably be appalled that their identities were being used in that way.<p>When other people quit Facebook, it&#x27;s likely that your photo is being presented to other users (who you may not really know) telling them that you will miss them. It&#x27;s terrible.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>varrock</author><text>I deleted Instagram 6 months ago. I recently came into contact with somebody in person, and they told me that they were aware I was deleting social media because Instagram told them to re-invite me back to the platform. It was this moment that I realized you&#x27;re never truly out of the system. What is the point of me deleting my Instagram if I am still showing up on people&#x27;s application?</text></comment> | <story><title>How Facebook handles account deletions</title><url>https://pageflows.com/blog/delete-facebook/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>JoshMnem</author><text>&gt; &quot;Your friends will miss you!&quot;<p>The company seems to have a strong culture of gaslighting and manipulating users. When I saw that screen, there were people there that definitely wouldn&#x27;t miss me and who would probably be appalled that their identities were being used in that way.<p>When other people quit Facebook, it&#x27;s likely that your photo is being presented to other users (who you may not really know) telling them that you will miss them. It&#x27;s terrible.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>existencebox</author><text>This is something I&#x27;ve seen across the board, and have always been hesitant to say something lest I come off as &quot;that crazy guy who feels bad because his cloud console has a frowny face next to the fact that something broke.&quot; (as a tongue-in-cheek example.) There are certainly other products I&#x27;ve used in recent memory that played the &quot;we&#x27;ll miss you, don&#x27;t go!&quot; game on uninstalling, but I can&#x27;t pull their names off the top of my head, and I don&#x27;t recall them being QUITE as blatant as to use pictures of your friends.<p>The amount of anthropomorphism and insertion of emotional levers into tech tools&#x2F;products is something I&#x27;ve always had a very visceral reaction against, but at least for consumer products (and unfortunately, increasingly in the SaaS space as well) it seems to be gaining traction. I have no doubt that it _works_ from a psychological perspective, but I wonder if I&#x27;m alone in feeling offput as a user. Clearly alone enough that it doesn&#x27;t move the needle in terms of efficacy, unfortunately. (unfortunately in the context of whatever weird emotional pathology I&#x27;ve apparently developed have with my tooling :) )</text></comment> |
13,275,654 | 13,275,285 | 1 | 2 | 13,274,064 | train | <story><title>Why I close pull requests</title><url>http://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2016/why-i-close-prs-oss-project-maintainer-notes</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fdsfsaa</author><text>Requiring permission to do work is the enemy of progress and engineering dignity. It creates a presumption of incompetence and an atmosphere of low trust that punishes people who want to push the envelope of what&#x27;s possible.<p>Google&#x27;s design document culture is bad. Google has succeeded in spite of it.<p>In my experience, having worked at many large tech companies, design documents obfuscate, not enlighten. They become increasingly out-of-date as the code evolves, creating anti-documentation that makes it take longer to understand code. Yes, yes, people should update design documents as the code evolves. Everyone knows that in practice, nobody updates old design documents.<p>Design documents make it too easy for other developers to shoot down ideas. Sometimes the worth of code isn&#x27;t apparent until it&#x27;s made. It&#x27;s far too easy for someone to comment &quot;this will never work&quot; on a proposed change. It&#x27;s much harder for someone to deny benchmarks attached to a proposed change. It&#x27;s too easy for reviewers to knock out functionality.<p>Design documents turn every feature into a half-assed, lowest-common-denominator risk-minimized barely-adequate shell of itself.<p>The real reason everyone at Google writes design documents is that promotion committees demand documents as &quot;evidence of complexity&quot;. No design document, no impact. No impact, no promotion.<p>Code is just code. Bad changes can be backed out. It&#x27;s much better to move fast and iterate quickly than to create an illusion of care and add friction to every aspect of the development process. Up-front design of software just does not work. If it did, waterfall project planning would be successful.<p>These questions you highlight --- Why are you making this change? What impact will it have? --- can be asked during review of actual code. There is no need to build a speedbump, not if you trust your people.<p>Developers should be able to <i>choose</i> to create design documents and solicit feedback. Most changes don&#x27;t need this process. You should trust developers to know what changes require a more extensive discussion and which ones don&#x27;t.<p>A culture that requires permissions and signoffs before work can begin is a culture that leaves products stagnant for years.</text></item><item><author>yegle</author><text>At Google, if you want to implement new features (or large refactoring), you&#x27;ll need to write a design doc. In which, you should answer questions your reviewers might ask (common questions like: why do you want to do this, what are the alternatives, how components interactive with each other before&#x2F;after your change). This is something like Python&#x27;s PEP: you need a proposal to convince your reviewer that you have put thought into your change.<p>Real world examples of these design docs can be found at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;golang&#x2F;proposal" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;golang&#x2F;proposal</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tytso</author><text>At least in the part of Google where I work (Technical Infrastructure), in general most of the obvious optimizations that can be made at only one level (within the scope of a single programmer, or a single team), have been made long ago. So most of the changes to make the system more efficient will require coordinated changes across multiple teams, and multiple pieces of software, and in some cases, may impact more than one SRE team.<p>In that kind of situation, you betcha we need to have design docs! And in terms of making it easy for other developers to shoot down ideas, very often they may know about some dependency or key assumption in some other piece of code that you didn&#x27;t know about it. And it&#x27;s better to find out about it during the design phase, than to have to rework 50% of your work when you find out about it at code review time, or worse, if it gets deployed and you get angry notes from SRE&#x27;s that were woken up at 3am and you need to send them a bottle of whiskey to apologize for your f*ck up....</text></comment> | <story><title>Why I close pull requests</title><url>http://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2016/why-i-close-prs-oss-project-maintainer-notes</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fdsfsaa</author><text>Requiring permission to do work is the enemy of progress and engineering dignity. It creates a presumption of incompetence and an atmosphere of low trust that punishes people who want to push the envelope of what&#x27;s possible.<p>Google&#x27;s design document culture is bad. Google has succeeded in spite of it.<p>In my experience, having worked at many large tech companies, design documents obfuscate, not enlighten. They become increasingly out-of-date as the code evolves, creating anti-documentation that makes it take longer to understand code. Yes, yes, people should update design documents as the code evolves. Everyone knows that in practice, nobody updates old design documents.<p>Design documents make it too easy for other developers to shoot down ideas. Sometimes the worth of code isn&#x27;t apparent until it&#x27;s made. It&#x27;s far too easy for someone to comment &quot;this will never work&quot; on a proposed change. It&#x27;s much harder for someone to deny benchmarks attached to a proposed change. It&#x27;s too easy for reviewers to knock out functionality.<p>Design documents turn every feature into a half-assed, lowest-common-denominator risk-minimized barely-adequate shell of itself.<p>The real reason everyone at Google writes design documents is that promotion committees demand documents as &quot;evidence of complexity&quot;. No design document, no impact. No impact, no promotion.<p>Code is just code. Bad changes can be backed out. It&#x27;s much better to move fast and iterate quickly than to create an illusion of care and add friction to every aspect of the development process. Up-front design of software just does not work. If it did, waterfall project planning would be successful.<p>These questions you highlight --- Why are you making this change? What impact will it have? --- can be asked during review of actual code. There is no need to build a speedbump, not if you trust your people.<p>Developers should be able to <i>choose</i> to create design documents and solicit feedback. Most changes don&#x27;t need this process. You should trust developers to know what changes require a more extensive discussion and which ones don&#x27;t.<p>A culture that requires permissions and signoffs before work can begin is a culture that leaves products stagnant for years.</text></item><item><author>yegle</author><text>At Google, if you want to implement new features (or large refactoring), you&#x27;ll need to write a design doc. In which, you should answer questions your reviewers might ask (common questions like: why do you want to do this, what are the alternatives, how components interactive with each other before&#x2F;after your change). This is something like Python&#x27;s PEP: you need a proposal to convince your reviewer that you have put thought into your change.<p>Real world examples of these design docs can be found at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;golang&#x2F;proposal" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;golang&#x2F;proposal</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>skj</author><text>We write design docs at Google to communicate ideas with each other. They&#x27;re useful for promo committees because effective communication between engineers is something that is prerequisite for effective engineering.<p>Of course a full design doc is not needed for every change. Many changes are small and straightforward. Only big things, where the team needs to discuss and understand options. Or bigger things, where directors etc need to sign off (not really design docs anymore, but same basic thing).<p>The fact is that, on average, design doc+code takes less time than code without design (that is, without communication). Again, only for certain kinds of changes. Things go faster because problems are found, approaches are adjusted, or unmotivated features are axed.</text></comment> |
36,333,751 | 36,333,150 | 1 | 3 | 36,330,116 | train | <story><title>I may be the only evil (bit) user on the internet (2015)</title><url>https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/evil-bit-RFC3514-real-world-usage</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>js2</author><text>Maybe 20 years ago now, I wrote a simple email-to-sms script that I ran from procmail. To send the email out as SMS, it connected to a Verizon web site. This was before Verizon provided their own email-to-sms gateway.<p>I wrote and tested the script under OS X and it worked fine. I then moved it to my Linux server on the same network and it couldn&#x27;t connect to Verizon&#x27;s web site.<p>After using tcpdump to figure out what the difference was, I noticed that Linux was setting the ECN bit. Verizon had a firewall in front of their site that was apparently dropping packets with the ECN bit set. ECN was only a couple years old at that point. I think I figured out that it was due to an out-of-date Cisco PIX firewall on the Verizon end, but I&#x27;m not sure how I would have figured that out.<p>The solution was to disable ECN on the Linux box.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Explicit_Congestion_Notification" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Explicit_Congestion_Notificati...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>I may be the only evil (bit) user on the internet (2015)</title><url>https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/evil-bit-RFC3514-real-world-usage</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>lucb1e</author><text>This is the sort of thing that comes back to bite you. Websites that you think are down and ignore for now, annoyed but ok happens, only to later notice it was your own doing.<p>I played this on myself by setting X-Forwarded-For: &#x27;&quot; which would trigger an sql error if someone assumes an IP address is safe to insert without escaping or parameterization. Very few sites broke, but the first one that did I remember sold TLS certificates.</text></comment> |
20,362,519 | 20,362,620 | 1 | 2 | 20,362,266 | train | <story><title>Wikipedia co-founder slams the ‘appalling’ internet</title><url>https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/05/wikipedia-co-founder-larry-sanger-slams-facebook-twitter-social-media.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>iamsb</author><text>I agree with Larry about abuse by Facebook and Twitter.<p>I also strongly encourage him to look at state of wikipedia moderations. Specially in a country like India. Lot of pages related to political content is moderated by people who are deeply partisan and have no respect for facts.</text></comment> | <story><title>Wikipedia co-founder slams the ‘appalling’ internet</title><url>https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/05/wikipedia-co-founder-larry-sanger-slams-facebook-twitter-social-media.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>everdrive</author><text>The internet was much nicer before most people were using it. We usually focus on the technology problems here at HN: filter bubbles, skinner box addictive UIs and content feeds, algorithmic and centralized control. Has anyone simply wondered if the problem with the internet is fundamentally that everyone&#x27;s on it? It used to be an escape from the problems of the real world. Now it&#x27;s just a new way for the problems of the real world to reach you.</text></comment> |
25,757,864 | 25,757,943 | 1 | 3 | 25,757,712 | train | <story><title>Joint Chiefs remind U.S. forces that they defend the constitution</title><url>https://www.npr.org/sections/congress-electoral-college-tally-live-updates/2021/01/12/956170188/joint-chiefs-remind-u-s-forces-that-they-defend-the-constitution</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bostonsre</author><text>It&#x27;s incredibly reassuring to know that there are solid honorable people in our armed forces that eschew politics in favor of doing the right thing. I&#x27;m sure they don&#x27;t hear it enough, but thank you if any members read this.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rayiner</author><text>Yes, incredible to read this. My family left Bangladesh when it was being run by a military government. We are so fortunate to have the military we do.<p>Its not an idea or a principle or a law. It’s culture. It’s a norm
that has been socialized into members of the military, especially the leadership, for hundreds of years. I live in Annapolis now by the Naval Academy and it’s quite a joy to see each new cohort of naval officers carry on the tradition.</text></comment> | <story><title>Joint Chiefs remind U.S. forces that they defend the constitution</title><url>https://www.npr.org/sections/congress-electoral-college-tally-live-updates/2021/01/12/956170188/joint-chiefs-remind-u-s-forces-that-they-defend-the-constitution</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bostonsre</author><text>It&#x27;s incredibly reassuring to know that there are solid honorable people in our armed forces that eschew politics in favor of doing the right thing. I&#x27;m sure they don&#x27;t hear it enough, but thank you if any members read this.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>refurb</author><text>In case you haven’t noticed, US politicians (and military leadership is definitely political) love to proclaim they are defenders of the constitution (when it benefits them) and make excuses why the constitution doesn’t apply (when it benefits them).<p>**<p>Edit to respond to reply below asking if there are no honorable people in the military.<p>**<p>Not saying that there are no honorable people in the military. There are plenty.<p>What I’m saying is getting to leadership position in the government, business or military requires a lot of political savvy.<p>Of course everything the Joint Chiefs said is accurate, but also view it through the lens of how saying it <i>now</i> benefits the person saying it.<p>It’s pretty apparent that the Capitol Riot has led to a major shakeup across the entire government. It’s apparent that everyone is looking to position themselves as best they can for the post-Trump world.<p>Think of it like after Germany was defeated in WW2. Collaborators told stories of how they bravely resisted. Those who just laid low painted themselves as brave partisans. Some hated Germany for their own selfish reasons but post-war could exploit their resistance and claim to be nationalists. Others saw a power vacuum and realized now was the time to exploit it.<p>It’s quite interesting to watch.</text></comment> |
10,315,338 | 10,315,354 | 1 | 3 | 10,314,261 | train | <story><title>East Texas judge throws out 168 patent cases</title><url>http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/10/east-texas-judge-throws-out-168-patent-cases-in-one-fell-swoop/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>TheMagicHorsey</author><text>Software patents are pitched as a policy choice that encourages programmers by giving them some financial incentive to invent more software.<p>That&#x27;s how they have been pitched to programmers and the American people.<p>However, after having worked in the patent industry for a few years now, I can tell you software patents are really just a mechanism to redistribute the wealth of engineers to lawyers. Period. That&#x27;s the end result. Nothing more.<p>I wish this was some sort of exaggeration. But it isn&#x27;t in my opinion.</text></comment> | <story><title>East Texas judge throws out 168 patent cases</title><url>http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/10/east-texas-judge-throws-out-168-patent-cases-in-one-fell-swoop/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>bsimpson</author><text>&gt; reformed rules would have forced trolls like eDekka to actually explain how their targets infringe their patents. However, that&#x27;s not currently a requirement<p>How is it even possible to sue somebody for something you can&#x27;t show that they did?</text></comment> |
18,104,364 | 18,103,816 | 1 | 3 | 18,103,159 | train | <story><title>Rust Ownership Explained with Python</title><url>https://paulkernfeld.com/2018/09/16/ownership-explained-with-python.html#</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>shmageggy</author><text>Not that it really matters, but since he lamented that the second Python solution was &quot;longer and less elegant&quot;, I&#x27;ll point out that that algorithm can be written in a functional style that is both short and (IMO) somewhat elegant. However with reduce being removed as a built-in since Python 3, this is arguably not Pythonic.<p><pre><code> from functools import reduce
squares = (x * x for x in range(10))
min_and_max = lambda current, x: [min(current[0], x), max(current[1], x)]
minimum, maximum = reduce(min_and_max, squares, [next(squares)]*2)
print(minimum)
print(maximum)</code></pre></text></comment> | <story><title>Rust Ownership Explained with Python</title><url>https://paulkernfeld.com/2018/09/16/ownership-explained-with-python.html#</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>bayesian_horse</author><text>As a Rust beginner I am not quite sure why .min() is supposed to take ownership and change the sequence. I would assume it does nothing with the sequence except read it.</text></comment> |
9,146,709 | 9,146,791 | 1 | 2 | 9,145,197 | train | <story><title>Turning the database inside-out with Apache Samza</title><url>http://blog.confluent.io/2015/03/04/turning-the-database-inside-out-with-apache-samza/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>coffeemug</author><text>Slava @ rethink here.<p>This is a really interesting subject -- I should do a talk&#x2F;blog post about this at some point. Here is a quick summary.<p>RethinkDB&#x27;s storage engine heavily relies on the notion of immutability&#x2F;append-only. We never modify blocks of data in place on disk -- all changes are recorded in new blocks. We have a concurrent, incremental compaction algorithm that goes through the old blocks, frees the ones that are outdated, and moves things around when some blocks have mostly garbage.<p>The system is very fast and rock solid. But...<p>Getting a storage engine like that to production state is an enormous amount of work and takes a very long time. Rethink&#x27;s storage engine is really a work of art -- I consider it a marvel of engineering, and I don&#x27;t mean that as a compliment. If we were starting from scratch, I don&#x27;t think we&#x27;d use this design again. It&#x27;s great now, but I&#x27;m not sure if all the work we put into it was ultimately worth the effort.</text></item><item><author>slashdev</author><text>Immutability is hardly a cure-all, see the discussion here for why RethinkDB moved away from it: <a href="http://www.xaprb.com/blog/2013/12/28/immutability-mvcc-and-garbage-collection/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.xaprb.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2013&#x2F;12&#x2F;28&#x2F;immutability-mvcc-and-g...</a><p>The reality is shared, mutable state is the most efficient way of working with memory-sized data. People can rant and rave all they want about the benefits of immutability vs mutability, but at the end of the day, if performance is important to you, you&#x27;d be best to ignore them.<p>Actually, to be more honest, reality is more complicated still. MVCC that many databases use to get ACID semantics over a shared mutable dataset is really a combination of mutable and immutable.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>boredandroid</author><text>I really think there are a couple of levels of immutability that it is easy to conflate.<p>Specifically immutability for<p>1. In memory data structures...this is the contention of the functional programming people.<p>2. Persistent data stores. This is the lsm style of data structure that substitutes linear writes and compaction for buffered in-place mutation.<p>3. Distributed system internals--this is a log-centric, &quot;state machine replication&quot; style of data flow between nodes. This is a classic approach in distributed databases, and present in systems like PNUTs.<p>4. Company-wide data integration and processing around streams of immutable records between systems. This is what I have argued for (<a href="http://engineering.linkedin.com/distributed-systems/log-what-every-software-engineer-should-know-about-real-time-datas-unifying" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;engineering.linkedin.com&#x2F;distributed-systems&#x2F;log-what...</a>) and I think Martin is mostly talking about.<p>There are a lot of analogies between these but they aren&#x27;t the same. Success of one of these things doesn&#x27;t really imply success for any of the others. Functional programming could lose and log-structured data stores could win or vice versa. Pat Helland has made an across the board call for immutability (<a href="http://www.cidrdb.org/cidr2015/Papers/CIDR15_Paper16.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cidrdb.org&#x2F;cidr2015&#x2F;Papers&#x2F;CIDR15_Paper16.pdf</a>), but that remains a pretty strong assertion. So it is worth being specific about which level you are thinking about.<p>For my part I am pretty bullish about stream processing and data flow between systems being built around a log or stream of immutable records as the foundational abstraction. But whether those systems internally are built in functional languages, use lsm style data layout on disk is kind of an implementation detail. From my point of view immutability is a lot more helpful in the large than in the small--I have never found small imperative for loops particularly hard to read, but process-wide mutable state is a big pain, and undisciplined dataflow between disparate systems, caches, and applications at the company level can be a real disaster.</text></comment> | <story><title>Turning the database inside-out with Apache Samza</title><url>http://blog.confluent.io/2015/03/04/turning-the-database-inside-out-with-apache-samza/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>coffeemug</author><text>Slava @ rethink here.<p>This is a really interesting subject -- I should do a talk&#x2F;blog post about this at some point. Here is a quick summary.<p>RethinkDB&#x27;s storage engine heavily relies on the notion of immutability&#x2F;append-only. We never modify blocks of data in place on disk -- all changes are recorded in new blocks. We have a concurrent, incremental compaction algorithm that goes through the old blocks, frees the ones that are outdated, and moves things around when some blocks have mostly garbage.<p>The system is very fast and rock solid. But...<p>Getting a storage engine like that to production state is an enormous amount of work and takes a very long time. Rethink&#x27;s storage engine is really a work of art -- I consider it a marvel of engineering, and I don&#x27;t mean that as a compliment. If we were starting from scratch, I don&#x27;t think we&#x27;d use this design again. It&#x27;s great now, but I&#x27;m not sure if all the work we put into it was ultimately worth the effort.</text></item><item><author>slashdev</author><text>Immutability is hardly a cure-all, see the discussion here for why RethinkDB moved away from it: <a href="http://www.xaprb.com/blog/2013/12/28/immutability-mvcc-and-garbage-collection/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.xaprb.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2013&#x2F;12&#x2F;28&#x2F;immutability-mvcc-and-g...</a><p>The reality is shared, mutable state is the most efficient way of working with memory-sized data. People can rant and rave all they want about the benefits of immutability vs mutability, but at the end of the day, if performance is important to you, you&#x27;d be best to ignore them.<p>Actually, to be more honest, reality is more complicated still. MVCC that many databases use to get ACID semantics over a shared mutable dataset is really a combination of mutable and immutable.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>eloff</author><text>It&#x27;s that merge (edit: GC is a better term) step that&#x27;s difficult to get right. Google screwed this up badly with LevelDB which had(still has?) horrible performance issues caused by compaction. Even with concurrent compaction it can be difficult due to needing additional disk space, adding additional read and write pressure to the storage subsystem and the effects that has on latency. I&#x27;m not sure what RethinkDB&#x27;s approach was there, but I&#x27;m very curious to know.</text></comment> |
4,498,134 | 4,497,875 | 1 | 2 | 4,497,461 | train | <story><title>Black Swan Farming</title><url>http://paulgraham.com/swan.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pg</author><text>It's pretty grim. I think that's one of the reasons I write fewer essays now.<p>After I wrote this one, I had to go back and armor it by pre-empting anything I could imagine anyone willfully misunderstanding to use as a weapon in comment threads. The whole of footnote 1 is such armor for example. I essentially anticipated all the "No, what I said was" type comments I'd have had to make on HN and just included them in the essay.<p>It's a uniquely bad combination to both write essays and run a forum. It's like having comments enabled on your blog whether you want them or not.</text></item><item><author>thaumaturgy</author><text>Off-topic, but something I've been chewing on lately: what's it like to have your every written (or spoken!) word analyzed by a bunch of people? Esp. people that you end up having some form of contact with.<p>It seems like it would be difficult to just have a public conversation about a topic. Do you think about that much when you write?</text></item><item><author>pg</author><text>I do care about would-be founders' opinions, but surely I don't have to use every essay I write to convince people to apply to YC. I've already written elsewhere about the founder's eye view of YC (e.g. <a href="http://ycombinator.com/atyc.html" rel="nofollow">http://ycombinator.com/atyc.html</a>). This essay is just an exploration of the strangeness of startup investing as a business. The goal is not to convince anyone to do anything.</text></item><item><author>cperciva</author><text>Quoth pg: <i>It would hurt YC's brand (at least among the innumerate) if we invested in huge numbers of risky startups that flamed out.</i><p>Paul, you're sounding like a venture capitalist who is worried about whether he can find investors for his next fund.<p>I would posit that the people whose opinions you should care about are <i>potential founders</i>; and that their primary concern is <i>themselves</i>, not the performance of a fund (oops, I mean class) as a whole. You're damn right that it would hurt YC's brand if 70% of each class didn't survive past Demo Day -- because for an individual founder, success is pretty much binary, and having a 50% chance of becoming a millionaire is more attractive than having a 5% chance of becoming a billionaire, despite the 100-fold reduction in mean wealth.<p>You may be in in the business of farming black swans, but if they're all you worry about you'll find that <i>all</i> the swans end up laying their eggs elsewhere.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jseliger</author><text>Well, I still enjoy your essays. Let this comment be the generic encouragement of those who aren't trying to pointless dispute and who are usually silent.<p>At least some of the people who are questioning you are probably doing so out of intellectual curiosity, rather than animosity. You probably know that intellectually, but for many people—including me—it's sometimes hard to remember that in the heat of the reading moment.</text></comment> | <story><title>Black Swan Farming</title><url>http://paulgraham.com/swan.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pg</author><text>It's pretty grim. I think that's one of the reasons I write fewer essays now.<p>After I wrote this one, I had to go back and armor it by pre-empting anything I could imagine anyone willfully misunderstanding to use as a weapon in comment threads. The whole of footnote 1 is such armor for example. I essentially anticipated all the "No, what I said was" type comments I'd have had to make on HN and just included them in the essay.<p>It's a uniquely bad combination to both write essays and run a forum. It's like having comments enabled on your blog whether you want them or not.</text></item><item><author>thaumaturgy</author><text>Off-topic, but something I've been chewing on lately: what's it like to have your every written (or spoken!) word analyzed by a bunch of people? Esp. people that you end up having some form of contact with.<p>It seems like it would be difficult to just have a public conversation about a topic. Do you think about that much when you write?</text></item><item><author>pg</author><text>I do care about would-be founders' opinions, but surely I don't have to use every essay I write to convince people to apply to YC. I've already written elsewhere about the founder's eye view of YC (e.g. <a href="http://ycombinator.com/atyc.html" rel="nofollow">http://ycombinator.com/atyc.html</a>). This essay is just an exploration of the strangeness of startup investing as a business. The goal is not to convince anyone to do anything.</text></item><item><author>cperciva</author><text>Quoth pg: <i>It would hurt YC's brand (at least among the innumerate) if we invested in huge numbers of risky startups that flamed out.</i><p>Paul, you're sounding like a venture capitalist who is worried about whether he can find investors for his next fund.<p>I would posit that the people whose opinions you should care about are <i>potential founders</i>; and that their primary concern is <i>themselves</i>, not the performance of a fund (oops, I mean class) as a whole. You're damn right that it would hurt YC's brand if 70% of each class didn't survive past Demo Day -- because for an individual founder, success is pretty much binary, and having a 50% chance of becoming a millionaire is more attractive than having a 5% chance of becoming a billionaire, despite the 100-fold reduction in mean wealth.<p>You may be in in the business of farming black swans, but if they're all you worry about you'll find that <i>all</i> the swans end up laying their eggs elsewhere.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cperciva</author><text>Having people pick over every detail of what I write is something I like about HN -- it forces me to think more carefully about what I'm saying, and on a few occasions (tptacek, I'm looking at you) has even prompted me to go back and write further blog posts about specific points.<p>Of course, my blog posts don't get nearly as much attention as your essays, and I don't have the problem of having people try to draw attention to themselves in the hopes of being remembered when applications are considered for the next YC round.</text></comment> |
25,738,575 | 25,737,129 | 1 | 3 | 25,735,574 | train | <story><title>CD Projekt Red is under investigation</title><url>https://www.mcvuk.com/business-news/cd-projekt-red-is-under-investigation-by-polands-office-of-competition-and-consumer-protection/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Sodman</author><text>I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s fair to blame this on gamers. With all of the hyperbole over various games being &quot;broken&quot;, most people that are hyped about a specific game are just going to buy it and see for themselves. Unless it&#x27;s literally unplayable (as may actually have been the case here), most people won&#x27;t refund it.<p>This has been going on for years and years, it&#x27;s just getting worse over time. It&#x27;s always some variant of this conversation at $GAMEDEV_STUDIO:<p>Focus group feedback: Our test groups are noticing 10% of players are running into this bug&#x2F;issue. It&#x27;s frustrating them, but there are workarounds.<p>Management: All of our marketing materials target release date XX&#x2F;XX&#x2F;XXXX. If we try to fix this bug we&#x27;ll have to push the release... How many people will _not_ buy the game because of this bug?<p>Focus group feedback: Nobody that would have otherwise bought this game would decide not to buy it over this issue.<p>Management: So we ship as planned, and fix the bugs in a patch.<p>Over time studios realized that you can get away with much bigger bugs affecting much larger portions of players. Ship sooner, start recognizing revenue, and push post-launch patches to fix the &quot;really bad bugs&quot;. It&#x27;s shocking how bad the quality has to get before it starts making headlines.</text></item><item><author>jgust</author><text>It&#x27;s a tragedy of the commons situation with gamer enthusiasts acting against their own best interest.<p>If people can&#x27;t delay gratification for something as inconsequential as &quot;non-broken video games&quot;, I don&#x27;t see how any personal responsibility campaign has any chance of working for things impacting society at large such as climate change, overfishing, public health, etc.</text></item><item><author>chundicus</author><text>I hope this will encourage big studios to stop releasing broken games, but I doubt it will. The incentives are just so broken due to ease of patching, a need&#x2F;desire for cash after a drawn out dev process, and a general disrespect for their customers.<p>I think releasing a &quot;broken&quot; game in the form of &quot;early access&quot; from smaller studios can be good in terms of iterative and community development, but also that can be abused too. These bigger studios really don&#x27;t have as much of an excuse in my opinion.<p>The only solution I see is to stop pre-ordering games and don&#x27;t reward studios that do this, but easier said than done.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>incrudible</author><text>I disagree that this is getting worse. Every game of this magnitude of complexity has shipped broken, even way back in the nineties. The Elder Scrolls series in particular comes to mind. Back then, you&#x27;d get patches from print media.<p>The games that didn&#x27;t ship broken simply weren&#x27;t that complex. Console games never were that complex. PC gamers gamers accepted this in order to be able to (sort of) play through an experience that was at the edge of what was possible. There was no Digital Foundry to count pixels and analyze frame drops. If you hit 20FPS most of the time, that was considered &quot;playable&quot;.<p>If a game like Cyberpunk 2077 can&#x27;t ship broken, then it can&#x27;t ship at all. It can&#x27;t even get produced. Nobody is going to put hundreds of millions of dollars on the line to <i>maybe</i> ship next year, forever. Nobody except maybe the Star Citizen community.</text></comment> | <story><title>CD Projekt Red is under investigation</title><url>https://www.mcvuk.com/business-news/cd-projekt-red-is-under-investigation-by-polands-office-of-competition-and-consumer-protection/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Sodman</author><text>I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s fair to blame this on gamers. With all of the hyperbole over various games being &quot;broken&quot;, most people that are hyped about a specific game are just going to buy it and see for themselves. Unless it&#x27;s literally unplayable (as may actually have been the case here), most people won&#x27;t refund it.<p>This has been going on for years and years, it&#x27;s just getting worse over time. It&#x27;s always some variant of this conversation at $GAMEDEV_STUDIO:<p>Focus group feedback: Our test groups are noticing 10% of players are running into this bug&#x2F;issue. It&#x27;s frustrating them, but there are workarounds.<p>Management: All of our marketing materials target release date XX&#x2F;XX&#x2F;XXXX. If we try to fix this bug we&#x27;ll have to push the release... How many people will _not_ buy the game because of this bug?<p>Focus group feedback: Nobody that would have otherwise bought this game would decide not to buy it over this issue.<p>Management: So we ship as planned, and fix the bugs in a patch.<p>Over time studios realized that you can get away with much bigger bugs affecting much larger portions of players. Ship sooner, start recognizing revenue, and push post-launch patches to fix the &quot;really bad bugs&quot;. It&#x27;s shocking how bad the quality has to get before it starts making headlines.</text></item><item><author>jgust</author><text>It&#x27;s a tragedy of the commons situation with gamer enthusiasts acting against their own best interest.<p>If people can&#x27;t delay gratification for something as inconsequential as &quot;non-broken video games&quot;, I don&#x27;t see how any personal responsibility campaign has any chance of working for things impacting society at large such as climate change, overfishing, public health, etc.</text></item><item><author>chundicus</author><text>I hope this will encourage big studios to stop releasing broken games, but I doubt it will. The incentives are just so broken due to ease of patching, a need&#x2F;desire for cash after a drawn out dev process, and a general disrespect for their customers.<p>I think releasing a &quot;broken&quot; game in the form of &quot;early access&quot; from smaller studios can be good in terms of iterative and community development, but also that can be abused too. These bigger studios really don&#x27;t have as much of an excuse in my opinion.<p>The only solution I see is to stop pre-ordering games and don&#x27;t reward studios that do this, but easier said than done.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>surge</author><text>Stop announcing release dates until its 90% finished or all major bugs are fixed and you&#x27;re just 3 months away from being ready.<p>Publishers are a problem too, they pressure to release games around the holidays, or the console manufacturers do cause it helps sell hardware around the holidays.<p>From what I gathered its mostly fine on PC, they&#x27;re a PC shop after all, the console versions needed probably at least 6 months of work to be polished. People were screaming for it to be released no matter what or to stop making excuses no matter how much crunch the devs were already doing. If they released it as an &quot;early-beta&quot; like a lot of games or just said up front, okay we&#x27;re releasing it but its not finished, so you can play it but you&#x27;re getting the beta now and we&#x27;ll be fixing it with updates. I think hardcore gamers would understand. It would just not look good for release sales and I&#x27;m not sure if the game media would care.</text></comment> |
10,404,355 | 10,404,335 | 1 | 2 | 10,403,820 | train | <story><title>Show HN: CloudScrape – Cloud-based web scraping platform</title><url>http://cloudscrape.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>danielmiessler</author><text>Probably a super dumb question, but isn&#x27;t this fairly unethical? The &quot;automatic IP rotation&quot; feature isn&#x27;t there for no reason.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>angry-hacker</author><text>As much as unethical as using adblock or disabling javascript. If you don&#x27;t want your content to be scraped, don&#x27;t put it online!</text></comment> | <story><title>Show HN: CloudScrape – Cloud-based web scraping platform</title><url>http://cloudscrape.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>danielmiessler</author><text>Probably a super dumb question, but isn&#x27;t this fairly unethical? The &quot;automatic IP rotation&quot; feature isn&#x27;t there for no reason.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hvs</author><text>It could certainly be used for unethical purposes, but it isn&#x27;t de facto unethical.</text></comment> |
36,091,584 | 36,091,561 | 1 | 2 | 36,090,755 | train | <story><title>Dolphin on Steam Indefinitely Postponed</title><url>https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2023/05/27/dolphin-steam-indefinitely-postponed/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>EMIRELADERO</author><text>Is it your position that no entity should ever try to challenge a big company&#x27;s interpretation of the law, however ridiculous it may be? At that point, why even have a judicial system?</text></item><item><author>dcchambers</author><text>Have to agree with this.<p>Nintendo is infamously litigious. I know that many people say the debate over emulators is &quot;settled&quot; and they are perfectly legal, but I&#x27;d rather not poke the bear and just keep things as they are.<p>Emulators are an invaluable tool for game preservation...and I don&#x27;t want to see one of, if not the best emulator ever, be forced to cease development.</text></item><item><author>slurpyb</author><text>I think they were crazy to even try. Just let it exist within RetroArch - in-fact I hope it doesn’t draw attention to RetroArch after this incident</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>favorited</author><text>Because the last time it was litigated in the US, the good guys won. But SCEA v. Bleem was over 20 years ago, and there&#x27;s no guarantee that the courts won&#x27;t roll back protections for emulation development.<p>NoA is notoriously vindictive &amp; litigious, and they have more money than the Dolphin devs. Even though Sony lost the case, the lawsuit ruined Bleem. It&#x27;s not outside the realm of possibility that Nintendo will try to do the same thing to Dolphin, Ryujinx, Yuzu, etc.</text></comment> | <story><title>Dolphin on Steam Indefinitely Postponed</title><url>https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2023/05/27/dolphin-steam-indefinitely-postponed/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>EMIRELADERO</author><text>Is it your position that no entity should ever try to challenge a big company&#x27;s interpretation of the law, however ridiculous it may be? At that point, why even have a judicial system?</text></item><item><author>dcchambers</author><text>Have to agree with this.<p>Nintendo is infamously litigious. I know that many people say the debate over emulators is &quot;settled&quot; and they are perfectly legal, but I&#x27;d rather not poke the bear and just keep things as they are.<p>Emulators are an invaluable tool for game preservation...and I don&#x27;t want to see one of, if not the best emulator ever, be forced to cease development.</text></item><item><author>slurpyb</author><text>I think they were crazy to even try. Just let it exist within RetroArch - in-fact I hope it doesn’t draw attention to RetroArch after this incident</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jonhohle</author><text>It’s an expensive theory to test. I would imagine most OSS projects or their contributors are not in a financial position to get to court, let alone see the trial to a conclusion.<p>I don’t know what to do about it, but it seems we’ve fell into aristocracy of ruling corporations.</text></comment> |
9,199,540 | 9,199,269 | 1 | 3 | 9,197,920 | train | <story><title>When IE gave us beautiful, fast touch interactions, and nobody cared</title><url>https://paulbakaus.com/2015/03/13/when-ie-gave-us-beautiful-fast-touch-interactions-and-nobody-cared/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>glesica</author><text>I think the reason nobody seems to care about IE today isn&#x27;t that it is a terrible browser, as in the past, but that it doesn&#x27;t run on Mac OS or GNU&#x2F;Linux. There are certainly people doing development on Windows, but more (at least of people who would use features like this) doing so on other platforms. Until IE is cross-platform, many developers will continue to ignore it because they have no reasonable way of using it and getting to know it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lectrick</author><text>I don&#x27;t know about other people, but as an early web developer who worked in an all-Microsoft shop, learning about <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish</a> literally caused me nausea and I quit my job and became an open source developer very soon after and never looked back. There was something so entirely... wrong about that approach. And the browser that was involved with it. And the company that even conceived of it. I still harbor plenty of anti-MS anger as a result (well that, and having to do IE compatibility for many years!)<p>(I admit that also reading the books &quot;The Cathedral and the Bazaar&quot; and &quot;Hackers &amp; Painters&quot; influenced me a lot!)</text></comment> | <story><title>When IE gave us beautiful, fast touch interactions, and nobody cared</title><url>https://paulbakaus.com/2015/03/13/when-ie-gave-us-beautiful-fast-touch-interactions-and-nobody-cared/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>glesica</author><text>I think the reason nobody seems to care about IE today isn&#x27;t that it is a terrible browser, as in the past, but that it doesn&#x27;t run on Mac OS or GNU&#x2F;Linux. There are certainly people doing development on Windows, but more (at least of people who would use features like this) doing so on other platforms. Until IE is cross-platform, many developers will continue to ignore it because they have no reasonable way of using it and getting to know it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>untog</author><text>The reason nobody cares about IE today is that it has a far lower market share. On desktop far more people are using Chrome, and it&#x27;s nowhere to be seen on mobile, given that it&#x27;s tied to the Windows Phone platform, which is usually a rounding error in usage numbers.<p>I don&#x27;t think Mac OS&#x2F;Linux has a huge impact here. And as for the inability to test IE, try modern.ie - free Windows VMs with different IE versions. It&#x27;s not that difficult.</text></comment> |
15,617,775 | 15,617,424 | 1 | 3 | 15,616,719 | train | <story><title>Life Inside the RVs of Silicon Valley</title><url>https://www.topic.com/life-inside-the-rvs-of-silicon-valley</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Mz</author><text><i>Their precarious living situation became a catch 22: while the truck allowed them to live near the hospital, when the social worker found out Isidoro was living in a truck, the hospital kicked Isidoro off the transplant list: he needed to live indoors to recover from a potential surgery to be eligible for a transplant. Luckily, after weeks of looking, Silvia’s sister in nearby Milpitas rented her a bedroom for $700&#x2F;month this fall, where they’ve been staying since. The last she heard, they had to stay inside for a year for Isidoro to get back on the list.</i><p>Well, I think I officially feel ashamed to be an American now.<p>I slept in a tent for nearly six years to work on getting healthier, but I was not seeing a doctor. I was doing my own thing. That was frustrating enough, what with not getting taken seriously by a lot of people and facing classism online, etc. But, I kind of understand why I get given so much flak: people genuinely think what I am doing simply cannot be done. They have no mental framework for effectively engaging with me.<p>But to have a specialty hospital someplace so expensive and a requirement to live near it to get treatment and no help for complying with this expectation, then delist them for sleeping in a truck, it just seems monstrous. The hospital has to know that normal, healthy people can&#x27;t afford housing here. They should also be fully well aware that people with health problems face the double whammy of high medical expenses plus reduced earnings.<p>America needs to fix both the medical system and affordable housing. It doesn&#x27;t really deserve to be seen as a civilized, first world nation as things stand currently. I don&#x27;t care what our GDP is. We are failing to take care of our people and it is monstrous.</text></comment> | <story><title>Life Inside the RVs of Silicon Valley</title><url>https://www.topic.com/life-inside-the-rvs-of-silicon-valley</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>SwellJoe</author><text>It&#x27;s worth noting that even for folks who have enough income to afford an RV park, there are effectively none in the Bay Area. The ones that exist are either: Booked solid with a long waiting list, don&#x27;t allow old RVs (I found this out when I passed through the area with my 34 year old Avion travel trailer), or are so far from everything as to be useless for most of the folks covered in the article. Or, most likely, all three. Also, among the most expensive RV parks in the country.<p>I&#x27;m pleasantly surprised the city of Palo Alto isn&#x27;t ticketing or arresting or towing these folks. They passed a law against sleeping in vehicles a few years ago, as I recall. It&#x27;s deeply troubling, to me, that the solution to homelessness (or near homelessness) is often to make mere existence illegal.<p>I spent a couple of weeks parking around the University Ave.&#x2F;Downtown area in Palo Alto a few months after I moved into my first RV (a nice&#x2F;newish motorhome), about eight years ago, to visit with a friend who lived on University, and I didn&#x27;t have any trouble with police or neighbors, even parked among multimillion dollar homes (it certainly helped that the RV was nice...I got questions from residents but they were of the form &quot;Where&#x27;ve you been?&quot; and &quot;Where are you going next?&quot;), but I&#x27;d read there&#x27;d been a crackdown on it. I haven&#x27;t been back in an RV since then.<p>Last time I was in the area earlier this year, I parked <i>way</i> outside of the valley (about a 1.5 hour drive away, which was literally the closest I could get) and rented a car to drive in (rather than driving my very large F250; the fuel savings paid for the car rental), but I saw that there were little RV villages in a few locations in Mountain View and Palo Alto. If I&#x27;d been in a motorhome and didn&#x27;t have a girlfriend that liked having limitless power and water with me, I would have spent a night or two on those streets just to avoid making that ridiculous drive several times. But, with a trailer, it&#x27;s just not a great idea to park on streets. Even in places that tolerate motorhomes and vans, they might not tolerate a truck and trailer, and its length often makes it subject to other street parking laws.</text></comment> |
40,592,773 | 40,590,782 | 1 | 2 | 40,574,331 | train | <story><title>Research as leisure activity</title><url>https://www.personalcanon.com/p/research-as-leisure-activity</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mark_l_watson</author><text>That is a beautiful article, but if you are time constrained skip 1&#x2F;4 down to the definition of research as leisure activity.<p>I felt like the author was describing me in the paragraph: “”” I’d also say that pretty much every writer, essayist, “cultural critic,” etc—especially someone who’s writing more as a vocation than a profession—has research as their leisure activity. What they do for pleasure (reading books, seeing films, listening to music) shades naturally and inevitably into what they want to write about, and the things they consume for leisure end up incorporated into some written work.”””</text></comment> | <story><title>Research as leisure activity</title><url>https://www.personalcanon.com/p/research-as-leisure-activity</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>nico</author><text>Are there publications for “research as a leisure activity”?<p>Somewhere where I can read what “amateurs” are researching in their free time?<p>There’s a few channels I follow on YouTube, but they all seem to be living off of the content they produce<p>I’m curious about communities of people with scientific inclinations, doing experiments of interesting things “at home”</text></comment> |
8,079,611 | 8,079,623 | 1 | 2 | 8,079,294 | train | <story><title>How to move a 200-ton spectrometer across Europe</title><url>http://www.fogonazos.es/2008/05/how-to-move-200-ton-spectrometer-across.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>aylons</author><text>Zeppelins could solve transport scenarios just like this one, where you must transport a huge cargo from&#x2F;to specific locations far from the shore:<p><a href="http://rt.com/news/aeroscraft-revolutionary-airship-cargo-187/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;rt.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;aeroscraft-revolutionary-airship-cargo-18...</a><p>However, after hearing about this comeback for at least a decade, I&#x27;m a bit skeptic it will ever come true.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fh973</author><text>One of these efforts graced the Berlin, Germany area with a huge hangar:
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CargoLifter" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;CargoLifter</a><p>Luckily, they found a new use for the structure:
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_Islands_Resort" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Tropical_Islands_Resort</a></text></comment> | <story><title>How to move a 200-ton spectrometer across Europe</title><url>http://www.fogonazos.es/2008/05/how-to-move-200-ton-spectrometer-across.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>aylons</author><text>Zeppelins could solve transport scenarios just like this one, where you must transport a huge cargo from&#x2F;to specific locations far from the shore:<p><a href="http://rt.com/news/aeroscraft-revolutionary-airship-cargo-187/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;rt.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;aeroscraft-revolutionary-airship-cargo-18...</a><p>However, after hearing about this comeback for at least a decade, I&#x27;m a bit skeptic it will ever come true.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>seszett</author><text>The Zeppelin this article talks about could still only potentially lift 66 tonnes, less than a third of the weight of this spectrometer. But yeah, a zeppelin with sufficient lift would be a very good solution to this problem.<p><i>edit</i> yes, &quot;over the long term&quot; they say they <i>could</i> build an airship with a 500 tons lift capability, but that seems far away.</text></comment> |
12,586,001 | 12,586,042 | 1 | 3 | 12,584,880 | train | <story><title>BeagleBone Black Wireless</title><url>https://beagleboard.org/blog/2016-09-26-meet-beaglebone-black-wireless/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mintplant</author><text>The link at the bottom goes to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;beagleboard.org&#x2F;wireless" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;beagleboard.org&#x2F;wireless</a> which isn&#x27;t working for me, but <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;beagleboard.org&#x2F;black-wireless" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;beagleboard.org&#x2F;black-wireless</a> works. Mouser lists the price as $68.75 and element14 as $99.25; neither has any stock yet.<p>There are hardware design source files on <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;beagleboard&#x2F;beaglebone-black-wireless" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;beagleboard&#x2F;beaglebone-black-wireless</a>, including a PDF schematic: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;beagleboard&#x2F;beaglebone-black-wireless&#x2F;raw&#x2F;master&#x2F;BeagleBone_Black_Wireless_SCH.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;beagleboard&#x2F;beaglebone-black-wireless&#x2F;raw...</a> which features a Texas Instruments WL1835MODGBMOCT WiFi&#x2F;Bluetooth module: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;store.ti.com&#x2F;WL1835MODGBMOCT.aspx" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;store.ti.com&#x2F;WL1835MODGBMOCT.aspx</a></text></comment> | <story><title>BeagleBone Black Wireless</title><url>https://beagleboard.org/blog/2016-09-26-meet-beaglebone-black-wireless/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ausjke</author><text>Used beaglebone since it&#x27;s out years ago, it&#x27;s a great piece of hardware and kind of kicked off the open-source-software plus open source 32-bit-CPU DIY hardware movement before everybody else.<p>Then clone was up everywhere, from RPI to Intel to many small shops in China etc, even Arduino started to add 32-bit CPU boards, price has remained to be low so far.<p>The only concern is that TI is not as active as before on its ARM-chip business, otherwise Beaglebones could have dominated the market instead of RPI series.</text></comment> |
1,119,300 | 1,119,289 | 1 | 2 | 1,119,184 | train | <story><title>Daring Fireball: "Facebook login"</title><url>http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/11/facebook-login</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>natemartin</author><text>This is fascinating... apparently users are just typing "facebook login" into google, clicking on the first link, and getting very confused as to why they're not actually on facebook.<p>How can you design a web application that is usable by people with this level of computer knowledge? Should one even try?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>patio11</author><text>You relentlessly simplify. You collect data and look for errors or opportunities for misunderstanding, then eliminate them. You tell people how to succeed with the app three times. You make the defaults close to success. You aggressively segment your users, giving the hard stuff only to those that can handle it. You provide an easy way to talk to you and pipe that straight to the dev team to automate or eliminate responses to the common issues.You implement game mechanics and award people features for learning or mastering other features.<p>This is not trivial but it also is not impossible. Trust me if my users can do it then yours can too. Help them succeed and take their money for it.</text></comment> | <story><title>Daring Fireball: "Facebook login"</title><url>http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/11/facebook-login</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>natemartin</author><text>This is fascinating... apparently users are just typing "facebook login" into google, clicking on the first link, and getting very confused as to why they're not actually on facebook.<p>How can you design a web application that is usable by people with this level of computer knowledge? Should one even try?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jpd</author><text>Answer: You can't, and no, you shouldn't try. You have to assume your users actually have the ability to get to your website before you can worry about what they do when they get there.<p>Sorry, but this whole thing is a whole new level of idiocy I had not previously encountered: Even my mother (whose sole computer skill is that she can get to amazon.com to buy gifts for people) would be able to determine whether or not she was at amazon after searching Google and clicking a random link.<p>My God! RWW isn't even BLUE for heaven's sakes.</text></comment> |
13,034,958 | 13,032,415 | 1 | 2 | 13,031,786 | train | <story><title>Pinebook ARM Linux Laptop Powered by Allwinner A64 CPU</title><url>http://www.cnx-software.com/2016/11/24/pinebook-arm-linux-laptop-powered-by-allwinner-a64-processor-to-sell-for-89-and-up/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>colindean</author><text>This must be based on the NexDock: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;nexdock.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;nexdock.com&#x2F;</a><p>The pictures of the laptop are exactly the same device I have sitting in my lap right now. The NexDock of course has no computer inside it: it&#x27;s a keyboard, touchpad, SD reader, USB hub, and display.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tdubhro1</author><text>Anyone know how does nexdock compare with Andromium? I definitely want this type of product, but I don&#x27;t know enough to make a decision on which one to back....
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kickstarter.com&#x2F;projects&#x2F;andromium&#x2F;the-superbook-turn-your-smartphone-into-a-laptop-f" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kickstarter.com&#x2F;projects&#x2F;andromium&#x2F;the-superbook...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Pinebook ARM Linux Laptop Powered by Allwinner A64 CPU</title><url>http://www.cnx-software.com/2016/11/24/pinebook-arm-linux-laptop-powered-by-allwinner-a64-processor-to-sell-for-89-and-up/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>colindean</author><text>This must be based on the NexDock: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;nexdock.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;nexdock.com&#x2F;</a><p>The pictures of the laptop are exactly the same device I have sitting in my lap right now. The NexDock of course has no computer inside it: it&#x27;s a keyboard, touchpad, SD reader, USB hub, and display.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kogepathic</author><text>There are still a few places selling the Motorola Atrix lapdock. I got a brand new (old stock) one for 50€!</text></comment> |
5,783,739 | 5,783,752 | 1 | 2 | 5,782,704 | train | <story><title>The Unexotic Underclass</title><url>https://miter.mit.edu/the-unexotic-underclass/</url><text> "But if you were to go to Bulgaria to volunteer or to start a social enterprise, how would the folks back on Facebook know you were helping ‘the poor?’ if the poor in your pictures kind of looked like you?"</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>kyllo</author><text>I noticed that devs on HN often sneer at CRUD apps because they're boring to build, but meanwhile a simple CRUD app could do something like make all these veterans' medical benefit claims paperless so that they can get filled out and approved in <i>minutes</i> rather than <i>months</i>, and they could get the care they need sooner. One could do a lot of good by just making CRUD apps for people who need them and can't afford to pay much for them.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mikeash</author><text>All the technology in the world won't make those veterans' benefit claims go through any faster. The problem there isn't the technology (it's not all that hard of a problem) but getting it into the right place, past all the gatekeepers who want to keep it out.<p>It's not that nobody is building the technology because they're concentrating on other things, but rather nobody is building it because they know it won't sell, because it would have to go sixteen thousand layers of red tape and many tours through Congress before anything got done.<p>I think there's probably a lot of scope for solving problems with fairly simple apps, but this example seems like a terrible one.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Unexotic Underclass</title><url>https://miter.mit.edu/the-unexotic-underclass/</url><text> "But if you were to go to Bulgaria to volunteer or to start a social enterprise, how would the folks back on Facebook know you were helping ‘the poor?’ if the poor in your pictures kind of looked like you?"</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>kyllo</author><text>I noticed that devs on HN often sneer at CRUD apps because they're boring to build, but meanwhile a simple CRUD app could do something like make all these veterans' medical benefit claims paperless so that they can get filled out and approved in <i>minutes</i> rather than <i>months</i>, and they could get the care they need sooner. One could do a lot of good by just making CRUD apps for people who need them and can't afford to pay much for them.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>arkades</author><text>The VA has the largest, best-maintained electronic medical records system in the country. It is open-source and available to the public.<p>The problem with vets is not the absence of software. I am rather tired of seeing this particular horse beaten.</text></comment> |
23,007,121 | 23,006,512 | 1 | 3 | 23,003,578 | train | <story><title>Google Credential Provider for Windows</title><url>https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gcpw/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>monocasa</author><text>I&#x27;ll throw out there that I work for JumpCloud, an Identity Management Provider, and we have a credential provider as well for seamless Windows login. We also have a Mac login window so your users have a seamless experience regardless of the OS (our Linux solution doesn&#x27;t really need one). We&#x27;ve also got LDAP, RADIUS, gsuite, and O365 backends (plus more I&#x27;m forgetting I&#x27;m sure) and a ton of other niceties. Check us out if you&#x27;re into that.<p>We also go beyond this and support MFA on Windows, Mac, Linux login.<p>Orgs with less than 10 users are free.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jumpcloud.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jumpcloud.com&#x2F;</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Google Credential Provider for Windows</title><url>https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gcpw/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>solatic</author><text>&gt; After GCPW installation, the device appears in the Admin console Windows device list after the user signs in with their Google Account for the first time.<p>We use G Suite at work (legacy decision) and it really kills me just how poorly the G Suite product team seems to understand enrollment and authorization workflows.<p>No, I don&#x27;t want to allow every device to register itself into the device list. If I&#x27;m managing installations of organization-owned devices, then I want to pre-register the device into a device whitelist that I maintain before I allow that device unfettered access to protected resources.<p>This is right up there with other dumb moves like requiring AWS roles to be added per-user for SAML login and functionally being unable to setup G Suite as an OIDC IdP for Kubernetes because G Suite refuses to expose group membership (or even more importantly, transitive group membership) to service providers.<p>If Google uses G Suite internally then I have zero idea how they manage to actually get anything done, unless they have a lot of in-house automation that they haven&#x27;t open-sourced. It doesn&#x27;t make sense unless they&#x27;re not eating their own dogfood.</text></comment> |
10,582,291 | 10,582,478 | 1 | 2 | 10,580,412 | train | <story><title>Times Pulls Article Blaming Encryption in Paris Terror Attack</title><url>http://www.insidesources.com/new-york-times-article-blaming-encryption-paris-attacks/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>colund</author><text>If (almost) everyone who is not a terrorist were to give up encryption, then it would be much easier to track down&#x2F;narrow down the terrorists if they keep using it, no?</text></item><item><author>ewzimm</author><text>It&#x27;s even more absurd than that. The premise is that we can have a public worldwide debate that emphasizes how important encryption is to successfully carrying out terrorist attacks, convince the world to give up their privacy for the sake of safety, and after the majority of the protestors have been defeated by public awareness that encryption and terrorism go hand-in-hand, the terrorists will go back to using phone calls and unencrypted email.</text></item><item><author>rbcgerard</author><text>&quot;One key premise here seems to be that prior to the Snowden reporting, The Terrorists helpfully and stupidly used telephones and unencrypted emails to plot, so Western governments were able to track their plotting and disrupt at least large-scale attacks. That would come as a massive surprise to the victims of the attacks of 2002 in Bali, 2004 in Madrid, 2005 in London, 2008 in Mumbai, and April 2013 at the Boston Marathon.&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;theintercept.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;11&#x2F;15&#x2F;exploiting-emotions-about-paris-to-blame-snowden-distract-from-actual-culprits-who-empowered-isis&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;theintercept.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;11&#x2F;15&#x2F;exploiting-emotions-abou...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jacquesm</author><text>No because they&#x27;re not using it in the first place. It&#x27;s a totally unrelated issue, dear to some for reasons entirely their own. The fear of terrorism is just a convenient little button to press to get their cookie.</text></comment> | <story><title>Times Pulls Article Blaming Encryption in Paris Terror Attack</title><url>http://www.insidesources.com/new-york-times-article-blaming-encryption-paris-attacks/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>colund</author><text>If (almost) everyone who is not a terrorist were to give up encryption, then it would be much easier to track down&#x2F;narrow down the terrorists if they keep using it, no?</text></item><item><author>ewzimm</author><text>It&#x27;s even more absurd than that. The premise is that we can have a public worldwide debate that emphasizes how important encryption is to successfully carrying out terrorist attacks, convince the world to give up their privacy for the sake of safety, and after the majority of the protestors have been defeated by public awareness that encryption and terrorism go hand-in-hand, the terrorists will go back to using phone calls and unencrypted email.</text></item><item><author>rbcgerard</author><text>&quot;One key premise here seems to be that prior to the Snowden reporting, The Terrorists helpfully and stupidly used telephones and unencrypted emails to plot, so Western governments were able to track their plotting and disrupt at least large-scale attacks. That would come as a massive surprise to the victims of the attacks of 2002 in Bali, 2004 in Madrid, 2005 in London, 2008 in Mumbai, and April 2013 at the Boston Marathon.&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;theintercept.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;11&#x2F;15&#x2F;exploiting-emotions-about-paris-to-blame-snowden-distract-from-actual-culprits-who-empowered-isis&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;theintercept.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;11&#x2F;15&#x2F;exploiting-emotions-abou...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>munificent</author><text>Maybe, but I&#x27;d rather not send my financial information over the Internet in cleartext every time I buy something from a web site.</text></comment> |
26,567,050 | 26,566,876 | 1 | 2 | 26,561,847 | train | <story><title>I finally escaped Node</title><url>https://acco.io/i-escaped-node</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cygned</author><text>We went away from node as a backend technology for a bunch of reasons. Here&#x27;s a list of the biggest pain points:<p>- Lack of a good standard API; compared to environments like Java, C# or Go, node&#x27;s standard library is significantly sparse.<p>- The tendency for small libraries&#x2F;frameworks leads to a very high number of third party code with all the problems attached; bigger attack surface, licensing challenges, it&#x27;s economically impossible to vet and review dependencies<p>- There&#x27;s a tendency in the ecosystem to abandon projects rather soon (~1-2 years) and to keep changing things. Further, we have had several situations where maintainers did not respect semver, combined with npm&#x27;s approach of updating patch versions upon installation, we have had too many broken builds from one day to another w&#x2F;out code changes. The state of documentation of a lot of projects is non-existent.<p>- Lack of multi threading. We have used all the options, including RPC implementations, but that doesn&#x27;t even come close to approaches like Java threads or go routines. Neither in performance, nor in maintainability.<p>- Lack of typing. That&#x27;s probably the biggest one. Yes, we use TypeScript, quite extensively even. But TypeScript brings its own problems. First, it&#x27;s only declarative. If you have a `something: number`, there&#x27;s no guarantee that it&#x27;s actually a number upon execution, so if you have a bug in a layer interacting with another system, that might fail a couple levels deep. You hence end up with type checks at some places and you cannot really trust it anyway. Second, TypeScript&#x27;s tooling is slow and has some annoying quirks (e.g. aliases not being resolved upon compilation). Having aliases allowing to shorten import paths is a big, big win, though. Third, the typing, given the complexity of JavaScript, can be confusing, sometimes even seemingly impossible to get right.<p>Is node a bad technology? Not at all. I&#x27;d not chose it for enterprise, big or long-lived projects, though. It&#x27;s a very good technology for a lot of things, especially smaller projects. We are building on Java + Spring Boot now.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hn_throwaway_99</author><text>To each their own. I was a Java engineer for most of my career since the early 00s, switched to Node a couple years ago (primarily running Apollo GraphQL server in Node), and I find myself <i>so</i> much more productive now. Addressing each of your points:<p>1. Yes, I think it&#x27;s true that server-side Node isn&#x27;t really usable without tight reliance on NPM. That said, I think NPM has improved by leaps and bounds over the past few years and it now makes it quite easy to have a stable and secure set of dependencies. Integrating our build with npm audit (and audit-resolver) and other tools like snyk, using package lock files, and keeping dependencies up-to-date on a regular schedule has worked very well for us.<p>2. Again, I think the NPM ecosystem has settled down in the past few years and I don&#x27;t see as much churn. While there has been some issues with large projects (e.g. lodash and moment) going into hibernation, that&#x27;s been fine for us.<p>3. I&#x27;ve found all of our uses for multithreading were better served by having an event system publish events that were then handled by serverless functions. The <i>lack</i> of multithreading, and the way Node manages concurrency, has been a godsend. Just check out the recent GitHub report where they were accidentally leaking information from <i>other users</i> into their sessions.<p>4. Typescript (combined with autogenerating typescript type files from GraphQL schema definitions) has been honestly heaven for us, and the benefits I&#x27;ve seen with the structural-based typing of TS made me realize the huge number of times I had to battle the nominal-based typing of Java and the immense pain that caused.</text></comment> | <story><title>I finally escaped Node</title><url>https://acco.io/i-escaped-node</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cygned</author><text>We went away from node as a backend technology for a bunch of reasons. Here&#x27;s a list of the biggest pain points:<p>- Lack of a good standard API; compared to environments like Java, C# or Go, node&#x27;s standard library is significantly sparse.<p>- The tendency for small libraries&#x2F;frameworks leads to a very high number of third party code with all the problems attached; bigger attack surface, licensing challenges, it&#x27;s economically impossible to vet and review dependencies<p>- There&#x27;s a tendency in the ecosystem to abandon projects rather soon (~1-2 years) and to keep changing things. Further, we have had several situations where maintainers did not respect semver, combined with npm&#x27;s approach of updating patch versions upon installation, we have had too many broken builds from one day to another w&#x2F;out code changes. The state of documentation of a lot of projects is non-existent.<p>- Lack of multi threading. We have used all the options, including RPC implementations, but that doesn&#x27;t even come close to approaches like Java threads or go routines. Neither in performance, nor in maintainability.<p>- Lack of typing. That&#x27;s probably the biggest one. Yes, we use TypeScript, quite extensively even. But TypeScript brings its own problems. First, it&#x27;s only declarative. If you have a `something: number`, there&#x27;s no guarantee that it&#x27;s actually a number upon execution, so if you have a bug in a layer interacting with another system, that might fail a couple levels deep. You hence end up with type checks at some places and you cannot really trust it anyway. Second, TypeScript&#x27;s tooling is slow and has some annoying quirks (e.g. aliases not being resolved upon compilation). Having aliases allowing to shorten import paths is a big, big win, though. Third, the typing, given the complexity of JavaScript, can be confusing, sometimes even seemingly impossible to get right.<p>Is node a bad technology? Not at all. I&#x27;d not chose it for enterprise, big or long-lived projects, though. It&#x27;s a very good technology for a lot of things, especially smaller projects. We are building on Java + Spring Boot now.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>FlyingSnake</author><text>I would upvote this comment a hundred times if I could. I had got a Node project in my previous gig and I hated it every minute. The team got immensely productive when we migrated it to Golang.<p>In the times of RESTful APIs and µServices, is there really a need for node? JVM, C#, Elixir, Golang etc provide excellent development experience and are battle tested the way single-threaded Node just hasn&#x27;t been.</text></comment> |
26,950,444 | 26,950,409 | 1 | 2 | 26,944,980 | train | <story><title>iOS 14.5 delivers Unlock iPhone with Apple Watch, new privacy controls, and more</title><url>https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/04/ios-14-5-offers-unlock-iphone-with-apple-watch-diverse-siri-voices-and-more/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mirthflat83</author><text>Sorry, it’s not. Face ID: Just pick up your phone and your phone automatically unlocks with your face. This experience is way superior than having to position your finger at a specific place every time you want to unlock it. Putting it on the back is even worse, you need to actually pick up your phone from the desk just to unlock it. I swear HN readers would create devices with the worst UX possible.</text></item><item><author>lwansbrough</author><text>Touch ID is an entirely superior technology and Apple is profoundly stupid for removing it. It doesn&#x27;t have to be in the screen, just put it on the back. The lengths they&#x27;ll go to offset the removal of Touch ID are astounding, from IR face tracking, to degraded biometric security, and now to requiring an Apple Watch to unlock the phone with your mask on. Talk about a Rube Goldberg machine.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lwansbrough</author><text>If you haven’t unlocked your phone by the time you’re looking at it you’re doing it slower than I am. Typically my phone is unlocked before I’ve even fully pulled it out of my pocket. The muscle memory for thumb (or finger placement if it’s on the back) is a pretty low barrier to usability, and can be learned quickly.<p>Can you unlock your phone without moving it in front of your face? I can, if it’s sitting across my desk I can unlock it without picking it up or moving my head towards it. I do this regularly.<p>Perhaps you’ve forgotten how many usability compromises you’ve made in using Face ID, but I guarantee it’s slower.</text></comment> | <story><title>iOS 14.5 delivers Unlock iPhone with Apple Watch, new privacy controls, and more</title><url>https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/04/ios-14-5-offers-unlock-iphone-with-apple-watch-diverse-siri-voices-and-more/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mirthflat83</author><text>Sorry, it’s not. Face ID: Just pick up your phone and your phone automatically unlocks with your face. This experience is way superior than having to position your finger at a specific place every time you want to unlock it. Putting it on the back is even worse, you need to actually pick up your phone from the desk just to unlock it. I swear HN readers would create devices with the worst UX possible.</text></item><item><author>lwansbrough</author><text>Touch ID is an entirely superior technology and Apple is profoundly stupid for removing it. It doesn&#x27;t have to be in the screen, just put it on the back. The lengths they&#x27;ll go to offset the removal of Touch ID are astounding, from IR face tracking, to degraded biometric security, and now to requiring an Apple Watch to unlock the phone with your mask on. Talk about a Rube Goldberg machine.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>NoPicklez</author><text>I&#x27;d argue that when I used to pick my phone up, I&#x27;d place my thumb on the touch ID location as I was raising the phone to my face and it would unlock quicker than face ID.<p>I don&#x27;t have a problem with either options, but I do think touch ID was slightly faster.</text></comment> |
13,269,657 | 13,268,950 | 1 | 3 | 13,268,673 | train | <story><title>An American airline wins the right to weigh passengers on its Samoan route</title><url>http://www.economist.com/blogs/gulliver/2016/10/scales-justice</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>hipaulshi</author><text>Pilot here.<p>Every airplane has a maximum weight it can fly. Different than cars, every airplanes also have an envelope where the center of gravity has to fall enter. If the center of gravity is behind the design envelope, airplane has a tendency to flip backward, stall on take off then crash, it has happened before. It could also means if the airplane enters a spin, the recover may not be possible. If the center of gravity is too forward, it will slow the cruising speed due to increased drag, much easier to stall during cruise and burning more fuel.<p>So for every single flight, pilot or dispatch has to calculate those 2 numbers, for every passenger and baggage, and decide how many fuel to take on each flight.<p>Of course, asking each passengers weight would be awkward at best, so airlines and FAA used an average body weight number to avoid this, it worked until 2003. An accident happened which killed 21 people on board a small transportation aircraft. It is found that the average body weight number FAA and airline used were outdated <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ntsb.gov&#x2F;Investigations&#x2F;AccidentReports&#x2F;Pages&#x2F;AAR0401.aspx" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ntsb.gov&#x2F;Investigations&#x2F;AccidentReports&#x2F;Pages&#x2F;AAR...</a> FAA has since advised airlines that what FAA presumed average weight of its population has increased, and advised airlines to do the same.<p>Of course, this will only work on average cases, and will fail if the sample group is out of average. Resampling has to be done to remain operating in the envelope, and if standard deviation is still out of normal, each individual weight has to be taken.</text></comment> | <story><title>An American airline wins the right to weigh passengers on its Samoan route</title><url>http://www.economist.com/blogs/gulliver/2016/10/scales-justice</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>_coldfire</author><text>I struggle to see the problem other than human vanity as to why passengers aren&#x27;t weighed with their luggage.<p>If you can accept that your bag costs the airline more in fuel why not accept that your weight contributes also?</text></comment> |
37,877,614 | 37,877,312 | 1 | 2 | 37,841,865 | train | <story><title>Underwater Chain Saws</title><url>https://www.stanleyinfrastructure.com/products/underwater-chain-saws</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>chubs</author><text>Around $4100!
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amronintl.com&#x2F;stanley-cs113no-hydraulic-underwater-chainshaw-cs11.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amronintl.com&#x2F;stanley-cs113no-hydraulic-underwat...</a><p>Amazing how capable tools can be, in industries that simply cannot get their work done without them and are willing to pay a healthy amount. Sometimes I wonder how good our dev tooling would be if we were willing to pay thousands a year, as opposed to the time-wasting bug-fest that is Xcode. Not singling out Apple, I’m sure all are comparably bad, it’s just what I happen to use :)</text></comment> | <story><title>Underwater Chain Saws</title><url>https://www.stanleyinfrastructure.com/products/underwater-chain-saws</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>akovaski</author><text>Previously discussed here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=37840371">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=37840371</a></text></comment> |
908,211 | 907,999 | 1 | 3 | 907,617 | train | <story><title>Want 50Mbps Internet in your town? Threaten to roll out your own</title><url>http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/10/want-50mbps-internet-in-your-town-threaten-to-roll-out-your-own.ars</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>timmaah</author><text>That tells me there is a huge market waiting to be tapped by the right company. 20 years ago there were barely any cell companies and now people (and phone companies) are dropping their land lines left and right.<p>Up here in Burlington VT there is about to be some heads rolling on how the gov handled the gov run phone/internet company.</text></item><item><author>ytNumbers</author><text>In large parts of the USA, there is only one (or fewer) decent Internet providers. It's hard to let the free market decide when there is no real competition.</text></item><item><author>RiderOfGiraffes</author><text>I'm not an American, and I was wondering if you could help me to understand this ...<p><pre><code> &#62; Internet really needs to become a public utility
&#62; operated by the city/state on cost, rather than
&#62; to line the pockets of greedy corporations...
</code></pre>
How is this not effectively Socialism? Isn't the system you currently have simply Capitalism in action?<p>Under Capitalism, shouldn't people simply choose another supplier when your ISP does stupid things?</text></item><item><author>nuclear_eclipse</author><text>And as I found out first hand, if the only internet provider in town starts to roll out bandwidth caps, just raise a ruckus until your senator drops legislation on the table banning caps, and then watch your ISP become a sour grape and refuse to roll out DOCSIS3 in retaliation...<p>Internet really needs to become a public utility operated by the city/state on cost, rather than to line the pockets of greedy corporations...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Kadin</author><text>There are multiple competing cell networks because it's relatively inexpensive to set up a cell site, compared to running wires to everyone's house in the same area.<p>If this wasn't the case, you'd have a dozen pairs of copper phone wires and as many cable TV coax lines running into your house, all by different companies -- those industries have existed for far longer than the Internet has, and have traditionally been ridiculously profitable. That you <i>don't</i> have more than one telephone line and one cable line is a strong indication that last-mile infrastructure is a natural monopoly. Whoever gets to your house first basically owns you.</text></comment> | <story><title>Want 50Mbps Internet in your town? Threaten to roll out your own</title><url>http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/10/want-50mbps-internet-in-your-town-threaten-to-roll-out-your-own.ars</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>timmaah</author><text>That tells me there is a huge market waiting to be tapped by the right company. 20 years ago there were barely any cell companies and now people (and phone companies) are dropping their land lines left and right.<p>Up here in Burlington VT there is about to be some heads rolling on how the gov handled the gov run phone/internet company.</text></item><item><author>ytNumbers</author><text>In large parts of the USA, there is only one (or fewer) decent Internet providers. It's hard to let the free market decide when there is no real competition.</text></item><item><author>RiderOfGiraffes</author><text>I'm not an American, and I was wondering if you could help me to understand this ...<p><pre><code> &#62; Internet really needs to become a public utility
&#62; operated by the city/state on cost, rather than
&#62; to line the pockets of greedy corporations...
</code></pre>
How is this not effectively Socialism? Isn't the system you currently have simply Capitalism in action?<p>Under Capitalism, shouldn't people simply choose another supplier when your ISP does stupid things?</text></item><item><author>nuclear_eclipse</author><text>And as I found out first hand, if the only internet provider in town starts to roll out bandwidth caps, just raise a ruckus until your senator drops legislation on the table banning caps, and then watch your ISP become a sour grape and refuse to roll out DOCSIS3 in retaliation...<p>Internet really needs to become a public utility operated by the city/state on cost, rather than to line the pockets of greedy corporations...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nuclear_eclipse</author><text>It is also far less expensive to drop a few new cell towers (or lease space on competitors' towers) than to go through the gigantic, expensive process of laying new cable/fiber.</text></comment> |
32,050,474 | 32,049,817 | 1 | 3 | 32,049,508 | train | <story><title>Assassin’s Creed Liberation delisted, unplayable even to owners starting Sept 1</title><url>https://mp1st.com/news/report-assassins-creed-liberation-delisted-to-be-unplayable-even-to-owners-starting-september-1-on-steam</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Shadonototra</author><text>France tried <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gamesindustry.biz&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2019-09-19-french-court-rules-countrys-steam-users-can-resell-their-games" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gamesindustry.biz&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2019-09-19-french-cou...</a><p>Then steam said you don&#x27;t own the games they are selling to you<p>So you buy games that you don&#x27;t really own with a 30% tax on the developer&#x27;s paycheck on top of his local taxes, thanks Valve!</text></item><item><author>bnj</author><text>If platform licensing arrangements don’t protect customers from losing access to purchases, they should be forced to advertise them as rentals or leases and not something the consumer is buying.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>eikenberry</author><text>Valve is obviously right. You don&#x27;t own any games sold to you. You don&#x27;t own any commercial, proprietary software sold to you. On only have ever been a license holder. You own that license but are restricted by the license. IE. the same thing that keeps from from making copies and selling them is used to let them shut down the required servers whenever it stops being profitable.<p>If you don&#x27;t like this then stop using proprietary software.</text></comment> | <story><title>Assassin’s Creed Liberation delisted, unplayable even to owners starting Sept 1</title><url>https://mp1st.com/news/report-assassins-creed-liberation-delisted-to-be-unplayable-even-to-owners-starting-september-1-on-steam</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Shadonototra</author><text>France tried <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gamesindustry.biz&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2019-09-19-french-court-rules-countrys-steam-users-can-resell-their-games" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gamesindustry.biz&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2019-09-19-french-cou...</a><p>Then steam said you don&#x27;t own the games they are selling to you<p>So you buy games that you don&#x27;t really own with a 30% tax on the developer&#x27;s paycheck on top of his local taxes, thanks Valve!</text></item><item><author>bnj</author><text>If platform licensing arrangements don’t protect customers from losing access to purchases, they should be forced to advertise them as rentals or leases and not something the consumer is buying.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>convolvatron</author><text>its really puzzling how a technology so perfect for lowering cost of entry and promoting disintermediation has done the exact opposite.</text></comment> |
17,475,481 | 17,474,503 | 1 | 2 | 17,473,131 | train | <story><title>Say Hello to Full Employment</title><url>https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/07/hello-full-employment/564527/?single_page=true</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tmpz22</author><text>I can&#x27;t help but feel the unemployment rate is so politicized that its facts and statistics will continue to be cherrypicked outside of reality.</text></item><item><author>spir</author><text>This article seems to use the terms &quot;unemployed&quot; and &quot;jobless&quot; interchangeably.<p>People who stop searching for jobs (eg. due to despondence or poor health) are excluded from the official unemployment rate, yet they are jobless.<p>On a recent EconTalk, Edward Glaeser, the Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics at Harvard, said, in their recent sample, 11.9% of U.S. men aged 25-55 have been jobless for over 12 months.<p>From quick googling, 11.9% of U.S. men aged 25-55 is about 7.5 million people.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.econtalk.org&#x2F;archives&#x2F;2018&#x2F;03&#x2F;edward_glaeser.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.econtalk.org&#x2F;archives&#x2F;2018&#x2F;03&#x2F;edward_glaeser.html</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>azernik</author><text>The selection of this metric is not some recent political decision - the headline number has been U3 for a loooong time, and its definition was decided by the UN-affiliated International Labor Organization.<p>It&#x27;s not a <i>good</i> measure, but it&#x27;s not a case of politicians picking a convenient metric, it&#x27;s just a case of a bad metric being optimized for.</text></comment> | <story><title>Say Hello to Full Employment</title><url>https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/07/hello-full-employment/564527/?single_page=true</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tmpz22</author><text>I can&#x27;t help but feel the unemployment rate is so politicized that its facts and statistics will continue to be cherrypicked outside of reality.</text></item><item><author>spir</author><text>This article seems to use the terms &quot;unemployed&quot; and &quot;jobless&quot; interchangeably.<p>People who stop searching for jobs (eg. due to despondence or poor health) are excluded from the official unemployment rate, yet they are jobless.<p>On a recent EconTalk, Edward Glaeser, the Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics at Harvard, said, in their recent sample, 11.9% of U.S. men aged 25-55 have been jobless for over 12 months.<p>From quick googling, 11.9% of U.S. men aged 25-55 is about 7.5 million people.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.econtalk.org&#x2F;archives&#x2F;2018&#x2F;03&#x2F;edward_glaeser.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.econtalk.org&#x2F;archives&#x2F;2018&#x2F;03&#x2F;edward_glaeser.html</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dev_dull</author><text>Is it called the Wells Fargo effect now? When you optimize for a number, you&#x27;ll get that number -- and it will deceive you.</text></comment> |
33,489,176 | 33,488,981 | 1 | 3 | 33,488,224 | train | <story><title>Twitter sources say company reached out to fired people asking them to come back</title><url>https://twitter.com/caseynewton/status/1589075543420325888</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>polio</author><text>Elon is understanding why Twitter had to seem so &quot;woke&quot;. It turns out that &quot;woke&quot; consumers make for the most lucrative demographic to serve ads to. I don&#x27;t believe he had to reckon with advertiser psychology to this extent at Tesla or SpaceX.</text></item><item><author>threeseed</author><text>I think this is a large part of it:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;GoAngelo&#x2F;status&#x2F;1588696157794242560" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;GoAngelo&#x2F;status&#x2F;1588696157794242560</a><p>Apparently, Twitter instantly lost ~15% of their 2023 revenue because of their poor showing at NewFronts where a lot of upfront ad buying is done. And with Musk firing the very teams the advertisers care about e.g. ethics, brand safety, human rights the industry is turning against them. Decade of painstaking work by Twitter to attract these advertisers gone in a week. And even worse Musk fired many of the relationship managers and so the company can&#x27;t smooth things over.<p>It really isn&#x27;t inconceivable with this trajectory that Musk could bankrupt the company within a year.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dehrmann</author><text>Usually it&#x27;s not woke so much as blandly inoffensive. Think Disney.</text></comment> | <story><title>Twitter sources say company reached out to fired people asking them to come back</title><url>https://twitter.com/caseynewton/status/1589075543420325888</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>polio</author><text>Elon is understanding why Twitter had to seem so &quot;woke&quot;. It turns out that &quot;woke&quot; consumers make for the most lucrative demographic to serve ads to. I don&#x27;t believe he had to reckon with advertiser psychology to this extent at Tesla or SpaceX.</text></item><item><author>threeseed</author><text>I think this is a large part of it:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;GoAngelo&#x2F;status&#x2F;1588696157794242560" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;GoAngelo&#x2F;status&#x2F;1588696157794242560</a><p>Apparently, Twitter instantly lost ~15% of their 2023 revenue because of their poor showing at NewFronts where a lot of upfront ad buying is done. And with Musk firing the very teams the advertisers care about e.g. ethics, brand safety, human rights the industry is turning against them. Decade of painstaking work by Twitter to attract these advertisers gone in a week. And even worse Musk fired many of the relationship managers and so the company can&#x27;t smooth things over.<p>It really isn&#x27;t inconceivable with this trajectory that Musk could bankrupt the company within a year.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>PuppyTailWags</author><text>I don&#x27;t think woke is the most lucrative demographic to serve ads to, but advertisers who buy ads on Twitter are likely selecting for Twitter. That is to say, Musk is destroying the Twitter branding, and so the advertisers that went to Twitter for its branding are now leaving.</text></comment> |
33,207,611 | 33,207,256 | 1 | 2 | 33,184,040 | train | <story><title>The Real War 1939-1945 (1989)</title><url>https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1989/08/the-real-war-1939-1945/306374/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ARandomerDude</author><text>I didn&#x27;t fight in WW2 obviously, but I did fight in a war. For me, the reticence to describe every detail to people who weren&#x27;t there boils down to this: I don&#x27;t want my wife, my children, or my neighbors to be burdened with thinking of something so horrible. I want them to be happy and safe, that&#x27;s why I went. No need to bring it to their doorstep if I don&#x27;t have to.<p>I suspect many during and after WW2 felt this way.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>iancmceachern</author><text>I haven&#x27;t, my grandfather did. He was at Pearl Harbor, many battles in the Pacific (he was a submariner), in the end he was part of the occupation of Japan and earned many medals including the purple heart for almost dying in a sub accident.<p>Only as an adult have I come to realize the gift he gave me.<p>When I was a child, I spent a ton of time with him, he had a big hand in raising me. The picture he painted for the young me formed the foundation of my world view. He chose to share with us the Japanese cooking he learned while living there, he taught us how to use chop sticks, one of my most prized possessions is a silk he brought back and gave me in his will. He never once spoke negatively about any group of people, especially those who were &quot;enemies&quot;, he stood up for anyone who was being treated negatively and wouldn&#x27;t stand for it. He harbored no ill will, and therefore didn&#x27;t put it in me.<p>It&#x27;s only as an adult through research into his service that i have realized the full gravity of what he did during this service and the fact that he was a truly happy, blissful, and forgiving man after all that.<p>I can say to you, having been one of the recipients of the kindness and forgiveness you are showing in your own life now, and sharing in this comment - thank you. This is how the world moves on.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Real War 1939-1945 (1989)</title><url>https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1989/08/the-real-war-1939-1945/306374/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ARandomerDude</author><text>I didn&#x27;t fight in WW2 obviously, but I did fight in a war. For me, the reticence to describe every detail to people who weren&#x27;t there boils down to this: I don&#x27;t want my wife, my children, or my neighbors to be burdened with thinking of something so horrible. I want them to be happy and safe, that&#x27;s why I went. No need to bring it to their doorstep if I don&#x27;t have to.<p>I suspect many during and after WW2 felt this way.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gumby</author><text>&gt; I don&#x27;t want my wife, my children, or my neighbors to be burdened with thinking of something so horrible.<p>Interesting. Until <i>very</i> recently, as far as I could know, my mother&#x27;s life began at 16. She refused to talk about anything from her childhood.<p>I don&#x27;t know if, like you, she didn&#x27;t want to traumatize us or simply didn&#x27;t want to think about it at all. But now, in her late 80s, she&#x27;ll sometimes absent-mindedly relate some story from her childhood. They are all kid stories, but the perspective in them can be hair raising. (She was a child in an occupied country during WWII in the pacific; then immediately as the war ended the country became a different war zone, so she only knew living in that kind of environment until she left the country to go to university).<p>Recently I&#x27;ve been thinking of this because of the Ukraine war. I have seen at close range the impact of a generation of kids (like my mother in law, and others in her village) who grew up in postwar Germany with essentially no adult men around. That whole generation is pretty screwed up, and their kids (my generation) also reflect that impact. While my personal opinion is that Germany is not doing anywhere near enough to help Ukraine, I think they should be preparing a for a huge postwar assistance, not just money for rebuilding, but psychological &#x2F; therapy based on their experience to try to reduce the effects of wartime trauma on Ukraine.</text></comment> |
18,308,550 | 18,308,104 | 1 | 2 | 18,307,322 | train | <story><title>Pirate Party Leader to Be Prague mayor</title><url>http://praguemonitor.com/2018/10/26/pirate-zden%C4%9Bk-h%C5%99ib-be-prague-mayor</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>TomMarius</author><text>Yes, I&#x27;m Czech living in Prague. Last 4 years the Prague local government was led by ANO, the party led by StB (communist secret police) member billionaire Andrej Babis. Their campaign was extremely strong then and they won - today Prague is in horrendous state, bridges are <i>literally</i> falling down (2 more just this week), traffic is worse (extremely worse!) than ever due to idiotically planned long roadworks that have to be soon redone and zero construction of much needed infrastructure, the public transport is way worse than it was, taxi mafia is still the same, they caused a huge housing bubble... And on top of that Krnacova calls Prague people who don&#x27;t like it &quot;whiners&quot;, repeatedly and on purpose - she even recently confirmed that it&#x27;s exactly what she wanted to say.<p>The major implication for the whole country is that at least Prague citizens are absolutely fed up with ANO - that is important because they dominated the whole country politics for the last 2 periods. Today there are 2 other major parties - ODS (Občansko-demokratická strana, Civic Democracy Party) and the Pirate party. These are the three winners of the recent parliament vote - parliament politics affect local politics a lot in the Czech Republic. If you don&#x27;t want to vote ANO then you vote ODS if you&#x27;re more on the right (as in free market) and the Pirate party if you&#x27;re more on the left. There are basically no other options - the remaining &quot;major&quot; (bigger than others but has almost no influence) party in the country is a racist one. Other previously major parties such as ČSSD (social democracy), KDU-ČSL (the Roman-Catholics) and KSČM (literal communists) have fallen down significantly over last 2 periods, most probably because of their cooperation with ANO.<p>Pirates have a good track record as far as local politics go, but it&#x27;s a relatively new party and they only participated in smaller cities&#x2F;villages so far (on top of their recent entry to parliament). This person is completely unknown. Let&#x27;s see.</text></item><item><author>jxub</author><text>Any Czech person around to chim in and shed some light on the implications?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>saiya-jin</author><text>Basically the problem of whole east europe (although we like to call ourselves central europe) - too much crap left over communist rule and twisted mentality (ie everybody for themselves, screw the rest). Extremely rich individuals openly influencing politics, laughing at the cameras and enjoying being in spotlight.<p>Prague is a beautiful city to visit, be it for a weekend or a week. But living there long term sucks - most of the Prague apart from historical centre is properly fugly, as soviet-style architecture is still all over the place, cramped high rise residential areas with high criminality, little nature around (major mountains are &gt; 500km away, sea even further), Czech love to constantly complain and moan about almost everything (it really gets to you after some time). Gap between rich (ie IT workers, managers) and rest of population is big and widening, people constantly hate politics but vote an a-hole after a-hole for last 20 years. So rich often discuss how to shield themselves financially from the rest of country, politics and economy as much as possible - not an indication of paradise. Half of the country is xenophobic and&#x2F;or racist (although ie Roma question is a complex one).<p>I&#x27;ve worked there for couple of years, to be successful in IT was trivial due to constant lack of senior people, from what I heard its even worse now due to massive off&#x2F;near shoring of multinationals. When looking back, moving away was one of the best decisions of my life and major step up in quality of life.<p>Of course there are positive aspects, just like everywhere. Professionals (I can judge IT) are smart and work hard, beer is the best there is (for me) and as mentioned its a great starting point for career. There are people who consider it the best place for them. Interestingly, none I know in this category lived abroad for longer to properly compare.</text></comment> | <story><title>Pirate Party Leader to Be Prague mayor</title><url>http://praguemonitor.com/2018/10/26/pirate-zden%C4%9Bk-h%C5%99ib-be-prague-mayor</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>TomMarius</author><text>Yes, I&#x27;m Czech living in Prague. Last 4 years the Prague local government was led by ANO, the party led by StB (communist secret police) member billionaire Andrej Babis. Their campaign was extremely strong then and they won - today Prague is in horrendous state, bridges are <i>literally</i> falling down (2 more just this week), traffic is worse (extremely worse!) than ever due to idiotically planned long roadworks that have to be soon redone and zero construction of much needed infrastructure, the public transport is way worse than it was, taxi mafia is still the same, they caused a huge housing bubble... And on top of that Krnacova calls Prague people who don&#x27;t like it &quot;whiners&quot;, repeatedly and on purpose - she even recently confirmed that it&#x27;s exactly what she wanted to say.<p>The major implication for the whole country is that at least Prague citizens are absolutely fed up with ANO - that is important because they dominated the whole country politics for the last 2 periods. Today there are 2 other major parties - ODS (Občansko-demokratická strana, Civic Democracy Party) and the Pirate party. These are the three winners of the recent parliament vote - parliament politics affect local politics a lot in the Czech Republic. If you don&#x27;t want to vote ANO then you vote ODS if you&#x27;re more on the right (as in free market) and the Pirate party if you&#x27;re more on the left. There are basically no other options - the remaining &quot;major&quot; (bigger than others but has almost no influence) party in the country is a racist one. Other previously major parties such as ČSSD (social democracy), KDU-ČSL (the Roman-Catholics) and KSČM (literal communists) have fallen down significantly over last 2 periods, most probably because of their cooperation with ANO.<p>Pirates have a good track record as far as local politics go, but it&#x27;s a relatively new party and they only participated in smaller cities&#x2F;villages so far (on top of their recent entry to parliament). This person is completely unknown. Let&#x27;s see.</text></item><item><author>jxub</author><text>Any Czech person around to chim in and shed some light on the implications?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>runn1ng</author><text>Taxi mafia is the only thing I don&#x27;t agree with. Uber shaked that up pretty well.</text></comment> |
11,911,632 | 11,911,471 | 1 | 2 | 11,911,116 | train | <story><title>“autocomplete=off is ignored on non-login input elements”</title><url>https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=468153#c164</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>raldi</author><text>Good. It&#x27;s my browser. I get to turn its features on and off, not you.<p>And that goes double on my phone.<p>As a compromise, I&#x27;d accept a prompt like:<p><pre><code> +---------------------------------------+
| This page recommends we disable |
| autocomplete. What do you think? |
|[Okay] [Fuck them; autocomplete anyway]|
+---------------------------------------+</code></pre></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dasil003</author><text>Take it up with the standards body then.<p>Presumably this came about because some framework or something started including bad default attributes, and then Chrome responds by ignoring the meaning of the specification in order to &quot;improve UX&quot;. But in the end what happens is that the specification becomes meaningless and we&#x27;re back to the browser wars where you have no way of knowing how anything works except a continuous testing process to vet the veracity of the spec for any browser you are targeting, and of course this is subject to change on a whim by Google.<p>Will it improve the UX? Maybe... if Google is correct in its unilateral assumptions. But one thing for sure is that as a developer this costs you time, and it hurts the most if you are a well-intentioned developer who is trying to make the correct choice for your specific use case.</text></comment> | <story><title>“autocomplete=off is ignored on non-login input elements”</title><url>https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=468153#c164</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>raldi</author><text>Good. It&#x27;s my browser. I get to turn its features on and off, not you.<p>And that goes double on my phone.<p>As a compromise, I&#x27;d accept a prompt like:<p><pre><code> +---------------------------------------+
| This page recommends we disable |
| autocomplete. What do you think? |
|[Okay] [Fuck them; autocomplete anyway]|
+---------------------------------------+</code></pre></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jobead</author><text>If you want to &quot;turn it&#x27;s features on and off&quot;, then why does the Chromium team&#x27;s stance of &quot;extensions are the standard way to enable custom behavior&quot;[0] not apply here???<p>This is a classic unfortunate case of using data from the masses to drive a bad design choice because it increases &quot;usage&quot; along an arbitrary axis.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11729287" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11729287</a></text></comment> |
18,754,042 | 18,753,564 | 1 | 3 | 18,753,358 | train | <story><title>CSS grid garden</title><url>http://cssgridgarden.com/#en</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>reaperducer</author><text>This makes me sad. Not because I don&#x27;t like grid. But because two weeks ago I found out that a very senior person in the company has a computer running IE11, and will not let IT upgrade her machine.<p>She recently discovered that one of the company&#x27;s web sites doesn&#x27;t look right in IE11, and shit ran downhill into my lap. I checked the logs, and yep... she&#x27;s the only IE11 machine to hit any of the web sites in a year.<p>I spent a day and a half downgrading the site from CSS grid to Flexbox only to discover that once I found an old machine in a closet that has IE11 on it that I could test with that IE11 doesn&#x27;t fully support Flexbox, either!<p>Solution: Each building on campus has its own IP address. Connections from her building get a table version.</text></comment> | <story><title>CSS grid garden</title><url>http://cssgridgarden.com/#en</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dang</author><text>From 2017: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=14041367" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=14041367</a></text></comment> |
22,022,650 | 22,020,529 | 1 | 2 | 22,019,597 | train | <story><title>A billion medical images are exposed online</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/10/medical-images-exposed-pacs/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>txcwpalpha</author><text>I’ve been the IT vendor in this scenario. While I’m sure there are plenty of inept vendors not doing their part to ensure the systems they implement are secure, a big part of it is doctors and their work culture.<p>Many doctors see themselves as too important to deal with security. They have an attitude of “I went to school for medicine, not computers! How dare you ask me to use a computer.” They are not only technologically inept, they are proud of it. And I’m not just talking about refusing to use complicated software. I’m talking about doctors that insist that they shouldn’t be forced to use passwords (not even complicated passwords; ANY passwords). And in most of the organizations I have dealt with, doctors are the most important people in the organization and have final say on anything, which often means that the security department’s efforts are all overridden by doctors that can’t be arsed to even type in a password before using their EMR, and don’t even dream of something more complicated like asking them to use multi-factor auth.<p>I once worked at a hospital where a doctor was looking at porn at work, clicked a phishing link, and gave up his network credentials. An attacker then used those credentials to breach the network and siphoned several hundred thousand dollars from the financial system (wiring money to himself). Security detected this and disabled his account. 20 minutes later the doctor had called the CEO, yelled at him (“how dare you lock me out of my account!”) who then called security to yell at us and insist we re-enable his account. The doctor was never reprimanded (for falling for phishing or for the porn) meanwhile the security team got a stern talking to and was instructed to never disable a doctor’s account again.<p>Healthcare is a different world for security. You have to acknowledge that yes, patient safety is more important than security, but oftentimes these doctors take it to an extreme and they are very difficult to work with. I have never met a group of people more elitist and “too important to be bothered” by security than doctors.</text></item><item><author>prostheticvamp</author><text>An odd line from the article, wherein it states that security researchers don’t blame vendors, but the physicians and hospitals that fail to properly secure the software.<p>I have never, in all my years of working in healthcare, seen a hospital or physicians office directly install and manage PACS. They pay a third-party - usually the vendor - to install, configure, and walk them through it. Maybe a behemoth system like Northwell has the IT bench to do it themselves, but that would be the exception.<p>So allow me to rephrase slightly: “technologically inept organization pays vendor to make machine go vroom. Vendor leaves keys in ignition. Damn that technologically inept organization.”<p>To take a 10,000-foot view of the situation, though:<p>Healthcare-related technologically was largely pushed on the industry via legislation. Said legislation was almost entirely stick, no carrot. The result was healthcare organizations with a gun to their head to buy from a handful of vendors, with no real ROI to be seen from it - aka, the government outsourcing its costs to private industry, and throwing pork to some major health IT firms along the way. When a technology is forced on you at a loss, from a vendor with little incentive to optimize ease of use or utility, you get a terrible piece of shit that no one wants to invest more time and money into than absolutely needed. That’s going to show itself in a myriad of ways.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gambiting</author><text>On the other hand(and I&#x27;m really not trying to excuse this behaviour) some doctors are almost daily in situations where &quot;if I had a little bit more time or did this thing a day earlier maybe the patient would still be alive&quot;. If you run into those kinds of situations frequently, then obviously <i>any</i> slowdown(like having to remember or type in a password) is <i>obviously</i> stupid. And only they understand it, no IT employee ever would.</text></comment> | <story><title>A billion medical images are exposed online</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/10/medical-images-exposed-pacs/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>txcwpalpha</author><text>I’ve been the IT vendor in this scenario. While I’m sure there are plenty of inept vendors not doing their part to ensure the systems they implement are secure, a big part of it is doctors and their work culture.<p>Many doctors see themselves as too important to deal with security. They have an attitude of “I went to school for medicine, not computers! How dare you ask me to use a computer.” They are not only technologically inept, they are proud of it. And I’m not just talking about refusing to use complicated software. I’m talking about doctors that insist that they shouldn’t be forced to use passwords (not even complicated passwords; ANY passwords). And in most of the organizations I have dealt with, doctors are the most important people in the organization and have final say on anything, which often means that the security department’s efforts are all overridden by doctors that can’t be arsed to even type in a password before using their EMR, and don’t even dream of something more complicated like asking them to use multi-factor auth.<p>I once worked at a hospital where a doctor was looking at porn at work, clicked a phishing link, and gave up his network credentials. An attacker then used those credentials to breach the network and siphoned several hundred thousand dollars from the financial system (wiring money to himself). Security detected this and disabled his account. 20 minutes later the doctor had called the CEO, yelled at him (“how dare you lock me out of my account!”) who then called security to yell at us and insist we re-enable his account. The doctor was never reprimanded (for falling for phishing or for the porn) meanwhile the security team got a stern talking to and was instructed to never disable a doctor’s account again.<p>Healthcare is a different world for security. You have to acknowledge that yes, patient safety is more important than security, but oftentimes these doctors take it to an extreme and they are very difficult to work with. I have never met a group of people more elitist and “too important to be bothered” by security than doctors.</text></item><item><author>prostheticvamp</author><text>An odd line from the article, wherein it states that security researchers don’t blame vendors, but the physicians and hospitals that fail to properly secure the software.<p>I have never, in all my years of working in healthcare, seen a hospital or physicians office directly install and manage PACS. They pay a third-party - usually the vendor - to install, configure, and walk them through it. Maybe a behemoth system like Northwell has the IT bench to do it themselves, but that would be the exception.<p>So allow me to rephrase slightly: “technologically inept organization pays vendor to make machine go vroom. Vendor leaves keys in ignition. Damn that technologically inept organization.”<p>To take a 10,000-foot view of the situation, though:<p>Healthcare-related technologically was largely pushed on the industry via legislation. Said legislation was almost entirely stick, no carrot. The result was healthcare organizations with a gun to their head to buy from a handful of vendors, with no real ROI to be seen from it - aka, the government outsourcing its costs to private industry, and throwing pork to some major health IT firms along the way. When a technology is forced on you at a loss, from a vendor with little incentive to optimize ease of use or utility, you get a terrible piece of shit that no one wants to invest more time and money into than absolutely needed. That’s going to show itself in a myriad of ways.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>endorphone</author><text>This seems like a caricature or an exception. Doctors are very aware of HIPAA (and the equivalent in every other country), and the professional and monetary costs of non-compliance.<p>Doctors didn&#x27;t set up these systems. Doctors didn&#x27;t expose them to the internet. As the other post said, vendors did. If those vendors couldn&#x27;t properly communicate the needs, that&#x27;s their problem.<p>What I think is a more rational explanation for doctor (nurse, lab technologist, etc) resistance is that the industry is rife with incompetence and vendor balkanization. So much so that every healthcare professional deals with literally <i>dozens</i> of logins to try to do their job. Every one of those logins has its own bizarre password policies, rotation schedules, etc. Pretty soon there is rightly hostility to whatever scheme some small niche vendor has imagined up in the illusion of security.</text></comment> |
10,388,647 | 10,388,393 | 1 | 3 | 10,386,847 | train | <story><title>Mattermost 1.0 released – open-source Slack alternative</title><url>http://www.mattermost.org/open-source-slack-alternative-reaches-1-0/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>finnn</author><text><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;getkaiwa.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;getkaiwa.com&#x2F;</a> is another Slack alternative that uses an XMPP backend, which IMO is much better than a custom backend. So far the only open source Slack clone I&#x27;ve seen that uses an existing standard for the backend</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>yourapostasy</author><text>There are a slew of developers who tangled with XMPP and came away with very negative, well-founded reasons to dislike the protocol. Do you want XMPP because it is a standard, or you also have a contrary experience to these developers?<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;about.psyc.eu&#x2F;Jabber#Technical_Issues_in_Jabber" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;about.psyc.eu&#x2F;Jabber#Technical_Issues_in_Jabber</a><p>[2] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;josephg.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;xmpp-in-wave-in-a-box&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;josephg.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;xmpp-in-wave-in-a-box&#x2F;</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=2069810" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=2069810</a><p>[4] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;comments&#x2F;rvzdp" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;comments&#x2F;rvzdp</a><p>[5] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10040302" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10040302</a><p>For some balance, there are contrary opinions. This one seems to revolve around project governance.<p>[6] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;about.psyc.eu&#x2F;Jabber#Technical_Issues_in_Jabber" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;about.psyc.eu&#x2F;Jabber#Technical_Issues_in_Jabber</a><p>And links [4] and [5] have a lot of people piping up saying they like XMPP just fine.<p>To be fair to XMPP, I strongly suspect it is a protocol trying to solve a very large, very messy problem space, and too many developers are trying to wrestle with it &quot;raw&quot; in its totality, unaware that for their specific problem domain, they only need a subset, and a specialized protocol&#x2F;library that exposes only that subset to them. It&#x27;s almost as if too few understand that XMPP is kind of the assembly language (or microcode?) of its problem domain, and most people need a $High_Level_Language_of_Choice instead.</text></comment> | <story><title>Mattermost 1.0 released – open-source Slack alternative</title><url>http://www.mattermost.org/open-source-slack-alternative-reaches-1-0/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>finnn</author><text><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;getkaiwa.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;getkaiwa.com&#x2F;</a> is another Slack alternative that uses an XMPP backend, which IMO is much better than a custom backend. So far the only open source Slack clone I&#x27;ve seen that uses an existing standard for the backend</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>joeyspn</author><text><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rocket.chat&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rocket.chat&#x2F;</a> built with Meteor and with WebRTC videocalls, is another great open source alternative... The list of current and upcoming features is quite impressive:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;RocketChat&#x2F;Rocket.Chat#features" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;RocketChat&#x2F;Rocket.Chat#features</a></text></comment> |
3,904,450 | 3,904,237 | 1 | 2 | 3,903,694 | train | <story><title>How Apple Sidesteps Billions in Taxes</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/29/business/apples-tax-strategy-aims-at-low-tax-states-and-nations.html?hp</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>grellas</author><text>The implied but never fully-articulated point of this article is that high-tax domiciles resent it when rational actors having a choice in the matter will routinely structure their business affairs to incur tax to the maximum extent possible in low-tax as opposed to high-tax domiciles.<p>The issue becomes almost formulaic. Given (1) rational actors, (2) freedom to choose and to structure business affairs using a multiplicity of entities for different purposes, (3) resources with which to hire and pay for the talent needed to sort out the tax issues and their complexities, (4) a business goal of maximizing after-tax profits, (5) a multiplicity of domiciles from which to choose, and (6) a ready means by which to direct resources from one domicile to another (as with digital assets), it inevitably follows that every sophisticated company meeting these criteria will avail itself of the tax avoidance/minimization strategies. As the article notes, it is perfectly legal and every big company does it (see, e.g., this similar write-up from a couple of years ago on Google's comparable tax strategies: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1815195" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1815195</a>).<p>Nothing, of course, stops a given company from voluntarily subjecting itself to higher tax rates by declining to follow this formula but why would it? Big companies will routinely want to avoid high taxes if they can. So too do small businesses. People may have social views that higher taxes are desirable but, as individual economic actors, they will seek to avoid them. This may be right or wrong but it is reality.<p>This means that high-tax domiciles will have no choice but to continue to remain frustrated that they cannot have unchecked means of taxing their citizens. As long as people have freedom, governments have to strike a balance that people can live with. And that is not a bad thing.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>_delirium</author><text>What's annoying to me is not that companies choose jurisdictions based on taxes, but that they get away with playing shell games to <i>fake</i> moving between jurisdictions entirely on paper, which also gives them an advantage over smaller companies and individuals that can't do that.<p>I lived in California for some years. If it were possible for me to open a P.O. box (or even rent a small office) in Reno, book all my non-California-sourced income (e.g. AdSense) to the Reno P.O. box, and avoid California taxes, maybe I would've. But that's not legal; my attempt to produce a fake domicile in Nevada for tax purposes when I clearly lived ~11 months of the year in California would be correctly judged a sham. If I wanted to claim I'd moved to Reno for tax purposes, I'd have to <i>actually</i> move to Reno in real life, too. Yet Apple can do effectively do that, opening a sham office where no work is done, solely to dodge taxes, because the rules for individuals when it comes to those kinds of fake domiciles are much stricter than the rules for corporations are.<p>If Apple actually moved its main operations and employees from Cupertino to Reno for tax reasons, that would be another matter entirely, and a more honest example of jurisdictional competition.</text></comment> | <story><title>How Apple Sidesteps Billions in Taxes</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/29/business/apples-tax-strategy-aims-at-low-tax-states-and-nations.html?hp</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>grellas</author><text>The implied but never fully-articulated point of this article is that high-tax domiciles resent it when rational actors having a choice in the matter will routinely structure their business affairs to incur tax to the maximum extent possible in low-tax as opposed to high-tax domiciles.<p>The issue becomes almost formulaic. Given (1) rational actors, (2) freedom to choose and to structure business affairs using a multiplicity of entities for different purposes, (3) resources with which to hire and pay for the talent needed to sort out the tax issues and their complexities, (4) a business goal of maximizing after-tax profits, (5) a multiplicity of domiciles from which to choose, and (6) a ready means by which to direct resources from one domicile to another (as with digital assets), it inevitably follows that every sophisticated company meeting these criteria will avail itself of the tax avoidance/minimization strategies. As the article notes, it is perfectly legal and every big company does it (see, e.g., this similar write-up from a couple of years ago on Google's comparable tax strategies: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1815195" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1815195</a>).<p>Nothing, of course, stops a given company from voluntarily subjecting itself to higher tax rates by declining to follow this formula but why would it? Big companies will routinely want to avoid high taxes if they can. So too do small businesses. People may have social views that higher taxes are desirable but, as individual economic actors, they will seek to avoid them. This may be right or wrong but it is reality.<p>This means that high-tax domiciles will have no choice but to continue to remain frustrated that they cannot have unchecked means of taxing their citizens. As long as people have freedom, governments have to strike a balance that people can live with. And that is not a bad thing.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>timr</author><text><i>"The implied but never fully-articulated point of this article is that high-tax domiciles resent it when rational actors having a choice in the matter will routinely structure their business affairs to incur tax to the maximum extent possible in low-tax as opposed to high-tax domiciles."</i><p>No, that's the conclusion you might draw if you choose to read the article through an extremely narrow filter where you start from the premise that the laws, as they stand, are sufficient and reasonable.<p>If, instead, you look at the situation and wonder at the <i>utter inefficiency</i> of a tax system that allows some (but not all) corporations to move profits around on paper to avoid taxation -- but only if they spend money on creating fake offices and legal castles in the sky that don't contribute to productivity -- then you start to wonder if perhaps the situation can be changed. And that's an interesting discussion.</text></comment> |
2,056,562 | 2,056,014 | 1 | 2 | 2,054,992 | train | <story><title>Breaking a WoW addiction</title><url>http://www.pixelpoppers.com/2010/12/doing-my-dailies-why-i-quit-wow-and.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>xal</author><text>It seems to be stated as a fact in this discussion that you can't play a game such as WoW and do anything other productive on the side, but it's a lot more nuanced.<p>Anecdotally, I've been playing WoW almost non stop since it launched and have been raiding once to three times a week. During this time I also got married, had a kid, founded Shopify, overtook the CEO role, grew it to be a multi million dollar business. In this community that seems far from being a failure.<p>I'm engaging in anecdotal junk science here but my theory is that the people who really loose themselves in games like WoW are people with very poor time management skills. I'm convinced those people have always been around before. However, previously almost all activities came with some inherent caps on the time you can productively spend on those. All sports wear you out and force you to stop after some time. TV repeats pretty quickly and there is no original content during the night. Reading works but that's a socially fully acceptable timesink.<p>WoW is just extremely good game that fulfills a lot Maslow's needs, especially the top ones. There is a great asymmetry in the lure of this game and the established defenses of some people.<p>I think one of the key parts of parenting for our generation will be to equipt our children with the time management skills and the willpower to handle and enjoy games like WoW properly.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ced</author><text><i>I think one of the key parts of parenting for our generation will be to equipt our children with [...] the willpower to handle and enjoy games like WoW properly.</i><p>How do you do that?</text></comment> | <story><title>Breaking a WoW addiction</title><url>http://www.pixelpoppers.com/2010/12/doing-my-dailies-why-i-quit-wow-and.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>xal</author><text>It seems to be stated as a fact in this discussion that you can't play a game such as WoW and do anything other productive on the side, but it's a lot more nuanced.<p>Anecdotally, I've been playing WoW almost non stop since it launched and have been raiding once to three times a week. During this time I also got married, had a kid, founded Shopify, overtook the CEO role, grew it to be a multi million dollar business. In this community that seems far from being a failure.<p>I'm engaging in anecdotal junk science here but my theory is that the people who really loose themselves in games like WoW are people with very poor time management skills. I'm convinced those people have always been around before. However, previously almost all activities came with some inherent caps on the time you can productively spend on those. All sports wear you out and force you to stop after some time. TV repeats pretty quickly and there is no original content during the night. Reading works but that's a socially fully acceptable timesink.<p>WoW is just extremely good game that fulfills a lot Maslow's needs, especially the top ones. There is a great asymmetry in the lure of this game and the established defenses of some people.<p>I think one of the key parts of parenting for our generation will be to equipt our children with the time management skills and the willpower to handle and enjoy games like WoW properly.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cheald</author><text>Fully agreed. I've been playing since launch at a similar level, and I've since gotten married, had a kid, founded and sold a startup, and done a bunch of other stuff. I work from home, so you betcha it takes good time management to not spend time playing when I should be working, but I think I've got a pretty decent handle on it.<p>(Plus, writing addons is a <i>fantastic</i> way to switch mental gears to recharge sometimes, too. And it's pretty decent residual hobby income, to boot.)<p>WoW is very easy to spend way too much time in if you're not careful, but it's not inherently evil; like anything which is fun and enjoyable, if you spent an inordinate amount of time on it, that time will eventually have to start coming out of other activities. In moderation, it can be great.</text></comment> |
34,763,325 | 34,763,157 | 1 | 3 | 34,762,844 | train | <story><title>Hackers interrupt Iran president’s TV speech on anniversary of revolution</title><url>https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/12/middleeast/hackers-interrupt-iran-leader-revolution-anniversary-intl-hnk/index.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>brap</author><text>As much as I want to see the Islamic Republic collapse, and as much as I do believe it will collapse in the next few years, to me this hack[1] seems state-sponsored. It looks like professionals trying to look like amateurs. Not a bad thing, though. Iranians need all the help they can get.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;EdaalateAli1400&#x2F;status&#x2F;1624373234836668418" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;EdaalateAli1400&#x2F;status&#x2F;16243732348366684...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Hackers interrupt Iran president’s TV speech on anniversary of revolution</title><url>https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/12/middleeast/hackers-interrupt-iran-leader-revolution-anniversary-intl-hnk/index.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>sillystuff</author><text>&gt; Security forces have responded with a deadly crackdown to the protests, among the strongest challenges to the Islamic Republic since the 1979 revolution ended 2,500 years of monarchy.<p>Iran had a democratically elected government in 1953 when the US and UK overthrew their democracy, and installed the dictator&#x2F;monarch, the Shaw.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;world&#x2F;2013&#x2F;aug&#x2F;19&#x2F;cia-admits-role-1953-iranian-coup" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;world&#x2F;2013&#x2F;aug&#x2F;19&#x2F;cia-admits-rol...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nsarchive.gwu.edu&#x2F;briefing-book&#x2F;iran&#x2F;2017-08-08&#x2F;1953-iran-coup-new-us-documents-confirm-british-approached-us-late" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nsarchive.gwu.edu&#x2F;briefing-book&#x2F;iran&#x2F;2017-08-08&#x2F;1953...</a></text></comment> |
22,247,925 | 22,246,415 | 1 | 3 | 22,245,409 | train | <story><title>ZZ is a modern formally provable dialect of C</title><url>https://github.com/aep/zz</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>MaxBarraclough</author><text>I find the basic idea of this project to be very compelling - I was thinking aloud on HN recently and arrived at roughly the idea this project is implementing. [0]<p>With that said, I really dislike the way they&#x27;re describing their project.<p>When I read <i>safe dialect of C</i>, I first assumed they meant they had developed a safe subset of C, or perhaps a very similar language, like OpenCL C [1]. Instead, they developed a new language which isn&#x27;t C at all. Nothing wrong with that, but if I don&#x27;t instantly recognise the syntax as C, I wouldn&#x27;t call it a C dialect.<p>They also put <i>formally provable dialect of C</i>. Their language compiles to C code which is guaranteed to be free from undefined behaviour. This is not the same thing as a language where hard guarantees can be made about program behaviour, such as SPARK [2] or Dafny [3].<p>If the authors are reading this, I urge you to improve your project summary. Your language does not allow me to prove program correctness, instead it protects me from C&#x27;s undefined behaviour. That&#x27;s still a great idea! Please make this clear!<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=22102658" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=22102658</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;OpenCL#OpenCL_C_language" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;OpenCL#OpenCL_C_language</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;SPARK_(programming_language)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;SPARK_(programming_language)</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Dafny" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Dafny</a></text></comment> | <story><title>ZZ is a modern formally provable dialect of C</title><url>https://github.com/aep/zz</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>pjc50</author><text>This is a great achievement in making formal methods accessible in pragmatic terms - something that actually works and can be used by normal humans.<p>Would be nice to have an actual microcontroller example.<p>&gt; The standard library is fully stack based and heap allocation is strongly discouraged<p>:&#x2F; - I can see why this is done, as it&#x27;s hard, so banning it to make the problem tractable works. But it&#x27;s also quite inconvenient. On the other hand, &quot;MISRA C:2004, 20.4 - Dynamic heap memory allocation shall not be used.&quot;</text></comment> |
14,509,843 | 14,509,790 | 1 | 2 | 14,508,928 | train | <story><title>DeepLearning10: The 8x Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti GPU Monster</title><url>https://www.servethehome.com/deeplearning10-the-8x-nvidia-gtx-1080-ti-gpu-monster-part-1/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>highd</author><text>I&#x27;ve been evaluating this space a fair bit recently. If you want to optimize FLOPS&#x2F;$, especially for research-workstation sorts of setups, there&#x27;s unfortunately not a lot of options for getting more than 6 GPUs in a motherboard without going to server grade where you&#x27;re spending basically $3-4K more for unclear benefit - maybe a factor of two in GPU-to-GPU bandwidth.<p>The bitcoin miners have figured out one way to handle this, which is by using a variety of PCIe splitting systems. I&#x27;ve seen examples of people putting in 8GPUs in 4 slots with these splitters. The problem is that the majority of these splitters take your x16 connection and turn into 2 to 4 x1 PCIe lanes, which is a lot of wasted bandwidth. This is fine for the miners, since the cards run mostly independently. If I could find compatible PCIe splitters that could split x16 into 2 x8 channels then that would be a really sweet spot in performance&#x2F;$, but unfortunately I&#x27;ve yet to find them. So right now I&#x27;m going to stick to 6 GPUs, which you can get in a $500 consumer motherboard with just a few riser cables.<p>See for example: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;amfeltec.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;flexible-x4-pci-express-4-way-splitter-gpu-oriented&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;amfeltec.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;flexible-x4-pci-express-4-way-s...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>DeepLearning10: The 8x Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti GPU Monster</title><url>https://www.servethehome.com/deeplearning10-the-8x-nvidia-gtx-1080-ti-gpu-monster-part-1/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mippie_moe</author><text>The author wasn&#x27;t joking about the noise levels. This machine sounds like an F1 race car.<p>If you don&#x27;t require a rack mounted server, a cluster of workstations like NVIDIA&#x27;s DIGITS DevBox is far more cost efficient (and less noisy). I run a compute intensive business (Dreamscopeapp.com) and we opted to build a cluster of desktop-like machines instead of using a rack mounted solution. Another benefit is you don&#x27;t run into the power issues mentioned in the post.<p>My start-up actually sells the machine described in this post:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lambdal.com&#x2F;nvidia-gpu-server" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lambdal.com&#x2F;nvidia-gpu-server</a><p>And a machine inspired by the NVIDIA DIGITS DevBox:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lambdal.com&#x2F;nvidia-gpu-workstation-devbox" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lambdal.com&#x2F;nvidia-gpu-workstation-devbox</a></text></comment> |
6,046,409 | 6,046,509 | 1 | 3 | 6,045,581 | train | <story><title>Elon Musk to publish hyperloop design by August</title><url>https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/356776740409974785</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>btilly</author><text>Everyone has criticized you based on how great SpaceX is. I&#x27;ll go the other way.<p>Tesla at its heart is &quot;put a ton of batteries which were developed by other companies into an electric motor that drives a car.&quot; People have been trying this formula for over a century. Tesla happened to do it when battery technology was just good enough to work, with really good styling.</text></item><item><author>rayiner</author><text>I think there is more &quot;secret sauce&quot; in Tesla than in SpaceX. SpaceX is doing great implementations of pretty conservative designs. In any case, both are &quot;product&quot; companies and benefit from patents less than &quot;design&quot; companies. Contrast SpaceX with Mojave Aerospace Ventures (the investment vehicle that owns the Spaceship One IP developed by Scaled Composites).</text></item><item><author>kiba</author><text>SpaceX don&#x27;t patent anything because they thought the Chinese would steal their technologies using the patents itself.<p>It&#x27;s a different story for Tesla Motors, though.</text></item><item><author>onebaddude</author><text>&gt;<i>&quot;I really hate patents unless critical to company survival&quot;</i><p>Isn&#x27;t &quot;critical to company survival&quot; the same defensive argument that every patent holder uses?</text></item><item><author>non-sense</author><text>Classy! <a href="https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/356779314043305985" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;elonmusk&#x2F;status&#x2F;356779314043305985</a><p>&quot;I really hate patents unless critical to company survival. Will publish Hyperloop as open source.&quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mncolinlee</author><text>Looking at the spectacular flop of the Fisker, packaging is far too often understated. Most people don&#x27;t understand how complicated automotive systems are and how difficult it is to integrate them all together without numerous bugs and annoyances. Most big name automakers use off the shelf systems from third parties. Tesla did not.<p>Tesla won the highest score ever achieved from Consumer Reports while Fisker perished with a similar formula. That isn&#x27;t simply luck.</text></comment> | <story><title>Elon Musk to publish hyperloop design by August</title><url>https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/356776740409974785</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>btilly</author><text>Everyone has criticized you based on how great SpaceX is. I&#x27;ll go the other way.<p>Tesla at its heart is &quot;put a ton of batteries which were developed by other companies into an electric motor that drives a car.&quot; People have been trying this formula for over a century. Tesla happened to do it when battery technology was just good enough to work, with really good styling.</text></item><item><author>rayiner</author><text>I think there is more &quot;secret sauce&quot; in Tesla than in SpaceX. SpaceX is doing great implementations of pretty conservative designs. In any case, both are &quot;product&quot; companies and benefit from patents less than &quot;design&quot; companies. Contrast SpaceX with Mojave Aerospace Ventures (the investment vehicle that owns the Spaceship One IP developed by Scaled Composites).</text></item><item><author>kiba</author><text>SpaceX don&#x27;t patent anything because they thought the Chinese would steal their technologies using the patents itself.<p>It&#x27;s a different story for Tesla Motors, though.</text></item><item><author>onebaddude</author><text>&gt;<i>&quot;I really hate patents unless critical to company survival&quot;</i><p>Isn&#x27;t &quot;critical to company survival&quot; the same defensive argument that every patent holder uses?</text></item><item><author>non-sense</author><text>Classy! <a href="https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/356779314043305985" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;elonmusk&#x2F;status&#x2F;356779314043305985</a><p>&quot;I really hate patents unless critical to company survival. Will publish Hyperloop as open source.&quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>marvin</author><text>In fact, Tesla&#x27;s approach to battery packs is revolutionary - it goes completely against the status quo in the same way that Google&#x27;s use of commodity hardware went against the status quo in the late 90s. Tesla packs use about 7000 commodity li-ion cells which are arranged in a pack with individual software-controlled charge management.<p>A user on the Tesla Motors forum pointed out that if Tesla actually implements their battery patents, the battery pack which was displayed in a National Geographic documentary (pixelated, of course) was in fact a fake.</text></comment> |
38,506,389 | 38,505,446 | 1 | 3 | 38,505,138 | train | <story><title>A Personal History of APL (1982)</title><url>https://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/APL-hist.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jacquesm</author><text>The easiest way for non-APL programmers to begin to understand APL is to see what it hasn&#x27;t got: boilerplate and loops. If you discard those from any other programming text you&#x27;re left with the essence of what the code does. APL is only explicit about that essence, the rest is inferred by the interpreter. That&#x27;s why it is so compact and that&#x27;s why if you&#x27;re used to step-by-step instructions with a ton of air in between you will initially find it hard to read. But that gets easier over time and before you know it you&#x27;ll think of other languages as hopelessly verbose.</text></comment> | <story><title>A Personal History of APL (1982)</title><url>https://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/APL-hist.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>robomartin</author><text>I used APL professionally for about ten years. One of the most interesting applications I worked on was the analysis of DNA sequencing data during the Human Genome project.</text></comment> |
13,267,698 | 13,267,612 | 1 | 2 | 13,266,238 | train | <story><title>Open Letter to a Car-Addicted City (2014)</title><url>http://www.planetizen.com/node/72068/open-letter-car-addicted-city</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dexwiz</author><text>Because trains are dirty in the US.<p>Go to Vienna, ride a train, and then go to San Francisco, and ride BART. Its night and day. Vienna had clean trains with a smooth ride. BART seems to always be dirty, and the cars screech like banshees.<p>Its a vicious cycle. No one wants to fund trains, so they fall into disrepair. The then get a bad rap about being in disrepair, so no one wants to fund them. If you want a real villain, blame the oil companies that bought up local trains and dismantled them in the first half of the century.</text></item><item><author>brianwawok</author><text>My parents would say the trains are dirty and shake their head.<p>So hard to get people in the US to like public transit :(</text></item><item><author>m_mueller</author><text>This is the dilemma in a car society - whenever you ask people what they want, it&#x27;s more roads and parking spaces. People can&#x27;t even imagine how a good public transit can improve their lifes, including that of the remaining road users.<p>I think the solution is just for everyone to visit a place with a good public transit network and live there for a few months - in the US I can only think of New York. Exchange student programs should be mandated anyways, to mend the cultural gaps within the nation.</text></item><item><author>bgirard</author><text>I recall in ~2009 my university (UWaterloo) had a referendum to increase tuition by $50&#x2F;term (now $80&#x2F;term) to increase city bus routes to the university and provide free service to students using your student card. I voted against it because I could easily carpool and was against another mandatory fee.<p>The vote was fairly controversial and passed by a narrow margin. But since the service was improved to every 15 minutes and I was already paying for it I started using the service and shortly stopped driving to school altogether.<p>By the time I graduated I really loved the system since it really improved my commute and really regretted voting against it. I just checked and now the approval is at 94% for the UPass.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>yoloswagins</author><text>Placing the onus of the death of public transit in the US on the General Motors streetcar conspiracy fails to look at other economic aspects of the end of streetcars.<p>* Streetcar companies were the loss leaders for real estate developers.<p>* The Great Depression and WW2 caused deferred maintenance that undercapitalized transit companies could not afford after the real estate had been sold.<p>* Municipalities regulated fares, with voters regularly voting down measures to increase fares. At the time, transit agencies had to generate revenue almost entirely from fares.<p>* Transit companies had to pay recurring franchise fees for each mile of track, while bus companies didn&#x27;t pay such a fee.<p>* With the increase in auto traffic slowing down streetcars, busses had more maneuverability in heavier auto traffic.</text></comment> | <story><title>Open Letter to a Car-Addicted City (2014)</title><url>http://www.planetizen.com/node/72068/open-letter-car-addicted-city</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dexwiz</author><text>Because trains are dirty in the US.<p>Go to Vienna, ride a train, and then go to San Francisco, and ride BART. Its night and day. Vienna had clean trains with a smooth ride. BART seems to always be dirty, and the cars screech like banshees.<p>Its a vicious cycle. No one wants to fund trains, so they fall into disrepair. The then get a bad rap about being in disrepair, so no one wants to fund them. If you want a real villain, blame the oil companies that bought up local trains and dismantled them in the first half of the century.</text></item><item><author>brianwawok</author><text>My parents would say the trains are dirty and shake their head.<p>So hard to get people in the US to like public transit :(</text></item><item><author>m_mueller</author><text>This is the dilemma in a car society - whenever you ask people what they want, it&#x27;s more roads and parking spaces. People can&#x27;t even imagine how a good public transit can improve their lifes, including that of the remaining road users.<p>I think the solution is just for everyone to visit a place with a good public transit network and live there for a few months - in the US I can only think of New York. Exchange student programs should be mandated anyways, to mend the cultural gaps within the nation.</text></item><item><author>bgirard</author><text>I recall in ~2009 my university (UWaterloo) had a referendum to increase tuition by $50&#x2F;term (now $80&#x2F;term) to increase city bus routes to the university and provide free service to students using your student card. I voted against it because I could easily carpool and was against another mandatory fee.<p>The vote was fairly controversial and passed by a narrow margin. But since the service was improved to every 15 minutes and I was already paying for it I started using the service and shortly stopped driving to school altogether.<p>By the time I graduated I really loved the system since it really improved my commute and really regretted voting against it. I just checked and now the approval is at 94% for the UPass.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nradov</author><text>The new tapered wheels on BART cars are supposed to be only half as noisy.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bart.gov&#x2F;news&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2016&#x2F;news20160831" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bart.gov&#x2F;news&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2016&#x2F;news20160831</a></text></comment> |
1,810,397 | 1,809,594 | 1 | 3 | 1,809,051 | train | <story><title>From 0 to 450k, an App Store Success Story - With Charts and Numbers</title><url>http://struct.ca/2010/the-story-so-far/#</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>stevenwei</author><text>The most interesting thing to me is that the app sat in relative obscurity for 4 months before being featured by Apple, at which point sales exploded.<p>And judging by the App Store, being 'featured' only meant that the app icon was added to the New &#38; Noteworthy section....not the giant banner you get for being App of the Week (currently Nike GPS) or Game of the Week (currently Cut the Rope)...unless I missed it earlier in the month?</text></comment> | <story><title>From 0 to 450k, an App Store Success Story - With Charts and Numbers</title><url>http://struct.ca/2010/the-story-so-far/#</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>avgarrison</author><text>This is certainly an inspiration for developers that want to take the time to make a quality game, instead of trying to "game" the app-store with submissions like iFart, etc.</text></comment> |
22,425,881 | 22,425,993 | 1 | 2 | 22,420,548 | train | <story><title>Things I Learned from Five Years in Climate Tech</title><url>https://evanm.website/2020/02/five-years-in-energy/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ryanmercer</author><text>&gt;and I think it has a bright future.<p>That&#x27;s highly debatable. While you might sell software&#x2F;solar panels&#x2F;magicwidgets to a small subset of people, for the most part no technology is going to have a meaningful impact on current greenhouse gas emissions.<p>As I said to Wren (I really tear into them in this post, I feel I was fair though)[1] after they post their introduction thread here:<p>&gt; We&#x27;re going to make changes by convincing people they really don&#x27;t need to take their 4th international vacation in as many years, nor do they need their 3rd iPhone in 5 years, that their year and a half old MacBook is perfectly fine. They don&#x27;t need the newest model just because it now has ultra holographic flurm instead of super holographic flurm because all they do is watch YouTube and write emails with the damn thing.<p>Sure you might sell a regional power provider on using some software that does something a little better to improve efficiency 1&#x2F;2 % which will absolutely make a difference but while you&#x27;re doing that, a few new coal plants went online in India&#x2F;China&#x2F;a developing country. Also the power company that you sold it to is losing obscene amounts of electricity, generated by fossil fuels, via transmission loss<p>So you develop something for ICE cars that cuts out cylinders when lower demand is required, turns off the engine at stops, uses a solar panel to recharge a battery specifically for defrosting the windows instead of relying on the ICE charged lead-acid battery, etc but while you are designing that for a specific line of cars over the course of 2 years China alone added tens of millions of new drivers to the road driving ICE vehicles that aren&#x27;t burning fuel optimally.<p>While you are writing software, or developing a widget, to shave a few grams of CO2 emissions off of each customer a day websites&#x2F;apps like YouTube&#x2F;Facebook&#x2F;Twitter&#x2F;Instagram are generating tens to hundreds of grams of CO2 per gigabyte of data transferred.<p>While you&#x27;re trying to reduce the footprint of people with 6-figure salaries that can afford to spend money on reducing their footprint, you have hundreds of millions to billions of up and lower middle-class consumers consuming more and more as their greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase at staggering rates.<p>While you&#x27;re developing software to plan the best optimized routes for a UPS driver or commercial flight, you have people watching vidieos on YT trying to figure out where they want to take their 4th exotic vacation to (by plane, at a couple of tons of CO2 roundtrip per passenger) where they&#x27;ll eat out the entirety of the time probably generating a bunch of petrochemical derived single-use packaging.<p>You even have Y Combinator doing contradictory stuff in this field, as I said in an open letter to them [2]<p>&gt;Another example of something that wholly puzzles me is, YC has recently asked for solutions to global warming, chiefly carbon sequestration solutions. We&#x27;re going to produce close to 40 gigatons of carbon this year that will enter the system, that&#x27;s insanity. If you filled the 10 most massive bodies of freshwater in the world with Azolla (see the Azolla event) you&#x27;d only pull roughly 10% of that amount out of the atmosphere annually, and you would only sequester a fraction of that. Yet YC, for the interviews for companies that get an invite, they want the founders to fly to the Bay Area for a 10-minute interview. FOLKS! One round-trip flight from New York to Europe or San Francisco creates a warming effect equivalent to 2 or 3 tons of carbon dioxide per person.<p>People can make immediate and real impacts on their greenhouse gas emissions by cutting 1 day of meat consumption out a week. Then 2 days. Then get meat down to being a special occasion, or never, consumption.<p>People can make immediate and real impacts by opting to watch a documentary instead of flying to Antarctica to take pictures with penguins.<p>People can make immediate and real impacts by reading a book from a library instead of having Netflix streaming in the background why they play Candy Crush or Angry Birds on their phone with the air conditioning blasting 70F air at them while they&#x27;re wrapped up in a blanket with a hoodie on when it&#x27;s 75F out.<p>Even if someone cracks cold fusion TODAY, replacing the tens of thousands of power plants around the world... the concrete alone required would release a mind boggling amount of CO2 to produce and replacing them would take decades.<p>Developing software or a widget to optimize one&#x27;s impact is just selling people hopium. Getting people to radically change their habits (stop travelling, stop ordering from Amazon five times a week for one item each time, stop ordering Uber eats and cook something, reduce meat consumption, shop with a minimal waste mindset, don&#x27;t buy food if you&#x27;re going to throw half of it out, make tv a treat not a daily necessity etc).<p>Sure, there is investor money to be pilfered in this field but ehhhh.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ryanmercer.com&#x2F;ryansthoughts&#x2F;2019&#x2F;7&#x2F;18&#x2F;wren-medieval-indulgence-and-your-carbon-footprint" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ryanmercer.com&#x2F;ryansthoughts&#x2F;2019&#x2F;7&#x2F;18&#x2F;wren-medi...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ryanmercer.com&#x2F;ryansthoughts&#x2F;2018&#x2F;10&#x2F;30&#x2F;an-open-letter-to-yc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ryanmercer.com&#x2F;ryansthoughts&#x2F;2018&#x2F;10&#x2F;30&#x2F;an-open-...</a></text></item><item><author>layoric</author><text>This is a great piece and resonates with me a lot. I was an early employee at a climate tech startup ~3 years ago. I moved into climate tech intentionally from local gov contracting, it’s a great field for someone like a Data Engineer or Data Science kind of role, lots of opportunity to work on many different things.<p>I agree with the post that the utility scale space is a hard slog but I honestly believe the only way to scale renewables is to make it economically attractive for investment and any tech that can reduce operational cost of these assets to increase margins and attract more investment into utility scale renewable generation. A carbon price would be a huge boost to this space, things are still progressing without it but I think it would seriously accelerate our energy transition as well as spur innovation for non energy related carbon intensive industries. The current state of low interest rates world wide and funds having a harder time finding good returns means a lot of groups building solar utility scale assets are banks&#x2F;funds with little knowledge&#x2F;interest in energy generation, pulling together those with the how to knowledge to materialize their return on investment.<p>I highly recommend working in this space, its technically challenging and I think it has a bright future. It’s not as big and flashy as a lot of software startup worlds but small teams can still have a big impact. I also sure prefer working on these problems than working on platforms trying to sell more ads.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>triceratops</author><text>I&#x27;m sorry but that sounds wildly idealistic. &quot;If everyone acted in a certain way, the world would be perfect and we&#x27;d have peace forever.&quot;<p>People drive SUVs, eat burgers, and travel on jet planes because it&#x27;s fun and cheap. Make those things less cheap, say by introducing carbon taxes, and people will do less of them. It&#x27;s really really hard to get people to change their lifestyles absent any immediate, external pressure.<p>It&#x27;s awesome that you&#x27;re doing all those things. I do many of them too (biking to work, shopping 2nd hand for many things, stubbornly repairing electronics etc) but not because I think it has any substantial impact. I do because it&#x27;s the right thing to do and because it presents a positive example. It can show others that a rich, fulfilling life is possible without the frills of consumerism.</text></comment> | <story><title>Things I Learned from Five Years in Climate Tech</title><url>https://evanm.website/2020/02/five-years-in-energy/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ryanmercer</author><text>&gt;and I think it has a bright future.<p>That&#x27;s highly debatable. While you might sell software&#x2F;solar panels&#x2F;magicwidgets to a small subset of people, for the most part no technology is going to have a meaningful impact on current greenhouse gas emissions.<p>As I said to Wren (I really tear into them in this post, I feel I was fair though)[1] after they post their introduction thread here:<p>&gt; We&#x27;re going to make changes by convincing people they really don&#x27;t need to take their 4th international vacation in as many years, nor do they need their 3rd iPhone in 5 years, that their year and a half old MacBook is perfectly fine. They don&#x27;t need the newest model just because it now has ultra holographic flurm instead of super holographic flurm because all they do is watch YouTube and write emails with the damn thing.<p>Sure you might sell a regional power provider on using some software that does something a little better to improve efficiency 1&#x2F;2 % which will absolutely make a difference but while you&#x27;re doing that, a few new coal plants went online in India&#x2F;China&#x2F;a developing country. Also the power company that you sold it to is losing obscene amounts of electricity, generated by fossil fuels, via transmission loss<p>So you develop something for ICE cars that cuts out cylinders when lower demand is required, turns off the engine at stops, uses a solar panel to recharge a battery specifically for defrosting the windows instead of relying on the ICE charged lead-acid battery, etc but while you are designing that for a specific line of cars over the course of 2 years China alone added tens of millions of new drivers to the road driving ICE vehicles that aren&#x27;t burning fuel optimally.<p>While you are writing software, or developing a widget, to shave a few grams of CO2 emissions off of each customer a day websites&#x2F;apps like YouTube&#x2F;Facebook&#x2F;Twitter&#x2F;Instagram are generating tens to hundreds of grams of CO2 per gigabyte of data transferred.<p>While you&#x27;re trying to reduce the footprint of people with 6-figure salaries that can afford to spend money on reducing their footprint, you have hundreds of millions to billions of up and lower middle-class consumers consuming more and more as their greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase at staggering rates.<p>While you&#x27;re developing software to plan the best optimized routes for a UPS driver or commercial flight, you have people watching vidieos on YT trying to figure out where they want to take their 4th exotic vacation to (by plane, at a couple of tons of CO2 roundtrip per passenger) where they&#x27;ll eat out the entirety of the time probably generating a bunch of petrochemical derived single-use packaging.<p>You even have Y Combinator doing contradictory stuff in this field, as I said in an open letter to them [2]<p>&gt;Another example of something that wholly puzzles me is, YC has recently asked for solutions to global warming, chiefly carbon sequestration solutions. We&#x27;re going to produce close to 40 gigatons of carbon this year that will enter the system, that&#x27;s insanity. If you filled the 10 most massive bodies of freshwater in the world with Azolla (see the Azolla event) you&#x27;d only pull roughly 10% of that amount out of the atmosphere annually, and you would only sequester a fraction of that. Yet YC, for the interviews for companies that get an invite, they want the founders to fly to the Bay Area for a 10-minute interview. FOLKS! One round-trip flight from New York to Europe or San Francisco creates a warming effect equivalent to 2 or 3 tons of carbon dioxide per person.<p>People can make immediate and real impacts on their greenhouse gas emissions by cutting 1 day of meat consumption out a week. Then 2 days. Then get meat down to being a special occasion, or never, consumption.<p>People can make immediate and real impacts by opting to watch a documentary instead of flying to Antarctica to take pictures with penguins.<p>People can make immediate and real impacts by reading a book from a library instead of having Netflix streaming in the background why they play Candy Crush or Angry Birds on their phone with the air conditioning blasting 70F air at them while they&#x27;re wrapped up in a blanket with a hoodie on when it&#x27;s 75F out.<p>Even if someone cracks cold fusion TODAY, replacing the tens of thousands of power plants around the world... the concrete alone required would release a mind boggling amount of CO2 to produce and replacing them would take decades.<p>Developing software or a widget to optimize one&#x27;s impact is just selling people hopium. Getting people to radically change their habits (stop travelling, stop ordering from Amazon five times a week for one item each time, stop ordering Uber eats and cook something, reduce meat consumption, shop with a minimal waste mindset, don&#x27;t buy food if you&#x27;re going to throw half of it out, make tv a treat not a daily necessity etc).<p>Sure, there is investor money to be pilfered in this field but ehhhh.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ryanmercer.com&#x2F;ryansthoughts&#x2F;2019&#x2F;7&#x2F;18&#x2F;wren-medieval-indulgence-and-your-carbon-footprint" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ryanmercer.com&#x2F;ryansthoughts&#x2F;2019&#x2F;7&#x2F;18&#x2F;wren-medi...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ryanmercer.com&#x2F;ryansthoughts&#x2F;2018&#x2F;10&#x2F;30&#x2F;an-open-letter-to-yc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ryanmercer.com&#x2F;ryansthoughts&#x2F;2018&#x2F;10&#x2F;30&#x2F;an-open-...</a></text></item><item><author>layoric</author><text>This is a great piece and resonates with me a lot. I was an early employee at a climate tech startup ~3 years ago. I moved into climate tech intentionally from local gov contracting, it’s a great field for someone like a Data Engineer or Data Science kind of role, lots of opportunity to work on many different things.<p>I agree with the post that the utility scale space is a hard slog but I honestly believe the only way to scale renewables is to make it economically attractive for investment and any tech that can reduce operational cost of these assets to increase margins and attract more investment into utility scale renewable generation. A carbon price would be a huge boost to this space, things are still progressing without it but I think it would seriously accelerate our energy transition as well as spur innovation for non energy related carbon intensive industries. The current state of low interest rates world wide and funds having a harder time finding good returns means a lot of groups building solar utility scale assets are banks&#x2F;funds with little knowledge&#x2F;interest in energy generation, pulling together those with the how to knowledge to materialize their return on investment.<p>I highly recommend working in this space, its technically challenging and I think it has a bright future. It’s not as big and flashy as a lot of software startup worlds but small teams can still have a big impact. I also sure prefer working on these problems than working on platforms trying to sell more ads.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>EpicEng</author><text>So... corporate action is meaningless because other companies will continue to pollute. Technological advancements are meaningless because other countries will continue to use old tech.<p>But... individual actions are meaningful because... other people won&#x27;t continue to live wastefully... I guess? I don&#x27;t see the logic here at all.</text></comment> |
22,693,700 | 22,693,630 | 1 | 2 | 22,692,885 | train | <story><title>3.28M file for U.S. jobless benefits</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-long-run-of-american-job-growth-has-ended-11585215000</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Demiurge</author><text>As a developer I immediately though of the power of queues. Twenty people trying to submit same form does not work for everyone, but a queue processing one person at a time might allow the twenty people to submit within a short time. It is flattening the curve! If I was contracted to fix this ASAP, I would set up an nginx front-end proxy config that doesn&#x27;t allow more than X sessions and suggest a time in the future when they could try again.</text></item><item><author>luma</author><text>Further, unemployment benefits are managed by the states, and those states are running web services which typically see a few hundred hits a day. They are now trying to process tens of thousands of new records each day, and at least in MI the service is absolutely not up to the task.<p>My wife managed to get her filing completed a little after 1am this morning. She was the only one of her 20 coworkers to successfully file, the rest are continuing to attempt to get the state web site to work today, while more people pile in.<p>These numbers are going to get much, much worse.</text></item><item><author>stupandaus</author><text>A few things to note:<p>1. These figures are only new claims as of 3&#x2F;21, so the numbers will get worse.<p>2. This is ~2% of the estimated ~160-165M US Workforce.<p>3. This is nearly 5x (!) the prior record of 671K new jobless claims from 1982, and redefines the scale for jobless claims. [1]<p>4. This does not account for the countless gig workers that are part of the modern economy that likely did not file for unemployment since they were not covered prior to the passing of the senate bill last night.<p>This goes to show just how sharp of an impact the coronavirus pandemic has had relative to past recessions. Even the &#x27;08 Financial Crisis took MONTHS to unravel.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fred.stlouisfed.org&#x2F;series&#x2F;ICSA" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fred.stlouisfed.org&#x2F;series&#x2F;ICSA</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>driverdan</author><text>Having worked on this type of application in the past they should find a new company to work with if they can&#x27;t handle this traffic. We were handling hundreds of requests per second with ease 10 years ago. That was with MySQL and the app running on the same server.<p>It doesn&#x27;t take many resources to show the user a form, validate it, and save to a DB.</text></comment> | <story><title>3.28M file for U.S. jobless benefits</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-long-run-of-american-job-growth-has-ended-11585215000</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Demiurge</author><text>As a developer I immediately though of the power of queues. Twenty people trying to submit same form does not work for everyone, but a queue processing one person at a time might allow the twenty people to submit within a short time. It is flattening the curve! If I was contracted to fix this ASAP, I would set up an nginx front-end proxy config that doesn&#x27;t allow more than X sessions and suggest a time in the future when they could try again.</text></item><item><author>luma</author><text>Further, unemployment benefits are managed by the states, and those states are running web services which typically see a few hundred hits a day. They are now trying to process tens of thousands of new records each day, and at least in MI the service is absolutely not up to the task.<p>My wife managed to get her filing completed a little after 1am this morning. She was the only one of her 20 coworkers to successfully file, the rest are continuing to attempt to get the state web site to work today, while more people pile in.<p>These numbers are going to get much, much worse.</text></item><item><author>stupandaus</author><text>A few things to note:<p>1. These figures are only new claims as of 3&#x2F;21, so the numbers will get worse.<p>2. This is ~2% of the estimated ~160-165M US Workforce.<p>3. This is nearly 5x (!) the prior record of 671K new jobless claims from 1982, and redefines the scale for jobless claims. [1]<p>4. This does not account for the countless gig workers that are part of the modern economy that likely did not file for unemployment since they were not covered prior to the passing of the senate bill last night.<p>This goes to show just how sharp of an impact the coronavirus pandemic has had relative to past recessions. Even the &#x27;08 Financial Crisis took MONTHS to unravel.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fred.stlouisfed.org&#x2F;series&#x2F;ICSA" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fred.stlouisfed.org&#x2F;series&#x2F;ICSA</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>JMTQp8lwXL</author><text>Put the web form (plain static assets JS&#x2F;CSS&#x2F;HTML) on a globally accessible CDN. Then use SQS intake for each unemployment application form. Then firehouse it out, wherever it needs to go, at a rate which you can realistically deal with it.<p>Queuing access to the form itself and telling someone to wake up at 4:52 AM so they can then merely access the static assets is a less-than-desirable user experience.</text></comment> |
14,303,520 | 14,303,585 | 1 | 2 | 14,299,482 | train | <story><title>Redesigning Apple Music after Being Rejected</title><url>https://medium.com/@jasonyuan/i-got-rejected-by-apple-music-so-i-redesigned-it-b7e2e4dc64bf</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>abrongersma</author><text>Music discovery is the primary reason that I&#x27;ve moved away from Apple Music. It&#x27;s become difficult to explore their music catalog, almost as if it&#x27;s by design. I&#x27;ve made the move to Spotify and it&#x27;s been wonderful.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>captainjack2</author><text>I agree that discovery is way better with Spotify. I feel like Apple is still hoping people will continue to buy music.<p>Lately I&#x27;ve been using <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jqbx.fm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jqbx.fm</a> . Which is a more a turntable.fm approach but hooks into your Spotify account so you can save things for later and DJ from your existing playlists. Definitely helped me discover a lot of new stuff I wouldn&#x27;t have found otherwise.</text></comment> | <story><title>Redesigning Apple Music after Being Rejected</title><url>https://medium.com/@jasonyuan/i-got-rejected-by-apple-music-so-i-redesigned-it-b7e2e4dc64bf</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>abrongersma</author><text>Music discovery is the primary reason that I&#x27;ve moved away from Apple Music. It&#x27;s become difficult to explore their music catalog, almost as if it&#x27;s by design. I&#x27;ve made the move to Spotify and it&#x27;s been wonderful.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jobu</author><text>Interesting. I&#x27;ve been thinking about switching to Apple Music to have a bit more control over my music. Spotify puts out some amazing curated playlists that are constantly being updated, but then after a few weeks those playlists suddenly turn to shit.<p>My theory is that they have a few people manually curate a list with good songs for a while to train an AI, but when they finally turn control over to the AI it falls on its face and starts adding shitty cover band music to the list.</text></comment> |
23,418,603 | 23,418,501 | 1 | 2 | 23,418,281 | train | <story><title>Germany bans digital doppelganger passport photos</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-tech-morphing/germany-bans-digital-doppelganger-passport-photos-idUSKBN23A1YM</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ceejayoz</author><text>Surely manipulating the photo beyond tweaking exposure, white balance, etc. was <i>already</i> banned?<p>It sounds like they&#x27;re just taking steps to make it harder to do the already-banned thing. Hell, you can&#x27;t even fix red-eye in the US:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;travel.state.gov&#x2F;content&#x2F;travel&#x2F;en&#x2F;passports&#x2F;how-apply&#x2F;photos.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;travel.state.gov&#x2F;content&#x2F;travel&#x2F;en&#x2F;passports&#x2F;how-app...</a><p>&gt; Can I remove red-eye from my photo? No, you can not digitally alter a photo to remove red eye. You will have to submit a new photo without red eye.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kleiba</author><text>That&#x27;s why they will now require you to have your photo taken either at a passport office or at a photographer&#x27;s. Although the wording in the article is not quite precise on the latter part.</text></comment> | <story><title>Germany bans digital doppelganger passport photos</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-tech-morphing/germany-bans-digital-doppelganger-passport-photos-idUSKBN23A1YM</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ceejayoz</author><text>Surely manipulating the photo beyond tweaking exposure, white balance, etc. was <i>already</i> banned?<p>It sounds like they&#x27;re just taking steps to make it harder to do the already-banned thing. Hell, you can&#x27;t even fix red-eye in the US:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;travel.state.gov&#x2F;content&#x2F;travel&#x2F;en&#x2F;passports&#x2F;how-apply&#x2F;photos.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;travel.state.gov&#x2F;content&#x2F;travel&#x2F;en&#x2F;passports&#x2F;how-app...</a><p>&gt; Can I remove red-eye from my photo? No, you can not digitally alter a photo to remove red eye. You will have to submit a new photo without red eye.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>the_mitsuhiko</author><text>Currently you can bring your own picture which makes it possible to do certain modifications beforehand.</text></comment> |
40,929,606 | 40,928,935 | 1 | 2 | 40,925,906 | train | <story><title>Show HN: I made a Note-Taking app for people who keep texting themselves</title><url>https://strflow.app</url><text>This project began when I realized that despite trying many fantastic note-taking apps, I often defaulted to dumping notes into chat apps like Slack or iMessage. I wanted to bring that effortless “text yourself” note-taking experience to a dedicated note-taking app.<p>Originally developed as a macOS app, Strflow is now also available for iOS. Strflow is designed to make note-taking as quick and intuitive as possible, centered around a chronological timeline UI.<p>Here are some of its features:<p>* Tag system<p>* Rich editor with text formatting, images, and note linking<p>* Global shortcuts for quick access<p>* Share extension<p>* Encrypted iCloud backup &amp; synchronization (becomes end-to-end encryption if you enable iCloud’s Advanced Data Protection)<p>Hope you find Strflow interesting. I’m happy to answer any questions.<p>## Some implementation details some of you might be interested in:<p>* The app is implemented natively using Swift.<p>* On macOS, it’s based on AppKit, and on iOS, it uses UIKit, with SwiftUI used partially.<p>* The editor intensively utilizes TextKit.<p>* The sync engine is custom-built using CloudKit.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>entropyie</author><text>My number one problem with notes apps is that they <i>all</i> take too long to open a new note, and try to sync themselves when opened, often slowing everything down. Especially if you have a slow &#x2F; choppy connection (fully offline is usually ok, but barely online is the worst).<p>I have a literal supercomputer in my pocket, yet not one app let&#x27;s me open and start writing a critical note in less than 500ms.<p>To this day I still use plaintext editors on my desktop to dump short strings or notes into, because they load faster than any other app. And don&#x27;t try to be clever with smart quotes, fonts and butchering my code snippets.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vladxyz</author><text>Just as a counter-example, my workflow works very quickly for me:<p>On mobile, my launcher has four pinned favorites on the homepage - one of which is a shortcut to go straight to the new note activity in my notes app. From typing up this comment I can swipe up to home and touch that button in (probably?) under 500ms and type in a new note.<p>(launcher = KISS Launcher, notes app = Joplin. though I&#x27;m sure similar things work with other launchers and note apps.)<p>It is unfortunately an electron app on desktop, but I&#x27;m invested enough that I never close it, and can start a new note just as quickly (super + 1 to launch it from my task bar, ctrl+n to start a new nearly plaintext note). This is the same on my windows and Linux computers. MacOS (as it is with most things) is somewhat more annoying: I keep a Space dedicated to Joplin and never collapse to the icon, which allows me to similarly go two chords - ctrl+9, cmd+n - to a new note.<p>Joplin doesn&#x27;t need sync to complete before opening a new note.</text></comment> | <story><title>Show HN: I made a Note-Taking app for people who keep texting themselves</title><url>https://strflow.app</url><text>This project began when I realized that despite trying many fantastic note-taking apps, I often defaulted to dumping notes into chat apps like Slack or iMessage. I wanted to bring that effortless “text yourself” note-taking experience to a dedicated note-taking app.<p>Originally developed as a macOS app, Strflow is now also available for iOS. Strflow is designed to make note-taking as quick and intuitive as possible, centered around a chronological timeline UI.<p>Here are some of its features:<p>* Tag system<p>* Rich editor with text formatting, images, and note linking<p>* Global shortcuts for quick access<p>* Share extension<p>* Encrypted iCloud backup &amp; synchronization (becomes end-to-end encryption if you enable iCloud’s Advanced Data Protection)<p>Hope you find Strflow interesting. I’m happy to answer any questions.<p>## Some implementation details some of you might be interested in:<p>* The app is implemented natively using Swift.<p>* On macOS, it’s based on AppKit, and on iOS, it uses UIKit, with SwiftUI used partially.<p>* The editor intensively utilizes TextKit.<p>* The sync engine is custom-built using CloudKit.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>entropyie</author><text>My number one problem with notes apps is that they <i>all</i> take too long to open a new note, and try to sync themselves when opened, often slowing everything down. Especially if you have a slow &#x2F; choppy connection (fully offline is usually ok, but barely online is the worst).<p>I have a literal supercomputer in my pocket, yet not one app let&#x27;s me open and start writing a critical note in less than 500ms.<p>To this day I still use plaintext editors on my desktop to dump short strings or notes into, because they load faster than any other app. And don&#x27;t try to be clever with smart quotes, fonts and butchering my code snippets.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rsanek</author><text>try Google keep. there&#x27;s a shortcut you can make that with a single tap from the homescreen creates a new note and brings up your keyboard for typing. after you&#x27;re done you don&#x27;t have to even click save to persist it. it also auto syncs in the background.<p>I&#x27;ve been using it on iOS for years</text></comment> |
4,802,779 | 4,802,622 | 1 | 2 | 4,802,118 | train | <story><title>The Quiet Ones</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/18/opinion/sunday/the-quiet-ones.html?pagewanted=all</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bpatrianakos</author><text>Oh, the quiet car. I ride the quiet car every weekday to and from work into and out of Chicago (except ours is Metra, not Amtrak). His description of it is completely accurate. The people on the quiet car tend to be thinkers, readers, writers, and I dare say just a bit more intelligent than the average rider.<p>I've had the same experience before. For some reason people think the signs and the announcements don't apply to them and it just boggles my mind how much self awareness they lack! There's been a guy I've seen on the quiet car twice last week who for some reason had his iPhone at full volume and texted for the entire hour I was on the train. The problem wasn't the texting but that the iPhones clickers clackety keyboard sounds were on. Is that really necessary? And on the quiet car no less? A woman did the same thing a few weeks back. Of course no one said a word but we were all very annoyed. And then you get the oblivious guy who doesn't read signs or listen to the 3 announcements who talks on his cell the whole ride. And don't get me started on the teenagers who seem to be visiting the city for the first time and for some reason need to scream at each other despite being centimeters from each others face in a car full of completely silent people. The signs are obvious. The announcement are loud, clear, and numerous. So what the fuck, man?!<p>That's life now. It seems we have a whole generation of people who are just completely lacking self-awareness and have a serious problem with entitlement. But it's not young people this is specific to. I'm only 26 and I'm good on the quiet car (though I have had my moments I'll admit). There are people of all ages,miracles, and genders who behave this way and though I think humans are like this by nature anyway I also think the Internet and cell phones have made it worse. It seems like a learned behavior.<p>I just blamed Internet and cell phones for a portion of the world's ills. I'm going to go think about how old that makes me sound now...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>eupharis</author><text>This diversity of opinion about what is and is not hard to tune out is fascinating.<p>Also 26 here. One of the great shortcomings of youth is not being able to understand that other people can be fundamentally <i>different</i>. Not better, not worse. Just <i>different</i>. This is something I'm only truly beginning to appreciate lately.<p>I had never realized until this thread that people could find typing annoying. Well, theoretically I mean I understood you could think "Oh that's annoying" and get on with life. But not the overwhelming, consuming pathos here.<p>Maybe the problem is less a lack of self-awareness and a serious problem with entitlement. Maybe the problem is this:<p>Their awareness of self leads them to different conclusions about what is and is not annoying. They don't see themselves as doing anything more entitled than breathing, because other people's typing bothers them about as much as your breathing.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Quiet Ones</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/18/opinion/sunday/the-quiet-ones.html?pagewanted=all</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bpatrianakos</author><text>Oh, the quiet car. I ride the quiet car every weekday to and from work into and out of Chicago (except ours is Metra, not Amtrak). His description of it is completely accurate. The people on the quiet car tend to be thinkers, readers, writers, and I dare say just a bit more intelligent than the average rider.<p>I've had the same experience before. For some reason people think the signs and the announcements don't apply to them and it just boggles my mind how much self awareness they lack! There's been a guy I've seen on the quiet car twice last week who for some reason had his iPhone at full volume and texted for the entire hour I was on the train. The problem wasn't the texting but that the iPhones clickers clackety keyboard sounds were on. Is that really necessary? And on the quiet car no less? A woman did the same thing a few weeks back. Of course no one said a word but we were all very annoyed. And then you get the oblivious guy who doesn't read signs or listen to the 3 announcements who talks on his cell the whole ride. And don't get me started on the teenagers who seem to be visiting the city for the first time and for some reason need to scream at each other despite being centimeters from each others face in a car full of completely silent people. The signs are obvious. The announcement are loud, clear, and numerous. So what the fuck, man?!<p>That's life now. It seems we have a whole generation of people who are just completely lacking self-awareness and have a serious problem with entitlement. But it's not young people this is specific to. I'm only 26 and I'm good on the quiet car (though I have had my moments I'll admit). There are people of all ages,miracles, and genders who behave this way and though I think humans are like this by nature anyway I also think the Internet and cell phones have made it worse. It seems like a learned behavior.<p>I just blamed Internet and cell phones for a portion of the world's ills. I'm going to go think about how old that makes me sound now...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mgkimsal</author><text>"I'm good on the quiet car (though I have had my moments I'll admit). There are people of all ages,miracles, and genders who behave this way..."<p>You probably don't encounter the same people all the time. There's enough people out in the world such that each one can "have their moments" when they're around you, and nowhere else, and you wouldn't know the difference.<p>I do sympathize with you though. I've got a sound sensitivity problem, and lots of noises bug me way way way out of the ordinary compared to most peoples' tolerance. I know this isn't specifically related to quiet cars on trains, but noises in general still bug me (even my own oftentimes). I'm sometimes shocked how I can be on an airplane, with gigantic engines blowing away at tremendous force just 20 feet from me, yet a person a row ahead of me chewing gum or chowing down on pretzels penetrates in to my brain.</text></comment> |
4,008,336 | 4,008,388 | 1 | 3 | 4,007,980 | train | <story><title>Facebook Bankers Secretly Cut FB Revenue Estimates In Middle Of IPO Roadshow</title><url>http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/facebook-bankers-secretly-cut-facebook-revenue-estimates-middle-133648905.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>JumpCrisscross</author><text>The original Reuters article does a better job explaining this than the link-bait title here: <a href="http://www.reuters.com/assets/print?aid=USBRE84L06920120522" rel="nofollow">http://www.reuters.com/assets/print?aid=USBRE84L06920120522</a><p>FB amended their S-1 to lower revenue forecasts. Following that, a research analyst at Morgan Stanley cut his revenue forecast on FB close to their IPO. Nothing here should fire anyone up.<p>Equity research must be conducted independently of the investment bankers' non-public information. Given that they are opinions assembled from public data I don't see how disclosing it only to clients is a problem. If you want to publish a newsletter with stock tips and only disclose it to paying clients that is your prerogative, too.</text></comment> | <story><title>Facebook Bankers Secretly Cut FB Revenue Estimates In Middle Of IPO Roadshow</title><url>http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/facebook-bankers-secretly-cut-facebook-revenue-estimates-middle-133648905.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>chernevik</author><text>The bankers surely know how disastrous something like this would be. Facebook has been aggressively indifferent to this whole process, which involves a lot of complexity both in decision making and communication. "Don't make the analysts look bad" is an important rule, but one that's easy to miss unless you spend some time thinking through your communications with the market.<p>If FB's initial analyst communications emphasized optimism over credibility and deliverability, or FB was impatient with questions casting doubt, the analysts may have had reason to start with high estimates. The May 9 filing comes out and reveals those to be implausible, and they have to dial back to avoid looking silly or as if they're pumping the stock.<p>If FB management hadn't spent a lot of time thinking about the relationships between the analysts and the investors, they may have missed the point that those investors are the analysts' ultimate clients. If they didn't spend much time with the analysts, they may have neglected building relationships where they could subtly signal issues without tripping regulatory problems.<p>Or the analysts were idiots and screwed up the biggest assignments of their lives.<p>Is all this shady company / banker / investor communication good? No, but this is how it's done right now, and if you want your partners to do well you have to work within the rules of the road. It isn't clear to me that Facebook took the time to do that.</text></comment> |
10,169,269 | 10,168,957 | 1 | 2 | 10,168,734 | train | <story><title>The Mystery of Devil's Kettle Falls</title><url>http://www.mnn.com/lifestyle/eco-tourism/stories/the-mystery-of-devils-kettle-falls</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Animats</author><text>There are mine communication devices that can punch a signal through a few hundred meters of solid rock. Here&#x27;s a simple one.[1] VLF can get through, with enough power, a simple signal, and a smart receiver.[2]<p>There&#x27;s been a lot of work on &quot;down-hole communication&quot; for oil and gas drilling. Modern drilling involves com links to the sharp end, with info coming up and commands going down. Some of the techniques work through the drill string, but some are VLF radios.<p>There are also high-powered ultrasonic pingers, with a range of several kilometers in water.[3]<p>If you could get info for the first kilometer or two, you&#x27;d at least know where to look for the rest of the path.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;radiolocation.tripod.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;radiolocation.tripod.com&#x2F;</a>
[2] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;onlinelibrary.wiley.com&#x2F;doi&#x2F;10.1029&#x2F;2010RS004378&#x2F;full" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;onlinelibrary.wiley.com&#x2F;doi&#x2F;10.1029&#x2F;2010RS004378&#x2F;full</a>
[3] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sonotronics.com&#x2F;?page_id=96" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sonotronics.com&#x2F;?page_id=96</a></text></comment> | <story><title>The Mystery of Devil's Kettle Falls</title><url>http://www.mnn.com/lifestyle/eco-tourism/stories/the-mystery-of-devils-kettle-falls</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>cossatot</author><text>For the record lava tubes can happen in flood basalts; I&#x27;ve been to some at Hell&#x27;s Half Acre in Idaho, and I&#x27;m sure there are others. But these are not like karst-type cave systems; they&#x27;re much shorter.<p>It&#x27;s really unlikely that the water goes anywhere other than the lake. It just might travel through a fracture network and seep out of the lake bottom miles away, but groundwater tends to flow broadly following the topographic slope (driven by the gravitational loading of groundwater surface called the &#x27;hydraulic head&#x27;) and there typically aren&#x27;t isolated tunnels where some water can flow unimpeded by regional groundwater flow.</text></comment> |
36,372,058 | 36,371,896 | 1 | 3 | 36,367,241 | train | <story><title>Reddit 1.0 was written in Lisp</title><url>https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit1.0</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mchaver</author><text>So I&#x27;ve read that they wrote it in Lisp at Paul Graham&#x27;s request or to win favor. Does anyone know if writing your startup code in Lisp still has that benefit?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>coldtea</author><text>It never had any particular benefit to write your startup code in Lisp.<p>That myth came from a few posts by a person who was a huge proponent of Lisp, in an era were web (front and backend) development was much easier, and web-related libraries were lacking in all languages (so it wasn&#x27;t like Lisp&#x27;s smaller popularity would hurt you there).<p>It&#x27;s an example of one.<p>If they didn&#x27;t get lucky and Yahoo! bought some other company in the same domain in their place (they already have a few competitors) the whole &quot;Lisp as a secret weapon&quot; would be moot.<p>Statistically speaking, 99.9% of succesful startups were written not in any Lisp, and 0.1% of them in Lisp. Not the biggest 0.1% either, more towards the bottom, in the context of web company deals during the ramp up to the dot-com bust. Viaweb was sold for $50 million. For context, Yahoo! bought Broadcast.com a year later for 5 billion and doc.com startups of the era routinely raising and burning $50-$100 million for fun - heck, Razorfish (a design consultancy) built websites for clients like Levis, Sony, Mercedes Benz, etc. for $20-$40 million (and that&#x27;s late-90s era websites, nothing especially fancy).<p>Of course all that&#x27;s irrelevant to whether Viaweb was written in Lisp. Which is my point, exactly. What&#x27;s more, Yahoo! even scrapped all their Lisp code soon after.<p>Now, writing your startup code in a productive language, that doesn&#x27;t slow down the development team, allows for easy+quality hires, and so on - even if it&#x27;s not the best for when you get huge, is a benefit. That hardly requires Lisp.</text></comment> | <story><title>Reddit 1.0 was written in Lisp</title><url>https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit1.0</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mchaver</author><text>So I&#x27;ve read that they wrote it in Lisp at Paul Graham&#x27;s request or to win favor. Does anyone know if writing your startup code in Lisp still has that benefit?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>philwelch</author><text>It&#x27;s probably not the way you&#x27;re making it sound. This was in the early early days of YC, when there were like eight companies per batch, and at the peak of PG&#x27;s influence as an online essayist. He wrote a lot about the benefits of Lisp and how Lisp was a competitive advantage for Viaweb. So it was probably less a case of trying to win favor with a seed investor and more a case of actually being convinced it was a good business decision.</text></comment> |
5,134,664 | 5,133,447 | 1 | 3 | 5,133,328 | train | <story><title>Amazon Elastic Transcoder</title><url>https://aws.amazon.com/elastictranscoder/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>chrisacky</author><text>It's quite an interesting business decision to jump into this market.<p>Take Zencoder for example (which is one of my favourite players in this field)... if you are to compare the prices with say Zencoder [1] AWS is <i>much more cost effective</i> (by several factors). Even if you were operating at scale and spending $2000 per month with Zencoder, you would only get 50,000minutes worth of HD Video. (You pay 2 minutes worth of credits for HD video on Zencoder).<p>If you spend $2000 with AWS, you would be getting 33% more value. (Remember, this is operating at scale. The savings can be even larger)... and this is really the best case scenario for Zencoder.<p>If you are "just getting started", the savings are immediate. On Zencoder it's $0.10 for HD video, compared to $0.03 on AWS.<p>I'd be really worried and slightly confused by Amazon took this step? There are several video encoding companies that operate on AWS already, and they all just got sandbagged.<p><pre><code> [1] : http://zencoder.com/en/pricing</code></pre></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jon_dahl</author><text>Zencoder here. Amazon has done a good job of making their pricing look simpler/cheaper than ours, and for some customers, it is. Two quick comments.<p>1. Our larger customers don't pay more than this already.<p>2. Paying 33% less doesn't necessarily mean getting 33% more value.<p>We'll be writing up an analysis today. Off the record (ahem), we've known about this for a long time, and we aren't worried.</text></comment> | <story><title>Amazon Elastic Transcoder</title><url>https://aws.amazon.com/elastictranscoder/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>chrisacky</author><text>It's quite an interesting business decision to jump into this market.<p>Take Zencoder for example (which is one of my favourite players in this field)... if you are to compare the prices with say Zencoder [1] AWS is <i>much more cost effective</i> (by several factors). Even if you were operating at scale and spending $2000 per month with Zencoder, you would only get 50,000minutes worth of HD Video. (You pay 2 minutes worth of credits for HD video on Zencoder).<p>If you spend $2000 with AWS, you would be getting 33% more value. (Remember, this is operating at scale. The savings can be even larger)... and this is really the best case scenario for Zencoder.<p>If you are "just getting started", the savings are immediate. On Zencoder it's $0.10 for HD video, compared to $0.03 on AWS.<p>I'd be really worried and slightly confused by Amazon took this step? There are several video encoding companies that operate on AWS already, and they all just got sandbagged.<p><pre><code> [1] : http://zencoder.com/en/pricing</code></pre></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>zimbatm</author><text>Not really. Amazon just builds what they need instead of depending on others and then sell it as a service to the larger market. Remember, they're playing for the long-run. Maybe they needed it to convert their videos on LoveFilm.com or maybe another future service connected with their Cloud Drive.<p>What is also means is that if your company provides a service to other developers you might well be in competition with Amazon in the future.<p>EDIT: Maybe I should mention that I work at PandaStream, another video transcoding service. We're still cheaper with 100% utilisation but our pricing model and target market isn't exactly the same.</text></comment> |
17,046,488 | 17,045,705 | 1 | 2 | 17,041,466 | train | <story><title>All Work and No Play: Why Kids Are More Anxious, Depressed (2011)</title><url>https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2011/10/all-work-and-no-play-why-your-kids-are-more-anxious-depressed/246422/?single_page=true</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>binarnosp</author><text>One month ago I started removing the constraints on my 8 years old daughter&#x27;s outside activity. I just gave a wristwatch with the alarm set before dinner time and told her &quot;when the alarm goes off then come home&quot;. I&#x27;m against her having a phone.<p>When she comes home and she tells us what she and her friends did (I don&#x27;t ask, she just wants to share) it is hilarious and I usually think &quot;It was better if I didn&#x27;t know this and that&quot;. But then I think about the 8 years old version of me &quot;bombing&quot; the toy soldiers together with a friend of mine by spraying alcohol on them and by setting everything on fire, and I relax...</text></comment> | <story><title>All Work and No Play: Why Kids Are More Anxious, Depressed (2011)</title><url>https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2011/10/all-work-and-no-play-why-your-kids-are-more-anxious-depressed/246422/?single_page=true</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>slx26</author><text>It&#x27;s important to let kids be bored and ignored from time to time, so they actually have the space to think for themselves and realize how many opportunities they have out there and how fun it is to explore them.<p>Of course, every kid is a different universe, but in general I feel we are missing quite a bit of that.</text></comment> |
20,857,687 | 20,857,680 | 1 | 2 | 20,855,441 | train | <story><title>Ways to Tweak Slow SQL Queries</title><url>http://www.helenanderson.co.nz/sql-query-tweaks/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>craig_asp</author><text>&quot;Pull out the names of only the columns you need instead of using SELECT * to speed things up further.&quot;<p>This is not performance-related in most cases. Unless the bottleneck is in the amount of data being transferred to a client over a network connection and there is a large amount of columns, or you have an index which matches the limited column list query exactly, there would be no performance difference in SELECT * vs SELECT &lt;column list&gt;.<p>In columnar dbs it does matter because the less columns you select the less data gets accessed on disk. However, this does not hold true for row stores because data is stored in such a way that the whole row gets accessed no matter how many columns get specified in the query.<p>There are many other good reasons why SELECT * is acceptable only in development queries, but performance is not one of them.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>branko_d</author><text>Some joins may be completely eliminated if the fields coming from them are omitted from the SELECT list. This happens when the DBMS can prove (through FOREIGN KEYS) that the joined row always exists, without having to ever physically retrieve that row.<p>This is especially important when querying views (or inline functions, if your DBMS supports them) built on top of several other layers of views.</text></comment> | <story><title>Ways to Tweak Slow SQL Queries</title><url>http://www.helenanderson.co.nz/sql-query-tweaks/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>craig_asp</author><text>&quot;Pull out the names of only the columns you need instead of using SELECT * to speed things up further.&quot;<p>This is not performance-related in most cases. Unless the bottleneck is in the amount of data being transferred to a client over a network connection and there is a large amount of columns, or you have an index which matches the limited column list query exactly, there would be no performance difference in SELECT * vs SELECT &lt;column list&gt;.<p>In columnar dbs it does matter because the less columns you select the less data gets accessed on disk. However, this does not hold true for row stores because data is stored in such a way that the whole row gets accessed no matter how many columns get specified in the query.<p>There are many other good reasons why SELECT * is acceptable only in development queries, but performance is not one of them.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>danielbarla</author><text>In terms of performance, the primary rationale for only retrieving columns you need would be to allow the database engine to select a proper index to use, specifically, one that covers all the columns you are making use of. This can actually have a massive impact on the execution plan, far more than simply fetching say 2x more data, as you point out.<p>In fact, I&#x27;d go so far as to say that the practice of selecting all columns makes it practically impossible to make use of covering indexes for high impact queries.</text></comment> |
21,711,755 | 21,711,159 | 1 | 2 | 21,711,037 | train | <story><title>DeepSpeech 0.6</title><url>https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/12/deepspeech-0-6-mozillas-speech-to-text-engine/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>bmn__</author><text>I do not understand how to use Deepspeech even in the most simple use case.<p>1. I want to teach it ten words. How do I do this?<p>2. I want to speak into my microphone (available as a Pulseaudio device) and recognise the words and output the words as a text stream on stdout. How do I do this?<p>This is the documentation:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;deepspeech.readthedocs.io&#x2F;en&#x2F;v0.6.0&#x2F;Python-Examples.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;deepspeech.readthedocs.io&#x2F;en&#x2F;v0.6.0&#x2F;Python-Examples....</a>
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;deepspeech.readthedocs.io&#x2F;en&#x2F;v0.6.0&#x2F;Python-API.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;deepspeech.readthedocs.io&#x2F;en&#x2F;v0.6.0&#x2F;Python-API.html</a><p>It does not answer the questions I have.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;deepspeech.readthedocs.io&#x2F;en&#x2F;v0.6.0&#x2F;DeepSpeech.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;deepspeech.readthedocs.io&#x2F;en&#x2F;v0.6.0&#x2F;DeepSpeech.html</a><p>The introduction page is full of incomprehensible jargon.</text></comment> | <story><title>DeepSpeech 0.6</title><url>https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/12/deepspeech-0-6-mozillas-speech-to-text-engine/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>detaro</author><text>&gt; <i>It achieves a 7.5% word error rate on the LibriSpeech test clean benchmark</i><p>Anyone have a comparison for how good&#x2F;bad that is compared to other solutions, and what it means for practical usage, if that can be guessed at from a single number?</text></comment> |
10,368,301 | 10,367,689 | 1 | 3 | 10,366,293 | train | <story><title>Python wats</title><url>https://github.com/cosmologicon/pywat</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ak217</author><text>Of these, only += on tuple elements and indexing with floats strike me as WTFs, and many others are evidence of the author really going out of their way to look for behaviors to nitpick on. The absolute majority of these are things that Python programmers either will never encounter, or can easily explain from Python &quot;first principles&quot; (e.g. most of the nitpicks on string and sequence behaviors).<p>I can tell you what I consider WTF worthy - things that I and others have undoubtedly been bitten by because they are ubiquitous. Those are mutable defaults, lack of loop scoping, and &quot;global&quot;&#x2F;&quot;nonlocal&quot; scoping. Oh, and add the crazy &quot;ascii&quot; I&#x2F;O encoding default on 2.7 (and the inability to cleanly reset it) to that list.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>crdoconnor</author><text>Truthiness values are also WTF worthy (although not mentioned above).<p><pre><code> if not x:
do_something()
</code></pre>
Where do_something will occur if x is None, zero, 0.0, a blank string or even <i>midnight</i> in some versions of python.<p>This has bitten me multiple times. It&#x27;s a violation of python&#x27;s explicit over implicit. It&#x27;s an example of weak typing in an otherwise strongly typed language. There&#x27;s really no good reason for it.<p>IMO, if x isn&#x27;t a boolean, that line should just throw an exception. If you want to check for x being 0.0 or &quot;&quot;, you should do x == &quot;&quot; or x == 0.0.</text></comment> | <story><title>Python wats</title><url>https://github.com/cosmologicon/pywat</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ak217</author><text>Of these, only += on tuple elements and indexing with floats strike me as WTFs, and many others are evidence of the author really going out of their way to look for behaviors to nitpick on. The absolute majority of these are things that Python programmers either will never encounter, or can easily explain from Python &quot;first principles&quot; (e.g. most of the nitpicks on string and sequence behaviors).<p>I can tell you what I consider WTF worthy - things that I and others have undoubtedly been bitten by because they are ubiquitous. Those are mutable defaults, lack of loop scoping, and &quot;global&quot;&#x2F;&quot;nonlocal&quot; scoping. Oh, and add the crazy &quot;ascii&quot; I&#x2F;O encoding default on 2.7 (and the inability to cleanly reset it) to that list.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hueving</author><text>The indexing with a float was on a dict. If you can index with a string, why not a float? If it&#x27;s hashable, it&#x27;s good!</text></comment> |
8,938,699 | 8,937,852 | 1 | 2 | 8,934,786 | train | <story><title>$1.6B in funding and $7B in exits: Chicago tech just had its best year ever</title><url>http://www.builtinchicago.org/2015/01/22/16b-funding-and-7b-exits-chicago-tech-just-had-its-best-year-ever</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>spamizbad</author><text>Eh, three things really grind me gears about the tech scene in Chicago.<p>1) Lots of mediocre entrepreneurs that seem to have the same story:<p><pre><code> - Little to no hard skills.
- Probably got an MBA from a good B-school
- Did a stint at a consulting firm and is going to outsmart
the competition with all the wisdom they gained at
Accenture, McKinsey, BCG, Bain, or some big IL firm.
- Does NOT have a technical co-founder but is being advised
by some guy with a similar pedigree that attended a coding
bootcamp&#x2F;wrote a crappy iOS app&#x2F;got a CS degree...
but has written &lt;10,000 lines of code in their life.
- This person will interview you by giving you a fizz
buzz test followed by &quot;lateral thinking&quot; brain-teaser
questions). Very 90s.
</code></pre>
I know these people exist everywhere today but there&#x27;s an unusually large number concentrated in Chicago. Must be something in the water?<p>2) Developer compensation is roughly 10% lower (when adjusted for CoL) than it should be. And in terms of equity compensation Chicago isn&#x27;t even in the same league as SV today. Getting &gt;0.25% as the initial engineering hire is extremely rare here - even at companies that lack a technical co-founder.<p>This causes younger talent to get sucked to the coasts.<p>3) Many of the startups do not actively cultivate a technology or engineering culture. I think this largely stems from Point #1 - you really do need a tech co-founder to drive that side of the company.</text></comment> | <story><title>$1.6B in funding and $7B in exits: Chicago tech just had its best year ever</title><url>http://www.builtinchicago.org/2015/01/22/16b-funding-and-7b-exits-chicago-tech-just-had-its-best-year-ever</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>_random_</author><text>It&#x27;s interesting what would be 80s&#x2F;90s person assumption?<p>&quot;1.6B in funding! Oh boy, robots, life extension, hover cars!&quot;<p>&quot;Err, no. But you will be targeted with ads about food delivery and HR services much more precisely!&quot;</text></comment> |
5,820,427 | 5,819,716 | 1 | 2 | 5,819,231 | train | <story><title>Designing a Pragmatic RESTful API</title><url>http://www.vinaysahni.com/best-practices-for-a-pragmatic-restful-api?hn</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>buro9</author><text>We've built a first version of an API that we have in testing at the moment, and it follows a lot of the things laid out in an ebook✝ and in the linked article.<p>The epiphany we had was that whilst machines do access the API, the developer is always the customer and user. Everything we do should help the developer, and if we have to break rules to help them... then largely we should.<p>I've built a couple of very pure REST APIs in the past, but had a lot of developers pushing back and demanding something simpler. To not use media types so precisely, to be more accepting of what data is sent, to provide meta-data along with the resource (most seem to prefer an envelope), to prefer composite resources over very decoupled interfaces, etc.<p>This time, I haven't even tried to build a pure REST API. This time I've just mixed together the bits that developers I've spoken to liked and prefer. Adjusting as I went depending on how it was received.<p><a href="http://microcosm-cc.github.io/" rel="nofollow">http://microcosm-cc.github.io/</a><p>That's the docs for it, and we get the arguments out the way right at the beginning. All we're trying to do is build an API that helps developers get their task done. We're not done, and I know it's not pure anything... but the feedback we're getting is far more positive than any pure REST API I've ever built.<p>✝ If you are willing to give out a fake email address then this free eBook is a great resource and has a lot of sane information presented clearly:
<a href="http://pages.apigee.com/web-api-design-ebook.html" rel="nofollow">http://pages.apigee.com/web-api-design-ebook.html</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Designing a Pragmatic RESTful API</title><url>http://www.vinaysahni.com/best-practices-for-a-pragmatic-restful-api?hn</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>peterwwillis</author><text>This is a well-written and informative article, kudos.<p>That said, it reminds me how fucking overcomplicated REST HTTP API is for 99% of uses. As an API user, all I want is to call a function on a server, pass it some arguments and get a result. I want it to be dead simple, and REST is probably the opposite of that.<p>Finally, it also occurs to me that most API calls may call one function which returns lots of data that I don't need. Specifying the data types and field names I want in the query would simplify parsing and potentially reduce bandwidth use (if you've ever seen an API call that returns a user's profile when all you wanted was their last login timestamp, you know what I mean). <i>edit</i> Whoops, didn't see he mentioned the field limiter... why don't more people do that?</text></comment> |
5,891,952 | 5,891,905 | 1 | 2 | 5,891,814 | train | <story><title>Apple’s Commitment to Customer Privacy</title><url>http://www.apple.com/apples-commitment-to-customer-privacy/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>quaunaut</author><text>Okay, a few things I&#x27;m just plainly getting pissed off about every time I see these threads.<p>* Bitching about the words &quot;direct access&quot;: Guess what, these are words, they have a meaning. They&#x27;re saying that the government can&#x27;t view the database directly, they can&#x27;t determine what they get to see, and they don&#x27;t get to pull it up whenever the fuck they feel like it. And guess what? That means something. I swear, everyone obsessing over the words &quot;direct access&quot; goes on record as one of the most idiotic things a lot of really smart people get obsessed about.<p>* Most of these companies are effectively saying they&#x27;re agreeing to subpoenas, with the one difference being that NSA warrants can&#x27;t be reported by the companies involved. This is still infinitely more tame than the previous claims that the Guardian has been walking back this last week(let alone the entirely ridiculous argument Snowden put out there saying they can &#x27;watch your thoughts form as you type&#x27;, which gets even more funny when you consider the only service listed that transmits your typed data is GMail).<p>* There is a lot to be concerned about here- no mistake about it. But right now, there&#x27;s a lot more holes in Snowden &amp; Co&#x27;s story than the opposite. It&#x27;s still troubling, the attitude taken by some of those at the highest echelons of government, on the whole subject- but the accusers have a lot of explaining to do, if you&#x27;ve been paying attention.</text></comment> | <story><title>Apple’s Commitment to Customer Privacy</title><url>http://www.apple.com/apples-commitment-to-customer-privacy/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>evadne</author><text>&gt; For example, conversations which take place over iMessage and FaceTime are protected by end-to-end encryption so no one but the sender and receiver can see or read them. Apple cannot decrypt that data.<p>I don’t know, then, why when I do an iCloud restore on a brand new device, all existing messages are recovered. Is this a way to recover all past messages that’s not really addressed, if I can still recover all historical messages after replacing all devices connected to an iCloud account at once?<p>Cursory links:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;security.blogoverflow.com&#x2F;2012&#x2F;09&#x2F;qotw-34-imessage-what-security-features-are-present&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;security.blogoverflow.com&#x2F;2012&#x2F;09&#x2F;qotw-34-imessage-wh...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;meeee&#x2F;pushproxy" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;meeee&#x2F;pushproxy</a><p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;imfreedom.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;IMessage" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;imfreedom.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;IMessage</a></text></comment> |
26,102,216 | 26,101,832 | 1 | 2 | 26,101,066 | train | <story><title>Rust Cookbook</title><url>https://rust-lang-nursery.github.io/rust-cookbook/intro.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>carols10cents</author><text>Note: The Rust Cookbook has existed for 4 years now, but it&#x27;s still unofficial and somewhat out of date because we don&#x27;t have enough people maintaining it.</text></comment> | <story><title>Rust Cookbook</title><url>https://rust-lang-nursery.github.io/rust-cookbook/intro.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>protoman3000</author><text>I like this book a lot, but the writers use an external package to handle errors.<p>Why don’t you just return a Result&lt;T, Box&lt;dyn Error&gt;&gt; instead?</text></comment> |
15,288,199 | 15,283,619 | 1 | 2 | 15,282,469 | train | <story><title>PassGAN: A Deep Learning Approach for Password Guessing</title><url>https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.00440</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tbiehn</author><text>I&#x27;m a bit confused as to why they cite <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.usenix.org&#x2F;conference&#x2F;usenixsecurity16&#x2F;technical-sessions&#x2F;presentation&#x2F;melicher" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.usenix.org&#x2F;conference&#x2F;usenixsecurity16&#x2F;technical...</a>, but then don&#x27;t evaluate their performance relative.
The selection of JTR and HashCat rule eval is troubling - &#x27;Best64&#x27; isn&#x27;t the way a skilled attacker uses those tools.
It would be cool to see these teams participating in cracking event; <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;contest.korelogic.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;contest.korelogic.com&#x2F;</a> or tasked against un-recovered corpus; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hashes.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hashes.org&#x2F;</a><p>Of course, maybe a more accurate view was that the paper isn&#x27;t actually seeking to advance to the state of the art in password cracking, and has other motivations.</text></comment> | <story><title>PassGAN: A Deep Learning Approach for Password Guessing</title><url>https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.00440</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>matrix2596</author><text>PaGAN would have been a better name</text></comment> |
20,102,229 | 20,102,057 | 1 | 2 | 20,100,902 | train | <story><title>Proposal: A built-in Go error check function, try</title><url>https://github.com/golang/proposal/blob/master/design/32437-try-builtin.md</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>umurgdk</author><text>I am strongly against this. `try` seems exactly like a function yet it is not acting like a function at all. People wouldn&#x27;t expecting calling a function may return from the caller. And there is a reason why golang doesn&#x27;t have macros. With macros all kind of craziness would be possible, and would really difficult to read different kind of projects&#x27; code.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gnud</author><text>Agreed - I thought this looked pretty reasonable, if a bit parenthesis-heavy, until I saw this example:<p><pre><code> func printSum(a, b string) error {
fmt.Println(
&quot;result:&quot;,
try(strconv.Atoi(a)) + try(strconv.Atoi(b)),
)
return nil
}
</code></pre>
When you nest the calls to try inside another method call, like this, the control flow really becomes obscured.</text></comment> | <story><title>Proposal: A built-in Go error check function, try</title><url>https://github.com/golang/proposal/blob/master/design/32437-try-builtin.md</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>umurgdk</author><text>I am strongly against this. `try` seems exactly like a function yet it is not acting like a function at all. People wouldn&#x27;t expecting calling a function may return from the caller. And there is a reason why golang doesn&#x27;t have macros. With macros all kind of craziness would be possible, and would really difficult to read different kind of projects&#x27; code.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lifty</author><text>I dislike this proposal for the same reason. Looks like a function but does not behave like a normal one. I personally don&#x27;t mind the verbose error handling in go and I think it&#x27;s clear and easy to follow.</text></comment> |
13,562,038 | 13,561,868 | 1 | 2 | 13,561,388 | train | <story><title>Amazon soars to more than 341K employees, adding 110K people in a single year</title><url>http://www.geekwire.com/2017/amazon-soars-340k-employees-adding-110k-people-single-year/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mabbo</author><text>It&#x27;s not simply an e-commerce giant, it&#x27;s a logistics giant.<p>Hundreds of warehouses, hundreds of delivery stations, thousands of shipping containers, dozens of planes (plus an airport soon), a container ship is rumoured. That 341k number probably doesn&#x27;t even count the independent contractors (both through Flex and through Amazon Logistics) handling deliveries.<p>The tens of thousands of software developers are there to (among other things) optimize the efficiency of those workers, make them achieve more with less effort via technology.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>petra</author><text>My contrarian opinion: Walmart is going to create some hard times for Amazon.<p>Walmart ackuired jet.com just 4 months ago. Jet.com, a startup, has managed to create a logistics network being able to do 1-day delivery to 50% of the population(or at least they claimed so), reached $1B in sales rapidly. Walmart has recently started to offer free 2-day delivery($35 minimum), which means that now, even for Prime memebers. shopping comparison is a reasonable option.<p>Furthermore, Walmart has curbside pickup for groceries, a very convinient service to get your groceries on the way from work, is seeing a lot of sucsess according to Walmart, with availibility in 500 stores, and planning to be in 600 more soon.<p>And Walmart definetly has got a huge logistics chain, maybe less in areas where Amazon is strong at, but they&#x27;re probably better at the china&#x2F;usa logistics part, that&#x27;s why Amazon is doing some of those moves.<p>And Walmart does have enough capital to compete.<p>And once this impacts Amazon, will Amazon be able to keep it&#x27;s very high stock price ? and how will this affect talent and growth ?<p>In short: finally , we&#x27;re in for some very interesting times.</text></comment> | <story><title>Amazon soars to more than 341K employees, adding 110K people in a single year</title><url>http://www.geekwire.com/2017/amazon-soars-340k-employees-adding-110k-people-single-year/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mabbo</author><text>It&#x27;s not simply an e-commerce giant, it&#x27;s a logistics giant.<p>Hundreds of warehouses, hundreds of delivery stations, thousands of shipping containers, dozens of planes (plus an airport soon), a container ship is rumoured. That 341k number probably doesn&#x27;t even count the independent contractors (both through Flex and through Amazon Logistics) handling deliveries.<p>The tens of thousands of software developers are there to (among other things) optimize the efficiency of those workers, make them achieve more with less effort via technology.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ljk</author><text>&gt; <i>make them achieve more with less effort via technology</i><p>and one day replace everything with robots</text></comment> |
9,289,534 | 9,288,759 | 1 | 3 | 9,288,642 | train | <story><title>An API is only as good as its documentation</title><url>https://rocketeer.be/blog/2015/03/api-quality/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>cbd1984</author><text>Good documentation includes examples.<p>Good documentation does not <i>rely</i> on examples.<p>An example can provide a base to start from, a beginning point from which further hacking can ensue.<p>However, an example, like a picture, can&#x27;t say &quot;ain&#x27;t&quot;: Examples can only show you what you <i>can</i> do, never what you <i>cannot</i> do, or what you <i>should not</i> do.<p>Further, examples are inductive, and it takes a massive amount of induction to get <i>all</i> of the rules of a system. However, once someone&#x27;s done something, they&#x27;ve internalized it a lot better than if they&#x27;ve only read about it.<p>Examples should, therefore, allow people to see the <i>intended use</i> of an API. How do the developers <i>want</i> people to use their API to solve problems?<p>Documentation is permissive: &quot;You can use this tool to do this.&quot;<p>Examples are normative: &quot;You should use this tool this way.&quot;<p><i>Both</i> are needed. I focus on examples because good examples are not as common as they should be.</text></comment> | <story><title>An API is only as good as its documentation</title><url>https://rocketeer.be/blog/2015/03/api-quality/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>pavlov</author><text>I have a corollary of sorts:<p><i>A framework is only as good as its UI.</i><p>This is a widely neglected point. Only game engines tend to understand this fully (e.g. Unreal Engine&#x27;s editor). But Smalltalk and NextStep&#x2F;Cocoa had a grasp of this too.<p>Even without a GUI, the interface matters. Rails&#x27; &quot;generate&quot; and &quot;console&quot; commands are a major part of its appeal.</text></comment> |
20,014,881 | 20,014,593 | 1 | 2 | 20,014,206 | train | <story><title>‘If I disappear’: Chinese students make farewell messages amid crackdowns</title><url>https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/if-i-disappear-chinese-students-make-farewell-messages-amid-crackdowns-over-labor-activism-/2019/05/25/6fc949c0-727d-11e9-9331-30bc5836f48e_story.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>geggam</author><text>Things like this are always interesting to me.<p>It&#x27;s interesting that people who were subject to this sort of treatment created the constitution limiting the US govt.<p>It&#x27;s interesting that people who aren&#x27;t subject to this sort of treatment are trying to change the constitution and give the govt more power.<p>It&#x27;s interesting to me that democide is the number 1 cause of death in the 20th century and everyone ignores that fact.<p>Its also interesting to me that the internet allows people to communicate and learn how much all govts lie.<p>Change is coming as govts try to control the internet and the communication people have with each other.</text></comment> | <story><title>‘If I disappear’: Chinese students make farewell messages amid crackdowns</title><url>https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/if-i-disappear-chinese-students-make-farewell-messages-amid-crackdowns-over-labor-activism-/2019/05/25/6fc949c0-727d-11e9-9331-30bc5836f48e_story.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>yorwba</author><text>The article mentions the students using GitHub to evade censorship. I think that might refer to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;terminus2049.github.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;terminus2049.github.io&#x2F;</a><p>Terminus 端点星计划，是在 GitHub 开放平台搭建的一个站点，以去中心化的方式备份微信、微博等平台被删文章。<p><i>Terminus is a site set up on GitHub&#x27;s open platform to back up posts deleted from WeChat, Weibo and other platforms by means of decentralization.</i></text></comment> |
3,109,712 | 3,108,199 | 1 | 3 | 3,108,087 | train | <story><title>How to beat the CAP theorem</title><url>http://nathanmarz.com/blog/how-to-beat-the-cap-theorem.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mononcqc</author><text>This doesn't beat the CAP theorem. The approach can be quickly described as a log-based append-only database with read-repair code based on last-write-wins.<p>The system will have inconsistent views for the whole time a netsplit lasts. If I have two nodes, A and B, and that they both hold a piece of data related to a meeting M0 at 11 on Monday, then a netsplit happens, the strategy suggested won't help with the following case:<p>Jim and Peter have access to node A, and Mary and Julie have access to the node B. Because there is a netsplit between A and B, communication is impossible there. However, Jim and Peter agree to move the meeting M0 to 3PM on Monday, and we call it {A,M1}. Mary and Julie, however, agree to move the meeting to 1PM on Tuesday. We call it {B,M1}. Now, the M1 record on A and B is no longer the same. If the netsplit isn't resolved before Monday, then inconsistent data will have caused the loss of our team meeting!<p>When the netsplit is resolved and we consult the meeting, the approach of the blog post will pick either B's version of M1 or A's version of M1 based on the map-reduce we've had. To the reader, we'll have discarded either of them. This is why the last write wins -- it's the latest state in the log of events, the other one is ignored.<p>Last-write-wins is a default mode to be used on read-repair, and nothing solving the problem of losing consistency. During the netsplit, views of the data remain inconsistent.<p>The way to keep them consistent would have been to have A and B blocking writes. As such, we would have kept Jim, Peter, Julie and Mary from writing new meeting times and made sure that they all had the same hour presented.<p>An easy way to test whether you beat the CAP theorem or not is to imagine your system functional during a week-long netsplit. Either it keeps on working with inconsistent data, or it has a way to keep it consistent. The CAP theorem tells us it's impossible to do both at once, and the blog post didn't disprove that, but merely provided a way to resolve conflicts in data in an automatic way.<p>I would expect someone to 'beat' the CAP theorem as much as I would expect someone to 'beat' the Pythagorean theorem. The blog is interesting in its own approach to make the CAP theorem simpler to handle, but misses its own point of beating it.</text></comment> | <story><title>How to beat the CAP theorem</title><url>http://nathanmarz.com/blog/how-to-beat-the-cap-theorem.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>rxin</author><text>Good write up, Nathan. Nonetheless, you started by saying you were going to challenge the basic assumptions of how data systems should be built, but the resulting system architecture is in fact very similar to a lot of data streaming systems that the academia and industry have proposed and built for a number of years. An example of such system is Google's Percolator [1].<p>In essence, you separate the system into two parts, a read-only part and a real-time part. CAP explains fundamental trade-offs in OLTP type of queries, whereas this system design is catered towards streaming, analytical queries. These are two very different contexts.<p>[1] <a href="http://research.google.com/pubs/pub36726.html" rel="nofollow">http://research.google.com/pubs/pub36726.html</a></text></comment> |
40,975,012 | 40,974,411 | 1 | 3 | 40,972,589 | train | <story><title>The Second Law of Thermodynamics (2011)</title><url>https://franklambert.net/secondlaw.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>exmadscientist</author><text>A neat little corollary to this is to look a little more closely at what temperature actually <i>is</i>. &quot;Temperature&quot; doesn&#x27;t appear too often in the main explanation here, but it&#x27;s all over the &quot;student&#x27;s explanation&quot;. So... what is it?<p>The most useful definition of temperature at the microscopic scale is probably this one:
1&#x2F;T = dS &#x2F; dU,
which I&#x27;ve simplified because math notation is hard, and because we&#x27;re not going to need the full baggage here. (The whole thing with the curly-d&#x27;s and the proper conditions imposed is around if you want it.) Okay, so what does <i>that</i> mean? (Let&#x27;s not even think about where I dug it up from.)<p>It&#x27;s actually pretty simple: it says that the inverse of temperature is equal to the change in entropy over the change in energy. That means that temperature is measuring how much the <i>entropy</i> changes when we add or remove <i>energy</i>. And now we start to see why temperature is everywhere in these energy-entropy equations: it&#x27;s the link between them! And we see why two things having the same temperature is so important: <i>no entropy will change</i> if energy flows. Or, in the language of the article, <i>energy would not actually spread out any more</i> if it would flow between objects at the same temperature. So there&#x27;s no flow!<p>The whole 1&#x2F;T bit, aside from being inconvenient to calculate with, also suggests a few opportunities to fuzz-test Nature. What happens at T=0, absolute zero? 1&#x2F;T blows up, so dS&#x2F;dU should blow up too. And indeed it does: at absolute zero, <i>any</i> amount of energy will cause a <i>massive</i> increase in entropy. So we&#x27;re good. What about if T -&gt; infinity, so 1&#x2F;T -&gt; zero? So any additional energy induces no more entropy? Well, that&#x27;s real too: you see this in certain highly-constrained solid-state systems (probably among others), when certain bands fill. And you do indeed observe the weird behavior of &quot;infinite temperature&quot; when dS&#x2F;dU is zero. Can you push further? Yes: dS&#x2F;dU can go <i>negative</i> in those systems, making them &quot;infinitely hot&quot;, so hot they overflow temperature itself and reach &quot;negative temperature&quot; (dS&#x2F;dU &lt; 0 implies absolute T &lt; 0). Entropy actually <i>decreases</i> when you pump energy into these systems!<p>These sorts of systems usually involve population inversions (which might, correctly, make you think of lasers). For a 2-band system, the &quot;absolute zero&quot; state would have the lower band full and the upper band empty. Adding energy lifts some atoms to the upper band. When the upper and lower band are equally full, that&#x27;s maximum entropy: infinite temperature. Add a little more energy and the upper band is now more full than the lower: this is the negative temperature regime. And, finally, when everything&#x27;s in the upper band, that is the exact opposite of absolute zero: the system can absorb no more energy. Its temperature is maximum. What temperature is that? Well, if you look at how we got here and our governing equation, we started at 0, went through normal temperatures +T, reached +infinity, crossed over to -infinity, went through negative temperatures -T, and finally reached... -0. Minus absolute zero!<p>(Suck on that, IEEE-754 signed zero critics?)<p>And all that from our definition of temperature: how much entropy will we get by adding a little energy here?<p>Thermodynamics: it&#x27;ll hurt your head even more than IEEE-754 debugging.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>yamrzou</author><text>I like the following related explanation (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;thermodynamics&#x2F;comments&#x2F;owhkiv&#x2F;comment&#x2F;h7gktgs&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;thermodynamics&#x2F;comments&#x2F;owhkiv&#x2F;comm...</a>) :<p>&gt; Many people focus on the statistical definition of entropy and the fact that entropy increases for any spontaneous process. Fewer people are familiar with thinking about entropy as the conjugate thermodynamic variable to temperature. Just as volumes shift to equalize pressure, areas shift to equalize surface tension, and charges shift to equalize voltage, entropy is the &quot;stuff&quot; that shifts to equalize temperature. (Entropy is of course also unique in that it&#x27;s generated in all four processes.) Entropy is thus in some ways the modern version of the debunked theory of caloric.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Second Law of Thermodynamics (2011)</title><url>https://franklambert.net/secondlaw.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>exmadscientist</author><text>A neat little corollary to this is to look a little more closely at what temperature actually <i>is</i>. &quot;Temperature&quot; doesn&#x27;t appear too often in the main explanation here, but it&#x27;s all over the &quot;student&#x27;s explanation&quot;. So... what is it?<p>The most useful definition of temperature at the microscopic scale is probably this one:
1&#x2F;T = dS &#x2F; dU,
which I&#x27;ve simplified because math notation is hard, and because we&#x27;re not going to need the full baggage here. (The whole thing with the curly-d&#x27;s and the proper conditions imposed is around if you want it.) Okay, so what does <i>that</i> mean? (Let&#x27;s not even think about where I dug it up from.)<p>It&#x27;s actually pretty simple: it says that the inverse of temperature is equal to the change in entropy over the change in energy. That means that temperature is measuring how much the <i>entropy</i> changes when we add or remove <i>energy</i>. And now we start to see why temperature is everywhere in these energy-entropy equations: it&#x27;s the link between them! And we see why two things having the same temperature is so important: <i>no entropy will change</i> if energy flows. Or, in the language of the article, <i>energy would not actually spread out any more</i> if it would flow between objects at the same temperature. So there&#x27;s no flow!<p>The whole 1&#x2F;T bit, aside from being inconvenient to calculate with, also suggests a few opportunities to fuzz-test Nature. What happens at T=0, absolute zero? 1&#x2F;T blows up, so dS&#x2F;dU should blow up too. And indeed it does: at absolute zero, <i>any</i> amount of energy will cause a <i>massive</i> increase in entropy. So we&#x27;re good. What about if T -&gt; infinity, so 1&#x2F;T -&gt; zero? So any additional energy induces no more entropy? Well, that&#x27;s real too: you see this in certain highly-constrained solid-state systems (probably among others), when certain bands fill. And you do indeed observe the weird behavior of &quot;infinite temperature&quot; when dS&#x2F;dU is zero. Can you push further? Yes: dS&#x2F;dU can go <i>negative</i> in those systems, making them &quot;infinitely hot&quot;, so hot they overflow temperature itself and reach &quot;negative temperature&quot; (dS&#x2F;dU &lt; 0 implies absolute T &lt; 0). Entropy actually <i>decreases</i> when you pump energy into these systems!<p>These sorts of systems usually involve population inversions (which might, correctly, make you think of lasers). For a 2-band system, the &quot;absolute zero&quot; state would have the lower band full and the upper band empty. Adding energy lifts some atoms to the upper band. When the upper and lower band are equally full, that&#x27;s maximum entropy: infinite temperature. Add a little more energy and the upper band is now more full than the lower: this is the negative temperature regime. And, finally, when everything&#x27;s in the upper band, that is the exact opposite of absolute zero: the system can absorb no more energy. Its temperature is maximum. What temperature is that? Well, if you look at how we got here and our governing equation, we started at 0, went through normal temperatures +T, reached +infinity, crossed over to -infinity, went through negative temperatures -T, and finally reached... -0. Minus absolute zero!<p>(Suck on that, IEEE-754 signed zero critics?)<p>And all that from our definition of temperature: how much entropy will we get by adding a little energy here?<p>Thermodynamics: it&#x27;ll hurt your head even more than IEEE-754 debugging.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vinnyvichy</author><text>More intuitively: that TdS has the same &quot;units&quot; as -PdV suggests that temperature [difference] is a &quot;pressure&quot; (thermodynamic potential) that drives entropy increase.</text></comment> |
30,604,027 | 30,604,361 | 1 | 2 | 30,602,967 | train | <story><title>Apple Event March 8, 2022</title><url>https://www.apple.com/apple-events/event-stream/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>josh2600</author><text>The pace at which apple is pumping out new silicon is astounding. It’s hard to imagine anyone competing with them pound for pound, especially in the flops per watt game. I still can’t get over the fanless MacBook pros and the battery life.<p>I actually hope somebody is challenged enough by this to really push for competition as this level of performance asymmetry will ultimately result in further pricing asymmetry as competition breaks down.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Toutouxc</author><text>&gt; can’t get over the fanless MacBook pros and the battery life<p>Only the M1 Air is truly fanless, the Pros do have fans, they&#x27;re just silent most of the time.</text></comment> | <story><title>Apple Event March 8, 2022</title><url>https://www.apple.com/apple-events/event-stream/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>josh2600</author><text>The pace at which apple is pumping out new silicon is astounding. It’s hard to imagine anyone competing with them pound for pound, especially in the flops per watt game. I still can’t get over the fanless MacBook pros and the battery life.<p>I actually hope somebody is challenged enough by this to really push for competition as this level of performance asymmetry will ultimately result in further pricing asymmetry as competition breaks down.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Tade0</author><text>&gt; I still can’t get over the fanless MacBook pros and the battery life.<p>The Lenovo X13s reportedly offers even more battery life at around 70% the multicore performance(based on demo device score) and is fanless as well.<p>Still doesn&#x27;t beat the M1, but comparing the TDPs of M1 and Qualcomm&#x27;s 8cx gen 3 in the X13s, it appears that it&#x27;s TSMC&#x27;s 5nm node that&#x27;s doing all the magic.<p>Personally I&#x27;m happy that we&#x27;re getting proper fanless laptops now - I hate moving parts in mobile devices, because they tend to fail first.</text></comment> |
22,984,412 | 22,984,533 | 1 | 3 | 22,983,894 | train | <story><title>Japan to subsidize 100% of salaries at small companies</title><url>https://asia.nikkei.com/Economy/Japan-to-subsidize-100-of-salaries-at-small-companies</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hpoe</author><text>So I know a guy that he bought some real estate he owns 3 properties I think. He isn&#x27;t a millionaire just a software engineer working the 9-5 and the properties exist mostly to help him prepare for retirement. Now he has some money set aside so that if one of his properties goes dormant he can cover it for a while, but if he were to lose all three of them at the same time. That would be bad.<p>Then you suggest the government can just buy him out at market rates. Who decides what the market rate is? What if the government decides to value the property for $50,000 less than it is worth?<p>Well suddenly he has just had $150,000 taken from him by the government. When things restabiloxe what do we do then? The government owns tons of housing? Who is going to manage and administer that? If they dump them than all that you&#x27;ve done is transferred the properties from small owners to massive multi-million dollar firms that managed to take the hit. What about people who got laid off and still don&#x27;t have a job after it is over? Because it was a result of the coronavirus do we just continue to say it&#x27;s okay don&#x27;t pay rent? If we do that guarantee a year from now tons of properties won&#x27;t be paying rent still.<p>It sounds like an easy and simple fix but it is usually more complicated than that and drastic decisions made will often have downsteam effect for years and decades that we can&#x27;t see now.</text></item><item><author>ethanbond</author><text>1. Cancel rent payments, mortgage payments, and property taxes. People simply stop paying and stay where they are, no enforcement burden and no distribution necessary.<p>2. For landlords who cannot sustain the loss of cash flow, offer to buy them out at market price and then hire them as property managers for their previously owned properties.<p>With essentially zero overhead, you&#x27;ve eliminated small business&#x27;s first or second largest expense (payroll and rent). If they still can&#x27;t make payroll, it&#x27;s not a super huge deal since those employees also have their rent frozen.<p>Now the economy can hibernate.<p>When we&#x27;re ready to resuscitate it, do a direct stimulus check as you reopen businesses. Let money start flowing without any component going to rent for some amount of time until we&#x27;re back on solid footing.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ethanbond</author><text>As far as pricing: simply purchase the properties for whatever their value was last declared on tax forms. Can even add 5-10% for good measure. You lowballed the government to decrease tax burden? No problem, that’s the price you get.<p>This isn’t an anti-millionaire plot, so it doesn’t matter much what he earns. This is a hibernate-then-stimulate plot.<p>We cannot hibernate if businesses and individuals are getting absolutely gutted at the end of each month.<p>We cannot stimulate if stimulus checks are going directly into landlords’ pockets.<p>After this is over, yes, either the government can keep it (as Singapore does) or even sell them back, giving preference to the original owners at the original price (who had been kept employed throughout the hibernation).<p>The land itself is not charging landlords to hold it, so landlords don’t <i>need</i> to be charging tenants to exist on it (except mortgages&#x2F;taxes, which would be frozen).</text></comment> | <story><title>Japan to subsidize 100% of salaries at small companies</title><url>https://asia.nikkei.com/Economy/Japan-to-subsidize-100-of-salaries-at-small-companies</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hpoe</author><text>So I know a guy that he bought some real estate he owns 3 properties I think. He isn&#x27;t a millionaire just a software engineer working the 9-5 and the properties exist mostly to help him prepare for retirement. Now he has some money set aside so that if one of his properties goes dormant he can cover it for a while, but if he were to lose all three of them at the same time. That would be bad.<p>Then you suggest the government can just buy him out at market rates. Who decides what the market rate is? What if the government decides to value the property for $50,000 less than it is worth?<p>Well suddenly he has just had $150,000 taken from him by the government. When things restabiloxe what do we do then? The government owns tons of housing? Who is going to manage and administer that? If they dump them than all that you&#x27;ve done is transferred the properties from small owners to massive multi-million dollar firms that managed to take the hit. What about people who got laid off and still don&#x27;t have a job after it is over? Because it was a result of the coronavirus do we just continue to say it&#x27;s okay don&#x27;t pay rent? If we do that guarantee a year from now tons of properties won&#x27;t be paying rent still.<p>It sounds like an easy and simple fix but it is usually more complicated than that and drastic decisions made will often have downsteam effect for years and decades that we can&#x27;t see now.</text></item><item><author>ethanbond</author><text>1. Cancel rent payments, mortgage payments, and property taxes. People simply stop paying and stay where they are, no enforcement burden and no distribution necessary.<p>2. For landlords who cannot sustain the loss of cash flow, offer to buy them out at market price and then hire them as property managers for their previously owned properties.<p>With essentially zero overhead, you&#x27;ve eliminated small business&#x27;s first or second largest expense (payroll and rent). If they still can&#x27;t make payroll, it&#x27;s not a super huge deal since those employees also have their rent frozen.<p>Now the economy can hibernate.<p>When we&#x27;re ready to resuscitate it, do a direct stimulus check as you reopen businesses. Let money start flowing without any component going to rent for some amount of time until we&#x27;re back on solid footing.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pfranz</author><text>Item #1 was to cancel mortgage payments and property taxes. This person would only be paying for things like maintenance contracts, lawn service, and insurance. I would think those would be relatively low and all of them are very likely negotiable right now. I know many are proactively reaching out to accommodate. Much like Japan subsidizing 100% of salaries, there would be a timetable for it to sunset since it&#x27;s obviously can&#x27;t happen indefinitely.<p>Not that I think that idea is 100% feasible (I don&#x27;t think states and counties can function without property taxes), but losing an investment seems like a better option than losing where you live.<p>Ideally, &quot;the market&quot; would fix itself. Nobody has leverage here. It&#x27;s not like there are new tenants waiting to move in and pay rent. So everyone is motivated to renegotiate--unfortunately, the volume of renegotiations often means enforcing silly policies like &quot;evict everyone immediately&quot; might get used. This happened in 2008.<p>I, too, am worried about consolidation. I know that will happen without any action, and will likely happy if the government does.</text></comment> |
35,909,035 | 35,908,671 | 1 | 2 | 35,904,118 | train | <story><title>IRS files $44B claims against bankrupt FTX</title><url>https://unchainedcrypto.com/irs-files-44-billion-claims-against-bankrupt-ftx/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tombert</author><text>I mean, I know. I lost my money. I wrote the post explaining that I feel stupid about it.</text></item><item><author>hibikir</author><text>But it&#x27;s precisely that handwaviness that should make you not have to do research at all and smell a rat, as ultimately rate of interest and risk come hand in hand. It doesn&#x27;t matter whether the instrument is based on crypto, real estate or pokemon cards.<p>If someone is offering a high interest, very liquid investment with returns so high that you are better off taking a larger mortgage, and putting the extra money into the investment, there has to be a hidden risk component: Otherwise, why would anyone issue mortgages, instead of investing in this very liquid instrument? It&#x27;s too good to be true.<p>It&#x27;s not unlike the people that spent money ordering cryptominers from butterfly labs: The expected return from buying them (pay the whole thing off in two months, and afterwards it&#x27;s all profit!&quot;) just doesn&#x27;t line up, regardless of the justification. Extraordinary returns exist, but they either require that you discover them yourself, or have to carry significant risks. So when someone is selling the opportunity to you, and you are told there&#x27;s no risk, you have to know you are being lied to, no due diligence necessary.</text></item><item><author>tombert</author><text>Well, there was some hand-waviness claiming that GUSD was FDIC insured [1], and they kept comparing it to bank accounts. I will admit that I should have done more research before putting it in, but I just assumed that since Gemini was ostensibly working with regulators and they were plastering the safety of GUSD everywhere, I guess I just didn&#x27;t do my due diligence. I&#x27;ll accept my share of the blame.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gemini.com&#x2F;dollar" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gemini.com&#x2F;dollar</a> It still mentioned &quot;FDIC&quot; stuff in small print, but it was much more prominent in earlier stuff.</text></item><item><author>prepend</author><text>I’m sorry for your loss but I’m really amazed you thought that 7% yield from savings at a time of 0% interest rates was anything other than a fabrication.<p>I looked at these and they were so absurd there was no way I would invest. No fundamentals. No audit. No insurance. No stable company or bank.<p>What was your thought process in putting funds here? Did you think it would just take longer to explode and you would be able to withdraw before? Did you genuinely believe?</text></item><item><author>tombert</author><text>I sincerely hope that I never meet Sam Bankman Fried, because if I did I do not know what I would do but it certainly wouldn&#x27;t be legal.<p>I was stupid and thought that the 7+% interest I was getting from Gemini+GUSD+Genesis Holdings was a good idea, I put a good chunk of money in there, and as of right now the status for that appears to be in &quot;limbo at best&quot;. It&#x27;s particularly upsetting, because this all unfolded right after I got fired from my last job, when I really needed my liquid money to pay for things like &quot;my mortgage&quot; and &quot;food&quot;.<p>I&#x27;m fine now fiscally, and even wasn&#x27;t in too much trouble back in November [1], but it make me lose multiple nights of sleep worrying about stuff, and also made me feel like an idiot for ever thinking that cryptocurrency was a good idea.<p>[1] I have a good chunk of money stashed in stocks&#x2F;ETFs, which I could have liquidated for money, but the market was pretty far down so I would have had to take a big haircut.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>diversionfactor</author><text>Don’t sweat it. I’ve invested multiple hundreds of thousands in venture-backed startups over the past two decades, and lost all of it. None of the startups was successful. These were all audited venture-backed with experienced founders many of whom I’ve known personally in the Austin tech scene. Losing money is the rule in any kind of investing beyond the prevailing real interest rate. It’s all speculation. By the sound of it your diversification is paying off. Actually you’re quite smart in that regard, you didn’t put it all into startups like me.</text></comment> | <story><title>IRS files $44B claims against bankrupt FTX</title><url>https://unchainedcrypto.com/irs-files-44-billion-claims-against-bankrupt-ftx/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tombert</author><text>I mean, I know. I lost my money. I wrote the post explaining that I feel stupid about it.</text></item><item><author>hibikir</author><text>But it&#x27;s precisely that handwaviness that should make you not have to do research at all and smell a rat, as ultimately rate of interest and risk come hand in hand. It doesn&#x27;t matter whether the instrument is based on crypto, real estate or pokemon cards.<p>If someone is offering a high interest, very liquid investment with returns so high that you are better off taking a larger mortgage, and putting the extra money into the investment, there has to be a hidden risk component: Otherwise, why would anyone issue mortgages, instead of investing in this very liquid instrument? It&#x27;s too good to be true.<p>It&#x27;s not unlike the people that spent money ordering cryptominers from butterfly labs: The expected return from buying them (pay the whole thing off in two months, and afterwards it&#x27;s all profit!&quot;) just doesn&#x27;t line up, regardless of the justification. Extraordinary returns exist, but they either require that you discover them yourself, or have to carry significant risks. So when someone is selling the opportunity to you, and you are told there&#x27;s no risk, you have to know you are being lied to, no due diligence necessary.</text></item><item><author>tombert</author><text>Well, there was some hand-waviness claiming that GUSD was FDIC insured [1], and they kept comparing it to bank accounts. I will admit that I should have done more research before putting it in, but I just assumed that since Gemini was ostensibly working with regulators and they were plastering the safety of GUSD everywhere, I guess I just didn&#x27;t do my due diligence. I&#x27;ll accept my share of the blame.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gemini.com&#x2F;dollar" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gemini.com&#x2F;dollar</a> It still mentioned &quot;FDIC&quot; stuff in small print, but it was much more prominent in earlier stuff.</text></item><item><author>prepend</author><text>I’m sorry for your loss but I’m really amazed you thought that 7% yield from savings at a time of 0% interest rates was anything other than a fabrication.<p>I looked at these and they were so absurd there was no way I would invest. No fundamentals. No audit. No insurance. No stable company or bank.<p>What was your thought process in putting funds here? Did you think it would just take longer to explode and you would be able to withdraw before? Did you genuinely believe?</text></item><item><author>tombert</author><text>I sincerely hope that I never meet Sam Bankman Fried, because if I did I do not know what I would do but it certainly wouldn&#x27;t be legal.<p>I was stupid and thought that the 7+% interest I was getting from Gemini+GUSD+Genesis Holdings was a good idea, I put a good chunk of money in there, and as of right now the status for that appears to be in &quot;limbo at best&quot;. It&#x27;s particularly upsetting, because this all unfolded right after I got fired from my last job, when I really needed my liquid money to pay for things like &quot;my mortgage&quot; and &quot;food&quot;.<p>I&#x27;m fine now fiscally, and even wasn&#x27;t in too much trouble back in November [1], but it make me lose multiple nights of sleep worrying about stuff, and also made me feel like an idiot for ever thinking that cryptocurrency was a good idea.<p>[1] I have a good chunk of money stashed in stocks&#x2F;ETFs, which I could have liquidated for money, but the market was pretty far down so I would have had to take a big haircut.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sally_glance</author><text>Just wanted to chime in and say thank you for sharing. If everyone was too ashamed of sharing past stupidness we would have no guideposts at all for gauging our own inevitable stupidness.</text></comment> |
22,860,794 | 22,860,243 | 1 | 3 | 22,859,938 | train | <story><title>California, Oregon and Washington announce western states pact</title><url>https://www.gov.ca.gov/2020/04/13/california-oregon-washington-announce-western-states-pact/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jcranmer</author><text>Also relevant is that the states of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Delaware made a similar pact today.<p>Edit: Massachusetts has also joined this pact as well (I thought it was surprising that it hadn&#x27;t when I first read the news).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sandworm101</author><text>If only there was some sort of multi-state organization through which individual states could pull together on issues spanning multiple states. Such a &quot;federal&quot; approach would be very useful. If only someone had thought of this years ago. Of course it would have to be staffed by people selected and respected by all, but surely there is some way of doing that too.</text></comment> | <story><title>California, Oregon and Washington announce western states pact</title><url>https://www.gov.ca.gov/2020/04/13/california-oregon-washington-announce-western-states-pact/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jcranmer</author><text>Also relevant is that the states of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Delaware made a similar pact today.<p>Edit: Massachusetts has also joined this pact as well (I thought it was surprising that it hadn&#x27;t when I first read the news).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>aioprisan</author><text>MA joined in as well on that pact</text></comment> |
38,219,014 | 38,218,826 | 1 | 2 | 38,218,346 | train | <story><title>Swedish painters trade union to stop all work with Tesla brand cars</title><url>https://www.malarna.nu/om-oss/nyheter/20232/pressmeddelande-malarna-stoppar-lackering-av-tesla-bilar/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dalbasal</author><text>So it sounds like the action isn&#x27;t about particulars, at least not at this point.<p>They are describing the dispute as being about general principles afaict. That Tesla should accept the &quot;swedish labour model&quot; in general. They emphasize that it&#x27;s an non-disruptive model and good for business.<p>This stuff is all context(that I don&#x27;t have. Otherwise it&#x27;s just a generic &quot;unions or not&quot; debate unrelated to Tesla, Sweden or 2023.<p>That said... US companies seem at aeas with these sorts of issues in Europe. In china, companies either stay out or bite the bullet and play by Chinese rules.<p>In Europe, especially around labour issues... American companies seem to always &quot;rebel.&quot; It&#x27;s as if local labour laws just aren&#x27;t taken into prior account... and companies are caught surprised by the inevitable.<p>This doesn&#x27;t really happen outside of Europe, nor for non-labour issues like environmental regs.<p>What is this? How&#x2F;why?</text></item><item><author>vmarchaud</author><text>If someone else doesn&#x27;t understand why painters would have a problem with Tesla (like me), you might be interested in this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ifmetall.se&#x2F;aktuellt&#x2F;tesla&#x2F;background-information-on-if-metalls-conflict-at-tesla&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ifmetall.se&#x2F;aktuellt&#x2F;tesla&#x2F;background-informatio...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>anon4242</author><text>It&#x27;s interesting, I&#x27;ve started seeing job ads in Sweden where you are expected to setup your own company to work for a US-based company with US-style PTO. The salary looks bigger than what is typically offered by Swedish companies but that is because not only do you have to work more, the company you setup will also have to pay the quite steep payroll tax (at ~31%) that most employees are not familiar with (as it&#x27;s paid by the employer on top of your salary before personal taxes).<p>The law in Sweden dictates that a company must give its employees at least 5 weeks of vacation of which at least four weeks consecutively some time during June, July and August.<p>This is really insidious as it looks like you&#x27;ll be earning a lot (but you won&#x27;t) and it&#x27;s hard to sue yourself for only giving yourself two weeks of vacation.</text></comment> | <story><title>Swedish painters trade union to stop all work with Tesla brand cars</title><url>https://www.malarna.nu/om-oss/nyheter/20232/pressmeddelande-malarna-stoppar-lackering-av-tesla-bilar/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dalbasal</author><text>So it sounds like the action isn&#x27;t about particulars, at least not at this point.<p>They are describing the dispute as being about general principles afaict. That Tesla should accept the &quot;swedish labour model&quot; in general. They emphasize that it&#x27;s an non-disruptive model and good for business.<p>This stuff is all context(that I don&#x27;t have. Otherwise it&#x27;s just a generic &quot;unions or not&quot; debate unrelated to Tesla, Sweden or 2023.<p>That said... US companies seem at aeas with these sorts of issues in Europe. In china, companies either stay out or bite the bullet and play by Chinese rules.<p>In Europe, especially around labour issues... American companies seem to always &quot;rebel.&quot; It&#x27;s as if local labour laws just aren&#x27;t taken into prior account... and companies are caught surprised by the inevitable.<p>This doesn&#x27;t really happen outside of Europe, nor for non-labour issues like environmental regs.<p>What is this? How&#x2F;why?</text></item><item><author>vmarchaud</author><text>If someone else doesn&#x27;t understand why painters would have a problem with Tesla (like me), you might be interested in this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ifmetall.se&#x2F;aktuellt&#x2F;tesla&#x2F;background-information-on-if-metalls-conflict-at-tesla&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ifmetall.se&#x2F;aktuellt&#x2F;tesla&#x2F;background-informatio...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rsynnott</author><text>Some companies absolutely try it for environmental regs, too. I think what you&#x27;re possibly seeing here is that where a multinational tries labour abuses, the response is typically very messy and public, whereas only the very most extreme _regulatory_ offences will be particularly publicly visible (typically where the company tries to defy the regulator after being caught red-handed). More commonly they&#x27;ll be told what they need to fix and possibly fined.</text></comment> |
38,802,715 | 38,802,770 | 1 | 3 | 38,802,152 | train | <story><title>40% of US electricity is now emissions-free</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/12/40-of-us-electricity-is-now-emissions-free/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>andy_ppp</author><text>The astonishing amount of gas being flared off from US shale production can be seen from space. Nobody is actually reducing emissions as far as I can tell, we are running the experiment of far more that 2°C increases in temperature. What should we expect to happen at say 3.5°C?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>simonhorlick</author><text>Anything about 2C is extremely risky for civilised society. It’s likely that we’ve already surpassed the tipping point for the West Antarctic ice sheet which over time will lead to meters of sea level rise. Changing weather patterns and simultaneous breadbasket failures will mean food becomes a lot more expensive - if you’re lucky enough to have access to it at all. At 3.5C many places on the planet become uninhabitable. People aren’t able to work outside for much of the year due to wet bulb temperatures. Regular storm surge causes a large percentage of the planets population to migrate. Salination of ground water and water for crop irrigation becomes a serious problem. Mountain glaciers that provide clean drinking water for millions of people dry up. In all, it’s hard to see a situation where we’d be able to maintain a reasonable quality of life under the conditions of &gt;2C of warming.</text></comment> | <story><title>40% of US electricity is now emissions-free</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/12/40-of-us-electricity-is-now-emissions-free/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>andy_ppp</author><text>The astonishing amount of gas being flared off from US shale production can be seen from space. Nobody is actually reducing emissions as far as I can tell, we are running the experiment of far more that 2°C increases in temperature. What should we expect to happen at say 3.5°C?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>chrisco255</author><text>We&#x27;re nowhere near any such levels. Temperature trends are roughly 0.13C per decade and have not accelerated in spite of the bigger issue of nations like China and India expanding global coal demand.</text></comment> |
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